“Your letter* operated well. Like a good boy I began my task immediately after its arrival, and have now completed one part and begun the second, of a poem which is to consist of three. Can you give me a better title than Carmen Maritale? I distrust my own Latinity, which has long been disused and never was very good. The poem is in six-lined stanzas; first a proem, so called rather than introduction, that the antiquated word may put the reader in tune for what follows. It is a poet’s egotism making the best of the laurel, and passing to the present subject by professing at first an unfitness for it; the second part will be a vision, wherein allegorical personages give good advice; and the concluding part a justification of the serious strain which has been chosen; something about the king; and a fair winding up with a wish that it may be long before the Princess be called upon to exercise the duties of which she has been here reminded. The whole poem 300 to 400 lines,—on which, when they are completed, I will request you to bestow an hour’s reading, with a pencil in your hand.
“In George Gascoigne’s poem there are many things about the Dutch, showing that the English
* My father had been in doubt as to the likelihood of the Princess Charlotte’s marriage with the Prince of Orange, and hesitated whether to commence a poem on that subject. |
| Ætat. 40. | OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 65 |
“‘And thus, my lord, your honour may discerne Our perils past; and how, in our annoy, God saved me (your lordship’s bound for ever), Who else should not be able now to tell The state wherein this country doth persever, Ne how they seem in careless minds to dwell (So did they erst, and so they will do ever). And so, my lord, for to bewray my mind, Methinks they be a race of bull-beef borne, Whose hearts their butter mollyfieth by kind, And so the force of beef is clear outworne. And eke their brains with double beer are lined, Like sops of browasse puffed up with froth; When inwardly they be but hollow geer, As weak as wind which with one puff up goeth. And yet they brag, and think they have no peer, Because Harlem hath hitherto held out; Although in deed (as they have suffered Spain) The end thereof even now doth rest in doubt.’ |
“I dearly love a piece of historical poetry like this, which shows how men thought and felt, when history only tells me how they acted.
