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HOMES AND HAUNTS
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BRITISH POETS
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A I'OKTS HAUNT.
HOMES AMD HAUNTS
OK 1'1!K
BRITISH POETS
WILLIAM IIOWITT
V/ITH ILLUSTRATIONS
LONDON
GEORGE ROUTLEDGE AND SONS, Limited
BROADWAY, LUDGATE HILL
MA^'CHESTER AND NEW YOR!C
1894
i - c - • ,
• fr «
• • • fa.
60 •• '^
CONTENTS.
POLTS ILLUSTRATIONS. fiOE
CHAUCER Tahard Inn, Southwarh 1
SPENSER Kilcohnan Castle on Fire 10
SHAKSPEARE .... Shakspeare reading to Queen Elizabeth . . 29
COWLEY House at Chertsey 40
MILTON" ...... Cottage at Chalfont 46
BUTLER Ludloic Castle G9
DRYDEN Burleirjh House 74
ADDISON Holland House 83
POPE Villa at Tiuiclcnham 04
SWIFT Laracor Church Il'J
Stella's House 132
Ilains of Sicift's Hmse 140
THOMSON Cottage hi Kcw Lane 141
SHENSTONE .... Lcasowes 155
CHATTEIITON . . . Muniment Room 158
GRAY ISC
GOLDSMITH .... Room at Walker's Hotel 195
BURNS Burns and Mary parting 229
Lincluden Abbey 2C8
COWPEPv House at Westm 269
MRS. TIGHE 281
KEATS Tombs of Keats and Shelley at Home . .292
SHELLEY Shelley's Body found 301
PYRON Anneslcy Hall 322
CRABBE Bchoir Castle 350
riOaO 369
VL CONTENTS.
rOITS. ILLUSTRATIONS. J'AGB
COLEllIDGE .... Culcridffc Enlistinrj 3l<3
MRS. IIEMANS . . . Bcsidencc at RhjUon 419
L. E. L Cape Coasl Castle 433
SCOTT Abhoisford Aid
CAMPBELL Gatcicay of Glasrjow CoUciic 487
SOUTIIEY Residence at Kcsuuh 508
Birthplace at Bristol 525
BAILLIE 526
WORDSWORTL' . , . Grasmere 632
MONTGOMERY . . . Fuhicclc Moravian Sclllancn! 556
LANDOR Residence near Fiesclc 578
LEIGH HUNT , , , . Birthplace at SotUhgate 595
ROGERS House in St. James's Place 609
MOORE Cottage at Sloperlon G26
GEOFFREY CHAUCER.
The first thing whicli forcibly striiies our attention in tracing tho
Homes and Haunts of the Poets, is the devastation which Time has
made amongst them. As if he would indemnify himself for the
degree of exemption from his influence in their works, he lays waste
their homes and annihilates the traces of their haunts with an
active and a relentless hand. If this is startlingly apparent in the
cases of those even who have been our cotemporaries, how much
more must it be so in the cases of those who have gone hence cen-
turies ago. We begin with the father of our truly English poetry,
tho genial old Geoffrey Chaucer ; and, spite of the lives which
have been written of him, Tyrwhitt tells us that just nothing is
really known of him. The whole of his account of what he considers
well-authenticated facts regarding him amounts to but twelve pages,
including notes and comments. The facts themselves do not fill
more than four pages. He is supposed to have been born in 1328,
and probably of an old Kentish family. Of his birth-place, further
than that it was in London, as he tells us himself in the Testament
of Love, fol. 321, nothing is known. The place of his education is
by no means clear. It has been said that he was educated first at
Cambridge and then at Oxford. He himself leaves it pretty certaiu
2 CH AUG Kit.
that he was at Cambridge, atyling hhuself, in The Court of Love,
" Philogenet of Cambridge, Clerk." Leland has asserted that he was
at Oxford : and Wood, in his Annals, gives a tradition that, " when
Wickhfle was guardian or warden of Canterbury College, he had for
his pupil the famous poet called Jeffrey Chaucer, father of Thomas
Chaucer, Esq., of Ewelme, in Oxfordshire, who, following the steps
of his master, reflected much upon the corruptions of the clergy."
He is then said to have entered himself of the Inner Temple.
Speght states that a Mr. Buckley had seen a record in the Inner
Temple of '' Geffrey Chaucer being fined two shillings for beating
a Franciscan Friar in Fleet Street." This, Tyrwhitt says, was a
youthful sally, and points out the fact that Chaucer studied in the
Inner Temple-on leaving college, and befoi^o his travels abroad, which
is contrary to the account of Leland, who makes him after his travels
reside in the Inner Temple. These travels even in France resting
jsolely on the authority of Leland, Tyrwhitt disputes, but of their
reality there can be little doubt.
Chaucer, having finished his education, became a courtier. The
first authentic memorial, says Tyrwhitt, that we have of him, is the
patent in Rymer, 41 E. Ill, by which the king grants him an annuity
of twenty marks, by the title of Valettus nostcr ; at which time he is
also said to have been knighted, on or about the time of his marriage.
He was then in the thirty-ninth year of his age. But previously to
this we have it on his own evidence that he served under Edward
III. in his great campaigns in France ; was made prisoner, and ob-
tained his release at the peace of Bretigni, which took place in 1360,
consequently in the 34. E. Ill, seven years before. Speght mentions
a succeeding grant by the title of Valettus hospitil. By those titles
it appears that he was a royal page or groom. In this situation he
enjoyed various grants fi-om the king. In the 48 E. III. he had,
according to Rymer, a grant for life of a pitcher of wine daily ; in
the same year a grant, during pleasure, of the office of Comptroller
of the Custom of Wools, Wines, etc. in the port of London. The
next year the king granted him the Wardship of Sir Edmund Staple-
gate's heir, for which he received 104/. ; and in the following year,
some forfeited wool to the value of 71/. As. Gd. His annuity of
twenty marks was confirmed to him on the accession of Richard II,
and another annuity of twenty marks was granted him in lieu of the
daily pitcher of wine. It is probable, too, that he was confirmed in
his office of comptroller, though the instrument has not been pro-
duced. In the 13th of Richard II. he appears to have been clerk of
the works at Westminster, etc., and in the following year at Windsor.
In the 17tli of Richard II. the king granted him a new annuity of
twenty pounds ; in the 22d, a pipe of wine. On the accession of
Henry IV. his two grants, of the annuity of twenty pounds and
of the pipe of wine, were confirmed to him, with an additional grant
of forty marks.
Thus it appears that Chaucer did not miss the profitable part of
court patronage. He also reaped some of its honourable employ-
ments. Edward III, in the 4Gth year of his reign, appoiut-pd tirgu
CHAUCER.
with two others, liis envoy to Genoa, Avith the title of Scuiifer noster.
Our Squire. This great and able king, it is evident, regarded Chaucer
as a good man of business ; and that he proved himself so, is pretty
u'cU denoted by the chief grants of his life immediately following
his return. On the heels of these grants, came also another em-
bassy," in company with Sir Thomas Priest, to Flanders, in 1377, and
after that to France, with Sir Guichard d' Angle and Eichard Stan,
according to Froissart, to treat of a marriage between the Prince of
Wales, afterwards Richard II, and Isabella, daughter of the French
king. Other historians assert that the original object of his mission
was to complain of some infringement of the truce concluded with
France, and which was so well pushed by Chaucer and his colleagues,
that it led to some overtures respecting the marriage. However that
may be, it is evident that our poet's part in the transaction met with
the royal approbation ; for the old king dying, one of the first acts
of the prince, on his accession, was to confirm his fixther's grants to
him, with an additional one, as we have observed. Eichai-d, more-
over, in the very first year of his reign, sent him on a second embassy
to Flanders, and, in the following year, on another to Lombardy. Eight
years later he was elected a knight of the shire for Kent to Parliament.
But Chaucer had also his share of life's reverses. In 1386, he was
dismissed from his offices. In the eleventh year of Richard II, that
is, only two years later, he had the king's licence to surrender his
two grants of twenty marks each, in favour of John Scalby. It is
not really known v/hy he surrendered those grants, but it is sup-
posed that it was owing to his connexion with the LoUai'd cause,
and especially to his alliance with John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lan-
caster, and John of Northampton. He was not only attached to the
duke on account of their common interest in the reformed opinions,
Ijut he was married to a sister of Catherine Swynford, the duke's
mistress, and afterwai'ds wife. Chaucer, it seems, had exerted himself
zealously to secure the re-election of John of Northampton as mayor
of London. There is much mystery attached to the cause of the
riot which took place ; but as this Comberton, or John of North-
ampton, was a zealous Wickliffite, the supposition that the disturb-
ance arose from the violent opposition of the clergy to him, is very
probable. Comberton was finally committed to prison, and Chaucer
Hed, first to Hainault, then to France, and lastly to Zealand. " Whilst
in Zealand," says Mr. Chalmers, " he maintained some of his country-
men, who had fled thither on the same account, by sharing the
money he had brought with him, — an act of liberality which soon
exhausted his stock. In the meantime the partizans of his cause,
whom he had left at home, contrived to make their peace, not only
without endeavouring to procure a pardon for him, but without
aiding him in his exile, where he became greatly distressed for want
"jf pecuniary supplies. Such ingratitude, we may suppose, gave him
more uneasiness than the consequences of it ; but it did not lessen
h:n courage, as he soon ventured to return to England. On this he
W43 discovered, and committed to the Tower, where, after being
treated with great rigour, he was promised his pardon if he w)ukt
IS i
4 oriAtroi^fl.
disclose all lie knew, and pxit it in the power of government to
restore the peace of the city. His former resolution appears now to
have failed him ; or, perhaps, indignation at the ungrateful conduct
of his associates induced him to think disclosure a matter of indif-
ference. It is certain that he complied with the terms offered ; but
•we are not told what was the amount of his confession, or what the
consequences were to others, or who they were that he informed
against. We know only that he obtained his liberty, and that an
oppressive share of blame and obloquy followed. To alleviate his
regret for this treatment, and partly to vindicate his own conduct,
he now wrote The Testament of Love ; and although this piece, from
want of dates, and obscurity of style, is not sufficient to form a very
satisfactory biographical document, it at least furnishes the preceding
account of his exile and return."
This account is attended with its difficulties. Chalmers states this
exile to have occurred about the 3d or 4th of Richard II ; Tyrwhitt
in the eleventh of that reign. One thing is certain ; that if it
occurred in the eleventh, the whole period of his exile and troubles
lasted only two years, for in the 13th of Richard II. he was in great
lavour at court, and made clerk of the new works at Westminster,
ind in other castles and palaces which the king was carrjdng on.
Again, the two years during which he claimed protection from the
king, are stated by Chalmers to be from the 2d of Richard, and by
Tynvhitt, quoting Rymer, are dated from the twenty-first of that
reign. It appears, however, pretty certain that he was reduced to
gre'at pecuniary distress, and obliged to screen himself from the
persecutions of his creditors under the royal grant of protection.
There can be little doiibt that Rymer is the correct authority, and
that it occurred in the 21st of Richard. About the time of the ter-
mination of this grant of protection, he would see his protector also
reduced to the need of protection himself ; which he did not find,
but was deposed, and succeeded by Henry IV, who confirmed to our
poet the grants of the imfortunate monarch Richard.
Such are the few prominent facts of Chaucer"s public life. Where,
during his abode in London, he took up his residence, we have no
knowdedge. During the troubles of the court, and during his own,
he is said to have retreated to his favourite Woodstock, This house
he had engaged originally, because the court was then much at
Woodstock, and he was obliged to be in constant attendance on the
king. It became his favourite abode. It was a square stone house
near the park gate, and long retained the name of Chaucer's House.
<fRlany of the rural descriptions in his works have been traced to this
Yavourite scene of his walks and studie^j Every trace of it has been
'-.mg swept away. The other residence which has acquired fame
from connexion with Chaucer, is Donnington Castle, in Berkshire.
Tyrwhitt doubts whether it ever really belonged to him. If it did,
he says, it could not have been till after the IGth of Richard II, for
at that time it was in the possession of Sir Richard Abberbury. Ho
observes that we have no proof of such purchase, and he doubts
whether the situation of his affairs admitted of such a purchase. It
CHAUCEB.
was five years, hoi^ever, after this time when these afiairs compelled
him to seek the king's protection. There are traditions of his having
settled all his lands on his son Thomas, for whom he had jDrocured
a rich wife. Again, it is denied that Thomas Chaucer was his son,
or that it is known that he had any son but Lewis, said to be born
twenty years after his marriage. So dubious is every step in this
history. Yet tradition asserts Thomas Chaucer to have been his
eldest son. It is known that Donnington Castle was for many years
in the hands of this Thomas Chaucer, who was speaker of the Com-
mons in the second year of Henry V, and who in Henry IV.'s time
was high in favour at court, for Joanna of Navarre, the queen of
Henry IV, conferred on him, in the twelfth year of that reign, the
manors of Wotton and Stantesfield for life. His only daughter,
Alice, was a great heiress, and married as her third husband, William
de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk, who was attainted and beheaded in 1450.
May it not have been the fact, that the purchase of Donnington
Park, and the settlement of it on his son, must, together with
a diminished income from the change of some of his afiairs, have
been the source of the poet's embarrassments 1 It is certain that
at one time his emoluments were great ; he speaks of himself as
" once glorified in worldly wellfuluesse, and having suche goods in
welthe as makin men riche." He was in a fair way to make a fortune,
and plant a family of rank and substance. He was married to the
sister of the favourite mistress and subsequent wife of the powerful
and liberal John of Gaunt : had the favour of the king, Edward III,
and his wife that of the noble queen Philippa, one of whose maids
of honour she had been. Everything promised prosperity; the
promise was confirmed on the accession of Richard II ; but soon, as
we have said, the scene changed. He was involved in the troubles
of the times ; compelled to sacrifice his offices, and obliged to fly to
foreign countries. He then complained, in his Testament of Love,
"of being berafto out of dignitie of office, in which he made a
gatheringe of worldly godes."
Notwithstanding all this cloud of uncertainty, the belief will
always jDrevail that Donnington was the residence of Chaucer.
Evelyn tells us, that there was an oak in the park which tradition
asserted to have been planted by Chaucer, and which was still called
Chaucer's Oak. As his house at Woodstock is gone, so his castle
here is a mere ruin. It is generally supposed to be at Woodstock
that he wrote his Canterbury Tales, where he also is said to have
written his Treatise on the Astrolabe, for the use of his son Lewis ;
yet if, as asserted, he was upwards of sixty when he commenced the
Canterbury Tales, he may have been in possession also of Donnington,
during part of the time that he was writing his great poem. But
everything concerning these particulars is wrapt in the mists of five
hundred years. The only branch of his family that he mentions by
name is his sou Lowis. The very name of his wife is imcertain, but
beli/^ved to have been Philippa Rouet, the eldest daughter of Sir
Payne Rouet, king of arms of Guienne, but a native of Hainault.
"Historians," says Tyrwhitt, "though tlicy own themselves totally
CHAUCER.
iguoraut of the cliiistuin iiaiiK; of his wife, are all agreed that her
surname was llouel, the same with that of her father and younger
sister, Catherine Swynford." How Rouct and Swynford can be the
same surname, Tyrwhitt does not tell us; but the tact is, Catherine
Swynford had sunk her maiden name in that of her first husband, for
she was a widow when John of Gaunt married her. Spite of this,
the commentators have pored into the list of nine Lunicella, of the
queen Philippa, to whom the king had granted annuities, and finding
no Rouet there, have been resolved to fix as the future wife of Chaucer,
one Philippa Pykard whom they did find. These are all rash peerings
into the dark. As no damsel of the name of Rouet was found, the
natural conclusion is, that she' was already married to Chaucer.
Of Donnington Castle in its present state a few more words may
be acceptable, and this is the account we find given by Mr. Brittou,
in the Beauties of England and Wales. " Donnington Castle rears
its lofty head above the remains of the venerable oaks that once
surrounded it, on an eminence north-east of Donnington Grove, and
nearly opposite to the village of Speen, now Newbury. It was
formerly a place of much importance, and, by commanding the
western road, gave to its possessors a considerable degree of authority.
When it was originally built is uncertain, but from a manuscript
preserved in the Cottouian Library, it appears that it belonged to
Walter Abberbury, who paid C. shillings for it to the king Hither,
about 1397, in the 70th year of his age, Geoff'rey Chaucer, who nacl
purchased it, retired. Alice, his grandaughter, conveyed it by marriage
to William de la Pole, Duke of Sufiblk." In this hne, and therefore
in the descendants of Chaucer, it continued till the reign of Henry
VII, when, by the treasonable practices of the owner, it was escheated
to the crown. In the Civil Wars it was a post of great consequence,
being fortified as a garrison for the king. During these troubles it
was twice besieged ; the second time its siege being raised by the
arrival of the king himself. In Camden's time this castle was entire.
He describes it as " a small but very neat place, seated on the brow
of a woody hill, having a fine prospect, hghted by windows on every
side." The remains now consist of the east entrance, with its two
round towers, and a small part of the east wall. The gateway is in
good preservation, and the place for the portcullis may still be .seen.
A staircase winds up the south tower to the summit of the castle,
which commands a beautiful view of the Hampshire hills, and the
intermediate country.
It has been the fate of the places celebrated by Chaucer in his
exquisite Canterbury Tales to retain something of their identity
beyond all that might have been expected from the rapid changes,
especially of late years, in England. The Tabard Inn, Southwark,
from which his pilgrims set out, still exists, or at least, partly so,
under the name of The Talbot. This old inn is within view of
Loudon Bridge, on the left hand going thence down High Street iu
the Borough. It is evidently the inn which Dickens had in view
\yhen he described the one where Pickwick originally encountered
Sam WelJer. This once famous old hostel has indeed survived, but
CHAUCER. 7
bas fallen into decXvy, and sunk in rank. London has spread, and
changed the importance of its localities. In the city, and at the
west-end, multitudes of splendid hotels have sprung up — the ancient
Tabard is gone down to a ver}' ordinary house of entertainment.
Once it occupied, no doubt, the frontage on both sides of its gate-
way, now it is confined to the right hand ; and although the ancient
yard and ancient galleries present themselves to your view as you
enter, you find the premises occupied by at least half a dozen dif-
ferent tenants and trades. Here is the inn, on the right hand ; oit
the left are offices of wine merchants and others. Under the oLi
galleries is the warehouse of a London carman, and huge bales of
goods lie before it, to go off by wagon or by railroad. "Wagons
belonging to this establishment are going in and out, and gigs and
chaises are drawn up on the further side of the inn. There is life
and trade here still, but the antiquity and dignity of the ancient
Tabard are broken up. The frontage, and about half the premises,
were once destroyed by fire ; the remainder, occupying the lower
end of the court, exists in all its antiquity. The old wooden gallery,
supported on stout wooden pillars, and with a heavy wooden balus-
trade, is roofed over ; above are steep red-tiled roofs, with dormor
windows, bearing every mark of being very old. In front of this
gallery hangs a large painting, long said to be a picture of tho
pilgrims entering Canterbury. A horseman is disappearing through
the city gateway, and others are following; but the whole is so
weather-beaten that it is difficult to make out. The painting seems
to have jiossessed considerable merit, and it is to be regretted that
it is not restored.
Tyrwhitt says, " They who are disposed to believe the pilgrimage
to have been real, and to have happened in 1383, may support their
opinion by the following inscription, which is still to be read upon
the inn, now called The Talbot, in Southwark : " This is the inn where
Sir Jeffery Chaucer and the twenty-nine pilgrims lodged in their
journey to Canterbury, Anno 1383." Though the present inscription
is evidently of a very recent date, we might suppose it to have been
propagated to us by a succession of faithful transcripts from the
very time ; but unluckily there is too good reason to be assured that
the first inscription of this sort was not earlier than the last century.
We learn from Speght — who appears to hare been inquisitive about
this inn in 1597 — that "this was the hostelry where Chaucer and the
other pilgrims met together, and, with llevry Bailey their host,
accorded about the manner of their journey to Canterbury." Within
the gallery was a large table, said to be the one at which the pilgrims
were entertained. This gallery is now divided into four bedrooms,
where the guests of the inn stiU sleep, in the very floor occupied
by the x^ilgnms upwards of 600 years ago. And, indeed, how much
longer ? The building existed jjrobably long before Chaucer's days,
who has been dead 456 years. It is one of the greatest antiquities
and curiosities of London, so few of the like kind being spared by
the fire, and still fewer by modern changes and improvements.
, In Canterbury, also, the pilgrim's inn is said to have continued to
8 CHAUCER
the present time, no longer, indeed, existing as an inn, but divided
into a number of private tenements in High-street. The old inn
mentioned by Chaucer was called the Chequers. It stands in the
High-street, at the corner of the lane leading to the cathedral, just
below the parade, on the left-hand side going into Canterbury. Its
situation was just that which was most convenient for the pilgrims
to Thomas a Backet's tomb. It was a very large inn, as was necessary
for the enormous resort of votaries to the shrine of this pugnacious
saint. It is now divided into several houses, and has been modernized
externally, bearing no longer traces of having been an inn. The way
to the court-yard is through a narrow doorway passage, and round
the court you see the only evidences of its antiquity — remains of
carved wood-work, now whitewashed over.
The old age of Chaucer, like that of too many men of genius, is
said to have been stormy, and not unvisited by necessity. We are
informed that, on the deposition of Richard II, he went from Wood-
stock to Donnington Castle, and thence to London, to solicit a con-
tinuance of his annuities from Henry IV, in which he found such
difficulties as probably hastened his death. It has been said, how
could this be 1 How could a man with lands and a castle be in such
necessity 1 and it has been attributed to the desire of his biographers
to excite an undue sympathy for their subject, that they have repre-
sented him in his old age as avaricious. Probably, if we knew all
the circumstances, the whole would be clear enough. We know so
little of Chaucer's real, and especially of his domestic history, that
we may pronounce, as falsely as presumptuously, in saying he could
not be in need. Who shall say that because Chaucer casually men-
tions only one son, that he might not have half a dozen ? Who shall
.say what misfortunes may have visited his old age ? These were
changeable and troublesome times. His biographers have settled his
castle and estate on his son Thomas; and if he had other sons to
provide for, and his annuities were not paid, these are causes enough
for pecuniary difficulty. Sir Harris Nicolas has hunted out various
incidents relating to his life, and to his descendants, which may be
referred to in his Memoir of the poet, prefaced to Pickering's
edition of his poetical works.
The general oi^inion is, that he died October 25, in the year 1400,
being seventy-two years of age. According to Wood, he never
repented of his reflections on the clergy of his times, but upbraided
himself bitterly with the licentious portions of his writings, often
crying out at the approach of death, " Woe, woe is me, that I cannot
recall and annul those things, but, alas ! they are now continued
from man to man, and I cannot do what I would desire." He was
buried in Westminster Abbey, in the great south aisle, but no
monument was raised to his memory till a century and a half after
his decease, when Nicolas Brigham, a gentleman of Oxford, a poet
and great admirer of Chaucer, erected the plain altar now so well
known, having three quatre-foils, and the same number of shields,
at the north end of a magnificent recess formed by four obtuse
arched angles. The inscription and figures are now almost obliterated.
CHAUCEU, 9
Like himself, his great work, the Canterbury Tales, lay Luried for
upwards of seventy years in manuscript. Caxton, the first English
printer, selected these Tales as one of the earliest productions of his
press, and thus gave to the world what it will never again consent
to lose. Spite of the rude state of the language when he wrote, the
splendour of his genius beams and burns gloriously through its
inadequate vehicffi. Time, which has destroyod his house at AVood-
stock, and beaten down his castle at Donnington, has not been able
to effect the same ruin on his poems. The language has gone on
perfecting and polishing ; a host of glorious names and glorious
works have succeeded Chaucer and the Canterbury Tales, making
England affluent in its literary fame as any nation on earth ; but
from his distant position, the Father of Enghsh poetry beams like
a star of the first magnitude in the eternal hemisphere of genius.
Like Shakspeare, he has, for the most part, seized on narratives
already in existence to employ his art upon, but that art is so exqui-
site, that it has stamped immortal value on the narrative. The life
and the characters he has represented to us are a portion of the far
past, rescued for us from the oblivion that has overwhelmed all that
age besides. We gaze on the living and moving scenes with an
interest which the progress of time can only deepen. To the latest
ages, men will read and say, — Thus in the days of Wicklilfe, of John
of Gaunt, and Richard II, did men and women look, and act, and
think, and feel ; thus did a great poet live amongst them, and send
them down to us, and to all posterity, ten thousand times more
faithfully preserved than by all the arts of Egypt and the East.
Quaint as they are, they are the very quintessence of human nature.
They live yet, fresh and vivid, passionate and strong, as they did on
their way to the tomb of St. Thomas, upwards of five hundred years
ago. They can never die ; they can never grow old ; and amid them,
the poet. Englishman every inch, lives, and laughs, and quaffs his
cup of wine, and tells his story, and chuckles over his jokes, or
listens to the narratives of ail those around him with a relish of
life, that he only could feel, or could communicate. There is an
elastic geniality in his spirit, a buoyant music in his numbers, a
soul of enjoj'mcnt in his whole nature, that mark him at once as
a man of a thousand ; and we feel in the charm that bears us along,
a strength that will outlast a thousand years. It is like that of the
stream that runs, of the wind that blows, of the sun that comes up,
ruddy as with youth, from the bright east on an early summer's
morning. It is the strength of nature living in its own joyful life,
and mingling with the life of all around in gladdening comi^anion-
ship. For a hundred beautiful pictures of genuine Enghsh existence
and English character, for a world of persons and things that have
snatched us from the present to their society, for a host of wise aud
experience-fraught maxims, for many a tear shed, and emotion
revived, and laugh of merriment, for many a happy hour and bright
remembrance, we thank thee, Dan Chaucer, and just thanks shalt
thou receive a thousand years hence.
EDMUND SPKKSEK.
So little is krijwn of the early life of Spei^ser, tljat our notice of his
haunts will be confined, almost -wholly, to his Castle of Kilcolnian.
He is said to be descended from the ancient family of Spenser ;
indeed he says it himself —
" At length they all In iiicry Loiu^.oii came;
To iiicry London, my most kyndly muse,
■Jhat to me gave ttiis life's first native sourse,
Though from another place I toke my name,
An house of ancient fame." — PruUialamion.
This \\as the house of Althorpc. and now also of Marlborough ; but
however this may be, his parentage was obscure enough. He is said
by Fenton to be born in East Smithfield, near the Tower of London,
in 1553 ; but the parish registers of that time are wanting, and we
have no clue to trace more accurately the locality. He was admitted
as sizer, the lowest order of students, at Peml)roke-hall, Cambridge,
in the year 1569 ; he took the degree of Bachelor of Art^ in January
1572-3, and -^hat of Master of Arts in June 1576, in which year he
was an unsuccessful candidate for a fellowship, according to some of
liis biographers, though others denj' this. On quitting the Univcrsitv,
be went to reside with his relations in the north of England, I'ut
Sl'EXSER.
bow he was supported does not appear. These relations, it would
seem probable, from the communication of a Mr. F. C. Spenser, in
the Gentleman's Magazine of August 1842, quoted by Craik, in his
Spenser and his Poetry, were the Spensers, or Le Speusers, of Hunt-
wood, near Burnly, Lancashire, part of which estate abutted on a httle
property still called Spensers, at the foot of Pendle-hill. This
derives confirmatiou from the fact of Spenser having a son called
Lawn:ii':'ft. and of the names of Edmund and Lawrence abounding in
the registries of this Lancashire family, as well as of that family
only speUing the name with an " s." Here he fell in love witn a lady,
whom he celebrates under the name of Rosahnd, and who deserted
him ; this is said to be the cause of his writing the Shepherd's
Calendar, in which he complains of this faithless mistress. Others,
again, think she was a maiden of Kent, a Rose Lynde, the Lyndes
being an old family in tbat county, where he went on his acquaintance
with Sir Philip Sidney, while in the south ; but this cannot at all
agree with the letter of his friend Gabriel Harvey to him. To Sir
Philip he was introduced by this old college friend Gabriel Harvey,
and dedicated to him the Shepherd's Calendar. If it be true that
the dedication was the cause of introduction, this must have been
sohcited and decided upon while the poem was only in progress, for
it appears pretty clearly that he wrote part of the Calendar at
Penshurst ; especially the eleventh eclogue, in which, he laments the
death of a " maiden of great blood," supposed to have been a daughter
of the Earl of Leicester. In the tenth eclogue he lauds the Earl of
Leicester as " the worthy whom the queen loves best ;" so that he
was now in the high road to preferment, and does not appear to have
been backward to walk diligently in it. Leicester and Sidney, near
kinsmen as they were, were just the two men of the whole kingdom
to push the fortunes of a poet. With this early and regular
introduction to these two powerful men, (powerful in pohtics and
hterature, and in favour with the queen,) it is difhcult to weave in
a belief of the fine story of Spenser's pushing his own way with the
ninth canto of the first book of the Faerie Queene. It is a pity this
should not be true, yet how can it ? The story goes thus : One
morning Spenser, determined to try his fortune with Sir Philip
Sidney, the courtier most celebrated of the time, for his intellectual
accomplisbnents, and for his generous disposition, went to Leicester
House, an entire stranger, carrying with him this canto of his great
poem in which is contained the fine allegory of Despair. He
obtained admission to Sidney, and presented his MS. for his
approbation : that great lover and judge of poetry had not read far
before he was so much struck with the beauty of a stanza, that he
ordered fifty pounds to be given to the author ; proceeding to the
next stanza he raised his gift to a hundred, which sum he doubled
on reading a third, and commanded his steward to pay instantly, lest
he should be induced by a further delay to give away his whole
estate. Pity so fine a story was not true ! some imaginative person
must have pleased himself with fancying how such a thing nn'ght
have bc<!U.
12 SPENSER.
However, Spenser was now a regular inmate of Leicester House,
and of Penshurst ; so that that latter sweet place has the honour o^
being as well the haunt of our great romantic poet as of the high
hearted Sidney. By Leicester and Sidney Spenser was introduced to
Queen Elizabeth, who, it is said, on his presenting some poems to
her, conferred on him a gratuity of a hundred pounds. If this be
true, it is so unlike Elizabeth's parsimony, that we must set it down
as a wonder. Yet it is to this fact that Lord Burleigh's dislike to
the rhymer, as he called Spenser, is attributed. He deemed the grant
so extravagant as to neglect its payment till he received a repe-
tition of the order from his mistress, with a reproof for his defay.
There were, no doubt, plenty of causes for Burleigh's dislike of
Spenser. In the first place, he had not a spark of poetry in his
constitution. To him it was sheer nonsense, idle and childish
nonsense. But, besides this, Spenser was brought forward by the
very party of whom Burleigh was most jealous — Leicester. He
appeared at court as the particular friend of Leicester and Sidney ;
and the incautious poet is said to have aggravated the dislike of
Burleigh by some satirical rhymes, which wei'e assiduously earned
to the clever but cold-blooded minister. There has not been wanting
active vindication of Burleigh, and the discovery of a patent granting
him a pension of fifty pounds a year, dated 1590-1, which he enjoyed
till his death in 1598-9, has been said to be sufficient refutation of
all that has been alleged against Burleigh in Spenser's case. But
liow does this at all remove the statements of Burleigh's dislike of
Spenser and reluctance to his promotion ? Not in the least. It
merely shows that Spenser had friends, and an interest in the
([ueen's good-will, powerful enough to overrule the minister's oppo-
sition. It may be, and most likely is, just as true, that on the grant
of this pension Burleigh declared " the pension was a good example,
too great to be given to a ballad-maker ; " and that when the queen
ordered him a hundred pounds, he replied — " What ! all this for
a song % " These facts are so in keeping with Burleigh's character,
that we cannot question them. Indeed, Spenser himself has put
the truth past a doubt. What means —
" To have thy prince's grace, yet want her peeres' ? "
AVhat those lines at the close of the sixth book of the Faerie
Queeue ?
" Ne may this homely verse, of many meanest,
Hope to escape his venomous despite,
More tlian my former urits, all were tliey clearest,
From blamefull blot, and free from all tliat wile
AVitli which some wicked tongues did it backbite.
And bring into a mighty peere's displeasure
That never so deserved to indite."
Again, in the Raines of Time, written subsequently to the first
edition of the Faerie Queene ; —
" The rugged foremost that with grave foresight
Wields Itingdoms' causes, and affairs of state,
My looser verses, I wote, doth sharply wite
For praising love," etc.
e-PENSEH. 13
Thus, whether Speuser, as alleged, or not, gave cause of oflence by
his satire, one thiu2 is clear, that Burleigh was his bitter and
unchangeable enemy. That Spenser had suffered at coui-t is fully
shown in his oft-cited verses in his " Mother Hubbard's Tale," the
most lively picture of court attendance and its consequent chagrins
that ever was painted.
" Full little knowest thou tliat liast not tryd,
What hell it is in sui/ig long to byde ;'
To lose good days that might he better spent j
To waste long nights in pensive discontent ;
To speed to-day, to be put back to-morrow;
To feed on hope, to pine with fear and sorrow ;
To have thy prince's grace, yet want her peeres';
To liave thy asking, yet wait many years;
To fret thy soul with crosses and with cares;
To eat thy heart with comfortless despairs ;
To fawn, to crouch, to wait, to ride, to run,
To spend, to give, to want, to be undone."
Spenser's sole reliance was on Leicester, Sidney, and Kalcigb, with
whom he became soon acquainted. Ho is said to have been
cmj)loyed by the Earl of Leicester on a mission to Fi-ance in 1579 ;
and though this has been questioned, yet his own assertion, in a
letter to Gabriel Harvey, confirms it. In 1580 he accompanied
Arthur, Lord Grey of Wilton, who went as Lord-Lieutenant to
.Ireland, as his private secretary. In this i^ost he is said to have
displayed great talents for business. He wrote a " Discourse on the
State of Ireland," containing many decided plans for the improve-
ment of that country.
In 1581, the first year of his being in Ireland, he was also made
clerk to the Irish Court of Chancery, and Mr. Craik has pointed out
the fact given in CoUins's Peerage, in the account of the Earls of
Portsmouth, that in this same year, too, he received from the queen
a grant of a lease of the Abbey of Iniscorthy, or Enniscorthy, and
the attached castle and manor, in the county of Wexford, at an
annual rent of 300/. 6s. 8d. ; and that he conveyed this property on
the 9th of December of the same year to Eichard Syuot. This
leasehold by another sale came into the hands of the family of the
Earls of Portsmouth, and is rated by G. Wakefield, in his " Account
of Ireland," at 8,000/. a-year.
Lord Grey was recalled in 1582, and Spenser returned with him.
But his fate was bound up with Ireland. After hanging about court
for four years, during which time there can be little doubt that he
experienced much of the bitterness expressed in the lines just
quoted, he obtained, through the interest of his friends, Lords Grey
and Leicester, and Sir Philip Sidney, a grant of 3,026 acres of land
in the county of Cork, part of the forfeited estate of the great Eai'l
of Desmond. Scarcely was his patent made out, when his best
friend and patron, Sidney, was killed at the battle of Zutphcu.
This was the death of his hopes in England, and he set out to reside
on and cultivate his newly acquired estate in Ireland ; having
lamented Sir Philip's death in the pastoral elegy of Astrophel. This
was in 1586. In thi-ee or four years, 1590 or 1591, Spenser retui-ned
14 BPKNSER.
to England witli Raleigh, published his tirst three books of. tho
Faerie Queeue, and was presented by Raleigh to Elizabeth, who at
this time conferred on him his pension. Spenser, it seems, now
returned to Ireland, wrote his second tliree cantos, and, bringing
them over in 1596, published them ; and also printed and published
his Discourse on the State of Ireland, as a defence of his patron
Lord Grey's policy there. From the condition of Ireland at that
time, and the sense of insecurity which Spenser felt at his lonely
castle of Kilcolman, it is not to be wondered at that his plan
abounds with earnest recommendations of a coercive nature, and
especially for tho stationing of strong garrisons numerously. In
1597, he returned to Ireland, where almost immediately the great
lebellion of Tyrone breaking out, he was chased from his castle, and
retiring to London, died thei-e heart-broken in 1598.
Such is a brief outline of the life of Spenser. Let us now take
a nearer view of his Irish home. One of the best accounts of it is
contained in the Dublin University Magazine of November 1843.
The writer, evidently not only a genuine lover of the poetry of
Spenser, but well acquainted with the scene he describes, goes at
much length into the characters and allusions of the poem of the
Faerie Queene. He shows us that SjDenser draws a noble portrait of
his benefactor. Lord Grey, in the second book of that poem. It is
tlie warrior seen by Britomart in the mirror of Merlin, as her future
husband.
"A comely knight, all armed in complete wize,
Through whose bright ventayle lifted up on hye
His manly face, that did his foes agrize,
And friends to termes of gentle truce entize,
Looked forth, as Phoehus' face out of the east
IJetwixt two shady mountaynes doth arise," &c.
The portrait is certainly a noble one, and limned with the colours
of divine poetry. The anonymous but able author leads us justly
to notice that, in the Legend of Artegall, the thirteen stanzas
opening the first canto of the fifth book " relate to the hapless con-
dition of the Ladye Irena — her tears and her troubles ; tears that,
alas ! have not yet ceased to flow down, and troubles that to tho
present hour are convulsing her bosom. For Irena is Ireland ; and
she sends her supplications across the ocean to Gloriana, the Queen
of Faerie, the great and good Elizabeth of England, beseeching her
to come over and help her. Artegall is the personification of equity
and justice ; and this is the boon which poor Irena looks for, and
hopes to receive at her sister's hand."
Artegall, or, in other words. Lord Grey, passes over to Ireland,
and encounters PoUente, or Gerald, Earl of Desmond, " who was in
rebellion against Elizabeth at the time of Lord Grey's appointment
to the chief authority in Ireland, and perished miserably in conse-
quence. His prodigious wealth and power would amply bear out
such an appellation. His lands extended one hundred and fifty miles
in the south of the kingdom, stretching from sea to sea, and com-
prising tho greater portion of the counties of Waterford, Cork,
Kerry, and Limerick. We read of his being able tn bring t -gether
SPENSER. 15
by his summoua, six liuudred cavaliy aud two thousand tootraen ;
and of these, nearly live hundred were gentlemen of his own
kindred and surname. His castles were numerous, aud scattered
over this large tract of country in well-chosen places, for its defence
and protection ; and it is curious that attached to one of them is
a tale of blood not uulike what you will find Spenser describing. A
few miles above the sea, on a bold cUfif overhanging one of the
deepest parts of the beautiful river Blackwater, stand the battered
remains of the earl's castle of Strancally. Attached to this strong-
hold is a murderous device, which we had often previously heard of,
but never till then beheld. The solid rock had been pierced with
a large well-like aperture, communicating with the river ; and the
neighbouring peasants will tell you, that the unwary, when decoyed
within the castle, were tied hand and foot, and iiung down tho
murder-hole — the rapid river hurried by, and soon carried away their
gasping shrieks, aud the dead told no tales. We have every respect
for these local traditions ; notwithstanding, we place no faith in tho
present horrible legend, which is wholly at variance with the received
character of the Earl of Desmond. It may be that such things were
told of him, even in Spenser's days ; and it is certain that about the
close of the year 1579, his castle of Strancally was taken by the
Earl of Ormond, the President of Munster ; a capture which could
be easily transferred to the poet's hero, Artegall."
Lord Grey was recalled, in consequence of representations of
cruelty and oppression in his administration. " With this event the
fifth book of the Faerie Queene concludes : and the poet there
enters at large into the facts of the case. Artegall is summoned
away to Faerie Court, and on his way thither meets with two ill-
favoured hags, — ' superannuated vipers,' as Lord Brougham w^ould
^erm them, — whom he knows to be Envy and Detraction. These
\ arc painted in language that makes the grisly creatures live before
I you. Every hue and feature of their vile countenances is preserved —
Vheir slavering lips, their tireless tongues, their foul and claw-hke
jiands. We remember nothing in Milton or Dante that surpasses
xhis powerful personification."
Spenser, as we have already stated, accompanied Lord Grey home,
and here came in for a share in the partition of the vast estates of
the vanquished Earl of Desmond. The plan now devised for more
securely attaching Ireland to the British Crown was called the
Plantation of Munster. The scheme, which was first put in operation
on this vast confiscated territory of the Earl of Desmond, is thus
described in Smith's History of Cork : —
"All forfeited lands to be divided into manors and seigniories,
containing 12,000, 8,000, 6,000, and 4,000 acres each, according to
a plot laid down. The undertakers (those who got these grants) to
have an estate in fee-farm, yielding for each seigniory of 12,000
acres, for the first three years, 33/. 6?. 8^/. sterling, viz. from 1590 to
1593, and from Michaelmas, 1593, 66/. 13s. Ad. sterling, and rateably
for every inferior seigniory, yielding upon the death of the under-
tiilcer the best beast as an heriot. To be- discharged of all taxee
16 SPENSER,
whatsoever, except subsidies levied by parliament. Bogs, mountains,
&c. not to be included, till improved, and tbcn to pay a halfpenny
for each English acre. Licence to the undertakers to transport all
commodities, duty free, into England for five years. That none be
admitted to have more than 12,000 acres. No English planter to be
permitted to convey to any mere Irish. The head of each planta-
tion to be English ; and the heirs female to marry none but of
English birth ; and none of the mere Irish to be maintained in any
family there.
"Each freeholder, from the year 1590, to furnish one horse and
horseman, armed ; each principal undertaker for 12,000 acres, to
supply three horsemen and six footmen, armed ; and so rateably for
the other seigniories ; and each copyholder one footman, armed.
That, for seven years to come, they shall not be obliged to travel out
of Munster, upon any service ; and after that time, no more than ten
horsemen and twenty footmen out of one seigniory of 12,000 acres,
and so rateably ; and such as serve out of Munster to be paid by the
queen.
" That the queen will protect and defend the said seigniories, at
her own charge, for seven years to come. All commodities brought
from England for the use of the same seigniories to be duty free for
seven yeai's."
There was to be a complete English population established on
these lands in this manner: "For any seigniory containing 12,000
acres, the gentleman was to have for his own domain 2,100 acres ;
.six farmers, 400 acres each ; six freeholders, 100 acres each ; and
lands to be appropriated for mean tenures of 50, 25, and 10 acres,
to the amount of 1,500 acres ; whereon thirty-six families, at least,
must be established. The other seigniories to be laid out in like
l^roportion. Each undertaker was to people his seigniory in seven
years." These articles received the royal signature on the 27th of
June, 1586. The following list of undertakers i)resents some curious
particulars. In the first place, Sir Walter Raleigh and Arthur Bobbins
by some means managed at once to overleap the grand provision,
that no imdertaker should bo permitted to have more than 12,000
acres : Sir Walter getting 42,000, and poor Spenser, i^oet-like, only
3,029 ! He is just tacked on at the end like an after-thought-
ACRES.
Sir W;iUcr Ri'.k-igli -I^.OO )
Arthur llobbins, Esq 1^,00(1
Fane IJecclitr, Esq 12,000
IIup;h Worth, Esq 12,000
Arthur Hyde, Esq ll,7i!G
Sir Thomas Norris 6,000
Sir I! icliard Beacon 0,000
Sir Warham St. Lc^'er 0,000
Hugh CufT, Esq 0,000
Tliomas Jay, Esq 5,775
Sir Arthur Hyde 5,774
Edmund Spenser, Esq 3,029
The diflerence did not consist merely in the quantity either.
Some of their lands, like Sir Walter's at Youghal on the Blackwater,
were splendid lands ; those of Spenser were wild moorlands^, facing
SPENSER. '7
the wilder mountains, where the Irish, yet smarting under defeat
and expulsion, the destruction of their great chief, and this plan,
•which was to continue that expulsion for ever, and plant on their
own soil the hated Saxon, were looking down ready to descend, and
take sanguinary vengeance. Such was the lot which Spenser chose
in preference to the degrading slavery of court dependence. No
doubt he pleased himself with the idea of a new English state, esta-
blished in this newly-conquered region ; where, one of the lords of
the soil, surrounded by English gentlemen, he should live a life of
content and happiness, and hand down to his children a fair estate.
But in this fond behef how much of the poet's self-delusive property
was mixed ! Hear what the authority I have ah'eady made such use
of says : " It was a wild and lonesome banishment at best for one
who had lived so much in courts, and in companionship with the
rich and high-born. Mountains on all sides shut in the retreat, and
in the midst of the long and level plain between them stood a strong
fortalice of the Earl of Desmond, which was to be the poet's resi-
dence, Kilcolman Castle. Hard by the castle was a small lake, and
a mile or two distant, on either side, a river descended from the
hills. In position, likewise, it was insecure ; forming, as it did, th'
frontier of the English line in tlic south, and the contiguous hills
affording lurking-places for the Irish kerns, whence they could pour
down in multitudes to plunder. In the insurrectionary warfiire
that shortly succeeded, these mountain-passes became the scene of
many a skirmish ; and the first object of the commander of the
English forces, when he heard of any partial outbreak, was to send
off a detachment of liglit-armed troops to occupy them in the name
of the Queen."
But overlooking all these hazards, Spenser came hither full of
bright views of the future. " The sunshine of the years to come,"
says the author we have been quoting, '• were to atone for the dark-
ness and the gloom of life's morning. His poetry, which had been
previously of a pastoral cast, became now cmbued with the wildness
of the sylvan solitude around him : wood-nymphs and fairies were
inhabitants he could summon up at will, and with them the hill-tops
about him were peopled. Such names of places and things as his
musical ear pronounced inharmonious, were exchanged for others
which quaint fancy suggested, and which read more sweetly in his
tender verse. He sang sweet strains of the bridal or separation of
his rivers ; told how their stern sires, the mountains, ofttimes forced
their unwilling inclinations, and brought about a union which the
water-nymph detested ; and how sometimes she, in her faithful
attachment to the one she loved, effected her Avish by a circuitous
course, or even sought beneath the earth's surface the waters dear
to her bosom. Before an imagination so vivid the iron desolateness
of Kilcolman vanished ; and in its stead a fairy world arose to gladden
the eyes of the dreamer with its bowers of bliss, and enchanteil
palaces, and magnificence more gorgeous than the luxuries of Ind.
" The Ballyhowra hills, which formed the northern boundary of
the poet's retreat, appeared in this new world under the feigned
18 SPENSER.
title of the Mountains of Mole ; while the highest of them, which,
like Parnassus, has a double summit, was dignified by the name of
' Father.' Sometimes Spenser seems to have extended the name of
Mole to the entire range of hills which run along the northern and
eastern limits of the county of Cork, and divide it from Limerick
and Tipperary. In one place he speaks of a river rising from the
Mole, and thence styled by him Molana ; which undoubtedly takea
its origin from the Tipperaiy hills. The plain in which his castle
stood was rebaptized in Helicon by the name of ArmuUa Dale. Of
his two streamlets, one was suffered, for a special purpose, to retain
its original name of Bregoge, /. e. false, or deceitful —
' Bregog hight
So hight became of liis deceitful trainel'
and the other, the Awbeg, was specially appropriated to himself Ijy
the name of Mulla—
' And Mulla mine, wliose waves I whilom taught to weep.'
" The rivers here mentioned flowed at some distance on each side
of Spenser's castle. The Bregoge on the east, at the distance of
a mile ; the Mulla on the west, at about two miles. Both rise, as
the poet sings, in the Mole Mountain. They spring from wells, in
glens about a mile and a half asunder, on the opposite sides of Cor-
rtvglas, the highest mountain in the range. The Bregoge proceeds,
in a winding course, to the south-west, and falls into the Mulla a
mile above the town of Doneraile. It is a very inconsiderable
stream, forcing itself with difficulty amongst the rocks with which
its channel is encumbered ; and, like many mountain rivulets, is dry
during the summer heats. AVhen we saw it, in the course of the
present year, its bed was a mass of dusty sand.
'■^ The Mulla rises on the remote side of the hill from the Castlo
of Kilcolman, but has a more northerly head in Annagh bog, five
miles from Anster's birth-place, Charleville, which perhaps in strict-
ness should be deemed its source. Spenser, in the foregoing passage,
describes it as springing out of Mole. It proceeds to Buttevant, and
receives a branch a little above that town, at Ardskeagh ; it then
winds away towards Kilcolman, and meets the Bregoge near Done-
raile. Directing its course thence, it turns to the south, and flows
through a deep romantic glen to Castletown Roche, after which it
enters the Blackwater at Bridgetown Abbey. It is now called the
Awbeg, in contradistinction to the Awmore or Avonmore, one of the
names of the Blackwater."
I have been the more particular in quoting from one well ac-
quainted with the scene, the geography of Spenser's domain, because
those who have not been on the spot can really form no idea of the
proportion of matter drawn hence, and from Ireland generally, iu
his poems. The Faerie Queene, Colin Clout, and his two cantos on
" Mutabilitie," abound with allegorical or actual descriptions of his
Irish life, and of the scenery, and especially the rivers, about his
estate here. I must now trace my own visit to it.
Starting from Fermoy with a car, I ascended the valloy of the
SPENSER. 19
Blackwatef, — a river wliicli for beauty of scenery is -worthy of all its
fame. About six miles up, I was told that Spenser bad lived at a
place called Eennie. I found it a gentleman's house, standing at
a field's distance from the highway ; and drove up to it. It is the
property of Mr. Smith, a merchant and magistrate of Fermoy. He
was there with his lady, come out to see their sjolendid dairy of
cows which they keep there, forty in number. They were at
luncheon, and insisted on my joining them ; after which they both
set out, most hospitably, to show me the place. The house stands
on a lofty rock, overlooking the valley of the river, but at a field's
distance from it. It is one of the places of exuberant vegetation,
where vegetation in grass and trees seems perfectly exhaustless.
The richest pastures, the most abundant and overshadowing trees,
everywhere. In the little garden close to the house, and lying on
the verge of the precipice, all glowing with dahlias, still remains
a wall of the castle which was undoubtedly inhabited by Spenser.
There is an old oak on the river bank, at some distance above the
house, under the precipice, which is called Spenser's tree ; and where
he is said to have written part of the Faerie Queene. This property
was inherited by Spenser's eldest son, Sylvanus, who married a Miss
Nagle, of Monanimy, in Cork, and lived at Eennie.
In a life of Spenser the following scanty information, which has
been collected relative to his descendants, is given, and may heljj us
to a clearer conception of the matter. Sylvanus had, by the marriage
M'ith Miss Nagle, two sons, Edmund and William. Peregrine Spenser,
the third son of the poet, — the second being Lawrence, — is described,
in a MS. deposition relative to the rebellion in 1641, as a Protestant
resident about the barony of Fermoy, and so impoverished by the
troubles, as to be unable to pay his debts ; and a part of the estate
had been assigned to him by his elder brother, Sylvanus : this part
of the estate is distinctly stated to have been Eennie. Hugoline,
the son of Peregrine, opposed the designs of che Prince of Orange,
and, after the revolution, was outlawed for treason and rebellion ;
liis cousin, William Spenser, the son of Sylvanus, became a suitor
for the forfeited property, and obtained it. Dr. Birch has described
him as a man somewhat advanced in years, and as unable to give
any account of the works of his ancestor which are missing. His
case, as he presented it to Parliament, has been printed by Mr. Todd
in his Life of Spenser, from the copy in the British ]\hiseum, pi-c-
sented by Mr. George Chalmers. In this document Hugoline is
described as " very old and unmarried." Dr. Birch informs us that,
in 1751, some of the descendants of Spenser were living in the
county of Cork ; and Mr. Todd, coming later down, observes, that
" a daughter of a Mr. Edmund Spenser of Mallow, the last lineal
descendant of the poet, is now married to a Mr. Burne, of the English
Custom-house." A Mr. Price, in a MS. in the British Museum, states
that he was told by Lord Cartarct, that when he was Lord-Licutcnanfc
of Ireland in 1724, a true descendant of Edmund Spenser, who bore
his name, had a trial before Baron Hall, and he knew so little of the
Engli.sh tongue that he was forced to have an interpretei'.
20 KPFA^SKR.
Now, Ml'. Smith iufurmcd me that not only was it the fixed tradi-
tion that this house at Rennie was inhabited by Spenser the poet,
but that it was also as positively asserted that one of his descend-
ants was murdered in it in a very extraordinary manner. The story
•was that of two brothers ; one, banished for high treason, and the
other, who succeeded him, murdered by his housekeeper out of
jealousy. That this woman had been led to hope that her master
would marry her, but finding that he was going to marry another
lady, proijosed, one morning as he was shaving, to do it for him,
and being permitted, cut his throat with the razor. There seemed,
however, some suspicion that the cousin of the murdered man, who
was next heir, — the elder brother being outlawed, — had instigated
or urged upon the woman to commit this act ; but, such was the
state of the times, that, notwithstanding this suspicion, his cousin
came in for the property.
Wild and terrible as this tradition is, it is there ; and what is
curious, we see in the above slight tracing of the descent of the
Spensers, that Hugoline, a son of Peregrine, was outlawed for treason
and rebellion, and that William, a cousin, and the son of Sylvanus,
became a suitor for the forfeited property, and obtained it. In
O'Flanagan's Guide to the Blackwater, this is stated to have happened
to the last descendant of Spenser at Rennie, and that " in the small
antique dwelling at Rennie is pointed out the room in which she did
the deed." This is very different to the account I received from the
present proprietor, which is that given above : nor does the house
at Rennie prove to be " a small antique one." It is a good modern
mansion. The property of Rennie continued in the famitylong after
it had lost Kilcolman : in fact, till about 1734, -when on the death of
Nathaniel Spenser, the then possessor, it was sold ; the family
became landless, and soon after extinct.
Mr. and Mrs. Smith set out with me to explore the scene. The
house is modern ; the land on the level of the house of the richest
quality, and beautified with fine trees ; the views up and down the
river, and over it into the woods of Lord Listowell, with the tower
of his castle peeping over them, are rich and beautiful. We descended
into the meadows below the house, attended by four remarkably fine
greyhounds, one of them as white as snow, and three or four terriers ;
and the dogs were soon in full chase of rabbits, up amongst the rocks
and trees. We were soon below the house, and at the foot of the
precipice on which it stands. The place was fit for Spenser's Pan,
with all his Fauns and Sylvans. In the meadow, w-hich extended to
the banks of the river, grazed a fine herd of cattle, and amidst
them the sturdy bull ; and all around us, above us on the rocks, in
the meadow itself, and on the banks and green slopes on the other
side of tlie river, grew the most prodigal trees. The whole scene
told of ancient possession and a most affluent nature. At the foot
of the precipice under the house, laurels and filberts, which must
have been planted long ago, and probably by Sj)enser himself, had
attained the most enormous size ; the laurels were as large as forest
trees ; they had, some of them, stems, I suppose, half a yard in
SPENSEB, 21
diameter, and had assumed a shape of sylvau massiveness and wood-
land rudeness, such as before 1 had no conception of in laurels.
Some had been blown down by the winds and grew half prostrate ;
others had been sawn off, and had left huge stumps, knit, as it were,
into one mass with the foot of the rocks. All was one scene of
Arcadian greenness, and excess of growth.
Beneath the rock was a sort of damp cave where water stood as if
oozing through from the river, and the plants above hung down their
long arms, and made a fitting retreat for Spenser's satyrs. Around,
seen from the shadow of this spot, lay the deep-green meadow, the
swift, broad river, the rich masses of trees, closing in a little woi'ld
of solitude ; and as if to mark it for a spot in which the poet of
Fairy-land had sojourned, and left the impress of his spirit, in his
own words : —
" Beside the same a dainty place there lay,
Planted with myrtle-trees and laurels green,
In which the birds sung many a lively lay
Of God's high praise, and of their sweet loves' teene,
As it an earthly paradise had been."
Perhaps Spenser might reside here till his castle was fitted up for
his reception ; perhaps it might be a retreat at times from the mora
open perils of the desolate Kilcolman ; and a sweet change from
moorland wildness, to a sort of Italian richness and softness of
scenery.
The way was still enchanting. Now down into the valley of the
Blackwater, amongst mills and rocks, and resounding waters ; now
aloft again, overlooking the white house of Ronnie on its precipice,
and opposite to it spreading out the woods and mountains of Bally-
nahoolly. Now arose a bare district of hedgerows without trees,
and little brown huts, with geese, and goats and swine. Now again
passing some gentleman's park, with its ocean of trees, and under
a sort of tunnel rather than avenue of beeches, which are planted
on banks, so that they meet close above, sometimes for half a mile,
and which at night are as dark as a dungeon. Then again I passed
between hedges of cyder-apple, all grown into trees, and giving the
country — for the fields right and left were enclosed with the same —
a very wild look ; and I came out on bare heights, and with view of
far-off bleak and brown mountains. Near Doneraile, I saw the ocean
of green woods belonging to Lord Doneraile 's park and domain lying
before me in the valley, and passed through it for a mile or more in
highest admiration of the splendid growth and richness of foliage of
its beeches, its superb way-side ashes, and other trees. Surely,
where it is allowed to produce trees, Ireland does exhibit them in
a beauty and prodigality of growth which is almost um-ivalled by
those of England. To this contributes, not merely the fertihty of
the soil, but the moisture of the atmosphere.
About two miles beyond Doneraile I found, on a wide plain, tho
ruins of Kilcolman. These ruins have frequently been drawn and
engi-aved, and tho views we have of them are very correct. Indeed,
60 vividly were the features of the scene impressed on my mind by
the views, and by reading of it, that I seemed to know it quite well.
22 SPENSER.
its old black mass of wall catches your eye as soon as you liave
passed the woody neighbourhood of Doneraile, standing up on the
wild moorland plain, a solitary object amid its nakedness. A toler-
able highway, newly constructed, leads up near to it, along which
you advance amid scattei'ed Irish cabins, and their usual potato
plots. To reach the castle, you have to turn to the left up one of
those stony lanes that threaten to jolt a car to pieces, and then have
to scale a gate belonging to the farm on which the luin stands, and
advance on foot, through a farm-yard, and along the lake side. The
remains of the castle, which consist only of part of the tower, at the
southernmost corner, stand on a green mound of considerable extent,
overlooking the lake, or rather a winding sort of pond, overgrown
with potamogeton. On one side, masses of limestone-rock, on which
the castle, too, stands, protrude from the banks, and on the other
extends the green marsh, and the black peat-bogs, with their piles of
peat-stacks. To the north, at about a mile distant, stretch those
brown moorland mountains, called by the natives the Ballyhov/^ra
Hills, but dignified by Spenser with the name of Mole. Of either
of these names the peasants seemed to know nothing, but assured
me the one nearest to the castle eastward was called Slieve Ruark.
Southward, at a couple of miles' distance, stands another sombre-
looking tower, the remains of an ancient castle, which they called
Castle Took. On a hill, nearer Doneraile westward, are also the
ruins of an abbey ; so that, probably, in Spenser's time, this scene
might be well wooded ; these places inhabited by families of the
English settlers might furnish some society for him ; but at
present, nothing can be more wild, dreary, and naked than this
scene, and the whole view around. Turn which way you will, you
see nothing but naked moorlands, bare and lonely, or scattered with
the cabins and potato plots of the peasantry. To the north-east
stands, at perhaps half a mile distant, a mass of plantations, enclos-
ing the house of a j\Ir. Barry Harold ; and that is the only relieving
object, except the distant mass of the woods of Doneraile Park, and
the bare ranges of mountains that close in this unpicturesque plain
at more or less distance.
As I stood on the top of the massy old keep, whose walls arc three
yards thick, and its winding stairs of slippery grey marble, I seemed
to be rather in a dream of Spenser's castle, than actually at it. The
sun was hastening to set, and threw a clear shining light over the
whole silent plain, and thousands of pewits and rooks from Lord
Doneraile's woods, spread themselves over the green fields near the
weedy water, and seemed to enjoy the calm dreamy light and still-
ness of the scene. The hour and the scene naturally brought to my
mind the melodious stanza of Mickle, which has special reference to
this solitary memorial of the history both of Ireiand and its troubles,
and the English poet of Fairyland and his fate : —
"Awake, ye west winds, through the lonely dale,
And Fancy, to thy fairy bower betake ;
Even now, with balmy sweetness breathes the gale,
liimpling with downy winj; the stilly lake ;
Through the pale willows faltering whispers wake,
BPENSER. 23
And evening conies vith locks bedipped with dew,
On Desmond's niould'ring tuiTCts slowly shake
The withered rye-grass, and the harebell blue,
And ever and anon sweet Mulla's plaint renew."
Looking round over this stripped and lonely landscape, over '• the
looming flats," over the dark moorland hills that slumber to tlic
north and east, and then far away to more distant but equally sterile
mountain ranges, a strange feeling crept over me of the force of
events which could compel, nay, make it desirable for the most
imaginative spirit of the age next to Shakspeare, to quit the British
capital, the wit and intelligence of Elizabeth's court, to sit down in
this wilderness, and in the face of savage and exa,sperated foes, the
poetical ei'emite, the exile of necessity. But, perhaps, the place then
was not so shorn of all embellishment as now. The writer I have
quoted seems to imagine that Spenser, by the sheer force of fancy,
not only peopled this waste with fauns and nymphs, but clothed
it with trees, and other charms of nature. But we must re-
member, that since then ages of devastation, of desertion, and
of an exhausting system, have gone over this country. Then, this
castle stood fair and complete, and no doubt had its due embellish-
ment and garniture of woodland trees. The green alder, very likely,
not only overhung the ]\Iulla, but this lake ; and a pleasure bark
might then add its grace and its life to the view from the castle
windows. Todd calls it " the icoody Kilcolmau," on what authority
I know not, and supposes that Spenser called his first-born son
Sylvanus on that account, as its heir. Here he sijent twelve years,
and, if we may judge from his poetry, to his own great satisfaction.
We cannot suppose, therefore, that he found the place without some
native charms, far less that he left it without those which planting
and cultivation could give it. As Sir Walter Raleigh planted and
embellished his estate at Youghal with laurels and other evergreens,
there is little doubt that Spenser would do the same here. He
would naturally feel a lively and active interest in raising that placw
and estate, which was to be the family seat of his children, to as
high a degree of beauty and amenity as possible. Though busily
engaged on his great poem, the Faerie Queene, there is evidence that
lie was also an active and clever man of business ; so much so that
Queen Ehzabeth, in preference to all those more aristocratic and
more largely land-endowed gentlemen, who were settled with him
on the plantations of Munster, had the very year of his expulsion
hence by the Irish rebels, named him to fill the office of sheriff of
the county of Cork. That he asserted his rights, appears from
a document published by Mr. Hardiman, in his Irish Minstrelsy,
showing that he had a dispute with his neighbour. Lord Roche,
about some lands, in which, by petitions to the Lord Chancellor of
Ireland, it appeared that Edmund Spenser had made forcible claim
on these plough-lands at Ballingerath, dispossessed the said Lord
Roche, had made great waste of the wood, and appropriated the corn
growing on the estate. And the decision was given against Spenser.
Spenser was, therefore, evidently quite alive to the value of property.
-4 SPENSER.
If wc look now at what Doneraile is, a perfect paradise of glorious
woods, we may imagine what Kilcolmau would have been, if, instead
of being laid waste with lire and sword by the Irish kerns, and left
to become a mere expanse of Irish rack-rent farms, and potato-
grounds, it had been carefully planted, cultivated, and embellished,
113 the estate of the descendants of one of the proudest names of
England.
As it is, it stands one more lonely and scathed testimony to the
evil fortunes of poets : —
" The poets who on earlli have made us heirs
Of truth and pure delight, by Iieavenly lays !"
VL't \vho,_ themselves, of all men are still shown by a wise Providence
to be " pilgrims and sojourners on the earth, having no abiding city "
in it. Their .souls have a heaven-aspiring tendency. They cannot
grasp the earth — it escapes from their hold, and they leave behind
them, not castles and domains, but golden footprints, which whoever
ibllows, finds them ever and ever leading him upwards to the im-
mortal regions.
" For a ricli giierLlon waits on minds that d;ire,
Tf aught be in tliem of immortal seed,
And reason governs that audacious flight
Which heaven-ward they direct." — WordsicuiUi.
Let US then, at this moment, rather endeavour to look at the
happiness which Spenser enjoyed here for twelve bright years, than
at the melancholy //;/(//^. Here he worked busily and blissfully at his
great poem. Forms of glory, of high valour aud virtue, of female
beauty and goodness, floated richly through his mind. The imperial
Gloriana, the heavenly Una,
" whose angel face.
As the great eye of heaven, sliinod bright,
And made a sunshine in the shady place," —
the sweet Belphoebe, the gallant Britomart, and the bra^•e troop of
knights, Arthur the magnanimous, the Red-Cross Knight, the holy
and hardly-tried, the just Artegall, and all their triumphs over
Archimagcs, false Duessas, and the might of dragon niitures. This
was a life, a labour which clothed the ground with golden flowers,
made heaven look forth from between the clouds and the mountain
tops, and songs of glory wake on the winds that swept past his
towers. Hei-e he accomplished and saw given to the world half his
great work, — a whole, and an immortal whole, as it regarded his fame
and great mission in the world, — to breathe lofty and unselfish
thoughts into the souls of men, — to make truth, purity, and high
principle the objects of desire.
Here, too, he married the woman of his heart, chosen on the
principle of his poetry, not for her lands, but for her beauty and her
goodness. Nothing is known of her, not even her name, except that
it was Elizabeth, that she was eminently beautiful, and of low
degree. Some conjecture her to be of Cork, and a merchant's
daughter, but Spenser himself says she was a country lass. Thus in
the Faerie Queene ; —
" Such were these goddesses which you did see :
But that fourth maid, which there amidst tlieiu traced,
Who can aread what creature may she bee ;
Whether a creature, or a goddess graced
With heavenly gifts from heaven lirst euraced 1
liut whatso siiro she was, she worthy was
To be the fourth with these three other placed .
Yet was she certes but a country lasse ;
Yet she all other country lasses far did passe.
So far, as doth the daughter of the day
All other lesser lights in light excell :
So far doth she in beautiful array
Above all other lasses bear the bell :
Ne less in virtue that beseemes her well
Doth she exceede the rest of all her race ;
i"or which the Graces that there wont to dwell
Have for more honour brought her to this place,
And graced her so much to be another Grace.
Another Grace she well deserves to be,
In whom so many graces gathered are,
]'',xcelling much the mean of her degree:
Divine resemblance, beauty sovereign rave.
Firm chastity, that spight no blemish dare ;
All which she with such courtesie doth grace
That all her peres can not with her compare,
lUit quite are dimmed when she is in place:
Slie made me often pipe, and now to pipe apace.
Sunne of the world, great glory of the sky,
That all the earth doth lighten with thy rayes,
Great Gloriana, greatest majesty.
Pardon thy shepherd, 'mongst so many lays
As he hath sung of thee in all his days
To make one mencine of thy poor handmaid,
And underneath thy feet to place her praise,
That when thy glory shall be far displayed
In future age, of her this mention may be made."
Faerie Qiicene, b. vi. c. 10.
These were kuowu in Spenser's days to be an affectionate monument
uf immortal verse to his wife, still more nobly erected in hi.s
."Spithalamion ; and to identify it more, in his Amoretti he tells us
that his queen, his mother, and his wife, were all of the same name
" The which three times thrice happy hath me made
With gifts of body, fortune, and of minde.
Ye lliree Elizabei/is, for ever live.
That thus such graces unto me did give."
Here, too, he enjoyed the memorable visit of Sir Walter Raleigh,
which he commemorates in Colin Clout. Ho had now ready for the
press the three first books of his Faerie Queenc ; and these he read
to Raleigh during his visit, probably as he has described it in pastoral
style, as they sat together under the green alders on the banks of
the Mulla. " I sate, as was my trade,
Under the foot of Mole, that mountain here,
tCeeping my sheep among the coolly shade
Of the green alders by the Mulla's sliore.
There a strange shepherd chanced to find me out;
Whether allured with my pipe's delight,
AVliose pleasing sound yshrilled far about,
Or thither led by chance, I know not right.
Whom when I asked from what place he came.
And how he hight, himself he did ycleep
The Shepherd of the Ocean by name.
And said he came far from the main sea deep.
He, sitting me beside in that same shade,
I'rovoked me to play ^ome pleasant fit," tic.
Jsb BPENSKR.
Raleigh was encliautcd with the poem. He was just returned
fi'oni a voyage to Portugal, and was now bound for England. Ho
was, it appears, himself weary of his own location, for he soon after
sold it to the Eai'l of Cork. He pressed Spenser to accomijany him,
put his poem to press, and by means of its fame to win the more
earnest patronage of Queen Elizabeth.
" When tluis otir pipes we both had wearied well.
Quoth he, and each an end of singing made,
He 'gan to cast great liking to my lore,
And great disliking to my luckless lot,
That banished had myself, like wight forlore.
Into that waste, where I was quite forgot.
The wliich to leave, thenceforth he counselled me,
Unmeet for man in whom was aught regardful.
And wend with him, his Cynthia to see ;
AVhose grace was great, and bounty most rewardful.
So what with hope of good, and hate of ill,
He me persuaded forth with him '.o fare.
So to the sea we came."
Here it comes out that, however much more clothed with trees,
and however much better this spot was in Spenser's days, it was still
" a waste where he was forgot," a place into which Raleigh considered
his friend as banished, and as unfit for any " man in whom was
aught regardful." He left it, jiublished his poem, tried court
expectation and attendance once more, but found them still more
bitter and sterile than his Irish wilderness, and came back.
When we hear Kilcolman described by Spenser's biographers as
"romantic and delightful," it is evident that they judged of it
from mere fancy ; and when writers about him talk of the MuUa
"flowing through his grounds," and "past his castle," they give the
reader a most erroneous idea. The castle, it must be remembered,
is on a wide plain ; the hills are at a couple of miles or more distant ;
and the Mulla is two miles off. We see nothing at the castle but the
wide boggy plain, the distant naked hills, and the weedy pond under
the castle walls. Sucii is Kilcolman.
Here the poet was startled at midnight from his dreams by the
!;ound of horses' hoofs beating in full gallop the stony tracks of the
dale, and by a succeeding burst of wild yells from crowding thousands
of infuriated Irish. Fire was put to the castle, and it was soon in
flames. Spenser, concealed by the gloom of one side of the building,
contrived to escape with his wife, and most probably his three boy3
and girl, as they were saved, and lived after him, but the youngest
child in the cradle perished in the flames, with all his property and
unpublished poems. On a second visit to England he had published
three more books of his Faerie Queene ; and there is a story of the
remaining six being lost by his servant, by whom they were sent to
England. This could not be the fact, as he had himself but recently
returned from the publication of the second three. Probably the
rumour arose from sonae other MSS. lost in that manner. Fleeing
to England, distracted at the fate of his child and his property, he
lied there, heart-broken and in poverty, at an inn or lodging-house
m K'ng Street, Westminster, and was buried in Westminster Abbey,
SPEKSER. 27
at the expense of the Earl of Essex ; " his hearse attended," saya
Camden, " bj poets, and mournful elegies and poems, with the pena
that wrote them, thrown into his tomb."
There is much that we naturally are anxious to know connected
with the final fate and family of Spenser. How his children actually
escaped ? What became of them, and their claim on the property'?
When the property of Kilcolman was lost to the poet's descendants ?
Of all this next to nothing is known. The literati of that age do
not seem to have given themselves any trouble to preserve the facts
of the history of their illustrioiis cotemporaries. Shakspeare and
Spenser were left to the cold keeping of careless tradition. The
particulars, beyond what we have already given, are very few.
Spenser's widow returned to Ireland, and there brought up her
children. Of these Sylvanus, as eldest son, inherited Rennie and
Kilcolman. It appears that he found some difficulty with his
mother, Spenser's widow, who married again, to a Eoger Seckerstone,
and was obUged to petition the Lord Chancellor of Ireland, to obtain
from his mother and her new husband documents belonging to his
estate, which they withheld. He married, as already stated, Ellen
Nagle, of Mouanimy, south of Kilcolman, of a Catholic family, a
circumstance which had a gi'eat effect on the fortunes of their
descendants, as connecting them with the unsuccessful party in the
troubles of Ireland. His eldest son died without issue, and his
second son, William, succeeded to Kilcolman. The property of
William, being seized on by the Commonwealth party, Vv^as ordered
to be restored to him by Cromwell, but is supposed to have only
been regained at the Restoration. He had three other grants of land
in the counties of Galway and Roscommon ; in the latter, the estate
of Ballinasloe. At the Revolution he joined King William, who for
his services granted him the estate of his cousia Hugoline, of
Rennie. This Hugoline was the son of Peregrine, the jsoet's youngest
son, wlio had Rennie made over to liim by his eldest brother,
Sylvanus. Hugoline took part with his Cathohc relatives, and
siding with King James at the Revolution, was outlawed, and his
property at Rennie made over to his cousin William. Thus the
descendants of Sylvanus, or the eldest son of the poet, became the
only known posterity of the poet. The descendants of William,
and therefore of Sylvanus Spenser, the elder male Hue, possessed
Rennie till 1734, soon after which this hue became extinct. There
are still in Ireland persons claiming to be descendants, by the
mother's side, fi'om Spenser ; and the Travers, of Chfton, near Cork,
are lineal descendants of Spenser's sister Sarah and John Travers, a
friend of the poet's, who accompanied him to Ireland, and had the
townlands of Ardenbone and Knocknacai^le given to him by Spenser
as his sister's marriage dowry. The descendants of this sister
number amongsb many distinguished families of Ireland, those of the
Earls of Cork and Orrery, Earl Shannon, Lord Doneraile, Earl of
Clanwilliam, etc.
The fame of Spenser is not quite rooted out of the minds of the
neighbouring peasantry. I inquired of an old man and his family^
28 SPENSER.
•who live close by tlic castle, to whom that castle formerly belonged,
and they replied, "To one Spenser."
" Who was he 1 "
" They could not tell : they only knew that many officers from
Fermoy, and others, came to see the jjlace."
" Aye, I have heard of him," I added. " He was an Englishman,
and the Irish burnt him out of the castle, and he fled to England."
" Oh no ! nothing of the kind. He lived and died there, and was
buried just below the castle, which used to be a churchyard. Bones
are often dug up, and on the western side of the mound there had
been a nunnery."
In fact, they knew nothing accurately, but, like the people at
Lissoy, with regard to Goldsmith, would insist on his death and
burial on the spot.
But the desolated spot possesses an interest stronger than the
possession of the poet's dust. It was the scene of- his happiest
hours — hours of love and of inspiration. Here the Faerie Queene
gi'ew in heavenly zeal, and here it was suddenly arrested by the howl
of savage vengeance, and the flames which wrapt the poet's heart
in ruin.
" Ah ! what a warning for a tlioughtless man,
Could field or grove, or any spot of earth,
Show to liis eye an image of tlie pangs
Which it liath witnessed ; rc:uier back tlio echo
Of th? spu steps by whioli it luith bec>n tied.'-- Wjrdiuyi'.ti
SHAKSPEARE.
There are two reasons why I proposed to omit the homes and
Jiaunts of Shakspeare from the present vokimc ; the first, because 1
have found it impossible to include the dramatic poets in the
compass of it, and must reserve them for a future one ; and the
second, because I have already, in my Visits to Remarkable Places
(vol. i.), devoted a considerable article to almost the onlj' place where
jiis homes and haunts still remain, Stratford-upon-Avon. A very
little reflection, however, convinced me that an entire omission of the
haunts of this great national poet from this work, would be received
as a disappointment by a numerous class of readers. Shakspeare is
not merely a dramatic poet. Great and peerless as is his dramatic
fame, the very elements not of dramatic art and fame alone, but of
universal poetry, and that of the highest order, are so difFused through-
out all his works, that the character of poet soars above the character
of dramatist in him, like some heaven-climbing tov/er above a glorious
church. Every line, almost every word, is a living mass of poetry ;
these are scattered through the works of all authors as such exponents
of their deepest sentiments as they cannot command themselves.
They are like the Ijranches, the buds, the flowers and leaves of a gi'cat
tree of poetry making a magnificent whole, and rich and b^cautiful as
30 SHAKSfEARE.
nature itself, down to its minutest portions. To leave out Shak-
speare were indeed to play Hamlet with the part of Hamlet himself
omitted ; it were to invite guests, and allow the host to absent him-
self. In the Walhalla of British poetry, the statue of Shakspearo
must be first admitted and placed in the centre, before gradations and
classifications are thought of. He is the univer.sal genius, whoso
presence and spirit must and will pervade the whole place.
And yet, where are the homes and haunts of Shakspeare in
London ? Like those of a thousand other remarkable men, in the
accidents and the growth of this great city, they are swept away.
Fires and renovation have carried everything before them.. If the
fame of men depended on bricks and mortar, what reputations would
have been extinguished within the last two centuries in London !
In no place in the world have the violent necessities of a rapid and
immense development paid so little respect to the " local habitations "
of great names.
^Ve may suppose that Shakspeare, on his coming uji to London,
would reside near the theatres where he sought his livelihood. The
first appears to have been that of Blackfriars. It has long been
clean gone, and its locality is now occupied by Playhouse-yard, near
Apothecaries' Hall, and the dense buildings around. Playhouse-yard
derives its name from the old playhouse. In Knight's London, it is
suggested that this theatre might be pulled down soon after the
permanent close of the theatres during the Commonwealth, by the
Puritans ; but the real old theatre of Shakspeare must, had that not
been the case, have perished entirely in the fire of London, which
cleared all this ground, from Tower-street to the Temple. If
Shakspeare ever held horses at a theatre-door on his first coming to
town, it would be here, for here he seems to have been first engaged.
The idea of his holding horses at a theatre-door, bold and active
fellow as he had shown himself in his deer-stealing exploits, and with
friends and acquaintances in town, has been scouted, especially as he
was then a full-grown man of twenty-three. The thing, however, is
by no means improbable. Shakspeare was most likely as independent
as he was clever and active. On arriving in town, and seeing an old
acquaintance, Thomas Green, at this theatre, he might, like other
remarkable men who have made their way to eminence in London,
be ready to turn his hand to anj'thing till something better turned
up. Green, who was a player, might be quite willing to introduce
Shaksi:)eare into that character and the theatre ; but it had yet to be
proved that Shakspeare could make an actor of himself, and till
opportunity offered, what so likely to seize the attention of a hanger
about the theatre, as the want of a careful horse-holder for those
who came there in such style, which it ajapears was then common
enough. AVe have the statement from Sir William Davenant, and
therefore from a cotemporary, admirer, and assumed relative. We
are told that the speculation was not a bad one. Shakspeare, by his
superior age and carefulness, soon engrossed all this business, and
had to employ those boys who had before been acting on their own
account, as his subordinates; whence they acquired, and retained
SHAKSPEARE. 31
long after he had mounted into an actor himself within tlie tlieatre,
the name of Shakspeai-e's boys. That he became " an actor at one of
the playhouses, and did act exceedingly well," Aubrey tells us. He
is supposed to have acted Old Knowell in Ben Jonson's " Every Man
in his Humour ;" and Oldys tells us that a relative of Shaksi)eare,
then in advanced age, but who in his youth had been in the habit of
visiting London for the purpose of seeing him act in some of his
own plays, told Mr. Jones of Tarbeck, that " he had a faint recollection
of having once seen him act a part in one of his own comedies,
wherein, being to personate a decrepit old man, he wore a long beard,
and appeared so weak and drooping, and unable to walk, that he wa,s
forced to be supported, and carried by another person to a table, ab
which he was seated amongst some company who were eating, and
one of them sang a song." This is supposed to have been in the
character of Adam, in " As you like it ; " and hence it has been
inferred, in connexion with his acting the Ghost in Hamlet, and Old
Knowell, that he took chiefly old or elderly characters.
Every glimpse of this extraordinary man, who, however much ho
might have been acknowledged and estimated in his own day,
certainly lived long before his time, is deeply interesting. That he
was estimated highly we know from Jonson himself : —
" Sweet swan of Avon, what a sight it were
To see thee in our waters jet appear,
And make those flights upon the banks of Tlianies
That so did take Eliza and our James."
When the two monarchs imder whom Shakspeare lived admired
and patronized him, we may be sure that Shakspeare's great merits
were perceived, and that vividly, though the age had not that
intellectual expansion which could enable it to rise above its
prejudices against a player, and comprehend that Shakspeare's
dramas were not merely the most wonderful dramas, but the most
wonderful expositions of human life and nature that had ever
appeared. Peo])Ie were too busy enjoying the splendid scenes
presented to them by this great genius, to note down for the
gratification of posterity the daily doings, connexions, and where-
abouts of the man with whom they were so familiar. He grew rich,
however, by their flocking to his theatre, and disappeared fi-oni
amongst them.
In this theatre of Blackfriars he rose to great popidarity both as
an actor and dramatic author, and became a proprietor. It was
under the management of Richard Burbage, who was also a share-
holder in the Globe Theatre at Banlcside. To the theatre at
BanKside, Shakspeare also transferred himself, and there he became,
in 1()03, the lessee. There he seems to have continued about ten
years, or till 1613 ; having, however, so early as 1597, purchased one
of the best houses in his native town of Stratford, repaired and
improved it, and that so much, tliat he named it New Place. To
this, as his proper home, he yearly retired when the theatrical
season closed ; and having made a comfortable fortune, when tho
theatre was burnt down in 1613 retired from public life altogether.
32 bHAIiSPKARE,
Bankside is a spot of interest, because Sliakspearo lived thero
many j^eavs during the time he was in London. It is that portion
of Southwark lying on the river-side between the bridges of Black-
friars and Southwark. This ground was then wholly devoted to
public amusements, such as they were. It was a place of public
gardens, playhouses, and worse places. Paris garden was one of the
most famous resorts of the metropolis. There were the bear-gardens,
where Elizabeth, her nobles and ladies, used to go and solace them-
selves with that elegant sport, bear-baiting. There also was the
Globe Theatre, of which Shakspeare became licensed proprietor,
and near which he lived. The theatre was an octagon wooden build-
ing, which has been made famiUar by many engravings of it. In
Henry the Fifth, Shakspeare alludes to its shape and material : —
" Can this cockpit hold
The vasty fields of France ? Or may v>e cram
Within this wuodcn O the very casques
That did affright the air at Agincourt ;"
It was not much to be wondered at that this wooden globe should
get consumed with fire, which it did, as I have already stated, in
1613. Shakspeare's play of Henry VIII. was acting, a crowded and
brilliant company was present, and amongst the rest Ben Jonson, as
we learn from his Consecration of Vulcan, when in the very first act,
where, according to the stage directions, "drums and trumpets,
chambers discharged," cannons were fired, the ignited wadding flew
into the thatch of the building, and the whole place was soon in
flames. Sir Henry Wotton thixs describes the scene in a letter to
his nephew. " Now to let matters of state sleep, I will entertain
you at present with what happened this week at the Bankside. The
king's players had a new play, called All is True, representing some
principal pieces from the reign of Henry VIII, which was set forth
with many extraordinary circumstances of pomp and majesty, even
to the matting of the stage ; the knights of the order with their
Georges and garters, the guards with their embroidered coats, and
the like ; suflicient, in truth, within a while, to make greatness very
familiar, if not ridiculous. Now, King Henry making a mask at
Cardinal Wolsey's house, and certain cannons being shot ofi" at his
entry, some of the paper or other stufl" wherewith one of them was
stopped, did light on the thatch, where, being thought at first but
an idle smoke, and their eyes more attentive to the show, it kindled
inwardly and ran round like a train, consuming within an hour, the
whole house to the veiy ground. This was the fatal period of that
virtuous fabric, wherein yet nothing did perish but wood and straw,
and a few forsaken cloaks ; only one man had his breeches set on
fire, that would perhaps have bi'oiled him, if he had not, by tho
benefit of a provident v/it, put it out with bottle ale."
Fires seem to have menaced Shakspeare on all sides, and he had
narrow escapes. As there is no mention of his name in the accounts
of the Globe Theatre in 10 13, nor any in his will, it is pretty clear
that he had retired from the proprietorship of the Globe before, and
escaped that loss ; but in tlie very year after it was Imrned down,
6HAKSPEARE, 33
there was a dreatlM fire iu Stratford, which consumed a good pare
of the town, and put his own house into extreme danger.
These were the scenes where Shakspeare acted, for which he wrote
his dramas, and where, like a careful and thriving man as he was,
he made a fortune before he was forty, calculated to be equal to
1,000/. a-year at present. He had a brother, also, on the stage at the
same time with himself, who died iu 1607, and was buried in St.
Saviour's Church, South wark, where his name is entered in the jjarish
register as " Edmund Shakspeare, a player."
The place wliere he was accustomed particularly to resort for
social recreation was the Mermaid Tavern, Friday-street, Cheapside.
This was the wits' house for a long period. There a club for beaux
esprits was established by Sir Walter Ealeigh, and here came, in their
several days and times, Spenser, Shakspeare, Philip Sidney, Jonson,
Beaumont and Fletcher, Massinger, Marlowe, Selden, Cotton, Carew,
Martin, Donne, Wotton, and all the brave spirits of those ages.
Here Jonson and ShaksjDeare used to shine out by the brilliancy of
their powers, and in their " Avit-combats," in which Fuller describes
Jonson as a Spanish great galleon, and Shakspeare as the English man-
of-icar. " Master Jonson, like the former, was built far higher in
learning ; solid, but slow in his performances. Shakspeare, with the
English man-of-war, lesser in bulk but lighter in sailing, could turn
with all tides, tack about, and take advantage of all winds, by the
quickness of his wit and his invention." Enough has been said of
this celebrated club by a variety of writers. There can be no doubt
that there wit and merriment abounded to that degree, that, as
Beaumont has said in his epistle to Jonson, one of their meetings
was enough to make up for all the stupidity of the city for three
days past, and supply it for long to come ; to make the worst com-
panions right witty, and " downright fools more wise." There is as
little doubt, however, that with Jonson in the chair, drinking would
be as pre-eminent as the wit. The verses which he had inscribed
over the door of the Apollo room, at the Devil Tavern, another of
their resorts, are, spite of all vindications by ingenious pens, too
indicative of that.
"Welcome, all wlio lead or follow,
To the oracle of Apollo ;
Here he speaks out of his pottle,
Or the tripos, his tower bottle :
All his answers are divine ;
Truth itself doth How in wine.
Han',' up all the poor hop-drinkers,
Cries old Sim, tlie king of skinkers.
He the half of life abuses
That sits watering with the Muses
Those dull gods no good can mean (i- .
Wine— it is tl'.e milk of Venus,
And the poet's horse accounted :
Ply it, and you all are mounted.
'Tis tl'.e true Pliocbian liquor,
Cheers tlie brains, makes v.it flie (luicktr,
]'ays all debts, cures all diseases.
And at once three senses pleases.
A\'elcome, all who lead or follov,',
To (he Oracle of Apollo."
3 1 SHAKSPEARE.
There is not any reason to believe that Shak.speare, lover of wit
and jollity as he was, was a practical upholder of this pernicious
doctrine. He may often make his characters speak in this manner,
but personally he retired as soon as he could from this bacchanal
life to his own quiet hearth at Stratford ; and if we are to believe
liis sonnets addressed to his wife, — and they possess the tone of a
deep and real sentiment, — he seriously rued the orgies in which ho
had participated.
" 0)1, fcjv my sake do you with Fortune cliiile,
The suilty goddess of my harmfull deeds,
That did not better for my life provide
Tlian public means which public manners breeds :
Thence came it tliat my name receives a brand,
And ahuobt thence my nature is subdued
To wliat it works in, like the dyer's land ;—
Pity me then, and wish I were renewed.
Wliilst, like a willing patient, I will drink
Potions of eysell,* 'gainst my strong infection.
No bitterness that I will bitter think,
Nor double penance to correct correction.
Pity me, then, dear friend, and 1 assure ye
Even that your pity is enough to cure mc."
We cannot read these and many other portions of his sonnets, we
camiot see Shakspeare retiring every year, and, as soon as able,
altogether from the bacchanalian and dissipated habits of the literary
men of the day, to the peaceful place of his birth, and the purity of
his wedded home, without respecting his moral character as much
as we admire his genius. The praises and the practice of drunken-
ness by Uterary men, and poets especially, have entailed infinite
mischief on themselves and on their followers. What woes and
degradations are connected with the history of brilhaut men about
town, which have tended to stamp the general literary character
with the brand of improvidence and disrespect ;— jails, deaths, pick-
ing out of gutters, sponging-houses, and domestic misery, — how
thickly do all these rise on our view as we look back through the
history of men of genius, the direct result of the absurd rant about
drinking and debauch ! With what a beautiful purity do the names
of the greatest geniuses of all rise above these details, like the calm
spires of churches through the fogs and smokes of London ! How
cheering is it to see the number of these grow with the growth of
years ! Shakspeare, Spenser, Sidney, Milton, Cowper, Scott, Words-
worth, Southey, Shelley, — have all been sober and dom-estic men ;
and the sanction which they have given by their practice to the pro-
prieties of life, will confer on all future ages blessings as arople as
the public truths of their teaching. The Mermaid Tavern, like the
other haunts of Shakspeare, has disappeared. It was swept away by
the fire. If any traces of his haunts remain, they must be in the
houses of the great, where he was accustomed to visit, as those of
the Lords Southampton, Leicester, Pembroke, Montgomery, and
others. These are, however, now all either gone or so cut up and
metamorphosed, that it were vain to look for them as abodes hal-
lowed by the footsteps of Shakspeare. If it be true that he was
• Vinegar.
SHAKSPEARE. I].-,
commanded to read his play of Falstaft' iu love — the Merry Wives
of Windsor — tc Queen Elizabeth, it would probably be at White-
hall or St. James's, for Somerset-House was comparatively little
occupied by her.
The very places in London more particularly illustrated by his
genius Lave too much followed the fate of those in which he lived.
It is true, the Tower, Westminster Palace, and some other of those
public buildings and old localities where the scenes of his national
dramas are laid, still remain, spite of time and change ;,and the sites
of others, though now covered with wildernesses of fresh houses,
may be identified. But the Boar's Head in East Cheap is annihi-
lated ; it, too, fell in the gi-eat fire, and the modern improvements
thereabout, the erection of New London Bridge, and the cutting of
King William-street, have swept away nearly all remaining marks
of the neighbourhood. It is supposed that the present statue of
William IV. stands not very fur from the .spot where Hal revelled
and Sir John swaggered and drank sack.
Over London, and many a spot in and about it, as well as over a
thousand later towns, forests, and mountains, of this and other
countries, wherever civilised man has played his part, will the genius
of Shakspeare cast an undying glory ; but to see the actual traces of
his existence, we must resort to the place of his nativity and his
death. There stiU stand the house and the room in which he was
born : there stands the house in which he wooed his Ann Hathaway,
and the old garden in which he walked with her. There stands his
tomb, to which the great, and the wise, and the gifted from all
regions of the world have made pilgrimage, followed by milHons of
those who would be thought so, the frivolous and the empty ; but
all paying homage, by the force of reason, or the force of fashion,
vanity and imitation, to the universal interpreter of humanity. It is
well that the slow change of a country town has permitted the spirit
of veneration to alight there, and cast its protecting wings over the
earthly traces of that existence which diftused itself as a second life
through all the realms of intellect.
There is nothing missing of Shakspeare's there but the house
which he built, and the mulbeny-tree which he planted. The tree
was hewn down, the house was pulled down and dispersed piecemeal,
by the infamous parson Gastrell ; who thus " damned himself to
eternal fame," more thoroughly than the fool who fired the Temple
of Diana. There, only a few miles distant, is the stately hall of
Charlecote, whither the youthful poacher of Parnassus was carried
before the unlucky knight. There too, and, oh shame ! shame to
England, shame to the lovers of Shakspeare, shame to those who
annually turn Stratford and their club into a regular " Eatanswill,"
on pretence of honouring Shakspeare ; there, too, live the descendants
of the nearest relative of Shakspeare — of his sister Joan — in un-
noticed and unmitigated poverty ! Several years ago, on my visit
to this place, I pointed out this fact ; and the disgraceful fact still
remains.
The Shakspeare Club have gone down to Stratford, and feaste 1 and
c 2
yi6 BHAKSPEARE.
guzzled ill honour of Shalispeare, and tlie representatives of Shakspeare
iu the place have been left in their poverty. There seems to bo
some odd association of ideas in the minds of Englishmen on the
subject of doing honour to genius. To reward warriors, and lawyers,
and politicians, — places, titles, and estates are given. To reward
poets and philosophers, the property which they honestly, and with
the toil of their whole lives create, is taken from them, and that which
should form an estate for their descendants to all posterity, and
become a monument of fame to the nation, is conferred on book-
sellers. The copyright of authors, or, in other words, the right to
the property which they made, was taken away in the reign of Queen
Anne, "/o?- the benefit of literature," — so says the Act. Let the same
principle be carried out into all other professions, and we shall soon
come to an understanding on the subject. Take a lord's or a squire's
land from him and his family for ever, after a given number of years,
for the benefit of aristocracy, — take the farmer's plough and team, his
harrows and his corn, for the benefit of agriculture, — take the mill-
uwners' mills, with all their spinning-jennies, and their cotton, and
their wool, and their silk, and their own new inventions, for the
benefit of manufacturing, — take the merchant's ships and their
cargoes, the shopkeeper's shop and his stores, the lawyer's parch-
ment and his fees, the physician's and surgeon's physic and fees, for
the benefit of commerce, trade, law, and physic : and let the clergy
suffer no injury of neglect iu this respect ; let their churches, and
their glebes, and tithes, be taken for the benefit of religion, — let
them all go shares with the authors in this extraordinary system of
justice and encouragement, and then the whole posse will soon put
their heads together, and give back to the author his rights, while
they take care of their own.
But till this be done, — so long as the children and descendants,
and nearest successors of the author are robbed by the State, while
the poet and philosopher crown their coiuitry with glory, and fill it
with happiness, and their country iu return brands their children
Avith disgrace, and fills them with emptiness — while they go in rags,
and the bookseller in broadcloth, — in leanness, and the book.seller,
endowed by the State with the riches of their ancestors, in jollity
and fat, — so long let those who are anxious to do honour to the
glorious names of our literature, honour them with some show of
common sense and common feeling. Honour Shakspeare, indeed !
Has he not honoured himself sufficiently? What says John Milton,
another glorious son of the Muse ?
" What needs my Shakspeare for liis honour'd bones,
The labour of an aj:e in piled stones ?
Or that his hallowed reliques should be hid
Under a star-ypointing pyramid ?
Dear son of memory, great heir of fame !
What need'st thou such weak witness of thy name?
Thou in our wonder and astonishment
Hast built thyself a live-long monument."
But if this honour be not needed, what needs there for our
Shakspeare, the still weaker witness of his name, of guzzling, and
gormandizing ? Is th^re any the remotest connexion between the
SHAKSPEAKi;. 37
achievements of' pure intellect and seven-gallon-barrel stomachs ot
anniversary topers ? Between the still labours of a divine imagina-
tion, and the uproarious riot of a pubUc feed when half-seas over '?
Let us suppose, for a moment, that the spirit of Shakspeare could
hear the hiccupings of the cr.ew assembled in his name, to honour
him forsooth ! If he were permitted to descend from the sereno
glory of his seventh heaven, and appear at the door of their dining-
room with the meagre descendants of the Shakspeare family crowd-
ing sadly behind him, what are the indignant words that he would
address to the flushed throng of his soi-disant worshippers % They
have been already addressed to hke ears by the great Master of love
and of the philosophy of true honour. " I was an hungered, and ye
gave me no meat ; I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink ; I was
a stranger, and ye took me not in ; naked, and ye clothed me not ;
sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not. * * * Inasmuch as ye
did it not to the least of these, ye did it not to me." * No, the sycophantic
humbugs never did it to Shakspeare. What cares he, in his seventh
heaven of glory and of poetry, for their guzzlings ? What have they to
do with him or his honour 1 Is it not a precious imposture, to make
a feast to a man's honour, and not to invite to it his nearest relatives,
especially when they live at the next door 1 In the name of the
national reputation, let this wretched and egotistic farce be put
down by the good sense of the British jaublic ! If these people will
not honour Shakspeare by honouring his family, let them at least
abstain from insulting their poverty and their neglect by this public
parade, and this devouring of joints.
Hear what Robert Southey says : — " The last descendants of Milton
died in poverty. The descendants of Shakspeare t ai'e living in
poverty, and in the lowest condition of life. Is this just to these
individuals 1 Is it grateful to those who are the pride and boast of
their country ? Is it honourable or becoming to us as a nation,
holding — the better part of us assuredly, and the majority aflecting
to hold — the names of Shakspeare and Milton in veneration 1 To
have placed the descendants of Shakspeare and Milton in respecta-
bility and comfort, in that sphere of life where, with a full provisiou
for our natural wants and social enjoyments, free scope is given to
the growth of our intellectual and immortal part, simi:)le justice was
all that was required — only that they should have possessed the
perpetual copyright of their ancestors' works — only that they should
not have been deprived of their proper inheritance." %
The time is evidently not yet come for setting this great matter
right ; for doing this great act of justice towards the teachers of the
world and glorifiers of our national name ; for executing this due
redress. We have yet much to learn from those divine minds, whom,
in Southey's words, we profess to venerate. But still the public
mind is not destitute of its glimmerings of the truth, and its respon-
sibiUties. Since I wrote the pages quoted, numerous individuals
pave written to inquire if nothing can be done to remove tlie oppro-
• Matthew xxv. 43—45. f Such are Southej's v.onU.
I Colloquies, Vol. H p. 312
o6 BHAKSPEARE.
brium of our trcatmeut to tlie Shakspeare family. Many visitora
have desired to see the boy whom I poiuted out, and have made him
presents, but he still remains unprovided for.* A clergyman wrote
to me from the west of England, expressing the interest he felt in
this youth, whom he had seen at Stratford, and his anxious desire to
have" a subscription raised to educate him, and put him into some
honourable way of life. He begged me to make a move, in which he
would zealously cooperate, to interest a sufficient number of literary
and influential individuals to agitate the question, and commence tho
subscription. I made the attempt, but in vain. Some parties gave
professions which ended in nothing, others which began in nothing ;
some doubted the chance of success, and some successfully chanced
to doubt. The Countess of Lovelace, the worthy representative of
another great bard, expressed the readiest and most zealous desire
to move aU those within the reach of her influence in the matter.
But, in a word, it did not succeed. The honour of Shakspeare lay
too much on the national tongue instead of on the heart, yet to
procure justice to the living members of his family.
Let us still trust that that time will come. I will not beUeve that
this gieat and intellectual nation, which has given an estate and
Htles to the family of Marlborough, and the same to the family of
Wellington, will refuse all such marks of honour to the Shakspeare
family. Shall the heroes of the sword alone be rewarded 1 Shall
the heroes of the pen, those far nobler and diviner heroes, be treated
with a penniless contempt 1 In this nation, the worship of military
honours is fast subsiding, the perception of the greatness and benefi-
cence of intellect is fast gi'owing. We are coming to see that it is
out of our immortal minds, and not out of our swords and cannons,
that our highest, purest, and most imperishable glory has grown and
will grow. The people every day are more and more coming to this
knowledge, and making it felt by Government and the world. The
money which is spent in visiting the trumpery collected as his at
Stratford, Avould have purchased a large estate for the descendants
of the Shakspeare family. That has not been done, and never will
be done ; but a penny a-piece from every person in this kingdom,
who has derived days and mouths of delight from the pages of
Shakspeare, would purchase an estate equal to that of Strathfleldsaye,
or of Blenheim. What a glorious tribute would this be from the
people of England to tlieir great dramatic poet — the greatest dra-
matic poet in the world ! How far would it rise above the tributes
to violence and bloodshed ! The tribute of a nation's love to j^ure
and godlike intellect ! This estate should not be appropriated on
the feudal principle of primogeniture ; should not be the estate of
one, but of the family : should be vested in trustees, chosen by tlie
l)eople, to educate and honourably settle in the world every son and
daughter of the Shakspearian family; and to support and comfort
the old age of the unfortunate and decrepit of it. That it should
not encourage idleness and a mischievous dependence, all such
persons, when educated and endowed with a sufficient sum to enable
• Visits to Eemarkable Places, Vol. I. p. 98, (3d edition.)
SHAKSPEARE. HO
them to make theli way in the world, should be left so to make their
way. The nation would then have discharged its parental duties
towards them, and they could expect no more. They should be
educated to expect no more, and more should not be extended to
them, except in case of utter misfortune or destitution, and then
only on a scale that should be in itself no temptation.
Such an estate, founded by the people, would be the noblest
monument ever yet erected to any man, or on any occasion. Shak-
spoare has a decent monument at Stratford, f,nd an indifferent one
in Westminster Abbey ; this would be one worthy of him and of the
nation which produced him. It would take away from us a melan-
choly opprobrium, and confer on him and the British people an
equal glory.
But though such a magnificent event, we fear, is very far distant,
it is a pleasure to be able to state, that the house in which the poet
was born has been purchased, as well as the adjoining houses, so as to
be able to isolate the birthplace, and make it more secure from fire.
Four tenements, adjoining the birthplace on the western side, were
purchased by the Stratford Committee, some years ago, for 820/., and
have been paid for by degrees. The portion of the property known
as the birthplane, including the Swan and Maidenhead Inn, was
purchased at pubhc auction in 1847, by the Stratford and London
Committees, for 3,000/., and conveyed in trust to Lord Carlisle, Mr.
Thomas Amyott, Mr. Payne Collier, Dr. Thomas Thomson, of
Leamington ; and Mr. Flower of Stratford and other gentlemen are
trustees for the former purchases.
Since then, Mr. John Shakspeare, the Orientalist, who claims to be
descended from an ancestor of the poet, has munificently paid into
the Stratford Bank, in the name of nine local trustees, the sum of
2,.500/., for the purpose of purchasing and taking down the buildings
immediately adjoining the house, so as to carry out the plan of its
secure isolation, and to put it into thorough repair. I understand
that Mr. Shakspeare is desirous to have the whole house enclosed in
a miniature Crystal Palace, to defend it from the destroying influences
of the weather. The house is now shown to the pubhc free ot
charge, but any one is at hberty to give a trifle towards the necessary
expense of keeping it open to inspection.
ABRAHAM COWLEY
The chief places connected with the name of Cowley are Barn-Elms
and Chertsey, both in Surrey. Cowley is one of those poets who had
a great reputation in his own time, but who at the present day are
only read by those who are anxious to know the real history of the
poetry of their country. He is so overloaded with the most out-
rageous conceits, and his whole system of versification is at once so
affected, artificial, and yet rugged and often mean, that he has, in the
midst of so much more genuine inspiration, fallen into almost utter
neglect. Johnson, often unjust to our poets, can hardly be said to
have been so to Cowley, when he says of him and the other
metaphysical poets, that " they were men of learning, and to show
their learning was their whole endeavour ; but unluckily resolving to
show it in rhyme, instead of writing poetry, they wrote only verses,
and very often such verses as stood the trial of the finger better
than of the ear ; for the modulation was so imperfect, that they
were only found to be verses by counting the syllables.". . . .From
this account of their compositions it will bo readily inferred, that
they were not successful in representing or moving the affections.
" For these reasons," Johnson adds, " that though in his own time
considered of unrivalled excellence, and as having taken a flight
beyond all that went before him, Cowley's rei^utation could not last.
His character of writing was indeed not his own : he vmhappily
adopted that which was predominant. He saw a certain way to
present praise ; and, not sufficiently inqtiiring by what means the
COWLKY. 41
ancieuts have continued to delight through all the changes of human
manners, he contented himself with a deciduous laurel, of which the
verdure in its spring was bright and gay, but which time has been
continually stealing from his brows."
In Cowley, in fact, you will find many beautiful sentiments, and
much learning ; but he seems always playing with his matter, not
deahng earnestly with it ; constructing toys and gewgaws, not
everlasting stinictures. You have artifice instead of feeling, and
conceits and often downright fustian instead of heart, soul, and
human passion. Who would now willingly wade through pages of
such doggrel as this 1 —
Serpents in Egypt's monstrous land
Were ready still at hand,
And all at the old serpent's first command.
And they too gaped, and they too hist,
And they their threatening tails did twist.
But strait on both the Hebrew serpent flew,
Broke both their active backs, and both it slew."
As a specimen of his fiction, Johnson has quoted his description
of the archangel Gabriel :
" He took for skin a doud most soft and bright,
That e'er the mid-day sun pierced through ■with light ;
Upon his cheeks a lively blush he spread,
WasU'd from the morning beauties' deepest red;
An harmless, flaming meteor shone for hair.
And fell adown his shoulders with loose care ;
He cuts out a silk mantle from the skies,
AVhere the most sprightly azure pleased the eyes ;
This he with starry vapours spangles all.
Took in their prime ere they grow ripe and fall ;
Of a new rainbow, ere it fret or fade,
The choicest piece cut out, a scarf is made."
This comes but indifferently after a passage of Byron or Shelley.
But, in fact, Cowley seems to have been a man who could not be
permanently and decidedly anything. He could not rise out of
aff'ectations, and dubious, halfway sort of positions, either in poetry
or in life. He would fain pass for an ardent lover and general
admirer of the fair sex, and published a poem called " The Mistress,"
on the ground stated in the preface to one of its editions, " That
poets are scarcely thought freemen of their company, without
paying some duties, or obliging themselves to be true to love." This
is genuine Cowley : ho did not write a poem on a love subject
because he was full of the subject, but because it seemed to be
expected of a poet. It was not passion and admiration that fired
him, but it was necessary to appearances that he should do it. He
was imluckily always spying about on the outside of his subject, and
never plunging boldly into it. He was like a man who, instead of
enjoying his house, should always be standing in the front, and
asking passengers what they thought of it, and if it did not look very
fine 1 or, if not, where he could lay on some plaster, or put up
a veranda ? This sentiment is strikingly expressed by the very
opening lino of his poems : —
" What shalJ I do to be foi ever known? "
42 COWLET.
That comes upon you as a grand burst of ambition, but it turns out
ambition only. If his heart and soul had been engaged, tlicre would
have been less opportunity for his eternal self-consciousness ; ho
would have done his work for the love of it, and because he could
not help it, and not because he found it becoming to do some sort of
work. Of love, therefore, says his biographer, he never knew any-
thing but once, and then dared not to tell his passion.
He was a strong loyalist ; went over to France after the queen of
Charles I. retired thither, and became secretary to Lord Jermyn,
afterwards Earl of St. Albans, and was employed in such compositions
as the royal cause required, and particularly in copying and decipher-
ing the letters which passed between the king and queen. He
aftei'wards came back, and occupied the equivocal character of sjn'
on the republican government, and detailer of its proceedings to the
royal party abroad. "Under pretence of privacy and retirement, ho
was to take occasion of giving notice of the posture of things in this
nation." This soon led to his arrest and incarceration ; and he was
not set at large without a guarantee of a thousand pounds. As it
was supposed, he now published his poems, with the object of
writing something in his preface which should give government an
idea of the abatement of his loyalty. This gave great offence to the
royal party, and was in subsequent editions withdrawn. Continuing
to live in England as if contented with the existing government, on
the death of Cromwell he wrote verses, as is said, in praise of him,
and which verses he suppressed ; and then went over again to
France, as soon as the Commonwealth gave signs of dissolution ; and
came back in the crowd of royalists, eager for the spoil of the nation.
Like many others, however, who had been more decided and con-
sistent than himself, he did not get what he expected — the Mastershi]}
of the Savoy.
This, and the ill success of his play, " Cutter of Coleman Street,"
which also was accused of being a satire on the king, filled Cowley
with a desperate desire of retreating into the country. Whenever
lie was in trouble at Court, this passion for solitude came rapidly
upon him. Under the Commonwealth, when imprisoned as a spy, he
introduced into the preface to his poems, that "his desire had been
for some days past, and did still very vehemently continue, to retire
himself to some of the American plantations, and to forsake this
world for ever. His courtly ambition being now again disappointed-
he styled himself the melanclioJi/ Cowley, and resolved to ruralize irv
earnest. He had formerly studied physic, and obtained a diploma,
but never practised ; having now, however, convinced himself that he
was a lover of the country, he determined to practise that, and so
betook himself to Barn-Elms. "He was now," says Sprat, "weary
of the vexations and formalities of an active condition. He had been
perplexed with a long compliance to foreign manners. He was
satiated with the arts of a Court, which sort of life, though his
virtue made it innocent to him, yet nothing could make it quiet.
These were the reasons that moved him to follow the violent
inclinations of his own mind, which, in the greatest hurry of his owa
" COWIEY. 43
business, had still called upon him, and represented to him the
delights of solitary studies, of temperate pleasures, and a moderate
Income below the malice and flatteries of fortune."
It was not from a mind like Cowley's that we should expect a deep
contentment as the result of this choice, and it is said not to have
been the case. At first his poverty debarred him the necessary
domestic comfort, but through the influence of his old patrons,
the Earl of St. Albans and the Duke of Buckingham, he secured
a lease of some of the Queen's lands, which afforded him an ample
income.
Barn-Elms lies about half-a-mile from Barnes, near the road leading
from Hammersmith suspension-bridge to Wimbledon. It is an old
estate, and in Cowley's time must have been tolerably solitary.
Since then the road just mentioned has been made across the estate,
and an inn built close to its entrance gate. It still, however, presents
the aspect of antiquity. The land is rich and flat ; and the present
])ark is thickly scattered with the trees from which it derives its
name. Some of these are reduced to mere massy fragments of
trunks, which give a venerable aspect to the place. The house at
the time we visited it was occupied by the late Sir Lancelot Shadv/ell,
the vice-chancellor of England. The si)ot is remarkable for many
other associations than those with Cowley.
The old house here was called Queen Elizabeth's Dairy, and from
the richness of the meadow land, seems admirably calculated for a
dairy on a grand scale. The property belonged to the canons of St.
Paul's, having been granted to them by king Athelstan, but it was
leased to Queen Elizabeth, and she granted her interest in it to Sir
Francis Walsingham and his heirs. Here, in 1589, that subtle
courtier entertained the queen and her whole court, where I suppose
they would drink milk and be very rural. The Earl of Essex married
Sir Francis's daughter, the widow of Sir Philip Sidney, and resided
here frequently. No other man than Jacob Tonson afterwards lived
in this house, to which he built a gallery, wherein he placed the
l^ortraits of the members of the Kit-kat Club, which had been painted
for him by Kneller. The members of the club were also entertained
here frequently by the munificent bookseller, their secretary. Gartli
wrote the verses for the toasting glasses of the club, which, as they
are preserved in his works, have immortalized some of the principal
l)eauties of the commencement of the last century : Lady Carlisle,
Lady Essex, Lady Hyde, and Lady Wharton. Tonson's gallery was
partly pulled down a good many years ago, and partly united to a
barn, so as to form a riding school. The pictures were removed to
Bayfordberry, the seat of William Baker, Esq. near Hertford.
In George the Second's time, Heydegger, his master of the revels,
was the tenant, and the following whim of his was played off on his
royal master. The king gave him notice that he would sup with
him one evening, and that he would come from Richmond by water.
It was Heydegger's profession to invent novel amusements, and ho
was resolved to surprise his Majesty with a specimen of his art. Tho
king's attendants, Avho were in tho secret, contrived that he shoidd
44 COWLEr.
r:^t arrive at Barn-Elms before night, and it was with difficulty that
he found his way up the avenue to the house. When he came to the
door all was dark ; and he began to be angry that Heydegger should
be so ill-prepared for his reception. Heydegger suffered the king to
vent his anger, and affected to make some awkward apologies, when,
in an instant, the house and avenues were in a blaze of light, a great
number of lamps having been so disposed as to communicate with
each other, and to be lit at the same instant. The king heartily
laughed at the device, and went away much pleased with his
entertainment.
Adjoining the park, and not far from the hoiise, is the farm and
farm-yard of William Cobbett. Here that extraordinary man, as
much attached to agriculture as to politics, had a sort of domicile
and sleeping-place made for him in the farm-buildings, and used to
survey his planting and ploughing as assiduously as if there were no
corruptions to root up, and no rank weeds to extirpate, in the great
estate of the nation.
Cobbett's farm-yard still stands to I'emind you of him, but the
house which Cowley inhabited has long been pulled down. From
what I could learn on the spot, and it was little, it seems to have
stood near the present stable -yard. The walls of the old gardens
still remain, and old mulbei'ry and other frixit-trees bear testimony
to the occujiation by wealthy families for ages. The grounds are
now disposed in the fashion of a considerable park, with these old
gardens and extensive shrubberies adjoining. A carriage-drive of
considerable extent leads from the Barnes road down to the house,
on one hand giving a level prospect over the meadows towards Ham-
mersmith, and on the other bounded with the tall hedge and thick
trees enclosing the park. The whole, with its rich meadow land, its
old elms and old gardens, and shrubberies of fine evergreens, is
almost too goodly for our ideas of the fortunes of a poet, and accords
more truly with the prestige of a successful lawyer.
The house of Cowley at Chertsey yet remains, though it has been
considerably altered : it is still called the Porch-house, but the porch
has been cut away because it pi-ojected into the street. Over the
front door is a tablet of stone, let into the wall, on which is inscribed
a line from Pope, slightly varied, —
" Here tlie last accents fell from Cowley's tongue."
His garden and grounds were on the level of the meadows, as level
as the meadows of Barn-Elms. These meadows lie along the road,
as you go from AVeybridge to St. Ann's-hill, and a pleasant brook
runs through them, skirting the garden. The country around is very
agreeable, and the nearness of St. Ann's-hill, with its heathy sides,
and noble views far and wide, is a great advantage. For a heart that
loved solitude, there need have been no pleasanter spot, esisecially
as the little town of Chertsey could afford all creature comforts, and
the occasional chat of the clergyman, the doctor, and a resident
family or two. But in Cowley's time, how much deeper must have
been the retirement of such a retreat here : how much further it
COWLEY. 45
was from London ! Now it is only a few hours' distance by llio
South Western Railway ; then, it was a journey — they took a night's
rest on the way ! His letter to Sprat from this place gives us an odd
idea of his enjoyment of the place : —
" To Dr. Thomas Sprat.
" Chertsey, May 21, V>C>S.
" The first night that I came hither, I caught so great a cold, with
a defluxion of liieum, as made me keep my chamber ten days ; and,
two after, had such a bruise on my ribs with a fall, that I am yet
unable to move or turn myself in my bed. This is my personal for-
tune here to begin with. And besides, I can get no money from my
tenants, and have my meadows eaten up every night by cattle put
in by my neighbours. What this signifies, or may come to in time,
God knows ; if it be ominous, it can end in nothing less than hanging.
Another misfortune has been, and stranger than all the resh, that
you have broke your word with me, and failed to come, even though
you told Mr. Bois you would. This is what they call J\[onstri simile.
I do hope to recover my late hurt so far within five or six days,
though it be uncertain yet whether I shall ever recover it, as to walk
about again. And then, methinks, you and I, and the Lean, might
be very merry upon St. Ann's-hill. You might very conveniently
come hither the way of Hampton Town, lying there one night.
I write this in pain, and can say no more. Verhv.iu sainenti."
Poor Cowley did not long enjoy his retreat here, if he did enjoy it
at all. Within two years he died at the Porch-house (in 1667), in
the forty-ninth year of his age. He was buried with great pomp in
Westminster Abbey, near Chaucer and Spenser.
JOHN MILTON.
Perhaps uo man ever inhabited more houses than our great epic
poet, yet scarcely one of these now remains. The greater part of
his residences were in London ; and in the hundred and seventy-two
j-ears since his decease, the whole of this great metropolis has been,
as it were, in a ferment of growth and extension. The great fire of
London swept away an immense mass of the old houses ; and if we
look around us, we see how very few of the ancient framed tenements
which then prevailed now remain. Again, Milton generally chose his
houses, even in the city, with a view to quiet and retirement. They
were, say his biographers, generally garden houses, where he enjoyed
the advantages of a certain remoteness fi-om noise, and of some
openness of space. These spaces the progress of population has
filled with dense buildings, in the course of the erection of which,
the old solitary houses have been pulled down.
Milton, as is well known, was born in Bread-street, Cheapside, at
the sign of the Sjiread Eagle. The spread eagle was the armorial
bearing of the family. His father was an eminent scrivener, living
and practising there at the time of Milton's birth, which took place
on the 9th December, 1608. This house was destroyed in the fire of
London. During his boyhood, which was passed here, Milton was
educated at home, in the first instance, by a private tutor, Thomas
Young. This man Aubrey calls " a puritan in Essex, who cutt his
MILTOX. 47
liair .short." Young had suffered persecution for his rehgious faith,
and it is supposed that from him Milton imbibed a strong feehng for
liberty, and a great predilection for the doctrines which he held. He
was much attached to him, as he testified by his fourth elegy, and
two Latin epistles. It has been remarked, that however much Milton
might be swayed by the principles of his tutor, he never was by his
cut of hair ; for, through all the reign of the Roundhead.s, he pre-
served his flowing locks. After the private tutor was dismissed, he
was sent to St. Paul's School. This appears to have been in his
fifteenth year. Here, too, he was a favourite scholar. The then
master was Alexander Gill, and his son was the usher, and succeeded
his father in the school. With him Milton was on terms of great
friendship, and has left a memorial of his regard in three of his
Latin epistles.
From the relation of his original biographer, Aubrey, we may seo
the boy Milton going to and fro between Bread-street and his school,
full of zealous thirst of knowledge, and the most extraordinary
industry. He studied with excessive avidity, regardless of his
health, continuing his reading till midnight, so that the source of
his future blindness is obvious in his early passion for letters.
Aubrey says, that " when Milton went to school, and when he was
very younge, he studied very hard, and sate up very late, commonly
till twelve or one o'clock ; and his father ordered the maid to sett up
for him." His early reading was in poetical books. He confirms this
account of himself in his Befensio Secunda pro Populo, cjr. He says
that his father destined him to liberal studies, which he so eagerly
seized upon, that from his twelfth year he seldom ever retired from
his books to bed before midnight ; and that his eyes, originally weak,
thus received the first causes of their future mischief That per-
ceiving the danger of this, it could not arrest his ardour of study,
though his nocturnal vigils, followed by his daily exercises under his
masters, brought on failing vision and pains in the head. Humphrey
Lownes, a printer, living in Bread-street, supplied him, amongst
other books, with Spenser and Sylvester's Du Bartas. Spenser was
devoured with the intensest enthusiasm, and he has elsewhere called
him his master.
Todd, the generally judicious biographer of Milton, praises his
father for his discernment in the education of his son. The father,
who was a very .superior man, and especially fond of and skilled in
music, certainly appears to have at once seen in his son the evidences
of genius, and to have given to it every opportunity of development ;
but it is to be regretted that his fatherly encouragement was not
attended with more prudence, and that he had not, instead of en-
couraging the habit of nocturnal study, — the most pei-nicious that
a student can fall into,— restrained it. Had he done this, the poet
might have retained his sight, and who shall say with what further
advantage to the world !
At seventeen, IMilton entered as a pensioner at Christ College,
Cambridge. He was found to be a distinguished classical scholar^
and conversant in several languages. His academical exercises
48 MILTON.
attracted great attention, as well as his verses, both in English and
Latin. His Latin elegies, in his eighteenth year, have always been
regarded with wonder ; and, indeed, in his Latinity, both iu verse
and prose, perhaps no modern writer has surpassed him. Hampton,
the translator of Polybius, pronounced him the first Englishman
who, since the revival of letters, wrote Latin verses with classic
elegance. His extraordinary merit and acquisitions found, from the
authorities of his College, general applause, spite of a disposition to
severity, induced by his sturdy opposition to them in opinion, ou
a plan of academical studies then under discussion.
Milton here, it appears, on the testimony of Aubrey, suffered an
indignity from his tutor, which it was not in his high and indepen-
dent nature to endure with impunity. He refers to the fact in his
first elegy. He mentions threats and other things, which his dispo-
sition could not tolerate ; that he was absent in a state of inistication,
and felt no desire to revisit the reedy banks of the Cam. Aubrey
says, from the information of our author's brother Christopher, that
i\Iilton's first tutor at Cambridge was Mr. Chappell, from whom
receiving some unkindness, {lie whipped him) he was afterwards,
though it seemed against the rules of the College, transferred to the
tuition of one Mr. Tovell. This information stands in the MS. Mus.
Ashmol. 0.1-011. No. x. p. iii. Warton, remarking on the fact, adds,
that Milton " hated the place. He was not only offended at the
College discipline, but had even conceived a dislike to the face of
the country — the fields about Cambridge. He peevishly complains
that the fields have no soft shades to attract the Muses, and there is
something pointed in his exclamation, that Cambridge was a place
quite incompatible with the votaries of Phoebus."
It was not very likely that a youth of perhaps eighteen, who was
writing the elegies and epistles in Latin which drew upon him so
much notice, would submit quietly to so degrading a treatment.
This treatment, it appears from Warton, was common enough,
nevertheless, at both Cambridge and Oxford, amongst the tutors at
that time. But Milton spurned it, as became his great spirit and
noble nature, and was in consequence, probably, rusticated for a time.
But this could not have been long, nor could it have been accordant
to the wishes of the fellows of his College. The offence was against
the tutor, not against the heads of the College, in the poet's mind.
In his Apology for Smectymnus, he thanks an enemy for the oppor-
tunity of expressing his grateful sense of the kindness of the fellows,
in these words ; " I thank him ; for it liath given me an apt occasion
to acknowledge publickly, with all grateful mind, that more than
ordinary favour and respect which I found above any of my equals,
at the hands of those courteous and learned men, the fellows of the
College wherein I spent some years ; who at my parting, after " aaa
taken two degrees, as the manner is, signified many ways how luch
better i t would content them if I would stay ; as by many letters
full of kindness and loving resjject, both before that time and long
after, I w^as assured of their good affection to me."
Leaving Camb-ridge, Milton went to reside eomc tiius t Horton,
MILIOX. 4<>
•near Colnbrook, iu Buckinghamshire. His father had i-etired from
his practice, on a competent fortune, to this village. Tiiis portion
of his life Avas, probably, one of the most delightful periodT of it.
He had acquired great reputation for talent and learning at College ;
he had taken his degree of M.A.; and in tliis agreeable retirement ho
not only indulged himself, as he tells us, iu a deep and thorough
reading of the Greek and Latin authors, but, j^robably then contem-
plating his visit to Italy, made himself master of its language and
well acquainted with its literature. To such perfsction did he carry
this accomplishment, that in Italy he not only si3oke the languago
with perfect fluency, but wrote in it so as to astonish the most
learned natives. Five years he devoted to these classical and modern
studies, but not to these alone. He was here actively at work in
laying the foundation of that great poetical fame which he after-
wards achieved. Born in the city, he now made himself thoroughly
famihar with nature. In the woods and parks, and on the pleasant
hills of this pleasant county, he enjoyed the purest delights of con-
templation and of poetry. Here he is supposed to have imbued
himself with the allegoric romance of his favourite Spenser, and also
to have written his own delightful Arcades, Comus, L' Allegro, II
Penseroso, and Lycidas. It is a fact which his biographers have not
seemed to perceive, but which is really significant, that the very
Italian titles, L' Allegro and II Penseroso, of themselves almost
identify the productions of this period and place, where he was busy
with the preparation for his visit to Italy. The county of Bucking-
ham appeared always to be from this time a particular favourite
with him ; and no wonder, for it is full of poetical beauty, abounds
with those solemn and woodland charms which are so welcome to
a mind brooding over poetical subjects, and shunning all things and
places that disturb. It abounds, being so near the metropohs, also,
with historic associations of deep interest.
" This pleasant retreat," says Todd, " excited his most poetical
feelings ; and he has proved himself, in his pictures of rural life, to
rival the works of nature which he contemplated with delight. In
the neighbourhood of Horton, the Countess Dowager of Derby
resided ; and the Arcades was performed by her grandchildren at
this seat, called Harefield-place. It seems to me that Milton in-
tended a compliment to his fair neighbour, — for fair she was, — ^in his
L'Allegro : —
' Tuwers and battlements it sees
Bosom'd high in tufted trees,
Wliere, perhaps, some beauty lies,
The cynosure of neighbouring eyes.'
The woody scenery of Harefield, and the personal accomplishments
of the Countess, are not unfavourable to this supposition ; which, if
admitted, tends to confirm the opinion that L'Allegro and II Pense-
roso were composed at Horton. The Masque of Comus, and Lycidas,
were certainly produced under the roof of his father."
_ The whole of these poems breathe the spirit #f youth, and of scenes
Uke those in which he now daily rambled. Whether L'Allegro am'
50 MILTON.
II Pensoroso ^Yere written, a§ Sir William Jones couteuds, at Forest-
hill, in Oxfordshire, or hero, need not be much contested. If thoy
were written there, it must have been many years afterwards, after
liis return from abroad, and after his first marriage ; for it was at
Forest-hill that he found his wife. But for the reason assigned, and
for that of their general spirit, I incline to the belief that they were
Nvritten at Horton, as there is plenty of evidence that Comus and the
Arcades were. These latter poems overflow with the imagery and
the feeling of the old wooded scenery of Buckinghamshire.
" Comin. I know cacli lane, and every alley green,
Dingle, or bushy dell of this wild wood,
And every bosky bourne from side to side,
My daily walks and ancient neighbourhood."
How full of the old pastoral country are these lines !-^
" Sec. Bro. Miglit we but hear
The folded flocks penned in their wattled cotes,
Or sound of pastoral reed with oaten stops,
Or whistle from the lodge, or village cock
Count the night watches to his feathery dames,
'Twould be some solace yet, some little cheering,
In this close dungeon of innunierous boughs."
There is no other poet who has been able to transfuse the very
ppirit of nature into words, as it is done in the following passages,
except Shakspeare, on whose soul images of rural beauty and reposp
fell with equal felicity of eft'ect : — •
" This evening late, by then the chewing flocks
Had ta'en their supper on the savoury herb
Of knot-grass dew besprent, and were in fold,
I sate me down to watch upon a bank
Witli ivy canopied, and interwove
Witli flaunting honeysuckle, and began.
Wrapt in a pleasing flt of melancholy,
To meditate my rural minstrelsy,
Till Fancy had her fill ; but ere a close,
The wonted roar was up amidst the woods," &-c.
How exquisite is every image of this passage : —
" Keturn, Sicilia.T JFuse,
And call the vales, and bid them hither cast
'J'lieir bells, and flowerets of a thousand hues.
Ve valleys low, where the mild whispers use
Of shades, and wanton winds, and gushing brooks.
On whose fresli lap the swart star sparely looks ;
Throw hither all your quaint enamelled eyes.
That on the green turf suck the honied showers.
And iiurple all tlie ground with vernal flowers.
Bring the rathe primrose that forsaken dies.
The tufted crow-toe and pale jessamine.
The white pink, and the pansy freak'd with jet,
The glowing violet,
Tlie musk-rose, and the well-attired woodbine,
AVith cowslips wan that hang the pensive head,
And every flower that sad embroidery wears.
Bid .\niaranthu3 all his beauty shed.
And datTodillies nil their cups with tears.
To strow the laureat hearse where Lycid lies."
A powrr of poetic landscape-painting like this, is only the result of
genius deeply instructed in the school of nature. But the time waa
now come fci* the survey of other and more stiiking scenes than
MILTON. 51
those of the woodlands and pastoral uplands of Buckingham. Tlie
tour of Milton in Italy is a marked portion of his life, and no doubt
opened wide fields of poetic imagination and of artistic experience
in his mind. He visited Nice, Leghorn, Pisa, Florence ; in the
vicinity of which last city, at the village of Belloguardo, or at Arcetri,
it is supposed that he paid his visit to Galileo. Thence he went on
to Sienna and Rome ; he afterwards proceeded to Naples, and was
intending to visit Sicily and Athens, when the news of the revolu-
tionary troubles in England reached him, and caused him to retrace
his steps through Rome and Florence ; whence he visited Lucca, and
crossing the Apennines to Bologna, Ferrara, and Venice, he then
hastened homewards by Verona, Milan, and along the lake Leman to
Geneva, and so on through France.
In every city of Italy he was cordially and honourably received by
the most distinguished pei'sons of the age, and studied the works of
the great masters, in both painting and sculpture, with an eft'ect
which is believed to be ajaparent in his great work. Paradise Lost.
The sacrifice which he made to the spirit of patriotism by this
return, is eloquently adverted to by Warton. " He gave up," he
remarks, " these countries, connected with his finer feelings, inter-
woven with his poetical ideas, and impressed upon his imagination
by his habits of reading, and by long and intimate converse with the
Grecian literature. But so prevalent were his patriotic attachments,
that, hearing in Italy of the commencement of the national quarrel,
instead of proceeding forward to feast his fancy with the contempla-
tion of scenes familiar to Theocritus and Homer, the fires of Etna,
and the porticos of Pericles, he abruptly changed his course, and
hastily returned home, to plead the cause of ideal liberty. Yet in
this chaos of controversy, amidst endless disputes concerning reli-
gious and political reformation, independency, prelacy, tithes, toler-
ation, and tyranny, he sometimes seems to Irnve heaved a sigh for
the peaceable enjoyments of lettered solitude, for his congenial
pm-suits, and the more mild and ingenuous exercises of the Muse."
But though he might sigh for these, he never suffered them to
draw him aside from the path of what he deemed the most sacred
duty, both towards God and man ; he sacrificed not only his
desire of visiting classical regions, and of lettered ease, but he was
willing to risk the achievement of what he considered — and which
eventually proved to be — the crowning act of his eternal fame, the
writing of his great epic. He had conceived, as he tells us himself,
the scheme of his Paradise Lost ; on that he placed his hope of
immortality ; but even that he heroically resolved to postpone till
he had seen his country rescued from her oppressors, and placed od
a firm ground of freedom. The casualties of life might have robbed
him and the world for ever of the projected work ; but he ventured
all for the great cause of his country and of man, and was rewarded.
A story has been repeatedly told as the occasion of Milton's Italian
journey, and very generally believed, which Todd has shown to be
told also in the preface to " Poesies do Marguerite Eleanore Clotilde,
depuis Madame do Surville, Poete Franjaise du xv. Siecle," of another
52 Ml-LTOX.
poet, a Loviis dc Puytenclro, exactly agreeing iu all the particulai's,
except that the ladies were ou foot. That Milton needed no such
romantic incentive to his Italian tour is self-evident, having a suffi-
cient one in his classical and poetic tastes ; but as it appeared in
a newspaper, and obtained general credeiice, it may be worth
transcribing.
" It is well known that in the bloom of youth, and when he
pursued his studies at Cambridge, this poet was extremely beautiful.
Wandering one day, during the summer, far beyond the precincts of
the University, into the country, he became so heated and fatigued,
that, reclining himself at the foot of a tree to rest, he fell asleep
Before he woke, two ladies, who were foreigners, passed in a carriage ;
agreeably astonished at the loveliness of his appearance, they alighted,
and having admired him, as they thought, unperceived, for some
time, the youngest, who was very handsome, drew a pencil from her
pocket, and having written some hnes upon a piece of paper, put it
with her trembling hand into his own ; immediately afterwards, they
proceeded on their journey. Some of his acquaintances who were
in search of him had observed this silent adventure, but at too
great a distance to discover that the highly-favoured party in it was
our illustrious poet. Approaching nearer, they saw their friend,
to whom, being awakened, they mentioned what had happened :
Milton opened the paper, and with surprise read these verses from
Guarini, Madrigal xii. ed. 1598 :
' Occhi, stelle mortali,
Ministre de miei mali, —
Se chiusi m'uccidete,
Aperti che farete ? '
" ' Ye eyes, ye human stars ! ye authors of my liveliest pangs !
If thus, when shut, ye wound me, what must have proved the con-
sequence had ye been open 1 ' Eager from this moment to find the
fair incorpiifci, Milton traversed, but in vain, through every part of
Italy. His poetic fervour became incessantly more and more heated
by the idea which he had formed of his unknown admirer ; and it
is in some degree to her that his own times, the present times, and
the latest posterity, must feel themselves indebted for several of the
most irapassioned and charming compositions of the Paradise Lost."
Now, to say nothing of the incoherence of this story, — of the
questions that naturally suggest themselves, of how these young
men, too far oflf to recognise their companion as the object of this
flattering attention, could know that the ladies were foreigners, and
that the' one who wrote the paper was the youngest, and was very
handsome,— it is evident, that had a young Cantab found himself
awaking, now-a-days, under a tree, Avith a paper of Italian verses in
his hand, and his comrades ready with a story of a couple of beautiful
young ladies, foreigners, travelling in a carriage, and the youngest, who
vas very handsome, putting this paper into his hand, he would very
uaturaii'y have deemed himself the subject of a most palpable quiz.
Vet the world, in a simpler age, not only gravely received this
narrative as a fact, but Anna Seward did it into verse,
MILTON. 53
Eetuiiied from Italy, uot from the vain quest after au imagiuary
and romantic fair cue, but with his mind stored with knowledge and
poetic imagery, which he had not pursued in vain, Milton took up his
residence in London, in order to be I'eady, as occasion presented
itself, to serve his country. He had no longer the inducement to
return to Horton. He had seen his mother laid in the grave before
he went : his father had probably quitted Horton when the civil war
broke out, and betaken himself to the security of Reading, a fortified
town ; for on the surrender of that town to the Earl of Essex, in
1643, the old man came up to London to his sou, with whom he
continued to reside till his death, about four yeai'S afterwards.
During the five years spent by Milton at Horton, between leaving
Cambridge and setting out on his travels, he did uot entirely bury
himself there in his classical books and poetic musings in the woods
and fields. He had occasional lodgings in London, in order to culti-
vate music, for which he had always a great passion, to prosecute
his mathematics, to procure books, to enjoy the society of his
friends, amongst whom were many of his old college friends, and, no
doubt, to perfect himself in speaking the French and Itahan lau'
guages, which it is not to be supposed he could do at Horton. Now,
however, duty as well as inclination fixed him almost wholly in
London. Great events were transpiring, and he felt a persuasion
that he must bear his part in them. There was one circumstance
which di-ew him for awhile from the metropolis, and it was this. He
became attached to a young lady in Oxfordshire, and is supposed to
have made some abode in the place of her residence. " The tradi-
tion," says Todd, " that he did reside at this beautiful village of
Forest-hill, near Shotover, is general, though none of his biographers
assert the circumstance. Madame du Bocage, in her entertaining
'Letters concerning England,' &c., relates that, 'visiting in June,
1750, Baron Schutz and lady, at their house near Shotover-hill, they
showed me, from a small eminence, Millon's House, to which I bowed
with all the reverence with which that poet's memory inspires me.' "
And the same writer quotes this interesting account of the place
and circumstance from a letter of Sir William Jones : " The neces-
sary trouble of correcting the first printed sheets of my history,
prevented me to-day from paying a proper respect to the memory of
Shakspeare, by attending his jubilee. But I resolved to do aU the
honour in my power to as gi-eat a poet, and set out in the morning,
in company with a friend, to visit a place where Milton spent some
part of his life, and where, in all probability, he composed several of
his earliest compositions. It is a small village on a pleasant hiU,
about five miles from Oxford, called Forest-hill, because it formerly
lay contiguous to a forest, which has since been cut down. The
poet chose this place of retirement after his first marriage, and he
describes the Ijoauties of this retreat in that fine passage of his
L'AlWro:—
Soiiiefinie walking' not unseen,
liy hedge-row elms, on liillocks green, —
While the ploughman, near at hand,
Wliistlea o'er the furrowed land,
64 JIILTON.
And the mUxma'ul sinftetli blithe,
And the luowt- r whets liis sithe.
And every shepherd tells his tale
Under the hawtliorn in the dale.
Straight mine eye hath caught new jileaMires,
AVhilst the landscape round it measures ;
Uusset lawns, and fallows gray,
Where the nibbling flocks do stray,
Mountains, on w hose barren breast
The labouring clouds do often rest ;
Meadows trim with daisies pied.
Shallow brooks, and rivers wide :
Towers and battlements it sees
liosomed high in tufted trees ;
Hard by, a cottage chimney smokes
From betwixt two aged oaks,' &c.
" It was neither the proper season of the year, nor time of thft
clay, to hear all the rural sounds, and see all the objects mentioned
in this description ; but, by a pleasing concurrence of circumstances,
wfc were saluted on our approach to the village with the music of
the mower and his scythe ; we saw the ploughman intent upon his
iabour, and the milkmaid returning from her country emjployment.
" As we ascended the hill, the variety of beautiful objects, the
agreeable stillness and natural simplicity of the whole scene, gave vis
the highest pleasure. We at length reached the spot whence Milton
undoubtedly took most of his images ; it is on the tojj of a hill, from
which there is a most extensive prospect on all sides. The distant
mountains, that seemed to support the clouds ; the village and
turrets, partly shrouded in trees of the finest verdure, and partly
raised above the groves that surrounded them ; the dark plains and
meadows, of a greyish colour, where the sheep were feeding at large ;
in short, the view of the streams and rivers, convinced us that there
was not a single useless or idle word in the above-mentioned de-
scription, but that it was a most exact and lively representation of
nature. Thus will this fine passage, which has always been admired
for its elegance, receive an additional beauty from its exactness.
After we had walked, with a kind of poetical enthusiasm, over this
enchanted ground, we returned to the village.
" The poet's house was close to the church ; the greatest part of
it has been pulled down ; and what remains belongs to an adjacent
farm. I am informed that several papers, in Milton's own hand,
were found by the gentleman who was last in possession of the
estate. The tradition of his having lived there is current amongst
the villagers ; one of them showed me a ruinous wall that made
jiart of his chamber, and I was much pleased with another, who had
forgotten the name of JMilton, but recollected him l)y the title of
The Poet.
" It must not be omitted, that the groves near this village are
famous for nightingales, which are so elegantly described in the
Penseroso. Most of the cottage windows are overgrown with sweet-
briars, vines, and honeysuckles ; and that Milton's habitation hail
the same rustic ornament, we may conclude from his descriptiou ;>f
the lark bidding him good morrow : —
' Through the sweet-briar, or the vine,
Pf the twisted eglantine ;'
MILTOX. .56
for it is evident that he meant a sort of honeysuckle by the eglan«
tine ; though that word is commonly used for the sweet-briar, whicV
he could not mention twice in the same couplet.
" If ever I pass a month or six weeks at Oxford in the summer,
I shall be inclined to hire and repair this venerable mansion, and to
make a festival for a circle of friends in honour of ]\Iilton, the most
perfect scholar as well as the sublimest poet that our country ever
produced. Such an honour will be less splendid, hut more sincere
and respectful, than all the pomp and ceremony on the banks of
the Avon."
That Sir William might be, and probably was, mistaken in sup-
posing that the Allegro was written at Forest-hill, I think is apparent
from the character of that poem and of the Penseroso, which bear,
to me, evident marks of a more youthful muse than the Comus and
the Lycidas. They deal more in mere description, and, what itf
more, the poet himself placed them in his original volume, prior to
those poems, as if written prior. The images quoted by Sir William
will apply to a thousand other scenes in England, and where Milton
himself never was. They are such as a thousand hiU-tops in our
beautiful pastoral land can show us. They may be found equally in
his earlier haunts in Buckinghamshire. Nevei-theless, Shotover is
not the less interesting, nor do the scenes the less apply to it. There
Milton undoubtedly did walk and muse,
" By liedge-row elms on hillocks green,"
and hear the ploughman's whistle, the milkmaid's song, and the
mower's ringing scythe, and rest his eye on its landscape, tinted and
varied as he describes it. There he saw the distant mountains of
Wales, and the shepherds under the hawthorns down in the dales
below him, each " telling his tale ; " that i.s, not telling a story to
.some one, or making love, but " telling the tale," or number of his
flock, before penning them for the night, or letting them loose in
the morning.
That Milton lived at Forest-hill some time, there is no doubt : but
when, and how long, and how often, are jooints that now cannot be
very well cleared up. Sir William Jones represents him to have
chosen this retirement after his lirst marriage. Now Milton was
not married before 164,3, at which time he was in his thirty-fifth
year. But Comus and Lycidas were wi'itten long before, and so
no doubt were L' Allegro and II Penseroso. Mosely, in his Address
to the Reader, in the volume of Milton's poems containing all these
pieces, pubhshed in 1615, tells us that these poems were known to
be written, and that he soUcited them to accompany Lycidas and
Comus ; and j\Iilton, in presenting this volume to his friend House,
says plainly that they were the productions of his early youth : —
" Gemelle cultu simpliei gaudcns liber,
Fronde licet geminu,
Muiiditia<|ue nitens non operos?. ;
Quern marnis atlulit
Juveniles olim,
Secula tanien iiaud niniii poeta,'' Jjc.
56 MlLTON.
This settles the question of the location of the poems ; but the
question of when, and how long, and how often Milton resided at
I'oi'est-hill, still remains. That he did not reside there long, imme-
iliatdy after his marriage, is very clear, from the statement of his
nephew and biographer, Phillips. " About AVhitsuntide, or a little
after, he took a journey into the country ; nobody about him cer-
tainly knowing the reason, or that it was more than a journey of
recreation. After a month's stay, home he returns a married man,
that went out a bachelor ; his wife being Mary, the eldest daughter
of Mr. Richard Powell, tlien a justice of peace at Forestil, near Shot-
over, in Oxfordshire." This account is confirmed by Anthony Wood,
who states that Milton courted, married, and brought his wife to his
house in London, in one month's time.
She was very young, and had been accustomed to a gay life.
According to Aubrey, '•' she was brought up and bred where tliere
was a great deal of company and merriment, as dancing, &c. ; and
when she came to live with her husband, she found it solitary, no
company coming to her ; and she often heard her nephews cry and
bo beaten. This life was irksome to her, and so she went to her
parents." Phillips says that she was averse to the philosophic life
of Milton, and sighed for the mirth and jovialness to which she had
been accustomed in Oxfordshire. It was a gi-eat mistake altogether.
Milton was now a man of a sober age ; he was yet but a school-
master, though he had a large and handsome house in Aldersgate-
street in a garden. This was necessary for the accommodation of
his pupils, as well as for his own quiet study. But it must have
been immensely dull to a young girl who, from all the glimjises wc
can get of her, was, though perhaps handsome and fascinating, of an
ordinary nature, and one who had been educated to frivolity and
mere enjoyment of the fashionable gaieties of life. What was more,
the very work on which Milton was zealously engaged, — the defence
of the Parliamentary cause, and the defeat of the kingly, — was i^erfect
poison to her and her family, — all high Royalists. " Her relations.''
^ays Phillips, "being generally addicted to the Cavalier party, and
some of them possibly engaged in the king's service, who at this
time had his head-quarters at Oxford, and was in some prospect of
success, they began to repent them of having matched the eldest
daughter of the family to a person so contrary to them in opinion ;
and thought it would be a blot in their escutcheon, whenever that
events would come to flourish again."
These circumstances, operating together, induced his young wife
to desert Milton. She asked leave, after a week, to go home and see
her parents ; he, in the meantime, was calmly and manfully labouring
at his Areopagitica, or Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing,
one of the noblest works in our language. His wife had gone home,
at the invitation of her friends, to spend the remaining part of the
summer with them ; and her husband gave her leave to stay till
Michaelmas. Michaelmas came, but no wife. He sent for her, and
she refused to come. He sent letter after letter ; these remained
unanswered. He despatched a messenger to bring her home ; the
s
MILTOX. 57
messenger was dismissed from her father's house with contemijt.
This moved his spirit, and he resolved to repudiate her. To justify
this bold step, he published four treatises on divorce : The Doctrine
and Discipline of Divorce ; The Judgment of Martin Bucer con-
cerning Divorce ; hia famous TetmcJiordon, or Expositions upon the
four chief places of Scriptiu-e which treat of Marriage, or Nullities
of Marriage ; and Colasterion. It is probable that the lady and her
friends would have thanked him for the divorce, had the world gone
well with them ; but the political scene was now fast changing. The
royal power was waning;" the PoweUs were getting into trouble, or
foresaw it approaching, from their active participation in the royal
cause. Milton, on the other hand, was fast rising into popular note. He
was the very man that they were likely to need in the coming storm ;
and with true worldly policy, they forgot all their pride and insults ;
were willing to forget the offended husband's public exposure of his
wife's conduct, and his active measures for repudiation ; and a plan
was laid for retaking him. The plot was this. Milton was accus-
tomed to visit a relative in St. Martin's-le-Grand ; and here, as it
had been concerted on her part, he was astonished to see his wife
come from another apartment, and falling on her knees before him,
beg forgiveness for her conduct. After some natural astonishment,
and some reluctance on his pai't to a reconciliation, he at length gave
way to her tears ; and forgave and embraced her.
" Soon his heart relented
Towards her, his life so late, and sole delight,
Now at his feet submissive in distress."
It has been supposed that the impression made upon his imagina-
tion and his feelings, on this occasion, contributed no little to his
description of the scene in Paradise Lost, in which Eve addresses
herself to Adam for pardon and peace.
And certainly Milton, on this occasion, disjjilayed no little magna-
nimity and nobility of character. His domestic peace and reputa-
tion had been most remorselessly attacked, yet, says Fenton, " after
this reunion, so far was ho from retaining an unkind memory of the
provocations which he had received from her ill conduct, that when
the king's cause was entirely oppressed, and her father, who had
been active in his loyalty, was exposed to sequestration, Miltoy
received both him and his family to protection and free entertain'
ment, in his own house, till his affairs were accommodated by \\\>-
interest with the victorious faction." The old father-in-law had to
suffer for his attachment to the royal cause. He was publicly an-
nounced as a dehnquent, and fined 576/. 12.?. 3c7. ; besides that hia
house was seized by the Parliamentary party.
It would be agreeable if from this time we could find data for
believing that the returned wife and her friends showed a generous
sense of the kindness of the poet. But we cannot. After the royal
power was restored, and Milton was in danger and disgrace, we hear
of no protection afforded by them to him : no protecting roof ex-
tended, no countenance even to the daughters, their mother now
being dead. Of these daughters, one died early, liaving married
68 MILTON.
a master builder ; one died single ; aud the third married a weaver
in Spitalfields. It should be recollected that all three daughters sur-
vived their father as well as mother, yet it does not appear that
they received the slightest notice or assistance from their wealthier
relations of Shotover. Yet his third daughter, Deborah, had great
need of it, and, in many respects, well deserved it. She lived to the
age of seventy-six. This is the daughter that used to read to her
father, and was well known to Richardson and Professor "Ward ;
a woman of a very cultivated understanding, and not inelegant of
manners. She was generously patronised by Addison, and by Queen
Caroline, who sent her a present of fifty guineas. She had seven
sons and three daughters, of whom Caleb and Elizabeth are remem-
bered. Caleb emigrated to Fort Saint George, where, perhaps, he died.
Elizabeth, the yoimgest daughter, married Thomas Foster, a weaver
in Spitalfields, as her mother had done before her, and had seven
children, who all died young. She is said to have been a plain, sensible
woman, and kept a petty grocer's or chandler's shop, first at Lower
Holloway, and afterwards at Cock-lane, near Shoreditch church. In
April, 1750, Comus w^as acted for her benefit : Doctor Johnson, who
wrote the prologue, says, " She had so little acquaintance with diver-
sion or gaiety, that she did not know what was intended when a
benefit was oflered her." The profits of the performance were only
67/., the expenses being deducted, although Dr. Newton contributed
largely, and Jacob Tonson gave 20/. On this trifling augmentation
to their small stock, she and her husband removed to Islington,
where they both soon died.
Such is the history of Milton's posterity.
From this melancholy review of his domestic history, let us now
return to his homes in London after his return from Italy. He came
back with great intentions, but to the humble occupation of a school-
master : and here we encounter one of the most disgraceful pieces
of chuckling over his lowly fate, to be found in that most disgraceful
life of our great poet and patriot, by Dr. Johnson. The Lives of the
Poets, by Johnson, in the aggregate, do him no credit. In point of
research, even, they are extremely deficient ; but the warped and pre-
judiced spirit in which they are written destroys them as authority.
On Milton's head, however, Johnson poured all the volume of his
collected bile. Such a piece of writing upon the greatest epic poet,
as well as one of the most illustrious patriots of the nation, is a
national insult of the grossest kind. Take this one passage as
a specimen of the whole. " Let not our veneration for Milton for-
bid us to look with some degree of merriment on great promises
and small performances ; on the man who hastens home because his
countrymen are contending for their liberty, and, when he reaches
the scene of action, vapours away his ]5atriotism in a private boarding-
school." The jiassage is as false as it is malicious. Milton did not
promise to come home and put himself at the head of armies or of
senates. He knew where his strength lay, and he came to use it,
and did use it, most effectually. He did not say, " I will be another
Cromwell," but he became the Cromwell of the pen. It was precisely
MILTON. 69
because he was poor, — that he had no interest or connexions to i)lace
him in the front ranks of action, — that he showed the greatness of his
resolve, in hasting to the scene of contest, and standing ready to
seize such opportunity as should offer, to strike for his country and
for liberty. He desired to do his duty in the great strife, whatever
might be the part he could gain to play ; and had he only sincerely
desired to do that, and had not yet done it for want of opportunity,
he would still have been worthy of praise for his laudable desire.
Of all the various residences of Milton in London, as I have re-
marked, scarcely one has escaj^ed the ravages of the fire, and the
progress of improvement and population. The habit which he had
of selecting houses standing in gardens, on account of their quiet-
ness, has more than anything else tended to sweep them away
These places, as population increased, were naturally crowded, and
the detached houses pulled down to make way for regular streets.
His first lodging was in St. Bride's Churchyard, Fleet-street, on his
return from Italy. Here he began educating his two nephews, John
and Edward Phillips. Of this lodging nothing now remains. The
house, as I learn from an old and most respectable inhabitant of St.
Bride's parish, who lives in the Churchyard, and very near the spot,
was on the left hand, as you proceed towards Fleet-street through
the avenue. It was a very small tenement, very old, and was burnt
down on the 24th of November, 1824, at which time it was occupied
by a hairdresser. It was — a proof of its age — without party wails,
and much decayed. The back part of the Pimch Office now occupies
its site.
These lodgings were too small, and he took a garden-house in
Aldersgate-street, situated at the end of an entry, that he might
avoid the noise and disturbance in the street. To his nejAews, he
here added a few more pupils, the sons of his most intimate friends.
This house was large and commodious, affording room for his library
and furniture. Here he commenced his career of pure authorship,
— all he did having public reform and improvement for its object.
Hei'e he wrote, as a fitting commencement, a treatise Of Reformation,
to assist the Puritans against the Bishops, as he deemed the Puritans
deficient in learning for the defence of the great principles they wero
contending for. That Milton would turn out a stern reformer of
Church matters, might be clearly seen from a passage in his Lycidas,
written before he was twenty-nine years old. In this he is said even
to anticipate the execution of Laud. The passage is curious ; —
" llow uell could I Imve spared for thee, young swain,
Enow of such as for their bellies' sake
Creep, and intrude, and elimh into the fold t
Of other care they little reckoning make
Than how to scramble at the shearers' feast,
And shove away the worthy bidden guest ;
)Jlind mouths ! that scarce themselves know how to hold
A. sheep-hook, or have learn'd aught else the least
That to the faithful herdsman's art belongs !
What recks it them '. What need they ? They are sptd ;
And when they list, their lean and flashy songs
Urate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw ;
The hungry sheep look up and are not fed,
60 " MILTON.
Hut, swoli) witli wiiul and the rank mist they draw
Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread.;
Besides what the grim wolf with privy paw
Daily devours apace, and nothing said :
But that two-handed engine at the door.
Stands ready to smite once, and smites no more."
Here he next wrote his treatise, Of Practical Episcopacy, in defence
of the Smectymneans, against Archbishop Usher ; then, Reasons of
Church Government, urged against Prelacy. In this work he revealed
to his readers his plans for a great poem, — the Paradise Lost, — which
only was deferred till the advocacy which the times demanded of
him should be completed.
It was in this house, on the approach of the troops of Prince
Rupert to the capital, in 1642, soon after the battle of Edgehill, that
Milton placed in imagination, if not in actual ink, his proudly depre-
catory sonnet ; —
" Captain, or colonel, or knight in arms.
Whose chance on these defenceless doors may seize,
If deed of honour did thee ever please.
Guard them, and him within protect from harms.
lie can requite thee, for he knows the charms
That call fame on such gentle acts as these.
And he can spread thy name o'er lands and seas,
Whatever clime tlie sun's bright circle warms.
Lift not thy spear against tlie Muses' bower :
The great Emathian conqueror bid spare
The house of Pindarus, when temple and tower
Went to the ground ; and the repeated air
Of sad Electra's poet had the power
To save th' Atlienian walls from ruin hare."
His next remove was to a house in the Barbican, now also, without
djubt, removed : this was a larger house, for it was necessary to
accommodate not only his wife, but her family.
From the Barbican issued the first volume of his poems, iiiciuding
Comus, Lycidas, L' Allegro, II Penseroso, &c. ; a strange Parnassus, as
it now seems to us. In 1647, his numerous inmates having left him,
he once moi-e flitted, to use the good old Saxon term, into a smaller
house in Holborn, opening backwards into Lincoln's Inn Fields ;
this house will now be sought in vain. Here he published, in 1649,
his bold Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, in which he vindicated
what the Parliament had done in 1648, in the execution of the king •,
this was followed by some other political pamphlets. As he had
made himself a marked man before, this open defence of the royal
decapitation bouud him up at once with the measures of the ruhng
government. Such a champion was not to be overlooked ; and ac-
cordingly, immediately afterwards, ho was invited by the Council of
State, without any expectation or solicitation on his part, to become
Latin Secretary ; as they had resolved neither to write to others
abroad, nor to receive answers from any, except in that language,
Avhich was common to them all. Thus, without any anxious solicita-
tion, any flatteries, or compromise of his dignity and integrity, he had
steadily advanced to that post in which he could effectually serve
his country. He was here not merely the secretary, he was the
champion of the government ; and accordingly the Eicon BasiUke,
attributed to King Charles himself, was ordered bf him to have aii
MILTON. iJl
auswer, — whick auswei* was his, Eicoiioclastcs, ov the Image-bi'eaker,
Then came his great Defence of the People of England, against
Salmasius, This work was received, both at home and abroad, with
the greatest excitement, abuse, and applause, as the different parties
were affected : at Paris and Toulouse, it was burnt ; at home, Milton
was comphmented on his performance of his task, by the visits or
invitations of all the foreign ministers in London ; his own govern-
ment presented him with a thousand pounds, as a testimouy
of their approbation of the manner in which he had acquitted
himself ; and even Queen Christina of Sweden, the patron of
Salmasius, could not avoid applauding it, and soon after dismissed
Salmasius from her court. The work itself, and the effect it pro-
duced, are said to have shortened the life of Salmasius, who died
about two years afterwards, without having finished his reply, upon
which he was labouring.
On being made Latin Secretary, Milton quitted Holborn, and took
lodgings in Scotland-yard, near Whitehall. Here he lost his infant
son ; and his own health being impaii-ed, he removed to a more
airy situation ; that is, into one of his favourite garden-houses, situ-
ated in Petty-France, Westminster, which opened into St. James's
Park, in which he continued till within a few weeks of the Restora-
tion. In this house some of the greatest domestic events of his life
cccm-red. Here he lost the entire use of his eyes ; his left eye
having become quite dark in 1651, — the year in which he pubUshed
his Defensio PojniU, — the second in 1653. His enemies triumphed in
his blindness as a judgment from Heaven upon his writing against
the king ; he only replied by asking them, if it were a judgment
upon him to lose his eyes, what sort of judgment was that upon the
king, which cost him his head ? and by adding that he had charity
enough to forgive them. We have seen that he laid the foundation
of this deprivation in his youth, by unremitted and nocturnal study ;
and, when Avriting the Defence of the People, the physicians an-
nounced to him that he must desist, or lose his sight : he believed
his duty required him to go on, and he went on, knowing the sacrifice
he made.
In this house he lost, too, his first wife, Mary Powell ; their
infant son was dead, but she left him three daughters, the only
children that survived him. He afterwards married Catherine,
the daughter of Captain Woodcock, of Hackney, who died in child-
bed within a year of their marriage. Of the beautiful character
of this excellent woman, he has left us this testimony, his twenty-
second sonnet : —
" Metliouglit I saw my late espoused saint
}5rought to me, like Alcestis from the grave,
Whom Jove's great son to her glad husband gave,
Uescued from death by force, though pale and faint.
Mine, as whom washed from spot of childbed taint,
Purification in the oird law did save.
And such as yet once more I trust to have
Full sight of her in heaven without restraint,
(;ame, vested all in wliite, pure as her mind :
llcr face was veiled, yet, to iny fancied sight.
62 MILTON.
Love, sweetness, fioodness, in her per.so.i shincd
So clear, as in no face with more delight.
But, oh ! as to embrace me she inclined,
I waked, she fled, and day brought back my night."
Here Milton wrote his Second Defence of the People against the
attack made in a book called lief/ii Sanguinis clamor ad Cceltim adoersM
imrricidas Anglicanos ; written by one Peter du Moulin, afterwards
Prebendary of Canterbury ; with other things in the same contro-
versy. As he was now blind, he had the excellent Andrew Marvell
associated with him, as assistant-secretary. His industry continued
at writing, as if he had full use of his eyes. He published now his
Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Cases, and The Means of Pemoving
Hirelings out of the Church ; collected the Original Letters and
Papers addressed to Oliver Cromwell concerning the aftairs of Great
Britain, from 1G49 to 1G58, with other things.
This memorable dwelling is yet standing. It no longer opens into
St. James's Park. The ancient front is now its back, and overlooks
the tine old but house-surrounded garden of Jeremy Bentham. Near
the top of this ancient front is a stone, bearing this inscription —
" Sacred to Milton, the Prince op Poets." This was placed there
by Jeremy Bentham, and WiUiam Hazlitt rented the house some
years, purely because it was Milton's. Bentham, when he was con-
ducting people round his garden, used to make them sometimes go
down on their knee.T to this house. The house is tall and narrow,
and has nothing striking about it. No doubt, when it opened into
St. James's Park, it was pleasant ; now it fronts into York-street,
which runs in a direct line from the west end of Westminster Abbey.
It is number 19, and is occupied by a cutler. The back, its former
front, is closed in b}^ a wall, leaving but a very narrow court ; but
above this wall, as already said, it looks into the pleasant garden of
the late venerable jDhilosopher.
But the time of the Restoration was approaching, and jMilton
began to retrace his steps towards the city, by much the same regular
stages as he had left it. After secreting himself in Bartholomew-
close till the storm had blown over, and his i)ardon was signed, he
once more took a house in Holborn, near Red-Lion-Fields ; and
thence removed to Jewin-street, near Aldersgate. All these places
have been rebuilt, and no house of Milton is now to be found in
these thickly-populated parts. People have often wondered why
Milton always showed such a preference for the city. There were
many reasons. In the first place, he was born and brought up till
his seventeenth year in it : the associations of youth form strong
attractions. In the second, as Dr. Johnson considerately tells vis,
Aldersgate-street and the like were not then so much out of the
world as now. Besides this, after the Restoration, it would be far
more agreeable to Milton to be at some distance from the West-end,
where cavaliers and courtiers were now flaunting with newly-revived
insolence ; and nothing but taunts, insults, and the hearing of
strange and most odious doings could have awaited him. Here
Milton married his third and last wife, Elizabeth MiiLshull, of a good
MILTOIT. 03
family in Cheshire, with whom he seems to have lived in gi-eat aftoo-
tion, so much so, that he wished to leave her all that was left him
Df his property.
From Jewin-street, he made his last remove, as to his London
residences, into Artillery-walk, Bunhill-fields. Bunhill-fields were,
probably, in those days, open, and airy, and quiet ; at present, with
the exception of the Artillery-ground itself, and the thickly-populated
burial-ground, which contains the bones of Bunyan and De Foe, the
whole of that neighbourhood is covered with a dense mass of modern
houses. Artillery-walk, Bunhill-fields, is no longer to be found. The
nearest approach that you get, even to the name, is Artillery-place,
Bunhill-row, which is merely a row of new houses adjoining the
Artillery-ground, and a new church which has been erected in that
busy, ordinaiy, and dingy street, still called Bunhill-row. Besides an
Art of Logic, his Treatise of True Religion, Heresie, and Schism,
Toleration, and what best means may he 7(sed against the r/rowfh of
PoTpery; his Familiar Letters in Latin ; and a translation of a Latin
Declaration of the Poles in favour of John IIL, their heroic sove-
reign — the two last published in the last year of his life ; his resi-
dence in Bunhill-fields was made remarkable by the publication of
Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes. He left,
moreover, in manuscript, a Brief History of Muscovy, and of other
less known Countries lying eastward of Russia as far as Cathay,
which was published in 1682, and his System of Theology, which
was long supposed to have perished, but has been recovered and
published of late years, much to the scandal of the orthodox.
Thus to the last did this wonderful man live and labour. There
is something singularly interesting and impressive in our idea of.
him, as he calmly passed his latter days in his quiet habitation in
Bunhill-fields. He had outlived the great battle of king and people,
in which extraordinary men and as extraordinary events had arisen,
and shaken the whole civilized world. Charles I., Laud, and Strafford,
had fallen in their blood ; the monarchy and the church had fallen.
Pym, Hampden, Marvell, Vane, and the dictator Cromwell, had not
only pulled down the greatest throne in Europe, but had made all
others seem to reel by the terrific precedent. All these stern
agents, with the generals Ireton, Harrison, Lambert, Fleetwood, and
their compeers, who had risen from the people to fight for the
people, were gone, like the actors in an awful tragedy who had
played their role. Some had perished in their blood, others had been
torn from their graves ; the monarchy and the church, the peerage
and all the old i)ractices and maxims, were again in the ascendant,
and had taken bloody vengeance; yet this one man, he who had
incited and applauded, who had defended and made glorious through
his eloquence and his learning, the whole republican cause, was left
untouched. As if some especial guardianship of Providence had
shielded him, or as if the very foes who pulled the dreaded Cromwell
from his grave, feared the imprecations of posterity, and shrunk
from the touch of that sacred head,— there sat the sublime old man
jit his door, feeling with grateful enjoyment the genial sunshine faU
(M MILTON.
(ju him. There he sat, erect, serene, cahii, and trusting in God the
Father of mankind. He had hved even to fulfil that iong-deferred
task of poetic glory ; the vision of Paradise Lost passed before him,
and had been sung foi-th in the most majestic strains that had ever
made classical the English tongue. His trust in Providence had
been justified ; he had served his country, and had yet not missed
his immortality. The great and the wise came from every quarter
to converse with him ; and the wonderful passages through which he
and his nation had lived, were food for the musings of the longest
day or the most solitary moments.
Many have thought that those melancholy lines in Samson
Agonistes, commencing —
" O loss of sight ! of thee I most complain,"
were his own wretched cogitations. But Milton, unlike Samson, had
no weak seductions from the path of his great duty to reproach
himself with ; and far likelier were it that the whole apostrophe to
light, spoken in his own character in the opening of the third book
of Paradise Lost, was the more usual expression of his feelings •-•
" Thee I revisit safe,
And feel thy sov'ran, vital lamp ; but thou
Ilevisit'st not these eyes, that roll in vain
To find thy piercing ray, and find no dawn ;
So tliick a drop serene hath qnench'd their orhs.
Or dim suffusion veil'd. Yet, not the more
Cease I to wander where the Muses haunt
Clear spring, or shady grove, or sunny hill,
Smit with the love of sacred song; but chief
Thee, Sion, and the flowery brooks beneath,
That wash thy hallowed feet, and warbling flow,
Nightly I visit: nor sometimes forget
Those other two equall'd with me in fate,
So were I equalled with them in renown,
Blind Thamyris and blind Maeonides,
And Tiresias and Phineus, prophets old :
Then feed on thoughts, that voluntary move
Harmonious numbers ; as the wakeful bird
Sings darkling, and, in shadiest covert hid,
Tunes her nocturnal note."
Such is the view that Eichardson has given us of him in hia
declining days : — "An ancient clergyman of Dorsetshire, Dr. Wright,
found John Milton in a small chamber hung with rusty green,
sitting in an elbow chair, and dressed neatly in black ; pale, but not
cadaverous ; his hands and fingers gouty, and with chalk stones. He
used also to sit in a grey, coarse cloth coat, at the door of his house
in Bunhill-fields, in warm sunny weather, to enjoy the fresh air ; and
so, as well as in his room, received the visits of people of distinguished
parts as well as quality."
There is an episode in the later life of Milton which we are made
acquainted with by Thomas Elwood the Quaker, and which has
something very pleasing and picturesque about it. It is that of his
abode at Chalfont St. Giles, in Buckinghamshire. Elwood, who waf?
the son of a country justice of peace, was one amongst the first
converts to Quakerism, and has left us a most curious and amusing
autobiography. In this he tells us that, while Milton lived ir>
MILTON. 65
Jewin-street, he was introduced to him as a reader, the recompence
to Elwood being that of deriving the advantage of a better know-
ledge of the classics, and of the foreign pronunciation of Latin. A
gi-eat regard sprung up between Milton and his reader, who was
a man not only of great integrity of mind, but of a quaint humour
and a poetical taste. On the breaking out of the plague in London,
Milton, who was then living in Bunhill-fields, wrote to Elwood, who
had found an asylum in the house of an affluent Quaker at Chalfont,
to procure him a lodging there. He did so ; but before Milton
could take possession of his country retreat, Elwood, with numbers
of other Quakers, was hurried oflf to Aylesbury gaol. The perse-
cution of that sect subsiding for awhile, Elwood, on his hberation,
paid Milton a visit, and received the MS. of Paradise Lost to take
home and read. With this, Elwood had the sense to be greatly
dehghted, and, in returning it, said, " Thou hast said a great deal
upon Paradise Lost : what hast thou to say upon Paradise Tonnd? "
Milton was silent a moment, as pondering on what he had heard,
and then began to converse on other subjects. When, however,
Elwood visited him afterwards in London, Milton showed him the
Paradise Regained, saying, " This is owing to you, for you put it into
my head by the question you put to me at Chalfont ; which before I
had not thought of."
Thus, in this abode at Chalfont, we hear the first mention of
Paradise Lost, and to it we owe Paradise Eegained. It is supposed
that Milton wrote the whole of the latter poem there, and that he
must have done, or the greater part of it, from his being able so
soon after his return to show it to Elwood.
It says much for the proprietors of the cottage at Chalfont, and
for the feeling of the country in general, that this simple dwelling
has been sacredly preserved to this time. You see that all the
others near it are much more modern. Tliis is of the old framed
timber kind, and is known, not only to the whole village, but the
whole country round, as Milton's house. Mr. Dunster, in the
additions to his edition of Paradise Eegained, says that the cottage
at Chalfont " is not pleasaptly situated ; that the adjacent country is
extremely pleasant ; but the immediate spot is as little picturesque
or pleasing as can be well imagined." He might have recollected,
that it could signify very little to Milton whether the spot _ was
Victuresque or not, if it were quiet, and had a good air ; for Milton
i\-as, and had been long quite blind. But, in fact, the_ situation,
though not remarkably striking, is by no means unpleasing. It is
the tirst cottage on the right hand as you descend the road from
Beaconsfield, to Chalfont St. Giles.
Standing a little above the cottage, the view before you is very
interesting. The quiet old agricultural village of Chalfont lies in
the valley, amid woody uplands, which are seen all round. The
cottage stands facing you, with its gable turned to the road, and
fronting into its little garden and field. A row of ordinary cottages
is built at its back, and face the road below. To the right ascends
the grass field mentioned ; but this, with extensive old orchards
66 MILTON.
above the house, is pleasing to the eye, presenting an idea of quiet,
rural repose, and of meditative walks in the shade of the orchard
trees, or uj) the field, to the breezy height above. Opposite to the
house, on the other side of the way, is a wheelwright's dwelling,
with his timber reared amongst old trees, and above it a chalk-pit,
grown about with bushes. This is as rural as you can desire. The
old house is covered in front with a vine ; bears all the marks of
antiquity ; and is said by its inhabitant, a tailor, to have been but
little altered. There was, he says, an old porch at the door, which
stood till it fell with age. Here we may well imagine Milton sitting,
in the sunny weather, as at Bunh ill-fields, and enjoying the warmth,
and the calm, sweet air. Could he have seen the view which here
presented itself, it would have l)een agreeable ; for though in this
direction the ascending ground shuts out distant prospect, its gi-ecn
and woody upland would be itself a pleasant object of contemplation ;
shutting out all else, and favourable to thought. The house, on the
ground Hoor, consists of two rooms ; the one on the left, next to the
road, a spacious one, though low, and with its small diamond case-
ments suggesting to you that it is much as when Milton inhabited
it. Here he no doubt lived principally ; and, in all probability, here
was Paradise Regained dictated to his amanuensis, most likely at
that time his wife, Elizabeth MinshuU. I found the worthy tailor
and his apprentice mounted on a table in it, busily pursuing their
labour.
Outside, over the door, is an armorial escutcheon, at the foot of
which is painted in bold letters, Milton. The old man, who was
very civil and communicative, said that it was not really the
escutcheon of Milton, but of General Fleetwood, who purchased the
house for Milton, and wlio at that time lived at the Manor-house,
and lies buried in the church here. Of this, Elwood tells us nothing,
but on the contrary, that he procured the house for Milton.
Whether this escutcheon be really Fleetwood's or not, I had no
means of ascertaining, as it was not only very indistinct, but too
high to examine without a ladder ; but as Milton's armorial bearing
contained sjoread eagles, and as there were birds in the shield, it no
doubt had been intended for Milton by ttiose who placed it there.
If Fleetwood were living at Chalfont, that might be an additional
reason for Milton's choosing it for his then retreat ; but Elwood, and
not Fleetwood, took the house, and it is doubtful even whether
Fleetwood was still living, being one of the regicides condemned,
but never executed. Independent, however, of any other considera-
tion, Milton had many old associations with Buckinghamshire, which
would recommend it to him ; and in summer the air amid the heaths
and parks of this part of the country is peculiarly soft, delicious,
and fragrant.
We come now to Milton's last house, the narrow house appointed
for all living, in which were laid his bones beside those of his
father. This was in the church of St. Giles, Cripplegate. He died
on Sunday, the 8th November, 1674, and was buried on the 12th.
His fmieral is stated to have been very sfilendidlj' and numerously
HILTON. 67
attended. By the parish registry we find tnat he was buried in the
chancel: "John Milton, gentleman. Consumption. Chancell. 12.
Nov : 1674." Dr. Johnson suj^posed that he had no inscrii^tion, hut
Aubrey distinctly states that " when the two steppes to the com-
munion table were raysed in 1G90, his stone was removed." Milton'.s
grave remained a whole century without a mark to point out whei'c
the great poet lay, till in 1793 Mr. Whitbread erected a bust and an
inscription to his memory. What is more, there is every reason to
believe that his remains were, on this occasion of raising the chancel
and removing the stone, disturbed. The coffin was disinterred and
opened, and numbers of relic-hunters were eager to seize and convey
off fragments of his bones. The matter at the time occasioned
a sharp controversy, and the public were at length persuaded to
believe that they were not the remains of Milton, but of a female,
that by mistake had been thus treated. But when the workmen had
the inscribed stone before them, and dug down directly below it,
what doubt can thei-e be that the remains were those of the poet ?
By an alteration in the church when it was repaired in 1682, that
which was the old chancel ceased to be the present one, and the
remains of Milton thus came to lie in the great central aisle. The
monument erected by Whitbread marks as near as possible the
place. The bust is by Bacon. It is attached to a pillar, and beneath
it is this inscription : — •
JouN Milton,
Author of Paradise lost,'
Born Deer. igoS.
Died Novr. \67i.
His father, John Milton, died March, 1040
'ihey were both interred in this church.
Samuel Whitbread posuit, ITOS.
This church is remarkable for having been the scene of Oliver
Cromwell's marriage, and for being the burial-place of many emi-
nent men. In the chancel, in close neighbourhood with Milton,
lay old John Speed, the chronicler, and Fox, the martyrologist, whosa
monuments still remain on the wall. That of Speed is his bust, in
doublet and ruff, with his right hand resting on a book, and his left
on a skulk It is in a niche, representing one of the folding shrine^
still seen in Catholic churches on the continent. There is a monu-
ment also seen there to a lady of the family of Sir Thomas Lucy, ol
Shakspeare notoriety ; and another of some noble person, having
beneath the armorial escutcheon, an opening representing skulls,
bones, and flames, within a barred grating, supposed to be symbolic
of purgatory. The burial-ground of Bunhill-helds, where Bunyan
and De Foe lie, belongs also to this parish, and their interments aro
contained in the registry of this church.
* This word " lost," with a little 1 in the inscriptio.n,
J) 2
6B MrLTON.
Thus the Prince of Poets, as Hazlitt styled him, sleeps iu good
company. The times in which he lived, and the part he took in
them, were certain to load his name with obloquy and misrei^re-
sentation ; but the solemn dignity of his life, and the lofty tone and
principle of his writings, more and more suffice not only to vindicate
him, but to commend him to posterity. No man ever loved hberty
and virtue with a purer affection; no man ever laboured in their
cause with a more distinguished zeal ; no man ever brought to the
task a more glorious genius, accomplished with a more consummate
learning. ]\Iilton was the noblest model of a devoted patriot and
true Englishman ; and the study of his works is the most certain
means of perpetuating to his country .spirits worthy cf iier
greatness.
m
SAMUEL BUTLER.
" In the midst of obscurity passed the life of Butler, a man whose
name can only perish witli his language. The mode and place of his
education arc miknown ; the events of his life are variously related ;
and all that can be told with certainty is, that he was poor."
Such are the expressive words with which Dr. Johnson winds up
his meagre account of the witty author of Hudibras. A more signi-
ficant finish to a poet's biography could scarcely be given. A more
striking instance of national neglect, and the ingratitude of posterity,
is nowhere to be found.
Sti'ensham, in Warwickshire, claims the honour of his bii'th. His
father is said to have been an honest farmer there, with a small
estate, who made a shift to educate his son at the grammar-school at
Worcester, whence he is supposed to have gone to the university ;
but whether of Oxford or Cambridge, is matter of dispute. Hi^^
brother as.serted that it was Cambridge, but could not tell at which
liall or college. Dr. Nasli discovered that his father was owner of a
house and a little land, worth about eight pounds a-year, which, in
Johnson's time, was still called ]hi(lci's tenement.
70 BUTLER,
When we consider the humble position of the fatlier, we can only
wonder that he contrived to give him an education at a classical
school at all, and may very well doubt, with the great lexicographer,
whether he in reality ever did study at Cambridge. Having, how-
ever, given his son a learned education, his resources were exhausted,
he had no jiatronage, and the young man became, and might pro-
bably think himself fortunate in doing so, a clerk to a justice of
peace, Mr. Jeflt'erys, of Earl's Croomb, in Worcestershire. Here he
appears to have passed an easy and agreeable life. " He had," says
Johnson, " not only leisure for study, but for recreation ; his amuse-
ments were music and painting ; and the reward of his pencil was
the friendship of the celebrated Cooper. Some pictures, said to be
his, were shown to Dr. Nash, at Earl's Croomb ; but when he in-
quired for them some years afterwards, he found them destroyed to
stop windows, and owns that they hardly deserved a better fate."
From this gentleman's service he passed into that of the Countess
of Kent. The celebrated John Selden was then steward of the
countess, and it was probably through him, or for his purposes, that
Butler was introduced into the family. He was much noticed by
Selden, and employed by him as an amanuensis. Whether this were
the actual capacity in which he stood in the family of the countess,
is, like almost every other event of his life, however, quite unknown.
One thing seems certain, that, both at Mr. JefFerys' and here, he had
been turned loose into great libraries, the sort of pasture that he of all
others liked, and had devoured their contents to some purpose, as is
manifested in his writings. These were the real colleges at which he
studied, and where he laid np enormous masses of information.
His next remove was into the family of Sir Samuel Luke, one of
Cromwell's officers. This was the decisive circumstance of his life.
Sir Samuel was the hero of his future poem, — the actual Hudibras.
But he was here in the very centre of republican action, and secta-
rian opinion and discussion. In Sir Samuel, he had a new and rich
study of character ; in those about him a new world, abounding
with all sorts of persons, passages, and doctrines, which made him
feel that he had also a world unknown still in himself, that of
satirical fun infinite. Into this world he absorbed all the new views
of things ; the strange shapes that came to and fro ; the strange
phraseology and sounds of conventicle hymns that assailed his ears.
The historian and poet of the new Land of Goshen, where all was
light, while the neighbouring Egypt of royalty was all in darkness, was
born into it ; and Hudibras, and his Squire Ralph, Sidrophel, Talgol
and Trulla, the Bear and Fiddle, all sprung into immortal existence.
The story of the utter neglect of Butler by the king and coui-t, at
the time that not only they, but all royalists in the kingdom, were
bursting with laughter over Hudibras, is too well known. Once it
was hoped that he was on the verge of good fortune, and Mr. Wy-
cherley was to introduce him to the all-powerful Duke of Buckingham.
The story of this interview is too characteristic to be passed over.
" Mr. Wycherley," says Packe, " had always laid hold of an oppor-
tunity which offered of representing to the D'lke of Buckingham how
BUTLEE. 71
well Mr. Butler had deserved of the royal family, by writing his inimit-
able Hudibras, and that it was a reproach to the court, that a person
of his loyalty and wit should suffer in obscurity, and under the want
he did. The duke always seemed to hearken to him with attention
enough ; and after some time undertook to recommend his pretensions
to his majesty. Mr. Wycherley, in hopes to keep him steady to his
Avord, obtained of his grace to name a day when he might introduce
that modest and unfortunate poet to his new j^atron. At last an ap-
pointment was made, and the place of meeting was agreed to be the
Roebuck. Mr. Butler and his friend attended accordingly ; the duke
joined them ; but as the d 1 would have it, the door of the room
where they sat was open, and his grace, who had seated himself
near it, observing a pimp of his acquaintance, — the creature, too,
was a knight, — tri^"" by with a brace of ladies, immediately quitted
his engagement to follow another kind of business, at which he was
more ready than at doing good offices to men of desert, though no
one was better qualified than he, both in regard of his fortune and
understanding, to protect them ; and from that time to the day of
his death, poor Butler never found the least effect of his promise ! "
The brightest gleam of his life would seem to be between his
quitting Sir Samuel Luke's and the publication of his Hudibras ;
but when this exactly took place, and how long this lasted, we are
not informed. It must, however, have taken place between the king's
return, which was in 1659, and 16G4, some five years or so. During
this period he was made secretary to the Earl of Carberry, president
of the principality of Wales, who made -iim steward of Ludlow
Castle, when the Court of Marches was revived.
This was a post in which a poet might feel himself well placed.
This ancient castle of the Lacys and Mortimers stands at the west
end of the town of Ludlow, on a bold rock, overlooking the river
Corve, and near the confluence of tha^ river and the Teme. Many
striking events had occurred here since the time that William the
Conqueror bestowed it on Roger de Montgomery, from whose des-
cendants it passed successively into the hands of the crown, tha
AVarines, the Lacys, and the Moi-timer.** On the borders of Wales,
it was a strongliold of the crown of England, and, after it fell again
into the hands of thi^ king, became the palace of the President of
the Marches, and often the residence of princes. Here the young
king Edward V. lived, and left it only to proceed to London, into the
murderous hands of his uncle, Richard III, who, within two months
of his quitting this quiet asylum, had him and his brother smothered
in the Tower. Here Prince Arthur, eldest son of Henry VII, was
married to Catharine of Arragon, who, after his death, was married
to his brother, Henry VIII; her divorce finally leading to the Re-
formation in England. Here Sir Philip Sidney's fathei'. Sir Henry
Sidney, had lived, as President of the Marches ; and manya scene of
splendour and festivity had lit up the venerable towers, on the occa-
sion of royal visits, and other seasons of rejoicing. Above all, it was
for one of those occasions that the youthful Milton had composed his
Oomus ; and on a visit of Charles I, in 1031, to the Earl of Eridg-
72 BUTLER.
water, then Presidcut of the Marclies, it was performed before him,
the work being founded on a real incident occurring in the Lord
President's own family, which is thus related by Nightingale : —
" When he had entered on his official residence, he was visited by a
large assembly of the neighbouring nobility and gentry. His sons,
the Lord Brackley and Sir Thomas Egerton, and his daughter, the
Lady Alice, being on their journey,
' To attend their father's state,
And new intrusted sceptre,'
were benighted in Haywood Forest, in Herefordshire, and the lady
for a short time was lost. The adventure being related to their
father on their arrival at the castle, IMilton, at the request of his
friend, Henry Lawes, who taught music in the family, wrote the
masque. Lawes set it to music, and it was acted on Michaelmas
Night ; the two brothers, the young lady, and Lawes himself, each
bearing a part in the representation."
This single circumstance, of being the scene of the first represen-
tation of the Mask of Comus, one of Milton's most beautiful compo-
sitions, has given a perpetual interest to Ludlow Castle.
I The genius of Butler was of a different stamp. It wanted the
sublimity, the pathos, and tender sensibilities of that of Milton ; but,
on the other hand, for perception of the ridiculou.s, — for a diving
mto the closest folds of cant and fanatical pretence, — for a rough,
bold, and humorous power of sketching ordinary life, — it was un-
rivalled. A tower is still shown as the place where he wrote a part
of his Hudibras. Whether it be the precise fact or not, it is Idle
to inquire. There our author has resided ; there he is said to have
written something or other, and the very room and spot of its com-
position are pointed out. It is best not to be too critical ; and, on
the other hand, if we believe in general that where a man of genius
has lived he has also written, we shall seldom be far wrong. There
is little doubt that here Butler, possessed of more leisure and inde-
pendence than at any other period of his life, did really revise and
prepare his work for press ; of which the first part was published in
1663, and the second in the year following.
Here he married Mrs. Herbert, a lady of good family, with whom
he lived in comfort, if not in affluence. Of the j)lace where Comus
was first acted by the real personages of it, and where Butler brought
forth his Hudibras, some idea may be gratifying to the reader. It
was deserted in the first year of William and Mary, in consequence
of the dissolution of the Court of the Marches. From an inventory
of the goods found in Ludlow ;Castle, bearing date 1708, in the
eleventh year of Queen Anne, there appeared to be then forty i-ooms
entire. Many of the royal apartments were in that condition ; and
the couch of state and the velvet hangings were preserved. In the
chapel there were still to be seen on the panels many coats of arms ;
and in the hall many of the same kind of ornaments, together with
lances, spears, firelocks, and old armour. On the accession of George I,
an order came down to unroof the buildings, and strip thorn of
their lead. Decay consequently ensued. Several panels beari/ig the
BUTLER. 73
arms of the Lords President, were converted into wainscoting foj-
a public-house in the town, a former owner of which enriched hini-
self by the sale of materials clandestinely carried away. There
remains also a rich embroidered carpet, hung up in the chancel of
St. Lawrence's church, said to be part of the covering of the council-
board. The Earl of Powis, who previously held the castle in virtue
of a long lease, acquired the reversion in fee by purchase from the
ci'own in 1811.
The whole is now a scene of venerable ruin. The castle rises from
the point of a headland, and its foundations are engrafted into a bare
grey rock. The north front consists of square towers with high
connecting walls, which are embattled with deep interstices ; and
the old fosse, and part of the rock, have been formed into walks,
which in 1722 were planted with beech, elm, and lime trees by the
Countess of Powis, and those trees, now grown to maturity, add ex-
ceedingly to the dignity and beauty of the scene. Through a chasm
on the west rims the broad and shallow river Teme. It were too
long to describe all this mass of ruins, with its various courts, re-
mafns of barracks, and escutcheoned walls. The first view of the
interior of the castle is fine. The court is an irregular square area,
not very spacious ; but the lofty embattled structures with which it
is surrounded, though in ruin, still preserve their original outhues.
The spacious hall is of sixty feet by thirty, the height about thirty-
live feet, and is ornamented with a door with a beautiful pointed
arch. The once elegant saloon, where the splendid scene of Comus
was first exhibited ; where chivalry exhausted her choicest stores,
both of invention and wealth, and where hospitality and magnifi-
cence blazed for many ages in succession, without diminution or
Jecay — is now totally dilapidated, and neither roof nor floor remains.
From the time of Butler's quitting this scene of his ease and hap-
piness, he seems to have experienced only poverty and neglect. His
wife's fortune is said to have been lost through bad securities ; his
expectations from the royal person, or the royal party whom he had
so immensely served, were wholly disappointed ; and in 1680 he died,
where, on the authority of the son of his truest friend and benefactor,
Mr. Longueville, he had lived some years, in Rose street, Covent-
garden. Mr. Longueville exerted himself to raise a subscription for
his interment in Westminster Abbey, but in vain; he thereforo
buried him at his own cost in the churchyard of Covent-garden.
About sixty years afterwards, Mr. Barber, a printer, Lord ]\Iayor of
London, and a friend to Butler's principles, bestowed on him that
monument in Westminster Abbey which is well known.
Such were the life, fortunes, and death of the author of Hudibras,
whose name, as Johnson justly observes, can only perish with his
language. It was his misfortune to look for protection to a monarch
who only protected courtezans, and the most disgusting of libertines.
Butler should have been a pimp, and not a poet, and he would soon
have found employment enough. His neglect is but one opprobrium
more added to the lacnjovy of a monarch whose whole life was u
nuisance and a disgrace to the country which tolerated him.
JOHN DRYDEN.
Dryden should have been transferred to the vohime of the dramatic
poets, if the quaUty of his dramas had borne any relative proportion
to their quantit}^, or to the quality of his poetry ; but it is the latter
which gives him his great and lasting distinction. They are his
Satires, and Fables, and Translations ; his Absalom and Achitophel ;
his Hind and Panther ; his Palemon and Arcite ; the Flower and the
Leaf ; and, in short, all those racy and beautiful stories which he
threw into modern poetry from Chaucer and Boccaccio, with his
Virgil, and lyrical compositions, and, at the head of these, his Ode
on St. Cecilia's Day, that stamp his character with the English public
as one of the most vigorous, harmonious, and truly British writers.
Dryden displayed no great powers of creation ; perhaps the literary
hurry of his life prevented this ; but he contemplated for years a
national epic on Prince Arthur ; and probaVjly, had he possessed pei-
fect leisure for carrying out this design, he would have astonished
us as much with the display of that faculty as ho delights us with
the masterly vigour of his reasoning powers ; with his harmony and
nerve of style ; and v>-ith the stiletto stabs of his annihilating satire.
But from any necessity of criticism on his genius, the familiar ac-
(juaintancc of every true lover of poetry with the merits and beauties
DRYDEN. 75
which have fixed his immortality, fortunately for my space, fully
exempts me. Even over the long succession of literary events in hi?
life we must pass, and fix our attention on his homes and havmts.
For nearly forty years, from 1660 to 1700, he was before the public
as an active author ; and on the disappearance of Milton from the
field of life, he became, and continued to be, the most marked man
of his time ; yet it is astonishing how little is known of his town
haunts and habits. Of his publications, the appearance of his dramas,
the controversies into which he fell with his literary cotemporaries,
his change of religion, and his chnging to the despotic government of
the Stuarts, we know enough ; but of his home life, next to nothing.
That he lived in Gerrard-street, and was a constant frequenter of
AVill's coffee-house, Covent-garden, seems to be almost all that is
known of his town resorts. Like Addison, and most literary men
who have married titled ladies, he did not find it contribute much
to his comfort. His wife was Lady Elizabeth Howard, the eldest
daughter of the Earl of Berkshire, and sister of his friend Sir Robert
Howard. He was married at St. Swithin's Church, London Stone,
Cannon-street, and the following copy of the entry in the register
has been kindly forwarded to me by the Rev. W. G. Watkins, son of
the rector of that church. It is in engrossing hand : " John Dryden
and Elizabeth Howard married 1st of December, 1663, by license."
His wife's temper is said to liave been very peculiar, and that she
looked down on Dryden as of inferior rank, though he was descended
from a very old family, mixed with the most distinguished men of
the nobility, and kus the first man of his time ; but conceit or the
blindness of aristocratic pride do not alter the real nature or pro-
portion of things, except in the vision of the person afflicted with
them. Dryden was the great personage, and his titled wife the little
one, and on him, therefore, ]ay the constant pressure of the unequal
yoke he bore.
What no doubt rendered the conduct of his wife worse, was the
])ride of her family on the one hand, and the unlucky connexion of
Dryden's brothers with ordinary trades. His family, and that of his
mother, the Pickerings, had taken a decided part during the civil
wars for the parliament, while that of his wife had been as zealous
ou the royalist side. Besides this, Erasmus, his immediate younger
brother, was in trade in King-street, Westminster ; James, the fourth
brother, was a tobacconist in London ; one of his sisters was married
to a bookseller in Little Britain, and another to a tobacconist in
Newgate-street ; these would be dreadful alliances to a family proud
and poor. " No account," says Mitford, in his life of the poet, " has
been transmitted of the person of Dryden's wife, nor has any portrait
of her been discovered. I am afraid her personal attractions were
not superior to her mental endowments ; that her temper was way-
ward ; and that the purity of her character was sullied by some early
indiscretions. A letter from Lady Elizabeth to her son at Rome is
preserved, as remarkable for the elegance of the style as the correct-
ness of the orthography. She says — ' Your father is much at woon
86 to his health, and his dcfnese is wosce, but much as he was wh lu
76 DIIYDKN.
he was heare ; give me a true accouut how my deare son Charles is
head dus.' Can this be the lady who had formerly held captive iu
her chains the gallant Earl of Chesterfield ? "
" Lady Elizabeth Dryden," says Scott, " had long disturbed her
husband's domestic happiness. ' His invectives,' says Malone, * against
the mai-ried state were frequent and bitter, and were continued to
the latest period of his life ; ' and he adds from most respectable
authority, that the family of the poet held no intimacy with his lady,
confining their intercourse to mere visits of ceremony. How could
they 1 how could the tobacconist, and the other tobacconist's wife,
and the little bookseller's wife of Little Britain, venture under the
roof of the proud lady of the proud house of Howard, with * her weak
intellects and her violent temper 1 ' "
A similar alienation also, it is said, took place between her and
her relatives. Sir Eobert Howard perhaps being excepted ; for her
brother, the Honourable Edward Howard, talks of Dryden's being
engaged in a translation of Virgil as a thing he had learned merely
by common report. Her wayward disposition, Malone says, was,
however, the eflect of a disordered imagination, which, shortly after
Dryden's death, degenerated into absolute insanity, in which state
she remained until her own death in 1714, probably in the seventy-
ninth year of her age.
Poor Dryden ! what with his wife — consort one cannot call her,
and help-meet she was not — and with a tribe of tobacconist brothers
on one hand, and proud Howards on the other ; and a host of titled
associates, and his bread to dig with his pen, one pities him from
one's heart. Well might he, when his wife once said it would be
much better for her to be a book than a woman, for then she should
have more of his company, reply, " I wish you were, my dear, an
almanac, and then I could change you once a year." It is not well to
look much into such a home, except for a warning. Yet the outside
of that life, like many others, would have deceived an ordinary
spectator. There all was brilliant and imposing. " Whether," says
Sir Walter Scott, "we judge of the rank which Dryden held in
society by the splendour of his titled and powerful friends, or bj
his connexions among men of genius, we must consider him a;i
occupying at one time as high a station, in the very foremost circle,
as literary reputation could gain for its owner. Independent of the
notice with which he was honoured by Charles himself, the poet
numbered among his friends most of the distinguished nobility.
The great Duke of Ormond had already begun that connexion whicii
subsisted between Dryden and three generations of the house of
Butler. Thomas Lord Clifibrd, one of the Cabal ministry, was
uniform in patronizing the poet, and appears to have been active in
introducing him to the king's favour. The Duke of Newcastle loved
liim sufficiently to present him with a play for the stage ; the witty
Earl of Dorset, then Lord Buckhurst, and Sir Charles Sedley, admired
in that loose age for the peculiar elegance of his loose poetry, were
liis intimate associates, as is evident from the turr of The Essay on
Dramatic Poesy, where they are the speakers. Wilmot, Earl of
DETDEN. 77
Rochester, soon to act a very different part, was then anxious to
vindicate Dryden's writings ; to mediate for him with those who
distributed the royal favour, and was thus careful, not only of his
reputation, but his fortune. In short, the author of what was then
held the first style of poetry, was sought for by all among the great
and gay who wished to maintain some character for literary taste.
It was then Dryden enjoyed those genial nights described in the
dedication of the Assignation, when 'discourse was neither too
serious nor too light, but always pleasant, and for the most part
instructive ; the raillery neither too sharp upon the present, nor too
censorious upon the absent ; and the cups such only as raised the
conversation of the night, without disturbing the business of the
morrow.' He had not yet experienced the disadvantages attendant
on such society, or learned how soon hterary eminence becomes the
Dbject of detraction, of envy, of injury, even from those who can
best feel its merit, if they are discouraged by dissipated habits from
emulating its flight, or hardened by perverted feeling against loving
its possessors." But all this came ; and in the mean time the poet
had to work like Pegasus in the peasant's cart, for the means to
maintain this intercourse with such lofty society. And what did all
these great friends do for him ? They procured him no good post in
return for good services rendered to their partj^, but the poet's
meagre office of the laureateship, which, added to that of historio-
grapher to royalty, brought him 200/. a year, and his butt of canary.
Poor Dryden ! wdth the cross wife, and the barren blaze of aristocracy
around him, the poorest coal-heaver need not have envied him.
Neither did " glorious John " escape his sliare of annoyance from
his cotemporaries of the pen, nor from the pubhshers. He had
a controversy with his friend and brother-in-law, Sir Robert Howard,
on the true nature of dramatic poetry, which speedily degenerated
into personal bitterness and a long estrangement. Then came the
Rehearsal, that witty farce in which he was ridiculed in the character
of Bayes, and his hterary productions, as well as personal character-
istics, held up to the malicious merriment of the world by a
combination of the wits and fashionable penmen of the time;
amongst them the notorious Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, the
author of Hudibras, the Bishop of Rochester, and others. The
miserable Elkanah Settle was set up as a rival of hira ; and after
these rose in succession the hostile train of the licentious Lord
Rochester, Lord Shaftesbury, Milbourne, Blackmore, and others, by
whom every species of spite, misrepresentation, and ridicule, were
for years heaped upon him. Nor did his enemies restrain themselves
to the use of the pen in their attacks upon him. One of the most
prominent events of Dryden's life is that of a ruffianly attack upon
him as he returned from his club at Will's cofiee-house, on a winter's
night. Lord [Mulgrave had published a satire called an Essay on
Satire, in which Rochester and other wits and profligates of the
time were introduced. The poem was a wretched affair; but
\)rydcn, to oblige Mulgrave, had undertaken to revise it. Much
.abour he could not have bestowed upon it, it was ?o flat and poor ;
78 DRYDEN.
but liocliestcr thought fit to attribute it to Drydeii himself; auil
a set of ruflians, supposed to be hired by him and the Duchess of
Portsmouth, who had been also reflected on, fell on the poet, as he
passed through Rose-street, Covent-garden, on his way from Will's
coffee-house to his own house in Gerrard-street. A reward of 50/.
was in vain offered in the London Gazette and other newspapers for
the discovery of the perpetrators of the outrage. The beating was,
in those loose times, thought a good joke. The Rose-alley ambuscade
became almost proverbial ; and even Mulgrave, the real author of the
satire, and upon whose shoulders the blows ought in justice to have
descended, in his Art of Poetry, thus mentions the circumstance
with a pitiful sneer : —
" Though praised and punished for another's rhymes,
His own deserve as great applause sometimes."
Thus attacked with pens and cudgels by the envious writers of the
(lay, Dryden was nearly (starved by the booksellers. On one occasion,
provoked by the refusal of timely supplies by Jacob Tonson, he did
not do as Johnson did by Osborne, knock him down with a quarto,
but ran him through with a triplet, describing the bibliopole's
person : —
" With leering looks, bull-faced, and freckled fair,
■\Vitli two left legs, and Judas-coloured hair.
And frowzy pores that taint the ambient air."
" Tell the dog," said the i)oet to the messenger by whom he sent
these complimentary lines, " that he who wrote these can write
more." But he needed not to write more ; they were as effective as
he could desire. Jacob, however, on his part, could make his tongue
as i)ungent as Dryden could his verse. Johnson, in the "Life of
Dryden," relates that Lord Bolingbroke one day making a call on
Dryden, he heard another person enter the house. "That," said
Dryden, " is Tonson. You will take care not to depart before he
goes away; for I have not completed the sheet which I promised
him ; and if you leave me unprotected, I shall suQ'er all the rudeness
to which his resentment can prompt his tongue."
Perhaps the happiest hours of Dryden's life, next to those spent
over his finest compositions in his study, were passed at Will's
coffee-house. After dinner, at two o'clock, he used to repair thither,
where assembled all the most fiimous men of the time. There he
reigned su2)reme. He had a chair placed for him by the chimney in
winter, and near the balcony in summer ; where, says his biographer,
he pronounced, e.v cathedra, his opinions upon new jiublications, and
in general upon all matters of doubtful criticism. Latterly, all who
had occasion to ridicule and attack him, represent him as presiding
in this little senate. His opinions, however, were not maintained
with dogmatism, but he listened to criticism, provided it was just,
from whatever unexpected and undignified quarter it happened to
come. In general, however, it may be suj^posed that few ventured
to dispute his opinion, or to place themselves in the gap between
liim and the object of his censure.
Dryd'^n's house, which he appears to have resided in from the
DRTDEN. 79
period of his luarriage till his death, was, as I h-ave said, in Gerrard-
street : the fifth on the left hand, coming from Little Newport-street,
now No. 43. The back windows looked upon the gardens of Lei-
cester House, of which circumstance the poet availed himself to pay
a handsome compliment to the noble owner. His excursions to the
country seem to have been frequent ; perhaps the more so, as Lady
Elizabeth always remained in town. In his latter days, the friend-
ship of his relations, John Dryden, of Chesterton, and Mrs. Steward,
of Cotterstock, rendered their houses agreeable places of abode to
the aged jjoet. They appear also to have had a kind solicitude about
his little comforts, of value infinitely beyond the contributions they
made towards aiding him.
The principal traits of his domestic life have been collected
together by Malone. From these, and from the pen of Congreve, we
learn that he was, in youth, of handsome form and agreeable counte-
nance ; modest in his manner, reluctant to intrude himself on the
notice and company of others, easily chilled and rebuffed by anything
like a distant behaviour. He is described as most amiable and
affectionate in his family, generous beyond his means, and most
forgiving of injuries ; all noble traits of character. Malone related,
on the authoi-ity of Lady Diyden, that at that time the poet's little
estate at Blakesley was occupied by one Harriots, grandson of the
tenant who held it in Dryden's time, who .stated that his grandfather
used to take great pleasure in talking of him. He was, he said, the
easiest and the kindest landlord in the world ; and never raised the
rent during the whole time he possessed the estate. The two most
unfortunate circumstances in his life, next to his marriage, were his
going over from Puritanism to Popery, and from the liberal opinions
of his family to the adherence to the worst of kings. For these
changes it would be difficult to assign any better motive than that
of mending his fortunes. But if this were the case, he was bitterly
punished for it in both instances. The monarchs that he flattered
were Stuarts, and the last of them being driven out, left him to
encounter all the scorn, the sarcasms, and sacrifices that were sure to
come against him with the Dutch monarch of 1688. He was, instead
of gaining more from royalty by his change, deprived of that which
he had — the laureateship and office of historiographer ; and saw
them conferred, with 300/. a year, on his unworthy rival, Shadwell.
The change of his religion was equally unpropitious. His sons
became more connected with Rome than England. Charles, the
eldest, was Chamberlain of the household of Pope Innocent XII ;
but having suffered by a fall from a horse, he returned to England,
and was drowned in attempting to swim across the Thames at
Datchett, near Windsor, in August, 1704. The second son, John,
also went to Rome, and acted as the deputy of Charles, in the Pope's
household ; he died at Rome. Both of these sons were poetical, and
published. Erasmus-Henry, the third son, went also to Rome, and
became a captain in the Pope's guards. He afterwards returned to
England, and succeeded to the family title of Baronet, but not to the
jstate of Canons-Ashby, where he, however, continued to I'.ve with
80 DRYDEN.
the proprietor, Edward Drydeu, his cousin, till his death in 1710
Thus terminated the race of the gi'eat satiric poet.
In the county of Northampton there are various places connected
with Dryden. He was of the old family of the Drydens or Dridens
of Cauons-Ashby, which family still remained there at the time of
my visit. The poet was born at the parsonage-house of Aldwinkle
All-Saints. His father was Erasmus Dryden, and his mother Mary
Pickei'ing, the daughter of the rector of Aldwinkle, a sou of the
well-known Sir Gilbert Pickering, a zealous puritan. It aj^pears that
oitr author's father lived at Tichmarsh, and that his son was born
under his grandfather's roof. At Tichmarsh, accordingly, we find
Dryden receiving his first education, whence he proceeded to West-
minster, and studied under Dr. Busby, and thence to Cambridge.
Scott says — " If we can believe an ancient tradition, the poem
»f 'The Hind and Panther' was chiefly comj^osed in a country
retirement, at Rushton in .N'orthamptonshire. There was an em-
bowered walk at this place, which, from the pleasure which the poet
took in it, retained the name of Dryden's Walk ; and here was
erected, about the middle of the last century, an urn, with the
following inscription : ' In memory of Dryden, who frequented these
shades, and is here said to have composed his poem of ' The Hind
and Panther.' "
This spot was, no doubt, the old house and park of the Treshams ;
that old, zealous Catholic family, of which one member, Sir Francis
Tresham, played so conspicuous a part in the Gunpowder Plot. This
Sir Francis Tresham had been actively engaged in the affair of the
Earl of Essex, and his head had only been rescued from the block by
his father bribing a r/reaf ladij, and some people about the court,
with several thousand pounds. This business was so closely veiled,
that for some time the direct proofs of Tresham's connexion with
the business escaped the hands of the historians. The late examina-
tions into the treasures of the State Paper Office, have, however,
made this fact, like so many others, clear. Long ago, also, original
documents, fully proving it, fell into the hands of Mr. Baker, the
excellent historian of Northamptonshire, including an admirable
love-letter by this Sir Francis ; who, notwithstanding his narrow
escape, again rushed into the Gunpowder treason, being a near rela-
tion of Catesby, the prime actor in it. The movements of Tresham
in the matter have all the character of those of an actor in some
strange romance. From the moment that he was admitted to the
secret, Catesby was struck with inward terror and misgivings.
Tresham augmented this alarm, by beginning soon to jjlead warmly
for warning the Lords Stourton and Mounteagle, who had married his
sisters. A few days after, he suddenly came upon Catesby, Winter,
and Fawkes, in Enfield Chase, and reiterated his entreaty. They
refused ; and then, on the 26th of October, as Lord Mounteagle was
sitting at supper, at an old seat of his at Hoxton, which he seldom
visited, and to which he had now come suddenly, a letter was brought
Jn by his page, saying, he had received it from a tall man, whose face
lie could not discern in the dark, and who went hastily away, Tlio
CRTDEN. 81
letter was tossed carelessly by Mounteagle to a geutleman iu hia
service, who read it aloud- It was the very warning which Tresham
wished so earnestly to convey to him. Mounteagle, iu astonishment,
carried the letter to Cecil the next morning, and thus the secret of
the impending catastrophe was out. Once more Catesby and Winter
appointed a meeting with Tresham in Enfield Chase. Their purpose
was to charge him with the warning of Mounteagle, and if he were
found guilty, to stab him to the heart on the spot. But while they
told him what had been done, they fixed their eyes searchingly on
his countenance ; all was clear and firm ; not a muscle moved, not
a tone faltered ; he swore solemn oaths that he was ignorant of the
letter, and they let him go. This man, when part of the conspirators
were arrested, remained at large ; while others fled, he hastened to
the Council to offer his services in apprehending the rebels. Finally,
Arrested and conveyed to the Tower himself, there, under torture, he
implicated the Jesuits, Garnet and Greenway, in some treason in
Queen Elizabeth's time, then retracted the confession, and died in
Agony, as the Catholics believed of poison. Such was the career and
end of this strange man. The family estate passed away into the
hands of the Cockaynes, and is now the property of Mr. Hope.
Could there be a more inspiring solitude for the composition of a
poem, the object of which was to smooth the way for the return of
Cathohc ascendancy, and that by a poet warm with the first fires of
a proselyte zeal ?
Amongst other places of Dryden's occasional sojourn, may be
mentioned Charlton, in Wiltshire, the seat of his wife's father, the
Earl of Berkshire, whence he dates the introduction to his Annus
Mirabilis ; and Chesterton, in Huntingdonshire, the seat of his
kinsman, John Driden, where he translated part of Virgil. In the
country he delighted in the pastime of fishing, and used, says
Malone, to spend some time with Mi-. Jones, of Ramsden, in Wilt-
shire. Di;rfey was sometimes of this party; but Dryden appears
to have underrated his skill in fishing, as much as his attempt at
poetry. Hence Fenton, in his Epistle to Lambard : —
" By long experience, Durfey may, no doubt,
Ensnare a gudgeon, or sometimes a trout ;
Yet Dryden once exclaimed in partial spite,
' We fish r — because the man attempts to write."
And finally, Canons-Asliby connects itself inevitably with his name.
It was the ancient patrimony of the family. It was not his father's,
it was not his, or his son's, though the title generally connected with
it fell to his son, and there his son lived and died ; yet, as the place
which gives name and status to the line, it will always maintain an
association with the memory of the poet. These are the particulars
respecting it collected by Mr. Bakei*. The mansion of the Drydens,
seated in a small deer park, is a singular building of different periods.
The oldest part, as early as the beginning of the sixteenth century,
or pcrha])S earlier, is built round a small quadrangle. There is a
dining-room in the house thirty feet long by twenty feet wide, which
'\H said to be entirely flooi'cd and wainscoted with tlie timl^er of
82 DRYDEN.
one single oak, ■which grew in this lordship. In this roota are various
portraits of persons of and connected with the family. The drawing-
I'oom is traditionally supposed to have been fitted up for the recep-
tion of Anne of Denmark, queen of James I. The estate is good,
but not so large as formerly, owing to the Etrange condvict of the
late Lady Dryden, who cut oft' her own children, three sons and two
daughters, leaving the whole ancient patrimonial property from them
to the son of her lawyer, the lawyer himself refusing to have it, or
make such a will. The estate here was, it appears, regained, but
only by the sacrifice of one in Lincolnshire. Such are the strange
events in the annals of families which local historians rarely record.
How little could this lady comprehend the honour lying in the name
of Dryden ; how much less the nature and duties of a mother !
The monument of the poet in Westminster Abbey is familiar to
the public, placed there by SheflSeld, Duke of Buckingham, bearing
only a single word, the illustrious name of — Dryden.
JOSEPH ADDIS0^7.
Addison was a fortunate man ; the houses in which he lived testify
it. His fame as a poet, though considerable in his own time, has
now dwindled to a point which would not warrant us to include him
in this work, were not his reputation altogether of that kind which
inseparably binds him up with the poetical history of his country.
lie was not only a popular poet in his own day, but he was the
friend and advocate of true poetry wherever it could be found. It
was he who, in the Spectator, first sounded boldly and zealously
abroad the glory of John Milton. In our time the revival of true
poetry, the return to nature and to truth, have been greatly indebted
to the old ballad poetry of the nation. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southcy,
Scott, and others, attribute the formation of their taste in the highest
degree to the reading of Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry.
But it was Addison who long before had pointed out these sources,
and these effects. It was he who brought forward again the brave
old ballad of Chevy Chace ; who reminded us that Sir Philip Sidney
liad said that it always stirred his heart like the sound of a tnmipet.
It was he who showed us the inimitable touches of nature and of
84 ADDISON.
true pathos in it, and how aUve was the old bard who comjjosed it
to all the influences of nature and of circumstances.
