who will keep a warm place in their hearts and easily pardon a kindred warmth in our words. After Dryburgh, and its pall, we have in these pages found our way to Edinboro', and have sketched the beginners, and the beginnings of that great northern quarterly, which so long dominated the realm of British book-craft, and which rallied to its ranks such men as Jeffrey and the witty Sydney Smith, and Mackintosh and the pervasive and petulant Brougham - full of power and of pyrotechnics. These great names and their quarterly organ call up comparison with that other, southern and distinctive Quarterly of Albemarle Street, which was dressed for literary battle by writers like Gifford, Croker, Southey, and Lockhart. The Prince Regent puts in an appearance in startling waistcoats and finery-vibrating between Windsor and London; so does the bluff SailorKing William IV. Next, Walter Savage Landor leads the drifting paragraphs of our story — a great, strong man; master of classicism, and master of language; now tender, and now virulent; never quite master of himself. Of Leigh Hunt, and of his graceful, lightweighted, gossipy literary utterance, there is indulgent mention, with some delightful passages of verse foregathered from his many books. Of Thomas Moore, too, there is respectful and grate ful if not over-exultant - talk; yet in these swift days there be few who are tempted to tarry long in the "rosy bowers by Bendemeer." From Moore and the brilliant fopperies of "The First Gentleman of Europe," we slip to the disorderly, but pungent and vivid essays of Hazlitt - -to the orderly and stately historic labors of Hallam, closing up our chapter with the gay company who used to frequent the brilliant salon of the Lady Blessington-first in Seamore Place, and later at Gore House. There we find Bulwer, Disraeli (in his flamboyant youth-time), the elegant Count d'Orsay, and others of that trainband. Following quickly upon these, we have asked our readers to fare with us along the old and vivid memories of Newstead Abbey - to track the master-poet of his time, through his early days of romance and marriage — through his journeyings athwart Europe, from the orange groves of Lisbon to the olives of Thessaly-from his friendship with Shelley, and life at Meillerie with its loud joys and stains through his wild revels of Venice his masterly verse-making- his quietudes of Ravenna (where the Guiccioli shone) through his passionate zeal for Greece, and his last days at Missolonghi, with one brief glimpse of his final resting-place, beside his passionate Gordon mother, under the grim, old tower of Hucknall-Torkard. So long indeed do we dwell upon this Byronic episode, as to make of it the virtual pièce de résistance in the literary menu of these pages. After the brusque and noisy King William there trails royally into view that Sovereign Victoria, over whose blanched head-in these very June days in which I write the bells are all ringing a joyous Jubilee for her sixtieth year of reign. But to our eye, and to these pages, she comes as a girl in her teens-modest, yet resolute and calm; and among her advisers we see the suave and courtly Melbourne; and among those who make parliamentary battle, in the Queen's young years, that famed historian who has pictured the lives of her kinsfolk - William and Mary-in a way which will make them familiar in the ages to come. We have a glimpse, too, of the jolly Captain Marryat cracking his for'castle jokes, and of the somewhat tedious, though kindly, G. P. R. James, lifting his chivalric notes about men-at-arms and knightly adventures a belated hunter in the fields of ancient feudal gramarye. And with this pennant of the old times of tourney flung to the sharp winds of these days, and shivering in the rude blasts - where anarchic threats lurk and murmur we close our preface, and bid our readers all welcome to the spread of - what our old friend Dugald Dalgetty would call the Vivers. EDGEWOOD, June 24, 1897. D. G. M. |