'&mgf \ '% ii&Co.,PuMisliera.New ii r II UC Mll.C J 9 I, 27 Beetansm. Street PORTRAIT GALLERY OF EMINENT MEN AND WOMEN OF EUROPE AND AMERICA. EMBRACING HISTORY, STATESMANSHIP, NAVAL AND MILITARY LIFE, PHILOSOPHY THE DRAMA, SCIENCE, LITERATURE AND ART. WITH BIOGRAPHIES. BY EVERT A. DUYCKINCK, n IUTHOR or "PORTRAIT QALLEBY or EMINENT AMERICANS," "CYCLOPEDIA OP AMERICAN urERATOBB," "HISTORY OF THE WAS TOR THE ONION," ETC., ETC. ILLUSTRATED WITH HIGHLY FINISHED STEEL ENGRAVINGS FROM ORIGINAL PORTRAITS BY THE MOST CELEBRATED ARTISTS. IN Two VOLUMES. VOL, I. NEW YORK: JOHNSON & GITTENS, PUBLISHERS, 122 & 124 DUANE STREET. Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1873, by JOHNSON, WILSON & COMPANY, In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington, D. 0. CONTENTS OF VOLUME I. SAMUEL JOHNSON, . OLIVER GOLDSMITH, . *. HANNAH MORE, FREDERICK II., . ^EDWARD GIBBON, . .'MARIE ANTOINETTE, . DAVID GARRICK, . GEORGE WASHINGTON, ^MADAME D'ARBLAY, EDMUND BURKE, . SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS, . MARTHA WASHINGTON, Y BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, ROBERT BURNS, . CHARLOTTE CORDAY, v'JOHANN WOLFGANG GOETHE, JOHN PHILIP KEMBLE, . ABIGAIL ADAMS, . GILBERT-MOTIER DE LAFAYETTE, THOMAS JEFFERSON, . MARIA EDGEWORTH, FRIEDRICH SCHILLER, . HENRY GRATTAN, . . SARAH VAN BRUGH JAY, . NAPOLEON BONAPARTE, . ROBERT FULTON, . ^MADAME DE STAEL, . HOHATIO NELSON, . FOHN PHILPOT CURRAN, . JANE AUSTEN, . WILLIAM WILBERFORCE, . GEORGE STEPHENSON, . PAGR. 5 28 , 43 60 . 75 87 . 106 123 . 139 159 . 169 182 , 192 204 . 218 226 . 240 255 . 263 279 , 293 310 , 323 334 . 344 360 . 368 378 , 396 409 416 433 -v CONTENTS. SARAH SIDDONS, . 446 ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT, . . . . . . . 466 WALTER SCOTT, . . 473 DOROTHY PAYNE MADISON, . .488 LORD BROUGHAM, 494 LORD BYRON, . ,507 ELIZABETH FRY, 529 ROBERT PEEL, . . 539 WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, 544 FELICIA DOROTHEA HEMANS, 566 DUKE OF WELLINGTON, .577 THOMAS MOORE, ..... . .593 LYDIA HUNTLEY SIGOURNEY, . . ... . . .605 ANDREW JACKSON, . , 315 PREFACE. 4 T) IO GRAPHY," says Archbishop Whately, " is allowed on all hands to be l^y one of the most attractive and profitable kinds of reading." The reason of this ir. obvious. It has, when properly treated, the ease and variety of the most agreeable forms of literature, and its subject-matter most nearly concerns the reader. In its very nature it is bound to a certain interest of progress and development, such as we look for in the Drama. Reaching back fre- quently into the story of an ancient lineage, the infant human life is introduced with a species of historic interest in the concerns and opportunities of the family. The formative years of childhood succeed, with the influences of education which, if they do not create the character, go far to shape its manifes- tation to the world. How infinitely varied are these forms of development, how peculiar the action of the individual mind ! Then comes the great struggle for success as the years roll on, till the man, with noble endeavor, obtains the mastery, and whether in art, science, literature or public affairs, places himself on a pinnacle where he will be surveyed through all coming time. The end which crowns the work of the personal career is yet to be reached ; and as we have watched the rising of the hero with hope and anxiety, we look upon his age and departure with sympathy and admiration. To observe and chronicle the achieve- ments and vicissitudes of every year of busy life is the province of the biographer, and there are no resources of literature which may not on occasion be serviceable to the work. Hence, books of biography are more and more, in the hands of consummate masters of the art, claiming the highest rank in our libraries. They are no longer scant and meagre records of a few personal details, but, in the case of men of eminence, require for their perfection a vast deal of the resources of history and philosophy. In the hands of Macaulay and Carlyle, biography, in its most attractive exhibition, is made to do the work of history, and nobly it accom- plishes the design. Nor is this simply a daring achievement of men of genius. The greater part of the knowledge which we have of history, it may safely be said, is at this day conveyed through the lives of distinguished personages. Looking at the work before us the exhibition of the LIVES OF EMINENT MEN AND WOMEN OF EUROPE AND AMERICA, from the period of the Revolution to the present day we find, when we have made up the list, a singularly general representaton of the nationalities of the present century as well as of (3) PREFACE. the various modes of illustrious achievement All the GREAT NATIONS OF EUROPE supply their men of thought and action, their great sovereigns, theii founders of governments, their distinguished military chieftains, their statesmen, their philanthropists, their scientific discoverers, their poets and artists. The new birth of ITALY is exhibited in the record of Cavour, Garibaldi, and Victor Emanuel, and the early rule of Pope Pius ; FRANCE has her Marie Antoinette, her Charlotte Corday, her Napoleons, her Thiers ; RUSSIA, her Alexander, with his grand work of national reform ; GERMANY emerges from the old revolution with her Goethe, Schiller, Humboldt, to enter upon the empire with King William, Bismarck and Von Moltke ; ENGLAND is illustrated from the days of Johnson to those of Dickens and Tennyson in literature ; she has her statesmen in Bright, Cobden and Gladstone ; her warriors on sea and land in Nelson and Wellington ; her philanthropists of both sexes from Wilberforce to Florence Nightingale; her race of female novelists from Jane Austen to Charlotte Bronte ; her inventors in such examples as Stephenson and Faraday ; SCOTLAND has her Burns, Scott and Livingstone; IRELAND her Burke, Goldsmith, Edge- worth, Curran, Grattan, and O'Connell ; while in the UNITED STATES, all of the classes we have alluded to are represented in Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Lincoln, Grant, Webster, Fulton, Morse, Peabody, Bryant and others of either sex, and so we might enumerate the whole of the hundred and more subjects of these biographies. In no work of the kind, thus far published, has the same attention been given to FEMALE BIOGRAPHY AND PORTRAITURE. One-third of the portraits will be of illustrious women, eminent in history, literature, art or philanthropy. It has been the object to present these " lives " of persons of eminence suffi- ciently in detail to interest the reader in their personal history ; to exhibit, to the young particularly, the foundation of their success in early self-denial and resolu- tion ; to include all that can be gathered within the necessary limits to display the strong, essential elements of character. The artistical department of the work is greatly indebted to the ability of our native painter, MR. ALONZO CHAPPEL In many instances the portraits have been re-drawn by him, while the selection . of originals has been made from the most eminent painters, including Sir Joshua Reynolds, Sir Thomas Lawrence, Paul de la Roche, and others. They are here presented in a novel style, with characteristic accessories. Unusual pains have been taken in this country and in Europe, to obtain the most reliable authori- ties ; while the engraving of the whole has been entrusted to experienced artists of the highest reputation in London and New York, at a great outlay of cost SAMUEL JOHNSON. XN all English biography it is ad- mitted that the Life of Samuel Johnson, as exhibited by Boswell and his associates in the work, stands forth the fullest in detail and least likely to be exhausted in interest, one generation succeeding another since it was written and the latest still perusing it with eager curiosity. Never before or since, has so minute and faithful a record been given to the world of the personal career of a man of letters, probably of any man in any station of life. The nearest approach to the nar- rative in English literature is one in- spired by it, the life of Sir Walter Scott, by Lockhart, but that is com- paratively a simple production when placed by the side of the performance of his elder countryman. Of Burns, also, we know a great deal, as we do of the personality of Scott. The names of these men bring before us at once their noble traits of character, and we may conceive on the instant how they would think and act under any cir- cumstances. So too of others of whom less has been written. We may know the men ; but we do not know so much of them as we may gather in a few hours from our book-shelves of the life of Johnson. Between what he \\ rote of himself and what was written of him by others, of whom his great bi- ographer was only the chief, what with the revelations of* his diaries, the can- dor of his correspondence and the vigorous impression of himself upon his moral writings, we may be inti- mately acquainted with him in his in- ner as well as his outer life through the entire seventy-five years of his ex- istence. For the story begins with his cradle. He was anecdotical even in his infancy. Non vine diis animosus infans. His friend, Sir Joshua Reynolds, turning his pencil in later years from that scarred and seamed countenance, im- mortal on his canvas, in a fanciful pic- ture portrayed the child as he may then have appeared, a companion to his infant Hercules : " The baby figure of the giant mass, Of things to come at large." The portrait is that of a vigorous, healthy child, and in that respect it was but imaginary for the real John- O v t son was, in his early years, sickly and diseased, so miserable an object one of his aunts afterwards told hitr thai (5 SAMUEL JOHNSON. 'she would not have picked such a poor creature up in the street." But Reynolds, always a poet painter, was intent upon a glorification of his subject. This seemingly unhap- py child came into the world in the city of Lichfield, Staffordshire, England, on the 18th of September, 1709. The house in which he was born is still standing in 1872 a familiar object to many pilgrims at the corner of a street opening named St. Mary's Square, "a tall and thin house of three stories with a square front and a roof rising steep and high," as it is de- scribed by Nathaniel Hawthorne who visited it, and as it may be seen repre- sented in many familiar engravings. Here at the time of the birth of his son Samuel, Michael Johnson, a native of Derbyshire, of obscure extraction, r vas settled in a humble way as a book- seller and stationer. When he was more than fifty he was married to Sarah Ford, of a peasant family in Warwickshire. She was then at the age of forty. Two sons were born to them Samuel, three years after the union, and three years later, Nathaniel, who died at the age of twenty-five. In the year of his son's birth, Michael Johnson was sheriff of the county ; he owned the house in which he resided and generally bore a respectable posi- tion in the place. His business as a bookseller was extended by his excur- sions into the neighboring towns where he opened a shop on market days, held auctions and offered for sale works of various kinds, law, history, mathe- matics and a good stock of divinity for the serious and, to please the ladies," as one of his circulars informs us, a " store of fine pictures and paper-hang ings " which were to be sold precisely at noon " that they may be viewed by daylight ;" for Michael Johnson was a conscientious man and would practice no deception even in the sale of pic- tures. He was of a strong and robust frame, but of a melancholy tempera- ment, arising it may be from a scrofu lous taint which his son inherited with his disposition. The mother of John- son is described by Boswell as "a woman of distinguished understand- ing ;" but from the account we have of her from her son she was quite il- literate, so that she could not sympa- thize at all with her husband's love of books ; nor was she able to assist him in his business as it became less pros- perous and the family encountered the hardships of poverty. Her uneducated piety was sometimes troublesome to her son in his boyhood when she kept him home on Sundays to read the dull and sombre homilies of " The Whole Duty of Man ;" but she was kind to him with a mother's fondness enhanced by his sufferings from ill-health, and he always entertained a grateful re- collection of her. The first authentic anecdote of John- son, as a child, belongs to his third year, when being thirty months old, at the advice of Sir John Floyer, a notable physician at Lichfield, he was taken by his mother to London to be relieved of his scrofulous disease, the King's Evil, as it was called, by the magical touch of Queen Anne, who, following the royal precedents from the days of Edward the Confessor, as may be read IL Shakspeare, was supposed to be gifted with power to relieve that coja SAMUEL JOHNSON. plaint. Johnson must have been among the last on whom that cere- mony was performed for which in the old editions of the Books of Common Prayer there was an especial religious service. Queen Anne was the last to practice this mode of cure. The iden- tical gold coin or ".touch piece " which, according to custom the child Johnson received on the occasion may now be seen preserved as a curiosity in the British Museum. The Johnson family were inveterate tories and were in- clined to believe to the end in the effi- cacy of kings. Johnson professed to retain a recollection of this introduction to royalty, remembering a boy crying at the palace when he went to be touched and the appearance though shadowy of Queen Anne. He had, he told Mrs. Thrale, "a confused, but somehow a sort of solemn recollection of a lady in diamonds and a long black hood." Another incident of about the same time, savoring also of toryism, is of a decidedly apocryphal character, though circumstantially related to Bos- well by a lady of Lichfield whose grandfather witnessed the scene and which is also represented on a bas-re- lief of the monument to Johnson in front of his birth-place. In this he is pictured as a child of three years old held on his father's shoulders listening to the preaching of the famous high- church Doctor Sacheverell. It was impossible, the tale runs, to keep the boy at home, for " young as he was he believed he had caught the public spirit and zeal for Sacheverell and would have staid for ever in the church, satisfied with beholding him." Boswell gave the story in his book, for he thought it "curiously charac teristic," but his editor, Croker, set the idle tale at rest by reminding the reader that at the time assigned the tory preacher was interdicted from preach ing, and though he had visited Lich field in his triumphal progress through the counties, it was when Johnson was but nine months old. There is also a stupid story of his having recited to his mother at the same tender age of three, four bad lines of his composi- tion, an epitaph on a duckling which he had trod upon and killed. Passing beyond these mythical in- ventions to the sober facts of biogra- phy we come upon a "Dame Oliver, a schoolmistress, such as Shenstone has described, who taught the young Samuel to read English, a dame so wonderfully gifted that she could peruse black letter, calling upon her pupil to borrow from his father's stock a Bible for her in that character. Then came a preceptor, Tom Brown, who published a spelling-book which he dedicated to the universe ; and after him Hawkins, the usher of the Lichfield school, with whom Johnstfn learned much, passing to the upper form, literally into the hands of Mr. Hunter ; for this head master " whipt me very well," as his great pupil af- terwards stated with pride, being prone as a moralist to defend this method of implanting learning in the youthful mind. He thought it much better than the emulation system which, he would say, created jealousy among friends, while the flogging set- tled the matter at once and the knowl- edge was secured. Johnson, however was an apt scholai and, not withstand SAMUEL JOHNSON. ing his admiration of the birch, was probably very little indebted to it for his education. He early showed great powers of memory, an indication of a strong and fertile mind, that faculty implying both sunshine and replenish- ing of the soil. He would help his fellow pupils in their studies, and was BO popular with them that they would call for him at his home and carry him to school in a sort of triumphal pro- cession, one stooping to bear him upon his back while two others supported him on either side. His eyesight, which was defective from his birth, kept him from the usual boyish sports, but he contrived wonderfully well, as he afterwards said, " to be idle without them." Though capable of great ex- ertions, with a mind always actively employed, he was constitutionally en- couraged to fits of indolence which sometimes got the better of him, as he was often in the habit of confessing and lamenting. As a boy he liked to wander idly in the fields, talking to himself and had an immoderate fond- n^ss for losing himself in old romances such as the vicar ejected from Don Quixote's library. At the age of fifteen he was sent to the Grammar School of Stourbridge, in Worcestershire, where he passed about twelve months, returning home to spend a couple of years " loitering," says his biographer, " in a state very unworthy his uncommon abilities." He was, however, all the while an om- nivorous reader, browsing on the mis- cellaneous stock of his father's books, one day lighting upon the Latin Works of Petrarch, which he devoured with avidity certainly not the proof of an idle employment of his time. He had. moreover, already in his school exer- cises proved his ability in various po etical translations of Virgil and Horace, so that, when in his nineteenth year he was, with the promised assistance of a gentleman of Shropshire, entered a commoner of Pembroke College, Ox- ford, he carried with him a stock of attainments which at once gave him a creditable position at that University. On the night of his arrival he was in- troduced with his father, "who had anxiously accompanied him," to his in- tended tutor, Mr. Jorden, when, spite of his ungainly appearance, for he even then appears to have had something of that uncouthness of person and man- ner afterwards so much commented upon, he impressed the company favor- ably by his ready citation of a passage from Macrobius, an out-of-the-way au- thor for a novice to be acquainted with. But Johnson was no novice in learned reading ; and though he showed some waywardness in attendance upon rou- tine duties, he soon gained the respect of the authorities by his talent, and es- pecially attracted their attention by an easily executed brilliant translation into Latin verse of the Messiah of Pope, who is said to have remarked, on being shown the production by a son of Dr Arbuthnot, then a student at Oxford " The writer of this poem will leave it a question for posterity, whether his or mine be the original." Johnson passed about three years at the University, his course being great- ly impeded by his poverty, for the assistance which had been promised failed to be given, and the waning for- tunes of his father enabled him to eke SAMUEL JOHNSON. out for his son but a scanty support, which finally failed altogether and com- pelled him to leave without a degree. So extreme was his want of resources tliiit he could hardly maintain the or- dinary decencies of the place, going about, or rather, shrinking from view, with worn-out shoes, through which his feet were painfully visible, and when some friendly hand placed a new pair at his door, throwing them away with indignation as an insult to his poverty. Such was the pride of John- son, an honest pride often shown in his career through life, which preserved his independence and kept him free from the baseness with which he might, from the associations into which he was inevitably thrown, have otherwise been entangled. His association with Oxford was doubtless one of the import- ant influences of his life, though it bore no immediate fruit in academic honors. He acquired there no inconsiderable knowledge of Greek, must have added largely to his stores of reading and, lover of learning as he ever was, been pro- portionately impressed with the genius of the place. He had some reputation while there as " a gay and frolicsome fellow," it is said, and was disposed to be satirical and censorious. This he long afterwards characteristically ex- plained : " Ah, I was mad and violent. It was bitterness which they mistook for frolic. I was miserably poor, and I thought to fight my way by my liter- ature and my wit ; so I disregarded all power and all authority." In truth there was seriousness enough in his life at this time. During his first va- cation, passed at his home at Lich- 6eld, he became the prey of so oppres- 2 sive a melancholy that existence waa almost insupportable to him under the anticipation of impending insanity. It was but lit tie relief to the evil at the time that the burden was imagin- ary, and that he showed the absurd- -ity of his fears by engrossing them to the admiration of his physician with remarkable ability in most excellent Latin. The hypochondria, like the ter- rors of a dream, produced much suffer- ing ; but it was of a kind over which he learned to gain control, though its shadows accompanied him through life. It was also while at Oxford that he be- came the subject of those deep reli- gious convictions which, with a dash of superstition, never departed from him. The seeds of piety were early implanted in him by his mother's teachings; but, as we have seen, the method was not always well judged, and in his youth he was disposed to some laxity of opinion which was re- strained by the habits of Oxford and extinguished by a famous book of evangelical piety which he met with there " Law's Serious Call to a Holy Life." He took it up, he tells us, " ex- pecting to find it a dull book, as such books generally are, and perhaps to laugh at it, but I found Law quite an even match for me ; and this was the first occasion of my thinking in ear- nest of religion, after I became capa- ble of rational enquiry." Keligion thenceforth became intimately associ- ated with his thoughts and actions. A few months after Johnson left Oxford his father died at Lichfield, at the age of seventy-six, leaving scant property to his family ; for out of his effects the portion which came to h's 10 SAMUEL JOHNSON. son Samuel, excluding that which he might ultimately derive from his moth- er, was but twenty pounds. With this he was to begin the world at the age of twenty-two. But the regard in which his father had been held was something of an inheritance to him, and the knowledge which, according to the old proverb, survives houses and lands, was to prove its excellence. He looked to his scholarship as his nrst means of support. The prospect of advantage from it was for a long time not a cheering one. He began by ac- cepting the humblest position as a teacher, that of usher or under-master in the school of Market-Bosworth, in Leicestershire, to which he proceeded on foot. The situation was necessarily irksome to one of his temperament, who always grasped at knowledge with impatience, seldom during his life read- ing a book through, but, with an in- stinctive sagacity, hastily "plucking )\it the heart of its mystery." He was in his capacity of usher con- lemned to the painful iteration of the rales of grammar, the inflections of nouns and the moods of verbs, with boys to whom to-day's lesson was a re- flection of that of yesterday, and identi- cal with that of the morrow a melan- choly drudgery for the quick-minded -Johnson ; it was doubtless also aggra- vated according to the manntu of boys by half concealed ridicule of his pecu- liarities, and, when the whole was sup- plemented by what he considered " in- tolerable harshness " on the part of the citled patron of the school, he threw up the employment in disgust. A few months were sufficient for this un- happy experiment. Leaving Market-Bosworth with no other engagement in view, Johnson accepted an invitation from Mr. Hec- tor his school-fellow at Lichfield, to visit him at Birmingham. Johnson O passed some time in tkis city, and there wrote his first book, a transla- tion from the French of a Voyage to Abyssinia by father Lobo, a Jesuit missionary, for which he received from the bookseller Warren with whom he lodged the payment of five guineas. With praiseworthy indus- try and sagacity, Boswell, with the assistance of Burke examined this book to ascertain if it bore any marks of that peculiarly rich and effective style which became known to the world as the peculiar manner of Johnson. So far as the translation itself was concerned they found only traces of the idiom of the original ; but when they came to the preface their search was rewarded. In the words of Boswell "the Johnsonian style begins to appear." Imbedded like rich nuggets in the flowing stream were some brilliant specimens of genuine Johnsonese, a foretaste of o ' that inimitable generalization sup- ported by picturesque detail and ani- mating suggestions, enlivened by epi- gram and antithesi, a pomp of words in stately music supporting a burthen of thought the comprehen- sion of the poet, the wit and philoso- pher. After a residence of about a year at Birmingham, he returned to Lich field, where he made an ineffectual at- tempt at literary occupation by issu ing proposals for publishing by sub scription the Latin poems of Politiao SAMUEL JOHNSON. 11 with a life of the author, an under- taking which found few to encourage 't though the price was small ; so, nothing came of it. Two years now passed without any distinct employ- ment to further his prospects in life, when in July, 1736, he was married to a Mrs. Porter, the widow of a mer- cer at Birmingham with whom he had become acquainted in his former stay in that city during the life-time of her first husband. There was a great disparity in the age of the pair, Johnson, at the time of the marriage, being in his twenty-seventh year and the bride in her forty-eighth. Nor was she remarkable for her per- sonal charms, or any refinement in her appearance, if we may credit the account of Garrick in his description of her to Boswell. But the mar- riage, notwithstanding all inequalities, proved a happy one. However the lady might appear to the youthful Garrick and the world, she was an angel of light to her husband, whose poverty she alleviated and consoled, and whose mental ability she had suf- ficient understanding to appreciate. This alliance brought with it eight hundred pounds, the widow's fortune, and, encouraged by this new resource, Johnson, who had failed in an en- deavor to procure the mastership of a grammar school in Warwickshire, re- solved to set up a species of academy of his own. He accordingly hired an imposing looking house, at Edial, in the vicinity of Lichfield, and invited the attendance of pupils to board with him and be taught the Latin and Greek languages. Only three came, two of whom were David Garrick, of illustrious memory, and his brother George, sons of a gentle- man, a half-pay captain, at Lichfield. With such scant encouragement it is a marvel that Johnson's patience held out for a year and a half; but it last- ,ed probably as long as his means ; and while these continued, spite of the drudgery of teaching, the home must have been to him. a comfortable one, fascinated, as the young lover was for Johnson was really a chivalric lover with the perfections of his " Tetty," as he fondly called his wife Elizabeth. Johnson, who had employed some of his leisure at Edial Hall, as his house is called, in the construction of a portion of his tragedy " Irene," now by the advice of his friend Gilbert Walmsley, a gentleman of Lichfield, Register of its Ecclesiastical Court, a o man of reading and influence, resolv- ed to pursue the work with a view to its introduction on the stage. This directed his thoughts to London, the certain refuge of provincial literary as- pirants of all times. There if anywhere in England he might turn his literary talents, his sole capital, to account. His pupil, Garrick, about being sent to a school at Rochester to finish his education, Johnson's friend, Walmsley, gave them a joint letter to the head master, the Rev. Mr. Colson, a man of eminence as a mathematician. Com- mending to him the youthful Garrick, he wrote / " He and another neighbor of mine, one Mr. Samuel Johnson, set out this morning (March 2, 1737), for London, together; Davy Garrick to be with you early the next week, and Mr. Johnson to try his fate with a 12 SAMUEL JOHNSON. tragedy, and to see to get himself em- ployed in some translation, either from the Latin or the French. Johnson is a very good scholar and poet, and I have great hopes will turn out a fine tragedy-writer." Nothing particular appears to have come, so far as John- son was concerned, of Colson's letter. He was out, of the way at Rochester in a quiet seclusion, and Johnson was to fight for his life against severe odds in the rough training-school of Lon- don. The booksellers were his first resort. Applying to one of the craft, with the intimation that he expected to get his living as an author, the dealer in books, surveying his robust frame with a significant look, remark- ed, "You had better buy a porter's knot ;" and the man who uttered this rude speech Johnson got to reckon among his best friends. Occasional literature offers the most available re- source to a young writer in search of employment, and Johnson was natur- ally attracted to it in one of its better forms. Edward Cave, the son of a provincial shoemaker, with some edu- cation at Rugby school, had found his way into literature in London through his employment as a printer, and in the face of the usual auguries of failure, had successfully established the "Gentle- man's Magazine," the most famous pro- duction of its class and still surviving, though changed with the wants of the times, approaching its hundred and fiftieth year a longevity utterly be- yond any of its short-lived race. When Johnson came to London it had been five or six years in existence, and its fame had reached him at Lichfield. He had written a letter to its founder two or three years before, offering to contribute poems and criticisms, and he now addressed him again, propos- ing a new translation from the Italian of Father Paul Sarpi's History of the Council of Trent. It was not, however, till about a year later that he became a contributor to the Magazine, his first appearance being as the author of a complimentary Horatian ode in Latin, addressed to Sylvanus Urban, as the editor designated himself on the title- page of his work. After this he was engaged as a regular contributor, and for several years derived his chief sup- port from this source. There were no parliamentary reporters in those days, the publication of debates being inter- dicted; and to meet the public curi- osity without violating the law, it was the custom of Cave to publish a dis guised account of the proceedings un der the name of " Reports of the De- bates of the Senate of Lilliput," in which the leading speakers figured under absurd disguised names, in a clumsy slang language invented for the occasion. The mask was awkwardly worn, and not intended to conceal the features. In this contrivance Johnson was employed in the "Gentleman's Magazine " to write out the debates, often from the scantiest of material, be- ing left to his own resources to supply thought and words. This he did with O much effect, bestowing his best elo- quence it is said on the side of the to- ries, of whom from his childhood he was among the most resolute if not the most bigoted. Services like these might have se- cured a scanty compensation barely sufficient to keep soul and body toge SAMUEL JOHNSON. 13 ther, with little comfort for either ; but Johnson, happily, mindful of his poet- ical faculty, employed it in these early months in the metropolis on a task which raised him at once to a higher level, gave him assurance of a posi- tion in the world of letters, and which doubtless had the most favorable effect upon his character in sustaining him through the dark days, aye, years of trial and hardships yet before him. Pope was at this time at the height of his reputation, in the maturity 'of his powers, having produced his best works, and among the latest his ex- quisite adaptation, to modern English society, of the satires and epistles of Horace. This was a species of liter- ature eminently adapted to gain the admiration of Johnson, whose own reading was always subservient to a better appreciation of the daily life around him. Few scholars, so inti- mate with the past, have lived so heartily in the present as Johnson. No author has more closely identified the life of all ages in his writings, or so demonstrated its essential moral unity. It was an easy labor for him, therefore, to supply with modern ex- amples the scheme of an ancient poet who had made Home in the fulness of its development the subject of his song. In the sagacity and moral force of Juvenal he had an author to his liking, and in his descriptions of city life a strong ground for his sympathy. It is quite worthy of being noticed that the first important production which John- son gave to the world is stamped with the name of London. Choosing the third satire of Juvenal for his subject, that quaint picture of Rome, sketched by the departing Umbritius as he shakes off the dust of the town from his feet, he transferred its spirit to the world of England of his own times, and he accomplished this so gracefully; with so much of taste, feeling and power, that it secured him at once a distinguished place among the poets of England. It is interesting to trace the modest manner in which this work was brought forward. We first hear of it in a very supplicating letter to Cave, the printer, a letter which no- thing but extreme poverty could have extracted from a man like Johnson on such an occasion. He submits the poem to his consideration, thinly dis- guised as the production of another a person, he writes, who " lies at pre- sent under very disadvantageous cir- cumstances of fortune," and, a conces- sion which is the strongest proof of his necessity, offers to alter any stroke of satire which the printer may dis- like. Cave, upon this, sends the author a " present " for his immediate relief, ac- cepts the work, and suggests the name of Dodsley the publisher for the ti- tle page. Dodsley proves d uite willing to have a share in it, thinking it, as he said, " a creditable thing to be con- cerned in;" and so, one morning in May, 1738, the very same on which appeared Pope's " Epilogue to the Sa tires," a sequel to the "Imitations of Horace," Johnson's "London" was given to the world. It was the first introduction of the name of Samuel Johnson to the polite society of Eng- land, and it was a sufficient one. The literati of London hailed in the new poet a rival or successor to Pope ; the scholars of Oxford were delighted. ,snd u SAMUEL JOHNSON. Pope himself approved the work. Be- ing told that the author was an obscure man named Johnson, for his name did not appear on the title page, he re- marked that he would soon be brought to light. So favorable generally was the reception of the poem that a sec- ond edition of it was called for in a week. Comparing this work with the simul- taneous production of Pope, the satire of the man of twenty-nine with that of the man of fifty, the preference must be given to youth over experience. It is quite fair to test Pope by the quo- tations from his writings for no Eng- lish writer has been quoted to such an extent but there are more remember- ed familiar lines in Johnson's " Lon- don," than in Pope's " 1738," as the satire was called on its first appear- ance. While the poem thus gained its author reputation, its success did lit- tle to mend his fortunes. It produced him only ten guineas, half the sum or less, that was given at the time for a hack political pamphlet ; and Johnson was left a living illustration of one of the finest lines in the poem itself: ' ' Slow rises worth, by poverty depressed. " That poverty was so pressing that Johnson in his despair would again have assumed the office of a teacher, the mastership of a school in Leicester- shire being offered to him and willing- ly accepted, if he could have complied with the condition. To hold the situ- ation, it was necessary that he should have the degree of Master of Arts. Oxford was thought of and set aside, the request being considered too bold i one for that high quarter ; but Earl | Gower, a patron of the school, thought it worth while to solicit through a friend the intervention of Dean Swifl to secure the coveted honor from the University of Dublin. The English nobleman plead hard for " the pooi man" whom he wished to serve, de scribing him in his letter " starved to death in translating for- booksellers. which has been his only subsistence for some time past." But fortunately nothing came of it ; else Johnson might have been lost to London and the world, and served only as a notable head-master or a curiosity among ped- agogues in the local annals of a county history. The law seems then to have been thought of, and Johnson had many requisites in subtilty and force of mind for the profession ; but here again a degree was wanted, and the project, if seriously entertained, w T as abandoned. So he was left to the booksellers. Reviving the plan of a translation of Father Paul Sarpi, a prospectus was is- sued, some subscriptions obtained and several sheets of the work printed, when it was found, a strange coincidence, thai it had been already undertaken by an- other Samuel Johnson in London ; and in the discussion which ensued between the two, the execution of it was given up by both. At the conclusion of onr Goldsmith at an examination. For, with whatever learning he may have possessed, he was profoundly ignorant of Goldsmith's nature. Long after- wards, when his pupil was at the height of his fame, this unhappy man came to a violent end, being found dead one morning on the floor of his room with some bruises on his person, a disaster attributed to his disreputable mode of living. While Goldsmith was bearing these inflictions he was cast more deeply into poverty by the death of his father, in his second year at the College, when the scanty remittances from home ceased, and he was thrown upon casual loans from his friends to supply his narrow ne- cessities not,, however, without some assistance from his own genius. He composed street ballads, for which he found a ready sale, receiving five shil- lings for each from a bookseller in the city ; and, what was more agreeable to his nature, his instinctive pride in au- thorship was gratified by listening to them at night as they were sung oy the criers in the streets a consolatory suggestion, we may hope, to him in the midst of his humiliations of tli OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 31 " All hail hereafter ! " There were other incidents, too, of a rougher cha- racter, of this college life. Feuds be- tween gownsmen and the town people were not uncommon in Dublin in the last century. A riot occurred, in which a bailiff who had arrested a student was assailed, the peace of the city was disturbed, 'and several lives lost in the tumult. Goldsmith was not a ring- leader in this affair, but he had been out with the rioters, and was publicly admonished for favoring the tumult. To redeem his character, he tried the next month for a scholarship, and fail- ing in this, succeeded in gaining a trifling "Exhibition," worth about thirty shillings. Characteristically enough, he celebrated this little tri- umph by a dancing party, of more frolic than expense, in his upper rooms, and in the midst of the hilarity was confronted by his savage tutor for his infringement of the rules. The tutor from words proceeded to vio- lence, and Goldsmith was so roughly and ignominiously handled, Wilder, with his mathematical attainments, being a redoubted pugilist, that Goldsmith, stung by the disgrace, de- termined to escape from the College. Selling his books, he improvidently loitered in Dublin till his stock was reduced to a shilling, with which he set out for Cork, with a vague inten- tion of going to America. The shil- ling supported him for three days, and when the proceeds of such clothes as he had to sell were exhausted, he began to feel the sufferings of hunger. Late in life he told Reynolds how, after fasting at this time for twenty-four hours, a handful of gray peas, given him by a girl at a wake, was the most delicious meal he had ever tasted. Utterly desti- tute, he turned homeward, was met on his way by his brother Henry, who re- lieved his wants and accompanied him back to College. There he remained to the end of his four years' course, taking his degree of Bachelor of Arts in 1749. "The popular picture of him in these Dublin University days," writes his biographer, Forster, " is little more than of a slow, hesitating, some- what hollow voice, heard seldom, and always to great disadvantage in the class-rooms ; and of a low-sized, thick, robust, ungainly figure, lounging about .the College courts in the wait for misery and ill-luck." Something, doubt- less, is to be added to this notion of Goldsmith on the score of reading and scholarship. Though, as he afterwards told Malone in London, " I made no great figure at the University in mathe- matics, which was a study much in re- pute there, I could turn an ode of Ho- race into English better than any of them." But of all who were students at the University during his service there, certainly he appeared the least likely to be enthroned at its gate in a monumental statue. Yet there he now stands, in the exquisite workmanship of the sculptor Foley, clad in his habit as he lived, his right hand, falling at ease, holding a pen, his left support- ing an open book, his countenance re- flecting at once his humor and intelli- gence the oppressed servitor of 1745 the most interesting tradition of the University a century afterwards. From College Goldsmith returned home, and uncertain as to his pros- pects, with no settled resolution, passed 32 OLIVER GOLDSMITH. three years in a desultory mode of living, occasionally visiting Ms brother Henry, the clergyman, in the village school at Lissoy ; and what was more to his inclination, freely partaking in the junketings and frolics of the care- les company of the place. As the clerical life seemed to be the natural resource of the family, his mother, his brother-in-law, Hodson, for whom the elder Goldsmith had made the sacrifice tn the matter of his daughter's dowry, and his uncle, tlie Rev. Mr. Contarine, who was often visited by Goldsmith at his parsonage in Roscommon, all united in urging Oliver to take holy orders. The advice was not much in accordance with his habits or inclina- tions, but he accepted it, and after the necessary interval, presented himself to the Bishop of Elphin for ordina- tion. Various explanations are given of his rejection one, that he was too young ; another, that his doubtful re- cord at College had preceded him; another, which is quite probable, that he had neglected the preliminary stu- dies ; and yet a fourth, that his dress stood in the way, particularly a most unclerical pair of scarlet breeches, which he wore on the occasion. The next resource for Goldsmith was provided by his uncle Contarine, the only one of the family who seems to have had much faith in him, or done much for him. He obtained him the situation of tutor or companion in the family of a gentleman of his county named Flinn, which lasted for a year, when it was broken up by Goldsmith 3harging one of the household with unfair play at the card-table. So it must have been upon thp whole a rather free-and-easy sort of life undei the roof of Mr. Flinn. He parted with it somehow with money in hia pocket, thirty pounds, it is said, and rode away with a good horse to Cork, where, a second time, according to a letter written to his mother, he enter tained the idea of going to America. He actually, he says, paid his passage in a ship bound for that country, but being off with a festive party in the country when the wind provefl favor- able, " the captain never inquired after me, but set sail with as much indiffer- ence as if I had been on board." The generous steed with which he set out had been sold, the money the animal brought had been spent, and the thirty guineas had been reduced to two, the greater part of which was expended upon a broken down, raw-boned horse, to which "generous beast" ashe styles it, he gave the name of Fiddleback. Leav- ing Cork for home on the back of this Rozinante, with five shillings in hand, expecting to recruit his finances from an old college friend on the road, who had often expatiated to him on his hos- pitality, he parted with half a crown to a beggar on the way, and in this impov- erished condition reached the dwelling where he looked for relief. His account of his reception, an admirable speci- men of his early literary talent, recalls the incidents and humor of the pictu- resque Spanish novels. Indeed, Laza- rillo de Tonnes himself might have been the hero of his adventure. Another attempt was now to be made in one of the professions, and the law was thought of, kind-hearted Uncle Contarine, whose benevolence was worthy of his early intimacy with OLIYER GOLDSMITH. 33 the good Bishop Berkeley, furnishing out of his slender clerical revenue fifty pounds to set him on the track. He was to proceed to London to keep the usual terms; but got no further than Dublin, where he was stripped of all his money at the gambling table by one of his Irish acquaintances. This sent him back to his home, Uncle Con- tarine receiving him with kindness. A few months after, at the suggestion of another relative, the chief clerical dig- nitary of the family, Dean Goldsmith, of Cloyne, the third and last of the professions, that of medicine was re- solved upon and Uncle Contarine again stepped forward to furnish the pecu- niary outfit for Edinburgh, where the study was to be prosecuted at the Uni- versity. Here Goldsmith remained a year and a half, becoming a member of its Medical Society and attending the lectures, particularly admiring the scope and ability of Munro, the pro- fessor of anatomy. He found pleasure in his studies, in a letter to his uncle, speaking of the science as " the most pleasing in nature, so that my labors are but a relaxation, and, I may truly say, the only thing here that gives me pleasure." There is a hint of his em- ployment, probably as a tutor, in the family of the Duke of Hamilton, to eke out his resources ; but the remittances of the generous Contarine, though lim- ited, were sufficient to support some indulgence in dress, as the tailor's bills yet extant indicate in their items of sky-blue satin, rich Genoa velvet and high claret-colored cloth; while there was something left to undertake a visit to the Continent to perfect his medical studies at one of its universities. Paris was resolved upon for this purpose, and in the spring of 1754, Oliver em- barked on his round-about way thither in a ship to Bordeaux. But, as luck would have it, the vessel was driven by a storm into Newcastle-upon-Tyne, where the passengers were seized, on the charge of being recruits for the French service, and Goldsmith with difficulty procured his liberation after a fortnight's imprisonment. It was some consolation afterwards to reflect that had he been allowed to proceed with the vessel he would probably have been drowned with the crew shipwrecked at the mouth of the Garonne. Finding another ship ready for Holland, he took his passage for Rotterdam, arri- ved there safely, proceeded to Leyden, and presently reported in a very agree- able letter to his Uncle Contarine, the state of medical learning at its Univer- sity, at which he was for some time a student. He now gained some sup- port as a teacher of his native language, in which we may suppose he fumed his knowledge of French to account. Habitual cheerfulness, with a physical constitution of great endurance, en- abled him to support a life of make- shifts, which to a less courageous tem- perament would have been unendu- rable. Encouraged by the example of the Baron Holberg, then recently deceased, who, following his own in- clinations in a career of adventure had risen by his exertions from a youth of poverty to the highest rank in the lite- rature of Denmark, he determined to pursue the somewhat vagrant course which, in the career of that eminent man had preceded his acquisition of fame and fortune. As Holberg's story 34 OLIVER GOLDSMITH. was afterwards told by Goldsmith himself, " without money, recommend- ations or friends, lie undertook to set out upon his travels, and make the tour of Europe on foot. A good voice and a trifling skill in music were the only finances he had to support an un- dertaking so extensive ; so he travelled by day, and at night sang at the doors of peasant's houses to get himself a lodging."* The exact counterpart of this is the story of Goldsmith's life for the year 1755. Setting out in Febru- ary, he made some stay at Louvain, in Flanders, at whose University, it is said, he obtained his degree of Bachelor of Medicine. He is to be traced at Brus- sels and Antwerp, and signally at Paris where he attended the chemical lectures of Rouelle, admired Mademoi- selle Clairon, then the delight of the stage, and, as we may gather from what he subsequently wrote, was no unenlightened spectator of the down- ward . tendencies of the French mon- archy. Travelling through Switzerland, Goldsmith appears to have made the acquaintance of Voltaire at Geneva, and, crossing the Alps, to have pene- trated Italy as far at least as the chief cities of Lombardy and Florence. In the beginning of 1756, he was again in England. On his landing at Dover, at the age of twenty-eight, begins with him the real struggle for life. He is too old for dependence upon the scant re- sources of home any longer ; the ani- mal spirits of youth in their first ef- .fervescence have subsided, and he can * Inquiry in to the Present State of Polite Learning. no longer hide his mortifications in a foreign land, or divert them by its novelties and amusements. The hard realities of English life are before him ; hard enough they had recently proved to the indomitable moral energy and strength of Johnson ; how will Gold- smith with his susceptibilities and weaknesses encounter them? With suffering and humiliation enough, as we shall see, but with a glorious tri- umph in the end. Happily, the strug- gle was relieved by the cheerfulness of his disposition, and " a knack of hoping," as he called it, in which he had great advantages over Johnson, while his imagination and sense of humor invited him to a certain superi- ority over the lowest parts he was called upon to perform. We may con- stantly observe him in his writings turning his discomfitures to profit, and even as he had fluted his way through poverty on the Continent, making with the magic of his pen, his petty miseries " discourse most excellent music." It was not an easy thing at the very en- trance upon this new period of his ca- reer, for this starving man to get even from Dover to London. He accom- plished it, it is said, by a turn at low comedy with some strolling players in a barn, and had offered his services on the way as a hireling in an apothecary's shop. The latter became one of his earliest resources in London in em- ployment with one Jacob, on Fish Street Hill, for whom he pounded drugs, and by whose assistance he WHS promoted to a humble physician for the poor of the class of Johnson's friend Levett. It is of this period of his life that the story is told of his perse v 6 OLIVER GOLDSMITH. . ranee in keeping possession of his hat, of which a respectful patient pertina- ciously sought to relieve him. He held it firmly to his breast to conceal the patch in the dilapidated second-hand velvet coat in which he was support- ing Iris professional reputation. A poor patient, a printer's workman in- troduces him to his master, Richard- son, the author of Clarissa, who gives him some employment as proof- reader. One of his fellow Edinburgh students falling in with him at this time was constrained to listen to two or three acts of an abortive tragedy, and to a still more chimerical project of proceeding to the Holy Land to de- cipher the inscriptions on the " writ- ten mountains." From this wildness of the imagination, he is recalled by the daily drudgery of usher to a clas- sical school kept at Peckham, in the neighborhood of London, to which he was introduced by another of his Ed- inburgh companions, the son of its proprietor, Dr. Milner. There would seem to have been some obscure ser- vice of this kind in another situation not long before, not so easily traced as that at Peckham, the memory of which survives in various anecdotes related by the family, exhibiting a fondness for practical jokes in the servants' hall proof of the ignominy of the posi- tion as well as of the incumbent's in- nate love of fun and frolic. Like his contemporary, Johnson, who had en- dured the same infliction, he had no reason to remember it with equanimity. Both were at a disadvantage in ap- pearance and personal peculiarities. The usher or under-teacher of his time comes up in Goldsmith's writings with a feeling of anything but ad miration. He had not been, however, many months with Dr. Milner, in the school at Peckham, when he made the ac- quaintance, at his table, of Griffiths, the bookseller, of Paternoster Row, who was engaged in the publication of the " Monthly Review." The " Critical Review," the literary character of which was maintained by Smollett, was then pressing him hard, and Grif- fiths was on the look-out for contribu- tors. Struck by some remarks of Gold- smith, the publisher, thinking he might serve his purpose, procured from him some specimens of his powers as a critic. Their merits were perceived by the shrewd eye of Griffiths, and Gold- smith was secured, body and mind, for a year, to be boarded and lodged with his employer, be paid a small salary, and write articles as called upon for the Review. Griffiths, who was much of a screw, held him to a strict account in the employment of his time, and when his daily task was done, it was at the mercy not only of the publisher himself but of his wife, who tampered with the articles. This arrangement with Griffiths lasted five months of the year, when it was broken off. It was a long time for Pegasus to be kept in harness. Goldsmith resented his treat- ment, Griffiths also had his complaint, and the contract was closed. In dis* gust at the poor reward of literary ex ertion, the author, who as yet hardly ventured to call himself such, returned to the school at Peckham. Dr. Milner, who had shown himself in the affair with Griffiths desirous to promote the welfare of Goldsmith, now undertook, 36 OLIVER GOLDSMITH. through the influence of an East India director, to procure him a medical ap- pointment at a foreign station; and while this affair was in progress, he devoted himself assiduously to the pre- paration of an independent work which should give his friends and the public some assurance of his talents. The subject which he chose was an Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learn- ing in Europe, as the book was en- titled on its publication. While Goldsmith was engaged on the composition of this work, he was assured of the success of his friend Milner's application for his employ- ment in the East. He was in fact ap- pointed physician to one of the fac- tories of the East India Company on the Coromandel coast. His spirits were raised in consequence, and he applied himself more heartily to the Essay, looking to its success to supply the means for his outfit, and endeavoring with honest pride and confidence to enlist his friends in Ireland in pro- curing subscriptions for the book. The letters which he wrote for this pur- pose are in his best vein, full of kindly feelings towards his correspondents, with that genial humor which was never more fully awakened than when he thought of the home associations of his youth. In one of these epistles to Byanton, at Ballymahon, he let his pen wander on in a fine strain of rhap- sody, picturing to himself, what he evidently considered the greatest ab- surdity, the future fame of Goldsmith ! Could he but have tasted then the reality of this posthumous applause ! For he was entering upon his darkest hours of disappointment. From some unexplained cause the Coromandel ap pointment was taken from him and given to another ; and when, in des pair, he offered himself at Surgeone Hall for examination as a hospitaj mate, with an eye perhaps to the ex- ample of Smollett and service in the navy, he was rejected as incompetent. This was his last attempt at profes- sional life. Fortunately, the doors of a wider temple were opening before him. But they were to be entered through much sorrow. Goldsmith, after his separation from Griffiths, was still called upon for occasional essays for the Review, to which he had re- cently contributed four articles to pro pitiate the publisher to become secu rity for him with his tailor in pro- viding a new suit of clothes for the Surgeon's examination. Before the debt was paid, the keeper of poor Goldsmith's quarters, in his humble retreat in Green Arbor Court, was ar- rested, and his wife came in tears, sup- plicating her lodger for relief. Gold- smith being himself in arrears to the couple, there was a double claim upon him as a man and a debtor. The first was with him always sufficient. To provide means on the emergency, the new suit went to the pawnbroker's, while Griffiths' four books for review were deposited as security for a loan with a friend. Immediately upon this, the publisher demanded payment for the clothes or their instant return to him, calling also for the books. In vain Goldsmith asked for delay, while Griffiths had no words for him but those of insult and imputations of fraud. The letter which Goldsmith wrote in reply has been preserved a OLIVER GOLDSMITH. most touching- memorial of his suffer- ings. Manfully rebuking Griffiths for his aspersions, he deprecates his inter- pretation of his character, and, the one ray of light in this dark epistle, trusts that on the appearance of his book from Mr. Dodsley's press, the " bright side of his mind" may be revealed to his reviler. But Griffiths, setting aside his avarice, could have needed no in- struction on this point. He knew Goldsmith's merits, and was ready to negotiate with him for a Life of Vol- taire, out of the allowance for which the debt to the tailor was paid. The publication of the Essay on Polite Learning followed, and gave the au- thor at once a respectable standing in the world of letters. He had written an independent book, in which he had manfully and tenderly protested against the assumptions which stood in the way of men of genius, and it could hardly be perused by a candid, intelligent reader without ranking its author among their number. His course from the date of the publica- tion of this work was onward. The Essay on Polite Learning, though relieved by much happy illustration, was, upon the whole, a purely didactic work, where the free- dom of movement of the writer's mind was fettered by the conditions of the subject. Nor had he a fair opportu- nity as yet to exhibit his peculiar vein in the magazines, in which his writings had been confined mainly to revk . , r s. He was now to appear in his individ- ual character, subject to no law but that of his humor, as the genial essay- ist, to which department of literature, after all that had been accomplished in the Tatlers, Spectators, and Guar- dians, he was to impart an ease and gracefulness entirely his own. At the solicitation of Wilkie, a bookseller in St. Paul's Churchyard, he undertook the preparation of a collection of mis- cellaneous papers to be published weekly in a distinct pamphlet form, to which he gave the title, " The Bee.'' The first number appeared at the be- ginning of October, 1759, and was fol- lowed by seven others, the contents of which were all furnished by himself Somehow, as a whole, the publica- tion, though it contained a number of very pleasing papers, was not success- ful. It was too much of a miscellany to fasten the attention of the town. At least we may infer this from the better reception of the writer's next venture in this line, when he had the advantage of greater apparent unity in one continuous thread upon which to hang his observations. This was but a couple of months later, when he commenced in the new daily paper started by Newbery, the " Public Led- ger," the series of letters in the