to be on a very friendly footing in 1684. He sends the poet a present of two melons; and the poet, in his letter of thanks, advises him to reprint "Lord Roscommon's Essay on Translated Verse," and to print a thousand copies. Dryden was now at work upon the " Miscellany Poems;" that collection which is sometimes called "Tonson's," and sometimes "Dryden's." According to the fashion of title-pages at that time, it was to be written "by the most eminent hands." The poet writes, "Since we are to have nothing but new, I am resolved we will have nothing but good, whomever we disoblige." The first volume was published in 1684: a second volume appeared in 1685. Malone says, "This was the first collection of that kind which had appeared for many years in England." The third "Miscellany" was published in 1693. Tonson has now become a sharp tradesman. A letter from him to Dryden exhibits him haggling about the number of lines he ought to receive of the translation of parts of Ovid. He had only 1,446 for fifty guineas, whereas he expected 1,518 lines for forty guineas. He is, nevertheless, humbly submissive. "I own, if you don't think fit to add something more, I must submit; 'tis wholly at your choice." Still, holding to his maxim to have a pennyworth for his penny, he adds, "You were pleased to use me much kindlier in Juvenal, which is not reckoned so easy to translate as Ovid." Although the bookseller seems mercenary enough to justify Malone's remark that "by him who is to live by the sale of books, a book is considered_merely as an article of trade," Dryden soon after writes to Tonson, "I am much ashamed of myself that I am so much behindhand with you in kindness. Above all things, I am sensible of your good nature in bearing me company to this place" (somewhere in Northamptonshire).

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Dryden could now ill afford to be curtailed in the bookseller's payment for his verses. The Revolution had deprived him of his office of poet-laureate; but he might do better than writing Miscellany Poems at the rate of ninepence a line. He will publish a specimen of his translation of Virgil in the Miscellany," but he will produce the complete work by subscription. Tonson shall be his agent for printing the volumes, with engravings. The plan succeeds. There are large-paper copies for the rich and great; there are small-paper copies for a second class of subscribers. "Be ready with the price of paper and of the books," writes Dryden. They were to meet at a tavern. "No matter for any dinner; for that is a charge to you, and I care not for it. Mr. Congreve may be with us, as a common friend." Few were the literary bargains that were settled without a dinner. Fewer, indeed, were the coffee-house meetings between author and bookseller that were not accompanied with that solace which was called "a whet." Their business is completed. Mr. Dryden goes again into the country for his poetical labors and his fishing. Mr. Tonson is "My good friend;" and “I assure you I lay up your last kindness to me in my heart." But a terrible subject of dispute is coming up which much perplexes the bookseller. In October, 1695, the poet writes, "I expect fifty pounds in good silver: not such as I had formerly. I am not obliged to take gold, neither will I; nor stay for it beyond four and twenty hours after it is due." The sellers and the buyers in all trades are sorely disturbed in their calculations; whilst Charles Montague and Locke and Newton are thinking over the best means for a reform of the coinage. Mr. Tonson's customers give him bad silver for his books, and Mr. Dryden's subscribers for his five-guinea edition would take care not to pay the bookseller at the rate of twenty-one shillings for each golden piece, whose exchangeable value is increased forty per cent. When the author writes, "I expect fifty pounds in good silver," he demands an impossibility. All the "good silver" was hoarded. When he says, "I am not obliged to take gold," he means that he was not obliged to take guineas at their market value, as compared with the clipped and debased silver. Cunningham, a historian of the period, says, "Guineas on a sudden rose to thirty shillings apiece: all currency of other money was stopped." Dryden

was, in the end, compelled to submit to the common fate of all who had to receive money in exchange for labor or goods. So the poet squabbles with his publisher into the next year, and the publisher of whose arguments in his self-defence we hear nothing gets hard measure from the historian one hundred and fifty years afterwards. "The ignorant and helpless peasant," says Macaulay, "was cruelly ground between one class which would give money only by tale, and another which would take it only by weight; yet his sufferings hardly exceeded those of the unfortunate race of authors. Of the way in which obscure writers were treated we may easily form a judgment from the letters, still extant, of Dryden to his bookseller, Tonson." The poet's complaints, presented without any attendant circumstances, and with some suppression, would seem to imply that Tonson attempted to cheat Dryden, as he would have attempted to cheat obscure writers. But Macaulay justly says, "These complaints and demands, which have been preserved from destruction only by the eminence of the writer, are doubtless merely a fair example of the correspondence which filled all the mail-bags of England for several months."

