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Page 14
So I hope to see a soberer generation of girls return to a profession
which they have always adorned, for the schooling of which their
husbands and children shall rise up and call them blessed.
POETRY AND THE MODE
A good friend of mine, poet and scholar, was recently approached by
the President, or other kind of head of a Working Men's Association,
for a paper. A party of them was to visit Oxford, where, after an
inspection, there should be a feast, and after the feast, it was
hoped, a paper from my friend--upon Addison. The occasion was not to
be denied: I don't doubt that he was equal to it. I wish that I had
heard him; I wish also that I had seen him; for he had determined on
a happy way of illustrating and pointing his discourse. He had the
notion of providing himself with a full-bottomed wig, a Ramillies; at
the right moment he was to clothe the head of the President with
it; and--Bless thee, Bottom, how art thou translated! In that woolly
panoply, if one could not allow for _Cato_ and the balanced antitheses
of the grand manner, or condone rhetoric infinitely remote from life
past, present or to come--well, one would never understand Addison, or
forgive him. This, for instance:--
CATO (_loq._): Thus am I doubly arm'd; my death and life,
My bane and antidote are both before me:
_This_ in a moment brings me to an end;
But _this_ informs me I shall never die.
The soul, secured in her existence, smiles
At the drawn dagger....
Ten pages more sententious and leisurely comment; then:
Oh! (_dies_).
There is much to be said for it, in a Ramillies wig. It is stately, it
is dignified, it is perhaps noble. If, as I say, it is not very much
like life, neither are you who enact it. But be sure that out of sight
or remembrance of the wig such a tragedy were not to be endured.
That is very well. The wig serves its turn, inspiring what without it
would be intolerable. I am sure my friend had no trouble in accounting
for Addison in full dress and his learned sock. Nor need he have had
with Addison the urbane, Addison of the _Spectator_ condescending to
Sir Roger de Coverley and Will Honeycomb. There is in that, the very
best gentlemanly humour our literature possesses, nothing inconsistent
with the full-bottomed wig and an elbow-chair. But when the right
honourable gentleman set himself to compose _Rosamond: an Opera_, and
disported himself thus:
PAGE:
Behold on yonder rising ground
The bower, that wanders
In meanders
Ever bending,
Never ending,
Glades on glades,
Shades in shades,
Running an eternal round.
QUEEN:
In such an endless maze I rove,
Lost in the labyrinths of love,
My breast with hoarded vengeance burns,
While fear and rage
With hope engage,
And rule my wav'ring soul by turns--
then I do not see how the wig can have been useful. I feel that
Addison must have left it on the bedpost and tied up his bald pate
in a tricky bandana after the fashion of Mr. Prior or Mr. Gay, one of
whom, if I remember rightly, did not disdain to sit for his picture in
that frolic guise. The wig, which adds age and ensures dignity, would
have been out of place there; nor is it possible that _The Beggar's
Opera_ owes anything to it. To explain the Addison of _Rosamond_
or _The Drummer_, my friend would have had to shave the head of his
victim and clap a nightcap upon it.
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