char- acter of a Chinese Philosopher visiting England, subsequently collected under the title of " The Citizen of the World." Under this thin disguise he had the privilege of satirizing with greater freedom than he might otherwise have assumed, the vices and follies of the day ; while a certain piquancy in the invention of his observer, Lien Chi Altangi, the curiosities of whose " flow- ery land " were then coming into fash- ionable vogue, gave an interest to re- flections on matters of government and politics, which had become dull and wearisome in the ordinary forms of dis OLIVER GOLDSMITH. cussion. Goldsmith, too, by this time, from his practice in magazines and reviews, had become a thorough adept in the arts of composition in this lighter walk of literature, and success had given him courage to trust to his own genius. The volumes of the " Citi- zen of the World" contain some of his most charming writings. The style, in his unapproachable idiomatic felic- ity, invests the most familiar topics with interest, while it is frequently the medium of new ideas, on the most im- portant. He is more than once in ad- vance of his age as a reformer on ques- tions of national and domestic policy, ventilates various sound notions of so- cial as well as political economy, and is always on the side of virtue and humanity. His satire on occasion is sufficiently pungent ; but it has no bit- terness, and is always sheathed in the most exquisite humor. As the papers grew in number from week to week, his wit, so far from flagging, acquired new powers by exertion; his touch was at once lighter and more assured ; and in his introduction of the " Man in Black," disguising his benevolence under an assumption of cynicism, and in " Beau Tibbs," who sought to con- ceal the poverty of his poor vain life by the pretences of the imagination, he added two new and delightful char- acters, worthy of association with Roger de Coverley and his friends in the " Spectator," to the gallery of Eng- lish fiction. The enterprise of Newbery in his various literary undertakings now gave Goldsmith constant employment, with a paymaster ready to assist him ii his occasional extra pecuniary necessities, the result usually of his generosity and hospitality. The squalid lodging in Green Arbor Court was deserted for respectable rooms in Wine Office Court, Fleet Street, where, in the spring of 1761, we hear of Johnson as a visitor, and a year or so later, also under the wing of Newbery, our author is in pleasant rural quarters at Islington, daily entertaining his friends in the intervals of his preparation of a series of letters on the History of England, which, with an eye to popular favor, were set forth on their publication as addressed by a nobleman to his son. The device was successful enough, the knowing ones of the day variously at- tributing the book to Lords Chester- field, Orrery and Lyttelton ; so true in that time were the lines of Pope : " Let but a Lord once own the happy lines, How the wit brightens and the sense refines." The year 1764 is memorable in the life of Goldsmith, for in that he wrote the " Vicar of Wakefield," and com- pleted his poem of the "Traveller." The first knowledge which we have of the former is in a striking scene in which Johnson appears as an actor The story as related by Johnson him self with great exactness is thus given by Boswell. "I received," said John- son, " one morning, a message from poor Goldsmith that he was in great distress, and, as it was not in his power to come to me, begging that I would come to him as soon as possible. I sent him a guinea, and promised to come to him directly. I accordingly went as soon as I was dressed, and found that his landlady had arrested him for his rent, at which he was in a OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 39 violent passion. I perceived that lie had already changed my guinea, and had got a bottle of Madeira and a glass before him. I put the cork into the bottle, desired he would be calm, and began to talk to him of the means by which he might be extricated. He then told me that he had a work ready for the press, which he produced to me, I looked into it, and saw its merit ; told the landlady I should soon return ; and having gone to a booksel- ler, sold it for sixty pounds. I brought Goldsmith the money, and he dis- charged his rent, not without rating his landlady in a high tone for having used him so ill." The bookseller to whom Johnson sold the work was Francis Newbery, nephew to the pub- lisher of the " Citizen of the World," by whom it was kept more than a year before it was issued from the press. Meanwhile, the elder Newbery had issued " The Traveller ; or, a Pros- pect of Society, a Poem by Oliver Gold- smith, M. B.," the first of his publica- tions to which he had put his name on the title-page. He felt, doubtless, that it was a distinct personal revelation of himself, something which he might emphatically call his own, and leave to the world as a representation of his peculiar powers. To point out the beauties of this poem, would be to comment upon every passage ; and, indeed, it may be safely left to the admiration of its myriad readers. Though praised by Johnson and successful at the start, passing in a few months through four editions, it grew, by degrees, like all works of ge- nius, in popular estimation. The best test of its merit is that now, after the extraordinary production of a new race of poets of the highest powers in the nineteenth century, it is as secure of ad- miration as ever. And the same may be said of the ever enduring "Vicar," which was less appreciated on its first appearance than the poem. " The first pure example in English literature," says Forster "of the simple domestic novel," and in spite of all attempts since, still the purest and brightest. Every one knows and loves its exqui- site grace and humor, its idyllic scenes, its characters daily repeated in real life, and ever new to us in the book ; the jests which never tire, the moralities which never grow stale, the tender hu- manity which lurks in every sentence, its cheerful gayeties and the darkening shadows over the gentle picture, which bring still stronger into relief, the ami- ability and charity of the whole. .Whatever Goldsmith touched with his pen he seemed to turn into an en- during monument of himself. By two brief productions he had now secured lasting fame as poet and novelist; hia next attempt was in the humorous drama, and there, too, though his con- temporaries failed fully to perceive the fact, he again wrote his name high on the lists of the genius of his country men. Of his two comedies, "The Good Natured Man," first produced in 1768, and " She Stoops to Conquer," five years afterwards, the last has proved the most successful. In their own day they met with considerable opposition, for they came to supplant a school of sentimental comedy, if comedy so tearful a business can be properly called, which then held pos- session of the stage. "During some 40 years," Macaulay tells us, " more tears were shed at comedies than at trage- dies; and a pleasantry which roused the audience to anything more than a grave smile was reprobated as low. It is not strange, therefore, that the very best scene in the * Good Natured Man/ that in which Miss Bichland finds her lover attended by the bailiff and the bailiff's follower in full court dresses, should have been mercilessly hissed, and should have been omitted after the first night." It seems to have been a hard struggle with the audi- ence, but the humor of Goldsmith, se- conded by the irresistible powers of Ned Shuter, the original Croaker, car- ried the day. Johnson, who, whatever liberties he may have taken with Gold- smith in conversation, was always strong in his favor on critical occa- sions, stood firmly by his side at the production of both his plays. He furnished the Prologue to the " Good Natured Man," and worthily received the dedication of "She Stoops to Con- quer." " It may do me some honour," writes Goldsmith, " to inform the pub- lic that I have lived many years in in- timacy with you. It may serve the interest of mankind also to inform them, that the greatest wit may be found in a character, without impair- ing the most unaffected piety." In the later play, produced, like its prede- cessor, at Covent Garden Theatre, un- der the management of the elder Col- man, Shuter was the Hardcastle and Quick the Tony Lumpkin of the ori- ginal cast. Mrs. Bulkley represented the young lady heroine in both pieces, Miss Kichland in the one and Miss Hardcastle in the other. Garrick, who OLIVER GOLDSMITH. had unluckily rejected the " Good Na- tured Man," when offered to him for performance at Drury Lane, disinterest- edly furnished the prologue spoken by Woodward to "She Stoops to Con- quer." Intermediate between the two plays, in 1770, appeared Goldsmith's second poem, a companion piece to " The Tra- veller," "The Deserted Village." It. was dedicated to Sir Joshua Reynolds. As its name imports, its design is to contrast a picture ' of rural felicity, with its loss in the abandonment of home under the pressure of wealthy oppression. In this respect, as Macau- lay has remarked, " it is made up of incongruous parts. The village in its happy days is a true English village. The village in its decay is an Irish vil- lage. The felicity and the misery which Goldsmith has brought close together belong to two different countries, and to two different stages in the prospect of society. He had assuredly never seen in his native island such a rural paradise, such a seat of plenty, content and tranquility, as his Auburn. He had assuredly never seen in England all the inhabitants of such a paradise turned out of their homes in one day and forced to emigrate in a body to America. The hamlet he had probably seen in Kent; the ejectment he had probably seen in Munster; but by joining the two, he has produced some- thing which never was and never will be seen in any part of the world." I3ut, notwithstanding all its errors of situation and political economy, the poem will be read for its felicitous scenes and imagery. " Sweet Auburn " remains, and will still continue to be OLIVER GOLDSMITH. .the "loveliest village of the plain;" and though, as a fact, men do not decay where "wealth accumulates," the se- quel of the passage has a sterling ring whenever and wherever it can be ap- plied : ' Princes and lords may flourish, or may fade ; A breath can make them, as a breath has made; But a bold peasantry, their country's pride, When once destroyed, can never be supplied." No one knew better than Goldsmith the truth in social economy, that lux- ury, far from being the enemy, is the friend of civilization, by creating new wants and calling forth for their sup- ply the higher arts of man. He had advocated this idea in his Chinese Letters in the " Public Ledger." " Ex- amine," says he there, " the history of any country remarkable for patience and wisdom, you will find they would never have been wise had they not been first luxurious ; you will find poets, philosophers, and even patriots, march- ing in luxury's train." But the ex- igencies of his poem led him appa- rently to take another view of the matter. However, few readers think of the philosophy of the poem, or judge it by the rules of Adam Smith, while thousands admire its descrip- tions of the Village Preacher, the homely " splendors," a cabinet Dutch picture, of the ale-house, and the sweet rural scenery which surrounds it. The works which we have described, by which Goldsmith survives, the po- ems, the novel, the plays, were written for fame. There were a host of others, of which Histories of Rome, England, Greece, and a History of Animated Nature, written by contract for the 6 booksellers, were to supply his imme- diate necessities. They gave him a re- venue which he freely expended upon his friends, but any vanity of dress or hospitality which they may have led him to assume, cost him dear in the constant drudgery to which they sub- jected him. And yet with all his ef- forts he was constantly in pecuniar} embarrassment. It is painful to sur- vey his life in the details of his petty miseries as they have been disclosed to view by his minute biographers. It is still more painful to think what fine powers were lost to the world by his sudden death in the midst of his embar- rassments, when the ink was hardly dry on his splendid fragment " Retali- ation," a poem, one of the happiest of its kind, a series of living portraits, literary companions to those of Rey- nolds, of his eminent fellow-members of the Club Burke, Garrick, Cumber- land and Reynolds among the num- ber. What a sketch might he have written with equal candor, good na- ture, and still more of feeling, of John- son. But it was not so to be. There is something very melancholy in the history of this last exertion of Gold- smith's poetical faculty. It was writ- ten to meet a studied provocation by the members of the old social Club. In his absence it was proposed to write an epitaph upon him, Garrick ever ready upon such occasions, and the in- veterate punster, Caleb Whitefoord, appearing as the leading instigators, Garrick's has been preserved, and is often quoted: " Here lies Nolly Goldsmith, for shortness call'd Noll, Who wrote like an angel, but talk'd like poor Poll." OLIYEE GOLDSMITH. The verses, whatever were written, reached Goldsmith, who was called up- on to "retaliate." And in how just and kindly a manner, in a general way, be set about the task, pointing his sen- tences the most severe with wit with- out malice, and tempering censure with the most considerate of praise. Before he had finished the poem, leaving a line on Reynolds half ended, he was taken ill of the fever, which after a few days' illness carried him off on the 4th of April, 1774. He had only re- cently completed his forty-fifth year. He was buried in a grave in the churchyard of the Temple, near his residence. No stone was placed there at the time to mark the spot, and the exact place where the poet was inter red cannot at the present day be de- termined. A public funeral had been proposed, but a private ceremony was thought more in accordance with the circumstances of" his death. But on the stairs which led to his chambers, in Brick Court, was gathered, beside the few family mourners, a number of the homeless poor women whom he had befriended. A monument, sug- gested by Reynolds and sculptured by NTollekens, was not long after erected in "Westminster Abbey, to which John son furnished the Latin inscription, weighty with words of admiration for his friend and his writings, which the love of posterity daily confirms. A portion of the lines are intelligi- ble enough, even to persons unfamiliar with the language, so often have they been cited and admired. We allude to the opening : OLIYARII GOLDSMITH, Poetae, Physici, Historic!, qui nullum fere scribendi genus non tetigit, nullum quod tetigit non ornavit. The whole has been literally and elegantly rendered by Mr. Forster. We give it entire, omitting the records of the poet's birth and death at the close : OP OLIVER GOLDSMITH Poet, Naturalist, Historian, who left scarcely any kind of writing untouched, and touched nothing that he did not adorn : Whether smiles were to be stirred or tears, commanding our emotions, yet a gentle master In genius lofty, lively, versatile, in style, weighty, clear, engaging The memory in this monument is cherished by the love of Companions, the faithfulness of Friends, the reverence of Headers. HANNAH MORE HANNAH MORE was born in 1745, at the village of Stapleton, Gloucestershire, England, where her father, Jacob More, a man of a learned education, was then in charge of a char- ity school. He was of a respectable family and had been intended for the church, but was led by want of means to the inferior occupation of a country schoolmaster. He was a tory and high-churchman, though other mem- bers of the family were Presbyterians. He married a farmer's daughter, like himself a person of sound intellect. There were five daughters the issue of this marriage, of whom Hannah was the youngest but one. She exhibited in her earliest childhood a remarkable quickness of apprehension, learning to read between her third and fourth year, and before she had reached the latter, recited her catechism in church to the admiration of the village rector. Her nurse, who ie described as a pious old woman, had a distant flavor of lit- erature about her, having lived in the family of the poet Dryden, and thus early the name and fame of " glorious John," became familiar to her infant charge. "The inquisitive mind of the little Hannah," says her biographer, Roberts, "was continually prompting her to ask for stories about the poet Dryden." At the age of eight, the child had developed an eager thirst for learning, which her father was abun- dantly able to gratify out of the stock of his professional acquisitions. His stock of books was scanty, the greater part of them having been lost in his re- moval from his birth-place in Norfolk- shire to Stapleton ; but he supplied the deficiency from his memory, taking his daughter upon his knee and narrating to her stories of the Greeks and Ro- mans, " reciting to her the speeches of his favorite heroes, first in their origi- nal language to gratify her ear with the sound, and afterwards translating them into English ; particularly dwel- ling on the parallels and wise sayings of Plutarch; and these recollections made her often afterward remark, that the conversation of an enlightened pa- rent or preceptor, constituted one of the best parts of education." In this, and in other particulars of the mental growth and literary pro- gress of Hannah More, we are remind ed of the similar intellectual develop- ment of Maria Edgeworth. She also was mainly taught in her childhood (43) HANNAH MORE. by her father, and constantly incul- cates in her admirable writings for the young, the advantage of this family oral instruction. Indeed, with impor- tant differences, there is a certain pa- rallelism in the career of the two per- sonages. Both entered the literary field early, were welcomed by the pub- lic at the start and continued to study and write under favorable circum- stances, through an unusually prolong- ed term of life. Miss Edgeworth, in- deed, was born twenty-two years later, but the two were on the earth together for sixty-six years, and, during the most stirring events of that period circling about the era of the French Revolu- tion, were in their prime. Both were favorites of society, and saw much of the most cultivated people of their times. The object of both, as authors, was the improvement of their readers, and there was a great resemblance in the method of their labors in their plain, practical instructions on educa- tional topics, though one drew more from every-day experience and illus- trated the lesson with gaiety and hu- mor, while the other, as we shall see, appealed constantly to the sanctions of religion and Christianity. In this respect, one, in fact, supplements the other. Add Hannah More to Maria Edgeworth, and you have a perfect whole. Hannah More gained from her father an early knowledge of Latin, which she afterwards improved and constantly maintained. She also gradually ac- quired an intimate acquaintance with French in reading and speaking. It was her parents' design that the chil- dren should be qualified to conduct a lady's boarding school; and for this purpose the eldest sister was sent to a French school at Bristol. Returning at the end of each week to pass the Sunday at home, she communicated what she had learned to Hannah, who proved an apt pupil. This scheme of education succeeded so well, that about the year 1757, the eldest sisters opened the projected boarding school at Bristol, and prosecuted it from the beginning with success. Hannah, then at the age of twelve, was taken with them and continued her studies with the double incentive of the love of knowledge, and a maintenance for life involved in its immediate acquisition. Addison's "Spectator," the constant companion of the generation in which she was born, which has lit the way to so many youthful minds in the pur suit of letters and cheerful observation of the world, was the first book, we are told, which at this time engrossed her attention. The arrival of the elder Sheridan, the father of Richard Brins- ley, who came to deliver his famous lectures on oratory at Bristol, proved an interesting point in Miss More's life. Sheridan had been on the boards at Drury Lane, a species of rival to Garrick, and had for years been con- nected with the theatre at Dublin. When he left the stage, he devoted himself to the cause of education. His lectures, we may suppose, retained the best part of his theatrical declamation. They made a great impression on the mind of Miss More, then in her six teenth year. She addressed some verses to Sheridan, which led to his making her acquaintance. In all this, her mind was doubtless directed or as HANNAH MORE. 45 listed in a tendency to dramatic com- position which soon manifested itself, and. in no long time, resulted in her sharing the glories of the British stage. She was also benefited at this early period of her life by her acquaintance with Ferguson the astronomer, who delivered a course of popular lectures at Bristol ; and still more by the in- structions of a Mr. Peach, a linen-dra- per of the town, a man of cultivation in English literature, who had been the friend of Hume, and claimed the credit of removing from his History of England, more than two hundred Scotticisms. Encouraged by such as- sociations as these, and inspired by the work of education in her sisters' school, with which she was connected, she, now in her seventeenth year, executed her first important literary work. It grew out of the recitations in the school, which she observed were often drawn from plays, the moral character of which would not bear too close an inspection. In a minor way, as Racine wrote his sacred dramas of " Esther " and " Athalie," at the request of Ma- dame de Maintenon in her religious days, for performance before her young ladies at St. Cyr, so Miss Hannah More prepared her pastoral drama, "The Search After Happiness." It is in a number of scenes in ten syllable rhym- ed verse, interrupted by occasional lyric effusions. In accordance with its moral intent, we have in the drama four ladies sev- erally discontented with the world meeting in a grove in search of the happiness which they had not found in fashion, a vain pursuit of science, the seductions of imagination or the languors of indifference, for in each of these varieties have Euphelia, Cleora, Pastorella and Laurinda, been in turn engrossed. Florella, a young; virtuous, contented shepherdess, does the honors of the grove ; and Urania, an antique maiden of greater authority, reviews the passions of them all, shows their inefficiency for beings of immortal growth, and points the way to the better life, bidding them : " On holy faith's aspiring pinions rise, Assert your birthright, and assume the skies." The moral is a good one, the pictures of life in a certain general way, accord- ing to the fashion of the literature of the time, are piquant and animated; but we question whether young ladies of the present era are often employed in recitations from this elegant poem. Neither, on the other hand, do they declaim passages from the wicked plays it was intended to supersede. The argument of Miss More, as it is given in her prologue, is insufficient. It begs the whole question of dramatic power and interest. People do not necessarily become vicious by even the ardent impersonation of such passions as she would supersede by the utter- ance of simple, moral and religious re- flections, or Mrs. Siddons, who bore a most estimable character, would have become from her performance of Lady Macbeth, one of the most wicked per- sons of her sex. Miss More, in truth, concedes this by her lively pictures of the world in this very innocent pasto ral drama, and when she herself came to write for the stage, she invoked the passions she here laments. From a very early period of her life. HANNAH MORE. Miss More attached herself to persons of eminence and distinction in the so- ciety by which she was surrounded. As she could have gained little from the position in which she was placed, one of a group of several maiden la- dies earning their living by school- teaching, the attentions which she re- ceived must have been wholly owing to her happy disposition and literary acquirements. Besides Latin and French, she cultivated the Spanish and Italian tongues. From the latter she translated and adapted some of the dramatic works of Metastasio. Most of these were destroyed. One of them, based on the Opera of Regulus, she afterwards extended into a tragedy in five acts, entitled "The Inflexible Captain." It was about the time we are writing of, when she was at the age of twenty- two, that a Mr. Turner, a gentleman of wealth, living on a fine estate, and nearly double her own age, fascinated by her agreeable qualities, proposed to her in marriage and was accepted. The thing got so far that she quitted the school, and made some expensive pre- parations for her new mode of life. Mr. Turner, however, hesitated, and the marriage was broken off. He, however, settled an annuity upon her, to enable her to devote herself to her literary pursuits, and on his death left her a thousand pounds. We now reach a memorable point in Miss More's life, the year of her first introduction to London society. In the year 1774, when she was approach- ing the age of thirty, she visited the metropolis with two of her sisters, and sras introduced to David Garrick, who had been enlisted in her favor by see ing a letter, shown to him by a coin mon friend, in which she described her emotions on witnessing his perform- ance of Lear. The great actor was a very sociable and friendly man, highly appreciative of literary excellence, and doubtless thought not the less of it when it was displayed by an agreeable young lady in admiration of himself. The acquaintance soon ripened into an intimacy, which remained unbroken during his life. The theatre was then in the ascendant, and Miss More, spite of her recommendations of the simple moral drama in her pastoral play at Bristol, entered heartily into, its de- lights. She was present at the perform- ance of Sheridan's first dramatic pro- duction, the "Rivals," of which she says : " On the whole I was tolerably entertained." She also witnesses a re- presentation of General Burgoyne's " Maid of the Oaks." Garrick was for the time unable from ill health to ap- pear upon the stage. " If he does not get well enough to act soon," writes the enthusiastic Hannah, "I shall break my heart." Miss More had a very useful friend in London in Miss Reynolds, the sister of Sir Joshua, by whom also she was much admired. Garrick and Reynolds opened to her an entrance to the fore- most literary society. The former in- troduced her to Mrs. Montagu, then in the ascendant with all her charms of wit and cleverness; the presiding deity of those Montagu House assem- blies, which gave a new and lasting name to the female cultivators of litera- ture, the " Blue Stockings." It ori- ginated with Admiral Boscawen, whose HANNAH MOEE. . wife was one of the most brilliant of the set. Looking one evening at Dr. Stillingfleet's gray stockings, which were quite out of keeping with the fashionable requirements of the time, he christened the free-and-easy com- pany the " Blue Stocking Society." It was a palpable hit. A name was wanted for a new thing under the sun in England, a cultivated lady courting society and challenging attention for her literary attainments. In those gos- siping days, so brightly reflected in the letters of Walpole, the term was caught up with avidity, and from that day to this literary ladies have had to endure this nonsensical appellation because slo- venly Parson Stillingfleet appeared one night at Mrs. Montagu's in blue wors- ted stockings. A letter addressed by Miss More to one of her sisters, to be found in her published correspondence, gves us an interesting view of this learn- ed society. It would appear from a sub- sequent letter of Miss More, that this party at Mrs. Montagu's was on a Sunday evening, a fact of which she was reminded by a letter from home containing a clerical admonition from Dr. Stonehouse. She received it in good part, and acknowledged the de- linquency. "Conscience," she writes, "had done its office before; nay, was* busy at the time ; and if it did not dash the cup of pleasure to the ground, infused at least a tincture of worm- wood into it." The thought recurs to her again at a Sunday's dinner at Mrs. Boscawen's ; but as she reflects she finds there is preaching and solemnity in life everywhere, even in its gayest moments a truth worth .remembering by a certain class of moralists very touching in its expression by Miss More. After her return at night from this Sunday dinner, she writes, " One need go no further than the company I have just left, to be convinced that 'pain is for man,' and that fortune, talents, and science are no exemption from the universal lot. Mrs. Montagu, eminently distinguished for wit and virtue, the wisest where all are wise, is hastening to insensible decay by a slow but sure hectic. Mrs. Chapman has experienced the severest reverses of fortune, and Mrs. Boscawens' life has been a continued series of afflic- tions, that may almost bear a parallel with those of the righteous man of Uz." Hannah More's acquaintance with Dr. Johnson deserves a separate para- graph. She came up to London with a desire of all things to see the great Doctor, for whom she had always a sincere admiration and respect. His moral writings in the " Rambler," greatly influenced her thought and style. The attentions paid to John- son strike readers of the present day with surprise. A first interview with him was looked forward to with the greatest anxiety, and, when accom- plished, was frequently recorded as a prominent event in life. The honors paid to literature and art in the high social importance and esti- mation of Johnson, Reynolds, Garrick and Burke and their fellows, are cer- tainly to the credit of English life in that much abused eighteenth century. The world has since grown more de- mocratic, and literature, perhaps, through the press, more powerful, but the republic of letters would then ap- HANNAH MORE. pear to have been more fully recog- nized as a social institution than at present. Miss More first met Johnson at the house of Sir Joshua Eeynolds. It was frequently a matter of uncer- tainty whether a new comer would be received by the learned Doctor with a growl or a smile. It depended very much upon his physical condition, and that often influenced his mind, when he became moody and splenetic. On handing Miss More up-stairs to the drawing-room where Johnson had al- ready arrived, Eeynolds advised Miss More of the risk she was running. The more pleasant was consequently her surprise when the dreaded Leviathan came forward to meet her, as described by her biographer, " with good humor in his countenance, and a macaw of Sir Joshua's in his hand, and still more, at his accosting her with a verse from a Morning Hymn which she had writ- ten at the desire of Sir James Stone- house." They were soon on a most excellent footing. Miss More was pre- sently taken by Miss Reynolds to Johnson's house. " Can you picture to yourselves," writes one of Hannah's sisters who was with her, to the family at home, "the palpitation of our hearts as we approached his mansion ?" They talked with the Doctor about his "Tour to the Hebrides," which was just coming out, and were introduced to the Doctor's protege, Mrs. Williams, the blind poet, whose conversation they found lively and entertaining. The Doctor was told how Miss Hannah on coming in, before he made his appear- ance, had seated herself in his great chair with the hope of catching a little ray of his genius, which he, of course, laughed at, saying that he never sat in that chair, and that it reminded him of an adventure of Boswell and him self in the Highlands ; how, when they were stopping a night at an inn at the place where they imagined the weird sisters had appeared to Macbeth, they were quite deprived of rest at the idea, and how, the next morning, they were informed that all this happened in quite another part of the country. Miss Reynolds also told the Doctor of the raptures the ladies were in as they rode along in the carriage at the pros- pect of visiting him, when he shook his head at Hannah, and said " she was a silly thing ! " At tea, one evening at Sir Joshua's, she was placed next to Johnson and had him entirely to herself. "They were both," writes her sister Sarah, "in remarkably high spirits; it was certainly her lucky night ! I never heard her say so many good things. The old genius was extremely jocular, and the young one very pleasant. You would have imagined we had been at some comedy, had you heard our peals of laughter. They, indeed, tried which could 'pepper the highest,' and it is not clear to me that the lexicographer was really the highest seasoner." ' The record of another visit to John- son is of interest, for its reference to the personal history of the Mores. It occurs in a letter of one of the sisters in 1776. "If a wedding," she writes from London to the family at Bristol, " should take place before our return, don't be surprised, between the mo- ther of Sir Eldred and the father of my much-loved Irene ; nay, Mrs. Mon- tagu says, if tender words are the pre- HANNAH MORE. cursors of connubial engagements, we may expect great things ; for it is no- thing but 'child/ 'little fool, 'love,' and ' dearest.' After much critical dis- course, he turns round to me, and with one of his most amiable looks, which must be seen to form the least idea of it, he says : ' I have heard that you are engaged in the useful and honorable employment of teaching young ladies,' upon which, with all the same ease, familiarity and confidence we should have done had only our own dear Dr. Stonehouse been present, we entered upon the history of our birth, parent- age and education ; showing how we were born with more desires than gui- neas ; and how, as years increased our appetites, the cupboard at home began to grow too small to gratify them; and how, with a bottle of water, a bed, and a blanket, we set out to seek our for- tunes; and how we found a great house, with nothing in it ; and how it was likely to remain so, till looking into our knowledge-boxes, we happen- ed to find a little laming, a good thing when land is gone, or rather none : and so at last, by giving a little of this laming to those who had less we got a good store of gold in return ; but how, alas ! we wanted the wit to keep it. 'I love you both,' said the inamorato 'I love you all five I never was at Bristol I will come on purpose to see you what ! five wo- men live happily together ! I will come and see you I have spent a hap- py evening I am glad I came God for ever bless you, you live to shame duchesses.' He took his leave with so much warmth and tenderness, we were quite affected at his manners." 7 The " Sir Eldred " alluded to at the beginning of the letter, was the hero of a legendary tale, entitled, " Sir El- dred of the Bower," which Hannah More had shortly before published in London a ballad of the modern school of Goldsmith's Edwin and Angelina, in the same easy, gentle measure. A faultless hero marries the blameless daughter of a neighboring knight, all in the prettiest rural scenery and sur- roundings, when the lady's long lost brother returns from the wars to clasp her in his arms. Sir Eldred, who is passionate, finds them in this attitude and slays the stranger on the spot, the wife dies on the instant in sympathy with her brother, and Eldred lives a little longer in too wretched a condi- tion for the muse to describe. The poem was accepted as a certificate of the talents of the author by the lite- rary world of the day. Johnson ad- mired it, recited its best passages from memory, and contributed a stanza of his own to the poem, and Garrick, at a little party at her house, gave the finest pathetic expression to its tender melancholy. "I think," writes Han- nah, " I never was so ashamed in my life; but he read it so superlatively, that I cried like a child. Only think what a scandalous thing, to cry at the reading of one's own poetry ! I could have beaten myself ; for it looked as if I thought it very moving, which, I can truly say, is far from being the case. But the beauty of the jest lies in this : Mrs. Garrick twinkled as well as I, and made as many apologies for crying at her husband's reading, as I did for crying at my own verses. She got out of the scrape by pretending 50 HANNAH MOKE. she was touched at the story, and /, by saying the same thing of the read- i.ug. It furnished us with a great laugh at the catastrophe, when it would really have been decent to have been a little /sorrowful." Garrick, who was a mas- ter of courtly compliment, in occasional society verses, wrote a few stanzas on "Sir Eldred," signed, "Roscius," in which he celebrates the triumph of a female genius over the wits of the other sex. Miss More was not behind the versatile David in these poetical atten- tions. She addressed a tame sonnet to the river Thames, on Mr. and Mrs. Garrick's birthday, and wrote a rather clever ode to Dragon, his housedog, at Hampton, in which she introduces some pretty compliments to Roscius on his retirement from the stage. ND inamorato was ever more devoted to a lover than Miss More to Garrick, in attendance upon his last perform- ances at Drury Lane. Her devotion was paid not less to his kindly qualities as a man, than to his genius as an actor. He was one of the first to give her a helping hand on her arrival in London. He welcomed her to his seat on the Thames at Hampton, where she passed many days and weeks, domesticated as a member of the family while he read to her, she tells us, " all the whimsical correspondence, in prose and verse, which for many years, he had carried on with the first geniuses of the age " the very letters, we presume, which are now gathered in the two ample quartos of the "Garrick Correspondence," to which the epistles of Hannah herself contributed not the least delightful pages. We may follow her in her charming letters, through her visits to Drury Lane during Garrick's last sea sons on the stage. "Let the Muses shed tears," she writes in 1776, " for GarricL. has this day sold the patent of Drury Lane Theatre, and will never act after this winter. Sic transit gloria mundi f He retires with all his blushing honors thick about him, his laurels as green as in their early spring. Who shall supply his loss to the stage ? Who shall now hold the master-key of the human heart ? Who direct the passions with more than magic power ? Who purify the stage ? and who, in short, direct and nurse my dramatic muse ? " Of the last anon. On the very day that Garrick took his leave of the stage, after he had intro- duced the whole series of his perform- ances in London, Miss More wrote from Bristol to the departing Roscius "I think by the time this reaches yo i I may congratulate you on the end of your labors and the completion of your fame a fame which has had no parallel, and will have no end. Surely, to have suppressed your talents in the moment of your highest capacity for exerting them, does as much honour to your heart as the exertion itself did to your dramatic character ; but I cannot trust myself on this subject, because, as Sterne says, ' I am writing to the man himself;' yet I ought to be in- dulged, for, is not the recollection of my pleasures all that is left to me of them ? Have I not seen in one season that man act seven and twenty times, and rise each time in excellence, and shall I be silent ? Have I not spent three months under the roof of that man and his dear, charming lady, and received from them favors that would take me another three months to tell HANNAH MORE. over, and shall I be silent ? " In the distribution of souvenirs of the last performance of Garrick, Miss More re- ceived from him the shoe buckles which he wore in Don Felix, upon which Mrs. Barbauld wrote a doggrel epigram : ' ' Thy buckles, O Garrick, thy friend may now use, But no mortal hereafter shall tread in thy shoes." Miss More's intimacy with Garrick was continued after his retirement from the stage, when, though he played no more, he still, like Pope's departed lady of fashion, " o'erlooked the cards." She sends him from time to time various little items of theatrical gossip from the provincial stage at Bungay, where she is on a visit, and where the Nor- wich tragedians play several of his pieces " Cymon," " Bon-Ton," and " The Clandestine Marriage," which he wrote with Colman. " A certain Mrs. Ibbott plays Mrs. Heidleburg more than tolerably, and a pretty-look- ing Mrs. Simpson was very pleasing in Fanny ;" and at Bristol, how Reddish was there with an extempore Mrs. Reddish, which excited much scandal and opposition, " this being the second or third wife he had produced at Bris- tol: in a short time we have had a whole bundle of Reddishes, and all re- markably impungent ;" and how Red- dish was pelted at his benefit, "but didn't mind that, for he had a great house." But the most important topic of the correspondence, at least for the gentle Hannah, was the preparation of a certain tragedy of "Percy," which she had under way with an eye to the stage. The first two acts were got off in August, 1777, to Garrick, who ac- knowledges their receipt, addressing Miss More as "My dear Nine" -all the Muses rolled into one. He talks of a visit to Bath and Bristol. " Mrs. Garrick," he says, "is studying your two acts. We shall bring them with us, and she will criticise you to the bone. A German commentator (Mon- taigne says) will suck an author dry- She is resolved to dry you up to a slender shape, and has all her wits at work upon you." Presently she sends the third and fourth acts. "I shall leave the fifth unfinished till I am so happy as to be indulged with your in- structions. I am at a loss how to man- age it. As to madness, it is a rock on which even good poets split ; what, then, will become of me ? It is so difficult and so dangerous, I am afraid of it." Meantime Garrick is stimu- lating her anxieties. " I hope you will consider your dramatic matter with all your wit and feeling. Let your fifth act be worthy of you, and tear the heart to pieces, or wo betide you ! I shall not pass over any scenes or parts of scenes that are merely written to make up a certain number of lines. Such doings, Madam Nine, will neither do for you nor for me." At last the play, dry- nursed by Garrick, was, through his agency, accepted by Harris, the man- ager of Covent Garden, and brought upon the stage. Garrick wrote both prologue and epilogue, in the former wittily stirring up that anomalous per- sonage the Chevalier D'Eon. Hannah pronounced both excellent, and had an amusing altercation, which she de- scribes, over the price with the author, who, of course, would receive nothing. " Dryden," he said, " used to have five HANNAH MOEE. guineas apiece, but as he was a richer man he would be content if I would treat him with a handsome supper and a bottle of claret. We haggled sadly about the price, I insisting that I could only afford to give him a beef- steak and a pot of porter; and at about twelve we sat down to some toast and honey, with which the tem- perate bard contented himself." The play under Garrick's auspices proved a decided success. Both Mr. and Mrs. Garrick were present with her at its first performance, when it was brought out in December. It had a run of seventeen nights, and that, too, while the School for Scandal was in its first season. It was published with a dedi- cation to Earl Percy, for which she re- ceived the thanks of that noble house, communicated to her by Dr. Percy. Home, the author of Douglas, was then in London to witness the produc- tion of his new play of Alfred, which proved a failure. This did not, how- ever, prevent his complimenting his rival on her success. Mrs. Montagu and her blue stocking friends were, of course, on hand with their applause. We get in the author's letters a glimpse or two of the acting. " One tear is worth a thousand hands," she writes ; " and I had the satisfaction to see even the men shed them in abun- dance." " Mrs. Barry is so very fine in the mad scene, in the last act," writes Miss More, " that though it is niy own nonsense, I always see that scene with pleasure." Leaving Sir Joshua's one evening after dinner, when the com- pany had sat down to cards, to witness that particular act, she is shocked at entering the theatre to see " a very in- different house. I looked (she adds) on the stage and saw the scene was the inside of a prison, and that the hero- ine, who was then speaking, had on a linen gown. I was quite stunned, and really thought I had lost my senses, when a smart man, in regimentals, be- gan to sing, ' How happy could I be with either.' ' : Lewis had been taken ill, and the " Beggar's Opera " substi- tuted for " Percy." The pecuniary re- sults were very gratifying, the author's nights, sale of the copy, etc., amount- ing to near six hundred pounds, which Garrick invested for her on the best security at five per cent. A first im- pression of the play of four thousand copies was sold at once, and a second went off rapidly. Some forty years after this first success, " Percy " was re- vived at the same theatre, with Miss O'JSTeil for the heroine. About a year after the production of " Percy," Miss More was summoned to London by the death of Garrick. She joined Mrs. Garrick at her express desire, was with her while prepara- tions were being made for the public funeral in Westminster Abbey, and witnessed the ceremony from a gallery overlooking the grave. Her descrip- tion of the scene is full of feeling. "We were no sooner recovered from the fresh burst of grief on taking our places, than I east my eyes the first thing on Handel's monument, and read the scroll in his hand 1 1 know that my Redeemer liveth.' Just at three, the great doors burst open, with a noise that shook the roof; the organ struck up, and the whole choir, in strains only less solemn than the ' arch- angel's trump,' began Handel's fine HANNAH MOKE. 53 antliem. The whole choir advanced to the grave, in hoods and surplices, singing all the way ; then Sheridan, as chief mourner ; then the body, (alas ! whose body !) with ten noblemen and gentlemen, pall-bearers ; then the rest of the friends and mourners ; hardly a dry eye the very players, bred to the trade of counterfeiting, shed genuine tears." The friendship formed with Mrs. Garrick in the life-time of her husband remained unbroken during their long subsequent career. Miss More was for several years her con- stant guest. She was with her in her first season of bereavement, and, in her correspondence, gives several touching anecdotes of her conduct during the early period of her affliction. At the time of Garrick's death, Miss More had a second play which had partly undergone his revision, ready for the stage. It was entitled "The Fatal Falsehood," and was brought out the same year with some success, though inferior to that which had at- tended " Percy." Miss Young played in it with much effect. The prologue was written by the author ; the epilo- gue, by Sheridan, a fine piece of wit in an amusing picture of lady authorship, delivered in the character of an envi- ous poetaster. The remainder of the year 1779 was mostly passed by Miss More with Mrs. Garrick at Hampton in close retire- ment, but, she writes, " I am never dull, because I am not reduced to the fatigue of entertaining dunces, or of being obliged to listen to them. We Jress like a couple of scaramouches, dispute like a couple of Jesuits, eat like a couple of aldermen, walk like a couple of porters, and read as much as any two doctors of either university." One day came "the gentlemen of the Museum to fetch poor Mr. Garrick's legacy of the old plays and curious black-letter books, though they were not things to be read, and are only valuable to anti- quaries for their age and scarcity ; yet I could not see them carried off with- out a pang." The words which we have marked in italics are noticeable, show- ing the neglect into which the early English literature about the time of Shakespeare had fallen. These are the very plays from which Charles Lamb gathered his choice volume of Drama- tic Specimens. Had Miss More fully entered into their spirit, her own tra- gedies might have been improved by the acquaintance, with a better chance than they are having of being read by her posterity. The old intercourse was still and for several years after kept up with the literary society of London which met at Sir Joshua's, Mrs.Vesey's, Mrs. Boscawen's, aged Mrs. Delany's and the rest ; but we hear less and less of fashionable gaieties at the theatre or elsewhere. A growing seriousness was at work in the mind of the fair author, which was leading her to new schemes of moral improvement. In the mean time, she summed up her observations rather than experiences of the worldly life of the day in two sprightly poems, first printed together in 1780, and pub- lished with additions in 1786. In one of these, entitled " The Bas Bleu ; or, Conversation," she celebrated the in- tellectual social intercourse which ani- mated the parties of Mrs. Montagu and Mrs. Vesey, and sighed for the de- parted days when the winged words HANNAH MOKE. of Garrick, Johnson and Burke gave flight to the friendly hours. " And Lyttleton's accomplished name, And witty Pulteney shared the fame ; The men, not bound by pedant rules, Nor ladies predeuses ridicules : For polished Walpole showed the way, How wits may be both learned and gay ; And Carter taught the female train, The deeply wise are never vain. ***** Here rigid Cato, awful sage ! Bold censor of a thoughtless age, Once dealt his pointed moral round, And not unheeded fell the sound ; The muse his honored memory weeps, For Cato now with Roscius sleeps 1 " "Cato," Miss Seward thought was an odd " whig-title " for the tory John- son. " I could fancy him," she writes to her friend, Court Dewes, " saying to the fair author, ' You had better have called me the first Whig, Madam, the father of the tribe, who got kicked out of Heaven for his republican prin- ciples.' " " Florio ; a Tale for Fine Gentlemen and Ladies," was appropriately dedi- cated to Horace Walpole, not, we can hardly imagine, without a tinge of co- vert satire, though the terms in which she propitiates the wit are highly flat- tering. The story is well told in octo- syllabic, verse, bearing a general resem- blance in its moral to Dryden's " Cy- mon and Iphigeneia," though the cir- cumstances are quite different, in the one case a youth being rescued from clownishness and neglect, in the other from foppery and licentiousness. In both, the motive power is a charming woman. Florio, the spoilt child of fortune ; passing his life in fashionable frivolities, a smatterer in literature, a free-thinker, or rather no-thinker in re- ligion, is brought to a knowledge of himself by the simple attractions of a country Celia, for whom at first he has a great contempt ; but he carries back with him to London a spark of love and nature's fire in his breast, and by the light which this kindles, all the meritricious attractions of the metrop- olis which had formerly fascinated him grow pale and worthless. He hurries back to the country and the poem con- cludes with the triumph of virtue in a marriage with the pious Celia. The sketch of Florio in his days of worldli- ness is much the best of the poem. Miss More's acquaintance with Ho- race Walpole began in the literary soirees at Mrs. Yesey's and was per- petuated in visits to Strawberry Hill, and a correspondence which was con- tinued through the life of its noble owner. There is a great deal of com- pliment in the letters on both sides , Walpole was always fond of ladies' society, and gratefully reciprocated the attentions of a lady who might have been his satirist. Miss More, on the other hand, was attracted to him by his kind attentions to Mrs. Vesey in her failing health, "my dear, infirm, broken-spirited, Mrs. Vesey," as she calls her in one of her letters. The home life of the five sisters at Bristol was, in the meanwhile under- going a change. Hannah, enriched by her literary pursuits, bought a small country residence near Bristol, which had acquired the name of " Cowslip Green," and spent more of her time in rural occupations. In 1789 her sisters having acquired sufficient property by their labors retired from the charge of the school to pass their time between a town residence which, with the aid of HANNAH MORE. 55 Hannah, they had erected for them- selves at Bath and the retreat at Cow- slip Green. They now began to em- ploy themselves in what became the serious occupation of their lives, the establishment of schools for the educa- tion of the neglected poor in their neighborhood. The first of these was started at Chedder, in the vicinity of Bristol. In setting this on foot, Miss More had to encounter a redoubtable giant gf the old tory breed, in a person whom she describes as " the chief des- pot of the village, very rich and very brutal ; " but she was not to be deter- red by any such lions in the way, " so," says she, " I ventured to the den of this monster, in a country as savage as him- self, near Bridgewater." She was met 7 oy an argument which was very com- mon in those days in England, and which she had often practically to re- fute, that " religion was the worst thing for the poor } for it made them lazy and useless." It was in vain that she rep- resented to these country landowners that men would become more industri- ous as they were better principled, and that she had no selfish ends in her un- dertakings. It w r as, however, by ap- pealing to their selfish interests that she was at last permitted to proceed. " I made," says she, " eleven of these agreeable visits ; and as I improved in the art of canvassing, had better suc- cess. Miss Wilberforce would have been shocked, had she seen the petty tyrants whose insolence I stroked and tamed, the ugly children I praised, the pointers and spaniels I caressed, the cider I commended, and the wine I swallowed. After these irresistible flatteries, I inquired of each if he could recommend me to a house; and saiu that I had a little plan which I hoped would secure their orchards from being robbed, their rabbits from being shot, their game from being stolen, and which might lower the poor-rates." The squirearchy upon this relented and soon the benevolent Miss More had nearly three hundred children in the school learning the elements of a reli- gious education. While this work was going on in the country, Miss More was appealing to the world in her writings, which were now assuming a direct reformatory tone with an earnest inculcation of religious principle as the governing motive of life. Her first as- sault was directed against fashionable follies and vices which she had hitherto tickled in verse. She now resumed the argument in prose with a heavier em- phasis. Her " Thoughts on the Impor- tance of the Manners of the Great to General Society," first printed anony- mously in 1798, as a sequel or aid to a royal proclamation which had just been issued against irreligion and im- morality, was a bombshell thrown into the ranks, not of the grossly wicked, but of those who were considered good sort of people, whom she desired to bring to a higher standard of justice and morality. It was a vigorous pro- test against luxury and extravagance, pointing out the selfishness and conse- quent hard-heartedness of indulgence, with a special effort to correct the evils arising from the ill observance of Sunday, and the prevalent passion for play. In the course of her remarks, the author speaks of a singular custom which then prevailed, " the petty mis- chief of what is called card ino7iey? in 56 MOKE. the exaction of a part of their wages from servants to pay for the playing cards furnished to the guests ! She denounces this as " a worm which is feeding on the vitals of domestic vir- tue." She argues too the old social question of " the daily and hourly lie of Not at Home" for which she would provide some suitable phrase for the necessary denial to a visitor, in prefer- ence to the education of the servant in the art of lying. She makes an appeal also for " hair-dressers," as a peculiarly oppressed class of Sunday laborers. Not long after, in 1791, this pro- duction was followed by an elaborate prose composition of a similar charac- ter, " An Estimate of the Religion of the Fashionable World," in which the general neglect of Christianity by leading men of the time was compared with its open avowal by the Sidneys, Hales and Clarendons of a former age ; the benevolence of the day was tested in its motives; Christian education shown to be neglected, and a revival of its vital spirit declared to be a ne- cessity of the period. A copy of the work reached Horace Walpole, who speaks of it in a letter to Miss Berry : "Good Hannah More is laboring to amend our religion, and has just pub- lished a book called ' An Estimate of theEeligion of the Fashionable World.' It is prettily written, but her enthu- siasm increases; and when she comes to town, I shall tell her that if she preaches to people of fashion, she will be a bishop in partibus infidelium" In pursuing her labors in the instruc- tion and amelioration of the condition of the poor, Miss More began the issue >f a series of popular tracts, written in a plain attractive style, suited to the comprehension of the peasant class for which they were intended. They were written with such marked ability that they soon took a wider range and were largely circulated throughout Great Britain and America. It is sufficient to allude to such narratives among them as "The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain," and such allegories as " Parley the Porter," to remind the reader of their scope and spirit. The former has passages worthy of De Foe ; the latter might have been written by Bunyan. The theory of the author's religious teaching of the poor, was in general very simple. In one of her letters published in the "Whalley Corres- pondence," referring more particularly to the conduct of her charity schools, she says, "My grand principle is, to infuse into the minds of the young people as much Scriptural knowledge as possible. Setting them to get by heart such portions of the Bible as shall take in the general scheme of doctrine and practice, then bringing that knowledge out, by easy, simple and intelligible conversation, and then grafting it into their minds as a prin ciple of action, and making all they learn practical and of personal appli- cation, seems the best method. I am extremely limited in my ideas of in- structing the poor. I would confine it entirely to the Bible, Liturgy and Ca- techism, which, indeed, includes the whole of my notion of instruction. To teach them to read, without giving them principles, seems dangerous ; and I do not teach them to write, even in my weekly schools. Almost all I do is done by conversation, by a simple HANNAH MORE. 57 exposition of texts, which I endeavor to make as lively and interesting as I can, often illustrating what is difficult by instances drawn from common life. To those who attend four Sundays without intermission, I give a penny, provided they are at school by prayer- time; this promotes regularity of at- tendance more than anything. Tarts and gingerbread occasionally are a pleasant reward. Clothing I cannot afford to such multitudes as my differ- ent schools consist of, but at Whitsun- tide, I give them all some one article of dress. If there is a large family of boys, for instance, I give to one a jacket, to another a shirt, to a third shoes, to a fourth a hat, according to their re- spective wants; to the girls, a white calico apron, and muslin cap and tip- pet, of which I will send you one for a pattern if you wish it." Strange that in the carrying out such simple works of benevolence as this, Miss More should have been thwarted and even persecuted. Though as con- servative as any person in the kingdom, she was charged with undermining the British constitution and encouraging French revolutionary propagandism with her nefarious proceedings; with unsettling the established order of British society; with assisting "Me- thodism," as if that were an unpardon- able sin. The curate of Blaydon who presided over her district was especially unfriendly, and at one time succeeded in closing the school which was for a time re-opened. The controversy on the subject became fierce and lasting. Various meetings were