Following Horace Walpole in some degree, Mrs. Radcliffe
paved the way for Scott, Byron, Maturin, Lewis, and
Charlotte Bronte, just as Miss Burney filled the gap
between Smollett and Miss Austen. Mrs. Radcliffe,
in short, kept the Lamp of Romance burning much more
steadily than the lamps which, in her novels, are
always blown out, in the moment of excited apprehension,
by the night wind walking in the dank corridors of
haunted abbeys. But mark the cruelty of an intellectual
parent! Horace Walpole was Mrs. Radcliffe’s
father in the spirit. Yet, on September 4, 1794,
he wrote to Lady Ossory: “I have read some
of the descriptive verbose tales, of which your Ladyship
says I was the patriarch by several mothers”
(Miss Reeve and Mrs. Radcliffe?). “All
I can say for myself is that I do not think my concubines
have produced issue more natural for excluding the
aid of anything marvellous.”
CHAPTER VII: A SCOTTISH ROMANTICIST OF 1830
The finding of a rare book that you have wanted long
is one of the happier moments in life. Whatever
we may think of life when we contemplate it as a whole,
it is a delight to discover what one has sought for
years, especially if the book be a book which you really
want to read, and not a thing whose value is given
by the fashion of collecting. Perhaps nobody
ever collected before
THE
DEATH-WAKE, OR LUNACY
A NECROMAUNT
In Three Chimeras
BY THOMAS T. STODDART.
“Is’t like that lead contains
her?— It were too gross To rib her
cerecloth in the obscure grave.”—
Shakespeare.
EDINBURGH:
Printed for HENRY CONSTABLE, Edinburgh,
And HURST, CHANCE, & CO., London.
MDCCCXXXI.
This is my rare book, and it is rare for an excellent
good reason, as will be shown. But first of
the author. Mr. Thomas Tod Stoddart was born
in 1810. He died in 1880. Through all his
pilgrimage of three-score years and ten, his “rod
and staff did comfort him,” as the Scottish
version of the Psalms has it; nay, his staff was his
rod. He “was an angler,” as he remarked
when a friend asked: “Well, Tom, what are
you doing now.” He was the patriarch, the
Father Izaak, of Scottish fishers, and he sleeps,
according to his desire, like Scott, within hearing
of the Tweed. His memoir, published by his daughter,
in “Stoddart’s Angling Songs” (Blackwood),
is an admirable biography, quo fit ut omnis Votiva
pateat veluti descripta tabella Vita senis.
But it is with the “young Tom Stoddart,”
the poet of twenty, not with the old angling sage,
that we have to do. Miss Stoddart has discreetly
republished only the Angling Songs of her father, the
pick of them being classical in their way. Now,
as Mr. Arnold writes:—
“Two desires toss about
The poet’s
feverish blood,
One drives him to the world without,
And one to solitude.”
Copyrights
Adventures Among Books from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
