Vant-brace, and greves, and gauntlet, add thy spear, Or one is reminded again of a passage in Spenser's antepenultimate canto, descriptive of one who 66 had no weapon but his shephearde's hooke Whence ere he could recov'r, he did him quell, De Quincey's monograph on Joan of Arc opens with the question, What is to be thought of the poor shepherd girl from the hills and forests of Lorraine, that—like the Hebrew shepherd boy from the hills and forests of Judæa-rose suddenly out of the quiet, out of the safety, out of the religious inspiration, rooted in deep pastoral solitudes, to a station in the van of armies, and to the more perilous station at the right hand of kings? "The Hebrew boy inaugurated his patriotic mission by an act, by a victorious act, such as no man could deny. Adverse armies bore witness to the boy as no pretender; the boy rose to a splendour and a noonday prosperity, both personal and public, that rang through the records of his people, and became a by-word amongst his posterity for a thousand years, until the sceptre was departing from Judah." Remember, says the Countess in Landor's Siege of Ancona, by what weapon fell the chief of Philistines : . 66 Did brazen chariots, driven By giants, roll against him? From the brook A little pebble stretched the enormous bulk That would have filled it and have turned its course." A MATCH FOR BEAR, LION, AND GIANT. 129 The aspiration of Home's young shepherd-hero, who disdains the shepherd's slothful life, and fain would follow to the field some warlike lord, is to distinguish himself as the son of Jesse had done at the outset of his career, and his onset with the Philistine : 'May heaven inspire some fierce gigantic Dane To give a bold defiance to our host! and, like a hero, conquer, or like one die. Triumphs in his own pastoral line of things, as a good shepherd that cared for his sheep, and that would risk his life for theirs, had young David to rehearse before King Saul: "Thy servant slew a lion and a bear." Applicable, in some sort to him, in the matter of Goliath, are the words imputed by Byron to Cain, in respect of a more grim and puissant foe: Could I wrestle with him? I wrestled with the lion, when a boy, In play, till he ran roaring from my gripe.” But a rustic slayer of lions and bears was not the sort of foeman Goliath thought worthy of his steel. Give him a man ; not a youth. Give him a man-at-arms, a man of war from his youth, like himself, albeit not a man of his inches, for that were hard to find. But the encounter came off; and David lost nothing by his encounter with the giant, not even his temper. And a sore trial it is to the temper of the young, to be reproached with their boyhood—to be pooh-poohed as striplings, who cannot treat or speak on equal terms. The chronicles of Chivalry record a tragical transgression of it on the part of that young Achon, nephew of the Maréchal de St. André, who was provoked to stab behind his back the veteran Matas, for the disdainful words, uttered after Matas had disarmed his angry junior, "Begone, for a rash boy that you are." What growing Alcibiades can endure to be called to his face, Neaniskos, and Kouridion, and Ta paidika? What Alexander can forgive the Demosthenes that incites to war against him by the name K of boy? Aufidius has hit on the true means of infuriating Coriolanus when he calls him boy,—a boy of tears. The adversaries of Cleomenes harped on the phrase "boy," or its equivalent in his case; and Aratus, says Plutarch, deemed it insufferable that a young fellow of mushroom growth should rob him at once of the honours and power that had been his for three-and-thirty years. Pompey was snubbed by Scipio and by Sertorius as a beardless youth, as a cockerell: "I would have flogged the boy well, and sent him back to Rome," quoth Sertorius, "if the old woman had not been here," meaning, by the latter personage, Metellus, before whom Sertorius had to decamp. Boyhood was cast in the teeth of Octavius by Mark Antony, with all the calculated force and breakage of a sling and a stone. Many men, it has been remarked, honestly believe sixty-five or sixty-eight to be the prime of life; and are apt at that stage to call younger men (and not very young) boys,—uttering the word in a very spiteful tone, as though it were a term of great reproach. Dr. Boyd bids us remember how Sir Robert Walpole hurled the charge of youth against Pitt; but he mistakes his man it was not Sir Robert, but Horace; and not the Horace, but Uncle Horace. We are also invited to remember how Pitt (or Dr. Johnson for him) defended himself with great force of argument against the imputation. By Pitt is here meant, of course, the elder Pitt, the great Earl of Chatham. But the younger Pitt also was obnoxious to parliamentary taunts of the like Horatian character. The severest retort that he ever in his life received, according to his biographer, Lord Stanhope, was when Sheridan parried, or rather returned, a stage-thrust, by calling him, in reference to Ben Jonson's Alchymist, "the Angry Boy." The phrase was a delight to all who were jealous of the precocious start and success of the young Minister, so soon to be the young Prime Minister, a junior barrister who had received but very few briefs-a BANTERING A BOY MINISTER. 