Squares — streets —— — and alleys, on the ocean!
While doors — floors — wainscot — pane and pannel —
Strange wreck! — come floating down the Channel.
Hold, Ridicule! — and hear our Squire
Excuse the errors of his lyre! —
— He writes — with a spontaneous flow,
— A neat currente calam o —
He writes— “that he who runs may read:” —
What pity! should he not succeed!
Yet failing, let him not be vex’d,
But print — on gingerbread, his next:
So may — (without a moment lost)
His little friends, with little cost,
Buy his hot satires by the ounce,
And run, and read, — and eat at once!
— Thus boys for school, with book in budget,
Will chew their letters as they trudge it
At length view Sancho come to tell us,
How He resembles young Marcellus:
As such He’ll breathe eternal spring,
And, scoffing, say— “Death, where’s thy sting?”
“Marcellus was not born to die:” —
O Grave, where is thy victory?
Here, then, He yields the drooping nation
The comfort of his peroration:
For now, that He has prov’d his force,
He means to choose a bolder course;
There stand prepar’d, should danger real
Supplant our present woes ideal.
Be careful then, ye noble Peers,
Or Sancho’s muse shall pierce your ears:
Sell on your votes to those who need ’em,
And set at auction musty Freedom;
But in the latter be more nice,
And bargain for a double price:
And, O ye votaries of St. Steven,
Preserve the scales of Justice even;
For, should ye sell each freehold cottage,
Like Esau, for a mess of pottage,
With ways and means the people rob,
In bold rebellion ‘gainst the mob, —
Our Bard shall keep your spirits under
And bruise you with a song of thunder:
Exalted on a throne of brass,
The bold Salmoneus he’ll surpass.
Heavens bless us! Lord defend us
From a Poet so tremendous!
Lo! what a sudden change of style!
Black frowns dismiss the sneering smile:
Mark of sublime, he gives example! —
Observe — and profit by the sample:
See, like a lion from his den,
He roars an eight-line specimen!
O Fancy, draw the god-like figure! —
Colossus’ size — or somewhat bigger!
Make both his hands the thunder brandish!
(For want of bolts — suppose the standish)
And, while his gloomy wrath is bright’ning,
Ply him with spermaceti lightning.
But, lo! a bolt of wond’rous thickness,
With words well pick’d, to show its quickness,
Comes down — O miserere meil —
Souse in a line of five spondœi!
Heavens bless us! Lord defend us
From a Poet so tremendous!
Until each culprit on his back
He binds to little pocket rack:
There long expos’d, ye all shall feel
The torture of his quarto wheel:
While all the dogs that pass that way
Shall grin, and seize you for their prey;
Nay, pasture-beasts shall quit their herbage,
And come to pick your guts and garbage!
Heavens bless us! Lord defend us
From a Poet so tremendous!
O how shall similes aspire
To suit this man of bolts and fire!
When striding his immortal horse
With scourge of flame He clears the course!
— O Sancho, let thy lucky name
Supply a hint to aid thy fame.
— Thus — when thy brother, little Panza
(Thy peer in steed, tho’ not in stanza)
Engag’d to pass the regions upper,
Astride on Clavilino’s crupper,
Altho’ his nag ne’er mov’d a joist, —
He thought he’d gain’d a wond’rous hoist;
And when the squibs began to whiz, —
— No fire on earth e’er equall’d his!
Here let us pause: — we’ve said enough,
If Sancho does not scorn rebuff:
Yet, e’er we quit the copious thesis,
— For still before our eye his piece is —
We’ll just review — what store to choose in!
The diff’rent shapes we’ve seen his muse in.
Behold her first with pewter lyre,
Profess herself Sir William’s Squire:
A builder next, in haste she marches,
With brick and lime for marble arches!
Thence in a trice we view a reaper! —
No Teague would do a day’s work cheaper:
— A goddess now, with wings like eagle’s,
And note as piercing as a beagle’s!
Marcellus then — no mortal power;
Nor born “to be cut down like flower:”
A wet-nurse next, with store of pap
To feed the bantling on her lap:
Last, in Jack-Ketch’s nobler part,
She quits the mean, too gentle cart,
Close pressing at the culprit’s heels,
— With divers racks, and sundry wheels!
O Sancho, when the suff’ring nation,
Shall rouse your serious indignation;
When, bursting forth, your patriot heat
Shall bid you prove your final threat —
No more expect my humble car
Will chase your chariot thro’ the war:
Alas! I fight not cap-a-pée
With figure, trope, and simile!
Your Pegasus, so strong and bony,
Would gallop over my poor poney!
He never eat of sacred grass,
Nor run for fifties on Pamass’:
Nor water’d at Castalian springs,
Nor had the loan of eagle’s wings:
Unskill’d is he to turn and double
Thro’ acres of Pierian stubble,
Where here and there a few Bay switches,
Are guarded by a thousand ditches.
My nag, unlike your high-fed prime hacks,
Would break his wind to mount your climax:
And, when in Satire’s field you take him,
One line of pointed spleen would stake him:
Your steed disdains a fetter’d chime; —
Mine boggles at an awkward rhyme;
Bad grammar always made him wait;
False concord is a five-barr’d gate;
Each gap of sense, where your’s would shine,
Would seem a double-ditch to mine.
