to his divine mission. He may say atmosphere. Where we recognise with the prophet "Mon empire est détruit si l'homme est reconnu." nor Some kinds of posthumous renown there are indeed which the purest coveters of fame might envy. But such kinds of renown are the rarest; are they those which most fascinate the emulous eyes of youth by the pomps of intellectual splendour. For perhaps a certain roughness of surface is necessary to the emission of that light which most strikes the remote beholder, as it is said the moon would be invisible to us were its surface even. And the renowns of which I now speak at tract less by the glare of genius than by the just proportions of moral beauty, which the genius of others hallowing and revering them (as genius ever hallows and reveres all images of moral beauty), preserves distinct and clear by the tribute of its own rays. in any one an image of moral elevation, which seems to us at the first glance unique and transcendent, I believe that, on a careful examination, we shall find that among his coevals, or in the very nature of his times, those qualities. which furnish forth their archetype in him were rife and prevalent. And if, in him, they have a more conspicuous and striking embodiment, it will be partly from circumstances, whether of birth, fortune, or favouring event, which first served to buoy up his merit to the surface of opinion, and then bear it onward in strong tide to the shore of fame; and partly from that force of will which is often neither a moral nor an intellectual property, but rather a result of physical energy and constitutional hardihood of nerve. Again, some men have found in a grateful posterity the guardians of an enviable renown, less by any remarkable excellence of their own, than by the wrongs they have suf fered in a cause which is endeared to the interests of mankind. Thus, William Lord Russell and Algernon Sidney are hallowed to English freemen so long as our history shall last. But if they had not died on the scaffold, it may be reasonably doubted whether they could still live in fame. What English gentleman would not rejoice to bequeath a name like that of Sir Philip Sidney? what French chevalier like that of Bayard? what cosmopolitan philanthropist like that of Howard? what republican patriot like that of Washington? what holy priest like that of Carlo Borromeo? But in all these serene and beautiful reDowns the intellectual attributes, though not inconsiderable, are slight Seeing, then, that the prizes in comparison with the moral. The drawn from the funeral urn are so admiring genius of others, however, few, and among the few, so very invests them with the intellectual few that are worth more than a glory which genius alone can be- blank, it is not surprising that the stow. They are of those whom desire of posthumous reputation, poets do not imitate, but whom though in itself universal, should poets exalt and sanctify. Yet in rather contract into a yearning for the moral attributes which secure affection or a regard for character, their fame they must have been bounded to the memory of our own approached by many of their con- generation or the next, than expand temporaries never heard of. For into the) grandiose conceit of everthough in intellect a man may so during fame. Nor do I believe lift himself above his class, his land, that with those by whom such fame his age, that he may be said to is won is the prophetic hope of it a tower alone as well as aloft, yet the prevalent motive power after the moral part of him must, almost dreamy season of early youth. always, draw the chief supply of the dawn of life, in our school and its nutriment from the surrounding college days, we do but dimly see At the line between life and death, life seems so distinct and so long death seems so vague and so far. Then, when we think of fame, we scarce discern the difference between the living and the dead. Then, our enthusiasm is for ideals, and our emulation is to vie with the types that express them. It is less living men we would emulate than immaterial names. In the martial sports of our play-ground we identify ourselves not with a Raglan or a Gortschakoff, but with a Hector or Achilles. Who shall tell us that Hector and Achilles never lived ? to us, while in boyhood, they are living still, nay, among the most potent and vital of living men. We know not then what we could not do; we fancy we could do all things were we but grown-up men. We ignore the grave. As we live familiarly with the ancients, so we associate our own life with posterity. Is our first copy of verse, on the Ruins of Pæstum is our first theme, to the text, Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori,' - uncommended by our tasteless master, unadmired by our envious class, we have an undefined consolatory idea that posterity will do us justice. And posterity to us seems a nextdoor neighbour, with whom we shall shake hands, and from whom we shall hear polite compliments not when we are dead, but when we are grown up. We are too full of life to comprehend that there is any death except for those old folks who cannot appreciate us. Bright and illustrious illusions! Who can blame, who laugh at the boy, who not admire and commend him, for that desire of a fame outlasting the Pyramids, by which he insensibly learns to live in a life beyond the present, and nourish dreams of a good unattainable by the senses? But when a man has arrived at the maturity of his reason, and his sight has grown sufficiently disciplined to recognise the boundaries of human life when he has insensibly taught his ear to detect the hollow blare of those wind-instruments of fame - which once stirred his heart like the fife of Calliope descending from heaven to blend the names of men with those of the Uranides, the greed of posthumous renown passes away with the other wild longings of his youth. If he has not already achieved celebrity even among his own race, his sobered judgment reveals to him the slender chance of celebrity among the race which follows, and is sure to be stunned by living claimants loud enough to absorb its heed. If he has achieved celebrity, then his post is marked out in the Present. He has his labours, his cares, his duties, for the day. He cannot pause to