Читать книгу: «The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 04, No. 24, October, 1859», страница 15

I would transport this child to Rome at once, if I had my will. She should ripen under an Italian sun. She should walk under the frescoed vaults of palaces, until her colors deepened to those of Venetian beauties, and her forms were perfected into rivalry with the Greek marbles, and the east wind was out of her soul. Has she not exhausted this lean soil of the elements her growing nature requires?

I do not know. The magnolia grows and comes into full flower on Cape Ann, many degrees out of its proper region. I was riding once along that delicious road between the hills and the sea, when we passed a thicket where there seemed to be a chance for finding it. In five minutes I had fallen on the trees in full blossom, and filled my arms with the sweet, resplendent flowers. I could not believe I was in our cold, northern Essex, which, in the dreary season when I pass its slate-colored, unpainted farmhouses, and huge, square, windy, 'squire-built "mansions," looks as brown and unvegetating as an old rug with its patterns all trodden out and the colored fringe worn from all its border.

If the magnolia can bloom in northern New England, why should not a poet or a painter come to his full growth here just as well? Yes, but if the gorgeous tree-flower is rare, and only as if by a freak of Nature springs up in a single spot among the beeches and alders, is there not as much reason to think the perfumed flower of imaginative genius will find it hard to be born and harder to spread its leaves in the clear, cold atmosphere of our ultra-temperate zone of humanity?

Take the poet. On the one hand, I believe that a person with the poetical faculty finds material everywhere. The grandest objects of sense and thought are common to all climates and civilizations. The sky, the woods, the waters, the storms, life, death, love, the hope and vision of eternity,—these are images that write themselves in poetry in every soul which has anything of the divine gift.

On the other hand, there is such a thing as a lean, impoverished life, in distinction from a rich and suggestive one. Which our common New England life might be considered, I will not decide. But there are some things I think the poet missed in our western Eden. I trust it is not unpatriotic to mention them in this point of view, as they come before us in so many other aspects.

There is no sufficient flavor of humanity in the soil out of which we grow. At Cantabridge, near the sea, I have once or twice picked up an Indian arrowhead in a fresh furrow. At Canoe Meadow, in the Berkshire Mountains, I have found Indian arrowheads. So everywhere Indian arrowheads. Whether a hundred or a thousand years old, who knows? who cares? There is no history to the red race,—there is hardly an individual in it;—a few instincts on legs and holding a tomahawk,—there is the Indian of all time. The story of one red ant is the story of all red ants. So, the poet, in trying to wing his way back through the life that has kindled, flitted, and faded along our watercourses and on our southern hillsides for unknown generations, finds nothing to breathe; he "meets

 
A vast vacuity! all unawares,
Fluttering his pennons vain, plumb down he drops
Ten thousand fathom deep."
 

But think of the Old World,—that part of it which is the seat of ancient civilization! The stakes of the Britons' stockades are still standing in the bed of the Thames. The ploughman turns up an old Saxon's bones, and beneath them is a tessellated pavement of the time of the Caesars. In Italy, the works of mediaeval Art seem to be of yesterday,—Rome, under her kings, is but an intruding new-comer, as we contemplate her in the shadow of the Cyclopean walls of Fiesole or Volterra. It makes a man human to live on these old humanized soils. He cannot help marching in step with his kind in the rear of such a procession. They say a dead man's hand cures swellings, if laid on them. There is nothing like the dead cold hand of the Past to take down our tumid egotism and lead us into the solemn flow of the life of our race. Rousseau came out of one of his sad self-torturing fits, as he cast his eye on the arches of the old Roman aqueduct, the Pont du Gard.

I am far from denying that there is an attraction in a thriving railroad village. The new "dépôt," the smartly-painted pine houses, the spacious brick hotel, the white meeting-house, and the row of youthful and leggy trees before it, are exhilarating. They speak of progress, and the time when there shall be a city, with a His Honor the Mayor, in the place of their trim but transient architectural growths. Pardon me, if I prefer the pyramids. They seem to me crystals formed from a stronger solution of humanity than the steeple of the new meeting-house. I may be wrong, but the Tiber has a voice for me, as it whispers to the piers of the Pons Aelius, even more full of meaning than my well-beloved Charles eddying round the piles of West Boston Bridge.

