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-The Project Gutenberg eBook, A Little English Gallery, by Louise Imogen
-Guiney
-
-
-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
-other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions 
-whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
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-
-
-
-
-Title: A Little English Gallery
-
-
-Author: Louise Imogen Guiney
-
-
-
-Release Date: February 21, 2017  [eBook #54219]
-
-Language: English
-
-Character set encoding: UTF-8
-
-
-***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A LITTLE ENGLISH GALLERY***
-
-
-E-text prepared by Emmy, MFR, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
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-Transcriber's note:
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-      Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_).
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-[Illustration]
-
-
-A LITTLE ENGLISH GALLERY
-
-by
-
-LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY
-
-
-
-
-
-
-[Illustration]
-
-New York
-Harper and Brothers
-MDCCCXCIV
-
-Copyright, 1894, by Harper & Brothers.
-
-All rights reserved.
-
-
-
-
-    TO
-
-    EDMUND GOSSE
-
-    THIS FRIENDLY TRESPASS ON HIS FIELDS
-
-
-
-
-PREFATORY NOTE
-
-
-THE studies in this book are chosen from a number written at irregular
-intervals, and from sheer interest in their subjects, long ago.
-Portions of them, or rough drafts of what has since been wholly
-remodelled from fresher and fuller material at first hand, have
-appeared within five years in _The Atlantic Monthly_, _Macmillan’s_,
-_The Catholic World_, and _Poet-Lore_; and thanks are due the
-magazines for permission to reprint them. Yet more cordial thanks,
-for kind assistance on biographical points, belong to the Earl of
-Powis; the Rev. R. H. Davies, Vicar of old St. Luke’s, Chelsea; the
-Rev. T. Vere Bayne, of Christchurch, and H. E. D. Blakiston, Esq.,
-of Trinity College, Oxford; T. W. Lyster, Esq., of the National
-Library of Ireland; Aubrey de Vere Beauclerk, Esq.; Miss Langton,
-of Langton-by-Spilsby; the Vicars of Dauntsey, Enfield Highway, and
-Montgomery, and especially those of High Ercall and Speke; and the
-many others in England through whose courtesy and patience the tracer
-of these unimportant sketches has been able to make them approximately
-life-like.
-
-
-
-
-CONTENTS
-
-
-    CHAP.                                PAGE
-      I. LADY DANVERS (1561-1627)           1
-
-     II. HENRY VAUGHAN (1621-1695)         53
-
-    III. GEORGE FARQUHAR (1677-1707)      119
-
-     IV. TOPHAM BEAUCLERK (1739-1780)
-                  AND
-         BENNET LANGTON (1741-1800)       171
-
-      V. WILLIAM HAZLITT (1778-1830)      229
-
-
-
-
-I
-
-LADY DANVERS
-
-1561-1627
-
-
-MR. MATTHEW ARNOLD somewhere devotes a grateful sentence to the women
-who have left a fragrance in literary history, and whose loss of long
-ago can yet inspire men of to-day with indescribable regret. Lady
-Danvers is surely one of these. As John Donne’s dear friend, and George
-Herbert’s mother, she has a double poetic claim, like her unforgotten
-contemporary, Mary Sidney, for whom was made an everlasting epitaph.
-If Dr. Donne’s fraternal fame have not quite the old lustre of the
-incomparable Sir Philip’s, it is, at least, a greater honor to own
-Herbert for son than to have perpetuated the race of Pembroke. Nor is
-it an inharmonious thing to remember, in thus calling up, in order to
-rival it, the sweet memory of “Sidney’s sister,” that Herbert and
-Pembroke have long been, and are yet, married names.
-
-Magdalen, the youngest child of Sir Richard Newport, and of Margaret
-Bromley, his wife, herself daughter of that Bromley who was
-Privy-Councillor, Lord Chief-Justice, and executor to Henry VIII., was
-born in High Ercall, Salop; the loss or destruction of parish registers
-leaves us but 1561-62 as the probable date. Of princely stock, with
-three sisters and an only brother, and heir to virtue and affluence,
-she could look with the right pride of unfallen blood upon “the many
-fair coats the Newports bear” over their graves at Wroxeter. It was
-the day of learned and thoughtful girls; and this girl seems to have
-been at home with book and pen, with lute and viol. She married, in
-the flower of her youth, Richard Herbert, Esquire, of Blache Hall,
-Montgomery, black-haired and black-bearded, as were all his line; a man
-of some intellectual training, and of noted courage, descended from
-a distinguished brother of the yet more distinguished Sir Richard
-Herbert of Edward IV.’s time, and from the most ancient rank of Wales
-and England. At Eyton in Salop, in 1581, was born their eldest child,
-Edward, afterwards Lord Herbert of Cherbury, a writer who is still the
-puzzle and delight of Continental critics. He is said to have been a
-beautiful boy, and not very robust; his first speculation with his
-infant tongue was the piercing query: “How came I into this world?” But
-his next brother, Richard, was of another stamp; and went his frank,
-flashing, fighting way through Europe, “with scars of four-and-twenty
-wounds upon him, to his grave” at Bergen-op-Zoom, with William, the
-third son, following in his soldierly footsteps. Charles grew up
-reserved and studious, and died, like his paternal uncle, a dutiful
-Fellow of New College, Oxford. The fifth of these Herberts, “a soul
-composed of harmonies,” as Cotton said of him, and destined to make the
-name beloved among all readers of English, was George, the poet, the
-saintly “parson of Fuggleston and Bemerton.” Henry, his junior, with
-whom George had a sympathy peculiarly warm and long, became in his
-manhood Master of the Revels, and held the office for over fifty years.
-“You and I are alone left to brother it,” Lord Herbert of Cherbury once
-wrote him, in a mood more tender than his wont, when all else of that
-radiant family had gone into dust. The youngest of Magdalen Newport’s
-sons was Thomas, “a posthumous,” traveller, sailor, and master of a
-ship in the war against Algiers. Elizabeth, Margaret, and Frances
-were the daughters, of whom Izaak Walton says, with satisfaction,
-that they lived to be examples of virtue, and to do good to their
-generation. None of them made an illustrious match. Margaret married
-a Vaughan. Frances secured unto herself the patronymic Brown, and was
-happily seconded by Elizabeth, George Herbert’s “dear sick sister,”
-who became Mistress Jones. In the south chancel transept of Montgomery
-Church, where Richard Herbert the elder had been buried three years
-before, there was erected in 1600, at his wife’s cost, a large canopied
-alabaster altar-tomb, with two portrait-figures recumbent. All around
-it, in the quaint and affectionate boast of the age, are the small
-images of these seven sons and three daughters; “Job’s number and Job’s
-distribution,” as she once remarked, and as her biographers failed
-not to repeat after her. But their kindred ashes are widely sundered,
-and “as content with six foot as with the moles of Adrianus.” This at
-Montgomery is the only known representation of the Lady Magdalen. Her
-effigy lies at her husband’s left, the palms folded, the eyes open, the
-full hair rolled back from a low brow, beneath a charming and simple
-head-dress. Nothing can be nobler than the whole look of the face, like
-her in her prime, and reminding one of her son’s loving epithet, “my
-Juno.” The short-sighted inscription upon the slab yet includes her
-name.
-
-Never had an army of brilliant and requiring children a more excellent
-mother. “_Severa parens_,” her gentle George called her in his
-scholarly verses; and such she was, with the mingled sagacity and
-joyousness which made up her character. If we are to believe their
-own testimony, the leading members of her young family were of
-excessively peppery Cymric temperaments, and worthy to call out that
-“manlier part” of her which Dr. Donne, who had every opportunity of
-observing it in play, was so quick to praise. There is a passage in
-a letter of Sir Thomas Lacy, addressed to Edward Herbert, touching
-upon “the knowledge I had how ill you can digest the least indignity.”
-“Holy George Herbert” himself, in 1618, commended to his dear brother
-Henry the gospel of self-honoring: “It is the part of a poor spirit to
-undervalue himself and blush.” And physical courage went hand in hand
-with this blameless haughtiness of the Herberts, a pretty collateral
-proof of which may be adduced from a message of Sir Henry Jones to his
-brother-in-law, the other Henry just mentioned, concerning a gift for
-his little nephew. “If my cozen, William Herbert your sonne . . . be
-ready for the rideing of a horse, I will provide him with a Welch nagg
-that shall be as mettlesome as himself.” There is no doubt that all
-this racial fire was fostered by one woman. “Thou my root, and my most
-firm rock, O my mother!” George cried, long after in the _Parentalia_,
-aware that he owed to her his high ideals, and the strength of
-character which is born of self-discipline.
-
-“God gave her,” says one of her two devoted annalists, who we wish
-were not so brief and meagre of detail—“God gave her such a comeliness
-as though she was not proud of it, yet she was so content with it as
-not to go about to mend it by any art.” Her fortune was large, her
-benevolence wide-spreading. All the countryside knew her for the living
-representative of the ever-hospitable houses of Newport and Bromley.
-“She gave not on some great days,” continues Dr. Donne, “or at solemn
-goings abroad; but as God’s true almoners, the sun and moon, that pass
-on in a continual doing of good; as she received her daily bread from
-God, so daily she distributed it, and imparted it to others.” In these
-years of her wifehood and widowhood at Montgomery Castle (the “romancy
-place” dating from the eleventh century, and ruined, like the fine
-old house at High Ercall, during the Civil Wars), and afterwards at
-Oxford and London, she reared her happy crew of boys and girls in an
-air of generosity and honor; training them to habits of hardiness and
-simplicity, and to the equal relish of work and play. “Herself with
-her whole family (as a church in that elect lady’s house, to whom John
-wrote his second Epistle) did every Sabbath shut up the day at night
-with a general, with a cheerful singing of psalms.” One may guess at
-young Richard’s turmoil in-doors, and at the little Elizabeth’s soft,
-patient ways, and think of George (on Sundays at any rate) as the child
-of content, “the contesseration of elegances” worthy Archdeacon Oley
-called him.
-
-The fair and stately matron moving over them and among them was not
-without her prejudices. “I was once,” Edward testifies, “in danger of
-drowning, learning to swim. My mother, upon her blessing, charged me
-never to learn swimming; telling me, further, that she had learned of
-more drowned than saved by it.” Though the given reason failed to
-impress him, he adds, the commandment did; so that the accomplished
-Crichton of Cherbury, who understood alchemy, broke his way through
-metaphysics, and rode the Great Horse; the ambassador, author, and
-beau, to whom Ben Jonson sent his greeting:
-
-    “What man art thou that art so many men,
-     All-virtuous Herbert?”
-
-even he lacked, on principle, the science of keeping himself alive
-in an alien element, because it had been pronounced less risky to
-die outright! It was a pretty paradox, and one which sets down our
-high-minded Magdalen as quite feminine, quite human.
-
-Her Edward was matriculated in 1595 at University College, Oxford,[1]
-for which he seemed to retain no great partiality; he bequeathed his
-books, like a loyal Welshman, to Jesus College, instead, and his
-manuscripts to the Bodleian Library. In 1598, when he was little
-more than seventeen, he was wedded to his cousin Mary Herbert, of
-St. Gillian in Monmouthshire. Her age was one-and-twenty; she was an
-heiress, enjoined by her father’s will to marry a Herbert or forfeit
-her estates; she was also almost a philosopher. There was no wild
-affection on either side, but the marriage promised rather well, both
-persons having resources; and no real catastrophe befell either in
-after-life. Much as she desired the match for worldly motives, the
-chief promoter of it was too solicitous for her tall dreamer of a
-son, who underwent the pleasing peril of having Queen Bess clap him
-on the cheek, not to take the whole weight of conjugal direction on
-her own shoulders. Without undue officiousness, but with the masterly
-foresight of a shrewd saint, she moved to Oxford from Montgomery with
-her younger children and their tutors, in order to handle Mistress
-Herbert’s husband during his minority. “She continued there with him,”
-says Walton, in his _Life of George Herbert_, “and still kept him in
-a moderate awe of herself, and so much under her own eye as to see and
-converse with him daily; but she managed this power over him without
-any such rigid sourness as might make her company a torment to her
-child, but with such a sweetness and compliance with the recreations
-and pleasures of youth as did incline him willingly to spend much of
-his time in the company of his dear and careful mother.”
-
-It was during this stay that she contracted the chivalrous friendship
-which has embalmed her tranquil memory. Dr. John Donne (not ordained
-until 1614, and indeed not Dr. Donne then at all, but “Jack Donne,”
-his profaner self) had been at Cadiz with Essex, and had wandered over
-the face of Europe; and he came back, accidentally, to Oxford during
-the most troubled year of his early prime. It was no strange place to
-him,[2] who had been, at eleven, the Pico della Mirandola of Hart
-Hall, and whose relatives seem to have resided always in the town.
-There and then, however, he cast his bright eye upon Excellence, and in
-his own phrase,
-
-    “—dared love that, and say so, too,
-     And forget the He and She.”
-
-We can do no better than cite a celebrated and beautiful passage, once
-more from Walton: “This amity, begun at this time and place, was not
-an amity that polluted their souls, but an amity made up of a chain of
-suitable inclinations and virtues; an amity like that of St. Chrysostom
-to his dear and virtuous Olympias, whom, in his letters, he calls his
-saint; or an amity, indeed, more like that of St. Hierom to his Paula,
-whose affection to her was such that he turned poet in his old age, and
-then made her epitaph, wishing all his body were turned into tongues
-that he might declare her just praises to posterity.” How these words
-remind one of the sweet historic mention which Condivi gives to the
-relations between Vittoria Colonna and Michelangelo! The little English
-idyl of friendship and the great Italian one run parallel in much.
-
-Donne’s trenchant _Satires_, some of the earliest and very best in
-the language, were already written, and he was not without the hint
-of fame. Born in 1573, he was but eight years the senior of Edward
-Herbert, and not more than a dozen years the junior of Edward Herbert’s
-mother. To her two sons, also, who were to figure as men of letters,
-he was sincerely attached from the first, and had a marked and lasting
-influence on their minds. Donne had the superabundance of mental power
-which Mr. Minto has pointed out as the paradoxical cause of his failure
-to become a great poet. He was a three-storied soul, as the French say:
-a spirit of many sides and moods, a life-long dreamer of good and bad
-dreams. To his restless, incisive intelligence his contemporaries, with
-Jonson and Carew at their head, bowed in hyperboles of acclaim. He had
-a changeful conscience, often antagonized and often appeased. There
-was a strain in him of strong joy, for he was descended through his
-mother from pleasant John Heywood the dramatist, and from the father
-of that great and merry-hearted gentleman, Sir Thomas More. If ever
-man needed vitality to buoy him over sorrows heavy and vast, it was
-Donne in his “yeasting youth.” Thrown, through no fault but his own,
-from his old footholds of religion and occupation, and unable, despite
-his versatile and alert genius, to grind a steady living from the hard
-mills of the world, he was in the midst of a bitter plight when the
-friends worthy of him found a heavenly opportunity which they did not
-let go by, and made his acceptance of their favor a rich gift unto
-themselves. Foremost among these, besides Lady Herbert, were Sir Robert
-Drury of Drury Lane, and a kinsman, Sir Francis Woolly, of Pirford,
-Surrey, fated to die in his youth, both of whom gave the Donnes, for
-some nine consecutive years, the use of their princely houses. John
-Donne had been in the service of the Chancellor, Lord Ellesmere,
-and lost place and purse by the opposition to his marriage with his
-“_lectissima dilectissimaque_,” Anne More, who was Lady Ellesmere’s
-niece, the daughter of Sir George More of Loxly, Lieutenant of the
-Tower, and probably a distant cousin of his own. No reverses, however,
-could beat the pathetic cheer out of him. “Anne Donne,[3] undone,” was
-one of his inveterate teary jests over the state of things at home. He
-wrote once, with sickness, poverty, and despair at his elbow: “If God
-should ease us with burials, I know not how to perform even that. But I
-flatter myself that I am dying, too, for I cannot waste faster than by
-such griefs.” Five of his twelve children passed before their father to
-the grave, the good domestic daughter Constance upholding him always,
-and keeping the house together. But just as hope dawned with his
-appointment to the Lectureship of Lincoln’s Inn, heavenward suddenly,
-with her youngest-born, in 1617, went his dear and faithful wife, whom
-he laid to rest in St. Clement Danes.
-
-About the time when the remorseful old queen died disdainfully on her
-chamber-floor at Richmond, the necessities of this family called for
-daily succors, and with a simple and noble delicacy they were supplied.
-Nor did they cease. Magdalen Herbert was a “bountiful benefactor,”
-Donne “as grateful an acknowledger.” His first letter to her from
-Mitcham in Surrey, dated July 10, 1607, is made up of terse, tender
-thanks, in his heart’s own odd language. He sends her an enclosure of
-sonnets and hymns, “lost to us,” says Walton, movingly, “but doubtless
-they were such as they two now sing in heaven.” Dr. Grosart, with a
-great show of justice, claims that the sequence called _La Corona_, and
-familiar to latter-day readers, are the identical sonnets passed from
-one to the other. During this same month of July we know that, paying a
-call in his “London, plaguey London,” and finding his friend abroad,[4]
-Dr. Donne consoled himself by leaving a courtliest message: “Your
-memory is a state-cloth and presence which I reverence, though you be
-away;” and went back after to his “sallads and onions” at Mitcham, or
-to his solitary lodgings near Whitehall.
-
-The attachment, close and deferent on both sides, was continued without
-a breach, and with the intention, at least, of “almost daily letters.”
-Thoreau, quoting Chaucer, so saluted Mrs. Emerson: “You have helped
-to keep my life on loft.” No meaner service than this was his dear
-lady’s to John Donne, often heretofore astray in the slough of doubt
-and dissipation; she fed more than his little children, clothed more
-than his body, and fostered anew in him that faith in humanity which
-is the well-spring of good works. He was not a poet of Leigh Hunt’s
-innocent temperament, who could accept benefits gladly and gracefully
-from any appreciator; his soul dwelt too remote and proud in her
-accustomed citadels. But this loving help, thrust upon him, he took
-with dignity, and after 1621, when he was able, in his own person, to
-befriend others, he gave back gallantly to mankind the blessings he
-once received from two or three. It was something for Magdalen Herbert
-to have saved a master-name to English letters, and kept in his unique
-place the poet, interesting beyond many, whose fantastic but real force
-swayed generations of thinking and singing men; it was something, also,
-to have won in return the words which were his gold coin of payment.
-Nowhere is Donne’s sentiment more genuine, his workmanship more happy
-and less complex, than in the verses dedicated to her blameless
-name. They have a lucidity unsurpassed among the yet straightforward
-lyrics of their day. Drayton’s self, who died in the same year with
-Donne, might have addressed to the lady of Eyton so much of his noble
-extravagance;
-
-    “Queens hereafter shall be glad to live
-     Upon the alms of thy superfluous praise.”
-
-Yet in these eulogies, as in most of the graver contemporaneous poems
-of the sort, there is little personality to be detected; the homage
-has rather a floating outline, an unapproaching music, exquisite and
-awed. Donne gives, sometimes, the large Elizabethan measure:
-
-    “Is there any good which is not she?”
-
-In the so-called _Elegy, The Autumnal_, written on leaving Oxford, he
-starts off with a well-known cherishable strophe:
-
-    “No spring nor summer beauty hath such grace
-     As I have seen in one autumnal face.”
-
-The entire poem is a monody on the encroachments of years, and neatly
-chronological:
-
-    “If we love things long-sought, age is a thing
-     Which we are fifty years in compassing;
-     If transitory things, which soon decay,
-     Age must be loveliest at the latest day.”
-
-It strikes the modern ear as maladroit enough that a woman in her yet
-sunshiny forties, and a most comely woman to boot, should have required
-prosody’s ingenious excuses for wrinkles and kindred damages. Was life
-so hard as that in “the spacious days”? Shakespeare, in agreement with
-Horace, had already reminded his handsome “Will” of the pitiless and
-too expeditious hour,
-
-    “When forty winters shall besiege thy brow,
-     And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field!”
-
-which also seems, to a nice historical sense, somewhat staggering. The
-close of Donne’s little homily is perfect, and full of the winning
-melancholy which was part of his birthright in art, whenever he allowed
-himself direct and homely expression:
-
-                            “May still
-    My love descend! and journey down the hill,
-    Not panting after growing beauties; so
-    I shall ebb on with them who homeward go.”
-
-Such was John Donne’s first known tribute to his friend. She must have
-been early and thoroughly familiar with his manuscripts, which were
-passed about freely, Dr. Grosart thinks, prior to 1613, and which
-burned what Massinger would call “no adulterate incense” to herself.
-Her bays are to be gleaned off many a tree, and she must have cast a
-frequent influence on Donne’s work, which is not traceable now. He
-seems to have had a Crashaw-like devotion to the Christian saint whose
-inheritance
-
-    “Bethina was, and jointure Magdalo,”
-
-not unconnected with the fact that some one else was Magdalen also;
-never does he tire of dwelling on the coincidence and the difference.
-In one of his quaintly moralizing songs, he goes seeking a “true-love”
-primrose, where but on Montgomery Hill! for he is hers, by all
-chivalrous tokens, as much as he may be. Again he cites, and almost
-with humor:
-
-                  “that perplexing eye
-    Which equally claims love and reverence.”
-
-And his platonics make their honorable challenge at the end of some
-fine lines:
-
-    “So much do I love her choice, that I
-     Would fain love him that shall be loved of her!”
-
-There was prescience in that couplet. As early, at least, as 1607-8,
-the widow’s long privacy ended, probably while she was at her “howse
-at Charing Cross,” watching over the progress of her son George at
-Westminster School; and he that was “loved of her” was the grandson of
-the last Lord Latimer of the Nevilles, junior brother of a nobleman
-who perished with Essex in 1602, and brother and heir of that Sir
-Henry Danvers who was created Earl of Danby in 1625 for his services
-in Ireland, and who literally left a green memory as the founder of
-the pleasant Physic Gardens at Oxford. The name of Danvers, the kindly
-step-father, is one of the noteworthy omissions of Lord Herbert of
-Cherbury’s _Autobiography_. But George Herbert was devoted to him,
-as his many letters show, and turned to him, never in vain, during
-his restless years at Cambridge; and into his circle of relatives,
-with romantic suddenness, he afterwards married. Sir John Danvers, of
-Dauntsey, Wilts, was twenty years younger than his wife. It is worth
-while to quote the very deft and courtly statement of the case made at
-the last by Dr. Donne: “The natural endowments of her person were such
-as had their part in drawing and fixing the affections of such a person
-as by his birth and youth and interest in great favors at court, and
-legal proximity to great possessions in the world, might justly have
-promised him acceptance in what family soever, or upon what person
-soever, he had directed. . . . He placed them here, neither diverted
-thence, nor repented since. For as the well-tuning of an instrument
-makes higher and lower strings of one sound, so the inequality of their
-years was thus reduced to an evenness, that she had a cheerfulness
-agreeable to his youth, and he had a sober staidness conformable to her
-more advanced years. So that I would not consider her at so much more
-than forty, nor him at so much less than thirty, at that time; but as
-their persons were made one and their fortunes made one by marriage,
-so I would put their years into one number, and finding a sixty
-between them, think them thirty apiece; for as twins of one hour they
-lived.”[5]
-
-In the August of 1607, a masque by John Marston was given in the now
-ruined castle of Ashby-de-la-Zouch, eighteen miles from Leicester, as
-an entertainment devised by Lord Huntingdon and his young wife, the
-Lady Elizabeth Stanley, to welcome her mother, Alice, Countess-Dowager
-of Derby,[6] “the first night of her honor’s arrival at the house of
-Ashby.” Fourteen noble ladies took part in the masque, and among them
-was “Mris Da’vers.” The name may, perhaps, be recognized as that of the
-subject of this sketch, for Sir John Danvers was not knighted until the
-following year; and it has been so recognized by interested scholars
-who have searched Nichols’s _Progresses of James I_. And yet we cannot
-be too sure that we have her before us, in the wreaths and picturesque
-draperies of the amateur stage; for there was another Mistress Da’vers
-at court, whose purported letter, dated February 3, 1613, signed with
-her confusing Christian names of “Mary Magdaline,” gave great trouble,
-thirty years ago, to the experts of the Camden Society. Besides, a
-letter of the good gossipy Chamberlain, dated March 3, 1608-9, mentions
-as if it were then a piece of fresh news: “Young Davers is likewise
-wedded to the widow Herbert, Sir Edward’s mother, of more than twice
-his age.” This would seem to preclude the possibility of the fair
-masquer being the same person.
-
-The mother of many Herberts, the “more than forty” bride, was by
-nature a home-keeping character. Among the correspondence relating
-to Lord Herbert of Cherbury, privately printed in 1886 by the Earl
-of Powis, are a few pages which give us invaluable glimpses of the
-London household. Lady Danvers’s eldest son, who set off upon his
-travels soon after her second marriage, and who applied himself
-vigorously to the various diversions of body and mind catalogued
-in the _Autobiography_, found himself often pinched for money. In
-such a strait, not unfamiliar to other fine gentlemen of his day, he
-invariably appealed to the services of the step-father who was his
-junior, in England. The latter, writing how “wee are all some what
-after the olde manner, and doe hartely wish you well,” seems to have
-busied himself to some avail, in concert with his brother-in-law, Sir
-Francis Newport (the first Lord Newport), in securing letters of credit
-to Milan, Turin, the Netherlands, and elsewhere, and in explaining at
-length, in his long involved sentences, how matters could be bettered.
-Whether or not the absent Knight of the Bath had reason to suspect Sir
-John’s disinterested action when it came to the handling of pounds
-and pence, he does not seem, then or after, to have burdened him with
-any great harvest of thanks. But Sir John’s faithful wife knew how to
-defend him, in a script of May 12, 1615, which may be quoted precisely
-as it stands in the Herbert papers.
-
-    “To my best beloved sonn, S’r Edward Herbert, Knight,
-        “My deare Sonn,
-
-                        it is straunge to me to here you
-    to complayne of want of care of you in your absence
-    when my thoughts are seldom removed from you which
-    must assuredly set me aworkinge of any thinge may doe
-    you good, & for writinge the one of us yf not both
-    never let messenges pass without letter, your stay
-    abroad is so short in any one place & we so unhappy in
-    givinge you contentment as our letters com not to your
-    hands which we are sorry for. And to tel you further
-    of S’r John Da’vers Love which I dare sweare is to no
-    man more, he is & hath beene so careful to keep you
-    from lake of money now you are abroad as your Baylife
-    faylinge payment as they continually doe & pay no man,
-    he goeth to your Merchaunt, offers him self & all the
-    powers he can make to supply you as your occasions may
-    require, mistake him not, but beleeve me there was
-    never a tenderer hart or a lovinger minde in any man
-    then is in him towards you who have power to com’aund
-    him & all that is his. Now for your Baylifs I must
-    tell you they have not yet payed your brothers all
-    their Anuities due at Midsom’er past & but half due
-    at Christmas last and no news of the rest, this yf
-    advauntage were taken might be preiuditiall to you and
-    it is ill for your Brothers & very ill you have such
-    officers.
-
-    “I hope it will bringe you home & that is all the good
-    can com of this. your sister Johnes hath long beene
-    sicke & within this 8 dayes hath brought a boy she is
-    so weake as she is much feared by those aboute her. my
-    Lady Vachell lyes now adyeinge the bell hath twice gone
-    for her. your wife & sweet children are well & herein
-    I send you little Florence letter to see what comfort
-    you may have of your deare children, let them, my Dear
-    sonn, draw you home & affoorde them your care and me
-    your comfort that desire more to see you then I desire
-    any thinge ells in the world, and now I end with my
-    dayly prayer for your health and safe retorne to Your
-    ever lovinge mother,
-
-                                         Magd: Da’vers.
-
-    “I have received the Pattent of your Br: William, & S’r
-    John hath beene with the ambassatore who stayes for S’r
-    James Sandaline[7] his cominge.”
-
-A sympathizing reader, aware of sequences, may wonder whence Sir John
-drew “all the powers he can make”! The dignified letter, with its
-undulating syntax and thrifty punctuation, harmonizes with all we
-know of this delightful woman, who could so reproach what she deemed
-a shortcoming, without a touch of temper. How affectionate is the
-reference to the “little Florence” who died young, and to the other
-children, sufficiently precious to all that household, except to the
-wool-gathering chevalier their father, far away! Their innocent faces
-peer again through a sweet postscript of their grand-uncle: (“Dick
-is here, Ned and Bettye at Haughmond,”) written in the winter, from
-Eyton, to the truant at the Hague.[8] This same genial Sir Francis
-Newport, “imoderately desyring to see you,” confides to his nephew,
-during what he complains of as “a verye drye and hott time”[9] for
-Shropshire farmers, that “mye syster your mother is confident to take
-a iourney into these pts this somer, the rather, I think, because yo’r
-brother Vaugh’n is dead & if yo’ have a willing harte you maye come
-tyme enough to acco’pany her heare, & would not then the companye bee
-much the better?” But we fear the little excursion never came off.
-Edward Herbert’s next visit to his home, presumably after a four-years’
-absence, was in 1619; and in May of that year he accepted the office
-of Ambassador to France, and spread his ready wing again to the
-Continent. And the _Athenæ Oxoniensis_ will not let us forget that the
-too spirited envoy had to be temporarily recalled in 1621, because he
-had “irreverently treated” De Luynes, the powerful but good-for-nothing
-Constable of France. It is not insignificant that this was the year in
-which George Herbert wrote to his mother in one of his consoling moods,
-bidding her be of good cheer, albeit her health and wealth were gone,
-and the conduct of her children was not very satisfying!
-
-We know that Lady Danvers had the “honor, love, obedience, troops of
-friends” which became her, and that she lost none of her influence,
-none of her serene charm. Her poet was much with her in his advancing
-age. In July, 1625, while the plague was raging in London, Donne
-reminded Sir Henry Wotton of the leisure he enjoyed, golden as
-Cicero’s, by dating his letter “from S’r John Davor’s house at Chelsey,
-of w’ich house & my Lord Carlil’s at Hanworth I make up my Tusculum.”
-Many a peaceful evening must they have passed upon the terraces,
-within sound of the solemn songs always dear to both. Visitors yet
-more illustrious came there from the city; for the noble hostess
-had once the privilege of reviving the great Lord Bacon,[10] who
-had fainted in her garden. We learn, with sympathy, that “sickness,
-in the declination of her years, had opened her to an overflowing
-of melancholy; not that she ever lay under that water, but yet had,
-sometimes, some high tides of it.” Death chose Dr. Donne’s ministering
-angel before him, after thirty years of mutual fealty. Her restless son
-Edward, now at home, was already eminent, and wearing his little Irish
-title of Baron Castleisland; her thoughtful Charles was long dead; her
-brother, also, was no more; her daughters were matrons, and dwelling in
-prosperity. With but one unfulfilled wish, that of seeing her favorite
-George married and in holy orders,[11] and after a life which left a
-wake of sunshine behind it in the world, very patiently and hopefully
-Magdalen Newport, Lady Danvers, entered upon eternity, in the early
-June of 1627. On the eighth day of the month, in St. Luke’s, the parish
-church of Chelsea, she was buried:
-
-    “Old age with snow-bright hair, and folded palm,”
-
-the final earthly glimpse of her still traditionally beautiful. On the
-first of July her faithful liegeman, now Dean of St. Paul’s and Vicar
-of St. Dunstan-in-the-West, preached her funeral sermon there, before
-a crowd of the great ones of London, the clergy, and the poor. Izaak
-Walton’s kind face looked up from a near pew, whence he saw Dr. Donne’s
-tears, and felt his breaking voice, the voice of one who did not belie
-his friend, nigh the end of his own pilgrimage. In present grief and
-among graver memories, he had the true perception not to forget how
-joyous she had been. “She died,” he said, “without any change of
-countenance or posture, without any struggling, any disorder, . . . and
-expected that which she hath received: God’s physic and God’s music,
-a Christianly death. . . . She was eyes to the blind, and feet to the
-lame, . . . naturally cheerful and merry, and loving facetiousness and
-sharpness of wit.” His own fund of mirth and strength was fast going;
-and a haunting line of his youth,
-
-    “And all my pleasures are like yesterday,”
-
-must have reverted to him many and many a time. Morbid and persistent
-thoughts beset him from this hour, probably, more than ever, until
-he had the effigy of himself, painted as he was, laid in his failing
-sight;[12] morbid and persistent thoughts of the ruin which befalls the
-bright bodies of humanity, sometimes surging up in his loneliness, and
-crowding out the better vision which yet may “grace us in the disgrace
-of death.” His inward eye was drawn strongly to his friend’s sepulchre,
-sealed and sombre before him, and to what had been her, “going into
-dust now almost a month of days, almost a lunar year . . . which, while
-I speak, is mouldering and crumbling into less and less dust.” But he
-ended in a wholesomer strain, subdued and calm: “This good soul being
-thus laid down to sleep in His peace, ‘I charge you, O daughters of
-Jerusalem, that ye wake her not!’”
-
-The rare little duodecimo which contains Lady Danvers’s funeral sermon
-was printed soon after, “together with other Commemorations of Her, by
-her Sonne G. Herbert,” and offered to the public at the Golden Lion in
-Paul’s Churchyard. The commemorations are in Greek and Latin. Strangely
-enough, nowhere is the sweet and sage poet of _The Temple_ so set upon
-his prosody, so given to awkward pagan conceits, so out of tune with
-the ideals of classic diction. But he, who tenderly loved his mother,
-has given to us, in the _Memoriæ Matris Sacrum_, several precious
-personal fragments, and one more precious whole picture of daily habits
-in the lines beginning _Corneliæ sanctæ_: her morning prayer, her bath,
-and the plaiting of her glossy hair; her housewifely cares, her fit
-replies, her writing to her friends, her passion for music, her gentle
-helpfulness; the long felicity of a glad and stainless life,
-
-    “Quicquid habet tellus, quicquid et astra, fruens.”
