mentators of his day, does not forget our friends when manning his Modern Ship of Fools:—
- "Dolts, by whom a trifle's cherish'd,
- Which 'neath Time's withering hand hath perish'd;
- Which 'neath Time's withering hand hath perish'd;
Whose sapient brain from modern works no pleasure knows;
Dotes on crack'd urn Etruscan—bust without a nose."[1]
Well, the "Antiquaries" can bear this innocent fun-poking, or I should not have revived it. Not but that there are among them yet, and always will be, fit subjects for the satirist—feeble, credulous, shallow-brained men, who,—
"Vetera extollentes, recentium incuriosi,"—
ride their stumbling hobby to the very death, miss the end in devotion to the means, and expend their minds amid les infinments petits, whether of bibliography, verbal criticism, book-collecting, or any other pursuit connected with "antiquarianism."
But these are the weaker brethren, from whom we may turn, when our laugh is over, to pay our respects to the "antiquaries" proper—men really deserving of the name—unobtrusive and earnest scholars, to whom we are indebted for all that we know of the past; for correct texts, elucidatory comments, recovered manuscripts, instructive collections, and the preservation of the evanescent memorials, the "trivial fond records" of bygone days, from which, better than formal chronicles or splendid monuments, we gain the form and pressure of the elder time.
What a funny question that is of Wordsworth's,—
- "Is it a party in a parlour?
Cramm'd just as they on earth were cramm'd:
Some sipping punch, some sipping tea,
But, as you by their faces see,
- All silent and all damn'd!"[2]
Charles Lamb was amazingly tickled by it, and it will be sought for in vain in the later editions of Peter Bell. These facts must justify its introduction here; for, now I have written it, I cannot, for the life of me, see the applicability of any part of it; except, indeed, the latter half of the third line, and then for "tea" we must read "coffee."
The present is naturally all in all to the "young man," and it is generally when Time has thinned the flowing locks, and written strange defeatures in the face, that we become addicted to the study of the past. Hence it is that the individuals of our group are already elderly,—"by'r lady, inclining to threescore,"—and that it comes to pass that not one now remains to be reminded of other days by this happy reproduction of a symposium of five brief decades ago.
The first to obey the dread summons was "old" John Caley. This gentleman died August 28th, 1834, aged 71. He held the office of Keeper of the Records in the Augmentation Office and Chapter House, West-
- ↑ Stultifera Navis: the Modem Ship of Fools, 1807, p. 125.
- ↑ An erudite critic in the Examiner, for January 3rd, 1874, took upon himself to assert that these lines were not by Wordsworth. He will find them, all the same, in the original edition of Peter Bell, 1819, 8vo. If their relevancy in this place may not appear such as to justify their retention, I must fall back, for my excuse, upon the opinion of the late Mortimer Collins, who, writing of Wordsworth, asks—"Why, O why, did his friends advise him to expunge that immortal stanza, superior to almost anything in Dante?"