Then, again, we Yankees are a kind of gypsies,—a mechanical and migratory race. A poet wants a home. He can dispense with an apple-parer and a reaping-machine. I feel this more for others than for myself, for the home of my birth and childhood has been as yet exempted from the change which has invaded almost everything around it.

–—Pardon me a short digression. To what small things our memory and our affections attach themselves! I remember, when I was a child, that one of the girls planted some Star-of-Bethlehem bulbs in the southwest corner of our front-yard. Well, I left the paternal roof and wandered in other lands, and learned to think in the words of strange people. But after many years, as I looked on the little front-yard again, it occurred to me that there used to be some Stars-of-Bethlehem in the southwest corner. The grass was tall there, and the blade of the plant is very much like grass, only thicker and glossier. Even as Tully parted the briers and brambles when he hunted for the sphere-containing cylinder that marked the grave of Archimedes, so did I comb the grass with my fingers for my monumental memorial-flower. Nature had stored my keepsake tenderly in her bosom; the glossy, faintly streaked blades were there; they are there still, though they never flower, darkened as they are by the shade of the elms and rooted in the matted turf.

Our hearts are held down to our homes by innumerable fibres, trivial as that I have just recalled; but Gulliver was fixed to the soil, you remember, by pinning his head a hair at a time. Even a stone with a white band crossing it, belonging to the pavement of the back-yard, insisted on becoming one of the talismans of memory. This intussusception of the ideas of inanimate objects, and their faithful storing away among the sentiments, are curiously prefigured in the material structure of the thinking centre itself. In the very core of the brain, in the part where Des Cartes placed the soul, is a small mineral deposit, consisting, as I have seen it in the microscope, of grape-like masses of crystalline matter.

But the plants that come up every year in the same place, like the Stars-of-Bethlehem, of all the lesser objects, give me the liveliest home-feeling. Close to our ancient gambrel-roofed house is the dwelling of pleasant old Neighbor Walrus. I remember the sweet honeysuckle that I saw in flower against the wall of his house a few months ago, as long as I remember the sky and stars. That clump of peonies, butting their purple heads through the soil every spring in just the same circle, and by-and-by unpacking their hard balls of buds in flowers big enough to make a double handful of leaves, has come up in just that place, Neighbor Walrus tells me, for more years than I have passed on this planet. It is a rare privilege in our nomadic state to find the home of one's childhood and its immediate neighborhood thus unchanged. Many born poets, I am afraid, flower poorly in song, or not at all, because they have been too often transplanted.

Then a good many of our race are very hard and unimaginative;—their voices have nothing caressing; their movements are as of machinery, without elasticity or oil. I wish it were fair to print a letter a young girl, about the age of our Iris, wrote a short time since. "I am *** *** ***," she says, and tells her whole name outright. Ah!—said I, when I read that first frank declaration,—you are one of the right sort!—She was. A winged creature among close-clipped barn-door fowl. How tired the poor girl was of the dull life about her,—the old woman's "skeleton hand" at the window opposite, drawing her curtains,—"Ma'am–shooing away the hens,"—the vacuous country eyes staring at her as only country eyes can stare,—a routine of mechanical duties,—and the soul's half- articulated cry for sympathy, without an answer! Yes,—pray for her, and for all such! Faith often cures their longings; but it is so hard to give a soul to heaven that has not first been trained in the fullest and sweetest human affections! Too often they fling their hearts away on unworthy objects. Too often they pine in a secret discontent, which spreads its leaden cloud over the morning of their youth. The immeasurable distance between one of these delicate natures and the average youths among whom is like to be her only choice makes one's heart ache. How many women are born too finely organized in sense and soul for the highway they must walk with feet unshod! Life is adjusted to the wants of the stronger sex. There are plenty of torrents to be crossed in its journey; but their stepping-stones are measured by the stride of man, and not of woman.

Women are more subject than men to atrophy of the heart. So says the great medical authority, Laennec. Incurable cases of this kind used to find their hospitals in convents. We have the disease in New England,—but not the hospitals. I don't like to think of it. I will not believe our young Iris is going to die out in this way. Providence will find her some great happiness, or affliction, or duty,—and which would be best for her, I cannot tell. One thing is sure: the interest she takes in her little neighbor is getting to be more engrossing than ever. Something is the matter with him, and she knows it, and I think worries herself about it. I wonder sometimes how so fragile and distorted a frame has kept the fiery spirit that inhabits it so long its tenant. He accounts for it in his own way.

