Louise Imogen Guiney

								

keeping the world a house of ordered rooms, she made brave thrusts at
it. Appointed to the post-office at Auburndale, and later to a position
in the Boston Public Library, she briskly clapped harness on her horses
of the sun and was anxiously intent on doing well. But the only road
for her was still the path of escape to the open, to the free fields of
thought and the fellowship of the written word.
Hers was a youth of picturesque loyalties, one of them to the
lost cause of the Stuarts, a confessed congenital bias. The Irish
Jacobities, of whom there were many, had “claimed the Stuarts as of the
Milesian line, fondly deducing them from Fergus.” Born into that direct
succession of race loyalty, she was in addition, (and this seems to be
the true argument) incalculably beguiled by the sheer fascination of
that luckless house. Her Inquirendo into the Wit and Other Good Parts
of His Late Majesty King Charles the Second ties you a pretty nosegay
of the oak twig and the white rose. How should she not have loved
Charles II., if only that he was, in her own words, “a choice wag?”
“Charles might have confessed with Elia, ‘How I like to be liked, and
what don’t I do to be liked!’” Certainly His ill-starred Majesty could
have desired no liking more whole-hearted, albeit discriminating, more
merrily tolerant than hers. He had cast his magnetic spell upon her pen
and it turned to some good-natured vindicating of his varied parts.
Perhaps she never took her adherence very seriously, off the printed
page. She was beguiled by picturesqueness, not so much concerned with
lineal rights; perhaps, also, it tickled an impish fancy to repudiate
the “dull Georgian farce.” But Charles never had a more humorous
apologist, one who gave him full value as an apostle of good taste and
of a “wheedling charm.”
The sum of her appraisement is of a captivating genius who had found
himself “in the king business” and got addled and spoiled. And who
knows how she must have loved him for his adaptability to portraiture
of a pen like hers, and for the rush and glow of the Restoration, the
very circumstances that inspired her Hazlitt to his glorious inventory
of rustling silks and waving plumes, of gems and people! The time and
the gay immortalities of it go to her head.
“There was an astonishing dearth of dull people; the bad and bright
were in full blossom, and the good and stupid were pruned away.”
She adores “the sworded poets of the Civil Wars, with their scarcely
exerted aptitude for the fine arts, whose names leave a sort of
star-dust along the pages of the anthologies.” And it was, this
star-dust of the period, immediate to one of her own dreams, a labor
she delighted in: the making of a perfect anthology of the seventeenth
century.
Her first book was Songs at the Start (1884) and the first collected
essays Goose-Quill Papers (1885). The essays, despite a wilful