Reconciliation soon comes. The business intercourse of Dryden and Tonson continues uninterrupted. Jacob, we may believe, sometimes meditates upon the loss of his great friend. Will any poetical genius arise worthy to take his place? He thinks not. He must look around him and see which of the old writers can be successfully reproduced, like the Milton, which he has now made his own, as the world may observe in the portrait which Sir Godfrey Kneller has painted for him, with "Paradise Lost" in his hand.

I see the shadow of a younger Jacob Tonson than he who is thus represented in the engraving. I see him bargaining, in 1683, with Brabazon Aylmer for one-half of his interest in Milton's poem. Aylmer produces the document, which transfers to him the entire copyright, signed by Samuel Simmons; and he exhibits also the. original covenant of indenture, by which Milton sold to Simmons his copy for an immediate payment of five pounds, with a stipulation for other payments, according to the future sales, twenty pounds in the whole. Mr. Tonson thinks that the value of other literary wares than "prologues and plays" has risen in the market. He could scarcely have dreamed, however, that the time would come when a hundred guineas would be given for this very indenture, and that it would be preserved in a national museum as a sacred treasure. He buys a half of Aylmer's interest, and has many cogitations about the best mode of making profit out of his bargain. The temper of the times, and the fashionable taste, are not propitious to blank-verse upon a sacred subject; and the name of Milton, the secretary of the late usurper, is held in hatred. It is true that Mr. Dryden had said that this was one of the greatest, most noble, and most sublime poems which either the age or nation had produced; but the prudent Jacob would pause a little. The time might come when he who sang of "man's first disobedience" would not be hated by the clergy, and when Rochester would not be the fashion at court. He waited four years, and then issued proposals for. publishing "Paradise Lost" by subscription. He was encouraged in this undertaking by two persons of some influence, John Somers, who had written verses and other things for him, a barrister; and Francis Atterbury, a student of Christ Church. There is sufficient encouragement to proceed; and so, in 1688, Milton comes forth in folio, with a portrait, under which are engraven certain lines which Dryden had furnished to his publisher. Times were changed since Samuel Simmons paid his five pounds down for the copy, and agreed to pay five pounds more when thirteen hundred were sold. And so Mr. Dryden was not altogether opposed to the critical opinions of the existing generation when he wrote that "the force of Nature could no farther go" when she united Homer and Virgil in Milton. Dryden not only gave his fa

mous six lines to Tonson, but paid his crowns as a subscriber.

It is St. Cecilia's Day, the 22d of November, 1697. Mr. Tonson has seen the manuscript of Mr. Dryden's ode, or song, to be performed at the Music Feast kept in Stationers' Hall,—“the Anniversary Feast of the Society of Gentlemen, lovers of musick." Mr. Tonson has attended many of these performances in his own hall, and was particularly interested in one a few years before, for which his distinguished friend wrote the ode. But on this latter occasion, as earnest Jacob tells to every one who will listen to him, Mr. Dryden has surpassed himself. Never, he thinks, and thinks truly, has there been so glorious an ode as" Alexander's Feast." His notions differed somewhat from the majority of the audience assembled on that occasion, who were accustomed to attach more importance to the music than to the words of the annual song of praise. Purcell died two years before, and Dryden wrote his elegy. One of less renown, Jeremiah Clarke, of the Chapel Royal, is now the composer. A great musician was to arise, in another generation, whose music should be married to this immortal verse. But the noble ode can well stand alone.

The Ode to St. Cecilia formed a part of the volume of "Fables" which Tonson published just before the poet's death. In December, 1699, Dryden had finished the work, with a preface written in his usual pure and vigorous prose. He was paid by Tonson two hundred and fifty guineas, with an engagement to make up that amount to three hundred pounds when a second impression should be demanded. It was thirteen years before such second edition was published.

In May, 1700, the bookseller's first great patron died. The time, I think, has arrived when a different interpretation of " patronage,' as between author and publisher, must be adopted, in preference to the conventional use of the term which long prevailed. "During the better half of the past century," writes the worthy John Nicholls, "Jacob Tonson and Andrew Millar were the best patrons of literature;" a fact rendered unquestionable by the valuable works produced under their fostering and genial hands. Again: "That eminent bookseller, Andrew Millar, the steady patron of Thomson and Fielding, and many other eminent authors." In 1773, Johnson said, "Now learning itself is a trade. A man goes to a bookseller, and gets what he can. We have done with patronage." pleasant delusion of Paternoster Row that patronage of authors had only changed from the Mæcenas of the Cabinet to the Mæcenas of the Counting-house.