held, numerous pamphlets were written. No less than thirty-four distinguished persons, most 8 of them of the clerical order, took part in the discussion. Miss More was fairly distracted by the agitation, and fell sick in consequence. Meanwhile, she was continuing; the series of her didactic O writings, by the publication in 1799 of one of the largest and most elaborate of her works, entitled " Strictures on the Modern System of Female Educa- tion." The book abounds with sound practical suggestions on subjects of every-day life. Though earnest in the ultimate reference of all to the sanc- tions of Christian precept, it is marked by a general moderation of thought. About the year 1802, Miss More left her residence at Cowslip Green for one more convenient in the vicinity, which proved so attractive, that the town house at Bath was also relinquished for it. This new situation, known by the name of Barley Wood, became thenceforward identified with the fam- ily, continuing their home till Miss Han- nah More became the sole survivor, and finally quitted it for another residence after a sojourn of fully a quarter of a century. From this . spot her frequent correspondence with Wilberforce was dated, and thence went forth several of her most important books to the world. In 1805, she published the work entitled " Hints Towards Form- ing the Character of a Young Princess," written at the earnest request of Bishop Porteus, who, it is said, favored the design of placing the education of the young Princess Charlotte, for whom it was intended, under her care. The next important publication by Miss More is that, with the exception perhaps of her more popular tracts, by which she is best known at present, HAKNAH MOKE. the novel, if it may be so called, en- titled " Ccelebs in Search of a Wife." Immediately popular at the time when it was first issued it ran through eleven editions within nine months it is still the most read of its author's productions. A simple test is at hand. The seven volumes of the American edition of her complete works belong- ing to a large city circulating library are before us. Six are clean and un- injured by use ; the remaining one con- taining " Coelebs " is worn with hand- ling, and ready to fall in pieces. The poems and the moral essays, the in- struction for peasants and princesses, the lay sermons, worthy of Dr. Blair, and with something of his style, are forgotten : the novel, lightly as it touches the heart and life, is remem- bered and read. It is hardly fair, how- ever, to regard it simply as a novel. It is in reality, as its second title imports, a series of observations on domestic habits and manners, religion and mo- rals. " Love itself," as the author re- marks in the preface, " appears in these pages, not as an ungovernable impulse, but as a sentiment arising out of qual- ities calculated to inspire attachment of persons under the dominion of reason and religion, brought together by the ordinary course of occurrences in a private family party." With this un- derstanding the work may be read without disappointment ; otherwise, it might be thought to lack invention and 'nterest in the plot, which is of the sim- plest. It certainly, with all its sermon- izing, has many entertaining sketches of society and lively exhibitions of char- acter. There is nothing very extrava- gant or any way impossible in the model young lady of the writer's imagination, who is brought forward to engage the affection of the scrutinizing and ex- acting young bachelor. The key-note of the book is struck in the first chap- ter, which is devoted to the perfections of Mother Eve, as exhibited by John Milton, in his immortal epic. Lucilla, the irresistible heroine of the book, is the daughter of most exemplary par ents, a pious, practical and literary father, a graceful and elegant hostess her mother. She herself has all the domestic and a proper share of the philanthropic virtues. "Fresh as a rose and gay as a lark," she rises at six in the morning in summer, gives two hours to reading in her closet, has an interview with the housekeeper on the state of the larder, and enters the break- fast room, a charming spectacle of health, cheerfulness and culinary ac- complishments. " Her conversation, like her countenance, is compounded of liveliness, sensibility and delicacy." She teaches her little sisters, is modest and engaging, visits the poor and reads Latin with her father every day. Coe- lebs, with credit to himself, is smitten through and through by the archer god at the first sight of her in the four- teenth chapter. Twenty-five more are occupied before the wedding comes on, in playing her off through a series of important discussions on social and ed- ucational topics by persons of the most decisive ways of thinking. The con- versations are always sensible and in- structive, sometimes amusing. The book is the gathering up on the part of the author it was published when she was sixty-four of a cheerful lifetime of thought and experience. HANNAH MOKE. We have still to record several other of her books: "Practical Piety," published in 1811 ; and the collection of essays entitled " Christian Morals," put forth the next year; "An Essay on the Character and Practical Writ- ings of Saint Paul," in 1815; and 'Moral Sketches of Prevailing Opin- ions and Manners, Foreign and Domes- tic/' in 1819. A month after the pub- lication of this last work, Miss More's sole surviving sister Martha died ; the others had been called away within a few preceding years. In 1822 she no- tices in one of her letters from Barley Wood, the death of " my ancient and valued friend, Mrs. Grarrick. I spent .above twenty winters under her roof, and gratefully remember not only their personal kindness, but my first intro- duction through them into a society re- markable for rank, literature and tal- ents. Whatever was most distinguished in either was to be found at their table." It was a backward glance through near- ly fifty years by a venerable lady at seventy-seven. Though visited by fre- quent and severe illness, she was to survive ten years longer. In 1828, she finally left her home at Barley Wood, a name endeared to the Christian world, for a new residence at Clifton, where on the 7th of September, 1833, she placidly closed a life which must ever be regarded with admiration and affec- tion. A letter from one of the wor- thiest of her friends, Sir Robert Inglis, to the E-ev. Dr. McVickar, in New York, records her Christian departure. ''Though her mind has been eclipsed bv her advancing years, for she was in the eighty-ninth year of her life, and though there was no longer any continuous flow of wisdom and of pie- ty from her lips, yet the devotional habit of her days of health, gave even to the weakness of decay a sacred char- acter, and her affections remained strong to the last. On Thursday (two days before she expired) she became more evidently dying, her eyes closed, she made an effort to stretch forth her hands, and exclaimed to her favorite sister, now for many years departed,- 'Patty -joy.' And when she could no longer articulate, her hands remained clasped as in prayer." The five sisters lie interred within a plain enclosure in Wrington church yard, a large stone slab recording theii names, the dates of their birth and of their deaths. The portrait of Hannah More was painted in her early days by Sir Joshua Reynolds. As described by a recent English writer, "it represents hei small and slender figure gracefully at- tired; the hands and arms delicately fine, the eyes, large, dark and lus- trous ; the eyebrows well marked and softly arched ; the countenance beam- ing with benevolence and intelligence." Mr. S. C. Hall, who visited her at Bar ley Wood about 1825, thus decribea her appearance : " Her form was small and slight, -her features wrin- kled with age ; but the burden of eighty years had not impaired her gracious smile, nor lessened the fire of her dark eyes, the clearest, the brightest and the most searching I have seen. FREDERIC 11. celebrated King of Prussia -A- was in no respect indebted for his personal greatness to the virtues or ex- ample of his immediate progenitors. His grandfather Frederic I., the first of the House of Brandenburg who as- sumed the title of king, was a weak and empty prince, whose character was taken by his own wife to exemplify the idea of infinite littleness. His father, Frederic William, was a man of a violent and brutal disposition,' ec- centric and intemperate, whose princi- pal, and almost sole pleasure and pur- suit, was the training and daily super- intendence of an army disproportion- ately greater than the extent of his do- minions seemed to warrant. It is how- ever to the credit of Frederic William as a ruler, that, notwitstanding this expensive taste, his finances on the whole were well and economically ad- ministered ; so that on his death he left a quiet and happy, though not wealthy country, a treasure of nine millions of crowns, amounting to more than a 7 O year's revenue, and a well-disciplin- ed army of 76,000 men. Thus on his accession, Frederic II. (or as, in consequence of the ambiguity of his father's name, he is sometimes call- (60) ed, Frederic HI.) found, ready prepar ed, men and money, the instruments of war; and for, this alone was he in- debted to his father. He was born January 24th, 1712. From Frederic William, parental tenderness was not to be expected. His treatment of his whole family, wife and children, was brutal: but he showed a particular antipathy to his eldest son, from the age of fourteen upwards, for which no reason can be assigned, except that the young prince manifested a taste for lit- erature, and preferred books and music to the routine of military exercises. From this age, his life was embittered by continual contradiction, insult, and even personal violence. In 1730, he endeavored to escape by flight from his father's control ; but this intention being revealed, he was arrested, tried as a deserter, and condemned to death by an obedient court-martial ; and the sentence, to all appearance, would have been carried into effect, had it not been for the interference of the Emperor of Germany, Charles VI. of Austria. The king yielded to his urgent entreaties, but with much reluctance, saying, " Austria will some day perceive what a serpent she warms in her bosom." FEE:: i. drawing by H&Eunberg. I FEEDEEIC II. n 1732, Frederic procured a remission of this ill treatment by contracting, much against his will, a marriage with Elizabeth Christina, a princess of the house of Brunswick. Domestic hap- piness he neither sought nor found; for it appears that he never lived with his wife. Her endowments, mental and personal, were not such as to win the affections of so fastidious a man, but her moral qualities and conduct are highly commended ; and, except in the resolute avoidance of her society, her husband through life treated her with high respect, From the time of his marriage to his succession, Frederic resided at E-heinsberg, a village some leagues north-east of Berlin. In 1734, he made his first campaign with Prince Eugene, but without displaying, or finding opportunity to display, the military talents by which he was dis- tinguished in after-life. From 1732, however, to 1740, his time was princi- pally devoted to literary amusements and society. Several of his published works were written during this period, and among them the " Anti-Machiavel," and " Considerations on the Character of Charles XII. ;" he also devoted some portion of his time to the study of tactics. His favorite companions were chiefly Frenchmen: and for French manners, language, cookery and philo- sophy, he displayed through life a very decided preference. The early part of Frederic's life gave little promise of his future energy as a soldier and statesman. The flute, em- broidered clothes, and the composition of indifferent French verses, seemed to occupy the attention of the young di- lettante. His accession to the throne, May 31, 1740, called his dormant ener- gies at once into action. He assumed the entire direction of government, charging himself with those minute and daily duties which princes gene- rally commit to their ministers. To discharge the multiplicity of business which thus devolved on him, he laid down strict rules for the regulation of his time and employments, to which, except when on active service, he sci i- pulously adhered. Until an advanced period of life he always rose at four o'clock in the morning; and he be stowed but a few minutes on his dress, in respect of which he was careless, even to slovenliness. But peaceful employments did not satisfy his active mind. His father, content with the possession of a powerful army, had never used it as an instrument of con- quest : Frederic, in the first year of hi& reign, undertook to wrest from Aus- tria the province of Silesia. On that country, which, from its adjoining sit- uation, was a most desirable acquisi- tion to the Prussian dominions, it ap- pears that he had some hereditary claims, to the assertion of which the I time was favorable. At the death of Charles VI., in October, 1740, the here- ditary dominions of Austria devolved on a young female, the afterwards cele- brated Maria Theresa. Trusting to her weakness, Frederic at once marched an army into Silesia. The people, being chiefly Protestants, were ill affected to their Austrian rulers, and the greater part of the country, except the for- tresses, fell without a battle into the King of Prussia's possession. In the following campaign, April 10th, 1741, was fought the battle of Molwitz 62 FKEDEKIC II. which requires mention, because in this engagement, the first in which he com- manded, Frederic displayed neither the skill nor the courage which the whole of his subsequent life proved him really to possess. It was said that he took shelter in a windmill, and this gave rise to the sarcasm, that at Molwitz the King of Prussia had covered him- self with glory and with flour. The Prussians however remained masters of the field. In the autumn of the same year they advanced within two days' march of Vienna ; and it was in this extremity of distress, that Maria Theresa made her celebrated and af- fecting appeal to the Diet of Hungary. A train of reverses, summed up by the decisive battle of Czaslaw, fought May 17th, 1742, in which Frederic display- 5d both courage and conduct, induced Austria to consent to the treaty of Breslaw, concluded in the same sum- mer, by which Silesia, with the excep- tion of a small district, was ceded to Prussia, of which kingdom it has ever since continued to form a part. But though Prussia for a time en- joyed peace, the state of European politics was far from settled, and Frederic's time was much occupied by foreign diplomacy, as well as by the internal improvements which always were the favorite objects of his solici- tude. The rapid rise of Prussia was not regarded with indifference by other powers. The Austrian govern- ment was inveterately hostile, from offended pride, as well as from a sense of injury ; Saxony took part with Austria ; Russia, if not an open en- emy, was always a suspicious and un- friendly neighbor ; and George II. of England, the King of Prussia's uncle, both feared and disliked his nephew Under these circumstances, upon the formation of the triple alliance be- tween Austria, England, and Sardinia. Frederic concluded a treaty with France and the Elector of Bavaria, who had succeeded Charles VI. as Emperor of Germany ; and antici- pated the designs of Austria upon Silesia, by marching into Bohemia in August, 1744. During two campaigns the war was continued to the advan- tage of the Prussians, who, under the command of Frederic in person, gained two signal victories with inferior num- bers, at Hohenfriedberg and Soor. At the end of December, 1745, he found himself in possession of Dres- den, the capital of Saxony, and in a condition to dictate terms of peace to Austria and Saxony, by which Silesia was again recognized as part of the Prussian dominions. Five years were thus spent in ac- quiring and maintaining possession of this important province. The next ten years of Frederic IL's life passed in profound peace. During this period he applied himself diligently and suc- cessfully to recruit his army, and reno- vate the drained resources of Prussia. His habits of life were singularly uniform. He resided chiefly at Pots- dam, apportioning his time and his employments with methodical exact- ness; and, by this strict attention to method, he was enabled to exercise a minute superintendence over every branch of government, without es tranging himself from social pleasures or abandoning his literary pursuits, After the peace of Dresden he com FREDERIC II. nienced liis " Histoire de mon Temps," ivhich, in addition to the history of his own wars in Silesia, contains a general account of European politics. About the same period he wrote his "Memoirs of the House of Branden- burg," the best of his historical works. He maintained an active correspond- ence with Voltaire, and other of the most distinguished men of Europe. He established, or rather restored, the Academy of Sciences of Berlin, and was eager to enrol eminent foreigners among its members, and to induce them to resort to his capital ; and the names of Voltaire, Euler, Maupertuis, La Grange, and others of less note, testify his success. But his avowed contempt for the German, and admira- tion of the French literature and lan- guage, in which all the transactions of the Society were carried on, gave an exotic character to the institution, and crippled the national benefits which might have been expected to arise from it. The story of Frederic's association with Voltaire, as narrated in his usual vivid manner by Macaulay, is worthy of "being given in detail, for its illus- tration of the characters of both these extraordinary personages. It may fairly be prefaced with the same writ- er's account of the king's entertain- ment of his literary friends at Potsdam. " It was the just boast of Schiller, that in his country no Augustus, no Lorenzo, had watched over the infancy of art. The rich and energetic lan- guage of Luther, driven by the Latin from the schools of pedants, and by the French from the palaces of kings, had taken refuge among the people. Of the powers of that langiiage, Fre- deric had no notion. He generally spoke of it, and of those who used it, with the contempt of ignorance. His library consisted of French books ; at his table nothing was heard but French conversation. The associates of his hours of relaxation were, for the most part, foreigners. Britain fur- nished to the royal circle two distin guished men, born in the highest rank, and driven by civil dissensions from the land to which, under happier circumstances, their talents and virtues might have been a source of strength and glory. George Keith, Earl Mar- ischal of Scotland, had taken arms for the house of Stuart in 1^15, and his younger brother James, then only sev- enteen years old, had fought gallantly by his side. When all was lost they retired together to the Continent, roved from country to country, served under many standards, and so bore themselves as to win the respect and good- will of many who had no love for the Jacobite cause. Their long wanderings termin- ated at Potsdam ; nor had Frederic any associates who deserved or obtained so large a share of his esteem. They were not only accomplished men, but nobles and warriors, capable of serving him in war and diplomacy, as well as of amusing him at supper. Alone of all his companions they appear never to have had reason to complain of his demeanor towards 'hem. Some of those who knew the palace best pro- nounced that the Lord Marischal was the only human being whom Frederic ever really loved. " Italy sent to the parties at Pots- dam the ingenious and amiable Alga- 64 FEEDERIC II. rotti, and Bastiani, the most crafty, cautious, and servile of Abbes. But the greater part of the society which Frederic had assembled round him, was drawn from France. Maupertuis had acquired some celebrity by the journey which he made to Lapland, for the purpose of ascertaining, by actual measurement, the shape of our planet. He was placed in the chair of the Academy of Berlin, a humble imitation of the renowned Academy of Paris. Baculard D'Arnaud, a young poet, who was thought to have given promise of great things, had been in- duced to quit his country, and to reside at the Prussian Court. The Marquess D'Argens was among the king's favor- ite companions, on account, as it should seem, of the strong opposition between their characters. The parts of D'Ar- gens were good, and his manners those of a finished French gentleman ; but his whole soul was dissolved in sloth, timidity, and self-indulgence. His was one of that abject class of minds which are superstitious without being reli- gious. Hating Christianity with a rancor which made him incapable of rational inquiry : unable to see in the harmony and beauty of the universe the traces of divine power and wisdom, he was the slave of dreams and omens ; would not sit down to table with thirteen in company ; turned pale if the salt fell towards him ; begged his guests not to cross their knives and forks on their plates ; and would not for the world commence a journey on Friday. His health was a subject of constant anxiety to him. Whenever his head ached, or his pulse beat quick, his dastardly fears and effeminate pre- cautions were the jest of all Berlin. All this suited the king's purpose ad mirably. He wanted somebody by whom he misrht be amused, and whom O i he might despise. When he wished to pass half-an-hour in easy polished con- versation, D'Argens was an excellent companion; when he wanted to vent his spleen and contempt, D'Argens was an excellent butt. "With these associates, and others of the same class, Frederic loved to spend the time which he could steal from public cares. He wished his sup- per-parties to be gay and easy ; and invited his guests to lay aside all re- straint, and to forget that he was at the head of a hundred and sixty thou- sand soldiers, and was absolute master of the life and liberty of all who sat at meat with him. There was, therefore, at these meetings the outward show of ease. The wit and learning of the company were ostentatiously displayed. The discussions on history and litera- ture were often highly interesting. But the absurdity of all the religions known among men was the chief topic of conversation ; and the audacity with which doctrines and names venerated throughout Christendom were treated on these occasions, startled even per- sons accustomed to the society of French and English free-thinkers. But real liberty, or real affection, was in this brilliant society not to be found. Absolute kino;s seldom have friends : O and Frederic's faults were such as, even where perfect equality exists, make friendship exceedingly precarious. He had indeed many qualities, which, on a first acquaintance, were captivating His conversation was lively ; his man FREDEEIC II. 65 ners to those whom lie desired to please were even caressing. No man could flatter with more delicacy. No man succeeded more completely in inspiring those who approached him with vague hopes of some great advantage from his kindness. But under this fair ex- terior he was a tyrant suspicious, disdainful, and malevolent. " Potsdam was, in truth, what it was called by one of its most illustrious inmates, the Palace of Alcina. At the first glance it seemed to be a delightful spot, where every intellectual and phy- sical enjoyment awaited the happy adventurer. Every new comer was received with eager hospitality, intoxi- cated with flattery, encouraged to ex- pect prosperity and greatness. It was in vain that a long succession of favor- ites who had entered that abode with delight and hope, and who, after a short term of delusive happiness, had been doomed to expiate their folly by years of wretchedness and degradation, raised their voices to warn the aspirant who approached the charmed threshold. Some had wisdom enough to discover the truth early, and spirit enough to fly without looking back ; others lin- gered on to a cheerless and unhonored old age. We have no hesitation in saying that the poorest author of that- time in London, sleeping on a bulk, dining in a cellar, with a cravat of paper, and a skewer for a shirt-pin, was a happier man than any of the literary inmates of Frederic's court. "But of all who entered the en- chanted garden in the inebriation of delight, and quitted it in agonies of rage and shame, the most remarkable was Voltaire. , To Berlin he was in- 9 vited by a series of letters, couched in terms of the most enthusiastic friend- ship and admiration. For once the rigid parsimony of Frederic seemed to have relaxed. Orders, honorable of- fices, a liberal pension, a well-served table, stately apartments under a royal roof, were offered in return for the pleasure and* honor which were expect- ed from the society of the first wit of the age. A thousand louis were re- mitted for the charges of the journey. No ambassador setting out from Berlin for a court of the first rank, had ever been more amply supplied. But Vol- taire was not satisfied. At a later period, when he possessed an ample for- tune, he was one of the most liberal of men; but till his means had become equal to his wishes, his greediness for lucre was unrestrained either by jus- tice or by shame. He had the effron- tery to ask for a thousand louis more, in order to enable him to bring his niece, Madame Denis, the ugliest of co- quettes, in his company. The indeli- cate rapacity of the poet produced its natural effect on the severe and frugal king. The answer was a dry refusal. ' I did not,' said his majesty, ' solicit the honor of a lady's society.' On this, Voltaire went off into a paroxysm of childish rage. ' Was there ever such avarice? He has hundreds of tubs full of dollars in his vaults, and hag- gles with me about a poor thousand louis.' It seemed that the negotiation would be broken off; but Frederic, with great dexterity, affected indiffer- ence, and seemed inclined to transfer his idolatry to Baculard d'Arnaud. His majesty even wrote some bad verses, of which the sense was, that 86 FEEDEEIC II. Voltaire was a setting sun, and that Arnaud was rising Good-natured friends soon carried the lines to Vol- taire. He was in his bed. He jumped out in his shirt, danced about the room with rage, and sent for his passport and his post-horses. It was not diffi- cult to foresee the end of a connection which had such a beginning. "It was in the year 1750 that Vol- taire left the great capital, which he was not to see again till, after the lapse of nearly thirty years, he returned, bow- ed down by extreme old age, to die in the midst of a splendid and ghastly triumph. His reception in Prussia was such as might well have elated a less vain and excitable mind. He wrote to his friends at Paris, that the kindness and the attention with which he had been welcomed surpassed description that the king was the most amiable of men that Potsdam was the para- dise of philosophers. He was created chamberlain, and received, together with his gold key, the cross of an order, and a patent ensuring to him a pen- sion of eight hundred pounds sterling a-year for life. A hundred and sixty pounds a-year were promised to his niece if she survived him. The royal cooks and coachmen were put at his disposal. He was lodged in the same apartments in which Saxe had lived, when, at the height of power and glory, he visited Prussia. Frederic, indeed, stooped for a time even to use the lan- guage of adulation. He pressed to his lips the meagre hand of the little grin- ning skeleton, whom he regarded as the dispenser of immortal renown. He would add, he said, to the titles which be owed to his ancestors and his sword. another title, derived from his last and proudest acquisition. His style should run thus : Frederic, King of Prussia, Margrave of Brandenburg, Sovereign Duke of Silesia, Possessor of Voltaire. But even amidst the delights of the honey-moon, Voltaire's sensitive vanity began to take alarm. A few days after his arrival, he could not help telling his niece, that the amiable king had a trick of giving a sly scratch with one hand while patting and stroking with the other. Soon came hints not the less alarming because mysterious. ' The supper parties are delicious. The king is the life of the company. But I have operas and comedies, reviews and concerts, my studies and books. But but Berlin is fine, the princess charm- ing, the maids of honor handsome. But, ' "This eccentric friendship was fast cooling. Never had there met two per- sons so exquisitely fitted to plague each other. Each of them had exactly the fault of which the other was most im- patient; and they were, in different ways, the most impatient of mankind. Frederic was frugal, almost niggardly. When he had secured his plaything, he began to think that he had bought it too dear. Voltaire, on the other hand, was greedy, even to the extent of im pudence and knavery; and conceived that the favorite of a monarch who had barrels full of gold and silver laid up in cellars, ought to make a fortune, which a receiver-general might envy. They soon discovered each other's feel- ings. Both were angry, and a war be- gan, in which Frederic stooped to the part >f Harpagon, and Voltaire to that of Scapin. It is humiliating to relate, FREDERIC IT. 67 that the great warrior and statesman gave orders tliat his guest's allowance jf sugar and chocolate should be cur- tailed. It is, if possible, a still more humiliating fact, that Voltaire indem- nified, himself by pocketing the wax- candles in the royal ante-chamber. Disputes about money, however, were not the most serious disputes of these extraordinary associates. The sarcasms of the king soon galled the sensitive temper of the poet. D'Arnaud and D'Argens, Guichard and La Metric, might, for the sake of a morsel of bread, be willing to bear the insolence of a master; but Voltaire was of another order. He knew that he was a poten- tate as well as Frederic ; that his Eu- ropean reputation, and his incompara- ble power of covering whatever he hated with ridicule, made him an ob- ject of dread even to the leaders of armies and the rulers of nations. In truth, of all the intellectual weapons which have ever been wielded by man, the most terrible was the mockery of Voltaire. Bigots and tyrants who had never been moved by the wailing and cursing of millions, turned pale at his name. Principles unassailable by rea- son, principles which had withstood the fiercest attacks of power, the most valuable truths, the most generous sen- timents, the noblest and most graceful images, the purest reputations, the most august institutions, began to look mean and loathsome as soon as that withering smile was turned upon them. To every opponent, how- ever strong in his cause and his tal- ents, in his station and his character, who ventured to encounter the great scoffer, might be addressed the caution which was given of old to the Arch angel : 1 1 forewarn thee, shun His deadly arrow ; neither vainly hope To be invulnerable in those bright arms, Though temper'd heavenly; for that fatal dint, Save Him who reigns above, none can resist.' " We cannot pause to recount how often that rare talent was exercised against rivals worthy of esteem how often it was used to crush and torture enemies worthy only of silent disdain how often it was perverted to the more noxious purpose of destroying the last solace of earthly misery, and the last restraint on earthly power. Neither can we pause to tell how often it was used to vindicate justice, hu- manity, and toleration the principles of sound philosophy, the principles of free government. Causes of quarrel multiplied fast. Voltaire, who, partly from love of money, and partly from love of excitement, was always fond of stock-jobbing, became implicated in transactions of at least a dubious char- acter. The king was delighted at hav- ing such an opportunity to humble his guest; and bitter reproaches and complaints were exchanged. Voltaire, too, was soon at war with the other men of letters who surrounded the king ; and this irritated Frederic, who, however, had himself chiefly to blame : for, from that love of tormenting which was in him a ruling passion, he per- petually lavished extravagant praises on small men and bad books, merely in order that he might enjoy the mor- tification and rage which on such oc- casions Voltaire took no pains to con- ceal. His majesty, however, soon had reason to regret the pains which he 88 FKEDEEIC II. had taken to kindle jealousy among the members of his household. The whole palace was in a ferment with literary intrigues and cabals. It was to no purpose that the imperial voice, which kept a hundred and sixty thou- sand soldiers in order, was raised to quiet the contention of the exasperated wits. It was far easier to stir up such a storm than to lull it. Nor was Fred- eric, in his capacity of wit, by any means without his own share of vexations. He had sent a large quantity of verses to Voltaire, and requested that they might be returned, with remarks and correction. ' See,' exclaimed Voltaire, ' what a quantity of his dirty linen the king has sent me to wash ! ' Talebear- ers were not wanting to carry the sar- casm to the royal ear; and Frederic was as much incensed as a Grub Street writer who had found his name in the ' Dunciad.' "This could not last. A circumstance which, when the mutual regard of the friends was in its first glow, would merely have been matter for laughter, produced a violent explosion. Mau- pertuis enjoyed as much of Frederic's good-will as any man of letters. He was president of the Academy of Ber- lin; and stood second to Voltaire, though at an immense distance, in the literary society which had been assem- bled at the Prussian court. Frederic had, by playing for his own amusement on the feelings of the two jealous and vainglorious Frenchmen, succeeded in producing a bitter enmity between them. Voltaire resolved to set his mark, a mark never to be effaced, on the forehead of Maupertuis ; and wrote the exquisitely ludicrous diatribe of "Doctor Akakia." He showed this little piece to Frederick, who had toe much taste and too much malice not to relish such delicious pleasantry. In truth, even at this time of day, it is not easy for any person who has the least perception of the ridiculous to read the jokes on the Latin city, the Patagonians, and the hole to the centre of the earth, without laughing till he cries. But though Frederic was di verted by this charming pasquinade, he was unwilling that it should get abroad. His self-love was interested. He had selected Maupertuis to fill the chair of his Academy. If all Europe were taught to laugh at Maupertuis, would not the reputation of the Aca- demy, would not even the dignity of its royal patron, be in some degree compromised? The king, therefore, begged Voltaire to suppress his per- formance. Voltaire promised to do so, and broke his word. The diatribe was published, and received with shouts of merriment and applause by all who could read the French language. The king stormed. Voltaire, with his usual disregard of truth, protested his innocence, and made up some lie about a printer or an amanuensis. The king was not to be so imposed upon. He ordered the pamphlet to be burned by the common hangman, and insisted upon having an apology from Voltaire, couched in the most abject terms. Voltaire sent back to the king his cross, his key, and the patent of his pension. After this burst of rage, the strange pair began to be ashamed of their violence, and went through the forms of reconciliation. But the breach was irreparable ; and Voltaire FKEDEEIO II. took liis leave of Frederic for ever. They parted with cold civility; but their hearts were big with resentment. Voltaire had in his keeping a volume of the king's poetry, and forgot to re- turn it. This was, we believe, merely one of the oversights which men set- ting out upon a journey often commit. That Voltaire could have meditated plagiarism is quite incredible. He would not, we are confident, for the half of Frederic's kingdom, have con- sented to father Frederic's verses. The king, however, who rated his own writings much above their value, and who was inclined to see all Voltaire's actions in the worst light, was enraged to think that his favorite compositions were in the hands of an enemy, as thievish as a daw and as mischievous as a monkey. In the anger excited by this thought, he lost sight of reason and decency, and determined on com- mitting an outrage at once odious and ridiculous "Voltaire had reached Frankfort. His niece, Madam Denis, came thither to meet him. He conceived himself secure from the power of his late master, when he was arrested by order of the Prussian resident. The pre- cious volume was delivered up. But the Prussian agents had, no doubt, been instructed not to let Voltaire escape without some gross indignity. He was confined twelve days in a wretched hovel. Sentinels with fixed bayonets kept guard over him. His niece was dragged through the mire by the soldiers. Sixteen hundred dol- lars were extorted from him by his insolent jailers. It is absurd to say that this outrage is not to be attri- buted to the king. "Was anybody punished for it ? Was anybody called in question for it ? Was it not consist- ent with Frederic's character ? Was it not of a piece with his conduct on other similar occasions ? Is it not no- torious that he repeatedly gave private directions to his officers to pillage and demolish the houses of persons against whom he had a grudge charging them at the same time to take their meas- ures in such a way that his name might not be compromised? He acted thus towards Count Buhl in the Seven Years' War. Why should we believe that he would have been more scru- pulous with regard to Voltaire ? " Turning from this exhibition of dis- creditable royal vanity and meanness, we may with more satisfaction look upon the service of Frederic to the state in its civil as well as military development, and study the real great- ness of this extraordinary man. In the cause of education he was active, both by favoring the universities, to which he sought to secure the services of the best professors, and by the es- tablishment of schools wherever the circumstances of the neighborhood rendered it desirable. It is said that he sometimes founded as many as sixty schools in a single year. This period of his reign is alsc marked by the commencement of that revision of the Prussian law (a con- fused and corrupt mixture of Roman and Saxon jurisprudence) which led to the substitution of an entirely new code. In this important business the Chancellor Cocceii took the lead; but the system established by him under- went considerable alterations from 70 FKEDEK1C IL time to time, and at last was remodel- led in 1781. For the particular merits or imperfections of the code, the law- yers who drew it up are answerable, rather than the monarch ; but the lat- ter possesses the high honor of having proved himself, in this and other in- stances, sincerely desirous to assure to his subjects a pure and ready adminis- tration of justice. Sometimes this de- sire joined to a certain love and habit of personal inquiry into all things, led the king to a meddling and mischiev- ous interference with the course of jus- tice ; but in all cases his intention seems to have been pure, and his conduct proves him sincere in the injunction to his judges : " If a suit arises between me and one of my 'subjects, and the case is a doubtful one, you should al- ways decide against me." If, as in the celebrated imprisonment of Baron Trenck, he chose to perform an arbi- trary action, he did it openly, not by tampering with courts of justice: but these despotic measures were not fre- quent, and few countries have ever enjoyed a fuller practical license of speech and printing, than Prussia un- der a simply despotic form of govern- ment, administered by a prince natu- rally of impetuous passions and stern and unforgiving temper. That temper, however, was kept admirably within bounds, and seldom suffered to appear in civil affairs. His code is remark- able for the abolition of torture, and the toleration granted to all religions. The latter enactment, however, re- quired no great share of liberality from Frederic, who avowed his indif- ference to all religions alike. In crim- inal cases he was opposed to severe punishments, and was always strongly averse to shedding blood. To his sub jects, both in person and by letter, he was always accessible, and to the peas- antry in particular he displayed pater- nal kindness, patience, and condescen- sion. But, on the other hand, his mili- tary system was frightfully severe ; both in its usual discipline and in its punishments. Numbers of soldiers de- serted, or put an end to their lives, or committed crimes that they might be given up to justice. Yet his kindness and familiarity in the field, and his fearless exposure of his own person, endeared him exceedingly to his sol- diers, and many pleasing anecdotes, honorable to both parties, are pre- served, especially during the cam- paigns of the Seven Years' War. During this peace Austria had re cruited her strength, and with it her inveterate hostility to Prussia ; and it became known to Frederic that a se- cret agreement for the con piest and partition of his territories existed be- tween Austria, Russia, and Saxony. The circumstances of the times were such that, though neither France nor England were cordially disposed to- wards him, it was yet open to him to negotiate an alliance with either. Frederic chose that of England ; and France, forgetting ancient enmities, and her obvious political interest, im- mediately took part with Austria. The odds of force apparently were overwhelming; but, having made up his mind, the King of Prussia dis- played his usual promptitude. He demanded an explanation of the views of the court of Vienna, and, on receiv- ing an unsatisfactory answer, signified FREDERIC II. 71 that lie considered it a declaration of war. Knowing that the court of Saxony, contrary to existing treaties, flras secretly engaged in the league against him, he marched an army into the electorate in August, 1756, and, o / / / almost unopposed, took military pos- session of it. He thus turned the enemy's resources against himself, and drew from that unfortunate country continual supplies of men and money, without which he could scarcely have supported the protracted struggle which ensued, and which is celebrated under the title of the Seven Years' War. The events of this war, how- ever interesting to a military student, are singularly unfit for concise narra- tion, and that from the very circum- stances which displayed the King of Prussia's talents to most advantage. Attacked on every side, compelled to hasten from the pursuit of a beaten, to make head in some other quarter against a threatening enemy, the ac- tivity, vigilance, and indomitable reso- lution of Frederic must strike all those who read these campaigns at length, and with the necessary help of maps and plans, though his profound tactical skill and readiness in emergen- cies may be fully appreciable only by the learned. But when these compli- cated events are reduced to a bare list of marches and countermarches, vic- tories and defeats, the spirit vanishes, and a mere caput mortuum remains. The war being necessarily defensive, Frederic could seldom carry the seat of action into an enemy's country. The Prussian dominions were subject to continual ravage, and that country, as well as Saxony, paid a heavy price that the possession of Silesia might be decided between two rival sovereigns. Upon the whole, the first campaigns were favorable to Prussia; but the confessed superiority of that power in respect of generals (for the king was admirably supported by Prince Fer- dinand of Brunswick, Prince Henry of Prussia, Schwerin, Keith, and others) could not always countervail the great superiority of force with which it had to contend. The celebrated victory won by the Prussians at Prague, May 6th, 1757, was balanced by a severe de- feat at Kolin, the result, as Frederic confesses, of his own rashness ; but, at the end of autumn, he retrieved the reverses of the summer, by the bril- liant victories of Rosbach, and Leu- then or Lissa. In 1758, Frederic's contempt of his enemy lulled him into a false security, in consequence of which he was surprised and defeated at Hochkirchen. But the campaigns of 1759 and 1760 were a succession ot disasters by which Prussia was reduced to the verge of ruin ; and it appears, from Frederic's correspondence, that, in the autumn of the latter year, his reverses led him to contemplate sui- cide, in preference to consenting to what he thought dishonorable terms of peace. The next campaign was bloody and indecisive ; and in the fol- lowing year the secession of Russia and France induced Austria, then much exhausted, to consent to a peace, by which Silesia and the other posses- sions of Frederic were secured to him as he possessed them before the war So that this enormous expense of blood and treasure produced no result what- ever, except that of establishing the 72 FEEDEEIC 11. King of Prussia's reputation as the first living general of Europe. Peace was signed at the castle of Huberts- burg, near Dresden, Feb. 15th, 1763. The brilliant military reputation which Frederic had acquired in this arduous contest did not tempt him to pursue the career of a conqueror. He had risked everything to maintain pos- session of Silesia ; but if his writings speak the real feelings of his mind, he was deeply sensible to the sufferings and evils which attend upon war. "The state of Prussia," he himself says, in the " Histoire de mon Temps," "can only be compared to that of a man riddled with wounds, weakened by loss of blood, and ready to sink under the weight of his misfortunes. The nobility was exhausted, the com- mons ruined, numbers of villages were burnt, of towns ruined. Civil order was lost in a total anarchy : in a word, the desolation was universal." To cure these evils Frederic applied his earn- est attention ; and by grants of money to those towns which had suffered most ; by the commencement and con- tinuation of various great works of public utility ; by attention to agricul- ture ; by draining marshes, and settling colonists in the barren, or ruined por- tions of his country; by cherishing manufactures (though not always with a useful or judicious zeal), he succeed- ed in repairing the exhausted popula- tion and resources of Prussia with a rapidity the more wonderful, because his military establishment was at the same time recruited and maintained at the enormous number, considering the size and wealth of the kingdom, of 200,000 men. One of his measures deserves especial notice, the emancipa tion of the peasants from hereditary servitude. This great undertaking he commenced at an early period of his reign, by giving up his own seignioral rights over the serfs on the crown do mains: he completed it in the yeai 1766, by an edict abolishing servitude throughout his dominions. In 1765, he commenced a gradual alteration in the fiscal system of Prussia, suggested in part by the celebrated HelvetiuS: In the department of finance, though all his experiments did not succeed, he was very successful. He is said, in the course of his reign, to have raised the annual revenue to nearly double what it had been in h>s father's time, and that without increasing the pressure of the people. In such rares and in his literary pursuits, among which we may espe- cially mention his "History of the Seven Years' War," passed the time of Frederic for ten years. In 1772, he engaged in the nefarious project for the first partition of Poland. It does not seem, however, that the scheme originated, as has been said, with Frederic: on the contrary, it appears to have been conceived by Catherine II., and matured in conversations with Prince Henry, the King of Prussia's brother, during a visit to St. Peters- burg. By the treaty of partition, which was not finally arranged till 1777, Prussia gained a territory of no great extent, but of importance from its connecting Prussia Proper with the electoral dominions of Brandenburg and Silesia, and giving a compactness to the kingdom, of which it stood greatly in need. Frederic made some FREDERIC II. 73 amends for his conduct in this matter, by the diligence with which he labored to improve his acquisition. In this, as in most circumstances of internal administration, he was very successful ; and the country, ruined by war, mis- government, and the brutal sloth of its inhabitants, soon assumed the as- pect of cheerful industry. The King of Prussia once more led an army into the field, when, on the death of the Elector of Bavaria, child- less, in 1778, Joseph II. of Austria conceived the plan of re-annexing to his own crown, under the plea of vari- ous antiquated feudal rights, the great- er part of the Bavarian territories. Stimulated quite as much by jealousy of Austria, as by a sense of the injus- tice of this act, Frederic stood out as the assertor of the liberties of Ger- many, and proceeding with the utmost politeness from explanation to expla- nation, he marched an army into Bo- hemia in July, 1778. The war, how- ever, which was terminated in the fol- lowing spring by the peace of Teschen, was one of manoeuvres, and partial en- gagements; in which Frederic's skill in strategy shone with its usual lustre, and success, on the whole, rested with the Prussians. By the terms of the treaty, the Bavarian dominions were secured, nearly entire, to the rightful collateral heirs, whose several claims were settled, while certain minor stip- ulations were made in favor of Prussia. A few years later, in 1785, Frederic again found occasion to oppose Aus- tria, in defence of the integrity of the Germanic constitution. The Emperor Joseph, in prosecution of his designs on Bavaria, had formed a contract 10 with the reigning elector, to exchange the Austrian provinces in the Nether- lands for the Electorate. Dissenting from this arrangement, the heir to the succession entrusted the advocacy of his rights to Frederic, who lost no time in negotiating a confederation among the chief powers of Germany, (known by the name of the Germanic League,) to support the constitution of the empire, and the rights of its several princes. By this timely step Austria was compelled to forego the desired acquisition. At this time Frederic's constitution had begun to decay. He had long been a sufferer from gout, the natural consequence of indulgence in good eat- ing and rich cookery, to which through- out his life he was addicted. Towards the end of the year he began to experi- ence great difficulty of breathing. His complaints, aggravated by total neglect of medical advice, and an extravagant appetite, which he gratified by eating to excess of the most highly seasoned and unwholesome food, terminated in a confirmed dropsy. During the lat- ter months of his life he suffered griev- ously from this complication of disor- ders ; and through this period he dis- displayed remarkable patience, and consideration for the feelings of those around him. No expression of suffer- ing was allowed to pass his lips ; and up to the last day of his life he con- tinued to discharge with punctuality those political duties which he had im- posed upon himself in youth and strength. Strange to say, while he ex- hibited this extraordinary self-control in some respects, he would not abstain from the most extravagant excesses in FREDERIC II. diet, though they were almost always followed by a severe aggravation of his sufferings. Up to August 15th, 1786, ne continued, as usual, to receive and answer all communications, and to des- patch the usual routine of civil and military business. On the following day he fell into a lethargy, from which he only partially recovered. He died in the course of the night of August 16. The published works of the King of Prussia were collected in twenty-three volumes, 8vo. Amsterdam, 1790. We shall here mention, as completing the body of his historical works, the " Me- moires depuis la Paix de Huberts- bourg," and "Memoires de la Guerre de 1778." Among his poems, the most remarkable is the " Art de la Guerre ; " but these, as happens in most cases, where the writer has thought fit to em- ploy a foreign language, have been lit- tle known or esteemed, since their au- thor ceased to rivet the attention of the world by the brilliance of his ac- tions, and the singularity of his char- acter. Of the personal appearance of the king, Old Fritz, as he was familiarly called by the people, we have this graphic sketch by his latest biographer, Carlyle : " A king every inch of him, though without the trappings of a king. Presents himself in a Spartan simplicity of vesture ; no crown but an old mili- tary cocked-hat; no sceptre but one like Agamemnon's, a walking-stick out of the woods, which serves also as a riding-stick; and for royal robes, a mere soldier's blue coat with red fa- 3mgs, coat likely to be old, and sure to have a great deal of Spanish snuff on the breast of it; rest of the apparel dim, unobtrusive in color or cut, end- ing in high, over-knee, military boots, which may be brushed, but are not permitted to be blackened or varnish- ed. The man is not of godlike phy- siognomy, any more than of imposing stature or costume : close shut mouth with thin lips, prominent jaws and nose, receding brow, by no means of Olympian height; head, however, is of long form and has superlative gray eyes in it. Not what is called a beau- tiful man, nor yet, by all appearance what is called a happy one. On the contrary, the face bears evidence of many sorrows, as they are termed, of much hard labor done in this world ; and seems to anticipate nothing but more still coming. Quiet stoicism, ca- pable enough of what joy there were, but not expecting any worth mention ; great unconscious and some conscious pride, well tempered with a cheery mockery of humor, are written on that old face; which carries its chin well forward, in spite of the slight stoop about the neck ; snuffy nose ra- ther flung into the air, under its old cocked-hat, like an old snuffy lion on the watch ; and such a pair of eyes as no man or lion or lynx of that cen- tury bore elsewhere, according to all the testimony we have."