-
-Dr. Donne died in 1631, whatever was yet of earth in his spirit healed
-and chastened by long pain. His last remembrance to some he loved
-was his own seal of Christ on the Anchor, “engraven very small on
-heliotropium stones, and set in gold, for rings.” Many of those to
-whom his heart would have turned, the “autumnal beauty” scarce second
-among them, had preceded him out of England. But in travelling towards
-his Maker, he had that other sacred hope to “ebb on with them,” and
-gloriously overtake them, as he traced the epitaph which covered
-him in old St. Paul’s: “_Hic licet in occiduo cinere, aspicit eum
-cujus nomen est Oriens_.” The tie between himself and her was not
-unremembered in the next generation; for we find John Donne the younger
-dedicating his father’s posthumous work to Francis, Lord Newport,
-and when making his will, in 1662, bequeathing also to the same Lord
-Newport “the picture of St. Anthony in a round frame.” And thus, in a
-revived fragrance, the annals of true friendship close.
-
-These rapid, ragged strokes of a pen make the only possible biography
-of Lady Danvers. When Walton wrote of her, he had the entire
-correspondence with Dr. Donne before him.[13] “There were sacred
-endearments betwixt these two excellent persons,” he assures us, but
-disappointingly hurries on into the highway of his subject. It is
-curious that it seems impossible now to trace these breathing relics,
-or others from the same source; for George Herbert, in the second
-elegy of the _Parentalia_, has much to say, and very sweetly, of the
-industry of his mother’s “white right hand,” and of the “many and most
-notable letters, flying over all the world.” Much detail is utterly
-lost which men who agree with Prosper Mérimée that all Thucydides
-would not be worth an authentic memoir of Aspasia, or even of one of
-the slaves of Pericles, might be glad to remember. A copy of a song,
-a reminiscence of the glow and stir of the days through which she
-moved, a guess through a mist at the blond head,[14] the half-imperious
-carriage, the open hand, as she went her ways, like Dante’s lovely
-lady, _sentendosi laudare_,—these are all we have of the daughter of
-England’s golden age. It would be easy, were it also just, to throw
-a dash of color into her shadowy history. One would like to verify
-the scene at Eyton, while the news of the coming Armada roused the
-lion in Drake, and struck terror into the Devon towns; and to hear the
-young wife, with three lisping Herberts at her knee, beguile them with
-mellow contralto snatches of a Robin Hood ballad, or with the sweet
-yesterday’s tale of Zutphen, where their country’s dearest gave his
-cup of water to a dying comrade. A decade later, before their handsome
-bluff father, her other healthful boys stood up to wrestle, and twang
-their arrows at forty paces; or a rosy daughter stole to his side, and
-asked him of mishaps in Ireland, or of the giant laughter bubbling
-from the “oracle of Apollo” in a London street. It is to be believed
-that one who watched events through the insurrection of Essex, through
-Raleigh’s dramatic trial, reprieve, and execution, through the national
-mourning for the Prince of Wales, through the fever for colonization,
-the savage sea-fights, the great intrigues in behalf of the Queen of
-Scots, the religious divisions, the muttering parliamentary thunders,
-the stress and heat of the exciting dawn of the seventeenth century,
-was not unmindful of all it meant to be alive, there and then. Magdalen
-Newport’s girlhood fell on Lyly’s _Euphues_, fresh from the printers;
-the _Arcadia_ made the talk of Oxford, in her prime; the dusky splendor
-of Marlowe’s _Faustus_ was abroad before her second marriage. She was,
-surely, aware of Shakespeare, and of the wonder-folio of 1623; of the
-newest delighting madrigals and antiphons set forth by one Robert
-Jones, when every soul in England had the gift of music; of rascal
-Robert Greene’s lovable lyrics, of Wyatt’s, Campion’s, and Drayton’s.
-She wrote no verses, indeed, but her familiars wrote them; her every
-step jostled a Muse. We may assume that no growth nor loss in literary
-circles escaped that tender “perplexing eye.” Perhaps it glistened from
-a bench, in the pioneer British theatre, on the actors of _Volpone_,
-and followed silently, behind the royal group, the first mincings
-of the first dear Fool in _King Lear_, one day-after-Christmas at
-Whitehall. Last of all, for whim’s sake, how any sociologist would
-enjoy having the honest opinion of young Lady Herbert, or that of
-little Mistress Donne, concerning the person they could but thank and
-praise! _Utinam vivisset Pepys!_ It is a cheat of history that it
-preserves no clearer tint or trace of this chosen passer-by. Such, in
-truth, she was, and the quiet vanishing name clings to her: the woman
-of durable gladness, happily born and taught, like the soul whereof Sir
-Henry Wotton, who must have known her well, made his immortal song.
-
-Of the gracious figure of Sir John Danvers we may be said to lose
-sight; for he seems less gracious, as by a Hindoo trick, as soon as
-it is written that his wife departed unto her reward. Comment on
-his character is equal comment upon hers, and adds new force to the
-classic episode of a lady philanthropist espousing a ne’er-do-weel and
-a featherbrain. Aubrey, always happy over a little ultra-contemporary
-gossip, calls it “a disagreeable match,” disappointing to the
-bridegroom’s kindred; but adds that “he married her for love of her
-wit.” Now, wit is an admirable magnet, but it is to be suspected that
-there was also, and in the immediate vicinity, “metal more attractive,”
-as Hamlet says. In the Chelsea parish-books is an entry, the first of
-its kind, certifying that Sir John Danvers had settled his account with
-“the poore,” a matter of thirty pounds’ loan (in which the vicar must
-have connived), for the year ending in January of 1628. If the payment
-were, by any hap, in advance, it may have fallen in Lady Danvers’s own
-lifetime; and if so, it is quite as likely that she paid it, with an
-admonition! Her “high tides of melancholy,” of whose true cause she
-certainly would not have complained to Dr. Donne, had something to
-do with this young spendthrift, who must have had his wheedling way,
-sooner or later, with such of her ample revenues as were yet extant.
-Perhaps Lord Herbert of Cherbury was both shrewd and charitable, in
-suppressing mention of his new relative.[15] The longer one looks into
-the matter, the less curious seems his unexplained silence concerning
-this late graft of a family hitherto always respectable and always
-loyal.
-
-There are gleams of subsequent private history in the tell-tale records
-at Chelsea. We are not incurably astonished to learn that as early as
-May of 1629 was christened Elizabeth, daughter of Sir John Danvers
-and Elizabeth his wife. This Lady Elizabeth, arriving providentially
-with her Dauntsey wealth, having borne him four children, died, as
-did his mother, in 1636; and left him even as she found him, none too
-monogamous. In 1648 Sir John Danvers again appeared at the venerable
-altars where his first saint never had a memorial, loving, honoring,
-and cherishing a Mrs. Grace Hewes, Hawes, or Hewet, of Kemerton in
-Gloucestershire, and, as it is to be surmised, leading her tame
-fortune by a ribbon. His debts and difficulties, not of one but of all
-time, sprout perennially in the registers. His indefatigable name,
-oftener than any rival’s whatsoever, figures as borrowing and paying
-interest on a forty-pound note, which, like a Hydra-head, was always
-forthcoming so soon as it was demolished. This disgraceful business was
-the man’s chief concern: for the older he grew the deeper and deeper
-he sank into entanglements, particularly after the death of the King.
-It was never doubted, in his day, but that this was a judgment on the
-former Gentleman Usher who affixed hand and seal to the warrant of his
-sovereign’s execution.[16] His own family, it is said, as well as the
-royalist Herberts and Newports, dropped his acquaintance; and who knows
-whether Mrs. Grace Hewet was faithful? At his favorite Chelsea, in the
-April of 1655, and in about the seventy-fourth year of his age, Sir
-John Danvers ended his career by more conventional agencies than the
-rope and the knife, which might have befallen him in the Stuart triumph
-of the morrow. His manor fell an immediate forfeit to the crown. In
-1661, the dead republican was attainted, and all of his estate which
-was unprotected was declared regal booty. The year before his own
-burial at Dauntsey he laid there, “to the great grief of all good men,”
-the body of his elder son Henry, who had just attained his majority.
-The Earl of Danby had died, “full of honors, wounds, and days,” in
-1643, while this Henry, his nephew, was still a hopeful child; and on
-him alone he had taken pains to settle his possessions. But Henry, in
-turn, was persuaded to bequeath the major part of them to his father’s
-ever-gaping pocket, the remainder reverting to one of his two surviving
-sisters. The third Lady Danvers, who lived until 1678, had also a son
-Charles,[17] who petitioned the crown for his paternal rights, but
-died in old age, with neither income nor issue.
-
-Clarendon quietly indicts Sir John Danvers as a “proud, formal, weak
-man,” such as Cromwell “employed and contemned at once.” George Bate
-gives him a harder character, saying that he “proved his brother to be
-a delinquent in the Rump Parliament, whereby he might overthrow his
-will, and so compass the estate himself. He sided with the sectarian
-party, was one of the King’s judges, and lived afterwards some years
-in his sin, without repentance.” But the same accuser adds the saving
-fact that Dr. Thomas Fuller, like Aubrey, was Sir John’s friend, and,
-by his desire, preached many times at Chelsea, “where, I am sure, he
-was instructed to repent of his misguided and wicked consultations in
-having to do with the murther of that just man.” One half surmises
-that had the preliminaries of the great struggle occurred in her time
-Magdalen Herbert’s rather austere and advanced standards of right would
-have stood it out, despite her traditions, for the Commons against
-_Carolus Agnus_.[18] But that would have been a very different matter
-from sharing the feelings of the crude advocates of revolution and
-regicide. What a misconception of her spotless motives must she have
-borne, had others found her in agreement with her vagabond lord, who
-treated politics as he treated the sacrament of matrimony, purely as a
-makeshift and a speculation!
-
-He was no raw-head-and-bloody-bones, this Roderigo-like Briton who won
-the approval of Lord Bacon, and whom George Wither thanks for “those
-pleasurable refreshments often vouchsafed”; and whom very different
-men, such as George Herbert and Walton[19] and peaceable Fuller loved.
-He was a comely creature of some parts, a luckless worldling anxious
-to feather his own nest, and driven by timidity and the desire of gain
-into treacheries against himself. His short, thin, and “fayre bodie,”
-common, as George Herbert would have us imply, to all who bore his
-name, his elegance, his hospitality, and his devotedness to his elderly
-wife, carried him off handsomely in the eyes of her jealous circle. His
-house in Chelsea, commemorated now by Danvers Street, adjoined that
-which had been Sir Thomas More’s, and was presumably a part of the same
-estate. All around it, and due to its master’s genuine enthusiasm, lay
-the first Italian garden planted in England; and there, rolling towards
-the Thames, were the long glowing flower-beds and green orchard-alleys,
-which were also the “_horti deliciæ dominæ_” recalled thrice in the
-music of filial sorrow. This home of Magdalen Danvers was pulled down,
-and built over, in 1716. Within its unfallen walls, where she spent
-her serene married life, and where she died, she had time to think,
-nevertheless, that she stood, towards evening, in the ways of folly,
-and that hers was one of those little incipient domestic tragedies
-which must always look amusing, even to a friend.
-
-FOOTNOTES:
-
-[1] Walton confuses this Edward Herbert with a namesake entered at
-Queen’s College; and he follows the erring dates of the _Autobiography
-of Lord Herbert of Cherbury_. The boy’s age is correctly given as
-fourteen in the college registers.
-
-[2] Donne had been in residence at both Universities, but took no
-degree at either, as he had scruples against accepting the conditions
-imposed. He was at that time, and until about 1593, like his parents, a
-Catholic. His father was of Welsh descent: a fact which may have borne
-its share in attracting him towards the Herberts.
-
-[3] Anne Donne, it may be remarked, was also the name of Cowper’s
-mother.
-
-[4] Sir Richard Baker’s _Chronicle_, 1684, mentions Dr. Donne as one
-of his “heroic Grecians,” and adds, in the same breath, that he was “a
-great visitor of ladies.”
-
-[5] Dr. Donne’s conceit about the ages of his friends is better handled
-in the young Cartwright’s
-
-“Chloe, why wish you that your years,”
-
-a little later. It is not impossible that Cartwright, an Oxonian and an
-observer, may have drawn upon Donne’s report of this very wedding for
-his charming and ingenious lyric.
-
-[6] This august personage was one of the Spencers of Althorp. At
-this time she had been for six years the wife of her second husband,
-the Lord Keeper Egerton, although retaining the magnificent title of
-her widowhood. At their estate of Harefield in Middlesex, Milton’s
-_Arcades_ was afterwards given, and it will be remembered what fine
-compliments to the then aged countess-dowager figure in its opening
-verses. Spenser’s _Teares of the Muses_ had been dedicated to her, in
-her prime, and she was the Amaryllis “highest in degree” of his _Colin
-Clout’s Come Home Again_.
-
-[7] Sir James Sandelyn, Sandalo, or Sandilands (who cuts his finest
-figure as Jacobus Sandilandius in _The Muses’ Welcome_) was appointed
-Maistre d’Hostel to the beloved and beautiful Princess Elizabeth on
-her marriage to Frederic, Count Palatine of the Rhine, afterwards
-King of Bohemia, in 1612. As Sir James’s name is down on the lists of
-the Exchequer for a gift in 1615, and as his little son Richard was
-baptized in Deptford Church two months after the date of Lady Danvers’s
-letter, we may conclude that he came back to England just when the
-“ambassatore” expected him.
-
-[8] Edward Herbert served as a volunteer in the campaign of 1614-15
-in the Netherlands, under the Prince of Orange. Richard Herbert, here
-mentioned, was his eldest son, a future Cavalier and captain of a troop
-of horse in the Civil Wars; Edward was the baby, and “Bettye” the child
-Beatrice, destined, like her sister, to a short life.
-
-[9] This 1614-15 was an eccentric and un-English year throughout. The
-winter signalized itself by the Great Snow; “_frigus intensum_,” as
-Camden says, “_et nix copiosissima_.”
-
-[10] Lord Bacon dedicated to Edward Herbert, “the father of English
-deists,” his very flat translation of the Psalms! George wrote three
-Latin poems in his honor, one being upon the occasion of his death.
-
-[11] He was, in July of 1626, ordained deacon, and prebendary of Layton
-Ecclesia in Huntingdonshire. Readers of Walton will remember how his
-dear mother invited him to commit simony on that occasion.
-
-[12] The standing marble figure in a winding-sheet which Dr. King had
-modelled upon this strange painting on wood, may yet be seen in the
-south ambulatory of the choir of St. Paul’s; almost the only relic
-saved from the old cathedral which perished in the Great Fire of 1666.
-It is not only of unique interest, but of considerable artistic beauty,
-and “seems to breathe faintly,” as Sir Henry Wotton said of it.
-
-[13] Dr. Donne’s papers were bequeathed to Dr. Henry King, the
-poet-Bishop of Chichester, then residentiary of St. Paul’s. The “find”
-were a precious one, if they yet survive.
-
-[14] The half-romantic reference, which occurs more than once in
-Donne’s poems, to his own long-dead arm which still shall keep
-
-“The bracelet of bright hair about the bone,”—
-
-has it nothing to do with this blond head? _Honi soit qui mal y pense._
-The internal evidences in _The Relic_, with its mention of St. Mary
-Magdalen, and its boast of purest friendship, and the roguery of the
-closing line in _The Funeral_, are somewhat strong, nevertheless.
-
-[15] The famous _Autobiography_, indeed, boldly assures posterity
-that Lady Herbert, after 1597, “continued unmarried,” and, in brief,
-“was the woman Dr. Donne hath described her.” The acknowledgment of
-the accuracy of that funeral sermon, containing, as it does, its very
-specific Danvers passages, is in our fearless philosopher’s best style.
-
-[16] There was afterwards, in France, a Gentleman of the Bedchamber who
-had other notions. “Gratitude,” said Thierry to his executioner in the
-court-yard of the Abbaye—“gratitude has no opinions. I am leal to my
-master.”
-
-[17] An elder Charles, son of the Lady Elizabeth Danvers, was baptized
-in 1632, and must have died early.
-
-[18] Edward Herbert sided eventually with the Parliament, which
-indemnified him for the burning and sacking of Montgomery Castle.
-
-[19] The six very innocent, cheerful, pious ten-syllable stanzas,
-attributed in _The Complete Angler_ to “another angler, Jo. Davors,
-Esq.,” are not, it is hardly necessary to add, from our scapegrace’s
-pen. He ceased to be “Jo. Davors, Esq.,” when Walton was fourteen years
-old.
-
-
-
-
-
-II
-
-HENRY VAUGHAN
-
-1621-1695
-
-
-IN his own person, Henry Vaughan left no trace in society. His life
-seemed to slip by like the running water on which he was forever gazing
-and moralizing, and his memory met early with the fate which he hardly
-foresaw. Descended from the royal chiefs of southern Wales whom Tacitus
-mentions, and whose abode, in the day of Roman domination, was in the
-district called Siluria,[20] he called himself the Silurist upon his
-title-pages; and he keeps the distinctive name in the humblest of
-epitaphs, close by his home in the glorious valley of the Usk and the
-little Honddu, under the shadow of Tretower, the ruined castle of his
-race, and of Pen-y-Fan and his kindred peaks. What we know of him
-is a sort of pastoral: how he was born, the son of a poor gentleman,
-in 1621, at Newton St. Bridget, in the old house yet asleep on the
-road between Brecon and Crickhowel; how he went up to Oxford, Laud’s
-Oxford, with Thomas, his twin, as a boy of sixteen, to be entered at
-Jesus College;[21] how he took his degree (just where and when no one
-can discover), and came back, after a London revel, to be the village
-physician, though he was meant for the law, in what had become his
-brother’s parish of Llansantffraed; to write books full of sequestered
-beauty, to watch the most tragic of wars, to look into the faces of
-love and loss, and to spend his thoughtful age on the bowery banks of
-the river he had always known, his _Isca parens florum_, to which
-he consecrated many a sweet English line. And the ripple of the not
-unthankful Usk was “distinctly audible over its pebbles,” as was the
-Tweed to the failing sense of Sir Walter, in the room where Henry
-Vaughan drew his last breath, on St. George’s day, April 23, 1695. He
-died exactly seventy-nine years after Shakespeare, exactly one hundred
-and fifty-five years before Wordsworth.
-
-Circumstances had their way with him, as with most poets. He knew
-the touch of disappointment and renunciation, not only in life, but
-in his civic hopes and in his art. He broke his career in twain, and
-began over, before he had passed thirty; and he showed great æsthetic
-discretion, as well as disinterestedness, in replacing his graceful
-early verses by the deep dedications of his prime. Religious faith and
-meditation seem so much part of his innermost nature, it is a little
-difficult to remember that Vaughan considered himself a brand snatched
-from the burning, a lawless Cavalier brought by the best of chances
-to the quiet life, and the feet of the moral Muse. He suffered most
-of the time between 1643 and 1651 from a sorely protracted and nearly
-fatal illness; and during its progress his wife and his dearest friends
-were taken from him. Nor was the execution of the King a light event
-to so sensitive a poet and so passionate a partisan. Meanwhile Vaughan
-read George Herbert, and his theory of proportional values began to
-change. It was a season of transition and silent crises, when men bared
-their breasts to great issues, and when it was easy for a childlike
-soul,
-
-    “Weary of her vain search below, above,
-     In the first Fair to find the immortal Love.”[22]
-
-Vaughan, in his new fervor, did his best to suppress the numbers
-written in his youth, thus clearing the field for what he afterwards
-called his “hagiography”; and a critic may wonder what he found in his
-first tiny volume of 1646, or in _Olor Iscanus_, to regret or cancel.
-Every unbaptized song is “bright only in its own innocence, and
-kindles nothing but a generous thought”; and one of them, at least,
-has a manly postlude of love and resolve worthy of the free lyres of
-Lovelace and Montrose. Vaughan, unlike other ardent spirits of his
-class, had nothing very gross to be sorry for; if he was, indeed, one
-of his own
-
-              “feverish souls,
-    Sick with a scarf or glove,”
-
-he had none but noble ravings. Happily, his very last verses, _Thalia
-Rediviva_, breaking as it were by accident a silence of twenty-three
-years, indorse with cheerful gallantry the accents of his youth.
-The turn in his life which brought him lasting peace, in a world
-rocking between the cant of the Parliament and resurgent audacity
-and riot, achieved for us a body of work which, small as it is, has
-rare interest, and an out-of-door beauty, as of the natural dusk,
-“breathless with adoration,” which is almost without parallel. Eternity
-has been known to spoil a poet for time, but not in this instance.
-Never did religion and art interchange a more fortunate service,
-outside Italian studios. Once he had shaken off secular ambitions,
-Vaughan’s voice grew at once freer and more forceful. In him a
-marked intellectual gain sprang from an apparently slight spiritual
-readjustment, even as it did, three centuries later, in one greater
-than he, John Henry Newman.
-
-Vaughan’s work is thickly sown with personalities, but they are so
-delicate and involved that there is little profit in detaching them.
-What record he made at the University is not apparent; nor is it at
-all sure that so independent and speculative a mind applied itself
-gracefully to the curriculum. He was, in the only liberal sense, a
-learned man, full of life-long curiosity for the fruit of the Eden
-Tree. His lines beginning
-
-    “Quite spent with thought I left my cell”
-
-show the acutest thirst for hidden knowledge; he would “most gladly
-die,” if death might buy him intellectual growth. He looks forward to
-eternity as to the unsealing and disclosing of mysteries. He makes the
-soul sing joyously to the body:
-
-    “I that here saw darkly, in a glass,
-       But mists and shadows pass,
-     And by their own weak shine did search the springs
-       And source of things,
-     Shall, with inlighted rays,
-       Pierce all their ways!”
-
-With an imperious query, he encounters the host of midnight stars:
-
-                  “Who circled in
-    Corruption with this glorious ring?”
-
-What Vaughan does know is nothing to him; when he salutes the Bodleian
-from his heart, he is thinking how little honey he has gathered from
-that vast hive, and how little it contains, when measured with what
-there is to learn from living and dying. He had small respect for the
-sinister sciences among which the studies of his beloved brother,
-a Neo-Platonist, lay. Though he was no pedant, he dearly loved to
-get in a slap against the ignorant whom we have always with us. At
-twenty-five, he printed a good adaptation of the Tenth of Juvenal, and
-flourished his wit, in the preface, at the expense of some possible
-gentle reader of the parliamentary persuasion who would “quarrel with
-antiquitie.” “These, indeed, may think that they have slept out so many
-centuries in this Satire, and are now awaked; which had it been still
-Latin, perhaps their nap had been everlasting!”
-
-He was an optimist, proven through much personal trial; he had
-sympathy with the lower animals, and preserved a humorous deference
-towards all things alive, even the leviathan of Holy Writ, which
-he affectionately exalts into “the shipmen’s fear” and “the comely
-spacious whale”! Vaughan adored his friends; he had a unique veneration
-for childhood; his adjective for the admirable and beautiful, whether
-material or immaterial, is “dear”; and his mind dwelt with habitual
-fondness on what Sir Thomas Browne (a man after his own heart) calls
-“incomprehensibles, and thoughts of things which thoughts do but
-tenderly touch.”
-
-His occupation as a resident physician must have fostered his fine
-eye and ear for the green earth, and furnished him, day by day,
-with musings in sylvan solitudes, and rides abroad over the fresh
-hill-paths. The breath of the mountains is about his books. An early
-riser, he uttered a constant invocation to whomever would listen, that
-
-                    “Manna was not good
-    After sun-rising; far-day sullies flowers.”
-
-He was hospitable on a limited income.[23] His verses of invitation
-_To his Retired Friend_, which are not without their thrusts at
-passing events, have a classic jollity fit to remind the reader of
-Randolph’s ringing ode to Master Anthony Stafford. Again and again
-Vaughan reiterates the Socratic and Horatian song of content: that he
-has enough lands and money, that there are a thousand things he does
-not want, that he is blessed in what he has. All this does not prevent
-him from recording the phenomenal ebb-tides of his purse, and from
-whimsically synthesizing on “the threadbare, goldless genealogie” of
-bards! No sour zealot in anything, he enjoyed an evening now and then
-at the Globe Tavern in London, where he consumed his sack with relish,
-that he might be “possessor of more soul,” and “after full cups have
-dreams poetical.” But he was no lover of the town. Country life was
-his joy and pride; the only thing which seemed, in his own most vivid
-phrase, to “fill his breast with home.”
-
-    “Here something still like Eden looks!
-     Honey in woods, juleps in brooks.”
-
-A literary acquaintance, one unrecognized N. W., congratulates
-Vaughan that he is able to “give his Muse the swing in an hereditary
-shade.” He translated with great gusto _The Old Man of Verona_, out
-of Claudian, and Guevara’s _Happiness of Country Life_; and he notes
-with satisfaction that Abraham was of his rural mind, in “Mamre’s holy
-grove.” Vaughan was an angler, need it be added? Nay, the autocrat of
-anglers: he was a salmon-catcher.
-
-With “the charity which thinketh no evil,” he loved almost everything,
-except the Jesuits, and his ogres the Puritans. For Vaughan knew where
-he stood, and his opinion of Puritanism never varied. He kept his
-snarls and satires, for the most part, hedged within his prose, the
-proper ground of the animosities. When he put on his singing-robes, he
-tried to forget, not always with success, his spites and bigotries.
-For his life, he could not help sidelong glances, stings, strictures
-between his teeth, thistle-down hints cast abroad in the neatest of
-generalities:
-
-    “Who saint themselves, they are no saints!”
-
-The introduction to his _Mount of Olives_ (whose pages have a soft
-billowy music like Jeremy Taylor’s) is nominally inscribed to “the
-peaceful, humble, and pious reader.” That functionary must have found
-it a trial to preserve his peaceful and pious abstraction, while the
-peaceful and pious author proceeded to flout the existing government,
-in a towering rage, and in very elegant caustic English. Vaughan was
-none too godly to be a thorough hater. He was genially disposed to
-the pretensions of every human creature; he refused to consider his
-ancestry and nurture by themselves, as any guarantee of the justice
-of his views or of his superior insight into affairs. Yet in spite of
-his enforced Quaker attitude during the clash of arms, he nursed in
-that gentle bosom the heartiest loathing of democracy, and shared the
-tastes of a certain clerk of the Temple “who never could be brought to
-write Oliver with a great O.” It is fortunate that he did not spoil
-himself, as Wither did, upon the wheels of party, for politics were his
-most vehement concern. Had he been richer, as he tells us in a playful
-passage, nothing on earth would have kept him from meddling with
-national issues.
-
-The poets, save the greatest, Milton, his friend Andrew Marvell, and
-Wither, rallied in a bright group under the royal standard. Those
-among them who did not fight were commonly supposed, as was Drummond
-of Hawthornden, to redeem their reputation by dying of grief at the
-overthrow of the King. Yet Vaughan did not fight, and Vaughan did not
-die of grief. It is so sure that he suffered some privation, and it
-may be imprisonment, for his allegiance, that shrewd guessers, before
-now, have equipped him and placed him in the ranks of the losing cause,
-where he might have had choice company. His generous erratic brother (a
-writer of some note, an alchemist, an Orientalist, a Rosicrucian, who
-was ejected from his vicarage in 1654, and died either of the plague,
-or of inhaling the fumes of a caldron, at Albury, in 1665, while the
-court was at Oxford)[24] had been a recruit, and a brave one. But Henry
-Vaughan explicitly tells us, in his _Ad Posteros_, and in a prayer in
-the second part of _Silex Scintillans_, that he had no personal share
-in the constitutional struggle, that he shed no blood. Again he cries,
-in a third lyric,
-
-                              “O accept
-    Of his vowed heart, whom Thou hast kept
-    From bloody men!”
-
-This painstaking record of a fact by one so loyal as he goes far
-to prove, to an inductive mind not thoroughly familiar with his
-circumstances, that he considered war the worst of current evils, and
-was willing, for this first principle of his philosophy, to lay himself
-open to the charge, not indeed of cowardice (was he not a Vaughan?),
-but of lack of appreciation for the one romantic opportunity of his
-life. His withdrawal from the turmoil which so became his colleagues
-may seem to harmonize with his known moral courage and right sentiment;
-and fancy is ready to fasten on him the sad neutrality, and the
-passionate “ingemination” for “peace, peace,” which “took his sleep
-from him, and would shortly break his heart,” such as Clarendon tells
-us of in his beautiful passage touching the young Lord Falkland. But
-it is greatly to be feared that Vaughan, despite all the abstract
-reasoning which arrays itself against so babyish and barbarous a thing
-as a battle, would have swung himself into a saddle as readily as any,
-had not “God’s finger touched him.” A comparison of dates will show
-that he was bedridden, while his hot heart was afield with the shouting
-gentlemen whom Mr. Browning heard in a vision:
-
-    “King Charles! and who’ll do him right, now?
-     King Charles! and who’s ripe for fight, now?
-     Give a rouse: here’s in Hell’s despite now,
-                  King Charles!”
-
-This is the secret of Vaughan’s blood-guiltlessness. Of course he
-thanked Heaven, after, that he was kept clean of carnage; he would have
-thanked Heaven for anything that happened to him. It was providential
-that we of posterity lost a soldier in the Silurist, and gained a poet.
-As the great confusion cleared, his spirit cleared too, and the Vaughan
-we know,
-
-    “Delicious, lusty, amiable, fair,”
-
-comes in, like a protesting angel, with the Commonwealth. Perhaps
-he lived long enough to sum up the vanity of statecraft and the
-instability of public choice, driven from tyranny to license, from
-absolute monarchy to absolute anarchy; and to turn once more to his
-“loud brook’s incessant fall” as an object much worthier of a rational
-man’s regard. Born while James I. was vain-gloriously reigning, Henry
-Vaughan survived the Civil War, the two Protectorates, the orgies of
-the Restoration (which he did not fail to satirize), and the Revolution
-of “Meenie the daughter,” as the old Scots song slyly calls her. He had
-seen the Stuarts in and out, in and out again, and his seventy-four
-years, on-lookers at a tragedy, were not forced to sit through the dull
-Georgian farce which began almost as soon as his grave was green.
-
-Moreover, he was thoroughly out of touch with his surroundings. While
-all the world was either devil-may-care or Calvin-colored, he had for
-his characteristic a rapt, inexhaustible joy, buoying him up and
-sweeping him away. He might well have said, like Dr. Henry More, his
-twin’s rival and challenger in metaphysics, that he was “most of his
-time mad with pleasure.” While
-
-                  “every burgess foots
-    The mortal pavement in eternal boots,”
-
-Vaughan lay indolently along a bank, like a shepherd swain, pondering
-upon the brood of “green-heads” who denied miracles to have been or to
-be, and wishing the noisy passengers on the highways of life could be
-taught the value of
-
-    “A sweet self-privacy in a right soul.”
-
-His mind turned to paradoxes and inverted meanings, and the analysis
-of his own tenacious dreams, in an England of pikes and bludgeons and
-hock-carts and wassail-cakes. “A proud, humoursome person,” Anthony
-à Wood called him. He was something of a fatalist, inasmuch as he
-followed his lonely and straight path, away from crowds, and felt eager
-for nothing but what fell into his open hands. He strove little, being
-convinced that temporal advantage is too often an eternal handicap.
-“Who breaks his glass to take more light,” he reminds us, “makes way
-for storms unto his rest.” This passive quality belongs to happy men,
-and Vaughan was a very happy man, thanks to the faith and will which
-made him so, although he had known calamity, and had failed in much.
-Throughout his pages one can trace the affecting struggle between
-things desired and things forborne. It is only a brave philosopher who
-can afford to pen a stanza intimate as this:
-
-    “O Thou who didst deny to me
-     The world’s adored felicity!
-     Keep still my weak eyes from the shine
-     Of those gay things which are not Thine.”
-
-He had better possessions than glory under his hand in the health and
-peace of his middle age and in his cheerful home. He was twice married,
-and must have lost his first wife, nameless to us, but most tenderly
-mourned, in his twenty-ninth or thirtieth year. She seems to have been
-the mother of five of his six children. Vaughan was rich in friends. He
-had known Davenant and Cartwright, but it is quite characteristic of
-him that the two great authors to whom he was especially attached were
-Jonson and John Fletcher, both only a memory at the time of his first
-going to London. Of Randolph, Jonson’s strong “son,” who so beggared
-English literature by dying young in 1634, Vaughan sweetly says
-somewhere that he will hereafter
-
-    “Look for Randolph in those holy meads.”
-
-Mention of his actual fellow-workers is very infrequent, nor does he
-mention the Shakespeare who had “dwelt on earth unguessed at,” and who
-is believed to have visited the estates of the Vaughans at Scethrog,
-and to have picked up the name of his merry fellow Puck from goblin
-traditions of the neighborhood. Vaughan followed his leisure and his
-preference in translating divers works of meditation, biography, and
-medicine, pleasing himself, like Queen Bess, with naturalizing bits of
-Boethius, and much from Plutarch, Ausonius, Severinus, and Claudian.
-He did some passages from Ovid, but he must have felt sharply the
-violence done to the lyric essence in passing it ever so gently from
-language to language, for he lingered over Adrian’s darling _Animula
-vagula blandula_, only to leave it alone, and to write of it as the
-saddest poetry that ever he met with.
