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LEISURE HOURS:

No. I.

ON HOMER'S BATTLE OF THE FROGS AND MICE.

I WOULD give something to meet with an intelligent disquisition on this admirable old poem: the first instance that I know of, in the seriocomic manner. Blair is as silent as his namesake's grave; and the mere common-place of that much overrated writer's lectures (a quality, which, by the way, is the secret of their popularity) might have deterred us from cherishing any violent expectation that he would throw light on the matter. I have got no Homer but Clarke's, with Ernesti's additions, and on turning to the " præfatio," with an eagerness which some experience of the "sterile abundance" of the classic commentators makes rather ridiculous, I read as follows: "To speak either of the author or the genius of this poem, after so many disputes on each side of the question, is, in my opinion, nothing to the purpose." Grant me patience! But, sir, it does "appertain" to me, and to many others of your readers, take my word for it, that we should know something of the reasons pro and con; though as to the "genius' of the poem, we shall scarcely come to a note-maker for his assistance. You have palmed upon us three whole pages of information concerning the different copies; from which we learn, that one copy is short by eighty-six lines, and another by sixteen; but you can afford to tell us nothing of the possible inventor of the grave burlesque; though its existence, at a period of unquestionable antiquity, is, of itself, a curious and interesting phenomenon. Mr. Godwin, I believe, treating on the successive imperceptible links of cause and effect, starts a notion, in his profound hypothetical manner, that if Alexander had never crossed the Granicus, the fire of London could never have happened. But we need not be supposed to have taken a degree in the university of Laputa, if we come to the conclusion, that but for the Battle of the Frogs and Mice we should not have had the Lutrin, VOL. IV.

the Rape of the Lock, and what (ut opinor, as Ernesti says) is fairly worth them both, Hudibras. We are, Mr. Word-catcher, most exceedingly desirous to know what blockheads they are, who ascribe a burlesque of epic poesy in general, and of the Iliad in particular, to the author of the Iliad himself. If they had fastened it on Zoilus, it would have been a plausible hit; and if he had written it, there would have been an additional preponderating argument against the sentence of the holy critical inquisition of Alexandria, which sentenced this luckless Perrault of antiquity to be burnt, instead of his papers; seemingly with the full matter-of-course approbation of all English schoolmasters. Every stray waif in poetry was sure to find its way to Homer; but he would no more have burlesqued his own divine song, than Milton would have written

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Mr.

a Cottonian travestie of his.
Monk Lewis, indeed, turned his A-
lonzo and Imogene into a comical bal-
lad, almost as nonsensical, and ten
times as stupid; and so he might;
but imagine Milton, proud as he was
of his " ancient liberty recovered to
heroic poem," being charged with
inditing Philips's Splendid Shil-
ling!" The lofty legends of Troy
would not admit of being debased by
a light association in the mind of
such a bard as Homer; they must
have been laid up in the inner re-
cesses of his soul, with all sacred
and inviolable things. But the ques-
tion is laid at once to rest by a stub-
born prose-fact. The idea of this
old minstrel that floats about among
the mob of readers, is something like
the frontispiece to Scarronides; a
blind ballad-singer, with a fist-full of
printed songs. We will not insist as
to the printing; but we may give a
shrewd guess that Homer could not
write. The craft was not in exist-
ence.

It is no use to talk of the pala uyga, the mournful symbols sent to Bellerophon: the Mexican barbarians corresponded with each other

X

penmen.

by means of pictorial signs; but we do not, therefore, think them good The parts of the Iliad were not books, but rhapsodies; the bard did not unroll a written papyrus, but recited his verses, like an Italian improvisatore, marking the cadence with a rude harp, or waving a bough of laurel. Those ingenious gentlemen called reporters were not yet in existence; the songs, which, like a snow-ball, gathered by successive recitations into a poem, were not written down, but gotten by heart. It was an oral age. Now in the very outset of the "Battle of the Frogs and Mice," the poet says, in Cowper's version of him,

seated; makes you sick with some common-place about the Muses; (I wish I had never written a verse ;) or intercepts you on your way to the book-ladder, and (like that "fell serjeant Death, strict in his arrest,") claps a forked hand on your breast, and detains you some twenty minutes with the fall of stocks, the impending ruin of cash payments, the revolution of 1688, and the propriety of excluding placemen and pensioners from the House of Commons. My friend Aquillius helped me on the other day, while sitting after a têteà-tête dinner, (I have been all my life what Johnson calls a tête-à-tête man) by advising me to trace the progress of burlesque, or serio-comic My song, which I have newly poetry, downwards in a series of In tables open'd on my knees. He talked very glibly of the facility of this; and for a moment (I And thus there is an end of the dis- had not the remotest idea of doing

pute.

