Sir Walter Raleigh

The juxtaposition of the blog title and the photograph may seem inexplicable (though not to one reader, at least!). For one thing, the portrait looks nothing like Sir Walter Raleigh; and for another, photography was not invented until some two and a half centuries after Raleigh’s death. However, the Sir Walter Raleigh here portrayed was a university lecturer, and the first holder of the chair of English literature at Oxford (1904). His works include Style, Milton, Wordsworth, The English Novel, Shakespeare, Robert Louis Stevenson, and other collected works: published by BiblioBazaar and Adamant Media Corporation. That these books have — within the last decade — been brought back into print is a tribute to Raleigh as a stylist; a stylist in the deepest sense — that of being inseparable from his meaning. Many years ago, I came across:

ON

WRITING AND WRITERS

BY

WALTER RALEIGH

BEING EXTRACTS FROM HIS NOTE–BOOKS,

SELECTED AND EDITED

BY

GEORGE GORDON

Merton Professor of English Literature in

The University of Oxford

This was published by Edward Arnold & Co in 1926. Well, this is a lazy man’s blog, and what follows is a very small number of extracts from George Gordon’s extracts.

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 The Double Negative.—This old construction is found in Lamb, and later. It is needed for emphasis.

 E.g., ‘There’s nothing not so difficult, not to drive, when there’s a many on ’em, very, isn’t, a pig.’

 How can anyone pretend to get the force of this by, There’s nothing so difficult to drive as a herd of pigs.’

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 Pope was not the first to discover that happiness attends virtue, that extremes should be avoided, or that life may be led honourably in any station; but he gave polish and point to them in the English Tongue. A platitude is a truth spoken by someone who does not feel it

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 Gray passed the greater part of his life at Cambridge, cursing the place yet unable to tear himself away from it. Why should he have continued to live there? His quarrel, perhaps, was with the world at large, rather than with this fragment of it. It is not easy to imagine a society in which he would have felt himself completely at home…

 To Dr Clarke, 1760 :— ‘Cambridge is a delight of a  place, now there is nobody in it. I do believe you would like it if you knew what it was without inhabitants. It is they, I assure you, that get it an ill name, and spoil all. Our friend Dr Chapman (one of its nuisances) is not expected here again in a hurry. He is gone to his grave with five mackerel (large and full of roe) in his belly. He eat them all at one dinner; but his fate was a turbot on Trinity Sunday, of which he left little for the company besides bones. He had not been hearty all the week; but after his sixth fish he never held his head up more… They say he made a very good end.’

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‘Is it a fatality in me,’ he says [Charles Lamb], ‘that everything I say turns into a lie? I once quoted two lines from a translation of Dante, which Hazlitt greatly admired, and quoted in a book as an example of the stupendous powers of that poet; but no such lines are to be found in that translation, which has been searched for the purpose. I must have dreamed them, for I am quite certain I did not forge them knowingly.’ In fact, Lamb knew pretty well what Dante would have said, and forgot that, in point of fact, Dante had not said it. He assimilated the authors he admired so well that they became bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh, and underwent change with his own organic processes of thought.