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Far more striking, however, is his famous poem of “The Bastard,” which Merriman must surely have read. It begins:—
Blest be the Bastard’s birth—through wondrous ways
He shines eccentric like a comet’s blaze
No sickly fruit of tame compliance he
He stamped in Nature’s mint of ecstacy
He lives to build and boast a generous race
No tenth transmitter of a foolish face.
And he addresses Lady Macclesfield, who he claimed to be his mother, as follows:—
What had I lost if, conjugally kind,
By Nature hating yet by use confined
Untaught the matrimonial bounds to slight,
And coldly conscious of a husband’s right,
You had faint-drawn me with a form alone,
A lawful lump of life, by force your own
Surely this is the same argument that Merriman puts into the mouth of the “feeble old man”—a rare stroke of humour!
Ní deacair a ṁeas naċ spreas gan ḃríġ, etc.
Of course the idea is not an unfamiliar one. We find a passage to the same effect put in the mouth of Edmund in “King Lear”:—
Thou, Nature, art my goddess, to thy law
My services are bound: Wherefore should I
Stand in the plague of custom, and permit
The curiosity of nations to deprive me.
For that I am some twelve or fourteen moonshines
Lag of a brother? Why bastard? Wherefore base?
When my dimensions are as well compact,
My mind as generous, and my shape as true,
As honest madam’s issue? Why brand they us
With base? With baseness? bastardy? base, base?
Who, in the lusty stealth of Nature, take
More composition and fierce quality,
Than doth, within a dull, stale, tired bed,
Go to creating a whole tribe of fops
Got ’tween sleep and wake?
Whether they prove anything or not, these coincidences are worth noting.
P.B.
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