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If this is permitted to the poet, the chaste nurseling of the muses, ought it not to be conceded to the novelist, who is only the half-brother of the poet, and who still touches by so many points?
Whose bounty glistens in the beauteous gift That friendly hands to loving lips shall lift: Turn the fair goblet when its floor is dry, Their names shall meet thine eye. Count thou their number on the beads of Heaven, Alas! the clustered Pleiads are but seven; Nay, the nine sister Muses are too few, The Graces must add two. "For whom this gift?"
No domestic articles are so sympathetic as those of the milk tribe: they readily take on the smell and taste of any neighboring substance, and hence the infinite variety of flavors on which one mournfully muses who has late in autumn to taste twenty firkins of butter in hopes of finding one which will simply not be intolerable on his winter table.
You will find them all there all the Essays in Verse, the Inspirations, the lofty flights, the hymns, and songs, and ballads, and odes; all the nestfuls hatched during the last seven years, in fact. There lie their muses, thick with dust, bespattered by every passing cab, at the mercy of every profane hand that turns them over to look at the vignette on the title-page.
John Woodbridge takes up the strain in lines of much easier verse, in which he pays her brotherly tribute, and is followed by his brother, Benjamin, who had been her neighbor in Andover. Now I believe Tradition, which doth call The Muses, Virtues, Graces, Females all; Only they are not nine, eleven nor three; Our Auth'ress proves them but one unity.
The immorality of these men is of comparatively slight significance, whereas the importance of the poet's personality is enormous, because it takes on immortality through his works. Not his contemporaries alone, but readers of his verse yet unborn have a right to call him to account for his faults. Though Swinburne muses happily over the sins of Villon,
The wise and brave Sir David Lyndsay was familiar with his writings; and he was not only occasionally imitated, but praised with enthusiastic eloquence by William Dunbar, that "darling of the Scottish Muses," whose poetical merits Sir Walter Scott, from some points of view, can hardly be said to have exaggerated, when declaring him to have been "justly raised to a level with Chaucer by every judge of poetry, to whom his obsolete language has not rendered him unintelligble."
The truer account of the impulse that urged them to create is that given also by Plato in an earlier and more impassioned work, in which he describes it as a "madness of those who are possessed by the Muses; which enters into a delicate and virgin soul, and there inspiring frenzy, awakens lyrical and all other numbers; with these adorning the myriad actions of ancient heroes for the instruction of posterity.
Everywhere students might be seen with Bibles in their hands; the young nobles and sons of burghers applied themselves diligently to self-discipline; and the drinking-bouts practised elsewhere, and so destructive to the muses, were unknown among them. Luther, by his behaviour at Worms in particular, had fastened upon himself the eyes of all Germany.
After they have been received by the host, the "name-caller" leads them to their places, according to such order of precedence as Silius chooses to pre-arrange. The regular number of guests for the three couches will be nine the number of the Muses or three to each couch. To squeeze in more was regarded as bad form.
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