MALIM CONVIVIS QVAM PLACVISSE COQVIS.
We need not, perhaps, regret that Mr. Stoddart withdrew
from the struggles and competitions of poetic literature.
No very high place, no very glorious crown, one fancies,
would have been his. His would have been anxiety,
doubt of self, disappointment, or, if he succeeded,
the hatred, and envyings, and lies which even then
dogged the steps of the victor. It was better
to be quiet and go a-fishing.
“Sorrow, sorrow speed away
To our angler’s
quiet mound,
With the old pilgrim, twilight gray,
Enter through
the holy ground;
There he sleeps whose heart is twined
With wild stream
and wandering burn,
Wooer of the western wind
Watcher of the
April morn!”
My copy of the Confessions is a dark little book,
“a size uncumbersome to the nicest hand,”
in the format of an Elzevir, bound in black morocco,
and adorned with “blind-tooled,” that is
ungilt, skulls and crossbones. It has lost the
title-page with the date, but retains the frontispiece,
engraved by Huret. Saint Augustine, in his mitre
and other episcopal array, with a quill in his hand,
sits under a flood of inspiring sunshine. The
dumpy book has been much read, was at some time the
property of Mr. John Philips, and bears one touching
manuscript note, of which more hereafter. It
is, I presume, a copy of the translation by Sir Toby
Matthew. The author of the Preface declares,
with truth, that the translator “hath consulted
so closely and earnestly with the saint that he seemeth
to have lighted his torch att his fire, and to speak
in the best and most significant English, what and
how he would have done had he understood our language.”
There can be no better English version of this famous
book, in which Saint Augustine tells the story of
his eager and passionate youth—a youth
tossed about by the contending tides of Love, human
and divine. Reading it to-day, with a mundane
curiosity, we may half regret the space which he gives
to theological metaphysics, and his brief tantalising
glimpses of what most interests us now—the
common life of men when the Church was becoming mistress
of the world, when the old Religions were dying of
allegory and moral interpretations and occult dreams.
But, even so, Saint Augustine’s interest in
himself, in the very obscure origins of each human
existence, in the psychology of infancy and youth,
in school disputes, and magical pretensions; his ardent
affections, his exultations, and his faults, make
his memoirs immortal among the unveilings of the spirit.
He has studied babies, that he may know his dark
beginnings, and the seeds of grace and of evil.
“Then, by degrees, I began to find where I
was; and I had certain desires to declare my will
to those by whom it might be executed. But I
could not do it, . . . therefore would I be tossing
