Notes and Queries, Number 189, June 11, 1853

Notes and Queries, Number 189, June 11, 1853
Various

Various

Notes and Queries, Number 189, June 11, 1853 / A Medium of Inter-communication for Literary Men, Artists, Antiquaries, Genealogists, etc

Notes

TOM MOORE'S FIRST!

It is now generally understood that the first poetic effusion of Thomas Moore was entrusted to a publication entitled Anthologia Hibernica, which held its monthly existence from Jan. 1793 to December 1794, and is now a repertorium of the spirited efforts made in Ireland in that day to establish periodical literature. The set is complete in four volumes: and being anxious to see if I could trace the "fine Roman" hand of him whom his noble poetic satirist, and after fast friend, Byron, styled the "young Catullus of his day," I went to the volumes, and give you the result.

No trace of Moore appears in the volume containing the first six months of the publication; but in the "List of Subscribers" in the second, we see "Master Thomas Moore;" and as we find this designation changed in the fourth volume to "Mr. Thomas Moore, Trinity College, Dublin!" (a boy with a black ribband in his collar, being as a collegian an "ex officio man!"), we may take it for ascertained that we have arrived at the well-spring of those effusions which have since flowed in such sparkling volumes among the poetry of the day.

Moore's first contribution is easily identified; for it is prefaced by a note, dated "Aungier Street, Sept. 11, 1793," which contains the usual request of insertion for "the attempts of a youthful muse," &c., and is signed in the semi-incognito style, "Th-m-s M—re;" the writer fearing, doubtless, lest his fond mamma should fail to recognise in his own copy of the periodical the performance of her little precocious Apollo.

This contribution consists of two pieces, of which we have room but for the first: which is a striking exemplification (in subject at least) of Wordsworth's aphorism, that "the child is father to the man." It is a sonnet addressed to "Zelia," "On her charging the author with writing too much on Love!" Who Zelia was—whether a lineal ancestress of Dickens's "Mrs. Harris," or some actual grown up young lady, who was teased by, and tried to check the chirpings of the little precocious singing bird—does not appear: but we suspect the former, for this sonnet is immediately followed by "A Pastoral Ballad!" calling upon some Celia unknown to "pity his tears and complaint," &c., in the usual namby-pamby style of these compositions. To any one who considers the smart, espiègle, highly artificial style of "Tom Moore's" after compositions, his "Pastoral Ballad" will be what Coleridge called his Vision, a "psychological curiosity."

Passing on through the volumes, in the Number for February 1794 we find a paraphrase of the Fifth Ode of Anacreon, by "Thomas Moore;" another short poem in June 1794, "To the Memory of Francis Perry, Esq.," signed "T. M.," and dated "Aungier Street." These are all which can be identified by outward and visible signs, without danger of mistake: but there are a number of others scattered through the volumes which I conjecture may be his; they are under different signatures, generally T. L., which may be taken to stand for the alias "Thomas Little," by which Moore afterwards made himself so well known. There is an "Ode to Morning," in the Number for March 1794, above the ordinary run of magazine poetry. And in the Number for May following are "Imitations from the Greek" and Italian, all under this same signature. And this last being derived from some words in Petrarch's will, bequeathing his lute to a friend, is the more curious; and may the more probably be supposed Moore's, as it contains a thought which is not unlikely to have suggested in after years the idea of his celebrated melody, entitled the "Bard's Legacy." The Number for Nov. 1794, last but one in the fourth volume, contains a little piece on "Variety," which independent of a T. M. signature, I would almost swear, from internal evidence, to be Moore's; it is the last in the series, and indicates such progress as two years might be supposed to give the youthful poet, from the lack-a-daisical style of his first attempts, towards that light, brilliant, sportive vein of humour in which he afterwards wrote "What the Bee is to the Flowret," &c., and other similar compositions. I now give Moore's first sonnet, including its footnote, reminding us of the child's usual explanatory addition to his first drawing of some amorphous animal—"This is a horse!" or "a bear!" as the case may be. Neither the metre nor the matter would prepare us for the height to which the writer afterwards scaled "the mountain's height of Parnassus:"

"To Zelia

(On her charging the Author with writing too much on Love.)

'Tis true my Muse to love inclines,
And wreaths of Cypria's myrtle twines;
Quits all aspiring, lofty views,
And chaunts what Nature's gifts infuse:
Timid to try the mountain's* height,
Beneath she strays, retir'd from sight,
Careless, culling amorous flowers;
Or quaffing mirth in Bacchus' bowers.
When first she raised her simplest lays
In Cupid's never-ceasing praise,
The God a faithful promise gave—
That never should she feel Love's stings,
Never to burning passion be a slave,
But feel the purer joy thy friendship brings.

* Parnassus!"

If you think this fruit of a research into a now almost forgotten work, which however contains many matters of interest (among the rest, "The Baviad of Gifford"), worth insertion, please put it among "N. & Q.;" it may incite others to look more closely, and perhaps trace other "disjecta membra poetæ."

    A. B. R.

Belmont.

NOTES ON SEVERAL MISUNDERSTOOD WORDS

(Continued from p. 544.)