* * The main portion of this narrative is from the "Gallery of Portraits and Memoirs," pub- lished under the superintendence of the ; ' So- ciety for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge." The episode on the intimacy of the sovereign with Voltaire is from Macaulay's article on Frederic in the Edinburgh Review. . EDWARD GIBBON IBBON has so well told the story ~ of his life in Ms memorable Auto- biography, that subsequent writers in their account of the man, including his editor, the persevering Milman, have had no other course to pursue than to follow closely the details of his narra- tive. The Autobiography is indeed an extraordinary production among the works of its class. Its style is charm- ing, with just enough of that elevation which gives such peculiar emphasis to the author's great work to impart to or- dinary incidents a certain indescribable animation which we can find nowhere more agreeably displayed. Written evi- dently with the consciousness of the value of his " History " to the world, it unfolds to us the processes of acci- dent or study by which he gradually reached that great work. It was not till he felt that he had some claims upon the attention of the world by the completion of the History that he un- dertook the preparation of his personal memoir ; and he proceeded in it with so much care that he left for his friend and literary executor, Lord Sheffield, no less than six different sketches of the work, all in his own handwriting. From all of these, the " Memoirs," as they now staled, were constructed. Their motive is expressed in a few opening sentences, revealing at the start a certain pride of authorship and sense of the importance of the task ; egotistical, of course, for to be success- ful in literary compositions one must be in love with his subject, so that a man who undertakes to write his au- tobiography should be first assured that he is in love with himself. If this were the only qualification, how ever, it must be admitted there would be few failures in productions of this class. " In the fifty-second year of my age," Gibbon commences, "after the completion of an arduous and suc- cessful work, I now propose to employ some moments of my leisure in review- ing the simple transactions of a private and literary life. Truth, naked, un- blushing truth, the first virtue of more serious history, must be the sole re- commendation of this personal narra. tive. The style shall be simple and familiar: but style is the image of character; and the habits of correct writing may produce, without labor or design, the appearance of art and study. My own amusement is my motive, and will be my reward : and if these sheets (75) 76 EDWARD GIBBON. are communicated to some discreet and indulgent friends, they will be secreted from the public eye till the author shall be removed beyond the reach of criti- cism or ridicule." Following then this best authority, the historian himself, we ascend with him in the records of his ancestry to the eleventh century, when the Gib- bons of Kent flourished in that old English county. One of the family was architect or castle-builder of King Edward III. ; another, was captain of the English militia in the reign of Eli- zabeth. An alliance by marriage con- nected the historian, in the eleventh degree, with a Lord High Treasurer of England of the days of Henry VI., the historic Baron Say and Seale who was beheaded by the insurgents in the Kentish Rebellion, and who, in Shake- speare's play is reproached by Jack Cade with erecting a grammar school, setting printers at work, building a paper mill, and having men about him " who usually talk with a noun and a verb, and such abominable words as no Christian ear can endure to hear." " Our dramatic poet," writes the his- torian of the Roman Empire " is gene- rally more attentive to character than to history ; and I much fear that the art of printing was not introduced into England till several years after Lord Say's death : but of some of these me- ritorious crimes I should hope to find my ancestors guilty; and a man of letters may be proud of his descent from a patron and martyr of learning." At the beginning of the seventeenth century a branch of the family settled in London in mercantile life and pros- pered, Edward, the grandfather of the historian, acquiring wealth as a draper and rising to a government appoint- ment as one of the commissioners of the customs. Unhappily he became ? director of the South Sea Company, and his previous fortune of sixty thou sand pounds was lost in the wreck of that extraordinary speculation. Es- caping from his creditors with a small allowance, he was however enabled by his energy to repair his losses and be- come again a man of consideration for his property. His son Edward was educated at Westminster School and at Cambridge, enjoyed the advantages of foreign travel, and on his return represented the tory interest in parlia- ment as a borough member. He mar- ried the daughter of James Porten, a London merchant, and of this union, the first child, Edward, the subject of this notice, was born at the family es- tate at Putney, in the County of Surry, on the 27th of April, old style, 1737. So weak appeared the constitution of the child, that his father, to preserve the family designation, thought fit to call each of his five brothers who suc- ceeded him by the name of Edward yet they all died in their infancy, leav- ing the first-born to maintain the hon ors of the title. The care of Edward in his feeble childhood fell to his aunt Mrs. Catharine Porten, who watched over him with the greatest assiduity and to whose kind care he attributed the preservation of his life. At the age of seven he was provided with a domestic tutor named Kirkby, a man of some ingenuity as an author and grammarian, from whose hands, at the end of eighteen months, he was sent tc a school at Kingston, where, as he trlla EDWAKD GIBBON. . us, " by the common methods of disci- pline, at the expense of many tears and some blood, I purchased the knowledge of the Latin syntax." The authors which he studied at this time, or, as he expresses it, "painfully construed and darkly understood," were the lives of Cornelius Nepos and the fables of Phsedrus. The one gave him his first glimpses of the history of Greece and Rome ; the other taught him in an at- tractive form " the truths of morality and prudence." After two years' study at the school, frequently interrupted by sickness, he was recalled by his mother's death, which brought him again within the attentions of his aunt, a lady of cultivated understanding, who encouraged his mental develop- ment and inspired him with an ar- dent pursuit of knowledge. " To her kind lessons," he says, " I ascribe my early and invincible love of reading, which I would not exchange for the treasures of India." Owing to her fa- ther's losses in business, Mrs. Porten, in a spirit of independence, in keeping with her high character, opened a boarding-house for the scholars of Westminster School. Her nephew, Edward, now at the age of twelve, joined her in this new residence and was immediately entered at the school, which, as we have seen, his father had attended before him. The boy still needed the care of his devoted aunt ; his studies were still broken in upon by his maladies, while " in the space of two years, interrupted by danger and debility," as he informs us, he " pain- fully climbed into the third form." All this while his lessons were of the filamentary character, leaving him to " acquire in a riper age the beauties of the Latin and the rudiments of the Greek tongue." Unable to mingle in the sports of the school, his leisure with his aunt was doubtless largely given to reading. He was already familiar with Pope's Homer, Dryden's Virgil, Ovid's Metamorphoses and the Arabian Nights' Entertainments, and had " turn ed over many English pages of poetry and romance, of history and travels," in his maternal grandfather's library. A severe nervous affection now led to his withdrawal from Westminster to seek relief from the mineral waters at Bath, and some time was passed at vari- ous residences, his education being car- ried on in the most desultory manner, till at about sixteen his constitution unexpectedly developing new powers and throwing off his former complaints, after an unprofitable attempt to pursue his studies with Francis, the translator of Horace, who proved too careless for the duty which he assumed, the young Gibbon, without further preparation, before he had accomplished his fifteenth year, was entered by his father as a student at Magdalen College, Oxford. Imperfectly trained in the regular academic studies in consequence of his frequent attacks of illness, the youth carried with him to the University an extraordinary stock of miscellaneous reading, which had already been con- centrated upon history, especially in reference to Greece and Rome. He had eagerly perused all that he could lay his hands upon relating to these subjects in translations of the ancient authors, and had penetrated beyond the classic period into the later Byzan- tine period aid the outlying history 78 EDWARD GIBBON. of the East. " Before I was sixteen," says he, " I had exhausted all that could be learned in English of the Arabs and Persians, the Tartars and Turks ; and the same ardor urged me to guess at the French of D'Herbelot, and to con- strue the barbarous Latin of Pocock's Albufaragius." Nor was this merely the gratification of an idle curiosity. The historic passion was already de- veloped within him, as is shown by his careful study of geography and chro- nology. He sought order and accuracy in the confusion of the early dates, and perplexed himself with the systems of rival authorities. His sleep was dis- turbed by the difficulty of reconciling the Septuagint with the Hebrew com- putation. With such acquirements, " I arrived at Oxford," says he, " with a stock of erudition that might have puzzled a doctor, and a degree of ig- norance, of which a school-boy would have been ashamed." The transition to the University was well calculated to make a mark- ed impression on a youth whose intel- lectual faculties were thus alive for wonder and admiration. Entering, with all the privileges of wealth, "I felt myself suddenly raised from a boy to a man ; the persons, whom I respect- ed as my superiors in age and acade- mical rank, entertained me with every mark of attention and civility; and my vanity was nattered by the velvet cap and silk gown which distinguished a gentleman-commoner from a plebeian student. A decent allowance, more money than a school-boy had ever seen, was at my own disposal; and I might command, among the tradesmen at Oxford, an indefinite and dangerous latitude of credit. A key was deliv ered into my hands, which gave me the free use of a numerous and learn- ed library: my apartment consisted of three elegant and well furnished rooms in the new building, a stately pile, of Magdalen College; and the adjacent walks, had they been fre- quented by Plato's disciples, might have been compared to the Attic shade on the banks of the Ilissus." "With such advantages shielding the student so effectually in his defects of special preparation, one would have thought the course of an ingenuous youth would have been steadily onward without in- terruption. Eveiy opportunity was in his way to amend his deficiencies, with a large liberty for the prosecution of his favorite studies. But too much appears to have been left to his choice his tutors were compliant and indiffer- ent, and he took advantage of their neglect, giving himself freely to the amusements and dissipations of the place. He needed restraint and pre- scribed duties, and from both he was exempt in the privileged ease of the college. But though he was acquiring little in exact learning or mental disci pline, his mind was not inactive. In his first long vacation he was intent upon writing a book which involved much learned reading, on "The Age of Sesostris," and actually accomplish- ed a portion of it. On his return to the University, he engaged in a course of religious reading, excited by the pe- rusal of Dr. Middleton's " Free Inquiry into the Miraculous Powers possessed by the Church in the Early Ages," a work so consonant with Gibbon's later habits of thought, that it is surprising EDWAKD GIBBON. that he did not then accept its skepti- cism in relation to the pretensions up- on which the Romanists relied. But ais prejudices were then enlisted on the side of what he considered author- ity, and with the wholesale ardor of youth, accepting as an inference from the miraculous claims of the Church of Rome, its whole series of doctrines, having finished his conversion by him- self chiefly from the writings of Bos- suet, he got access to a Jesuit priest in London, and " at his feet solemnly, though privately, abjured the errors of heresy." As the act of a youth of sixteen, in the situation of life in which Gibbon was placed, it exhibits a cer- tain courageous enthusiasm of charac- ter, not less than the vanity or indis- cretion to which it might be readily assigned. Looking back upon it in af- ter life, he writes, "To my present feelings, it seems incredible that I should ever believe that I believed in transubstantiation." This boyish freak cost the convert his luxurious abode in Magdalen and trans- ferred him according to an arrangement made by his father to the care of Mr. Pavilliard, a Calvinist minister at Lausanne, in Switzerland, who was now charged with the continuance of his studies with the view of disengag- ing his mind from his new ecclesiasti- cal opinions. A better choice of a preceptor could hardly have been made than this calm, clear-headed, mode- rate, benevolent M. Pavilliard, a man of learning and information, who speedily acquired an influence over his pupil, and in no long time, " the various articles of the Romish creed disappearing like a dream," brought him into full communion with the Protestant Church of Lausanne. "It was here," writes the mature Gibbon, "that I suspended my religious in- quiries, acquiescing with implicit be- lief in the tenets and mysteries, which .are adopted by the general consent of Catholics and Protestants." But it was not only in his amended religious creed that Gibbon profited by the instructions of his new teacher. The whole current of his life was changed by this transfer to Switzer- land. In place of the luxurious quar- ters of the fellow commoner at Magda- len, he was now, with a tightened purse, submitting to the small econo- mies of a meagre residence in a dull street of an unhandsome town, with his studies to begin anew in the ele- ments of a foreign language. It was much to his credit that he accepted the new conditions with equanimity. Here, indeed, at Lausanne, his educa- tion as a source of power and strength may fairly be said to have begun. He not only became thoroughly acquaint- ed with French and accustomed to write and speak it, but he thought in it and incorporated its finer spirit with his mental processes. His Eng- lish prejudices disappeared under this foreign culture, and the sphere of his criticism on history and its methods were greatly enlarged. He made himself also a master of the Latin and acquired a knowledge of the Greek, which he afterwards perfected. Choos- ing some classic Latin or French au thor, he would translate from one tongue into the other, and when the phrases had passed from his memory, would re-translate his work into the EDWAED GIBBON. other language and compare the result with the original from which he had started. In this way he became ac- complished in two foreign tongues. An intimate knowledge of Cicero led the way to his acquaintance with the whole series of the Latin classics, of which he made abstracts in French. A close study of logic gave dexterity to his critical faculties, which were set in motion and sharpened by the delight with which he perused the Provincial Letters of Pascal, from which he learn- ed the art of which he so often availed himself in his " History," of " manag- ing the weapon of grave and temperate irony, even on subjects of ecclesiasti- ca solemnity." The confidence and ac- tivity of his mind were shown in his opening a correspondence on points of learned inquiry with various distin- guished professors of Europe, in which he sustained his part with credit. Al- together, the five years of his novitiate at Lausanne, were well spent, and when, at the end of this time, he was recalled by his father to England, the foundation of his future literary great- ness may be said to have been already laid. An episode of his career as a student at Lausanne should not- be forgotten. While there he fell in love with a learned and accomplished young lady, Mademoiselle Curchod, the daugh- ter of a Swiss rural pastor, and would, if his father had not forbidden the un- ion, have made her his wife. " I sigh- ed," says he, with a philosophical equi- librium which had now become his characteristic, "as a lover, I obeyed as a son; my wound was insensibly healed by time, absence and the hab- 'ts of a new life." The lady was after- wards married to a native of Geneva, a rich banker of Paris, M. Necker, who as the minister of finance of the dying French monarchy, acquired an historic fame. Nor are the pair less known as the parents of that remarka- ble phenomenon in female intellect, the celebrated Madame De Stael. On his return to England Gibbon was greeted with all the warmth of her former affection by the kind aunt to whom he owed so much ; w r hile his father, who had parted with him with an air of severity, was conciliated by the evident good effects of the pupilage to which he had consigned him at Lausanne. In his mother-in- law, whom he had not before seen, he found a lady of understanding and esprit who appreciated his various ac- complishments. Under these auspices he was free to pursue with every ad- vantage of fortune, his own tastes and inclinations. The first employment which was thought of for him was that of secretary to a foreign embassy, if such a place could be found; and it was partly to advance his pretensions to an appointment of the kind that he set about the completion of his first pub- lication, an "Essay on the Study of Literature," written in the French language, in which it was now easier for him to compose than in his own tongue. After a deal of preparation and revision it was issued in London in 1761, when its author was at the age of twenty-four. In the autobio graphy will be found a retrospective criticism of the work, the candor of which, in its administration of praise and censure, is not without a certain kind of humor. While condemning its EDWARD GIBBOK 81 confusion and occasional obscurity he looks back upon it with pride as the creditable production of a young writer of two-and-twenty, "who had read with taste, who thinks with free- dom, and who writes in a foreign lan- guage with spirit and elegance." The " Essay" also appeared in English, but the author speaks slightingly of the translation. The work, as might have been expected, was better received on the continent than in England. It at- tracted the attention of the savans of France, Holland and Switzerland, and paved the way for the writer's early admission into their ranks. While this work was in progress, Gibbon had been pursuing his studies with a diligence and zeal which had already become habitual to him and which not even the dissipations of a London season could effectually im- pair. On the receipt of the first quar- terly payment of a liberal allowance from his father, a large share of it was appropriated to his literary wants. " I cannot forget," says he, "the joy with which I exchanged a bank-note of twenty pounds for the twenty volumes of the Memoirs of the Academy of In- scriptions; nor would it have been easy, by any other expenditure of the same sum, to have procured so large and lasting a fund of rational amuse- ment." The choice indicates the scholar and the future historian. His reading of the classic authors and their com- mentators was continued, and by a judicious method he fully incorporated what he read with his own reflections. "After glancing my eye," he tells us, 1 over the design and order of a new book, I suspended the perusal till I 11 had finished the task of self-examina- tion, till I had revolved, in a solitary walk, all that I knew or believed, or had thought on the subject of the whole work, or of some particular chapter: I was then qualified to dis- cern how much the author added to my original stock and if I was some- times satisfied by the agreement, I was sometimes armed by the opposition of our ideas." His studies were however broken in upon by what to a person of his tastes was a novel sort of life. It was the period of the Seven Years' War, in which England participated, and the old chronic alarm of an invasion of the country had stirred up the enlist- ment of a local militia. The patriot- ism of the Gibbons was aroused in their residence in Hampshire, and in the battalion which was raised in the county the father was commissioned as major, and the son as captain. The work once undertaken, there was no easy or honorable mode of abandoning it, so that our embryo historian for two years and a-half was actively en gaged in furthering and superintend- ing the various encampments of his restless regiment through the southern counties from Winchester to South- ampton. During these movements, in which his time was much engrossed by the bustling importance of the camp, there was, of course, little time for systematic reading, though that was not wholly resigned, while, as he fondly narrates, " on every march, in every journey, Horace was always in my pocket and often in my hand." Meanwhile, as his diary shows, he was planning future historical undertak- 82 EDWAED GIBBON. ings, meditating first the expedition of Charles VIII. of France into Italy; then topics of English history, as the crusade of Bichard I., the Barons' wars against John and Henry III., the His- tory of Edward the Black Prince, and settling down for a time, after a glance at Sir Philip Sidney, upon a kindred subject of mixed biography and his- tory, the life of Sir Walter Kaleigh. After extensive reading regarding this hero, finding, among other difficulties, " his fame confined to the narrow lim- its of our language and our island," he looked abroad for a wider subject in the History of the Liberty of the Swiss and the Republic of Florence under the Medici. All these show his passion for history, to which he was turning even his military occupation to account. "The discipline and evo- lutions of a modern battalion," he writes, " gave me a clearer notion of the phalanx and the legion ; and the captain of the Hampshire grenadiers (the reader may smile) has not been useless to the historian of the Roman Empire." When the war was ended by the treaty of Paris, in 1763, the militia was disbanded and Gibbon was once more free to pursue his own inclina- tions. A month had hardly passed when he was again on the continent engaged in the round of foreign travel which was thought essential to com- plete the education of an English gen- tleman. Three or four months were passed in Paris in the study of its antiquities and literary resources, and "in friendly communication with its men of letters, when the journey was piirsued to Switzerland and his now beloved Lausanne, where he was wel- comed with enthusiasm by his tutor Pavilliard, and lingered eleven months before he advanced into Italy. His classical studies had prepared him for the full appreciation of the latter country. He followed up its antiqui- ties with his usual energy, was im- pressed by all its wonders with some- thing of a poetical imagination, and when he reached Rome, the literary dreams of his life were ready to be concentrated upon one enduring vision, the realization of which in a perma- nent work was to give employment to the best years of his life. " It was at Rome," says he, "on the 15th of Oc- tober, 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the bare- footed friars were singing vespers in the temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind. But my original plan was circumscribed to the decay of the city rather than of the empire; and though my reading and reflections began to point towards that object, some years elapsed and several avocations intervened, before I was seriously engaged in the execution of that laborious work." Returning to England in the sum- mer of 1765, he resumed for a time his engagements in the militia service with the rank of major and lieutenant colo- nel commandant ; and being joined by his friend M. Deyverdun, an accom- plished gentleman with whom he had become intimate in Switzerland, he en- gaged with him in 1767, in the publi- cation of a species of review or critical journal entitled, "Memoires Litteraires de la Grand Bretagne," which reached EDWARD GIBBON. a second volume the following year. To this miscellany Gibbon contributed among other papers a trenchant review of Lord Littelton's History of Henry II. The work, composed in French^ was not likely to meet with a large circulation; but it gained reputation for the writers and introduced them to the acquaintance of "David Hume, who was much admired as an historian by Gibbon, and who lived to enjoy with great unction the perusal of the first volume of his friend's Roman history. In his next publication, issued anony- mously in 1770, Gibbon entered the field in opposition to Warburton, in an , attack upon that prelate's hypothesis, in his " Divine Legation of Moses," of a revelation of the Eleusinian Mysteries by Virgil, in the sixth book of the JEneid. This Essay was our author's first publication in English. After this his studies were steadily directed to the work of preparation for his great work on the history of Rome. By the death of his father he came into pos- session of a moderate fortune, and was free to pursue his own plans in life. His time was divided between city and country. At the residence of his inti- mate friend and constant correspond- ent Mr. Holroyd, afterwards Lord Sheffield, in Sussex, he found a home where he was always appreciated. In town he mingled freely in the fashion- able society of the metropolis, and in the literary clubs formed the acquaintance of the eminent wits of the time, John- son, Burke, Garrick, Goldsmith and the rest. Gathering his books about him in his house in London, he set seriously to work at the composition of the " Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." Much of the learning re- quisite for his purpose he had already accumulated ; but a style was yet to be formed. "Many experiments," he tells us, "were made before I could hit the middle tone between a dull chronicle and a rhetorical declamation : three times did I compose the first chapter, and twice the second and third, before I was tolerably satisfied with their effect." "Style," Buffon says, "is the man," and that of Gibbon truly represents his character a com- posite union of his French and Eng- lish education, self-conscious, animat- ed and important. Language grew in his hands to be the most apt and forcible means for the adequate presentation of his subject, cover, ing the events of many centuries in the records of divers nations in every degree of culture from the most refined civilization to the rudest bar- barism, and producing a living picture of the whole, which moves and breathes in every page. There is indeed a cer- tain mannerism in the language ; but this is common to the style of great authors 'and marks its individuality. It is certainly not a model for imita- tion on ordinary subjects ; but in the privileged hands of Gibbon it is an instrument of great power, capable of conveying the finest meanings, distin- guished by its philosophical acumen, which has frequently the force of wit, and, above all, to be admired for its march to " the Dorian sound of flutes and, soft recorders," in the imposing progress of a grand historic narrative. Its condensation is wonderful. The most interesting details feed the curi osity of the reader while they are EDWAKD GIBBON. never suffered to fatigue his attention. The work in its thousands of pages glitters with perpetual novelty. Fact and philosophy are blended in happy union. It is one musical incantation from beginning to end. The industry of the author never flags ; his literary genius is never at fault. In our author's previous studies we have seen something of his half con- scious preparation for this work. As he approached his task more closely he applied himself with greater devo- tion to its special requirements. Geo- graphy, chronology, the study of medals and antiquities no less than the ordi- nary historic authorities were his con- stant care. His reading was iudefati- gible ; so that when he began to write, his mind being fully charged with the subject, the most costly materials were on every side at hand for the construc- tion of his edifice. Two things are particularly noticeable in his language : one, the constant presentation of the object in the foreground of his sen- tences ; the other, the choice of motives which he steadily presents to the reader in his balancing of opinions. While engaged in the composition of the early portions of the history, Gibbon by family influence was re- turned to parliament for a borough. He sat in the House of Commons for several years, supporting steadily by his vote through the progress of .the American question, the tory adminis- tration of Lord North, for whose per- sonal qualities he had the highest admiration. As usual, he was turning his experience to account for the great work of his life. " The eight sessions," Bays he, " that I sat in parliament were a school of civil prudence, the first and most essential virtue of an historian." A more immediately practical result was his appointment at the instance 01 Lord Loughborough as one of the Lords of Trade, which brought an addition to his income of between seven and eight hundred pounds per annum. This was continued for three years, when it was brought to an end by the fall of Lord North's administration, which closed Gibbon's parliamentary career. The reception of his history was, however, now making him amends for his losses. The first volume, pub- lished in 1776, was succeeded by the second and third in 1781, bringing the work to the fall of the Western Em- pire. Its success was immediate. " I am at a loss to describe it," writes Gibbon, " without betraying the vanity of the writer. The first impression (of the first volume) was exhausted in a few days ; a second and third edition were scarcely adequate to the demand ; and the bookseller's property was twice invaded by the pirates of Dub- lin. My book was on every table, and almost on every toilette ; the historian was crowned by the taste or fashion of the day ; nor was the general voice disturbed by the barking of any pro- fane critic." The word " profane " is marked by the author's italics and re- fers to the storm of censure with which the chapters on the Early Progress of Christianity were greeted by the critics of a more sacred order, at the head of whom may be ranked Bishop Watson, whose reply was entitled " An Apology for Christianity." While allowing Gibbon every latitude for his criticism of the historical conditions of his theme EDWARD GIBBON. exceptions may certainly be taken to the contemptuous spirit with which he often approached the subject ; his lack of sympathy with its higher elements, and his departure in this instance from the usual course of his philosophical fairness. Nor less is to be censured a certain pruriency in his treatment of the relations of the sexes, which occa- sionally mars his work. Setting aside these defects, his general accuracy has been admitted by the most learned in- vestigators of his theme, and in the library of every scholar his work will be found by the side of the great classic historians of the world. Gibbon remained in England till 1783, when he removed to Lausanne, his old retreat, with the intention of making the place his permanent re- sidence. The motives which led to this change were varied. Much was to be gained on the score of leisure and independence ; he would be free from the political and other distrac- tions of London, and at liberty to de- vote his best powers to the completion of his literary task ; while, on the score of economy, the income, which was hardly sufficient for the claims of so- ciety in England, more than met every liberal requisition in Switzerland. The companionship of his friend Mr. Dey- ^erdun, who had invited him to share his habitation in Lausanne, offered to him the comforts and resources of a home. Gibbon undertook to support the expenses of the house, which was situated in one of the finest parts of the town, overlooking the Lake of Geneva and the mountains beyond. Here he brought his books and added to their number ; a picked collection f of some six or seven thousand volumes, It was a full twelvemonth, however, as he informs us, before he " could re- sume the thread of regular and daily industry." Then, with all his re- sources at command, his work proceed- ed apace. The morning hours were regularly given to it, and he seldom allowed it to exceed the day, only at the last, when he was anxious for its completion, permitting it to trespass upon the evening. At the end of three years, the great labor was accom- plished. " I have presumed," says he in his Memoir, in allusion to a passage already cited, " to mark the moment of conception: I shall now commem- orate the hour of my final deliver- ance. It was on the day, or rather night, of the 27th of June, 1787, be tween the hours of eleven and twelve, that I wrote the last lines of the ]ast page in a summer-house in my garden. After laying down my pen, I took several turns in a lerceau or covered walk of acacias, which commands a prospect of the country, the lake and the mountains. The air was tempe- rate, the sky was serene, the silver orb of the moon was reflected from the waters, and all nature was silent. I will not dissemble the first emotions of joy on recovery of my freedom, and perhaps, the establishment of my fame. But my pride was soon humbled, and, a sober melancholy was spread over my mind, by the idea that I had taken an everlasting leave of an old and agreeable companion, and that whatso- ever might be the future date of my History, the life of the historian must be short and precarious." Thus was brought to a close this 86 EDWAKD GIBBON. noble work, embracing a period of thirteen centuries, and connecting the great eras of ancient and modern civili- zation. It begins with a review of the prosperity of the Eoman Empire in the acre of the Antonines, and ends O ' with a picture of the renewed glories of the imperial city in its present as- pect, when its " footsteps of heroes, the relics, not of superstition, but of empire, are devoutly visited by a new race of pilgrims from the remote and once savage countries of the north. Of these pilgrims," he says in conclu- sion in a retrospective glance at the entire work, " the attention will be excited by a history of the decline and fall of the Eoman Empire ; the great- est, perhaps, and most awful scene, iu the history of mankind. The various causes and progressive effects are con- nected with many of the events most interesting in human annals : the art- ful policy of the Caesars, who long maintained the name and image of a free republic ; the disorders of military despotism ; the rise, establishment and sects of Christianity; the foundation of Constantinople; the division of the monarchy ; the invasion and settle- ments of the barbarians of Germany and Scythia ; the institutions of the civil law ; the character and religion of Mahomet ; the temporal sovereignty of the Popes ; the restoration and de- cay of the AVestern Empire of Charle- magne ; the crusades of the Latins in the East ; the conquest of the Saracens and Turks ; the ruin of the Greek Empire ; the state and revolutions of Eome in the middle age." Having finished his work, Gibbon proceeded to England to superintend its issue from the press. The new por- tion, equal in extent to the old, formed three quarto volumes. It was given to the public on the fifty-first anniver- sary of the author's birthday, the fes- tival being celebrated by a literary dinner at the publisher's, Mr. Cadell's, at which a poem by Hayley was read, in which the historian was vaguely complimented by association with Newton and Shakespeare. A better tribute to his fame is the silent and enduring admiration of successive generations of readers and the zeal of able translators and editors like Guizot and Milman, in assisting their compre- hension of his work. Eeturning to Lausanne, Gibbon re- mained there till 1793, when he again visited his friend Lord Sheffield in England. He was now afflicted with a troublesome dropsical affection, which he had long neglected, and which he was at length compelled to submit to medical treatment. The surgeons gave him some relief, but were unable to cure the malady, under the effects of which he sunk rapidly at last, closing his days at his temporary lodgings in London on the 16th of January, 1794. njn: MARIE ANTOINETTE* MAKIE ANTOINETTE was born at Vienna, November 2d, 1753, the daughter of Francis of Lorraine, Emperor of Germany, and of Maria Theresa, Archduchess of Austria, Queen of Hungary and Bohemia, and Empress of Germany. Persons whose curiosity or credulity may incline them to regard what, after the event, are brought up as ominous coincidences, may be struck with the circumstance noticed by her biographers, that the birth of the ill-fated Queen of France occurred on the same day with that which is darkly marked in the calen- dar as that of the destruction of Lis- bon by the earthquake, an event which long excited a fearful interest in the European community. It was indeed a troubled world into which Marie Antoinette was born. After unprece- dented queenly efforts which have gained her a distinguished name among the royal heroines of the world, Maria Theresa, having vigorously defended her Austrian dominions and maintain- ed a resolute struggle with Frederic the Great, had seen her husband raised to the rank of Emperor, and the long European contest in wiich she had been engaged terminated by the treaty of Aix La Chapelle recognizing her succession and leaving her with the ex- ception of Silesia in enjoyment of her coveted territories. After a brief in- terval, the Seven Years' War, in which Austria was associated with France and Russia against Prussia, had fol- lowed, closing in 1763, and two years later, by the death of her husband Francis I., her son Joseph succeeding him as Emperor, she was left during the life-time of the latter free to repair the injuries of war by devoting herself to the peaceful welfare of her legiti- mate subjects, a task, with the bold work of reform which it required, hardly less hazardous as to its results than the contests of the battle-field. If Austria had gained nothing by the wars just concluded, France had lost much in the cession to England of Canada and her other North American colonies. To regain the lost prestige of France her minister for foreign af- fairs, the Duke de Choiseul, clung all the closer to his favorite policy, the alliance with Austria, and to advance the interests of the nation in this direc- tion, early projected a marriage be- tween Louis, the grandson of Louis XV., and heir to the French throne. 88 MAfliE ANTOINETTE. and Marie Antoinette, the daughter of Maria Theresa. When this affair was brought about by negotiation, Louis was a youth of fifteen, and his intend- ed bride a year younger, and the mar- riage had been contemplated for some time before, as we learn from a letter written by the Empress Queen to her young son-in-law just before the nup- tials, in which she says, " I have brought her up with this design ; for I have long foreseen that she would share your destiny." What that education had been we may gather from the revelations in the Memoirs of the Queen by her intimate friend Madame Carnpan. According to her account it had been much neg- lected. She tells of the pretences put forth in the Austrian court of the princesses answering addresses in Latin, when in reality they did not understand a single word of the lan- guage, and of a drawing being shown as the work of Marie Antoinette to the French Ambassador sent to draw up the articles for her marriage con- tract, when she had not put a pencil to it. She had acquired in her youth, however no mean attainment a good knowledge of Italian, having been taught by no less a person than the Abbe Metastasio, many of whose great works were produced during his prolonged residence at Vienna. Of music, that necessaiy accomplishment of a court, she appears before her arrival in France to have learnt little. French, she spoke fluently without writing it correctly, though some ex- traordinary means had been taken to secure this branch of her education. Her mother, the Empress Queen, had provided for her two French actors as teachers, one for pronunciation, the other for taste in singing ; but as ob- jection was made in France to the lat ter on account of his bad character, an ecclesiastic, the Abbe de Vermond, was chosen, whose influence over his pupil is described as unfavorable in subsequently leading her to treat with contempt the requirements of the French court. The preliminary arrangements of betrothal, involving a great deal of state ceremony having been duly gone through with, the time came to con- duct the archduchess to Paris to accom- plish the marriage. The journey took place early in May, 1770. Leaving Vi- enna in an imposing procession, with loud expressions of regret on the part of the populace, she was received on the frontier of France near Kehl, in a splendid pavilion erected for the occa sion, on a small island in the Rhine. The building consisted of a large saloon with two inner rooms, one of which was assigned to the princess and her companions from Vienna, the other to the titled personages who were to compose her court attendants in Paris, the Countess de Noailles, her lady of honor ; the Duchess de Cosse, her tire woman ; four ladies of the bed- chamber; a gentleman usher, and among others, the Bishop of Chartres, her chief almoner. Here a peculiar cere- mony was observed. The princess, ac- cording to prescribed etiquette was dis- robed of all that she had worn on the journey, that on entering the new kingdom she might retain nothing be- longing to a foreign court. When par- tially undressed she came forward and MAEIE ANTOINETTE. 89 threw herself into the arnu of the Countess de Noailles, soliciting ;n the most affectionate manner her guidance and support. She was then invested in the brilliant paraphernalia becom- ing her position at the French court. Among the witnesses of these festivi- ties on the Rhine was one observer, whose record of the scene, from the part he was afterwards to play in the world, is one of the memorable inci- dents of history. This was the poet Groethe, then a youth of twenty who had recently come to pursue his uni- versity studies at Strasburg. Sensi- tive then as ever to the claims and as- sociations of art, he tells us how he was shocked to see in the costly deco- rations of the pavilion, the cartoons of Raphael, worked in tapestry, thrust into the side chambers while the main saloon was hung with tapestries worked after pictures of modern French artists. Nor was this all. The subjects of the latter struck him as sin- gularly incongruous. " These pictures were the history of Jason, Medea and Creusa consequently a story of a most wretched marritge. To the left of the throne was seen the bride struggling against a horrible death, surrounded by persons full of sympa- thetic grief; to the right stood the father, horror-struck at the murdered babes at his feet ; whilst the fury in her dragon car, drove through the air. ' What ! ' I exclaimed, regardless of bystanders ; ' can they so thoughtlessly place before the eyes of a young queen, on her first setting foot in her domin- ions, the representation of the most horrible marriage perhaps that ever was consummated ! Is there among the 12 architects and decorators no one man who understands that pictures repre- sent something that they work upon the mind and feelings that they pro- duce impressions and excite forebod- ings? It is as if they had sent a ghastly spectre to meet this lovely, and as we hear most joyous, lady at the very frontiers ! ' "* At that time there was in the gayety of the scene and the French court little encouragment for foreboding, and if any attention was paid to the remonstrances of Goethe, it was probably only to smile at the eagerness of the youthful dilettante art student. He was a thinker, how- ever, accustomed to penetrate beneath the surface and not be imposed upon by the shows of things. He yielded willingly everything of admiration which could be demanded for the in- teresting sight of the young princess whose " beauteous and lofty mien, as charming as it was dignified," he after wards recalled, but he could not fail to brand in his satiric verse the artifice by which a show of prosperity was kept up in the removing far from sight of the gay company, the halt, the lame and the blind, who might have thronged the way. In some lines writ- ten in French he contrasted the advent of our Saviour, who came relieving the sick and deformed, with that of the princess at which the unfortunate sufferers were made to disappear. Journeying towards the capital the princess was met at Compiegne by the reigning monarch with his grandsonj the dauphin to whom she was betroth- ed, and by whom she was conducted to Versailles, where the marriage took * Life of Goethe, by Lewes, Am. Ed., Vol. L, p. 97. MARIE ANTOINETTE. place on the 16th of May, amidst the :nost imposing festivities. An ill- Dmened accident however marred the rejoicings in Paris. A brilliant display of fireworks was to be exhibited on the Place Louis Quinze, in the centre of the city, and a huge scaffold had been erected for the purpose. On the night of the expected display the vast crowd of the great city were thronged round the spot to witness the brilliant show, when suddenly the platform was liscovered to be on fire, and the flames spread with rapidity, setting off the fireworks in all directions, scattering death and terror through the masses. The injury directly inflicted by the fly- ing bolts was terrific, and the masses were trampled down in vain efforts to escape. More than fifty were kill ed, and over three hundred severely wounded in this disaster. The newly married dauphiness was at this moment ap- proaching the scene to share in the en- joyments of the people. She showed her feeling for the calamity by joining with her husband in sending their whole income for the year to the fami- lies of the sufferers. Moved to tears by the disaster, one of the ladies her attendants, to relieve her thoughts by substituting another emotion than that of pity, remarked that among the dead there had been found a number of thieves with their pockets filled with watches and other valuables which they had stolen in the crowd, adding that they had been well punished. " Ah, no ! " was the reply of the dau- phiness, " they died by the side of honest people." The impression made upon the court and people by the dauphiness was highly favorable. She carried herself, even at this early period, with an ail of grace and nobility. Louis XV., who had miserably spent his life in devotion to beauty was enchanted with her. "All his conversation," we are told by Madame Campan, " was about her graces, her vivacity, and the apt- ness of her repartees. She was yet more successful with the royal family when they beheld her shorn of the splendor of the diamonds with which she had been adorned during the ear- liest days of her marriage. When clothed in a light dress of gauze or taffety, she was compared to the Ve- nus de Medici and the Atalanta of the Marly gardens. Poets sang her charms, painters attempted to copy her features. An ingenious idea of one of the latter was rewarded by Louis XV. The pain- ter's fancy had led him to place the portrait of Marie Antoinette in the heart of a full-blown rose. This ad- miration naturally excited the jealousy of the profligate court favorite, Madame du Barry, whose political influence with the king was still powerful. She was opposed to the minister, the Duke of Choiseul, and with his fall a few months after the wedding of the dauphiness, the latter lost a much needed friendly supporter and guide ' to her inexperi- ence. Her chief adviser was now the Abb6 de Vermond, who, having been her tutor before marriage, became her private secretary and confidant after. "Intoxicated," writes Madame Cam- pan, " with the reception he had met with at the Court of Vienna., and hav ing till then seen nothing of grandeur the Abbe de Vermond admired and valued no other iustoms than those oi MAEIE ANTOINETTE. 91 the imperial family; lie ridiculed the etiquette of the house of Bourbon in- cessantly; the young dauphiness was constantly invited by his sarcasms to get rid of it, and it was he who first induced her to suppress an infinity of practices of which he could discern neither the prudence nor the political aim." The court was ruled by eti- quette, and that of the most tedious and oppressive character. Nothing was to be done except in a prescribed way with the most rigid formalities. The dauphiness, gay and impulsive, and natural in her actions, was per- petually rebuked by the chief lady of her attendants, or rather the leading person appointed to guard her move- ments, the virtuous and ever punctili- ous Countess de Noailles, a duenna worthy of the old court of Spain, where these personal restrictions were carried to their utmost possible excess. The lively dauphiness gave this lady the title of Madame 1} Etiquette, and whenever opportunity presented, sought relief from her oppressive cere- monial. Her life was really an im- prisonment governed by oppressive court usages, which all, in a certain way, the king and his mistresses in- cluded, submitted to, while they were avowedly violating every law of pro- priety and morality on which the cus- toms were founded. It is pleasing to read, as we often may, in the accounts of the early life of Marie Antoinette, how her generous nature at times found vent for itself in extraordinary acts of kindness and charity. Once, when she was hunting in the forest of Fontaine- bleau, an old peasant was wounded by the stag On the instant, jumping from her open carriage, she placed the injured man in it with his wife and children and had the family taken back to their cot- tage. Some little time after she was found in her room with this old man, in the humblest manner staunching the blood which issued from a wound in his hand with her handkerchief, which she had torn up for the purpose. He had received some hurt in moving a heavy piece of furniture at her request. ' On another later occasion, a little country boy, four or five years old, of a pleas- ing appearance, with large blue eyes and fine light hair, narrowly escaped being tramped upon by getting under the feet of her horses, as she was driven out for an airing. The child was saved, and its grandmother came out of her cottage by the roadside to receive it; when the queen for the incident occurred after she had come to the throne stood up in the carriage and claimed the boy as her own, put in her way by Providence. Finding his mother was not alive, she under- took to provide for him herself, and bore him home on her knees, the boy violently kicking and screaming the whole time. A few days afterwards he was to be seen in the palace, his woollen cap and wooden shoes ex- changed for the court finery of a frock trimmed with lace, a rose-colored sash with silver fringe, and a hat decorated with feathers. He was looked aftei till he grew up and displayed some character, joining the republican army to obviate any prejudice which might exist against him as the queen's favor ite, and meeting his death at the bat- tle of Jemappes. Acts like these show the impulses of 92 MARIE ANTOINETTE. the woman. Though in her early years, while she was simply the dauphiness, she had for companions the two brothers of her husband with their princesses, they were compelled to maintain the utmost secrecy in so simple a matter is engaging in the amusements of a theatrical entertainment among them- selves, in which they acted the chief parts, the dauphin being the only spec- tator. The performance had at least one good effect, if, as is stated, it awak- ened the dauphin to a proper appre- ciation of the charming qualities of his bride, to which he appeared for some time after their marriage to have been insensible. Now came the event which was to mark an era in the breaking up of the old system. Louis XV., in his long reign of fifty years, commencing with the honorable administration of Fleury, had as he advanced plunged the nation deeper and deeper in financial embar- rassments, while in his surrender to his discreditable court favorites and mis- tresses, the Marchioness de Pompadour and Madame du Barry, and other intrigues of the vilest character, he had set the nation the example of the grossest licentiousness. The vices, hand- ed down in a long succession of royal immoralities, tolerated in history by a certain outward brilliancy, had culmi- nated in the utter degradation of the court. The country was on the verge of bankruptcy, the oppression of the privileged classes had reached its height; the whole system of govern- ment was rotten ; and if the nation was to be preserved, it could only be by the casting off of the old, and the infu- sion of new life into every department of the administration. At this crisis ; at the age of twenty, Louis XVI., a pedantic youth, with little capacity of insight to supply the lack of experi ence, came to the throne. His op- portunity consisted solely in his free- dom from the vices of his grandfather. For an old worn-out debauchee the nation was to receive as its head an uncorrupted well-meaning youth ; who also brought to the throne in exchange for the evil influences of an unprinci- pled courtesan, who had been elevated from the dregs of society, the hopes and prestige of the daughter of a noble house in a queen, whose beauty and brilliant bearing might well have warm- ed the heart of the most gallant country in Europe. In other times they might have passed through this exalted life with credit to themselves and glory to the nation. In the age in which their lot was cast, two things were wanting to them, a thorough comprehension of the needs of the period, with ability to direct its issues. Failing in these, their course was uncertain, shifting, insin- cere, and though not without a pro- found pathetic interest, inevitably leading to the most ignominious disas- ter. " Beautiful Highborn," chants the prose lyrist of our modern histori- cal literature, Thomas Carlyle, when writing of Marie Antoinette, " that wert so foully hurled low. Thy fault in the French Revolution, was that thou Avert the symbol of the sin and misery of a thousand years ; that with Saint Bartholomews and Jacqueries, with Gabelles and Dragonades and Parcs-aux-cerfs, the heart of mankind was filled full, and foamed over into all-involving madness. To no Napo- MARIE ANTOINETTE. 93 leon, to no Cromwell wert thou wed- ded : such sit not in the highest rank of themselves ; are raised on high by the shaking and confounding of all ranks ! As poor peasants, how happy, worthy had ye two been ! But by evil desti- ny ye were made a King and Queen of; and so are become an astonish- ment and a by-word to all times." The same vivid pen has pictured in words of fire the horrors of the death- bed of the departing king, and the greedy haste of the courtiers in usher- ing in his successor. " Yes, poor Louis, Death has found thee. No palace walls or life-guards, gorgeous tapestries or gilt buckram of stiffest ceremonial could keep him out ; but he is here, here at thy very life-breath, and will extin- guish it. Thou, whose whole existence hitherto was a chimera and scenic show, at length becomest a reality; sumptuous Versailles bursts asunder, like a dream, into void immensity; time is done and all the scaffolding of time falls wrecked with hideous clan- gor round thy soul : the pale kingdoms yawn open; there must thou enter, naked, all unking'd, and await what is appointed thee ! Unhappy man, there as thou turnest, in dull agony, on this bed of weariness, what a thought is thine ! Purgatory and Hell-fire, now all too possible, in the prospect ; in the retrospect, alas, what thing dids't thou do that were not better undone ; what mortal didst thou generously help ; what sorrow hadst thou mercy on ? Do the ' five hundred thousand' ghosts, who sank shamefully on so many battle-fields, from Rossbach to Quebec, that thy Harlot might take revenge for an epigram, crowd round thee in this hour? Thy foul Harem; the curses of mothers, the tears and infamy of daughters ? Miser able man ! thou ' hast done evil as thou couldst : ' thy whole existence seems one hideous abortion and mis- take of nature, the use and meaning of thee not yet known. Wert thou a fabulous Griffin devouring the works of men ; daily dragging virgins to thy cave ; clad also in scales that no spear would pierce ; no spear but Death's ? A griffin not fabulous but real ! Frightful, O Louis, seem these moments for thee. * * * It is now the 10th of May, 1774. He will soon have done now. This tenth May-day falls into the loathsome sick-bed ; but dull, un- noticed there : for they that look out of the windows are quite darkened ; the cistern-wheel moves discordant on its axis ; Life, like a spent steed, is panting towards the goal. In their remote apartments Dauphin and Dau- phiness stand road-ready ; all grooms and equerries booted and spurred: waiting for some signal to escape the house of pestilence. And hark ! across the (Eil-de-Beuf, what sound is that ; sound ' terribly, and absolutely like thunder ? ' It is the rush of the whole court, rushing as in wager, to salute the new Sovereigns. Hail to your Majesties ! The Dauphin and Dau- phiness are King and Queen ! Over- powered with many emotions, they two fall on their knees together, and, with streaming tears, exclaim : ' O God, guide us, protect us, we are too young to reign.' " * So Marie Antoinette became the Queen of France. The new reign was * The French Revolution, Book I., Ch. iv. 94 MAKIE ANTOINETTE. hailed with acclamations by the people. The king was at least free from the gross vices of his predecessor, and the miserable influence of such creatures as Du Barry was at an end. The government, however, could not as easily throw off the encumbrance of the vast debt which the preceding pro- fligacy and corruption had heaped upon it. Monopoly and restriction every- where prevailed; the demands upon the people in one form or another of taxation were every day becoming greater, while the means of paying them were less. Every department of the administration was encumbered with privileged abuses. With all his insensibility, the new sovereign could not fail to perceive these evils, and in the appointment of the experienced and philosophic Turgot, an economist in advance of the times, to the high office of comptroller general of finance, he gave a pledge to the people that their interests would not be disregard- ed. The difficulties and embarrass- ments, ending in his overthrow, which the minister experienced in carrying out his work of reform, which con- sisted simply in abolishing odious re- strictions fettering the industry of the country, and reducing the expenditure, to avoid bankruptcy, disclosed the evils under which the nation was suf- fering from the oppression of the privileged classes, and the^ittle hope there was of effecting any improve- ment with their concurrence. They were unwilling to yield anything. The court also was embarrassed by its old traditions and cumbrous machinery of ceremonial, which, outliving its j became an encouragement of the very evils it was originally contrived to prevent. If its various social con- trivances had one object to secure more than another, it was the protection of the character of those within their sphere ; but the whole system had now degenerated according to its necessary tendencies into a vexatious, burden- some formalism, inviting suspicion, detraction and slander. In the open life of most court circles of the present day the character of Marie Antoinette would be understood and appreciated, her vivacity or folly would be taken at their proper value, and her harmless freedoms, though they might subject her to the charge of levity and thoughtlessness unbecoming the re- sponsibility of her station, could not, however misrepresented, long be mis- taken for vice and criminality. It is singular, showing the hold the court traditions had upon the mind of the French people, that, while they were sighing for freedom and entertaining the wildest dreams of natural liberty, they were holding the queen to the strictest requirements of an artificial court, and condemning her for the most innocent actions. On one occasion, early in her reign, she expressed a de- sire to see the sun rise, a phenomenon which she had never before witnessed, and a party was arranged for the purpose, in which she took the precau- tion to include the ladies attending on her person to accompany her, at three o'clock in the morning to the heights of the gardens of Marly a simple enough proceeding, which was travestied in a wicked and licentious ballad, attri- buting to her the worst motives. This was circulated by her enemies MARIE ANTOINETTE. 95 wiio never lost an opportunity of ca- lumniating her. Instances of this kind might be multiplied from her Memoirs. The motive of such hostilities appears to have been supplied in the jealousies of various ladies about the court whom she had taken little pains to conciliate, in the general dislike to the Austrian alliance, and, when the question of political liberty was fully before the people, her natural dfnd irrepressible leaning to the cause of the aristocracy and monarchy. It is curious to note the etiquette which was practised at the French court in the days immediately preced- ing the Revolution. One of the cus- toms which Marie Antoinette abolish- ed in coming to the throne was that of dining every day in public, when, ac- cording to ancient usage, the queen was waited upon only by persons of her own sex, titled ladies, who pre- sented the plates kneeling a spectacle highly attractive to country people, who had thronged to see the dau- phiness undergoing this ceremony. There were others of a more private nature which she could not so well escape. Madam Campan gives an amusing account of the absurd pro- ceedings attending the queen's toilette. "It was a master-piece of etiquette; every thing done on the occasion was in a prescribed form. Both the lady of honor and the tire- woman usually at- tended and officiated, assisted by the first femme de chambre and two in- ferior attendants. The tire- woman put on the petticoat, and handed the gown to the queen. The lady of honor poured out the water for her hands, and put on her body linen. When a princess of the royal family happened to be present while the queen was dressing, the lady of honor yielded tc her the latter act of office, but still did not yield it directly to the princess of the blood ; in such a case, the lady of honor was accustomed to present the linen to the chief lady in waiting, who, in her turn, handed it to the princess of the blood. Each of these ladies observed these rules scrupulously, as affecting her rights. One winter's day it happened that the queen, who was entirely undressed, was just going to put on her body linen ; I held it ready unfolded for her ; the lady of honor came in, slipped off her gloves, and took it. A rustling was heard at the door ; it was opened : and in came the Duchess d'Orleans ; she took her gloves off, and came forward to take the gar- ment ; but as it would have been wrong in the lady of honor to hand it to her, she gave it to me, and I handed it to the princess : a further noise it was the Countess de Provence ; the Duchess d'Orleans handed her the linen. All this while the queen kept her arms crossed upon her bosom, and appeared to feel cold : Madame observed her uncom- fortable situation, and merely laying down her handkerchief, without taking off her gloves, she put on the linen, and in doing so knocked the queen's cap off. The queen laughed to conceal hei impatience, but not until she had mut- tered several times : ' How disagree- able ! how tiresome ! ' It is not surprising that the queen uttered this exclamation, for the pecu- liar incident just related was but one of a series of similar annoyances, which in one relation or another might hap 96 MARIE ANTOINETTE. pen any hour of the day. From morn ing till night, before she arose and after she was installed in her royal bed, eti- quette was continually at her elbow. The manoeuvres of the toilet were more circumstantial than the rites of an an- cient Roman sacrifice, and quite as sa- cred and obligatory. This matter of dress was an affair of the highest mo- ment, a sort of public transaction taking place at high noon, a state performance to be witnessed in due order and se- quence by princes of the blood, cap- tains of the guards and other great officers. The king's brothers, the Count de Provence and the Count d' Artois, we read, came very generally to pay their respects while the queen's hair was dressing, and if these princes had any sense of humor, it must have been something amazing to them to witness the erection on the human head of that proud edifice, puffed up by hidden contrivances and decorated by such su- perb millinery and flower and feather- work beyond the art of any painted savage. The queen, it must be ac- knowledged, took kindly to this species of manufacture. Early in her reign, by the kind intervention of the Duchess de Chartres, contrary to all precedent, a famous milliner from the outer world of the great city, Mademoiselle Bertin, was introduced into the royal house- hold, with whom the queen planned an infinity of new dresses, a new fashion eyery day, to the equal delight and distraction of the fashionable society of Paris. " Every one," we are told, " wished to have the same dress as the queen, and to wear the feathers and flowers to which her beauty, then in its brilliancy, lent an indescribable charm. The expenditure of youiis women was necessarily much increased ; mothers and 1 usbands murmured at it ; some giddy women contracted debts, unpleasant domestic scenes occurred; in many families quarrels arose; in others, affection was extinguished ; and the general report was, that the queen would be the ruin of all the French ladies." Connected with this extravagance of dress there arose a great scandal, much to the detriment of the queen, though, in reality, she was not at all responsible for it. This was the com plicated affair, famous in law and his- tory, of The Diamond Necklace, a curi- ous embroglio of roguery, implicating various notable personages, and for a time apparently the queen, while she suffered not for any act of her own but for being involved in an evil system of things which rendered so stupen- dous a fraud a possible achievement. The story at every turn of its many involutions, throws a wondrous light upon the state of society in France at the period. We can but indicate its general outline, referring the reader for the entire plot to the energetic dra- matic dithyrambic narrative of Car- lyle. The main agent in the plot, though not the prime mover, was that strange personage, of the dying mon- archy, Prince Louis de Rohan, a profli- gate nobleman who had by family in- fluence and intrigue gathered to him- self a great many extraordinary honors and distinctions with splendid emolu- ments,Archbishop of Strasbourg, Grand Almoner of France, Commander of the Holy Ghost, Cardinal, Commendatorot St. Wast d' Arras, " one of the fattest MARIE ANTOINETTE. 