— Judge how imprudent then the chase,
‘Tween beasts of such unequal race!
The one a common, jaded hack, —
The other — fit for Gods to back!
— Ohe! jam sat! — what scribbling rage!
— I’ve writ a volume for a page!
— By Heav’ns I do my spirit wrong,
To grate this scrannel-pipe so long:
Hence! hence! — I hate it’s peevish tone,
Tho’ aim’d at pride and spleen alone:
And, if my rhyming vein still need
A song, I’ll touch some gentler reed —
A reed I something know to touch; —
Whose mildly plaintive notes are such, —
They steal the Sting from youthful grief,
Breathe to a lover’s soul relief,
Or such resign’d distress bestow,
They
make the suff’rer proud of woe.
— O noble trifling of the hour!
When ‘scap’d from dread of Fortune’s pow’r,
I loiter in some secret, rude,
Yet sometimes broken solitude, —
While, with a heart not slow to prove
My theme’s delight, — I sing of love.
Not with bent brow, or raptur’d eye,
Or “thoughts commercing with the sky,”
But mildly gay, with am’rous guile
Persuading thought to wear a smile; —
Studious awhile, yet never long,
Nor rapt nor careless in my song;
Glancing at all that Fancy sends,
And fixing where my heart commends.
Such be my walk, if Hope inspire
With mirthful notes to touch the lyre;
And when I’ve done the sprightly task,
No wreath of Laurel do I ask.
Be there a smile upon the cheek
Of her, to whom my numbers speak;
And, while she smiles, — be mine the praise,
Without a blush, that smile to raise.
Or, if more sad my numbers flow,
To tell some simple tale of woe,
While yet she reads, one sigh shall be
More precious far than fame to me;
And ending, let, uncheck’d, appear
The silent plaudit of a tear.
— O ye rude souls, who never gain
A joy, but from another’s pain;
Ye base, unhallow’d sons of Rhyme,
Who waste in Satire all your time;
Who boast no pow’r, who own no fame,
But what from dastard guilt ye claim, —
Ye little know to prize the bliss
Of such a dear reward as this;
Your hearts could ne’er the boon revere
Of such a smile, of such a tear.
INTRODUCTION
“A PORTRAIT” is not, strictly speaking, the Dedicatory Poem to The School for Scandal, though for over a century it has always been printed as such. It is the “copy of verses” which Sheridan, as he told his second wife, sent “with a finely bound manuscript of that comedy” to the lady whose virtues he celebrates under the name of Amoret. A Portrait was being circulated in MS. in less than four months, at least, after the first performance of The School for Scandal. The play was acted on May 8, 1777; on August of the same year Lord Camden wrote to David Garrick, “By some accident you forgot to show us Sheridan’s verses when you were here. Would it be too much to beg a copy?” In Boaden’s Private Correspondence of David Garrick, another letter of August 11 from Lord Camden tells Garrick, “I have returned the verses you were so good to lend me, and, considering they are mere panegyric (the most insipid species of poetry) they are extremely good. The girls have taken a copy, perhaps without leave, but if you think Mr. Sheridan may be displeased with this liberty, it shall be burnt... Charles Fox dined here yesterday; he admires Sheridan’s verses, and agrees with me in marking him as the first genius of these times.” Boaden notes that these verses were A Portrait, adding they “have a heavy elaborate ingenuity about them without warmth.” Mr. Walter Sichel, however, pronounces them the best dedicatory poem in our language.
In the beginning the poet summons the Daughters of Calumny:
Tell me, ye prim adepts in Scandal’s school,
Who rail by precept, and detract by rule,
Lives there no character, so tried, so known,
So deck’d with grace, and so unlike your own,
That even you assist her fame to raise,
Approve by envy, and by silence praise?
Attend! — a model shall attract your view —
Daughters of Calumny, I summon you!
The model he bids before them is “the gentle Amoret”:
Adorning Fashion, unadorn’d by dress,
Simple from taste, and not from carelessness;
Discreet in gesture, in deportment mild,
No state has Amoret! no studied mien;
She frowns no goddess, and she moves no queen.
The true name of Amoret, by a conceit so agreeable to the artificial style of the poem, is not revealed until, after a dramatic pause, the very last word of the last line. This conceit has always been destroyed in the printed copies of the poem, where her name is always printed beneath the title. As the poem was not printed for more than thirty years after it was written (and then not with Sheridan’s sanction) I have dared, by slightly altering the sub-title, to restore the artifice upon which the climax depends. This seems all the more necessary as the last line has always been misinterpreted. It has been often said, and even by Mr. Sichel, that this last line acknowledges and celebrates her as the inspirer of The School for Scandal. This cannot be sustained. The poem invokes first, the Daughters of Calumny; second the Muse of Poetry; and third, the gentle Amoret. After the Muse has chanted the praise of Amoret, the Daughters of Calumny are silenced:
And lo! each pallid hag, with blister’d tongue,
Mutters assent to all thy zeal has sung —
Owns all the colours just — the outline true;
Thee my inspirer, and my model — CREWE!