-
-Not the least of Henry Vaughan’s blessings was his warm friendship with
-“the matchless Orinda.”[25] This delightful Catherine Fowler married,
-in 1647, a stanch royalist, Mr. James Philips of Cardigan Priory, and
-as his bride, became what, in the Welsh solitudes, was considered
-“neighbor” to Vaughan, her home being distant from his just fifty miles
-as the crow flies. She had been, in her infancy, a prodigy of Biblical
-quotation, like Evelyn’s little Richard, and grew up to be such another
-_précieuse_ as Madame la Comtesse de Lafayette, _née_ Lavergne; but
-we know that she was the cleverest and comeliest of good women, and
-Vaughan’s association with her must have been a perpetual sunshine
-to him and his. She prefixed, after the fashion of the day, some
-commendatory verses to his published work. They are not only pretty,
-but they furnish a bit of adequate criticism. The secular Muse of the
-Silurist is, according to Orinda,
-
-    “Truth clothed in wit, and Love in innocence,”
-
-and has, for her birthright, seriousness and a “charming rigour.” The
-last two words might stand for him in the fast-coming day when nobody
-will have time to discuss old poets in anything but technical terms and
-epigrams. Orinda, with her accurate judgment, should have had a chance
-to talk to Mr. Thomas Campbell, who adorned his _Specimens_ with the
-one official and truly prepositional phrase that “Vaughan was one of
-the harshest of writers, even of the inferior order of the school of
-conceit!”[26]
-
-While Henry Vaughan was preparing for publication the first half of
-_Silex Scintillans_ as the token of his arrested and uplifted youth,
-Rev. Mr. Thomas Vaughan, backed by a few other sanguine Oxonians, and
-disregardful of his twin’s exaggerated remorse for the fruits of his
-profaner years, brought out the “formerly written and newly named”
-_Olor Iscanus_, over the author’s head, in 1650, and gave to it a
-motto from the Georgics. The preface is in Eugenius Philalethes’ own
-gallant style, and offers a haughty commendation to “beauty from the
-light retired.” Perhaps Vaughan’s earliest and most partial editor
-felt, like Thoreau on a certain occasion, that it were well to make an
-extreme statement, if only so he might make an emphatic one. He chose
-to supplicate the public of the Protectorate in this wise: “It was
-the glorious Maro that referred his legacies to the fire, and though
-princes are seldom executors, yet there came a Cæsar to his testament,
-as if the act of a poet could not be repealed but by a king. I am
-not, reader, Augustus Vindex: here is no royal rescue, but here is a
-Muse that deserves it. The author had long ago condemned these poems
-to obscurity and the consumption of that further fate which attends
-it. This censure gave them a gust of death, and they have partly known
-that oblivion which our best labors must come to at last. I present
-thee, then, not only with a book, but with a prey, and, in this kind,
-the first recoveries from corruption. Here is a flame hath been some
-time extinguished, thoughts that have been lost and forgot, but now
-they break out again like the Platonic reminiscency. I have not the
-author’s approbation to the fact, but I have law on my side, though
-never a sword: I hold it no man’s prerogative to fire his own house.
-Thou seest how saucy I am grown, and if thou dost expect I should
-commend what is published, I must tell thee I cry no Seville oranges;
-I will not say ‘Here is fine,’ or ‘cheap’: that were an injury to
-the verse itself, and to the effect it can produce. Read on; and
-thou wilt find thy spirit engaged, not by the deserts of what we call
-tolerable, but by the commands of a pen that is above it.” All this is
-uncritical, but useful and proper on the part of the clerical brother,
-who writes very much as Lord Edward Herbert might be supposed to write
-for George under like conditions; for he knew, according to an ancient
-adage, that there is great folly in pointing out the shortcomings of
-a work of art to eyes uneducated to its beauties. It was just as well
-to insist disproportionately upon the principle at stake, that Henry
-Vaughan’s least book was unique and precious. He was not, like the
-majority of the happy lyrists of his time, a writer by accident; he
-was strictly a man of letters, and his sign-manual is large and plain
-upon everything which bears his name. He indites like a Roman, with
-evenness and without a superfluous syllable. One cannot italicize
-him; every word is a congested force, packed to bursting with meaning
-and insistence; the utterance of a man who has been thinking all his
-life upon his own chosen subjects, and who unerringly despatches
-a language about its business, as if he had just created it. Like
-Andrew Marvell’s excellent father, “he never broached what he had
-never brewed.” It follows that his work, to which second editions were
-wellnigh unknown, shows scarcely any variation from itself. It carries
-with it a testimony that, such as it stands, it is the very best its
-author can do. Its faults are not slips; they are quite as radical and
-congenital as its virtues. Vaughan (to transfer a fine phrase of Mr.
-W. T. Arnold) is “enamoured of perfection,” but he is fully so before
-he makes up his mind to write, and from the first every stroke of his
-pen is fatal. It transfixes a noun or a verb, pins it to the page, and
-challenges a reformer to move or replace it. His modest Muse is as
-sure as Shakespeare, as nice as Pope; she is incapable of scruples and
-apprehensions, once she has spoken. What Vaughan says of Cartwright may
-well be applied to his own deliberate grace of diction:
-
-    “Thou thy thoughts hast drest in such a strain
-     As doth not only speak, but rule and reign.”
-
-His verses have the tone of a Vandyck portrait, with all its firm
-pensive elegance and lack of shadow.
-
-Vaughan has very little quaintness, as we now understand that word, and
-none of the cloudiness and incorrigible grotesqueness which dominated
-his Alexandrian day. He has great temperance; he keeps his eye upon
-the end, and scarcely falls at all into “the fond adulteries of art,”
-inversions, unscholarly compound words, or hard-driven metaphors. If
-he be difficult to follow, it is only because he lives, as it were, in
-highly oxygenated air; he is remote and peculiar, but not eccentric.
-His conceits are not monstrous; the worst of them proclaims:
-
-      “Some love a rose
-    In hand, some in the skin;
-       But, cross to those,
-    I would have mine within”;
-
-which will bear a comparison with Carew’s hatched cherubim, or with
-that very provincialism of Herbert’s which describes a rainbow as the
-lace of Peace’s coat! Those of Vaughan’s figures not drawn from the
-open air, where he was happiest, are, indeed, too bold and too many,
-and they come from strange corners: from finance, medicine, mills, the
-nursery, and the mechanism of watches and clocks. In no one instance,
-however, does he start wrong, like the great influencer, Donne, in
-_The Valediction_, and finish by turning such impediments as “stiff
-twin-compasses” into images of memorable beauty. The _Encyclopædia
-Britannica_, like Campbell, finds Vaughan “untunable,” and so he is
-very often. But poets may not always succeed in metaphysics and in
-music too. The lute which has the clearest and most enticing twang
-under the laurel boughs is Herrick’s, and not Donne’s; Mr. Swinburne’s,
-and not Mr. Browning’s. It is to be observed that when Vaughan lets go
-of his regrets, his advice, and his growls over the bad times, he falls
-into instant melody, as if in that, and not in a rough impressiveness,
-were his real strength. His blessing for the river Usk flows sweetly as
-the tide it hangs upon:
-
-    “Garlands, and songs, and roundelays,
-     And dewy nights, and sunshine days,
-     The turtle’s voice, joy without fear,
-     Dwell on thy bosom all the year!
-     To thee the wind from far shall bring
-     The odors of the scattered spring,
-     And, loaden with the rich arrear,
-     Spend it in spicy whispers here.”
-
-Vaughan played habitually with his pauses, and unconsciously threw the
-metrical stress on syllables and words least able to bear it; but no
-sensitive ear can be otherwise than pleased at the broken sequence of
-such lines as
-
-        “these birds of light make a land glad
-    Chirping their solemn matins on a tree,”
-
-and the hesitant symbolism of
-
-    “As if his liquid loose retinue stayed
-     Lingering, and were of this steep place afraid.”
-
-The word “perspective,” with the accent upon the first syllable, was
-a favorite with him; and Wordsworth approved of that usage enough to
-employ it in the majestic opening of the sonnet on King’s College
-Chapel.[27] In short, if Vaughan be “untunable,” it is because he
-never learned to distil vowels at the expense or peril of the message
-which he believed himself bound to deliver, even where hearers were
-next to none, and which he tried only to make compact and clear. His
-speech has a deep and free harmony of its own, to those whom abruptness
-does not repel; and even critics who turn from him to the masters of
-verbal sound may do him the parting honor of acknowledging the nature
-of his limitation.
-
-    “A noble error, and but seldom made,
-     When poets are by too much force betrayed!”
-
-Vaughan was a born observer, and in his poetry may be found the pioneer
-expression of the nineteenth-century feeling for landscape. His canvas
-is not often large; he had an indifference towards the exquisite
-presence of autumn, and an inland ignorance of the sea. But he could
-portray depth and distance at a stroke, as in the buoyant lines:
-
-    “It was high spring, and all the way
-     Primrosed, and hung with shade,”
-
-which etches for you the whole winding lane, roofed and floored with
-beauty; he carries a reader over half a continent in his
-
-    “Paths that are hidden from the vulture’s eyes,”
-
-and suspends him above man’s planet altogether with his audacious
-eagle, to whom “whole seas are narrow spectacles,” and who
-
-          “in the clear height and upmost air
-    Doth face the sun, and his dispersèd hair!”
-
-Besides this large vision, Vaughan had uncommon knowledge how to employ
-detail, during the prolonged literary interval when it was wholly out
-of fashion. It has been the lot of the little rhymesters of all periods
-to deal with the open air in a general way, and to embellish their
-pages with birds and boughs; but it takes a true modern poet, under the
-influence of the Romantic revival, to sum up perfectly the ravages of
-wind and frost:
-
-    “Where is the pride of summer, the green prime,
-      The many, many leaves all twinkling?—Three
-     On the mossed elm; three on the naked lime
-      Trembling; and one upon the old oak tree”;
-
-and it takes another to give the only faithful and ideal report of a
-warbling which every schoolboy of the race had heard before him:
-
-    “That’s the wise thrush: he sings each song twice over,
-     Lest you should think he never could recapture
-     The first fine careless rapture.”
-
-That Vaughan’s pages should furnish this patient specification is
-remarkable in a man whose mind was set upon things invisible. His gaze
-is upon the inaccessible ether, but he seems to detect everything
-between himself and heaven. He sighs over the inattentive rustic, whom,
-perhaps, he catches scowling by the pasture-bars of the wild Welsh
-downs:
-
-                  “O that he would hear
-    The world read to him!”
-
-Whatever is in that pleasant world he himself hears and sees; and his
-interrupted chronicle is always terse, graphic, straight from life. He
-has the inevitable phrase for every phenomenon, a little low-comedy
-phrase, sometimes, such as Shakespeare and Carew had used before him:
-
-                        “Deep snow
-    Candies our country’s woody brow.”
-
-It seems never to have entered the primitive mind of Vaughan to love,
-or serve, art and nature for themselves. His cue was to walk abroad
-circumspectly and with incessant reverence, because in all things
-he found God. He marks, at every few rods in the thickets, “those
-low violets of Thine,” and the “breathing sacrifice” of earth-odors
-which the “parched and thirsty isle” gratefully sends back after a
-shower.[28] His prayer is that he may not forget that physical beauty
-is a great symbol, but only a symbol; a “hid ascent” through “masks and
-shadows” to the divine; or, as Mr. Lowell said in one of his last poems,
-
-                                  “a tent
-    Pitched for an Inmate far more excellent.”
-
-A humanist of the school of Assisi, Vaughan was full of out-of-door
-meeknesses and pieties, nowhere sweeter in their expression than in
-this all-embracing valedictory:
-
-    “O knowing, glorious Spirit! when
-     Thou shalt restore trees, beasts, and men,
-
-           *       *       *       *       *
-
-     Give him among Thy works a place
-     Who in them loved and sought Thy face.”
-
-He muses in the garden, at evenfall:
-
-    “Man is such a marigold
-     As shuts, and hangs the head.”
-
-Clouds, seasons, and the eternal stars are his playfellows; he
-apostrophizes our sister the rainbow, and reminds her of yesterday, when
-
-    “Terah, Nahor, Haran, Abram, Lot,
-     The youthful world’s grey fathers, in one knot,”
-
-lifted anxious looks to her new splendor. He is familiar with the
-depression which comes from boding weather, when
-
-            “a pilgrim’s eye,
-        Far from relief,
-    Measures the melancholy sky.”
-
-He has an artist’s feeling, also, for the wrath of the elements, which
-inevitably hurry him on to the consummation
-
-    “When Thou shalt spend Thy sacred store
-      Of thunders in that heat,
-     And low as e’er they lay before
-      Thy six-days buildings beat!”
-
-“I saw,” he says, suddenly—
-
-    “I saw Eternity the other night”;
-
-and he is perpetually seeing things almost as startling and as bright:
-the “edges and the bordering light” of lost infancy; the processional
-grandeur of old books, which he fearlessly calls
-
-    “The track of fled souls, and their Milky Way”;
-
-and visions of the Judgment, when
-
-                        “from the right
-    The white sheep pass into a whiter light.”
-
-Here the figure beautifully forecasts a famous one of Rossetti’s.
-Light, indeed, is Vaughan’s distinctive word, and the favorite source
-of his similes and illustrations.
-
-If Vaughan’s had not been so profoundly moral a nature, he would
-have lacked his picturesque sense of the general, the continuous.
-That shibboleth, “a primrose by the river’s brim,” is to him all the
-generations of all the yellow primroses smiling there since the Druids’
-day, and its mild moonlike ray reflects the hope and fear and pathos
-of the mortal pilgrimage that has seen and saluted it, age after age.
-Whatever he meets upon his walk is drowned and dimmed in a wide halo
-of association and sympathy. His unmistakable accent marks the opening
-of a little sermon called _The Timber_; a sigh of pity, tender as a
-child’s, over the fallen and unlovely logs:
-
-    “Sure, thou didst flourish once! and many springs
-       Many bright mornings, much dew, many showers,
-     Passed o’er thy head; many light hearts and wings,
-       Which now are dead, lodged in thy living towers.”[29]
-
-Leigh Hunt once challenged England and America[30] to produce anything
-approaching, for music and feeling, the beauty of
-
-              “boughs that shake against the cold,
-    Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.”
-
-He forgot the closes of these artless lines of a minor poet; or he did
-not know them.
-
-Vaughan’s meek reputation began to renew itself about 1828, when four
-critics eminently fitted to appraise his worth were in their prime;
-but, curiously enough, none of these, not even the best of them, the
-same Charles Lamb who said a just and generous word for Wither, had the
-satisfaction of rescuing his sunken name. Lamb’s friend, the good soul
-Bernard Barton, seems, however, to have known and admired his Vaughan.
-
-Eight little books, if we count the two parts of _Silex Scintillans_
-as one,[31] enclose all of the Silurist’s original work. He began to
-publish in 1646, and he practically ceased in 1655, reappearing but
-in 1678 with _Thalia Rediviva_, which was not issued under his own
-supervision. It is commonly supposed that his verses were forgotten
-up to the date (1847) of the faulty but timely Aldine edition of the
-Rev. H. F. Lyte, thrice reprinted and revised since then, and until the
-appearance of Dr. Grosart’s four inestimable quartos; but Mr. Carew
-Hazlitt has been fortunate enough to discover the advertisement of an
-eighteenth-century reprint of Vaughan. As the results of Dr. Grosart’s
-patient service to our elder writers are necessarily semi-private,
-it may be said with truth that the real Vaughan is still debarred
-from the general reader, who is, indeed, the identical person least
-concerned about that state of affairs. His name is not irrecoverable
-nor unfamiliar to scholars.[32] His mind, on the whole, might pass
-for the product of yesterday; and he, who needs no glossary, may
-handsomely cede the honors of one to Mr. William Morris. It is at least
-certain that had Vaughan lately lifted up his sylvan voice out of
-Brecknockshire, he would not so readily be accused of having modelled
-himself unduly upon George Herbert.[33] He has gone into eclipse behind
-that gracious name.
-
-Henry Vaughan was a child of thirteen when Herbert, a stranger to
-him, died at Bemerton, and he read him first in the sick-chamber to
-which the five years’ distresses of his early manhood confined him.
-The reading could not have been prior to 1647, for _Olor Iscanus_,
-Vaughan’s second volume, was lying ready for the press that year, as
-we know from the date of its dedication to Lord Kildare Digby. As no
-novice poet, therefore, he fell under the spell of a sweet and elect
-soul, who was also a lover of vanquished royalty, a convert who had
-looked upon the vanities of the court and the city, a Welshman born,
-and not unconnected with Vaughan’s own ancient and patrician house.
-These were slight coincidences, but they served to strengthen a forming
-tie. The Silurist somewhere thanks Herbert’s “holy ever-living lines”
-for checking his blood; and it was, perhaps, the only service rendered
-of which he was conscious. But his endless iambics and his vague
-allegorical titles are cast thoroughly in the manner of Herbert, and
-he takes from the same source the heaped categorical epithets, the
-didactic tone, and the introspectiveness which are his most obvious
-failings. Vaughan’s intellectual debt to Herbert resolves itself into
-somewhat less than nothing; for in following him with zeal to the
-Missionary College of the Muses, he lost rather than gained, and he
-is altogether delightful and persuasive only where he is altogether
-himself. Nevertheless, a certain spirit of conformity and filial
-piety towards Herbert has betrayed Vaughan into frequent and flagrant
-imitations. It seems as if these must have been voluntary, and rooted
-in an intention to enforce the same truths in all but the same
-words; for the moment Vaughan breaks into invective, or comes upon
-his distinctive topics, such as childhood, natural beauty (for which
-Herbert had an imperfect sense), friendship, early death, spiritual
-expectation, he is off and away, free of any predecessor, thrilling and
-unforgettable. Comparisons will not be out of place here, for Vaughan
-can bear, and even invoke them. Dryden said in Jonson’s praise that he
-was “a learned plagiary,” and nobody doubts nowadays that Shakespeare
-and Milton were the bandit kings of their time. There was, indeed,
-in English letters, up to Queen Anne’s reign, an open communism of
-ideas and idioms astonishing to look upon; there is less confiscation
-at present, because, outside the pale of the sciences, there is less
-thinking. If any one thing can be closer to another, for instance, than
-even Drummond’s sonnet on _Sleep_ is to Sidney’s, it is the dress of
-Vaughan’s morality to that of George Herbert’s. Mr. Simcox is the only
-critic who has taken the trouble to contrast them, and he does so in
-so random a fashion as to suggest that his scrutiny, in some cases,
-has been confined to the rival titles. It is certain that no other
-mind, however bent upon identifications, can find a likeness between
-_The Quip_ and _The Queer_, or between _The Tempest_ and _Providence_.
-Vaughan’s _Mutiny_, like _The Collar_, ends in a use of the word
-“child,” after a scene of strife; and if ever it were meant to match
-Herbert’s poem, distinctly falls behind it, and deals, besides, with
-a much weaker rebelliousness. _Rules and Lessons_ is so unmistakably
-modelled upon _The Church Porch_ that it scarcely calls for comment.
-Herbert’s admonitions, however, are continued, but nowhere repeated;
-and Vaughan’s succeed in being poetic, which the others are not. Beyond
-these replicas, Vaughan’s structural genius is in no wise beholden to
-Herbert’s. But numerous phrases and turns of thought descend from the
-master to the disciple, undergoing such subtle and peculiar changes,
-and given back, as Coleridge would say, with such “usurious interest,”
-that it may well be submitted whether, in this casual list, every
-borrowing, save two, be not a bettering.
-
-
-HERBERT.
-
-    “A throbbing conscience, spurrèd by remorse,
-               Hath a strange force.”
-
-    “My thoughts are all a case of knives,
-             Wounding my heart
-             With scattered smart.”
-
-                 “And trust
-    Half that we have
-    Unto an honest faithful grave.”
-
-    “Teach me Thy love to know,
-       That this new light which now I see
-     May both the work and workman show:
-       Then by a sunbeam I will climb to Thee!”
-
-    “I will go searching, till I find a sun
-           Shall stay till we have done,
-     A willing shiner, that will shine as gladly
-           As frost-nipt suns look sadly.
-     Then we will sing and shine all our own day,
-           And one another pay;
-     His beams shall cheer my breast, and both so twine
-     Till even his beams sing, and my music shine.”
-
-(_Of prayer._)
-
-    “Heaven in ordinary, man well-drest,
-     The Milky Way, the bird of Paradise.”
-
-    “Then went I to a garden, and did spy
-              A gallant flower,
-     The crown-imperial: Sure, said I,
-          Peace at the root must dwell.”
-
-
-VAUGHAN.
-
-    “A darting conscience, full of stabs and fears.”
-
-    “And wrap us in imaginary flights
-     Wide of a faithful grave.”
-
-    “That in these masks and shadows I may see
-               Thy sacred way,
-     And by these hid ascents climb to that day
-               Which breaks from Thee
-     Who art in all things, though invisibly!”
-
-    “O would I were a bird or star
-     Fluttering in woods, or lifted far
-              Above this inn
-              And road of sin!
-     Then either star or bird would be
-     Shining or singing still to Thee!”
-
-(_Of books._)
-
-    “The track of fled souls, and their Milky Way.”
-
-    “I walked the other day to spend my hour
-               Into a field,
-     Where I sometime had seen the soil to yield
-               A gallant flower.”
-
-
-HERBERT.
-
-    “But groans are quick and full of wings,
-       And all their motions upward be,
-     And ever as they mount, like larks they sing:
-     The note is sad, yet music for a king.”
-
-    “Joys oft are there, and griefs as oft as joys,
-           But griefs without a noise;
-     Yet speak they louder than distempered fears:
-           What is so shrill as silent tears?”
-
-    “At first Thou gavest me milk and sweetnesses,
-           I had my wish and way;
-     My days were strewed with flowers and happiness;
-           There was no month but May.”
-
-               “Only a scarf or glove
-    Doth warm our hands, and make them write of Love.”
-
-    “I got me flowers to strew Thy way,
-       I got me boughs off many a tree;
-     But Thou wast up by break of day,
-       And brought Thy sweets along with Thee.”
-
-    “O come! for Thou dost know the way:
-       Or if to me Thou wilt not move,
-     Remove me where I need not say,
-       ‘Drop from above.’”
-
-    “Sure Thou wilt joy by gaining me
-     To fly home like a laden bee.”
-
-
-VAUGHAN.
-
-    “A silent tear can pierce Thy throne
-       When loud joys want a wing;
-     And sweeter airs stream from a groan
-       Than any artèd string.”
-
-    “Follow the cry no more! There is
-             An ancient way,
-     All strewed with flowers and happiness,
-             And fresh as May!”
-
-                   “feverish souls
-    Sick with a scarf or glove.”
-
-    “I’ll get me up before the sun,
-       I’ll cull me boughs off many a tree;
-     And all alone full early run
-       To gather flowers and welcome Thee.”
-
-    “Either disperse these mists, which blot and fill
-       My perspective still as they pass;
-     Or else remove me hence unto that hill
-       Where I shall need no glass!”
-
-    “Thy grave, to which my thoughts shall move
-     Like bees in storms unto their hive.”
-
-To arraign Vaughan is to vindicate him. In the too liberal assizes of
-literature, an idea becomes the property of him who best expresses
-it. Herbert’s odd and fresh metaphors, his homing bees and pricks of
-conscience and silent tears, the adoring star and the comrade bird,
-even his famous female scarf, go over bodily to the spoiler. In many an
-instance something involved and difficult still characterizes Herbert’s
-diction; and it is diverting to watch how the interfering hand sorts
-and settles it at one touch, and sends it, in Mr. Matthew Arnold’s
-word, to the “centre.” Vaughan’s mind, despite its mysticism, was full
-of despatch and impetuosity. Like Herbert, he alludes to himself, more
-than once, as “fierce”; and the adjective undoubtedly belongs to him.
-There is in Vaughan, at his height, an imaginative rush and fire which
-Herbert never knew, a greater clarity and conciseness, a far greater
-restraint, a keener sense both of color and form, and so much more
-deference for what Mr. Ruskin calls “the peerage of words,” that the
-younger man could never have been content to send forth a line which
-might mean its opposite, such as occurs in the fine stanza about glory
-in the beautiful _Quip_. It is only on middle ground that the better
-poet and the better saint collide. Vaughan never could have written
-
-    “O that I once past changing were
-     Fast in Thy Paradise, where no flower can wither!”
-
-or the tranquil confession of faith:
-
-    “Whether I fly with angels, fall with dust,
-       Thy hands made both, and I am there:
-     Thy power and love, my love and trust
-       Make one place everywhere!”
-
-For his best is not Herbert’s best, nor his worst Herbert’s worst. It
-is not Vaughan who reminds us that “filth” lies under a fair face. He
-does the “fiercer” thing: he goes to the Pit’s mouth in a trance, and
-“hears them yell.” Herbert’s noblest and most winning art still has its
-stand upon the altar steps of _The Temple_; but Vaughan is always on
-the roof, under the stars, like a somnambulist, or actually above and
-out of sight, “pinnacled dim in the intense inane”; absorbed in larger
-and wilder things, and stretching the spirits of all who try to follow
-him. Herbert has had his reward in the world’s lasting appreciation;
-and though Vaughan had a favorable opinion of his own staying powers,
-nothing would have grieved him less than to step aside, if the choice
-had lain between him and his exemplar. Or re-risen, he would cry
-loyally to him, as to that other Herbert, the rector of Llangattock and
-his old tutor: “_Pars vertat patri, vita posthuma tibi_.”
-
-Vaughan, then, owed something to Herbert, although it was by no means
-the best which Herbert could give; but he himself is, what Herbert is
-not, an ancestor. He leans forward to touch Cowper and Keble; and Mr.
-Churton Collins has taken the pains to trace him in Tennyson.
-
-The angels who
-
-                    “familiarly confer
-    Beneath the oak and juniper,”
-
-invoke an instant thought of the Milton of the _Allegro_; and the
-fragrant winds which linger by Usk, “loaden with the rich arrear,”
-appear to be Milton’s, too. His austere music first sounded in the
-public ear in 1645, one year before Vaughan, much his junior, began
-to print. It would seem very unlikely that a Welsh physician should
-be beholden long after to the manuscripts of the Puritan stripling,
-close-kept at Cambridge and Horton; but it is interesting to find the
-prototype of Vaughan’s charming lines about Rachel,
-
-    “the sheep-keeping Syrian maid,”
-
-in the _Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester_, dating from
-1631.[34] Vaughan’s dramatic Fleet Street,
-
-    “Where the loud whip and coach scolds all the way,”
-
-might as well be Swift’s, or Crabbe’s; and his salutation to the lark,
-
-    “And now, as fresh and cheerful as the light,
-     Thy little heart in early hymns doth sing,”
-
-is like a quotation from some tender sonnet of Bowles, or from his
-admirer, the young Coleridge who instantly outstepped him. _Olor_,
-_Silex_, and _Thalia_ establish unexpected relationships with genius
-the most remote from them and from each other. The animated melody of
-poor Rochester’s best songs seems deflected from
-
-    “If I were dead, and in my place,”
-
-addressed to Amoret,[35] in the _Poems_ of 1646. The delicate simile,
-
-    “As some blind dial, when the day is done,
-     Can tell us at midnight there was a sun,”
-
-and
-
-    “But I am sadly loose and stray,
-     A giddy blast each way.
-     O let me not thus range:
-     Thou canst not change!”
-
-(a verse of a poem headed by an extract, in the Vulgate, from the
-eighth chapter to the Romans), come home with a smile to the lover of
-Clough. Vaughan was that dangerous person, an original thinker; and the
-consequence is that he compromises a great many authors who may never
-have heard of him. It is admitted now that we owe to his prophetic lyre
-one of the boasts of modern literature. Dr. Grosart has handled so well
-the obvious debt of Wordsworth in _The Intimations of Immortality_, and
-has proven so conclusively that Vaughan figured in the library at Rydal
-Mount, that little need be said here on that theme. In _Corruption_,
-_Childhood_, _Looking Back_, and _The Retreat_, most markedly in the
-first, lie the whole point and pathos of
-
-    “Trailing clouds of glory do we come
-     From Heaven, which is our home.”
-
-Few studies are more fascinating than that of the liquidation, so
-to speak, of Vaughan’s brief, tense, impassioned monodies into “the
-mighty waters rolling evermore” of the great _Ode_. It is Holinshed’s
-accidental honor that he is lost in Shakespeare, and incorporated
-with him. So with Vaughan: if shorn of his dues, he still remains
-illustrious by virtue of one signal service to Wordsworth, whom, in the
-main, he distinctly foreshadows. Yet it is no unpardonable heresy to be
-jealous that the “first sprightly runnings” of a classic should not be
-better known, and to prefer their touching simplicity to the grandly
-adult and theory-burdened lines which everybody quotes. In the broad
-range of English letters we find two persons whose normal mental habits
-seem altogether of a piece with Vaughan’s: a woman of the eighteenth
-century, and a philosopher of the nineteenth. The lovely _Petition for
-an Absolute Retreat_, by Anne, Countess of Winchelsea (whose genius
-was the charming _trouvaille_ of Mr. Edmund Gosse), might pass for
-Vaughan’s, in Vaughan’s best manner; and so might
-
-    “Their near camp my spirit knows
-     By signs gracious as rainbows,”
-
-as indeed the whole of Emerson’s ever-memorable _Forerunners_, itself a
-mate for _The Retreat_; or rather, had these been anonymous lyrics of
-Vaughan’s own day, it would have been impossible to persuade a Caroline
-critic that he could not name their common author.
-
-Our poet had a curious fashion of coining verbs and adjectives out of
-nouns, and carried it to such a degree as to challenge pre-eminence
-with Keats.
-
-      “O how it bloods
-    And spirits all my earth!”
-
-is part and parcel of the young cries of Endymion. When Vaughan has
-discovered something to produce a fresh effect, he is not the man who
-will hesitate to use it; and this mannerism occurs frequently: “our
-grass straight russets,” “angel’d from that sphere,” “the mountained
-wave,” “He heavened their walks, and with his eyes made those wild
-shades a Paradise.” A little informality of this sort sometimes
-justifies itself, as in the couplet ending the grim and powerful
-_Charnel-House_:
-
-    “But should wild blood swell to a lawless strain,
-     One check from thee shall channel it again!”
-
-And Henry Vaughan shares also with Keats, writing three hundred
-years later, a defect which he had inherited, together with many
-graces, directly from Ben Jonson:[36] the fashion of crowding the
-sense of his text and the pauseless voice of his reader from the
-natural breathing-place at the end of a line into the beginning or
-the middle of the next line. More than any other, except Keats in his
-first period, he roughens, without always strengthening, his rich
-decasyllabics, by using what Mr. Gosse has happily classified as the
-“overflow.”
-
-Though the Silurist had in him the possibilities of a great elegiac
-poet, and his laments for his dead are many and memorable, there is not
-one sustained masterpiece among them; nothing to equal or approach,
-for example, Cowley’s _Ode on the Death of Mr. William Hervey_, in
-the qualities which abide, and are visited with the honors of the
-class-book and the library shelf. Yet Vaughan’s elegies are exquisite
-and endearing; they haunt one with the conviction that they stop short
-of immortality, not because their author had too little skill, but
-because, between his repressed speech and his extreme emotions, no art
-could make out to live. He had a deep heart, such as deep hearts will
-always recognize and reverence:
-
-    “And thy two wings were grief and love.”
-
-In the face of eternity he seems so to accord with the event which
-all but destroys him, that sorrow inexpressible becomes suddenly
-unexpressed, and his funeral music ends in a high enthusiasm and
-serenity open to no misconception. Distance, and the lapse of time,
-and his own utter reconciliation to the play of events make small
-difference in his utterance upon the old topic. The thought of his
-friend, forty years after, is the same mystical rapture:
-
-    “O could I track them! but souls must
-           Track one the other;
-     And now the spirit, not the dust,
-           Must be thy brother:
-     Yet I have one pearl by whose light
-           All things I see,
-     And in the heart of death and night,
-           Find Heaven and thee.”
-
-_Daphnis_, the eclogue to the memory of Thomas Vaughan, is the only
-one of these elegies which, possessing a surplus of beautiful lines,
-is not even in the least satisfying. “R. Hall,” “no woolsack soldier,”
-who was slain at the siege of Pontefract, won from Henry Vaughan a
-passionate requiem, which opens with a gush of agony, “I knew it would
-be thus!” as affecting as anything in the early ballads; and the battle
-of Rowton Heath took from him “R. W.,” the comrade of his youth. But
-it was in one who bore his sovereign’s name (hitherto unidentified,
-although he is said to have been the subject of a “public sorrow”) that
-Vaughan lost the friend upon whom his whole nature seemed to lean. The
-soldier-heart in himself spoke out firmly in the cry he consecrated
-_To the Pious Memory of C. W._ Its masculine dignity; the pride and
-soft triumph which it gathers about it, advancing; the plain heroic
-ending which sweeps away all images of remoteness and gloom, in
-
-    “Good-morrow to dear Charles! for it is day,”
-
-can be compared to nothing but an _agitato_ of Schubert’s mounting
-strings, slowing to their major chord with a courage and cheer that
-bring tears to the eyes. Vaughan’s tender threnodies would make a small
-but precious volume. _To the Pious Memory_, with _Thou that Knowest for
-Whom I Mourn_, _Silence and Stealth of Days_, _Joy of my Life while
-Left me Here_, _I Walked the other Day to spend my Hour_, _The Morning
-Watch_, and _Beyond the Veil_, are alone enough to give him rank
-forever as a genius and a good man.
-
-“C. W.’s” death was one of the things which turned him forever from
-temporal pursuits and pleasures. Of his first wife we can find none but
-conjectural traces in his books, for he was shy of using the beloved
-name. The sense of those departed is never far from him. The air of
-melancholy recollection, not morbid, which hangs over his maturer
-lyrics, is directly referable to the close-following calamities which
-estranged him from the presence of “the blessèd few,” and sent him, as
-he nobly hoped,
-
-    “Home from their dust to empty his own glass.”
-
-His thoughts centred, henceforward, in their full intensity, on the
-supernatural world; nay, if he were irremediably depressed, not only
-on the persistence of resolved matter, by means of which buried men
-come forth again in the color of flowers and the fragrance of the wind,
-but even on the physical damp and dark which confine our mortality. It
-is the poet of dawn and of crisp mountain air who can pack horror on
-horror into his nervous quatrains about Death:
-
-    “A nest of nights; a gloomy sphere
-       Where shadows thicken, and the cloud
-     Sits on the sun’s brow all the year,
-       And nothing moves without a shroud.”
-
-This is masterly; but here, again, there is reserve, the curbing hand
-of a man who holds, with Plato, a wilful indulgence in the “realism” of
-sadness to be an actual crime. Vaughan’s dead dwell, indeed, as his own
-mind does, in “the world of light.” As his corporeal sight is always
-upon the zenith or the horizon, so his fancy is far away, with his
-radiant ideals, and with the virtue and beauty he has walked with in
-the flesh. He takes his harp to the topmost hill, and sits watching
-
-    “till the white-winged reapers come.”
-
-He thinks of his obscured self, the child he was, and of “the narrow
-way” (an ever-recurrent Scriptural phrase in his poetry) by which he
-shall “travel back.” To leave the body is merely to start anew and
-recover strength, and, with it, the inspiring companionship of which he
-is inscrutably deprived.