It was a

At the beginning of the eighteenth century Tonson purchased a small house and grounds at Barn Elms, a village between Putney and Mortlake. Its majestic elms are said to have been the subject of many a pastoral poet. There was a mansion here in which Count Heidegger, the founder of Italian operas, resided. George II. was here entertained with displays of fireworks and illuminated lamps; but the "boets and bainters," who were not in good odor with the Hanoverian dynasty, conferred a lustre upon Barn Elms which did not go out quite so quickly as Heidegger's fireworks. Jacob's villa, originally little more than a cottage, was a pleasanter summer place of meeting for the Kit-Cat Club than Shire Lane or the Fountain. Like other clubable men, its members were fond of country excursions. They had occasional meetings at the "Upper Flask" on Hampstead Heath, but to Barn Elms they could come in the painted vessel or the swift wherry, not quite so free from care, perhaps, as the swan-hopping citizens, who, in their August voyages, were accustomed to land at Barn Elms, and, with collations and dances on the while green, away a summer afternoon.

The origin and early history of the Kit-Cat Club are shrouded in the "darkness visible" of the past. Fable and tradition assert their claims to be interpreters, as in the greater subject of the beginning of nations. Elkanah Settle, whose name has been preserved, like a fly in amber, by Dryden's bitter description of him under the name of Doeg, addressed, in 1699, a manuscript poem "To the

most renowned the President and the rest of the Knights of the most noble Order of the Toast." In these verses the city poet asserted the dignity of this illustrious society. Malone supposes the president to have been Lord Dorset or Mr. Montague, and the Order of the Toast to have been identical with the Kit-Cat Club. The toasting glasses of this association had verses engraven upon them, which might have perished with their fragile vehicle had they not been preserved in Tonson's fifth Miscellany, as verses by Halifax, Congreve, Granville, Addison, Garth, and others of the rhyming and witty companionship, whose toasts, as was irreverently written, were in honor of old cats and young kits. This ingenious derivation is ascribed to Arbuthnot. There was a writer of a far lower grade, - the scurrilous Ned Ward, who, in his "Secret History of Clubs," gives a circumstantial account of the origin of the Kit-Cat in connection with Jacob Tonson. It was founded, he said, "by an amphibious mortal, chief merchant to the Muses." According to Ward's narrative, we see the shadow of Jacob Tonson, as drawn by a party caricaturest, waiting hopefully in his shop for the arrival of some one or more of "his new profitable chaps, who, having more wit than experience, put but a slender value as yet upon their maiden performances." The exact locality, made illustrious by Christopher Katt and his mutton-pies, is held by Ned Ward to have been Gray's Inn Lane; by other and better authorities Shire Lane, and subsequently the Fountain Tavern in the Strand. Mr. Tonson, then, in accordance with the custom of the times, was always ready to propose a whet" to his authors; but he now added a pastry entertainment. At length, according to the satirist, Jacob proposed a weekly meeting, where he would continue the like feast, provided his friends would give him the refusal of all their juvenile productions. This "generous proposal" was very readily agreed to by the whole poetic class, and the cook's name being Christopher, for brevity called Kit, and his sign being the "Cat and Fiddle,” they very merrily derived a quaint denomination from puss and her master, and from thence called themselves the Kit-Cat Club." Ward goes on to say that the club, having usurped the bays from all the town, "many of the quality grew fond of showing the everlasting honor that was likely to crown the poetical society."

