Certainly the restrictions which produce the feeble-witted, earth-bound Dodo, must give way to the freedom which will give the angels in our houses room to grow their six strong wings

two for personal dignity and beauty, two for spiritual elevation, and two with which to fly on serviceable errands for humanity.-Contemporary Review.

PROBABLY no literary tendency is of older standing than that expressed by the title of this paper. Whether the object be ornament, elucidation, display of reading, or the desire to ally one's views to those of others who carry more weight, the practice must be well-nigh as old as literature itself. Nor was it ever more general. Conversation, perhaps, nowadays exhibits a certain impatience of the habit. Old stagers will still illustrate their moments of conviviality, of kindly optimism, of gentle half fictitious pessimism, from Horace; younger scholars will occasionally recall the Anthology to

the embarrassment of friends who have forgotten their Greek; but the custom of quotation in talk, of classical quotation especially, is decaying. The modern listener is perhaps a trifle too ready to scent a prig, the modern talker too much afraid of the imputation; but whatever the cause, while allusion fully holds its own, and paradox is stronger than ever, quotations are gradually disappearing from the current coin of speech. From Parliamentary oratory they have almost disappeared already perhaps one should rather say their disappearance from Parliament accompanied that of Parliamentary oratory. Occasionally the habit reappears with the awakening gleam that lights up our dormant patriotism, as when the late Lord Cairns closed his fine speech on the Transvaal surrender with the words:

"In all the ills we ever bore

"They never told their love; But let concealment, like a worm i' the bud,

Feed," etc.

or to Mr. Bright:

"Perhaps it was wise to dissemble your love, But why did you kick me downstairs?"

But for the most part quotation, like other ornaments, has disappeared from our debates with the influx of the "You're another!" type of politician, and amid the amenities of Irish discussion. If the House still occasion

ally wastes its time, it is at least entirely innocent of doing so in any way that might give pleasure to persons of reading and taste.

But the journalist, the lecturer, the littérateur, still quote; and the tendency seems on the increase among all wielders of the pen. From the epistolary efforts of the higher-educated poets appear duly emphasized with inyoung lady, whose scraps from the verted commas and underlines, to the delicate interweaving of Shakespearean echoes with the precious sentences of ing of moral or psychological truth our most spruce essayists, or the pointfrom the pulpit by apt passages from secular literature, the literary atmosphere is full of quotation. Of what is the fact significant? Chiefly, perhaps, of the enormous extension of journalistic enterprise. It is the newspapers, daily and weekly, that are mainly responsible for all the changes that pass over our current speech, for the healthy admission of new words and new phrases, for the formation of new hab

fore!"'

of much that is radically mistaken or in poor taste. For ages past there has existed a vast body of traditional quotations, the common property of all fairly educated folk, who employ them quite legitimately, though very often. without the slightest knowledge of their

origin, because they have acquired a certain value as talismans. Such value was originally due, no doubt, to the fact of their embodiment of

What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed";

but has been increased tenfold by their repetition from generation to generation, until they have acquired almost the force of geometrical axioms and definitions. Of this common heritage of quotations every novelist and journalist has for years been making the fullest use. The growth of the habit of reading the papers has not only familiarized a far wider circle with such common heritage, but has raised up a far larger body of younger writers who take on the literary habits and stockin-trade of their predecessors, and disseminate their quotations still more widely. The gradual severance of the quotation from its proper source is the inevitable result of journalistic hurry. The pointed epigram or antithesis recurs to the mind far more readily than the name of the author or of the work wherein it occurs, particularly if it be a sentiment of a general kind which might have been uttered by many writ

ers.

