Captain Ravenshaw; Or, The Maid of Cheapside. A Romance of Elizabethan London

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Robert Neilson Stephens. Captain Ravenshaw; Or, The Maid of Cheapside. A Romance of Elizabethan London

PREFACE

CHAPTER I. MEN OF DESPERATE FORTUNES

CHAPTER II. DISTURBERS OF THE NIGHT

CHAPTER III. MASTER JERNINGHAM'S MADNESS

CHAPTER IV. THE ART OF ROARING

CHAPTER V. PENNILESS COMPANIONS

CHAPTER VI. REVENGE UPON WOMANKIND

CHAPTER VII. MISTRESS MILLICENT

CHAPTER VIII. SIR PEREGRINE MEDWAY

CHAPTER IX. THE PRAISE OF INNOCENCE

CHAPTER X. IN THE GOLDSMITH'S GARDEN

CHAPTER XI. THE RASCAL EMPLOYS HIS WITS

CHAPTER XII. MASTER HOLYDAY IN FEAR AND TREMBLING

CHAPTER XIII. A RIOT IN CHEAPSIDE

CHAPTER XIV. JERNINGHAM SEES THE WAY TO HIS DESIRE

CHAPTER XV. RAVENSHAW FALLS ASLEEP

CHAPTER XVI. THE POET AS A MAN OF ACTION

CHAPTER XVII. DIRE THINGS BEFALL IN THE FOREST

CHAPTER XVIII. RAVENSHAW'S SLEEP IS INTERRUPTED

CHAPTER XIX. KNAVE AGAINST GENTLEMAN

CHAPTER XX. HOLYDAY'S FURTHER ADVENTURES

CHAPTER XXI. THE CAPTAIN FORSWEARS SWAGGERING

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Here is offered mere story, the sort of thing Mr. Howells cannot tolerate. He will have none of us and our works, poor "neo-romanticists" that we are. Curiously enough, we neo-romanticists, or most of us, will always gratefully have him; of his works we cannot have too many; one of us, I know, has walked miles to get the magazine containing the latest instalment of his latest serial. This looks as if we were more liberal than he. He would, for the most part, prohibit fiction from being else than the record of the passing moment; it should reflect only ourselves and our own little tediousnesses; he would hang the chamber with mirrors, and taboo all pictures; or if he admitted pictures they should depict this hour's actualities alone, there should be no figures in costume.

But who shall decide in these matters what is to be and what is not to be? Who shall deny that all kinds of fiction have equal right to exist? Who shall dictate our choice of theme, or place, or time? Who shall forbid us in our faltering way to imagine forth the past if we like? The dead past, say you? As dead as yesterday afternoon, no more. "Where's he that died o' Wednesday?" As dead as the Queen of Sheba. But on the pages of Sienkiewicz, for example, certain little matters of Nero's time seem no more dead than last week's divorce trial in the columns of those realists, the newspaper reporters. All that is not immediately before our eyes, whether dead or distant, can be visualised only by imagination informed by description, and a small transaction in the reign of Elizabeth can be made as sensible to the mind's eye as a domestic scene between Mr. and Mrs. Jones in the administration of McKinley. But how can one describe authentically what one can never have seen? You may propound that question to the realists; they are often doing it, or else they see extraordinary things now and then.

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"Well," said the captain, having by this time pretty well stuffed himself, "I like thee the better for being a poet. Such as you know me to be, you will scarce believe it; but I am one – or was once – fitted by nature to take joy in naught so much as in poetry, and the sweet pastoral life that poets praise so. But never whisper this; I were a dead man if the town knew the softness underneath my leathern outside. But in very truth, as for books, I would give all the Plutarchs in the world for one canto of 'The Faerie Queene' or ten pages of the gentler part of Sidney's 'Arcadia.' Had I won my choice, I had passed my days, not in camps and battles, taverns and brawls, but in green meadows, sitting and strolling among flowers, reading some book of faery or shepherds – for I never could make up poetry of my own."

"That picture belies the common report of Captain Ravenshaw."

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