But this is quite enough of his Homer. Hugues Salel, of Casalé in Querci, was born about the year 1508. Quercy, Salel, de toi se vantera ; are Marot's words to him in the "Querci will boast itself in thee, Salel; and, as I think, will not pass my name in silence." Ronsard esteemed him one of the first who began to write well in France. Besides the other marks of favour which he received from the openhearted Francis I. he was presented by that monarch with the abbey of Saint Cheron, near Chartres; where he died in the year 1558. OLIVIER DE MAGNY. THE first production I have met with from the pen of Olivier de Magny, is entitled Les Amours d'Olivier de Magny, Quercinois, et quelques Odes de lui. Ensemble un recueil d'aucunes Oeuvres de Monsieur Salel, Abbé de Saint Cheron, non encore veuës. A Paris. Vincent Sartenan, 1553, 8vo. In this col lection, Magny's sonnets (in the common or ten syllable measure) are in the taste of the Italian Petrarchisti, or imitators of Petrarch. In some of the odes there is more nature. That on a nosegay presented to him by Castianira (F. 56), has a peculiar vivacity and richness, and is very much in Ben Jonson's way. His next work is Les Gayetez d'Olivier de Magny à Pierre Paschal, Gentilhomme du Bas Pais de Languedoc, Non tamen est facinus molles evolvere versus, Multa licet castè non facienda legant. There is much ease in these trifles. If I were to select one of the most pleasing, it would be that to Corydon, Ronsard's servant, which gives an engaging picture of that poet's manner of life. Et s'il veult avec la brigade Choisir le meilleur vin François ; Pour luy faire prendre son vin. (The leaves are not paged in this book.) And if he with his troop repair We shall be reminded of the hawthorn, when we come to Ronsard himself. These poets seem to have enjoyed nature with an unceremonious gaiety and frankness of heart, not known to their successors in the days of Louis XIV. of Olivier de Magny, is called Les Soupirs. Paris. Par Jean Dallier, 1557. 8vo. These Sighs vent themselves in a hundred and seventy-six sonnets, some of which, fortunately, are any thing but dolorous; as may be seen The last publication, I have seen, by the following: Sonnet 123. Sus, leve les papiers, descharge m'en la table, And nought but mirth and pleasure shall come near. This is a festal and no working day: I will with white chalk score this day for gladness; Yea, I will laugh and leap and dance away, their voluminous works of biography. This must be my excuse for having nothing to tell either of his birth, his fortunes, or his decease. He was of Querci. His verses bespeak him to have been a good soul, free from envy and ill-nature; and he was prized accordingly by the wits of his age. Be this his record. SONNET. Ah! know you not suspense is worse than fate, Love, dearest lady! barreth not despair, When out of heart no gentle hope remaineth; To note mine own, and value them the less: R. HOMER'S HYMN TO PAN. LEISURE HOURS. THIS Godling, as he is commonly taken to be, has been excessively ill used. In the vulgar mythology he is the guardian of mountains, caves, and forests; and so far he would seem a swain-like pastoral personage; a shepherd-genius, like that in the Vision of Mirza. Nothing of the sort: noscitur à socio: he has always an ill-conditioned group of goathorned, goat-footed, goat-tailed, goggle-eyed, wrinkle-faced, yahoolike caricatures of humanity near him and about him, and he is himself the ugliest of the crew. How should he be otherwise? for however odd and paradoxical the announcement of the fact may seem, it is as unquestionable as the existence of Pompey's pillar, that his Godship is the great original from whom traditionary superstition has embodied in painting the personification of the Principle of Evil, vulgarly ycleped The Devil! Let the reader turn to Leviticus xvii. 7, and he will read of offering sacrifices to devils," but the original Hebrew imports the demons (as the word should be rendered) that is, ghosts, or human genii, that were worship'd under the emblematic form of goats. There was a city and a nome (or district) of Egypt, not far from the Israelitish border, called Mendes, and this, in fact, was the name of the Egyptian PAN: he was a personification of the prolific energy of nature, and his symbol was a goat. He was represented in sculpture either simply as a goat, or with a mixed human figure: sometimes as a man with goats' legs, sometimes with the head of a goat and the body of a man. The frequent Scripture comparison of