traced

"Pray, sir, why do not you make some search after the labours of these several illustrissimi? Mr. Boswell would run to the opposite extremities of London, not reckoning bye-alleys, garrets, and trunk-makers' shops, in quest of a solitary fact, which he acknowledges nobody would care about but himself."-Gentlemen, I have not the indagatorial organ. (If there be none of the kind or name, Dr. Spurzheim may thank me for helping him on towards the number forty, by this little addition to his very simple and intelligible nomenclature. I never can believe, by the bye, that I have only just thirty-three organs. There is something questionable and unsatisfactory in a broken number. It is like being asked to dinner at a quarter past six. I would have stopped at thirty, or subdivided a few more faculties, till I eked out the next round number.) I hate trouble. I am not certain whether I should lift down a book from a high shelf, particularly if dusty, as mine always are, though I should be sure to ascertain what I wanted. I had rather call in the figure of periphrasis or of metathesis, or any other that saves exertion; and talk of somewhere, or some writer has said. As to library hunting, I have forsworn it. You are sure to meet the very man whom you most wish to avoid; who looks over your shoulder, if you are doggedly

essays.

all this myself) I was casting in my mind the request that he would set about it himself. But I thought of his painting-room and his port-folio, and I did not ask it. My friend (not to speak it profanely) reminds me of Mrs. Malaprop's address to the Captain: "I hope, Sir, you are not like Cerberus; three gentlemen at once." At times he is like Wordsworth in his retrospective poem: "the tall rock haunts him like a passion." The gross remembrance of dinner does not molest him (and in this, I confess, he has the advantage of me) when lolling on a stone in some valley, with his drawing-board before him, and his box of colours, ten to one, slipped into a neighbouring brook, without leave asked. He deposits this unfinished piece (like a tabula votiva to the Dryads) under some tuft of broom or fern; and imagines we live in those times of Arcadian simplicity, that it will be respected. A wag of his acquaintance, a brother of the brush, found it, and wrote "very bad" in the margin of a towering sketch of rock, jutting out amidst ivy and underwood, and capped with a verge of heath, and a sprinkling of unexpectedly defined trees, at scattered distances, with azure glimmerings of horizon. He took the criticism somewhat to heart, till he detected the commentator; and retaliated, in a lucky moment, by a few random touches, surreptitiously introduced

into a drawing of his woodland critic, by which the pendant boughs of trees, and swelling projections of rocks, were made to assume the configuration of chins, eyes, and noses: of which the painter himself was first apprized by an explosion of laughter round a supper-table. He is, after all, happier in a dim closet, with a sky-light, where, planted at his easel, he shows a reckless disdain of Wordsworth's remonstrance about "growing double." He has little love for the sun, and commends a fine day according as the landscape in its tints and shadows approximates to canvas. He abominates green. I always considered it as a striking proof of his good-nature, that, after his manner of encouraging poor artists, he once gave a guinea for a green park and wooden deer, for which this obscure competitor of Claude had modestly charged five shillings. As Tom Paine said of the Quakers, that if they had had any hand in the creation, they would have clothed the face of nature in drab, so we may be certain that my friend would have proscribed Coleridge's

Healthful greenness pour'd upon the soul, in favour of reds, browns, and yellows: autumn, therefore, for his money. He has no sympathy with the dewy emerald of a meadow in a showery summer. These strike me as some of the disadvantages of a painter. I am always at fault in conversation with an artist. I have a most plebeian fondness for enclosed fields, gently swelling and sinking, with their hedge-rows thick set with hollies and hawthorns, and now and then an elm or an oakling. These, I find, I must not confess the liking of. But I may admire a brown interminable heath, that, such is my cockneyism, always puts me in mind of a gibbet: and I may talk, as long as I please, of glaciers, of mountains that topple over our heads, and lakes that give the sensation of a bottomless watery abyss at our feet. I should like (but for the trouble of motion) to visit such scenes: though I am rather of Dr. Johnson's way of thinking respecting the Giant's Causeway in Ireland: "Worth seeing, Sir, yes! but not worth going to see:" but I do not covet to live among them. I

have a sense of awful and appalling dreariness and solitariness: I feel among them desolate, hopeless, and forsaken. I cling to undulating fieldpaths, and familiar knolls under plane or birch-trees, with glimpses of rarely passing rural faces, and the long, flaxen, uncut ringlets of cottage children. I had rather look at a sheltered farm, with sheep nibbling on the slope that overhangs it, than gaze dizzily upwards to the monastery, however hospitable within, or however picturesque without, on the summit of mount St. Gothard. I cannot say with Correggio, " ed io sono pittore." I am afraid I like Morland's bits of rustic animal life and homely cottage nature: his she-ass and her colt in a straw-yard, when under snow (though I had rather the latter were away); his shaggy carthorses, standing with a sort of sleepy patience in a dark field-stable, into which a broken light streams down from a hole in the roof; above all, his pigs, especially if a chubby-faced child is clambering over a half-door, and leaning to look at them. I am not on terms of intimacy with Wilhave few aspirings beyond Gainsboson's tempest-troubled landscapes. I rough's cattle, standing in a clear pool, or winding up along a steep hollow, under banks of broad clustering oaks with their sketchy and natural leafing. My friend is fond of spreading his canvas with the massive, umbered tints of Poussin: he plunges his genius into a brown overhanging forest, with a splash of broken river, and one delicious peep of sky, of a deeper blue than the kingfisher's plumage, which relieves, what I should call, the melancholy blackness of the scene. He delights to surround himself with gnarled mountain ashtrees, that straggle from the sides of cliffs; and often sketches out a root of most fantastic growth, and undefinable figure, about which he has not quite made up his mind, whether it shall be a scathed fibre of a tree, or a twining dragon, like one in Lucan's, or Tasso's forest. By the way, he has no objection to a soldier or two, sheathed in armour, climbing out of a midway mountaincavern, from behind a huge disparted crag, and looking down over it, in

