Sure, ere the full of it I come to try,

I shall e'en surfeit in my joy, and die.

But such a loss might well be call'd a thriving,
Since more is got by dying so, than living.

'Come, kill me then, my dear! if thou think fit,
With that which never killed woman yet.'

6

This line, according to Lamb (or possibly according to Gutch), 'alludes to "The [A] Woman Killed with Kindness '; 'not necessarily,' thinks Nott: ass,' retorts Lamb in his largest (pencil) writing. But at the close of the poem a graver offence on the Doctor's part has provoked a fiercer explosion than any we have yet witnessed.

'People will not,' if Nott is not mistaken, 'read this heavy and rambling epistle. I should think fifty lines would comprize (sic) its merits. To much of Philarete the same remark (!) applies: and I suspect that the public will dissent from you in their opinion of the occasional interruptions of the singing-boy.'

'Damn the Public and you too, thou Bellua nullius capitis !'

With this gentle expression of responsive dissent Lamb concludes his notes on the first of these two volumes. At the opening of the second we find the notes on Abuses stript and whipt which in their revised condition as part of the essay on Wither are familiar to all lovers of English letters. They begin with the second paragraph of that essay, in which sundry slight and delicate touches of improvement have fortified or simplified the original form of expression. After the sentence which describes the vehemence of Wither's love for goodness and hatred of baseness, the manuscript proceeds thus: 'His moral feeling is work'd up into a sort of passion, something as Milton describes himself at a like early age, that night and day he laboured to attain to a certain idea which he had of perfection.' Another cancelled passage is one which originally followed on the reflection that perhaps his premature defiance often exposed him' (altered in the published essay to sometimes made him obnoxious') 'to censures, which he would otherwise have slipped by.' The manuscript continues: But in this he is as faulty as some of the primitive Christians are described to have been, who were ever ready to outrun the executioner.'

The treatment of the next sentence by Nott (if Nott and not Gutch it be whose impudent fingers have defaced it) seems to me worth a moment's notice.

'The homely versification of these Satires is not likely to please

3 Altered by the elegant hand of the revisor into this more acceptable form'similar to that which Milton describes himself as feeling' &c. Let this stand as a sample of the fashion in which Lamb's exquisite English was improved by the awkward impertinence of editorial scribblers who would have strained out all the sweetness and drain out all the sap of it. There are five or six other such instances on this single page of manuscript.

in this age.' So wrote Lamb, simply and justly. Thus writes the corrector: The homely versification of these Satires, as Poems, the Editor does not print as likely to please readers of refinement.' The quality of this alteration is too apparent to need a comment. Then why give it one?

The first noteworthy note from the hand of Lamb on the text of Wither's satires is pencilled opposite a line in the first of them, headed' Of the Passion of Love.'

'But how now; was't not you (says one) that late

So humbly begg'd a boon at beauty's gate?'

This second verse is underlined by Lamb, and marked as a 'beautiful line'; and in the margin of the following four verses (two pages later) he has again written beautiful."

6

Yet, for all this, look, where I loved of late,

I have not turn'd it in a spleen to hate;
No, for 'twas first her virtue and her wit
Taught me to see how much I wanted it.

On a passage in the interesting and high-toned fifth satire, 'Of Revenge,' there is a note by Lamb which has provoked as amusing a controversy as any that enlivens the margins of this volume. Wither, it must be understood, has been dwelling with no unmanly self-complacency on the self-control displayed in the forbearance of his conduct towards a cowardly tale-bearer who had spread against him some foul calumny, a damned invention,' which, as Lamb has remarked, seems to be the slander referred to in his verses to his Mother' reprinted towards the end of this volume; a slander circulated, as he hardly need have told us, 'with dissemblings fair, and shews of love and grief,' after the changeless fashion of such venomous vermin.

I must confess I let his error pass,

Nor have I done amiss; for say, an ass

Had struck me with his heels: how should I quit

The harm he doth me?

You would blame my wit

If I should kill him. If I went to law,

Who would not hold me the most ass-a daw-
Or worst of fools? And pray, what were I less,
If I had done't to his unworthiness?

One that's so ignorant of his offence,

He seems as if he had no spark nor sense

Of understanding; one, whom if I touch

Or offer to lay hands on, 'tis as much

As if I in my anger would begin

To break the stool that erst had broke my shin.

Poets, as we all know, by all the evidence of all successive contemporaries, have steadily degenerated through each generation since the age of Wither--and indeed since the age of Chaucer: it is consoling, if it be requisite, to be reassured by such evidence as this

that the breed of their backbiters, if it could not change for the better, has found it impossible to change, in any respect whatever, for the worse. Examples of the type above described have this in common with the poor-we have them always with us. It might suffice, one would think, to connote any particular specimen as belonging to the tribe of autocoprophagi: but Lamb, eager to denote this individual example of its kind, has referred the reader of the following remark to the words 'a daw' in the sixth line of this extractdoubly underlined by his energetic pencil.

'I take the name of this man to have been Daw '-the name again doubly underlined. To whom the sceptic, or in the phrase of Wither's time the nullifidian Nott:- -"I should doubt this-he would not compare himself to the other (!)--Daw was wanted for the rhyme.' To whom again Lamb:-'I'll be damn'd if Daw was not his name. C. L.' And below :-'Explain this line' on the opposite page ('Bearing his folly's emblem in his name,') ' in any other possible way. Not compare himself with the other! why, 'tis the commonest way of speaking, IF I did so and so, I were a greater fool than he I arraign of folly. But I waste words on this Daw of Daws.' This example rather of the countercheck quarrelsome than of the retort courteous is vehemently pencilled along the margin of a previous note on the fashion of fighting duels on Calais sand. In the Comedy of Albumazar,' as he says, 'Trincalo is pleasant on this subject'; but the passage has now grown stale through frequent quotation. This custom,' he adds, "is mentioned in Sam' Rowland's [Rowlands'] Good Newes and Bad Newes, 1622': whence he proceeds to transcribe four lines.

