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| 2016/08/15 12:12:58瀏覽211｜回應0｜推薦0 | |
| THE Barnewalls were in feeling both more Catholic and more Irish than the Stanihursts, and they showed Edmund Campion a no less tender hospitality. The great house was in a beautiful and remote situation. Running in and out of it was a horde of laughing children, including the eleven-year-old Janet who was to become Richard Stanihurst’s early-dying wife. Campion loved the hearty Knight, their father, and their lady mother, whom he calls “in very sooth company set up hk , a most gentle and godly woman.” Though he mingled freely with the life of the family, he was considerately given the great garret to write in and hide in. Here he began his little History. First of all, though, he sent back a grateful missive in Latin to the men who had been so providently kind to him. To[28] the Recorder, he says: “Was I not fortunate in such friendship and patronage as yours? How good, how generous it was of you to take in an unknown stranger, and to keep him all these months on the fat of the land! You looked after my health as carefully as after Richard’s, the son worthy of your love. You supplied me, too, with books, and made the best possible provision for my time of study: may I perish, if ever in this world, outside my room in Oxford, I had sweeter dealings with the Muses! . . . Up to this, I have had to thank you for conveniences; but now I must thank you for my rescue, and my very breath,—yes, breath is just the word! for they who succumb to these persecutors are wont to be thrust into dismal dungeons, where they inhale filthy fogs, and are cut off from wholesome air. But now, through you and your children’s kindness, I shall live, please God . . . most happily.” The stress laid, in this affectionate letter, upon the writer’s appreciation of personal care, of the privacy dear to students, of good diet and pure air, tells its own tale of physical delicacy.[29] Campion was slight in build hk offshore company , and like many another tireless and quenchless spirit known to history, at no time really strong. He ends by asking that his St. Bernard may be sent on to him, and encloses a lively page for his friend Richard, recalling the service rendered in snatching him from danger, and conveying him to Turvey House. “Is it not hard,” Campion breaks out, “that beholden to you as I am, I have no way of showing it? . . . Meanwhile, if these buried relics have any flavour of the old Campion, their flavour is for you . . . you and your brother Walter . . . you, up that whole night through, and he, summoned to us from his wife’s side. Seriously, I owe you much. I have nothing to write about unless you have time and inclination for a laugh. Have you? Then hold your breath, and listen! The day after I came here, as I sat down to work, into the bedroom burst a poor old soul, coming on what business I wot not. She knew nothing of me service apartment hong kong , so seeing me suddenly at her left, took me for a ghost! Her hair rose on end; she went dead white; she stared[30] aghast; her jaw fell. ‘What is the matter?’ quoth I, whereupon she almost collapsed with fright. Not a syllable could she utter, but made shift to flounce out of the room, and pour into her mistress’s ear how some sort of hideous spectre had appeared to her on the top floor! This was repeated to me at supper. They called the little old thing in, and made her relate her scare. We all nearly died with laughter; and I was established as quite alive.” The book, put together, as was almost all Campion’s literary work, under highly disturbing conditions, is unfinished; and what there is of it is sketchy and out of proportion. One of its charms is its character-drawing, including the speeches with which, after the fashion of Livy, Campion fits the situation by putting them into the mouths of his personages. His was a dramatic mind. He knew both history and human nature: the latter knowledge crops up everywhere in all that he wrote, and spoke, and did, and supplied him with no small share of his power over[31] others. The outstanding charm of the History of Ireland is its style, crisp, arresting, bright with idiom: an idiom so noble and so much his own, that one understands the almost breathless admiration with which his generation looked up to him and listened to him. But this book, like the View of the Present State, written some seventeen years later by another gentle-hearted Englishman, the poet Spenser, is all wrong in its theory that to get any footing in the modern world the “mere Irishry” must be Anglicized. Campion did not know the Celts, their laws, nor their literature; he never came nearer to them than through chronicles written in scorn of them, or the daily table-talk, wide of the mark, of the English Pale. Yet, according to his opportunity, he loved the country and the people, and deplored that the descendants of a race of medi?val scholars should be cut off from education. Afterwards he felt that his rather helter-skelter pamphlet represented limited knowledge and unformed opinion; he speaks of it as “premature,” and wished, when he[32] lost the manuscript, that it might perish rather than reach the public as it was. It bore a dedication to the Earl of Leicester, his “singular good lord,” in the hope that it might “make his travel seem neither causeless nor fruitless,” or, as he says again in plainer language: “I render you my poor book as an account of my voyage.” It was first printed, without supervision from the author, in a very muddled, unsatisfactory way, by Raphael Holinshed in 1577; then in more scholarly fashion by Sir James Ware, in his Ancient Irish Histories, 1633. We all remember how useful Holinshed’s pages were to Shakespeare: the twenty lines or so of the famous description of Wolsey in Act IV, Scene 2, of Henry VIII, is taken almost word for word from what Campion had written, and Holinshed had incorporated in his Chronicles. |
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