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There probably never existed a club whose members have had such a happy chance of their memories being preserved for the admiration or indifference of posterity as those of the Kit-Cat. Many of them are important figures in the state history of their country, and in the history of its literature. Others have passed on to the obscurity of mere lord chamberlains and grooms of the stole; whilst some of the versifiers and wits of their day have written their names upon the sands of the ebbing tide, which the next flood obliterates. But they each of them were painted by Kneller. The pictures are still in the possession of the representative of the Tonson family, in Hertfordshire, having been, some of them, from time to time publicly exhibited; as was the case in the last International Exhibition. All the portraits, engraved by Faber, were published a year before the death of Jacob Tonson. They were re-engraved in 1821, accompanied by "Memoirs of the celebrated persons composing the Kit-Cat Club." These memoirs are, with some justice, described by the Quarterly Review of 1825 as "one of the most blundering pieces of patchwork that the scissors of a hackney editor ever produced." It certainly is one of the dullest books, manufactured out of the commonest materials. The portraits, it is also said by this unsparing critic, are "deficient in characteristic resemblance." That sort of family likeness here prevails which is to be found in all Kneller's faces, a quality described also as “a monotony in the countenances, and a want of spirit in the figures.” This volume, by which I may trace my course as by a catalogue in calling up some of the Shadows associated in this club with Jacob Tonson, brings them before me, nearly all in the full-bottomed peruke of the court; the men of letters, however, affected their not ungraceful head decoration. Farquhar, in 1698, makes "the full wig as infallible a token of wit as the laurel." Some of the grandees show with

ribbons and stars and white staffs; many of them are in the négligé costume, which the painter often adopted; more artistic, perhaps, than the lace cravat and the embroidered coat. Only a few are in the cap in which Tonson himself is depicted, but some of these are lords.

First, let me call up the great Sir Godfrey himself, state painter to five sovereigns. He was equally favored by Charles II., James II., William III., Anne, and George I. The German artist must have been exceedingly discreet in his politics and his religion, to have begun life with Toryism and Popery; to have gone on happily with those who accomplished the Revolution; and to have ended his days amongst some of the stanchest adherents of the Protestant cause, the boon companions of his Kit-Cat family at Barn Elms. He must have been an amusing associate when his inordinate vanity was unlocked by good cheer. He would there scarcely venture to relate that famous vision of his which he described to Pope. He dreamed that he was dead; when, encountering St. Peter, the apostle very civilly asked his name. "I said it was Kneller. I had no sooner said so, than St. Luke, who was standing close by, turned towards me, and said, with a great deal of sweetness, 'What! the famous Sir Godfrey Kneller, from England?' 'The very same, sir,' said 1; 'at your service." It is related, upon the authority of Pope, that Tonson got a good many fine portraits, and two of himself, by flattering Kneller's vanity. I may picture the bookseller whispering into his ear at the Kit-Cat dinners that he was the greatest master that ever was. That might be sufficient when the flattery was accompanied by the feast; but there were sometimes dull intervals when the Kit-Cat room no longer echoed the toasts of lords and the jokes of wits. The bookseller must then propitiate the painter in some other way. "Oh!" said Kneller, with his usual oath, to Vander Gutcht, "this old Jacob loves me; he is a very good man; you see he loves me, he sends me good things; the venison was fat."

I pass on to another personage, who is characterized by an essentially different ruling passion from that of Sir Godfrey. The "proud" Duke of Somerset was the first of the members of the Kit-Cat who sat for his portrait, for the purpose of presenting it to Mr. Tonson, the secretary of the club. I hesitate in giving implicit credence to the stories that are related of this Whig partisan by the Tory writers, such as, that he would never suffer his children to sit in his presence, and that, not deigning to speak to servants, he gave his orders by signs. It seems scarcely consistent that this inordinately haughty peer should write to a tradesman who kept an open book-shop in a public thoroughfare, "Our club is dissolved till you revive it again, which we are impatient of." This was in June, 1703, when Tonson had made a trip to Holland to purchase paper for his noble edition of Cæsar. At that exact period, Vanbrugh, who seems to have been his constant friend and correspondent, writes to him at Amsterdam, "In short, the Kit-Cat wants you much more than you ever can do them. Those who remain in town are in great desire of waiting on you at Barn Elms; not that they have finished their pictures, neither; though, to excuse them as well as myself, Sir Godfrey has been most in fault. The fool has got a countryhouse near Hampton Court, and is so busy in fitting it up (to receive nobody) that there is no getting him to work." Vanbrugh had recollections of Tonson's villa which were not associated with its ceremonial banquets. Writing to Tonson in 1725, he says, "From Woodstock we went to Lord Cobham's, seeing Middleton-Stony by the way, and eating a cheerful cold loaf at a very humble ale-house: I think, the best meal I ever ate, except the first supper in the kitchen at Barnes."

