Who press the downy couch, while slaves advance, Who with mock patience dire complaints endure, How would ye bear to draw your latest breath Where all that's wretched paves the way for death? EXERCISES TO CHAPTER XXII. Ex. 1.-Prepare the passage from Cowper's Retirement with the following uotes: 1. Deem to judge. To deem was the technical word employed of a judge's decisions, before the introduction of the French word juger (the d in our spelling is intrusive). Hence in Scotland the judge closes his sentence with the words: "This is pronounced for doom." The Old English word for judge is dempster (the p being intrusive). 2. Assuage, from the Latin suavis, sweet, through the French. 3. Stanch, from the Old French word estancher, to stop; which itself comes from the Latin stagnum. 4. Forgery. Forge is a French contraction of the Latin fabrica (hence English fabricate), from faber, a workman. 5. Elude escape. From Latin ludere, to play. 6. Tuft seems to be only another form of top. Compare German Zopf. 7. Preceptress is a word hardly ever found. Gibbon, in his Autobiography, uses preceptrix. 8. We should have expected which. That is generally employed as a relative of description merely. 9. In this passage, and more especially in this line, Cowper was writing from the saddest experience. = - Ex. 2.-Prepare the passage on Winter with the following notes: 1. Inverted seems an odd epithet; but it is not without appropriateness. In winter the night is longest, in summer the day; in winter the cold is greatest, etc. 2. It seems out of keeping to remind us that the snows of winter are not those of age; the natural comparison of winter is to "eld." So Spenser and other poets, when they personify winter, make him an old man: Lastly came Winter, clothed all in frieze, 3. The sun in winter rises farther south and sets farther south, and has therefore a much smaller arc to traverse. 4. This epithet is also out of keeping; it would have been better in a description of summer. 5. Instructive is just a little stiff. 6. The Latin epithet uninterrupted has a fine effect; it gives the sense of continuousness and length with great force. Ex. 3. Compare Cowper's description of Winter with Thomson's. [It will be noticed that Thomson delights in winter, and the sights of winter for themselves; while Cowper mentions them merely to bring out into stronger relief the comforts and quiet beauty of the English fireside.] Ex. 4. Prepare the lines To a Mountain Daisy with the following notes: 1. Thou's thou hast-a dialectic form. 2. Maun-must. The Old English form was mun. 3. Stour dust. 4. Pronounce poor; and so with the other rhymes. 5. Neighbour. The neigh is a dialectic form of nigh, which is itself another form of neah. 6. Weet wet, that is, the wet dew. 7. Shone modestly. Ex. 5. Prepare the verses on p. 391, with the following notes: 1. Whiles is an old genitive (like sideways, else, etc.), and is = sometimes. 2. A waterfall. 3. Ran here and there cheerfully. 4. A rock with steep sides. Connected with sceran, to cut. Hence also shire, shore, share, shears, short, etc. 5. A whirlpool. 6. Appeared and disappeared by fits. 7. Slopes. Ex. 6. Prepare the lines To Mary in Heaven with the following notes :— 1. Loves-dialectic for lovest. 2. Torn-perhaps the strongest possible expression. 3. We now use part only in poetry, and its compound depart has taken its place. 4. The placing of the epithet after the noun-a fashion introduced by the Norman-French, and seldom followed in England—gives a slightly artificial effect, which takes away from the strength and feeling of the lines. 5. Wakes-an exquisite word to express the absolute sleeplessness of memory upon these events and feelings. Ex. 7. Prepare the passage from Crabbe with the following notes:1. Yon-the demonstrative adjective which points out the most distant things. The steps are: This; that; yon. (The includes them all, as a generic). The comparative of you is yonder. The d is intrusive, and comes in between the two liquids n anir, as in thunder, etc. 2. The door has not only broken from its hinges, but is broken itself. 3. Putrid=utterly rotten. 4. The spinning-wheel. 5. The alliteration of the d adds to the dolefulness of the line. Almost all words beginning with d have a sad meaning-as dull, dead, dolour, dire, dreadful, etc. Words, on the contrary, beginning with gl have a pleasant meaning-as glow, glad, glitter, glee, etc. 6. As if they were criminals and deserved their doom; the word receive implies this. 7. Pride, in the sense of contemptuous wealth. 