-
-Chambers’ _Cyclopædia_ made an epic blunder, long ago, when it ascribed
-to this gentlest of Anglicans a “gloomy sectarianism.” He, of all
-religious poets, makes the most charming secular reading, and may well
-be a favorite with the heathen for whom Herbert is too decorative,
-Crashaw too hectic and intense, Cowper too fearful, and Faber too
-fluent; _Lyra Apostolica_ a treatise, though a glorious one, on Things
-which Must be Revived, and _Hymns Ancient and Modern_ an exceeding
-weariness to the spirit. It is a saw of Dr. Johnson’s that it is
-impossible for theology to clothe itself in attractive numbers; but
-then Dr. Johnson was ignorant of Vaughan. It is not in human nature to
-refuse to cherish the “holy, happy, healthy Heaven” which he has left
-us (in a graded alliteration which smacks of the physician rather than
-of the “gloomy sectarian”), his very social “angels talking to a man,”
-and his bright saints, hovering and smiling nigh, who
-
-        “are indeed our pillar-fires
-          Seen as we go;
-    They are the city’s shining spires
-          We travel to.”
-
-Who can resist the earnestness and candor with which, in a few
-sessions, he wrote down the white passion of the last fifty years
-of his life? No English poet, unless it be Spenser, has a piety so
-simple and manly, so colored with mild thought, so free from emotional
-consciousness. The elect given over to continual polemics do not count
-Henry Vaughan as one of themselves. His double purpose is to make life
-pleasant to others and to praise God; and he considers that he is
-accomplishing it when he pens a compliment to the valley grass, or,
-like Coleridge, caresses in some affectionate strophes the much-abused
-little ass. All this liberal sweetness and charity heighten Vaughan’s
-poetic quality, as they deepen the impression of his practical
-Christianity. The nimbus is about his laic songs. When he talks of
-moss and rocks, it is as if they were incorporated into the ritual. He
-has the genius of prayer, and may be recognized by “those graces which
-walk in a veil and a silence.” He is full of distinction, and of a sort
-of golden idiosyncrasy. Vaughan’s true “note” is—Vaughan. To read him
-is like coming alone to a village church-yard with trees, where the
-west is dying, in hues of lilac and rose, behind the low ivied Norman
-tower. The south windows are open, the young choir are within, and the
-organist, with many a hushed unconventional interlude of his own, is
-rehearsing with them the psalm of “pleasures for evermore.”
-
-FOOTNOTES:
-
-[20] Siluria comprised the shires of Monmouth, Hereford, Glamorgan,
-Radnor, and Brecon.
-
-[21] The Reverend H. F. Lyte, Vaughan’s enthusiastic editor, best known
-as the author of _Abide with Me_, reminds us that there was another
-Henry Vaughan of the same college and the same neighborhood at home—a
-pleasant theological person not to be confounded with the poet. It was
-probably he, and not the Silurist, who devoted some verses to Charles
-the First in the book called _Eucharistica Oxoniensis_, 1641.
-
-[22] These deep Augustinian lines are Carew’s, gay Carew’s; and they
-mark the highest religious expression of their time.
-
-[23] Vaughan apparently enjoyed that privilege of genius, acquaintance
-with a London garret, if we may take autobiographically the fine brag
-worthy of the tribe of Henri Mürger:
-
-“I scorn your land, So far it lies below me; here I see How all the
-sacred stars do circle me.”
-
-[24] The King lodged at Christchurch, the Queen and my Lady Castlemaine
-(together, alas!) at Merton, amid endless hawking, tennis, boating,
-basset, and general revelry.
-
-[25] Orinda’s own verses, scattered in manuscript among her friends,
-were collected and printed without her knowledge, and much against her
-desire, in 1663: a piece of treachery which threw her into a severe
-indisposition. She could therefore condole more than enough with Henry
-Vaughan. Friends were officious creatures in those days.
-
-[26] This, to say the least, was not “pretty” of Campbell, who thought
-so well of the “world’s grey fathers” congregated to gaze at Vaughan’s
-_Rainbow_ that he conveyed them bodily into the foreground of his own.
-
-[27] Per´-spective was, of course, the general pronunciation from
-Shakespeare to Dr. Johnson, and is used with great beauty in Dryden’s
-_Ode to the Memory of Mrs. Anne Killigrew_. But it is a characteristic
-word with Vaughan, and it was from Vaughan that Wordsworth took it.
-
-[28] Vaughan had a relish for damp weather, the thing which makes the
-loveliness of the British isles, and which the ungrateful islanders
-are prone to revile. He never passes a sheet of water without looking
-upward for the forming cloud:
-
-“That drowsy lake From her faint bosom breathed thee!”
-
-[29] Sometimes erroneously printed “bowers.”
-
-[30] It was kind of the ever-kind Hunt to include America in his
-enumeration, at a time when the United States were supposed by his
-fellow-countrymen to have no literature at all of their own. The
-circumstance that his challenge appeared in the preface to _The Book
-of the Sonnet_, which was edited by Hunt in conjunction with an
-American, and published at Boston in 1868, may help to account for the
-mannerliness of the reference.
-
-[31] In the _Letters and Memorials of Archbishop Trench_, vol. ii.,
-p. 57, there is a letter bearing upon this point from Mr. Frank
-Millson, dated 1868, which deserves serious consideration from
-Vaughan’s forthcoming editors. “I think,” he writes the Dean, “that
-your supposition that the 1655 edition is the same book as the one
-of 1650, with a new title-page and additions, can hardly be correct,
-though I know that Lyte, the editor of Pickering’s reprint, thinks as
-you do. The preface to the 1655 edition is dated September 30, 1654,
-and contains this passage” (not given in the _Memorials_) “which seems
-to me to refer to the fact of a new edition. A comparison of my two
-copies shows that the 1650 edition consists of half a sheet, title
-and dedication, and 110 pages. The second edition has title, preface,
-dedication, motto, the 110 pages of the first edition, with 84 pages
-of new matter, and a table of first lines. A noticeable thing in the
-arrangement is that the sheets do not begin with new printer’s marks,
-as they might be expected to do if the second part were simply new
-matter added to the first volume, but begin with A, the last sheet of
-the former volume having ended with G. I am sorry to trouble you with
-these trifling details; but as Vaughan has long been a favorite author
-of mine, they have an interest for me, and if they help to show that he
-was not neglected by readers of his own time, I shall be glad.”
-
-[32] Anthologies and cyclopædias nowadays, especially since Dr. John
-Brown and Principal Shairp drew attention to the Silurist in their
-pages, are more than likely to admit him. It was not so always.
-Winstanley, sharp as was his eye, let Vaughan escape him in his
-_Lives of the Poets_, published in 1687. He is not in the _Theatrum
-Poetarum_, nor in Johnson’s _Lives_. He is in neither of Southey’s
-collections. Mr. Palgrave allows him, in _The Golden Treasury_, but
-a song and a half; Ellis’s sheaf of excellent _Specimens_ of 1811
-furnishes eighteen lines of a wedding blessing on the _Best and Most
-Accomplished Couple_ apologizing for “their too much quaintness and
-conceit”; and in Willmott’s _Sacred Poets_ Vaughan occupies four
-pages, as against Crashaw’s thirty-five, Herbert’s thirty-seven, and
-Wither’s one hundred and thirty-two. But Vaughan fares well in Dr.
-George Macdonald’s _England’s Antiphon_, and in Archbishop Trench’s
-_Household Book_. Ward’s _English Poets_, in the second volume, has a
-conventional selection from him, as has, at greater length, Fields’ and
-Whipple’s _Family Library of British Poetry_. There is a goodly list
-entered under Vaughan’s name in Gilfillan’s _Less-Known British Poets_,
-all chosen from his devotional work. Thirty-seven religious lyrics
-again adorn the splendid _Treasury of Sacred Song_. Vaughan’s secular
-numbers yet await their proper bays, although a limited edition of most
-of them, containing a bibliography, was printed in 1893 by J. R. Tutin
-of Hull. Mr. Saintsbury, in his _Seventeenth Century Lyrics_, has a
-small and very choice group of Vaughan’s songs, and Professor Palgrave,
-having to do with him for the third time, gives him large and cordial
-honor in the eleventh volume of _Y Cymmrodor_. In Emerson’s Parnassus
-he appears but once. He had his most graceful and grateful American
-tribute when Mr. Lowell, long ago, named him in passing as “dear Henry
-Vaughan,” in _A Certain Condescension in Foreigners_.
-
-[33] In one of his prefaces, Vaughan hits neatly at the crowd of
-Herbertists: “These aim more at verse than at perfection.” Where there
-are noble resemblances, it is well to remember that two sides have the
-right to be heard. Mrs. Thoreau used to say: “Mr. Emerson imitates
-Henry!” And she was at least as accurate as the critics who annoyed her
-old age by the reversed statement.
-
-[34] Mr. R. H. Stoddard owns a copy of the first edition of
-_Nieremberg’s Meditations_, translated by Vaughan in 1654, and
-published the following year, which has upon the title-page an
-autographic “J. M.” supposed, by every evidence, to be Milton’s. If it
-be so, the busy Latin Secretary, meditating his grand work, must have
-been, on his part, a reader and a lover of the man who was almost his
-equal at golden phrases.
-
-[35] Congreve and Waller employ the same rather too obvious love-name
-for their serenaded divinities.
-
-[36] Vaughan openly wears jewels which belong to Jonson.
-
-“Go seek thy peace in war: Who falls for love of God shall rise a star!”
-
-wrote brave Father Ben; and no Englishman of spirit, between 1642 and
-the Restoration, was likely to forget it. The passage certainly clung
-to Vaughan’s mind, for he assimilated it later in a sweet line all for
-peace:
-
-“Do thou the works of day, and rise a star.”
-
-
-
-
-III
-
-GEORGE FARQUHAR
-
-1677-1707
-
-
-THERE is a narrow dark Essex Street West in the city of Dublin, running
-between Fishamble Street and Essex Gate, at the rear of the Lower
-Blind Quay. The older people still bluntly call it what it was called
-before 1830: Smock Alley. On its north side stands the sufficiently
-ugly church of SS. Michael and John. The arched passage still in use,
-parallel with the nave of this church, was the entrance to a theatre
-on the same site; what is now the burial vault was once the pit, full
-of ruddy and uproarious faces. The theatre, erected about 1660, which
-had a long, stormy and eventful history, was rebuilt in 1735, and
-having been turned into a warehouse, fell into decay, to be replaced
-by a building of another clay. But while it was still itself, it was
-great and popular, and the lane between Trinity College and the old
-arched passage was choked every night with the press of jolly youths,
-who, as Archbishop King pathetically complained, appeared to love the
-play better than study! Among those who hung about Smock Alley like a
-barnacle in the years 1694 and 1695, was a certain George Farquhar,
-son of William,[37] a poor Londonderry clergyman of the Establishment;
-a long-faced peculiar lad of mild mien but high spirits. He had come
-from the north, under episcopal patronage, to wear a queer dress among
-his social betters, to sweep and scour and carry tankards of ale to
-the Fellows in hall; and incidentally, to imbibe, on his own part, the
-lore of all the ages. The major event in his history is that, instead
-of sitting up nights over _Isocrates de Pace_, he slipped off to see
-Robert Wilkes and the stock company, and to decide that acting, or,
-as he afterwards sarcastically defined it, “tearing his Lungs for a
-Livelihood,” was also the thing for him. Wherefore, at eighteen, either
-because his benefactor, Bishop Wiseman of Dromore, had died, or else,
-as is not very credibly reported, because he was cashiered from his
-class, Master Farquhar, cut loose from his old moorings, applied to
-Manager Ashbury of the Dublin Theatre, and to such avail that he was
-able presently to make his own appearance there as no less a personage
-than Othello. He had a weak voice and a shy presence; but the public
-encouraged him. One of his first parts was that of Guyomar, Montezuma’s
-younger brother, in Dryden’s tragedy of _The Indian Emperor_. In the
-fifth act, as soon as he had declaimed to Vasquez in sounding sing-song:
-
-    “Friendship with him whose hand did Odmar kill?
-     Base as he was, he was my brother still!
-     But since his blood has washed away his guilt,
-     Nature asks thine for that which thou hast spilt,”
-
-he made, according to stage directions, a fierce lunge at his too
-conciliatory foe. Guyomar had armed himself, inadvertently, with
-a genuine sword, and Vasquez came near enough to being killed in
-the flesh. The man eventually recovered; but it shows of what
-impressionable stuff Farquhar was made, that his mental horror
-and pain, during that moment while he believed he had slain a
-fellow-creature, should have turned the course of his life. He left the
-stage; nor would he return to it. Some eight years after, indeed, he
-visited Dublin again, and on the old boards played Sir Harry Wildair
-for his own benefit; but this was at a time when he forced himself to
-undertake all honorable chances of money-making, out of his consuming
-anxiety for his family.
-
-Wilkes and his wife returned to London, and the lad Farquhar went with
-them. He obtained a commission in the army from the Earl of Orrery;
-he was in Holland on duty during a part of the year 1700, and came
-back to England with one of her earliest military red coats on his
-back, in the train of his much-approved sovereign, William III. He
-had already written, thanks to Wilkes and his incessant urging, his
-first two plays, and had seen them successful at Drury Lane;[38] he
-had also overheard with enthusiasm, at the Mitre Tavern in St. James’s
-Market, Mistress Nance Oldfield, an orphan of sixteen, niece of the
-proprietress, reading _The Scornful Lady_ behind the bar. Captain
-Vanbrugh was duly told of Farquhar’s delight and admiration, and on
-the strength of them introduced the girl to Rich, who did few things
-so good in his lifetime as when he put her upon the stage at fifteen
-shillings a week. It was not long before this distinguished actress
-and generous woman, destined to lend her gayety and beautiful bearing
-to the interpretation of Farquhar’s women, enlivened the town as the
-glorious Sylvia of _The Recruiting Officer_, who can “gallop all the
-morning after a hunting-horn, and all the evening after a fiddle.”
-
-“We hear of Farquhar at one time,” says Leigh Hunt, in a pretty
-summary, “in Essex, hare-hunting (not in the style of a proficient);
-at another, at Richmond, sick; and at a third, in Shropshire on a
-recruiting party, where he was treated with great hospitality, and
-found material for one of the best of his plays.”
-
-_Love and a Bottle_ inaugurated the vogue of the Farquhar comedy; and
-Wilkes, whose name in London carried favor and precedence, was the
-Roebuck of the cast. Its successors, _The Constant Couple_ (with a
-framework transferred and adapted from its author’s earlier _Adventures
-of Covent Garden_), and its sequel, _Sir Harry Wildair_, again
-championed by the “friendly and indefatigable” Wilkes, who impersonated
-the engaging rakish heroes, had long runs, and firmly established
-their author’s fame. In 1702 Farquhar produced _The Inconstant_ (which
-he had perverted from Fletcher’s _Wild Goose Chase_, as if a fit
-setting were sought for the wonderfully effective last act of his own
-devising); and after _The Inconstant_, _The Twin Rivals_. _The Stage
-Coach_, a one-act farce in which he had a collaborator,[39] dates from
-1704, and _The Recruiting Officer_ from 1706; _The Beaux’ Stratagem_
-was written in the spring of 1707. This is a working record of barely
-nine years; it represents a secure and continuous artistic advance; and
-it should have brought its patient originator something better than the
-privilege of dying young, “broken-hearted,” as he confessed to Wilkes,
-“and without a shilling.”
-
-Farquhar had but the trifling income of an officer’s pay on which to
-support his wife and his two little daughters. He seems to have sought
-no political preferment, nor did his numerous patrons put themselves
-out to advance him, although these were the very days when men of
-letters were crowded into the public service. Ever and anon he received
-fifteen guineas, then a very handsome sum, for a play. Perhaps,
-like his rash gallants, he had “a head to get money, and a heart to
-spend it.” He greatly wished success, for the sake of those never
-absent from his thought; and he complained bitterly when the French
-acrobats and rope-dancers took from _The Twin Rivals_ the attention of
-pleasure-seeking Londoners, much as poor Haydon complained afterwards
-of the crowds who surged down Piccadilly, to behold not his “Christ’s
-Entry into Jerusalem” at all, but General Tom Thumb, holding court
-under the same roof.
-
-When Farquhar’s health was breaking, and debts began to involve him at
-last, it appears that the Earl of Ormonde, his general, prompted him
-to sell his commission in order to liquidate them, and agreed to give
-him a captaincy. Or, as is yet more probable, in view of the fact that
-Farquhar was already known by the title of captain, he was urged to
-sell out of the army, on a given pledge that preferment of another sort
-awaited him. His other industrious devices to secure support for four
-having missed fire, he gladly performed his part of the transaction,
-only to experience a fatal delay on the part of my Lord Ormonde,
-whose mind had strayed to larger matters. In fine, the unkept promise
-hurt the subaltern to the heart; he sank, literally from that hour,
-of grief and disquietude. Lintott the stationer, and his old friend
-Wilkes stood manfully by him, one with liberal payment in advance,
-and one with affectionate furtherance and gifts; but Farquhar did not
-rally. It was to Wilkes, as everybody knows, that he penned this most
-touching testament: “Dear Bob, I have not anything to leave thee to
-perpetuate my memory but two helpless girls. Look upon them sometimes!
-and think of him who was, to the last moment of his life, thine.” The
-end came on or about April 29, 1707, George Farquhar being just thirty
-years of age. While he lay dying in Soho, his last and best comedy
-was in progress at the new magnificent Haymarket, and his audiences,
-with a barren benevolence not uncharacteristic of the unthinking human
-species, are said to have wept for him. He was buried in the parish
-church-yard of St. Martin-in-the-Fields,[40] where Nell Gwynne’s
-contrite ashes lay, and where her legacied bells tolled for his passing.
-
-Farquhar’s name is always coupled with those of Congreve, Wycherley,
-and Vanbrugh, although in spirit and also in point of time he was
-removed from the influences which formed them. Many critics, notably
-Hazlitt, Macaulay, and Thackeray, have allowed him least mention of the
-four, but he is, in reality, the best playwright among them; and it is
-greatly to the credit of a discreditable period if he be taken as its
-representative. He had Vanbrugh’s exuberant vivacity, Congreve’s grace,
-Wycherley’s knack of climax. Wycherley, retiring into private life when
-Farquhar was born, lived to see his exit; Etherege was then at his
-zenith; Dryden’s _All for Love_ was in the printer’s case, and Otway,
-almost on the point of his two great works, was coming home ragged
-from Flanders: Otway, whose boyish ventures on the stage, and whose
-subsequent soldiering, Farquhar was so closely to follow.
-
-Pope, and a gentler observer, Steele, found Farquhar’s dialogue “low,”
-and so it must have sounded between the brave surviving extravagances
-of the Jacobean buskin and the modulated utterances of _Cato_ and _The
-Revenge_. A practical talent like Farquhar’s was bound to provoke hard
-little words from the Popes who shrank from his spontaneous style,
-and the Steeles who could not approve of the gross themes he had
-inherited. For sheer good-breeding, some scenes in _The Way of the
-World_ can never be surpassed; they prove that one cannot hold the
-stage by talk alone. It is fortunate for Farquhar that he could not
-emulate the exquisitely civilized depravities of Congreve’s urban Muse.
-But his dialogue is not “low” to modern tastes; it has, in general, a
-simple, natural zest, infinitely preferable to the Persian apparatus
-of the early eighteenth century. Even he, however, can rant and
-deviate into rhetoric, as soon as his lovers drop upon one knee. More
-plainly in Farquhar’s work than in that of any contemporary, we mark
-the glamour of the Caroline literature fading, and the breath of life
-blowing in. An essentially Protestant nationalism began to settle down
-upon England for good and all with William and Mary, and it brought
-subtle changes to bear upon the arts, the trades, the sports, and
-the manners of the people. In Farquhar’s comedies we have the reflex
-of a dulling and strengthening age; the fantasticalities of the last
-three reigns are all but gone; the Vandyck dresses gleam and swish
-no longer. Speech becomes more pert and serviceable, in a vocabulary
-of lesser range; lives are vulgarizing, that is, humanizing, and
-getting closer to common unromantic concerns; no such delicately unreal
-creature as Millamant, all fire and dew and perfumery,—Millamant who
-could not suffer to have her hair done up in papers written in prose,
-and who, quite by herself, is a vindication of what Mr. Allibone is
-pleased to call “Lamb’s sophistical and mischievous essay,”—walks the
-world of Farquhar. With him, notwithstanding that the sorry business
-to be despatched is the same old amorous intrigue, come in at once
-less license, less affectation, less Gallicism. He reports from the
-beginning what he himself apprehends; his plays are shorthand notes,
-albeit timid in character, upon the transitional and prosaic time. His
-company is made up of individuals he had seen in a thousand lights at
-the Spread Eagle and the Rummer; in the Inner Temple and in St. James’s
-Park; in barracks domestic and foreign; and in his native place, where
-adventurers, eloquent in purest Londonderry,[41] stumbled along
-full of whiskey and ideas. He anticipates certain phases of Private
-Ortheris’s thorough-going love of London, and figures his exiled Dicky
-as “just dead of a consumption, till the sweet smoke of Cheapside
-and the dear perfume of Fleet-ditch” made him a man again. In this
-laughing affectionate apprehension of the local and the temporal
-lies Farquhar’s whole strength or weakness. From the poets of the
-Restoration there escapes, most incongruously, now and then, something
-which betokens a sense of natural beauty, or even a recognition of the
-divine law; but Farquhar is not a poet, and this spray from the deeps
-is not in him. He perceives nothing that is not, and opens no crack or
-chink where the fancy can air itself for a moment and
-
-    —“step grandly out into the infinite.”
-
-Such a lack would not be worth remarking in the debased and insincere
-writers who but just preceded him. But from the very date of his
-first dealings with London managers, idealism was abroad, and a man
-with affinities for “the things that are more excellent” need have
-feared no longer to divulge them, since the court and the people, if
-not the dominant town gentry, were with him. Farquhar had neither the
-full moral illumination nor the will, though he had the capacity,
-to lend a hand to the blessed work waiting for the opportunist. He
-was young, he was of provincial nurture; he was carried away by the
-theatrical tradition. Yet his mind was a Medea’s kettle, out of which
-everything issued cleaner and more wholesome. Despite the prodigious
-animal spirits of his characters, they conduct their mad concerns with
-sense and moderation; they manage tacitly to proclaim themselves as
-temporarily “on a tear,” as going forth to angle in angling weather,
-and as likely to lead sober citizen lives from to-morrow on. Under bad
-old maintained conditions they develop traits approximately worthy of
-the _Christian Hero_. They “look before and after.” They are to be
-classed as neutrals and nondescripts, for they have all the swagger
-of their lax progenitors, and none of their deviltry. They belong
-professionally to one family, while they bear a tantalizing resemblance
-to another. Farquhar himself, perhaps unaware that partisanship is
-better than compromise, made his bold toss for bays both spiritual
-and temporal. Imitating, as novices will ever do, the art back of
-him, he adopted the claim to approbation which that art never dreamed
-of. In the very good preface to _The Twin Rivals_ (which has always
-been approved of critics rather than of audiences), he sets up for a
-castigator of vice and folly, and he offers to appease “the ladies and
-the clergy,” as, in some measure apparent to the more metaphysical
-among them, he may have done. His friend, Mr. John Hopkins, the
-author of _Amasia_, invited, on behalf of _The Constant Couple_, the
-commendation of Collier. That open-minded censor may have seen with
-satisfaction, in the general trend of Farquhar’s composition, the less
-and less dubious day-beams of Augustan decency. Though Farquhar did not
-live, like Vanbrugh and the magnanimous Dryden, to admit the abuse of a
-gift, and to deplore it, he alone, of the minor dramatists, seems all
-along to have had a negative sort of conscience better than none. His
-instincts continually get the better not only of his environment, but
-of his practice. Some uneasiness, some misgiving, are at the bottom of
-his homely materialism. He thinks it best, on the whole, to forswear
-the temptation to be sublime, and to keep to his cakes and ale; and
-for cakes and ale he had an eminent and inborn talent. What was ably
-said of Hogarth, the great exemplar, will cover all practicians of his
-school: “He had an intense feeling for and command over the impressions
-of senses and habit, of character and passion, the serious and the
-comic; in a word, of nature as it fell in with his own observation, or
-came into the sphere of his actual experience. But he had little power
-beyond that sphere, or sympathy for that which existed only in idea. He
-was ‘conformed to this world, not transformed.’” Or, as Leigh Hunt, in
-his beautiful memoir, adds, with acuteness, of Farquhar himself: “He
-could turn what he had experienced in common life to the best account,
-but he required in all cases the support of ordinary associations, and
-could not project his spirit beyond them.” In short, Farquhar lacked
-imagination. He had insight, however, of another order, which is
-his praise, and which distinguishes him from all his fellows: he had
-sympathy and charity.
-
-The major blot on the literature of the English stage of the period is
-not its libertinism, but rather its concomitant utter heartlessness.
-“Arrogance” (so, according to Erasmus, that ascetic scholar Dean Colet
-used to remind his clergy) “is worse than a hundred concubines.” The
-slight sporadic touches of tenderness, of pity, of disinterested
-generosity, to be found by patient search in Congreve, come in boldly
-with Farquhar, and boldly overrun his prompter’s books. Vanbrugh’s
-scenes stand on nothing but their biting and extravagant sarcasm. As
-Congreve’s characters are indiscriminately witty, so Vanbrugh’s are
-universally and wearisomely cynical, and at the expense of themselves
-and all society. His women in high life have no individuality; they
-wear stings of one pattern. The genial conception of the shrewd,
-material Mrs. Amlet, however, in _The Confederacy_, is worthy of
-Farquhar, and certainly Congreve himself could not have bettered
-her in the execution. Etherege’s typical Man of Mode is a tissue
-of untruth, hardness, and scorn, all in impeccable attire; a most
-mournful spectacle. Thinking of such dainty monsters, Macaulay let fly
-his famous invective against their creators: “Foreheads of bronze,
-hearts like the nether millstone, and tongues set on fire of hell!”
-George Farquhar may be exempted altogether from this too-deserved
-compliment. There is honest mirth in his world of fiction, there is
-dutifulness, there is true love, there are good women; there is genuine
-friendship between Roebuck and Lovewell, between Trueman and Hermes
-Wouldbe, between Aimwell and Archer, and between the green Tummas of
-_The Recruiting Officer_ and his Costar, whom he cannot leave behind.
-Sylvia, Angelica, Constance, Leanthe, Oriana, Dorinda, free-spoken
-as they are, how they shine, and with what morning freshness, among
-the tiger-lilies of that evil garden of the Restoration drama! These
-heroines are an innovation, for they are maids, not wedded wives.
-As to the immortal periwigged young bloods their suitors, they are
-“real gentlemen,” as Hazlitt, who loved Farquhar, called them, “and
-only pretended impostors;” or, to quote Farquhar’s latest editor, Mr.
-A. C. Ewald, they are “always men and never yahoos.” Their author
-had no interest in “preferring vice, and rendering virtue dull and
-despicable.” Their praise may be negative, but it establishes a wide
-wall of difference between them and the fops and cads with whom they
-have been confounded. In their conversations, glistening with epigram
-and irony, malevolence has no part; they sneer at no virtue, they
-tamper with none; and at every turn of a selfish campaign they find
-opportunity for honorable behavior. From the mouths of these worldlings
-comes satire, hot and piping, against worldliness; for Farquhar is
-as moralizing, if not as moral, as he dares be. Some of the least
-attractive of them, the most greedy and contriving, have moments of
-sweetly whimsical and optimistic speech. Thus Benjamin Wouldbe, the
-plotter against his elder brother in _The Twin Rivals_, makes his
-adieu after the fashion of a true gallant: “I scorn your beggarly
-benevolence! Had my designs succeeded, I would not have allowed you the
-weight of a wafer, and therefore will accept none.” The same person
-soars again into a fine Aurelian speculation: “Show me that proud stoic
-that can bear success and champagne! Philosophy can support us in hard
-fortune, but who can have patience in prosperity?” Over his men and
-women in middle life Farquhar lingers with complacence entirely foreign
-to his colleagues, to whom mothers, guardians, husbands, and other
-apple-guarding dragons were uniformly ridiculous and odious. Justice
-Balance is as attractive as a hearth-fire on a December night; so is
-Lady Bountiful. Over Fairbank, the good goldsmith, Farquhar gets fairly
-sentimental, and permits him to drop unaware into decasyllabics, like
-the pastoral author of _Lorna Doone_. His rogues are merely roguish,
-in the softened sense of the word; in his panorama, though black
-villains come and go, it is only for an instant, and to further some
-one dramatic effect. He has eulogy for his heroes when they deserve it,
-and when they do not you may trust him to find a compassionate excuse;
-as when poor Leanthe feelingly says of her lover that “his follies are
-weakly founded upon the principles of honor, where the very foundation
-helps to undermine the structure.” Even Squire Sullen, for his
-lumpishness, is divorced without derision, and in a peal of harmless
-laughter. Farquhar, indeed, is all gentleness, all kindness. He had the
-pensive attitude of the true humorist towards the world he laughed at;
-his characters let slip words too deep for their living auditors. It
-is curious that to a Restoration dramatist, “a nether millstone,” we
-should owe a perfect brief description of ideal married life. In the
-scene of the fourth act of _Sir Harry Wildair_, where Lady Lurewell,
-with her “petrifying affectation,” is trying to tease Sir Harry out
-of all endurance on the subject of his wife (whom he believes to be
-lost or dead), and the degree of affection he had for her, he makes
-reply: “My own heart whispered me her desires, ’cause she herself was
-there; no contention ever rose but the dear strife of who should most
-oblige—no noise about authority, for neither would stoop to command,
-where both thought it glory to obey.” This is meant to be spoken
-rapidly, and not without its tantalizing lack of emphasis; but what a
-pearl it is, set there in the superlatively caustic dialogue! English
-chivalry and English literature have no such other golden passage in
-their rubrics, unless it be the famous tribute to the Lady Elizabeth
-Hastings that “to love her was a liberal education,” or Lovelace’s
-unforgettable song:
-
-    “I could not love thee, dear, so much,
-     Loved I not Honour more!”
-
-The passage takes on a very great accidental beauty when we remember
-that it required courage, in its time and place, to have written it.
-It is characteristic also of Farquhar that it should be introduced,
-as it is, on the top wave of a vivacious and stormy conversation,
-which immediately sweeps it under, as if in proof that he understood
-both his art and his audience. The conjugal tie, among the leaders
-of fashion, was still something to laugh at and to toy with. Captain
-Vanbrugh, from whom nobody need expect much edification, had put in the
-mouth of his Constant, in a play which was a favorite with Garrick,
-a bit of sense and sincerity quoted, as it deserved to be, by Hunt:
-“Though marriage be a lottery in which there are a wondrous many
-blanks, yet there is one inestimable lot in which the only heaven on
-earth is written.” And again: “To be capable of loving one is better
-than to possess a thousand.” This was in 1698, and Farquhar therefore
-was not first, nor alone, in daring to speak for the derided idea of
-wedlock. Steele was soon to arise as the very champion of domestic
-life; and English wit, since he wrote, has never subsisted by its
-mockery of the conditions which create
-
-    “home-keeping days and household reverences.”
-
-But it was Farquhar who spoke in behalf of these the most memorable
-word of his generation. After that lofty evidence of what he must be
-suspected to have been, it is well to see, as best we may, what manner
-of man George Farquhar was. And first let us take some extracts from
-his own account of himself, “candid and modest,” as Hunt named it.
-
-He gives us to understand that he had an ardent temperament, held in
-check by an introspective turn of thought, by natural bashfulness, and
-by habits of consideration for others. The portrait is drawn from a
-letter in the _Miscellanies_, of “a mind and person generally dressed
-in black,” and might have come bodily, and with charming grace, from
-_The Spectator_. “I have very little estate but what lies under the
-circumference of my hat . . . and should I by misfortune come to lose
-my head, I should not be worth a groat.” “I am seldom troubled by what
-the world calls airs and caprices, and I think it an idiot’s excuse
-for a foolish action to say: ‘’Twas my humor.’” “I cannot cheerfully
-fix to any study which bears not a pleasure in the application.”
-“Long expectation makes the blessing always less to me; I lose the
-great transport of surprise.” “I am a very great epicure; for which
-reason I hate all pleasure that’s purchased by excess of pain. I can’t
-relish the jest that vexes another. In short, if ever I do a wilful
-injury, it must be a very great one.” “I have many acquaintances, very
-few intimates, but no friend; I mean, in the old romantic way.” “I
-have no secret so weighty but that I can bear it in my own breast.”
-“I would have my passion, if not led, at least waited on by my
-reason.” This last text, repeated elsewhere by Farquhar, which is the
-counterpart of one in Sir Philip Sidney’s _Arcadia_, has interest from
-the lips of a child of the “dancing, drinking, and unthinking time.”
-Farquhar’s face, in the old prints, is wonderfully of a piece with
-these amiable reports: a handsome, humane, careworn, melancholy young
-face, the negation of the contemporary idea of the man about town. His
-constitution, at its best, was but frail. “You are as dear to me,” he
-says, pathetically, to his Penelope, “as my hopes of waking in health
-to-morrow morning.”