Equally did he vindicate and commend to our hearts the sweet
ballad of the Babes in the Wood, and others of the true school of
nature and feeling. Who shall say that it was not owing to these
criticisms that Bishop Percy himself was led to the study and the
collection of the precious relics of former ages, that lay scattered
about amongst the people ? The services of Addison to the poetry
of England are far greater through what he i-ecommended than what
he composed ; and the man who, more than all others, contributed
to make periodical literature what it has become, and gave us, moi"e-
over, Sir Roger de Coverley, and the spirit of true old English life
which surrounds him, with all those noble papers in which reli-
gion and philosophy so beautifully blend in the Spectator, must
ever remain enshrined in the most grateful remembrance of his
countrymen.
Addison, I have said, was a fortunate man. It is well for us that
he was in that one case so fortunate. It was the service that his
pen could render to the government of .the time, that raised him
from thp o,ondition of a poor clergyman's son, to a minister of
state, and thus gave him afterwards leisure to pursue those
beautiful aesthetic speculations which have had so decided and so
permanent an influence on our literature and modes of thinking.
Addison had his faults, and was not without those thorns in the
fiide which few escape in their progi-ess through the wilderness
of the world ; but so far as we are concerned, we owe to him
nothing but love and admiration. Thus much said, we must, in
this brief article, leave all the details of his life and progress, of
his travels, and his literary contests and achievements, as matters
well known, and confine oxu'selves to a survey of the abodes in
which he lived.
He wafj born at the parsonage of Milston, in Wiltshire, a humble
dwelling, of which a view may be seen in Miss Aiken's life of him ;
his father being then incumbent of the parish. He was sent to
schools at Shrewsbury and Lichfield, and then to the Charterhouse,
where he formed that acquaintance with Richard Steele, which re-
sulted in such lasting consequences to literature. Thence he went to
Oxford, where he continued till the age of five-and-twenty, when,
finding that, notwithstanding his fellowship and the resource of his
pupils, he was so for from realizing a livelihood, that he was greatly
in debt, he gave up all thought of taking orders, and devoted himself
to public business. Fully to qualify himself for this, he applied to
Montague, afterwards Lord Halifax, with whose friendship he was
already honoured, as well as with that of Lord Somers, and procured
from government a pension of 300/. a-year, to enable him to make
the circle of Euroi^ean travel, and acquaint himself with the real
condition of those countries with which every English statesman
must come into continual practical contact. He first went over to
France, saw Paris, and then settled down at Blois, to make himself
master of the language. He continued nearly a year and a half at
ADDISON. 8C
Blois ; and it was to his intense study during this time that he owed
his great knowledge of French hterature. He then sailed from ]\Iar-
seilles for Italy. " It was in December, 1700," says Miss Aiken, "that
he embarked at Marseilles for Genoa, whence he proceeded through
Milan, Venice, Eavenna, and Loretto, to Eome; thence to Naples by
sea, and proceeded, by Florence, Bologna, and Turin, to Geneva ;
where he arrived exactly one year from his quitting Marseilles, and
two and a half after his departure from England." At Geneva he was
met by the news of the death of King William. This was followed
by the dismissal of the Whigs from office, the consequent loss of his
pension, and the blasting of all his hopes of further advantage from
them for the present. Instead, therefore, of attending on Prince
Eugene, as secretary from the English king, as was appointed for
him, he turned aside, on his own slender resources, to take a survey
of Germany. After making a pleasant tour through the Swiss
cantons, he descended into the plains of Germany, but found the
inhabitants in arms, and full of apprehension of the Bavarian troops,
and was advised not to trust himself in the territories of the Duke
of Bavaria. He therefore lost all opportunity of seeing Munich,
Augsburg, and Ratisbon, and was obliged to make his way through
the Tyrol to Vienna. In Vienna he felt himself in great anxiety on
account of money, and made his v,-ay back through Holland home.
Before reaching it, he received a proposal to go on a second tour of
Europe for three years, with the son of the Dv;ke of Somerset, but
refused the Duke's offers. Soon after his return to England, he was
engaged to write a poem on the victory of Blenheim, to serve the
Whig cause, and produced The Campaign ; at the time, a most suc-
cessful poem, but now chiefly remembered by the passage in which
he represents Marlborough, like the angel of divine vengeance, riding
on the whirlwind and directing the storm. From this period his
advance was rapid, and we here leave him to the biographer, and
restrict ourselves to our proper task.
The change of circumstances, from the humble author to the
minister, and the friend of ministers ; from the simple clergyman's
son to the husband of a countess, and the step-father of an earl,
cannot be more strikingly displayed than by the singular contrast of
his abodes under these different characters. D'Israeli, in his Curi-
osities of Literature, says that Pope, when taking his usual walk
with Harte in the Haymarket, desired Harte to enter a little shop,
when, going up three pair of stairs into a small room, Poj^e said,
" In this gaiTet Addison wrote his Campaign." That was certainly
somewhat different to Bilton and Holland-house. But between the
garret in the Haymarket, and these princely houses, there were some
connecting and ascending steps in residence. Addison was always
anxious to get to a quiet retreat, amidst trees and greenness, where he
could write. Such was afterwards his abode at Sandy-end, a hamlet
of Fulham. Here he appears to have occupied apartments in a
lodging-house established at this place ; whence several of the pub-
lished letters of Steele are dated, written at times when he seems to
have been the guest of Addison. From Sandy-end, too, are dated
,^6 ADDISOi;.
some letters to Lord Warwick, his future step-son, then a hoy,
;ind very anxious to get news ahout birds and birds'-nests, which
i\ddison most cordially gives him. He then went to Ireland as
chief secretary to the Earl of Wharton, on his appointment to the
TiOrd-Lieutenaucy, and resided for some time in that capacity in
Dublin. After this, he removed to a lodging at Kensington, owing
to his increasing intimacy at Holland-house, and was about this
time a frequent guest at Northwick-park, with the first Lord North-
wick, and there one of the best portraits of him, by Kneller, still
remains.
in 1716, he married the Dowager Countess of Warwick ; but five
years before this, that is, in 171 1, he had made the purchase of Bilton,
as a suitable residence for a person of his position in the state, and
of that high connexion towards which he was already looking.
Before, however, we indulge ourselves with a view of Addison at
]jilton, let us see the mode of his life in town, on the authority of
Pope, Spence, and Johnson : — " Of the course of Addison's familiar
day, before his marriage. Pope has given a detail. He had in the
house with him Budgell, and perhaps Philips. His chief com-
panions were Steele, Budgell, Philips, Carey, Davenant, and Colonel
Brett. With one or other of these he always breakfasted. He
studied ail morning ; then dined at a tavern ; and went afterwards
to Button's.
" Button had been a servant in the Countess of Warwick's family ;
who, under the patronage of Addison, kept a coflfee-house on the
north side of Eussell-street, about two doors from Covcut-garden.
Here it was that the wits of that time used to assemble. It is
said, when Addison had suffered any vexation from the countess, he
withdrew the company from Button's house.
" From the coffee-house he went to a tavern, where he often sat
late and drank too much wine. In the bottle, discontent seeks foi*
comfort, cowardice for courage, and bashfulness for confidence. It
is not unlikely that Addison was first seduced to excess by the
manumission which he obtained from the servile timidity of his
sober hours. He that feels ojjpression from the presence of those
to whom he knows himself superior, will desire to set loose his
])o',vers of conversation ; and who, that ever asked succours from
Bacchus, was able to preserve himself from being enslaved by his
auxiliary ?
" Among those friends it was that Addison displayed the elegance
of his colloquial accomplishments, which may easily be supposed
such as Pope represents them. The remark of Mandeville, who,
when he had passed an evening in his company, declared that he
was a parson in a tie-wig, can detract little from his character ; he
was always reserved to strangers, and was not incited to uncommon
freedom by a character like that of Mandeville." — Johmoiis Life of
Addison.
The statement made by Dr. Johnson, in his Lives of the Poets,
and by Spence, that Addison's marriage, like that of Dryden, was
not a happy one, has lately been strongly argued against by Misa
ADDISON. 87
Aikin. One would glacUy be able to acquiesce in it, and if we could
believe the painter as well as Miss Aikin, we should be inclined to
believe the Countess of Warwick possessed both unusual sense and
sweetness of temper. The current of tradition, however, runs
strongly the other way ; and I fear we have not now sufficient
strength of evidence to divert it. As little do I anticipate that Miss
Aikin will prove Addison a veiy sober man ; the statements of his
cotemporaries, and the voice of tradition, are against her. We must
be content to take the man with his failings and his secret griefs,
the foils to a great reputation and a great prosperity.
Addison purchased the estate of Bilton for 10,000/., and the money
was principally advanced by his brother, Gulston Addison, governor
of Fort St. George, at Madras. Thither he conveyed his paintings,
liis library, and his collection of medals, which, as connected with
his Dialogues on ]\Iedals, was very valuable. Here it may be siip-
posed that, during the five years previous to his marriage, he passed
much of his leisure time. It was a beautiful retirement, well calcu-
lated to dispose to thought, and worthy of the author of the Spec-
tator. If we are to believe tradition, that he planted most of the
trees now standing around it, he must ha^•e taken great i)leasure in
its embellishment. On his death, he left it to his only child, Char-
lotte Addison, who could not have been much more than two years
old. Here she spent her long life, from the death of her mother, the
countess, — dying in 1797, at about eighty yeats of age. Miss Addison
— for she was never married — is said to have been of weak intellect ;
a fact traced by many to the want of real and spiritual union be-
tween her parents, — a supposition which the researches of our own
times into the nature of man tend greatly to confirm. With the
usual effect of aristocratic prejudice on a feeble mind, she is said to
have been especially proud of her mother, but to have rarely men-
tioned her father. Being left to the care and education of her mother,
this does not very strongly corroborate the case which Miss Aikin
labours to establish. It does not speak very eloquently for that true
affection which she tells us the countess bore towards Addison, and
which she endeavours to prove by his affection for her, as evidenced
by his making her his sole executrix, and guardian of his child. By
the fruits we must judge of the woman, as well as the tree : and the
fruit of Lady Warwick's education of her child was, by all accounts,
this, — that she left her ashamed of her fath-^r the commoner, though
an immortal man, and proud of her mother, a countess — and nothing
more. There arc many stories of the eccentricities and incre<\singi
fatuity of poor Miss Addison, floating in the village and neigkcour
hood of Bilton, which may as well die out with time. The disposal
of her property marks the tendency of her feelings. Her grandfather,
Dr. Lancelot Addison, was a native of Cumberland. There, at the
time of Miss Addison making her will, still remained many near and
poor relations, whom she entirely passed over, as she had done in
her lifetime, and bequeathed Bilton to the Honourable John Bridgmau
Simpson, brother to Lord Bridgman, whose representative is now
Earl (;f Bradford. This gentleman she chose to consider her ncarefi
88 AUDISON.
relation, because her mother's relation, though very near ln3 could
not be. Her mother, the countess, was the daughter of Sir Thomas
Middleton, of Chirk Castle, Denbighshire, by a daughter of Sir Orlando
Bridgman ; so that this Mr. Bridgman Simpson, a relative of her
grandmother, could not be a very near relative of her own, while she
must have had first cousins of the paternal hue in plenty. Those
relatives of her own name, and who would have handed down the
property, bound up with the name of Addison, as a monument of
their family fame, disputed her will, but ineffectually. She is buried
in the chancel of the church.
Soon after Miss Addison's death, the library was removed to
London, and in May, 1799, was sold by auction for 456/. '2s. del., and
Addison's collection of medals for 92/. 2s. 2d. The poet's screen,
drinking cup, teapot, etc. are now in the possession of "William
Ferdinand Wratislaw, Esq. of Rugby, the descendant of one of the
most ancient femilies in Europe,— no other than the royal family of
Bohemia, of which our " good Queen Ann," the wife of Eichard II.,
was a princess ; and of which— that is, of Mv. Wratislaw, of Rugby,
the present head of the house— the young Count Adam Wratislaw,
allied to Queen Victoria by his aunt the Princess of Leiningeu, is a
near relative. They could not be in better hands.
Since Miss Addison's death, the house at Bilton has been succes-
sively occupied by Mrs. Brookes and Lliss Moore ; by Mr. Appcrley,
the well-known Nimrod of sporting literature ; by Sir Charles Palmer,
Bart. ; by the Vernon family ; by the Misses Boddington ; and lastly,
by Mr. Simpson himself. Mr. Simpson has considerably improved
the house, rebuilding the back part facing the garden ; but, on the
other hand, he cut down a considerable part of a fine avenue of limes,
stretching along one side of the garden down to a wood below, called
Addison's AValk. This avenue is said to have been planted by Addison,
and terminated in a clump of evergreens, where was an alcove, called
Addison's Seat. It was not till about half this avenue was felled,
that Mr. Simpson heard that it was Addison's AValk, and caused the
destruction to stop. He was at the time of our visit a very ^ old
man, and had not rasided at Bilton since the death of his wife. The
house is, however, furnished ; and after reading Miss Aikin's state-
ment, that " a small number of pictures collected by Addison, still,
it is believed, remain in the house, which are mostly portraits of his
contemporaries, and intrinsically of small value," how gi-eat was my
delight and surprise, to find what and how many these paintings
were ! But let us make a more regular approach to this gem of an
old house, to the actual country seat of our " dear short-face," the
Spectator.
Issuing from Rugby, Bilton salutes you from the hill on the oppo-
site side°of the valley which you have to cross in order to reach it.
A lofty mass of trees, on a fine airy elevation ; a small grey church,
with finely tapering spire in front of them, show you where Bilton
lies ; but house or village you do not discern till you are close upon
them. It was not till I had approached within a few hundred yards
of Addison's house, or the Hall, as it is called, that I saw the cottaged
ADDISON. 89
of the village strett.hing away to my right hand; aud a carriage-road
diverging to my left towards the church, brought me within view of
the house ; there it stood in the midst of the fine old trees. A
villager informed me that no one hved there but the gardener, nor
had done for years. The autumn had dyed all the trees with its rich
and yet melancholy hues ; leaves strewed the ground in abundance ;
and there was a feeling of solitude and desertion about the place
which was by no means out of keeping, when I reflected that I was
approaching the house of Addison, so long quitted by himself. A finu
old avenue of hme-trees, winding with the carriage-drive, brought
me to the front of the house. It is a true Elizabethan mansion, not
too large for a poet, yet large enough for any country gentleman
who is not overdone with his establishment. The front of the main
portion is lofty, handsome, and in excellent repair. A projecting
tower runs up from the porch to the roof Over the door is cut, in
freestone, that masonic sign — the circle enclosing two interlaced
triangles, indicating the degree of the royal arch ; and near the top
is the date of 1623. On the right hand, a wing of lower buildings
runs forward from the main erec'.ion, forming, as it were, one side
of a court. These buildings turn their gables towards you, and are
covered with ivy. On the left hand, but standing back in a stable-
yard, are the out-buildings, seeming, however, to balance the whole
fabric, and giving it an air of considerable extent. All round,
adjoining the buildings and along the avenue, grow evergreens in
tali and luxuriant masses.
On the other side of the house lies the old garden, retaining all
the characters of a past age. The centre consists of a Hue lawn : the
upper part of which, near the house, has recently been laid out in
fancy flower-beds, in the form of a star, and corner beds to make up
the square. The rest appears as it might be when Addison left it.
On the right, a square-cut holly hedge divides it from the fields,
which are scattered with lofty trees, amongst which are foreign oaks,
said to be raised from acorns brought home by the poet. To tho
left, the garden is bounded by a still more massy square-clipped
hedge of yew, opening halfway down into a large kitchen-garden,
being at the .same time at the upper end an old Dutch flower-garden.
At the far side of this garden, opposite to the entrance through the
yew hedge, is an alcove, and down that side extends the hme avenue
called Addison's Walk. At the bottom of this garden are fishponds,
and in the field below, an oak wood. Thus, amidst lofty trees, some
of them strong, old, and crooked, presenting a scene worthy of a
picture by Claude Lorraine, you look down over the garden to rich
fields descending into the country below. At the bottom right-hand
corner is an alcove, shut in by a group of evergreen shrubs and pine-
trees from the house, but overlooking tlie fields and woodlands,
called Addison's Seat ; and a very pleasant seat it is, full of quiet
retirement. Such is the exterior of Bilton. The interior of the main
part of the house consists principally of two large rooms, a dining
and drawing room. These extend quite through, arc lighted at each
end, and the projection in front forms a sort of little cabinet in each
90 ADDISON.
room. These two fiuc large rooms are hung round with the paintings
placed here by Addison : whether they are few, and of no intrinsic
value, will soon be seen.
In the dining-room are, first, full-lengths of James I, by Mai-k
Garrard ; Lord Crofts, Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, by Balthazar
Gerbier ; the Duke of Hamilton, Henry Rich, Earl of Warwick,
Prince Rupert, and Prince JMaurice, all by Vandyck ; Sir Thomas
Middleton, the Countess of Warwick's father, by Sir Peter Lely ;
and in the small division in front of the room, Chief Justice the
Earl of Nottingham, by Michael Dahl ; Mr. Secretary Craggs, by Sir
Godfrey KneUer, a man of fair complexion, and handsome, amiable
countenance, in a light bright blue dress ; Sir John Vanburgb, by
Verelst ; and Lord Halifax, by Kneller. These are chiefly three-
quarter figures.
On the staircase is one of the four well-known equestrian Charles
tlie Firsts, by Vandyck, the horse by Stone, one of which is at
Hampton Court, and another at Warwick Castle. Ojiposite to it is
a full-length figure of Anne of Austria, Queen of France, by Mignard.
In the drawing-room, a full-length figure of a lady, labelled as Lady
Isabel Thynne, daughter of the Earl of Holland, behind which some
artist had placed a paper, stating that at Knowle there is a precisely
similar picture marked as Lady Frances Grenfield, daughter of the
Earl of Middleton, and fifth Countess of Dorset ; as well as a copy
of it, likewise, at Knowle. Next to this is a singular picture, which
might be one of Lely's, but bears no name of the artist. Thei-e is
an exact fac-simile of it at Penshurst. It contains two half-length
figures of Lady Lucy Percy, Countess of Carlisle, and Lady Dorothy
Percy, Countess of Leicester, two of the most flattered and remarkable
women of the day, and the latter the mother of Algernon Sidney ;
next is the Duke of Northumberland, their father, by Lely ; and full
lengths of the unfortunate Arabella Stuart, a very pretty and
interesting-looking woman, and Rich, Earl of Holland, by Vandyck.
On the opposite side of the room is the Countess of Warwick,
Addison's wife, by Kneller, in a bright blue dress. She is here
rejjresented as decidedly handsome, having a high, broad forehead,
dark hair falling in natural ringlets, and with a sweet expression of
countenance. To her right is her son, Lord Warwick, as a boy of
twelve or fourteen years old, also in a light-blue dress, and red scarf,
by Dahl. On her left is a head of Lord Kensington, by Lely. A
mother and daughter in two sej)arate pictures, sup^josed to be by
Lei}' ; and the Earl of Warwick again as a boy.
Within the small department of the room, we find a half-length
of Addison himself, also in light blue, which seems the almost
universal colour of Kneller's drapery. He appears here about forty
years of age, his figure fuller, and the countenance more fleshy and
less spiritual than in either of the portraits at Holland-house and
Northwick. Besides this, there is another portrait of the Earl of
Warwick, by Kneller, as a young man ; a head of Gustavus Adolphus,
by Meirveldt ; and lastly of the heiress of the house, Miss Addison
herself. She is here a child, nor is there any one of her of a later
ADDISOy. 9l
age. If this portrait "was done during Addison's life, it must
have been represented as older than she really was ; she could not
be much more than two, and here she appears at least five years of
age. It is a full-length. The child stands by a table, on which is
a basket of flowers, and she holds a pink flower in her hand against
her bosom. She has the air of an intelhgent child, and, as usual,
wears one of Kneller's light-blue draperies, with a lace-bordered
apron, and stomacher of the same.
Such are the paintings at Bilton. They include a most interesting
group of the friends and contemporaries of Addison, besides others.
It is a rare circumstance that they have been permitted to remain
there, when his library and his medals have been dispfersed. Alto-
gether Bilton is one of the most satisfactory specimens of the home.*
and haunts of our departed literary men.
Of Holland-house, the last residence of Addison, it would require
a long article to give a fitting idea. This fine old mansion is full of
historic associations. It takes its name from Henry Rich, Earl of
Holland, whose portrait is in Bilton. It was built by his father-in-
law. Sir Walter Cope, in 1607, and affords a very good specimen of
the architecture of that period. The general form is that of a half
H. The projection in the centre, forming at once porch and tower,
and the two wings supported on pillars, give great decision of effect
to it. The stone quoins vv'orked with a sort of arabesque figure,
remind one of the style of some portions of Heidelberg Castle,
which is what is called on the Continent roccoco. Here it is deemed
Elizabethan ; but the plain buildings attached on each side to the
main body of the house, with their shingled and steep-roofed towers,
have a very picturesque and Bohemian look. Altogether it is a
charming old pile, and the interior corresponds beautifully with the
exterior. There is a fine entrance hall, a libi-ary behind it, and
another library extending the whole length of one of the wings and
the house upstairs, one hundred and five feet in length. The drawing-
room over the entrance hall, called the Gilt-room, extends from front
to back of the house, and commands views of the gardens both ways ;
those to the back are very beautiful.
In the house are, of course, many interesting and valuable works
of art ; a great portion of them memorials of the distinguished men
who have been accustomed to resort thither. In one room is a por-
trait of Charles James Fox, as a child, in a light-blue dress, and
with a close, reddish woollen cap on his head, under which show lace
edges. The artist is unknown, but is supposed to be French. The
countenance is full of life and intelligence, and the " child " in it is,
most remarkably, " the father of the man." The likeness is won-
derful. You can imagine how, by time and circumstance, that child's
countenance expanded into what it became in maturity. There is
also a portrait of Addison, which belonged to his daughter. It
represents him as much younger than any other that I have seen.
In the Gilt-room are marble busts of George IV. and William IV.
On the staircase is a bust of Lord Holland, father of the second earl
and of Charles Fox, by Xollekens. This bust, which is massy, and
E
92 ADDISON.
full of power and expression, is said to have broughb NoIIekena
into his'great repute. The likeness to that of Charles Fox is very
striking. By the same artist there are also the busts of Charlea
Fox, the late Lord Holland, and the present earl. That of Frere,
by Chantrey, is very spirited. There are also, here, portraits of Lord
Lansdowne, Lord John Eussell, and famity portraits. There is also
a large and very curious painting of a fair, by Callot, and an Italian
print of it.
In the library, down stairs, are portraits of Charles James Fox —
a very fine one ; of the late Lord Holland ; of Talleyrand, by Ary
Scheffer, perhaps the best m existence, and the only one which
lie said that he ever sat for ; of Sir Samuel Romilly ; Sir James
^raekintosh ; Lord Erskine, by Sir Thomas Lawrence ; Tierney ;
Francis Horner, by Eaeburn, so like Sir Walter Scott by the same
artist, that I at first supposed it to be him ; Lord Macartney, by
Phillips ; Frere, by Shee ; Mone, Lord Thanet ; Archibald Hamilton;
late Lord Darnley ; late Lord King, when young, by Hoppner ; and
a very sweet foreign fancy portrait of the present Lady Holland.
We miss, however, from this haunt of genius, the portraits of Byron,
Brougham, Crabbe, Blanco White, Hallam, Eogers, Lord Jeffrey, and
others. In the left wing is placed the colossal, model of the statue
of Charles Fox, which stands in Bloomsbury-square.
In the gardens are various memorials of distinguished men.
Amongst several very fine cedars, perhaps the finest is said to have
been planted by Charles Fox. In the quaint old garden is an alcove,
in which are the following lines, placed there by the late carl —
" Here Rogers sat — and here for ever dwell
With me, those pleasures ^rhich he sang so well."
Beneath these are framed and glazed a copy of verses in honour
of the same poet, by Mr. Luttrell. There is also in the same garden,
and opposite this alcove, a bronze bust of Najwleon, on a granite
pillar, with a Greek inscription from the Odyssey, admirably apply-
ing the situation of Ulysses to that of Napoleon at St. Helena — " In
a far-distant isle he remains under the harsh surveillance of base
men."
The fine avenue leading down from the house to the Kensington-
road, is remarkable for having often been the walking and talking-
place of Cromwell and General Lambert. Lambert then occu-
pied Holland-house ; and Cromwell, who lived at the next house,
when he came to converse with him on state affairs, had to speak
very loud to him, because he was deaf. To avoid being overheard,
they used to walk in this avenue.
The traditions regarding Addison here are very slight. They are,
simply, that he used to walk, when composing his Sj)ectators, in the
long library, then a picture-gallery, with a bottle of wine at each
end, which he visited as he alternately arrived at them ; and that
the room in which he died, though not positively known, is sup-
jiosedto be the present dining-room, being then the state bed-room.
The young Earl of Warwick, to whom he there addressed the
ADDISON. 93
emphatic words — "See in what peace a Christian can die!" died
also, himself, in 1721, but two years afterwards. The estate then
devolved to Lord Kensington, descended from Robert Rich, Earl of
Warwick, who sold it, about 1762, to the Right Honourable Henry
Fox, afterwards Lord Holland. Here the early days of the great
statesman, Charles James, were passed ; and here lived the late
patriotic translator of Lope de Vega, amid the society of the first
spirits of the age. It has been rumoured that the present amiable
and intelligent possessor, his son, contemplated pulling down this
venerable and remarkable mansion. Such a thought never did, and
never could, for a moment enter his mind, which feels too proudly
the honours of intellect and taste, far above all mere rank, which
there surround his name and family.
^•5S^*^^^ztaJ
ALEXANDER POPE.
PoPK, who was bom in Loudon, spent nearly the whole of his life
between Binfield, in Windsor Forest, and Twickenham. They were
his only two constant residences ; the time which he passed in
London, he passed but as a visitor, or lodger. Town poet, or poet
of society, as he seems, he was inseparabl;y attached to the country,
though it was the country of an easily-accessible vicinity to town,
and itself pretty thickly inhabited by people of rank and intelligence.
Trom the time that his father purchased the property at Binfield,
with the exception of a short time at school at Twyford, near Win-
chester, and at another school in Marylebone, which was removed
while he was there to Hyde Park Corner, Pope never quitted Binfield
as a residence, till he bought Twickenham. He went soon after his
twelfth year from school, and he continued to reside at Binfield till
1716, when he was twenty-eight years of age ; and singularly enough,
he lived at Twickenham twenty-eight years more, dying in May,
1744, at the age of fifty-six.
As is the case of many other people, who, with all their philo-
sophy, are not content to rest their claims to distinction on their
own virtues and achievements, there was an attempt on the part of
Pope to hang his family on an aristocratic peg ; and, as was to be
POPE. 95
expected in the case of a man who did not spare his enemies!, and
who wrote Dunciads, there was as stout an attempt to pull this peg
out. In his Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, he makes this claun for hia
parentage : —
" Of fjentle blood, part shed in lionour's cause,
Whilst jet in Britain honour had applause,
Each parent sprang."
And in a note to that Epistle we are further informed, " that Mr.
Pope's father was a gentleman of family in Oxfordshire, the head of
which was the Earl of Downe, whose sole heiress married the Earl
of Lindsay. His mother was the daughter of William Turnor, of
York," &c. In reply to this, Warton tells us that when Pope i^ublished
this note, a relation of his own, a Mr. Pottinger, observed that his
cousin. Pope, had made himself out a fine pedigree, but he wondered
where he got it ; that he had never heard anything himself of their
being related to the Earls of Downe ; and, what was more, he had an
old maiden aunt, equally related, a great genealogist, who was always
talking of her family, but never mentioned this circumstance, on
which she certainly would not have been silent, had she known any-
thing of it. That the Earl of Guildford had examined the pedigree
and descents of the Downe family, for any such relationship ; and
that at the Heralds' Office, this pedigree, which Pope had made out
for himself, was considered to be as much fabricated as Mr. Ireland's
tlescent from Shakspeare.
This was one of Pope's weaknesses. No man did more than he
did, in his day, to free Uterature from the long degradation of servile,
fulsome dependence on patrons. He created a property for himself
by his own literary exertions, and set a splendid example to literary
men of independence. He showed them that they might be free,
honourable, and even wealthy, by their o^vn means. He had the
l)ride to place himself on equal terms with lords, when they were
intellectual, but he scorned to flatter them. It was a pride worthy
(jf a literary man, and it was well that when he departed from this
just feeling, and would fain set up a claim to rank with them on
their own terms of ftimily and descent — a proceeding which under-
mined his true and unassailable principle of the dignity of genius —
that he should receive a due reprimand from the hands of his
enemies. The moment that he abandoned in any degree the patent
of God, the long and luminous descent of genius from heaven, —
a patent far above all other patents, a descent far higher than all
other descents, — it was a fitting retribution that the pigmies of the
Dunciad should fling it in his face that his father was a mechanic, —
a hatter, or a cobbler, — as it appears that they did, from his reply to
Lord Ilervey and Lady Mary Wortlej' Alontagu, who themselves
had thus addressed him in print : —
-None thy crabbed numbers can endure,
Hard as thy heart, and as thy birth obscure.'
Tho simple fact was, that Pope's grandfather, the highest they
rould trace the family, was a clergyman in Hampshire. The second
«on was Alexander, the father of the poet. This Alexander waa
96 r-oPE.
intended for mercantile offices, and was sent out to reside in a family
in Lisbon, where he embraced Catholicism, and transmitted that
faith to his son. He afterwards settled in Lombard-street, in London,
as a linen-merchant, where Pope was born ; and, acquiring an inde-
pendence, retired first to Kensington, and afterwards to Binfield,
where he purchased a house, and about twenty acres of land. This
was pedigree enough for a poet, who needs none. In a truer tone,
he pronounces the genuine honours of both his parents and himself
in these words : — " A mother, on whom I never was obliged so far
to reflect, as to say, slie spoiled me; and a father, who never found
himself obliged to say, that he disapproved my conduct. In a word, 1
think it enough that my parents, such as they were, never cost me
a blush ; and that their son, such as he is, never cost them a tear."
Improving on this, in his prologue to his Satires, he disclaims any
adventitious distinctions from his parents whatever, and draws a
beautiful character of his father : —
" Born to no pride, inlieritin;;: no strife,
Nor niarryins discord in a noble wife ;
Stranger to civil and religious rage,
The good man walked innoxious through his age ;
No courts he saw, no suits would ever try.
Nor dared an oath, nor hazarded a lie.
Unlearned, he knew no schoolman's subtle art ,
No language but the language of the heart ;
By nature honest, by experience wise,
Healthy by temperance and by exercise ;
His life, though long, to sickness pass'd unknown,
His death was instant, and without a groan."
From these parents, however. Pope inherited a feeble and crooked
frame. This circumstance, added to his being the only child of his
father, led to his domestic education and habits. When eight years
old, he was placed under the tuition of the family priest. From him
he passed to the schools mentioned, and at the early age of twelve
returned home. This, he says, was all the instruction he received.
He continued, however, to educate himself; and, as Milton had
done in Buckinghamshire, so he at Binfield, and in the shades of
Windsor Forest, pursued steadily his studies, both of books and
nature. One of his earliest favourite books was Homer ; and at
Twyford school he wrote a satire on the master, for which he was
severely castigated. Both these facts indicated his future character
and pursuits. At Binfield, he not only went on strenuously with
the study of Latin, Greek, and French, but he commenced author.
At twelve, he wrote his Ode to Solitude, a subject with which his
situation made him well acquainted. Pope was one of the very rare
instances of a genius which was at once precocious and enduring.
But the secret of this was, that he did not exhaust his young powers
out of mere puerile vanity, but went on reading all the best authors,
English, French, Italian, Greek, and Latin, and wrote rather to
imitate and j)ractise diffei'ent styles. To his sedulous practice of all
kinds of styles, as those of Spenser, Waller, Cowley, Rochester,
Dorset, but especially Chaucer and Dryden, may bo attributed that
great mastery of language, and that exquisite harmony of versifi-
cation, in which he has never yet been excelled.
POPE. 97
A great advantage to him in these pursuits was the friendship
of Sir Wilham Trumbull, who was not only an excellent scholar, but
a man of great taste, and had seen the world. Sir William had
been ambassador to the Ottoman Porte, and afterwards one of the
secretaries of William III ; he had now retired to East Hamstead,
his native place, near Binfield, where he soon found out the promise
of Pope, and became his guide and friend so long as he lived. Sir
William introduced him to Wycherley, then an old man ; Wycherley
introduced him to Walsh ; and the hterary connexions of the young
poet spread so rapidly, that at seventeen he was an avovv'ed poet,
and frequented Will's coffee-house, which was on the north side of
Russell-street, in Covent-garden, where the wits of the time used to
assemble ; and where Dryden had, when he lived, been accustomed
to preside. But even while giving his evenings to society of the
Aighest kind here, he was, diu-ing the day, pursuing his studies in
town, and particularly prosecuting, under good masters, his know-
ledge of French and Italian. Neither, freely as he had written, had
he rushed so very prematurely into print ; it was not till 1709, when
he was twenty-one, that he published his Pastorals, including some
verses of Homer and Chaucer, in Jacob Tonson's Miscellany. This
Miscellany seemed to be the great periodical of the time ; but the
same year in which Pope's contributions appeared in it, brought
forth the Tatler, which was succeeded by the Guardian and
Spectator.
In 1711, Pope published his Essay on Criticism : this was soon
followed by the Eape of the Lock ; and Pope, still only twenty-
three, was at once on the pinnacle of popularity. In 1715, or at the
age of twenty-seven, he had already proceeded boldly with his grand
tuterpi-ise, the translation of the Iliad of Homer, and had issued
the first volume. This great work, however, had been preceded by
the Windsor Forest, in 1712, and other detached poems, as his Ode
on St. Ceciha's Day, in 1713 ; and his Temple of Fame, in 1714.
Long before his Homer was out, he numbered amongst his acquaint-
ance and friends every great and distinguished name of the time —
Swift, Bohngbroke, Gay, Addison, Steele, Congreve, Mr. Secretary
Craggs, Lord Halifax, Prior, Mallet, Arbuthnot, Parnell, Lord Oxford,
(jarth, Eowe, Lady i\Iary Wortley Montagu, &c. All this Pope had
accomplished by the age of twenty-seven, and while at Binfield.
Binfield will, therefore, always remain a place of Lively interest to
the lovers of our national literature, and especially to the admirers
of the polished, acute, logical, and moral intellect of Pope.
Binfield lies near Wokingham, and about two miles north of
Ctfisar's camp, a pleasant village, surrounded with handsome houses,
and in the midst of the tract called the Royal Hunt. The house in
which Pope's father, and Pope too, resided, till he went to Twicken-
ham, is a small neat brick house, on the side of the London road.
Within about half a mile of this house, and within a retired part of
the forest, on the edge of a common, is the spot where, it is said,
i-*ope used to compose many of his verses ; on a large tree were
iuscribod in capital letters the words, Here Fope saur/ : this sentence
98 POPE.
used to be annually refreshed at the expense of a lady of Wokingham,
There used to be a seat under this tree, but that has long disappeared ;
the fact is, however, that tradition likes to fix on some particular
spot, and especially some tree, as a particular object of a poet's
attachment ; it is a palpable afi'air, and satisfies the ordinary mind :
but Poi)e, no doubt, especially when planning and working out his
poem of Windsor Forest, used to ramble through these scenes, and
they may all be considered as associated with his memory and genius.
Of the town life of Pope we find but few traces, considering the
well-known times and the personages amongst whom he moved.
Where his settled lodgings were I find no exact mention ; he was
sometimes at friends' houses, or at that of Jervas, the painter, which
was probably near St. James's Park ; as when Mr. Blount writes to
Pope, in 1716, endeavouring to persuade him to make a journey to
the continent with him, he exhorts him to leave " laziness and the
elms of St. James's Park." Now, this summer Jervas was on a visit
to Swift in Ireland, and dui'ing his absence Pope made use of his
house as his town sojourn ; it was exactly at the crisis of Pope's
removal from Binfield to Twickenham, and no doubt was a great
convenience to him till his own house was fully ready for him. His
description of this house, in a letter to Jervas, will be well remem-
bered by the readers of his letters : — " As to your inquiry about
your house, when I came within the walls, they put me in mind of
those of Carthage, where you find, hke the wandering Trojan —
• Aniraum pictura pascit inani ;'
for the spacious mansion, like a Turkish caravanserai, entertains the
vagabonds with bare lodgings, I rule the family very ill, keep bad
hours, and lend out your pictures about the town. See what it is to
have a poet in your house, Frank, indeed, does all he can in such
circumstances ; for, considering he has a wild beast in it, he con-
stantly keeps the door chained : every time it is opened, the links
rattle, the rusty hinges roar. The house seems so sensible that you
are all its support, that it is ready to drop in your absence ; but I
still trust myself under its roof, as depending that Providence will
preserve so many Raphaels, Titians, and Guidos as are lodged in
your cabinet. Surely the sins of one poet can hardly be so heavy
as to bring an old house over the heads of so many painters. In a
word, your house is falling ; but what of that ? I am only a lodger ! "
This was mere pleasant badinage. During Jervas's absence, Pope
made a journey on horseback to Oxford, a place he was fond of visit-
ing ; and the account of his journey and mode of passing his time
there, given in a letter to Martha Blount, is a pleasant near peep
into his life. " Nothing could have more of that melancholy which
once used to please me than my last day's journey; for, after having
passed through my favourite woods in the forest, with a thousand
reveries of past pleasures, I rode over hanging hills, whose tops were
edged with groves, and whose feet watered with winding Tivers,
listening to the falls of cataracts below, and the murmuring of tho
winds above. The gloomy verdure of Stonor succeeded to these,
roPE. 09
and then the shades of the evening overtook me : the moon rose in
the clearest sky I ever saw, by whose solemn light I passed on slowly
without company, or any interruption to the range of my thoughts.
About a mile before I reached Oxford, all the bells rang out in dif-
ferent notes ; the clocks of every college answered one another, and
sounded forth, some in deeper, some in softer tones, that it was
eleven at night. All this was no ill preparation to the life I havo
since led among these old walls, memorable galleries, stone porticos,
students' walks, and solitary scenes of the University. I wanted
nothing but a black gown and a salary to be as mere a bookworm as
any there. I conformed myself to college hours, was rolled up in
books, lay in the most dusky parts of the University, and was as
dead to the world as any hermit of the desert. If anything was
alive or awake in me it was a little vanity, such as even those good
men used to entertain, when the monks of their own order extolled
their piety and abstraction ; for I found myself received with a sort
of respect which the idle part of mankind, the learned, pay to their
own species ; who are as considerable here as the busy, the gay, and
the ambitious are in your world. Indeed, I was treated in such a
manner, that I could not but sometimes ask myself in my mind,
what college I was founder of, or what library I had built. Methinks,
I do very ill to return to the world again ; to leave the only place
where I make a figui-e ; and from seeing myself seated with dignity
on the most conspicuous shelves of a library, put myself into the
abject posture of lying at a lady's feet in St. James's Square."
There is a good deal of the poetical and picturesque in this account,
as in another, of a ride to Oxford about two years before, there is of
the picturesque and ludicrous. Pope and his contemporaries, Swift,
Addison, and Steele, have made immortal the triad of great publishers
of their day — Tonson, Lintot, and Curll. Curll issued to the light
a stolen volume of Pope's letters, to the poet's astonishment ; and,
on Pope's very natural anger, Avith very bibliopolical coolness, replied
that Mr. Pope ought to be very much obliged to him for making
them known, for they did him so much credit. Jacob Tonson was
the John Murray of his day ; he turned out the most splendid
editions of standard works, and was, moreover, the secretary of the
great political Whig, or Kit-cat club, of which the dukes of Somerset,
Richmond, Grafton, Devonshire, and Marlborough ; the earls of
Dorset, Sunderland, Manchester, Wharton, and King.ston ; lords
Halifax and Somers ; Sir Pilchard Steele, Addison. Congreve, Garth,
Mainwaring, Pulteney, and many other distinguished men, were
members. These, such was the munificence of the great bibliopole,
he employed Sir Godfrey Kneller to paint for him, of a size to admit
of representing the heads, and which has since been called the kit-
cat size. Munificent, however, as he was, Lintot soon out-bid him
for Pope's Homer, and made his fortune by it.
Of Lintot's active schemes to turn a penny, tlic ride just mentioned
to Oxford affords a curious example. Pope had borrowed a horse ot
Lord Bm'lington, and set out alone. He had mo.st likely mentioned
his going in Lintot's shojj, for lie hud but just entered AVindsor
j: -1
100 POPE.
Forest, wheu who sliuukl come trotting up bcliiud at a smart rato
but Bernard Lintot. Pope had au instant feeling of Lintot's design,
and in a letter to Lord Burlington gave a humorous and characteristic
account of the singular conversation which took place between them.
Pope had observed that Lintot, who was more accustomed to get
astride of authors than of horses, sat uneasily in his saddle, for
which he expressed some solicitude, when Lintot proposed that, as
they had the day before them, it would be pleasant to sit awhile
under the woods. When they had alighted, " See here," said Lintot,
" what a mighty pretty Horace I have in my pocket ! What if you
amused yourself in turning an ode till we mount again ? Lord ! if
you pleased, what a clever miscellany you might make at leisure
hours." " Perhaps I may," said Pope, " if we ride on ; the motion
is an aid to my fancy ; a round trot very much awakens my spirits ;
then jog on apace, and I'll think as hard as I can." Silence ensued
for a full hour, after which Lintot stopped short, and broke out —
" Well, Sir, how far have you gone 1 " — " Seven miles," answered Pope.
" Zounds ! sii'," exclaimed Lintot, " I thought you had done seven
stanzas. Oldsworth in a ramble round Wimbledon Hill would
translate a whole ode in this time. I'll say that for Oldsworth,
though I lost by his Timothys, he translates an ode of Horace the
quickest of any man in England. I remember Dr. King would write
verses in a tavern, three hours after he could not speak ; and there is
Sir Eichard, in that rumbling old chariot of his, between Fleet-street
and St. Giles's Pound, shall make you half a Job." Pope jogged on
to Oxford, and dropped Lintot as soon as he could.
We may imagine Pope, during his occasional visits to London,
looking in at Lintot's to see what was coming out new, or spending
a morning with Swift at his lodgings ; with Bolingbroke ; or with
Gay, at the Duke of Queensbury's ; with Lord Burlington, or Lord
Halifax ; and in the evening meeting in full conclave all the wits and
philosophers of the time, at Will's coftee-house, or at Button's, to
which some of the company which used to meet at Will's had been
transferred by the influence of Addison. This was also called the
Hanover club, because the members adhered to the Whig principles
and the house of Hanover. But Pope was equally welcome at the
Tory club, which had been constituted by his great friends, Boling-
broke and Harley, on the downfall of the Whigs at the peace of
Utrecht, in opposition to the Kit-cat club, and where these noblemen,
their great champio)/ Swift, Sir William Wyndham, Lord Bathurst,
Dr. Arbuthnot, and other men of note of that party assembled. This
was called the October club, from the month in which the great
alteration in the ministry took place. Later, when the dissensions
arose between Harley and Bolingbroke, a more exclusive literary
club was formed, of which Swift, Gay, Parnell, and Arbuthnot were
members. This was the Scriblerus club, amidst whose convivialities
originated the history of Martinus Scriblerus, the Discourse on the
Bathos, and Gulliver's Travels.
At all these places. Pope, who having friends of all parties would
uot commit liiinself to any political party, was always welcome,
POPE. 101
though the casual iuflueuce of party did not fail to take its effect,
and do the work of estrangement amongst many of the leading
spirits of the time. Pope always professed to hold Whig principles,
but in fact there was little distinction of political principle at that
period ; the chief difference was the difference of mere party. To
the nation and its interests it was of little consequence what leader
was in power.
Amid all the convivialities, the excitements of wine, wit, and con-
versation, which so many meetings of celebrated men opened to
Pope, he began to find himself growing dissipated, and hia health
suffering. His wise old friend, Sir William Trumbull, warned him
of his danger with an aft'ectionato earnestness, and it is supj^osed
with due effect. " I now come," said he, " to what is of vast moment,
I mean the preservation of your health, and beg of you earnestly to
get out of all tavern company, and fly away tanquam ex incendio.
What a misery it is for you to be destro^-ed by the foolish kindness
— it is all one, real or pretended — of those who are able to bear the
poison of bad wine, and to engage you in so unequal a combat. As
to Homer, by all I can learn, your business is done ; therefore come
away, and take a little time to breathe in the country. I beg now
for my own sake, and much more for yours. Methinks Mr. has
said to you more than once —
' Heu ! fuge, iiati dea, teque his, ait, eripe flamiuis.' "
Pope felt the justice of this call, and obeyed. It was not, however,
without a lingering and reverted look, as a letter of his to Jervas
testifies. " I cannot express how I long to renew our old intercourse
and conversation ; our morning conference in bed in the same room,
our evening walks in the park, our amusing voyages on the watei", our
yAilosojihical suppers, our lectures, our dissertations, our gravities,
our fooleries, or what not."
It appears that not merely Jervas, Parnell, Garth, Eowe, and others
of like respectable character, were his companions in the amusements
referred to, but that unfortunately for him he had fallen into the
company of the dissolute Earl of Warwick, Addison's step-son, and
of CoUey Gibber ; who, avaihng themselves of his vivacity, laid a
deliberate plan to engage him in an affair derogatory to his reputation.
But he cut wisely these connexions, and London, with a valediction
to be found in his verses written in the character of a philosophical
nike : —
"Dear, damned, distracting town, farewell;
Thy fools no more I'll tease," &c.
■« * * *
" To drink and droll be Rowe allowed
Till the third watchman toll ;
Let Jervas gratis paint, and Froude
Save threepence and his soul.
" Farewell Arbuthnot's raillery
On every learned sot :
And Gartli, tlie best good Christian he,
Altbough lie knows it not.
10£ POPE.
" I.iiitot, farewell ! thy bard must go .
Farewell, unhapi)y Tousoii .
Heaven pives thee for thy loss of llowc,
Lean Philips and fat Johnson.
" Why should I stay? both parties rage ;
My vixen mistress squalls ;
The wits in envious feuds engage,
And Homer — damn him — calls."
Here, theu, ends Pope's town life, or that part of his hfe when ho
gavo himself most up to it. We now accompany him to his new
and his last residence, his beloved Twickenhnm, or Twitenham, as he
used to write it.
It seems that Pope did not purchase the freehold of the house and
gi-ounds at Twickenham, but only a long lease. He took his father
and mother along with him. His father died there the year after,
but his mother continued to Hve till 1733, when she died at the great
age of ninety-three. For twenty years she had the singular satis-
faction of seeing her son the first poet of his age ; caressed by the
greatest men of the time, courted by princes, and feared by all the
base. No parents ever found a more tender and dutiful son. With
liim they shared in honour the ease and distinction he had acquired.
They were the cherished objects of his home. Swift paid him no
false compliment when he said, in condoling with'him on his mother's
death, — " You are the most dutiful son I have ever known or heard
of, which is a felicity not happening to one in a million."
The property at Twickenham is properly described by Eoscoe, as
lying on both sides of the highway, rendering it necessary for him
to cross the road to arrive at the higher and more ornamental jiart
of his gardens. In order to obviate this inconvenience, he had
recourse to the expedient of excavating a passage under the road
from one part of his grounds to the other, — a fact to which he alludes
m these hues : —
" Know all the toil the heavy world can heap
KoUs o'er my grotto, nor disturbs my sleep."
The lower part of these grounds, in which his house stood, con-
stituted, in fact, only the sloping bank of the river, by much the
smaller portion of his territory. The jjassage, therefore, was very
necessary to that far greater part, which was his wilderness, shrub-
bery, forest, and everything, where he chiefly planted and worked.
This passage he formed into a grotto, having a front of rude stone-
work opposite to the river, and decorated within with spars, ores,
and shells. Of this place he has himself left this description.
" I have put the last hand to my works of this kind, in happily
finishing the subterranean way and grotto. I found there a spring
of the clearest water, which falls in a perpetual rill, that echoes
through the cavern night and day. From the river Thames you see
through my arch, up a walk of the wilderness, to a kind of open
temple wholly composed of shells in the rustic manner ; and from
that distance, under the temple, you look down through a sloping
arcade of trees, and see the sails on the river passing suddenly and
vanishing, as through a perspective glass. When you shut the dooif
POrB. 103
of this grotto, it becomes ou the instant, from a luminous room,
a camera ohscura, on the walls of which all the objects of the river,
hills, woods, and boats, are forming a moving picture, in their visible
radiations ; and when you have a mind to light it less, it affords you
a very different scene. It is finished with shells, interspersed with
looking-glass in regular forms, and in the ceiling is a star of the
same material, at which when a lamp of an orbicular figure of thii
alabaster is himg in the middle, a thousand pointed rays glitter, and
are reflected over the place. There are connected to this grotto, by
a narrow passage, two porches : one towards the river, of smooth
stones, full of light and open ; the other towards the garden, shadowed
with trees, rough with shells, flints, and iron ore. The bottom is
paved with simple pebbles, as is also the adjoining walk up the
wilderness to the temple, in the natural taste, agreeing not ill with
the little dripping murmur, and the aquatic idea of the whole place.
It wants nothing to complete it but a good statue with an inscrip-
tion, like that beautiful antique one which you know I am so fond
of. You will think I have been very poetical in this description ;
but it is pretty near the truth."
To this prose description Pope added this one in verse : —
" Thou who shalt stop, where Thames' translucent wave
Sliines a broad mirror through the shadowy cave ;
Where lingering drops from mineral roofs distil,
And pointed crystals break the sparkling rill ;
Unpolished gems no ray on pride bestow,
And latent metals innocently glow;
Approach! great Nature studiously behold,
And eye the mine without a wish for gold.
Approach ; but awful ! Lo ! the Egerian grot,
Where, nobly pensive, St. John sat and thought ;
■\Vhere British sighs from dying Wyndham stole,
And the bright flame was shot through Marchmont's soul.
Let such, such only, tread this sacred floor,
Who dare to love their country, and be poor."
But it was not merely in forming this grotto that Pope employed
himself; it was in building and extending his house, which was in
a Roman style, with columns, arcades, and porticos. The designs
and elevations of these buildings may be seen by his own hand in
the British Museum, drawn in his usual way on backs of letters.
The following passage, in a letter to Mr. Bigby, will be suflicient to
give us his idea both of his Thamesward garden and his house in
a summer view : — " No ideas you could form in the winter could
make you imagine what Twickenham is in this warm summer. Our
river glitters beneath the unclouded sun, at the same time that its
banks retain the verdure of showers ; our gardens are offering their
lirst nosegays ; our trees, like new acquaintance brought happily
together, are stretching their arms to meet each other, and growing
nearer and nearer every hour. The birds are paying their thanks-
giving songs for the new habitations I have made them. My building
rises high enough to attract the eye and curiosity of the pas.senge*
from the river, where, upon beholding a mixture of beauty and ruin,
he inquires. What house is falling, or what church is rising ? So
little taste have our common Tritons for Vitruvius ; whatever delight
104 POPE.
the poetical gods of the river may take iu reflecting on their streams,
Hiy Tuscan porticos, or Ionic pilasters."
Pope's arcliitecture, like his poetry, has been the subject of much
and vehement dispute. On the one hand, his grottos and his
buildings have been vituperated as most tasteless and childish ; on
the other, applauded as beautiful and romantic. Into neither ol
these disputes need we enter. In both poetry and architecture
a bolder spirit and a better taste have prevailed since Pope's time.
AVith all his foibles and defects, Pope was a great poet of the critical
and didactic kind, and his house and grounds had their peculiar
beauties. He was himself half inclined to suspect the correctness of
his fancy in such matters, and often rallies himself on his gimcracks
and crotchets in both verse and prose. Thus, in his first epistle of
his first book of Horace, addi'essed to Bolingbroke : —
" But -when no prelate's lawn with haircloth lined
Is half so incoherent as my mind ;
When — each opinion with the next at strife,
An ebb and flow of follies all my life —
I plant, root up ; I build, and then confound ;
Turn round to square, and square again to round ;
You never change one muscle of your face ;
You think this madness but a common case."
Pope's building madness, however, had method iu it. Unlike the
great romancer and builder of our time, he never allowed such
things to bring him into debt. He kept his mind at ease by such
prudence ; and soothed and animated it under circumstances of con-
tinual evil, by working amongst his trees and grottos and vines, and
at his labours of poetry and translation. At the period succeeding
the rebellion of 1715, Avhen that event had implicated and scattered
so many of his highest and most powerful friends, here he was
labouring away at his Homer with a progress which astonished
every one. Removed at once from the dissipations and distractions
of London, and from the agreeable interrui^tions of such society, he
found leisure and health enough here to give him vigour for exer-
tions astonishing for so weak a frame. The tastes he indulged here,
if they were not faultless according to our notions, were healthy,
and they endured To the end of his life he preserved his strong
attachment to his house and grounds. In 1736, writing to Swift,
be says : — "I wish you had any motive to see this kingdom. I could
keep you, for I am rich ; that is, I have more room than I want.
I can afibrd room for myself and two servants. I have indeed room
enough ; nothing but myself at home. The kind and hearty house-
wife is dead ! The agreeable and instructive neighbour is gone 1
Yet my house is enlarged, and the gardens extend and flourish, as
knowing nothing of the guests they have lost. I have more fruit-
trees and kitchen garden than you have any thought of; nay, I have
melons and pine-apples of my own growth. I am as much a better
v^ardener, as I am a worse poet, than when you saw me ; but gar-
dening is more akin to philosoiiliy, for Tully says, '■ Agricultiira
jrroxima sapientice^ " And towards the end of the same year he says,
in a letter to Ralph Allen, — " I am now as busy planting for myself
POPE. 105
as I was lately in planting for another ; and I thank God for everj
wet day and for every fog that gives me the head-ache, but prospers
my works. They will indeed outhve me, but I am pleased to think
my trees will aftbrd fruit and shade to others, when I shall want
them no more. And it is no sort of grief to me that those others
will not be things of my own poor body ; but it is enough that they
are creatures of the same species, and made by the same hand that
made me."
In 1743, the last year of his life, he was still inspired by the same
tastes, and occupied in the same pursuits. " I have lived," says he,
March 24th, 1743, "much by myself of late, partly through ill health,
and partly to amuse myself with little improvements in my gardens
and house, to which, possibly, I shall, if I live, be much more
confined."
Of the mode of Pope's life here we have, from the letters of him-
self and his friends, a pretty tolerable notion. He was near enough
town to make occasional visits to it, and his friends there near
enough to visit him. His friends and acquaintances were every dis-
tinguished man and woman of the time, whether literary characters
or statesmen. The greater part of them may be set down as his
guests here, at one period or another. He delighted to have his
most intimate friends near him, and some one or more of them with
him. Bishops Atterbury and Warburton, the Duke and Duchess of
Queensbury, Gay's great patrons ; Sheffield, Duke of Buckingham,
Lady Suffolk, Lord and Lady Hervey, Lords Bathixrst, Halifax, Ox-
ford, Bolingbroke, Burlington, Lady Scudamore, the Countess of
Winchilsea, Lord Chancellor Harcourt, and his son Sir Simon Har-
court, the Duke of Chandos, Lords Carlton, Peterborough, and Lans-
downe, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Addison, Steele, Swift, Parnell,
(jfay, Eowe, and all the literary men of the age. What an array of
those who wrote, and of those who admired letters, were the fre-
quenters of Twickenham. In fact, in a letter to Swift, in 1736,
Pope says, " I was the other day recollecting twenty-seven great
ministers, or men of wit and learning, who are all dead, and all of
ray acquaintance within twenty years past."
But Pope loved to induce those he most delighted to converse with,
to reside near him. Bolingbroke settled at Dawley, and Lady Mary
Wortley Montagu at Twickenham itself. The latter remarkable
woman was a little too near. All the world is familiar with Pope's
intense admiration of her, his having her picture drawn by Sir
Godfrey Kncller, to gaze on every day, his worship of her, and their
quarrel, which knew no reconciliation.
But Pope's attachments were, for the most part, strong and en-
during. Except in the case of the flattered, spoiled, and satirical
Lady JNfary, there is scarcely a friend of Pope's who was not a friend
for life. With the Blounts, the Aliens,
"And honest, hatless Cromwell, with red breeches,"—
people wlio could confer no distinction, but had qualities worth
loving — he maintained the most steady friendship to the last. On
106 ropE.
JMartha Bluuat, the woman who above all others ho most loved, he
lias couferred au immortality as enduring as his own.
But his three most intimate friends, after all, were Swift, Boliug-
broke, and Gay. These congenial souls were here much, often, and
for long times together. With Pope they not only entered into
literary plans, read together, wrote together, and joked and feasted
together, but with him they worked at his grotto and in his garden.
They helped him to construct his quincunx ; to plant, to sort spars
and stones, and to fix them in the wall. Lord Peterborough, who
liad run so victorious a career in Spain, did not disdain to lay on
a helping hand.
" He whose liglitninKs pierced the II)eri:in lines,
Now forms my quincunx and now ranks my vines."
Even the querulous dean, even the proud Bohngbroke, as well as the
easy and good-natured Gay, zealously partook of the rural as well as
the philosophical labours of Pope at Twickenham. Swift made two
extraordinarily long sojourns here, one of five months ; and though
he took an abrupt leave at length, it was not, as Johnson would
biHously represent it, because they could not live together, or had
abated their mutual regard, but because they were both completely
out of health, and the dean especially, afflicted with the nervous
irritability which proved the forerunner of insanity. It was neces-
sary for him to get home, where, in that morbid condition, he could
as little bear any society. Gay dead, Bohngbroke obliged to live
abroad. Swift sunk into a hypochondriac, the latter end of Pope's life
was melancholy, and Twickenham a comparative sohtude. He had,
however, the cordially cheei-ing attentions of Martha Blount ; and
Warburton, whose advancement in the church was the work of his
friendship, came in to supply the places of the old companions gone.
Such wa,s the home of Pope : there is still another portion of his
life of which we get most picturesque glimpses, — I mean into his
haunts. Occasionally we find him at Bath for his health, but more
frequently making a summer sojourn of a few weeks or months at
the houses of some of his friends in the country. At one time he is
at Dawley, with Bohngbroke, where they are lying and reading be-
tween two haycocks ; at another, at Prior Park, near Bath, at the
Aliens', where an odd kind of stifthess grew up between the Aliens
and Miss Blount and himself, that was never cleared up, but blew
away, and left them as good friends as before. Then he is at Oakley
Park, Lord Bathurst's seat at Cirencester. In 1716, he writes to
Martha and Teresa Blount, — that was in his young and Homeric
(Liys, — " I am with Lord Bathurst at my bower, in whose groves we
had yesterday a dry walk of three hours. It is the place that of all
others I fancy, and I am not yet out of humour with it, though
I have had it some months ; it does not cease to be agreeable to me
BO late in the season (October) ; the very dying of the leaves adds
a variety of colours that is not unpleasant. I look upon it as upon
a beauty I once loved, whom I should preserve a respect for in her
decay ; and as we should look upon a friend, with remembrance how
POPE. 107
he pleased us once^ though now declined from his gay and flourishing
condition.
" I write an hour or two every morning, then ride oiit a hunting
upon the downs, eat heartily, talk tender sentiments with Lord B.,
or draw plans for houses and gardens, open avenues, cut glades, plant
tirs, contrive water-works, — all very fine and beautiful in our own
imagination. At night we play at commerce, and play pretty high.
I do more. I bet too ; for I am really rich, and must throw away my
money, if no deserving friend will use it. I like this course of life
so well, that I am resolved to stay here till I hear of somebody's being
in town that is worth coming after."
In another letter to these sisters, he gives us a curious peep at
court life. " First, then, I went by water to Hampton Court, unat-
tended by all but by my own virtues, which were not of so modest
a nature as to keep themselves or me concealed ; for I met the prince
with all his ladies on horseback, coming from hunting. Mrs. B
and Mrs. L " (Mary Bellenden and Mary Lepell, maids of honour
to the queen) " took me into protection, contrary to the laws against
harbouring papists, and gave me a dinner, with something I liked
better, an opportunity of conversing with Mrs. H " (Mrs. Howard,
afterwards Countess of Suffolk.) " We all agreed that the life of
a maid of honour was of all things the most miserable ; and wished
that every woman that envied it had a specimen of it. To eat West-
phalia ham in a morning, ride over hedges and ditches on borrowed
hacks, come home in the heat of the day with a fever, and — what is
worse a hundred times — with a red mark in the forehead from an
uneasy hat : all this may qualify them to make excellent wives for
fox-hunters, and bear abundance of ruddy-complexioned children.
As soon as they can wipe ofi" the sweat of the day, they must simper
an hour, and catch cold in the princess's apartment ; from thence, as
Shakspeare has it, ' to dinner, with what appetite they may ;' and
after that, till midnight, walk, work, or think, which they please.
I can easily beUeve no lone house in Wales, with a mountain and
a rookery, is more contemplative than this court ; and, as a proof of
it, I need only tell you, Mrs. L (Mary Lepell) walked with mt
three or four houi's by moonlight, and we met no creature of any
quality but the king, who gave audience to the vice-chamberlain, all
alone, under the garden wall.
" In short, I heard of no ball, assembly, basset-table, or any place
where two or three were gathered together, except Madam Kilman-
segg's, to which I had the honour to be invited, and the grace to
stay away.
" I was heartily tired, and posted to park ; (^. Bushy 1) there
we had an excellent discourse of quackery ; Dr. S was mentioned
with honour. Lady walked a whole hour abroad without dying
after it, at least in the time I stayed, though she seemed to be fainting,
and had convulsive motions several times in her head. I arrived in
the forest by Tuesday at noon."
At another time we find him at Orchard Wyndhara, the seat of
Sir William Wyndham, in Somersetshire. "The reception we mot
108 POPE.
with," says he, " raid the little excursions wo made, were every way
agreeable. I think the country abounds with beautiful prospects
Sir WiUiam Wyndham is at present amusing himself with some real
impi-ovements, and a great many visionary castles. We are often
entertained with sea-views and sea-tish ; and were at some places in
the neighbourhood, amongst which I was mightily pleased with
Dunster Castle, near Minehead. It stands upon a great eminence,
and hath a prospect of that town, with an extensive view of the
Bristol Channel, in which are seen two small islands called the Steep
Holms and Flat Holms, and on the other side we could plainly dis-
tinguish the divisions of the fields on the "Welsh coast. All this
journey I performed on horseback." To how many readers will this
fine scene here mentioned be familiar !
But another visit of Pope's, to Stanton Harcourt, Oxfordshire, an
old mansion of Lord Harcourt's, who lent it to him for the summer,
has furnished us with a description which, though somewhat long,
we must take in fall. So much delighted was Pope with it, that he
has described it twice ; once to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and
once to the Duke of Buckingham. The following account is made
complete by a careful comparison of both these letters ; but may be
supposed to be addressed to Lady Mary.
" I am fourscore miles from London ; and the i)laco is such as
I could not quit for the town, if I did not value you more than, nay,
everybody else there ; and you will be convinced how little the town
has engaged my affections in your absence from it, when you know
what a place ttiis is which I jji-efer to it. I shall therefore describe
it to you at large, as the true picture of a genuine ancient country
seat.
" You must expect nothing regular in my description of a house
which seems to be built before rules were in fashion. The whole is
so disjointed, and the parts so detached from each other, and yet so
joining again, one cannot tell how, that, in a poetical fit, you could
imagine it had been a village in Amphion's time, when twenty
cottages had taken a dance together, were all out, and stood still in
amazement ever since.
" You must excuse me if I say nothing of the front ; indeed I do
not know which it is. A stranger would be grievously disappointed
who should think to get into this house the right way. One would
reasonably expect, after the entry through the porch, to be let into
the hall : but alas ! nothing less ! you find yourself in a brewhouse.
From the parlour you think to step into the drawing-room, but,
upon opening the iron-nailed door, you are convinced, by a flight of
bh-ds about your ears, and a cloud of dust in your eyes, that it is
the pigeon-house. On each side of our porch are two chimneys,
that wear their greens on the outside, which would do as well within ;
for whenever we make a fire, we let the smoke out of the windows.
Over the parlour window hangs a sloping balcony, which time has
turned to a very convenient penthouse. The top is crowned with
a very venerable tower, so like that of the church just by, that the
jackdaws build in it, as if it were the true steeple.
POPE. 100
" The great hall is high and spacious, flanked on one side with
a very long table, a true image of ancient hospitality-. The walls are
all over ornamented with monstrous horns of animals, about twenty
broken pikes, ten or a dozen blvmderbusses, and a rusty matchlock
musquet or two, which we were informed had served in the civil
wars. There is one vast arched window, beautifully darkened with
divers escutcheons of 2:)ainted glass. There seems to be a great pro-
priety in this old manner of blazoning upon glass ; ancient families, like
ancient windows, in the course of generations, being seldom free from
cracks. One shining pane, in particular, bears date 1286, which alone
]3reserves the memory of a knight whose iron armour has long since
jjerished with rust, and whose alabaster nose has mouldered from his
monument. The youthfid face of Dame Elinor, in another piece,
owes more to that single pane than to all the glasses she ever con-
sulted in her life. Who can say, after this, that glass is frail, when
it is not half so perishable as human beauty or glory 1 And yet
i cannot but sigh to think that the most authentic record of so
ancient a family should be at the mercy of every boy who flings
a stone ! In this hall, in former days, have dined gartered knights
and courtly dames, with ushers, sewers, and seneschals, and yet it
was but the other night that an owl flew in hither, and mistook it
for a barn.
" This hall lets you, up and down over a very high threshold, into
the great parlour. It is furnished with historical tapestry, whose
marginal fringes do confess the moisture of the air. The other con-
tents of this room are a broken-bellied virginal, a couple of crippled
velvet chairs, with two or three mouldered pictures of mouldy an-
cestors, who look as dismally as if they came fresh from hell with all
their brimstone about them. These are carefully set at the further
corner, for the windows being everywhere broken, make it so con-
venient a place to dry poppies and mustard seed in, that the room
is appropriated to that purpose.
" Next to this parlour lies, as I said before, the pigeon-house ; by
the side of which runs an entry that leads, on one hand and on the
other, into a bed-chamber, a buttery, and a small hole called the
chaplain's study. Then follow the brewhouse, a little green and gilt
parlour, and the great stairs, under which is the dairy. A little
further on the right, the servants' hall ; and, by the side of it, uj>
six steps, the old lady's closet for her private devotions, which has
a lattice into the said haU, that, while she said her prayers, she
might cast an eye on the men and maids. There are, upon the
ground floor, in all, twenty-six apartments, hard to be distinguished
by particular names ; amongst which I must not forget a chamber
that has in it a huge antiquity of timber, which seems to have becn
rither a bedstead or a cyder-press.
" The kitchen is built in form of the Rotunda, being one vast vault
to the top of the house, where one aperture serves to let out the
smoke and let in light. By the blackness of the walls, the circular
th'es, vast cauldrons, yawning mouths of ovens and furnaces, you
would think it either the forge of Vulcan, the cave of Polyphemu.s,
110 POPE.
or the temple of Moloch. The horror of this place has made such
an impression ou the country people, that they believe the witchea
keep their sabbath here, and that once a year the devil treats them
with infei'nal venison, a roasted tiger stufied witli tenpenny nails.
" Above stairs we have a number of rooms ; you never pass out
of one into another but by the ascent and descent of two or three
stairs. Our best room is very long and low, of the exact proportions
of a bandbox. In most of these rooms there are hangings of the
finest work in the world ; that is to say, those which Arachne spins
from her own bowels. Were it not for this only furniture, the whole
would be a miserable scene of naked walls, flawed ceilings, broken
windows, and rusty locks. Its roof is so decayed, that after a favour-
able shower we may, with God's blessing, expect a crop of mushrooms
between the chinks of the floors.
" All the doors are as little and low as those to the cabins of packet-
boats; and the rooms have, for many years, had no other inhabitants
than certain rats, whose very age renders them worthy of this
venerable mansion, for the very rats of this ancient seat are grey.
Since these have not yet quitted it, we hope at least that this house
may stand during the small remnant of days these poor animals
have to live, who are too infirm to remove to another. They have
still a small subsistence left them, in the few remaining books of the
library.
" We had never seen half what I have described, but for an old,
starched, grey-headed steward, who is as much an antiquity as any
in the place, and looks hke an old family picture walked out of its
frame. He failed nqj;, as w^e passed from room to room, to entertain
us with several relations of the family ; but his observations were
particularly curious when he came to the cellar. He showed where
stood the triple rows of butts of sack, and where now ranged the
bottles of tent for toasts in a morning. He pointed to the stands
that supported the iron-hooped hogsheads of strong beer : then,
stepping to a corner, he lugged out the tattered fragments of an
unframed lecture. ' This,' says he, with tears in his eyes, ' was poor
Sir Thomas, once master of all this drink ! He had two sons, poor
young masters ! who never arrived to the age of this beer ; they both
fell ill in this very cellar, and never went out upon their own legs.'
He could not pass by a heap of broken bottles without taking up
a piece, to show us the arms of the family upon it. He then led us
up the tower by dark, winding, stone steps, which landed us into
several little rooms, one above another. One of these was nailed up ;
and our guide whispered to us a secret occasion of it. It seems the
course of this noble blood was a little interrupted, about two centuries
ago, by a freak of the Lady Frances with a neighbouring priest ;
since which the room has been nailed up and branded as the Adultery
Chamber. The ghosf of Lady Frances is supposed to walk there,
and some prying maids of the family report that they have seen a
lady in a farthingale through the keyhole ; but this matter is hushed
up, and the servants are forbid to talk of it.
" I must needs have tired you by this long description ; but what
POPE, 111
engaged me iu it was, a generous principle to preserve the meuiory
of that which must itself soon fall into dust ; nay, perhaps, part of
it, before this letter reaches your hands. Indeed I owe this old
house the same gratitude that we do to an old friend who harbours us
in his declining condition, — nay, even in his last extremities. 1 have
found this an excellent place for retirement and study, where no one
who passes by can dream there is one inhabitant ; and even any body
that could visit me does not venture under my roof. You will not
wonder that I have translated a great deal of Homer in this retreat ;
any one that sees it will own that I could not have chosen a litter or
more likely place to converse with the dead."
No one, after reading this, can doubt that Pope possessed that rare
talent of painting in words which Thomson called so truly " the
portrait painting of Nature ;" and which, in a letter to Doddington,
from Italy, he justly laments as so rare a faculty. "There are
scarcely any to be met with who have given a landscape of the
country through which they travelled, — seen thus with the mind's
eye ; though that is the first thing which strikes, and what aU readers
of travels demand." "We must lament," says Warton, "that we
ha\'e no more letters of Bishop Berkeley, who, we see by this before
us (from Naples), possessed the uncommon talent of describing jilaces
in the most lively and graphical manner, a talent in which he has
only been equalled or excelled by Gray, in many of those lively and
interesting letters published by Mason ; those especially written
during his travels." The want continues to the present hour ; the
want of the art of bringing the things you speak of livingly before
the reader. It is this want, which can only be supplied by the same
principles of study in the writer as iu the painter, which first sug-
gested to me the necessity of " Visits to Remarkable Places." No
one could have made such visits more eflfectual than Pope. This is
a merit for which he yet has received little or no praise ; and yet no
talent is rarer, and few more delightful. In his letters, especially
those addressed to his two lovely, charming, and life-long fi-iends,
Martha and Teresa Blount, such living portraitures of places abound.
His description of Sir Walter Ealeigh's old mansion and gardens at
Sherbourne is a masterpiece of the kind. You are now at Letcombe,
in Berkshire, with Swift, where the author of Gulliver used to run
up a hill every morning before breakfast ; now at Bevis Mount, near
Southampton, with his friend Lord Peterborough, the conqueror cf
Spain ; and in his journeys to Bath or to Lord Cobham's at Stowe,
you peep in at a number of country houses, and rich peeps they
are. Bath and London society is sketched with great vivacity and
gusto ; but such sketches are more common than these peeps into
aristocratic country life. Thus you have him rolling along slowly
from Cobham towards Bath, drawn by the very horse on which Lord
Derwentwater rode in the Rebellion, but then employed by Lord
Cobham in rolHng the garden. He looks in at Lord Dcloraiue's on
the Downs. He lies one night at Rowsham, the seat of Colonel
Cotterell, near Oxford; " the prettiest place for wateifalls, jets, pomls
enclosed with beautiful scenes of green and hanging wood, ever seen."
112 POl-E.
Then at Mr. Hovru's in Gloucestershire, " as fine a thing of another
kind ; where Nature has done everything, and luckily, for the master
has ten children." Thou he calls at Sir William Codrington's, at
Durhams, eight miles from Bath, where he thus describes his enter-
tainment : — " My reception there will be matter for a letter to Mr.
Bethel. It was perfectly in his spirit. All his sisters, in the first
place, insisted that I should take physic preparatory to the waters,
and truly I made use of the time, place, and persons to that end.
My Lady Cox, the first niglit I lay there, mixed my electuary ; Lady
Codrington pounded sulphur ; Mrs. Bridget Bethel ordered broth ;
Lady Cox mounted first up stairs with the physic in a gallipot ;
Lady Codrington next, with the vial of oil ; Mrs. Bridget third with
pills ; the fourth sister with spoons and tea-cups. It would have
rejoiced the ghost of Dr. Woodward to have beheld this procession."
But two years before his death, he was again at Stowe, when he says,
" All the mornings we breakfast and chspute ; after dinner and at
night, music and harmony ; in the garden fishing ; no poUtics, and
no cards, nor novel reading. This agrees exactly with me, for the
want of cards sends us early to bed."
This was the way he describes spending the latter part of his life :
— " Lord Bathurst is still my constant friend, but his country seat
is now always in Gloucestershire, not in this neighbourhood. Mr.
Pulteney has no country seat ; and in town I see him seldom. In
the summer, I generally ramble for a month to Lord Cobham's, or to
Bath, or elsewhere."
Such were the homes and haunts of Pope. In his life one thing is
very striking. How much the literary men of the time and the
nobility associated, — how little they do now. Are our nobility gi-owu
less literary, or our authors less aristocratic ? It may be said that
authors now are more independent, and cannot flatter aristocracy.
But no man was more independent, and proud of his independence,
than Pope.
Pope was anxious that some of his friends should have the lease
of his house and grounds, to prevent their being demolished ; but
it was never done. Since his day they have gone through various
liands. His house has long been pulled down ; his willow has fallen
in utter decay ; his quincunx has been destroyed. Two new tene-
ments, having the appearance of one house, with a portico opening
into the highway, have for some years been built at the farther
extremity of Pope's grounds next to the Thames. The house itself
was stripped, immediately after his death, of all mementos of hini
by the operation of his own will. To Lord Bolingbroke he left his
own copy of his Translation of Homer, and his other works. To
Lord Marchmont, other books, with the portrait of Bolingbroke by
Richardson. To Lord Bathurst, the three statues of the Hercules
of Farnese, the Venus do Medici, and the Apollo in chiaro oscuro,
by Kneller. To Mr. Murray, the marble head of Homer, by Bernini ;
and Sir Isaac Newton, by Guelh. To the son of Dr. Arbuthnot,
another picture of Bohngbroke. He left to Lord Littleton the busts
in marble of Shakspeare, Spensei', and IMilton, presented to him by
POPE. 113
the Prince of Wales. His library went amongst his friends ; the
pictiu-es of his mother, father, and aunts, to his sister-in-law, Mrs.
Rackett. Of that of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, by Kneller, there
is no mention ; but all the furniture of his grotto, with the urns for
liis garden, given by the Prince of Wales, he left to Martha Blount.
Thus flew abroad those iDrecious relics, then ; and what changes
since in the place itself ! A new house has recently arisen on a part of
the Thames bank : so that there are actually three tenements on th3
spot, and it is cut up and divided accordingly. With all this havoc
there are still, however, more traces of Pope left than might have
been expected. The Thames is there,— nothing can remove or cut
up that. The scene across the river is woody, rich, and agreeable as
ever. The sloping bank from the road to the river, once Pope's
garden, is a pretty garden still. There is even at the end nearest _tf)
London a conservatory still standing, which has all the characteristics
of another age, and probably was Pope's. It has Tuscan columns,
and large panes of glass fit for sash windows. But a fine fantastic
sort of Swiss villa has sprung up there, called by the neighbourhood
EHzabethan. It has deep, depending eaves, full of wooden ornament,
and a lofty tower. It is the property of Sir. Young, a wholesale
tea-dealer. When I visited it, heaps of lime and other building
materials were lying around, and troops of work-people were busily
employed where the lords, ladies, and literati of George II.'s reign
resorted.
The subterranean passage, or grotto, still runs under the road
spite of Bowles telling us that all these things were pulled down
and done away with. It is secured by iron gates at each end, and
far more of the original spar and shell-work remains than you could
have believed. Xear the opening facing the Thames, under some
ivied rock- work, stands the figure of a nun in stone, which no doubt
has been placed there by some occupant subsequent to Pope.
On the opposite side of the road, there is a field of some half-dozeu
acres, still bearing traces of its former character. This was Pope's
larger garden and wilderness, where he used to plant and replant,
contrive and rccontrive, puU down and build up, to his heart's con-
tent. Around it still are traces of shrubberies, and over all are
scattered many of those trees which, upwards of a hundred years
ago, Pope said he was busy planting for posterity. They are now
stupendous in size — Spanish chestnuts, elms, and cedars. No doubt
many of them have been felled, but what remain are lofty and
magnificent trees. The walks and shrubberies are to a great extent
annihilated ; the centre of the field was planted with potatoes. In
the midst of a clump of old laurels, near the road, there is the
remains of a large tree, hewn out into the shape of a seat, not unlike
a watchman's box, which is said to have been Pope's, but is doubtful.
At the top of the grounds is another gi'otto, that which was erected
by Sir William Stanhope, who purchased the estate, or the lease of
it, at Pope's death. This gi-otto seems to have formed the passage
to still further grounds ; for we are informed that Sir William
Stanhope not only built two wings to Pope's house, but extended
'14 POPE.
iis grounds. Tlieie was placed over the eiilrauce of thi.s grotto
n, bust of Pope iu white marble, and on a white marble t-lab the
following in.scription : — •
" The humble roof, the garden's scanty line,
J 1 1 spoke the genius of a bard divine :
JUit fancy now displays a fairer scope,
And Stanhope's plans' unfold the soul of Pope."— Clare.
The.se A-aunting lines, which represent the addition of another
gixitto and another field as unfolding the soul of Pope, and Sir
William Stanhope as somebody capable of far greater things than
the poet himself, still remain, the monument of the writer's and the
erector's folly. The bust, of course, is gone. The grotto is lined
with spars ; pieces of basalt, perhaps the very joints of the Giant's
Causeway sent to Pope by Sir Hans Sloane iu 1742, only two years
before Pope's death ; some huge pieces of glazed and striped jars of
pottery ; and masses of stalactites and of stone worn by the action
of the waters, evidently brought from some cavernous shore, or bed
of a torrent, perhaps from a great distance, and no doubt at great
expense. As this, however, was the work of Sir William Stanhope,
and not of Pope, the whole possesses little interest. Every trace of
the temple of which Pope speaks, as being in full view from his
grotto, is annihilated ; and the small obelisk, bearing this inscrip-
tion in memory of his mother, —
Ah ! Editha.
Watrum Optima,
Mulierum Amantissima,
Vale!
has been removed, and is said to be in the possession of Lord Howe,
and set up in his grounds, just by.
Lord Mendip, who married Sir Wilham Stanhope's daughter, i.s
said to have been particularly anxious to retain every trace of Pope.
Yet in his care to maintain, he must have very much altered. He
.stuccoed the house, and adorned it, says a writer in the Gentleman's
Magazine, in an elegant style. He enclosed the lawn, and propped
witli uncommon care the far-famed weeping willow, supposed to be
the parent stock of the willows in Twickenham Park. Yes, Pope is
said to have been the introducer of the weeping willow into England ;
^that seeing some twigs around the wrapping of an article of vertu
sent to Lady Sylvius from abroad, he planted these, saying thev
might belong to some kind of tree yet unknown in England. Fron-
one of these sprung Pope's willow, and from Pope's willow thousands
of others. Slips of his tree were anxiously sought after ; they were
even transmitted to distant chmes ; and, in 1789, the Empress of
Russia had some planted in her garden at Petersburgh. Kotwith-
standing every care, old age overcame this willow, and in spite of all
props, it perished, and fell to the ground in 1801.
^ On the decease of Lord Mendip, in 1802, the property was sold to
Lir John Briscoe, Bart.; after whose death, it was again sold to the
Baroness Howe. This lady, and her husband. Sir J. Waller Wathen,
with a tasteless Vandalism, levelled the house of Pope to the ground ;
lixtirjwted ruthlessly almost every possible trace of him in the
POPE. 1 1 ,S
gardens; and erected that house already mentioned at the extremity
of Pope's property, now occupied as two tenements. This house of
the uupoetical Lady Howe was also erected on the site of an elegant
little villa belonging to Hudson, the painter, the master of Sir
Joshua Reynolds.
Such are the revolutions which have passed over Pope's villa and
its grounds. Where he and such celebrated gardeners as Swift,
Bolingbroke, and Gay laboured, I found potatoes, black with the
disease of 1846, growing. How long the giant trees planted by his
hands, and which still lift aloft their noble heads, may escape some
fresh change, we know not. The whole of the larger garden of Pope,
in which they grow, bears evidences of neglect. Laurels grow wild
under the lofty hedges. The stones of Stanhope's grotto lie scattered
about ; and vast quantities of the deadly nightshade, as if undis-
turbed for years, displayed to my notice its dark purple and burnished
berries of death.
The remains of Pope rest, with those of his parents, in Twicken-
ham church. In the middle aisle, the sexton shows you a P in
one of the .stones, which marks the place of their interment. To see
the monuments to their memory, you must ascend into the north
gallery ; where, at the east end, on the wall, you find a tablet with
a Latin inscription, which was placed there by Pope in honour of his
parents ; and on the side wall of the gallery nearest the west is
a tablet of grey marble, in a pyramidal form, with a medallion profile
of the poet. This was placed here by Bishop Warburton, and bears
tlie following inscription : —
Alexansro Pope. M. II. Gulielmus Episcopus, Glocestriensis,
Amicitiae causa fac : cur: 1/61.
Poeta loquitur,
FOR ONE WHO WOULD NOT BE BUniED IN WESTMINSTER ABBLV.
Heroes and kings, your distance keep ;
In pence let one poor poet sleep,
Who never flattered folks like you:
Let Horace blush, and Virgil too.
By one of those acts which neither science nor curiosity can
excuse, the skull of Pope is now in the private collection of a phreno-
logist. The manner in which it was obtained is said to have been
this. On some occasion of alteration in the church, or burial of
some one in the same spot, the coffin of Pope was disinterred,
and opened to see the state of the remains ; by a bribe to the
sexton of the time, possession of the skull was obtained for a night,
and another skull retui-ned instead of it. I have heard that fifty
pounds were paid to manage and carry through this transaction. Be
that as it may, the undoubted skull of Pope now figures in the
phrenological collection of the late Mr. Holm, of Highgate, and was
frequently exhibited by him in his lectures, as demonstrating, by its
not large but well-balanced proportions, its affinity to the intellectual
tharactcr of the poet.
o
EEAX SWIFT.
The principal scenes of residence of Dean Swift lie in Ireland.
Johnson, in liis life of tne Dean, makofs it doubtful whether he was
really an Englishman or an Irishman by birth. He says : "Jonathan
Swift was, according to an account said to be written by himself, the
mn of Jonathan Swift, an attorney, and was born at Dublin, on
St. Andrew's day, 1667 ; according to his own report, as delivered by
Pope to Spence, he was born at Leicester, the son of a clergyman,
who was minister of a parish in Herefordshire. During his life, the
place of his birth was iindetermined. He was contented to be called
an Irishman by the Irish, but would occasionally call himself an
Engh.shman. The question may, without much regret, be left in the
obscurity in Avhich he delighted to involve it."
There has long ceased to be any obscurity about the matter. His
relations, justly proud of the connexion, have set that fully in the
light which Swift himself characteristically wrapped in mj'stification.
He was of an English family, originally of Yorkshire ; but his grand-
iather, Thomas Swift, was vicar of Goodrich, in Herefordshire.
Taking an active jxirt with Charles I. against the Parliament, he was
SWIFT. 117
expelled from his living ; yet he died at Goodrich, and was buried
under the altar there. The account of the plundering of his par-
sonage by the Paiiiament army, given in the appendix to Scott's life
of the Dean, is so lively a description of such an affair, that I wih
transcribe it : —
" When the Earl of Stamford was in Herefordshire, in October
1642, and pillaged all that kept faith and aUegiance to the king,
inforroation was given to Mrs. Swift, wife of Thomas Swift, parson of
Goodrich, that her house was designed to be plundered. To prevent
so great a danger, she instantly repaired to Hereford, where the earl
then was, some ten miles from her own home, to petition him that
no violence might be offered to her house or goods. He most nobly,
and according to the goodness of his disposition, threw the petition
away, and swore no small oaths that she should be plundered
to-morrow. The good gentlewoman, being out of hope to prevail,
and seeing that there was no good to be done by petitioning him,
speeds home as fast as she could, and that night removes as much of
her goods as the shortness of the time would permit. Next morning,
to make good the Earl of Stamford's word, Captain Kirle's troop,
consisting of seventy horse and thirty foot, which were hangers on —
birds of prey — came to Mr. Swift's house. There they took away all
his i^rovision of victuals, corn, household stuff, which was not con-
veyed away. They empty his beds, and fill the ticks with malt ; they
roij him of his cart and six horses, and make this part of their theft
the means to convey away the rest. Mrs. Swift, much affrighted to
see such a sight as this, thought it best to save herself though she
lost her goods ; therefore, taking up a young child in her arms, began
to secure herself by flight ; which one of the troopers perceiving, he
commanded her to stay, or, holding his i)istol to her breast, threat-
ened to shoot her dead. She, good woman, fearing death whether
she went or returned, at last, shunning that death which was next
unto her, she retires back to her house, where she saw herself
undone, and yet durst not oppose, or ask why they did so. Having
thus rifled the house and gone, next morning early, she goes again to
Hereford, and there again petitions the earl to show some com-
passion to her and her ten children, and that he would be pleased to
cause her horses and some part of her goods to be restored to her.
The good earl was so far from granting her petition that he would
not vouchsafe so much as to read it. When she could not prevail
herself, she makes use of the mediation of friends. These have the
repulse also, his lordship remaining inexorable, without any inclina-
tion to mercy. At last, hoping that all men's hearts were not
adamant relentless, she leaves the earl, and makes her addresses to
Captain Kirlo, who, upon her earnest entreaty, grants her a protection
for what was left ; but for restitution there was no hope of that.
This protection cost her no less than thirty shillings. It seems
paper and ink are dear in those parts. And now, thinking herself
secure in his protection, she returns home, in hope that what was
left she might enjoy in peace and quietness. She had not been long
at home but Captain Kirlc sends her word, that if it pleased her, she
.:18 SWIFT.
might buy four of her own six horses again, assuring her by hor
father's servant and tenant, that she should not fear being plundered
any more by the Karl of Stamford's forces, while they were in those
parts. Encouraged by these promises, she was content to buy her
own, and deposited eight pounds ten shillings for four of her horses.
And now conceiving the storm to be blown over, and all danger past,
and placing much confidence in her purchased protection, she causes
all her goods secured in her neighbours' houses to be brought home ;
and since it could not be better, rejoiced that she had not lost all.
She had not enjoyed these thoughts long, but Captain Kirle sent
mito her for some vessels of cyder, whereof having tasted, but not
liking it, since he could not have drink for himself he would have
provender for his horses, and therefore, instead of cyder, he demands
ten bushels of oats. Mrs. Swift, seeing that the denial might give
some ground for a quarrel, sent him word that her husband had not
two bushels of oats in a year for tythes, nor did they grow any on
their glebe, both of which were most true. Yet, to show how wilHng
she was, to her power, to comply with him, that the messengers
might not return empty, she sent him forty shillings to buy oats.
Suddenly after, the captain of Goodridge castle sends to Mr. Swift's
house for victual and corn. Mrs. Swift instantly shows him her pro-
tection. He, to answer show with show, shows her his warrant ; and
so without any regard to her protection, seizeth upon that provision
which was in the house, together with the cyder which Captain
Kirlo had refused. Hereupon Mrs. Swift writes to Captain Kirle,
complaining of this injury, and the affront done to him in slighting
his protection ; but before the messenger could return with an
answer to her letter, some from the castle come a second time to
])lunder the house, and they did what they came for. Presently after
comes a letter from Captain Kirle in answer to Mrs. Swift's, that the
Earl of Stamford did by no means approve of the injuries done to
her, and withal, by word of mouth, sends to her for more oats. She,
perceiving that as long as she gave they would never leave asking,
resolved to be drilled no more. The return not answering expecta-
tion, on the third of December, Captain Kirle's lieutenant, attended
by a considerable number of dragoons, comes to Mr. Swift's house,
and demands entrance ; but the doors being kept shut against them,
and not being able to force them, they broke down two iron bars in
a stone window, and so, with swords drawn and pistols cocked, they
enter the house. Being entered, they take all Master Swift's and
his wife's apparel, his books and his children's clothes, they being in
berl ; and these poor children that hung by their clothes, unwilling to
part with them, they swung them about until, their hold-fast failing,
they dashed them against the walls. They took away all his ser-
vants' clothes, and made so clean work with one that they left him
not a .shirt to cover his nakedness. There was one of the children,
an infant, lying in the cradle ; they robbed that, and left not the
poor soul a rag to defend it from the cold. They took away all the
:ron, pewter, and brass ; and a very fair cupboard of glasses, which
they could not carry away, they broke to pieces ; and the four horses
SWIFT. 119
lately redeemed are with them lawful prize again, and nothing left of
all the goods but a few stools, for his wife, children, and servants to
sit down and bemoan their distressed condition. Having taken away
all, and being gone, Mrs. Swift, in compassion to her poor infant in
the cradle, took it np, almost starved with cold, and wrapped it in
a petticoat, which she took off from herself ; and now hoped, that
having nothing to lose would be a better protection for their persons
than that which they purchased of Captain Kirle for thirty shillings.
But as if Job's messenger would never make an end, her three maid-
.servants, whom they in the castle had compelled to carry the poultry
to the castle, return and tell their mistress, that they in the castle
.said they had a wan-ant to seize upon Mrs. Swift and bring her into
the castle, and that they would make her three maid-servants wait
on her there, and added things not fit for them to speak nor us to
write. Hereupon Mrs. Swift tied to the place where her husband,
for fear of the rebels, had withdi-awn himself. She had not been
gone two hours, but they come from the castle, and bring with them,
three teams to carry away what was before designed for plunder, but
wanted means of conveyance. When they came, there was a batch of
bread hot in the oven. This they seize on ; her children on their
knees entreat but for one loaf, and at last, with much importunity,
obtained it ; but before the children had eaten it, they took even
that one loaf away, and left them destitute of a morsel of bread
amongst ten children. Ransacking every corner of the house, that
nothing might be left behind, they find a small pewter dish in which
the dry-nurse had put pap to feed the poor infant, the mother who
gave it suck being fled to save her life. This they seize on too. The
nurse entreats for God's sake that they would spare that, pleading
that in the mother's absence it was all the substance which was or
could be provided to sustain the life of the child, that ' knew not the
right hand from the left,' a motive which prevailed with God him-
self, though justly incensed against Kineveh.
" Master Swift's eldest son, a youth, seeing this barbarous cruelty,
demanded of them a reason for this so hard usage. They replied
that his father was a traitor to the king and parhamcnt, and added,
that they would keep them so short, that they would eat the very
flesh from their arms ; and to make good their word, they threaten
the miller, that, if he groimd any corn for these children, they would
grind him in his own mill ; and not contented with this, they go to
Mr. Swift's next neighbour, whose daughter was his seiwant, and
take him prisoner : they examine him on oath what goods of Mr.
Swift's he had in his custody. He professing that he had none, they
charge him to take his daughter away from Mr. Swift's service, or
else they threaten to plunder him ; and to make sure work, they
make him give them security to obey all their commands. Terrific/
with thiSj the neighbours stand afar oft", and pity the distressed con-
dition of these persecuted children, but dare not come or send to
their relief. By this means the children and servants had no suste-
nance, hardly anything to cover them, from Friday, six o'clock at
night, until Saturday, twelve at night, until at last/tlic neighbours,
120 SWIFT.
moved with the lamentable cries and complaints of the children and
servants, one of the neighbours, overlooking all difficulties, and
showing that he durst be charitable, in despite of these monsters,
ventured in, and brought them some provision. And if the world
would know what it Avas that so exasperated these rebels against this
gentleman, the Earl of Stamford, a man that is not bound to give an
account of all his actions, gave two reasons for it. First, because he
had bought arms, and conveyed them into Monmouthshire, which,
under his lordship's good flivour, was not so ; and, secondly, because
not long before, he preached a sermon in Rosse, upon that text,
' Give unto Ca;sar the things that arc Caisar's,' in which his lordshijj
said he had spoken treason in endeavouring to give Coesar more than
his due. These two crimes cost Mr. Swift no less than 300/." *
With the memory of such things as these in the family, there
need be no wonder at the Dean's decided tendency to toryism. His
father and three uncles, that is four out of ten sons, and three or
four daughters of the persecuted clergyman fled to Ireland, where
the eldest son, Godwin Swift, a barrister, married a relative of the
Marchioness of Ormond, and was made, by the Marquis of Ormond,
his attorney-general in the palatinate of Tipperary. This Godwin
married the co-heiress of Admiral Deane ; the second son, a daughter
of Sir William Daveuant. Another was Mr. Dryden Swift, so called
After his mother, who was a Dryden, and a near relation of the
poet's. Thus Swift was of good family and alliance. He was the
only son of Jonathan Swift, the eighth son of Thomas Swift, the
vicar of Goodrich, who was so jilundered. His mother was Abigail
Erick, of Leicestershire, descended from the most ancient family of
i he Ericks, who derive their lineage from Erick the Forester, a great
commander, who raised an army to oppose the invasion of William
the Conqueror, by whom he was vanquished, but afterwards employed
to command that prince's forces. In his old age he retired to his
house in Leicestershire, where his family has ccntinued ever since,
has produced many eminent men, and is still represented by the
Heyricks of Leicester town, and the Herricks of Beaumanor.
Swift's father was a solicitor, and steward to the Society of the
King's Inn, Dublin ; but he died before Swift was born, and left his
mother in such poverty, that she was not able to defray the expense?-
of her husband's funeral. He was born on the 30th of November,
1667, St. Andrew's-day, in a small house now called No. 7, in Hoey's-
court, Dublin, which is still pointed out by the inhabitants of that
quarter, and by the antiquity of its appearance seems to vindicate
the truth of the tradition. Here a circumstance occurred to him as
singular as the case of his father, who, as a child in the cradle, had
his clothes stripped from him by the troopers of Captain Kirle. His
imrse was a woman of Whitehaven, and being obhged to go thither,
in order to see a dying relative from whom she exjsected a legacy,
nut of sheer affection for the child, she stole on shipboard, unknown
to Ills mother and uncle, and carried him with her to Whitehaven,
where he continued for almost three years. For when the matter
* Mercurins liuslicus. London, 1638.
SWIFT. 121
was discovered, his '.motlier sent orders by all means not to hazard
a second voyage till he could better bear it. The nurse was so
careful of him, that before he returned he had learned to spell, and
by the time that he was five years old, he could read any chajiter in
the Bible.
After his return to Ireland, he was sent, at six years old, to
Kilkenny school, and thence, at fourteen, he was transferred to the
university at Dublin. At Kilkenny, it is said that his name is still
shown to strangers at the school, cut, boy fashion, upon his desk or
form. At the university, like Goldsmith, he was more addicted to
general reading and poetry, than to the classics and mathematics.
He was poor, and the sense of his poverty on his proud spirit made
him reckless, and almost desperate. He got into dissipation to drown
his mortification. Between the 14th of November 1685, and the
fcith of October 1687, he incurred no less than seventy penalties for
non-attendance at chapel, for neglecting lectures, for being absent at
the evening roU-call, and for town-haunting, the academical phrase
for absence from college without licence. These brought censures,
suspension of his degree ; and on his part, satirical sallies against the
college authorities. He finally received his degree of bachelor of
arts by special grace, that is, not by his own fair acquisition. His
uncles, Godwin and, after his death, Dryden, had borne the cost of
his education ; his mother had gone over to her native Leicester and
friends, and on obtaining his degree, he passed over to England to
lier. His mother was rc'lated to the wife of Sir William Temple, and
through her Swift was received into Sir Wilham's house as his private
secretary. This brings us to the first home which Jonathan Swift
may almost be said to have had.
Sir William, according to some authorities, was residing at this
time at Sheen, near Richmond; according to others, he had retired
to his favourite residence of jMoorpark, near Farnham, in Surrey.
Whichever place it was originally, it soon became MoorjDark. Here
William III. used to visit Temple, and here, as at Sheen, it was that
the Dutch monarch, it is related as a most important fact, taught
Swift to cut asparagus the Dutch way. The fact is Dutch and
economical, and worthy to be known to all gardeners, and all other
people who undertake this useful operation. It consists in cutting
with a short and circular stroke, not with a wide sweeping one. In
the first case you cut off only the head of asparagus you want, ir.
the other you most probably cut oS" half-a-dozen heads that have
not yet appeared above the soil. Still, this was only half the
advantage derived from the royal gardener ; he taught Swift how to
eat the asparagus when cut; and Swift used always to tell his guests
that King WiUiam ate the stalks as weU as the heads. If he taught
him ho^v' to make them eatable, it is a great pity that the secret is
lost. William is said also to have offei'ed Swift a troop of horse,
which might naturally arise out of their cutting //or.sr radish for dinner
at the same time, though of this the biographers do not inform us.
Certain it is, that Swift must have become a great favourite with
William, or have thought so, for though he respectfully declined
122 SWIFT.
becoming a trooper, he gave the king to understand that he had no
objection to become a canon; and the king, as Swift wi'ote his uncle,
desired him not to take orders till he gave him a prebend. Such
■was the opinion entertained by both Sir William Temple and Swift,
of his standing in the monarch's estimation, that he was employed
by Sir William, who was himself laid up with the gout, to lay before
the king reasons why his majesty ought to assent to the bill for
triennial jjarliaments. Swift could strengthen Sir William's opinion
by several arguments drawn from English history, but all his
argiiments had no effect on William III, who knew how to cut
triennial parliaments as cleverly as asparagus. This was Swift's
first dip into politics, and though he said it helped to cure him of
vanity, it did not of addicting himself to the same unsatisfactory
pursuit in after life.
Swift's residence at Moorpark is marked by all the characteristics
of his after life, and by two of those events which are mixed up
with its great mystery, and which brought after them its melancholy
ending. He was so morose, bitter, and satirical, that Mr. Temple,
nephew to Sir William, stated, that Sir William for a long time very
much disliked him " for his ill qualities, nor would allow him to sit
down at table with him." Though related to Lady Temple, Sir
William had engaged him only in the capacity of reader and
amanuensis, at a salary of 20/. a year and his board, and looked
upon him as " a young fellow taken into a low office who was
inclined to forget himself." We can well believe that the proud and
unbending spirit which through life never deserted Swift, made
him feel that he was thus regarded, and excited his most hostile and
disagreeable qualities. He was also very defective in his education,
and the consciousness of this in a towering spirit like Swift's, while
it mortified him, could not make him humble. Yet his better
qualities at length prevailed. He took to study ; was commended
by Sir William ; and this on his part induced a more respectful
deportment towards Sir William, whose fine mind and noble character
no one could better estimate than Swift, and it ended, notwithstand-
ing an occasional jar, and a parting at one time, with Swift's becoming
the most zealous, attentive, and affectionate friend of Sir Wilham,
who admitted him to his most entire and cordial confidence.
The whole period of Swift's residence at Moorpark was two years.
During this time, he went for awhile to Oxford to take his degree,
and he was absent twice in Ireland ; once a few months, on account
of his health, and the second time, when Swift, anxious for some
means of independence, and Temple only offering him an employ-
ment worth a hundred a-year in the office of the rolls in Ireland, they
parted with mutual displeasure. Swift then went to Ireland, where,
tlie heat of their difference having almted on both sides, through Sir
William's influence, he obtained the prebend of Kilroot, in the
diocese of Connor, worth about a hundred pounds a-year. To this
rfinall living he retired, and assumed the character of a country
ck-rgyman. But this life of obscurity and seclusion was not likely
long to suit the reckless, aspiring nature of Swift. He sighed to
SWIFT. 1 i'3
return to the intellectual pleasures and persons who resorted to
Moori^ark, and Sir William had not the less sensibly felt the absence
of Swift, than Swift the absence of Mooi'park. He returned within
the year, and was welcomed back w'ith warmth and respect, and
thenceforward stood in a new position. With his abrupt departure
from Kilroot two very different stories have been connected ; one
Avhich, if true, would sink his character for ever ; the other, which
has never been questioned, evidencing the noblest qualities in that
character. The first of these stories is, that he attempted violence
on the daughter of a farmer, one of his parishioners. Of this it is
enough to quote the words of Sir Walter Scott, which, after giving
the particulars of the refutation of this calumny, are : — " It is suffi-
cient for Swift's vindication to observe, that he returned to Kilroot
after his resignation, and inducted his successor in face of the church
and of the public ; that he returned to Sir William Temple with as
fair a character as when he left him ; that during all his public life
in England and Ii'eland, when he was the biitt of a whole faction,
this charge was never heard of ; that when adduced so many years
after his death, it was xmsupported by aught but sturdy and general
averment ; and that the chief jiropagator of the calumny first
retracted his assei'tions, and finally died insane."
That thei-e might be somethipg on which this charge was founded is
by no means improbable, and that Swift, as alleged, was brought
before a magistrate of the name of Dobbs, for it is confessed that
in his youth he was of a dissipated habit, and it is far more likely
that these habits induced that constitutional affection, with giddiness,
deafness, and ultimate insanity, which made his future life wretched,
than that it was owing to eating an over quantity of stone-fruit. lu
this point of view the life of Swift presents a deep moral lesson, for
no man, if that were the case, ever drew down upon himself a severer
chastisement. But as regards this particular fact, it could by possi-
bility be nothing so flagrant as was endeavoured to be propagated
by the report. The second statement one is imwilling to weaken,
because in itself it is so beautiful ; yet in the Dean's life there are
so many proofs of his making professions of patriotism and gene-
rosity to cover and screen his private purposes, that one is equally
tempted to suspect a certain share of policy. The fact is thus
stated : —
"In an excursion from his habitation, he met with a clergym.an,
with Avhora he formed an acquaintance, which proved him to bo
learned, modest, well-principled, the father of eight children, and a
curate at the rate of forty pounds a-year. Without explaining his
fmrjjose, Swift borrowed this gentleman's black mare — having, no
lorse of his own — rode to Dublin, resigned the prebend of Kilroot,
and obtained a grant of it for this new friend. When he gave the
presentation to the poor clergyman, he kept his eyes steadily fixed
on the old man's face, which at first only expressed pleasure at
finding himself preferred to a living ; but when he found that it
was that of his benefactor, who had resigned in his fixvour, his joy
•issumed so touching an expression cf surprise arid gratitude, that
124 swiFi'.
Swift, himself deeply affected, declared he had never cxperieuced so
much pleasure as at that moment. The poor clergyman, at Swift's
depai'ture, pressed upon him the black mai'c, which he did not
choose to hurt him by refusing ; and thus mounted for the first time
on a horse of his own, with fourscore pounds in his purse, Swift
again rode to Dublin, and there embarked for England, and resumed
his situation at jMoorpark, as Sir William Temple's confidential
secretary."
The incident is a charming one, and we may admit the facts as
regards the clergyman to be fully true, and that the pleasure of
Swift must have been great in having the opportunity of thus making
a good man happy ; but in order to place the transaction on its pro-
bably correct basis, we must not forget that Swift was confessedly
already most thoroughly weary of the obscurity of Kilroot, and
longing for return to Moorpark. This takes a good deal of the
romance out of it. Without, therefore, astonishing ourselves at the
unworldly generosity of a young man abandoning his own chance in
life to serve a poor and meritorious man, we may supj)ose to the full
that Swift was glad to do the good man such a service while it coin-
cided with his own wishes. No person was more clear-sighted than
Swift as to the consequences of such things ; and none could better
estimate the wide difference in the mode of doing the thing, between
saying, " Well, I am tired of this stupid place, I must away again to
E;iG;laud, but I'll try to get the living for you," and leaving the high
merit of such a personal sacrifice to be attributed to him. In any
vi^y, it was rich in consequences. He left behind a family made
happy; grateful hearts, and tongues that would sound his praises
through the country ; and W'hat a ])restigc Avith which to return to
]\Ioorpark ! He came back like a hero of romance. That, judging
by the after life of the Dean, is probably the true view of the affair.
He did a good deed, and he took care that it presented to the publio
its best side.
These ten years of life at Moorpark, which ended only with the
death of Sir AVilliam Temple, were every way a most important
jjortion of Swift's life. Here he laid at once the foundation of his
fame and his wretchedness. Here, with books, leisure, and as much
solitude as he pleased ; with the conversation of Sir William Templo
and the most distinguished literati of the age who visited him ;
Swift in so auspicious an atmosphere not only thought and studied
much, but wrote a vast deal, as it were to practise his pen for great
future efforts, when he felt his mind and his knowledge had reached
a sufficient maturity. Ho informs his friend, Mr. Kendall, that ho
had "written, and burned, and written again upon all manner of
subjects, more than perhajis any man in England." He wrote Pin-
daric Odes ; translated from the classics ; and exercised his powers
of satire till he could confidently to himself predict the force of that
" hate to fools '' which he afterwards assumed as his principal cha-
racteristic. Besides this, he was deeply engaged in assisting Sir
AV'illiam in tlie controversy on the superiority of ancient ov laoderu
learning, in which Teniple, Boyle, Wotton, and Bcntley were •■(]]
SWIFT. 125
involved. This occasioned Swift's " Battle of the Books," though it
was not printed till some years afterwards. Here, also, he wi-ote his
famous " Tale of a Tub," which more than any other cause stopped
effectually the path of his ambition towards a bishopric. Though
not known avowedly as an author, Swift was now well known as a
man of great ability to many Uterary men, and was on terms of
particular friendship with Congreve.
But his literary' jiursuits here had not so completely engrossed
him as to prevent his engaging in what, in any other man, would
have been termed more tender ones ; in Swift they must take some
other name, be that what it may. The history of his conduct, too,
with regard to every woman to whom he paid particular court, is the
most extraordinary thing in all literary research. There have been
several ways of accounting for it, into which it is not my intention
to descend ; let the causes have been what they may, they stamp his
character for intense selfishness beyond all possibihty of palliation.
If Swift felt himself disqualified for entering into matrimonial re-
lations from whatever cause or motive, as it is evident he did, he
should have conducted himself towards women of taste and feeling
accordingly ; but, on the contrary, he never, in any instance, seems
to have j)ut the shghtest check on himself in this respect. He paid
them the most marked attentions ; in some instances he v/ooed with
all the appearances of passion, and proposed marriage with the most
eager importunity; he saw one after another respond to his warmth,
and then he coolly backed out, or entered into such a tantalizing
and mysterious position — where the woman had to sacrifice every-
thing, peace of mind being destroyed, and character being put into
utmost jeopardy — as wore their very hearts and lives out. He played
with women as a cat does with mice. So that they were kept fast
bound within his toils, cut off from all the better prospects of life,
.sacrificed as victims to his need of their society, he cared nothing.
He was alarmed and agitated almost to madness by the fear of losing
them, yet this was a purely selfish feeling ; he took no measures to
set their hearts at rest ; he placed them in siich circumstances that
he coTild not do it ; to satisfy one he must immolate another. Some
of the finest and most charming women of the age were thus kept,
as it were, with a string round their hearts, by v;hich he could pluck
and torture them at pleasure ; and keep them walking for ever over
the burning ploughshares of agonizing im certainties, and the world's
oblique glances. There is nothing which can ever reclaim Swift's
memory, in this respect, from the mo.st thorough contempt and
indignation of every manly mind.
Every instance of what are called love-afl:'airs, in which Swift was
concerned, presents the same features, even under the softened effect
of the colouring of his most laudatory biographci-, Sir Walter Scott.
While Swift was at Leicester, his mother was afraid of his forming
an imprudent attachment to a young woman there ; at which Swift;
knowing him.self pretty well, only laughed. His flirtations, he re-
presented, were only "op])ortunitics of amusement;" a "sort (k
insignificant gallantry which he used towards the girl in question ;
12) SWIFT.
a *' iiabit to be laid aside whenever lie took sober resolutions, a..-\d
Avhicli, Khould he enter tlio church, he should not find it hard to lay
down at the porch." This is base language, and that of Scott i.s
hardly better. He says — " it is probably to a habit, at first indulged
only from vanity or for the sake of amusement, that we are to trace
the well-known circumstances which embittered his life, and impaired
his reputation."
And is this all 1 Are habits of indulging vanity, and of amusing
oneself with the affections aiid the happiness of others, to be thus
ooolly talked of? "Circumstances which embittered /lis life, and
impaired //is reputation," indeed ! Swift had the greatest right to
embitter his own life, and imjmir his own reputation, if he pleased,
but that is not the question ; it was because he most recklessly, for
the indulgence of his vanity and his self-love, embittered the lives
of those who listened to him, and impaired their reputations, that
he was culpable in proportion to his brilliant powers, and placed
himself thereby in the category of heartless villains. These are
severe words ; but I have always felt, and still cannot avoid feeling,
ihat their application to Swift is most just and necessary. Perhaps
no instance of mere meanness was ever more striking than that
shown in his second courtship. The lady in this case was not a
simple country girl, but was Jane Waryng, the sister of an ancient
i-oUege companion ; to this yoimg lady, in his affected pastoral style,
he had given the name of Varina. Let it be remembered that this
was in Ireland, while he was bearing the name and performing the
functions of a clergyman. His suit for this lady was continued for
four or five years with all the appearances and protestations of the
deepest attachment ; he proposed marriage in the most unequivocal
terms. The J'oung lady docs not seem to have responded very cor-
dially to his advances for a long time, in fact, till that very response
put a speedy end to the disgraceful farce. When she did agree to
accept him and his ofi'er, " he seemed," saj^s Scott, " to have been
a little startled by her sudden offer of capitulation." He then assumed
quite another tone ; — let Scott's own language relate what he did :
" Swift charged Varina with want of affection, and indifference ;
stated his own income in a most dismal point of view, yet intimated
that he might well pretend to a better fortune than she was pos-
sessed of ! He was so far from retaining his former opinion as to
the effects of a happy union, that he inquired whether the physicians
had got over some scruples they appeared to entertain on the subject
of her health. (He had made this delicate health before a plea for
entreating her to put herself under his care.) Lastl}', he demanded
peremptorily to know whether she would undertake to manage their
domestic affairs with an income of rather less than three hundred
jjounds a-year ; whether she would engage to follow the methods he
should point out for the improvement of her mind ; whether she
could bend all her affections to the same direction which he should
give his own, and so govern her passions, however justly provoked,
as at all times to resume her good humour at his approach ; and,
tinally, whether she could account the place wjt"»re he resided mor^
SWIFT. 1 ?'
welcome than courts and cities without him ? These prem-bbo
agreed, as indispensable to please those -who, like himself, 'wore
deeply read in the world,' he intimates his willingness to wed her,
though tcithoid personal beauty or large fortune."
This language requires no comment ; it is the vile shufHe of a
contemptible fellow, who, taken at his word, then bullies and insults
to get oft" again.
His next victim was Esther Johnson, the Stella of this strange
history. This young lady was the daughter of the steward of Sir
William Temple at Moorpark ; she was fatherless when Sv»-ift com-
menced his designs upon her ; her father died soon after her birth,
and her mother and sister resided in the house at Moorpark, and
were treated with particular regard and esteem by the family. Miss
Esther Johnson, who was much younger than Swift, was beautiful,
lively, and amiable. Swift devoted himself to her as her teacher,
and under advantage of his daily office and position, engaged her
young affections most absolutely. So completely was it understood
by her that they were to be married when Swift's income warranted
it, that on the death of Temple, and Swift's preferment to the living
of Laracor in Ireland, she was induced by him to come over and fix
her residence in Trim near him, imder the protection of a lady of
middle age, Mrs.Uingley. The story is too well known to be minutely
followed ; Swift acquired such complete mastery over her, that he
kept her near him, and at his command, the greater part of his life,
but would neither marry her, nor allow her to marry anyone else,
though she had excellent ofters. It was not till many years after-
wards, when this state of dependence, uncertainty, and arbitrary
selfishness had nearly worn her to death ; and when these were aggra-
vated by fears for her reputation, and then by the appearance of a
i-ival on the scene, that she extorted from him a marriage which was
.still kept a profound secret, unacknowledged, and which left her just
in the position she was in befoi-e, that of a mere companion in pre-
sence of a third party, when he chose. The rival just mentioned
was a Miss Vanhomrigh, the daughter of a widow lady, whose house
he frequented during his life in London. This young lady, to whom
he, on his uniform plan, v;hich tended to prevent unpleasant claims
by the evidence of letters, gave the name of Vanessa, as he termed
himself Cadenus, was high-spirited and accomplished. When Swift,
in his usual manner, had for a long time paid every marked atten-
tion to Miss Vanhomrigh, and was regarded both by herself and the
whole family as an acknowledged lover, yet never came to plain
terms, the young lady came boldly to them herself. The gay
deceiver was thunder-struck : he had for years been living in the
most intimate state of confidence with Stella, as her affianced lover;
she had all the claims of honour and affection upon him that a wife
could have ; for, tliough maintaining the strictest propriety of life
luider the closest care of Mrs. Dingley, she was devoting her time,
her thoughts, the very flower of her life, and the hazard of her good
Jiame, to his social happiness. This jjlain dealing, therefore, on the
\\\.\i of Vanessa, was an embarrassing blow. " We cannot doubt,"
12S SWIFT.
says Scott, " that he actually felt " the shame, cUsappointmeut, guilt,
surprise, " expressed in his celebrated poem, though he had not the
courage to take tlic open and manly course of avowing those engage-
ments Avith Stella, or other impediments, which prevented his
accepting the hand and fortune of her rival."
The fox in fact was taken in his wiles. He had more on his
hands than with all his cunning he knew how to manage. His
Kclfisli tj'ranny had been able to control and put off jjoor Stella, but
Vanessa was a different kind of subject, and occasioned him great
alarm and anxiety. He retired to Ireland ; but this did not mend
the matter, it tended rather to make it Avorse ; for Miss Vanhom-
righ had property there, and speedily announced to the guilty Dean
her presence in Dublin. He was now in as pretty a fix as one could
Avisli such a double-dealer to be. " The claims of Stella," says Scott,
'• were preferable in point of date, and to a man of honour and good
faith, in every respect inimitable. She had resigned her country,
her friends, and even hazarded her character, in hope of one day
being united to Swift. But if Stella had made the greater sacrifice,
Vanessa was the more important victim. She had youth, fortune,
fashion; all the acquired accomplishments and information in which
Stella was deficient ; possessed at least as much wit, and certainly
higher powers of imagination. She had, besides, enjoyed the advan-
tage of having in a manner comi^elled Swift to hear and reply to the
language of passion. There was in her case no Mrs. Dingley, no
convenient third party, Avhose presence in society and community
in correspondence neces.sarily imposed on both a restraint, conve-
nient perhaps to Swift, but highly unfavourable to Stella."
The consequences were such as might be expected. Swift endea-
voured to temporize and amuse Miss Vanhomrigh, and to induce her
to return to England, but in vain. She never ceased to press the, to
lier, important question, and to keep him in what he used to call
" a quickset hedge." She im23ortuned him with complaints of
cruelty and neglect, and it was obvious that any decisive measure
to break this acquaintance would be attended with some such tragic
consequence, as, though late, at length concluded their story. He
was thus compelled to assume a demeanour of kindness and affection
to Vanessa, which, of course, soon was reported to Stella, and began
to produce in her the most fatal symptoms. Her heart was wrung
by fears and jealousies ; her health gave way ; and Swift was com-
pelled to a private marriage, in order not to clog his conscience with
Jier murder. The conditions of this marriage were, that it should
continue a strict secret from the public, and that they should con-
tinue to live separately, and in the same guarded manner as before
The grand business of his life now was to soothe and wheedle
A^anessa, and to play the hypocrite lover to her while he was the
iiusband of another woman ; a fine situation for a clergyman and
a dean ! This, we may believe, with a woman of Miss Vanhomrigh's
temperament, was no easy task. His next plan was to try to get
rid of her by inducing her to marry some one else, and for tlais pur-
pose he presented to her Dean Winter, a frentleman of character and
SWIFT. 129
fortune, and Dr. Price, afterwards Archbishop of Cashel. It was iu
vain ; she rejected such offers jjeremptorily, and at length, as if to
hide her vexation and seek repose in nature, she retired to Marley
Abbey, her house and property, near Celbridge. But tlie dreams of
love and jealousy pursued her thither with only the more force.
She heard whispers of Stella being actually the wife of Swift, and
she determined to know the truth. For this pui-pose che Avrote at
once to Stella, and put the plain question to her. The result of this
was rapid and startling. In a few days she saw the Dean descend
from his horse at her gate, and advance to her door, dark and fierce
as a thunder-cloud. He entered, threw down a letter upon the table
before her, and with a look black as night, stalked out again without
a word, mounted, and rode away. As soon as Miss Vanhomrigh
recovered in some degree from her terror and amazement, she took
up the letter, opened it, and found it her own to Stella !
Stella herself confirmed the fatal truth by a candid avowal, and
Miss Vanhomrigh sank under the shock. For eight years, trusting
probably to the promises of Swift, and the apparently failing health
of Stella, she had maintained the unequal contest with her deep-
rooted passion and Swift's mysterious conduct, but this revelation
of his villany was her deatli. However, she lived only to revoke in
haste her will, which had been made in favour of Swift, and to leave
Jier fortune to Mr. i\Iarshall, afterwards one of the Judges of the
Court of Common Pleas in Ireland, and Dr. Berkeley, the celebrated
philosopher, and afterwards Bishoji of Cloyne ; and to command the
pubhcation of all the letters which had jiassed between Swift and
herself, as well as the celebrated j^oem of Cadenus and Vanessa.
Stella died in 1727-8,'having borne the secret and corroding suffer-
ing of the position imjioscd by the selfishness of Swift for upwards
of thirty years. Mrs. Whiteway, a lady who was on terms of great
intimacy Avith Swift, and spent much time at the deanery of St.
Patrick's, stated that when Stella was on her death-bed she expostu-
lated with Swift on his having kept their marriage unnecessarily
.secret, and expressed her fear that it might leave a stain on her
reputation ; to which Swift replied, " Well, my dear, if you wish it,
it shall be owned." Stella replied, " B is too later
Scott says, " he received this report of ]\Irs. Whiteway with j^lea-
sure, as vindicating the Dean from the charge of cold-blooded and
hard-hearted cruelty to the unfortunate Stella, when on the verge of
existence." How does it vindicate him from any such charge ? The
a^-owal was never made by him ; and so dubious was the very fact of
the marriage left, as far as any act of Swift's was concerned, that its
very existence has since been strenuously denied, especially by Mr.
^lonck ]\Iason in his History of St. Patrick's Cathedral. The simple
truth is, that the whole of Swift's conduct to Stella for thirty-three
years was a piece of " cold-blooded and hard-hearted cruelty," which
admits of no defence. Such was the treatment which all ladies who
manifested an attachment to Swift received at his hands ; is it any
wonder that such a man went mad ?
These circumstances have given a singular character to the b''9'
l30 SWIFT.
graphy of Swift ; the letters of Stella and Vanessa, which have boon
])ublished, convert it by their passion and heart-eloquence into u
.si>ecies of romance ; in which, however, Swift himself plays the part
of a very clever, witty, and domineering, but certainly not a,ttractive,
hero. Moorpark will always possess an interest connected with Stellii,
Tt was amid its pleasant groves that, young, beautiful, and confiding,
she indulged with Swift in those dreams of after-life which he was
so bitterly to falsify. There is a cavern about three quarters of a
mile from the mansion, called Mother Ludlam's Hole, which the
country tradition represents as having been a frequent resort of
Swift and Stella in their walks. It lies halfway down the side of the
hill covered with wood, towards the southern extremity of the park.
It seems to have been hewn out of the sandstone rock, and to have
increased considerably in its dimensions since it was described by
Grose. The greatest height of this excavation may be about twelve
feet, and its breadth twenty, but at the distance of about thirty feet
from the entrance it becomes so low and narrow as to be passable
only by a person crawling on his hands and knees. From the bottom
of the cave issues a small, clear stream, and two stone benches have
been placed for the accommodation of visitors. The gloom and un-
cei-tain depth of the grotto, the sound of the water, and the beauty
of the surrounding soUtary scene, surveyed through the dark arched
entrance, shagged with weeds and the roots of trees, give the spot an
impressive etfect. HaufF has introduced this cavern into a drama
called " Ludlam's Hohle."
Grose gives a jocose account of the origin of the name of the cave.
Old Mother Ludlam, he tells us, was a lohiic witch ; one who neither
!nlled hogs, rode on broomsticks, nor made children vomit nails and
crooked pins, but, on the contrary, did all the good she could. That
the country people, when in want of any article, — say a frying-pan
or a spade, — would come to the cave at midnight, and turning three
times round, would three times say, "Pray, good Mother Ludlam,
lend me such a thing, and I will return it within two days." The
next morning, on going there again, the article would be found laid
at the entrance of the cave. At length the borrower of a large
cauldron was not punctual in returning it, which so irritated the
good mother, that when it did come she refused to take it in again,
and in course of time it was conveyed away to Wayerley Abbey,
and, at the dissolution of the monasteries, was deposited in Frens-
ham church. From the hour of the non-appearance of the cauldron,
however, at its proper time. Mother Ludlam never would lend the
.slightest thing. Moorpark is now a water establishment, conducted
by Dr. Lane.
The resorts and residences of Swift in London, during his life
there, have no very pecuhar interest. He frequented freely the
houses of the great political characters with whom he was connected.
His immediate friends were Harley, Bolingbroke, and Godolphin. He
was a frequent attendant at Leicester-house, the court of the Prince
of Wales, afterwards George II. He was on the most familiar term.s
with all the literati, Gay, Pope, Addison, and, for a considerable
SWIFT. 131
period, Steele, &c. He was often at Twickenham for months
together, and a frequenter of Button's coffee-house with the other
wits of the time. It is not in these places, however, that the deep
interest of Swift's life has settled, and, therefore, wo cross the
Channel to Ireland, and seek his homes there. Wo have already
noticed his brief abode at Kilroot : his next residence was at Laracor,
in Meath.
Swift was about tliirty-two years of age when he attended Lord
Berkeley, one of the Lords Justices of Ireland, to that country as
his chaplain and private secretary. Berkeley had promised him the
first good chui-ch living that fell vacant, but the rich deanery of
Derry soon after tailing out, he would only sell it to Swift for a thou-
sand pounds. Swift resented this in such a manner, that to prevent
making so formidable an enemy, Berkeley gave him the next vacancy,
— the rectory of Agher, and the vicarage of Laracor and Rathbeggan .
These livings, united, amounted to about 230/. yearly ; and the pre-
bend of Dunlavin being added in the year 1700, raised Swift's income
to betwixt 350/. and 400/. His manner of taking possession of
Laracor, where he resolved to live, was characteristic. He was a
great pedestrian, and is said to have walked down incocpiifo to Laracor
from Dublin, making doggrel rhymes on the places which he passed
thi-ough. Many anecdotes are related of this journey. Arriving, he
entered the curate's house, demanded his name, and announced him-
self bluntly " as his master," AU was bustle to receive a person of
such consequence, who, apparently, was determined to make his
consequence felt. The curate's wife was ordered to lay aside the
Doctor's clean shirt and stockings, which he carried in his pocket ;
nor did he relax his airs of domination until he had excited much
alarm, which his subsequent friendly conduct to the worthy couple
turned into respectful attachment.
These Lrusqueries of the Dean's were, no doubt, very amusing to
liimself, and are agreeable enough to read of, but they must have
been anything but agi-eeable to those upon whom they were played
off. They betray a want of regard to the feelings of others, and
were offences against the best laws of society, which every one who
regards the kindly sparing of the feelings of the humble and the
snodest ought to condemn. However respectful might be the after
attachment of this worthy curate and his wife, we may well believe
tliat the first strange rudeness and severity of tlie dreaded Dean
would leave a wound and a terror behind that were not deserved,
and that no one ought willingly to inllict. There were cases whero
folly merited tlie eccentric chastisement which Swift gave them.
The farmer's wife who invited him to dinner, and then spoiled the
dinner by repeatedly complaining that it really was too poor for him
to sit down to, though the table groaned with good things, deserved,
in some degree, the retort, — " Then why did you not get a better '<
— you knew 1 was coming ; I have a good mind to go av/ay and
<line on a red herring." Yet even there, the good-natured country
jiabit of the woman was somewhat too severely punished. Sua
meant well.
f2
132
SWIFT.
Swift seemed to settle down at Laracor in good earnest. He found
the church and parsonage much neglected and dilapidated, and set
about their repairs at once. He w^as active and regular in the dis-
charge of his clerical duties. He read prayers twice a-week, and
preached regularly on Sundays. The prayers were thinly attended,
and it was on one of these occasions that Lord Orrery represents
him as addressing the clerk, Roger Coxe, as " M}' dearly beloved
]{oger." The truth ot the anecdote has been disputed, and is said
to exist in an old jest-book, printed half-a-century before. This
does not, however, render it at all improbable that Swift made
use of the jest, especially when we know that Roger was himself
a humourist and a joker : as, for instance, when Swift asked Roger
why he wore a red waistcoat, and he replied, because he belonged to
the church mihtant.
Swift took much pleasui-e in his ganleu at Laracor ; converted
a rividet that ran through
r^
STr.LLA S HOUSE.
it into a regular canal, - ^~~''
and planted on its banks
avenues of wnllows. As
soon as he was settled,
Stella, and her companion
^Irs. Dingley, came over
and settled down too.
They had a house near
the gate of Knightsbrook,
the old residence of the
Percivals, almost half-a-
mile from Swift's house,
where they lived when
Swift was at Laracor, or
were the guests of the
hospitable vicar of Trim,
Dr. Raymond. Whenever
Swift left Laracor for a
time, as on his annual journeys to England, the ladies then took
possession of the vicarage, and remained there during his absence.
The site of Stella's house is marked on the Ordnance Survey of the
county of Meath.
The residence of Swift at Laracor includes a most important por-
tion of his life. It was, at the least, twelve years, as he took pos-
session of his living in 1700, and quitted it for the deanery of St.
Patrick in 1713. Here he was fully occupied with the duties of his
parish, and the united labours of authorship and pohtics. Hardly
was he settled when he wrote his pamphlet on the Dissensions
between the Nobles and Commons of Rome, Avhich applied to the
impeachment by the Commons of Lord Somers, Oxford, Halifax,
and Portland, on account of their share in the partition treaty. This
biought him at once into the intimacy of Somers, Sunderland, and
Halifax. Here he soon after published' his Tale of a Tub, which had
been wiittt-n at Moorpark. This created a vast sensation, and though
SWIFT. 133
anonyiaous, like most of Swift's w^orks, was soon known to be his,
and hi? society was eagerly sought by men of the highest distinction
both for rank and genius. Amongst the latter, Addison, Steele,
Tickell, Philips, and others, at once became his friends. He now
made use of his iuliuence with government to obtain the gift of the
first-fruits and tenths to the Church of Ireland, v/hich he effected.
Besides this boon to the Church at large, he increased the glebe of
Laracor from one acre to twenty ; and, purchasing the tithes of
Effernock, when he was not overburdened with money, settled them
for ever on his successors. Here he amused himself with his quizzes
upon Partridge the Astrologer, under the title of Isaac Bickerstaft',
which almost drove that notorious impostor mad. Here he wrote
the celebrated verses on Baucis and Philemon, and other of his
poems. Here, in 1710, he made his grand political transit from the
Whigs to the Tories, and became the great friend, assistant, and
political counsellor of Harley and Bolingbroke ; living, during his
long sojourns in London, on the most famihar terms with those
noblemen, and also with Pope, Gay, and all the more celebrated
authors.
Swift's political achievements at this time arc a singular subject
of contemi:)lation, and show what momentous influence a mere
private man may acquire in England by his talents. Here was a
country clergyman of an obscure parish in IMoath, with a congrega-
tion, as he himself said, of "some half-score persons," who yet
Avielded the destinies of all Europe. It was more by the power of
his pen in " The Examiner," and by his counsels and influence, than
by any other means, that the Tories were enabled to turn out of
office the long triumphant Whigs, and, by the peace of Utrecht, put
a stop to the triumphs of ]Mai-lborough on the Continent. The ven-
geance which the Tories took on their adversaries the Whigs on
regaining power for a time, in Anne's reign, is, perhaps, the most
startUng thing in the history of party. The Whigs had steadily
pursued the war against Louis the Fourteenth, in which WiUiam had
been engaged all his life. For nearly half-a-century, that is, from
1667 to 1713, the French monarch had carried on a desiderate contest
for the destruction of the liberties of Europe. In Spain, in tho
Netherlands, in Holland, in Italy, and Germany, his generals, Catinat,
Luxemburg, Conde, Turenne, Vendome, Villars, INIelac, Villeroi,
Tallard, &c., &c., had led on the French armies to the most remorse-
less devastations. To this day, the successive demon deeds of
Turenne, Melac, Crequi, and their soldiers, are vividly alive in the
hearts and the memories of the peasantry of the Palatinate, where
they destroyed nearly every city, chased tlie inhabitants away, leav-
ing all that beautiful and fertile region a black desert, and throwing
the bones of the ancient Germanic emperors out of thcu' graves in
the cathedral of Speir, played at bowls with their skulls. To extin-
guish Prcjte.stantism, and to extend the French empire, apjieared
Louis's two great objects ; in which he was supported by all the
spiritual power of the king of super-stitions, the Pope. Pevoking the
Edict of Nanles, lie committed tlic most horrible outrages and
I3i SWIFT.
destruction on his own Protestant subjects. He hoped, ou the sub-
jugation of Holland and the reformed states of Germany, to carry out
there the same horrors of religious annihilation. Except in the
])erson of Buonaparte, never has the spirit of conquest, and of poli-
tical insolence, shown itself in so lawless, determined, and offensive
a form as in this ostentatious monarch. WiUiam III, before his
accession to the British throne, had been the most formidable oppo-
nent to his progress. But he had contrived to set his grandson,
Philip V, on the throne of Spain, in opposition to the claims of
Austria, and, by the fear of the ultimate union of these two great
nations under one sceptre, alarmed all Europe. In vain was the
united resistance of Austria and Holland, till England sent out its
great general, Marlborough. The names of Marlborough, and the
Savoj'ard, Prince Eugene, became as those of the demi-gods in the
temple of war ; and Blenheim, Ramillies, Oudenarde, and Malplaquet,
arose from their ages of obscurity into Continental pyramids of
England's military renown.
But of what avail was all this renown ? What was won by it,
except the empty glory itself? At the crowning moment — at the
hour of otherwise inevita.ble retribution to the bloody and unprin-
cipled monarch of Fi-ance, and of recompence to those nations whose
blood he had so lavishly shed, and whose surface he had covered with
ashes, ruins, and horrors, instead of cities, peaceful villages, and fair
iields — the Whigs were expelled from office by the Tories, and all
the fruits of this long and bitter war were snatched away from us
and our allies. To deprive the Whigs of the glory of a successful
war, to dash down as abortive all the triumphs of the Whig general,
Marlborough, these men rushed into peace, without consulting the
allies, and left no results to the great European struggle but the
blood which had been shed, and the misery that had been endured.
Louis, then eighty-five years of age, and tottering towards the grave,
saw himself at once released from the most fearful condition into
which his wicked ambition had plunged him — ^from the most terrible
prospect of humiliation and disgrace which could Avring such a mind.
He had reduced his kingdom to the last stage of exhaustion, by half-
a-ceutury's incessant contest with Europe ; by bribing the English
monarchs, Charles II, and James II, and many English nobles, to
refuse help to the suffering Continent ; and by briliing and paying
the armies of German j^rinces whom he could induce to become
traitors to their nation. His people were fiercely embittered against
him ; no taxes could be raised ; his best generals were defeated on
all hands ; and a short time would, most probably, have seen Marl-
borough and Eugene anticipate the allies of our day, by marching
directly uj^on and taking possession of Paris. So sensible of this was
Louis, that his haughty tone was totally gone ; he ordered his am-
bassadors to give ujj Alsace, and even to assist in driving Philip, his
own grandson, out of Spain, by privately paying the allies a million
of livres monthly for the purpose. The Tories came in at this cri-
tical juncture, and all was changed. They ofiered Louis a most
unexpected peace. At once he lifted again his head and his heart :
SWIFT. 135
Alsace remains, to this day, a part of France ; Spain Las descendecl
to the Bourbon ; and the glory of IMarlboroxigh is without a single
result, except Blenheim House, the dukedom to his family, and
xixfif-iico miUiom and a half of taxatio)iy which that war cost the Enj.'-
lish people. The peace of Utrecht roused the indignation of tho
whole civilized world. Volumes have been written in reprehension
of it, and even enlightened conservatives of our time, as Hallam, in
his Constitutional History, join in the condemnation.
Yet this mighty change, with all its coiuitless consequences, could
be effected, almost wholl}^, by the simple vicar of a simple Irish
parish. It was Swift who helped to plan and carry out this grand
scheme of defeat and mortification to the Whigs, who had excited
his wrath by withholding from him preferment. It was he, more
than all men together, who, in the Examiner, painted the scheme in
all his affluence of delusive colours to the nation, and roused the
English people, by the cry of English blood and English money
wasted on the Continent, to demand immediate peace. While
we lament the deed, we must confess the stupendous powers of
the man.
But all this could not win hmi the keenly- coveted bishopric. Ho
could reverse the history of total Europe, he could arrest the vic-
torious arms of Marlborough and Eugene, he could put forth his
hand and save France and its proud monarch from just humiliation ;
but he could not extort from the reluctant queen, even by the com-
bined hands of Oxford and Bolingbroke, the object of his own
ambition — a mitre. The Tale of a Tub stood in his way : it was only
just in time, that his friends, themselves falhug, secured for him the
deanery of St. Patrick ; to which he retired to act the ostensible
patriot by indulging his own private resentment against his enemies
and his fate.
Laracor is about two English miles from Trim. It lies in a
drearyish sort of farming country, and to Swift, full of ambition,
and accustomed to town life, and the stirring politics of the time,
with which he was so much mixed iip, one would have thought
must provp a perfect desert. There is no village there, nor does
there appear to have been one. It was a mere church and parsonage,
and huts were very hkely scattered about here and there, as they
are now. The church still stands ; one of the old, plain, barn-like
structures of this part of the countiy, with a low belfry. Tiie
graveyard is ])retty well filled with headstones and tombs, and some
that seem to belong to good families. The churchyard is surrounded
by a wall and trees, and in a thatched cottage at the gate lives the
sexton. He said he had built the house himself ; that he was
seventy-five or so ; and his wife, who had been on the spot fiftv
years, as old ; but that the incumbent, alMr. Irvine, was eighty-fovu-,
and that he was but the third from Swift. Swift held it fifty-live
years, the next incumbent nearly as long, and this clergyman thirty-
six, or thereabouts. It must, therefore, be a healthy place. The old
man complained that all the gentry who used to live near were gone
awav. His wife used to get 20/. at Christmas for Christmas-boxes,
136 SWIFT.
" and now slie does not get even a cup o' tay. Poor creature ! and
pho so fond of the tay ! "
Like hits house at Dublin, Swift's house here is gone. There
remains only one tall, thick ruin of a wall. " What is that ? " I asked
of a man at a cottage-door, close by. " It's been there from the time
of the Dane," said he. For a moment I imagined he meant the
Danes ; but soon recollected myself. Close to it, at the side of the
high road, is a clear spring, under some bushes, and margined with
great stones, which they call " the Dane's cellar," and " the Dane's
well." Swift has not lost his jjopularity yet with the i^eople. " Ho
M"as a very good man to the poor," say they. " He was a tine bright
man." This, however, is all the remains of his place here. The
present vicar has built himself a good house in the fields, nearer to
Trim ; and not only the Dean's house is all gone except this piece of
■wall, but his holly hedge, his willows, and cherry-trees have vanished.
A common Irish hut now stands in what was his garden. The canal
may still be traced, but the river walk is now a marsh.
Trim, where Stella lived when Swift was at Laracor, though the
county town of Meath, is now little more than a large village. It
bears, however, all the marks of its ancient importance. The ruins
.scattered on the banks of the Boyne are most extensive. They arc
those of a great palace, a castle, a cathedral, and other buildings. It
is a great haunt for antiquarians ; and not far distant from it is Tara,
with its hill, the seat of ancient kings. As you leave the town to go
to Ijaracor, you come at the town-end to a lofty column in honour
of Wellington, who was born at Dangan Castle, a few miles beyond
Laracor. The way to Laracor then lies along a flattish country, with
a few huts here and there by the wayside. On your left, as you
approach Laracor, runs an old ruinous wall, with tall trees within it,
as having once formed a park. The first object connected with Swift
which arrests your attention, is the ruin of his house, with its
sjjring, which lies on the right hand of the road ; and on the left side
of the road, pei'haps a hmidred yards further, stands the church in
its enclosure.
From Laracor, Swift's remove A\'as to Dublin, where he spent the
remainder of his life. Here the deanery has been quite removed, and
a modern house occupies its place. The old cathedral of St. Patrick
is a gi'eat object connected with his memory here. Though wearing
a very ancient look, St. Patrick's was rebuilt after its destruction in
1362, and its present spire was added only in 1750. In size and
proportion, the cathedral is fine. It is three hundred feet long, and
eighty broad. It cannot boast much of its architecture, but contains
several monuments of distinguished men ; amongst them, those of
Swift and Curran. These two arc busts. Aloft in the nave hang
the banners of the knights of St. Patrick ; and again in the choir
Jiang newly-emblazoned banners of the knights ; and over the stalls
which iDftlong to the knights are fixed gilt helmets, and by each stall
hangs the knight's sword. The whole fabric, when I visited it, was
imdergoing repair, and not before it was needed. Of course, tha
monuments of highest interest here are those of Swift and Stella,
SWIFT. 137
These occupy two contiguous pillars on the south side of the nave.
They consist of two plain slabs of marble, in memory of the Dean
and Jlrs. Johnson, — Stella. The inscription on the Dean's slab is
expressive '' of that habit of mind v/hich his own disappointments
and the oppressions of his country had produced." It was written
by himself.
" Jlic deposituui est corpus
Jonathan S w i p t, S. T. D.
lliijus Ecclesiae Cathedralis
Decani
Ubi sffiva indignatio
Ulterius
Cor lascerare nequit.
Abi Viator
Et iniitare, si poteris,
Strenuum pro viriii
Libertatis vindicatorem.
Obiit 190. (lie mensis Octobris,
A.D. 1745. Anno ^Etatis 7S."
Over this monument has been placed his bust in marble, sculptured
by Cunningham, and esteemed a good likeness. It was the gift of
T. T. Faulkner, Esq., nephew and successor to Alderman George
Faulkner, Swift's bookseller, and the original publisher of most of
his w^orks. The inscription over his amiable and much-injured wife
is as follows: — "Underneath lie the mortal remains of Mrs. Hester
Johnson, better known to the world by the name of Stella, under
which she is celebrated in the writings of Dr. Jonathan Swift, dean
of this cathedral. She was a person of extraordinary endowments
and accomplishments of body, mind, and behaviour, justly admired
and respected by all who knew her, on account of her many eminent
virtues, as well as for her great natural and acquired perfections.
She died January 27th, 1727-8, in the forty-sixth year of her age,
and by her will bequeathed one thousand pounds towards the sup-
port of a chaplain to the hospital founded in this city by Dr; Steevens."
In an obscure corner, near the southern entrance, is a small tablet
of white marble with, the following inscription : — "Here lieth the
body of Alexander M'Gee, servant to Doctor Swift, Dean of St.
Patrick's. His grateful master caused this monument to be erected
in memorj' of his discretion, fidelity, and diligence in that humble
station. Obiit Mar. 24, 1721-2. ..Etatis 29."
There are other monuments, ancient and modern, in the cathedral
worthy of notice, but this is all that concerns our present subject,
llow httle, indeed, seems to remain in evidence of Swift where ho
lived so many years, and played so conspicuous a part. The hospital
for the insane, which he founded, is perhaps his most genuine monu-
ment. It still flourishes. The sum which was made over by the
Dean's executors for this purpose was 7,720/. This has been
augmented by parliamentary gi-ants and voluntary donations, and i.s
capiible of aeconunodating upwards of a hundred pauper patients,
besides nearly an equal number of paying ones.
13S ewiFT.
At the deanery liouse there is an excellent portrait of Swift by
Eindon. Another by ]jindon, and said to be one of the best likenesses
of him, is in the possession of Dr. Hill, of Dublin ; and there is a
third at Ilowth Castle. But nothing can to the visitor fill up the;
vacuum made by the destruction of the house in which he lived.
We want to see where the author of the Drapier's Letters and of
(JulHver's Travels lived ; where he conversed with Stella and Mrs.
AVhiteway, and joked with Sheridan and Delany ; and where he finally
sank into moody melancholy, and died.
Of all the lives of Swift which have been written, it would be
difficult to say whether Dr. Johnson's or Sir Walter Scotfs is the
most one-sided. Johnson's is like that of a man who had a personal
l)ioue, and Scott's is that of a regular pleadei". In his admiration of
his author he seems unconsciously to take all that comes as excellent
and right, and slurs over acts and principles in Swift, which in
another he would denounce as most disgraceful. When we recollect
that Swift was bitterly disappointed in his ambition of a mitre, and
that he retired to Ireland to brood not only over this, but over the
utter wreck of his political patrons and party, the impartial reader
finds it difficult to concede to him so much the praise of real patriot-
ism, as of personal resentment. He was ready to lay hold on anj'-
thing that could at once annoy government and enhance his own
popularity. In all relations of life, an intense selfishness was his
great characteristic, if we except this in his character of author :
there he certainly displayed a great indifference to pecuniary profit ;
and was not only a staunch friend to his literary associates, but
allowed them to reap that ]M'ofit by his writings which he would not
reap himself. But in all other respects his selfishness is strikingly
prominent. He did not hesitate to sacrifice man or woman for the
promotion of his comfort or his ambition. We have spoken of his
treatment of women ; we may take a specimen of his treatment of
men. In the celebrated case of Wood, the patentee, and the Drapier's
Letters, nothing could be more recklessly unjust than his conduct,
or more hollow than his pretences. He wanted a cause of annoyance
to Wiilpole, and against the government generally. Government haL'
given a contract to Wood to coin a certain quantity of halfpence for
Ireland, and this he seized hold on. He represented Wood as a low
ironmonger, an adventurer ; his halfpence as vile in quality, and
deficient in weight ; and the whole as a nuisance, which would rob
Ireland of its gold, and enrich England at its expense. Now Scott
himself is obliged to admit that the whole of this was false. Wood,
instead of the mere ironmonger on whom he heaped all the charges
and epithets of villany and baseness that he could, even to that of a
" wood-louse," was a highly respectable iron-master of Wolver-
liarapton. His coinage, on this outcry being raised by Swift, was
submitted by government to Sir Isaac Newton, to be assayed ; when
it was reported by Sir Isaac to be better than bargain ; and is
admitted by Scott to have been better than Ireland had been in the
habit of having ; and in fact, he says, a very handsome coinage. So
liir from an evil to Ireland, Scott admits, as is very obvious, that.
SWIFT. 1 39
one of the best things wLich Ireland could have was a suflicitnt
stock of coin. But the ignorant population, once possessed with the
idea of imposition, grew outrageous, and flung the coinage into the
Liffey, and Swift chuckled to himself over the success of his scheme,
and the acquisition of the reputation of a patriot. In the mean
time he had inflicted a real injury on his infatuated fellow-country-
men, and a loss of G0,000/. on his innocent victim. Wood. Scott
says that Wood was indemnifled by a grant of 3,000/. yearly, for
twelve years. The simple fact I believe to be, that though granted,
it was never paid. Wood, who had nine sons, lost by this transac-
tion the fortune that should have provided for them. One of these
sons was afterwards assay-master in Jamaica, and the introducer of
platina into England. The real facts respecting Wood's coinage may
be found in " Ending's Annals of Coinage."
There is another point in which Swift's biographers and critics
have been far too lenient towards him. Wonderful as is his talent,
and admirable as his wit, these are dreadfully defiled by his coarse-
ness and filthiness of ideas. Wit has no necessary connexion with
disgusting imagery; and in attempting to excuse Swift, his admirers
have laid the charge upon the times. But Swift out-Herods the
times and his contemporaries. In them may be found occasional
smuttiness, but the filthy taint seemed to pervade the whole of
Swift's mind, and his vilest parts are inextricably woven with the
texture of his composition, as in Gulliver's Travels. There is nothing
so singular as that almost all writers speak of the wit of Swift ami
of Rabelais, without, as it regards the latter, warning the reader
against the mass of most revolting obscenity which loads almost
every page of the Frenchman. Pope, though professing to be a great
moralist, talks of "laughing with Rabelais in his easy-chair," but he
never seems to reflect that far the greater portion of readers would
have to blush and quit his company in disgust. It is fitting that, in
an age of moral refinement, youthful readers should at least be made
aware that the wit that is praised is combined with obscenity or
grossness that cannot be too emphatically condemned. Yet Coleridge,
probably when his intellects were muddled by opium, has praised
Rabelais as a most moral and decent writer ; and this praise has been
quoted by Mr. Bohn, in justification of his cheap reprint of the filthy
Gaul.
Amongst the places connected with the history of Swift's life,
the residence of Miss Vanhomrigh — Vanessa — is one of the most
interesting. The account of it procured by Scott was this : —
'•Marley Abbey, near Celbridge, where Miss Vanhomrigh resided, is
built much in the form of a real cloister, especially in its external
appearance. An aged man, upwards of ninety by his own account,
showed the grounds to my correspondent. He was the son of Miss
Vanhomrigh's gardener, and used to work with his father in the
•garden when a boy. He remembered the unfortunate Vanessa well,
and his account of" her corresponded with the usual description of
her person, especially as to her embonpoint. He said she went seldom
abroad, and saw little company ; her constant amusement was reac^
140
SWIFT.
ing, or walking in the garden. Yet, according to this authority, her
society was courted 'oy several families in the neighbourhood, who
visited her, notwithstanding hor seldom returning that attention ;
and he added, that her manners interested every one who knew her.
But she avoided company, and was always melancholy, save when
Dean Swift was there, and then she seemed happy. The garden was
to an uncommon degree crowded with laurels. The old man said,
that when Miss Vauhomrigh expected the Dean, she always planted
with her own hand a laurel or two against his arrival. He showed
her favourite seat, still called Vanessa's bower. Three or four trees
and some laurels indicate the spot. They had formerly, according
to the old man's information, been trained into a close arbour. There
were two seats and a rude table within the bower, the opening of
which commanded a view of the Liftey, which had a romantic eftect,
and there was a small cascade that murmured at some distance. In
this sequestered spot, according to the old gardener's account, the
Dean and Vanessa used often to sit, with books and writing materials
on the table before them. Vanessa, besides musing over her unhappy
attachment, had, during her residence in this solitude, the care of
nursing the declining health of her younger sister, who at length
ilied about 1720. This event, as it left her alone in the world, seems
to have increased the energy of her fatal passion for Swift; while he,
(>u the contrary, saw room for still greater reserve, when her situation
became that of a solitary female, without the society or countenance
of a female relation."
Marley Abbey, Vanessa's house, is now the residence of ^Ir. Henry
Grattan, M.P.
In D'Altou's "History of the County of Dublin," p. 344, there is an
account of the present state of Delvillc, the residence of Dr. Delany,
/ ~f
JAMES THOMSON".
The author of The Seasons was boiu at Eduam, a couple of miles
or so from Kelso, on the 11th of September, 1700. His father was
the minister of the parish, and it was intended to bring him up to
the same profession. The early childhood only of Thomson was
spent here, for his father removed to Southdean, near Jedburgh,
having obtained the living of that place.
Ednam has nothing poetical about it. It hes in a rich farming
country of ordinary features. The scenery is flat, and the village by
no means picturesque. It consists of a few farm-houses, and long
rows of hinds' cottages. David Macbeth Moir, the Delta of Black-
wood'.s Magazine, dcscrilxid the place some years ago in these
lines : —
" A rural cliurdi ; .some scattered cottage roofs,
From -whose secluded hearths the thin blue smoke
Silently wreathing tlirou!,'h the breezeless air,
Ascended inin},'ling with the summer sky,
A rustic bridge, mossy and -weather-stained ;
A fairy streamlet, finginn to iisclf ;
.\nd liere and there a venerable tree
In foliated beauty ;— of these elements.
And only these, the simple scene was fonneu."
142 THOMSON.
Yet even this description is too favourable. It would iuduce us to
believe that the spot had something of the picturesque— it has
nothing of it. The streamlet sings little even to itself through that,
tlat district ; — the mossy bridge has given way to a good substantial
but unpoetical stone one. The landscape is by no means over
enriched by tine trees. There are some limes, I believe they are,
in the churchyard. The old church has been pulled down since
Thomson's time, and the new one now standing is a poor barn-like
affair, with a belfry that would do for a pigeon-cote. The manse in
which the poet was born has also disappeared, and a new, square, un-
picturesque one been built ui^on the site. Perhaps no class of people
have less of the poetical or the picturesque in them than the Pres-
byterian clergy of Scotland. The hard, dry, stern Calvinism im-
parted by John Knox has effectually expelled all that. The country
people of Scotland are generally intelligent, and have a taste for
poetry and literature ; but to a certainty they do not derive this
from their clergy. In no country have I found the parish clergy so
ignorant of general literature, or so unacquainted with anything
that is going on in the world, except the polemics of their own
church. The cargo of Geneva which Knox imported has operated
on the religious feeling of Scotland worse than any gin or whisky
on its moral or physical condition. It is a ifpirit as unlike Chris-
tianity as possible. One is all love and tenderness ; the other all
bitterness and hardness : — the one is gentle and tolerant ; the other
fierce and intolerant : — the one careless of form, so that the life and
soul of charity and piety are preserved ; the other is all form and
doctrine — doctrine, hard, metaphysical, rigid, and damnatory. On
the borders too, in many places, the very people seem to me more
ignorant and stupid than is the wont of Scotland ; they would match
tho Surrey chopsticks or Essex calves of England.
I walked over from Kelso to Ednam on a Sunday morning. The
2>eople were collected about the church door, waiting for the time
of service. I thought it a good o^iportunity to hear something of
the traditions of the country about Thomson. Nobody could tell
me anything. So little idea had they of a poet, that they informed
me that another j^oet had been born there besides Thomson. I
asked whom that might be ? They said, " One White, a decrepit old
man, who used to write under the trees of the churchyard ;" and
this they thought having another poet ! Such — as we are often
obliged to exclaim — is fame !
An old woman, into whose cottage I stepped, on returning, to
avoid a shower, was more intelligent. She told me that her mother
had Uved at the old manse, and frequently heard what had been told
to inquirers. The manse in which Thomson was born, she said, was
of mud ; and he was born in the parlour, which had a bed in a
recess concealed by a curtain.
I stayed the service, or at least nearly three hours of it. It is
the odd custom of many country places in Scotland, where the people
have too far to come to be able to do it twice in the day, to hava
actually two services performed all at one sitting. With that atteu-
THOMSON, 143
tion to mere rigid formality wiiich Calvinism has introduced, that
task-work holiness which teaches that God's wrath will be aroused
if they do not go through a certain number of prayers, sermocs,
and ceremonies in the day, they have the morning and afternoon
services all at once. There were, therefore, tico enormously long
sermons, three prayers, three singings, and, to make worse of it, the
sermons consisted of such a mass of doctrinal stubble as filled me
with astonishment that such actual rubbish, and worse than rubbish,
could at the present day be inflicted on any patient and unoffending
people. What a gross perversion and misconception of Christianity
is this ! How my heart bled at the very idea that the state paid
and upheld this system, by which the people were not blessed with
the pure, simple, and benign knowledge of that simplest, most
beautiful, and love-inspiring of all systems — Christianity, but were
actually cursed with the drawing of the horrid furze-bushes of
school divinity and Calvinistic damnation across their naked con-
sciences.
Imagine a company of hard-working and care-worn peasants,
coming for five or ten miles on a Sunday to listen to such chopj)ed-
straw preaching as this. The sermons were to prove that the
temptation of Christ in the wilderness was a (^o;/c<' /o'e and actual
history. And, first, the preaclier told them what profound subtlety
the temptations of Satan showed, such as advising Christ after fortV
days' fast to cause the stones to be made bread ; as if Christ could
not have done that, if he needed, without the devil's suggestion.
And then he told them that Christ was God himself, so that the
devil, knowing that, instead of showing such profound subtlety,
must have been a very daft devil indeed to try to tempt him at all.
Poor people ! of all the beautiful sayings and doings in the life of
our Saviour ; of all the divine precepts which he peculiarly brought
down from heaven for the especial consolation and invigoration of
the poor ; of all the deeds and the expressions of an infinite love ;
of all those teachings that " the Sabbath is made for man, and not
man for the Sabbath ;" of all the gracious declarations, that it was
not by doctrine and cunningly devised fables, but by the great spirit
of love — love to God and to one another, and by keeping his com-
mandments, that we are to be saved — was there nothing that could
be dealt out to you ? Could your dry and thirsty sjiirits receive
nothing but this dry and musty fodder of sectarian disqui.sition ?
Oh ! how much better were one simple word of genuine feeling
from the most unlettered preacher on a bare hill-side !
My only wonder was to find any body in the church, for I thought
I must have met the whole village going to Kelso, where they have
eifiht different sects, the most zealous of all being the Free Church.
It is only by a passage through Scotland that you get a living idea
of what a movement the movement of this Free Church has been.
In every town, from the cxtremest south to the extremest north,
you see free churclies rising or arisen. Even in little Melrose there
is a large one ; and 1 observed that they built them as near, on all
occasions, as possible to the cstablishctl one, and, if compassable,
141 TH03IS0N,
exactly opposite. Indeed, I have been told that land has, in many
instances, been oflei'ed gratuitonsly to build a free church upon, and
has been refused because it was not opposite to the established one.
Such is the fruit of an Establishment in Scotland, and such were the
evidences of its teachings in Ednam. How different to the fine,
genial, and genuine faith of James Thomson !
On a hill on the right hand of the road, proceeding from Kelso to
Ednam, and about a quarter of a mile from that village, a i)lain
obelisk has been erected to the memory of the poet, bearing this
inscription : — " Erected in memory of James Thomson, Author of
the Seasons. Born at Ednam, 11th of September, a.d. 1700."
The Earl of Buchan, who erected a temple of the Muses at Dry-
burgh, in the centre of which he placed Thomson, and who affixed
the brass tablet to his memory in the church at Richmond, also
instituted an annual commemoration of his fame at Ednam, which
has long fallen into desuetude. For the first meeting of this kind,
Burns wrote his address to the shade of Thomson in crowning his
]>ust at Ednam.
Of Thomson's sojourn at Southdean nearly all that is now kuowii
is comprehended in the following passage in Mi-, llobert Chambers's
"Picture of Scotland:" — "The father of James Thomson was re-
moved from Ednam to this parisli while the poet was a child ; and
here accordingly the author of the Seasons spent the days of his
boyhood. In the churchyard may still be seen the humble monu-
ment of the father of the poet, though the inscription is nearly
obliterated. The manse in which that individual reared his large
family, of whom one was destined to become so illustrious, was
what would now be described as a small thatched cottage. It is
traditionally recollected that the poet was sent to the University of
Edinburgh, seated behind his father's man on horseback, but was so
reluctant to quit the country for a town life, that he had returned
on foot before his conductor, declaring that he could study as well
on the braes of Sou'den — so Southdean is generally pronounced — as
in Edinburgh."
Southdean lies in a much more beautiful country than Ednam.
In his rambles he' could reach the banks of the Tweed and the
Teviot, and the fine ruins of Jedburgh, Dryburgh, and Melrose ; and
here Thomson undoubtedly acquired that deep love for nature, and
that intimate acquaintance with it, which enabled him to produce
the poem of the Seasons, which, with considerable faults of style, is
one of the richest compositions in the language, in the legitimate
subject-matter, in the grandeur of its scenery drawn from all regions
of the earth, and in tlie broad and beautiful spirit of its religious
philosoj^hy. It has stood the test of more than a century, during
which time great changes have taken place in the theory of versi-
fication and in public taste. Compositions of great variety, and of
the most splendid character, have since rendered fastidious the
public judgment, yet the Seasons are, and will continue to be, read
with pleasure.
Through the I'ecommendation of Mr. I'iccaltounj the minister oJ
THOMSON. " 145
Hobkirk, Thomson was sent to Jedburgh school. His iiucle was
gardener to Sir Gilbert Elliott, of Minto, and that gentleman and Sir
'vYilliam Bennet, of Chesters, noticed something promising in the lad,
and invited him to their houses. Though the old man-servant, who
had jogged along to Edinburgh with little Jemmy Thomson behind
liim, was astonished on his return to find him at home again, yet
another attempt must have been more successful, for at the Uni-
versity of Edinburgh he finished his education. The poetic nature,
however, convinced him by that time that it was not his vocation to
preach the arid notions of Knox, and palm them off as the grand
heart-opening truths of Christianity. His father had died, two years
after his coming to Edinburgh, in a very extraordinary manner,
being fatally struck on the head, it is said, by a ball of fire, while
trying to exorcise a ghost at a place called Woolic, leaving his
mother with nine children, who raised upon her little estate by
mortgage what she could, and came to reside in Edinburgh. James
resolved not to weigh upon her resources longer tlian needful ; but
set out for London with his poem of Winter in his pocket. He
had introductions to several influential persons, and one of them to
Mr. Mallet, then tutor to the sons of the Duke of Montrose, with
whom, after residing some time r.ear East Barnet as a tutor to the
eldest son of Lord Binning, he went to live. His great want. Dr.
Johnson says, on reaching London, was a i^air of shoes. To make
his calls these were necessary, and his "Winter was his sole resource.
It was a wintry one, for lie could find no purchaser for it for a long
time, and when purchased it did not for a good while sell. At
length it fell under the eye of a Mr. Whatley, who instantly per-
ceived its merit, and zealously spread the information. Thomson
was quickly a popular author, and from this time resided chiefly in
the neighbourhood of London. Before this period he was fagging as
usher of an academy in Little Tower Street. On the success of his
"Winter he left the school, and took lodgings in Lancaster Court,
Strand. He made one tour on the Continent as companion to ]\Ir,
Talbot, the eldest son of the chancellor. The despotism which ho
.saw abroad induced him to write his poem of Liberty, one of his
very worst productions, and which lost him much government pre-
ferment ; and when the public complained of this, a ministerial
writer remarked that " Thomson had taken a JAhniy which was not
agreeable to Britannia in any Season^
Government preferment, however, he did receive. The chancellor
conferred on him the place of Secretary of the Briefs, which made
him independent. On the death of the Chancellor Talbot ho lost
his post, through being too indolent to make application to Lord
Hardwicke for it, though Hardwicke kept it open for some time that
he might. He was again reduced by this circumstance to poverty
and difficulty, out of which he was, after a while, permanently
raised through the influence of Lord Lyttelton, a pension of a hun-
dred a year lieing conferred on him. This removed the jiressure of
utter necessity, but compelled him to work, without which com-
pulsion perhaps no man Avould have worked less- About tlu'ce years
M6 THOMSON.
before his death, Lord Lyttelton, being then in power, made him
Surveyor-General of the Leeward Islands. Those islands he sur-
veyed from his elevation on Richmond-hill, and very general his
survey of course must have been. The particular and actual survey
was left to his deputy in the islands themselves, and Thomson netted
a yearly balance, the deputy being paid, of three hundred a year ;
which, with his pension, left him most comfortably at ease in tho
castle of indolence. Besides his two principal poems he wrote several
tragedies, as Sophonisba, in which the unfortunate line,
" O Sophonisba, Sophonisba, O ! "
was parodied by a wag with—
" O Jemmy Thomson, Jemmy Thomson, ! "
and was echoed through the town everywhere and for a long time.
Agamemnon was another, Edward and Eleonora a third, and Tan-
cred and Sigismunda his last and best ; except a posthumous one —
Coriolauus.
Amongst the haunts of Thomson were the country houses of many
of the more literary or more tasteful noblemen of the time ; as
Hagley, the seat of Lord Lyttelton ; Bub Doddington's seat in
Dorsetshire ; Stowe, then the seat of Lord Cobham; the seat of the
Countess of Hertford, etc. The last place, however, it seems, only
received Thomson once. It was the practice, says Johnson, of the
Countess of Hertford, to whom Thomson dedicated his poem of
Spring, to invito some poet every summer into the country to hear
her verses and assist her studies. This honour was once conferred
on Thomson, who took more delight in carousing with Lord Hertford
and his friends than assisting her ladyship's poetical operations, and
never therefore received another summons.
Thomson was, in fact, the last person to hope for much literary
•ind understrapper service from, though in the shape of a countess,
where, on the one hand, bad verses had to be inflicted on him, and
on the other there was a good table and good talk. Indolence and
self-indulgence were his besetting sins. Every one has heard of tho
lady who said she had discovered three things concerning the author
in reading the Seasons : that he was a great lover, a great swimmer,
and rigidly abstinent ; at all which Savage, who had lived much with
him, laughed heartily, saying that he believed Thomson was never
in cold water in his life, and that the other particulars were just as
true. The anecdote of Quiu, regarding Thomson's splendid descrip-
tion of sunrise, has been equally diffused. He, like Savage, asserted
that he believed Thomson never saw the sun rise in his life ; and
related that, going one day to see him at Richmond, he found him in
bed at noon, and asking him why he did not get up earlier, he replied
listlessly, that " he had nae motive."
That no man ever lived more completely in a castle of indolence
there can be little question, and perhaps as little that it cut his life
short. He died August the 27th, 1748, at the age of forty-eight, of
cold taken on the Tliames between Kiav and Richmond. He used,
it seems, to be in the habit of v.'alking from town to his house at
THOMSO.V. 147
llichmond, and crossed at a boat-house, somewhere hereabout,
which being also a public-house, he there took a rest and refresli-
rneiit. The place is still shown. Here, it would seem, he came warna
fron; liis walk, and crossing in a damp wind took cold ; but this sus-
ceptibiUty to cold was the direct resiUt of his indolent, self-indulgent,
and effeminate habits. Had he followed those jiractices of healthy
activity so finely described in his poem, how much longer and more
useful might his life have been ! Yet it must be a fact unquestion-
able, that Thomson as a boy rose earlj', saw both sunrises and all
the glories of nature, plunged into the summer flood, and braved tho
severity of winter. No man could so vividly or so accurately describe
what he had not experienced, and they who know best the country
know how exact is his knowledge of it. Every one can feel how
masterly are his descriptions of the grandest phenomena of naturo
in every region of the world, when such descriptions are deducible
from books. In those, however, which came under his own eye,
there is a life and there are beauties that attest that personal know-
ledge. The faults of his Seasons are those of style. His blank verso
is peculiar ; you can never mistake it for that of any other poet, but
it has not the charm of that of Milton, of Wordsworth, or of various
other poets. It is often turgid, and still more often prosaic. There
are strange inversions used ; and with his adverbs and adjectives he
plays the most terrible havoc. Frequently the adjective is tossed
behind the substantive, just for the sake of the metre, and regardless
of all other effect, as, —
" Driving sleets
Deform the day deliglitless ;"
instead of the deliglitless day. His adverbs are continually lopped
of their last syllable, and stand like wretched adjectives out of place ;
as, — the sower "liberal throws the grain," instead of liberally, —
clouds, "cheerless, drown the crude, unripened j'car," instead of cheer-
lessly, — the herb dies, though with vital power " it is copious blest,"
instead of copioush'. These barbarisms, which greatly deface this
jjoem, abound ; but especially in the Sjiring, which was not pub-
lished first in its native i^osition, but third, the routine of appearance
being AVinter, Summer, Spring, and Autumn.
But, above its faults, how far ascend the beauties and excellences
of this poem ! the finest of which spring out of that firm, glowing,
and noble spirit of patriotism and religion which animated James
Thomson. His patriotism bursts forth on all occasions, but more
especially in that elaborate description of England, her deeds aiii/.
worthies, in the Summer, commencing —
" Heavens ! wliat a goodly prospect spreads around,
Of hills and dales, of woods and lawns, and spires
And glittering towns, and gildi^d streams, till all
'I'hc stretching landscape into smoke decays !
Happy Britannia!" etc.
His piety, — the piety of love and wonder, of that profound admira-
tion which the contemplation of the works of the Divine Creator
bad inspired him with, and of that grateful love and trust which the
148 THOMSON.
manifestations of j)avental goodness everywhere had impressed upon
his heart, — these are, as it were, the hving soiil of the poem, and
the principles of imperishable vitality. These sentiments, diffused
throughout the jjoem itself, concentrate themselves at its conclusion
as predominant over all others, and burst foi-th in that magnificent
hymn, which has no lival in the language, excej^t the glorious one of
Milton, the morning hymn of our first jjarents, beginning,—
" These are thy glorious works, Parent of good,
Ahnighty ! Tliine this universal frame,
Thus wondrous fair; Thyself how wondrous then," etc.
The religion, too, of Thomson was the religion not of creeds and
crabbed doctrines of humanity. He had studied nature in the spirit
of its i\Iaker, and the fruit of that study was an enlarged and tender
s^Tiipathy for his fellow-men. This sentiment is everywhere con-
.spicuous as his piety ; and in the passage following the fine account
of the man perishing in the snow, rises to a high degree of power
^nd descriptive eloquence.
" Ah ! little think the gay licentious proud.
Whom pleasure, power, and affluence surround ;
They who their thoughtless hours in giddy mirth.
And wanton, often cruel, riot waste ;
Ah ! little think they, while they dance along.
How many feel, this very moment, deatli.
And all the sad variety of pain :
}low many sink in tlie devouring flood,
(Jr more devouring flame: how many bleed.
By shameful variance betwixt man and man ;
How many pine in want, and dungeon glooms ;
Shut from tlie common air, and common use
Of their own limbs : how many drink the cup
Of baneful grief, or eat the bitter bread
Of misery: sore pierced by wintry winds,
How many shrink into the sordid hut
Of cheerless poverty ! How manj' shake
With all the fiercer tortures of the mind,
Unbounded passion, madness, guilt, remorse;
Whence tumbled headlong from the height of life,
They furnish matter for tlie tragic Muse.
Even in the vale where Wisdom loves to dwell.
With Friendship, Peace, and Contemplation joined.
How many racked with honest passions, drooj)
In deep retired distress. How many stand
Around the death-bed of their dearest friends.
And point the parting anguish. Thought fond man
Of these, and all the thousand nameless ills,
That one incessant struggle render life.
One scene of toil, of suflering, and of fate.
Vice in his high career would stand appalled,
And heedless rambling Impulse learn to think ;
The conscious heart of Charity would warm,
And her wide wish Benevolence dilate;
The social tear would rise, the social sigh,
And into clear perfection, gradual bliss.
Refilling still, the social passions work." — Winter.
Ics, if the great sentiment of this passage were but firmly im-
printed on the hearts of all men and all women, but especially the
rich and powerful, how soon would the face of earth be changed, and
the vale of tears be converted into a lesser heaven ! It is the grand
defect of our systems of education, for rich and for poor, but pre-
eminently for the former, that they are not taught that no man can
THOMSON. 149
Ii\o inuocently who lives only for liis own enjoyment; that to live
merely to enjoy ourselves in the highest treason against God and
man ; that God does not li-\'e merely for himself, his eternal existence
is one constant work of beneficence ; and that it is the social dnty
oi every rational being to live like God, his Creator, for the good of
others. Were this law of duty taught foithfuUy in all our schools,
with all its responsibilities, the penalties of its neglect, the inelFable
delight of its due discharge, there would be no longer seen that
moral monster, the man or woman who lives alone for the mere pur-
pose of selfish enjoyment. That host of gay and idle creatures, who
pass through life only to gUtter in the circles of fashion, to seek ad-
miration for personal attractions and accomplishments — for dressing,
playing, dancing, or riding — v^iiose life is but the life of a butterfly
when it should be the life of a man, would S2:)eedily disperse, and bo
no more seen. That life would be shrunk from as a thing odious and
criminal, because useless ; when faculties, wealth, and fame are put
into their hands, and a world is laid before them, in which men are
to be saved and exalted ; misery, crime, shame, despair, and death
prevented ; and all the hopes and capacities for good in the human
.soul are to ])e made easy to the multitude. To live for these objects
is to be a hero or a heroine, and any man or woman may be that ;
to live through this world of opportunities given but once, and to
neglect them, is the most fearful fate that can befal a creature of
eternal responsibilities. But poets and preachers have proclaimed
this great truth for ages ; the charge now lies at the door of the
educators, and they alone can impress effectually on the world its
highest and most inalienable duty, that of living for the good of
others.
Amongst those wdio have used the voice of ]3oetry given them of
God to rouse their fellow-men to a life of beneficence, none have
done it more zealously or more eloquently than Thomson. For this
we pass over here the mere charms of his poetic achievements ;
over those great pictures which he has painted of the world, and its
elements of frosts, tempests, plagues, earthquakes ; of the views of
active life at home and abroad ; the hunter's perils and the hunter's
carouse,
" In t;liostly halls of grey l•cno^Yn ;"
of man roaming the forests of the tropics, or climbing the chfFs of
the lonely Hebrides ; to notice in this brief article those bursts of
eloquent fh-e in which he calls to godhke deeds,— those of mercy and
of goodness. In this respect, as w^ell as in that of mere poetical
beauty, his poem of the Castle of Indolence is i)rc-cminent. Thomson
suffered from the seductions of the vile wizard of Indolence, and in
his first canto he paints most effectively the horrors of that vice ; in
the second canto he shows that though he had fallen into the net of
sloth, it had not entirely conquered, and it could not corrupt him.
lie calls with the energy of a martyr on his fellow-men to assume
the privileges and glories of men. The Castle of Indolence is as
felicitous in its versification as in its sentiments ; it is full of har-
mony, and the spirit of picturesque beaixty pervades every line •
] 50 THOMSON.
tlierc is a mauliuess of sentiment about it that is worthy of true
genius. Such a stanza as this is the seed of independence to the
iiiiuils of tliousands :
" 1 care not, Fortune ! what you nie ilenj- :
You cannot rob nie of free Nature's frrace ;
You cannot s)iut tlie windows of tlie sky.
Through which Aurora shows lier hriglit'ninj; face ;
You cannot bar my constant feet to trace
The woods and lawns, by living stream, at eve ;
Let liealth my nerves and finer fibres brace.
And I their toys to the great cliildren leave :
Of fancy, reason, virtue, nought can nie bereave."
The address of the bard of active virtue is wortliy of being hstenod
to in every age.
" Ye hapless race !
Dire Labouring here to smother Reason's ray,
'I'hat lights our Maker's image in our face.
And gives us wide o'er earth imquestion'd sway :
AVhat is the adored Supreme Perfection, say .'
Wliat but eternal, never-resting soul,
Almighty power, and all-directing day;
By whom each atom stirs, the planets roll :
Who fills, surrounds, informs, and agitates the whole.
" Come, to the beaming God your hearts unfold !
Draw from its fountain life ! 'Tis thence alone
We can excel. Up from unfeeling mould
To seraphs burning round the Almighty's throne,
Life rising still on life, in brighter tone, _
Perfection forms, and with perfection bliss.
In universal nature this clear shown
Not needeth proof; to prove it were, I wis.
To prove the beauteous world excels the brute abyss.
" It was not by vile loitering in ease,
Tliat Greece obtained the brighter palm of art ;
Tliat soft, yet ardent Athens learn'd to please,
To keen tlie wit, and to sublime the heart.
In all supreme, complete in every part !
It was not thence majestic IJome arose.
And o'er the nations shook her conquering dart :
For sluggard's brow tlie laurel never grows •
Renown is not the child of indolent repose.
" Had unambitious mortals minded nought,
lUit in loose joy their time to wear away ;
Had they alone the lap of dalliance sought,
Pleased on her pillow their dull heads to lay;
Rude nature's state had been our state to-day ;
Xo cities here their towery fronts had raised.
No arts had made us opulent and gay;
With brother brutes the human race had grazed ;
Noae e'er had soared to fame, none honour'd been, none praised.
" Great Homer's song had never fired the breast
To thirst of glory and heroic deeds ;
Sweet Maro's Muse, sunk in inglorious rest,
Had silent slept amid the Mincian reeds ;
The wits of modern times had told their beads.
And monkish legends been their only .strain ;
Our Milton's Eden had lain wrapp'd in weeds ;
Our Shakspeare strolled and laugh'd witli Warwie'ii swair'.s;
Ne had my master, Spenser, charm'd his !\Iulla's plairA.
THOMSON. 151
"Dumb, too, Iiad been the sajre historic muse,
And perished all the sons of ancient fame;
Those starry lights of virtue that diffuse
Through the dark depths of time their vivid flame,
Had ail been lost with such as have no name.
■VVlio then had scorn'd his care for others' good ?
Who then had toil'd rapacious men to tame?
Who in tlie public breach devoted stood,
And for his country's cause been prodigal of blood?
" Heavens ! can you then thus waste in shameful wise
Your few important days of trial here ?
Heirs of eternity ! yborn to rise
Tlirough endless states of being, still more near
To bliss approasihing and perfection clear ;
Can you renounce a fortune so sublime, — •
Such glorious hopes, your backward steps to steer.
And roll with vilest brutes through mud and slime ?
No ! no ! — your hcaven-touch'd hearts disdain the sordid crime ! ''
It 16 a pleasure to find tliat the spot where these noble sentiments
were penned is still preserved sacred to the memory of the poet of
truth and virtue. As far as the restless and rapid change of property
would permit so near London, the residence of Thomson has been
kept from destruction: changed it is, it is true, but that change has
been made with a veneration for the muse in the heart of the new
inhabitant. The house of Thomson, in what is called Kew-foot-lauc
at Richmond, as shown in the woodcut at the head of this article,
was a simple cottage ; behind this lay his garden, and in front he
looked down to the Thames, and on the tine landscape beyond. The
cottage now appears to be gone, and in the place stands the goodly
villa of the Earl of Shaftesbury ; the cottage, however, is not really
gone, it is only swallowed up in the larger house of the present time.
After Thomson's death his cottage was purchased by George Koss,
Esq., who, out of veneration for hi-? memory, forbore to pull it down,
but enlarged and improved it at the expense of 9,000/. The walls of
the cottage were left, though its roof was taken off, and the walla
continued iipwards to their present height. Thus, Avhat was Thom-
son's cottage forms now the entrance hall to Lord Shaftesbury's
house. The part of the hall on the left hand was the room where
Thomson used to sit, and here is preserved a plain mahogany Pem-
broke table, with a scroll of white wood let into its surface, on which
is inlaid, in black letters, this piece of information : —
"Ontliis table James Thomson constantly wrote. It was therefore
purchased of his servant, who also gave these brass hooks, on which his
liat and cane were hung in this his sitting room. F. B."
These initials, F. B., are those of the Hon. Frances Boscawcn, the
widow of Admiral Boscawen, who came into possession of the i)ro-
perty after the death of Mr. Ross, whose name, however, still
attaches to it, being called Rossdale, or more commonly, Rosedale,
House. Mrs. Boscawen it was who repaired the poet's favoiu'itt;
seat in the garden, and placed there the table on which he wrote his
poems ; she it was too, no doubt, who hung the inscrijitions there,
her initials being again found appended to one of them. Her son,
Lord Falmouth, sold the jolace. No brass hooks are now to be seen,
that 1 could discover or learn anything of.
1,52 THOMSON.
The garden of Thomson^ whicli lay bcliiud the house, has been
preserved, iu the same manner and to the same extent as his house ;
the garden and its trees remain, hut these now form only part of
the present grounds, as the cottage forms only part of the pre-
sent house. ]\Ir. Ross, when he purchased the cottage and some
adjoining grounds, and came to live here after Thomson, not only
enlarged the house, but threw down the partition fence, and enlarged
the "rounds to their present extent. A plcasanter lawn and shrub-
beries are rarely to be seen ; the turf, old and mossy, speaks of long
duration and great care ; the trees, dispersed beautifully upon it, are
of the finest growth and of the greatest beauty. In no part of Eng-
land are there so many foreign trees as in the grounds of gentlemen's
villas near London ; in many of them the cedars of Lebanon arc of
a oi'OAvth and majesty which probably Lebanon itself cannot now
show. In these grounds are some fine specimens, and one of especial
and surj^assing loveliness ; it is the piuits picect, or silver cedar. The
•Towth is broad, like that of the cedar of Lebanon, though its boughs
do not throw themselves out in that exact horizontal direction that
those of the cedar of Lebanon do ; they sweep down to the ground
iu a style of exquisite grace. Heavy, full of life, rich in hue as
masses of chased silver, their effect with the young cones sitting
birdlike on them resembles that of some tree of heaven, or of some
garden of poetic romance. Besides this superb tree, standing on its
ample portion of lawn, there are here the evergreen ilex, hickory,
wliite sassafi'as, scarlet and liagland oaks, tlie tuhp-trec, the catalpa,
the tupelo, the black American ash, etc. The effect of their large
growth, their varied hues and foliage, their fine branches sweeping
over the soft velvet turf, is charming ; for trees display the effects of
breeding and culture quite as much as horses, dogs, or men.
A large elm not far from the house is pointed out as the one under
which Thomson's alcove stood ; this alcove has, however, been removed
to the extremity of the grounds, and stands now under a large Spanisli
chestnut-tree in the shrubbery. It is a simple wooden construction,
with a plain back and two outward sloping sides, a bench running
round it within, a roof and boarded floor, so as to be readily removable
altogether. It is kept well painted of a dark green, and in it stands
an old small walnut table with a drawer which belonged to Thomson.
On the front of the alcove overhead is painted, on a white oval tablet —
" Horo
'J'homson san^
The Seasons
and their change."
Within the alcove hang three loose boards, on wliich arc painted the
following inscriptions : —
" Hail, Nature's Foet, v/hom she taught alone
To sing her ^voiks in numbers like her own.
Sweet as the thrush that warbles in the dale,
And soft as Philomela's tender tale ;
She lent her pencil, too, of wondrous pn-wer,
To catch the rainbow, and to form the flower
Of many mingling hues ; and, smiling, said^-
Uut first with laurels crowned her favourite's liead—
TJIOMSOX. 163
These beauteous children, though so fair they shine
fade in my Seasons, let them live in Thine.
And live they shall ; the charm of every eye,
Till Nature sicicens, and the Seasons die."
F. B.
' Within this pleasing retirement,
Allured by the music of the nightingale,
Which warbled in soft unison to the melody of his soul,
In unatfected cheerfulness.
And general though simple elegance,
Lived
James Thomson.
Sensitively alive to the beauties of Nature,
He painted their images as they rose in review.
And poured the wliole profusion of them
Into his inimitable Seasons.
Warmed ■\vitli intense devotion
To the Sovereign of the Universe,
Its flame glowed through all liis compositions.
Animated with unbounded benevolence,
W'ith the tenderest social sensibility.
He never gave one moment's pain
To any of his fellow-creatures,
Save only by his death, which happened
At this place on the 27th day of August,
1748."
" Here Thomson dwelt.
He, curious bard, examined every drop
That glistens on the thorn ; each leaf surveyed
That Autumn from the rustling forest shakes.
And marked its shape ; and traced in the rude w ind
Its eddying motion. Nature in his hand
A pencil, dipped in her own cojours, placed,
AVith which he ever faithful copies drew,
r.ach feature in proportion just."
Oil a brass tablet in the top of the table in the alcove i.s iuscribcil
— " This table was the property of James Thomson, and always stooil
hi this seat." '
Such is the state of the former residence of James Thomson at
Richmond. Here, no doubt, he was visited by many of his literary
cotemporaries, though it does not appear that Pope, who was so near
a neighbour, was of this number. Poets, with advancing years, grow
exclusive. Wordsworth, in his old age, said that he read no new
poets, but left them to their cotemporaries ; so, in the cori'espondenco
of Pope, you find no further mention of Thomson, than that
" Thomson and some other young men have published lately some
creditable things ;" and Gray, writing to one of his friends, says —
'•'Thomson has ju.st published a poem called 'The Castle of Indo-
lence,' Avhich contains some good stanzas."
The view down to the Thames, and over the country beyond,
which he enjoyed, is now much obstructed by the walls, including
\yAv\j of the royal property, on which the Queen has erected her
laundry — sending, it seems, all the royal linen, from Windsor, the
Isle of Wight, and elsewhere, to be washed and got up here, suffi-
ciently, as one would think, near enough to the smoke of L(.)ndoii.
loi THOMSON.
The vicinity of the royal washliouse certainly does not improve Lord
Shaftesbury's residence here, especially as a tall, square, and most
unsightly tower, most probably intended to carry the soot from the
drying iires pretty high, overlooks his grounds. But it will not
•listurb tlie remains of the poet; and let us hope that the Queen's
iinen will enjoy the benefit of all the Seasons, from this close
neighbourhood.
Thomson is buried in Eichmond church, at the west end of the
north aisle. There is a square brass tablet, well secured into the
wall with ten large screws, bearing this inscription • —
" In the earth helow this Tablet
Are the remains of
James Thomson,
A itlior of tl\e beautiful Poems entitled, Tlie Seasons, Castle of Indolence, etc. cw
wlio (lieil at Kiclimond on the 27th day of August, and was buried liere
on t!ie 2!)th, old style, 174S. Tlie Earl of Buchan, unwilling that
so good a man and sweet a poet should be without a
memorial, has denoted the place of his inter-
ment for the satisfaction of his
admirers, in the year of
our Lord 1792. '•'
" Father of light and life, thou Good Supreme !
() teach me what is good ; teach me Thyself!
Save me from folly, vanity, and vice
From every low pursuit ! and feed my soul
With knowledge, conscious peace, and virtue puie,
Sacred, substantial, nevcr-fnding bliss !" — Wintr.r.
WILLIAM SHENSTONE.
No poet of the same ])retensions has been so much kno-\vn through
his residence as Shenstonc. Without the Leasowcs he would have
been nothing. His elegies and pastorals would have Iain on the
dustiest of book-shelves, and his Schoolmistress, by far the best of
his productions, would hardly have retained vitality enough to make
herself noticeable in the crowd of poetical characters. The Leasowes
was the chief work of Sheustone's life, and it is the chief means of
that portion of immortality which he possesses. Into every quarter
of the kingdom the fame of this little domain has penetrated.
Xature there formed the grand substratum of his art, and nature is
always beautiful. But I do confess, that in the Leasowcs, I have
always found so much ado about nothing ; such a parade of minia-
ture cascades, lakes, streams conveyed hither and thither ; surprises
in the disposition of woods and the turn of walks, with a seat
placed here, and another there ; with inscriptions, Latin and English ;
and piping Fauns faunbirj upon you in half-a-dozen places, that 1
have heartily wished myself out upon a good rough heath, with the
winds blowing away the cobwebs of so many conceits from niy
brain.
The remarks of Dr. Johnson appear to mc, in the case of Shen-
.stone, who was amial)le but trifling, very just : — "Whether to plant
a walk in undulating curves, and to ]i1acc a bench at every turn
156 SHENSTONE.
whore there is an object to catch the view ; to make -watei- run
where it will be heard, and to stagnate where it will be seen ; to
leave intervals where the eye will be pleased, and to thicken the
plantation where there is something to bo hidden, demand any great
powers of mind, I will not inquire ; perhaps a sullen and surly
spectator may think such i)erformanccs nither the sport than the
business of human reason."
This seems to me the in'ecise merit of Sheustone. He introduced
a better taste in landscape gardening, though his taste was often
questionable, and may be ranked with Browne and Kent. He was
a man of taste rather than of genius, and may claim a full alliance
Avith tlie lovers of nature, but is as far from the association with
great poets — with such men as Milton or Shakspeare, Burns or
Elliott, as the glow-worm is with the comet. Poetry is not only the
highest art, but, next to religion itself, the most divine principle on
earth. It is a religion itself, or rather, forms part and parcel of that
of Christ ; for its object is to stimulate virtue, abash vice, raise the
humble, abase the iproud, call forth the most splendid qualities of
the soul, and pour love like a river over the earth till it fills every
house, and leaves behind it a fertility like that which follows the
inundations of the Nile. We do injustice to Shenstone when we
place him beside the giants, and thus i^rovokingly display his true
proportions.
"The pleasure of Shenstone," continues Johnson, " was all in his eye ;
he valued what he valued merely for its looks ; nothing raised his
indignation more than to ask if there were any fishes in his water.
" His house was mean, and he did not improve it ; his care ■was of
his grounds. When he came home from his walks, he might find
his floors flooded hj a shower through the broken roof ; but could
spare no money for its reparation. In time his expenses brought
clamours about him that overpowered the lamb's bleat and the
linnet's song ; and his groves were haunted by beings very different
to fauns and fairies. He spent his estate in adorning it, and his
death was probably hastened by his anxieties. He was a lamp that
spent its oil in blazing. * * * 'lie died at the Leasowes, of a putrid
fever, in 1763, and was buried by the side of his brother in Hales-
owen churchyard.
"He was never married, though he might have obtained the lady
whoever she v^ras, to whom his Pastoral Ballad was addressed. He
is represented by his friend Dodsley as a man of great tenderness
and generosit}', kind to all that were within his influence ; but if
once offended not easily appeased ; inattentive to economy, an()
careless of his expenses. In his person he was larger than the
middle size, with something clumsy in his form ; very negligent of
his clothes, and remarkable for wearing his grey hair in a particular
manner ; for he held that the fashion was no rule of dress, and that
every man was to suit his appeai-ance to his natural form. His mind
was not very comprehensive, nov his curiosity active ; he had no value
for those parts of knowledge which he had not himself cultiva,ted."
Gray visited the Leasowes. and his opinion of Shenstone was
SHENSTONE, 157
very similar to that of Johnson. The Leasowes is about six or seven
miles distant from Birmingham on the road to Kidderminster, and
about four miles from Hagley, in the parish of Halesowen. Arriving
at Halesowen, you have to descend a long and steep hill, from the
top of which you have a view of the Bromsgrovo, Clent, and Dudley
hills, which are in the immediate neighbourhood, — Hagley -park- being
situated on one of the Clent hills, — and of the Clee hills in the
jlistance ; these form a boundary between the counties of Hereford
and Salop. About halfway down this descent, which is a mile long,
vou turn to the left down a shady lane ; this leads to the Leasowes,
.ind in some degree partakes of the character of the place ; winding
continually, yet still presenting a beautiful archway of trees, of
nearly all descriptions. From this lane you enter the Leasowes ;
and crossing a bridge, pass on to the lawn. On your left lies a beau-
tiful piece of still water, overshadowed with evergreens, and con-
veying the idea of infinite depth. This is nearly the lowest part of
the grounds, which here begin to ascend towards the house, com-
manding, not an extensive, but a beautifully condensed prospect.
Going round the house to the right, and still ascending, you gain
another prospect equally agreeable, yet diflFerent, and in both cases
are surprised by the skill which presents to the eye the artificial
depth of forest which there strikes it. A canal which has been cut
through the valley between the house and Halesowen, so far from
injuring the prospect, as many of these things are apt to do, rather
improves it, giving a rest to the eye, and shutting out, by its em-
bankment, sundry forges w^hich would otherwise be visible. In
order to discover, however, the true spirit of the place, you must
cross the lawn at the back of the house, where you are reminded of
passages in Shenstone's jDastorals.
Let us now suppose the grounds lying in the shape of a Y ; the
house not standing at the top, but near the centre of the fork, and
the lowest part of the scene, the stem. The lines forming the fork
of the Y are beautifully wooded ravines, or dolls, down which flow
small streamlets, meeting at the bottom of the hill, and in their
progress forming numerous small pools, which may well represent
" the fountains all bordered with moss." The walks along the sides
of these streams are now neglected, but they still conduct you to
the natural beauties of the scene. There is one spot which com-
mands the view of the whole grounds, and all the poetry of them.
Following the course of one of the streams, you arrive at that part
of the scene which was Shenstone's favourite spot ; still marked by
the remnants of several fallen statues. Still advancing along the
i>rook side, you come to a pool. This may be called the tail or stem
of the Y ; and at dusk, on a November day, it gives you no bad idea
of the Lake of the Dismal Swamp in miniature. Lideed, the feeUng
on quitting the place is, that you have been well deceived as to
extent ; so small a space really containing great variety of scenery.
The Leasowes now belongs to the Attwood family ; and a Miss
Attwood resides there occasionally. But the whole place boars tho
Jrapress of desertion and neglect.
,i"ir.
-.■^'^t}\'';\:<Ki
'^
CHATTERTON.
St. !Mary Redcliffe, Bristol, is a beautiful church ; some of the
hiographers of Chatterton have declared that it is the finest parish
cliurch in England. Mr. Britton was almost as enamoured of it as
was Chatterton liirnself. Ho wrote a complete history of it, and for
3'ears zealously exerted himself to rouse the inhabitants of Bristol to
have this ornament of their city put into thorough repair by sub-
scription, an object in which I am glad to find that he finally suc-
ceeded, and that the restoration, especially of the time-woi'n exterior,
which commenced under the superintendence of himself and Mr.
Brayley, is still progressing under Mr. Godwin.
" Betiutiful exceedingly " is St. Mary of liedcliffe ; and it is the
triumph of this beauty that it awoke the poet in the soul of one of
its lovers, and a poet so extraordinary in the circumstances of hi.s
life, in the mere boyhood of his age, in the ti-agic nature of his death,
and, above all, in the proud splendour of his genius ; that his i)assiou
for this lovely structure, and the facts which have sprung out of it,
liave flung round St. Mary an evei'lasting interest, and made it one
of the most brilliant monuments of national glory which stand on
the bosom of our mother-laiid.
CUxVTrEUXON'. 109
If it bad turned out that the Rowley Poems produced to the pubhc
by Chatterton had been genuine, and that the fame of so great a
Eoet as Thomas Rowley the priest had been buried for near four
undred years in the iron chest of William Canynge, it would have
been a most extraordinary circumstance that it should have been
a boy of fourteen who had discovered them ; who had had the taste
and discernment to pick them out from amidst the ordinary docu-
ments of such a chest, of little interest except to parishioners ; to
transcribe them, to press them upon the attention of his townsmen,
and the literary public, and to have suffered insult, obloquy, and
persecution on their account. Had he only raised that great public
astonishment, inquiry, quarrel and controversy, amongst the learned
and antiquarian of his time, and had been satisfactorily proved to be
onbi the discoverer, introducer, and champion of the merit of these
productions, it would have been one of the most remarkable occur-
rences in the whole history of literature, and the boy Chatterton
Avould have still merited the happy epithet of " the marvellous boy."
Had he been allowed, on justly admitted grounds, to have taken only
the position which he claimed, that of the discoverer of the Rowley
MSS., and the writer of his own acknowledged poems, the occurrence
would have stood alone in the annals of letters, and Chatterton must
have still remained one of the most extraordinary of precocious
geniuses. The wit which sparkles through tlie whole series of his
verses, from Sly Dick to his Journal and his Will ; the bold satire,
the daring independence of his thoughts, setting defiance to public
opinion, even on the most solemn of all subjects — religion ; the
indomitable pride, and bold adventure of the lad ; these are facts, in
connexion with his great " discovery," suj^posing it to have been a
real discovery, which must have raised the wonder of every one, and
have given him a distinguished niche in the Waihalla of his country.
The boy of sixteen, who could pen such a description as that of
Whitfield in his Journal, beginning — •
" In liis wooden palace jumpiiii;.
Tearing, sweating, bawling, thumping,
Repent, repent, repent,
Tlie mighty Whitfield cries,
Oblique lightning in his eyes;" —
the daring description oi* religion in his Defence ; or who could make
such a Will as that which he drew up, when he for the first time
proposed to himself suicide, must be pronounced a startling but
most uncommon lad. The youth, who, without friends or patrons
in the great metropolis, could set out with a small fund borrowed at
the rate of a guinea apiece from his acquaintances, to make his
fortune and fame ; and there, in the midst of the utter wreck of all
his august visions and soaring hopes ; in the depth of neglect, con-
tempt, and tlie most grinding indigence, could issue satire after satire,
and launch Junius-like letters from the newspapers at the highest
personages of the land, not sjiaring even the crowned head, can,
however wo might estimate such productions in an experienced
adult, only be regarded with the most profound and unmixed wonder.
We way lament over the waywardness of his genius, but we must
160 CHATTKRTON.
admit its uue.:iuivocal reality ; and when its career is closed by self-
violence, after appealing to Heaven from the abyss of its agony in
stanzas such as the following, we know not whether most to marvel
at the gi-eatness of the phenomenon, or the dense stolidity of tho
age which did not perceive it, but suffered it to expire in horroi', to
the eternal disgrace of human nature and our country.
" THE ItESIONAIIOX.
J God, vliose thumlei- sliakes the sky, Tlien wliy, my soul, dost thou complain ?
Whose eye this atom globe surveys, 'Why, liioopinjr. seek the dark recess i
To thee, lu'y only rock, I fly ; Shake oil" the melancholy chain.
Thy mercy in thy justice "praise. For God created all to bless.
The mystic mazes of thy \vill. But ah ! my breast is human still ;
The shadows of celestial light, The rising sigh, tlie falling tear,
.\re past the power of human skill ;— My languid vitals' feeble rill,
But what th' Eternal acts is right. The sickness of my soul declare.
O teach me in the trying hour. But yet, with fortitude resigned,
AVhen anguish swells the dewy tear, I thank the inflictor of the blow ;
To still my sorrows, own thy power. Forbid the sigh, compose my mind.
Thy goodness love, thy justice fear. Nor let the gush of misery How.
If in this bosom aught but Thee The gloomy mantle of the night.
Encroaching sought a boundless sway. Which on my sinking spirit steals,
Omniscience could the danger sec. Will vanish at the morning light
And Mercy look the cause away. AVhich God, my East, my Sun, reveals.'-
But pride and despair triumphed over this deep feeling of trust in
Divine goodness. These words were the rending cry of the dying
giant ; they were the mighty jioetry of forlornest misery ; and inde-
pendently of the poems of Thomas Eowley, they stamp beyond
dispute the high j^oetical renown of Thomas Chatterton. They
.show, that notwithstanding the unworthy subjects on which necessity
had forced him to attempt the waste of his sublime endowments,
and had forced him in vain, for the soul of poesy within him had
refused to come forth at the call of booksellers and political squab-
blers, there lay still in his bosom the great heart, and the great mind,
of the iirst-rate poet.
But what were ail these flashes and indications of the mens divinior
to the broad and dazzling display of it in the Eowley Poems them-
selves ; those poems which would have crowned any grown man a
king in the realms of intellectual reputation, which yet the towering
pride of the boy — " that damned, native, unconquerable pride" which
he said " plunged him into distraction," that " nineteen-twentieths
of his composition," as he himself asserted it to be — flung determi-
nedly from him ? These poems, now admitted on all hands to be
his own boyish compositions, and which indeed were thrust upon
him as crimes by those of his cotemporaries who ought to have seen
in them the proofs of a genius which should have been carefully and
kindly cherished for the good of humanity, and the honour of
England, — these are indeed as stately and beautiful as the fair pile
of St. Mary, which had first awoke in his spirit the deathless love of
poetry and antique romance. Ah ! what a sad, beautiful, but heart-
wringing romance is itself the story of Chatterton !
His real history is this.
CHATTERTON. ICl
There was a little boy, iu Bristol, whose fathers, for many genera-
tions, had been the sextons of St. Mary Redcliffe. The veneration
for this beautiful fabric, from the habit of ages, might be said to bo
woven into the frames and infused into the blood of this family.
The office was gone out of the family ; the boy's father had become
a schoolmaster, and died three weeks previous to the child's birth.
His xmcle had been the last to fill this post, but he too was deceased.
The boy's mother, however, lived iu a small house in a back court,
ilearly opposite to this chui-ch ; and the lad, very likely led by what
lie heard her say of the former long connexion of their family wi th
it, was in the habit of going into it when ojien, and wandering about
it for hours. At that time, nearly a centmy ago, neither churches
uor churchyards were so rigidly locked up as at present, and ample
and often was the time when a little boy on the watch might enter,
and while marriage or burial ceremony went on, w'hile the cleaners
and sweepers were at work, or while the evening and the morning bell
was rung, might stroll to and fro, and gaze, and wonder to his heart's
content. That this was his dearest occupation was soon well known
to his family. " His mother's house," says one of his biographers,
*•' was close to the fine structure of St. Mary Redchffe, and they well
knew that the boy's favourite haunts were the aisles and towers of
that noble pile. And there they would find the truant, seated gene-
rally by the tomb of Canynge, or lodged in one of the towers, read-
ing." And what effect this church-haunting had upon him was very
early visible. At five years of age he went to the day-school in
Pyle-street, which had formerly been taught by his father, but here
he was dull and .stupid ; and till he was six and a half years old, his
master could trace no sign of intellectual jjrogress in him, and his
poor mother began to think him an absolute fool. But the objects
of the silent church had not falleia in vain on his infant fancy.
Those quaint and gorgeous paintings, and those antique letters
engraven on floor brasses, had acquired a strong hold upon him, and,
without doubt, led him to seize as he did, with an avidity new to
him, on the old musical manuscript in French, adorned with illumi-
nated capitals, which he found at home. " He fell in love with it,'"
said his mother ; and the shrewd woman catching at this discovered
charm, brought him an ancient black-letter Bible, which she pos-
sessed, to I'ead, and the boy's inner nature came to light, — " he was
no longer a dunce." At eight he was a voracious devourer of books.
He read morning, noon, and night, from tlie hour that he awoke tf)
that in which he went to bed. But another cause now contributed
to strengthen the impressions of antiquity w^hich he had received in
St. Mary's church. He was become an inmate of the blue-coat school
of Bristol, on St. Augustine's Back, founded by Colston, a merchant,
iu 1708. Here, in an institution which, though not of ancient date,
was yet conducted in the ancient fashion, he was arrayed in long
blue coat and belt, and scarlet stockings, and tonsure cap. Here,
Kay some of his schoolfellows, he took no part in the poetical and
literary emulations which arose. An usher wrote poetry, and his
example stimulated others to a hke ambition ; but Chattcrton
1G2 CIIATTEin'O.-^.
" possessed apparently neither the inclination nor ability for literary
pursuits ;" he contented himself with the ordinary sports and
Dastimes of his age. But, in truth, he was secretly gleaning up
knowledge wherever he could lay hands on it. Long before, he had
bef^ged of a painter " to paint him an angel, with wings and a trumpet
io °trimpet las name over the u-orld!" This spirit, once awoke, was not
likely to die again, even in the bosom of a child. He had continually
in his heart that cry which haunted Cowley : —
" What shall I do to be for ever known ? "
From the time he had begun to read, a great change had passed
over him. " He grew thoughtful and reserved. He was silent and
gloomy for long intervals together, speaking to no one, and appearing
ano-ry when noticed or disturbed. He would break out into sudden
fits of weeping, for which no reason could be assigned ; would shut
himself in some chamber, and suffer no one to approach him, nor
allow himself to be enticed from his seclusion. Often he would go
to the length of absenting hiinself from home altogether, for the
space sometimes of many hours ; and his sister remembered him
being most severely chastised for a long absence, at which, however,
he did not shed one tear, but merely said, ' It was hard, indeed, to
be whipped for reading.' This was before his entering Colston's
school, but there he kept up the zealous reading. He is reported to
xidve stooa aloot from the society of his schoolmates, to have made
few acquaintances, and only amongst those whose disposition inclined
them to reflection. His money, all that he could procure, went for
the perusal of books ; and on Sundays, and holidays, and half-holidays,
he was either wandering solitarily in the fields, sitting beside the
tomb of Canynge in the church, or was shut up in a little room at
ills mother's, attending to no meal-times, and only issuing out, when
he did appear, begi-imed with ochre, charcoal, and black-lead.
" From twelve to seven, each Saturday, he was always at home ;
returning punctually a few minutes after the clock had struck, to
get to his little room, and to shut himself up. In this room he
always had by him a great piece of ochre in a brown pan ; pounce-
bags full of charcoal dust, which he had from a Miss Sanger, a
neighbour ; also a bottle of black-lead powder, which they once took
to clean the stove with, and made him very angry. Every holiday,
almost, he passed at home, and often, having been denied the key
when he wanted it, because they thought he hurt his health, and
made himself dirty, he would come to Mrs. Edkins, and kiss her
cheek, and coax her to get it him, using the most persuasive expres-
sions to effect his end ; so that this eagerness of his to be in this
room so much alone, the api)aratus, the parchments (for he was not
then indentured to Mr. Lambert), both plain as well as written on,
and the begrimed figure he always presented when he came down at
tea-time, his face exhibiting many stains of black and yellow — all
fhese circumstances began to alarm them ; and when she could got
into his room, she would be very inquisitive, and peep about at
everything. Once he put his foot on a parchment on the floor, to
CHATl'ERTON. 1 63
' prevent her from takiug it up, saying — ' You are too curious anti
clear-sighted — I wish you would bide out of the room — it is my
room.' To this she answered by telling him that it -was only a general
lumber-room, and that she wanted some parchment to make thread-
papers of; but he was offended, and would not permit her to touch
any of them, not even those that were not written on ; but at last,
with a voice of entreaty, said — ' Pray don't touch anything here,' and
seemed very anxious to get her away ; and this increased her fears,
lest he should be doing something improper, knowing his want of
money, and his ambition to appear like others.* At last, they got a
strange idea that these colours were to colour himself with, and that
perhaps he would join some gipsies, one day or other, as he seemed
so discontented with his station in life, and unhappy." f
But the true secret was one far beyond the conception cf his
simple relatives. Coining and forging, indeed, he was bent upon,
and meant to join himself, some day or other, to a company Avhich,
in their eyes, would have appeared stranger than a troop of gipsies.
He was already, child as he was, forging the name and deeds of
Thomas Rowley, and fathering upon him the glorious coinage of his
own brain. A great and immortal guest was theirs, and they did not
know it. One of themselves was marked by the passing angel of
destiny, as the one of all his generation doomed to the fearful sacri-
iice of a sad but eternal fame. The spirit which had stolen upon
him and taken possession of him as he had roamed the dim aisles of
the old church, and gazed on the great sacred scene of the Ascension
of Christ, and on the light avenues of lofty columns, and sat by tlic
tomb of Master Canynge, was now busy with him. It was this
which had made him gloomy and retiring, which had caused him to
bm'st into passions of tears for which no reason could be assigned.
A new world had dawned before his inner vision ! the sensibilities
of the poet were now quivering in every nerve ; mysterious shapes
moved around him, which one day he must report of to the world —
shapes, the oS'spring of that old church, and its tombs and monu-
ments, and traceries and emblazonments, mingled with the spirit of
his solitary readings in history, divinity, antiquities; and that me-
lancholy foreboding, \h^\i Ahmiufi of the future, as the Germans term
it, which, like a present angel of prophecy, imseen but felt, hangs on
the heart cf youthful genius with an overpowering sadness, was spread
over him like a heavenly cloud, which made the physical face of life
dreary and insipid to him.
This was the boy of eleven or twelve j^ears old, who had already
commenced satirist, and launched his arrows of sarcasm at offenders,
ill Felix Farley's Bristol Journal; where "Sly Dick," and "Apostate
Will," were pilloried before the whole city by so young a hand.
This was the boy of, perhaps, fourteen, who astonished the worthy
pewterer, Burgum, by bringing to him an historic account of his
pedigree, with coats of arms all elaborately painted on parchment,
* Of a scene suiiposed to occur in this !uinber-rooni, a beautiful mezzotint enfjraving
Jias been published by Mr. Mitchell of Bristol, from a paintiDa by Mr. Lewis of that city,
t 0. Cumberland, Estj. in Pix's Life.
G 2
i6i CHATXKR'rON,
traciug his desceut, with minute detail of personages, from no loss a
distance than the Saxon period, and from no less a person than tho
great Waltheof, Earl of Northumberland, Northampton, and Hunt-
ingdon! Great has been the laughter at poor Burgum, for swallowing
the pleasant deceit ; but let any one imagine to himself a charity
schoolboy, in old-fashioned costume, and his innocent boy's face,
appearing before him, and presenting so matter-of-fact a document,
as found in a chest in the muniment-room of St. Mary's church, in
which this boy was known to pore and hunt about. Could any sus-
I)icion of such a boy's forgery of the document at first be entertained ?
^Vould any feelings but those of wonder and curiosity be excited ?
Burgum w^as completely taken in, and a thousand others who have
since laughed at him would have been taken in too. And now began
to be sounded abroad that famous story of the iron-bound chest of
Master Canynge, in the muniment-room over the north porch of St.
3[ary Eedclitie church, from which Chatterton's father had been
allowed to carry home whole heaps of parchments, and from which
heaps Chattcrtou isrofessed to have drawn this pedigree of the Do
Bergham family. This was the prohfic source of the strange docu-
ments, which from time to time came issuing fortli, in the shape of
transcripts by the boy Cliattertou. His fifteenth J'ear, however,
saw him, in one day, metamorphosed from a Colston's charity boy
into a lawyer's apprentice. He was bound to one Lambert, a man of
little practice, and who, besides, is termed " a vulgar, insolent, im-
perious man ; who, because the boy wrote poetry, was of a melan-
choly and contemplative disposition, and chsposed to study an<l
reading, thought him a fit object of insult and contemptuous rage."
Need we ask why his mother Ijound him to such a man ? To whom
ni/i the poor bind their children ? Had Lambert been a pleasant
fellow, and in great practice, he would have had rich men's sons
oifered, and would have demanded a fee that would eflcctually exclude
the poor. Here Chatterton's life was the life of insult and degradation,
which might pretty safely be calculated upon with such a man, and
such a practice. Twelve hours he was chained to the office, i.e. from
eight in the morning till eight at night, dinner hour only excepted ;
and in the house he was confined to the kitchen, slept with the foot-
boy, and was subjected to indignities of a hke nature, at which his
pride rebelled, and by which his temper was embittered. Yet here
it was, during this life of base humiliation, that Thomas Chattertou
worked out the splendid creations of his imagination. In less than
three years of the life of a poor attorney's apprentice, fed in tho
kitchen, and lodged with the footboy, did he here achieve an im-
mortahty such aa the whole life of not one in millions is sufficient
to create.
In the long solitary hours of this empty office, — for, not having
any business, even the master was very often absent, — he had amplo
leisure and secure opportunity to give scope to the feelings and
fancies which had sprung up in the aisles of St. Mary's ; but which
had since grown with the aliment of historic and poetic knowledge,
gathered from Fuller, Camden, Chaucer, and the old chroniclers.