such a posture as to make one giddy: or, what is more usual with him, a knight, in panoply complete, all but his helmet, stretched at his length on the wild herbage, and a damsel gleaming through the shadowy brakes, and wheeling away on a fugitive palfrey. I went to see his progress in one of these romantic sketches, and found him half suffocated with the vapour of aqua fortis, of which he had inhaled rather an unreasonable quantity, in etching a small Venice-piece of Canaletti. He allowed the inconvenience of this sort of accidental inspiration; but gave very cogent reasons for the superior satisfaction resulting from the graver over the pencil, and thought he should never touch canvas again. I thought differently. However, the copper fell into the same disgrace as the canvas. The window of a bookseller of my acquaintance exhibited, all of a sudden, a weekly succession of macaronic poems. The subjects were various. There was an eccentric French dancing-master, who, among other freaks, set up a child's wheel-chair with a sail to it, which he called a char volant: and in this his daughter, a stout stocky demoiselle of fifteen, dragged herself heavily along the floor; the flying being limited to his own capers, as he preceded the car with his kit. There was a Logierian professor, who taught the theory and practice of music in four lessons. There was a doctor, a violent favourite of the ladies, who brought elderly gentlemen to a crisis in four days, by wrapping them in sheets steeped in brandy; and who cured his own children, by baking them in puff paste: and there was a radical school-master, who demonstrated, from Cobbett's grammar, that the House of Commons, and a den of thieves, being both nouns of multitude, were convertible in meaning. This accounted for the glance, which I now so frequently had at my friend's back, as he turned into a printing-office. He was grown mysterious and invisible. Till "dawdling with him over a dish of tea," one evening, he read me half a canto of Wieland's Oberon in stanzaic verse; and after explaining, to my perfect apprehension, that Sotheby's version was too terse and polished to be

characteristic of the original, he avowed his intention of completing the whole in the manner that he had begun. He hit off the thing with such an easy freedom, that for once I began to persuade myself he would "keep the word of promise to the hope as well as to the ear." His perseverance was a nine weeks' wonder; and in this time he mastered nine cantos; when he murmured something about having heard that Mr. Coleridge had expressed a similar intention; and I found the MS. had been slid into a drawer among some sketches, which he had once commenced, but never finished, illustrative of the scenes and adventures in St. Pierre's Paul and Virginia. In fact, as he told me in confidence, he was now very busily employed in counteracting the spread of Methodism, by a sermon and commentary on King James the First's anti-sabbatical proclamation for the encouragement of sports and exercises on a Sunday.

This is a very formidably faulty digression; but how else could I make it quite clear, that there would have been little hope in persuading my friend to give us a systematic history of burlesque poetry?

He had, however, got actually a good way in translating the battle: when, just as he arrived at the words yarn yaén, (verse 113,) (which he persisted, with Parnell and Cowper, in calling a cat, for want of taking the trouble to reflect that cats are not usually found in open fields, and on the borders of marshes) a cat, one mid-day, sprang upon his bed (which, according to custom, was piled with books and papers), overturned his ink-bottle on the coverlet, and put to flight frogs and mice in pell-mell rout and irretrievable confusion. He had always an antipathy to this "democratic beast," (as Robert Southey, before he dubbed himself Esquire, and was created Doctor of Laws, and Poet Laureate, and wrote the Vision of Judgment, sympathetically called it in his Annual Anthology) and this incident has forced him to rise before noon, and ply his pencil once more in the valley. It was a poetical battle of spurs, and his epic ideas have never rallied since.

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I wish the cat had not intermeddled; for there is no translation of this mock-heroic, that conveys to an English_reader any idea of its humour. The original has by no means that stately and unbending gravity of phrase, which the stanGolddard versions impute to it. smith, who is usually right, blamed Parnell for retaining the Greek names; and Johnson, who is oftener right than the admirers of Gray's hubble-bubble sublimity will allow, concurs in the criticism. Cowper, not forethus fore-warned, was armed; but blundered on in the Who cares for PHY

same error.

SIGNATHUS? Who, that has a tooth
which dreads hard crust, would will-
ingly take upon him to pronounce
What smiles will
PSYCHARPAX?
flicker round the corners of an Eng-
lish mouth, at the sounds of BORBO-
ROCOITES and CNISSODIOCTES? John
Bull, I'll be sworn,

Would rather hear a brazen candlestick turn'd,

Or a dry wheel grate on the axle-tree.

At my next leisure hour I may, perhaps, cull out a sample or two for the LONDON MAGAzine. AN IDLER.

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