CHAPTER LIV. On Commendatory Verses. If the faculties of the writer of these papers are anything at all, they are social; and we have always been most pleased when we have received the approbation of those friends, whom we are most in the habit of thinking of when we write. There are multitudes of readers whose society we can fancy ourselves enjoying, though we have never seen them; but we are more particularly apt to imagine ourselves in such and such company, according to the nature of our articles. We are accustomed to say to ourselves, if we happen to strike off anything that pleases us,-K. will like that:-There's something for M. or R. :-C. will snap his finger and slap his knee at this:—Here's a crow to pick for H.—Here N. will shake his shoulders :-There B., his head :-Here S. will shriek with satisfaction:-L. will see the philosophy of this joke, if nobody else does.-As to our fair friends, we find it difficult to think of them and our subject together. We fancy their countenances looking so frank and kind over our disquisitions, that we long to have them turned towards ourselves instead of the paper. Every pleasure we could experience in a friend's approbation, we have felt in receiving the following verses. They are from a writer, who, of all other men, knows how to extricate a common thing from commonness, and to give it an underlook of pleasant consciousness and wisdom. We knew him directly, in spite of his stars. His hand as well as heart betrayed him. TO MY FRIEND THE INDICATOR. Your easy Essays indicate a flow, Dear Friend, of brain, which we may elsewhere seek; And to their pages I, and hundreds, owe, That Wednesday is the sweetest of the week. Such observation, wit, and sense, are shown, We think the days of Bickerstaff return'd; The receipt of these verses has set us upon thinking of the good-natured countenance which men of genius, in all ages, have for the most part shown to contemporary writers; and thence by a natural transition, of the generous friendship they have manifested for each other. Authors, like other men, may praise as well as blame for various reasons; for interest, for vanity, for fear and for the same reasons they may be silent. But generosity is natural to the humanity and the strength of genius. Where it is obscured, it is usually from something that has rendered it misanthropical. Where it is glaringly deficient, the genius is deficient in proportion. And the defaulter feels as much, though he does not know it. He feels, that the least addition to another's fame threatens to block up the view of his own. At the same time, praise by no means implies a sense of superiority. It may imply that we think it worth having; but this may arise from a consciousness of our sincerity, and from a certain instinct we have, that to relish anything exceedingly gives us a certain ability to judge, as well as a right to express our admiration, of it. On all these accounts, we were startled to hear the other day that Shakspeare had never praised a contemporary author. We had mechanically given him credit for the manifestation of every generosity under the sun; and we found the surprise affect us, not as authors (which would have been a vanity not even warranted by our having the title in common with him), but as men. What baulked us in Shakspeare seemed to baulk our faith in humanity. But we recovered as speedily. Shakspeare had none of the ordinary inducements, which make men niggardly of their commendation. He had no reason either to be jealous or afraid. He was the reverse of unpopular. His own claims were allowed. He was neither one who need be silent about a friend, lest he should be hurt by his enemy; nor one who nursed a style or a theory by himself, and so was obliged to take upon him a monopoly of admiration in self-defence; nor was he one who should gaze himself blind to everything else, in the complacency of his shallowness. If it should be argued, that he who saw through human nature was not likely to praise it, we answer, that he who saw through it as Shakspeare did was the likeliest man in the world to be kind to it. Even Swift refreshed the bitterness of his misanthropy in his love for Tom, Dick, and Harry; and what Swift did from impatience at not finding men better, Shakspeare would do out of patience in finding them so good. We instanced the sonnet in the collection called the Passionate Pilgrim, beginning If music and sweet poetry agree, in which Spenser is praised so highly. It was replied, that minute inquiries considered that collection as apocryphal. This set us upon looking again at the biographers who have criticised it; and we see no reason, for the present, to doubt its authenticity. For some parts of it we would answer upon internal evidence, especially, for instance, the Lover's Complaint. There are two lines in this poem which would alone announce him. They have the very trick of his eye: O father, what a hell of witchcraft lies But inquirers would have to do much more than disprove the authenticity of these poems, before they made out Shakspeare to be a grudging author. They would have to undo the modesty and kindliness of his other writings. They would have to undo his universal character for "gentleness," at a time when gentle meant all that was noble as well as mild. They would have to deform and to untune all that round, harmonious mind, which a great contemporary described as the very "sphere of humanity;" to deprive him of the epithet given him in the school of Milton, "unvulgar;"* to render the universality of wisdom liable to the same drawbacks as the mere universality of science; to take the child's heart out of the true man's body; to un-Shakspeare Shakspeare. If Shakspeare had never mentioned a contemporary in his life, nor given so many evidences of a cordial and admiring sense of those about him, we would sooner believe that sheer modesty had restrained his tongue, than the least approach to a petty feeling. We can believe it possible that he may have thought his panegyrics not wanted; but unless he degraded himself wilfully, in order to be no better than any of his fellowcreatures, we cannot believe it possible that he would have thought his panegyrics desired, and yet withheld them. It is remarkable that one of the most regular contributors of Commendatory Verses in the time of Shakspeare, was a man whose bluntness of criticism and feverish surliness of manners have rendered the most suspected of a jealous grudgingness ;Ben Jonson. We mean not to detract from the good-heartedness which we believe this eminent person to have possessed at bottom, when we say, that as an excess of modest confidence in his own generous instincts might possibly have accounted for the sparingness of panegyric in our great dramatist, so a noble distrust of himself, and a fear lest jealousy should get the better of his instincts, might possibly account for Ben Jonson's tendency to distribute his praises around him. If so, it shows how useful suck. a distrust is to one's ordinary share of humanity; and how much safer it will be for us, on these as well as all other occasions, to venture upon likening ourselves to Ben Jonson than to Shak. speare. It is to be recollected at the same time, that Ben Jonson, in his old age, was the more prominent person of the two. as a critical bestower of applause; that he occupied the townchair of wit and scholarship; and was in the habit of sanctioning the pretensions of new authors by a sort of literary adoption, calling them his "sons,' " and " sealing them of the tribe of Ben.' There was more in him of the aristocracy and heraldry * By Milton's nephew Phillips, in his Theatrum Poetarum. It is an epithet given in all the spirit which it attributes. of letters, than in Shakspeare, who, after all, seems to have been careless of fame himself, and to have written nothing during the chief part of his life but plays, which he did not print. Ben Jonson, among other panegyrics, wrote high and affectionate ones upon Drayton, William Browne, Fletcher and Beaumont. His verses to the memory of Shakspeare are a noble monument to both of them. The lines to Beaumont in answer for some of which we have formerly quoted, we must repeat. They are delightful for a certain involuntary but manly fondness, and for the candor with which he confesses the joy he received from such commendation. How do I love thee, Beaumont, and thy Muse Observe the good effect which the use of the word "religion" has here, though somewhat ultra-classical and pedantic. A certain pedantry, in the best sense of the term, was natural to the author, and throws a grace on his most natural moments. There is great zeal and sincerity in Ben Jonson's lines to Fletcher, on the ill-success of his Faithful Shepherdess; but we have not room for them. Beaumont's are still finer; and indeed furnish a complete specimen of his wit and sense, as well as his sympathy with his friend. His indignation against the critics is more composed and contemptuous. His uppermost feeling is confidence in his friend's greatness. The reader may here see what has always been thought by men of genius, of people who take the ipse dixits of the critics. After giving a fine sense of the irrepressible thirst for writing in a poet, he says, Yet wish I those whom I for friends have known, |