CHATIERTOX. 165
From time to time, as I have said, came flying forth some precious
old piece of local history, whicli astonished the good people of Bristol,
and was always traced to this same wonderful lad, and his inex-
haustible parchments from the old chest. A new bridge is built,
and in Felix Farley's Journal appears an account of the opening of
the old bridge, ages before, with all the ceremonies and processions
of civil officers, priests, friars, and minstrels, with all their banners
and ckriojis. Then Mr. Barrett, a surgeon, is writing his history of
the place, and lacks information respecting the ancient churches ;
and lo ! the i^rolitic MSS. of Maister Canynge supply not only his-
tories of all churches, but of castles and palaces, with the directions
of the ancient streets, and all the particulars of the city walls, and
all their gates. Never was an historian so readily and so affluently
suppUed ! Whoever now sees the ponderous quarto of Barrett's
History of Bristol, with all the wonders palmed upon the author by
I'hatterton, must be equally amazed at the daring of the lad and the
creduhty of the man. He restored in a fine drawing the ancient
castle, in a style of architecture such as surely never was seen in
any castle before. There were towers of a most lofty and unique
description, yet extremely beautiful; there were battlements as
imique, as if the ancient knights who defended them had left their
shields lying upon them. There were tiers of arches, circles and
stars one above another, in fronts of the most fanciful kind. There
were other parts where pilasters ran from ground to battlement,
ornamented with alternating cross-keys, human figures, lozenges,
ovals, zigzag lines, and other ornaments, such as never could have
originated but in a poetical and daring brain; yet was the whole
worthy of the residence of some knight or king of old romance. It
^vas beautiful, and might suggest to architects, in these threadbare
days, ideas of a style piquantly original and refreshing. This was
the view of Bristol Castle in 1138; Eowlie Canonicus, delineator,
1440, to be seen in Barrett's History. But deeper and deeper does
this fortunate youth dive into the treasures of the chest, and more
a.nd more amazing are the wonders that he brings up. Never was
so rich a chest stowed away in cloisters of the rich old middle ages.
Now came up poets, painters, carvers, heralds, architects, and
stainers of glass, besides warriors of proudest renown, all flourishing
in times that we are wont to deem barren of such glories ; and a
more than chivalric reign of Arthixr — a more than Elizabethan con-
.stellatiou of genius in arts and arms, astonishes the senses of those
deeply learned, who fancied that they had explored all possible mines
of the past knowledge. The dark ages grow brighter and brighter as
the necromantic striphng rubs his lamp in the ofQce of the attorney
Lambert, till the living are almost bhnded by the blaze of light from
the regions of the forgotten dead. No less than eleven poets of
great fame did he bring to hght, of whom Abbot John, v^ho flourished
in 1186, he says, was one of the greatest that ever lived ; and
Maister John a Iscam not much less, living in the time of the great
Maister Canynge, himself also a fine poet ! But of all men, most
versatile and rich in lore and intellect was Thomas Rowley, the friend
166 CHATTERTON.
of Cauyugc, and priest of St. John in Bristol ; and truly, if tha
poems which lie put forth iu Eowley's name had been Kowloy'.s,
llowley would have been a famous poet indeed — to say nothing of
his sermons, histories, and other writings.
Spite of the wretchedness of his domestic position in Lambert's
house, this must have been the happiest portion of Chatterton's
life. His bringing out these treasures to the day had given him great
consideration, amongst not only some of the most leading men, but
amongst the youth of Bristol. With his excitable temperament his
spirits rose occasionally into great gaiety and confidence. He began
to entertain dreams of a lofty ambition. He had created a new
world for himself, iu which he lived. He had made Rowley its great
heroic bard. He had raised Maister Canynge again from his marble
rest in the south transept of St. Mary's, and placed him in his
ancient glory in Bristol. Beneath lais hands St. Mary's rose like a
fixiry fabric out of the earth, and was consecrated amid the most glo-
rious hymns, and with the most gorgeous processions of priests and
minstrels. Great and magnificent was Canynge in his wealth and
his goodness once more in his native city ; and in the brave lays of
Eowley the valiant Ella fought, and the fierce Harold and William
the Norman made the hill of Battell the eternal monument of the
loss and gain of England.
" He was always," says Mr. Smyth, one of his intimate com-
panions, " extremely fond of walking in the fields, particularly in
Eedcliffe meadows, and of talking about these manuscripts, and
sometimes reading them there. ' Come,' he would say, ' you and I
will take a walk in the meadow. I have got the cleverest thing for
you imaginable : — it is worth half-a-crown merely to have a sight of
it, and to hear me read it to you.' When we arrived at the place
proposed he would produce his parchment, show it me, and read it
to me. There was one spot in particular, full in view of the church,
in which he would take a particular delight. He would frequently
lay himself down, fix his eyes upon the church, and seem as if he
were in a kind of trance. Then, on a sudden, abruptly he would tell
me, ' That steeple was bm-nt down by lightning ; that was the placo
where they formerly acted plays.'
"His Sundays were commonly spent in walking alone into the
country about Bristol, as far as the duration of daylight would allow ;
and from those excursions he never failed to bring home with him
drawings of churches, or some other objects which had impressed hia
romantic imagination.
This was one of those brief seasons in the poet's life when the
heaven of his spirit has cast its glory on the nether world ; when
the light and splendour of his own beautiful creations invest the
comrnon earth, and he walks in the summer of his heart's joy. Every
imagination seems to have become a reality; every hope to expand
before him into fame and fehcity; and the flowers beneath his tread,
the sky above him, the air that breathes upon his cheek, — all Nature,
in short, is full of the intoxication of poetic triumph. Bristol was
become quite too narrow for him and Rowley ; he shifted the field ot
CHATTERTOS'.
16:
bis ambition to London, and the wliole euclianted realm of his anti-
cipations passed hke a Fata Morgana, and was gone ! There camu
instead, cruel contempt, soul-withering neglect, hunger, despair, and
suicide !
Such was the history of the hfe of one of England's greatest poets,
who i^erished by his own hand, stung to the soul by the utter neglect
of his country, and too proud to receive that bread from compas-
sion which the reading public of Great Britain refused to his poetic
labours. Of this, of Walpole, and Gray, and Johnson, and the like,
v/e will speak more anon. Here let us pause, and select a few speci-
mens of that poetry which the people of England, at the latter end
of the eighteenth century, would fain have suffered to perish with
its author. That they may be better understood, we will modernise
them.
The chief of his Rowley Poems are,— Ella, a Tragical Interlude, or
Discoursing Tragedy ; Godwin, the fragment of another Tragedy ;
the Battle of Hastings, the fragment of an Epic ; and the Parliament
of Sprytes, a most merry Interlude ; with smaller ones.
ROHNDELAT, SUNG BY THE MINSTRELS IN ELLA.
' O ! sing unto my roundelay,
O ! drop the briny tear with me,
Dance no more at holiday ;
Like a running river he.
My love is dead,
Gone to his death-bed,
Ml under the willow-tree.
" Black his hair as the winter night,
While his neck as the summer snow,
Ked his face as the morning light ;
Cold he lies in the grave below.
My love is dead, etc.
" Sweet his tongue as the tlirostle's note.
Quick in dance as thought can he,
Daft his tabour, cudgel stout;
O ! lie lies l)y the willow-tree.
My love is dead, etc.
" Hark! the raven flaps his wing
In the hriared dell below;
>laik ! the death-owl loud doth sing
To the nightmares, as they go.
My love is dead, etc.
Whiter is my true love's shroud ;
Whiter than the morning sky.
Whiter than the evening cloud.
My love is dead. etc.
" Here, upon my true love's grave.
Shall the barren flowers belaid;
Xot one holy saint to save
All tlie coldness of a maid.
My love is dead, etc.
" With my hands I'll bend the briars
Hound his holy corse to gre :*
Klfin fairies, light your fires ;
Here my body still shall be.
My love is dead, etc.
" Come with acorn-cup and tliorn.
Drain my heart's blood all away ;
Life and all its good I scoki,
Dance by night, or feast by day.
Sly love is dead.
Gone to his death-bed,
All under the willow-tree.
W'ater-witches, crowned with reytcs,t
IJear me to your lethal tide.
X die ! I come ! my true love waits ; —
Thus the damsel spoke, and died."
This roundelay has always, and most justly, been greatly admired
for its true pathos, and that line harmony which charms us so much
in the fragments of similar songs preserved by Shakspeare. Not less
beautiful is the Chorus in Godwin. Tliere is something singularly
great and majestic in its imagery.
* Grow.
t Water-flags.
ICS CHATTERT0?7.
CHORUS IN GODWIN.
" WliL'u Frcctlom, dressed in Wood-stained vest.
'J'o every knif>Ut lier war-song suns;.
Upon her lic.ul wild weeds were spread ;
A sory anlacc liy her hung:
She danced upon tlie lieath ;
She heard the voice of death ;
Pale-eyed Affrisht, his heart of silver hue
In vain assailed her hosom to aeaie;*
She heard unmoved the shrieking voice of woe,
And Sadness in the owlet shake the dale.
She shook the pointed spear.
On high she reared her shield;
Her foemen all appear,
And fly along the held.
Power, with his head aloft unto the skies.
His spear a sunbeam, and his shield a star,
Like two fierce flaming meteors rolled his eyes,
Chafes with his iron feet and sounds to war.
She sits upon a rock.
She bends before his spear, ,
She rises with the shock,
AVielding her own in air.
Hard as the thunder doth she drive it on ;
Wit, closely mantled, guides it to his crown, —
ilis long sharp spear, his spreading shield is gone;
He falls, and falling, rolleth thousands down.
War, gore-faced War, by Envy armed, arist,t
His fiery helmet nodding to the air.
Ten bloody arrov.'s in his straining fist."
#**■»»
Next let Its take a posm whose truest criticism is coiitaiiiod in its
own title : —
AN EXCELLENT BALLAD OF CHARITY.
" From Virge did the sun diffuse his sheen.
And liot upon the meads did cast his ray;
Jled grew the apple from its paly green.
And the soft pear did bend the leafy spray ;
The pied goldfinch sung the livelong day :
'Twas now the pride, the manhood of the year,
And eke the ground was dight in its most deft aumere.t
" The sun was gleaming in the midst of day,
Dead still the air, and eke the welkin blue,
When from the sea arose in drear array
A heap of clouds of sable sullen hue ;
The which full fast unto the woodlands drew,
Hiding at once the sun's rejoicing face,
And the black tempest swelled and gathered up apace.
" Beneath an holm fast by a pathway side,
Which did unto St. Godwin's convent lead,
A hapless pilgrim moaning did abide ;
In aspect poor, and wretched in his weed.
Long filled with the miseries of need.
Where from the hailstone could the almer§ fly ?
He had no house at hand, nor any convent nigh.
" Look in his gloomed face, his sprite there scan ;
How woe-begone, how withered, dry and dead!
Haste to thy church-glebe-honse,i| unhappy man!
Haste to thy cotiln, thy sole sleeping bed.
Cold as the clay which will lie on thy head
Is charity arid love amongst higli elves;
Now knights and barons live for pleasure and themselves.
• Pivf/c. t Arose. J PLobe. § Beggar. || urave.
CHATTERTON. 1&9
*' The gathered storm is rife ; the big drops fall ;
The sun-burnt meadows smoke and drink the rain ;
The comuig ffliastness* doth the cattle 'i)all.
And the full flocks are driving o'er the piain.
Dashed from the clouds, the waters fly again ;
The welkin opes ; the yellow levin flies,
And the hot fiery steam in the wide flashing dies.
" List! now the thunder's rattling, dinning sound
Moves slowly on, and then augmented clangs,
Sliakes tlie high spire, and lost, dispended, drowned,
Still on the startled ear of terror hangs.
The winds are up ; the lofty elm-tree swings !
Again the levin, and the thunder pours,
And the full clouds at once are burst in stony showers.
" Spurring his palfrey o'er the watery plain.
The Abbot of St. Godwin's convent came ;
His chapournettet was drenched -with the rain,
llis painted girdle met with mickle shame;
He backward told his bead-roll at the same ;
The storm grew stronger, and he drew aside
With the poor alms-craver near to the holm to bide.
" His cloak was all of Lincoln cloth so fine,
A golden button fastened near his chin ;
llis autreinete t w'as edged with golden twiiir,
.\nd his peaked shoes a )iol)le's might have b^i-n ;
l''ull well it showed that he thought cost no sin ;
The trammels of the palfrey pleased his sight.
Tor the horse-milliner§ his head with roses dight.
" 'An alms, sir priest ! ' — the dropping pilgrim sniil ;
' O ! let me wait within your convent door,
Till the sun ohineth high above our head,
.And the loud tempest of the air is o'er ;
Helpless and old am I, alas ! and poor ;
Ko house, nor friend, nor money in my pouch ;
All that 1 call my own is this my silver crnuv/n:'
" ' Varlet ! ' replied the Abbot, ' cease your din ;
This is no season alms and prayers to give ;
.My porter never lets a stroller in ;
><one touch my ring who not in honour live.'
And now the sun with the black clouds did strive,
And shedding on the ground his glaring ray,
The Abbot spurred his steed, and eftsoons rode away.
" Again the sky •nas black, the thunder rolled ;
I'ast hieing o'er the plain a priest was seen :
Not dight full proud, nor buttoned up in g'old :
1 1 is cloak and cape were grey, and eke were clean ;
A limitor he was of order seen ;*I
And from the pathway side then turned he.
Where the poor aimer lay beneatli the holmen tree.
' ' An alms, sir priest,' the dropping pilgrim saiil,
• l-'or sweet St. Mary and your order's sal:e.'
The limitor then loosed his pouch's thread,
And did thereout a groat of silver take ;
The wretched pilgrim did for gladness shake.
' Here, take this silver, it may ease thy care;
Vt'c are God's stewards all; nought of our own we hear.
• Ghastliness.
I A small round liat, not unlike the chapournette of heraldry, formerly worn by ecci^
lia^lics and lawyers. — Cuatterton. J Coil'.
5 The sign of a bor>c'-milUii.T was till lately, if not still to be seen,' in Bristol.
II Crucilix. :. Begging friar.
170 . CHATTERTOJT.
" ' But oil ! unhappy pilgrim, learn of me,
Scarce any give a rent-roll to their Lord.
]lfre, take my semi-cape,* thou'rt bare I see ;
'Tis thine; the saints will give me my reward.'
He left the pilgrim, and away he strode.
Virgin and iloly Saints who sit in gloure.t
Or give the mighty will, or give the good man power :"
The following presents a very living picture of the ceremony of
church consecration formerly: —
OK THE DEDICATIOK OF OUR LADY's CHURCIt.
" Soon as hright sun along the skies had sent his ruddy light,
And fairies hid in oxlip cups till wished approach of night;
The matin hell with shrilly sound reechoed through the air;
A troop of holy friars did for Jesus' mass prepare.
Around the high unsainted church with holy relics went ;
And every door and post about with godly things hespent.
Then Carpenter,! in scarlet dressed, and mitred holily.
From Master Canynge, his great house, with rosary did hio.
Before him went a throng of friars, who did the mass song sing ;
Behind him Master Canynge came, tricked like a barbed king.
And then a row of holy friars who did the mass song sound ;
The procurators and church reeves next pressed the holy ground.
And when unto the church they came, a holy mass they sang,
So loudly that their pleasant voice unto the heavens rang.
Then Carpenter did purify the church to God for aye,
AVith holy masses and good psalms which he therein did say.
Then was a sermon preached soon by Carpenter holily ;
And after that another one > preached was by me.
Then all did go to Canynge's house an interlude to play,
And drink his wines and ale so good, and prr.y for him for aye."
\\'c will select just one short lyric more, because its stanza and
rhythm seem to me to have communicated their peculiar music to
one of the sweetest of our living poets : —
SONG OP SAINT ■WAREVRUH.
" When king Kynghill in his hand " Then the folks a bridge did make
Held the sceptre of this land. Over the stream unto the hecke,
Shining star of Christ's own light, All of wood eke long and wide,
I'he murky mists of pagan night Pride and glory of the tide,
'fian to scatter far and wide ; Which in time did fall away.
Then Saint Warburgh he arose, Then Earl Leof he bespe''
Doffed his honours and fine clothes; This great river from its bed.
Preaching his Lord Jesus' name Hound his castle for to run ;
To the land of West Sexx carne, 'Twas in truth an ancient one ;
Where yellow Severn rolls his tide. But war and time will all decay.
" Strong in faithfulness he trode " Now again with mighty force,
Over the waters like a god, Severn in his ancient cofirse,
Till he gained the distant hecke -.5 }lolls his rapid stream along.
In whose banks his staff did stick With a sand both swift and strong.
Witness to the miracle. AVhelming many an oaken wood.
Then he preached night and day, We, the men of Bristol town,
And set many the right way. Have rebuilt this bridge of stone.
This good staff great wonders wrought. Wishing each that it may last
More than guessed by mortal thought, Till the date of days be past.
Or than mortal tongue can tell. Standing where the other stood."
Now, would it ever have been believed, had not the thing really
taken jjlace in its unmitigated strangeness, that such poetry as this
• — poetry, indeed, of which these are but mere fragments, which,
while they display the power, poetic freedom, and intellectual riches
of the writer, do not show the breadth and grandeur of his plans, to
be seen only in the works themselves, — that they could have been
* Short under-cloak.; t Glory.
X Bishop Carpenter. f Height.
CHATTERTON. 1"!
presented to the public, and passed over with contempt, not a cen-
tury ago ? Would it have been credited, that the leading men of
the' literary world at that time, instead of flinging back such poems
at the boy -who presented them as a discovered antiquity, were not
struck with the amazing fact, that if the boy were an impostor, as
they avowed, if he indeed had written them himself, he must at tlio
same time be a glorious poet ? Yet Horace Walpole, Gray, ]\Iason, Dr.
Johnson, and the whole British throng of literati were guilty of this
blindness !
That was a dark time in which Chatterton had the misfortune to
appear. Spite of the mighty intellects, the wit or learning of such
men as Johnson, Gray, "Goldsmith, Thomas and Joseph Warton,
Burke, and Walpole, poetry, and the spirit of poetry, were, as a
general fact, at a low ebb. It was the midnight succeeding the long
declining day of the imitators of Pope. The great crowd of versifiers
had waiTdered away from Nature, and her eternal fountain of inspira-
tion, and th&long array of Sprats, Blackmores, Yaldens. Garths, and
the like, had wearied'^ the ear and the heart to death with their
T>olished commonplaces. The sweet muse of Goldsmith was almost
the only genuine beam of radiant light, before the great dawn of a
more glorious day which was about to break ; and Goldsmith himself
was hasting to his end. Beattie was but just appearing, publishing
the first part of his ]\Iinstrel the very year that Chatterton perished
by his own hand. The great novelists, Richardson, Fielding, and
Sterne, had disappeared from the scene, and their fitting cotemporary,
Smollett, was abroad on his travels, where he died the year after
Chatterton's suicide. Akenside died the same year ; Falconer was
drowned at sea the year before ; Sheridan's litei-ary s\m appeared
only above the horizon five years later, with the publication of his
Rivals. Who then were in the ascendant, and therefore the influential
arbiters of public opinion ; they who must put forth the saving
hand, if ever put forth, and give the cheering "all hail," if it were
given ? They were Gray, who, however, himself dieel the following
year, Armstrong, Anstey of the Bath Guide, I^Iason, Lord Lyttelton,
Gibbon, the Scotch historians and philosophers, Hume, Robertson,
Adam Smith, and the like. There were, too, such men about the
stage as Foote, ^lacklin, Colman, and Cumberland ; and there were
the lady writers, or patrons of literature, ^Irs. Carter. Mrs. ^Macauley.
^Irs. Montagu. Macpherson was smarting under the flagellations
received on account of his Ossian, — and that w;is about all. Spite
of great names, is that a literary tribunal from which mucli good was
to be hoped ? No, we repeat it, so far as poetry, genuine poetry, was
concerned, it was a dark and wintry time. The Wartons were of a
more hopeful chai-acter, and Mrs. Montagu, the founder of the Bhie-
Stocking Club, had then recently published her Essay on the Genius
and Writings of Shakspeare. She, a patron and an atlvocate of
Shakspeare, might, one would have thought, have started from the
herd, and done herself immortal honour by asserting the true rank
of the new genius, and saving him from a fearful death. But it is
one thing t'> assert the fame of a Shakspeare, established on the
172 CHATTERTON.
throne of the world's homage, and another to discover, much more to
]iymn, the advent of a new genius. The literary world, warned by tha
t^earifying castigation which Macphersou had undergone for intro-
ducing Ossian, as if, instead of giving the world a fresh poet, he had
robbed it of one, shrunk back from the touch of a second grand im-
postor — another knave come to forge for the public another greaf'
poet ! It was a new kind of crime, this endowment of the republic of
literature with enormous accessions of wealth : and, what was more
extraordinary, the endowers were not only denounced as thieves, but
as thieves from themselves ! Macphersou and Chatterton did not
assert that theij had written new and great poems, which the acute
critics proved to be stolen from the ancients, Ossian and Eowley ;
that and their virtuous indignation we might have comprehended ;
but, on the contrary, while the critics protested that Chatterton and
jMacpherson themselves were the actual poets, and had only put on tlie
masks of ancients, they treated them, not as clever maskers, joining
in the v/itty conceib, and laughing over it in good-natured triumph,
but they denounced them in savage terms, as base thieves, false
coiners, damnable impostors !
And of what were they impostors ? Were not the poems real ?
Were they not genuine, and of the true Titanic stamp 1 Of what
were they thieves 1 Were not the treasures which they came dragging
into the literary bank of England genuine treasures ? and if they
^s'ere found not to have indeed dug tliem out of the rubbish of the
ruined temple of antiquity, were they not their oion ? Did the critics
not protest that they were their own ? What, then, was their strange
crime % That they would rob themselves of their own intellectual
riches, and deposit them on the altar of their country's glory.'*
Wondrous crime ! wondrous age ! Let us rejoice that a better time
has arrived. Not thus was execrated and chased out of the regions
of popularity, and even into a self-dug grave, " The Great Unknown,"
" The Author of Waverley." He wore his mask in all peace and
lionour for thirteen years, and not a soul dreamed of denouncing Sir
AValter Scott, when he was compelled to owji himself as the real
nuthor, because he had endeavoured to palm off his productions as
those of Peter Pattison, or Jedediah Cleishbotham.
The world has grown \riser, and that through a new and more
generous, because a more gifted, generation which has arisen. The
age which was in its wane when Chatterton appeared upon the stage,
Avas lying beneath the incubus of scholastic formality. Dr. Johnson
ruled it as a growling dictator, and the mediocre herd of coj)yists
sln-unk equally from the heavy blow of his ci'itical cudgel, and the
* Thii fact of two poets at the same period producing cxtraoidinary compositions,
wliich they protested were not tlicir own, and who, rather than enjoy the glory of them,
died steadfastly rei-udiating them, amid one universal yell of execration as impostors,
is one of the most inexplicable phenomena in the history of litoratnre. The Spiritualists
would solve the whole by declaring them unconscious mediums. And, curiously enouRli,
Macpherson belonged to the country of second-sight, and Chatterton exhibited all tlia
symptoms of mediumship. His trance-like appearance in the Kedclifie meadows, in
which he made sudden oracular declarations; liis wonderful arcliitecture ; and tha
Bplendour of his poetry, so far a))ove his years, all favour their supposition, and without
pronouncing upon it, we may aflimi that it is, at least, curious.
CHATTEUTOX. 173
sharp puncture of Horace TTalpole's wit. But the dawn was at hand.
Bishop Percy had aheady, in 1705, pubHshed his Kehques, and they
were beginning to operate. Men read them, went back again at
once to nature, and, at her inspiration, up sprung the noble throng
of poets, historians, essayists, and romance writers, which, have,
clothed the nineteenth century with one A\"ide splendour of the glory
of genius.
The real crime, however, which Chatterton committed was, not
that he had attempted to palm off upon the world his own produc-
tions as Rowley's, but that he had succeeded in taking the knowing
ones in. He had caught in his tra]3 those to whom it was poison
and death not to appear more sagacious thaii all the world besides.
He had showed up the infallibility of the critics, — an unpardonable
crime ! These tricks of mere boys, by which the craft, and the owl-
gravity of the greybeards of literary dictation, might any day be so
lamentably disconcerted, and exposed to vulgar ridicule, was a dan-
gerous practice, and therefore it was to be put down with a genuine
Mohawk onslaught. Walpole, who had been bitten by Macpherson,
and was writhing imder the exposure so agonizing to his aristocratic
pride, was most completely entrapj^ed again by Chatterton. Spite
of his cool denial of this, any one has only to read liis letter to
Chatterton, despatched instantly on the receipt of Chatterton's first
packet, to be quite satisfied on this point. He '-'thinks himself
singularly obliged," he '•' gives him a thousand thanks for his very
curious and kind letter." ""What you have sent," he declares, "is
valuable, and full of information ; hvt instead of correcthuj yo7!, sir, yon
(ire far mr/re able to correct meV Think of the cruel chagrin of tlie
])roud dilettante, Walpole, when he discovered that he had been
making this confessiou to a boy of sixteen I What was worse, h(!
had offered, in this letter of March 28, 1769, to print the poems of
Rowley, if they had never been printed ! and added, " The Abbot
John's verses which you have given me are wonderful for their
harmony and spirit ! "
Xever was a sly old fox so perfectly entrapped by a mere lad. Ijut
hear with what excess of politeness he concludes : —
" I will not trouble you with more questions now, sir ; but flatter
myself, from the urbanity and politeness you have already shown
me, that you will give mo leave to coustilt you. I hope, too, you will
forgive the simplicity of my direction, as you have favoured mc with
no other. " I am. Sir,
" Your much obliged and obedient servant,
" Horace Walpolk."
This was before Gray and Mason, Avho had seen the MS. sent,
declared it to bo a forgery ; and before Hoi'acc had discovered that
he had been thus complimenting a poor lawyer's clerk, and liis
poems ! Ho thought that he was addressing some gentleman ot'
fortune, pursuing antiquarian lore in his own noble library, no
doubt ; but he was stung by two serpents at once — the writer was a
poor lad, and the verses were his own !
174 CHATTERTON.
There has been a great war of words regardmg the. conduct of
Walpole to Chatterton. Some have declared him guilty of the fate
of the poor youth ; others have gone as far the other way, and
exempted him from all blame. In my opinion, nothing can excuso
the conduct of Walpolc. If not to prevent the fate of Chatterton,
was, in his case, to accelerate it, then Walpole must be pronounced
guilty of the catastrophe which ensued ; and what greatly aggravates
the offence is, that he made that a crime in Chatterton of which ho
himself had set the example. Chatterton gave out that his poems
were written by Rowley ; Walpole had given out that his Castle of
Otranto was the work of an old Italian, and that it had been found,
not in Canynge's chest, but " in the library of an ancient catholie
family in the north of England." Nothing is more certain, then,
that, brought into close communication with this extraordinary
youth and his brilliant productions, he either did not or would not
see, that if Rowley were nobody, Chatterton was a great poet, and as
a boy, and a poor boy, was an extraordinary phenomenon ; and that
both patriotism and humanity demanded that he should be at once
brought under the notice of the good and wise, and everything pos-
.sible done to develop his rare powers, and secure them to his
country. Walpole coolly advised him to stick to his desk, and left
him ! Sir Walter Scott has said that Walpole is not alone to blame ;
the whole country partakes the censure with him, and that he gave
the boy good advice. This is not quite true. The whole country did
not know of Chattei'ton, of his wonderful talents, and his peculiar
situation ; but all these were thrust upon the attention of Waljjole,
imd he gave him advice. True, the advice in itself was good ; but,
imluckily, it was given when Walpole by his conduct had destroyed
all its value with Chatterton — when the proud boy, seeing the con-
temptible way in which the aristocrat, wounded in his vanity, turned
round upon him, had torn his letters to atoms, and stamped them
under his feet.
Had Walpole, when he discovered the real situation and genius of
Chatterton, kindly taken him by the hand, — had he, instead of
deserting him on account of his poverty, and of his having put
on him the pardonable trick of representing his ovrn splendid pro-
ductions as those of a nonentity, Thomas Rowley, then and there
advised him to adhere to his profession, as a certain source of
fortune, and to cultivate his poetic powers in his leisure moments,
promising to secure for him, as he so easily could, a full acknow-
ledgment of his talents from the public, — it is certain that he might
have made of Chatterton, who was full of affection, what he would.
He might have represented to him what a fair and legitimate field
of poetry he had chosen, thus celebrating the historic glory of his
nation, and what an injustice he was doing to himself by giving the
fame of his own genius to Rowley. Had he done this, he would have
assuredly saved a great mind to his country, and would have
ileserved of it all honour and gratitude. But to have expected this
from Walpole was to expect wai-mth from an icicle.
Si)ite, therefore, of the advice of Walpole, "given with as much
CHATTERTOX. 17£
kindness and tenderness as if he had been his guardian,"' no argii-
ment or eloquence can shield him from the blame of posterity.
There stands the fact — that he turned his back on a great poet,
when he stood before him blazing like a star of the first magnitude,
and suffered him to perish. He did more. When that poet had
perished, and the great soul of his country had awoke to its error
and its loss, and acknowledged that " a prince had fallen in Israel,"
then, on the publication of Chatterton's letters to him in 1786, did
this inean-souled man, in a canting letter to Hannah More, absolutely
deny that he had ever received these letters ! — " letters jiretended to
hate been sent to me, and which never icere sentr *
After this, let those defend Walpole who like ; would that we
could clear that rough, dogmatic, but noble fellow, Samuel Johnson,
from a criminal indifference to the claims and fate of Chatterton ;
but, with that unreflecting arbitrariness of will, which often led him
into error, we learn from Boswell, who often urged him to read the
poems of Eowley, that he long refused, saying, " Pho, child ! don't
talk to me of the powers of a vulgar, uneducated stripling ! Xo man
can coin guineas but in proportion as he has gold." When at length
he teas induced to read them, he confessed — " This is the most
extraordinary young man that has encountered my knowledge. It is
wonderful how the whelp has written such things." It had then
been long too late to begin to admire ; and the giant prejudices of
Johnson had driven poor Chatterton as completely from him, as the
petit-maitre vanity of Walpole rei^ulsed him in that quarter.
Miss Seward, a woman who, with all her faults as a writer, had
always the tact to discern true genius, would have dared to acknow-
ledge the vast powers of Chatterton, had it been in her own day of
popularity ; but at the death of Chatterton, she was a country girl
of twenty-thi'ee. What she says of Johnson's conduct is xcry just: — •
" Though Chatterton had long been dead when Johnson began his
Lives of the Poets, — though Chatterton's poems had long been
before the world, — though their contents had engaged the literati of
the nation in controversy, — ^yet would not Johnson allow Chatterton
a place in those volumes into which Pomfret and Yalden were
admitted. So invincible were his grudging and surly prejudices,
enduring long-deceased genius but ill, and contemporary genius
not at all."
Thus we have traced the course of Thomas Chatterton to that
eventful crisis of his fate, when he found himself rejected, as it were,
by the literary senate of his nation, and thrust down the few steps
of the temple of fame, which ho had dfjred to ascend, as a forger and
imi)Ostor. He was thrust away, in a manner, from the heart, and
what was more, from the intellect of his country ; yet his proud
spirit spurned the ignominious treatment, and he dared to make one
grand effort, one great and final appeal against the fiat, in the face of
the whole world, and in the heaii of the British metropolis. Alas ! it
was a desperate enterprise, and our hearts bleed as we follow hiiu in
his course. There is nothing, in my opinion, so utterly nu^ancholv
* Horace Walpole's Letters, vol. ii. ISJC
176 CUATXEliTOX.
iu all the Lisiory of the ealauiities of authors, as the four fata)
months of Chatterton's sojourn in London. It was his great misfor-
tune, from the hour of his birth till that moment, that he never had
one suitable fi'iend — one wise, generous, and sympathising friend^
who saw at once his splendid endowments, and the faults of hi.-^
character, and who could thus acquire a sound, and at the same time
uu inspiring influence over him. Born of poor people, who, however
they might love him, did not and could not comprehend him,—-
living iu a town devoted to trade, and nailed to the desk of a petti-
fogging attorney, — he went on his way alone, conscious of his own
]jowers, and of the inferiority of those around him, till his pride and
his passions kept j)ace with his genius, and he would have been
a miracle had he not had great and many faults. If we, therefore,
sigh over his religious scepticism, and regret the occasional symp-
toms of a sufficient want of truth and high principle in his literary
hoaxes, especially in foisting fictitious matter into grave history, we
are again compelled to acknowledge that it was because he had no
adequate friend and counsellor. He was like a young giant wander-
ing sohtarily over a wilderness without guide or guide-post ; and if
he did not go v/rong in proportion to his imusual ardour, strength,
and speed, it were a wonder. But from the moment that he sets
foot in London, what is there in all biography so heart-breaking to
contemplate ? With a few borrowed guineas he sets out. Arrived
in this great ocean of human life, v/here one living wave rushes past
another as unrecognizaut as the waves of the ordinary sea, his heart
overflowing with domestic affections, he expends the fcAV borrowed
guineas in presents to his mother and sister, and sends them with
flaming accounts of his prospect of honours for himself, and of
wealth for them. If any one would make himself acquainted with
the true pathetic, let him only read the few letters written home by
Chatterton, from Shoreditch and Holborn. He was to get four
guineas a month by one magazine ; was to write a History of Eng-
land, and occasional essays for the daily jiapers. " What a glorious
prospect !" He was acquainted with all the geniuses at the Chapter
coffee-house. " No author can be poor who understands the arts of
booksellers ; this knowledge I have pretty well dipped into ! " Ah !
])oor Chatterton, one frog move gone to put himself under the pro-
tection of King Stork ! Mr. Wilkes knew him by his writings ; and
he was going to visit him, and use his interest to secure the Trinity
House for a Mi's. Ballance. He wi'ote to all his young men acquaint-
ances : they were to send him up compositions, and he would have
them inserted in all sorts of periodicals. Songs he was to write for
a Doctor in Music ; and such was the good fortune pouring in, that
he could not help exclaiming — '■'■Bravo, nnj hoys, up we go ! " One
person would give him a recommendation as travelling companion
to the young Duke of Northumberland, only he spoke nothing but
English ; another to Sir George Colebrook, an East India Director,
for a place of no despicable description, only he would not go to sea-
He was about to wait on the Duke of Bedford ; and had had a most
polite interview with Beckford, the Lord J\Iayor. In short, all.
r^f
CHATTERTOX. 1 7
accordiDg to his poetic fancy, was going on most mountingly. " Ily'
wrote he to his sister, " money flowed as fast npon me as honoiu-s, i
would give you a portion of 5,000/."
But what was the stern reality ? Amid all the flush, of imagin.'i'i.y'
honours and success, or what he would have his family to ihiy'tt
such, to tranquillise their minds, he was, in truth, almost from the
rirst, in a state of starvation. His journey, and the presents so
generously but so injudiciously purchased for his mother and sister,
— the little fund of borrowed guineas, was gone. Of friends he does
not appear to have had one in this huge human wilderness. Besides
the booksellers for whom he did slave-work, not a single influential
mortal seems to have put out a finger of fellowship towards him.
So far as the men of literary fame were concerned, it was one wide,
dead, and desert silence. From the wretched region of Shoreditcli,
lie flitted to the good-natured dressmakei-'s of Brook-street, Holborn.
But starvation pursued him, and stared him every day more fearfully
in the face. He was, with all his glorious talents and his indomitable
])ride, utterly alone in the world. Walpole, who had gdven him
advice '"'as kindly as if he had been his guardian," was in great
bodily Comfoi't, penning smart letters, and compiling a " Catalogue
of Eoyal and Noble Authors," at Strawberry-hill ; while the noblest
genius living was stalking on sternly through the streets of pitiless
London, to famine and desj)air. Sam Johnson, all Ais struggles now
over, and at the annual price of 300/. become, according to his own
definition of Pensioner in his Dictionary, — " A slave of state, hired
by a stipend to obey his master," — was comfortably lolling on the
soft sofas of Mrs. Thrale, or acting the lion in the Literary Club, oi"
in the saloon of some wealthy noble. Goldsmith was hastening to
his end at fiftj'-three, and Chattertou to his at seventeen !
Of all the tine flourishes about the booksellers, whose arts he
flattered himself that he understood, the following extract from his
pocket-book, found after his death, will show the wretched result : —
" Received to May 23, for Middlesex £1 II (5
„ ,, ofB 12."
„ ,, of Fell, for the Consuliad ... 10 (i
,, ,, of Mr. Hamilton, for Candidus and
Foreiun Journal 2
„ ,, of Jlr. Fell 10 (i
' ,, ,, of Middlesex Journal .... 086
„ ,, of Mr. Hamilton, fov 10 son j;s 10 (i
'£4 1.5~n
" In another part of this little book," says his biographer, " shortly
before his death, he had inserted a memoi'andum, intimating that,
the sum of eleven pounds was duo to him from the London pub-
lishers. It was a cruel fate to be compelled to turn literary drudge,
with four-and-twcnty shillings a month for wages, — and more cruel
still, to be doomed to sufler all the pains of hunger because those
wages were not paid !"
Such was the hfe of Chatterton. His fate is too well known : and
so little sensation did the awful death of this
" Marvellous boy,
The sleepless soul, who perished in hia pride,"
ITS CHATTERTON'.
dccasiou, that it was loug before liis friends heard anything of liuii.
He was buried without ceremony umongd paupers in Shoe-lane; hi.s
identity could with difficulty be established when the fact was
known.
In all the annals of literature thei'e is nothing resembling the
history of this boy-poet; he stands alone. Never did any other
youth of the same years, even under the most favourable circum-
stances, produce works of the same high order ; and never was child
of genius treated by his country with such unfeeling contempt,
with such an iron and unrelenting hai'shness of neglect. The fate
of Francis Hilary Gilbert, a French writer, has been compared to
that of Chatterfcon ; but, besides that Gilbert was a man of forty-
three, and had no claims to the genius of Chatterton, being a writer
on veterinary medicine and rural economy, he destroyed himself
because the government, which had sent him to Spain, neglected to
send him his remittances, — not from neglect of a whole nation.
Except in the mere facts of destitution and suicide, there is little
resemblance in the characters, claims, or fates of the two men.
Ohatterton's death has furnished a tragedy to the French stage from
the pen of Alfred de Vigny.
The haunts of Chatterton lie within a narrow space. He was
not one of those whom fate or fortune allows to traverse many
lauds ; Bristol and London were his only places of residence. In
London, little can now be known of his haunts : that he frequented
Vauxhall and Marylebone gardens ; resorted to the Chapter coffee-
house ; that he lived nine weeks at Mr. Walmsley's, a plasterer, in
Shoreditch ; and then removed to Mrs. Angel's, dressmaker. No. 4,
Brook-street, Holborn, comprises nearly the totality of his homes
and haunts in London. Where Mr. Walmsley's house was cannot
now be ascertained ; the Chapter coffee-house still retains its old
situation, but has long ceased to be the resort " of all the literary
characters" of London ; Vauxhall is in its deserted old age, and
Marylebone gardens are, like many other gardens of Chatterton's
time, now overrun, not with weeds, but houses. No. 4, Brook-
street, Holborn, would be an interesti'ag number if it remained—
but, as if everything connected with the history of this ill-fated
youth, except his fame, should be condemiied to the most singular
iatality, there is no No. 4 — it is swallowed up by an enormous fur-
niture warehouse, Charles Meeking's, now fronting into Holborn,
and occupying what used to be numbers one, two, three, and four of
Brook-street. Thus, the whole of the interior of these houses has
been cleared away, and they have been converted into one long show-
shop below, and as long manufacturing shops above. In this form
they have been for the last eight-and-twenty years ; and previous to
that time, I am told, were occupied by an equally extensive iron-
mongery concern. Thus, all memory of the i^articular spot which
was the room of Chatterton, and where he committed the suicide,
is rooted out. AVhat is still more strange, the very same fate has
attended his place of sepulture. He was buried amongst the paupers
in Shoe-lane ; so little was known or cared about him and his fate,
CHATXERTOX. 179
that it was some time, as stated, before his frieuds learned the sad
story ; in the meantime, the exact site of his grave was well-nigh
become unknown. It appears, however, from inquiries which I have
made, that the spot was recognised ; and when the public became
at length aware of the genius that had been suffered to perish in
despair, a headstone was erected by subscription amongst some
admirers of his productions. With the rapid revolutions of pro-
perty which now take place, especially in the metropolis and other
large cities ; with new plans and improvements, which in their
progress seem to spare nothing of the past, however sacred, wo
have already seen, in the course of these volumes, how many traces
of the resoi'ts and dwellings of our poets have vanished from
amongst us. The very resting-place of Chatterton could not escape
the ungenial character of his fate. London, which seemed to refuse
to know him when alive, refused a quiet repose to his ashes. To lie
amongst the paupers of Shoe-lane was, one would have thought,
a sufdciently abject lot for so proud and soaring a nature ; but
fortune had still another spite in reserve for his remains ! The
burial-ground in Shoe-lane, one of those enclosures of the dead
which a dignitary of the Church has asserted to be guarded and
guaranteed against all violence and change by the ceremony of con-
secration, was sold to form Farriugdon-market ; and tombs and
memorials of the deceased disappeared to make way for the shambles
and cabbage-stalls of the living. Was there no lover of literature,
no venerator of genius, to take the alarm ; to step in and see that
the bones and the headstone of Chatterton were removed to the
graveyard which still is attached to St. Andrew's church ? It appears
not. .Neglected in death as in life, the headstone was pulled up, the
bones of the poet were left to share the fate of those of his pauper
•comrades, and it is now most probable that they are scattered —
Heaven knows where ! for I am assured, on good authority, that
liouses are now built on the spot where this unfortunate youth lay.
If houses are built, most likely cellars were dug to those houses ;
and then the bones of Chatterton — where are they ? Echo may
answer — where ?
Mr. Pryce, in his " Memorials of the Canynges' Family," gives a
letter, dated January, 1853, from Joseph Cottle to Sholto Vere Hare,
in which he states that, forty years befoi'e, Mr. George Cumberland,
a descendant of Bishop Cumberland, and a highly respectable man
of literary tastes, informed him that Mrs. Edkins, so frequently
mentioned in Chatterton's life, assured him, that so soon as Mrs.
Chatterton heard of her son having destroyed himself, she wrote to
Chatterton's uncle, a carpenter in London, " urging him to send
down his body in a coflBn or box. The box was, accordingly, sent
down to Bristol ; and when," said Mrs. Edkins, " I called on my
friend Mrs. Chatterton to condole with her, she, as a great secret,
took me upstairs and showed me the box ; and, removing the lid,
I saw the poor boy, while his mother sobbed in silence. She told
me she should have him taken out in the middle of the night, and
bury him in RedcIifTe churchyard. Afterwards, when I saw her, she
i80 CHATTERTON.
.said she Lad managed it very well, so that iioue but the sextou aud
his assistant knew anything about it. This secrecy was necessary,
or he could not have been buried in consecrated ground." — Memorialx
uf the Campigcs" Famib/, p. 293.
Mr. Cottle infers that the poet was buried in " the family grave,"
though it is not so asserted in this passage. Can this very circum-
stantial story be true, and yet have continued unknown so many
years? Chatterton has been now dead eighty-six years. It is a
question of curious interest to the public; and a "pick-axe and
a spade " would decide, in a single hour, whether he really ever was
buried in his father's grave.
Let us now quit the desecrated scene of the jjoet's interment, and,
returning to Bristol, seek that of his birth — we shall seek it equally
in vam ! The house of his birth, and the last narrow house of his
lemains, are alike swept away from the earth ! Chatterton was born
on Eedcliffe-hill, in a back-couit behind the row of houses facing the
north-west side of St. Mary's churchyard ; the row of houses and its
back-courts have all been pulled down and rebuilt. The house; in
which Chatterton was born was behind a shop nearly opposite the
uorth-west corner of the church ; and the monument to the young
poet, erected by subscription in 1840, was })laced in a line between
this house and the north porch of the church in which he professed
to have found the Eowley MSS.
This monument was a gothic erection, much resembling an ancient
cross, and on the top stood Chatterton, in the dress of Colston's
school, and with an unfolded roll of parchment in his hand. It was
erected from the design of ^Ir. Frijip, Avhich superseded the one
planned by John Britton, the antiquary, who, so much to his honour,
long zealously exerted himself to rescue Chatterton's memory from
apparent neglect in his native city. The man who could gaze on this
monument ; could contemplate the boyish figure and face of the
juvenile poet ; could glance from the quarter where he was born in
poverty, to that old porch, where he planned the scheme of his
fame ; and could call to mind what he was, and what he did, without
the profoundest sensations of wonder and regret, might safely pass
through life without fear of an astonishment. How much, then,
would that feeling of sympathy and regret have been augmented,
had the monument simply borne the very words written by the
inspired boy himself for his supposed tomb, and inserted in his
'■' will ! "
" To THE Memory op
THOMAS CHATT.EllTOX.
Reader,, judsc not : if thou art a Christian— believe that lie shall
1)0 judged by a Superior Pov.er ; — to that Power alone is he now
answerable."
The fate of Chatterton still seems to pursue his memory. This
Mionument, soon after the publication of the first edition of this
work, was pulled down, it is said, because it impeded, or was in
danger from the operations of the restoration of the church. It was
feaid at the time that it was to be re-erected in another part of the
CHATTERTOX. 181
chuvchyarJ, but this has never yet been done. The stones of the
monument he in the crypt of the church, and the statue is carefully
enclosed in a box, locked and nailed down.
From the inquiries of a friend on the sj)ot, made at my request,
and who saw both the architect for the restoration, the church-
wardens, and the persons who have the keeping of the crypt, it
appears that nothing whatever is determined on as to the re-erection.
One party believed that it would be re-erected if there were funds,
which he stated there were not ; another thought the mojiument
of a suicide would not be permitted to stand on consecrated ground.
The only thing certain apjaeared that it was apparently as fur from
re-erection as on the day when it was pulled down.
What are the subscribers about ? They who purchased this
monument should see that it is erected somewhere. Is there no
other public spot in Bristol where could stand the monument of the
greatest man it ever produced ? Why not the com-t of Colston's
school? The statue of Lord Byron, repelled from the portal of
Westminster Abbey, has found a fitting locale in his university at
Cambridge, — why should not that of the Colston boy stand in front
of Colston's school 1 If allowed to stand there till it produce;
another such boy, we may jsromise it a term of occupation probably
without limit. At aU events, Bristol owes a duty to the memory of
Chatterton, and to itself, which it ought not to neglect.
One of the spots in Bristol which we should visit with the in-
tensest interest connected with the history of Chatterton, would be
the office of Lambert the attorney, where he wrote the finest of his
poems attributed to Rowley. The first office of this person was on
St. John's steps, but he left this during Chatterton's abode with
him ; and, ceasing to be an office, it does not now seem to be exactly
known in which house it was. From this place he removed to the
house occupied, at the time of my visit, by Mr. Short, silversmith,
in Cornhill, opposite to the Exchange ; and here Chatterton jwo-
bably wrote the greater portion of Eowley's poems. Another
favourite haunt of Chatterton's, Redcliffe meadow, is now no longer
a meadow, but is built all over ; so rapidly has about eighty years
eradicated the footsteps of the poet in his native place. There are
two objects, however, which from their public character remain, anc'
are likely to remain, unchanged, and around which the recollectioui.
of Chatterton and his singular history will for ever vividly chng—
these are, Colston's school and the church of St. Mary.
The school in Byle-street, where he was sent at five years of age,
and which his father had taught, I believe no longer exists. The
school on St. Augustine's Back exists, and is likely to do so. It is
one of those endowments founded by the great merchants of Eng-
land, which, if they had been preserved from the harpy and per-
verting fingers of tnistees, would now suffice to educate the whole
;-.ation. Tliis school, founded at a comparatively recent date, and in
the midst of an active city like Bristol, seems t) be well adminis-
"32 CHATTERTOX.
tei'cd. Thurc you find au ample school-room, diniiig-hall, chai)el,
and spacious bed-rooms, all kept in most clean and healthy order ;
a hundred boys, in their long blue full-skirted coats, and scarlet
stockings, exactly as they were in the days of Chatterton. You may
look on them and realize to yourself precisely how Chatterton and
his schoolfellows looked when he was busy there devouring books of
history, poetry, and antiquities, and planning the Burgum pedigree,
and the like. Take any fair boy, of a similar age, let him be one or
the oldest and most attractive, — for, says his biographer, " there was
a stateliness and a manly bearing in Chatterton beyond what might
have been expected from his years." " He had a proud air," says
Mrs. Edkins, and, according to the general evidence, he was as
remarkable for the prematurity of his person, as he was for that of
his intellect and imagination. His mien and manner were exceed-
ingly prepossessing ; his eyes were grey, but piercingly brilliant;
and when he was animated in conversation, or excited by any passing
event, the fire flashed and rolled in the lower part of the orbs in
ji wonderful and almost fearful way. Mr. Catcott characterised
Chatterton's eye " as a kind of hawk's eye, and thought we could
)ee his soul through it." As with Byron, '' one eye was more re-
markable than the other ; and its lightning-like flashes had some-
thing about them supernaturally grand." Take some fine, clever-
looking lad, then, from the crowd, and you will find such, and you
will feel the strangest astonishment in imagining such a boy-
appearing before the grave citizen Burgum, with his pedigree, and
within a few years afterwards, acting so dai'ing and yet so glorious
a part before the whole world.
To the admirers of genius, and the sympathizers with the strange
fate of Chatterton, a visit to this school must always be a peculiar
gratification. I found all so airy, fresh, and cheerful ; there was such
a spirit of order evinced even in the careful rolling up of their
Sunday suits, with their broad silver-plated belt clasps, each arranged
in its proper place, on shelves in the clothes-room, under eveiw
boy's own number, and yet without that order degenerating into
severity, but the contrary, — that I could not hv.lp feeUng the grand
beneficence of those wealthy merchants who, like Edward Colston,
make their riches do their generous will for ever ; who become
thereby the actual fiithers of their native cities to all generations ;
who roll, in every year of the world's progress, some huge stone of
anxiety from the hearts of jjoor widows ; who clear the way before
the unfriended but active and worthy lad; who put forth their
invisible hands from the heaven of their rest, and become the
genuine guardian angels of the orphan race for ever and ever ;
raising from those who would otherwise have been outcasts and
ignorant labourers, aspiring and useful men, tradesmen of substance,
merchants, the true enrichers of their country, and fathers of happy
families. How glorious is such a lot ! how noble is such an appro-
priation of wealth ! how enviable is such a fame ! And amongst
such men there were few mere truly admirable than Edward Colston.
He was worthy to have been lifted by Chatterton to the side of the
CHATTERTON'. 183
Biagaificent Canynge, and one cannot help wondering that he says
40 httle about this great benefactor of his city.
Edward Colston was not merely the founder of this school for the
clothing, maintaining, and apprenticing of one hundred boys, at a
charge of about 40,000/., but he also founded another school in
Temple-street, to clothe and maintain fortj^ boys, at a cost of 3,000/. ;
and he left 8,500/. for an almshouse for twelve men and twelve
women, with Gs. per week to the chief brother, and 3,?. per week to
the rest, with coals, &c. ; 600/. for the maintenance of six sailors in
the Merchants' Almshouse ; 1,500/. to clothe, maintain, instruct, and
apprentice six l)oys ; 200/. to the Mint Workhouse ; 500/. to rebuild
the Boys' Hospital ; 200/. to put out poor children ; 1,200/. to be given
in 100/. a-year, for twelve years, to apprentice boys fi-om his school,
at the rate of 10/. each; 1,230/. to beautify different churches in the
city ; 2,.o00/. to St. Bartholomew's Hospital in London ; and 2^000/.
to Christchurch School in London ; 500/. to St. Thomas's Hospital ;
500/. to Bethlehem Hospital ; 200/. to New Workhouse in Bishopsgate
AVithout ; 300/. to the Society for Propagating the Gospel ; 900/. for
educating and clothing twelve poor boys and twelve girls, at 45/.
yearly, at Mortlake, in Surrey ; to build and endow an almshouse at
Sheen, in Surrey, sum not stated ; 6,000/. to augment poor livings ;
besides various other sums for charitable purposes. All this pro-
perty did this noble man thus bestow on the needs of his poorer
brethren, without forgetting, as is often the case on great occasions,
those of his own blood relatives, to whom he bequeathed the princely
sura of 100,000/. But, like an able and wise merchant, he did
not merely bequeathe these munificent funds, — he " performed all
these charitable works in his lifetime ; invested revenues for their
support in trustees' hands ; lived to see the trusts justly executed^
as they are at this day ; and saw with his own eyes the good effects
of all his establishments." Great, too, as were these bequests, they
were not the result of hoarding during a long penurious life, as is
often the case, to leave a boastful name at his death ; his whole life
was like the latter end of it. True, he did not marry ; and when
urged to it, used to reply with a sort of pleasantness, " Every help-
less widow is my wife, and her distressed orphans my children." "He
was a most successful merchant," says Barrett, in his History of
Bristol, "and never insured a ship, and never lost one. He lived
first in Small-street, Bristol, but having so much business in London,
and being chosen to represent the city, he removed thither ; and
afterwards lived, as he advanced in years, a very retired life, at
Mortlake, in Surrey. His daily existence was one of the noblca'l; acts
of Christian benevolence ; and his private donations were not lesi
than his public. He sent at one time 3,000/. to relievo and frea
debtors in Ludgate, by a private hand ; freed yearly those confined
for small debts in Whitechapel prison and the Marshalsea ; sent 1,000/.
to relieve distress in Whitechapel ; twice a-week distributed beef
and broth to all the poor around liiin ; and were any sailor suffering
or cast away, in his emjiloy, his family afterwards found a sure
usvlurn in liim."' ^
18i CSATTERTON.
Why did not Chatterton, who by the splendid provision of this
man recoived his education and advance into life, resound the praises
of Edward Colston as loudly as he did those of William Canynge ?
There is no doubt that it was because time had not sufficiently
clothed with its poetic hues the latter merchant, as it had the
former. Canynge, too, as the builder of EedcliiFe church, was to
him an object of profound admiration. This church is the most
lively monument of the memory of Chatterton. His mother is said
to have lived on Redclifie-hill, nearly opposite to the upper gate of
this church, at the corner of Colston's parade ; this must have been
when he was apprentice at Lambert's, and also probably before, while
he was at Colston's school. The houses standing there now, how-
ever, are too large and good for a woman in her circumstances to
have occupied ; and it is, therefore, jirobablc that this abode of his,
too, must have been pulled down. We turn, then, to the church
itself, as the sole building of his resort, next to Colston's school,
which remains as he used to see it. A noble and spacious church it
is, as we have stated, of the lightest and most beautiful architecture.
The graceful lofty columns and pointed arches of its aisles ; the
richly groined roof ; and the fine extent of the view from east to
west, being no less than 197 feet, and the height of the middle cross
aisle, 54 feet, with a proportionate breadth from north to south, fills
you, on entering, v>'ith the highest admiration and pleasure. What
does not a little surprise you, is to find in the church, where the
great painted altar-piece used to hang, now as large a painting of the
Ascension, with two side-pieces ; one representing the stone being
rolled away from the sepulchre of our Saviour, and the other, the
three Marys come to visit the empty tomb ; and those by no other
artist than — Hogarth ! The curiosity of such a fact makes these
paintings a matter of intense interest ; and if we cannot place them
on a par with such things from the hands of the old masters, we
must allow that they are full of talent, and wonderful for a man
whose ordinary walk was extremely different.
Another object of interest is the tomb of Admiral Penn, the father
of the founder of Pennsylvania, which is in the pavement of the
.south aisle, with this inscription : — " Here lieth the body of Sir
William Penn, who departed this life the 16th of September, 1G74.
Dum clavum teneam." On a pillar near hang two or three decayed
banners, a black cuirass and helmet, gauntlets and sword, with his
escutcheon and motto. Not being aware that Admiral Penn lay buried
here, I cannot describe the singular feeling which the sight of these
remnants of aristocratic pageantry, suspended above the tomb of the
father of the great quaker ofPennsylvania, gave me ; suspended, too,
in one of the proudest temples of that proud national church, the
downfal of which this very man predicted on his death-bed : — " Son
William," said he, " if you and your friends continue faithful to that
which has been made known to you, you will make an end of priests
and priestc»'aft to the end of the world."
In the south transept stand conspicuously the tomb and effigies of
William Canynge. These arc striking objects in connexion with the
CEATTERTON. 1S5
history of Oliatterton. Here you behold the very forms which, from
the early dawn of his life, filled the mind of the poet-child with the
deepest sense of admiration. It was here, before these recumbent
figures, that he used to be found sitting in profound thought ; and
when the reading of the wealth, the princely merchant state, and
the munificent deeds of William Canynge, had arrayed the inanimate
stone with the hues of long-past life and the halo of solemn and
lieautiful deeds, — the raising of this fair church the most beautiful of
all, — then was it these which became the germ of the great Eowley
fable. Canynge, the ancient and magnificent, now the merchant and
now the shaven priest and dean, arose once more at the touch of the
inspired boy, and played his part, not as a citizen of Bristol, but as
a citizen of the world. These effigies are singular in themselves.
First, you have William Canynge and Joan his wife, lying on an
altar-tomb, in full proportion, under a canopy handsomely carved in
freestone ; then, not far ofi", you have Canynge again carved in ala-
baster, lying along in his priest's robes as dean of Westbury, with
hands lifted up as in devotion, and a large book under his head. It
is rare, and almost unique, to have two monuments of the same
person side by side, and that in two different characters ; yet still,
little would these have attracted notice, more than a thousand other
goodly tombs in our churches, had they not chanced to attract the
attention of this little charity-boy, the descendant of the sextons of
the church.
Last, but far most striking of all the haunts of Chatterton, is that
mimiment-room over the north porch. When you ascend the dark
and winding stair, and enter this dim and stony hexagon apartment,
and see still standing on its floor the seven very chests of the Rowley
story, old and mouldering, their hds, some of them circular as if
hewn out of solid trees, broken ofi', and all dirty and worm-eaten, the
reality of the strange facts connected with them comes thrillingly
upon you. You seem then and there only first and fully to feel how
actual and how sad is the story of Thomas Chatterton ; that here,
indeed, began his wondrous scheme of fame : hence it spread and
stood forth as a brilliant mystery for a moment ; hence the proud
boy gloried in its sudden blaze, as in that of a recognising glory from
heaven ; and then
" Black (Ios]::iir,
The shadow of a starless ni};!il, Mas throun
Over the earth, in v.hich he inovec'. a'.oiio." — Shelley,
GIIAY. AT STOKK-POCrS.
The lilo of Thomas Gray, the author of the Elegy in a Couiitvy
Churchyard, was passed in London, in Cambridge, and at Stoke-
Pogis, in Buckinghamshii'e, except what he spent in travelling, which
was considerable. Gray was born in Cornhill, November 2G, 1716.
His parents were reputable citizens of London. His grandfather was
a considerable merchant, but his father, ISIr. Philip Gray, ]\Iason says,
tliough he also followed business, was of an indolent and reserved
temper ; and therefore rather diminished than increased his paternal
fortune. He had many children, of whom Thomas was the fifth ; all
except him died in their infancy. The business of Gray's father was,
like that of Milton's, a money-scrivener. But, unlike Milton's father
Philip Gray was, according to Mason, not only reserved and indolent,
but of a morose, unsocial, and obstinate temper. His indolence led
liim to neglect the business of his profession ; his obstinacy, to build
a country house at Wanstead, without acquainting his wife or son of
the design, to which he knew they would bo very avei'se, till it was
executed. This turned out a loss of two thousand pounds to the
family ; and the character of the father, which is supposed to have
been stamped by bodily ailments, was the occasion of Gray, though
an only child, being left with a very narrow patrimony. His mother,
to provide for her family, entered into business independent of her
husband, with her sister, Miss Antrobus. The two ladies kept a kind
of Lidia warehouse in Cornhill. As clever ladies in business generally
do, they succeeded so well, that, on Mr. Gray'.s death, which happened
about the time of the young poet's return from his first trip to the
Continent, they retired, and went to join housekeeping with their
third sister, Mrs. Pogers, the widow of a gentleman of that name,
who had formerly been in the law, and had retired to Burnham, in
Buckinghamshire ; where we find Gray, on one occasion, describing,
in a letter to Walpole, the uncle and the place thus. " The descrip-
tion of a road that your coachwheels have so often honoured, it is
needless to give to you ; suffice it that I arrived safe at my uncle's,
who is a great hunter in imagination. Hi.s dogs take up every chair
in the house, so I am forced to stand up at this present writing :
and though the gout forbids him galloping after them in the field,
GRAY. 18 f
yet lie contirmcs still to regale his cars and nose with their comfort-
able noise and stink. He holds me mighty cheap, I perceive, for
walking when I should ride, and reading when I should hunt. My
comfort amid all this is, that I have at the distance of half-a-mile,
through a green lane, a forest — the vulgar call it a common — all my
own, at least as good as so, for I spy no human thing in it but my-
self. It is a little chaos of mountains and precipices ; mountains, it
is true, that do not ascend much above the clouds, nor are the decli-
vities quite so amazing as Dover cliff; but just such hills as people
who love their necks as well as I do may venture to climb, and crags
that give the eye as much pleasure as if they were more dangerous.
Both vale and hill are covered with most venerable beeches, and other
very reverend vegetables, that, like most other ancient people, are
always dreaming out their old stories to the winds : —
• And as they bow, their hoary tops relate,
In murmuring sounds, the dark decrees of Fate ;
While visions, as poetic eyes avow,
Cling to each leaf and swarm on every bough.'
At the foot of one of these squats me I, il penscroso, and there grow
to the tnuik for a whole morning. The timorous hare and sportive
.squirrel gambol around me like Adam in Paradise, before he had
Eve ; but I think he did not use to read Virgil, as I commonly do
there. In this situation I often converse with my Horace, aloud too,
that is, talk to j'ou, but I do not remember that I ever heard you
answer me. I beg pardon for taking all the conversation to myself,
but it is entirely your own fault. We have old Mr. Southern at
a gentleman's house a little way oft", who comes often to see us. He is
now seventy-seven years old, and has almost wholly lost his memory ;
but is as agi-eeable as an old man can be, at least I persuade myself
so when I look at him, and think of Isabella and Oronoko.'"
By this agreeable extract, however, we have outstepijed the pro-
gress of Gray's life. He was educated at Eton, under the care of
Mr. Antrobus, his mother's brother, then assistant to Dr. Geoi'gc ;
and, when he left school, in 1734, entered a pensioner at Peterhouso
in Cambridge. It was intended that he should foUow the profession
of the law, for which his uncle's practice and connexions seemed to
open a brilliant way. He therefore lived on at college so long as his
attendance on the lectures was required, but took no degree. His
uncle's death put an end to his prospects of that kind, and he aban-
doned the idea of the legal profe.ssion. When he had been at Cam-
bridge about five year.s, he agi-eed to make a tour on the Continent
with Horace Walpole ; and they proceeded together through France
to Italy, where they quarrelled and parted, taking different ways.
On his return, he again went to Cambridge, took the degree of
Bachelor of Civil Law, and continued there, without liking the place
or its inhabitants, as we are informed by botn Johnson and Mason,
or professing to like them. His pleasure lay in wading through huge
libraries, out of wliicli, on a vast number of subjects, he extracted a
vast amount of information. Such were Gray's assiduous study and
research, that the following character of him by a contemporary, the
II
188 ORAT.
Rev. Mr. Toinple, rector of St. Gluvias, in Cornwall, written a fe\1
months after his death, can scarcely bo termed overdrawn :— "Per
liaps he was the most learned man in Euro^je. He was equally
iiequainted with the elegant and profound parts of science, antl that
not superlicially, but thoroughly. He knew every branch of history,
both natural and civil ; had read all the original histories of Eng-
land, France, and Italy ; and was a great antiquarian. Criticism,
metaphysics, morals, politics, made a principal part of his plan of
titudy. Voyages and travels of all sorts were his favourite amuse-
ment ; and' he had a fine taste in painting, prints, architecture, and
gardening."
lie was, in fact, one of the first to open up the Scandinavian
mythology, antiquities, and legendary literature, still so little under-
stood in this country, and on which our best literary historians dis-
play so marvellous an ignorance ; Hallam, amongst others, describing
the " Niebelungen Lied " as an original German poem, not aware that
the nxagnilicent original of that poem exists in the Icelandic. Gray
was also one of the very first, if not the very first person, who began
to trace out and distinguish the diiferent orders of Anglo-Gothic
architecture, by attention to the date of its creation. These were
the studies, enough to occupy a life, which kept him close at Cam-
bridge in his rooms for years, and once induced him to take lodgings
for about three years near the British Museum, where he diligently
copied from the Ilarleiau and other manuscripts. The death of his
most intimate friend, Mr. "West, the son of the Chancellor of Ireland,
soon after his return from the Continent, tended only the more to fix
this habit of retirement and study. He lived on at Peterhouse till
1758, whcu a curious incident drove him forth. Two or three young
men of fortune, who lived in the same staircase, had for some time
intentionally distm'bed him with their riots, and carried their ill-
behaviour so far as frequently to awaken him at midnight. After
having borne their insults longer than might reasonably have been
expected, even from a man of less warmth of temper, Mr. Gray com-
plained to the governing part of the society ; and not thinking his
remousti'ance sufficiently attended to, quitted the college. He took
lip his residence at Pembroke-hall, where he continued to reside till
the day of his death, which occurred here in the fifty-fifth year of
his age, July 30, 1771, being seized with gout in the stomach while
lit dinner in the college-hall.
He had for the last three j'ears been appointed Professor of
1 listory in this college ; but such was his indolence, fastidiousness,
or aversion to so public a duty, that, to use the words of Johnson,
" ho was always designing lectures, but never reading them ; uneasy
at his neglect of duty, and appeasing his imeasiness with designs of
reformation, and with a resolution which he believed himself to have
made, of resigning the office if he found himself unable to discharge
it." He continued thus to vacillate, and held on till his death. A
eircumstance which attached him more to Pembroke college was,
that Mason was elected a Fellow of ib in 1747; tliey grew warn.)
friends, and Mason afterwards became his biographer.
ORAY. I SO
Such was the general outline of Gray's life. In reading it we iind
the most interesting features those which he descril^es so well in his
letters, his travels, and his occasional retreats at Stoke-Pogi«. lie
made a tour into the north of England, to the lakes, and into Scot-
land ; at another time through Worcester, Hereford, JMonmouth, and
parts of the neighbouring counties ; and all his details of such
rambles, as they are given with an evident zest, are full of life and
interest. In his prose, Gray gets out of the stiff and stilted formality
of much of his poetry. He forgets his learning and his classical
notions, and is at once easy, amiable, witty, and jocose. There was
a degree of effeminacy about him, which you see in his portraits,
and which you do not the less detect in his poetry ; but his prose
gives you a far more attractive idea of him, such as he must have been
in the familiar circle of his friends. On tm-ning to Gray's account
of those places which 1 have visited in vaiious parts of the kingdom,
I have always found him seizing on their real features, and impressed
with their true spirit.
It is at Stoke-Pogis that we seek the most attractive vestiges of
(iray. Here he used to spend his vacations, not only when a youth
at Eton, but during the whole of his future life, Avhile his mother
and his aunts lived. Here it was that his Ode on a Distant Prospect
of Eton College, his celebrated Elegy written in a Country Church-
yard, and his Long Story, were not only written, but were mingled
with the cii'cumstances and all the tenderest feelings of his own life.
His mother and aunts lived at an old-fashioned house in a very
retired spot at Stoke, called West End. This house stood in a hollow,
much screened by trees. A small stream ran through the garden,
und it is said that Gray, when here, iised to employ himself much in
this garden, and that many of the trees stiU remaining are of his
planting. On one side of the house extended an \ipland field, which
was planted round so as to give a charming, retired walk ; and at the
•oummit of the field was raised an artificial mound, upon which was
built a sort of arcade or summer-house, which gave full prospect of
\Vindsor and Eton. Here Gray delighted to sit. Here he was accus-
tomed to read and write much ; and it is just the place to inspire
tiie Ode on Eton College, which lay in the midst of its fine landscape,
beautifully in view. The old house inhabited by Gray and his
mother, at the time of my visit, had just been pulled down, and
replaced by an Elizabethan mansion by the present proprietor, Mr.
Penn, of Stoke Park, just by. The garden, of course, had shared in
the change, and now stood gay with its fountain and its modern
greenhouse, and, excepting for some tine trees, no longer remindeil
you of Gray. Tlie woodland walk still remained round the atljoining
field, and the summer-house on its summit, though much cracke(l
by time, and only held together by iron cramps. The trees were so
lofty as completely to obstruct the view, and shut out both Eton
•md Windsor.
It was at this house, now destroyed, that the two ladies from the
Park made their memorable visit, which gave occasion to the Long
vitory. The fact^ were these. Gray had finished his Elegy, and liad
100 GKAY.
gent it in iiiamiscript to Horace VValpole, by whom it was shown
about with grout a[)plaiisc. Amongst the rest of the fashionable
world to whom it was thus communicated, Lady Cobham, who lived
at the Mansion-house at Stoke-Pogis, had read and admired it
Wishing to make the acquaintance of the author, and hearing that
he was so near her, her relatives, Miss Speed and LadySchaub, then
at her house, luidertook to bring this about by making him the first
y'lait. lie happened to be from home when the ladies arrived at his
aunts' solitary mansion ; and when he returned, was surprised to
find, written on one of his i^apers in the patloTir where he usually
i-cad, the following note : — "Lady Schaub's compliments toMr. (Jray.
She is sorry not to have found him at home, to tell him that Lady
Brown is very well." This necessarily obliged hira to return the
visit, and soon after induced him to compose a ludicrous account of
lliis little adventure for tlie amusement of the ladies in question.
This was a nicrGjeu (Vesirnt, and, extravagant as some parts of it are,
is certainly clever. Gray regarded it but as a thing for the occasion,
and never included it in his published poems. But Mason tells us
that when it appeared, though onlj' in manuscript, it was handed
about, and the most various opinions pronounced on it. By some it
was thought a masterpiece of original humour, by others a wild and
fantastic farrago. It in truth much more resembles his prose, and
])roves that, if he had not always had the fear of the critics before
his eyes, he would have written with far more freedom and life than
lie often did. "We may take a few stanzas, as connected with our
further subject.
" In Britain's ible, no matter where,
An ancient pile of building stands :
Tlie Iliintingdons and Hattons tliero
Employed the power of fairy hands
To raise "tlie ceiling's fretted height,
Each panel in acliievements clotliing,
llicli windows that exclude the light,
And passages that lead to nothing.
Full oft within the spacious walls.
When he had fifty winters o'er him.
My grave Lord Keeper led the brawls ;
The seal and maces danced befoi'j him.
His bushy heard, and shoe-strings green.
His high-crowned hat, and sntin doublet.
Moved the stout heart of England's Uueen,
Though Pope and Sjianiard could not trouble it.
« * » •
A house there is, and that's enough,
I'rom whence one fatal mornmg issues
A brace of warriors, not in bulf.
But rustling in their silks and tissues.
The first came ciip-u-pie from France,
Her conquering de>tiny fulfilling,
Whom meaner beauties eye askance,
And vainly ape her art of killing.
The other Amazon, kind Heaven
Had armed with spirit, wit, and satire ;
JJnt f'obhani had the polish given.
And tipped her arrows with gO(jd-nalure.
To celebrate her eyes, her air —
Coarse panegyrics would but tease her;
Melissa is her nom dc guerre ;
Altts! who would not wish to please heil
GKAT. 191
Witli bonnet blue, and capuchhie,
And aprons long, they liid their armour,
And veiled their weapons bright and keen,
In pity to the country farmer,
lame, in tlie sliape of Mr. P— t —
Hy this time all the parisli know it —
Had told that thereabouts there lurked
A wicked imp they call a poe' ;
Who prowled the country, far and near,
Bewitched the children of the peasants,
Dried up the cows, and lamed the deer,
And sucked the eggs, and killed the pheasants.
My lady heard their joint petition.
Swore, by her coronet and ermine.
She'd issue out her high commission,
To rid the manor of such vermin.
The heroines undertook the task.
Through lanes unknown, o'er stiles they ventured,
Rapped at the door, nor stayed to ask,
15ut bounce into the parlour entered.
The trembling family they daunt,
They flirt, they sing, they laugh, they tattle.
Rummage his mother, pinch his aunt,
And upstairs in a whirlwind rattle," etc.
Tho ancient pile here mentioned was tlie Mauor-liou.se, Stoke
Pai'k, which was then in the possession of Viscountess Cobham.
This place and the manor had been in seme remarkable hands. • Tho
manor was so ctilled from the Pogies, the ancient lords of that nann-.
The heiress of this family, in the reign of Edward the Third, married
l^ord Molines, who shortly afterwards procured a licence from the
king to convert the Manor-house into a castle. From hira it
descended to the Lords Hungerford, and from them to the Hastings,
Earls of Huntingdon, and was afterwards the residence of Lord
Chancellor Hatton. Sir Christopher Hatton had won his promotion
with Queen Elizabeth through his graceful person and fine dancing,
and is very picturesquely described by Gray, with "his shoe-strings
green, high-crowned hat, and satin doublet," leading off the brawls,
a sort of figure-dance then in vogue, before the queen. Sir Edward
Coke, having married an heiress of the Huntingdon family, became
the next possessor ; and here, in the year 1601, he was honoured
with a visit from Elizabeth, whom he entertained in a very sump-
tuous style. After the death of the Viscountess Cobham, the estate
was purchased by Mr. William Ponn, chief proprietor of Pennsylvania,
a descendant of the celebrated William Penn, the founder of that
State.
This old manor-house has since been swept away, as Gray's resi-
dence is also, and a large modern mansion now occupies its place.
This was built from a design by Wyatt, in 1789, and has since been
altered and enlarged. It is built chiefly of brick, and covered with
stucco, and consists of a large square centre, with two wings. The
north, or entrance front, is ornamented with a colonnade, consisting
of ten Doric columns, and approached by a flight of steps leading to
the Marble Hall. The south front, 196 feet long, is also adorned
with a colonnade, consisting of twelve fluted columns of tho okl
Doric order. This is surrounded by a projecting portico of foui
1^)2 GRAY.
Ionic columns, .sustaining an ornamental pediment ; and again on
tlic top of tlie house by a dome.
Stoke Park, thus interesting both on account of tliese older asso-
ciations, and of Penn and Gray, is about a couple of miles from
Slough. The country is flat, but its monotony is broken up by the
noble character and disposition of its woods. Near the house is a
fine expanse of water, across which the eye falls on fine views, par-
ticularly to the south, of Windsor Castle, Cooper's Hill, and the
Forest Woods. About three hundred yards from the nortii front of
the house stands a colunm, sixty-eight feet high, l)eariug on the top
a colossal statue of Sir Edward Coke, by Rosa. The woods of the
park shut out the view of West End House, Gray's occasional resi-
dence, but the space is open from the mansion across the park, so as
to take in the view both of the church and of a monument erected
by the late JNIr. Penn to Gray. Alighting from the carriage at a
lodge, I entered the park just at the monument. Thi.s is composed
of fine freestone, and consists of a large sarcophagus, supported on
a square pedestal, with inscriptions on each side. Three of them
are selected from the Ode to Eton College and the Elegy. They
are —
" IFaid by yon wood, now smiling as in .^corn,
.Mntlering his wayward fancies lie would rove;
Now drooping, woeful, wan, like one forlorn,
Or crazed with care, or crossed in hopeless love.
One morn I missed him on the accustomed hill,
Along the heath, and near his favourite tree ;
Anotlier came : nor yet beside the rill,
Kor up the lawn, uor at the woo<l was he."
The second is from the Ode : —
" Ye distant sjjires ! ye antique towers !
That crown the watery glade,
Where grateful science still adores
Her Henry's holy shr.de ;
And ye, that from the stately brow
Of Windsor's heights the expanse below
Of grove, of lawn, of mead survey,
Whose turf, whose sh.-ide, whose ilowers aii'.oiig
Wanders the hoary Thames along
]Iis silver winding wa}'.
Ah, hapjiy hills ! ah, pleasing shade !
Ah, fields beloved in vain !
AVhere once my carcles? childhood strayed,
A stranger yet to pai.i !
I feel the gales that from ye blow
A momentry bliss bestow."
The third is again from the Elegy : —
" Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree's shade,
Where heaves the turf in many a mouldering heap,
Kach in his narrow cell for ever laid,
'>'j;exude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.
The 'breezy call of incense-breathing moi-n,
The swallow twittering from the straw-built shed,
The cock's shrill clarion, or the echoing liorn,
No mure shall rause tiieni from their liuvlv bed '
GHAT. 1^'J
llie fourth bears this inscription : —
" This ^ronunicnt, in lionmir of
Thomas Gray,
■\Vas erected a.d. 1799,
Among the scenery
Celebrated hy that great Lyric and Elegiac Fciet.
lie died in 1771,
And lies unnoted in the adjoining Cliurch-yard,
Under tlie Tombstone on wliich lie pionsly
And pathetically recorded the interment
Of his Aunt and lamented Jlother."
This monument is enclosed in a neatly kept garden-like enclosure,
with a winding walk approaching from the shade of the neighbouring
trees. To the right, across the park at some little distance, backed
by fine trees, stands the i-ural little church and churchyard, where
firay wrote his Elegy, and where he lies. As you walk on to this,
the mansion closes the distant view between the woods with fine
effect. The church has often been engraved, and is therefore toler-
ably fumihar to the general reader. It consists of two barn-liko
structures, with tall roofs, set side by side, and the tower and finely
tapered spire rising above them at the north-west cornei\ The
church is thickly hung with ivy, where
" The moping owl may to the moon complain
Of such as, wandering near her secret bower,
Molest her ancient, solitary reign."
The structure is as simple and old-fashioned, both without and
within, as any village church can well be. No village, however, is to
be seen. Stoke consists chiefly of scattered houses, and this is now
in the midst of the park. In the churchyard,
" Beneath those'rugged elms, that yew-tree's shade,
Where heaves the turf in many a mouldering heap,
Each in his narrow cell for ever laid.
The rude forefathers of the hanikt sleep."
All this is quite literal ; and the tomb of the poet himself, near
the south-east window, completes the impression of the scene. It
is a plain brick altar tomb, covered with a blue slate slab, and,
besides his own ashes, contains those of his mother and aunt. On
the slab are inscribed the following lines by Gray himself : — " In the
vault beneath are deposited, in hope of a joyful resurrection, the
remains of Mari/ Anlrohus. She died unmarried, Nov : 5, 1749, aged
Bixty-six. In the same pious confidence, beside her friend and sister,
here sleep the remains of Dorothy Gvcnj, widow ; the tender, careful
mother of many children, one of whom alone had the misfortune to
Burvive her. She died March 11, 1753, aged sixty-seven."
No testimony of the interment of Gray in the same tomb was
hiscribed anywhere till Mr. Penn, in 1799, erected the monument
already mentioned, and placed a small slab in the wall, under the
window, opposite to the tomb itself, recording the feet of Gray's
IJl GHiT.
burial there. Tlie whole scene is well worthy of a summer day's
stroll, especially for such as, pent in the metropolis, know how to
enjoy the quiet freshness of the country, and the associations of
poetry and the past. The Great Western llailway now will set such
down in about one hour at Slough, a pleasant walk from Stot;p.
The late Mr. Penn, a gentleman of reiined taste, and a great
reverencer of the memory of Gray, possessed his autographs, which
liave been sold at great prices. It is to be regretted that his house,
too, is now gone ; but the church and the tomb will remain to future
ajrcs.
OLIVER GOLDSMITH.
Of all our poets, there is none who more completely verifiid the
words of Crabbc than Oliver Goldsmith : —
" And never mortal left this world of sin
More like the infant that he entered in."
He was a genuine Irishman, all heart and impulse. Imposed upon,
ill-treated, often made the butt of witlings, and compelled to labour
and live on with that cancer of the heart, constant anxiety to prociu'('
the ordinary means of existence — none of these things could conve? t
the milk of hmaan kindness within him into gall, could teach liini
one lesson of malevolence, or dim the godlike sense of truth and
humanity in his soul. Through a long experience of men and things,
living by shifts, and writing for mere bread, he still remained tin.
same simple, warm-hearted, generous, and unsophisticated creatun
that he was cit the beginning. Improvident he was, out of the ovit
flowing goodness of his natiu-e ; ready, at the iirst ciy of distress, tc
{.'ive away that which he had bitterly toiled for, and which had \>vt-u
;'rud<nngly paid ; but he never made others the victims ( f his iiu-
H 2
IOC GOLDSMITH.
providence. He remained single, and made all that were in suffering
his family, and helped them even when he needed help himself. I
know not whether more to admire the exquisite beauty of his poetry,
the life and virtues of the Vicar of Wakefield, or the gloriously un-
worldly texture of his heart. Thousands of brilliant spirits have
risen, glittered, and died in the field of our literature, having
astonished and wounded their neighbours, as they have gone along
i n their pi'ide, dreaming of an everlasting leputation, who are now
justly forgotten, or are remembered without respect or emotion.
They had intellect unallied to heart, and the cold meteor dazzled in
its descent to earth, and left no blessing behind it. But tlie genial
spirit of Goldsmith, all love and pity in itself, is and will bo for ever
remembered with love and reverence, — the last the very quality that
he received least of in his lifetime. One of the most amiable and
iittractive points of view in which we contemplate Dr. Johnson, is
that of his attachment to Goldsmith and of his acknowledgment of
his genius.
The life of Oliver Goldsmith has been well written by Mr. Prior.
It is almost the only one that I have found, during the researches
iiecessary for this work, which might have rendered unnecessary a
visit to the actual " homes and haunts " of the poet under notice-
It is a most rare circumstance that a biographer possesses the faculty
of landscape-painting, and besides detailing the facts of a person's
life, can make you see the places where that life was passed. Mr.
Prior possesses this faculty in a high degree. He was at the pains to
visit Ireland, and see, with his own eyes, the scenes where Gold-
smith was born, and where he lived ; and the different sojourns of
Goldsmith in that country are so accurately sketched, that they
might have been transferred literally to these pages with advantage,
had not I myself also gone over the same ground.
Goldsmith was of a very respectable family in Ireland, many of
whom had been clergymen, residing principally in the counties of
Roscommon, Westmeath, and Longford. Two of them were deans
of Elphin, another dean of Cloyne. Goldsmith used to boast that,
by the female side, he was remotely descended from Oliver Crom-
well, from whom his Christian name was derived. It seems, however,
more likely, that he owed his name to his mother's father, the Rev.
OUver Jones, master of the diocesan school at Elphin. The poet's
own father, Charles Goldsmith, was a poor curate at the time of the
poet's birth. He had married Ann Jones at a time when he was
without occupation, and therefore to the great dissatisfaction of her
friends. Mrs. Goldsmith's uncle, however, was rector of Ivilkenny
\Vest, near Lissoy, afterwards to become the residence of Goldsmith
himself, and to receive from him the immortal name and celebrity
of Auburn. This uncle provided the young couple with a house,
vUjout six miles from Kilkenny West, at a small hamlet called Pallas-
more, and with a salary for officiating at the church of the parish in
which Pallas or Pallasmore was situated, and also in that of his own,
Kilkenny West, It seems Goldsmith's parents continued to reside
twelve years at Pallas ; and here the poet was born, on the 10th of
GOLDSMITH. 197
November, 1728. He was one of eiglit children, five boys and thrc^
girls. He was the second son, his elder brother being Henry, who
afterwards became curate of Kilkenny West, and lived at Lissoy,
where Oliver addressed to him his poem, " ITie Traveller." That
Goldsmith was come of a good stock, we may infer by the character
of simple piety which both his poetry and local tradition give to his
father, the good parish priest, — "passing rich with forty pounds
a year ; " and not the less from the sjiirit and decision which his
grandmother, Mrs. Jones, displayed, in order to improve the scanty
income of Oliver's parents. The husband of this lady, the Rev.
Oliver Jones, was now dead ; she was a widow, her daughter and
sou-in-law were living at Pallas, on the poor stipend derived from his
curacy. Her husband had rented a considerable tract of land on
very advantageous terms, which now fell out of lease. She deter-
mined, if possible, to secure this for her son-in-law and daughter.
She was refused : but, nothing daunted, she mounted behind her
own son on a pillion, and set out on the long and arduous joux'uey to
Dublin, to try her personal influence with the landlord. Here the
same refusal met her; but, as a last argument, she took out a hundred
guineas, which she had provided herself with, and held them open
in her hand while she pleaded. This had the effect that she procured
liulf the land on the same easy terms as before ; and she used jocu-
larly to regret that she had not taken two hundred guineas, and thus
got the whole. This noble act of maternal heroism is the more to
ije admired, as it cost her the life of her son, who received an injury
of some kind on the jcum.y.
Pallasmore, where Oliver Goldsmith was bom, is a mere cluster
of two or three cottages, called in Ireland farm-houses, but which,
to an English eye, would present only the appearance of huts. The
place lies quite out of the track of high-roads, about a mile and a
half from Ballymahon in a direct line, but perhaps three, taking in al'
the windings of the ways to it. It is now the property of the Edge-
worths. There is nothing remarkable in the aspect of the country.
It is rather flat, naked of trees, and cultured by small tenants. It
was with some difficulty that I reached it. My car-driver from
Edgeworthstown knew nothing more of it than its name; and we had
jiroceeded somewhat beyond the proper turning, as it lay quite oft'
the highway, and were obliged to obtain permission to pass through
tlie park of Newcastle, in order to reach it without making a great.
circuit. Having approached to within half-a-mile, a peasant j^ointed
it out, as a group of white cottages standing in a clump of trees.
The lanes were now become so narrow and stony that I was obliged
to quit my car, as Mr. Prior describes himself to have done, and
proceed across the fields on foot. I passed along the deep, stony,
and narrow lanes; here and .there a regular Irish cabin sticking in
the bank, the smoke coming out of the door, or i.ssuing from the
thatched roof about on a level witli the fields above. A boy who
was teaching .school in one of these came out with his book in his
hand, and directed me into a footpath across the fields. I advanced
through the standing corn, and at length renched this out-of-the-
198 GOLDSMITH.
world spot, dignified witli the sounding title of Pallasmore. Here
about three whitewashed cottages, of a superior description to the
cabins I liad passed in the narrow lanes, stood amid a number of ash-
trees looking out over an ordinary sort of country. A man, the
inhabitant of one of them, advanced to show me the spot where the
poet was born. He plunged into a potato-field, and at a few hundred
yards from the cottages, in the bank of the next field, showed me
a few stones, like the foundation of a wall, which have the reputa-
tion of being the sole remains of the house where the poet was
born. Poets are, certainly, often born in odd places, but it never-
theless struck me strangely, that the man who was destined to
spend the greater portion of his life in the dense crowd of London
should have sprung out of this obscure and almost inaccessible
location. There is nothing in the view around to suggest to the
mind the most faint dream of poetry. Oliver Goldsmith, how-
ever, was a mere infant when first removed from this place. His
father, two years after his birth, succeeded, on the death of his wife's
uncle, to the rectory of Kilkenny "West, and removed to Lissoy ; but
Oliver was accustomed to come hither, and make considerable
sojourns with his brother Henry, who lived here when Oliver was
grown up. The house is said to have been a good country house,
looking towards Forney church, at which Oliver's father and brother
used to preach, and which still rises to view between it and some
distant woods, one of the most pleasing objects of the scene.
Popular tradition ascribes the utter destruction of the house to
the fairies, who, on its becoming untenanted, used to take up their
quarters there, and pursue their nocturnal sports in great content.
But a tenant being found, and repairs of the house being com-
menced, a huge man in huge jackboots came every night, and making
a horse of it by bestriding the roof, pushed his legs through the
tiles, and, imitating galloping, shook the roof to pieces. It was
Iherefore obliged to remain empty, till, falling into ruin, it was at
ength cleared away, with the exception of these few stones.
The very ordinary character of this scene, and of the country
round, almost extinguished my desire for proceeding onwards five
miles further to Lissoy, the reputed Auburn, especially as the Edge-
worths had told me it was not worth my while. I inquired, how-
ever, of a farmer that I met on my return to the car that waited for
me on the road, what sort of a place Lissoy was. " Oh, a veiy
beautiful place ! " said he, " a very beautiful place. You must see
it — that was where Oliver Goldsmith lived and died." " Lived, but
not died," I replied : " he died in London." " Oh no ! your honour,''
replied the man ; " I assure you he died there, and lies buried at
Kilkenny West."
The accuracy of the man's account was about equal in all its parts.
Lissoy was just as truly beautiful as Goldsmith was buried there.
13ut this is always the way with the Irish peasantry. Unlike tlio
.Scotch, whose local knowledge is generally very correct, they seem
to look upon all remarkable men as they do on their saints, and insist
on their remains bring preserved amongst them. At Kilcolman
QOLDSMITH.
castle I was assured, with equal positiveness, that Spenser was burioiv
just below the castle, and the spot pointed out to mc. There was,
however, sufficient charm in the farmer's assurance that Lissoy was
a very beautiful place to turn the scale for going on. In such cases
one is willing to be deceived, and follow the slightest word, though
with an inward consciousness that we shall not find what we are
promised. We drove on, therefore, six or seven miles further, over
a very monotonous, naked country, only marked by a few banks for
fences, and a few little smoky cabins with a iwor population. It is
a country that to Goldsmith's boyish fancy might be charming, but
is cei'tainly to an English eye by no means romantic. A part of an
old round tower, however, stands near Auburn. There are the ruins
of an old castle not far off, and old parks that are charming. One I
passed, old, grey, craggy, and full of fern, but having not a single
tree in it except old thorn-trees, large and of venerable age. There
was a desolate antiquity about it that was attractive to the imagina-
tion. From the higher part of the road too, approaching Lissoy,
you see the Shannon hastening on towards the west. Presently, at
a turn of the road, we passed the public-house said to be that
alluded to in the Deserted Village, and were in that " very beaiitiful
place," Lissoy. It consists, in fact, of a few common cottages by the
road-side, on a flat and by no means particulai-ly interesting scene.
A few hundred yards beyond these cottages stand, at some distance
from the road, the ruins of the house where Goldsmith's father
lived, and which continued in the family till 1802, when it was sold
l)y Henry, the son of Henry, Oliver Goldsmith's brother, the nephew
of the poet, who had gone to America. This house was described in
1790 by the Ilev. Mr. Hancock, of Athlone, who was intimatelji'
acquainted Avith the Goldsmith family, and indeed managed thei ;
liroperty for them, as "a snug farm-house, in view of the high road,
to which a straight avenue leads, with double rows of ash-trees, six
miles north-east of this town — ^Athlone. The farm is still held under
the Napier family, by a nephew of Goldsmith at present in America,
In the front view of the house is the 'decent church' of Kilkenny
West, that literally ' tops the neighbouring hill ;' and in a circuit oi
not more than half-a-mile diameter around the house, are * the never-
failing brook,' ' the busy miU,' ' the hawthorn bush with seats beneath
the shade,' ' the brook with mantling cresses spread,' 'the. straggling
fence that skirts the way, with blossomed furze unprofitably gay,'
the thorn that lifts its head on high, where once the sign-post
caught the passing eye,' 'the house where nut-brown draughts
ins|)ired ;' in short, every striking object of the picture. There are,
besides, many ruined houses in the neighbourhood, bespeaking a
better state of population than at present."
Such it was. Prior's description of it, at his visit a few years ago,
would very nearly do for it now. " The house once occupied by the
rector of Kilkenny AVest, pleasautly situated and of good dimensions,
is now a ruin, verifying the truth of the pathetic lines of his son —
' Vain, transitory s])lendours I could not all
Ueprieve th.e tottering mansion from its f;ill t '
200 GOLDSMITH.
The frout, iiicludiug a wiug, extends, as nearly as could bo judged
by pacing it, sixty-eight feet by a depth of twenty-four ; it consisted
of two stories, with live windows in each. The roof has been off for
a period of twenty years : the gable-ends remain, but the front and
back walls of the upper story have crumbled away, and, if the hand
of the destroyer be not stayed, will soon wholly disappear. Two or
three wretched cottages for labourers, surrounded by mud, adjoin it
on the left. Behind the house is an orchard of some extent, and tlic
remains of a garden, both utterly neglected. In fact, the pretty
avenue of double rows of ash-trees, which formed the approach from
the high-road, about sixty yards distant, and at one time presented
an object of interest to travellers, has, like every other trace of care
or superintendence, disappeared — cut down by 'the ruthless hand of
some destroyer. No picture of desolation can be more complete.
As if an image of the impending ruin had been present, the poet
has painted with fearful accuracy what his father's house was to be : —
' Near yonder copse, viiere once the garden smiled,
And still where manj- a garden flower grows ^ild;
There, where a few torn shrubs the place disclose,
The village preacher's modest mansion rose.' "
Little can be added to that account. There still stands the long
white ruin of the house which .sheltered Goldsmith as a boy, at the
right-hand end one tall gable and chimney remaining aloft, the otlier
having since Mr. Prior's visit fallen in. At the left hand, near the
house, still remains one of the wretched cottages ho mentions. I
went into it. The floor of mud was worn into hollows, in which
geese were sitting in little pools. There was a dresser on one side,
with a few plates laid on it ; a few chairs, of a rudeness of construc-
tion such as no Englishman who has not visited an Irish cabin has
any conception of ; and the interior of the roof, for ceiling it had
none, was varnished into a jetty brilliancy by the smoke.
Behind the ruins of the house there are still the orchard and wild
I'emaius of a garden, enclosed with a high old stone wall. One could
imagine this retreat a play place for the embryo poet, whose charm
would long linger in his memory : and in truth, when the house was
complete, with its avenue of ash-trees, along which you looked to the
highway, and thence across a valley to the church of Kilkenny West,
on a hill at about a mile distant, the abode of Goldsmith's boyhood
must have been a very pleasant one. It is now seen as stripped of
all its former attractions, — its life, its completeness as a house, its
trees, — and stands a white, bare, and solitary ruin.
Many people think, that as Goldsmith's father was the clergyman,
this was the parsonage. It was not so. The parsonage was at
liilkenny AVest, where the present rector resides. This house was
attached to the farm which the pastor had here, and was probably a
much better and more commodious dwelling than the parsonage.
Returning to the village, — if three or four poor cottages by the
roadside can deserve that name, — the public-house is the object
which attracts your attention. This is said to be the very house of
which Goldsmith speaks in the Deserted Village. Goldsmith, however,
GOLDSMITH. 201
tells you himself, iu the Deserted Village, that tlic public-liouso,
amongst others, was destroyed : —
" Low lies that house wlieie nut-biown ilrau^hts inspired,
AVliere greybeard mirth, and smiling toil retired," etc.
Iu fact, it was rebuilt by Mr. Hogau, a gentleman living near, who,
being an ardent admirer of Goldsmith's poetry, did all t^at he could
to restore to Lissoy the characteristics of Auburn. He i-ebuilt the
public-house, on the .spot where tradition placed the old one, with
the traditionary thorn iu front. He gave it the sign of " The Jolly
Pigeons ; " he supplied it with new coj^ies of " The Twelve Good
Rules," and " The Eoyal Game of Goose ; " he went even to the
length of the ludicrous in his zeal for an SLCCuvaie facsimile of the.
genuine house — and
" Broken tea-cups, wisely kept for show.
Ranged o'er thQ chimney, glistened in a row."
These, to perpetuate them, were fast embedded in the mortar, but
in vain ; relic-hunters knocked them out, fictitious as they were,
and carried them oft' as genuine. The very sign did not escape this
relic mania, — it is no longer to be seen ; nor, I suppose, were a new
one to be set up, would it long remain. The new " twelve good
rules," and new " royal game of goose," have gone the same way ;
and there is no question that a brave trade in such things might be
carried on with what Goldsmith calls " the large fomily of fools," if
a supply were kept here. The very thorn before the door has been
cut down piecemeal, and carried off to all quartei"s of the world. In
1830, Mr. Prior, when visiting the place, making inquiries for Gold-
smiths biography, observed that " a tender shoot had again forced
its way to the surface, which he, in emulation of so many other in-
considerate idlers, felt disposed to seize upon as a memorial of his
visit ; but which, if permitted to remain, though this is unhkely,
may renew the honours of its predecessor." Vain hope ! there is
not an atom of it left ! He himself tells us, that " every traveller
thither for forty years had carried away a portion of the tree, as a
relic either of the poem or of his pilgrimage ; when the branches
had been destroyed, the trunk was attacked ; and when this disap-
peared, even the roots were dug up : so that in 1820 scarcely a vestige
remained, either above or below ground, notwithstanding a resident
gentleman had built a wall round it, to endeavour to prevent its
extermination." There is now neither vestige of tree, root, nor wall
I suppose the rage of relicism has carried off the very stones that
had stood on so hallowed a spot. There is still a slight moimd left,
or rather made, to mark the spot where the thorn stood.
The public-house ])resents not a resemblance to Goldsmith'.i
picture in his poem. The road from Eallymahou runs right towards
tills house. On arriving at it, the house stands on the further sido
of the road, facing you and the Ballymahon highway. Another road
i-uns at right angles, that is, parallel with the house, so that it stands
at what is usually called, "where three roads meet." The road on
your right hand runs down to the village; and some space is left in
iVout of the house, the stone wall on your right, which fences in tha
202 GOLDSMITH.
licld, being carried in a circular sweeping, instead of coming up to
un abrupt corner. On the space left by this arrangement, on the
.side of the road, and directly opposite to the house, stood the tree.
But how (liftercnt is the house itself, to that whose delightful picture
your imagination has carried away from the page of the poet ! —
" " Near yoiuler tliorn tliat lifts Us head on liiRli,
AVhcie once tlie sign-post cauglit tlie passing eye,
Low lies that house where nut-brown drauglits inspired,
AVliere greybeard mirtli and smiling toil retired.
Where village statesmen talked with looks profound,
And news much older than their ale went round.
Imagination fondly stoops to trace
The parlour splendours of that festive place ;
The whitewashed wall, the nicely sanded floor,
The varnished clock that clicked behind the door :
The chest contrived a double debt to pay,
A bed by night, a chest of drawers by day :
'J'he pictures, placed for orrmnient and use,
U'he twelve good rules, the royal game of goose :
Tlie hearth, except when winter chilled the day,
AVith aspen bouglis, and flowers, and fennel gay,
While broken tea-cups, wisely kept for sliow,
Ranged o'er the chimney, glistened in a row.
Vain, transitory splendour! could not all
■Reprieve the tottering mansion from its fall?
Obscure it sinks, nor shall it more impart
An hour's importance to the poor man's heart ;
Thither no more the peasant shall repair
To sweet oblivion of his daily care ;
No more the farmer's news, the barber's tale,
No more the woodman's ballad shall prevail ;
No more the smith his dusky brow shall clear,
Kelax his ponderous strength, and lean to hear;
The host himself no longer shall be found.
Careful to see the mantling bliss go round ;
Nor the coy maid, half-willing to be prest,
Shall kiss the cup to pass it to the rest."
These arc all the attractive characteristics of a nice old village puLlic-
house in England. Clean, quiet, sweet, and breathing of the olden
time. They are characteristics professedly gathered by the jioet in
his rural rambles in England, where he had lived at least twenty
years when he wrote the poem. In his preface he talks of thoso
"country excursions for four or five years past," in which he had
" taken all possible pains" to be correct in his details. An Irisli
village alehouse ! What is it ? A poor and filthy cabin, the wall*
of rough stones, the roof often with nothing between it and tha
floor. The floor nicely sanded? — a bed of mud, full of holes, in
which geese, and ducks, and pigs, are dabbling and wallowing ! If
floored at all, paved with pebbles, which stand uji in heaps by places,
and by places are gone, leaving the aforesaid duck-j^ools and pig-
troughs. A parcel of ragged people sprawling on the hearth around
the peat fire ; the coy maid, a bare-legged, shock-headed body, hard
at work in tending the potato kettle, or contending with the ass, the
cow, the pigs, that make part of the family. The parlour splendours ?
Half 4he house separated by a counter, behind which the landlord
stands, amid a stock of candles and bread for sale, and dealing out,
not the generous nut-brown ale, but the dejidly liquid fire called
whisky. Such are the almost imiversal attributes of a village alo*
GOLDSMITH. 203
house in Ireland. Goldsmith knew better than to draw on his
memory for them ; he turned to the more poetical scene of tho
English village alehcwase, which, clean as hands coidd make it, sweet,
and all that he describes, had charmed him in his numerous rural
cxcuj'sions in this country.
TheThree Jolly Pigeons is a regular Irish alehouse, or rather whisky-
shop. On going in, you look in vain for the picture Goldsmith has so
beautifully drawn. The mud floor, the dirty walls, the smell of whisky,
these are what meet you. You look for " the parlour splendours," and
on your left hand there is, for a wonder, a separate room, but it is,
as usual, filled with the caudles, the herrings, the bread, of the Ii'isli
alehouse ; and the whisky is doled out over the suspicious counter,
instead of the nut-brown ale being brought in the generous foaming
cup, to the bright, cban fireside, by the neat and blooming maid.
In all Goldsmith's description of his Auburn, he has clearly
blended the Doric charm of the English village and English scenery
with the fond boyish memories of his actual native place. He has
evidently intended to represent the scene as in England, or at all
events to make his poem of general application, though he has drawn
on his memory for features connected with his native place, and im-
parted soul and sentiment to it by indulging the feelings of old
affectionate regret. Thus the alehouse, the parsonage, the mil], the
brook, the village green, the schoolmaster, the pious clergyman, were
all portions of his native place, and actual inhabitants of it, yet
mixed with touches from the later observations of his English life.
The very circumstance of depopulation, which no doubt had occurred
at Lissoy, and had sunk deep into his indignant heart, he tells us, in
liis dedication to Sir Joshua Reynolds, was going on in England, and
that his description meant to apply to England. " But I know you
will object, — and indeed several of our best and wisest friends
concur in the opinion, — that the depopulation it deplores is nowhere
to be seen, and the disorders it laments are only to be found in tlic
poet's own imagination. To this I can scarcely make any other
answer, than that I sincerely believe what I have written ; that I
have taken all possible pains in my country excursions, for these four
or five years past, to be certain of what I allege, and that all my
views and inquiries have led me to believe those miseries real which
I here attempt to display."
The fact is only too much a fact. From Goldsmith's time to our
own the process of rural depopulation has been going on, by tho
absorption of smaller properties into larger ones.
But what is more strange than the doubt of the progress of rural
depopulation in England is that Mr. Prior, the biographer of Gold-
smith, doubts even the justice of his strictures as applied to Ireland.
He admits that there appeared to have been some such circumstance
at Lissoy in Goldsmith's youth, as h'^ has described in the Deserted
Village ; but he is inclined to fialliate it till it becomes a mere trifle.
" In November, 1738, a part of the town lands of Lissoy, and the
adioiniiig lands of Cannorstown, to the number of 600 acres, were
6oId by Jeffcry Frcnd,- Esq., of the Middle TcmplCj to the Honourable
204 GOLDSMITH,
Ivobert Naper, Lieuteuant general of his Majesty's forces in Ireland,
for the sum of 3,300/., but the General died before the purchase wa^'
completed. Ui)on this ijrojjerty, named Ballybegg, lying behind tlio
house of Mr. Goldsmith, about half-a-inile distant, Mr. William Naper
son of the General, several years afterwards built the family residence
named Littleton. In the preliminary arrangements, some circum-
stances, probably neither harsh nor xmjust in themselves, connected
with the removal of part of the tenantry, gave rise in the mind of
Goldsmith, morbidly acute in his benevolent feelings, and particularly
towards the poorer classes of society, to the idea of the Deserted
Village." — Vol. I. p. 18. This, however, does not agree with Mr.
Prior's own account of the appearance of the place on his own visit,
given at page 257 of Vol. II. " There are, besides, many ruined
houses in the neighbourhood, bespeaking a better state of population
than at present." It as little agrees with Goldsmith's assertion, that
the very alehouse of the village was pulled down. Nay, at this very
part of Mr. Prior's account (Vol. II. p. 259), he gives a more extended
history of Mr. Naper or Napier's transactions ; and while he endea-
vours to persuade us that the tradition of the neighbourhood was
not to be trusted, he shows that Mr. Naper had 1,200 acres of land,
a great part of which had been converted into demesne. The story of
the neighbourhood, as given by himself, is that Lieutenant-general
Ivobert Naper, returning from Vigo in Spain with a large fortune,
purchased, as has been stated, the adjoining lands. In erecting a
residence and forming a demesne around it, the habitations of some,
as is alleged, respectable tenants and several of the peasantry stood
in the way, and being unwilling to remove for his convenience, were
at length, after much resistance, all, except the Goldsmith fomily,
ejected for non-payment of rent. Their houses were pulled down,
and the park enlarged to a circumference of nine miles ; but so great
was the indignation of the people at the proceeding, that on the
General's death, which occurred soon afterward, they assembled in
a tumultuous manner, destroyed most of the property in and around
it, and, among other things, plantations to the value of 5,000/.
The fact, however, is, that the tragedy of The Deserted A'^illago
has been often enacted in Ireland. The scene which Goldsmith so
pathetically describes, of the poor villagers whose homes had been
destroyed, whose native haunts had been made to cast them forth,
going on towards tlie shore seeking for an asylum beyond the oceai:,
is not a solitary scene. It has been repeated from that hour to this ;
and evei-y year, and almost every day, sees sad thousands bidding
adieu to their birthplaces.
" Even now, metliinks, as pondering lievc I stand,
I see the rural virtues leave the land.
Down wliere yon anchoring vessel spreads the sail
That idly waiting, (laps with every gale,
Downward they move, a melaneholy band,
Pass from the shore, and darken all the strand.
Contented toil, and liospitable care,
And kind connubial tenderness are there;
And piety, Avith wishes placed above,
And bteady loyalty, and faithful love."
GOLDSMITH. 20.J
Under all these circumstauces, Auburn or Lissoy, which you. will,
will always be visited with enthusiasm by the genuine lovers of
purest poetry and of kindly humanity. The visitor will not find all
there that he naturally looks fo)-. He will not fuid the country very
beaatiful, or the mill, the brook, the alehouse, as rm-al and picturesque
us he could wish ; but he will find the very gi-ound on which Oliver
(jtoldsmith ran in the happy days of his boyhood, the ruins of tho
house in which that model of a village preacher, — simple, pious, and
warm-hearted, justly, indeed, dear to all the country, — lived, the
father of the poet ; the ruins of the house in which the poet himself
spent a happy childhood, cherishing under such a parent one of the
noblest spirits which ever glowed for truth and humanity ; fearing
no ridicule, contracting no worldliness, never abating, spite of harsh
experience and repeated imposition, one throb of pity or of generous
sympathy for the wretched. The ground where such a man was
reared is, indeed, holy. Goldsmith himself, not less than his father
and brother, was one of the most genuine Christian preachers that
ever lived. The sermons of the father and the brother perished
with their hearers, but those of the poet live for ever in his writings.
And how many of the personal characteristics of " the village
preacher," which in his father he celebrates, lived in him.sclf !
" Unpractised he to fawn or seek for power,
By doctrines fashioned to the varying liour;
Far other aims his heart liad learned to prize,
More skilled to raise the wretclied than to rise."
How often did he present this trait in his own hfe ! How zealous
lie was to help any one that he could ; how careless to help himself!
Thus, when requested by the minister of state to ,say if he could bo
of any service to him, he said, " Yes, he had a brother, a worthy
clergyman, whom he would gladly see promoted." At this time ho
was in great distress himself. At another time Lord North sent to
him a Dr. Scott, a base ministerial hack, with a carte blandie to induce
liina to write for the ministry; but Goldsmith was not to be bought.
" I found him," said the Doctor, " in a miserable set of chambers in
the Temple ; I told him my authority ; I told him that I was em-
powered to pay most liberally for his exertions ; and, would you believe
it % he was so absurd as to say, ' / can earn as nmch as tctll supply w>/
tcants without icritlng for any party ; the assistance therefore you offer is
unnecessary to me;' and so I left him," added Dr. Scott, "in his
garret."
How completely was this Dr. Primrose ! How thoroughly Avas he
the same man in everything. How could a clerical vampyre hke this
Scott, himself crammed with two fat livings, the price of subservience
understand such high principle ? AVhen his aid was needed by his
fellow-man —
" Careless their merits or their faults to scan,
His pity gave ere charity began."
It is because lie embodied himself in all he wrote, that his writings
eommaud such undecaying interest ; for in impressing his own heart
»n his page, he impressed there nature itself in its most unselfish
206 GOLDSMITH.
and generous character. Every circumstance, therefore, connected
Avitli " Tlio Deserted Village" of &ach a man will always be deeply
interesting to the visitor of the spot, and we must for that reason
notice cue or two facts of the kind before quitting Lissoy. Mr. Best,
an Irish clergyman, met by Mr. Uavis in his travels in the United
States, said — " Tlie name of the schoolmaster was Paddy Burns. I
remember him well. He was indeed a man severe to view. A woman,
called Walsey Cruse, kept the alehouse. I have often been in the
liouse. The hawthorn bush was remarkably large, and stood opposite
the house. I was once riding with Brady, titular Bishop of Ardagh,
when he observed to me — ' Ma foy, Best, this huge, overgrown bush
is mightily in the way ; I wall order it to be cut down ! ' ' What,
sir,' said I, ' cut down Goldsmith's hawthorn bush, that supplies so
beautiful an image in the Deserted Village !' 'Ma foy !' exclaimed
the bishop, ' is that the hawthorn bush 1 Then ever let it be sacred
from the edge of the axe, and evil to him that ■would cut from it a
branch!'"
In other places, the Schoolmaster is called, not Paddy Burns, but
Thomas Byrne, evidently the same person. He had been educated
for school-teaching, but had gone into the army ; and, serving in
Spain during the reign of Queen Anne, became quarter-master of
the regiment. On the return of peace he took up his original calling.
He is represented to be well qualified to teach ; little more than
writing, reading, and arithmetic were wanted, but he could ti'anslate
extemporaneously Virgil's Eclogues Into Irish verse, in considerable
elegance. But his grand accomplishment was the narration of his
adventures, which was commonly exercised in the alehouse ; at the
same time that, when not in a particular humour for teaching, he
would edify his boys in the school with one of his stories. Amongst
his most eager listeners was Oliver, who was so much excited by
what he heard, that his friends used to ascribe his own love of
rambhng to this cause. The schoolmaster was, in fact, the very man
to excite the imagination of the young poet. He was eccentric in his
habits, of a romantic turn, wrote poetry, was well versed in the fairy
superstitions of the country, and what is not less common in Ireland,
believed implicitly in their truth.
A poor woman, named Catherine Geraghty, was supposed to be —
" Yon widowed, solitary thing,
That feebly bends beside the plashy spring :
She, wretched matron, pressed in age for bread.
To strip the brook witfi mantling cresses spread.'
The brook and ditches, near where her cabin stood, still furnish
cresses, and several of her descendants reside in the neighbourhood.
The school-house is still pointed out, but it is unfortunate for its
identity tliPt no school-house was built then, school being taught in
the master's cottage. There is moi-e evidence in nature of the poet's
recalling the place of his boyhood as he wrote his poem. The waters
and marshy lands, in more than one direction, gave him acquaintance
with the singular bird which he has introduced with such effect, as*
an imago of desolation.
GOLDSMITH. 207
" Along thy glades, a solitary guest,
The hollow -sounding bittern guards its nest."
Little charm as Lissoy has at the jn-esent moment, iudependcnt of
association with Oliver Goldsmith, with him and genius it possesses
one that grows upon you the more you trace the scenes made pro-
minent in his poem, and we leave it with regret.
There are various other places in the same part of Ireland which
are connected with the early history of Goldsmith. At the school
of Paddy Byrne he made little progress, as was to be expected,
except in a growing attachment to the marvellous. He devoured
not only the romantic stories of the schoolmaster, but those of the
peasantry. He listened enthusiastically to their ballads, their feiry
tales and superstitions, of which they have in Ireland a plentiful
stock. He got hold of, and read with equal avidity, what have been
called the cottage classics of Ireland, — those books which may be
found in their cabins everywhere : History of Witches and Ghosts ;
the Devil and Dr. Faustus ; Parisuuis and Parismenus ; Montelea,
Knight of the Oracle ; Seven Champions of Christendom ; Mendoza's
Art of Boxing ; Ovid's Art of Love ; Lives of celebrated Pirates :
History of the Irish llogues and Eapparees ; of Moll Flanders ; of
Jack the Bachelor, a notorious smuggler ; of Fair Eosamond and
Jane Shore ; of Donna Rosena ; the Life and Adventures of James
Freny, a famous Irish robber, etc. A precious literature for a lad,
it must be confessed ! Luckily, if it excited his imagination, it failed
in corrupting his heart ; and, thanks to the spread of knowledge, a
better class of books has now found its way even into Irish cabins.
To jDut Oliver under more suituable tuition, he was sent to the Ilev.
j\Ir. Griffin of Elphin, master of the school once taught by his grand-
father. Here he became an inmate of his uncle, I\Ir. John Goldsmith,
of Ballyoughter, in the vicinity. Displaying now much talent, which
was at once seen and cordially acknowledged by his uncle, he was
destined for the university ; and pi-eparatory to that he was sent to
a school of repute at Athlone. At this school he continued two
years ; when lie was removed to Edgeworthstown, under the care
of the Rev. Patrick Hughes, where he continued till he went to tht
imiversity.
That we may take a connected view of his homes and haunts in
this part of the country, we must include at once his life hereabout
before he went to the university, and his visits hither during an
interval of two years, between his quitting the university and his
quitting Ireland, to study physic in Edinburgh, and, in fact, never
again to return to Ireland.
There are several facts connected with liis school days at Edge-
worthstown that are very interesting. Ho is said to have become
acquainted, cither here or at Ballyoughton, with Turlogh O'Carolan.,
the last of the ancient Irish bards. This popular musician and poet,
whose songs have been translated into English and published, main-
tained the style and life of the minstrel. He disdained to play for
money, but went as an admired and honoured guest from house to
house amongst the most ancient and opulent families of Conuaught.
208
GOLDSMITH.
To complete his character as a harper, he was blind ; and had been so
from the age of eighteen. His songs, which are sung by the peasantry
with enthusiasm, are numerous, and celebrate the persons and families
of his patrons. If they do not in the mind of an Englishman appear
to possess an originality equal to their fame in Ireland, it is to be
remembered that they have there all the charm of association ; their
very titles being the names of lords and ladies of old families :
O'Connor Faby ; Dennis O'Connor ; Plansty Stafford ; Nelly Plunket ;
Jlrs. French ; Anna M'Dermott Roe, etc.
The influence which the other local poet, Laurence Whyte, had on
the mind and genius of Goldsmith is very striking. Whyte wrote,
as part of a larger poem, The Parting Cup, or the Humours of Deoch
an Doruis, in four cantos. It is a lively picture of a Westmeath
farmer's life, about the year 1710, and shows not only how its themes
had sunk into the mind of Goldsmith as a boy when they reappeared
in the Deserted Village, but also how old and how fixed a portion of
Irish history are the miseries and outrages of eviction ; the stream of
consequent emigration ; and the curse of absenteeism. Whyte'.s
])oem is very clever, and deserves to be better known. Speaking of
the better condition of farmei-s in the seventeenth century, he pro-
ceeds : —
JIow viunij villnrjes l/ici/ razed,
IIdv: mrinij parishes laid waste,
To fallen bullocks, sheep and cows,
When scarce one parish has two ploughs.
Tlieir flocks do range on every plain,
That once produced all kind of grain.
Depopulating every village,
Wliere we had luisbandry and tillage ;
Fat bacon, poultry, and good bread,
]!y which tlie poor were daily fed.
^f * * -K- *
Instead of living well and thriving,
There's nothing now but Icadijig,
drieing, —
The lands are all monopolized,
The tenants racked and sacriliced ;
Whole colonies, to shun ihefale
Of being oppressed at such a ralf,
111/ tijranis who still raise their rent,
Sail to the Western Continent,
llather than lire at home like slaces,
***** 'J'hey trust themselves to winds andwa'JCs "
If a i)oet at the present hour were describing the acts and deeds
of the Irish exterminators, could he have done it more literally ?
To turn to a more agreeable subject. The chief incident in " Shr
Stoops to Conquer" is said to have originated in an amusing adven-
ture of Goldsmith's, on his last going from home to the school at
Edgeworthstown ; and is thus related by Prior : — '•' Having set off on
horseback, there being then, and indeed now, no regular wheeled
conveyance from Ballymahon, he loitered on the road, amusing him-
self by viewing the neighbouring gentlemen's seats. A friend had
presented him with a guinea ; and the desire, perhaps, of spending
it — to a schoolboy — -in a most independent manner at an inn, tended
to slacken his diligence on the road. Xigitt overtook him in the
' Tims farmers lived like gentlemen.
Ere lands were raised from five to ten ;
Again from ten to three times five,
Then very few could hope to thrive;
Hut tugged against the rapid stream.
Which drove them back from whence
they came :
.At length 'twas canted to a pound,
AVhat tenant then could keep his ground .'
Not knowing which, to stand or lly.
When rent-rolls mounted zenith hijh,
They had their choice to run away,
Or labour for a groat a day.
Kou) beggared and of all bereft,
Are doomed to starve or live by theft.
Take In the m.ounlain or the roads,
When banished from their old abodes.
Their native soil were forced to Quit,
So Irish landlords thought it fit ;
Who tvilhout ceremony or rout.
For tlieir improvements turned them out.
GOLt)SirlTQ. 209
g-mall town of Ardagh, about half-way on his journey. Inquiring
for the best house in the place, meaning the best inn, he chanced to
address, as is said, a person named Cornelius Kelly, who boasted of
having taught fencing to the JMarquis of Granby, and was then
domesticated in the "house of Mr. Featherstone, a gentleman of
fortune in the town : he was known as a notorious wag ; and, willing
to play ofi' a trick upon one whom he had no doubt discovered to be
■d, swaggering schoollioy, directed him to the house of his patron.
" Suspecting no deception, Oliver proceeded as directed ; gave
authoritative orders about the care of his horse ; and, being thence
conceived by the servants to be an expected guest, was ushered into
the presence of their master, who immediately discovered the mis-
take. Being, however, a man of humour, and willing to enjoy an
evening's amusement with a boy under the influence of so unusual
a blunder, he encouraged it, particularly when, by the communicative
disposition of the guest, it was found he was the son of an old
acquaintance on his way to school. Nothing occuri-ed to undeceive
the self-importance of the youth, fortiiied by the possession of a sum
he did not often possess ; wine was therefore ordered, in addition to
a good supper, and the supposed landlord, his wife and daughters,
were invited to partake of it. On retiring for the night, a hot cake
was ordered for breakfast the following morning ; nor was it until
preparing to quit the house next day that he discovered he had been
entertained in a private family."
Ballymahon, the little foreign-looking town near his native place,
figure,'! conspicuously in Goldsmith's early life. After his father'.s
death, which took place while he was at college, his mother removed
thither ; and thither during vacations Oliver betook himself. Again,
when he quitted college, he spent two years amongst his relations,
with no fixed aim ; sometimes he was with his uncle Contarine in
Eoscommon ; sometimes at Lissoy, where now his brother-in-law,
]\Ir.Hodson, lived in the old hous3 ; at other times he was with his
brother Henry, who, officiating as curate, lived at Pallasmore in tlie
house where Oliver was born, and, to eke out his small salary, kept a
school, in which Oliver assisted him. No place was so dear to him,
however, as Lissoy, where he entered into all the rural sports and
occupations of his brothei'-in-law with fullest enjoyment. There is
no doubt that, had he had sufficient means, he would have continued
to live here a country life, and the world would most probably have
lost a poet. As it is", he has made the life and characters of Lissoy
Jamiliar to all the world, in both the Deserted Village andthe Yicar
of Wakefield. No man drew more from real, and especially from
his own past life, than Goldsmith. The last years he spent in the
coiuitry he was a tutor in the family of a gentleman in the county (if
Eoscommon, of the name of Flinn ; and the nature of his impressions
I'egarding such a situation he is supposed to have recorded in the
history of The Man in Black.
His mother's house at Ballymahon, where she lived as a widow
about twenty years, is still pointed out to the curious ; it forms one
corner of the road to Edgeworthstown. Some shop accounts have
210 GOLDSMITH.
been preserved, in whicli Oliver, nnder the familiar title of Master
Noll, is found figuring as his mother's messenger for tea and sugar ;
it was only to the next door. Opposite to his mother's house stood
George Conway's inn, where he used to spend many a gay and jovial
evening, in the company of those who resorted thither ; often amused
them with a story or a song, and was naturally a great authority in
matters of learning. From scenes and characters occurring here, it
is believed he drew the first idea of Tony Lumpkin ; at all events,
in such a circle he saw traits of human life and action that would be
found as old gold at the necessary time. At Ballymulvey House in
the neighbourhood, he spent many happy hours with his friend and
quondam college and school companion, Mr. Robert Bryanton ; and
ilso with him made excursions into the surrounding country, some-
times shooting, sometimes fishing in the Inny, which runs through
the town. In these rambles he made himself as familiar with nature
and her wild children as he did with man in towns ; he traced the
haunts of the wild fowl, and hunted the otter in the waters, that
there comm^^nicate with the Shannon. There are many objects in
the neighbourhood of Ballymahon still proudly pointed out as be-
longing to the haunts of Goldsmith : the islets in the river ; the
I'uins of a mill, in his time in full activity ; the places on the river
side where he used to sit and play on his flute ; as well as the house
of a Mr. Gannon, where, as he himself tells us in his Animated
Nature, he first saw a seal, this gentleman having two for ten years
ill his house.
In this portion of his life there are many rich incidents, which it
iS to be regretted we cannot here introduce ; particularly that most
amusing account of his visit to an old college friend, who had often
pi'essed him to come and "command his stable and his purse," but
who turned out as such friends often do. But we have overstepped
his sojourn at college, and must turn back to it.
Trinity College, Dublin, is a noble structure ; and, with its spacioiLS
courts and extensive gardens, more fittingly deserving the name of
parks, one would think a place where the years of studentship might
— especially in the heart of such a city — be very agreeably spent.
But Goldsmith entered there under circumstances that were irksome
to him, and, to add to the matter, he met with a brute in his tutor.
The family income did not allow him to occupy a higher rank than
that of a sizer, or poor scholar, and this was mortifying to his sensi-
tive mind. The sizer wears a black gown of coarse stufi' without
sleeves, a plain black cloth cap without a tassel, and dines at the
fellows' table after they have retired. It was at that period far
worse ; they wore red caps to distinguish them, and wei-e compelled
to perform derogatory offices : to sweep the courts in the morning,
carry up the dishes from the kitchen to the fellows' table, and wait
in the hall till they had dined. No wonder that a mind like that of
Goldsmith's writhed under the degradation ! He has recorded his
own feelings and opinions on this custom : "Sure pride itself haa
dictated to the fellows of our colleges the absurd fashion of being
attended at njeals, and on otlier public occasions, ')y those poor uu;y
GOLDSMITH. 5 1
who, willing to be scholars, come in upon some charitable foundation.
It implies a contradiction, for men to be at once learning the liberal
ai-ts and at the same time treated as slaves ; at once studying freedom
and practising servitude." A spirited fellow at length caused the
abolition of the practice of the sizers acting as ^vaiters, and that,
too, on grand occasions before the pulilic, liy flinging the dish he was
carrying, on Trinity Sunday, at the head of a citizen in the crowd
assembled to witness the scene, who made some jeering remarks on
the office he had to perform.
His tutor, a great brute — let his name be known ; it was the Rev.
Theaker Wilder — proceeded sometimes to actual corporal castigation ;
and with Oliver's natural tendency to poetry, rather than to dry
classical and mathematical studies, like many other poets, including
Scott and Byron, he cut no great figure at college ; and, like the
latter, detested it. Amongst his cotemporaries at the college was
lulmund Burke, but they appear to have known little of each other.
To add to Goldsmith's uncomfortable position, there occurred a riot
of the students, who, hearing that one of their body had been arrested
in Fleet-street, rushed to the rescue, seized the bailiffs, dragged them
to the college, and pumped them soundly in the old cistern. They
next attempted to break open Newgate, and make a general jail
delivery, but failed for want of cannon. In the subsequent inquiry,
Goldsmith came in, not for any severe punishment, but for a college
censure. Feeling his self-respect deeply wounded by his brutal
tutor entering his chambers, on one occasion when he had a party of
merry comrades there, and in their presence inflicting personal
chastisement upon him, he quitted college, selling his books, and set
off to Cork to embark for some foreign country. Bat his money
failed ; he was compelled to sell his clothes from his back ; and, brought
to the utmost condition of misery and starvation, he thus reached
his brother's house, who again clothed him, and brought him back
to college, endeavouring to propitiate the brutal tutor. His father
dying, he was reduced to the deepest distress. His generous uncle,
Contarine, helped to the utmost of his power, but, with Oliver's
careless habits, he was still often reduced to the iitmost straits. He
was sometimes compelled to pawn his books, and borrow others to
study from. His condition became that of squalid poverty, and, at
length, he was driven to the extremity of writing street ballads,
which he found a ready- sale for at five shillings a copy, at a shop
known as the sign of the Reindeer, in Mountrath-street. Eventually
obtaining the degree of B. A. he quitted the university, and, as we
have seen, retreated to his own native neighbouihood and friends.
During this interval of his life Goldsmith gave great concern to
}iis friends. He appeared before the Bishop of Elphin in a pair of
scarlet breeches to be examined for orders, and was, of course,
rejected. He then spent what money he had in buying a horse, on
which he disapi)eared no one knew whither, and after a time I'eap-
peared on a sorry hack which he called " Fiddleback."
All chance of succeeding as a clergyman, to which office he more-
over had an aversion, appearing out of the question, and liavirg
2 J 2 GOLDSMian.
lither no inclination or not sufficient ,s})irifc of plodding for llio
])ursnit of law, which had been recommended to him, by assistance
of liis friends lie crossed over to Edinbnrgh, and commenced, in tluat
rmiversity, tlie .study of physic. We have no clue to the exact
lodgings of Goldsmith during his stay in Edinburgh, which was two
wiiitcrs. Men in the poverty of Goldsmith, as a student, seldom
I'ecord very traceably their whereabouts. The tradition is, however,
that the lodgings he chiefly occupied were in the College Wynd ;
and this is very likely, both because the situation is convenient for
the college, and because the character of the place agrees pretty
nnich with the sort of entertainment he describes himself to have
ibund in them. The College Wynd is a narrow alley of wretched
houses, now inhabited only by the lowest grade of population. It
is probable, however, that in it was the better class of lodgings which
Goldsmith occupied in this city. The house in which he located
Jiirasolf at first was also a boarding-house, but of such a description
that he used, in after days, to amuse his friends in London with an
account of the economy of the table. A leg of mutton, as he told
the story, dished up in various ways by the ingenuity of his hostess,
served for the better part of dinner during a week ; a dish of broth
being made on the seventh day from the bone. He soon fled fi'om
this luxurious abode, and joined several other students, his friends
and countrymen, who were better accommodated, most likely in thi.s
College Wynd. He had the advantage of studying under the elder
Monro ; he became a member of the Medical Society ; but was soon
more noted for his convivial talents and habits than for his indus-
trious study. He made a trip into the Highlands on a pony, he says,
of the size of a ram, and wrote a humorous account of Scotland and
the people, to his friend Robert Bryanton, of Ballymahon. Through
some Irish connexion he was invited to the Duke of Hamilton's,
whose duchess at that time was one of the celebrated Gunnings :
but he said he soon found himself liked rather as a jester than as a
companion, and he at once disdained the company of dukes on any
such terms. Amongst his college friends was that Lauchlan Maclcane
whom some writers have endeavoured to prove to be the real Junius,
though his claims were long ago sifted, and rejected by public
opinion.
Having, with his usual incaution in such matters, become security
for a fellow-student, Goldsmith would not have been able to quit
Edinburgh, had it not been for Macleane and Dr. Joseph Fenn Sleigh,
a Quaker, and afterwards a popular physician at Cork. Saved from
arrest by their kindness, he embarked for Bordeaux, but was driven
into Newcastle-on-Tyne ; where the ship proving to be engaged in
enlisting soldiers for the French army, he was seized and cast into
prison for a fortnight, before he could prove his innocence. In the
meantime the ship had escaped out of the harbour. He had lost
iiis passage, and his passage-money and luggage ; but saved his life,
for the ship was wrecked, and every soul perished. He then went
over to Rotterdam, studied at Leyden for a year, but, so far as
appears, took no degree ; and thence set off", on foot, on that tour of
GOLDSMITH. 213
which so much has always been said in counexion with his name.
With his usual good-natured thoughtlessness, when about to set for-
ward from Leyden, provided with a small fund by his undo Contarine,
being struck, in the garden of a florist, with some beautiful buibous
flowers, and recollecting in his gratitude his uncle Contarine's admi-
ration of those flowers, he spent most of the money in purchasing
a quantity of them to ship to Ireland for him, as the most welcome
present he could think of; and then set out, almost penniless, on his
journej'. His tour extended through Flanders and France, at Paris
attending the chemical lectures of Rouelle, and being introduced to
Voltaire ; a small portion of Germany ; thence thi-ough Switzerland,
visiting some of its most celel^rated scenes, and chmbing some of its
highest mountains, as the Jura ; and thence into Italy, where he
extended his journey to most of the northern cities, Mantua, Milan,
Padua, Florence, Verona, Venice, and the wilds of Carinthia; but
never reached Rome or Naples. His necessities became too great to
permit Kim to go further. In France his flute was, amongst the
2)easantry, as represented in his Traveller, a never-failing resource —
not so in Italy. There the higher taste for music made his nule
skill useless; but he found many of his coimtrymen residents in the
monasteries, and these were always ready to reheve his wants. He
found also another resource, which ho relates in his Philosophic
Vagabond : — " My skill in music could avail me nothing in Italy
where every peasant was a better musician than I ; but by this time
I had acquired another talent, which answered my purpose as well ;
and this was a skill in disputation. In all the foreign universities
and convents there are, upon certain days, philosophical theses
maintained against everj' adventitious disputant ; for which, if the
champion opposes with any dexterity, he can claim a gratuity in
money, a dinner, and a bed for one night. In this manner, then, I
fought my way towards England ; w^alked along from city to city,
examinedVaukind more closely, and, if I may so express it, saw both
sides of the picture."
There is no question that this hardy enterprise of making the
tour of Europe on foot, and pushing his way as he could, by his
powers of argument, or his flute, though, as he observed, it made
him a debtor in almost every kingdom in Europe, yet immensely
extended his knowledge of human nature. He was the first man,
through his close observation of the French people, to predict their
breaking up the despotism of the old monarchy. " As the Swedes
are making concealed approaches to despotism, the French, on the
other hand, are imperceptibly vindicating themselves into freedom.
When I consider that these parliaments, the members of which are
all created by the court, the presidents of which can only act by
immediate direction, presume even to mention privileges and freedom,
who, till of la,te, received directions from the throne with implicit
luimility ; when this is considered, I cannot help fancying that the
genius of freedom has entered that kingdom in disguise. If they
have but three weak monarchs successively on the throne, the mask
will be laid aside, and the country will certainly once more be free."
J51 [ COLDSMITir.
This was a remarkable pr()[)Iiecy ; the sagacity of Goldsmith pene-
trated the eventful future twelve years before the mind of Burke, by
treading the same ground, arrived at the same conclusion.
In 17o6 Oliver Goldsmith reached England, destined now to the
ind of his life to become the scene of his varied struggles, his i^overtv,
and his ftime. It were a long story to follow him minutely through
all his numerous pursuits of an existence, his various changes of
residence, for a long time without much advance towards profit or
reputation. The early part of his career is lost in obscurity and
conjecture. He stepped upon the shore of England a nameless
adventurer, destitute of cash, and uncertain as to what means of
livelihood he should embrace. The struggle which now and for
some time went on was for life itself. He was reduced to the most
desperate circumstances. He applied for assistance to his relations
in Ireland ; but whether tliey could no longer help him, or whether
they now regarded his continual wanderings, and continual drain
upon them, as the confirmed signs of a thriftless vagabond, none
r-anie. It is said that in this situation he tried the stage in a comitry
town ; and his intimate acquaintanceship with the interior of the
wretched country playhouse, as displayed in The Adventures of a
Strolhng Player, and the conclusion of the story of George Primrose,
renders it very probable. He was driven by utter need, according to
the byeword of the Irishman, to be almost " anybody's customer."
Phe next resource was, trusting to his scholastic acquirements to
procure an engagement as an usher in a country school. But his
appearance must have been against him ; reference he had none in
tills country to give ; and though he applied to his old kind tutor in
Dublin, Dr. Piadclifif'e, not the brute Wilder, he requested his recom-
mendation to be given to him under a feigned name, being ashamed
of hereafter having his_present condition associated with his own.
Dr. RadchfFe was obliged to be silent. Goldsmith held this situation,
it may be supposed, under these circumstances, for no long period ;
but the very location of the school is unknown ; it has been said to
be in Yorkshire, and also in Kent, near Ashford or Tenterdeu. "What
sort of a life he had of it in this " Do-the-boj-s Hall," wherever it
was, we may learu from the curious catechism he puts into the
mouth of the cousin of one of his heroes. " Ay, this is indeed a
very pretty career that has been chalked out for you. I have been
an usher at a boarding-school myself ; and may I die by an anodyne
necklace, but I had rather be under-turnkey in Newgate. I wa^ tip
early and late. I was browbeat by the master ; hated for my ugly
face by the mistress ; worried by the boys within, and never jier-
mitted to stir out to receive civility abroad. But are you sure you
are fat for a school ? Let me examine you a little. Have you been
bred apprentice to the business ?" " No." " Then you won't do for
a school. Have you had the sijiall-pox V " No." " Then you won't
do for a school. Can you lie three in a bed 1 " " No." " Then you
won't do for a school. Have you got a good stomach 1 " " Yes."
" Then you will by no means do for a school ! "
Driven from such a purgatory even for want of a character, Gold-
GOLDSMIin. 215
sniitli, with the Deserted Village and the Viear of Wakefield in liifi
head, was once more wandering the streets of London amid a
thousand other equally destitute wretches. He applied to apothecary
after apothecar}', trusting to his medical education for employment
with them ; but with all the traces of vagabond indigence upon hiin,
and without any recommendation to show, his repulses were certain.
A chemist of the name of Jacob, residing at the corner of Monument
or Bell-yard, on Fish-street-hill, taking comjiassion on his destitute
condition, at length gave him employment. It may be supposed to
be about this time that his lodgings were of that magnificent descrip-
tion with which he once in after life startled a circle of good company,
• — In-eaking out suddenly in some fit of forgetful enthusiasm with — •
" When 1 lived amongst the beggars in Axe-lane." His first gleam
of better fortune was finding his old Edinburgh college friend. Dr.
Sleigh, in Loudon, who received him in all his squalor with the
warmth of true friendship, and enabled him to commence as physician
in Baukside, Southwark. It did not answer, and the next glimpse
of him is, acting as a corrector of the press in the printing office of
llichardson the Novelist. The next fortunate circumstance was
meeting with Mr. Milner, one of his old Edinburgh fellow-studciits,
whose Kither, Dr. Milner, a dissenting minister, kept a classical school
at Peckham, in Surrey. By him he was recommended to his father,
to assist him in his school duties. Dr. Milner was suffering under
severe illness, and Goldsmith's services were accepted. Here he con-
tinued for some time — it has been said by part of the family, three
years ; and this connexion led to the one which brought him into
the direct field of authorship. Mr., afterwards Dr. Griffiths, a book-
seller of Paternoster-row, had started the Monthly Review, and was
beating up for contributors. Goldsmith, whom he had . become
acquainted with at Dr. Milner's, was one invited. The engagement
is calculated to make both proprietors and authors of the present
day smile. Goldsmith was regularly boarded and lodged in the
bibliopole's house — the hired servant of literature. How satisfac-
tory tills odd arrangement of keeping a tame author turned out, may
be guessed by the fact that the engagement for a year ended in five
months. The great fact at which Goldsmith kicked was, that not
only Griffiths, but his icife, was in the regular habit of acting as the
censor, and altering the articles written for the lleview.
From this time to the day of his death Goldsmith was regularly
launched into the drudgery of literature ; the most wearing, feverish,
uncertain, and worst remunerating life under the sun. To live in
one long anxiety, and to die poor, was his lot, as it has been that of
thousands of others. There are innocent minds, who are filled witii
gladness at the sight of a goodly library ; who feast on a well-bound
j'ow of books, as the lover of nature does on a poetical landscape or
on a bank of violets. For my part, I never see such a collection of
books witliout an inward pang. They remind me of a catacomb ;
every volume is in my eyes but a bone in the great gathering of the
remains of literajy martyrs. When I call to mind the pleasure with
which many of these books were written, followed by the agonies of
210 GOLDSMITH
disappointment thoy brought ; the repulses and contempt of book-
sellers, to whom the authors had carried them in all the flush of
their inexperience and of high hope ; the cruel malice of the critics
which assailed them, —
'• Those cut-throat bandits in tlie paths of fame ;
Bloody dissectors, worse than ten Monros :^
lie hacks to teach, they mangle to expose." — Burns.
When I think of the glorious hopes which accompanied their com-
position, and the terrible undeceiving which attended their i)ublicu-
tion ; when I reflect how many of these fair tomes were written in
bitterest poverty, with the most aching hearts, in the most cheerlci-s
homes, and how manj' others ruined the writers who were tolerably
well off before they jjut pen to paper ; when I remember, on passing
my eye along them, how many of them never were raised to their
present rank till the unhappy authors were beyond the knowledge
of it ; when I see others which had their fame during the author's
life-time, but enriched only the lucky bibliopole, and left the con-
scious producer of wealth only doubly poor by seeing it in the en-
joyment of another ; when I see those works which, while the author
lived, were assailed as blasphemous and devilish, now the text-books
of liberty and progress ; and when I call to mind all the tears which
have bedewed them, the sadness of soul, often leading to suicide,
which has weighed down the immortal spirits which created them, —
I own that there is to me no such melancholy spectacle as a tine
cnllection of books.
Goldsmith had his full share of this baptism of literary wretched-
ness. I cannot follow him minutely through the years of book-
drudgery and all its attendant adventures. Suffice it, that he wrote
ail immense mass of articles for the periodicals ; hosts of histories ;
plays, tales, essays and the like, anonymously ; and which, therefore,
brought him precarious bread, but little fame. He commenced
writing in the Monthly Keview, in 1757, and it was not till 1764
that his name was first affixed to his first poem — The Traveller.
Thus he served a seven years' apprenticeship to anonymous author-
ship before he began to take that rank in English literature which
was his destined portion ; exactly in ten years more he was in his
grave, having in the mean time given to posterity his exquisite
Deserted Village ; his inimitable Vicar of Wakefield ; his Good-
natured Man, and She Stoops to Conquer ; besides hosts of histories,
written to make the pot boil, — Histories of Animated >N"ature ; of
]:^ngland. Greece, Rome, and what not. During the whole of his
career the pecuniary condition of Goldsmith was one of uneasiness.
It is true that his generous, improvident disposition might have left
the result the same had he won ten times the sum he did ; but one
cannot help regarding the sums received by him for his writings as
'tomething most humiliating, when their real value to the booksellers
of all ages is considered. ^7e find his life abounding Vi'ith his bor-
rowing two and three guineas of his bookseller ; and receiving sjich
sums for articles. The Traveller bi'ought him tirciili/ guineas ! The
Vicar of Wakefield, sixtij ; and for the Deserted Village, one hundred ;
GOLDSMITH. 5^17
—not two buiulred pounds altogether, for three of the most popular
works in any language. It would be a curious fact to ascertain, were
it possible, what these three works alone have made for the book-
sellers.
But if Goldsmith was not well remunerated for the works with-
which he enriched the English language, he was rich in friends.
Johnson, Burke, Sir Joshua Reynolds, all the great men of the age,
v\-ere his intimate associates, and knew how to value both his genius
and his unselfish nature. The friendship of Johnson for him was
beautiful. All the world knows the story of Johnson selling " the
manuscript of the Vicar of Wakefield" to save the author from an
arrest of his landlady for arrears of rent. It has been made the
subject of more than one excellent painting ; but it is not so gene-
rally known, that so uncertain were both Johnson and the publisher
of its merits, that it remained nearly two years in the pubhsher's
desk before he ventm-ed to publish it. It was the fame of Tlie
Traveller which emboldened the bibliopole to bring it out, and the
public at once received it with one instant and general cheer.
But it was the public which welcomed it thus warmly, not the
critics. Some of these never even noticed it, others gave a bare
account of its story, but not one of them dared to praise it heartily,
if he ever perceived its merit. It requires genius to discover genius,
or, what is better, heart. And it was the unsophisticated heart in
the reading public at large which was at once touched by the pathos,
tlie humour, and the genuine pictures of life in tliis incomparable
story. Before the year was out it had passed through three editions ;
and then the directors of the literary world began to find that there
was something in it. Goldsmith lived to see its sixth edition ; an(.l
since his time it has passed through some hundreds ; has been
translated into almost every language, including the Chinese, and
has received the highest applause from the greatest geniuses of all
nations. Goethe, in his " Wahrheit und Dichtung," says that, being in-
troduced to his notice by Herder, it opened up a new world to him ;
and every one feels how much he has endeavoured to give to one
of the most interesting episodes of his student life, that of the
daughters of the Pfarrer of Sesenheim the colouring of Goldsmith.
'We must now confine ourselves to a brief indication of successive
j'csidences and haunts of Goldsmith during his iiterary life in London ;
first observing only, that so unpromising for a long time was the field
of authorship, that lie sought several times to quit it. In 17^8, ho
procured the post of physician and surgeon to one of the factories
on the coast of Coromandel, but was refused his certificate at Sur-
geons' Hall, as not duly qualified. He tried, in 17G0, to procure the
Bituation of secretary to the Society of Arts, as a means of perma-
nent support ; and failing, he recurred to a wild project, which he
had entertained years before, of going out to the East to decypher
the inscriptions on the Written Mountains, though he was totally
ignorant of Arabic or the language in wliich the inscriptions might
be supposed to be written. His inducement was the salary of '.iOOL
a-3'ear, which had been left for that puvpo.se. He pi-oposed in thi?
218 GOLDSMITH.
expedition also to acquire a knowledge of the arts peculiar to tha
FJast, and introduce them into Britain. When Johnson heard of thia
he said,—" Why, Sir, he would bring home a grinding-barrow, which
yon see in every street of London, and think he had furnished a
"wonderful improvement." The scheme appeared as visionary in
other quarters, and so fell through. These various plans, however,
all show what a thorny path was that of authorship to him.
We find Goldsmith first residing, after he had quitted Griffiths's
roof, about 1757, in the vicinity of Salisbury-square, Fleet-street ;
where exactly, is not known. At this time he was in the habit of
frequenting the Temple Exchange coffee-house, near Temple-bar ;
where he had his letters addressed, and where he even saw, according
to the fashion of the times, his patients, when he had any. There
does not appear to bo any such coffee-house now. Green-ai'bour-
court, between the Old Bailey and what was lately Fleet Market,
was his next abode, where he located himself towards the end of
17oS. " Here," says his biographer, "he became'well-known to his
literary brethren, was visited by them, and his lodgings well remem-
bered."^ This house, a few years ago, formed the abode, as it appears
to have done in his own time, of laborious indigence. The adjoining
] louses likewise presented every appearance of squalid poverty, every
floor being occupied by the poorest class. Two of the number fell
down from age and dilapidation ; and the remainder, on the same
side of the court, including that in which the poet resided, standing
on the right-hand corner on entering from Farringdon-street by what
is called, from their steepness and number. Breakneck-steps, — were
taken down some time afterwards to avoid a similar catastrophe.
They were four stories in height, the attics had casement windows,
and at one time they were probably inhabited by a superior class of
tenants. The site is now occupied by a large building, enclosed by
a wall running through the court or square, intended for the stabling
and lofts of a waggon office."
In the beginning of March, 1759, he was seen here by the Rev. Mr.
Percy, afterwards Bishop Percy, the collector of the Reliques, and
author of the Hermit of Warkworth, one of his earliest literary
friends. "The doctor," observed the prelate, "was emj^loyed in
writing his Enquiry into Polite Learning, in a wretchedly dirty room,
in which there was but one chair ; and when, from civility, this was
offered to his visitant, he himself was obliged to sit in the vrindow.
While they were conversing, some one gently rapped at the door,
and on being desired to come in, a poor ragged little girl of very
decent behaviour entered, who, dropping a curtsy, said — 'lly mamma
sends her compliments, and begs the favour of your lending her
a potful of coals.' "
f Mr. Prior, in 1820, going into a small shop in the Clapham-road to
purchase the first edition of Goldsmith's Essays, lying in the window,
found the woman in the shop an old neighbour of the poet's. She
said she was a near relative of the woman who kept the house in
Green-arbour-court, and at the age oF seven or eight went frequently
thither ; one of the inducements to which was the cakes and sweet
GOLDSMITU. 219
meats given to her and other children of the family by the gentleman
■who lodged there. These they duly valued at the moment ; but when
afterwards considered as the gift of one so eminent, the recollection
became the source of pride and boast. Another of his amusements
consisted in assembhug these children in his room, and inducing
them to dance to the music of his flute. Of this instrument, as
a relaxation from study, he was fond. He was usually shut up in
the room during the day, went out in the evenings, and preserved
regular hours. His habits otherwise were sociable, and he had several
visitors. One of the companions whose society gave him particular
jileasure w^as a respectable watchmaker, residing in the same court,
celebrated for the possession of much wit and humour ; qualities
which, as they distinguish his own writings, he professes to have
sought and cultivated wherever they were to be found. .
Here the woman related that Goldsmith's landlord, having fallen
into difSculties, was at length arrested ; and Goldsmith, who owed
a small sum of money for rent, being applied to by his wife to assist
in the release of her husband, found that, although without money,
he did not want resources. A new suit of clothes was consigned to
the pawnbroker, and the amount raised proving much more than
sufficient to discharge his own debt, was handed over for the release
of the prisoner. What is most singular is, that this eftbrt of active
benevolence to rescue a debtor from gaol, gave, in all probability,
rise to a charge against him of dishonesty. As we have said. Gold-
smith proposing to go out to India, took his examination at Surgeons'
Hall. To make a creditable appearance there, he had borrowed
money of Griffiths, the bookseller, for a new suit of clothes. These
clothes Griffiths soon afterwards discovered hanging at a pawn-
broker's door. As Goldsmith had lost the situation he had boasted
of when he borrowed this money, and kept his own not very flatter-
ing secret of the cause of the loss — his rejection at Surgeons' Hall,
— Griffiths, a man of coarse mind, at once jumped to the conclusion
that it was all a piece of trickery. He demanded an explanation of
Goldsmith ; Goldsmith refused to give it. He demanded the return
of his money ; Goldsmith, of course, had it not. They came to
a fierce and violent, and, as it proved, irreconcilable quarrel ; and
Goldsmith, disdaining to explain the real circumstances, long bore
the disgrace of duplicity as the result of his generous act.
There is one more anecdote connected with his residence here,
and it is characteristic. A gentleman inquiring whether he was
within, was shown up to his room without farther ceremonj^, when,
soon after having entered it, a noise of voices, as if in altercation,
was heard by the people below, the key of tlie door at the same
moment being turned within the room. Doubtful of the nature of
the interview, the attention of the landlady was excited, but both
voices being distinguished] at intervals, her suspicions of personal
violence were lulled, aiKl no further notice taken. £ate in the even-
nig the door was unlocked, a good supper ordered by the visitor from
the neighbouring tavern, and the gentlemen who met so ungraciou.sly
at first, .spent the remainder of the evening in great good Inimour,
1
220 GOLDSMITH.
The explanation given of this scene was, that the poet being behind-
hand with certain writings for the press, and the stated period of
jjublication arrived, the intruder, who was a printer or publislier,
probably Hamilton or Wilkie, for both of whom he wrote at that
time, would not quit the room till they were finished ; and for this
species of durance infiicted on the author, the supper formed the
I apology.
^ In those apartments, little indebted as we may believe to the
labours of the housemaid, he is said to have observed the predatory
habits of the spider, and drawn up that paper on the subject which
appeared in the fourth number of the Bee, reprinted in the Essays,
and given in substance in the History of Animated Nature. In
these lodgings he wrote a Memoir of the Life of Voltaire, and a
Translation of the Henriade ; an Enquiry into the State of Polite
Learning in Europe ; besides a multitude of reviews and other
articles in the Bee, the Busybody, and other magazines of the day.
He wrote also his Chinese Letters, and newspaper articles at least
two a-week, at the rate of a guinea per article. In 1760 he quitted
Green-arbour-court, and took respectable lodgings in Wine-office-
court, Fleet-street, where he continued about two years in the house
of an acquaintance, a relative of the friendly bookseller, Newbery,
predecessor of Hunter, corner of St. Paul's Churchyard, since of
Harris, and now Grant and Griffiths. Here he had a large literary
acquaintance amongst men of aU grades of reputation and talent.
Amongst them Dr. Percy was a frequent visitor, and here it was
that Dr. Johnson was introduced to him by Dr. Percy, at a large
party which Goldsmith gave to persons chiefly literary. Johnson
went dressed in his highest style, and on Percy remarking it as they
went along, '•'Why, Sir," said Johnson, " I hear that Goldsmith, who
is a very great sloven, justifies his disregard of cleanhness and
decency by quoting my practice ; and I am desirous this night to
show him a better examiile." From the first moment of meeting,
these two great men took vastly to each other, and continued firm
friends till Goldsmith's death.
During Goldsmith's residence in Wine-olfice-court, he was busily
employed on a pamphlet on the Cock-lane Ghost ; a History of
Mecklenburg ; the Art of Poetry on a New Plan ; an Abridgement
of Plutarch ; Additions to English History ; a Life of Beau Nash ;
and contributions to the Christian Magazine : most of these being
written for Newbery. To relieve the tedium of his drudgery, he
■\vas in the habit of frequenting the IMonday evening meetings of the
Robin Hood Debating Society, held at a house of that name in
Butcher-row, whither it had been removed from the Essex Head, in
Essex-street, in the Strand. The payment of sixpence formed the
only requisite for admission ; three half-pence of which were said to
be put by for the purposes of charity. The annual number of
visitors averaged about 5,000. A gilt chair indicated the presiding
I'.uthority, and all questions, not excepting religion and politics, were
open to discussion. In these discussions Goldsmith used even to
Li,ke part, but his '/vi\d delight was to listen to thp harangues of
GOLiySMlTH. 221
au eloquent baker, at the conclusion of one of which Goldsmith
exclaimed to his companion, Derrick, "That man was meant by
nature for a lord chancellor ; " to which Derrick replied, " No, no,
not so high ; he was only intended for master of the rolls' "'he mar^
actually became a magistrate in Middlesex, and, as was said, a first-
rate one.
In 1762 Goldsmith quitted Wine-office-court, and took lodgings in
the house of a Mrs. Elizabeth Fleming, in Islington. This was to be
near his friend and publisher, Mr. Newbery, who resided at Canon-
buiy-house, near to Mrs. Fleming's. Here he continued till 17G4,
chiefly employed upon job-work for his friend Newbery ; amongst
the most important, the Letters of a Nobleman to his Son, and the
Hi.story of England. He used to relieve the monotony of his life by
weekly visits to the Literary Club, of which Johnson, "Burke, and Sir
Joshua Eeynolds, were principal members, and which was held at
the Turk's Head, Gerrard-street, Soho.
Here, there is every reason to believe, occurred the event already
alluded to, the thi'eat of his arrest, and the sale of the mariuscript
of the Vicar of Wakefield, by Johnson, to liberate him. Of this
story there have been various versions ; Mrs. Piozzi, Sir John Hawkins,
Cumberland, and Boswell, all relate it, all profess to have heard it
from Johnson, and yet each tells it very dift'erently. In all these
stories, however, there is a landlady demanding arrears of rent, and
bailiffs waiting to arrest if the money were not forthcoming. All
agree that Goldsmith was drinking, most of them say Madeira, to
drown his vexation ; and Cumberland adds, that the landlady jm-o-
jDosed the alternative of payment or marriage. W^hether the latter
point were i-eally included in the demand is not likely ever to be
known : but that ]\Irs. Fleming, who went by the name of Goldsmitb's
ho.stess, and is thus painted by Hogarth, was the woman in question,
I think there can be little doubt ; though Prior, the biographer, would
fain exempt her from the charge, and suppose the scene to occur in
some temporary lodging. There does not appear the smallest gi'ound
for such a supposition. All facts point to this place and person.
Goldsmith had been here for at least a year and a half ; for Prior
himself gives the particulars of this landlady's bill reaching to
June 22d. As it occurred in this year, and about this time, — for it
is expressly stated that the Vicar of Wakefield was kejjt about two
years by the bookseller unpublished, and it was not published till
the end of March, 1766, — it could not possibly happen anywhere
else. He could not have left Mrs. Fleming, or if he had, he could
not have been away long enough to accumulate any alarming score.
Here, on the contrary, everything indicates that he was in debt an<l
difficulty. He had been at least a year and a half here, and might,
and probably had, run a good way into his landlady's books. Th(5
biographer states expressly that Goldsmith teas in great difficulties,
and for some months was invisible, — said to have made a trip into
Yorkshire. The biographer also shows that Newbery, the bookseller,
generally paid the landladv ■^.-^r Goldsmith ; but it comes out that
Goldsmith was now also rx"^ far behind with Newberj', owing ])im
222 GOLDSMITH.
no less than 111/. ; and next comes an obvious dislocation with
Newbery himself. It is a fact which does not seem to have struck
the biographer, that when Johnson sold the manuscript of the Vicar
of Waketield, he did not sell it to Newbery, though Newbery was
not only Goldsmith's publisher, but his own. He went and sold
it to a nephew of Newbery's, Mr. Francis Newbery, of Paternoster-
row. Now there must have been a reason for this ; and what so likely
as that Goldsmith having run too deeply into debt had alarmed
Newbery — laublishers are careful men — that he had not only refused
to advance more, but had withdrawn his guarantee to the landlady.
This being the case, Goldsmith would be at his wit's end. "With
long arrears of rent and board, for Mrs. Fleming found that too, the
security withdrawn by Newbery, she would be alarmed, and insist
on Goldsmith's paying. To Newbery he could not fly, and in his
despair he sent for Johnson. Johnson sold tne novel, but not to
John Newbery. With him it would only have gone to reduce the
■standing claim, with another it could bring what was wanted, instant
cash. What confirms this view of the case is, moreover, the fact
that immediately after this Goldsmith did quit his old landlady, and
return to' London.
Canonbury-tower, or Canonbury-house, as it is indifferently called,
is often said to have been a residence of Goldsmith; and the room is
shown which he used to occupy, and where it is said he wrote the
Deserted Village. The reason given for Goldsmith's going to live at
Islington is, tha.t it was a pleasant, rural situation, and that there
he would be near Newbery, his publisher, who engaged with Gold-
smith's landlady to pay the rent. Newbery had apartments in
Canonbury-house, and here Goldsmith visited him. Anon, as his
difficulties increased, he used to hide from his creditors in the tower,
where he lay concealed for days and weeks. Verj- probably he was
there all the time he was said to be gone into Yorkshire.
As to his having written the Deserted Village there, that is quite
likely. It is equally probable that he might write there The Traveller,
wliich was iiublished at the end of the very year he left Islington.
The Deserted Village was not published for five years afterwards, or
in 1769 ; and was, if written at Canonbury, the fruit of a subsequent
residence there in 1767. His fixed abode was then in the Temple:
but he had apartments for part of the summer in Canonbury-house.
and was visited there by most of his literary friends. On many of
these occasions they adjourned to a social dinner at the Crown
tavern in the Lower-road, where tradition states them to have been
very jovial. It is not improbable that he wrote part of the Vicar of
Wakefield -at Islington too, having, as we see, completed it at the
time of his threatened arrest, that is, at the close of his residence at
Islington.
Canonbury-tower, at the time Goldsmith used to frequent it, was
a fine airy place, in a sweet rural neighbourhood. Geoffrey Crayon
Bays : " It is an ancient brick tower, hard by ' merry Islington,' the
remains of a hinating-seat of Queen Elizabeth, where she took the
j-lea.'>ure of the country when the neighbourhood was all woodland.
GOLDSMITH. 223
\Vhat gave it particular interest in my eyes was the circumstance
that it had been the residence of a poet. It was here Goldsmith
resided when he wrote his Deserted Village. I was shown the very
apartment. It was a relic of the original style of the castle, with
panelled wainscot and Gothic windows. I was pleased with its air
of antiquity, and its having been the residence of poor Goldy."
Ii-ving located his " Poor Devil Author" in this room of Goldsmith's,
but represents him as soon driven away by the troops of Londoners.
" Sunday came, and with it the whole city world, swarming about
fanonbury-castle. I could not open my window but I was stunned
with shouts and noises from the cricket-ground ; the late quiet road
lieneath my windows was alive with the tread of feet and the clack
of tongues ; and, to complete my misery, I found that my quiet
retreat was absolutely a ' shovz-housc,' being shown to strangers at
sixpence a head. There was a perpetual tramping up stairs of
citizens and their families, to look about the country from the top
of the tower, and to take a peep at the city through the telescope,
to try if they could discern their own chimneys."
The reason why Irving located his " Poor Devil Author " in Canon-
bury-tower, no doubt, was because it had been the resort of several
such, as well as men of gi'eater note, — Smart ; Chambers, author of
t he Cyclopcedia ; Humphries, author of Canons, a poem, Ulysses, an
opera, &c.
" Here Humpliiies breathed Ivis last, tlie Muses' fiienU,
And Chambers found his mighty labours end."
See on the distant slope, majestic shows
Old Canonbury's tower, an ancient pile ,
To various fates assigned ; and where by turns
Meanness and grandeur have alternate reigned.
Thither in latter days hath genius fled
From yonder city to repine and die.
There the sweet Bard of Auburn sate, and tuned
The plaintive moanings of his village dirge.
There learned Chambers treasured lore for jiiti/i,
And Newbery there his ABC for babes."
One of these citizens who took a particular pleasure in a visit to
Caiionbury-towcr was William Hone. The view of the tower in his
lOvery-Day Book is very correct, except that there is now an iron
balustrade round the top, for greater security of those who ascend
it for the prospect. His account of it is as follows : —
' Canonbury -tower is sixty feet high, and seventy feet square. It
is part of an old mansion which appears to have been erected, or, if
erected before, much altered, about the reign of Elizabeth. The
more ancient ediiice was erected by the priors of the Canons of St.
Bartholomew, Smithfield, and hence was calle I Canonbury, to whom
:t appertained until it was suiTcndered with the priory to Henry Vill. ;
and when the religious houses were dissolved, Henry gave the mansion
to "^Jliomas Lord Cromwell. It afterwards passed through other
liand.s, till it was possessed by Sir John Spencer, an Alderman and
Lord Mayor of London, known by the name of * rich Spencer.' While
he resided at Canonbury, a Dunkirk pirate came over in a shallop t(/
Baj'king creek, and hid himself with some 9;rmed men in Islington-
224 GOLDS.MITII
fields, near the path Sir John usually took from his house iu Crosby-
place to this mansion, with 'the hope of making him prisoner ; bub
as he remained in town that night, they were glad to make off, fur
fear of detection, and returned to France disappointed of their prey,
and of the lai'ge ransom they calculated on for the release of his
person. His sole daughter and heiress, Elizabeth,* was carried off in
a baker s basket from Canonbury-house, by William, the second Lord
Compton, lord president of Wales. He inherited Canonbury, with
the rest of Sir John Spencer's wealth, at his death, and was after-
wards created Earl of Northampton ; in this family the manor still
remains."
In Hone's time a Mr. Symes, the bailiff of the manor under Lord
Northampton, was residing in the tower. He had lived there for
thirty-nine years. His mother-in-law, Mrs. Evans, wife to the former
bailiff, told Mr. Symes that her aunt, Mrs. Tapps, a seventy year
inhabitant of the tower, was accustomed to talk much about Gold-
smith and his apartment. It was an old oak room on the first floor.
]\[rs. Tapps affirmed that he there wrote his Deserted Village, and
slept in a large press bedstead placed in the eastern coi-ner. Since
(loldsmith's time the room has been much altered and subdivided.
The house is still the residence of the bailiff of the manor.
Poor Hone lamented sorely over the changes going on in this once
sweet neighbourhood. " I ranged the old rooms, and took perhaps
a last look from the roof. The eye shrunk from the wide havoc
below. Where new buildings had not covered the sward, it was
cmbowelling for bricks, and kilns emitted flickering fire and sul-
phurous stench. Surely the dominion of the brick-and-mortar king
will have no end ; and cages for commercial spirits will be there,
instead of every green thing."
" So, Canonbury, thou dost stand awhile;
Yet fall at last thou must ; for thy rich warden
Is fast ' improving; ' all thy pleasant fields
Have fled, and hrick-kilns, hricks, and houses rise
At his command : the air no longer yields
A fragrance — scarcely health ; the very skies
Grow dim and town-like ; a cold creeping gloom
Steals into thee, and saddens every room ;
And so realities come unto me.
Clouding the chambers of my mind, and making me — like thee."
One-and-twenty years have passed since Hone took this melancholy
view of the changes going on round Canonbury-tower. There has
been no pause in the process of housification since then. The whole
neighbourhood is fast engulfing in one overflowing London. What
a change since Queen Elizabeth used to come to this solitary tower,
to hunt in the far-spreading woodlands around ; or to take a view
from its summit of her distant capital, and of the far-off winding
Thames ! What a change even since Goldsmith paced this oUl
tower, and looked over green fields, and thick woods, and over tlic
.vhole airy scene, full of solitude and beauty ! There are still okl
gardens with their stately cedars, and lanes that show that they were
* For an account of this extraordinary woman, see " The Visits to Remarkabla
Places," vol. i. p. 3l.«-
GOLDSMITH. 22.5
once in a rural district, aud tliat Canonbury was a light pleasant
place. But the goodly house of Sir Walter Raleigh, who grew ena-
moured of the spot from attending his royal mistress thither, is
degraded to the Pied Bull, and long terraces of new houses extinguish
one green held rajsidly after another. Everything seems in a state
of spreading and acti^'0 advance, except the great tavern near tho
tower, whose cricketers and revellers used to din Washington Irving
so much, and that now stands empty and ruinous ; the very
Sunday roisterers from the city have sought some more greenly
suburban resort.
The last residences of Goldsmith in London were within the pre-
cincts of the Temple. He first took apartments ou the library
staircase. No. 2, Garden-court. This is now pulled down, and I
suppose on the site stands the new library, for on going into tho
court you now find no No. 2, but only Nos. 3 and 4, looking odd and
puzzhug enough to the inquirer. Hence he removed to the King's-
bench-walk ; but the particular house does not appear to be known.
Lastly, he removed to No. 2, Brick-court. His lodgings w^ere on tho
second floor, on the right hand ascending the staircase ; and are said
to consist of three rooms, sufficiently airy and pleasant. With an
imprudence which brought upon him deep anxiety, and probably
hastened his end, he borrowed of the booksellers and of the occupier of
the opposite rooms, ]\Ir. Edmund Bott — a literary barrister, who was
much esteemed by him, and became his j^rincipal creditor at his death,
and the possessor of his papers — four hundred pounds, with which he
furnished these apartments in an expensive manner. Here, also, ho
occasionally gave expensive suppers to his literary friends. Below
Goldsmith, on the tirst floor, lived Sir William Blackstone, and is
said there to have written his Commentaries. There were other
barristers living in the Temple, especially a Mr. William Cooke,
author of a work on Dramatic Genius, and called Conversation
Cooke, with whom Goldsmith was on terms of intimacy. In this
portion of his life, the accounts of him abound with the naivetes of
his talk and character, for which he is more famous with some people
than for his genius. His bloom-coloured coat, with sky-blue linings,
is stiU commented on by writers, who will never be able to com-
prehend the grand nobihty of his nature. He was now visited by
almost every man of note of the time ; Johnson with his Boswell,
Burke, Reynolds, Garrick, Percy, Sir IPhilip Francis, &c. Almost
twenty years after his death these rooms became the scene of a
tragical adventure, by a Miss Brodcrick shooting in them a Mr.
Eddington, with whom she had formerly lived, and who took this
desperate means of punishing his desertion.
These rooms are at the lower end of Brick-court, at the corner of
the range of building on your right hand as you descend the court
from Fleet-street. There seems to be a considerable mistake in
Prior's account of them. Nearly all that he says appears to apply
much more natm-aUy to his rooms in Garden than in Brick court.
In Garden-court, they most likely would be airy and pleasant, and
there the anecdote of his watching the rooks might take place. It
226 GOLDSMITH,
is thus given : " The view towards the gardens supplied him with
an observation given in Animated Nature, respecting the natural
history of the rooks. ' I have often amused myself with observing
their plan of policy from my window in the Temple, that looks
upon a grove where they have made a colony in the midst of the
city,' " &c.
This could not be in Brick-court, where there is no view towards
the garden. The court is built all round with buildings as old as
Goldsmith's time, and older. In his rooms in Garden-court he could
have full view of the elms in the garden, the probable scene of the
rookery in question.
During Goldsmith's life here, he was in the habit of meeting his
literary friends often in the evenmg at the Mitre tavern, Fleet-
ijtreet ; at a card club at the Devil tavern, near Temple-bar, not now
existing ; at the Globe tavern, also near there, nov/ gone too ; and at
Jack's coffee-house, now Walker's hotel. Dean-street, corner of
Queen-street, Soho. This was at that time a resort of Garrick and
his friends, being kept by Jack Roberts, formerly a singer of Gar-
rick's theatre. It was here that Goldsmith confounded the gravity
of Johnson with one of his oft-hand and simple jokes. They were
Bupping tete-a-tete on rumps and kidneys. Johnson observed,- — •
" Sir, these rumps are pretty little things, but they require a good
many to satisfy a man." "Aye, but," said Goldsmith, "how many
of these would reach to the moon 'i " " To the moon ! aye. Sir,
I fear that exceeds your calculation." "Not at all. Sir," said
Goldsmith, " I think I could tell." " Pray then let us hear." " Why
(i//e, if it were long enough." Johnson growled at this reply for some
time, but at last, recollecting himself, " Well, Sir, I have deserved
it ; I should not have provoked so foolish an answer by so foolish a
question."
This house, in 1770, was the oldest tavern in London but throe,
and is now probably the oldest. Mr. Walker, the landlord at the
time I visited it, who had lived in it fifty years, and had then
reached the venerable age of ninety, was proud of the ancient
honours of the house. On his card he duly informed his friends,
that it was here that " Johnson, Garrick, Goldsmith, and other
literary characters of eminence," used to resort. The house is old,
spacious, and quiet, and well adapted for the sojourn of families
from the country, who are glad to escape the noise of more fre-
quented parts of the city. By permission of Mr. Walker, I present
at the head of this article a view of the room once honoured by
Johnson and Goldsmith.
It is pleasant to find the author of The Traveller and Deserted
Village, amid all his labours, ever and anon escaping to the country,
which no man more profoundly enjoyed. It is delightful to imagine
with what intense j)leasure he must have traversed the groves or
Ham, and the lovely scenes of Dove-Dale. He made many similar
rambles into Hampshire, Sussex, Suftblk, Yorkshire, Leicestershire,
and Lincolnshire. When he wanted at once to enjoy country retire-
ment apd hard work, he would " abscond " from his town associates
GOLDSMn'H. 227
without a word — dive iuto some queer obscure retreat, often on the
Harrow or Edgeware roads, and not be visible for two or three
months together. One of these retreats is said to be a small wooden
cottage, on the north side of the Edgeware-road, about a mile from
Paddington, near what is called Kilburn Priory. At such places it
was his great luxury, when tired of writing, to stroll along the shady
hedge-sides, seating himself in the most agreeable spots, and occa-
sionally setting down thoughts which arose for future use. When
he was in a more sociable mood, he got ujj parties for excursions into
the neighbourhood of London, in which he and his companions
had a good long ramble amongst the villages, dined at the village
inn, and so home again in the evening. These he called "trades-
men's holidays," and thus were Blackhcath, Wandsworth, Fulham,
Chelsea, Hampstead, Highgate, Highbury, &c., explored and enjoyed.
"There was a very good ordinary," says Cons^ersation Cooke, who
was occasionally of the party, " at Highbury Barn about this time,
at ten-pence per head, including a penny to the Avaiter ; and the
company generally consisted of literary characters, a few Templars,
and citizens who had left oif trade. The whole expenses of this da3''.s
fete never exceeded a crown, and were oftener from three and six-
pence to four shillings."
On those occasions Goldsmith gave himself up to all his love of
good fellowship and of generously seeing others happy. He made
it a rule that the party should meet and take a splendid breakfast
at his rooms. The party generally consisted of four or five persons ;
and was almost sure to include some humble person, to whom such
a treat would never come from any other quarter. One of the most
constant of these was his poor amanuensis, Peter Barlow. Peter had
his oddities ; but with them a spirit of high independence. He
always wore the same dress, and never would pay more than a certain
sum, and that a trifle, for his dinner, but that he would insist on
paying. The dinner always costing a great deal more. Goldsmith
paid the difference, and considered himself well reimbursed by the
fund of amusement Peter furnished to the party. One of their
frequent retreats was the well known Chelsea Bun-house. Another
of these companions was a Dr. Glover, a medical man and author
of no great note, who once took Goldsmith into a cottage in one
of their rambles at West End, Hampstead, and took tea with the
family as an old acquaintance, when he actually knew no more of the
people than Goldsmith did, to his vast chagrin on discovering the
fact.
A temporary retreat of Goldsmith's was a cottage near Edgeware,
in the vicinity of Canons. There he lived, in conjunction with his
friend Bott, and there he worked hard at his Roman History. It had
been the retreat of a wealthy shoemaker of Piccadilly ; and, having
•I pleasant garden, they christened the place " The Shoemaker's
Paradise." The last country lodging which he had was at Hyde, on
the Edgeware-road. It is described by Prior as " of the superior
^rder of farm-houses, and stands upon a gentle eminence in what is
called Hyde-lane, leading to Kenton, about three hundred yards from
I 2
228 GOLDSMITH.
the village of Hyde, on the Edgeware-road, and commauds a view of
an undulating country directly opposite, diversified with wood, in
the direction of Hendon." From Mr. Selby, the occupier of the pro-
perty, Mr. Prior obtained this information. He was himself a lad of
sixteen at the time Goldsmith lodged there, and remembered him
perfectly. He had only one room there, up one pair of stairs, to the
right of the landing. There he wrote She Stoops to Conquer. He
boarded with the family, but commonly had his meals sent up to his
own apartment. When he had visitors to tea, — for his friends used
to come out from London, take tea, and then drive home, — he had
the use of the parlour immediately under his own room. Occasionally
he would wander into the kitchen, and stand with his back towards
the fire, apparently absorbed in thought. Sometimes he strolled
about the fields, or was seen loitering and musing under the hedges,
or perusing a book. In the house he usually wore his shirt-collar
open, in the manner represented in the portrait by Sir Joshua.
Occasionally he read much in bed, and his mode of extinguishing his
candle, v/hen out of immediate reach, was to fling his slipper at it,
which in the morning was found near the overturned candlestick,
l)edaubed with grease.
There, then. Goldsmith sper:t the last days of his life, except what
lie spent on his sick-bed, in the full enjoyment of those two great
t;harms of his existence, nature and books. There he forgot all his
bitter struggles, his ill -paid, endless work for the publishers, ami
even the empty honours of his latter years, which he expressively
styled " giving him ruffles, when he wanted a shirt." There he could
ibrget that great disease of hunger, which be said killed so many
who were said to die of broken hearts, some of whom he declared that
lie had known. He was still poor, but famous, and in these moments
happy. Occasionally he would indulge in a festive diversion —
liave a dance got up amongst his visitors ; and on one occasion took
the young people of the house in a carriage to Windsor, to see a
company of strolling players, and made himself and his juvenile
])arty very merry by his remarks on the performance. From these
({uiet enjoyments and field musings, death called him away. He
returned to town, and died in his lodgings in the Temple, on the 4th
of April, 1774, only five months more than forty-five years of ago.
1 lis constitution is said to have been exhausted by his labours and
his consuming anxieties. He died two thousand pounds in debt,
and Dr. Johnson, on hearing this fact, exclaimed, " Was ever poet so
trusted before ?" He was privately interred in the Temple burial-
ground, and a tabular monument to his honour placed on the walls
of Westminster Abbey. That gi-eat and noble building does not hold
the remains of a nobler or better heart. Ohver Goldsmith was a true
Irishman, generous, .impulsive, and improvident ; but he was more,
he was a true man and true poet. Whether avc laugh with him or
weep with him, we arc still the better for it.
ROBERT BURNS.
We come now to the man who is the great representative of a class
which is the pccuhar glory of Great Britain ; that is, to Robert
]jurns. It is a briUiaiit feature of English literature, that the people,
the mass, the multitude, — call them what you will, — have contributed
to it their share, and that share a glorious one. We may look in vaiu
into the literatuj-e of every other nation for the like fact. It is true
that there may be found in all countries men who, born in the lowest
walks of life — orphans, outcasts, slaves even — men labouring under
not only all the weight of social prejudices, but under the curse of
jDersonal deformity, have, through some fortunate circumstance,
generally the favour of some generous and superior person, lusen
out of their original position, and through the advantages of acade-
mical or artistic education have taken their place amongst the learned
and illustrious of their race. We need not turn back to the /Esops
and Terences of antiquity for such characters ; they are easy to select
from the annals of the middle ages, and modern art and Icai-ning ;
but there is a class, and this class is found in Great Britain alone,
which, belonging to the body of the people, has caught, as it were
passingly, just the quantum of education Avhicli had come within the
230 B0BNS.
people's reach, ami who, on this slender participation of the general
intellectual projiort}', have raised for themselves a renown, great,
glorious, and enduiing as that of the most learned or most socially
exalted of mankind. These extraordinary individuals, who arc found
in the literature of all civilized nations, — these men who, admitted
from the ranks of the people to the college or the studio, have dis-
tinguished themselves in almost every walk of science or letters, —
these have vindicated the general intellect of the human race from
every possible charge of inequality in its endowments. They have
shown triumphantly that " God is no respecter of persons." They
have thus vindicated not only man's universal capacity for greatness,
Init the Creator's justice. They have demonstrated that " God has
made of one blood all the nations of the earth ;" and still more, tliat
he has endowed them all with one intellect. Over the whole bosom
of the globe its divine Architect has spread fertility ; he has diffused
beauty adapted to the diversity of climes, and made that beauty
present itself in such a variety of forms, that the fi'eshness of its
first perception is kept alive by ever occurring novelties of construc-
tion, hue, or odour. It is the same in the intellectual as iu the
physical world. In the iinivcrsal spirit of man he has implanted the
universal gifts of his divine goodness. Genius, sentiment, feeling,
the vast capacity of knowledge and of creative art, are made the
common heritage of mankind. But climate and circumstance assert
a gi'eat and equal influence on the outer and the inner life of the
earth. Some nations, under the influences of certain causes, have
advanced beyond others ; some individuals, under the like causes, have
advanced beyond the generality of their cotemporaries. But these
facts have not proved that those nations, or those individuals, were
more highly endowed than the rest ; they have rather proved that
the soil of human nature is rich beyond all conception, — the extent
of that wealth, however, becoming only palpable through the opera-
tion of peculiar agencies. The causes which developed in Greece, iu
Rome, in India, in Egypt, such manifestations of grace, spirit, and
power at certain periods, as never were developed even there at any
other periods, before or since, present a subject of curious inquiry,
but they leave the grand fact the same ; and this fact is, that the
soul of universal man is endowed with every gift and faculty which
any possible circumstances can call upon him to exert for his benefit
and the adornment of his life. He is furnished for every good word
and work. He is a divine creature that when challenged can p)-ove
amply his divinity, though under ordinary circumstances he may be
content to walk through this existence in an ordinary guise. Every
great social revolution, every great popular excitement of every age,
has amply demonstrated this. There never was a national demand
for intellect and energy, from the emancipation of the Israelites from
the Egyptian yoke, or the destruction of the Thirty Tyrants of
Athens, down to the English or the French Eevolution, which was
not met, to the astonishment of the whole world, with such a supplj'
of orators, poets, warriors, and statesmen, speakers and actors, in-
ventors and constructors, in every shape of art, wisdom, and abilitj,
BURNS. 231
as' mast completely to certify that the powei'S which slumber in the
human bosom, are far beyond those which are called into activity.
The fertility of the soil of the earth is there in winter, but it liea
rmnoticed. The sun breaks out, and, like a giant alarmist thundering
at the doors of the world, he awakens a thousand hidden powers.
Life, universal as the earth itself, starts forth in its thousand shapes,
and all is movement, beauty, sweetness, hurrying on through a
charmed being into an exuberant fruit.
Those men, then, who have risen through the medium of a finished
education to literary, artistic, or scientific eminence, have, I repeat,
vindicated the universality of intellectual endowment ; but there is
.still another class, and that, as I have said, peculiar to these islands,
who have shown that a finished or academical education is not abso-
lutely necessary to the display of the highest order of genius. Cir-
cumstances, again, have been at work here. The circumstances of
this country are different to those of any other. We have preserved
our liberties more entire. The British people have disdained from
age to age to suffer the curb and the bit that have been put upon
the neck, and into the mouth, of the more pliant nations of the
Continent. Whether these circumstances are to be looked for in the
peculiar mixture of races, or in this particular mixture coexisting
with peculiarities of climate and insular position, might afford
scope to much argument ; enough, these circumstances have existed,
and their results do exist in a race, proud, active, free, and indomi-
table.
" Pride in their port, defiance in their eye,
I see the lords of human kind pass by ;
Intent on high designs, a tlioughtful band,
By forms unfashion'd, fresh from nature's Iiand,
I'ierce in tlieir native liardiness of soul ;
True to imagined right, above control ;
While e'en the peasant boasts these rights to scan,
And learns to venerate liimself as man."
Goldsmith, The Traveller.
Thus it is that this free constitution of the British empire ; this
spirit of general independence ; this habit of the peasant and the
artizan of venerating themselves as men, has led to an universal
awakening of mind in the people. In other countries few think ; it
is a few who are regularly educated, and arrogate the right to think,
and write, and govern. If the poor man become an acknowledged
genius, it is only through the passage of the high school. The mass
IS an inert mass ; it is a labouring, or at best a singing and dancing
multitude. But in Great Britain, there is not a man who does not
feel that he is a member of the great thinking, acting, and govern-
ing whole. Without books he has often caught the spark of inspi-
ration from his neighbour. In the field, the workshop, the alehouse,
the chartist gathering, he has come to the discussion of his rights,
and in that discussion all the powers of his spirit have felt the
arousing influence of the sea of mind around, that has boiled and
heaved from its lowest depths in billows of fire. Under the opera-
tion of this oral and, as it were, forensic education, wliich has Iteeu
going on for generations in the British empire, the whole rnun with
232 BURXS.
all his iiowers lias become wide awake ; and it required only the
.simple powers of writing and reading to enable the peasant or
artizan to gather all the knowledge that he needed, and to stand
forth a poet, an orator, a scientific inventor, a teacher himself of the
nation.
To these circumstances we owe our Burns, Hogg, Bloomfield,
Clare, Elliott, Allan Cunningham, Bamford, Nicoll, Thorn, Massey ;
our Thomas IVDUer, and Thomas Cooper. To these circumstances we
owe, however, not merely poets, but philosophers, artists, and men
of practical science. Such were Drew, Opie, Smeaton, Brindley,
Arkwright, Sfcrutt, Crompton, "Watt, Hugh Miller ; such men axe
AYilliam Faii'bairn, one of the greatest civil engineers in the world.
Sir Joseph Paxton, the architect of the Crj'stal Palace, Joseph
Barker, the religious reformer of the peojDle, and Carlton, the
vigorous delineator of Irish actual life. For such men we look in
vain abroad ; and at home they constitute themselves a constella-
tion of genius, such as more than one country of continental Eurojie
cannot muster from all the gathered lights of all its ages.
It is with pride, and more than pride, that I call the attention of
my countrymen to this great and unique section of their country's
glorious hterature. I look to the future, and see in these men but
the forerunners of a numerous race springing from the same soil.
They are evidences of the awakened mind of the common people of
England. They are pledges that out of that awakened mind there
will, as general education advances, spring whole hosts of writers,
thinkers, and actors, who shall not merely represent the Avorking
classes of our society, but shall point out the people as the grand
future source of the em'ichment of our literature. They are luminous
proofs, and the forerunners of multitudinous proofs of the same
kind, that genius is not entirely dependent uj)on art ; but can,
having once the simple machinery of reading and writing, seize on
.sufficient art to enable it to exhibit all the nobler forms of intellec-
tual life, and to speak from heart to heart the hving language of
those passions and emotions, which are the elements of all human
exertion after the good and the great, which console in distress,
liarden to necessary endurance, or fire to the generous rage of
conquest over diffi.culties, and over the enemies of their just
rights. These men are the starry lights that glitter on the verge
of that dawn in which mankind shall emerge. to its true position, —
the many being the enlightened spirits, and the few the weak
exceptions, shrinking like shadows from the noonday of human
progress.
At the head of this great class stands, first in stature as in era,
Tiobert Bui-ns. True, before him there had been a Stephen Duck,
and a Eobert Dodsley, — glow-worms preceding the morning star ;
wonders, because the day of genuine minds had not yet come ; re-
spectable men, but not geniuses of that Titanic stamp which, by its
veiy appearance, puts an end to every question as to its rank or
nature in the utter astonishment at its colossal presence. There
have been many small geniuses paraiJed before the public as curio-
BURNS, 233
sities, Lecause tliey were uneducated ; but when Burns came forth
from the crowd of his fellow-meu, it was as the poet of the people ;
issuing Hke Moses from the cloud of God's presence, with a face so
radiant with divine light, that the greatest prophets of the schools
were dazzled at the apparition. He needed no apologies of want of
academic discipline ; he was a man with all the gifts and powers of
a man, fresh and instinctive in their strength, as if direct from the
Creator's hand. Burns was the representative of the common man
in representative perfection. He was a combination of all the
powers and the failings, the strength and the weakness, of human
nature. He had the great intellect of such a specimen man, awakened
to its full consciousness, but not polished to the loss of any of its
I^rominences. He was manly, blunt, daring, independent ; full of
passion and the thirst of pleasure ; yet still, tender as a woman,
sensitive as a child, and capable of sinking to the humblest penitent
at the suggestions of his conscience, or rising to the dignity of a
prophet or the sanctity of an apostle, as the oppressions of man or
the sublimity of God aroused or exalted his spirit. He had the
thrilling nerves and the changing moods of the poet ; quick, versatile,
melancholy or humorous, he reflected all the changes of the social
sky. His sensations were too acute to obey the sole dictates of mere
reason, — they carried him to every extreme. He was now bursting
with merriment in the midst of his convivial comrades, singin^ like
the lark or the nightingale in the joy of his heart ; now thundering
against the outrages of the strong and arbitrary, or weeping in con-
vulsive grief over his follies or his wounded affections. But if his
sensations were too acute to obey reason at all times, his moral nature
was too noble not to obey the clear voice of a conscience, which he
often outraged, but never strove systematically to destroy. There
are numbers who have wondered that David should be called " a man
after God's own heart ;" but to me there is nothing wonderful in
such an appellation. God knows that we are weak and imperfect,
that in proportion to the strength of our passions are we liable to
go wrong, and he does not expect miracles from us. What ho
expects is, that errors committed in the hurricane of passion shall
be abhorred and repented of, as soon as they are fully displayed tc
our consciences. To endeavour to do right, yet, if ovei-taken with
error, to abhor oiir crime, and to I'cpent in the dust and ashes of
Ijrostrate remorse, marks a heart frail, yet noble, — and such is human
nature at best. The evidence of a corrupt spirit, of a truly criminal
nature, is that leaven of malignity, which goes doggedly wrong, sub-
stituting the base purposes of its selfishness for the broad commands
of God, and finding a satanic pleasure in working evil against its
fellow-men. Such was not Eobert Bui-ns. He was no faultless
monster, nor yet a monster with all his faults. His vivid sensibili-
ties, — those sensibiHties which gave him the capacity for poetry,
those qualities which were the necessary requisites for his vocation,
—often led him astray, often stained the purity of his mind ; but
they never succeeded in debasing his moral nature. That was too
generous, too noble, too true to the godlike gift of a great human
234 BURNS.
heart, wliicli was to feel for all mankind, and to become tlie inspiroi
of the general mass with truer and higher ideas of themselves, and
of their rank in creation. Woefully fell David of old, — the poet
taken from the sheepfold and the solitude of the wilderness to sit on
the throne of a great jDeople, — and bitterly in the sight of that people
did he lie in the dust and deplore his errors. Greatly went Eobert
Burns astray, — the poet taken from the plough to sit on the throno
of the realm of poetry, — and bitterly did he, too, bow down and
weep in the ashes of repentance. God gave, in both instances, im-
]>rcssive proofs to the world, that glorious talents given to men leave
them but men still ; and that they who envy the gift should not
forget that they too, with the gift, would be exposed to the immineut
danger of the fall. There is a comfort and a warning, tliere is a
<i;ieat moral lesson for mankind in the lives of such men — a lessori
of humility and charity. Who shall say that with a nature equally
igneous and combustible, his delinquencies would not be for greater '!
Where is the man in ten millions, that with such errors on one side
of the account, can place the same talents and virtues on the other ?
Ju the v/ordn of Burns himself : — •
" Who made the heart, 'tis He alone
Decidedly can try us ;
He knows each chord — its various tone,
Each spring — its various bias :
Tlien at the balance let's be mute,
We never can adjust it ;
What's done we partly may compute,
But know not what's resisted."
The errors of Burns were visited upon him severely in his day ;
they stand recorded against him ; no man can jjlead his example,
for he condemned himself, and the consequences of his aberrations
stand warningly side by side with the deeds themselves : but who
is he that, with all the perfections of a monotonous propriety, shall
confer the same benefits on his country and on his fellow-men ?
There was in the nature of Burns a manliness, a contempt of everj'-
thing selfish and mean, a contempt of all distinctions not based on
nature, a hatred of tyranny, a withering scorn of hypocrisy, which,
had he not possessed the brilliant genius that lie did, would, amongst
his cotemijoraries, have diflfused that tone of honest uprightness and
justness of thinking which are the truest safeguards of a country's
liberties and honour, and would have stamped him as a remarkable
man. But all these quahties were but the accorripaniments of a
genius the most brilliant, the wonders and delights of which stand
written, as it were, in lightning for ever. Besides the irresistible
contagir)n of his merriment, the flashes of his wit, the tenderness of
his sentiment, the wild laughter of his satiric scorn of cant and
priestcraft and self-righteousness, the ardour of his patriotism, the
gaiety of his social songs, there is a tone in his graver writing whicli
breathes over the hearts of his countrymen, and of all the world,
that high and dignifying feeling which ever hallows tlie heart of
man.
With Burns, to be a man is the grand distinction. All other dis-
BURNS. 235
tinctions are but the clothes which wrap the figure — the figure itself
is the real thing. To be a man, in his eye, was to be the most
glorious thing that we have any conception of on this side of
heaven ;— to be an honest man, was to be " the noblest work of
God!" That was the great sentiment which animated him, and
made him come forth from between the stilts of his plough, from
his barn or his byre, into the presence of wealth and title, with
a calm dignity and a proud bearing which astonished the artificial
creatures of society. Titles, carriages, gay garments, great houses,
what were they but the things which the man had gathered about
him for his pride or his comfort % It was for the raan that they were
created and gathered together. Without the man they were nothing,
had no value, could have no existence. Without that sohd and
central and sentient monarch, titles are but air, gay clothes but tluj
furniture of a Jew's shop, great houses but empty useless .shells,
carriages no better than wheelbari-ows. From the 'nuiii they derived
all they were or counted for ; and Burns felt that he and his
jioorest brother of the spade, and poorest sister of the spindle, were
as entirely and essentially that as the king upon his throne. The
king upon his throne ! He was set there and arrayed in all his
pageantry, and armed with all his power, solely iov the man and by
the man. In the man and his inner life, the heart, the soul, and thu
sentiment, — that wondrous mystery which, prisoned in ilesh and
chained by matter to one corner of the limitless universe, yet is
endowed with power to range through eternity — to plunge down
amidst innumerable worlds and their sv^-arming life — to soar up and
worship at the footstool of the Framer and Upholder of suns and
systems, the Father of all being. In him the poet recognised the
only Monarch of this nether world. For him, not for lords, or mil-
lionaires, or mitred priests, but for him was this august world created.
For him were its lands and waters spread abroad ; for him the
seasons set forward in the harmony of their progress ; for him were
empires and cities framed, and all the comforts of life, and the pre-
cious flowers of love and intellect breathed into the common air, and
.shed into the common heart. That was the feeling of Robert Burns,
which made him tread down all other distinctions as he did the
thistles of his own fields. That was the doctrine which he was
created and sent forth to preach. Robert Burns was the apostle of
the dignity of man, — man, in his own proper nature, standing calmly
and invincibly above every artful distinction which sought to thrust
liim from his place in God's heritage, and set over him the selfi.sh
and the base, ^\'hcn contemplating such delusive distinctions, the
winged woi'ds
" A man's a man for a' tlial ! "
burst like a lightning flash from the poet's bosom, and became the
eternal watchword of self-respecting humanity.
" The king can make a belted kni^'ht,
A marquis, duke, an a' that ;
The rank is but Die guinea stamii,
A man's a man for a' that 1 "
236
BURNS.
Bi-ave words ! glorious truth ! The soul of poetry aud the whole
scienc'e of social philosophy compressed into a single stanza, to serve
as the stay and comfort of millions of hearts in every moment when
most needed.
The preeminent merit of Burns, independent of his beauties as a
line poet, is the vigorous inculcation of these sentiments of a just
self-estimation into the peoj^le. To teach them to regard themselves
as objects of worth from their own human nature and destiny,
irrespective of the mere mode by which they live, is to confer on the
million the noblest benefaction. It is to give them at once a shield
against " the proud man's contumely," and the degradations of vice.
It is to set their feet on the firm rock of an eternal truth, and to
render them alike invulnerable to envy and despair. The man who
breathes the soul of a rational dignity into the multitude is the
greatest of possible patriots. He who respects virtue and pm'ity in
himself will respect those qualities in others ; and a nation permeated
with the philosophy of Burns would be the noblest nation that the
sun ever yet shone upon.
But it is not merely that Eobert Burns teaches his fellow-ijeasants
and citizens to fling out of their bosoms the fiends of envy and self-
depreciation ; taught by those errors for which he has been sd
•severely blamed, he has become, without question, the most efficient,
wise, and tender counsellor that they ever had. He knows all their
troubles and temptations, for he has experienced them ; and he gives
them the soundest advice under all circumstances. He weeps with
them, he rejoices with them, he worsliips with them, in such a
brotherly, and occasionally such a fatherly sympathy, that his poems
have become to the jDOor of Scotland, as they have told me, a sort of
Kecond Bible. How beautifully are blended in these stanzas the in-
dignant sense of those oppressions which never crushed more directly
the labouring poor than they do at this day in wealthy England, and
the consoling truth of a divine retribution : —
' Many and sharp tlie numerous ills
Inwoven with our frame :
?iIore pointed still we make ourselves
liegret, remorse, and shame !
And man, whose heaven-erected fare
The smiles of love adorn,
Man's inhumanity to man
Mak?s countless thousands mourn.
" If I'm designed yon lordling's .slave,
By nature's law designed.
Why was an independent wish
E'er planted in my mind 1
If not, why am I subject to
His cruelty and scorn ?
Or why has man the will and power
To make his fellow mourn t
" See yonder poor o'erlaboured wight,
So abject, mean and vile.
Who begs a brother of the earth
To give tim leave to toil ;
And see his lordly fellow-worm
The poor petition spurn.
Unmindful, though a weeping wife
And helpless offspring mourn.
Yet let not this too much, my son,
Disturb thy youthful breast;
This partial view of human kind
Is surely not the last !
The poor, oppressed, honest man,
Had never, sure, i)een born;
Had there not been some recompenoe
To comfort those that mourn !"
Eobert Burns ran off the railroad line of morality ; but listen to
the advice, warned by his own folly, which he gives to a young
friend : —
BURNS. 237
" The sacred lowe weel-placedlove, " The fear o hell's a hangman's whip
Luxuriantly indulge it ; To hand the wretch in order ;
But never tempt the illicit rove, But where ye feel your honour grip,
Tho' naething should divulge it : Let That aye he your border :
I waive the quantum o' the sin, Its slightest touches, instant pause —
The hazard of concealing ; Debar a' side pretences ;
But, och! it hardens a' within. And resolutely keep its laws,
And petrifies the feeling ! Uncaring consequences.
■' To catch dame Fortune's golden smile, " The great Creator to revere
Assiduous watt upon her; MuSft sure become the creature,
And gather gear by every wile But still the preaching cant forbear.
That's justified by honour : And ev'n the rigid feature ;
Xot for to hide it in a hedge, Yet ne'er with wits profane to range,
Xor for a train attendant ; Be complaisance extended ;
But for the glorious privilege An Atheist laugh's a poor exchange
Of being independent. For Deity offended !
" When ranting round in pleasure's ring,
Religion may be blinded ;
Or if she gie a random sting.
It may be little minded.
But when on life we're tempest-driven,
A conscience but a canker —
A correspondence fixed wi' Heaven
Is sure a noble anchor ! "
These are golden words, worthy to be committed to memory by
every young person ; they are full of the deepest wisdom. But sucli
wisdom, such golden lines, we might quote from almost every page
of Burns. In his Epistle to Davie, how cordially does he enter into
all the miseries of the poor, yet how Cioquently does he also dwell on
those blessings which God has given to all, and which no circum-
stances can take away !
" To lie in kilns and barns at e'en,
When banes are crazed and biuid is thin,
Is doubtless great distress '. "
Yet there are other seasons when Nature, even to the most abject
tramp, pours out royal pleasures.
" What though, like commoners of air,
We wander out we know not where.
But either house or hall I
Yet nature's charms, the hills and woorls,
The sweeping vales, and foaming floods,
Are free alike to all.
In days when daisies deck the ground.
And blackbirds whistle clear,
With honest joy our hearts will bound
'To see the coming year.
On braes when we jdeasc, then,
We'll sit and sowth a tune :
• Syne rhyme till 't, we '11 time till 't,
And sing 't when we hae done.
" It's no in titles nor in rank ;
It's no in wealth like Lon'on bunk,
To purchase peace and rest :
It's no in makin muckle mair ;
It's no in books ; it's no in Icar ;
To make us truly blest ;
If happiness hae not her seat
And centre in the breast,
W'' may be wise, or rich, or great,
But never can be blest.
238 BURN'?.
Nae treasures, nor pleasures,
Could make us Iiappy lang :
The heart ay's the part ay,
That makes us right or wrang."
So speaks i.lie humble ploughman of Ayrshire, the still humbler
exciseman of Dumfries, but the greatest poet of his country, and one
of the noblest and wisest men of any country or age, spite of all his
practical errors. We must now make our pilgrimage to the spots
which were his homes on larth.
The old town of Ayr, so intimately connected with the memory of
Burns, by his birth near it, by his poem of the Twa Brigs, by the
scene of Tarn o' Shanter, by the place of his monument and the
festival in his honour, and by other particulars, is a quiet and plea-
sant old town of some twenty thousand population. It lies on a
level, sandy coast, on land which, in fact, appears to have been won
from the sea. Though lying close on the sea, it has no good harbour,
and therefore little commerce, and no manufacture of any account.
These circumstances leave much of the town as it was in Burns's
time, though there are also evidences of modern extension and im-
l^rovement, in new streets and public buildings, especially of a county
jail lying between the town and the shore. The moment you step
out of the station of the Glasgow railway, which terminates here, you
come upon the mouth of the river Ayr, and behold the Twa Brigs.
Tha,t which was the New Brig iu Buius's days, is the one over which
you pass into the town. This bridge, whose guardian sprite is made
to swagger over the Auld Brig, if it has not fulfilled the prophecy of
the Auld Brig, and been swept away by a flood, has been iu danger of
demolition, having grown too narrow for the increase of traffic. It
has been saved, however, no doubt, by the preserving power of Burns's
l)oetry, which has made it sacred, and it was undergoing the process
of widening at the time I was there, in July, 1845. The Auld Brig
is some hundred yards or so higher up the stream, and seems re-
tained really for little more than its antiquity and poetic classicality.
It is now used only as a footpath, and not being considered safe for
carriages, has posts set up at the end to prevent every attempt with
any carriage to pass it. One is irresistibly reminded, on going upon
it, of the liaughty query of the New Brig, —
" Will your poor narrow footpath of a street,
\\'here two wheelbarrows tremble when they meet,
Your ruined formless bulk o' stane an" lime.
Compare \vi' bonnie brigs o' modern time t "
Mr. Chambers says that the Auld Brig is reported to have been
built in the reign of Alexander III. by two maiden sisters, who>*^
t-tfigies are still shov.'n in a faded condition on a stone in the eastern
parapet, near the south end of the bridge. There certainly is such
a stone, and you may rather fancy than distinctly trace two outlines
of heads. The whole bridge is, as described by Burns, very old and
Lime-worn.
" Auld Brig appeared o' ancient Pietisli race
The very wrinkles Gothic in his face;
He seemed as he wi' Time had warstled lam;,
Yet, teuglily doure, he baide an unco hanij."
BURNS. 23!)
' There is a peculiar pleasiu'c iii standing on this old Brig, so exactly
has Burns enabled you to place yourself in the very scene that he
contemplated at the moment of conceiving his poem.
" A siin;)!:; bard,
Unknown and poor, simplicity's reward,
Ae night, v.-ltliin the ancient burgii of Ayr,
By whim inspired, or haply pressed '.vi' care.
He left his bed, and took iiis wayward route.
And down by Simpson's wheeled the left about ;
The drowsy Dungeon clock had numbered two,
And Wallace tower had sworn the fact was true ;
The tide-swollen Firth, wi' sullen sounding ro.ir,
Through the still night dashed hoarse along the shore.
All else was hushed as Nature's closed e'e ;
The silent moon shone high o'er tower and tree;
The chilly frost, beneath the silver beam.
Crept, gently crusting, o'er the glittering stream"
From this scene " the drowsy Dungeon clock " is removed, the old
jail having been pulled down ; but " Simpson's " is still to be seen,—
a public-house at the end of the bridge on the side most distant from
the town ; and Wallace tower, — I believe, however, almost wholly
I'ebuilt since then, and presenting now a very modernized aspect, — •
rears itself in a distant part of the town. Along the river side the
" ancient burgh of Ayr " presents its antiquated houses, roofs, and
gables, much as they did to the eye of Burns.
Ayr, though it stands on a flat, has still great charm of location ;
and this you perceive as you set out to visit the birthplace and
monument of Burns, which he about three miles south of Ayr. You
may, if you please, take the way along the shore ; and here you have
the sea, with its living billows, displaying at a distance opposite the
c-raggy mountain heights of Arran, and the Mull of Cantire. Nortli-
ward, Troon, with its new houses, may be seen standing on its naked
promontory; and southward, the tower of Dunbere is a bold but
sombre object on an elevated knoll on the margin of the ocean, and
far out south-west, Ailsacraig is descried, towering amid the waters.
It is a fine and animated scene. It was Sunday forenoon as I ad-
vanced over the very level ground near the shore, towards Alloway.
People were walking on the beach enjoying the sunshine, breeze, and
glittering world of waters ; lovers were seated amongst the broomy
hillocks, children were gathering flowers amid the crimson glare of
the heather ; all had an air of beauty and gladness. To my left lay
a richly-wooded country, and before me, beyond Alloway and the
Doon, stretched the airy range of the Carrick hills. It was the direc-
tion which I was pursuing that Tarn o' Shanter took fi-om the town
to Alloway, for the old road ran that way ; but there is a new and
more direct one now from Ayr, and into that, having been shown the
cottage where Mrs. Begg, Burns's sister, .still lived, I struck. This
agreeable road I soon saw diverge into two, and asked a poor man
which of the two led to Burns's monument. At the name of Burns
his face kindled with an in.stant animation. " I am going part of the
way. Sir," ho said, "and will be proud to show it you." I begged
him not to put himself at all out of his way. " Oh," said he, " I am
going to look at my potato plot, which lies out b'",v." Wu fell into
i!4(> BURNS.
couvci'satioii about Bld'iis : the way agaiu showed a fresh branch ;
that was the way to his potato field — but the poor fellow gave a hesi-
tating look, he could not find in his heart to give up talking about
Burns, and begged that I would do him the honour to allow him to
walk on with me. " But your potatoes, my friend 1 " " Oh ! they'll
tak no harm, Sir. The weather's very growing weather — one feels
a natural curiosity to see how they thrive, but that will do next
Sunday, if you iro/eld allow me to go on with you ? "
T assured him that nothing would give me greater pleasure. I
only feai'ed that I might keep him out too long, for I must see
Burus's birth-place. Kirk Alloway, the Brig of Doon, the monument,
and everything of the kind. It was now about noon, and must be
liis dinner-hour. He said, " No ; he never had dinner on a Sunday ;
for years he had accustomed himself to only two meals on that day,
because he earned nothing on it, and had ten children I But he
generally took a walk out into the country, and got a good mouthful
of fresh air, and that did him a deal of good."
I looked more closely at my new companion. He was, apparently,
sixty, and looked like a man accustomed to diuc on air. He was of
a slight and grasshopper build ; his face was thin and pale ; his hair
grizzled ; yet there was an intelligence in his large grey eyes, but it
was a sad intelligence, one which had long kept fellowship with
patience and suiiering. His grey coat, and hat well worn, and his
clean but coarse shirt collar tm-ned down over a narrow band of a
blue cotton neckerchief, with its long ends dangling over his waist-
coat, all denoted a poor but a careful and superior man. I cannot
tell what a feeling of sympathy came over me : how my heart
warmed towards the poor fellow. We went on ; gay groups of
people met us, and seemed to cast looks of wonder at the stranger
and his poor associate ; but I asked mj^self whether, if we could
know, as God knows, the hearts and merits of every individual of
tlioso well-dressed and laughing walkers, we should find amongst
them one so heroic as to renounce his Sunday dinner, as a perpetual
practice, because he " earned nothing on that day, and had ten
children." Was there a man or a woman amongst them who, if they
knew this heroic man, as I now knew him, would not desire to give
him, for that one day at least, a good dinner, and as much pleasure
as they could ?
" My friend," said I, " I fear you have had more than your share
of hardship in this life ? "
" Nay," he replied, he could not say that. He had had to work
hard, but what poor man had not ? But he had had many comforts ;
and the greatest comfort in life had been, that all his children had
taken good ways ; " if I don't except," and the old man sighed, " one
lad, who has gone for a soldier ; and I think it a little ungrateful
that he has never written to us since he went, three years ago. Yet
I hear that he is alive and well, in Jamaica. I cannot but think
that rather ungrateful," he added ; " but of a' Eobin Burns's poems,
there's none, to my thinking, that comes up to that one — Man waa
made to mourn."
BURNS. i!41
1 could not help again glancing at the thin, pale figure, which went
«s softly at my side as if it were a ghost, and could not wonder that
Burns was the idol of the poor throughout Scotland, and that the
Sunday wanderer of his naiive place had clung so fondly to the
southern visitor of the same sacred spot.
" Can you explain to me," I asked, " what it is that makes Burns
such a favourite with you all in Scotland 1 Other poets you have,
and great ones ; out of the same class, too, you had Hogg, but I do
not perceive the same instant flash, as it were, of an electric feeling;
when any name is named but that of Burns."
" I can tell," said he, " why it is. It is because he had the heart
of a man in him. He was all heart, and all man ; and there's
nothing, at least in a poor man's experience, either bitter or sweet,
which can happen to him, but a line of Burns springs into his
mouth, and gives him courage and comfort if he needs it. It is like
a second Bible."
I was struck with the admirable criticism of the poor artizai-..
What acuteness of genius is like the acuteness of a sharp experience,
after aU ? I found that, had I picked the whole county of Ayr, 1
could not have hit on a man more clearly aware of the real genius
of Burns, nor a more excellent guide to all that related to him here-
abouts. He now stopped me. AVe were on the very track of Tarn
o' Shantei*.
" Kirk AUoway was iliawiiig nigli,
AVhere ghaists and houlcts niglilly cry, —
By this time he was cross tlie ford,
Where in the snaw the chapman smoorcd ;
And past the birks and meikle stane
Where drunken Charley brak 's neck-banc.
And through the whins, and by the cairn
Where hunters found the murdered bairn ;
And near tlie thorn aboon the well
Where Mungo's mither hanged hersel."
The whins, the birks were gone : all was now one scene of richesb
cultivation ; but in the midst of a cottager's garden still projected the
" meikle stane " fi'om the ground in a potato bed. To this, by
permission of the cottager, we advanced, and from this spot my
guide pointed out the traditionary course of Tarn on that awful
night when —
" Before him Doon pours all his floods ;
The doublin' storm roars through the woods,
And lightnings Hash from pole to pole."
Some of these scenes lay yet far before us ; as the well
" Where Mungo's mither hanged hersel ; "
which is just on the banks of the Doon itself.
Anon we reached the cottage in which Burns was born. This
stands on the right-hand side of the road, about a quarter of a mile
from Kirk AUoway and the Brig o' Doon. It is a genuine Scotch
cottage of two rooms on the ground floor, thatched and whitewashed.
It is now, and has been long, a little public-house. It stands close
to the road, and over the door is a portrait of Burns, an evident
copy from the portrait by Na.-mytli, and under it, in large and
242 ncRXS.
noticeable letters—" JiouKiir EoRNS, the Avrshiiie Poet, avas corn
rXDER THIS ROOF, THE 2r)TH JaN. A. D. 1759. DiED A. D. 1796, AGED
37^ YEARS."
It i.s well known to most readers that this house was bnilt by
Burus's father, and that about a week after Robert, his iirst child,
was born, the roof fell in during a tempest at midnight, and that
mother and child had to be carried forth in a hurry through the
storm and darkness, to a cottage, which still remains, not far off, ou
the opposite side of the road. Robert Burns was born in what is
now the kitchen, in one of those recess beds so common in Scotch
cottages. This is still shown to visitors by the occupiers of the
liouse. The better room, in which the guests are entertained, that
nearest to the t(^wn of Ayr, bears abundant marks of the zeal of
these visitors. The walls are well written over with names, but
not in that extraordinary manner that the walls of Shakspeare's
birth-place at Stratford are. The rage here has taken another turn,
Ihat of cutting the names into the furnitvire. There are two j^lanc-
tree tables, which are cut and carved in the most singular complete-
ness. There does not seem to be left space, neither on the top,
the sides, nor the legs, even for another initial. There were formerly
three of these tables, but one of them was sold some years ago.
There is a cupboard and chairs all cut over, the chairs having been
obliged to be renewed, but the fresh ones are now as much cut as
ever. We were informed by Mrs. Goudie, the widow of the old
miller, John Goudie, of Doonside mill, who had lived in the house
nearly forty years, that the lease of the jiroperty had been bought
of Burns's father, by the Shoemakers' Company of Ayr, for one
hundred and sixty guineas ; but that the property now let for
£45 a year ; and that the said Shoemakers' Company wishing again
to raise the rent, the widow was going to quit at Michaelmas next
and that another person had taken the house, and a small piece of
ground adjoining, at a rental of X60 a year. jNIrs. Goudie said that
she had been once bid £15 for one of the tables, but had refused
it ; that, however, being now about to quit the premises, she had
sold the chairs and tables to a broker at Glasgow, who was announ-
cing them as the actual furniture of Burns; though it was well
known that when Burns's father left this liouse for Mount Oliphant,
a few miles off, when Robert Burns was not seven years of age, he
took all his furniture with him. Conspicuous amongst the carved
names in this room was that of an ambitious Peter Jones, of Great
Bear Lake, North America.
Burns's father, who was, when he lived here, gardener to Mr.
Ferguson, of Doonholm, was a man of an excitable temperament
but of a most upright disposition ; and his mother, like the mothers
of most remarkable men, was a woman of clear, clever, and superior
mind, of a winning address, and full of ballads and traditions. From
l)oth sides the son drew the elements of a poet ; and we can well
nnagine him sitting by the humble fireside of this cottage, and
receiving into his childish heart, from the piety of the father, and
the imaginative tales of the mother, tliose images of genuine Scottish
BURNS. 243
life, which poured themseh-es forth, as well in Tam o' Shaiitcr, a.s in
the grave and the beautiful Cotter's Saturday Night.