In former days the writer would perhaps have worried his memory for the proper reference, and inserted it in his copy; the modern journalist must abandon that exercise to his readers. Hence the surprise often felt on hearing the remote and obscure source of many a familiar phrase. The revela tion is sometimes not without its touch of pathos. Dryden, writing in 1666, of Beaumont and Fletcher: says of "Their plays are now the most pleasant and frequent entertainments of the stage; two of theirs being acted through the year, for one of Shakespeare's or Johnsons" (sic).* And yet of all the vast body of irregular but often magnificent work left by those collaborateurs, containing more than fifty plays apart from the poems, I doubt if there be more than a single phrase that has passed into the common speech of their countrymen, and whether more than a very few are aware that the proverb about one man's meat being another

"An Essay of Dramatic Poesy."

66

(However of our virtue we may boast,) The woman that deliberates is lost."

66

-Act IV., Scene 1.

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even

To journalistic hurry, too-and be it understood that the phrase is used rather as a type of the pressure which spoils so much of our modern life, than as an indictment of the Press, in particular, for a fault so common-must we attribute the stereotyping of certain time-honored misquotations, such as fresh fields and pastures new" for Milton's "fresh woods," tenor of their way" where Gray wrote "noiseless tenor," the on land or sea" or else on sea or shore" put for Wordsworth's "light that never was on sea or land," the attribution of the last-quoted line to Shelley, and the impossible transference of Fiat justitia, ruat cœlum" to Horace from its unknown author. Such misquotations have their origin, no doubt, in hurry, in the necessity of printing without verification ; sometimes in deliberate intention, for the better serving of the quoter's purpose; and more rarely in the indolence which is careless about verifying where it could. But their perpetuation is rather due to the fact that many of those who use them are using them at second hand, are quoting from their memory of others' quotations, and not from their personal recollection of the original. times the sense and bearing of a passage may have undergone such change that verification proves it actually useless for the purpose intended.

Some

Nevertheless, it would be a world of pities if people shrank from employing a quotation because they were not perfectly sure of it. Only conscientious folk know how much valuable time may be wasted in the effort after perfect honesty. The hunting up of some line, of whose sense we are absolutely certain, but of whose exact locality, or of a particular epithet in which, we are not so sure, will often consume half a morning, and leave the end, perhaps, after all unattained. Rarely do we misinterpret, or misremember in any important particular, a line that has strongly impressed us; and it is better to face the risk of a trifling mistake a risk which recent discussion of the subject showed to be freely taken by some of our best-known living writers. Nor need we wholly reprobate even the shameless cribbing of quotations which other men have won the right to use by patient study of the original authors. Robert Burton used to be instanced as the greatest victim of such pilfering; but it is more than doubtful if the cribber of to-day is commonly aware of that vast storehouse of famous line and phrase, "The Anatomy of Melancholy." A brief reference by the cribber to the quarter, or quoter, whence he borrows is, no doubt, desirable, but sometimes-as in the case of unsigned work or deficient memoryimpossible. Is he for that reason to forego the pithy or beautiful expression of the particular sentiment he wishes to recommend? or to whittle down such expression to his private standard of weakness or banality, lest he seem to poach? Once a sentiment has attained admirable expression, our allegiance to the best tolerates nothing inferior to that. We demand that such recognized best form, which haunts our own minds, shall be reflected also, by allusion, if not by actual quotation, in the author we are reading. Seldom have we either the power or the wish to question whence he got it. Words once uttered are no longer even the exclusive property of the original authors; certainly they cannot be considered the private preserve of those diligent enough to study him.

The ap

propriator of other men's quotations should be compared, not so much to

the poacher, as to the unsuccessful sportsman who repairs his defects as a shot by judicious purchase at the poulterer's on the way home-at least, he brings back something in his bag. The first quoter should rather rejoice that the old wisdom he has disinterred is borne upon the lips of men; and, if he naturally chafes against the nonrecognition of his claim as first discoverer, he need not be seriously uneasy. The pilferer will very seldom be one whose rivalry he has the slightest cause to dread. Nowhere has the mere charlatan, the mere purveyor of stolen scraps, so little chance of ultimate success on any worthy scale as in the pursuit of letters. Mere literary pretension can never finally impose itself as literary talent or knowledge. The indolence or the ignorance which constitutes it mere pretension will keep it so, unless repaired; and in these diligent days, when pretension is discovered so much more quickly, it has no more chance of succeeding greatly than has real merit, steadily evinced, of remaining long without its "fair guerdon" of fame.

