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diff --git a/old/54219-0.txt b/old/54219-0.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 33d0752..0000000 --- a/old/54219-0.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,5728 +0,0 @@ -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 -the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at -www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you'll have -to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. - - - - -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 -(http://www.pgdp.net) from page images generously made available by -Internet Archive (https://archive.org) - - - -Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this - file which includes the original illustration. - See 54219-h.htm or 54219-h.zip: - (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/54219/54219-h/54219-h.htm) - or - (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/54219/54219-h.zip) - - - Images of the original pages are available through - Internet Archive. See - https://archive.org/details/littleenggallery00guinrich - - -Transcriber's note: - - Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_). - - A carat character is used to denote superscription. A - single character following the carat is superscripted - (example: 9^a). - - - - - -[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.” - - - - - -MONSIEUR HENRI - - A Foot-note to French History. By LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY. - With Portrait and Map. Small 16mo, Cloth, Ornamental, - $1 00. - - -A fascinating career, truly, and here most exquisitely chronicled. The -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._ - - ———— - - PUBLISHED BY HARPER & BROTHERS, NEW YORK. - - [Illustration] _For sale by all booksellers, or will be - sent by the publishers, postage prepaid, to any part of - the United States, Canada, or Mexico, receipt of the - price._ - - - - -BY CONSTANCE F. WOOLSON. - -———— - - HORACE CHASE. 16mo, Cloth, $1 25. - JUPITER LIGHTS. 16mo, Cloth, $1 25. - EAST ANGELS. 16mo, Cloth, $1 25. - ANNE. Illustrated. 16mo, Cloth, $1 25. - FOR THE MAJOR. 16mo, Cloth, $1 00. - CASTLE NOWHERE. 16mo, Cloth, $1 00. - RODMAN THE KEEPER. 16mo, Cloth, $1 00. - -———— - -One of the most remarkable qualities of Miss Woolson’s work was its -intense picturesqueness. 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