Having insisted on luy worthy guide getting some refreshment,
we again sallied forth to make a more thorough exploration of tho
youthful haunts of the poet. And now, indeed, we were surrounded
by mementos of him, and of his fame, on all hands. The cottage
stands on a pleasant plain ; and about a quarter of a mile onward
you see, on the left-hand of the road, the monument erected to his
memory — a dome, surmounted with a lyre and the significant wine-
cup, and supported on Corinthian pillars. On the oiijiosite, that is,
on the right-hand side of the road, is the old Kirk of AUoway ;
beyond, away to the right, is heard the sea ; while the airy range of
the Carrick hills stretches across, closing the landscape before you.
At their feet a mass of trees marks the course of the Boon ; but,
before you reach any of these objects, you joass on your left the largo
iipeu field in which was held the Burns festival, on the 6th of August,
1844. The place where the wall had been broken down to admit tho
procession was plainly discernible by its new mortar ; and a fine
crop of corn was now waving where such thousands had, but a year
before, met in honour of the immortal exciseman.
Of this festival copious particulars are to be found in all tho
newspapers of the day ; but in none so complete and accurate as
" The Full Report," published by Mr. Maxwell Dick, the worth}-
l)ublisher of the Ayrshire News Letter at Irvine, one of the most
enthusiastic admirers of the genius of Burns, and of genius in
general. By this report it appears that the procession, forming on
the Low Green of Ayr, near the county buildings, met at ten o'clock
iii the morning, and consisted of the magistrates of the town, public
bodies, farmers, numerous freemasons' lodges, societies of gardeners,
archers, and odd-fellows. King Crispin in his most imposing style,
with Souter Johnny in character, accompanied by attendants witli
banners floating, and bands playing music of Burns's songs. In this
l)rocession were seen gentlemen and noblemen, and literary men of
the highest distinction, from all parts of the empire. It reached a
mile along the high road, three abreast. The whole number of
I)ersons present — that is, in the procession and on the ground — was
calculated at eighty thousand. A splendid triumphal arch was
erected at the cottage where the poet was born ; and, as the pro-
cession drew near it, the band played " There was a lad was born in
Kyle ; " the vast multitude uncovered at once, and the flags were
lowered as they passed the humble but much respected spot. Plat-
forms were erected in various places, so that people could get a
coitp-d'oeil of the procession. As it approached Kirk AUoway, the
old bell, which still occupies the belfiy, was set a-ringing, and con-
tinued so while the procession marched imder the triumj^hal arch
along the new bridge. Deploying round towards the old bridge of
Doon, tho circling lino, partially obscured by the houses and trees,
had a truly picturesque effect ; the waving banners, the music of the
bands, mellowed and echoed by "the banks and braes o' bonnie
Doon," were deeply impressive. On reaching the Auld Brig, over
241 BURNS.
■whiuh was thrown a tiiumplial arch, the bancl .struck up " Welcome,
Royal Charlie," while the procession, uncovering and lowering their
flags, passed over in front of the platform, on which stood the three
sons of Burns, his sister Mrs. Begg, her son, and two daughters. The
procession occupied at least an hour in coming from the new bridge to
tlie held, on entering which the band played "Duncan Gray," followed
by "The Birks of Aberfeldy." A large circle was then formed round
the i^latform for the musicians in the field ; and the whole company,
led b}^ professional vocalists, joined in singing " Ye banks and braes
o' bonnio Doon," and " Auld lang syne." The bands were then
stationed in various parts of the field ; the Eegimental and Glasgow
St. Andrew's bands, in the centre of the field ; the Kilwinning and
Cumnock bands at the cottage, and the bagpipers played at a dis-
tance from the pavilion. There were two enclosures for dancing ;
one near the head of the field, and the other on the brow, overlooking
tlie Doon. Immediately after the procession was over, the crowd
were astonished by the sudden appearance of Tarn o' Shanter, " well
mounted on his grey mare Meg," and a flight of witches in full pur-
suit of her, till he reached and passed the keystone of the arch of the
Auld Brig. At two, the Earl of Eglinton took the chair at the
banquet in the pavilion, w^ith Professor Wilson as croupier. To the
I'ight of the chairman sat Robert Burns, Esq., the eldest son of the
poet ; Major Burns, his youngest son ; on the left. Colonel Burns,
second son of the poet ; Mrs. Begg, Burns's sister ; and right and
left, other members of the family, and many noble and distinguished
persons ;' as Mrs. Thomson, of Dumfries, the Jessie Lewars of the
]ioet ; Sir John M'i^eill, late plenipotentiary to the court of Persia ;
the Lord Justice-General, the Countess of Eglinton, Alison, the
historian, Mr. and Mrs. S. C. Hall, Robert Chambers, of Edinburgh,
Douglas Jerrold, William Thorn, the poet of Inverury, etc. etc. The
chairs of the chairman and croupier were made of oaken rafters from
Kirk Alloway, and many mementos of the poet decoi-ated the table.
The scene in the pavilion is described as splendid, and like one of
fairyland ; and the most enthusiastic speeches were made in honour
< 'f the poet, especially by the noble chairman and the eloquent John
Wilson. ' '
It will be seen by those acquainted with the ground, that the
procession had thus taken a course contrived to include every object
of interest connected with Burns here. It had passed the cottage
of his birth ; passed between Kirk Alloway and his monument ;
cros.sed by the new bridge over the Doon, to the side of the river,
and returned over the old bridge, so as to see all " the banks and
braes o' bonnie Doon," and so entered the field of the festival,
having entirely encircled the monument. There, in fuU view of
all these objects, the cottage, the old ruins of the kirk, the mo-
imment, and the banks of Doon, they celebrated, — eighty thousand
persons, — the festival of his honour, amid the music of his own
enchanting songs, amongst which were — "A man's a inan for a'
that ;" " This is na my ain house ;" " Green grow the rashes O ;"
" My love she's but a lassie yet ;" " Wat ye wha's in you toun."
BUKXS. -'i.'J
This stirring iind tumultuous expression of a imtioivs veueratiou
was gone by ; silence had again fallen, as it were, with a luusiug
sense of the poet's glory on the scene ; and witli my worthy guide
I went over the same ground leisurely, noting all its beauties
and characteristics. First, we turned into the grave-yard of Kirk
fUloway. Here stood the roofless old kirk, just such a plain, simple
rdn as you see in a hundred places in Ireland. One of the hrst
objects that arrests your attention is the bell in the little belfry,
with a rope hanging outside, only sufficiently low for the sexton, on
any occasion of funeral, to reach it with a hooked pole, and thus to
prevent any idle person ringing it at other times. This bell, when
the parishes of Alloway and Ayr were joined, was attempted to be
carried away by the authorities of Ayr, by no means to their honour,
but the crofters of Alloway manfully rose and resisted successfully
the removal. There are plenty of open windows, where Tarn o'
Shanter could take a full view of the unsonsie dancing party ; and
" the winnock bunker in the east," a small window, " where sat auld
Nick in shape of beast" as tiddler, is conspicuous enough. The
interior of the kirk is divided by a wall. The west end division is
the burial-place of the Cathcarts, which is kept very neat. The
other end, where the witch-dance met Tarn's astonished eyes, is now
full of briars and nettles, bearing sufhcient evidence of no recent
displays of the kind. The kirk-yard is crowded with tombs, and the
lirst memorial of the dead which meets your eye, is the headstone of
the poet's father, just before you as you enter by the stile, with this
inscription : — " Sacred to the memory of Wilham Burns, farmer in
Lochlea, who died Feb. 1784, in the 63d year of his age ; and of
Agnes Browne, his spouse, who died the 14th of Jan. 1820, in the
88th year of her age. She was interred in Bolton Churchyard, East
Lothian.
O ye whose cheek the tear of pity stains,
hravr near with pious reverence, and attend!
Here lie tlie loving husband's dear remains,
The tender father, and the fjenerous friend.
The pitying heart that felt for human woe ;
The dauntless heart that feared no human pride ;
The friend of man, to vice alone a foe ;
' For ev'n his failings leaned to virtue's side.'"
This epitaph was written expressly for this tomb by Burns ; the last
line being quoted from Goldsmith.
Advancing now to the new bridge, you stand between two remark-
able monuments of the ijoet. On your right hand, close on the
banks of the Doon, and adjoining the bridge, stands a handsome
villa, iu beautiful grounds which occupy part of "the banks and
braes." This is the house of Mr. Auld, the enterprising hairdresser
of Ayr, who was the fii'st to recognise the genius of Thorn the
sculptor, then a poor stonemason of Ayr. Thorn, seeing a picture
of Tam o' Shanter in Auld's window, requested the loan of it for a
few days. Being asked by Auld what ho wanted it for, he said he
had a notion that he could make a ligure from it. It was lent, and
iu a few davs he returned with a model of Tarn in clay. Mr. Auld
21G BURNS.
%v;i.s SO struck with the genius displayed iu it, that he suggested to
Tlioui to coaiplote the group by adding Souter Johnny. That was
soon done ; and then, by the assistance of Mr. Auld, the weIl-kno\vii
group was cut in stone. Tlie enterprising hairdresser now j^n-epared
to set out on a tour of exhibition of this group, the proceeds of which,
I understand, were agreed to be equally divided between Auld,
Thorn, and a conuuittee for a monument to Burns, near his birth-
place. Such was the success of the scheme, that Thom, I am told,
received ^^4,000 as his share of the proceeds, which, however, ho
.soon contrived to lose by taking stone-quarries, and entering on
building schemes. Having lost his money, he retired to America.
Auld. more careful, quitted the wig-block and lather-brush, and
building himself a house, sat down as a country gentleman opposite
to the monument, which seems to be in his keeping. It has been
said, that the monument committee never received anything like a
tliird of the proceeds of the exhibition, or the monument might now
be opened free of cost to the public. That, however, is a point
which the committee and Mr. Auld must be best informed about.
One thing is certain, that Mr. Auld's present residence is a gi'and
K[)ecimen of the effect of the united genius of Burns, Thom, and
Auld ; an exciseman, a stone mason, and a barber. To the left hand
of the road, opposite to this monument, stands, in a pleasant garden,
the other monument of Burns, as already described, and which also,
it seems, partly owed its existence to the same bold enterprise of
this l^arbcr of Ayr, who seems actually to have had the art of "cut-
ting blocks with a razor." In this monument is no statue of Burns,
Init merely a framed copy of that admirable coloured print of Burns,
jmblished by Mr. Maxwell Dick, of Irvine, from Nasmyth's picture ;
luid on the table iu the centre, the Bible and Testament given by
Burns to his Mary at their last parting near Montgomerie castle.
These are two separate volumes, and are displayed at the beginning
of each, where Burns has placed a masonic sign, and
written his name, now nearly obliterated ; adding the
■:S''/ two texts, — Leviticus xix. 12 ; Matthew v. 3.3 : which
are, " Ye shall not swear by my name falsely ; I am the
Lord ;" and " Thou shalt not forswear thyself, but shalt perform unto
the Lord thine oaths." These precious volumes were known to be in
the possession of the sister of Burns's " Mary," in America ; and a
society of young men, ardent admirers of Burns, resolved to regain
them, i f possible, for the public. This, after great trouble and expense,
they finally effected ; and here they are, objects certainly of the
deepest interest.
In a separate and small building in the same garden stands the
celebrated group by Thom, of Tarn and Souter Johnny. This, how-
ever, being Sunday, was by an order of the au£horities of Ayr not
allowed to be seen, though the monument was. I asked the youth
who .showed the monument, if he could explain to me why it was a
sin to show the grou}), and not a sin to show the monument on a
Sunday ; but the lad very properly replied that he did not pretend
to a metaphysical sagacity so profound ; his business w^as to show
BUiiNS. 247
tlie monument, and not to shorn either the group or t^e reason why
for that he referred me to the superior hair-splitting piety and
acumen of the corporate authorities of Ayr.
Quitting this garden, you encounter, at the foot of the new bridge,
a new inn, called Burns's Inn and Hotel, with a line painted sign, of
a blackbird singing upon a bough, with a crook and a house, and an
>ak in the centre of a shield laid on branches of olive and oak ; and
ovor it the words — " Better a small bush than nae bield." The Auld
Brig is some little distance up the stream ; and the view from it is
very beautiful. You are surrounded by " the banks and braes o'
bonnie Doou," steep, hung with orchards and fine woodland trees.
At some little distance still farther up the stream, you descry the
old mill of Alloway, half buried in umbrageous trees, and all round
rise sweet woodland fields at the feet of the hills. The bridge is well
carved over with names, and overgrown with masses of ivy.
Standing on this remarkable C)ld grey bridge, my companion exhi-
bited a trait of delicate and genuine feeling, which no man of the
most polished education in the school of politeness could have sur-
l^assed. Gathering a sprig of ivy, he said, presenting it, — " May be
,-e would like to send this to your leddy in England ; it's gathered
jUst frae the keystane." I accepted it with the liveliest pleasure, and
it is now carefully preserved where the good man wished it. We
then returned to Ayr, talking of Burns, his history, his poetry, and
his fine qualities all the way ; and after one of the pleasantest
rambles I ever made in any comiiany, I bade my old friend good-bye
at his door, leaving in his hand a trifle to mend his Sunday supper.
" But," said he, as I was going away, " might I request the favour of
vour name, that I may know who it was that I had the honour of a
walk with to Bui'ns's monument, when I am thinking of it ? " I told
him ; his face passed from its usual paleness to a deep flush ; and he
exclaimed, — "Eh, Sir! I ken yer name, and that o' yer leddy too,
right weel ! " Depend upon it, the recollection of that walk has Ix'oii
as pleasant to my old friend as to myself.
The next day, with a driver well acquainted with the country,
I issued forth in a gig, to visit all the various residences of Burns
between Ayr and Mauchline. Burns in his life seemed like a bird
leaving its nest. He took two or three short flights, till he flew quite
away to Dumfries. At every move he got farther from Ayr. He was
like an emigrant, still going on and on in one direction, and his
course was south-east. First, he went, that is, with his father, to
Mount Oliphant, a farm about four miles from Alloway, where he
lived from his sixth to his twelfth year. This form has nothing par-
ticular about it. It lies on a bare ridge of hill, an ordinary little
Scotch farm-steading, with bare and treeless fields Then he went on
to another farm — to Lochlea, still fixrther out on this long, high, and
bleak tract of country, near Tarbolton. This farm ruined his father,
and there he died. Lochlea is a neat farm-house, lying in a hollow
more sheltered than IMount Oliphant, but still possessing no pic-
turesque features. In fact, the family was seeking not the picturesque,
but a livelihood. At Lochlea, Burns lived till he was twenty-foui-,
248 BURNS.
and here lie attended the masonic lodge at the Cross-keys, at I'ai-
liolton, which still remains. Thei*e he became acquainted with Mc
David Sillar, the schoolmaster of Tarbolton, and addressed to him
liis Epistle to Davie. It was about three miles from Tarbolton, but
that was nothing to Buiuis, full of life and poetry. The Bachelor's
Society, whicli, Avith David Sillar and other young men, he formed
there, had infinite charms for him. Humble were tliese companions ;
in Davitl Sillar's words —
" Of birth and Wood we do not boast,
No gentry does our club afl'ord,
But ploughmen and meclianics we
In nature's simple dress record ; "
liut they were men after Burns's own heart. He judged of men as
his father had taught him : —
*' My father was a farmer upon the Carrick Border,
And carefully he bred me up in decency and order ;
He bade me act a manly part, though I had ne'er a farthing.
For without au honest manly heart no man was worth regarding."
It was during his abode here that he wrote John Barleycorn ; Corn-
riggs are bonnie ; Winter, a Dirge ; the Death of Poor Mailie ; Maihe's
Elegy ; and Now Whistling Winds, etc. But the love affairs he was
at this time continually getting into, and the dissipations that he be-
came acquainted with at Kirkoswald and Irvine, at which places he
spent some months, rendered his poetical growth far less than it
otherwise might have been there. One incident in his life, and one
of his most beautiful poems consequent on it, however, arose out of
au attachment, which, though said to be formed at Mauchline, was
certainly cultivated here. Just below Tarbolton lies Montgomerie
castle, beautifully situated amidst its woods on the banks of the Faile,
where he fell in love with Mary Campbell. Here, near the house, it
was, according to his own beautiful poem, that he used to meet, and
here that he finally took leave of her. She was dairymaid iu the
house then belonging to Colonel Hugh Montgomerie, afterwards Earl
of EghntoU; and grandfather of the present earl.
" Ye banks and braes and streams around
The castle of Montgomerie,
Green be your woods, and fair your flowers,
Your waters never drumlie ;
There summer first unfauld her robes,
And there the longest tarry,
For there I took my last farewell
Of my sweet Highland Mary."
There is a story mentioned in the Lives of Burns, of this parting
being on the banks of Ayr, and Cromek repeats it, adding thtit " the
lovers stood on eacli side of a small purUng brook— they laved their
liands in the limpid stream, and holding a Bible between them, pro-
nounced their vows to be faithful to each other."
All this may be true, for they took a day to this final solitary en-
joyment of each other's society in the woods before parting. They
niiglit wander by the Ayr, and so on up to the Faile, and at some
sniaU rivulet on the way perform this simple and affecting ceremony.
Mary was going to the Western Highlands, to see her friends before
BURNS. 249
she married Robert Burns, but she died on her way back, and they
never met again. This Bible, as we have seen, has been recovered
and is deposited in the monument at Alloway. Wherever this
ceremony took place, the parting assuredly took place here. Burnfi
savs, uot only that " there I took my last farewell," but also
" II-'w sweetly bloomed the Ray green Iiirk,
Kow rich the hawthorn's blossom.
A«. underneath their fragrant shade,
i clasped her to my bosom I "'
There stiU .stands the thorn, called by all the countrv, " Highland
Mary's Thorn."
The house and park are sold or leased by the Earl of Eglinton to
a soUcitor in Ayr. ]\Iy driver appeared afraid of going into the park,
saying " the writer," that is, the solicitor, was a queer fellow, and
would not let anybody go to the thorn, and certainly a large board
at each park gate, warning all persons to avoid those hallowed
precincts, appeared to confirm the man's opinion ; but, having come
so far, I did not mean to pass without a glance at the parting scene
of Burns and Highland Mary. I bade him drive down to the house,
where I was speedily assured by the servants about that I was quite
at liberty to go to the tree. " How shall I know it 1" " Oh ! a child
may know it — it is all hacked and the twigs broken, by people who
carry away some of it to keep." By these signs I readily recognised
tlie tree. It is not far from the house, close to the carriage-drive,
and on the top of the slope that descends to the Faile, which murmurs
un beneath its sweet woodland shade.*
The last abode of Burns in Ayrshire was at Mossgiel. This is
some four miles beyond Tarbolton, and close to Mauchline, which is
merely a large village. IMossgiel farm lies, as it were, at the end of
that long, high, barren ridge of hills, which extends almost all the
way from Ayr thither, and on which Bui-ns's father had sought a
poor Hving, and found ruin. It stands near the line of the slope
which descends into Mauchhne, and overlooks a large extent of
bleak and bare country, and distant bare hills. In the vales of the
country, however, lie many scenes of great beauty and classic fame.
.Such are the banks of the Ayr, which winds on deep between its
braes and woods, hke the Nith, the Doon. and the higher Clyde.
►Such are Stair, Logan, Crtikerne, Catrine, Dugald Stewart's place,
and many others.
The farm of Mossgiel, which consists of about 118 acres, lies, as
observed, high, and as Gilbert, the brother of Burns, described it,
'■' on a cold, wet bottom." The farms occupied by the Burns family
in this part of the country were all of a thankless and ungenial kind;
in fact, they lacked the means to command better. The two brothers,
■» I am still, liowever, ai'raid that it is. too true tliat the country people are not allowed
to visit " Mary's Thorn," though held in such high honour by them. Not only the
boards at the park gates, but other information, confirmed this fact; and my passing the
lioiise to tlie tree brought all the family to the window, servants as well as gentlemen,
ladies, and children, and no few in number, as if some extraordinary circumstance had
uucurred.
250 BUKNS.
Robert and Gilbert, had taken this farm some time before their
father's death, iu the hope of assisting the family in that poverty
which came still after them, like an armed man, spite of the most
laborious exertion, and which was weighing their father to the grave
At his death they removed altogether from Lochlea, and with their
mother and sisters becanae here one household. Here Burns made
the firmest resolves of steadiness, industry, and thriving ; but the
seasons were against him, and he soon became mixed wp with all the
dissipations of Mauchline, where he established a club after the
fashion of that at Tarbolton. Very soon, too, he plunged into
the midst of church disputes, in which his friend Gavin Hamilton,
a lawyer of the place, was personally embroiled. Here he wrote
The Holy Tuilzie, Holy Fair, Holy Willie's Prayer, The Ordination,
The Kirk's Alarm : — those scalping poems, in which he lays bare to
the skull bone, bigotry, hypocrisy, and all sanctimonious bitterness
in religion. Here he fell in love with Jean Armour, the daughter of
a stonemason of Mauchline, who, after many troubles, and nnicb
opposition on the part of the family, became afterwards his wife.
Here he wrote the greater part of his poems, and of his very finest
ones ; and here he broke forth uj^on the world like a new-risen sun,
his poems, which were first published at Kilmarnock, attracting
such extraordinary attention, that he was called to Edinburgh, and
a new and more complete edition there pubhshed, while he himself
was introduced as a sort of miracle to the highest circles of
aristocracy and literature.
The four years which he lived hei'e, though they were sinking him
in a pecuniary point of view into such a slough of despair, that he
seriously resolved to emigrate to the West Indies, and only published
his poems to raise the means, were, as regarded his fame, glorious
and most interesting years. It was here that he might be said, more
expressly than anywhere else —
" To walk in ftlorv- and in jo)-,
l-'ollowing his plough along the mountain side ; "
for, spite of the iron destiny which seemed to pm'sue him, and iu
an ungenial soil and the most untoward seasons, to endeavour to
crush him with " carking care," he was full of life and vigour, and
often rose in the entrancement of his spirit above all sense of eartli
and its darkness. By the testimony of his cotemporaries, in all
the operations of the farm,— in mowing, reaping, binding after the
reapers, thrashing, or loading, — there were few who could compete
with him. He stood five feet ten in height, and was of singular
strength and activity. He prided himself on the straightness of the
furrow that he drew, and the skill with which he threw his corn iu
.sowing. On one occasion, a man having succeeded in a hard strife in
setting up as many shocks in a given time, said, " There, I am not
far behind this time ;" to which Burns replied, " In one thing, John,
you are still behind ; I made a song while I was stooking " Allan
Cunningham says that his father, who was steward to Miller of
Dalswinton, Bums's landlord, and lived just opposite to him ai
BURNS. 251
hiiisiand, declared that " he had the handsomest cast of the hand ic
sowing corn that he ever saw on a furrowed field."
It was here, then, at Mossgiel, that, young, vigorous, and full of
desire to advance in worldly matters, he worked assiduously with
his brother Gilbert in the fields, undivided in his attentions by the
duties of the Excise. But poetry, si^ite of all resolves to the con-
trary, came over him like a flood. As his hand worked, his heai-t
was full of inspiration, and as Gilbert held the plough, Robert would
come and walk beside him, and repeat what he had just composed ;
or, as they went with the cart to carry out corn or bring home coals,
he would astonish him with some such display. " The verses to the
Mouse and the Mountain Daisy," says Gilbert, "were composed on
these occasions, and while the author was holding the plough. I
could point out the spot where each was composed. Holding the
plough was a favourite situation with Eobert for poetic composition,
and some of his best verses were produced while he was at that
exercise." With what interest, then, do we look over the fields at
Mossgiel, scarcely an inch of which has not been strode over by
Burns, while engaged at once in turning up the soil, sowing or
gathering its crops, and in working out in the depth of his mind
those compositions which were to remain for all time, the watch-
words of liberty and of noble thought ! Besides the polemic poems
already spoken of, here he wrote Hallowe'en ; Address to the Deil ;
Death and Dr. Hornbook, a satire on the poor schoolmaster and self-
appointed apothecary, Wilson of Tarbolton, which drove him from
the place, but only to thrive in Glasgow ; The Jolly Beggars ; Man
was made to mourn ; The Vision ; The Cotter's Saturday Night,
which he very appropriately repeated to Gilbert during a Sunday
afternoon walk.
The very interesting scene of the creation of these exquisite
poems, lies on the left hand of the road proceeding from Tarbolton
to Mauchline. The house stands at a field's distance from the road.
It is a thatched house with but and ben, just as it was, and th«
buildings behind it forming two wings exactly as he built his house
at Ellisland. To the north-west the house is well sheltered with tine,
full-grown trees. A handsome young mother, the farmer's wife,
worthy for her comely and intelligent look to have been celebrated
by Bums, told me that great numbers of people came to see the
place, and that it was very much as Burns left it. There were the
barn, the byre, the garden near, in all which the j)oet had laboured
like any other son of earth for his daily bread, and on the yearly
allowance — for every one of the family had a specific allowance for
clothes and pocket-money — of seven pounds, which, says his brother,
he never exceeded ! Veiy extravagant he could not have been.
You see the ingle where he sate and composed some of his most
pathetic and most humorous pieces. It is said to be in the spence,
a better room, which has a boarded floor and the recess beds so
common in Scotland, that he chiefly wrote. Who can contemplate
this humble room, and recal the image of the young poet with a
heart of melancholy here inditing, — Man was made to mourn, ot his
K
iiJ^, BURNS.
Vision, -without the liveliest emotion ? There is uo feeling of utt«<T
sadness more strongly expressed than in the opening of the Vision :
" The sun had closed the winter day,
The cullers quat tlieir roaring play,
An' hungur'il inawkin ta'en her v-'ay
'J'o kail-yard green,
While faitlilcss snaws ilk step betray
■\Vharc she has been.
*' The thresher's weary flinging tree
The lee-lang day hail tired me ;
And when the day liad closed his e'e
Far i' tlie west,
lien i' the spencc, right pensively,
I gaed to rest.
" There, lanely, by the ingle cheek,
I sate and eyed the spewing reek,
That filled witli hoast-provoking smcck
The auld clay biggin ;
And heard the restless rations squeak
About the riggin.
" All in this mottic, misty clime.
I backward mused on wasted time.
How I had spent my youthful prime
An' done nae tiling
But stringin blethers up in rhyme.,
Tor fools to sing.
" Had I to gude advice but harkit.
I might, by this, hae led a markit,
Or strutted in a bank and elarkit
Mv cash account;
Wiile here, ha'lf mad, half fed, half sarket,
Is a' th' amount."
Gilbert, it seems, continued on this farm, after Robert left for Ellis-
land, till 1800 ; and the next tenant had occupied it till but a year
ur two before my visit, when the husband of the young woman I saw
came in.
Mauchline, at the distance of a few minutes' walk, abounds with
recollections of Burns. There is the inn whore Burns used to meet
his meiTy club. There is the churchyard where the scene of the
Holy Fair is laid, though the old church which stood in Burns's
time has disappeared and a new one taken its place. Opposite to the
(iiurchyard gates runs the street called " The Cowgate," up which
he makes Common-Sense escape; just by is the house of "Posie
Nansie," where Burns fell in with the "Jolly Beggars ;" not far oft" is
the public-house of John Dow, that Burns and his companions fre-
((uented at the opening of the Cowgate. Posie Nansie, or Nance
'linnock's, was the house mentioned in the Holy Fair, where the
public crowded in during the intervals of the service, having a back-
tloor most convenient into the area.
" Xow but an' hen, the change-house fills
Wi' yill-eaup commentators ;
Here's crying out for bakes and gills.
An' there the pint-stoup clatters."
Everybody can tell of the haunts and places of Burns and his jollv
companions in Mauchhnc. The woiTien came out of their houses as
they saw me going about, and were most generously anxious to point
out every noted spot, ^ifany of the older people remembered him.
BUKXS. 253
"A fiue liaudsome youug fellow, was he not ?" I asked of an old
woman who would show me where Jean Armour lived. " Oh ! just
a black-avised chiel," said she, hurrying up a narrow street parallel
to the Cowgate ; " but here lived Jean Armour's father. Come iu,
come," added she, unceremoniously opening the door, when an old
dame ajipeared who occupied the house. " I am only going to show
the gentleman where Robin Burns's Jean lived. Come along, sir, come
along," continued she, hastening as unceremoniously upstairs, "ye
maun see where the bairns were born. Ha ! ha ! ha ! " "^ " Ha ! ha ! hal "
screamed the old dame of the house, apparently highly dehghted.
"Ay, show the gentleman !— show him ! he ! he ! he!" So up went
my free-making guide, up went I, and up came the old lady of the
house. "There! there!" exclaimed the first old woman, pointing
to a recess bed in one of the chambers, — there were three o' Robin
Burns's bairns born. It's true, sir, as I live ! " " Ay, gude faith is
it," re-echoed the old lady of the house, and the two gossips again
were very merry. "But ye maun see where Rob an' Jean were
married ! " so out of the house the lean and nimble woman again
liurried, and again at a rapid pace led me down another narrow
street just to the back of what they call the castle, Gavin Hamilton's
old house. It was in Burns's time Gavin Hamilton's office, and in
that office Burns was married. It is now a public-house.
Having taken a survey of all the scenes of Burns's youthful life
liere, I proceeded to that house where he was always so welcome a
guest, the house of Gavin Hamilton itself. Though called the castle,
it is, in fact, a mere keep, with an oi'dinary house attached to it in a
retired garden. The garden is surrounded by lofty walls, with a
remarkably large tree in the centre. The house, a mere cottage, is hud-
dled down in the far right-hand corner, and opposite to it stands th?
old keep, a conspicuous object as you descend the hill into the town.
It is maintained in good order, and used as a laundry. A bare-legged
lassie was spreading out her linen on the gi'ass-plot, who informed me
that not only was Gavin Hamilton dead, but his son too, and that his
son's widow and her children were living there. I was shown the
room, an ordinary little parlour, where Burns, one Sunday, on coming
in after kirk, wrote the satirical poem of the Calf, on the clergyman.
In traversing the streets of Mauchline, it was impossible to avoid
not only recalling all the witty jolhty of Burns here, but his troubles
that well-nigh drove him from the land. The opposition of Jean
Armour's family, though she had three children by him ; the tearing
up of her secret marriage lines by herself in her despair ; Burns's
distraction, his poverty, his hidings from the myrmidons of the law;
and his daily thirteen miles' walk to correct the proofs of his poems
at Kilmarnock, to save postage. But now the muse which had made
him poor, refused to permit him to quit his native land. Out
burst the sun of his glory, and our scene changes with this change
to Edinburgh.""'
» I must mention one fact regarding the nei|;;hbourhood of Ayr. Never, surely, Wales
not excepted, was there a country so infested with toll-bars. In going to Mauchline,
twelve miles, including a slight divergence to take a view of Mount Oliphant, and thui
254 BURNS.
To describe all the haunts of Buries iu Edinburgh were a long
affair. They were the houses of all the great and gay— of the
Gordons, the Hamiltons, the Montgomeries, of the learned, and tho
beautiful. The celebrated Duchess of Gordon, at that time at tbo
zenith of beauty and fashion, was one of his warmest admirers, and
invited him to her largest parties. Tho young x^loughman of Ayrshire
sat hob-nobbing in the temples of splendour and luxury with the
most distinguished in every walk of life ; yet his haunts also lay
equally amongst the humble and the undistinguished. Burns was
true to his own maxim, " a man's a man for a' that ;" and where there
were native sense, wit, and good humour, there he was to be found,
were it even in a cellar, with only a wooden stool to sit on. At his
first arrival in Edinburgh, he took up his quarters with a young
Ayrshire acquaintance, Richmond, a writer's apprentice, in the house
of a ]\Irs. Carfrae, Baxter's-close, Lawn-market, where he had a share
of the youth's room and bed. From the most splendid entertain-
ments of the aristocracy, he described himself as groping his way at
night through the dingy alleys of the " gude town to his obscure
lodgings, with his share of a deal table, a sanded floor, and a chaff bed
at eighteen-pence a-week." This was during the winter and spring
of 1786-7, on his first visit to Edinburgh, where he became the great
fashionable lion, and while his new edition by Creech was getting
out. In the spring, finding his popularity had brought him so much
under the public eye, that his obscure lodgings in the Lawn-market
were not quite befitting him, he went and lodged with his new
acquaintance, William Nicol, one of the masters of the High-school,
who lived in the Buccleuch-road. In the winter of 1787, on his
second visit to Edinburgh, he had lodgings in a house at the entrance
of James' s-square, on the left hand. As you go up East Register-
.street, at the end of the Register-house, you see the end of a house
at the left-hand side of the top of the street. There is a perpen-
dicular row of four wnndows ; the top window belongs to the room
Burns occupied. Here it was that he was visited by the lady with
whom at this time he corresponded under the name of Sylvander,
and she with him as Clarinda. His leg had been hurt by an overturn
of a carriage by a drunken coachman, and he was laid up some time,
and compelled to use crutches. Allan Cunningham tells us that this
lady " now and then visited the crippled bard, and diverted him by
her wit, and soothed him by her presence." She was the Mrs. Mac.
of his toasts— a blithe, handsome, and witty widow ; and a great
passion or flirtation grew up between Burns and her. In one of his
letters to his friend Richard Brown, December 30, 1787, he says :
" Almighty love still reigns and revels in my bosom, and I am at this
moment ready to hang myself for a young Edinburgh widow." In a
letter of their correspondence, which has recently been published, he
going out of Ayr by one road and coming in by the other, I paid at nine bars, five of tliem
sixpence oach. At no one did they give you a ticket to another. New bars were, more-
over, building ! "How did you like the country?" asked my landlord on my return.
"Oh!" said I, " it is a most iariaroHs country." "Barbarous?" " Yes,— there is
nothing but bars. I must send Rebecca to you," "True," said he, "Rebecca nev^l
found anything more abominable."
BURNS. 255
DJds Clarinda look vip at his window as she occasionally goes past,
and in another complains that she does not look high enougli for
a bard's lodgings, and so he perceives her only gazing at one of the
lower windows. If we are to believe the stanza of hers quoted by
Burns, we must suppose Clarinda to have been unhappily mai-ried :
" Talk not of love, it gives me pain,
For love has been my foe ;
He bound me with an iron chain.
And plunged me deep in woe."
If it be true, as Allan Cunningham surmises, that those inimitable
verses in the song of "Ae fond kiss, and then we sever," which
expresses the pain of a final parting better than any other words
ever did, have reference to Clarinda, then Burns inust have been
passionately attached to her indeed :
" Who shall say that fortune grieves him.
While the star of hope she leaves him?
Me, nae cheerfu' twinkle lights me ;
Dark despair around benights me.
Had we never loved sae kindly.
Had we never loved sae blindly,
Never met — or never parted.
We had ne'er been broken hearted."
Of the generous and true-hearted disposition of Clarinda we shall
possess a juster idea, when we reflect that Burns was not at this
time any longer the lion of the day. The first warm flush of aristo-
cratic flattery was over. The souls of the great and fashionable had
subsided into their native icy contempt of peasant merit. " What
he had seen and endured in Edinburgh," says honest Allan Cunning-
ham, " during his second visit, admonished him regarding the reed
on which he leant, when he hoped for a place of profit and honour
from the aristocracy on account of his genius. On his first appear-
ance the doors of the nobihty opened spontaneously, ' on golden
hinges turning,' and he ate spiced meats, and drank rare wines,
interchanging nods and smiles ' with high dukes and mighty earls.'
A colder reception awaited his second coming ; the doors of lords
and ladies opened with a tardy courtesy ; he was received with a
cold and measured stateliness, was seldom requested to stop, seldom
to repeat his visit ; and one of his companions used to relate with
what indignant feehngs the poet recoimted his fruitless calls, and
his uncordial receptions in the good town of Edinburgh."
It is related that, on one occasion being invited to dine at a noble-
man's, he went, and, to his astonishment, found that he was not to
dine with his guests, but with the butler ! After dinner, he was
.sent for into the dining-room ; and a chair being set for him near the
bottom of the table, he was desired to sing a song. Kestraining his
indignation within the bounds of outward appearance, Burns com-
phecl, and he sang, —
" Is there, for honest poverty,
Who liangs his head and' a' that ?
The coward slave, we pass him by.
And dare be poor for a' that.
For a' that, and a' that,
A man's a man for a' tliat I
25Q BURNS.
" You see }on Turkic, ca'd a lord,
(Pointing to the nobleman at the lii'ati of the tubln.
Who struts and stares and a' that,
Though hundreds worship at )iis -n-ord,
He's but a coof for a' that.
For a' that, and a' that.
A man's a man for a' tliat."
As the last word of these stanzas issued from liis lips, lie rose, and
not deigning the company a syllable of adieu, marched out of the
room and the house.
Burns himself expressed in some lines to Clarinda all this at this
very moment : —
" In vain would Prudence, -with her decent sneer,
Point to the censuring; world and bid me fijar :
Above that world on wings of love I rise,
I know its worst, and can that worst despise.
Wronged, slandered, shunned, unpitied, unredressed,
The mocked quotation of the scorners' jest,
Let Prudence' direst bodements on me fall—
Clarinda, rich reward ! o'erpays them all."
But Clarinda could never be Burns's. To say the least of it, his
attachment to her was one of the least defensible things of his life.
Jean Armour had now the most inviolable claims upon him, and in
fact as soon as his leg was well enough, he tore himself from the
fascinations of Clarinda's society, went to Mauchline, and married
Jean.
But wo must not allow ourselves to follow him till we have taken
a peep at the house of Clarinda at this time, where Burns used to
visit her, and where, no doubt, he took his melancholy farewell. This
liouse is in Potter's-row ; now old and dingy-looking, but evidently
having been at one time a superior residence. It is a house memor-
able on niore accounts than one, having been occupied by General
Monk while his army lay in Edinburgh ; and the passage which goes
under it to an interior court is still called the General's Entrance.
To the street, the house presents four gabled windows in the upper
story, on the tops of which stand a rose, thistle, fleur-de-lis, with a
second rose or thistle to complete the four. The place was, at the
time of my visit, inhabited by the poorest people ; and on a little
shop window in front was written up, " Bags and Metals bought " !
The fiat which was occupied by Clarinda is now divided into two very
poor tenements. In the room which used to be Clarinda's sitting-
room, a poor woman was busy with her work and two or three
very little children. My companion told her that her house had
vf ^"i ?,^^^® frequented by a great man ; she said, " Oh yes, General
Monk." When he, however, added that ho was then thinking of
Kobert Burns, this was news to her, and seemed to give to the
wretched abode quite a charm in her eyes.
Clarinda lived to a great age, as a Mrs. Maclehose, and only died
a few years ago. Mrs. Howitt and myself were once introduced to
her by our kind friend Mr. Robert Chambers, at her house near the
Lalton Hill ; and a very characteristic scene took place. The old
lady, evidently charmed with our admiration of Burns, and warmed
up by talking of past days, declared that we should drink out of the
BURNS. iJi»<
pair of glasses which Bums had presented to her iii the daya of their
acquaintance ; and with which he sent the verses given in Mr. Nichol's
recent beautiful edition of the " British Poets," Burns's Works, vol.
ii. p. 128. She brought these sacred relics out of the cupboard, and
rang for the servant to bring in wine. An aged woman appeared,
who, on hearing that we were to drink out of Burns's glasses, which
stood ready on the table, gave a look as if sacrilege were going to be
committed, took up the glasses without a word, replaced them in the
cupboard, locking them up, and brought us three ordinary wine-
glasses to take our wine out of. It was in vain for Mrs. Maclehose
to remonstrate ; the old and self-willed servant went away without
deigning a reply, with the key in her pocket.
During the period of his Edinburgh life, Burns diversified it by two
excursions, — one south, in which he visited the soft, gi-een, pastoral
hills round Hawick, Selkirk, Coldstream, and thence by Kelso to New-
castle and Carlisle. Another he made into the Highlands, with his
friend William Nicol. During this excursion he seems to have luxuri-
ated on all the glorious scenery of those regions, and revelled with
high and low ; fell in love with Charlotte Hamilton, the sister of his
friend Gavin, and several other ladies ; did and said many wild, and
clever, and some foolish things.
On his return, disheartened and chagrined, treated with the utmost
contempt by those who once flattered and lionized him beyond bounds.
Burns now turned his back on Edinburgh, and went to seek that
obscure country life which he saw weU enough was his destiny. The
man to whom that very city was to raise a splendid monument on
the Calton Hill ; the man who was to have monuments raised to his
honour in various spots of his native land ; the man to whose im-
mortal memoi'y jubilees were to be held, to which people of all ranks
were to flock by eighty thousands at a time ; the man who was to
take the highest rank of all the poets of Scotland, —
" Whose lines are mottoes of the heart,
"Whose truths electrify the sage,"
in the eloquent words of Campbell ; and whose genius w^as to be the
dearest memory of his coi;ntrymen in all regions of the earth whither
their adventurous spirit leads them, — now, with a sad and wounded
Iieart, pursued his way homewards with an exciseman's appointment
in his pocket, the highest and only gift of his country. Burns knew
and felt that his genius had a just claim to a good and honourable
po-st in his native land ; and his remaining letters sufficiently testify
that from this hour the arrow of blighted ambition rankled in his
heart, which never ceased its irritation till it had pulled down his
gallant strength, and sent him to an early grave. He maiTied his
Jean, and chose his farm on the banks of the Nith, as Allan Cun-
ningham's father remarked to him at the time, not with a farmer's,
but a poet's choice. But here, half farmer, half exciseman, poverty
came rapidly upon him once more ; in three years' time only ha
c^uitted it, a man ruined in substance and constitution, and went to
depend on his excise salary of 70/. a-year in the town of Dumfries.
258 ntJRKS,
I visited this farm in August, 1845. The coach from Dumfries to
Glasgow set me down at ElUsland, lying about seven miles from
Dumfries. Here I found a road running at right angles from tho
highway at a field's distance, and saw the grey roof of the farm
homestead and its white chimneys peeping over the surrounding
trees. The road, without gate or fence, leads you across a piece of
watery ground, one of those hollows left undrained for the growtli
of what they call bog-hay, that is, rushes and coarse grass, which
they give to the cows in winter. This was quite gay with cotton-
rush, bog-beans, orchises, and other bog-flowers, and with its fragrant
marginal fringe of meadow-sweet. After about a hundred yards, the
road becomes a lane, enclosed on one side by a rough stone wall, and
on the other by a tall hedge, with a row of flourishing ashes, each
fence standing on a bold bank well hung with broom. The barley
stood green on the one hand, and the hay in cock in the field on the
other, and all had a pleasant summer air and feeling about it.
Advancing up this lane, I soon stood on the ascent, and saw the
farm-house shining out white from amongst its trees, and half-a-
dozen young men and women busily hoeing turnips in the adjoining
fields. The farm, in fact, is a very pleasant farm. It hes somewhat
high, and its fields swell and fall in a very agreeable manner, though
it is still low compared to the hills that rise around it at a distance,
green and cultivated, but bare. It is distinguished from all the farms
round it, by being so completely planted with hedge-row trees, par-
ticularly ashes and larches. The land is light, yet tolerably fertile,
dry, and healthy. Close below the house sweeps along that fine vale
of the Nith, with all its rich meadows and woods, its stately old
houses, and its river dark and swift, overhung with noble and ver-
ditrous trees. This seems the place where Burns might have been
happy, had happiness and prosperity been easily secured by a tem-
perament and circumstances such as his. He had a home fit for
a poet, though humble. It was a home amid the goodhness and the
godliness of nature. It was the home of a brave, a free, and an
honest man, of a great man and great poet, whose name and fame
were allowed and honoured by the sound hearts and sound minds, if
not by the baser and vainer ones, of his country. Here he was a
man and a farmer ; and both man and farmer are gentlemen if they
choose to be so. He had no need to doft' his bonnet, or to pull it in
shame over his brow before any man, so that he cultivated his acres,
and the glorious soil of his intellect, with the heart and hand of an
enthusiast in his labour. He had built his own bower in the spot
chosen by himself, in a spot beautiful, and pure, and calm as a poet
could desire ; and had brought to it the woman of his love ; and his
children were springing up around him, making the green and wood-
land banks of the Nith ring with the rapture of their young sports.
He had a stalwart frame, and a giant intellect, and a heart true in
its feelings to the divinity of human nature, to the divinity within
him, to the divinity of those aims, and objects, and truths, for which
man exists, and for whose advance and illustration the poet is
beyond all men, born and endowed. Ah ! if he could but have
BURKS. 259
guided with a safe hand those passions which are given to feed and
kindle the glorious impulses of the glorious nature of the poet, the
friend and prophet and counsellor of mankind, what a great and
what a happy man might he have lived and died here ! If he had
really —
" Follow'd his plough along the mountain-side,"
instead of the exciseman's horse over the hills and througn the
hamlets of the country round, to what a venerable age might he
have lived amongst his children and his admiring countrymen ! But
the tact for business and the turn for prudence, how rarely can thej^
exist with the fervid temperament which has to evolve the living
meteors of poetry ! The volcano icill have its crater and its desola-
tions, and not green and peaceful ridges of peace. Particularly in
this case, where the poet had been called out of the ranks of the
poor, and had had at once to contend against the flatteries of exalta-
tion unprepared by the discipline of education. Burns and Hogg
may therefore be excused, where Byron could not stand ; Ebenezer
Elliott is almost the only instance of contrary success.
One cannot, however, see this Arcadian scene, this sort of Sabine
farm, so well calculated for the " otium cum difpntate " of the poet,
without feeling one's heart wrung at the idea that it was a vain gift ;
a haven of peace only oftered to a struggling and doomed swimmer ;
and that the foul exciseman craft, and the degrading dipstick, and
the whisky firkin, were in the rear. Mr. Chambers in his Life of
Burns says, he does not see how he could have done anything else
at that time but accept the post of an exciseman, and this opinion
has been echoed by Mr. Gilfillan. He could have been a farmer with-
out being an exciseman, and a much happier and soberer man.
The very ne:it neighbours of Burns were Mr. Miller, of Dalswinton,
and Mr. RiddeU, of Friar's-Carse. There he went to meet, and dine,
and revel with distinguished guests. Heavens ! why should he not
have been able to go there as the honest British farmer, and not as
the exciseman ? Could he feel that he was a poet, and fit society
for the wealthy, the refined, and the learned, and that he was not
degraded ? He was glorious — and an exciseman. Here he wrote
Mary in Heaven — and mounted his jaded steed and trotted off" to
the hell of whisky distilleries and whisky dram-shops. He wrote
here, in one day, Tam o' Shanter, in a fever of laughter and excite-
ment — and perhaps the next day would repeat the lines to the rude
and fuddled rabble of a " pubhc," where he was in the way of his
business and his ruin. There is something so anomalous in the
genius and the grade, in the magnificent endowments and the bare
necessities of Robert Burns, that one cannot now conceive how they
could have been permitted to occur by his fellow-men., or be tolerated
by himself. To think of him here, in his own white farm-house,
like a dove's nest, amid its green and overshadowing leaves, and
hung over the pure lapsing waters ; and then of him in that little
dirty house in Dumfries, in that street of tramps and beggars, living
degraded, despised, and persecuted, and dving the poorest exciseman
K -1
e>
2G0 BURNS-
and greatest poet of his country ! In the hour of his death, the
soul of his country awoke with one gi-eat throb to the consciousness
of who and what he was : what a pity that the revelation did not
come a little sooner ! And this I say not to taunt his covmtry with
it. The sense of the national treatment of Robert Burns has been
expressed with such manly eloquence by his countrymen, Lockhart,
Wilson, and Allan Cunningham, that it needs not us English to cast
a single stone, who have the memory of Chattertou amongst us.
All great nations have similar sins to answer for. Scotland does not
stand alone ; but there is something so peculiarly strange in the fate
of Burns, and which comes over us as we tread the ground that he
had chosen for his home, and the floor of the house that he built,
that it has forced me involuntarily to follow my own feelings, instead
of my descriptions.
The farm, as I have said, is a very pleasant one. Burns is sup-
posed to have chosen the particular situation of his house not only
for its fine situation on the banks of the river, and overlooking the
vale and country round, but on account of a beautiful spring which
gushes from the slope just below the house. The ground plan of
his house is very much like that of most Scotch farms. The build-
ings form three sides of a quadrangle. The house and buildings are
only one storj^high, white, and altogether a genuine Scotch steading.
The house is on the lowei' side, next to the river. Burns's bed-room
has yet two beds in it, of that sort of cupboard- fashion, with check
curtains, which are so often seen in Scotch farm-houses. The
humble rooms are much as they were in his time. Near the house,
and running parallel with the river, is a good large garden, which he
planted. The side of the farm-yard opposite to the house is pleasantly
planted off with trees. The farm is just as it was, about one hundred
acres. By places it exhibits that stony soil which made Burns call
it " the riddlings of creation," and say that when a ploughed field
was rolled it looked like a paved street ; but still it carries good
crops. Burns had it for oO/. a-year, or ten shillings an acre. I sup-
Eose the present tenant pays three times the sum, and is proud of
is bargain. He observed it was an ill wind that blew nobody any
profit. " Mr. Burns," said he, " had the farm on lease for ninety
years, and had he not thrown it up, I should not have been here
now." The farmer seemed a very sensible man, and though he was
just mouating his gig to go on business to Dumfries, he stopped,
und would go over the farm and house, and point out everything to
me. He said what Lockhart and Cunningham say, that Burns had
so many servants that they ate and drank all that came oft" the farm.
" The maids baked new bread, and the men ate it hot with ale."
But it is said, too, on the spot, that most of these servants were
relatives, and that presents of whisky and other good things were
sent from far and near to Burns, and that while he was absent on
his excise rounds, they sat in the house and drank, and ate to it,
instead of being at work. Burns once observed to his neighbour,
the next farmer, that he wondered how it was that the farm left no
surplus for rent ; and the farmer said, " Why, i\Tr. Burns, it would
BURNS. 2G1
bo a wonder if it did, for your servants cannot eat it and leave it for
rent too." It is said, also, that being once invited to dinner at
Dalswinton House, and not coming, the guests asked how he was
getting on. Mr. Miller said he hoped very well, " for," added he, "I
think I have set him up." This being repeated to Burns, is said to
have hurt his proud feelings extremely, and to have induced him to
i-emark that he did not like to live on the estate of a man who
thought he had set him up. Long he did not live there, more's the
pity. The goodwill of his haughty landlord had gone before.
It was here, too, that the story is told of his being found by two
Englishmen fishing in the Nith. "On a rock that projected into
the stream, they saw a man angling. He had a cap of fox.skin on
his head, a loose great-coat fixed round him by a belt, from which
hung an enormous Highland broadsword : it was Burns." The
.story is likely enough. The banks of the Nith here are steep, and
full of wild thickets ; and one may very well imagine Burns not
being over-particular in his toilet v/hile pursuing his amusement in
this solitude.
It was one of his delights to range along these steep river bank.s,
and it was along them, between the house and the fence at the
Ijottom of the field down the river, that he paced to and fro as
he composed Tam o' Shanter. Mrs. Burns relates, " that, observing
Kobert walking with long swinging strides, and apparently mut-
tering as he went, she let him alone for some time. At' length
she took the children with her and went forth to meet him. He
seemed not to observe her, but continued his walk. On this," said
she, " I stept aside with the bairns aiuong the broom, and past us he
came, his brow flushed and his eyes shining ; he was reciting these
lines : —
' Now Tam, O Tam ! liad time Ijeen queans
A' plump an' sirapping, i' their teens;
Their sarks, instead o' ereeshie flannen,
Been snaw-white seventeen Iiunder linncii I
Thir breeks o' mine, my only pair,
That ance were plush, o' f,'ude blue hair,
I wad hae f,'i'en them aff my hurdles,
Por ae blink o' tlie bonnie burdies.'
1. wish ye had but seen him ! He was in such ecstasy that the teara
were happing down his cheeks." He -had taken writing materials
with him, and leaning on a turf fence which commanded a view
down the river, he committed the poem to paper, walked home, and
read it in great triumph at the fireside. The remains of this turf
fence may be seen to this day in the shape of a green bank, close-
alcove the river, under the shade of a narrow plantation of larches
which bounds the field. The farmer said that Professor Wilson,
when he visited the spot, rolled himself on the bank, saying it was
^TOl•th while trying to catch any remains of genius and humour that
liurns might have left there.
The farmer said, what indeed Allan Cunningham states, that when
Burns came the farm was all open, " there were no dykes,"— walls
ind fences. That he introduced the first dairy of Ayrshire cows, all
2G2 BURKS.
Bplendid cattle, some of them beiug presents from such friends as
the Dimlops, &c. Presents or no presents, poor Burns laid out on
the farm in his first year all the proceeds of the Edinburgh edition
of his poems, and never saw them again.
The view from the house is very charming. The river runs clear
and lleet below, broad as the Thames at Hampton Court, or the Trent
at Nottingham, and its dark trees hang far along it over its waters.
Beyond the stream lie the broad rich meadows and house of Dalswin-
ton, a handsome mansion of red freestone aloft amid its woods, and
still beyond, and higher up the rivei-, rise still bolder hills. The very
next residence upwards on the same side of the river is Friar's-Carse,
the seat of Burns's friend Mr. Riddell, into whose grounds he had a
private key, so that he could enjoy all the beauty and sohtude of his
woods at pleasure, or take the nearest cut to the house. Up the
valley, about two miles or so, is the farm-house belonging to his
friend Nicol of the High School, where
" Willie brewed a peck o' malt,
And Rob and Allan cam to see."
Friar's-Carse deserves a few more words, before we shift to the
last sad scene, Dumfries. It is a beautiful estate which you enter
from the Glasgow road by a neat lodge, and advance a quarter of a
mile, perhaps, along a carriage drive, one side of which is planted
with shrubs and Howers, and the other consists of the steep wild
bank of a fine wood. The way winds on, and here and there you
have an old stone grey cross, or old picturesque saint, or such thing,
which has a good effect. At last, you emerge in an open meadow
suiTounded by fine hills and woods, and at the head of which, on a
green and graceful esplanade, stands a good, though not a very large
house. In the meadows, which are of great extent, roves a numerous
herd of as fine cattle as ever roamed the meads of Asphodel, and
much finer, I suspect, for they are Ayrshire cows of the most
splendid description ; and some very fine trees rear their heads to
beautify the ground. As you approach the house, it is along the
foot of a beautiful slope enriched by noble old trees. Behind
the house there is a green and airy sort of table-land, on which
flower-stands of rustic work filled with roses and geraniums stand,
and down which moneywort with all its golden blossoms streams,
and then the ground sinks rapidly into a deep dell full of tall trees,
and containing a garden of the old pleached walk kind, and which
through the latticed gate gives you such a peep at its beauties as
enchants you.
In this house used to live Mr. Riddell and his wife, the beautiful
and accomplished Maria Riddell ; but who was of a capricious
temper, and to whom Burns, as they violently quarrelled or were
again reconciled, addressed some of his most flattering and his most
severe verses. Here the Whistle was caroused for, and here the
original copy of Burns's poem on the subject is kept still. Pity it
was that the lady of the house, a young widow, Mrs. Crichton, was
just bowling out at her lodge gates as I walked in, or I would have
called and requested the favour of a sight of this paper. But the
BUHXS. 263
butler assured mc tnat there it was ; and in the pine wood on the
Bide by which you enter, the remains of the hermitage where Burns
wrote the well-known lines on the window. The iDine wood has
grown ; there are silver firs that may claim kindred with those of
the Black Forest, but the hermitage is gone. A single gable, a few
scattered stones, and a mass of laurels that have grown high and
hidden it, are all that remain of the hermitage, which I only found
by dint of long traversing the dusky wood.
But Bm-ns is gone ; Miller of Dalswintou is gone ; the Riddells of
Friar's-Carse are gone ; their estates are in other families ; and it is
to be hoped that the exciseman's guagiug-stick is gone too. I do not
see it hung aloft in any hall. I dare say the sons of Burns have not
preserved it, as the walking-stick of Sir Walter Scott now hangs
aloft in the study at Abbotsford. But the memory of the poet and
his friends lives all over these walks, and meadows, and woods,_more
livingly than ever. It is the quick spirit of the place. Poetry is not
dead here. It is the soul and haunting shadow of these fair and solemn
scenes, and a thousand years hence will startle young and beating
hearts as the wood-pigeon dashes out through the magic hush of the
forest, and the streamlet leaps down the mossy stone, and laughs and
glitters in the joyous glance of the sun. The exciseman's stick is
turned into the magic wand of nature, and there will be bitter satire,
and deep melancholy, and wonder and love, as it waves a thousand
times self-multiplied in the bough of the pine-tree, and the bent of
the grass, wliile the heart of man can suffer or enjoy. You see that
already in everything. Burns no longer walks on one side of tlie
market-place of Dumfries, solitary and despised, while the great and
gay crowd and flutter on the other ; but as the daily coach rolls on
its way, the coachman pointing with his whip, says softly — " That is
the fai'm of Ellisland ! " And every man and woman, every trade-
ti-aveller and servant-maid says—" Where ? " And all rise up, and
look, and there is a deep silence.
For that silence, and the thoughts that live in it, who would not
have lived, and suffered, and been despised 1 It is the triumph of
genius and the soul of greatness over the freaks of fortune, and even
over its own sins and failings. It is something to have walked over
the farm of Ellisland : it is still more to have stood on the spot in
his farm-yard where the heart of Burns rose up in a flame of hal-
lowed aS'ection to Mary in heaven — a more glorious shrine than the
mausoleum of Dumfries.
The neighbourhood of Dumfries, to which the last scene of our
subject leads us, is very charming. The town is just a quiet country
town ; but the Nith is a fine river, and runs through it, and makes
both town and country very agreeable. The scenery is not wild and
rocky, but the vale of the Nith is rich, and beautiful in its richness.
The river runs in the finest sweeps imaginable ; it seems to disdain
to go straight, but makes a circle for a mile, perhaps, at a time, as
clean and perfect as if struck with compasses, and then away in
another direction ; while on its lofty banks alders and oaks hang
richly over the water, and fine herds of cattle arc grouped in those
L'Gl nrnxs.
deep meadows, aud salmon fishers spread their nets aud arc busy
mending them on the broad expanse of gravel that covers here and
there the bends of the river ; while, high above the lapsing waters,
your eye wanders over a broad extent of fresh, rich meadow country,
with scattereil masses of trees and goodly farms ; and far around arc
liigh aud airy hills, cultivated to the top. A more lovely pastoral
country, more retired aud poetical, you cannot well find. This is the
scenery to which Burns, during his abode in Dumfries, loved to
resort. " When he lived in Dumfries," says Allan Cunningham, " he
had three favourite walks, — on the dock-green by the river-side,
among the ruins of Lineludeu College, and towards the Martingam
l^ord on the north side of the river. The latter place was secluded,
commanded a view of the distant hills and the romantic towers or
Lincluden, and afforded soft greensward banks to rest upon, aud the
.sight aud sound of the stream. As soon as he was heard to hum to
himself, his wife saw that he had something in his mind, and wan
(|uite prepared to see him snatch up his hat and set off silently for
his musing-ground."
About three miles up the river we come upon the beautiful ruins
of the abbey of Lincluden, standing on an elevated mound, over-
looking the junction of the Cluden and the Nith, and overlooked by
a sort of large tumulus covered with larches, where the monks are
said to have sate to contemplate the country, aud where the country
people still resort to loiter or read on Sundays. A profound tran-
quillity reigns over all the scene, a charm indescribable, which Burns,
of all men, must have felt. For myself, I knew not where to stop.
I advanced up the left bank of the liver, opposite to the ruins, now
treading the soft turf of the Nith's margin, now pent in a narrow-
track close on the brink of the stream amongst the alders, now
emerging into a lofty fir clump, and now into a solemn grove of
neech overhanging the stream. Farther on lay the broad old mea-
dows again, the fisher watching in his wooden hut the ascent of the
salmon, the little herdboy tending his black cattle in the solitary
field, old woods casting a deep gloom on the hurrying water, grey
old halls standing ori fine slopes above the Nith, amid trees of mag-
nificent size and altitude. The mood of mind which comes over you
here is that of unwritten poetry.
When one thinks of Burns wandering amid this congenial nature
where the young now wander and sing his songs, one is apt to forget
that he bore with him a sad heart and a sinking frame. When wo
see his house in Dumfries, we are reminded pretty forcibly of these
things. We have to dive at once into a back street in the lower
part of the town, and turn and wind from one such hidden and poor
street to another, till, having passed through a sufficient stench of
tan-yards, which seem to abound in that neighbourhood, we come to
a Uttle street with all the character of the abode of the poor, which
is honoured with the name of Burns Street. The house is the
first you come to on the left hand. There was an old thatched one oi i
the opposite side, and I set it down at once to be the poet's ; but no,
at a regularly formal poor man's house, of a dingy whitewash, with
BURNS. 2f>5
its stone door and window frames painted of a diugy blue, a bare-
legged girl, very dirty, was washing the floors, and went from the
bucket and showed me the house. On the right hand of the door
was the kitchen, in which the girl informed me that there was
nothing left belonging to the Burnses, except two bells which she
pointed out, and a gas pipe which Mr. Burns had put in. On the
left hand was the sitting-room, furnished very well for a poor man,
with a carpet on the floor. The girl said her father was an under-
taker ; but when I asked where was his shop, she said he was au
undertaker of jobs on railroads and embankments. Up stairs there
was a good large chamber unfurnished, which she said was the one
occupied by Mr. and Mrs. Burns, and where both of them died. Out
of the other chamber a little closet was taken, including one front
window, and here, she said, Bm-ns Avi'ote, or it was always said so.
There were two garrets ; and that was the poet's, or rather the
exciseman's house. It was just about suited to the income of an
ordinary exciseman, and had no attribute of the -poefs home about
it. Mr. Robert Chambers, in his Picture of Scotland, calls it a neat
little house. Unfortunately, at my visit it was anything but neat or
clean, and its situation in this miserable quarter, and amid the odour
of tan-yards, m.ust give to any foreigner who visits it an odd idea of
the abodes of British poets. I wonder that in some improvement
the Dumfriesians don't contrive to pull it down.
From this abode of the living poet, I adjourned to that of the
dead one. This is situated in St. Michael's churchyard, not far from
the house, but on an eminence, and on the outside of the town. The
lane in which the house is, is just one of the v:orst. It looks as though
it were only inhabited by keepers of lodging-houses for tramps, and
1 believe mainly is so. It is a sort of Tinker's-lane. The church-
yard, though not more than two hundred j-ards off, is one of the
most respectable, and the poet's house there is the very grandest.
One naturally thinks how mxich easier it is to maintain a dead poet
than a living one.
A churchyard in this part of the country has a singular aspect to
an English eye. As you approach the Scottish border, you see the
headstones getting taller and taller, and the altar-tombs more and
more massive. At Carlisle, the headstones had attained the height
of six or seven feet at least, and were deeply carved with coats of
arms, &c. near the top, but here the whole church j^ard is a wildernes*
of huge and ponderous monuments. Pediments and entablatures,
Grecian, Gothic, and nondescript ; pillars and obelisks, some of them
at least twenty feet high — I use no exaggeration in this account —
stand thick and on all sides. To our eyes, accustomed to suchadifferent
size and character of churchyard tombs, they are perfectly astonish-
ing. I imagine there is stone enough in the funeral monuments of
this churchyard to build a tolerable street of houses. You would
think that all the giants, and indeed all the gmd people of all sorts
that Scotland had ever produced, had here chosen their .sepulture.
Such ambitious and gigantic structures of freestone, some red, some
white, for dyers, ironmongers, gardeners, slaters, glaziers, and the
2G6 BURNS.
like, are, I imagine, nowhere else to be seen. There are vintner.?
who have tombs and obelisks fit for genuine Egyptian Pharaohs ;
and slaters and carpenters, who were accustomed to cUmb high when
alive, have left monuments significant of their soaring character.
These far outvie and overlook those of generals, writers to the signet,
esquires, and bailiffs of the city.
Your first view of this churchyard strikes you by the strange aspect
of these ponderous monuments. A row of very ancient ones, in fact,
stands on the wall next to the street. Two of them, most dilapi-
dated, and of deep red stone, have a very singular look. They have
Latin inscriptions, which are equally dilapidated. One to J^^rancis
Irving fairly exhausts the Latin tongue with his host of virtues, and
then takes to English, thus : —
" King James the First me Balive named;
Dumfries oft since me Provost claimed ;
(Jod has for me a crown reserved,
Tor king and country have I served."
Burns's mausoleum occupies, as nearly as possible, the centre of
the farther end of the churchyard opjjosite to the entrance, and a
broad walk Isads up to it. It stands, as it should do, overlooking
the pleasant fields in the outskirts of the town, and seems, like the
poet himself, to belong half to man and half to nature. It is a sort
of little temple, which at a distance catches the eye as you approach
that side of the town, and reminds you of that of Garrick at
Hampton. It is open on three sides, except for iron gates, the
upper border of which consists of alternating Scottish thistles and
spear-heads. A couple of Ionic pillars at each corner support a pro-
jecting cornice, and above this rises an octagon superstructure with
arche.s, across the bottom of which again run thistle-heads, one over
;3ach gateway, and is surmounted by a dome. The basement of the
mausoleum is of granite. The building is enclosed by an iron
railing, and the little gate in front of the area is left unlocked, so
that you may approach and view the monument through the iron
gates. The area is planted appropriately with various kinds of ever-
greens, and on each side of the gate stands conspicuously the
Scottish thistle.
In the centre of the mausoleum floor, a large flag with four iron
rings in it, marks the entrance to the vault below. At the back
stands Turnarelli's monument of the poet. It consists of a figure of
Burns, of the size of life, in white marble, at the j^lough, and Coila,
his muse, appearing to him. This is a female figure in alto-relievo
on the wall, somewhat above and in front of him. She is in the act
of throwing her mantle, embroidered with Scotch thistles, over him,
according to his own word.s — "The poetic genius of my country
found me, as the prophetic bard Elijah did Elisha, at the plough,
and threw her inspiring mantle over me." Burns stands with his
left hand on one of the plough stilts, and with the other holds his
bonnet to his breast, while, with an air of surprise and devotion,
he gazes on the muse or genius of his poetry. He appears in a
short coat, knee breeches, and short gaiters. The esecutiou is so-so.
BUKXS. 2G7
The likeness of the poet is by no means conformable to the best
portraits of him ; and Nature, as if resenting the wretched cari-
cature of her favourite son, has already began to deface and corrode
it. The left hand on the plough is much decayed, and the right
hand holding the bonnet is somewhat so too. At his feet lies
what I suppose was the slab of his former tomb, with this inscrip-
tion : " In memory of Kobert Burns, who died the 21st of July,
1796, in the 37th year of his age. And Maxwell Burns, who died
the 25th of April, 1799, aged 2 years and 9 months. Francis
Wallace Burns, who died the 9th of June, 1808, aged 14 years
His sons. The remains of Burns received into the vault below 1 9th
of September, 1815. And his two sons. Also, the remains of Jean
Armour, relict of the Poet, born Feb. 1765, died 26th of March.
1834."
The long Latin inscription mentioned by his biographers, a
manifest absurdity on the tomb of a man like Burns, and whose
epitaph ought to be intelligible to all his countrymen, is, I suppose,
removed, for I did not observe it ; and the above English in-
scription, of the elegance of which, however, nothing can be said,
substituted.
The gates of the mausoleum itself are kept locked, and the monu-
ment again enclosed within a plain railing.
Some countrymen were just standing at the gate with their plaids
on their shoulders making their observations as I arrived at it. I
stood and listened to them.
1st Man. — " Ay, there stands Robin, still holding the plough, but
the worst of it is, he has got no horses to it."
2i? Man. — " Ay, that is childish. It is just like a boy on a Sunday
who sets himself to the plough, and fancies he is a ploughing when
it never moves. It would have been a deal better if you could but
have seen even the horses' tails."
ud Man. — " Ay, or if he had been sitting on his plough, as I have
seen him sometimes in a picture."
\st Man. — " But Coila is well drawn, is not she ? That arm whicb
.she holds up the mantle with, is very well executed."
2c? Man. — " It's a pity though that the sculptor did not look at his
own coat before he put the only button on that is to be seen."
Zd Man.—'' Why, where is the button ? "
2</ Man. — " Just under the bonnet ; and it's on the wrong side."
1*^ Man. — " Oh ! it does not signify if it be a double-breasted coat,
or perhaps Robin buttoned his coat different to other folks, for he
was an unco chiel."
%l Man. — " But it's only single-breasted, and it is quite wrong."
The men unbuttoned and then buttoned their coats up again to
satisfy themselves ; and they decided that it was a great blunder.
I thought there was much sound sense in their criticism. The
allegorical figure of the muse seems too much, and the absence of the
horses too little. Burns would have looked quite as well standing
at the plough, and looking up inspired by the muse without her
being visible.
£.'■8
BURNS.
The jjloiigh rests ou a nigged piece of marble laid on a polished
basement, in the centre of which is inscribed in large letters, —
BURNS.
I had to regret missing at Dumfries the three sons of Burns, and
the staunch, friend of the family, and of the genius of the poet, Mr.
M'Diarmid. Mr. Robert Burns, the poet's eldest son, resides at
Dumfries, but was then absent at Belfast, in Ireland, where I after-
wards saw him, and was much struck with his intelligence and great
information. Colonel and Major Burns had just visited Dumfries,
but were gone into the Highlands, with their friend Mr. M'Diarmid.
The feelings with which I quitted Dumfries were those which so
often weigh upon you in contemplating the closing scenes of poets'
lives. " The life of the poet at Dumfries," says Eobert Chambers,
" was an unhappy one ; his situation was degrading, a'ld his income
narrow." Reflecting ou this as I proceeded by the mail towards
Moffat, the melancholy lines of Wordsworth recurred to me with
peculiar etfect : —
" ^ry former thoughts returned: the fear that kills:
And hope that is ti;i\villiiig to be fed;
Cold, pain, and labour, and all fleshly ills ;
And mighty poets in Iheir misevv dead."
WILLIAM COWPER.
There is scarcely any ground in Englaud so well known in imagina-
tion as the haunts of Cowper at Olney and Weston ; there is httle
that is so interesting to the lover of moral and religious poetry.
There the beautiful but unhappy poet seemed to have created a now
world out of unknown ground, in which himself and his friends, the
Unwins, Lady Austen and Lady Hesketh, the Throckmortons, and
the rest, played a part of the simplest and most natural character,
and which fascinated the whole public mind. The hfe, the spirit,
and the poetry of Cowper present, when taken together, a_ most
singular combination. He was timid in his habit, yet bold in his
writing ; melancholy in the tone of his mind, but full of fun and
])layfulness in his correspondence ; wretched to an extraordinary
dcgree, he yet made the whole nation merry with his John Gilpin
and other humorous writings ; despairing even of God's mercy and
of salvation, his religious poetry is of the most cheerful and even
triumphantly glad character ;
" Hi? soul exults, hope animates his lays,
The sense of mercy kindles into jiraise."
Filled with this joyous assurance, wherever he turns his eye on tho
magnificent spectacle of creation, he finds themes of noblest gratu-
latioa. He looks into the lieavens, and exclaims : —
270 COWPER.
" Tell mc, ye sliiiiin;; host,
1 hat ravifjate a sea that knows no storm,
Keiieath a vault unsullied with a cloud,
If Ironi your elevation, whence ye view
Distinctly scenes invisiWe to man,
And systems, of whose liirth no tidings yet
Have reached this nether viorld, ye s])y a race
I'avoured as ours, transgressors from the womb,
And hastening to a grave, yet doomed to rise.
And to possess a brighter heaven than yours?
As one, who long detained on foreign shores
I'ants to return, and when he sees afar
His country's weather-bleached and battered rocks
From the green wave emerging, darts an eye
Radiant witli joy towards the happy land ;
So I with animated hopes behold
And many an aching wish, your beamy fires.
That show like beacons in the blue abyss,
Ordained to guide the embodied spirit home
From toilsome life to never-ending rest.
Love kindles as I gaze. I feel desires,
That give assurance of their own success.
And that, infused from heaven, must thither tend."
The Task, book v.
Such is the buoyant and cordial tone of Cowper's poetry ; how
unlike that iron deadness that dared not and could not soften into
prayer, which so often and so long oppressed him. Nay, it is not for
himself that he rejoices only, but he feels in his glowing heart the
gladues-s and the coming glory of the whole universe.
" All creatures worship ma.i, and all mankind
One Lord, one Father. Lricr has no place ;
That creeping pestilence is driven away ;
The breath of Heaven has chased it. In the hear>
No passion touches a discordant string,
But all is harmony and love. Disease
Is not, the pure and uncontaminate blood
Holds its due course, nor fears the frost of ago.
One song employs all nations, and all cry,
• Worthy the Lamb, for he was slain for us \ '
The dwellers in the vales and on the rocks
Shout to each other, and tlie mountain tops
From distant mountains catch the flying joy :
Till nation after nation taught the strain.
Earth rolls the rapturous Hosanna round.
Behold the measure of the promise filled ;
See Salem built, the labour of a God !
Bright as a sun tlie sacred city shines ;
AH kingdoms, and all princes of the earth
Flock to that light ; the glory of all lands
Flows into her; unbounded is her joy.
And endless her increase. Thy rams are there,
Nebaioth, and the flocks of Kedar there;
Praise is in all her gates : upon her walls
And in her streets, and in her spacious courts,
Is heard salvation. Eastern Java there
Kneels with the native of the farthest West ;
And Ethiopia spreads abroad the hand.
And worships. Her report has travelled forth
Into all lands. From every clime they come
To see thy beauty, and to share thy joy,
O Sion '. an assembly such as earth
Saw never, such as Heaven stoops down to see.
Thus heavenward all things tend. For all were once
Perfect, and all must be at length restored.
So God has greatly purposed." — The Tash, book vi
COWPER. 271
Such was the lofty and all-embracing spirit of that man whom
hard dogmatists could yet terrify and chill into utterest woe.
Shrinking from the world, he yet dared to lash this world from
which he shrunk, with the force of a giant, and the justice of more
than an Aristides. Of the church, he yet satirized severely its
errors, and the follies of its ministers ; in political opinion he was
free and indignant against oppression. The negro warmed his blood
into a sympathy that produced the most effective strains on his
behalf — the worm beneath his feet shared in his tenderness. Thus
he walked through life, shuiniiug its tumults and its highways, ono
of its mightiest labourers. In his poetry there was found no fear,
no complaining ; often thoroughly insane, nothing can surpass the
sound mind of his compositions ; haunted by delusions even to the
attempt at suicide, there is no delusion in his page. All there is
bright, clear, and consistent. Like his Divine Master, he may truly
be said to have been bruised for our sakes. As a man, nervous
terrors could vanquish him, and unfit him for active life ; but as a
poet he rose above all nerves, all terrors, into the noblest heroism,
and fitted and will continue to fit others for life, so long as just and
vigorous thought, the most beautiful piety, and the truest human
sympathies command the homage of mankind. There is no writer
who surpasses Cowper as a moral and religious poet. Full of powei
and feehng, he often equals in solemn dignity Milton himself. He
is as impressive as Young without his epigrammatic smartness ; he
is as fervently Christian as Montgomery, and in intense love of
nature there is not one of our august band of illustrious writers who
surpasses him. He shows the secret of his deep and untiring p,ttach-
ment to natui-e, in the love of Him who made it.
" He is the Freeman, wlioni the truth makes free,
And all are slaves beside. There's not a chain
That hellish foes, confederate for his harm,
Can wind around him, but he casts il oft'
With as much ease as Samson his green withes.
He looks abroad into the varied field
Of Nature, and though poor perhaps, compared
With those whose mansions glitter in his sight..
Calls the delightful scenery all his own.
ills are the mountains, and the valleys his.
And the resplendent rivers. — His to enjoy
With a propriety that none can feel,
but who with filial confidence inspired
Can lift to heaven an unpresumptuous eye,
And smiling say — ' My Father made them all ! '
Are they not his by a peculiar right,
And by an emphasis of interest his,
Whose eye tliey fill with tears of holy joy.
Whose heart with praise, and whose exalted mii.il
With worthy thoughts of that unwearied love
That planned, and built, and still upholds a wT^rt
So clothed with beauty, for rebellious man ?
Yes— ye may fill your gamers, ye that reap
The loaded soil, and ye may waste much good
In senseless riot ; but ye will not find
In feast, or in the chase, in song or dance,
A liberty like his, who unimpeached
Of usurpation, and to no man's wrong,
Appropriates nature as his Father's work,
And haj s, richer use of yours than ye.
272 COWPER.
jf c is indeed a Freeman : free by uirth
or no mean city, planned or ere tlie liills
AVere built, tbe fountains ojjened, or tlie sea
AVith r.ll his roaring multitude of ■waves/' — The Task, Look v.
The writings of Cowper testify everywhere to that grand sermon
M-nicli is eternally preaching in the open air ; to that Gospel of the
field and the forest", w^hicli, like the Gospel of Christ, is the voice of
that love which overflows the universe ; which puts down all
sectarian bitterness iu hira who listens to it ; which, being perfect,
" casts out all fear," against which the gloom of bigots and the
terrors of fanatics cannot stand. It was this which healed his
wounded spirit beneath the boughs of Yardly Chase, and came
fanning his temj^les with a soothing freshness in the dells of Weston.
When we follow his footsteps there, we somewhat wonder that
scenes so unambitious could so enrapture him ; but the glory came
from within, and out of the materials of an ordinary walk he could
raise a brilliant superstructure for eternity.
William Cowper was born in the parsonage of Great Berkhamp-
stead. The Birmingham railway whirls you now past the spot, or
you may, if you please, alight and survey that house hallowed by
the love of a mother such as he has described, and by the record of
it in those inimitable verses of the son on receiving her picture.
" WHiere once we dwelt our name is lieard no more,
Children not thine have trod my nursery floor;
And where the gardener llobin, day by "day,
Drew me to school along the public way.
Delighted with my bauble coach, and wrapped
In scarlet mantle warm, and velvet capped.
"J'is now become«a history little known,
That once we called the pastoral house our oun.''
Cowi)er Avas at school at Market-street, Hertfordshire, then at
Westminster ; after w-hich he was articled for three vears to Mr.
Jhapman, a solicitor. After quitting Mr. Chapman, he" entered the
Inner Temple, as a regular law student ; where his associates were
Thurlow, afterwards the well-known Lord Chancellor, Bonnel Thorn-
ton, and Colman. Cowper's family w-as well connected, both on the
father's and mother's side, and he had every prospect of advance-
ment ; but this the sensitiveness of his nature prevented. Being
successively appointed to the offices of Beading Clerk, Clerk of the
Private Committees in the House of Lords, and Clerk of the Jour-
nals, he vvas so overwhelmed by being unexpectedly called on to
discharge his duty publicly before the House, that it unsettled his
mind, his prospects of a v/orldly nature were for ever over, and in a
state of the most settled melancholy he was committed to the care
of Dr. Cotton of St. Alban's. In the summer of 1765 he quitted
St. Alban',s, and retired to private lodgings in the town of
Huntingdon. There he was, as by a direct act of Providence,
led to the acquaintance of the family of the Rev. Mr. Unwin, one of
the clergymen of the place. Cowper had attended his church ; and
his interesting appearance having attracted the attention of his son
William Cawthorne Unwin, he followed him in his solitarv walk,
COWPER. . 2 1?,
and inti'oduced himself to him. This simple fact decided, as by the
very finger of heaven, the whole destiny of the poet, and probably
secui-ed him as a poet to the world. "With this family he entered
into the most affectionate intimacy. They wei-e people after his own
heart, pious, intelligent, and most amiable. The father was, how-
ever, soon after killed by a fall from his horse, the son was himself
become a minister, and the widow, the ever-to-be-loved Mary
Unwin, retired with the suffering poet to Olney, at the invitation of
the Eev. John Newton, the clergyman there, where she watched over
him with the tender solicitude of a mother. To her, in all pro-
bability, we owe all that we possess in the poetry of Cowper.
With his life here we are made familiar by his poetry and letter.'^,
and the biography of Hayley. His long returns of melancholy, the
writing of poetry, which Mrs. Unwin suggested to him to divert his
thoughts, his gardening, his v/alks, his tame hares, his successive
acquaintances with Lady Austen, Lady Hesketh, and the like, all this
we know. What particularly concerns us is, the present state and
appearances of his homes and haunts here. To these the access is
now easy. From the Wolverton station, on the North-western rail-
way, an omnibus sets you down, after a run of nine miles, at the
iSull inn, in the spacious, still, and triangular market-place of Olney.
Here, again, prints have made us most accurately acquainted with
the place. The house occupied by Cowi)er stands near the eastern
corner, loftily overtopping all the rest. There are the other quiet,
cottage-like houses sti-etching away right and left, the tall elm-tree,
the pump, the old octagon stone lock-up house. The house which
was Cowper's makes an imposing appearance in a picture, and in
reality is a building of considerable size ; but it must always have
l)een internally an ill-finished house. He himself, and his friends,
compared it to a prison. It had no charms whatever of location.
Opposite to it came crowding uji some common dwellings, behind
lay the garden, on a dead flat, and therefore with no attractions but
.such as art and a poet's imagination gave it. It was, for some years
after he quitted it, inhabited by a surgeon. He had, in his "turn,
long left it ; and it now was divided into three tenements. One was
a little grocer's shop, the other part in front was an infant school, and
the back part a workshop of some kind. The house was altogether
dingy and desolate, and bore no marks of having at any time been
finished in a superior style. That which was once the garden was
now divided into a back-yard and a small garden surrounded by a
high stone wall. They show an apple-tree in it, which they say
(Jowper planted. The other and main portion of the garden was cut
off by the stone wall, and the access to it was from a distcsit part of
tlie town. This garden was now in the possession of Mi. Morris, a
master bootmaker, Avho, with a genuine feeling of respect for the
poet's memory, not only retained it as much as possible in the state
in which it was in Cowper's time, but had the most good-natured
pleasure in allowing strangers to see it. The moment I presented
myself at his door, he came out, anticipating my object, with the
key, and profiered his own guidance. In tlie garden, abovt the
274 COWPER.
centre, still stands Cowper's summer-house. It is a little square
tenement, (as Cowper describes it himself, in one of his letters,) not
much bigger than a sedan-chair. It is of timber, framed and plas-
tered, and the roof of old red tiles. It has a wooden door on the side
next to his own house, and a glass one, serving as window, exactly-
opposite, and looking across the next orchard to the parsonage.
There is a bench on each side, and the ceiling is so low that a man
of moderate stature cannot stand upright in it. Except in hot
weather, it must have been a regular wind-trap. It is, of course,
written all over with verses, and inscribed with names. Around it
stand evergreens, and in the garden remain various old fruit-trees,
which were there in Cowper's time, and some of them, no doubt,
jjlanted by him. The back of some low cottages, with their windows
level with the very earth, forms part of the boundary wall ; and the
orchard, in front of the summer-house, remains as in Cowper's time.
It will be recollected that, in order to save himself the trouble of
going round through the town, Cowper had a gate put out into this
orchard, and another into the orchard of the Eectory, in which lived
his friend Mr. Newton. He paid a pound a year for thus crossing
his neighbour's orchard, but had, by this means, not only a very near
cut to the Parsonage opened to him, but a whole quiet territory
of orchards. This still remains. A considerable extent of orchards,
bounded, for the most part, by the backs of the town houses, pre-
sents a little quiet region, in which the poet could ramble and muse
at his own pleasure. The Parsonage, a plain, modern, and not large
building, is not very distant from the front of the summer-house,
and over it peeps the church spire. One cannot help reflecting how
often the jjoet and his friends used to go to and fro there. Newton,
with his genuine friendship for Cowper, but with his severe and pre-
destinarian religion, which to Cowper's grieving spirit was terrifying
and pi'ostrating ; then, a happy change, the lively and affectionate
and witty Lady Austen, to whom we owe John Gilpin and The Task.
Too lively, indeed, was this lady, charming as she was, for the nerves
nnd the occupations of the poet. She went, and then came that
delightful and true-souled cousin, Lady Hesketh, a sister as Mary
Unwin was a mother to the poet. She had lived much abroad, from
the days in which Cowper and herself, merry companions, had
laughed and loved each other dearly as cousins. The fame of him
whom she had gone away deploring, as blighted and lost for ever,
met her on her return to her native land, a widow ; and, with a
heart and a purse equally open, she hastened to renew the intercourse
of her youth, and to make the poet's life as happy as such hearts
only could make him. There is nothing more delightful than to see
how the bursting-forth fame of Cowper brought around him at once
all his oldest and best friends — his kith and kin, who had deemed
him a wreck, and found him a gallant bark, sailing on the brightest
sea of glory to a sacred immortality.
Lady Hesketh, active in her kindness as she was beautiful in
person and in spirit, a true sisterly soul, lost no time in removing
Cowper to a more suitable house and neighbourhood. Of the housw
C0^VPER. 275
we liave spoken. The situation of Olney is on the flat, near the river
Ouse, and subject to its fogs. The town was dull. It is much now
as it was then ; one of those places that are the links between towns
and villages. Its present population is only 2,300. In such a place,
therefore, every man knew all his neighbours' concerns. It was too
exposed a place for a man of Cowjjer's shy disposition, and yet had
none of that bustle which gives a stimulus to get out of it into the
country. Removing from it to the country was but passing from
stillness to stillness. The country around Olney, moreover, is by no
means striking in its features. It is like a thousand other parts of
England, somewhat flat, yet somewhat undulating, and rather naked
of trees. AVeston, to which he now removed, was about a mile west-
ward of Olney. It lies on higher gi-ound, overlooking the valley of
the Ouse. It is a small village, consisting of a few detached houses
on each side of the road. The Hall stood at this end, and the neat
httle church at the other. Trees grew along the street, and Cowper
pronounced it one of the prettiest villages of England. Luckily he
had neither seen all the villages of England, nor the finest scenery
of this or other countries. To him, therefore, the country was all
that he imagined of lovely, and all that he desired. It never tired,
it never lost its hold upon his fancy and his heart.
" Scenes must be beautiful, which daily viewed
Please daily, and where novelty survives
Long knowledge, and the scrutiny of years.
Praise justly due to those that I describe."
This he said of this scenery around Weston ; and in setting out fur
that village from Olney, we take the track which, even before ho
went to live there, was his daily and peculiarly favourite walk.
Advancing out of Olney street, we are at once on an open ascent on
the highway. At a mile's distance before us lie AVeston and its
woods ; its little church-tower overlooking the valley of the Ouse.
Beliind us lies Olney, its tall church spire rising nobly into the sky ;
and close beneath it the Ouse emerges into sight, sweeping round
the water-mills which figure in the poet's works, and then goes in
several different streams, as he says, lazily along a fine stretch of
green meadows, in which the scenes of The Dog and Water-lily,
and The Poplar Field occur. On this eminence stood Cowper often,
with Mary Unwin on his arm ; and thus he addresses her, as he
describes most vividly the view : —
" And witness, dear companion of my walks,
Whose arm this twentieth winter I perceive
Fast locked in mine, with pleasure sucli as love.
Confirmed by long experience of tliy worth
And well-tried virtues could alone inspire —
Witness a joy that thou hast doubled long.
Thou knowest my praise of nature most sincere,
And that my raptures are not conjured up
To serve occssions of poetic pomp,
But genuine, and art partner of tliem all.
How oft upon yon eminence our pace
Has slackened to a pause, and we have borne
The ruffling wind, scarce conscious that it blew,
While admiration, feeding at the eye,
And still unsated dwelt upon the scene!
Thence with what pleasure we have just disterned
27o COWl'ER.
Tlio distant plough slow moving, and beside
His labouring team, that swerved not from the trace,
The sturdy swain diminished to a boy ;
Here Ouso slow winding through a level plain
Of spacious mead, with cattle sprinkled o'er,
Conducts the eye along his sinuous course
Delighted. There, fast rooted in their bank,
Stand, never overlooked, our favourite elms,
That screen the herdsman's solitary hut ;
While far beyond, and overthwart the stream,
That, as with molten glass, inlays the vale,
The sloping land recedes into the clouds ;
Displaying on its varied side the grace
Of hedge-row beauties numberless, square tower,
1'all spire, from which the sound of cheerful bells
Just undulates upon the listening ear.
Groves, heaths, and smoking villages remote."
We sliould not omit to notice that behind us, over Olney, shows itself
the church tower and hall of Clifton, the attempt to walk to which
forms the subject of Cowper's very humorous poem, The Distressed
Travellers. Before us, as we advance, — the Ouse meadows below on
our left, and plain, naked farm-lands, on our right, — the park of
Weston displays its lawns, and slopes, and fine masses of trees. It
will be recollected by all lovers of Cowper that here lived Sir John
and Lady Throckmorton, Cowper's kind and cordial friends, who,
even before they knew him, threw oi>en their park and all their
domains to him ; and who, when they did know him, did all that
generous people of wealth and intelligence could do to contribute to
his happiness. The village and estate here wholly belonged to them,
and the hall was a second home to Cowper, always open to him with
a warm welcome, and an easy, unassuming spirit of genuine friend-
.ship ; Lady Throckmorton herself voluntarily becoming the tran-
scriber of his Homer, when his young friend, Rose, left him. In the
whole of our literature there is no more beautiful instance of the
intercourse of the literary man and his wealthy neighbours, than that
of Cowper and the Throckmortons. Their reward was the pleasure
they conferred ; and still more, the fame they have thus won.
The Throckmortons having other and extensive estates, the suc-
cessors of Cowper's friends have deserted this. The house is pulled
down, a wall is built across the bottom of the court-yard, which cuts
off from view what was the garden. Grass grows thickly in the
court, the entrance to which is still marked by the pillars of a gate-
way bearing vases. Across the court arc erected a priest's house and
Catholic chapel, — the Throckmortons were and are Catholic, — and
beyond these still stand the stables, coach-house, &c., bearing a clock-
tower, and showing that this was once a gentleman's residence. At
the end of the old thatched outbuilding you see the word school
painted ; it is the village school — Catholic, of course, as are all, or
nearly all, the inhabitants. A pair of gateway pillars, like those
Avhich led to the house, mark the entrance to the village a little
beyond the house. On the opposite side of the road to the house is
the park, and, directly opposite to the house, being taken out of the
park, is the woodland wilderness in which Cowper so much delighted
to ramble.
COWPER. 277
The house of Cowper, Wcstou Lodge, stands ou the right hand,
about the centre of the village, adjoining a picturesque old orchard.
The trees, which in his time stood in the street opposite, however,
have been felled. A few doors on this side of the Lodge is a public-
house, with the Yardly Oak upon its sign, and bearing the name of
Cowper's Oak. The Lodge is a good and pleasant, but not large
house. The vignette at the head of this article represents the tree
opposite as still standing, which is not the fact. The room on the
right hand was Cowper's study. In his bedroom, which is at the
back of the house overlooking the garden, still remain two lines,
which he wrote when about to leave VVeston for Norfolk, where
he died. As his farewell to this place, the happiest of his life, when
his own health, and that of his dear and venerable friend, ]\Irs.
Unwin, were both failing, and gloomy feelings haunted him, these
lines possess a deep interest. They are written on the bevel of a
panel of one of the window shutters, near the top right-hand corner ;
and when the shutter has been repainted, this part has been carefully
excepted.
" Farewell, deav scenes, for ever closed to me!
Oh for what sorrow must I now exchaiiire you ?
Julv 22.
— — even here 28 \ 1795
July 22 J 1795."
The words and dates stand just as here given, and mark his recur-
i-ence to these lines, and his restless state of mind, repeating the
tlate of both month and year.
From this room Cowper used to have a view of his favourite
shrubbery, and beyond it, up the hill, pleasant crofts. The shrubbery
was generally admired, being a dehghtful little labyrinth, composed
of flowering shrubs, with gravel walks, and seats placed at appro-
I)riate distances. He gave a humorous account to Hayley of the
erection of one of these arbours. " I said to Sam, ' Sam, build me
a shed in the garden with anything you can find, and make it rude
and rough, like one of those at Eartham.' ' Yes, sir,' says Sam ; and
straightway laying his own noddle and the carpenter's togethei-, has
built me a thing fit for Stowe gardens. Is not this vexatious ?
I threaten to inscribe it thus : —
Beware of building ! I intended
Rough logs and thatch, and thus it ended."
All this garden has now been altered. A yard has been made behind,
with outbuildings, and the garden cut oft" with a brick wall.
Not far from this house a narrow lane turns up, enclosed on one
side by the park wall. Through this old stone wall, now well
crowned with masses of ivy, there used to be a door, of which
Cowper had a key, which let him at once into the wilderness. In
this wilderness, which is a wood grown full of underwood, through
which walks are cut winding in all directions, you come upon what
is called the Temple. This is an open Gothic alcove, having in front
an open .space, scattci-ed with some trees, amongst them a fine old
acacia, and closed in by the thick wood. Here Cowper used to sit
278 COWPER.
much, delighted with the perfect and deep seclusion. The t-emplo
is now fast falling to decay. Through a short windiug walk to the
left you come out to the park, which is separated from the wilder-
ness by a sunk fence. A broad grass walk runs along the head of
this fosse, between it and the wilderness, and here you find the two
urns luider the trees, which mark the grave of two favourite dogs
of the Throckmortons, for which Cowper condescended to write
epitaphs, which still remain, and may be found in his poems.
There is also a figure of a lion, couchant, on a pedestal, bearing thi.s
inscription : "Mortuo Leone etiam Lepores insultant, 1815."
From this point also runs out the tine lime avenue, of at least a
quarter of a mile long, terminated by the alcove. Every scene, and
every spot of ground which pi-esents itself here, is to be found in
Cowper's poetry, particularly in the first book of his Task — The
Sofa. The Sofa was but a hook to hang his theme upon ; his real
theme is his walk through this park and its neighbourhood, jjarticu-
larly this fine avenue, closing its boughs above with all the solemn
and insi)iring grace of a Gothic cathedral aisle. To the right the
park descends in a verdant slope, scattered with noble trees. There,
in the valley, near the road to Olney, is the Spinny, with its rustic
moss-house, haunted by Cowper ; and where he wrote those verses
full of the deepest, saddest melancholy which ever oppressed a guilt-
less heart, beginning, —
" Oh, happy shades, to me unhlest!
Friendly to peace, but not to me!
How ill the scene that offers rest.
And heart, that cannot rest, agree ! "
There, too, in the valley, but where it has freed itself from the wood,
is the rustic bridge, equally celebrated by him ; and beyond it in
the fields, the Peasant's Nest, now grown from a labourer's cottage,
shrouded in trees, to a considerable farm-house, with its ricks and
buildings, conspicuous on an open eminence. Still beyond are the
woods of Yardly Chase, including those of Kilwick and Dinglebury,
well known to the readers of Cowper ; and this old chase stretches
away for four or five miles towards Castle Ashby.
In traversing the park to reach the woods and Yardly Oak, we
come into a genuinely agricultural region, where a sort of peopled
solitude is enjoyed. Swelling, rounded eminences, with little valleys
winding between them ; here and there a farm-house of the most
rustic description ; the plough and its whistling follower turning up
the ruddy soil ; and the park, displaying from its hills and dells its
contrast of nobly umbrageous trees, showed where Cowper had
often delighted himself, and whence he had drawn much of his
imagery.
" Now roves the eye ;
And posted on tliis speculative height
Exults in its command. The sheepfold here
Pours out its fleecy tenants o'er the glebe.
At first, progressive as a stream, they seek
The middle field ; but scattered by degrees.
Each to his choice, soon whitens all the land.
There from the sun-burnt hay-field homeward creeps
COWPER. 279
• The loaded wain ; while, lightened of its charge.
The wain that meets it passes swiftly by ;
The boorish driver leaning o'er his team,
■Vociferous, and impatient of delay.
Nor less attractive is the woodland scene,
Diversified with trees of every growth,
Alike, yet various. How the grey, smooth trunks
Of ash, or lime, or beech, distinctly shine
Within the twiliglit of their distant shades :
There, lost behind a rising ground, the wood
Seems sunk, and shortened to its topmost boughs."
Tlie Task, book i.
At this point of view you find the poet's praises of the scenery
more fully justified than anywhere else. The park here has a solemn,
solitary, splendidly wooded air, and spreads its green slopes, and
gives hints of its secluded dells, that are piquant to the imagination.
And still the walk, of a mile or more, to the ancient chase is equally
impressive. The vast extent of the forest which stretches before
you gives a deep feeling of silence and ancient repose. You descend
into a valley, and Ejlwick's echoing wood spreads itself before you
on the upland. You pass through it, and come out opposite to a
lonely farm-house, where, in the opening of the forest, you see the
remains of very ancient oaks standing here and there. You feel
that you are on a spot that has maintained its connexion with the
world of a thousand years ago ; and amid these venerable trees, you
.soon see the one which by its bulk, its hollow trunk, and its lopped
and dilapidated crown, needs not to be pointed out as the Yardly
Oak. Here Cowper was fond of sitting within the hollow boll for
liours ; ai'ound him stretching the old woods, with their solitude and
the cries of woodland birds. The fame which he has conferred on
this tree has nearly proved its destruction. Whole arms and great
pieces of its trunk have been cut away with knife, and axe, and saw,
to prepare different articles from. The Marquis of Northampton,
to whom the chase belongs, has had multitudes of nails driven in to
stop the progress of this destraction, but finding that not sufficient,
has affixed a board bearing this inscription : — " Out of respect to
the memory of the poet Cowper, the Marquis of Northampton is
l)articularly desirous of preserving this oak. Notice is hereby given,
that any person defacing, or otherwise injuring it, will be prosecuted
according to law." In stepping round the Yardly oak, it appeared
to me to be, at the foot, about thirteen yards in circumference.
Every 5tep here shows you some picture sketched by Cowper,
" I see a column of slow rising smoke
O'ertop the lofty wood that skirts the wild.
A vagabond and useless tribe there cat
Their miserable meal. A kettle slung
Ketween two poles upon a stick transverse.
Receives the morsel — flesh obscene of dog.
Or vermin, or at best, of cock purloined
From his accustomed perch. Hard-faring race !
They pick their fuel out of every hedge,
AVhich kindled with dry leaves just saves unquenched
The spark of life. The sportive wind blows wide
Their fluttering rags, and shows a tawny skin,
The yc'Jura of the pedigree they claim."
280 COWPER.
Wo aro now upon ■'
" The grassy sward, close cropped by nibbling sheep,
And skirted thick vith intennixture firm
or tlioniy boughs."
Tlic (ikl wild chase opens its glades, discovers its heaths, startles
113 with its abrupt cries of birds, or plunges us into the gloom of
thick overshadowing oaks. It is a fit haunt of the poet. Such arc
the haunts of Cowper in this neighbourhood. Amid these, his was
a secluded but an active and most important existence. How many
of those who bustle along in the front of public life can boast of a
ten -thousandth jjart of the benefit to their fellow-men which was
conferred, and for ages will be conferred, by the loiterer of these
woods and fields ? In no man was his own doctrine ever made more
""anifest, that
" God gives to every man
Tlie virtue, teinper, understanding, taste,
That lifts him into life, and lets him fall
Just in the niche he was ordained to fill."
He says of himself —
" I was a stricken deer, that left the herd
Long since. With many an arrow deep infixed
My panting side was charged, when I withdrew
To seek a tranquil death in distant shades.
There was I joined by one, who had himself
Been hurt by the archers. In his side he bore,
And in his hands and feet, the cruel scars.
With gentle force soliciting the darts.
He drew them forth, and healed, and baVie me live.
Since then, with few associates, in remote
And silent woods I wander, far from those
My former partners of the peopled scene,
With few associates, and not wishing more."
Thus he began ; but, soothed by the sweet freshness of nature,
.strengthened by liar peace, enlightened to the pitch of true wisdom
by her daily converse, spite of all his griefs and fears, he ended by
describing himself, in one of the noblest passages of modern poetry,
as the happy man.
Quitting these scenes in quest of health, both the poet and his
dear friend Mary Unwin died at Dereham, in Norfolk ; she in 1796,
and he in 1800. '' They were lovely in their lives, and in death ihay
ire not divided,"
MRS. TIGHE, THE AUTHOR OF PSYCHE.
i"'iiRHAPS uo writer of merit has been more ueglected by her OuJi
fi lends than Mrs. Tighe. With everj means of giving to the public
a good memoir of her, 1 believe no such is in existence ; at all events,
1 have not been able to find one. The following brief particulars
have been furnished by a private hand : " Mrs. Tighe was born in
Ijublin, in 1774. Her father, the Eev. WiUiam Blachford, was Hbrariau
oJ Marsh's hbrary, St. Sepulchre, in that city. Her mother, Theo-
d'jsia Tighe, was one of a family whose seat has been, and is, Eosanna,
ccunty Wicklow. In 179:3, Miss Blachford, then but nineteen, mar-
ried her cousin, Henry Tighe, of "Woodstock, M.P. for Kilkenny in
the Irish Parliament, and author of a County History of Kilkenny.
Consumption was hereditary in Mrs. Tighe's family, and its fatal
seeds ripened with her womanhood. She was constantly afflicted
with its attendants, languor, depression, and want of appetite. With
the profits of Psyche, which ran through four editions previous to
her death, she built an addition to the Oi-phan Asylum in Wicklow,
thence called the Psyche ward. She died on the 24th of March, 1810,
and was buried at Woodstock, in Kilkenny, beneath a monument by
riaxman, from the finest marble of Italj'. ]\Lrs. Hemans, Banim, and
Moore, h&ve done homage to her genius, or lamented over its eclipse
North, in the ' Noctes Ambrosiantc,' with the assistance of Mr.
Timothy Tickler, has paid her a very high compliment. But her
abilities, her beauty, and her virtue, have not, as yet, been adequately
lectured in any biographical notice of her that I have seen. The
1813 edition of Psyche contains some aft'ecting allusions to her, in
the preface written Ijy her husband, who soon after followed her to
the grave."
How little is known of Mrs. Tighe, when so short an account is
the best that a countryman of hers can furnish ! and even in that
there are serious errors. So far from her monument being of the;
finest marble of Italy, it is of a stone not finer than Portland stone,
if so fine. So far from her husband soon following her to the gravc',
Mrs. Tighe died in 1810, and her husband was living at the time of
Mrs. Hemans's visit to Woodstock in 1831. He must have survived
:iS2 SIRS. TIGHE.
her above twenty years. In Mrs. Hemans'a own account of her
visit to Woodstock, she speaks of it as the place where " Mrs. Tigho
passed the latest years of her Hfe, and near where she is buried ;"
yet in the same vohime with Psyche, (1811 edition, p. 306,) there is a
" Sonnet, written at Woodstock, in the county of Kilkenny, the seat
of AVilliam Tiglie, June 30, 1809," i.e. only nine months before her
death. For myself, I confess my ignorance of the facts which might
connect these strangely clashing accounts of a popular poetess,
of a wealthy family, and who died little more than forty years
ago. I hoped to gain the necessary information on the spot, which
I rnade a long journey purposely to visit. Why I did not, remains
to tell.
The puem of Psyche was one which charmed me intensely at an
early age. There was a tone of deep and tender feeling pervading it,
which touched the youthful heart, and took possession of every
sensibility. There was a tone of melancholy music in it, which
seemed the regretful expression of the consciousness of a not far-off
death. It was now well known that the young and beautiful poetess
■iras dead. The life which she lived — crowned with every good and grace
that God confers on the bright ones of the earth, on those who are
to be living revelations of the heaven to which w^e are called, and to
which they are hastening, youth, beauty, fortune, all glorified by the
emanations of a transcendent mind — was snatched away, and there
was a sad fascination thrown over both her fate and her work. The
delicacy, the pathos, the subdued and purified, yet intense passion of
the poem, were all calculated to seize on the kindred spirit of youth,
luid to make you in love with the writer. She came before the
imagination in the combined witchery of brilliant genius, and the
pure loveliness of a seraph, which had but touched upon the earth on
some celestial mission, and was gone for ever. Her own Psyche, in
the depth of her saddest hour, yearning for the restoration of the
lost heaven and the lost heart, was not more tenderly beautiful to
the imagination than herself.
Such was the effect of the Psyche on the glowing, sensitive, ye't
immature mind. How much of this effect has in many cases been
the result of the quick feelings and magnifying fancy of youth itself !
We have returned to our idol in later years, and found it clay. But
this is not the case with Psyche. After the lapse of many years,
after the disenchanting effects of experience, after the enjoyment of
a vast quantity of new poetry of a splendour and power such as no
one age of the world ever before witnessed, we return to the poem
of Mrs. Tighe, and still find it full of beauty. There is a graceful
fluency of diction, a rich and deep harmony, that are the fitting
vehicle of a story full of interest, and scenery full of enchantment.
Spite of the incongruity of engrafting on a Grecian fable the knight-
errantry of the ]\Iiddle Ages, and the allegory of still later days, we
follow the deeply-tried Psyche through all her ordeals with unabat-
ing zest. The radiant Island of Pleasure, the more radiant Divinity
of Love, the fatal curiosity, the weeping and outcast Psyche wander-
ing on through the forests and wildernesses of her eartiily penance.
MRS. TIGIIE. 283
the myaterious kuight, the intrepid squire of the starry brow, are
all sketched with the genuine pencil of poetry, and we follow the
fortunes of the wanderers with ever-deepening entrancement.
None but Spenser himself has excelled Mrs. Tighe in the field of
allegory. Passion in the form of the lion subdued by the Knight ;
Psyche betrayed by Vanity and Flattery to Ambition ; the Bower of
Loose Delight ; the attacks of Slander ; the Castle of Suspicion ; the
Court of Spleen ; the drear Island of Indifierence ; and the final
triumph and apotheosis of the gentle soul, — are all vigorously con-
ceived, and executed with a living distinctness. The pleasm-e with
which she pursued her task is expressed in the graceful opening
stanzas of the fifth canto.
" Delightful visions of my lonely hours!
Cliarm of my life and solace of my care!
Oh ! would the muse but lend proportioned powers,
And give me language equal to declare
The wonders which she bids my fancy share,
Vi'hen wrapt in her to other worlds I lly ;
See angel forms unutterably fair,
And hear the inexpressive harmony
That seems to lloat in air, and warble through the sky.
" Might I the swiftly-glancing scenes recall !
Bright as the roseate clouds of summer eve.
The dreams which hold my soul in willing thrall.
And h.ilf my visionary days deceive,
C"ommunicai)le shape might then receive,
And other hearts be ravished with the strain ;
But scarce I seek the airy threads to weave.
When quick confusion mocks the fruitless j.ain,
And all the airy forms are vanished from my brain.
" Fond dreamer! meditate thine idle song!
But let thine idle song remain unknown ;
Tlie verse which cheers thy solitude, prolong ;
What though it charm no moments but thy own.
Though thy loved Psyche smile for thee alone,
Still shall it yield thee pleasure, if not fame ;
And when, escaped from tumult, thou hast flown
To tliy dear silent hearth's enlivening llama.
Then shall the tranquil muse her happy votary claim ! "
Moore has recorded his admiration of Psyche in a lyric of which
these stanzas are not the least expressive.
•' Tell me the witching tale again,
For never has my heart or ear
Hung on so sweet, so pure a strain,
So pure to feel, so sweet to hear.
" Say, Love ! in all thy spring of fame,
When the high Heaven itself was thine,
When piety confessed the flame.
And even thy errors were divine!
" Did ever muse's hand so fair
A glory round thy temple spread 1
Did ever life's ambrosial air
Such perfume o'er thine altars shed.'"
Mrs. Hemans had always been much struck with the poetry of ^Mrs.
Tighe. She imagined a similarity between the destiny of this pen-
.sive poetess and her own. She had her in her imagination when
she wrote The Grave of a Poetess ; and the concluding stanzas ara
particularly descriptive of Mra. Tighe's spirit.
h
5^84 MRS. TIGHE.
" Thou hast left sorrow in thy song,
A voice not loud but deep!
Tiie ^'loiious howcrs of cartli amonir,
How often didst tliou weep !
" Wliere couldst thou fix on mortal .cround,
Thy tender thouglits and liifrh ?
Now peace tlie woman's lieart liath foinul,
And joy the poet's eye ! "
' It was certaiuly among earth's glorious bowers that !Mrs. Tighe
passed her days. Eosanna, in Wicklow, is snid to have been her
principal residence after her marriage. The whole country round is
extremely beautiful, and calculated to call forth the poetic faculty
Avhcre it exists. All the way from Dublin to Eosanna is through a
rich and lovely district. It is a gold district, much gold being found
in its streams upwards of thirty years ago, the getting of which was
put a stop to by Government.
As you approach Eosanna the hills become higher, and your way
lies through the most beautifully wooded valleys. At the inn at
Ashford-bridge you have the celebrated Devil's-glen on one hand,
and Eosanna on the other. This glen lies a mile or more from the
inn, and is about a mile and a half through. It is narrow, the hills
on either hand are lofty, bold, craggy, and finely wooded ; and along
the bottom runs, deep and dark over its rocky bed, the river Vartree.
Tliis river runs down and crosses the road near the inn, and then
takes its way by Eosanna. Eosanna is perhaps a mile down the
valley from the inn. The house is a plain old brick house, fit for
a country squire. It lies low in the meadow near the river, and
around it, on both sides of the water, the slopes arc dotted with the
most beautiful and luxuriant trees. The park at Eosanna is indeed
eminently beautiful with its wood. The trees are thickly scattered,
and a great proportion of them are lime, the soft delicate foliage of
Avhich gives a peculiar character to the scenery. The highway, for
the whole length of the park as you proceed towards Eathdrum, is
completely arched over with magnificent beeches, presenting a fine
iiatural arcade. On the right, the ground ascends for a mile or
more, covered with rich masses of wood. In fact, whichever way
you turn, towards the distant hills, or pursuing your way down
the_ valley, all is one fairy land of beauty and richness. It is a
region worthy of the author of Psyche, worthy to inspire her beau-
tiful mind ; and we rejoice that so fair, and gentle, and good a
spirit had there her lot cast. In her poems she addresses one to
the Vartree : —
" Sweet are thy banks, O Vartree ! when at morn
Their velvet verdure glistens with the dew;
AVhcn fragrant gales, by softest zephyrs borne,
Unfold the flowers, and ope their petals new.
" And sweet thy shade, at noon's more fervid hours,
When faint we quit the upland gayer lawn.
To seek the freshness of tliy sheltering bowers.
Thy chestnut glooms, where day can scarcely dawn.
" Beneath the fragrant lime, or spreading beech.
The bleating flocks in panting crowds repose;
Their voice alone my dark retreat can reacli.
While peace and silence all my soul compose."
MRS. TIGHE, 285
In her sonnets, too, sbe alludes to lier favourite Rosanna, and to her
" chestnut bower," which, I behave, still remains. Indeed Rosanna
will always be interesting to the lovers of gentle female virtue and
pure genius, because here Psyche was written ; here the author of
Psycho lived, loved, and suffered.
Woodstock, where she died, lies, I suppose, forty or fifty mile«
distant, in Kilkenny. It is equally beautiful, though in a different
style. It lies on a high, round, swelling hill, — a good modern man-
sion. You see it afar off" as you drive over a country less beautiful
than that about Rosanna. There is a fine valley, along which the
river Nore runs, amid splendid masses of wood, two miles in length,
and meadows of the deepest green ; and beyond swells up the steep
round hill, covered also with fine timber to the top, eight hundred
feet in elevation. The whole is bold, ample, and impressive. To
reach the house, you pass through the village of Innerstiogue, at the
foot of the hill, and then begin the long and steep ascent. A con-
siderable way up you are ai-rested by smart lodge gates, and there
enter a fine and well kept park, in which the neatness of the carriage
roads, which are daily swept, and the skilfully dispersed masses of
line trees, speak of wealth, and a pride in it. On the top of the hill
stands the house, commanding noble views down into the superb
vale below, and over a wide extent of country.
In travelling between these two estates, a mind like that of Mrs.
Tighe would find scenery not inferior to that immediately lying
around both of them. In one direction she might traverse the cele-
In-ated district of Glendalough, or the vale of the Seven Churches ;
in another she might descend the vale of Avoca, and cross some of
Ihe finest parts of Carlow to Kilkenny. I took this latter route. i\u
part of England is m.o.re beautiful, or more richly cultivated than
much of this : thick woods, fertile fields, well-to-do villages, and
gentlemen's houses abounded. From the little town of Rathdrum
wo began to descend rapidly into the vale of Avoca, and passed the
^Meeting of the Waters just before dark. The vale, so far, had a very
different character to what I expected. I imagined it to be a mile or
two long, soft, flowing, and verdant. On the contrary, it is eight
miles in length, and has to me a character of greatness and exten-
siveness about it. It is what the Germans call ^^ grosmriig^'' — we want
the word. You descend down and down, and feel that a deeper
comitry is still below you. To me it had a feeling as if descending
from the Alps into a champaign country. Long ranges of hills on
either hand ever and anon terminated, as if to admit of a way into
the country beyond, and then began again, with the river wandering
on still far below us ; and here and there stupendous masses of lofty
rock, open meadows, and bold, high woods. These were the features
of this striking and great valley.
At the bridge, where the first meeting of the waters takes place,
that is, the meeting of the two streams, Avonbeg and Avonmore,
which thence become the Avoca, the driver of the car said — " Perhaps
your honour knows that this is the Meeting of the Waters. It wa<
Iiere that Moore made his speech ! "
28G MRS. IIGHK.
But the most striking meeting to us was a meeting with i great
number of one-horse carts, those of miners, with whom this vale
abounds. They were coming up from a market at Avoca, just below,
and they took no more notice of being all exactly in our way than if
we were not there. The driver shouted, but in vain ; and it was
only by using his whip over them till he broke oft" the lash that he
could get a passage. When they did draw out of the way, it was
always purposely to the wrong side. The fact is, they were all drunk,
and seemed to have a very animal doggedness of disposition about
them. The Wooden Bridge inn, at the bottom of the vale, and at the
commencement of the vale of Arklow, and the place of the second
meeting of the waters, is the great resort of travellers. The scene
here has much softness. A bend of the valley, an opening of rich
meadow, surrounded by hills thickly clothed with foliage, and the
rivers running on to their meeting, give a feeling of great and quiet
seclusion. Hei-e I posted, as I have said, across Carlow to Kilk(?nny,
and to Woodstock.
But at Rosanna and at Woodstock, my hope of obtaining some in-
formation regarding Mrs. Tighe, of seeing some iiaintiug, or other
object connected with her, was, with one exception, thoroughly
frustrated. Mrs. Tighe was an angel ;— of her successors I have
somewhat more to say. In all my visits to remarkable places in
England, I have received the utmost courtesy from the proprietors
of those houses and scenes which it was my object to see. In those
where I was anxious to obtain sight of relics of celebrated persons of
antiquity not ordinarily shown to the public, I have written to the
owner to request opportunity of examining them. In such cases,
noblemen of the highest rank have not, in a single instance, shown
the slightest reluctance to contribute to that information which was
for the public. In some cases they have themselves gone down into
the country to give me the meeting, and thrown open private
cabinets, and the like depositories of rare objects, with the most
active liberality. In every other case, so invariably have I found
the most obligmg facilities given for the prosecution of my inquiries,
that I have long ceased to carry a letter of introduction ; my name
alone being considered warranty enough. I found it equally so in
Ireland, except with the Tighes.
At Rosanna, Mr. Dan Tighe, as the people familiarly call him, cer-
tainly not Dante, was pointed out to me by a woikman, walking in
the meadow before his house, handling his bullocks which grazed
there. On asking the servant who came to the door whether Mr.
Tighe was at home, he first, as a perfect tactician, requested my
name, and he would see. I gave him my card ; and though he could
see his master as well as 1 could in the meadow, to whom I directed
his attention, he very solemnly marched into the house, and returnetl,
Baying he was not in. A self-evident truth. I inquired if Mrs. Tighe
was at home, explaining that I had come from England, and for what
object. He said, " Yes, but she was lymg in, and could see no one."
I then inquired when ]\Ir. Tighe might be expected in, as I should
much regret losing the opportunity of learning from him any parti-
MRS. TIGHE. 287
culars couuccttJ with my present iuquiiy. " He could not say ; —
most likely at six o'clock, his dinner hour." I promised to call on
my way towards Avoca, about half-an-hour before that time, that
I might not interfere with Mr. Tighe's dinner hour. I did so. Mr.
Tighe was now standing in his field, not a hundred yards from his
house. As soon as the servant appeared, he assured me Mr. Tighc
was not at home ; he could not tell where he was. I immediately
directed his attention to where he stood looking at some men at
work. The man did not choose to see him ; and, under the circum-
stances, it was not for me to advance and address him. It was
evident that the man had his cue ; the master did not choose to be
seen. I therefore mounted my car, and ordered the driver to drive
off. The spirit of the place was palpable. A willing master makes
a willing man. Well, as Mr. Tighe was walkuu/ out, and ]\Irs. Tighc
was li/bir/ in, I bade adieu to Rosanna, not much wiser for my visit ;
• — but then there was Woodstock.
1 drove fifty miles across the country, and found myself at the
door of Woodstock. Woodstock is a show house ; and here, there-
fore, I anticipated no difficulty of at least obtaining a sight of the
portrait or .statue of the late charming poetess. But unfortunately,
— what in England would have been most fortunate, — ]\Ir. Tighe was
at home, and the servant on opening the door at once informed mo
that the house was never shown when the family was there. Having
written on my card what was my object, that I had made the journey
from England for it, and added the name of a gentleman well known
to Mr. Tighe, who had wished me to do so, I requested the servant
to present it to Mr. Tighe. He did so ; and returned saying, " Mr.
Tighe said I was at liberty to see the ground.?, but not the house ;
and he had nothing further to say ! "
My astoni.shment may be imagined. The servant seemed a very
decent, modest sort of fellow, and I said — " Good heavens ! does
Mr. Tighe think I am come all the way from England to see his
grounds when ten thousand country squires could show much finer ?
AVas there no picture of Mrs. Tighe, the poetess, that I might be
allowed to see ? " " He thought not ; he did not know." " Was
there no statue ? " " He thought not ! he never heard of any."
How long had he been there ? " " Five years." " And never heard
of a statue or a monument to Mrs. Tighe, the poetess ? " " No,
never ! He had never heard Mrs. Tighe the poetess spoken of in
the family ! But if there were any monument, it must be at tho
church at Innerstiogue ! " I thanked him for his intelligence, the
only glimpse of information I had got at Rosanna, or Woodstock,
and drove off.
The matter was now clear. The very servants who had lived years
in the family had never heard the name of Mrs. Tighe, the poetess,
mentioned ! These present Tighes had been mari-ying the daughters
of lords — this a daughter of the Duke of Richmond, and Dan Tighe,
n daughter of Lord Crofton. They were ashamed, probably, that any
of their name should have degraded herself by writing poetry, which
a man or woman without an acre may do. When I reached tha
288 MRS. TIQHE.
cLui'i.h at luucrsitiogue, the matter received a most strikiiig coii-
tirmatiou. There, sure enough, was the monumeut, in a small
mausoleum in the churchyard. It is a recumbent figure, laid on
a granite altar-shaped basement. The ligure is of a freestone
resembling Portland stone, and is lying on its side as on a sofa,
being said, by the person Avho showed it, to be the position in which
she died, on coming in from a walk. The execution of the whole is
very ordinary, and if really by Flaxman, displays none of his genius.
I have seen much better things by a common stonemason. There is
a httle angel sitting at the head, but this has never been fastened
down by cement. The monument was, no doubt, erected by the
widower of the poetess, who was a man of classical taste, and, I
believe, much attached to hei-. There was no inscription yet put upon
the tomb, though one, said to be written by her husband, had long
been cut in stone for the purpose. In the wall at the back of the
monument, aloft, there was an oblong-square hole left for this inscrip-
tion, which I understood was lying about at the house, but no single
effort had been made to put it up, though it would not require an
liour's work, and though ISIrs. Tighe had been then dead six and
thirty years !
This was decisive! If these two gentlemen, nephews of the
poetess, who are enjoying the two splendid estates of the family,
Woodstock and Rosanna, show thus little respect to the only one of
their name that ever lifted it above the mob, it is not to be expected
that they will show much courtesy to strangers. AVell is it that
Mrs. Tighe raised her own monument, that of immortal verse, and
•UTote her own epitaph, in the hearts of all the pure and loving, not
on a stone which sordid relatives, still fonder of earth than stone,
may consign to the oblivion of a lumber-room.
That these nephews of the poetess do look after the earth which
her husband left behind him, though not after the stone, I learned
while waiting in the village for the sexton. I fell into conversation
with the woman at the cottage by which I stood. It was a^
foUows: — .
^g//:_«Well, your landlord has a tine estate here, i hope he is
good to you." J,
TFoman.—" Well, your honour, very good, very good. ^
Self.—" Very good ? What do you call very good ? I tind Lnghsli
and Irish notions of goodness don't always agree."
JFoimn.—" Well, your honour, wo may say he is mixed ; mixed,
your honour."
Self.—" How mixed ? "
Woman. — " Why, your honour, you sec I can't say that he was very
good to me."
&//:—" How was that ?" .
Woman. — "Why, your honour, we were backward in our rent, and
tlje squire sent for my husband, and told him that if he did not pay
all next quarter, be would sell us up. ]\Iy husbaud begged he would
MRS. i'lUHE. 2SS)
give hiin a little more time, as a neighbour said lie r.'ad some money
left liim, and would take part of our land at a good rent, and then
■we should be able to pay ; but now we got little, and the children
were many, and it was hard to meet and tie. ' Oh ! ' said the squire,
* if you are going to get all that money, j^ou will be able to pay more
I'ent. I must have two pounds a-ycar more ! ' "
,%//:_« But, surely, he did no such thing?"
Womc'd. — " 13ut he did it, your honour. The neighbom* had no
money — it was a hum ; he never took the field of us at all ; we never
were able to get a penny more from any one than we gave ; but when
my husband went to pay the rent at the next rent-day, the steward
would not take it. He said he had orders to have two pounds a-year
more ; and from that day we have had it regularly to pay."
What a fall out of the poetry of Psyche to the iron realities of
Ireland !
Since the publication of the first edition, I have received a little
information respecting Mrs. Tighe. Mrs. Ehnor Ward, of Southamp-
ton, who states herself to be the daughter of the first cousin to Mrs.
Henry Tighe, who was brought up as a sister with her, has kindly
forwarded the following particulars. The Rev. William Blachford,
the father of Mrs. Tighe, she says, was not only librarian of Marsh's
library, but rector of St. Werburgh's church, in Dublin. That he
died of a fever, leaving a family of ten young children. Mrs. Ward
asserts that consumption was not in the Blachford family ; and that
Mrs. Tighe's works were not published till after her death, and that
the proceeds of the sale went to the fimds for the support of an
institution founded and established by her mother, Mrs. Blachford,
in Dublin, and called " The House of Eefuge," intended for a home
for female servants out of place, and educating them for service.
This is totally at variance with the account already given ; yet it
should be correct, for Mrs. Ward adds — " When I said ]\Irs. Tighe' .s
works were not published till after her death, I should have excepted
twelve copies of 'Psyche,' which she had printed herself for her
nearest and dearest friends, of whom my mother was one. I have
the little volume now in my possession, with my mother's name
written by Mrs. Tighe, and a portrait of her, given by Mrs. Blach-
ford as the highest token of affection to my mother, her niece ; and
]\Irs. Blachford considered it the best that had been taken of her
daughter."
As to the mode of her death, Mrs. Ward says — " For many years
previous to her death, Mrs. Tighe had lost all power of movement in
her legs and feet, and was carried from room to room. She could
iiot, therefore, have died on her return from a walk ; nor did she die
in the attitude represented in the monument erected to her memory
at Woodstock. She died in the position in which, for some time
before her death, she had been accustomed to sleep, — sitting on a
low stool, leaning back in the easy-chair in which she used to sit
occasionally."
The Eev. C. Bathurst Woodman has also very kindly forwarded to
me a mamisci-ipt letter of the Eev, S. Pierce, who si>ent some time ir
2!»() MKS. TIGHK.
tho family at Rosaniia, aud was particularly struck with Mrs. Henry
Ti'^hc, the author of rsvclie. The whole account is highly interest-
in° and perhaps contains more information respecting the family
than the public is likely to obtain. The letter is addressed by tlie
reverend gentleman to his wife. It is dated July, 1796 : — _
" I had heard nuich of the county of Wicklow, as containing the
most romantic views and enchanting scenes in Ireland, and especially
iui estate called Eosanna, where a very opulent family reside of the
name of Tighe, and where every external pleasure oifered itself to
the various senses of the happy visitants.
" You may suppose that I was not without a wish to see this Eden
of delights, and little thought of realizing my desires ; when, to my
pleasing astonishment, I received a letter of invitation from Dr.
M'Dowall, written at I\Irs. Tighe's request, to spend some days at
liosanna.
'•' I went down last Monday, in company with Mr. and Mrs. Kelly ;
the former a son of Judge Kelly, the latter a daughter of Mrs. Tighe.
I tarried there till yesterday morning ; but oh, the enrapturing
I)lace ! It is impossible for me to describe it. Never did my ima-
gination paint Paradise itself so full of Nature's sweets. Everything
that could gratify the most delicate taste abounds there ; the ear,
the eye, the smell, all were charmed at once. Nature in her richest
fohage, her most varied beauty, her truest dignity, and amid her
sweetest perfumes, literally displayed herself in this charming
demesne ; while the combined family produced tlie same effect upon
the heart within doors, that Nature does upon the senses without.
" Mrs. Tighe is a widow lady of about forty-five years of age, of
strong sense, friendly manners, and, above all, with a heart warmly
devoted to religion. She has three sons : one has a seat in the
House of Parliament ; the youngest lives with her ; another, Mr.
Henry Tighe, having lately married, is building himself a house near
his mother's. Of all the men I ever saw, I never was so much
interested at the glance of a moment as when my eyes first fell on
him. I fancied I perceived all the dignity and frankness of a Koman
in his countenance and bearing ; nor was I disappointed. I found
him the idol of all his acquaintance. One thing alone he wants —
oh, that Heaven would bless him with it ! — the one thing needful.
His lady is young, lovely, and of sweet manners, united with as sweet
a form. She entered the room, soon after I came to Rosanna, with
a chaplet of roses about her head. * Where,' I thought, * were the
beauties of the garden and the parlour so united before V Indeed,
1 felt myself as on enchanted ground, amused with a pleasing dream,
too romantic to be true.
" Three ladies besides form the female division of the family ; the
eldest is ilrs. Kelly. She is not distinguished by the regularity of
her features, nor the delicacy of her complexion ; but her mind is
enriched with such stores of grammatical, classical, philosophical,
and historical knowledge, as I never met with in one of her sex
before. She paints admirably. I do not pretend to be a connoisseur
in painting ; but, as well as 1 could judge, she unites the boldness of
MRS. TIGHE. 291
Reyuolds with the iuiagiuatiou and delicacy of a Cypriani, and the
flowing pencil of a Kubeus. I noticed a Jewish high-priest, whom I
saw in the synagogue last year, and two other gentlemen of London,
who had sat at her request. With all these accomplishments, she dis-
covers a modesty and humiUty which, united with a strong under-
standing and a devout heart, set her as far above the common level
of mortals as the summit of the Alps rises superior to the vale*
below.
" Miss Caroline is remarkable for nothing but an amazing vivacity
and continual flow of spirits, imless it be those accomplishments
which are common to the family— a fluency in the French language,
and an elegant touch of the harpsichord and organ. The third
female is a cousin ; but I was not enough in her company to ascei'-
taiu much of her character. The last thing she talked to me about
was the wish she had to enter a nunnery, and take the veil. Her
ilisposition seems naturally recluse, though not unamiable."
To this pleasing insight into the family of the Tighes, in which the
poetess, with the roses in her hair, and her husband, with his noble
Koman aspect, constitute the chief figures, Mr. Pierce adds a mention
uf the private tutor of the youngest son, and the curate of the parish,
who had a house in the corner of the orchard. He also informs ua
of the benevolence of the elder Mrs. Tighe, her schools for poor
children, and of her pressing desire that he should come and settl?
uear Rosanna.
*»s
JOHN KEATS.
We come now to one whose home and hamits on the earth wero
brief, —
" Who sparkled, was exhaled, and v.'eiit to heaven."
John Keats was one of those sweet and glorious spirits who descend
hke the angel messengers of old, to discharge some divine command,
not to dwell here. I'ure, ethereal, glowing with the fervency of
inward life, the bodily vehicle appears but assumed for the occasion,
and as a mist, as a shadow, is ready to dissolve the instant that
occasion is served. They speak and pass away into the higher hght
from wdience they came ; but their words remain — themselves life,
and spirit, and power — like the electric element in the veins of the
earth, quickening and vitalizing the souls of men to the end of time.
They become part and parcel of our nature ; they are as essential to
the aliment and the progress of our intellectual being as the light,
the morning dew of summer, the morning and the evening star, or
any of those great components of nature, the sky, the sea, or the
mountain, from which we draw the daily spirit of beauty ; and
live! — live, not as mere material machines; not as animal existences,
as brutes —
" Which giaza the uiountaiii-top witli faces prone,
And eyes intent upon tlie scanty lierb
It yields them ; or, recumbent on its brow,
Ruminate heedless of the scene outspread
Beneath, beyond, and stretching far away
From inland regions to tlie distant mahij" — Cowveu.
KKAXS. 293
nut lucre men of the world, laouey-gettiug, liouse-buildiiig, land-
purehasing creatures, but souls of God and of eternity. "Man lives
not by bread alone, but by every word \vliicli proceeds out of the
mouth of God," and which descends to earth by his prophets,
whether of prose or of poetry. It is by the mediation of such pure
and seraphic intelligences, that our true psychological frame and
i.-onstitution are built up. For, created to take our places in the
great future of the universe, amid the spiritual revelation of all
things spiritual, we must be raised substantially from the mere germ
of immortahty within us into "spirits of just men made perfect."
^Ye must be composed of the spiritual elements of beauty, thought,
sensation and seizure of all intellectual things, growing by the daily
absorption of divine essences into spiritual bodies, incorporate of
love, of light, of lofty aspirations and teuderest desires ; of thoughts
that comprehend the world, and hearts that embrace it with a divino
eapacity of aflection. As we walk on our daily way, and along the
muddiest paths of hfe, amid our own cares and loneliness, we do not
and cannot walk unblest. The shower of God's benedictions falls
on us ; the sunshine of his ceaseless gifts surrounds us. From his
own appointed men, whether living or dead, " the refreshments from
his presence" reach us, melt into us, and sustain us. Words spoken
thousands of years ago steal, like the whisper of a breeze, into our
bosoms, and become bright guests there ; music, full of deep movings,
heard but yesterday from the lips of the inspired, touches the spring
of happiness within us. The thoughts and sentiments of poets and
philosophers, " beautiful exceedingly," stand around us like the trees
and the flowers of our wayside ; and from every point of heaven
and earth are reflected, upon us the flowing waters, the cool forest
shades, the bright and glittering stars of that mind, which has been
poured through a myriad of vehicles and a host of ages down upon
us here. The light and colour and warmth which mature our very
corn aud fruits come from the sun. They are no more inherent in
this nether earth than our own life is. All that wo have and enjoy
must come from other worlds to us. Our material aliments are
sustained by the strength and life issuing from the infinite heavens ;
and thence too descend, in still more ethereal actuality, all that our
souls are made of.
Of the class of swift but resplendent messengers by \vhom these
ministrations are performed, neither om-s nor any other history can
ftu'nish a specimen more beautiful than John Keats. He was of
feeling and "imagination all compact." His nature was one pure
mass of the living light of poetry. On this world and its concerns
he could take no hold, and they could take none on him. The worldly
and the worldly wise could not comprehend him, could not sympa-
thise with him. To them his vivid orgasm of the intellect was
madness ; his exuberance of celestial gifts was extravagance ; his
unworldlincss was effeminacy ; his love of the universal man, and
not of gross distinctions of pride and party, was treason. As of the
liighest and divinest of God's messengers to earth, they cried "Away
vrith him, he is not fit to live ; " and the body, that mere mist-hke,
2:1 I KEATS.
Ihiit mere ^iliadow-likc body, already failing before tlic ferveucy of
liis spiritvial fuuetions^ fell, '* foded away, dissolved," and disappeared
before the bitter frost-wind of base criticism.
It was a dark and wretched time when Keats made his appearanco
amongst us. War, and i)arty, and peculation on the one side, and
resentment and discontent on the other ; the necessity for the gainer
maintaining his craft at all costs, and the equal necessity for the loser
dragging this ruinous craft to the ground, had infused into literature
an atrocious spirit. From this foul spirit, genius, in every fresh
incarnation, suffered the most ruthless and inhuman assaults. The
stronger possessor of it stood ; the weaker or more sensitive fell.
Keats was one of the latter. He had soul enough for anything, but
\\\^ phi/siqiie was feeble, and sunk. It will be one of the "damning
spots " which will for ever cling, not to the country, but to the age.
But it is to the everlasting honour of Leigh Hunt, that, himself a
critic as well as a poet, he never dipped his hand in the blood of the
innocents. He never slew one of those martyrs whose glorious
tombs we now build with adamantine stones of admiration, temper-
ing the cement with the tears of our love. Himself assailed, and
shot at, and cruelly wounded by the archers, he not only turned and
manfully defended himself, but spread the shield of his heart to
protect those who were rising up to become formidable rivals in the
public regard. It is a glory that is peculiar, and peculiarly beautiful,
that amid that iron age of a murderous criticism, he was for ever
found in close union and communion with the morning stars of
■[loetry. They truly " sang together." They seemed by an instinct
of life to flock to him, and by an instinct equally sure and unselfish
he felt at once their claims, and with open hand and lieart maintained
thcui. It was in the pages of the Examiner that, amid specimens
of young poets, I first made acquaintance with the magnificent
sonnet of Keats on reading Chapman's Homer, and with Shelley's
Hymii to Intellectual Beauty. From that hour there could be no
(juestion but that great men were come amongst us ; those men
who, in fact, " turn the world upside down," and by which turning
upside down, the only process, the asps and scorpions of malice are
shook out of it, and all its strong-rooted fabrics of prejudice and
pride are toppled into the dust. Till death, the souls of these
men never ceased to maintain that brave union thus begun, but
amid abuse, misrepresentation, and the vilest onslaughts from the
army of the aliens, went on blessing the world with those emanations
of splendid and unshackled thought, which are now recognised as
amongst the most precious of the national property. Who in future
days will not pray that he might have been as one of these 1
It is to the account by Leigh Hunt, in his " Byron and some of his
Contemporaries," that we owe almost all that we know of the hfe
and haunts of Keats. From this we learn that " Mr. Keats's origin
was of the humblest description. He was born October 29, 1796, at
a Itvery stables in Moorfields, of which his grandfather was pro-
prietor. He never spoke of it— perhaps out of a personal soreness
vvliich the world had exasperated. After receiving the rudiments of
KEATS. £f>o
a classical education at Mr. Clarke's school at Enfield, he was bound
'xppreutice to ]\Ir. Hammond, a surgeon, in Church-street, Edmonton j
and his enemies having made a jest even of this, he did not like to
be reminded of it ; at once disdaining them for their meanness, and
himself for being weak enough to be moved by them. Mr. Clarke,
jun., his schoolmaster's son, a reader of genuine discernment, had
encouraged with great warmth the genius that he saw in the young
poet ; and it was to Mr. Clarke I was indebted for my acquaintance
with him."
Mr. Hunt, in his warm-hearted way, lost no time in introducing
his poetry to the best judges of poetry, amongst them to Godwin,
Hazlitt, Basil Montagu, Charles Lamb, and others. He read to them,
amongst others, that tine sonnet already mentioned, —
" ON FIRST LOOKING INTO CHAPMAN'S irOMER.
" Much have I travelled in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen,
Round many western islands have I been,
AVhich hards in fealty to Apollo hold ;
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told,
That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne ;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I lieard Chapman speak out loud and hold.
Tlien felt I like some watcher of the skies.
When a new planet swims into his ken.
Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific— and all his men
Looked at each other witli a wild surmise,
Silent, upon a peak in Darien."
The two poets became speedily familiar and almost inseparable.
They read, walked, and talked together continually ; and Mr. Hunt
gives us various particulars of Keats's haunts at this period which
are nowhere else to be obtained. " The volume containing the above
sonnet," he says, " was pubhshed in 1817, when the author was in
his twenty-first year. The poem with which it begins was suggested
to him by a delightful summer day, as he stood beside the gate that
leads from the battery on Hampstead Heath into a field by Caen
Wood ; and the last poem, the one on Sleep and Poetry, was occa-
sioned by his sleeping in one of the cottages in the Vale of Health,
the first" one that fronts to the valley, beginning from the same
quarter. I mention these things, which now look trivial, because his
readers will not think them so twenty years hence. It was in the
beautiful lane running from the road between Hampstead and High-
gate to the foot of Highgate Hill, that meeting me one day he first
gave me the volume. If the admirer of Mr. Keats's poetry does not
know the lane in question, he ought to become acquainted with it,
both on his author's account and its own. It has been also paced
by Mr. Lamb and IMr. Hazlitt, and frequently, like the rest of the
Ijeautiful neighbourhood, by Mr. Coleridge ; so that instead of
Millfield-Iane, whiclt is the name it is known by ' on eartb,' it has
sometimes been called Poet's-lane, which is an appellation it richly
deserves. It divides the grounds of Lords ]\Iansfield and South-
ampton, running thi-ough trees and sloping meadows, and being rich
206 KEATS.
ill Iho botauy for which this part of the neighbourhood of London
lias al\vaj-s been celobratcd."
'Mv. Ilnnt was at this time Hving at Hampstead, in the Vale of
llcalth, and the house at which it is said Keats wrote the beautiful
poem on Sleep and Poetry was his. There is another fact in thi.s
iccouut that deserves attention, and that is, the date of the pubh-
oation of Keats's first small volume. This was 1817 ; in 1818 lie
published his Endjmion ; on the 26th of June, 1820, his third
volume, Lamia and other Poems, was published ; and on the 27th of
December of the same year he died at Rome.
Thus the whole of his poetical life, from the issue of his first
small volume to his death, was but about three years. During the
greater part of that period he felt his disease, consumption, was
mortal. Yet what progress in the development of his powers, and
the maturing of his judgment and feeling of art, was manifested in
that short space and under those circumstances ! The first volume
was a volume of immature fancies and unsettled style, but with
things which denoted the glorious dawn of a short but illustrious
(lay. The Endymion had much extravagance. It was a poetical
oft'ervescence. The mind of the writer was haunted by crowds of
imaginations, and scenes of wonder, and dreams of beauty, chiefly
irom the old mythological world, but mingled with the passion for
living nature, and the warmest feelings of youth. It brought for-
wai'd the deities of Greece, and invested them with the passions and
tenderness of men, and all the youthful glow which then reigned in
the poet's heart. The mind was j)ouriug over from intense fer-
mentation, but amid the luscious foam rose streams of the richest
wine of poetry which ever came from the vintage of this world.
The next volume. Lamia, Isabella, &c. showed how the heady liquor
liad cleared itself, and become spirit bright and strong. There was an
aim, a settled plan and purpose, in each composition, and a steady
power of judgment growing up amid all the vivid impulses of the
brain that still remained vivid as ever. The style was wonderfully
condensed, and the descriptive as well as conceptive faculty hail
assumed a vigour and acumen which was not, and is not, and pro-
bably never v;ill be, surpassed by any other poet. For proofs to
justify these high terms, it is only necessary to open the little
volume, and open it almost anywhere. How powerful and tender is
the narrative of Isabella: how rich and gorgeous and chaste and
well weighed is the whole of St. Agnes' Eve : how full of the soul of
poetry is the Ode to the Nightingale ! Pei'haps there is no poet,
living or dead, except Shakspeare, who can pretend to anything like
the felicity of epithet which characterises Keats. One word or
phrase is the essence of a whole description or sentiment. It is like
the dull substance of the earth struck through by electric fires and
converted into veins of gold and diamonds. For a piece of perfect
and inventive description, that pas.sage from Lamia, where— Lyci us
gone to bid the guests to his wedding — Lamia in her uneasy excite-
ment employs herself and her demon powers in adorning her palace,
is unrivalled.
KEATS. 297
" It was the custom then to bring away
The hride frotn liome at blushing shut of day.
Veiled, in a chariot, heralded along
Uy strewn flowers, torches, and a niaiTiage sonff.
With other pageants ; but this fair unknown
Had not a friend. So being left alone —
Lycius was gone to summon all his kin—
And knowing surely she could never win
His foolish heart from its mad pompousness,
She set herself, liigh-thoughted, how to dress
The misery in fit magnificence.
She did so ; but 'tis doubtful how and whence
Came, and who were her subtle servitors.
About the halls, and to and from the doors.
There was a noise of wings, till in short space
The glaring banquet-room shone with wide-arched grace.
A haunting music, sole, perhaps, and lone
Kupportress of the fairy roof, made moan
Throughout, as fearful tl.e whole charm might fide.
Fresh carved cedar mimicking a glade
Of palm and plantain, met from either side
High in the midst, in honour of the bride,
Two palms, and then two plantains, and so on,
From either side their stems branched one to one
All down the aisled place; and beneath all
There ran a stream of lamps straiglit on from wall to v.all.
.So canopied lay an untasted feast
Teeming ^Yitb odours. Lamia, regal drest,
Silently paced about, and as she went.
In pale contented sort of discontent,
Missioned her viewless servants to enrich
The fretted splendour of each nook and niche :
lietween the tree-stems, marbled plain at first.
Came jasper panels ; then, anon there burst
Forth creeping imagery of slighter trees.
And with the larger -wove in small intricacies.
-Approving all, she faded at self-will.
And shut the chamber up, close, hushed, and still,
Complete and ready for tlie revels rude,
AVhen dreadful giiests would come to spoil her solitude."
The description of Lamia undergoing the metamorpho.sis l)y which
she escaped from the form of a serpent to that of a h.eautiful woman,
is mavvpllous for its power and precision of language.
" Left to herself, the serpent nov/ began
To change : her elfin blood in madness ran.
Her mouth foamed, and the grass, therewith bespent.
Withered at dew so sweet and virulent.
Her eyes in torture fixed, and anguish drear.
Hot, glazed, and wide, with lid-lashes all sear,
Flashed phosphor and sharp sparks, -witliout one cooling tear.
The colours all inflamed throughout her train.
She writhed about convulsed with scarlet pain :
A deep, volcanian yellow took the place
Of all lier milder mooned body's grace ;
And as the lava ravishes the mead,
Spoilt all her silver mail, and golden brede ;
jSIade gloom of all her frecklings, streaks, and bars,
F.clipsed her crescents, and licked up her stars :
So that in moments few she was undrest
Of all her sapphires, greens, and amethyst,
And rubious argent; of all these bereft,
Nothing but pain and ugliness was left.
Still shone her crown ; that vanished, also she
Melted and disappeared as suddenly ;
And in the air her new voice luting soft
Cried ' Lycius, gentle Lycius ! ' — Borne aloft
With the bright mists about the mountains hoar
These words dissolved ; Crete's fore;,ts heard no more."
4)1)5 KEATS.
Tlio most magnificent trophy of his genius, however, is the fragment
(.f llviurion. On tliis poem, which has something vast, colossa'.
and dreamy about it, giving you a conception of the unfoldings of an
ahiiost infinite scope of " the vision and the faculty divine ' in this
extraordinary youth, he was employed when the progress of his com-
plaint and the savage treatment of the critics, sunk his heart, and
he abandoned the task, and went forth to die. How touching under
the circumstances is the short preface affixed to this volume by the
publishers ! — " If any apology be thought necessary for the appear-
ance of the unfinished poem of Hyperion, the pubHshers beg to
state that they alone are responsible, as it was printed at their
particular request, and contrary to the wish of the author. The
poem was intended to have been of equal length with Endymiox,
but the reception given to that work discouraged the author from
l)roceeding." Can a critic even read the passage without some com-
punction 1 and who shall again repeat the stale sophism that unkinil
criticism never extinguished genuine poetry ?
]\Ir. Hunt says of Keats, that "he enjoyed the usual privileges of
greatness with all whom he knew, rendering it delightful to be obliged
by him, and an equal, but not a greater, to oblige. It was a
pleasure to his friends to have him in their houses, and he did not
grudge it."
He was sometimes a regular inmate with Mr. Hunt at Kentish
Town, and used to ramble about the sweet walks of Hampstead and
Ilighgate to his heart's content. "When Endymion was published,
he was living at Hampstead with his friend Charles Brown, who at-
tended him most affectionately through a long and severe illness,
and with whom, to their great mutual enjoyment, he had taken
a journey into Scotland. The lakes and mountains of the North
delighted him exceedingly. He beheld them with an epic eye.
Afterwards he went into the South, and luxuriated in the Isle of
Wight." He was, also, in Devonshire. The preface to his Endymion
is dated from Teignmouth.
On Mr. Brown's leaving England a second time, " Mr. Keats," says
Leigh Hunt, " was too ill to accompany him. and came to reside with
rae, when his last and best volume of poems appeared, containing
Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St, Agnes, and the noble fragment of
Hyperion. I remember Charles Lamb's delight and admiration on
reading this work ; how j^leased he was with the designation of
Mercury as ' the star of Lethe,' rising, as it were, and glittering when
he came upon that pale region ; with the fine daring anticipation in
that passage of the second poem, —
' So the two brothers anil l/uir murdered man
It ode past fair Florence ; '
and with the description, at once delicate and gorgeous, of Agues
praying beneath the painted window,"
This must have been immediately before the young poet quitted
England in the vain quest of health. There is a very affecting
passage in ^Ir. Hunt's brief meraoir of him, which shows what was
KEATS. 299
the state of mind of this fine young poet at this crisis. The huntei
liad stricken him, death was busy with him, and the pain of affec-
tions unassured of a return was helping his other enemies to pull
him down. " Seeing him once," says Mr. Hunt, " change countenance
in a manner more alarming than usual, as he stood silently eyeing
the country out of the window, I pressed him to let me know how
he felt, in order that he might enable me to do what I could for
him ; upon which he said, that his feelings were almost more than
he could bear, and that he feared for his senses. 1 proposed that
we should take a coach and ride about the country together, to vary,
if possible, the immediate impression, which was sometimes all that
was formidable, and would come to nothing. He acquiesced, and
was restored to himself. It was, nevertheless, on the same day,
sitting on the bench in Well-walk, at Hampstead, nearest the heath,
that he told me, with unaccustomed tears in his ej'es, that ' his heart
was breaking.' A doubt, however, was upon him at that time, which
he afterwards had reason to know was groundless ; and during his
residence at the last house that he occupied before he went abroad,
he was at times more than tranquil."
This house, it appears, was in Wentworth-pkce, Downshire-hill,
Hampstead, by Pond-street ; and at the next door lived the young
lady to whom he was engaged. Mr. Hunt accompanied Keats and
this young lady to the j^lace of embarkation in a coach, and saw
them part. It was a most trying moment. Neither of them enter-
tained a hope to see each other again in life, yet each endeavoured
to subdue the feelings of such a moment to the retention of outward
composure. Keats was accompanied on his voyage by that excellent
artist, Mr. Severn, and who, to quote again the same competent au-
thority, possessed all that could recommend him for a companion ;
— old aciiuaintanceship, great animal spiriCs, active tenderness, and
a mind capable of appreciating that of a poet. They first went to
Naples, and afterwards to Rome, where they occupied the same
house, at the corner of the Piazza di Spagna. Mr. Severn made
several sketches of Keats, both on the voyage and at Rome, and
while there finished a portrait of him for the late Lord JeftVey, who
had spoken handsomely of him in the Edinburgh Review. At Rome,
on the 27th of December, 1S20, as already stated, John Keats died
in the arms of his friend, completely worn out, at the age of twenty-
four, and longing for release. How the circumstances of this life-
weariness reminds us of his longing for death in his inimitable Odo
to the Nightingale !
" oil for a (Irauglit of vintage that liatli been
Cooled a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tastinj? of l-'lora and the country green ;
Dance and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth !
Oh for a beaker full of the warm south,
I'ull of tlie true, the blushful llippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stained mouth!
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim ; —
SOI KEAfS.
'' Fiuio f:.r auay, dissolve, r.nd finite forget
Wliat thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret,
irerc, -where men sit and licar each other groan;
Wliere palsy shakes a few, sad, last Rrey hairs;
■Where youth grows pale, and spectre tliin, and dies;
■Wlicre but to think is to be full of sorrow,
And leaden-eyed despairs :
AVhcre beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes.
Or new love pine at them beyond to-niorrow."
"A little before lie died, he said tli.at lie 'felt the daisies growing
f>ver him.' But he made a still more touching remark respecting
Ins epitaph. 'If any,' said he, 'were put over him, he wished it to
i-onsist of nothing but these words :— Here lies one whose name was
writ in water ;'— so little did he think of the more than promise he
liad given ; of the fine and lasting things he had added to the stock
of poetr}'. The physicians expressed their astonishment that he had
held out so long ; the lungs timiing out, on inspection, to have been
almost obliterated. They said he must have lived upon the mere
strength of the spirit within him. He was interred in the English
burying-gi-ound at Rome, near the monument of Caius Cestius,
Avhere his friend and poetical mourner, Mr. Shelley, was shortly to
join him."
Such is the brief but deeply interesting account of John Keats,
drawr mostly from the written narrative, and partly from the con-
versation of his true friend and fellow-poet. It is not possible to
close it in more just or appropriate words than those of this admiring
but discriminating friend : — "So much for the mortal life of as true
a man of genius as these latter times have seen ; one of those who
are too genuine and too original to be properly appreciated at first,
but whose time for applause will infallibly arrive with the many,
and has already begun in all poctictil quarters."
^^fg^^S^'^;-
PERCY r.YSSHJ"] SHKLLEY.
Keats was tlic martyr of poetry, but Shelley was the martyr of
opinion. Keats dared to write in a new vein, to disregard all the
old canons of criticism, to pour out his heart, and all his fancies, in
iliat way only which seemed naturall}' to belong to them ; and this
was cause enough to bring down upon him the vengeance of all the
rule-and-linc men of literature. But, besides this, Keats kept sus-
picious company'. Hunt and Shelley were notorious radicals ; and
Hunt and Shelley were his friends. " Tell me what company you
keep, and I will tell you what you are," is an old proverb, and was iu
John Keats's case most promptly applied. But Shelley was perliaps
the most daring as he was the most splendid offender of modern
times. Born of a good family, educated in the highest schools of
orthodox}^, it was to the public, which looked for a new chamjiion
of the old state of things, a most exasperating circumstance that, in
Ids very teens, he should set all these expectations, and all the pros-
pects of his own worldly advantage, at defiance, and boldly avow
himself the champion of atheism. The fact is ever}' way to be
deplored. It became the source of blight and misery to himself
through his whole life. It alienated his friends and family ; it occa-
sioned an excitement of fiery bigotry and party wrath, which, in
their united virulence, were poured upon liis head, and destroying
;;,12 SHKLLKT.
the s.ilc of his works, greatly dispirited hiiu, and so diminished tho
amount, and perhaps in no shght degree the joyous and buoyant.
Hiirit of what lie diil write. Who shall say, wonderful as are the
works of Shellev all accomplished amid ill-health and the bitterest
persecutions, before the age of thirty, and most of them before the
acre of twenty-six, what he would have produced, had he written
with the encouraging feeling of a generous public with him i And
when we regard the whole affair impartially, it was the pubhc which
was really the greatest oflender after all. On the part of Shelley, it
was a rash and boyish action. It was the act of a really fine and
noble spirit led away, and so far led wrong, by its impetuous indig-
nation against popular delusions and impositions. He was not the
tirst man, nor will he bo the last, whom the spirit of a virtuous zeal
precipitates into an offence against virtue itself. In him it was
meant to be no sucli thing. He was honest as he was zealous, and
the world ought to have respected his honesty if it could not his
opinions. It should have endeavoured to show him by calm and
sound reason, that he was wrong as to the existence of a God, and
by its charity and forbearance, that Christianity was true. There
can be little doubt what effect a wise conduct like this would have
had on a nature like his. As it was, spite of all the outrageous
cries of infidel, blasphemer, and atheistic wretch, ^yith which he
was pursued; time showed a wonderful change in his opinions on
these matters. .
The world should have recollected that it professed to be a Cluis-
tian world, and it should not have let the spirit and conduct of the
infidel put it to shame by its superior liberahty and goodness. Our
Saviour nowhere preached or commanded persecution, but to bless
those who curse us, and do good to those who hate us and despite-
fuliy use us. The world did not do thus ; it left poor Shelley
to show this conduct to it. Christ left a glorious example to all
time— why is the Christian world blind to it? He declared a
glorious doctrine on the treatment of unbelievers— why is the world
deaf to it ? He declared that he was come to seek and save that
which was lost, and to die for the conversion of those who mocked
and denied him. He nowhere left us the whip, the gag, or the
sword of extermination. He brought no such things with him out
of heaven, but the great corrector— patience, the great weapon —
charity. When his disciples ran and called upon him to silence
those who performed miracles, and yet did not follow him, he gave
a reply which never should be forgotten while the sun rises_ and
sets ;— " Let them alone ; ye know not what manner of spirit ye
.ire of."
It was Shelley who showed the spirit of the Christian, and the
so-called Christian world tlie spirit of the infidel.
Shelley, indeed, was a good and noble creature. He had, spite of
his scepticism, clearly and luminously stamped on his front the
highest marks of a Christian ; for the grand distinction appointed
liy Chi-ist was — love. Shelley was a Christian spite of himself. Wo
learn from all whc snew him that the Bible was his most favouiite
SHELLEY. .3(>3
I)Ook. He; veueratcil the character ofChriMt, and no man more fully
carried out his precepts. His dehght was to do good, to comfort and
assist the poor. It was his zeal for truth and for the good of man-
kind, which led him, in his indignation against those who oppressed
thenx and imposed upon them, to leap too far in his attack on those
enemies, and pass the borders which divide truth from error. For
his conscientious opinion he sacrificed ease, honour, the world's
esteem, fortune, and friendship. Never was there so generous a
friend, so truly and purely poetical a nature. Others ai'e poets in
their books and closets ; the j^oet's soul in him was the si:)irit of all
hours and all occasions. His conduct to his friend Hunt was a mag-
nificent example of this. ]\Ii'. Hunt himself tells us that he at once
presented him with fourteen hundred pounds to free him from em-
barrassments, and he meant to do more, an intention which his son
has nobly remembered. Where are the censorious zealots who can
show like deeds 1 " He was," says Mr. Hunt, " pious towards nature,
towai'ds his friends, towards the whole human race, towards the
meanest insect of the forest. He did himself an injustice with the
public in using the popular name of the Supreme Being inconsider-
ately. He identified it solely with the vulgar and tyrannical notions
of a God, made after the worst human fashion, and did not suffi-
ciently reflect that it was often used by a juster devotion to express
a sense of the great Mover of the universe."
The same generous, enthusiastic spirit was the living and glowing
l)rinciple of his poetry. With an imagination capable of soaring
into the highest and most ethereal regions, and di'awing thence most
gorgeous colours, and most sublime, spiritual, and beautiful imagery,
lie preached love and tenderness to the whole family of man, except
to tyrants and impostors. For liberty of every kind he was ready
to die. For knowledge, and truth, and kindness, he desired only to
live. He Avas a rare instance of the union of the finest moral nature
and the finest genius. If he erred, the world took ample vengeance
upon him for it ; while he conferred in return his amplest blessing
on the world. It was long a species of heresy to mention his name
in society — that is passing fast away. It was next said that he never
could become popular, and therefore the mischief he could do was
limited. He is become popular, and the good that he is likely to do
will be unlimited. The people read him ; though we may wonder at
it, they comprehend him, — at least so far as the principles of freedom
and progress are concerned ; and in these ho will not lead them
astray. He is the herald of advance, and every year must fix him
more widely and firmly in men's hearts. How truly does he describe
himself and his mission in Laon, the poet of the lievolt of Islam : —
" Yes, from the records of my youthful state,
And from the lore of bards and sapes ohl,
From whatsoe'er my wakened thoughts create.
Out of the hopes of thine aspirings bold,
Have I collected language to unfold
Truth to my countrymen ; from shore to shore
Doctrines of human power my words have told ;
They have been heard, and men aspire to more
''^iian they have ever gained, or ever lo!^t of yorii
804 SHELLKY.
■• 111 secret diaiiibers parents read, and weep,
IMy writings to their babes, no longer blind ;
And young men gather vlien their tyrants sleep,
And vows of faith each to the.other bind ;
And marriageable nuiidens, who liavo pined
With love, till life seemed melting through their look,
A warmer zeal, a nobler hope now lind ;
And every bosom tlius is rapt and shook,
I, ike autumn's myriad leaves in one swoln mountain brook.
" Kind thoughts, and mighty ho))es, and gentle deeds,
Abound, for fearless love, and the pure law
Of mild equality and peace succeeds
'i'o faiths which long have held the world in awe,
Bloody, .and false, and cold :— as whirlpools draw
AH wrecks of ocean to their chasm, the sway
Of thy strong genius, Laon, which foresaw
This hope, conij-els all spirits to obey,
Mhich round tiiy secret strength now throng in wide array."
This extraordinary man, and the most purely poetic genius of hin
age, scarcely excepting Keats ; this great and fearless, and yet benign
apostle of freedom, whose intiuence on succeeding ages it is impos-
sible to calculate, mixed, it is true, witli a sceptical leaven deei^ly to
be deplored, was a descendant of a true poetic line, that of Sir Philip
Sidney. He was born at Field-place, in Sussex, on the 4th of August,
1792. He was the eldest son of Sir Timothy Shelley, Bart., of Castle-
Goring in that county ; and his son, Percy Florence Shelley, now
bears the fiimily title. His family connexions belonged to the Whig
aristocrats of the House of Commons ; and Mr. Hunt has, in the
circum^auces of such birth and connexion, hit perhaps upon the
fact which solves the mystery of a mind like Shelley's rushing into
the extreme course he did. "To a man of genius," he observes,
" endowed with a metaphysical acuteness to discern truth and false-
hood, and a strong sensibility to give way to his sense of it, such an
origin, however respectable in the ordinary point of view, was not the
very luckiest that could have happened for the purpose of keei^ing
him within ordinary bounds. AVith what feelings is truth to open
its eyes u])on this world, amongst the most respectable of our mere
party gentry 1 Among licensed contradictions of all sorts 1 Among
the Christian's doctrines and tlie worldly practices 1 Among fox-
liunters and their chaplains 1 Among beneficed loungers, noli-epis«
copalian bishops, rakish old gentlemen, and more startling young
ones, who are old in the folly of kaoiDhigMss ? In short, among all
those professed demands of what is right and noble, mixed with real
inculcations of what is wrong and full of hypocrisy ? * * * Mr.
Shelley began to think at a very early age, and to think too of these
anomalies. He saw that at every step in life some compromise was
expected between the truth which he was told he w^as not to violate,
and a colouring and a double meaning of it, which forced him upon
the violation."
This is, no doubt, the great secret of both the noble resolve of
Shelley to burst at once loose from this conventional labyrinth, and
of the length to wliich the impetus of his effort carried him. He'
saw that truth and falsehood were so intimately mixed in all the
education, hfe, and purposes of the class by which he was surrounded,
SHELLEY. 305
that he suspected the same mixture iu everything ; and the very
eflort necessary to clear himself of this state of things, plunged him
into the natural result of rejecting indiscriminately, in the case of
Christianity, the grain with the chaflF. At every school to which he
was sent, he found the same system existing. Education was moulded
to a gi-eat national plan, to a future support of a church and a party.
The noble heart of the boy rebelled against this sacrifice of truth to
interest, and I believe at every school to which he went, showed a
Hrm resolve never to bend to it. He was brought np for the first
seven or eight years in the retirement of Field-place with his sisters,
receiving the same education as they ; and hence, it is stated, he
never showed the least taste for the sports or amusements of boys.
Captain Medwin, who is a relative, teUs lis that it was not Eton, but
Sion House, Brentford, to which he alludes in his introductory
.stanzas to the Revolt of Islam. Medwin was Shelley's school-fellow
there, and says, " this place was a perfect hell to Shelley. His puro
and virgin mind was shocked by the language and manners of liis
new companions ; but though forced to be wit/i them, he was not cf
them."
"Tyranny," continues he, " generally produces tyranny in common
minds, — not so with Shelley. Doubtless much of his hatred of
oppression may be attributed to what he saw and suffered at this
school ; and so odious was the recollection of the place to both ol
us, that we never made it a subject of conversation in after life. Ho
was, as a schoolboy, exceedingly shy, bashful, and reserved ; indeed,
though peculiarly gentle and elegant and refined in his manners, ho
never entirely got rid of his diffidence — and who would have wished
he should ? With the character of true genins, he was ever modest,
humble, and prepared to acknowledge merit wherever he found it,
without any desire to shine himself by making a foil of others."
Yet it was this gentle and shy boy, who had so early resolved to
be "just, and free, and mild," that was roused by his sense of truth,
and his abhorrence of oppression, to make the most bold and deter-
mined stand against majust and degrading customs, however sanc-
tioned by time, place, or persons. At Eton, whither he went at the.
age of thirteen, he rose up stoutly in opposition to the system of
fagging. He organized a conspiracy against it, and for a time com-
pelled it to pause. While thus resisting school tyranny, he was
reading deeply German romances and poetry ; and to Burger's
Leonora, and the ghost stories and legends of the Black Forest, has
been traced his fondness for the romantic, the marvellous, and the
mystic. His mind was rapidly unfolding, and to the high pitch of
his moral nature and aims, these stanzas from the dedication to the
Itevolt of Islam bear touching testimony : —
" Tlioufilits of great deeds were mine, dear friend, -wlien first
The clouds tliat wrap this world from youth did pass.
T do remember ■well the hour which hurst
My spirit'a sleep : a fresh May-dawn it was
When I walked forth upon the glittering grass
And wept, I knew not why; until there rose
From the near school-room, voices, that, alas I
Were but one echo from a world of woes,
The harsh and grating strife of tyrants and of foes.
30r, SHELI-ET.
•' And then I clasped iiiy lianils, and looked around—
Kut none was near to mark my strcamins eyes.
Which poured their warm drops on t!ie sunny ground,—
So without shame I spake, ' 1 will be wise,
And just, and free, and mild, if in me lies
Such power; for I grow weary to behold
Tlie selfish and the strong still tyrannize
Without reproach or check.' I then controlled
Sfy tears ; my heart grew calm, and I was meek and bohl.
" And from that hour did I with earnest thought.
Heap knowledge from forbidden mines of lore ;
Yet nothing that my tyrants knew or taught
I cared to learn ; but from that secret store
■Wrought linked armour for my soul, before
It might walk forth to war among mankind."
This war began in earnest at Oxford. He had left Eton, it_ is nn-
derstood, before the usual time, and in consequence of his resistance
to the practices which he there found inconsistent with his ideas of
self-respect : what was to be hoped from Oxford 1 The contest into
which he soon fell with the Principal of University College, on theo-
logical and metaphysical questions, quickly led to bis expulsion. No
circumstance in his history has made so much noise as this ; on it
turned the whole character of his destiny. He was expelled on a charge
of atheism. In the New IMonthly Magazine for 1833 is given "The
History of Shelley's Expulsion from Oxford." From this account,
nothing could have been more unfeeling and tyrannical than the
conduct of the Principal on this occasion. It appears that Shelley
and some of his companions had indulged themselves in puzzling the
logicians. They liad made a careful analysis of Locke on the Human
Understanding, and Hume's Essays, particularly the latter, as was
t;ustomary with those who read the Ethics, and other treatises of
Aristotle,"^ for their degrees. They printed a syllabus of these, and
challenged, not only the heads of houses, but others to answer theni .
" It was," says tlie writer, " never offered for sale ; it was not ad-
dressed to the general reader, but to the metaphysician alone ; and
it was so short, that it only designed to point out the line of argu-
ment. It was, in truth, a general issue ; a compendious denial of
every allegation, in order to put the whole case in proof. It was a
formal mode of saying, — you offer so and so, then prove it ; and
thus it was under.stood by his more candid and intelligent cor-
respondents. As it was shorter, so it was plainer, and perhaps, in
order to provoke discussion, a little bolder than Hume's Essays,
a book which occupies a conspicuous place in the library of every
student. The doctrine, if it deserve the name, was precisely similar ;
the necessary and inevitable consequence of Locke's philosophy, and
of the theory that all knowledge is from without. I will not admit
your conclusions, his opponent might say ; then you must deny those
of Hume ; I deny them ; but you must deny those of Locke also ; and
we will go back together to Plato. Such was the usual course of
argument ; sometimes, however, he rested on mere denial, holding
his adversary to strict proof, and deriving strength from his weak-
ness. The yotmg Platonist argued thus negatively through the love
of nrgument, and because he founil a nol)le joy in the fierce shock of
SHELLEY. 307
coiiteudiiig iiiiuds. He loved truth, and sought it everywliore, and
at all hazards, frankly and boldly, like a man who deserved to find
it ; but he also deai'ly loved victory iu debate, and warm debate for
its own sake. Never was there a more unexceptionable disputant.
He was eager beyond the most ardent, but never angry and never
personal ; he was the only arguer I ever knew who drew every argu-
ment from the nature of the thing, and who never could be provoked
to descend to personal contentions." — F. 2.5 of Part 11.
This is a very different thing to the foul and offensive statement
put forth to the world, that Shelley avowedly, with his name, jDut
forth a pamphlet on atheism, challenging the whole bench of bishops
to refute it, for the sake and from the mere love of atheism. Not
less disgraceful was the manner of his expulsion. He was suspected
of this pamphlet ; it i.s said that " a pert, meddling tutor of a college
of inferior note, a man of an insalubrious and inauspicious aspect,"
had secretly denounced him to the master as the author of it ; anil
that for this piece of treason, he was, as he hoped, speedily enriched
with the most splendid benefices, and finally made a bishop ! The
master himself is described by a third party, as a man possessing
neither intellect nor erudition. " I thank God," he adds, " that I have
never seen that man since ; he is gone to his bed, and there let him
sleep. While he lived he ate freel}' of the scholar's bread, and drank
I'reely of his cup ; and he was sustained throughout the whole term
of his existence, wholly and most nobly, by those sacred funds that
were consecrated by our pious forefathers to the advancement of
learning. If the vengeance of the all-patient and long-contemned
God can ever be roused, it will surely be by some such sacrilege ! "^
But let us see in what manner this swollen Eosotian ox dealt with
this ardent yet gentle stripling of seventeen — for let it be remem-
bered he was only of that age, — and let ixs see what was the condition
of the university at that time, in which it was made a mortal offence
in a young and zealous spirit to dispute metaphysical points.
" Whether such disputations," says the writer in the New Monthly,
" were decorous or profitable may be perhaps doubtful ; there can
be no doubt, however, since the sweet gentleness of Shelley was
easily and instantly swayed by the mild influences of friendly admo-
nition, that had even the least dignified of his elders suggested the
propriety of pursuing his metaphysical inquiries with less ardour,
his obedience would have been prompt and perfect. Not only had
all salutary studies been long neglected at Oxford at that time, and
all wholesome discipline fallen into decay, but the splendid endow-
ments of the vuiiversity were grossly abused. The resident autho-
rities of the college were, too often, men of the lowest origin ; or
mean and sordid souls ; destitute of every literary attainment, except
that brief and narrow course of reading by which the degree was
attained ; the vulgar sons of vulgar fathers ; without liberality, and
wanting the manners and sympathies of gentlemen. A total neglect
of all learning, an im.seemly turbulence, the most monstrous irregu-
larities, open and habitual drunkenness, vice, and violence, were
tolerated or encouraged with the basest sycophancy, ihat the prospect
SOS SHELLEY.
of perpetual liociitiuutincsis might fill the .colleges with youiig men
of fortune. Whciicvci' the riirely-exeveised power of coercion was ex-
ercised, it demonstrated the utter incapacity of our unworthy rulers,
by coarseness, ignorance, and injustice. If a few gentlemen were
ailniitted to fellowships, they were always absent ; they were not
persons of literary pretensions, or distinguished by scholarship, and
they had no share in the government of the college." — P. 26.
It is fitting that the Avoiid should know how and by whom Shelley
Wiis expelled from Oxford. Let us see the manner in which it was
done.
*' As the term was drawing to a close, and a great part of the
books we were reading together still remained unfinished, we had
agreed to increase our exertions, and to meet at an early hour. It
was a fine spring morning on Lady-day in the year 1811, when I
went to Shelley's rooms : ho was absent ; l)ut before I had collected
mir books he rushed in. He was terribly agitated. I anxiously
inquired what had happened. 'lam expelled,' he said, as soon as
he had recovered himself a little. ' I am expelled ; I was sent for
suddenly a few minutes ago ; I went to the common room, where ]
found our master, and two or three of the fellows. The master
i)roduced a copy of the little syllabus, and asked me if I were tho
author of it. ITe spoke in a rude, abrupt, and insolent tone. 1
begged to be informed for what purpose he put the question. No
answer was given ; but the master loudly and angrily repeated^
'• ^Vre you the author of this book 1 " " If I can judge from your
manner," I said, " you are resolved to punish me, if I should acknow-
ledge that it is my work. If you can prove that it is, produce your
evidence; it is neither just nor lawful to interrogate me in such a
case and for such a purpose. Such proceedings would become a
court of inquisitors, but not free men in a free country." "Do you
choose to deny that this is your composition 1" the master reiterated,
in the same rude and angry voice.'
"Shelley comi)lained much of his violent and ungentlemaulikc
dejiortment, saying, ' I have experienced tyranny and injustice
before, and I well know what vulgar insolence is ; but I never met
with such imworthy treatment. 1 told him calmly, but firmly, that
I was resolved not to answer any questions respecting the publi-
cation on the table.' ' Then,' said he, furiously, ' you are expelled ;
and I desire you will quit the college early to-morrow morning at
the latest.' "
A regular sentence of expulsion, ready drawn up in due form, was
handed to him, under the seal of the college. So monstrous and
illegal did the outrage seem to one of Shelley's fellow-students, that
he immediately wrote a remonstrance to the master and fellows
against it, declaring that he himself, or any one else in that college,
might just as well be treated in tho same manner. The consequence
was that he iras immediately treated in the same manner. He was
called before this tribunal. "The angry and troubled air," he says,
in a statement communicated to the writer of the article, "of men
assembled to commit injustir^ according to established forms, w^.3
SHELLEY. 30'.)
uew to me ; but a native iuisthict told mc, as soon as I entered tho
room, that it was an afiair of party ; that whatever could conciliate
the favour of patrons was to be done without scruple ; and what-
ever could tend to pievent preferment was to be brushed away
without remorse." The same question was put to him, he refused
to answer it. and he was also expelled with the same summary
violence.
Thus were Shelley and another youth of eighteen expelled and
branded for life with the stigma of atheism. They were exi^elletl
simply because they refused to criminate themselves, and the boast
of a virtuous zeal against atheism was trumpeted abroad, which soon
raised one man to a bishopric, and others, no doubt, to what they
wanted. So are sacrificed the rare sj)irits of the earth for tho
worldly benefit of the hogs of Epicurus. If all youths were treated
thus brutally at that age when doubts beset almost every man, and
more especially the earnest and inquiring, what would become of
our finest and noblest characters ! When men begin to study the
grounds of theology, they must study, too, what is advanced by the
uj^posers. The consequence is at once, that all that has been re-
ceived as fact by unquestioning boyhood falls to the ground, and
they have to begin again, and test through doubts and anxieties, and
amid the menaces of despaii", all the evidence on which our faith is
built. Seize on any one of these inquii-ers at this peculiar crisis,
and expel him for atheism, and, if he be a man of cpiick feelings,
and a high spirit, you will pretty certainly make him that for which
you have stigmatized him. His pride will unite with his doubts
to fix him, to petrify him, as it were, into incurable unbelief. It
would be a brutal and murderous procedure. Such procedure hail
the worst effect on Shelley. The consequences were a sort of re-
pudiation of him by his father and family, who had built the highest
worldly hopes on his talents. There was a fierce hue aud cry
set up after him in the world, and the very next year saw him
Bit down aud write Queen Mab. The actions of this portion of his
life are the least defensible of any portion of it. He seemed
restless, unhappy, and put into a more antagouistic temperament
by his public expulsion from college, which he felt more deeply
than was natural to him, or could have arisen, had he been treated
differently.
At this period he made his first unfortunate marriage, with a
young woman of humble station, and, as it proved, of very uncon-
genial mind. They separated, and in her distress she, some time
afterwards, drowned herself. Differing as I do most widely from
Shelley, both in his ideas regarding Christianity and marriage, it is
l)ut just to say that they who knew him best, aud his second wife,
tlie celebrated daughter of celebrated parents, Godwin and Mary
Wolstancroft, most emphatically assert th«ir assurances that "in all
he did, at the time of doing it, he believed himself justified to his
conscience, while the various ills of poverty, and tlie loss cf friends,
l>rought home to him tho sad realities of life."' For hi.i errors at
this period, the direct fruits of the desolating outrages on his sen-
310 SHELLET.
Kitivc luiluro, abuvu .slated, he suft'ereJ deeply and severely. One of
lii.s biographers say.s, "Nobody could lauieut the catastrophe of his
wife's death more bitterly than he did. For a time it tore his being
to pieces."
For about two years after his wife's death lie seemed to be wan-
dering about in quest of rest, and not finding it. He was at one
time at the Lakes on a pilgrimage to Southey, of which, when
Coleridge heai'd, he said, " A\^hy did he not come to me ? I should
have understood him." Most true. He was in London, and 90, Great
llussell-street, oddly enough kept by a person named Godwin, and
a corner house in Mabledon-place, next to Hastings-street, are known
as lodgings of his. He was also in Dublin, and in North Wales,
where, in the absence of his landlord, Mr. Maddocks, an extraordinary
tide menacing his embankment against the sea, IShelley put his
name at the head of a subscription paper for ^500, and, carrying it
round the neighbourhood, raised a sum sufficient to prevent this truly
Roman work being destroyed. In 1814 he made a tour on the con-
tinent, visiting France, Switzerland, the Ileuss, and the Rhine, the
magnificeut scenery of which produced the most striking effects on
his mind. In 1815 he made a tour along the southern coast of De-
vonshire, and then renting a house on Bishopsgate heath, on the
borders of Windsor forest, he spent the summer months in rumi-
nating over the scenes he had visited, and produced there his poem
of Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude. The next year he again visited
the continent. He was now married to Mary Wolstancroft Godwin,
who accompanied him. They fixed their residence for a time on the
banks of the Lake of Geneva.
Here Shelley and Lord Byron first met ; they had corresponded
before, but here began that friendship which contributed so palpably
to the purification and elevation of tone in the higher poetry of
Byron. They seemed equally pleased with each other. Byi'on was
occupying the Villa Diodati ; a name connected with Milton, and
perhaps one of the noble poet's reasons for choosing it as a re-
sidence. Shelley engaged one just below it, in a most sequestered
spot. There was no access to it in a carriage, it stood only separated
from the lake by a small garden, much overgrown by trees, and
a patliway through the vineyard of Diodati communicated with
it. The two poets entered deeply into poetical disquisition. Nothing
could be more opposite than their natures, and their poetic ten-
dencies. Shelley was all imagination ; Byron had a strong tendency
to the actual, or to that which must tell upon the general mind :
Shelley was purely spiritual ; Byron had much of the world in him :
Shelley was all generosity ; Byron, with a great show of it, had a
tremendous dash of the selfish. Still, they had many things in com-
mon. They were fond of boating and pistol shooting ; they were
persecuted by public opinion ; they had broken from all bonds of
ordinary faith, and were free in discussion and .speculation as the bird.s
were in their fliglit over their heads. They rowed together round
the lake, and were very near being lost in a storm upon it. They
visited together I\lci]lerie and Clarens; and the effect of the scenery
SHELLEY. 311
on Shelley, •ivith the Xouvelle Heloise in his hand, was enlrancing.
He visited also Lausanne, and while walking in the acacia walk
belonging to Gibbon's house, he could not help saying, " Gibbon had
a cold and unimpassioned spirit. I never felt more inclination to
i-ail at the prejudices which clung to such a thing, than now that
Julie and Clarens, Lausanne and the Roman Empire, compel me to a
contrast between Rousseau and Gibbon." His lines on the Bridge of
Arve and his Hymn to Intellectual Beauty were written at this time.
The poets and Mrs. Shelley were constantly together, out in the
air, amid that sublime scenery, in fine weather, and in the evenings
at each other's houses ; and, during a week of rain, they horrified
themselves with German ghost stories, and gave a mutual cliallengc
to write each one of their own. To this we owe the Vampire, which
was, on its first appearance, attributed to Lord Byron ; but was in
reality written by his vain satellite of a physician, Polidori. Byron
wrote a story called The Marriage of Belphegor, which was to narrate
the circumstances of his own, — as he was now smarting imder the
recent refusal of his wife to live with him ; but, on hearing from
England that Lady Byron was ill, with an impulse that did him
honour, he thrust it into the fire. What Shelley wrote does not
appear, but the production of Mrs. Shelley was Frankenstein.
On his return to England, in the autumn of that year, he had to
endure the misery of his two children being taken from him by the
Court of Chancer}', on the ground of his disbelief in revealed religion,
and the authorship of Queen Mab, a work published without his
consent. It was at this period that he went to live at Great Mar-
lowe, in Buckinghamshire. Mrs. Shelley says : — " Shelley's choice of
abode was fixed chiefly by this town being at no great distance from
London, and its neighbourhood to the Thames. The poem of the
Revolt of Islam was written in his boat, as it floated under the
beech groves of Bisham, or during wanderings in the neighbouring
country, which is distinguished for its peculiar beauty. The chalk
hills break into cliff's that overhang the Thames, or form valleys
clothed with beech. The wilder portion of the country is rendered
beautiful by exuberant vegetation ; and the cultivated part is parti-
cularly fertile. With all this wealth of nature, which, either in the
form of gentlemen's parks, or soil dedicated to agriculture, flourishes
around, Marlowe was inhabited— I hope it is altered now — by a very
poor population. The women are lace-makers, and lose their health
by sedentary labour, for which they are very ill paid. The pCor-laws
ground to the dust not only the paupers, but those who had risen
just above that state, and were obliged to pay poor-iates. The
change produced by peace following a long war, and a bad harvest,
brought with thom the most heart-rending evils to the poor. Shelley
afforded what alleviation he could. In winter, while bringing out
his poem, he had a severe attack of ophthalmia, caught while visiting
the cottages. I mention these things, for this minute and active
sympathy with his fellow-creatures gives a thousand-fold interest
to his speculations, and stamps with reality his pleadings for ilie
human race."
312 SHELLEY.
Shelley docs not seem to have had any acqiuiutauce at Mavlowe,
or in the neighbourhood, — it was simply the charm of the country
and the river here -which attracted him ; but his friend Mr. Peacock,
author of Headlong Hall, was residing there at the time, either
drawn there by Shelley, or Shelley by him. Marlowe stands in a fine
open valley, on the banks of the Thames. The river here is beautiful,
running bankful through the most beautiful meadows, level as a
bowling-green, of the richest verdure, and of a fine, ample, airy
extent. Beyond the river, these meadows are bounded by steep hills
clothed with noble woods ; and a more charming scene for boating
cannot be imagined. The grass and flowers on the river margin
overhang and dip lovingly into the waters, which, from running over
a chalk bottom, are as transparent nearly as the air itself ; and at
the various turns of the river new features of beauty salute you — •
impending woods, which invite you to land and stroll away into
them ; solitary valleys, where house or man is not seen ; and then,
again, cultivated farms, and hills covered with flocks. No wonder
tliat Shelley was all summer floating upon this fine river, and
luxuriating in the composition of his splendid poem. A httle below
the town stands the village of Little JMarlowe, with its grey church,
and old manor-house, called Bisham Abbey, amid its fine trees ; and
around, a lovely scene of the softly flowing, beautiful rive)-, the level
meads, and the hills and woods. On the other side of the town, the
country is of that clear, bright aspect, with its tillage farms and
isolated clumps of beech on swelling hills, which always marks a
chalk district. The town itself is small, and intensely quiet. The
lioases are low and clean looking, as if no smoke ever fell on them
from the pure diaphanous aii-. It consists of three principal streets,
something in the shape of the letter T, with some smaller ones. In
passing along it, you would not suspect it of that intense poverty
which Mrs. Shelley speaks of, though, from the wretched depression
of the hand-lace-weaving, it may exist. The houses have a neat
miniature look, and the people look cheerful, healthy, and the women
of a very agreeable expression of countenance.
Such was the spot where Shelley resided, eight-and-thirty years
ago. His house was in the main street— a long stuccoed dwelling, of
that species of nondescript architecture which once was thought
Gothic, because it had pointed windows, and battlements. It must
have been then a spacious and a very pleasant residence ; it is now,
as IS the lot of most places in which poets have lived, desolated and
desecrated. It is divided into three tenements, a school, a private
house, and a pothouse. I entered the latter, and with a strange
feeling In a large room with a boarded floor, and which had pro-
bably been Shelley's dining-room, was a sort of bar partitioned off",
and a number of visitors were drinking on benches along the walls,
which still bore traces, amid disfigurement and stains, of former
taste. The garden behind had evidently been extensive, and very
pleasant There were remains of fine evergreen trees, and of a mound
on which gi-ew some deciduous cypresses, where had evidently stood
a summer-house. This was gono. The garden was divided into as
SHELLEY. 313
many portions as there were now tenants, and all evidences of care
had vanished from it. Along the side of it, however, lay a fine open
meadow, and the eye ran across this to some sweetly-wooded hills.
It was a melancholy thing to go back to the time when Shelley, and
liis wife and friends, walked in this garden, enjoying it and its sur-
rounding quiet scenerj^, and to reflect what had been the subsequent
fate both of it and him.
Amongst the poor of the town the remembrance of his bene-
volence and unassuming kindness had still chroniclers ; but from
the other classes little could bo learned, and that not what the
memory of such a man deserves. One old sho2:»keeper, not for from
his house, remembered him, and " hoped his children did not take
after him." " Why ? " " Oh ! he was a very bad man ! " " Indeed !
what bad actions did he do ? " " Oh ! I beg your jmrdon ! he did no
bad actions that I ever heard of, but, on the contrary, he was un-
commonly gjod to the poor ; but then — " " But then, what 1 "
" Why, he did not believe in the devil ! " Such are the fruits of
bigot teaching. In vain has Christ said, " By their //■mis shall ye
know them." I begged the poor man, of whom I found Shelley
l)ought no groceries, at least to leave him to the judgment of his
God, and of Christ, who came to seek and to save all that were lost ;
and to believe those great assurances of the gospel, that the prodigal,
when he had committed all kind of crimes, foimd not only a pacified
l)ut a fond father ; that he that hath not charity is as a sounding
Ijrass and a tinkling cymbal ; and that he that loveth intensely,
though he may think erroneously, will stand a very fair chance with
tlie Father of love himself.
" But pray what has become of this Mr. Shelley, then ? " asked the
man's wife, who had come from an inner room. " He was drowned,"
T replied. " Oh ! that's just what one might have expected. Drowned !
Lud-a-mercy ! ay, just what we might ha' said he'd come to. He
was always on the water, — always boating, boating, — never easy but
when he was in that boat. Do you know what a trick was iilayed
him by some wag ? " " No." " He called his boat ' Faffa,' and one
morning he found the name lengthened, by a piece of chalk, with the
word '■ bomV — Vagabond. There are clever fellows here, as well as in
London, mind you. But Mr. Shelley was not offended. He only
laughed ; for, you see, he did not believe in a devil, and so he thought
there could be nothing wrong. He used to say, when he heard of
wickedness, ' Ah, poor people ! it's only ignorance ; if they knew
better, they'd do better ! ' Oh ; what darkness and heathenry ! to
excuse sin, and feel no godly jealousy against wickedness ! " I found
that the crabbed creedsman had been there too long before me. My
hint about charity was thrown away, and I moved off, lest I myself
for faith in Jesus Christ, who would not condemn even the adulteress
at the desire of the vengeful and the sensual, should be found
wanting in holy indignation too.
It was in vain that I inquired amongst the class of little gentry
in the place for information about Shelley — they knew nothing of
any such person. At length, after much reseai'ch, and the running
.•514 SHEI.LET.
to and fro of waiters from the inn, I was directed to an ancient
.surgeon who liad attended ahnost everybody for the last half-century.
I fo^uul him an old man of nearly ninety. He recf)llected Shelley ;
had attended him, but knew little about him. He was a very uu-
f;ocial man, he said ; kept no company but I\rr. Peacock's, and that
of his boat, and was never seen in the town but he had a book in
his hand, and was reading as he went along. The old gentleman,
however, kindly sent his servant to point out Shelley's house to me,
and as I returned up the street, I saw him standing bare-headed on
the pavement before his door, in active discourse with various
neighbours. My inquiries had evidently aroused the Marlowean
curio.sity. On coming up, the old gentleman inquired eagerly if I
wanted to learn more yet about Mr. Shelley. — I had learned little or
nothing. I replied that I should be very happy. " Then," said he,
" come in. Sir, for I have sent for a gentleman w^ho knows all about
him." 1 entered, and found a tall, well-dressed man, with a very
solemn aspect. "It is the squire of the place," said I to myself.
With a very solemn bow he ai'ose, and with very solemn bows wo
sat down opposite to each other. " I am happy to hear," I said,
"that 3'ou knew Mr. Shelley, and can give me some particulars
regarding his residence here." " I can, Sir," he replied, with another
solemn bow. I waited to hear news — but I waited in vain. That
I^Ir. Shelley had lived there, and that he had long left there, and that
his house was down the street, and that he was a very extraordinary
man — he knew, and I knew ; but that was all : not a word of his
doings or his sayings at Marlowe came out of the solemn brain of
that large solemn man. But at length a degree of interest appeared
to gather in his cheeks and brighten in his eyes. " Thank God ! " I
exclaimed, inwardly. " The man is slow, but it is coming now."
His mouth opened, and he said, " But pray, Sir, what became of that
Mr. Shelley ? "
" What, did you never hear 1 " I exclaimed. " Did it never reach
Marlowe — but thirty miles from London — that sad story of his
death, which created a sensation throughout the civilized world ? "
No, the thing had never penetrated into the Boeotian denseness of
that place ! I rose up, and now bowed solemnly too. "And pray
what family might he leave 1 " asked the solemn personage, as I was
liasting away. " You will learn that," I said, still going away, " in
the Baronetage, if such a book ever reaches Marlowe."
I hastened to the inn where my chaise was standing ready for my
departure, and was just in the act of entering it, when 1 heard a
sort of outcry, perceived a sort of bustle behind me, and turning
my head, saw tlie tall and solemn man hasting with huge and anxious
strides after me.
" You'll excuse me. Sir ; you'll excuse me, I think ; but I cottld
relate to you a fact, and I think I will venture to relate to you a fact
connected with the late Mr. Shelley." " Do," said I. " I think I
Kill," replied the tall stout man, heaving a deep sigh, and erecting
himself to his full height, far above my head, and casting a m.ost
awful glance at the sky. " I i/iink I will,— I ///iit/,- I may venture.''
SHELLEY. 315
" It is certainly something very sad and agonizing," I said to myself;
" but I wish he would only bring it out." " Well, then," continued
he, with another heave of his capacious chest, and another great
glance at the distant horizon, " I certainly will mention it. It was
this. When Mr. Shelley left Marlowe, he ordered all his bills to be
paid, most honourably, certainly, most honourably; and they were
paid — all — except — mine ! There, Sir ! it is out ; excuse it — excuse
it ; but I am glad it is out."
" What ! a bill ! " I exclaimed, in profoundest astonishment, " a
bill .'—was that all ? "
" All, Sir ! all ! everything of the sort ; every shilling, I assure
you, has been paid, but my little account ; and it was my fault ; 1
don't know how in the world I forgot to send it in."
" What," said I, " are you not the squire here ? What are you V
" Oh, Lord ! no, Sir ! I am no squire here ! I am a tradesman i
I am — in the general way ! "
" Drive on ! " I said, springing into the carriage, " drive Hke thcj
Dragon of Wantley out of this place— Shelley is remembered in
Marlowe because there was one bill left unpaid ! "
There again is fame. It would be a curious thing if the man who
deems himself most thoroughly and universally famous, and walks
about in the comfortable persuasion of it, could see his fame mapped
upon the country. What an odd figure it would make ! A few
feeble rays shooting here and there, but all around what vast patches
of unvisited country, what unilluminated regions, what deserts of
oblivion of his name ! Shelley lived, and suffered, and spent himself
for mankind, and in the place where he last hved in England, within
thirty miles of the great metropolis of genius and knowledge, he is
nnly remembered by a bad joke on his boat, by his disbelief of the
devil, and by a forgotten bill. Were it not forgotten, he had been
so ! £/ieu ! jam satis.
On the 12th of March, 1818, Shelley quitted England once more.
He was never to return. His own fate and that of Byron wero
wonderfully alike. The two greatest, most original, most powerful,
and influential poets of the age, were driven into exile by the pubHo
feeling of their country. They could not bring themselves to think
on political questions with a large party, nor on religious ones with
a stiU larger ; and every species of vituperation and insult was let
loose upon them. As if charity and forbearance had been heathen
(qualities, and wrath and calumny (jhri.stian virtues, the British
pubUc most loftily resolved not to do as Christ required them —
to love those who hated them and despitefully used them, but to
hate those who loved them, and had noble virtues, though they
liad their errors. Their errors should have been lamented, and
their doctrines refuted as much as possible ; but there is no law,
human or divine, that can release us from the law of love, and the
command of seventy times seven forgiveness of injuries. Both these
great men died in their exile of hatred — the world had its will for
T.he time, and the spirits of these dead outcasts must now have their
wiU, in their deathless volumes, to the end of time.
316 SHELLEY,
If any one would know what sort of a man this moral monster,
Shelley, was, let liim read the eloquent account of him and his life
at Oxford, in the New Monthly Magazine for 1832, written by ono
who was his friend and companion, and who, Mrs. Shelley says, has
described hin^ most faithfully. There we find him full of zeal for
learning ; most zealous in accumulating knowledge ; overflowing in
kindness ; indignant against all oppression to man or to animals.
Never failing to rush in on witnessing any cruelty, or hearing of any
calamity, to stop the one, and alleviate the other. Full of gaiety and
fun as a child, sailing his paper boats on every pool and stream, or
rambling far and wide over the country in earnest talk and deep love
of all nature. He was ready to caress children, to smile even on
gipsies and beggars, to run for refreshment for starving people by
the wayside, pledging even his flivourite microscope, his daily means
of recreation, to assist a poor old man. Such was the dreadful crea-
ture that must be expelled from colleges, have his children torn from
him to prevent the contamination of his virtues, and to be hooted
out of his native land. Yet amid all the anguish that this inflicted
on him, he was ever ready still to do a sublime good, or enter with
the most boyiish relish into the merest joke. Nothing can convey
a more vivid idea of the latter disposition — which is not that of a
man systematically malicious, which is the true spirit of wickedness
— than to quote a joke related to him by the writer of these articles,
and see the manner in which it was enjoyed.
" I was walking one afternoon, in the summer, on the v/estern side
of that short street leading from Long-acre to Co vent-garden, where
the passenger is earnestly invited, as a personal favour to the de-
mandant, to proceed straightway to Highgate or Kentish town, and
which is called, I think, James-street. I was about to enter Covent-
garden, when an Irish labourer, whom I met bearing an empty hod,
accosted me somewhat roughly, and asked why I had run against him
J. told him briefly that he was mistaken. Whether somebody had
actually pushed the man, or he only sought to quarrel, and although
he, doubtless, attended a weekly row regularly, and the week was
already drawing to a close, he was unable to w^ait till Sunday for a
broken head, I know not, but he discoursed for some time with tho
vehemence of a man who considers himself injured or insulted, and
he concluded, being emboldened by my long silence, with a cordial
invitation just to push him again. Several persons, not very unlike
in costume, had gathered round him, and appeared to regard him
with sympathy. When he paused, I addressed to him, slowly and
quietly, and it should seem with great gravity, these words, as nearly
as I can recollect them : — ' I have put my hand into the hamper ;
I have looked upon the sacred barley ; I have eaten out of the drum !
I have drunk, and was well j^leased ; I have said, koj^ ofina^, and it
is finished ! ' 'Have you. Sir?' inquired the astonished Irishman ;
and his ragged friends instantly pressed round him with, — ' Where
is the hamper, Paddy ? '— ' AVhat barley ? ' and the like. And ladies
from his own country, that is to say, the basket-women, suddenly
began to interrogate him :— ' Now, I say, Pat, where have you been
SHELLEY. 317
drinking ? — What iiave you had ? ' I turned, therefore, to the right,
leaving the astounded neophyte, whom I had thus planted, to ex-
pound the mystic words of initiation as he could to his inquisitive
companions. As I walked slowly under the piazzas, and through the
streets and courts towards the West, I marvelled at the ingenuity of
Orpheus, — if he were indeed the inventor of the Eleusinian mysteries ;
that he was able to devise words that, imperfectly as I had repeated
them, and in the tattered fragment that has reached us, were able to
soothe people so savage and barbarous as those to whom I had ad-
dressed them, and which, as the .ajjologists for those venerable rites
affirm, were manifestly well adapted to incite persons who hear them
for the first time, however rude they may be, to ask questions.
Words that can awaken curiosity even in the sluggish intellect of
a wild man, and can open the inlet of knowledge ! "
" Konx ompax ; and it is finished ! " exclaimed Shelley, crowing
with enthusiastic delight at my whimsical adventure. A thousand
times, as he strode about the hovise, and in his rambles out of doors,
would he stop and repeat the mystic words of initiation, but always
with an energy of manner, and a vehemence of tone and gesture,
that would have prevented the ready acceptance which a calm,
passionless delivery had once procured for them. How often would
he throw down his book, clasp his hands, and starting from his seat,
cry suddenly, with a thrilling voice, " I have said, Konx ompax ; and
it is finished ! "
This child-like, this great, and greatly kind, and if men would
have let him, this light-hearted man, thus then quitted England.
Like Byron, he sought a home in Italy. He lived in various cities,
and wrote there his very finest works, amongst them Prometheus
Unbound ; The Cenci ; Hellas ; part of Rosalind and Helen ; his
Ode to Liberty, perhaps the very finest ode in the language, and
certainly in its description of Athens never excelled in any piece
of description in any language ; Adonais, an elegy on the death of
Keats, and those very melancholy verses written in the Bay of
Naples. He was drowned, as is well known, by the sinking of his
boat in a squall, in the Gulf of Spezia, in the summer of 1822, at the
age of thirty.
Shelley would have enjoyed this portion of his life beyond all
others, had he been in health and spirits. He was united to a woman
worthy of him, and who could partake of all his intellectual plea-
sures. Children were growing around him, and he Avas living in that
beautiful country, surrounded by the remains of former art and
history, and under that fine sky, pouring out from heart and brain,
glorious, and impassioned, and immortal works. But his health foiled
him, and the darts of calumny were rankling in his bosom, depressing
his spirits, and sapping his constitution. I can only allow myself
a few passing glances at his homes in Italy, of which Mrs. Shelley
has given us such delightful sketches in the notes to her edition of
her husband's ]iocms.
They went direct to Milan, and visited the Lake of Como ; then
proceeding to Pisa, Leghorn, the baths of Lucca, Venice, Este, Rome,
31 S SHELLEY.
Naples, and back to Rome for the winter. There he chiefly wroto
his Prometheus. In 1818, they were at the Baths of Lucca, whero
Shelley linishcd Kosalind and tfelen. Thence he visited Venice, and
occupied a liouse lent him by Lord Byron, at Este. " I Capucini was
!i vilia built on the site of a Capuchin convent, demohshed when the
I'-rench suppressed rehgious houses. It was situated on the very
overhanging brow of a low hill, at the foot of a range of higher ones.
The house was cheerful and pleasant ; a vine-trellised walk, or per-
gola, as it is called in Italian, led from the hall-door to a summei--
house at the end of the garden, which Shelley made his study, and
in which he began the Pi-ometheus ; and here also, as he mentioned
in a letter, he wrote Julian and Maddalo. A slight ravine, with
a wood in its depth, divided the garden from the hill, on which stood
the ruins of the ancient castle of Este, whose dark massive wall gave
forth an echo, and from whose ivied crevices owls and bats flitted
forth at night, as the crescent moon sunk behind the black and
heavy battlements. "We looked from the garden over the wide plain
of Lombardy, bounded to the west by the far Apennines ; while to
the east, the horizon was lo.st in misty distance. After the pic-
turesque but limited view of mountain, ravine, and chestnut wood
at the Baths of Lucca, there was something infinitely gratifying
to the eye in the wide range of pi'ospect commanded by our new
abode."
Here they lost a little girl, and quitting the neighbourhood of
Venice, they proceeded southward. Shelley was delighted beyond
expression with the scenery and antiquities of Italy. " The aspect
of its nature, its sunny sky, its majestic streams, the luxuriant
vegetation of the country, and the noble marble-built cities, en-
chanted him. The first entrance to Rome opened to him a scene of
remains of ancient grandeur that far surpassed his expectations ;
and the uus[)eakable beauty of Naples and its environs added to the
impression he received of the, ti'anscendent and glorious beauty
of Italy."
The winter was spent at Naples, where they lived in utter solitude,
yet greatly enjoyed their excursions along its sunny sea, or into its
beautiful environs. From Naples they returned to Rome, where
they arrived in March, 1819. Here they had the old MS. account of
the story of the Cenci put into their hands, and visited the Doria
and Colonna palaces, where the portraits of Beatrice were to be
found. Her beauty cast the reflection of its grace over her apj^alliug
story, and Shelley conceived the subject of his masterly drama. In
Rome they lost their eldest child, a very lovely and engaging boy ;
and, quitting the eternal city, took the villa, Valsovano, between
Leghorn and Monte Nero, where they resided during the summer.
" Our villa," says Mrs. Shelley, " was situated in the midst of a podere ;
the peasants sang as they worked beneath our windows, during the
heat of a very hot season ; and in the evening the water-wheel
creaked as the progress of irrigation went on, and the fire-flies flashed
nmoug the myrtle hedges ; nature was bright, sunshiny, and cheerful,
or diversified by storms of a majestic terror, sucb as we had nevet
before witnessed.
SHELLEY. 319
" At the top of tlie house there was a sort of terrace. There is
often such in Italy, generally roofed. This one was very small, yet
not only roofed, but glazed. This Shelley made his study ; it looked
out on a wide prospect of fertile country, and commanded a view of
the near sea. The storms that sometimes varied our day, showed
themselves most picturesquely as they were driven across the ocean.
Sometimes the dark, lurid clouds dipped towards the waves, and
became water-spouts, that churned up the waters beneath, as they
were chased onwards, and scattered by the tempest. At other times
the dazzling sunlight and heat made it almost intolerable to every
other ; but Shelley basked in both, and his health and spirits revived
under then- influence. In this airy cell he wrote the principal part
of the Cenci."
They spent part of the year 1819 in Florence, where Shelley
passed several hours daily in the Gallery, studying the works of art,
and making notes. The summer of 1820 was spent chiefly at the
Baths of GuiHano, near Pisa, where Shelley made a solitary journey
on foot, during some of the hottest weather of the season, to the
summit of Monte San Pelegrino,— a mountain on which stands a
pilgrimage chapel, much frequented : and during this expedition he
conceived the idea of The Witch of Atlas ; and immediately on hi.s
return sate down and wrote it in three days. An overflowing of the
Serchio inundated the house, and cau-sed them to quit San Guiliano :
they returned to Pisa.
In 1821, the Spanish revolution excited throughout Italy a similar
spirit. In Naples, Genoa, Piedmont, almost everywhere, the spirit
of revolt showed itself; and Shelley, still at Pisa, sympathised
enthusiastically with these movements. Then came the news of
the Greek insurrection, and the battle of Navarino, which put the
climax to his joy ; and in this exultation he wrote Hellas. These
circumstances seem to have given a new life to him. He had now
his new boat, and was sailing it on the Arno. It was a pleasant
summer, says Mrs. Shelley, bright in all but Shelley's health ; yet he
enjoyed himself greatly. He was in high anticipation of the arrival
of Leigh Hunt ; and at this juncture, the now happy poet and his
family made their last remove. Let us give the deeply interesting
picture of Shelley's last home, in the words of his gifted wife.
" The bay of Spezia is of considerable extent, and is divided by a
rocky promontory into a larger and a smaller one. The town of
J.irici is situated on the eastern point, and in the depth of the
.smaller bay, which bears the name of this town, is the village of
Sant Arenzo. Our house, Casa Magni, was close to this village ; the
sea came up to the door, a steep hill sheltered it behind. The pro-
prietor of the estate was insane ; he had begun to erect a large house
at the summit of the hill behind, but his malady prevented its being
iinished, and it was falling into ruin. He had, and this to the Italian.s
seemed a glaring symptom of decided madness, rooted up the olives
<ju the hill-side, and planted forest trees. These were mostly young;
])ut the plantation was more in English taste than I ever saw else-
where in Italy. Some fine walnut and ilex trees intermingled their
320 SHELLEY.
(lark, massy foliage, and formed groups wliicli still haunt my memory,
lis then they satiated the eye with a sense of loveliness. The scene
was indeed, of unimaginable beauty ; the blue extent of waters,
the almost land-locked bay, the near castle of Lerici, shutting it in
to the east, and distant Porto Venere to the west ; the various forms
of precipitous rocks, that bound in the beach, near which there was
only a winding rugged path towards Lerici, and none on the other
side ; the tideless sea, leaving no sands nor shingle, — formed a pic-
ture such as one sees in Salvator Eosa's landscapes only. Sometimes
the sunshine vanished when the sirocco raged, — the ponente, the
wind was called on that shore. The gales and squalls that hailed
our lirst arrival, surrounded the bay with foam ; the howhng wind
swept round oiu" exposed house, and the sea roared unremittingly,
so that we almost fancied ourselves on board ship. At other times
sunshine and calm invested sea and sky, and the rich tints of Italian
heaven bathed the scene in bright and ever-varying hues.
" The natives were wilder than the place. Our near neighbours,
of Sant Arenzo, were more like savages than any people I ever be-
fore lived among. Many a night they passed on the beach, singing,
or rather howling ; the women dancing about among the waves that
broke at their feet, the men leaning against the rocks, and joining in
their loud, wild chorus. We could get no provisions nearer than
Sarzana, at a distance of three miles and a half off, with the torrent
of the Margra between ; and even there the supply was deficient.
Had we been wrecked on an island of the South Seas, we could
scarcely have felt ourselves further from civilization and comfort ;
but where the sun shines, the latter becomes an unnecessaiy luxury,
and we had enough society among ourselves. Yet, I confess house-
keeping became rather a toilsome task, especially as I was suffering
in my health, and could not exert myself actively."
To this wild region they had come to indulge Shelley's j)assion for
boating. News came of Leigh Hunt having arrived at Pisa. Shelley,
and his friend Captain EUerker Williams, set out to welcome him,
and were on their return to Lerici, when the fatal squall came
on, and they went down in a moment. The particulars of that event,
and the singular scene of the burning of the body by his friends,
liyron, Hunt, Trelawney, and Captain Shenley, have been so vividly
related by Mr. Hunt, as to be familiar to every one. Shelley had
gone down with the last volume of Keats, the Lamia, &c., in his
jacket pocket, where it was found open. The bodies came on shore
near Via Reggio ; but had been so long in the sea as to be much
decomposed. Wood was, therefore, collected on the strand, and they
were burnt in the old classical style. The magnificent bay of Spezia^
says Mr. Hunt, is on the right of this spot, Leghorn on the left, at
equal distances of about twenty-two miles. The headlands pro-
jecting boldly and far into the sea, form a deep and dangerous gulf,
with a heavy swell and a strong current generally running right
into it.
So ended this extraordinary man his short, but eventful and
influential life ; and his ashes were buried near his friend John
SHELLEY. 321
Keats, under a beautiful ruined tower in the English burial-ground
at Eome. It was remarkable, that Shelley always said that no pi'e-
sentiment of evil ever came to him, except as an unusual elevation
of spirits. "When he was last seen, just before embarking for his
retm-n, he was said to be in most brilliant spirits. On the con-
trary, Mrs. Shelley says,—" If ever shadow of evil darkened the
present hour, such was over my mind when they went. During the
whole of our stay at Lerici an intense presentiment of coming evil
brooded over mj mind, and covered this beautiful place and genial
summer with the shadow of coming misery, * * ' A vague expec-
tation of evil s^hook me to agony, and I could scarcely bring myself to
let them go."_ The very beauty of the place, she says, seemed
unearthly in its excess ; the chstance they were from all signs of
civilisation, the sea at their feet, its murmurings or its roarings for
ever in their ears, led the mind to brood over strange thoughts, and
lifting it from every-day life, caused it to be famihar with the unreal.
" Shelley," she adds, " had now, as it seemed, almost anticipated his
own destiny ; and when the mind figures his skiiT wrapped from
sight by the tlumder-storm, as it was last seen upon the purple sea,
and then as the cloud of the tempest passed away, no sign remained
of where it had been, — who but will regard as a prophecy the las.t
stanza of the Adonais 1 —
' The breath, whose might T have invo'ked in song,
Descends on me : my spirit's bark is driven
Far from the shore, I'ar from tlie trembling throng,
Whose sails were never to the tempest given ;
Tlie massy earth and sphered skies are riven !
1 am borne darkly, fearfully, afar;
Whilst burning through the inmost veil of heiven,
The soul of Adonais, like a star.
Beacons from the abode where the eternal art."
_^ ,_^ y.^
. 1 f. '■^-^*
LORD BYRON.
In The Rural Life of England I have already recorded my visits to
two of the most interesting haimts of Lord Byron, — Newstead Abbey
and Annesley Hall. In this paper we will take a more chronological
and consecutive survey of his haunts and abodes.
Lord Byron was, it appears, born in London, in lodgings in
Holies-street, as his mother was on her way from France to Scot-
land. His mother, whose history and iU-starred marriage are well
known through Moore's life of the poet, had accompanied her husband
to France soon after their marriage, to avoid the swarm of claimants
on her property, the creditors of her dissipated husband, which that
marriage had brought upon her. The Byrons, who had inherited
the estate of Newstead, in Nottinghamshire, since the reign of
Henry VIIL, when it was granted to Sir John Byron, generally
called The Little Sir John Byron, had distinguished themselves
greatly in the civil wars, but had of late years been much more con-
spicuous for their poverty and eccentricity. His grandfather was
Commodore Byron, whose name will always be remembered from
the narrative of the sufferings of himself and crew, in conseqvience
of the wreck of the AVager, and who was still better known by the
uame of " Foul-weather Jack," from the singular fact that he never
BYRON. 3£3
put to sea, even when holding the rank of admiral, and in command
of the fleet for the protection of the West Indies, without encoun-
tering the most tempestuous weather. The father of Lord Byrou,
Captain Byron, appears to have been one of the most unprincipled
and dissipated men of his day. He ran off with the wife of Lord
Carmarthen to the continent ; and this, of course, leading to a
divorce, he married Lady Carmarthen, and had by her one daughter,
the present Hon. Augusta Leigh, the wife of Colonel Leigh. Lady
Carmarthen did not live long ; and covei'sd with debt, and pursued
by hungry creditors. Captain Byron looked out for some woman of
fortune to victimize to his own comfort. This species of legalized
robbery, that is, of selecting a simple and unsuspecting woman to
plunder under the sanction of the laws, instead of running the
hazard of hanging or transportation by the more vulgar method of
highway robbery, house-breaking, or forgery, is one so fashionable,
that a man like Captain Byron was not likely to boggle at it. Of all
species of theft, it is the most dastardly and despicable, because it
is performed under the sacred name of affection. The vampire who
means to suck the blood of the selected victim, makes his approach
with flatteries and vows of the deepest attachment, of the most
eternal tenderness, and protection from the ills of life. He wins the
heart of the confiding woman by the basest lies, and then delibe-
rately proceeds to the altar to pronounce before the all-seeing God
the same foul falsehood, " to love and comfort," and " cherish till
death," the helpless creature that is binding herself for life to ruin
and deception. One would think it were enough for a man to feel,
as he stands thus before God and man, that he is a mere seeker of
creature comforts and worldly honour while he is wedding a rich
wife ; but knowingly to have picked out his prey under the pretence
of loving her above all of her sex, in order to hand over her estate
to his creditors, to defray the scores of his gambling and licentious-
ness, that characterises a monster of so revolting a kind, that
nothing but the gradual corruption of society through the medium
of conventionalism, could save him from the expatriating execrations
of his fellows. There are cases of peculiar aggravation of this kind,
those where the property of the victim is ahnost wholly demanded
for the liquidation of the demon-lover's debts, and the wife is left to
instantaneous beggary. The marriage of Captain Byron was one
very much of this kind. His wife's most convertible property, as
bank shares, salmon fisheries, money securities, were hastily disposed
of ; then went the timber from her estates, then the estates them-
selves, all amounting to probably £30,000, leaving her a mere annuity
of ill23 ! The property gone to this mite, the harpy husband
still hung upon her, and upbraided her with the want of further
means to contribute to his reckless riot. With cash extorted from
her now severe poverty, he at length luckily departed again for tlic
continent, and died at Valenciennes in 1791, when Byron was tln-ce
years old.
