Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 8.djvu/27

 12 s. vin. JAX. i,i92i.] NOTES AND QUERIES. 19 solemn words ' As sorrowful, yet always rejoic- ing,' give tte true key to Alfred Tennyson's inmost nature, his life and his poetry." (12 g. vii. 511.) 2. This is an incorrect quotation from "'The Stirrup Cup. 'as sung by Mr. Santley. Written by H. B. Farnie, composed by L. Arditi. London, Chappel& Co," Probably the song was published about 1875-80. It was in its time very popular ; witness the fact that it was published in three keys. The two verses are as follows : The last saraband has been danc'd in the hall, The last prayer breath'd by the maiden ere sleeping, The light of the cresset has died from the wall, Yet still a love-watch with my Lady I'm keeping. My charger is dangling his bridle and chain, The moment is neariug dear love ! we must sever; But pour out the wine, that thy lover may drain A last stirrup-cup to his true maiden ever ! I cannot ride off, I am heavy with fears, No gay disregard from the flagon I borrow, I pledge thee in wine, but 'tis mingled with tears, Twin-type of the Love that is shaded by sorrow ; But courage, mine own one, and if it be willed That back from the red field thy gallant come never, In death he'll remember, the she who had filled His last stirrup-cup was his true maiden ever ! Later there appeared * The Gift and the Giver,' sequel to 'The Stirrup Cup,' by the same authors and publishers, also "sung by Mr. Santley." A foot-note on p. 1 as to the title "The Gift, and the Giver' says, "A favorite inscription, in olden times, on betrothal rings." ROBERT PIERPOINT. Shakespeare's Last Years in London, 1586-1592 By Arthur Acheson. (Bernard Quaritch, 1 Is. net.) A RECONSTRUCTION of Shakespeare's life, even in regard to the periods of which .we know most, is a business which calls for more than ordinary judg- ment as to the value of such evidence as we possess. To make anything of the obscurer years one had need be, to start with, of so cautious a turn of mind as to count the task impossible. A lively, hopeful imagination will certainly create delusions, having vast spaces in which to disport itself, with almost no facts and not very many more clear inferences, to serve as checks or guides. The writer of this book, at the very outset, shakes our confi- dence in his pessimism the pessimism required by the situation. He suggests Jacquespierre as, possibly, the original form of Shakespeare, and therewith a Gallic origin for bearers of the name. So hopeful and ingenious a mind must be expected to show itself rather clever and entertaining than over-solicitous as to what the evidence in favour oi its surmises will bear : and so we find our author He advances little of which one can say positively ; This cannot be so ; but the reasons for which we are invited to agree with him remain slender. The most interesting of these studies, to our mind^ s that of John Florioas Sir John Falstaffs original. This is introduced by an exceedingly apt quotation from an eighteenth century criticism'of the dramatic character of Falstaff, the point of which is that those characters in Shakespeare which are seen only in 3art are " capable of being unfolded and understood n the whole ; every part being in fact relative and nferring all the rest." This "wholeness" of Shakespeare's characters it has, of course, often Deen commented on is the subject of several good- remarks which conclude with the opinion that these jharacters may be considered "rather as Historic than as Dramatic beings." Our author proceeds, after quoting the passage, to declare that the reason For this life-likeness lies in the fact that every "very distinctive Shakespearean character" when acting or speaking " from those parts of the com- position which are inferred only and not distinctly shewn " is the portrait of a personage contemporary with Shakespeare whom the dramatist knew and took for his model. Fluellen, thus, is Captain Roger Williams ; Falconbridge. Sir John Perrot and Falstaff Florio. The Falstaff-Florio case is set forth most plausibly and. against it what we have to urge is chiefly our ignorance of Shakespeare's circumstances, his degree of ac- quaintance with Florio, and his actual methods of working. That quality in Shakespeare which has preserved him among the greatest and most lively forces in literature down to the present hour has often been described as a capacity for seeing and rendering the universal in the individual' along with even thereby enhancing individual peculiarities. A portrait on such lines would be immeasurably more troublesome to produce than a work of pure imagination imagination, that is, informed and inspired by observation and close knowledge of individual men. Would a man of Shakespeare's power adopt a method, to his per- ception of what goes to make up a man, so nearly impossible? Again, admitting he did, it cannot be proved tnat Florio was the model. Florio, we know, was furious with one, H. S-, for having made a satirical use of his initials, J- F. H. S., then, is to be identified with Shakespeare and much hangs on that identification but proof thereof is not to be had. We should, perhaps, follow our author more readily if he himself were not so well satisfied as to the truth of these conjectures and did not so cheer- fully forget how slender are the materials with which he is working and how honeycombed with doubts. And we should also have been grateful to him for so much more care and polish in his own writing as would have enabled a reader to seize his meaning at once. But we would by no means discourage students of Shakespeare from making acquaintance with his book. A History of Scotland from the Roman Evacuation to the Disruption, 1843. By Charles Sanford Terry. (Cambridge University Press, 1 net.) DR. SANFORD TERRY claims for the history of Scotland that it is " a story of development unsur- passed by the national experience of any modern community." We concede that claim, and we further agree with him that a new History of