ter's penitence) and other learned divines. When we come to an edition of Roscommon's poems a little later the prefatory poem is a wraith of itself-scissors and paste cuttings from the occasional comments of Pope, Addison, Dryden, etc., stuck arbitrarily at the beginning. Thus the publisher's puffs, printed shamefacedly at the back instead of the front of a book, are possibly the evolutionary proliferation (that's the kind of way the scientists talk) from the parent stock of the prefatory poem. Perhaps the literary feuds of the eighteenth century drove the friendly habit into exile; perhaps the economy of space demanded by needy booksellers; more probably the seventeenth century became vieux jeu. Nowadays, as in most other matters, the personal element has been vested in an institution and the clasping hand has a coin in its palm. But of old the prefatory poem was a part of literary history, and I should have to turn these letters into a transatlantic thesis should I compass the subject in all its bearings. It was apt to be a little mannered, a little aware of the formalities, a little prone to play with its literary tail, fond of hyperbole and of being in at the death with a conceit; at its worst, a set exercise. But it gives a comely and well-dressed air to a book; is often well rounded and dignified, and at its most pompously ceremonious, never descended to the level of the average generalized eighteenth-century ode. It stayed personal. Frequently (as in Ben Jonson's address to Shakespeare in the 1623 folio and Chapman's to Jonson in the first edition of his “ Works," published in 1616) it achieved a very fine level of stately eulogy. Nor is its use by any means confined to the great writers. Habington's (the 66 author of that beautiful poem, "Nox nocti indicat scientiam ")"Castara" (a popular book) had in the edition of 1640 only one prefatory poem from his kinsman George Talbot. Drummond had thirteen prefixed to various editions of his poems (one of them is by "Mary Oxlie of Morpet"), of whose authors only Sir William Alexander has crept dubiously into posterity. Fuller is lauded by ten obscure writers in the 1647 edition of his "Holy War," most of them probably personal friends. A vast crop of elegies sprang from the grave of Sir Thomas Overbury, none of them signed with more than initials. Countless editions of "The Wife" were published, with "characters" of various types (the " Franklin," the "Milkmaid," and so on) in prose by Overbury and various hands at the end. Overbury's sensational death (he was apparently poisoned in the Tower by the machinations of the Countess of Essex and her paramour James I's favourite) had no doubt a good deal to do with it. Campion was implicated, you may remember, happily without any evidence of value. Overbury besides was a popular and gentle personality. The panegyrists make great play, you may be sure, with the "Wife" and the "Widow." One of them rather strains his compliment : "Juno vouchsafe and Venus when I wed, I may behold this Widdow in my bed." Others take the excellent opportunity of admonishing their own recalcitrant spouses, under the aegis of such titles as "The Cleane Contrary Wife." In one of the earlier editions of Donne's poems there are a large number of elegies from admirers-not at the beginning of the book but the end. They are a mark of the extraordinary reverence the age so justly paid him. Carew's noble address begins : "Can we not force from widowed poetry, Now thou art dead (great Donne) one Elegy Phineas Fletcher of "The Purple Island," an anatomical allegory (superb industry!) of the several parts of man's body, receives a poem from that curious patron of the poetic Muse, Edward Benlowes, no two copies of whose poems "Theophilia" (folio 1652) were published alike. The same book, if I may be so irrelevant to you, my dear X, contains some charmingly designed engravings by Hollar. Quarles (a prolific dedicator) has, of course, a couple of poems, commemorating his rather than Fletcher's genius. "My genius jumpt with thine," he says. And he actually has the audacity to talk about his "lazy quill"! O Lamb, too tender Lamb, why did you call Quarles and Herbert the two greatest religious poets of the century? The prefatory matter to Sylvester's translation of Du Bartas is a delightful farrago. There are eighteen. prefatory poems in nearly all the European languages, among them addresses (in the mother tongue) from Ben Jonson, John Davies of Hereford (a dull and disputatious poet), Hall the satirist, and Daniel. There is an engraved title, a set of acrostics and anagrams, geometrical prose devices under the names of the nine Muses, exclaiming upon the incomparable merits of James I, to whom the translation is dedicated, a portrait of Du Bartas and an inconsequent series of decorations, planted like a landscape garden wherever the ingenious fancy of the printer could find room. The author, in the true spirit of the book, has of course a commendatory poem to himself. "Hence," he says, in a religious self-esteem: "Hence, profane Hands, Factors for Hearts profane; Cartwright has fifty-one dedicatory poems to his collected works, published in 1651. It is like a gathering of the birds in my garden during cold weather. For Cartwright was a fashion and a convention in poetry, rather more than an individual poet, and the poetic spirit was on its last legs. Will you say to me what a reviewer once said of Belloc's verses: 66 More of this, Mr. Belloc, more of this "? MY DEAR X, ΧΙ THE PREFATORY POEM (II) Ben Jonson is the hero, the embodiment, the plume of the prefatory poem. Whenever I see the name of Ben I feel like a chorister solitarily chanting in the "bare, ruined quires" of his reputation. For to the moderns he is only a picturesque relic, with one or two mullioned windows of song, still exquisitely surviving. Or he is a harsh scholiast, a brawling toss-pot, a stranded hulk, whelked and bubukled with superfluous learning, a gnarled brow-beater of the fame of better men than himself. His high-coloured masques and pageants, his witty epigrams and apothegms, his pointed and at the same time exuberant dialogue, his copious realistic comedies (he is a pantechnicon of Elizabethan types, manners and characters), the frequent stateliness of his tragic declamation, the amplitude of genius which could create such figures as Sir Epicure Mammon-all are bundled away in the attic. The soundness and sanity of his criticism, the criticism of a fine, sagacious and fertile mind, are derided—the audacity of telling Shakespeare to blot a thousand lines! He is too almost invariably right about Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Better |