Bid you to cross the road your friend to greet,
Nay, dash between the waggons in the street.
"That man is absolute in Coger's Hall;
Trades unions follow upon this man's call;
A thousand licensed victuallers this man leads;
With Nonconformist votes a fourth succeeds.
They give the seat, I say, to whom they please,
Or take it from you, with the greatest ease.
Be very civil, with-Dear Sir-My friend-
If they advise, keen interest pretend.
Admire the children, grasp the voter's hands
Profess yourself the slave to his commands."

If " to live well" with you is how to dine,
Learn where the cookery's best and where the wine.
Buy fish in Billingsgate, and as for game
Hear what the Cockney did, and do the same.
Rigged as a sportsman, with his brace of dogs
At early dawn along the road he jogs;
Two servants sit behind him on his drag:
This carries guns, that a capacious bag:
He drives apace; the villagers admire
And touch their hats with reverence to the Squire.
At evening he returns; his neighbours see
His game-bag stuffed as full as it can be,
Envy his sport, admire his spattered clothes.
Who shot the game, the poulterer only knows.

Look to your health. That man's a greater fool
Than the worst blockhead ever birched at school
Who, though he knows his proper diet, still
Cannot abstain from that which makes him ill.
If life's best pleasures lie in love and wit,
Listen to Moore's advice, and follow it.
And now farewell. I've told you all I can;
Inform me plainly of a better plan
(If you have found it), how a man may live;
If not, accept the counsels which I give.

EDWIN HERON.

The Cycle of English Song.

IV.

EARLY MANHOOD.

WHEN does youth close? When does manhood begin? And how long do the pulses and faculties of manhood remain in full vigour and vitality? These are questions which it is not easy to answer with logical accuracy, and fortunately logical accuracy is not necessary. The Romans, with their turn for codification of all sorts, attempted to define the periods through which we pass as puer, adolescens, vir, and the rest; but as the classification has been neither imitated nor preserved, we may fairly conclude that it has been weighed in the balance and found wanting.

One point, however, is clear and incontestable: that manhood, prime, vigorous manhood, is the largest slice out of life. It is difficult to understand why we should pass even so much of our time as we do in what Shelley calls our "shadow-peopled Infancy," or in "Age's icy caves"; but it is satisfactory to feel that "Manhood's dark and tossing waves" absorb by far the greater part of our exisience.

It is at this period that, in traversing the cycle of English song, we have at length arrived. If manhood, roughly speaking, begins at five-and-twenty and endures till sixty, or in other words, covers half of the space of life allotted to us by the Psalmist, then indeed it is only reasonable and fitting that we should regard the manly period of a nation's poetical literature as occupying a commensurate portion of its entire course. It has been the custom to speak of the Elizabethan era as the crown and summit of the poetic spirit of this country; but unless our method of analysis be entirely misleading, such a conclusion betrays signs of haste and immaturity. We, on the other hand, opine that the manhood of English poetry, commencing with Shakespeare and those of his contemporaries who were not merely echoing the thoughts and sentiments of a prior epoch, endures through the age of Milton, is still alive and energetic in the days of Dryden, Pope, and Goldsmith, and has not even expired in the calm, meditative pages of Wordsworth. That it should last from the middle of the sixteenth century to the beginning of the nineteenth, is surely nothing wonderful.

Compared with manhood, youth is as moonlight unto sunlight and as water unto wine. Manhood is the best, the largest, the most active, most various and comprehensive portion of life; and the man

hood of English song boasts all these attributes. And it is precisely because its qualities are so many and so various that we must treat them separately and successively; for the manhood of English poetry is filled with "all thoughts, all passions, all delights." It is sublimely and recklessly catholic. It touches the heavens, it explores the depths of hell; it leaves nothing on earth unvisited.

It is commonly thought that Shakespeare exhausted the spheres of poetic thought and feeling, and that English literature would still be as great and as valuable as it is if every other author's name and works had been lost to us. That is an error springing from the national infirmity of exaggeration. We find much in Shakespeare, but by no means all. He is, before all things, the poet of the passions. He is the most full-blooded, the most muscular, the most savage and and sensual, of all English authors. The current of life runs within him tremendously and tumultuously. Shall we not say of him that in the cycle of English song he and those of his contemporaries who resemble him—all other reference to whom must, for brevity's sake, be omitted-fill up the gap expressed in the individual life by "from twenty-five to forty?" To use his own phrase, his blood is warm within; and like a very different character, Goethe's fair saint, he knows as little of restraint as of repentance. The fears of childhood, the superstitions of youth, have fallen away from him, and the recurring doubts of old age have not arrived. He only asks to live, and breathe, and have his being. He is to one thing constant never, for constancy implies a check to vitality, a curb upon thoroughgoing development.