6

At the close of the seventh satire, 'Of Jealousy,' Nott, who has been very severe on the satire preceding it, observes: There is but little pungency in this either.' To him Lamb, in punning indignation:Pray, expunge your observations, or make them a little more pungent.'

In the ninth satire, 'Of Ambition,' Wither, after a sharp attack on 'the Beast of Rome, and his foul brood of climbing cardinals,' prays Heaven

There rise not up another monster here
'Mongst our ambitious churchmen;

but proceeds with great earnestness to disclaim any community of opinion with those

That do our reverend bishops disallow,

and grows warm in praise of Abbot, archbishop of Canterbury, late bishop of London, condoling with the metropolis on the loss of this rare one among men,' and again congratulating it on the fact that Abbot's late see was filled by King; in other words,

that fate did bring

In place of such a father, such a king—

Yet is my Muse so constant in her frown,

She shall not soothe a king for half his crown.

In each of these verses Lamb has underlined the word 'king,' and asks, with a strange slip of the pen,-it can hardly have been a slip of memory-Was King bishop of London, after Laud?' This not immoderate satire on clerical ambition seems to have ruffled the spiritual plumage of Dr. Nott, who brands it as a 'very dull essay indeed.' To whom, in place of exculpation or apology, Lamb returns this question by way of answer :- -'Why double-dull it with thy dull commentary? have you nothing to cry out but "very dull," "a little better," "this has some spirit," "this is prosaic," foh!

'If the sun of Wither withdraw a while, Clamour not for joy, Owl, it will out again, and blear thy envious Eyes!'

The tenth satire, 'Of Fear,' though not very brilliant or forcible in style or verse, is curious and amusing, with a touch of historic interest towards the close, where Wither attacks the improvidence which leaves the country unprepared and her citizens undrilled for resistance, while on the strength of a muster taken once in four years

we suppose

There are no nations dare to be our foes.

Ignorant, perhaps, or forgetful, of the value given to this impeachment of his countrymen's characteristic and hereditary infirmity by the circumstances of the writer's future career as a soldier in the cause of the Commonwealth, Who,' asks the supercilious Nott, 'would read this satire twice?' 'I,' replies Lamb, with an emphatic stroke of his pencil. Why not, Nott?'

Near the end of the fourteenth satire, 'Of Cruelty,' opposite an undeniably flat and feeble verse, which had the authors known it might have been embalmed in the treatise of Scriblerus on the Bathos, the facetious Doctor has vented a marginal ejaculation of Dear me!' Lamb underlines the second word, and asks, 'Is anything else dear to you?'

6

In the first satire of the second series, Of Vanity,' Wither denounces the abuses which had crept into the administration of the universities, where heretofore, in better days,' store of palaces had been erected by the patrons of good learning, that there the Muses might live in sheltered safety,

Can this word possibly be a misprint for the name of Hiero, the royal patron of poets who had left their country for his court? This suggestion may seem farfetched, but only to those who have no personal experience of printers, and their insane ingenuities of verbal or literal perversion.

"Who is he?' inquires Nott, in sardonic perplexity. The answer is: 'Wither has here made a masculine of Pirene, the Muse's (sic) fountain. C. L.' But if this be the meaning, surely the word 'his' is a simple and obvious misprint for her.' Wither tells us that he was 'well grounded' at school, and no whit for grammar-rules to seek'; and such a barbarism would have been wellnigh impossible even to such huge fat curmudgeons' as are not, says the satirist soon after,

half so fit, if 't came to proof,

To serve for pastors, as to hang at roof

-to smoke like Bacon,' explains the author of the Essay on Roast Pig.

'If,' says Wither, after denouncing the dunces who abuse the gifts and foundations of well-devoted patrons,'

6

If I could take on me some hideous form,

I'd either make them their bad lives reform,
Or fear them quick to hell.

Qu. bear?' suggests Nott. Fear, i.e. fright,' answers Lamb: whose reading is no doubt much the finer, if perhaps at first sight the less plausible.

From consideration of other forms of the vice or folly attacked in this long and somewhat desultory satire, Wither passes on to rebuke the monumental vanity of epitaphs, of a glorious funeral or a flattering sermon, carved marble or a gilded tomb. The erection of Stonehenge supplies him with an apt if not a fresh illustration of his general text: if a deed of such great wonder die,' how shall ‘a few carved stones' secure to a man's name the immortality which its unknown founders thought surely to secure in vain ?

This is taken,' writes Lamb, 'from some far superior lines in Daniel's Musophilus; as it is a most noble passage, and not generally known, it may perhaps be worth while to quote it at length': as he proceeds to do, giving a full reference to its exact place in the edition of 1718 before he transcribes fifty-four verses in a delicately clear and even hand. The extract is a model of dignified melody, and the high simplicity of a meditative and stately style: but Dr. Nott cannot think the passage deserves so high an eulogium.' 'You damn'd fool!' rejoins the transcriber, in a less dainty but more vigorous autograph.

6

The author of the Farewell to Tobacco has very happily corrected a misprint in the closing couplet of a passage which attacks the misuse of the great plant' by rascal ragamuffins' with an energy that might have won favour for the satirist from the judgment of King James.

And you must yield, that now we justly sumus,
E'en as the old verse says, flos, fænum, fumus.