Richard Tonson, the descendant of the old bookseller, who resided at Water-Oakley on the banks of the Thames, added a room to the villa which he inherited, on whose spacious walls the portraits were hung; not so completely in the style of a master of the ceremonies as in the memoirwriter series of engravings. This latter Tonson, one of the representatives for Windsor, was a partner with his brother, the third Jacob, in the old bookselling business in the Strand; and may therefore be excused for having, with his

trade notion of great names, placed together in close companionship, Dryden, Vanbrugh, Congreve, Addison, Garth, and Steele. In my discursive fashion, I shall venture to depart from both the arrangements. Peers, without any intermixture of plebeian blood, are not considered to be the liveliest of companions. I think I may also take the liberty of saying, that a knot of six authors of our own time, though not exactly possessing the qualities attributed to the tribe,

"So very clever, anxious, fine, and jealous," would not come up to the ordinary expectation that nothing but pearls would drop from their mouths.

In the Water-Oakley arrangement, the door of the room cuts off Tonson from Dryden, who is not given in the engraved series. It may be doubted whether Dryden takes his place here as a member of the Kit-Cat Club, or was introduced by Jacob's descendant, out of respect to the great name by whom the son of the barber-surgeon of Fleet Street was first brought into notice. If so, it was a very just tribute. As I have intimated, there was no cause of discord between the poet and the bookseller, when the translator of Virgil might expect, like Dante, to be conducted through the unknown regions by his great original. Dryden had, no doubt, forgiven the offence which Jacob had committed a few years before. Although the poet had refused his request to dedicate his translation to King William, the publisher, nevertheless, " prepared the book for it; for, in every figure of Æneas, he has caused him to be drawn, like King William, with a hooked nose. The device of the bookseller is recorded in an epigram of the period : —

'Old Jacob, by deep judgment swayed,
To please the wise beholders,

Has placed old Nassau's hook-nosed head
On young Æneas' shoulders.

"To make the parallel hold tack,
Methinks there's little hacking:
One took his father pick-a-back,

And t'other sent him packing.""

The history of the Kit-Cat Club would be far more inte!ligible could I trace the dates of the admission of members. Club records are perishable commodities, and there are none remaining of the Kit-Cat Club. Ned Ward tells us that the banter upon Dryden's "Hind and Panther," called "The City Mouse and Country Mouse," stole into the world out of the witty society of the Kit-Cat. This joint production of Prior and Charles Montague was published in 1687, much to the annoyance of Dryden, who thought it hard that two young fellows, to whom he had been civil, should set the town laughing at him. Charles Montague, Earl of Halifax, was painted by Kneller amongst the KitCat portraits. Prior does not appear in this collection. Between 1687 and 1703, when the club had a settled locality at Barn Elms, Montague had well pushed his fortunes, to adopt Johnson's words, - as "an artful and active statesman, employed in balancing parties, contriving expedients, and combating opposition.' His qualities as a writer have ceased to interest; but, as a patron of letters, at the period before reliance was placed upon that greater patron the public, who is not to be flattered into complacency by dedications and odes, his memory has survived. "From the moment," says Macaulay, "at which he began to distinguish himself in public life, he ceased to be a versifier... He wisely determined to derive from the poetry of others a glory which he never could have derived from his own. As a patron of genius and learning, he ranks with his two illustrious friends, Dorset and Somers." Both the eminent men thus referred to were members of the Kit-Cat, and are amongst the foremost of those who justify the eulogy of Horace Walpole: "The Kit-Cat Club, though generally mentioned as a set of wits, were, in fact, the patriots that saved Britain."

Amongst the nobles and statesmen of the period that have been made so familiar to us by the eloquent narrative of Macaulay, and who are represented in Kneller's Kit-Cat portraits, we find that of one who has been "damned to everlasting fame," not only by the great historian, but by

the great novelist. If we would study the character of one of the most wicked nobles of that day, we may turn to Macaulay's History, and Thackeray's "Esmond." How Charles Lord Mohun could have become a member of any decent society, after his participation in the murder of Mountford, the actor, in 1692, it would be difficult to conjecture. There were few peers, I may believe, of the KitCat Club, who, whatever might have been their motive for the verdict of "not guilty" upon Mohun's trial before the Lord High Steward, would have applauded the saying of one great nobleman, "After all, the fellow was but a player; and players are rogues." Spence has preserved a satisfactory anecdote of our friend the bookseller, as told him by Pope, which evidently refers to the early days of the club. "The master of the house where the club met was Christopher Katt; Tonson was secretary. The day Lord Mohun and the Earl of Berkley were entered of it, Jacob said he saw they were just going to be ruined. When Lord Mohun broke down the gilded emblem on the top of his chair, Jacob complained to his friends, and said that a man who would do that would cut a man's throat.' So that he had the good and the forms of the society much at heart."

