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When the later Browning takes us on one of those long afternoon rambles through his mind, over moor and fen, through jungle, down precipice, past cataract, we know just where we are coming out in the end. We know the place better than he did himself. Nor will posterity like Browning's manners, the dig in the ribs, the personal application, and de te fabula of most of his talking.
If not a hypocrite or a vain man, he may find himself blushing at the thought de me fabula narratur. The only alteration that our satire on others may require is to change the name of the folly or fault we lash, and then the stripes will be merited by ourselves. The other day Temple and I listened to a discourse of the Rev. Dr. Waddell of St Magdalen's on the perils of novel-reading.
I should never think of making personal remarks about her guests before her!" "Then, sir," says Hagan, fiercely, "why did you speak of my theatre?" "Sir, you are saucy!" roars the Doctor. "De te fabula," says the actor. "I think it is your waistcoat that is saucy. Madam, shall I make some punch in the way we make it in Ireland?"
"Yes, indeed; all honor to the merits of our noble lady!" said Fabula; "but, with his honor's permission, I know what I know. I know where his honor spent the whole summer." Michael felt as if his hair stood on end with horror. Could this man know where he had been? It would be awful if he did. Michael winked with one eye over his glass at his guest, but in vain.
Is the Gospel which she has represented in so many attractive lights nothing better to her, after all, than "fabula ista de Christo"? Are the various forms under which she has exhibited it no more for her than the Mahometan and Hindoo systems were for the poet of Thalaba and Kehama? Has she been carrying out in these novels the precepts of that chapter in which Dr.
"Now, look you," said Johann Fabula, "since I was here last, the course of the river has altered; if I don't let her go a bit free we shall get into the new eddy which has formed under the 'Lovers' Rock. Do you see that devilish monster which keeps swimming close to us? That's an old sturgeon he must be at least five hundred-weight. If this beast keeps up with us, he'll bring us ill-luck.
Elizabeth turned from the greetings of sibyls and giants to deliver the enchanted lady from her tyrant, 'Sans Pitie. Shepherdesses welcomed her with carols of the spring, while Ceres and Bacchus poured their corn and grapes at her feet." Oh, gilded youth of the Gaiety, mutato nomine de te Fabula narratur. Yours, yours is this glory! For our own age, too, is a second Elizabethan.
But they say you are only a Papist on board, and a Calvinist directly you set foot on shore; that you pray in the ship, and can hardly wait for dry land before you begin cursing and swearing. And they say too that your name is Fabula, and that Fabula means just the same as a pocketful of lies. But of course I believe all you have told me, so you need not be angry."
Gentlemen, de me fabula; are my resources like those of Antiochus quite unfit for battle on the whole, but including some elephants, some queer impositions, some jugglery, in fact? That is what all the praise I hear points at.
And so he goes back to the famous Langbard Saga, the old story, which he has turned out of living Teutonic verse into dead Latin prose, and calls De Woden et Frea quaedam ridicula fabula; but can't help for the life of him telling it, apologizing all the time. But the Winils are far away on the war-road, and there is no time to send to them.
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