of London. He selected Swansea, but stopping at Bristol, was treated with great kindness by the opulent merchants and other inhabitants, whom he afterwards libelled in a sarcastic poem. In Swansea he resided about a year; but on revisiting Bristol he was arrested for a small debt, and being unable to find bail, was thrown into prison. His folly, extravagance, and pride, though it was 'pride that licks the dust,' had left him almost without a friend. He made no vigorous effort to extricate or maintain himself. Pope continued his allowance; but being provoked by something in his conduct, he wrote to him, stating that he was 'determined to keep out of his suspicion by not being officious any longer, or obtruding into any of his concerns.' Savage felt the force of this rebuke from the steadiest and most illustrious of his friends. was soon afterwards taken ill, and, unable to procure medical assistance, was found dead in bed. The kindly keeper of the prison buried the poor man at his own expense.
Savage was the author of two plays and a volume of miscellaneous poems. Of the latter, the principal piece is The Wanderer (1729), written with greater care than most of his things; it was the offspring of that happy period of his life when he lived with Lord Tyrconnel. Pope repeatedly read it and commended it. Amidst much puerile and tawdry description and many banalities, The Wanderer contains some impressive passages. There are obvious evidences that Savage studied The Seasons, of which part was published three years before. The Bastard (1728)| is also a striking poem, and bears the impress of true feeling and vigorous thinking. One couplet is worthy of Pope. Of the bastard he says:
He lives to build, not boast, a generous race:
No tenth transmitter of a foolish face.
The concluding passage, in which he bewails the lot of his victim and of himself, has real pathos in it, though it ends in a bit of preposterous bombast, bathos, and bad taste.
Is chance a guilt, that my disastrous heart,
For mischief never meant, must ever smart?
Can self-defence be sin? Ah, plead no more!
What though no purposed malice stained thee o'er,
Had heaven befriended thy unhappy side,
Thou hadst not been provoked-or thou hadst died.
Far be the guilt of home-shed blood from all
On whom, unsought, embroiling dangers fall!
Still the pale dead revives, and lives to me,
To me! through Pity's eye condemned to see.
Remembrance veils his rage, but swells his fate;
Grieved I forgive, and am grown cool too late.
Young and unthoughtful then; who knows, one day,
What ripening virtues might have made their way!
He might have lived till folly died in shame,
Till kindling wisdom felt a thirst for fame.
He might perhaps his country's friend have proved;
Both happy, generous, candid, and beloved;
He might have saved some worth, now doomed to fall, And I, perchance, in him have murdered all.
O fate of late repentance! always vain :
Thy remedies but lull undying pain.
Where shall my hope find rest? No mother's care
Shielded my infant innocence with prayer :
No father's guardian hand my youth maintained,
Called forth my virtues, or from vice restrained;
Is it not thine to snatch some powerful arm,
First to advance, then screen from future harm ?
Am I returned from death to live in pain?
Or would imperial pity save in vain ?
Distrust it not. What blame can mercy find,
Which gives at once a life, and rears a mind?
Mother, miscalled, farewell-of soul severe,
This sad reflection yet may force one tear :
All I was wretched by to you I owed;
Alone from strangers every comfort flowed!
Lost to the life you gave, your son no more,
And now adopted, who was doomed before,
New born, I may a nobler mother claim,
But dare not whisper her immortal name;
Supremely lovely and serenely great,
Majestic mother of a kneeling state;
Queen of a people's heart, who ne'er before
Agreed, yet now with one consent adore.
One contest yet remains in this desire,
Who most shall give applause where all admire.
There is a certain parallelism in the passage quoted below to the survey of the city, its sins, sorrows, and close-packed contrasts, in Dr Teufelsdröckh's garret-window in Weissnichtwo. 'Bold bad spectre' sounds like a modern joke, although the collocation of 'bold' and 'bad' is as old at least as Spenser; and few even of Savage's poetical contemporaries would regard the epithet 'sapient bard' a compliment.
From 'The Wanderer.'
Yon mansion, made by beaming tapers gay,
Drowns the dim night, and counterfeits the day;
From 'lumined windows glancing on the eye,
Around, athwart, the frisking shadows fly.
There midnight riot spreads illusive joys,
And fortune, health, and dearer time destroys.
