do not think my
concubines have produced issue more natural for excluding the aid of
anything marvellous."

CHAPTER VII: A SCOTTISH ROMANTICIST OF 1830

The finding of a rare book that you have wanted long is one of the
happier moments in life. Whatever we may think of life when we
contemplate it as a whole, it is a delight to discover what one has
sought for years, especially if the book be a book which you really want
to read, and not a thing whose value is given by the fashion of
collecting. Perhaps nobody ever collected before

THE
DEATH-WAKE, OR LUNACY
A NECROMAUNT

In Three Chimeras

BY THOMAS T. STODDART.

"Is't like that lead contains her?--
It were too gross
To rib her cerecloth in the obscure grave."--
_Shakespeare_.

EDINBURGH:
Printed for HENRY CONSTABLE, Edinburgh,
And HURST, CHANCE, & CO., London.

MDCCCXXXI.

This is my rare book, and it is rare for an excellent good reason, as
will be shown. But first of the author. Mr. Thomas Tod Stoddart was
born in 1810. He died in 1880. Through all his pilgrimage of
three-score years and ten, his "rod and staff did comfort him," as the
Scottish version of the Psalms has it; nay, his staff was his rod. He
"was an angler," as he remarked when a friend asked: "Well, Tom, what are
you doing now." He was the patriarch, the Father Izaak, of Scottish
fishers, and he sleeps, according to his desire, like Scott, within
hearing of the Tweed. His memoir, published by his daughter, in
"Stoddart's Angling Songs" (Blackwood), is an admirable biography, _quo
fit ut omnis Votiva pateat veluti descripta tabella Vita senis_.

But it is with the "young Tom Stoddart," the poet of twenty, not with the
old angling sage, that we have to do. Miss Stoddart has discreetly
republished only the Angling Songs of her father, the pick of them being
classical in their way. Now, as Mr. Arnold writes:--

"Two desires toss about
The poet's feverish blood,
One drives him to the world without,
And one to solitude."

The young Stoddart's two desires were poetry and fishing. He began with
poetry. "At the age of ten his whole desire was to produce an immortal
tragedy . . . Blood and battle were the powers with which he worked, and
with no meaner tool. Every other dramatic form he despised." It is
curious to think of the schoolboy, the born Romanticist, labouring at
these things, while Gerard de Nerval, and