John Middleton

“ Middleton is on the side of youth. Young men induce usurers to compete with one another for the hand of a disguised courtesan, or by ingenious devices rob their old uncles when these refuse to provide for them. Middleton's indelicacy is almost always relieved by real humour. Even A Chaste Maid in Cheapside is as amusing as it is outrageous.
In his more romantic plays Middleton betrays the inability which besets all the minor dramatists, to invest a whole play with the poetic charm which illumines portions. What is beautiful and what is repulsive are found side by side. ”

“ He became an excellent classical scholar, and cultivated both literature and science, but politics absorbed his chief interests. In 1663 he joined Glencairn's expedition on behalf of Charles II, and on the defeat of Middleton [see Middleton, John, first Earl of Middleton] , 26 July 1654, fled to the castle of Island Donan. He succeeded to the family estates on his father's death, 10 Sept. ”

“ Middleton came to Toronto as music-critic of The Mail and Empire and after a year of serv ice took up similar work on The Toronto Daily News. He retired from critical work to write a daily column of paragraphs and light verse under the heading "On the Side." This "feature" has awakened a good deal of favourable comment. Mr. Middleton is well-known and highly regarded in Canada. Some of his work is not unknown to the readers of the American magazines. ”

“ There's nothing to laugh at in being a squatter. They're as rich as What's-his-name. Some of them are millionaires. I wish Papa was a squatter—but he would be no use on a sheep-run; you've got to be in the saddle all day, and keep your eyes skinned for blackfellows half the night. John Smith looked the very chap for it. Girl!"
"You needn't go on saying girl in that voice," said Grizzel. "It isn't the girl who is tumbling about with loverishness; it's Mr. Smith."
"What happened to the diamond-mine?" Mollie interrupted, feeling that another squabble was in the air. ”

“ Amongst dramatists of primarily tragic and sombre temper, who in their best scenes recall the creator Middleton and Webster. of Angelo, Iago and Timon, must be named Thomas Middleton (1570?-1627) , John Webster, and Cyril Tourneur. Middleton has great but scattered force, and his verse has the grip and ring of the best period without a sign of the decadence. He is strong in high comedy, like The Old Law, that turns on some exquisite point of honour—“the moral sense of our ancestors”; in comedy that is merely graphic and vigorous ”

“ Sir John was a sportsman; Lady Middleton a mother. He hunted and shot, and she humoured her children; and these were their only resources. Continual engagements at home and abroad, however, supplied all the deficiencies of nature and education--supported the good spirits of Sir John, and gave exercise to the good-breeding of his wife.
Mrs. Jennings, Lady Middleton's mother, who formed one of the party on the first occasion of the Dashwoods dining at Barton Park, was a good-humoured, fat, elderly woman, who talked a good deal, and seemed very happy, and rather vulgar. ”

“ While man makes sewers and artillery,
Grim bayonets, and howitzers and shell,
The battle-squadron surging through the tides,
Ten thousand hecatombs of reeking red
And all the vile magnificence of War.
Jesse E. Middleton is the only son of the Rev. E, Middleton of the Canadian Methodist Church, and was born in Wellington County, Ontario, Canada, on November 3, 1872. His father is of English birth, but his mother, Margaret Agar, is a native Canadian. His home education, which was very thorough, was supplemented by High School training. ”

“ To have made Shakespeare's Falconbridge out of the old lay figure, to have created the scenes between Hubert and John, and Hubert and Arthur, out of that decrepit skeleton—that is the work of a commanding poetical genius on the threshold of full mastery of its powers, worthy of all wonder, no doubt, but doubly worthy of close examination. ”

“ John Jones's ‘Benefit of the auncient Bathes of Buckstones,’ for Luke Harrison, George Bishop, William Jones, and William Norton. In 1572 Middleton left East and set up his press at the sign of the Falcon in Fleet Street, and also opened a shop for the sale of his books in St. ”