Thirty years after the Kit-Cat Club had taken its station at Barn Elms, Pope, in his first satire, published in 1733, celebrated a distinguished epicure of that period :—

"Each mortal has his pleasure; none deny;
Scarsdale his bottle, Darty his ham-pie.

Darty was Charles Dartiquenave, or Dartineuf. The famous lover of "ham-pie" might have been one of the early members of the Kit-Cat who rejoiced in Christopher Katt's "mutton-pies." Swift describes him to Stella as "the man who knows every thing and that everybody knows, and where a knot of rabble are going on a holiday, and where they were last." He wrote a paper in the Tatler on the use of wine, in which Addison is supposed to be pointed at. "I have the good fortune to be intimate with a gentleman who has an inexhaustible source of wit, to entertain the curious, the grave, the humorous, and the frolic. He can transform himself into different shapes, and adapt himself to every company; yet, in a coffee-house, or in the ordinary course of affairs, appears rather dull than sprightly. You can seldom get him to the tavern; but, when once he is arrived to his pint, and begins to look about, and like his company, you admire a thousand things in him which before lay buried. Then you discover the brightness of his mind and the strength of his judgment, accompanied with the most graceful mirth."

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It is scarcely necessary that I should notice Addison or Steele as members of the Kit-Cat Club, except as they hover round the shadow of Jacob Tonson. The bookseller, it would appear from Pope's representations, had no affection for the famous essayist: "Old Jacob Tonson did not like Mr. Addison. He had a quarrel with him; and, after his quitting the secretaryship, used frequently to say of him, One day or other you'll see that man a bishop! I'm sure he looks that way; and, indeed, I ever thought him a priest in his heart." In Spence's Anecdotes, Tonson is made to say, "Addison was so eager to be the first name, that he and his friend Sir Richard Steele used to run down even Dryden's character as far as they could. Pope and Congreve used to support it." Tonson, indeed, appears to have been chivalrously faithful to his first great friend. There is a curious letter addressed to him by Dennis, the critic, in 1715, which thus begins: "When I had the good fortune to meet you in the city, it was with concern that I heard from you of the attempt to lessen the reputation of Mr. Dryden; and 'tis with indignation that I have since learned that that attempt has chiefly been carried on by small poets." Pope is here the jealous rival who is pointed at. One more anecdote which Spence gives, on the authority of Dr. Leigh: "Mr. Addison was not a good-natured man, and very jealous of rivals. Being one evening in company with Philips, and the poems of Blenheim and the Campaign being talked of, he made it his whole business to Jun down blank-verse. Philips never spoke till between

The statesmen of the Kit-Cat Club-"the patriots that saved Britain"-thus lived in social union with the Whig writers who were devoted to the charge of the poetry that opened their road to preferment. This band of orators and wits was naturally hateful to the Tory authors that Harley and Bolingbroke were nursing into the bitter satirists of the weekly sheets. Jacob Tonson naturally came in for a due share of invective. In a poem entitled "Factions Displayed," he is ironically introduced as "the touchstone of all modern wit;" and he is made to vilify the great ones of Barn Elms:

"I am the founder of your loved Kit-Cat, A club that gave direction to the State; 'Twas there we first instructed all our youth To talk profane and laugh at sacred truth; We taught them how to boast and rhyme and bite, To sleep away the day, and drink away the night." Tonson may be deemed the prince of booksellers, in his association with some of the most eminent men of his own time. These were essentially "his friends;" but the mighty ones of the past had not less to do than the living in his establishment of his fortune and his fame. He identified himself with Milton by first making "Paradise Lost" popular. A few years after, when he moved from his old shop in Chancery Lane, he no longer traded under the sign of "The Judge's Head," but set up "Shakspeare's Head." He was truly the first bookseller who threw open Shakspeare to a reading public. The four folio editions had become scarce even in his time. The third folio was held to have been destroyed in the fire of London. In 1709 Tonson produced Rowe's edition in octavo. Bernard Lintot the elder, who about the same time republished Shakspeare's poems, expresses himself in his advertisement as if Tonson's speculation were an experiment not absolutely certain of success: "The writings of Mr. Shakspeare are in so great esteem, that several gentlemen have subscribed to a late edition of his Dramatic Works in six volumes, which makes me hope that this little book will not be unacceptable to the public." Tonson and his family were long associated with editions of Shakspeare. Rowe, Pope, Theobald, Warburton, Johnson, and Capell, were liberally paid by the Tonsons for their editorial services.