97 benefices," says Carlyle, " here below." In the early part of his career he had been remarkable for his dissipation; as he advanced in life, he played the courtier and became ambitious. At the age of thirty-six he had the honor on behalf of the nation of receiving Marie Antoinette on her first arrival in France, and subsequently, while she remained the dauphiness, was sent am- bassador to Vienna, where he main- tained an amazing style of pomp and display, till his extravagance brought him deeply in debt. He was no favor- ite with the empress queen, who de- spised his profligacy, so unbecoming his sacred character, and would have had him recalled. He moreover of- fended the dauphiness by a witticism in one of his dispatches reflecting on her mother in relation to one of the least defensible acts of her reign, de- scribing Maria Theresa standing with the handkerchief in one hand weeping for the woes of Poland, and with the sword in the other ready to divide the land and take her share. This was sent to the last minister of Louis XV., D' Aiguillon, who communicated it to the king and he to Du Barry, when it became the jest of the day among the courtiers. Marie Antoinette, it is said, never forgave this. She may very well, too, have had a natural dislike to the perpetrator of the sarcasm. However this may be, when she became queen, De Rohan, greatly to his chagrin, was refused admittance at court. To be compelled to remain outside of that charmed circle was a perpetual torment to a man of his tastes and dispositions. His rapid preferments and rise to the dignity of Lord Cardinal would seem 13 to have made him little amends for the exclusion. We are now to be introduced to an other personage, more remarkable in her way than the cardinal in his, a bold adventuress, one of the boldest who ever displayed the arts and capa- city of unsexed womanhood. This was the Countess Lamotte, as she was call- ed, with royal blood in her veins, in an illegitimate way, a descendant of one of the numerous mistresses of Henry II. of France. Her ancestor, Saint Remi, had been enriched and the family had kept up its state for several genera- tions till it had fallen into utter worth- lessness and bankruptcy, and its latest representative, Jeanne, a little girl, is one day picked up, a beggar on the highway, by the Countess Boulainvil- liers, and under her patronage becomes, to quote the nomenclature of Carlyle, " a nondescript of mantua-maker, sou- brette, court beggar, fine lady, abigail, and scion-of-royalty," a person, in fine, with natural and acquired tastes, pas- sions and propensities, needing of all things money for their support. As a compliment to her royal ancestry, the court, grown economical or indifferent, after so many generations, grants her a poor thirty pounds a-year. Looking round for ways and means, her first thought is to visit the place of the alienated possessions of her family, in hopes to discover possible flaws in the title, which comes to nothing. All that she gains there is a husband, a private in the army, and thus she becomes Madame Lamotte, or, as she styles her- self, dignifying her plebeian help-mate, the Countess Lamotte. A few years pass. Lamotte is no longer a soldier, MARIE ANTOINETTE. his wife's patroness, the Countess, is dead, and with her pension about dou- bled, all insufficient for her wants, Ma- dame, or the Countess Lamotte is living in humble quarters on the edge of the sourt in the town of Versailles. Still, with an eye to her family deserts or pretensions, she one day goes to his eminence, the Cardinal Rohan, a proper person as she thinks, in his capacity of* Grand Almoner to gain her some more adequate allowance from the royal treasury. The cardinal, affected doubt- less by her piquant address, for, with- out being beautiful, she had a coun- tenance which her intellect or artful manners could make attractive, was moved to reply, not by an advance of money, of which, with all his revenues, he appears never to have had any sur- plus, but with the advice to appeal to the queen. In recommending this re- source, he expressed his great disap- pointment that he had not access to her presence to assist in the application. Lamotte, whose natural keenness ad- versity had sharpened, saw thoroughly into the character of the cardinal, and gigantic as the game was, quite unap- proachable to a meaner intellect, resolv- ed in the consciousness of her strength to make him her dupe. Her knowledge of the court and her means of access to several of its inferior servants, with the occurrence at this time of an extra- ordinary opportunity, were the means, to her, all things considered, of one of the boldest and most successful at- tempts ever made on human credulity. The opportunity was the chance in gome dexterous way of getting posses- sion of a necklace of diamonds, quite capable of being converted into the handsome sum of about four hundred thousand dollars in gold, for such a thing is not to be profared by estima- ting it in a paper currency. Allowing for the difference of values, it might probably be estimated in this year, 1872, at about half a million. The preparation of this magnificent work had been the one idea, to surpass all Bothers of his princely constructions of this sort, of the court jeweler, M. Boch- mer. He had held that position in the days of Louis XV., and the necklace was his chef d 'euvre, not too expensive for the enormous waste of that era, or for the revenues lavished upon the court mistress Du Barry, for whose or- namentation it had been intended. As pictured in an ordinary representation before us in common printers' ink from a wood-cut, it quite glorifies the page with its sparkling drops of light. It must have been indeed a brilliant ob- ject to look upon. Here is Carlyle's description of it from the engraving. "A row of seventeen glorious dia- monds, as large almost as filberts, en- circle, not too tightly, the neck, a first time. Looser, gracefully fastened thrice to these, a three-wreathed festoon, and pendants enough (simple pear-shaped, multiple star-shaped, or clustering am- orphous) encircle it, enwreath it, a sec- ond time. Loosest of all, softly flowing round from behind, in priceless cate- nary, rush down two broad threefold rows ; seem to knot themselves round a very queen of diamonds on the bo som ; then rush on, again separated, a& if there were length in plenty ; the very tassels of them were a fortune for some men. And now lastly, two other in expressible threefold rows, also with MAEIE ANTOINETTE. 99 their tassels, will, when the necklace is on and clasped, unite themselves be- hind into a doubly inexpressible six- fold row ; and so stream down, together or asunder, over the hind-neck, we may fancy, like lambent Zodiacal or Aurora-Borealis fire." A work like this, in tradesman's phrase, was locking up a great deal of money, and its owner, a tradesman, must needs be anxious for its sale. It was naturally offered at the new court something worthy the attire of the youthful brilliant Austrian queen, but though there were vanity and expense enough left, retrenchment was the order of the day, and, in comparison with previous reigns, royalty was poor and parsimonious. Earlier ministers of finance might have managed it, but the budgets of Turgot and Necker had no place for such an item, and the people were on the track of these ex- travagances with a fearful vengeance in store. To the credit of Marie An- toinette, she gave no countenance to its acceptance, remarking, on the pro- iect being brought before her, that "we have more need of seventy-fours than of necklaces." She advised its being broken up ; but this was to sac- rifice the idea of its constructor. He was not yet ready to abandon the greatest achievement of his career. He would not, or could not, solve the pro- blem for himself. There was one, how- ever, at hand ready enough to do it the Countess Lamotte, both able and willing. A necessary preliminary, the cardinal, was already in her toils. Re- turning to De Rohan a few days after the interview in which he had advised her to have recourse to the queen, she informs him that she had obtained ad- mittance to her, been favorably re- ceived, and taken the opportunity to speak of the grief of the cardinal in his exclusion from the royal favor, and obtain permission to present his vindi- cation. The cardinal accordingly made her the medium of his apology, and received in return a note, appa rently in the queen's writing, expres- sing her satisfaction at learning that he was innocent, and promising at some indefinite future time the audience he solicited, in the mean time enjoining him to be discreet. The bait was swallowed, and hence- forth the cardinal, who of all men on earth should have had the best eye for trickery, was but a puppet in the hands of this intriguing woman. The correspondence was continued ad libi- tum, the artful messenger, from her ready resources, having a supply of sufficiently specious answers ready on demand. Presently, in judicious se- quence, the money card is played and wins. The queen commissions the Grand Almoner to borrow for her sixty thousand francs for a charitable object, and the sum is paid, as requested, into the hands of Lamotte. A second ap- plication for a like sum succeeds equally well payments for the time being made in royal letters of thanks. The Lamottes, thus handsomely pro- vided with the means, set up an es- tablishment at Versailles, and, that the cardinal might not observe it, and thus have his suspicions aroused, he is saga- ciously advised by a letter from the queen to visit his diocese in Alsace, which he does. Successful negotiations like these 100 MAKIE ANTOINETTE. encouraged a move to get possession of the necklace, a fascinating object sufficient to call forth the best powers of the most consummate roguery. Her show of living at Versailles being attributed to favors received from the queen, Lamotte, through an emissary, began to approach the jeweler Boch- mer on the subject of the diamonds, and gets him to think she might assist in the negotiation at court. Presently she announces to him that an eminent personage has been commissioned to purchase on behalf of the crown. The cardinal is sent for, and on his arrival in Paris is told that the queen wishes him, as a special mark of her favor, to buy the necklace for her without the knowledge of her husband, and that she will pay for it out of her income. He receives an authorization from her, pledges himself for the whole amount, promises quarterly payments, and the jewelers seeing the queen's authority, and understanding that he is acting confidentially for her, place the neck- lace in his hands. Arrangements are now made for the delivery of the jewel. This Lamotte contrives shall take place at her house at Versailles, to be there given by her to a messenger of the queen, the cardinal being present to witness the transaction. He arrives at dusk with a valet bearing the casket containing the necklace; it is placed in her hands, and the confidential valet of the queen arriving, receives it and bears it away the cardinal looking through the glazed window of an al- cove in the apartment, satisfying him- self of the identity of the receiver. It is high time for some recognition from the queen. This is prettily prepared by Lamotte in evasive approaches tc an interview. On a previous occasion the cardinal had accompanied her in a midnight visit to the gardens of \ r er sailles there being much talk and idle scandal of the queen's summer walks and musical parties there at that hour, and as he appeared to be near j the royal person in the obscurity, she hurries away seemingly frightened at the approach of some members of the court, dropping, however a rose for his eminence, with the cheering words: " You know what that means." This, though evasive as the pursuit of the unapproachable in dreams, feeds his hopes for the time. When the neck- lace has been delivered, Lamotte in- vites the cardinal to take his place among the courtiers in the gallery of the CEil-de-Boeuf, where she has ob served the queen has a customary motion of the head as she passes through the throng on her way to the chapel. This of course is to be inter preted as a special mark of regard for the cardinal. He perceives it, and accepts it as such. Another royal mandate again sends him out of the way to Alsace, while Lamotte de- spatches the necklace to her husband in London, where it is broken up and sold for the benefit of the conspirators. The day of payment now arrives, and the jeweler looks to the cardinal ; out of the proceeds of the jewels Lamotte produces a sum of money as interest, and the principal is not forthcoming Meanwhile the jewelers have made their acknowledgments for the trans- action at court, where nothing of course is known about it, and the whole bur- den is thrown upon the cardinal. At MAEIE ANTOINETTE. 101 length, in August, 1785, a year and a half after the beginning of those trans- actions with Lamotte so long had he been the victim of pretences and for- geries the cardinal is summoned to the presence of the king and queen, and confronted by the depositions of the jewelers and the financier from whom he had borrowed money for the queen. He pleads the royal authority for his act, and the writing on which he relies is pronounced a forgery. He is arrested and sent to the Bastille, whither shortly the Countess Lamotte is sent after him. Not long after, Vil- lette, who personated the queen's valet, and Mademoiselle Leguet, who repre- sented the queen herself in the gardens of Versailles, the deceivers of the car- dinal, are also arrested. The plot now becomes clearer, and, when the whole case is before the court, the prince car- dinal is acquitted of fraud, though sent into exile by the king for his mischievous absurdities, while Lamotte expiates her wickedness with flogging, branding on both shoulders, and a sentence of imprisonment for life, which is not fully executed, for after a while she escapes to England, and one day, from some unseemly cause, is found precipitated from a high win- dow to the street pavement, which ends her remarkable career. Anecdotes might be multiplied of the gay life of the court during the first ten or fifteen years of the new reign, of the festive entertainments at Versailles, of the queen's innocent pastoral amusements in her little re- treat of the Petit Trianon, where she sought to realize that rustic simplicity which had been the dream of the poets of the age a court simplicity, howev- er, with music from the opera, in the background, laces and ribbons un known to the genuine Arcadia, and the graces and affectations of the fash ionable world ; but we must refer the reader for these things to the gossiping pages of Madame Campan. In her Me- moirs, much may be read of the petty jealousies of the court, great often in their results ; of the gradual ascendan- cy gained by the queen over her hus- band, who at first neglected her; of ber intimacy with the members of her household, the Princess de Lamballe and the Countess de Polignac ; of her mortification in the early years of her reign when she was childless, and of the delight of the nation, when after the birth of a princess in 1778, in 1781 an heir was born to the throne. On the latter occasion, the artificers and traders of Paris went to Versailles in a body, carrying the various insignia of their callings, with some humorous accessories. Even the chimney sweep- ers, we are told, turned out, " quite as well dressed as those that appear upon the stage, carrying an ornamented chimney, at the top of which was perch- ed one of the smallest of their fra- ternity. The chairmen carried a sedan, highly gilt, in which were to be seen a handsome nurse and a little dauphin. The smiths hammered away upon an anvil, the shoemakers finished off a little pair of boots for the dauphin, and the tailors a little suit of the uni- form of his regiment. The king en- joyed the sight for a long time from the balcony. So general was the en- thusiasm that (the police not having carefully examined the procession) the 102 MAKIE ANTOINETTE. grave-diggers had the impudence to send their deputation also, with the emble- matic devices of their ill-omened occu- pation " ill omened surely, if read by the light of the dire revolutionary pro- ceedings of the few succeeding years. The market women were received a deputation from them into the queen's bed-room, one of them read- ing to her an address written by La Harpe, piquantly engraved on the in- side of a fan, which she handed to her without any embarrassment. This was peculiarly French. Fancy an English market - woman approaching Queen Victoria on such an occasion in that style ! The fish - women, the pois- wrdes, spoke their addresses and sang their songs in honor of the event, with abundant good humor and gayety. Fol- lowing upon these rejoicings came the bustle and stir of the American war, which the queen is said to have made popular at court, favoring the negotia- tor Beaumarchais, and humoring the extraordinary attentions paid to Frank- lin. The time came when she looked back upon this enthusiasm as a source of evil to the dynasty in the encouragement of the democracy which was sweeping away old institutions; but meantime the danger was unsus- pected, and France was avenged on the American continent for her loss of Canada to England. The personal appearance of the queen at this time has been described by La- martine : " On her arrival in France, her beauty had dazzled the whole kingdom, a beauty then in all its splendor. The two children whom she had given to the throne, far from impairing her good looks, added to the attractions of her person, that character of mater- nal majesty which so well becomes the mother of a nation. The presentiment of misfortunes, the recollection of the tragic scenes of Versailles, the uneasi- ness of each day somewhat diminished her youthful freshness. She was tall, slim and graceful, a real daughter of Tyrol. Her naturally majestic car- riage in no way impaired the grace of her movements: her neck rising ele- gantly and distinctly from her shoul ders gave expression to every attitude. The woman was perceptible beneath the queen, the tenderness of heart was not lost in the elevation of her destiny Her light brown hair was long and silky, her forehead, high and rather projecting, was united to her temples by those fine curves which give so much delicacy and expression to that seat of thought or the soul in women ; her eyes of that clear blue which recall the skies of the North or the waters of the Danube; an aquiline nose, with nostrils open and slightly projecting where emotions palpitate and courage is evidenced ; a large mouth, bril- liant teeth, Austrian lips, that is, pro- jecting and well defined; an oval countenance, animated, varying, im passioned, and the ensemble of these features replete with that expression, impossible to describe, which emanates from the look, the shades, the reflec- tions of the face, which encompasses with an iris, like that of the wnrm and tinted vapor which bathes objects in full sunlight the extreme loveliness which the ideal conveys, and which by giving it life increases its attrac- tion. With all these charms, a soul yearning to attach itself a heart easi- MAEIE ANTOINETTE. 103 ly moved, but yet earnest in desire to itself; a pensive and intelligent smile, with nothing of vacuity in it, nothing of preference or mere acquaintanceship in it, because it felt itself worthy of friendships. Such was Marie Antoinette as a woman." In the political events which suc- ceeded so rapidly, ending in the over- throw of the monarchy, the queen, in common with the king, was charged with duplicity in her professions of adherence to the will of the nation. Though of a generous kindly nature, her inclinations, when the issue came to be made, were naturally with the aristocratic party. It would be expect- ing perhaps too much of any sovereign at that day to yield gracefully to such sweeping reforms as were then insti- tuted in France. The deeds of violence and lawlessness which were daily com- mitted by the people, might well seem to justify the conviction that the only safety for the state was in power and repression, and that this force belonged of right to the ancient monarchy. The misfortune of the king was the emi- gration of members of the court and the formation of a hostile party outside of the country, to whose assistance he was looking for redress. " In forming a judgment on the terrible events of the French Revolution," says a recent writer, "it must never be forgotten that this disposition of the court to rely on 'foreign aid and to subdue the revolution by foreign influence, was the inexpiable crime of the king and queen. It was ridiculous to talk of Louis as a tyrant. It was an outrage to ascribe to the queen, as a woman, any single action which would not have become the noblest of her sex. Whatever may have been the short- comings of her Austrian education and the frivolity of her early habits, mis- fortune and danger awakened in her a force of will, a clearness of intelligence, a power of language, and a strength of soul, which speak with imperishable eloquence in every line of the letters written by her after the commence- ment of the revolution. But, although these qualities of the queen do her the highest honor, and in this respect the publication of her most private corres- pondence can only exalt her reputation, yet these papers render still more appa- rent the fact that she had but little po litical judgment, and that neither she nor the king ever conceived the possi- bility of dealing honestly with the rev- olution. At each successive stage in that protracted tragedy, there was a secret policy always at work in the opposite sense, and that policy, relying mainly on external support was their destruc- tion."* It was more, however, by sufferance than action that the queen was to be distinguished in those days of trial. Events moved rapidly. There was hardly more than a single step from the freedom of the court to the re- straint of the prison, and the part borne by Marie Antoinette, at any time, could scarcely be anything more than that of a simple adviser of the king, in a feeble, capricious sort of way. She had no senate to influence, no army to command, no royal -will to execute. The policy of the nation was shaped by its necessities. Bankruptcy * Art. Correspondence of Marie Antoinette, Edinburgh Review, April, 1866. 104 MARIE ANTOINETTE. and starvation were the imperial ru- lers, and were inexorable in their de- mands for reform. All that could be done to palliate or defer had been done in previous reigns. The waters had been dammed up beyond the power of human engineery to control them fur- ther, and the deluge was inevitable. JTie only escape for royalty was timely abdication, if the reformers had been willing to spare it as an agent of their work. The king was made both an instrument and a sacrifice. His forced acquiescence in the constitution, which he had no real intention to respect, gave a sanction to the revolutionary proceedings, and henceforth, after a few shiftless efforts at intrigue, and one weak attempt to escape, there was nothing left but submission. The story of the last years of the royal family in this constantly dark- ening revolutionary period is one of the saddest narratives in all history. In their powerless, helpless condition, the insincerity forced upon them by their position, might surely have been forgiven. To bring them to death was an unnecessary crime; to accompany that death with the brutalities which attended it, was the act of fiends. The first scene in this great drama in which Marie Antoinette prominently figures, is in its first act in that incursion of the mob at Versailles, in the night of the 5th of October, 1789, when driven from her bed-chamber, she appeared in early morning in a balcony of the pa- lace with her children, confronting the infuriated crowd in the court-yard be- low. When they ordered the children away, as if to shut out from their view that appeal to tenderness and pity, the queen appeared alone before them, her hands and eyes raised to heaven, appa- rently expecting instant death an act of heroism which must have tamed for the moment the ferocity of her perse- cutors, whose wanton, libellous detrac- tion, assailing her fair fame, was even more cruel than their personal vio- lence. The ignominious escort to Paris follows upon this, and the prolonged virtual imprisonment in the palace of the Tuilleries, the king, shorn of his prerogatives, a puppet in the hands of the Assembly. Wearied at length of this anomalous position, in concert with the emigrant nobles, encouraged by the decision of the queen, in June, 1791, he endeavors to make his es- cape from the kingdom. The queen had been for some time busy in pre- paration for the departure. Madame Campan, who was still with her, was employed in getting together and for- warding to Brussels a complete ward- robe for the family. On the 20th, the king, with the queen, their children and his sister Elizabeth, leave the Tuil- leries clandestinely in flight for the frontier. The journey has been gene- rally well arranged, but failing in some of its details, chiefly through a slight loss of time on the route, the actual cause of disaster it is said being the king's persistence in stopping to gratify his appetite by eating a meal at a friend's house, is fatally checked, late in the evening of the 21st at Va- rennes. The king, showing himself from a window, has been recognized, and a band of young patriots effect his capture. The party is brought back in triumph to the Tuilleries and guarded there more rigorously than before. MARIE ANTOINETTE. 105 Though untried, they are already vir- tually condemned, and their lives, in the rapid deterioration of political par- ties, are at the mercy of a mob. In vain has the king sworn to obey the Constitution, completed at last by the National Assembly. The Legislative Assembly, their successors, are more intolerant, and a mob, in the interest of the Republicans, on the 20th June, 1792, finds its way into the inner court of the Tuilleries, demanding conces- sions of the king, crowning his majesty with the red revolutionary cap, while the queen with difficulty escapes wear- ing just such another, getting off by placing a tri-colored cockade in her head-dress. This is but child's play, however, to the events at the Tuille- ries of the 10th of August, one of the dark days of history, when the insur- rectionary factions, commencing the reign of terror, drove the royal family as their only escape from immediate massacre to take refuge in the National Assembly, while the faithful Swiss o-uard laid down their lives in defence o of the palace. The queen would have remained to risk their fate and there met death in defence of the crown; but she was moved by an appeal for her children and submitted. The As- sembly decreed that the royal family should be lodged in the Temple, an ancient fortress or castle in the heart of the city. Here for a time, under strict confinement, making the best of their situation, the royal party, though suffering greatly, solaced their misfor- tunes by mutual acts of affection and kindness, till the king was separated from them. In December, he was car- ried forth to his trial by the Conven- tion which had succeeded to the As- sembly, and on the 21st suffered death at the hands of the public executioner, having previously been permitted the grace, or rather the final torture, of a parting interview with his family Four months after the death of the king, the dauphin was separated from his mother in the Temple, and the queen was left with the king's sister, Madame Elizabeth, to endure the aggra- vated sorrows and humiliations heap- ed upon her. In August, 1793, she was removed to the still more cruel prison of the Conciergerie, in the vaults of the Palace of Justice, and in October was led to the court above to undergo the mockery of a trial aggravated by the fiercest and most revolting indigni- ties. She endured all with a heroism worthy the daughter of Maria Theresa. The only charity she experienced, was in her speedy execution on the 16th, when she was conducted amidst the jeers of the populace to the spot, the Place Louis Quinze, where, nine months before, the king had met his fate, and there, her last glance toward the Tem- ple, and her last thoughts on her chil- dren, she too suffered death by the guillotine. U DAVID GARRICK. DAVID GARRICK was born at the Angel Inn, Hereford, on the 19th February, 1716.* He was French by descent. His paternal grandfather, David Garric, or Garrique, a French Protestant of good family, had escaped to England after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, reaching London on the 5th of October, 1685. There he was joined in the following December by his wife, who had taken a month to make the passage from Bordeaux in a wretched bark of fourteen tons, " with strong tempests, and at great peril of being lost." Such was the inveteracy of their persecutors, that, in effecting their own escape, these poor people had to leave behind them their only child, a boy called Peter, who was out at nurse at Bastide, near Bordeaux. It was not until May, 1687, that little Peter was restored to them by his nurse, Mary Mougnier, who came over to London with him. By this time a daughter had been born, and other sons and daughters followed ; but of a numerous family three alone surviv- ed Peter, Jane, and David. David * This narrative is abridged from an admira- ble presentation of the career of Garrick in the Quarterly Review. (106) settled at Lisbon as a wine meicLant, and Peter entered the army in 1706. His regiment was quartered at Lien- field ; and, some eighteen months after he received his commission, he married Arabella, the daughter of the Rev. Mr. Clough, vicar choral of the cathedral there. There was no fortune on either side, but much affection. The usual result followed. Ten children were born in rapid succession, of whom sev- en survived. Of these the third was David, who made his appearance some- what inopportunely, while his father, then a lieutenant of dragoons, was at Hereford on recruiting service. Lichneld was the home of the fami- ly. There was good blood on both sides of it, and they were admitted in- to the best society of the place, and held in deserved respect. David was a clever, bright boy ; of quick observa- tion, apt at mimicry, and of an enga ging temper. Such learning as the grammar - school of the town could give he obtained; and his training here, and at Edial some years after- wards under his townsman Samuel Johnson, produced more of the fruits of a liberal education than commonly results even from schooling of a more DAYID GARRICK:. 107 elaborate and costly kind. The occa- sional visits of a strolling troop of play- ers gave the future Roscius his first taste of the fascinations of the drama. To see was to resolve to emulate, and before he was eleven years old he dis- tinguished himself in the part of Ser- jeant Kite in a performance of Far- quhar's "Recruiting Officer," organiz- ed for the amusement of their friends by his companions and himself. Meanwhile the cares of a numerous family were growing upon his parents. To meet its expenses, his father ex- changed from the dragoons, into a marching regiment, and went upon half-pay. Peter, the eldest boy, had gone into the Navy ; and upon the in- vitation of the uncle, whose name he bore, young David, then only eleven, was sent to Lisbon, apparently with the expectation that a provision for life would be made for him in his un- cle's business. But either his uncle had no such intention, or the boy found the occupation distasteful, for his stay in Portugal did not extend over many months. Short as it was, he succeeded in making himself popular there by his vivacity and talents. After dinner he would be set upon the table to recite to the guests passages from the plays they were familiar with at home. A very pleasant inmate he must have been in the house of his well-to-do bachelor uncle. No doubt he was sent home with something handsome in his pock- et ; and when a few years afterwards the uncle came back to England to die, he left his nephew 1000/., twice as much as he g'ave to any others of the family. Garrick's father, who had for some years been making an ineffectual strug gle to keep his head above water upon his half-pay, found he could do so no longer, and in 1731 he joined his regi ment, which had been sent out to gar- rison Gibraltar, leaving behind him his wife, broken in health, to face sin gle-handed the debts and duns, the worries and anxieties, of a large fami- ly. In her son David she found the best support. His heart and head were ever at work to soften her trials, and his gay spirit doubtless brighten- ed with many a smile the sad wistful- ness of her anxious face. The fare in her home was meagre, and the dresses of its inmates scanty and well worn ; still there were loving hearts in it, which were drawn closer together by their very privations. But the poor lady's heart was away with the father. " I must tell my dear life and soul," she writes to him in a letter, which reads like a bit of Thackeray or Sterne, " that I am not able to live any longer without him ; for I grow very jealous. But in the midst of all this I do not blame my dear. I have very sad dreams for you but I have the pleas- ure when I am up, to think, were I with you, how tender. .... my dear would be to me ; nay was, when I was with you last. O ! that I had you in my arms. I would tell my dear life how much I am his A. G." Her husband had then been only two years gone. Three more weary years were to pass before she was to see him again. This was in 1736, and he returned, shattered in health and spirits, to die within little more than a year. One year more, and she, too, the sad faithful mother, whose " dear 108 DAYID GAREICK. Life " was restored to her arras only to be taken from them by a sterner part- ing, was herself at rest. During his father's absence Garrick had not been idle. His busy brain and restless fancy had been laying up stores of observation for future use. He was a general favorite in the Lich- field circle amusing the old, and head- ing the sports of the young winning the hearts of all. Gilbert Walmsley, Registrar of the Ecclesiastical Court, a good and wise friend, who had known and loved him from childhood, took him under his special care. On his suggestion, possibly by his help, Dav- id and his brother George were sent as pupils to Johnson's academy at Edial, to complete their studies in Latin and French. Garrick and Johnson had been friends before, and there was in- deed but seven years' difference in their ages. But Johnson even then impress- ed his pupil with a sense of superiority, which never afterwards left him ; while Garrick established an equally lasting hold upon the somewhat capricious heart of his ungainly master. From time to time he was taken by friends to London, where, in the theatres that were to be the scenes of his future triumphs, he had opportunities of studying some of the leading perform- ers, whom he was afterwards to eclipse. Even in these early days the dream of coping with these favorites of the town had taken possession of him. But he kept it to himself, well knowing the shock he would have inflicted on the kind hearts at home, had he suggested oo to 1hem the possibility of such a career for himself. By the time his father returned from Gibraltar Garrick was nineteen. A pro- fession must be chosen, and the law ap- pears to have been thought the fittest for a youth of so much readiness and address, and with an obviously unusu- al faculty of speech. Some fuHhei preliminary studies were, howevei, in- dispensable. He could not afford to go to either university, and in this strait his friend Valmsley bethought him of a " dear old friend " at Rochester, the Rev. Mr. Colson, afterward Lucasian Professor at Cambridge, a man ol em- inence in science, as a person most like- ly to give young Garrick the instruc- tion in " mathematics, philosophy, and humane learning " which was deemed requisite to complete his education. To him, therefore, a letter was de- spatched, asking him to undertake the charge, from which we get an authen- tic and agreeable picture of the young fellow's character. " He is a very sensible fellow, and a good scholar, nineteen, of sober and good dispositions, and is as ingenious and promising a young man as ever I knew in my life. Few instructions on your side will do, and in the intervals of study he will be an agreeable com- panion for you. This young gentleman has been much with me, ever since he was a child, and I have taken much pleasure in instructing him, and have a great affection and esteem for him." Mr. Colson accepted the proposal ; but by the time the terms had been arrang ed, another young native of Lichileld, in whom Walmsley felt no slight inter- est, had determined to move southward to try his fortunes, and was also to be brought under Mr. Colson's notice. This was Samuel Johnson, whose DAYID GAREICK. 109 Edial Academy had by tliis time been starved out, but for whom. London, the last hope of ambitious scholars, was still open. He had written his trage- dy of "Irene," and it had found pro- vincial admirers, Walmsley among the number, who thought a tragedy in verse the open sesame to fame and for- tune. For London, therefore, Johnson and Garrick started together John- son, as he used afterwards to say, with two-pence-half-penny in his pocket, and Garrick with three halfpence in his ; a mocking exaggeration, not very wide, however, of the truth. For some reason not now known Garrick did not go to Mr. Colson in a week. On reaching town he lost no time in getting himself admitted to the Honorable Society of Lincoln's Inn (19th March, 1737) by payment of the admission fee, the only act of member- ship which he appears ever to have performed. He stayed in London with Johnson for some time, and their fi- nances fell so low that they had to bor- row five pounds on their joint note from one Wilcox, a bookseller and acquaintance of Garrick' s, who after- wards proved one of Johnson's best friends. Most probably Garrick's plans of study under Mr. Colson were disconcerted by the illness of his father, who died within a month after Garrick *iad started from Lichfield. Nor was it nntil the death soon afterwards of the Lisbon uncle, and the opening to Gar- rick of his 1000 legacy, that he found himself in a condition to incur that ex- pense. Late in 1737 he went to Koches- ter, and remained with Mr. Colson for some months, but with what advantage can be only matter of conjecture. Early in 1738 Garrick returned to Lichfield. By this time his brother Peter had left the navy, and returned home. There were five brothers and sisters to be provided for, so Peter and he clubbed their little fortunes, and set up in business as wine merchants in Lichfield and London. David, by this time tolerably familiar with the ways of town, and not unknown at the coffee-houses where his wines might be in demand, took charge of the London business. Vaults were taken in Dur- ham Yard, between the Strand and the river, where the Adelphi Terrace now stands, and here Foote, in his usual vein of grotesque exaggeration, used to say, he had known the great actor " with three quarts of vinegar in the cellar, calling himself a wine mer- chant." Of Garrick at this period we get a vivid glimpse from Macklin, an estab- lished actor, who was then Garrick's inseparable friend, but was afterwards to prove a constant thorn in his side through life, and his most malignant detractor after death. Garrick "was then," as Macklin told his own bio- grapher Cooke, " a very sprightly young man, neatly ma'de, of an express- ive countenance, and most agreeable manners." Mr. Cooke adds, upon the same authority : " The stage possessed him wholly ; he could talk or think of nothing but the theatre ; and as they often dined together in select parties, Garrick rendered himself the idol of the meeting by his mimicry, anecdotes, etc. With other funds of information, he possessed a number of good travel ling stories " (with which his youthful voyage to Lisbon had apparently sup- 110 DAYID GABRICK. plied him), "which he narrated, sir " (added the veteran), " in such a vein of pleasantry and rich humor, as I have seldom seen equalled." There could be only one conclusion to such a state of things. The wine business languished; that it was not wholly ruined, and Garrick with it, shows that with all his love of society he was able to exercise great prudence and self-restraint. " Though on plea- sure bent, he had a frugal mind." Early habits of self-denial, and the thoughts of the young brothers and sisters at Lichfield, were enough to check everything like extravagance, though they could not control the pas- sion which was hourly feeding itself upon the study of plays and inter- course with players, and bearing him onwards to the inevitable goal. Their society, and that of the wits and critics about town, were the natural element for talents such as his. He could even then turn an epigram or copy of verses, for which his friend Johnson would secure a place in the " Gentleman's Magazine." Paragraphs of dramatic criticism frequently exercised his pen. He had a farce, " Lethe," accepted at Drury Lane, and another, " The Lying Valet," ready for the stage. Actors and managers were among his inti- mates. He had the entree behind the scenes at the two great houses, Drury Lane and Covent Garden, and his his- trionic powers were so well recognized, that one evening, in 1740, when Wood- ward was too ill to go on as harlequin, at the little theatre in Goodman's Fields, Garrick was allowed to take his place for the early scenes, and got Jirough them so well that the sub- stitution was not surmised by the audience. Nor had his been a mere lounger's delight in the pleasures of the theatre. The axiom that the stage is nought, which does not " hold the mirror up to nature," had taken deep hold upon his mind. But from the actual stage he found that nature, especially in the poetical drama, had all but vanished, and in its place had come a purely conventional and monotonous style of declamation, with a stereotyped system of action no less formal and unreal. There was a noble opening for any one who should have the courage and the gifts to return to nature and to truth, and Garrick felt that it was " in him " to effect the desired revolution. Nor was that reform far distant. The very next summer was to decide Garrick' s career. His broodings were now to take actual shape. But before hazard- ing an appearance in London he wisely resolved to test his powers in the coun- try ; and with this view he went down to Ipswich with the company of Gif- fard, the manager of the Goodman's Fields Theatre, and made his appear- ance under the name of Lyddal as Aboan in Southern's tragedy of " Oroonoko." This he followed up by several other characters, both tragic and comic, none of them of first im- portance, but sufficient to give him ease on the stage, and at the same time enable him to ascertain wherein his strength lay. His success was unques- tionable, and decided him on appealing to a London audience. The quality in which Garrick then and throughout his career surpassed all his contemporaries was the power DAVID GAERICK. Ill of kindling with the exigencies of the scene. He lost himself in his part. It spoke through him ; and the greater the play it demanded of emotion and passion, the more diversified the ex- pression and action for which it gave scope, the more brilliantly did his genius assert itself. His face answer- ed to his feelings, and its workings gave warning of his words before he uttered them ; his voice, melodious and full of tone, though far from strong, had the penetrating quality hard to define, but which is never wanting either in the great orator or the great actor ; and his figure, light, graceful, and well balanced, though under the average size, was equal to every de- mand which his impulsive nature made upon it. We can see all this in the portraits of him even at this early period. Only in those of a later date do we get some idea of the command- ing power of his eyes, which not only held his audience like a spell, but con- trolled, with a power almost beyond endurance, his fellow performers in the scene. But from the first the power must have been there. He had noted well all that was good in the professors of the art he was destined to revolutionize ; and he had learned, as men of ability do learn, even from their very defects, in what direction true excellence was to be sought for. Long afterwards he used to say that his own chief successes in " Richard the Third " were due to what he had learn- ed through watching Ryan, a very in- different actor, in the same part. Richard was the character he chose for his first London trial ; a choice made with a wise estimate of his own pow- ers, for the display of which it was eminently fitted. At this time the part was in the possession of Quin, whose "manner of heaving up his words, and labored action," as de- scribed by Davies, were the best of foils to the fiery energy and subtle varieties of expression with which Gar rick was soon to make the public familiar. He appeared, by the usual venial fiction on similar occasions, as a " gentleman who never appeared on any stage." The house was not a great one ; still the audience was nu- merous enough to make the actor feel his triumph, and to spread the report of it widely. They were taken by sur- prise at first by a style at once so new and so consonant to nature. "To the just modulation of the words," says Davies, " and concurring expression of the features, from the genuine workings of nature, they had been strangers, at least for some time. But, after Mr. Garrick had gone through a variety of scenes, in which he gave evident proof of consummate art, and perfect knowledge of charac- ter, their doubts were turned into sur- prise and astonishment, from which they relieved themselves in loud and reiterated applause." A power like this was sure of rapid recognition in those days, when theatres formed a sort of fourth estate. Gar- rick's first appearance was on the 19th of October, 1^41. He repeated the character the two following nights, then changed it for " Aboan," his first part of the Ipswich Series. The audi- ences were still moderate, and his sal- ary, a guinea a night, moderate in proportion. Bui fame had carried the 112 DAVID GARPJCK. report of the new wonder from the obscure corner of the city, near the Minories, in which his friend Giffard's theatre was situated, to the wits and fashionable people in the West-end. Richard was restored to the bills. " Goodman's Fields," says Davies, " was full of the splendors of St. James's and Grosvenor Square; the coaches of the nobility filled up the space from Temple Bar to White Chapel." What Garrick valued more than all this concourse of fashionables, men of high character and undoubted taste nocked to hear him ; and on the 2nd of November, Pope, ill and failing, who had come out early in the year to see Macklin's " Shylock," and had re- cognized its excellence, was again tempted from his easy chair at Twick- enham by the rumor of a worthy suc- cessor having arisen to the Betterton and Booth of his early admiration. " I saw," said Garrick, describing the event long afterwards to the somewhat mag- niloquent Percival Stockdale, " our lit- tle poetical hero, dressed in black, seated in a side-box near the stage, and viewing me with a serious and earnest attention. His look shot and thrilled like lightning through my frame, and I had some hesitation in proceeding from anxiety and from joy. As Rich- ard gradually blazed forth, the house was in a roar of applause, and the con- spiring hand of Pope showered me with laurels." Pope returned to see him twice; and his verdict, which reached Garrick through Lord Orrery, shows how deeply he was impressed by Garrick's fresh and forcible style, and the genuine inspiration which animated his performance. "That young man never had his equal as an actor, and he will never have a rival.'" Pope dreaded that success would spoil him ; but Garrick's genius was not of the ungenuine kind, which is spoiled by success. He knew only too well how far his best achievements fell short of what his imagination con- ceived. Others might think his de> lineations could not be improved. Not so he; for act as long as he might, there was no great part, in Shakespeare especially, which would not constantly present new details to elaborate, or suggest shades of significance or con- trast which had previously escaped him. The praise of old Mrs. Porter, herself the greatest tragedian of her time, who had come up to town to see him from her retirement in the country, must have spoken more eloquently to him than even Pope's broad eulogiuTn, and in it, too, there was the prophecy of the " All hail, hereafter." " He is born an actor, and does more at his first appearance than ever anybody did with twenty years' practice ; and, good God, what will he be in time ! " The Duke of Argyle and Lord Cobham, great authorities in stage matters, pro- nounced him superior to Betterton. The very conflicts of opinion to which such high commendations gave rise were the best of fame for the young ar tist. They drew crowds to the theatre ; and even before the end of 1741, it was often far too small to accommodate the numbers that flocked for admittance. The humble salary of a guinea a night was clearly no adequate return for such merits. GifFard offered him a share in the management upon equal terms; and within the next few months the DAVID GAEETCK. H3 foundation of the actor's ultimate great fortune was laid. Such success could not fail to pro- voke the jealousy of those performers who had hitherto occupied the fore- most ranks. It was a virtual condem- nation of all they had trained them- selves to think true acting. " If this young fellow is right, then we have all been wrong," said one, as if in that statement were included a final verdict against him. "This," remarked the sententious Quin, " is the wonder of a day ; Garrick is a new religion ; the people follow him as another White- field ; but they will soon return to church again." Return, however, they did not. A new era had begun ; and Garrick, whose ready pen did not al- ways do him such good service, was able to retort the sarcasm in a smart epigram, of which these two lines have kept their place in literature : " When doctrines meet with general approba- tion, It is not heresy but Reformation." While people were still in admira- tion at the tragic force of his Richard, he surprised them by the display of comic powers, scarcely less remarkable, in Clodio in the " Fop's Fortune," Fondlewife in Congreve's " Old Bache- lor," and other characters ; thus early demonstrating his own doctrine that " there must be comedy in the perfect actor of tragedy," of which he was af- terwards to furnish so brilliant an example. His lively farce of " The Lying Valet " (produced in December, 1741), established his reputation as a writer, at the same time that it gave him in Sharp a field for the airy viva- city, the ever-bubbling gayety of tone, 15 the talent of making witty things doubly witty by the way of saying them, for which he was afterwards so famous. Some of his friends (his townsman Newton, the future Bishop, then tutor to Lord Carpenter's son, among the number) thought his ap- pearance in such parts a mistake. " You, who are equal to the greatest parts, strangely demean yourself in acting anything that is low or little," he wrote, 18th January, 1742. "There are abundance of people who hit ofl 1 low humor and succeed in the cox- comb and the buffoon very well ; but there is scarce one in an age who is capable of acting the hero in tragedy and the fine gentleman in comedy. Though you perform these parts never so well, yet there is not half the merit in excelling in them as in the others." Sound enough advice in the main and to actors of limited scope, and most politic as a warning, by which Garrick profited, not to let himself down by playing merely farce parts. But there is no good reason why an actor of the requisite genius should not play Touch- stone as well as Othello, Sir Toby Belch as well as Coriolanus, with no more loss of caste than Shakespeare for hav- ing written them. But then there must be the requisite genius to justify the attempt. This Garrick had, as was soon afterwards proved, when he pass- ed from King Lear to Abel Drugger, in "The Alchemist," from Hamlet to Bayes in " The Rehearsal," and left his severest critics in doubt in which he was most to be admired. Indeed it was just this wide range of power, this Shakesperian multiformity of concep- tion, which was the secret of Garrick's DAVID GAEKICK. greatness, and, after his death, made even the cynical Walpole confess that he was " the greatest actor that ever lived, both in comedy and tragedy." Newton himself was struck by this a few months later. He had just seen Garrick's Lear, and after giving him the opinion of certain friends that he far exceeded Booth in that character, and even equalled Betterton, he goes on to say : "The thing that strikes me above all others is that variety in your act- ing, and your being so totally a differ- ent man in Lear from what you are in Richard. There is a sameness in every other actor. Gibber is something of a coxcomb in everything : and Wolsey, Syphax, and lago, all smell strong of the essence of Lord Foppington. Booth was a philosopher in Cato, and was a philosopher in everything else ! His passion in Hotspur I hear was much of the same nature, whereas yours was an old man's passion, and an old man's voice and action ; and, in the four parts wherein I have seen you, Richard, Cha- mont, Bayes, and Lear, I never saw four actors more different from one another, than you are from yourself." His Lear, like his Richard, seems from the first to have been superb. Cooke, indeed, in his " Memoir of Mack- lin" says the first and second perfor- mances of the part disappointed that severe critic. It did not sufficiently in- dicate the infirmities of the man " four- score and upwards " the curse did not break down, as it should have done, in the impotence of rage there was a lack of dignity in the prison scene, and so forth. Garrick took notes of Mack- lin's criticisms on all these points, withdrew the play for six weeks, and restudied the character in the interval. Of the result on his next appearance Macklin always spoke with rapture. The curse in particular exceeded all he could have imagined; it seemed to electrify the audience with horror. The words " kill kill kill," echoed all the revenge of a frantic king, " whilst his pathos on discovering his daughter Cordelia drew tears of com- miseration from the whole house. In short, sir, the little dog made it a chef d'ceuvre, and a chef dceuvre it contin- ued to the end of his life." While the town was ringing with his triumphs, and his brain was still on fire with the fulfilment of his cher- ished dreams, Garrick did not forget his sober partner in business nor the other good folks at Lichfield, to whose genteel notions his becoming a stage- player, he knew, would be a terrible shock. The Ipswich performances had escaped their notice; and brother Peter, when in town soon afterwards, found him out of health and spirits. It was the miserable interim " between the acting of a dreadful thing, and the first motion" of it. Garrick, though he had quite made up his mind to go on the stage, was afraid to break the news to his family. But he did so the day after his debut at Goodman's Fields while the plaudits of his audience were yet sounding in his ears, in a let- ter to his brother and partner, depre- cating his censure with an unassuming earnestness which speaks volumes for the modesty of the artist, and the simple and loving nature of the man : "My mind," he writes, "(as you must know) has been always inclined L>AVID GARRICK. to tlie stage, nay, so strongly so that all my illness and lowness of spirits was owing to my want of resolution to tell you my thoughts when here. Finding at last both my inclination and interest required some new way of life, I have chose the most agreeable to myself, and though I know you will be much displeased at me, yet I hope when you shall find that I may have the genius of an actor, without the vices, you will think the less severely of me, and not be ashamed to own me for a brother. . . Last night I played Richard the Third to the sur- prise of everybody, and as I shall make very near 300 per annum by it, and as it is really what I doat upon, I am resolved to pursue it." The winjB business at Durham Yard, he explained, had not prospered 400 of Garrick's small capital had been lost and he saw no prospect of re- trieving it. He was prepared to make every reasonable arrangement with his brother about their partnership, and his new career better fortune in awaited him, of which his family should share the fruits. But the news spread dismay in the old home at Lich- field; their respectability was com- promised by one of their blood becom- ing a "harletry player," and getting mixed up with the loose morals and shifty ways of the theatrical fraternity. Before Peter's reply reached him, Gar- rick must have known that his fame was secure. But the tone of his re- joinder is still modest, though firm. Writing again on the 27th, he assures his brother that even his friends, " who were at first surprised at my intent, by seeing me on the stage, are now well convinced it was impossible to keep me off." As to company, " the best in town " were desirous of his, and he had received more civilities since he came on the stage than he ever did in all his life before. Leonidas Glover has been to see him every night, and goes about saying he had not seen acting for ten years before. " In short, were I to tell you what they say about me, 'twould be too vain, though I am now writing to a brother ... I am sorry my sisters are under such uneasinesses, and, as I really love both them and you, will ever make it my study to appear your affectionate brother, D. Garrick." A less modest or more selfish man would have thrown off with some im- patience the weak scruples of his fam- ily about loss of caste. When they found their brother making his way in the highest quarters, and becoming well to do at the same time, the views of his family underwent a change. It was not, however, till the 2nd of De- cember, 1741, that Garrick threw off the mask and performed under his own name. By this time even they must have begun to doubt whether honor was not more likely to accrue to them than discredit from the step which he had taken. But it must have been no small pain to hin to have the vulgar estimate of his profession thrown so remorselessly in his teeth by his own kindred. Garrick paid the actor's accustomed penalty for success by being overwork- ed. Between nis first appearance in Oc- tober, 1741, and the following May, when the Goodman's Fields Theatre closed, he played no less than one hun 110 DAVID GARRIOK. dred and thirty-eight times, and for the most part in characters of the greatest weight and importance in both tragedy and comedy. Among the former were Richard, Lear, Pierre ; among the lat- ter, Lord Foppington, in Gibber's "Careless Husband," Fondlewife and Bayes. The range of character and passion which these parts covered was immense. To have played them at all, new as he was to the stage, was no common feat of industry, but only ge- nius of the most remarkable kind could have carried him through them, not only without injury, but with positive increase, to the high reputation his first performances had created. In Bayes he was nearly as popular as in Richard and Lear ; and he made the part sub- servient to his purpose of exposing the false and unnatural style into which actors had fallen, by making Bayes speak his turgid heroics in imitation of some of the leading performers. But when he found how the men whose faults he burlesqued good, worthy men in their way were made wretch- ed by seeing themselves, and what they did in all seriousness, held up to derision, his naturally kind heart and good taste made him drop these imi- tations. Garrick's true vocation was to teach his brethren a purer style by his own example, not to dishearten them by ridicule. Mimicry, besides, as he well knew, is the lowest form of the actor's art, and no mere mimic can be a great actor, for sincerity, not simulation, is at the root of all great- ness on the stage. The success of Garrick at Goodman's Fields emptied the patent houses at Covent Garden and Drury Lane, and the patentees had recourse to the la\v to compel Giffard to close his theatre Ganick was secured for the next sea son at Drury Lane. But as that house did not open till September, and the people of Dublin were impatient to see him, he started off for that city early in June, and remained there play- ing a round of his leading parts till the middle of August. An epidemic which raged during the greater part of this time, caused by distress among the poor, and by the great heat, got the name of the Garrick Fever. But the epidemic which he really caused was not among the poor, but among the wits and fine ladies of that then fashionable and lively city, who were not likely to be behind his English admirers in enthusiasm. He was be- rhymed and feted on all hands, and from them he got the title of Roscius, which to this hour is coupled with his name. During this engagement he added Hamlet to his list of characters. Like his Richard and his Lear it was treated in a manner quite his own, and like them it was from the first a success, but was, of course, much elaborated and modified in future years. At Drury Lane Garrick found him- self associated with his old friend Macklin, who was deputy manager and with that " dallying and danger ous" beauty, Peg Woffington, under whose spell he appears to have fallen as early as 1740. As an actress she was admirable for the life, the nature, and the grace which she threw into all she did, set off by a fine person, and a face, which, as her portraits show, though habitually pensive in its ex- pression, was capable of kindling into DAVID GAKRICK. Ill passion, or beaming with the sudden and fitful lights of feeling and fancy. She had been literally picked out of the streets of Dublin as a child crying " halfpenny salads," and trained by a rope-dancer, Madame Violante, as one of a Lilliputian company, in which she figured in such parts as Captain Mao- heath. Like Rachel and many other celebrated women, she contrived, it is Lard to say how, to educate herself, so v t / that she could hold her own in conver- sation in any society; and such was her natural grace, that she excelled in characters like Millamant and Lady Townley, in which the well-bred air of good society was essential. Frank, kindly and impulsive, she had also wit at will, to give piquancy to the expres- sions of a very independent turn of mind. She never scrupled to avow that she preferred the company of men to that of women, who " talked," she said, " of nothing but silks and scandal." The men returned the compliment by being very fond of her company. " Forgive her one female error," says Murphy, "and it might fairly be said of her that she was adorned with every vir- tue." But when Garrick first fell un- der her fascination, these frailties had not been developed. She was then in the bloom of her beauty, and how charming that was we can see from Hogarth's exquisite portrait, and though suitors of wealth and rank surrounded her, genius and youth had probably more charms for her than gold and fine living. Garrick was deep- ly smitten by her, and he seems for a time to have thought her worthy of an honorable love. For one season he kept house together with her and Macklin, and they were visited by his friends, Johnson and Dr. Hoadley among the number. It was thought he would marry her ; but Peg's aberrations her " one female error " grew too serious. She was in truth an incurable coquette. Garrick's heart was touched, hers was not. It cost him a good many strug- gles to break his chains, but he broke them at last, and left her finally in 1745 to the rakes and fools who were out- bidding each other for her favors. He was worthy of a better mate; and he was to find one before very long, for in March of the following year (1746) the lady came to England who was to replace his feverish passion for the wayward Woffmgton, by a de- votion which grew stronger and deeper with every year of his life. This was the fair Eva Maria Veigel, which latter name she had changed for its French equivalent Violette. She was then twenty-one, a dancer, and had come from Vienna with recommendations from the Empress Theresa, who was said to have found her too beautiful to be allowed to remain within reach of the Emperor Frederick I. Jupiter Carlyle, returning from his studies at Leyden, found himself in the same packet with her, crossing from Helvoet to Harwich. She was disguised in male attire, and this, although traveling un- der the protection of a person who call- ed himself her father, and two other foreigners. Carlyle took the seeming youth for " a Hanoverian Baron com- ing to Britain to pay his court at St. James's." But the lady becoming alarmed by a storm during the pas- sage, her voice, no less than her fears, at once betrayed her to Carlyle. This 118 DAYID GAKBICK. led to an avowal of her profession, and of the object of her journey, and the vouno* handsome Scotchman took care / o not to leave London without seeing his fair fellow-traveler on the Opera stage, where he found her dancing to be " ex- quisite." Such was the general ver- dict. The dancing of those days was not a thing in which every womanly feeling, every refined grace, was vio- lated. It aspired to delight by the poetry of motion, not to amaze by com- plexities of distortion, or brilliant mar- vels of muscular force. Beautiful, modest, accomplished, the Violette not only charmed on the stage, but soon found her way into fashionable society. So early as June, 1746, Horace Walpole writes to his friend Montague : " The fame of the Violette increases daily. The sister Countesses of Burlington and Talbot exert all their stores of sullen partiality and competition for her." The Countess of Burlington took her to live with her, and was in the habit of attending her to the the- atre, and waiting at the side- wings to ' O O throw a shawl over her as she left the stage. These attentions, due solely to the charm of the young lady, and the enthusiasm of her patroness, were quite enough to set in motion the tongues of the Mrs. Candors and Sir Benjamin Backbites of society. The Violette, they began to whisper, was a daughter of Lord Burlington, by a Florentine of rank; and when, upon her marriage with Garrick in 1749, she received a handsome marriage portion from the countess, this was considered conclu- sive evidence of the scandal. It was not, however, from the earl, but from the countess that the dowry came. It consisted of a sum of five thousand pounds, secured on one of her lady- ship's Lincolnshire estates, Garrick on his part settling ten thousand pounds on his bride, with seventy pounds a year of pin-money. It is quite possi- ble that the security for five thousand pounds granted by the countess was simply an equivalent for some such sum previously handed over to her by the young lady. But the parties kept their own counsel in their arrange- ments, and so left the busy-bodies at fault. The countess, it is said, looked higher for her young friend than the great player, as a countess with so cele- brated a beauty in hand was likely to do ; and it was not without difficulty that Garrick won what proved to be the great prize of his life. He had on one occasion to disguise himself as a woman, in order to convey a letter to his mistress. But the fact of her receiv ing it bespeaks the foregone conclusion that he had won her heart ; and, that fact once ascertained, the countess was probably too wise to oppose further resistance. How attractive in person the young dancer was her portraits sur- vive to tell us. What her lover thought of her appears from some verses which he wrote in the first happiness of what we cannot call his honeymoon, for their whole married life was one honeymoon " 'Tis not, my friend, her speaking face, Her shape, her youth, her winning grace, Have reached my heart ; the fair one's mind Quick as her eyes, yet soft and kind A gayety with innocence, A soft address, with manly sense ; Ravishing manners void of art, A cheerful, firm, yet feeling heart, Beauty that charms all public gaze, And humble, amid pomp and praise." DAYID GARRICK. 