-
-A tradition has been received without question by his many critics and
-biographers, that his chief characters, all cast in the same animated
-mould, are but incognitos of himself. Highly-colored projections of
-himself, with latent traits exaggerated, and formed mental restraints
-removed, they may indeed be. The public, which loves identifications,
-insisted on finding him revealed in his Archers and Sir Harrys. Whether
-or not the dramatists of the day had universally the Rembrandtesque
-whim of painting themselves into their own foregrounds, they were
-obstinately supposed to do so, with Etherege in Young Bellair, with
-Otway in Jaffier. But the real Farquhar
-
-                  —“courteous, facile, sweet,
-    Hating that solemn vice of greatness, pride,”
-
-with his reserve, his simple dress, his thin, agreeable voice,
-his early reputation at college for uncongeniality, acting in
-every emergency whither we can fairly trace him with deliberate
-high-mindedness, is far enough from the temper of his restless and
-jocund creations. He wished to remove the impression that he could have
-been his own model; for he took pains to inscribe _The Inconstant_ to
-his classmate, Richard Tighe, and to compliment him upon his kinship
-with Mirabel, “a gay, splendid, easy, generous, fine young gentleman”;
-the applauded type, in short, of all that Farquhar’s heroes set out to
-be. Again, lest he should pass for a realist as rabid as Mademoiselle
-de Scudéry, who pinioned three hundred and seventy of her acquaintances
-between the covers of _Clélie_, Farquhar adds this warning to his
-enthusiastic dedication of _The Recruiting Officer_ “to all friends
-round the Wrekin”: “Some little turns of humor that I met with almost
-within the shade of that famous hill gave the rise to this comedy;
-and people were apprehensive that, by the example of some others, I
-would make the town merry at the expense of the country gentleman. But
-they forgot that I was to write a comedy, not a libel.” He disclaims
-everywhere, with the same playful decisiveness, the interpretations put
-upon his designs and actions by the world of overgrown infants which he
-entertained. Endowed with courage and much personal charm, he had small
-chance of distinguishing himself upon the field, and for the most part
-shone at a garrison mess; but he had led a not inadventurous life, in
-which were incidents of the most pronounced melodrama, with a touch of
-mystery to enhance their value for the curious. Farquhar had travelled,
-and with an open, not an insular mind; he had, by his own confession,
-too deep an acquaintance with wine, and with the nightingales of Spring
-Gardens, outsinging “the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow”; he had
-been, in short, though with “melancholy as his every-day apparel,”
-alive and abroad as a private Whig of the Revolution, shy of ladies’
-notice till it came, and proud of it ever after. When he printed, in
-his twenty-first year, _The Adventures of Covent Garden_, he added to
-it a boy’s bragging motto: _Et quorum pars magna fui_. The inference
-seems to have clung closer to him than he found comfortable. He
-complains, not without significance, in his prose essay upon the
-drama, that the public think any rôle compounded of “practical rake
-and speculative gentleman is, ten to one, the author’s own character.”
-With the incident which furnished its thrilling closing scenes to _The
-Inconstant_, Farquhar had probably no connection; he takes pains to
-state that the hero of it was the Chevalier de Chastillon, quite as if
-he feared another confusion of himself, as fearless and quick-witted
-a man, with the “golden swashbucklers” of his imagination. The rumor
-which confounded them with him has next to nothing to support it.
-Fortune, fashion, foolhardiness, impudence, were not the stars which
-shone upon Farquhar’s nativity. Such exotic and epic virtues as may
-flourish under these, such as do adorn the delightful dandies he
-depicted, surely belonged to him in person; and his quiet habit of
-living apart and letting the town talk, fixed to perpetuity the belief
-that he had exploited himself vicariously, for good and all, upon the
-stage. Certain qualities of his, certain brave truces established with
-adverse conditions, force one to consider him with more attention and
-respect than even his brilliant pen invites. It is something to find
-him diffident and studious in a bacchanalian society, and with such
-scrupulous sensitiveness that a mere inadvertence in boyhood forbade
-him ever to fence again;[42] but his outstanding characteristic, the
-thing which sets him apart from his brocaded _dramatis personæ_, is his
-known lasting devotion to the welfare of his family, and his admirable
-behavior in relation to his early and extraordinary marriage.
-
-In 1702, Farquhar issued a charming and little-known miscellany,
-called _Love and Business_, “a collection of occasionary verse and
-epistolary prose.” The poetic exercises are of small importance;
-but the other data (which survive as a hindrance, rather than as a
-help, to biographers) come near being of very definite value. All
-manner of futile guesses have been expended upon the identification
-of his Penelope. It is given to no mouser to name her with certainty;
-but, despite the gossip of the greenroom, now as ever too ready to
-weave romances about the name of George Farquhar, internal evidence
-is strongly against her having been Anne Oldfield. Yet this is the
-supposition of most of his editors. Commenting upon one passage
-touching some villanous stratagem from which Farquhar says he was
-able to rescue a friend in the Low Countries, a friend with whom he
-afterwards condoles upon a robbery she had undergone, Leigh Hunt adds
-that this may have been the woman whom Farquhar subsequently made his
-wife. A widow, whose Christian name was Margaret, but of whom we know
-so little else that we cannot say whether she was English, or whether
-her age considerably exceeded his, conceived a passionate attachment
-for him, and managed to have it represented to him from several
-quarters not only that she was kindly disposed towards him, but that
-it would be well for his opening career if he should seek her hand,
-as she had estates and revenues. Eventually, after we know not what
-hesitations natural to a fastidious temperament, he proposed to her
-and was accepted, and it soon transpired that the bride was quite as
-penniless as himself. Hunt does not follow out his own hint in the
-matter of the robbery, though the question, when carefully considered,
-has a vital import. If the victim were indeed the lady whom Farquhar
-married later, and if she were indeed robbed, it should signify that
-she must then have been possessed of some wealth, so that the report
-given to Farquhar could not have been, up to that time at least, a
-lie. On the other hand, casuists must decide whether, again in the
-event of the victim having been correctly identified by Hunt, the
-robbery itself may not have been an invention meant, after Farquhar had
-declared his allegiance, to quicken his sympathy, and to soften the
-coming revelation that the robbery could never have resulted, owing to
-a defect in the premises! There is very much else about the _Letters_
-which is confusing and inconsistent. They are so disconnected, and
-they vary so in tone and manner, as to suggest a doubt whether, if not
-altogether imaginary, they could have been meant for any one person. A
-lady is announced as having returned them for publication; she dresses
-in mourning, and resides now on the Continent, now in London or in the
-country; her suitor very explicitly states that he had long solicited
-in vain the honor of her hand; and, in the end, with farewells and an
-abrupt and unexplained severing, he gives up the quest, with his own
-admission that he has lost her and that her heart “had no room for
-him.” Now that the recipient of this correspondence, Anne Oldfield
-or another, should have returned it for commercial purposes, not
-having been won by the very real passion exhibited in parts of it,
-seems somewhat peculiar; but to accept as fact that Farquhar himself
-actually asked these letters back from her, and printed them as they
-stood, is, under the conditions, absurd, and irreconcilable with
-our knowledge of his character from other and prior sources. Hunt
-further suggests that the _Miscellany_ was gathered together in some
-press of pecuniary trouble; and its title, indeed, may hint at a
-whimsical expectation that Love, being harnessed and sent abroad to
-arouse curiosity among readers, may return in the way of Business to
-headquarters. But Farquhar, in his bachelor days, had a fair income,
-and would not have been so likely to hear the wolf at the door as he
-was later, when that sound would awake in him a dread not ominous to
-himself alone. It is possible that the undiscovered register of his
-marriage bears the date of 1702 or even of 1701; if it were so, that
-might explain the issue of his only book not in dramatic dress, and the
-emergency which called it forth. It is difficult indeed to suppose,
-although modern delicacy in these matters was just then a somewhat
-unknown quantity, that we have between its covers genuine love-letters
-hot from the pen. Steele, of an August morning nine years later,
-inserted in _The Spectator_ as the communication of a third person, six
-of his own notes to his comely and noble _fiancée_, Mary Scurlock. But
-Farquhar had not Steele’s earnestness and love of circumstantial truth,
-nor his zest for pointing a moral. Or was this publication the sort of
-thing he would be likely, for a not unworthy purpose, to do? Was he,
-in reality, a shade more obtuse and misguided than Miss Fanny Brawne?
-Rather let us believe the _Letters_ a work of fiction, and only founded
-largely upon various bygone moods and incidents of the foregoing two
-years, which for one reason or another might interest buyers. Such is
-the description to “dear Sam” of Dryden’s erratic funeral, which is
-almost too keenly rhetorical a summing-up to have been written the next
-day, or the thoughtful and sensible surveys of the Dutch. The amatory
-epistles, with their leaven of reality, are presumably edited out of
-all recognition. They make no defined impression; they do not move
-forward; they veil impenetrably the traits of the person addressed, who
-is made to appear as a vanishing unrelenting goddess, deaf and blind to
-George Farquhar pleading his best. Whatever were the facts, the report
-of them is chivalrous. Assume for a moment that his wife stands behind
-the whole of this correspondence, or even behind the latter part of
-it, and what seemed to constitute a little betrayal in the very worst
-taste turns out to be an innocent joke. Of course the “lady” (or one of
-the ladies) lent the manuscripts to the printers; of course Farquhar
-originated, in order to give color to Mistress Farquhar’s known
-pretence of riches, and their joint subsequent poverty, the magnificent
-thieving practised upon the never-thieved and the unthievable! One can
-fancy them both, in their hard chairs in the bare room, laughing well
-and long, between tears of anxious hope that the more personal element
-in the _Miscellany_ might fetch them from the Covent Garden book-stalls
-a parcel of fagots and a dinner.
-
-Aside from all theorizing, it is pleasant to know that their life
-together was a happy one. The consensus of all witnesses, in the
-significant absence of any contrary voice, affirms that Farquhar,
-having been trapped, bore himself like the gentleman he was. Two
-children were born to him, to brighten, but also to sadden, his brief
-and diligent life. Under his added anxieties he did his royal best; he
-addressed to their mother, from first to last, no word of reproach for
-her fraud.
-
-    “The secret pleasure of the generous act
-     Is the great mind’s great bribe.”
-
-In its fragrance of faith and patience and self-sacrificing tenderness,
-their domestic story can almost rank next after that sacred one of
-Charles and Mary Lamb.
-
-Farquhar’s widow, who had loved him, appears to have loved his
-memory.[43] She did not survive her husband many years; for there is
-reason to suppose she died before 1719, and in penury. Poor Farquhar
-used to declare that the dread that his family might suffer want was
-far more bitter to him than death. Wilkes gave at his theatre, in the
-May of 1708, a benefit for Margaret Farquhar, and twelve years later
-he was acting as trustee for the young girls Mary and Anne Margaret,
-whose pension is said by the _Encyclopædia Britannica_ to have amounted
-to thirty pounds; it was obtained through the exertions of Edmund
-Challoner, to whom their father had dedicated his _Miscellanies_.
-Wilkes seems to have again aided both the orphans when they came of
-age. One of them married an humble tradesman, and died early; the
-other was living in 1764, wholly uneducated, and, as it is said on
-small authority, as a maid-servant. Farquhar’s elder biographers
-and editors, Ware, Genest, Chetwood, and the rest, writing in this
-daughter’s lifetime, were apparently unconscious of her existence; but
-the thought of her father’s child, old, neglected, and in a menial
-position, served to anger Leigh Hunt as late as 1842.
-
-Fear and forecast of what is only too likely to befall the helpless,
-depressed Farquhar in the April long ago, when he lay dying of
-consumption, and when, with a fortitude which sustained him under
-his bitter disappointment, for six weeks, he wrote and finished his
-masterly comedy _The Beaux’ Stratagem_. As he drew near the end of the
-second act he was told to give up hope; but the second act closes with
-the famous rattling catechism between Cherry and Archer, and the best
-bit of verse its author ever made; and the third starts in with the
-hearty sweet laugh—Anne Oldfield’s laugh—of that “exquisite creature,
-Mrs. Sullen.” On a fund of grief, Farquhar enriched his London with a
-legacy of perpetual merriment. The unflagging impetus of his dramas,
-above and beyond their very real intrinsic merit, accounts for their
-great and yet unforfeited popularity. They descend to us associated
-with the intellectual triumphs of the most dear and dazzling names
-upon the English stage; they move upon the wings of intelligence
-and good-nature; they “give delight, and hurt not.” They swarm with
-soldiers, welcome figures long tacitly prohibited from the boards, as
-too painful a reminder of the Civil Wars. They begin with the clatter
-of spurs, the bang of doors, the hubbub of bantering voices in “a
-broadside of damme’s.” Sergeant Kite appears, followed by a mob on
-whom he lavishes his wheedling, inspiriting gibble-gabble; Roebuck
-enters in fantastic colloquy with a beggar; Sir Harry crosses the road,
-singing, with footmen after him, and Vizard meanwhile indicating him
-to Standard as “the joy of the playhouse and the life of the park,
-Sir Harry Wildair, newly come from Paris”; _The Twin Rivals_ opens
-in a volley of epigrams; the rise of the curtain in _The Beaux’
-Stratagem_ discloses sly old Boniface and the ingenious Cherry calling
-and running, running and calling, in a fluster pregnant of farce and
-revel. Farquhar’s pages are not for the closet; they have little
-passive charm; to quote from them, full as they are of familiar saws
-almost all his own, is hardly fair. His mother-wit arises from the
-ludicrous and unforeseen predicament, not from vanity and conscious
-power; it is integral, not mere repartee; and it never calls a halt to
-the action. As was well said by Charles Cowden Clarke, “there are no
-traps for jests” in Farquhar; “no trains laid to fire _équivoque_.” The
-clear fun, spurting unannounced in dialogue after dialogue, in incident
-after incident; the incessant Molière-like masquerades; the thousand
-little issues depending upon by-play and transient inspiration; the
-narrowing scope and deepening sentiment of the plot, like a secret
-given to the players, to be told fully only to the audience most in
-touch with them—these commend Farquhar’s vivacious rôles to actors, and
-make them both difficult and desirable. With what unction, from an
-actor’s lips, falls his manifold and glowing praise of theatres! What
-a pretty picture, a broad wash of rose-purple and white, he can make
-of the interior seen from the wings! “There’s such a hurry of pleasure
-to transport us; the bustle, noise, gallantry, equipage, garters,
-feathers, wigs, bows, smiles, ogles, love, music, and applause!” And
-again, in another mood: “The playhouse is the element of poetry,
-because the region of beauty; the ladies, methinks, have a more
-inspiring, triumphant air in the boxes than anywhere else. They sit
-commanding on their thrones, with all their subject slaves about them;
-their best clothes, best looks; shining jewels, sparkling eyes; the
-treasures of the world in a ring.” And Mirabel, who is speaking, ends
-with an ecstatic sigh: “I could wish that my whole life long were the
-first night of a new play!”
-
-This is a drop, or a rise, from Congreve and his aristocratic
-abstractions. Farquhar, in his youth, had modelled himself chiefly
-upon the comedy of Congreve, and may be said to have perfected the
-mechanism which the genius of Congreve had brought into vogue. He never
-attained, nor could attain, Congreve’s scholarly elegance of proportion
-and his consummate diction. But he had the happiness of being no purely
-literary dramatist; he had technical knowledge and skill. He brought
-the existing heroes with their conniving valets, the buxom equivocal
-maids, the laughing, masking, conscienceless fine ladies, out of their
-disreputable moonlight into healthful comic air; and added to them, in
-the transfer, a leaven of homely lovableness which will forever keep
-his masterpieces upon the stage.
-
-Farquhar’s original intellect has a value only relative; he may be
-considered as Goldsmith’s tutor rather than as Congreve’s disciple.
-Goldsmith had no small knowledge of Farquhar, his forerunner by sixty
-years as a sizar student of Trinity; and, like him, he is reported
-to have been dropped from his class for a buffoonery. What friends
-(_Arcades ambo_, in both Virgilian and blameless Byronese) might
-these two parsons’ sons have been! Scrub, Squire Sullen’s servant,
-in _The Beaux’ Stratagem_, who “on Saturday draws warrants, and on
-Sunday draws beer,” was a part Goldy once greatly desired to act. He,
-too, when he came to write plays, cast about for conventional types
-to handle and improve. Tony and his incomparable mother would hardly
-have been, without their first imperfect apparition in Wycherley’s
-powerful (and stolen) _Plain Dealer_; and Young Marlow and Hastings
-are frank reproductions of Archer and Aimwell, in a much finer
-situation. Miss Hardcastle hopes that in her cap and apron she may
-resemble Cherry. And no one seems to have traced a celebrated passage
-in _The Vicar of Wakefield_ either to my Lady Howdye’s message to my
-Lady Allnight repeated by Archer (who in this same scene introduces
-the “topical song” upon the modern boards), or else to the example
-of the manœuvring Bisarre in Act II., Scene I., of _The Inconstant_.
-Surely, “forms which proceed from simple enumeration and are exposed to
-validity from a contradictory instance” supplies the unique original
-of the nonsense-rhetoric which so confounded poor Moses.[44] The talk
-of Clincher Junior and Tim, of Kite, Bullock, Scrub, Lyric, and the
-unbaptized wench Parly, of the constable showing the big bed to Hermes
-Wouldbe, the talk, that is, of Farquhar’s common people, shows humor
-altogether of what we may call the Goldsmith order: genial, odd,
-grotesque paradox, springing from Irish inconsequence and love of human
-kind.
-
-In the sixth year of Queen Anne, when Farquhar died, Steele was married
-to his “Prue,” and having seen the last of his three reformatory
-dramas “damned for its piety,” sought Joseph Addison’s approval and
-collaboration, and fell to designing _The Tatler_. Fielding was
-newborn, Johnson just out of the cradle, Pope was trying a cunning
-young hand at his first _Pastorals_; Defoe, an alumnus of Newgate, was
-beating his way outward and upward; Swift, yet a Whig, was known but
-for his _Tale of a Tub_. The fresh waters were rising on all sides to
-vivify the sick lowlands of the decadence. The kingdoms had a forgotten
-lesson, and long in the learning, set before them: to regain, as a
-basis for legitimate results, their mental independence and simplicity;
-to serve art for art’s sake, and to achieve, through the reactionary
-formalism of the nascent eighteenth century, freedom and a broad ethic
-outlook. It was as if Comedy, in her winning meretricious perfections,
-had to die, that English prose might live. It is enough for an immature
-genius of the third order, born under Charles the Second, to have
-vaguely foreshadowed a just and imperative change. Farquhar certainly
-does foreshadow it, albeit with what theologians might call absence of
-the necessary intention.
-
-He wrote excellent prefaces and prologues. His _Discourse upon Comedy_,
-in the _Miscellanies_, did pioneer work for his theory, since
-expounded by more authoritative critics, and received by the English
-world, that the observance or non-observance of the dramatic unities
-is at the will of the wise, and that for guidance in all such matters
-playwrights should look to Shakespeare rather than to Aristotle. The
-_Discourse_, in Farquhar’s clear, sunny, homespun, forceful style,
-does him honor, and should be reprinted. His best charm is that he
-cannot be didactic. His suasion is of the strongest, but he has the
-self-consciousness of all sensitive and analytic minds, which keeps
-him free here as elsewhere from the slightest assumption of despotism.
-It is very refreshing, in the face of that incessant belaboring of
-the reader which Lesage was setting as a contemporaneous fashion, to
-come across Farquhar’s gentle good-humored salutatory: “If you like
-the author’s book, you have all the sense he thought you had; if you
-dislike it, you have more sense than he was aware of!” Had he lived
-longer, or a little later, we should have found him as well, with his
-turn for skirmishing psychology, among the essayists and the novelists.
-There were in him a mellowness and an unction which have their fullest
-play in professedly subjective writing. Farquhar, after all, did not
-fulfil himself, for he followed an ill outgoing fashion in æsthetics
-rather than further a right incoming one. No one can help begrudging
-him to the period he adorned. He deserved to flourish on the manlier
-morrow, and to hold a historic position with the regenerators of public
-taste in England. “Ah, go hang thyself up, my brave Crillon, for at
-Arques we had a fight, and thou wert NOT in it!” One can fancy Sir
-Richard Steele forever quoting that at Captain George Farquhar, in some
-roomy club-window in Paradise.
-
-FOOTNOTES:
-
-[37] Incipit Annus Academicus Die Julii 9^a 1694.
-
-------+---------+----------+-----+-----------+------------+----------+
-Die |Georgius | filius | | Natus | ibidem | Eu. Lloyd 17a |Farquhare|
-Gulielmi |Annos|Londonderry|educatus sub|(college Julii | Sizator
-| Farqhare | 17 | | magistro | tutor) | | Clerici | | | Walker |
-------+---------+----------+-----+-----------+------------+----------+
-
-This matriculation entry from the register of Trinity does away
-with our sizar’s presumed father, Rev. John Farquhar, prebendary of
-Raphoe. We hear nothing more, ever after, of the Farquhar family, who
-henceforth leave young George to his own profane devices; nor can any
-certainty be attached to additional information, sometimes proffered,
-that the father had seven children in all, and held a living of only
-one hundred and fifty pounds a year. One other point is fixed by the
-entry, to wit: if George Farquhar was seventeen in the July of 1694, he
-cannot have been born in 1678.
-
-[38] This was the theatre built by Sir Christopher Wren in 1672.
-
-[39] Peter Anthony Motteux, the wild and clever linguist and dramatist,
-who made the best English translation of _Don Quixote_. _The Stage
-Coach_, itself an adaptation, has little merit beyond its liveliness.
-
-[40] The register of burial is dated a month later than the received
-date of his death. It reads simply: “23 May, George Falkwere, M.” The
-initial is the sapient sexton’s indication that this was neither a W
-(woman) nor a C (child). The spelling of the name betokens its usual
-and original pronunciation. The present famous porticoed church was not
-built for nineteen years after Farquhar died.
-
-[41] The not altogether foolish censure has been cast upon the rogue
-Teague in _The Twin Rivals_ that he speaks an impossible brogue, which
-might as well be Welsh. Farquhar did not succeed in transferring to
-paper the weird and unlovely Ulster dialect with which he was familiar
-in boyhood, and which had figured already in the third act of _Henry
-the Fifth_, in Jonson’s Irish masque, in Shadwell’s _Lancashire
-Witches_; which was simultaneously being used in his farce _The
-Committee_, by Dryden’s friend Howard, and which was afterwards to have
-good corroboration in Aytoun’s _Massacre of the MacPherson_. Farquhar
-employs it twice elsewhere, passably well in the case of Torlough
-Macahone of the parish of Curroughabegley (the personage who built a
-mansion-house for himself and his predecessors after him), and with
-lamentable flatness in that of Dugard in his last comedy. Dugard is a
-rival of the nursery-maid dear to almanac humorists, who is wont to
-exclaim: “Can’t ye tell boi me accint that ’tis Frinch Oi am!” It was
-one of Farquhar’s inartistic mistakes that he made no loving study of
-this or of anything touching nearly his own people. His Irishmen, with
-the exception of Roebuck, are either rascals or characterless nobodies.
-The name Teague, or Teig, which Howard had also employed, is old and
-pure North Irish; and no less pleasant an authority than George Borrow
-reminds us in the _Romano Lavo-Lil_ that it is Danish in origin.
-
-[42] Dear Dick Steele, in 1701, while Captain of Fusileers, had a
-duel thrust upon him; and in parrying, his sword pierced his man. To
-his remorse may be ascribed his hatred of the custom of duelling,
-expressed afterwards on every occasion. Steele owed his start in life
-to James Butler, Duke of Ormonde, who entered him among the boys on
-the Charterhouse foundation. This peer was grandfather to the man who
-failed George Farquhar.
-
-[43] Mrs. Farquhar published in 1711 an octavo volume of the _Plays,
-Letters, and Verses_. Among the verses figures a poem of six cantos
-dedicated to the victorious Earl of Peterborough, entitled _Barcelona_.
-“It was found among my dear deceased husband’s writings,” says the
-widow, in her prefatory note. He was not at the siege, and it is
-possible that the six cantos were a manuscript copy of the effusion of
-some former comrade. Farquhar was the author of several songs, one, of
-highly didactic complexion, having emanated from him at the reputed age
-of ten. Of these, only two are of fair lyrical quality: the page’s song
-in _Love and a Bottle_, and “Tell me, Aurelia, tell me, pray,” which
-Robert Southey included in his collection.
-
-[44] _The Vicar of Wakefield_ dates from 1766. Almost twenty years
-before that, the immortal Partridge had remarked to Tom Jones, quoting
-his schoolmaster: “Polly matete cry town is my daskalon.” Noble
-nonsense hath her pedigree. Goldsmith, however, is not so likely to
-have taken his cue from Fielding.
-
-
-
-
-IV
-
-TOPHAM BEAUCLERK
-
-1739-1780
-
-AND
-
-BENNET LANGTON
-
-1741-1800
-
-
-IN Samuel Johnson’s famous circle nearly every man stands for himself,
-full of definite purpose and power. But two young men are there who
-did nothing of moment, whose names chime often down the pages of all
-his biographies, and to whom the world must pay honor, if only for
-the friendship they took and gave. As Apollo should be set about with
-his Graces “tripping neatly,” so the portentous old apparition of
-Johnson seems never so complete and endearing as when attended by these
-two above all things else Johnsonians. When the Turk’s Head is ajar
-in Gerrard Street, in shadow-London; when the “unclubable” Hawkins
-strides over the threshold, and Hogarth goes by the window with his
-large nod and smile; when Chamier is there reading, Goldsmith posing
-in purple silk small-clothes, Sir Joshua fingering his trumpet, Burke
-and little brisk Garrick stirring “bishop”[45] in their glasses, and
-the king of the hour, distinguished by his lack of ruffles, is rolling
-about in his chair of state, saying something prodigiously humorous
-and wise, it is still Bennet Langton and Topham Beauclerk who most
-give the scene its human genial lustre, standing with laughter behind
-him, arm in arm. They were his favorites, and it is the most adorable
-thing about them both that they made out to like James Boswell, who
-was jealous of them. (Perhaps they had apprehended thoroughly Newman’s
-fine aphorism concerning a bore: “You may yield, or you may flee: you
-cannot conquer!”) The rare glimpses we have of their brotherly lives is
-through the door which opens or shuts for Johnson. Between him and them
-was deep and enduring affection, and what little is known of them has
-a right to be more, for his sake.
-
-Bennet Langton, born in 1741 in the very neighborhood famous now as the
-birthplace of Tennyson, was the elder son of the odd and long-descended
-George Langton of Langton, and of Diana his wife, daughter of Edmund
-Turnor, Esquire, of Stoke Rochford, Lincolnshire. While a lad in the
-fen-country, he read _The Rambler_, and conceived the purest enthusiasm
-for its author. He came to London, indeed, on the ideal errand of
-seeking him out, and, thanks to the kind apothecary Levett, found the
-idol of his imagination at home at No. 17 Gough Square, Fleet Street.
-Despite the somewhat staggering circumstances of Johnson’s attire,—for
-the serious boy had rashly presupposed a stately, fastidious, and
-well-mannered figure,—he paid his vows, and commended himself to
-his new friend for once and all. Langton entered Trinity College,
-Oxford, in 1757, at the age of sixteen.[46] The Doctor, who had
-known him about three years, followed his career at the university
-with interest, writing to Langton’s tutor, then “dear Tom Warton,”
-just appointed to the professorship of poetry held by his father, and
-afterwards poet-laureate: “I see your pupil: his mind is as exalted
-as his stature,” and to Langton’s self the sweet generality: “I love,
-dear sir, to think of you.” He even paid his Freshman a visit, and
-swam sportively across a dangerous pool in the Isis, in the teeth of
-his warning; and here also, in the Oxford which was long ago his own
-“tent of a night,” he fell across a part of his destiny in the shape
-of that strange bird, Mr. Topham Beauclerk, then a taking scapegrace
-of eighteen. The Doctor must have shaken his head at first, and
-wondered at the juxtaposition of this arrant Lord of Misrule and the
-“evangelical goodness” of his admirable Langton, until mollified by
-the knowledge that a species of cult for himself, and ardent perusal
-of his writings, had first brought them together. It was a pleasant
-thought to him, that of the two young ribboned heads high in the
-quadrangle, bending for the ninth time over _The Reasons Why Advice is
-Generally Ineffectual_, _The Mischief of Unbounded Raillery_, and the
-jolly satire on _Screech-Owls_; or smiling over the shy Verecundulus
-and the too-celebrated Misellus who were part of the author’s machinery
-for adding “Christian ardor to virtue, and Christian confidence to
-truth.”
-
-Beauclerk, like Langton, was a critic and a student; he was well-bred,
-urbane, and of excellent natural parts; moreover, he was a wit, one
-of the very foremost of his day, when wits grew in every garden. An
-only child, he was born in London in the December of 1739, and named
-after that benevolent Topham of Windsor who left the manors of Clewer
-Brocas and Didworth and a collection of paintings and drawings to his
-father, the handsome wild Lord Sydney Beauclerk, fifth son of the
-first Duke of St. Albans, and also, in his time, a gentleman commoner
-of Trinity. Lord Sydney died early, in the autumn of 1744, and was
-buried in Westminster Abbey with his hero-brother Aubrey, whose
-epitaph, still to be read there, Thomson seems to have written. All
-the pretty toys and curios passed to Topham the little boy, under the
-guardianship of Lady Beauclerk, his excellent but literal mother, once
-Mary Norris of Speke in Lancashire. His tutor was named Parker, and
-must have been a much-enduring man. Young Beauclerk grew up, bearing
-a resemblance in many ways to Charles II.; and so it befell that with
-his aggravating flippancy, his sharp sense, his quiver full of gibes,
-his time-wasting, money-wasting moods, foreign as Satan and his pomps
-to those of his sweet-natured college companion, he was able to strike
-Dr. Johnson in his own political weak spot. A flash of the liquid
-Stuart eye was enough to disarm Johnson at the very moment when he was
-calling up his most austere frown; it was enough to turn the vinegar
-of his wrath to the honey of kindness. _Il ne nous reste qu’une chose
-à faire: embrassons-nous!_ as the wheedling Prince, at a crisis,
-says to Henry Esmond. Johnson, as everybody knows, was a Jacobite.
-No sincerer testimony could he have given to his inexplicable liking
-for a royal rogue than that he allowed Nell Gwynn’s great-grandson to
-tease him and tyrannize over him during an entire lifetime. A choice
-spectacle this: Mr. Topham Beauclerk, on his introduction, literally
-bewitching Dr. Samuel Johnson! The stolid moralist was enraptured
-with his Jack-o’-lantern antics; he rejoiced in his manners, his
-taste and literary learning; admired him indiscreetly, rich clothes,
-equipage, and all; followed his whims meekly, expostulated with him
-almost against his traitorous impulses, and clung to him to the end in
-unbroken fondness and faith.
-
-Beauclerk had immense gayety and grace, and the full force given by
-high spirits. His accurate, ever-widening knowledge of books and men,
-his consummate culture, and his fearlessness, sat handsomely on one
-who was regarded by contemporary old ladies as a mere “macaroni.” It
-was a matter of course that he tried for no degree at college. The
-mistress of Streatham Park, who was by no means his adorer, and who
-remembered his chief wickedness in remembering that “he wished to be
-accounted wicked,” informs us in a private jotting since published
-that he was “a man of very strict veracity.” A philosopher and a
-truth-teller, whatever his worldly weaknesses, was sure to be a
-character within the range of Johnson’s affections. It was he who most
-troubled the good Doctor, he for whom he suffered in silence, with whom
-he wrangled; he whose insuperable taunting promise, never reaching any
-special development, vexed and disheartened him; yet, perhaps because
-of these very things, though Bennet Langton was infinitely more to his
-mind, it was Absalom, once again, whom the old fatherly heart loved
-best. Nor was he unrepaid. None loved him better, in return, than his
-“Beau,” the very mirror of the name, who was wont to pick his way up
-the grimy Fleet Street courts “with veneration,” as Boswell records.
-
-Bennet Langton, as Mr. Forster expresses it in his noble _Life of
-Goldsmith_, was “an eminent example of the high and humane class who
-are content to ‘ring the bell’ to their friends.” He was a mild young
-visionary, scrupulous, tolerant, and generous in the extreme; modest,
-contemplative, averse to dissipation; a perfect talker and reader,
-and a perfect listener; with a face sweet as a child’s, fading but
-now, among his kindred, on the canvas of Sir Joshua Reynolds. He left
-a gracious memory behind at Oxford, where his musing bust adorns the
-old monastic library of Trinity. He was six feet six inches tall,
-slenderly built, and slightly stooping. “The ladies got about him in
-drawing-rooms,” said Edmund Burke, “like maids about the Maypole!”
-
-Miss Hawkins, in her _Memoirs_, names him as the person with whom
-Johnson was certainly seen to the fairest advantage. His deferent
-suave manner was the best foil possible to the Doctor’s extraordinary
-explosions. He had supreme self-command; no one ever saw him angry;
-and in most matters of life, as a genuine contrast to his beloved
-friend Beauclerk, he was apt to take things a shade too seriously. We
-learn from Mr. Henry Best, author of some good _Personal and Literary
-Memorials_, that the advance rumors of the French Revolution found
-Langton, in the fullest sense, an aristocrat; but it was not long
-before he became, from conviction, a thorough Liberal, and so remained,
-although he suffered a great unpopularity, owing to this change, in
-his native county. He wrote, in 1760, a little book of essays entitled
-_Rustics_, which never got beyond the passivity of manuscript. The
-year before, under the date of July 28th, Langton contributed to the
-pages of _The Idler_ the paper numbered 67 and entitled _A Scholar’s
-Journal_. It is a pleasant study of procrastination and of shifting
-plans, a gentle bit of humor to be ranked as autobiographic. There is
-an indorsement of Montrose in its heroic advice to “risk the certainty
-of little for the chance of much.” But Langton’s graceful academic
-pen was not destined to a public career. Perseverance of any sort was
-not native to him. He fulfilled beautifully, adds the vivacious Miss
-Hawkins, “the pious injunction of Sir Thomas Browne, ‘to sit quietly
-in the soft showers of Providence,’ and might, without injustice,
-be characterized as utterly unfit for every species of activity.”
-Yet at the call of duty, so well was the natural man dominated by
-his unclouded will, he girded himself to any exertion. Wine-drinking
-was habitual with him, and he felt its need to sharpen and rouse
-his intellect; “but the idea of Bennet Langton being what is called
-‘overtaken,’” wrote the same associate whom we have been quoting, “is
-too preposterous to be dwelt on.” She furnishes one illustration of
-Langton’s Greek serenity. Talking to a company, of a chilly forenoon,
-in his own house, he paused to remark that if the fire lacked attention
-it might go out: a brief, casual, murmurous interruption. He resumed
-his discourse, breaking off presently, and pleading abstractedly with
-eye in air: “Pray ring for coals!” All sat looking at the fire, and
-so little solicitous about the impending catastrophe that presently
-Langton was off again on the stream of his softened eloquence. In a few
-minutes came another lull. “Did anybody answer that bell?” A general
-negative. “Did anybody ring that bell?” A sly shaking of heads. And
-once more the inspired monody soared among the clouds, at last dropping
-meditatively to the hearthstone: “Dear, dear, the fire is out!”