dream what may be said of him in a morrow that he will not greet. If really and substantially famous, his egotism is gone. He is moving with and for multitudes and his age; and what he writes, what he does, potential in his own time, must indeed have its influence over the times that follow, but often mediately, indirectly, and as indetectable from the influence of minds that blend their light with his own, as one star-beam is from another. And for the most part, men thus actively engaged in the work which distinguishes them in the eyes of contemporaries, think as little of the fame which that work may or may not accord among distant races to the six or seven letters which syllable their names, as thinks a star whose radiance reaches us, of what poets may hymn to its honour, or astrologers assign to its effect, under the name by which we distinguish the star, whether we call it Saturn or Mars or Venus. Certainly we may presume, that of all aspirants to posthumous renown poets are the most ardent and the most persevering justly so; for of all kinds of intellectual merit, the poet's is that which contemporaries may the most fail to recognise. And yet among poets since the Christian era (I shall touch later on those of the heathen time), we cannot, I think, discover any great anxiety for posthumous renown in -- "So much the rather thou, celestial light, Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers Irradiate !" Poor and trivial, among sublimer consolations, would have been even the assured foreknowledge of that rank among the worldly subjects of mortal kings, which Addison's elegant criticism established for Burnet's blind schoolmaster to him who, alone among poets, had the privilege to say those who lived long enough to But the brief sigh for renown, less fulfil their mission, and have re- haughtily than modestly breathed ceived from posterity a homage forth in the parenthetical line, soon that would have sanctioned their swells into the loftier prayer with most confident appeal to a future which he closes his complaint of the generation. I say, those who lived loss of external day long enough to fulfil their mission; and I mean, that when their mission was fulfilled their great works done their care for the opinion of posterity seems to have been anything but restless and over-cager. No doubt, in youth, the longing for posthumous renown in them was strong. In youth, that yearning might dictate to Milton the first conception of some great epic which the world would not willingly let die. But when, after the toils and sorrows of his hard career, the old man returned to the dream of his young ambition, the joy of his divine task seems to have been little commingled with vain forethought Again, passages in Shakespeare's of the praise it might receive from Sonnets, attesting Shakespeare's men. He himself was so grand a sensitive pain in the thought of man, and so fully conscious of his his equivocal worldly status and own grandeur, that, however it may vocation, may, not illogically, be wound our vanity to own it, I do held to imply a correspondent de not think he cared very sensitively sire for the glory to which he may what we light readers or scholastic have known that his genius was critics might say of him, for or the rightful heir. Indeed, if in against. The audience which he his Sonnets he may be fairly prehoped to find, "fit, though few," was, according to the guess of one of his shrewdest commentators, confined much to the sect of his own Puritan brethren. - Goethe compares the joy of the poet to the joy of the bird; the bird sings because it is its nature to sing not because it is to be praised for singing. But Milton's joy was high beyond the bird's- it was the joy of a sublime human soul the joy of lifting himself above man's judgment, as a great soul ever seeks to do high above the evil days the dangers and the darkness with which he was encompassed round. True, he enjoins himself not "Sometimes to forget Those other two, equalled with me in fate (So were I equalled with them in renown), Blind Thamyris and blind Mæonides." "Into the heaven of heavens I have presumed, An earthly guest, and drawn empyreal air." sumed to speak in his own person (as I think the probable and natural supposition), and not, as some contend, inventing imaginary sentiments for imaginary persons in imaginary situations he indulges in an exulting vaunt of the immortality his young muse had already secured "Not marble, not the gilded monuments Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme." But in his later days, when he had attained to such reputation as the Elizabeth and James reigns of would accord to a playwriter and luckier than most playwriters, and, of course, more prudent (for genius so complete as his is always eminently prudent, eminently practical), had saved or gained the means which allowed him to retire to New Place in Stratforda gentleman, taking rank not with Homer and Sophocles, but with county squires with a Master Slender, or even with a Justice Shallow-be certainly appears to have given himself no trouble about preparing his works for us-that is, for posterity. He left them to take their chance with a carelessness that startles commonplace critics. Why so careless?-it startles me to think that critics can ask why. To an intellect so consummate as Shakespeare's, the thought of another world beyond the criticism of this world must have been very familiar; that it was familiar might, I think, be made clearly manifest by reference to the many passages and sentences in which, without dramatic necessity, and not always with dramatic fitness and effect, the great pyschologist utters his own cherished thoughts through the lips of his imaginary creations. Now, without straining too far lines in the Sonnets which appear to intimate his own mournful sense of humiliation in his calling of play er, the age itself so austerely refused to recognise the stage as a school of morals or an ally of religion, that possibly Shakespeare, who so solemnly attests his Christian faith in the Will written a year before his death, might have had some humble doubts whether his mighty genius had conferred those vast benefits on mankind which are now recognised in the wisdom of its genial and