584 FIRST-FRUITS OF AUSTRALIAN POETRY. We saw Wilkinson after it in a “Walk for a Wager.” What a picture of forlorn hope, of abject, orphan destitution! He seems to have no friends in the world but his legs, and he plies them accordingly. He goes walking on like a perpetual motion. His continual ambulatory presence performs the part of a Greek chorus. He is the walking gentleman of the piece; a peripatetic that would make a stoic laugh. He made us cry. His Muffincap in "Amateurs and Actors" is just such another piece of acting. We have seen charity boys, both of St. Clement's and Farringdon Without, looking just as old, ground down out of all semblance of youth, by abject and hopeless neglect-you cannot guess their age between fifteen and fifty. If Mr. Peake is the author of these pieces, he has no reason to be piqued at their reception. We must apologise for an oversight in our last week's article. The allusion made to Mr. Kean's acting of Luke in the "City Madam was totally inapplicable to the part and to the play. We were thinking of his performance of the concluding scenes of "The New Way to Pay Old Debts." We confounded one of Massinger's strange heroes with the other. It was Sir Giles Overreach we meant; nor are we sure that our remark was just, even with this explanation. When we consider the intense tone in which Mr. Kean thinks it proper (and he is quite as likely to be in the right as his blundering critic) to pitch the temperament of that monstrous character from the beginning, it follows but logically and naturally, that where the wild uncontrollable man comes to be baffled of his purpose, his passion should assume a frenzied manner, which it was altogether absurd to expect should be the same with the manner of the cautious and self-restraining Cantwell, even when he breaks loose from all bonds in the agony of his final exposure. We never felt more strongly the good sense of the saying, "Comparisons are odious." They betray us not seldom into bitter errors of judgment; and sometimes, as in the present instance, into absolute matter-of-fact blunders. But we have recanted. FIRST-FRUITS OF AUSTRALIAN POETRY. The "Examiner," January 16, 1820. I first adventure; follow me who list: WHOEVER thou art that hast transplanted the British wood-notes to the far-off forest which the kangaroo haunts,-whether thou art some involuntary exile that solaces his sad estrangement with recurrence to his native notes, with more wisdom than those captive Hebrews of old refused to sing their Sion songs in a strange land,—or whether, as we rather suspect, thou art that valued friend of ours who, in thy young time of life, together with thy faithful bride, thy newly 66 wedded flower," didst, in obedience to the stern voice of duty, quit thy friends, thy family, thy pleasing avocations, the Muses, with which thou wert as deeply smitten as any, we believe, in our age and country, to go and administer tedious justice in inauspicious, unliterary FIRST-FRUITS OF AUSTRALIAN POETRY. 585 THIEFIELD,'-we reclaim thee for our own, and gladly would transport thee back to thy native "fields," and studies congenial to thy habits. We know a merry captain, and co-navigator with Cook, who prides himself upon having planted the first pun in Otaheite. It was in their own language, and the islanders first looked at him, then stared at one another, and all at once burst out into a genial laugh. It was a stranger, and as a stranger they gave it welcome. Many a quibble of their own growth, we doubt not, has since sprung from that well-timed exotic. Where puns flourish, there must be no inconsiderable advance in civilisation. The same good results we are willing to augur from this dawn of refinement at Sydney. They were beginning to have something like a theatrical establishment there, which we are sorry to hear has been suppressed; for we are of opinion with those who think that a taste for such kind of entertainments is one remove at least from profligacy, and that Shakespeare and Gay may be as safe teachers of morality as the ordinary treatises which assume to instil that science. We have seen one of their playbills (while the thing was permitted to last), and were affected by it in no ordinary degree, particularly in the omission of the titles of honour which in this country are condescendingly conceded to the players. In their dramatis persona, Jobson was played by Smith; Lady Loverule, Jones; Nell, Wilkinson : gentlemen and lady performers alike curtailed of their fair proportions. With a little patronage, we prophesy that, in a very few years, the histrionic establishment of Sydney would have risen in respectability, and the humble performers would, by tacit leave or open permission, have been allowed to use the same encouraging affixes to their names which dignify their prouder brethren and sisters in the mother country. What a moral advancement, what a lift in the scale, to a Braham or a Stephens of New South Wales to write themselves Mr. and Miss! The King here has it not in his power to do so much for a commoner, 'no, not though he dub him a Duke. The "First-Fruits" consist of two poems. The first celebrates the plant Epacris grandiflora; but we are no botanists, and perhaps there is too much matter mixed up in it from the "Midsummer Night's Dream to please some readers. The thefts are indeed so open and palpable, that we almost recur to our first surmise, that the author must be some unfortunate wight sent on his travels for plagiarisms of a more serious complexion. But the old matter and the new blend kindly together, and must, we hope, have proved right acceptable to more than one -Among the fair Of that young land of Shakespeare's tongue. We select for our readers the second poem, and are mistaken if it does not relish of the graceful hyperboles of our elder writers. We can conceive it to have been written by Andrew Marvell, supposing him to have been banished to Botany Bay, as he did, we believe, once meditate a voluntary exile to Bermuda. See his fine poem, "Where the remote Bermudas ride." 1 An elegant periphrasis for the Bay. Mr. Coleridge led us the way-"Cloudland, gorgeous land." TABLE-TALK. BY THE LATE ELIA,1 No. I. THE greatest pleasure I know is to do a good action by stealth, and to have it found out by accident. 