Greek in a novel of to-day!) and to make the rogues of printers set
it up correctly. He likes to air his ideas on Homer, to bring in a

piece of Aristotle--not hackneyed--to show you that if he is writing
about "characters and situations so wretchedly low and dirty," he is

yet a student and a critic.
Mr. Samuel Richardson, a man of little reading, according to

Johnson, was, I doubt, sadly put to it to understand Booth's
conversations with the author who remarked that "Perhaps Mr. Pope

followed the French Translations. I observe, indeed, he talks much
in the Notes of Madame Dacier and Monsieur Eustathius." What knew

Samuel of Eustathius? I not only can forgive Fielding his pedantry;
I like it! I like a man of letters to be a scholar, and his little

pardonable display and ostentation of his Greek only brings him
nearer to us, who have none of his genius, and do not approach him

but in his faults. They make him more human; one loves him for them
as he loves Squire Western, with all his failings. Delightful,

immortal Squire!
It was not he, it was another Tory Squire that called out "Hurray

for old England! Twenty thousand honest Frenchmen are landed in
Sussex." But it was Western that talked of "One Acton, that the

Story Book says was turned into a Hare, and his own Dogs kill'd 'un,
and eat 'un." And have you forgotten the popular discussion (during

the Forty-five) of the affairs of the Nation, which, as Squire
Western said, "all of us understand"? Said the Puppet-Man, "I don't

care what Religion comes, provided the Presbyterians are not
uppermost, for they are enemies to Puppet-Shows." But the Puppet-

Man had no vote in 1745. Now, to our comfort, he can and does
exercise the gloriousprivilege of the franchise.

There is no room in this epistle for Fielding's gloriousgallery of
characters--for Lady Bellaston, who remains a lady in her

debaucheries, and is therefore so unlike our modern representative
of her class, Lady Betty, in Miss Broughton's "Doctor Cupid;" for

Square, and Thwackum, and Trulliber, and the jealous spite of Lady
Booby, and Honour, that undying lady's maid, and Partridge, and

Captain Blifil and Amelia, the fair and kind and good!
It is like the whole world of that old England--the maids of the

Inn, the parish clerk, the two sportsmen, the hosts of the taverns,
the beaux, the starveling authors--all alive; all (save the authors)

full of beef and beer; a cudgel in every fist, every man ready for a
brotherly bout at fisticuffs. What has become of it, the lusty old

militant world? What will become of us, and why do we prefer to
Fielding--a number of meritorious moderns? Who knows? But do not

let us prefer anything to our English follower of Cervantes, our
wise, merry, learned Sancho, trudging on English roads, like Don

Quixote on the paths of Spain.
But I cannot convert you. You will turn to some story about store-

clerks and summer visitors. Such is his fate who argues with the
fair.

LONGFELLOW
To Walter Mainwaring, Esq., Lothian College, Oxford.

My dear Mainwaring,--You are very good to ask me to come up and
listen to a discussion, by the College Browning Society, of the

minor characters in "Sordello;" but I think it would suit me better,
if you didn't mind, to come up when the May races are on. I am not

deeply concerned about the minor characters in "Sordello," and have
long reconciled myself to the conviction that I must pass through

this pilgrimage without hearing Sordello's story told in an
intelligible manner. Your letter, however, set me a-voyaging about

my bookshelves, taking up a volume of poetry here and there.
What an interesting tract might be written by any one who could

remember, and honestly describe, the impressions that the same books
have made on him at different ages! There is Longfellow, for

example. I have not read much in him for twenty years. I take him
up to-day, and what a flood of memories his music brings with it!

To me it is like a sad autumn wind blowing over the woods, blowing
over the empty fields, bringing the scents of October, the song of a

belated bird, and here and there a red leaf from the tree. There is
that autumnal sense of things fair and far behind, in his poetry,

or, if it is not there, his poetry stirs it in our forsaken lodges
of the past. Yes, it comes to one out of one's boyhood; it breathes

of a world very vaguely realized--a world of imitative sentiments
and forebodings of hours to come. Perhaps Longfellow first woke me

to that later sense of what poetry means, which comes with early
manhood.

Before, one had been content, I am still content, with Scott in his
battle pieces; with the ballads of the Border. Longfellow had a

touch of reflection you do not find, of course, in battle poems, in
a boy's favourites, such as "Of Nelson and the North," or "Ye

Mariners of England."
His moral reflections may seem obvious now, and trite; they were

neither when one was fifteen. To read the "Voices of the Night," in
particular--those early pieces--is to be back at school again, on a

Sunday, reading all alone on a summer's day, high in some tree, with
a wide prospect of gardens and fields.

There is that mysterious note in the tone and measure which one
first found in Longfellow, which has since reached our ears more

richly and fully in Keats, in Coleridge, in Tennyson. Take, for
example,

"The welcome, the thrice prayed for, the most fair,
The best-beloved Night!"

Is not that version of Euripides exquisite--does it not seem
exquisite still, though this is not the quality you expect chiefly

from Longfellow, though you rather look to him for honest human
matter than for an indefinable beauty of manner?

I believe it is the manner, after all, of the "Psalm of Life" that
has made it so strangely popular. People tell us, excellent people,

that it is "as good as a sermon," that they value it for this
reason, that its lesson has strengthened the hearts of men in our

difficult life. They say so, and they think so: but the poem is
not nearly as good as a sermon; it is not even coherent. But it

really has an original cadence of its own, with its double rhymes;
and the pleasure of this cadence has combined, with a belief that

they are being edified, to make readers out of number consider the
"Psalms of Life" a masterpiece. You--my learned prosodist and

student of Browning and Shelley--will agree with me that it is not a
masterpiece. But I doubt if you have enough of the experience

brought by years to tolerate the opposite opinion, as your elders
can.

How many other poems of Longfellow's there are that remind us of
youth, and of those kind, vanished faces which were around us when

we read "The Reaper and the Flowers"! I read again, and, as the
poet says,

"Then the forms of the departed
Enter at the open door,

The beloved, the true-hearted
Come to visit me once more."

Compare that simple strain, you lover of Theophile Gautier, with
Theo's own "Chateau de Souvenir" in "Emaux et Camees," and confess

the truth, which poet brings the break into the reader's voice? It
is not the dainty, accomplished Frenchman, the jeweller in words; it

is the simpler speaker of our English tongue who stirs you as a
ballad moves you. I find one comes back to Longfellow, and to one's

old self of the old years. I don't know a poem "of the affections,"
as Sir Barnes Newcome would have called it, that I like better than

Thackeray's "Cane-bottomed Chair." Well, "The Fire of Driftwood"
and this other of Longfellow's with its absolute lack of pretence,

its artful avoidance of art, is not less tender and true.
"And she sits and gazes at me