Jesse Cliffe | Page 7

in dead of night To make me follow, and so tempt me on Through mire
and standing pools to find my swain Else why should this rough thing,
who never knew Manners nor smooth humanity, whose herds Are
rougher than himself, and more misshapen, Thus mildly kneel to me?
&c. &c.
Beaumont and Fletcher's Works, (Seward's edition,) vol. iii. p.
117--121.

How we track Milton's exquisite Comus in this no less exquisite
pastoral Drama! and the imitation is so beautiful, that the perception of
the plagiarism rather increases than diminishes the pleasure with which
we read either deathless work. Republican although he were, the great
poet sits a throned king upon Parnassus, privileged to cull flowers
where he listeth in right of his immortal laurel- crown.
Phoebe loved flowers; and from the earliest tuft of violets ensconced
under the sunny southern hedge, to the last lingering sprig of woodbine
shaded by some time-hallowed oak, the blossoms of the meadow and
the coppice were laid under contribution for her posies.
Phoebe had her own little garden; and to fill that garden, Jesse was
never weary of seeking after the roots of such wild plants as he himself
thought pretty, or such as he found (one can hardly tell how) were
considered by better judges to be worthy of a place in the parterre. The
different orchises, for instance, the white and lilac primrose, the golden
oxslip, the lily of the valley, the chequered fritillary, which blows so
freely along the banks of the Kennett, and the purple campanula which
covers with equal profusion the meadows of the Thames, all found their
way to Phoebe's flower-plats. He brought her in summer evenings
glow-worms enough to form a constellation on the grass; and would
spend half a July day in chasing for her some glorious insect,
dragon-fly, or bee-bird, or golden beetle, or gorgeous butterfly. He not
only bestowed upon her sloes, and dew-berries, and hazel-nuts "brown
as the squirrel whose teeth crack 'em," but caught for her the squirrel
itself. He brought her a whole litter of dormice, and tamed for her
diversion a young magpie, whose first effort at flattery was "Pretty
Phoebe!"
But his greatest present of all, most prized both by donor and receiver,
(albeit her tender heart smote her as she accepted it, and she made her
faithful slave promise most faithfully to take nests no more,) was a
grand string of birds' eggs, long enough to hang in festoons round, and
round, and round her play-room, and sufficiently various and beautiful
to gratify more fastidious eyes than those of our little heroine.
To collect this rope of variously-tinted beads--a natural rosary--he had

sought the mossy and hair-lined nest of the hedge-sparrow for her
turquoise-like rounds; had scrambled up the chimney-corner to bear
away those pearls of the land, the small white eggs of the house-martin;
had found deposited in an old magpie's nest the ovals of the
sparrow-hawk, red and smooth as the finest coral; had dived into the
ground-mansion of the skylark for her lilac-tinted shells, and groped
amongst the bushes for the rosy-tinted ones of the woodlark; climbed
the tallest trees for the sea-green eggs of the rooks; had pilfered the
spotted treasures from the snug dwelling which the wren constructed in
the eaves; and, worst of all--I hardly like to write it, I hardly care to
think, that Jesse could have committed such an outrage,--saddest and
worst of all, in the very midst of that varied garland might be seen the
brown and dusky egg, as little showy as its quaker-like plumage, the
dark brown egg, from which should have issued that "angel of the air,"
the songstress, famous in every land, the unparagoned nightingale. It is
but just towards Jesse to add, that he took the nest in a mistake, and
was quite unconscious of the mischief he had done until it was too late
to repair it.
Of course these gifts were not only graciously accepted, but duly
returned; cakes, apples, tarts, and gingerbread, halfpence in profusion,
and now and then a new shilling, or a bright sixpence--all, in short, that
poor Phoebe had to bestow, she showered upon her uncouth favourite,
and she would fain have amended his condition by more substantial
benefits: but authoritative as she was with her grandfather in other
instances, in this alone her usual powers of persuasion utterly failed.
Whether infected by old Daniel's dislike, (and be it observed, an
unfounded prejudice, that sort of prejudice for which he who entertains
it does not pretend to account even to himself is unluckily not only one
of the most contagious feelings in the world, but one of the most
invincible:) whether Farmer Cobham were inoculated with old Daniel's
hatred of Jesse, or had taken that very virulent disease the