“ There are fine truths also scattered through his dramas as:—
"To see what solitariness is about dying princes! As heretofore they have unpeopled towns, divided friends, and made great houses inhospitable, so now, O justice, where are their flatterers? Flatterers are but the shadows of princes' bodies; the least thick cloud makes them invisible."
Of Middleton, who wrote from twenty to thirty plays, in some of which, according to a very prevalant fashion of that age, he called in the aid of Rowley, Decker, Fletcher, and Massinger ”

“ Before this reality the poet is impotent as his fellows; he is above them by his knowledge of it, but below them by the weakness which that knowledge brings. He, too, is the prey of contraries, the mirror of his deity, struck to the heart of his victory, enduring the intolerable pain of triumph. ”

“ Dr. Conyers Middleton, occasioned by his late ‘Free Inquiry.’” 12mo, 102 pages. Middleton was born at Richmond, in Yorkshire, in 1683, and died the year after Wesley wrote his letter. He was a favourite of George I.; was hated by Dr. Bentley, the master of his college; had three wives; was Woodwardian professor, and the university librarian; a writer of great powers, but more an oneht of whose productions are debased by the leaven of infidelity. Of an irritable temper, he was always creating [Pg 62] antagonists instead of friends. ”

“ It was instinct which guided him into a sequestered path, which ran equably by the side of the road of alternate exaltation and catastrophe which other men of equal genius must travel. Therefore he has seen men as it were in profile against the sky, but never face to face. ”

“ HINDLE, JOHN (1761–1796) , vocalist and composer, born in 1761, was the son of Bartholomew Hindle of Westminster. It appears that after 1789 he owned some property at Tottenham in Middlesex. He was lay vicar of Westminster Abbey ”

“ Instead of an instinctive love, there is a conscious desire of England; instead of slow saturation, a desperate plunge into its mystery. The fragrance does not come at its own sweet will; we clutch at it. It does not enfold and pervade our most arduous speculations; no involuntary sweetness comes flooding in upon our confrontation of human destinies. ”

“ When the sound of the bugles died, having crowned reveillé with the equal challenge of the last post, how easily we might have been persuaded that there was a silence, if there had not been one whose voice rose only so little above that of the winds and trees and the life of undertone we share with them as to make us first doubt the silence and then lend an ear to the incessant pulses of which it is composed. ”

“ He longs not merely to know in what undifferentiated oneness his roots are fixed, but to discover it beautiful. Not even yet is it sufficient to have a premonition of the truth; the truth must wear a familiar colour. ”

“ He has sought the healing virtue where he believed it undefiled, in that miraculous English country whose magic (as Mr Masefield so well knows) is in Shakespeare, and whose strong rhythm is in Hardy. But the virtue eludes all conscious inquisition. The man who seeks it feverishly sees riot where there is peace. And may it not be, in the long run, that Mr Masefield would have done better not to delude himself into an identification he cannot feel, but rather to face his own disquiet where alone the artist can master it, in his consciousness? ”

“ Great poetry stands in this, that it expresses man's allegiance to his destiny. In every age the great poet triumphs in all that he knows of necessity; thus he is the world made vocal. Other generations of men may know more, but their increased knowledge will not diminish from the magnificence of the music which he has made for the spheres. The known truth alters from age to age; but the thrill of the recognition of the truth stands fast for all our human eternity. ”

“ He behaves like a fine horse with a bearing rein: he is continually tossing his head after a minute or two of 'good manners and action,' and saying, 'Shakespeare was the best of them, anyhow'; 'Chaucer beats Ovid to a standstill.' It is a gesture with which all decent people sympathise and when it is made in language so supple as Dryden's prose it has a lasting charm. Dryden's heart was in the right place, and he was not afraid of showing it; but that does not make him a critic, much less a critic to be set as a superior in the company of Aristotle and Coleridge. ”

“ Hardy is the last of that great line. If we long for sweetness—as we do long for it, and with how poignant a pain!—we must seek it out, like men who rush dusty and irritable from the babble and fever of the town. The rhythm of the earth never enters into their gait; they are like spies among the birds and flowers, like collectors of antique furniture in the haunts of peace. The Georgians snatch at nature; they are never part of it. And there is some element of this desperation in Mr Masefield. ”