-
-Langton was the centre of a group, wherever he happened to be, talking
-delightfully, and twirling the oblong gold-mounted snuff-box, which
-promptly appeared as sociabilities began: a conspicuous figure, with
-his height, his courteous smile, his mild beauty, and his habit of
-crossing his arms over his breast, or locking his hands together on
-his knee. He was a great rider, and could run like a hound. He had a
-queerness of constitution which seemed to leave him at his lowest ebb
-every afternoon about two of the clock, forgetful, weary, confused,
-and without an idea in his head; but after a little food, he was
-himself again. At dinner-parties he usually rose fasting, “such was the
-perpetual flow of his conversation, and such the incessant claim made
-upon him.” A morning call from Mr. Langton was a thing to suggest the
-eternal years; yet we are told that satiety dwelt not where he was;
-like Cowley, “he never oppressed any man’s parts, or put any man out
-of countenance.” He had much the same sense of humor as Beauclerk had,
-and his speech was quite as full of good sense and direct observation,
-if not as cutting. He indicted a fault of Edmund Burke’s in one extreme
-stroke: “Burke whisks the end of his tail in the face of an arguer!”
-Johnson, the arch-whisker of tails, was not to be brought to book; but
-Burke’s greatness was of a texture to bear and enjoy the thrust. It is
-curious that Langton was markedly fond of _Hudibras_; such a relish
-indicates, perhaps, the turn his own wit might have taken, had it not
-been held in by too much second thought.
-
-Johnson was wont to announce that he valued Langton for his piety,
-his ancient descent, his amiable behavior, and his mastery of Greek.
-“Who in this town knows anything of Clenardus, sir, but you and I?”
-he would say. In the midst of his talk Langton would fall into the
-“vowelled undertone” of the tongue he loved, correcting himself with a
-little wave of the hands, and the apologetic phrase: “And so it goes
-on.” “Steeped to the lips in Greek” he was indeed, bursting out with
-a joyous salute to the moon of Hellas, upon a friend’s doorstep, or
-making grotesque Hellene puns, for his own delight,[47] upon the blank
-leaves of a pocket-book. Every one familiar with Johnsoniana will
-recall the charming and spirited retort written by Dr. Barnard, then
-Dean of Derry, later, Bishop of Killaloe, which closes:
-
-    “If I have thoughts and can’t express ’em,
-     Gibbon shall teach me how to dress ’em
-            In terms select and terse;
-     Jones teach me modesty and Greek;
-     Smith, how to think; Burke, how to speak;
-            And Beauclerk, to converse!”
-
-In all deference to the illustrious Sir William Jones, it may be
-claimed that “modesty and Greek” were the very arts in which Langton
-was a past-master. But he was an amateur, and a private scholar, and
-his name was a dissyllable; else the Dean might have tossed at his feet
-as pretty a compliment as that given in the last line to his colleague.
-It must have gratified Johnson that Langton refused, at Reynolds’s
-dinner-table, “like a sturdy scholar,” to sign the famous Round Robin
-(not signed, either, by Beauclerk) which besought him to “disgrace the
-walls of Westminster with an English inscription.” And as if to keep
-Langton firmly of his own mind on the subject, it was to him the Doctor
-confided the Greek quatrain, sad and proud, which he had dedicated to
-Goldsmith’s[48] memory.
-
-For Bennet Langton Johnson had no criticism but praise. He presented
-him with pride to Young and to Richardson, described him handsomely to
-Hannah More, and proceeded to draw his character for Miss Reynolds, ere
-she had met him, with such “energy and fond delight” as she avowed she
-never could forget. What fine ringing metal was Johnson’s commendation!
-“He is one of those to whom Nature has not spread her volumes,
-nor uttered her voices, in vain.” “Earth does not bear a worthier
-gentleman.” “I know not who will go to Heaven if Langton does not.” And
-in the sweetest and completest approval ever put by one mortal upon
-another: “_Sit anima mea cum Langtono!_” Yet even with this “angel of a
-man” the Doctor had one serious and ludicrous quarrel.
-
-It was the fatal outcome of his uneven moods that he must needs be
-disenchanted at times even with his best beadsmen: there came days
-when he would deny Beauclerk’s good-humor to be anything but “acid,”
-Langton’s anything but “muddy.” He considered it the sole grave
-fault of the latter that he was too ready to introduce a religious
-discussion into a mixed assembly, where he knew scarcely any two of
-the company would be of the same mind. On Boswell’s suggestion that
-this may have been done for the sake of instructing himself, Johnson
-replied angrily that a man had no more right to take that means of
-gaining information than he had to pit two persons against each other
-in a duel for the sake of learning the art of self-defence. Some
-indiscretion of this sort on Langton’s part seems to have alienated
-the friends for the first and last time. It was during their transient
-bitterness that the Doctor made the historic apology, across the table,
-to Oliver Goldsmith; an incident which, however beautiful in itself,
-was a hard back-handed hit at Langton, standing by. Croker’s conjecture
-may be true that the business which threatened to break a fealty of
-some sixteen years’ standing arose rather from Langton’s settling his
-estate by will upon his sisters, whose tutor he had been. On hearing
-of it, the Great Cham grumbled and fumed, politely applying to the
-Misses Langton the title of “three dowdies!”[49] and shouting, in a
-feudal warmth, that “an ancient estate, sir! an ancient estate should
-always go to males.” In fact, the Doctor behaved very badly, very
-sardonically, and was pleased to lay hold of a post by Temple Bar one
-night, and roar aloud over a piece of possible folly up in Lincolnshire
-which concerned him not in the least. But in due time the breach,
-whatever its cause, was healed. The Doctor, in writing of it, uses
-one of his balancing sentences: “Langton is a worthy fellow, without
-malice, though not without resentment.” The two could not keep apart
-very long, despite all the unreason in the world. “Johnson’s quarrels,”
-Mr. Forster tells us, “were lovers’ quarrels.” Another memorable
-passage-at-arms, rich in comedy, happened in the course of one of
-Johnson’s sicknesses, when, in the cloistral silence of his chamber,
-he solemnly implored Bennet Langton, always the companion who comforted
-his sunless hours, to tell him wherein his life had been faulty. His
-shy and sagacious monitor wrote down, as accusation enough, various
-Scriptural texts recommending tolerance, humility, long-suffering,
-and other meek ingredients which were not predominant in the sinner’s
-social composition. The penitent earnestly thanked Langton on taking
-the paper from his hand, but presently turned his short-sighted eyes
-upon him from the pillow, and emerging from what his own verbology
-would call a “frigorific torpor,” he exclaimed in a loud, wrathful,
-suspicious tone: “What’s your drift, sir?” “And when I questioned him,”
-so Johnson afterwards told his blustering tale—“when I questioned him
-as to what occasion I had given him for such animadversion, all that
-he could say amounted to this: that I sometimes contradicted people in
-conversation! Now, what harm does it do any man to be contradicted?” To
-this same paternal young Langton the rebel submitted his Latin verses;
-the _Poemata_, in the shape in which we possess them, were rigorously
-edited by him. And Johnson leaned upon him in more intimate ways, as he
-could never lean upon Beauclerk. To the scrupulous nature instinctively
-right he made comfortable confidences: “Men of harder minds than ours
-will do many things from which you and I would shrink; yet, sir, they
-will, perhaps, do more good in life than we.”
-
-As to the Honorable Topham Beauclerk, more volatile than Langton, he
-had as steady a “sunshine of cheerfulness” for his heritage. We find
-him complaining to a friend in the July of 1773: “Every hour adds to
-my misanthropy; and I have had a pretty considerable share of it for
-some years past.” This incursion of low spirits was not normal with
-him. Johnson, bewailing his own morbid habits of mind, once said: “Some
-men, and very thinking men, too, have not these vexing thoughts. Sir
-Joshua Reynolds is the same all the year round; Beauclerk, when not ill
-and in pain, is the same.” Boswell attests that Beauclerk took more
-liberties with Johnson than durst any man alive, and that Johnson was
-more disposed to envy Beauclerk’s talents than those of any one he had
-ever known. Born into the freedom of London, Beauclerk was familiar
-with Fox, Selwyn, and Walpole, and with the St. James men who did not
-ache to consort with Johnson; and he was quite their match in ease and
-astuteness. He walked the modish world, where Langton could not and
-would not follow; he alternated the Ship Tavern and the gaming-table
-with the court levees; Davies’s shop with the golden insipidities of
-the drawing-room; _la comédie_, _la danse_, _l’amour même_, with the
-intellectual tie-wigs of Soho. It shows something of his spirit that
-whereas no member of the Club save himself was a frequenter of White’s
-and Betty’s,[50] or a chosen guest at Strawberry Hill, yet there was no
-person of fashion whom he was not proud to make known to Doctor Johnson
-whenever he judged the candidate for so genuine an honor worthy of it.
-Some of these encounters must have been queer and memorable!
-
-Beauclerk’s unresting sarcasm often flattened out Boswell and irritated
-the Doctor, though Bennet Langton, in his abandonments of enthusiastic
-optimism, was never more than grazed. It is not to be denied that this
-spoiled child of the Club liked to worry Goldsmith, the maladroit great
-man who might have quoted often on such occasions the sad gibe of
-Hamlet:
-
-    “I’ll be your foil, Laertes: in mine ignorance
-     Your skill shall, like a star in the darkest night,
-     Stick fiery off indeed.”
-
-What a pity that Goldsmith’s _Retaliation_ was never finished, so as
-to include his portrait of Beau! He was “a pestilent wit,” as Anthony
-à Wood calls Marvell. Johnson, shy creature! deplored Beauclerk’s
-“predominance over his company.” The tyranny, however, was gracefully
-and decorously exercised, if we are to believe the unique eulogy that
-“no man was ever freer, when he was about to say a good thing, from a
-look which expressed that it was coming; nor, when he had said it, from
-a look which expressed that it had come.” Few human beings have had
-a finer sense of fun than Topham Beauclerk. He had an infallible eye
-for the values of blunders, and an incongruity came home to him like
-a blessing from above. Life with him was a night-watch for diverting
-objects and ideas. When he was not studying, he was disporting himself,
-like the wits of the Restoration; and he was equal to all emergencies,
-as they succeeded one another. Every specimen preserved of his talk
-is perfect of its kind, and makes us long for a full index. Pointed
-his speech was, always, and reminds one indeed of a foil, but without
-the button; a dangerous little weapon, somewhat unfair, but carried
-with such consummate flourish that those whom it pricks could almost
-cheer it. “O Lord! how I did hate that horrid Beauclerk!” Mrs. Piozzi
-scribbled once on the margin of Wraxall’s _Memoirs_, in an exquisite
-feminine vindication of poor Beau’s accomplished tongue.
-
-He was no disguiser of his own likes and dislikes. Politics he avoided
-as much as possible; but he affected less concern in public matters
-than he really felt. “Consecrate that time to your friends,” he writes
-with mock severity to the ideal Irishman, Lord Charlemont, “which
-you spend in endeavoring to promote the interests of a half-million
-of scoundrels.” For his private business he had least zeal of all;
-and cites “my own confounded affairs” as the cause of his going into
-Lancashire. Beauclerk had great tact, boldness, and independence; his
-natural scorn of an oppressor was his modern and democratic quality.
-His idleness (for he was as idle by habit as Langton was by nature) he
-recognized, and lightly deprecated. Fastidious in everything, he made
-“one hour of conversation at Elmsley’s”[51] his standard of enjoyment,
-and his imagined extreme of annoyance was “to be clapped on the back
-by Tom Davies.” What he chose to call his leisure (again the ancestral
-Stuart trait!) he dedicated to the natural sciences in his beloved
-laboratory. “I see Mr. Beauclerk often, both in town and country,”
-wrote Goldsmith to Bennet Langton; “he is now going directly forward
-to become a second Boyle, deep in chemistry and physics.” When there
-was some fanciful talk of setting up the Club as a college, “to draw
-a wonderful concourse of students,” Beauclerk, by unanimous vote, was
-elected to the professorship of Natural Philosophy.
-
-Johnson’s influence on him, potent though it was, seems to have been
-negative enough. It kept him from a few questionable things, and
-preserved in him an outward decorum towards customs and established
-institutions; but it failed to incite him to make of his manifold
-talents the “illustrious figure” which Langton’s eyes discerned in a
-vain anticipation. Beauclerk and the great High Churchman went about
-much together, and had amusing experiences. On such occasions, as in
-all their familiar intercourse, the disciple had the true salt of the
-Doctor’s talk, which, as Hazlitt remarks, was often something quite
-unlike “the cumbrous cargo of words” he kept for professional use. In
-the late winter of 1765 the two visited Cambridge, Beauclerk having a
-mind to call upon a friend at Trinity.
-
-These, as we know, had their many differences, “like a Spanish great
-galleon, and an English man-o’-war”; the one smooth, sharp, and civil,
-the other indignantly dealing with the butt-end of personality. Boswell
-gives a long account of a charming dispute concerning the murderer
-of Miss Reay, and the evidence of his having carried two pistols.
-Beauclerk was right; but Johnson, with quite as solid a sense of
-virtue, was angry; and he was soothed at the end only by an adroit
-and affectionate reply. “Sir,” the Doctor began, sternly, at another
-time, after listening to some mischievous waggery, “you never open your
-mouth but with the intention to give pain, and you often give me pain,
-not from the power of what you say, but from seeing your intention.”
-And again, he said to him whom he had compared to Alexander, marching
-in triumph into Babylon: “You have, sir! a love of folly, and a scorn
-of fools; everything you do attests the one, and everything you say
-the other.”[52] Beauclerk could also lecture his mentor. It was his
-steadfast counsel that the Doctor should devote himself to poetry, and
-draw in his horns of dogma and didactics.
-
-He had, ever ready, some quaint simile or odd application from the
-classics; in the habit of “talking from books,” as the Doctor called
-it, he was, however, distanced by Langton. Referring to that friend’s
-habit of sitting or standing against the fireplace, with one long leg
-twisted about the other, “as if fearing to occupy too much space,”
-Beauclerk likened him, for all the world, to the stork in Raphael’s
-cartoon of The Miraculous Draught.[53] One of Beauclerk’s happiest
-hits, and certainly his boldest, was made while Johnson was being
-congratulated upon his pension. “How much now it was to be hoped,”
-whispered the young blood, in reference to Falstaff’s celebrated vow,
-“that he would purge and live cleanly, as a gentleman should do!”
-Johnson seems to have taken the hint in good-humor, and actually to
-have profited by it.
-
-Very soon after leaving Oxford, Beauclerk became engaged to a Miss
-Draycott, whose family were well known to that affable blue-stocking,
-Mrs. Montagu; but some coldness on his part, some sensitiveness on
-hers, broke off the match. His fortune-hunting parent is said to have
-been disappointed, as the lady owned several lead-mines in her own
-right. That same year, with Bennet Langton for companion part of the
-way, Beauclerk, whose health, never robust, now began to give him
-anxiety, set out on a Continental tour. Baretti, whom he had met at
-home, received him most kindly at Milan, thanks to Johnson’s urgent
-and friendly letter. By his subsequent knowledge of Italian popular
-customs, he was able to testify in Baretti’s favor, when the latter
-was under arrest for killing his man in the Haymarket, and in concert
-with Burke, Garrick, Goldsmith, and Johnson, to help him, in a very
-interesting case, towards his acquittal. It was reported to Selwyn
-that the handsome gambling Inglese was robbed at Venice of £10,000!
-an incident which, perhaps, shortened his peregrinations. If the
-report were accurate, it would prove that he could have been in no
-immediate need of pecuniary rescue from his leaden sweetheart. It was
-Dr. Johnson’s opinion, coinciding with the opinion of Roger Ascham on
-the same general subject, that travel adds very little to one’s mental
-forces, and that Beauclerk might have learned more in the Academe of
-“Fleet Street, sir!”
-
-Topham Beauclerk married Lady Diana Spencer, the eldest daughter of
-the second Duke of Marlborough, as soon as she obtained a divorce from
-her first husband. This was Frederick, Lord Bolingbroke, nephew and
-heir of the great owner of that title; a very trying gentleman, who
-was the restless “Bully” of Selwyn’s correspondence; he survived until
-1787. The ceremony took place March 12, 1768, in St. George’s, Hanover
-Square, “by license of the Archbishop of Canterbury,” both conspirators
-being then residents of the parish. Lady Diana Spencer was born in
-the spring of 1734, and was therefore in her thirty-fifth year, while
-Beauclerk was but twenty-nine.[54] Johnson was disturbed, and felt
-offended at first with the whole affair; but he never withdrew from the
-agreeable society of Beauclerk’s wife. It is nothing wonderful that the
-courtship and honey-moon was signalized by the forfeit of Beauclerk’s
-place in the exacting Club, “for continued inattendance,” and not
-regained for a considerable period. “They are in town, at Topham’s
-house, and give dinners,” one of George Selwyn’s gossiping friends
-wrote, after the wedding. “Lord Ancram dined there yesterday, and
-called her nothing but Lady Bolingbroke the whole time!” Let us hope
-that “Milady Bully” triumphed over her awkward guest, and looked, as
-Earl March once described her under other difficulties, “handsomer than
-ever I saw her, and not the least abashed;” or as deliberately easy as
-when she entertained with her gay talk the nervous Boswell who awaited
-the news of his election or rejection from the Club. She was a blond
-goddess, exceedingly fair to see. In her middle age she fell under the
-observant glance of delightful Fanny Burney, who did not fail to allow
-her “pleasing remains of beauty.”
-
-The _divorcée_ was fond of and faithful to her new lord, and no
-drawback upon his æsthetic pride, inasmuch as she was an artist of no
-mean merit. Horace Walpole built a room for the reception of some of
-her drawings, which he called his Beauclerk Closet, “not to be shown
-to all the profane that come to see the house,” and he always praised
-them extravagantly. It is surer critical testimony in her favor that
-her name figures yet in encyclopædias, and that Sir Joshua, the honest
-and unbought judge, much admired her work, which Bartolozzi was kept
-busy engraving. It was her series of illustrations to Bürger’s wild
-ballad of _Leonora_ (with the dolly knight, the wooden monks, the
-genteel heroine, and the vigorous spectres) which, long after, helped
-to fire the young imagination of Shelley. It is to be feared that her
-invaluable portrait of Samuel Johnson is not, or never was, extant.
-“Johnson was confined for some days in the Isle of Skye,” writes her
-rogue of a spouse, “and we hear that he was obliged to swim over to
-the mainland, taking hold of a cow’s tail. . . . Lady Di has promised
-to make a drawing of it.” Sir Joshua’s pretty “Una” is the little
-Elizabeth, afterwards Countess of Pembroke, elder daughter of Lady Di
-and Topham Beauclerk, painted the year her father died.
-
-The family lived in princely style, both at their “summer quarters” at
-Muswell Hill, and on Great Russell Street, where the library, set in a
-great garden, reached, as Walpole mischievously gauged it, “half-way to
-Highgate.” Lady Di, an admirable hostess, proved herself one of those
-odd and rare women who take to their husbands’ old friends. Selwyn
-she cordially liked, and her warmest welcome attended Langton, whom
-she would rally for his remissness, when he failed to come to them at
-Richmond. He could reach them so easily! she said; all he need do was
-to lay himself at length, his feet in London and his head with them,
-_eodem die_. This Richmond home remained her residence during her
-widowhood. Walpole mentions a Thames boat-race in 1791, when he sat in
-a tent “just before Lady Di’s windows,” and gazed upon “a scene that
-only Richmond, on earth, can exhibit.” In the church of the same leafy
-town her body rests.
-
-Beauclerk died at his Great Russell Street house on March 11, 1780. He
-had been failing steadily under visitations of his old trouble since
-1777, when he lay sick unto death at Bath, and when his wife nursed
-him tenderly into what seemed to Walpole a miraculous recovery. He was
-but forty-one years old, and, for all his genius, left no more trace
-behind than that Persian prince who suddenly disappeared in the shape
-of a butterfly, and whom old Burton calls a “light phantastick fellow.”
-His air of boyish promise, quite unconsciously worn, hoodwinked his
-friends into prophecies of his fame. He did not give events a chance to
-put immortality on his “bright, unbowed, insubmissive head.” Yet he was
-bitterly mourned. “I would walk to the extent of the diameter of the
-earth to save him,” cried Johnson, who had loved him for over twenty
-years; and again, to Lord Althorp: “This is a loss, sir, that perhaps
-the whole nation could not repair.” Boswell mentions the Doctor’s April
-stroll, at this time, while he was writing his _Lives of the Poets_;
-and tells us how, returning from a call on the widow of the companion
-of his youth, David Garrick, he leaned over the rails of the Adelphi
-Terrace, watching the dark river, and thinking of “two such friends
-as cannot be supplied.” “Poor dear Beauclerk!” Johnson wrote, when his
-violent grief had somewhat subsided, “_nec, ut soles, dabis joca!_ His
-wit and his folly, his acuteness and his maliciousness, his merriment
-and his reasoning, are alike over. Such another will not often be found
-among mankind.” Beyond this well-known and characteristic summing-up,
-the Doctor made no discoverable mention, in his correspondence, of his
-bereavement, certainly not to the highly-prejudiced Mrs. Thrale, to
-whom he wrote often and gayly in the year of Beauclerk’s death. Nor
-shall we know how the catastrophe affected Bennet Langton; for all the
-most interesting papers relating to him were destroyed when the old
-Hall at Langton-by-Spilsby was burned in 1855. On this subject, as on
-others as intimate, he stands, perforce, silent.
-
-Readers may recall a passage in Miss Burney’s _Diary_ which gives
-countenance to an accusation not borne out by any other testimony,
-that Beauclerk and his wife had not lived happily together. Dining
-at Sir Joshua’s at Richmond, in 1782, Edmund Burke, sitting next the
-author of _Evelina_, took occasion, on catching sight of Lady Di’s
-“pretty white house” through the trees, to rejoice in the fact that
-she was well-housed, moneyed, and a widow. He added that he had never
-enjoyed the good-fortune of another so keenly as in this blessed
-instance. Then, turning to his new acquaintance, as the least likely
-to be informed of the matter, he spoke in his own “strong and marked
-expressions” of the singular ill-treatment Beauclerk had shown his
-wife, and the “necessary relief” it must have been to her when he was
-called away. The statement does not seem to have been gainsaid by any
-of the company; nor was Burke liable to a slanderous error. So severe a
-comment on Beauclerk, resting, even as it does, wholly on Miss Burney’s
-veracity, ought, in fairness, to be incorporated into any sketch of the
-man. On the other side, it is pleasant to discover that Beauclerk, in
-his will, made five days before the end, bequeathed all he possessed to
-his wife, and reverted to her the estates of his children, should they
-die under age. There was but one bequest beyond these, and that was to
-Thomas Clarke, the faithful valet. The executors named were Lady Di
-and her brother, Lord Charles Spencer, who had also been groomsman at
-the marriage, which, despite Burke and its own evil beginnings, it is
-hard to think of as ill-starred. The joint guardians of Charles George
-Beauclerk, the only son, were to be Bennet Langton and a Mr. Loyrester,
-whom Dr. Johnson speaks of as “Leicester, Beauclerk’s relation, and a
-man of good character;” but the guardianship, provisional in case of
-Lady Di’s decease, never came into force, as she survived, in fullest
-harmony with her three children, up to August 1, 1808, having entered
-her seventy-fifth year. Various private legacies came to Langton, by
-his old comrade’s dying wish, the most precious among them, perhaps,
-being the fine Reynolds portrait of Johnson, which had been painted at
-Beauclerk’s cost. Under it was inscribed:
-
-            “_Ingenium ingens
-    Inculto latet hoc sub corpore._”
-
-Langton thoughtfully effaced the lines. “It was kind of you to take
-it off,” said the burly Doctor, with a sigh; and then (for how could
-he but recall the contrast of temperament in the two, as well as the
-affectionate context of Horace?), “not unkind in him to have put it
-on.” The collection of thirty thousand glorious books “_pernobilis
-Angli T. Beauclerk_” was sold at auction. The advertisement alone is
-royal reading. There is much amiable witness to the circumstance that
-Beauclerk was not only an admirer but a buyer of his friends’ works.
-From some kind busybody who attended the twenty-ninth day of the sale,
-and pencilled his observations upon the margins of the catalogue now in
-the British Museum, we learn that Goldsmith’s _History of the Earth and
-Animated Nature_ (nothing less!), which was issued, with cuts, in the
-year he died, was knocked down to the vulgar for two and threepence.
-The shelves, naturally, were stocked with Johnsons. Things dear to
-the bibliophile were there: innumerable first editions, black-letter,
-mediæval manuscript, Elzevirs, priceless English and Italian classics,
-gathered with real feeling and pride; but the most vivid personal
-interest belonged to the unpretending Lot 3444, otherwise known to fame
-as _The Rambler_, printed at Edinburgh in 1751; for that was the young
-Beauclerk’s own copy, carried with him to Oxford, and with a fragrance,
-as of a last century garden, of the first hearty friendship of boys.
-One cannot help wishing that a sentimental fate left it in Langton’s
-own hands.
-
-Lady Beauclerk, Topham’s mother, had died in 1766; and he asked to be
-buried beside her, or at her feet, in the old chapel of Garston, near
-Liverpool: “an instance of tenderness,” said Johnson, “which I should
-hardly have expected.” There, in the place of his choice, he rests,
-without an epitaph.
-
-After this the Doctor consoled himself more than ever with Bennet
-Langton, and with the atmosphere of love and reverence which surrounded
-him in Langton’s house. He had been of old the most desired of all
-guests at the family seat in Lincolnshire. “Langton, sir!” as he
-liked to announce, “had a grant of warren from Henry II.; and Cardinal
-Stephen Langton, of King John’s reign, was of this family.” Peregrine
-Langton, Bennet’s uncle, was a man of simple and benevolent habits, who
-brought economy to a science, without niggardliness, and whom Johnson
-declared to be one of those he clung to at once, both by instinct and
-reason; Bennet’s father, learned, good, and unaffected, the prototype
-of his learned, good, and unaffected son, was, however, a more
-diverting character. He had sincerest esteem for Johnson, but looked
-askance on him for his liberal views, and suspected him, indeed, of
-being a Papist in secret! He once offered the Doctor a living of some
-value in the neighborhood, with the suggestion that he should qualify
-himself for Orders: a chance gravely refused. Of this exemplary but
-rather archaic squire, Johnson, a dissector of everything he loved,
-said: “Sir! he is so exuberant a talker in public meetings that the
-gentlemen of his county are afraid of him. No business can be done
-for his declamation.” In his behalf, too, Johnson produced one of his
-most astounding words; for having understood that both Mr. and Mrs.
-Langton were averse to having their portraits taken, he observed aloud
-that “a superstitious reluctance to sit for one’s picture is among the
-anfractuosities of the human mind.”
-
-Bennet Langton married, on the 24th of May, 1770, Mary Lloyd, daughter
-of the Countess of Haddington, and widow of John, the eighth Earl of
-Rothes, the stern soldier in laced waistcoat and breastplate beneath,
-painted by Sir Joshua. It was a common saying at the time that
-everybody was welcome to a Countess Dowager of Rothes; for it did so
-happen that three ladies bearing that title were all remarried within
-a few years. Lady Rothes, although a native of Suffolk, had acquired
-from long residence in Scotland the accent of that country, which Dr.
-Johnson bore with magnanimously, on the consideration that it was not
-indigenous. She had a handsome presence, full of easy dignity, and a
-naturalness marked enough in the heyday of Georgian affectation. With
-a vivacity very different from Lady Di Beauclerk’s, she kept herself
-the spring and centre of Langton’s tranquil domestic circle: a more
-womanly woman historiographers cannot find. His own charm of character,
-after his marriage, slipped more and more into the underground channels
-of home-life, and so coursed on beneficently in silence. Their children
-were no fewer than nine,[55] “not a plain face nor faulty person
-among them:” the goddess daughters six feet in height, and the three
-sons so like their Maypole father that they were able once to amuse
-the Parisians by raising their arms to let a crowd pass. Langton was
-wont to repeat with some glee certain jests about his height, and Dr.
-Johnson’s nickname of “Lanky” he took ever with excellent grace; and
-when Garrick had leaped upon a chair to shake hands with him, in old
-days, he had knelt, at parting, to shake hands with Garrick. But the
-King’s awkward digs at his “long legs” he found terribly distasteful,
-nor was he thereby disposed to agree with the Doctor’s enthusiastic
-proclamation, after the famous interview of 1767, that George III. was
-“as fine a gentleman as Charles II.”
-
-It was his cherished plan to educate his boys and girls at home, and
-to give them a thorough acquaintance with the learned languages. No
-social engagements were to stand in the way of this prime exigency. He
-was in great haste to turn his young brood into Masters and Mistresses
-of Arts. Johnson complained to Miss Burney, as they were both taking
-tea at Mrs. Thrale’s, that nothing would serve Langton but to stand
-them up before company, and get them to repeat a fable or the Hebrew
-alphabet, supplying every other word himself, and blushing with pride
-at the vicarious learning of his infants. But another of the tedious
-royal jokes, “How does Education go on?” actually lessened his devotion
-to his self-set task, and worried him like the water-drop in the
-story, which fell forever on a criminal’s head until it had drilled
-his brain. Again, both he and his wife, even after they had moved into
-the retirement of Great George Street, Westminster, in pursuance of
-their design, were far too agreeable and too accessible to be spared
-the incursions of society. In a word, Minerva found her seat shaken,
-and her altar-fires not very well tended, and therefore withdrew.
-Langton impressed one axiom on his young scholars which they never
-forgot: “Next best to knowing is to be sensible that you do not know.”
-An entirely superfluous waif of a baby was once left at the doors of
-this same many-childrened house, to be fed, clothed, and petted by Mr.
-Bennet Langton and Lady Rothes, without protest. Dr. Johnson, who made
-friends with all children, was especially attached to their third girl,
-his god-daughter, whom he called “pretty Mrs. Jane,” and “my own little
-Jenny.” The very last year of his life her “most humble servant” sent
-her a loving letter, extant yet, and written purposely in a large round
-hand as clear as print.
-
-“Langton’s children are very pretty,” Johnson wrote to Boswell in
-1777, “and his lady loses her Scotch.” But again, during the same
-year, condescendingly: “I dined lately with poor dear Langton. I do
-not think he goes on well. His table is rather coarse, and he has his
-children too much about him.” Boswell takes occasion, in reproducing
-this censure, to reprehend the custom of introducing the children after
-dinner: a parental indulgence to which he, at least, was not addicted.
-The Doctor gave him a mild nudge on the subject in remarking later:
-“I left Langton in London. He has been down with the militia, and is
-again quiet at home, talking to his little people, as I suppose you
-do sometimes.” While Langton was in camp on Warley Common, in command
-of the Lincolnshire troops, Johnson spent with him five delightful
-days, admiring his tall captain’s blossoming energies, and poking
-about curiously among the tents. Langton had fallen, little by little,
-into a confirmed extravagance, so that the moral of Uncle Peregrine’s
-sagacious living bade fair to be lost upon him. Boswell had a quarrel
-with Johnson on the subject of Langton’s expenditure, during the course
-of which, according to his own report, the Laird of Auchinleck suffered
-a “horrible shock” by being told that the best way to drive Langton out
-of his costly house would be to put him (Boswell) into it. The Doctor
-was truly concerned, nevertheless, about his engaging spendthrift; up
-to the very end, he would implore him to keep account-books, even if
-he had to omit his Aristophanes. “He complains of the ill effects of
-habit,” grumbled the great moralizer, “and he rests content upon a
-confessed indolence. He told his father himself that he had ‘no turn
-for economy!’ but a thief might as well plead that he had no turn for
-honesty.” Such were the hard hits sacred to those Dr. Johnson most
-esteemed. It transpires from his will that, by way of discouragement,
-he had lent Langton £750.[56]
-
-In the winter of 1785, Langton came from the country, and took lodgings
-in Fleet Street, in order to sit beside Johnson as he lay dying, and
-hold his hand. Nor was he alone in his pious offices: the Hooles, Mr.
-Sestre, and several others were there, to keep constant vigil. Miss
-Burney met Langton in the passage December 11th, two days before the
-end: “He could not,” she wrote in her journal, “look at me, nor I at
-him.” But through the foggy and restless nights when Johnson tried
-to cheer himself, like More and Master William Lilly, by translating
-into Latin some epigrams from the _Anthologia_, the true Grecian
-beside him must have been his chief comfort. One can picture the old
-eyes turning to him for sympathy, perhaps with that same murmured
-“Lanky!” on awaking, which Boswell laughed to hear from him one merry
-Hebridean morning, twelve years before. The last summons did not come
-in Langton’s presence. Hurrying over to Bolt Court at eight of the
-fatal evening, he was told that all was over three-quarters of an hour
-ago. That large soul had gone away, as Leigh Hunt so beautifully said
-of Coleridge, “to an infinitude hardly wider than his thoughts.” Then
-Langton, who was wont to shape his words with grace and ease, went
-up-stairs, and tried to pen a letter to Boswell, which is more touching
-than tears: “I am now sitting in the room where his venerable remains
-exhibit a spectacle, the interesting solemnity of which, difficult as
-it would be in any sort to find terms to express, so to you, my dear
-sir, whose sensations will paint it so strongly, it would be of all men
-the most superfluous to”—and there, hopelessly choked and confused, it
-broke off.
