equal degree, if haply quite another kind, of sumptuous apparel. Lord Clive was fond of rich and gay clothing, and replenished his wardrobe with what Macaulay derides as "absurd profusion."* Was this harsh-featured, grimvisaged warrior the man to set up for a beau ? But the beau proper, Beau Brummell for instance, is, as likely as not, superior to a weakness for anything high-coloured and outré. The Prince Regent's sometime guide, philosopher, and friend, instead of running riot in fantastical forms and colours, is said to have been a model of cleanliness, neatness, good taste, and exquisite propriety in dress, and to have held it a violation of every sound canon of æsthetics to be dressed in any way that attracted attention. Lovelace was talking rather after the manner of Polonius than that of the conventional man of fashion, when he said though the figure smacks of the shopkeeper, and we taste Richardson in it—that we do but hang out a sign, in our dress, of what we have in the shop of our minds.

§ VI.

OBTRUSIVE ART.

Hamlet, Act ii., Sc. 2.

POLONIUS volunteers a promise to be brief, in his "expostulation " or exposition of the way to deal with Hamlet. Brevity he defines to be the soul of wit, and wit, he flatters himself, he never was deficient in. Tediousness he calls the

Mr. Disraeli's Young Duke: "His Grace had a taste for magnificence in costume; but he was young, handsome, and a duke. Pardon him." Dukes are easily pardoned, young dukes especially.

Sir John Malcolm gives us a letter worthy of Sir Matthew Mite, in which Clive orders "two hundred shirts, the best and finest that can be got for love or money." The contrast is piquant with the historical figure of Henry of Navarre, whose wardrobe consisted of a dozen shirts in all, and five pocket-handkerchiefs, most of them ragged.

"limbs and outward flourishes" of it; and tedious he never suspected himself of being. Nevertheless, so far from brief the Queen finds his prolegomena, and so far gone in tediousness,- so pedantic and scholastic are his terms and his method, and so artificial and unsubstantial the process and the results of his chopping logic,-that she cannot refrain from a request for "more matter, with less art." "Madam, I swear I use no art at all," the inveterate proser reproachfully remonstrates, with a chafed haste of repudiation not unworthy of Sir Fretful Plagiary himself. Extremes meet,

So

and excess of art may in effect touch upon utter artlessness. Ars celare artem is at any rate wanting in Polonius. artful in his style that he is not master of arts enough to veil its sheer artificiality. If ever in his long life the lord chamberlain has been subjected to the slight of an uncalledfor interruption, it is, he believes, in her majesty's present call for more matter, with less art.

Polonius regards himself, with regard to this imputation, much as Acasto is made to do, in Otway's tragedy of the Orphan :

"You may have known that I'm no wordy man.

Fine speeches are the instruments of knaves,

Or fools, that use them when they want good sense,
But honesty

Needs no disguise or ornament."

Or, again, we may apply the diction of Signior Sylli in Massinger's Maid of Honour :

"You may, madam,

Perhaps believe that I in this use art;

But I, as I have ever done, deal simply."

Lewis the Eleventh, in Quentin Durward, pulls up Des Comines, much as Gertrude interrupts Polonius: "You are figurative," said Lewis, unable to restrain a show of peevishness; I am a dull blunt man, Sir of Comines. I pray you leave your tropes, and come to plain ground." Too sick at heart to be amused by Sir Dugald's airs of pedantic gallantry, and his airing of the classics, Annot Lyle, in the Legend of Montrose, interrupts him with, "If you would have the good

ness to explain."

That, madam," replied Dalgetty," may not be so easy, as I am out of the habit of construing-but we shall try." And with a will, after (Scoticè) putting shall for will, he does try. But the trial only provokes Mistress. Annot to a renewed request that he will at once and in brief speak out his plain meaning in plain words. So again in the last chapter but one of Waverley, "Pray read short, sir," says the Colonel, when Macwheeble is mouthing and drawling out his array of law terms and technicalities. "On the conscience of an honest man, Colonel," protests the Bailie, "I read as short as is consistent with style."

Like another Polonius maunders on the verbose churchman in Kingsley's Hereward, till "it might seem strange that William [of Normandy], Taillebois, Guader, Warrenne, short-spoken, hard-headed, swearing warriors, could allow a complacently smooth churchman to dawdle on like this," counting the periods on his fingers, and seemingly never coming to the point. But they knew their man, and so let him go his own way, a roundabout one, and take his own time over it.