Soon death's dark agent to luxuriant ease
Shall wake sharp warnings in some fierce disease.
O man! thy fabric's like a well-formed state;
Thy thoughts, first ranked, were sure designed the great ;
Passions plebeians are, which factions raise ;
Wine, like poured oil, excites the raging blaze;
Then giddy anarchy's rude triumphs rise:
Then sovereign Reason from her empire flies:
That ruler once deposed, wisdom and wit
To noise and folly, place and power, submit ;
Like a frail bark thy weakened mind is tost,
Unsteered, unbalanced, till its wealth is lost.
The miser-spirit eyes the spendthrift heir,
And mourns, too late, effects of sordid care.
His treasures fly to cloy each fawning slave,
Yet grudge a stone to dignify his grave.
For this, low-thoughted craft his life employed;
For this, though wealthy, he no wealth enjoyed;
For this he griped the poor, and alms denied,
Unfriended lived, and unlamented died.
Yet smile, grieved shade! when that unprosperous store
Fast lessens, when gay hours return no more;
Smile at thy heir, beholding, in his fall,
Men once obliged, like him, ungrateful all!
Then thought-inspiring woe his heart shall mend,
And prove his only wise, unflattering friend.
Folly exhibits thus unmanly sport,
While plotting Mischief keeps reserved her court.
Lo! from that mount, in blasting sulphur broke,
Stream flames voluminous, enwrapped with smoke!
In chariot-shape they whirl up yonder tower,
Lean on its brow, and like destruction lower!
From the black depth a fiery legion springs;
Each bold bad spectre claps her sounding wings,
And straight beneath a summoned, traitorous band,
On horror bent, in dark convention stand:
From each fiend's mouth a ruddy vapour flows,
Glides through the roof, and o'er the council glows:
The villains, close beneath the infection pent,
Feel, all possessed, their rising galls ferment;
And burn with faction, hate, and vengeful ire,
For rapine, blood, and devastation dire!
But Justice marks their ways: she waves in air
The sword, high-threatening, like a comet's glare.
While here dark Villainy herself deceives,
There studious Honesty our view relieves ;
A feeble taper from yon lonesome room,
Scattering thin rays, just glimmers through the gloom;
There sits the sapient bard in museful mood,
And glows impassioned for his country's good!
All the bright spirits of the just combined,
Inform, refine, and prompt his towering mind!
He takes the gifted quill from hands divine,
Around his temples rays refulgent shine.
Now rapt, now more than man, I see him climb
To view this speck of earth from worlds sublime.
I see him now o'er nature's works preside;
How clear the vision! and the view how wide!
John Dyer was born at Aberglasslyn, Carmarthenshire, about 1700; and on the death of his father, a solicitor, abandoned the profession of law. He then took to art, and rambled over South Wales and the adjoining parts of England, filling his mind with a love of nature and his portfolio with sketches. During his excursions he wrote Grongar Hill (1726), a poem remarkable in its period for simplicity, warm feeling, and fine description of natural scenery; it provokes comparison with Jonson's Penshurst and Denham's Cooper's Hill. Grongar Hill, on the river Towy in Cardigan, commands a view noble enough to inspire any poet. Dyer next made a tour to Italy, to study painting. On his return in 1740 he published anonymously another poem, The Ruins of Rome, in blank verse of this pattern:
Behold the pride of pomp,
The throne of nations fallen; obscured in dust;
Even yet majestical: the solemn scene
Elates the soul, while now the rising sun
Flames on the ruins in the purer air
Towering aloft, upon the glittering plain,
Like broken rocks, a vast circumference;
Rent palaces, crushed columns, rifted moles,
Fanes rolled on fanes, and tombs on buried tombs.
