Posterity

When Sir Max Beerbohm received an invitation to lunch with Swinburne at his home at The Pines, No 2, Putney High St, he felt as if he had been asked to meet Catullus.

No. 2—prosaic inscription! But as that front-door closed behind me I had the instant sense of having slipped away from the harsh light of the ordinary and contemporary into the dimness of an odd, august past. Here, in this dark hall, the past was the present. Here loomed vivid and vital on the walls those women of Rossetti whom I had known but as shades. Familiar to me in small reproductions by photogravure, here they themselves were, life-sized, "with curled-up lips and amorous hair" done in the original warm crayon, all of them intently looking down on me while I took off my overcoat—all wondering who was this intruder from posterity.

Beerbom was an intruder from posterity, but now his world seems one with Babylon and Ninevah. 

Thomas Jordan was the official City of London Poet, but reminds me of the Cavalier Poets, who were the antithesis of the City men. In him and them you hear the last faint echo of the Elizabethan lyric tradition. His contemporaries rightly accused him of vulgarity, but compared with Lord Rochester he is an altar boy.

He died in 1685. This is from his anthology piece, Coronemus nos Rosis antequam marcescant.

Your beautiful piece, who has all eyes upon her

Who, her honesty sells, for an hogo of honour,

Whose lightness and brightness doth cause such a splendour

That none are thought fit, but the stars, to attend her.

Although she seems pleasant and sweet to the sense,

She'll be damnably mouldy an hundred years hence.





Your usurer who, in one hundred, takes twenty,

Who mourns in his wealth and who pines in his plenty

Saves up for a season he never shall see

The year of One Thousand Eight Hundred and Three

When he'll turn all his bags, all his houses and rents

For a worm eaten coffin an hundred years hence.

This old joke is repeated by Joseph Addison but he disclaimed inventing it. The old don to whom he credits it may be one Thomas Stafford.

I know when a man talks of posterity in matters of this nature he is looked upon with an eye of ridicule by the cunning and selfish part of mankind. Most people are of the humour of an old fellow of a colledge, who when he was pressed by the society to come into something that might redound to the good of their successors, grew very peevish, We are always doing, says he, something for posterity, but I would fain see posterity do something for us.