“ What hypocrisy or self-deception enabled you to clothe your statements of fact in a moral aura, and to blind yourselves and the world to the truth that you were killing a domesticated dragon who guarded the cave of a devouring hydra, whom you benevolently loosed? Why did you not see that the end of all your devotion was to shift man's responsibility for himself from his shoulders? ”

“ The infinite and infinitesimal vague happinesses and immaterial alarms, terrors and beauties scared by the sound of speech, memories and forgettings that the touch of memory itself crumbles into dust—this very texture of the life of the soul might have been a gray background over which tumultuous existence passed unheeding had not Edward Thomas so painfully sought the angle from which it appears, to the eye of eternity, as the enduring warp of the more gorgeous woof. ”

“ The critic has not merely the right, but the duty, to judge between Homer and Shakespeare, between Dante and Milton, between Cezanne and Michelangelo, Beethoven and Mozart. If the foundations of his criticism are truly æsthetic, he is compelled to believe and to show that among would-be artists some are true artists and some are not, and that among true artists some are greater than others. ”

“ Nothing less than a supremely great genius can save him if he ventures into the vast without a landmark visible to other eyes than his own. Blake had a supremely great genius and was saved in part. The masculine vigour of his passion gave stability to the figures of his imagination. They are heroes because they are made to speak like heroes. Even in Blake's most recondite work there is always the moment when the clouds are parted and we recognise the austere and awful countenances of gods. The phantasmagoria of the dreamer have been mastered by the sheer creative will of the poet. ”

“ One day, we believe, a great book will be written, informed by the breath which moves the Spirits of Pity in Mr Hardy's Dynasts. It will be a delicate, yet undeviating record of the spiritual awareness of the generation that perished in the war. It will be a work of genius, for the essence that must be captured within it is volatile beyond belief, almost beyond imagination. We know of its existence by signs hardly more material than a dream-memory of beating wings or an instinctive, yet all but inexplicable refusal of that which has been offered us in its stead. ”

“ Our search for the pure literary critic is likely to be arduous. We have seen that there is a sense in which Dryden is a purer literary critic than either Coleridge or Aristotle; but we have also seen that it is precisely by reason of the 'pureness' in him that he is to be relegated into a rank inferior to theirs. It looks as though we might have to pronounce that the true literary critic is the philosophic critic. ”

“ For we have no doubt at all in our mind that, in comparison with the bulk of contemporary poetry, such work as Reynard the Fox is valuable. We may use the old rough distinction and ask first whether Reynard the Fox is durable in virtue of its substance, and second, whether it is durable in virtue of its form.
The glorification of England! There are some who would give their souls to be able to glorify her as she has been glorified, by Shakespeare, by Milton, by Wordsworth, and by Hardy. For an Englishman there is no richer inspiration, no finer theme ”

“ When you invoked the sanction of criticism were you more than merely destructive? When you riddled religion with your scientific objections, did you not forget that religion is something more, far more than a nexus of historical facts or a cosmogony? When you questioned everything in the name of truth and science, why did you not dream of asking whether those creations of men's minds were capax imperii in man's universe? What right had you to suppose that a man disarmed of tradition is stronger for his nakedness? ”

“ Georgian Poetry is like the Coalition Government; Wheels is like the Radical opposition. Out of the one there issues an indefinable odour of complacent sanctity, an unctuous redolence of union sacrée; out of the other, some acidulation of perversity. In the coalition poets we find the larger number of good men, and the larger number of bad ones; in the opposition poets we find no bad ones with the coalition badness, no good ones with the coalition goodness, but in a single case a touch of the apocalyptic, intransigent, passionate honesty that is the mark of the martyr of art or life. ”

“ He is shaken by a presentiment that the lovely bodies of men are being spent and flaming human minds put out in a conflict for something which never can be won in the clash of material arms, and he is distraught by a vision of humanity as a child pitifully wandering in a dark wood where the wind faintly echoes the strange word 'Peace.' Therefore he too wanders pitifully like that child, seeking peace, and men are become the symbols of mankind. ”