A BOOK OF THE MOMENT.

MASTER WALTER MAP'S BOOK.

Master Walter Map's Book de Nugis CuriaHum (Courtiers' Trifles). Englished by Frederick Tupper, Ph.D., Professor of English, University of Vermont, and Marbury Bladen Ogle, Ph.D., Professor of Latin, University of Vermont. (Matto and Windus. 21s. net.) Tun University of Vermont in the person of two of its most eminent sons has done the English-speaking -world a notable service. It has restored to us a most valuable gift which

once belonged to our ancestors, but which during recent generations has been buried and forgotten, neglected, and even perhaps despised. A man of my years has little expectation of ever again feeling that he has inherited a new garden, almost a new estate, in which one may disport oneself, lie on the grass, dip one's hands into the fountain, court the shade under interlacing trees, and wander along some path of little breadth, which will take one straight to an enchanted summer house set on a turf carpet " as bright as green wool,"

to borrow from the springtime of English poetry. Yet, lo and behold ! I have actually achieved that undreamed of, unhoped for possession—a great new book, and not a great

new book of education, but a great new book of delight- s book in which one likes not merely the product of the

author's pen, but begins to feel a real sense of friendship and fellowship with the author's aims.

Map was a man of many sides. lie was of an aristo- cratic temper, the result of position and breeding, and fully competent to feel the charm and beauty of life. His mind was not cynical, and he probably found it quite easy to be a churchman. He was a priest, an archdeacon (of Oxford), and was almost made a Bishop. He was in a sense religious,

but without paying any very great attention to matters of Faith or Doctrine. He had a very pretty fancy in super- stition and believed thoroughly in demons, succubi, incubi, and the like, not to mention the Celtic sprites who lurked in the groves, the fairies who haunted the woods, waters, and wastes of England and Wales, and the accursed creatures that walked the earth to do men harm. What really troubled him was that God should have tolerated Jews, heretics, and Cistercians, and perhaps we might even add Welshmen, for, though he could not keep off Wales and the Welsh, he appears to have believed much ill of them. Also, he seems to have very much disliked what he calls " slaves," by whom he meant serfs, and the lower orders generally. This was probably due to the fact that, being a bachelor and yet a rich man with a very large household, he could not manage his servants.

Like many people in that position, he let them get on his nerves, and he developed a peevish hatred of those whom he could not manage and with whom he was always in antagonism. We must not forget that, though he hated those of the house- hold in which he was king, he still more deeply hated the Court—that is, the household in which he was a servant. He liked Henry II., and no wonder, for he was not only a great statesman, but a man of intellect and courage.

In three things, as I shall try to show, Map was unsur- passed in his own age. He was a great essay writer, in the sense of Addison's Spectator, Lamb's Essays, and Thackeray's Roundabout Papers. His book opens with the following quaint piece of social wisdom on the Psychology of the Court .- " am in time, and I speak of time,' said Augustine, and litre ightway added, ' I know not what time is.' With like wonder- ment can I say that I am in the court, and speak of the court, and know not—God alone knoweth—what the court is. This I know withal that the court is not time ; it partaketh, indeed, of time's temper, a thing of flux and change, of a place, and yet of subtle shifts, never persisting in the same subsistence. At my withdrawal from it, I know it through and through ; on my .return to it, I find little or nothing that I have left there ; having become a stranger I view it as a thing altogether strange. The court is the same, but the members are changed. If I shall describe the court as Porphyrius defmeth genus, perchance I shall not lie in saying that it is a multitude which standeth in some relation or other to one chief principle. Certainly we are an unnumbered multitude, striving to please only one man, and to-day we are one multitude, to-morrow we shall be another. The court indeed is not changed, it is always the same."

But though Map's book flows like a river, the current soon takes him into strange places. The passage about the Court soon wanders off into natural philosophy and asks

such questions as : " Who discovered the boiling down of metals, and the reduction of one to another ? Who turned the hardest bodies into liquid ? " and then, laughing at himself, as he is always doing, he ends :—

" I began with a discourse about the court, and to what have I now come ? Thus ever and anon do occur things which, though they be not very pertinent- to the present matter, yet are unwilling to be put off ; but it no wise mattereth provided they end not (as the poet saith) in a black fish, and are demanded by what is to follow."

