I believe his patrician bride did every thing but beat him. His courtship had been long, timid, and anxious; and at length, the lady was persuaded to marry him, on terms much like those on which a Turkish Princess is espoused, to whom the Sultan is reported to pronounce, "Daughter, I give thee this man to be thy slave."* They were only three years married, and those were years of bitterness. Young, the author of the Night Thoughts, married Lady Elizabeth Lee, the daughter of the Earl of Litchfield, and grand-daughter of the too famous, or more properly, infamous Duchess of Cleveland:-the marriage was not a happy one. I think, however, in the last two instances, the ladies were not entirely to blame. But these, it will be said, are the wives of poets, not the loves of the poets; and the phrases are not synonymous,au contraire. This is a question to be asked and examined; and I proceed to examine it accordingly. But as I am about to take the field on new ground, it will require a new chapter. * Johnson's Life of Addison. It is Ir it be generally true, that Love, to be poetical, must be wreathed with the willow and the cypress, as well as the laurel and the myrtle-still it is not always true. not, happily, a necessary condition, that a passion, to be constant, must be unfortunate; that faithful lovers must needs be wretched; that conjugal tenderness and "domestic doings" are ever dull and invariably prosaic. The witty invectives of some of our poets, whose domestic misery stung them into satirists, and blasphemers of a happiness denied to them, are familiar in the memoryready on the lips of common-place scoffers. But of matrimonial poetics, in a far different style, we have instances sufficient to put to shame such heartless raillery; that there are not more, is owing to the reason which Klopstock has given, when writing of his angelic Meta. "A man," said he," should speak of his wife as seldom and with as much modesty as of himself." A woman is not under the same restraint in speaking of her husband; and this distinction arises from the relative position of the two sexes. It is a species of vain-glory to boast of a possession; but we may exult, unreproved, in the virtues of him who disposes of our fate. Our inferiority has here given to us, as women, so high and dear a privilege, that it is a pity we have been so seldom called on to exert it. The first instance of conjugal poetry which occurs to me, will perhaps startle the female reader, for it is no other than the gallant Ovid himself. One of the epistles, written during his banishment to Pontus, is addressed to his wife Perilla, and very tenderly alludes to their mutual affection, and to the grief she must have suffered during his ab sence. And thou, whom young I left when leaving Rome, Grant, heaven! that such I may behold thy face, Regret for me has thinned this beauteous frame. Here then we have the most abandoned libertine of his profligate times reduced at last in his old age, in disgrace and exile, to throw himself, for sympathy and consolation, into the arms of a tender and amiable wife; and this, after spending his life and talents in deluding the tenderness, corrupting the virtue, and reviling the characters of women. In truth, half a dozen volumes in praise of our sex could scarce say more than this. Every one, I believe, recollects the striking story of Paulina, the wife of Seneca. When the order was brought from Nero that he should die, she insisted upon dying with him, and by the same operation. She accordingly prepared to be bled to death; but fainting away in the midst of her sufferings, Seneca commanded her wounds to be bound up, and conjured her to live. She lived therefore; but excessive weakness and loss of blood gave her, during the short remainder of her life that spectral appearance which has caused her conjugal fidelity and her pallid hue to pass into a proverb,-"as pale as Seneca's Paulina ;" and be it remembered, that Paulina was at this time young in comparison of her husband, who was old and singularly ugly. This picturesque story of Paulina affects us in our younger years; but at a later period we are more likely to sympathize with the wife of Lucan, Polla Argentaria, who beheld her husband perish by the same death as his uncle Seneca, and through love for his fame, consented to survive him. She appears to have been the original after whom he drew his beautiful portrait of Cornelia the wife of Pompey. Lucan had left the manuscript of the Pharsalia in an imperfect state; and his wife who had been in its progress his amanuensis, his counsellor and confidant, and therefore best knew his wishes and intentions, under took to revise and copy it with her own hand. During the rest of her life, which was devoted to this dear and pious task, she had the bust of Lucan always placed beside her couch, and his works lying before her: and in the form in which Polla Argentaria left it, his great poem has descended to our times. I have read also, though I confess my acquaintance with the classics is but limited, of a certain Latin poetess, Sulpicia, who celebrated her husband Calenas: and the poet Ausonius composed many fine verses. in praise of a beautiful and virtuous wife, whose name I forget. But I feel I am treading unsafe ground, rendered so both by my ignorance, and by my prejudices as a woman. Generally speaking, the heroines of classical poetry and history are not much to my taste; in their best virtues they were a little masculine, and in their vices so completely unsexed, that one would rather not think of them -speak of them-far less write of them. * * * * * The earliest instance I can recollect of modern conjugal poetry, is taken from a country, and a class, and a time where one would scarce look for high poetic excellence inspired by conjugal tenderness. It is that of a Frenchwoman of high rank, in the fifteenth century, when France was barbarized by the prevalence of misery, profligacy, and bloodshed, in every revolting form. Marguerite-Eléonore-Clotilde de Surville, of the noble family of Vallon Chalys, was the wife of Berenger de Surville, and lived in those disastrous times which immediately succeeded the battle of Agincourt. She was born in 1405, and educated in the court of the Count de Foix, where she gave an early proof of literary and poetical talent, by translating, when eleven years old, one of Petrarch's Canzoni, with a harmony of style wonderful, not only for her age, but for the times in which she lived. At the age of sixteen she married the Chevalier du Surville, then, like herself, in the bloom of youth, and to whom she was passionately attached. In those days no man of noble blood, who had a feeling for the misery of his coun * Elton's Specimens. try, or a hearth and home to defend, could avoid taking an active part in the scenes of barbarous strife around him; and De Surville, shortly after his marriage, followed his heroic sovereign, Charles the Seventh, to the field. During his absence, his wife addressed to him the most beautiful effusions of conjugal tenderness to be found, I think, in the compass of poetry. In the time of Clotilde, French verse was not bound down by those severe laws and artificial restraints by which it has since been shackled: we have none of the prettinesses, the epigramatic turns, the sparkling points, and elaborate graces, which were the fashion in the days of Louis Quatorze. Boileau would have shrugged up his shoulders, and elevated his eyebrows, at the rudeness of the style; but Molière, who preferred J'aime mieux ma mie, oh gai! to all the fades galanteries of his contemporary bels esprits, would have been enchanted with the naïve tenderness, the freshness and flow of youthful feeling which breathe through the poetry of Clotilde. The antique simplicity of the old French lends it such an additional charm, that though in making a few extracts, I have ventured to modernize the spelling, I have not attempted to alter a word of the original. Clotilde has entitled her first epistle "Heroïde à mon époux Bérenger;" and as it is dated in 1422, she could not have been more than seventeen when it was written. The commencement recalls the superscription of the first letter of Heloise to Abelard. Clotilde, au sien ami, douce mande accolade! A son époux, salut, respect, amour! Ah, tandis qu'eplorée et de cœur si malade, Que deviens? où cours tu? Loin de ta bien-aimée, She then describes her lonely state, her grief for his absence, her pining for his return. She laments the hor * Querir. |