comprehensive humanity. And thus, silent as to the works of his mind, he speaks but of the deathless nature of his soul-"I commend my soul into the hands of God my Creator, hoping, and assuredly, through the only merits of Jesus Christ my Saviour, to be made partaker of life everlasting; and my body to the earth whereof it is made." Campbell has thought that Shakespeare made a secret and touching reference to his retirement from his own magic art, in the work which is held by so many critics, including De Quincey, to have been the last (viz., The Tempest'), and which Dyce esteems the most elaborately finished of all his plays; and there is so much in the sympathy by which one great poet often divines the interior parabolic significations veiled in the verse of another, that the opinion of Campbell has here an authority which will not be lightly set aside by thoughtful critics. Certainly, if Shakespeare were at that time meditating retirement from the practice of his art, he could scarcely have been more felicitously "inspired to typify himself" than in Prospero's farewell to the enchanted isle "Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves," &c. It is true that it cannot be clearly proved, any more than as yet it has been satisfactorily disproved, that the Tempest,' performed before James in 1611, five years previous to Shakespeare's decease, really was the last drama which Shakespeare wrote; but if it were ascertained that, in his retirement at Stratford, he did, during those five intervening years, busy himself on some other play,* it would not confute the assumption that he had meant to typify himself in that farewell, and, at the time, had intended to write plays no more. Descartes at one moment seriously resolved to withdraw from philosophical pursuits, and yet revoked his resolution. Be this as it may, one thing is certain, whether he did or did not write plays subsequent to the date of the Tempest,' he took no pains to secure their transmission to posterity, and evinced so little care even to distinguish those he had composed from other stock-pieces in his theatre, that it is only comparatively within a recent period that the many inferior plays assigned to his pen have been rejected from the list of his dramas; while one of the grandest of all his works, Lear,' is spoken of by Tate as an ་ 66 * Dyce says, "I suspect that before 1613 he (Shakespeare) had entirely abandoned dramatic composition." obscure piece recommended to him by a friend." My own experience of life, so far as it has extended, confirms the general views I have here taken with regard to the thirst for posthumous renown. I have seldom known a very young man of first-rate genius in whom that thirst was not keen; and still more seldom any man of first-rate genius, who, after middle life, was much tormented by it, more especially if he had already achieved contemporaneous fame, and felt how little of genuine and unalloyed delight it bestows, even while its plaudits fall upon living ears. But, on the other hand, I daily meet with mediocre men, more especially mediocre poets, to whom the vision of a fame beyond the grave is a habitual hallucination. And this last observation leads me to reflect on the strange deficiency of all clear understanding as to his degree of merit, which is almost peculiar to the writer of verse. In most other departments of intellectual industry and skill a man soon acquires a tolerably accurate idea whether what he is doing be good, bad, or indifferent; but the manufacturer of verse seems wholly unable to estimate the quality of the fabric he weaves, or perceive whether the designs he stamps or embroiders on it are really beauteous and original forms, or trite copies and graceless patterns. No matter how consummate his intelligence in other domains of mind, yet he may rank with the most stolid and purblind of self-deceivers when he has to pass judgment on his own rhymes. Frederick the Great is certainly Fritz the Little when he abandons the tented field for the Pierian grot. Richelieu never errs in his conceptions of the powers at his command except when he plunges into rhyme -never, in his vainest moments, overrates his strength against courts and nobles and foreign armies, but is wholly unable to comprehend that he is not a match for Corneille in the omposition of a tragedy. Nay, what is still more strange, poets the most confessedly illustrious have not always been able to judge so well as the most commonplace and prosaic of their readers the relative merits of their own performances. Milton is said to have preferred his Paradise Regained' to his 'Paradise Lost;' Byron to have estimated his imitations of Pope at a higher value than his 'Childe Harold' or his 'Siege of Corinth.' Campbell felt for Theodric' a more complacent affection than he bestowed on Gertrude of Wyoming;' and even Goethe, who judged his own compositions with a cooler and more candid survey than any other poet ever bestowed on the beloved children of his brain, can neither by artistic critics nor popular readers be thought justified in preferring the Second Part of 'Faust' to the First. Possibly a main cause of this offuscation of intelligence in versewriters may be found in the delight which the composition of verse gives to the author. And Richelieu explained why he, so acute in assessing his power for governing kingdoms, was so dull in comprehending his abilities for the construction of rhyme, in the answer he once gave to Desmarets, to whom he said, wearily, "In this troubled life of mine, what do you think constitutes my chief pleasure?" Desmarets, courtier-like, replied, "The thought that you are making the happiness of France." "Pas de tout!" answered Richelieu, "c'est à faire les vers." Now, the mere delight of making verse was perhaps quite as great in Richelieu as in Corneille - is as great in the schoolboy poetaster as in the loftiest bard; and in the loftiest bard not less, possibly even more, when he is rapidly and painlessly writing down to his lowest level, than when piling thought on thought, with carefully selected marbles of expression, up to his highest height. If it be truly reported of Virgil that he spent the morning in pouring forth his verses, and the evening in correcting, condensing |