Such were the circumstances in wliich Lord Byron entered the
world. If he were the prey of violent passions ; if he, too, had a
.M 2
324 BYRON,
tendency to dissipation ; if he in future years followed his father's
oxample, though not to so culpable a degree, and married an
heiress,
" And spoiled her goodly liiiuis to gild his waste; "
there maybe some excuse for him, drawn from hereditary taint. His
father was not the solitary instance of irregularity, violent passions,
and wastefulness. His great uncle, to whose title and diminished
property he succeeded, was of the like stamp. His violence had led
to his w'ife's separation from him ; he had killed his next neighbour,
^Ir. Chaworth, in a duel ; he had shot his coachman ; he had felled
extensive plantations on his estate, with the avowed purpose
of preventing his son's enjoyment of their profit, because he had
offended him. This son, and also his grandson, died before him, and
the wifeless and childless old lord had led a moody and solitary hfe
in the decaying abbey of Newstead, which threatened to drop about
his ears, feeding a heap of crickets on the hearth, and feared by the
whole peasant population of the country round.
Such was the paternal lineage of Lord Byron ; his maternal one, if
more moral, was not the less fiery and volcanic. His mother was
a little fat woman, of a most excitable temperament, — an evil which
no doubt was much aggravated by the outrage on her warm affections
and trust in her husband, which the base object of his marriage
with her revealed in all its blackness. She appeared all feeling and
jjassion, with very little judgment to control them. She was fond to
distraction of her child, and used to spoil him to the utmost extreme ;
at the same time that her passions occasionally broke out so im-
petuously against his freaks, that she would fling the tongs or poker
at his head, when a mere child.
At the age of eleven brought to England, and, with all this an-
cestral fire in him, introduced to the ruinous and gloomy abode of
his forefathers, with the stories of their recent doings rife all around
him, no wonder that on his peculiarly sensitive mind the impression
became deep. He grew up a Byron in the eccentricity and other
characteristics of his life ; like his father, his morals were not very
nice, his habits were not very temperate ; he, too, married to repair
the waste of his lands, and quitted his wife to live abroad, and die
there a comparatively early death. Happily there was implanted in
him an ethereal principle, which gave a higher object to the exercise
of his passions and energies than had of late distinguished his
fathers. He was a born poet, and the divine gift of poetry converted,
in some degree, his hereditary impetiiosity into an ennobling instru-
ment. His very dissipations extended his knowledge of life and
hurnan nature ; and if they led him too frequently to seek to em-
bellish sensuality, they compelled him to depict, in the strongest
terms that language can furnish, the disgust and remorse which in-
evitably pursue vice. He was a strange mixture of the poet and the
man of the world ; of the radical and the aristocrat ; of the scoffer
at creed.s, and the worshipper of the Divine Being in the sublimity
of his works. Well was it for him and the world, that his early
years were cast amidst the beauty and the solitude of nature, where
BYROX. 325
he coiUcl wander wholly abandoned to the influences of heath and
mountain, river and forest ; and that the prospect of aristocratic
splendour did not come in to disturb those influences till they had
acquired a life-long power over him. The grandeur of nature cannot
make a poet, thousands and millions live during their whole exist-
ences amidst its most glorious displays, and are little more sentient
than the rocks that tower around them ; but where the spark of
poetry lies latent, it is sure to call it forth.
They who visit, then, the earliest scenes of Lord Byron's life,
will not be surprised at the influence which they exercised upon him,
nor at the fondness with which he cherished the memory of them.
This is strongly expressed in one of his juvenile poems.
LACUIN-Y-GAIR.
" Away, ye gay landscapes, ye gardens of roses !
In you let the minions of luxury rove ;
Restore me the rocks, where the snow-flake reposes,
Though still they are sacred to freedom and love:
Yet, Caledonia, heloved are thy mountains.
Round their white summits though elements war ;
Tliough cataracts foam 'stead of smooth-flowing fountains,
I sigh for the valley of dark Loch na Garr.
" Ah ! there my young footsteps in infancy wandered ;
My cap was the bonnet, my cloak was the plaid ;
On chieftains long perished my memory pondered.
As daily I strode through the pine-covered glade :
I sought not my home till the day's dying glory
Gave place to the rays of the bright polar star ;
Tor fancy was cheered by traditional story,
Disclosed by the natives of dark Loch na-Gatr."
Hours of Idleness, p. 111.
Tlie feeling thus ardent in youth was equally vivid to the last.
Only about two years before his death, he wrote thus in The
Island : —
" lie who first met the Highlands' swelling blue
Will love each peak that shows a kindred hue;
llail in each crag a friend's familiar face,
And clasp the mountain in his mind's embrace.
Long have I roved through lands which are not mine,
Adored the Alp, and loved the Apennine ;
Revered Parnassus, and beheld the steep
Jove's Ida, and Olympus crown the deep ;
But 'tv.-as not all long ages' lore, nor all
Their nature held me in their thrilling thrall ;
The infant rapture still survived the boy.
And Loch na Garr with Ida looked o'er Troy ;
Mixed Celtic memories witii the Phrygian mount.
And Highland linns with Castalie's clear fount."
The city of Aberdeen was the place where the chief part of the
earlier boyhood of Byron was spent. He went thither as an uncou-
.jcious infant, and there, and in the neighbouring Highlands, he con-
tinued till in his eleventh year, when the title fell to him, and he
was brought by his mother to England. Aberdeen is a city which
must have beeu a very charming abode for a boy of Byron's disposi-
tion, ready either to mix in the throng of lads of his own age in all
their plays, contentions, and enterprises, to shoot a marble, or box
out a quarrel, or to stroll away into the country and enjoy nature
ind liberty with an equal zest. There are people who arc inclined
^op, BYRON.
to think that a srcat ileal of the sublime tone of some of Byron's
poctrv as that of the Childe Harold, of the sentiment almost senti-
mentaiitv of his Hours of Idleness, and of many of his smaller
noems throughout his works, were assumed by hmi at will and tor
J'ftect They do not see how these things could proceed from the
same mind as the rhodomontade of many of his most familiar letters,
or the slan'^ and wild humour of many parts of Don Juan. How
little do sudi persons know of the human mind ! Did not Tarn o'
Shanter and Mary in Heaven, and the Cotter s Saturday Night all
procced'from the same mind, and one of the most earnest minds that
ever lived 1 Did not the sublime scenes of the Iliad, and the battle
of the bco'crars in the Odyssey, and the trick of Ulysses in the cave
of Polvpheme, when he called himself Noman— so that when Poly-
pheme roared out as they put out his eye, and he told his neighbours
who came running to inquire what was the matter, that Noman hurt
him, they replied,
" If no man hurt thee, why tlost thou complain? "
and marched away without helping him— did not these proceed froni
the same mind ? Did not the puns of Hood, and the sober ballad of
Eugene Aram, and the Song of the Shirt, proceed from one andthe
saine mind ? Did not John Gilpin and the loftiest strains of pious
poetry proceed from that of Cowper? Did not Chatterton write equally
Sly Dick, and the tragedy of Ella 1 In fact, we might run through
the whole circuit of poetic and prose literature, and show that the
moods of our minds are as various and changeable as those of ex-
ternal nature. The very gi-avest, the most steadfast of us have our
transitions from sad to gay, from frivolous to the highest tone of
the highest purpose, with a rapidity that is supposed to belong
only to the most changeful of us. There is, in fact, no such
chameleon, no such kaleidoscope as the human mind. Light and
shadow pass over us, and communicate their lustres or their glooms.
Facts give us a turn up or down, and the images of our brain present
new and ever new arrangements. But in all this change there is no
mere chance, far less confusion ; every movement depends on a fixed
jirinciple. Perhaps there have been few men in whom circumstances,
circumstances of physical organization, of life, and education, che-
rished and made habitual so many varied moods as in Lord Byron.
Thrown at a very early age into the bosom of a beautifnl and
solitary nature, he imbibed a profound and sincere love of nature
and solitude. Sent early to pubhc schools to battle his way amongst
boys of his own age, and with a personal defect which often sub-
jected him to raillery, his native spirit made him bristle up and
show iight, as he did afterwards with his reviewers. Raised to rank
and wealth, and, spite of his crooked foot, endowed with, in all
other respects, a very fine person, he was led to plunge into the
dissipations of young men of his class, and he thus acquired a tone
of libertinism that ever afterwards, under the same circumstances,
was sure to show itself. Led by his quick sense of right and wrong,
and by his shrewd insight into character, to despise priestcraft and
BTROX. 3i./
political despotism, and spuircd on by the spirit of the time,
especially abroad where he travelled, he imbibed a spirit of scepti-
cism and radicalism as principles. From these causes he soon began
\o exhibit the most opposite phases of character. In solitude and
nature he was religious in his tone — in society a scoffer ; iu solitude
he was pensive, and even sentimental — in society he was convivial,
fond of practical jokes, satirical. He wrote like a radical, and spoke
like an aristocrat. In him Childe Harold and Don Juan, the sublime
and the ludicrous, the noble and the mean, the sarcastic and the
tender, the voluptuous and beautifully spiritual, the pious and the
impious, were all embodied. He was all these by turns, and in
all, for the moment, most sincere. Like an instrument of many
strings, each had its peculiar tone, and answered faithfully to tho
external impulse. Multifarious as were his moods, you might in
any given circumstances have predicated which of these would
prevail. There would be no sensuality in the face of the Alps, there
would be no/ sublimity in the city saloon. If he had to speak in the
House of Lords, his speech by the spirit of antagonism would
assuredly be radical ; did he come in contact with the actual mob,
he would case himself in the hauteur of the aristocrat. With Nature
he was ashamed of men and his doings and sayings amongst them,
with men he was ashamed of nature and poetry. He would laugh at
his own flights of sentiment. He was a many-sided monster, show-
ing now sublime and now grotesque, but with a feeling in the depths
of his soul that he ought to be something greater than he was or
dared to be.
To go back, however, from his character to himself. Aberdeen
presented to the boy ample food for two of his propensities, those
towards the enjoyment of nature and society. The country round,
though not sublime, is beautiful. The sea is at hand, an ever grand
and stirring object. The Dee comes winding from the mountains of
the west through a vale of great loveliness, the Don from the north
through scenes perhaps still more striking. There is an air of anti-
quity about the town, with its old churches, colleges, and towers,
that is peculiarly pleasing ; and the country has hkewise a primitive
look that wins at once on the spectator. To a traveller from the
south, the approach to it by sea is very striking — I do not mean the
immediate approach, for this is flat, but the coast voyage out from
Edinburgh. The whole coast is bleak, yet green, and presenting to
the sea bold and time-worn rocks. For a considerable part of the
way they appear to be of red sandstone, and are therefore scooped
out into the boldest caves, hollows, and promontories imaginable.
Here and there are deep, dark caverns, into which the sea rushes as
into its own peculiar dens ; in other places it has cut out arches and
doorways through insulated rocks, and you see the light through
them displaying other rocks behind. One of these is noted for pre-
senting, by effect of light behind it, the appearance of a lady iu
white, standing at the mouth of a cave, and- beckoning with her
hand. As you skim along the coasts of Fife, Forfar, Kincardine, and
Aberdeen, these rocks and caverns present ever-new forms, while all
328 BYRON.
the country abo\c them is uow green, smiling, and cultured, though
formerly it must have been savage indeed, giving rise to strange
buper.stitions and legends. Bleak little towns ever and anon stretch
along the shore ; though green, tlie country is very bare of trees.
Dundee, Arbroath, jMontrose, are good large towns ; and there are
the ruins of Arbroath Abbey and Duunottar Castle, with others of
less note. Dunuottar cannot be passed without thinking of Old
Mortality, whom Scott found in the churchyard there, restoring the
inscriptions on the gravestones of the Covenanters ; nor can Uri, an
old-fashioned house on the bare iiplands above Stonehaven, as the
abode of Barclay, the writer of the celebrated Apology for Quakerism,
and in our day for that of his pedestrian descendant, Captain Bar-
clay. How singular are the reflections which arise on human life
and its combinations when gazing on such a place as this ! What
should induce a man at one time to go forth from a remote scene
and solitary old house like this, to mingle with the ferment of the
times — to become an active apostle of Quakerism, and the expositor
of its faith ; and another, nearly two centuries afterwards, to march
out of the same house down into England, not for an exhibition of
Quakerism, but of Pedestrianism — not of reasoning but of walJcing
powers 1 Why should thah house, just that house and its family, be
destined to produce great Quakers, ending in great walkers and great
brewers ? How often in my boyhood had 1 read Barclay's preface to
his Apology, dated from "Uri in Scotland, the Place of my Pil-
grimage," and addressed to King Charles II, by " Eobert Barclay, the
servant of Jesus Christ, called by God to a dispensation of the
Gospel revealed anew in this our age," &c. And there it stood, high,
bare, and solitary, eliciting the oddest compound ideas of " hops and
heresy," according to the phrase of a clergyman of the time, or rather
of Quakerism, Loudon porter, and walking matches against time !
Beyond this, the coast becomes more and more what is called
iron-bound, and the rocks — probably of trap, or whinstone — as you
advance northward stand up in the sea, black and curdled as it were,
and worn into caverns and perpendicular indentures, exactly as you
see them in Bewick's wood-cuts. Stepping then on land at Aber-
deen, how agreeable is the change ! The city, built of a grey and
lustrous granite, has a look of cleanness and neatness almost incon-
ceivable. Since the days of Byron's boyhood, great must have been
the changes. The main streets are all evidently new ; and on ad-
vancing into Union-street, the great street which traverses almost
the whole length of the city, a mile in length, and seventy feet wide,
you are struck with a pleasant surprise. The width and extent, the
handsome yet plain buildings of clean granite, and the fine public
buildings visible in different directions, are far more than you ex-
pected in a town so far north.* On the river you see an imposing
tssemblage of ships ; you find the Llarischal College now built in a
» In the centre of tlie town is erected a granite statue of the late Duke of Gordon,
^eeing a decent looking man near it, I asked him if he could tell me wlio executed that
figure. " Sir! " rephed the honest Aherdonian, with unfeigned surprise, " he neve- was
excc7(<erf at all. It is the Duke of Gordon!" *■ '
BYRON 329
very graceful style ; and a market-liouse, I suppose, in extent, con-
venience of arrangement, and supply, inferior to none in the kingdom.
The olden streets, such, as were in existence in Byron's time, are
much more like what you would have looked for — of a narrower and
more ordinary character.
About a mile to the north of the new town lies Old Aberdeen. In
advancing towards it you become every moment more aware of its
far greater antiquity. It looks as if it had a fixed attachment to the
past, and had refused to move. There is a quietness, a stationariness
about it. One old house or villa after another stands in its garden
or court, as it has done for centuries. The country about has an old
Saxon look. It carried me away into Germany, with its unfenced
fields of corn and potatoes ; villages seen in the distance, also un-
fenced, but with a few trees clustered about them ; and the coimtry
naked, except for its corn. To the right lay the sea, to the left this
open country ; and on before arose, one beyond the other, tower and
spire of an antique character, as of a very ancient city. Presently
I came to the college — King's College, with the royal crown of Scot-
land surmounting its tower, in fine and ample dimensions, and its
courts and corridors seen through the ancient gateway. Then, on
the other hand, the equally antique gateway to the park of ]\Ir
Powis Leslie, with its two tall round towers of most ancient fashion,
with galleries and spires surmounted with crescents. Then, onwards,
the ancient, massy cathedral, with its two stone spires, and tall
western window of numerous narrow windowlets, and ponderous
walls running along the roadside, with a coping of a yard high, and
stuccoed. Everything had a heavy, ancient, and German character.
I could have imagined myself in Saxony or Franconia ; and, to
augment the illusion, a woman at a cottage door, inquiring the time
of day, received the answer, "half twa," as near as possible "half
two" in Plat-deutsch. Still further to increase the illusion, the
people talked of the bridge as " she." Truly, the repose of centuries
and the fashion of a far-gone time, so far as I'elates to our country
lay over the whole place.
I had now to inquire my way to the brig of Balgounie, a spot
which makes a conspicuous figure in Byron's boyish history. "The
brig of Don," says he himself in a note in Don Juan, Canto X.
p. 309, "near the 'auld town' of Aberdeen, with its one arch, and
its black deep salmon stream, is in my memory as yesterday. I still
remember, though perhaps I may misquote, the awful proverb which
made me j)ause to cross it, and yet lean over it with a childish
delight, being an only son, at least by the mother's side. The saying
as recollected by me was this, but I have never heard or seen it
since I was nine years of age : —
* Brig of BalRounie, wight (strong) is thy wa',
Wi' a wife's ae son on a mare's ae foal,
Down Shalt thou fa'.'"
How accurate was his recollection of this old bridge ; a proof of the
delight with which he had enjoyed this scenery. We are told that
on holiday afternoons he would (jet down to the sea-side and find
330 BYRON.
L'l-eat amusement there. Hero was the sea just below ; aud it will
he seen that the whole way that he had to come from NewAberdeeu
was full of a spirit and an aspect to fall deep mto the heart of ar
nubrvo poet. There is a new and direct way now from the citj
■cireV to the sea, and from the new bridge of Don the view of the
old bridcrc is very picturesque. It is one tall grey ponited areh, with
cotta<'es°al:.out it on both sides on the high banks of the Don, and
mills" with masses of trees. On the low ground below the bridge at
the left-hand end stands a white house, and little fishermen's huts or
.sheds scattered here and there. On the other bank of the river the
".n-ound is high and knolly. Clumps of trees seem to close in upon
the brid"-e, and behind and above them is a little gi-oup of fisher-
men's houses called the huts of Balgounie. Below the bridge the
river widens out into a broad expanse, and between high, broomy
banks, comes down to the new bridge and thence to the sea
meadows, where the white billows are seen chasing each other at its
mouth. Above the bridge the river is dark and deep, and the high
itanks are overhung with Avood. The valley of the Don above_ is
very picturesque with woods and rocks, and is enlivened with mills
and factories.
The view from the bridge itself down into the river is striking.
I suppose it must be forty or fifty feet from its centre to the water,
yet a man living close by told me that he once saw a sailor leap from
"it for a wager. The bridge is remarkably strongly built. It is said
to have been built in the time of Bruce, yet it has by no means a very
ancient look, and being of solid granite is not very likely to fulfil the
prophecy of its Ml. i^et Mr. Chambers, in his " Picture of Scot-
land," says this superstition has not always been confined to children,
for our late Earl of Aberdeen, who was an only son, and rode a
iavourite horse, which was " a mare's ae foal," always dismounted
on approaching this bridge, and used to have his horse led over at
a little distance after him. The people near do not now seem to
partake of it. " Fall ! " say they, " ay, when the rocks on which it
is based fall ! " It is, in fact, like a solid piece of rock itself; and is
111 possession of funds left in 1605, by Sir Alexander Hay, which
though then only producing five and forty shillings a year, have so
accumulated that they are not only amply sufticient to maintain it in
repair, but have built the new brig. At each end of the bridge you
see several large iron rings in the wall. These, I was told, were to
.secure ropes or chains to, from which to suspend scaftblding for the
repair of the bridge on the outside. Every care is thus taken of it.
" She is verra rich, is the auld brig," said the man before mentioned.
" She has been verra useful in her time, for before the new brig was
built, she was the only means of getting to the north country — there
was no fording the river. And the new brig has been built wi' her
money, ay every sixpence of it, gran brig as the newane is with her
five granite arches ; and the auld brig gives 100/. a-year to take care
of her too. But she's verra well off in the world yet, for all that,
ishe has plenty left for herself." Thus do they talk of the auld brig
fts if she v^ere a wealthy old lady, It however, any one should pay
BYROX. 331
her a visit from New Aberdeen, I would counsel him to go by tho
old road for its picturesque effect, but to be careful to inquire the
road in Old Aberdeen down to the brig, for it is particularly obscure.
They must ask too for " The auld brig o' Don." for the name of the
brig of Balgounie seems known to few of the younger generation.
In New Aberdeen, the admirer of Lord Byron will also naturally
seek to take a glance at the difierent houses in which he lived a's
a child with his mother. These are in Queen-street, one at nearly'
each end of the street ; one at the house in Broad-street, then occu-
pied by Mr. Leslie, father of the present surgeon of that name ; and
one in Virginia-street, not far from the docks. The visitor will not
be surprised to find that these are but ordinary houses in ordinary
streets in general, when he recollects that Mrs. Byron was then reduced
by the matrimonial robbery of her husband to an income of 123/.a year,
and that her effects, that is, the furniture of the lodgings, &c., when
sold on her setting out with her boy for England, amounted only to
74.1. 17s. 7d. In these houses she was merely a lodger. The best
situation which she occupied was in Mr. Leslie's house in Broad-
street, over a shop. All these places are still well known. The
schools to which Byron went in Aberdeen are also objects of interest.
.That in Long-acre, kept by a Mr. Bower, whom he calls Bodsi/ Bower,
a name, he says, given him on account of his dapperness, was
a common day-school, where little boj'S and girls were sent prin-
cipally to be out of the way at home. This school has long been
closed. The next school to which he went, and where he continued
to go till he left Aberdeen, was the grammar school. This, of course,
remains, and though it has been considerably enlarged since Byron
was there, the room iu wlaich he studied continues exactly as it was
at that time. It is an ordinary school-room, with benches and desk.s
cut deep with hundreds of names, and hvmdreds of other names
printed and written over them with ink, and the walls adorned in
the like style, as well as with grotesque figures drawn with the peufj
of schoolboys. Amidst this multitude of names, the Eev. Dr. Mel-
vin, the master at the time of ray visit, assured me that diligent
search had been made to discover that of Byron, but in vain.
There are many of his old schoolfellows still living in the place, and
all seem to recollect him as " a mischievous urchin." It must,
however, be recollected that Byron was little more than ten years of
age when he left Aberdeen, and that was then forty-seven years
ago.
The place to which perhaps still more interest will attach, connected
with the poet's boyhood in this part of the country, is Ballater,
where his mother was advised to take him on recovering from the
scarlet fever, in 1796. It would appear as if ]Mrs. Byron, as well as
her child, was so delighted with the residence there, as to return
thither the two following summers. The.se are all the opportunities
there could possibly be, for they left for England in the aututnn of
1798, on the death of the old Lord Byron. They were the summer
residences here, however, that awoke the poetic feeling in him. He
was here in the midst of the most beautiful mountain scenery, and
3;52 ' BYKON..
BO intensely did it operate upon him, that through his whole life he
looked back to his abode here as the most delicious- period in his
mrniory.
The vale of the Dee. or the Dee-side, as they call it, all the way
from Aberdeen, a distance of forty miles, is fine ; beautifully Avooded
by places, the hills as you advance, become more and more striking.
You pass the castle of Drum, one of the oldest inhabited castles in
Scotland ; a seat of the Burnets, ot Bishop Burnet's line, finely
situated on the right hand on rising ground, and various other
interesting jjlaces. But it is as you ai3j)roacli Ballater that the
scenery becomes most striking. It becomes truly Highland. The
hills get lofty, bare, grey, and freckled. They are, in fact, bare and
tempest-tinted granite, having an air of majestic desolation. Some
rise peaked and splintered, and their sides covered with debris, yet,
as it were, bristled with black and sharp-looking pine forests. Some
of the hills run along the side of the Dee, covered with these woods,
exactly as the steep Black Forest hills are in the neighbourhood of
U^ildbad.
As you approach Ballater, the valley expands. You see a breadth
of green meadow, and a neat white village stretching across it, and
its church lifting its spire into the clear air, while the mountains*
sweep round in a fine chain of peaked hills, and close it in. All up
Dee-side there is well-cultivated land, but, with the exception of
this meadow, on which Ballater stands, all is now hill, dark forest,
and moorland ; while below, on the banks of the winding and rapid
Dee, birch woods present themselves in that peculiar beauty so
truly belonging to the Highlands. On your right first looks out
the dark height of Culbleen, mentioned by Byron in his earlier
I)ocms : —
" Wlien I see some dark hill point its crest to the sky,
I think of the rocks that o'ershadow Culbleen;"
then " Morven, streaked with snow ; " and Loch-na-garr lifts himself
long and lofty over the lower chains that close the valley beyond
Ballater.
Ballatei', though a neat village now, did not exist when Byron was
here. There were a few cottages for the use of visitors, near the
other side of the present bridge, but those who came to drink the
waters, generally located themselves in farm-houses as near as they
could to " the wells," which are two miles down the opposite bank
of the Dee. Mrs. Byron chose her summer residence in one of the
most thoroughly secluded and out-of-the-world sj)ots which it was
possible to find, jjcrhaps, in the whole island. It lies four miles
below Ballater, on the same side of the river as the spring, that is,
two miles beyond "the wells" as they call them, some chalybeate
springs which issue from the hills, and which now bring many people
to Ballater in summer. You proceed to them along the feet of the
hills, and at the feet also of a dark pine wood. The river is below
you ; above you are these mountain forests, and the way lies some-
times through the wood. Under beeches, which shade the way,
there are benches set at intervals, so that a more charming walk.
"BYRON. 333
with the noble mountaiu views opposite to you, cannot wall be con-
ceived. At about two miles on the road, after passing under
stupendous dark cliffs that show themselves above the craggy and
steep forest, you find a couple of rows of houses, and here are the
waters issuing out of pipes into stone basins. Going still forwards,
you come out upon the wild moorlands. Above you, on the right
hand, rise the desolate hills ; below, on the left, wanders on the Dee,
amid its birch woods; and the valley is one of those scenes of
chaotic beauty, which perhaps the Highlands only show. It is a sea
of heath-clad little hills, sprinkled with the light green birch-trees,
and here and there a dark Scotch fir. It is a fairy land of purple
beauty, such as seems to belong to old romance, and where the
people of old romance might be met without wonder. And through
all goes the sound of the river like a distant ocean. Those who have
been in the Highlands know and recollect such scenes, so carpeted
with the crimson heather, so beautified with the light-hued fairy
birch woods. Still the way leads on till you come down to the Dee,
where it makes a wide and splendid sweep deep below the bank on
which you are, and then you wonder where can be Bellatrich, the
house you seek, for you see no house at all ! In the birch wood,
however, you now discern one white cottage, and that must be it.
No ! To that cottage I went, and out came a woman with spectacles
on and her Bible open in her hand. I asked if she could tell me
where Bellatrich was, and I expected her to say — " Here ! " but she
replied in a low, quiet voice — " I will show you, for it is not easy to
find." And so on we went for another quarter of a mile ; when
coming to a little hidden valley running at right angles from the
river up into the moorlands, she showed me a smoke rising abova
the trees, and told me there I should find the house.
And here was the place to which Byron's mother used to retire in
the summer months from Aberdeen with her bo}-. The valley is
divided by a wild brook hidden among green alders, and its slopes
are hung with the native birch and a few oaks. At the upper end
stands a farm-house, but this is new ; and the farmer, to show mo
the house in which Byron lived, took me into his farm yard. The
house Mrs. Byron inhabited is now a barn, or sort of hayloft rather,
in his yard. It was exactly one of the one-storied, long Highland
huts, and is now included in the quadrangle of his farm-yard ; but
the bed in which Byron used to lie is still there. It is one of the
deal cupboard sort of beds that are common in Highland huts.
There it stands amongst the straw. The farmer says many people
come to see the place, and several have tried to buy the bed from
him, but that he should think it quite a shame to sell it.
Imagine, then, Mrs. Byron living here half a century ago, and
Byron a boy of about ten years of age ; soon after which lie left for
England to be converted out of a poor Highland boy into a lord.
There was probably another hut or so near, as there is now, but that
was all. The house they lived in was but a hut itself. There was
no Ballater then. That has sprung up under the management of
Mr. Farquharson, the laird of Eallator. There was only the water
,iXi BYllOX.
issuing from the iiiooilaiid rocks, and uo house at it, but those few
luits ueai- Ballater bridge, where Lords Panmurc and Kennedy, and
sonic of their jovial companions, notorious up here, used to come
and to drink the watei's, in order to remedy their drinking too much
whisky. There was no carnage road then. There was no cultivated
meadow. All was moorland, and woods, and wild mountains. There
was a rude road at the margin of the river, but so stony that no
carriage could exist upon it. Nay, the present farmer says, that
wjion he came to live here, there was no road into this little hidden
\alley. There was no bridge over the brook, but they went through
amid the great stones, and that without taking any trouble to put
them aside. There was no gai'den, and there was no field. Around
rose, as they do now, dark moorland mountains, and the little black-
faced sheep, and the black cattle roamed over the boggy, heathery,
and birch scattei'ed valley, as they do still, except within the littlt)
circle of cultivation that the present tenant has made.
What a place for a civilized woman and her only son ! How he
got so far around as he did is to me a miracle. He advanced up the
valley quite to Braemar, and there was no carriage road thither !
There was no turnpike road from Aberdeen further than to Banchorj',
half way to Ballater, fifty-six years ago, and that then made was
the first turnpike road in Aberdeenshire. So a gentleman of Aberdeen
assured me. Farther, all was a mere track, in which a horse could
go. Yet the boy Byron, with his lame feet, and very lame he was,
according to those who knew him, and plenty of such remain,
rambled all about this wild region. The passion with which ho
ti-aversed those scenes is expressed in his poem to Mary Duff, the
equally beloved object of his boyish heart.
" Wl^en I roved a young Highlander on the dark heath.
And climbed thy steep summit, oh Morven ! of snow,
To gaze on the torrent that thundered beneath,
Or the mist of the tempest that gathered below ;
Untutored by science, a stranger to fear,
And rude as the rocks where my infancy grew,
Xo feeling, save one, to my bosom was dear.
Need I say, my sweet Mary, 'twas centred in you ?
" Yet it could not be love, for I knew not the name, —
What passion can dwell in the heart of a child?
But still I perceive an emotion the same
As I felt, when a boy in the crag-covered wild.
One image alone on my bosom impressed,
I loved my bleak regions, nor panted for new ;
And few were my wants, for my wishes were blessed,
And pure were my thoughts, for my soul was with you.
" I arose with the dawn ; witli my dog as my guide,
From mountain to mountain I bounded along;
I breasted the billows of Dee's rushing tide.
And heard at a distance the Highlander's song," &c.
That he was intensely happy here the poetry and memories of his
whole life testify. That he must have strolled far and wide, and, as
he says, with his dog for his guide, is no doubt true ; but, lame as
he was, it appears little less than miraculous. " I mind him weel,"
vaid a shepherd still living in the valley near the farm : " He was
'ust such a boy as yon," pointing to a boy of eleven or twelve ;
BYRO!\\ 335
•' and used to play about wi' us here. His feet were hoth turned in,
and he used to lift one over the other as he walked ; and when he
ran he would sometimes catch one against the other, and tumble
over neck and heels. We heard that in England he had got his feet
straightened."
How such a boy could get about there, over the rough heath and
up the distant mountains, is strange enough. We do not hear that
he had any pony, and there was only his mother or the maid to
accompany him. ]\Irs. Byron, by all accounts, was not well-fitted
for much walking, far less climbing up hills ; yet it is quite certain
that he rambled far and wide, and, it is most probable, alone.
Loch-na-garr, Morven, and Culbleen, are the grand features of the
mountain scenery, and it is evident that the wild and beautiful
.solitudes of the Dee-side, and the mountains around, had made a
deep and indelible impression on his imagination. It is just the
scenery to awake the poet, where the soul and the organization of
the poet exist. The deep solitude ; the stern mountains, with all
their changes of storm and sunshine — now blazing and burning out
in all the brightness of a clear sun, now softly beaming beneath the
slanting light of evening, and now black as midnight beneath a gloomy
sky, looking awfully forth from their sable and yet transparent veil of
shadow. These, and the sound of waters, and the mild beauty of
the low, heath-clad hills and soft glens, where the birch hangs its
weeping and fragrant branches over the lovely harebell and the secret
nest of the grouse, were the imagery which surrounded the boy
Byron during the summer months ; and the boy " was father to the
man," seeking out ever afterwards, from land to land, all that was
lovely and sublime in nature.
But he was now called upon to say —
' Adieu, then, ye liills, where my childhood was bred,
Thou sweet flowing Dee, to thy waters adieu ! "
and the scene changed to England ; solitude to cities : poverty to
fortune ; and the nameless obscurity of the juvenile mountain
wanderer to title and unimagined fame.
Before, however, quitting this favourite scene of the early life of
Byron, which he never again visited, I must notice it under the
aspect which it happened to present to me from the particular time
of jiiy arrival. It was on the 18th of August, just one week after
the commencement of the grouse-shooting season, and every inn on
the road was crowded with sportsmen and their servants. Lord
Castlereagh, on his way to his shooting ground in Braemar, was my
next neighbour on the mail from Aberdeen ; and his wide acquaint-
ance with the sports of various countries, the capercailzie and bear-
shooting of the north of Europe, in particular of Paissia, made his
descriptions of them, as w^ell as of the deer-shooting of Braemar — •
his particular sport — very interesting. But the weather of that wet
.summer was at this time outrageously rainy, and from every way-
side inn the lugubrious faces of sjiortsmen weie visible. As wo
drew up at the village of Banchory, the door was thronged with
livery servants, ard. a gentleman at an open upper window, eyeing
33G BYRON.
anxiously the sho\Yei'y clouds hanging upon the hills, caught sight
ol' Lord Castlereagh, and called out, in a tone of momentary anima-
tion quickly relapsing into melancholy, — " Ha ! Cass ! are you there 1
Here 1 have been these four days, and nothing but this confounded
rain. Not a foot have I yet been able to set upon the heath. There
are six of us."
" Who is that who addresses you so familiarly ? "
" Oh ! it is Sir John Guest ! " Poor Sir John ! What a pur-
gatory !
On went the coach. At Ballater, again, the door was thronged
with livery servants ; the rain was falling in torrents ; there were
nine shooting gentlemen in the house, not one of whom could stir
out. After taking luncheon, Lord Castlereagh went with the mail
to Braemar, and I, with expanded umbrella, issued forth to explore
the neighbourhood as well as I might, but was speedily driven back
again by the deluging rains, which made every highway an actual
river. The next day was Sunday, and the sun rose with a beauty
and warmth which seemed to say — "Gentlemen sportsmen, you
shall at least have fair weather for church." A more glorious day
never was sent down over mountain and moorland ; and few are the
scenes on which fine summer weather confers a greater beauty than
on those around Ballater. Along these pleasant valleys the country
people, all health and animation, in cordial conversation streamed
along to and from church. I climbed the dark moorland hills,
where the wild flocks scudded away at the presence of a stranger,
and the grouse rose up in whole coveys, with a startling whirr and
strange cries, and gazed down into the vales on the most lovely
rttle homesteads, on their crimson heathery knolls, amid their
beautiful little woodlands of birch. Above arose on every side the
solemn and dreary bulks of Loch-na--gaiT, Morven, and Culbleen.
It was a day and a scene amongst a thousand. Night fell ; morning
again rose — Monday morning ! Hundreds of anxious sportsmen
throughout the Highlands, and thousands of their anxious attendants,
eager for the hills —
" And the rain fell as though the world would drown ! " ',
When I looked out of my bedroom window, there were men and
boys standing in fi'ont of the inn, casting dreary looks at the ragged
and low-sweeping curtains of clouds that shrouded every hill, and
then longing looks at the windows, if the slightest possible breaks
in those clouds occurred, hoping to be called and engaged as guides
and game-carriers on the hills. Keepers were walking about, and
bringing bags of shot in. Men and boys, already looking wet and
dirty, as if they had tramped with their strong shoes some distance
out of the country to come hither, asked them if they thought it
v/ould take up ; and they cast knowing looks at the clouds and shook
their heads. But anon ! as if in very desperation, there were dogs
let loose, which ran helter skelter over the bridge towards the hills,
full of eager life for the sport ; and gigs full of gentlemen, three or
^our together, packed close, in white hats, or glazed and turned-up
BYKOK. 33 >
wide-awakes, and thick sliooting-jackets, close buttoned up, will;
their guns erect at their sides, setting oft' for their shooting grounds.
They were determined to be at their stations, perhaps some ten
miles oft", and take the chance of a change in the weather. Good
luck to them !
I took my way back again to Aberdeen ; and lo ! at Banchory, the
inn-door still crowded with livery servants, and poor Sir John Guest
still seated at the selfsame window, with long and melancholy face,
watching the clouds! Truly the sporting, not less than the Christian
life, has its crosses and its ma :tifications.
Lord Byron's first journey ijito England was with his mother, to
see his ancestral abode — his abbey and estate of Newstead. It was
a considerable step from the rooms over the shop at Aberdeen, or
the little hut at Bellatrich, with 123^. a-year. But yet for a lord it
was no very magnificent subject of contemplation. The estate had
been dreadfully denuded of wood, and showed a sandy nakedness of
meagre land, the rental of a great part of which would be high at
ten shillings an acre. The old abbey was dilapidated, and menacing
in various places to tumble in. The gardens were a wilderness of
neglect.
" Through thy battlements, Newstead, the hollow winds whistle ;
Thou, the hall of my fathers, art gone to decay;
In thy once smiling garden, the hemlock and thistle
Have choked up the rose which late bloomed in the way."
The place was, after a time, leased to Lord Grey de Ruthyn, who let
ruin take its course, as the old lord had done. When the old lord
died, the host of crickets which he had fed are said to have taken
immediate flight, issuing forth in such a train that the servants could
.scarcely move without treading on them. When Lord Grey's lease
was out, he and his hounds took their flight in like manner ; but
this was some years afterwards, and for the present Mrs. Byron
betook herself to Nottingham, and placed her son under the care of
i\rr. Rogers, the principal schoolmaster there, and under that of a
quack, one Lavender, to straighten his feet. Th^^nco they removed
to London, where they resided in Sloane-terrace, and Byron was
sent to Dr. Glennie's school at Dulwich. Thence he was removed to
Harrow ; and during the years he spent there INlrs. Byron went to
reside again at Nottingham, and afterwards at Southwell, with occa-
sional visits to Bath and Cheltenham. Harrow and Cambridge were,
of course, for the chief part of the years of his minority, his proper
homes, but the vacations were chiefly spent at Southwell, with fre-
quent visits to Newstead and Annesley. Before his minority, how-
ever, expired, Lord Grey de Ruthyn had quitted Newstead, leaving
it in a deplorable state of dilapidation, and Lord Byron incurred
great expense in repairing the abbey, much indeed beyond the reach
of his resources. His income was small, for the best pai't of his
ancestral property had been sold by the late lord, especially the
Rochdale estate, which was afterwards recovered. The allowance for
his education was all that he could claim from his trustees, and hia
mother's small income was eked out by a pension of 300^. per annum.
;i3S BYRON.
The debts incurred by him for the repairs of Newstead not being
legally recoverable, as they were incurred by a minor, remained for
vears unpaid ; and the importunity of his creditors was one of the
'stron,2;est motives for his early travelling abroad. The failure of his
liope of manying jMiss Chaworth, and adding her estate, whicli ad-
ioined his own, to Newstead, was, both in affection and in point of
"fortime, a severe blow. His embarrassments finally compelled him
to sell iNewstead, and to make a manage de convenance, which, to a
person of his peculiar temperam^Jit, habits, and opinions, was cer-
tain to result in trouble and disuuion. From these causes his life
became unsettled and embittered ; and scarcely had he reached the
])oriod at which his fame ought to have made his native land the
proudest and happiest of all lands to him, when he abandoned it for
ever, and
" In the wilds
Of fiery dimes he made himself a home,
And his soul drank their sunbeams : he was girt
With strange and dusky aspects : he was not
Himself like what he had been : on tlie sea
And on the shore he was a wanderer." — The Dream, vol. x. p. 2^9.
Of New.stead and Annesley I have given a particular account in
the Rural Life of England. To those I must refer, and have only to
iidd that, in the hands of Lord Byron's old schoolfellow Colonel Wild-
man, Newstead is restored and maintained as all lovers of English
goniuG would wish it to be, and is ever open to their survey. Since
that account, too, the old hall of Annesley has undergone a reno-
vation, and the scene of melancholy desertion and decay there
described, exists now only in the volume which recorded it. In
the present paper Southwell and Harrow will chiefly demand our
attention.
Southwell, during the period of his Harrow school life, became
a most favourite resort of his. His mother had settled down there.
Jjodyand mind were now in progress of expansion towards manhood.
His relish for society, his love of fame, and his love of poetry, were
every day more and more developing themselves. But his world yet
was only the school world. He was shy in general society. Here,
however, he formed a group of friends of superior taste and educa-
tion, in whose quiet little circle he became speedily at home ; and for
a time into this circle he seemed to throw himself, with all his heart
and youthful enthusiasm. The Pigotts, the Beecliers, the Leacrofts,
&c. were his friends. Here he used to spend his summer vacations ;
here it seems he spent nearly the whole of one year. His dogs, his
horses, firing at marks, swimming, and private theatricals, were his
amusements, and for a time Southv/ell was his world. The Pigotts
were his great friends, and there he went in and out, spent his even-
ings or spent his days, to his great contentment. A wider and a
gayer world had not yet opened upon him, and for a season South-
well and his friends there were everything to him. Of course, in
this little circle he was the great hero ; it is not often that a little
c-athedral town can catch a live lord : nothing could be done without
him ! every flattering attention awaited hira ; and for a time he was
BYROif. 33!)
not enough conversant with the great world, for the Httle one of
Southwell to be spoiled to him. Hence he made occasional visits to
Newstead and Annesley, with whose heiress he had fallen deeply in
love. Here he began to cultivate more sedulously the composition
of poetry, in which he was warmly encouraged by his most intimate
friends, the Pigotts and Mr. Beecher, — all persons of very refined
taste, — and here, eventually, he pat his first volume to press, with
Ridge, a printer at Newark. It was from "Southwell that he made
an excursion to Scarborough wdth his young friend Mr., since Dr.
Pigott, and was much smitten with a fair quakeress, to whom he
addressed the verses published in his Hours of Idleness. But he
had not been long at Cambridge, and seen something too of London,
before the charm of Southwell had vanished, and we find him pro-
testing that he hated Southwell. " Oh ! Southwell, Southwell, how
1 rejoice to have left thee ; and how I cui\se the heavy hours I dragged
along, for so many months, among the Mohawks who inhabit your
kraals ! " During the time that he spent there, his hours certainly
did not drag very heavily. It was only on looking back from a gay
scene that they appeared so to him. No one who now visits that
quiet little town will be surprised that a scene so still, though so
naturally pleasant, could not long hold a spirit of so restless a caste.
For, by his own experience,
" Quiet to quick spirits is a hsil."
Most of hia old friends had long left the place at the time of my
visit ; Dr. Pigott to practise at Nottingham : others were dead. Lliss
Pigott still lived in the house which her society and music made so
agreeable to him. Mr. Beecher, too, was still living, and had not
lived without setting the stamp of his mind on the age. To him and
another clergyman we are, in fact, indebted for the experiments on
which Lord Brougham based the New Poor Law. That, however, is
not the reason of his name appearing here ; here he is interesting as
the early friend of Lord Byron, whose influence was so great with
him as to induce him to commit his first volume to the flames.
It was in the summer of 1845 that I paid the visit already men-
tioned to Southwell. The day, for a wonder, was fine ; for a more
rainy or cold June never passed. The little town looked very pleasant
in its quietness. Every one knows how a cathedral town does look ;
all asleep in the sunshine, if sunshine there be. A few shops, that
seem to be expecting customers some time ; a large inn, that must,
too, have visitors sometimes, or it could not exist ; a number of
pleasant villas in their pleasant gardens, full of roses, and green plots
not shaven quite so close as in greater and smarter places, amid
a great deal of greenness everywhere in gardens, crofts, and meadows ;
the old minster standing aloft, in venerable and profoundly silent
majesty, in its ample green burial-ground.
The minster at Southwell is fine, and presents specimens of various
architecture, from the ancient Saxon to the Perpendicular. All is in
perfect taste, according to the time in which the work was done, and
is kept in excellent presenration. The inside is jiarticularly neat ;
iiO BYRON.
aud the reading-desk is a brass eagle, which, having been found at
the bottom of the lake at Newstead, where it is supposed to have
been thrown, at the dissohition of the abbey, by the monks, would
be an object on which Lord Byron would look with great interest. It
contained writings connected with the estate, which the angry monks
might Avish to destroy.
We looked into the ruins of the old palace, adjoining the minster-
yard, where Cardinal Wolsey was entertained on his last journey to
York, and found ourselves in a lovely garden, the walls of which
were the grey aud irregular ruins of this ancient fabric ; and the
house, running along one side of it, evidently, though old, built partly
out of its material. Every one knows how charming such an old
louse looks ; — its low range, its irregular windows, its front partly
ivcrhung with roses, jasmines, and figs ; the open porch, and the
^)eeps of goodly pictures, or rather the frames of the pictures, rich
curtains, and furniture, — the attributes of wealth ; and the green-
.-iward of the court-garden, filling with its velvet the area between
the old and rugged walls.
Under the obliging guidance of Dr. Calvert, I went round to see
the people with whom Byron used to associate. Unfortunately, Miss
Pigott was in London ; we had a glimpse of her entrance-hall, and
that was all. The house is one of those old-fashioned, rather darkish
houses, that one sees in such places ; and in the hall were heaps of
busts, apparently phrenological specimens.
We went then to the house where Byron's mother lived. It is at
the opposite end of the town, or village. It is called Burgage Manor,
and stands on the top of a sloping green, called Burgage Green, and
at the back looking over a pleasant stretch of country toward.
Farnsfield. The house is a good, large, and cheerful abode ; but has
it seems, been considerably enlarged since Mrs. Byron lived in it ; in
fact, another half built to it in front. Unluckily, the lady who now
inhabits it was absent too ; so that we could learn nothing particular
about it. It was undergoing painting, and we entered it, and walked
about the lower rooms, which are good modern rooms. The hall has
a number of middling portraits, apparently belonging to the lady's
family : a Mary Childers ; a lady of the name of Mace ; a Rev. Jackson,
without a John or Thomas to his name, just thus — " Rev. Jackson,"
a sandy-haired schoolmaster-looking man, leaning on his elbow, and
apparently trying to look very full of calculation. One picture was
very funny ; it was that of a Httle girl of about five or six years old,
in a loose dress, and her hair arranged in a very wiggish fashion,
with three ostrich feathers. She occupied the centre of the picture,
and stood facing you, and on each hand a white rabbit was partly
rearing up and looking at her ; and under the figures stood the
names— Mary Booth, Mary Law, and Mary Becher. You w-ould
imagine that two of the names were the names of the rabbits ; but,
in fact, they are all her own names, she having, in after years, been
twice married.
In this mansion Byron probably wrote many of the poems in his
Houra of Idlocess, but not the English Bards and Scotch Reviewers,
BYROX. 341
which the good lady of the house claims to have been written there,
" every line of them." He never saw the attack of the Edinbiu-gh
Review till he had entirely left Southwell. The house where Byron
used to join in private theatricals, that of IMr. Leacroft, was then
occupied by a Mrs. Heathcote.
In going from one place to another, we went round by the Greet,
the stream in which Byron used to bathe, and where he dived foi
a lady's thimble, which he took from her work-box and threw in.
The Greet is a mere brook, and for the most part so shallow that
a man would much sooner crack his skull in it than dive very deep,
unless it were above the mill, where the water is dammed up, or just
below the mill-wheel by the bridge, but that is too public, being in
the high road. Such is Southwell, in Nottinghamshire, which Avill
always be livingly associated with one of the happiest periods of the
life of Lord Byron.
Harrow being so near the metropolis, will naturally draw many
visitors, as another of the happiest scenes of Byron's youthful life.
Here he represents himself to have been eminently happy ; and
ilways looked back to this period of his youth with particular aftec-
tion. The schoolroom where he studied, the tomb where he used to
sit in the churchyard, and the spot where his natural daughter,
Allegra, is buried, will always excite a lively interest. This tomb is
still called by the boys at Harrow, " Byron's tomb : " and its identity
is very accurately fixed by himself in a letter to ]Mr. Murray, when
giving direction for the interment of his daughter. " There is a spot
in the churchyard, near the footpath, on the brow of the hill looking
towards Windsor, and a tomb, under a large tree, bearing the name
of Peachie or Peachy, where I used to sit for hours and hours when
a boy. This was my favourite spot ; but as I wish to erect a tablet
to her memory, the body had better be deposited in the church,
Near the door on the left hand as you enter, there is a monument,
with a tablet containing these words : —
' When SoiTow weeps o'er Virtue's sacred dust,
Our tears become us, and our grief is just :
Such -vvere the tears she slied, who grateful pays
This last sad tribute of her love and praise.'
I recollect them after seventeen years, not from anything remarkable
in them, but because, from my S€at in the gallery, I had generally
my eyes turned towards that monument. As near as convenient I
could wish Allegra to be buried, and on the wall a marble tablet
placed, with these words : —
In Memory of
Allegra,
Daughter of G. G. Lord Byron,
Who died at Bapna Cavallo,
In Italy, April 20th, 1822,
Aged five years and three months.
' I shall go to her, but she shall noJ return to me.'
2 Samuel .xii. 23."
These are interesting landmarks to the visitor, who will find the path
to the tomb beneath the large elm Avell tracked, and the view there
over the far stretching country, such as well might draw the musing
34-2 BYROIT,
eyes of the young poet. Cai)taiu Medwin says he saw the name of
Byron *• carved at Harrow, in three places, in very large characters —
a presentiment of his future fame, or a pledge of his ambition to
acquire it." The play-ground and cricket-ground will also be visited
with equal interest. There we see a new and eager generation of
line lads at play, and then have a lively idea of what Byron and his
cotemporaries were in their time. No one was a more thorough
schoolboy, in all the enjoyment of play and youthful pranks, than
Lord Byron, as he himself in verses addressed to one of his school-
comrades shows us, and as all his schoolfellows testify of him.
" Yet when confinement's lingering liour was done,
Our sports, our st\uiies, and our souls were one:
Together we impelled the flying ball,
Together waited in our tutor's liall ;
Together joined in cricket's manly toil,
Or sliareil the produce of the river's spoil ;
Or plunging from the green declining shore,
Our pliant limbs the buoyant billows bore :
]n every element, unchanged, the same,
All, all that brothers should be, but the name."
But the whole of this poem, called Childish EecoUections, published
in the Hours of Idleness, is filled by the charms of recollected school
delights at Harrow. Here his schoolfellows, amongst others, were
JiOrd Clare, for whom through life he retained the wai-mest attach-
ment. Lord Delaware, the Duke of Dorset, to whom he addressed
one of his early poems, Colonel Wildman, who afterwards purchased
Newstead, Lord Jocelyn, the Rev. William Harness, &c. He says,
"P. Hunter, Curson, Long, Tattersall, were my principal friends.
Clare, Dorset, Colonel Gordon, De Bath, Claridge, and John Wing-
held, were my juniors and favourites." Last, and not least, the late
Sir Robert Peel was his cotemporary, and it is now Avith very odd
feelings that we read the anecdote in Byron's life, that when a great
fellow of a boy-tyrant, who claimed little Peel as a fag, was giving
him a castigation, Byron came and proposed to share it. " While
the stripes were succeeding each other, and poor Peel writhing under
them, Byron saw and felt for the misery of his friend ; and although
he knew that he was not strong enough to fight * * * * * * with any
hope of success, and that it was dangerous even to approach him,
he advanced to the scene of action, and with a blush of rage, tears
in his eye^, and a voice trembling between terror and indignation,
asked very humbly if * * * * * « would be pleased to tell him
' how many stripes he meant to inflict ? ' — ' Why,' returned the
executioner, 'you little rascal, wdiat is that to you?' — 'Because,
if you please,' said Byron, holding out his arm, 'I would take
half.' "
With Harrow, we take leave of the years of innocent boyhood.
His removal to Cambridge, and his now long residences in London,
led him into those dissipations and sensualities which continued to
cast a sad foil on the greater part of his after life. To Cambridge
lie never appeared much attached, and rather resided there occa-
sionally as a necessity for taking his degree, than from any pleasure
he had in the place. His rooms in Trinity College, Cambridge, aro
BYRON. 343
nearly the sole locality which ■will there attract the attention of the
admirers of the poet, except the Commoners' hall, in which the long
tossed about statue of him by Thorwaldsen has been erected.
It was during his being a student of Cambridge that Newstead
abbey fell into his hands, by the expiration of Lord Grey de Ruthyn's
lease, and that he went thither, and repaired it to a certain extent, and
furnished it at an expense far beyond his resources at the time.
Here, with half-a-dozen of his fellow-collegians, amongst whom was
the very clever and early lost Charles Skinner Matthews, he sj^ent
a rackety time. He had got a set of monks' dresses from a mas-
querade wai'ehouse in London, and in these they used to sit up all
night, drinking and full of uproarious merriment. " Our hour of
rising," says Mr. Matthews himself, " was one. It was frequently
past two before the breakfast party broke up. Then for the amuse-
ments of the morning, there were reading, fencing, single-stick, or
shuttle-cock, in the great room ; practising with the pistols in the
hall ; walking, riding, cricket, sailing on the lake, playing with the
bear, or teasing the wolf. Between seven and eight we dined ;
and our evening lasted from that time till one, two, or three in
the morning. The evening's diversions may easily be conceived.
I must not omit the custom of handing round, after dinner, on the
removal of the cloth, a human skull, filled with burgundy. After
revelling on choice viands and the finest wines of France, we ad-
journed to tea, where we amused ourselves with reading, or improving
conversation, each according to his fancy ; and after sandwiches, &c,
retired to rest."
It may well be imagined what a scandal this occasioned in the
neighbourhood. During this time there were still work-people
employed in the repaii-s of the house, and I recollect a master plas-
terer, who at the same time was doing work for my father a dozen
miles off, relating to our astonishment the goings on of these gay
roisterers. Byron himself says, that
" Where Superstition once had made her den,
Now Paphian girls were known to sing and smile."
And the person here referred to particularly mentioned one young
damsel dressed in boy's clothes that Byron had there, no doubt the
same who soon after lived with him at Brompton, and used to ride
about on horseback with him at Brighton. Here at this time his
dog Boatswain died, and had the well-known tomb raised for him in
the garden where the poet himself proposed to lie. Here he employed
himself with writing his scarifying English Bards and Scotch lie-
viewers, which .appeared about the time that he came of age, and so
amply avenged him of the Edinburgh reviewers. Being, as he
informs us, about ten thousand pounds in debt, he left his mother
in possession of Newstead and set out on his foreign tour. In two
years he returned to England, not only triumphant by the great
])opularity of his satire over all his enemies, but liaving in his port-
folio the two first cantos of his inimitable Childe Harold. From this
ijaoment he was the most celebrated man of his age, and that at the
844 BYRON.
age of twenty-four. At one spring he ascended above Walter Scott
-.vitli all his well-earned honours. From the most solitary anJ
friendless, because tmconnected, man of his I'ank, living about town in
clubs and lodgings, for his few college friends were scattered abroad
in the world, he became at once the great lion of all circles. Lord
Holland, Rogers, Moore, &c. were his friends. He was besieged
on all sides by aristocratic blue-stockings and givers of great
parties. His life was for four or five years that of the most
perfect Circean intoxication of worship and dissipation ; yet during
this period he poured out the Giaour, the Bride of Abydos, the
'j^orsair, and Lara, poems of great vigour and beauty, and new in
x;ene and spirit, but by no means reaching that height of poetical
vealth and glory which he afterwards mounted to. Then came his
>.l-starrcd marriage, and in one short year his utter and lasting
separation from his wife.
This marriage proved the blight of his whole life. AVe have
no desire to probe the mysteries with which it is still surrounded,
but in justice to all parties we are bound to notice the extenuating
facts which have been advanced on each side. We do not drag
them from the sacred privacy of domestic life ; they are such as
have been put into print voluntarily by the parties themselves.
To the last Lord Byron persisted in protesting that he never knew
the cause of his wife's withdrawal from him : but Lady Byron, in a
paper addressed to his biographer since his decease, has assigned as
the reason that she believed him insane, or not safe to live with.
There w^ere causes which might give him an air of crreat violence and
excitement. He has candidly avowed the fact, that he married an
heiress in order to I'id himself of a heavy weight of debt. He cal-
culated on her wealth " to gild his waste." But though his wife
eventually brought him a substantial fortune, there is reason to
believe that it was not in immediate money. His creditors, however
rushed upon him from all sides, in the supposition that such was the
fact. They surrounded him like a swarm of hornets ; and instead o!
domestic repose, he tells us himself that in the first year of his
marriage, he had nine executions levied on his goods, and was only
saved from a prison by his peerage. No wonder, then, that his
excitable temperament was lashed to a pitch of fury little short of
madness.
In order to extricate him from this terrible condition, Lady Byron
set out on a visit to her father, to endeavour to procure the shui
necessary to appease the importunate creditors. From all that has
appeared, they parted in the utmost harmony. Lady Byron even
wrote to him while on the journey, with every mark of affection;
and yet instead of returning, a letter from her father assured him that
she would come no more. AVhy not ? Lady Byron herself assigned
to Thomas Moore as the reason, that she thought him insane, or
feared to live with him. Did she assume a cheerful and even kindly
air ia order to escape fi'om him in safety 1 Here lies the mystery,
which we desire not to penetrate, but it is easy to perceive the effect
of this ,suq)rising, and clearly unexpected event, on his proud and
BTROJf. S45
sensitive nature. The hand that he beUeved stretched out ko aid
and thus to soothe him, was withdrawn : a furious storm of abuse
fell immediately upon him from the public, and the finish was put
to mortal endurance. Banished, as it were, by the abhorrence of
his country, of that country which from worshipping turned so
suddenly to denounce him, for the abandonment by a wife was taken
as proof of some hideous guilt, he went forth never to return.
The limits of this work will necessarily confine any minute account
of the homes and haunts of our poets to those only which lie within
the British isles ; I shall, therefore, only summarily trace the pro-
gress of Byron's wanderings and abodes from this period ; and before
doing this, I will point out in a few lines the residences which he
occupied during the five years of his London life. Before he went
abroad, Gordon's hotel, Durant's hotel, both in Albemarle-street,
and 8. St. James's-street, were his homes. On his return from his
first tour he took, on a lease for seven years from Lord Althorpe, a
suite of rooms in the Albany. The year of his married life was
chiefly spent at 13, Piccadilly-terrace. The clubs which he fi-equented
were the Alfred, tlic Cocoa Tree, Watier's, and the Union.
In his first tour he traversed Portugal, Spain, Greece, and Turkey,
tracking his way in light, by the composition of Childe Harold.
Now, leaving behind him a desolated hearth, assailed bittei'ly by
that public which had so recently devoured with avidity his splendid
poems, regarded as an infidel and a desperado, he went from the
field of Waterloo across Belgium, along the Rhine, through Switzer-
land into Italy, which became his second country, retaining him till
a few months before his death. Every step of his progress was
illustrated by triumjDhs of genius still more brilliant than before.
From the moment that at Waterloo he exclaimed
" stop, for thy tread is on an empire's dust,"
till that in which he concludes with his sublime apostrophe to the
Ocean, he advances from Alp to Alp in the regions of genius. Every
one that traces the banks of the Rhine is made to feel what additional
charms he has scattered along them ; and how infinitely inferior are
all, even the most enthusiastic and elaborate, descriptions of ita
scenery, from other pens.
" The castled crag of Draclienfels
Frowns o'er the vide and winding Rhine,
Whose breast of waters broadly swells
Rctween the banks which bear the vine,
And hills all rich with blossomed trees,
And fields which promise corn and wine,
And scattered cities crowning these,
Whose fair white walls along them shine.
" And peasant girls, with deep blue eyes.
And hands which offer early flowers,
AValk smiling o'er this paradise;
Above, the Irequent feudal towers
Through green leaves lift thtir walls of grey,
And many a rock which steeply lowers,
And noble arch in proud decay,
Look o'er tliia vale of vintage bowers."
346 BTRON.
Volumes of description could not give you so vivid a feeling of the
rluiracteristic features of the valley of the Rhine as these lines.
And thus through the Alps, "The palaces of Nature," Byrou
advanced into Italy, the laud of ancient art, heroic deeds, and
clysiau nature. At (jfeneva he fell in with Shelley for the first time,
and henceforth these two great poets became friends. At Diodati,
on the lake of Geneva, he spent the autumn, then advanced to Italy,
and took up his abode in Venice, where, in the palace Mocenigo, on
tlie Canal Grande, he lived till December, 1819, i.e. about three years.
His next remove was to Ravenna, where he had splendid apartments
in the Guiccioli palace. In the autumn of 1821 he quitted Ra.venna,
having resided there not two years, and took up his residence at
risa, in the Lanfranchi palace on the Arno, Avhich he describes as
large enough for a garrison. In the autumn of 1822 he quitted Pisa
for Genoa, having resided at Pisa a year. At Genoa he inhabited
the villa Saluzzo at Albaro, one of the subm-bs of that city, where
he continued to live till the July of 1823, not quite a year, when he
set sail for Greece, where in a few months his existence terminated.
Of Lord Byron's abodes and modes of life we have some graphic
glimpses in Moore's life, in Shelley's and Captain Medwin's notices.
Everywhere he remained true to his schoolboy habits of riding on
horseback, swimming, firing with pistols ; to his love of bull and
Newfoundland dogs. Moore describes his house in Venice as a
damp-looking mansion, on a dismal canal. " As we groped our way
after him," he says, " through the dark hall, he cried out, ' Keep clear
of the dog ;' and before we had proceeded many paces farther, 'Take
care, or that monkey will fly at you,' a curious proof of his fidelity
to all the tastes of his youth, and of the sort of menagerie which
visitors at Newstead had to encounter in their progress through his
hall." Soon after he adds, " The door burst oi^en, and at once we
entered an apartment not only spacious and elegant, but wearing an
aspect of comfort and habitableness which, to a traveller's eye, is as
welcome as rare." Captain Medwin somewhere mentions meeting
Lord Byron, travelling from one of his places of abode to another,
with a train of carriages, monkeys, and whiskered servants, a strange
procession ; and Shelley, visiting him at Ravenna, says, — " Lord
Byron has here splei'did apartments in the palace of his mistress's
husband, who is one of the richest men in Italy. There are two
monkeys, five cats, eight dogs, and ten horses, all of whom, except
the horses, walk about the house like the masters of it. Tita, the
V^enetian, is here, and operates as my valet — a fine fellow, with a
prodigious black beard, who has stabbed two or three people, and is
the most good-natured fellow I ever saw."
Of his house at Pisa, Byron himself says : — " I have got here
a famous old feudal j^alazzo, on the Arno, large enough for a
garrison, witli dungeons below and cells in the walls ; and so full
of ghosts, that the learned Fletcher, my valet, has begged leave to
change his room, and then refused to occupy his neio room, because
there were more ghosts there than in the other. It is quite true
that there are most extraordinary noises, as in all old buildings.
BYRON. 347
which have terrified the servants so as to incommodQ me extremely.
There is one place where people were evidently walled np; for there
is but one possible passage, broken through the wall, and then meant
to be closed again upon the inmate. The house once belonged to
the Lanfranchi family, the same mentioned by Ugolina in his dream,
as his persecutor with Sismondi, and has had a fierce owner or two
in its time."
The mode of spending his time appears by all accounts to have
been pretty much the same everywhere. Rising about one o'clock
at noon, taking a hasty breakfast, often standing. "At three or
four," says the Guiccioli, " at Ravenna and Pisa, those who used to
ride out with him agreed to call, and after a game at bil hards they
mounted and rode out." At the two latter places his resort was
generally the forests adjoining the towns. At Ravenna, that forest
rendered so famous by Dante and Boccaccio, especially for the story
of the spectre huntsman in the Decamerone ; and at Pisa the old
pine forest stretching down to the sea. Latterly he used to proceed
to the outside of the city, to avoid the staring of the jieople, espe-
cially English jaeople ; then mounted his horse, and rode on at a great
rate. In the forest they used to fire with pistols at a mark. The
forest rides of Byron near Pisa and Ravenna will always be scenes
visited with deep interest by Englishmen, and Shelley's description
of themselves, the two great poets, in Julian and Maddalo, as they
rode
" upon the bank of land which breaks the flow
Of Adria towards Venice, a bare strand
Of hillocks, heaped from ever-shifting sand,
Matted with thistles and amphibious weeds,"
is one of everlasting value. Returning to dinner at six. or seven,
he conversed with his friends till midnight, and then sat down to
Avrite.
Thus we have traced this great and singular man from the moun-
tains of the Scottish Highlands, where he roamed as a boy, from
land to land, till he stood as a liberator on the shores of Greece, and
was seen for a few months riding forth with his long train of Suliote
guards, and then was at once lost to Greece and the world. In no
short life was there ever more to applaud and to condemn, to wonder
at and to deplore. From those hereditary and other causes which
we have already noticed, the temperament of Byron was passionate
to excess ; but this extreme sensibility, which was the food and
foundation of liis splendid genius, was at the same time the torture
of his exi.stencc. Misunderstood where he ought to have been
soothed with the deepest tenderness, attacked by the public where
he should have been most closely sympathised with, he went forth,
as it w^ere, reckless of peace or of character. A series of adulterous
connexions darkened his glorious reputation, and served to justify
in Ihe eyes of the public the accusations brought against him. But
spite of the censures of the world, and reproaches of his own con-
science, the ]iowers of his genius continually grew, till they even
forced into tlic silence of astonishment the most heartless of hu
348 BTROIT.
detractors. To say uotliiug of those grand and sombre metaphysical
;Jrai|ias, Manfred, Cain, and the rest, which he wrote in Italy, the
-.oera alone of Childo Harold, ever ascending in magnificent strength,
richness, and beauty, as it advanced, was sufficient to give him an
immortality second to no othei*. The wide and superb field of its
action, that of all the finest countries of Europe ; the great events,
those of tlie most stirring and momentous age of the whole world ;
and the illustrious names which it wove into its living mass ; the
glorious remains of art, and the still more glorious features of
nature in Italy and Greece ; — all combined to render Childe Harold
the great poem of his own and the favourite of every after age.
Totally different as he was under different impressions, Childe
Harold had the transcendent advantage of being the product of that
mood which was inajjired only by the contemplation of every object
calculated to draw him away from the seductions of society, and the
lower tones of his mind ; — the mood inspired by the most august
objects of heaven and of earth, — the midnight skies, the Alpine
mountains, the sublimities of mighty rivers and oceans, the basking
beauties of southern nature, and the crumbling but unrivalled works
of man. Filled with all these images of nobility and greatness, he
yave them back to his page with a tone so philosophically profound,
with a music so thrilling, with a dignity so graceful and yet so
tender, thjit nothing in poetry can be conceived more fascinating and
perfect. Every thought is so clearly and fully developed, every image
is so substantial and so strongly defined, and the very scepticism
which here and there betrays itself comes forth so accompanied by
a pensive, earnest, and intense longing after life, that it resembles
the melancholy tone which pervades the book of Job, and some of
the prophets, more than that of any other human, much less modern,
composition. We may safely assert that there are a hundred com-
bining causes, in the subjects and the spirit of Childe Harold, to
render it to every future age the most lovely and endearing gift from
this. Don Juan, the reflex of Byron's ordinary, as this was of his
solitary and higher life, — his life alone with Nature and with God, — •
has its wonderful and inimitable passages ; but Childe Harold is one
woven mass of beauty and intellectual gold from end to end.
In judging the errors of Lord Byron, there is one consideration
calculated to disarm severity perhaps more than all others. The
excesses in which he had indulged were "made by Providence the
means of the severest punishment that could befal him. The cause
of Greece aroused his spirit, at that period of life when life should
have been in its prime, and a new scene of most glorious ambition
was opened to him, — that of adding to the unrivalled renown of the
poet the still more grateful renown of becoming the saviour of a
country and a people, whom the triumphs of ancient art, science,
liberty, and literature, had made as it were kindred to the whole
world. This august prospect was unveiled to him, and he rushed
forward to secure it ; but his constitution, sapped by vicious indul-
gence, gave way ;— the brilliant promise of new ancl loftiest glories
was snatched from him ; — he sunk and perished. Reflecting on this
BYRON. 349
—the hardest moralist could not desire a sadder retribution ; and
they ■who love rather to seek in the corrupt mass of humanity for the
original germs of the divine nature, will turn with Thomas Moore to
the fair side, and acquiesce most cordially in the concluding words
of his biography. " It would not be in the power, indeed, of the
most poetical friend to allege auythuig more convincingly favom-able
of his character than is contained in the few simple facts, that,
through life, with all his faults, he never lost a friend ; that those
about him in his youth, whether as companions, teachers, or servants,
remained attached to him to the last ; that the woman to whom he
gave the love of his maturer years idolizes his name ; and that, with
a single unhappy exception, scarce an instance is to be found of any
one once brought, however briefly, into relations of amity with him
that did not feel towards him a kind regard in life and retain a
fondness for his memory."
In his last moments his heart fondly turned to his wife and child ;
and he commissioned his old servant, Fletcher, to deliver to them
messages of an affection which then rose sublimely above all the
resentments of earth.
GEORGE CRABBE.
When a youth, with a voi'acious appetite for books, an ohl lady, wlio
kindly siipjilied me with many, put one day into my hands Crabbe's
Jiorough. It was my first acquaintance with him, and it occasioneil
me the most singular sensations imaginable. Intensely fond of
poetry, I had read the great bulk of our older writei-s, and was
enthusiastic in my admiration of the new ones who had appeared.
The Pleasures of Hope, of Campbell ; the AVest Indies and World
before the Flood, of Montgomery ; the first Metrical Romances of
Scott ; all had their due appreciation. The calm dignity of Words-
worth, and the blaze of Byron, had not yet fully appeared. Evei-y-
thing, however, old or new, in poetry had a certain elevation of
subject and style, which seemed absolutely necessary to give it the
title of poetry. But here was a poem by a country clergyman, — the
description of a seaport town, so full of real life, yet so homely and
often prosaic, that its efl'ect on me was confounding. Why, I said
to myself, it is not poetry, and yet how clever ! There is certainly
a resemblance to the style of Pope ; yet what subjects, what charac-
ters, what ordinary jihraseology ! The country parson, certainly, is
a great reader of Pope ; but how unlike Pope's is the music of the
rhythm — if music there be ! What an opening for a poem in four-
and-twenty books !
" Describe the Borough— Ihoiigli our idle tribe
May love description, can we so describe.
Tliat you sliall fairly streets and buildings trace,
Anil all that gives distinction to the place?
CKABBE. 351
This cannot be ; yet moved by your rjque»t,
A part I paint — let fancy form the rest.
Cittes and towns, the various haunts of men,
Require the pencil ; they defy the pen.
Could he, who sang so well the Grecian Fleet,
So well have sung of Alley, Lane, or Street?
Can measured lines these various buildings show.
The Town Hall Turning, or the Prospect Row ?
Can I the seats of wealth and want explore,
And lengthen out my lays from door to door? "
No, good parson ! how should jou ? I exclaimed to myself. You see
the ab.surdity of your subject, and yet you rush into it. He -svho
sang of the Greek Fleet certainly would never have thought of
singing of Alley, Lane, or Street ! What a difference from —
Or—
' Achilles' wrath, to Greece the direful spring
Of woes unnumbered, heavenly goddess, sing ! "
The man for wisdom's various arts renowned,
Long exercised in woes, O Muse, resound ! "
What a difference from —
" Arms and the man I sing, who forced hy fate.
And haughty Juno's unrelenting hate ! "
Cr from the grandeur of that exordium : —
" Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world, and all our woe.
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful seat.
Sing, heavenly Muse! that on the secret top
Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire
That shepherd, who first taught the chosen seed
In the heginning, how the Heavens and Earth
Rose out of chaos ; or, if Sion-hill
Delight thee more, and Siloa's brook, that flowed
Fast by the Oracle of God, I thence
Invoke thine aid to my adventurous song.
That with no middle flight intends to soar
Above the Aonian mount, while it pursues
Things unattenipted yet in prose or rhyme.
And chiefly Thou, O Spirit ! that dost prefer
Before all temples the upright heart and pure.
Instruct me, for Thou knowest : Thou from the first
Wast present, and, Avith mighty wings outspread,
Dove-like sat'st brooding on the vast abyss.
And mad'st it pregnant ; what in me is dark
Illumine, what is low raise and support ;
That to the height of this great argument
I may assert Eternal Providence,
And justify the ways of God to men."
With this glorious sound in my ears, like the opening hymn of an
archangel — language in which more music and more dignity were
united than in any composition of mere mortal man, and which
heralded in the universe, God and man, perdition and salvation, crea-
tion and the great sum total of the human destinies, — what a fall
was there to those astounding words —
" Describe the Borough ! "
It was a shock to everything of the ideal great and jjoetical in the
young and sensitive mind, attuned to the harmonies of a thou.sand
^reat lays of the bygone times, that was never to be forgotteii.
352 CRABBE.
Are we then come to this ? I asked. Is this the scale of topic, and is
this the tone to which wc are reduced in this generation ? Turning
over the heads of the different books did not much tend to remove
this fcchnsj. The Church, Sects, the Election, Law, Physic, Trades,
Clubs and'Social Meetings, Players, Almshouse and Trustees, Peter
Grimes and Prisons ! What, in heaven's name, were the whole nine
Muses to do with such a set of themes ! And then the actors ! See
a set of drunken sailors in their ale-house :■ —
" The Anchor, too, affords the seaman joys.
In small smoked room, all clamour, crowds, and noise;
Wliere a curved settle half surrounds the fire,
Where fifty voices purl and punch require ;
They come for pleasure in their leisure hour,
And they enjoy it to their utmost power ;
Standing they drink, they swearing smoke, while all
Call, or make ready for a second call."
But, spite of all, a book was a book, and therefore it was read. At
every page the same struggle went on in the mind between all the
old notions of poetry, and the vivid pictures of actual life which it
unfolded. When I had read it once, I told the lender that it was
the strangest, cleverest, and most absorbing book I had ever read,
but that it was no poem. It was only by a second and a third perusal
that the first surprise subsided ; the first shock gone by, the poem
began to rise out of the novel composition. The deep and expe-
rienced knowledge of human life, the sound sense, the quiet satire,
there was no overlooking from the first ; and soon the warm sj'^mpathy
vvith poverty and suffering, the boldness to display them as they
existed, and to suffer no longer poetry to wrap her golden haze
round human life, and to conceal all that ought to be known, tecause
it must be known before it could be removed ; the tender pathos,
and the true feeling for nature, grew every hour on the mind. It was
not long before George Crabbe became as firmly fixed in my bosom
as a great and genuine poet, as Rembrandt, or Collins, or Edwin
Landseer are as genuine painters.
Crabbe saw plainly what was become the great disease of our
literature. It was a departure from actual life and nature.
" I've often marvelled, when hy night, by day,
I've marked the manners moving in my way,
And heard the language and beheld the lives
Of lass and lover, goddesses and wives.
That books which promise much of life to give
Should show so little how we truly live."
To this home-truth, succeeds that admirable satirical description
of our novel hterature, which introduces the sad story of Ellen
Orford. My space is little, but I must give a specimen of the man-
ner in which the Cervantes of England strips away the sublime
fooleries of our literary knight-errantry.
" Time have I lent — I wou'.d their debt were less —
To flowing pages of sublime distress ;
And to the heroine's soul-distracting fears
I early gave my sixpences and tears ;
Oft have I travelled in these tender tales,
To Darnlet/ Cullngcs, and Maple Vales.
CRABBE. 353
I've watclied a wintry night on castie walls,
I've stalked by moonlight through deserted halle ;
And when the weary world was sunk to rest,
I've had such sights — as may not be expressed.
" Lo ! that chateau, the western tower decayed,
The peasants shun it, they are ail afraid;
for there was done a deed ! could walls reveal
Or timbers tell it, how the heart would feel-
Most horrid was it : — for, behold the floor
Has stains of blood, and vill be clean no mote.
Hark to the winds ! which, through the wide saloon.
And the long passage, send a dismal tune, —
Music that ghosts delight in; and now heed
Yon beauteous nymph who must unmask the deed •.
See ! with majestic sweep she swims alone
Through rooms all dreary, guided by a groan.
Though windows rattle, and though tapestries shako,
And the feet falter every step they take.
Mid moans and gibing sprites she silent goes.
To find a something which shall soon expose
The villanies and wiles of her determined foes :
And having thus adventured, thus endured,
Fame, wealth, and lover, are for life secured.
" Much have I feared, but am no more afraid.
When some chaste beauty, by some wretch betrayed'
Is drawn away with such distracted speed
That she anticipates a dreadful deed.
Nut so do I. Let solid walls impound
The captive fair, and dig a moat aroun," :
Let there be brazen locks and bars of stv?],
And keepers cruel, such as never feel.
With not a single note the purse supply.
And when slie begs let men and maids den)
Be windows those from which she dare net f. 11,
And help so distant 'tis in vain to call ;
Still means of freedom will some powf.r "'"vise,
And from the baffled ruffian snatcli the prize."
From all this false sublime, Crabbe was the first to free us, and to
lead us into the true sublime of genuine human life. How novel at
that time, and yet how thrilling, was the incident of the sea-side
visitors surprised out on the sands by the rise of the tide ! Here was
real sublimity of distress, real display of human passion. The lady,
with lier children in her hand, wandering from the tea-table which
hai been spread on the sands, sees the boatmen asleep, the boat
adrift, and the tide advancing ; —
" She gazed, she trembled, and though faint her call,
It seemed like thunder to confound them all.
Their sailor-guests, the boatman and his mate.
Had drunk and slept, regardless of tlieir state ;
' Awake ! ' they cried aloud ! ' Alarm the shore 1
Shout all, or never shall we reach it more ! '
Alas ! no shout the distant land can reach,
Xo eye behold them from the foggy beach :
Again they join in one loud, fearful cry,
Tlien cease, and eager listen for reply;
None came — tlie rising wind blew sadly by.
They shout once more, and then they turn asida
To see how quickly flowed the coming tide :
Between each cry they find tlie waters steal
Or. their strange prison, and new horrors feel.
Foot after foot on the contracted ground
The billows fall, and dreadful is tlie so-jnd ;
Loss and yet less the sinking isle necame,
And there wa., weeping, wailing, wrath, and blame."
;i54 CEABBE.
It has been said that Cnibbe's poetry is mere descripiiou, however
!vccurat-c, and Ihat ho lias not a spark of imagination. The charge
arises froiu a false view of the poet and liis objects. He saw that
the world was well suppUed with what are poems of the creative
faculty, that it was just as destitute of the poetry of truth and
reality. He saw human life lie like waste land, as worthless Oi
notice, while our poets and romancers
" In trim gardens took their pleasure."
He saw the vice, the ignorance, the misery, and he lifted the veii
and cried, — " Behold your fellow-men ! Such are the multitude of
your fellow-creatures, amongst whom you live and move. Do you
want to weep over distress ? Behold it there, huge, dismal, and
excruciating ! Do you wish for a sensation 1 Find it there ! Follow
the ruined gentleman from his gaming and his dissipation, to his
f^qualid den and his deatli. Follow the grim savage, who murders his
shrieking boy at sea. Follow the poor maiden to her ruin, and the
parent weeping and withering under the curse of a depraved child.
Go down into the abodes of ignorance, of swarming vice, of folly,
and madness — and if you want a lesson, or a moral, there they are
by thousands."
Crabbe knew that the true imaginative faciUty had a great and
comprehensive task, to dive into the depths of the human heart, to
iathom the recesses and the springs of the mind, and to display all
their movements under the various excitements of various passions,
Vi'ith the hand of a master. He has done this, and done it with
unrivalled tact and vigour. Out of the scum and chaos of lowest
life, he has evoked the true sublime. He has taught us that men
tu-e our proper objects of display, and that the multitude has claims
on our sympathies that duty as well as taste demand obedience to.
He was the first to dare these desperate and deserted walks of hu-
manity, and to prove to us that still it was humanity. At every step
he revealed scenes of the truest pathos, of the profoundest interest,
and gave instances of the most generous sacrifices, the most patient
love, the most heroic duty, in the very abodes of unvisited wretched-
ness. He made us feel that these beings were men ! There are
few pictures so touching in all the volumes of romance, as that of
*no dying sailor and his sweetheart. What hero breathed a more
beautiful devotion, or clothed it in more exquisite language, than this
poor sailor youth, when beUeving himself dying at sea : —
" He called his friend, and prefaced with a sigh
A lover's message — ' Thomas, I must die.
AVould I could see my Sallv, and could rest
My throbbing temples on her faithful breast,
And gazing go!— if not, this trifle take,
And say till death I wore it for her sake :
Yes, I must die — blow on, sweet breeze, blow on !
(iive me one look before my life be gone,
Oh ! give me that and let me not despair,
One last fond look— and now repeat the prayer.'
* • • «
-' She ])laced a decent stone his grave above.
Neatly engraved— an offering of her love;
]''or that she wrought, for that forsook her bed,
.Vwake alike to duty and the deai; "
CRABBE. 365
It was by tliese genuine vindications of our entire humanity, that
Crabbe, by casting the full blaze of the sunshine of truth and
genius on the real condition of the labouring population of these
kingdoms, laid the foundations of that great popular feeling which
prevails at the present day. He was not merely a poet, but a poet
who had the sagacity to see into the real state of things, and the
heart to do his duty — the great marks of the true poet, who is
necessarily a true and feeling man. To him popular education,
popular freedom, popular advance into knowledge and power, owe
a debt which futurity will gratefully acknowledge, but no time can
cancel.
George Crabbe was born on the borders of that element which he
so greatly loved, and which he has so powerfully described in the
first chapter of the Borough. He has had the good fortune to have
in his son George a biographer such as every good man would desire.
The life written by him is full of the veneration of the son, yet of
the candour of the historian ; and is at once one of the most graphic
and charming of books.
From this volume we learn that the poet was born at Aklborough,
in Suftblk, on the Christmas eve of 1754. His birthplace was an old
house in that range of buildings which the sea has now almost
demolished. The chamber projected far over the ground floor ;
and the windows were small, with diamond panes almost impeiwious
to the light. A view of it by Stanfield forms the vignette to the
biography.
Both the father and grandfather of Crabbe bore the name of
George, as well as himself. The grandfather, a burgess of Aid-
borough, and collector of customs there, yet died poor. The father,
originally educated for trade, had been in early life the keeper of a
parochial school in the porch of the church at Orford. He after-
wards became schoolmaster and parish clerk at Norton, near Loddon,
in Norfolk ; and finally, returning to his native Aldborough, rose to
the collection of the salt duties, as Salt-master. He was a stern
but able man, and with all his sternness not destitute of good
quaUties. The mother of Crabbe was an excellent and pious woman.
Besides himself there were five other children, all of whom, except
one girl, lived to mature years. His next brother, Robert, was a
glazier, who retired from business at Southwold. John CrablDe, the
third son, was the captain of a Liverpool slave ship, who perished
by an insurrection of the slaves. The fourth brother, AVilham, also
a seafaring man, was carried prisoner by the Spaniards into Mexico,
and was once seen by an Aldborough sailor on the coast of Hon-
duras, but never heard of again. This sailor brother, in his inquiries
after all at home, had expressed much astonishment to find that
George was become a clergyman, when he left him a doctor ; and on
this incident Crabbe afterwards founded the sailor's story in The
Parting Hour. His only surviving sister married a Mr. Sparkes,
a builder of Aldborough, and died in 1827. Such were Crabbe'a
family. The scenery amongst which he spent his boyhood has
been frequently described in his poetry, especially in the openin;^
n2
3.">G CRABBE.
letter of his Borougli. It is hero given with equal life in his son's
prose.
" Aldborough, or, as it is more correctly written, Alderburgh, was
in those days a poor and wretched place, with nothing of the elegance
and gaiety which have since sprung up about it, in consequence of
the resort of watering-parties. The town lies between a low hill
or cliff, on which only the old church and a few better houses were
then situated, and the beach of the German Ocean. It consisted of
two parallel and unpaved streets, running between mean and
scrambhug houses, the abodes of seafaring men, pilots, and fishers.
The range of houses nearest to the sea had suffered so much from
repeated invasions of the waves, that only a few scattered tenements
appeared erect among the desolation. I have often beard my father
describe a tremendous spring-tide of, I think, the 17th of January,
1779, when eleven houses here were at once demolished ; and he saw
the breakers dash over the roofs, and round the walls, and crush all to
ruin. The beach consists of successive ridges — large rolled stones,
then loose shingles, and, at the fall of the tide, a stripe of fine hard
sand. Vessels of all sorts, from the large heavy troll boat, to the
yawl and prame, drawn up along the shore — fishermen preparing
their tackle, or sorting their spoil, — and, nearer, the gloomy old
town-hall, the only indication of municipal dignity, a few groups
of mariners, chiefiy pilots, taking their quick short walks back-
wards and forwards, every eye watchful of the signal from the offing,
— such was the squalid scene which first opened on the author of
The Village!
" Nor was the landscape in the vicinity of a more engaging aspect ;
open commons and sterile farms, the soil poor and sandy, the herbage
bare and rushy, the trees ' few and far between,' and withered and
stunted by the bleak breezes of the sea. The opening picture of
The Village was copied, in every touch, from the scene of the poet's
nativity and boyish days : —
' Lo ! where the heath, with withering brake grown o'er.
Lends the light turf tliat warms the neighbouring poor;
From thence a lengtli of burning sand appears,
Where the thin harvest waves its withered ears ;
Rank weeds, that every art and care defy.
Reign o'er the land, and rob the blighted rye ;
There thistles spread their prickly arms afar,
And to the ragged infant threaten war.'
" The broad river, called the Aid, approaches the sea close to
Aldborough, within a few hundred yards, and then turning abruptly,
continues to run for about ten miles parallel to the beach, from
which a dreary stripe of marsh and waste alone divides it, until it at
length finds its embouchure at Orford. The scenery of this river
has been celebrated as lovely and delightful, in a poem called
Slaughden Vale, written by Mr. James Bird, a friend of my father's ;
and old Camden talks of ' the beautiful vale of Slaughden.' I confess,
however, that though I have ever found an indescribable charm in the
very weeds of the place, I never could perceive its claims to beauty.
Such as it is, it has furnished Mr. Ciabbe with many of his happiest
CRABBE. 357
and most graphic descriptious ; and tlie same may be said of tha
whole line of coast from Orford to Dunwich, every feature of which
has, somewhere or other, been reproduced in his writings. The quay
of Slaughden, in particular, has been painted with all the minuteness
of a Dutch landscape : —
'Here samphire banks and saltwort bound the flood,
There stakes and sea-weeds withering on the mud;
And higher up a ridge of all things base,
Which some strong tide has rolled upon the place. . .
Yon is our quay ! those smaller hoys from town.
Its various wares for country use bring down,' etc.
* * • ' *
'■' For one destined to distinction as a portrayer of character,"
continues his son, " few scenes could liave been more favourable
than that of his infancy and boyhood. He was cradled among the
rough sons of the ocean, — a daily witness of unbridled passions, and
of manners remote from the sameness and artificial smoothness of
polished society. At home, as has already been hinted, he was sub-
ject to the caprices of a stei-n and imperious, though not unkindly
nature ; and jjrobably few whom he could familiarly approach but
had passed throiigh some of those dark tragedies in which his futuro
strength was to be exhibited. The common people of Aldborough
in those days are described as —
'A wild, amphibious race.
With sullen woe displayed in every face;
Who far from civil arts and social fly,
And scowl at strangers with suspicious eye.'"
Crabbe, though imbibing everything relating to the sea, and
sailors, and fishermen, was bj^ no means disposed to be one of this
class himself He early exhibited a bookish turn, and was reckoned
effeminate ; but his father saw his talent, and gave him a good
education. He was then put apprentice to a surgeon, who was also
a farmer ; and George alternately pounded the pestle and worked in
the fields, till he was removed to another surgeon at Woodbridge,
Here he became a member of a small literary club, which gave a new
stimulus to his love of poetry, already sufficiently strong ; and in his
eighteenth year he fell in love with the young lady who was destined
to be his wife. Before the expiration of his apprenticeship, he had
published a volume of poems. His apprenticeship terminated, he
set out for London ; but, unfurnished with money to attend the
hospitals, he remained awhile in mean lodgings in Whitechapel, and
then returned to Aldborough ; and, after engaging himself as an
assistant for a short time, commenced practice for himself. It would
not do, however ; and as he filled itp his leisure time hj botanizing
in the country, the people got a notion that he gathered his medicine
out of the ditches. At length, starved out, he resolved to return t(
London, as a literary adventurer. With 5/. in his pocket, a presenV
for the purpose, from Dudley North, brother to the candidate foi
Aldborough, he took his passage in a sloop for town.
In thinking of Crabbe, we generally picture him to ourselves as
the well-to-do clergyman, comfortably inditing his verse in a goodly
^,r>S CRABBE.
parsonage ; but Orabbc coiUDicnced as a regulav hack-authov about,
town, and went through all the racking distress of that terrible life,
utterly without funds, without jiatrons, or connexions. Chatterton
\iad perished in the desperate undertaking just before, and it ap-
peared likely enough, for a long time, that Crabbe might perish too
In vain he wrote — nobody would publish ; in vain he addressed
ministers of state in verse and prose — nobody would hear him. He
maintained this fearful struggle for twelve months. He had lodgings
at a ^Ir. Vickery's, a hairdresser, near the Exchange, who afterwards
removed to Bishopsgate-street, whither he accompanied the family.
They appeared to behave well to him, and gave him more trust than
is usual with such peoi-)le, though at length even their patience seems
to have been exhausted, and he was threatened with a prison.
While he resided there, he often spent his evenings at a small
coffee-house near the Exchange, where he became acquainted with
several clever young men, then beginning the world, like himself.
One of these was Bonnycastle, afterwards master of the military
academy at Woolwich ; another was Isaac Dalby, afterwards professor
of mathematics in the military college of Marlowe ; and a third,
Reuben Burrow, who rose to high distinction in the ser-vice of the
East India Company, and died in Bengal. To obtain healthy exer-
cise, he used to walk much in the day time, and would accompany
Mr. Bonnycastle on his visits to different schools in the suburbs ;
but more frequently stole off alone into the country, with a small
edition of Ovid, Horace, or Catullus, in his pocket. Two or three of
these little volumes remained in his possession in later days, and ho
set a high value on them, saying they were his companions in his
adversity. His favourite haunt was Hornsey wood, where he sought
for plants and insects. On one occasion he had strolled too far from
town to return, and, having no money, he was compelled to lodge on
a mow of hay, beguiling the time, while it w'as light, with reading
Tibullus, and in the morning returned to town.
Of the depth of distress to which Crabbe was reduced, his journal
kept througli that dark time testifies, but nothing more so than thii
prayer : —
" My God, my God, I put my trust in thee ; my troubles increase,
my soul is dismayed ; I am heavy and in distress ; all day long
I call upon thee ; O be thou my helper in the needful time of
trouble.
" Why art thou so far from me, my Lord ? why hidest thou
thy face ? I am cast down ; I am in poverty and affliction : be
thou with me, O my God ; let me not be wholly forsaken, my
Redeemer !
"Behold, I trust in thee, blessed Lord. Guide me and govern
me unto the end. O Lord, my salvation, be thou ever with me.
Amen."
Unlike poor Chatterton, Crabbe had a firm trust in Providence,
and was neither so passionate nor so reservedly haughty. He deter-
mined to leave no stone miturned ; and at length he 'wrote to the
only man. of the age who was likely to lend him a kindly ear— that
CRABBE, 359
was Edmund Burke. From that moment his troubles were at an
end, and his fortune made. Burke sent for him, looked at his manu-
scripts, perceived his claims to genius well founded, and received
him to his own table. He then introduced him to Dr. Johnson, Sir
Joshua Reynolds, and the surly old Lord Chancellor Thurlow ; the
last of whom, though he had paid no attention to a letter Crabbe
had before written to him, nor to a stinger which he had sent him
in consequence, now sent for him, and told him that he o?{r//i( to have
noticed the first letter, and that he forgave the second, and that
there was his reply. He put a sealed paper into Crabbe's hand,
which, on being opened, contained a bank-note, value one hundred
pounds ! Burke advised Crabbe to take orders, as they were walking
together one day at Beaconsfield, whither Burke had invited him.
This was soon managed ; he was examined and admitted to priest's
orders by the Bishop of Norwich, and was sent, to the astonishment
of the natives, to officiate as curate in his native town. But Burke
soon procured him the chaplaincy to the Duke of Rutland, and he
went down to reside at Belvoir Castle. At this splendid establish-
ment, and in a fine country, Crabbe did not enjoy himself His son
says : " The numberless allusions to the nature of a literary de-
pendant's existence in a great lord's house, which occur in my
father's writings, and especially in the tale of The Patron, are quite
enough to lead any one that knew his character and feelings to the
conclusion that, notwithstanding the kindness and condescension of
the Duke and Duchess themselves, — which were, I believe, uniform,
and of which he always spoke with gratitude, — the situation he filled
at Belvoir was attended with many painful circumstances, and pro-
ductive in his mind of some of the acute.st sensations of wounded
pride that have ever been traced by any pen." He was always
delighted to get away from the cold stateliness of Belvoir, with its
troops of insolent menials, to the small seat of Chevely, about the
■period of the Newmarket races ; or to Croxton, another small seat
near Belvoir, where the family went sometimes to fish in the extcn-
.sive ponds. Here the servants were few, ceremony was relaxed, and
he could wander in the woods after his insects and his plants.
Thurlow gave him two small hvings in Dorsetshire, Frome St. Quin-
tin and Evershot ; saying at the time, " By G — d, you are as much
like Parson Adams as twelve to a dozen." He now publi.shed The
V^illage, which was at once popular, and he married.
Alias Sarah Elmy, to whom he became engaged at eighteen, had,
through all his strugles in the metropohs, with vmswerving afiection
maintained the superiority of his talents, and encouraged him to
persevere. The Duke of Rutland being appointed Lord Lieutenant
of Ireland, the ducal family quitted Belvoir for Dublin, and Crabbe
being left behind, was, on his propo.sed marriage, invited to bring
his wife to the castle, and occupy certain apartments there. This
was done ; but the annoyance of another man's, and a great man's,
menials to attend on him, was too much for Crabbe, and he fled the
castle, and took up liis abode as curate of Stathevn, in the humble
parsonage there.
360 CKABBE.
In this obscure parsonage Crabbe lived for years. He had three
children born there — his two sons, George and John, and a daughter
who died in infancy. There he published, too, his poem The News-
|iaper, which also was well received ; and then he laid by his poetic
jHU'suits for two and twcnly i/ears! Nay, his son says, that after this
period of two and twenty years he published The Parish Register,
and again lay by from his thirty-first year till his fifty-second ; and
so completely did he bury himself in the obscurity of domestic and
village life, that he was gradually forgotten as a living author, and
the name of Crabbe only remembered through some passages of his
poems in the Elegant Extracts.
Of the four years spent at Stathern he used to speak as the very
happiest of his life. He had won a pleasant retreat after his despe-
rate clutch at fortune. His perseverance was rewarded by the society
of her who had been the one faithful and congenial friend of his
youth, and they could now ramble together at their ease amid the
rich woods of Belvoir, without any of the painful feelings which had
before chequered his enjoyment of the place. At home, a garden
aflbrded him healthful exercise and unfailing amusement ; and, as a
mere curate, he was freed from any disputes with the villagers
around him. Here he botanized, entomologized, and geologized to
his heart's content. At one time he was tempted to turn sportsman,
but neither his feelings nor his taste would allow him to continue
one ; and he employed his leisure hours much more to his satis-
faction in exercising his medical skill to relieve the pains of his
parishioners.
At the instance of the Duchess of Eutland, Thurlow having ex-
changed the poet's Dorsetshire livings for those of Muston, in
Leicestershire, and Allington, in Lincolnshire, but near each other,
Mr. Crabbe, in 17S9, left Stathern, and entered on his rectory at
Muston. Here his life continued much the same, but the country
around was open and uninteresting. " Here," saj'S his son, " were
no groves, nor dry green lawns, nor gravel roads, to tempt the
pedestrian in all weathers ; but still, the parsonage and its premises
formed a pretty little oasis in the clayey desert. Our front windows
looked full on the churchyard, by no means like the common for-
bidding receptacles of the dead, but truly ornamental ground ; for
some fine elms partially concealed the small beautiful church and
its spire, while the eye travelled through their stems, and rested on
the banks of a stream, and a picturesque old bridge. The garden
enclosed the other tv/o sides of the churchyard ; but the crown of
the whole was a gothic archway, cut through a thick hedge and
many boughs, for through this opening, as in the deep frame of a
picture, appeared, in the centre of the aerial canvas, the unrivalled
Belvoir."
The home picture of Crabbe at this period is given by his son
with a glow of grateful remembrance of the happiness of the time to
himself, then a child, that is beautiful. " Always visibly happy in
the happiness of others, especially of children, our father entered
into all our pleasures, and soothed and cheered us in all our httle
CRABBE. 361
griefs, with such overflowing tenderness, that it was no wonder we
almost worshipped him. My first recollection of him is of his carry
ing me up to his private room to prayers, in the summer evenings,
about sunset, and rewarding my silence and attention afterwards
with a view of the flower garden through his prism. Then I recal
the delight it was to me to be permitted to sleep with him during
a confinement of my mother's — how I longed for the morning,
because then he would be sure to tell me some fairy tale of his own
invention, all sparkling with gold and diamonds, magic fountains and
enchanted princesses. In the eye of memory I can still see him as
he was at this period of his life ; his fatherly countenance, unmixed
with any of the less loveable expressions that, in too many faces,
obscure that character — but ■pree-mmentlj fa f/iei-lyj conveying the
ideas of kindness, intellect, and purity ; his manners grave, manly,
and cheerful, in unison with his high and open forehead ; his very
attitudes, whether he sat absorbed in the arrangement of his
minerals, shells, and insects, or as he laboured in his garden until
his naturally pale complexion acquired a tinge of fresh healthy red,
or as coming lightly towards us with some unexpected present, his
smile of indescribable benevolence spoke exultation i x the foretaste
of our raptures.
'•' But I think even earlier than these are my first recollections of
my mother. I think the very earliest is of her combing my hair
one evening, by the light of the fire, which hardly broke the long
shadows of the room, and singing the plaintive air of ' Kitty Fell,'
till, though I could not be more than two or three years old, my
tears dropped profusely."
Equally charming is the writer's recollection of a journey while
a boy into Suff"olk with his father. This was to Parham, the house
of Mrs. Crabbe's uncle Tovell, with whom she had been brought up.
The picture presented of the life and establishment of a wealthy
yeoman is so vivid, that I must take leave to add it to the passage
already quoted.
" My great-uncle's establishment was that of the first-rate yeoman
of that period — the yeoman that already began to be styled by
courtesy an esquire. Mr. Tovell might possess an estate of some
eight hundred pounds per annum, a portion of which he himself
x^ultivated. Educated at a mercantile school, he often said of himself,
' Jack will never make a gentleman ; ' yet he had a native dignity of
mind and manners which might have enabled him to pass muster in
that character with any but vei'y fastidious critics. His house was
large, and the surrounding moat, the rookery, the ancient dovecote,
and the well-stored fishponds, were such as might have suited a
gentleman's seat of some consequence ; but one side of the house
immediately overlooked a farm-yard, full of all sorts of donie.stic
animals, and the scene of constant bustle and noise. On entering
the house there was nothing, at first sight, to remind one of the
farm : a spacious hall paved with black and white marble ; at one
extremity a very handsome drawing-room, and at the other a fine
old staircase of black oak, polished till it Avas as slippery as ice, and
:]62 CRABBE.
having a cliiinc clock and a barrel organ on i(,s landing-places. But
this drawing-room, a corresponding dining parlour, and a handsome
sleeping apartment upstairs, were all tabooed ground, and made use
of on great and solenni occasions only, such as rent days, and an
occtisional visit with which Mr. Tovell was honoiu'cd by a neighboiu'-
ing peer. At all other times the family and their visitors lived
entirely in the old-fashioned kitchen, along with the servants. My
great-uncle occui^ied an arm-chair, or, in attacks of gout, a couch on
one side of a large open chimney. Mrs. iovell sat at a small table,
on which, in the evening, stood one small candle, in an iron candle-
stick, plying her needle by the feeble glimmer, surrounded by her
maids, all busy at the same employment ; but in winter a noble
block of wood, sometimes the whole circumference of a pollard, threw
its comfortable warmth and cheerful blaze over the apartment.
" At a very early hour in the morning the alarum called the maids
and their mistress also ; and if the former were tardy, a louder
alarum, and more formidable, was heard chiding the delay— not that
scolding was peculiar to any occasion ; it regularly went on through
all the day, like bells on harness, inspiriting the work whether it was
done ill or well. After the important business of the dairy and a
hasty breakfast, their resi^ective employments were again resumed ;
that which the mistress took for her especial privilege being the
scrubbing the floors of the state aj^artments. A new servant,
ignorant of her presumption, was found one morning on her knees,
hard at work on the floor of one of these preserves, and was thus
a'ldressed by her mistress : — ' Yon wash such floors as these ? Give
nie the brush this instant, and troop to the scullery, and wash that,
madam ! .... As true as G — d's in heaven, here comes Lord Rochforcl
ti ) call on Mr. Tovell. Here, take my mantle,' — a blue woollen apron,
- -' and I'll go to the door.'
" If the sacred apartments had not been opened, the family dined
in this wise : the heads seated in the kitchen at an old table ; the
farm-men standing in the adjoining scullery, with the door open ;
the female servants at a side table, called a /iiowi??;-; with the principal
af the table, perchance some travelling rat-catcher, or tinker, or
fa.rrier, or an occasional gardener in his shirt-.sleeves, his face pro-
bably streaming with perspiration. My father well describes, in
The Widow's Tale, my mother's situation, when living in her younger
■.Liys at Parham : —
" But when the men beside their station took,
The maidens Avitli them, and with these llie cook ;
When one huge wooden bowl before them stood,
Filled with large balls of farinaceous food ;
With bacon, mass saline! where never lean
Beneath the brown and bristly rind was seen :
When, from a single horn, the party drew
'riieir copious draughts of heavy ale and new;
When the coarse cloth she saw with many a stain,
Soiled by rude hands who cut and came a2:ain ;
She could not breathe, l)ut with a heavy sigh,
iteined the fair neck, and shut the offended eye;
She minced the sanguine flesli in frustums fine,
And wondered much to see the crratures dine "
CRABBE. 36. J
" Oil ordinai-y days, when the kitchen diiiuer was ovei', the Hm
replenished, the kitchen sanded and lightly .swe2)t over in waves,
mistress and maids, taking off their shoes, retired to their chambers for
a nap of one hour to a minute. The dogs and cats commenced theiT
siesta by the fire. Mr. To veil dozed in his chair ; and no noise was heard,
except the melancholy and monotonous cooing of a turtle-dove, varied
with the shrill treble of a canary. After the hour had expired, the
active part of the family were on the alert ; the bottles — Mr. Tovell's
tea equipage — placed on the table ; and, as if by instinct, some old
acquaintance would glide in for the evening's carousal, and then
another and another. If four or five arrived, the punch-bowl was
taken down, and emptied and filled again. But whoever came, it was
comparatively a dull evening, unless two especial knights-companions
were of the party. One was a jolly old farmer, with much of tlie
person and humour of FalstafF, a face as rosy as brandy could make
it, and an eye teeming with subdued merriment, for he had that prime
quality of a joker, superficial gravity. The other was a relative of
the family, a wealthy yeoman, middle-aged, thin, and muscular. ITo
was a bachelor, and famed for his indiscriminate attachment to all
Avho bore the name of woman — young or aged, clean or dirty, a lady
or a gipsy, it mattered not to him ; all were equally admired. Such
was the strength of his constitution, that, though he seldom went
to bed sober, he retained a clear eye and stentorian voice to hi.^
eightieth year, and coursed when he was ninety. He sometimes
rendered the colloquies over the bowl peculiarly piquant ; and as
soon as his voice began to be elevated, one or two of the inmates —
my father and mother, for example — withdrew with Mrs. Tovell into
her own sanctum sanctorum; but I, not being supposed capable of
understanding much that might be said, was allowed to linger on
the skirts of the festive circle ; and the servants, being considered
much in the same point of view as the animals dozing on the hearth,
remained to have the full benefit of their wit, neither producing the
Blightest restraint, nor feeling it themselves."
This jolly old Mr. Tovell being carred off suddenly, Mr. Crabbe,
induced by the desire to be in his own county, and amongst his own
relatives, placed a curate at Muston, and went to reside at Parham
in Mr. Tovell's house. It was not a happy removal. It was a deser-
tion of his proper flock and duty in obedience to his own private
inclinations, and it was not blessed : his son says, that as they were
slowly quitting Muston, preceded by their furniture, a pei'son who
knew them called out in an impressive tone — " You are wrong, you
are wrong ! " The sound, Crabbe said, found an echo in his own
conscience, and rang like a supernatural voice in his ears through
the whole journey. His son believes tliat he sincerely repented of
this step. At Parham he did not find that happiness that perhaps
the dreams of his youth — for there lived Miss Elmy daring their
long attachment — had led him first to expect. Mrs. Elm}', his wife's
mother, and Miss Tovell, the sister of tlio old gentleman, were
the coheiresses of their brother, and resided with liim. 'J'he latter
seems to have been a regular old-fashioned fidget. She used to stalk
3G4 CRABBE.
about with her tall ivory-tipped walking cane, and on any the slightest
alteration made, were it but the removal of a shrub, or a picture on
the walls, would say — "It was enough to make Jacky (her late
l)rother) shake in his grave if he could see it," and would threaten to
make a cadicy to her will."
Mr. Crabbe stood it for four years — memorable instance of patience !
— and then found a residence to his heart's content. This was Great
Glemhaui hall, belonging to Mr. North, and then vacant. He took it,
and continued there live years. We may imagine these five of as
liajjpy years as most of Crabbe's hfe. The house was large and hand-
.some. It stood in a small but well-wooded park, occuiDying the
mouth of a glen ; and in this gleu lay the mansion. The hills that
were on either hand were finely hung with wood ; a brook ran at the
foot of one of these, and all round were woodlands, " and those green
dry lanes which tempt the walker in all weathers, especially in the
evenings, when in the short grass of the dry sandy banks lies, every
few yards, a glow-worm, and the nightingales are pouring forth their
melody in every direction." Just at hand was the village ; and the
church at which he preached at Sweffling was convenient. At
Parham, he was not more popular out of doors than he was in, be-
cause he was no jovial fellow like Mr. TovelL and did not like much
visiting. Here he was popular as a preacher, drew large congrega-
tions, and in Mr. Turner, his rector, had an enlightened and admiring
friend. In such a place, too, a paradise to his boys, he was as busy
in botany as ever ; wrote a treatise on the subject,., which, how-
ever, he was advised, to the public loss, not to publish, because
such books had usually been published in Latin! He therefore
burnt it, as he used to do novels, which it was his great delight
to write, and then make bonfires of; his boys carrying them out to
him by armfuls in the garden, and glorying in the blaze as he
presided over it.
He returned in 1805 to Muston, to which he was called by the
bishop. At the end of five years he had been obliged to quit his
beautiful retreat at Glemham. It was sold, the house pulled down,
and another built in its place. For the four further years that he
continued in Suffolk he lived at the village of Rendham. At Muston,
the shepherd being absent, all had gone wrong ; the warning voice
had been fulfilled. The Methodist and the Huntingtonian had, in
the absence of the pastor, set up their tabernacles, and had become
successful rivals. Crabbe was not destitute of professional feehngs
or zeal. He preached against these interlopers, and only increased
the evil. The farmers here were shy of him, for they had heard that
he was a Jacobin, of all things ! that is, he was no advocate for the
terrible war which was raging with France, and which kept up the
price of their corn. In this cold, clayey, and farming county, he con-
tinued nine years. Here he issued to the world his Parish Register,
and his Borough ; perhaps, after all, his very best work, for it is full
of such a variety of life, all drawn with the force and clearness of his
prime ; here also he published his Tales in verse ; but here, too, he
lost his wife, who had been an invalid for many years. It was there-
CRABBE. 365
fore become to him a sad place. His health and spirits failed him ;
and it was a foi-tunate circumstance that at this juncture the living
of Trowbridge was conferred on him by the Duke of Kutland. He
removed thither in June, 1814.
From long before the time of Mr. Crabbe's removal to Trowbridge,
he had been in the habit of making, during the season, occasionally
a visit to London. His fame, especially after the publication of The
Borough, was established. His power of painting human life and
character, the bold and faithful pencil with which he did this, the
true sympathies with the poor and afflicted and neglected which
animated him, were all fully perceived and acknowledged ; and he
found himself a welcome guest in the highest circles of both aris-
tocracy and literature. He who had been the humble curate at
Belvoir, subject to slights and insults from pompous domestics,
which are difficult to complain of but are deeply felt, had, long
before quitting the neighbourhood of the castle, been the honoured
guest in the midst of the proudest nobles. In London, all the lite-
rary coteries were eager to have him. Holland-house, Lansdowne-
house, the Duke of Rutland's, and other great houses, found him
a frequent guest amid lords and ladies, dukes and duchesses ; and at
Holland-house, and Mr. Rogers's, he was surrounded by all that was
at the time brilliant and famous in the political and literary world.
These visits, after the death of his wife, became annual, and the old
man wondei-fully enjoyed them. The extracts which his son has
given fi'om his journal teem with men and women of title and name.
He is dining or breakfasting with Lady Errol, Lady Holland, the
Duchess of Rutland. He meets Mr. Fox, Mr. Canning, Foscolo ;
Lords Haddington, Dundas, Strangford, &c. ; Moore, Campbell, Sir
Walter Scott, Sir James Mackintosh ; Ladies Sj^encer and Bes-
borough ; the Duke and Duchess of Cumberland ; in fact, everybody
He became much attached to the Hoares, of Hampstead, and used
to take up his quarters there, and with them make summer excur-
sions to Hastings, the Isle of Wight, and the like places. With them
he saw Miss Edgeworth, Joanna Baillie, &c. So popular was he
become, that John Murray gave him 3,000/. for his Tales of the Hall ;
and he carried the bills for that sum home in his waistcoat pocket.
His meeting with Sir Walter Scott caused him to accept a pressing
invitation from him to Scotland, whither he happened to go at the
time of George IV.'s visit to Edinburgh ; by which means, though he
saw all the gala of the time, and all Highland costumes, he missed
seeing Scott at Abbotsford. At Scott's house, in Castle-street,
occurred his adventure with the three Highland chiefs, which has
caused much merriment. He came down one moi-ning and found
these thsee portly chiefs in full Highland costume, talking at a great
rate, in a language which he did not understand ; and not thinking
of Gaelic, concluded that they were foreigners. They, on their part,
seeing an elderly gentleman, dressed in a somewhat antiquated style,
with buckles in his shoes, and perfectly clerical, imagined him some
learned Abbu, who had come on a visit to Sir Walter. The conse-
quence was, that Sir Walter, entering the breakfast-room with his
366 CRABBE.
family, stood a moment in amazement to hear them all conversing
together in execrable French ; and then burst into a hearty laugh,
saying, — " Why, you are all fools together ! This is an Englishman,
and these Highlanders, 3Ir. Crabbe, can speak as good English as you
can." The amazement it occasioned may be imagined.
Trowbridge is not the sort of place that you would imagine a poet
voluntarily choosing as a place of residence. It is a manufacturing
town of about 12,000 inhabitants, chiefly of the working class, with
a sprinkling of shopkeepers, and wealthy manufacturers. It has no
striking features, but to a person proceeding thither from London,
has a mean, huddled, and unattractive aspect. The country round
is a good dairy country, but is not by any means striking. Crabbe,
however, found there families of intelligence and great kindness.
His sons married well amongst them, and John acted as his curate ;
George, the writer of his biography, had the living, and occupied the
parsonage of Pucklechurch, only about twenty miles distant. These
were all circumstances, with a good parsonage, and a wide field of
usefulness in comforting and relieving his poor parishioners, as well
as in instructing them, which were calculated to make a man like
Crabbe happy. By all classes he soon became much beloved ; and
was, in every sense, a most excellent pastor. In his own children he
seems to have been peculiarly blest ; his two sons, clergymen, being
all that he could desire, and they and his grandchildren held him in
the warmest and most reverential affection.
One of his great haunts were the quarries near Trowbridge,
where he used to geologize assiduously ; for, after his wife's death,
he ceased to retain his taste for botany ; her youthful botanical
rambles with him no doubt now coming back too painfully upon
him.
His parsonage was a good, capacious old house, of grey stone, and
pointed gables, standing in a large garden surrounded by a high
wall. It lies almost in the heart of the town, and within a hundred
yards of the churchyard. In his time, I understand, the garden was
almost a wood of lofty trees. Many of these have since been cut
down. Still it is a pleasant and sjaacious retirement, with some fine
trees about it. The church is a very old building, and threatening
to tumble. At the time of my visit workmen were busy lowering
the tower, and the northern aisle showed no equivocal marks of
giving way. The churchyard was also luidergoing the process of
levelling ; the turf was removed, and it altogether looked dismal.
A very civil and intelligent sexton, living by the churchyard gate, in
a cottage overhung with ivy, showed me the church, and appeared
much interested in the departed pastor and poet. I ascended into
the pulpit, and imagined how often the author of The Borough had
itood there and addressed his congi-egation. There is a monument
to his memory in the chancel, by Bailj'. The old man is represented
as lying on his death-bed, by which are two celestial beings, awaiting
his departure. The likeness to Crabbe is said to be excellent.
The inscription is as follows : — " Sacred to the memory of the Rev.
George Crabbe, LL.B., who died February the third, 1832, in the
CRABBE. 367
seventy-eiglith year of his age, and the nineteenth of his ser\ ices
as rector of this parish. Born in humble hfe, he made himself
what he was. By the force of his genius he broke through the
obscurity of his birth ; yet never ceased to feel for the less fortunate.
Entering, as his works can testify, into the sorrows and privations
of the poorest of his parishioners ; and so discharging the duties
of his station, as a minister and a magistrate, as to acquire the
respect and esteem of all his neighbours. As a writer he is we..
described by a great cotemporary, as 'Nature's sternest painter, yet
her best.' "
In the north aisle is also a tablet to the memory of the wife of his
son George, who, it appears, died two years after Crabbe himself, and
in the very year, 1834, in which her husband published his excellent
and most interesting life of his father.
Trowbridge impressed me, as numbers of other places have done
where men of genius have lived, with the fleeting nature of human
connexions. Crabbe, so long associated with Trowbridge, was gone ;
his sons were gone, neither of them succeeding him in the living,
and all trace of him, except his monument, seemed already wij^ed
out from the place. Another pastor occupied his dwelling and his
pulpit, and the population seemed to bear no marks of a great poet
having bcou among them, but were rich subjects for such a pen as that
of Crabbe. The character of the place may be judged of by its head
inn. It was a fair, and I found the court-yard of this old-fashioned
inn set out with rows of benches, all filled with common people
drinking. On one side of the yard was a large room, in which the
fiddle went merrily, and a crowd of dancers hopped as merrily to it.
At a window near that room, on the same side, a woman was de-
livering out pots of ale, as fast as somebody within could supply
them, to the people in the yard. On the other side of the court lay,
however, the main part of the inn. Here a gallery ran along which
conducted to the difFei-ent bedrooms, through the open air; and from
this sundry spectators were surveying the scene below. All was
noise, loud and eager talking, and odours not the most delectable, of
beer, fish, and heaven knows what. The house was dirty, dark, and
full of the same fumes. People of all sorts were passing up and
down stairs, and in and out of the house in crowds. The travellers'
room was the only place, I was informed, where there was space
or comfort. Thither I betook myself, and while my dinner was
preparing, I heard the fine strong, clear voice of a woman in an ad-
joining room, which I instantly recognised by the style of singing to
be German. I walked into the said room to see who was the singer,
and what was her audience. She was a strong-built, healthy-looking
German girl, who was accompanying her singing on a guitar, in a
little room closely packed with the ordinary run of people. To
these she was singing some of the finest airs of Germany, with
no mean skill or voice, but in a language of which they did not
anderstand a syllable. My appearance amongst them occasioned
some temporary bustle ; but this soon passed, and they poUtelj
36S CRABBi.
oli'i'vcd mo a chair. I stayed to hear several songs, and proposed
some of the most rare and excellent that I knew, amongst them
some Austrian airs, which, in every instance, the poor girl knew
and sun"' with great effect. As I went out, two French women were
entering' with a tambourine, and I soon heard them, accompanied
by a fiddle, also performing their parts. Thus through the whole
dav the strolling musicians of the fair entered this little concert-
room of the head inn of Trowbridge, and entertained the fair-
r'oin"- bacchanals. It was a scone which Crabbe would have made
umch of.
JAMES HOGG, THE ETTRICK SHEPHERD.
Amongst the many remarkable men which the humble walks of life
in Scotland have "furnished to the list of poets, Hogg, the Ettrick
Shepherd, is one of the most extraordinary. There have been Allan
Ramsay, the barber, Burns, the ploughman, Allan Cunningham, the
stonecutter, Tannahill and Thom, the weavers. Had there been no
Burns, Hogg would have been regarded as a miracle for a rural poet ;
yet how infinite is the distance between the two ! Burns's poetry
is full of that true philosophy of life, of those noble and manly truths
which are expressions for eternity of what lives in every bosom, but
cannot form itself on every tongue.
" His lines are mottoes of tlie lieart,
His truths electrify the sage."
Such a i)oet becomes at once and for ever enshrined in the heart of
his whole country ; its oracle and its prophet. To no such rank can
James Hogg aspire. His chief characteristics are fancy, humour, a
love of the strange and wonderful, of fairies and brownies, and
country tradition, mixed up with a most amusing egotism, and an
ambition of rivalhng in their own way the greatest poets of his
time. He wrote The Queen's Wake, in imitation of Scott's metrical
romances, and bragged that ho had beaten him in his own line.
Byron, Wordsworth, Southey, Rogers, Campbell, all the great poets
of the day he imitated, and that in a wonderful manner for any man,
not simply for a poor shepherd of Ettrick. Scott had a poem on
Waterloo, Hogg had a Waterloo too, and in the same metre ; Byron
wrote Hebrew Melodies, and Hogg wrote Sacred Melodies ; and On
Carmel's Brow, The Guardian Angels, The Rose of Sharon, Jacob
and Laban, The Jewish Captive's Parting, &c., left no question as to
the direct rivalry. His third volume was one pubhshed as avowed
poems by Scott, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, and Wilsoc.
He had conceived the scheme of getting a poem from each of these
popular authors, and pubhshing them in a volume, by which to raise
money for the stocking of a farm. Byron consented, and destined
Lara for Hogg's benefit ; but Scott at once refused, not approving
870 iioao.
the plan, for which Hogg most luiceremoniously assailed him ; and
Byrou being afterwards induced not to send Lara, Hogg set about at
once, and M'rote jioenis for them and the others named, and published
them under the title of the Poetic Mirror. Of these poems, which
were clever burlesques rather than serious forgeries, 1 need not
speak ; here I wish only to point out one of the most striking
characteristics of liogg, that of imitation of style. This was also
•shown in the famous Ghaldee Manuscript, which appeared in Black-
wood's Magazine, and created so much noise. But this great versa-
tility of maimer ; this ambition of rivalling great authors in their
own peculiar fields, marked the want of a prominent caste of genius
of his own. There was an absence of individuality in him. There
was nothing, except that singular egotism and somewhat extravagant
fiincy, which could lead you on reading a poem of his to say, that is
Hogg, and can be no one else. His poems are generally extremely
diffuse ; they surprise and charm you on opening them, at the vigour,
liveliness, and strength of the style, but they are of that kind that the
farther you go the moi'e this charm wears off ; you grow weary, you
hardly know why ; you cannot help protesting to yourself that they
are very clever, nay, wonderful ; yet there wants a certain soul, a
condensation, a something to set upon them the stamp of that
genius which seizes on your love and admiration beyond question or
control. Accordingly, while you find every man and woman in
Scotland, the peasantry as much as the more cultivated classes,
having lines and verses of Burns's treasured in their memories, as
the precious wealth of the national mind, you rarely or never hear
a similar quotation from Hogg. "A clever, ranting chiel was the
shepherd," is the remark ; his countrymen read and admire, and do
justice to his genius, but with all his ambition, he never seated him-
self in their heart of hearts like Eobert Burns.
There is nothing so amusing as Hogg's autobiography. His good-
natured egotism overflows it. The capital terms on which he was
with himself made him relate flatteries and rebuffs with equtd
udicete ; and the familiarity with which he treated the greatest
names of modern literature, presenting the most grave and dignified
])ersonages as his cronies, chums, and convivial companions, is
ludicrous beyond everything. He opens his narrative in this style :
— " I like to write about myself ; in fact, there are few things which
I like better ; it is so delightful to call up old reminiscences. Often
have I been laughed at for what an Edinburgh editor styles my good-
natured egotism, which is sometimes anj-thing but that ; and I am
aware that I shall be laughed at again. But I care not ; for this
important memoir, now to be brought forward for the fourth time, at
different periods of my life, I shall narrate with the same frankness
as formerly ; and in all relating either to others or myself, sjjeak
feai'Iessly and unreservedly out. Many of those formerly mentioned
are no more ; others have been unfortunate ; but of all I shall speak
the plain truth, and nothing but the truth."
Immediately afterwards he adds — "I must apprise you, that,
whenever 1 have occasion to sjjeak o" myself and my performances,
HOGG. Ml
I find it impossible to divest myself of an inherent vanity." Of thin
no one can doubt either the truth or the candour of the confession.
He tells us that he was the second of four sons of Robert Hogg and
Margaret Laidlaw, the wife in Scotland often retaining her maiden
name. That his father was a shepherd, but, saving money, had
taken the farms of Ettrick-house and Ettrick-hall. At the latter
place Hogg was born, he says, on the 2oth of January, 1772 ; but he
assigns this date to his birth out of his desire to resemble Robert
Burns, so much as even to have been born on the same day and
month. He used to boast of this, and even of some similar occur-
:*ence, as of having been in some sort of danger at his birth through
a storm, and the necessary help for his mother being difficult to
procure in night and tempest. He has related, in his life, that he
was born on the same day of the month as Burns, but on referring
to the parish registry it did not bear him out, but showed him to
have been born on the 0th of December, 1770. He tells us that his
father was ruined, and that they were turned out of doors without
a farthing when he was six years old, but that a worthy neighbouring
farmer, Mr. Brydon of Crosslie, took compassion on them, leased the
farm of Ettrick-house, one of those Hogg's father had occujiied, and
put him as shepherd upon it. Here the embryo poet went to the
parish school just by for a few months, and then at Whitsvmtide was
sent out to service to a farmer in tlie neighbourhood, as a herd-boy.
The account that he gives of himself, as a lad of seven years old, in this
solitary employment on the hills, is curious enough. " My wages for
the half-year were a ewe lamb and a pair of new shoes. Even at
that early age my fancy seems to have been a hard neighbour for
both judgment and memory. I was wont to strip off my clothes,
and run races against time, or rather against myself ; and in the
course of these exploits, which I accomplished much to my own
admiration, I first lost my plaid, then my bonnet, then my coat, and
finally my hosen, for as for shoes, I had none."
The next winter, he tells us, he went to school again for a quarter,
got into a class who read in the Bible, and " horribly detiled several
sheets of paper with copy lines, every letter of which was nearly an
inch long." This, he says, tini.shed his education, and that he never
was another day at school. The whole of his career of schooling ha
computes at about half-a-year, but says that his old schoolmaster
even denied this, declaring that he never was at his school at all !
What a stock of education on which to set up shepherd, farmer,
and poet !
Like Lord Byron, Sir Walter Scott, and other illustrious men,
Hogg, of course, fell in love in his very childhood, and, to say truth,
his relation of this juvenile passion is as interesting as that of any
of theirs. " It will scarcely be believed that at so early an age I
Buould have been an admirer of the other sex. It is, nevertheless,
strictly true. Indeed, I have liked the women a great deal better
than the men ever .since I remember. But that summer, when only
eight years old, I was sent out to a height called Broadheads, with
lii rosy-ckeeked maiden, to herd a flock of ncw-wexnocl lambs, and I
37i2 HOGG.
Iiail my mischievous cows to herd besides. But as she had no dog,
and I had an excellent one, I was ordered to keep closs by her.
>^ever was a master's order better obeyed. Day after day I herded
tJiiie cows and lambs both, and Betty had nothing to do but to sit
and sew. Then we dined together every day, at a well near to the
Shiel-sike head, and after dinner I laid my head down on her lap,
covered her bare feet with my plaid, and pretended to fell sound
asieep. One day I heard her say to herself, ' Poor little laddie !
he's joost tired to death :' and then I wept till I was afraid she
would feel the waim tears trickling on her knee. I wished my
master, who was a handsome young man, would fall in love with
her, and marry her, wondering how he could be so blind and stupid
as not to do it. But I thought if I were he, I would know well what
to do."
By the time he was fifteen years of age, he says he had served a
dor«n masters, being only engaged for short terms and odd jobs.
Wlhen about twelve years old, such was the flourishing state of his
ciroamstances that he had two shirts, so bad that he could not wear
them, and therefore went without, by this means falling into another
difficult}', that of keeping up his trousers on his bare skin, there
being no braces in those days. Yet he had a fiddle, which cost five
shillings, with which he charmed the cow houses and stable lofts at
night, after his work was done. In his eighteenth year he entered the
service of Mr. Laidlaw, of Black-house, near St. Mary's Loch, on Yarrow.
He had been in the service of two others of the same family, probably
relatives by his mother's side, who was a Laidlaw, at Willensee, and
at Elibank, on the Tweed ; and he now continued with Mr. Laidlaw,
of Black-house, ten years, as shepherd. William Laidlaw, the son of
his master, and afterwards the bailiff of Sir Walter Scott, and also
the author of the sweet song of " Lucy's Flitting," was here his great
companion, and they read much together, and stimulated in each
other the flame of poetry. These must have been happy years for
Hogg. The year after Burns's death he first heard Tam o' Shanter
repeated, and heard of Burns, as a ploughman, who had written
beautiful songs and poems. "Every day,'' says he, "I pondered on
the genius and fate of Burns. I wept, and always thought with
myself, what is to hinder me from succeeding Burns ? I, too, was
born on the 25th of January, and I have much more time to read
and compose than any ploughman could have, and can sing more old
songs than ever ploughman could in the world. But then I wept
again, because I could not write. However, I resolved to be a poet,
and follow in the steps of Burns ! " A brave resolve, to be a poet,
in a man that could not write. Nevertheless, he composed songs,
and one of these, called M'Donald, had the luck to get sung at a great
masonic meeting at Edinburgh, and was taken up by a General
M'Donald, who fancied it was written upon him, and had it sung
every week at his mess. Hogg, now thirty-one years of age, resolved
to astonish the world with his genius, and the account of the way
he took is not a little amusing.
" lu 1801, believing that I was then beconiB a grand ^oet, I most
HOGG. 373
Bapieutly determined on publishing a pamphlet, and appealing to
the world at once. Having attended the Edinburgh market one
Monday, with a number of sheep for sale, and being unable to dis-
pose of them all, I put the remainder into a park until the market
on Wednesday. Not knowing how to pass the interim, it came into
my head that I would write a poem or two from my memory, and
get them printed. The thought had no sooner struck me than it
was put in practice ; and I was obliged to select, not the best poem^,
but those that I remembered best. I wrote several of these during
my short stay, and gave them all to a person to print at my expense •,
and having sold off my sheep on Wednesday morning, I returned to
the forest. I saw no more of my poems until I received word that
there were one thousand copies of them thrown off. I knew no more
of publishing than the man in the moon ; and the only motive that
influenced me was, the gratification of my vanity by seeing myself
in print. All of them were sad stuff, although I judged them to be
exceedingly good. Notwithstanding my pride of authorship, in a few
days I had discernment enough left to wish my publication heartily
at the devil, and I had hopes that long ago it had been consigned to
eternal oblivion, when, behold ! a London critic had, in malice of
heart, preserved a copy, and quoted liberally out of it last year, to
my intense chagrin and mortification;" ?".<?. while Hogg was, but
four years before his death, lionizing in London.
His adventures afterwards in Edinburgh, publishing his subse-
quent poems, are equally curious. How he published by subscrip-
tion, and one-third of his subscribers took his books but never paid
for them. How he set up a weekly literary paper, "The Spy,"
which he continued a year. How he became a great spouter at a
debating club called " The Forum." How he wrote a musical farce,
and a musical drama ; all ending in ruin and insolvency, till he
brought out the Queen's Wake, and won a good reputation. H-^re
he with great simplicity tells us, that Mr. Jeffrey never noticed the
poem till it had got into a third edition, and having given offence i\>
Mr. Anster by comparing the two poets, he never afterwards t<S".[\
any notice of any of his writings. Whereupon, Hogg says, proudly,
he thinks that conduct can do him no honour m the long run ; and
that he would match the worst poem he ever published with some
that Mr. Jeffrey has strained himself to bring forward. _ But Hogg
was now a popular man. His Queen's Wake went on into edition
after edition. He was introduced to Blackwood, who became his
publisher ; and Hogg looked upon himself as on a par in fame with
the first men of his time. The familiar style in which he relates his
first acquaintance with Professor Wilson will excite a smile.
" On the appearance of Mr. Wilson's Isle of Palms, I was so greatly
taken with many of his fanciful and visionary scenes, descriptive of
bliss and woe, that it had a tendency to divest me occasionally of all
worldly feelings. I reviewed this poem, as well as many others, in
a Scottish review then going in Edinjjurgh, and was exceedingly
anxious to meet with the author ; but this I tried in vain for the
Bpace of six months. All J could learn of him was, that he Avas
374 HOGG.
;i luau from the mountaius of Wales, or the west of England, with
hairs like eagles' feathers, and nails like birds' claws, a red beard,
and an uncommon degree of wildness in his looks. Wilson was then
utterly unknown in Edinburgh, except slightly to Mr. Walter Scott,
who never introduces any one person to another, nor judges it of any
avail. However, having no other shift left, I sat down and wrote
him a note, telling him that I wished much to see him, and if he
wanted to see me, he might come and dine with me at my lodgings
in the road of Gabriel, at four. He accepted the invitation, and
dined with Grieve and me ; and I found him so much a man ac-
cording to my own heart, that for many years we were seldom
twenty-four hours asunder when in town. I afterwards went and
visited him, staying with him a month at his seat in Westmoreland,
where we had some curious doings among the gentlemen and poets
of the lakes."
According to Hogg, he had the honour of being the projector* and
conimencer of no less a periodical than Blackwood's Magazine — •
whether this was true or not, certain it is that he became and con-
tinued for many years one of its chief contributors, and figured
most conspicuously in those admirable papers, the Noctes Ambro-
siana;. In these, language the most beautiful and poetical was often
put into the Shepherd's mouth ; but, it must also be confessed, much
ofteuer language of a very different kind. He was made to figure as
a coarse toper and buffoon. That he was at once proud of figuring
so largely in the Noctes, and yet felt acutely the degrading character
fixed on him there, is evident from his own statement in his auto-
biography. In speaking of Professor Wilson, to whom he deservedly
awards a noble nature, he says : " j\ly friends in general have been of
opinion that he has amused himself and the pubhc too often at my
expense : but, exce^st in one instance, which terminated very ill for
me, and in which I had no more concern than the man in the moon,
I never discerned any evil design on his part, and thought it ail
excellent sport. At the same time, I must acknowledge that it was
using too much freedom with any author, to print his name in full
to poems, letters, and essays, which he himself never saw. I do not
say that he has done this ; but either he or some one else has done
it many a time." — Memoir, p. 87.
But speaking of Blackwood, the publisher, he assumes a different
tone. " For my j^art, after twenty years of feelings hardly suj:)-
]jressed, he has driven me beyond the bounds of human patience.
That magazine of his, which owes its rise principally to myself, has
often put words and sentiments into my mouth of which I have
been greatly ashamed, and which have given much pain to my
family and relations ; and many of these, after a solemn written
promise that such freedoms should never be repeated. I have been
often urged to restrain and humble him by legal measures, as an
incorrigible offender deserves. I know I have it in my power, and
if he dares me to the task, I want but a hair to make a tether of." —
Memoir, p. 107.
It must be confessed that no justification can be offered for sucji
HOGO. 375
tteatmeiit. Such was my owu opinion of Hogg, derived from this
source, and from prints of him, with wide open mouth, and huge
stragghng teeth, in fuU roars of drunken laughter, tliat, on meeting
him in London, I was quite amazed to find him so smooth, weU-
looking, and gentlemanly a person.
Of his cotemporary authors Hogg speaks in his life with the
highest honour. He confesses that he used naost unmeasured lan-
guage towards both Sir Walter Scott and John Wilson, when they
offended him, but records their refusal to be offended with him, and
their cordial kindness. Of Southey, Lockhart, Sym, the Timothy
Tickler of Blackwood, Gait, &c. his reminiscences are full of life and
interest. Of Wordsworth's poetry he entertained the high notion
that a true poet must do ; but there occurred a scene at Rydal
which James gives iu explanation of his caricaturing Wordsworth,
which, as it is his own account, is worth transcribing.
" I dined with Wordsworth, and called on himself several times
afterwards, and certainly never met with anything Init the most
genuine kindness ; therefore people have wondered why I should
have indulged in caricaturing his style in the Poetic Mirror. I have
often regretted that myself ; but it was merely a piece of ill nature
at an affront which I conceived had been put upon me. It was the
triumphal arch scene. This anecdote has been told and told again,
but never truly ; and was likewise brouglit forward in the Noctes
Ambrosianse, as a joke ; but it was no joke ; and the plain, simple
truth of the matter was this : —
" It chanced one night, when I was there, that there was a re-
splendent arch across the zenith, from the one horizon to the other,
of something like the Aurora Borealis, but much lighter. It was
a scene that is well remembered, for it struck the country with
admiration, as such a phenomenon had never before been witnessed
in such perfection ; and, as far as I can learn, it had been more
brilliant over the mountains and pure waters of Westmoreland than
anywhere else. Well, when word came into the room of the splenditl
meteor, we all went out to view it ; and on the beautiful platform
at Mount Eydal, we were walking in twos and threes, arm-in-arm,
talking of the phenomenon, and admiring it. Now, be it remembered,
that there were present, Wordsworth, Professor Wilson, Lloyd, De
Quincy, and myself, besides several other literary gentlemen, whose
names I am not certain that I remember aright. Miss Wordsworth's
arm was in mine, and she was expressing some fears that the splendid
stranger might prove ominous, when I by ill luck blundered out the
following remark, thinking that I was saying a good thing: — 'Hout,
me'em ! it is neither mair nor less than j cost a triumphal airch, ,
raised in honour of the meeting of the poets.'
" ' That's not amiss. Eh 1 eh ? — that's very good,' said the Pro-
fessor, laugliing. But Wordsworth, who had De Quincy 's arm, gave
a grunt, and turned on his heel, and leading the little opium-chewer
aside, he addressed him in these disdainful and venomous words : —
'Poets ? Poets ? Wliat does the fellow mean ?— Wlieru are they 1 '
" \\\\n could forgive this ? For n)y [lart, I nuver can, ami never
37G HOGG.
will ! I aJniirc Wovtlsworth, as who does not, whatever they may
pretend ? Eut for that short sentence I have a lingering ill will at
liim which I cannot get rid of. It is surely presumption in any man
to circumscribe all human excellence within the narrow sphere of
his own capacity. The ' IFhere are tlieyf was too bad. I have always
some hopes that De Quincy was Iceing, for I did not myself hear
Wordsworth utter the words."
Whether Wordsworth did utter these words, or De Quincy only
quizzed Hogg with them, it is a great pity that poor Hogg's mind
was suffered to the last to retain the rankling supposition of it. The
anecdote appeared in the Noctes ; it was made the subject of much
joke and remark, and must have reached Wordsworth's ears. What
a thousand pities then, that, by a single line to Hogg, or in public,
he did not take the sting out of it! Nobody was so soon projiitiated
as Hogg. To have been acknowledged as a brother-poet by Words-
worth would have filled his heart with much happiness. Imme-
diately after his death, Wordsworth hastened to make such a
recognition ; but of how little value is posthumous praise ! Hogg
died on the 21st of November, and on the 30th AVordsworth sent the
following lines to the Athenseum, which I quote entire, because they
commemorate other departed lights of the age.
THE ETTRICK SHEPHERD.
Extempore Eflfusion, upon reading, in the Newcastle Journal, the notice of the deatli of
the poet, James Hogg
" When first descending from the moorland,
I saw the stream of Yarrow glide
Along a fair and open valley,
The Ettrick Shepherd was my guide.
" When last along its banks I wandered,
Through groves that had began to shed
Their golden leaves upon the pathways,
My steps the Border Minstrel led,
" The mighty minstrel breathes no longer,
'Mid mouldering ruins low he lies :
And deatli upon the braes of Yarrow
Has closed tlie shepherd-poet's eyes.
" Nor has the rolling year twice measured
From sign to sign his steadfast course.
Since every mortal power of Coleridge
Was frozen at its marvellous source.
" The rapt one of the god-like forehead.
The beaven-eyed creature sleeps in death ;
And Lamb, the frolic and the gentle.
Has vanished from his lonely hearth.
" Like clouds that rake the mountain summits,
Or waves that own no curbing hand,
How fast has Brother followed Brother,
From sunshine to the sunless land !
" Yet I, whose lids from infant slumbers
Were earlier raised, remam to hear
A timid voice that asks in whispers,
• Who nc.\t will drop and disappear 1 '
" Our haughty life is crowned with darkness.
Like London with its own black wreat>>,
On which with thee, O Crabbe, forth looking,
1 gszed from Hampstead's breezy heath.
HOGG. 377
■■' As if but j'esterday departed,
Tliou, too, art gone before; yet why
For ripe fruit, seasonably gatliered,
Should frail survivors heave a sigh f
" No more of old romantic sorrows.
The slaughtered youth and love-lorn maid ;
With sharper grief is Yarrow smitten,
And Ettrick mourns with her their Shepherd dead."
These extracts throw much light on the pecuHar character of
Hogg's mind. Simple, candid to an astonishment, vain without an
attempt to conceal it, sensitive to an extreme, with such a develop-
ment of self-esteem, that no rebuffs or ridicule could daunt him,
and full of talent and fancy. But to estimate the extent of all these
qualities, you must read his j^rose as well as his poetry ; and these,
considering how late he began to write, and that he did not die very
old, are pretty voluminous. During the greater part of his literary
life, he was a very popular contributor to various magazines. Of his
collected works he gives us this list.
VOL. VOt.
The Queen's Wake 1 The Spy 1
Pilgrims of the Sun 1 Queen Hynde 1
The Hunting of Badlewe ... 1 The Three Perils of Man . . . :!
Mador of the Moor 1 The Three Perils of Wonir.n . . ■>
Poetic Mirror 1 Confessions of a Sinner .... J
Dramatic Tales 2 The Shepherd's Calendar .... 2
Brownie of Bodsbeck 2 A Selection of Songs I
Winter Evening Tales 2 The Queer Book H
Sacred Melodies 1 The Royal Jubilee 1
Border Garland 1 The Mountain Bard 1
Jacobite lielics of Scotland ... 2 The Forest Minstrel 1
Total 31.
It may be imagined that while the produce of his literary pen was
so abundant, that of his sheep-pen would hardly bear comparison
with it. That was the case. Hogg continually broke down as a
shepherd and a farmer. He
" Tended his flocks upon Parnassus hill ; "
his imagination was in Fairyland, his heart was in Edinburgh, and
his affairs always went wrong. To afford him a certain chance of
support, the Duke of Buccleuch gave him, rent free for life, a little
farm at Altrive in Yarrow, and then Hogg took a much larger farm
on the opposite side of the river, which he called Mount Benger.
From this, it will be recollected that he often dated his literary
articles. The farm was beyond his capital, and far beyond his care.
It brought him into embarrassments. To the last, however, he had
Altrive Lake to retreat to ; and here he lived, and wrote, and fished,
and shot grouse on the moors. Let us, before visiting his haunts,
take a specimen or two of his poetry, that we may have a clear idea
of the man we have in view.
In all Hogg's poetry there is none which has been more pojiular
than the Legend of Kilmeny in the Queen's Wake. It is the tra-
dition of a beautiful cottage maiden, who disappears for a time, and
returns again home, but, as it were, glorified and not of the earth.
She has, for her purity, been transported to the land of spirits, and
bathed in the river of immortal life.
378 HOQC.
" They lifted Kilmciiv, tliey led licr away,
And she walked in the li^ht of a sunless day ;
The sky was a dome of cvystal hright,
The fountain of vision and fountain of lisht :
The emerald lields were of dazzling glow,
And the (lowers of everlasting blow.
Then deep in the stream her hody they laid.
That her youth and beauty never might fade ;
And they smiled on heaven when they saw her lie
In the stream of life that wandered by..
And she lieard a song, she heard it sung.
She kenned not where, but sae sweetly it rung,
It fell on her ear like a dream of the morn ;
() ! blest be the day Kilmeny was born.
Now shall the land of the spirits see,
Now shall it ken what a woman may be !
The sun that shines on the world sae bright,
A borrowed gleid frac the fountain of light-;
And the moon that sleeks the sky sae dun,
Like a gowden bow, or a beamless sun,
Shall wear away, and be seen nae mair.
And the angels shall miss them travelling the air.
But lang, Inng after baith night and day,
AVhen the sun and the world have elyed away;
■\Vlien the sinner has gaed to his waesome doom,
Kilmeny shall smile in eternal bloom ! "
r.iit Kilmeny longs once more to revisit the earth and her kindred
at home, and —
" Late, late in a gloaming, when all was still.
AVlien the fringe was red on the westlin hill.
The wood was sere, the moon i' the wane,
The reek o' the cot hung over the plain.
Like a little wee cloud in the world its lane ;
When the ingle glowed with an eiry leme.
Late, late in the gloaming Kilmeny came hame !
' Kilmeny, Kilmeny, where have you been '!
T/ang hae we sought baith holt and den ;
IJy linn, by ford, and greenwood tree,
Yet you are hailsome and fair to see.
AVliere gat you that joup o' the lily scheen ?
That boimy snood o' the birk sae green ?
And these roses, the fairest that ever were seen ? —
Kilmeny, Kilmeny, where have you been} '
Kilmeny looked up with a lovely grace.
But nae smile was seen on Kilmeny's face:
As still was her look, and as still was her ee,
As the stillness that lay on the emerant lea.
As the mist that sleeps on a waveless sea.
For Kilmeny had been she knew not where.
And Kilmeny had seen what she could not declare ;
Kilmeny liad been where the cock never crew,
Where the rain never fell, and the wind never blew : "
But on earth the spell of heaven was npon her. All loved, both
man and beast, the pure and spiritual Kilmeny ; but earth could not
detain hor.
" When a month and a day had come and gane,
Kilmeny sought the greenwood wene;
There laid her down on the leaves so green,
s And Kilmeny on earth was never mair seen.
But O the words that fell from her mouth
Were words of wonder, and words of truth I
But all the land were in fear and dread.
For they kenned na whether she was living or dead.
It wasna her hanie, and she couldna remain ;
.She left this world of sorrow and pain.
And returned to the land of thought again."
Hoao. 370
Tlio Legend of Kilmeny is as beautiful as anythiug iu that depart-
ment of poetry. It contains a fine moral ; that purity of heart makes
an earthly creature a welcome denizen of heaven ; and the tone and
imagery are all fraught with a tenderness and grace that are as
unearthly as the subject of the legend.
There is a short poem introduced into the Brownie of Bodsbeck,
which is worthy of the noblest bard that ever wrote.
DWELLER IS HEAVEN.
" Dweller in heaven high, Ruler below !
Fain would I know thee, yet tremble to know!
How can a mortal deem, how it may be,
That being can ne'er be but present with thee ?
Is it true that thou sawest me ere I saw the morn ?
Is it true that thou knewest me before I was born ?
That nature must live in the light of thine eye ?
This knowledge for me is too great and too high !
" That, fly I to noonday or fly I to night.
To shroud me in darkness, or hatlie me in light,
The light and the darkness to thee are the same.
And still in thy presence of wonder I am !
Should I with the dove to the desert repair.
Or dwell with the eagle in cleugh of the air:
In the desert afar — on the mountain's wild brink —
From the eye of Omnipotence still must I shrink !
" Or mount I, on wings of the morning, away,
To caves of the ocean, unseen by the day.
And hide in the uttermost parts of tlie sea,
Even there to be living and moving in tlice !
Nay, scale I the clouds, in the heaven to dwell.
Or make I my bed in tlie shadows of hell,
Can science expound, or humanity frame.
That still thou art present, and all are tlie same ?
" Yes, present for ever ! Almighty! Alone!
fireat Spirit of Nature ! unbounded ! unknown !
What mind can embody thy presence divine :
I know not my own being, liow can I thine ?
Then humbly and low in the dust let me bend.
And adore what on earth I can ne'er comprehend :
The mountains may melt, and the elements flee,
Yet an universe still be rejoicing in thee ! "
The last poem that we will select is one which was written for an
anniversary celebration of our great dramatist ; yet is distinguished
by a felicity of thought and imagery that seem to have sjirung spon-
taneously in the soul of the shepherd-poet, as he mused on the airy
brow of some Ettrick mountain,
TO THE GENIUS OF SUAK8PEAHE.
" Spirit all limitless,
Wliere is thy dwelling-place f
Spirit of him wliose high name we revere I
Come on thy seraph wings.
Come from thy wanderings.
And smile on thy votaries who sigh for thee here !
" Come, O thou spark divine !
Hise from thy hallowed shrine!
Here in the windings of Forth thou shalt see
Hearts true to nature's call,
Spirit* congenial,
Froud of their country, yet bowing to thee
380 HOGG.
Ilei-c with rapt lic.irt and tongue,
AVliiU- our fond minds were younp,
Oft iliy bold nuinbi-rs \vc poured in our mUl^ i
Now in o>ir liall for aye
This sliall be lioliday,
Bard of all nature ! to honour tliy birth.
" Whether tliou tremblest o'er
Green grave of Elsinore,
Stayest o'er the hill of Dunsinnau to hover,
"Bosworth, or Shrewsbury,
Egypt, or Philippi ;
Come from thy roamings the universe over.
" AVhether thou journeyest far.
On by the morning star,
Dream'st on the sliadowy brows of the moon,
Or lingerest in Fairyland,
'Mid lovely elves to stand,
Singing thy carols unearthly and boon :
' Here thou art called upon.
Come thou to Caledon !
Come to the land of the ardent and free !
The land of the lone recess.
Mountain and wilderness,
Tliis is the land, thou wild meteor, for thct 1
'• O never, since time had birth,
Rose from the pregnant earth
Gems such as late have in Scotia sprung ;
Gems that in future day^
When ages pass away.
Like thee shall be honoured, like thee shall be sung !
" Then here, by the sounding sea.
Forest, and greenwood tree.
Here to solicit thee, cease shall we never
Yes, thou effulgence bright.
Here must thy flame relight,
Or vanish from nature for ever and ever ! "
Such strains as these serve to remind us that we go to visit tne
native scenes of no common man. To reach Ettrick, I took the mail
from Dumfries to Moffat, where I breakfasted, after a fresh ride
through the woods of Annandale. With my knapsack on my back,
I then ascended the vale of Moffat. It was a fine morning, and the
green pastoral hills rising around, the white flocks scattered over
them, the waters glittering along the valley, and women spreading
out their linen to dry on the meadow grass, made the walk as fresh
as the morning itself. I passed through a long wood, which stretched
along the sunny side of the steep valley. The waters ran sounding
on deep below ; the sun filled all the sloping wood with his yellow
light. There was a wonderful resemblance to the mountain wood-
lands of Germany. I felt as though I was once more in a Swabiaa
or an Austrian forest. There was no wall or hedge by the way, — all
was open. The wild ra.spbei'ry stood in abundance, and the wild
strawberries as abundantly clothed the ground under the hazel
bushes. I came to a cottage and inquired, — it was Craigiehurn IFood,
— where Burns met " The lassie m' the lintwhite locks."
But the pleasure of the walk ceased with the sixth milestone.
Here it was necessary to quit Moffat and cross over into Ettrick
dale. And here the huge hills of Bodsbeck, more villanous than
the Brownie in his mo,st vindictive mood, interposed. I turned of?
HOGG. 381
the good road which would have led me to the Grcy-Mare's-Tail,
to the inn of lunerleithing (St. Eonan's well), and St. Mary's lake
on Yarrow, and at Capel-gill forsook Moflat water and comfort at
once.
And here, by-the-bye, as all the places in these dales are called
gills and hopes and cleugha, as Capel-gill, Capel-hoj^e, Gamel-cleugh,
&c., I may as well exjjlain that a hope is a sort of slight ravine aloft
on the hill-side, generally descending it pretty perpendicularly ; a
cleugh, a more deep and considerable one ; and a gill, one down
which a torrent pours, continuing longer after rains than in the
others. At least, this was the definition given me, though the dif-
ferent terms are not, it seems, always very palpably discriminative.
Turning off at Capel-gill, I crossed the foot-bridge at the farm of
Bodsbeck, where the Brownie used to haunt, and began to ascend
the hill, assuredly in no favour with the Brownie. These hills are
long ranges, enclosing deep valleys between them ; and there are but
few entrances into the dales, except by crossing the backs of these
great ridges. I found the ascent of the Bodsbeck excessively steej),
rugged, boggy, stony, and wet, and fir higher than I had anticipated.
A more fatiguing mountain ascent I never made. I was quite ex-
hausted, and lay down two or three times, resolving to have a good
long rest and sleep on the gi'ass, with my knapsack for a pillow ; but
the Brownie came in the shape of rain, and woke me up again.
I suppose I was two hours in getting to the summit ; and then I did
lie down, and .slept for a quarter of an hour, but the Brownie was at
me again with a bluster of wind and rain, and awoke me.
Preparing to set forward, what was my astonishment to see a cart
and horse coming over the mountain with a load of people ! It was
a farmer with his wife and child, and they were about to descend
the rugged, rock}', boggy, steep hill-side, with scarcely a track !
They descended from the cart ; the man led the horse, the woman
walked behind, carrying the child, and they went bumping and
banging over the projecting crag.s, as if the cart was made of some
uusmashable timber, the horse a Pegasus, and the people without
necks to break. 'Tis to be hoped that they reached the bottom
somehow.
I had supposed by my map that from Moffat to Ettrick kirk would
be about six miles. Imagine, then, my consternation at the tidings
these adventurous people gave me — that I had still eight miles
to go ! that, instead of six, it was sixteen from Mofi'at to Ettrick
kirk ! There was a new road made all down this side of the moun-
tain ; very fair to look at in the distance, but infamous for foot
travellers, being all loose, .sharp cubes of new-broken whinstone.
My feet were actually strained with coming up the mountain, and
were now so knocked to pieces and blistered in going down it, that
I suppose I crawled on at about two miles an hour. In fact, I was
seven hours and a half between Mofiat and Ettrick kirk on foot.
Down, down, down I went for eight weary miles, one long descent,
with nothing on either hand but those monotonous green mountains
which extend all over the south of Scotland. Soft they can look a3
382 HOGG.
tlie very hills of heaven under the evening light, with their white
flocks dotting them all over, and the shepherds shouting, and their
dogs barking from afar. And dark, beautifully dark they can look
beneath the shadow of the storm, or the thunder-cloud. Wild^
drearily wild, they can look when the winds come sweeping and roar-
ing hke some broken-loose ocean, fierce and strong as ocean waters,
and with this mighty volume fill the scowling valleys and rush,
without the obstacle of house or tree, over the smooth round
heights ; and men at ease, especially if in want of a stroU, and in
good company, may, and no doubt do, find them Aery attractive.
But t-o me they were an endless green monotony of swelling heaps ;
and Ettrick dale, with its stream growing continually larger in its
bottom, an endless vale of bare greenness, with but here and there
a solitary white house, and a cluster of fir-trees, with scarcely a cul-
tured fiel'J, even of oats or ix)tatoes, for eight miles. It was one
eternal sheep-walk, and for me eight miles too much of it. Yet the
truth is, that everj' one of these hills, and ^'ery portion of this vale,
and every house with its hope, or its cleugh, or its plantation, and
every part of the river where the torrent has boiled and raged for a
thousand years, till it has worn the iron-like whinstone into the
most hideous channels and fantastic shapes, has its history and its
tradition. There is Phaup, and Upper Phaup, and Gamelshope, and
Ettrick-house, and all have their interest ; but to me they were
then only white houses with black plantations, many of them on
the other side of the water, without bridge, or any visible means of
access ; and with huge flocks of sheep collected and collecting in
their yards and pens, with the most amazing and melancholy
clamour. It was the time when they prepare for the great lamb
fairs, and were separating those they meant to sell ; and here was
one loud lamentation all through these hills. It is amazing what
a sentiment of attaxiiment and distress can exist in mutton !
But no sentimental piece of mutton was ever more in distress
than I was. I was quite famished and knocked up ; and when at
length I saw the few grey houses at Ettrick kirk, I actually gave a
shout of exultation. I shouted, however, before I was out of the
wood ; for Ettrick kirk W3.3 not, as I had fancied, a kirk Ettiick —
tliat is, a village — it was Ettrick kirk, and nothing more. I knew
that Hogg was born and buried here, and that here I must stop ;
but unluckily I saw no village, no stopping place. To my left hand
stood the kirk, a little elevated on the side of the valley, and what
was clearly the rnanse near it, in a garden. A little farther on was
a farm-house, and then a cottage or two, and that was alL I saw a
large, queer sign over a door, and flattered myself that that at least
must be a public-house; but a gipsy with his stockings oft' in a little
stream tickling trout, while his basket and his set of tea-trays stood
on the roa'l, soon told me my fortune. " Is -that an inn 1 " " No,
h'ir, the inn is three milcfs further down !"
Three miles further down ! It was enough to have finished all
Job's miseries ! " Whiit I is it not a public-house even 1" " No, it
is a f^ihop."
noocr. 3S3
And a shop it was : and wlien I hoped at least to find a shop that
Bold breatl, it turned out to be a tailor's shop '.
Just as I vras driven to despair, I fancied that the next building
looked like a school ; in I went, and a school it was. I had hopes
of a Scotch schoolmaster. He is generally a scholar and a gentleman.
The master was just hearing his last class of bovs : I advanced to
him, and told him that I must take the hberty to rest, for that I
w;vs outi-ageously tired, and hungry, and was told that it was three
miles to the next inn. He said it was true, but that it was not three
hundred yards to his house, and he would have much pleasure in my
accompanying him to tea. Never, of aU the invitations to tea which
I have received in the course of this tea-drinking life, did I receive
so welcome a one as that I I flung off my knapsack, laid up my
legs quite at my ease on a bench, and heard out the class with great
satisfaction. Anon, the tux?hins were dismissed, and ilr. Tait, the
master, a tall and somewhat thin young man, with a very intelligent
and thoughtful face, declared himself ready to accompany me. I
told him I wanteil to visit the birth-place and gi-ave of Hogg, and
presented my card. '"Hal'' exclaimed he, on reading the name,
" why, we are not strangers, I find — we are old friends, A hearty
welcome. Mr. Howitt, to Ettrick ! " Mr. Tait was an old friend of
Hogg's, too — the very man of all othei-s that I should have sought
out for my purpose. We were soon at a very handsome new cottage,
with a capital ganlen, the upper end full of flowers, and the lower
of most flourishing kitchen-garden produce. Tired as I was, I could
not avoid staying to admire this garden, which was the masters
c>wn work ; and was then introduced to his mother and sister. The
old lady was in a consternation that, by one of those accidents that
sometimes in moimtaiuous districts afllict a whole country, the
baker had uj>set his cart, broken his leg, and by his absence deprived
all the vales fivm Moflat to the very top of Ettrick, namely, Upper
Phaup, of wheaten breatL It wi^s a cii-cumstance that did not m
the least trouble me, except on account of the lady's housewifery
anxiety. An old friend of mine Siiid that he never knew the want
of bread but once in his life, and then he made a goo<;l shift with
pie-crust, and I made an actual feast on barley cake and tea.
The schoolniiister and I were now soon abroad, and on our way up
the valley to Hogg's birthplace. Ettrick-house, whei"e Hogg saw
the light, according to the people, though accorvling to his toml>stone
it was Ettrick-hall, on the opposite side of the valley, is now a new-
built faiTU-house, standing within a square embankment, which is
well grown with a row of fine trees. This marks the site of an old
house, and no doubt was the site of Ettrick old house. But the
house in which Hogg was born, or, if not born, wnere ho lived as a
child, was only a sort of hind's house, belonging to the old house.
That, too, is now pulled clean down. Hogg, during his lifetime,
never liked to hear its demolition proposed. Hero he had lived as
u child, and here he live<l when grown up, and rented the farm,
before going to Alt rive. He used always to inquire of people fn,>m
Ettrick, if the house realiv were vet destroved. I believe it stood
384 HOGG.
till after his death, but h now quite gone. Tlie bricklayers ? There
is no such thing here ; all is built of the iron-like, hard whinstone
of the hills ; — the builders, then, with a sentiment which does
honour to them, were reluctant to pull down the birth-place and
home of the shepherd-poet ; and, when obliged to do so, to mark
and commemorate the exact spot, when they built the wall along
the front of the ground by the highway, built a large blue
sort of stone upright in it. The stone is very conspicuous, by
its singular hue and position, and on it they have inscribed the
l)oet's mitials, J. II. Ettrick-hall, as already said, lying on the oppo-
site side of the valley, was in Hogg's father's hands. Afterwards,
in ]\Ir. Brydon's, of Crosslee, with whom Hogg was shepherd. This
IMr. Brydon, who, Hogg says, was the best friend their family had in
the world, died worth 15,000/. ; and, indeed, these sheep-farmers
generally do well. There was a Mr. Grieve here, who used to
live up the valley, at a house where I saw a vast flock of sheep
collected, who was also a most excellent friend of Hogg's. Hogg
had lived as a herd-boj^ at most of the houses in this valley, and
from that association he laid the scene of most of his poems and
tales here,
Hogg's birthplace and his grave arc but a few hundred yards
asunder. The kirkyard of Ettrick is old, but the kirk is recent ;
1824 is inscribed over the door. Like most of the country clnirches
of Scotland, it is a plain fabric, plainly fitted up with seats, and
a plain pulpit. Such a thing as "a kist full o' wliistles" the Scotch
cannot endure. It is a curious fact, that neither in Scotland nor
Ireland do you find those richly-finished old parish churches that are
so common in England. This is significant of the ancient state of
these countries. Catholic though they all were, neither Scotland
nor Ireland could at any age pretend to anything like the wealth of
England. Hence, in those countries, the fine abbeys and cathedrals
are rare, the parish churches are very plain ; whilst in England,
spite of all the ravages of puritanism, the country abounds with the
noblest si^ecimens of cathedral and conventual architecture, and tho
very parish churches, in obscure villages, are often perfect gems of
architecture and carving, even of the old Saxon period.
Ettrick kirk lifts its head in this quiet vale with a friendly air. It
is built of the native adamantine rock, the whinstone ; has a square
battlemented tower; and, what looks singular, has, instead of Gothic
ones, square doorways, and very tall square sash windows. Hogg's
grave lies in the middle of the kirkyard. At its head stands a rather
handsome headstone, with a harp sculptured on a bordejr at the Ujy,
and this inscription beneath it : — " James Hogg, the Ettrick Shep-
herd, who was born at Ettrick Hall, 1770, and died at Altrive Lake,
the 21st day of November, 1835."
After a wide space left for other inscriptions, as of the widow and
children, this is added : " This stone is erected, as a tribute of aft'ec-
tion, by his widow, Margaret Hogg."
As Hogg used to boast that he was born on the same day as Burns,
and as this assertion was negatived by the parish register, we cannot
HOGG. 3ti0
but admire the thoughtful dehcacj' which induced the -widow to
omit the day of his birth altogether, though carefully inserting the
day of his death.
On the right hand of the poet's headstone stands another, erected
by the Shepherd himself, as follows: "Here lieth William Laidlaw,
the far-famed "Will o' Phaup, who, for feats of frolic, agility, and
strength, had no equal in that day. He was born at Ettrick, a.d.
1691, and died in the eighty-fourth year of his age. Also Margaret,
his eldest daughter, spouse to Eobert Hogg, and mother of the
Ettrick Shepherd, born at Over Phaup in 1730, and died in the
eighty-third year of her age. Also Robert Hogg, her husband, late
tenant of Ettrick Hall, born at Bowhill in 1729, and died in the
ninety-third year of his age."
There are several curious particulars connected with these stones.
Those which I have pointed out— Hogg's birthday being omitted ;
Ettrick-hall being given as his birthplace, yet the people asserting
it to be Ettrick-house ; and the much shorter life of the poet than
those of his jDarents and ancestors. His father died at the age of
ninety-three, his mother at eighty-three, his grandfather at eighty-
four; he died at sixty-three. The poet had lived faster than his
kindred. What he lost in duration of life he had more than made
up in intensity. They held the quiet tenor of their way in their
native vale ; he had spi'ead his life over the whole space occupied by
the English language, and over generations to come. In his own
pleasures, which were of a far higher character than theirs, he had
made thousands and tens of thousands partakers. Many of Hogg's
family and friends were not pleased at the memorial he thus gives
to Will o' Phaup ; but it is very characteristic of the Shepherd, who
gloried as much himself in the sports, feats, and exploits of the
Borders, as in poetry.
Hogg, in his younger years, displayed much agility and strength
in the border games, and in his matured yeai's was often one of
the umpires at them. In Lockhart's Life of Scott are related two
especial occasions in which James Hogg figui'ed in such games. One
was of a famous foot-ball match played on the classic mead of Car-
terhaugh, between the men of Selkirk and of Yarrow, when the
Duke of Buccleuch, and numbers of other nobles and gentlemen, as
well as ladies of rank, were present. When the different parties
came to the ground with pipes playing, the Duke of Buccleuch raised
his ancient banner, called the banner of Bellenden, which being
given by Lady Ann Scott to young Walter Scott, he rode round the
held displaying it ; and then Sir Walter led on the men of Selkirk,
and the Earl of Home, with James Hogg as his aide-de-camp, led on
the men of Yarrow. The other occasion was at the annual festival
of St. Ronan's Well, when James Hogg used to preside as captain of
the band of border bowmen, in Lincoln green, with broad blue bon-
nets ; and when, already verging on threescore, he used often to join
at the exploits of racing, wrestling, or hammer-throwing, and would
carry off the prizes, to universal astonishment ; afterwards presiding,
too, at the banquet in the evening with great cclat, supported by
' HOGG.
Sir "Walter Scott, Professor Wilson, Captain Adam Fergusson, and
Peter llobcrtson. _ .
Another curious thing is, that he states himself in his Life to be
one of four sons, and, on the headstone, that his father and three sons
lie there. Now he himself was living, of course, when he set up the
stone, and his brother William still survives. There could then be
but two, if he were one oifour.
Hogg died at Altrive, but was buried here, as being his native
parish ; and, indeed, I question whether there be a nearer place
where he could be buried, though Altrive is six miles off, and over
the hills from one valley to another. His funeral must have been a
itriking thing in this solitary region — striking, not from the sensa-
tion it created, or the attendance of distinguished men, but from the
absence of all this. The shepherd-poet went to his grave with little
pomp or ceremony. Of all the great and the celebrated with whom
he had associated in life, not an individual had troubled himself to
go thus far to witness his obsequies, except that true-hearted man,
Professor Wilson. An eye-witness says : " No particular solemnity
seemed to attend the scene. The day was dull and dismal, windy
and cloudy, and everything looked bleak, the ground being covered
with a sprinkling of snow. Almost the whole of the attendants
were relatives and near neighbours, and most of them, with stolid
irreverence, were chatting about the affairs of the day. Professor
Wilson remained for some time near the newly-covered grave after
all the rest had departed."
I walked over this road to Altrive the day after my arrival in
Ettrick. But before quitting Ettrick, I must remark, that every
{)art of it presents objects made familiar by the Shepherd. At the
ower end are Lord Napier's castle, Thirlstane, a quaint castellated
house with round towers, and standing in pleasant woodlands ; and
the remains of the old tower of Tushielaw, and its hanging-tree, the
robber chief of which stronghold James VI. surprised, and hanged
on his own tree where he had hanged his victims, treating him with
as little ceremony as he did Johnny Armstrong and others of the
like i^rofession. All these the hearty and intelligent schoolmaster
pointed out to me, walking on to the three-mile -distant inn, and
seeing me well housed there.
AVhat i;i called Altrive Lake, the farm on the Yarrow, given for
life by the Duke of Buccleuch to Hogg, and where he principally
lived after leaving Ettrick, and where he died, stands in a consider-
able opening between the hills, at the confluence of sevei'al valleys,
where the Douglas burn falls into the Yarrow. Thus, fi'om some of
the windows, you look up and down the vale of Yarrow, but where
the vale has no very striking features. The hills are lower than on
Ettrick, and at a greater distance, but of the same character, green
and round. Shepherds are collecting their flocks ; the water goes
leaping along stony channels ; you see, here and there, a small
white farm-house with its clump of trees, and a circular enclosure
of stone wall for the sheepfold. A solitary crow or gull flies past ;
there are black stacks of peat on the bogs, and on the hill-tops
HOGC. 387
■—for there are bogs there too, and you perceive your approach to i\
house by the smell of peat. That is the character of the whole
district.
Altrive Lake is, in truth, no lake at all. One had always a plea-
sant notion of Hogg's house standing on the borders of a cheerful
little lake. I looked naturally for this lake in the wide opening
between the streams and hills, but could see none. I inquired of the
former who has succeeded Hogg, for this lake, and he said there never
was one. Hogg, he said, had given it that dignified name because a
little stream, that runs close past the house, not Douglas burn, but
one still less, is called the Trive lake. The farmer at the time of my
visit, who vv-as an old weather-beaten Scotchman, eighty-two years of
age, but hardy and pretty active, and well-oft' in the world, expressed
liimself as quite annoyed with the name, and said it was not Altrive
Lake ; he would not have it so called. It should be Aldenhope, for it
(\-as now joined to his ferm, which was the Alden fiirm. I believe the
Altrive farm is but about a hundred acres, including sheepwalk on the
hills, and lets for 45/. a-year ; but old Mr. Scott, the then tenant, had
a larger and better farm adjoining ; and in his old house, which was
just above this, across the highway from Ettrick, but almost hidden
in a hollow, he kept his hinds. Hogg's house is apparently two
white cottages, for the roof in the middle dips down like it, but it is
really but one. It stands on a mound, in a very good and pleasant
flower garden. The garden is enclosed with palisades, and the .steep
bank down from the house, descending to the level of the garden, is
gay with flowers. It has another flower garden behind, for the tenant
has his kitchen garden at his other house ; and around lie green
meadows, and at a distance, slope away the green pastoral hills. As
you look out at the front-door, the Yarrow runs down the valley at
the distance of, perhaps, a quarter of a mile on the left hand, with
a steep scaur, or precipitous earthy bank, on its further side, in full
view, over the top of which runs the highway from Edinburgh to
Galashiels. Down the valley, and on the other side of the water,
lies, in full view also, the farm of Mount Benger, which Hogg took
from the Duke of Buccleuch, after he came to Altrive. It is nuich
more enclosed and cultivated in tillage than Altrive. The house
where Hogg lived, however, is now pulled down, all except one ruinous
white wall, and a very capital farm-house is built near it ; witii a
(quadrangle of trees, which must have been originally planted to
shelter a hou.se long ago gone.
An old farmer and his wife in the neighbourhood, who seemed the
last people iu the world to admire poets or poetry, though very
worthy people in their way, blamed Hogg extremely for taking
]\Iount Benger. He was more fitted for books than for farming, said
they. "Perhaps," I obsei-ved, "he did not hnd that little farm of
Altrive enough to maintain him." " Why should he not ? " asked
they. " He had nothing to do there but look after liis little flock —
that was all he had to care for — and that was the projier business of
a man that called himself the Ettrick Shepherd — as though there
was never a shepherd in Ettrick besides himself And if he wanted
2
388 HOGO.
more iacome, had not be his pen, and was not he very popular with
the periodicals ? But he was always wanting to take great farms,
without any money to stock them. He was hand-and-glove with
great men in Edinburgh, Professor Wilson, and Scott, and the like ;
he was aye going to Abbotsford and Lord Napier's; and so he
thought himself a very great man too, and ilrs. Hogg thought herself
a great woman, and looked down on her neighbours. These poets
think nothing's good enough for them. Hogg paid the Duke no
rent, but he caught his fish, and killed his game ; he was a desperate
fellow for fishing and shooting. If people did not do just what ho
wanted, he soon let them know his mind, and that without much
ceremony. He wrote a very abusive letter to Sir "Walter Scott,
l)ecause he would not give him a poem to print when he asked him,
and would not speak to him for months ; and when he took Mount
Benger he wrote to his generous friend Mr. Grieve, of Ettrick, and
desired him to send him 350/. to stock the farm, which Mr. Grieve
I'cfused, because he knew that the scheme was a ruinous one ; on
which he wrote lam a very abusive letter, and would not speak to
liim for years. The upshot was that he failed, and paid eighteen-
l^ence in the pound ; and yet the Dulce, though he got no rent,
allows the widow the rental of Altrive."
It is curious to hear the estimation that a man is held in by his
vveighbours. It is generally the case, that a man who raises himself
Jtbove those with whom he set out on equal or inferior terms in life,
is regarded with a very jealous feeling. I found Grace Darling denied
all merit by those of her own class in her own neighbourhood.
Hogg, who is admired by the more intellectual of his countrymen,
is still, in the eyes of the now matter-of-fact sheep farmers of Ettrick
and Yarrow, looked upon only as an aspiring man, and bad farmer.
They cannot comprehend why he should be so much more regarded
than themselves, who are great at market, great on the hills, and
pay every man, and lay up hard cash. Yet these men who pay
cighteenpence in the pound, have farms for nothing, and their
families after them, and associate with lords and dukes, — that is
very odd, certainly.
For worldly prudence, I am afraid, we cannot boast of Hogg ; and
he confesses that he did rate Sir Walter soundly for not giving him
a poem for his Poetic Mirror, and that he would not speak to
him, till Scott heaped coals of fire on his head by sending the doctor
to him when he was ill, and by Hogg finding out that Scott had
come or sent dfiily to inquire how he was going on, and had told his
friends not to let Hogg want for anything. Hogg was a creature of
the quickest impulse ; he resented warmly, and he was as soon
melted again by kindness. He had the spirit of a child, sensitive,
quick to resent, but forgiving and generous. His imprudence in
taking Mount Bsngcr is much lessened, too, when we learn that he
expected 1,000/. from his wife's father, whose circumstances, however,
became embarrassed, and Hogg had already, through the intervention
of Scott, obtained possession of the farm, and incurred the debt for
the .stocking of it, before lie became aware of the disastrous fact. In
HOGG. 38?
tru";!!, l.e was probably too good a poet to be a good farmer ; noi
need we wonder at the opinion yet held of him by some of his
neighbours, when we find him relating in his Life that, when leaving
Edinburgh once because his literary projects had failed, he found his
character for a shepherd as low in Ettrick, as it was for poetry in
the capital, and that no one would give him anything to do. Such
are the singular fortunes of men of genius !
It is said in his own neighbourhood, that his last visit to London
hastened his death. That the entertainments given him there, and
the excitement he went through, had quite exhausted him. That
he never afterwards seemed himself again. That he was listless and
feeble, and tried to rally, but never did. Probably his breach v>nth
Blackwood might prey upon his spirits ; for, on Blackwood declining
to give a complete edition of his works, he had entered into arrange-
ments with Cochrane and Johnstone of London, who commenced
his edition, but failed on the issue of the first volume. By the act
of quitting Blackwood, all the old associations of his life, its happiest
and most glorious, seemed broken up. After that, his name vanished
from the magazine, and was no more seen there, and the new staff
on which he leaned proved a broken reed. Truly many are the
verifications of the melancholy words of Wordsworth : —
" We poets in our youth begin in gladness ;
But thereof cornes in the end, despimdeney and madness."
I have received the following account of his last days from one of
his oldest and most intimate friends : —
"Innerleithen, Slst Feh. 1S4G.
" Mr. Hogg, although apparently in good health, had been ailing
for some years previous to his death, with water in the chest. When
this was announced to him by his friend. Dr. W. Gray, from Lidia,
a nephew of j\Ir. Hogg's, he seemed to laugh at the idea, and pro-
iiounced it impossible, as one drop of water he never drank. Not-
withstanding, he very shortly after had a consultation with some of
the Edinburgh medical folks, who corroborated Dr. Gray's opinion.
Mr. Hogg, on his retura from town, called upon me in passing, and
.seemed somewhat depressed in spirits about his health. The Shep-
herd died of what the country folks call black jaundice, on the 21st
November, 1835, and was buried on the 27th, in the churchyard of
Ettrick, within a few Jmndred yards of Ettrick-house, the place where
he was born. It was a very imposing scene, to see Professor Wilson
standing at the grave of the Shepherd, after every one else had left
it, with his head uncovered, and his long hair waving in the wind,
and the tears literally running in streams down his cheek. A monu-
ment has been erected to the memory of Hogg, by his poor wife. At
this the good people of the forest should feel ashamed. Mr. Hogg
was confined to the house for some weeks, and, if I recollect right,
was insensible some days previous to his death. He has left one son
and four daughters ; the son, as is more than jirobable you are aware,
went out to a banking establishment in Bombay, some two years
ago. ^Ir. Hogg loft a cousideral;>le library, which is still in the pos-
390 "OGCt.
session of Mrs. Hogg and family. AVitli regard to the state of Lis
mind at the time of his death, 1 am unable to speak. I may men-
tion, a week or two previous to his last illness, he spent a few days
with me in angling in the Tweed ; the last day he dined with mo,
the moment the tumblers were produced, he begged that I would
not insist upon him taking more than one tumbler, as he felt much
inclined to have a tumbler or two with his friend Cameron, of the
inn, who had always been so kind to him, not unfrequently having
sent him home in a chaise, free of any charge whatever. The moment
the tumbler was discussed, we moved off to Cameron's ; and, by way
of putting off" the time until the innkeeper returned from Peebles,
where he had gone to settle some little business matter, we had
a game at bagatelle ; but no sooner had we commenced the game,
than poor Hogg was seized with a most violent trembling. A glass
of brandy was instantly got, and swallowed ; still the trembling con-
tinued, until a second was got, which produced the desired effect.
At this moment the Yarrow carrier was passing the inn, on his way
to Edinburgh, when Mr. Hogg called him in, and desired him to sit
down until he would draw an order on the Commercial Bank for
twenty pounds, as there was not a single penny in the house at
home. After various attempts he found it impossible even to sign
his name, and was, therefore, obliged to tell the carrier that he must
of necessity defer drawing the order until next week. The carrier,
however, took out his pocket-book, and handed the Shepherd a five-
pound note, which he said he could conveniently want until the
following week, when the order would be cashed. A little before
the gloaming, Mr. Hogg's caravan cart landed for him, which he
instantly took possession of ; but, before moving off", he shook hands
with me, not at all in his usual way, and at the same time stated
to me that a strong presentiment had come over his mind that we
would never meet again. It was too true. I never again saw my old
friend, the Shepherd, with whom I had been intimately acquainted
.since the year 1802.
" Yours truly,
"P. Boyd."
I went over his house at Altrive with much interest. His little
study is in the centre of the front of the house ; and within that is
tae equally small bedroom where he died. The house has been
Winch improved, as well as the garden about it, since his time, foi
all agree that Hogg was very slovenly about his place. However,
as Lockhart has justly observed, there will never be another such
a shepherd.
He had a brother still living, William Hogg, who had always been
considered a very clever man. He lived somewhere in Peebleshire,
as a shepherd. Hogg's widow and family were living in Edinburgh.
In many of my visits to the homes and haunts of the poets, I have
fallen in with persons and things which I regret that I could not
legitimately introduce, and wliich yet are 'jo full of life that they
HOGG. 39 i
deserve to be preserved. Exactl}' such a person did I meet with at
Altrive Lake, at Mr. Scott's, the successor of Hogg. He was a johy
^ool-bujer ; a stout, fine, jovial-looking man, one of that class
who seem to go through the world seeing only the genial side
of it, aud drawing all the good out of it, as naturally as the sun
draws out of the earth flowers and fruit. The hearty fellow was
sitting at luncheon with Mr. Scott as I went in, and I was requested
to join them. His large, v,'ell-fed person, and large handsome face,
seemed actually to glow and radiate with the fulness of this world's
joyousness and prosperity. His head of rich bushy black hair, aud
his smooth black STiit, both cut in town fashion, marked him as
belonging to a more thronged and bustling region than these tawny,
treeless, solitary hills. The moment I mentioned Hogg, and my
object in visiting Altrive and Ettrick, the stranger's countenance lit
up with a thorough high-flowing tide of rosy animation. "Eh, but
ye should ha' had me in Ettrick wi' ye ! I know every inch of all
these hilLs and the country round. Haven't I bought the wool all
over this country these twenty years 1 Hogg ! why, Sir, I've bought
his wool many a time, and had many a merry ' clash ' and glass of
toddy wi' him at this verra table." Nothing would do but I must
accept half his gig thence to Galashiels that evening, a distance of
twenty miles. It was a very friendly offer, for it saved me much
time. Our drive was a charming one, and my stout friend know-
ing all the country, and apparently everybody in it, pointed out
everything, and had a nod, a smile, a passing word, for every one
that we met or passed in their cottages by the road-side. He pointed
out the piece of a wall, the only remains of Hogg's old house at
Mount Benger, adding — "Ay, I bought his wool!" We descended
the vale of Yarrow, passing through the beautiful woods of Ilaiujiini-
sJiaw. " Ye'U remember," said he, " what was said by some English
noblemen in the rising in '45, when they heard that the lairds of
ilangingshaw aud Galtov:sMeIs were among the Scotch conspirators.
These are ominous names, said they, we'll ha' naething to do with
'em ; and withdrew, and thereby saved their own necks." So we
went on, every few hundred yards bringing new histories of my jolly
friend's wool-buying, and of matters which seemed nearly as im-
portant in his eyes. There was Newark tower — a beautiful object —
standing on a lofty green mound on the other side of the Yarrow,
the banks of which are most beautifully wooded. The tower, indeed,
is included in the pleasure-grounds of Bowhill, a seat of the Duke of
Buccleuch's, within sight ; and you see neat walks running all along
the rivei'-side for miles amid the hanging woods, and looking most
tempting. Opposite to Newark my friend pointed out a farm-house.
"Do you know what that is?" "A farm-hou.se," I replied. "Ay,
but what farm-house, that's the thing 1 Why, Sir, that's the house
where Mungo Park lived, and where his brother now lives." He then
related the fact recorded in Scott's Life, of Sir Walter finding Mungo
Park standing one day in an abstracted mood, flinging stones into
the Yarrow ; and asking him why he did that, he told Scott that he
was sounding the depth of the river, it being a plan he had dis-
392 HOGG.
covered and used ou his Afiicau tour; the length of time the bubblca
took coming to the top indicating the comparative depth, and show-
ing whether he might venture to ford the stream or not, tSocn after
Park again set out for Africa, never to I'eturn. " There, too, I buy
the wool," added my companion. " But do you see," again he went
ou, " the meadow there below us, lying between those two streams 1 "
— "Yes." — "Well, there meet the Ettrick and Yarrow, and become
the Tweed ; and the meadow between is no other than that of
Carterhaitgh ; you've heard of it in the old ballads. I buy all the
wool oS" that farm." I have no doubt if the jolly fellow had fallen
in with the fairies on Carterhaugh, he would have tried to buy their
wool too.
Ever and auon, out of the gig he sprung, and bolted into a house.
Here there was a sudden burst of exclamations, a violent shaking of
hands. Out he came again, and a wliole troop of people after him.
" Well but, "Mr. — , don't you take my wool this time % " " Oh ! why
not % What is it ? what weight ? what do you want % " "It is so and
so, and I want so much for it." " Oh, fie, mon ! I'll gi'e ye so much ! "
"That's too little." "Well, that's what I'll gi'e— ye can send it, if ye
like the price ; " and away we drove, — the man all life and jollity,
giving me a poke in the side with his elbow, and a knowing look,
Avith — " He'll send it ! It won't do to spend much time over these
little lots ; " and away we went. At one house, no sooner did he
enter, than out came a bonny lass with a glass and the whisky-
bottle, most earnestly and respectfully pressing that I should take
a glass ! " AVliat could the bonny girl mean by being so urgent that
I should take some of her whisky 1" " Oh," said he, laughing heartily,
" it was because I told her that ye were a Free-kirk minister fi'ae
London, and they're mighty zealous Eree-kirk folk here."
At Selkirk my jolly friend put himself and horse to a great deal
of labour in ascending the steep hill into the town, which we miglit
have avoided, that I might see the statue of Sir Walter Scott, by
Ritchie, in the market-place. This, however, was but part of his
object. Leaving the gig at the inn, he said we must just look in on
a friend of his. It was at a little grocer's shop, and, in a little dusky
parlour, he introduced me to a young lady, his wife's sister, and we
niust have some tea with her. The young lady was a comely, quiet,
dai'k-complexioned person, who seemed to have a deal of quiet sense,
and some sly humour ; just such a person as Scott would have intro-
duced into one of his stories as a Jenny Middlemass, or the like ;
and it was most amusing to sit and listen to all their talk, and jokes,
and his mystifications, and her quick detection of them, and their
anited mirth over them. The good man finally lauded me in Galashiels,
and there I had no little difficulty in getting away to my inn ; as
he thought of nothing less than my staying to supper with him, and
hearing a great deal more of all the country round, of Scott and
Burns, Hogg and wool-buying, trading and tradition, the old glories
of Border-reiving, and new glories of Galashiels, and its spinning
end weaving, without end.
.'>:tiii/.^o« I "^
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE.
CuLERiDGE, whose .simple, unworldly character is as well known
as his genius, seems to have inherited his particular disposition
from his father, the Rev. John Coleridge, the vicai" of Otter_y
St. ^lary, in Devonshire. He was a learned man, the head master
of the free grammai'-school at Ottery, as well as vicar. Ho had
been previously head master of the school at South Molton, and
v.-a3 one of the persons who assisted Dr. Kennicott in his Hebrew
]>ible. "Ho was an exceedingly studious man," says Gillman, on the
authority of Coleridge himself, " pious, of primitive manners, and
the most simple habits : passing events were little heeded by him,
and therefore he was usually characterised as ' the absent man.' "
Coleridge was born October 21st, 1772, the youngest of thirteen
children, of which nine were sons, one of whom died in infancy. Of
all these sons, Coleridge is said to have most resembled his father in
mind and habit. His mother was, except for education, in which
she was deficient, a most fitting wife for such a man. She was a?i
active, careful housekeeper and manager, looked well after worldly
afFaii's, and was ambitious to place her sons well in the world. She
always told them to look after good, substantial, sensible women,
and not after fine harpsichord ladies. Coleridge used to relate many
394 COLERIDGE.
instances of his fatlior's abseuce of mind, one or two of which we
may quote. On one occasion, having to breakfast with his bishop,
lie went, as was the practice of that day, into a barber's shop, to
have his head shaved, wigs being then in common use. Just as the
operation was completed, the clock struck nine, the hour at which
the bishop punctually breakfasted. Roused as from a reverie, ho
instantly left the barber's shop, and in his haste forgetting his wig,
appeared at the breakfast-table, where the bishop and his party had
assembled. The bishop, well acquainted with his absent manners,
courteously and playfully requested him to walk into an adjoining
room, and give his opinion of a mirror which had arrived from
London a few days previously, and which disclosed to his astonished
guest the consequence of his haste and forgetfulness.
The old gentleman, Coleridge also related, had to take a journey
on some j^i'ofessional business, which would detain him from home
for three or four days : his good wife, in her care and watchfulness,
had packed a few things in a small trunk, and given them in charge
to her husband, with strong injunctions that he was to put on a
clean shirt every day. On his return home, his wife went to search
for his linen, when, to her dismay, it was not in the trunk. A closer
search, however, discovered that the vicar had strictly obeyed her
injunctions, and had put on daily a clean shirt, but had forgotten to
remove the one underneath. This might have been the pleasantest
and most portable mode of carrying half-a-dozen shirts in winter,
but not so in the dog-days.
The jDOor idolized him and paid him the greatest reverence ; and
amongst other causes, for the odd practice of quoting the original
Hebrew liberally in his sermons. They felt themselves particularly
favoured by his giving them " the very words the Spirit spoke in ; "
the agricultural population flocked in from the neighbourhood with
great eagerness to hear him on this account ; and such an opinion
tlid they acquire of his learning, that they regarded his successor
with much contempt, because he addressed them in simple English.
This worthy man died when Coleridge was about seven years old
only.
He seems to have been a delicate child, of timid disposition. Being
so much younger than his brothers, he never came to be a play-
fellow of theirs, and thus to acquire physical hardihood and activity,
" I was," he says, " in earliest childhood hufi'ed away from the enjoy-
ment of muscular activity in play, to take refuge at my mother's
side, or on my little stool to read my book, and listen to the talk of
my elders. I was driven from life in motion, to life in thought and
sensation. 1 never played except by myself, and then only acting
over what I had been reading or fancying ; or half one, half the
other, with a stick cutting down weeds and nettles, as one of the
seven champions of Christendom. Alas ! I had all the simplicity,
all the docility of a child, but none of the child's habits. I never
thought as a child, never had the language of a child. I forget
whether it was in my fifth or sixth year, but I believe the latter, in
consequence of some quarrel between me and my brother, in the
COLERIDGE. 30,'
first week iu October, 1 ran away from fear of beiug whipped, and
passed the whole uight, a night of rain and storm, on a bleak side of a
mil on the Otter ; and was there fomid at daybreak, without the power
of iising my limbs, about six yards from the naked bank of the river."
This anecdote has been difierently related by Cottle, and by the
author of Pen and Pencil Sketches. They state that little Sammy
Coleridge, as they call him, when between three and four years of
age, had got a thread and a crooked pin from his elder sister Ann,
and, unknown to the family, had set out to fish in the Otter. That
he had wandered on and on, till, overtaken by fatigue, he lay down
and slept. That he continued out all night, to the consternation of
the family, and was found by a waggoner the next morning, who,
going along the road at four o'clock, thought he heard a child's voice.
He stopped and listened. He now heard the voice cry out, " Betty !
]3etty ! I can't pull up the clothes." The waggoner went to the
margin of the river, where he saw to his astonishment, a little child
with a withy bough in his hand, which hung over the stream, pulling
hard, and on the very point of dragging himself into the water. Tho
child, when awakened as well as frightened, could only say his name
was Sammy ; and the waggoner carrying him into Ottery, joy inde-
scribable spread through the town and the parsonage.
Which version of this story is the more correct, who shall decide 1
Little Coleridge, at the age of ten, was placed in Christ's Hospital,
in London, through the influence of Judge Buller, who had been
educated by his father. This school was then, it seems, conducted
in a very miserable and unkind manner-. Coleridge was half-starved
there, neglected, and wretched. The first bitter experiences of chil-
dren who have had happy homes, of such as have had loving parents
or friends, is on going to school. There has, no doubt, been much
improvement in these as in other respects of late years. School-
masters, like other men, have felt the growing influences of civiliza-
tion and true feeling ; but there is yet much to be done in schools.
Let it be remembered that fagging and flogging still continue in our
great public schools of Westminster, Eton, and others. Riding the
other day on the top of an omnibus through London, we could, from
that popular eminence, see the master of a naval and militaiy school
exercising his vocation with the cane on one of his unhappy scholars.
This, I presume, is a part of what the boys are systematically taught
there — the preparatory initiation into the floggings that they are
likely to get in the army or navy. That is bad and brutalizing
enough, but that we are not yet advanced beyond the absurd idea of
driving learning into our gentlemen with the cudgel and the birch,
says very little indeed for our advance in true social jAilosophy.
Southey gives a very lively idea of the school change in a boy's life,
in his Hymn to the Penates : —
" When first a little one I left my home,
I can remember the firit prief I felt,
And the lirst painful smile that clotlied my front
With feelings not its own. Sadly at nisjlit
I sate me down beside a stranger's hearth;
And when the lingering; liour of rest was comCt
l''irst wet with tears mv pillow."
3;)6 COLICUIDOK.
In The Ixeti aspect he has .still more clearly depicted his iatroducfci^a
to the schoiil at Corstou : —
" There now, in ))c'lty empire o"er the seliool,
The niifility master held despotic rule;
'i'renililiiii,' in silence, all his deeds we saw,
His look a mandate, and his vord a haw ;
Severe his voice, severe and stern his mien,
And wondrous strict he was, and wondrous wise, I ween.
" Even now, through many a long, long year, I trace
The hour when first with awe I viewed his face ;
Even now, reeal my entrance at the dome, —
'Twas the first day I ever left my home !
Years, intervening, have not worn away
The deep remembrance of Ihat tcretclnd tliii/.
' Methinks e'en now the interview I see,
The mistress's glad smile, the master's glee.
Much of my future happiness they said,
Much of the easy life the scholars led ;
Of spacious playground, and of wholesome air,
'I he best instruction, and the tenderest care;
And wiien I f ;Ilowed to the garden door
My father, till, through tears, I saw no more,—
How civilly they soothed my parting pain.
And how iheij never spake so ciiiUy again."
Bravo, Southey ! In these lines how many feelings of how many
oppressed little hearts you have given vent to ! Improvement, I do
beheve, has fotuid its way, in a great degree, since then into private
schools ; but in many of them still, how much remains to be done !
How much more may the spirits of masters and mistresses be
humanized ! How much more the law of love be substituted for the
law of severity ! It cannot be too deeply impressed on the hearts of
those who take the charge of children, often at a great distance, that
there is no tyranny so cowardly and mean as that which is exercised,
not over grown men, but over tender children.
Coleridge calls this change, being "first plucked up and trans-
planted;" and adds, — "Oh, what a change! I was a depressed,
moping, friendless, poor orphan, half-starved ; — at that time the
portion of food to the Bluecoats was cruelly insufficient for thoso
who had no friends to supply them." For those who had friends to
supply them, the distinction set up was of the most detestable kind.
They had luxuries brought in and served up before these poor half-
starved little wretches. Charles Lamb, under the title of Elia,
describes his own case as one of these favoured ones. " I remember
l^amb at school, and can well remember that he had some peculiar
advantages, which I and others of his schoolfellows had not. His
friends lived in town and were at hand, and he had the privilege of
going to see them almost as often as he wished, through some
invidious distinction which was denied us. The present treasurer
of the Inner Temple can explain how it happened. He had his tea
and hot rolls in the morning, while we were battening upon our
quarter of a penny loaf ; our cr/iff moistened with attenuated small
beer in wooden piggins, smacking of the pitched leathern jack it was
poured from. On Mondays, milk porritch, blue and tasteless, and
the pease soup of Saturday, coarse and choking, were enriched for
COLERIDGE. 397
him with a sHce of ' extraordinary bread and butter ' from ihe hot
loaf of the Temple. The Wednesday's mess of millet, somewhat
less repugnant — (we had three banyan to four meat days in the
week) — was endeared to his palate with a lump of double-rehned,
and a smack of ginger, or the fragrant cinnamon, to make it go down
the more glibly. In lieu of our Juilf-picl-lcd Sundays, or quite fresh
boiled beef on Thursdays, strong as caro equina, with detestable
marigolds floating in the pail to poison the broth ; our scanty mutton
crags on Fridays ; and rather more savoury but grudging portions
of the same flesh, rotten-roasted, or rare, on the Tuesdays — the only
dish which excited our appetites, and disappointed our stomachs in
almost equal proportion ; he had his hot plate of roast veal, or the
more tempting griskin, exotics unknown to our palates, cooked in
the laaternal kitchen."
" I," says Coleridge, giving us the other side of the case, " was a
poor friendless boy ; my parents, and those who should have cared
for me, were far away. Those few acquaintances of theirs, which
they could reckon on being kind to me in the great city, after a little
forced notice, which they had the grace to take of me on my first
arrival in town, soon grew tired of my holiday visits. They seemed
to them to recur too often, though I thought them few enough ; cue
after another, they all failed me, and I felt myself alone among six
hundred playmates. 0, the cruelty of separating a poor lad from
his early homestead ! The yeai'uings whicli I used to have towards
it in those unfledged years ! Hov/ in my dreams would my native
town, far in the west, come back, with its churches, and trees, and
faces ! To this late hour of my life do I trace the imi)ressions left
by the painful recollections of those friendless holidays. The long
warm days of summer never return, but they bring with them a
gloom from the haunting memories of those whole day's leave, when,
by some strange arrangement, we were tm-ned out for tlie livelong
day, upon our own hands, whether we had friends to go to or none.
I remember those bathing excursions to the New Eiver, which Lamb
recals with such relish, better, I think, than he can, for he was a
home-seeking lad, and did not care for such water parties. How wc
would sally forth into the fields, and strip under the first warmth of
the sun, and wanton like young dace in the streams, getting appetites
for the noon which those of us that were penniless had not the
means of allaying ; while the cattle, and the birds, and the fishes
were at feed about us, and we had nothing to satisfy our cravings :
the very beauty of the day, the exercise of the pastime, and the
sense of liberty, setting a keener edge upon them ! How faint and
languid, finally, wc would return, towards nightfall, to our desired
morsel, half rejoicing, half reluctant, that the hours of uneasy liberty
had expired !
" It was worse, in the days of winter, to go prowling about the
streets objectless ; shivering at cold windows of print-shops, to
extract a little amusement ; or, haply, as a last resort, in the hope
of a little novelty, to pay a lifty-times-repeated visit to the lions in
the Tower, to whose levee, by c Curtesy immemorial, we had a pre-
3'J8 COLERIDGE.
scriptive right of admissiou, and where our individual faces would
be as well known to the warden as those of his own charges."
What an amount of cruelty may bo perpetrated even under the
show of favour i what hard days for the stomach, under the guise
of holidays ! Coleridge was, from all accounts, at this time, " a
delicate and suffering boy." His stomach was weak, his feet tender,
so that lie was obliged to wear very large easy shoes. TJiis might
be one cause why he more readily fell into sedentary reading habits.
Ho was to be found during play-hours, often, with the knees of his
breeches unbuttoned, and his shoes down at the heel, walking to and
fro, or sitting on a step, or in a corner, deejjly engaged in some book.
The future author of the Ancient Mariner, and translator of Wallen-
stcin, sitting on door-steps and at corners, with his book on his
knee, was a very interesting object, if the Ancient Mariner and
Wallenstein could have been seen seated in that head of black cropped
hair ; as it was, it did excite attention ; and Bowyer, one of those
clever brutes who, on the strength of a good store of Latin and
Greek, think themselves authorized to rain a good store of blows on
the poor children in their power, testified his hopes of Coleridge's
progress by continually and severely punishing him. He was often
lieard to say that " the lad was so ordinary a looking lad, v/ith his
black head, that he generally gave him, at the end of a flogging, an
extra cut ; for," said he, "you are such an ugly fellow."
Books were the poor fellow's solace for the flagellations of the
masters and the neglect of the boys, amongst whom Lamb was
not to bo reckoned, for he was very fond of him and kind to him.
" From eight to fourteen I was a playless day-dreamer," he observes ;
" a /lelluo librorum ; my appetite for which was indulged by a singular
incident— a stranger who was struck by my conversation, made me
free of a circulating libraiy in Iving-street, Cheapside."
This incident, says Gillman, was indeed singular. Going down
the Strand, in one of his day-dreams, fancying himself swimming
across the Hellespont, thrusting his hands before him as in the act
of swimming, one hand came in contact with a gentleman's pocket.
The gentleman seized his hand, turned round, and looked at him
with some anger, exclaiming — " What ! so young and so wicked ! "
at the same time accusing him of an attempt to pick his pocket.
The frightened boy sobbed out his denial of the intention, and
explained to him how he thought himself Leander swimming across
the Hellespont. The gentleman was so much struck and delighted
with the novelty of the thing, and with the simplicity and intelli-
gence of the boy, that he subscribed, as before stated, to the library,
in consequence of which Coleridge was further enabled to indulge
his love of reading.
It is stated that at this school he laid the foundation of those
Ijodily sufferings, which made his life one of sickness and torture,
and occasioned his melancholy resort to opium. He greatly injured
his health, it is said, and reduced his strength by his bathing excur-
hious ; but is it not just as likely that the deficiency of food, and
those holiday dayg when he was turned out to starvation, had quito
COLERIDGE. 399
as much to do with it 1 On one occasion he swam across the New
Eiver in his clothes, and dried them on his back. This is supposed
to have laid the foundation of his rheumatic pains ; but may not
that lying out all night in the rain at a former day have been even
a still earlier predisposing cause ? However that might be, he says,
that " full half the time from seventeen to eighteen was passed m
the sick-ward of Christ's Hospital, afflicted with jaundice and rheu-
matic fever."
At an earlier day he had undergone a medical treatment which
was, oddly enough, the cause of his breaking out into verse. He
had a remarkably delicate white skin, which was once the causeof
great punishment to him. His dame had undertaken to cure him
of the itch, with which the boys of his ward had suffered much ;
but Coleridge was doomed to suffer more than his comrades, from
the use of sulphur ointment, through the great sagacity of his
dame, who with her extraordinary eyes, aided by the power of
glasses, could see the malady in the skin, deep and out of power
of common vision ; and, consequently, as often as she employed
this miraculous sight, she found, or thought she found, fresh reason
for continuing the friction, to the prolonged suffering and morti-
fication of her patient. This occurred when he was about ten
years of age, and gave rise to his first attempt at making a verse,
as follows : —
" O Lord, have mercy on me !
For I am very sad !
For why, good Lord? I've pot the itch.
And eke I've got tlie tad!"
the school name for ringworm.
In classical study Coleridge made wonderful progress, though
but little in mathematics He read on through the catalogue, folios
and all, of the library in King-street, and was always in a low
fever of excitement. His whole being was, he says, with eyes
closed to every object nf present sense, to crumple himself up in
a sunny corner, and read, read, read ; fancying himself on Robinson
Crusoe's island, finding a mountain of plum-cake and eating a room
for himself, and then eating out chairs and tables — hunger and
fancy !
So little affection had Coleridge for the school, that he greatly
wanted at fifteen to put himself apprentice to a shoemaker. It was
of the same class of odd attempts as his future one at soldiering.
" Near the school there resided a worthy, and in their rank of life,
a respectable middle-aged couple. The husband kept a little shop
and was a shoemaker, with whom Coleridge had become intimate.
The wife also had been kind and attentive to him, and that was
sufficient to captivate his affectionate nature, which had existed
from earliest childhood, and strongly endeared him to all around
him. Coleridge became exceedingly desirous of being apprenticed
to this man, to learn the art of shoemakiug ; and in due time, when
some of the boys were old enough to leave the school and be put to
trade, Coleridge, being of the number, tutored his friend Crispin
tiow to apply to the head master, and not to heed his anger should
400 COLERIDGE.
ho become irate. Accordingly, Crispin applied at tlie hour proposed
to see Bowyer, who having heard the proposal to take Coleridge as
an apprentice, and Coleridge's answer and assent to become a shoe-
maker, broke forth ^Yith his favourite adjuration : — ' Ods my life,
man, what d'ye mean 1 ' At the sound of his angry voice Crispin
stood motionless, till the angry pedagogue, becoming infuriate,
pushed the intruder out of the room with such force, that CrisiDin
might have sustained an action at law against him for the assault.
Thus, to Colex'idge's mortification and regret, as he afterwards in joke
would say, 'I lost the opportunity of su]>plying safeguards to the
imderstandings of those who, perhaps, will never thank me for what
I am aiming to do in exercising their reason.' "
Disappointed in becoming a shoemaker, he was next on fire to
become a surgeon. His brother Luke was now in London, walking
the London hospitals. Here every Saturday he got leave and went,
jlelighted beyond everything if he were permitted to hold the
plasters or attend dressings. He now plunged headlong into books
of medicine, Latin, Greek, or English ; devoured whole medical
dictionaries ; then fell from physic to metaphysics ; thence to the
writings of infidels ; fell in love, like all embryo poets, and wrote
verse. He was, however, destined neither to make shoes nor set
bones, but for the University ; whither he went in 1701, at the age
of nineteen, being elected to Jesus College, Cambridge.
Here his friend Middleton, afterwards Bishop of Calcutta, who had
been his most distinguished schoolfellov/ at Christ's Hospital, had
])receded him, and was an undergraduate at Pembroke College. Their
friendship was revived, and Coleridge nsed to go to Pembroke Col-
lege sometimes to read with him. One day he found Middleton
intent on his book, having on a long pair of boots reaching to the
knees, and beside hira, on a chair next to the one he was sitting on,
a pistol. Coleridge had scarcely sat down before he was startled by
the report of the pistol. "Did you see that?" said Middleton.
" See what 1 " said Coleridge. " That rat I just sent into his holo
again. Did you feel the shot 1 It was to defend my legs that I put
on these boots. I am frightening these rats from my books, which,
without some precaution, I shall have devoured." Middleton, not-
withstanding his hard studies, failed in his contest for the classical
medal, and so in his hopes of a fellowship, — a good thing eventually
for him, for it drove him out of college into the world and a
bishopric.
Coleridge came to the University with a high character for talent
and learning ; and the Blues, as they are called, or Christ's Hospital
boys, anticipated his doing gi'eat honour to their body. This he
eventually did by his poetical fame, and might have done by his
college honours, had he but been as well versed in mathematics as
in the classics. In his first year he contested for the prize for the
Greek ode, and won it. In his second year he stood for the Craven
Bcholarship, and of sixteen or eighteen competitoi's, four were selected
to contend for the prize ; these were Dr. Butler, late bishop of Lich-
field ; Dr. Keate, the late head master of Eton ; Mr. Bethell, and
COLERIDGE 401
Coleriilge. Dr. Butler was the successful candidate, and Coleridije
was supposed to stand next. But college honours were contingent
on a good mathematical stand ; this Coleridge, who hated mathe-
matics, despaired of, and determined to quit the university. He
was, moreover, harassed with debts, the most serious of which, it
seems, was incurred immediately on his arriving at Cambridge. He
was no sooner at his college, than a polite ui^holsterer accosted him,
requesting to be permitted to furnish his rooms. The next question
was, " How would you like to have them furnished 1 " The answer,
prompt and innocent enough, was, " Just as you please. Sir," — think-
ing the individual employed by the college. The rooms were there-
fore furnished according to the taste of the artisan, and the bill
presented to the astonished Coleridge. On quitting the college, it
seems that his debts were about one hundred pounds — no great
matter, but to him as overwhelming as if they had been a thousand.
Cottle, in his account of him, says, he had fallen in love, as well as
into debt, with a Mary G , who rejected his offer. He made his
way to London, and there, of all things in the vrorld, enlisted for
a soldier. The story is very curious, and, as related both by Cottle
and Gillman, who were intimate with him at different periods of his
life, is no doubt true.
In a state of great dejection of mind, he strolled about the streets
of London till night came on, when he seated himself on the steps
of a house in Chancery-lane, speculating on the future. In this
situation, overwhelmed with his own painful thoughts, and in misery
himself, he had now to contend with the misery of others, — for he
was accosted by various kinds of beggars importuning him for money,
and forcing on him their real or pretended sorrows. To these appli-
cants he emptied his pockets of his remaining cash. Walking along
Chancery -lane, he noticed a bill posted on the wall — "Wanted a few
smart lads for the 15th, Elliott's Light Dragoons;" he paused a
moment, and said to himself, " Well, I have had aU my life a violent
antipathy to soldiers and horses, the sooner I cure myself of these
absurd prejudices the better ; and so I wiU enlist in this regiment."
Forthwith, he went as directed to the place of enlistment. On his
arrival, he was accosted by an old sergeant, with a remarkably bene-
volent countenance, to whom he stated his wish. The old man, look-
ing at him attentively, asked him if he had been in bed 1 On being
answered in the negative, he desired him to take his, made him
breakfast, and bade him rest himself awhile, which he did. This
feeling sergeant, finding him refreshed in his body, but still suffering
apparently from melancholy, in kind words begged him to be of good
cheer, and consider well the step he was about to take ; gave him
half-a-guinea, which he was to repay at his convenience, desiring him
at the same time to go to the play, and shake off his melancholy,
and not to return to him. The first part of the advice Coleridge
attended to, but returned after the play to the quarters he had left.
At the sight of him, tliis kind-hearted man burst into tears. " Then
it must be so," said he. This sudden and unexpected .sympathy from
an entire stranger deeply affected Coleridge, and nearly shock hu
40? COLERIDGE.
resolution ; but still cou.sidcring that he could not in honour even
to the sergeant retreat, he kept his secret, and, after a short chat,
they retired to rest. In the morning the sergeant mustered his
recruits, and Coleridge, with his new comrades, w^as marched to
Heading. On bis arrival at the quarters of the regiment, the general of
the district inspected the recruits ; and looking hard at Coleridge, with
a military air, said, " What's your name, Sir 1 " He bad previously
determined to give one thoroughly Kamtschatkan ; but, having ob-
served somewhere, over a door, Cumberbatch, he thought this suffi-
ciently outlandish, and therefore gave it with a slight alteration,
which implied a joke on himself as a horseman : Silas Tomkeu
Comberbacke, as thus it is spelt in the books at the War-office.
" What do you come here for 1 " said the officer, as if doubting that
he had any business there. "Sir," said Coleridge, "for what most
other persons come, — to be made a soldier." " l3o you think," said
the general, "you can run a Frenchman through the body ? " "I don't
know," replied Coleridge, " as I never tried ; but I'll let a Frenchman
run me through before I'll run away." " That will do," said the
general ; and Coleridge was turned into the ranks.
Here, in his new capacity, laborious duties devolved on Mr. Cole-
ridge. He endeavoured to think on Caesar, Epaminondas, and Leonidas,
with other ancient heroes, and composed himself to his fate, remem-
bering that in every service there must be a commencement ; but
still he found confronting him no imaginary difficulties. Perhaps he
who had most cause of dissatisfaction was the drill-sergeant, who
thought his professional character endangered ; for, after iising his
utmost effiDrts to bring his raw recruit into anything like a training,
he expressed the most serious fears, from his unconquerable awkward-
ness, that he never should be able to make a proper soldier of him. It
appears that he never advanced beyond the awkward squad, and that
the drill-sergeant was obliged continually to warn the members of
this squad by vociferously exclaiming — "Take care of that Cumber -
back ! take care of him, for he will ride over you ! " and other such
complimentary warnings.