119 What Garrick owed to the happy cir- cumstances of his marriage, can scarcely be stated too highly. In his home he found all the solace which grace, re- finement, fine intelligence, and entire sympathy could give. As artist, these were invaluable to him; as manager, a man of his sensibilities must have broken down without them. In 1747, two years before his marriage, he had, along with Mr. Lacy, become patentee of Drury Lane Theatre, to which his performances had been confined, with the exception of a second visit to Dub- lin in 1745-6, and a short engagement at Covent Garden in 1746-7. So well had he husbanded his means since his debut at the end of 1741, that he was able, with some help from friends, to find eight thousand pounds of the twelve thousand pounds which were required for the enterprise. Lacy took charge of the business details, while all that related to the performances de- volved upon Garrick. He got together the very best company that could be had, for, to use his own words, he "thought it the interest of the best actors to be together," knowing well, that apart from the great gain in gen- eral effect, this combination brings out all that is best in the actors themselves. At starting, therefore, he drew round him Mrs. Gibber, Mrs. Pritchard, Mrs. Clive, Mrs. Woffington, among the wo- men ; Barry, Macklin, Delane, Havard, Sparks, Shuter, among the men. Later on he secured Quin and Woodward, and, whenever he could, he drew into his com- pany whatever ability was in the mar- ket. He determined to bring back the public taste, if possible, from panto- mime and farce, to performances of a more intellectual stamp. Johnson wrote his fine prologue to announce the principles on which the theatre was to be conducted, and threw upon the public, and with justice, the re sponsibility, should these miscarry, by the well-known lines, "The drama's laws the drama's patrons give, For those, who live to please, must please to live." The public, as usual, fell back after a time upon its love for "inexplicable dumb show and noise," and Garrick had no choice but to indulge its taste. But in these early days the array of varied ability which his company presented, backed by his own genius, filled, as it well might, the theatre nightly. Garrick's sympathies with literature and literary men were very great. He formed a fine library, and not only formed but used it. He was well vers- ed in the literature of Europe, especial- ly of Italy and France. He wrote well himself. His prologues and vers de socie- te are even now pleasant reading. He would turn off one of his prologues or epilogues in two hours. As a rule, an epigram such as his famous one on Goldsmith took him five minutes. There was no man of literary eminence in England with whom he was not on a friendly footing. " It has been the business, and ever will be, of my life," he wrote to Goldsmith in 1757, " to live on the best terms with men of ge- nius." When such men wanted money, his purse was always at their command and in the handsomest way. Sterne, Churchill, Johnson, Goldsmith, Mur- phy, Foote, had many proofs of this helpful sympathy, not to speak of men of lesser note. 120 DAVID GARRICK. " The animated graces of the player," Colley Gibber Las well said, " can live no longer than the instant breath and motion that present them, or at best can but faintly glimmer through the memory or imperfect attestation of a few surviving spectators." There are many descriptions, and good ones, of Garrick's acting ; but the most vivid pen can sketch but faintly even the outlines of an actor's'work, and all the finest touches of his art necessarily perish with the moment. Of Garrick, however, we get some glimpses of a very life-like kind, from the letters of Lichtenberg, the celebrated Hogarthian critic, to his friend Boie. Lichtenberg saw Garrick in the autumn of 1775, when he was about to leave the stage, in Abel Drugger, in Archer in the " Beaux Stratagem," in Sir John Brute in the " Provoked Wife," in Hamlet, in Lusignan in Aaron Hill's version of " Zaire," and in Don Leon in Beau- mont and Fletcher's " Rule a "Wife and Have a Wife." He brought to the task of chronicler powers of observa- tion and a critical faculty scarcely second to Lessing's. " What is it," he writes, " which gives to this man his great superiority ? The causes, my friend, are numerous, and very very much is due to his peculiarly happy organization. . . . In his entire figure, movements, and bearing, Mr. Garrick has a something which I have seen twice in a modified degree among the few Frenchmen I have known, but which I have never met with among the many Englishmen who have come under my notice. In saying this I mean Frenchmen of middle age, and good society, of course. If, for exam- ple, he turns towards any one with an inclination of the person, it is not the head, not the shoulders, not the feet and arms alone, that are employed, but each combines harmoniously to produce a result that is most agreeable and apt to the situation. When he steps upon the stage, though not moved by fear, hope, jealousy, or other emotion, at once you see him and him alone. He walks and bears himself among the other performers like a man among marionettes. From what I have said, no one will form any idea of Mr. Gai rick's deportment, unless he has at some time had his attention arrested by the demeanour of such a well-bred Frenchman as I have indicated, in which case this hint would be the best description. His stature inclines ra- ther to the under than the middle size, and his figure is thickset. His limbs are charmingly proportioned, and the whole man is put together in the neat- est way. The most practiced eye can- not detect a flaw about him, either in details, or in ensemble, or in movement. In the latter one is charmed to observe a rich reserve of power, which, as you are aware, when well indicated, is more agreeable than a profuse expenditure of it. There is nothing flurried, or flaccid, or languid about him, and where other actors in the motion of their arms and legs allow themselves a space of six or more inches on either side of what is graceful, he hits the right thing to a hair, with admirable firmness and certainty. His manner of walking, of shrugging his shoulders, of tucking in his arms, of putting on his hat, at one time pressing it over hia eyes, at another pushing it sideways DAYID GAKEICK. 121 off Ms forehead, all done with an airy motion of the limbs, as though he were all right hand, is consequently refresh- ing to witness. One feels one's self vigorous and elastic, as one sees the vigor and precision of his movements, and how perfectly at ease he seems to be in every muscle of his body. If I mistake not, his compact figure contrib- utes not a little to this effect. His sym- metrically formed limbs taper down- ward from a robust thigh, closing in the neatest foot you can imagine ; and in like manner his muscular arm ta- pers off into a small hand. What ef- fect this must produce you can easily imagine." A description like this, aided by the many admirable portraits which exist, enables us to see the very man, not merely as he appeared on the stage, but also as he moved in the brilliant social circle, which he quickened by the vivacity, the drollery, the gallant tenderness to women, and the kindly wit, which made him, in Goldsmith's happy phrase, " the abridgment of all that is pleasant in man." When Lich- tenberg saw Garrick he was fifty-nine. But with such a man, as Kitty Clive had said of herself and him some years before, " What signifies fifty-nine ? The public had rather see the Garrick and the Clive at a hundred and four than any of the moderns." His was a spirit of the kind that keeps at bay the signs of age. " Gout, stone, and sore throat," as he wrote about this period ; " yet I am in spirits." To the two first of these he had long been a martyr, and sometimes suffered horribly from the exertion of acting. When he had to play Richard, he told Craddock, "I 16 dread the fight and the fall ; I am af- terwards in agonies." But the audi- ence saw nothing of this, nor, in the heat of the performance, was he con- scious of it himself. It is obvious that Lichtenberg at least saw no trace in him of failing power, or of the bodily weakness which had for some time been warning him to retire. He had medi- tated this for several years; but at last, in 1775, his resolution was taken. His illnesses were growing more frequent and more severe. People were beginning to discuss his age in the papers, and, with execrable taste, a public appeal was made to him by Governor Penn to decide a bet which had been made that he was sixty. " As you have so kindly pulled off my mask," he replied, " it is time for me to make my exit." He had accumulated a large fortune. The actors and actresses with whom his greatest triumphs were associated were either dead or in retirement. Their successors, inferior in all ways, were little to his taste. The worries of management, the ceaseless wrang- ling with actors and authors which it involved, fretted him more than ever. He had lived enough for fame, and yearned for freedom and rest. At the end of 1775 he disposed of his in- terest in Drury Lane to Sheridan, Lin- ley, and Ford. " Now," he wrote, " I shall shake off my chains, and no cul- prit in a jail-delivery will be happier." When his resolution to leave the stage was known to be finally taken, there was a rush from all parts, not of England only, but of Europe, to see his last performances. Such were the crowds, that foreigners who had come to England for the purpose were un- 122 DAVID GAEKICK. able to gain admission. While all sorts of grand people were going on their knees to him for a box, with characteristic kindness, he did not for- get his humbler friends. The piece selected for his farewell was " The Wonder ; " and it was an- nounced, with Garrick's usual good taste, simply as a performance for " the benefit of the Theatrical Fund." No gigantic posters, no newspaper puffs clamorously invoked the public inter- est. The town knew only too well what it was going to lose, and every corner of the theatre was crammed. In his zeal for the charity of which he was the founder, and to which this " mean " man contributed over 5000, Garrick had written an occasional Pro- logue, to bespeak the good- will of his audience in its favor. It has all his wonted vivacity and point, and one line "A fellow-feeling makes one wondrous kind " has passed into a household phrase. This he spoke as only he could speak such things. He had entire command of his spirits, and he even thought that he never played Don Felix to more advantage. So, at least, he wrote to Madame Necker eight days afterwards ; but when it came to taking the last farewell, he adds " I not only lost the use of my voice, but of my limbs, too ; it was indeed, as I said, a most awful moment. You would not have thought an English audience void of feeling, if you had then seen and heard them. After I had left the stage, and was dead to them, they would not suffer the petite piece to go on ; nor would the actors perform, they were so affected ; in short, the public was very generous, and I am most grateful." Garrick did not enjoy his retirement long. While on his wonted Christmas visit to the Spencers at Althorpe, in 1778, he was attacked by his old ail- ment. He hurried back to his house in the Adelphi, and, after some days of great pain and prostration, died upon the 20th of January following. His funeral at Westminster Abbey was upon an imposing scale. Among the pall-bearers were Lord Camden, the Duke of Devonshire, Lord Spencer, Viscount Palmerston, and Sir W. W. Wynne, and the members of the Lite- rary Club attended in a body. " I saw old Samuel Johnson," says Cumber- land, "standing beside his grave, at the foot of Shakespeare's monu- ment, and bathed in tears." Johnson wrote of the event afterwards as one that had eclipsed the gayety of nations. In October, 1822, at the extreme age of ninety-eight, Mrs. Garrick was found dead in her chair, having lived in full possession of her faculties to the last. For thirty years she would not suffer the room to be opened in which her husband had died. " He never was a husband to me," she said, in her old age, to a friend ; " during the thirty years of our marriage he was always my lover!" She was buried, in her wedding sheets, at the base of Shake- speare's statue, in the same grave which forty-three years before had closed over her " dear Davie." GEORGE WASHINGTON. THE traditions of the "Washington family in England have been car- ried back to the picturesque era of the early days of the Plantagenets, when the De Wessyngtons did manorial ser- vice in the battle and the chase, to the military Bishop of Durham. Follow- ing these spirited scenes through the fourteenth century to the fifteenth, we have a glimpse of John de Wessyng- ton, a stout, controversial abbot attach- ed to the cathedral. After him, we are called upon to trace the family in the various parts of England, and particu- larly in its branch of Washingtons for so the spelling of the name had now become determined at Sulgrave, in Northamptonshire. They were loy- alists in the Cromwellian era, when Sir Henry gained renown by his defence of Worcester. While this event was quite recent, two brothers of the race, John and Lawrence, emigrated to Vir- ginia in 1657, and established them- selves as planters, in Westmoreland county, bordering on the Potomac and Rappahannock, in the midst of a dis- trict destined to produce many emi- nent men for the service of a State then undreamt of. One of these broth- ers, John, a colonel in the Virginia service, was the grandfather of Augus- tine, who married Mary Ball, the belle of the county, and became the parent of George Washington. The family home was on Bridges' Creek, near the banks of the Potomac, where, the old- est of six children by this second mar- riage of his father, the illustrious sub- ject of our sketch was born on the twenty-second of February, 1732. Augustine Washington was the own- er of several estates in this region of the two rivers, to one of which, on the Rappahannock, in Stafford County, he removed shortly after his son's birth, and there the boy received his first im- pressions. He was not destined to be much indebted to schools or school-mas- ters. His father, indeed, was not in- sensible to the advantages of education, since, according to the custom of those days with wealthy planters, he had sent Lawrence, his oldest son by his previous marriage, to be educated in England; an opportunity which was not given him in the case of George ; for before the boy was of an age to leave home on such a journey, the father was suddenly taken out of the world by an attack of gout. This event happened in April, 1743, when George was lefi (123) 124: GEORGE WASHINGTON. to the guardianship of his mother. The honest merits of Mary, " the mother of Washington," have often been matters of comment. All that is preserved of this lady, who survived her husband forty-six years, and of course lived to witness the matured triumphs of her son he was seated in the Presidential chair when she died bears witness to her good sense and simplicity, the plainness and sincerity of her house- hold virtues. The domestic instruction of Wash- ington was of the best and purest. He had been early indoctrinated in the rudiments of learning, in the "field school," by a village pedagogue, named Hobby, one of his father's tenants, who joined to his afflictive calling the more melancholy profession of sexton a shabby member of the race of instruc- tors, who in his old age kept up the association by getting patriotically fud- dled on his pupils' birth-days. The boy could have learnt little there which was not better taught at home. Indeed we find his mother inculcating the best precepts. In addition to the Scriptures and the lessons of the Church, which always form the most important part of such a child's education, she had a book of excellent wisdom, as the event proved, especially suitable for the guidance of her son's future life, in Sir Matthew Hale's " Contemplations, Moral and Divine " a book written by one who had attained high public dis- tinction, and who tells the secret of his worth and success. The very volume out of which Washington was thus taught by his mother is preserved at Mount Vernon. He had, however, some limited school instruction with a Mr. Williams, whom he attended from hia half brother, Augustine's home, in Westmoreland, and from whom he learnt a knowledge of accounts, in which he was always skilful. He had also particular instructions from Mr. Williams in geometry, trigonometry, and surveying, in which he became an adept, writing out his examples in the neatest and most careful manner. This was a branch of instruction more im- portant to him than Latin and Greek ; of which he was taught nothing, and one that he turned to account through life. All the school instruction which Washington received was thus com- pleted before he was sixteen. On leaving school, young Washing- ton appears to have taken up his resi- dence with his brother at Mount Ver- non, where he was introduced to new social influences of a liberal character in the family society of the Fairfaxes Lawrence was married to a daughter of William Fairfax, a gentleman of much experience and adventure about the world, who resided at his neigh- boring seat " Belvoir," on the Potomac, and superintended, as agent, the large landed operations of his cousin, Lord Fairfax. Surveys were to be made to keep possession of the lands, and bring them into the market ; and who so well adapted for this service as the youth who had made the science an object of special study ? We consequently find him regularly retained in this service. His journal, at the age of sixteen, re- mains to tell us of the duties and ad- ventures of the journey, as he travers- ed the outlying rough ways and pas- sages of the South Branch of the Potomac. It is a short record of camp GEOKGE WASHINGTON. 125 incidents and -the progress of his sur- veys for a month in the wilderness, in the spring of 1748, the prelude, in its introduction to Indians and the expos- ares of camp life, to many rougher scenes of military service, stretching westward from the region. Three years were passed in expedi- tions of this nature, the young survey- or making his home in his intervals of duty mostly at Mount Vernon. The health of his brother, the owner of this place, to whom he was much attached, was now failing with consumption, and George accompanied him in one of his tours for health in the autumn of 1751, to Barbadoes. As usual, he kept a journal of his observations, which tells us of the every-day living and hospitalities of the place, with a shrewd glance at its agricultural resources and the conduct of its governor. A few lines cover nearly a month of the visit ; they record an attack of the small-pox, of which his countenance always bore some faint traces. Leaving his brother, par- tially recruited, to pursue his way to Bermuda, George returned in February to Virginia. The health of Lawrence, however, continued to decline, and in the ensuing summer he died at Mount Vernon. The estate was left to a daughter, who, dying in infancy, the property passed, according to the terms of the will, into the possession of George, who thus became the owner of his mem- orable home. Previous to this time, rumors of im- minent French and Indian aggressions on the frontier began to engage the at- tention of the colony, and preparations were making to resist the threatened O attack. The province was divided in- to districts for enlistment and organi- zation of the militia, over one of which Washington was placed, with the rank of major, in 1751, when he was but nine- teen a mark of confidence sustained by his youthful studies and experience, but in which his family influence, doubt- less, had its full share. We hear of his attention to military exercises at Mount Vernon, and of some special hints and instructions from one Adjutant Ware, a Virginian, and a Dutchman, Jacob Van Braam, who gave him lessons in fencing. Both of these worthies had been the military companions of Law- rence Washington in the West Indies. In 1753, the year following his brother's death, the affairs on the fron- tier becoming pressing, Governor Din- widdie stood in need of a resolute agent, to bear a message to the French commander on the Ohio, remonstrating against the advancing occupation of the territory. It was a hazardous ser- vice crossing a rough, intervening wil- derness, occupied by unfriendly Indi- ans, and it was a high compliment to Washington to select him for the duty. Amply provided with instructions, he left William sburg on the mission on the last day of October, and, by the middle of November, reached the ex treme frontier settlement at Will's Creek. Thence, with his little party of eight, he pursued his way to the fork of the Ohio, where, with a military eye, he noted the advantageous posi- tion subsequently selected as the site of Fort Du Quesne, and now the flour- ishing city of Pittsburg. He then held a council of the Indians at Logstown, and procured guides to the station oi the French commandant, a hundred 126 GEORGE WASHINGTON. and twenty miles distant, in the vicin- ity of Lake Erie, which he reached on the llth of December. An interview having been obtained, the message de- livered and an answer received, the most hazardous part of the expedition yet lay before the party in their return home. They were exposed to frozen streams, the winter inclemencies, the perils of the wilderness and Indian hostilities, when Indian hostilities were most cruel. To hasten his homeward journey, Washington separated from the rest, with a single companion. His life was more than once in danger on the way, first from the bullet of an In- dian, and during a night of extraordi- nary severity, in crossing the violent Alleghany river on a raft beset with ice. Escaping these disasters, he reached Williamsburg on the 16th of January, and gave the interesting journal now included in his writings as the report of his proceedings. It was at once published by the Governor, and was speedily reprinted in London. The observations of Washington, and the reply which he brought, confirmed the growing impressions of the designs of the French, and military prepara- tions were kept up with spirit. A Virginia regiment of three hundred was raised for frontier service, and Washington was appointed its Lieu- tenant-Colonel. Advancing with a portion of the force of which he had command, he learnt that the French were in the field, and had commenced hostilities. Watchful of their move- ments, he fell in with a party under Jumonville, in the neighborhood of the Great Meadows, which he put to flight with the death of their leader. His own superior officer having died on the march, the entire command fell upon Washington, who was also joined by some additional troops from South Carolina and New York. With these he was on his way to attack Fort Du Quesne, when word was brought of a large superior force of French and In- dians coming against him. This in- telligence led him, in his unprepared state, to retrace his steps to Fort Ne cessity, at the Great Meadows, where he received the attack. The fort was gallantly defended both within and without, Washington commanding in front, and it was not until serious loss had been inflicted on the assailants that it surrendered to superior num- bers. In the capitulation the garrison was allowed to return home with the honors of war. A second time the Le- gislature of Virginia thanked her re- turning officer. The military career of Washington was now for a time interrupted by a question of etiquette. An order was issued in favor of the officers holding the king's commission outranking the provincial appointments. Washington, who knew the worth of his countrymen, and the respect due himself, would not submit to this injustice, and the estate of Mount Vernon now requiring his attention, he withdrew from the army to its rural occupations. He was not, however, suffered to remain there long in inactivity. The arrival of General Braddock, with his forces, in the river", called him into action at the summons of that officer, who was attracted by his experience and accomplishments. Washington, anxious to serve his coun- try, readily accepted an appointment as GEOKGE WASHINGTON. 127 one of the general's military family, the question of rank being thus dis- pensed with. He joined the army on its onward march at "Winchester, and proceeded with it, though he had been taken ill with a raging fever, to the Great Crossing of the Youghiogany. Here he was compelled to remain with the rear of the army, by the positive injunctions of the general, from whom he exacted his " word of honor " that he " should be brought up before he reached the French fort." This he ac- complished, though he was too ill to make the journey on horseback, arriv- ing at the mouth of the Youghiogany, in the immediate vicinity of the fatal battle-field, the evening before the en- gagement. In the events of that me- morable 9th of July, 1755, he was des- tined to bear a conspicuous part. From, the beginning, he had been a prudent counsellor of the general on the march, and it was by his advice that some of its urgent difficulties had been over- come. He advised pack-horses instead of baggage-wagons, and a rapid ad- vance with an unencumbered portion of the force before the enemy at Fort Du Quesne could gain strength; but Braddock, a brave, confident officer of the European school, resolutely ad- dicted to system, was unwilling or uii- able fully to carry out the suggestions. Had Washington held the command, it is but little to say that he would not have been caught in an ambuscade. It was his last advice, on arriving at the scene on the eve of the battle, that the Virginia Rangers should be employed as a scouting party, rather than the regular troops in the advance. The proposition was rejected. The next day, though still feeble from his ill- ness, Washington mounted his horse and took his station as aid to the gen- eral. It was a brilliant display, as the well-appointed army passed under the eye of its martinet commander on its way from the encampment, crossing and recrossing the Monongahela to- wards Fort Du Quesne and the sol- dierly eye of Washington is said to have kindled at the sight. The march had continued from sunrise till about two o'clock in the afternoon, when, as the advanced column was ascending a rising ground covered with trees, a fire was opened upon it from two concealed ravines on either side. Then was felt the want of American experience in fighting with the Indian. Braddock in vain sent forward his men. They would not, or could not, fight against a hidden foe, while they themselves were presented in open view to the marksmen. Washington recommended the Virginia example of seeking pro- tection from the trees, but the general would not even then abandon his Eu- ropean tactics. The regulars stood in squads shooting their own companions before them. The result was an over- whelming defeat, astounding when the relative forces and equipment of the two parties is considered. Braddock, who, amidst all his faults, did not lack courage, directed his men while five horses were killed under him. Wash- ington was also in the thickest of the danger, losing two horses, while his clothes were pierced by four bullets. Many years afterwards, when he visited the region on a peaceful mission, an old Indian came to see him as a won- der. He had, he said, levelled his rifle 128 GEORGE WASHINGTON. so often at him without effect, that he became persuaded he was under the special protection of the Great Spirit, and gave up the attempt. Braddock at length fell in the centre of the field fatally wounded. Nothing now re- mained but flight. But four officers out of eighty-six were left alive and unwounded. Washington's first care was for the wounded general; his next employment, to ride to the reserve camp of D unbar, forty miles, for aid and supplies. Returning with the re- quisite assistance, he met the wounded Braddock on the retreat. Painfully borne along the road, he survived the engagement several days, and reached the Great Meadows to die and be buried there by the broken remnant of his army. Washington read the fune- ral service, the chaplain being disabled by a wound. Writing to his brother, he attributed his own protection, " be- yond all human probability or expect- ation," to the "all-powerful dispensa- tions of Providence." The natural and pious sentiment was echoed, shortly after, from the pulpit of the excellent Samuel Davies, in Hanover County, Virginia. " I may point," said he, in illustration of his patriotic purpose of encouraging new recruits for the ser- vice, in words since that time often pronounced prophetic, " to that heroic youth, Colonel Washington, w T hom I cannot but hope Providence has hither- to preserved in so signal a manner for some important service to his country." The public attention of the province was now turned to Washington, as the best defender of the soil. His volun- tary service had expired, but he was still engaged as adjutant, in directing the levies from his residence at Mount Vernon, whence the Legislature soon called him to the. chief command of the Virginia forces. He stipulated for thorough activity and discipline in the whole service, and accepted the office. The defence of the country, exposed to the fierce severities of savage warfare, was in his hands. He set the posts in order, organized forces, rallied recruits, and appealed earnestly to the Assem- bly for vigorous means of relief. It was again a lesson for his after life when a greater foe was to be pressing our more extended frontiers under his care, and the reluctance or weakness of the Virginia Legislature was to be reproduced, in an exaggerated form, in the imbecility of Congress. We shall thus behold Washington, everywhere the patient child of experience, unwea- riedly conning his lesson, learning, from actual life, the statesman's knowl- edge of man and affairs. He was sent into this school of the world early, for he was yet but twenty-three, when this guardianship of the State was placed upon his shoulders. We find him again jealous of autho- rity in the interests of the service. A certain Captain Dagworthy, in a small command at Fort Cumberland, refused obedience to orders, asserting his privi- lege as a royal officer of the late cam- paign, and the question was ultimately referred to General Shirley, the coin- mander-in-chief at Boston. Thither Washington himself carried his appeal, making his journey on horseback in the midst of winter, and had his view of his superior authority confirmed. Returning immediately to Virginia, Colonel Washington continued hi a GEORGE WASHINGTON. 129 employment in active military duties, struggling not less with the inefficient Assembly at home, whom he tried to arouse, than with the enemy abroad. It was a trying service, in which the commander, spite of every hardship, which he freely encountered, was sure to meet the reproach of the suffering public. The disinterested conduct of Washington proved no exception to the rule. He even experienced the in- gratitude of harsh newspaper com- ments, and thought for the moment of resignation ; but his friends, the noblest spirits in the colony, reassured him of their confidence, and he steadily went on. The arrival of Lord Loudoun, as commander-in-chief of his majesty's forces, seemed to offer some opportu- nity for more active operations, and Washington drew up a memorial of the affairs he had in charge for his in- struction, and met him in conference at Philadelphia. Little, however, re- sulted from these negotiations for the relief of Virginia, and Washing- ton, exhausted by his labors, was com- pelled to seek retirement at Mount Vernon, where he lay for some time prostrated by an attack of fever. In the next spring, of -1758, he was enabled to resume his command. The Virginia troops took the field, joined to the forces of the British general, Forbes, and the year, after various dis- astrous movements, which might have been better directed had the counsels of Washington prevailed, was signal- ized by the capture of Fort Du Quesne. Washington, with his Virginians, tra- versed the ground whitened with the bones of his former comrades in Brad- dock's expedition, and with his entry 17 of the fort closed the French dominion on the Ohio. The war had taken another direction, on the Canadian frontier in New York, and Virginia was left in repose. Shortly after this event, in January, 1759, Washington was married to Mrs. Martha Custis, of the White House, county of New Kent. This lady, born in the same year with himself, and conse- quently in the full bloom of youthful womanhood, at twenty-seven, was the widow of a wealthy landed proprietor whose death had occurred three years before. Her maiden name was Dan dridge, and she was of Welsh descent. The prudence and gravity of her dis- position eminently fitted her to be the wife of Washington. She was her husband's sole executrix, and managed the complicated affairs of the estates which he had left, involving the raising of crops and sale of them in Europe, with ability. Her personal charms, too, in these days of her widowhood, are highly spoken of. The honeymoon was the inauguration of a new and pacific era of Washington's hitherto troubled military life. Yet even this repose proved the introduction to new public duties. With a sense of the obligations befitting a Virginia gentle- man, Washington had offered himself to the suffrages of his fellow country men at Winchester, and been elected a member of the House of Burgesses. About the time of his marriage, he took his seat, when an incident occur- red which has been often narrated. The Speaker, by a vote of the House, having been directed to return thanks to him for his eminent military ser- vices, at once performed the duty with 130 GEOEGE WASHINGTON. wannth and eloquence. "Washington rose to express his thanks, but, never soluble before the public, became too embarrassed to utter a syllable. " Sit down, Mr. Washington," was the courteous relief of the gentleman who had addressed him, "your modesty equals your valor, and that surpasses the power of any language I possess." He continued a member of the House, diligently attending to its business till he was called to the work of the Revolution, in this way adding to his experiences in war, familiarity with the practical duties of a legislator and statesman. Fifteen years had been quietly passed at Mount Vernon, when the peace of provincial life began to be ruffled by a new agitation. France had formerly furnished the stirring theme of opposition and resistance when America poured out her best blood at the call of British statesmen, and helped to restore the falling great- ness of England. That same parlia- ment which had been so wonderfully revived when America seconded the call of Chatham, was now to inflict an insupportable wound upon her defend- ers. The seeds of the Revolution must be looked for in the previous war with France. There and then America be- came acquainted with her own powers, and the strength and weakness of British soldiers and placemen. To no one had the lesson been better taught than to Washington. By no one was it studied with more impartiality. There was no faction in his opposition. The traditions of his family, his friends, the provinces, were all in favor of allegi- ance to the British government. He had nothing in his composition of the disorganizing mind of a mere political agitator, a breeder of discontent. The interests of his large landed estates, and a revenue dependent upon exports, bound him to the British nation. But there was one principle in his nature stronger in its influence than all these material ties the love of justice ; and when Patrick Henry rose in the House of Burgesses, with his eloquent asser- tion of the rights of the colony in the matter of taxation, Washington was there in his seat to respond to the sentiment. To this memorable occasion, on the 29th May, 1765, has been referred the birth of that patriotic fervor in the mind of Washington, welcoming as it was developed a new order of things, which never rested till the liberties of the country were established on the firmest foundations of independence and civil order. He took part in the local Virginia resolutions, and on the meeting of the first Congress, in Phila- delphia went up to that honored body with Patrick Henry and Edmund Pen- dleton. He was at this time a firm, unyielding maintainer of the rights in controversy, and fully prepared for any issue which might grow out of them ; but he was no revolutionist for it was not in the nature of his mind to consider a demand for justice a provo- cative to war. Again, in Virginia after the adjournment of Congress, in the important Convention at Rich- mond, he listens to the impetuous elo- quence of Patrick Henry. It was this body which set on foot a popular mili tary organization in the colony, and Washington, who had previously given GEORGE WASHINGTON. his aid to the independent companies, was a member of the committee to re- port the plan. A few days later, he writes to his brother, John Augustine, who was employed in training a com- pany, that he would " very cheerfully accept the honor of commanding it, if occasion require it to be drawn out." The second Continental Congress, of which Washington was also a member, met at Philadelphia in May, 1775, its members gathering to the deliberations with throbbing hearts, the musketry of Lexington ringing in their ears. The overtures of war by the British troops in Massachusetts had gathered a little provincial army about Boston ; a national organization was a measure no longer of choice, but of necessity. A commander-in-chief was to be ap- pointed, and though the selection was not altogether free from local jealousies, the superior merit of Washington was seconded by the superior patriotism of the Congress, and on the 15th of June he was unanimously elected by ballot to the high position. His modesty in accepting the office was as noticeable as his fitness for it. He was not the man to flinch from any duty, because it was hazardous; but it is worth knowing, that we may form a due esti- mate of his character, that he felt to the quick the full force of the sacrifices of ease and happiness that he was making, and the new difficulties he was inevitably to encounter. He was so impressed with the probabilities of failure, and so little disposed to vaunt his own powers, that he begged gen- tlemen in the House to remember, " lest some unlucky event should happen un- favorable to his reputation," that he thought himself, " with the utmost sin- cerity, unequal to the command he was honored with." With a manly spirit of patriotic independence, worthy the highest eulogy, he declared his inten- tion to keep an exact account of his public expenses, and accept nothing more for his services a resolution which was faithfully kept to the let- ter. With these disinterested prelim- inaries, he proceeded to Cambridge, and took command of the army on the 3d of July. Bunker Hill had been fought, establishing the valor of the native militia, and the leaguer of Bos- ton was already formed, though with inadequate forces. There was excel- lent individual material in the men, but everything was to be done for their organization and equipment. Above all, there was an absolute want of powder. It was impossible to make- any serious attempt upon the British in Boston, but the utmost heroism was shown in cutting off their resources and hemming them in. Humble as were these inefficient means in the present, the prospect of the future was darkened by the short enlistments of the army, which were made only for the year, Congress expecting in that time a favorable answer to their second petition to the king. The new recruits came in slowly, and means were feebly supplied, but Washington, bent on ac- tion, determined upon an attack. For this purpose, he took possession of and fortified Dorchester Heights, and pre- pared to assail the town. The British were making an attempt to dislodge him, which was deferred by a storm; and General Howe, having already re- solved to evacuate the city, a few d aye 132 GEORGE WASHINGTON. after, on the 17th of March, inglori- ously sailed away with his troops to Halifax. The next day, Washington entered the town in triumph. Thus ended the first epoch of his revolution- ary campaigns. There had been little opportunity for brilliant action, but great difficulties had been overcome with a more honorable persistence, and a substantial benefit had been gained. The full extent of the services of Wash- ington became known only to his pos- terity, since it was absolutely neces- sary at the time to conceal the difficul- ties under which he labored ; but the country saw and felt enough to extol his fame and award him an honest meed of gratitude. A special vote of Congress gave expression to the senti- ment, and a gold medal, bearing the head of Washington, and on the re- verse the legend Hostibus primo fu- gatis, was ordered by that body to commemorate the event. We must now follow the commander rapidly to another scene of operations, remembering that any detailed notice, however brief, of Washington's mili- tary operations during the war, would expand this biographical sketch into a historical volume. New York was evi- dently to be the next object of attack, and thither Washington gathered his forces, and made every available means of defence on land. By the beginning of July, when the Declaration of Inde- pendence was received in camp, Gene- ral Howe had made his appearance in the lower bay from Halifax, where he was speedily joined by his brother, Lord Howe, the admiral, who came bearing ineffectual propositions for re- concilation. Additional reinforcements to the royal troops on Staten Island arrived from England ; a landing waa made by the well-equipped army on Long Island, and a battle was immi nent. Washington, who had his head quarters in New York, made vigilant preparations around the city, and at the works on Long Island, which had been planned and fortified by General Greene. This officer, unfortunately falling ill, the command fell to General Putnam, who was particularly charged by Washington with instructions for the defence of the passes by which the enemy might approach. These were neglected, an attack was made from opposite sides, and in spite of much valiant fighting on the part of the va- rious defenders, who contended with fearful odds, the day was most disas- trous to the Americans. The slaughter was great on this 27th of August, and many prisoners, including General Sul livan and Lord Stirling, were taken. Still the main works at Brooklyn, occu pied by the American troops, remained, though, exposed as they were to the enemy's fleet, they were no longer ten- able. Washington, whose duties kept him in the city to be ready for its de fence, as soon as he heard of the en gagement, hastened to the spot, but it was too late to turn the fortunes of the day. He was compelled to witness the disaster, tradition tells us, not with- out the deepest emotion. But it was the glory of Washington to save the remnant of the army by a retreat more memorable than the vic- tory of General Clinton. The day after the battle, and the next were passed without any decisive movements on the part of the British, who were GEOPvGE WASHINGTON. 133 about bringing up their ships, and who, doubtless, as they had good reason, considered their prey secure. On the twenty - ninth, Washington took his measures for the retreat, and so per- fectly were they arranged, that the whole force of nine thousand, with ar- tillery, horses, and the entire equipage of war, were borne off that night, under cover of the fog, to the opposite shore in triumph. It was a most masterly operation, planned and superintended by Washington from the beginning. He did not sleep or rest after the bat- tle till it was executed, and was among the last to cross. After the battle of Long Island, there had been little but weariness and disaster, in the movements of Wash- ington, to the end of the year, when, as the forces of Howe were apparently closing in upon him to open the route to Philadelphia, he turned in very despair, and by the brilliant affair at Trenton retarded the motions of the enemy and checked the growing de- spondency of his countrymen. It was well planned and courageously under- taken. Christmas night, of a most inclement, wintry season, when the river was blocked with ice, was chosen to cross the Delaware, and attack the British and Hessians on the opposite side at Trenton. The expedition was led by Washington in person, who anxiously watched the slow process of the transportation on the river, which lasted from sunset till near the dawn too long for the contemplated surprise by night. A storm of hail and snow now set in, as the general advanced with his men, reaching the outposts about eight o'clock. A gallant onset was made, in which Lieut. Monroe, afterwards the President, was wounded ; Sullivan and the other officers, accord ing to a previously arranged plan, seconded the movement from another part of the town ; the Hessians were disconcerted, and their general, E-ahl, slain, when a surrender was made, nearly a thousand prisoners laying down their arms. General Howe, astonished at the event, sent out Corn- wallis in pursuit, and he had his game seemingly secure, when Washington, in front of him at Trenton, on the same side of the Delaware, made a bold diversion in an attack on the forces left behind at Princeton. It was, like the previous one, conducted by night, and, like the other, was at- tended with success, though it cost the life of the gallant Mercer. After these brilliant actions the little army took up its quarters at Morristown for the winter. In the spring, General Howe mad* some serious attempts at breaking up the line of Washington in New Jersey, but he was foiled, and compelled to seek another method of reaching Phila- delphia. The withdrawal of the Brit- ish troops would thus have left a simple course to be pursued on the Delaware, had not the attention of Washington been called in another direction by the advance of Burgoyne from Canada. It was natural to suppose that Howe would act in concert with that officer on the Hudson, nor was Washington relieved from the dilemma till intelli- gence reached him that the British general had embarked his forces, and was actually at the Capes of the Dela- ware. He then took up a position at 134 GEOKGE WASHINGTON. Gennantown for the defence of Phila- delphia. Howe, meanwhile, the summer hav- ino- passed away in these uncertainties, was slowly making his way up the Chesapeake to the Head of Elk, to gain access to Philadelphia from Mary- land, and the American army was ad- vanced to meet him. The British troops numbered' about eighteen thousand ; the Americans, perhaps two-thirds of that number. A stand was made by the latter at Chad's Ford, on the east side of the Brandy wine, to which Kny- phausen was opposed on the opposite bank, while Cornwallis, with a large division, took the upper course of the river, and turned the flank of the po- sition. General Sullivan was intrusted with this portion of the defence ; but time was lost, in the uncertainty of information, in meeting the movement, a.nd when the parties met, Cornwallis had greatly the advantage. A rout ensued, which was saved from utter defeat by the resistance of General Greene, who was placed at an ad- vantageous point. Lafayette was severely wounded in the leg in the course of the conflict. Washington was not dismayed by the disaster ; on the contrary, he kept the field, mar- shalling and manoeuvring through a hostile country, one thousand of his troops, as he informed Congress, actu- ally barefoot. He would have offered battle, but he was without the means to resist effectually the occupation of Philadelphia. A part of the enemy's forces were stationed at Germantown, a few miles from the city. Washing- ton, considering them in an exposed situation, planned a surprise. It was well arranged, and at the outset was successful ; but, owing to the confusion in the heavy fog of the October morn- ing, and loss of strength and time in attacking a strongly defended man- sion at the entrance of the village, what should have been a brilliant vic- tory was changed into a partial defeat. The encampment at Valley Forge succeeded the scenes we have describ- ed. Half clad, wanting frequently the simplest clothing, without shoes or blankets, the army was hutted in the snows and ice of that inclement win- ter. Yet they had Washington with them urging every means for their welfare, while his " lady," as his wife was always called in the army, came from Mount Vernon, as was her custom during these winter encampments, to lighten the prevailing despondency. Washington, meanwhile, was busy with a Committee of Congress in put- ting the army on a better foundation. With the return of summer came the evacuation of Philadelphia by the Brit- ish, who were pursuing their route across New Jersey to embark on the waters of New York. Washington with his forces was watching their movements from above. Shall he at- tack them on their march ? There was a division of opinion among his officers. The equivocal Charles Lee, then unsus- pected, was opposed to the step ; but Washington, with his best advisers, Greene, Lafayette, and Wayne, was in favor of it. He accordingly sent La- fayette forward, when Lee interposed, and claimed the command of the ad- vance. Washington himself moved on with the reserve towards the enemy's position near Moninouth Court House GEOEGE WASHINGTON. 135 to take part in the fortunes of the day, the 28th of June. As he was proceed- ing, he was met by the intelligence that Lee was in full retreat, without notice or apparent cause, endangering the or- der of the rear, and threatening the utmost confusion. Presently he came upon Lee himself, and demanded from him with an emphasis roused by the fiercest indignation and the anger of Washington when excited was terrific the cause of the disorder. Lee re- plied angrily, and gave such explana- tion as he could of a superior force, when Washington, doubtless mindful of his previous conduct, answered him with dissatisfaction, and it is said, on the authority of Lafayette, ended by calling the retreating general "a damned poltroon."