The air of the Old World is good for nothing,—he said, one day.—Used up, Sir,—breathed over and over again. You must come to this side, Sir, for an atmosphere fit to breathe nowadays. Did not old Josselyn say that a breath of New England's air is better than a sup of Old England's ale? I ought to have died when I was a boy, Sir; but I couldn't die in this Boston air,—and I think I shall have to go to New York one of these days, when it's time for me to drop this bundle,—or to New Orleans, where they have the yellow fever,—or to Philadelphia, where they have so many doctors.

This was some time ago; but of late he has seemed, as I have before said, to be ailing. An experienced eye, such as I think I may call mine, can tell commonly whether a man is going to die, or not, long before he or his friends are alarmed about him. I don't like it.

Iris has told me that the Scottish gift of second-sight runs in her family, and that she is afraid she has it. Those who are so endowed look upon a well man and see a shroud wrapt about him. According to the degree to which it covers him, his death will be near or more remote. It is an awful faculty; but science gives one too much like it. Luckily for our friends, most of us who have the scientific second-sight school ourselves not to betray our knowledge by word or look.

Day by day, as the Little Gentleman comes to the table, it seems to me that the shadow of some approaching change falls darker and darker over his countenance. Nature is struggling with something, and I am afraid she is under in the wrestling-match. You do not care much, perhaps, for my particular conjectures as to the nature of his difficulty. I should say, however, from the sudden flushes to which he is subject, and certain other marks which, as an expert, I know how to interpret, that his heart was in trouble; but then he presses his hand to the right side, as if there were the centre of his uneasiness.

When I say difficulty about the heart, I do not mean any of those sentimental maladies of that organ which figure more largely in romances than on the returns which furnish our Bills of Mortality. I mean some actual change in the organ itself, which may carry him off by slow and painful degrees, or strike him down with one huge pang and only time for a single shriek,—as when the shot broke through the brave Captain Nolan's breast, at the head of the Light Brigade at Balaklava, and with a loud cry he dropped dead from his saddle.

I thought it only fair to say something of what I apprehended to some who were entitled to be warned. The landlady's face fell when I mentioned my fears.

Poor man!—she said.—And will leave the best room empty! Hasn't he got any sisters or nieces or anybody to see to his things, if he should be took away? Such a sight of cases, full of everything! Never thought of his failin' so suddin. A complication of diseases, she expected. Liver-complaint one of 'em?

After this first involuntary expression of the too natural selfish feelings, (which we must not judge very harshly, unless we happen to be poor widows ourselves, with children to keep filled, covered, and taught,—rents high,—beef eighteen to twenty cents per pound,)—after this first squeak of selfishness, followed by a brief movement of curiosity, so invariable in mature females, as to the nature of the complaint which threatens the life of a friend or any person who may happen to be mentioned as ill,—the worthy soul's better feelings struggled up to the surface, and she grieved for the doomed invalid, until a tear or two came forth and found their way down a channel worn for them since the early days of her widowhood.

Oh, this dreadful, dreadful business of being the prophet of evil! Of all the trials which those who take charge of others' health and lives have to undergo, this is the most painful. It is all so plain to the practised eye!—and there is the poor wife, the doting mother, who has never suspected anything, or at least has clung always to the hope which you are just going to wrench away from her!—I must tell Iris that I think her poor friend is in a precarious state. She seems nearer to him than anybody.

I did tell her. Whatever emotion it produced, she kept a still face, except, perhaps, a little trembling of the lip.—Could I be certain that there was any mortal complaint?—Why, no, I could not be certain; but it looked alarming to me.—He shall have some of my life,—she said.

I suppose this to have been a fancy of hers, of a kind of magnetic power she could give out;—at any rate, I cannot help thinking she wills her strength away from herself, for she has lost vigor and color from that day. I have sometimes thought he gained the force she lost; but this may have been a whim, very probably.

One day she came suddenly to me, looking deadly pale. Her lips moved, as if she were speaking; but I could not hear a word. Her hair looked strangely, as if lifting itself, and her eyes were full of wild light. She sunk upon a chair, and I thought was falling into one of her trances. Something had frozen her blood with fear; I thought, from what she said, half audibly, that she believed she had seen a shrouded figure.