Coleridge, or Cumberbatch, or Cumberback, could never manage
to rub down his own horse. The creature, he said, was a vicious
one, and would return kick or bite for all such attempts ; but then,
in justice to the poor animal, the awkwardness of the attempts
should be taken into the account. Cumberback at this time com-
plained of a pain at the pit of his stomach, accompanied with
sickness, which totally prevented his stooping ; and, in consequence,
he could never rub the heels of his horse at all. He would very
quietly have left his horse unrubbed, but then he got a good rubbing
down himself from the drill-sergeant. Between sergeant and steed
ne was in a poor case ; for when he mounted his horse, it, like
Gilpin's nag,
" Wliat tiling upon its back had got
Did wonder more and more."
But the same amiable and benevolent conduct which was so
mterwoven in his nature, soon made him friends, and his new
COLERIDGE. 403
comrades vied with each other in their endeavours to be useful to
him. They assisted to clean his horse, and he amply repaid the
obligation by writing all their letters to their sweethearts and wives.
Such an amanuensis, we may well affirm, no lucky set of soldiers
ever had before. Their lasses and good wives must have wondered
at the new burst of affectionate eloquence in the regiment.
Poor Cumberback's skill in horsemanship did not progress. He
was always encountering accidents and troubles. So little did he
often calculate for a due equilibrium, that in mounting on one side
— perhaps the wrong stirrup — the probability was, especially if his
horse moved, that he lost his balance, and if he did not roll back on
this side, came down ponderously on the other ! The men, spite of
their liking for him, would burst into a laugh, and say to one another,
" Silas is off again ! " Silas had often heard of campaigns, but he
never before had so correct an idea of hard service.
From his inability to learn his exercise, the men considered him
a sort of natural, though of a peculiar kind — a talking natural. This
fancy he stoutly resisted, but no matter — what was it that he could
do cleverly 1 — therefore a natural he must be.
But now came a change. He had been placed as a sentinel at the
door of a ball-room, or some public place of resort, when two of his
officers passing in, stopped for a moment near Coleridge talking
about Euripides, two lines being quoted by one of them as from that
poet. At the sound of Greek the sentinel instinctively turned his
ear, when, with all deference touching his cap, he said, " I hoj^e
your honour will excuse me, but the lines you have repeated are not
quite accurately cited. These are the lines ;" which he gave in their
true form. " Besides," said Cumberback, " instead of being in
Euripides they will be found in the second antistrophe of the Oedipus
of Sophocles." " Why, who the d — 1 are you 1 " said the officer ;
" old Faustus ground young again 1 " — " I am only your honour's
humble sentinel," said Coleridge, again touching his cap.
The officers hastened into the room, and inquired about that "odd
fish " at the door ; when one of the mess, the surgeon it is believed,
told them that he had had his eye upon him, but he could neither
tell where he came from, nor anything about the family of the
Comberbacks. "But," continued he, "instead of an 'odd fish,' I
suspect him to be a ' stray bird ' fi-om the Oxford or Cambridge
aviai-y." They leai-ned also the laughable fact that he was bruised
all over by frequent falls from his horse. The officers kindly took pity
on the poor scholar, and had him removed to the medical department,
where he was appointed "assistant" in the regimental hospital.
This change was a vast improvement in Mr. Coleridge's condition ;
and happy was the day also on which it took place, for the sake of
the sick patients ; for Silas Tomken Comberback's amusing stories,
they said, did them more good than all the doctor's physic. If he
began talking to one or two of his comrades, — for they were all on
a perfect equality, except that those who were clever in their exer-
cise lifted their heads a little above the awkward squad, of which
Comberback was, l>y acclamation, the preeminent member, — if he
40i COLERIDGE.
began to talk, however, to one or two, others drew near, increasing
momently, till by and by the sick beds were deserted, and Comber-
back formed the centre of a large circle. Many ludicrous dialogues
occurred between Coleridge and his new disciples, particularly with
the "geographer."
On one occasion he told them of the Pelopounesian W'ar, which
lasted twenty-seven years. " There must have been famous promo-
tions there," said one poor fellow, haggard as a death's head.
Another, tottering with disease, ejaculated, "Can you tell, Silas,
how many rose from the ranks ? "
lie now still more excited their wonderment by recapitulating the
feats of Archimedes. As the narrative proceeded, one restrained his
scepticism till he was almost ready to burst, and then vociferated,
" Silas, that's a lie ! " " D'ye think so 1 " said Coleridge, smihng,
and went on with his story. The idea, however, got amongst them
that Silas's fancy was on the stretch, when, finding that this would
not do, he changed his subject, and told them of a famous general
called Alexander the Great. As by a magic spell, the flagging atten-
tion was revived, and several, at the same moment, to testify their
eagerness, called out, " The general ! the general ! " " I'll tell you
all about him," said Coleridge, and impatience marked every coun-
tenance. He then told them who was the father of this Alexander
the Great, — no other than Philip of Macedon. " I never heard of
him," said one. " I think I have," said another, ashamed of being
thought ignorant. " Silas, wasn't he a Cornish man 1 I knew one
of the Alexanders at Truro."
Coleridge now went on, describing to them, in glowing colours,
the valour, the wars, and the conquests of this famous general.
"Ah," said one man, whose open mouth had complimented the
speaker for the preceding half hour — " Ah," said he, " Silas, this
Alexander must have been as great a man as our colonel ! " Cole-
ridge now told them of the " Retreat of the Ten Thousand." " I
don't like to hear of retreat," said one. "Nor I," said a second ;
" I'm for marching on." Coleridge now told of the incessant con-
flicts of those brave warriors, and of the virtues of " the square."
" They were a parcel of crack men," said one. " Yes," said another,
" their bayonets fixed, and sleeping on their arms day and night."
" I should like to know," said a fourth, " what rations were given
with all that hard fighting ;" on which an Irishman replied, " To be
sure, every time the sun rose, two pounds of good ox beef and plenty
of whisky."
At another time he told them of the invasion of Xerxes, and his
crossing the 7cide Hellespont. " Ah ! " said a young recruit, a native
of an obscure village in Kent, who had acquired a decent smattering
of geogi-aphy, knowing well that the earth went round, was divided
into land and water, and that there were more countries on the globe
than England, and who now wished to show off a little before his
comrades — "Silas, I know where that 'Hellspont ' is. I think it
must be the mouth of the Thames, for 'lis very wide."
Colei-idge now told them of the heroes of Thermopyla? ; when
COLERIDGE. 40.')
the geograplier interrupted him by saying, " Silas, I know, too, where
that there Moppily is ; it's somewhere up in the north." " You arc
quite right, Jack," said Coleridge, " it is to the north of the line."
A conscious elevation marked his countenance ; and he rose at once
five degrees in the estimation of his friends.
But the days of Comberback were drawing to an end. An officer,
supposed to be Captain Nathaniel Ogle, who sold out of tliat regi-
ment towards the end of the same year that Coleridge left it, had, it is
said, had his attention drawn towards this singular private, by finding
the following sentence written on the walls of the stable where
Comberback's horse-equipage hung : — ''■Eheu! qiiam infortunli miser-
rimum est fidsse felicem!''' He showed him particular distinction.
"When Captain Ogle walked the streets, Coleridge walked behind
liim as his orderly ; but when out of town, they walked abreast,
to the great mystification of his comrades, who could not compre-
liend how a man out of the awkward squad could merit this honour.
It was probably Ogle who wormed the secret out of Coleridge, and
informed his friends where he was. It has, however, been said to
have been through a young man, who had lately left Cambridge for
the army, and on his road through Reading to join his regiment, met
Coleridge in the street, in his dragoon's dress, who was about to pass
him ; on which he said, '• No, Coleridge, this will not do ; we have
been seeking you this six months. I must and will converse with
vou, and have no hesitation in declaring that I shall immediately
inform your friends that I have found you."
Whether owing to one or both of these causes, as Comberback
was sitting as usual at the foot of a bed, in the hospital, in the
midst of one of his talks, and surrounded by his usual gaping
auditors, the door suddenly opened, and in came two or three
gentlemen, his friends, looking in vain some time for him, amid the
uniform dresses. At length they pitched on their man, and taking
him by the arm, led him in silence out of the room. As the sup-
posed deserter passed the door, one of the astonished auditors
uttered, with a sigh — " Poor Silas ! I wish they may let him off
with a cool five hundred ! "
Comberback was no more ! but his memory was long and aficc-
tionately preserved amongst his hospital companions, one of whom
he had volunteered to attend during a most malignant attack of
small-pox, when all others deserted him, and had waited on him,
and watched by him, for six weeks. To prevent contagion, the
patient and his noble-hearted nurse, and eventual saviour, were put
into an out-house, where Coleridge continued all that time, night
and day, administering medicine, guarding him from himself during
violent delirium, and when again capable of listening, sitting by his
bed, and reading to him. In the annals of humanity, that act must
stand as one of the truest heroism.
Connected with this singular passage in Coleridge's life, an old
friend of his told Cottle this anecdote. The inspecting officer of
his regiment, on one occasion, was examining the guns of the men ;
and coming to one piece which was rusty, he called out in an autho-
40G COLERIDGE.
ritative tone, "Whose rusty gun is this?" "Is it ren/ rusty, Sir?"
asked Coleridge. " Yes, Comberbatch, it is," said the officer, stei-uly.
" Then, Sir," rephed Coleridge, " it must bo mine ! " The oddity
of the reply disarmed the officer, and the " poor scholar " escaped
without punishment.
There are vai-ious anecdotes abroad, at once illustrative of Cole-
ridge's queer horsemanship and happy knack at repartee, of which
ii specimen or two may be given here, before we dismiss him as
a ti'ooper.
His awkwardness on horseback was so marked that it attracted
general notice. Once riding along the turnpike road in the county
of Durham, a wag approaching him, noticed his peculiarity, and
thought the rider a line subject for a little fun. Drawing near, he
thus accosted Coleridge, " I say, young man, did you meet a tailor
on the road ?" "Yes," rejjlied Coleridge, "I did, and he told me if
I went a little further T should meet a goosed'' The goose trotted on,
quite satisfied with what he had got.
Coleridge is represented as being at this time on his way to
a neighbouring race-course ; that a farmer, at whose house he was
staying, knowing his sorry horsemanship, had put him on the least
and poorest animal he had, with old saddle and bridle, and rusty
stirrups. On this Rosinante, Coleridge went in a black dress coat,
with black breeches, black silk stockings, and shoes. Two other
friends, as better horsemen, were entrusted with better steeds, and
scon left him on the road. At length, reaching the race-ground, and
thrusting his way through the crowd, he arrived at the spot of
attraction to which all were hastening. Here he confronted a
barouche and four, filled witli smart ladies and attendant gentlemen.
In it was also seated a baronet of sporting celebrity, steward of the
course, and member of the House of Commons ; well known as
having been bought and sold in several parliaments. The baronet
eyed the figure of Coleridge, as he slowly passed the door of the
barouche, and thus accosted him: "A pretty piece of blood, Sir,
you have there." " Yes ! " answered Coleridge. " Rare paces, I
have no doubt, Sir ! " "Yes," answered Coleridge, "he brought me
here a matter of four miles an hour." He was at no loss to perceive
the honourable baronet's drift, who wished to show off before the
ladies : so he quietly waited the opportunity of a suitable reply.
" What a free hand he has ! " continued Nimrod ; " how finely he
carries his tail ! Bridle and saddle well suited, and appropriately
appointed ! " " Yes," said Coleridge. " Will you sell him ?" asked
the sporting baronet. " Yes," was the answer, " if I can have my
price." "Name your price, then, putting the rider into the
bargain ! " _" My price," replied Coleridge, " for the horse, Sir, if
I sell him, is otie hundred guineas ; as to the rider, never having
been in parlia,ment, and never intending to go, his price is not
j-et fixed." The baronet sat down more suddenly than he had risen
— the ladies began to titter — while Coleridge quietly now moved on.
Coleridge returned to Cambridge, but only for a very short time.
The French Revolution, in its early promise, had raised the spirit
COLERIDGE. 407
of enthusiasm for liberty in the bosom of all generous-natured
young men. This had brought together Coleridge, Sou they, and
others of the like temperament. Coleridge now went to visi*-
Southey, at Oxford, where they hit upon the Pantisocracy scheme,
an offshoot from the root of Rousseau's visions of primitive life.
Coleridge is said first to have broached it, and that it was eagerly
adopted by Southey, and a college friend of his, George Burnet.
These young men, soon after, set off to Bristol, Southey's native
place, where they were soon joined by Coleridge. Here Southey,
Coleridge, and Burnet occupied the same lodging ; Robert Lovell,
a young quaker, had adopted this scheme, and they all concluded to
embark for America, where, on the banks of the Susquehannah, they
were to found their colony of peace and perfection, to follow their
own ploughs, harvest their own corn, and show forth to the world
the union of a patriarchal life of labour, with the highest exercise of
intellect and virtue. Luckily for them, the mainspring was wanting.
Without the root of all evil, they could not rear this tree of all good
fruits. They were obliged to borrow cash of Cottle even to pay for
their lodgings ; and the shrewd bookseller, while he listened to their
animated descriptions of their future transatlantic Eden, chuckled
to himself on the impossibility of their ever carrying it out. The
dream gradually came to an end. Lovell died unexpectedly, being
carried off by a fever, brought on through a cold, caught on a journey
to Salisbury. Symptoms of jarring had shown themselves amongst
the friends, which wei"e rather ominous for the permanence of a
pantisocracy. Coleridge had quarrelled with Lovell before he died,
because Lovell, who was married to a Miss Fricker, opposed Cole-
ridge's marriage with her sister till he had butter prospects.
Coleridge and Southey quarrelled about the pantisocracy afterwards.
The most important results to Southey and Coleridge of this pan-
tisocratic coalition were, that they eventually married the two
sisters of Lovell's wife. Both these young poets, with their minds
now fermenting with new schemes of politics and doctrines of
religion, commenced at Bristol as lecturers and authors. The profits
of the lectures were to pay for the voyage to America; they did
not even pay the rent. Coleridge lectured on the English Rebellion
and Charles I., the French Revolution, and on Religion and Pliilo-
.sophy ; Southey, on General History : both displaying their peculiar
talents and characters — Coleridge all imagination, absence of mind,
and impracticability ; Southey, with less genius, but more order,
prudence, and worldly tact. Both of those remarkable men began
by proclaiming the most ultra-liberalism in politics and theology —
both came gradually back to the opinions which early associations
and education had riveted on them unknown to themselves, but
with very different degrees of rapidity, and finally with a very
different tone. Coleridge ran through infidelity, unitarianism, tin;
philosophy of Berkeley, Spinoza, Hartley, and Kant ; and came back
finally to good old Church-of-Englandism, but full of love and
tolerance. Southey, more prudent, and notoriously timid, startled
at once by the horrors which the French committed in the name of
408 COLERIDGE.
liberty, saw that the way of worldly prosperity was closed for life
to him who was not orthodox, and became at once orthodox. But
the consciousness of that sudden change hung for ever ui^ou him,
He knew that reproach would always pursue the suspicious recon-
version, and on that consciousness grew bitterness and intolerance.
Coleridge, having Avandei'ed through all opinions himself, was afraid
to condemn too harshly those who diftered from him. He con-
tented himself with loving God, and preaching the true principles of
Christianity : —
" He pvayeth best who loielli best
All things, both great and small ;
For the dear God who loveth us
He made and loveth all."
Southej', on the contrary, stalked into the fearful I'cgions of bigotry,
assumed in imagination the throne and thunderbolts of Deity, and
" Dealt damnation round the land
On all he deemed his foes."
But this was the worst view of Southey's character. He had that
lower class of virtues which Coleridge had not ; and out of his pru-
dence and timidity sprung that worldly substance which Coleridge
was never likely to acquire, and by which he kindly made up for
some of Coleridge's deficiencies. Coleridge could not provide i)ro-
perly for his family ; Southey helped to provide for them, and invited
Coleridge's wife and daughter to his house, where for many years
they had a home. In all domestic relations Southey was admirable ;
he failed only in those which would have given him a name, j^erhaps,
little short of ]\Iilton for glorious patriotism, had he proceeded to
the end as he began.
Of the literary life of Southey, Coleridge, and Wordsworth, who
soon after joined them in the west, I have yet to speak. We must
now follow Coleridge.
The circumstances which had brought Coleridge to Bristol, though
they did not end in pantisocracy, ended in marriage, which for some
years fixed him in that part of the country. Cottle, who, a poet of
some merit himself, saw the great talent of these young men, offei*ed
Southey fifty guineas for his Joan of Arc, and became its publisher. He
also offered Coleridge thirty guineas for a volume of poems, the cash
to be advanced when he j^leased from time to time. On this slender
foundation Coleridge began the world. He took a cottage at Clevedon,
some miles from Bristol, and thither he took his bride. It appears
truly to have been the poetic idea — love in a cottage, for there was
love and little more. Cottle says it had walls, and doors, and windows ;
but as for furniture, only such as became a philosopher. This was
not enough even for jDoetic lovers. Two days after the wedding, the
poet wrote to Cottle to send him the following unpoetical, but very
essential articles : — " A riddle-slice ; a candle-box ; two ventilators ;
two glasses for the wash-hand stand ; one tin dust-pan ; one small
tin tea-kettle ; one pair of candlesticks ; one carpet brush ; one flour-
dredge ; three tin extinguishers ; two mats ; a pair of slippers ; a
rheese-toaster ; two large tin spoons ; a Bible ; a keg of porter ;
vULWUDGE. 409
coffee, raisins, currauts, catsup, nutmegs, allspice, rice, ginger, and
mace."
So Coleridge began the world. Cottle, having sent these articles,
hastened after them to congratulate the young couple. This is his
account of their residence. '• The situation of the cottage was jdccu-
liarly eligible. It was in the extremity, not in the centre of the
village. It had the benefit of being but one story high ; and, as the
rent was only five pounds i^er annum, and the taxes nought, Mi\
Coleridge had the satisfaction of knowing that, by fairly mounting
his Pegasus, he could make as many verses in a week as would pay
his rent for a year. There was also a small garden, with several
pretty flowers, and the ' tallest tree-rose ' did not fail to be pointed
out, which ' peeped at the chamber window,' and has been honoured
with some beautiful lines."
The cottage is there yet in its garden ; but Coleridge did not long
inhabit it. He soon found that even Clevedon was too far out of the
world for books and intellect ; and returning to Bristol, took lodgings
on Redcliff-hill. From this abode he soon again dei^arted, being in-
%ited by his friend, JJr. Thomas Poole, of Nether Stowey, to visit
him there. During this visit, he wrote some of his first volume of
poems, including the Religious Musings ; he then returned to Bristol,
and started the idea of his Watchman, and made that journey
through the principal manufacturing towns, to obtain subscribers
for it, which he so amusingly describes in his Biographia Literaria.
This was a failure ; but about this time, Charles Lloyd, the eldest
son of Charles Lloyd, the banker, of Birmingham, whom Byron has
commemorated in the alliterative line of
" Lovell, Lamb, and Lloyd,"
was smitten with admiration of Coleridge's genius, and oflered
to come and reside with him. He, therefore, took a larger house on
Kingsdown, where Lloyd was his inmate. Mr. Poole, of Stowey,
however, was not easy to be without the society of Coleridge ; he
sent him word that there was a nice cottage there at liberty, of only
seven pounds per annum rent, and pressed him to come and 6.x. there.
Thither Coleridge went, Lloyd also agreeing to accompany them.
Uufortunatety, Lloyd had the germs of insanity as well as poetry in
him. He was subject to fits, which agitated and alarmed Coleridge.
They eventually disagreed, and Lloyd left, but was afterwards recon-
ciled, well perceiving that his morbid nervousness had had much to
do with the diflerence.
This place became for two years Coleridge's home. Here he wrote
some of his most beautiful poetry. " The manhood of Coleridge's
true poetical life," has been observed by a cotemporary, " was in the
year 1797." He was yet only twenty-five years of age, but his poetical
faculty had now acquired a wide grasp and a deep power. Here ho
wrote his Tragedy of Remorse, Christabel, the Dark Ladie, the
Ancient Mariner (which was published in the Lyrical Ballads jointly
with Wordsworth's first poems), his Ode on the Dei^artiug Year, and
his Fcar.s in Solitude. These works arc at once imbued with the
410 COLERIDGE
highest spirit of his poetiy, and the noblest seiitiiueuts of humani'^y,
Here ho was visited by Charles Lamb, Charles Lloyd, Southey,
Hazlitt, Do Quiucey (who had previously presented him generously
with 300/.), the two great potters, the Wedgwoods, and other eminent
men. Wordsworth lived near him at Allfoxden, and was in almost
daily intercourse with him. The foot of Quantock was to Coleridge,
says one of his biographers, a memorable spot. Here his studies
were serious and deep. They were directed not only to poetry, but
into the great bulk of theological philosophy. Here, with his friend
Thomas Poole, a man sympathising in all his tastes, and with Words-
worth, ho roamed over the Quantock hills, drinking in at every step
new knowledge and impressions of nature. In his Biographia Lite-
raria, he says, " My walks were almost daily on the top of Quantock,
and amongst its sloping coombs." He had got an idea of writing
a poem called The Brook, tracing a stream which he had found,
from its source in the hills amongst the yellow-red moss and conical
glass-shaped tufts of bent, to the first break, or fall, where its drops
become audible, and it begins to form a channel ; thence to the peat
and turf barn, itself built of the same dark masses as it sheltered ;
to the sheepfold ; to the first cultivated spot of ground ; to the
lonely cottage, and its bleak garden won from the heath ; to the
hamlets, the market towns, the manufactories, and the sea-port. It
will be seen that this was not quite on so fine a scale as Childe
Harold, and that Wordsworth has carried out the idea in the Sonnets
on the river Duddon, not quite so amply as the original idea itself.
He says, when strolling alone he was always with book, paper, and
pencil in hand, making studies from nature, whence his striking and
accurate transcripts of such things. It will be noticed in the article
on Wordsworth, that these rambles, in the ignorant minds of the
country j^eople, converted him and Coleridge into suspicious charac-
ters. Coleridge was so open and simj)le, that they said, " As to
Coleridge, he is a whirlbrain, that talks whatever comes uiapermost ;
but that Wordsworth ! he is a dark traitor. You never hear him say
a syllable on the subject ! "
Coleridge himself, in his Biograj^hia Literaria, tells us, that a cer-
tain baronet in the neighbourhood got Government to send down
a spy to watch them. That this spy was a very honest fellow, for
a wonder That he heard them, he said, at first, talking a deal of
Spy Nosey (Spinoza), and thought they were up to him, as his nose
was none of the smallest ; but he soon found that it was all about
books. Coleridge also gives the amusing dialogue between the inn-
keeper and the baronet, the innkeeper having been ordered to enter-
tain the spy, but, like the spy, soon found that the strange gentlemen
were only jioets, and going to put Quantock into verse.
Many are the testimonies of attachment to this neighbourhood
and the wild Quantock hills, to be found in the poems of Coleridge ;
and in the third book of the Excursion, AVordsworth describes
the Quantock and their rambles with all the gusto of a fond
memory.
In Colerid;re's poem of Fears in Solitude^ a noble-hearted poem,
COLERIDGE. 411
these hills, and one of these very dells, are described with graphic
truth and affection.
" A green and silent spot amid the hills,
A small and silent dell I O'er stiller place
No singing skylark ever poised himself;
The hills are heathy, save that swelling slope,
Which hath a gay and gorgeous covering on,
All golden with the never bloomless furze
Which now blooms most profusely ; but the dell,
Bathed by the mist, is fresh and delicate
As vernal corn field, or the imripe flax,
MTjen through its half-transparent stalks at evt,
The level sunshine glimmers with green light.
Oh ! 'tin a quiet, spirit-healing nook !
Which all, methinks, would love : but chiefly he,
The humble man. who, in his youthful years.
Knew just so much of folly as had made
His early manhood more securely wise !
Here he might lie on fern or withered heath.
While from the singing lark, that sings imseen
The minstrelsy that solitude loves best,
And from the sun, and from the breezy air,
Sweet influences trembled o'er his frame;
And he with many feelings, many thoughts,
Made up a meditative joy, and found
Religious meanings in the forms of nature !
And so his senses gradually wrapt
In a half sleep, he dreams of better worlds,
And dreaming hears thee still, O singing lark.
That singest like an angel in the clouds."
Here, buried in summer beauty from the world, in this green and
delicious oratory, he lay and poured out those finely human thoughts
on war and patriotism, which enrich this poem ; which closes with
a descriptive view of these hills, the wide prospects from them, and
of little quiet Stowey lying at their feet.
" But now the gentle dew-fall sends abroad
The fruit-like perfume of the golden furze;
The light has left the summit of the hill ;
Though still a sunny gleam lies beautiful
Aslant the ivied beacon. Now farewell.
Farewell, awhile, O soft and silent spot!
On the green sheep-track, up the heathy hill.
Homeward I wind my way ; and lo ! recalled
From bodings that have well-nigh wearied nie,
I find myself upon the brow, and pause
Startled ! And after lonely sojourning
In such a quiet and surrounded nook,
This burst of prospect, — here the shadowy main,
Dim-tinted, there the mighty majesty
Of that huge amphitheatre of rich
And elmy fields, seems like society
Conversing with the mind, and giving it
A livelier impulse and a dance of thought !
And now, beloved Stowey ! I behold
Thy church-tower, and, metliinks, the four huge elms
Clustering, whicli mark the mansion of my friend ;
And close behind them, hidden from my view,
Is my own lowly cottage, where my babe,
And my babe's mother, dwell in peace! With light
And quickened footsteps thitherward I tend.
Remembering thee, O green and silent deiU
And grateful that, by nature's quietness
And solitary musings, all my heart
Is softened, and made worthy to indulge
Love, and the thoughts that yearn for humankind."
412 COLERIDGE.
Stowej', like all other places where remarkable men have li^ed,
even but a few years ago, impresses us with a melancholy sense of
rapid change, of the swift flight of human life. There is the little
town, there ascend beyond it the green slopes and airy range of the
Quantock hills, scattered with masses of woodland, which give a
feeling of deep solitude. But where is the poet, who used here to
live, and there to wander and think ? Where is his friend Poole ?
All are gone, and village and country are again resigned to the use
of simple and little-informed people, who take poets for spies and
dark traitors. The little town is vastly like a continental one. It
consists of one street, which at an old market cross diverges into
two others, exactly forming an old-fashioned letter Y. The houses are,
like continental ones, white, and down the street rolls a little full
stream, quite in the fashion of a foreign village, with broad flags
laid across to get at the houses. It stands in a particulai'ly agree-
able, rich, and well-wooded country, with the range of the Quantock
hills, at some half mile distance, and from them a fine view of the
sea and the Welsh coast, on the other side of the Bristol channel.
The house in which Thomas Poole used to live, and where
Coleridge and his friend had a second home, is about the centre of
the village. It is a large old-fashioned house, with pleasant garden,
and ample farm-yard, with paddocks behind. I found it inhabited
by a medical man and his sister, who did all honour to the memory
of Coleridge, and very courteously allowed me to see the house. The
lady obligingly took me round the garden, and pointed out to me
the windows of the room overlooking it, where so many remarkable
men used to assemble.
Mr. Poole, who was a bachelor, and a magistrate, died a few years
ago, leaving behind him the character of an upright man, and a
genuine friend to the poor. On his monument in the church is
inscribed, that he was the friend of Coleridge and Southey.
The cottage inhabited by Coleridge is the last on the left hand
going out towards Allfoxden. It is now, according to the very com-
mon and odd fate of poets' cottages, a Tom and Jerry shop. Moore's
native abode is a whisky shop ; Burns's native cottage is a little
public-house ; Shelley's house at Great Marlowe is a beer shop ; it
is said that a public-house has been built on the spot where Scott
was born, since I was in that city ; Coleridge's house here is a beer
shop. Its rent was about 11. a-year, and it could not be expected to
])e very superb. It stands close to the road, and has nothing now to
distinguish it from any other ordinary pot-house. Where Coleridge
sate penning the Ode to the Nightingale, with its
"Jug, jug, jug,
And C^nt low note more sweet than all; "
which the printer, by a very natural association, but to the poet'a
infinite consternation, converted into
" Jug. jug, jug,
And that low note more sweet than ale ; "
sate, when I entered, a number of country fellows, and thought their
ale more sweet than any poet's or nightingale's low notes. Behind
COLERIDGE. 413
the house, however, there were traces of the past pleasantness, two
good large gardens, and the old orchard where Coleridge sate on the
apple-tree, "crooked earthward;" and while Charles Lamb and his
sister went to ascend the hills and gaze on the sea, himself detained
by an accident, wrote his beautiful lines, " This Lime-tree Bower,
my prison," including this magnificent picture : —
" Yes, they wander on
In gladness all: but thee, methinks, most {,'lad.
My gentle-hearted Charles ! for thou hast pined
And hungered after nature, it'.any a year ;
In the great city pent, winning thy way.
With sad yet patient soul, through evil and pain,
And strange calamity ! Ah ! slowly sink
Behind the western ridge, thou glorious sun !
Shine in the slant beams of the sinking orb,
Ye purple heath flowers ! richlier beam, j'e clouds !
Live in the yellow light, ye distant groves !
And kindle, thou blue ocean ! So my friend,
Struck with deep joy, may stand as I have stood.
Silent with swimming sense : yea, gazing round
On the wide landscape, gaze till all doth seem
Less gross than bodily; and of such hues
As veil the Almighty Spirit when yet he makes
Spirits perceive his presence."
The woman in the house, — her husband was out in the fields, —
and her sister, had neither of them heard of such a thing as a poet.
When I asked leave to see the house and garden, on account of a
gentleman who had once lived there, " Yes," said the landlady, quite
a young woman, " a gentleman called one day, some time age, and
said he wished to drink a glass of ale in this house, because a great
man had lived in it."
" A great man, did he say 'I Why, he was a poet."
" A poet. Sir, what is that ? "
" Don't you know what a poet is ? "
" No, Sir."
" But vou know what a ballad-singer is 1 "
" Oh yes ; to be sure."
" Well, a i:)oet makes ballads and songs, and things of that kind."
" Oh, lauks-o' me ! why, the gentleman said it was a great man."
"Well, he was just what I tell you — a poet — a ballad maker, and
all that. Nothing more, I assure you."
" Good lauk-a-me ! how could the gentleman say it was a great
man ! Is it the same man you mean, think you 1 "
" Oh ! no doubt of it. But let me see your garden."
The sister went to .show it me. There were, as I have said, two
gardens, lying high above the house, so that you could see over part
of the town, and, in the other direction, the upland slopes and hills.
Behind the garden was still the orchard, in which Coleridge had so
often mused. Returning towards the house, the remains of a fine
bay-tree caught my attention, amid the ruins of the garden near the
house, now defaced with weeds, and scattered with old tubs and
empty beer barrels.
" That," said I, " was once a fine bay-tree."
" Ay, that was here when we came '
414 COLERIDGE.
" No doubt of it. That poet planted it, as sure as it is there. Thai
is just ono of those people's tricks. "Wherever they go they are
always planting that tree."
" Good Lord, do they ? what odd men they must be ! " .said the
young woman.
Such is the intelligence of the common people in the west, and in
many other parts of England. Is it any wonder that the parents
of these people took Coleridge for a sjiy, and Wordsworth for a dark
traitor ? But these young women were very civil, if not very
enlightened. As I returned through the house, the young landlady,
evidently desirous to enter into further discourse, came smiling up,
and said, " It's very pleasant to see relations addicting to the old
place." Not knowing exactly what she meant, but supposing
that she imagined I had come to see the house because the poet
was a relation of mine, I .said, " Verv ; but I was no relation of the
poet's."
" No ! and yet you come to see the house ; and perhaps you have
come a good way 1 "
" Yes ; from London."
" From London ! what, on purpose ? "
" Yes, entirely on purpose."
Here the amazement of herself, her sister, and the men drinking,
grew astoundingly. " Ah ' " I added, " he was a great man — a very
great man — he was a particular fiiend of Mr. Poole's."
" Oh, indeed ! " said they. " Ay, he must have been a gentleman,
then, for Mr. Poole was a very great man, and a justice."
Having; elevated the character of Coleridge from that of a poet
into the friend of a justice of the peace, I considered that I had
vindicated his memory, and took my leave.
In September, 1798, Coleridge quitted Stowey and England, in
company with Wordsworth, for a tour in Germany. His two
wealthy friends, Thomas and Josiah Wedgwood, the great Stafford-
shire potters, had settled on him 150/. a-year for life, which, witli
other slight means, enabled him to undertake this journey, with
Wordsworth and his sister. The Wedgwoods were Unitarians, and
now looked on Coleridge as the great champion of the cause, for he
preached at Taunton and other places in the chapels of that denomi-
nation ; and in his journey on account of the Watchman had done
so in most of the large manufacturing towns, entering the pulpit in
a blue coat and white waistcoat, that not a rag of the woman of
Babylon might be seen on him. These are his own words, in his
Biographia Literaria. Thomas Wedgwood either died long before
Coleridge, and so the annuity died with him, or he might have with-
drawn his moiety when Coleridge ceased to fulfil his religious hopes :
it did, howevei', cease ; but the 751. from Josiah Wedgwood was paid
punctually to the day of his death.
From tills journey to Germany we may date a great change in the
tone of Coleridge's mind. He became more metaphysical, and a
thorough Kantist. From this period, there can be no doubt, on
looking over his poems, that his poetry suffered from the effects of
COLERIDGE. 415
his philosophy. But to this journey we owe also the able translation
of AVallenstein, \yhich was then a new production, the original being
l)ublished only on the eve of Coleridge's return to England, Septem
ber, 1799, and the translation appearing in 1800. In Coleridge's
owi account of his tour, the description of the ascent of the Brocken
is one of the most living and graphic possible. Having gone over
the ground myself, the whole scene, and feeling of the scene, has
never shice been revived by anything which I have read in any
degree hke the account of Coleridge. In that, too, is to be found
the same story of their rude treatment at an inn in Hesse, which is
given in the article on Wordsworth.
On Coleridge's return to England, he settled in London for a time,
and brought out his translation of Wallenstein, which was [jurchased
by the Messrs. Longman, on the condition that the English version,
and Schiller's play in German, should be published simultaneously.
Coleridge now engaged to execute the literary and political depart-
ment of the Morning Post, to which Southey, Wordsworth, and
Lamb were also contributors. In this situation he was accused by
Mr. Fox, under the broad appellation of the Morning Post, but with
allusion to his articles, of having broken up the peace of Amiens, and
renewing the war. It was a war, said Fox, produced by the Morning
Post. Coleridge's strictures on Buonaparte occasioned that tyrant
to select him for one of the objects of his vengeance, and to issue an
order for his arrest when in Italy. Coleridge, on quitting the Morn-
ing Post, went to reside near his friends Southey and Wordsworth.
He was much at the houses of each. In 1801, he regularly took
a house at Keswick, thinking, like his two great friends, to reside
there permanently. The house, if not built for him, was expressly
finished for him by a then neighbour, Mr. Jackson ; but it was soon
found that the neighbourhood of the lakes was too damp for his
rheumatic habit. In 1803, his health was so much worse that it
was considered necessary for him to seek a warmer climate ; and
he accepted an invitation from his friend Mr., since Sir John
Stoddart, to visit him at Malta, which he accepted. Here he acted
for some time as public secretary of the island. In 1805 he returned,
not much benehted by his sojourn. He came back through Italy,
and at Rome saw Allston, the American painter, and Tieck, the
German poet. It was on this occasion that he was warned of the
order of Buonaparte to arrest him ; and hastening to Leghorn with
a passport furnished him by the Pope, was carried out to sea by an
American captain. At sea, however, they were chased by a French
vessel, which so alarmed the American that he compelled Coleridge
to throw all his papers overboard, by which all the fruits of his
literary labours in Rome were lost.
On his return to England he again went to the lakes, but this
time was more with Wordsworth than with Southey. Wordsworth
was at this time living at Grasmere, and we have a humorous
account of Coleridge, in his " Stanzas in my pocket copy of Thom-
son's Castle of Indolence," as " the noticeable man with large grey
eyes," In another place \Yordsworth has, in one line descriptive of
41 G COLERIDGE.
him there, given us one of the most beautiful portraitures of a poet
dreamer, — . . , , ,
" The biooduig poet with the heavenly eyes. '
At Grasmcre he plamied The Friend, Wordsworth and some other
of his friends furnishing a few contributions. From this period
till 1816, he appears to have been fluctuating between the Lakes,
London, and the w^est of England. In 1807 we find him at Bristol ;
and then at Stowey again, at Mr. Poole's. It was at this time that
De Quincey sought an interview with him. He went to Stowey, did
not meet with Coleridge, but stayed two days with Mr. Poole, and
describes him and his house thus : " A plain-dressed man, in a i-ustic
old-fashioned house, amply furnished with modern luxuries, and
a good librarj^ Mr. Poole had travelled extensively, and had so
entirely dedicated himself to his humbler fellow-countrymen who
resided in his neighbourhood, that for many miles round he was the
general arbiter of their disputes, the guide and counsellor of their
daily life ; besides being appointed executor and guardian to his
children by every third man who died in or about the town of
Nether Stowey."
De Quincey followed Coleridge to Bridgewater, and found him
thus : " In Bridgewater I noticed a gateway, standing under which
was a man, corresponding to the description given me of Coleridge,
whom I shall presently describe. In height he seemed to be five feet
eight inches ; in reality he was about an inch and a half taller,
though, in the latter part of life, from a lateral curvature in the
spine, he shortened gradually from two to thi'ce inches. His person
was broad and full, and tended even to corpulence ; his complexion
was fair, though not what painters technically style fair, because it
was associated with black hair ; his eyes were large and soft in their
expression ; and it was by a peculiar appearance of haze or dimness
which mixed with their light, that I recognised my object. This was
Coleridge. I examined him steadily for a moment or more, and it
struck me that he neither saw myself, nor any other object in the
street. He was in a deep reverie ; for I had dismounted, made two
or three trifling arrangements at the inn-door, and advanced close to
him, before he seemed apparently conscious of my presence. The
sound of my voice announcing my name first awoke him. He stared,
and for a moment seemed at a loss to understand my purpose, or his
own situation ; for he repeated rapidly a number of words which
had no relation to either of us. There was no maitvaise hontc in hia
manner, but simple perplexity, and an apparent difficulty in re-
covering his position among daylight realities. This little scene
over, he received me with a kindness of manner so marked that it
might be called gracious."
Mr. De Quincey then tells us that Coleridge was at this moment
domesticated with a most amiable and enlightened family, descend-
ants of Chubb, the philosophic writer; and that, walking out in the
evening with Coleridge, in the streets of Bridgewater, he never saw
a man so much interrupted by the courteous attentions of young
and old.
COLERIDGE. 417
In 1809 we find him again at the Lakes ; in 1810 he left them
again with Mr. Basil Montague, and remained some time at hia
house. In 1811 he was visiting at Hammersmith with Mr. Morgan,
a common friend of himself and Southey, whose acquaintance they
had made at Bristol ; and here he deUvered a course of lectures on
Shakspeare and ]\Iilton. While still residing with Mr. Morgan, his
Tragedy of Kemorse was brought upon the stage at Drury-lane, at
the instance of Lord Byron, then one of the managing committee,
with admirable success. After this he retired to the village of Calne,
in Wiltshire, with his friend Morgan, partly to be near Lisle Bowles ;
where he arranged and pubhshed his Sibylline Leaves, and wrote
the greater part of the Biographia Literaria. He also dedicated to
Mr. Morgan the Zapolya, which was offered to Mr. Douglas Kinnaird,
for Drury-lane, and declined. The effect of this refusal Coleridge has
noticed in some lines at the end of the Biographia Literaria, quoted
from this very play : —
■' O "C are querulous creatures ! Little less
Than all things can suflice to make us liappy ;
Thougli little more than nothing is enough
To make us wretched."
In 1816 he took refuge under tlie roof of Mr. Gillman, tho
surgeon, in the Grove, at Highgate. The motive for his going to
reside with this gentleman was, that he might exercise a salu-
tary restraint upon him as it regarded the taking of opium. His
rheumatic j^ains had first led him to adopt the use of this insidious
di-ug ; and it had, as usual, in time, acquired so much power over
him as to render his life miserable. He became the victim of its
worst terrors, and so much its slave, that all his resolutions and
precautions to break the habit, he regularly himself defeated. At
one time a friend of his hired a man to attend him everywhere, and
to sternly refuse all his solicitations for, or attempts to get opium ;
but this man he cheated at his pleasure. He would send the man
on some trifling errand, while on their walks, turn into a druggist's
shop, and secure a good stock of the article. Mr. Gillman, who had
only himself and wife in his family, was I'ecommended to him as the
proper man to exercise a constant, steady, but kindly authority over
him in this respect. Coleridge, at the first interview, was so much
delighted with the prospect of this house, that he was impatient to
get there, and came very characteristically with Christabel in his
hand, to send to his host. With the Gillmans Coleridge continued
till his deaih ; and his abode here is too well known to need much
mention of it. Plere he held a species of soiree, at which numbers
of persons were in the habit of attending to listen to his extra-
ordinary conversations, or rather monologues. Those who heard
him on these occasions used to declare that you could form no
adequate idea of the intellect of the man till you had also heard him.
Yet, by some strange neglect, or some wish of his own, these extra-
ordinary harangues were never taken down ; which, if they merited
tlie praises conferred on them, is a loss to the world, as well as to
his full fame.
418 COLERIDGE.
Coleridge died on the 2otli of July, 1834, being about tliree moni'ng
short of sixty-two years of age. He lies buried iu Ilighgate.
The house which Mr. Gillman occupied is now occupied by his
successoi-, Mr. Brendon. There is nothing remarkable about the
ho\ise except its view. Coleridge's room looked upon a delicious
prospect of wood and meadow, with a gay garden full of colour,
inidjr the window. When a friend of his first saw him there, he
said he thought he had taken his dwelling-place like an abbot.
Tliere he cultivated his flowers, and had a set of birds for his pen-
sioners, who came to breakfast with him. He might be seen taking
his daily stroll \ip and down near Highgate, with his black coat
and white locks, and a book in his hand and was a great acquaint-
ance of the little children. He loved, says the same authority, to
I'ead great folios, and to make old voyages with Purchas and Marco
Polo ; the seas being in good visionary condition, and the vessel
well stocked with botargoes.
In England there has been of late years a decided tendency to
underrate his poetry, and we have even seen his claim to the
character of a poet all but denied. There has been an industrious
endeavour to trace almost every fine idea, and fine composition
bearing his name, to some borrowed source, English or foreign. But
while the " Hymn in the Vale of Chamouni," and similar poems
remain, though "Wordsworth always asserted that Coleridge " never
was at Chamouni, nor near it," the character of Coleridge will still
continue that of one of the noblest poets of any country. Though
his philosophy is but little thought of in this country, it is highly
estimated in America; some of his works are class-books in the
Universities, and his " Aids to Reflection " has, perhaps, more than
any other production, formed the minds of the studious young men
of the United States. Such is the enthusiasm for the memory of
Colei'idge in the States, that numbers of Americans visit his last
residence at Highgate, and one of them offered a large price for the
very doors of his room, that he might set them up in his own ho\jse
across the Atlantic.
"^
;.- ?- xm
FELICIA IIEMANS.
If the lives of our poets had been written with the same attention
to the placing of their abodes as clearly before you as that of Mrs,
Ilemans has been, both by Mr. Chorley and by her own sister, it
might have saved me some thousand of miles of travel to visit and
sec them for myself.
Felicia Dorothea Browne, the future poetess, bearing the familiar
iiame of Mrs. Hemans, was born in Duke-street, Liverpool, on tho
25th of September, 1 793. The house is still pointed out to strangers,
but has nothing besides this event to give it a distinction from other
town houses. Her father was a considerable merchant, a native of
Ireland. There seems to have been a pai-ticular connexion with the
state of Venice, for her mother was descended from an old Italian
family. Her father was the Imperial and Tuscan Consul at Liverpool.
The old name of Mrs. Hemans's maternal ancestry is said to havo
been Veniero, but had got corrupted to the German name of Wagner.
]\Irs. Hemans was the fifth of seven children, one of whom died in
infancy. Before she was seven years old, her father, having sufiered
losses in trade, retired from business, and settled at Gwrych, near
Abergele, in Denbighshire, close to the sea, in a large, old, solitary
mansion, shut in by a range of rocky mountains. Here the family
resided nine years, so that the greater and more sensitive part of her
girlhood was passed here. She was sixteen when they removed.
r 2
420 MRS. HEMANS.
Here, then, the iuteuse love of nature and of poetry, which dis-
tinguished lacr, grew and took its full possession of her. How strong
this attachment to the beauty and fresh liberty of nature had become
by her eleventh year, was shown by the restraint which she felt in
passing a winter in Loudon, at that age, with her father and mother ;
and her intense longing to be back. Her rambles on the shore, and
amongst the hills ; her wide range through that old house, with a
good library, and the companionship of her brothers and sisters,
were all deeply calculated to call forth the spirit of poetry in any
heart in which it lay. Her elder sister died ; and she turned for
companionship to her younger sister, since her biographer, and lier
younger brother, Claude Scott Browne, who also died young. Her
two elder brothers, who with her younger sister only remain, became
officers in the army ; and this added a strong martial tendency to
the spirit of her genius. Her mother, who was a very noble-minded
and accomplished woman, bestow(;d gi'cat care on her education, and
her access to books filled her mind with all the food that the young
and poetical heart craves for. The Bible and Shakspeare were her
two great books ; and the traces of their influence are conspicuous
enough in the genuine piety and the lofty imagery of her writing.
She used to i-ead Shakspeare amongst the branches of an old apple -
tree. In this secret retreat, and in the nut wood, the old arbour
and its swing, the post-office tree — a hollow tree, where the family
put letters for each other, — the pool where they launched their little
ships, used to be referred to by her as belonging to a perfect elysium
of childhood. She was fond of dwelling on " the strange creeping
awe with which the sohtude and stillness of Gwrych inspired her."
It had the reputation of being haunted — another spur to the imagi-
native faculty. There was a tradition of a fairy greyhound, which
kept watch at the end of the avenue, and she used to sally forth by
moonlight to get a sight of it. The sea-shore was, however, her
favourite resort ; and one of her biograjshers states that it was a
favourite freak of hers, when quite a child, to get up of a summer
night, when the servants ftxucied her safe in bed, and making her
way to the water side, indulge in a stolen bathe. The sound of the
ocean, and the melancholy sights of wreck and ruin which follow a
storm, are said to have made an indelible impression upon her mind,
and gave their colouring and imagery —
" A sound and a gleam of tlie moaning sea,
to many of her lyrics. In short, a situation cannot be imagined
more certain to call forth and foster all the elements of poetry than
this of the girlhood of Mrs. Hemans. To the forms of nature, wild,
lonely, and awful, the peoiDle, with their traditions, their music, and
their interesting characteristics, added a crowning spell. The young
poetess was rapidly springing in this delightful wilderness into the
woman. She is described by her sister, at fifteen, as " in the full
glow of that radiant beauty which was destmed to fade so early
The mantling bloom of her cheeks was shaded by a profusion of
natural ringlets, of a rich, golden brown ; and the ever-varying
MKS. HEMAXS. 421
espressiou of her brilliant eyes gave a changeful play to her counte-
nance, which ^Y0uld have made it impossible for any painter to do
justice to it."
According to all accounts, at this period she was one of the most
lovely and fascinating creatures imaginable ; she was at once beau-
tiful, warm-hearted, and enthusiastic. Her days had been spent in
wandering through mountain and glen, and along the sea-shore, with
her brothers and sister, or in brooding over the pages of Froissart
and Shakspeare. Her mind was full of visions of romance, her heart
of thrilling sensibilities ; and at this moment the feeling of martial
gloiy came to add a new enthusiasm to her character. Her two
elder brothers were in the army, and one was fighting in Spain.
There were many poetic and chivalrous associations with this
country, which now were felt by her with double force, and which
turned all her heart and imagination in this direction. In this
critical hour, a young officer who was visiting in the neighbourhood
was introduced to the family, and her fate was decided. It was
Captain Hemans. The hero of the hour, he became completely so,
when he also set sail for Spain. It was natural for so enthusiastic
and poetic a damsel to contemplate him as a warrior doing battle
for the deliverance of that land of Gothic and of Moorish romance,
in the most delusive colouring. When he returned, it was to become
her husband in an ill-fated marriage.
In the mean time, in ] 809, and when she was about seventeen,
her family quitted Gwrych, so long her hajspy home. Since then
the greater part of the house has been pulled down, and a baronial-
looking castle has arisen in its stead, the seat of Mr. Lloyd Bamford
Hesketh. Bronwylfa, near St. Asaph, in Flintshire, became the
residence of her family. Here she lived for about three years, ok
till 1812, when Captain Hemans returned, and they were marrie«i.
For a short time she lived with her husband at Daventry, who r.
they returned to Bronwylfa, where they lived till 1818, or about six
years, the whole period of their married life that they lived together.
From that time till the death of Mrs. Hemans, seventeen years
more, they lived apart — she in Wales, England, and Ireland, he in
Italy.
At the time of Captain Hemans's first acquaintance with her, or
in 1808, she was already an avowed poetess, having not only written
much verse, but having already published a volume. While they
lived together, tliough called upon to care for a rapidly-increasing
family, — for at the time of Co.ptain Hemans's departure for Italy he
was the father of five boys, — she still pursued her studies, and wrote
and published her poems. In 1812 appeared Dcmestic Affections
and other Poems ; and soon after. Tales and Historic Scenes. After
her husband's departure she continued her writing with undaunted
fortitude. In 1819 she contended for the prize for a poem on Sir
William Wallace, and bore it away from a host of competitors. In
1820 she published The Sceptic : and the following year she won
another prize from the Royal Society of Literature, for the best
poem on Dartmoor. From this time Mrs. Hcniaus may be said to
422 MRS. HEMANS.
be fiiirly before the public ; and her fame, from year to year, con-
tinued steadily to advance. There is something admii-able in the
manner in which Mrs. Ilemans, as a deserted wife, her father also
now being dead, and at such a distance from the literary world,
marched on her way, and at every step won some fresh ground of
honour. Daring this period she made a firm and fatherly friend of
Dr. Luxmore, the bishop of St. Asaph, and, at his house, became
acquainted with Reginald Heber. Her sister returning from a visit
to Germany, where one of her brothers then was, brought with her
a store of German books, and a great enthusiasm about German
literature. This ojiened up to her a new field of intellectual life,
and produced a decided effect on her poetic tone and style. From
the hour of Mrs. Hemans's acquaintance with the German literature,
you perceive that she had discovered her own/orie, and a new life of
tenderness and feeling was manifest in all she wrote. She became
an almost constant writer in Blackwood's and Colburn's Magazines.
Schiller, Goethe, Korner, and Tieck, — how sensibly is the influence
of their spirit felt in The Forest Sanctuary ; how different was the
tone of this to all which had gone before ! The cold classical model
was abandoned, the heart and the fancy spoke out in every line,
warm, free, solemn, and tenderly thoughtful. She dared the stage,
in The Vespers of Palermo ; and though the tragedy was cruelly
used in London, she bore up bravely against the unkindness, and
was afterwards rewarded by a reception of it in Edinburgh, as
cordially rapturous, and which brought her the friendship of Sir
AValter Scott.
In 1825 Mrs. Hemans made another remove, though but a short
one. The house in which she lived at Bronwylfa had been purchased
by her elder brother, who came to live in it; and she, with her
mother, sister, and her children, removed about a quarter of a mile,
to Rhyllon, yet in full view of the old house. This house at
Rhyllon is described as being a tall, staring, brick building, almost
destitute of trees, of creepers on the walls, or of shrubbery ; while
Bronwylfa, on the contrai-y, was a perfect bower of roses, peeping,
says her sister, like a bird's nest out of the foliage in which it was
embosomed. " In spite, however," continues the same sisterly bio-
grapher, " of the unromantic exterior of her new abode, the earlier
])art of Mrs. Hemans's residence at Rhyllon may, perhaps, be con-
sidered as the hapi^iest of her life ; as far, at least, as the term hap-
piness could ever be fitly apj^lied to any period of it later than
childhood. The house, with all its ugliness, was large and con-
venient ; the view from the windows beautiful and extensive ; and
its situation, on a fine green slope, terminating in a pretty w^oodland
dingle, peculiarly healthy and cheerful. Never, perhaps, had she
more thorough enjoyment of her boys than in witnessing and often
joining in their sports, in those pleasant, breezy fields, where the
kites soared so triumphantly, and the hoops trundled so merrily, and
where the cowslips grew as cowslips never grew before. An atmo-
Hphcre of home soon gathered round the dwelhng ; roses weru
planted, and honeysuckles trained ; and the rustUng of the solitar;^
MRS. HKMANS. 423
poplar near the window was taken to her heart, like the voice or
a friend. The dingle became a favourite haunt, where she would
pass many dream-like hours of enjoyment with her books, and her
own sweet fancies, and her children playing around her. Every tree,
and flower, and tuft of moss that sprung amidst its green recesses,
was invested with some individual charm by that rich imagination,
so skilled in —
" Clothing the palpable and the familiar
With golden exhalations of the dawn."
Here, on what the boys would call "mamma's sofa," — a little grassy
mound under her favourite beech-tree, — she first read The Talisman,
and has described the scene with a loving minuteness, in her Hour
of Romance : —
" There were thick leaves above me and around,
And low sweet sighs, like those of childhood's sleep,
Amid their dimness, and a fitful sound,
As of soft showers on water. Dark and deep
Lay the oak shadows o'er the turf, so still,
They seemed but pictured glooms ; a hidden rill
Made music — such as haunts us in a dream —
Under the fern-tufts ; and a tender gleam
Of soft green light, as by the glow-worm shed,
Came pouring through tlie woven beech- boughs down."
Many years after, in the sonnet. To a distant Scene, she addresses,
witli a fond yearning, this well-remembered haunt : — •
" still are the cowslips from thy bosom springing,
O far oft" grassy dell! "
How many precious memories has she hung round the thought of
the cowslip, that flower with its " gold coat " and " fairy favours,"
which is, of all others, so associated with the " voice of happy child-
hood," and was, to her, ever redolent of the hours when her
" Heart so leapt to that sweet laughter's tune ! "
Another favourite resort was the picturesque old bridge over the
Clwyd ; and when her health admitted of more aspiring achieve-
ments, she delighted in roaming to the hills ; and the announcement
of a walk to Cwm, a remote little hamlet, nestled in a mountain
hollow amidst very lovely sylvan scenery, about two miles from
llhyllon, would be joyously echoed by her elated companions, to
whom the recollection of those happy rambles must always be un-
speakably dear. Very often, at the outset of these expeditions, the
party would be reinforced by the addition of a certain little Kitty
Jones, a child from a neighbouring cottage, who had taken an
especial fancy to Mrs. Hemans, and was continually watching her
movements. This little creature never saw her without at once
attaching itself to her side, and confidingly placing its tiny hand in
hers. So great was her love for children, and her repugnance to hurt
the feehngs of any living creature, that she never would shake oft'
this singular appendage, but let little Kitty rejoice in her " pride of
place," till the walk became too long for her capacity, and she would
quietly fall buck of her own accord.
Those who only know the neighbourhood of St. Asaph from
424 MRS. HEMAN2.
travelling along its higliwaj's, can be little aware how much delight-
ful scenery is attainable within walks of two or three miles' distance
from Mrs. Hemans's residence. The placid beauty of the Clwyd,
and the wilder graces of its sister stream, the Elwy, particularly in
the vicinity of " Our Lady's Well," and the interesting rocks and
•caves at Cefu, are little known to general tourists ; though, by the
jovers of her poetry, it will be remembered how sweetly she has
apostrophized the
" Fount of the chapel, with ages grey ; "
and how tenderly, amidst far different scenes, her thoughts reverted
to the
" Cambrian river, witli slow music gliding
By pastoral hills, old woods, and ruined towers."
Tliis is a peep into the daily life of the poetess, which is worth
a whole volume of ordinary biography. We see her here amid the
lonely magnificence of nature ; yet, at the same time, surrounded by
Hiose affectionate ties that make the only real society on earth.
The affectionate mother, the beloved brother and sister, the buoyant
hearts and voices of her own children. We see that there and then
she was and must be happy. We see how wise was that instinctive
love that drew the poetic heart from the flattering and worshipping
things of the city, to dwell apart with God, with nature, and with
family affection. What has all the society of ordinary city and
literary life to equal that ? The throng of drawing-rooms, where
people stand and look at each other, and remain strangers as much
as if they were sundered by half the globe ! Nay, it is not half a
globe, it is a whole world of fest-succeeding engagements ; dissipa-
tions that beget indifference ; Sittings of the eye from face to face,
and of the ear from gossip to gossip, where neither eye nor ear ever
finds any power or wish for rest, but the heart j^awns in insufferable
Aveariness, if decorum keep the mouth shut. It is this dreary woi'ld
which is thrust between man and man, and kills at once time and
enjoyment. What has such a life, with all its petty scandals, and
bitterness, and foul criticisms, and rankling jealousies, to compare
with the breezy mountain, and the blue sky soaring high above ;
with the grey ruin, and the rushing river ; with the dell and its
whispering leaves, soothing down the mind to a peaceful conscious-
ness, in which thoughts of eternity steal into it, and come forth again
to the eternal page 1
It is a deep consolation to know that the teachers and refiners of
men do sometimes enjoy a life thus heavenly, and repose at once on
the gracious bosom of nature, and on those of long-tried and beloved
friends. Such was, for a time, the life of Mrs. Hemans here. For
a time the elements of happiness seemed daily to augment them-
selves. Her younger brother, a man of a most genial nature, and
liis amiable wife, came from service in Canada, and settled down
among them. The circle of affinity and social pleasure seemed com-
plete ; but time rapidly causes a change upon the completest
combinations of earth. In rapid succession death and sorrow feU
MRS. HEMANS, 425
on the house of her elder brother ; her mother sickened and died ;
her younger brother was called to an appointment in Ireland, and
her sister was married, and was withdrawn to a distance. The fatal
inroad was made into the circle of happiness ; and from that time
Mrs. Hemans began to contemplate quitting the scene of so many
years' sojourn. She made a visit to Liverpool, which ended in her
concluding to quit Wales, and settle there, for more congenial
society and the education of her children. One of her last pleasures
in Wales was the enjoyment of the society of Miss Jewsbury, after-
wards Mrs. Fletcher, who passed part of the summer and autumn of
1 S28 in the neighbourhood of St. Asaph.
For about thirty years she had resided in Wales — the bulk of her
life ; for she was but about six years of age when her family went to
reside there ; and she survived her departure from it only the same
number of years. The whole of her existence, therefore, excepting
that twelve years, was spent in her favourite Wales. For the short
remainder of her life she seemed rather a wanderer in the earth than
a settled resident. She was at Liverpool, at the Lakes, in Scotland,
in Ireland ; and there, finally, seldom long in one place.
Her choice of Liverpool seemed to be determined by the con-
sideration of education already mentioned, and by the desire to bo
near two families to which she was much attached— those of Mrs.
Lawrence, of Wavertree-hall, and the Chorleys, of Liverpool. She
took a house in the village of Wavertree, a little apart from the road.
It must have been a dreary change from the fine, wild, congenial
scenery of North Wales, to the flat, countryless neighbourhood of
Liverpool. Nothing, surely, but the sense of maternal duty could
have made such a change endurable to a mind like Mrs. Hemans's.
This residence has been described by the author of Pen and Ink
Sketches, who, though some of his relations have been much called
in question, seems, in this instance, to have stated the simple facts.
" The house," he says, " was one of a row, or terrace, as it was called,
situated on the high-road, from which it was separated only by the
footway, and a little flower-garden, surrounded by a white-thorn
hedge. I noticed that all the other houses on either side of it were
unadorned with flowers ; they had either grass lawns or a plain
gi-avel surface ; some of them even grew cabbages and French beans
— hers alone had flowers.
" I was shown into a very small apartment, but everything about
it indicated that it was the home of genius and taste. Over the
mantelpiece hung a fine engraving of William Roscoe, author of the
Lives of the De Medici, with a presentation line or two in his own
handwriting. The walls were decorated with prints and pictures,
and on the mantel-shelf were some models in terra coda, of Italian
gi'oups. On the table *lay casts, and medallions, and a portfolio of
choice prints and water-colour drawings."
The writer was first received by Miss Jewsbury, who happened to
l)e there, and whom he truly describes as one of the most frank
iind open-hearted creatures possible. Pie then adds : —
'■ It was not long before the poetess entered the room. She held
426 MRS. HEMAKS.
out her hand and welcomed me in the kinde^st manner, and then sat
down opposite to nie, first introducing Miss Jewsbury. I cannot well
conceive a more exquisitely beautiful creature than Mrs. Hemans
was ; none of the poi traits or busts I have ever seen do her justice,
nor is it possible for words to convey to the reader any idea of the
matchless, yet sei-ene beauty of her expression. Her glossy waving
hair was parted on her forehead, and terminated on the sides in rich
and luxuriant auburn curls. There was a dove-like look in her eyes,
and yet a chastened sadness in their expression. Her complexion
Avas remarkably clear, and her high forehead looked as pure and
.'spotless as Parian marble. A calm repose, not unmingled with
nielancholj^, was the characteristic expression of the face ; but when
.she smiled, all traces of sorrow were lost, and she seemed to be but
' a little lower than the angels,' — fitting shrine for so pure a mind ! "
The writer says that he, some time after, paid a second visit to
Wavertree. " Some time I stood before the well-remembered house.
The little flower-garden was no more, but rank grass and weeds
sprung up luxuriantly ; the windows were many of them broken ;
the entrance-gate was off" its hinges ; the vine in front of the house
trailed along the ground, and a board, with ' This house to Let ' upon
it, was nailed on the door. I entei-ed the deserted garden, and lookeii
into the little parlour — once so full of taste and elegance ; it was
gloomy and cheerless ; the paper was spotted with damp, and spiders
had built their webs in the corners. Involuntarily I turned away ;
and during my homeward walk mused upon the probable home and
enjoyment of the two gifted creatures I had formerly seen there.
Both were now beyond the stars ; and as I mused on the uncertainty
of human life, I exclaimed, with the eloquent Burke, — ' What
shadows we are, and what shadows, alas, do we pursue ! ' "
Spite of the warm and congenial friends Mrs. Hemans had at
Liverpool, .she soon found that it was not the location for her. She
had lost all that her mind and heart had been accustomed to sustain
themselves upon in a beautiful country ; her hopes of educational
advantages were not realized, and she was subjected to all the annoy-
ing interruptions which celebrity has to endure from idle curiosity,
without any of its attendant advantages. To fly the evils and regain
.some of her old pleasures, she in 1829 made a journey into Scotland,
to visit her friends Mr. Hamilton and his lady, at Chiefswood, near
Abbotsford. This, of course, brought her into immediate contact
with Sir Walter Scott. She was invited to Abbotsford, and the
great minstrel showed her over his estate, and through the classic
beauty of all that border-land which must from her early years
have been regions of deepest romance to a mind like hers. The
I)articulars of this visit, so cheering and delightful to her whole
nature, are to be found in the biography written by her sister. She
was, of course, received in Edinburgh with the cordial hospitality
characteristic of that capital, and which was sure to be shown with
double extent, in consequence of her great fame, and the pleasure
which every one had derived from her productions. During this
visit she was introduced, amongst other di.stinguished people, to Mrs.
Mn«. HEMAN8. 427
Grant, of Laggan ; Lord Jeffrey ; Captain Basil Hall ; Mr. Alison ;
Kirkpatrick Sharps ; Barou Hume ; Sir Robert Liston, and the old
literary veteran, Henry Mackenzie.
The advantage and the happines.s of this visit to the north, deter-
mined her the next summer to pay a visit to the Lakes. Here she
took up her abode for a fortnight with Wordsworth, at Rydal Mount,
and there so charmed was she with the country, and so much did
her health need the quiet refreshment of rural retirement, that she
took for the remainder of the summer a small cottage overlooking
Windermere, called Dove's Nest. But quiet as the spot appeared,
secluded as it is, it was a great mistake to suppose that a woman of
any reputation could escape the inroads of the Tourist Vandals so
near Ambleside, and Lowood. "The soothing and healthful repose
which had been so thoroughly and thankfully appreciated," saj'S her
.sister, " was, alas ! not destined to be of long continuance." Subse-
quent letters speak of the irruption of parties hunting for lions in
Dove's Nest ; of a renewal of " the Album persecution ; " of an
absolute mail storm of letters and papers, threatening " to boil over
the drawer to which they were consigned ; " till at last the despairing
conclusion is come to that " one might as well hope for peace in the
character of a shadowless man as of a literary woman."
The inundation was irresistible and overwhelming ; in August
she fled in desperation, and again made a journey into Scotland.
Mrs. Hemans had three of her boys with her at Dove's Nest, and
they enjoyed the place to perfection. It was just the place for boys
to be turned loose in ; and with fishing, sketching, and climbing the
hill above the Nest, they wei'e in elysium. Her own health, however,
was so far undermined now, that she complains in her letters that
she cannot follow them a.s she would, though she is more a child in
heart than any of them. Her own description of the Doves Nc-nt
is this : — " The house was originally meant for a small villa, though
it has long passed into the hands of farmers ; and there is in conse-
quence an air of neglect about the little demesne, which does not at
all approach desolation, and yet gives it something of attractive
interest. You see everywhere traces of love and care beginning to
be effaced ; rose trees spread into wildness ; laurels darkening the
windows with too luxuriant branches ; and I cannot help saying to
myself, ' Perhaps some heart like my own iu its feelings and suffer-
ing, has here sought refuge and repose.' The ground is laid out in
rather an antiquated style, which, now that nature is beginning to
reclaim it fron: art, I do not at all dislike. There is a little grassy
ten-ace immediately under the window, descending to a small court
with a circular grass plat, on which grows one tall white rose-tree.
You cannot imagine how I delight in that fair, solitary, neglected-
looking tree. I am writing to you from an old-fashioned alcove in
the little garden, round which the sweet-briar and moss-rose trees
have completely run wild ; and I look down from it upon lovely
Windermere, which seems at this moment even like another sky, so
truly is our summer cloud and tint of azure pictured in its transpa«
rent mirroi-."
■^28 MRS. TIKMATCS.
This cottage is, in fact, a very sim])lc affair. It is let by the
people, farmers, who live in one end of it, and who have now built
another house near it with farm buildings. It stands perhaps at
half the elevation of Professor Wilson's house at Elleray, and not at
such a distance from "Windermere, and nearer to Lowood inn than
to Ambleside. A considerable wild wood ascends above it to the
top of the rocky hills, and it seems indeed to have had a place cut
out of the front of the wood for it. You can ascend from Lowood
by a steep, straight carriage road, all bordered with laurels luxuri-
antly grown, and ovei'shadowed by forest trees ; or you may, if
coming from Ambleside, ascend a foot-path, which is by far the most
charming way. Yes, a very charming way it is — a wild wood walk,
reminding you of many of those in Germany. It is narrow, and
ovei'hung with hazels, at the time of my visit full of nuts in abundant
and large clusters. Here water is running by the wayside, clear,
and in fleet abundance. The wood opens its still solitudes, ever and
anon ; and far above you the rocks are seen lifting themselves into
the heavens in a grey silence. This wood walk goes on and on,
l)ordered with wild flowers, and odorous with the scent of meadow-
sweet, till you arrive in about half a voile at the cottage.
This consists of but four rooms in f'.out ; two little sitting-rooms,
and two bed-rooms over them. It is a little white battlemented
affair, with a glass door. The woman of the house pointed out to
me tire chamber window, that on the right hand as you face the
house, at which ]\Irs. Hemans, she said, used to write ; and which
connnands a fine view of the lake and its encircling hills.
The woman is a character. She w^as very violent against steam,
railroads, and all sorts of new-fangled things. She wondered what
Parliament was about that they did not stop the steam. " What are
your Sir Ptobert Peels, your Grahams, and your Stanleys good for, if
they cannot stop the steam 1 " She would make them sit, if she
could have her way, till they did some good, for they had done none
yet. She almost preferred O'Connell to them, for he did get master
of the queen !
" You seem to be a great radical," I said.
"Nay, nay ! " she replied ; "I'm naw radical. I stick fast to the
Church, but I am a great Politic ! And what jc/'Il all those navvies
do when the railways are all made 1 What is to become of the poor
boatmen when there are nothing but steamers ?"
"Well, but has not Mr. Wordsworth written against the railroads ? "
" Ay, he may write ; but there's more nor Mister Wordsworth
now-a-days. People are got too clever now ; and if he writes there's
twenty ready to write against him."
All the time that the woman was getting on in this style, she had
a sort of smile on her face as if she was merely talking for talking's
.sake ; and, as she proceeded, she led the way to show me the garden,
which is a very pleasant little retirement, looking down the hill, and
towards Lowood upon the lake, and far across to its distant shores
and mountains. We then passed into a second garden, at the top of
which is the alcove mentioned by Mrs. Hemans. It is in the wall,
MRS. HEMilNS. 42.0
arched above, and white-waslied within, and witli seats set round,
and a most hixuriant Ayrshire rose climbing and manthng it about,
high and thick. Here, said the woman, Mrs. Hemans sate in the
fine weather generally to write. At the lower end of the garden
stood the tall white rose-tree which Mrs. Hemans so much admired.
From this the landlady plucked a flower, and begged me to send it
to my wife ; as well as a number of moss-roses growing about, which
she said IMrs. Hemans admired, but not so much as this white rose.
The strange woman, unpohshed, but evidently full of strong inde-
pendent feeling, and keen spirit of observation, was also as evidently
possessed of tender feelings too. She declared it often made her
melancholy to see that rose-tree and that alcove.
"Ah, poor thing ! " said she, " it was a pity she did not open her
situation sooner ; but she did not open her heart enough to her
rich relations, who were very fond of her. It was anxiety. Sir ;
•t was anxiety, you may depend on it. To maintain five boys,
and edicate 'em with one pen, it was too much, you arc sure.
Ay, I have thought a deal more of her since, than I did at the
time ; and so many ladies come here, and wish she had but opened
her situation sooner, for when Government did something for hei',
it was too late ! "
" Did she seem quite well here 1 "
" Oh, yes ; she seemed pretty woli, and she had three of her
children with her, and well-behaved, nice children they were.
Charles, they tell me, is turned Catholic, and Henry is gone abroad,
and Claude is dead. Who could have believed it, when they were
all so merry here ! Poor thing ! if she /tad but made known her
situation — it was wearing her away. Mr. Graves, who was the tutor
to the boys, and is now rector of Bowness, came here with tha
boys, when she went to Dublin, and she was to come back,
and be with me by the year ; and then the boys could have been
still with Mr. Graves, for he got the living just then. He always
comes to tell me when he heai'S anything about them — and her
husband is dead too, I hear."
Such was the woman's information, and there may be moie truth
in it than we would like to believe. There can be no doubt that
Mrs. Hemans taxed all her strength and power to maintain her
family. It is not to be believed but that her brothers and sister,
v.^ho were well off, did all .she would allow them to do ; but we
know the honourable pride of a truly noble mind. — not to be
Inu'densome when it can itself do its own work. How sensitlvo
tuid shrinking it is ! That j\Irs. Hemans, in her praiseworthy en-
d-savour to furnish the means of her boys' education, did overtax
herself, and was obliged to write more than either her inclination
or her true fame promj^ted, we have the evidence of herself in
one of her very last letters to her friend Mrs. Lawrence. " You
know into how rugged a channel the poor little stream of my
life has been forced, and through what rocks it has wrought its
way ; and it is now longing for repose in some still valley. It haa
ever been one of my regrets that the constant necessity of pro-
4."50 MRS. HEMANS.
viding sums of money to meet the exigencies of the boys' education
has obliged me to waste my mind in what I consider mere desultory
sffiisions : — • t. • ,<•
Ponnnff inyself away,
As a wild 1)ir(l, amidst the foliage, tunes
That whicli within him thrills, and heats, and burns,
Into a llcL'ting lay.
My wish ever was to concentrate all my mental energy in the
production of some more noble and complete work, something of
pure and holy excellence which might permanently take its place a.s
the work of a British poetess. I have always hitherto written as if
111 the breaking times of storms and billows. Perhaps it may not
even yet be too late to accomplish what I wish, though I sometimes
feel my health so deeply penetrated that I cannot imagine how I
am ever to be raised up again. But a greater freedom from these
cares, of w/iic/i I ham been obliged to hear vp binder the whole respoufii-
hilUy, may do much to restore me ; and though my spirits are
greatly subdued by long sickness, I feel the powers of my mind in
full maturity."
This is a plain enough confession ; and it is the old melancholy
story, of genius fighting for the world, and borne down by the
world, which should be its friend. Once more, and for the ten
thousandth time, iiuder such circumstances, we must exclaim with
Sbakspeare —
" O what a noble mind is here o'erthrown ! "
We have here the bright, warm-hearted, fascinating girl of Bron-
wylfa, full of all the romance of life and the glorious visions of poetry,
now sinking the martyr of the heart betrayed in its tenderest trust,
doomed to labour like Pegasus in the peasant's cart and harness,
perishing of exhaustion, and feeling that the unequal contest of life
had yet left imdeveloped the full aiHuence of the spirit. I could not
avoid gazing again on the empty alcove, — the beautiful prospect, and
the wildly-growing white rose, and feeling the full contagion of their
and the good woman's melancholy.
But at once, out broke the strange creature with a different look
and tone — " And we have now got another writer-lady down at
Ambleside."
" A poet % "
" Nay, nothing of the sort ; another guess sort of person, I can
tell you."
" Why, who is that ? "
" Who is that ? Why, Miss Martineau they call her. They tell
me she wrote up the Reform Bill for Lord Brougham ; and that
tilie's come from the Lambtons here ; and that she's writing now
about the taxes. Can she stop the steam, eh ? can she, think you ?
Nay, nay, I warrant, big and strong as she is. Ha ! ha ! good lauk !
as I met her the other day walking along the muddy road below
here — 'Is it a woman, or a man, or what sort of an animal is it ?'
Baid I to myself. There she came, stride, stride, — great lieavy shoes,
— stout leather leggins on, — and a knapsack on her back ! tia ! ha !
that's a political comicalisf, they say. What's that 1 Do they mean
MRS. HEMANS. -iSj
that she cau stop steam ? But I said to luy husband — goodness !
but that tcoiild have been a wife for you. Why, she'd ha' ploughed !
and they say she mows her own grass, and digs her own cabbage
and potatoes ! Ha ! ha ! well, we see some queer 'uus here. Words-
Avorth should write a poem on her. What was Peter Bell to a
political comicalist % "
The good woman laughed outrageously at the images she had
raised in her own mind, and infected by her mirth, as I had been
by her melancholy, I bade her good bye. Her husband, a quiet
aian, sate all this time, and spite of all our talk, never for one
moment looked up from his newspaper, nor uttered a syllable.
Possibly he might be deaf; otherwise he was as impassive as an old
Indian.
The warnings of failing health which often operate insensibly on
the mind, seemed now to draw Mrs. Hemaus towards the society of
her younger brother and his amiable wife, who were then settled in
Ireland, and were living at the Hermitage near Kilkenny, where
Colonel Browne was acting as a stipendiary magistrate. Here she
joined the.i. and from this point visited Woodstock near Thomas-
town, th sidence of Mrs. Tiglie, and where she is buried. At
these places we must not linger. Her brother removed to Dublin,
as Commissioner of Police, and she went there also. It was in
1831 that she took up her abode in Dublin. She first resided in
Upper Pembroke-street ; then removed to 36, Stephen's-green, and
finally to 20, Dawson-street, still within a hundred yards or so of
Stephen's-green.
It is needless to say that in Dubhn Mrs. Hemans received all the
respect that was due to her genius and virtues ; but her health was
so delicate, as to oblige her to live as quietly as possible. Her boys
were now a good deal o^ her hands, or, rather, did not require her
immediate attention. And she was enabled, the first autumn of her
abode in Dublin, to make an excursion to the mountains of Wick-
low. Dawson-street was well situated for quietness and airiness.
Stephen' s-green is one of the largest squares in the world, far larger
than any London one. While she resided in it, she had a set of
back rooms, the noise of Upper Pembroke-street having been too
much for her. The College grounds, of great extent, are at the
bottom of Dawson-street, this spacious green at its top. And near
are Merrion -.square, and the gardens of what was once the palace of
the Duke of Leinster ; so that no part of Dublin could ofi'er more
openness. Her lodgings in Dawson-street consisted of the apart-
ments over the shop of the proprietor, Mr. Jollifle, a very respectable
tailor. These could, London fashion, be thrown into one drawing-
room, but were generally used as two rooms ; and in the back room
she nearly always sate and wrote.
In 1833, her sister and brother-in-law arrived in Dublin, and Mrs.
Hemans and they met after a five years' separation. The ravages
of sickness," says her sister, " on her worn and faded form were
painfully apparent to those who had not seen her for so long ; yet
her spirits rallied to all theii wonted cheerfulness, and the powers of
4:52 MBS. HEMANS.
her mind seemed more vivid and vigorous than ever. With all hei
own cordial kindliness, she busied herself in forming various plans
for the interest and amusement of her visitors ; and many happy
hours of delightful converse, and old home communion, were passed
by her and her sister in her two favourite resorts, the lawn of the
once stately mansion of the Duke of Leinster, now occupied by the
Dublin Society, and the spacious gardens of Stephen' s-green."
In the gardens of the Dublin Society Mrs. Hemans took that cold
which, seizing on an akeady enfeebled frame, terminated fatally.
She had one day taken a book with her, and was so much absorbed
by it, that she was thoroughly chilled by the autumnal fog ; and,
feeling a shudder pass through her frame, she hastened home, already
tilled with a strong presentiment that her hours were numbered.
In her illness, by which she was gradually wasted to a skeleton,
she enjoyed all the consolations which affection can bestow. Her
sister attended her assiduously, till she was called away by the
serious illness of her husband. Her place was then tenderly sup-
jilied by her sister-in-law, the lady of Colonel Browne ; and her son
Charles was with her the whole time ; George, now a prosperous
engineer, for some days ; and Henry, then a schoolboy at Shrews-
bury, likewise, during the Christmas holidays. For a time she was
removed to Eedesdale, a seat of the Archbishop of Dublin, about
seven miles from the city ; but she returned and died in Dawson-
.street, on the 16th of May, 1835. During her last illness she wrote
some of the finest poetry that she ever produced, especially that
most soul-full effusion. Despondency and Aspiration ; and the Sal)-
bath Sonnet ; which she dedicated to her brother, less than three
weeks before her death, the last of her lays.
Her remains were interred in a vault beneath St. Ann's church,
but a short distance from her house, on the same side of the street ;
where, on the wall under the gallery, on the right hand as you enter,
you observe a tablet, bearing this inscription : " In the vault beneath
are deposited the Mortal Eemains of Felicia Hemans, who died
Mav 16, 1835.
" Calm on the bosom of thy God.
Fair spirit, rest thee now ;
Even while with us thy footsteps trod,
His seal was on thy brow.
Dust to its narrow house beneath,
Soul to its place on hifrh !
They that have seen thy look in death
No more will fear to die."
The same vault, as nearly as possible three years afterwards,
received the remains of her faithful and very superior servant, Anna
Creer, a native of the Isle of Man, who had lived with her seven
years, and, after her death, married Mr. Jolliffe, the master of the
house. The worthy man was much affected in speaking of the cir-
cumstance, and bore also the highest testimony to the character of
Mrs. Hemans, saving, " It was impossible for any one to know her
without loving her." To such a tribute, what can be added 1 The
perfection of human character is to excite ?.t once admiration and
lasting affection.
L. E. L.
Thhre is not mucli to be said about the homes and haunts of ^Iis.
^lacleau, or, as I shall call her in this article, by her poetical
cognomen, L. E. L. She was a creature of town and social life. The
bulk of her existence was spent in Hans-place, Sloane-street, Chelsea.
I.ike Charles Lamb, she was so moulded to London habits and
tastes, that that was the world to her. The country was not to hci-
\\'hat it is to those who have passed a happy youth there, and learned
to sympathise with its spirit, and enjoy its calm. In one respect
she was right. Those who look for society alone in the country, are
not likely to be much pleased with the change from London, where
every species of intelligence concentrates, — where the rust of intel-
lectual sloth is pretty briskly rubbed off, and old prejudices, whicli
often lie like fogs in low still nooks of the country, are blown away
by the lively winds of discussion. Though descended from a country
family, and spending some time, as a child, in the country, she was
not there long enough to cultivate those associations with places and
things which cling to the heart in after-life. Her mind, naturally
quick, and all her tastes, were developed in the city. City Ufe was
part and parcel of her being ; and as she was one of the most bril-
liant and attractive of its children, we must be thankful to take her
as she was. It robs us of nothing but of certain attributes of the
picturesque in the account of her abodes.
Her ancestors, it seems, from Mr. Blanchard's memoir of her,
were, about the commencement of the eighteenth centuiy, settled at
Crednall, in Herefordshire, where they enjoyed some landed pro-
perty. -^ Sir William Landon was a successful participator in the
43 ) L. i^- L-
South Sea Bubble, but afterwards contrived to lose the whole patn-
iiionial estates. A descendant of Sir William Avas the great grand-
father of L. E. L. He was rector of Nursted and listed, in Kent,
and a zealous antagonist of all Dissent. His son was rector of Ted.
stoue Delamere, near Bromyard, Hereford.shire. At his death, the
property of the family being exhausted, his children, eight in number,
were left to make their way through the world as they could. Mi.s.s
Laudon's father, John Landou, was the eldest of these children. He
went to sea, and made two voyages, one to the coast of Africa, and
one to Jamaica. His friend and patron. Admiral Bowyer, dying, his
career in the naval service was stopped. In the meantime, the next
of his brother.s, Whittington Landon, had acquired promotion in the
(Jhurcli, and eventually became Dean of Exeter. By his influence the
father of the poetess was established as a partner in the prosperous^
house of Adair, army agents in Pall Mall. On this he married
IJatharine Jane Bishop, a lady of Welsh extraction, and settled at
No. 25, in Hans-place. Here J\Iiss Landon was born on the ] 4th oi
August, 1802. Besides her, the only other surviving child was a
brother, the present Eev. AVhittingtou Henry Landon.
In her sixth year she was sent to school to Miss Rowden, at
No. 22, Hans-place, the house in which she was destined to pass the
greater part of her life. This lady, herself a poetess, afterwards
became Countess St. Quentin, and died near Paris. In this school
]\Iiss Mitford was educated, and here Lady Cai-oline Lamb was for
i\ time an inmate. At this period, however, Miss Landon was here
only a few mouths. She had occasionally been taken into the country
to a farm in which her father was deeply interested, called Coventry
Farm, in Hertfordshire. She now went with her family to I'eside at
Trevor Park, East Barnet, where her education was conducted by her
cousin. Miss Landon. She was now about seven years old, and here
the family continued to live about six years. Here she read a great
deal of romance and poetry, and began to show the operation of her
fancy, by relating long stories to her parents, and indulging in long
meditative walks in the lime-walk in the garden. Her brother was
her companion, and, spite of her nascent authorship, they seem to
have played, and romped, and enjoyed themselves as children should
do. They read Plutarch, and had a great ambition of being Spartans.
An anecdote is related of their taking vengeance on the gardener for
.some affront, by shooting at him with arrows with nails stuck in
them for piles, and of his tossing them upon a quickset hedge for
punishment, — most probably one of the old-fashioned square-cut
ones, where they would be rather prisoners than sufferers. This
man, whose name was Chambers, Miss Landon taught to read ; and
he afterwards saved money, and retired to keep an inn at Barnet.
Now she read the Arabian Nights, Scott's Metrical Romances, and
Robinson Crusoe, besides a book called Silvester Trampe. This last
professed to be a narrative of travels in Africa, and seems especially
to have fascinated her imagination. No doubt that the united
effects of this book, of other African travels, and of the fact of her
father and one of her cousins having made voyages to that continent,
L. E. L. 435
had no little iuflueuce iu deciding the fatal step of marrying to go
out to Cape Coast. To the happy days spent at Trevor Park, and
the reading of books like these, always a period of elysima to a child.
Miss Landon makes many references, both in her poems and her
prose sketches, called Traits and Trials of Early Life. Some lines
addressed to her brother commemorate these imaginative pleasures
very graphically : —
"It was an August evening, with sunset in the trees,
When home you brought liis voyages, who found the fair South Seas.
For weeks he was our idol, we sailed with liim at sea,
And the pond, amid the willows, our ocean seemed to be ;
The water-lilies growing beneatli tlie morning smile,
We called the South Sea Islands, each fiower a different isie.
Within that lovely garden what happy liours went by,
While we fancied that around us spread a foreign sea and sky."
From this place the family removed to Lower-place, Fulham,
where they continued about a year, and then removed again to Old
Bromptou. Miss Landon now gave continually-increasing signs of
a propensity to poetry. Mr. Jerdan, the editor of the Literary
Gazette, was a neighbour of her father's, and from time to time her
compositions were shown to him, who at once saw and acknowledged
their great promise. It does not appear very clear whether Miss
Landon continued at home during this period — that is, from the
time the family came to live here, when she was about fourteen, till
the death of her father, when she was about twenty — but it is
probable that she was for part of this time at the school, No. 22,
Hans-place, which was now in the hands of the Misses Lance, as she
says of herself, — " I have lived all my life since childhood with the
same people. The Misses Lance," &c. However, it was at about
the age of eighteen that her contributions appeared in the Literary
Gazette, which excited universal attention. These had been pre-
ceded by a little volume now forgotten. The Fate of Adelaide, a
Swiss romantic tale ; and was speedily followed by the Impi'ovi-
satrice. It was during the writing of this her first volume ol
successful poetry that her father died, leaving the family in narrow
circumstances.
The history of her life from this time is chiefly the history of her
works. The Improvisatrice was published in 1824 ; the Troubadour
in 1825 ; the Golden Violet in 1826 ; the Venetian Bracelet, 1829.
In 1830 she produced her first prose work, Romance and Reality.
In 1831 she commenced the editorship of Fisher's Drawing-room
Scrap Book, which she continued yearly till the time of her mar-
riage — eight successive volumes. In ] 835 she published Francesca
Carrara ; the Vow of the Peacock, 1835 ; Traits and Trials of Early
Life, 1836 ; and in the same year, Ethel Churchill Besides these
works, she wrote largely in the annuals and periodicals, and edited
various volumes of illustrated w-orks for the publishers.
None of the laborious tribe of authors ever toiled more inces-
santly or more cheerfully than Miss Landon — none with a more
devotedly generous spirit. She had the proud satisfaction of con-
tributing to the support of her family, and to the end of her lift;
436 L- K. L.
this great object was uppermost iu her mind. On her marriage, sha
proposed to herself to go on writing still, with the prospect of being
thus enabled to devote the whole of her literary profits to the com-
fort of her mother and the promotion of the fortunes of her brother.
In all social and domestic relations no one was ever more amiable or
more beloved.
With occasional visits to different parts of the kingdom, and once
to Paris, I\liss Landon continued living in Hans-place till 1837. The
Misses Lance had given up the school, I believe, about 1830, but
she continued still to reside there with Mrs. Sheldon, their successor.
In 1837 Mrs. Sheldon quitted Ilans-place, for 28, Upper Berkeley-
street West, whither Miss I^andon accompanied her. Here she
resided only a few mouths, when, at the request of some much
attached friends, she took up her abode with them in Hyde Park-
street. On the 7th of June, 1838, she wms married to Mr. ]\Iaclean,
Governor of Cape Coast Castle, and almost immediately left this
country, never to return.
Of the abode where the greater part of Miss Landon's life was
spent, and where almost every one of her works was written, the
reader will naturally wish to navo some description. The following
particulars are given by Laman Blanchard, as from the pen of a
female friend. " Genius," says our accomplished informant, " hallows
every place where it pours forth its inspirations. Yet how strongly
c<:>ntrasted, sometimes, is the outward reality around the poet with
the visions of his inward being. Is it not D'Israeli, in his Curiosities
of Literature, referring to this frequent incongruity, who mentions,
among other facts, that Moore composed his Lalla Rookh in a large
barn 'i L. E. L. remarks on this subject, 'A history of the //ow and
w/iere works of imagination have been produced, would often be
more extraordinary than the woi-ks themselves.' Her own case was,
in some degree, an illustration of independence of mind over all
external circumstances. Perhaps to the L. E. L. of whom so many
nonsensical things were said — as 'that she should wi-ite with a
crystal pen, dipped in dew, ui^on silver j^aper, and use for pounce
the dust of a butterfly's wing ;' a dileUaute of literature would assign,
for the scene of her authorship, a fairy-like boudoir, with rose-
coloured and silver hangings, fitted with all the luxuries of a
fastidious taste. How did the reality agree with this fairy sketch ?
Miss Landon's drawing-room, indeed, was prettily furnished, but it
was her invariable habit to write in her bed-room. I see it now,
that homely-looking, almost uncomfortable room, fronting the street,
and barely furnished ; with a simple white bed, at the foot of which
was a small, old, oblong-shaped sort of dri;ssing-table, quite covered
with a common, worn writing-desk, heaped with papers, while some
strewed the ground, the table being too small for aught beside the
desk ; a high-backed cane chair, which gave you any idea rather than
that of comfort. A few books scattered about completed the author's
paraphernalia."
Certainly one would have imagined a girl's school in Loudon ju&t
tl-o last place that a poet would have fixed upon to live and work ia
L. E. L. 437
But as Louuon was the city of cities to Miss Landon, so, no doubt,
ilans-place, from early associations, was to her the place of places ;
and, when she was shut in her little bedroom, was just as poetical
as any other jjlace in the world. I recollect there was a little
garden behind the house, which, if I remember right, you saw into
through a glass door from the hall. At all events, a person full of
poetic admiration once calling upon her, saw a young girl skipping
very actively in this court or garden, and was no little astonished to
see the servant go up to her, and announce the caller, whereupon
she left her skipping, and turned out to be no other than Miss
Landon herseU".
Of her person, Mr. Blancliard gives this description : — " !N"obody
who might happen to see her for the first time, enjoying the little
quiet dance, of which she was fond, or the snug corner of the room
where the little lively discussion, which she liked still better, was
going on, could possibly have traced in her one featm'e of the senti-
mentalist which popular error reported her to be. The listener
might only hear her running on from subject to subject, and lighting
lip each with a wit never ill-natured, and often brilliant ; scattering
quotations as thick as hail, opinions as wild as the winds ; defying
fair argument to keep ]iace with her, and fairly talking herself out of
breath. He would most probably hear from her lips many a pointed
and sparkling aphorism, the wittiest things of the night, let who
might be around her, — he would be surprised, pleased ; but his
heroine of song, as painted by anticipation, he would be unable to
discover. He would see her looking younger than she really was ;
and perhaps, struclc by her animated air, her expressive face, her
slight but elegant figure, his impression would at once find utterance
in the exclamation which' escaped from the lips of the Ettrick Shep-
hex"d on being presented to her, whose romantic fancies had often
charmed him in the wild mountains, ' Hey ! but I did not think
ye'd bin sac bonnie ! '
" Without attempting an elaboi-ate description of the person of
L. E. L., we cite this expression of surprise as some indication that
she was far prettier than report allowed her to be, at' the period we
are speaking of. Her easy carriage and careless movements would
seem to imply an insensibihty to the feminine passion for dress ; yet
she had a proper sense of it, and never disdained the foreign aid of
ornament, always provided it was simple, quiet, and becoming. Her
hair was liarkly In-own, very soft and beautiful, and always tastefully
arranged ; lier figure, as before remarked, slight, l)ut well-formed
and graceful ; her feet small, but her hands especially so, and fault-
lessly white, and finely shaped ; her fingers were fairy fingers ; her
cars also were observably little. Her face, though 3iot "regular in any
feature, became beautiful by expression ; every flash of thought,
every change and colour of feeling, lightened over it as she spoke,
when she spoke earnestly. The forehead was not high, but broad
and full ; the eyes had no overpowering brilliancy, but their clear
intellectual light penetrated by its exquisite softness ; her moutli
was not less marked by character ; and, besides the glorious faculty
438 L. E. L.
of uttering the pearls ami diamonds of fancy and wit, knew how to
express scorn, or an<,'er, or ])ride, as well as it knew how to smile
winning!}', or to pour forth those short, quick, ringing laughs, which,
not even exceiiting her hon-mots and aphorisms, were the most
delightful things that issued from it."
Tliis may be considered a very fair portrait of Miss Landoii.
Your first impressions of her were, — what a little, light, simple,
merry-looking girl. If you had not been aware of her being a
popular poetess, you would have sus^jected her of being nothing
more than an agreeable, bright, and joyous young lady. This impres-
sion in her own house, or amongst a few congenial people, was quickly
followed by a feeling of the kind-heartedness and goodness about
her. You felt that you could not be long with her without loving
her. There was a frankness and a generosity in her nature that won
extremely upon you. On the other hand, in mixed companies, witty
and conversant as she was, you had a feeling that she was playing an
assumed part. Her manner and conversation were not only the very
reverse of the tone and sentiment of her poems, but she seemed to say
things for the sake of astonishing you with the very contrast. You
felt not only no confidence in the truth of what she was asserting,
but a strong assurance that it was said merely for the sake of saying
what her hearers would least expect to hear her say. I recollect
once meeting her in company, at a time when there was a strong
report that she was actually though secretly married. Mrs. Hofland,
on her entering the room, went up to her in her plain, straightfor-
tvard waj', and said, " Ah ! my dear, what must I call you ? — Miss
Landon, or who ? " After a well-feigned surprise at the question,
!Miss Landon began to talk in a tone of merry ridicule of this report,
and ended by declaring that, as to love or riiarriage, they were things
that she never thought of.
" What, then, have you been doing with yourself this last month ? "
'• Oh, I have been puzzling my brain to invent a new sleeve ; pra}'-
how do you like it ? " showing her arm.
" You never think of such a thing as love ! " exclaimed a young
sentimental man, " you, who have written so many volumes of poetry
upon it ? "
" Oh ! that's all professional, you know ; " exclaimed she, with an
air of merry scorn.
" Professional! " exclaimed a grave Quaker, who stood near — " Why,
dost thou make a difference between what is professional and what
is real ? Dost thou write one thing and think another ? Does not
that look very much like hypocrisy ? "
To this the astonished poetess made no reply, but by a look of
genuine amazement. It was a mode of putting the matter to which
she had evidently never been accustomed.
And, in fact, there can be no question that much of her writing
was professional. She had to win a golden harvest for the comfort
of others as dear to her as herself ; and she felt, like all authors who
have to cater for the public, that she luust provide, not so much
what she would of her free-will choice, but what they expected from
L, H. I., 439
her. Still, working for profit, and for the age, the peculiar idiosyn-
crasy of her mind showed itself through all. Before we advance to
the last melancholy home of L. E. L., let us take a review of her
literary career ; rapid, yet sufficiently full to point out some parti-
culars in her writings, which I think too peculiar not to interest
strongly the reader.
The subject of L. E. L.'s first volume was love ; a subject which,
we might have supposed, in one so young, would have been clothed
in all the gay and radiant colours of hope and happiness ; but, on
the contrary, it was exhibited as the most fatal and melancholy of
human passions. With the strange, wayward delight of the young
heart, ere it has known actual sorrow, she seemed to riot anci to revel
amid death and woe ; laying prostrate life, hope, and afl'ection. Of
all the episodical tales introduced into the general design of the
principal poem, not one but terminated fatally or sorrowfully ; the
heroine herself was the fading victim of crossed and wasted affections.
The shorter poems which filled up the volume, and which were
mostly of extreme beauty, were still based on the wrecks and agonies
of humanity.
It might be imagined that this morbid indulgence of so strong an
appetite for grief, was but the first dipping of the playful foot in the
sunny shallows of that flood of mortal experience through which all
have to pass ; and but the dallying, yet desperate pleasure afforded
by the mingled chill and glittermg eddies of the waters, which might
hereafter swallow up the passer through ; and the first real pang of
actual pain would scare her youthful fancy into the bosom of those
hopes and fascinations with which the young mind is commonly only
too much delighted to surround itself. But it is a singular fact, that,
spite of her own really cheerful disposition, and spite of all the
advice of her most influential friends, she persisted in this tone from
the first to the last of her works, from that time to the time of her
death. Her poems, though laid in scenes and times capable of any
course of events, and though filled to overflowing with the splendours
and high-toned sentiments of chivalry ; though enriched with all the
colours and ornaments of a most fertile and sportive fancy, — were
still but the heralds and delineations of melancholy, misfortune, and
ileath. Let the reader turn to any, or all, of her jjoetical volumes,
and say whether this be not so, with few, and in most of them, no
exceptions. The very words of her first heroine might have literally
been uttered as her own : —
" Sad were my shades; niethinks they had
Almost a tone of prophecy — •
I ever liad, from earliest youth,
A feeling what my fate would be." — The Improvisalrice, p. 2.
This is one singular peculiarity of the poetry of L. E. L., and her
1)oetry must be confessed to be peculiar. It was entirely her own.
t had one prominent and fixed character, and that character belonged
wholly to itself. The rhythm, the feeling, the .stylo, and phraseology
of L. E. L.'s poetry were such, that you could immediately recognise
it, though the writer's name was not mentioned. Love was still the
440 L. E. L.
gi'eat theme, and misfortime the great docti-inc. It was not the less
remarkable, that, in ahnost all other respects, she retained to the
last the poetical tastes of her very earliest years. The heroes of
chivalry and romance, feudal pageants, and Eastern splendour,
delighted her imagination as much in the full growth, as in the
budding of her genius.
I should say, that it is the young and ardent who must always be
the warmest admirers of the larger poems of L. E. L. They are filled
with the faith and the fancies of the young. The very scenery and
ornaments are of that rich and showy kind which belongs to the
youthful taste ; — the white rose, the jasmine, the summer garniture
of deep grass and glades of greenest foliage ; festal gardens with
lamps and bowers ; gay cavaliers, and jewelled dames, and all that
glitters in young eyes and love-haunted fancies. But amongst these,
numbers of her smaller poems from the first dealt with subjects and
sympathies of a more general kind, and gave glimpses of a nobility
of sentiment, and a bold expression of her feeling of the unequal lot
of humanity, of a far higher character. Such, in the Improvisatrice,
are The Guerilla Chief, St. George's Hospital, T)ie Deserter, Glades-
mure, The Covenanters, The Female Convict, The Soldier's Grave,
&c. Such are many that might be pointed out in every succeeding
volume. But it was in her few last years that her heart and mind
seemed every day to develop more strength, and to gather a wider
range of humanity into their embrace. In the latter volumes of the
Drawing-room Scrap Book, many of the best poems of which have
been rejirinted with the Zenana, nothing was more striking than the
steady development of growing intellectual power, and of deep,
generous, and truly philosophical sentiments, tone of thought, and
serious experience.
But when L. E. L. had fixed her character as a poet, and the public
looked only for poetical productions from her, she suddenly came
forth as a prose writer, and with still added proofs of intellectual
vigour. Her prose stories have the leading characteristics of her
poetry. Their theme is love, and their demonstration that all love
is fraught with destruction and desolation. But there are other
qualities manifested in the tales. The prose page was for her a wider
tablet, on which slie could, with more freedom and ampler display,
I'ecord her views of society. Of these, Francesca Carrara, and Ethel
Churchill, are unquestionably the best works, the latter preeminently
so. In these she has shown, under the characters of Guido and
AYalter Maynard, her admiration of genius, and her opinion of its
fate ; under those of Francesca and Ethel Churchill, the adverse
destiny of pure and high-souled woman.
These volumes abound with proofs of a shrewd observation of
society, with masterly .sketches of character, and the most beautiful
snatches of scenery. But what surprise and delight more than all,
are the sound and true estimates of humanity, and the honest bold-
ness with which her opinions are expressed. The clear perception of
the fearful social condition of this country, and the fervent advocacy
of the poor, scattered through these works, but especially the la.'it
•L. E. L. 441
:lo honour to lier woman's heart. These portions of L. E. L.'s writings
require to be yet more truly appreciated.
There is another characteristic of her prose writings which is
peculiar. Never were the feelings and experiences of authorship so
cordially and accurately described. She tells us freely all that she
Has learned. She puts words into the mouth of Walter Maynard, of
which all who have known anything of literary life must instantly
acknowledge the correctness. The author's heart never was more
completely laid open, with all its hopes, fears, fatigues, and enjoy-
ments, its bitter and its glorious experiences. In the last hours of
Walter Maynard, she makes him utter what must at that period
have been daily more and more her own conviction. " I am far
cleverer than I Avas. I have felt, have thought so much ! Talk of the
mind exhausting itself ! — never ! Think of the mass of materials
which every day accumulates ! Then experience, with its calm,
clear light, corrects so many youthful fallacies ; every day we feel
our higher moral responsibility, and our greater power."
They are the convictions of "higher moral responsibilities and
greater power," which strike us so forcibly in the later writings
of L. E. L.
But what shall we say to the preparation of prussic-acid, and its
preservation by Lady Marchmont 1 What of the perpetual creed of
L. E. L., that all affection brings woe and death ?
Whether this melancholy belief in the tendency of the great theme
of her writings, both in prose and poetry, — this irresistible annuncia-
tion, like another Cassandra, of woe and desolation, — this evolution
of scenes and characters in her last work, bearing such dark resem-
blance to those of her own after experience, — this tendency, in all
her plots, to a tragic catastrophe, and this final tragedy itself, —
whether these be all mere coincidences or not, they are still but
parts of an unsolved mystery. Whatever they are, they are more
than strange, and are enough to make us superstitious ; for surely,
if ever
" Coming events cast their sliadows licfoic,"
they did so in the foreboding tone of this gifted spirit.
The painful part of Miss Landon's history is, that almost from the
fh'st outbreak of her reputation, she became the mark of the most
atrocious calumnies. How far any girlish thoughtlessness had given
a shadow of ground on which the base things said of her might rest,
is not for me, who only saw her occasionally, to say. But my own
impressions, when I saw and conversed with her, were, that no
guilty spirit could live in that bright, clear, and generous person,
nor could look forth through those candid, playful, and transparent
eyes. It was a presence which gave you the utmost confidence in
the virtuous and iimocent heart of the poetess, however much you
might regret the circumstances which had diverted Iier mind from
the cultivation of its very highest powers. In after years, and when
I had not seen her for a long time, rumours of a like kind, but with
ft show of foundation more startling, were spread far and wide. That
442 I" E. L.
they were equally untrue in fact, we may reasonably infer from the
circumstance, that they who knew her best still continued her firm
and unflinching friends. Dr. and Mrs. Todd Thomson, Mr. and Mrs.
S. C. Hall, Mr. Blanchard, General Fagan and his family, and many
others ; amongst them, Lady Emmeline Stuart Wortley, Miss Jane
Porter, Miss Strickland, Miss Costello, and Mrs. and Miss Sheldon,
wliose inmate she had been for so many years ; who began with pre-
judice against her, and who soon became, and continued to the last,
\vith the very best means of observation, her sincere friends.
These calumnies, however, must for years have been a source of
anguish to her, haunting, but, happily, not disabling her in the
midst of her incessant exertions for the holiest of purposes. They
put an end to one engagement of marriage : they very probably
threw their weight into the decision which conducted her into the
fatal one she ultimately formed.
The circumstances connected with her marriage and death are too
well known to require narrating here. Time has thrown no clear
light on the mystery. Mr. Laman 13Ianchard, in his memoir of her,
has laboured hard to prove that she did not die by the poison of
jtrussic-acid. His reasoning will not bear examination. That she
ilied with a bottle in her hand, which contained it, he confesses is
l^roved by other evidence than that of Mrs. Bailey, who first found
her dead.
But the question still remains, whether she took it purposely ; and
it may be very strongly doubted that she did. From all that has
transpired, it is more probable that she had taken it by mistake.
That she was likely to take this poison purposely, there is no
ground to imagine. On the contrary, to the very last, her letters to
England were full of a cheerfulness that has all the air of thorough
reality. It is true, there are many circumstances that we could
wish otherwise : that her husband had, it is believed, u family
by a native Fantee woman ; that he insisted on the marriage
with Miss Landon in England remaining a secret till just before
sailing, as if fearful of the news preceding him home ; that he went
on shore in the night, through the surf, and at great risk, as if to
remove this woman from the spot, or to see that she was not on it ;
that the last two letters written to her family in England were de-
tained by her husband ; that the Mrs. Bailey, who attended on Mrs.
jNIaclean, and was about to sail the next day with her husband for
England, not only gave up these letters, but stayed there a year
longer ; and that she turned out to be anything but truthful in her
statements. Besides these, there are other facts which surprise us.
We are told that ]\lrs. Maclean married under the impression that
she was not to go out to Cape Coast at all : that on discovering it, it
was stipulated that she was to stay only three years. Mr. Maclean
knew tho. position L. E. L. had hold here— that she had been occupied
with writing, and not with cooking. He must have been sensible
that a woman who had been, for the greater part of her life, the
cherish sd and caressed favourite of the most intelligent society of
London, could not make, for the man of her choice, a more entire
L. E. L. 4 13
sacrifice thau to go out to a distant barbarous coast and settlement,
iu which was no single Englishwoman, except the wife of a mis-
sionary ; and we might, therefore, reasonably expect that he shoul<I
make every arrangement possible for her comfort ; that he should
not object to her taking an English maid ; that he should, at least,
have pots and pans in his house, where his celebrated wife was to
become housekeeper, and almost cook ; that he should not lie in bed
all day, and leave her to entertain sti-auge governors and their suites.
There are these and other things, which we must always wish had
been much otherwise ; but all these will not induce us to let go the
belief to which we cling, that L. E. L., though she unquestionably
died by her own hand, died so through accident, and not through
resolve or cause for it.
The circumstances connected with this last home of the young
poetess are strange enough in themselves, independent of the closing
tragedy. That she who was educated in, and for, London ; who could
hardly bear the country ; who says she worshipped the very pave-
ment of London ; who was the idolized object of the ever moving
and thronging social circles of the metropolis, — should go voluntarily
out to the desert of an African coast, to a climate generally fatal to
Englishwomen, and to the year-long solitude of that government
fort, was a circumstance which astonished every one. The picture
of this home of exile, and of herself and her duties in it, is drawn
livingly by her own pen. Before giving this,- we may here simply
state that Cape Coast Castle is one of the eight British settlements
on the Gold Coast. The castle stands on a rock of gneiss and mixed
slate, about twenty feet above the level of the sea, in 5° 6' N. lat.,
and 1° 10' W. long. Outside there is a native town ; and the ad-
jacent country, to a considerable distance, has been cleared, and
rendered lit for cultivation. The ruling natives are the Fantees,
a clever, stiri-ing, turbulent race.
In one of her letters, she gives this account of the situation and
scenery of the castle : — " On three sides we are surrounded by the
sea. I hke the perpetual dash on the rocks — one wave comes up
after another, and is for ever dashed in pieces, like human hopes,
that only swell to be disappointed. We advance, — up springs the
shining froth of love or hope, — ' a moment white, then gone for
ever ! ' The land view, with its cocoa and palm trees, is very striking
— it is like a scene in the Arabian Nights. Of a night, the beauty is
very remarkable ; the sea is of a silvery purple, and the moon de-
serves all that has been said in her favour. I have only been once
out of the fort by daylight, and then was delighted. The salt lakes
were iirst dyed a deep crimson by the setting sun, and as we returned
they seemed a faint violet by the twilight, just broken by a thousand
stars ; while before us was the red beacon-light."
We may complete the view, exterior and interior, by other ex-
tracts. " I must say in itself the place is infinitely superior to all
that I ever dreamed of. The castle is a fine building — the rooms
excellent. I do not suffer from heat : insects there are few. or none ;
aud I am in excellent health. The sohtude, except an occasional
Q
o
.144 L. E. T'.
dinner, is absolute : from seven in the morning, till seven, when wo
•line, I never see ]\Ir. Maclean, and rarely' any one else. We were
welcomed by a series of dinners, which I am glad are over, — for it
is very awkward to be the only lady ; still the great kindness with
Avhich I have been treated, and the very pleasant manners of many
of the gentlemen, made me feel it as little as possible. Last week
we had a visit from Captain Castle of the Pylades. We had also
a visit from Colonel Bosch, the Dutch governor, a most gentleman-
like man. But fancy how awkward the next morning ! — I cannot
induce Mr. Maclean to rise ; and I have to make breakfast, and do the
honom's of adieu to him and his officers — white plumes, mustachios,
and all. I think I never felt more embarrassed."
" The native huts I first took for ricks of hay ; but those of the
better sort are pretty white houses, with green bhnds. The English
jentlemen resident here have very large houses, quite mansions,
with galleries running round them. Generally speaking, the vege-
tation is so thick, that the growth of the shrubs rather resembles
a wall. The solitude here is Robinson Crusoeish. The hills are
covered to the top with what we .should call calf-weed, but here is
called bush : on two of these hills are small forts, built by Mr.
Maclean. The natives seem obliging and intelligent, and look very
picturesque, with their fine dark figures, with pieces of the country
cloth flung round them : they seem to have an excellent ear for
music. The band seems to play from morning to night.
" The castle is a fine building, a sort of double square, shaped like
an H, of which we occupy the middle. A large flight of steps leads
to the hall, on either side of which is a suite of rooms. The one in
which I am writing would be pretty in England. It is of a pale
blue, and hung with some beautiful prints, for which Mr. Maclean
has a passion.
" You cannot imagine how different everything is here to Eng-
land. I hope, however, in time to get on pretty well. There is,
nevertheless, a deal to do. I have never been accustomed to houses
keeping, and here everything must be seen to by yourself ; it matters
not what it is, it must be kept under lock and key. I get up at
seven, breakfast at eight, and give out flour, butter, sugar, all from the
store. I have found the bag you gave me so useful to hold the keys, of
which I have a little army. We live almost entirely on chickens and
ducks, for if a sheep be killed it must be all eaten that day. The
bread is very good : they use palm oil for yeast. Yams are a capital
substitute for potatoes ; pies and puddings are scarce thoiight of,
unless there is a party. The washing has been a terrible trouble,
but I am getting on better. I have found a woman to wash some of
the things, but the men do all the starching and ironing. Never
did people require so much looking after. Till Mr. Maclean comes
in from court at seven, I never see a living creature but the ser-
vants. * * * The weather is now very warm ; the nights so hot
that you can only bear the lightest sheet over you. As to the beds,
the mattresses are so hard, they are like iron. The damp is very
desti"uctive : the dew is like rain, and there are no fire-places : you
L. E. L. 443
would not believe it, but a grate would be the first of luxuries.
Keys, seizors, everything rusts. * * « I find the servants civil,
and not wanting in intelligence, but industry. Each has servants
to wait on him, whom they call sense boys, -/. c. they wait on them
to be taught. Scouring is done by the prisoners. Fancy three
men employed to clean a room, which, in England, an old woman
could do in an hour, while a soldier stands over them with a drawn
bayonet."
Such was the last, strange, solitary home of L. E. L. ; such the
strange life of one who had been before employed only in diffusing
her beautiful fancies amid her countrymen. Here she was rising at
seven, giving out flour, sugar, &c., from the stores, seeing what room
she would have cleaned, and then sitting down to write. In the
midst of this new species of existence, she is suddenly plunged into
the grave, leaving the wherefore a wonder. The land which was the
attraction of her childhood, singularly enough, thus became her
sepulchre. A marble slab, with a Latin inscription, is said to be
erected there by her husband.
We may now add that Captain Maclean himself died at Cape
Coast on the 22d of May, 184G.
^^i»^'- "•^■'^
SIR WALTER SCOTT.
Many and wonderful as are the romances which Sir Walter Scott
wrote, there are none of them so wonderful as the romance of his
(iwn life. It is not that from a simple son of a Writer to the Signet,
he raised himself to wealth and title ; — that many have done before
liim, and far more than that. That many a man of most ordinary
brain can achieve ; can, as it were, almost stumble into, he knows
mot how. That many a scrivener, a paviour, or a pawnbroker, has
accomphshcd, and been still deemed no miracle. The city of London,
from the days of Dick Whittington to those of Sir Peter Laurie, can
.><how a legion of such culminations. But Sir Walter Scott won his
wealth and title in fields more renowned for starvation and " Calami-
ties," than for making of fortunes — those of literature. It was from
the barren hills of Parnassus that he drew down wealth in quantities
that struck the whole world with astonishment, and made those
famous mountains, trodden bare with the feet of glorious paupers,
rivals of the teeming heights of Mexico and Peru, of California aiul
Australia. At a period when the sources of literature appeared to
have exhausted themselves ; when it was declared that nothing
original could be again expected in poetry, that all its secret places
SCOTT. 447
were rifled, all its fashions outworn, all its imagery beaten into
triteness ; when romance was grown mawkish and even childish ;
when Mrs. Pvadcliffe and Horace Walpole had exhausted its terrors,
and the uovehst's path through common life, it was thought, had
been gleaned of all jjossible discovery by Fielding, Richardson and
Smollett, Goldsmith and Sterne, — when this was couhrmed in public
opinion by the sentimentalities of Henry Mackenzie, forth started
Scott as a giant of the tirst magnitude, and demolished all the fond
ideas of such dusty-brained dreamers. He opened up on every side
new scenes of invention. In poetry and romance, he showed that
there was not a corner of these islands which was not, so far from
being exhausted, standing thick with the richest materials for the
most wonderful and beautiful creations. The reign of the schoolmen
and the copyists was at an end. Nature, history, tradition, life,
every thing and every place, were shown by this new and vigorous
spirit to be full to overflowing with what had been, in the dim eyes
of former soi-disant geniuses, only dry bones ; but which, at the
touch of this bold neci'omancer, sprung up living forms of the most
fascinating grace. The whole public opened eyes of wonder, and in
breathless amazement and delight saw this active and unweariable
agent call round him, from the brooks and mountains of his native
land, troop after troop of kings, queens, warriors, women of regal
forms and more regal spirits ; visions of purity and loveliness ; and
lowly creations of no less glorious virtues. The whole land seemed
astir with armies, insurrections, pageantries of love, and passages of
sorrow, that for twenty years kept the enraptured public in a trance,
as it were, of ever-accumulating marvel and joy. There seemed no
bounds to his powers, or the held of his operations. From Scotland
he descended into England, stepped over into France, Germany,
Switzerland, nay, even into Palestine and India ; and people asked,
as volumes, any one of which would have established a first-rate
reputation, were i^oured out, year after year, with the rapid prodi-
gahty of a mountain stream, — is there no limit to the wondrous
powers of this man's imagination and creative faculty ? There really
seemed none. Fresh stories, of totally novel construction, fresh
characters, of the most startling originality, were continually coming
forward, as from an inexhaustible world of soul. Not only did the
loftiest and most marked characters of our history, either the Scotch
or English, again move before us in all their vitality of passion and
of crime, of virtue and of heroism, — as Bruce, James V. and VI.,
Kichard Coeur de Lion, Elizabeth, Mary of Scots, Leicester, James I.
of England, Montrose, Giaverhouse, Cumberland the butcher ; not
only did the covenanters preach and light anew, and the highland
clans rise in aid of the Stuart, but new personages, of the rarest
beauty, the haughtiest command, or the most curious humour,
swarmed forth upon the stage of life, thick, as if their creation had
cost no eftbrt. Flora IM'Ivor, Hose Bradwardine, liebecca the high-
souled Jewess, the unhappy Lucy Ashton and Amy Robsart, the
lowly Effie Deans, and her homely yet glorious sister Jenny, tho
bewitching Di Vernon, and Minna and Brenda Troil of the northern
4-18 SCOTT.
jsies, stand radiant amid a liost of lesser beauties ; while Kob Eoy,
the Eobin Hood of the hills, treads in manly dignity his native
heather; Balfour of Burley issues a stalwart apparition from his
hiding-places ; and for infinitude of humour, and strangeness of
aspect and mood, where are the pages that can present a troop like
these : the Baron of Bradwardine, Dominie Sampson, Meg Merrilies,
Monkbarns, Edie Ochiltree, Dugald Dalgetty, Old Mortality, Bailie
Nicol Jarvie, Andrew Fairservice, Caleb Balderstone, Flibbertigibbet,
Noma of the Fitful Head, and that fine follow, the farmer of Liddes-
dale, with whom every one feels a desire to shake hands, honest
Dandle Dinmont, with all his Peppers and Mustards yaffling at his
heels ?
It may be safely said that, in twenty years, one man enriched the
literature of his country with more story of intense beauty, and more
original character, than all its literati together for two hundred years
before. And this is only part of the wonder with Sir Walter Scott^ he
was all this time a man of business, of grave and various businesfv:=— a
Clerk of Session, sitting in the Parliament-house of Edinburgh daily,
during term, from ten to four o'clock — the Sheriff of Selkirk, with
its calls — an active cavalry volunteer — a member of gas and other
committees — a zealous politician and reviewer — mixed up in a world
of printing and publishing concerns, and ready to run off and tra-
verse as diligently sea and land, in all directions, at every possible
interval. Besides all this, he was a buyer of lands, a planter of
extensive woods, a raiser of a fairy castle, a keen sportsman with
greyhound and fish-spear. Amidst all these avocations and amuse-
ments, his writing appeared the produce of his odd hours ; and this
mass of romance, on which his fame chiefly rests, after all, but a
fragment of his literary labour. In the enormous list of his works,
to be found at the end of his Life by Lockhart, his novels and poems
appear but a slight sprinkling amid his heavier toils : — i-evie\vs,
translations, essays, six volumes ; Tales of a Grandfather, twelve
volumes ; sermons, memoirs, a multitude ; editions of Swift and
Dryden, in nineteen volumes and eighteen volumes ; Somers' Tracts,
in thirteen volumes ; antiquities, lives, &c. &c. The array of woi-ks,
written and edited, is astounding ; and when we recollect that little
of this was done before forty, and that he died at the age of sixty-
one, our astonishment becomes boundless. It is in vain to look for
another such life of gigantic literary labour, performed by a man of
the world, and no exclusive, unmitigated bookworm ; much less of
a life of such an affluent produce of orfginality. In these particulars,
Scott stands alone. ,
But though the wonder of his life is seen in this, the romance of
it yet remains. He arose to fill a great and remarkable point of
time. A new era was commencing, which was to be enriched out
of the neglected matter of the old. The suppression of the rebellion
of 1745 was the really vitalizing act of the miion of Scotland and
England. By it the old clan life and spirit were extinguished. The
spirit which maintained a multitude of old forms, costumes, and
modea of life, was by that event annihilated ; and the rapid amalga-
SCOTT. 44!)
mation of the two nations in a time of internal peace, would soon
have obliterated much that was extremely picturesque and full of
character, were it not seized and made permanent by some mighty
and comprehensive mind. That mind was Scott's ! He stood on
the threshold of a new world, with the falling fabric of the past
close beneath his view. Every circumstance which was necessary
to make him the preserver of the memory and life of this past world
met in him, as by a marked decree of the Almighty. He had all the
sensibility and imagination of the past, with the keenest relish of
everything that was prominent in living character amongst his
fellow-men. He was inspired with the love of nature, as an undying
passion, by having been, in his earliest years, suffered to run wild
amid the rocks of Smailholm, and the beautiful scenery of Kelso.
The Reliques of Ancient Eughsh Poetry — that herald of nature to
all who were capable of loving her at that period, and which, with-
out saying a word about the false taste of the age, at once awoke in
it the true one — was to him but the revelation of still further
relics of the like kind in his own country. He had heard similar
strains from his nurses; from the country people amongst whom
he had been cast ; from the ladies of his family ; and Percy's volumes
were but as a trumpet note, awakening him to a consciousness of
poetic wealth, that lay all around him thick as the dews of a spring
morning. In highland and in lowland, but especially along that
wild border-land which had become the delight of his boyhood, the
lays and the traditions of the past were in every mouth, and awaited
some fortunate hand to gather them. His was the hand destined to
do that and more. Every step that he made in the pursuit of the
old ballad literature of his country, only showed him more and more
of the immense mass of the materials of poetry and romance which
the past ages had neglected as vulgar. The so-called poets of two or
three generations had gone about on the stilts of classical i)ride ;
and had overlooked, nay, had scorned to touch even with their shoe-
toes, the golden ore of romantic character and deed, that lay in
actual heaps on every mountain, and along every mountain stream.
Young Scott, transported at the sight, flew east and west : traversed
mountain and heath, with all the buoyancy of youth and the
throbbing pulse of poetry. He went amongst the common people,
and amidst shepherds, and with housewives at their wheels, and
milkmaids over their pails ; he heard the songs and ballads which
had been flashed forth amid the clash of swords, or hymned mourn-
fully over the fallen, in wild days of wrong and strife, and still
stin'ed the blood of their descendants when they were become but
the solace of the long watch on the brae with the flock, or the
excitement of the winter fireside. Nay, he found not only poetry and
romance, but poets and romancers. Hogg and Leyden, Laidlaw and
Shorti'eed, all men of genius, all glowing with love of their native
land, became his friends, companions, and fellow-gatherers. The
romance of his life had now begun. Full of youth and the delicious
buoyancy of its enjoyment, full of expanding ho])es and aspirations,
dreams of power came upon him. He put forth his volumes of The
4."0 SCOTT.
Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, ;ukI found them realized. Ilia
horizon was at once wonderfully widened. The brightest spirits of
England, as well as of his own country, hailed him as a true
brother. The dawn of this new era was kindling apace. The hearts
which had caught the same impulse from the same source as him-
self, and owned the native charms of nature, were now becoming
vocal with the burden of this new music. Campbell, Wordsworth,
Southey, Coleridge, and others, were sending forth new strains of
poetry, such as had not been heard since Shakspeare, and Spenser,
and Milton had lived. But Walter Scott was to become something
more than a poet. His destiny was to become the great romance
writer of his age ; to gather up and mould into a new form the life
and spirit of the past many-coloured ages of his country, and to
leave them as a legacy of delight to the world for ever. For this
purpose he was qualified, by sundry accomplishments and experi-
ences. He studied the literature of Germany, and drew thence a
love of the wild and wonderful ; he became a lawyer, and thus was
brought into closer contact with the inner workings of society, its
forms and formalities. He was brought to a close gaze upon family
history, ujdou the passions that agitate men in the transitions of
l^roperty, and in the committal of crime, or the process of its arrest
and punishment. He was made to study men, both as they were
and had been, and was enriched with a knowledge of the techni-
caliti-es which are so essential to him who will describe, with accuracy,
trials and transactions in which both life and propert}^ are at stake,
and the crooked arts of villains, especially the villains of the law.
To these most auspicious preparations for his great task — a task not
yet revealed to him — he added a keen relish for antiquities ; and a
memory as gigantic as his frame was robust. Did there yet want
anything ? It was a genial humour, which rejoiced in the social
pleasures of life, and that, while it lived amid the open hearts of his
fellow-men, in the hours of domestic freedom and convivial gaiety,
saw deep into those hearts, and hoarded up without knowing it
theories of the actuality of existence, and of original character. This
too was eminently his.
His Border Minstrelsy published, he turned his views northward,
and a still more stirring scene presented itself. The Highlands,
with their beautiful mountains and lakes, their clan life, their thrill-
ing traditions and stories of but recently-past conflicts, bloodshed,
and sorrow ; — their striking costume, their pipers blowing strains
that, amid the rocks, and forests, and dark heather of that romantic
region, kindled even in the heart of the stranger a strange enthusiasm.
— all was to him full of the fire of poetry, and of a romance too
large, with all its quick and passionate characters, and its vivirl
details, for poetry itself. First came forth his Metrical Romances—
themselves a new and inspiriting species of poetry, founded indeec'
Du an old basis, but quickened with the soul of modern knowledge,
ftud handled with the harmonious freedom of a modern master
These, however we may now regard them as somewhat oversteppea
by the more impassi?v.=rl lays of Byron, and by the more expansive
scon:. 4.'il
wouilei's of the author's own prose romances, were, at the time, an
actual infusion of new life-blood into the public. They v/ere the
opening up of a totally new world, fresh and beautiful as the imagi-
nation could conceive. They actually seemed to smell of the heather.
Every rock, hung with its dark pines, or graceful birches ; every
romantic lake, bosomed in its lonely mountains : the hunt careering
along its richly-coloured glens ; the warrior, full of a martial and
chivalrous spirit ; the lithe Highlander, with dirk and phihbeg,
crouching in the heath, like the Indian in his forest, or speeding
from clan to clan with the fiery cross of war, — every one of these
vivid images was as new to the English public as if they had been
brought from the furthest regions of Japan. Then the whole of
these newly-discovered regions, the Highlands, for such they were,
was covered with traditions of strangest exploits ; the people were
a wild, irritable, vengeful, but still high-minded people, exhibiting
the equally prominent virtues and crimes of a demi-civilized race.
How refreshing was the contemplation of such scenes and people to
the jaded minds of the English, so long doomed to mediocre mono-
tony! I well remember, then a youth, with what avidity a new
poem of Walter Scott's was awaited for and devoured. It was
a poetry welcome to all, because it had not merely the qualities of
good poetry, which would have been lost on the majority of readers,
but it had all this novelty of scenery and character, and the excite-
ment of brilliant story, to recommend it. Then it was perpetually
shifting its ground. It was now amid the lonely regions of the
south of Scotland ; now high vip amid heaths, and lochs, and pine-
hung mountains, the shepherd's sheihng, the roar of the cataract,
and the cry of the eagle mixing with the wild sound of the
distant jjibroch ; and now amid the green naked mountains and
islands of the west, and savage rocks, and thundering seas, and the
cries of sea-birds, as they were roused by the wandering Bruce and
his followers, on their way to win back the crown of Scotland from
the English invader.
The sensation which these poems produced is now forgotten, and
can only be conceived by those who remember their coming out ;
but these were soon to be eclipsed by the prose romances of the
same author. The ground, the spirit, and the machinery were the
same ; but these were nov/ allowed to work in broad, unfettered
prose, and a thousand traits and personages w'ere introduced, which
could by no possibility have found a place in verse. The variety of
grotesque character.?, the full country dialect and dialogues of all
sorts of actors in the scenes, thus gave an infinite superiority to the
prose over the poetry. The fir.st reading of Waverley was an era in
the existence of every man of taste. There was a life, a coloui',
a feeling given to his mind, which he had never before experienced.
To have lived at that period when, ever and anon, it was announced
that a new novel by the Author of Waverley was coming out ; to
liave sate down the moment it could be laid hold of, and have
entered through it into another new world, full of new objects of
hdmiration, new friends, and new subjects of delight and discussion,
Q -2
4')'2 SCOTT.
— was, in truth, a veal privilege. The fame of Scott, before great,
now became unbounded. It flew over sea and land. His novels
were translated into every language which could boast of a printing-
press ; and the glory of two such men as himself and Byron made
still more proud the renown of that invincible island, which stood
against all the assaults of Napoleon, and had now even chained that
terrible conqueror, as its captive, on a far sea-rock.
I say the fame of Scott was thus augmented by the Waverley
Novels. Yes, they wei'e, long before they were owned to be his, felt
by the public to be nobody else's. The question might be, and was
agitated, but still there was a tacit feeling that Scott was their author,
far and wide diff"used. Dense, indeed, must they have been who
could doubt it. What were they but prose amplifications of his
Lady of the Lake, his Marmion, and his Lord of the Isles 1 So early
as 1822, rambling on foot with Mrs. Howitt in the Highlands, we
came to Aberfoil, where the minister, Mr. Graham, who had written
Sketches of the Scenery of Perthshire, accompanied us to spots in
that neighbourhood which are marked ones in the novel of Kob Roy.
It was he who had first turned the attention of Scott to the scenery
of Loch Katrine and the Trosachs. " Can there be any doubt," we
asked, " that Scott is the author of Waverley ? " " Could it possibly
be anybody else ? " he replied. " If the whole spirit and essence of
those stories did not show it, his visits here during the writing of
Rob Roy would have been decisive enough. He came here, and
inquired out all the traditionary haunts of Rob. I accompanied
him upon Loch Ard, and at a particular spot I saw his attention
fixed ; he observed my notice, but desired his daughter to sing
something to divert it ; but I felt assured that before long I should
see that spot described — and there, indeed, was Helen Macgregor
made to give her celebrated breakfast." Long before the formal
acknowledgment was made, few, in fact, were they who were not as
fully satisfied of the identity of Walter Scott and the author of
Waverley, as was the shrewd Ettrick Shepherd, who from the first
had the Waverley Novels bound and labelled, "Scott's Novels."
No one could have seen Abbotsford itself without being at once
convinced of it, if he had never been so before. Without, the very
stones of the old gateway of the Tolbooth of Edinburgh stared the
fact in his face ; within, it was a perfect collection of testimonies to
tlie fact. The gim of Rob Roy ; the pistols of Claverhouse ; the
thumbikins which had tortured the covenanters ; nay, a whole host
of things cried out, " We belong to the author of Waverley."
And never did fame so richly follow the accomplishment of deeds
of immortality as in the case of Sir Walter. From the monarch to
the meanest reader ; from Edinburgh to the farthest wilds of Russia
and America, the enthusiastic admiration of " The Great Northern
Magician," as he was called, was one universal sentiment. Wherever
he went he was made to feel it ; and from every quarter streamea
crowds on crowds to Abbotsford to see him. He was on the kindliest
terms of friendship with almost every known writer ; to his most
'listinguished cotemporaries, especially Byron, Miss Edgeworth, and
SCOTT. 453
Miss Joanna Baillie, he seemed as though, he could not testify suffi-
tient honour ; and, on the other hand, the highest nobiUty, nay
royalty itself, felt the pride of his presence and acquaintance. Never
had the glory of any literary man — not even of those who, like
Petrarch, had been crowned publicly as the poetic monarchs of the
age — reached such a pitch of intense and universal splendour. Thf
field of this glory was not one country, — it was that of the vast
civilized world, in which almost every man was a reader. No evi<
dences more striking of this were ever given than on his tour in
Ireland, where the play was not allowed to go on in Dublin till he
showed himself to the eager jDeople ; and on his return from whence,
he declared that his whole journey had been an ovation. It was the
same on his last going on the Continent. But the fact mentioned
by Lockhart as occurring during his attendance in London at the
coronation of George IV. in 1821, is worth a thousand others, as it
shows how truly he was held in honour by the common people. He
was retiu'ning from the coronation banquet in Westminster Plall.
He had missed his carriage, and " had to return on foot between two
and three in the morning, when he and a young gentleman, his
tompanion, found themselves locked in the crowd, somewhere near
Whitehall ; and the bustle and tumult were such, that his friend
was afraid some accident might happen to the lame limb. A space
for the dignitaries was kept clear at that point by the Scots Greys.
Sir Walter addressed a sergeant of this celebrated regiment, begging
to be allowed to pass by him into the open ground in the middle of
the street. The man answered shortly, that his orders were strict —
that the thing was impossible. While he was endeavouring to per-
suade the sergeant to relent, some new wave of turbulence approached
from behind, and his young companion exclaimed, in a loud voice —
' Take care. Sir Walter Scott, take care ! ' The stalwart dragoon,
healing the name, said — ' What ! Sir Walter Scott ? He shall get
through anyhow.' He then addressed the soldiers near him — ' Make
room, men, for Sir Walter Scott, our illustrious countryman ! ' The
men answered — ' Sir Walter Scott ! God bless him ! ' and he was in
a moment within the guarded line of safety."
This is beautiful. Sir Walter had won a proud immortality, and
lived now in the very noon of its living radiance. But the romance
is still behind. When about six-and-twenty, at the pleasant little
watering-place of Gilsland, in Cumberland, he fell in love with a
young French lady, Charlotte Margaret Charpentier. The meeting
was like one of those in his own novels. He was riding with his
friend Adam Fergusson — the joyous, genial friend of his whole life —
one day in that neighbourhood, when they met a young lady taking
in airing on horseback, whom neither of them had before seen.
They were so much struck Vv^ith her apijearance, as to keep her in
view till they were sure that she was a visitor at the wells. The
same evening they met her at a ball ; and so much was Scott
charmed with her, that he soon made her a i)roposal, and she became
his wife. All who knew her in her youth speak of her as a very
charming person, though I confess that her portrait at Abbotsford
4.J4 SCOTT.
tloes not give me much idea of her personal charms. But, says Mr.
Lockhart, who had the best oi^portuuity of knowing, " Without the
features of a regular beauty, she was rich in personal attractions ;
' a form that was fivshioned as hght as a fairy's ;' a complexion of the
clearest and the brightest olive ; eyes large, deep-set, and dazzling.
of the finest Italian brown ; and a profusion of silken tresses, black
as the raven's wing : her address hovering between the reserve of a
pretty Enghshwoman who has not mingled largely in general society,
and a certain natural archness and gaiety that suited well wifh the
accompaniment of a French accent. A lovelier vision, as all whc
remember her in the bloom of her days have assured me, could
hardly have been imagined."
With his charming young wife, Scott settled at Lasswade, about
seven miles from Edinburgh. Here he had a lonely and retired
cottage, in a most beautiful neighbourhood ; and was within an easy
distance of Edinburgh, and his practice there as an advocate. Here
he busied himself in his literary pursuits, and made those excursions
into Liddesdale, and Ettrick forest, and other parts of the border
country, in quest of materials for his Border Minstrelsy, in which he
found such exquisite delight. Here he found Shortreed, Hogg, Laid-
law, — men all enthnsiastic in the same pursuits and tastes. At this
time, too, he became acquainted in Edinburgh with Leyden, also
a border man, full of ballad and poetry, and with powers as gigantic
as Scott himself, though uncouth as a colt from the moors. There is
nothing in any biography which strikes me so full of the enjoyment
of life as Scott's raids, as he called them, into Liddesdale, and other
border wildernesses, at that period. He found everywhere a new
country, untrodden by tourists, unknown to fame, but richly de-
serving of it. There was a new land discovered, full from end to end
of wild scenery, and strange, rude, but original character, rich in
native wit, humour, and fun. Down Liddesdale there was no road ;
in it thei'e was no inn. Scott's gig, on the last of seven years' raids,
was the first wheel carriage that ever entered it. " The travellers
jjassed from the shepherd's hut to the minister's manse ; and again
from the cheerful hospitality of the manse, to the rough and jolly
welcome of the homestead." " To these rambles," says Lockhart,
" Scott owed much of the material of his Minstrelsy of the Scottish
Border, and not less of that intimate acquaintance with the living
manners of those unsophisticated regions, which constitutes the
chief charm of one of the most charming of his prose works." " He
was makin' himsel' a' the time," said Mr. Shortreed, " but he did na
ken, may be, what he was about till years had passed. At first he
thought o' little, I dare say, but the queerness and the fan." That
overflowing enjoyment of life, which so much distinguished Scott at
all periods, except the short melancholy one of his decline, now
exhibited itself in all its exuberance. " Eh me ! " says Mr. Short-
reed, " sic an endless fund o' humour and drollery as he then had
wi' him ! Never ten yards but we were either laughing, or roaring,
and singing. Wherever we stopped, how brawlie he suited himsel'
to everybody ! He aye did as the lave did ; never made himsel' the
SCOTT. 455
great man, or took ony airs in the company." It was in one of these
rauh that they fell in with the original of Dandie Dinmont.
His Border Minstrelsy came out ; his fame spread. His Metrical
Romances followed ; and he was the most popular man of the day.
In matters of business he rapidly advanced. He was made Clerk of
Session and Sheriff of Selkirk. He quitted his cottage at Lasswade
for the still more beautiful, but more sohtary farm of Ashestiel, on
the banks of the Tweed. Lord Byron's poetry blazed out ; but Scott
took another flight, in the Historical Novel, and was still, if not the
greatest poet, the most popular man of his age. Never had there
been any evidence of such pecuniary success in the literary world.
He made about 15,000/. by his poetry ; but by his prose he made, by
a single work, his 5,000/., his 10,000/., his 12,000/. His facility was
equal to his success ; it was no long and laborious t-isk to complete
one of these truly golden volumes — they were thrown off as fast as
he could write ; and in three months a novel, worth eight or ten
thousand pounds in the market, was finished ! Well might his hopes
and views tower to an unprecedented height. The sjDirit of poetry
and romance revelled in his brain, and began to show itself not only
'iu the construction of volumes, but in the building of a castle, an
tstate, a family to stand amid the aristocratic families for ever. The
name of Walter Scott should not only descend with his children as
that of an illustrious wi'iter, but should clothe them with the world-
honoured mantle of titular rank. And everything was auspicious.
The tide of fortune flowed on, the wind of public favour blew
wondrously. Work after work was thrown off; enormous sums
often were netted. Publishers and i:)rinters struggled for his patron-
age ; but Constable and the Ballantynes, acquaintances of his youth,
were selected for his favour, — and great became their standing and
business. There seemed not one fortune, but three secure of accom-
l^lishment. The poet, in the romantic solitude of Ashestiel, or
galloping over the heathy hills in the neighbourhood, as he mused
uD new and ever-succeeding visions of romances amongst them, con-
ceived the most fascinating scheme of all. It was to purchase lands,
to raise himself a fairy castle, to become, not the minstrel of a lord,
as were many of those of old, but a minstrel-lord himself. The
practical romance gi-ew. On the banks of the Tweed, then, began
to rise the fairy castle. Quaint and beautiful as one of his descrip-
tions, it arose ; lands were added to lands ; over hill and dale spread
the dark embossment of future woods ; and Abbotsford began to be
.spoken of far and wide. The poet had chosen his seat in the midst
of the very land of ancient poetry itself. At three miles' distance
.stood the fair pile of Melrose, which he had made so attractive by
his Lay of the Last Minstrel to the whole world. Near that showed
themselves the Eildon hills, the haunt of True Thomas; at their
feet ran the classic stream of Huntly burn. The Cowdenknows
lifted its black summit further down the Tweed ; and upwards waa
a whole fairyland — Carterhaugh, Newark tower, Ettrick forest, St.
Mary's lake, and the Dowie Dens of Yarrow. There was scarcely an
object in the whole country round — neither hill, nor M'ood, nor
io6 SCOTT.
stream, nor single rock — whicli was not full of the associations cf
ballad fame. Here, then, he lived like an old feudal lord, with his
hounds and his trusty vassals ; some of the latter, as Laidlaw and
Tom Purdie, occupying the station of those humble, faithful friends,
who tend so much to complete the happiness of life. In truth, never
did the i:>oet himself dream a fairer dream beneath a summer oak
than he had now realized around him. His lovely wife, the lady of
the domain ; his children shooting fast vip into beautiful manhood
and womanhood ; his castle and domain built, and won, as they were,
from the regions of enchantment ; and friends and worshijipers
flocking from every country, to behold the far-famed minstrel.
Princes, and nobles, and men of high name in every walk of life
were his guests.
(tEvery man of any note called him friend. The most splendid
equipages crowded the way towards his house ; the feast was spread
continuallj' as it were the feast of a king ; while on the balcony ranging
along the whole front, stalked to and fro, in his tartans, the wild piper,
and made the air quiver with the tempestuous music of the hills.
Arms and armour were ranged along the walls and galleries of his
hall. There were portraits of some of the most noted persons who
had figured in his lays and stories — as of Claverhouse, Monmouth,
the Pretender, the severed head of the Queen of Scots ; with those
of brother poets, Dryden, Thomson, Prior, and Gay. There were
the escutcheons of all the great clan chieftains blazoned round the
ceiling of his hall ; and swords, daggers, pistols, and instruments of
torture, from the times and the scenes he had celebrated.
Such was the scene of splendour which had sprung from the pen
of one man. If it were wonderful, the streams of wealth which
continued to pour from the same enchanted goose quill were still
more astounding. From Lockhart's Life we see that, independent of
what these works have made since, he had pretty early netted above
13,000/. by his poems, though he had sold some of them in their first
edition.
£ s. d.
Border Minstrel, 1st and 2d vol. 1st edit 78 10 ()
Copyright of the same work 500
Lay of the Last Minstrel, copyright sold 769 C
Marmion ditto 1,000
Lady of the Lake ditto 2,100
Hokeby ditto .5,000 o o
Lord of the Isles 3,000
Ilalidan Hill l.COO
£13,4-17 1(>
But this was nothing to the produce of liis romances. Of
Waverley, 51,000 copies had been sold when that Life Avas pub-
lished, and Scott tells us that he cleared 400/. by each 1,000 copies,
that is . . £20,000.
Guy Mannering, 60,000, or £24,000
Rob Roy, .53,000, or 21,300
Of the rest we have no total amount given ; but at a similar rate,
his twenty-one novels would make an amount of 460,000/. I Besidea
8C01T. 45T
this, he received for the Life of Napoleon above 18.000/. In three
months he wrote Woodstock, for which he tells us that he received
8,400/. at once. Then there are his Tales of a Grandfather, twelve
volumes, a most popular work, but of which no i:)roceeds are given.
His History of Scotland for Lardner's Cyclopaedia, 1,500/. ; for editing
Dryden, 756/. ; for seven Essays for the Encyclopaedia Britannioa,
300/.; Paul's Letters to his Kinsfolk, 1,350/.; for a contribution to
the Keepsake, 400/. which he says he considered poor pay. Then
he wrote thirty-five Reviews for the Edinburgh and Quarterly
lleviews, for which such a writer could not, on an average, receive
less than 50/. each, probably 100/. ; but say, 50/., that is 1,750/. And
these items are exclusive of the vast mass of edited editions of
Swift, of Memoirs, Antiquities, &c. &c. They do not either, except
in the three novels specified, include the proceeds of the collective
editions of either his prose or his poetry. It appears certain that
his works must have produced to the author or his trustees, at the
very least, half a miUioii of money ! !
Truly this was the revenue of a monarch in the realm of letters !
Popular as Lord Byron was, I suppose the whole which he received
for his writings did not realize 30,000/. Scott cleared that by any
two of his novels. He could clear a third of it in three months.
Weil might he think to lay field to field, and house to house, and
plant his children in the land as lords of the soil, and as titled
magnates for ever !
But, as the fabric of this glorious estate had risen as by the spell
of a necromancer, so it fell. It was like one of those palaces, with
its fairy gardens, and lawns scattered with diamonds instead of dews,
in the Arabian Nights, which, with the destruction of the spell,
passed away in a crash of thunder. A house of cards is proverbial,
and this house of books fell at one shock, and struck the world with
a terrible astonishment. It was found that the great minstrel wa.'i
not carefully receiving his profits, and investing them ; Init waii
engaged as partner in the printing and publishing of his works. His
publisher and his printers, drained on the one hand by the vast
outlay for castle-building, land-buying, and the maintenance of all
comers ; and, on the other, infected with the monstrous scene of
acquisition which was revealed to their eyes, — were moving on a
.slippery course, and, at the shock of the great panic in 1826, went
to the ground; leaving Scott debtor to the amount of 120.000/.,
besides a mortgage of 10,000/. on his estate.
In some instances the darkness and the difficulty of human life
come in the early stages, and wind up in light and happiness ; in
others, the light comes first, and the darkness at the end. These
• latter are tragedies, and the romance of Scott's life was a tragedy.
How sad and piteous is the winding up here ! The thunder-bolt
of fate had fallen on the "Great Magician." The glory of hi.')
outward estate was over, but never did that of his inner soul show
so brilliantly. Gentle, and genial, and kindly to all men, had he
shown himself in his most prosperous days ; but now the giant
strength of his fortitude, and the nobility of his moral principle.
4r>8 SCOTT.
came into magnificent ])lay. He was smitten, sorely smitten, but ha
was not subdued. Not a hero which he had described could match
him in his contest with the rudeness of adversity. He could have
paid his dividend, as is usual in such cases, and his prolific pen
would have raised him a second fortune. But then his honour ! — no,
he would pay to the uttermost farthing ! And so, with a sorrowful,
but not murmuring or desponding heart, he went to work again on
his giant's work ; and in six years, with his own hand, with his single
pen, paid off 16,000/. a-year ! That is an achievement which has no
parallel. With failing health, with all his brilliant hopes of establish-
ing a great family dashed to the ground, with the dearest objects of
his heart and health dropping and perishing before him, he went on,
and won 60,000/., resolved to pay all or perish. And he did perish !
His wife, shattered by the shock, died ; he was left with a widowed
heart still to labour on. Awful pangs, and full of presage, seized his
own frame ; a son and a daughter failed, too, in health ; his old man,
Tom Purdie, died suddenly ; his great publisher, and one of his
printers, died, too, of the fatal malady of ruined hopes. All these
old connexions, formed in the bright morning of life, and which had
made his ascent so cheering and his toil so easy, seemed now to be
giving way ; and how dark was become that life which had exceeded
nil others in its joyous lustre !
Yet, in the darkness, how the invincible soul of the heroic old man
went on rousing himself to fight against the most violent shocks of
fortune, and of his own constitution. " I have walked the last on
the domains I have planted ; sat the last in the halls I have built ;
but death would have taken them from me if misfortune had spared
them. My poor people whom I loved so well ! There is just another
die to turn against me in this run of ill luck ; /. e. if I should break
my magic wand in the fall from this elephant, and lose my popularity
with my fortune ! . . . But I find my eyes moistening, and that will
not do ; I will not yield without a fight for it." " Well, exertion,
exertion. O invention, rouse thyself ! May man be kind ! may God
be propitious ! The worst is, I never quite know when I am right
•,)r wrong." " Slept ill, not having been abroad these eight days ;
now a dead sleep in the morning, and when the awaking comes,
a strong feeling how well I could dispenije with it for once and for
ever. This passes away, however, as better and more dutiful
thoughts arise in my mind." Poor man ! and that worst which he
feared came. His jjublisher told him, though reluctantly, that his
power had departed, and that he had better lay by his pen ! Tc
a man like Scott, wiio had done such wonders, and still doggedly
laboured on to do others as great, that was the last and the bitterest
feeling that could remain with life.
Is there anything in language more pathetic than the words of
Sir Walter, when at Abbotsford he looked round him, after his wife's
death, and wrote thus in his journal ? — " When I contrast what this
place now is, with what it has been not long since, I think my heart
will break. Lonely, aged, deprived of my family — all but poor Anne ;
an impoverished, an embarrassed man, deprived of the sharer of my
SOOTT. 459
thoughts and counsels, who could alwaj's talk down my sense of the
calamitous apprehensions which break the heart that mur-t bear
them alone."
Sir Walter was the Job of modern times. His wealth and prosperity
had been Hke his, and the fabric of his fortune was smitten at the
four corners at once by the tempest of calamity ; but his patience
and resignation rivalled even those of the ancient patriarch. In no
period of his life, though he was admirable in all, did he display so
lofty a nobility of nature as in that of his adversity. Let us, who
have derived such boundless enjoyment from his labours, praise
with a fitting honour his memory. How descriptive are the words
of Prior, which in his last days he apphed to himself ! —
" Whate'er thy countrymen have done,
By law and wit, by sword and gun,
In thee is faithfully recited;
And all the living world that view
Thy works, give thee the praises due —
At once instructed and delighted."
That tragic reverse which bowed down himself and so many of
those who had shared with him in his happiness, did not stop with
his death. His daughters and one of his sons soon followed him.
His eldest, the second Sir Walter, had no family, and did not live
long ; there remained no heir of his name, though there were two of
his blood, the son and daughter of Mr. Lockhart, of the third gene-
ration. The SOP of Lockhart succeeded to the title, and died ; the
daughter, married to Mr. Hope, has succeeded to the estate ; and
it is said the fine library at Abbotsford is now a Catholic chapel. As
in the greatest geniuses in general, — in Milton, Shakspeare, Byron.
— the direct male line has failed in Sir Walter Scott. " The hope of
founding a family," says Lockhart, "died with him."
Such is the wonderful and touching romance of the life of Sir
Walter Scott. We might pause and point to many a high teaching
in it, — but enough ; in the beautiful words of Sir Egerton Brydgcs,
quoted by Lockhart, — " The glory dies not, and the grief is past."
We will now visit seriatim the homes and haunts of this extraor-
dinary man.
Sir Walter has himself pointed out in his autobiography the place
of his birth. He says, " I was born, I believe, on the 15th of August,
1771, in a house belonging to my father, at the head of the College
Wynd. It was pulled down with others to make room for the
northern part of the new college." In ascending the Wynd, it occu-
pied the left-hand corner at the top, and it projected into what is
now North College-street. According to the account of my friend,
Mr. Eobert Chambers, in his Reekiana, it has been puUed down
upwards of sixty years. " The site," he says, " is now partly occu-
pied as a wood-yard, and partly used in the line of North College-
street. Mr. Walter Scott, W. S., father of the poet, here lived at,
iroisihne, according to the simple fashion of our fathers, ihejiaf which
he occupied being accessible by a stair leading up from tlie little
court behind. It was a house of what would now be considered
humble aspect, but- at that time neither humble from its individual
l60 SCOTT.
appearance, nor from its vicinage. When required to be destroyed
for the pubhc convenience, Mr. Scott received a good price for it ;
he had some time before removed to a house on the west side of
George's-square, where Sir "Walter sjDent all his schoolboy and college
days. At the same time that Mr. Scott lived in the third flat, the
two lower floors were occupied as one house by Mr. Keith, W. S.,
grandfather to the late Sir Alexander Keith, knight-marischal of
Scotland.
" In the course of a walk through this part of the town in 1825,
Sir AValter did the present writer the honour to point 'out the site
of the house in which he had been born. On Sir Walter mentioning
that his father had got a good price for his share of it, in order that
it might be taken clown for the public convenience, the individual
who accomjaanied him took the liberty of expressing his belief that
more money might have been made of it, and the public much more
gratified, if it had remained to be shown as the birthplace of a man
who had written so many popular books. ' Ay, ay,' said Sir Walter,
' that is very well ; but I am afraid it would have been necessary
for me to die first, and that, you know, would not have been so
comfortable.' "
Thus, the birthplace of Scott remained, at the time of my visit,
exactly in the condition described above, being used for a wood-
yard, and separated from North College-street merely by a wooden
fence.
The other spots in Edinburgh connected with Scott, are his
father's house in George's-square ; his own house, 39, North Castle-
street ; 19, South Castle-street, the second flat, which he occupied
immediately after his marriage ; the High School, and the Parlia>
ment House. We may as well notice these at once, as it will ther
leave us at hberty to take his country residences in consecutive
order.
George's-square is a quiet and respectable square, lying not for
from Heriot's Hospital, and opj)osite to Watson's Hospital, on the left
^and of the Meadows-walk. Mr. Eobert Chambers — my great in,
formant in these matters in Edinburgh, and who is an actual walking
history of the place — every house, and almost every stone, ajjpear-
ing ■ft) suggest to him some memorable fact connected with it —
stated that this was the first square built, when Edinburgh began to
extend itself, and the nobility and wealthy merchants to think of
coming down from their lofty stations in flats of the old town ten-
storied houses, and seeking quieter and still more airy residences in
the suburbs. It was the first sign of the new life and growth before
the new town was thought of. No doubt, when Scott's father
removed to it, it was the very centre of fashion, and still it bears
traces of the old gentility. Ancient families still linger about it, and
you see door-plates bearing some aristocratic title. At the top, or
north side of the square, lived Lord Duncan, at the time that he set
out to take command of the fleet, and fight the battle of Camper-
down. Before his setting out, he walked to and fro on the pavement
here before his house, and, with a friend, talked of his plans ; so tha*;
SCOTT. 461
the victory of Camperdown may be said to have been planned in thia
square. The house still belongs to the family. Many other remark-
able people have lived just about hei-e. Blacklock, the blind poet,
lived near ; and Anderson, the publisher of the series of The Poets,
imder his name, hved near also, in Windmill-street. A quieter
square now could not, perhaps, be found; the grass was growing
greenly amongst the stones when I visited it. The houses are capa-
cious and good, and from the upper windows, many of them look out
over the green fields, and have a full view of the Pentland hills. The
new town, however, has now taken precedence in jjublic favour, and
this square is thought to be on the wrong side of the city. The
house which Scott's father occupied, is No. 25.
On the window of a small back room, on the ground floor, the
name of Walter Scott still remained written on a pane of glass, with
a diamond, in a schoolboy's hand. The present occupiers of the
house told us, that not only the name, but verses had been found on
several of the windows, undoubtedly by Walter Scott, and that they
had had the panes taken out, and sent to London to admirers of the
great author.
The room in which this name is written on the glass, used to be
his own apartment. To this he himself, in his autobiography, par-
ticularly refers ; and Lord Jeffrey relates, that, on his tirst call on
young Walter Scott, " he found him in a small den, on the sunk
floor of his father's house, in George's-square, surrounded with dingy
books." Mr. Lockhart says, " I may here add the description of that
early den, with which I am favoured by a lady of Scott's family: —
' Walter had soon begun to collect out-of-the-way things of all sorts.
He had more books than shelves; a small painted cabinet, with
Scotch and Eoman coins in it, and so forth. A claymore and
Lochabar axe, given him by Mr. Invernahyle, mounted guard on a
little print of Prince Charlie ; and Broitghtons Saucer was hooked up
against the wall below it.' Such was the germ of the magnificent
library and museum at Abbotsford ; and such were the ' new realms'
in which he, on taking possession, had arranged his little parapher-
nalia about him, ' with aU the feelings of novelty and liberty.' "
" Since those days," says Mr. Lockhart, " the habits of life in Edin-
burgh, as elsewhere, have undergone many changes; and 'the
convenient parlour ' in which Scott first showed Jeffi-ey his col-
lection of minstrelsy, is now, in all probability, thought hardly good
enough for a menial's sleeping-room." This is very much the fact ;
such a poor little damp den did this appear, on our visit, being
evidently used by the cook, as it was behind the kitchen, for a sort
of little lumber-room of her own, that my companion contended that
Scott's room must have been the one over this. The evidence hero
is, however, too strong as to its identity ; and, indeed, who does not
know what Uttle dingy nooks children, and even youths, Avith ardent
imaginations, can convert into very palaces.
This house will always be one of the most truly interesting spots
connected with Scott's history. It was here that he lived, from a
Very child to his marriage. Here passed all that happy boyhood and
162 SCOTT.
voutli which arc described with so much beautiful detail in his
Life, both from his own autobiography and from added materials
collected by Lockhart. These show in his case how truly and
entirely
" Tlie child was father of the man ;"
or, as Milton had it long before,
" The chililliood shows the man,
As morning shows the day."
Paradise Regained, Book IV. p. 63.
Here it was that he passed his happy boyhood, in the midst of
.that beautiful family life, which he has so attractively described :
(the grave, careful, but kind father ; the sweet, sensible, ladylike, and
religious mother ; the three brothers, various in their fortunes as in
their dispositions ; and that one imfortunate sister, Anne Scott,
whom he terms from her cradle the butt for mischance to shoot
arrows at. She who had her hand caught by the iron gate leading
into the area of the square in a high wind, and nearly crushed to
pieces ; who next fell into a pond, and narrowly escaped drowning ;
and was finally, at six years of age, so burnt by her cap taking fire,
that she soon after died. Here, as schoolboy, college student, and
law student, he made his early friendships, often to continue for life,
with John Irvine ; George Abercrombie, sou of the famous general,
and now Lord Abercrombie ; William Clerk, afterwards of Eldin,
.son of Sir John Clerk, of Pennycuick house ; Adam Fergusson, the
son of the celebrated Professor Fergusson ; the present Earl of
Selkirk, David Boyle, present Lord Justice Clerk, Lord Jeffrey, Mr.
Claude Eussell, Sir William Rae, David Mony penny, afterwards
Lord Pitmilly ; Sir Archibald Campbell of Succoth, Bart. ; the Earl
of Dalhousie, George Cranstoun (Lord Corehouse), John James
Edmonstone, of Newton ; Patrick Murray, of Simprim ; Sir Patrick
Murray, of Ochtertyre ; David Douglas (Lord Preston) ; Thomas
Thomson, the celebrated legal antiquary ; William Erskine (Lord
Kinedder), Alexander Frazer Tytler (Lord Woodhouselee), and other
celebrated men, with many of whom he was connected in a literary
club.
Here it was that, with one intimate or another, and sometimes in
a jovial troop, he set out on those country excursions which were to
render him so affluent in knowledge of life and varied character ;
commencing with their almost daily strolls about Arthur's Seat and
Salisbury Craig, repeating poetry and ballads ; then to Prestonpans,
Pennycuick,' and so extending their rambles to Roslyn, Lasswade,
the Pentlands, down into Roxburghshire, into Fife, to ]^lodden.
Chevy Chase, Otterburn, and many another scene of Border renown,
Liddesdale being, as we have stated, one of the most fascinating ;
and finally away into the Highlands, where, as the attorney's clerk,
his business led him amongst those old Highland chiefs who had
been out in the '15 and '4.5, and where the veteran Invernahyle set
him on fire with his stories of Rob Roy, Mar, and Prince Charlie
ivnd where the Baron of Bradwardine and Tullyveolan, and all tii6
SCOTT. 463
scenes of Waverley, and others of his Scotch romances, were im-
pressed on his soul for ever. Here it was, too, that he had for tutor
that good-heai"ted but formal clergyman, Mr. Mitchell, who was
afterwards so startled when Sir Walter, calling on him at his manse
in Montrose, told him he was " collecting stories of fairies, witches,
and ghosts :" " intelligence," said the pious old presbyterian minister,
" which proved to me an electric shock ; " adding, that moreover,
" these ideal beings, the subjects of his inquiry," were not objects
on which he had himself wasted his time. And here, finally, it was
that, in the ballads he read, — as in that of Cumnor Hall, the germ of
Kenilworth, of which he used as a boy to be continually repeating
the first verse, —
" The dews of summer night did fall —
The moon, sweet regent of the sky,
Silvered the walls of Cumnor hall,
And many an oak that grew therehy ; " —
in the lays of Tasso, Ariosto, &c., he laid up so much of the food of
future romance, and where Edie Ochiltrees and Dugald Dalgetties
were crossing his every-day path.
It was here that occurred that singular scene, in which his mother
])ringing in a cup of coffee to a gentleman who was transacting
I )usiness with her husband, when the stranger was gone, Mr. Scott
told his wife that this man was Murray of Broughton, who had been
a traitor to Prince Charles Stuart ; and saying that his lip should
never touch the cup which a traitor had drank out of, flung it out of
the window. The saucer, however, being preserved, was secured by
Scott, and became a conspicuous object in his juvenile museum.
Such to Scott was No. 25, George's-square. Probably it was the
secret charm of these old and precious associations which led his
old and most intimate friend. Sir Adam Fergusson, afterwards to
take a house in this squai-e, and within, I believe, one door of Scott's
old residence.
We may dismiss in a few words' No. 19, South Castle-street, the
house where he occupied a flat immediately on his marriage, and the
Parliament house, where he sat, as a clerk of session, and the Outer
honse, where he might, in his earlier career, bo seen often making his
acquaintance merry over his stories ; — these places will always be
viewed with interest by strangers ; but it is his house, 39, North
Castle-street, around which gather the most lively associations con-
nected with his mature life in Edinburgh.
Here it was that he lived when in town, from soon after his
marriage till the great break-up of his aiFairs in 1826. Here a great
portion of the best of his life was passed. Here he lived, enjoyed,
worked, saw his friends, and felt, in the midst of his happy family,
the sense of the great name and affection that he had v/on amongst
liis fellow-men. It is evident, from what he says in his journal,
when it had to be sold, that he was greatly attached to it. It was
his pride very often when he took strangers home with him, to stoji
at the crossing of Ceorge-strect, and point out to them the beauty
and airiness of the situation. In one direction was St. George's
4G4 SCOTT.
oUurch, in another the whole length of George-street, with the
monuments of Pitt and Dimdas. In one direction, the castle on its
commanding rock, in the other the Frith of Forth, and the shores of
Fife beyond. It was in this house that " the vision of the hand "
was seen from a neighbouring one in George-street, which is related
in Lockhart's Life. A party was met in this house, which was
situated near to, and at right angles with, George-street. " It was a
party," says the relater, " of very young persons, most of them, like
Menzies and myself, destined for the bar of Scotland. The weather
being hot, we adjourned to a library, which had one large window
looking northwards. After carousing here an hour or more, I observed
that a shade had come over the aspect of my friend, who happened
to be placed immediately opposite to myself, and said something that
intimated a fear of his being unwell. ' No,' said he, ' I shall be well
enough presently, if you will only let me sit where you are, and take
my chair ; for there is a confounded hand in sight of me here, which
has often bothered me before, and now it won't let me fill my glass
with a goodwill.' I rose to change places with him accordingly, and
he pointed out to me this hand, which, like the writing on Belshazzar's
wall, disturbed his hour of hilarity. ' Since we sat down,' said he,
' I have been watching it — it fascinates my eye — it never stops —
page after page is finished and thrown on that heap of manuscript,
and still it goes on unwearied, and so it will be till candles are
brought in, and God knows how long after that. It is the same
every night — I can't stand a sight of it when I am not at my books.'
' Some stupid, dogged, engrossing clerk, probably,' exclaimed myself,
or some other giddy youth of our society. ' No, boys,' said our host,
' I well know what hand it is — 'tis Sir Walter Scott's.' This was the
hand that, in the evenings of three summer weeks, wrote the two
last volumes of Waverley."
I went with Mr. Robert Chambers into this house, to get a sight
of this window, but some back wall or other had been built up and
had shut out the view. In the next house, occupied, I think, by a
tailor, we, however, obtained the desired sight of this window on
the second story at the back of Scott's house, and could very well
have seen any hand at work in the same situation. The house was
then inhabited by Professor Napier, editor at that time of the
Edinburgh Review.
The houses and places of business of the Ballantynes and Constable
are not devoid of interest, as connected with Scott. In all these he
was fi-equently for business or dining. The place of business of
Constable, was at one time that whioh is now the Crown hotel, at
the east end of Princes-street. That which is now the commercial
room, or the first floor, was Constable's book depot, and where he
sat a good deal ; and a door near the window, looking out towards
the Register Office, entered a lesser room, now altered, where Scott
ised to go and write occasionally. The private residence of Constable
ivas at Palton, six or seven miles from Edinburgh. James Ballantyue's
was in St. John-street, a row of good, old-fashioned, and spacioua
aouses, adioining the Cauongatc t'.ud Holyrood, and at no great dis
»
SCOTT. 465
tauce from his printing establishment. John Ballantyne's aviction
rooms were in Hanover-street, and his country house, styled by him
Harmony-hall, was near the Frith of Forth by Ti-inity. Of both
the private and convivial entertainments at these places, we have
full accounts given by Lockhart. Sometimes, he says, Scott was
there alone with only two or three intimate friends ; at others, there
were great and jovial dinners, and that all guests with whom Scott
did not wish to be burdened wei'e feasted here by John Ballantyne,
in splendid style; and many were the scenes of uproarious merriment
amid his " perfumed conversations," and over the Parisian dehcacies
of the rejiast.
But, in fact, the buildings and sites in and around Edinburgh,
with which associations of Scott are connected, are innumerable,
almost universal. His Marmion, his Heart of Mid-Lothian, his Tale.s
of the Canongate, have peoijled almost every part of the city and
neighbourhood with the vivid characters of his creation. The Canon-
gate, the Cowgate, the Nether and West Bows, the Grass-market,
the site of the old Tolbooth, Holyrood, the Park, Muschat's cairn,
Salisbury Craig, Davie Dean's cottage, Liberton, the abode of Dominie
Butler, Craigmillar Castle, and a thousand other places, are all alive
Avith them. We ai-e astonished, on visiting Edinburgh, to find how
much more intense is the interest cast over difierent spots by his
genius than by ordinary history.
A superb monument to his memorj', a lofty and peculiarly beau-
tiful Gothic cross, now stands in Princes-street, within which stands
his statue.
The first place in the country which Scott resided at, is the scene
of a sojourn at a very early age, and of subsequent visits — Sandy-
knowe, near Kelso. In his autobiography he gives a most pic-
turesque account of his life here. He says that it was here that he
came soon after the commencement of his lameness, which was
attributed to a fever, consequent on severe teething, when he was
about eighteen months old. He dates his first consciousness of life
from this place. He came here to be strengthened by country air,
and was suffered to scramble about amongst the crags to his heart's
content. His father, AV alter Scott, was the first of his family who
entered on a town life. His grandfather, Kobert Scott, then very old,
Avas living at this Sandy-knowe. The place is some five or six miles
from Kelso. The spot lies high, and is still very wild, but in the
time of Scott's childhood would be far wilder. It was then sur-
rounded, far and wide, with brown moorlands. These are now, for
the most part, reclaimed by the plough ; but the country is open,
naked, and solitary. The old tower of Smailholm, which stands on
the spot, is seen afar off as a tall, square, and stern old Border keep.
In his preface to the Eve of St. John, Scott says, " The circuit of the
outer court being defended on three sides by a precipice and a morass,
is accessible only from the west by a steep and rocky path. The
apartments, as usual in a Border keeji or fortress, arc placed one
above another, and communicate by a narrow stair. On the roof aro
two bartizans, or platforms, for defence or pleasure. The inner door
466 SCOTT.
of the tower is wood, the oiiter an iron grate ; the distance between
them being nine feet, the thickness, namely, of the walls. Among
the crags by which it is surrounded, one more eminent is called the
Watchfold; and is said to have been the station of a beacon in the
times of war with England."
Stern and steadfast as is this old tower, being, as Scott himself
says, nine feet thick in the wall, each room arched with stone, and
the roof an arch of stone, with other stones piled into a steep ridge
apon it, and being built of the iron-like whinstone of the rocks
around, it seems as if it were a solid and time-proof portion of the
crag on which it stands. The windows are small holes, and the feel-
ing of grim strength which it gives you is intense. Since Scott's
day, the inner door and the outer iron grate are gone. The place is
open, and the cattle and the winds make it their resort. All around
the black crags start out of the ground ; it is an iron wilderness. A
few laborious cotters live just below it ; and not far off is the spot
where stood the old house of Scott's grandfather, a good modern
farm-house and its buildings. This savage and solitary monument
of the ages of feud and bloodshed stands no longer part of a waste,
^vherc
" The bittern clamoured from the moss,
The wind blew loud and shrill ; "
but in the midst of a well-cultivated corn farm, where the farmer
looks with a jealous eye on visitors, wondering what they can want
with the naked old keep, and complaining that they leave his gates
open. He had been thus venting his chagrin to the driver of my
chaise, and wishing the tower were down — a stiff business to accom-
plish — but withdrew into his house at my approach.
Sterile and bare as is this wild scene, Scott dates from it, and
no doubt correctly, his deep love of nature, and ballad romance.
In the introduction to the third canto of Marmion, he thus rcfer.-^
to it : —
" It was a barren scene and wild,
Where naked cliffs were rudely piled ;
But ever and anon between
Jiay velvet tufts of loveliest preen ;
And well tlie lonely infant knew
llecesses where the wall-flower Rrew,
And honeysuckle loved to crawl
Up the low crag and ruined wall.
I deemed such nooks the sweetest shade
The sun in all its round surveyed ;
And still I thought that shattered tower
The mightiest work of human power:
And marvelled as the aged hind
With some strange tale bewitched my mind—
Of forayers who, with headlong force,
Down from that strength had spurred their I'orse.
Their southern rapine to renew,
Far in the distant Cheviots blue;
And home returning, filled the hall
With revel, wassail-rout, and brawl.
Methoufiht that still with trump and clang
The gateway's broken arches rang ;
Methcught grim features, seamed with scaia
Cared through the window's rusty bars.
And ever, by the winter heartli
Old tales I heard of woe or mirth, *■
SCOTT. 4f;;
Of lovers' slights, of ladi^3 cliarms ;
or witches' spells, of warriors' arms ;
Of patriot battles won of old
By Wallace wight and Bruce the bold;
Oi' later fields of feud and fight,
When, pouring from their Highland heigl.t,
Tlie Scottish clans in headlong sway,
Had swept the scarlet ranks away.
While stretched at length upon the floor.
Again I fought each combat o'er;
Pebbles and shells in order laid,
The mimic ranks of war displayed;
And onward still the Scottish lion bore,
And still the scattered southron fled before.''
Here we liave the elements of Waverley at work in the child o*f
four or five years old. In fact, the years that h* sj^ent here were
crowded with the impressions of romance, and th« excitement of the
imagination. He was surrounded by singular and picture squecha-
racters. The recluse old clergyman; old Mac Dougal, of Makerstoun,
in his little laced cocked hat, embroidered scarlet waistcoat, light-
coloured coat, and white hair tied military fashion, kneeling on the
carpet before the child, and drawing his watch along to induce him
to follow it. Old Ormistoun, the herdsman, that used to carry him
out into the moorlands, telling him all sorts of stories, and blew his
whistle when the nurse was to fetch him home. The nurse herself,
who went mad, and to escape from this solitude, confessed that she
had carried the child up among the crags, luider a temptation of the
devil, to cut his throat with her scissors, and bury him in the moss ;
and was therefore dismissed at once, but found to be a maniac.
These things were certain of sinking deep into the child's mind,
amid the solitude and wildness of the place ; but all this time too
he was fed daily with every sort of Border and other ballad : Watt
of Harden, Wight Willie of Aikwood, Jamie Telfer of the fair Dod-
head, Hardyknute, and the like ; and the stories of the cruelties
practised on the rebels at Carlisle, and in the Highlands, after the
battle of Culloden, related to him by a farmer of Yethyn who had
witnessed them — " tragic tales which," said Scott, " made so great ar
impression upon me." In fact, here again were future materials of
Waverley. Before quitting the stern old tower of Smailholm, anil
Sandy-knowc, — why so called, and why not rather Whinstone-knowe,
it were difficult to say, — we may, in the eloquent words of Mr. Lock-
hart, point out the celebrated scenes which lie in view from it.
" Nearly in front of it, across the Tweed, Lessudden, the compara-
tively small, but still venerable and stately, abode of the lairds of
Raeburn ; and the hoary abbey of Dryburgh, suri'ounded with yew-
trees as ancient as itself, seem to lie almost at the feet of the
spectator. Opposite him rise the purple peaks of Eildon, the tradi-
tional scene of Thomas the Rhymer's interview with the Queen of
•Faerie; behind are the blasted peel which the seer of Erceldoun
himself inhabited, ' The Broom of the Cowdenknowes,' the pastoral
valley of the Leader, and the bleak wilderness of Lammermoor.
To the eastward, the desolate grandeur of Hume castle breaks the
horizon, as the eye travels towards the range of the Cheviot. A few
46S SCOTT.
miles westward, Melrose, 'like some tall rock with lichens grey,"
appears clasped amidst the windings of the Tweed ; and the distancH
presents the serrated mountains of the Gala, the Ettrick, and the
\.^arrow, all famous in song. Such were the objects that had painted
the earliest images on the eye of the last and greatest of the Border
minstrels."
The next place which became a haunt of the boyhood of Scott was
Kelso. Here he had an uncle, Captain Robert Scott, and an aunt,
Miss Janet Scott, under whose care he had spent the latter part of
his time at Saudy-knowe. Scott, as I have obsei'ved, was one of tbe
most fortunate men that ever lived in the circumstance of his early
life, in which every possible event which could prepare him for the
office of a great and original novelist concurred, as if by appoint-
ment of Providence. He was led to visit and explore all the most
beautiful scenes of his country — the Borders, the Highlands, those
around Edinburgh ; and in every place at that time existed multi-
tudes of singular characters, many of them still retaining the quaint
garb and habits of a former day. We have seen that his school and
college fellows comprised almost all the afterwards distinguished
men of their age, no trivial advantage to him in his own progress.
At Sandy-knowe, besides the characters we have referred to, his old
grandfather and grandmother, and their quiet life — " Old Mrs.
Scott sitting with her sjiinning-wheel at one side of the fire, in a
clean, clean parlour ; the grandfather, a good deal failed, in his elbow-
chair opposite; and the little boy lying on the carpet at the old
man's feet, listening to the Bible, or whatever good book Miss Jenny
was reading to them." He was away sometimes at Prestonpans, and
there, as fortune would have it, for he must be enriched with aU
!5uch treasure, he saw in George Constable the original of Monkbarns,
and also the original Dalgetty. Kelso now added to the number of
his original characters, and scenes for future painting. Miss Janet
Scott lived, he tells us, in a small house in a large garden to the
eastward of the churchyard of Kelso, which extended down to the
Tweed. This grand old garden of seven or eight acres, had winding
walks, mounds, and a banqueting-house. It was laid out in the old
style with high pleached hornbeam hedges, and had a superb plane-
tree. In many parts of the garden were fine yews and other trees, and
there was also a goodly old orchard. Here, as in a very paradise,
he used to read and devour heaps of poetry: Tasso's Jerusalem
Delivered, Percy's Reliques, and the works of Richardson, Eielding,
Smollett, Mackenzie, and other of the great novelists. The features
of this garden remained deeply imprinted in his mind, and have been
reproduced in different descriptions of works. Like the garden of
Eden itself, this charming old garden has now vanished. Indeed, he
himself relates with what chagrin he found, on revisiting the place
many yeai's afterwards, the good old plane-tree gone, the hedges
pulled up, and the bearing trees felled ! I searched for some trace
of it on my visit there in vain, though its locality is so well defined
r^here was, however, the old grammar-school not far off to which he
ix-'xd to go, and where he found, in Lancelot Whale, the prototype of
SCOTT. 460
Dominie Sampson, and in two of the boys, his future printers, Jatuea
and John Ballantyne. The neighbourhood of Kelso, the town itself
quiet and old-fashioned, was well calculated to charm a boy of his
dreaming and poetry-absorbing age. The Tweed here is a fine broad
stream, the banks are steep and magnificently hung with splendid
w'oods. The adjoining park and old castle, the ruins of the fine
abbey in the town, and charming walks by the Tweed or the Teviot,
Avhich here unite, with their occasional broad sandy beach, and
anglers wading in huge boots ; all made their delightful impression.*
upon him. He speaks with rapture of the long walks along the.
river with James Ballantyne, repeating poetry and telling stories.
His uncle, Captain Eobert Scott, lived somewhat farther out on the
same side as his aunt, at a villa called Eosebank, which still stands
unchanged amidst much fine lofty timber, and with its lawn running
down to the Tweed.
Kelso was the last country abode of the boyhood of Scott. Edin-
bui'gh, with his occasional flights into the Highlands, and his raids
into Liddesdale, kept him till his manhood. That found him with
iiis blithe little wife in his cottage at Lasswade.
Lasswade is a lovely neighbourhood. It is thrown up into lofty
ridges all finely wooded. The country there is rich ; and the noble
wood.s, the fine views down into the fertile valleys, and the Esk
coming sounding along its channel from Rosslyn and Hawthomden,
make it very charming. It is in the immediate neighbourhood not
only of Rosslyn, with its beautiful chapel, and the ckssic clifi's aTid
woods of Hawthornden, but of Dalkeith ; and Lord Melville's park
is at Lasswade itself.
The cottage of Scott is still called Lasswade Cottage. Every one
still knows the house as the one where he lived. A miller near said,
"He minded him weel. He was an advocate then, and his wife
a little dark Frenchwoman." The house was, at the time of my
visit, occupied as a ladies' school, kept by two Miss Mutters. It
looked somewhat neglected, and wanted painting and keeping in
more perfect order ; but it is itself a very sweet secluded place. It
is before you come to the village of Lasswade, about halfway down
the hill, from an ordinary hamlet called Loanhead. It stands about
fifty yards from the roadside ; and, in fact, the road divides at the
projecting corner of its higher paddock ; the main highway descend-
ing to the left to Lasswade, and the other to the right proceeding
past several pleasant villas to the Esk. There are two roads leading
from the highway up to the house ; one being the carriage-drive up
to the front, and the other to the back, past some labourers' cottages.
It is a somewhat singular-looking house, having one end tall, and
thiitched in a remarkably steep manner ; and then a long, low range,
running away from it. The whole is thatched, whitewashed, and
covered with Ayrshire roses, evergreen plants, and masses of ivy.
When you get round to the front, for it turns its back on the road,
you find thft lofty jjart projecting much beyond the low range, and
having a sort of circular front. A gravel walk or drive goes quite
round to tlua side, and is divided from a paddock by laurels. There
470 SCOTT.
lire three paddocks ; one opposite to the tall end, and extending
down to the road, one in front, and one behind the house, in which
tands, neai" the house, in a still smaller enclosure, a remarkably
large sycamore-tree. The paddocks are all surrounded by tall, full-
gi'own trees, and they shut in the place to perfect retirement. At
the end of the low range lies a capital large kitchen-garden, with
plenty of fruit-trees ; and this extends to the back lane, proceeding
towards the valley of the Esk. The neighbourhood is full of the
houses of people of wealth and taste. Here for many years lived
Henry ilackenzie, the INIan of Feeling. Here, at this cottage, how-
ever secluded, Scott found plenty of literary society. He was busy
with his German translations of Lenore, Gotz von Berlichingen, &c.,
and his Border Minstrelsy. Here Mat. Lewis, and Heber, the collector
of rare books, visited him ; as well as the crabbed Ritson, whom the
rough and impatient Leyden put to flight. Then came Wordsworth
and his sister Dorothy, from a tour in the Highlands ; and Scott set
off with them on a ramble down to Meh-ose and Teviotdale. He had
here partly written the Lay of the Last Minstrel, and edited and
published Sir Tristram. These facts are enough to give a lasting
interest to the cottage of Lasswade. The duties of his sheriffdom
now called him frequently to the forest of Ettrick, and he fixed his
abode at the lovely but solitary Ashestiel.
Ashestiel occujjied as an abode a marked and joyous period of
Scott's life. He was now a happy husband, the happy father of a
lovely young family. Foi'tune was smiling on him. He held an
honourable, and to him delightful office, that of the sheriff of the
county of Selkirk ; which bound him up with almost all that Border
ballad country, in which he revelled as in a perfect fairy land. He
was fast rising into fame, and in writing out the visions of poetry
which were now warmly and rapidly opening upon his mind, he
was located in a spot most auspicious to their development. The
solitude of Ashestiel was only felt by him as a refreshing calm, foi
his spirit was teeming with life and action, and his rides over hill
and dale, his coursing with his favourite dogs and friends, along the
hills of Yair, " his burning of the water," in the deep and dark
Tweed, which rolled sounding on beneath the forest banks below his
house — that is, siiearing salmon by torchlight : these were all but
healthy and joyous set-ofFs to the bustle of inward life in the com-
position of the Lay of the Last Minstrel, Marmion, the Lady of the
Lake, the Lord of the Isles, of Waverley, and the active labours on
Dryden, and a host of other literaiy undertakings. I believe Scott
resided about se\en years at Ashestiel ; and it is amazing what a
mass of new and beautiful compositions he worked off there. It
was here that his poetic fame grew to its full height ; and he was
acknowledged, though Southey, Wordsworth, Campbell, and Cole-
ridge were now pouring out their finest productions, to be the most
original and popular writer of the day. There was to be one fresh
and higher flight even by him, that of " The Great Unknown," and
this was reserved for Abbotsfonl. There the fame of his romances
began, there grew into its full-blown greatness ; but here the sun of
SCOTT. 471
his poetic reputation ascended to its zenith. In particular, the poem
of Marmion will for ever recal the memory and the scenery of
Ashestiel. The introductions to the different cantos, than which
there are no poems in the English language more beautiful of their
kind, are all imbued with the spirit of the place. They breathe at
once the solitary beauty of the hills, the lovely charm of river, wood,
and heath, and the genial blaze of the domestic hearth ; on which
love, and friendship, and gladsome spirits of childhood, and the
admiration of eager visitors to the secluded abode of " The Last
Minstrel," had made an earthly paradise. The summer rambles up
tlie Ettrick or Yarrow, by Newark tower, St. Mary's Loch, or into
the wilds of Moffatdale, when
" The laverock whistled from the clo.iil :
The stream was lively, but not loud ;
From the white-thorn the May-flower shed
Its dewy fragrance round our head :
Not Ariel lived more merrily
Under the blossomed bough than we."
Then how the time flew by in the brighter season of the year, by
dale and stream, in wood and wold, till the approach of winter and
the Edinburgh session called them to town ! How vividly are these
days of storm and cloud depicted ! —
" When dark December ;;looms the day,
And takes our autumn joys av.ay :
AVhen short and scant tlje funheam tliiows
Upon the weary waste of snows,
A cold and profitless regard.
Like patron on a needy bard —
AVhen sylvan occupation's done.
And o'er the chimney rests the gun,
And hang, in idle trophy near,
The game-poucli, fishing-rod, and spear:
AVhen wiry terrier, rough and grim.
And greyhound with his length of limb, '
,\nd pointer, now employed no more,
Cumber our parlour's narrow floor :
When in his stall the impatient steed
Is long condemned to rest and feed :
AVheii from our snow-encircled home-
Scarce cares the hardiest step to roam.
Since path is none, save that to bring
The needful water from the spring :
When wrinkled news-page, thrice conned o'er,
Beguiles the dreary hour no more,
And darkling politician, crossed,
Inveighs against the lingering post,
And answering housewife sore complains
Of carriers' snow-impeded wains :
When such the country cheer, I come.
Well pleased to seek our city home ;
Kor converse, and for books, to change
The forest's melancholy range;
And welcome, with renewed delight.
The busy day and social night." — Introduction to Canto V.
It •was on a fine, fresh morning, after much rain, that, with a
smart lad as driver, I sped in a gig from Galashiels up the valley on
the way to Ashestiel. The sweet stream of the Gala water i-an on
our left, murmuring deliciously, and noble woods right and left,
amongst them the classic mansion of Torwoodlee, and wood-crowned
472 SCOTT.
banks, made the way beautiful. Anon we came out to the opcc
country, bare but pleasant hills, and small light streams careering
along the valleys, and shepherds, with their dogs at their heels,
setting out on their long rounds for the day. There was an in-
spiriting life and freshness in everything — air, earth, and sky. The
way is about sis miles in length, from Galashiels to Ashestiel.
About three parts of this was passed, when we came to Clovenfoot,
a few houses amongst the green hills, where Scott used often to
lodge for days and weeks at the little inn, before he got to Ashestiel.
The country about Ashestiel consists of moorland hills, still show-
ing the darkness of the heather upon them. It is wilder, and has
an air of greater loneliness than the pastoral mountains of Ettrick
and Mofiatdale ; and the pleasant surprise is the more lively, when
at once, in the midst of this brown and treeless region, after going
on wondering where this Ashestiel can have hidden itself, not a
house or a trace of existence being visible, but bare hill beyond
hill, you suddenly see before you, down in a deep valley, a mass of
beautiful woodlands emerging into view ; the Tweed displays its
broad and rapid stream at the foot of this richly-wooded scene, and
a tasteful house on the elevated bank beyond the river shows its
long front and gables over the tree tops. This is Ashestiel, the
residence of Scott, where he wrote Marmion, and commenced
Waverley. We descended to the Tweed, where there is no bridge,
but a ford, called by Scott " none of the best," " that ugly ford,"
which after long rains is sometimes carried away, and instead of a
ford becomes a gulf. I remembered the incident of Scott himself
being once pushed into it, when his horse found no bottom, and had
to swim across ; and of a cart bringing the new kitchen-range being
upset, and leaving the much-desired fireplace at the bottom. The
river was now much swollen, but my stout-hearted lad said he did
not fiear it, he often went there ; and so we passed boldly through
the powerful stream, and up the woodland bank to the house. The
proprietor and occupant, INIajor-General Sir James Russell, a relativa
of Sir Walter's, was just about to mount his horse to go out, but
very kindly turned back and introduced me to Lady Russell, an
elegant and very agreeable woman, the sister of Sir James and
Captain Basil Hall. They showed me the house with the greatest
pleasure, and pressed me to stay luncheon. The house. Sir James
said, was in Scott's time much less than at present. It was a farm-
house, made out of an old Border tower by his father ; and in the
room looking down the Tweed, a beautiful view, Scott wrote Mar-
mion, and the first part of Waverley, as well as the conclusion of
the Lay of the Last Minstrel, and the whole of the Lady of the Lake.
That room is now the centre sitting-room, and Sir Walter's little
drawing-room is Sir James's bed-room. Sir James has greatly
enlarged and improved the house. He has built a wing at each end,
running at right angles with the old front, and his dining-room
now enjoys the view which Scott's sitting-room had before. The
house is very elegantly furnished, as well as beautifully situated.
The busts of Sir Walter Scott and Captain Basil Hall occupy coa-
SCOTT. ; -173
spicuous places in the dining-room, and recal the associations of th«
past and the present. The grounds which face the front that i,v
turned from the river and looks up the hill, are very charming ; and
at the distance of a field is the mound in the wood called " The
Shirra's knowe," because Scott was fond of sitting there. Its views
are now obstructed by the growth of the trees, but if they were
opened again would be wildly woodland, looking down on the Tweed,
and on a brook which rushes down a deep glen close by, called the
Stiel burn. The knowe has all the character of a cairn or barrow,
and I should think there is little doubt that it is one. It does not,
however, stand on Sir James's property, and therefore it is not kept
in order. Above the knowe, and Sir James's gardens, stretch away
the uplands, and on the distant hill lies the mound and trench
called Wallace's trench.
One would have thought that Scott was sufficiently withdrawn
from the world at Ashestiel ; but the Avorld poured in upon him
even here ; and besides the visits of Southey, Heber, John Murray,
and other of his distant friends, the fashionable and fai'-wandering
tribes, found him out. " In this little drawing-room of his," said
Sir James Russell, " he entertained three duchesses at once ; " add-
ing, " Happy had it been for him had he been contented to remain
hei-e, and had left unbuilt the castle of Abbotsford, so much more in
the highway of the tourist, and oiiering so much more accommoda-
tion." That is too true. The present house is good enough for
a lord, and yet not too good for a private gentleman ; while its situ-
ation is, in some respects, more beautiful tlian that of Abbotsford.
The site of the house is more elevated, standing amid its fine woods,
and yet commanding the coiu-se of the bold river deep beneath it,
with its one bank dark with hanging forests, and that beyond open
to the bare and moorland hiUs. But Scott would go to Abbotsford,
and so must we.
I have, somewhere Cise, expressed how greatly the innkeepers of
Scotland are indebted to Scott. It is to him that thousands of them
owe not merely subsistence, but ample fortunes. In every part of
the country, where he has touched the earth with his magic wand,
roads have run along the heretofore impassable morass, rocks have
given way to men, and houses have sprung up full of the necessary
" entertainment for man and horse." Steamers convey troops of
summer tourists to the farthest west and north of the Scottish
coast ; and every lake and mountain swarms with them. On arriving
at Melrose, I was greatly struck with the growth of this ti-affic of
picturesque and romantic travel. It was twenty years since I was
in that village before, — Scott was then living at Abbotsford, and
drew up to the inn-door to take post-horses on to Kelso. While
these were got out, we had a full and fair view of him as he sat,
without his hat, in the carriage reading, as we ourselves were break-
fasting near the window of a room just opposite. Then, there was
one small inn in the place, and very few people in it ; now, there
were two or three ; and these, besides lodging-houses, all crammed
full of guests. The inn-yards stood full of travelling carriages, and
471 SCOTT.
t;ervaaits iu livery were louuging about in motley throngs. The ruiiia
i)f the abbey were like a flxir for people, and the intelligent and very
obliging woman who shows them said that every year the numbers
increased, and that eveiy year foreigners seemed to arrive from more,
and more distant regions.
At Abbotsford it was the same. It must be recollected that there
had been a summer of incessant rain ; yet, both at the inn and at
the abbey, the people said that it had ajipeared to make no dift'erenco
— they had been constantly full As I drove up towards Abbotsford
it was getting towards evening, and I feared I might be almost too
late to be allowed to see through the house ; but I met three or four
equipages returning thence, and as many fresh ones arrived whilst
I was there. Some of these were obliged to wait a long time, as
the housekeeper would not admit above a dozen persons or so at
once ; and carriages stood about the court as though it were some
great visiting day. That visiting day endures the whole summer
through, and the money received for inspection alone must be a
handsome income. If the housekeeper gets it all, as she receives it
all, she will eventually match the old housekeeper of the Duke of
Devonshire, at Chatsworth, who is said to have died a few years ago,
worth 120,000/. ! and was still most anxious to secure the reversion
of the post for her niece, but in vain ; the Duke probably, and very
justly, flunking that there should be turn about even in the office of
.^iucli liberal door-keeping.
Abbotsfoi'd, after twenty years' interval, and having then been
seen under the doubly exaggerating influence of youth and the
recent influence of Scott's poetry, in some degree disappointed me.
I had imagined the house itself larger, its towers more lofty, its
whole exterior more imposing. The plantations ai'e a good deal
grown, and almost bury the house from the distant view ; but they
still preserve all their formality of outline, as seen from the Gala-
shiels road. Every field has a thick, black belt of fir-trees, which
i-un about, forming on the long hill-side the most fantastic figures.
The house is, however, a very interesting house. At first you come
to the front next to the road, which you do by a steep descent down
the plantation. You are struck, having a great castle iu your
imagmation, with the smallness of the place. It is neither large nor
lofty. Your ideal Gothic castle shrinks into a miniature. The house
is quite hidden till you are at it, and then you find yourself at a
small castellated gateway, with crosses cut into the stone pillars
on each side, and the little window over it, as for the warden to look
out at you. Then comes the view of this side of the house, with its
portico, its bay windows with painted glass, its tall, battlemented
gables, and turrets with their lantern terminations ; the armorial
escutcheon over the door, and the corbels ; and then another
escutcheon, aloft on the wall, of stars and crescents. All these have
a good eftect ; and not less so the light screen of freestone, finely
v/orked and carved, with its elliptic arches and iron lattice-work,
through which the garden is seen, with its espalier trees, high brick
walls, and greenhouse, with a doorway at the end leading into ^
SCOTT. 475
Becond gal-den of the same sort. The house has a dark look, being
built of the native whinstone, or grau-wacke, as the Germans call it,
relieved by the quoins and projections of the windows and turrets
in freestone. All looks classic, and not too large for the poet and
antiquarian builder. The dog Maida hes in stone on the right-hand
of the door in the court, with the well-known inscription. The
house can neither be said to be Gothic nor castellated. It is a com-
bination of the poet's, drawn from many sources, but all iinited by
good taste, and forming a unique style, more ajiproaching to the
Ehzabethan than any other. Round the court, of which the open-
work screen just mentioned is the farther boundary, runs a covered
walk — that is, along the two sides not occupied by the house and
the screen ; and in the wall beneath the ai'cade thus formed, are
numerous niches, containing a medley of old figures brought from
various places. There ai-e Indian gods, old figures out of churches,
and heads of Roman emperors. In the corner of the court, on the
opposite side of the portico to the dog Maida, is a fountain, with
some similar relics reared on the stone-work round it.
The other front gives you a much greater idea of the size. It has
a more continuous range of fafade. Here at one end is Scott'?
square tower, ascended by outside steps, and a round or octagon
tower, at the other ; — you cannot tell, certainly, which shape it is,
as it is covered with ivy. On this the flag-staff stands. At the end
next to the square tower, i.e. at the right-hand end as you face it,
you pass into the outer court, whicli allows you to go round the end
of the house from one front to the other, by the old gateway, which
once belonged to the Tolbooth of Edinburgh. Along the whole of
this front runs a gallery, in which the piper used to stalk to and fro
while they were at dinner. This man still came about the place,
though he had been long discharged. He was a great vagabond.
Such is the exterior of Abbotsford. The interior is far more
interesting. The porch, copied from that of the old palace of Lin-
lithgow, is finely groined, and there are stags' horns nailed up in it:
When the door opens, you find yourselves in the entrance-hall, which
is, in fact, a complete museum of antiquities and other matters. It
is, as described in Lockhart's Life of Scott, wainscoted with old
wainscot from the kirk of Dunfermline, and the pulpit of John
Knox is cut in two, and placed as chiffonniers between the windows.
The whole walls are covered with suits of armour, and arms, horns
of moose deer, the head of a Musk buU, &c. At your left hand, and
close to the door, are two cuirasses, some standards, eagles, &c.,
collected at Waterloo. At the opposite end of the room are two
fall suits of armour, one Italian, and one English of the time of
Henry V, the latter holding in its hands a stupendous two-handed
sword, I suppose six feet long, and said to have been found on Bos-
worth field. Opposite to the door is the fii-eplace of freestone,
imitated from an arch in the cloister at IMelrosc, with a peculiarly
graceful spandrel. In it stands the iron grate of Archbishop Sharpe,
who was murdered by the Covenanters ; and before it stands a most
massive Roman camp-kettle. On the roof, at the centre of the
B
476 SCOTT.
pointed avclies, runs a row of escutclieons of Soott's family, two or
three at one end being empty, the poet not being able to trace tho
■maternal lineage so high as the paternal. These were painted
Accordingly, i>i iinhibus, with the motto, — Nox alta vehit. Round the
door at one end are emblazoned the shields of his most intimate
friends, as Erskine, Moritt, Rose, &c., and all round the cornice ran
the emblazoned shields of the old chieftains of the Border, with
this motto, in old English letters :— " These be the Coat Armouries
OP the Clannis and Chief Men of name who keepit the
Marchys of Scotland in the aulde tyme of the King. Trewe
weare they in their tyme, and in their defence, God tjiem
defendit."
The chairs are from Scone Palace. On the wall hangs the chain
shirt of Croniwell ; and on a table at the window where visitors
sign their names, lies the huge tawny lion skin, sent by Thomas
Pringle from South Africa.
A passage leading from the entrance-hall to the breakfast-room
has a line groined ceiling, copied from Melrose ; and the open space
at the end, two small full-length paintings of Miss Scott and Miss
Anne Scott.
In the breakfast-room, where Scott often used to read, there is a
^able, constructed something like a pyramid, which turns round. On
each side of this he laid books of reference, and turned the table as
he wanted one or the other. Here is also a small oak table, at which-
he breakfasted. His daughter Anne used generally to join him at
it ; but if she did not come, he made breakfast himself, and went to
work again without waiting. In this room — a charming little room,
with the most cheerful views up the valley — there is such a collection
of books as might serve for casual reading, or to refresh the mind
when weary of writing, consisting chiefly of poetry and general litera-
ture : besides a fine oil-painting over the fireplace of the Wolf's
Craig, in Lammermoor, i. c. Fast Castle, by Thomson, and numbers
of sweet water-colour pictures ; also a bust of Mackenzie, the Man
of Feeling, in a niche.
Then there is the library, a noble room, with a fine cedar ceiling,
with beautiful compartments, and most lovely carved pendants,
where you see bunches of gi'apes, human figures, leaves, &c. It is
copied from Rosslyn or Melrose. There are three busts in this room ;
the first, one of Sir Walter, by Chantrey ; one of Wordsworth ; and
in the great bay window, on a table, a cast of that of Shakspeare,
from Stratford. There is a full-length painting of the poet's son,
the second Sir Walter, in his hussar uniform, with his horse. The
work-table in the space of the bay window, and the fine carved ceiling
in this part of the room, as well as the brass hanging lamp brought
from Herculaneum, are particularly worthy of notice. There is a
pair of most splendidly carved boxwood chairs, brought from Italy,
and once belonging to some cardinal. The other chairs are of ebony,
presented by George IV. There is a tall silver urn, standing on a
porphyry table, filled with bones from the Pira3us, and inscribed as
the gift of Lord Byron. The books in this room, many of which are
SCOTT. -IT?
secured from hurt by wire-work doors, are said to amount to twenty
thousand. jMauy, of course, arc very vakiable, having been collected
with great care by Scott, for the purpose of enabling him to write
his diiferent works. Then, there is a large collection of both printed
and MS. matter, relative to the rebellions of '15 and •45; and others
connected with magic and demonology. Altogether, the books, many
of which are presentation copies, from authors, not only of this
but various other countries, make a goodly show, and the room is a
noble one.
In the drawing-room, the w^ood also is of cedar ; and here Jiangs
the large painting by Raeburn, containing the full-length portrait of
Sir Walter, as he sits under a wall, with his two dogs. This, one
often sees engraved. It is said to be most like him, and is certainly
very like Chantrey's bust when yon examine them together. There
is a portrait of Lady Scott, too. Oh ! such a round-faced little
blackamoor of a woman ! One instantly asks — where was Sir
Walter's taste ? Where was the judgment which guided him in
describing Ui Vernon, Flora Maclvor, or Rebecca 1 " But," said the
housekeeper, " she was a very brilliant little woman ; " and this is
also said by those who knew her. How greatly, then, must the
artist have sinned against her ! The portrait of Miss Anne Scott is
''ovely, and you see a strong likeness to her father, Scott's mother
IS a very good, amiable, motherly-looking woman, in an old-fashioned
lady's cap. Besides these articles, there is a table of verd antique,
presented by Lord Byron. This is placed between the front windows,
and bears a vase of what resembles purple glass, but in reality a
transparent marble, inlaid beautifully with gold. There is also t
black ebony cabinet, which was presented by George IV. with tins
chairs now in the library.
The armoury is a most remarkable room ; it is the collection of
the author of Waverley ; and to enumerate all the articles which are
here assembled, would require a volume. Take a few particulars.
The old wooden lock of the Tolbooth of Selkirk ; Queen Mary's
offering-box, a small iron ark or coffer, with a circular lid, foimd in
Holyrood House. Then Hofer's rifle— a short, stout gun, given him
by Sir Humphrey Davy, or rather ry Hofer's widow to Sir Humphrey
for Sir Walter. The housekeeper said, that Sir Humphrey had done
some service for the widow of Hofer, and in her gratitude she offered
him this precious relic, which he accepted for Sir Walter, and
delighted the poor woman with the certainty that it would be pre-
served to posterity in such a place as Abbotsford. There is an old
white hat, worn by the burgesses of Stowe when installed. Rob
Roy's purse and his gun ; a very long one, with the initials R. M. C,
Robert Macgregor Campbell, round the touch-hole. A rich sword
in a silver sheath, presented to Sir Walter by the people of Edin-
burgh, for the pains he took when George IV. was there. The sword
of Charles I, afterwards belonging to tlie iMarquis of Montrose. A
lollcction of claymores, and of the swords of (merman executioners,
of tne very kind still used in that semi-barbarous, though soi-discnt
philosophical country ; a country of pi ivate trials without juries, of
473 SCOTT.
torture in prison, and of the bloodiest mode of execution possiolo,
There the criminal, if not — as was a poor tailor of Konigsberg, in
1841 — broken on the wheel inch by inch for killing a bishop, is seated
in a chair on the platfoi*m, with his head against a post, which the
executioner strikes off. The head falls, the blood spouts like fountains
from the struggling trunk, and falls in a crimson shower all over the
figure, — a horrible spectacle !
On the blades of one of these swords is an inscription thus trans-
lated by Scott himself, —
" Dust, ■when I strike, to dust ; from sleepless grave,
Sweet Jesu, stoop a sin-stained soul to save."
The hunting-bottle of James I ; the thumbikins with which tno
Covenanters were tortured ; the iron crown of the martyr Wish art ;
Buonaparte's pistols, found in his carriage at Waterloo ; the pistols
of Claverhouse, all of stee' according to the fashion of that time,
and inlaid with silver ; two great keys of the Tolbooth of Edinburgh,
found after the doors were burnt by the mob who seized and hanged
Captain Porteus ; and innumerable other objects of the like kind.
In the dining-room, the most curious thing is the painting of the
head of Mary Queen of Scots, immediately after decapitation. Of
this, it is said. Sir Walter took great pains to establish the authen-
ticity. It is by Amias Cawood, and, to my fancy, strange as it may
seem, gives a better notion of the beauty of Mary than any of her
living portraits. But the hair is still black, not grey, or rather
white, as stated by the historians. There is a considerable number
of good portraits in this room. A fine one of Nell Gwynn, also
much handsomer than we generally see her ; it is a fellow to the one
in Glammis Castle. An equestrian portrait of Lord Essex, the par-
liament general. Thomson, the poet, who must likewise have been
handsome, if like this. John Dryden. Oliver Cromwell when young.
The Duke of Monmouth. The marriage of Scott of Harden, to
Muckle-mouthed Meg, who is making the widest mouth possible,
with a very arch expression, as much as to say, " As you will be
obliged to have me, I will, for this once, have the pleasure of giving
you a fright." Charles XII. of Sweden. Walter Raleigh, in a broad
hat, very different to any other portrait I have seen of him — more
common looking. Small full-lengths of Henrietta, queen of Charles I,
and of Ann Hyde, queen of James II. Prior and Gay, by Jervas.
Hogarth, by himself. Old Beardie, Scott's great grandfather. Lucy
Walters, first mistress of Charles II, and mother of the Duke of
Monmouth ; with the Duchess of Buccleuch, Monmouth's wife.
Lastly, and on our way back to the entrance-hall, we enter the
writing-room of Sir Walter, which is surrounded by book-shelves,
and a gallery, by which Scott not only could get at his books, but by
which he could get to and from his bed-room, and so be at work
■when his visitors thought him in bed. He had only to lock his door,
and he was safe. Here are his easy leathern chair and desk, at which
he used to work, and, in a little closet, is the last suit that he ever
wore — a bottle-green coat, plaid waistcoat, of small pattern, grey
ulaid trousers, and white hat. Near these hang his walking-stick,
SCOTT. 479
aud his boots and walking shoes. Here are also his tools, with which
he used to prune his trees in the plantations, and his yeoman-cavalry
accoutrements. On the chimney-piece stands a German light-machine,
where he used to get a light, aud light his own fire. There is a chair
made of the wood of the house at Eobroyston, in which WiUiam
Wallace was betrayed ; having a brass plate in the back, stating that
it is from this house, where " Wallace was done to death by Traitors."
The writing-room is connected with the hbrary, and this little closet
had a door issuing into the garden ; so that Scott had all his books
at immediate command, and could not only work early and late
without anybody's knowledge, but, at will, slip away to wood and
field, if he pleased, unobserved. In his writing-room, there is a fuU-
length portrait of Eob Eoy, aud a head of Claverhouse. The writing-
room is the only sitting-room facing the south. It ranges with the
entrance-hall, and between them lies a little sort of armoury, where
stand two figures, one presenting a sjDCcimen of chain armour, and
the other, one of wadded armour — that is, silk stuffed with cotton.
Here, then, is a tolerable account of the interior of Abbotsford.
I perceive that Mr. Lockhart, in his recent People's Edition of hia
Life of Scott, has given an account said to have been furnished by
Scott himself to an annual. If it were correct at the time it was
written, there must have been a general re-arrangement of paintings
and other articles. Mr. Lockhart saj's he suspects its inaccuracy ;
l>ut what makes me doubt that Scott drew up the account is, tliat
some of the most ornamental ceilings, which can not have been
changed, are stated to be of dark oak, whereas they are of pencil
cedar.
I again walked up the mile-long plantation, running along the hill-
side from the house up the valley, and found it again merely a walk
through a plantation — nothing more. It is true that, as you get a
good way up, you arrive at some high ground, and can look out up
the valley towards Selkirk, and get some views of the Tweed, coming
down between its moorland hills, which are very sweet. But the
fault of Abbotsford is, that it is not laid out to the advantage
that it might be. The ground in front of the house, highly capable
of being laid out in beautiful lawn and shrubbery, is cut up with
trees that shut out the noblest feature of the scene — the river. One
side of the house is elbowed up with square brick garden walls,
which ought to be at a distance, and concealed ; the other with an
unsightly laundry-yard, with its posts and lines. Just down before
the house, where the sweet and rich verdure of lawn should be, is
set the farm-yard; and then comes the long, monotonous wood.
This, in some degree, might be altered, and probably some time will.
At present, the fault of the whole estate is stiffness and formality.
The plantations of fir have, necessarily, a stiff", formal look ; but
this, too, will mend with time. They are now felling out the fir
timber ; and then what is called the hard-wood, that is, the de-
ciduous trees, will, in course of time, present a softer and more
agreeable look.
I ranged all through these plantations, from the house to the foot
480 SCOTT.
of the Eildoii Hills, down by the Rhymer's glen and Huntley burn,
It is amazing what a large stretch of poor land Sir Walter had got
together. It is not particularly romantic, except for the fine back-
ground of the Eildon Hills ; but Sir Walter saw the scene with the
eyes of poetic tradition. He saw things which had been done there,
and sung of ; and all was beautiful to him : and in time, when the
trees are better grown, and have a more varied aspect, and the
plantations are more broken up, it icill be beautiful. The views from
the higher grounds are not so now. Down at the house the trees
have so grown aiid closed up the prospect, that you can scarcely get
a single glimpse of the river ; but when you ascend the woods, and
come to an opening on the hills, you see up and down the valley, far
and wide. Near a mount in the plantations, on which an old carved
/ stone is reared, and held upright by iron stays, probably marking
the scene of some border skirmish, there are seats of turf, from which
jon have fine views. You see below Abbotsford, where the Gala
water comes sweeping into the Tweed, and where Galashiels lies
smoking beyond, all compact, like a busy little town as it is. And
in another direction, the towers and town of Melrose are discerned
at the foot of the bare but airy Eildon Hills ; and, still further, the
black summit of the Cowdenknowes.
Something beyond this spot, after issuing out of the first mass of
plantations, and ascending a narrow lane, I came to a farm-house.
I asked a boy in the yard what the farm was called ; and a thrill
went through me when he answered — Kaeside. It was the farm of
William Laidlaw, the steward and the friend of Sir Walter. We have
seen how, in his earlier, joyous days. Sir Walter fell in with Laidlaw,
Hogg, and Leyden. The expeditions into Ettrick and Yarrow, in
quest of old border ballads, brought Scott into contact with the two
former. He found, not only poetry, but actual living poets, amongst
the shepherds and .sheep farmers of the hills. I know of nothing
more beautiful than the relation of these circumstances in Lockhart's
Life of Scott. In Chambers' Edinburgh Journal of July and August,.
1845, there is also a very interesting account of Laidlaw, and especi-
ally of the coming of Scott and Leyden to Blackhouse farm, in
Yarrow, Laidlaw's farm, and of their strolling over all the classic
ground of the neighbourhood ; to St. Mary's Loch, to the thorn of
Whitehope, Dryhoj^e tower, the former abode of "the Flower of
Yarrow," Yarrow church, and the Seven Stones, which mark the
graves of the Seven Brothers, slain in " The Douglas Tragedy." How
Laidlaw produced the famous ballad of " Auld Maitlaud," and how
Leyden walked about in the highest excitement while Scott read it
aloud. Then follows the equally i»teresting account of the visit of
Scott and Laidlaw to Hogg, in Ettrick. These were golden days.
Laidlaw and Hogg were relatives, and old friends. Hogg had been
shepherd at Blackhouse, with Laidlaw's father. The young men had
grown poets, from the inspiration of the scenes they Uved amongst,
and their mutual conversation. Then comes the great minstrel of
the tim?, seeking up the scattered and unedited treasures of anti-
Jiuity, ard finds these rustic poets of the hills, and they become
SCOTT. 4Si
friends f(;r life. It is a romance. LaicUaw was of an old and famous
but decayed family. The line had been cursed by a maternal
ancestress, and they believed that the curse took effect: they al'
became lawless men. But Laidlaw went to live at Abbotsford, aa
the factor or steward of Scott ; and in him Scott found one of the
most faithful, intelligent, and sympathizing friends, ready either to
plant his trees or write down his novels at his dictation, when his
evil days came upon him. In our day-dreams we imagine such
things as these. We lay out estates, and settle on them our friends
and faithful adherents, and make alDout us a paradise of affection,
truth, and intellect ; but it was the fortune of Scott only to do this
actually. Here, at his little farm of Kaeside, lived Laidlaw, and
after Scott's death went to superintend estates in Rosshire ; and his
health at length giving way, he retired to the farm of his brother,
a sheep-farmer of Contin ; and there, in as beautiful scenery as
Scotland or almost any country has to show, the true poet of
nature, this true-hearted man, breathed his last on the 18th of
May, 1845.