One short passage Johnson specially noted as
'conceived with the mind of a poet'-it is certainly
neither smooth (even if we agree to mispronounce
orison) nor in Johnson's own manner :
The pilgrim oft
At dead of night, 'mid his orison, hears,
Aghast, the voice of time, disparting towers,
Tumbling all precipitate down dashed,
Rattling around, loud thundering to the moon. Seeing that he had little chance of succeeding as an artist, Dyer entered the Church, and obtained successively the vicarage of Catthorpe in Leicestershire and the Lincolnshire livings of Belchford, Coningsby, and Kirkby-on-Bain. He published in 1757 his longest poetical work, The Fleece, devoted to the care of sheep, the labours of the loom." How The subject was hardly a promising one. can a man write poetically, said Johnson, of serges and druggets? Yet Dyer did write a not unpleasing didactic poem on this theme; Akenside assisted him with some finishing touches, and Wordsworth praised the result in a sonnet. One critic, learning from Dodsley that the author of The Fleece was no longer young, threatened 'He will be buried in woollen!' He did die the year after the publication. (Samuel Dyer, translator and Johnson's friend, was a younger contemporary.) Dyer's poetical pictures are happy miniatures of nature, carefully drawn, prettily coloured, and grouped with the taste of an artist. His versification is musical, and his moralisings relevant enough. Byron thought the six lines towards the close of Grongar Hill beginning 'As yon summits soft and fair' had suggested Campbell's famous opening of the 'Pleasures of Hope.'
Silent nymph, with curious eye,
Who, the purple evening, lie
On the mountain's lonely van,
Beyond the noise of busy man;
Painting fair the form of things,
While the yellow linnet sings;
Or the tuneful nightingale
Charms the forest with her tale;
Come, with all thy various hues,
Come, and aid thy sister muse;
Now, while Phoebus, riding high,
Gives lustre to the land and sky!
Grongar Hill invites my song,
Draw the landskip bright and strong;
Grongar, in whose mossy cells
Sweetly musing quiet dwells;
Grongar, in whose silent shade,
For the modest Muses made;
So oft I have, the evening still,
At the fountain of a rill,
Sat upon a flowery bed,
With my hand beneath my head;
While strayed my eyes o'er Towy's flood,
Over mead, and over wood,
From house to house, from hill to hill,
Till contemplation had her fill.
About his checkered sides I wind,
And leave his brooks and meads behind,
And groves, and grottoes where I lay,
And vistas shooting beams of day:
Wide and wider spreads the vale,
As circles on a smooth canal:
The mountains round, unhappy fate,
Sooner or later, of all height,
Withdraw their summits from the skies,
And lessen as the others rise:
Still the prospect wider spreads,
Adds a thousand woods and meads;
Still it widens, widens still,
And sinks the newly risen hill.
Now I gain the mountain's brow,
What a landskip lies below!
No clouds, no vapours intervene,
But the gay, the open scene
Does the face of nature shew,
In all the hues of heaven's bow;
And, swelling to embrace the light,
Spreads around beneath the sight.
Old castles on the cliffs arise,
Proudly towering in the skies!
Rushing from the woods, the spires
Seem from hence ascending fires!
Half his beams Apollo sheds
On the yellow mountain heads!
Gilds the fleeces of the flocks,
And glitters on the broken rocks!
Below me trees unnumbered rise,
Beautiful in various dyes :
The gloomy pine, the poplar blue,
The yellow beech, the sable yew,
The slender fir that taper grows,
The sturdy oak with broad-spread boughs.
And beyond the purple grove,
Haunt of Phillis, queen of love!
Gaudy as the opening dawn,
Lies a long and level lawn,
On which a dark hill, steep and high,
Holds and charms the wandering eye!
Deep are his feet in Towy's flood,
His sides are cloathed with waving wood,
And ancient towers crown his brow,
That cast an aweful look below;
Whose ragged walls the ivy creeps,
And with her arms from falling keeps :
So both a safety from the wind
On mutual dependence find.
'Tis now the raven's bleak abode ;
'Tis now the apartment of the toad;
And there the fox securely feeds,
And there the poisonous adder breeds,
Concealed in ruins, moss, and weeds;
While, ever and anon, there falls
Huge heaps of hoary mouldered walls.
Yet time has seen, that lifts the low,
And level lays the lofty brow,
Has seen this broken pile complete,
Big with the vanity of state;
But transient is the smile of fate!
A little rule, a little sway,
A sunbeam in a winter's day,
Is all the proud and mighty have
Between the cradle and the grave.
And see the rivers, how they run
Through woods and meads, in shade and sun,
Sometimes swift, sometimes slow,
Wave succeeding wave, they go
A various journey to the deep,
Like human life, to endless sleep!