That night, at about eleven o'clock, I was sent for to see the Little Gentleman, who was taken suddenly ill. Bridget, the servant, went before me with a light. The doors were both unfastened, and I found myself ushered, without hindrance, into the dim light of the mysterious apartment I had so longed to enter.

I found these stanzas in the young girl's book, among many others. I give them as characterizing the tone of her sadder moments.

UNDER THE VIOLETS

 
Her hands are cold; her face is white;
No more her pulses come and go;
Her eyes are shut to life and light;—
Fold the white vesture, snow on snow.
And lay her where the violets blow.
 
 
But not beneath a graven stone,
To plead for tears with alien eyes:
A slender cross of wood alone
Shall say, that here a maiden lies
In peace beneath the peaceful skies.
 
 
And gray old trees of hugest limb
Shall wheel their circling shadows round
To make the scorching sunlight dim
That drinks the greenness from the ground,
And drop their dead leaves on her mound.
 
 
When o'er their boughs the squirrels run,
And through their leaves the robins call,
And, ripening in the autumn sun,
The acorns and the chestnuts fall,
Doubt not that she will heed them all.
 
 
For her the morning choir shall sing
Its matins from the branches high,
And every minstrel-voice of spring,
That trills beneath the April sky,
Shall greet her with its earliest cry.
 
 
When, turning round their dial-track,
Eastward the lengthening shadows pass,
Her little mourners, clad in black,
The crickets, sliding through the grass,
Shall pipe for her an evening mass.
 
 
At last the rootlets of the trees
Shall find the prison where she lies,
And bear the buried dust they seize
In leaves and blossoms to the skies.
So may the soul that warmed it rise!
 
 
If any, born of kindlier blood,
Should ask, What maiden lies below?
Say only this: A tender bud,
That tried to blossom in the snow,
Lies withered where the violets blow.
 

REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES

The Collier-folio Shakespeare. Is it an imposture?

When the Lady Bab of "High Life below Stairs," having laid the forgetfulness which causes her tardy appearance at the elegant entertainment given in Mr. Lovel's servant's hall to the fascination of her favorite author, "Shikspur," is asked, "Who wrote Shikspur?" she replies, with that promptness which shows complete mastery of a subject, "Ben Jonson." In later days, another lady has, with greater prolixity, it is true, but hardly less confidence, and, it must be confessed, equal reason, answered to the same query, "Francis Bacon." This question must, then, be regarded as still open to discussion; but, assuming, for the nonce, that the Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies in a certain folio volume published at London in 1623 were written by William Shakespeare, gentleman, sometime actor at the Black Friars Theatre and a principal proprietor therein, we apply ourselves to the brief examination of another, somewhat related to it, and at least as complicated:—the question as to the authorship of certain marginal manuscript readings in a copy of a later folio edition of the same works,—that published in 1632,—which readings Mr. Payne Collier discovered and brought before the world with all the weight of his reputation and influence in favor of their authority and value. We write for those who are somewhat interested in this subject, and must assume that our readers are not entirely without information upon it; but it is desirable, if not necessary, that in the beginning we should call to mind the following dates and circumstances.

According to Mr. Collier's account, this folio was bought by him "in the spring of 1849," of Mr. Thomas Rodd, an antiquarian bookseller, well known in London. For a year and more he hardly looked at it; but his attention being directed particularly to it as he was packing it away to be taken into the country, he found that "there was hardly a page which did not represent, in a handwriting of the time, some emendations in the pointing or in the text." He then subjected it to "a most careful scrutiny," and became convinced of the great value of its manuscript readings. He talked about it to his literary friends, and took it to a meeting of the Council of the Shakespeare Society, and to two or three meetings of the Society of Antiquaries, as we know by the reports of those meetings in the London "Times." He wrote letters in the summer of 1852 to the London "Athenaeum," setting forth the character of the volume, and giving some of its most noteworthy changes of Shakespeare's text. He published, at last, in 1853, his volume of "Notes and Emendations to the Text of Shakespeare's Plays from Early Manuscript Corrections in a Copy of the Folio of 1632," etc.; and in 1854, he published an edition of Shakespeare, in the text of which these manuscript readings were embodied. In 1856, he added to a Shakespearian volume a "List of all the Emendations" in his folio, remarking in the preface to the book, (p. lxxix.,) that he had "often gone over the thousands of marks of all kinds in its [the folio's] margins," and that, for the purpose of making the list in question, he had "recently reëxamined every line and letter of the folio." He had previously printed for private circulation a few fac-simile copies of eighteen corrected passages in the folio; and with the volume last mentioned, his publications, and, we believe, all others,—of which more anon,—upon the subject, ceased. Mr. Collier, it should be borne in mind, has been for forty years a professed student of Elizabethan literature, and is a man of hitherto unquestioned honor.