That is delightful. All discursive writers, such as I am proud to consider myself, know those matters well, and how unwilling they are to be put off. Then, how exquisite is the apology that it is all right to put them off, provided that they do not end " in a black fish, and are demanded by what is to follow." Most people in regard to their digressions on paper are worried how to hitch them on to what came before. Map characteristically considers what is required by the coming irrelevancy !

The next thing in which Map excelled was in telling a

story. He is a perfectly admirable romancer, full of charm, colour and brightness. The best of the stories is that of " Sadius and Galo," two young men " equal in character, youth and comeliness, well learned in the science of arms, and of a long and noble lineage." They loved each other, we are -told, with warm and -honourable affection. They stood

" proved amid adversity " and were made " a pattern and a proverb." Galo was not one of those people who could say with Wordsworth's Matthew that :-

" By none was ho enough beloved."

He was much too much loved by the nearest queen in the game, poor boy ! and it worried him frightfully. " With hands and eyes desiring, but not desired," she forced herself upon Galo. " There were gifts without end, necklaces, rings, girdles, Persian garments, and in truth a passion which was not slothful or forgetful." To be plain, she was a very naughty lady, indeed 1 " Venus all-out to hold her prey with tooth and claw," to paraphrase from Racine. The gentle Galo tried " to calm her without despair until she could return to her senses," a result which he attempted to accomplish by " gentle reproof."

I wish I had space to follow out so delightful a story, one never exaggerated and never coarsened, but I can only be allusive. There is a wonderful scene in which the queen throws herself upon her bed and utters " all that baneful love can teach dark hearts." Soon, however, the story slips away into a tournament with a giant and all sorts of adventures at arms, told with great spirit and ingenuity.

And just when one is becoming rather uncomfortable it ends very happily if rather confusedly. Galo tried in the furnace of love learns to triumph, but nobody is very tragically treated. Even the vamp queen is only made to weep, as she deserved to do, and has to be content to point a moral and to adorn this very delightful tale.

Walter Map's final apology for his story, however, is so pretty and so full of grace that I cannot help quoting it :—

" May one gather from trifles such as these, and by a grace given by God, the power to choose and to love the bitter paths of justice, as did Galo, and not perversely strive with the queen to cling fast to evil delights ; and it will prove to be a song sung to the wisest heart."

Another very good tale is that of " On Rollo and His Wife," and there are a number of excellent stories about apparitions and fairies, for Map could never keep very far from dear dead demons, "with such hair, too." Take, for example, the story which gives an account of " the Sons of the Dead," or the wonderful tale of Henno Cum Dentibus, a gentleman so called from the size of his teeth. It was he who " found

the loveliest of girls in a leafy grove by the Norman coast at the noon hour." Can we wonder that the youth " straight-

.way was all aflame " ? It is a fascinating fable, and the lady, whose beautiful dress, by the way, is lovingly described, spoke exactly the kind of words that a youth, " more dental perhaps than mental," would expect her to speak. " Lovable

flower of youths and desirable light of men, no plan of my own hath brought me hither, but mere chance." She had, of course, missed her train or rather Royal galley of thirty

oars with no doubt gold rowlocks. A charming incident in this story is that at a critical moment " a young lady's maid," " all proper," turns up—a sort of chaperon ex Machina, who was a clear godsend to the Archdeacon of Oxford, for

the situation was evidently getting beyond his control. The story, alas I has a sad end, for the lady turns into a dragon on entering her bath and bites her towels, &c., into little bits. Evidently she was not as good as she was beautiful, but instead a creature like the demon in " Christabel." She went clean through the roof when she was sprinkled with holy water, like a fleshly rocket!