Polonius would seem never to have had a shade of misgiving as to his power to keep his promise, "I will be brief." Dr. Dryasdust was almost equally self-complacent and selfasserting. He piqued himself on his ability properare in mediam rem, instead of dallying in the porch, and wearying his reader with long inductions: "As his Grace is wont to say of me wittily, 'No man tells a story so well as Dr. Dryasdust, when he has once got up to the starting-post.'" But then the getting there-hic labor, hoc opus est. "Fear me not, girl, I will be brief, unreasonably and unseasonably brief," pledges himself to Margaret the old Rotterdam physician in Cloister and Hearth. "And when a man's said what he means, he'd better stop," sententiously rules Mr. Poyser in Adam Bede-the goodman of whom his goodwife bears honourable testimony behind his back, "Not as I'm a-finding faut wi' my husband, for if he's a man o' few words, what he says he'll stand to." Plautus, or one of his dramatis persone for him, calls it a tedious (nay, odious) way of

talking, to beat about the bush when you should be hitting the matter home: "Odiosa est oratio, cum rem agas, longinquum loqui." Longinquum loquacity is the dear delight of some long-winded bores. They have no taste whatever for the spirit and the meaning, though perhaps as ready as any to adopt the form and the phrase of the Horatian apology,

"Ne te longis ambagibus ultra Quàm satis est morer."

Life is short; why should speeches be long? as Augustus Tomlinson has it. But orators are apt to reck not their own rede.

"Just as Cicero says he won't say this or that,

(A fetch, I must say, most transparent and flat,) After saying whate'er he could possibly think of.”* Who is there, asks Dr. Maginn in his comment on this speech of Polonius, which, translated into Ciceronian Latin, would be worthy of Cicero himself,-who is there that has not heard promises of brevity made preludes to tediousness, and disclaimers of art vehicles of rhetorical flourish? Polonius would probably have applauded the suggestion of one of our Elizabethan statesmen, commending the art of compressing a tiresome discourse into a few significant phrases, that proverbs should be employed in diplomatic society. "Le sage est ménager du temps et des paroles," sings La Fontaine, who loved to iterate his praises of that very laudable economy. Thus, in the epilogue to another fable:

"Les longs ouvrages me font peur.

Loin d'épuiser une matière,

On n'en doit prendre que la fleur."

And, midway in the narration of another :

"Mais les ouvrages les plus courts

Sont toujours les meilleurs. En cela j'ai pour guides

Tous les maîtres de l'art."

The Polonian promise, "I will be brief," is excellent, if only it be kept; but so many are ready with an Ita faciam to the

* J. R. Lowell: A Fable for the Critics.

Terentian Quin tu uno verbo die. Easier said than done. Quid verbis opus est? is very easily indeed said.

"What need's thou run so many miles about,

When thou may'st tell thy tale the nearest way?"

objects King Richard to bush-beating Stanley. And many a narrative poet has occasion to paraphrase the promise in the Endymion of John Keats,

"So will I in my story straightway pass

To more immediate matter."

Very many more are the yawning readers that are fain to plead with Gertrude for more matter with less art. An admiring critic of the Latin epistles of Grosseteste, who compares them by advantageous contrast with the general tediousness of medieval letters, is yet forced to own that Bishop Robert is not exempt from the prevailing sin, and that one wishes he would come sooner to the point, and give fewer quotations and illustrations from Scripture and the Fathers, from Aristotle and the Latin poets. It is the one complaint urged against the celebrated German mathematician and philosopher, J. C. von Wolff, by another appreciative critic, that he, Doctor Johann Christian, in stating a philosophical proposition which perhaps is selfevident, often exhibits a tedious demonstration in order that he may show its dependence on some more general theorem which precedes it; his developments being as a rule remarkable for their merciless prolixity.

When Dr. Battius expatiated, in technical terms of science, on a simple enough vexed question, "The man is given to speak in parables," muttered the single-minded trapper, “but I conclude there is always some meaning hidden in his words, though it is as hard to find sense in his speeches, as to discover three eagles on the same tree." King George the Second, according to Lord Waldegrave, had a quick conception, and expected that those who talked to him on business should come at once to the point. Now Pitt and Temple, being orators even in familiar conversation, endeavoured to convince His Majesty's judgment according to