But he is now upon trial. Certain officers of the British Museum, among them men of high professional reputation and personal standing, men who occupy, and who confess that they occupy, "a judicial position" on such questions, charge, after careful investigation, that a great fraud has been committed in this folio; that its marginal readings, instead of being as old as they seem, and as Mr. Collier has asserted them to be, are modern fabrications, and that, consequently, Mr. Collier is either an impostor or a dupe. The charge is not a new one. The weight that it carries, and the impression that it has produced, are owing to the position of the men who make it, and the evidence which they have published in its support. It was made, however, six years ago,—but vaguely. For, although there was on every side a disposition to welcome with all heartiness the manuscript readings, the antiquity and value of which Mr. Collier had so positively announced, the poetic sense of the world recoiled from the mass of them when they appeared; and although a few, a very few, of the readings peculiar to this folio were accepted by Shakespearian editors and commentators, they were opposed as a whole with determination, and in one or two instances with unbecoming heat, by Mr. Collier's fellow-laborers. Prominent among these was Mr. Singer, a man of moderate capacity and undisciplined powers, but extensive reading in early English literature,—known, too, for the bitterness with which he habitually wrote. In opposing Mr. Collier's folio, he did not hesitate to insinuate broadly that he believed it to be an imposition. But as he based his suspicion solely upon the very numerous coincidences between the marginal readings in that volume and the conjectural readings of the editors and critics of the last century,—coincidences which, however, affect the character of a very large proportion of the noticeable changes in the folio,—he failed to accomplish his conservative purpose at the expense of Mr. Collier's reputation. But although this insinuation of the spurious character Of the writing in Mr. Collier's folio fell to the ground, such antiquity as would give its readings the consequence due to their having been introduced by a contemporary of Shakespeare was shown not to pertain to them, in the course of two articles which appeared in "Putnam's Magazine" for October and November, 1853, and which, it may be as well to say, were from the same hand that writes this reference to them. They effected this by exhibiting the corrector's ignorance of the meaning of words in common use twenty years after Shakespeare's death, and his introduction of stage directions which could not have been complied with until half a century after that event, and which were at variance with the very text itself to which they were applied. That the argument which they embodied was conclusive has been admitted by all the English editors and commentators, including even Mr. Collier himself. But this conclusion only brought down the date of these marginal readings to a period somewhat later than the Restoration of the British Monarchy, and it did not put in question the good faith either of their author or their discoverer.

The attack now made upon them is directed solely against their genuineness, and is based altogether upon external, or, we may properly say, physical evidence. The accusers are Mr. N.E.S.A. Hamilton, an assistant in the Manuscript Department of the British Museum, (whose chief, Sir Frederick Madden, the Keeper of that Department, is understood to support him,) and Mr. Nevil Story Maskelyne, Keeper of the Mineraloglcal Department. Of the alphabetical Mr. Hamilton we know something. He is one of the ablest palaeographists of his years in England, and the possessor of a pair of eyes of such microscopic powers that he can decipher manuscript which to ordinary sight seems obliterated by time, or even fire: a man of worth, too, as we hear, and one who has borne himself in this affair with mingled confidence and modesty. He says, that, of the corrections originally made on the margins of this folio, the number which have been wholly or partially "obliterated…..with a penknife or the employment of chymical agency" "are almost as numerous as those suffered to remain"; that, of the corrections allowed to stand, many have been "tampered with, touched up, or painted over, a modern character being dexterously altered, by touches of the pen, into a more antique form"; and that the margins are "covered with an infinite number of faint pencil-marks, in obedience to which the supposed old corrector has made his emendations"; and that these pencilled memorandums "have not even the pretence of antiquity in character or spelling, but are written in a bold hand of the present century"; and with regard to the incongruities of spelling, he especially mentions the instances, "'body,' 'offals,' in pencil, 'bodie,' 'offals,' in ink."