Those who wander through the woods of Abbotsford, and find
their senses regaled by the rich odour of sweetbriar and woodbines,
Avith shrubs oftener found in gardens, as I did with some degree of
surprise, will read with interest the following direction of Scott to
Laidlaw, in which he explains the mystery : — " George must stick in
a few wild roses, honeysuckles, and sweetbriars in suitable places, so
as to produce the luxuriance we see in the woods which Nature
plants herself. We injure the effects of our plantings, so far as
beauty is concerned, very much by neglecting underwood." In the
woods of Abbotsford, the memory of Laidlaw will be often recalled
by the sight and odour of these fragrant plants.
Descending into a valley beyond Kaeside, I came to the forester's
lodge, on the edge of a little solitary loch. Was this cottage formerly
the abode of another worthy, Tom Purdie, whom Scott has, on his
gravestone in Melrose abbey-yard, styled " Wood-forester of Abbots-
ford " ? — a double epithet which may be accounted for by foresters
being often now-a-days keepers of forests where thei'e is no wood, as
in Ettrick, &c. Whether, however, this was Tom Purdie's abode or
not, I found it inhabited by a very obliging and intelligent fellow,
as porter there. The little loch hei'e I understood him to be called
Abbotsford loch, in contradiction to Cauldshiels loch, which is still
further up the hills. This Cauldshiels loch was a favourite resort
of Scott's at first. It had its traditions, and he had a boat upon it ;
but finding that it did not belong to his estate, as he supposed, by
one of his purchases, he would never go upon it again, though
requested to use it at his plea.sure by the proprietor. By the direc-
tion of the forester, I now steered my way onward from wood to
wood, towards the Eildon hills, in quest of the glen of Thomas the
Ilhymer. The evening was drawing on, and there was a deep solitude
and solemnity over the dark pine woods through which I passed-
The trees which Scott had planted were in active process of being
thinned out, and pAes of them lay here and there by the cart track.';
482 SCOTT,
through the woods, and heaps of the peeled bark of the larch for
sale. I thought with what pleasure would Scott have now surveyed
these operations, and the beginning of the marketable profit of the
woods of his own planting. But that day was past. I went on over
fields embosomed in the black forest, where the grazing herds gazed
wildly at rne, as if a stranger were not often seen there ; crossed the
deep glen, where the little stream roared on, lost in the thick growth
of now lofty trees ; and then passed onward, down the Rhymer's
glen, to Huntly burn — every step bearing fresh evidence of the
vanished romance of Abbotsford. How long was it since Miss Edge-
worth sate by the little waterfall in the Rhymer's glen, and gave her
name to the stone on which she was seated ? The house at Iluutly
burn, which Scott had purchased to locate his old friend Sir Adam
Fergusson near him, was now the house of the v/ood-factor ; and
piles of timber, and sawn boards on all sides, marked its present use.
Lockhart was gone from the lovely cottage just by at Chiefswood ;
and Scott himself, after his glory and his troubles, slept soundly at
Dryburgh. The darkness that had now closed thickly on my way
seemed to my excited imagination to have fallen on the world.
AVhat a day of broad hearts and broad intellects was that which had
just passed ! How the spirit of power, and of creative beauty, had
been poured abroad amongst men, and especially in our own country,
as with a measureless opening of the Divine hand ; and how rapidl_\i
and extensively had then the favoured ministers of this intellectual*
diffusion been withdrawn from the darkened earth ! Scott, and
almost all his family who had rejoiced with him — Abbotsford was an
empty abode — the very woods had yielded up their faithful spirits —
Laidlaw and Purdie were in the earth — Hogg, the shepherd-poet, had
disappeared from the hills. And of the great lights from England,
how many were put out ! — Crabbe, Southey, Coleridge, Byron, Shel-
ley, Keats, Campbell, Mrs. Hemans, Miss Landon, Hood, and Lamb ;
many of them bidding farewell to earth amid clouds and melancholy,
intense as was the contrasting brightness of their noonday fame.
" Sic transit gloria mundi." The thought passed through me ; but
a second followed it, saying, " Not so— they by whom the glory is
created are yet travelling onward in the track of their eternal
destiny.
' Won is the glory, and Ihe grief is past.' "
The next morning I took my way to Dryburgh, the closing scene
of the present paper. Dryburgh Abbey lies on the Tweed, about four
miles from Melrose. You turn off— when you have left the Eildon
hills on your right, and have seen on your left, in the course of the
river, the Cowdenknowes, Bemerside, and other classic spots— down
a steep and woody lane, and suddenly come out at a wide bend of
the river, where, on your side, the gravel brought down by the
floods spreads a considerable strand, and the lofty banks all round
on the other are finely wooded. Few are the rivers which can show
more beautiful scenery in their course than the Tweed. But what
strikes you strangely arc the ruins of a chain bridge, which soma
SCOTT. 483
time ago was carried away by the wind. There stand aloft the tall
white frames of wood to which the bridge was attached at each end,
like great skeletons ; and the two main chains stretch across, and
fragments of others dangle in the air — iron rags of ruin. It has
a most desolate and singular look. This, I suppose, was put up by
the late whimsical Earl of Buchau, to whom Dryburgh belonged, as
now to his nephew. At the opposite end of the bridge peeps out of
the trees the top of a little temple. It is a temple of the Muses,
where the nine sisters are represented consecrating Thomson the
poet. Aloft, at some distance in a wood, you descry a gigantic
tigure of stone ; and this, on inquiry, you find to be William Wallace,
who, I believe, was never here, any more than Thomson. It was in-
tended for Burns ; but as the block was got out of the quarry on the
opposite side of the river, close to where you land from the ferry-
boat, the fantastic old fellow took it into his head that, as it was so
large a block, it should be Wallace.
As you ascend a lane from the ferry to go to the Abbey, you find a
few cottages, and a great gate built in the style of an old castle
gateway, with round stone pillars with lantern summits, and the
cross displayed ou each — a sort of poor parody on the gateway at
Abbotsford. This castle gateway is the entrance, however, to no
castle, but to a largo orchard ; and over the gate is inscribed — " Hoc
Pomarium sua mauus satum Pareutibus suis optimis sac : D. S.
Buchanisc Comes." That is, "This orchard, sown by his own hands,
the Earl of Buchan dedicates to his best of parents." The whole is
worthy of the man. If there be any sense in it, the orchard was
noicn by this silly old lord, not the trees ; and these were merely soicii
by him, and not planted And why dedicate an orchard to his
deceased parents ? Were they so excessively fond of apples ? Why
not satisfy himself with some rational monument ] But then he
must have been rational himself ; and it must be recollected that
this was the man who, when Scott was once very ill, forced himself
into the house, in order to get at the invaUd, and arrange with him
in his last moments the honours of a great heraldic funeral pro-
cession, — the same man that Scott afterwards congratulated himself
was dead first, lest he should have made some foolish extravagance
of the sort over his remains.
But to return to the orchard gateway — it is droll enough, imme-
diately under the pious and tender inscription to his parents, in
Latin, to see standing this sentence in plain English — " Man-traps
AND SPRING-GUNS PLACED IN THIS ORCHARD." Query? Are they
too dedicated to his best of parents, or only to his poor brethren ot
mankind ?
Dryburgh is a sweet old monastic seclusion. Here, lying deep
below the surrounding country, the river sweeps on between high,
rocky banks, overhung with that fine growth of trees which no river
presents in more beauty, abundance, and luxuriance. A hush pre-
vails over the spot, which tells you that some ancient sanctity is
there. You feel that there is some hidden glory of religious ai-t and
piety somewhere about, though vou do not see it. As vou advarco
i; 2
484 SCOTT.
it is up a lane overhung with old ashes. There are pnmitive-lookii:ig
cottages, also overshadowed by great trees. There are crofts, with
thick tall hedges, and cattle lying in them with a sybaritic luxury of
indolence. You are still, as you proceed, surrounded by an ocean of
foliage and ancient steins ; and a dream-like feeling of past ages
seems to pervade not only the air but the ground. I do not know
how it is, but I think it must be by a mesmeric influence that the
monks and the holy dreairisrs of old have left on the spots which
they inhabited their peculiar character. You could not construct
such a place now, taking the most favourable materials for it. Take
a low, sequestered spot, full of old timber and cottages, and old grey
walls ; and employ all the art that you could, to give it a monastic
character — it would be in vain. You would feel it at once ; the
mind would not admit it to be genuine. No, the old monastic spots
are full of the old monastic spirit. The very ground, and the rich
old turf are saturated with it. Dig up the soil, it has a monastery
look. It is fat, and black, and crumbling. The trees are actual
monks themselves. They stand and dream of the Middle Ages.
With the present age and doings they have no feelings, no sym-
pathies. They keep a perpetual vigil, and the sound of anthems
has entered into their very substance. They are solemn piles of
the condensed silence of ages, of cloistered musings ; and the very
whisperings of their leaves seemed to be muttered aves and ora pro
nohises.
This feeling lies all over Dryburgh like a living trance ; and the
arrangements of these odd Buchans for admitting you to the tomb of
Scott, enable you to see the most of it. You perceive a guide-post,
and this tells you to go on to the house where the keys are kept.
You descend a long lane amid these old trees and crofts, and arrive
at a gate and lodge, which seem the entrance to some gentleman's
grounds. Here probably you see too a gentleman's carriage waiting,
and present yourself to go in. But you are told that, though this is
the place, you must not enter there. You must go on still farther
to the house where the keys are kept. At length you find yourself
at the bottom of another stretch of lane, and here you stop for the
simple reason that you can go no further — you have arrived at the
bank of the river. Necessarily then looking about you, you see on
one side a gate in a tall wall, which looks into an orchard, and on the
other a cottage in a garden. On this cottage there is a board bearing
this long-sought inscription — " The Abbey keys kept here." You
knock, and ask if you can see the Abbey ; and a very careless " Yes,"
assures you that you can. The people appointed to show the ruins
and Scott's grave are become notorious for their lumijish, uncivil
behaviour. It would seem as if the owner of the place had ordered
them to make it as unpleasant to visitors as possible ; a thing very
impolitic in them, for they are making a fortune by it. Indeed Scott
is the grand benefactor of all the neighbourhood, Dryburgh, Melrose,
and Abbotsford. At Abbotsford and Melrose they are civil, at
Dryburgh the very reverse. They seem as though they would make
you feel that it was a favour to be admitted to the grounds of Lord
SCOTT. 485
Buchau ; aud you are pointed away at the gate of exit with a
manner which seems to say, " There ! — begone ! "
The woman of the cottage was ah-eady showing a party ; aud her
sister, just as sulky, ungracious a sort of body as you could meet
with, was my guide. The gate in the wall was thrown open, aud
she said, " You must go across the grass there." I saw a track
across the grass, aud obediently pursued it ; but it was some time
before I could see anything but a very large orchard of young trees,
and I began to suppose this another Pomarium dedicated by old
Lord Buchau to his parents, and to wish him aud his Pomaria undev
the care of a certain old gentleman ; but anon ! — the ruins of the
Abbey began to tower magnificently above the trees, and I forgot the
planter of orchards and his gracious guides. The ruins are certainly
very fine, and finely relieved by the tall, rich trees which have
sprung up in and around them. The interior of the church is now
greensward, and two rows of cedars grow where formerly stood the
pillars of the aisles. The cloisters and south transept , are more
entire, and display much fine workmanship. There is a window
aloft, I think in the south transept, peculiarly lovely. It is formed
of, I believe, five stars cut in stone, so that the open centre within
them forms a rose. The light seen through this window gives it
a beautiful effect. There is the old chapter-house also entire, with
an earthen floor, and a circle drawn in the centre, where the bodies
of the founder and his lady are said to lie. But even here the old
lord has been with his absurdities ; and at one end, by the window,
stands a fantastic statue of Locke, reading in an open book, and
pointing to his own forehead with his finger. The damp of the
place has blackened and mildewed this figure, and it is to be hoped
will speedily eat it quite up. AVhat has Locke to do in the chapter-
house of a set of ancient friars 1
The grave of Scott — for a tomb he had not yet got — was a beau-
tiful fragment of the ruined pile, the lady aisle. The square from
one pillar of the aisle to the next, which in many churches, as in
Melrose, formed a confessional, forms here a burial-place. It is that
of the Scotts of Haliburton, from whom Scott was descended ; and that
■was probably one reason why he chose this place, though its monastic
beauty and associations were, no doubt, the main causes. The fi'ag-
ment consists of two arches' length, and the adjoining one is the
family burial-place of the Erskines. The whole, with its tier of
small Norman sectional arches above, forms, in fact, a glorious tomb,
much resembling one of the chapel tombs in Winchester ; and the
trees about it are dispersed by nature and art so as to give it the
utmost T)icturesque efi'ect. It is a mausoleum well befitting the
author oi the Lay of the Last Minstrel ; and, though many wonder
that he should have chosen to be interred in another man's ground
and property, yet, independent of all such considerations, we must
say that it would be difficult to select a spot more in keeping with
Scott's character, genius, and feelings. But that which surprised
every one, was the neglect in which the grave itself remained. After
thirteen years, it was still a mere dusty aud slovenly heap of earth.
486 SCOTT.
His motlier lay on his riglit hand, and his wile on his left. His
mother had a stone laid on her grave, but neither Scott nor his
■wife had anything but the earth which covered them ; and lying
tuider the arched ruin, nature herself was not allowed, as she
otherwise would, to fling over the poet the verdant mantle with
w-hich she shrouds the grave of the lowliest of her children. The
contrast was the stranger since so splendid a monument had been
raised to his honour in Edinburgh ; and that both Glasgow and
Selkirk had their statue-crowned column to the author of Waverley.
The answer to inquiries was, that his son had been out of the
country ; but a plain slab, bearing the name, and the date of his
death, would have conferred a neatness and an air of respectful
attention on the spot, which would have accorded far more grate-
fully with the feelings of its thousands and tens of thousands of
visitors than its then condition.
Since that time an oblong tomb has been placed over Sir Walter's
grave, wV.li this simple and allsufEcient inscription, — " Sir Walter
Scott, Baronet, died September 21st, 1832."
THOMAS CAi\IPBELL.
Thomas Campepxl was born in Glasgow on the 27th of July, 1777.
His father was a resident of that citj', a respectable merchant, and
descended from an ancient Highland family, on which the poet evi-
dently prided himself, though undoubtedly he was the greatest man
his family ever produced. His ancestors traced their descent from
Gilespic-le-Camile, the first Norman earl of Lochawe ; and the
Scotch still pronounce the name Camel, or more broadly, Caumel.
The old family residence was at Kirnan, in the vale of Glassary, on
the southern frontier of the Western Highlands. So proud were the
]ioet's parents of this, that they always styled themselves Camp-
bells of Kirnan ; and the poet's mother, after he had risen to fame,
would, when requesting articles to be sent home from shops, say.
" Send them to Mrs. Campbell's of Kirnan ; " and when that did not
seem to produce a very profound impression of respect, would add,
" the mother of the author of The Pleasures of Hope."
Campbell's grandfather was the last laird of Kirnan. He died in
Edinburgh, and Campbell's father went to America, whci'e, falling in
with a Daniel Campbell, a clansman, but no way related, they agreed
to return to Glasgow, and set uji as Virginia merchants. They were
48y CAMPBELL.
fiiiccesbful, and Campbell's Mher, then forty-five, married the
daughter of his partner, who was only twenty. They had no less
than eleven children, who had various fortunes, and all of whom the
poet outlived. Three of them were daughters, none of whom married,
but had, as governesses, or teachers of schools, acquired a small
competency, which was increased by an allowance of 100/. a-year for
many years by the poet.
Campbell's father acquired a handsome fortune, but this was,
for the most part, swept away by the breaking out of the American
war in 1775, two years before the poet's birth. His father was then
in his sixty -fifth year ; but though he had so large a family, he had
not the elasticity left to continue his trade, and retired upon the
meagre remnant of his property. Two years later, his youngest
sou, Thomas, was born, that is, in his father's sixty-seventh year, at
which age it is remarkable that the poet died.
Thomas Campbell was born in the house where his parents had
resided since their marriage. This was in the High-street, but has
now been long swept away by the progress of modern improvement.
Campbell's father was a man of superior ability and education. He
was an intimate friend of Adam Smith, and of Dr. Thomas Reid,
author of the " Inquiry into the Human Mind," and Professor of
Moral Philosophy in the University of Glasgow. By Dr. Eeid the
infant poet was baptized, and named after himself. Campbell's
mother was a woman of a firm and somewhat acerb character, but
clever and active, which was rendered the more necessary by the
easy and indolent temperament of the father.
Campbell, who is described as a handsome boy, was first sent to
the grammar-school, then under the management of Mr. Allison,
who soon perceived the talents of his pupil. The discovery was
hailed with delight by Campbell's parents, and his father devoted
himself assiduously to his assistance in preparing his tasks, a proof
that the old gentleman was a good scholar. Campbell was soon at
the head of the school, but not without feeling the effects of too close
application ; and his father was obliged, on one occasion, to send him
for six weeks to a cottage on the banks of the Cai"t, a few miles out
of town. This country residence is said to have left such vivid
imagery on his mind, that the effect was constantly appearing in the
poetry of his mature years. During his grammar-school life, he
began writing poetry at the age of ten, specimens of which Dr.
Beattie has preserved in his very interesting life of the poet. But
his gi-eatest passion was for the classical authors, and his progress
in Latin and Greek was extraordinary. In his twelfth year he made
very respectable translations from Anacreon,and acquired the ambi-
tion of being a Greek scholar, which never left him, and which, to
the last, predominated over his ambition as a poet.
Tn his fourteenth year he entered the college of Glasgow, and con-
tinued there till 1795, or till his eighteenth year. His course at
college was one continuous triumph, especially in classical attain-
ment. He carried off most of the chief prizes, and at the same time
produced compositions both in prose and verse perfectly astonishing
CAMPBELL. 489
in a boy of his age. Those may be seen in his published works, or
in his Life and Letters, by Dr. Beattie. In translations from the
Greek he excelled all his fellow-students, so that they were afraid to
enter the lists with him. In his translations from Homer, Aristo-
phanes, .lEsehylus, and others, he entered into the spirit of the
ancients, with a wonderful ardour, and a beauty of expression which
astonished the professoi's. In his fourth session he carried off two
prizes : one of these was the first prize for the best translation of
the Clouds of Aristophanes ; and Professor Young, in awarding
the honours, declared that this was the best j^erformance which had
ever been given in by any student at the University. But the pro-
duction which won him still higher celebrity was that which gained
his second prize. This was an Essay on the Origin of Evil, which
was expected to be prose, but which was in poetry. It was the
chef-iV mivre of the Moral Philosophy class, and gave him at once a
local celebrity as a poet.
In the fifth session he carried off three prizes. One of these was
for the Choephoro) of .^Eschylus ; one for a translation of a chorus
from the Medea ; and a third, the translation of Claudian's " Epitha-
lamium on the Marriage of the Emperor Honorius and Maria."
Daring this period he was not less zealously engaged in studying
the works of the English poets, especially IMilton's Paradise Lost,
and the writings of Pope, Thomson, Gray, and Goldsmith. The influ-
ence of Pope and Goldsmith is sufficiently obvious in his future
style. A writer in Hogg's Weekly Instructor, who knew Cami3bell
well, says, " At this jieriod Campbell was a fair and beautiful boy,
with winning manners, with a mild and cheerful disposition ; he
was not only the wit of the school, but was greatly desirous to see
himself in print. Having got one of his juvenile poems printed, to
defray the expense of this, to him, then bold adventure, it is related
that he had recourse to the singular expedient of selling copies to
the students at a penny each. This anecdote has been told by one
who remembers seeing the beautiful boy .standing at the college
gate with the slips in his hand." The story was one which Camp-
bell was not fond of hearing told in his later years. The verses
began, —
" Loud shrieked afar the angry sprite
That rode upon the storm of night,
And h)ud tlie waives were heard to ro.ir
That lashed on Morven's rocky shore."
These he afterwards remodelled into his beautiful ballad of Lord
Ullin's Daughter.
The same writer describes the electric effect of his recitation of
his favourite passages from the Greek poets, as he often heard him
give tbem in after years.
Daring his life at college, his great companions were James Thom-
son, a youth from Lancashire, with whom he ever after maintained
the warmest friendship, and who had two busts of the poet exe-
cuted by Baily, one of which he presented to the University at
which they had studied together. The other was (jlregory Watt, the
•]!)0 CAMPBELL.
youugest sou of the celebrated engineer, who, after dis^jlaying great
talents, died at the early age of twenty-seven.
But no circumstance had so decided an influence on the mind of
Campbell during his college years as the trial of Muir, Gerald.
Skirviug, Margarot, and Palmer, for high treason. It was the time
when the outbreak of the French Revolution had stirred the .spirit
of all Europe. The lovers of liberty were active in diflfusing their
opinions, and no government was more alarmed and more severe in its
endeavours to repress them than that of England. These men would
not now even attract attention by advancing the notions for which
they were then condemned to transportation to Botany Bay, where
they were treated with such rigour, that few or none of them lived to
return. Campbell's mind was aU aglow with the flame of liberty,
imbibed from his favourite Greek authors. He conceived an ardent
desire to witness the trials of these patriots. His mother furnished
him with five shilUngs for his expenses on the way, and he was to
lodge at his aunt's house in Edinburgh. He walked there, a distance
of forty-two miles, and back. He witne.ssed the trial of Gerald, the
most gentlemanly and eloquent of all these ill-used men. Gerald
had been a student at the University, and a great favourite with the
professors. Campbell relates the effect the trial had vipon him ;
" Hitherto I had never known what jjublic eloquence was ; and I am
sure the judiciary Scotch lords did not help me to a conception
of it ; speaking, as they did, bad arguments in broad Scotch
(xerald's speech annihilated the remembrance of all the eloquence
that had ever been heard within the walls of that house. He quieted
the judges, in spite of their indecent interruptions of him, and pro-
duced a silence in which you might have heard a pin fall to the
ground. At the close of his address, I turned to a stranger beside
me, exclaiming — ''By heavens. Sir, that is a great man ! ' ' Yes, Sir,'
lie answered, ' and he makes every other man feel great who listens
to him.' "
Campbell returned to Glasgow so deeply impressed by what he
had seen and heard, and by the insight which this had given him,
young as he was, into the great questions before the world, and the
arbitrary and unjust spirit in the government, that all his wit and
gaiety had fled. He went about brooding in deep abstraction on all
that he had seen and heard ; and, no doubt, the ai'dent advocacy of
liberty, the burning and never-quenched championship of the op-
])ressed, which came forth in his Pleasures of Hope, dated from that
day. That fire was kindled within him which broke forth in his
vehement episodes on the wrongs of Poland, the massacre of Warsaw,
the iniquity of the slave-trade, the opjjressions of India, and tho
melancholy fate of individual patriots. But a more immediate vent
was found for his indignant feelings in the debating-club which the
students established, and where Campbell took a distinguished rank
amongst the embryo orators.
But all tliis time tlie res anguslce domi were pressing upon the
minds of his anxious parents what profession the young scholar
should or could embvafe. Hir. only inclinat^'ou was for the Church.
CAMPBELL. 491
but his family had no patronage. He had witnessed some surgica'v
operations, and his mind revolted from medicine. His chance of
A legal career was small, from his Avant of the necessary finances ;
and in the state of anxious uncertainty in which he was, he accepted
a tutorship in the solitary Isle of Mull, in the Hebrides. His engage-
ment was only for a few months, to give lessons in the classics to
the children of Mrs. Campbell, of Sunipol, on the Point of Callioch.
This lies on the northern shore of Mull, and the house of Sunipol is
conspicuous on the voyage from Tobermory, in Mull, to StafFa.
The session of the University being closed in May, 1795, he set off
with a young fellow-collegian, Joseph Finlayson, who also was going
on a like destination into the Highlands. They rambled along on
foot, each with a change of linen tied up in a bundle, and slung over
his shoulder on a stick. Thus they went on. " All the world," said
Campbell, " did not contain two merrier boys." They sang and
recited poetry through the wild Highland glens, surrounded by
roaring streams, yellow primroses, and chanting cuckoos, heathy
mountains, and climbing goats. The young poet declared that ho
felt a soul in every muscle of his body. At Inverary, the two friends
pai-ted, and Campbell went on alone across Loch-awe to Oban, whenco
he sailed to Mull. Jn one day he walked across the island, and
reached Sunipol at twihght.
Nothing can be conceived more likely to excite and impress the
mind of a juvenile poet than five months' residence in such a place.
The Point of Callioch commanded a magnificent view of thirteen
isles of the Hebrides, prominent amongst them Staffa and lona.
Here he was in the profoundest solitude, amid wild rocks, gloomy
heaths, and stormy seas. The wild deer bounded across the melan-
choly landscape ; the eagle soared above, or sat watching on some
craggy peak ; the distant isles, studding the rude ocean, loomed
mistily and strange ; and the sound of the mountain torrent, the
dashing surf, or the distant roar of the Coryvreckan, or the cries of
the curlew or the seagull, fell alone on his ear. He visited Stafla anrl
lona with a lonely enthusiasm, and filled his mind with the imagery
of Pi.eullura, of " Aodh, the dark-attired Culdee," and many a wild
strain that now lives familiarly in his poetry. Nor did he lack
a subject of more cheerful inspiration. A young lady of the name of
Caroline , in all the sweetness of seventeen, and of remarkable
beauty, was on a visit at Sunipol, and soon was hymned in strains of
affectionate admiration, which she retained as precious relics through
a long life.
Eeturning to Glasgow, he passed his last session at the University
with his usual echU; but he was in a depressed mood, and in failing
health. This was attributed to his over-excrtiou in his duties as
tutor, and in anxiously polishing up his prize poems from the Greek ;
but it is far more i^robable that the anxieties of a first love, whicli
gave no hope of success in the dark prospects of his life, was the
real cause. Only eighteen, and overflowing with feeling and imagina-
tion, the poetic vision of the brilliant Caroline had produced its
natural effect. At the end of the session he again went out as
492 CAMPBELL.
tutor. This time it was to educate the present Sir William Napier
of IMilliken, at Dowiiie in Argyleshire. The great attraction of this
engagement was, that Downie was not far from Inverary, the abode
of the beloved Caroline. Here also he was visited by some of his
college friends, — Hamilton Paul, and Douglas, and Mackenzie. Here,
amid the most magnificent scenery of mountains, heaths, lakes, and
ocean shores, Caiaipbell spent a j'ear, roaming about, when not oc-
cupied with his easy duties, and storing his mind with imagery,
imaginations, and feelings, which enriched his poetry all his life
afterwards. On a point of a lovely bay stands the House of Downie :
and at another point, near a farm-house, is a beautiful green hill,
still called " The Poet's Hill," where he used to sit for hours, reciting
passages from the Medea, and gazing out over the Sound of Jura,
over stormy seas, wild craggy shores, the Isle of Jura, and hoary
mountains, which could not fail to raise the sublimest and most
enduring sensations in such a mind. At the House of Downie there
is still shown the poet's room, in a small wing called the " Bachelor,"
— the one room with one window, which was his school-room, his
study, and sleeping-room.
Downie is also near Lochgilphead, at the entrance of the Crinau
Canal, through which such troops of tourists pass every summer to
the Western Isles, their steamer gliding along the very scenes where
Campbell used to wander, wonder, and recite. He there wrote many
parts of the Pleasures of Hope ; and the scenery of the same neigh-
bourhood is copiovisly repi'oduced in the poems of Glencoe, Gertrude
of Wyoming, and many others. Here he indulged the dreams of that
same sweet first love, and often fed its flame by the vicinity to the
charming Caroline. It was on recalling these days that he wrote '-•
" In joyous j'outh what soul hatli never known
Thoui;ht, feoling, taste, liarmonious to its own?
Who hath not paused wliile beauty's pensive eye
Asked from liis heart tlie homage of a sigh ?
Who hath not owned, with rapture-smitten frame,
The power of grace, the magie of a name ?"
It was here that he wrote, as if inspired by the tenderness of love,
and the sublimity of the mountain-land around him, in that
sonorous and high-toned style which distinguishes the Pleasures of
Hope from all other poems, not only those of other writers, but his
own. It was no longer the echo of Goldsmith, Rogers, and Pope,
but it had something of the gorgeous resonance of Darwin, and yet
something different too, and peculiar to the young j^oet. It was
a music sounding in his own soul, vocal with the wild swell of seas
and mountain winds— a new grand organ of entranced spirit, touched
by the hand of feeling, to which his whole being was tuned. The
first specimen of this style was in his Memory of Miss Broderick,
who shot her faithless lover ; lines which he afterwards called Love
and j\Iadues3. This poem has all the characteristics of the larger
one. You recognise the clarion notes of the music, the passion, and
the tones at the first line, —
" Say then, did pitying Heaven rondemn tlie deed,
When vengeance bade thee, faltliless lover, bleed i
CAMPBELL 493
Tong had I watclied Ihy dark foreboding brow,
AVhat time thy bosom scorned tliy dearest vow !
Sad. though 1 vept the friend, the lover changed,
Still thy cold look was scornful and estranged,
Till, from thy pity, love, and rhelter thrown,
I wandered hopeless, friendless and alone."
It is singular that as none of Campbell's previous poems displayctl
this beautiful but luxuriant diction, so none after the Pleasures of
Hope retained it. It appeared to spring out of the rich juvenescence
of life which was then in its fulness, and after that sub.sided into
the quiet beauty of the Gertrude, and finally faded into the cold
baldness of Theodoric.
The poem, however, into which he seems to me to have most
thoroughly infused the spirit of the wild and romantically desolate
Bceuery of the Western Isles and Highlands, is EeuUura, one of the
most exquisite poems of any language. Without any apparent attempt
at description, either of scenery or individual character, as in the
Lines on visiting a Scene in Argyleshire, in Lochiel's Warning, or
Lord Ullin's Daughter, both stand forth in strong and clear distinct-
ness. Aodh, the far-famed preacher of the word in Jura ; and
Reullura, " beauty's star," with her calm, clear eye, to which visions
of the future were often revealed ; and those desolate, treeless islands,
the savage shores of which, riven by primeval earthquakes, will be
lashed by the waves of a wild, stormy sea to the end of time. The
church of Jura again stands aloft, the Gael listens to the preaching
of the word, and the heathen sea-kings come from Denmark for
plunder and massacre. This poem it is, above all others, into whicli
the wild music of the Cory\'reckan entered, which he says in calm
weather, when the adjacent sea was silent, was like the sound nf
innumerable chariots.
The family at Downie were greatly attached to Campbell, and have
ever since cherished the memory of the time he spent there, as one
of the proudest reminiscenses of the house. Colonel Napier and
some other friends exerted themselves to secure a fund which .should
enable him to study for the bar, but they did not succeed ; and, at
the end of the term for v/hich he had engaged, he returned to Glas-
gow. He was a first-rate scholar ; he had displayed at the debating-
club all the elements of a great orator, and was likely to make
a great figure at the bar, if he could only get there. But the Uni-
versity, to which he did so much honour, could give him no aid in
that pursuit ; and his father was now poorer than ever, and in
the clutches of the law. When he heard some of the boys dis-
puting about the enduring qualities of a projected suit of clothes, ho
said, " Boys, boys, get a suit like mine — a Chancery suit ; that will
wear, I warrant." The only opening which occurred to the dispirited
youth was to go to Edinbm-gh. His aunt was living there, with
whom he took up his quarters, and got some occupation as a co2-)ying
clerk ; but ho very soon grew tired of that drudgery, and flung it up,
ileclaring that hn saw enough into the business of an attorney to
pronounce it " the most accursed of all i)rofessions ! Such mean-
494 CA>tPBELL.
iiess, sucli toil, such contemptible modes of peculation, were never
moulded into one profession."
There was nothing, therefore, hut literature left for him ; and ho
made the acquaintance of Dr. Anderson, the author of the Lives of
the British Poets, who at once conceived the highest idea of his
talents. He procured some job-work from Mundell, a publisher,
and returned awhile to Glasgow. He then returned to Edinburgh,
where he lived in Alison-square or court, in the Old Town, and made
a poor living by literary hack-work. There, however, he made ac-
quaintance with several of the rising literati of that extraordinary
]>eriod, — Grahame, author of The Sabbath ; Dugald Stewart, and
]?rown, the Professor of Moral Philosophy ; Jeffrey ; Brougham,
then only about twenty, but already famous for his mathematical
theorems, chiefly Porisms, which had appeared in the Transactions
of the Royal Society ; Alison, Leyden, Walter Scott, and others.
Here, also, he became acquainted with Mr. Richardson, a writer to
the signet, who remained one of his most attached friends through
life, After hoping to go over to America, to join his brothers there,
but disappointed even in that, he brought out his Pleasures of
Hope, which at once astonished the reading world on both sides of
the Tweed, and placed him at one spring in the rank of first-rate
poets. This beautiful production was published in April, 1799, when
the poet was only twenty-two, about the same age that Shelley pub-
lished his Revolt of Islam, Keats his Lamia and Hyperion, and
Byron his two first cantos of Childe Harold. The public heart,
refreshed and purified by the writings of Cowper, was in a tit state
to receive with the deepest love and the warmest admiration a poem
like the Pleasures of Hope.
The copyright of this splendid work was sold out and out to
Mundell for sixty pounds ; but the publisher, on its success, much
to his credit, volunteered the author fifty pounds on every new
edition, and afterwards allowed him to publish a large quarto edition
by subscription, entirely for his own benefit. The immediate effect
of its success was to increase his friendships,— adding to his former
ones those of Sydney Smith, Professor Playfair, Henry Mackenzie,
and Telford, the celebrated engineer. At the time of its publication
he was occupying gloomy lodgings in Rose-street ; but he speedily
emerged into more agreeable ones, and into the most intellectual
circles of the whole city.
We have seen, of late, frequent attempts to depreciate the
Pleasures of Hope ; and in Moore's Life and Letters we have the
Holland House clique (]\Ioore, Sydney Smith, and others) professing
to find nothing in it but sounding language. They were particularly
witty on the bombast and fustian of the lines —
" Where Andes, giant of the western star,
With meteor-standard to tlie winds unfiirl'd,
Looks from his throne of clouds o'er half the world !"
" Meteor-standard ! " they asked, — " what does it mean 1 " And they
came to the conclusion that it meant nothing. Did these great men
never hear of the volcano of Chimborazo in the Andes 1 Could they
CAMPBELL. 496
not conceive the flames of the great volcano glaring over the hills
like a meteor-standard 1 If they could not, they were much to bo
pitied. But had the poem nothing else in it, but this passage ?
Could they not .see those noble outpourings of the spirit of liberty
which bring all the wrongs of humanity before us 1 The wrongs of
Poland, of India, of Africa, and of Switzerland 1 Did they not feel
" The spirits of the niiglity dead !
Tliey viho at Marathon and Leuctra bled ! ''
and the spirits of Tell, of Kosciusko, of Hampden, breathe along
every line / Could they not feel the exquisite beauty of the domestic
scenes, the bower of youthful love, the mother leaning over the
cradle of her first-born, the sage and the natui'alist pursuing their
happy researches in the hamlet, " far from the woi-ld," in the summer
fields, and amid the hum of lively bees ? Coidd they not feel the
.sublimity of those hopes which are raised on the broken ties of
earthly affection, on the death-bed of the just ? In all the poetry of
Mcore, or the witticisms of Sydney Smith, where do we find a pas-
sage as truly great, as transcendent in its moral and intellectual
value, aa inspirmgly beautiful as this ? —
" Oh! deep-enchanting prelude to repose,
The dawn of bliss, the twilight of onr wees !
Yet half I hear the parting sjiirit sigh,
It is a dread and awful thing to die !
Mysterious worlds, nntravelled by the sun,
AVhere Time's far-wandering tide has never run.
From your unfathonicd shades, and viewless spheres,
A warning conies, unheard by other ears.
'Tis heaven's commanding trumpet, long and loud,
Like Sinai's thunder, pealing from the cloud !
While Nature hears, in terror-mingled trust,
The shock that hurls her fabric to the dust :
And like the trembling Hebrew, when he trod
The roaring ivaves, and called upon his God,
With mortal terrors clouds immortal l)liss,
And shrieks and hovers o'er the dread abyss !
Daughter of Faith, awake, arise, illume
The dread unknown, tlie chaos of the tomb ;
Melt and dispel, ye spectre-doubts, that roll
Cimmerian darkness o'er the parting s(nil !
Fly, like the moon-eyed herald of dismay.
Chased on his night-steed by the star of day !
Tlie strife is o'er — the pangs of Nature close,
And life's last rapture triumphs o'er her woes.
}Lark! as the spirit eyes, with eagle gaze,
Tlie noon of heaven, undazzled by the blaze,
On heavenly winds that waft her to tlie sky,
Float the sweet tones of star-born melody;
Wild as that hallowed anthem sent to hail
Bethlehem's sheplierds in the lonely vale,
When Jordan hushed his waves, and midnight still
Watch'd on the holy towers of Zion hill !
Soul of the just ! companion of the dead !
Where is thy home, and whither art thou (led ?
Back to its licavenly source thy being goes,
,'«wift as the comet wheels to whence he rose :
Poomed on his airy path awhile to burn,
And doomed, like thee, to travel and return. —
Hark ! from the world's exploding centre diiven,
With sou< ds that shook the firmament of h'.aven,
Careers the licry giant, fast and far.
On bickering wheels and adamantine car;
49G CAMPBELL.
Fi'om iilanct wliirlM to planet more remote,
He visits realnss beyond tlic reach of tlioiiyht ;
]iut wlieeliiij; liomeward, wlieu Ids course is run,
Curlis the red yoke, and mingles with the snn !
So hath the traveller of earth unfurl'd
Her trembling wings, emerging from the world ;
And o'er the path by mortal never trod,
Sprung to her source, the bosom of her God! "
After this, it is as rational to compare anything of Moore's to it,
as to compare a cock-boat to a man-of-war.
It is worth remark, that it was only three years after the death of
Burns that Campbell thna rose into sudden glory in the same field.
Abundance of work was now j^oured in npon him ; and he was en-
gaged by Mundell to write a great Scoto-national poem, to be called
the Queen of the North, but which never throve. In his now
famihar intercourse with the most accomplished men of Edinburgh,
Campbell felt an advantage which they had over him in their ac-
quaintance with other countries. He believed that travel gave great
wealth of mind and imagery, and he determined to command this.
Sir Walter Scott was bringing German literature into noticc,and Camp-
bell resolved to visit Germany. He hoped to have had the company
of his friend Richardson, who, however, could not go, and with his
brother Daniel he passed over to Hamburg in June, of 1800. It was
a hazardous time to visit Germany. War was raging there. The
French had conquered a great part of Bavaria, and Austria was
already invaded. The valley of the Danube was menaced with all
the horrors of invasion. Campbell's brother found that his hopes
of mercantile advantage in Germany were at an end, and returned.
The young poet, after a short stay in Hamburg, where he visited
the venerable Klopstock, proceeded to Ratiabon in the very face of
the French, and within three days of his reaching that city, it was
taken by them. Nay, during the very first night that he slept there,
their distant cannonading could be heard. Count Klenau was driven
over the Danube, and the French entered.
Before Campbell reached Ratisbon, he had to pass over a country
desolated by the war, and travelled on amid fields trodden down by
armies, and deserted villages lying in ashes, and men and horses
lying in their blood, many of them still alive. It was in the very rear
of the Austrian army that he travelled. Five thousand Austrians
passed in a broad line the carriage in which he travelled ; and the
Pandours and Red- cloaks —
"The whiskered Pandours, and the fierce Hussars — "
of the Pleasures of Hope, presented strange and picturesque groups,
as they camped and lay down to sleep on the bare ground.
But it was from the walls of Ratisbon, near the Scotch College of
St. Jakob's, that he witnessed the terrors of actual battle. " Never,"
he says in his letters, " shall time efface that hour of astonishment
and suspended breath, as I stood with the good monks to witness
a charge of Klenau's cavalry upon the French, under Grenier. Wo
saw the fire given and returned, and heard distinctly the French
pas-de-chari/c, collecting the lines to attack in close column." For
CAMPBELL. 497
three hours the battle raged beneath the j3oet's eye. " This," ho
wrote, " formed the most important epoch in my life in point of
impressions ; but these impressions at seeing numbers of men
strewn dead on the field, or — what was worse — seeing them in the act
of dying, are so horrible to my memory, that I study to banish them.
At times, when I have been fevered and ill, I have awoke from
nightmare dreams about these dreadful images."
This was the amount of actual warfare which he .saw. It is
'^vroneous to sujjpose that he described the battle of Hohenlinderr
from really seeing it, for it was not fought tiU the 3d of December,
1800, while he had quitted Bavaria in the previous October. But his
vivid imagery of the battle was probably derived from the battle of
Eatisbon, and the view of the burning ruins of Ingolstadt, which he
Avent out of Eatisbon to see.
The French officers in Eatisbon were very polite and kind to him ;
and so soon as the armistice was signed betwixt Austria and France,
he made an excursion to Munich on " the Iser, ruUiug rapidly." He
was planning extensive tours into the South and into Hungary,
when war recommenced with such fury, that he thought it safest to
retire to Hamburg ; on his journey taking Nuremberg, Bamberg,
Weimar, Jena, Leipsic, Brunswick, Halle, Hanover, and Lunenburg,
in his way. He arrived at Hamburg in October ; so that this journey
does not allow of that picturesque account of his travelling which ho
used to relate, but not of himself It was this : Driving near a place
where a skirmish of cavalry had occurred, the German postiliou
suddenly stopped, alighted, and disappeared, without uttering a
word, leaving the traveller in the carriage for a long time in the
cold, the ground being covered with snow. On his return, it was
discovered by the traveller that the provident German had been
cutting off the long tails of the slain horses, which he deliberately
placed in the vehicle beside him, and, without a word, pursued his
journey.
Campbell had studied hard in Germany, both at the acquisition of
the language and at Greek literature, under Professor Heyne. From
Hamburg he removed to Altona, where he spent the winter. There
lie fell in with some refugee Irishmen, who had been in the rebellion
of 1798. The chief of these was Anthony M'Canu. "It was," says
Campbell, " in consequence of meeting him one evening on the banks
of the Elbe, lonely and pensive at the thoughts of his situation, that
I wrote the Exiles of Erin ; and it was first sung, in their evening
meetings, by him and his fellow-exiles." Campbell enjoj'ed his
winter at Altona, reading Schiller, Wieland, and Biirger ; but finding
that the British fleet was on its way to seize that of Denmark, to
))revent its falling into the hands of France, he did not deem Ham-
burg, or its neighbourhood, desirable under such circumstances, and
embarked on board of the lloml Geonje, a small Scotch trading-vessel,
for Leith. They sailed out of the Elbe, under the very guns of tho
Danish batteries of Gliickstadt ; and these circumstances inspired
him with the idea of his splendid lyric. The Battle of tho Baltic.
Being chased by a Danish privateer, they put into Varmouth ; • nj
4!)S CAMPBKlJj.
Campbell made his first visit to Loudou, arriving there withoul
money or a single introduction. But his name was both introduction
and uioney. Perry, of the Morning Chronicle, received him with open
arms and'^as open purse ; and he found himself a warmly-welcomed
guest of Lord Holland, and sitting face to face with Eogers, Sir
James Mackintosh, Horace and James Smith, Sydney Smith, Tierney,
the Kerables, the Siddons, Mrs. Barbauld, ]\Irs. Inchbald, Dr. Burney,
»ind numbers of other celebrities.
In one of his letters, published by Washington Irving, he describes
his impressions of a sort of literary social club, to which he had
been introduced by Sir James Mackintosh, in the following terms: —
'• ^lackintosh, the Vindicia? Gallicsc, was particularly attentive to me,
and took me with him to his convivial parties at the King of Clubs,
— a place dedicated to the meetings of the reigning wits of Loudon,
and, in fact, a lineal descendant of the Johnson, Burke, and Gold-
smith society, constituted for literary conversations. The dining-
table of these knights of literature was an arena of very keen
conversational rivalship, maintained, to be sure, with perfect good-
nature, but in which the gladiators contended as hardly as ever the
]''rench and Austrians, in the scenes I had just witnessed. Much,
liowevcr, as the wit and erudition of tliese men please an auditor at
tlie first or second visit, this trial of minds becomes at last fatiguing,
because it is unnatural and imsatisfactory. Every one of these
brilliants goes there to shine ; for conversational powers are so much
the rage in London, that no reputation is higher than his who ex-
hibits them. Where every one tries to instruct, there is, in fact,
but little instruction ; wit, paradox, eccentricity, even absurdity, if
delivered I'apidly and facetiously, take priority, in these societies, of
.sound reasoning and delicate taste. I have watched sometimes the
devious tide of conversation, guided by accidental associations,
turning from topic to topic, and satisfactory upon none. What has
one learned ? has been my general question. The mind, it is true,
is electrified and quickened, and the spirits finely exhilarated ; but
one grand fault pervades the whole institution ; their inquiries are
desultory, and all improvements to be reaped must be accidental."
Campbell's own conversational powers were of the highest order,
and he showed singular discrimination in the choice of subjects of
an interesting and instructive nature. Mere talk for display on the
part of others must, therefoi'e, have been exceedingly disagreeable
to him.
After a short sojourn in London, the poet received the news of
his father's death, and returned to Edinburgh ; where, strange to
say, he was subjected to a private examination by the authori-
ties as a suspected spy, from his having been in the society, while
on the Continent, of some of the Irish refugees. He easily satis-
fied the civic guardians of his unshaken loyalty, and continued
to reside for about a year in Edinburgh, during which time he
wrote his Lochiel's Warning, Hohenlinden, and others of his well-
known ballads and minor poems. It is related, as an instance of the
wonderful powers of memory of Sir Walter Scott, that, on Lochiel's
CAMPBELL. 499
Waruiug being read to bitu in manuscript, be requested to be allowed
to peruse it for bimself, and tben astonisbed tbe autbor by repeating
it from memory from beginning to end. Tbe circumstances of bis
motber and sisters at tbis time demanded great exertions from tbo
young poet. To eflfect tbis be not only worked bard, but borrowed
money at enormous interest, wbicb long weigbed upon bim. Camp-
bell now determined upon removing to London, as tbe best field for
literary exertion. Accordingly, early in 180.3, be repaired to tbe
metrojjolis ; and on bis arrival resided for some time in tbe bouse
of Lord Minto, wbo bad made bis acquaintance in Scotland, and
.sbowed great attacbment to bim. He also lived a good wbile witb
bis friend Telford, tbe celebrated engineer. He returned to Scotland
with Lord Minto, spent some time at Minto Castle and Edinburgh,
and tben back to London, wbere be again took up bis quarters witb
Telford at Cbaring Cross. In tbe autumn of 1803 be married bis
cousin, Miss Matilda Sinclair, of Greenock, a lady of considerable
personal beauty ; and after living some time at 52, Upper Eaton-
street, Pimlico, be fixed bis residence in tbe beautiful village of
Sydenham, in Kent, about seven miles from London. At tbe time
of Campbell's marriage it appears that hope, and reliance on bis
own exertions, formed by far tbe largest portion of bis worldly
fortune ; for, on bis friend Telford remonstrating witb bim on tbe
inexpediency of marrying so early, be replied, " When shall I bo
better ofi"? I have fifty pounds, and six months' work at tbe
Encyclopsedia." Tbe Encyclopcedia here mentioned was Brewster'a
Edinburgh Encyclopaedia, to wbicb be contributed several papers.
Campbell resided at Sydenham till 1821, seventeen years. His
house was on Peak-hill, and had a quiet and sweet view towards
Forest-hill. Tbe bouse is one of two tenements under the same
roof, consisting of only one room in width, which, London fashion,
being divided by folding-doors, formed, as was needed, two. Tbe
front looked out upon the prospect already mentioned. To tbe left
was a fine mass of trees, amid which showed itself a large house,
which during part of tbe time was occupied by Lady Charlotte
Campbell. The back looked out upon a small neat garden^ enclosed
from the field by pales ; and beyond it, on a mass of fine wood, at
the foot of which ran a canal, and now along its bed, the railway
from London to Croydon. The bouse is small, and modest; but
its situation is very pleasant indeed, standing on a green and quiet
Bwell, at a distance from the wood, and catching pleasant glimpses
of tbe houses in Sydenham, and of tbe country round. In tbe little
back parlour be used to sit and write ; and to prevent tbe passage
of sound, he bad tbe door which opened into tbe ball covered witb
green baize, which still remains. Tbis at once defended him from
the noise of the passing, and operations of tbe housemaid, as tbe
door was near tbe stairs, and also from any one so plainly hearing
him, when, in poet-fashion, be sounded out sonorously bis verses aa
he composed them.
The next door to Campbell bved his landlord, a Mr. Onis, wbo
vas still living there at the time of my visit, an old man of ninety,
500 CAMPBIilX.
liaving every one of Lis windows in front, filled with strong jalousies,
j>ainted green, which gave a singular and dismal air to the house, as
the dwelling of one who wished to shut out the sight of the living
world and the sun at the same time. To i^revent too familiar
inspection from his neighbour's premises, Camj^bell ran up a sort of
buttress between the houses at the back, and planted trees thei'e, so
that no one could get a sight of him as he sat in his little parlour
writing. In the village was still living Miss May hew, a lady after-
wards alluded to, and then, of course, vely aged. Here Campbell lost
a son, of about eleven or twelve years of age, who is buried at
Lewisham. His wife was ill at tlie time he left in 1821, and he had
much trouble about that time. He went to reside in London in 1821,
on account of his literary engagements. Here he wrote Gertrude of
Wyoming. The country, which was then so fresh and retired, is
now cut up with railroads ; and new buildings, especially since the
erection of the Crystal Palace, are seen rising like crowding appari-
tions on every side.
Soon after his settlement at Sydenham he published, anonymously,
a compiled work, in three volumes 8vo, entitled. Annals of Great
Britain, from the Accession of George IH. to the Peace of Amiens,
intended, probably, as a continuation of Hume and Smollett's
histories. This was the first of his commissions from a London
publisher. He now devoted himself to writing and compiling for
the booksellers, and furnishing occasional articles to the daily press
and other periodical publications. He wrote for the Philosophical
Magazine and the Star newspaper. His conversational powers, as
we have already stated, were very great ; and these, with his other
qualities, acquired for him an extensive circle of friends. In the
social parties and convivial meetings of Sydenham and its neigh-
bourhood, his compauj' was at all times eagerly courted ; and among
the kindred spirits with whom he was in the habit of associating
there, were the brothers James and Horace Smith, Theodore Hook,
and others who afterwards distinguished themselves in literature.
Through the influence of Charles James Fox, he obtained in 1805,
shortly before that statesman's death, a pension from Government
of 200/., which, after deduction of duties, left him clear 168/. per
annum.
Campbell was at this period, and for many years afterwards,
a working author, the better portion of his days being spent in
literary drudgery and task-work. His gains from the booksellers
were not always, however, in proportion to the merit of the matter
.supplied to them ; and an anecdote is recorded which sti'ongly
illustrates his feelings in regard to them. Having been invited to a
booksellers' dinner, soon after Pam, of Nuremberg, one of the trade,
had been executed by command of Napoleon, he was asked for
a toast, and with much earnestness as well as gravity of manner
he proposed to drink the health of Buonaparte. The company were
amazed at such a toast, and asked for an explanation of it. " Gentle-
men," said Campbell, with sly humour, " J give you Napoleon, — ho
was a fine fellow, — he shot a bookseller ! "
CAMPBELL. 501
lu the beginning of 1809 lie published his second volume of poems,
containing Gertrude of "Wyoming, a simple Indian tale, in the Spen •
serian stanza, the scene of which is laid among the woods of Penn-
sylvania ; Glenara, the Battle of the Baltic, Lochiel, and Lord Ullin's
Daughter. A subsequent edition contained also the touching ballad
of O'Connor's Child. This volume added greatly to his popularity;
and the high reputation which he had now acquired must have been
very gratifying to his feelings. Indeed, even in the meridian of his
living renown, the native simjalicity and goodness of his heart ren-
dered him peculiarly pleased with any attention of a complimentary
natm'e which was shown to him. Of this many instances might be
given, but the following, related by himself, may be quoted here : —
In writing to a friend in 1840, respecting the launch of a man-of-war
at Chatham, at which he was present, he mentioned that none of the
compliments paid to him on that occasion afiected him so deeply as
the cii'cumstance of the band of two regiments striking up "The
Campbells are coming," as he entered the dockyard.
Campbell himself preferred Gertrude of Wyoming to the Pleasures
of Hope. It is said that one cause of this preference was, that from
hearing himself so exclusively called the author of the Pleasures of
Hope, it became so hackneyed, that he felt towards it as the Athenian
did who was tired of hearing Aristides called the Just.
In 1812 Campbell commenced the delivery of a course of lectm-es
on Poetry, at the Royal Institution, which had such success, that
they were afterwards enlarged, and re-delivered, some years after, at
Liverpool and Birmingham.
" His mode of life at Sydenham," says Mr. Cyrus Redding, in a
memoir of the poet published in the New Monthly Magazine, " was
almost uniformly that which he afterwards followed in London, when
he made it a constant residence. He rose not very early, break-
fasted, studied for an hour or two, dined at two or three o'clock, and
then made a call or two in the village, often remaining for an hoiu-
or more at the house of a maiden lady, of whose conversation he was
remarkably fond. He would return home to tea, and then retire
early to his study, remaining there to a late hour, sometimes even to
an early one. His life was strictly domestic. Ho gave a dinner
party now and then ; and at some of them Thomas Moore, Rogers,
Crabbe, and other literary friends from town, were present. His
table was plain, hospitalde, and cheered by a hearty welcome. While
he lived at Sydenham," continues Mr. Redding, " or at least during
a portion of the time, there resided in that village the well-known
Thomas Hill, who was a sort of walking chronicle. He knew the
business and afiairs of every hterary man, and could relate a vast
deal more about them than they had ever known themselves. Tliere
WPS no newspaper office into which he did not find his way ; no
third-rate scribbler of whom he did not know his business at thu
time. But his knowledge was not confined to literary men ; he knew
almost all the world of any note. It was said of him, that he could
stand at Charing Cross at noon-day, and tell the name and business
of everybody that passed Northumberland House. He died of
502 CAJiriiKLL.
apoplexy in the A.lelplii, fuur or five yeans ago, nearly at the age of
ci'i'hty, few sujipcsiiig him more than sixty.
°' At the table of this singular personage at Sydenham, there used
to meet occasionally a number of literary men and choice spirits of
the age. There was to be found Theodore Hook, giving full swing
to his jests, at the expense of everything held cheaji or dear in social
life, or under conventional rule. There too came the authors of the
Rejected Addresses, whose humour was only the lowest among their
better qualities. The poet living hard by could not, in the common
course of things, miss being among those who congregated at Hill's.
Repartee and pun passed about in a mode vainly to be looked for in
these degenerate days at the most convivial tables. Some practical
jokes were played off there, which for a long time afterwards fornied
the burdr'u of after-dinner conversations. Campbell was behind
none of the party in spirits. He entered with full zest into the
pleasantries of the houi-. Some of the party leaving Sydenham, to
leturn home by Dulwich, to which they were obliged to walk upon
one occasion, for want of a conveyance, those who remained behind
in Sydenham escorted their friends to the top of the hill to take
leave, in doing which the poet's residence had to be passed. But ho
scorned to leave his party. All went on to the parting place on the
hill summit, exchanging"^ jokes, or manufacturing indifferent puns.
AVhen they separated, it was with hats off and three boisterous
cheers."
Duriiig Campbell's residence at Sydenham, he made two visits to
the Continent ; one to France, in 1814, and the other to Germany, in
1820. Both these added greatly to his knowledge of literature and
life. In Paris he met with Sclilegel, Humboldt, Denon, Cuvier, &c.
In Germany he made a far wider tour than his former one. He had
his wife and son with him, and saw on his way many Dutch towns.
In Germany he saw Arndt, visited his old sojourn at Ratisbon, saw
Vienna, and sailed down the Danube.
In 1820 Campbell undertook the editorship of the New Monthly
Magazine ; and in this magazine appeared some of his most beautiful
minor poem:?. Tor some time he had lodgings at 62, Margaret- street,
Cavendish-square, and then took a house, 10, Seymour-street West.
In 1824 he published Theodoric, a poem, by no means equal to his
former productions.
" To Mr. Campbell," says his anonymous biographer, " belongs the
merit of originating the London University, in which project Lord
Brougham was an active coadjutor. This Campbell always regarded
as the most important action of his life. During the struggle for
independence in which Greece was engaged, and in which she was
idtimately successful, he took a strong interest in the cause of that
country, as he subsequently, and indeed all his life, did in that of
Poland." In November, 1820, he was chosen Lord Rector of the
University of Glasgow. It was with the utmost enthusiasm, as
might well be supposed, that this election took place ; it was a
tiiumphal return to the scenes of his early life ; and among the
numerous incidents which might be given in evidence of the enthu-
CAMPBELL. 503
elastQ folt by all classes towards their illustrious townsman may be
mentioned, the notice which was taken of a very beautiful rainbow,
which was seen on the day he entered his native city, and which
fond admirers of his genius regarded as a token that Heaven was
smihng on the event. Still more, he was re-elected with the same
enthusiasm twice more in preference to Canning, and Sir Walter
Scott. In 1825, he made another tour in Germany, to collect infor-
mation regarding the constitution and management of universities.
Everywhere he was received with great honour, and was entertained
at a public dinner in Hamburg. These agreeable events, however,
■were dashed by the death of his wife, who expired on the 10th of
May, 1828.
The poet, after the death of his wife, and suffering from an
accumulation of domestic calamities, the death of one of his two
sons, and the hopeless insanity of the other, gave up the editorship
of the New Monthly Magazine. He quitted his house in Seymour-
street AVest, and took one in Middle Scotland Yard. Some years
afterwards he removed into chambers, where he resided for some
years in a state of comparative loneliness at No. 61, Lincoln's-inn-
tields. His chambers were on the second Hoor, where he had a large
well-furnished sitting-room, adjoining which was his bedroom. One
side of his principal room was arranged with shelves, like a library,
which were full of books. In that room has the writer of this sketch
passed many a pleasant and profitable liour with him, and he never
shall forget the active benevolence and genuine kindliness of heart
displayed by the poet on one occasion when he called upon him. On
entering the room one forenoon, in the year 1839, he found Mr.
Campbell busy looking over his books, while, near the fireplace, was
seated an elderly gentlewoman in widow's weeds. He was desired
to take a chair for a few minutes. Presently the poet disappeared
into his bedroom, and returned with an armful of books, which he
placed among a heap of others that he had collected together on the
floor. " Thei'e now," he said, addressing the widow, "these will help
you a little, and I shall see what more I can do for you by the time
you call again. I shall get them sent to you in the course of the
day." The widow thanked him with tears in her eyes, and shaking
her cordially by the hand, he wished her a good morning. On her
departure, the poet said, with great feeling, " That lady whom you
saw just now is the widow of an early friend of mine ; and as she is
now in somewhat reduced circumstances, she wishes to open a little
book and stationery shop, and I have been busy looking out all the
books for which I have no use, to add to her stock. She has taken
a small shop in the neighbourhood of town, and I shall do all I can
to serve her, and forward her prospects, as far as my assistance and
infiuencc extend. Old times should not be forgotten." He men-
tioned the name of the place, and asked if the writer had any
acquaintances in the vicinity to whose notice he might recommend
the widow, but was an.swcred in the negative. The abstraction of
the volumes he thus so generously bestowed on the poor widow
made a sensible alteration in the appearance of his library. On
504 Campbell.
another occasion, soon aftor this, when the wi'iter iutroJuced to Iiim
a friend of his of tlio name of Sinclair, he said, while he shook him
by tlio hand, " I am glad to see j'ou, Sir, your name recommends
you to me ;" adding, with much tenderness, "my wife's name was
Sinclair."
"1'he years 1831 and 1832 he spent chiefly at St. lieonard's.
Ill 1832, the interest excited by the French conquest and coloni-
zation of Algiers induced him to pay it a visit. On his way the
Poles gave him a public dinner in Paris, Pj'ince Czartoryski in the
chair ; and on his return he furnished an account of his journey to
the New Monthly Magazine, which he afterwards published under
the name of Letters from the South, in two volumes. He did not
confine himself to Algiers, but made an excursion into the interior
of the country as flir as Mascara ; and his work, with a great deal of
light gossipping matter, contains much interesting information
respecting Algiers and tlae various races inhabiting that part of
Earbary. The same year, in conjunction with the Polish poet
Niemcewiez, Prince Czartoryski, and others, he founded the society
styled the Literary Association of the Friends of Poland. He had
rooms at the office of the Association, Duke-street, St. James's-
square, where he wrote a great deal, and where a tablet, in comme-
moration of his connexion with the Association, is now affixed to
the wall of what he called his attic. At this time he purchased a
share of the Metropolitan Magazine. Rogers lent him 500/. for the
purpose ; but he soon relinquished all proprietorship to Captains
Chamier and ]\Iarryat, and merely wrote for it. He also originated
the Clarence club, where he occasionally dined. In 1834 he pub-
lished his Life of Mrs. Siddons. On the death, that year, of his
friend ]\Ir. Telford, the engineer, after whom he had named his
surviving son, he, as well as Mr. Southey, was left a legacy of 500/. ;
which, added to the gains from his works, and succession to some
property in Scotland, placed him in very comfortable circumstances
so far as money was concerned. In 18.57 he published a splendid
edition of his poems, illustrated by Timms. He also edited the
Scenic Annual.
Soon after the Queen's coronation, she made Campbell a present of
her portrait. It was highly prized by him, and is especially men-
tioned in his will, together with the silver bowl given to him by the
students of Glasgow ; which two articles, says the said will, were con-
sidered by him the two jewels of his property. With i-egard to this
picture, which always tilled him with ecstasy and admiration, I
cannot do better than again quote the biographical sketch to which
I am already so much indebted.
" It was, or rather is, a large full-length engraving, enclosed in a
splendid frame, and was hung up in his sitting-room in Lincoln's-
inn-fields, on the same side as the fireplace, but nearer the window.
The writer of this called upon him a day or two after he received it,
and the explanation he then gave of the way in which it was pre-
sented to him agrees so with what has already appeared regarding
it, that it may be given here in nearly the same words. Indeed, he
CAMPBELL. 503
was so much flattered by the unexpected comphmeut of a present
of her portrait from his sovereign, that he must have spoken of it in
u somewhat similar manner to every one ou terms of intimacy with
him, who about that time happened to come into his company.
* I was at her Majesty's coronation in Westminster AbbejV said
Campbell, ' and she conducted herself so well, during the long and
fatiguing ceremony, that I shed tears many times. On returning
home, I resolved, out of pure esteem and veneration, to send her a
coi^y of all my works. Accordingly, 1 had them bound up, and went
pei'sonally with them to Sir Henry Wheateley, who, when he under-
stood mj errand, told me that her Majesty made it a rule to decline
presents of this kind, as it placed her under obhgations which were
unpleasant to her. Say to her Majesty, Sir Henry, I replied, that
there is not a single thing the Queen can touch with her sceptre in
any of her dominions which 1 covet; and I therefore entreat you, in
j'our office, to present them with my devotions as a subject. Sir
Henry then promised to comply with my request; but next day
they were returned. I hesitated,' continued Campbell, ' to open the
parcel, but, on doing so, I found, to my inexpressible joy, a note
enclosed, desiring my autograph ujion them. Having complied with
the wish, I again transmitted the books to her Majesty, and in the
course of a day or two received in return this elegant engraving,
with her Majesty's autograph, as you see below.' He then directed
particular attention to the royal signature, which was in her
Majesty's usual bold and beautiful handwriting.
"In 1833, he had lodgings in Highgate, and traversed the old
haunts of Coleridge, Keats, and Leigh Hunt, greatly to the reno-
vation of his health. He spent also much time at Rose Villa, Hamp-
stead, the abode of his physician. Dr. Bcattie, whence he made many
agreeable visits to Joanna Baillie.
"In 1842, his Pilgrim of Glencoe, and other poems, appeared,
dedicated to his friend and physician. Dr. William Beattie, whom he
also named one of his executors ; Mr. William Moxou, of the Middle
Temple, brother of Mr. Edward Moxon, his pubU.sher, being the
other. He also wrote a life of Petrarch, and a year or two before
his death he edited the Life of Frederick the Great, published by
Colburn. In this year, that is, in ] 842, he again visited Germany.
On one occasion, in the writer's presence, he expressed a strong desire
to go to Greece ; but he never carried that intention into effect, pro-
bably from the want of a companion. Previous to going to Germany,
that is, in 1841, he took a house at No. 8, Victoria-square, Pimlico,
and devoted his time to the education of his niece. Miss Mary Camp-
bell, a Glasgow young lady, whom he took to live with him. But his
health, which had long been in a declining state, began to give way
rapidly. He was no longer the man he had been ; the energy of his body
and mind was gone; and in the summer of 1843 he retired to Bou-
logne, where at first he derived benefit from the change of air and
scene ; but this did not continue long. He had taken lodgings in the
upper part of the town, at 5, Rue St. Jean, where the situation was
much too exposed for him. The cold subdued his failing vital
606 CAJirBELL.
powers, and he gradually grew feebler. He seldom went into society,
and for some months before his death he corresponded but little
with his friends in this country. A week before his decease Dr.
Seattle was sent for from London, and on his arrival at Boulogne he
found him much worse than he had anticipated. The hour was
approaching when the spirit of the poet of Hope was to quit this
transitory scene, and return to God who gave it. On Saturday
afternoon, the 15th June, 1844, he breathed his last, in the pi-esence
of his niece, his friend Dr. Beattie, and his medical attendants. His
last hours were marked by calmness and resignation. The Eev. Mr.
Hassell, an English clergyman, was also with liv. Campbell at the
time of his death.
" Campbell's funeral,'' continues this able writer, " was worthy of
his fame. He was buried in the Poet's Corner of Westminster
Abbey, on Wednesday, July 3, 1844. The funeral was attended by
a large body of noblemen and gentlemen, and by several of the most
eminent authors of the day. Mr. Alexander Campbell and Mr. Wiss,
two nephews of the deceased poet, with his executors, were the chief
mourners ; and the pall was borne by Sir Robert Peel, the Earl of
Aberdeen, the Duke of Argyle, Lord IMorpeth, Lord Brougham, Lord
Campbell, Lord Dudley Coutts Stuart, and Lord Leigh. The corpse
was followed by a large number of members of parliament and other
distinguished gentlemen.
" ' There was one part of the ceremony,' says an American writer,
' especially impressive. A deputation from the Polish Association
was present, in addition to the Poles who attended as mourners ;
and when the officiating clergyman arrived at that portion of the
ceremony in which dust is consigned to dust, one of the number
(Colonel Szyrma) took a handful of dust, brought for the occasion
from the tomb of Kosciusko, and scattered it upon the coffin. It
was a worthy tribute to the memory of him who has done so much
to immortahze the man and the cause ; and not the less impressive
because so perfectly simple. At the conclusion of the service the
solemn peals of the organ again reverberated for some minutes
through the aisles of the Abbey, and the procession retired as it
came.
" ' The barrier with iron spikes, which protected the mourners from
the jostling of the crowd, was then removed, and there was a rush
to get a sight of the coffin. After waiting a little while, I succeeded
in looking into the grave, and read the inscription on the large gilt
plate : —
THOMAS CAMPBELL, LL.D.
AITHOn OF THE PLEASURES OF IIOPE,
Died June 15, IS 14,
Aged G7.
" ' On visiting the Abbey the next day, I found the stone over the
grave so carefully replaced, that a stranger would never suspect
there had been a recent interment. To those who may hereafter
visit this spot, it may be interesting to know that it is situated
CAMPBELL. 507
between the monument of Addison and the opposite pillar, not far
from that of Goldsmith, and closely adjoining that of Sheridan. His
most Christian wish was accomplished. He lies in the Poet's Corner,
surrounded by the tombs and monuments of kings, statesmen, war-
riors, and scholars, in the massy building guarded with rehgious care,
and visited from all parts of the land with rehgious veneration.' "
A statue of the poet has been placed in the Abbey, executed by
Mr. Calder I\Iarshall, for which the gifted artist, according to all that
has appeared in the public journals on ti-e subject, has been very
indifferently remunerated.
ROBEiri' SOUTHEY.
SouTHKY was bom in Briatol, ou the litli of Aiigiiat, 1774. His
fixther was a draper ; his shop was in AViue-street. Southey, in his
Autobiography tells us that his father, as a boy, was very fond of
coursing, and that he took as his sign a hare ; that this hare was
painted on a pane in the window, on each side of the door, and was
engraved on his shop bills. Since then it has been known as the
sign of the Golden Key ; and there the shop still remains, in the
very same trade, and with the golden key yet hanging in_front.
Robert was the second of a family of seven or eight children, two
only of whom, besides himself, appear to have grown up, — one, an
officer in the army, and the other a physician in London. He tells
us that he could trace his ancestors as far back as 1696, that is, about
a century and a half. They were yeomen, or farmers ; but he thinks
they must have been of gentle blood, for they had arms, wid he even
traces a connexion with Lord Somerville. Southey appears inclined
to the pride of ancestry, when he had so much better things to be
proud of; for no ancestry can compare with a man's own genius,
which comes direct from heaven. Who cares what a man's physical
origin was, so that his career wa-s honourable ? Who thinks, because
Shakspeare was the son of a woolcomber ; because Ben Johnson was
apprenticed to a bricklayer ; because Milton was a schoolmaster ^
SOUTHEY, 509
because Moore was the son of a grocer and t^ijirit-dealer, and Chat-
terton was a charity-boy, that they are one whit less genuine nobles
of the land ? We are quite as well satisfied with Robert Southey
that his great-great-great-grandfather was a great clothier at Wel-
lington, and his father a retail draper^ as if they had been dukes or
princes. He had a trace of the blood of Locke, or of the same family
as Locke, but at that he sneers, calling him " the philosopher, so-
called, who is still held in more estimation than he deserves."
His mother's maiden name was Hill, and she had a half-sister, a Miss
Tyler, with whom Southey was a good deal in his boyhood. He has left
us a very minute account of his connexions and his early days. He
was sent as a mere child to a Mrs. Powell, in Bristol, to a day-school.
He was then taken to his aunt, Miss Tyler, at Bath. This Miss Tyler
was rich and handsome, and lived in a large old-fashioned house,
surrounded by old-fashioned gardens, in Walcot-parade, and at that
time quite in the country. There he was chiefly, from the age of
two to six. At that age he returned to Bristol, and was sent to
a day-school on the top of Mill Hill, kept by a Mr. Foot, a dissenting
minister. There, both from master and boys, he suffered great
tyranny. Once, he says, the master cruelly caned him, the only
time that any master ever laid a hand on him. Lucky fellow !
He was thence removed to a boarding-school at Corston, a village
about nine miles from Bristol, and three from Bath.
This was the school of which he speaks in his Hymn to tlio
Penates, and describes in the Retrospect. His parting there with
his father is admirably expressive of a child's first school ex-
perience : —
" Methinks e"eii now tlie interview I see,
The mistress's glad smile, the master's glee :
Much of my future happiness they said,
Mucli of the easy life the scholars led ;
Of spacious ])Iay-grounds and of wholesome air,
The best instruction and the tenderest care;
And when I followed to the garden door
My fatlier. till, through tears, I saw no more,—
How civilly they soothed my parting pain,
And never did they speak so civilly again."
The school-house was an old country mansion, surrounded by
gardens, orchards, paddocks, with high walls, summer-houses, gate-
pillars, with great stone balls, but everything in dilapidation. The
school was a very iudifierent one ; the boys washed themselves at a
little stream which ran through the grounds, and so neglected was
their general cleanliness, that when at the end of the year which ho
spent there his head was examined, it was found so populous that hi^
mother wept at the sight of it.
He was next sent to his grandmother's, at Bedminster, till a new
school could be pitched upon, and he always recollected with delight
the days which he spent there in its garden, orchards, and fields
His grandmother dying, he was sent as a day-boarder to a schoo.
kept by William Williams, a Welshman, in a part of Bristol called
I he Fort. He was then about eight years old, and there he con-
tinued four or five years, much to his contentment. His aunt Tyler
510 SOUTHEY.
took a house in 'rerril-streot, Bristol, auJ he 2')assod much time with
her. He was removed from WiUiams's school for a year, and sent
again as day-boarder to a Mr. Lewis, a clergyman ; and in February
of 1788, when he consequently was fourteen, he was placed at West-
minster school. At this school he formed two friendships, whicli
continued through life ; those of Mr. C. W. W. Wynu, of Sir
Watkins Wynn's family, and !Mr. Grosvenor Charles Bedford, late of
the Exchequer. They continued to the last the most prominent of
his correspondents ; and ]\Ir. Bedford, in particular, seems to have
been all that a man could wish for in a friend — a man of great
talent, fine education, and excellent heart. Here, when he had
been about four years, and had reached the upper classes, he was
expelled for publishing a periodical called the Flagellant, in con-
junction with his friend Bedford and some others. It reached nine
numbers, when it became so satirically severe on the flogging which
went on in that establishment, that it roused the wrath of the
master. Dr. Vincent.
The consequences of this expulsion followed him to Oxford. It waa
intended that he should enter at Christ Church ; but Cyril Jackson,
the dean, refused to admit the leading author of the Flagellant, and
he matriculated at Balliol College. He was scarcely settled there
when his father died. He had failed in business, as his son says,
through the treachery of relatives ; and his bi'other, who was worth
100,000/., but a regular muck-worm, had surlily refused to give him
the slightest assistance to I'ecover his position. These misfortunes
killed the old man ; and Miss Tyler and his uncle, the Rev. Her-
liert Hill, now became Southey's main stays ; Miss Tyler giving
him a home, and his uncle his education.
Whilst he was a student at Oxford, and about nineteen, he wrote
his Joan of Arc. The whole of this poem, except about three hun-
dred lines, he wrote at Brixton Causeway, at a then pleasant
country house, the residence of his friend Grosvenor Bedford.
During his abode at Oxford he was a red-hot republican, and deeply
inflated with the absurd views of Eousseau respecting social life. Ho
rejected the idea of entering the Church, commenced medical studies,
and then abandoned them, hoping to obtain a clerkship under
government. But his friend Bedford soon put all hopes of that
kind to flight, by reminding him that inquiries at Oxford as to his
avowed opinions would effectually preclude his success with govern-
ment.
In 1794 he became acquainted with Coleridge, who was then an
undergraduate of Jesus College, Cambridge. Here Coleridge quickly
inoculated him with his famous scheme of Pantisocracy — the equal
government of all ! The idea was to collect as many of like faith
with themselves as they could, and emigrate to America, where, on
the banks of the Susquehannah, they were to purchase a settlement.
There " this band of brothers in the wilderness were all to labour
with their hands, each according to the task assigned him. They
were all to be married, and the ladies were to cook and perform all
the domestic offices. They had plans drawn for the buildings ani^
SOtJTHEY. 61 1
lanJs of tlic settlement, and were to embark in Marcli, 1795.
Twelve men were easily to clear IJOO acres in four or live months,
and 600/. were to purchase 1,000 acres, and build houses upon
them ! The chief actoi's in this notable scheme were Robert Lovell,
the son of a wealthy quaker ; George Burnett, a fellow-collegian ;
Robert Allen, of Corpus Christi College ; Edmund Seward, also a
fellow-collegian, but who soon declared off; and a poor servant
boy, called Shadrach Weeks, was deemed such an acquisition, that
Coleridge almost went out of his mind at the idea of his company,
and in his letters wrote in huge characters — " Shad goes with us !
HE IS MY BROTHER ! ! "
The ladies who figured in the foreground of the Pantisocraiic
enterprise were the three Miss Frickers. Their father, like Southey's,
had been unfortunate in his trade of a sugar-baker, and they had
honourably supported themselves in business. Lovell had married
one, and Coleridge and Southey married the two others. But the
scheme began to look rather hopeless from want of the necessary
money ; and, at length, coming to the ears of Miss Tyler, from whom
it had been carefully kept, it was blown up at once by the fierce
outbreak of her indignation. Southey was turned out of her com-
fortable house on College-green, and poor Shadrach, her servant-bo}',
was left to endure the full force of her wrath. Nothing could ever
turn her heart again towards Southey. Houseless and friendless,
Southey and Coleridge now jjlanned lectures and magazines for a
livelihood ; and then quarrelled because Southey abandoned the idea
of the Pantisocracy. He married Miss Fricker, however, in Septem-
ber, 1795; and immediately afterwards accompanied his maternal
uncle, Hill, who was chaplain to the Factory at Lisbon. He was
absent six months, and returned to find his friend Lovell dead, and
his widow and one child left destitute. Though miserably poor him-
self, and not knowing hov/ to live, Southey, with that generosity of
character which always distinguished him, at once took Mrs. Lovell
home to him, and she continued a regular inmate of his house while
he lived ; as did Mrs. Coleridge and her daughter, till the daughter's
marriage.
From this time to 1801, Southey resided at various places. For
some time he was at Bristol, where Cottle, the publisher and poet,
published his Joan of Arc, for which he gave him one hundred
guineas ; as he also boldly risked the publication of the earliest
poems of Coleridge and Wordsworth. Southey now resolved to
study the law, being enabled to do this by an allowance of 160/.
a-year by his generous old schoolfellow, Wynu. But his head was
running more on literature than law. He was actually teeming with
literary projects — tragedies, suggested by his Portuguese studies — of
Sebastian ; of Inez de Castro ; of the Revenge of Don Pedro ; a poem
on Madoc, in twenty books ; a novel of Edmund Oliver ; a Romance ;
a Norwegian Tale ; an Oriental poem ; the Destruction of the Dom
Daniel. Jn fact, he had conceived the idea of various works, which
he afterwards completed, and others which he never commenced.
He was also publishing his Letters from Spain and Portugal.
f;12 BOUTHRY.
During the time that he occasionally visited London, in pursuit of
his legal studies, his home was successively at Barton, near Christ-
church, Hampshire ; at Bath ; and at Westbury, about two miles
from Bristol, where ho resided a year ; and then again at Christ-
church, where he made the acquaintance of one of his best fi'iends,
John Rickman.
Southey's health failing, and the study of the law having disgusted
him, he went again to Lisbon, taking his wife with him, and passed
a very delightful year at Cintra. On his return, Coleridge induce<l
him to go down to Keswick, which, however, at that time did not
please him, appearing cold after his southern sojourn.
On 1801, Southey obtained the appointment of secretary to the
Right Hon. Isaac Corry, Chancellor of the Exchequer for Ireland.
On retiring from office with his patron, our author, after returning
awhile to Bristol, and planning a settlement in Wales, went to reside
at Keswick, where also dwelt, under the same roof, the widow of his
friend Lovell, and tlie wife of Mr. Coleridge. Such were the move-
ments of Southey till he settled down at Keswick, and there, busy
as a bee in its hive, worked out the forty years of his then remaining
life. The mere list of his works attests a wonderful industry : —
Poems by Southey and Cottle, 1 vol, 1794. Joan of Arc, 1 vol,
quarto, 1795. Letters from Spain and Portugal, 1 vol, 1797. Minor
Poems, 2 vols, 1797 and 1799. Annual Anthology, 2 vols, 1799-1800,
Thalaba, 2 vols, 1801. Chatterton's works, edited, 1802. Amadis of
Gaul, 4 vols, 1803. Metrical Tales, 1805. Madoc, 1 vol, quarto,
1807. Espriella's Letters, 1807. Specimens of later Poets, 3 vols,
1807. Remains of H. K. White, 2 vols, 1807. Chronicle of the Cid,
1 vol, 1808. Curse of Kehama, 1810. Omniana, 2 vols, 1812. Life
of Nelson, 2 vols, 1813. Roderick, the Last of the Goths, 1 vol, 1814.
Carmen Triumphale, &c., 1814. Lay of the Laureate, 1 vol, 181G.
Pilgrimage to Waterloo, 1 vol, 1816. Morte d' Arthur, 2 vols, 1817.
History of Brazil, 3 vols, quarto, 1810 to 1819. Life of Wesley,
2 vols, 1820. Expedition of Orsua,, 1 vol, 1821. A Vision of Judg-
ment, 1 vol, 1821, Book of the Church, 2 vols, 1824, Tale of
Paraguay, 1 vol, 1825, Vindicia) Ecclesite Anglicanoe, 1 vol, 1826.
History of the Peninsular War, 3 vols, 1822 to 1832. Lives of Un-
educated Poets, 1 vol, 1829. All for Love, or a Sinner Well Saved,
1 vol, 1829, Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society,
1829. Life of Bunyan, 1830. Select Works of British Poets, from
Chaucer to Johnson, with Biographical Notices, 1 vol, 1831. Naval
History of England, 4 vols, 1833-40. The Doctor, 7 vols, 1834 to 1847.
Life and Works of Cowper, 15 vols, 1835-1837. Common-Place
Book, 4 vols. Oliver Newman, &c., 1 vol, 1845.
This is a striking list of the works of one man, though he took
nearly fifty years of almost unexampled health and industry to com-
plete it. But this does not include the large amount of his contri-
butions to the Quarterly and other periodicals ; nor does the mere
bulk of the work thrown off convey any idea of the bulk of work
gone through. The immense and patient research necessary for
his histories was scarcely less than that which he bestowed on the
BOUTHET. 513
subject-matter and illustrative notes of bis poems. The whole of his
writings abound with evidences of learning and laborious reading
that have been rarely equalled. But the variety of talents and
humour displayed in his different writings is equally extraordinary.
The love of fmi, and the keenness of satire, which distinguished his
smaller poems, are enough to make a very brilliant reputation. The
Devil's Walk, so long attributed to Person, but, as testified by them-
selves, conceived and written by Southcy, with some touches and
additions from the hand of Coleridge ; the Old AYoman of Berkeley ;
The Surgeon's Warning ; The Pig ; Gooseberry Pie ; Roprecht the
Robber ; The Cataract of Lodore ; Bishop Hatto ; The Pious Painter ;
St. Antidius, the Pope, and the Devil ; The March to Moscow ; — these
and others of the like kind would make a volume, that might be
attributed to a man who had lived onty for joke and quiz. Then
the wild and wandering imagination of Thalaba and Kehama ; the
grave beauty of IVIadoc ; the fine youthful glow of liberty and love
in Joan of Arc ; and the vivid fire and vigour of Roderick the last
of the Goths — are little less in contrast to the jocose productions just
mentioned, than they are to the grave judgment displayed in his
histories, or the keenness with which he enters, in his Book of the
Church, the Colloquies, and his critiques, into the questions and
interests of the day, and puts forth all the acumen and often the
acidity of the partizan.
AYith all our admiration of the genius and varied powers of
Southey, and with all our esteem for his many virtues, and the
peculiar amiability of his domestic life, we cannot, however, read
him without a feeling of deep melancholy. The contrast between
the beginning and the end of his career, the glorious and high path
:?ntered upon, and so soon and suddenly quitted for the pay of the
placeman and the bitterness of the bigot, cling to his memory with
a lamentable effect.
Deploring this gi'and error of Southey's life — for we bear no
resentment to the dead — more especially as England has gone on
advancing and liberalizing, spite of his slavish dogmas, and thus
rendered his most zealous advocacy of narrow notions perfectly in-
noxious, — we would ask, whether this peculiar change of his original
opinions may not have had a peculiar eftect on his poetry ? Much
and beautifully as he has written, yet, if I may be allowed the expres-
sion, he never seems to be at home in his poetry, any more than in
the country which, with his new opinions, he adopted. We can read
once, especially in our youth, his poems, even the longest — but it is
rarely more than once. We are charmed, sometimes a little wearied,
but we never wish to recur to them again. There are a few of his
smaller poems, as the Penates, the Bee, Blenheim, and a few others,
which are exceptions, with some exquisite passages, as that often-
quoted one on love in Kehama. But, on the whole, we arc quite
satisfied with one reading. There is a want, somehow, of the spirilttal
in his writing. Beautiful fancy, and tender feeling, and sometimes
deep devotion, there are ; but still there lacks that spirit, that
essence of the soul, which makes AVordsworth and many of the poems
614 SOUTHET.
of Lord Byrou a uevcr-satiating aliment and refreshment, — a divine
substance on which you Hve and grow, and by its influence seem to
draw nearer to the world of mind and of eternity. Southey's poetry
seems a beautiful manufacture, not a part of himself. He carries
you in it, as in an enchanted cloud, to Arabia, India, or America ;
to the celestial Meru, to the dolorous depths of Padalon, or to the
Domdaniel caves under the roots of the ocean ; but he does not
seem to entertain you at home; to take you down into himself
He does not seem to be at rest there, or to have there " his abiding
city."
It is exactly the same in regard to the country in which he lived. He
seemed to live there as a stranger and a sojourner. That he loved
the lakes and mountains around, there can be no question ; but has
he linked his poetry with them ? Has he, like Wordsworth, woven
his verse into almost every crevice of every rock ? Cast the spell of
his enchantment upon every stream 1 Made the hills, the waters,
the hamlets, and the people, parv. and parcel of his life and his fame ?
We seek in vain for any such amalgamation. AVith the exception of
the cataract of Lodore, there is scarcely a line of his poetry which
localizes itself in the fairy region where he lived forty years.
When Wordswoi'th died, he left on the mountains, and in all the
vales of Cumberland, an everlasting people of his creation. The
Wandei'er, and the Clergyman of the Excursion, Michael, and
Matthew, and the Wagoner, and Peter Bell, Ruth, and many a
picturesque vagrant, will linger there for ever. The Shepherd Lord
will haunt his ancient hills and castles, and the White Doe will still
cross Eylston Fells. A thousand associations will start up in the
rnind of many a future generation, as they hear the names of Hel-
vellyn, Blencathra, or Langdale Pikes. But when you seek for
evidences of the poetic existence of Southey in Cumberland, you
are carried at once to Greta hall, at Keswick, and there you remain.
I suppose the phrenologists would say it was owing to his idiosyn-
crasy — that he had much imitativeness, but very little locality. It
is most singular, that look over the contents of his voluminous
poems, and you find them connected with almost every region of the
world, and every quarter of these kingdoms, except with the neigh-
bourhood of his abode. He would seem like a man flying from the
fi^ce of the world, and brushing out all traces of his retreat as he
goes. In Spain, France, America, India, Arabia, Africa, the West
Indies, in Ireland, Wales, England, and Scotland, you perceive his
})oetical habitations and resting-places ; but not in Cumberland. He
las commemorated Pultowa, Jerusalem, Alentejo, Oxford, Blenheim,
Dreux, Moscow, the Rhine. He has epitaphs and inscriptions for
numbers of places in England, Spain, and Portugal. In his Madoc,
Wales ; in his Roderick, Spain ; in his Joan of Arc, France, find
abundance of their localities celebrated. In his Pilgrimage to
Waterloo, Flanders has its commemorations ; but Cumberland —
no ! You would think it was some district not glorious with
mountain, lake and legend, but some fenny flat on which a poetic
spirit could not dwell.
SOUTHET, 51")
Almost the only clues that we get arc to be fouud in the Col-
loquies and his ])rivate letters. Here we learn that the poet
and his family did sometimes walk to Skiddaw, Causey Pike, and
Watenlath. At page 119 of vol. i., where these names occur, we
find the poet proposing an excursion to Walla Crag, on the borders
of the Derwentwater. " I, who perhaps would more willingly' have
sat at home, was yet in a mood to suffer violence, and making a sort
of compromise between their exuberant activity and my own incli-
nation for the chair and the fireside, fixed on AValla Crag." Besides
this mention, you have in Colloquy XII. pages 59 to 69, a preface to
a long history of the Cliftbrd family, in which you are introduced to
Threlkeld farm and village. This peep into the mountains makes
you wonder that Southey did not give you more of them ; but no,
that is all. It is evident that his heart was, as he hinted just above,
" at home in the chair by the fireside." It was in his library that he
really lived ; and there is little question that when his children did
get him out, on the ^^lea that it was necessary for his health, his
mind was otherwise occupied.
To Keswick we must then betake ourselves as the main haunt of
Robert Southey. Here he settled down in the autumn of 1803, and
instantly commenced that life of incessant labour which we have
described, and which never ceased till his intellectual constitution gavo
way under it. The poet tried to secure an abode in Wales, in the Vale
of Neath, but had been disappointed, and next was on the point of
fixing his residence at Richmond, and was about to commence a
gigantic work called Bibliotheca Britannica. But Richmond and the
Bibliotheca both drifted away, and 1803 saw him hard at work on his
Madoc. Incessant literary labour, buying and arranging fresh books,
with an occasional trip to London or elsewhere, and a daily walk, con-
stituted the life of Robert Southey from that time to his death. To
the very latest years he was constantly conceiving new and enormous
labours, many of which he never completed, many wei-e commenced,
and he was generally working on four or five at the same time, every
day being divided into sections, each of which was appropriated to one
particular work. The works which he intended to write were nearly
as numerous, and would have been laborious as those he really
executed — A History of Monachism ; the Age of George III., being
a History of ^lodern Revolutions ; a Book of the State, on the prin-
ciple of his Book of the Church ; a Life of George Fox ; a coutimia-
tion of Warton's History of English Poetry, &c. &c.
Of his daily work he gives this account himself in a letter to
a friend. " I get out of bed as the clock strikes six, and shut the
house-door after me as the clock strikes seven. After two hours
with Davies, (arranging Dr. Bell's papers,) home to breakfast, after
which Cuthbert (his son) engages me till about half-past ten ; and
when the post brings me letters that either interest or trouble mo,
for of the latter I have many, by eleven I have done with the news-
paper, and can then set about what is properly the business of the
day. But I can scai-cely command two or three unbroken hours at
the desk. At two I take my daily walk, be the weather what it
s 2
51(3 SOUTHEY.
may, and when the weather permits, with a book iu my hand :
dinner at four, work about half an hour, then take the sofa with
a different book, and after a few pages get my soundest sleep, till
.summoned to tea at six. My best time during the winter is by
candlehght ; and in the season of company I can never count upon
an evening's work. Sujjper at half-past nine, after which I work an
hour, and then to bed ; the greatest part of my miscellaneous work
is done in the odds and ends of time." — IJ/e and Correspondence,
vol. vi. p. 238.
His chief relaxations from this incessant labour were, as I have
said, his daily walk and occasional excursions with his family to the
summits of Saddleback, Skiddaw, and Helvellyn, or amongst the
lakes and tarns which lay on all sides. Sometimes he and his
family met Wordsworth and his family and friends, at Leatheswater
or Thirlmere, half-way between their residences, where sometimes
as many as fifty persons have assembled, and made grand rural
festivities.
Sometimes, but more rarely, he oast aside his books, and made a
considerable tour. In the autumn of 1805 he made an excursion
into Scotland, and visited Walter Scott at Ashestiel. In 1817 he
made a journey to the Continent, visiting the Netherlands, the
Rhine, Switzerland, and the north of Italy. On this tour he saw
Pestalozzi at Yverdun, and Fellenberg at Hofwyl. In 1819 he made
a tour to the Highlands, with his friends Hickman and Telford, the
engineer. In 1825 he went to Holland, with his friends I\Ir. Henry
Taylor, author of Pliiliji van Artevelde, Mr. Neville White, and
Arthur Malet, where he was laid up some time at the house of the
celebrated Bilderdijk, whose wife had translated his Roderick into
Dutch, and formed a warm friendship with these interesting
people ; and so much was he pleased, that he paid them another
visit the following year. While at Brussels, he learned to his sur-
prise that he had been elected a member of Parliament, which
honour ho declined, as he afterwards did that of a baronetcy. In
1836 he made a sort of farewell visit, with his only son Cuthbert
Southey, down into the West of England. The aged poet went over
all the scenes of his boyhood at Bristol, and in that neighbourhood,
with the feeling that it was for the last time. There he saw
Joseph Cottle, one of his earliest and most generous friends, and
Walter Savage Landor, at Clifton. In 1838, again with his son and
several of his friends, he made an autumnal tour in France, chiefly
in Normandy and Brittany.
Such were the home labours and the brief wanderings of Robert
Southey. In his domestic life no cue ever showed more amiably
and beautifully, and the spirit which he communicated to his
children is felt iu the kindly and affectionate tone in which his Life
is written by his son.
Another most interesting trait in Southey's character was his
ever-ready and cordial aid and encouragement to young or struggling
authors. One of his earliest acts of authorship was the editing of
the Remains and Woi-ks of Chatterton, by which he was enabled to
SOUTHEY. 517
hand over to the surviving sister and niece of the poet 300/. ; thus
at once relieving them from great necessity, and doing them justice
on a nefarious hterary knight, who had been entrusted with Chatter-
ton's MSS., and had published them for his own use. His next
Samaritan deed of the same kind was the editing the Remains of
Henry Kirke White ; and these acts insj'jired all young poets with
so attractive a conception of the generosity of his character, that
numbers flocked to submit to him their early compositions, and to
solicit his advice. This was never refused ; and the i^ublication of
his letters demonstrates to what a number of young authors his
knowledge and experience were made useful ; but how plainly,
frankly, and yet kindly, his counsel was administered. Amongst
the names of such young aspirants for his favourable notice, we re-
cognise those of Ebeuezer Elliott ; Shelley, who went to Keswick in
1812 to consult with him ; the imfortunate Dusantoy ; Bernard
Barton, who sent to ask him the sagacious question — Barton being
educated a quaker, and Southey being no quaker at all — whether he
thought the Society of Friends would be displeased if he published
a volume of poems ? Herbert Knowles, Chauncey Hare Townshend,
Allan Cunningham, Henry Taylor, &c. With several of these
gentlemen the correspondence thus formed grew into warm friend-
ship. Besides this general encouragement to rising genius, he
edited the writings of Mai-y Collins and John Jones, two persons in
very humble life.
From a similar benevolent feeling he was a great advocate for Pro-
testant Bequinages, or laj' nunneries, in which women of education
and position, but of small incomes, might live together, and devote
their leisure to the soothing of sickness and distress in others, like
the Bonne Soeurs, or Sisters of Charity, on the Continent.
All this time he was labouring with never-ceasing exertion for the
maintenance of his own family. With a pension of :^00/., reduced by
deductions to IGO/., with 90/. per annum, the clear balance of hi.s
laureateship, with 400/. per annum from the Quarterly for many
years, besides the general profit of his works, it might have been suji-
posed that, living in a cheap part of the country, and a house, with
gardens and paddocks, at only 50/. rental, the life of Southey had
passed in tolerable ease and absence of anxiety. On the contrary,
we are assured by his son, in his biography of his father, that he was
constantly on the stretch to make his income meet his daily ex-
penses. This was the great eating canker of his life, as was the case
with Moore, and with far too many literary men. Having no inde-
pendent property, the very uncertainty of their gains hlled tiiem
with a perpetual anxiety. Southey appears to have had no expensive
b.abits, except his great passion for book-buying, which must have
drained him of very large sums. He had, moreover, insured his life
for 4,000/.; and he had always a number oi relatives resident under
Ills roof.
In this respect what a contrast he presented to Coleridge, who
eeemed to wander off from his home and domestic duties with a.s
complete an indifference as an ostrieli is .said to abandon her eggs !
S18 SOUTHET.
In one of his letters to Cottle, in 1814, Southey asks, "Can you tell
me anytliing of Coleridge 1 A few lines of introduction for a son
of Mv. , of your city, are all that we have received since I
saw him last September twelve months. The children being left
entirel}' to chance, I have applied to his brothers at Otley concern-
ing them, and am in hopes, through their means and the aid of
other friends, of sending Hartley to college. Lady Beaumont has
promised 30/. a-j-ear for this purpose ; Poole, 10/. I wrote to Cole-
ridge three or four months ago, telling him that unless he took some
steps in j^roviding for this object, I must make the application, and
required his answer within three weeks. He promised to answer
the letter, but has never taken any further notice of it." — Li/'e and
Correspondence, vol. iv. p. 82.
It is a melancholy reflection that Southey, with his gigantic
labours, could never accumulate sufficient beforehand to ward off" the
killing effects of anxiety. This was at the bottom of a great portion
of his immense periodical composition, of his continual projection of
heavy works, and of his eager grasping at posts which frequently
were wholly out of the range of his talents and habits. He applied
for the stewardship of the Greenwich Hospital Estates, and his
friend Bedford informed him, in reply, that the salary was 700/.
a-year, but that the place of residence varied over a tract of country of
about eighty miles ; that the steward must be a 2;)erfect agricultu-
I'ist, surveyor, mineralogist, and the best lawyer that, competently
with these other characteristics, could be found. The responsibihty
was that of a revenue of 40,000/. per annum. This was a dilemma.
He was equally anxious for the post of historiographer to the Crown,
as well as the laureateship, but this turned out to have no salary
attached to it. Yet, with all his anxiety for place, he refused the
editorship of The Times at 2,000/. a-year, because it implied a total
renunciation of his own literary pursuits.
As old age stole upon him, these constantly wearing cares and
exhausting labours, with other sorrows incident to humanity, the
loss of beloved children, began to undermine the great intellect
which had so long seemed actually to revel in the immensity of its
undertakings. But this did not take place before he had seen the
mind of his wife vanish under the annihilating burden of anxiety.
Cuthbert Southey distinctly ascribes the insanity of his mother to
this cause, — " An almost life-long anxiety about the uncertainty and
highly i^recarious nature of my father's income," acting on a naturall}^
nervous constitution. How excellent a woman was thus sacrificed,
we may judge from her husband's beautiful testimony — "During
more than two-thirds of my life, she has been the chief object of
my thoughts, and 1 of hers. No man ever had a truer helpmate !
no children a more careful mother ! No family was ever more
wisely ordei'cd, no housekeeping ever conducted with greater pru-
dence or greater comfort."
My visit to Keswick in the summer of 1845 was marked by a cir-
cumstance which may show how well the fame of Dr. Southey, the
laureate of Church and State, and the bard who sang the triumphs
SOUTHET. 51;)
of logitimacy on the occasion of the allied .sovereigns coniing to
England in 1814, is spread amongst the nations which are the strictest
maintainers of his favourite doctrines ; a fettered press, a law church,
and a government maintained by such statesmen as Castlereagh and
Metternich. I was travelling at that time with four of the subjects
of these allied sovereigns, whom our laureate had so highly lauded ;
a Russian, a Cossack, an Austrian, and a Bohemian ; the Cossack no
other than the nephew of the Hetman Platoff, and the Bohemian,
Count Wratislaw, since taking a distinguished command as general
in the Austrian army in the Itahan campaign, under Eadetzky,
being, moreover, the present representative of that very ancient
family of which the queen of our Richard the Second was one, "the
good Queen Anne," who sent out Wycliffe's Bible to IIuss, and was
thus the mother of the Reformation on the Continent ; and, singu-
larly also, still closely connected with our royal family, his mother
being sister to the Princess of Leiningen, wife to the half-brother of
Queen Victoria. Austrian and Russian nobles are not famous for
great reading, but every one of these was as familiar with Dr.
Southey's name as most people the world over are with those of
Scott and Byron. They not only went over the laureate's house with
the greatest interest, but carried away sprigs of evergreen to preserve
as memorials.
Southey's house, which lies at a little distance from the town of
Keswick, on the way to Bassenthwaite water, is a plain stuccoed
tenement, looking as you approach it almost like a chapel, from the
apparent absence of chimneys. Standing upon the bridge over the
Greta which crosses the high-road here, the view aU round of the
mountains, those which lie at the back of Southey's house, and those
which lie in front, girdling the lake of Derwentwater, is grand and
complete. From this bridge the house lies at the distance of a
croft, or of three or four hundred yards, on an agreeable swell. In
front, that i.s, between you and the house, ascends towards it a set
of homelike crofts, with their cut hedges and a few scattered trees.
When Southey went there, and I suppose for twenty years after,
these were occupied as a nursery ground, and injured the effect of
the immediate environs of the house extremel}'. Nothing now can
be more green and agreeable. On the brow of the hill, if it can be
called so, stand two stuccoed houses ; the one nearest to the town,
and the largest, being Southey's. Both are well flanked by pleasant
trees, and partly hidden by them, that of Southey being most so.
The smaller house has the air of a good neighbour of lesser import-
ance, who is proud of being a neighbour. It was at that time occu-
pied by a Miss Denton, daughter of a former vicar of Crosthwaite,
the place just below on the Bassenthwaite road, and where Southey
lies lauried.
The situation of Southey's house, taking all into consideration, in
exceeded by few in England. It is agreeably distant from the road
and the little town, and stands in a hue open valley, surrounded by
hills of the noblest and most diversified character. From your stand
fin Greta bridge, looking over the house, your eye falls on the group
620 socrncT.
of mountains beliind it. Tlie lofty hill of Latrig lifts its steep green
back, with its larch plantations clothing one edge, and scattered in
groups over the other. Stretching away to the left, rises the still
loftier range and giaut masses of Sliiddaw, with its intervening delb
and ravines, and summits often lost in their canopy of shadowy clouds.
Between the feet of Skiddaw and Greta bridge, lie pleasant knolls
and fields with scattered villas and cottages, and Crosthwaite church.
On your right hand is the town, and behind it green swelling fields
again, and the more distant enclosing chain of hills.
If you then turn your back on the house, and view the scene
which is presented from it, 3^011 find yourself in the presence of the
river, hurrying away towards the assemblage of beautifully varied
mountains, which encompass magnificently the lake of Derwent-
water.
The vicinity to the lake itself would make this spot as a residence
most attractive. I think I like Derwentwater more than any other
of the lakes. The mountains round are bold and diversified in form.
You see them showing themselves one behind another, many tend-
ing to the pyramidal form, and their hues as varied as their shapes.
Some are of that peculiar tawny, or lion colour, which is so singu-
lar in its effect in the Scotch mountains of the south ; others
softly and smoothly green ; others black and desolate. Some are
beautifully wooded, others bare. When you look onwards to the
end of the lake, the group of mountains and crags there, at the
entrance of Borrowdale, is one of the most beautiful and pictoiial
things imaginable. If any artist would choose a scene for the
entrance into fairyland, let him take that. When, again, you turn
and look over the town, there soars aloft Skiddaw, in his giant
grandeur, with all his slopes, ridges, dints, ravines, and summits,
clear in the blue sky, or hung with the cloud curtains of heaven, full
of magnificent mystery. There is a perfect pyramid, broad and
massy as those of Egypt, standing solemnly in one of its ascending
vales, called Carrsledrum. Then, the beautifully wooded islands of
Derwentwater, eight in number ; and the fine masses of wood that
stretch away between the feet of the hills and the lake, with here
and there a villa lighting up the scene, make it perfect. In all the
changes of weather, the changes of aspect must be full of new beauty ;
but, in bright and genial summer days, nothing can be more enchant-
ing. At the moment of our visit, the deep black yet transparent
shadow that lay on some of the huge piles of mountain, and the soft
light that lay on others, were indescribably noble and poetical ; and
the strangers exclaimed continually, — '■'■ Frdchtig ! ''' '' JVimderschm J "
and " Tres beau !"
When we ascend to the house, it is through a narrow sort of croft
or a wide shrubbery, which you will. The carriage-road goes another
way, and here you have only a single footpath, and on your right
hand a grassy plot scattered with a few flower beds, and trees and
shrubs, which brings you, by a considerable ascent, to the front of
the house, which is screened almost wholly from view by tall trees,
amongst which are some fine rnaples and red beeches. Here, on tht.i
SOUTHET. 521
left baud, a little side gate leads to Miss Denton's house, And on tho
other stretches out the lawn, screened by hedges of laurel and other
evergreens. Behind this little lawn, on the right hand of the house,
lie one or two kitchen gardens ; and passing thi'ough these, you come
to a wood descending towards the river, which you again find hero
sweeping around the house. Down this wood or copse, which is
half orchard and half of forest trees, you see traces of winding
foot-jjaths, but all now grown over with grass. The house ia
deserted ; the spirits which animated the scene are fled, some one
way, and some another ; and there is already a wildness and a deso-
lation about it. The Greta, rushing over its weir beneath this
wood, moans in melancholy sympathy with the rest of the scene.
You see that great pleasure has some time been taken in this spot,
in these gardens, in this shadowy and steeply descending wood ;
and the river that runs on beneath, and the melancholy feeling of
the dream-like nature and vanity of human things, its fame and
happiness included, seizes irresistibly upon you. A little foot-path
which runs along the Greta side towards the town deepens this
feeling. Through the trees, and behind the river, lie deep and
grassy meadows with masses of woodland, having a very Cuyp or
Paul Potter look ; and, between the higher branches of the trees,
you see the huge green bulk of Skiddaw, soaring up with fine and
almost startling effect. You may imagine Southey walking to
and fro along the foot-path under the trees, in the fields leading
to the town, by another route, and thinking over his topics, while he
took the air, and had in view a scene of mountain magnificence, of
the efiect of which the poet was fully conscious. " The height and
extent of the surrounding objects seem to produce a correspondent
expansion and elevation of mind, and the silence and solitude con-
tribute to this emotion. You feel as if in another region, almost in
another world." * Here, too, you may imagine Coleridge lying and
dreaming under the trees of the wood within sound of the river.
He was here, at one time, a great while.
To retm-n to the house, however. It is a capacious house enough,
but not apparently very well built. The floors of the upper roovan
shake under your tread ; and I have heard, that when Southey had
these rooms crowded and piled with books, there was a fear of their
coming down. The house is one of those square houses of which
you may count the rooms without going into them, but at each end
is a circular projection, making each a snug sort of ladies' room.
The room on the right hand as we entered was said to be tho
sitting-room, and that on the left the lil^rary, while the room over
it was Southcy's writing-roc m ; and most of these rooms, as well as
the entrance-hall, were all crowded with books. We were told that,
after several days' sale at home, where some books as well as tlie
furniture were sold, fourteen tons of books and similar articles were
sent ofl' for sale in London.
If Southey has not told us much about his haunts in the moun-
tains, he ha.^;, howovei', particularly described that where his heart
• Ccllo^uies, vol. ii. p. CI.
.'52& POUTHIiY.
lay — Ills library. To this he has given a whtilc chapter in his
Colloquies.
This noble collection, of which their possessor might well be proud,
which is said to have included by far the best collection of Spanish
books in England, and the gathering of which together, through
many researches, many inquiries, and many years, had, perhaps,
given him almost as much pleasurable excitement as their ijerasal,
is once more dispersed into thousands of hands. The house, indeed,
at the time we visited it, was in the act of being repaired, fresh
painted and papered, ready for a new tenant ; and, of course, looked
desolate enough. All the old j^aper had been torn off the walls, or
scraped away ; and workmen, with piles of rolls of new paper, and
buckets of paste, were begiiming their work of revival. The whole
house, outside and inside, had an air of dilapidation, such as houses
in the country are often allowed to fall into ; but, no doubt, when all
furnished and inhabited, would be comfortable and habitable enough.
But death had been there, and the appraiser and auctioneer, and
a crowd of eager sale-attenders after them ; and the history of the
poet and the poet's famil}'- life was wound up and done. A populous
dwelling it must have been when Southey and his wife and children,
and ]\Irs. Coleridge and her daughter, and perhaps other friends, were
all housed in it. And an active and pleasant house it nuist have
been when great works were going on in it, a Thalaba, a ]\Iadoc, an
article for the Quarterly, and news from London w^ere coming in,
and letters were expected of great interest, and papers were sending
ofi' by post to printers and publishers, and correspondents. All that
is uo\v passed over as a dream ; the whole busy hive is dispersed
many ways, and the house and grounds were preparing to let at 55/.
a year, just as if no genius had set a greater value on them than on
any other premises around. It is when we see these changes that
we really feel the vanity of human life. But the beauty of the life
of genius is, that though the scene of domestic action and sojourn
can become as empty as any othei', the home of the poet's rpind
becomes thenceforth that of the whole heart and mind of his nation,
and often far beyond that. The Cossack and the Bohemian — did
they not also carry away from it to their far-off lands tokens of their
veneration ?
Before quitting Southey's house for his tomb, I cannot resist
referring to that little fact connected with his appointment to the
laureateship already alluded to. It is well known that the post was
first offered to Sir Walter Scott, who declined it, but recommended
Southey, who was chosen. The letters on the whole transaction are
given in Lockhart's Life of Scott (cliap. xxvi.) Scott, who was then
only plain "Walter Scott, wdio was not made Sir Walter for seven
years after, who had published the greater number of his popular
poetical romances, but had not yet published Waverley, felt, how-
ever, quite terrified at the offer of the laureateship, and wrote off to
the Duke of Buccleuch to ask his advice how he was t£» get decently
out of the scrape without offending the Prince Eegent. "I am,"
says ScotL " very much embarrassed b^ it. I am, on the one handi
SOUTHEY. 523
very much afraiii of giving offence, Avliere no one would willingly
offend, and perhaps losing the opportunity of smoothing the way ta
my youngsters through life ; on the other hand, the offer is a ridiculou\
one ; somehow or other, they and I should be well quizzed," &c. ^
* * " I feel much disposed to shake myself free of it. I should
make but a bad courtier, and an ode-maker is described by Pope as
a man out of his way, or out of his senses."
Almost by return of post came the duke's answer. " As to the
offer of his Royal Highness to appoint you laureate, I shall frarikly
say, that I should be mortified to see you hold a situation which by
the general concurrence of the world is stamj^ed ridiculous. There
is no good reason why it should be so ; but it is so. Walter Scott,
Poet Lanreate, ceases to be "Walter Scott of the Lay, Marmion, &c.
Any future poem of yoiu's would not come forth with the same
probability of a successful reception. The poet laureate would stick
to you and your productions like a piece of co2(rt plaister. * * «
Only think of being chaunted and recitatived by a parcel of hoarse
and squeaking choristers on a birthday, for the edification of the
bishops, pages, maids of honour, and gentlemen pensioners ! Oh
horrible ! thrice horrible ! "
Scott replied, " I should certainly never have survived the recita-
tive described by your Grace ; it is a part of the etiquette I was
quite unprepared for, and should have sunk under it."
On this, Scott at once declined the honour; and though he said he
.should make a bad courtier, assuredly no courtier could have done
it in better style, professing that tlie office teas too distuiguhhed fu)
his merits; that he -was hy no means adequate to it. Now Scott all this
time had but an income of 1,000/. a-year, independent of literature ;
we have the particulars calculated and cast uj) on the very same
page, opposite to his letter to Buccleuch ; nay, he is in embarrass-
ments, and in the very same letter requests the Duke to be guarantee
for 4,000/. for birn : and he thought the laureateship worth 300/. or
400/. a-year. These facts all testify to his thorough idea of the
ignominy of the office. Nevertheless, he writes at once to Southey
— tells him that he has had this offer, but that he has declined it
because he has had already two pieces of preferment, and moreover,
" my dear Southey, I had you in my eye." He adds — and now let
any one who thinks himself flattered on any particular occasion,
remember this — " I did not refuse iifrom any foolish prejudice against
the situation — otherwise hoio durst I offer it to you, my elder brother in
the muse ? — but from a sort of internal hope that they would give
it you, on whom it would be so much more worthily conferred.
For I am not such an ass as not to know that you are my better in
poetry, though 1 have had, probably but for a time, the tide of popu-
larity in my favour. I have not time to add the thousand other
reasons, but I onl}' wished to tell you how the matter was, and to
beg you to think before you reject the offer which I flatter my.self
will be made to you. If I had not been, like Dogberry, a fellow with
two gowns already, I should hare ju>i/pcd at it like u cock at a goose-
berry. Ever yours, most truly, Walter Scott,"
6-i4 SOUTIIKY.
Soutliey accepted it, and Hcott wrote liiui a letter of warmest
congratulation on getting this piece of courl phislcr clapped ou his
back, and putting himself in a position to be " well quizzed ;" but
was quite confounded to learn that the honorarium for the " hor-
rible ! thrice horrible ! " was not 400/. a-year, but only 100/. and a
Ijutt of wine.
Wordsworth, when he became the holder of this post, accepted it
with a dignity worthy of his character and fame, declining it till
it was stripped of alfits disgusting duties. Thus qualified, Alfred
Tennyson has been able to accept the same title with less re-
pugnance ; but the next step, it is to be hoped, will be to abolish
an office equally derogatory, under any circumstances, to monarch
and subject. No poet of reputation should feel himself in a position
which implies the most distant obligation to pay mercenary praise.
No monarch of this country need purchase praise ; to a worthy
occupier of the throne it will be freely accorded from the universal
heart of the nation.
Crosthwaite church, in the graveyard of which Robert Southey's re-
mains lie, is about a quarter of a mile from the house, on the Bassen-
thwaite-water road. It is a very simple and lowly village church,
with a low square tower, but stands finely in the wide, open valley,
surrounded, at a considerable distance, by the scenery I have de-
scribed. I suppose it is nearly a mile from the foot of Skiddaw.
From Southey's house the walks to it, and again from it along the
winding lanes, and over the quiet fields towards Skiddaw, are parti-
cularly pleasant. Southey, in his Colloquies, speaks of the church
and churchyard with much afiection. He quotes the account of au
old man who more than fifty years ago spoke of the oldest and finest
yew trees in the country standing in this churchyard, and of having
seen all the boys of the school-house near, forty in number, perched
at once on the boughs of one of them.
At the north-west corner of the churchyard stands Southey's
tomb. It is a plain altar-tomb of reddish freestone, covered with
a slab of blue slate, with this inscription : — " Here Ues the body of
Robert Southey, LL.D. Poet Laureate ; Born August 12, 1774 ; Died
IMarch 26, 1843. Also of Edith his wife, born May 20, 1774 ; Died
Nov. 16, 1837. I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord."
Close in front of the tomb lies the gi-ave of Mrs. Southey ; and
behind, and close to the hedge, stands a stone bearing this inscrip-
tion : — " The Lord gave, and the Lord taketh away ; blessed be the
name of the Lord. Sacred to the memory of Emma Southey, who
departed in IVIay, 1809, aged 14 months. And of Herbert Southey,
who departed April 17th, 1816, in the tenth year of his age. Also of
George Fricker, their uncle, aged 26, 1814. Also Isabel Southey,
their sister, who departed on tiie 16th of July, 1826, aged 13 years.
Also of Edith Southey, their mother, who departed Nov. 1837,
aged 63. Requiescat in pace."
I recollected that there was something peculiar connected with
the death of the son, Herbert. The old clerk said that his disorder
could not be discovered till after his death ; but that ou opening
SODTHEY.
525
him, a Imuuiu hair was fuund fast round hi.s heart ! It wa.-, in fact,
i disease of the heart.
I wished to see the pew where the Southeys used to sit ; but I
found the interior of the church, as well as of his house, undergoing
the revolution of repair, or rather of renewal. It seemed as if people
had only waited for Southey's death to begin and clear off all traces
of his existence here. The church is fine and capacious within ; but
all the old pews, all the old seats, pulpit, and everything belonging
to them, have been cleared away, and the whole replaced by fittings
in the ancient style. There are nothing but open benches, with one
single exception. The benches are of solid oak, with heavy, hand-
some carving, and have a very goodly and substantial look. The
windows are also renewed with handsome painted glass ; and the
tables of the Decalogue, &c., placed behind the altar, are all painted
in the old missal style. The church will be very handsome, at the
same time that it is a sign of the times. Of course, Southey's pew
is gone. ' In the church is an ancient monument of the Eadcliffes,
ancestors of the Earl of Derwentwater ; and two of the Browurigs of
Ormathwaite, immediate materaal relations of my wife.
Since my visit, a beautiful monument, consisting of a recumbent
figure in white marble, by Lough, has been placed in this church,
bearing an epitaph by "Wordsworth.
The close of Southey's life was melancholy. His mind gave way,
probably from having being overtasked, and he sank into imbecilitj*.
Shortly before this event he had married, as his second wife, his
friend of many years' standing, Caroline Bowles, the author of
Chapters on Churchyards, and one of the sweetest and most genuine
poetesses of the age. She did not many year's .survive her husband.
At his death she retired to Buckland, in the New Forest, where she
had spent the chief portion of her hfe, and where she used to attend
Bouldre church, in wliich she was married, and where the venerable
Oilpnn, the author of Forest Scenery, had once been the minister.
^ rJ-J
m
:j:Niililiif
JOANNA BAILLTE.
Thk i^owerfiil dramatic writer, the graceful and witty lyrist, and
the sweet and gentle woman, who for so many years, in her quiet
retreat at Hanipstead, let the world flow past her as if she had
nothing to do with it, nor cared to be mentioned by it, was born in
one of the most lovely and historical districts of Scotland. She
was bor:» in a Scottish manse, in tlie upper dale of the Clyde, which
has, for its mild character and la\'ish production of fruit, been termed
" Fruitland." As you pass along the streets of Scotch towns, you
see on fruit-stalls in the summer piles of plums, pears, and other
fruits, labelled " Clydesdale Fruit " One of the finest specimens of
the fruit of this luxuriant and genial dale was Joanna Baillie, a name
never pronounced by Scot or Briton of any part of the empire, but
with the veneration due to the truest genius, and the afiection which
is the birthright of the tniest specimens of womanhood. The sister
of the late amiable and excellent Dr. Baillie, the friend of Walter
Scott, the woman whose masculine muse every great poet has for
nearly half a century delighted to honour, Joanna Baillie wrote
l)ecause she could not help pouring out the fulness of her heart and
mind, and the natural consequence was fame ; otherwise, whoever
saw that quiet, amiable, and unassuming lady, easy and cheerful as
when she i:)layed beneath the fruit-laden boughs of her native garden,
saw that, though not scorning the fair reputation of well exercised
intellect, she was at home in the bosom of home, and let no restless
desire for mei-e fame disturb the pure happiness of a serene life,
and the honoiu- and love of those nearest and dearest to her. Had
the lambent flame of genius not burned in the breast of Joanna
Baillie, that of a pure piety and a spirit made to estimate the bless-
ings of life, and to enjoy all the other blessings of peace and social
good which it brings, would have still burned brightly in her
bosom, and made her just as happy though not as great.
The birthplace of Joanna Baillie was the pretty manse of Both well,
in the immediate neighbourhood of Bothwell brig ; and, therefore,
as will at once be seen, in the centre of ground where stirring deeda
have been done, and where the author of Waverlcy has added the
\ iviil colouring of romance to those of history. Bothwell manse, from
JOANNA BAILLIE. 52?
its elevated site, looks directly down upon the scene of the battle at
Bothwell brig ; upon the park of Hiirailton, where the Covenanters
were encamped ; and upon Bothwellhaugu, the seat of Hamilton,
who shot the Eegent Murray. This is no mean spot in an historical
point of view, and it is richly endowed by nature. Near it also, a
little farther down the river, stands Bothwell Castle, on Bothwell
hank, on which the charm of poetry has been conferred with an
almost needless prodigality, for it is so delightful in its own natural
beauty.
The country as you proceed to Bothwell from Glasgow, from which
it is distant about ten miles, though from the first rich and well-
cultivated, is not so agreeable, from the quantity of coal that is
found along the roads into Glasgow, and which seem to have given, a
blackness to everything. As you advance, however, it grows con-
tinually more elevated, open, airy, and pleasant. About a mile before
you reach Bothwell, its tall square church steeple, seen far before
you, directs your course, and a pair of lodge gates on your right
hand marks the entrance to the gi-ounds of Bothwell Castle. By
writing your name and address in a book kept by the gate-keeper,
you are admitted, and can then pursue your way alone to the castle,
and make your own survey without the nuisance of a guide. The
castle lies about half a mile from the high-road. You first arrive at
very beautifully kept pleasure grounds, in which stands a good
modern mansion, the seat of the proprietor. Lord Douglas. Passing
through these grounds, and close to the right of the house, you soon
behold the ruins of the old castle. It is of a very red sandstone,
extensive in its remains, and bearing evidence of having been much
more extensive. Its tall red walls stand up amid fine trees and
masses of ivy, and seem as if created by Time to beautify the modern
scene with which they blend so well. The part remaining consists
of a great oblong square, with two lofty and massy towers overlook-
ing the river which lies to j'our left. There are also remains of an
ample chapel. From the openings in the ruins, the river below, and
its magnificent valley or glen, burst with startling effect upon you.
The bank from the foot of the castle descends with considerable
steepness to the river far below, but soft and green as possible ; and
beyond the dark and hurrying river rise banks equally high, and as
finely wooded and varied. Advancing beyond the castle you come
again to the river, which sweeps round the ruins in a fine curve.
Here every charm of scenery, the great river in its channel, its lofty
and well-wooded banks, the picturesque views of Blantyre Priory
opposite, the slopes and swells of most luxurious green, and splendid
lime-trees hanging their verdurous boughs to the ground, mingle the
noble and the beautiful into an enchanting whole. A gravel-walk
leads you down ^last the front of the castle, and presents you with a
new and still more impressive view of it. Here it stands aloft on the
precipice above you, a most stately remnant of the old times ; and
Stature has not stinted her laboui-s in arraying it in tree, bush, and
hanging plant, so as to give it the grace of life in its slow decay,
making it in perfect harmony with herself. Few scenes are moi'd
528 JOANNA BAaLIE.
iascinating than this. Above you the towers of the castle, which
onoe received as its victorious guest Edward I. of Engkmd ; which
again sheltered the Enghsh chiefs fleeing from the disastrous fiehl of
Bannockburn ; which was the stronghold of Archibald the Grim, and
the proud hall of the notorious Earl Bothwell. Below, slopes down
in softest beauty the verdant bank ; and the stately Clyde, dark and
deep, flows on amid woods and rocks worthy of all their fame. The
taste of the proprietor has seized on every circumstance to give a
finish to a scene so lovely; and it is impossible not to exclaim, in
the words of the celebrated old ballad, —
" Oh, Bothwell bank, thou Woomest fair."
The village of Bothwell is, as I have said, a mile farther on the
way towards Hamilton. The church and manse lie to the left hand
as you enter it, and the latter is buried, as it wei'e, in a perfect sea
of fruit trees. You may pass through the churchyard to it, and
tlien along a footpath between two high hedges, which leads you to
the carriage-road from the village to its front. The house in which
i\liss Baillie was born, and where she lived till her fourth year, seems
to stand on a sort of mount, on one side overlooking the valley of
the Clyde, and on the other the churchyard and part of the village.
'J'he situation is at once airy and secluded. Between the manse and
the chm-chyard lies the garden, full of fruit-trees ; and other gardens,
or rather orchards, between that and the village, add to the mass of
foliage in which it is immersed. Between the churchyard and the
manse garden commences a glen, which runs down on the side of
the manse most distant from the village, widening and deepening as
it goes, to the great Clyde valley. This gives the house a picturesquc-
ncss of situation peculiarly attractive. It has its own little secluded
glen, its sloping crofts, finely shaded with trees, and beyond again
other masses of trees shrouding cottages and farms.
The church had been rebuilt within a few years, of the same
rjd stone as Bothwell Castle ; but the old chancel still remained
standing, in a state of ruin. Tlie churchyard is extensive, scattered
with old-fashioned tombs, and forming a famous playground for the
children of the neighbouring village school, wdio were out leaping
in the deep damp soil, and galloping among its rank hemlocks and
mallows to their hearts' content. Having, by the courtesy of the
minister, Dr. Matthew Gardner, seen the manse, and had a stroll in
the garden, I again wandered over the churchyard, watching the
boys at their play, and reading the inscriptions on the tombs and
headstones ; one of which I copied in evidence of the state of paro-
chial education in Scotland, where it has existed as a. national insti-
tution, I believe, ever since the daj^s of Knox : —
" Erected hy Margaret Scott, in memory of her hushaiul, Ro^jert Stubo,
Late Smith and Farrier o' Gowkthrapple, who died 7th ^[ay 1S3I, \n tlu- 70tli
year of his age.
" Afy sledge and liammer lies declined,
My bellows pipes have lost its wind ;
My forge's extinct, my tires decayed.
And in the dust my vice is laid.
My coal is spent, my iron is gone,
M •■ nails are drov^, my v.ork is Dontr."
JOAXXA BAILLIE. 529
What struck mc as not less curious was tlio following handbill,
posted on the jamb of the church-door : — " Gooseberries for sale, by
public roup. The gooseberries in Aie orchards of Bothwell manse,
also at Captain Bogles Laroyet, and in, &c. &c. Sale to begin at
Bothwell manse, at five o'clock p. m., 10th of July." This ■was, cer-
tainly, characteristic of " Fruitland."
Though Miss Baillie only spent the first four years of her life at
this sweet and secluded parsonage, it is the place in her native
country which she said she liked best to think of. And this we may
well imagine ; it is just the place for a child's paradise, embosomed
amid blossoming trees, with its garden lying like a little hidden yet
sunny fairyland in the midst of them, with its flowers and its hum-
ming bees, that old church and half wild churchyard alongside of it,
and its hanging crofts, and little umbrageous valley.
To Bothwell brig you descend the excellent highway towards
Hamilton, and coming at it in something less than a mile, are sur-
prised to find what a rich and inviting scene it is. The brig, which
you suppose, from being described as narrow, steep, and old-
fashioned in the days of the Covenanters, to be something grey and
quaint, reminding you of Claverhouae and the sturdy Gospellers, is,
really, a very respectable, modern-looking bridge. The gateway which
used to stand in the centre of it has been removed, the breadth has
been increased, an additional arch or arches have been added at each
end, and the whole looks as much like a decent, everj'-day, well-to-do,
and toll-taking bridge as bridge well can do. There is a modern
toll-bar at the Bothwell end of it. There is a good house or two,
with their gardens descending to the river. The river flows on full
and clear, between banks well cultivated and well covered with
plantations. Beyond the bridge and river the country again ascends
with an easy slope towards Hamilton, with extensive plantations,
and park walls belonging to the domain of the Duke of Hamilton.
You have scarcely ascended a quarter of a mile, when on your left
hand, a handsome gateway, bearing the ducal escutcheons, and with
goodly lodges, opens a new carriage-way into the park. Everything
has an air of the present time, of wealth, peace, and intellectual
government, that make the days of the battle of Bothwell brig
seem like a piece of the romance work of Scott, and not of real
liistory.
Scott himself tells us in his Border Minstrelsy, in his notes to the
old Ballad of Bothwell Brig, that " the whole ai^pearance of the
ground as given in the picture of the battle at Hamilton Palace,
even including a few old houses, is the same as the scene now pre-
sents. The removal of the porch or gateway upon the bridge is the
only perceptible diS'erence." There must have been much change
here since Scott visited the spot. The old houses have given way
to new houses. The old bridge is metamorphosed into something
that might pass for a newish bi-idgc. Tlie banks of the river, and
the lands of the park beyond, are so planted and wooded, that the
jiioneers would have much to do before a battle could be fought.
All trace of moorland has vanished, and modem enclosure and
mo JOANNA BAILLIE.
cultivation has taken possession of the scene. When we bring back
by force of imagination the old view of the place it is a far different
one.
" Where Botliwell's bridge connects the margin steep,
And Clyde below runs silent, strong, and deep,
The hardy peasant, by oppression driven
To battle, deemed his cause the cause of Heaven.
Unskilled in arms, with useless courage stood,
AVhile gentle Mor.mouth grieved to shed his blood ;
But fierce Dundee, inflamed -with deadly liate.
In vengeance for the great Montrose's fate,
Let loose the sword, and to the hero's shade
A barbarous hecatomb of victories paid." — Wilsou's Cli/t!e.
When we picture to ourselves the Duke of Monmouth ordering
his brave foot-guards, under command of Lord Livingstone, to force
the bridge, which was defended by Hackstons of Rathillet, and
Claverhouse sitting on his white horse on the hill-side near Both-
well, watching the progress of the fray, and ready to rush down
with his cavalry, and fall on the infatuated Covenanters who were
quarrelling amongst themselves on Hamilton haughs, we see a -wild
and correspondent landscape, rough as the Cameronian insurgents,
and rude as their notions. The Bothwell brig of the present day
has all the old aspect modernized out of it. Its smihng fields, and
woods that speak of long peaceful times, and snug modern homes—
oil ! how far off are they from the grand old melancholy tone of the
old ballad :—
" Now farewell, father, and farewell, mother,
And fare ye weel, my sisters three;
An' fare ye weel, my Earlstoun,
For thee again I'll never see !
" So they're away to Bothwell hill.
An' waly they rode bonnily !
When the Duke of Monmouth saw Iheiii coiuin'
He went to view their company.
« » « •
" Tlien he set up the flag o' red,
A' set about wi' bonny blue ;
' Since ye'U no cease, and be at i)eace,
See tiiat ye stand by ither true.'
" They stelled their cannons on the height,
And showered their shot down in the howe;
An' beat our Scots' lads even doun.
Thick they lay slain on every kiiowe.
* • • «
" Alang the brae, beyond the brig,
Mony a brave man lies cauld and sfil! ;
But lang we'll mind, and sriir we'll rue,
The bloody battle of Bothwell hill."
To the left, looking over the haughs or meadows of Hamilton,
from Bothwell brig, you discern the top of the present house of
Bothwellhaugh over a mass of wood. Here another strange his-
torical event connects itself with this scene. Here lived that
Hamilton who shot in the streets of Linlithgow the llegent Murray,
the half-brother of the queen of Scots. This outrage had been
instigated by another, which was ealcu'nted, especially in an age like
JOANNA BAlLLiE. 531
that when nion took the redress of their wrongs into their own
hands without 7iiuch ceremony, to excite to madness a man of honour
and strong feeling. The regent had given to one of his favouritea
Hamilton's estate of Bothwellhaugh, who proceeded to take pos-
session with such brutality that he turned Hamilton's wife out
naked, in a cold night, into the oi:)en fields, where before morning
she became furiously mad. The spirit of vengeance took deep hold
of Hamilton's mind, and was fanned to flame by his indignant kins-
men. He followed the regent from place to place, seeking on oj^por-
tunity to kill him. This at length occurred by his having to pass
throvigh Linlithgow on his way from Stirling to Edinburgh.
Hamilton placed himself in a wooden gallery, which had a window
towards the street ; and as the regent slowly, on account of the
pressure of the crowd, rode past, he shot him dead.
Add to these scenes and histories that Hamilton Palace, in its
beautiful park, lies within a mile of the Bothwell brig, and it must
be admitted that no poetess could desire to be bom in a more
beautiful or classical region. Joanna Baillie's father was at the time
of her birth minister of Bothwell. "When she was four years old he
quitted it, and was removed to different parishes, and finally, only
three years before his death, was presented to the chair of divinity
at Glasgow. After his death Miss Baillie spent with her family six
or more years in the bare muirlands of Kilbride, a scenery not likely
to have much attraction for a poetical mind, but made agreeable by
the kindness and intelligence of two neighbouring families. She
never saw Edinburgh till on her way to England when about twenty-
two years of age. Before that period she had never been above ten
or twelve miles from home, and, with the exception of Botliwcll,
never formed much attachment to places. After that, she only .saw
Scotland as a visitor, and at distant intervals.
For many years Joanna Baillie resided at Hampstead, where she
was visited by nearly all the great writers of the age. Scott, as
may be seen in his letters to Joanna Baillie, delighted to make him-
self her guest, and on her visit to Scotland, in 1806, she spent some
weeks in his house at Edinburgh. From this time they were most
intimate friends : she was one of the persons to whom his letters
were most frequently addressed, and he planted, in testimony of his
friendship for her, a bower of pinasters, the seeds of which she had
furnished, at Abbotsford, and called it Joanna's bower. In 1810
her drama. The Family Legend, was, through his means, brought
out at Edinburgh. It was the first new play brought out by
Mr. Henry Siddons, and was very well received, a fortune which
rarely attended her able tragedies, which are imagined to be more
suitable for the closet than the stage. There they will continue
to charm, while vigour of conception, a clear and masterly style,
and healthy nobility of sentiment, retain their hold on the human
mind.
Joanna Baillie died February 2,3d, 18ol, aged 89, and is interred
in Hampstead churchyard, beside her mother, who had also reached
the venerable age of 86,
^^^^^^yr^
• jfli
WlLLTA^l WORDSWORTB.
William Wordsworth was born at Cockermouth on the 7th of
April, 1770. His father was a solicitor and law-agent to Sir James
Lowthcr, afterwards Earl of Lonsdale. By his mother's side he was
related to the Cooksons and Crackenthorps, families of Cumberland
and Westmorland. He was educated at Hawkshead school, where
he began to write poetry ; he then went to St. John's College, Cam-
liridge, of which his uncle, Dr. Cookson, had been a fellow. During
the vacation of 1790, when, of course, he was twenty years of age, ho
went on a short tour in France and Switzerland, -with a fellow-col-
legian, Robert Jones, a Welshman, returning by the Rhine, They
travelled on foot, with knapsacks on their backs and twenty pounds
each in their pockets at starting. On taking his degree, AVordsworth
made a pedestrian tour in Wales with his friend Jones. In the
autumn of 1701 he went again to France, and stayed rather more
than a year. During his sojourn there the king was deposed, and
the massacres of September took place while he was at Orleans.
When he reached Paris the king, queen, and their children lay in
prison, France was a re2:>ublic, and the army of the allies was
liovering on the frontiers. Soon after his reaching home tlie king
was executed.
WORDSWORTH. 533.
At this period, \Yoi'd.s\vorth was, like so many others, an ardent
republican, and gave credit to all the fine sentimental theories of the
revolutionists. The atrocities which they committed, and the sub-
sequent career of Napoleon, cured him of all that. He became a
decided advocate of monarch}', but he never ran into the extreme
of despotism, like Southey; and as he had not published, like him, in
the effervescence of youth, any such violent effusions as Wat Tyler,
and the Botany Bay Eclogues, he escaped the fierce resentment
which fell upon Southey, from those who were more steadfast to
their original liberalism.
On his return to England, Wordswortli continued for some time in
an unsettled state. He could not bring his mind to take orders, and
his resources were insufficient for his subsistence without a profes-
sion. He spent his time in rambling in the Isle of Wight, on
Salisbury Plain, in Wales, and amongst his friends in the North.
He thought of publishing a magazaine, and then of getting upon a
London newspaper. At this juncture a young friend dying, left him
900/. About the same time he again regained the society of his sister
Dorothy, who had been brought up by a relative. From this time
the brother and sister were inseparable.
Wordsworth and his sister took up their abode at Rouden, near
Ore wkerne, in Somersetshire, and there Coleridge, in 1795, paid them
.1 visit. Coleridge had now become connected with Southey and
Lovell, two Bristol men, and was in a great measure located there.
The spirit of poetry had revived again after a long period of mere
jmitatiou ; and by these circumstances three of the chief leaders of
literary reform were thus brought together. Southey was a Bristol
man, Coleridge was a Devonshire man, Wordsworth a Cumberland
man ; and Bristol for a time seemed as though it were to have
the honour of becoming a sort of western Athens. But Bri.stol
itself had no sympathy with any hterary spirit. It is one of
those places that have the singular fortune to produce great men,
though it never cherishes them. It produced Chatterton, and let
liim perish ; it produced Southey, and let him go away to rear the
fabric of his f^Tftio where he pleased. The spirit of trade, and that
not in its most adventurous or liberal character, was and is the
spirit of Bristol. By a wretched and penny-wise policy, even of
trade, it has allowed Gloucester, at many miles' distance from_ the
sea, to become a great port at its expense ; by the same spirit it
has created Liverpool ; and whoever now sees its wretched docks
coming u\) into the middle of the town, instead of stretching,
business-like and compactly, along the banks of the Avon, its
dusty and unwatered streets, and altogether dingy, and sluggish
appearance, feels at once, that not even the poetry of trade can
flourish there. Yet Bristol had the honour thrust upon it of issu-
ing to the world the first productions of Wordsworth, Southey,
and Coleridge. Joseph Cottle, the author of Alfred, an epic
poem, whom Byron so mercilessly handled, grafting upon him
the name of his brother Amos, for tlic sake of more ludicrous
effect, — Joseph Cottle was a bookseller here, and became the
o';4 WORDS wo KTIT.
patrol^ of those three young, aspiring, but far from wealthy yoluig
men.
Coleriilge had made the acquaintance of Mr. Thomas Poole, of
Nether Stowey, a gentleman of some property, and a magistrate.
Mr. Poole was a friend of the two great brother potters, Josiah and
Tliomas AVedgwood, of Staffordshire ; he introduced Coleridge to
them, and eventually they settled on liim an annuity of 150/. a-year ;
the half of which, however, was afterwards withdrawn by Thomas
AV^edgwood, or his executors. Poole invited Coleridge to come down
to Stowey to see him, and, after his marriage, prevailed on him to go
and live in Stowey. Tlie Wedgwoods were accustomed also to visit
Mr. Poole ; and the same causes drew Wordsworth and Southey
occasionally down there. Thus Bristol ceased to be the general
i-endezvous of this new literary coterie, and the solitudes of Somer-
setshire received them. People have often wondered what induced
this poetical brotherhood to select a scene so far out of the usual
haunts of literary men, — so inferior to Wordsworth's own neighbour-
hood, — as Stowey and its vicinity. These are the circumstances. It
was Mr. Poole and cheapness which had a deal to do with it. Poole
ili'ew Coleridge ; Coleridge and the dreams of Pantisocracy drew
most of the others. Wordsworth, I believe, never speculated on the
exclusive happiness of following the plough on the banks of the
Susquehannah ; but the whole of the corjjs had made the discovery
tliat true poetry was based on nature, and that it was to be found
only by looking into their own minds, and into the world of nature
around them. They therefore sought, not cities, but solitude, where
they could at once read, reflect, and store up that treasury of imagery,
full of beauty and truth, which should be repi'oduced, woven into the
living tissue of their own thought and passion, as poetry of a new,
startling, and high order. To this life of countrj' seclusion Words-
worth and Southey adhered, from choice, all their after lives.
AVhen Coleridge went to settle at Stowey, Wordsworth also re-
moved to Allfoxden, about five miles further down, near the Bristo'
Channel. Here his secluded habits gave rise to some ludicrous cir-
cumstances, annoying enough, however, to drive him out of the
neighbourhood. He was deep in the composition of poetry. He had
a Tragedy on the anvil, a poem called Salisbury Plain (never yet
published), and Peter Bell ; besides his Lyrical Ballads, which last
Cottle brought out while he was here. He sought the deepest soli-
tude, and here, if anywhere, he could find it. Allfoxden House is
situated at the very extremity of the Quantock hills, and v.'ithin
about a mile and a quarter of the Bristol Channel. As you advance
from Stowey, the Quantock hills run along at some little distance on
your left hand. They are of the character of downs, open and moor-
land on the top, and with great masses of wood here and there on
their slopes. The country on your right is level, rich, and well
wooded. On arriving near Allfoxden, you turn abruptlj' to the left ;
and, winding about through a woody lane, and passing through
a little hamlet, you begin to feel as if you were going quite out of
/he world of mankind. You are at the foot of the hills, and a thick
WORDSWORTH. 53-1
wood teimiuates your way. But througli this wood you have to pass to
discover the house where Wordsworth had hidden himself. Entering
at a gate, you iiud yourself in a most Druidical gloom. The wood is
of well-grown, tall, and thickly-growing oak ; filled still closer with
hollies, which were once underwood, but which have shot up, and
emulated the very oaks themselves in altitude. They are unques-
tionably amongst the loftiest hollies in England. Altogether the
mass of wood is dense, the scene is shadowy, the ground is strewn
with its brown carpet of fallen leaves. As you advance, on your
right hand you catch a sound of water ; and, pursuing it, you find it
issues from the bottom of a deep narrow glen or dean, which no
doubt gives the name to the place — All fox den, or glen of all the
foxes. This glen is a very poetical feature of the place, and espe-
cially attractive to a man in Wordsworth's theh turn of mind, which
led him to the deepest seclusion for the sake of abstraction. Tall
trees soar up from its sides, and meet above ; some of them have
fallen across, dashed down by the wind. Wild plants grow luxuri-
antly below ; woodbines and other creepers climb and cling from
bough to bough ; and the pure and crystal water hui'ries along over
its gravelly bed, beneath this mass of shade and overhanging banks,
with a merry music to the neighbouring sea.
Leaving this glen, you hold on through the wood to the left, and
soon emerge into a park, enclosed by hills and woods, where a good
country house looks out towards the sea. It is one of the most
secluded, and yet pleasantly secluded, houses in England. Around
it sweep the hills, scattered with fine timber, beneath which reposes
a herd of deer, and before it stretches the sea at a little distance.
The house is somewhat raised above the level of the valley, so as to
catch the charming view of the lands, woods, and outspread waters
below. To the left, near the coast, you catch a view of the walls of
St. Audrey, the seat of Sir Peregrine Ackland, pleasingly assuring
you that you are not quite cut off from humanity. Below the
house lies a sunny flower garden, and behind, the ascending lawn is
enriched by finely disposed masses of trees ; amongst them some
enormous old oaks, and elms of noblest growth. There are two
elms, growing close together, of remarkable size and height, beneath
which a seat is placed, commanding a view of the park and sea ; and
just below it a fine, well-grown larch, which used to be a very
favourite tree of the poet's. Under these trees he used to sit and
read and comjiose ; and no man could have coveted a more con-
genial study. Here originated or took form many of his lyrical
ballads.
If you ascend the park, you find yourself", after a good stout
climb, on the open hills. One summit after another, covered with
clumps of Scotch firs, allures you to ascend, till at length you find
yourself far from any abode, on the high moorland hills, amidst
a profound but glorious solitude. Fine glens, with glittering
streams, and here and there a lonely cottage sending up its quiet
smoke, run amongst tl:?se hills, and extensive tracts of woodland
offer you all the charm- of fo]-cst eeclusion. The hills which raugo
536 AVOEDSWOHTH.
along beliiiul Stowey cease here, and were the groat huuut of Cole-
ridge and ^Vordswoi'th. They might, if they pleased, extend their
i-ambles over them, from the abode of the one to that of the other.
We find numerous evidences of their haunting of these hills amongst
their poems. The ballad of the Thorn is said to be derived hence.
(Joleridge mentions their name occasionally. He has a poem to a
brook amongst the Quantock hills ; and the opening of his Fears in
Solitude, written in 1798, when he was at Stowey, and quoted at
p. !)-!, is most descriptive of their scener3\
But the views from the Quantock hills are as charming as the
hills themselves. From above Allfoxden you look down directly on
the Bristol Channel, the little island of Steepholms lying in the liquid
foreground, and the Welsh hills stretching along in the back. On
your right you see the whole level but rich country stretching away
to Bridgewater, and on towards Bristol.
In this pleasaut but solitary region we must recollect, however,
that the young poets were not left entirely to their solitary rambles
and cogitations. Coleridge had his wife and one or two young chil-
dren with him. AVordsworth had his sister Dorothy, the great com-
panion in his many wanderings through various parts of the kingdom.
Then there was Mr. Poole, their common friend at Stowey ; Charles
Lloyd, the son of the quaker banker of Birmingham, a poet, with the
usual fate of a poet, sorrow and an early death, was there part of
the time, as a great admirer of and boarder at Coleridge's. Southey,
Cottle, Charles Lamb, and the two Wedgwoods, and othei's, visited
them. We may well believe that this knot of friends, young, full
of enthusiasm, of the love of nature, and the dreams of poetry,
became a source of the strangest wonder to the simple and very
ignorant inhabitants of that part of the country. People whose
children at the present hour, as will be seen by the account of
Coleridge, do not know what a poet means, were not very likely to
comprehend what could bring such a number of strange young men
all at once into their neighbourhood. What could they be after
there 1 The honest people had no idea of persons frequenting a
place but in pursuit of some honest or dishone.st calling. They
could not see what calling these young gentlemen were following
there, and they very naturally set down their busines to be of the
latter description. They were neither lawyers, doctors, nor parsons.
They wore neither farmers, merchants, nor, according to their
notions, thorough gentlefolks ; i.e. people who lived in large houses,
kept large numbers of servants, and drove about in fine carriages. On
the contrary, they went wandering about amongst the hills and
woods, and by the sea. They were out, it was said, more b}' night
than by day ; and I have heard people of rank and education, which
ought to have informed them better, assert, and who still do assert,
that they led a very dissolute life ! The grave and moral Words-
worth, the respectable Wedgwoods, correct Robert Southey, and
Coleridge dreaming of glories and intellectualities beyond the
moon, were set down for a very disreputable gang ! Innocent
J.Irs. Coleridge, and poor Dolly AVordsworth, were seen strolling
WORDSWORTH. 537
about with, them, aud were pronounced no better than tliey should
be ! Such was the character which they unconsciously acquired,
that Wordsworth was at length actually driven out of the country.
Coleridge, writing to Cottle, says, >* Wordsworth has beeeu "ca-
balled against so long and so loudly , that ne has found it impossible
to prevail on the tenant of the Allfoxden estate to let him the
house, after their first agreement is expired, so he must quit it at
^lidsummer.
" At all events, come down, Cottle, as soon as you can, but before
^Midsummer ; aud we will procure a horse, easy as thy own soul, aud
we will go on a roam to Linton and Limouth, which, if thou comest
in May, will be in all their pride of woods and waterfalls, not to
speak of its august cliffs, and the green ocean, and the vast valley of
stones, all which live disdainful of the seasons, or accept new honours
only from the winter's snows."
This poetic trip, in company with another strange man, would, of
course, be considered by the neighbours to be another smuggling or
spy excursion. AVhat else could they be going all that way for, to
look at " the gi-een sea," aud at great " valleys of stones ? "
Wordsworth, always a solemn-looking mortal, even in his youth,
was particularly obnoxious to their suspicions, especially as he lived
in that large house, in that very solitary place. Hear Cottle's account
of the affair.
"Mr. Wordsworth had taken the Allfoxden house, near Stowey, for
one year, during the minority of the heir ; and the reason why ho
was refused a continuance by the ignorant man who had the letting
of it arose, as Mr. Coleridge informed me, from a whimsical cause,
or rather a series of causes. The wiseacres of the village had, it
seems, made Mr. Wordsworth the object of their serious conversation.
One said, that ' he had seen him wander about by night, and look
rather strangely at the moon ! And then, he roamed over the hills
like a partridge.' Another said, ' he had heard him mutter, as he
walked, in some outlandish brogue, that nobody could understand ! '
Another said, ' It's useless to talk, Thomas ; I think he is what people
call " a wise man" ' (a conjuror !). Another said, ' You are every one
of you wrong. I know what he is. AVe have all met him tramping
away towards the sea. Would any man in his senses take all that
trouble to look at a parcel of water ? I think he carries on a snug
business in the smuggling line, and, in these journeys, is on the look-
out for some wet cargo !' Another very significantly said, 'I know
that ho has got a private still in his cellar ; for I once passed his
house at a little better than a hundred yards' distance, and I could
smell the spirits as plain as an ashen fagot at Christmas.' Another
said, ' However that was, he is sm'ely a desperd French jacobin ; for
he is so silent and dark that nobody ever heai'd him say one word
about politics.' And thus these ignoramuses drove from their
village a greater ornament than will ever again be found amongst
them."
Southey once thought of settling near Neath instead of tlie Lakes,
and had pitched on a house which was to let, but the owner refused
538 W'OUDSWORIH.
to receive liim as tenant, because he had heard a rumour of his being
a jacobin.
Cottle gives an amusing adventure at Allfoxden, which must not
be omitted. " A visit to Mr. Coleridge at Stowey, in the year 1797,
had been the means of my introduction to Mr. Wordsworth. Soon
after our acquaintance had commenced, Mr. Wordsworth happened
to be in Bristol, and asked me to spend a day or two with him at
Allfoxden. I consented, and drove him down in a gig. We called
for Mr. Coleridge, Miss Wordsworth, and the servant at Stowey ; and
they walked, w^hile we rode to Mr. Wordsworth's house, distant two
or three miles, where we purposed to dine. A London alderman
would smile at our bill of fare. It consisted of philosopher's viands ;
namely, a bottle of brandy, a noble loaf, and a stout piece of cheese ;
and as there was plenty of lettuces in the garden, with all these
comforts wc calculated on doing very well.
" Our fond hopes, however, were somewhat damped, by finding
that our stout piece of cheese had vanished ! A sturdy rat of a
beggar, whom we had relieved on the road, with his olfactories all
alive, no doubt, smeli our cheese ; and, while we were gazing at the
magnificent clouds, contrived to abstract our treasure. Cruel tramp !
an X\\ return for our pence ! We both wished the rind might not
..•lioke him ! The mournful fact was ascertained a Httle befcre we
drove into the court-yard of the house. Mr. Coleridge bore the loss
with great fortitude, observing that we should never starve with a
loaf of bread and a bottle of brandy. He now, with the dexterity
of an adept, admired by his friends around, unbuckled the horse,
and putting down the .shafts with a jerk, as a triumphant conclusion
of his work,— lo ! the bottle of brandy that had been placed most
carefully behind us on the seat, from the inevitable law of gravity,
suddenly rolled down, and, before we could arrest the_ spirituous
avalanche, pitching right on the stones, was dashed to pieces ! We
all beheld the spectacle, silent and petrified ! We might have col-
lected the broken fragments of glass ; but the brandy, that was gone !
clean gone !
" One little untoward thing often follows another ; and while the
rest stood musing, chained to the place, regaling themselves with
the cogniac effluvium, and all miserably chagrined, I led the horse
to the stable, where a fresh perplexity arose. I removed the harness
without difficulty, but after many strenuous attempts, I could not
get off' the collar. In despair, I called for assistance, when aid soon
drew near. Mr. Wordsworth first brought his ingenuity into exercise,
but, after several unsuccessful efforts, he relinquished the achieve-
ment as altogether impracticable. Mr. Coleridge now tried his hand,
but showed no more grooming skill than his predecessors ; for after
twisting the poor horse's neck, almost to strangulation, and to the
great danger of his eyes, he gave up the useless task, pronouncing
that the horse's head must have grown — gout or dropsy ! since the
collar was put on ! 'For,' said he, 'it is a downright impossibility
for such a huge os frontis to pass through so narrow a collar!' Just
at this instant, the servant girl came near, and understanding thy
WORDSWOBTS. 539
cause of our consternation, ' La, master/ said she, ' you do not gc
about the work in the right way. You should do like this ; ' when
tiu-uing the collar completely upside down, she slipped it off in ?
moment, to our great humiliation and wonderment ; each satisfied,
afresh, that there were heights of knowledge in the world to which
he had not attained.
" We were now summoned to dinner ; and a dinner it was, such
as every blind and starving man in the three kingdoms would have
rejoiced to behold. At the top of the table stood a superb brown
loaf. The centre dish presented a pile of the true cos lettuces,
and at the bottom appeared an empty plate, where the stout piece
of cheese ought to have stood! — cruel mendicant! and though the
brandy was clean gone, yet its place was well, if not letter supplied
by a superabundance of tine sparkling Castalian champagne ! A
happy thought at this time started into one of our minds, that
some sauce would render the lettuces a little more acceptable, when
an individual in the company recollected a question once propounded
by the most patient of men — ' How can that which is unsavoury bo
eaten without salt % ' and asked for a little of that valuable culinary
article. ' Indeed, Sir,' said Betty, ' I quite forgot to buy salt.' A
general laugh followed the announcement, in which our host heartily
joined. This was nothing. We had j)lenty of other good things ;
and while crunching our succulents, and munching our crusts, we
pitied the far worse condition of those, perchance as hungry as our-
selves, who were forced to dine alone, off ether. For our next
meal, the mile-off village furnished all that could be desired, and
these trifling incidents present the sum aud the result of half the
little passing disasters of life."
In September of 1798, Wordsworth, his sister, and Coleridge, set
out for Germany. On his return to Englaiii he settled at Grasmere,
about the beginning of this century. At Grasmere, he resided in
two or three different houses ; one Avas Town-end, where his friends
the Cooksons now reside ; another at Allan-bank, at a white house
on the hill-side, conspicuous in our vignette ; a third, the parsonage.
He continued to live at Grasmere fifteen years, and in 1811 removed
to Eydal Mount, where he spent the remainder of his years.
His patrimony could not have been large, as I have heai-d Mrs.
"Wordsworth say, that, at the time of their marriage, they had in
joint income about one hundred pounds a-year. This, however,
v.-ould go a good way with a young couple, of simple habits, in
a place like Grasmere at that time of day ; and he did not hesitate
in those circumstances to expect any one staying with him to pay
for their board. Mrs Wordsworth was a Miss Hutchinson of Cocker-
mouth. Poetry was Wordsworth's real business from the first, and it
continued the great business of his life. His si^ster Dorothy, also gifted
with considerable poetic power, as may be seen in tlie Address to
A Child during a boisterous winter evening, and The Mother's
Ileturn, at p]). L> and 12 of the first volume of his poems, as well as
in the Journal of their Wanderingg together, was his great and con-
genial companion. She had a passion for nature not loss ardent
540 •wonDs^^ orth.
than his own, and went on at his side, fearless of rain, or cold, or
tempest, nor shrinking from heat. She was ready to climb the
mountain, to cross the torrent, or slide doAvn the slippery steep, with
equal boldness and skill, derived from long practice. With him slie
traversed a great part of Scotland, Wales, and parts of Englai:id. ITe
describes their thus setting out from Grasmere: —
" To cull conteiitmcr.t upon wildest shores,
And luxuries extract from bleakest moors ;
With prompt embrace all beauty to enfold,
And having rights in all that we behold."
To tlii^ ramble, chiefly on foot, we arc indebted for some of the
most vigorous and characteristic lyrics that Wordsworth ever wrote.
He was young, ardent, and overflowing with enthusiasm ; and the
soil of Scotland, on which so many deeds of martial fame had been
done, or where Ossian had sung in the misty years of far-oiT times,
or other bards whose names had for centuries been embalmed in the
strains which the spirit of the people had perpetuated, kindled ii;
him a fervent sympathy. We can imagine the delighted brother
and sister marching on, over the beautiful hills, the dark heaths,
and down the enchanting vales of the Highlands, conversing eagerly
of the scenes they had seen, and the incidents they had heard,
till the glowing thoughts had formed themselves, in the poet's mind,
into almost instant song. These poems have all the character of
having been cast, hot from the furnace of inspiration, into their
present mould. There is a life, an original freshness, and a native
music about them. Such are Ellen Irvine, or the Braes of Kirtle ;
To a Highland Girl ; Glen Almain, or the Solitary Glen : Stepping
Westwood ; The Solitary Eeaper ; Rob Roy's Grave ; Yarrow Re-
visited ; In the Pass of Killicranky ; The Jolly Matron of Jedburgh
and her Husband ; The Blind Highland Boy ; The Brownie's Cell ;
Cora Linn, &c.
It was to this beloved companion of his wanderings that he, the
year afterwards, addressed the beautiful verses, on revisiting
Tintern.— Vol. II. p. 179.
Was there something in '• the shooting gleams of those wild eyes,
whicli foretold that, like the lights of a fitful sky, they should flash
and cpiickly disappear ? The mind of that beloved sister went for
many j'cars, as it were, before her, and she lived on in a second
infancy, carefully cherished in the poet's heme.
Wordsworth, as I have observed, devoted himself to no profession
1)ut that of poetry. He followed the stream of life as it led him
down the retired vale of poetic meditation, but not without, at
times, being visited by fears of what the end might be. Of this ho
gave a graphic description in his poem of Resolution and Independ-
ence, the hero of which is the old leech gatherer.
" 1 heard the skylark warbling in the sky;
And I bethought me of the playful hare :
Even sucli a happy child of earth am I ;
Even as these blissful creatures do 1 fare :
Far from the world I walk and from all c:\ri\.
But tliere may come another day to mc—
Solitude, pain of hoart, distress aad poveity.
U'OEDSWORTH. 641
'' My whole life I liave lived in pleasant thought,
As if life's business were a summer mood ;
As if all needful things -would come unsought
To genial faith, still rich in genial good.
But how can he expect that others should
Build for him, sow for him, and at his call
Love liim, who for himself will take no care at all ?
I thought of Chatterton, the marvellous boy,
The sleepless soul that perished in his pride ;
Of him who walked in glory and in joy,
Following his plough along the mountain side.
By Dur own spirits are we deified :
Vie poets in our youth begin in gladness,
But thereof comes in the end despondency and luaduess."
]]ut this sad and common fate of poets was not to visit Words-
worth. The devotion he had vowed to nature was to remain hal-
lowed, happy, and unbroken to the end. His lot was to be the very
ideal of the poetic lot. He was to live amid his native mountains,
guaranteed against care and poverty ; at liberty to roam at will
amid beauty and solitude ; to work out his deepest thoughts in
stately verse, and in his old age to receive there the reverence of his
countrymen. He had the interest of the Lowther family. By that
he was appointed distributor of stamps for the counties of Cumber-
land and AVestmorland ; in his case a mere sinecure, for the
business of the office was easily executed by one or more experi-
enced clerks. His three children married well : his eldest son, a
clergyman, to a daughter of Mr. Curwen, formerly M.P. ; and his
daughter to Mr. Qiiillinan. This charming woman is since de-
ceased. His second .stm has succeeded him in his stamp-distributor-
ship. Wordsworth succeeded Southey in the laureateship, and had
superadded a pension of three or four hundred a-year. Perhaps
none of the purely poetic tribe laboured less for fortune, and few
liave been more fortunate. The early experience of himself and his
poelic cotemporaries is very instructive to all who seek to realize a
reputation ; it is, to have faith, to persevere, and believe nature and
not critics. Never was a fiercer onslaught made than by the Edin-
burgh Review on the whole race of poets who then arose. With the
same fatality which has since led that journal to declare that no
steamer Avould be able to cross the Atlantic, and that Grey, the
author of the railway s^'-stem, was a madman and ought to be put
into Bedlam, it denounced the whole class of young poets, who
were destined to revive real poetry in the land, as it afterwards did
Lord Byron, as drivellers and fools. Scotland, having starved to
death its own Burns, made a determined attempt to annihilate all
the rising poetry of England. It commenced the review of Words-
worth's Excursion with the ludicrous Avords, — "This will never
do ! " and declared that there was not a line of poetry, or scarcely
of common sense, in it, " From the hour that the driveller squatted
himself down in the sun, to the end of his preaching." If any
unfortunate author had made one-tenth of the gross blunders which
Jeffrey did in meddling with poets, he would have been pronounced
an idiot. But Jeffrey had no conception whatever of poetry ; yet
in the height of critical conceit, he went on, dwarf as he was,
542 WORDSWORTS,
assailing every inspired giant that appeared, till Byron with olio
cuft' settled hira. Let every youthful aspirant remember this his-
tory ; and that if criticism could prevail over genius, we should
not at this moment have one great established poet on our list
of fame.
It was Professor Wilson who first, in Blackwood's, by the most
glowing and eloquent eulogiums, month after month, made Words-
worth popular ; and one of the most curious facts in modern
literature is that, in the Life and Letters of Wordsworth, Wilson is
scarcely mentioned and nowhere thanked.
Wordsworth's poetical philosophy is now thought to be too well
known to need much explanation. He has indeed expounded it
himself in almost every page.
Yet, after all the brilliant and profound criticism which has been
expended upon it, by almost every review in these kingdoms, and
by every writer on poetry and poets, the simple truth remains to be
told. The fiict lies too much on the surface for very deep and
metaphysical divers to perceive. And what, then, is the funda-
mental philosophy of Wordsworth 1
It is, what he, perhaps, would himself have started to hear, simply
a poetic Quakerism. The Quaker's religious faith is in immediate
inspiration. He believes that if he " centres down," as he calls
it, into his own mind, and puts to rest all his natural faculties and
thoughts, he will receive the impulses and intimations of the Divine
Spirit. He is not to seek, to strive, to inquire, but to be passive,
and receive. This is precisely the great doctrine of Wordsworth, as
it regards poetry. He believes the Divine Spirit which fills the
universe, to have so moulded all the forms of visible nature, as to
make them to us perpetual monitors and instructors : —
" To inform
Tlie mind that is within us ; to impress
Witli quietness and beauty, and to feed
"With lofty thoughts."
Thus, in Expo.stulation and Reply, this doctrine is most distinctly
pronounced : —
" ' Why, William, on that old grey stone,
Thus for the length of half a day,
Why, William, sit you thus alone,
And dream your time away ?
" ' Where are your books 1 that light bequeathed
To beings else forlorn and blind !
Up ! up ! and drink the spirit breathed
From dead men to their kind.
" ' You look round on your mother earth,
As if she for no purpose bore you;
As if you were her first-born liirth.
And none had lived before you ! '
" One morning thus by Esthw;ute lake,
AVIien life was sweet, I knew not why.
To me my good friend Mathew spake,
And thus 1 made reply : —
•' 'The eye, it cannot choose but see;
We cannot bid the ear be still ;
Our bodies fuel, wl-.ere'er tliey be.
Against, or with our will.
WORDSWORTH. 543
" ' Nor less I deem that there are powers
Which of themselves our miiids impress ;
That we can feel this mind of ours
In a wise passiveness.
" 'Think jou, 'mid all this mighty sum
Of things for ever speaking,
'i hat nothing of itself will come,
But we must still be seeking.'"'
Thu same doctrine is inculcated in the very next poem, The
Tables Turned. Here the poet calls his friend from his books as
full of toil and trouble, adding : —
" And hark! how blithe the throstle sings I
lie, too, is no mean preacher:
Come forth into the light of things,
Let Nature be your teacher.
" She has a world of ready wealth
Our minds and hearts to bless —
Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health,
Truth breathed by cheerfulness.
" One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.
" Sweet is the lore which Nature brings ;
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things ;
We murder to dissect.
" Enough of science and of art;
Close up those barren leaves ;
Come forth, and bring witli you a heart
That watches and receives."
Now, if George Fox had written poetry, that is exactly what he
would have written. So completely does it embody the grand
Quaker doctrine, that Clarkson, in his Portraiture of Quakerism, has
quoted it as an illustration, without, however, perceiving that the
grand and complete fabric of Wordsworth's poetry is built on this
foundation : that this dogma of quitting men, books, and theories,
and sitting down quietly to receive the unerring intimations anci
influences of the spirit of the universe, is identical in Fox and
Wordsworth — is the very same in the poetry of the one as in the
religion of the other. The two reformers acquired their faith by the
same process, and in the same manner. They went out into solitude,
into night, and into woods, to seek the oracle of truth. Fox retired
to a hollow oak, as he tells u.s, and with prayers and tears sought
after the truth, and came at length to see that it lay Jiot in schools,
colleges, and pulpits, but in the teaching of the great Father of
Spirits ; and that to receive this divine intuition the human soul
must withdraw from outward objects, and become wholly passive
and receptive. Wordswcrth retired to the
" Mountains, to the sides
Of the deep rivers, and the lonely stream*.
Wherever Nature led."
Anil ho tells us to this practice he owed
" Another gift
Of aspect most sublime; that blessed mood
In whicli the burden of the mystery,
in which tj\e heavy and tiie weary weight
64 i WORDSWORTH.
Of all this uuiiitelligible world
Is lightened : that serene and blessed mood,
In whicli tlie affections gently lead us on,
Until tlie breath of this corporeal frame,
And even the motion of our human blood.
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul.
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmonv, and the deep power of joy,
We see into' the life of things."— Vol. II. p. 181.
So literal was this in Wordsworth, that Mrs. Wordsworth observed
to me that her husband had injured his health by almost ceasing to
breathe in his moods of deep abstraction. This is perfect Quakerism ;
the grand demand of which is, that you shall put down " this med-
dling intellect, which mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things " —
Bhall lay at rest the actions and motions of your own minds, and
subdue the impatience of the body.
Ifc was this very doctrine of the non-necessity of human inter-
ference between us and all knowledge, of the all-sufficiency of this
invisible and " great teacher," as Wordsworth calls him, which led
George Fox and his disciples to abandon all forms of worshi2:>, to
strip divine service of all music, singing, formal prayers, written
sermons, and to sit down in a perfectly passive state of silence, to
gather a portion of
" All this mighty sum
Of things for ever speaking,"
into
"A heart
That watches and receives."
" Come out," says Fox, " from all your vain learning and philo-
sophy, from your schools and colleges, from all your teachings and
preachings of human instruction, from all your will-worship and
your man-made-ministers, and sit down in the presence of Him who
made all things, and lives through all things, — who made the ear,
the eye, and the heart of man, and lives in and through them, and
can and will inform them. Put down every high and airy imagina-
tion, every carnal willing and doing ; cease to strive in your own
strength, and learn to depend on the teaching and strength of the
Holy Spirit that filleth heaven and earth ; and the light given to
enlighten every man that cometh into the world will soon shine in
upon you, and the truth in all its fulness will be made known to you
far beyond the teaching of all bishops, archbishops, pi'ofessors, or
other swelling men, puffed with the vain wind of human learning.
Come out from among them ; be not of them ; leave the dead to
bury the dead. He that sits at the king's table needeth not the dry
crumbs and the waste offal of hireling servitors ; he that hath the
sun itself shining on his head needeth no lesser, much less artificial
lights." These, though not his actual words, are the spirit of his
words.
In this state he regards man as restored to the original privilege
of his nature, and admitted to communion with the spirit of the
Creator, and into contact with all knowledge. " He sees into the
life of things," So fully did Fox consider that he saw into the life
■WORDSWORTH. 51S
of tilings, that he believed that the knowledge of the qualitj' of all
plants, minerals, and physical substances was imparted to him ;
and that had he not had a still higher vocation assigned him, as a
discerner and comforter of spirits, he could have practised most
successfully as a physician. He believed and taught — and Barclay, hi?
great disciple, in his famous Apology, teaches the same thing — that
in this state of communion with the Spirit of all knowledge, a man
needs no interpreter of the Scriptures ; that without any knowledge
of the original languages, he can instinctively tell where they aro
erroneously rendered, and what is the true meaning. He has pene-
trated to the fountain of truth, and not only of truth, but, to use
Wordsworth's words again, of "the deep power of joy." He is raised
above all earthly evil and anxiety, and breathes in the invisible
presence the pure air of heaven. He is restored to the unity of
his nature, to power, intelligence, and felicity. How exactly is this
the language of our poet !
" I liave felt
A presence that disturbs me with tlie joy
Of elevated thoughts ; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused.
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of n;an :
A motion and a spirit, that impels
AH thinking things, all objects of all thoni;ht.
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I >',iU
A lover of the meadows, and the woods,
And mountains ; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the miglity world
Of eye and ear, both what they half create,
And what perceive : well pleased to reco^'uise.
In nature and the language of the sense,
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being."— Vol. II. pp. 183, 1S4.
But this doctrine is not the casual doctrine of "Wordsworth in one
or two ca-sual or isolated poems ; it is the foundation and fabric of
the whole. It is the great theme everywhere pursued. Of his
principal and noblest production, The Excursion, it is the brain, the
very backbone, the vitals, and the moving sinews. Take away that,
and you take all. Take that, and you reduce the poet to a level with
a hundred others. His hero, the wanderer, is a shepherd-boy grown
into a pedlar, or pack-merchant, who has been educated and baptized
into this sublime knovv'ledge of God speaking through nature, fn hu?
KJxth year he tended cattle on the hills.
" lie, muny an evening, to his di^arit home
In solitude returning, saw the hills
(irow larger in the darkness, all alone
IJeheld tlie stars come out above his bead.
And travelled through the wood, with no one neai
'i'o whom he might confess the things hu sav.'.
So the foundations of his mind were laid.
In such connnunion, not from terror free,
While yet a child, an^i long before his time,
lie had perceived the presence and the power
Of greatness."
fj4»; -WORDSWORTH.
" He had received a precious gift," the poet tells us, thit gift of
spiritual perception which the poet himself adds that he also had
received. In the features of nature, —
" Even ill tlicir fixed and steady lineaments,
He traced an ebbiiijj and a flowing mind,
J'.xjjression ever varying. Thus informed,
He had small need of books."
There " was wanting yet the pure delight of love" in his inspiration,
but that came also, and —
" Such was the boy; but for the growing youth
Wliat soul was his, when, from the naked top
Of some bold headland, he beheld the sun
Ilise up, and bathe the world in light 1 He looked —
Ocean and earth, the solid frame of earth
And ocean's liquid niass, beneath him lay
In gUidness and deep joy. The clouds were touched,
And in their silent faces did he read
Unutterable love. Sound needed none,
Xor any voice of joy ; his spirit drank
The spectacle: sensation, soul, and form
All melted into him : they swallowed up
His animal being; in them did he live.
And by them did he live : they were his life.
/« suck access of mind, in such high hour
Of visitation from Vie living God,
Thought was not; in enjoyment it expired.
No thanks he breathed, he proffered no request.
Rapt into still communion that transcends
The imperfect offices of prayer and praise.
His mind was a tlianksgivin j to the Power
That made him ; it was blessed7tess and love!"
That is one of the finest pieces of Quakerism that ever was written ;
there is nothing in Oeorge Fox himself more perfect. It is a de-
scription of that state to which every true Friend aspires ; which
he believes attainable without the mediation of any priest, or the
presence of any church ; which Fox and the early Friends so often
describe as having been accorded to them in the midst of their
public meetings, or in the solitude of the closet, or the journey. It
is that state of exaltation, the very flower and glorious moment of a
religious life, which is the privilege of liim who draws near to and
walks with God. That
" Access of mind.
Of visitation from flic living God,"
when
" Thought is not; in enjoyment it expires."
It is an eloquent exposition of the genuine worship to which,
according to the Friends, every sincere seeker may and will bo
admitted, when
" Rapt into still communion that transcends
Tlie imperfect ofhces of prayer and praise,
His mind is a thanksgiving to the Power
'J'hat made him ; it is blessedness and love."
But to show how completely Wordsworth's system is a system of
poetical Quakerism, I should be obliged tf take his Excursion, and
uollute the whole with passages from the writings of the early
■n-ORDSWORTH. /547
Frieuds, Fox, Penn, Barclay, Pennington, and others. The Excursion
is a very bible of Quakerism. Every page abounds with it. It is, m
fact, wholly and fervently permeated by the soul of Quaker the-
ology. The Friends teach that the great guide of life is " the light
which enlighteneth every man that cometh into the world ;" hence
they were originally termed " children of light," till the nickname
of Quakers superseded it. They declare this hght to be " the
infallible guide" of all raen who will follow it. What says AVords-
worth ?
" Early he perceives
Within himself a measure and a rule,
Which to the Sun of Truth he can apply.
That shines for him, and shines Tor all mankind.
» » * he refers
His noticiHs to this standard; on this rock
Rest his desires ; and hence in after life,
Soul-strengthening patience, and sublin.e content."
The whole of the fourth book, from which this extract is made,
is no other than a luminous and vivid exposition of pure Quakerism.
The Wanderer is its apostle. He shows how in all ages and countries
men have been influenced by this voice of God in nature ; and, not
comprehending it fully, have mixed it up with the forms and pheno-
mena of nature itself, and shaped religions out of it. HenCe the
Chaldean faith ; hence the Grecian mythology.
"They felt
A spiritual Presence, ofttimes misconceived,
But still a high dependence, a divine
Bounty and government, that filled their hearts
With joy and gratitude, and fear and love ;
And from their fervent lips drew hymns of praise.
That through the desert ran;,'. Tliough favoured less,
Far less than these, yet such in their degree
Were those bewildered pagans of old time." — P. 109.
So say the Friends ; and to such a pitch do they carry their belief
in their " universal and saving light," that they contend, that to the
most savage nations, "having not law, it becomes a law," and that
through it the spirit, if not the history of the Saviour is revealed
and made operative, and that thus the voice of salvation is preached
in the heart where never outward gospel has been heard. The
Friends contend that science and mere human wisdom most com •
monly tend to darken and weigh down this divine principle, to cloud
this eternal lustre in the soul. So says the eloquent Wanderer. He
asks. Shall our great discoverers obtain less from sense and reason
than these obtained 1
" Shall men for whom our age
UnbafBed powers of vision hath prepared.
To explore the world without, and world within.
Be joyless as the blind ? Ambitious souls.
Whom earth, at this late season, hath produced
To regulate the moving spheres, and weigh
The planets in the hollow of their hand ;
And they who rather dive than soar, whose pains
Have solved the elements, or analysed
The thinking principle; — shall they, in fact,
Prove a degraded race? And what avails
Renown, if their presumption makes them such I
T 2
64fi -WOllDSWORTn.
I there is laughter ;it their worl;. in lieaveni
Inquire of ancient w isdoni ; fto, demand
Of mighty nature, if 'twas ever meant
That we should pry far off, yet he unraised ;
That -vve should pore, and dwindle as wo pore.
« * * » •
That this magnificent effect of power,
The earth we tread, the sky that we behold
liy day, and all the pomp that night reveals —
That these, and that su])erior mystery,
Our vital frame, so fearfully devised,
And the dread soul within it, should exist
Only to be examined, pondered, searched.
Probed, vexed, and criticised? — Accuse me not
Of arrogance, unknown Wanderer as I am,
Jf, having walked with nature threescore years
And offered, far as frailty would allow.
My heart a daily sacrifice to Truth,
1 now affirm of Nature and of Truth,
■Whom I have served, that their Divinity
lievolis, offended at the ways of men,
Swayed by such motives, to such ends employed."— Pp. 1/0, 171.
This divine principle, which can thus outsoar and put to shame
the vanity and conceit of science, can also baffle and repulse all the
sophistries of metaphysics.
" Within the soul a faculty abides,
That w ith interpositions which would hide
And darken, so can deal, that they become
Contingencies of pomp, and serve to exalt
Iler native brightness." — P. 171.
There, too, Wordsworth and the Friends are entirely agreed, and yet
farther. This faculty exists in and operates for all ; and whoever
trusts in it shall, Hke the Friends, pursue their way, careless of all
the changes of fashions or opinions.
" Access for you
Is yet preserved to principles of truth,
Which tlie Imaginative Will upholds
In seats of wisdom, not to be approached
By the inferior faculty that moulds,
With her minute and speculative pains,
Opinion, ever changing."
He illustrates the operation of this inward and primeval faculty by
the simile of the child listening to a shell, and hearing, as it were,
the murmurs of its native sea. Such a shell, he say.s, is
" The universe itself
Unlo the ear of faith ; "
and in this you have a sanctuary to retire to at will, where you will
become victorious over every delusive power and principle. The
Friends consider this the glory of our mortal state ; and Words-
worth says, —
" Yes, you liave felt, and may not cease to feel,
The estate of man would be indeed forlorn,
If false conclusions of the reasoning power
Made the eye blind, and closed the passages
Through which the ?ar converses with the heart." — P. 178.
But the poet and the Friends agree that there is a power seated
in the human soul, superior to the understanding, superior to the
reasoning faculty, the sure te-et of truth, to which every man may
WORDSWORTH. O i9
coufideiitly appeal in all cases ; for it is the voice of God himself.
With the poet and the Friends the result of this divine philosophy
is the same — the most perfect patience, the most holy confidence iu
the ever-present divinity ; connected with no forms, no creeds, no
particular conditions of men ; not confined b}', not approachable
only in temples and churches, but free as his own winds, boundless
as his own seas, universal as his own sunshine over all his varied
lands and people ; whispering peace in the lonely forest, courage ou
the seas, adoration on the mountain tops, hope under the burning
tropics and the blistering lash of the savage white man, joy iu the
dungeon, and glory ou the death-bed.
" Religion tells of amity sublime,
Which no condition can preclude : of One,
Who sees all suffering, comprehends all wants,
All weakness fathoms, can supply all needs." — P. ITo.
There is an illumination for the critics ! For these thirty years
have they been astounding themselves at the originality of Words-
worth's philosophy, and expounding it by all imaginable aids of
metaphysics. We have heard endless lectures on the ideality, the
psychological profundity, the abstract doctrines of the poet ; his
new views, his sp)iritual communion with and exposition of the
mysteries of nature, and of the soul in harmony with nature, &c. &c.
That is the simple solution ; it is Quakerism in poetry, neither more
nor less. The question is, how Wordsworth stumbled on this doc-
trine — a doctrine on which his great poetical reputation is, in fact,
built. Possibly, like George Fox, he found it in his sohtary wander-
ings and cogitations ; but more probably he drew it direct from George
Fox's Journal itself. It is a curious but a well-known fact, that all
that knot of young and enthusiastic writers at Bristol, and after-
wards at Stowey and AUfoxden, WoTrdsworth, Southey, and Coleridge,
were deeply read and imbued with the old Quaker worthies. Pro-
bably they were made acquainted with them by their two Quaker
friends, Lovell and Lloyd. Coleridge was so impressed with their
principles, that, though he preached, he did it iu a blue coat aiid
white waistcoat, that, as he said, " he might not have a rag of tuo
woman of Babylon on him." He imbibed and proclaimed all the
(Quaker hatred of slavery and war. He declares in his Biographia
Literaria his admiration of Fox. " One assertion I will venture to
make, as suggested by my own experience, that there exist fohos ou
the human understanding, and the nature of iTian, which would have
a far juster claim to their high rank and celebrity, if, in the whole
huge volume, there could be found as much fulness of heart and
intellect as burst forth in many a simple page of George Fox.""
Southey always cherished the idea of writing the life of George Fos,
but never accomplished it. Charles Lamb, another visitor of Stowey,
at the time of this youthful eflervcsccnce, has recorded his visit to a
Friends' meeting, and says, that in it he soon began to ask himself
liir more questions than he could quickly answer. He declares
Scwell's History of the Quakers worth all ecclesiastical history put
together, AVordsworth was not only as deeply read :n these books
650 WORDSWORTH.
Its any of thein,but was, to iny knowledge, remarkably well acquaiute3
with the history and opinions of Friends ; he has immortalized the
very spade of one of them, Thomas Wilkinson, and — ecce signun—
has perfected the development of this great poetical system.
There is, perhaps, no residence in England better known than that
of AVilliam Wordsworth. Rydal Mount, where he lived for more
than thirty years, is as perfectly poetical in its location and environs
as any poet could possibly conceive in his brightest moment of inspi-
ration. As you advance a mile or more on the road from Ambleside
towards Grasmere, a lane overhung with trees turns up to the right,
and there, at some few hundred yards from the highway, stands the
modest cottage of the poet, elevated on Eydal Mount, so as to look
out over the surrounding sea of foliage, and to take in a glorious
view. Before it, at some distance across the valley, stretches a high
screen of bold and picturesque mountains ; behind, it is overtowered
by a precipitous hill, called Nab-scar ; but to the left, you look down
over the bi-oad waters of Windermere, and to the right over the still
and more embosomed flood of Grasmere. Whichever way the poet
pleased to advance from his house, it must be into scenery of that
beauty for mountain, stream, wood, and lake, which has made
Cumberland so famous over all England. He might steal away up
backward from his gate, and ascend into the solitary hills ; or diverg-
ing into the grounds of Lady Mary Fleming, his near neighbour,
might traverse the deep shades of the woodland, wander along the
banks of the rocky rivulet, and finally stand before the well-known
waterfall there. If he descended into the highway, objects of beauty
still presented themselves. Cottages and quiet houses here and
^.here glance from their little spots of Paradise, through the richest
coughs of trees ; Windermere, with its wide expanse of waters, its
fairy islands, its noble hills, allured his steps in one direction ; while
the sweet little lake of Rydal, with its heronry and its fine back-
ground of rocks, invited him in another. In this direction the vale of
Grasmere, the scene of his early married life, opened before him, and
Dunmail-raise and Langdale-pikes lifted their naked rocky summits,
as hailing him to the pleasures of old companionship. Into no
quarter of this region of lakes, and mountains, and vales of primitive
life, could he penetrate without coming upon ground celebrated by
his muse. He was truly " sole king of rocky Cumberland."
The immediate grounds in which his house stands are worthy of
the country and the man. It is, as its name implies, a mount. Be-
fore the house opens a considerable platform, and round and beneath
lie various terraces and descend various walks, winding on amid a
profusion of trees and luxuriant evergreens. Beyond the house, you
ascend various terraces, planted with trees now completely over-
shadowing them ; and these terraces conduct you to a level above
the house-top, and extend your view to the enchanting scenery on
all sides. Above you tower the rocks and precipitous slojies of
Nab-scar ; and below you, embosomed in its trees, lies the richly
ornate villa of Mr. William Ball, a Friend, whose family and the jjoet'a
were on such social terras, that a little gate between their premises
■WORDSWORTH. 561
Opened them hotli to each family ahke. This cottage aud its giouuda
were formerly the property of Charles Lloyd, the bi-other-in-law of
Dr. Wordsworth, ]\Iaster of Trinity College, Cambridge, also a Friend,
and one of the Bristol and Stowey coterie. Both he aud Lovell have
long been dead ; Lovell, indeed, was drowned, en a voyage to Ireland,
in the very heyday of the dreams of Pantisocracy, in which he was
an eager participant.
The poet's house itself is a proper poet's abode. It is at ouce
modest, plain, yet tasteful and elegant. An ordinary dining-room, a
breakfast-room in the centre, and a library beyond, form the chief
apartments. There are a few pictures and busts, especially those of
Scott and himself, a fine engraving of Burns, and the like, with a
good collection of books, few of them very modern. In the dining-
room there stands an old cabinet, which is a sort of genealogical
.piece of furniture, bearing this inscription; —
Hoc op' fiebat A"" Dni M^CCCCCXXV ex sflptu Will'mi Wordswortli,
filii W. lil. Joh. fil. W. m. Nich. viri Elizabeth filias et hered. "W. P'ctor de
Pengsto quorS aniabus p' picietur De' !
A great part of the labour of laying out the garden, raising the
terraces at Rydal, and planting the trees, was that of the poet him-
.self. The property belongs to Lady Fleming, but Wordsworth
bought a piece of land lying just below, with the fatherly intent,
that should his daughter at any time incline to live there, she
might, if she chose, erect a house for herself in the old and endeared
situation.
The trees display a prodigality of growth, that make what are
meant for walks almost a wilderness. On observing to the poet' that
he really should have his laurels pruned a little, the old man smiled,
paused, and said, with a pardonable self-complacency, — "Ay, I will
tell you an anecdote about that. A certain general was going round
the place attended by the gardener, when he suddenly remarked, as
you do, the flourishing growth of the trees, especially of the ever-
greens, and said, ' Which of all your trees do you think flourishes
most here 1 '
" ' I don't know, Sir,' said James ; ' but I think the laurel.'
" ' Well, that is as it should be, you know,' added the general.
" Why it should be so, James could not tell, and made the
remark.
" 'Don't you know,' continued the general, 'that the laurel is the
symbol of distinction for some achievement, and especially in that
art of which IMr. Wordsworth is so eminent a master ? therefore it
is quite right that it should flourish so conspicuously here.'
" By this," continued the poet, " James acquired two new pieces
of intelligence ; first, that the laurel was a symbol of eminence, and
that his master was an emineiit man, of both which facts ho had
been before very innocently ignorant."
It may be supposed that, during the summer, Wordsworth being
in the very centre of a region swarming with tourists and hunters
of the picturesque, and in the very highway of their route, wafi
regularly beset by them. Day after day brought up whole troops
652 WORDSWORTH.
of them from every quarter of these kiugdoins, and no few from
America. Tho worthy old man professed a good deal of annoyance
at being thus lionized, but it was an annoyance which obviously had
its agreeable side. No one can doubt that it would have been a far
greater annoyance if, after a life devoted to poetry, people, in quest
of " the sublime and beautiful," had hurried past, scoured over all
the hiUs and dales, and passed unnoticed the poet's gate. As it was,
he had an ever-swinging censer of the flattery of public curiosity
tossing at his door. Note after note was sent in, the long levee
continued from day to day — the aged minstrel voted it a bore, and
quietly enjoyed it.
Some years ago, Mrs. Howitt and myself spending a few days
there, we witnessed a curious scene of this kind. The servant
came in, announcing that a gentleman and a large party of ladies
wished to see the place. " Very well, they can see it," said Mr:
Wordsv/orth.
" But the gentleman wished to see you, Sir." " Who is it ? — Did
he give his name 1 " " No, Sir." " Then ask him for it."
The servant went, and returned, saying, " The gentleman said
that he knew Mr. Wordsworth's name very well, as everybody did,
but that Mr. Wordsworth would not know his if he sent him his
card."
" Then say, I am sorry, but I cannot see him."
The servant once more disappeared, and the poet broke forth into
a declamation on the bore of these continual and importunate, not
to say impudent, visits. In tho midst of it the servant entered.
" Well, what did he say ? "
" That he had had the honour to shake hands with the Duke of
Wellington, and that his last remaining wish in life was to shake
hands with Mr. Wordsworth."
This was too good. The poet rose, laughing heartily. Mrs. and
Miss Dora Wordsworth, laughing as heartily, gently seized him, each
by an arm, and merrily pushed him out of the room. In another
minute, we beheld the worthy host bowing to the man who pos-
sessed such irresistible rhetoric, and to his large accompaniment of
ladies, and doing the amiable, by pointing out to them the prominent
beauties of the view.
The life of Wordsworth is not yet written. It is not in the mere
family memoir that you see the complete man — the man, as well as
the poet and philosopher — the man in his daily habits, and in the
character which he presented to those constantly about him. What-
ever may be the ideal of a poet, " a man's a man for a' that ; " and
it is that genuine, domestic, and homely view of him, combined
with our conception of his genius, which we always wish to acquire,
and so rarely do, from the limnings of filial or kindred biographers,
■who are generally anxious to present us, not a mortal man, but
a hero. The son of Crabbe is an admirable exception to this rule,
and he has given lis numerous traits of his father which make us
smile, but only heighten our regard. And an abundance of such traits
had Wordsworth, not yet to be met with in any biography. He was,
WORDSWORTH. 5o3
with all his solemnity and his poetry, a plain man. He did not
walk his mountains in stilts, but in good hob-nailed shoes, often
with a grey shepherd's plaid on his shoulders, and a broad straw
hat, or a simple cloth c-tp, on his head. You might have taken him
for a good honest old countryman, and it would only be by entering
into conversation with him that you would discover the man of
great mind.
In truth, no man ever devoted a whole life so thoroughly, so
exclusively to his art, as did Wordsworth. It was his one and per-
petual employment. His distributorship of stamps went on with
scarcely a thought from him. To ramble up and down his moun-
tain-glens, humming over and shaping his poetry, w^as his life-long
business. Like almost all poets, he was an actual humming-bird ;
that is, he went about perpetually humming aloud the verses
which he was making. By this hum you might find him at any
time if he were on the premises.
By his habit of living almost wholly apart from society, and
dwelling in his own mental perceptions, he had certainly acquired
a very cold and solemn exterior. His whole soul, and the totality of
his .sympathies, appeared centred in himself. That he did sympa-
thise with other men you had to learn from his w-ritings. He had,
midoubtedly, a very serious conviction that he was nearly the sole,
and certainly far the most exalted poet in England. Hogg has
recorded, in infinite disgust, his undisguised disjilay of this feeling
in the presence of himself and John Wilson; and though Wilson
was the man who, hj chalking up the praises of Wordsworth regularly
and for a long time in Blackwood, as Warren used to chalk iip his
blacking, did really stem the tide of public ridicule, and accelerate
liis popularity, we nowhere perceive in Wordsworth, as we have
stated, a reciprocation of this generous feeling, and AVilson is scarcely
mentioned in the whole Life of AVordsworth, though they lived many
j^ears within a few miles of each other. Nay, no one could be long in
Wordsworth's company without discovering that he was affected by
a deep jealousy of the great fame of Sir Walter Scott, and delighted
to depreciate his claims to it, as is very truly noticed by Moor'
in his Journal.
On the other hand, never was he so happy as when detaihng the
merits of William Wordsworth, or reading you his poetry ; and if
you expressed an approbation of any passage, he would say, " Ha !
do you like that?" and read it you again. Egotism in him was
become a simple and unconscious egotism. Yet in the most ordinary
or unceremonious hours of life he never seemed to relax his stately
solemnity, and this sometimes gave an irresistibly ludicrous charac-
ter to his proceedings. Emerson has given a laughable account of
his breaking out and declaiming to him some of his verses in school-
boy style, and his appearance rendered the more strange by his green
goggles. _ ....
If you sat down and entered into earnest conversation with lum,
Mrs. Wordsworth would come very quickly and seat herself on the
other side of him. She would bring a great basket of .stockings to
551 vrOEDSWORTH.
ineiul, or would pull off her slipper and begin stitching it. She said
that her object on these occasions was to prevent his forgetting to
breathe ; but you soon discovered another cause. Leigh Hunt
observed, even in his youth, that he had a habit of putting his hand
into his waistcoat bosom when engaged in argument, and seeming
to clutch at himself as he became earnest. This had grown so much
upon him, that if not prevented he would soon pull his shirt quite
out at his bosom. A hint from time to time by his watchful spouse
prevented this catastrophe.
A lady who spent a considerable time at Rydal Mount was, soon
after going there, rather astonished at this incident. They were
sitting by each other in Grasmere church, to which they had walked,
when the poet, taking the skirt of her dress, and sjireading it over
his knees, whispered to her, " Excuse me, but I forgot to put on my
drawers this morning, and I find it very cold."
On another occasion, as they were walking up the mountain side
behind Rydal Mount, the poet wrapped in his grey plaid, and wear-
ing a remarkably broad hat, and still more remarkable pair of green
spectacles, was haranguing on his poetry in a high and solemn strain,
when suddenly he disappeared. The lady, in amazement, looked
round, but she could perceive nothing but a very rapid motion and
whirling of the dead leaves which filled a ravine beneath her, till, at
length, she saw Wordsworth roll out of these leaves at the bottom
of the glen. He had set his foot, not upon solid ground, but on this
delusive accumulation of leaves, and had spun down the ravine
through them to the valley below.
The lady hastened in alarm down the hill side as well as she coidd,
and inquired if he was hurt. To all appearance he was greatly so.
He stood motionless, dark and solemn ; but to her anxious inquiry,
lie replied, raising his finger in a most imposing manner, in a deep
and serious tone, " Promise me, that while I live you will never men-
tion this circumstance. Px'omise — promise faithfully." fie did not
say why he extorted this great promise, but the lady felt that it waa
because he considered his dignity at stake.
But Rogers once told me a still more amusing occurrence, and ap-
peared to enjoy the relation of it greatly. Soon after being appointed
poet laureate, he said, Wordsworth being in town, and his guest,
came in one day in great trepidation, exclaiming, " What is to be
done ? 1 have received the commands of her Majesty to attend the
levee to-morrow. I never was at court in my life, and what is worse,
1 have no other dress than this in town!" an ordinary morning
costume, of not the most fashionable cut. " Oh ! never mind,"
said Rogers, " I'll tog you out. And so," he continued, " we stuffed
him into my court suit, as well as we could ; but, as he was a much
larger man than me, that was no easy matter. However, by dint of
labour, we did it. He was buttoned up as tight as a beetle in its
shell, and away I sent him in my carriage."
The next day a lady called, and was talking over the incidents of
the levee. "But of all things," she said, " I would like to know who
that venerab'e old gentleman was, who knelt so lOug before the
■WORDSWORTH. 555
Queen. Her Majesty smiled most graciously upon him, and there
the old gentleman remained, as though he would never get up."
" Ah, madam ! " said Rogers, laughing, " he -would have been glad
enough to get up, I can tell you. That was Wordsworth ; but he had
my breeches on, and they were so tight for him, that he was actually
in despair of ever rising to his feet again."
These are simple incidents which might occur in any one's life ;
but it is the characteristic solemnity of Wordsworth's demeanou;
which gives them a peculiar force. To Scott or Campbell, or Joht
Wilson, who with all their reputation could indulge in whim and
merriment, they would have been but the laughter of the moment.
And who thinks one whit the worse of Wordsworth for such amusing
occurrences '? He is not the less the great poet, but he is far more
the actual man of flesh and blood. It is when we discover that he
was like ourselves, had his little oddities and foibles, that we ap-
proach nearer to him. He ceases to be to us a mere picture or statue,
a mere walking phantasm amongst his mountain mists, and we now
feel the pulsation in his extended hand, and know that his blood has
warmth in it.
It is well known that the dread of a railroad into the lake country
alarmed Wordsworth into the firing off a sonnet against it, and that
his annoyance was increased by the launch of a steam-boat on Win-
dermere. There is some mitigation of our surprise, that the poet
who knew and had so well described the nuisances of cities and
manufacturing towns, should thus see with disgust the beautiful and
breezy region of the lakes laid open to them, when we know that
this railroad was proposed to be carried close under his beloved re-
tirement ; but still it was befitting the generosity of the man, who
had, in so many forms, given us an interest in the toil-worn and the
lowly, to be prepared to make some sacrifice of that quiet which he
had so long and so richly enjoyed, to the spread of health and rational
pleasure amongst the humble workers of the mill ; remembering his
own impressive words : —
'• Turn to private life
And social neighbourhood: look we to ourselves;
A light of duty shines on every day
For all, and yet how few are wanned or cheered I "
None of our poets had ampler opportunities of expanding their
intellectual hoi'izon, and storing their minds with various and
sublime imagery by travel, than AV^ords worth. He made numerou-s
tours in Italy, France, Germany, and into all the finest parts of these
islands. One of the haunts of Wordsworth must not be omitted, that-
of Coleorton, the seat of his friend. Sir George Beaumont, the artist,
in Leicestenshire, where there are several memorials with inscripiion.s
by the poet, erected in the grounds, commemorating his visits theiv;.
Wordsworth lost his very interesting daughter, Dora, before his
own death. She was married to Mr. Quillinan in 1841, and died in
1847. His brother. Dr. Wordsv.-orth, Master of Trinity College,
Cambridge, died in 184G, and the poet closed his own career in
1850, on the twenty-third of April, the day of Shakspeare's birth
and death, having just completed his eightieth year.
::,;**
^^«...5^^ife::^l|;
JAMES MONTGOMERY.
SnEFriELD lias been poetically fortunate. It has had the honour,
not to give birtli to two eminent poets — a mere accident, but to
produce them. Neither Montgomery nor Elliott was born in Shef-
field ; but there their minds, tastes, and reputations grew. In both
poets are strongly recognisable the intellectual features of a manu-
facturing town. They are both of a popular and liberal tendency
of mind. They, or rather their spirits and characters, grew amid
the physical sufferings and the political struggles of a busy and
high-spirited population, and by these circumstances all the elements
of freedom and patriotism were strengthened to full growth in their
bosoms. Montgomery came upon the public stage, both as a poet
and a political writer, long before Elliott, though the difference of
their ages was not so gi-eat as might be supposed from this fact,
being only about ten years.
It is not my object in this article to compare or to contrast the
intellectual characters of i.hese two genuine poets. They are widely
different. In both, the spirit of freedom, of progress, of sympathy
with the miUtitude, and of steady antagonism to oppression, manl-
iest themselves, but with much difference of manner. Both possess
great vigour, and fervour of feeling ; but in James Montgomery the
decorums of style are more strictly preserved. We feel that ho
received his education in a very different school to that of Ebenezer
SIONTGOMERT. 557
Elliott. Ill the still halls and gardens of the Moravian brethren,
Montgomery imbibed the softness of bearing, and that peculiarly
religious tone, which distinguish him. Amidst the roughest and
often most hostile crowd of struggling life, Elliott acquired a more
fiery and battling aspect, and he learned involuntarily to thunder
against evils, where Montgomery would reason and lament. Yet it
would be difficult to say iu which all that characterises real patriot-
ism, and real religion, most truly resides. In very different walks
they both did gloriously and well, and we will leave to others to decide
which is the greater poet of the two. Elliott, by both circumstance
and temperament, was led to make his poetry bear more directly
and at once vipon the actual condition of the working classes ; Mont-
gomery displayed more uniform grace, and iu lyrical beauty far
surpassed his townsman, though not in the exquisite harmony of
many portions of his versification. But they are not now to be
compared, but to be admired ; and nothing is more beautiful than
to find in what tone and manner they spoke of each other. Mont-
gomery gave Ebenezer Elliott the highest praise for his genius, and
was for years, in the Iris, the only one who could or would see the
merit of the great but unacknowledged bard ; while Elliott modestly
dedicated his poem of '' Spirits and Men " to the author of The
World before the Flood, " as an evidence of his presumption and
his despair."
James Montgomery had a strictly religious education ; he was the
son of religious jiarents, and belonged to a preeminently religious
body, the Moravian brethren ; and the spirit of that parentage,
education, and association, is deeply diffused through all that he has
written. He was essentially a religious poet. Perhaps there are no
lyrics in the language which are so truly Christian ; that is, which
breathe the same glowing love to God and man, without one tinge
of the bigotry that too commonly eats into zeal as rust into the
finest steel. We have no dogmas, but a pui-e and heavenly atmo-
sphere of holy faith, filial and fraternal affection, and reverence of the
great Architect of the universe, and of the destinies of man. There
is often a tone of melancholy, but it is never that of doubt. It is
the sighing of a sensitive heart over the evils of life ; but ever and
anon this tone rises into the more animated one of conscious
strength and well-placed confidence ; and terminates in that pa;an
of happy triumph to which the Christian only can ascend. There
is no " dealing damnation round the land" in the religious poetry of
James Montgomery ; we feel that he has peculiarly caught the genuine
spirit of Christ ; and a sense of beauty and goodness, and of the
glorious blessedness of an immortal nature, accompanies us through
all his works. That is the spirit which, more than all othei-, dis-
tinguishes his lyrical compositions ; and how many, and how beau-
tiful are they! as, The Grave, The Joy of Grief, Verses on the Death
of Joseph Brown, a prisoner for conscience' sake in York Castle,
commencing, " Spirit, leave thine house of clay ;" The Common Lot,
Prayer, The Harp of Sorrow, The Dial, 'Jlie Mole-hill, The Peak
Mountains, A Mother's Love, those noble Stanzas to the ]\Iemory ui
568
MONTGOMERY
the Eev. Thomas Spencer, The Alps, Fricuds, Night, and many others
in the same volunio with the Pelican Island, perhaps some of them
the most beautiful and spiritual things he ever wrote. The poetry
of Montgomery is too familiar to most readers, and especially reli-
giously intellectual readers, to need much quotation here ; but a few
stanzas may be ventured upon, and will of themselves more forcibly
indicate the peculiar features of his poetical character, than much
prose description.
The opening stanzas on the death of Thomas Spencer embody hia
very creed and doctrine as a poet.
".I will not sing a mortal's praise,
To thee I consecrate my lays,
To whom my powers belong;
These gifts upon thine altar thrown,
O God ! accept ; — accept thine own :
My gifts are Thine, — be Thine alone
The glory of my song.
■' In earth and ocean, sky and air,
All that is excellent and fair,
Seen, felt, or understood.
From one eternal cause descends.
To one eternal centre tends,
With God begins, continues, ends,
The source and stream of good.
" I worship not the Sun at noon,
The wandering Stars, the changingMoon,
The Wind, the Flood, the Flame ;
I will not bow the votive knee
To Wisdom, Virtue, Liberty ;
' There is no God but God,' for me :
— Jehovah is his name.
" Him through all nature I explore,
Him in His creatures I adore,
Around, beneath, above;
But clearest in the human mind.
His bright resemblance when 1 find.
Grandeur with purity combined,
1 most admire and love."
It
I cannot resist transcribing one more specimen, it is one m
which the quaint but adoring spirit of Quarll, Withers, or Herripk,
seems to speak ; nor shall I ever forget the thrilling tone in which
I have heard it repeated by a sainted friend, in whom the love of
her Saviour was the very life-blood of her heart, and who resembled
him in his beneficent walk on earth as much, perhaps, as it is
possible for mortal to do.
THE STRANGKR AND HIS FRIEND.
" Ye have done it unto me." — Matt, x.'iv. 40.
" A poor wayfaring man of grief
Hath often crossed me on my way,
Who sued so humbly for relief,
Tiiat I could never answer, ' Nay : '
I had not power to ask his name,
AVhither he went or v/hence he came ;
Yet was there something in bis eye
That won my love, I knew not why.
" Once when my scanty meal was spread,
He entered ;— not a word he spake; —
.lust perishing for want of bread,
I gave him all ; he blessed it, br.ike,
x\nd ate, — but gave me part again :
Mine was an angel's portion then,
For while I fed with eager haste,
That crust was manna to my taste.
'• I spied him where a fountain burst
Clear from the rock; his strength was
gone ;
The heedless water mocked his thirst,
Jle heard it, saw it hurrying on.
I ran to raise tlie sufferer up;
Tiirice from the stream lie drained my cup,
Dipt, and returned it running o'er;
I drank, and never thir:-ted more.
'Twas night; the floods were out ; it blew
A winter hurricane aloof;
I heard his voice abroad, and flew
To bid him welcome to luy roof;
I warmed, I clothed, I cheered my guest,
Laid him on my own couch to rest ;
Then made the hearth my bed, and seemed
In Eden's garden while I dreamed.
Stript, wounded, beaten, nigh to death,
I found him by the highway side ;
] roused his pulse,brought back his breath,
Revived his spirit, and supplied
Wine, oil, refreshment : he was healed :
I had myself a wound concealed ;
But from that hour forgot the smart.
And Peace bound up my broken heai t.
' In prison I saw him next, condemned
To meet a traitor's doom at morn ;
The tide of lying tongues I stemnted.
And honoured him 'midst shame and
scorn :
My friendship's utmost zeal to try.
He asked if 1 for him would die;
The flesh was weak, my blood ran chili
But tlie free spirit cried, ' I will.'
MONTGOMERY, 553
" Then in a moment to my view,
The stranger darted from disguise ;
The tokens in his hands I knew,
My Saviour stood before mine eyes :
He spake ; and my poor name He named:
Of me thou hast not been ashamed :
These deeds shall tliy memorial be :
Fear not, thou didst them unto Me.' "
But it is nut merely in the lyrical productions of bis muse that
Montgomery has indicated the deep feeling of piety that lives as a
higher hfe in him ; in every one of those larger and very beautiful
poems, in which we might have rather supposed him bent on
indulging his literary ambition, and sitting down to a long and
systematic piece of labour, which should remain a monument of the
more continuous if not higher flights of his genius, we perceive the
same still higher object of a sacred duty towards God and man. In
no instance has he been content merely to develop his poetical
powers, merely to aim at amusing and delighting. Song has been
to him a holy vocation, an art practised to make men wiser and
better, a gift held like that of the preacher and the prophet, for the
purposes of heaven and eternity. In every one of those productions
are still recognised the zealous and devoted spirit of one of that
indefatigable and self-renouncing people, who from the earliest ages
of the Christian Church have trod the path of persecution, and won
the burning crown of martyrdom ; and in the present age continue
to send out from their still retreats in Euroi^e an increasing and
untiring succession of labourers, male and female, to the frozen
regions of the north, and to the southern wilds of Africa, to civilize
and Christianize those rude tribes, which others, bearing the Chris-
tian name, have visited only to enslave or extirpate. The Wanderer
of Switzerland, the poem which first won him a reputation, was a
glowing lyric of liberty, and denunciation of the diabolical war-spirit
of the revolutionary French. It was animated by the most sacred
love of country, and of the hallowed ground and hallowed feelings of
the domestic hearth. The West Indies was a heroic poem, on one
of the most heroic acts which ever did honour to the deci-ees of
a great nation — the abolition of the slave trade. But it was a work
not merely of triumph over what was done, but of incentive to what
yet remained to do — to the abolition of slavery itself. Time has
shown what a stupendous mustering of national powers that achieve-
ment has demanded. What a combination of all the eloquence, and
wisdom, and exertions, of all the wisest, noblest, and best men of,
j)erhaps, the most glorious period of our history, was needed !
Time has shown that the very slave trade was only abolished on
paper. That, like a giant monster, that hideous traffic laughed at
our enactments, and laughs at them still, having nearly quadrupled
the number of its atmual victims since the great contest against it
was begun. I'ut amongst those whose voices and spirit have been in
fixed and per))etual operation against this vile cannibal commerce,
none more effectually exercised their influence than James Mont-
gomery. His poem, arrayed in all the charms and graces of hia
uoble art, has been read by every genuine lover of genuine poetry,
560 MONTGOMERY.
It has sunk mto the generous heart of youth ; and who shall say h\
how many it has been in after years the unconscious yet actual
spring of that manly demand for the extinction of the wrongs of the
African, which all good men in England, and wherever the English
language is read, still make, and will make till it be finally accom-
plished ? What fame of genius can be put in competition witli iho
profomid satisfaction of a mind conscious of the godlike privilege of
aiding in the happiness of man in all ages and regions of the earth,
and feeling that it has done that by giving to its thoughts the
power and privileges of a spirit, able to enter all houses at all hours,
and stimulate brave souls to the bravest deeds of the heroism of
humanity ?
There are great charms of verse displayed in the poem of Tho
West Indies. One would scarcely have believed the subject of the
slave trade capable of them. But the genial, glowing description of
the West Indian islands, of the torrid magnificence of the interior of
xVfrica —
" Re};ions immense, nnscarchable, unknown —
Bask in the splendour of the solar zone;
A world of wonders, — where creation seems
No more tho works of Nature, but her dreams'', —
Great, wild, and wonderful."
The white villains of Europe, desecrating the name of Christian-
Spaniards, Englishmen, Frenchmen, Dutchmen, Danes, and Portu-
guese — all engaged in the brutal traffic, are sketched with the same
\igorous pencil ; but the portraiture of the Creole is a master-piece,
and I quote it because it still is not a mere picture, but a dreadful
reality.
" Lives tliere a reptile baser than the slave ?
— Loathsome as death, corrupted as the grave;
See the dull Creole, at his pompous hoard.
Attendant vassals cringing round their lord ;
Satiate with food, his heavy eye-lids close,
Voluptuous minions fan him to repose ;
Prone on the noonday couch he lolls in vain,
Delirious slumbers rock his maudlin brain ;
He starts in horror from bewildering dreams :
His bloodshot eje with tire and frenzy gleams ;
He stalks abroad ; through all his wonted rounds,
The negro trembles, and the lash resounds.
And cries of anguish, shrilling through the air.
To distant fields his dread approach declare.
Mark, as he passes, every head declined ;
Then slowly raised— to curse him from behind.
This is the veriest wretch on nature's face.
Owned by no country, spurned by every race;
The tethered tyrant of one narrow span ;
The bloated vampire of a living man :
His frame,— a fungus form of dunghill birth.
That taints the air, and rots above the earth :
His soul ; — has he a sou), whose sensual breast
Of selfish passions is a serpent's nest ? .
Who follows headlong, ignorant and blind,
The vague, brute-instinct of an idiot mind ;
W'hose heart 'mid scenes of suffering senseless gTCTa,
Even from liis mother's lap was chilled to stone ;
AVhose torpid pulse no social feelings move ;
A stranger to the tenderness of love;
lUs motley harem charms his gloating eye,
Whore ebon, brown, and olive beauties vie :
MOXXGOMERY. ttV.l
Ilia cUildren, sprung alike from sloth and vice
Are born his slaves, and loved at market price :
Has he a soul .' — With his departing breath
A form shall hail him at the gates of death,
The spectre Conscience,— shrieking through the gloom,
' Man, we shall meet again beyond the tomb 1 ' "
There are few more pathetic passages in the English language
than these, describing the labours and the e:itinctions of the Chanb
tri bes.
" The conflict o'er, the valiant in their graves.
The wretched remnant dwindled into slaves ;
Condemned in pestilential cells to pine.
Delving for gold amidst the gloomy mine.
The sufferer, sick of life-protracting breath,
Inhaled with joy the fire damp blast of death ;
— Condemned to fell the mountain palm on high.
That cast its shadow from the evening sky.
Ere the tree trembled to his feeble stroke,
The woodman languished, and his heartstrings broke;
— Condemned in torrid noon, with palsied hand,
To urge the slow plough o'er the obdurate land,
The labourer, smitten by the sun's iierce ray,
A corpse along the unfinished furrow lay.
O'erwhelmed at length with ignominious toil,
.Mingling their barren ashes with the soil,
Down to the dust the Charib people passed,
Like autumn foliage, withering in the blast ;
The whole race sunk beneath the oppressor's rod.
And left a blank among the works of God.''
When we bear in mind that these beautiful passages of poetry are
not the mere ornamental descriptions of things gone by and done
with; but that, though races are extinguished, and millions of
negroes, kidnapped to supply their loss, have perished in their
misery, the horror.s and outrages of slavery remain, spite of all we
liave done to put a,n end to them, — we cannot too highly estimate the
productions of the muse which are devoted to the cause of theso
children of misery and sorrow, nor too oft n return to their perusal.