Let no one say that a tithe of these instances would have sufficed. Whoever thinks so, little understands the vitality of error. Most things die when the brains are out: error has no brains, though it has more heads than the hydra. Who could have believed it possible that after Steevens's heaped-up proofs in support of the authentic reading, "carded his state" (King Henry IV., Act III. Scene 2.), Warburton's corruption, 'scarded, i. e. discarded, was again to be foisted into the text on the authority of some nameless and apocryphal commentator? Let me be pardoned if I prefer Shakspeare's genuine text, backed by the masterly illustrations of his ablest glossarist, before the wishy-washy adulterations of Nobody: and as a small contribution to his abundant avouchment of the original reading, the underwritten passage may be flung in, by way of make-weight:

"Carded his state (says King Henry),
Mingled his royaltie with carping fooles."

"Since which it hath been and is his daily practice, either to broach doctrinas novas et peregrinas, new imaginations never heard of before, or to revive the old and new dress them. And these—for that by themselves they will not utter—to mingle and to card with the Apostles' doctrine, &c., that at the least yet he may so vent them."—One of the Sermons upon the Second Commandment, preached in the Parish Church of St. Giles, Cripplegate, on the Ninth of January, a.d. mdxcii.: Andrewes' Sermons, vol. v. p. 55. Lib. Ang.-Cath. Theol.

Trash, to shred or lop.—So said Steevens, alleging that he had met with it in books containing directions for gardeners, published in the time of Queen Elizabeth. I fear his memory deceived him, or why should a man of his sound learning afterwards incline to vail bonnet to the dogmatist Warburton? whose knowledge of dogs, by the way, must have been marvellously small, or he could never have imagined them to overtop one another in a horizontal course. Overrun, overshoot, overslip, are terms in hunting, overtop never; except perchance in the vocabulary of the wild huntsman of the Alps. Trash occurs as a verb in the sense above given, Act I. Sc. 2. of the Tempest: "Who t'aduance, and who to trash for over-topping." I have never met with the verb in that sense elsewhere, but overtop is evermore the appropriate term in arboriculture. To quote examples of that is needless. Of it metaphorically applied, just as in Shakspeare, take the following example:

"Of those three estates, which swayeth most, that in a manner doth overtop the rest, and like a foregrown member depriveth the other of their proportion of growth."—Andrewes' Sermons, vol. v. p. 177., Lib. Ang.-Cath. Theol.

Have we not the substantive trash in the sense of shreddings, at p. 542. book iii. of a Discourse of Forest Trees, by John Evelyn? The extract that contains the word is this:

"Faggots to be every stick of three feet in length, excepting only one stick of one foot long, to harden and wedge the binding of it; this to prevent the abuse, too much practised, of filling the middle part and ends with trash and short sticks, which had been omitted in the former statute."

Possibly some of the statutes referred to by Evelyn may contain examples of the verb. In the meantime it will not be impertinent to remark, that what appears to be nothing more than a dialectic variety of the word, namely trouse, is of every-day use in this county of Hereford for trimmings of hedges; that it is given by Grose as a verb in use in Warwickshire for trimming off the superfluous branches; and lastly, that it is employed as a substantive to signify shreddings by Philemon Holland, who, if I rightly remember, was many years head master of Coventry Grammar School:

"Prouided alwaies, that they be paued beneath with stone; and for want thereof, laid with green willow bastons, and for default of them, with vine cuttings, or such trousse, so that they lie halfe a foot thicke."—The Seuenteenth Booke of Plinie's Naturall History, chap. xi. p. 513.: London, 1634.

Trash no one denies to be a kennel term for hampering a dog, but it does not presently follow that the word bore no other signification; indeed, there is no more fruitful mother of confusion than homonomy.

Clamor, to curb, restrain (the tongue):

"Clamor your tongues, and not a word more."

    The Winter's Tale, Act IV. Sc. 4.
Most judiciously does Nares reject Gifford's corruption of this word into charm, nor will the suffrage of the "clever" old commentator one jot contribute to dispel their diffidence of this change, whom the severe discipline of many years' study, and the daily access of accumulating knowledge, have schooled into a wholesome sense of their extreme fallibility in such matters. Without adding any comment, I now quote, for the inspection of learned and unlearned, the two ensuing extracts:

"For Critias manaced and thretened hym, that onelesse he chaumbreed his tongue in season, ther should ere lōg bee one oxe the fewer for hym."—Apoptheymis of Erasmus, translated by Nicolas Vdall, mcccccxlii, the First Booke, p. 10.

"From no sorte of menne in the worlde did he refrein or chaumbre the tauntying of his tongue."—Id., p. 76.

After so many Notes, one Query. In the second folio edition of Shakspeare (my first folio wants the whole play), I find in Cymbeline, Act V. Sc. 3., the next beautiful passage:

"Post. Still going? This is a lord: Oh noble misery
To be ith' field, and aske what newes of me:
To-day how many would have given their honors
To have sav'd their carkasses? Tooke heele to doo't,
And yet dyed too. I in mine owne woe charm'd,
Could not find death, where I did heare him groane,
Nor feele him where he strooke. Being an ugly monster,
'Tis strange he hides him in fresh cups, soft beds,
Sweet words; or hath moe ministers then we
That draw his knives ith' war. Well I will finde him:
For being now a favourer to the Britaine,
No more a Britaine, I have resum'd againe
The part I came in."