Akin to misquotation, yet how different in its effect, is the witty alteration of the sense of a passage, the application of it to some quite foreign purpose, without outward change. All quotation may be said to imply some share of wit, which was well enough, if somewhat roughly, defined by Locke* as the ready perception of analogies; but those are felt to be wittiest where the resemblance, though close, seems removed as it were to a distance by some obvious differences of connection or circumstance. In this class may be cited the saying of Suetonius about Cæsar, or rather of Addison, who quotes it with some addition of wit in No. 231 of the Spectator. A man conscious of social defects, he says, "should exert a noble spirit, and palliate those imperfections which are not in his power by those perfections which are,. . . ... he should imitate Cæsar, who, because his head was bald, covered that defect with laurels." Then there was Harley's to Congreve, who on the fall of the Whig

* " Essay on the Human Understanding." Book II., chap. ii.

Ministry in 1710 was afraid he might be deprived of the post that Halifax had given him, until the new Minister gracefully reassured him by repeating Dido's friendly words to Eneas:"Non obtusa adeo gestamus pectora Pœni, Nec tam aversus equos Tyriâ sol jungit ab urbe."*

Of the same class was Macaulay's quotation from the Merry Wives, àpropos of the Johnsonese he found in the mouths of the female characters in the unfortunate play of Irene: "I do not like when a 'oman has a great peard: I spy a great peard under her muffler." Matthew Arnold alluded to his own nomenclature for our social classes when, in some passage describing Oxford, he quoted the line

"There are our young barbarians, all at play."

One of the happiest, I think, was that of Mr. Birrell in the first series of "Obiter Dicta," about the elegant mounting and get up of minor poets' first volumes, and its sad contrast with the sense of early doom he felt in perusing their contents:

"the conscious Parcæ threw Over those roseate lips a Stygian hue." One recalls, too, how Calverley, having baffled the pursuit of a proctor and his myrmidons, and reached sanctuary by a feat of daring climbing, bade his pursuers a cheerful adieu from the inside with the words: "Mine enemies compassed me round about, but by the help of my God I have leapt over the wall!" And lastly I am reminded of a brilliant unconscious misquotation on the part of a schoolboy, who, while reluctantly repeating lines from "Lycidas" about the vanity of the homely slighted shepherd's trade, suggested it as possibly preferable

"To sport with Amaryllis in the shade,

Or with the tangles of the negro's hair!"

I have said that the spread of the custom of quotation is significant of the extension of journalism. But it means much more than that. It points to an infinitely wider extension of gen

"We of Carthage have not so lost the edge of sympathy, nor is our Tyrian town so remote from the track of the car of Light."-Æn. i. 567-8.

eral culture. The success of quotation, its power of giving pleasure, its chance of being appreciated, will always bear a proportion to the reading of those to whom the quotations are made; and the spread of the habit means not only that the preachers and writers are more saturated with the great work of others, but that they can more confidently rely on the recognition of the passages given by a majority of their audience. Moreover, the range is perceptibly widening. The time-honored quotations have become too common and familiar for use; and not only are new authors brought into the field, but the well-thumbed classic is laid under contribution for new passages.