* It was a great day for the genius of Washington. He made his arrangements on the spot to retrieve the fortunes of the hour, and so admirable were the dispositions, and so well was he seconded by the bravery of officers and men, even Lee redeem- ing his character by his valor, that at the close of that hot and weary day, the Americans having added greatly to the glory of their arms, remained at least equal masters of the field. The next morning it was found that Sir Henry Clinton had withdrawn towards Sandy Hook. The remainder of the season was passed by Washington on the eastern borders of the Hudson, in readiness to co-operate with the French, who had now arrived under D'Estaing, and in watching the British in New York. In December he took up his winter quarters at Middlebrook, in New * Dawson's L 408 Battles of the United States. Jersey. The event of the next year in the little army of Washington, was Wayne's gallant storming of Stony Point, on the Hudson, one of the de- fences of the Highlands, which had been recently captured and manned by Sir Henry Clinton. The attack on the night of the 15th July was planned by Washington, and his directions in his instructions to Wayne, models of careful military precision, were faithfully car- ried out. Henry Lee's spirited attack on Paulus Hook, within sight of New York, followed, to cheer the encamp- ment of Washington, who now busied himself in fortifying West Point. Win- ter again finds the army in quarters in New Jersey, this time at Morristown, when the hardships and severities of Valley Forge were even exceeded in the distressed condition of the troops in that rigorous season. The main inci- dents of the war are henceforth at the South. The most prominent event in the personal career of Washington, of the year 1780, is certainly the defection of Arnold, with its attendant execution of Major Andre. This unhappy trea- son was every way calculated to enlist his feelings, but he suffered neither hate nor sympathy to divert him from the considerate path of duty. We may not pause over the subsequent events of the war, the renewed exertions of Congress, the severe contests in the South, the meditated movement upon New York the following year, but must hasten to the sequel at Yorktown. The movement of the army of Washington to Virginia was determined by the ex- pected arrival of the French fleot in that quarter from the West Indies L36 GEORGE WASHINGTON. Lafayette was already on the spot, where he had been engaged in the de- fence of the country from the inroads of Arnold and Phillips. Cornwallis had arrived from the South, and un- suspicious of any serious opposition was entrenching himself on York River. It was all that could be desired, and Washington, who had been planning an attack upon New York with Ro- chambeau, now suddenly and secretly directed his forces by a rapid march southward. Extraordinary exertions were made to expedite the troops. The timely arrival of Colonel John Lawrens, from France, with an instal- ment of the French loan in specie, came to the aid of the liberal efforts of the financier of the revolution, Rob- ert Morris. Lafayette, with the Vir- ginians, was hedging in the fated Corn- wallis. Washington had just left Phi- ladelphia, when he heard the joyous news of the arrival of De Grasse in the Chesapeake. He hastened on to the scene of action in advance of the troops, with De Rochambeau, gaining time to pause at Mount Vernon, which he had not seen since the opening of the war, and enjoy a day's hurried hospitality with his French officers at the welcome mansion. Arrived at Williamsburg, Washington urged on the military movements with the en- ergy of anticipated victory. "Hurry on, then, my dear sir," he wrote to General Lincoln, " with your troops on the wings of speed." To make the last arrangements with the French admiral, he visited him in his ship, at the mouth of James' River. Everything was to be done before succor could arrive from the British fleet and troops at New York. The combined French and American forces closed in upor Yorktown, which was fortified by re- doubts and batteries, and on the 1st of October, the place was completely invested. The first parallel was opened on the 6th. Washington lighted the first gun on the 9th. The storming of two annoying redoubts by French and American parties were set down for the night of the 14th. Hamilton, at the head of the latter, gallantly car- ried one of the works at the point of the bayonet without firing a shot. Washington watched the proceeding at imminent hazard. The redoubts gain- ed were fortified and turned against the town. The second parallel was ready to open its fire. Cornwallis vainly attempted to escape with his forces across the river. He received no relief from Sir Henry Clinton, at New York, and on the 17th he pro- posed a surrender. On the 19th, the terms having been dictated by Wash- ington, the whole British force laid down their arms. It was the virtual termination of the war, the crowning act of a vast series of military opera- tions planned and perfected by the genius of Washington. In the beginning of November, 1783, when the last arrangements of peace had been perfected, he took leave of the army in an address from head- quarters, with his accustomed warmth and emotion, and on the 25th, entered New York at the head of a military and civic procession as the British evacuated the city. On the 4th of December, he was escorted to the har- bor on his way to Congress, at An- napolis, to resign his command, aftei GEOEGE WASHINGTON. 137 a touching scene of farewell with his officers at Fraunces' Tavern, when the great chieftain did not disdain the sensibility of a tear and the kiss of his friends. Arrived at Annapolis, having on the way delivered to the proper officer at Philadelphia his ac- counts of his expenses during the war, neatly written out by his own hand, on the 23d of the month he restored his commission to Congress, with a few remarks of great felicity, in which he commended " the interests of our dear- est country to the protection of Al- mighty God ; and those who have the superintendence of them to His holy keeping." At the treaty of peace Washington was fifty-one, and had gloriously dis- charged the duties of two memorable eras the war with France and the war with Great Britain ; a third ser- vice to his country remained, her di- rection in the art of government in the formation of the Constitution. Many ministered to that noble end, but who more anxiously, more perse- veringly, than Washington ? His au- thority carried the heart and intelli- gence of the country with it, and most appropriately was he placed at the head of the Convention, in 1787, which gave a government to the scattered States and made America a nation. Once more he was called to listen to the highest demands of his country in his unanimous election to the presi- dency. With what emotions, with what humble resignation to the voice of duty, with how little fluttering of vainglory let the modest entry, in his diary, of the 16th of April, 1789, tell: u About ten o'clock," he writes, "I bade 18 adieu to Mount Vernon, to private life and to domestic felicity ; and with a mind oppressed with more anxious and painful sensations than I have words to express, set out for New York with the best disposition to render service to my country in obedience to its call, but with less hope of answering its expectations." His inauguration took place in that city on the 30th of April. Parties were soon at work in the gov- ernment the conservative and the progressive, such as will always arise in human institutions represented in the administration by the rival states- men, Hamilton and Jefferson; but Washington honestly recognized no guide but the welfare of his country, and the rising waves of faction beat harmlessly beneath his presidential chair. As the close of his second ad- ministration, to which he had been chosen with no dissentient voice, ap- proached, he turned his thoughts eager- ly to Mount Vernon for a few short years of repose ; and well had he earn- ed them by his long series of services to his country. He would have been welcomed for a third term, but office had no temptation to divert him front his settled resolution. Yet he parted fondly with the nation, and like a pa- rent, desired to leave some legacy oi council to his country. Accordingly, he published in September, 1796, in the Daily Advertiser, in Philadelphia, the paper known as his Farewell Address to the People of the United States. It had long engaged his attention ; he had planned it himself, and, careful of what he felt might be a landmark for ages, had consulted Jay, Madison and Ham- ilton in its composition. The spirit 138 GEORGE WASHINGTON. and sentiment, the political wisdom and patriotic fervor were every whit his own. Then, once again, Mount Vernon re- ceived her son, destined never long to repose unsolicited by his country. France, pursuing her downward course, adopted an aggressive policy towards the nation, which the most conciliating leference could no longer support. A state of quasi war existed, and actual war was imminent. The President looked to Washington to organize the army and take the command, should it be brought into action, and he accord- ingly busied himself in the necessary preparations. It was best, he thought, to be prepared for the worst while looking for the best. New negotia- tions were then opened, but he did not live to witness their pacific results. He was at his home at Mount Vernon, in- tent on public affairs, and making his rounds in his usual farm occupations, with a vigor and hardihood which had abated little for his years, when, on the 12th of December, he suffered some considerable exposure from a storm of snow and rain which came 'm while he was out, and in which he continued his ride. It proved, the next day, that he had taken cold, but he made light of it, and passed his usual evening cheerfully with the family circle. He became worse during the night with inflammation of the throat. He was seriously ill. Having sent for his old army surgeon, Dr. Craik, he was bled by his overseer and again on the arrival of the phy sician. All was of no avail, and he calmly prepared to die. "I am not afraid," said he, "to go," while with ever thoughtful courtesy he thanked his friends and attendants for their little attentions. Thus the day wore away, till ten in the night, when his end was fast approaching. He noticed the failing moments, his last act being to place his hand upon his pulse, and calmly expired. It was the 14th of December, 1799. His remains were interred in the grave on the bank at Mount Vernon, in front of his resi- dence, and there, in no long time, ac- cording to her prediction at the mo- ment of his death, his wife, Martha, whose miniature he always wore OD his breast, was laid beside him. MADAME D'ARBLAY. ly/TADAME D' ARBLAY, the an- .iVLthor of " Evelina," the leader of the modern school of lady English novelists, was descended from a family which bore the name of Macburney, and which, though probably of Irish origin, had been long settled in Shrop- shire, England, and was possessed of considerable estates in that county. Unhappily, many years before her birth, the Macburneys began, as if of set purpose and in a spirit of determin- ed rivalry, to expose and ruin them- selves. The heir apparent, Mr. James Macburney, offended his father by mak- ing a runaway match with an actress from Goodman's Fields. The old gen- tleman could devise no more judicious mode of wreaking vengeance on his undutiful boy, than by marrying the cook. The cook gave birth to a son named Joseph, who succeeded to all the lands of the family, while James was cut off with a shilling. The fa- vorite son, however, was so extrava- gant, that he soon became as poor as his disinherited brother. Both were forced to earn their bread by their labor. Jo- This sketch of Madame D'Arblay is abridged from an article by Macaulay in the Edinburgh Review. seph turned dancing-master, and settled in Norfolk. James struck off the Mac from the beginning of his name, and set up as a portrait-painter at Chester. Here he had a son named Charles, well known as the author of the His- tory of Music, and as the father of two remarkable children, of a son distin- guished by learning, and of a daugh- ter still more honorably distinguished by genius. Charles early showed a taste for that art, of which, at a later period, he be- came the historian. He was appren- ticed to a celebrated musician in Lon- don, and applied himself to study with vigor and success. He early found a kind and munificent patron in Fulk Greville, a high-born and high-bred man, who seems to have had in large measure all the accomplishments and all the follies, all the virtues and all the vices which, a hundred years ago, were considered as making up the character of a fine gentleman. Under such pro- tection, the young artist had every prospect of a brilliant career in the capital. But his health failed. It be came necessary for him to retreat from the smoke and river fog of London, to the pure air of the coast. He accepted (139) 140 MADAME D'AKBLAY. the place of organist at Lynn, and set- tled at that town with a young lady who had recently become hi? wife. At Lynn, in June, 1752, Frances Burney was born. Nothing in her childhood indicated that she would, while still a young woman, have se- cured for herself an honorable place among English writers. She was shy and silent. Her brothers and sisters called her a dunce, and not altogether without some show of reason; for at eight years old she did not know her letters. In 1760, Mr. Burney quitted Lynn for London, and took a house in Poland street ; a situation which had been fashionable in the reign of Queen Anne, but which, since that time, had been deserted by most of its wealthy and noble inhabitants. He at once obtained as many pupils of the most respectable description as he had time to attend, and was thus enabled to support his family, modestly indeed, and frugally, but in comfort and independence. His professional merit obtained for him the degree of Doctor of Music from the University of Oxford ; and his works on subjects connected with his art gained for him a place, respectable, though certainly not eminent, among men of letters. The progress of the mind of Frances Burney, from her ninth to her twenty- fifth year, well deserves to be recorded. When her education had proceeded no further than the horn-book, she lost her mother, and thenceforward she educa- ted herself. Her father appears to have been as bad a father as a very honest, affectionate, and sweet-tem- pered man can well be. He loved his daughter dearly ; but it never seems to have occurred to him thai a parent has other duties to perform to children than that of fondling them It would indeed have been impossible for him to superintend their education himself. His professional engagements occupied him all day. At seven in the morning he began to attend his pupils, and, when London was full, was some- times employed in teaching till eleven at night. He was often forced to carry in his pocket a tin box of sandwiches, and a bottle of wine and water, on which he dined in a hackney-coach while hurrying from one scholar to anoth- er. Two of his daughters he sent to a seminary at Paris; but he imagined that Frances would run some risk of being perverted from the Protestant faith if she were educated in a Catho- lic country, and he therefore kept her at home. No governess, no teacher of any art or of any language, was pro- vided for her. But one of her sisters showed her how to write ; and, before she was fourteen, she began to find pleasure in reading. It was not, however, by reading that her intellect was formed. Indeed, when her best novels were produced, her knowledge of books was very small. When at the height of her fame, she was unacquainted with the most cele- brated works of Voltaire and Moliere ; and, what seems still more extraordi nary, had never heard or seen a line of Churchill, who, when she was a girl, was the most popular of living poets. It is particularly deserving of observa- tion, that she appears to have been by no means a novel reader. Her father's library was large ; and he had admit- ted into it so many books which rigid MADAME D'AKBLAY. 141 moralists generally exclude, that lie felt uneasy, as lie afterwards owned, wlien Johnson began to examine the shelves. But in the whole collection there was only a single novel, Fielding's Amelia. An education, however, which to most girls would have been useless, but which suited Fanny's mind better than elab- orate culture, was in constant progress during her passage from childhood to womanhood. The great book of hu- man nature was turned over before her. Her father's social position was very peculiar. He belonged in for- tune and station to the middle class. His daughters seem to have been suf- fered to mix freely with those whom butlers and waiting-maids call vulgar. We are told that they were in the habit of playing with the children of a wig-maker who lived in the adjoining house. Yet few nobles could assemble in the most stately mansions of Gros- venor Square or St. James's Square, a society so various and so brilliant as was sometimes to be found in Dr. Burney's cabin. With the literary and fashionable society which occasionally met under her father's roof, Frances can scarcely be said to have mingled. She was not a musician, and could therefore bear no part in the concerts. She was shy almost to awkwardness, and scarcely ever joined in the conversation. The slightest remark from a stranger dis- concerted her; and even the old friends of her father who tried to draw her out could seldom extract more than a Yes or a No. Her figure was small, her face not distinguished by beauty. She was therefore suffered to withdraw quietly to the background, and, unob- served herself, to observe all that pass- ed. Her nearest relations were aware that she had good sense, but seem not to have suspected, that under her de- mure and bashful deportment were concealed a fertile invention and a keen sense of the ridiculous. She had not, it is true, an eye for the fine shades of character. But every marked pecu- liarity instantly caught her notice and remained engraven on her imagination. Thus, while still a girl, she had laid up such a store of materials for fiction as few of those who mix much in the world are able to accumulate during a long life. She had watched and listened in her father's dwelling to people of every class, from princes and great officers of state down to artists living in garrets, and poets familiar with subterranean cook shops. Hundreds of remarkable persons had passed in review before her, English, French, German, Italian, lords and fiddlers, deans of cathedrals and managers of theatres, travelers leading about newly caught savages, and singing women escorted by deputy-husbands, So strong was the impression made on the mind of Frances by the society which she was in the habit of seeing and hearing that she began to write little fictitious narratives as soon aa she could use her pen with ease, which, as we have said, was not very early. Her sisters were amused by her stories. But Dr. Burney knew nothing of their existence ; and in another quarter her literary propensities met with serious discouragement. When she was fifteen her father took a second wife. The new Mrs. Burney soon found out that her step-daughter was fond of scribT ling, i 42 MADAME D'AKBLAY. and delivered several good-natured lec- tures on the subject. The advice no doubt was well-meant, and might have been given by the most judicious friend ; for, at that time, nothing it would ap- pear could be more disadvantageous to a young lady than to be known as a novel-writer. Frances with amiable resignation yielded, relinquished her favorite pursuit, and made a bonfire of all her manuscripts. She now hemmed and stitched from breakfast to dinner with scrupulous regularity. But the dinners of that time were early ; and the afternoon was her own. Though she had given up novel-writing, she was still fond of using her pen. She began to keep a diary, and she corresponded largely with a person who seems to have had the chief share in the formation of her mind. This was Samuel Crisp, an old friend of her father. Long before Frances Burney was born, Mr. Crisp had made his entrance into the world, with every advantage. He was well connected and well educated. His face and figure were conspicuously handsome ; his manners were polished ; his fortune was easy ; his character was without stain ; he lived in the best so- ciety; he had read much; -he talked well.; his taste in literature, music, painting, architecture, sculpture, was held in high esteem. As an adviser he was inestimable. Nay, he might pro- bably have held a respectable rank as a writer, if he would have confined himself to some department of litera- ture in which nothing more than sense, taste, and reading was required. Un- happily, he set his heart on being a great poet, wrote a tragedy in five acts on the death of Virginia, and offered it to Garrick, who was his personal friend. Garrick read, shook his head, and expressed a doubt whether it would be wise in Mr. Crisp to stake a reputation which stood high on the success of such a piece. But the au- thor, blinded by self-love, set in mo- tion a machinery such as none could long resist. His intercessors were the most eloquent man and the most lovely woman of that generation. Pitt was induced to read Virginia, and to pro nounce it excellent. Lady Coventry, with fingers which might have fur- nished a model to sculptors, forced the manuscript into the reluctant hand of the manager; and in the year 1754, the play was brought forward. Noth- ing that skill or friendship could do was omitted. Garrick wrote both pro- logue and epilogue. The zealous friends of the author filled every box ; and, by their strenuous exertions, the life of the play was prolonged during ten nights. But, though there was no clamorous reprobation, it was univer- sally felt that the attempt had failed. Crisp lost his temper and spirits, and became a cynic and a hater of mankind. From London he retired to Hampton, and from Hampton to a soli- tary and long-deserted mansion, built on a common in one of the wildest tracts of Surrey. No road, not even a sheep-walk, connected his lonely dwel- ling with the abodes of men. The place of his retreat was strictly con- cealed from his old associates. In the spring he sometimes emerged, and was seen at exhibitions and concerts in London. But he soon disappeared and hid himself, with no society but MADAME D' A RELAY. 143 his books, in his dreary hermitage. He survived his failure about thirty years. Crisp was an old and very intimate friend of the Burneys. To them alone was confided the name of the desolate old hall in which he hid himself like a wild beast in a den. For them were reserved such remains of his humanity as had survived the failure of his play. Frances Burney he regarded as his daughter. He called her his Fannikin, and she in return called him her dear Daddy. In truth, he seems to have done much more than her real father for the development of her intellect ; for though he was a bad poet, he was a scholar, a thinker, and an excellent counsellor. He was practically fond of Dr. Burney's concerts. They had, indeed, been commenced at his sugges- tion, and when he visited London he constantly attended them. But when he grew old, and when gout, brought on partly by mental irritation, confined him to his retreat, he was desirous of having a glimpse of that gay and bril- liant world from which he was exiled, and he pressed Fannikin to send him full accounts of her father's evening parties. A few of her letters to him have been published ; and it is impos- sible to read them without discerning in them all the powers which after- wards produced Evelina and Cecilia, the quickness in catching every odd peculiarity of character and manner, the skill in grouping, the humor, often richly comic, sometimes even farcical. Fanny's propensity to novel- writing Had foi a time been kept down. It now rose up stronger than ever. The heroes and heroines of the tales which had perished in the flames, were still present to the eye of her mind. One favorite story, in particular, haunted her imagination. It was about a cer- tain Caroline Evelyn, a beautiful dam sel who made an unfortunate love- match, and died, leaving an infant daughter. Frances began to image to herself the various scenes, tragic and comic, through which the poor mother- less girl, highly connected on one side, meanly connected on the other, might have to pass. A crowd of unreal be- ings, good and bad, grave and ludi- crous, surrounded the pretty, timid, young orphan ; a coarse sea-captain ; an ugly insolent fop, blazing in a superb court-dress; another fop, as ugly and as insolent, but lodged on Snow-Hill, and tricked out in second- hand finery for the Hampstead ball; an old woman, all wrinkled and rouge, flirting her fan with the air of a Miss of seventeen, and screaming in a dialect made up of vulgar French and vulgar English ; a poet, lean and ragged, with a broad Scotch accent. By degrees these shadows acquired stronger and stronger' consistence : the impulse which urged Frances to write became irresistible ; and the result was the history of Evelina. Then came, naturally enough, a wish, mingled with many fears, to appear before the public ; for, timid as Fran- ces was, and bashful, and altogether unaccustomed to hear her own praises, it is clear that she wanted neither a strong passion for distinction, nor a just confidence in her own powers. Her scheme was to become, if possible, a candidate for fame without running any risk of disgrace. She had not 1-14 MADAME D'AEBLAY. money to bear the expense of printing. It was therefore necessary that some bookseller should be induced to take the risk ; and such a bookseller was not readily found. Dodsley refused even to look at the manuscript unless he were trusted with the name of the author. A publisher in Fleet Street, named Lowndes, was more complaisant. Some correspondence took place be- tween this person and Miss Burney, who took the name of Grafton, and desired that the letters addressed to her might be left at the Orange Coffee- House. But, before the bargain was finally struck, Fanny thought it her duty to obtain her father's consent. She told him that she had written a book, that she wished to have his per- mission to publish it anonymously, but that she hoped that he would not in- sist upon seeing it. What followed may serve to illustrate what we meant when we said that Dr. Burney was as bad a father as so good-hearted a man could possibly be. It never seems to have crossed his mind that Fanny was about to take a step on which the whole happiness of her life might de- pend a step which might raise her to an honorable eminence, or cover her with ridicule and contempt. Several people had already been trusted, and strict concealment was therefore not to be expected. On so grave an occasion, it was surely his duty to give his best counsel to his daughter, to win her confidence, to prevent her from expos- ing herself if her book were a bad one, and, if it were a good one, to see that the terms which she made with the publisher were likely to be beneficial to her. Instead of this, he only stared, burst out a laughing, kissed her, gave her leave to do as she liked, and never even asked the name of her work. The contract with Lowndes was speed- ily concluded. Twenty pounds wert given for the copyright, and were ac- cepted by Fanny with delight. Her father's inexcusable neglect of his duty, happily caused her no worse evil than the loss of twelve or fifteen hun- dred pounds. After many delays Evelina appeared in January, 1778. Poor Fanny was sick with terror, and durst hardly stir out of doors. Some days passed be- fore anything was heard of the book. It had, indeed, nothing but its own merits to push it into public favor. Its author was unknown. The house by which it was published, was not, we believe, held in high estimation. No body of partizans had been engaged to applaud. The better class of read- ers expected little from a novel about a young lady's entrance into the world. There was, indeed, at that time a dis- position among the most respectable people to condemn novels generally : nor was this disposition by any means without excuse; for works of that sort were then almost always silly, and very frequently wicked. Soon, however, the first faint accents of praise began to be heard. The keepers of the cir- culating libraries reported that every- body was asking for Evelina, and that some person had guessed Anstey to be the author. Then came a favorable notice in the " London Keview ; " then another still more favorable in the " Monthly." And now the book found its way to tables which had seldom been polluted by marble-covered vol MADAME D'AKBLAY. 145 umes. Scholars and statesmen, who contemptuously abandoned the crowd of romances to Miss Lydia Languish and Miss Sukey Saunter, were not ashamed to own that they could not tear themselves away from Evelina. Fine carriages and rich liveries, not often seen east of Temple Bar, were attracted to the publisher's shop in Fleet Street. Lowndes was" daily questioned about the author ; but was himself as much in the dark as any of the questioners. The mystery, how- ever, could not remain a mystery long. It was known to brothers and sisters, aunts and cousins : and they were far too proud and too happy to be dis- creet. Dr. Burney wept over the book in rapture. Daddy Crisp shook his fist at his Fannikin in affectionate an- ger at not having been admitted to her confidence. The truth was whispered to Mrs. Thrale ; and then it began to spread fast. The book had been admired while it was ascribed to men of letters long conversant with the world, and accus- tomed to composition. But when it was known that a reserved, silent young woman had produced the best work of fiction that had appeared since the death of Smollett, the acclamations were redoubled. What she had done was, indeed, extraordinary. But, as usual, various reports improved the story till it became miraculous. Eve- lina, it was said, was the work of a girl of seventeen. Incredible as this tale was, it continued to be repeated down to our own time. Frances was too honest to confirm it. Probably she was too much a woman to contra- dict it ; and it was long before any of 19 her detractors thought of this mode of annoyance. But we must return to our story. The triumph was complete. The timid and obscure girl found herself on the high- est pinnacle of fame. Great men, on whom she had gazed at a distance with humble reverence, addressed her with admiration, tempered by the ten- derness due to her sex and age. Burke, Windham, Gibbon, Reynolds. Sheridan, were among her most ardent eulogists. Cumberland acknowledged her merit, after his fashion, by biting his lips and wriggling in his chair whenever her name was mentioned. But it was at Streatham that she tasted, in the highest perfection, the sweets of flattery, mingled with the sweets of friendship. Mrs. Thrale, then at the height of prosperity and popularity with gay spirits, quick wit, showy though superficial acquire- ments, pleasing though not refined manners, a singularly amiable temper, and a loving heart felt towards Fanny as towards a younger sister. With the Thrales Johnson was domesticated. He was an old friend of Dr. Burney ; but he had probably taken little notice of Dr. Burney's daughters, and Fanny, we imagine, had never in her life dared to speak to him, unless to ask whether he wanted a nineteenth or twentieth cup of tea. He was charmed by her tale, and preferred it to the novels of Fielding, to whom, indeed, he had al- ways been grossly unjust. He did not, indeed, carry his partiality so far as to place Evelina by the side of Cla- rissa and Sir Charles Grandison ; yet he said that his little favorite had done enough to have made even Richardson MADAMK D'AKBLAY. feel uneasy. With Johnson's cordial approbation of the book was mingled a fondness, half gallant, half paternal, for the writer ; and this fondness his ao-e and character entitled him to show o without restraint. He began by put- ting her hand to his lips. But soon he clasped her in his huge arms, and implored her to be a good girl. She was his pet, his dear love, his dear lit- tle Burney, his little character-monger. At one time, he broke forth in praise of the good taste of her caps. At another time, he insisted on teaching her Latin. That, with all his coarse- ness and irritability, he was a man of sterling benevolence, has long been ac- knowledged. But how gentle and en- dearing his deportment could be, was not known till the Recollections of Madame D'Arblay were published. It would not have been surprising if such success had turned even a strong head, and corrupted even a generous and affectionate nature. But, in the Diary, we can find no trace of any feel- ing inconsistent with a truly modest and amiable disposition. There is, indeed, abundant proof that Frances enjoyed, with an intense, though a troubled joy, the honors which her genius had won ; but it is equally clear that her happiness sprang from the happiness of her father, her sister, and her dear Daddy Crisp. While nattered by the great, the opulent, and the learned, while followed along the Steyne at Brighton and the Pantiles at Tunbridge Wells by the gaze of ad- miring crowds, her heart seems to have been stil! with the little domestic circle in St. Martin's Street. If she recorded with minute diligence all the compli- ments, delicate and coarse, which sho heard wherever she turned, she record ed them for the eyes of two or three persons who had loved her from her infancy, who had loved her in obscu- rity, and to whom her fame ga^e the purest and most exquisite delight. Nothing can be more unjust than to confound these outpourings of a kind heart, sure of perfect sympathy, with the egotism of a blue-stocking, who prates to all who come near her about her own novel or her own volume of sonnets. It was natural that the triumphant issue of Miss Burney's first venture should tempt her to try a second. Evelina, though it had raised her fame, had added nothing to her fortune. Some of her friends urged her to write for the stage. Johnson promised to give her his advice as to the composi- tion. Murphy, who was supposed to understand the temper of the pit as well as any man of his time, undertook to instruct her as to stage effect. Sheridan declared that he would ac cept a play from her without even reading it. Thus encouraged she wrote a comedy named The Witlings. For- tunately it was never acted or printed. We can, we think, easily perceive from the little which is said on the subject in the Diary, that The Witlings would have been damned, and that Murphy and Sheridan thought so, though they were too polite to say so. Happily Frances had a friend who waa not afraid to give her pain. Crisp, wiser for her than he had been for himself, read the manuscript in his lonely retreat, and manfully told her that she had failed, that to remove MADAME D'ARBLAY. 147 blemishes here and there would be useless, that the piece had abundance of wit but no interest, that it was bad as a whole, that it would remind every reader of the Femmes $awantes, which, strange to say, she had never read, and that she could not sustain so close a comparison with Moliere. This opin- ion, in which Dr. Burney concurred, was sent to Frances in what she called " a hissing, groaning, cat-calling epis- tle." But she had too much sense not to know that it was better to be hissed and cat-called by her Daddy, than by a whole sea of heads in the pit of Dru- ry-Lane Theatre ; and she had too good a heart not to be grateful for so rare an act of friendship. She returned an answer which shows how well she deserved to have a judicious, faithful, and affectionate adviser. " I intend," she wrote, " to console myself for your censure, by this greatest proof I hare ever received of the sincerity, candor, and, let me add, esteem, of my dear daddy. And as I happen to love my- self rather more than my play, this consolation is not a very trifling one. This, however, seriously I do believe, that when my two daddies put their heads together to concert that hissing, groaning, cat-calling epistle they sent me, they felt as sorry for poor little Miss Bayes as she could possibly do for herself. You see I do not attempt to repay your frankness with the air of pretended carelessness. But, though somewhat disconcerted just now, I will promise not to let my vexation live out another day. Adieu, my dear daddy ! I won't be mortified, and I won't be downed; but I will be proud to find J have, out of my own family, as well as in it, a friend who loves me well enough to speak plain truth to me." Frances now turned from her dra- matic schemes to an undertaking fa.i better suited to her talents. She de- termined to write a new tale, on a plan excellently contrived for the display of the powers in which her superiority to other writers lay. It was in truth a grand and various picture-gallery, which presented to the eye a long se- ries of men and women, each marked by some strong peculiar feature. There were avarice and prodigality, the pride of blood and the pride of money, mor- bid restlessness and morbid apathy, frivolous garrulity, supercilious silence, a Dernocritus to laugh at everything, and a Heraclitus to lament over every- thing. The work proceeded fast, and in twelve months was completed. It wanted something of the simplicity which had been amongst the most at- tractive charms of Evelina ; but it fur- nished ample proof that the four years which had elapsed since Evelina ap- peared, had not been unprofi tably spent. Those who saw Cecilia in manuscript pronounced it the best novel of the age Mrs. Thrale laughed and wept over it Crisp was even vehement in applause, and offered to insure the rapid and complete success of the book for half a crown. What Miss Burney received for the copyright is not mentioned in the Diary ; but we have observed seve- ral expressions from which we infer that the sum was considerable. That the sale would be great nobody could doubt ; and Frances now had shrewd and experienced advisers, who would not suffer her to wrong herself. We 148 MADAME D'AKBLAY. have been told that the publishers gave her two thousand pounds, and we have no doubt that they might have given a still larger sum without being losers. Cecilia was published in the summer of 1782. The curiosity of the town was intense. We have been informed by persons who remember those days, that no romance of Sir Walter Scott was more impatiently awaited, or more eagerly snatched from the counters of the booksellers. High as public ex- pectation was, it was amply satisfied ; and Cecilia was placed, by general ac- clamation, among the classical novels of England. Miss Burney was now thirty. Her youth had been singularly prosperous ; but clouds soon began to gather over that clear and radiant dawn. Events deeply painful to a heart so kind as that of Frances, followed each other in rapid succession. She was first called upon to attend the death-bed of her best friend, Samuel Crisp. When she returned to St. Martin's Street, after performing this melancholy duty, she was appalled by hearing that Johnson had been struck with paralysis ; and, not many months later, she parted from him for the last time with solemn ten- derness. He wished to look on her once more ; and on the day before his death she long remained in tears on the stairs leading to his bed-room, in the hope that she might be called in to receive his blessing. But he was then sinking fast, and, though he sent her an affectionate message, was unable to see her. But this was not the worst. There are separations far more cruel than those which are made by death. Frances might weep with proud affec- tion for Crisp and Johnson. She had to blush as well as to weep for Mrs Thrale. Life, however, still smiled upon her. Domestic happiness, friend ship, independence, leisure, letters, all these things were hers ; and she flung them all away. Among the distinguished persons to whom Miss Burney had been intro- duced, none appears to have stood higher in her regard than Mrs. Delany. This lady was an interesting and ven- erable relic of a past age. She wa& the niece of George Granville Lord Lansdowne, who, in his youth, ex- changed verses and compliments with Edmund Waller, and who was among the first to applaud the opening talents of Pope. She had married Dr. Delany, a man known to his contemporaries as a profound scholar and an eloquent preacher, but remembered in our time chiefly as one of the small circle in which the fierce spirit of Swift, tor tured by disappointed ambition, by remorse, and by the approaches of mad ness, sought for amusement and repose. Doctor Delany had long been dead. His widow, nobly descended, eminent- ly accomplished and retaining, in spite of the infirmities of advanced age, the vigor of her faculties and the serenity of her temper, enjoyed and deserved the favor of the royal family. She had a pension of three hundred a-year ; and a house at Windsor, belonging to the crown, had been fitted up for her ac- commodation. At this house the king and queen sometimes called, and found a very natural pleasure in thus catch- ing an occasional glimpse of the pri vate life of English families. In December, 1785, Miss Burney was MADAME D'AKBLAY. 149 on a visit to Mrs. Delany at Windsor. The dinner was over. The old lady was taking a nap. Her grand-niece, a little girl of seven, was playing at some Christmas game with the visitors, when the door opened, and a stout gentle- man entered unannounced, with a star on his breast, and " What ? what ? what ? " in his mouth. A cry of " The king " was set up. A general scam- pering followed. Miss Burney owns that she could not have been more ter- rified if she had seen a ghost. But Mrs. Delany came forward to pay her duty to her royal friend, and the disturbance was quieted. Frances was then pre- sented, and underwent a long examina- tion and cross-examination about all that she had written and all that she meant to write. The queen soon made her appearance, and his majesty repeat- ed, for the benefit of his consort, the in- formation which he had extracted from Miss Burney. The good-nature of the royal pair could not but be delightful to a young lady who had been brought up a tory. In a few days the visit was repeated. Miss Burney was more at ease than before. His majesty, instead of seeking for information, condescend- ed to impart it, and passed sentence on many great writers, English and for- eign. Voltaire he pronounced a mon- ster. Rousseau he likedr ather better. " But was there ever," he cried, " such stuff as great part of Shakespeare? Only one must not say so. But what think you ? What ? Is there not sad stuff? What? What?" The truth is, that Frances was fasci- nated by the condescending kindness of the two great personages to whom she had been presented. Her father was even more infatuated than herself. A German lady of the name of Hagger- dorn, one of the keepers of the queen's robes, retired about this time ; and her majesty offered the vacant post to Miss Burney. When we consider that Miss Burney was decidedly the most popu- lar writer of fictitious narrative then living, that competence, if not opu- lence, was within her reach, and that she was more than usually happy in her domestic circle, and when we com- pare the sacrifice which she was invited to make with the remuneration which was held out to her, we are divided be- tween laughter and indignation. WTiat was demanded of her was, that she should consent to be almost as com- pletely separated from her family and friends as if she had gone to Calcutta, and almost as close a prisoner as if she had been sent to jail for a libel; that with talents which had instructed and delighted the highest living minds, she should now be employed only in mix- ing snuff and sticking pins; that she should be summoned by a waiting- wo- man's bell to a waiting-woman's duties ; that she should pass her whole life un- der the restraints of a paltry etiquette, should sometimes fast till she was ready to swoon with hunger, should some- times stand till her knees gave way with fatigue ; that she should not dare to speak or move without considering how her mistress might like her words and gestures. Instead of those distin guished men and women, the flower of all political parties, with whom she had been in the habit of mixing on terms of equal friendship, she was to have for her perpetual companion the chief keeper of the robes, an old hag from 150 MADAME D'ARBLAY. Germany, of mean understanding, of insolent manners, and of temper which, naturally savage, had now been exas- perated by disease. Now and then, indeed, poor Frances might console her- self for the loss of Burke' s and Wind- ham's society, by joining in the " ce- lestial colloquy sublime" of his ma- jesty's equerries. And what was the consideration for which she was to sell herself into sla- very ? A peerage in her own right ? A pension of two thousand a-year for life ? A seventy-four for her brother in the navy ? A deanery for her brother in the church ? Not so. The price at which she was valued was her board, her. lodging, the attendance of a man- servant, and two hundred pounds a- year. The man who, even when hard pressed by hunger, sells his birthright for a mess of pottage, is unwise. But what shall we say of him who parts with his birthright, and does not get even the pottage in return ? It is not necessary to inquire whether opulence be an adequate compensation for the sacrifice of bodily and mental freedom ; for Frances Burney paid for leave to be a prisoner and menial. It was evi- dently understood as one of the terms of her engagement, that, while she was a member of the royal household, she was not to appear before the public as an author: and, even had there been no such understanding, her avocations were such as left her no leisure for any considerable intellectual effort. It is not strange indeed that an in- vitation to court should have caused a fluttering in the bosom of an inexperi- enced woman. But it was the duty of the parent to watch over the child, and to show her that on the one side were only infantine vanities and chimerical hopes, on the other liberty, peace of mind, affluence, social enjoyments, hon- orable distinctions. Strange to say, the only hesitation was on the part of Frances. Dr. Burney was transported out of himself with delight. Not such are the raptures of a Circassian father who has sold his pretty daughter well to a Turkish slave-merchant. Yet Dr. Burney was an amiable man, a man of good abilities, a man who had seen much of the world. But he seems to have thought that going to court was like going to heaven: that to see princes and princesses was a kind of beatific vision; that the exquisite fe- licity enjoyed by royal persons was not confined to themselves, but was communicated by some mysterious ef- flux or reflection to all who were suf- fered to stand at their toilettes, or to bear their trains. He overruled all his daughter's objections, and himself escorted her to her prison. The door closed. The key was turned. She, looking back with tender regret on all that she had left, and forward with anxiety and terror to the new life on which she was entering, was unable to speak or stand; and he went on his way homeward rejoicing in her marvel- ous prosperity. And now began a slavery of five years, of five years taken from the best part of life, and wasted in menial drudgery or in recreations duller than even menial druggery, under galling restraints and amidst unfriendly or un interesting companions. The history of an ordinary day was this : Miss Bur ney had to rise and dress herself early MADAME D'AKBLAY. 151 that she might be ready to answer the royal bell, which rang at half-after seven. Till about eight she attended in the queen's dressing-room, and had the honor of lacing her august mistress's stays, and of putting on the hoop, gown, and neck-handkerchief. The morning was chiefly spent in rumma- ging drawers and laying fine clothes in their proper places. Then the queen was to be powdered and dressed for the day. Twice a week her majesty's hair was curled and craped ; and this operation appears to have added a full hour to the business of the toilette. It was generally three before Miss Bur- ney was at liberty. Then she had two hours at her own disposal. To these hours we owe great part of her diary. At five she had to attend her colleague, Madame Schwellenberg, a hateful old toad-eater, as illiterate as a chamber- maid, as proud as a whole German Chapter, rude, peevish, unable to bear solitude, unable to conduct herself with common decency in society. With this delightful associate Frances Burney had to dine, and pass the evening. The pair generally remained together from five to eleven ; and often had no other company the whole time, except during the hour from eight to nine, when the equerries came to tea. If poor Frances attemped to escape to her own apart- ment, and to forget her wretchedness over a book, the execrable old woman railed and stormed, and complained that she was neglected. Yet, when Frances stayed, she was constantly as- sailed with insolent reproaches. Lite- rary fame was, in the eyes of the Ger- man crone, a blemish, a proof that the person who enjoyed it was meanly born, and out of the pale of good society. All her scanty stock of broken English was employed to express the contem|^ with which she regarded the author of Evelina and Cecilia. Frances detested cards, and indeed knew nothing about them; but she soon found that the least miserable way of passing an even- ing with Madame Schwellenberg was at the card-table, and consented, with patient sadness, to give hours, which might have called forth the laughter and the tears of many generations, to the king of clubs and the knave of spades. Between eleven and twelve the bell rang again. Miss Burney had to pass twenty minutes or half an hour in undressing the queen, and was then at liberty to retire, and dream that she was chatting with her brother by the quiet hearth in St. Martin's Street, that she was the centre of an admiring assembly at Mrs. Crewe's, that Burke was calling her the first woman of the age, or that Dilly was giving her a check for two thousand guineas. Now and then, indeed, events oc- curred which disturbed the wretched monotony of Frances Burney's life. The court moved from Kew to Wind- sor and from Windsor back to Kew. One dull colonel went out of waiting and another dull colonel came into waiting. An impertinent servant made a blunder about tea, and caused a mis- understanding between the gentlemen and the ladies. A half-witted French Protestant minister talked oddly about conjugal fidelity. An unlucky mem- ber of the household mentioned a pas- sage in the "Morning Herald" reflecting on the queen, and forthwith Madame Schwellenberg began to storm in bad 152 MADAME D'ARBLAY. English, and told him that he made her " what you call perspire." A more importance occurrence was the royal visit to Oxford. Miss Bur- ney went in the queen's train to Nune- ham, was utterly neglected there in the crowd, and could with difficulty find a servant to show the way to her bed- room, or a hair-dresser to arrange her curls. She had the honor of entering Oxford in the last of a long string of carriages which formed the royal pro- cession, of walking after the queen all day through refectories and chapels, and of standing, half-dead with fatigue and hunger, while her august mistress was seated at an excellent cold colla- tion. At Magdalene College, Frances was left for a moment in a parlor, where she sank down on a chair. A good-natur- ed equerry saw that she was exhausted, and shared with her some apricots and bread, which he had wisely put into his pockets. At that moment the door opened; the queen entered; the wearied attendants sprang up ; the bread and fruit were hastily conceal- ed. "I found," says poor Miss Bur- ney, " that our appetites were to be supposed annihilated, at the same moment that our strength was to be invincible." Yet Oxford, seen even under such disadvantages, " revived in her," to use her own words, "a consciousness to pleasure which had long lain nearly dormant." She forgot, during one mo- ment, that she was a waiting maid, and felt as a woman of true genius might be expected to feel amidst venerable remains of antiquity, beautiful works of art, vast repositories of knowledge, and memorials of the illustrious dead. Had she still been what she was be fore her father induced her take the most fatal step of her life, we can eas- ily imagine what pleasure she would have derived from a visit to the no blest of English cities. She might, in deed, have been forced to travel back in a hack-chaise, and might not have worn so fine a gown of Chambery gauze as that in which she tottered after the royal party; but with what delight would she have then paced the clois- ters of Magdalene, compared the an- tique gloom of Merton with the splen- dor of Christ Church, and looked down from the dome of the Radcliffe library on the magnificent sea of turrets and battlements below ! How gladly would learned men have laid aside for a few hours Pindar's Odes and Aristotle's Ethics, to escort the author of Cecilia from college to college ? What neat little banquets would she have found set out in their monastic cells ? With what eagerness would pictures, med als, and illuminated missals have been brought forth from the most myste- rious cabinets for her amusement ? How much she would have had to hear and to tell about Johnson* as she walked over Pembroke, and about Reynolds in the ante chapel of New College? But these indulgences were not for one who had sold herself into bond- age. The account which she has given of the king's illness contains much ex- cellent narrative and description, and will, we think, be more valued by the historians of a future age than any equal portion of Pepys' or Eve- lyn's Diaries. That account shows, al- so, how affectionate and compassionate MADAME D'AKBLAY. 153 her nature was. But it shows also, we must say, that her way of life was rapidly impairing her powers of rea- soning, and her sense of justice. During more than two years after the king's recovery, Frances dragged on a miserable existence at the palace. The consolations which had for a time mitigated the wretchedness of servi- tude, were one by one withdrawn. Mrs. Delany, whose society had been a great resource when the court was at Wind- sor, was now dead. One of the gen- tlemen of the royal establishment, Col- onel Digby, appears to have been a man of sense, of taste, of some reading, and of prepossessing manners. Agreeable associates were scarce in the prison- house, and he and Miss Burney were therefore naturally attached to each other. She owns that she valued him as a friend; and it would not have been strange if his attentions had led her to entertain for him a sentiment warmer than friendship. He quitted the court, and married in a way which astonished Miss Burney greatly, and which evidently wounded her feelings, and lowered him in her esteem. The palace grew duller and duller; Mad- ame Schwellenberg became more and more savage and insolent. And now the health of poor Frances began to give way; and all who saw her pale face, her emaciated figure, and her fee- ble walk, predicted that her sufferings would soon be over. Frances uniformly speaks of her roy- al mistress, and of the princesses, with respect and affection. The princesses seem to have well deserved all the praise which is bestowed on them in the Diary. They were, we doubt not, 20 most amiable women. But " the sweet queen," as she is constantly called in these volumes, is not by any means an object of admiration to us. She had undoubtedly sense enough to know what kind of deportment suited her high station, and self-command enough to maintain that deportment invaria- bly. She was, in her intercourse with Miss Burney, generally gracious and affable, sometimes, when displeased, cold and reserved, but never, under any circumstances, rude, peevish or violent. She knew how to dispense, gracefully and skilfully, those little civilities which, when paid by a sover- eign, are prized at many times their intrinsic value ; how to pay a compli- ment; how to lend a book; how to ask after a relation. But she seems to have been utterly, regardless of the comfort, the health, the life of her at- tendants, when her own convenience was concerned. Weak, feverish, hard- ly able to stand, Frances had still to rise before seven, in order to dress the sweet queen, and to sit up till mid- night in order to undress the sweet queen. The indisposition of the nand- maid could not, and did not, escape the notice of her royal mistress. But the established doctrine of the court was, that all sickness was to be considered as a pretence until it proved fatal. The only way in which the invalid could clear herself from the suspicion of ma- lingering, as it is called in the army was to go on lacing and unlacing, till she dropped down dead at the royal feet. " This," Miss Burney wrote, when she was suffering cruelly from sickness, watching, and labor, " is by no means from hardness of heart ; far otherwise. 154 MADAME D'AKBLAY. There is no hardness of heart in any one of them ; but it is prejudice, and want of personal experience." Many strangers sympathized with the bodily and mental sufferings of this distinguished woman. All who saw her, saw that her frame was sink- ing, that her heart was breaking. The last, it should seem, to observe the change was her father. At length, in epite of himself, his eyes were opened. In May, 1790, his daughter had an in- terview of three hours with him, the only long interview which they had had since he took her to Windsor in 1786. She told him that she was miserable, that she was worn with at- tendance and want of sleep, that she had no comfort in life, nothing to love, nothing to hope, that her family and friends were to her as though they were not, and were remembered by her as men remember the dead. From day- break to midnight the same killing labor, the same recreations, more hate- ful than labor itself, followed each other without variety, without any in- terval of liberty and repose. The Doctor was greatly dejected by this news ; but was too good-natured a man not -to say that, if she wished to resign, his house and arms were open to her. Still, however, he could not bear to remove her from the court. His veneration for royalty amounted, in truth to idolatry. It can be compared only to the grovelling superstition of those Syrian devotees, who made their children pass through the fire to Mo- loch. When he induced his daughter to accept the place of keeper of the robes, he entertained, as she tells us, % hope that some worldly advantage or other, not set down in the contract of service, would be the result of her connection with the court. What ad- vantage he expected we do not know, nor did he probably know himself. But, whatever he expected, he certain- ly got nothing. Miss Burney had been hired for board, lodging, and two hun- dred a-year. Board, lodging, and two hundred a-year, she had only received. We have looked carefully through the diary, in the hope of finding some trace of those extraordinary benefac- tions on which the Doctor reckoned But we can discover only a promise, never performed, of a gown; and for this promise Miss Burney was expected to return thanks, such as might have suited the beggar with whom St. Mar- tin, in the legend, divided his cloak. The experience of four years was, how- ever, insufficient to dispel the illusion which had taken possession of the Doc- tor's mind; and, between the dear father and the sweet queen, there seemed to be little doubt that some day or other Frances would drop down a corpse. Six months had elapsed since the interview between the parent and the daughter. The resignation was not sent in. The sufferer grew worse and worse. She took bark ; but it soon ceased to produce a beneficial effect. She was stimulated with wine ; she was soothed with opium; but in vain. Her breath began to fail. The whisper that she was in a decline spread through the court. The pains in her side became so severe that she was forced to crawl from the card-table of the old fury to whom she was teth- tred, three or four times in an evening for the purpose of taking hartshorn MADAME D'AEBLAY. 