We may all be
very low Philistines if we are not prepared to accept rhymers for
chartered villains; but some of us still have a glimmering of belief in
the old standards of nobility and constancy. Can any one fancy Walter
Scott cheating a miserable little girl of sixteen into marriage, and
then leaving her, only to many a female philosopher? How that noble soul
would have spurned the maundering sentimentalist who talked of truth and
beauty, and music and moonlight and feeling, and behaved as a mean and
bad man! Scott is more to my fancy than is Shelley.
Again, this poet, this exquisite weaver of verbal harmonies, is
represented to us by his worshippers as having a passion for truth;
whereas it happens that he was one of the most remarkable fibbers that
ever lived. He would come home with amazing tales about assassins who
had waylaid him, and try to give himself importance by such blustering
inventions. "Imagination!" says the enthusiast; but among commonplace
persons another word is used. "Your lordship knows what kleptomania is?"
said a counsel who was defending a thief. Justice Byles replied, "Oh,
yes! I come here to cure it." Some critical justice might say the same
of Shelley's imagination.
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