Let us see him in the various moods, many of which are common to us all; and we will select illustrations from those passions of which even the most unsophisticated know something, beginning - how could we begin otherwise?—with the passion of love. What is love?

"It is to be all made of sighs and tears;

It is to be all made of faith and service;
It is to be all made of fantasy,

All adoration, duty, and obedience,

All humbleness, all patience, and impatience,
All purity, all trial, all observance."

That is one opinion. Let us hear another:

"What, I? I love? I sue? I seek a wife?
A woman, that is like a German clock,

Still a-repairing, ever out of frame,
And never going aright, being a watch,

But being watched that it may still go right."

But is this all? How far from it! High philosophy anon is dragged in to explain what that is which "gives to every power a

double power." It is as subtle as a sphynx, as musical as Apollo's

lute.

"And when Love speaks, the voice of all the gods
Makes heaven drowsy with the harmony.

Never durst poet touch a pen to write

Until his ink were tempered with Love's sighs.
O then his lines would ravish savage ears,
And plant in tyrants mild humanity!"

Yet Shakespeare knows full well how transitory and evanishing a thing is wild romantic love, to which alone some folks would concede the name. When he says that the woman should take an elder than herself, so that she may sway level to her husband's heart, how frankly he concludes:

"For, boy, however we do praise ourselves,
Our fancies are more giddy and infirm,

More longing, warring, sooner lost and worn,
Than women's are."

Yet what matter? Whilst the fever-fit lasts, have it furiously. Tear a passion to tatters; make a willow cabin at the gate of your sweet mistress; call upon her soul within the house, write whole cantos of love, and sing them aloud, even in the dead of night. Do as Viola would

"Holloa your name to the reverberate hills,
And make the babbling gossip of the air
Cry out, Olivia! O, you should not rest
Between the elements of air and earth,
But you should pity me!"

What grand earnestness, what overpowering thoroughness, there are in it all! That is Shakespeare's first and chief characteristic— masculine strength. He never husbands it, but puts it forth on all occasions to the full, and never more than when speaking of love. For all that, he knows that, as far as permanence is concerned, it is of no avail. The course of true love never did run smooth. It is at

best

momentary as a sound,

Swift as a shadow, short as any dream;

Brief as the lightning in the collied night,

That, in a spleen, unfolds both heaven and earth,

And ere a man hath power to say, Behold!

The jaws of darkness do devour it up:

So quick bright things come to confusion."

How he even delights to contradict himself; for he never cares to remember what he said before. Life is not logical and consistent; neither is love; neither is truth, or so much truth as we know; and neither is Shakespeare. The feeling of the moment, the predominant

emotion, is the main, the only point; and down it goes, with every epithet of glorious exaggeration. Luckily, the critics are obliged to leave Shakespeare alone, or how they would pull him to pieces! Here "concealment, like a worm i' the bud, feeds on the damask cheek" of her who never told her love. There,

"A murderous guilt shows not itself more soon

Than love that would seem hid. Love's night is noon.”

Which will you have? Both; for both are true, despite their apparent contradiction. Even that which, as we have said, is greatest in Shakespeare, viz., the inconstancy of his mind, he in one place depreciates and condemns. "Were man but constant, he were per

fect. That one error fills him with faults." It is fortunate that that one error filled Shakespeare with faults, for it has filled his pages with beauty. How little the knowledge that inconstancy in all great sensations is the law of life, hinders him from feeling at the moment that it will endure for ever! Love must not be dammed up, he pleads, for its gentle current will then rage all the more impatiently. But only stop not his course,

"He makes sweet music with the enamelled stones,
Giving a gentle kiss to every sedge

He overtaketh in his pilgrimage;

And so, by many winding nooks, he strays

With willing sport to the wild ocean.

Then let me go, and hinder not my course.

I'll be as patient as a gentle stream,

And make a pastime of each weary step,

Till the last step have brought me to my love,
And there I'll rest as, after much turmoil,

A blessed soul doth in Elysium."

There is nothing that he does not make one or other of his lovers say; and it is the shallowest criticism in the world to say that these are not Shakespeare's own utterances, but those of his characters. He was himself all of his characters, and considerably more. "Perdition catch my soul, but I do love thee; and when I love thee not, chaos is come again." What splendid extravagance! When dreaming Night will hide the joys of Troilus and Cressida no longer, "Beshrew the witch!" Troilus exclaims, "With tedious night she stays, as tediously as hell!" How true; but how furiously and ragingly put! But that is not enough.

"Injurious time now, with a robber's haste,

Crams his rich thievery up, he knows not how.
As many farewells as be stars in heaven,
With distinct breath and consigned kisses to them,
He fumbles up into a loose adieu,

And scants us with a single famished kiss,
Distasted with the salt of broken tears."