I have still what is perhaps the best, or, at any rate, most amusing of Map's literary powers to disclose—that is, his power of characterization—I had almost said of psychical

analysis. I say in all seriousness and -without any desire to exaggerate that his character of Earl Godwin is in its way as

wonderful a piece of analysis as Halifax's character of Charles II. There is not so much light and shade, nor such a mass of detail analysis, but we get an exact impression of the man. The character of Godwin begins by an account of how, as a young man, he was lighted upon by Ethelred.

The King strayed away from his companions when out hunting on a winter night and entered the home of a cow-

keeper :— " Then there came forward the energetic son of the keeper, a boy named Godwin, handsomer and better than his ancestry warranted. He drew off the greaves, cleaned them and replaced them ; washed the horse, led him out and tended him, cleaned him with the curry-comb and gave him straw and fodder ; he arranged all in good order, quickly and neatly. Seemingly the favourite of his father and the ruler of his narrow house, he placed over the fire the fattest of geese and entrusted it to his sister's care. His father ordered one hen to be prepared ; he straight way set three upon the fire. His father put a piece of salt pork by the pot herbs ; he at once added three, and, without the knowledge of father and mother, he brought on a pig that had no teeth as yet—that is, a young and untouched sow. He fed the fire, lighted the candles, told stories to prevent tedium ; to the king he was a mime, to his mother a flatterer, to his father a stimulus ; every want he carefully supplied ; he did not lie nor sit nor recline nor stand ; he was always in movement ; he did not weigh labour, he did not study and strain to be useful, he did not aim at his own promotion, he gave his whole attention to the king and offered the whole of himself to the !dug. And although he did not know the king, he paid royal reverence in great plenty, he despised himself and was regarded with favour, he neglected himself and was selected, he did not understand himself and was understood, he did not desire or hope, he did not serve covetously nor in artifice, that he might win something thereby ; he gave his whole self generously, and he sped with an open heart not for the sake of gain or reward, and he slipped unawares into reward and gain. The- king was taken by his work and adopted him as his own, that he might make him the overseer of great works. This is the way (of the world), that, where any one droppeth with greedy cunning the hook of anxious care, he hooketh not (his fish) ; and favour raineth unexpectedly from heaven upon simple earnestness. For the king, although in other ways dull, observed, drank in, accepted all things, and, though himself sluggish, approved in him the busy care and the ready service, as many praise what they do not hasten to imitate."

There follows a really terrible story to prove the corruption of heart which Godwin suffered as a courtier and a politician. Near the Severn was an exquisite little estate, the property

of nuns, whose abbess was beautiful and of noble blood. Godwin, however, did not- care about the beautiful lady. What he cared about was the lovely acres, for he was a man with the land hunger. He therefore devised one of the most diabolical schemes for seizing them ever devised by the wicked. He procured a very handsome young man, loaded him with all sorts of exquisite jewels and beautiful gifts, and then contrived that he should have a bad hunting accident just outside the nunnery gates. The nuns, greatly inter- ested, of course, in the misfortunes of the beautiful youth, took him in, put him to bed, and did everything to help him in his extremity as they thought. The petted invalid did not, however, mend as quickly as might have been expected, but lingered on an exquisite convalescent. While the Abbess sat by his bed, and the young nuns attended him, he showered upon them every sort of luxurious gift in the way of beautiful clothes, jewels and furs studded with gems. The inevitable, of course, happened—the Anglo-Saxon nun never seems to have had a great natural predilection towards chastity— and then one day the wicked, treacherous, hireling youth ran back to his diabolical master Godwin. Godwin waited a few months, i.e., till the scandal of the Abbess and the nuns was at its height and could not be hid, and then went to the King and demanded that the abbey should be dissolved. The King, shocked by the story, of which his spies afforded him confirmation, gave the necessary orders, and, of course, bestowed the vacant abbey and lands upon the black-hearted !statesman. With this-- tragic tale I must end my account of Walter Map's book. I have read it with delight, and shall say to my readers with full confidence of the result, " Go and do

thou likewise." J. ST. LOE STRACHEY.