Mr. Maskelyne, having examined many of the margins of the folio with the microscope, confirms entirely the evidence of Mr. Hamilton's eyes. He found the pencilled memorandums "plentifully distributed down the margins," and "the particles of plumbago in the hollows of the paper" in every instance that he has examined. He found, also, that what seems to be ink is not ink, but "a paint, removable, with the exception of a slight stain, by mere water,"—which "paint, formed perhaps of sepia," would enable an impostor, it need hardly be observed, to simulate ink faded by time; and in several cases in which "the ink word, in a quaint, antique-looking writing, and the pencil word, in a modern-looking hand, occupy the same ground, and are one over the other," the pencil-marks being obscured or obliterated, Mr. Maskelyne found, on washing off the ink, that at first "the pencil-marks became much plainer than before, and even when as much of the ink-stain as possible was removed, the pencil still runs through the ink line in unbroken, even continuity." These points established, Mr. Maskelyne's conclusion, that in the examples which he tested "the pencil underlies the ink, that is to say, was antecedent to it in its date," is unavoidable. But does it follow upon this conclusion that the manuscript changes in the readings of this folio are of spurious and modern date,—made, for instance, within the last fifty years, and with the intention of deceiving the world as to their age? Perhaps; but, for reasons which we are about to give, we venture to think, not certainly.

First, however, as to the very delicate and unpleasant position in which Mr. Collier is placed by these discoveries. For, although the age of the manuscript readings of his folio must be fixed by that of the pencilled memorandums over which they are written, the question as to whether he has not been uncandid or unwise enough to suppress an important part of the truth in describing that volume is entirely independent of this problem in paleography. For these numberless partially erased pencilled memorandums, to which Mr. Collier has made no allusion whatever, must have been written upon the margins of that folio either before Mr. Collier bought it, in the spring of 1849, or since. If before, is it possible that he could have subjected it to "a most careful scrutiny" in 1850, that he could have studied it for three years for the purpose of preparing his "Notes and Emendations,"—an octavo volume of five hundred pages,—which appeared in 1853, and that after having, for various purposes, "often gone over the thousands of marks of all kinds" on its margins, he could again, after the lapse of three years more, have "reëxamined every line and letter" on those margins for the purpose of making the list of the readings which he published in 1856, without having discovered, in the course of all this close scrutiny, extending through so many years, the pencil-marks which at once became visible when the volume went to the British Museum? And if these pencil-marks, that underlie the simulated ink corrections, were made after the spring of 1849–! Here is a dilemma, either horn of which has a very ugly look.

But out of this trial we hope, nay, we confidently believe, that Mr. Collier will come unscathed. We hope it for the sake of the profession of literature,—for the sake of one who has been honorably known among men of letters for almost half a century, and who has borne into the vale of years a hitherto untarnished name. We believe it, because a contrary supposition would be entirely at variance with Mr. Collier's conduct about this folio ever since his first announcement of its discovery. It is true, that, in the course of the controversy which the publication of his "Notes and Emendations" inevitably brought upon him, Mr. Collier has not always shown that delicacy and consideration for candid opponents which he could have afforded to show, and which would have sat so gracefully upon him. It is true, that, in noticing, and, in his enthusiastic partiality, much exaggerating, the admissions of a volume in which, as he must have seen, he was first defended against Mr. Singer's repeated insinuations of forgery,¹⁵ and in availing himself again and again of those not always discreet admissions, he was uncourteous enough not to mention the name even of the work in question, not to say that of its author. It is true, that, on the appearance of an edition of Shakespeare's Works edited by the author of that volume, he hastened to accuse him publicly of misrepresentation, unwarily admitting at the same time that he did so upon a mere glance at the book, and before he had even "cut it open," and, in his haste, causing his accusation to recoil upon his own head.^{16 17} he abandoned one of the readings of his folio, ("she discourses, she craves," Merry Wives, I. 3,) which the same opponent had been the first to show not only untenable, but fatal to the authority and antiquity of the readings of that volume, he requited that opponent's defence of him by attributing his defeat on this point to an English editor, who only quoted the passage in question from "Shakespeare's Scholar," and with special mention of its authorship and its importance,¹⁸