-
-Langton bore Johnson’s pall; and he succeeded him as Professor of
-Ancient Literature in the Royal Academy, as Gibbon had replaced
-Goldsmith in the chair of Ancient History. He survived many years,
-the delight of his company to the last. He, like others, was given
-in his later years to detailing anecdotes of his great friend, with
-an approximation to that friend’s manner. One lady critic, at least,
-thought that these explosive imitations did not become “his own serious
-and respectable character.” On December 18, 1801, in Anspach Place,
-Southampton, a venerable nook “between the walls and the sea,” when
-Wordsworth, Scott, and Coleridge were yet in their unheralded prime,
-when Charles Lamb was twenty-six, Byron a dreaming boy on the Cotswold
-hills, and Keats and Shelley little fair-eyed children, gentle Bennet
-Langton, known to none of these, and somewhat forgotten as a loiterer
-from the march of a glorious yesterday, slipped out of life. “I am
-persuaded,” wrote one who knew him well, “that all his inactivity, all
-the repugnance he showed to putting on the harness of this world’s
-toil, arose from the spirituality of his frame of mind . . . I believe
-his mind was in Heaven, wheresoever he corporeally existed.” He was
-laid under the chancel of ancient St. Michael’s at Southampton, with
-Johnson’s fond benison, “Be my soul with Langton’s!” inscribed on the
-marble tablet above him.[57] The Rev. John Wooll of Midhurst, Joseph
-Warton’s editor, was one of the few present at the funeral ceremony,
-and he leaves us to infer that it had a rather neglectful privacy,
-not, indeed, out of keeping with the “godly, righteous, and sober
-life” it closed. Langton’s will, drawn up in the June of 1800, and
-preserved in Somerset House, devised to the sole executrix, his “dear
-wife,” who outlived him by nearly twenty years, his real and personal
-estate, his books, his wines, his prints, his horses, and, as a gift
-particularly pretty, his right of navigation in the river Wey. George
-Langton was separately provided for, but there were some £8000 for the
-eight younger children. The document is crowded with technical details,
-and very long; and the manifest inference, on the whole, is that the
-dear squire’s affairs were in a prodigious tangle. There is no wish
-expressed concerning his burial, and, what is more curious, there
-are no Christian formulas for the committal of the _animula vagula
-blandula_: a lack perhaps not to be wondered at in Beauclerk’s concise
-testament, but somewhat notable in the case of a person who certainly
-had a soul.
-
-So went Beauclerk first of the three, Langton last, with the good ghost
-still between them, as he in his homespun, they in their flowered
-velvet, had walked many a year together on this earth. The old
-companionship had undergone some sorry changes ere it fell utterly to
-dust and ashes. Its happy prime had been in the Oxford “Longs,” when
-the Doctor humored his lads, and tented under their roofs, plucking
-flowers at one house, and romping with dogs at the other; or in 1764,
-at the starting of the immortal Club, when the two of its founders, who
-had no valid or pretended claim to celebrity, perched on the sills like
-useful genii, with a mission to overrule sluggish melancholy, and renew
-the sparkle in abstracted eyes. How supereminently they did what they
-chose to do, and what vagaries they roused out of Johnson’s profound
-hypochondria! Did not Topham Beauclerk’s mother once have to reprove
-that august author for a suggestion to seize some pleasure-grounds
-which they were passing in a carriage? “Putting such things into young
-people’s heads!” said she. Where could the innocent Beauclerk’s elbow
-have been at that moment, contrary to the canons of polite society,
-but in the innocent Langton’s ribs? The gray reprobate, so censured,
-explained to Boswell: “Lady Beauclerk has no notion of a joke, sir! She
-came late into life, and has a mighty unpliable understanding.” Who
-can forget the Doctor’s visit to Beauclerk at Windsor, when, falling
-into the clutches of that gamesome and ungodly youth, he was beguiled
-from church-going of a fine Sunday morning, and strolled about outside,
-talking and laughing during sermon-time, and finally spread himself at
-length on a mossy tomb, only to be told, with a giggle and a pleased
-rub of the hands, that he was as bad as Hogarth’s Idle Apprentice?
-Or the other visit in the north, when, after ceremoniously relieving
-his pockets of keys, knife, pencil, and purse, Samuel Johnson, LL.D.,
-deliberately rolled down a hill, and landed, betumbled out of all
-recognition, at the bottom? Langton had tried to dissuade him, for the
-incline was very steep, and the candidate scarcely of the requisite
-suppleness. “Oh, but I haven’t had a roll for such a long time!”
-pleaded his unanswerable big guest.
-
-Best of all, we have the history of that memorable morning when
-Beauclerk and Langton, having supped together at a city tavern, roused
-Johnson at three o’clock at his Inner Temple Lane Chambers, and brought
-him to the door, fearful but aggressive, in his shirt and his little
-dark wig, and his slippers down at the heels, armed with a poker.
-“What! and is it YOU? Faith, I’ll have a frisk with you, ye young
-dogs!” We have visions of the Covent Garden inn, and the great brimming
-bowl, with Lord Lansdowne’s drinking-song for grace; the hucksters and
-fruiterers staring at the strange central figure, always sure to gather
-a mob, even during the moment he would stand by a lady’s coach-door
-in Fleet Street; the merry boat going its way by oar to Billingsgate,
-its mad crew bantering the watermen on the river; and two of the
-roisterers (equally wild, despite a little chronological disparity
-of thirty years or so) scolding the other for hastening off, on an
-afternoon appointment, “to dine with wretched unidea’d girls!” What
-golden vagabondism! “I heard of your frolic t’other night; you’ll be in
-_The Chronicle_! . . . I shall have my old friend to bail out of the
-round-house!” said Garrick. “As for Garrick, sirs,” tittered the pious
-Johnson aside to his accomplices, “he dare not do such a thing. His
-wife would not let him!” All this mirth and whim sweetened the Doctor’s
-heavy life. He had other intimates, other disciples. But these were Gay
-Heart and Gentle Heart, who drove his own blue-devils away with their
-idolatrous devotion, and whose bearing towards him stands ever as the
-best possible corroboration of his great and warm nature. With him
-and for him, they so fill the air of the time that to whomsoever has
-but thought of them that hour, London must seem lonely without their
-idyllic figures.
-
-                          —“Our day is gone:
-    Clouds, dews, and dangers come; our deeds are done.”
-
-There are gods as good for the after-years; but Odin is down, and his
-pair of unreturning birds have flown west and east.
-
-FOOTNOTES:
-
-[45] A popular eighteenth-century beverage, composed of wine, orange,
-and sugar.
-
-[46] Although Langton is recorded on his college books as having given
-the usual £10 for plate, and also as having paid his caution money
-in 1757, his name is not down upon the matriculation lists, possibly
-because he failed to appear at the moment the entries were being made.
-In what must have been his destined space upon one of the pages, Dr.
-Ingram made this note: “Q. Num Bennet Langton hic inserendus?”
-
-[47] A boyish fashion of self-entertainment afterwards in great favor
-with Shelley.
-
-[48] It is a pleasant thing to remember that it was Langton, always an
-appreciator of Goldsmith’s lovable genius, who suggested “Auburn” as
-the name for his _Deserted Village_. There is a hamlet called Auborne
-in Lincolnshire.
-
-[49] Langton’s sisters are generally spoken of as three in number. But
-Burke’s _History of the Landed Gentry_ mentions but two, Diana and
-Juliet. There was a younger brother, Ferne, who died in boyhood, and
-the floral name, not unlike a girl’s, may have been responsible for the
-confusion.
-
-[50] The fruiterer.
-
-[51] The bookseller’s.
-
-[52] Rochester, in his immortal epigram, had said the same of King
-Charles II.
-
-[53] This neat descriptive stroke has been attributed also to Richard
-Paget.
-
-[54] The register of St. George’s betrays a little eager blunder of
-Lady Di’s which is amusing. When the officiating curate asked her to
-sign, she wrote “Diana Beauclerk,” and was obliged to cross out the
-signature—one knows with what a smile and a flush!—and substitute the
-“Diana Spencer” which stands beside it.
-
-[55] Miss Hawkins says “ten,” and may have had the extra adopted child
-in mind.
-
-[56] It is a pity he did not live to read the jolly _American Ballad
-of Bon Gaultier_, which seems to have a sort of muddled clairvoyant
-knowledge of this transaction:
-
-“Every day the huge Cawana Lifted up its monstrous jaws; And it
-swallowed Langton Bennet,(!) And digested Rufus Dawes.
-
-“Riled, I ween, was Philip Slingsby Their untimely deaths to hear; For
-one author owed him money,(!) And the other loved him dear.”
-
-[57] The church has since been “restored,” and the fine epitaph is now
-(1890) “skyed” on the south wall of the nave.
-
-
-
-
-V
-
-WILLIAM HAZLITT
-
-1778-1830
-
-
-THE titles of William Hazlitt’s first books bear witness to the ethic
-spirit in which he began life. From his beloved father, an Irish
-dissenting minister, he inherited his unworldliness, his obstinacy, his
-love of inexpedient truth, and his interest in the emancipation and
-well-being of his fellow-creatures. Bred in an air of seriousness and
-integrity, the child of twelve announced by post that he had spent “a
-very agreeable day” reading one hundred and sixty pages of Priestley,
-and hearing two good sermons. A year later he appeared, under a Greek
-signature, in _The Shrewsbury Chronicle_, protesting against sectarian
-injustice; an infant herald in the great modern movement towards fair
-play. The roll of the portentous periods must have made his father
-weep for pride and diversion. William’s young head was full of moral
-philosophy and jurisprudence, and he had what is the top of luxury
-for one of his temperament: perfect license of mental growth. Alone
-with his parents (one of whom was always a student and a recluse),
-and for the most part without the school-fellows who are likely to
-adjust the perilous effects of books, he became choked with theories,
-and thought more of the needful repeal of the Test Act than of his
-breakfast. He found his way at fourteen into the Unitarian College at
-Hackney, but eventually broke from his traces, saving his fatherland
-from the spectacle of a unique theologian. During the year 1795 he
-saw the pictures at Burleigh House, and began to live. Desultory but
-deep study, at home and near home, took up the time before his first
-leisurely choice of a profession. His lonely broodings, his early
-love for Miss Railton, his four enthusiastic months at the Louvre,
-his silent friendship with Wordsworth and with Coleridge; the country
-walks, the pages and prints, the glad tears of his youth,—these were
-the fantastic tutors which formed him; nor had he ever much respect for
-any other kind of training. The lesson he prized most was the lesson
-straight from life and nature. He comments, tartly enough, on the
-sophism that observation in idleness, or the growth of bodily skill and
-social address, or the search for the secret of honorable power over
-people, is not in any wise to be accounted as learning. Montaigne, who
-was in Hazlitt’s ancestral line, was of this mind: “_Ce qu’on sçait
-droictement, on en dispose sans regarder au patron, sans tourner les
-yeulx vers son livre._” Hazlitt insists, too, that learned men are
-but “the cisterns, not the fountain-heads, of knowledge.” He hated
-the schoolmaster, and has said as witty things of him as Mr. Oscar
-Wilde. Yet his little portrait-study of the mere book-worm, in _The
-Conversation of Authors_, has a never-to-be-forgotten sweetness. His
-mental nurture was serviceable; it was of his own choosing; it fitted
-him for the work he had to do. Like Marcus Aurelius, he congratulated
-himself that he did not squander his youth “chopping logic and scouring
-the heavens.” Hazlitt once entered upon an _Inquiry whether the Fine
-Arts are promoted by Academies_; the answer, from him, is readily
-anticipated.
-
-    “If arts and schools reply,”
-
-he might have added,—and it is a wonder that he did not,
-
-    “Give arts and schools the lie!”
-
-Mr. Matthew Arnold made a famous essay on the same topic, and some
-readers recollect distinctly that his verdict, for England, would be
-in the affirmative, whereas it was no such matter. Now, no man can
-conceive of Hazlitt presenting both sides of a case so impartially as
-to be misunderstood, especially upon so vital a subject. He pastured,
-he was not trained; and therefore he would have you and your children’s
-children scoff at universities. Indeed, though the boy’s lack of
-discipline told on him all through life, his reader regrets nothing
-else which a university could have given him, except, perhaps, milder
-manners. Hazlitt was perfectly aware that he had too little general
-knowledge; but general knowledge he did not consider so good a tool for
-his self-set task in life as a persistent, passionate study of one or
-two subjects. Again, he is pleased to conjecture, with bluntness, that
-if he had learned more he would have thought less. (Perhaps he was the
-friend cited by Elia, who gave up reading to improve his originality!
-He was certainly useful to Elia in delicate and curious ways: a whole
-vein of rich eccentricity ready for that sweet philosopher’s working.)
-Hear him pronouncing upon himself at the very end: “I have, then, given
-proof of some talent and more honesty; if there is haste and want of
-method, there is no common-place, nor a line that licks the dust. If
-I do not appear to more advantage, I at least appear such as I am.”
-Divorce that remark and the truth of it from Hazlitt, and there is
-no Hazlitt left. He stood for individualism. He wrote from what was,
-in the highest degree for his purpose, a full mind, and with that
-blameless conscious superiority which a full mind must needs feel in
-this empty world. His whole intellectual stand is taken on the positive
-and concrete side of things. He has a fine barbaric cocksureness; he
-dwells not with althoughs and neverthelesses, like Mr. Symonds and Mr.
-Saintsbury. “I am not one of those,” he says, concerning Edmund Kean’s
-first appearance in London, “who, when they see the sun breaking from
-behind a cloud, stop to inquire whether it is the moon.” And he takes
-enormous interest in his own promulgation, because it is inevitably
-not only what he thinks, but what he has long thought. He delivers an
-opinion with the air proper to a host who is master of a vineyard, and
-can furnish name and date to every flagon he unseals.
-
-None of Hazlitt’s energies went to waste: he earned his soul early, and
-how proud he was of the possession! Retrospection became his forward
-horizon. He was all aglow at the thought of that beatific yesterday;
-in his every mood “the years that are fled knock at the door, and
-enter.” He struggled no more thereafter, having fixed his beliefs and
-found his voice. He saw no occasion to change. “As to myself,” he wrote
-at fifty, referring to Lamb’s well-known “surfeits of admiration”
-concerning some objects once adored, “as to myself, any one knows
-where to have me!” He adds: “In matters of taste and feeling, one
-proof that my conclusions have not been quite shallow or hasty is the
-circumstance of their having been lasting. . . . This continuity of
-impression is the only thing on which I pride myself.” A fine saying in
-the _Boswell Redivivus_, attributed to Opie, is as clearly expressed
-elsewhere by Hazlitt’s self: that a man in his lifetime can do but
-one thing; that there is but one effort and one victory, and all the
-rest is as machinery in motion. “What I write costs me nothing, but it
-cost me a great deal twenty years ago. I have added little to my stock
-since then, and taken little from it.” His sensations, latterly, were
-“July shoots,” graftings on the old sap. It is his boast in almost his
-final essay that his tenacious brain holds fast while the planets are
-turning. He can look at a child’s kite in heaven, to the last, with the
-eyes of a child: “It pulls at my heart.”
-
-His conservative habit, however, seemed to teach him everything by
-inference. In 1821, familiar with none of the elder dramatists save
-Shakespeare, he borrowed their folios, and shut himself up for six
-weeks at Winterslow Hut on Salisbury Plain. He returned to town steeped
-in his theme, and with the beautiful and authoritative _Lectures_
-written. Appreciation of the great Elizabethans is common enough now;
-seventy years ago, propagated by Lamb’s _Specimens_, 1808, it was the
-business only of adventurers and pioneers. Here is a critic indeed who,
-without a suspicion of audacity, can arise as a stranger to arraign
-the _Arcadia_, and “shake hands with Signor Orlando Friscobaldo as the
-oldest acquaintance” he has! The thing, exceptional as it was, proves
-that William Hazlitt knew his resources. His devoted friend Patmore
-attributes his “unpremeditated art,” terse, profound, original, and
-always moving at full speed, to two facts: “first, that he never, by
-choice, wrote on any topic or question in which he did not, for some
-reason or other, feel a deep personal interest; and, secondly, because
-on all questions on which he did so feel, he had thought, meditated,
-and pondered, in the silence and solitude of his own heart, for years
-and years before he ever contemplated doing more than thinking of
-them.” Unlike a distinguished historian, who, according to Horace
-Walpole, “never understood anything until he had written of it,”
-Hazlitt brought to his every task a mind violently made up, and a
-vocation for special pleading which nothing could withstand.
-
-Sure as he is, he means to be nobody’s hired guide: a resolve for
-which the general reader cannot be too grateful. In wilful and mellow
-study of what chance threw in his way his strength grew, and his
-limitations with it. It is small wonder that he hated schoolmasters,
-and the public which expected of him schoolmaster platitudes. He had
-a pride of intellect not unlike Rousseau’s, and he seems to have had
-ever in mind Rousseau’s cardinal declaration that if he were no better
-than other men, he was at least different from them. Hazlitt defined
-his own functions with proper haughtiness, in the amusing apology of
-_Capacity and Genius_. “I was once applied to, in a delicate emergency,
-to write an article on a difficult subject for an encyclopædia; and was
-advised to take time, and give it a systematic and scientific form;
-to avail myself of all the knowledge that was to be obtained upon the
-subject, and arrange it with clearness and method. I made answer that,
-as to the first, I _had_ taken time to do all that I ever pretended
-to do, as I had thought incessantly on different matters for twenty
-years of my life; that I had no particular knowledge of the subject
-in question, and no head for arrangement; that the utmost I could do,
-in such a case, would be, when a systematic and scientific article
-was prepared, to write marginal notes upon it, to insert a remark or
-illustration of my own (not to be found in former encyclopædias!) or to
-suggest a better definition than had been offered in the text.”[58]
-Such independence nobly became him, and none the less because it kept
-him poor. But in the course of time, he had to work, and keep on
-working, under wretched disadvantages. He had spurts of revolt, after
-long experience of compulsory composition; his darling wish in 1822
-(confided to his wife, of all persons) being that he “could marry some
-woman with a good fortune, that he might not be under the necessity of
-writing another line!”
-
-There was in him absolutely nothing of the antiquary and the
-scholar, as the modern world understands those most serviceable
-gentlemen. He was a “surveyor,” as he said, erroneously, of Bacon.
-He was continuously drawn into the byway, and ever in search of the
-accidental, the occult; he lusted, like Sir Thomas Browne, to find the
-great meanings of minor things. The “pompous big-wigs” of his day, as
-Thackeray called them, hated his informality, his boldly novel methods,
-his vivacity and enthusiasm. He had, within proscribed bounds, an
-exquisite and affectionate curiosity, like that of the Renaissance.
-“The invention of a fable is to me the most enviable exertion of human
-genius: it is the discovery of a truth to which there is no clew, and
-which, when once found out, can never be forgotten.” “If the world were
-good for nothing else, it would be a fine subject for speculation.” It
-is his deliberate dictum that it were “worth a life” to sit down by an
-Italian wayside, and work out the reason why the Italian supremacy in
-art has always been along the line of color, not along the line of form.
-
-He depended so entirely upon his memory that those who knew him best
-say that he never took notes, neither in gallery, library, nor theatre;
-yet his inaccuracies are few and slight,[59] and he must have secured
-by this habit a prodigious freedom and luxury in the act of writing.
-He would rather stumble than walk according to rule; and he was so
-pleasantly beguiled with some of his own images (that, for instance,
-of immortality the bride of the youthful spirit, and of the procession
-of camels seen across the distance of three thousand years) that he
-reiterates them upon every fit occasion. He cites, twice and thrice,
-the same passages from the Elizabethans. He is a masterly quoter, and
-lingers like a suitor upon the borders of old poesy. His infallibility,
-like the Pope’s, is of narrow scope and nicely defined. When he steps
-beyond his accustomed tracks, which is seldom, his vagaries are
-entertaining. You may account for his declaration that Thomas Warton’s
-sonnets rank as the very best in the language, by reflecting that he
-dealt not in sonnets and knew nothing of them; if he prefer _Hercules
-Raging_ to any other Greek tragedy, it is collateral proof that he was
-no wide-travelled Grecian, nor even Euripideian; when he gives his
-distinguished preference to Shakespeare’s Helena, there is small need
-of adding that Mr. Hazlitt, albeit with an affectionate friendship for
-Mary Lamb, with a mother, a sister, a dynasty of sweethearts, and two
-wives, was notoriously unlearned in women.[60]
-
-The events of his life count for so little that they are hardly worth
-recording. He was born into a high-principled and intelligent family,
-at Mitre Lane, Maidstone, Kent, on the 10th of April, in the year 1778.
-His infancy was passed there and in Ireland, his boyhood in New England
-and in Shropshire. Prior to a long visit to Paris, where he made some
-noble copies of Titian, he came in 1802 to Bloomsbury, where his
-elder brother John, an advanced Liberal in politics and an excellent
-miniature-painter, had a studio; and here he worked at art for several
-joyous years, finally abandoning it for literature. The portraits he
-painted, utterly lacking in grace, are fraught with power and meaning;
-few of these are extant, thanks to the fading and cracking pigments
-of the modern schools. The old Manchester woman in shadow, done in
-1803, and the head of his father, dating from a twelvemonth later (two
-things to which Hazlitt makes memorable reference in his essays),
-are no longer distinguishable, save to a very patient eye, upon the
-blackened canvases in his grandson’s possession. The picture of the
-child Hartley Coleridge, begun at the Lakes in 1802, has perished
-from the damp; that of Charles Lamb in the Venetian doublet survives
-since 1804, in its serious and primitive browns,[61] as the best-known
-example of an English artist not in the catalogues. Its historic value,
-however, is not superior to that of two portraits of Hazlitt himself:
-one a study in strong light and shade, with a wreath upon the head,
-now very much time-eaten; and another representing him at about the
-age of twenty-five, with a three-quarters front face looking over the
-right shoulder, which appeals to the spectator like spoken truth. It
-is all but void of the beauty characterizing the striking Bewick head
-(especially as retouched and reproduced in Mr. Alexander Ireland’s
-valuable book of 1889, which is a sort of Hazlitt anthology), and
-characterizing, no less, John Hazlitt’s charming miniatures of William
-at five and at thirteen; therefore it can deal in no self-flattery.
-Fortunately, we have from the hand which knew him best the lank, odd,
-reserved youth in whom great possibilities were brewing; thought and
-will predominate in this portrait, and it expresses the sincere soul.
-It would be idle to criticise the technique of a work disowned by its
-author. Hazlitt had, as we know from much testimony, a most interesting
-and perplexing face, with the magnificent brow almost belied by
-shifting eyes, and the petulance and distrust of the mouth and chin;
-but a face prepossessing on the whole from the clear marble of his
-complexion,[62] remarkable in a land of ruddy cheeks. His lonely and
-peculiar life lent him its own hue; the eager look of one indeed a
-sufferer, but with the light full upon him of visions and of dreams:
-
-    “_Chi pallido si fece sotto l’ombra
-    Sì di Parnaso, o bevve in sua cisterna?_”
-
-In 1798 Hazlitt had his immortal meeting at Wem with Samuel Taylor
-Coleridge. He described himself at this period as “dumb, inarticulate,
-helpless, like a worm by the wayside,” striving in vain to put on paper
-the thoughts which oppressed him, shedding tears of vexation at his
-inability, and feeling happy if in eight years he could write as many
-pages. The abiding influence of his First Poet he has acknowledged
-in an imperishable chapter. For a long while he still kept in “the
-o’erdarkened ways” of Malthus and Tucker, or in the shadow, dear to
-him, of Hobbes; but in 1817 the floodgates broke, the pure current
-gushed out; and in the _Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays_ we have the
-primal pledge of Hazlitt as we know him, “such as had never been before
-him, such as will never be again.” From a “dumbness” and diffidence
-extreme, he developed into the readiest of writers; his sudden pages,
-year after year, transcribed in his slant large hand, went to the
-printers rapidly and at first draft. The longer he used his dedicated
-pen, the freer, the brighter, the serener it grew. In the fourteen or
-fifteen of his books which deal with genius and the conduct of life,
-there is, throughout, an indescribable unaffected zest, a self-same
-and unwavering certitude of handling. Once he learned his trade, he
-gave himself a large field and an easy rein. He never warmed towards
-a subject chosen for him. His conversation was non-professional. He
-considered a discussion as to the likelihood of the weather’s holding
-up for to-morrow as “the end and privilege of a life of study.”
-
-In London, as soon as he had abandoned painting, he became a
-parliamentary reporter, and began to lecture on the English
-philosophers and metaphysicians. He furnished his famous dramatic
-criticisms to _The Morning Chronicle_, _The Champion_, _The Examiner_,
-and _The Times_, and he acted later as home editor of _The Liberal_.
-He married, on May-day of 1808, Miss Sarah Stoddart, who owned the
-property near Salisbury where he afterwards spent melancholy years
-alone. He fulfilled one human duty perfectly, for he loved and reared
-his son. A most singular infatuation for the unlovely daughter of his
-landlady; a second inauspicious marriage in 1824 with a Mrs. Isabella
-Bridgwater; a prolonged journey on the Continent; the failure of
-the publishers of his _Life of Napoleon_, which thus in his needful
-days brought him no competence; a long illness heroically borne, and
-a burial in the parish churchyard of St. Anne’s, under a headstone
-raised, in a romantic remorse after an estrangement, by Charles Wells,
-the author of _Joseph and his Brethren_,—these round out the meagre
-details of Hazlitt’s life. He died in the arms of his son and of his
-old friend Charles Lamb,[63] on the 18th of September, 1830, at 6 Frith
-Street, Soho.
-
-His domestic experiences, indeed, had been nearly as extraordinary as
-Shelley’s. Sarah Walker, of No. 9 Southampton Buildings, is a sort of
-burlesque counterpart of that other “spouse, sister, angel,” Emilia
-Viviani. Nothing in literary history is much funnier than Mr. Hazlitt’s
-kind assistance to Mrs. Hazlitt in securing her divorce, going to visit
-her at Edinburgh, and supplying funds and advice over the teacups,
-while the process was pending, unless it be Shelley’s ingenuous
-invitation to his deserted young wife to come and dwell forever with
-himself and Mary! The silent dramatic withdrawal of the second Mrs.
-Hazlitt, the well-to-do relict of a colonel, who is henceforth
-swallowed up in complete oblivion, is a feature whose like is missing
-in Shelley’s romance. Events in Hazlitt’s path were not many, and his
-inner calamities seem somehow subordinated to exterior workings. It is
-not too much to say that to the French Revolution and the white heat of
-hope it diffused over Europe he owed the renewal of the very impetus
-within him: his moral probity, his mental vigor, and his physical
-cheer. His measure of men and things was fixed by its standard. Other
-enthusiasts wavered and went back to the flesh-pots of Egypt, but not
-he. _Et cuncta terrarum subacta præter atrocem animum Catonis._ Towards
-the grandest inconsistency this world has seen, he bore himself with a
-consistency nothing less than touching. Everywhere, always, as a friend
-who understood him well reminds a later generation, “Hazlitt was the
-only man of letters in England who dared openly to stand by the French
-Revolution, through good and evil report, and who had the magnanimity
-never to turn his back upon its child and champion.” The ruin of
-Napoleon, and the final news that “the hunter of greatness and of glory
-was himself a shade,” meant more to him than the relinquishment of
-his early and cherished art, or the fading of the long dream that his
-heart “should find a heart to speak to.” On his last autumn afternoon,
-he said what no one else would have dared to say for him: “I have had
-a happy life.” Such it was, if we are to compute happiness by souls,
-and not by the incidents which befall them. What were the things
-which atoned to this reformer for the curse of a mind too sentient,
-a heart never far from breaking? Over and above all amended and
-amending abuses, the memory of the Rembrandts on the walls of Burleigh
-House; the waving crest of the Tuderley woods; the sky, the turf, “a
-winding road, and a three-hours’ march to dinner”; the impersonator of
-Richard III. most to his mind, who lighted the stage, “and fought as
-if drunk with wounds”; and the figure (how pastoral and tender!) of
-the shepherd-boy bringing a nest for his young mistress’s sky-lark,
-“not doomed to dip his wings in the dappled dawn.” What heresy to
-the ancients would be this creed of poetic compensation! Montesquieu
-adhered to it; but hardly from baffled and impassioned Hazlitt, dying
-in his prime, would the avowal have been expected. Yet he had written
-almost always, as Jeffrey saw, in “a happy intoxication.” Like the
-sundial, in one of the most charming among his miscellaneous essays, he
-kept count only of the hours of joy.
-
-Hazlitt’s erratic levees among coffee-house wits and politicians, his
-slack dress, his rich and fitful talk, his beautiful fierce head, go to
-make up any accurate impression of the man. Mr. P. G. Patmore has drawn
-him for us; a strange portrait from a steady hand: in certain moods
-“an effigy of silence,” pale, anxious, emaciated, with an awful look
-ever and anon, like the thunder-cloud in a clear heaven, sweeping over
-his features with still fury.[64] He was so much at the mercy of an
-excitable and extra-sensitive organization that an accidental failure
-to return his salute upon the street, or, above all, the gaze of a
-servant as he entered a house, plunged him into an excess of wrath and
-misery. Full, at other times, of scrupulous good faith and generosity,
-he would, under the stress of a fancied hurt, say and write malicious
-things about those he most honored. He must have been a general thorn
-in the flesh, for he had no tact whatever. “I love Henry,” said one
-of Thoreau’s friends, “but I cannot like him.” Shy, splenetic, with
-Dryden’s “down look,” readier to give than to exchange, Hazlitt was
-a riddle to strangers’ eyes. His deep voice seemed at variance with
-his gliding step and his glance, bright but sullen; his hand felt
-as if it were the limp, cold fin of a fish, and was an unlooked-for
-accompaniment to the fiery soul warring everywhere with darkness, and
-drenched in altruism. His habit of excessive tea-drinking, like Dr.
-Johnson’s, was to keep down sad thoughts. For sixteen years before he
-died, from the day on which he formed his resolution, Hazlitt never
-touched spirits of any kind. Profuse of money when he had it, he lacked
-heart, says Mr. Patmore, to live well. Wherever he dwelt there was
-what Carlyle, in Hunt’s case, called “tinkerdom”; his marriage, and
-his residence under the august roof which had been Milton’s,[65] did
-not mend matters for him. He covered the walls and mantel-pieces of
-London landladies, after the fashion of the French bohemian painters,
-with samples of his noblest style; and the savor of yesterday’s potions
-of strong tea exhaled into their curtains. Never was there, despite
-his confessional attitude, so non-communicative a soul. He never
-corresponded with anybody; he never would walk arm in arm with anybody;
-he never, perhaps from horror of the “patron” bogie, dedicated a book
-to anybody. De Quincey knew a man warmly disposed towards Hazlitt
-who learned to shudder and dread daggers when poor Hazlitt, with a
-gesture habitual to him, thrust his right hand between the buttons
-of his waistcoat! And he once cheerfully requested of a cheerful
-colleague: “Write a character of me for the next number. I want to
-know why everybody has such a dislike to me.” As a social factor he
-was something atrocious.[66] The most humane of men, his suspicions
-and shyings cut him off completely from humanity. The base war waged
-upon him by the great Tory magazines could not have affected him so
-deeply that it changed his demeanor towards his fellows; for he had the
-mettle of a paladin, which no invective could break. But, alas! he had
-“the canker at the heart,” which is no fosterer of “the rose upon the
-cheek.”
-
-With all this fever and heaviness in Hazlitt’s blood, he had a hearty
-laugh, musical to hear. Haydon, in his exaggerated manner, reports an
-uncharitable conversation held with him once on the subject of Leigh
-Hunt in Italy, during which the two misconstruing critics, in their
-great glee, “made more noise than all the coaches, wagons, and carts
-outside in Piccadilly.” His smile was singularly grave and sweet.
-Mrs. Shelley wrote, on coming back to England, in her widowhood, and
-finding him much changed: “His smile brought tears to my eyes; it
-was like melancholy sunlight on a ruin.” A man who sincerely laughs
-and smiles is somewhat less than half a cynic. If there be any alive
-at this late hour who questions the genuineness of Hazlitt’s high
-spirits, he may be referred to the essay _On Going a Journey_, with
-the pæan about “the gentleman in the parlor,” in the finest emulation
-of Cowley; but chiefly and constantly to _The Fight_, with its
-lingering De-Foe-like details, sprinkled, not in the least ironically,
-with gold-dust of Chaucer and the later poets: the rich-ringing,
-unique _Fight_,[67] predecessor of Borrow’s famous burst about the
-“all tremendous bruisers” of _Lavengro_; and not to be matched in our
-peaceful literature save with the eulogy and epitaph of Jack Cavanagh,
-by the same hand. Divers hints have been circulated, within sixty-odd
-years, that Mr. Hazlitt was a timid person, also that he had no turn
-for jokes. These ingenious calumnies may be trusted to meet the fate of
-the Irish pagan fairies, small enough at the start, whose punishment
-it is to dwindle ever and ever away, and point a moral to succeeding
-generations. Hazlitt’s paradoxes are not of malice prepense, but are
-the ebullitions both of pure fun and of the truest philosophy. “The
-only way to be reconciled with old friends is to part with them for
-good.” “Goldsmith had the satisfaction of good-naturedly relieving
-the necessities of others, and of being harassed to death with his
-own.” “Captain Burney had you at an advantage by never understanding
-you.” Scattered mention of “people who live on their own estates and
-on other people’s ideas”; of Jeremy Bentham, who had been translated
-into French, “when it was the greatest pity in the world that he
-had not been translated into English”; of the Coleridge of prose,
-one of whose prefaces is “a masterpiece of its kind, having neither
-beginning, middle, nor end”; and even of the “singular animal,”
-John Bull himself, since “being the beast he is has made a man of
-him”:—these are no ill shots at the sarcastic. Congreve, with all his
-quicksilver wit, could not outgo Hazlitt on Thieves, _videlicet_: “Even
-a highwayman, in the way of trade, may blow out your brains; but if he
-uses foul language at the same time, I should say he was no gentleman!”
-Hazlitt’s sense of humor has quality, if not quantity. How was it this
-same sense of humor, this fine-grained reticence, which wrote, nay,
-printed, in 1823, the piteous and ludicrous canticle of the goddess
-Sarah?
-
-Hazlitt was a great pedestrian from his boyhood on, and, like
-Goldsmith, a fair hand at the game of fives, which he played by the
-day. Wherever he was, his pocket bulged with a book. It gave him keen
-pleasure to set down the hour, the place, the mood, and the weather
-of various ecstatic first readings. He became acquainted with _Love
-for Love_ in a low wainscoted tavern parlor between Farnham and Alton,
-looking out upon a garden of larkspur, with a portrait of Charles
-II. crowning the chimney-piece; in his father’s house he fell across
-_Tom Jones_, “a child’s Tom Jones, an innocent creature”; he bought
-Milton and Burke at Shrewsbury, on the march; he looked up from Mrs.
