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How immeasurably superior to the herd is the man whose father only is famous! Imagine, then, the feelings of one who can trace his line through a thousand years of heroes and of princes! 'Tis dinner! hour that I have loved as loves the bard the twilight; but no more those visions rise that once were wont to spring in my quick fancy.
'You have a quick observation, Captain Waverley, which in this instance has not deceived you. The Gaelic language, being uncommonly vocalic, is well adapted for sudden and extemporaneous poetry; and a bard seldom fails to augment the effects of a premeditated song by throwing in any stanzas which may be suggested by the circumstances attending the recitation.
A Highland bard might easily have found in the history of the year 1689 subjects very similar to those with which the war of Troy furnished the great poets of antiquity. One day Achilles is sullen, keeps his tent, and announces his intention to depart with all his men. The next day Ajax is storming about the camp, and threatening to cut the throat of Ulysses.
It is not my present purpose to review Carlyle's literary labors that were like crowding the Bard of Avon into a magazine article. For 300 years the world has been studying the latter, and is not yet sure that it understands him; yet Shakespeare is to Carlyle what a graded turnpike is to a tortuous mountain path. The former deals chiefly with the visible; the latter with the intangible.
He then diverged to Homer, whose Iliad he considered as a collection of poems by different authors, at different times during a century. There was, he said, the individuality of an age, but not of a country. Morritt, a zealous worshipper of the old bard, was incensed at a system which would turn him into a polytheist, gave battle with keenness, and was joined by Sotheby, our host. Mr.
His characters stand before us like epic heroes, and he tells his story like a bard singing his lay at a joyous festive meeting, checkered by alternate successes and reverses, though all tending to a happy result at last. But while these features constitute his charm as a narrator, they render him less valuable as a historian.
The measure of a nation's civilization is the number of heroes it has had, whose qualities have been harvested for children and youth. Full oft one hero has transformed a people. The blind bard singing through the villages of Greece met a rude and simple folk. But Homer opened up a gallery in the clouds, and there unveiled Achilles as the ideal Greek.
It might prove a little tiresome, but it would no doubt "look well," in the sense that going to church "looks well," if I were to write in here ten pages of praise of our national bard.
Above all else, the agreeable talker cultivates gentleness and delicacy of speech, avoids aggressive and overwhelming displays, and remembers the tortured cry of the neurotic bard:
The first is Drew. I must get back to him." "Why d'you want Drew? Let me tell you, Bard, he's a bigger job than ten tenderfeet like you could handle. Why, mothers scare their babies asleep by tellin' of the things that William Drew has done." "I can't tell you why. In fact, I don't altogether know the complete why and wherefore. It's enough that I have to meet him and finish him!"
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