Two Pastels by Edmund Gosse — Read

I. Mr. R. L. Stevenson as a Poet

A pretty little anthology might be made of poems by distinguished writers who never for a moment professed to be poets, and who only "swept, with hurried hand, the strings" when they thought nobody was listening. The elegant technical people of the eighteenth century, who never liked to be too abstruse to seem polite, would contribute a great many of these flowers that were born to bloom unseen. It is not everybody who is aware that the majestic Sir William Blackstone was "guilty," as people put it, of a set of one hundred octosyllabic verses which would do credit to any laurelled master on Parnassus. We might, indeed, open our little volume with _The Lawyers Farewell to his Muse_. Then, of course, there would be Bishop Berkeley's unique poem, _Westward the Course of Empire takes its Way_; and Oldys, the antiquary, would spare us his _Busy, curious, thirsty Fly_. We should appeal to Burton for the prefatory verses in the _Anatomy of Melancholy_, and to Bacon for _The World's Bubble_. If I had any finger in that anthology, Smollett's _Ode to Leven Water_ should by no means be omitted. It would be a false pride that would reject Holcroft's _Gaffer Gray_, or Sydney Smith's _Receipt for a Salad_, which latter Herrick might have been glad to sign. Hume's solitary poem should be printed by itself, or with some of Carlyle's lyrics, and George Eliot's sonnets, in an appendix, as an awful warning.