Mr. Ebsworth’s championship.

This mistake of Mr. Ebsworth’s is the less easy to understand inasmuch as he has been very careful to clear up the popular confusion of our poet Thomas Carew, “gentleman of the Privy Chamber to King Charles I., and cup-bearer to His Majesty,” with another Thomas Gary (also a poet), son of the Earl of Monmouth and groom of His Majesty’s bed-chamber.  But it is one thing to prove that this second Thomas Gary is the original of the “medallion portrait” commonly supposed to be Carew’s:  it is quite another thing to saddle him, merely upon guess-work, with Carew’s reputed indiscretions.  Indeed, Mr. Ebsworth lets his enthusiasm for his author run clean away with his sense of fairness.  He heads his Introductory Memoir with the words of Pallas in Tennyson’s “OEnone”—­

    “Again she said—­’I woo thee not with gifts: 
     Sequel of guerdon could not alter me
     To fairer.  Judge thou me by what I am,
     So shalt thou find me fairest.’”—­

from which I take it that Mr. Ebsworth claims his attitude towards Carew to be much the same as Thackeray’s towards Pendennis.  But in fact he proves himself a thorough-going partisan, and anyone less enthusiastic may think himself lucky if dismissed by Mr. Ebsworth with nothing worse than a smile of pity mingled with contempt.  Now, so long as an editor confines this belligerent enthusiasm to the defence of his author’s writings, it is at worst but an amiable weakness; and every word he says in their praise tends indirectly to justify his own labor in editing these meritorious compositions.  But when he extends this championship over the author’s private life, he not unfrequently becomes something of a nuisance.  We may easily forgive such talk as “There must assuredly have been a singular frankness and affectionate simplicity in the disposition of Carew:”  talk which is harmless, though hardly more valuable than the reflection beloved of local historians—­“If these grey old walls could speak, what a tale might they not unfold!” It is less easy to forgive such a note as this:—­

“Sir John Suckling was incapable of understanding Carew in his final days of sickness and depression, as he had been (and this is conceding much) in their earlier days of reckless gallantry.  His vile address ‘to T——­ C——­,’ etc., ’Troth, Tom, I must confess I much admire ...’ is nothing more than coarse badinage without foundation; in any case not necessarily addressed to Carew, although they were of close acquaintance; but many other Toms were open to a similar expression, since ‘T.C.’ might apply to Thomas Carey, to Thomas Crosse, and other T.C. poets.”

It is not pleasant to rake up any man’s faults; but when an editor begins to suggest some new man against whom nothing is known (except that he wrote indifferent verse)—­who is not even known to have been on speaking terms with Suckling—­as the proper target of Suckling’s coarse raillery,