13 stripling who [on becoming First Lord of the Treasury] had not quite attained the age of twenty-four." Fox was keen in his invective that year (1783) against "boys without judgment, without experience," etc. Next year we find Pitt, with lofty calmness, interrupting a speech of General Conway's, and concluding by an apt quotation of some words, in which Scipio, as a young man, rebuked the veteran Fabius for his intemperate invectives: Si nullâ aliâ re, modestiâ certe et temperando linguæ adolescens senem vicero. In the contest of the India Bill, the public are said to have beheld with astonishment the boy, as his adversaries loved to call him, wage this unequal conflict almost single-handed. When Pitt, that same year, was a candidate for the University of Cambridge, Paley suggested as a fitting text for a sermon at St. Mary's, "There is a lad here which hath five barley loaves and two small fishes; but what are they among so many ?" A year later, and we have in the Rolliad this couplet, commemorative of Mr. Pitt as jeune premier: "A sight to make surrounding nations stare, A kingdom trusted to a schoolboy's care.' But let us vary the range of our illustrations, such as they are. Scott's veteran crusader, Ralph Genvil, has the right, and freely exercises it, to scout the opposition and remonstrances of a protesting page. "Menace not me, Sir Boy, nor shake your sword my way." For he can tell Amelot, that were their weapons to cross, never flail sent abroad more chaff than he would make splinters of Sir Boy's hatched and gilded toastingiron. "Look you, there are grey-bearded men here that care not to be led about on any boy's humour." But there are few more disgusting sights, affirms the reverend author of a Discourse of Immaturity, than the envy and jealousy of their juniors, which may be seen in sundry malicious common-place old men ; and he avows the exasperation he has felt in his time at hearing men of more than middle age and less than middling ability speak with contemptuous depreciation of the productions and doings of men considerably their juniors and vastly their superiors, describing them as "boys" and as "clever lads," with looks of dark malignity. There are few terms of reproach, he says elsewhere, which he has heard uttered with such looks of deadly ferocity; as again there are not many which excite feelings of greater wrath in the souls of the young men concerned, or "concerning" whom he sympathetically writes. Creôn, in Sophocles, is for snubbing in peremptory style the remonstrances of such a boy as Hæmon; but the quasi-boy comes off not second-best in the war of words: 66 ΚΡ. Οἱ τηλικοίδε καὶ διδαξόμεσθα δὴ Φρονεῖν πρὸς ἀνδρὸς τηλικοῦδε τὴν φύσιν ; “ΑΙ. Μηδὲν τὸ μὴ δίκαιον· εἰ δ ̓ ἐγὼ νέος Οὐ τὸν χρόνον χρὴ μᾶλλον ἢ τἄργα σκοπεῖν. The most popular author of his day somewhere makes a sour oldster essay to put down a spirited youngster by calling him a boy;" and remarks that the word is much used as a term of reproach by elderly gentlemen towards their juniors, probably -the ironical surmise is made-with the view of impressing society with the belief that if they could themselves be young again, they would not, on any account. But a young man can better put up with the vocative affront from an old one than from a co-æval of the other sex. Witness the effect upon Mr. Disraeli's Cadurcis of Venetia's tirade against him, to the tune of "passionate and ill-mannered boy!" She is off and away at the last word; but him it roots to the spot, and he mutters the word "boy!" to his heart's discontent. Henceforth he will have none of her. "Woman," he apostrophizes her in return, “when you spoke I might have been a boy: I am a boy no longer." Oliver's arrogantly disdainful "What, boy!" addressed, in As You Like It, to his younger brother, is by him caught up and resented with spirit: "Come, come, elder brother, you are too young in this." The old Count's exclamatory Jeune présomptueux! addressed to Don Rodrigue in "Le Cid," is by him complacently turned to account : "Je suis jeune, il est vrai; mais aux âmes bien nées Much as the student turns on his senior in Le Nœud Gordien, |