He certainly
admired him as a poet; he was the first beyond mere actors on
the rolls of that innumerable army who have got "To be or not
to be" by heart. Nor was he content with that; it haunted
his mind; he quoted it to himself in the pages of the Diary,
and, rushing in where angels fear to tread, he set it to
music. Nothing, indeed, is more notable than the heroic
quality of the verses that our little sensualist in a periwig
chose out to marry with his own mortal strains. Some gust
from brave Elizabethan times must have warmed his spirit, as
he sat tuning his sublime theorbo. "To be or not to be.
Whether 'tis nobler" - "Beauty retire, thou dost my pity
move" - "It is decreed, nor shall thy fate, O Rome;" - open
and dignified in the sound, various and majestic in the
sentiment, it was no inapt, as it was certainly no timid,
spirit that selected such a range of themes. Of "Gaze not on
Swans," I know no more than these four words; yet that also
seems to promise well. It was, however, on a probable
suspicion, the work of his master, Mr. Berkenshaw - as the
drawings that figure at the breaking up of a young ladies'
seminary are the work of the professor attached to the
establishment. Mr. Berkenshaw was not altogether happy in
his pupil. The amateur cannot usually rise into the artist,
some leaven of the world still clogging him; and we find
Pepys behaving like a pickthank to the man who taught him
composition.
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