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THE RESTORATION, 1660-1700 Downloaded From vni THE RESTORATION, 1660-1700 Downloaded from [By MONTAGUE SUMMEES] THE last eighteen months have unfortunately seen but little original scholarship employed upon a period which, too long neglected, is now beginning to be more and more widely recog- http://ywes.oxfordjournals.org/ nized as of prime interest and importance. The difficulties, indeed, are very many, and research must here necessarily be somewhat laborious and slow. Mr. GosseJ is always happy in his critical essays, but he is seldom happier than when his urbane wit and polished periods are doing justice to some half-forgotten figure of the Restoration world. His study of the neglected Catherine Trotter—(quae repetit uoluitque Palaemonis artem)—is a delightful piece of at Université Laval on June 30, 2015 literature, and she is, indeed, well worth attention, a writer who assuredly should never have been allowed so entirely ' to have slipped between two ages and to have lost her hold on time'. This essay will go far to rehabilitate ' the champion of Locke and Clarke, the correspondent of Leibnitz and Pope, the friend of Congreve, the patroness of Farquhar'. In his essay The Court Poets * Mr. Charles Whibley mainly deals with Rochester, Sedley, Buckhurst, and Mulgrave, and of these the greater number of pages are devoted to Rochester, which is as it should be. From every point of view, even from that of mere curiosity, this extraordinary and extravagant figure is extremely interesting and calls for a long and detailed study. The legend which makes Rochester something like the black bugbear of Tflngiiah literature ' fort impie et fort ordurier' needs 1 Some Diversions qf a Man of Letters, by Edmand Gosse, C.B. London: William Heinemann, 1919. vii + 344 pp. 7». 6d. net. 1 Literary StudUs, by Charles Whibley. MacmillaTi & Co., Limited, St. Martin's Street, London, 1919. 1 + 360 pp. 7«. 6d. net. THE RESTORATION, 1660-1700 98 to be roughly dispelled; an authoritative and satisfactory study has yet to be written. To Sedley, Mr. Whibley devotes little more than a couple of pages, and in so brief a notice scant idea can be given of the charm and elegant wit of this ' more elegant Tibullus', as Dryden saluted him in the Epistle Dedi- catory to The Assignation. No mention is made of Bettamira; or The Mistress, the best of his comedies, a play of Terentian Downloaded from plot, and of peculiar interest owing to its outspoken satire on the Duchess of Cleveland and Harry Jermyn. Mr. Whible/s estimate of The Old Bachelor in Congreve and some Others hardly errs on the side of enthusiasm, and he surely misses much of the great dramatic power of The Double-Dealer, http://ywes.oxfordjournals.org/ a quality which is perhaps only wholly to be appreciated at an actual performance of the play upon the stage, and of which in the reading something essentially evaporates. To style The Mourning Bride 'a rash experiment in the later Elizabethan Drama' seems a very dubious classification, and The Way of the World should not without reserve be termed Congreve's master- piece. It was a failure at its first production, and although often revived it has never proved popular, either with audiences or at Université Laval on June 30, 2015 actors. In spite of its emphatically expressed claim to originality it can hardly be conceded that Dr. Bernbaum's Tlie Mary Carleton Narratives, 1663-1673,3 which he somewhat boldly terms ' A Missing Chapter in the History of the English Novel', contains anything new. The writer certainly does not seem adequately to recognize the value of the work of Sir Walter Raleigh, Mr. Edmund Gosse, G. A. Aitken, and other authorities upon the history of English prose fiction. And it is noticeable that when Dr. Bernbaum attempts to go beyond our scholars, many of the assertions which he so confidently makes without any saving hint that they are open to dispute may well be 1 The Mary Carleton Narratives, I663-1673. A Hissing Chapter in the History of the English Novel, hy Ernest Bernbanm, Ph.D., Instructor in English, Harvard University. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. London: Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press, 1914. v +106 pp. bs. 6d. net 94 THE RESTORATION, 1660-1700 questioned and impugned. His thesis, in truth, is by no means of first-rate importance, and if perhaps it has not been before stated in such detail, it might be that this is the case because no scholar has thought it worth while to enlarge so fully upon it. Historians of literature have always and with perfect justice insisted upon the originality of Defoe, who, although we are well aware he owed much to the popular biographies of criminals Downloaded from and rogues, yet presented these with incomparable skill in narrative form by adding and embroidering, by toning down and omitting, by deftly intermingling false with true for the sake of a continuous and absorbing tale. In fine, although—as is never denied—this was often done before, yet it is still maintained that http://ywes.oxfordjournals.org/ Defoe was original, essentially original with the supreme originality and master touch of genius. According to Dr. Bern- baum, when Francis Kirkman wrote Tlie Counterfeit Lady Unveiled he worked along precisely the same lines as Defoe used some thirty years later. It is not impossible that, in spite of Dr. Bernbaum's argument, this actual point might be disputed, but even if it be fairly allowed, it by no means impeaches the genius of Defoe, nor does it assign him to a somewhat lower at Université Laval on June 30, 2015 position, as Dr. Bembaum apparently would have it. Neverthe- less, in spite of his failure to substantiate the main theory of his thesis, the writer has done useful work by giving some account of the various pamphlets and pasquils which have Mary Carleton for their subject Most, if not all, which survive are to be found in the British Museum. It were to be wished that Dr. Bernbaum had in several instances given a fuller description of the matter under consideration. The play A Witty Combat: or, The Female Victor, by <T. P., Gent,' deserves more than a passing reference, and it should be noticed in this connexion that the words ' acted by persons of quality' must by no means necessarily be supposed ironically to refer ' to the real participants in the affair' as is suggested. There is an interesting allusion to Mary Carleton in Poor Robin's Almanack for 1681: ' In the Eleventh House is placed Ma^am Moders, alias Madam Carlton, alias German Princess, alias MiUer's Daughter: She was one who acted a huge part in the Comedy of The Cheats, but came off with very bad applause THE BESTORATION, 1660-1700 95 from the stage, making her Exit at Tyburn.' This reference seems unknown to Dr. Bembaum. It is important to remember that The Mary Carleton Narratives, 1663-1673, was printed and on the point of publication in 1914, but that, owing to the war, copies were only issued in May 1920. Hence the error con- cerning Mrs. Bean's Oroonoko remains uncorrected. Dr. Bern- baum wrote: ' It has lately become known that the supposedly Downloaded from autobiographic portions of Mrs. Bonn's " Oroonoko " (1688) are mendacious.' Since 1914, however, special research has proved that the conclusions all too sweepingly put forward on very insufficient evidence by Dr. Bernbaum in his paper' Mra Behn's "Oroonoko"' (1918) cannot be maintained, and Oroonoko is http://ywes.oxfordjournals.org/ beyond all question largely autobiographical No doubt several incidents are, as is natural, something exaggerated, but none the less the work is essentially founded on the writer's actual experience. The utility of The Mary Carleton Narratives, 1663-1673, would have been greatly increased had the book been provided with an index, a necessity in a monograph of this kind. at Université Laval on June 30, 2015 Extremely useful work has been done by Dr. Tanner in his Samuel Pepys and the Royal Navy.* The author sets out to show thai ' Pepys, familiar to the last generation in the sphere of literature, was also a leading figure in an entirely different world, who rendered inestimable services to naval administration in spite of the peculiar difficulties under which he worked', and a wholly admirable exposition is the result It is to be feared that there are still many who only think of this ' great public servant' as a ' delightful old Diarist 'or a1 garrulous gossip', living in an atmosphere of Bestoration scandals and gaiety, his boon companions the theatrical folk of the day, whilst his sur- prising business activities, his meticulous attention to detail, his technical knowledge and shrewd acumen, are quite lost sight of and forgotten. This false impression is in some measure due, 4 Samuel Pepys and the Royal Navy. Lees Knowles Lecture* delivered at Trinity College in Cambridge, 6, 18, 20 and 27 November, 1919, by J. R. Tanner, LittD., Fellow of St. John's College. Cambridge : at the University Press, 1920. 88 pp. 6*. 6d. net 96 THE RESTORATION, 1660-1700 no doubt, to the fact that, as is well known, Lord Braybrooke'a edition of the Diary at first printed scarcely half of the manu- script, and the omitted portions were often the records of Pepys's naval business and negotiations. Even the Rev. Mynors Bright, who in 1875-9 added so much new matter, states in his intro- duction : ' It would have been tedious to the reader if I had copied from the Diary the account of his daily work at the Office'.
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