Not that quotation is a very safe test of an author's popularity, still less, perhaps, of his merit. To have won admission among the ranks of the quoted at all implies, no doubt, popularity of some sort in the past, and a certain standard of merit ; but it would be utterly unjust to arrange poets-and it is from poetry that the vast majority of quotations are made-in a scale according to the number of lines or expressions from their works that have become trite. It may well be true that the poet of most genius will be the least often appealed to. Moreover, there is a fashion in quotation, as in everything else. else. A successful man of letters can give to a line or phrase more currency by quoting it in a single article than it has enjoyed, perhaps, in centuries of its existence before. In the best work, the wisdom or beauty of a sentiment actually suffers sometimes from the wealth by which it is surrounded. Where the general level is very high, there are few saliences; and an expression that would attract attention by its very loneliness in an inferior writer, may pass unnoticed in an excellent: yet, once severed from its context, its and it passes from lip to lip and pen to special merit is immediately apparent, pen. It may sometimes happen, too, that to be much quoted means to be little read. Campbell is responsible for many of our most familiar phrases, for instance "Distance lends enchantment to the view, Angel-visits, few and far between," Coming events cast their shadows before :" yet how

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many people now read either "The Pleasures of Hope" or "Gertrude of Wyoming"? The verdict of our own time has gone in favor of his great martial odes of the "Battle of the Baltic," of "Ye Mariners of England," of "Hohenlinden ;" and of "The Soldier's Dream"-but of these only. The fact of his furnishing us with lines to quote is witness to that patient industry in polishing by which he repaired his real defect of striking original power.

Generally speaking, the authors most quoted will be those who deal most with moral truth, with ethical ideas. Such ideas being of greater importance, and more frequently under discussion than any others, there is more frequent occasion to illustrate them; and a poet like Wordsworth, rich in short passages and vigorous expressions conveying ethical truth, will, now that by the help of Matthew Arnold and others the world has become more fully aware of him, never cease to be in demand for this purpose. But he would have stood higher, no doubt, had he written more in rhymed verse. Of all who express ethical ideas, those will have the greatest drafts made upon them who afford the greatest number of witty, polished, epigrammatic and antithetic sayings. These are most easily detached from their context; they most readily recur to the memory; and their wit, point, and terseness adapt them best to the quoter's purpose. The poet who possesses these qualities in the greatest degree is, undoubtedly, Pope; and, with the single exception of Shakespeare, I believe Pope to be more, and more often, quoted than any other English poet. Shakespeare's universally acknowledged supremacy enables him to head the list; but it is to be noted that the bulk of quotations made from him are made not from the sonnets, lines or phrases from which would (for the rhyme and other causes) have stood the best chance of taking rank as such, but from that body of dramatic work which has been kept constantly before the eyes and ears of his countrymen, and has thus gained him an advantage enjoyed by no other writer. But, putting Shakespeare aside, no other can compete with Pope; and that not beNEW SERIES.-VOL. LIX., No. 6.

50

cause he moves men most, or appeals to their innermost feelings with any special power, but simply because his writings offer the greatest number of clinches and tags, of general propositions suitable to man's varied relations with his fellow-man, of hard little gems of pure thought or reason, perfectly cut and polished, and set in the fine gold of wit.

In fact, the relative position of authors in this matter seems to be largely decided by the national preference of the useful to the merely beautiful. It is not in the least surprising to find poets like Spenser, Shelley, and Keats very little quoted. Assuredly this is not because they do not afford innumerable passages of beauty and of power, but because they do not abound in neatly turned aphorisms that stick in the memory and are easily reproduced. Take the last-named, for instance. Line after line in the "Eve of St. Agnes" prints an indelible picture on the mental retina; while the beauty of the odes haunts us like a passion or a spell. But what do people quote of Keats? hardly anything but the first line of "Endymion"

"A thing of beauty is a joy forever," and the

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," etc. of the "Ode on a Grecian Urn." Exquisite passages of his occur to us, only to be dismissed as too long, or too little precise, for our purpose. Even in Pope's case the principle is applicable. Probably no poem of his is more successful, or was more popular, than "The Rape of the Lock;" yet scarce a line of it has become current, except

"The nice conduct of a clouded cane,"

because the whole thing is an extravaganza, and touches reality only on its lightest side. Utility, practical bearing, general application-these seem to be the best recommendations to the quoter; and this seems to have been in John Selden's mind when he said that "quoting of authors is most for matter of fact," like the citation of witnesses, and advised the quotation only of "such authors as are usually