Thus is nature's vesture wrought,
To instruct our wandering thought;
Thus she dresses green and gay,
To disperse our cares away.
Ever charming, ever new,
When will the landskip tire the view!
The fountain's fall, the river's flow,
The woody valleys, warm and low;
The windy summit, wild and high,
Roughly rushing on the sky!
The pleasant seat, the ruined tower,
The naked rock, the shady bower;
The town and village, dome and farm,
Each give each a double charm,
As pearls upon an Æthiop's arm.
See, on the mountain's southern side,
Where the prospect opens wide,
Where the evening gilds the tide,
How close and small the hedges lie!
What streaks of meadows cross the eye!
A step, methinks, may pass the stream,"
So little distant dangers seem;
So we mistake the future's face,
Eyed thro' hope's deluding glass ;
As yon summits soft and fair,
Clad in colours of the air,
Which to those who journey near,
Barren, brown, and rough appear;
Still we tread the same coarse way,
The present 's still a cloudy day.
O may I with myself agree,
And never covet what I see;
Content me with an humble shade,
My passions tamed, my wishes laid;
For while our wishes wildly roll,
We banish quiet from the soul:
'Tis thus the busy beat the air,
And misers gather wealth and care.
Now, even now, my joys run high,
As on the mountain turf I lie;
While the wanton zephyr sings,
And in the vale perfumes his wings;
While the waters murmur deep,
While the shepherd charms his sheep,
While the birds unbounded fly,
And with music fill the sky,
Now, even now, my joys run high.
Be full, ye courts; be great who will;
Search for peace with all your skill;
Open wide the lofty door,
Seek her on the marble floor :
In vain you search, she is not there;
In vain you search the domes of care!
Grass and flowers Quiet treads,
On the meads and mountain heads,
Along with Pleasure close allied,
Ever by each other's side:
And often, by the murmuring rill,
Hears the thrush, while all is still,
Within the groves of Grongar Hill.
The Fleece, in blank verse, is not an English pastoral Georgic on sheep and the shepherd's cares and joys, but sees the fleece through the shearing, washing, dyeing, carding, spinning, and weaving, and even follows English woollens on their last journey by land and sea to France, Russia, Siberia, India, China, the United States, South America, and all the world; it is a patriotic poem on the woollen manufacture and the seaborne trade of the nation of shopkeepers. Description of the land suitable for rearing sheep leads quite naturally to pictures of life in Lapland and Arabia, which are not good for sheep-breeding; the voyages of Jason and the argonauts of the golden fleece presented inevitable attractions; and the Miltonic and sonorous lists of places to which English manufactures find their way leave room for references to Vasco da Gama, Columbus, and Anson. Not content with the processes of woollen manufacture, this poet of the woollen interest in its widest sense bursts into an enthusiastic excursus on the forging and sharpening of sheep-shears and cutlery at Leeds. Dyer had a warm affection for his native Wales, and Welsh sheep, Demetia, Siluria, the banks of the Wye and Severn, occupy disproportionate space in a survey of British sheep-farming. And repeated returns to the magnificence of Plynlimmon, Cader Idris, and other Welsh hills show that Dyer and his contemporaries were by no means so dead to the glories of mountain scenery as is often assumed. Amid the comically prosaic details and tedious didacticism there are fine passages and admirable lines in The Fleece, to which Mr Leslie Stephen is unjust in dismissing it as simply unreadable. The combination of true simplicity and eighteenth-century artificiality is curiously entertaining. Dyer's frank enthusiasm for the English climate, its refreshing fogs and rains, and the perennial verdure and purling brooks thereby nourished, is unconventional, frank, and infectious:
Those slow-descending showers,
Those hovering fogs, that bathe our growing vales
In deep November (loathed by trifling Gaul,
Effeminate), are gifts the Pleiads shed,
Britannia's handmaids. As the beverage falls,
Her hills rejoice, her valleys laugh and sing.
Hail noble Albion! where no golden mines,
No soft perfumes, nor oils, nor myrtle bowers,
The vigorous frame and lofty heart of man
Enervate round whose stern cerulean brows
White-winged snow, and cloud, and pearly rain,
Frequent attend, with solemn majesty :
Rich queen of mists and vapours! These thy sons
With their cool arms compress; and twist their nerves
For deeds of excellence and high renown.