There is no reference at all in the whole poem to The School for Scandal: it is not that comedy which has “cast a gloom o’er Scandal’s reign,” but the Portrait of Amoret, inspired by the Muse, and the model who sat for the Portrait is the beautiful, witty intellectual Frances Crewe— “The gentle Amoret,” the only daughter of Fulke Greville, who had married John Crewe in 1775. Years afterwards, when Sheridan had forgotten these verses, their surreptitious appearance in print, probably in some periodical, reminded him that Nature had made him (as he told his second wife) “an ardent, romantic blockhead.” In later years Mrs. Crewe’s indiscretions were notorious. To her beauty there are many tributes besides the three portraits by Sir Joshua Reynolds. In her Diary in 1799, after her first meeting with the Sheridans, Fanny Burney wrote that “the elegance of Mrs. Sheridan’s beauty is unequalled by any that I ever saw, except Mrs. Crewe’s.” It was a day of beautiful women, but Amoret was, as Sheridan wrote of her in his old age, “the handsomest of the set.”
Mr. Sichel says that “whether these verses were as welcome to the first Mrs. Sheridan as to their recipient may be questioned, but Pierrot, we may be sure could eventually explain them to her satisfaction.” He had clearly no reason to explain why he considered her as his inspirer of The School for Scandal, for the poem said nothing of the sort. Moreover, Pierrot was echoing a poem of his wife’s in A Portrait. It was (as nobody seems to have noticed) Mrs. Sheridan who gave the name of Amoret to Mrs. Crewe in her poem Laura to Silvio. For the ultimate origin of A Portrait we must turn to the famous ball, given by Mrs. Crewe in 1775, of which Sheridan had sent to his wife a glowing description, praising the celebrated beauties who were there. In return she sent him this poem, Laura to Silvio, in which he is depicted as a young poet, undecided among so many beauties which of them he shall sing. He is now captivated by the serene and majestic Stella, then by Myra of the lustrous eyes: now by the gaiety and playfulness of Flavia, then by Jessie, “lovely in smiles, more lovely still in tears.” But the loveliest of them all, as Mrs. Sheridan depicted her — and the portrait is exquisite — is Amoret:
With gentle step and hesitating grace,
Unconscious of her power, the fair one came;
If while he view’d the glories of her face
Poor Silvio doubted — who shall dare to blame?
A rosy blush his ardent gaze reprov’d,
The offer’d wreath she modestly declin’d...
At last, unable to decide, he divides his garland among them — to Myra, the rosebuds; to Stella, the glowing carnations; to Flavia, the daffodils; to Jessie, the flower called Love-in-Idleness; to gentle Amoret, Violets and Eglantine. To Laura he gives a never-fading wreath of Myrtle. In the couplet of Sheridan then:
Come, gentle Amoret (for
‘neath that name,
In worthier verse is sung thy beauty’s fame);
the “worthier verse” is the poem, Laura to Silvio. A Portrait has indeed other unnoticed allusion to Mrs. Sheridan’s poem. For instance:
On Granby’s cheek might bid new glories rise,
Or point a purer beam from Devon’s eyes!
is an echo of her:
On Myra’s breast the opening rose shall blow,
Reflecting from her cheek a livelier bloom;
For Stella shall the bright carnation glow,
Beneath her eye’s bright radiance meet its doom. Laura to Silvio was, in effect, a plea to Sheridan to write about his own wife, not somebody else’s. A Portrait was the consequence, — or the inconsequence. The deftness of his allusions to the two great ladies, to Sir Joshua Reynolds, to the “all-accomplished Mrs. Greville,” the mother of Mrs. Crewe, and to Mrs. Millar, the Sappho of the Garden of Bath-Easton, and to his own wife, are typical of the courtly, propitiatory manner of Sheridan. Pierrot could have explained, no doubt, but he did better — he anticipated.
A PORTRAIT
FOR AMORET:
WITH A COPY OF THE SCHOOL FOR SCANDAL
TELL me, ye prim adepts in Scandal’s school,
Who rail by precept, and detract by rule,
Lives there no character, so tried, so known,
So deck’d with grace, and so unlike your own,
That even you assist her fame to raise,
Approve by envy, and by silence praise! —
Attend! — a model shall attract your view —
Daughters of Calumny, I summon you!
You shall decide if this a portrait prove,
Or fond creation of the Muse and Love.
Attend, ye virgin critics, shrewd and sage,
Ye matron censors of this childish age,
Whose peering eye and wrinkled front declare
A fix’d antipathy to young and fair;
By cunning, cautious; or by nature, cold,
In maiden madness, virulently bold! —
Attend! ye skill’d to coin the precious tale,
Creating proof, where innuendoes fail!
Whose practis’d memories, cruelly exact,
Omit no circumstance, except the fact! —
Attend, all ye who boast — or old or young, —
The living libel of a slanderous tongue!
So shall my theme as far contrasted be,
Delphi Complete Works of Richard Brinsley Sheridan Page 58