the wicked to goats has been thought, with great probability, to involve an allusion to the Mendesian idolatry. As the sun is the spring of fecundity, the horns of the goat were frequently supplied by two solar rays; in the same manner as the horns of the Nilotic symbol, the bull Apis, were exchanged for the lunar crescent, the type of the ship of Osiris, or diluvian ark the mystic egg: which teemed with the elements of mundane life. Pan is then Osiris: who was the Nile on earth and the Sun in heaven: who was also Jupiter Hammon, or Hammon-No, when indicating the sun in his power; Horus or Apollo, when significant of his beneficial influences on the air; Serapis, when he passed to the lower hemisphere; Hercules, when admeasuring time by his passage through the Zodiacal constellations; and Vulcan, when, as the super-planetary fire, he was adored as the fountain of human souls, the subtle pervading heat which animated all things, and the organizing mind of matter. No wonder that such a considerable personage should have been thought able to scatter panic among armies. This faculty, however, is sometimes degraded into a propensity to urchin tricks: scaring cattle, and playing the night-mare with shepherds in their dreams. In Homer's hymn it must be owned that his figure is not very primitive. Plainly to speak, he is the same sort of wild man of the woods that we meet with every where else. The poet, however, wipes off the scandal of his clownish skill in music, (the reader will remember the affair of Midas), for he compares his piping to the nightingale; and if he could only leave his horns and hoofs behind him, it appears that he would make by no means a contemptible figure in the ballet. I have called this Homer's hymn, from a fellow-feeling with tender and moon-loving enthusiasts; believers in the books of Hermes Trismegistus, or the precocious metres of the chestburied Orosmanes, the cowled phantom Rowley. Scaliger would have thrown himself out of his garret window, had any one disproved his hypothesis of old Musæus having been the real author of Hero and Leander. Some persons would feel not a little discomposed by the insinuation that the "Economy of Human Life" was not a real Chinese manuscript; and still more at being told that the book which bears his name was not written by Robinson Crusoe. He that disturbs such gentle reveries ought to bear in mind Horace's spectator of ideal plays, who sate unintermit tingly (happy dog!) in the very best place of the first circle of Roman boxes; his whole life a Megalensian holiday; and Roscius "strutting and fretting," not his "hour" but his year, upon the stage before him," without either growing husky, so as to be "heard no more," or securing admission into future chronological registers, as having "declined on a certain day in a certain month to play to an empty house." On detecting this alarming state of quiescent rapture, his "dd good-natured friends" began to bustle about HYMN TO PAN. "Pol me occidistis amici !" Take up thy tale, O muse! of Hermes' darling child; AN IDLER. And climbs the headland top whence shepherds watch their sheep: Or at their sloping foot the beasts of chase he slays, And tracks them with his eye through every lair and maze: And all the time he breathes a tune upon his reeds, Which not the bird of flowery spring 'mid shrouding leaves exceeds, To these their rival tunes the nymphs make answer sweet, The clear-voiced mountain nymphs that troop with thronging feet And to their shrilling chaunt the hill-top echo rings. Then creeps the stealthy god and nimbly threads the throng, And beats the ground with doubling feet, timed to their charming song: He thus the meadow prints with silky grass o'ergrown, The Idler requests his readers will correct a typographical error in the 4th Leisure Hour, where Hebris is printed instead of Nebris: the red-deer-skin worn by Bacchus. The etymon, as will immediately occur to them, is vßpos, a fawn. But helpful Hermes straight caught up and dandled him: These are thine own-to others yet must other strains belong. SUPERSTITION'S DREAM. Thou scarest me with dreams.--JOB. WHEN Night's last Hours, like haunting spirits, creep "I dream'd a dream" of something 'kin to Fate, That time was come, or seem'd as it was come, When Agitation turn'd a straining eye, And Hope stood watching like a bird to fly, While suppliant Nature, like a child in dread, Then awful sights began to be reveal'd, Which Death's dark dungeons had so long conceal d: Bursting in noises like a hollow wind; |