Thus formed, our Edwards, Henrys, Churchills, Blakes,
Our Lockes, our Newtons, and our Miltons, rose.
See, the sun gleams; the living pastures rise,
After the nurture of the fallen shower,
How beautiful! How blue the ethereal vault,
How verdurous the lawns, how clear the brooks!
Such noble warlike steeds, such herds of kine,
So sleek, so vast; such spacious flocks of sheep,
Like flakes of gold illumining the green,
What other paradise adorn but thine,
Britannia? happy, if thy sons would know
Their happiness.
This English Cotter's Saturday Night' is not without a charming and truthful realism:
Only a slender tuft of useful ash,
And mingled beech and elm, securely tall,
The little smiling cottage warm embowered; ·
The little smiling cottage, where at eve
He meets his rosy children at the door,
Prattling their welcomes, and his honest wife,
With good brown cake and bacon slice, intent
To cheer his hunger after labour hard.
This is part of the shepherd's duties:
But spread around thy tenderest diligence
In flowery spring-time, when the new-dropt lamb,
Tottering with weakness by his mother's side,
Feels the fresh world about him; and each thorn,
Hillock, or furrow trips his feeble feet:
O guard his meek sweet innocence from all
The innumerous ills that rush around his life!
Mark the quick kite, with beak and talons prone,
Circling the skies to snatch him from the plain;
Observe the lurking crows; beware the brake;
There the sly fox the careless minute waits;
Nor trust thy neighbour's dog, nor earth, nor sky; ...
Between the lark's note and the nightingale's,
His hungry bleating still with tepid milk:
In this soft office may thy children join,
And charitable habits learn in sport.
Colin, on the top of Craig-y-Breiddyn in Montgomeryshire, laments like a modern philanthropic economist the rush to the towns :
What various views unnumbered spread beneath!
Woods, towers, vales, caves, dells, cliffs, and torrent
And here and there, between the spiry rocks, [floods;
The broad flat sea. Far nobler prospects these,
Than gardens black with smoke in dusty towns,
Where stenchy vapours often blot the sun:
Yet flying from his quiet, thither crowds
Each greedy wretch for tardy-rising wealth,
Which comes too late; that courts the taste in vain,
Or nauseates with distempers. Yes, ye rich,
Still, still be rich, if thus ye fashion life,
And piping, careless, silly shepherds we;
We silly shepherds, all intent to feed
Our snowy flocks, and wind the sleeky fleece. Dyer rejoiced in the present and prospective well-being of the American colonies :
Happy the voyage, o'er the Atlantic brine,
By active Raleigh made, and great the joy,
When he discerned above the foamy surge
A rising coast, for future colonies,
Opening her bays and figuring her capes,
Even from the northern tropic to the pole.
No land gives more employment to the loom,
Or kindlier feeds the indigent; no land
With more variety of wealth rewards
The hand of labour: thither from the wrongs
Of lawless rule the free-born spirit flies;
Thither affliction, thither poverty,
And arts and sciences: thrice happy clime,
Which Britain makes the asylum of mankind.
But joy superior far his bosom warms,
Who views those shores in every culture dressed;
With habitations gay, and numerous towns,
On hill and valley; and his countrymen
Formed into various states, powerful and rich,
In regions far remote: who from our looms
Take largely for themselves, and for those tribes
Of Indians, ancient tenants of the land,
In amity conjoined, of civil life
The comforts taught, and various new desires,
Which kindle arts, and occupy the poor,
And spread Britannia's flocks o'er every dale.
But he quite foresees American rivalry in raw
material, if not in manufacture, and warns Britons,
then as now too secure, of the dangers of slackness:
Even in the new Columbian world appears
The woolly covering: Apacheria's glades,
And Canses', echo to the pipes and flocks
Of foreign swains. While Time shakes down his sands,
And works continual change, be none secure :
Quicken your labours, brace your slackening nerves,
Ye Britons; nor sleep careless on the lap
Of bounteous Nature; she is elsewhere kind.