"KALEVALA;" OR, THE FINNISH NATIONAL EPIC.

Ir is difficult to account for the fact that the scientific curiosity which is just now so busy in examining all the monuments of the primitive condition of our race, should, in England at least, have almost totally neglected to popularize the "Kalevala," or national poem of the Finns. Besides its fresh and simple beauty of style, its worth as a storehouse of every kind of primitive folk-lore, being as it is the production of an Urvolk, a nation that has undergone no violent revolution in language or institutions, — the "Kalevala" has the peculiar interest of occupying a position between the two kinds of primitive poetry, the ballad and the epic. So much difficulty has been introduced into the study of the first developments of song, by confusing these distinct sorts of composition under the name of popular poetry, that it may be well, in writing of a poem which occupies a middle place between epic and ballad, to define what we mean by each. The author of our old English " Art of Poesie" begins his work with a statement which may serve as a text: Poesie," says Puttenham, writing in 1589, "is more ancient than the artificiall of the Greeks and Latines, coming by instinct of nature, and used by the savage and uncivill, who were before all science and civilitie. This is proved by certificate of merchants and travellers, who, by late navigations, have surveyed the

whole world, and discovered large countries, and strange people, wild and savage, affirming that the American, the Perusine, and the very canniball, do sing, and also say, their highest and holiest matters in certain riming versicles." Puttenham is here referring to that instinct of primitive men, which compels them in all moments of high-wrought feeling, and on all solemn occasions, to give utterance to a kind of chant. Such a chant is the song of Lamech, when he had "slain a man to his wounding." So in the Norse sagas, Grettir and Gunnar sing when they have any thing particular to express; and so in the "Mahrchen"- the primitive fairy tales of all nationsscraps of verse are introduced where emphasis is wanted. This craving for passionate expression takes a more formal shape in the lays which, among all primitive peoples, as among the modern Greeks to-day, are sung at betrothals, funerals, and departures for distant lands. These songs have been collected in Scotland by Scott and Motherwell: their Danish counterparts have been translated by Mr. Prior. In Greece, M. Fauriel and Dr. Ulrichs; in Provence, Damase Arbaud; in Italy, M. Nigra; in Servia, Talvj; in France, Gérard de Nervalhave done for their separate countries what Scott did for the Border. A comparison of these collections proves that among all these lands the primitive "versicles" of the people are identical in tone, form, and incident. It is this kind of early expression of a people's life-careless, abrupt, brief, as was necessitated by the fact that they were sung to the accompaniment of the dance

that we

call ballads. These are distinctly, and in every sense, popular poems; and nothing can cause greater confusion than to apply the same title, "popular," to primitive epic poetry. Ballads are short; a long ballad, as Mr. Matthew Arnold has said, creeps and halts. A true epic, on the other hand, is long; and its tone is grand, noble, and sustained. Ballads are not artistic; while the form of the epic, whether we take the hexameter or the rougher laisse of the French chansons de geste, is full of conscious and admirable art. Lastly, popular ballads deal with vague characters, acting and living in vague places; while the characters of an epic are heroes of definite station, whose descendants are still in the land; whose home is a recognizable place, Ithaca, or Argos. Now, though these two kinds of early poetry - the ballad, the song of the people; the epic, the song of the chiefs of the people, of the ruling race- are distinct in kind, it does not follow that they have no connection; that the nobler may not have been developed out of the materials of the lower form of expression. And the value of the "Kalevala" is partly this, that it combines the continuity and unison of the epic with the simplicity and popularity of the ballad, and so forms a kind of link in the history of the development of poetry. This may become clearer as we proceed to explain the literary history of the Finnish national poem.