8. Crabbe, who, like Dr. Johnson, had felt hunger and cold and poverty himself, had a great contempt for the "fantastic woes" which arise from luxury, over-eating, want of exercise, and other transgressions against natural law. TABLE OF CONTEMPORARIES. FROM THE BIRTH OF THOMSON TO THE DEATH OF COWPER. This table, coinciding with the century, will serve also as a Table of Literature. 1. CHAPTER XXIII. SIR WALTER SCOTT. ALTER SCOTT was born at Edinburgh, on the 15th of August, 1771. His birthday was the same as Napoleon's; and he was born one year after Wordsworth. His father was an attorney, Writer to the Signet or Queen's Seal, as it is called in Edinburgh; and his mother, Anne Rutherford, was the daughter of a medical professor in the University. The after-consequences of a fever, when he was only eighteen months old, produced lameness of the left leg, and general delicacy. At the age of five he was sent to his grandfather's farm of Sandyknowe* (on the Scottish Borders) which stood beneath, and was partly built out of, the ruins of an old feudal tower; and here, while still almost an infant, he formed his first love for the Tweed and for the past ages of Scotland-the two strongest passions of his life. In 1778 he was sent to the High School of Edinburgh, and remained there until 1783. He did not distinguish himself in school, though the Rector mentioned with some praise a short copy of verses he sent in at the age of twelve. He did distinguish himself in the playground-by fighting, by feats of physical daring (to which he was piqued by the feeling of his lameness-a feeling of pique which never quite left him), and by his wonderful powers of story-telling. He was an omnivorous reader of old romance and history; and he says of himself: "I left the High School with a great quantity of general information, ill-arranged indeed, and collected without system, yet deeply impressed upon my mind, readily assorted by my power of connection and memory, and Scottish form of knoll. The tendency to convert a final 7 into u, as in hall, ball, etc., the Scotch have in common with the French. Compare beau and bel; salmon and saumon. gilded-if I may be permitted to say so-by a vivid and active imagination." 2. In his twelfth year he paid a visit to his aunt at Kelso; where he read for the first time Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. This marks an epoch in his life. He had already begun to collect ballads from the recitation of old men and women, and to copy them in a small and neat hand into little volumes; but he hardly knew their value for others. In 1783 he entered the University, where he studied Latin, Greek, and Logic. Of Greek he knew so little, that in later life he had forgotten the very alphabet. The Greek Professor said of him, that "dunce he was, and dunce he would remain." But he acquired the power of reading with ease French, Italian, and Spanish; and, afterwards, he added to these a fair but inaccurate knowledge of German. A severe illness in his fifteenth year, from the bursting of a blood-vessel, gave him several months of unbroken reading in the old romances of chivalry, in poetry, and in history. Shakspeare and Spenser were his strongest passions; and he had read over and over again Froissart and Boccaccio. 3. In July, 1792, he was called to the bar. He had, however, previously served an apprenticeship, under his father, as an attorney. As an advocate (or barrister) his chief occupation was walking up and down the splendid hall of the old House of Parliament in Edinburgh; and here, if he got few briefs, he gained a reputation as a story-teller of high excellence. His first publication was a translation of Bürger's Lenore and The Wild Huntsman. The bold picturesque style of Bürger was new to him; and his old reading in ballad literature helped him in the task of translation. Tramp! tramp! across the land they speed! Splash! splash! across the sea! Hurrah! the dead can ride apace: Dost fear to ride with me? This style pleased him. In the summer of 1797 he met a young lady, a daughter of a French royalist émigré, Charlotte Margaret Charpentier; and in December of the same year they were married at Carlisle. They took a cottage at Lasswade, near the palace of the Duke of Buccleuch-a house of which Scott was himself a cadet. He was now quartermaster of the Edinburgh Light Horse (a volunteer troop); and this experience gave him some insight into military details. In 1799 he was appointed sheriff-deputy of Selkirkshire; |