Victor Hugo, and Theophile
Gautier, and Petrus Borel were boys also--boys of the same ambitions, and
with much the same romantic tastes. Stoddart had, luckily, another love
besides the Muse. "With the spring and the May fly, the dagger dipped in
gore paled before the supple rod, and the dainty midge." Finally, the
rod and midge prevailed.

"Wee dour-looking hooks are the thing,
Mouse body and laverock wing."

But before he quite abandoned all poetry save fishing ditties, he wrote
and published the volume whose title-page we have printed, "The Death
Wake." The lad who drove home from an angling expedition in a hearse had
an odd way of combining his amusements. He lived among poets and critics
who were anglers--Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd (who cast but a heavy line,
they say, in Yarrow), Aytoun, Christopher North, De Quincey--

"No fisher
But a well-wisher
To the game,"

as Scott has it--these were his companions, older or younger. None of
these, certainly not Wilson, nor Hogg, nor Aytoun, were friends of the
Romantic school, as illustrated by Keats and Shelley. None of them
probably knew much of Gautier, De Nerval, Borel, le lycanthrope, and the
other boys in that boyish movement of 1830. It was only Stoddart,
unconsciously in sympathy with Paris, and censured by his literary
friends, who produced the one British Romantic work of 1830. The title
itself shows that he was partly laughing at his own performance; he has
the mockery of _Les Jeunes France_ in him, as well as the wormy and
obituary joys of _La Comedie de la Mort_. The little book came out,
inspired by "all the poetasters." Christopher North wrote, four years
later, in _Blackwood's Magazine_, a tardy review. He styled it "an
ingeniously absurd poem, with an ingeniously absurd title, written in a
strange, namby-pamby sort of style, between the weakest of Shelley and
the strongest of Barry Cornwall." The book "fell dead from the Press,"
far more dead than "Omar Khayyam." Nay, misfortune pursued it, Miss
Stoddart kindly informs me, and it was doomed to the flames. The
"remainder," the bulk of the edition, was returned to the poet in sheets,
and by him was deposited in a garret. The family had a cook, one Betty,
a descendant, perhaps, of "that unhappy Betty or Elizabeth Barnes, cook
of Mr. Warburton, Somerset Herald," who burned, among other quartos,
Shakespeare's "Henry I.," "Henry II.," and "King Stephen." True to her
inherite