See Mississippi lengthen-on her lawns,
Propitious to the shepherds: see the sheep
Of fertile Arica, like camels formed,
Which bear huge burdens to the sea-beat shore,
And shine with fleeces soft as feathery down.
The country of the Apache Indians-parts of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona-was even farther away in the Wild West than Kansas. The sheep of Arica are, of course, llamas.
Isaac Hawkins Browne (1705-60), son of the vicar of Burton-on-Trent, was educated at Oxford, and in 1736 published a clever series of six imitations of then living authors which obtained great popularity. They naturally suggest a comparison with the parodies in the Rejected Addresses. Browne, who was called to the Bar, resided mainly on his family estate, but sat in Parliament for some time as member for Wenlock in Shropshire. He wrote a Latin poem, De Animi Immortalitate, which was much praised and repeatedly translated (as by Soame Jenyns), and an English poem on the subject of Design and Beauty. Johnson said that of all conversers he was the most delightful with whom I ever was in company,' and gave the sympathetic Boswell food for comfort when he told him that Browne 'drank freely for thirty years.' His imitations are his happiest work, the subject of the whole being A Pipe of Tobacco. The first of the series, A New Year's Ode, appropriately parodies the manner of Colley Cibber, then poetlaureate, in recitativo and airs, and begins:
Old battle-array, big with horror, is fled,
And olive-robed Peace again lifts up her head;
Sing, ye Muses, tobacco, the blessing of peace;
Was ever a nation so blessed as this?
Air. When summer suns grow red with heat,
Tobacco tempers Phoebus' ire;
When wintry storms around us beat,
Tobacco chears with gentle fire.
Yellow autumn, youthful spring,
In thy praises jointly sing.
Like Neptune, Cæsar guards Virginian fleets,
Fraught with tobacco's balmy sweets;
Old Ocean trembles at Britannia's power,
And Boreas is afraid to roar.
Cibber's laureate effusions are here happily traves-
tied. Ambrose Philips is also well hit off-not by
Browne himself, but by 'an ingenious friend :'
Little tube of mighty power,
Charmer of an idle hour,
Object of my warm desire,
Lip of wax and eye of fire;
And thy snowy taper waist
With my finger gently braced,
And thy pretty swelling crest,
With my little stopper pressed,
And the sweetest bliss of blisses
Breathing from thy balmy kisses.
Thomson is the subject of the third imitation:
O thou, matured by glad Hesperian suns,
Tobacco, fountain pure of limpid truth,
That looks the very soul; whence pouring thought,
Swarms all the mind; absorpt is yellow care,
And at each puff imagination burns;
Flash on thy bard, and with exalting fires
Touch the mysterious lip that chants thy praise,
In strains to mortal sons of earth unknown.
Behold an engine, wrought from tawny mines
Of ductile clay, with plastic virtue formed,
And glazed magnifick o'er, I grasp, I fill.
From Pætotheke with pungent powers perfumed
Itself one tortoise all, where shines imbibed
Each parent ray; then rudely rammed illume,
With the red touch of zeal-enkindling sheet,
Marked with Gibsonian lore; forth issue clouds,
Thought-thrilling, thirst-inciting clouds around,
And many-mining fires: I all the while,
Lolling at ease, inhale the breezy balm.
But chief, when Bacchus wont with thee to join
In genial strife and orthodoxal ale,
Stream life and joy into the Muse's bowl.
Oh, be thou still my great inspirer, thou
My Muse: oh, fan me with thy zephyr's boon,
While I, in clouded tabernacle shrined,
Burst forth all oracle and mystick song.
Many of the lines and phrases are from Thomson's poem of Liberty (1732), which also explains Gibsonian lore. Patotheke is a pedantic coinage for a tobacco-box. Such a smart parody of Thomson's magniloquent style and diction being inevitably ludicrous, the usually good-natured poet was offended, and indited some angry lines in reply. The fourth imitation is in the style of Young's Satires, which are less strongly marked by mannerism than the Night Thoughts, not then written. The parody begins :
Criticks avaunt; Tobacco is my theme;
Tremble like hornets at the blasting steam.
And you, court-insects, flutter not too near
Its light, nor buzz within the scorching sphere.
Pollio, with flame like thine my verse inspire,
So shall the Muse from smoke elicit fire.
|