In the World before the Flood, and Greenland, the same great
purpose of serving the cause of virtue is equally conspicuous. The
one relates the contest.s and triumphs of the good over the vicious
in the antediluvian ages, and is full of the evidences of a fine imagi-
nation and a lofty piety. Many think this the greatest of Mont-
gomery's productions. It abounds with beauties which we must not
allow ourselves to particularize here. In Greenland he celebrates
the missionary labours of the body to which his parents and his
brother belonged. In the Pelican Island he quitted his favourite
versification, the heroic, in which he displays so much force and
harmony, and employed blank verse. There is less human interest
in this poem, but it is, perhaps, the most philosophical of his
writings, and gives great scope to his imaginative and descriptive
powers. He imagines himself as a sort of spiritual existence,
watching the progress of the population of the world, from it3
inanimate state till it was thronged with men, and the savage began
to think, and to be prepared for the visitation of the Gospel mes-
sengers of peace and knowledge. It is obvious that vast opportunity
is thus given for the recital of the wonders, awful and beautiful,
hC>-2 MONTGOMERY.
of the various realms of nature — the growth of coral islauJs and
continents in the sea, and the varied developments of life on the
land. The last scene, with a noble savage and his grandchild, in
which the old man is smitten with a sense of his immortality,
and of the presence of God, and praying, is followed in his act of
devotion by the child, is very fine. But I must only allow myself
to quote, as a specimen of the style of this poem, so different to
all others by the same author, one of its opening passages already
referred to.
" I was a spirit in tlie midst of these,
All eye, ear, thought; existence was enjoj-meiit ;
Light was an clement of life, and air
Tlie clothing of my incorporeal form, —
A form impalpahle to mortal touch.
And volatile as fragrance from the flower.
Or music in the woodlands. What the soul
Can make itself at pleasure, that I was ;
A child in feeling and imagination ;
Learning new lessons still, as Nature wrought
Her wonders in my presence. All I saw.
Like Adam, when he walked in Paradise,
1 knew and named by secret intuition.
Actor, spectator, sullerer, each in turn,
I ranged, explored, reflected. Now I sailed
And now I soared; anon, expanding, seemed
DifTused into immensity, yet bound
Within a space too narrow for desire.
The mind, the mind, perpet\ial themes must task,
Perpetual power impel and ho[ie allure.
I and the silent sun were here alone,
But not companions ; high and bright he held
His course; I gazed with admiration on him —
There all communion ended ; and I sighed
To feel myself a wanderer without aim,
An exile amid splendid desolation,
A prisoner with infinity surrounded."
James Montgomery was born November 4, 1771, in the little town
of Irvine, in Ayrshire ; a place which has also had the honour of
giving birth to John Gait, and of being for about six months the
abode of Robert Burns, when a youth, who was sent there to learn
the art and mystery of flax-dressing, but his master's shop being
burnt, he quitted Irvine and that profession at the same time. The
house in which Burns resided does not seem to be now very posi-
ti's ely known, but it was in the Glasgow Vennel. The house where
Montgomery was born is well known. It is in Halfway-street, and
was pointed out to me by the zealous admirer and chronicler of all
that belongs to genius, Mr. Maxwell Dick, of Irvine, in whose pos-
session are some of the most interesting of the autograjih copies of
Burns's Poems, especially the Cotter's Saturday Night.
The house of Montgomery, at the time of his birth and till his
fifth year, was a very humble one. His father was the Moravian
minister there, and probably had not a large congregation. We
know how the ministers of this pious people will labour on in the
most physically or morally desolate scene, if they can hope but to
win one soul. The cottage is now inhabited by a common weaver,
and consists of two rooms only, on the ground floor, one of which is
occupied by the loom. The chapel, which used to stand opposite,
MONTGOMERY. 563
is now pulled dowu. This cottage is located in a narrow alley, back
ftom the street. When sixty years of age, the poet visited his
birthplace, and was received there by the provost and magistrate;^
of the town with great honour; in his own words, "the heart of all
Irvine seemed to be moved on the occasion, and every soul of it,
old and young, rich and poor, to hail me to my birthplace." Accom-
panied by his townsmen, he visited the cottage of his birth, and
was surprised to find the interior marked by a memorial of his
having been born there. Mr. Dick, who was present on this occa-
sion, said, that no sooner had he entered the first room, which used
to be, as it is still, the sitting-room, than the memory of his child-
hood came strongly back upon him, and he sat down and recounted
various things which he recollected of the apartment, and of what
had taken place in it.
The year after this visit to his birthplace, Montgomery received
an official letter from the authorities, stating that, as the town-chest
contained one of the original manuscripts of the poet Burns, it was
requested that he would enrich this depository with a similar gift.
He accordingly sent them the original copy of The World before the
Flood in manuscript, which is there preserved.
In his fifth year he returned with his parents to Grace Hill, a
settlement of the Moravian Brethren, near Ballymena, in the county
of Antrim, in Ireland ; and where his parents had resided previously
to the year of the poet's birth. When between six and seven he
was removed to the seminary of the Brethren at Fulneck, in York-
shire. In the year 1783 his parents were sent out as missionaries
to the West Indies, to preach to the poor slave the consolirjg doctrine
of another and a better world, "where the wretched hear not the
voice of the oppressor," and " where the servant is free from Ins
master." There they both died. One lies in the island of Barba-
does, the other in Tobago.
" Beneatli the lion-star tliey .sleep,
Beyond the western deep,
And v.'hen the sun's noon-glory crests the waves,
He shines without a shadov,' on their graves."
In the Fulneck academy, amongst a people remarkable for their
ardour in religion, and their indu,stry in the pursuit of useful learn-
ing, James Montgomery received his education. He was intended
for the ministry, and his i:)receptors were every way competent to
the task of preparing him for the important office f(;r which he was
desigued. His studies were various : the French, German, Latin,
and Greek languages ; history, geography, and music ; but a desire
to distinguish himself as a poet soon interfered with the plan laid
out for him. When ten years old he began to wi'ite verses, and con-
tinued to do so with unabated ardour till the period when he quitted
Fulneck, in 1787 ; they were chiefly on religious subjects.
This early devotion to poetry, iiTcsistii)le as it was, he was wont
himself to regard as the source of many troubles. It retarded hi.s
improvement at school, he has said, and finally altered his destina-
tion in life, compelling him to exchange an almost monastic socU;-
fiyi MONTGOMEKY.
610U from society, for the hurry and bustle of a worxd, which, for i
time, seemed disposed to repay him but ill for the sacritice. It ia
not to be supposed, however, that his opinion of this change
remained the same. In whatever character James Montgomery
had performed his allottetl work in this woi'ld, I am persuaded
that he would have performed it with the same conscientious stead-
fastness. In his lieart, the si^irit of his pious parents, and of that
society in which he was educated, would have made him a faithful
servant of that Master whom he has so sincerely served. Whether
he had occupied a pulpit here, or had gone out to preach Chris-
tianity in some far-oft" and savage land, he would have been the
same man, faithful and devout. But it may well be questioned
whether in any other vocation he could have been a tenth part as
(Successfully useful as he has been. There was need of him in the
v.'orld, and he was sent thither, sjiite of parentage, education, and
himself. There was a talent committed to him that is not com-
mitted to all. He was to bo a minister of God, but it was to bo
from the hallowed chair of poetry, and not from the pulpit. There
was a voice to be raised against slavery and vice, and that voice was
to perpetuate itself on the rhythmical i^age, and to kindle thousands
of hearts with the fire of religion and liberty long after his own
was cold. There was a niche reserved for him in the temple of
poetry, which no other could occupy. It was that of a bard who,
freeing his most religious lays from dogmas, should difi'use the love
of religion by the religion of love. He himself has shown how well
he knew his appointed business, and how sacredly he had resohed
to discharge it, when, in A Theme for a Poet, he asks, —
" What monument of mind
Shall I bequeath to deathless lame,
That after-times may love my name? "
And after detailing the characteristics of the principal poetii of thi
ago, he adds : —
" Transcendent masters of the lyre i
Not to your honours I aspire ;
Humbler, yet higher views
Have touclied my spirit into flame;
The pomp of fiction I disclaim:
Fair Truth ! be thou my muse :
Reveal in splendour deeds obscure —
Abase tlie proud, exalt the poor.
" 1 sins the men who left their liome,
Amidst barbarian hordes to roam,
Who land and ocean crossed, —
Led by a load-star, marked on high
By Faith's unseen, all-seeing eye, —
To seek and save the lost;
Where'er the curse on Adam spread,
To call his offspring from the dead.
" Strong in the great Redeemer's name,
They bore the cross, despised the shairei
And, like their Master here,
Wrestled with danger, pain, distress,
Hunger, and cold, and nakedness,
And every form of fear;
To feel his love their only joy,
I'o tell that love their sole employ."
MOiS'TGOSlEKT. 56'^
The highest ambition of James Montgomery was, then, to do that by
his pen which his brethren did by word of mouth. He had not
abandoned that great object to which he had as an orphan been, as
it were, dedicated by those good men in whose hands he had been
left ; he had only changed the mode of attaining it. At the very
time that he quitted their tranquil asyhim and broke forth into the
world, he was, unknown to himself and them, following the unseen
hand of Heaven. His lot was determined, and it was not to go forth
into the wilderness of the north or south, of Labrador or South
Africa, but of the active world of England. There wanted a bold
voice, of earnest principle, to be raised against great oppressions ; a
spirit of earnest duty, to be infused into the heart of poetic litera-
ture; and a tone of heavenly faith and confidence given to the
popular harp, for which thousands of hearts were listening in vain ;
and he was the man. That was the work of life assigned to him. He
was to be still of the Unitas Fratrum — still a missionary; — and
well has he fulfilled his mission !
Fulneck, the chief settlement of the Moravian Brethren in Eng-
land, at which we have seen that Montgomery continued till his
sixteenth year, is about eight miles from Leeds. It was built about
1760, which was near the time of the death of Count Zinzendorf. It
was then in a fine and little inhabited country. It is now in a
country as populous as a town, full of tall chimneys vomiting out
enormous masses of soot rather than smoke, and covering the land-
scape as with an eternal veil of black mist. The villages are like
towns for extent. Stone and smoke are equally abundant. Stone
houses, door-posts, window-frames, stone floors, and stone stairs, nay,
the very roof's are covered with stone slabs, and when they are new,
are the most completely drab buildings. The factories are the same.
Where windows are stopped up, it is with stone slabs. The fences
to the fields are stone walls, and the gate-posts are stone, and the
stiles are stones reared so close to one another, that it is tight work
getting through them. Not a bit of wood is to be seen except the
doors, water-spouts, and huge water-butts, which are often hoisted
in front of the house on the level of the second floor, on strong stone
rests. The walls, as well as wooden frames in the fields, are clothed
with long pieces of cloth, and wom§n stand mending holes or
smoothing off knots in them, as they hang. Troops of boys and
girls come out of the factories at meal times, as blue as so many little
blue devils, hands, faces, clothes, all blue from weaving the fresh dyed
yarn. The older mill girls go cleaner and smarter, all with coloured
iiandkerchiefs tied over their heads, chiefly bright red ones, and look
very continental. Dirty rows of children sit on dirty stone door-
sills, and there arc strong scents of oat cake, and CJenoa oil, and oily
yarn. There is a general smut of l)laekness over all, even in the very
soil and dust. And Methodist chapels, — Salems and Ebonezers, —
are seen on all hands. Who that has ever been into a cloth-weaving
district, does not see the place and peojilc 1
Well, up to the very back of Fulneck, throng these crowds and
attributes of cloth manufacturing. Leaving the coach and the high
566 MONTGOMERY,
road, I walked on ilirce miles to tlie left, through this busy smoke-
land, then through a large village, and then over some fields. Every-
where were the features of a fine country, but like the features of
the people, full of soot, and with volumes of vapour rolling over
them. Coming, at length, to the back of a hill, I saw emerging close
under my feet a long row of stately roofs, with a belfry, or cupola,
crowned with a vane in the centre. These were the roofs of the
Moj'avian settlement of Fulneck, the back of which was towards me,
and the front towards a fine valley, on the opposite slope of which were
Ttoble woods, and a stately old brick mansion. That is the house, and
that the estate of a Mr. Tempest, who will have no manufactory on
his land. This is the luckiest tempest that was ever heard of; for it
keejis a good open space in front of Fulneck clear, though it is
elbowed up at each end, and backed up behind with factories, and
workpeople's houses ; and even beyond Mr. Tempest's estate you
see other tall soot-vomiting chimneys rearing themselves on other
ridges ; and the eternal veil of Cimmerian smoke-mist floats over the
fair, ample, and beautifully wooded valley, lying between the settle-
ment and these swarthy apparitions of the manufacturing systen>
which seem to long to step forward and claim all — ay, and finally to
turn Fulneck into a weaving mill, as they probably will one day.
The situation, were it not for these circumstances, is fine. It has
something monastic about it. The establishment consists of one
range of buildings, though built at various times. There are tht
school, chapel, master's house, &c., in the centre, of stone, and a
sisters' and brothers' house, of brick, at each end, with various
cottages behind. A tine broad terrace-walk extends along the
front, a furlong in length, being the length of the buildings ; from
which you may form a conception of the stately scale of the
place, which is one-eighth of a mile long. From this descend the
gardens, play-grounds, &c , down the hill for a great way, and pri-
vate walks are thence continued as far again, to the bottom of the
valley, where they are farther continued along the brook side,
amongst the deep woodlands. The valley is called the Tong valley ;
the brook the Tong ; and Mr. Tempest's house, on the opposite
slope, Tong hall.
At the left hand, and as you stand in front of the building, look-
ing over the valley, lies the burial-ground, or, as they would call it
in Germany, the " Friedhof," or court of peace. It reminded mo
much of that of Herrnhut, except that it descends from you, instead
of ascending. It is covered with a rich green turf, is planted round
and down the middle with sycamore trees, and has a cross walk, not
two or three, like Herrnhut. I asked Mr. Wilson, the director, who
walked with me, whether this arrangement had not originally a
meaning — these walks forming a cross. He said, he believed it had,
and that the children were buiied in a line, extending each way
from the centre perpendicular walk, along the cross walk, from u
sentimental feeling that they were thus laid peculiarly in the arms
of Jesus, and in the protection of his cross. The grave-stones are
laid flat, just as at TIernihut and of the same size and fashion. Here,
JiOKTGOilERt. 6C7
howevef, we miss the central row of venerable tombs of the Zinzen-
dorf family, and those simple memorial stones lying aroimd them,
every one of which bears a name of patriarchal renown in the annals
of this society of devoted Christians. Yet even here we cannot
avoid feeling that we walk amid the ashes of the faithful descendants
of one of the most remarkable and most ancient branches of God's
church, whose history Montgomery has so impressively Mkctched in
a few lines : —
'• When Europe languished in barhariaii gloom,
Beneath the ghostly tyranny of Rome,
Whose second empire, cowled and mitred, burst
A phoenix from the ashes of the first ;
From persecution's piles, by bigots fired,
Among Bohemian mountains Truth retired.
There, midst rude rocks, in lonely glens obscure.
She found a people, scattered, scorned, and poor ;
A little flock through quiet valleys led,
A Christian Israel in the desert fed ;
While roaming wolves that scorned the shepherd's liand,
Laid waste God's heritage through every land.
With these the lovely exile sojourned long ;
Soothed by her presence, solaced by her song,
They toiled through danger, trials, and distress,
A band of virgins in the wilderness,
AVith burning lamps, amid their secret bowers,
Counting the watches of the weary hours,
In patient hope the Bridegroom's voice to hear,
And see his banner in the clouds appear.
But when the morn returning chased the night.
These stars that shone in darkness, sunk in li.Lht.
Luther, like Phosphor, led the conquering day,
His meek forerunners waned, and passed away.
" Ages rolled by ; the turf perennial bloomed
O'er the lorn relics of those saints entombed;
No miracle proclaimed their power divine.
No kings adorned, no pilgrims kissed their shrine;
Cold and forgotten, in the grave they slept :
But God remembered them : — their P'ather kept
A faithful remnant ; o'er their native clime
His Spirit moved in his appointed time;
'J'he race revived at his Almighty breath,
A seed to serve him from the dust of death.
' Go forth, my sons, through heathen realms proclaim
Mercy to sinners in a Saviour's name.'
'Thus spake the Lord ; they heard and they obeyed ;
— Greenland lay wrapped in nature's heaviest shade;
Thither the ensign of the cross they bore ;
The gaunt barbarians met them on the shore
With joy and wonder, hailing from afar,
Througli polar storms, the light of Jacob's star."
The internal arrangements of the establishments are just the same
as at all their settlements. The chapel, very much like a Friend.s'
meeting-house, only having an organ ; and the bed-rooms of the chil-
dren are large, ventilated from the roof, and furnished with the same
rows of single curtainless beds, with wtiite coverlets, reminding yon
of the sleeping rooms of a nunnery.
My reception, though I took no introduction, was most kind anc'
cordial. The brethren have here about seventy boys and fifty girls^
as pupils, who had just returned from the Midsummer holidays,
and were, many of them, very busy in their gardens. As T lieard
Life's MONTGOltEKT.
their meriy voices, and caught the glance of their bright eago.i* eyes
amongst the trees, I wondered how many would look back hereafter
to this quiet sweet lAacc, and exclaim, with the poet who first met
the muse here, —
" Days of my childhood, liail !
Whose geiith; spirits wandering here,
Uown in the visionary vale
Hefore mine eyes appear,
Benignly pensive, beautifully pale:
O days for ever lied, for ever dear.
Days of my childhood, liail ! "
AVhcu I\[ontgomory removed from Fulncck, the views of his frienda
were so far changed, that we find him placed by them in a retail
shop, at ]\[irfield, near Wakefield. Here, though he was treated with
great kindness, and had only too little business, and too much leisure
to attend to his favourite pursuit, he became exceedingly discon-
solate, and after remaining in his new situation about a year and
a half, he 2:>rivately absconded, and with less than five shillings in his
pocket, and the wide world before him, began his career in pursuit
of fixme and fortune. His ignorance of mankind, the result of his
retired and religious education, — the consequent simplicity of his
manners, and his forlorn appearance, — exposed him to the contempt
of some, and to the compassion of others, to whom he applied. The
In-illiant bubble of patronage, wealth, and celebrity, which floated
before his imagination, soon burst, and on the fifth day of his travels
he found a situation similar to the one he had left, at the village of
Wath, near Rotherham. A residence in London was the object of his
ambition ; but wanting the means to carry him thither, he resolved
to remain in the country till he could procure them. Accordingly,
he wrote to his friends amongst the Moravian Brethren, whom he
had forsaken, requesting them to recommend him to his new master,
conscious that they had nothing to allege against him, excepting the
imprudent step of separating himself from them ; and not being
under articles at Mirfield, he besought them not to compel him to
return. He received fx'om them the most generous propositions of
forgiveness, and of an establishment more congenial to his wishes.
This he declined, frankly explaining the causes of his late melan-
choly, but concealing the ambitious motives which had secretly
prompted him to withdraw from their benevolent protection. Fincl-
ing him unwilling to yield, they supplied his immediate necessities,
and warmly recommended him to the kindness of the master he had
chosen. It was this master, with whom he remained only twelve
months, that, many years afterwards, in the most calamitous period
of Montgomery's life, sought him out amidst his misfortunes, not
for the purpose of offering consolation only, but of serving him sub-
stantially by every means in his power. The interview which took
place between the old man and his former servant, the evening pre-
vious to his trial at Doncaster, ever lived in the I'emembrance of him
who could forget an injury, but not a kindness. No father could
liave evinced a greater affection for a darling son ; the tears he shed
MONTGOJrRRT. 5G9
fvere lionourable to his feelings, aud were the best testimony to the
conduct and integrity of James Montgomery.
A curious incident, -svorth relating here, is told in Holland and
Everett's life of- the poet, as occurring at the time when he waited at
Wath for his testimonials from Fulneck, before being engaged by his
new master. Aware of the proximity of Wentworth House, and
having heard of the affable and generous character of its noble
ownei", Earl Fitzwilliam, the young adventurer conceived the idea of
presenting him with a copy of verses. Accordingly, with a fluttering
heart in his bosom, and a fairly-transcribed copy of his poem in his
]:)0cket, he proceeded to Wentworth Park, where he had the good
fortune to meet his lordship. The verses were presented, read by
the Earl on tlie spot, and in return the young poet received a golden
guinea — the first money which his poetry procured for him.
From AVath he removed to London, having prepared his way by
sending a volume of his manuscript poems to Mr. Harrison, then
a bookseller in Paternoster-row. Mr. Harrison, who was a man of
correct taste and liberal disposition, received him into his house,
and gave him the greatest encouragement to cultivate his talents,
but none to publish his poems ; seeing, as he observed, no probability
that the author would acquire either fame or fortune by appearing
at that time before the public. The remark was just ; but it con-
veyed the most unexpected and afflicting information to our youthful
poet, who yet knew little of the world, except from books, and who
had permitted his imagination to be dazzled with the accounts which
be had read of the splendid success and magnificent patronage which
poets had formerly experienced. He was so disheartened by this
circumstance, that, on occasion of a misunderstanding with Mr. Har-
rison, he, at the end of eight months, quitted the metropolis, and
returned to Wath, where he vras received with a hearty welcome by
his former employer. While in London, having been advised to turn
his attention to prose, as more profitable than verse, he composed an
Eastern story, which he took one evening to a publisher in the east
end of the town. ' Being directed through the shop, to the private
room of the great man, he presented his manuscript in form. The
prudent bookseller read the title, marked the number of pages,
counted the lines in a page, and made a calculation of the whole ;
then, turning to the author, who stood in astonishment at this
summary mode of deciding on the merit of a work of imagination,
he very civilly returned the copy, saying, — " Sir, your manuscript is
too small — it won't do for me ; take it to K , he publishes those
kind of things." ^lontgomery retreated Avith so much confusion
from the presence of the bookseller, that, in passing through ihe
shop, he dashed his unfortunate head against a patent lamp, broke
tho glass, spilt the oil, and, making an awkwai'd apology to the
shopmen, who stood tittering behind the counter, to the no small
mortifiGation of the poor author, ho rushed into the street, equally
unable to restrain his vexation or his laughter, and retired to his
home, filled with chagi-in at this ludicrous and untoward misfortune.
On his journey from London to Wath, which was made in one of tho
670 Montgomery,
heavy coaches of those days, Montgomery was so much struck by
the countenance and appearance of his vis-a-vis traveller, that the im-
pression never left his mind. He was stern and silent, with a gloomy
visage, like that of a Cortes or Pizarro. His figure was tall and thin ;
he had an ati-abilious countenance, with a spasmodic twitching of
the muscles of the face, and a blue beard reaching almost to his keen
eyes, from the occasional glances of which Montgomery shrank as
from the fascination of a rattlesnake. " He was," said Montgomery,
" precisely one of those persons whom you feel it would be unsafe
to offend." On the arrival of the coach at Nottingham, this mys-
terious stranger left it, and Montgomery read upon the label of his
portmanteau, " Hon. Captain Byron." No doubt, therefore, that this
remarkable individual was no othei than the father of the after-
wards celebrated poet Lord Byron, and who was on his way to
Newstead Abbey.
From Wath, where Montgomery had sought only a teinporary
residence, he removed in 1792, and engaged himself with Mr. Galea
of Sheffield, as an assistant in his business of auctioneer. Gales was
also a bookseller, and printed a newspaper, in which popular
politics were advocated with great zeal and ability. To this
paper Montgomery contributed essays and verses occasionally ; but
though politics sometimes engaged the service of his hand, the Muses
had his whole heart, and he sedulously cultivated their favour ;
though no longer with those false, yet animating hopes, which
formerly stimulated his exertions. In 1794, when Mr. Gales left
England, a gentleman, to whom Montgomery was an almost entire
stranger, enabled him to imdcrtake the publication of the paper on
his own account : but it was a perilous situation on which he en-
tered ; the vengeance which was ready to burst upon his predecessor
soon fell upon him.
At the i^resent day it would scarcely be believed, were it not to
be found in the records of a court of justice, that in 1795 Mont-
gomery was convicted of a libel on the war then carrying on between
Great Britain and France, by publishing, at the request of a stranger
whom he had never seen before, a song written by a clergyman of
Belfast, }ii/ie months before the tear began. This fact was admitted in
the court ; and though the name of this country did not occur in
the libel, nor was there a single note or comment of any kind what-
ever affixed to the original words, which were composed at the
time and in censure of the Duke of Brunswick's proclamation and
march to Paris, he was pronounced guilty, and sentenced to three
months' imprisonment, and a fine of twenty pounds. Mr. M. A.
Taylor presided on this occasion. The first verdict delivered by
the jury, after an hour's deliberation, was " Guiltij of publishing.'''
This verdict, tantamount to an acquittal, they were directed to
reconsider, and to deduce the malicious intention, not from the
circumstances attending tho publication, but from the words of
t!ie song. Another hour's deliberation produced the general verdict
of " Gmlly"
Scarcely had Jlontgomery, then but about twenty-three years of
MONTGOMERY. 571
nge, returned to his home, when he was again called upon to answer
for another ofteuce. A riot took place in the streets of Sheffisld, in
which, unfortunately, two men were shot by the military. In the
warmth of his feelings he detailed the dreadful occurrence in his
paper. The details were deemed a libel, and he was again sentenced
to six months' imprisonment, and a fine of thirty pounds. The
magistrate who prosecuted him on this occasion is now dead, and
Montgomery would be the last man in the world who could permit
anything to be said here, in justification of himself, which might
seem to cast a reflection on the memory of one who afterguards
treated him with the most friendly attention, and promoted his
interest by every meany in his power.
The active imagination of Montgomery had induced him to sup-
pose that the deprivation of liberty was the loss of every earthly
good ; in confinement he learned another lesson, and he bore it with
fortitude and cheerfulness. In York Castle he had opportunities of
amusement, as well as leisure for study ; and he found kindness,
consolation, and friendship within the walls of a prison. Writing to
one of his friends at this time, he says of his prison companions; —
"There are four well-behaved persons, who have lived in the most
respectable circles, and seen better days ; and also eight of the people
called Quakers, who are confined for refusing to pay tithes. There
are three venerable grey-htaded men amongst them. One of the old
Quakers is my principal and best companion ; a very gay, shrewd,
cheerful man, with a heart as honest and as tender as his face is
clear and shining." Another was Joseph Brown, who afterwards
died in prison, after a confinement of two years, and in whose
memory Montgomery wrote a well-known and greatly-admired poem.
During confinement he wrote, and ]:)repared for the press, a volume
of poems, which he publish k1, in 1797, under the title of Prison
Amusements.
I went, in August, 1845, to visit York Castle, with the particular
object of seeing the room which Montgomery occupied during his
last imprisonment, and where he wrote the Prison Amusements.
" The room which I occupied," said the poet to me, " is up-stairs,
and is distinguished by a round window between two Ionic pillars,
at the end of the building nearest to the city and Clifford's tower,
and facing the Court-house." On requesting the turnkey to show
me that as the room whera Montgomery had been confined, he
assured me that it was not the room, but the true place was the
corresponding room at the opposite end of the building ; and which,
in fact, was the scene of his first imprisonment. The poet's first
imprisonment was, in many respects, the bitterest ; but it was during
the second term that the view from his window, commanding the
meadows along the Ouse, with their walks, trees, and a particular
windmill, caused in him such intense longings for liberty, that the
moment he was liberated he hurried out of the court, descended to
the Ouse, and perambulated its banks, where he had seen the people
so often walking. The poet's account of this enjoyment of hia
rastored libertv is extremelv touching : " One fine morning, in the
r)72 MONTGOMERY.
middle of April," says he, " I was liberated. Immediately I sallied
forth, and took my walk in that direction from whence, with feelings
which none but an emancipated captive can fully understand, I
looked back upon the castle walls to the window of that very chamber
from which I had been accustomed to look forward with wishful eye
and with hope, upon the ground which I was now treading with a
spring in my step, as though the very ground were elastic under my
feet. While I was thus traversing the fields, in the joy of liberty
long wished for and come at last, I diverged from the track, now to
the right, then to the left, like a butterfly fluttering here and there,
just to prove my legs that they were no longer under restraint, but
might tread where they pleased, and that I was in reality abroad iu
the world again, — not gazpg at a section of landscape over stone
walls that might not be scaled ; nor, when in the castle-yard th(i
ponderous gates or the httle wicket happened to be opened, looking
up the street from a particular point which might not be passed.
To some wise people this may appear very childish, even in such
a striphng as I then was, but the feeling was pure and natural."
The castle is spacious. It consists of buildings of different dates
and styles, and an ample court. No part of it is old, except a largo
round tower, called Clifford's Tower, which stands on a mount just
within the walls. The rest consists of four buildings. One is the
Court-house, iu which the county assizes are held, parallel with the
river Ouse, from which it is but a few hundred yards distant.
Opposite to this is what was once the felons' and crown-prisoners'
prison; a building Avith several Ionic columns in the centre, and two
at each end. This is now chiefly occupied by a turnkey's family,
and the female prisoners. The large area between these buildings is
closed at one end by the debtors' prison, and at the other by Clifford's
Tower. Between the tower and the turnkey's house just mentioned
stands the new felons' prison. This, as well as the outer court walls
and entrance gate, is built of solid stone iu castellated style. The
room occupied by Montgomery is now in the turnkey's house, and is
the bedroom of the servant.
The felons' prison is much in the shape of a fan, forming alternate
ranges of cells and court-yards, where the prisoners walk in the day-
time. The a-ssizes being just over, there were scarcely any prisoners
in the jail except those convicted and awaiting their punishments,
of which none were capital, but most of them transportation. These
men were all clothed in the convict's dress, a jacket and trousers of
coarse cloth, of broad green and yellow check. They were mostly
basking in the sun in groups, on the pavement of their respective
court-yards, and appeared anything but sad. The whole prison
seemed as if hewed out of solid stone ; and everywhere were gates
of iron, closing with a clang and a twank of the lock behind you,
which must sound anything but cheering to a prisoner just conducted
iu. The openings into the different court-yards were filled with
massy iron railing ; and the pavements, walls, everything else, was
one mass of solid stone. Many of the stones in the wail were nine
feet long, and of proportionate quadrature. The chapel presented
s
MONTGOMERY, 573
a range of partitions with strong bars, as for a wild beast's den, in
front, and doors behind, so that the prisoners from separate cells
are let in there, and cannot get sight of each other. The partition
for the women is boarded up in front, so that they are quite unseen,
except to the preacher. The windows were everywhere, as it were,
a complete network of knotted iron bars ; and the dining-rooms of
the prisoners were those long winding passages of massy stone,
along which we went to their cells. In these, with the iron gates
locked behind them, they stand at a long narrow board fixed along
the wall, about the width of a plate, and take their meals. No place
surely was at once so clean and so hopelessly ponderous and strong.
The very idea of it seemed to weigh on one like a nightmare, and
make one stretch one's-self, as for a sense of freedom.
The few women who were in prison, were, of course, convicts.
They all rose at our entrance into their room, where they were all
together, and curtsied very respectfully ; and if one were to judge
from their countenances, we could not think them very criminal.
The men seemed hardy, reckless, and inclined to be insolent, for
every word uttered in passing along these courts of solid stone was
flung back from wall to wall, and was heard in the remotest corners ;
and more than once, we heard the convicts take up our words,
imitate them in a burlesque style, and then join in laughter at their
own audacity. There were numbers of them that we should not be
glad to meet in a solitary wood. But the women, had I not known
that they were convicts, I should have regarded as a set of as decent,
modest, and honest women of the working class as one usually sees.
There was no expression of hardened guilt or gross depravity about
them. A thoroughly debased woman is one of the most revolting
objects in creation ; but how rarely is woman's nature so thoroughly
degraded ! How long do the feminine qualities of gentleness and
amiability outlive in them the temptations and incentives to crime !
How often are they the tools and victims of men, and how often and
readily might they be called back from error to the purest and most
devoted virtue !
The beds of all the prisoners were laid on iron frames, supported
oji solid stones, so that they could cut no wood from them for any
purposes of escape. Everywhere, above and below, all was stone,
stone, solid .stone, and bars of massy iron ; and yet out of even this
place there have been escapes.
But the most extraordinary scene in the whole place is an iron
cage in the lobby of the keeper's house, containing the irons of the
most signal malefactors, and the weapons with which they committed
tncir murders. There are Dick Turpin's shackles, with a massy bar
of iron, about two feet long, and more than twenty-eight pounds
weight, which were put on his legs when he had twice escaped out
of the castle ; and a girdle of iron to ])ut round his waist, with chains
and iron handcuffs for his hands. There is the most horrid collection
of hedge-stakes, huge and knotted pieces of rails, of pokers, and
hammers, of guns, and knives, and razors, with which murders have
been peqjctrated, each of which the jailer relates. There is a huge
574 MOOTGOSrERT.
piece of a spar and a heacy stone witli whicli one niurdeier destroyed
his victim. The stakes with which three men knocked out the brains
of another in a wood. There is a stone, I suppose ten pounds weight
at least, hanging by the cord which a mother put round the neck
of her infant, and sank it to the bottom of a pond. There is apiece
of the skull of Daniel Clarke, murdered, as it is said, by Eugene
Aram ; and liats battered in, or shot tlarough by the assassin. There
are iron bludgeons terminated with knobs of lead, to conceal under
coats ; and crowbars bent at the end, to force open doors. These,
with the casts of the heads of some of the most noted murderers,
foi'm a sufficiently horrible spectacle. It is a history of human
ferocity and guilt, actually written in iron and in blood, which still
dyes the dreadful instruments of its jierpetration with its dismal
iUst of death. Escaping from this exhibition, I did not do as one of
the visitors said he must go and do— get a stout glass of brandy to
rid him of his queerness ; but I did as Montgomery did on escaping
from the prison, — went and walked along the footpath by the Ouse,
under the noble elms which he had so often seen waving in their
greenness from his cell.
From the period of his imprisonment in this plpce,. Mr. Mont-
gomery continued to reside in Sheffield. For the long jjeriod of
half a century he was essentially bound up with the literary and
social progress of the place. Editing, for the greater part of that
period, the Iris newspaper, on which his name and writings conferred
a popular celebrity ; and from time to time sending forth one of
his volumes of poetry, there is no question that the influence of his
taste and liberal opinions has been greatly instrumental in the
growth of that spirit of intelligence and moral culture which highly
distinguish Sheffield. With the religious world, as was to be ex-
pected, James ]\lontgomery has always stood in high esteem, and in
the most friendly relation. Besides the works already mentioned,
Montgomery published Songs of Zion in 1822 ; Prose by a Poet,
1824 ; A Poet's Portfolio, 1835. His collected works, in three vols., in
1836. Through his own exertions, the proceeds of his pen, and a
pension of loOL a-year, in testimony of his poetic merit, the poor
orphan who set out from the little shop at Mirfield to seek fame and
fortune with less than five shillings in his pocket, for some years
retired to an enjoyment of both ; and no man ever reached the calm
sunshine of life's evening with a purer reputation, or a larger share
of the grateful affection of his townsmen, or of the honour of his
countrymen in general. One of his oldest friends, from whose written
statements I have been enabled to draw some of the facts here given,
sketched during his lifetime the following well-merited character of
James Montgomery • " It may be said, that nature never infused
into a human composition a greater portion of kindness and general
philanthropy. A heart more sensibly alive to every better, as well
HS every finer feeling, never beat in a human breast. Perhaps no
two individuals, in manners, pursuits, character, and composition,
AVer more exactly corresponded with each other, than Montgomery
and Cowper. The same benevolence of heart, the same modesty o^
MONTGOMERY. r>75
aeporttneut, the same purity of life, the same attachment to literary
pursuits, the same foneiness for solitude and retirement from the
public haunts of men ; and to complete the picture, the same ardent
feeling in the cause of religion, and the same disposition to gloom
and melancholy. His person, which is rather below the middle
stature, is neatly formed : his features have the general expression
of simplicity and benevolence, rendered more interesting by a hut'
of melancholy that pervades them. When animated by conversa
tion, his eye is uncommonly brilliant, and his whole countenance is
full of intelligence. He possesses great command of language ; his
observations are those of an acute and penetrating mind, and his
expressions are frequently strikingly metaphorical and eloquent. By
all who see and converse with him he is esteemed ; by all who know
him, he is beloved."
Strangers visiting Sheffield will have a natural curiosity to see
where Montgomery so many years resided, and whence he sent forth
his poems and his politics. That spot is in the Hartshead ; one of
the most singular situations for such a man and purpose often to be
met with. Luckily, it was in the centre of the town, and not far to
seek. Going up the High-street, various passages under the houses
lead to one common centre, — the Hartshead, — a sort of cul de sac,
having no carriage road through, but only one into it, and that not
from the main street. The shop, which used to be the Iris ofBce, is
of an odd ogee shape, at the end of a row of buildings. It has huge,
ogee-.shaped windows, with great dark-gi"een shutters. The door is
at the corner, making it a three-cornered shop. It was, at the time
of my visit, a pawnbroker's shop, the door and all round hung with
old garments. The shelves were piled with bundles of pawned
clothes, ticketed. The houses round this strange hidden court, in
which it stands, are nearly all public-houses, as the Dove and Rain-
bow, and the like, with low eating-houses, and dens of pettifogging
lawyers ; and, strange to say, even the pawnbroker's shop was after-
wards converted into another beer-house !
But, leaving the beer-house of the Hartshead, we shall find the
poet of religion and refinement residing at the Mount, on the
Glossop road, the West End of SheflSeld. It is, I suppose, at least
a mile and a half from the old Iris office, and is one regular ascent
all the way. The situation is lovely, lying high ; and there are many
pleasant villas built on the sides of the hill in their ample pleasure
grounds, the abodes of the wealthy manufacturers. The 'Movmi, par
excellence, is the house, or rather terrace, where Montgomerj' lived.
It is a large building, with a noble portico of six fine Ionic columns,
so that it seems a residence fit for a prince. It stands in ample
pleasure gi'ounds, and looks over a splendid scene of hills and valleys.
The rooms enjoy this fine prospect over the valleys of the Sheaf and
Porter, which, however, was obscured while I was there with the
fcmoke blowing from the town.
In the drawing-room hung the portrait of the Incognita, on whom
the beautiful lyric under that title was written, and which may bo
found in the S{ime volume as Greenland. As is there stated, he saw
57C MONTGOMERY.
the picture at Leamington ; it hung, in fact, iu his lodgings, ana
completely fascinated his fancy — and no wonder. It was afterwards
purchased by one of his friends, and presented to him.
It is evidently a family portrait, and is no doubt by Lely or
Kneller, probably by the latter ; at all events, by a master. It is of
the size of life, three-quarters ilgure ; a slender young lady in a pale
silk dress. She is very beautiful, and the expression of her coun-
tenance is extremely amiable. AH that Montgomery could learn
fi'om his landlady was, that it had belonged to Sir Charles Knightly
of Warwickshire ; and there can, therefore, be little doubt that this
fascinating creature, tit to insiDirc any poet, was cue of his family.
Below the mount, on the other side of the road, lie the botanic
gardens. These, stretching down the hiU-side, are charmiuglv
situated. The kind and active poet, though in his seventy-fifth year^
accompanied me to see them. You enter by a sort of Grecian
portico, and to the right hand, along the top of the gardens, see a
tine, long conservatory, in which the palms, parasitical, and other
tropical plants are in the most healthy state. The curator, a very
sensible Scotchman, seemed to have a particular pleasure in pointing
out his plants to us. What struck me most was, however, not so
much the tropical plants, as the size to which he has cultivated
certain plants which we commonly see small. The common, sweet-
scented heliotrope, in a pot, was at least five feet high, and had
a stem quite woody, and at least an inch in diameter. It formed, in
fact, a tree, and being in full bloom, filled all the conservatory with
its odour. The fuchsias wei-e the same, though this is not so unusual.
They were tied up to rods, and reaching to the very roof, formed arch-
ways hung with their crimson blossoms. The scarlet geraniums
were the .same ; had stems nearly as thick as one's wrist, and were
not, I suppose, less than twelve feet high. How much superior to
i;he dwarf state iu which we usually keep this magnificent plant !
which in Australia forms the lofty perennial hedge of gardens,
mingled with some woody shrub. The curator said that they cut
til the side branches from these plants quite close, iu the autumn
or eariy spring, and that they shoot out afresh and flower.
The gardens themselves are extensive and beautifully varied. In
one place you come to secluded waters and thickets ; in another, to
an open wide lawn, all filled with beds of every imaginable kind of
roses in glowing masses : in another, to the remains of the original
forest, with its old trees and heathery sward ; and with fine views
over the neighbouring valleys in different directions. It is a most
delightful place for walking in, and was naturally a great resort and
luxury of the poet's. We traversed it, I suppose, for a couple of
hours, and talked over a multitude of poets and poetry. At the
gate I took my adieu of James Montgomery, the most genuinely
/elio-ious poet of the age. The visitor to those pleasant gardens will
find the memory of the poet beautifully commemorated by several
trees which he j)lanted ; two of which are Chilian pines, at the
head of the principal walk, and immediately in front of the
conservatory.
MONTGOMERY. 577'
Montgomery died at tlie Mount, April 30tb, 1854, in the eighty-
third year of his age. His townspeople honoured him by a public
funeral, and he was interred in a beautiful spot of the cemetery, near
the western end of the church ; one of his own beautiful hymns
being sung over the uncovered grave, at the conclusion of the usual
burial service, by the choir of the parish church and the children of
the boys' and girls' charity-schools, to which the poet had long been
a benefactor, and to which he left bequests in his will.
With a wisdom, founded not on calculation, but on a sacred sense
of duty, Montgomery made even his ambition subservient to his
aspirations as a Christian, and he thus reared for himself a pedestal
in the poetic "VValhalla of England peculiarly his own. The longer
his fame endures, and the wider it spreads, the better it will be for"
virtue and for man.
^Ji<^YA-^.
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
Walter Savage Landor is one of the class of fortunate authors.
He was born with the silver spoon in his mouth ; and he was far
more fortunate than the host of those who are born thus ; he cared
little for the silver spoon of indulgence, and has always been ready
to help himself to his share of the enjoyment of life with the wooden
ladle of exertion. His fortune has given him all those substantial
advantages which fortune can give, and he has desj^ised its corrupt-
ing and effeminating influence. It gave him a lirst-rate education ;
a power of going over the surface of the earth at his will, of seeing
all that is worth seeing at home and abroad, of indulging the real
and true pleasure of surveying the varieties and the sublimities of
scenery, and studying the varieties and genuine condition of man.
Hence his original talent.s, which were strong, have been strengthened ;
his mind, which was naturally broad, has been expanded ; his classical
tastes have been perfected by the scenery of classic countries, while
he read the ancient works of those countries, not twisted into
pedantic oue-sidedness in monkish institutions of barren learning.
To him classical literature was but the literature of one, though of a
tine portion of the human race. He imbibed it with a feeling of
freshness where it grew, but at the same time he did not avert his
eyes from the world of to-day. It was humanity in its totality which
interested him. Hence the universality of his genius ; the healthi-
LANDOR. ^"9
ness of his tastes ; ttie soundness of his opinions. In stretching his
inquiries into all corners of the world he loosened himself from the
restrictions of sects, parties, and coteries. Born an aristocrat, he has
nevertheless remained fully conscious of the evils of aristocracy ;
educated at the schools and in the bosom of the Established Church,
he is as vividly sensible of the pride and worldliness of the hierarchy
as any dissenter, without the peculiar bigotry and narrowness of
dissent. Born a gentleman, he has felt with and for the poor ; being
interested, if men of landed estate are interested, in things remain-
inw as they are, he has announced himself, in no timid terms, for
advance, hberty, and law for the many.
These are the characteristics of the man and of his works. His
prose and his poetry, his life and his conversation, alike display
them. The man is a man of large and powerful physical frame, of a
passionate, impulsive, yet reflective mind. There is no disguise about
him. He lives, he writes, he talks, from the vigorous strength of this
great and equally developed nature, and you cannot be a day in his
society without hearing him enunciate every principle of his action,
and much of its history. His sentiments and doctrines seem con-
tinually to radiate on all around him, from the living central fire of
a heart which feels, as a sacred duty, every great truth, which the
mind has received into its settled conviction. It is therefore
astonishing, after a few hours' conversation with him, to find on
opening his works how much of his philosophy you are acquainted
with. But though you soon learn, thi'ough the noble transparency
of Landor's nature, what ai-e his principles of action, you do not
soon reach the extent of his thoughts. Those which play about his
great principles, which illustrate and demonstrate them, are endless
in their variety, and astonish you not the less by their originality
than by their correctness. His extensive range of observation
through nature, through men and things, has stored his mind with
an inexhaustible accumulation of imagery, equally beautiful and
effective. Whenever you meet with similes drawn from life or from
nature in Landor's writings, you may rely upon their accuracy.
The same accuracy marks his conclusions regarding men and
society. He is one of the few who, with the inherited means to dis-
tinguish himself in politics, to ascend in the scale of artificial life, to
acquire fame and wealth by the ordinary modes of promotion, has
reserved himself for a higher ambition, that of directing the future
rather than the present, and of living as a philosophical reformer
when the bulk of his cotemporaries are dead for ever to this world.
For this purpose he has stood aloof from the movements of ihf'
hour ; he has refused to sit in parliament ; he has gone and spent
years abroad, when shallower thinkers would presume the only jiatri-
otic position was at home ; and by these means he has qualified
himself, in various countries and various society, but chiefly through
the steady use of his faculties in poring through men and books,
and viewing them on all sides, unfettered by interest and unin-
fluenced by hope, except that of arriving at a true knowledge of
things, to speak with authoritv. From these cauar's it is, tliat thera
u 2
580 LAKDOR,
have been and there are few men who will so permanently and so
beneficially act on the progress of society as Walter Savage Landor.
The independence of his position and of his nature, his thoi-oughly
high and honourable disposition, seeking truth and hating meanness,
thus aided by the wide sphere of his observation, stamp upon his
experience the characters of indisputable truth and genuine wisdom.
He has no petty bias to any party, any school, any religious sect —
all his aspirations are for the benefit of man as man ; and whatever
comes in the way of the growth of what is intrinsically true, beau-
tiful, and benehcent, he attacks with the most caustic sarcasm ;
strikes at it with the most ponderous or trenchant weapons that he
can lay hands upon, and, careless of persons or consequences, calls on
all w'ithin hearing to help him to annihilate it. In this respect his
fortune has enabled him to do much with impunity.
He promulgates doctrines, and attacks selfish interests, ia a manner
which would, on the other hand, bring down destruction on an author
who had to live by his labours. There are critics, and those calling
themselves liberal too, who have crushed others for the very deeds
for which they have applauded and still continue to applaud Savage
Landor. Why 1 Because they know that Landor is invulnerable
through" his property. If they raised the hue and cry against him
of democrat, republican, of violent, or revolutionary, he would still
eat and drink indeisendently of them ; his books would remain, and
his position and influence would enable it at length to testify against
them. There is, moreover, a large class of critics who see principles,
when they see them at all, through the medium of a man's condition
in the world, and that which is audacious in a poor man becomes
only a generous boldness in a rich. If I were to select the opinions
of Savage Landor on half-a-dozen great questions from his works,
and quote him in all his undisguised strength upon them, I could
show half a score men of less fortune who have been immolated by
Landor's own admirers for the proclamation of these identical
opinions, or whose works have been left unnoticed because they
could not very consistently condemn in them what they had eulogized
in him ! How few men in this country can afford to be honest !
But not the less do I recognise, nor the less estimate, the sacrifices
of Landor to immortal truth. Though he could not be depi-ived of
his daily bread for his sins of plain speaking, yet he has had his
share of the malevolence of the low and selfish. The reptiles have
bitten, and no doubt have stung, at times, deeply, when he has
trodden them beneath his feet, or flung amongst them his clinging
and scalding Greek fire. But he knows that the fruit of his life will
not be lost. Already he has lived long enough to see that the tide
of opinion and reform is setting in strongly in the direction which
he has indicated. It is amazing what progress the truth has made
within the last twenty years ; and a man like Landor knows that at
every future step it must derive fresh strength from his writings
He has pandered to no corruption, he has flattered no fashion ; his
efforts are all directed to the uprooting of error and the spread of
sound reason : and therefox'e;, the more the latter prevails the more his
liANDOK. 5(S I
writings will grow into tlie spirit of tlie age. There are those who
say that Laudor's writings never can be popular. They are greatly
mistaken. There is a large reading class, every day becoming
larger, in which, were they made cheap enough, they would iind the
most lively acceptation. It is the class of the uncorrupted people
itself. His opinions, and his manly, uncompromising spirit, are
just what fall on the popular spirit like showers in summer. They
are drunk in with a thirsty avidity, and give at once life and solace.
In this respect I do not hesitate to place them amongst the very
first of the age.
The poetry of Savage Landor has not been so much read as his
prose. His Imaginary Conversations have echpsed his verse. Yet
there is great vigour, much satire, and much tender feeling in his
poems, which should render them acceptable to all lovers of_ manly
writing. His Gebir was written early. The scene lies chiefly in
Egypt, and introduces sorcerers, water nymphs, and the like cha-
racters, which might charm a youthful imagination, but are too far
removed from reality to make them general favourites. Yet there
is much line, imaginative, and passionate poetry in this composition.
His Hellenics transport you at once to the ordinary life of ancient
Greece, and are written with great force, clearness, and succinct
effect. His dramas of Count Julian, Andrea of Hungary, Giovanna
of Naples, Fra Rupert, the Siege of Ancoua, &c., are reading dramas,
very fine of their kind. They abound with splendid writing and the
noblest sentiments. Giovanna of Naples is one of the finest and
most beautiful characters conceivable ; and Fra Eupert has furnished
Landor with a vehicle for expressing his indignant contempt of a
proud, arbitrary, and hypocritical priest. There are many occasional
verses, in which the poet has expressed the feelings of the moment,
arising out of the connexions and incidents of his life ; and these arc
equally remarkable for their tenderness and their very opposite quality
of caustic satire. I must not allow myself to do more than quote a few
passages from his poetical writings, which are characteristic of the
man. This fine one occurs in the last of his Hellenics, p. 48fc), Vol. II.
of his uniform edition.
" We are what suns, and winds, and waters make us ;
The mountains are our sponsors, and the rills
Vashion and win their nurs]ini,'s with their smiles.
]5ut where the land is dim from tyranny.
There tiny pleasures occupy the place
Of glories and of duties ; as the feet
Of fabled fairies, when the sun goes down,
Trip o'er the grass where wrestlers strove hy day.
Then justice, called the Eternal One above,
Is more inconstant than the buoyant form
That burst into existence from tlie froth
Of ever-varying ocean ; what is best
Then becomes worst; what lovliest, most deformed.
The heart is hardest in the softest climes.
The passions flourish, the affections die."
Iliis true sentiment is put into the mouth of Count .Jnlin,n,- - paj;;-?
lyj'J, Vol. II.
" All men with lunuan feelings love llicir country.
^■ot the high-bom or weallliy n;an alone,
68:1 LA»iJUit.
Who looks vi])on liis children, each one led
By its gay huiidniaid from tlie hi^h alcove,
And hears them once a day ; not only he
Who hath forgotten, when his guest inq)iires
The name of some far village all liis own ;
Whose rivers bound the province, and whose hills
Touch the last clouds upon the level sky :
No; better men still better love their country.
'Tis the old mansion of their earliest friends.
The chapel of their first and best devotions.
When violence or perfidy invades,
Or when unworthy lords hold wassail there.
And wiser heads are drooping round its moat
At last they lix their steady and stiff eye.
There, there alone, stand while the trumpet blows.
And view the hostile flames above its towers
Spire, with a bitter and severe delight."
T hei'e is not less truth than satire in this : —
" In all law-courts that I have ever entered,
The least effrontery, the least dishonesty
Has lain among the prosecuted thieves." — P. 557.
I shall have occasion to quote a few more verses when speaking of
Mr. Landor's life. His Imaginary Conversations is the work on
which his fame, a worthy and well-earned fame, will rest. From hia
great experience of men of various nations, and his familiar acquaint-
ance with both ancient and modern literature, he has been enabled
to introduce the greatest variety of characters and topics, and to
make the dialogues a perfect treasury of the broadest and most
elevated axioms of practical wisdom. As I have observed, his
station and personal interests have not been able to blind him to
the claims of universal justice. He attacks all follies and all selfish
conventionalisms with an unsparing scorn, which, in a poor man,
would have been attributed to envy ; but, in his case, cannot be
otherwise regarded than as the honest convictions of a clear-seeing
and just mind. In all his writings he insensibly slides into the
dramatic form ; even in his Pentameron, not less than in his Citation
and Examination of William Shakspeare. His Pericles and Aspasia
is in the form of letters, a form but one i emove from conversation ;
in fact, conversation on paper. He must raise up the prominent
characters of all ages, and, bringing the most antagonistic together,
set them to argue some great or curious topic suited to their minds
and pursuits. Through all these the author's own sentiments diffuse
themselves, and become the soul of the book. Whoever converse,
we are made to feel that virtue, generosity, self-sacrifice, and a warm
sense of the wants and the true claims of the multitude, animate
the soul of the author, and maintain a perpetual warfare against
their opposite qualities, and the world's acquiescence in them. Mr.
Landor, no doubt, like his fellows, does not despise the advantages
which fortune has conferred on him; but he prides himself far more
obviously on the power which resides in his pen. In his conversation
with the Marchese Pallavicini, that nobleman relates the atrocious
conduct of an English general at Albaro, and says, " Your houses of
parliament, Mr. Landor, for their own honour, for the honour of the
uervice, and the nation, should have animadverted on such an out
LANDOR. 583
rage ; he should answer for it."' To which Lander rephed : — " These
two fingers have more power, Marchese, than those two houses. A
pen ! he shall live for it. What, with their animadversions, can
they do like this?"
In his conversation between Southey and Porson, he puts into the
mouth of Southey a sentence which all people would do well to
ground firmly into their minds, and remember when they are reading
reviews : — " We have about a million of critics in Gi"eat Britain ; not
a soul of which critics entertains the least doubt of his own infalli-
bility. You, with all your learning, and all your canons of criticism,
will never make them waver." Into Porson s mouth he puts also a
great fact, which, had he been a poor man, would have been hurled
back on his head, and have crushed him to death. "Eacy wino
comes from the high vineyard. There is a spice of the scoundrel in
most of our literary men ; an itch to iilch and detract in the midst
of fair-speaking and festivity. This is the reason why I have never
much associated with them. There is also another. We have nothing
in common but the alphabet. The most popular of our critics have
no heart for poetry : it is morbidly sensitive on one side, and utterly
callous on the other. They dandle some little poet, and never will
let you take him off their knees ; him they feed to bursting, with
their curds and whey. Another they warn off the premises, and
Avill give him neither a crust nor a crumb, until they hear that he
has succeeded to a large estate in popularity, with plenty of depen-
dants ; then they sue and supplicate to be admitted among the
number ; and, lastly, when they hear of his death, they put on
mourning, and advertise to raise a monument or a club-room to hia
memory."
In the same conversation he has a striking illustration of the
nature of metaphysics. •' What a blessing are metaphysics to our
generation ! A poet or any other who can make nothing clear, can
stir up enough sediment to render the bottom of a basin as invisibla
as the deepest gulf of the Atlantic. The shallowest pond, if turbid,
has depth enough for a goose to hide its head in." He has a remarli,
not the less hajjpy, on the folly of our reading ill-natured critiques
on ourselves, and on the light in which those who inform you of
them ought to be regarded. " The whole world might write against
me, and leave me ignorant of it to the day of my death. A friend
who announces to me such things has perfonned the last act of his
friendship. It is no more pardonable than to lift up the gnat net
over my bed, on pretext of showing me there are gnats in the
room. If I owed a man a grudge, I would get him to write against
me ; but if any owed me one, he would come and tell me of it."
Here are two opinions worthy of the deepest reflection. *• In our
days, only men wlio have some unsoundness of conscience and some
latent fear, reason against religion ; and those only scoff at it who
are pushed back and hurt by it." — Vol. I. p. 372. " More are made
insurgents by firing on them than by feeding them ; and men are
more dangerous in tlie field than in the kitchen." — P. 379. Mr.
Laiidor's opinion of gambling, even ordinary, every-day play ip
o8J LANDOR.
priviito Iiouses for money stakes, is expressed with a virtuous force
wliich proves the depth of the feehng against it. " You played I
Do you call it playing, to plunder your guests and overreach your
friends ? Do you call it playing, to be unhappy if you cannot be a
robl)er, happy if you can be one 1 The fingers of a gamester
reach further than a robber's, or a murderer's, and do more mischief.
Against the robber or murderer, the country's up in arms at once ;
to the gamester every bosom is open, that he may contaminate or
stab it." — Vol. 11. p. 76. Stern to faults which are tolerated, nay,
are cherished by society, Savage Landor would be lenient where the
wide-spreading misery and degradation of women in the present
day calls loudly for a change in our social philosophy.
" 3Iarvel. — Men who have been unsparing of their wisdom, like
ladies who have been unfrugal of their favours, are abandoned by
those who owe most to them, and hated or slighted by the rest. I
wish beauty in her lost estate had consolations like genius.
" Parker. — Fie, fie, Mr. Marvel ! consolations for frailty !
" Marcel. — What wants them more % The reed is cut down, and
seldom does the sickle wound the hand that cuts it. There it lies ;
trampled on, withered, and soon to be blown away."
Perhaps there is no one conversation in which so many popular
fallacies and customs are so ruthlessly dealt with, as in that between
the Emperor of China and his servant Tsing-Zi, who has been in
England. His description of the Quakers is most characteristic.
Tsing-Zi is astonished at the anti-christian pugnacity of those calling
themselves Christians. They make wars to make their children's
fortune, and the preachers of the peaceful gospel are ready, if they
disagree in a doctrine, to fight like a pair of cockerels across a staff
on a market-man's shoulder. One scanty sect is different. " These
never work in the fields or manuf\ictories ; but buy up corn when it
is cheap, sell it again when it is dear, and ai'e more thankful to God
for a fiimine than others are for plenteousness. Painting and sculp-
ture they condemn ; they never dance, they never sing ; music is as
hateful to them as discord. They always look cool in hot weather,
and warm in cold. Few of them are ugly, fewer handsome, none
graceful. I do not remember to have seen a person of dark com-
plexion, or hair quite black, or very curly, in their confraternity.
None of them are singularly pale, none red, none of diminutive
stature, none remarkably tall. They have no priests amongst them,
and constantly refuse to make oblations to the priests roval." —
Vol. II. p. 119.
But there is, in fact, scarcely any great question of religion,
morals, government, or the social condition, on which in these
conversations the boldest opinions are not expi-essed dn the most
unshrinking style. Landor strips away all the finery in which
follies, vices, and imposture ai-e disguised for selfish end.s, with
a strong and unceremonious hand. He lifts up the veil of worldly
policy, and showing us the hideous objects behind, says, " Behold
your gods, O Israel ! " His doctrines are such as would, less than
Eges ago, have consigned him to a pitiless persecution ; they are
LAXOOit. 585
Kuch aSj perhaps, in less than half another cent my, through the
means of popular education, will be the common property of the
common mind. The works of Savage Landor, both prose and
poetry, place him amongst the very tirst men of his age. They
are masterly, discriminating, and full of a genuine English robiLst-
ness. " Energy and imagination," he remarked in conversation,
" make the great poet." If he does not equal some of our poets in
intensity of imagination, there are few of them who can compete
with him in energy ; and what is peculiarly fortunate, the instinct
by which he clings to the real, and spurns the meretricious with
contempt, makes him eminently safe for a teacher. You can find
no glittering, plausible, destructive monstrosity, whether in the
shape of man or notion, which Landor, like too many of our writers,
has taken the perverse fancy to deify. His opinion of Buonaparte
is a striking example of this. Hazlitt, acute and discriminating as
he often was, placed this selfish and brutal butcher on a pedestal
for adoration. Landor, in his conversation between "Landor,
English visitor, and Florentine visitor," has given us an analysis of
his character. He commences this with this remark. " Buonaparte
seems to me the most extraordinary of mortals, because I am per-
suaded that so much power never was acquired by another, with so
small an exertion of genius, and so little of anything that captivates
the affections ; or maintained so long unbroken in a succession of
enormous faults, such scandalous disgraces, such disastrous failures
and defeats." He shows that he lost seven great armies in suc-
cession, which in every case of defeat he abandoned to destruction.
If he has not said it in his works he has in conversation, that
the true mark of a great man is, that he has accomplished great
achievements with small means. Buonaparte never did this. He
overwhelmed all obstacles by enormous masses of soldiery. He was
as notorious for his recklessness of human life, for no possible end
but his own notoriety, for his private cruelties and murders, as for
his insolence and undignified anger; scolding those who offended
him like a fishwoman, boxing their ears, kicking them, &c. Landor'a
words have ever been my own — " It has always been wonderful ta
me, what sympathy any well-educated Englishman can have witif
an rmgenerous, ungentlemanly, unmanly Corsican."
Such is Walter Savage Landor as a writer ; let us now look at him
as a man. Lander's physical development is correspondent to that
of his mind. He is a tall, large man, broadly and muscularly built,
yet with an air of great activity about him. His ample chest, the
erect bearing of his head, the fire and quick motion of his eye, all
impress you with the feeling of a powerful, ardent, and decided man.
The general character of his head is fine, massy, ample in phreno-
logical developcment, and set upon the bust with a bearing full of
strength and character. His features are well formed, and full of the
same character. In his youth, Landor must have been pronounced
handsome ; in hLs present age, with grey hair and considerable bald-
ness, he presents a fine, manly, and impressive presence. There is
instantaneous evidence of the utter absence of disguise about him
686 LANDOR.
You have no occasion to look deep and ponder cautiously to discover
his character ; it is there written broadly on his front. All is open,
frank, and self-determined. The lower part of his face displays much
thought and firmness ; there is a quick and hawk-like expression
about the upper portion, which the somewhat retreating yet broad
forehead increases. His eyebrows, arched singularly high on his fore-
head, diminish the apparent height of the head ; but. on looking at
his profile, you soon perceive the great elevation of the skull above
the line running from the ear to the eye. The structure, the air of
the whole man, his action, voice, and mode of talking, all denote an
extraordinary personage. His character is most unequivocally pas-
sionate, impulsive, yet intellectual and reflective, — capable of excite-
ment and of becoming impetuous, and perhaps headlong, for the lire
and strength in him are of no common intensity. One can see that
the quick instincts of his nature, that electric principle by which
such natures leap to their conclusions, would render him excessively
impatient of the slower processes or more sordid biases of more
common minds ; that he must be liable to great outbursts of in-
dignation, and capable of becoming arbitrary and overbearing : yet
you soon find, on conversing with him, that no man is so ready to be
convinced of the right, or so free to rectify the errors of a hasty
judgment. He has, in short, an essentially fine, high, vigorous
nature, — one which speaks forth in every page of his writi:igs, and
yet is so different to the stereotype of the world as to incur its
dictum of eccentricity.
Walter Savage Landor was born at Warwick, on the 30tli of
January, 1775 ; consequently he is in his eighty-second year. The
house in which he was born is near the chapel, and has a fine old
spacious garden, which, at the time of my visit, was well kept up by
his only surviving sister. It is the best house in the town, and had
a beautiful front before the improvement of the street required that
four or five feet of the basement should be erased. Savage Lander's
mother used to spend nearly half the year there, as his sister haa
done since ; for the garden has great charms, swarming with black-
birds, thrushes, and even wood-jjigeous, which haunt several lofty
elms and horse-chestnuts'; which, however, I dare say, are not thought
very charming by the gardener.
His family had considerable estates both in Staffordshire and
Warwickshire, many centuries ago. His mother was eldest daughter
and co-heiress of Charles Savage, Esq., of Tachbrook, whose family
were lords of that manor, and of the neighbouring manor of Whit-
marsh, in the reign of Henry II., and much earlier. One of this
family, according to Rapin, played a conspicuous part in demanding
a charter from the weak king, Edward II,, and in bringing his minion.
Piers Gaveston, to his end. This was Sir Arnold Savage, whom
Landor has commemorated by a conversation between him and
Henry IV., and by a note at the end of it, viz. — " Sir Arnold Savage,
according to Elsyne, was the first Speaker of the House of Commons
who appeared tipon ani/ record to have been appointed to the dignity
as now constituted. He was elected a second time, four years after-
LANDOR. 687
wards, a rare honour iu earlier days ; and during this presidency he
headed the Commons, and delivered their resohitions in the plain
words recorded by Hakewell." One of these was that the king
should receive no subsidy till he had removed every cause of public
grievance. Landor has come of good patriot blood. The Savages
have also figured in Ireland ; and Landor has introduced one of
them, Phihp Savage, Chancellor of the Irish Exchequer in Swift's
time, in his Conversation with Archbishop Boulter, also connected
by marriage with the Savage family. " Boulter," says Landor, " Pri-
mate of. Ireland, and President of the Council, saved that kingdom
from pestilence and famine in the year 1729, by supplying the poor
with bread, medicines, attendance, and every possible comfort and
accommodation. Again, in 1740 and 1741, two hundred and fifty
thousand were fed twice a-day, principally at his expense, as we find
in La Biographie Universelle — an authority the least liable to suspicion.
He built hospitals at Drogheda and Armagh, and endowed them
richly. No private man, in any age or country, has contributed so
largely to relieve the .sufferings of his fellow-creatures ; to which
object he and his wife devoted their ample fortunes, both during their
lives and after their decease. Boulter was certainly tne most disin-
terested, the most humane, the most beneficent man that ever guided
the councils of Ireland." Philip Savage, the chancellor, was so irre-
proachable, that even Swift, the reviler of Somers, could find in him
no motive for satire and no room for discontent. Such was the
ancestry of Walter Savage Landor.
Mr. I-andor spent the first days of his youth at Ipsley Court, near
Redditch, in Warwickshire, which manor belongs to him. You may
trace his life and his residences by glimpses in his Avorks. Of his
old family mansion he speaks in his Conversation with the Marchese
Pallaviciui.
" FuUacicbii. — We Genoese are proud of our door-ways.
" Landor. — They are magnificent ; so ai*e many in Rome, and some
in Milan. We have none in London, and few in the country ; where,
however, the staircases are better. They are usually oak. I inherit
an old, ruinous house, containing one, up which the tenant rode hi.s
horse to stable him."
In his poems, too, occurs this : —
WRITTEN IN WALES.
" Ipsley ! wlien hurried by nialif-'iiant fate
1 passed tliy court, and heard thy closing gate,
1 sighed, but sighing to myself 1 said.
Now for the quiet cot and mountain shade.
Oh ! wliat resistless madness made me roam
From cheerful friends and hospitable home !
Whether in Arrow's vale, or Tachbrook's grove,
My lyre resounded liberty and love.
]lere never Love hath fanned his purple flame.
And fear and anger start at Freedom's name.
Yet high exploits the churlish nation boasts
A;;ain>t the Norman and the Roman liosts.
"I'ls false; where con(iuest had but reaped disgrace
Contenipiuous valour spurned the reptile race.
r>88 LANDOR.
Let me ones more my native land refjaiii.
lidiimUii); with ste.idy pride and liiKli disdain ;
Tlien will I pardon all the faults of fate,
And hans fresh garlands, Ipsley, on thy gate."
Tiainlor Lwgliiiigly calls this old house a barracks. It is nearly a
hundred feet in front, if not quite, but this portion formed only the
offices of the old ]\Iarch house, which the steward of the Savages, the
clergyman, pulled down, and built his own with !
He received his education at Rugby, and at Tj-inity College,
Oxford. At Rugby, as we are told by Mr. Home in his New Spirit
of the Age, he was famous for riding out of bounds, boxing, leaping,
net-casting, stone-throwing, and making Greek and Latin verses.
A droll anecdote is related of his throwing his casting-net suddenly
over the head of a farmer who found him fishing in his ponds, and
keeping him there till the fellow was tame enough to beg to be
allowed to go away, instead of seizing Landor's net, as he had
threatened. He was conspicuous there for his resistance to every
species of tyranny, either of the masters and their rules, or the boys
and their system of making fags, which he violently opposed against
all odds ; and he was considered arrogant and overbearing in his own
conduct. All this, I have no doubt, is quite correct — it is most
characteristic of the man and his writings ; as well as that he was a
leader of the boys in all things, and yet did not associate with them.
This trait sticks by him to the present hour. He declares that he
never can bear to walk with men ; with ladies he can, but not with
men, and that to walk in the streets of London drives him mad.
To this peculiarity he alludes in the opening of the conversation
between Southey and Landor ; where also Southey mentions another,
which no one can be long in Landor's society without noticing —
his hearty peals of laughter at some merry story or other, often of
his own.
" Landor. — The last time I ever walked hither in company (which,
imless with ladies, I rarely have done anywhere), was with a just, a
valiant, and a memorable man. Admiral Nichols.
" Soidliej/. — I never had the same dislike to company in my walks
and rambles as you profess to have, but of which I perceived no
sign whatever when I visited you, first at Lantony Abbey, and after-
wards on the Lake Como. Well do I. remember four long conversa-
tions in the silent and sohfcary church of Sant' Abondio (surely the
coolest spot in Italy), and how often I turned back my head towards
the open door, fearing lest some pious passer-by, or some more dis-
tant one in the wood above, pursuing the pathway which leads
towards the tower of Luitprand, should hear the roof echo with your
laughter, at the stories you had collected about the brotherhood and
sisterhood of the place."
At Oxford, Landor was rusticated for firing off a gun in the
quadrangle ; and as he never intended to take a degree, he never
returned. On quitting the University, he pubhshed, in 1793, a
small volume of poems. After spending some time in London
studying Italian, he went to reside at Swansea, where he wrote
"Gebir."
LANDOR. 589
Having been pressed in vain by bis friends to enter tlie army or
to study tbe law, be was moved by bis old spirit of resistance to
oppression, by tbe Frencb invasion of Spain. He embarked for tbat
country, raised a number of troops at bis own expense, and — being
tbe first Englisbman wbo landed in Spain for tbe jiurpose of aiding
it— marcbed witb bis men from Corunna to Aguila, tbe bead-quar-
ters of General Blake. For tbis be received tbe tbanks of tbe
supreme junta in tbe Madrid Gazette, togetber witb an acknowledge-
ment_ of tbe donation of 20,000 reals. On tbe subversion of tbe
constitution by Ferdinand, be returned tbe letters and documents,
witb bis commission, to Don Pedro Cevallos, telling Don Pedro tbat
be was willing to aid a people in the assertion of its liberties
against tbe antagonist of Europe, but he could have nothing to do
witb a perjurer and traitor.
1 suppose it was before be left Spain tbat a circumstance occurred
which led to bis being robbed by George HI., of wbicb be often
talks. Expressing to a Spanish nobleman, tbe Marques de Portasgo,
a desire to have a ram and a couple of ewes of bis celebrated ]\Ierino
breed, tbe nobleman replied, " Ob, I will give you a score." Mr.
Landor thanked him, but replied, that be did not wish to tax bis
generosity to tbat extent. " Oh," said be, " I kill them for mutton :
you shall have a score. Tbe king of England is to have a cargo of
them, from the flocks of tbe Prince de Par, and I will send yours in
tbe same ship." Tbe ship arrived ; a letter from MacMabon, agent
of the Marques, also arrived to say tbat, " according to promise, there
they were, thirty in number, and tbat on applying to the king's
steward, be would have them." Away went Landor to the steward,
showed bis letter, and demanded bis sheep. The steward said he
bad no commands on tbe subject. " But his majesty," suggested
Landor, "bas undoubtedly information of the fact." "That," re-
plied tbe steward, " is in his own breast." " But on seeing this
letter," continued Landor, " bis majesty will certainly give command
for the sheep to be delivered to me. Be so good as to see tbat it is
laid before his majesty." The steward dechned, declaring that it
would be at tbe risk of bis place.
On this Landor applied to a nobleman in high favour with the
king, and wbo was well known to himself On annoimcing that he
wanted him to do bim a service, the nobleman replied, " Witb all
tbe pleasure in tbe world : anything that is in my jjower." Landor
then explained tbe case, showed bis letter from tbe Spanish noble-
man, and begged tbat bis noble friend would lay the matter before
tbe king. The nobleman seemed .struck dumb. After a while, re-
covering bis speech, he exclaimed — " Lay the case before bis majesty !
Advise bis majesty to have thirty Merinos of this quality delivered
up to you ! Why, Landor, you must be mad. There is not a man
in tbe kingdom wbo dare do any such thing. It would be bis ruin."
All similar efforts were in vain, and so tbe royal farmer kept Landor'.s
ebeep. They were at tbat time worth 1,000/. Landor bas the subject in
his mind when be makes Sheridan say to Wyndbam, '• I do believe
in my conscience be would rather lose the affection of half his sub-
590 LANDOR.
jects tliau the carcase of one fat sheep. I am informed that all his
possessions in Ireland never yielded him live thousand a-year. Give
him ten, and he will chuckle at overreaching you ; and not you only,
but his own heirs for ever, as he chuckled when he cheated his
eldest son of what he jjocketed in twenty years from Cornwall, Lan-
cashire, and Wales." — Vol. II. p. 179. Landor never relates one of
these facts without the other, adding, "When George was asked to
account for the revenues of the duchies of Cornwall and Lancaster,
and the Principality during the prince's minority, he said he had
spent the money irx the prince's education ! What an education
George IV, the prince, must have had ! "
If the life of Savage Landor were written, it would be one of the
most remarkable on record. He has lived much abroad in the most
eventful times in the history of the world. He witnessed the pro-
gress of the Fi'ench Revolution ; saw Buonaparte made First Consul ;
saw him and his armies go out to victory ; saw and conversed with
the greatest of his generals, and the most remarkable men of those
times and scenes. His conversation, therefore, abounds with facts
and jaersonages from his own actual knowledge, of which most other
men have only read, and many of which no one has read. On the
fall of Napoleon he saw him ride, followed by one servant, into
Tours, whose inhabitants hated him, and would have rejoiced to give
him up to his enemies. He was disguised, but Landor recognised
him in a moment. Hating and despising the man as he did, yet he
never for an instant dreamed of betraying him. Napoleon rode
away, wholly undiscovered by the townsmen.
This is his own account of the affair, communicated by letter to
me : — " I had called to pay my respects to Count Miramon, the
prefect. The sentinel said, ' Sir, the prefect does not receive on this
evening.' I then walked along the esplanade, and had taken two or
three turns, v/hen 1 saw a man in a grey coat, buttoned under the
chin, although the weather was hot, trot up to the prefect's gate.
The sentinel presented arms ; the rider leapt from his horse, leaving
him loose. A servant, whom I had not seen, galloped up, took the
horse, entered the gate, and it was closed. The figure and the recej)-
tion struck me at once. The day but one after I called on the prefect.
After a few words, letting him know when I called before, and that
I was not admitted, I said, ' I was master of a secret too valuable to
communicate.' He laid his hand on mine, and said, 'It could not
be in better keeping.' Shortly afterwards news was brought of
Buonaparte's attempt to escape at Rochefort. I then mentioned to
Arthur Clifford, and, about the same time, to General Comte Ornano,
wliat I had seen ; and, though the latter was a relative of Napo-
leon's, neither knew nor believed that the emperor i)assed through
Tours."
Before this time, however, Landor had done what gave him infinite
annoyance. I quote the account from Mr. Home : — " In 1806, Mr.
Landor sold several estates in Warwickshire, which had been in his
family nearly seven hundred years, and purchased Lantony and
Oomioy in Monmouthshire, where he laid out nearly 70,000/. Here
LANDOE. 691
he made extensive improvements, giving employment daily, for
many years, to between twenty and thirty labourers in building and
planting. He made a road at his own expense, of eight miles long,
and planted and fenced half a million of trees. The infamous beha-
viour of some tenants caused him to leave the country. At this
time he had a milhon more trees ready to plant, which, as he ob-
served, ' were lost to the country, by driving me from it. I may
speak of their utility, if I must not of my own.' The two chief
offenders were brothers, w4io rented farms of Mr. Landor to the
amount of 1,500/. per annum, and were to introduce an improved
system of Sufiblk husbandry. ]\Ir. Landor got no rent from them,
but all manner of atrocious annoyances. They even rooted up his
trees, and destroyed whole plantations. They jaaid nobody. When
aeighbours and work-jieople applied for money, Mr. Landor says,
•■ they were referred to the devil, with their wives and families, while
these brothers had their two bottles of wine upon the table. As for
the SulFolk system of agriculture, wheat was sown upon the last of
May, and cabbage, for winter food, were planted in August or Sep-
tember.' Mr. Landor eventually remained master of the field, and
drove his tormentors across the seas ; but so great was his disgust at
these circumstances that he resolved to leave England." Some years
afterwards he caused his house, which had cost him about 8,000/., to
be taken down, that his son might never have the chance of similar
vexations in that place.
To this there w^ant a few additional facts. It was not only the
SuflFolk farmers, but the general spirit and brutality of the people of
the country which wearied and disgusted him beyond endurance.
In the verses we have recently quoted he vents \unnitigated hatred
of the Welsh, as a " churlish nation," and a " reptile race." He
seems to have been subjected to a system of universal plunder and
imposition. None but they who have lived amongst such a rude,
thievish, and unattractive crew can conceive the astonishment and
exasperation of it to an intelligent and generous mind. He used to
have twenty watchers on his moorland hills night and dav to protect
his grouse. He had 12,000 acres of land, and never used to see
a grouse upon his table. He says the protection of game that ho
never ate or benefited by, cost him more than he now lives at.
Disgusted by all these circumstances, he left the place, and resolved
never to return to it. But it was not, as Mr. Home asserts, before
he left England, that he ordered the destruction of his new and
splendid house, in which he only resided six months. He ordered
his steward to let it. Years went on, and it still remained unlet.
Twelve or fifteen years afterwards he chanced to meet with Lord
Dillon in Jtaly, who had once applied to him for its occupation.
"How was it," he asked, " that you did not take my house at Lan-
tony?" "How? why, it was not to be let." "It has been to let
these dozen years." "You amaze me. I was most anxious to
take it, but your steward assured me it was not to be let on any
account."
Landor immediately wrote to England to make particular iu-
592 LANDOR.
quirics, and found that the steward was keei)ing the house t«
accommodate his own friends, who came down there in parties tc
shoot his master's gi'ouse. With characteristic indignation, Mr
Landor at once ordered the steward to quit hia service and estate,
and that the house should be levelled to the ground.
The steward had distrained on the Bethunes, the tenants, to the
amount of 1,000/. " The money," says Mr. Landor, in a letter to
me, "he permitted to remain in the hands of the sheriif ; and what
became of it, wholly or partly, he knows best, I never received one
shilling of it, but I received a long bill from him, which was imme-
diately paid out of several thousands that I borrowed at exorbitant
interest, my estates being all entailed." Such are a few of the plea-
sures of property.
In 1811 Mr. Landor married Julia, the daughter of J. Thuillier de
Malaperte, descendant and representative of the Baron de Neuve-
ville, first gentleman of the bed-chamber to Charles the Eighth. He
went to reside in Italy, and during several years occupied the Palazzo
Medici, in Florence. The proprietor dyiqg, and the palace being to
be sold, he looked out for a fresh residence, and found that the villa
Gherardesca, at Fiesole, with its gardens and farm of about 100
acres, was to be sold, and he purchased it. The villa Gherardesca
lies only two miles from Florence, on the banks of the AfFrico. It
was built by Michael Angelo, and is one of the most delightful
residences in the world. Here Landor lived many years, and
here, I believe, his family still resides. In both poetry and prose,
he frequently refers to this beloved spot with deep feeling and regi'et,
as in the verses commencing —
" I.ct me sit here and muse by thee
Awhile, aijrial Fiesole !
Tliy sheltered walks and cooler grots,
Villas, and vines, and olive plots.
Catch me, entangle me, detain nic,
And laugh to hear that aught can pain me." — Vol. II p '",2!)
And the
FAREWELL TO ITALY.
' I leave thee, heauteous Italy ; no more
From thy high terraces at even-tide
To look supine into thy depths of sky.
Thy golden moon between the cliff and me.
On thy dark spires of fretted cypresses,
liordering the channel of the milky way.
Fiesole and Valdarno must be dreams
Hereafter, and my own lost Affrico
Murmur to me but in the poet's song.
I did believe, — what have i not believed? —
M'eary with age, but unoppressed by pain.
To close in thy soft clime my quiet day.
And rest my bones in the Mimosa sh<ide.
Hope! linpe! few ever cherished thee so little;
Few are the heads thou hast so rarely raised ; jk
liut thou didst promise this, and all was well. ^
For we are fond of thinking where to lie
When every pulse hath ceased, when the lone he it
C.-m lift no aspiration .... reasoning
As if the sight wjre unimpaired by death,
Were unobstructed by the colIin lid.
And the sun cheered corruption. Over all
The smiles of nature shed a potent charm.
Arid light us to o;ir cbamher at the grave." — Vol. II. p. (.47.
LAXDOR. 593
Waltei' Savage Landor now resides at Bath. In his mode&t bouse
iu St. James's-square, he has surrounded himself with one of the
most exquisite miniature collection of paintings in the world. Every-
thing is select, from the highest masters, Raphael, Titian, Correggio,
and older and more quaint hands, and everything perfect of its kind.
These, including some by our own Wilson, he collected in Italy.
His larger collection of larger pictures he gave to his son, on leaving
Italy, and brought these only as more adapted to the house he pro-
posed to inhabit. Peace, meditation, and the gradual resumption of
simple tasks and habits, seem the leading objects of his present old
age. *' I have a pleasure," said he, " in renouncing one indulgence
after another ; in learning to live without so many wants. Why
should I require so many more comforts than the bulk of my fellow-
creatures can get ? We should set an example against the selfi.sh
self-indulgence of the age. We should discountenance its extravagant
follies. The pride and pomp of funerals is monstrous. When I die
I will spend but six pounds on mine. I have left orders for the
very commonest coffin that is made for the commonest man ; and
six of the stoutest and very poorest men to carry me to the grave,
for which each shall receive one sovereign."
" But don't you pine for your beautiful Fiesole and its beautiful
climate ; don't you want your children, especially that daughter
whose bust there opposite reminds one so of Queen Victoria 1 "
" I could wish it, but it is better as it is. 1 cannot live there.
They can, and are happy. I have their society in their letters ; they
are weU ofl", and therefore — I am contented."
AVith this he diverted the conversation to the decease of a mutual
friend. " Ah ! what a good, warm-hearted creature that was ! There
never was a woman so self-forgetting and full of aftection. She lies
in the churchyard just by here. We used to joke merrily on what
is now half fulfilled. ' 1 shall be buried in churchyard,' she
once said. ' Why, / mean to be buried there myself. My dear
Mrs. Price, we'll visit ! Being such near neighbours, we'll have a
chair, and make calls on one another ! ' " And at this idea he burst
forth into one of those hearty resounding laughs, that show iu
Landor how strangely fun and feeling can live side by side in the
human mind.
Walter Savage Landor is one of those men who are sent into the
world strong to teach. Strong in mind and body ; strong in the clear
sense of the right and the true, they walk unencumbered by preju-
dices, unshackled by fears. They tread over the trim borders of
artificial life, often oversetting its training glasses, and kicking over
its tenderest nurslings. They break down the hedge of selfish
monopoly, and carry along with them a stake from the gajj, to have
a blow at the first bull or /jullj/ they meet in the field. They stop to
gaze at the idol of the day when they reach the city, and pronounce
it but the scarecrow of last summer new dressed. They enter
churches, and are oftener disgusted with the dreadful religion made
for God, than delighted with the preaching of that divine benevo-
lence sent down by God for man. They weep at some rccollecetd
594 luV^'DOR.
sorrow ; but remembering that this is but a contagious weakness,
they laugh, to make their neighbours awake from sad tlioughts, and
are pronounced unfeeling. They attack old and bloody prejudices,
and are asked if they are wiser than any one else. They know it :
the divine instinct, the teaching faculty within them replie.s —
" Yes." They go on strong and unmoved, though fewer perceive
their great mission than feel them poking them in the delicate sides
of their interests ; fewer sympathise with their teuderest and purest
feehngs than are shocked by their ridicule of old and protitabh^
humbugs. Misuiiderstood, misrepresented, and calumniated, they go
on— nothing ouu alter them — for their burden and command are
from above ; yet every day the world is selecting some truth from
the truths they have collected, admiring some flower in the bouquet
of beauties they have gathered as they have gone through the wilder-
ness, picking up some gem that they have let fall for the first comer
After them, till eventually comparing, and placing all side by side,
the world with a sudden flash of recognition perceives that all these
truths, beauties, and precious things, belonged to the strange, rude
man, who was actually wiser than anybody else. Lang may Savage
Landor live to see the fruit of his \mdaunted mind gradually absoibetl
into the substance of socifty !
LEIGH HUNT.
Some forty years ago, three youths went forth, one fine suranier's
day, from tho quiet town of Mansfield, to enjoy a long luxurious
ramble in Sherwood forest. Their limbs were full of youth — their
hearts of the ardour of life — their heads of dreams of beauty. The
future lay before them, full of brilliant, but undefined achieve-
ments in the land of poetry and romance. The world lay around
them, fair and musical as a new paradise. They traversed
long dales, dark with heather — gazed from hill-tops over still and
immense landscapes — tracked the margins of the shining waters
that hurry over the clear gravel of that ancient ground, and
drank in the freshness of the air, the odours of the forest, the dis-
tant cry of the cm-lew, and the music of a whole choir of larks high
above their heads. Beneath the hanging boughs of a wood-side they
threw themselves down to lunch, and from their pockets came forth,
with other good things, a book. It was a new book. A hasty peep
into it had led them to believe that it would Ijlend well in the
perusal with the spirit of the region of Robin Hood and Maid Marian,
and with the more tragical tale of that Scottish qtieen, the grey and
distant towers of one of whose prison-houses, Hardwicke, could b''
descried from their resting-place, clad as with the solemn spirit of a
sad antiquity. The book was The Story of Rimini. The author's
696 LKIGH HUNT.
name was to them little known ; but they were not of a tempera-
ment that needed names — their souls were athirst for poetry, and
tliere they found it. The reading of that day was an epoch in their
lives. There was a life, a freshness, a buoyant charm of subject
and of style, that carried them away from the sombre heaths and
Avastes around them to the sunshine of Italy — to gay cavalcades
and sad palaces. Hours went on, the sun declined, the book and
the story closed, and up rose the three friends, drunk with beauty,
and with the sentiment of a great sorrow, and strode homewards
with the proud and happy feeling that England was enriched with
a new poet. Two of those three friends have for more than five
and thirty years been in their graves ; the third survives to write
this article.
For forty years and more from that time the author of Eimini has
gone on adding to the wealth of English literature, and to the claims
on his countrymen to gratitude and aftectiou. The bold politician,
when it required moral bravery to be honest ; the charming essayist ;
the poet, seeming to grow with every new effort only more young in
fancy and vigorous in style — he has enriched his country's fame, and
his country has not altogether forgotten him. Since the former
edition of this work was published, a pension of 200/. a-year has
been conferred on him.
We have the authority of Mr. Leigh Hunt himself, hi a memoir
written six and forty years ago, for the fact that he was born iu
1784, at Southgate. His parents were the Rev. J. Hunt, at that
time tutor in the family of the Duke of Chandos, and Mary, daughter
of Stephen Shewell, merchant of Philadelphia, whose aunt was the
lady of Mr. President West. Thus the poet was by his mother's
marriage nearly related to the great American painter ; and here, he
lays, he could enlarge seriously and proudly ; but this boasting, it
Uirns out very characteristically, is not of any adventitious alliance
^v'ith celebrated names, but of a truer and more hapj^y cause of gra-
tulation : — " If any one circumstance of my life could give me cause
for boasting, it would bo that of having had such a mother. She
was, indeed, a mother in every exalted sense of the word — in piety,
in sound teaching, in patient care, in spotless example. Married at
an early age, and commencing from that time a life of sorrow, the
world afflicted, but it could not change her : no rigid economy could
hide the native generosity of her heart, no sophistical skulking injure
her fine sense, or her contempt of worldly-mindedness, no unmerited
sorrow convert her resignation into bitterness. But let me not hurt
the noble simplicity of her character, by a declamation, however
involuntary. At the time when she died, the recollection of her
sufferings and virtues tended to embitter her loss ; but knowing
what she was, and believing where she is, I now feel her memory as
a serene and inspiring influence, that comes over my social moments
only to temper cheerfulness, and over my reflecting one^ to animate
me in the love of truth."
That is a fine filial eulogy ; but still finer and more eloquent has
been the practical one of the life and writings of the son. Whoever
LKIGH HUXT. 597
knows anything of these, perceives how the qualities of the mother
have Hved on, not only in the grateful admiration of the poet, but
in his character and works. This is another proud testimony added
to the numerous ones revealed in the biographies of illustrious men,
of the vital and all-prevailing influence of mothers. What does not
the worla owe to noble-minded women in this respect ? and what
do not women owe to the world and themselves in the consciousness
of the possession of this authority 1 To stamp, to mould, to animate
to good, the generation that succeeds them, is their delegated office.
They are admitted to the co-workmanship with God ; his actors in
the after age are placed in their hands at the outset of their career,
when they are plastic as wax, and pliant as the green withe. It is
they who can shape and bend as they please. It is they — as the
yon rig beings advance into the world of life, as passions kindle, as
eager desires seize them one after another, as they are alive with
ardour, and athirst for knowledge and experience of the great scene
of existence into which they are thrown — it is they who can guide,
warn, inspire with the upward or the downward tendency, and cast
through them on the future ages the blessings or the curses of good
or evil. They are the gods and prophets of childhood. It is in
them that confiding children hear the Divinity speak ; it is on them
that they depend in fullest faith ; and the maternal nature, engi cifted
on the original, gi-ows in them stronger than all other powers of life.
The mother in the child lives and acts anew ; and numberless gene-
rations feel unconsciously the pressure of her hand. Happy are
they who make that enduring j^ressure a beneficent one ; and, though
themselves unknown to the world, send forth from the heaven of
their hearts poets and benefactors to all future time.
It is what we could hardly have expected, but Leigh Hunt is
descended of a High Church and Tory stock. On his father's side
his ancestors were Tories and Cavaliers, who fled from the tyranny
of Cromwell, and settled in Barbadoes. For several generations
they were clergymen. His grandfather was rector of St. Michael's,
in Bridgetown, Barbadoes. His father was intended for the oame
profession, but being sent to college at Philadelphia, he there com-
menced, on the comjjletion of his studies, as a lawyer, and married.
It was, again, curious, that the Eevolution occurring, the conserva-
tive propensities of the family broke out so strong in him, as to
cause him to flee for safety to England, as his ancestors had formerly
tied from it. lie had been carted through Philadelphia by the infu-
riated mob, only escaped tarring and feathering by a friend taking
the opi)ortunity of overturning the tar-barrel set ready in the street,
and, being consigned to the prison, he escaped in the night by a
bribe to the keeper. On the arrival of his wife in England, some
time afterwards, she found him who had left America a lawyer, now
a clergyman, preaching from the pulpit, tranquillity. Mr. Hunt
seems to have been one of those who are not made to succeed in the
world. He did not obtain jireferment, and fell into much distress.
At one time he was a very popular preacher, and was invited by the
Duke of Chandos, who had a seat near Southgate, to become tutor
A;)8 I.EIGH HUNT.
to his nephew, Mr. Leigh. Here he occupied a house at Southgate
called Eagle Hall ; and here his son, the poet, was born, and was
nanied,at'ter Mr. Leigh, his fathei-'s pupil.
Mr. Hunt, in his autobiography, describes his mother as feeling
the distresses into which they afterwards fell vei-y keenly, yet bear-
ing them patiently. She is represented as a tall, lady-like person, a
brunette, with fine eyes, and hair blacker than is seen of English
growth. Her sons much resembled her.
At seven, Leigh Hunt was admitted into the grammar school of
Christ's Hospital, where he remained till he was fifteen, and received
a good foundation in the Greek and Latin languages. Mr. Hunt
describes very charmingly the two houses where, as a boy, he used
to visit with his mother ; one of these being that of West, the
])ainter, who had married his mother's aunt, — the aunt, however,
being much of the same age as herself ; the other was that of Mr.
Godfrey Thornton, of the great mercantile house of that name.
" How I loved," says Leigh Hvmt, " the graces in the one, and every-
thing in the other ! Mr. West had bought his house not long, 1
believe, after he came to England ; and he had added a gallery at the
back of it, terminating in a couple oi lofty rooms. The gallery was
a continuation of the hall passage, nr^d, together with the rooms,
formed three sides of a garden, very small, but elegant, with a grass-
plot ill the middle, and busts upon stands under an arcade. In the
interior, the gallery made an angle at a little distance as you went
up it ; then a shorter one, and then took a longer stretch into the
two rooms ; and it was hung with his sketches and pictures all the
way. In a corner between the two angles, and looking down the
lower part of the gallery, was a study, with casts of Venus and
Apollo on each side of the door. The two rooms contained the
largest of the pictures ; and in the further one, after stepping softly
down the gallery, as if respecting the dumb life on the walls, you
generally found the mild and quiet artist at his work ; happy, for he
thought himself immortal." West, it is well known, was brought
up a Quaker, and had been so poorly educated that he could hardly
read. Leigh Hunt states his belief that West did a great deal of
work for George III. for very little profit ; then, as since, the honour
was thought of itself nearly enough.
" As Mr. West," continues Leigh Hunt, " was almost sure to be
found at work in the farthest room, habited in his white woollen
gown, so you might have predicated, with equal certainty, that Mrs.
West was sitting in the parlour reading. 1 used to think that if I
had such a parlour to sit in, I should do just as she did. It was a
good-sized room, with two windows looking out on the little garden
I spoke of, and opening into it from one of them by a flight of steps.
The garden, with its busts in it, and the pictures which you knew
were on the other side of its wall, had an Italian look. The room
was hung with engravings and coloured prints. Among them was
the Lion's Hunt, by Rubens ; the Hierarchy, with the Godhead, by
Raphael, which 1 hardly thought it right to look at ; and two screens
bv the tiresidc, containing prints from Angelica Kauffman, of the
LEIGH HUNT, 599
Loves of Angelica and Mcdoro, which I could have looked at from
morning till night."
Here Mrs. West and Mrs. Hunt used to sit talking of old times
and Philadelphia. West never made his appearance, except at dinner
and tea time, retiring again to his painting-room directly afterwards ;
but used to contrive to mystify the embryo poet with some such
question as, " Who was the father of Zebedee's children 1 " " The
talk," he says, " was quiet ; the neighbourhood quiet ; the servant.-y
quiet; I thought the very squiiTel in the cage would have made a
greater noise anywhere else. James the porter, a line athletic fellow,
who fif^ured in his master's pictures as an apostle, was as quiet as
he was strong. Even the butler, with his little twinkling eyes, full
of pleasant conceit, vented his notions of himself in half tones and
whispers."
The house of the Thorntons ^as a different one, and a more
socially attractive place. "There was quiet in the one ; there were
beautiful statues and pictures ; and there was my Angelica for me,
with her intent eyes at the fireside. But, besides quiet in the other,
there was cordiahty, and there was music, and a family brimful of
hospitahty and good-nature ; and dear Almeria T., now JMrs. P e,
who in vain pretends that she is growing old. Those were indeed
holidays on which I used to go to Austin Friars. The house, accord-
ing to"^my boyish recollections, was of the description I have been
ever fondest of; large, rambling, old-fashioned, solidly built ; resem-
bhng the mansions about Highgate and other old villages. It was
furnished ^s became the house of a rich merchant and a sensible
man, the fcomfort predominating over the costliness. At the back
was a garden with a lawn ; and a private door opened into another
garden, belonging to the Company of Drapers ; so that, what with
the secluded nature of the street itself, and these verdant places
behind it, it was truly rus m nrk; and a retreat. When I turned
down the archway, I held my mother's hand tighter with pleasure,
and was full of expectation, and joy, and respect. My first delight
was in mounting the staircase to the rooms of the young ladies,
setting my eyes on the comely and sparkling face of my fair friend,
with her romantic name, and turning over, for the hundredth time,
the books in her library."
The whole description of this charming and cordial family is one
of those beautiful and sunny scenes in human life, to which the
heart never wearies of turning. It makes the rememberer exclaim :
— " Blessed house ! May a blessing be upon your rooms, and your
lawn, and your neighbouring garden, and the quiet old monastic
name of your street ; and may it never be a thoroughfare ; and may
all your inmates be happy ! Would to God one could renew, at a
moment's notice, the happy hours we have enjoyed in past times,
with the same circles, in the same houses ! "
But a wealthy aunt, with handsome daughters, came from the
West Indies, and Great Orraond-street, and afterwards Merton, iu
Surrey, where this aunt went to live, became a new and happy
resort for him.
6(H> LEIGH HUNT.
After lyeigh Hunt quitted Christ's Hospital, of which, &,nd of the
life there, he gives a very interesting description, at the age of sixteen
was published a volume of his schoolboy verses. He then spent
some time in what he calls "that gloomiest of all <■ darkness pal-
■pable'' " — a lawyer's office; he became theatrical critic in a newly
established paper, the News ; and his zeal, integrity, and talent,
formed a striking contrast to the dishonest criticism and insufferable
dramatic nonsense then in public favour. In 1805, an amiable
nobleman, high in office, procured him an humble post imder Govern-
ment ; but this was as little calciUated for the public spirit of honest
advocacy which lived in him as the lawyer's office. He soon threw
it up, having engaged with his brother in the establishment of the
well-known newspaper, the Examiner. The integrity of principle
which distinguished this paper, was as ill-.suited to the views of
Government at that dark and despotic period, as such integrity and
boldness for constitutional reform were eminently needed by the
public interests. He was soon visited with the attentions of the
Attorney-General ; who, twice prosecuting him for libel, branded
him " a malicious and ill-disposed person!^ It is now matter of
astonishment for what causes such epithets and prosecutions were
bestowed by Government at that day. On one occasion, in quoting
the fulsome statement of a hireling court scribe, that the Prince
Regent "looked like an Adonis," he added the words "of fifty" —
making it stand " the Prince looked like an Adonis of fifty ! " There
were other plain remarks in the paper, but this was the sting, and
this was cause enough for prosecution, and an imprisonment of two
years in Horsemonger-lane jail. It was here, in 1813, that Lord
Byron and Moore dined with him. They found him just as gay,
happy, and poetical, as if his prison was a shepherd's cot in Arcadia,
and there was no such thing as " an Adonis of fifty " in the world.
The " wit in the dungeon," as Lord Byron styled him in some verses
of the moment, had his trellised flower garden without, and his
books, busts, pictures, and jjiauoforte within. Byron has recorded
his opinion at that time of Mr. Hunt, in his journal, thus : — " Hunt
is an extraordinary character, and not exactly of the present age.
He reminds me more of the Pym and Hampden times : much talent,
great independence of spirit, and an austere, yet not repulsive
aspect. If he goes on qualis ah incepto, I know few men who will
deserve more praise, or obtain it. He has been unshaken, and will
continue so. I don't think him deeply versed in life : he is the
bigot of virtue (not religion), and enamoured of the beauty of that
empty name,' as the last breath of Brutus pronounced, and every
Jay proves it."
What a diflerent portrait is this to that of the afiected, finicking,
U'+.ificial cockney, which the critics of that day would fain have
made the world accept for Leigh Hunt. Lord Byron was a man ol
the world as well as a poet ; he could see into character as well as
anybody when there were no good-natured souls at his elbow
to alarm his aristocratic pride. He was right. Mr. Hunt has gone
on qiudis ah incepto; and deserved and done great things. The
LEIGH HDNT, 601
critic-wolves have long ceased to howl ; the world knows and loves
the man.
In process of time The Examiner was made over to other parties,
and Mr. Hunt devoted his pen more exclusively to literary subjects.
His connexion with Byron and SheUey led him to Italy, where The
Liberal, a journal the joint product of the pens of those three cele-
brated writers, was started, but soon discontinued ; and Leigh Hunt,
before his return, saw the cordiality of Lord Byron towards him
shaken, and witnessed one of the most singular and solemn spectacles
of modern times— the burning of the body of his friend Shelley on
the sea-shore, where he had been thrown up by the waves.
The occasion of Leigh Hunt's visit to Italy, and its results, havb
been placed before the public, in consequence of their singular
nature, and of the high standing of the parties concerned, in a more
prominent joosition than any other portion of his life. There have
been much blame and recrimination thrown aboiit on all sides. Mr.
Hunt has stated his own case, in his work on Lord Byron and his
Contemporaries. The case of Lord Byron has been elaborately stated
by !Mr. ]\Ioore, in his Life and Letters of the noble poet. It is not
the place here to discuss the question, but posterity will very easily
settle it. My simple opinion is, that Mr. Hunt had much seriously
to complain of, and, under the circvLmstances, made his statement
with great candour ; yet, in a recent revision of his autobiography,
he has stated that, perhaps, his account of these transactions was
written with too warm a feeling, and consequently was somewhat too
severe on Byron. The gi-eat misfortune for him, as for the Avorld,
was, that almost immediately on his arrival in Italy with his family,
his ti-ue and zealous friend, I\lr. Shelley, perished. From that moment,
any indifferent spectator might have foreseen the end of the cnu-
nexion with Lord Byron. He had numerous aristocratic friends, wno
would, and who did, spare no pains to alarm his pride at the union
with men of the determined character of Hunt and Hazhtt for pro-
gress and free opinion. None worked more earnestly for this purpose,
liy his own confession, than Moore. From that hour there could be
nothing for Mr. Hunt but disappointment and mortification. They
came fast and fully. With all the splendid qualitie-e of Lord Byron,
whether of disposition or intellect, no man of sensibility would win-
ingly have been placed in any degree of dependence upon him ; no
man of genius could be so without undergoing the deepest possible
baptism of suffering. Through that Leigh Hunt went, and every
generous mind must sympathise with him. Had SheUey lived, how
different would have been the whole of that aflair, and the whole of
his future life. He died — and all we have to do is now simply to
notice the residences of Leigh Hunt in Italy, without further re-
ference to these matters.
The chief jilaces of Mr. Hunt's Italian sojourn were Pisa, Genoa,
and Florence. At Leghorn he and his family landed, and almost
immediately went on with Shelley to Pisa, where Byron joined them ;
but at Monte Nero, near Leghorn, was at once introduced to a curious
scene of mixed English and Itahan life. " In a day or two, I went to
602 I.];iGH HUNT.
see liord Byron, who was in what the ItaUans call v'dlef/f/iaticra, at
Monte Nero ; that is to say, enjoying a country house for the season.
I there met with a singular adventure, which seemed to make me
free of Italy and stilettos, before I had well set foot in the country.
The day was very hot ; the road to Monte Nero was very hot,
through dusty suburbs ; and when I got there, I found the hottest-
looking house I ever saw\ Not content with having a red wash over
it, the red was the most unseasonable of all reds, a salmon colour.
Think of this flaming over the country in a hot Italian sun.
" But the greatest of all the heats was within. Upon seeing Lord
Byron, I hardly knew him, he was grown so fat ; and he was longer
in recognising me, I was grown so thin. He was dressed in a loose
nankeen jacket and white trowsers, his neckcloth open, and his hair
in thin ringlets about his throat; altogether presenting a very dif-
ferent aspect from the compact, energetic, and curly-headed person
whom I had known in England.
" He took me into an inner room, and introduced me to a young
lady in a state of great agitation. Her face was flushed, her eyes lit
up, and her hair, which she wore in that fashion, looked as if it
streamed in disorder. This was the Countess Guiccioli. The Conte
Pietro, her brother, came in presently, also in a state of agitation,
and having his arm in a sling. I then learned, that a quarrel having
taken place among the servants, the young count had interfered, and
been stabbed. He was very angry ; Madame Guiccioli was more so,
and would not hear of the charitable comments of Lord Byron, who
was for making light of the matter. Indeed, there was a look in the
business a little formidable ; for though the stab was not much, the
inflictor of it threatened more, and was at that minute keeping watch
under the portico, with the avowed intention of assaulting the first
person that issued forth. I looked out of the windov/, and met his
eye glaring upwards like a tiger. The fellow had a red cap on, like a
sans culotte, and a most sinister aspect, dreary and meagre, a proper
caitiff. Thus, it appeared, the house was in a state of blockade— the
nobility and gentry of the interior all kept in a state of impassabihtj
by a rascally footman.
" How long things had continued in this state I cannot say : but
the hour was come when Lord Byron and his friends took their
evening ride, and the thing was to be put an end to somehow.
Fletcher, the valet, had been despatched for the police, and was not
returned At length we set out, Madame Guiccioli earnestly
entreating 'Bairon' to keep back, and all of us uniting to keep in
advance of Conte Pietro, who was exasperated. It was a curious
moment for a stranger from England. I fancied myself pitched into
one of the scenes in the Mysteries of Udolpho, with Montoni and his
tumultuous companions. Everything was new, foreign, and violent.
There was the lady, flushed and dishevelled, exclaiming against the
' scelerato;' the young count, wounded and threatening ; the assassin
waiting for us with his knife ; and last, not least in the novelty, my
Knglish friend metamorphosed, round-looking, and jacketed, trying
to damp aU this fire with his cool tones, and an air of voluptuous*
LEIGH HUNT. 603
iiiJolence. He had now, however, put on his loose riding coat of
mazarine blue, and his velvet cap, looking more lordly then, bu*
hardly less foreign. It was an awkward moment for him, not knowing
what might happen ; but he put a good face on the matter ; and as
to myself, I was so occupied with the novelty of the scene, that I had
not time to be frightened. Forth we issued at the door, all squeezing
to have the honour of being the boldest, when a termination is pvit
to the tragedy by the vagabond throwing himself on a bench,
extending his arms, and bursting into tears. His cap was half over
his eyes ; his face gaunt, ugly, and unshaven ; his appearance
altogether more squalid and miserable than an Englishman could
conceive it possible to find in such an establishment. This blessed
figure reclined weeping and wailing, and asking pardon for his offence,
and, to crown all, he requested Lord Byron to kiss him."
This was a curious introduction to Italian life. Leghorn, Mr. Hunt
says, is a polite "Wappiug, with a square and a theatre. The country
around, though delightful to a first view, from its vines hanging from
the trees, and the sight of the Apennines, is uninteresting when you
become acquainted with it. They left here and proceeded to Pisa.
There they occupied the ground-floor of the Casa Lanfranchi, on the
Lung' Arno. The house is said to have been built by Michael
Angelo, and is worthy of him. It is, says Mr. Hunt, in a bold and
broad style throughout, with those harmonious graces of proportion
which are sure to be found in an Italian mansion. The outside is of
rough marble.
Here poor SheUey saw his friends settled in their apartments, and
took his leave for ever ! Here they spent their time in the manner
which has been made so well known by the Life and Letters of Lord
Byron, — talking or reading till afternoon in the house ; then riding
out to a wood or a vineyard, and firing pistols, after which they
would occasionally alight at a peasant's cottage, and eat figs in the
shade — returning to dinner. " In the evening," observes Mr. Hunt,
" I seldom saw Byron. He recreated himself in the balcony, or with
a book ; and at night, when I went to bed, he was just thinking of
setting to work with Don Juan."
In the autumn they left Pisa for Genoa ; and in their way visited
the deserted house of Shelley. Wild as the place is, it now seemed
additionally so. It was melancholy, its rooms empty, and its garden
neglected. " The sea fawned upon the shore, as though it could do
no harm."
Genoa now became, as it would appear, the residence of Leigh
Hunt for the greater part of the time that he continued in Italy, for
he describes himself as quitting it for Florence, three years after-
wards. Mrs. Shelley had j^receded them thither, and had furnished
houses both for herself and Lord Byron, in the village of Albaro.
With her they took up their residence in the Casa Negroto. There
were forty rooms in it, some of them such as would be considered
splendid in England, and all neat and new, with borders and ara-
besques. The balcony and staircase were of marble ; and tJ"'^re wa.s
a little flower garden. The rent was twenty pounds a-year, Byrou
X
604 LEIGH HDNT.
paid for liis twenty-four pounds. It was called the Casa Saluzzi,
v;as older and more imposing, with rooms in still greater plenty, and
a good piece of ground. Mr. Hunt describes himself as passing a
melancholy tinie at Albaro, walking about the stony alleys, and
thinking of Shelley. Here the first number of that imfortuuate pub-
lication, The Liberal, reached them ; here they prepared the few
numbers which succeeded it, and here the coldness between Byron
and Hunt grew to its height, and tliey parted.
We next, and lastly, find Mr. Hunt at Florence. He then says : —
" Agreeably to our old rustic jii'opensitics, we did not stop long
in the city. We left Santa Croce to live at IMaiano, a village
on the slope of one of the Fiesolau hills, about two miles ott".
I passed there a very disconsolate time ; yet the greatest comfort
I experienced in Italy was from being in that neighbourhood, and
thinking, as I went about, of Boccaccio. Boccaccio's father had a
house at Maiano, supposed to have been situated at the Fiesolan
extremity of the hamlet. That divine writer, whose sensibility out-
weighed his levity a hundred-fold — as a divine face is oftener serious
than it is merry — was so fond of the place, that he not only laid the
two scenes of the Decamerone on each side of it, with the valley his
company resorted to in the middle, but has made the two little
streams that embrace Maiano, the Afirico and the Mensola, the hero
and heroine of his Nimphale Fiesolano. A lover and his vestal
mistress are changed into them, after the fashion of Ovid. The scene
of another of his works is on the banks of the Mugnone, a river
a little distant ; and the Decamerone is full of the neighbouring
villages. Out of the windows of one side of our house, we saw the
turret of the Villa Ghcrardi, to which his 'joyous company ' resorted
in the first instance ; a house belonging to the Macchiavelli was
nearei', a little on the left ; and farther to the left, amongst the blue
hills, was the white village of Scttignano, where Michael Angelo was
horn. The house is still remaining in the possession of the family.
From our windows on the other side, we saw, close to us, the Fiesole
of antiquity and of Milton, the site of the Boccaccio house before
mentioned still closer, the Valley of Ladies at our feet ; and we
looked towards the quarter of the Mugnone, and of a house of Dante,
and in the distance beheld the mountains of Pistoia. Lastly, from
the terrace in front, Florence lay clear and cathedraled before us,
with the scene of Redi's Bacchus rising on the other side of it, and
the villa of Arcetri, illustrious for Galileo.
" But I stuck to my Boccaccio haunts, as to an old home. I lived
with the divine human being, with his friends of the Falcon and the
]3asil, and my own not unworthy melancholy ; and went about the
flowery hills and lanes, solitary, indeed, and sick to the heart, but
not unsustained. * * * My almost daily walk was to Fiesole,
through a path skirted with wild myrtle and cyclamen ; and 1
stopped at the cloister of the Doccia, and sat on the pretty melan-
choly platform behind it, reading, or looking through the pines down
to Florence. In the Valley of Ladies, I found some English trees,
— trees not vine and olive, — and even a bit of meadow : and these.
LEIGH HUNT. G05
while I made them furnish me with a bit of my old home in the
north, did no injury to the memory of Boccaccio, who is of all
countries, and finds his home wherever we do ourselves, in love, in
the gi'ave, in a desert island."
From this charming and celebrated spot of earth, Leigh Hunt
turned northward and homeward through Switzerland and Fi'ance.
Every lover of true poetry and of an excellent and high-hearted man,
must regret that his visit to Italy was dashed by such melancholy
circumstances, for no man was ever made more thoroughly to enjoy
that fine climate and classical land. Yet as the friend of Shelley,
Keats, Charles Lamb, and others of the first spirits of the age, Mr.
Hunt must be allowed, in this respect, to have been one of the
happiest of men. It were no mean boon of Providence to have been
permitted to live in the intimacy of men like these ; but, besides
this, he had the honour to suffer, with those beautiful and immortal
spirits, calumny and persecution. They have achieved justice through
death — he has lived injustice down. As a politician, there is a great
debt of gratitude due to him from the i^eople, for he was their firm
champion when reformers certainly did not walk about in silken
slippers. He fell on evil days, and he was one of the first and fore-
most to mend them. In literature he has distinguished himself in
various walks ; and in all he has manifested the same genial, buoyant,
hopeful, and happy spirit. His Sir Kalph Esher, a novel of Cliarles
II. 's time, is a work full of thought and fine painting of men and
nature. His Indicator, and his London Journal, abound with jmpers
which make us in love at once with the writer and ourselves. There
is a charm cast over every-day life, that makes us congratulate our-
selves that we live. All that is beautiful and graceful in nature, and
love-inspiring in our fellow -men, is brought out and made part of
our daily walk and pleasure. His Months, a calendar of nature, bears
testimony to his intense love of nature, which breathes equally in
every page of his poetry. In these jDrose works, however, as well as
in some of his earlier poetry, we find certain artificialities of phrase,
fanciful expressions, and what are often termed conceits, which the
critics treated as cockneyisms. and led them to style him the head of
the Cockney school. There arc certainly many indications, particu-
larly in The Months, of his regarding the country rather as a visitor
than an inhabitant. His Staiidjnincf, as the C4ermans call it, his point
of standing, or, in our phraseology, his point of view from which he
contemplates nature, is the town. He thus produces to a country-
man a curious inversion of illustration. For instance, he comj^arcs
Aj^ril to a lady watering her flowers at a balcony ; and we almost
expect him, in praising real flowers, to say, as a French lady once
said to us, " Why do you gather your garden flowers to adorn your
rooms 1 For ten sous you may have splendid artificial ones that will
la.st the whole season."
But these are merely the specks on a sun disc, all glowing with
tlie most genuine love of nature. In no writer does the love of the
l)ea\itiful and the good moi-e abound. And, after all, the f;xnciful
epithets in which he endeavours to cl the as fanciful notio:;s, are, aa
606 LEIGH HUXT.
he himself has explained, nothing whatever belonging to London or
the land of Cockayne, but to his having imbued his mind long ana
deeply witli the poetry, and, a« a matter of coiu'se, with the poetic
language of our okler writers. In a wider acquaintance with nature
the world, and literatin-o, these have vanished from his stylo ; an(i
I know of no more manly, English, and chastely vigorous style than
that of his poems in general. In conformity with the strictures of
various critics, he has, moreover, re-written his fine poem Rimini,
It was objected that the story was not very moral ; and he has now
in the smaller edition published by Moxon, altered the story so as tn
palliate this objection as much as possible, and, as he says, to bring
it, in fact, nearer to the truth of the case. For my pai't, I know not
what moral the critics would have, if wretchedness and death as the
consequence of sin, be not a solemn moral. If the selfish old father,
who deceives his daughter into a marriage liy presenting to her the
proxy as the proposed spouse, is punished by finding his daughter
and this proxy prince, who went out from him with pomp and joy,
soon come back to him in a hearse, and with all his ambitious pro-
jects thus dashed to the ground, be not held as a solemn warning,
where shall such be found ? However, the jioet has shown his
earnest desire to set himself right with the public, and the public
has now the poem in its two shapes, and can accommodate its deli-
cate self at its pleasure. I regret that the space allowed for this
notice does not permit me to point out a number of those delightful
passages which abound in his beatitiful and graceful poems. The
graphic as well as dramatic power of Rimini, the landscape and
scene-painting of that poem, are only exceeded by the force with
which the progress of passion and evil is delineated. The scene in
the gardens and the pavilion, where the lovers are reading Lancelot
du Lac, is not surpassed by anything of the kind in the language.
The sculptiu'ed scenes on the walls of this pavilion are all pictures
living in every line : —
" The sacrifice
By girls and shepherds brouf^ht, with reverend eyes,
Of sylvan drinks and foods, simple and sweet,
And goats with struggling horns and planted feet "
The opening cf the poem, beginning —
" The sun is up, and 'tis a morn of May
Round old Ravenna's clear-sliown towers and bay," —
all life, elasticity, and sunshine; — and the melancholy ending —
" The days were then at close of atitnmn — still,
A little lainy, and towards night-fall chill:
There was a fitful moaning all abroad;
And ever and anon over tlie road,
Tlie last few leaves came fluttering from the trees," &-c.
are passages of exquisite beauty, marking the change from joy to
sorrow in one of the loveliest poems in the language. AVe have
in it the genuine spirit of Chaucer, the rich nervous cadences ot
Dryden, with all the grace and life of modern English. But it is in
vain here to attempt to speak of the poetic merits of Leigh Hunt.
LEIGH HU>'T. C07
A host of fiue coiapositious comes crowding on oiu- cousciousuess.
The Legend of Florence, a noble tragedy ; the Palfrey ; Hero and
Leander ; the Feast of the Poets ; and the Violets ; nurubers of
delightful translations from the Italian, a literature in which Leigh
Hunt has always revelled ; and, above all, Captain Sword and Captain
Pen. We would recommend everybod}', when the war spirit rises
amongst ns, to read that poem, and learn what horrors they are apt
to rejoice over, and what the Christian sjairit of this age demands of
as. But we must praise the lyrics of the volume : — the pathos of
the verses " To T. L. H., six years old, during a sickness," and the
playful humour of those " To J. H., four years old," call on lis for
notice ; and then the fine blank verse poems, Our Cottage, and
Reflections of a Dead Body, equally solicit attention. If any one
does not yet know what Leigh Hunt has done for the peojjle and
the age, let him get the jjocket edition of his poems, and he will
•soon find himself growing in love with life, with his fellow-men, and
with himself. The philosophy of Leigh Hunt is loving, cheerful, and
confiding in the goodness that governs us all. And when we look back
to what was the state of things when he began to write, and then
look round and see what it is now, we must admit that he has a
good foundation for so genial a faith.
It remains only to take a glance or two at his English homes. To
several of these we can trace him. Soon after his quitting Horse-
monger-lane prison, he was living at Paddington, having a study
looking over the fields towards Westbourne-green. In this he had a
narrow escape one morning of being burnt, owing his escape to some
" fair cousin " not named. 'I'here he was visited by Lord Byron and
Wordsworth. At one time he was living at 8, York-buildings, New-
road, Marylebone. In the London Journal of January 7, 1835, Mr.
Hunt gives a very charming account of a very happy Twelfth Night
spent there, and in commemoration of it planted some young plane
trees within the rails by the garden gate. Under these trees, but a
year or two ago, he had the pleasure of seeing people sheltering from
the rain ; but they are now cut down. Here he first had the pleasure
of seeing John Keats, and here he was visited by Foscolo. At other
times he lived in Lisson-grove ; at Hampstead, in the Vale of Health,
v.-here, as already observed, Keats wrote Sleep and Poetry ; at High-
gate, near Coleridge ; and at Woodcote-green, near Ashstead-park,
in Surrey, where he laid the scene, and I believe wrote the romance,
of Sir Ralph Esher.
Since his return to England he has lived cliictly in the suburbs of
London, in what Milton called "garden houses ;" for some years in
Chelsea, near Thomas Carlyle ; and now in Edwardes-square, Kens-
ington, a square of small, neat houses, built by a Frenchman, it is
said, in expectation of the conquest of England by JJuonaparte, and
with a desire to be ready settled, and with homes for his countrymen
of more limited means against that event. The speculation failing
with the mightier speculation of Napoleon, the poor Frenchman was
luincd.
Such is a hasty .sketch of the many wanderings and .sojourns of
0(1 S LEIGH HtTNT.
livigli Hunt. May his age be rewarded fur the services of his youth !
lu closing this article I would, also with this wish, express another ;
and that is, that he would some time publish that small but most
beautiful manual of domestic devotion, called by him Christianism,
and printed only for private circulation, some years ago. The object
of this little work seems to be, to give to such as had not full faith
in Christianity an idea of what is excellent in it, and by which they
mi'dit be benelited and comforted, even though they could not attaJa
full belief in its authenticity. The spirit and style of it are equally
beautiful.
The poet has recently sustained the loss of hia wife, the cora-
panion of so many eveutfid yesra.
:i
^^^5
^^M
77
Sl'^^- L
l;"i,
Mi
; i;'' . .1
SAMUEL KOGEKS.
OxE of the greatest pleasures that an autlioi- can have is to record
the delight which ho has derived from other authors ; after a long
larcer of intellectual enjoyment, to pay the due tribute of gratitude
to those writers of an antecedent j^eriod who have laid the founda-
tions of his taste, and stimulated him in that career which has made
his happiness. This is always an act of love, an act of reverence
and regard, which is full of its own peculiar pleasure. Of the
writers, and especially the poets, who charmed our young and inex-
perienced spirits, how few are those whose works will bear the test
of time ; how few to whom we can turn at a mature age, and find
them all that we ever believed them to be ! Mr. Rogers is one of
this rare class. Amongst the very earliest literary pleasures which
I can remember, was that of reading, and that time after time, his
Pleasures of Memory : and the reading of this poem is now, after
nearly half a century, not only one of my pleasures of memory, but
on reperusal is equally frcsli, equally true to nature, and equally
attractive ])y the soundness and the beauty of its sentiments. Mr.
Rogers, I believe, never met with that species of Mohawk criticisni,
that scalping and scarifying hterary assault and battery, which ?(»
many of his coternporaries have had to undergo. There was a
gentleness and a calm suavity about his writings, calculated to disarm
ihe most eager assailant of merit. There was m them an hSkucc of
61(» ROGERS.
that militant aiul aalagonistio spirit which provokes the hke animus
■fhis was not the case, however, with Rogers's conversation. There
he was often mercilessly caustic. Nothing could be so opposed in
spirit as his pen and his tongue. Many examples of his cutting
remarks have been made public. As a general characteristic we may
mention this, which we know to be fact. At a dinner-party at his
house, consisting chietly of literary men, on one gentleman going
away early, Rogers said, " Come, now let us feather honest A ."
Whereupon he drew a description of him in such ludicrous colours,
that all present simultaneously jumped up, exclaiming, " Let us all
go together, and not allow ourselves to be dissected in detail' Yet,
ygain, his conduct differed from his language. To merit in distress
he was a frequent and generous friend. But in his poetry there was
felt only the purity of taste, the deep love of beauty in art and
natm'e, the vivid yet tender sympathy with humanity, which put
every one dreadfully in the wrong who should attempt to strike
down their possessor. Still more than all these causes, Samuel
Rogers was a wealthy banker. He gave good dinners, or breakfasts,
and what critic would think of quarrelling with such a man i The
very first line of criticism applied to the writings of Mr. Rogei's was
in the Monthly Review, on his Ode to Superstition, with some other
Poems, published by Cadell in 17SG, and was this, " In these pieces
we perceive the hand of a master." Yet in another article, in
Griffith's Monthly Review, we have come upon this sentence, " Mr.
Rogers writes very pretty prose, but he should never think of
meddling with verse." The writer of this daring critique had been
overlooked in the invitations to breakfast.
The master thus discovered in the first essay of his power, has
never ceased since to be acknowledged. In 1792, or six years after-
wards, he published the Pleasures of Memory, which was received
with universal and delighted acclamation. It took hold, at once, of
the English heart ; and became, and remains, and is likely to remain,
one of the classic beauties of our national poetr}'. From that day
to so late a period as 1830, Mr. Rogers, at leisurely but tolerably
regular intervals, went on adding to the riches of our hoards of taste
and genius. In 1798, or in another six years, he pubhshed his Epistle
with other Poems; in 1812, or fourteen years afterwards. The Voyage
of Columbus ; two years after that, Jacqueline, ?. e. in 1814 ; five
years later, or in 1819, Human Life ; and finally, in 1830, or when
he was sixty-seven years of age, his Italy.
These works steadily extended his fame ; and amid the truest en-
joyment of that fame, Mr. Rogers liveil a long, and honoured, and
siugularlv, for a poet, fortunate life. His wealth and position in
society, not less than his wealth and position in the world of mind,
drew around him all the distinguished characters of his time ; and
his house, filled from top to bottom with evidences of his taste and
of his means of indulging it, was the resort of most of those who
have given its intellectual stamp to the age. Amid the gi-eat struggles
and events of that period, the wars, the revolutions, and the social
contests which have conmiunicated their fiery elements to the spirit
ROGERS. 6 1 1
jf geuius, and produced works of a like extreme character, the mind
of Rogers, calm and self-balanced, pursued its course, apparently
uninfluenced by all that moved around him. With human nature
and human life in general he sympathised, but the love of the true
and the beautiful in it prevailed over the contagion of the vast and
violent ; he dealt rather with the pure and touching incidents of
existence than with the passionate and the tragic. Many, on this
account, have been disposed to attribute to him a want of power
and greatness, forgetting that the predominating character of his
taste inevitably decided the character of his subjects, and that
to these subjects he gave all the power and beauty which they
were capable of. Mr. Rogers was a great master in his own depart-
ment. In him taste lived as strongly as geuius. He was a poetic
artist. The beautiful and the retined mingle themselves with
the structure as inseparably as with the material of his composi-
tions. He knew that there is greatness in the broad champaign,
with its woods and towns, as well as in the huge and splenditl
mountain ; in the lofty but pure and placid sky, as well as in th'j
stormy ocean. It is not the creator only of the Laocoou m all his
agonies, that is a gi'eat artist — the Apollo Belvedere, and the Venus
de Medicis, and the Mourning Psyche, calm in most perfect re^jose,
or depressed with grief, equally demonstrate the hand of a master.
Thei'e is often the most consummate display of genius in the stillest
statue. Poussin or Claude are not the less admirable because they
do not affect the robust horrors of Eubens or the wilduess of Salvator.
In Rogers, the true, the pathetic — all those feelings, and sentiments,
and associations that are dear to us as life itself — are evolved with a
skill that is unrivalled ; and the language is elaborated to a perfection
that resembles the finish of a beautiful picture, or the music to
inimitable words. If we needed the excitement of impetuous emotions,
we would turn to Byron ; if the influence of cahn, and soothing, and
harmonizing ones, we would sit down to Rogers. Each is eminent in his
own department, each will exercise the supremacy of his geniusupon us.
This, we say, — who, though often invited, never ate one of his
breakfasts or dinners ; and having said it during his life, we say it
now that the lion is dead, — the celebrated breakfast-table is sold,
and there is a very ungratefid tendency perceptible to depreciate
his genius. These things, however, alway right themselves, and
Rogers will eventually hold an honourable position in the ranks of
our best poets.
In the Plea.sures of Memory we are forcibly reminded of Goldsmith
and the Deserted Village. We feel how deeply the geuius of that
exquisite writer liad affected the mind of Rogers in his youth. There
is a striking similarity of style, of imagery, and of subject. It is not
d. deserted village, but a deserted mansion which is desciibetl, and
where we are led to sympathise with all that is picturesque in jiature,
and dear to the heart in domestic life.
" Mark yon old mansion frowning through the trees,
Whose hollow turret woos the whistling breeze.
That casement, arched witli ivy's brownest shade,
First to these eves the light ol' heaven conveyed.
X -2
'ill' ROGERS.
The iiiouUleiiiig gateway strews tlie grass-{;rowii court,
Once t'la calm scene of iiniiy a simple sport;
AVlicn nature pleased, for life itself was new,
And Die heart promised what the fancy drew.
See, through the fractured pediment levealed,
Where moss inlays the rudely sculptured shield,
The martin's old hereditary nest —
Long may the ruin spare its hallowed guest !
As jars tlie liinge, what sullen echoes call 1
Oh haste, unfold the hospitable hall !
That hall, where once in antiquated state,
The chair of justice licld the grave dehate.
Now stained with dews, with cohwebs da-.kly l.uug,
Oft has its roof with peals of rapture rung ;
Hhen round yon ample board in due degree.
We sweetened every meal with social glee.
The heart's light laugh pursued the circling jest ;
."Ynd all was sunshine in each little breast.
'Twas here we traced the slipper by the sound,
And turned the blindfold hero round and round.
' I'was here, at eve, we formed our fairy ring ;
And Fancy fluttered on her wildest wing,
(jiants and genii chained eacli wondering ear ;
And orphan sorrows drew the ready tear.
Oft with the babes we wandered in tlie wood,
Or viewed the forest feats of Kobin Hood.
Oft, fancy-led, at midnigl-.t's fearful hour,
With startling step we scaled the lonely tov.'er,
O'er infant innocence to hang and weep.
Murdered by ruffian hands, when smiling in its slepp.
Ye household Deities ! whose guardian eye
Marked each pure thought we registered on high ;
Still, still ye walk the consecrated grouiul,
And breathe the soul of inspiration round.
As o'er the dusky furniture I bend,
Kach chair awakes the feelings of a friend.
The storied arras, source offend delight,
With old achievement charms the wildered sight ;
And still with heraldry's rich hues imi)ressed,
On the dim window glows the pictured crest ;
The screen unfolds its many-coloured chart ;
The clock still points its moral to the hearts
That faithful monitor 'twas heaven to hear.
When soft it spoke a promised pleasure near ;
And has its sober hand, its simple chime, .
Forgot to trace the feathered feet of Time?
That massive beam with curious carvings wrought,
Whence the caged linnet soothed my pensive thought ;
Those muskets cased with venerable rust.
Tliose once-loved forms still breathing through their du;.t.
Still from the frame in mould gigantic cast,
Starling to life — all whisper of the past ! "
This is SO exquisite and old English that it Nvill continue to charra
as long as there are hearts and memories. The whole of the first
part of the poem is of the like tone and feature ; the old garden, tho
old school and its i)orch, the gipsy group, the old beggar, the village
church and churchyard —
" On whose grey stone, that fronts tlie chancel door,
Worn smooth by tiny feet now seen no more,
Kach eve we shot the marble through the ring,
When the heart danced, and life was in the spring."
As it advances, however, it takes a wider range, and gradually em-
biaces higher topics and more extensive regions. History and death,
and etcriiity, all swell into its theme.
EOGERS. G.13
A new element of style also marks the progress of this poem
There are more animated invocations, and a greater pomp of versifi-
cation. It looks as if the muse of Darwin had infused its mora
ambitious tone, without leading the poet away from his purely
legitimate subjects. By whatever passing influences, or processes
of thought, this change was produced, there it is. This poem,
and this peculiar style of versification, soon caught the ear and
fascinated the mind of Campbell when a very young man, and out of
the Pleasures of Memory sprung the Pleasures of Hope. The direct
imitation of both style, manner, subject, and cast of subject, by
Campbell, is one of the most striking things in the language ; the
['cculiarities of the style and phraseology only, as was natural by
an enthusiastic youth, much exaggerated. In Campbell, that
which in Eogers is somewhat sounding and high-toned, becomes,
with all its beauty, turgid, and often bordering on bombast. Tha
very epithets are the same. "The wild bee's wing," "the war-
worn courser," and " pensive twilight in her dusky car," con
tinually in the Pleasures of Hope remind you of the Pleasures of
Memory.
" Kark, tlio bee winds lier small but mellow lioiii,
lUitb.e to salute tlie sunny smile of morn.
O'er tliymy downs she bends her busy course,
And many a stream allures her to its source.
'J'is noon, 'tis night. That eye so finely wrought,
Beyond the reach of sense, the soar of thought,
Now vainly asks the scenes she left behind:
Its orb so full, its vision so confined!
Who guides the patient pilgrim to her cell .'
Who bids her soul with conscious triumph swell;
Witli conscious truth retrace the mazy clue
Of summer scents, that charmed her as she flew !
Hail, Memory, hail! thy universal reign
Guards the least link of being's glorious chain.'"— Rogebs.
In the disciple the manner is reproduced, and yet modified as in
these lines : —
" Auspicious Hope ! in thy sweet garden grow
Wreaths for each toil, a charm for every woe ;
Won by their sweets, in Nature's languid hour.
The way-worn pilgrim seeks thy summer bower;
There as the wild bee munnurs on the wing,
What peaceful dreams thy handmaid spirits bring !
What viewless forms th' Eolian organ play.
And sweep the furrowed lines of anxious thought away.' — CAMrDKH,
How well the master and the scholar may be again recognised iu
the following passages : —
" So, when the mild TupiA dared explore
Arts yet untaught, aiul worlds unknown before;
And with the sons of scitnv-e wooed tiic gale,
'J'hat rising, swilled their strange expanse of sail;
So when he breathed hi;; firm, yet fond adieu,
Jtorne from his leafy hut, his carved canoe.
And all his soul best loved, such tears lie siied
While each soft scene of summer beauty fled.
Long o'er the wave a wistful look he cast,
Long watched the streaming signal from the mast ;
Till twilight's dewy tints deceived his eye,
And fairy forests fringed the evening sky."— Rookr».
614 ROGERS.
" And such thy stiength-inspiriiif,' aid, that ttre
The hardy Byron to his native shore, —
In horrid climes where Chiloe's tempests sweep
Tumultuous murmurs o'er the trouljled deep,
'Twas his to mourn misfortune's rudest shock,
Scourged by the winds, and cradled on the rock,
To wake each joyless morn and search again
The famished haunts of solitary men ;
Whose race, unyielding as their native storm.
Know not a trace of nature but the form;
Yet at thy call the hardy tar pursued,
Pale, but intrepid, sad, but unsubdutd ;
Pierced the deep woods, and hailing from afar
The moon's pale planet, and the northern star;
Paused at each dreary cry unheard before,
Hyenas in the wild, and mermaids on the sh(/re;
Till led hy thee o'er many a cliff sublime.
He found a warmer world, a milder clime,
A home to rest, a shelter to defend.
Peace and repose, a Briton and a friend !" — Campeeli..
Into every form of expression the scholar follcws his master : —
'• When Diocletian's self-corrected mind
The imperial fasces of a world resigned,
Say, why we trace the labours of his spade
In calm Salona's philosophic shade ?
Say, when contentious Charles renounced a throne,
To muse with monks unlettered and unknown,
What from his soul the parting tribute drew,
AVhat claimed the sorrows of a last adieu?" — Rogeks.
" And say, when summoned from the world and thee,
I lay my head beneath the willow tree.
Wilt thou, sweet mourner! at my stone appear,
And soothe my parting spirit lingering near? " — Campbell.
But the hkeness is found everywhere — in phrase, in imagery, in
topics, and in tone. When, after a lapse of twenty-seven years,
Mr. Rogers produced his poem of Human Life, what a change of
manner, what a transformation of style had taken place in him ! No
longer the grandiloquent invocations were found; no longer the
sounding style, uo longer the easy recurrence of the cadence, pausing
on the caesura and falling at the close of the line. Here the whole
rhythm and construction were of a new school and a new generation.
The style was more simple and more vigorous. The sentences
marched on with a rare recurrence of the ceesura, the cadence did not
fall with the end of the line, but ofteuer far in the middle of it, and
the verse abounded with triplets.
" He reads thanksgiving in the eyes ol all — \
All met as at a holy festival !
—On the day destined for his funeral ! I
Lo! there tiie friend, who, entering where he lay, "i
Breathed in his drowsy ear — ' Away, away ! >
'J'ake tliou my cloak^Nay, stait not, but obey ! )
Take it, and leave me.' "
What a total revolution is here ! The old chime is gone^ the old
melody is exchanged for a new. All depends on entirely new prin-
ciples, and seeks to give pleasure through an utterly fresh medium.
But the poem itself is one of the most beautiful things in any lan-
guage. It is human life from the cradle to the tomb, with all its
pleasures, aspirations, trials, and triumphs. Everything which clings
round the spii'it of man as precious, everything wliich wins ua
KOGEKS. 615
onward, and sustains us in sorrow, and soothes us under the infliction
of wrong, — the glory of public good, and the hallowed charm of
domestic affection, is thrown into this poem, with the art of a master
and the great soul of a sanctified experience. Nor were the varied
scenes of English life ever more sweetly described. The wedding
and the burial, the village wake and the field sports, the battle and
the victory, all are blended inimitably into the gi-eat picture of
existence, and at times the aged minstrel rises into a strain of power
and animation, such as rebuke the doubters of those attributes
in him.
" Then is the age of adrniration — Then
Gods walk the earth, or beings more than men ;
Who breathe the soul of inspiration round,
Whose very shadows consecrate the ground !
Ah ! then comes thronging many a wild desire,
And high imagining, and thought of fire !
Then from within, a voice exclaims — ' Aspire ! '
Phantoms, that upward point, before him pass,
As in ths cave athwart the wizard's glass;
They, that on youth a grace, a lustre shed,
Of everj- age, the living and the dead !"
Still this poem of Human Life is but the life of one section of our
fellow-men — that of the gentry. It is curious, that it does not
descend into the midst of the multitude, and give us any of those
deep and sombre shades which abound so much in Crabbe. The
reason is obvious. Crabbe had seen it and felt it. He had been born
amongst it, and had himself to struggle. Rogers had gone on that
easy path of life that is paved with gold, and " the huts where poor
men lie," therefore, probably never for a moment protruded them-
selves through the charmed circle of his poetic inspiration. Happily
for him his were wholly the Pleasures of Memory. Yet, as we have said,
it is not the less true, or less honourable, that in actual life, there was
no man who has remembered the struggling more sympathetically, nor
has held out a more generous hand to the aid of unfriended merit.
From the Voyage of Columbus the following extract will afford an
example of the beautiful description and rich imaginative power
which abound in that poem,
THE NEW WORLD.
" Long on the deep the mists of morning lay,
Then rose, revealing, as they rolled away,
Half-circling hills, whose everlasting woods
Sweep with their sable skirts the shadowy floods :
And say, — when all to holy transport given,
Kmbraced and wept as at the gate of Heaven,'
When one and all of us, repentant, ran.
And on our faces, blessed the wondrous man, —
Say, was I thus deceived, or from the skies
Burst on my ear seraphic harmonies?
' Glory to God!' unnumbered voices sung,
' Glory to God!' ihe vales and mountains rung —
Voices that hailed Creation's jirimal morn.
And to the shepherds sung a Saviour born.
Slowly, bareheaded, through the surf we bore
The sacred cross, and kneeling, kissed the shore.
But what a scene was there? Nymphs of romance,
Youths graceful as the Faun, with eager glance
Spring from the glades, and down the alleys peep ;
Some headlong rush, bounding from stee^ to stee^,
616 ROGERS.
And clap thiir liaiuls, exclaiiuin;? as they run,
' Come and behold the chihUen of the sun ! '
When havk, a signal-sliot ! The voice it came
Over the sea, in darkness and in flame !
They saw, they heard ; and up the highest hill,
As in a picture, all at once were still !
Creatures so fair, in garments strangely wrought,
From citadels with Heaven's own thimder fraught.
Checked their light footsteps— statue-like they stood.
As worshipped forms, the Genii of the Wood!
At length the spell dissolves! the warrior's lance
Rings on the tortoise with wild dissonance !
And see, the regal plumes, the coach of state !
Still, where it moves, the wise in council wait !
See now borne forth the monstrous mask of goldi
And ebon chair of many a serpent fold ;
These now exchanged for gifts that thrice surpass
The wondrous ring, and lamp, and horse of brass.
What long-drawn tube transports the gazer home,
Kindling with stars at noon the ethereal dome ?
'Tis here: and here circles of so!ul ;ight
Charm with" another self the cheated sight;
As man to man another self disclose.
And now with terror starts, with triumph glows :"
Italy, Mr. Rogers's last publislicci poem of any length, is a fine pro
diiction, full of that glorious land, and abounding with the finest
subjects for the painter and the sculjptor ; but we must not be
tempted to speak further of it here.
The changes of Mr. Rogers's life, or of his abodes, were not many.
He was born at Newington-green, on the 30th of July, 1763, and was
consequently, at his decease, December 1855, in the ninety-third
year of his age. Newington-green, his birth-place, has all the marks
of an old locality. In this neighourhood the Tudor princes used to
Jive a good deal. Canonbury, between this green and Islington, was
a favourite hunting-seat of Elizabeth, and no doubt the woods and
wastes extended all round this neighbourhood. There is Kings-
land, now all built over ; there is Henry VIII.'s walk, and Queen
Elizabeth's walk, all in the vicinity ; and this old quiet green seems
to retain a feeling and an aspect of those times. It is built round
with houses, evidently of a considerable age. There are trees and
quietness about it still. In the centre of the south side is an old
house standing back, which is said to have been inhabited by
Henry VIII. At the end next to Stoke Newington stands an old
Presbyterian chapel, at which the celebrated Dr. Price preached, and
of which, afterwards, the husband of Mrs. Barbauld was the minister.
Near this chapel De Foe was educated, and the house still remaiLS.
In this green lived, too, Mary Wolstoncroft, being engaged with
another lady in keeping a school. Samuel Rogers was born in the
stuccoed house at the south-west corner, which is much older than
it seems. Adjoining it is a large old garden. Here his father, and
his mother's father, lived before him. By the mother's side ho
was descended from the celebrated Philip Henry, the father of
Matthew Henry, and was therefore of an old Nonconformist family.
Mr. Rogers's grandfather was a gentleman, pursuing no profession ;
but his father engaged in banking. Mr. Ro<^ers continued to resid
in this house till after his father'.s death, and wrote and published
ROGERS. GlV
here liis Pleasures of Memory, which appeared a short time belbi-e
his fixther's decease.
On quitting Xewington-green, Mr. Rogers took chambers in tlio
Temple, where he continued to reside five years, or till about 1800,
when he removed to the house which he occupied for more than
half a century. In this house. 22, St. James's-place, he not oidy
wrote every one of his chief poems excejjt the Pleasures of Memory,
but he was visited by a vast number of the most celebrated men
of his time, amongst them Byron, Scott, Moore, Crabbe, Fox,
Campbell, Wordsworth, Southey, Coleridge, &c.
At an early period of his life he was anxious to purchase an estate
in the country, not too far from London, where he could build a
hou-se after his own taste. He pitched on Fredley farm, in Norbury
Park, near Mickleham, in Surrey, which was to be disposed of. By
some means it escaped him, and, disappointed in his object, he seems
to have given up the search for another situation, and contented
himself with building his house on paper. The result was the abode
described in his Epistle to a Friend, published in 1798. His villa is
placed in a rustic hamlet, has few apartments, but is not without
its library and cold bath, and is furnished with prints after the
best painters, and casts from the antique. The whole of this poem
breathes the love of the country, of simplicity of life, and condemn'?
the pomp and the follies of London fashionable society. Its accom-
paniments, its exterior and interior, are all of the same unostenta-
tious character, — it is an abode that any man of taste might posses.''
without any great wealth.
" Still must my partial pencil love to dwell
Oil the home-pros])ects of my hermit-cell :
The mossy pales that skirt the orchard-green
Jlere hid by shrub-wood, there by glimpses seen ;
And the brown pathway that witli careless flow
Sinks, and is lost among the trees below.
Still must it trace (the flattering tints forgive)
Each fleeting charm that bids the landscape live.
Oft o'er the mead, at pleasing distance pass,
Rrowsing the hedge by fits, the pannicred ass ;
The idling sheplierd-boy with rude delight,
Whistling his dog to mark the pebble's flight ;
And, in her kerchief blue, the cottage maid.
With brimming pitcher from the shadowy glade.
Far to the south a mountain-vale retires,
){ieh in its groves, and glens, and village spires ;
Its upland lawns, and clifTs with foliage hung.
Its wizard stream, nor nameless nor unsung.
And tnrough the various year, the various d.tV,
Wliat scenes of glory burst and melt away ! "
Hi.s interior embellishment shall be my last extract ; —
" Here no state chambers in long line unfold,
liright with broad mirrors, rough with fretted gidd :
Yet modest ornament, with use combined.
Attracts the eye to exercise the mind.
Small change of scene, small space his home requires.
Who leads a life of satisfied desires.
What though no marble breathes, no canvas glows,
Vrom every point a ray of genius flows !
He mine to bless the more mechanic skill.
That stamps, renews, and multiplies at will j
618 ROGERS.
And cheaply circulates through distant climes
Tli.e fairest relics of the purest times.
Here from the mould to conscious hein>? start
Those fmcr forms, the miracles of art ;
}[ere chosen gems, impressed on sulphur shiiit,
That slept for ages in a second mine;
And here the faithful graver dares to trace
A Mic.iael's grandeur and a Raphael's grace!
Th I p'allery, Florence, gilds my humble walls,
And n;v lou' mof tlie Vatican recalls."
]kit ]\[r. llogers had the power to procufe the originals ; and there-
fore the same taste put hiiu in possession of them. He was destined
to spend his hfe in London ; and only premising that the front of hi.s
liouae overlooks the Ureen Park, and possesses a gateway into it,
I shall present the account of its interior, or rather of its treasures
of art, from the pen of the well-known Professor Waagen of Berlin,
having been assured by the poet himself that it is accurate.
" By the kindness of Mi". Solly, who continues to embrace every
opportunity of doing me service, I have been introduced to Mr.
Rogers the poet, a very distinguished and amiable man. He is one
of the few happy mortals to whom it has been granted to be able to
gratify, in a worthy manner, the most lively sensibility to everything
noble and beautiful. He has accordingly found means, in the course
of his long life, to impress this sentiment on everything about
him. In his house you are everywhere surrounded and excited with
the higher productions of art. In truth, one knows not whether
more to admire the diversity or the purity of his taste. Pictures of
the most diflferent schools, ancient and modern sculptures, Greek
vases, alternately attract the eye, and are so arranged with a judi-
cious regard to their size, in proportion to the place assigned them,
that every room is richly and picturesquely ornamented, without
liaviug the appearance of a magazine from being over-tilled, as we
frequently find. Among all these objects none is insignificant ;
several cabiuets and portfolios contain, besides the choicest collec-
tions of antique ornaments in gold that I have hitherto seen, valuable
miniatures of the middle ages, fine drawings by the old masters, and
the most agreeable prints of the greatest of the old engravers, Mar-
cantonio, Diirer, &c., in the finest impressions. The enjoyment of
all these treasures was heightened to the owner by the confidential
intercourse with the most eminent, now deceased, English artists,
Flaxman and Stothard ; both have left him a memorial of their
friendship. In two httle marble statues of Cupid and Psyche, and
a mantel-piece, with a bas-reUef representing a nnise with a lyre and
Mnemosyne by Flaxman, there is the same noble and graceful feeling
which has so greatly attracted me from my childhood in his cele-
brated compositions after Homer and iEschyhis. The hair and
draperies are treated with great, almost too picturesque softness.
Among all the English painters, none, perhaps, has so much power
of invention as Stothard. His versatile talent has successfully made
essays in the domains of history, or fancy and poetry, of humour,
and lastly, even in dora.'stic scenes, in the style of Watteau. To this
mav be added much feeling for graceful movements, and cheerful,
noGERS. 619
bright colouring. In his pictures, which adorn a chimney-piece,
principal characters from Shakspeare's plays are represented with
great spirit and humour ; among them Falstaft' makes a very distin-
guished and comical figure. There is also a merry company, in the
style of Watteau ; the least attractive is an allegorical I'epresentatioii
of Peace returning to the earth, for the brilliant colouring approach-
ing to Rubens cannot make up for the poorness of the heads and the
weakness of the drawing.
" As there are among the pictures some of the best works of Sir
Joshua Reynolds, fine specimens of the works of three of the most
eminent British artists of an earlier date are here united.
" Besides portraits, properly so called. Sir Joshua ReynokLs was
the happiest in the representation of children, where he was able, in
the main, to remain faithful to nature, and in general an indifferent
but naive action or occupation alone was necessary. In such pic-
tures, he admirably succeeded in representing the youthful bloom
and artless manners of the fine English children. This it is which
makes his celebrated strawberry-girl, which is in this collection, sc
attractive. With her hands simply folded, a basket under her arm,
she stands in her white frock, and looks full at the spectator with
her fine large eyes. The admirable impasto, the bright golden tone,
clear as Rembrandt, and the dark landscape background, have a
striking effect. Sir Joshua himself looked upon this as one of his
best pictures. A sleeping girl is also uncommonly charming, the
colouring very glovv'ing ; many cracks in the painting, both in the
background and the drapeiy, show the uncertainty of the artist in
the mechanical processes of the art. Another girl with a bird does
not give me so much pleasure. The rather affected laugh is, in this
instance, not stolen from nature, but from the not happj' invention
of the painter ; in the glowing colour there is something specky and
false. Puck, the merry elf in Shaks^Jeare's Midsummer Night's
Dream, (called by the English, Robin Goodfellow,) represented as
a child, with an arch look, sitting on a mushroom, and full of wan-
lonness, stretching out arms and legs, is another much-admired
work of Sir Joshua. But, though this picture is painted with much
v/arrath and clearness, the conception does not at all please me. I
find it too childish, and not fantastic enough. In the background,
Titania is seen with the ass-headed weaver. Psyche with the lamp,
li inking at Cupid, figures as large as life, is of the most brdliant
efi'ect, i\nd, in the tender greenish half-tints, also of great delicacy.
In the rci^ard fc beautiful leading lines, there is an affinity to the
i-ather exaggerated grace of Pai'meggiano. In such pictures by Sir
Joshua, the n. correct drawing always injures the eft'ect. I was much
intere.sted with meeting with a landscape by this master. ]t is in tho
style of Rembrandt, and of very strong effect.
" Of older Engiisli painters there are here two pretty pictures by,
Gainsborough, one by Wilson ; of the more recent, I found only one,
by the rare and spirited Bonington, of a Tui-k fidlcn asleep over hia
pipe, admirably executed in a dee[) harmonious chiaro-oscuro. Mr.
Rogers's taste and knowledge of the art are too general for him not
6-20 ROGERS.
to feel the jirofound iutellectual value of works of art in \\ hich the
management of the materials was in some degree restricted. He
has, theVefore, not disdained to place in his collection the half figures
of St. Paul and St. John, and fragments of a fresco i)ainting from the
Carmelite church at Florence, by Giotto ; Salome dancing before
Herod, and the beheading of St. John, by Fiesole ; a coronation of
the Vn-gin, by Lorenzo di Crcdi, the fellow-scholar and friend of
Leonardo da Vinci, whose productions and personal character were
so estimable. Next to these pictures is a Christ on the Mount of
Olives, by Raphael, at the time when he had not abandoned the
manner of Perugino. This little picture was once a part of the pre-
della to the altar-piece which Eaphael painted, in the year 1505, for
the nuns of St. Anthony, at Perugia. It came with the Orleans
gallery to England, and was last in possession of Lord Eldon, in
Edinburgh. Unhappily it has been much injured by cleaning and
repairing ; but in many parts, particularly in the arms of the angel,
there are defects in the drawing, such as we do not find in Raphael
even at this period. So that, most probably, the composition alone
should be ascribed to him, and the execution to one of the assistants
who painted the two saints belonging to the same predella, now in
Dulwich College.
" From the Orleans gallery, Mr. Rogers has Raphael's Mado-nna,
well known by Flipart's engraving, with the eyes rather cast down,
on whom the child standing by her fondly leans. The expression of
joycusness in the child is very pleasing. The grey colour of the
imder-dress of the virgin, with red sleeves, forms an agreeable hai"-
mony with the blue mantle. To judge by the character and drawing,
the composition may be of the early period of Raphael's residence at
Rome. In other respects, this picture admits of no judgment, be-
cause many parts have become quite flat by cleaning, and others are
jjainted over. The landscape is in a blue-greenish tone, differing
from Raphael's manner.
"Of the Roman school I will mention only one more. Christ
bearing his cross, by Andrea Sacchi, a moderate-sized picture from
the Orleans gallery, is one of the capital pictures of this master, in
composition, depth of colouring, and harmony.
" The crown, however, of the whole collection, is Christ ajipearing
to Mary I\Iagdalene, by Titian. It was formerly in the possession of
the family of Muselli at Verona, and afterwards adorned the Orleans
gallery. In the clear, bright, golden tone of the flesh, the careful
execution, the refined feeling, in the impassioned desire of the
kneeling Magdalene to touch the Lord, and the calm, dignified refusal
of the Saviour, we recognise the earlier time of this master. The
beautiful landscape, with the reflection of the glowing horizon npon
the blue sea, which is of great importance here, in proportion to the
figures, proves how early Titian obtained extraordinary mastery in
this point, and confirms that he was the first who carried this branch
to a higher degree of perfection. This poetic picture is, on tlio
whole, in very good preservation ; the crimson drapery of the Mag-
dalene is of unusual depth and fulness. The lower part of the legs
1
ROGERS. G21
of Christ have, however, suffered a little. The figures are about a
third the size of life.
" The finished sketch for the celebrated picture, known by the
name of La Gloria di Tiziano, which he afterwards, by the command
of Philip II., king of Spain, painted for the church of the convent
where the emperor Charles Y. died, is also very remarkable. It is
ii rich, but not very pleasing composition. The idea of having tlie
cofnu of the emperor carried up to heaven, where God the Father
and Son ai'e enthroned, is certainly not a happy one. The painting
is throughout excellent, and of a rich, deep tone in the flesh. Un-
fortunately it is not wanting in re-touches. The large picture is nov/
in the Escurial.
"As the genuine pictures of Giorgione are so very rare, I will
briefly mention a young knight, small full-length, noble and
powerful in face and figure ; the head is masterly, treated in his
glowing tone ; the armour with great force and clearness in the
chiaro-oscuro.
" The original sketch of Tintoretto, for his celebrated ijicturc of
St. Mark coming to the assistance of a martyr, is as spirited as it is
full and deep in the tone.
" The rich man and Lazurus, by Giacomo Bassano, is, in execution
and glow of colouring approaching to Rembrandt, one of the best
pictures of the master.
" There are some fine cabinet pictures of the school of Carracci ;
a Virgin and Child, worshipped by six saints, by Lodovico Carracci,
is one of liis most pleasing pictures in imitation of Correggio.
Among four pictures by Domenichino, two landscapes, with the
punishment of Marsyas, and Tobit with the fish, are very attractive,
from the poetry of the composition and the delicacy of the finish.
Another likewise very fine one of Bird-catching, from the Borghese
palace, has unfortunately turned quite dark. A Christ, by Guido, is
broadly and spiritedly touched in his finest silver tone.
" There is an exquisite little gem by Claude Lorraine. In a
soft evening light, a lonely shepherd, with his peaceful flocks, is
playing the pipe. Of the master's earlier time ; admirable in the
impasto, careful and deUcate, decided and soft, all in a warm
golden tone. In the Liber Veritatis, marked No. 11. Few pictures
inspire, like this, a feeling for the delicious stillness of a summer's
evening.
'■ A landscape by Nicolas Poussin, rather large, of a very poetic
composition and careful execution, ins2iires, on the other hand, in
the brownish silver tone, the sensation of the freshness of morning.
There is quite a reviving coolness in the dark water and under tlio
trees of the foreground.
"Two smaller historical pictures by Poussin, of his earlier time,
class among his careful and good works.
"■ Of the Flerai.sh school there arc a few, but very good spof
ciraens.
"There is a highly interesting picture by T?ubons. During hie
r&aidencc in Mantua, he was so pleased with the Triun.ph of Jiil-OA
fii'2 ROOKRM.
CiSsar, by Mantegna, that ho made a fine copy uf one of the nine
pictures. His love for tlie fantastic and pompous led him to choose
that with the elephants carrying the candelabra ; but his aj-dent
imagination, ever directed to the dramatic, could not be content with
this. Instead of a harmless sheep, which in Mantegna is walking by
the side of the foremost elephant, Rubens made a lion and a lioness,
which growl angrily at the elephant. The latter, on his jjart, is not
idle, but, looking furiously round, is on the point of striking tha
lion a blow with his trunk. The severe pattern which he had
before him in Mantegna has moderated Rubens in his usually very
full forms, so that they are more noble and slender than they
generally are. The colouring, as in all his earlier pictures, is more
subdued than in the later, and yet pf)werful. Rubens himself
peems to have set much value on this study ; for it was among the
efiects at his death. During the revolution, ]\Ir. Champernowne
brought it from the Balbi palace, at Genoa. It is 3 ft. high and
5 ft. 5 in. wide.
"The study for the celebrated picture, the Terrors of War, in
the Pitti palace at Florence, and respecting which we have a letter
in Rubens's own hand, is likewise well worth notice. Rubens painted
this picture for the Grand Duke of Tuscany. Venus endeavom-s, in
vain, to keep Mars, the insatiable warrior, as Homer calls him, from
war ; he hurries away to prepare indescribable destruction. This
picture, 1 ft. 8 in. high and 2 ft. Ci in. wide, which I have seen in
the exhibition of the British Institution, is, by the wai-mthand power
of the colouring, and the spirited and careful execution, one of the
most eminent of Rubens's small pictures of this period.
'• Lastly, there is a ]\Ioonlight by him. The clear reflection of the
moon in the water, its eft'ect in the low distance, the contrast of the
dark mass of trees in the foreground, are a proof of the deep feeling
for striking incidents in nature which was peculiar to Rubens. As
in another picture the flakes of snow were represented, he has here
marked the stars.
" I have now become acquainted with Rembrandt in a new de-
partment ; he has i)ainted in brown and white a rather obscure
allegory on the deliverance of the United Provinces from the
miion of such great jiowers as Spain and Austria. It is a rich
composition, with many horsemen. One of the most prominent
figures is a lion chained at the foot of a rock, on which the tree of
liberty is growing. Over the rock are the words, ' iSolo Deo gloria!
The whole is executed with consummate skill, and the principal
effect is striking.
"Hi.s own portrait, at an advancetl age, with very dark ground
and shadows, and, for him, a cool tone of the lights, is to be classed,
among the great number of them, with that in the Bridgewater
Gallery ; only it is treated in his broadest manner, which borders
on looseness.
"A landscape, with a few trees upon a hill, in the foreground,
K'ith a horseman and a pedestrian in the background, a plain with a
bi'ight horizon, is clearer in the shadows than nther landscape.-^ by
ROGER.^. 623
RembrauJt, and therefore with the most poweiful effect, the more
harmouious.
" Amoug the drawings I must at least meutioii some of the
finest.
" Raphael. The celebrated Entombment, drawn with the utmost
spirit with the pen. From the Crozat collection. Mr. Rogers gave
120/. for it.
" ANDREA DEL Sarto. Some studies in black chalks, for his fresco
paintings in the Chapel del Scalzo. That for the young man who
carries the baggage in the visitation of the Virgin is remarkably
animated.
" Lucas Van Leydex. A pen drawing, executed in the most per-
fect and mastjrly manner, for his celebrated and excessively rare
engraving of the portrait of the Emperor Maximilian I. This won-
derful drawing has hitherto been erroneously ascribed to Albert
Diirer.
"Albert Dijrer. A child weeping. In chalk, on coloured paper,
brightened with white ; almost unpleasantly true to reality.
" Among the admirable engravings, I mention only a single female
figure, very delicately treated, which :s so entirely pervaded with the
spirit of Francisco Francia, that I do not hesitate to ascribe it to
him. Francia, originally a goldsmith, is well known to have been
peculiarly skilled in executing larger compositions in niello. How
easily, therefore, might it have occurred to him, instead of working
as hitherto in silver, to work with his graver in copper, especially as
in his time the engraving on copper had been brought into more
general use in Italy by A. Mantegna and others ; and Francia had
such energy and diversity of talents, that in his mature age he suc-
cessfully made himself master of the art of painting, which was so
much more remote from his own original i>rofession. Besides this,
the fine delicate lines in which the engraving is executed indicate
an artist who had been previously accustomed to work for niello-
plates, in which this manner is usually practised. The circum-
stance, too, that Marcantonio was educated in the workshop of
Francia, is favourable to the presumption that he himself had prac-
tised engraving.
" Among the old miniatures, that which is framed and glazed, and
hung up, representing, in a landscai)o, a knight in golden armour,
kneehng down, to whom God the Father, surrounded by cherul)im
and seraphiiii, appeai-s in the air, while the damned are tormented
by devils in the abyss, is by far the most important. As has been
already observed by Passavant, it belongs to a series of forty miuia-
ture.s, in the possession of l\Ir. George Brentano, at Frankfort-on-
Maine, which were executed for Maitre Etiennc Clievalier, tr(\-.iarer
of France under King Charles VII., and may piobably have adorned
his prayer-book. They are by the greatest French miniature painter
of the fifteenth century, Johan Fouquet do Tours, painter to King
Louis XI. In regard to the admirable spirited invention, which
betrays a great master, as well as the finished execution, they rank
uncommonly high.
C24 ROGERS.
" An antique bust of a youth, in Carrara marble, which in form
and expression resembles the eldest son of Laocoon, is in a very
noble style, uncommonly animated, and of admirable workmanship.
In particular, the antique portion of the neck and the treatment of
the hair are very delicate. The nose and ears are new ; a small part
of the chin, too, and the upper lip, are completed in a masterly
manner in wax.
" A candelabrum in bronze, about ten inches high, is of the most
beautiful kind. The lower part is formed by a sitting female figure
holding a wreath. This fine and graceful design belongs to the
period wdien art was in its perfection. This exquisite relic, which
was purchased for Mr. Rogers, in Italy, by the able connoisseur, Mr,
Millingen, is unfortunately much damaged in the epidermis.
" Among the elegant articles of antique ornament in gold, the ear-
rings and clasps, by which so many descriptions of the ancient poeta
are called to mind, there are likewise whole figures beat out in thiu
gold leaves. The principal article is a golden circlet, about two and
a half inches in diameter, the workmanship of which is as rich and
skilful as could be made in our times.
" Of the many Greek vases in terra cotta, there are five, some of
them large, in the antique taste, with black figures on a yellow
ground, which are of considerable importance. A flat dish, on the
outer side of which five young men are rubbing themselves with the
strigil, and five washing themselves, yellow on a black ground, is to
be classed with vases of the first rank, for the gracefulness of the
invention, and the beauty and elegance of the execution. In this
collection, it is excelled only by a vase, rounded below, so that it
must be placed in a peculiar stand. The combat of Achilles with
Penthesilea is represented upon it, likewise in red figures. This
composition, consisting of thirteen figures, is by far the most distin-
guished, not only of all representations of the subject, but in general
of all representations of combats which I have hitherto seen on
\ases, in the beauty and variety of the attitudes, in masterly draw-
ing, as well as in the spirit and delicacy of the execution. It is in
the happy medium between the severe and the quite free style, so
that in the faces there are some traces of the antique manner."
Besides these, the articles of ancient and modern art, in sculpture,
ivory carving, illustrated missals and MSS., specimens of Egyptian,
Greek, and Italian artistic manufactures, were almost endless.
To fhese treasures of art were added those of his sister, chiefly
paintings. Miss Rogers died on the 29th of Januaiy, 1855 ; and the
poet himself on the 18th of December of the same year. The poet,
his sister, and another brother, Henry Rogers, are all buried in the
same vault in Hornsey churchyard, with inscriptions bearing tho
dates of their respective births and deaths, and adding that Samuel
was the " Author of the Pleasures of Memory."
It remains only to add, that Mr. Rogers embellished his printed
works with the same exquisite taste as his house. They are sjilendid
specimens of typography, and are rich in the most beautiful designs
by Stothard and Titrner, from the most celebrated burins of tho
EOGEES. 626
day. I bt'lievc more than fifty thousaud copies of tnem have been
circulated. Since his death Mr. Moxon has published a volume of
Rogers' Table-Talk.
Jlr, Eogers, even in advanced age, was an active and persevering
v.-allier. We recollect seeing him some time before the decease of
.loanna Baillic, returning from a call upon her, and walking down the
hill towards Frognal Lane at a rate which made it difficult to over-
take him. His carriage was following him, and a servant, close at
liis elbow, kept a careful watch lest he should stumble over any loose
stone. Soon after this he met with his accident, which disabled him
from walking altogether. Eeturniug from a dinner-party in town,
again on foot, in orossini, a street, and endeavouring to avoid a cab,
he fell, and fractured the thigh-bone. Nothing in the world was
more likely than such an accident. Old gentlemen who are ex-
cessively deaf, and have carriages, should ride in them at night in the
streets of London, Avhen they are approaching ninety.
AU the art collections which enriched the poet's house are dis-
persed by the hammer of the auctioneer, except three of his best
paintings. These Mr. Eogers, by his will, bequeathed to the nation
—namely, his celebrated Knight in Armour, by Giorgioue; Ecce
Homo, by Guido ; and Noli me Tangere, by Titian ; which are now
in the National Gallery. Besides these, the Trustees of the National
Gallery purchased at the poet's sale ■.—Rubens. The Triumph of
Julius Csesar, a grand composition from a design by Andrea Man-
tegna, painted at Mantua, 1,102/. 10^. Giotto. Heads of Peter and
John in adoration before the body of Jesus ; a fragment of a fresco
from the church of the Carmelites of Brancacci in Carmel at Florence,
78/. 15.?. G. Basscuio. The Good Samaritan, from the collection of
Sir Joshua Eeynolds, 241/. \Qs. ; and liubeiis. The Horrors of AVar,
from the Balbi palace, at Genoa, 210/.
The sale of the poet's effects occupied twenty-two days, and pro-
duced the following amount, as kindly furnished to me by Messrs.
Christie and Manson, the auctioneers : —
£ .?^ (/.
Antiquities, Greek vases, &:c 'l.'j-l 17 li
Pictures 50,180 10
Ancient and modern drawings, -works of art, marbles, .Vc. 7,!tjl 12
Total 42,-107 5 r.
Coins ''"i' , ; "
Furniture 317 11
Plate 4SS ;> !)
llous.; ''.^ P Q
Tvl».'. l^M'i 14 3
THOMAS MOORE.
The author of Lalla Rookb, like most of the race of genius, -was
one whom his own genius ennobled. The man who has not to
thank his ancestors for what he enjoys of wealth, station, or repu-
tation, has all the more to thank himself for. The heralds, says
Savage Lander, will give you a grandfather if you want one, but
a genuine poet has no need of a grandfather ; he is his own grarid-
father, his own shield-bearer, and stands forth to the world in the
l)roud attitude of debtor to none but God and himself, the shiehl-
bearer and the grandfather of others. Thomas Moore was born in
an humble house in Dublin, the son of humble but respectable
parents. He made his own way in the world, and gave to those
parents the honour of having produced a distinguished son. That
is as it should be. People should honour their parents ; it is rarely
that parents can honour their children. They cannot bequeath their
genius to them ; it is not always that they can succeed in engrafting
on them their virtues : and if parents be glorious in reputation and
in goodness, if the children do not walk worthy of that glory, the
glory itself is only a blaze that exposes them to the world ; lights
aj. and aggi'avates every blemish to the general eye. How truly is
MOORE. 627
honour, true honour, in nine cases out of ten, a self-acquisition.
Wealth you may entail, station you may entail ; but well-won honour
is a thing which, like salvation, every man must achieve for nimself.
Poets in general know no ancestry. In their poetic character they
are as truly and newly created as Adam himself. Who cares a button
for the ancestors of Byron, of Milton, of Shakspeare, of Goethe, or
of Schiller ? These men start out to our eyes in the blaze of their
own genius, which darkens all around them. They are creations of
God, and not of man. They are sent forth into the world, and not
born into it. Their ancestors are not the ancestors of their genius.
They are the progenitors of the earthy caterpillar — the butterfly,
the Psyche of genius, is born of itself. With the splendid spirit
which breaks forth sometimes from an old line, that line commonly
has nothing more to do than the earth on which we tread, the
common mother of us all, has to do with our soul and its celestial
powers. These come out of the hand of God, gifts to us and the
world ; luminaries burning in a divine isolation ; priests after the order
of Melchisedec, whose ancestry and whose jjosterity are not known.
God has vindicated to himself the origination of Genius and Chris-
tianity. They both came into the world independent of governments
and princes : they spring out of the habitations of the poor, and
walk amongst the poor ; they disdain to confer on worldly pride the
honour of their alliance, but they do their mission in the strength of
their sender, and mount to heaven.
These are great truths that every man of genius should see,
acknowledge, and act upon. His birth is higher than that of any
prince, even be it more lowly than that of the Son of God, in a
stable and a manger, with a stalled ox instead of the Archbishop of
Canterbury, and an ass instead of a Prime Minister, attending as
witnesses. Nobles can confer no nobility on him : he bears hia
patent of honour in his own bosom ; the escutcheon of genius is his
in the broad and exalted brow. He should remember this ; and the
world will not then forget it. He should think of himself as sent
forth by God, doing God's work in the earth, and having to render nj)
to God the account of his embassy. With this idea within him and
before him, his work will be done the more nobly ; and the public
which is made what it is by him, — effeminate through his effemi-
nacy, corrupt through his corruption, wise through his wisdom, —
will soon place him in his true rank, above all heaps of metal and
spadefuls of earth, and honour him as the only true noble, the only
man who has no need of heraldic lies and fictitious grandfathers.
These are great truths that the children of men of genius too should
bear in mind. They should feel that they cannot inherit genius,
but they may possess it in some new shape, an equal gilt of heaven.
This will keep alive in them the spirit of honourable action ; and
they may come to live, not in the moonshine of their ancestral
lights, but in a genuine warm sunshine of their own. The honour
of a distinguished parent is not our honour but our foil, if we do not
seek to establish an alliance with it by our own exertion, and above
all by goodness.
628 MOORE.
For waut of pocls and poets' children entertaining these rationa.
ideas, what miseries have from age to age awaited them ! In the
course of my peregrinations to the birthplaces and the tombs of
poets, how often have these reflections been forced upon me.
Humble, indeed, are frequently their birthplaces ; but what is far
worse, how wretched are often the places of their deaths ! How
many of them have died in the squalid haunts of destitution, and
even by their own hand. How many of them have left their families
to utter poverty ; how many of those caressed in their lives, lie
without a stone or a word of remembrance in their graves ! But
still more melancholy is the contemplation of the beginning and the
end of Robert Tannahill, the popular song-writer of Paisley. Tanna-
hill was no doubt stimulated by the fame of Burns. True, he had
not the genius of Burns, but genius he had, and that is conspicuous
in many of those songs which during his lifetime were sung Avith
enthusiasm by his countrymen. Tannahill was a poor weaver of
Paisley. The cottage where he lived is still to be seen, a very
ordinary weaver's cottage in an ordinary street ; and the place where
he drowned himself may be seen too at the outside of the town.
This is one of the most dismal places in which a poet ever termi-
nated his career. Tannahill, like Burns, was fond of a jovial hour
amid his comrades in a public-house. But weaving of verse and
weaving of calico did not agree. The world api^lauded, but did not
patronize ; disappointment in fame and in the affections, acting on
a nervous temperament, disordered his mind ; and Tannahill, in the
frenzy of despair, resolved to terminate his existence. Outside of
Paisley there is a place where a small stream passes under a canal.
To facilitate this passage a deep pit is sunk, and a channel for the
waters is made under the bottom of the canal. This pit is, I believe,
eighteen feet deep. It is built round with stone, which is rounded
off at its mouth, so that any one falling in cannot by any possibility
get out, for there is nothing to lay hold of. Any one once in there
might grasp and grasp in vain for an edge to seize upon. He would sink
back and back till he was exhausted and sank for ever. No doubt
Tannahill in moments of gloomy observation had noted this. And
at midnight he came, stripped off his coat, laid down his hat, and
took the fatal jjlunge. No cry could reach human ear from that hor-
rible abyss ; no effort of the strongest swimmer could avail to
sustain him : soon worn out he must go down, and amid the black
boiling torrent be borne through the subterranean channel onward
with the stream. Thus died Robert Tannahill, and a more fearful
termination was never put to a poetical career. The place is called
TannahiU's hole, and cats and dogs drowned in it, from its peculiar
fitness for inevitable drowning, float about on the surface, and add to
the revolting shudder which the sight of it creates.
Such are some of the dominant tendencies of poetic fate which
made Wordsworth exclaim, —
" We poets in our youth begin in pladness,
But thereof come in the end despondency and nadness;"
Mid such must there be till gcuius respect Itself, and came the public
MOORE 629
to respect it ; till it reflect that it is a heavenly endowment, and not
a trade stock.
Amongst the most fortunate men of genius, — amongst those who
by strength of pinion, and by various resources of prose, poetry, and
music, have soared above the poet's ordinary path beset with rojies,
poison, throat-cutting razors, pistols, and drowning holes,— is the
gay and genial Thomas Moore. Moore was born, as I have said, in
Dublin. His father kept a shop in Aungier-street, and was a respect-
able grocer and spirit dealer. The shop continues exactly as it was
to the present day, is employed for the same trade, and over it is
the little drawing-room in which Mr. Moore himself tells us that he
used to compose his songs, and with his sister and some young
friends acted a masque of his own composing.
Moore was not ashamed of his humble birthplace. " Be sure," ha
said to me, "when you go to Dublin, to visit the old shop in
Aungier-street." I did visit it, and the landlord insisted tliat I should
drink a glass of whisky in honour of Tom Moore's being born there.
Moore declared that he knew very little of his ancestry. On his
father's side, his uncle, Garret Moore, was the only one whom he
knew. He was a Kerry man. His mother was an Anastatia Codd,
the daughter of " my gouty old grandfather, Tom Codd," as ]\Ioore
familiarly names him, " who lived in the corn market, Wexford,"
and who was in the provision trade, and, as Moore believed, from
his recollection of machinery, had been a weaver. Moore was born
on the 28th of May, 1779. He was first sent to school, at a very
early age, to a man of the name of Malone, in the same street ; " a
wild, odd fellow," he says, " of whose cocked hat I have still a clear
remembrance, and who used to pass the greater part of his nights
in drinking at public-houses, and was hardly ever able to make his
appearance in the school before noon. He would then generally
whip the boys all round for disturbing his slumbers." He was then
sent to the grammar school of the well-known Samuel Whytc, to
whom in his fourteenth year he addressed a sonnet, which was
published in a Dublin Magazine, called the Anthologia. In this
periodical he also printed his first amatory effusions, addressed by
him under the cognomen of Romeo to a Miss Hannah Byrne, who bore
the name of Zelia. This Mr. Whyte was fond of poetry and dramatic
ref)resentation, and is mentioned by Moore as having superintended
private theatricals at different gentlemen's and noblemen's houses,
as at the Duke of Leinster's, at Marly, the seat of the Latouches,
&c., where he supplied prologues. Sheridan had been a pupil of
Whyte's, and it is further stated by Mr. Moore, that many parents
were alarmed at the danger of his instilling a love for these things
into his scholars. Can there be a doubt that he did so with Sheridan
and Moore ?
Moore was sent to the university in Dublin, in 1795, where the un-
fortunate Kobert Emmet was at the time. Moore soon formed an
acquaintance with him, and became a member of a debating society,
at which Emmet and other young patriots assembled to preparo
themselves for public life. On the approach of the frigthful ci-
030 MOOKE.
plosion of 1798, the university was visited by Lord Fitzgibbon, its
vice-chancellor, with a rigorous examination, Government liaviug
become aware of the students being deeply engaged in the organiza-
tion of the Irish union. Amongst those found to be thus implicated
were Emmet, John Brown, and others. They became marked men.
Moore himself underwent examination, but came clear oft'. From
these connexions and early impressions, however, we may date hia
steady adherence to liberal and patriotic sentiments.
At the university his poetic genius early displayed itself. There
he commenced the translation of the Odes of Anacreon. He took
his degree of Bachelor of Arts in 1798 or 1799, and left the univer-
sity. He soon found his way over to England, where his wit, his
songs, and his conversational brilliancy, introduced him to the first
circles of fashionable life, and to Government patronage. He entered
himself of the Middle Temj^le in 1799 ; but, instead of legal studies,
poetical ones wholly engrossed him, so that in 1800, before he had
completed his twentieth year, he had published his Anacreon. At
this time he had lodgings at 44, Govver-street, Portman-square, at
six shillings a-week. This place was a great haunt of poor French
emigrants ; where he described himself as greatly disturbed by the
snoring of an old cure, and much amused by the scheme of a French
bishop, who, having too many hungry callers, used to hang up a
board on the st-aircase, chalked in lai'ge characters, — " The Bishop's
gone out."
He soon made the acquaintance of several Irishmen ; amongst
them of Martin Archer Shee ; had a sight of Peter Pindar and other
lions ; but by far the most important introduction was to tlie Earl
Moira. He visited him at his seat, Donnington Park, Leicestershire,
a place which afterwards became quite a home to him. By Lord
Moira he was introduced to the Prince Regent, and while Moira .and
that party continued in Aivour was a frequent guest at Carlton House.
In 1801 he published a volume of poems, under the title of The
Poetical Works of the late Thomas Little, Esq. To be able to
cancel many of these effusions the author would have given in after
years a great portion of his fame ; and, indeed, in the complete
edition of his poems in one volume, he took care to exclude the
most exceptionable.
Through the influence of Lord Moira he was, in 1803, appointed
to the office of Registrar to the Admiralty Court at the Bermudas.
He described in his letters the scenery of the island as beautiful,
but his occupations, — those of swearing skippers, mates, and sea-
men as witnesses in the causes of captured vessels, — as not very
poetical. In going and returning he saw something of the United
States and Canada. His whole absence from England was not four-
teen months. He published on his return a collection of odes,
epistles, and fugitive poems, illustrative of the scenery and life of
Bermuda, and of most caustic and scarifying epistles from the United
States. From the hour that he settled down again in England — •
notwithstanding the time that he devoted to society, into which hia
peculiar powers of pleasing continually threw him — he displayed au
MOORE. C31
exti-aoi-dinary industry. Though a very gay man, ]Moore never was
an indolent one.
In 1806 there appeared a very severe article in the Edhiburgh
Review on Moore's Odes and Epistles, which so roused his Irish
blood, that, hearing that Jefirey was in London, he sent him a chal-
lenge ; and the poet and reviewer met at Chalk Farm, where, when
about to fire, out stepped some police from behind the trees, and
arrested the belligerents. On examining the pistols, that of Moore
was found to have a bullet in it, that of Jeffrey none. This was
soon converted in the newspapers into Moore's pistol being only
loaded with a paper pellet, and Jeffrey's one without the i)eliet, — as
though he had already tired his pellet in the Edinburgh. The whole
made much merriment ; and Lord Byron did not let the story
lose anything in his version of it in English Bards and Scotch
Reviewers.
On the 2oth of ^Sfarch, 1811— was it because it was Lady-day ?—
Moore was married to a Miss Dyke, at St. Martin's church, in London,
being tv,'o-and-thirty years of age. It was a most fortunate marriage.
Though Miss Dyke had little or no property, as it is commonly
called, she seems to have been possessed of every other good property.
She was very handsome and very domestic. Though of a peculiarly
retiring disposition, and, therefore, not accompanying her husband
much into his gay and general society, she was mo-st amiable, in-
telligent, and accomplished. She showed herself on all occasions
a woman of much energy of charactei", of tact and judgment. Nothing
was more striking than the manner in which the poet relied upon
her in all matters of daily life. Lord John Russell says, " From 1811,
the year of his marriage, to 1852, that of his death, this excellent
and beautiful person received from him the homage of a lover, en-
hanced by all the gratitiide, all the confidence, which the daily and
hourly happiness which he enjoyed was sure to inspire. Thus, what-
ever amusement he might find in society, whatever sights he might
behold, whatever literary resources he might seek elsewhere, he
always returned to his home with a fresh feeling of delight."
But perhaps there never was a man who spent almost the whole
of his life in a constant round of visiting amongst the great and
fashionable, who i-etained so waindy and uncorruptedly the full
.strength of liis domestic aflections. There never was a more kind
and devoted son. Twice a week, except when in Bermuda and
America, he wrote to his mother, with a never varying love. He
settled a hundred pounds a-yeav on his parents as soon as ho began
to realize a tolerable income, and always paid it while they lived,
even when sorely pressed himself.
Soon after his mamage he made the acquaintance of Lord Byron,
but for some time he was almost constantly the guest of Lord
Moira, at Donnington Park. To be near him, and yet not quite
dependent on him for a home, he took a cottage at Kegworth in the
spring of 1812, about a year after his marriage. They did not long
remain there, for in the summer of the next year they removed to
Mayfield Cottage, near Ashbourne. This was, no doubt, occasioueii
632 MOORE.
by the appointment of Lord Moira to the government of India, and
to the expectation of Moore and his friends that he wonld take him
with him in some profitable post, which was wholly di^jappointed.
Lord Moira, though lie had raised such expectations, had too many
hungry expectants of his own kith and kin ; and Moore, justly
chagrined, removed to a distance. They had now two daughters,
one having been born in London, before settling at Kegworth, and a
second at that place.
But Moore had now prospects of no inconsiderable emolument at
home. He had already engaged with Power for 500/. a-year for
seven years, for his Irish Melodies, and he had now made the
engagement with Longmans for Lalla Rookh, for 3000/. Here then
he went to work in joyous alacrity. The rent of his cottage was only
20/. a-year, and the taxes three or four more, not altogether 30/. This
poem was ready for the press in 1816, so that it would seem to have
cost him between two and three years. Once more, therefore, they
removed. This time it was to the foot of Muswell Hill, near
Hornsey. It is a small brick cottage standing in very secluded
grounds. There they spent the summer of 1817, while JMoore was
putting Lalla Rookh through the press ; and his wife stayed there
while he made a trip to Paris ; where he collected the materials for
that humorous production, The Fudge Family in Paris. From
Paris he was hastily recalled by the illness of his eldest daughter,
who died soon after he reached Hornsey. In the autumn they went
rlown to Bowood to see some houses there which Lord Lansdowne,
ivho wished to have them near him, thought would suit them, where
they took Sloperton Cottage, furnished, for 40/. a-year !
But scai'cely were they got into this new house than care in a very
wholesale and disagreeable shape followed them. Moore's deputy,
whom he had left in Bermuda, after having long embezzled the pro-
'jeeds of the post, absconded, leaving the poet responsible for 6,000/.
The man was of a rich and respectable mercantile family of the
name of Sheddon. He had been recommended to Moore by tlio
uncle, a wealthy old fellow, and, poet-like, Moore had taken no
guarantee from him for this dishonest nephew. Till these affairs
could be settled, Moore was advised to get away to the Continent,
and accordingly he set out, in company with Lord John Russell, on
the 4th of September, 1819. In this journey he went with Lord
John to Paris, thence into Switzerland and as far as Milan, where
they parted ; and Mooi-e went on to visit Lord Byron at his countr)'
house. La Mira, near Fusina, and went from thence with him to
Venice. He found Byron grown fat, and living with the Countess
Guiccioli, whom he did not think at all handsome. Her husband
was perfectly agreeable to this arrangement, on condition that
Byron should let him have 1,000/. Moore returned by the south of
France to Paris, where, in January, 1820, his wife and children
joined him. There he lived till the latter end of November, 1822,
when, the Bermuda affair being settled, he returned to England, and
to his cottage at Sloperton, which he now secured on a terixi for
'Ibl. a-year.
MOORE. 633
During the nearly three years that he hved in Paris, Moore's hfe
was precisely the same as when in England — one continual round of
visiting amongs-t the English ai'istocracy and travellers who came
there. At the same time ho was busy on the Life of Sheridan, The
iCpicurean, The Loves of the Angels, &c. During this period he
made one visit to England, and to his parents in Ireland, in 1821, of
course in cog., wearing artificial moustaches as a disguise, and taking
his wife's name, Dyke.
The places in which Moore lived in and near Paris were, first,
apartments in the Rue Chantereine, where they lived only six weeks,
when they removed to a cottage in the Champs Elysees; after that
they occupied for some time a cottage of their friends the Villarnils,
at La Butte Coaslin, near Sevres. Moore says that the cottage of
La Butte conjured up an apparition of Sloperton, and he defines it by
a haj^py quotation from Pope —
" A little cot with trees a row,
And, like its master, very low."
Here he used to wander in the noble park of St. Cloud, with his
pocket-book and pencil, composing verses, and pondering on the
Epicurean ; and closing the evening by practising duets with the
lady of his Spanish friend, or listening to her guitar. Kenney,
the dramatic writer, lived near them, and Washington Irving visited
him there.
Thence they V\,-ent back to the Alice des Veuves, Champs Elysees,
and then back to Sevres. After that they had lodgings at 17, Paie
d'Anjou, Paris ; and finally at Passy. It is curious that it was in
Paris and its vicinity that Moore says he first began to feel the
influence o^ Naiure. In his journal of September, 1819, we find him
saying, " Few things set my imagination on the wing so much as
those spectacles at the Opera," which appears very characteristic ;
but in October, 1820, a year after, when he had been walking in the
park at St. Cloud, and the Bois de Boulogne, he discovers that " It is
only within these few yeans I have begun to delight in the charms of
inanimate nature, the safest as well as the purest passion."
At length his Bermuda affair was settled, by the claimants
reducing their demands to 1,000/. or 1,200/., of which the old
Sheddon, the delinquent's uncle, agreed to pay 300/., Lord John
Russell 200/., and Lord Lansdowne tlie remainder.
Perhaps the most important event connected with his later life
was the destruction of the Memoirs of Lord Byron, which had been
entrusted to him for publication after his death. These Memoirs had
been given to Mr. Moore, and Mi-. Moore had sold the copyriglit of
them to Mr. Murray, for two thousand guineas. Lord Byron being
dead, and the time for publication come, the relatives of Lord Byron
took alarm, and implored Mr. Moore to allow them to be destroyed.
To this Mr. ]\Ioore was weak enough to consent. That he did so
from a sense of the most delicate honour there could be no question ;
even had he not proved that by the sacrifice of two thousand guineas
and interest, which he repaid to ]\lr. Murray, thougli he had to
borrow it of Messrs. Longmans. But if honour to Lord ]^>yron'.'3
634 MOORE.
relatives was preserved, it was neither so to Lord Byron nor the
public. It was a sacred trust of the one for the gratification of the
other ; and had Mr. Moore had any scruples on the subject of publica.
tion, he should have returned the MS. to Lord Byron while living.
When dead, there was no such way out ; there was no alternative,
without a betrayal of the most sacred trust that could be reposed
in man, but to allow the noble donor's intention to be faithfully
carried out. There has been much controversy on this topic, but this
still continues, and will continue to be, the result of public opinion.
What renders the destruction of these memoirs the more unac-
countable is, that by Moore's own practice and confession, they
contained nothing objectionable, except it might be a passage bearing
rather hard upon the private character of some one in a conversa-
tion with Madame de Stael, and a charge against Sir Samuel
Romilly, which he admits could have been most easily neutralized,
by a true version in a note. They could not be very immoral, one
would think, for Moore lent them about amongst his lady friends,
Lady Holland, Lady Mildmay, &c., and they came back without any
remonstrances or disapprobation. Indeed, had there been anything
objectionable, he confesses that he had full authority from Lord
Byron to alter or annul.
One of the secrets of Mr. Moore's successful industry, perhaps,
may be found in the fact that, spite of his social disposition, and of
all the fascinations of society for a man of his fame, wit, and accom-
plishments, he lived the greater part of his life after his marriage in
the country. What is also highly commendable is, that his habits
of life with the wealthy aristocracy never seduced hira into living in
expensive houses. All his residences are of the humblest description,
and of a rent seldom passing 40/. a-year, and for the greater part of
his life, as we have seen, only 25/. Yet we have a suspicion that
this prudence originated with his wife, for we always find that
whenever Moore came into possession of money, or had a prospect of
it, he began to live expensively. — Borrowed a large house of LordLans-
dowme, at Richmond, one summer ; borrowed his friends' carriages ;
gave great dinners and fetes champctres ; and, therefore, at the time
of his death, though he confesses to have made 30,000/. by his
writings, he had nothing to leave to his wife, his sole survivor, but
his Diary in MS. Amongst the various places of abode, two only
were residences of much duration. These were Mayfield cottage,
near Ashbourne, in Derbyshire, and Sloperton cottage, near Devizes,
in Wiltshire.
Mayfield is not a particularly picturesque village, nor is the im-
mediate neighbourhood striking ; but it lies in a fine country, and
within a short distance of it are Dovedale, and other beautiful scenes
in Derbyshire and Stafibrdshire. The recommendations of Mayfield
have been thus enumerated by a cotemporary writer in a periodical.
"Moore's cottage is in a secluded part of Mayfield, a village on the
Stafibrdshire side of the river Dove, about two miles from Ash-
bourne. It is a spot not often alluded to in literature, though tho
neighbourhood has been peculiarly honoured by the presence of
MOORE. C35
literary men. Three miles from Mayfield is Wotton Hall, where
Eousseau lived several years ; where he botanized, and where he
wrote his Confessions. One mile from Mayfield, on the other side of
the Dove, lived a great, and perhaps a much better man than Rous-
seau, but who will not attain an equal renown — Michael Thomas
Sadler. At Oakover, one mile from Mayfield, is the residence of the
late Mr. Ward, author of Tremaine. Two miles further up the
river, in the loveliest of all villages, a grotto is still preserved iu
which Congreve wrote his first drama. A ten minutes' walk affords
a view of the grand entrance to Dovedale, immortalized by old Izaak
Walton. At Tissington, another most exqviisite village, like the
former, without workhouse or alehouse, lived Greaves, the author of
the Spiritual Quixote. Dr. Taylor, one of Dr. Johnson's most
esteemed friends, was an inhabitant of Ashbourne. The great lexi-
cographer was a visitor of this neighbourhood, and some of his most
amusing conversations and peculiarities are recorded by Boswell
while staying in this quiet town. Mayfield cottage bears now some
claim to the notice of the lovers of literature, from its being
the residence of Mr. Alfred Butler, the clever author of the novels
Elphinstone and the Herberts."
It was not, however, the attractions enumerated in the above pas-
sage which determined the settlement of Moore there. His wife and
liimself were travelling along from a scene of great aristocratic
splendour, of which they had become so weary, that they sighed for
the utmost simplicity, retirement, and repose, and vowed that they
woiild take the very first place of such a character that they found
vacant. Mayfield cottage was the one. " It was a poor place," said
Moore to myself, " little better than a barn, but we at once took it,
;uid set about making it habitable."
It is no doubt from some such remark on the part of the poet
that a paragraph originated which I have lately seen going the round
of the newspapers, that he wrote Lalla llookh in a barn. That barn
was, in fact, Mayiield cottage, though he describes their cottage at
Kegworth also as a barn-like abode. The right-hand front window
at Mayfield is pointed out as belonging to Sloore's little parlour ;
the window at the side belonged to his not very extensive library,
and the trees visible above the roof are part of the orchard,
his favourite study, in which some of his choicest lyrics were
composed.
The warm-hearted poet, though it was many years since he quitted
Mayfield, spoke with pleasure of the enjoyment he experienced
there. The country around, both in Derbyshire and Staffordshire,
has many charms for a poetic eye. It was within a walk of Dove-
dale; and he speaks of his rambling in that enchanting glen with "his
Bes!3y," his wife. There are, too, many persons of taste and intel-
ligence living thereabout, from whom he and his family received
every cordial attention. He was zealously engaged in working out
what he deemed was to be the crowning work of his fame, Lalla Rookh,
and he regarded the cottage at Mayfield, and the scene immediately
surrounding it, peculiarly favourable fur this purpose. '' It was in-
636 MOORE.
deed,'' lie observes, iu the preface to his eighth vohimc, " to the
secluded life I led during the years 1813 — 1816, iu a lone cottage iu
tlie fields in Derbyshire, that I owed the inspiration, whatever may
have been its value, of some of the best and most popular portions
of Lalla Rookh. It was amid the snows of two or three Derbyshire
winters that I found mysolf enabled, by that concentration of
thought which retirement alone gives, to call up around me some
of the sunniest of those Eastern scenes which have since been wel-
comed in India itself as almost native to its clime." It is, he says,
a peculiarity of his imagination that it is easily- broken in upon aiul
diverted by striking external objects. " I am," he observed to me,
" at once very imaginative, and very matter-of-fact. The matter-of-
fect can at any moment put to flight all the operations of the
imagination. It was, therefore, necessary for me to exclude matter-
of-fact, and all very striking or attractive objects, and to concentrate
■all my imagination on the objects I wished to portray. INIy story
iay in the East, and I must imbue and saturate my imagination
entirely with Eastern ideas, and Eastern imagery. I must create,
and place, and keep before me a peculiar world, with all its people
and characteristics. No place could be more favourable for this
than Mayheld, because it had nothing prominent or seducing enough
to rush thj:'Ough and force itself into the world which I had
evoked, created, and was walking and working in. The result was most
complete. Although I never have been in the East myself, yet every
one who has been there declares that nothing can be more perfect
than my representations of it, its people, and life, in Lalla Rookh."
But though living in the country, ^loore was always in the pretty
regular habit of visiting town during the season. Here he was the
charm of the circles of the Whig nobility, especially at Lansdowne
and Holland houses. At these places, and especially the latter, he
met all the distinguished men of the time — Byron, Jeffrey, Sydney
Smith, Campbell, Brougham, and the like. Even iu the country ho
Uved much in the houses of his great friends. His visits at Chats-
worth, and at Donnington Park, the seat of Lord Moira, where he
describes himself as passing whole weeks in the library, even when
the family was absent, " indulging in all the freest airy castle-build-
ing of authorship," were rather sojourns than visits. Here he met,
oddly enough, with the rival princes of France, poor Charles X. and
his brother, the Due de Montpensier, and the Comte Beaujolais, at
the same time with the Duke of Orleans, the late Louis Philippe,
who in the library at the same house would be deep in a volume of
Clarendon, " unconsciously preparing himself by such studies for
the high and arduous destiny which not only the good genius of
France, but his own sagacious and intrepid spirit, had early marked
out for him." Rogers and Moore were for many years very intimate
friends, and of course Moore was during those years much at home
in the classic abode of the latter poet.
But Lord Lansdowne was anxious to get the wit and poet dowa
into his own neighbourhood, and pressed him to come and live near
Bowood. "TommVj who dearly loves a lord," according to the
MOORK. 637
designation given to Moore by his dear friend Lord Byron, was will-
ing to oblige Lord Lansdowne by living near him, as he obliged the
relatives of Byron by burning the horror-creating Memoirs. His
Lordship sent him word that there was a house just the thing for
him, at Bromham, not far from Bowood. Moore went down to see
it, but found it far too large and expensive for a poet's income. It
was a huge, stately house, with extensive stabling, offices, rookeries,
gardens, and land ; " in fact," he said, " it might have done for Lord
Lansdowne, but did not suit the finances of a poet." He, howevei-,
told Mrs. Moore on his return that he had seen a cottage on the road
that was everything that he desired, with a most dehcious garden and
in a sweet situation. With her usual energy, Mrs. Moore took coach,
hastened to the cottage, liked it as well as her hu.sband did, and took
it at once. This was Sloperton cottage, and here they resided more
than thirty years.
It is SloiJerton cottage which hereafter will be regarded with the
chief interest as the residence of the poet. It stands in the midst
of a delightful country, and though itself buried, as it were, in an
ordinary thickly wooded lane, branching off to the left from the
high road, about two miles from Devizes, on the way to Chippenham,
yet from its upper windows, as well as fi'om its garden, it enjoys
])eeps through the trees into lovely scenes. Down southward from
the far end of the house opens the broad and noble vale towards
Trowbridge ; in front to the right, across a little valley, stands on a
tine mount, amid nobly grown trees, the village of Bromham, with
the great house proposed to Moore by Lord Lansdowne as a suitable
residence for him, standing, boldly backed and flanked by the masses
of wood, and the church spire peering above it. More to the left, in
front, you look across some miles of country, and see the historical
foreland of lloundaway hill, the termination of the chalk-hills of
the White-horse-vale, proudly overlooking Devizes. This hill, my
driver gravely assured me, was Roundaway hUl, ivkere King John
signed the charter ! Behind the cottage, across some rich fields, are
the wooded slopes of Spy Park, once the property of Sir Andrew
Baynton.
At a few hundred yards' distance, on the left-hand .side of the lane
as you advance from the Devizes road, there stands the old manor
liouse of Nonsuch, which has gone through many hands, and had, when
1 wa.s there, recently been sold, and was refitting for a modern
mansion. A nari'ow foot-lane descends past its grounds down through
the valley, between tall hedges and embowering alders to the village
of Bromham, which gives you a view of the ancient knolls of the
park-like environs of Nonsuch. Old sturdy oaks stand here and
there on these knolls, and everything presents an air of great
antiquity. A footpath runs through these grounds, by which you
are admitted to loiter at your leisure amid the retired slopes and
woodland hollows of this old English sceneiy. The footway which,
I have .said, le ads also down past it, to Bromham, is peculiarly rural.
It is paved, as the bottom abounds in water, where a beautiful spring
gushes up from the foot of the ascent towards the village ; and it
638 MOORK.
passing along it, you feel yourself to be shi'ouded amid a luxuriant
growth of water-loving trees, and surrounded by the quietness of
woodland banks, and rustic farm lands. The village is purely agri-
cultural, and has a fine church, with a singularly richly ornamented
battlement.
Such is the immediate situation of Moore's cottage. Views of it
every one has seen ; but it is only when you stand actually before
it, see it covered with clematis, its two porches hung with roses,
and the lawn and garden which surround it kept in the most exquisite
order, and fmgrant with every flower of the season, that you are
fully sensible of what a genuine poet's nest it is.
And yet the house was originally merely a common labourer's
cottage. This part forms still the end next to the Devizes road,
which road, however, is three-quarters of a mile distant ; but fresh
erections have been added, so that now it is not a very large, but a
very goodly and commodious dwelhng. The old entrance has been
left, as well as a new one made in the new part, so that no unneces-
sary interruption may be occasioned to the family by visitors. The
old entrance leads to the little drawing-room, the newer one to the
family sitting-room. The poet's study is u^j-stairs. In the garden
there is a raised walk running its whole length, bounded by a hedge
of laurel. This gives you the view over the fields of Spy Park, and
its finely-wooded slopes. This was a favourite walk of the poet ; and
it was, indeed, the fascination of this garden which originally took
his fancy, and occasioned him to think of securing it.
One of the most pleasing traits of Moore's character is that, spite
of his moving in high aristocratic circles, and having often great
need of money, he maintained a most independent and unselfish dis-
position. Besides his Bermuda appointment, which turned out a loss
through the dishonesty of his agent, he never received any othei*
post. He was offered various literary and political editorships, with
abundant incomes ; but, like Southey, he declined them, because
they would interrupt his own poetical pursuits. He had enjoyed for
seventeen years a pension of 300/. per annum, and that was the
extent of his Government patronage.
He has been careful to tell us himself, in his preface to his third
volume, the actual amount of royal patronage which he had been
said to have received, and unworthily repaid by quizzing the modern
Heliogabalus. It is this, and is worth reading : " Luckily, the list of
benefits showered upon me from that high quarter may be despatched
in a few sentences. At the request of the Earl of Moira, one of my
earHest and best friends, his royal highness gi-aciously permitted me
to dedicate to him my Translation of the Odes of Anacreon. I was
twice, I think, admitted to the honour of dining at Carlton House ;
and when the prince, on his being made regent in 1811, gave his
memorable fete, I was one of the envied — about 1,500, I believe, in
number — who enjoyed the privilege of being his guests on the occa-
sion." The obligation was certainly not overpowering, especially
when the country had to pay for it. Moore added, that history has
now pretty well settled the character of this royal patron
MOORE. 639
Moore was very unfortunate in regard to his children. He had
three daughters and two sons, but they all died before him. From
some cause they do not appear to have possessed constitutional
stamina sufficient to bear them through the wear and tear of exist-
ence. This has been freely attributed to the early dissipations of
the poet, who could i^urgate the new editions of his early and very
licentious poems, but could not thus chase the mischief from new
editions of himself. If this were the fact, what a punishment in
this life, and what a warning, if warnings are ever of any use I
Moore seems to quote in his Diary, with an air of great satisfaction.
Mr. Sneyd's verses on Lalla Rookh : —
"LallaRookh
Is a book
By Thomas Moore,
Who has written foui
Each wanner
Than the former;
So the most recent
Is the least decent."
Yet, as he advanced in life, he deeply regretted the sensuality of
the Little's Poems, and removed a good deal of it. But the publica-
tion of mischievous matter is a thing never to be remedied ; for the
original editions still exist, ready to be re-issued by low booksellers
as soon as the law of copyright permits them.
Moore's eldest daughter, Ann Jane Barbara, only about five years
old, died at Muswell Hill, in 1817, and was buried in Hornsey church-
yard. Her death was hastened by a fall ; but the doctors had before
said, that if she lived, it could only be as " an invalid, from the bad
state of her inward parts." These are Moore's own words. His
second daughter, Anastatia Mary, died in 1829. She lived to the age
of nearly seventeen, and was buried at Bromham, near Sloperton
and where also the poet and his son Russell sleep. A third daughter,
Olivia Byron, lived only a few months. John Russell Moore, the
second son, was born in May, 1823, and died November, 1842 ; conse-
quently, he was just turned nineteen. He had received a cadetship
in the East India Company's service, but a residence in India of
about eighteen months completely exhausted him. Lord John
Russell tells us that " his constitution was too delicate to carry him
on to manhood. Perhaps, as Anastatia, with an English home, fell
a victim to disease, Russell would not have survived long, even in
his native climate." The last surviving of Moore's children was hi«
eldest son, Thomas Lansdowne Parr Moore.
This youth was bom October, 1818, and died March, 1846, so that
be was in his eight-and-twentieth year. His father had purchased
an ensigncy and lieutenancy in succession for him. He went to
serve in India, where dissipation and the climate soon made him
incapable of discharging his duty. Lord John Russell says he was
" not physically strong, and had little restraint over himself." Moore
paid 1,500/. for him, and then the young man sold his commission.
He proposed to enter the French service in Algeria, which his father
enabled him to do by applying to Louis Philippe. It was the most
640 MOORE.
unfortunate thing he could have done. The cUmate and duly of
Algiers he soou reported far worse than that of India, and con-
sumjjtion ended his days in the hospital of Mostorganem. The
wildiiess of this son, and his melancholy death, told fearfully on the
mind and strength of the poet. His memory failed rapidly, antl
the last time that I saw him, which was soon after this sad event,
he had contracted all the appearance of the old man, stooping con-
siderably, and being continually obliged to apply to Mrs. Moore to
aid his recollection. This loss of memory was, in eflfect, a signal bless-
ing, bestowing a calm on his closing period, which otherwise could
not have existed. " His last days," says Lord John Russell, " were
peaceful and happy : his domestic sorrows, his literary triumphs,
seem to have faded away alike into a calm repose. He i-etained to
his last moments a pious submission to God, and a grateful sense
of the kindness of her whose tender office it was to watch over his
decline."
He died at Sloperton cottage on the 26th of February, 1852, aged
seventy-two years and nine months ; and was buried in the church-
yard of Bromham, within view of his own house, and by the side of
two of his children. It was a circumstance worthy of note in the
termination of the life of a man so wholly devoted to the society of
the aristocracy, that not one of his great friends was present at his
funeral. The sole persons from a distance being a clergyman, and
one of the Messrs. Longmans, his publishers, who had certainly,
through their long connexion with him, proved themselves real and
substantial friends.
Lord John Russell, one of his latest and most intimate com-
panions, though not present on this occasion, generously negotiated
for the publication of his Memoirs with the Messrs. Longmauis,
and obtaining 3,000/. for them, purchased with that sum an annuity
for Mrs. Moore, equal to the income which she and her husband had
enjoyed during the latter years of his life. Lord John, moreover,
edited the Memoirs himself, thus conferring the best boon on the
widow of his friend, who seems to have been one of the best wives
that ever man had.
In reviewing the life of the poet, we cannot help feeling regret
that so much of it should have been wasted in the empty glare of
mere fashionable society. We do not mean the select and intelligent
society of the RusseUs, Lansdownes, and Hollands, but in the mob
of mere titled people, who used him in the same capacity as great
people used their clever jesters of old, — to amuse them. Yet, so
absurdly proud was Moore of his perpetual fluttering, singing, and
collecting stale witticisms in these tinsel circles, that he looked
with the profoundest contempt on men of the highest talents,
whom he never met there. Several entries in his Diary of this kind
are absolutely pitiable. At Dr. Bowring's he says he met many
first-rate literati, not one of whom he knew by name ; and was
greatly surprised to meet so great a man as "Washington Irving there,
with whom he made a speedy escape. At Martin's, the painter's, he
found himself, also, to his inlinite disgust, amongst a host of small
MOOKE. G41
literati. In such houses as those of Sir Jolm Bowring aud John
Martin, the vain little poet might, we are satisfied, have found much
more taste and intelhgence than in far more pretending quarters,
had he condescended to put it to the proof. But it is as useless to
wish Moore anything but whafc he was, as to wish a butterfly a bee,
or that a moth should not fly into a candle. It was his nature ;
and the pleasure of being caressed, flattered, and admired by titled
people must be purchased at any cost. Neither poverty nor sorrow
could restrain him from this dear enjoyment. We find him at
one moment overwhelmed by some death or distress amongst his
nearest relatives, or in the very bosom of his family. News arrives
that a son is ill in a far-off land, or a daughter is dead at home.
In the very next entry in his Diary he has rushed away with his
grief into some fashionable concert, where he sings, and breaks
down in tears. He goes into the charmed, glittering ring to forget
his trouble, and leaves poor, desolate Mrs. Moore, solitarily at home
to remember it. And yet, this strange little fairy was a most affec-
tionate husband, son, and brother. We find him and his wife at
one time staying at Lord Moira's for a week beyond the time that
they should have left, because they had not money enough to give
to the servants. At another time you find him invited to dine witl
some great people, but he has not a penny in his pocket ; Bessy howevei
has scraped together a pound or two out of the housekeeping cask
and lets him have it, and he is off. Thus night after night, season
after season, he is the flattered and laughing centre of the most
briUiant circles of lords and ladies, while he and his wife in the day-
time are at their wits' end to find the means of meeting the demands
of their humble menage. He is joking aud carolling like a lark, while
his thoughts are at every pause running on how that confounded bill
is to be taken up. All the time his wife is sitting sohtarily at home
pondering on the same thing, and cannot call on her friends be-
cause it would necessitate the hire of a coach.
AVhat is the motive which induced the great people to have him
amongst them ? It was what the Duke and Duchess of Bedford
candidly confessed when they said — " They wished they had some
one like Mr. Moore, to be agreeable when they got to their inn in the
evening." And what were the agreeable man's own feelings in this
life 1 " Never did I lead such an unquiet hfe ; Bessy ill, my Jane
nncomfortable ; anxious to employ myself in the midst of distrac-
tions, and full of remorse in the utmost of my gaiety." What a costly
price for the gratification of vanity ! It is curious, amid these per-
petual distractions of gaiety without, and of gloom within, these
perpetual sacrifices of his time to the frivolities of fashionable life, to
fiee what an amount of labour he achieved, a great deal of it, indeed,
fcuch as he only performed for daily bread, and which added nothing
to his real fame.
The best parts of his character were his affection for his parents,
his wife and children, and the spirit of liberty which distinguished
him for the greater portion of his life, though this became so
uimontably deteriorated by his minghug with the aristocracy that
642 MOORE.
he cordially hated the Keform Bill, though it waa the favourite
object of his best friends, Lord John Russell, Lords Lansdowne and
Holland. The best part of his genius is to be found in his Irish
Melodies, and his Lalla Rookh, the latter of which, though not
attractive to a grave and lofty taste, will always charm those of an
Eastern and rather flowery imagination.
The list of his works from tirst to last, is quite enormous. The
Odes of Auacreon translated. A Candid Appeal to Pubhc Conh-
deuce, or Considerations on the Dangers of the Present Crisis, 1803.
Corruption and Intolerance, two poems. Epistles, Odes, and othei
Poems, 1806. Little's Poems, 1808. A Letter to the Roman Catholics
of Dublin, 1810. M. P., or the Blue Stocking; a comic opera, ir.
three acts, performed at the Lyceum, 1811. Intercepted Letters, oi
the Twopenny Post Bag, by Thomas Browne the younger, 1812 : this
has gone through upwards of fourteen editions. Irish Melodies.
Arthur Murphy's Translation of Sallust completed. The Sceptic, a
jihilosophical Satire. Lalla Rookh, 1817. The Fudge Family in
Paris, 1818. Ballads, Songs, &c. Tom Crib's Memorial to Congress,
in verse. Trifles Reprinted in verse. Loves of the Angels. Rhymes
on the Road. Miscellane-jus Poems by Members of the Procurante
Society. Fables for the Holy Alliance. Ballads, Songs, MisceUaneoua
Poems, &c. Memoirs of Captain Rock. Life of Sheridan. The
Epicurean. Odes on Cash, Corn, Catholics, &c. Evenings in Greece.
Life and Letters of Lord^ Byron, m 17 Vols. History of Ireland
&c. &c. &,c.
PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BECCLES.
This book is DUE on the last date stamped below
Form L-9-157n-7,'32
SOUTHERJN
PR
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