Sixty years ago, it may be said, no one was aware that Finland possessed a national poem at all. Her people who claim affinity with the Magyars of Hungary, but are possibly a back-wave of an earlier tide of population had remained untouched by foreign influences since their conquest by Sweden, and their somewhat lax and wholesale conversion to Christianity: events which took place gradually between the middle of the twelfth and the end of the thirteenth centuries. Under the rule of Sweden, the Finns were left to their quiet life and undisturbed imagining, among the forests and lakes of the region which they aptly called Pohja, "the end of things; " while their educated classes took no very keen interest in the native poetry and mythology of their race. At length the annexation of Finland by Russia, in 1809, awakened national feeling, and stimulated research into the songs and customs which were the heirlooms of the people.

It was the policy of Russia to encourage, rather than to check, this return on a distant past; and from the north of Norway to the slopes of the Altai, ardent explorers sought out the fragments of unwritten early poetry. These runes, or runots, were sung chiefly by old men called Runoias, to beguile the weariness of the long, dark win

ters. The custom was for two champions to engage in a contest of memory, clasping each other's hands, and reciting in turn, till he whose memory first gave in slackened his hold. The "Kalevala contains an instance of this practice, where it is said that no one was so hardy as to clasp hands with Wäinämöinen, who is at once the Orpheus and the Prometheus of Finnish mythology. These Runoias, or rhapsodists, complain, of course, of the degeneracy of human memory; they notice how any foreign influence, in religion or politics, is destructive to the native songs of a race. "As for the lays of old time, a thousand have been scattered to the wind, a thousand buried in the snow as for those which the Munks (the Teutonic knights) swept away, and the prayer of the priest overwhelmed, a thousand tongues were not able to recount them." In spite of the losses thus caused, and in spite of the suspicious character of the Finns, which often made the task of collection a dangerous one, enough materials remained to furnish Dr. Lönnrot, the most noted explorer, with thirty-five runots, or cantos. These were published in 1835; but later research produced the fifteen cantos which make up the symmetrical fifty of the "Kalevala." In the task of arranging and uniting these, Dr. Lönnrot played the part generally ascribed to Pisistratus in relation to the "Iliad" and "Odyssey." He is said to have handled with singular fidelity the materials which now come before us as one poem, not without a certain unity and continuous thread of narrative. It is this unity which gives the "Kalevala” a claim to the title of epic, although the element of permanence which is most obvious in the Greek epics, and in the earliest Hebrew records, is here conspicuously absent.

It cannot be doubted that, at whatever period the Ho- * meric poems took shape in Greece, they were believed to record the feats of the supposed ancestors of existing families. Thus, for example, Pisistratus, as a descendant of the Nelidæ, had an interest in securing certain parts. at least, of the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" from oblivion. The same family pride embellished and preserved the epic poetry of early France. There were in France but three heroic houses, or gestes; and three corresponding cycles of of épopées. Now, in the "Kalevala," there is no trace of the influence of family feeling; it was no one's peculiar care and pride to watch over the records of the fame of this or that hero. The poem begins with a cosmogony as wild as any Indian dream of creation; and the human characters who move in the story are shadowy inhabitants of no very definite lands, whom no man claims as his forefathers. The very want of this idea of family and aristocratic pride, gives the "Kalevala " a unique place among epics. It is em phatically an epic of the people, of that class whose life contains no element of progress, no break in continuity; which from age to age preserves, in solitude and close communion with nature, the earliest beliefs of gray intiquity. The Greek epic, on the other hand, has, as M. Preller points out, "nothing to do with natural man, but with an ideal world of heroes, with sons of the gods, with consecrated kings, heroes, elders, a kind of specific race of men. The people exist only as subsidiary to the great houses, as a mere background, against which stand out the shining figures of heroes; as a race of beings fresh and rough from the hands of Nature, with whom, and with whose concerns, the great houses and their bards have little concern." This feeling so universal in Greece, and in the feudal countries of medieval Europe, that there are two kinds of men, the golden and the brazen race, as Plato would have called them is absent, with all its results, in the "Kalevala." Among the Finns we find no trace of an aristocracy; there is scarcely a mention of kings or priests; the heroes of the poem are really popular heroes, fishers, smiths, husbandmen, "medicine-men," or wizards; exaggerated shadows of the people, pursuing on a heroic scale, not war, but the common daily business of primitive and peaceful men. In recording their adventures, the "Kalevala," like the shield of Achilles, reflects all the life of a race, the feasts, the funerals,

*Thus Scotland scarcely produced any ballads, properly speaking, after the Reformation. The Kirk suppressed the dances to whose motion the ballad was sung in Scotland, as in Greece, Provence, and France.