tated, and for a while its glow, but the counterfeit grows duller as the genuine grows brighter with wear. The greater poets have found out the ennobling secret, the lesser ones the trick of falsification. Ford seems to me to have been a master in it. He abounds especially in mock pathos. I remember when he thoroughly imposed on me. A youth, unacquainted with grief and its incommunicable reserve, sees nothing unnatural or indecent in those expansive sorrows precious only because they can be confided to the first comer, and finds a pleasing titillation in the fresh-water tears with which they cool his eyelids. But having once come to know the jealous secretiveness of real sorrow, we resent these conspiracies to waylay our sympathy, conspiracies of the opera plotted at the top of the lungs. It is joy that is wont to overflow, but grief shrinks back to its sources. I suspect the anguish that confides its loss to the town crier. Even in that single play of Ford's which comes nearest to the true pathetic, "The Broken Heart," there is too much apparent artifice, and Charles Lamb's comment on its closing scene is worth more than all Ford ever wrote. But a critic must look at it minus Charles Lamb. We may read as much of ourselves into a great poet as we will; we shall never cancel our debt to him. In the interests of true literature we should not honor fraudulent drafts upon our imagination.

Ford has an air of saying something without ever saying it that is peculiarly distressing to a man who values his time. His diction is hack

neyed and commonplace, and has seldom the charm of unexpected felicity, so much a matter of course with the elder poets. Especially does his want of imagination show itself in his metaphors. The strong direct thrust of phrase which we cannot parry, sometimes because of very artlessness, is never his.

Compare, for example, this passage with one of similar content from Shakespeare:

66 Keep in,

Bright angel, that severer breath to cool
The heat of cruelty which sways the temple
Of your too stony breast; you cannot urge
One reason to rebuke my trembling plea
Which I have not, with many nights' expense,
Examined; but, oh Madam, still I find
No physic strong to cure a tortured mind
But freedom from the torture it sustains."

Now hear Shakespeare:

"Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,
Raze out the written troubles of the brain,

And, with some sweet oblivious antidote,

Cleanse the stuff'd bosom of the perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart?"

Ford lingers-out his heart-breaks too much. He recalls to my mind a speech of Calianax in Beaumont and Fletcher's "Maid's Tragedy:" "You have all fine new tricks to grieve. But I ne'er knew any but direct crying." One is tempted to prefer the peremptory way in which the old balladmongers dealt with such matters:

"She turned her face unto the wa',

And there her very heart it brak."

I cannot bid you farewell without thanking you for the patience with which you have followed me to the end. I may have seemed sometimes to be talking to you of things that would weigh but as thistle-down in the great business-scales of life. But I have an old opinion, strengthening with years, that it is as important to keep the soul alive as the body: nay, that it is the life of the soul which gives all its value to that of the body. Poetry is a criticism of life only in the sense that it furnishes us with the standard of a more ideal felicity, of calmer pleasures and more majestic pains. I am glad to see that what the understanding would stigmatize as useless is coming back into books written for children, which at one time threatened to become more and more drearily practical and didactic. The fairies are permitted once more to imprint their rings on the tender sward of the child's fancy, and it is the child's fancy that often lives obscurely on to minister solace to the lonelier and less sociable mind of the man. Our nature resents the closing up of the windows on its emotional and imaginative side, and revenges itself as it can. I have observed that many who deny the inspiration of Scripture hasten to redress their balance by giving a reverent credit to the revelations of inspired tables and camp-stools. In a last analysis it may be said that it is to the sense of Wonder that all literature of the Fancy and of the Imagination appeals. I am told that this sense is the survival in us of some savage ancestor of the

age
of flint. If so, I am thankful to him for his
longevity, or his transmitted nature, whichever it
may be. But I have my own suspicion sometimes
that the true age of flint is before, and not behind
us, an age hardening itself more and more to those
subtle influences which ransom our lives from the
captivity of the actual, from that dungeon whose
warder is the Giant Despair. Yet I am consoled
by thinking that the siege of Troy will be remem-
bered when those of Vicksburg and Paris are for-
gotten. One of the old dramatists, Thomas Hey-
wood, has, without meaning it, set down for us the
uses of the poets:

66 They cover us with counsel to defend us
From storms without; they polish us within
With learning, knowledge, arts, and disciplines;
All that is nought and vicious they sweep from us
Like dust and cobwebs; our rooms concealed
Hang with the costliest hangings 'bout the walls,
Emblems and beauteous symbols pictured round."

INDEX.

American language, foolish talk about Browne, Sir Thomas, quoted, 7, 153.
an, 216.

Browning, his translation of the Aga-
memnon, 145.

Appleton, Samuel, anecdote of, 308, Burbage, Richard, the actor, 189.
309.