-Inchbald’s _Simple Story_, when its pathos grew too poignant, to
-find “a summer shower dropping manna” on his head, and “an old crazy
-hand-organ playing _Robin Adair_.” And on April 10, 1798, his twentieth
-birthday, he sat down to a volume of the _New Eloïse_, a book which
-kept its hold upon him, “at the inn of Llangollen, over a bottle of
-sherry and a cold chicken!” The frank epicurean catalogue, as of equal
-spiritual and corporeal delight, is worth notice. Do we not know that
-Mr. Hazlitt had wood-partridges for supper, in his middle age, at
-the Golden Cross, in Rastadt, near Mayence? Yet he failed to record
-what book lay by his plate, and distracted his attention from her
-who had been a widow, and who was already planning her respectable
-exit from his society. Evidence that he was an eater of taste is to
-be accumulated eagerly by his partisans, for eating is one of many
-engaging human characteristics which establish him as lovable—that is,
-posthumously lovable. Barry Cornwall was so jealously tender of his
-memory that he would have forbidden any one to write of Hazlitt who
-had not known him. As he did not warm miscellaneously to everybody,
-it followed that his friends were few. We do not forget which one
-of these, during their only difference, thought “to go to his grave
-without finding, or expecting to find, such another companion.”[68]
-
-Hazlitt would have set himself down, by choice, as a metaphysician.
-Up to the time when his _Life of Napoleon_ was well in hand, he used
-to affirm that the anonymous _Principles of Human Action_, which he
-completed at twenty, in the literary style of the azoic age, was his
-best work. He was rather proud, too, of the _Characteristics in the
-Manner of Rochefoucauld’s Maxims_, his one dreary book, which contains
-a couple of inductions worthy of Pascal, some sophistries and hollow
-cynicisms not native to Hazlitt’s brain, and a vast number of the very
-professorisms which he scouted. Maxims, indeed, are sown broadcast
-over his pages, which Alison the historian classified as better to
-quote than to read; but they gain by being incidental, and embedded in
-the body of his fancies. His vein of original thought comes nowhere
-so perfectly into play as in its application to affairs. His pen is
-anything but abstruse,
-
-    “Housed in a dream, at distance from the kind.”
-
-He did not recognize that to display his highest power he needed deeds
-and men, and their tangible outcome to be criticised. His preferences
-were altogether wed to the past. In his essay on _Envy_ he excuses,
-with a wise reflection, his comparative indifference to living writers:
-“We try to stifle the sense we have of their merit, not because they
-are new or modern, but because we are not sure they will ever be old.”
-Or, as Professor Wilson said of him, with tardy but winning kindness:
-“In short, if you want Hazlitt’s praise, you must die for it . . .
-and it is almost worth dying for.”[69] Yet what an eye he has for the
-idiosyncrasy at his elbow, be it in the individual or in the race!
-Every contemporary of his, every painter, author, actor, and statesman
-of whom he cared to write at all, stands forth under his touch in
-delicate and aggressive outlines from which a wind seems to blow
-back the mortal draperies, like a figure in a triumphal procession
-of Mantegna’s. His manner is essentially pictorial. His sketches of
-Cobbett and of Northcote, in _The Spirit of Obligations_; of Johnson,
-in _The Periodical Essayists_; of Sir Thomas Browne and Bishop Taylor;
-and of Coleridge and Lamb, drawn more than once, with great power,
-from the life, will never be excelled. His philippic on _The Spirit
-of Monarchy_, or that on _The Regal Character_, is a pure vitriol
-flame, to scorch the necks of princes. His comments upon English
-and Continental types, if gathered from the necessarily promiscuous
-_Notes of a Journey_, would make a most diverting and illuminating
-duodecimo; the indictment of the French is especially masterly. _The
-Spirit of the Age_, _The Plain Speaker_, the Northcote book, _The
-English Comic Writers_, and the noble and little-read _Political
-Essays_ are packed with vital personalities. So is _The Characters
-of Shakespeare’s Plays_, full of beautiful metaphysical analysis, as
-well as of vivifying criticism. This lavish accumulation of material,
-never put to use according to modern methods, must appear to some as a
-collection of interest awaiting the broom and the hanging committee;
-but until the end of time it will be a place of delight for the scholar
-and the lover of virtue. Hazlitt’s genius for assortment and sense of
-relative values were not developed; he was in no wise a constructive
-critic. Mr. R. H. Hutton complained once of Mr. Matthew Arnold that he
-ranked his men, but did not portray them. Now Hazlitt, whose search is
-all for character, irrespective of the historic position, falls into
-the opposite extreme: he portrays his men, but does not rank them. An
-attempt to break up into single file the merit which, with him, marches
-abreast, he would look upon as a bit of arrogance and rank impiety.
-He has nothing to say of the quality which stamps Bavius as the best
-elegiac poet between Gray and Tennyson, or of the irony of Mævius,
-which would place his dramas, were it not for their loose construction,
-next to Molière’s. He does not care a fig for comparisons; or, rather,
-he wishes them left to the gods, and to his perceiving reader.
-Meanwhile, one face after another shines clear upon the wall, and
-breathes enchantment on a passer-by.
-
-It is very difficult to be severe with William Hazlitt, who was
-towards himself so outspokenly severe. Every stricture upon him, as
-well as every defence to be urged for it, may be taken out of his own
-mouth. Even the _Liber Amoris_, as must always have been discerned,
-demonstrates not only his weakness, but his essential uprightness
-and innocence. His vindication is written large in _Depth and
-Superficiality_, in _The Pleasures of Hating_, in _The Disadvantage of
-Intellectual Superiority_. His “true Hamlet” is as faithful a sketch
-of the author as is Newman’s celebrated definition of a gentleman.
-Hazlitt says a tender word for Dr. Johnson’s prejudices which covers
-and explains many of his own. Who can call him irritable, recalling
-the splendid exposition of merely selfish content, in the opening
-paragraphs of the essay on _Good Nature_? Yet, with all his lofty and
-endearing qualities, he had a warped and soured mind, a constitutional
-disability to find pleasure in persons or in conditions which were
-quiescent. He would have every one as mettlesome and gloomily
-vigilant as he was himself. His perfectly proper apostrophe to the
-lazy Coleridge at Highgate to “start up in his promised likeness,
-and shake the pillared rottenness of the world,” is somewhat comic.
-Hazlitt’s nerves never lost their tension; to the last hour of his
-last sickness he was ready for a bout. Much of his personal grief
-arose from his refusal to respect facts as facts, or to recognize in
-existing evil, including the calamitous perfumed figure of Turveydrop
-gloriously reigning, what Vernon Lee calls “part of the mechanism
-for producing good.” He bit at the quietist in a hundred ways, and
-with choice venom. “There are persons who are never very far from the
-truth, because the slowness of their faculties will not suffer them to
-make much progress in error. These are ‘persons of great judgment.’
-The scales of the mind are pretty sure to remain even when there is
-nothing in them.” He was a natural snarler at sunshiny people with full
-pockets and feudal ideas, like Sir Walter, who got along with the ogre
-What Is, and even asked him to dine. In fact, William Hazlitt hated
-a great many things with the utmost enthusiasm, and he was impolite
-enough to say so, in and out of season. The Established Church and all
-its tenets and traditions were only less monstrous in his eyes than
-legendry, mediævalism, and “the shoal of friars.” He knew, from actual
-experience, the loyalty and purity of the early Unitarians, and he
-praised these with all his heart and tongue. As far as one can make
-out, he had not the remotest conception of the breadth and texture
-of Christianity as a whole. His theory, for he practised no creed
-except the cheap one of universal dissent, was a faint-colored local
-Puritanism; and that, as the Merry Monarch (an excellent judge of what
-was not what!) reminds us, is “no religion for a gentleman.” But more
-than this, Hazlitt had no apprehension of the supernatural in anything;
-he was very unspiritual. It is curious to see how he sidles away from
-the finer English creatures whom he had to handle. Sidney almost repels
-him, and he dismisses Shelley, on one occasion, with an inadequate but
-apt allusion to the “hectic flutter” of his verse. Living in a level
-country with no outlook upon eternity, and no deep insight into the
-human past, nor fully understanding those who had wider vision and more
-instructed utterance than his own, it follows that beside such men as
-those just named, then as now, Hazlitt has a crude villageous mien. He
-had his refined sophistications; chief among them was a surpassing love
-of natural beauty. But he relished, on the whole, the beef and beer of
-life. The normal was what he wrote of with “gusto”; a word he never
-tired of using, and which one must use in speaking of himself. While he
-is an admirable arbiter of what is or is not truly intellectual, he is
-all at sea when he has to discuss, for instance, emotional poetry, or,
-what is yet more difficult to him, poetry purely poetic; its inevitable
-touch of the fantastic, the mystical, puts his wits completely to rout.
-The stern, lopsided, and magnificent article on Shelley’s _Posthumous
-Poems_ in the _Edinburgh Review_ for July, 1824, and his impatience
-with Coleridge at his best, perfectly exemplify this limitation.
-Despite his partiality for Rousseau and certain of the early Italian
-painters, most of the men whose genius he seizes upon and exalts with
-unerring success are the men who display, along with enormous acumen
-and power, nothing which betokens the morbid and exquisite thing we
-have learned to call modern culture. Hazlitt, fortunately for us,
-was not over-civilized, had no cinque-cento instincts, and would
-have groaned aloud over such hedonism as Mr. Pater’s. Homespun and
-manly as he is, who can help feeling that his was but an imperfect
-development? that, as Mr. Arnold said so paternally of Byron, “he
-did not know enough”? He lacked both mental discipline and moral
-governance. He has the wayward and appealing Celtic utterance; the
-manner made of largeness and simpleness, all shot and interwoven with
-the hues of romanticism. Prodigal that he is, he cannot stoop to build
-up his golden piecemeal, or to clinch his generalizations, thrown down
-loosely, side by side. Esoteric thrift is not in him, nor the spirit of
-co-operation, nor the sweetest of artistic anxieties, that of marching
-in line. He has a knight-errant pen; his glad and chivalrous services
-to literature resemble those of an outlaw to the commonwealth. Despite
-his personal value, he stands detached; he is episodic, and represents
-nothing.
-
-    “The earth hath bubbles as the water hath,
-     And this is of them.”
-
-He misses the white station of a classic; for the classics have
-equipoise, and inter-relationship. But it is great cause for
-thankfulness that William Hazlitt cannot be made other than he is. Time
-can not take away his height and his red-gold garments, bestow on him
-the “smoother head of hair” which Lamb prayed for, and shrivel him into
-one of several very wise and weary _précieux_. No: he stalks apart in
-state, the splendid Pasha of English letters.
-
-Hazlitt boasts, and permissibly, of genuine disinterestedness: “If you
-wish to see me perfectly calm,” he remarks somewhere, “cheat me in a
-bargain, or tread on my toes.”[70] But he cannot promise the same
-behavior for a sophism repeated in his presence, or a truth repelled.
-In his sixth year he had been taken, with his brother and sister, to
-America, and he says that he never afterwards got out of his mouth the
-delicious tang of a frost-bitten New England barberry. It is tolerably
-sure that the blowy and sunny atmosphere of the young republic of
-1783-7 got into him also. Liberalism was his birthright. He flourishes
-his fighting colors; he trembles with eagerness to break a lance with
-the arch-enemies; he is a champion, from his cradle, against class
-privilege, of slaves who know not what they are, nor how to wish for
-liberty. But he cannot do all this in the laughing Horatian way; he
-cannot keep cool; he cannot mind his object. If he could, he would be
-the white devil of debate. There are times when he speaks, as does
-Dr. Johnson, out of all reason, because aware of the obstinacy and the
-bad faith of his hearers. Morals are too much in his mind, and, after
-their wont, they spoil his manners. Like the Caroline Platonist, Henry
-More, he “has to cut his way through a crowd of thoughts as through a
-wood.” His temper breaks like a rocket, in little lurid smoking stars,
-over every ninth page; he lays about him at random; he raises a dust of
-side-issues. Hazlitt sometimes reminds one of Burke himself gone off
-at half-cock. He will not step circumspectly from light to light, from
-security to security. Some of his very best essays, as has been noted,
-have either no particular subject, or fail to follow the one they have.
-Nor is he any the less attractive if he be heated, if he be swearing
-
-    “By the blood so basely shed
-     Of the pride of Norfolk’s line,”
-
-or scornfully settling accounts of his own with the asinine public.
-When he is not driven about by his moods, Hazlitt is set upon his fact
-alone; which he thinks is the sole concern of a prose-writer. Grace and
-force are collateral affairs. “In seeking for truth,” he says proudly,
-in words fit to be the epitome of his career, “I sometimes found
-beauty.”
-
-_The Edinburgh Review_, in an article written while Hazlitt was in the
-full of his activity, summed up his shortcomings. “There are no great
-leading principles of taste to give singleness to his aims, nor any
-central points in his mind around which his feelings may revolve and
-his imaginations cluster. There is no sufficient distinction between
-his intellectual and his imaginative faculties. He confounds the truths
-of imagination with those of fact, the processes of argument with
-those of feeling, the immunities of intellect with those of virtue.”
-Here is an admirable arraignment, which goes to the heart of the
-matter. Hazlitt himself corroborates it in a confession of gallant
-directness: “I say what I think; I think what I feel.” It is this fatal
-confusion which makes his course now rapid and clear, anon clogged with
-vagaries, as if his rudder had run into a mesh of sea-weed; it is
-this which deflects his judgments, and leads him, in the shrewd phrase
-of a modern critic, to praise the right things for the wrong reasons.
-Hazlitt’s prejudices are very instructive, even while he bewails
-Landor’s or Cobbett’s, and tells you, as it were, with a tear in his
-eye, when he has done berating the French, that, after all, they are
-Catholics; and as for manners, “Catholics must be allowed to carry it,
-all over the world!” His exquisite treatment of Northcote, a winning
-old sharper for whom he cared nothing, is all due to his looking like
-a Titian portrait. So with the great Duke: Hazlitt hated the sight
-of him, “as much for his pasteboard visor of a face as for anything
-else.” One of his justifications for adoring Napoleon was, that at a
-levee a young English officer named Lovelace drew from him an endearing
-recognition: “I perceive, sir, that you bear the name of the hero of
-Richardson’s romance.” If you look like a Titian portrait, if you read
-and remember Richardson, you may trust a certain author, who knows a
-distinction when he sees it, to set you up for the idol of posterity.
-Hazlitt thought Mr. Wordsworth’s long and immobile countenance
-resembled that of a horse; and it is not impossible that this
-conviction, twin-born with that other that Mr. Wordsworth was a mighty
-poet, is responsible for various gibes at the august contemporary whose
-memory owes so much to his pen in other moods.
-
-He is the most ingenuous and agreeable egoist we have had since the
-seventeenth-century men. It must be remembered how little he was in
-touch outwardly with social and civic affairs; how he was content to
-be the always young looker-on. There was nothing for him to do but
-fall back, under given conditions, upon his own capacious entity. The
-automaton called William Hazlitt is to him a toy made to his hand,
-to be reached without effort; the digest of all his study and the
-applicable test of all his assumptions. He knew himself; he could, and
-did, with decorum, approve or chastise himself in open court. “His
-life was of humanity the sphere.” His “I” has a strong constituency
-in the other twenty-five initials. In this sense, and in our current
-cant, Hazlitt is nothing if not subjective, super-personal. His sort of
-sentimentalism is an anomaly in Northern literature, even in the age
-when nearly every literary Englishman of note was variously engaged
-in baring his breast. Whether he would carp or sigh, he will still
-hold you by the button, as he held host and guest, master and valet,
-to pour into their adjacent ears the mad extravagances of the _Liber
-Amoris_. He gets a little tired at his desk, after battling for hours
-with the slow and stupid in behalf of the beauty ever-living; he wants
-fresh air and a reverie; he must digress or die. And from abstractions
-bardic as Carlyle’s, he runs gladly to his own approved self. This very
-circumstance, which lends Hazlitt’s pages their curious blur and stain,
-is the same which stamps his individuality, and gives those who are
-drawn towards him at all an unspeakably hearty relish for his company.
-What shall we call it?—the habit, not maudlin in him, of speaking out,
-of draining his well of emotion for the benefit of the elect; nay, even
-of delicate lyric whimperings, beside which
-
-    “Poore Petrarch’s long-deceasèd woes”
-
-take on a tinsel glamour. As the dancing-girl carries her jewels,
-every one in sight as she moves, so our “Faustus, that was wont to
-make the schools ring with _Sic probo_,” steps into the forum jingling
-and twinkling with personalia. He is quite aware of the figure he
-may cut: he does not stumble into an intimacy with you because he is
-absent-minded, or because he is liable to an attack of affectation. He
-is as conscious as Poussin’s giants, whom he once described as “seated
-on the tops of craggy mountains, playing idly on their Pan’s pipes, and
-knowing the beginning and the end of their own story.” Many sentences
-of his, from their structure, might be attributed to Coleridge, the
-single person from whom Hazlitt admits to have learned anything;[71]
-but there is no mistaking his _note émue_: that is as obvious as the
-syncopations in a Scotch tune, or the long eyes of Orcagna’s saints.
-
-He wishes you to know, at every breathing-space, “how ill’s all here
-about my heart; but ’tis no matter.” Laying by or taking up an old
-print or folio, he loosens some fond confidence to that surprised
-novice, the common reader. Like Shelley here, as in a few other
-affectionate absurdities, the prince of prose, turning from his proper
-affairs, assures you that he, too, is human, hoping, unhappy; he also
-has lived in Arcadia. It is in such irrelevancies that he is fully
-himself, Hazlitt freed, Hazlitt autobiographic, “his chariot-wheels
-hot by driving fast.”[72] Who can forget the parentheses in his advices
-to his little son, about the scholar having neither mate nor fellow,
-and the god of love clapping his wings upon the river-bank to mock him
-as he passes by? Or the noble and moving passage in _The Pleasures of
-Painting_, beginning with “My father was willing to sit as long as I
-pleased,” and ending with the longing for the revolution of the great
-Platonic year, that those times might come over again! He freshens with
-his own childhood the garden of larkspur and mignonette at Walworth,
-and “the rich notes of the thrush that startle the ear of winter . . .
-dear in themselves, and dearer for the sake of what is departed.” You
-care not so much for the placid stream by Peterborough as for his own
-wistful pilgrimage to the nigh farmhouse gate, where the ten-year-old
-Grace Loftus (his much-beloved mother, who survived him) used to gaze
-upon the setting sun. And in a choric outburst of praise for Mrs.
-Siddons, the splendor seems to culminate less in “her majestic form
-rising up against misfortune, an antagonist power to it” (what a truly
-Shakespearean breadth is in that description!); less in the sight of
-her name on the play-bill, “drawing after it a long trail of Eastern
-glory, a joy and felicity unutterable,” than in the widening dream of
-the happy lad in the pit, in his sovereign vision “of waning time, of
-Persian thrones and them that sat on them”; in the human life which
-appeared to him, of a sudden, “far from indifferent,” and in his
-“overwhelming and drowning flood of tears.” He can beautify the evening
-star itself, this innovator, who records that after a tranced and
-busy day at the easel, the day of Austerlitz, he watched it set over
-a poor man’s cottage with other thoughts and feelings than he shall
-ever have again. There is nothing of _le moi haïssable_ in all this. It
-is deliberate naturalism; the rebellion against didactics and “tall
-talk,” the milestone of a return, parallel with that of Wordsworth,
-to the fearless contemplation of plain and near things. But in a
-professing logician, is it not somewhat peculiar? When has even a poet
-so centred the universe in his own heart, without offence?
-
-Hazlitt threw away his brush, as a heroic measure, because he foresaw
-but a middling success. Many canvases he cut into shreds, in a fury
-of dissatisfaction with himself. Northcote, however, thought his lack
-of patience had spoiled a great painter. He was too full of worship
-of the masters to make an attentive artisan. The sacrifice, like all
-his sacrifices, great or small, left nothing behind but sweetness,
-the unclouded love of excellence, and the capacity of rejoicing at
-another’s attaining whatever he had missed. But the sense of disparity
-between supreme intellectual achievement and that which is only
-partial and relative, albeit of equal purity, followed him like a
-frenzy. Comparison is yet more difficult in literature than in art,
-and Hazlitt could take some satisfaction in the results of his second
-ardor. He felt his power most, perhaps, as a critic of the theatre.
-English actors owe him an incalculable debt, and their best spirits
-are not unmindful of it. He was reasonably assured of the duration and
-increase of his fame. Has he not, in one of his headstrong digressions,
-called the thoughts in his _Table-Talk_ “founded as rock, free as
-air, the tone like an Italian picture?” Even there, however, the
-faint-heartedness natural to every true artist troubled him. He went
-home in despair from the spectacle of the Indian juggler, “in his
-white dress and tightened turban,” tossing the four brass balls. “To
-make them revolve round him at certain intervals, like the planets in
-their spheres, to make them chase one another like sparkles of fire, or
-shoot up like flowers or meteors, to throw them behind his back, and
-twine them round his neck like ribbons or like serpents; to do what
-appears an impossibility, and to do it with all the ease, the grace,
-the carelessness imaginable; to laugh at, to play with the glittering
-mockeries, to follow them with his eye as if he could fascinate them
-with its lambent fire, or as if he had only to see that they kept time
-to the music on the stage—there is something in all this which he who
-does not admire may be quite sure he never really admired anything in
-the whole course of his life. It is skill surmounting difficulty, and
-beauty triumphing over skill. . . . It makes me ashamed of myself. I
-ask what there is that I can do as well as this? Nothing.” A third
-person must give another answer. The whole passage offers a very
-exquisite parallel; for in just such a daring, varied, and magical
-way can William Hazlitt write. The astounding result, “which costs
-nothing,” is founded, in each case, upon the toil of a lifetime.
-Hazlitt’s style is an incredible thing. It is not, like Lamb’s, of one
-warp and woof. It soars to the rhetorical sublime, and drops to hard
-Saxon slang. It is for all the world, and not only for specialists. Its
-range and change incorporate the utmost of many men. The trenchant
-sweep, the simplicity and point of Newman at his best, are matched
-by the pages on _Cobbett_, on _Fox_, and _On the Regal Character_;
-and there is, to choose but one opposite instance, in the paper _On
-the Unconsciousness of Genius_, touching Correggio, a fragment of
-pure eloquence of a very ornate sort, whose onward bound, glow, and
-volley can give Mr. Swinburne’s _Essays and Studies_ a look as of
-sails waiting for the wind. The same hand which fills a brief with
-epic cadences and invocations overwrought, throws down, often without
-an adjective, sentence after sentence of ringing steel: “Fashion is
-gentility running away from vulgarity, and afraid of being overtaken
-by it.” “It is not the omission of individual circumstance, but the
-omission of general truth, which constitutes the little, the deformed,
-and the short-lived in art.” The man’s large voice in these aphorisms
-is Hazlitt’s unmistakably. If it be not as novel to this generation as
-if he were but just entering the lists of authorship, it is because his
-fecundating mind has been long enriching at second-hand the libraries
-of the English world. He comes forth, like another outrider, Rossetti,
-so far behind his heralds and disciples, that his mannered utterance
-seems familiar, and an echo of theirs. For it may be said at last,
-thanks to the numerous reprints of the last seven years, and thanks
-to a few competent critics, whom Mr. Stevenson leads, that Hazlitt’s
-robust work is in a fair way to be known and appraised, by a public
-which is a little less unworthy of him than his own. His method is
-entirely unscientific, and therefore archaic. If we can profit no
-longer by him, we can get out of him cheer and delight: and these
-profit unto immortality. Meanwhile, what mere “maker of beautiful
-English” shall be pitted against him there where he sits, the despair
-of a generation of experts, continually tossing the four brass balls?
-
-It has been said often by shallow reviewers, and is said sometimes
-still, that Hazlitt’s style aims at effect; as if an effect must not
-be won, without aiming, by a “born man of letters,” as Mr. Saintsbury
-described him, “who could not help turning into literature everything
-he touched.”[73] The “effect,” under given conditions, is manifest,
-unavoidable. Once let Hazlitt speak, as he speaks ever, in the warmth
-of conviction, and what an intoxicating music begins!—wild as that of
-the gypsies, and with the same magnet-touch on the sober senses: enough
-to subvert all “criticism and idle distinction,” and to bring back
-those Theban times when the force of a sound, rather than masons and
-surveyors, sent the very walls waltzing into their places.
-
-In the face of diction so joyously clear as his, so sumptuous and
-splendid, it is well to endorse Mr. Ruskin, that “no right style
-was ever founded save out of a sincere heart.” It can never be
-said of William Hazlitt, as Dean Trench well said of those other
-“great stylists,” Landor and De Quincey, that he had a lack of moral
-earnestness. What he was determined to impress upon his reader, during
-the quarter-century while he held a pen, was not that he was knowing,
-not that he was worthy of the renown and fortune which passed him by,
-but only that he had rectitude and a consuming passion for good. He
-declares aloud that his escutcheon has no bar-sinister: he has not
-sold himself; he has spoken truth in and out of season; he has honored
-the excellent at his own risk and cost; he has fought for a principle
-and been slain for it, from his youth up. His sole boast is proven.
-In a far deeper sense than Leigh Hunt, for whom he forged the lovely
-compliment, he was “the visionary in humanity, the fool of virtue,” and
-the captain of those who stood fast, in a hostile day, for ignored and
-eternal ideals. The best thing to be said of him, the thing for which,
-in Haydon’s phrase, “everybody must love him,” is that he himself loved
-justice and hated iniquity. He shared the groaning of the spirit
-after mortal welfare with Swift and Fielding, with Shelley and Matthew
-Arnold, with Carlyle and Ruskin; he was corroded with cares and desires
-not his own. Beside this intense devotedness, what personal flaw will
-ultimately show? The host who figure in the Roman martyrology hang all
-their claim upon the fact of martyrdom, and, according to canon law,
-need not have been saints in their lifetime at all. So with such souls
-as his: in the teeth of a thousand acknowledged imperfections in life
-or in art, they remain our exemplars. Let them do what they will, at
-some one stroke they dignify this earth. It is not Hazlitt, “the born
-man of letters” alone, but Hazlitt the born humanist, who bequeaths us,
-from his England of coarse misconception and abuse, a memory like a
-loadstar, and a name which is a toast to be drunk standing.
-
-
-THE END
-
-FOOTNOTES:
-
-[58] The article on _The Fine Arts_ in the _Encyclopædia Britannica_ is
-signed “W. H.”
-
-[59] Mrs. Hazlitt the first, it would appear, undertook to verify
-her husband’s quotations for him. His favorite metaphor, “Like the
-tide which flows on to the Propontic, and knows no ebb,” must have
-passed many times under her eye. Any reference to Othello himself, in
-the great scene of Act III., would have shown four lines for William
-Hazlitt’s explicit one.
-
-[60] Some of Hazlitt’s comments on women are full of unconscious humor.
-In _Great and Little Things_ he admits being snubbed by the fair, and
-adds with grandiloquence: “I took a pride in my disgrace, and concluded
-that I had elsewhere my inheritance!”
-
-[61] In the National Portrait Gallery, London.
-
-[62] _Blackwood’s_, in the charming fashion of the time, repeatedly
-refers to Hazlitt’s “pimples”; and Byron credited and supplemented the
-allegation. Hazlitt himself says somewhere “that to lay a thing to
-a person’s charge from which he is perfectly free, shows spirit and
-invention!” The calumny is not worth mention, except as a fair specimen
-of the journalistic methods against which literary men had to contend
-some eighty years ago.
-
-[63] Lamb had been his groomsman twenty-two years before, at the Church
-of St. Andrew, Holborn, “and like to have been turned out several times
-during the ceremony; anything awful makes me laugh!” as he confessed in
-a letter to Southey in 1815.
-
-[64] Orrery had seen this same bitter indignation overwhelm Swift at
-times, “so that it is scarcely possible for human features to carry in
-them more terror and austerity.”
-
-[65] At 19 York Street, Westminster. The house, with its tablet “To the
-Prince of Poets” set by Hazlitt himself, was destroyed in 1877.
-
-[66] A snappy unpublished letter to Hunt, sold among the Hazlitt
-papers at Sotheby, Wilkinson and Hodge’s, in the late autumn of 1893,
-complains bitterly of kind Basil Montagu, who had once put off a
-proffered visit from Hazlitt, on the ground that a party of other
-guests was expected. The deterred one was naturally wroth. “Yet after
-this, I am not to look at him a little _in abstracto_! This is what has
-soured me and made me sick of friendship and acquaintanceship.” Hazlitt
-confounded cause and effect. He was unwelcome in general gatherings
-where his genius was unappreciated; and we may be sure Montagu
-was sorry for it when, in the interests of concord, he held up so
-deprecating and inhospitable a hand. But among those who nursed Hazlitt
-in his last illness, Basil Montagu was not the least loyal.
-
-[67] _The Fight_ appeared in the _New Monthly Magazine_ in 1822. It
-was itself antedated by _The Fancy_ of John Hamilton Reynolds, Keats’s
-friend and Hood’s brother-in-law, which was printed in 1820. The jolly
-iambics are as inspired as the essay. “P. C.” is, of course, Pugilistic
-Club.
-
-“Oh, it is life! to see a proud And dauntless man step, full of hopes,
-Up to the P. C. stakes and ropes, Throw in his hat, and with a spring
-Get gallantly within the ring; Eye the wide crown, and walk awhile
-Taking all cheerings with a smile; To see him strip; his well-trained
-form, White, glowing, muscular, and warm, All beautiful in conscious
-power, Relaxed and quiet, till the hour; His glossy and transparent
-frame, In radiant plight to strive for fame! To look upon the clean
-shap’d limb In silk and flannel clothèd trim; While round the waist
-the kerchief tied Makes the flesh glow in richer pride. ’Tis more than
-life to watch him hold His hand forth, tremulous yet bold, Over his
-second’s, and to clasp His rival’s in a quiet grasp; To watch the noble
-attitude He takes, the crowd in breathless mood; And then to see, with
-adamant start, The muscles set, and the great heart Hurl a courageous
-splendid light Into the eye, and then—the FIGHT!”
-
-But this is general: Hazlitt is specific. His particular Fight was the
-great one between Neate of Bristol and Tom Hickman the Gasman, Neate
-being the victor. On May 20, 1823, Neate met Spring of Hertfordshire
-(so translated out of his natural patronymic of Winter), in a contest
-for the championship, and Neate himself went under. This latter battle
-was mock-heroically celebrated by Maginn in _Blackwood’s_, and Hood’s
-casual meteorological simile heaped up honors on the winner:
-
-“The Spring! I shrink and shudder at her name. For why? I find her
-breath a bitter blighter, And suffer from her blows as if they came
-From Spring the fighter!”
-
-So that literature may be said to have set close to the ropes in those
-days, from first to last.
-
-[68] Lamb, in “_A Letter to R. Southey, Esq._”
-
-[69] The man of Martial’s epigram had other “views.” The capital
-translation is Dr. Goldwin Smith’s:
-
-“Vacerra lauds no living poet’s lays, But for departed genius keeps his
-praise. I, alas, live; nor deem it worth my while To die, that I may
-win Vacerra’s smile.”
-
-[70] This was the spirit of Henry Fielding on his last voyage, hoisted
-aboard among the watermen at Redcliffe, and hearing his emaciated body
-made the subject of jeers and laughter. “No man who knew me,” he writes
-in his journal, “will think I conceived any personal resentment at this
-behavior; but it was a lively picture of that cruelty and inhumanity
-in the nature of man which I have often contemplated with concern, and
-which leads the mind into a train of very uncomfortable and melancholy
-thoughts.” It is a fine passage, and a strong heart, not given to
-boasting, penned it. Poor Hazlitt could not bear even an unintentional
-slight without imputing diabolical malice to the offender. Yet it was
-certainly true that, in his saner hours, he could suffer personal
-discomfort in public without flinching, and deplore the habit which
-imposed it, rather than the act.
-
-[71] If Hazlitt conveyed some of his best mannerisms from Coleridge,
-not always transmuting them, surely the balance may be said to be
-even when one discovers later in Hartley Coleridge such an easy
-inherited use of Hazlitt’s “flail of gold” as is exemplified in this
-summary of Roger Ascham’s career. “There was a primitive honesty, a
-kindly innocence about this good old scholar, which gave a personal
-interest to the homeliest details of his life. He had the rare
-felicity of passing through the worst of times without persecution and
-without dishonor. He lived with princes and princesses, prelates and
-diplomatists, without offence as without ambition. Though he enjoyed
-the smiles of royalty, his heart was none the worse, and his fortunes
-little the better.”
-
-[72] The quotation is from Coleridge, and it was applied by him to
-Dryden. Hazlitt himself unconsciously expanded and spoiled it in his
-essay on _Burke_. “The wheels of his imagination did not catch fire
-from the rottenness of the material, but from the rapidity of their
-motion.”
-
-[73] The Rev. H. R. Haweis has another characterization of these
-breathing and burning pages: “long and tiresome essays by Hazlitt.”
-So they are, sure enough, if only you be endowed to think so! Hazlitt
-himself gives the diverting fact for what it is worth, that “three
-chimney-sweeps meeting three Chinese in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, they
-laughed at one another till they were ready to drop down.”
-
-
-
-
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-      With Portrait and Map. Small 16mo, Cloth, Ornamental,
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-little book, in its ardor of appreciation, vivacity of portraiture, and
-grace and spontaneity of style, is a masterpiece of concise narration,
-and by those who read it once will be sought with unfailing delight
-again and again.—_Boston Beacon._
-
-Miss Guiney writes with a love for her subject which makes her fine
-discrimination all the finer, and shows an insight into history
-all the more admirable for the research which it has compelled.
-This tiny volume gives evidence of as thorough study as would
-fit out a post-octavo, as some authors understand the writing of
-history.—_Evangelist_, N. Y.
-
-Miss Guiney has written La Rochejaquelein’s life on a small scale,
-but with spirit and enthusiasm, and her little book is very
-interesting.—_N. Y. Tribune._
-
-A spirited, vivid, and felicitously phrased account of that dramatic
-side-issue of the French Revolution, the Vendée War. . . . Miss
-Guiney’s literary touch is always admirable and, not infrequently,
-inspired.—_Hartford Courant._
-
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-Transcriber’s note:
-
-Obvious punctuation errors were corrected.
-
-Repeated headings were removed.
-
-Page 56, “Llansaintfraed” changed to “Llansantffraed” (brother’s parish
-of Llansantffraed)
-
-Page 171, Footnote 37, “Farquhare” and “Farqhare” retained as printed
-from the matriculation entry.
-
-
-
-***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A LITTLE ENGLISH GALLERY***
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