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CHAPTER XVII.

POETICAL OLD BACHELORS.

THERE is a certain class of poets, not a very numerous one, whom I would call poetical old bachelors. They are such as enjoy a certain degree of fame and popularity themselves, without sharing their celebrity with any fair piece of excellence; but walk each on his solitary path to glory, wearing their lonely honours with more dignity than grace: for instance, Corneille, Racine, Boileau, the classical names of French poetry, were all poetical old bachelors. Racine-le tendre Racine-as he is called par excellence, is said never to have been in love in his life; nor has he left us

a single verse in which any of his personal feelings can be traced. He was, however, the kind and faithful husband of a cold, bigoted woman, who was persuaded, and at length persuaded him, that he would be grillé in the other world, for writing heathen tragedies in this; and made it her boast that she had never read a single line of her husband's works! Peace be with her!

And O, let her by whom the muse was scorn'd,
Alive nor dead, be of the muse adorn'd!

Our own Gray was in every sense, real and poetical, a cold fastidious old bachelor, who buried himself in the recesses of his college; at once shy and proud, sensitive and selfish. I cannot, on looking through his memoirs, letters, and poems, discover the slightest trace of passion, or one proof or even indication that he was ever under the influence of woman. He loved his mother, and was dutiful to two tiresome old aunts, who thought poetry one of the seven deadly sins-et voilà tout. He spent his life in amassing an inconceivable quantity of knowledge,

which lay as buried and useless as

a miser's treasure; but with this difference, that when the miser dies, his wealth flows forth into its natural channels, and enriches others; Gray's learning was entombed with him: his genius survives in his elegy and his odes;-what became of his heart I know not. He is generally supposed to have possessed one, though none can guess what he did with it: he might well moralise on his bachelorship, and call himself "a solitary fly,"

Thy joys no glittering female meets,
No hive hast thou of hoarded sweets,
No painted plumage to display !

Collins was never a lover, and never married. His odes, with all their exquisite fancy and splendid imagery, have not much interest in their subjects, and no pathos derived from feeling or passion. He is reported to have been once in love; and as the lady was a day older than himself, he used to say jestingly, that "he came into the world a day after the fair." He was not

deeply smitten; and though he led in his early years a dissipated life, his heart never seems to have been really touched. He wrote an Ode on the Passions, in which, after dwelling on Hope, Fear, Anger, Despair, Pity, and describing them with many picturesque circumstances, he dismisses Love with a couple of lines, as dancing to the sound of the sprightly viol, and forming with joy the light fantastic round. Such was Collins's idea of love!

To these we may add Goldsmith. Of his loves we know nothing; they were probably the reverse of poetical, and may have had some influence on his purse and respectability, but none on his literary character and productions. He also died unmarried.

Shenstone, if he was not a poetical old bachelor, was little better than a poetical dangler. He was not formed to captivate: his person was clumsy, his manners disagreeable, and his temper feeble and vacillating. The Delia who is introduced into his elegies, and the Phillis of his pastoral

ballad, was Charlotte Graves, sister to the Graves who wrote the Spiritual Quixotte. There was nothing warm or earnest in his admiration, and all his gallantry is as vapid as his character. He never gave the lady who was supposed, and supposed herself, to be the object of his serious pursuit, an opportunity of accepting or rejecting him; and his conduct has been blamed as ambiguous and unmanly. His querulous declamations against women in general, had neither cause nor excuse; and his complaints of infidelity and coldness are equally without foundation. He died unmarried.

When we look at a picture of Thomson, we wonder how a man with that heavy, pampered countenance, and awkward mien, could ever have written the "Seasons," or have been in love. I think it is Barry Cornwall, who says strikingly, that Thomson's figure "was a personification of the Castle of Indolence, without its romance." Yet Thomson, though he has not given any popularity or interest to the name of a woman, is