'Tis unpleasant to meet a beggar. It is painful to deny him; and if you relieve him, it is so much out of your pocket. Men marry for fortune, and sometimes to please their fancy; but, much oftener than is suspected, they consider what the world will say of it; how such a woman in their friends' eyes will look at the head of a table. Hence we see so many insipid beauties made wives of, that could not have struck the particular fancy of any man that had any fancy at all. These I call furniture wives; as men buy furniture pictures, because they suit this or that niche in their dining-parlours. Your universally cried-up beauties are the very last choice which a man of taste would make. What pleases all cannot have that individual charm which makes this or that countenance engaging to you, and to you only, perhaps you know not why. What gained the fair Gunnings titled husbands, who, after all, turned out very sorry wives? Popular repute. It is a sore trial when a daughter shall marry against her father's approbation. A little hard-heartedness and aversion to a reconcilement is almost pardonable. After all, Will Dockwray's way is perhaps the wisest. His best-loved daughter made a most imprudent match; in fact, eloped with the last man in the world that her father would have wished her to marry. All the world said that he would never speak to her again. For months she durst not write to him, much less come near him. But in a casual rencounter he met her in the streets of Ware ;-Ware, that will long remember the mild virtues of William Dockwray, Esquire. What said the parent to his disobedient child, whose knees faltered under her at the sight of him? “Ha! Sukey, is it you?" with that benevolent aspect with which he paced the streets of Ware, venerated as an angel; come and dine with us on Sunday;" then turning away, and again turning back, as if he had forgotten something, he added, " And, Sukey, do you hear, bring your husband with you." This was all the reproof she ever heard from him. Need it be added that the match turned out better for Susan than the world expected? "We read the 'Paradise Lost' as a task," says Dr. Johnson. Nay, rather as a celestial recreation, of which the dullard mind is not at all hours alike recipient. "Nobody ever wished it longer; "— 1 From the "Athenæum" for 11th January, 31st May, 7th June, and 19th July, 1834 Lamb died the following December. nor the moon rounder, he might have added. Why, 'tis the perfectness and completeness of it which makes us imagine that not a line could be added to it or diminished from it with advantage. Would we have a cubit added to the stature of the Medicean Venus? Do we wish her taller? Lear. Who are you? No. II. Mine eyes are none o' the best. I'll tell you straight. Kent. The same; your servant Kent. Where is your servant Caius ? Lear. He's a good fellow, I can tell you that; Kent. That, from your first of difference and decay, Lear. You are welcome hither. Albany. He knows not what he says; and vain it is Edgar. Look up, my Lord. Kent. Vex not his ghost. O let him pass! He hates him, Stretch him out longer. So ends "King Lear," the most stupendous of the Shakespearian dramas, and Kent the noblest feature of the conceptions of his divine mind. This is the magnanimity of authorship, when a writer, having a topic presented to him fruitful of beauties for common minds, waives his privilege, and trusts to the judicious few for understanding the reason of his abstinence. What a pudder would a common dramatist have raised here of a reconciliation scene, a perfect recognition, between the assumed Caius and his master!-to the suffusing of many fair eyes and the moistening of cambric handkerchiefs. The old dying king partially catching at the truth, and immediately lapsing into obliviousness, with the high-minded carelessness of the other to have his services appreciated, as one that -served not for gain, Or followed out of form, are among the most judicious, not to say heart-touching, strokes in Shakespeare. Allied to this magnanimity it is where the pith and point of an argument, the amplification of which might compromise the modesty of the speaker, is delivered briefly, and, as it were, parenthetically; as in those few but pregnant words in which the man in the old "Nut-Brown Maid" rather intimates than reveals his unsuspected high birth to the woman : Now understand, to Westmorland, I will you bring, and with a ring, I will you take, and lady make. Turn we to the version of it, ten times diluted, of dear Mat Prior -in his own way unequalled, and a poet nowadays too much neglected. "In me," quoth Henry, addressing the astounded Emma -with a flourish and an attitude, as we may conceive In me behold the potent Edgar's heir, Illustrious Earl! him terrible in war, And with a deal of skimble-skamble stuff, as Hotspur would term it, more, presents the lady with a full and true enumeration of his papa's rent-roll in the fat soil by Deva. But of all parentheses (not to quit the topic too suddenly), commend me to that most significant one at the commencement of the old popular ballad of Fair Rosamund Now mark When good King Henry ruled this land, The second of that name, (Besides the Queen) he dearly loved There is great virtue in this besides. Amidst the complaints of the wide spread of infidelity among us, it is consolatory that a sect is sprung up in the heart of the metropolis, and is daily on the increase, of teachers of that healing doctrine which Pope upheld, and against which Voltaire directed his envenomed wit. We mean those practical preachers of optimism, or the belief that Whatever is is best-the Cads of Omnibuses; who, from their little back pulpits-not once in three or four hours, as those proclaimers of "God and his prophet" in Mussulman countries; but every minute, at the entry or exit of a brief passenger, are heard, in an almost prophetic tone, to exclaim-(Wisdom crying out, as it were, in the streets),-ALL's right. No. III. Advice is not so commonly thrown away as is imagined. We seek it in difficulties. But in common speech we are apt to confound with it admonition; as when a friend reminds one that drink is prejudicial to the health, &c. We do not care to be told of that which we know better than the good man that admonishes. M sent to his friend L, who is no water-drinker, a twopenny tract "Against the Use of Fermented Liquors." L acknowledged the obligation as far as to twopence. Penotier's advice was the safest after all: “I advised him But I must tell you. The dear, good-meaning, no-thinking creature had been dumbfounding a company of us with a detail of inextricable difficulties, in which the circumstances of an acquaintance of his were involved. No clue of light offered itself. He grew more and more misty as he proceeded. We pitied his friend, and thought God help the man so wrapt in error's endless maze : |