155 Elad she been a negro slave, a humane planter would have excused her from work. But her majesty showed no mercy. Thrice a day the accursed bell still rang ; the queen was still to be dressed for the morning at seven, and to be dressed for the day at noon, and to be undressed at eleven at night. But there had arisen, in literary and fashionable society, a general feeling of compassion for Miss Burney, and of indignation against both her father and the queen. " Is it possible," said a great French lady to the Doctor, " that your daughter is in a situation where she is never allowed a holiday ? " Horace Walpole wrote to Frances to express his sympathy. Boswell, boil- ing over with good-natured rage, al- most forced an entrance into the palace to see her. " My dear ma'am, why do you stay? It won't do, ma'am; you must resign. We can put up with it no longer. Some very violent measures, I assure you, will be taken. We shall address Dr. Burney in a body." Burke and Reynolds, though less noisy, were zealous in the same cause. Windham spoke to Dr. Burney ; but found him still irresolute. " I will set the Lite- rary Club upon him," cried Windham ; " Miss Burney has some very true ad- mirers there, and I am sure they will eagerly assist." Indeed the Burney family seem to have been apprehensive that some public affront, such as the Doctor's unpardonable folly, to use the mildest term, had richly deserved, would be put upon him. The medical men spoke out, and plainly told him that his daughter must resign or die. At last, paternal affection, medical authority, and the voice of all London crying shame, triumphed over Dr. Bur- ney's love of courts. He determined that Frances should write a letter of resignation. It was with difficulty that, though her life was at stake, she mustered spirit to put the paper into the queen's hands. " I could not," so runs the diary, " summon courage to present my memorial my heart always failed me from seeing the queen's en- tire freedom from such an expectation. For, though I was frequently so ill in her presence that I could hardly stand, I saw she concluded me, while life re- mained, inevitably hers." . At last, with a trembling hand the paper was delivered. Then came the storm. Juno, as in the ^Eneid, dele- gated the work of vengeance to Alecto. The queen was calm and gentle; but Madame Schwellenberg raved like a maniac in the incurable ward of Bed- lam. Such insolence ! Such ingrati- tude ! Such folly ! Would Miss Bur- ney bring utter destruction on herself and her family? Would she throw away the inestimable advantage of royal protection? Would she part with the privileges which, once relin- quished, could never be regained ? It was idle to talk of health and life. If people could not live in the palace, the best thing that could befall them was to die in it. The resignation was not accepted. The language of the medi- cal men became stronger and stronger. Doctor Burney's parental fears were fully roused; and he explicitly de- clared, in a letter meant to be shown to the queen, that his daughter must retire. The Schwellenberg raved like a wild-cat. " A scene almost horrible ensued," says Miss Burney, "She was 156 MADAME D'AKBLAY. too much enraged for disguise, and ut- tered the most furious expressions of indignant contempt at our proceedings. I am sure she would gladly have con- fined us both in the Bastile, had Eng- land such a misery, as a fit place to bring us to ourselves, from a daring so outrageous against imperial wishes." This passage deserves notice, as being the only one in the diary, as far as we have observed, which shows Miss Bur- ney to have been aware that she was a native of a free country, that she could not be pressed for a waiting-maid against her will, and that she had just as good a right to live, if she chose, in St. Martin's Street, as Queen Charlotte had to live at St. James'. The queen promised that, after the next birth-day, Miss Burney should be set at liberty. But the promise was ill kept ; and her majesty showed displeasure at being reminded of it. At length Frances was informed that in a fortnight her attendance should cease. " I heard this, " she says, " with a fearful presentiment I should surely never go through another fort- night, in so weak and languishing and painful a state of health. . . As the time approached, the queen's cor. diality rather diminished, and traces of internal displeasure appeared some- times, arising from an opinion I ought rather to have struggled on, live or die, than to quit her. Yet I am sure she saw how poor was my own chance except by a change in the mode of life, and at least ceased to wonder, though she could not approve." Sweet queen ! What noble candor, to ad- mit that the undutifulness of people who did not think the honor of ad- justing her tuckers worth the sacrificf of their own lives, was, though highly criminal, not altogether unnatural ! We perfectly understand her ma- jesty's contempt for the lives of others where her own pleasure was concerned. But what pleasure she can have found in having Miss Burney about her, it is not so easy to comprehend. That Miss Burney was an eminently skilful keeper of the robes is not very prob able. Few women, indeed, had paid less attention to dress. Now and then in the course of five years, she had been asked to read aloud or to write a copy of verses. But better readers might easily have been found; and her verses were worse than even the Poet-Laureate's Birth-day Odes. Per- haps that economy which was among her majesty's most conspicuous virtues, had something to do with her conduct on this occasion. Miss Burney had never hinted that she expected a re- tiring pension; and indeed would gladly have given the little that she had for freedom. But her majesty knew what the public thought, and what became her dignity. She could not for very shame suffer a woman of distinguished genius, who had quitted a lucrative career to wait on her, who had served her faithfully for a pit- tance during five years, and whose constitution had been impaired by la- bor and watching, to leave the court without some mark of royal liberality. George the Third, who. on all occa- O ' sions where Miss Burney was concern- ed, seems to have behaved like an honest good-natured gentleman, felt this, and said plainly that she was en- titled to a provision. At length, in re MADAME D'ABBLAY. 157 turn for all the misery which she had undergone, and for the health which she had sacrificed, an annuity of one hundred pounds was granted to her, dependent on the queen's pleasure. Then the prison was opened, and Frances was free once more. Johnson, as Burke observed, might have added a striking page to his poem on the Vanity of Human Wishes, if he had lived to see his little Burney as she went into the palace and as she came out of it. The pleasures, so long untasted, of liberty, of friendship, of domestic af- fection, were almost too acute for her shattered frame. But happy days and tranquil nights soon restored the health which the queen's toilette and Madame Schwellenberg's card-table had impaired. Kind and anxious faces surrounded the invalid. Conversation the most polished and brilliant revived her spirits. Traveling was recom- mended to her ; and she rambled by easy journeys from cathedral to cathe- dral, and from watering-place to wa- tering-place. She crossed the New Forest, and visited Stonehenge and Wilton, the cliffs of Lyme, and the beautiful valley of Sidmouth. Thence she journeyed by Powderham Castle, and by the ruins of Glastonbury Ab- bey, to Bath, and from Bath, when the winter was approaching, returned well and cheerful to London. There she visited her old dungeon, and found her successor already far on the way to the grave, and kept to strict duty, from morning till midnight, with a sprained ankle and a nervous fever. At this time England swarmed with French exiles driven from their coun- try by the revolution. A colony of these refugees settled at Juniper Hall, in Surrey, not far from Norbury Park, where, Mr. Lock, an intimate friend of the Burney family, resided, Frances visited Norbury, and was introduced to the strangers. She had strong pre- judices against them; for her toryism was far beyond, we do not say that of Mr. Pitt, but that of Mr. Eeeves ; and the inmates of Juniper Hall were all attached to the constitution of 1791, and were therefore more detested by the royalists of the first emigration than Petion or Marat. But such a wo- man as Miss Burney could not long re- sist the fascination of that remarkable society. She had lived with Johnson and Windham, with Mrs. Montagu and Mrs. Thrale. Yet she was forced to own that she had never heard conver- sation before. The most animated elo- quence, the keenest observation, the most sparkling wit, the most courtly grace, were united to charm her. For Madame de Stae'l was there, and M. de Talleyrand. There too was M. de Nar- bonne, a noble representative of French aristocracy ; and with M. de Narbonne was his friend and follower General D'Arblay, an honorable and amiable man, with a handsome person, frank, soldier-like manners, and some taste for letters. The prejudices which Frances had conceived against the constitutional royalists of France rapidly vanished. She listened with rapture to Talley rand and Madame de Stae'l, joined with M. D'Arblay in execrating the Jaco- bins, and in weeping for the unhappy Bourbons, took French lessons from him, fell in love with him, and raar 158 MADAME D'AEBLAY. ried him on no better provision than a precarious annuity o'f one hundred pounds. M. D'Arblay's fortune had perished in the general wreck of the French Revolution ; and in a foreign country his talents, whatever they may have been, could scarcely make him rich. The task of providing for the fam- ily devolved on his wife. In the year 1796, she published by subscrip- tion her third novel, Camilla. It was impatiently expected by the public; and the sum which she obtained by it was, we believe, greater than had at that time been received for a novel. Camilla, however, never attained pop- ularity like that which Evelina and Cecilia had enjoyed ; and it must be allowed that there was a perceptible falling off, not indeed in humor, or in power of portraying character, but in grace and in purity of style. During the short time which follow- ed the treaty of Amiens, M. D'Arblay visited France. Lauriston and Lafay- ette represented his claims to the French government, and obtained a promise that he should be reinstated in his military rank. M. D'Arblay, however, insisted that he should never be required to serve against the coun- trymen of his wife. The first consul, of course, could not hear of such a condi- tion; and ordered the general's com- mission to be instantly revoked. Madame D'Arblay joined her hus- band at Paris a short time before the war of 1803 broke out; and remained in France ten years, cut off from almost all intercourse with the land of her birth. At length, when Napoleon was on his march to Moscow, she with great difficulty obtained from his ministers permission to visit her own country, in company with her son, who was a native of England. She returned in time to receive the last blessing of her father, who died in his eighty-seventh year. In 1814 she published her last novel, the Wanderer, a book which no judicious friend to her memory will at- tempt to draw from the oblivion into which it has justly fallen. In the same year her son Alexander was sent to Cambridge. He obtained an honorable place among the wranglers of his year, and was elected a fellow of Christ's College. But his reputation at the University was higher than might be inferred from his success in academical contests. His French education had not fitted him for the examinations of the Senate-House ; but in pure mathe- matics, we have been assured by some of his competitors that he had very few equals. He went into the church and it was thought likely that he would attain high eminence as a preacher ; but he died . before his mother. All that we have heard of him leads us to believe, that he was such a son as such a mother deserved to have. In 1832, Madame D'Arblay published the " Memoirs of her Fa- ther;" and, on the 6th of January, 1840, she died in her eighty-eighth year Jo EDMUND BURKE. C1 ETTING aside the suggestion of a ^^^^ kJ descent from the noble Norman family of De Burgh, which settled in Ireland in the reign of Henry the Second, as unsupported by any satis- factory evidence, the family of Edmund Burke may be traced to a mayor of the city of Limerick of some historic reputation in the troublous scenes of the parliamentary contest with Charles the First. This was the great grand- father of Edmund. He was on the royal side in the struggle and conse- quently suffered in fortune. His grandson Richard, a Protestant, mar- ried a Miss Nagle, of a respectable Catholic family of the county of Cork. He was bred as an attorney, and re- moving from Limerick to Dublin be- came engaged in a profitable practice in that city. Here at his residence on Arran Quay, then a fashionable quar- ter of the town, his son Edmund was born on the first of January (the 12th, new style), 1728 if we follow the re- gister of Trinity College a year also memorable for its introduction of Oliver Goldsmith into the world. The date given by his biographer Prior is 1730; his latest biographer, Mac- knight, thinks that many difficulties would be removed by placing it in 1729. In his childhood and early life Edmund was of a delicate constitution, being threatened with consumption. Of his father's family of fourteen or fifteen children all but four died young, an elder brother Garret ; Richard, the celebrated London wit, the friend of Goldsmith and immortalized in his verses, and a sister Juliana, married to a Mr. French, from whom are descended any surviving representatives of the family. In consequence of his ill health Edmund was removed about the age of six from the residence in Dublin to the house of his maternal grandfather at Castletown Roche, the home of the Nagles, in the county of Cork, a district famous for its his- torical memories and its association with the life of the poet Spenser, who here from the Castle of Kilcolman looked out upon the scenery which he introduced in the Faery Queen. Spen- ser was always a favorite with Burke, and his eloquent biographer Macknight is inclined to trace something of the influence of the poet upon his mind and writings to this early acquaintance with the name and fame of the bard in this " main haunt and region of his (159) 160 EDMUND BUEKE. song." "The greatest of writers," is his remark, " has said that a divinity may ever be seen directing each indi- vidual human life to its purposed end. Who cannot discern it here? Read amid the scenes in which it was writ- ten, the Faery Queen could never be forgotten ; and many a splendid sen- tence and poetical allusion, which give such a peculiar fascination to the driest subject when treated by Burke, may easily be traced to the bard of Kilcol- man, whose mind was filled with such noble visions of all that is beautiful in humanity; who was, as his View of the State of Ireland amply testifies, not only a great poet, but also a true polit- ical philosopher, and who suffered so cruelly for his attachment to the coun- try of his adoption." Of course, the boy, if he read Spenser at all, could not read as the man afterwards learned to read ; but the exercise of the imag- ination, natural to youth, must always have had a peculiar fascination for Burke, and who better than Spenser, whose verse has inspired many poets, to engage the attention, and to teach the lesson to the infant mind of all beauty, grace, tenderness in that fas- cination of knightly adventure ? It was an advantage to Burke that so much of his boyhood was passed in the country in the society of his kind relatives. He was treated with indul- gence and consideration, lived happily, and always looked back upon this pe- riod of his life with pleasure. His mother had taught him to read and he now attended the village school ; but he was not pressed in his studies ; nature and the simple enjoyable life about him were his best instructors, and the improvement of health his most desirable achievement. Return- ing to Dublin at the age of twelve, if we accept the earliest date of his birth, he passed a year at home, after which he was placed with his brothers Garret and Richard at a boarding- school at Ballitore, a pretty village about thirty miles south of the capi- tal, in the county Kildare, established by the members of the Society of Friends who had settled at that place. It was fortunate in the possession of its first schoolmaster, Abraha?n Shack- leton, a man of worth and learning, ever held in great regard by Burke, who once sounded his praises in the House of Commons, declaring that he had been educated as a Protestant of the Church of England by a dissenter who was an honor to his sect, though that sect was considered one of the purest. Under his eye he had read the Bible, morning, noon and night, and had ever since been the happier and better man for such reading. The boy Edmund took kindly to the good Quaker's in- structions and studied diligently, read much and profited greatly by the inti- macy which he formed with his pre- ceptor's son Richard, who was his correspondent in after years, and with whom he cherished the most friendly relations during a life which ended a few years only before his own. It was a school of liberal, generous ideas, that academy at Ballitore, which was kept up by the Shackleton family, in three generations, father, son and grandson. There is a story related by Prior of Burke in these school-days which shows " the child, the father of the man." " Seeing a poor man pulling down his EDMUND BUKKE. 161 own hut near the village, and hearing that it was done by order of a great gentleman in a gold-laced hat (the parish conservator of the roads), upon the plea of being too near the high- way, the young philanthropist, his bosoin swelling with indignation, ex- claimed, that were he a man and pos- sessed of authority, the poor should not thus be oppressed." After nearly two years at Ballitore, Burke left the school to become a student of Trinity College, Dublin. He carried with him a fair training in the classics and some skill in verse-making, encourag- ed by rivalry with his friend, Richard Shackleton, with whom about this time he competed in the translation of the Idyll of Theocritus on the death of Adonis. He had also spent much time in perusing with delight the old romances, Palmerin of England, and Don Belianis of Greece. His college career, though not dis- tinguished by any extraordinary aca- demical honors or achievements in scholarship, was characterized by reg- ularity and a fair application of his powers. He probably was no profi- cient in Greek, but he must have made a good general acquaintance with some of the leading authors of that tongue, while he gave his admiration to the Latin poets Virgil, Ovid and Horace, and especially to the dramatic and philosophical historian, Sallust. Meta- physics he valued always rather for their power of enriching the mind by adding to its faculties of apprehen- sion, than for the science itself. He in turn applied himself with zeal to natural philosophy, logic and history, and ended with poetry. Milton seems 21 to have attracted his attention more than Shakespeare, and he would seem to have entered more heartily into the enjoyment of the ^Eneid than of Ho- mer. While at college he translated in rhyme the panegyric of country -life at the close of the second Georgia of Virgil, if not with peculiar poetic felicity, certainly with a creditable ap- preciation of the original and of his English model in Dryden. On one occasion, in a Dublin literary society of which he was a member, he was applauded for his recitation of the speech of Moloch in Paradise Lost. He also attended the meetings of the Historical Society, wh'ere politics were discussed, and wrote two satirical arti- cles, from the government or conserva- tive point of view, directed against what he considered the overwrought patriotic sentiments and doctrines of the day. In 1748 he took his Bache- lor's Degree at Trinity College, and not long after proceeded to London to enroll himself as a student of the law at the Middle Temple. The law by no means engrossed the whole of Burke's time during his early years in London, which he was expected by his father to devote to the profession. He seems never to have taken very kindly to it. His mind was too much imbued with lit- erature and philosophy to relish very greatly its technical subtleties. He knew shorter paths to learning, which he esteemed of greater account. He was too essentially moral and practi- cal to get entangled in its obscure and thorny intricacies. Hence while he regarded it in its political and social relations as " one of the first and no- 1612 EDMUND BUKKE. blest of human sciences, doing more to quicken and invigorate the under- standing than all the other kinds of learning put together," he thought it " not apt, except in persons very hap- pily born, to open and to liberalize the inind exactly in the same propor- tion." Indifferent health also came in the way of any great exertions in the study of the profession. We hear of visits to different parts of England, to Bristol and elsewhere ; while in Lon- don, through his acquaintance with Arthur Murphy, he is becoming famil- iar with literary and dramatic life.* An agreeable chapter could be writ- ten regarding Burke' s female acquaint- ances, their virtues, their failings, and their celebrity. There is Peg "Wof- fington, the unfortunate actress, the (laughter of a poor grocer's widow on Ormond Quay, Dublin, who fascinated everybody who came within her reach, and with whom young Edmund ex- changed glances in the green-room of Drury Lane. There is Mrs. Montague, one of the most brilliant and accom- plished women of her time, of great wealth and of great kindness, whose house was always open to men of let- ters, and who, in 1759, took a real pleasure in introducing the young au- thor of the " Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful" to her great friends. There was Burke's good-natured country- * For the remainder of this notice we are in- debted to an appreciative article in the ' ' North British Review " based on Thomas Macknight's eloquent "History of the Life and Times of Edmund Burke," to which as well as to " Ed- mund Burke, a Historical Study," by John Morley (1869), the reader may be referred for the fullest presentation of the man and his character in history. woman, Mrs. Vesey, of Bolton Row the friend and rival of Mrs. Montague, O ! who made all her guests at their ease and who was as full of Irish frolic and of Irish bulls, as if she still nourished on the banks of the Liffey. There were the two model women of French society in those days, Madame du Def fand and Mademoiselle de L'Espinasse, of whose class Sidney Smith onco said that they " outraged every law of civilized society, and gave very pleas- ant little suppers." Burke attended those suppers when in Paris in 1773, and listened to the wit and the athe- ism that circled so freely round their tables. Finance and philosophy, the drama and the Contrat Social, D'Al- embert and Diderot, Voltaire and Rousseau, Helvetius and " le bon David," all were discussed, all were made the subject of some jeu tfesprit. Burke was disgusted with what he saw of French society, and in his " French Revolution " has held it up as a terri- ble spectacle to all coming time. But the young writer has gone to his garret with health, hope, and genius on his side, and it will go hard with him if he cannot wring from letters what will supply his humble board As an ingenious decoy to the English public, Burke brought out a pamphlet entitled A Vindication of Natural Society (1756), which he dexterously ascribed to a late "noble writer." Every one pronounced the brochure Bolingbroke's. It was full of his in- genious arguments, it was full of his bold assumptions, and it was his style all over. But so high authorities as Lord Chesterfield and Mr. Pitt had pronounced Lord Bolingbroke's style EDMUND BURKE. 163 ''inimitable;" and here the most ac- complished man of fashion, and the most brilliant orator of the age, were both at fault, for it actually turned out to be the work of a poor law stu- dent of the Inner Temple. Hencefor- ward Burke had no need to enter the lists with his visor down. This philo- sophical satire placed his claims to lit- erary recognition beyond all doubt, and he was only following the dictates of prudence or of policy when he ventured before the public hereafter anonymously. A few months after- wards there appeared A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. His theory, that everything was beautiful that possessed the power of relaxing the nerves and fibres, and thus induc- ing a certain degree of bodily languor and sinking, is almost too grotesque to be calmly commented on ; yet the book is full of the most ingenious observations on mental phenomena; and, while comparatively cold and un- impassioned in its style, it possesses, nevertheless, many specimens of rare illustration and most apt allusion, charming the reader even when the oddity of his postulate affronts the reason, and does violence to the feel- ings. Towards the end of 1756, or early in the succeeding year, Burke married Miss Nugent, a countrywoman of his own, the daughter of Dr. Nugent, a physician in Bath. As this lady was brought up a Roman Catholic, it was probably this circumstance that gave rise to some whispers respecting Burke's alleged oscillation between his own faith and hers. After her marriage she joined the Church of England, made to him one of the best of wives, and survived him some four> teen years. His father-in-law came up shortly afterwards to London, and for many years Burke found a home in Wimpole Street with this excellent physician. In 1759 he became con- nected with Dodsley the publisher, with whom he engaged to write the historical section of the Annual Reg- ister for 100 a-year. For the next fifteen years or so, his lucid mind can be traced in its pages, giving order and arrangement to its reports, and in- fusing genius into its details. It was during the same year that he was in- troduced by Lord Charlemont to " Sin- gle-speech " Hamilton, a selfish, crafty Scot, of much more ability than he generally gets credit for, who had a seat at the Board of Trade and a resi- dence at Hampton Court. Whatever was the nature of Burke's connection with this man for it has not been clearly defined we are safe in assert- ing that it was in the manufacture of ideas that the young writer was em- ployed. He lived with Hamilton for the next six years, and, after an irre- concilable quarrel, the 300 of Irish pension which the wily Hamilton had procured for him, was thrown up, and Burke turned his back on " Single- speech" forever. Shortly after the Annual Register was started, Burke met Johnson, for the first time, at Garrick's table. Johnson was close on fifty, and we find the editor of the Register in 1759 re- proaching the nation with having done nothing for the author of Rasselas, Gruff old Samuel seem? to have token 164 EDMUND BUEKE. immensely to Burke, and the violence of his political views did not deter him from recognizing and giving pub licity to his admiration of the Irish- man's worth and genius. The cele- brated Club in Gerrard Street, of vhich Burke was one of the select aine, was founded in 1764. On the 17th of July, 1765, Burke somehow got introduced to Lord Rockingham, and became his private secretary by the obliging services of his friends William Burke and Wil- liam Fitzherbert. This William Burke was simply a kinsman of Edmund's, though the latter frequently calls him " cousin " in his correspondence. Wil- liam likewise gained for him the ac- quaintance of Lord Verney, from whom, a few months afterwards, he received the position of Member of Parliament for the borough of Wendover, near the foot of the Chiltern Hills. This borough was a close one, under Lord Verney's influence ; and in those days, when as much as 9,000 was the price paid for such a post, and 70,000 for a county, Edmund Burke required to thank those powers who had put it into Verney's heart to be so liberal. On the 26th of December, 1765, Burke became member for Wendover ; on the 14th of the following month he entered Parliament ; and on the 27th he made his maiden speech. The Rockingham Whigs had, the previous year, replaced the incompe- tent ministry of Grenville; and al- though Lord Rockingham was an excellent man, of sound integrity, of great courage, an inflexible patriot, and a disinterested politician, the House of Commons was, nevertheless, in no humor to listen to calm debate or tc impassioned harangue. The Ameri can colonies came before the British Parliament in a federal capacity ; and it was on a question touching the com- petency of the House of Commons to receive such a petition, that Burke first spoke. Pitt was understood to favor the petition, and the Adminis- tration considered the admission of it an open question. The new member argued, in a speech of much force and beauty, that the presentation of such a petition was of itself an acknowl- edgement of the House's jurisdiction. If Lord Rockingham had any fears for the discretion and tact of his new secretary, this maiden appearance of his set such suspicions at rest forever. The great Pitt was the first to rise and bestow a warm encomium on the new member. Unlike the young aristocratic po- litician of a former age, and, per chance, also of this one, Burke did not content himself with merely glancing over the newspapers at his club of a morning, before marching to duty : he set himself vigorously to work, as only he knew how, in analyzing the whole work of government, and the complica- ted interests of the British Empire. In his successive appearances, he seems, by universal testimony, to have taken the House entirely by storm. Old men and young men, able men and men less able, trading politicians and soldier? of fortune, all spoke of his orationa with enthusiasm. The Rockingham Whigs, after a very short term of office, had to re- sign, and Pitt, who had recently been raised to the peerage as Earl of Chat EDMUND BUEKE. 165 ham, again took the reins. But he did not hold them long ; the Duke of Graf- ton came into office in 1766, and was succeeded by Lord North in 1770, whose premiership lasted through the American war down to 1782. On the 19th of April, 1774, on Mr. Rose Fuller's motion that the House would take into consideration the tax of threepence per pound on tea import- ed into the American colonies, Burke gave one of his noblest speeches on American taxation. During the deliv- ery of this masterly oration, idle poli- ticians, drawn thither by common re- port, filled the lobbies and staircases of the House. Loud cries of " Go on ! go on !" greeted the speaker, on his pausing to ask if he tired gentlemen. Members of all shades of political opinion declared, enthusiastically, that here was the most wonderful man they had ever listened to, and the American agents were with difficulty restrained from hurraing their admiration in the gallery. So entirely and emphatically had he got men's prejudices under for the time by the force of his persuasive voice, that the king and his crotchet of taxing America were temporarily for- gotten, and, even at the risk of being regarded as personal enemies to his majesty, adherents of the ministry were known to join in the general and irresistible burst of applause. Perhaps the most perfect specimen of Burke's oratory is to be found in his great speech on administrative re- form, delivered on the llth of Febru- ary, 1780. At the height of his pow- ers, and in the full blaze of his fame, he was likewise of more gentle temper thau he afterwards became. All Eng- land sang his ' praises. "While difficul- ty is good for man, as Burke himself declared, there are occasions on which sunshine is one of the most joyoua things on earth. He opened his ad- dress by laying down the principles on which a wise reform should be founded, neither too liberal nor too conservative, and then proceeded to apply those principles. The sound political wisdom which held the reins while the bold imagina- tion went forward on the work of re- form ; the alluring charms of poetical illustration which clothed the past with life, and the future with radiance ; the brilliant flashes of wit which played up like electric coruscations over the House; the condensed rea- soning, the burning emotion, and the fervid appeals to the most noble pas- sions, rendered this speech the most remarkable one in a small compass that the orator ever delivered. For three hours the audience was spell-bound. Ministerialists, courtiers, sycophants, amid tumultuous cheers, bore testimo- mony to the greatness of the success. The historian, Gibbon, though a king's friend, praised it ; and even Lord North condescended to say of it that it had excelled all he had ever heard in the House. Burke's prodigious labors in the prosecution of Warren Hastings, for his alleged cruelty to the Rohillas and the Begums of Oude, formally began in 1784, and the actual trial commenced in Westminster Hall in February, 1788 The impeachment lasted nine days in all, four of which were occupied with the oratory of Burke. He opened his charge in the presence of the most au 166 EDMUND BURKE. gust assemblage of rank and intellect that perhaps ever met in Westminster Hall to listen to any single speaker. On the third day of the trial, which was perhaps, rhetorically considered, the most important, the speaker, with the documents in his raised hands as a testimony to heaven of the guilt of the person charged, with streaming eyes and with suffused countenance, related how slow fires were made to inflict un- mentionable tortures on tender wom- en, how death met life at the very gates and strangled it. His audience could endure the agony no longer, and burst out many of them into tears. Mrs. Siddons confessed that all the ter- rors and pity which she had ever wit- nessed on the stage, sank into insignifi- cance before the scene she had just be- held. Mrs. Sheridan fainted; and the stern Lord Chancellor Thurlow, who always in the most headstrong way had nsisted on Hastings' innocence, was /bserved for once in his life to shed a tear. "This peroration," said Wind- ham, himself an orator of great accom- plishments, as Burke closed his address, " was the noblest ever uttered by man." It may astonish not a few to be told that this speech was not written, that the speaker trusted to his never-failing supply of appropriate language in which to clothe his ideas as they crowded upon his brain. So thoroughly had Burke mastered the ?,rt of government, and so complete- ly new were his political speculations, that this very thoroughness and novelty stood in the way of the reception of his ideas by the British public, and even by the British Parliament. It lias taken the greater portion of a century to place the majority of the House of Commons abreast of what he spoke long years before. There are few of the great measures of the pres- ent day which his far-seeing wisdom did not anticipate, and which his feelings did not valiantly defend. He advoca- ted free trade many years before it be- came a watchword of party, and sup- ported the claims of Catholics when Fox was a boy in small clothes. Cath- olic emancipation was granted many years after his death, but only as a means of preserving the loyalty of the Irish nation. He supported the peti- tion of the Dissenters to be relieved from the restrictions which the Church of England in its own behoof had im- posed upon them. He opposed the cruel laws against insolvents, and at- tempted in vain to mitigate the penal code. He strove to abolish the old plan of enlistment ; and he attacked the slave trade, which the king wished to preserve as part of the British con stitution. His labors in law reform are well known, and he is almost uni- versally recognized as the first financial reformer whom the British nation pro- duced. By means 1 of various bills, he carried through parliament a system of official reorganization which, in the single office of paymaster-general, saved the country 25,000 a year. In March, 1768, he purchased a small estate in the county of Buckingham, twenty-three miles out of London, for some 23,000. This agreeable resi- dence was named Gregories; and is situated near Beaconsfield, where Burke now lies buried. He sat for Bristol from 1774 till 1780; then for Malton, in Yorkshire, till the close of his political EDMUND BUKKE. career. On his retirement from public af- fairs in 1794, the representation of Mai- ton was delegated to his son, a young man of good promise, who had pre- viously filled the post of deputy-pay- master to his father, at 500 a year. But this only son, the joy and pride of his heart, was cut off in a few months by a rapid consumption, in his thirty- sixth year. The grief of the father at this great catastrophe is said, by Dr. Lawrence, to have been "truly terri- ble." Bursting frequently from all control, he would rush into the room where his dead son lay, and "throw himself headlong, as it happened, on the body, the bed, or the floor." Thenceforward Burke's life was im- measurably desolate. His affections, which had always been fervid, now became almost ungovernable. His feel- ings occasionally mastered his reason ; and the strong oak of the forest sensi- bly swayed. " I live," says this broken- hearted old man, "in an inverted or- der. They who ought to have succeed- ed me have gone before me. They who should have been to me as posterity are in the place of ancestors. The storm has gone over me, and I lie like one of those old oaks which the late hurricane has scattered about me. I am stripped of all my honors; I am torn up by the roots." His increased irritability is observa- ble, likewise, in the writings which he gave to the world after this date. His Observations on a late Publication, inti- tuled the Present State of the Nation, which appeared in 1769, was admitted by highly competent judges to outstrip the publications of Halifax, of Swift, of Addison, and of Bolingbroke. His Thoughts on the Causes of the Present Discontents (1770), while it called down the dignified wrath of Chatham, the cynical sneers of Horace Walpole, and the screeches of Mrs. Catherine Macauley, sister to Sawbridge, Lord Mayor of London, is now admitted on all hands to be the most perfect expo- sition of Whiggism which has ever been made. It was in 1790 that his work on the French Eevolution made its appearance. It was read every where, and talked about by every body. No political work on the current events of the day ever equalled it in interest, and in the sudden reputation which it acquired. Nothing else was asked for or thought of. Edition followed edition quicker almost than the printers could throw them off. Thirty thousand copies were soon in the hands of the public. In no place was its effect greater than in the court of George III., where for long years the name of the author had not been mentioned without a shudder. His majesty himself read the book, and would have every one read it near him. " It will do you good do you good," said he; "it is a book every gentleman should read." Meanwhile Fox was consigned to perdition by the creatures of the court : Burke was a great man, and a good man. Even clever Miss Burney (Madame D'Ar blay), the intelligent keeper of the robes, felt her interest in Burke revive on this royal criticism. The book was talked over with much admiration by Pitt and Wilberforce, and other minis- terialists, at a public dinner at Wim- bledon. The fame of it reached the banks of the Isis and the shores of the 168 EDMUND BUEKE. Liffey ; and grave academicals in Ox- ford transmitted their thanks to the author, and in Dublin they made him an LL.D. ! All the crowned heads of Europe, the French nobility and princes in exile, King Stanislaus of Poland, the princes and sovereigns of Germany, and Catherine of the icy North, sent their special congratulations to the author of the Reflections. This was flattering to poor Burke, who had battled so long and so earnestly under neglect and de- preciation. Yet Fox could not bear the book ; Sheridan could not bear it ; and young Mackintosh, at the age of twenty-six, wrote a reply to it. Many of the English people liked it, yet many of them disliked it. Some fifty replies were penned against it ; but the only one that is still read is the production of a political staymaker, the " infidel " Tom Paine. Some two years before Burke's death, the king saw good to bestow upon him two considerable pensions, which amounted in all, dur- ing his life, to something over 10,- 000. Except 4000 per annum, which he received as paymaster under Shel- burne's ministery, this was all that he ever obtained either from king or courtier. From the time of his son's death, Burke never dined from home. His house, formerly like a hotel, was now the picture of desolation. He studious- ly avoided visitors, and wrapt himself 'ip in the cold folds of his own great sorrow. His head declined, and his body bent together ; and the peasants in the neighboring fields, accustomed to a kind word as he passed, now shrunk off awe-stricken at the spectacle of so great a grief. Yet still his mind was fresh, and his faculties vigorous. He spent a considerable portion of the days which preceded his death in the perusal of a good book sent him by a good man " Practical Christianity," by his friend Wilberforce. On the 9th of July, 1797, Edmund Burke expired at Greg- ories, without a groan, in the sixty-fifth year of his age. His disease was a scir- rhous affection of the stomach. " His end," wrote Dr. Lawrence, on the morn- ing of his death, over his lifeless re- mains, " was suited to the simple great- ness of his mind, which he displayed through life every way unaffected, without levity, without ostentation, full of natural grace and dignity." By his own express injunctions, he was to be interred in the family bury- ing-ground at Beaconsfield, beside his brother Richard, and yet a dearer friend to the old man's heart. On the 15th of the month, at eight o'clock, on a beautiful July evening, while the sinking sun sent its last rays through the casements of the little church, he was slowly lowered into the grave, and laid besides the ashes of his son. Burke's widow, who survived him for fifteen years, was removed to the same resting-place in 1812 SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS. Rev. Samuel Reynolds, the father of Sir Joshua, in 1715, at the age of thirty-four, became master of the grammar-school at Plympton, in Devonshire, and there Joshua was born, July 16th, 1723. He was the third son, and seventh child in a fam- ily of eleven. Samuel Reynolds was more remarkable for the range than for the depth of his attainments. His want of profundity might have been no disadvantage in the elementary in- struction of youth, but he was also re- markable for good temper, guileless- ness, and absence of mind, and these were qualities which would be likely to render him the dupe of his boys. Whatever was the cause he was un- successful in his office, and in spite of his various knowledge and virtues, he was at last left with only a single pu- pil. Joshua was intended for a gen- eral practitioner in medicine. Before he was seventeen he had already " spent a great deal of time and pains " on the study of medicine, un- der the direction of his father, who was, in his own opinion, a proficient Abridged from two elaborate papers on Rey- uolds and his works in the Quarterly Review for 1866. . 22 in the science. He thought of appren ticing his son to the Plympton apoth ecary, and said he should make no ac count of the qualification of the nomi nal master, since he himself should be the actual instructor. The salary of the worthy schoolmaster was only 120 a year and a house, and as, with his large family and small income, he could not afford to send his boys to the University, he had evidently re- solved to educate them with reference to their special callings, instead of de- voting their entire youth to obtaining a critical acquaintance with the learn ed languages. Joshua had been accustomed from childhood to make little sketches, and copy the poor engravings in Dryden's "Plutarch," and Jacob Cats' "Book of Emblems." He does not appear to have displayed at the outset any ex traordinary skill. His most memor- able feat was that he went through the Jesuits' " Perspective " of his own accord at the age of eight. " It hap- pened," he told Malone, " to lie on the window-seat of his father's parlor, and he made himself so completely master of it, that he never afterwards had oc casion to study any other treatise or (169) 170 SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS. fchat subject." He lost no time in re- ducing the system to practice, and drew by it the Plympton school-house, which was open below, and rested upon columns at one side, and one end. * Now this," said Samuel Reynolds of his son's performance, "exemplifies what the author of the ( Perspective ' asserts in his preface, that by observ- ing the rules laid down in his book, a man may do wonders ; for this is won- derful." The commendation sunk into the child's mind, and in the zenith of his fame Reynolds repeated the re- mark to Boswell. Joshua next tried his hand in taking likenesses, but with only " tolerable success." Year after year he continued to amuse his leisure hours with his pencil, and when the choice of his profession was under dis- cussion "his very great genius for drawing" raised a question whether medicine should not give way to art. Joshua had been "very much pleased" with a print he had seen, from a pic- ture by Hudson, who was the most popular portrait painter of the day. He was a native of Devonshire, and was shortly expected to pay a visit to Bideford, were Samuel Reynolds had an intimate friend in Mr. Cutcliffe, an attorney. The schoolmaster requested him to show some of Joshua's draw- ings to Hudson, and ascertain if he would receive the lad for a pupil. The fond father, with a prophetic faith in the result, pronounced it to be " one of the most important affairs in his life, and that which he looked upon to be his main interest some way or oth- er to bring about." The difficulties proved less formidable than he antici- pated. " Everything " he said, " jump- ed out in a strange, unexpected man- ner to a miracle." The arrangement was concluded through the mediation of Mr. Cutcliffe; and Joshua was to be boarded, lodged, and instructed du- ring four years for .120. Half of the money was to be raised by Samuel Reynolds in the course of the four years, and the other half was advanc- ed by one of his married daughters, Mrs. Palmer, as a loan to her brother. Young Reynolds was received into Hudson's house in November, 1740, and found his highest expectations fulfilled. " He is very sensible of his happiness," his father wrote to Mr, Cutcliffe in December, " in being un- der such a master, in such a family, in such a city, and in such an employ ment." When Joshua arrived in London, painting had sunk to be an ordinary manufacture. " The art," he said, " was at the lowest ebb : it could not indeed be lower." The painters were incapable of appreciating fine works as well as of executing them ; for from being trained in a false, conven- tional taste, they had come to prefer defects to beauties. Reynolds told Northcote that they would have laughed any one to scorn who had ventured to place the masterpieces of Vandyke in competition with the frigid mannerism of Kneller. Hudson was the last of this school who acquired a reputation. There are portraits by him which would not be thought con- temptible if they were from the pen cil of an artist without pretensions , but his choicest works are poor per- formances for the most celebrated pain- ter of a generation. Horace Walpole SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS. 1T1 speaks of his "honest similitudes," vdiich is a correct description of his pictures. They are formal, common- place, matter-of-fact representations ; and this degreee of skill, we know from Sir Joshua, could be acquired as readily as a mechanic trade. The young apprentice, in his ignorance, shared the contemporary opinion of Hudson's capabilities. Faith and do- cility were serviceable qualities in a youth who had nearly everything to learn ; and a considerable amount of rudimentary practice could be acquired in the studio of a man who had at least the faculty of producing " hon- est similitudes." "As for Joshua," his father reports, in August, 1742, " nobody, by his letters to me, was ever better pleased in his employment, in his master, in everything. ' While I am doing this, I am the happiest crea- ture alive,' is his expression." He had then been a pupil little more than a year and a half, and by his talents and enthusiasm he was rapidly eclipsing his instructor. At the end of two years he had painted the portrait of an elderly female servant, which is said by its superiority to have roused the jealousy of his master. Acting under the irritation of envy at per- ceiving himself outdone by his scholar, he is alleged to have dismissed him not long afterwards on a very frivolous pretence. He had served an appren- ticeship of two years and nine months. The Hudsons of the day could teach him nothing further, and relying on his local connections he set up at Ply- mouth Dock, where before January, 1744, r.e had painted twenty portraits, and had commissions for ten more. In December of that year he was again in London. His time, in the in- terval, had not been well spent. He told Malone that " about the age of nineteen or twenty he became very careless about his profession, and lived for near three years at Plymouth, in a great deal of dissipation." The age of twenty exactly corresponds with the period when he parted with Hud- son, and became his own master. His first taste of freedom from all control, conjoined with his love of sociality, naturally drew him from his easel to indulge in the pleasures of companion- ship. He said " he saw his error in time, and sat dowfi seriously to his art about the year 1743, or 1744." This reduces the season of idleness to rather less than eighteen months. Hudson's ill-will, if it had ever exist- ed, was of short duration. When his discarded pupil reappeared in London, and opened a studio at the close of 1744, he got him elected into a club, " composed of the most famous men in their profession," which was a recogni- tion of his right to take immediate rank with them. Samuel Reynolds calls the conduct " exceeding gener- ous," and a letter to Mr. Cutcliffe, on May 24, 1745, furnishes further proof of the cordial confidence which had survived the brief misunderstanding. " Joshua's master is very kind to him He comes to visit him pretty often, and freely tells him where his pictures are faulty, which is a great advantage, and when he has finished anything of his own, he is pleased to ask Joshua's judgment, which is a great honor." There are no more records of his son's progress from the kind, simple, elated 172 SIK JOSHUA REYNOLDS. jld man. He died on Christmas day, 1746, and Joshua once more withdrew from London and took a house, with his two unmarried sisters, at Plymouth Dock. It is said by Malone that Eeynolds " always considered the disagreement which induced him to leave Mr. Hud- son as a very fortunate circumstance, since by this means he was led to de- viate from the tameness and insipidity of his master, and to form a manner of his own." The change was not imme- diate. His works for some time were of the Hudson school, and he is not known to have produced anything in a better style until he painted the portraits of Captain Hamilton, and the boy engaged in reading, in 1747. Whatever may have been the exact period of the change in . Reynolds' s style, Northcote and Leslie agree that the hints which kindled his genius were derived from the works of Wil- liam Gandy, an itinerant artist, who rov- ed through Devonshire and Cornwall, and died about the time when Joshua was born. Lazy, gluttonous, improv- ident, and irascible, he dashed off likenesses at a couple of guineas a piece, with no other care than to ob- tain with as little trouble as possible the money which would purchase him a luxurious meal. "His portraits," says Northcote, " are slight and sketchy, and show more of genius than of labor; they, indeed, demon- strate facility, feeling, and nice obser- vation, as far as concerns the head ; but he was so idle, and so unambitious that the remainder of the picture, ex- cept sometimes the hand, was com- monly copied from some print after Sir Godfrey Knell er." One of the precepts of Gandy was that " a picture ought to have a richness in its texture, as if the colors had been composed of cream or cheese, and the reverse to a hard and husky, or dry manner." The re- mark was repeated to Reynolds, and how largely he profited by it is appa- rent from the circumstance that it would be difficult to describe more ac- curately the usual surface of his own paintings. The germ of his distinctive qualities may be clearly discerned in particular specimens of Gandy's works, but these merely furnished the spark which lighted up the latent powers of a far greater man. When once the mind of Reynolds was released from the trammels of Hudson's authority, he looked at nature for himself, and began to transfer to his canvas effects and incidents caught fresh from life, and portrayed with the individuality of his charming genius. In April, 1749, Commodore Keppel put into Plymouth on his way to take the command in the Mediterranean, and paid a visit to Lord Edgcumbe, who was one of the local patrons of Reynolds. The young painter yearn- ed to study the masterpieces of the world. The " height of his wishes " was to visit Rome, and at the request of Lord Edgcumbe the Commodore offered him a passage to Italy. They sailed in the Centurion on May llth, and after seeing Lisbon, Cadiz, Gibral- tar, and Algiers, they landed at Port Mahon on August 23d. Reynolds won his way wherever he went by his ad- mirable qualities. From the guest he became the friend of Keppel, and at Minorca General Blakeney, the gov- SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS. 173 ernor, provided him with quarters free of expense, and invited him to live at his table. During his stay on the island he met with a serious accident. His horse fell with him over a preci- pice, his face was much bruised, and his upper lip was injured to such an extent that it became necessary to cut a portion of it away. Nearly all the officers on the station availed them- Belves of his presence to get their por- traits painted, and he remained two or three months among them, " greatly to the improvement," says Northcote, " of his skill and fortune." In December, 1749, Reynolds sailed from Port Mahon to Leghorn, and pro- ceeded by way of Florence to Rome. He was at last in the presence of the finest productions of Raphael, and to his extreme mortification he was un- able to relish them. Surprise has of- ten been expressed that with the skill he had already attained he should have failed to appreciate the extraordinary qualities o? the frescoes at the Vati- can. A remark he made to North- cote explains the mystery. " Every painter," said Reynolds, " has some favorite branch of the art which he looks for in a picture ; and, in propor- tion as that part is well or ill executed, he pronounces his opinion upon the whole. One artist looks for coloring, another for drawing, another for hand- ling; an independent spectator looks for expression." He himself looked for coloring, or, in his own words, " for superficial and alluring beauties," and the pictorial effect of nature, dig- nity and grace seemed tame and in- sipid when it was not conjoined with the captivating hues of the Titans and Correggios. "I felt my ignorance," he says, " and stood abashed. All the indigested notions which I had brought with me from England were to be to tally done away with and eradicated from my mind. Notwithstanding my disappointment I proceeded to copy some of those excellent works. I viewed them again and again ; I even affected to feel their merits, and to ad- mire them more than I really did. In a short time a new taste and new per- ceptions began to dawn upon me, and I was convinced that I had originally formed a false opinion of the perfec- tion of art, and that this great painter was well entitled to the high rank which he holds in the estimation of the world." Thus the first lesson which Reynolds learnt in Italy proved the supreme importance of his journey. He had greatly enlarged his concep- tions, and to his previous aims he ad- ded a fuller insight into the noblest class of effects. His delight in color, and light and shade, remained undi- minished, but he had acquired a keen- er eye for those severer beauties of form and expression, which character- ized what has often been fitly called the epic of art. He was inspired above all by the sublime creations of Michael Angelo. " I was let," he says, in one of his Roman note-books, " into the Capella Sistina in the morning, and remained there the whole day, a great part of which I spent walking up and down it with great self-import- ance." He paid one severe penalty for the knowledge he had gained. While painting in the Vatican he caught a cold which left him deaf for life, and 174 Slit JOSHUA REYNOLDS. obliged him in company to use a trum- pet. In conversation with an indi- vidual, as with a sitter, where the talk ,vas exclusively addressed to himself, and there were no contending voices to interfere with the sound, he heard readily without artificial aid. He remained at Rome for two years and four months. He departed on May 3d, 1752, and proceeded to Flor- ence. Here he was in doubt whether to remain a little longer in Italy or re- turn at once to England. The motives for prolonging his sojourn prevailed. Reynolds stayed at Florence till July 4, and after visiting Bologna and Mo- dena he arrived at Venice on July 24. He again set out on August 16, having spent but three weeks in the head- quarters of that school of color, which he copied and rivalled. His craving to return to England was increased by a circumstance which occurred one night at the opera-house at Venice. The manager, out of compliment to the English part of the audience, or- dered the band to play a popular air which was heard in every street in London at the time when Reynolds and his companions left home. The recollections the simple strain conjured up brought the tears into their eyes. Reynolds did not again halt above a day or two on his homeward journey till he got to Paris, where he remained a month, and painted a beautiful por- trait of Mrs. Chambers, the wife of the architect. Between Turin and the Alps he fell in with Hudson, who, for the sake of appearances, had determined to visit Rome. He only stayed -a couple of days. He was back at Paris before Reynolds had gone away, and they returned together to Eng land. Reynolds reached London Octobei 16th, 1752. His health was impaired, and he went to Plymouth for a three months' holiday. He had no sooner recovered than he set off for London, and hired a studio in St. Martin's Lane. He had brought with him from Rome an Italian boy named Marchi, and he exhibited a head of this lad in a Turkish turban, "richly painted," says Northcote, "something in the style of Rembrandt." Ellis, a fash- ionable manufacturer" of portraits, ex- claimed, when he saw it, "Ah! Rey- nold, this will never answer : why, you don't paint in the least degree in the manner of Kneller." Reynolds denied that Kneller was the standard of per- fection; and Ellis, astonished and en- raged at the heresy, rushed from the room, calling out as he went, " Shake- speare in poetry, and Kneller in paint- ing, damme!" "It is well known," says Mason, the poet, "that when young Reynolds returned from his studies in Italy, Lord Edgcumbe persuaded many of the first nobility to sit to him for their pictures, and he very judiciously applied to such of them as had the strongest features, and whose likeness, therefore, it was the easiest to hit. Amongst those personages were the old Dukes of Devonshire and Grafton, and of these the young artist made portraits, not only expressive of their countenances, but of their figures, and this in a manner so novel, simple, and natural, yet withal so dignified, as pro- cured him general applause, and set him in a moment above his old master Hudson." A full-length portrait of SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS. 175 his friend Keppel speedily followed, and greatly increased his reputation. His sister Frances, who was six years younger than himself, and who died unmarried in 1807, removed with him to London, and kept his house for sev- eral years. She excelled in painting miniatures, and appears at one time to have practiced the art professionally, for Johnson, writing of her to Langton, in January, 1759, says, "Miss is much employed in miniatures." She some- times attempted large pictures in oil, which were so exceedingly bad that her brother remarked jestingly, " that they made other people laugh, and him cry." Before the close of 1753, the increas- ing reputation of Reynolds enabled him to raise his price to the sum charged by Hudson, and to exchange his quarters in St. Martin's Lane for a house in Great Newport Street. He had lived with strict economy abroad, for he once said that he knew from expe- rience that 50 a-year-was enough for a student at Rome. A part of the money was furnished by his married sisters, Mrs. Palmer and Mrs. Johnson, and he must have been indebted to re- lations or friends for the capital which started him in London. His immedi- ate success placed him at once above pecuniary care. His terms for a head were three guineas before he went to Italy, five when he set up in St. Mar- tin's Lane, and twelve when he re- moved to Newport Street. A half- xength was double the price of a head, and a full-length double the price of a half-length. He welcomed comments from every quarter, and scouted the notion that none but painters could judge of pictures. "The only opin- ions," he said, " of which no use can be made are those of half-learned connois- seurs, who have quitted nature and have not acquired art." Likeness of feature was the least achievement of Reynolds. His mastei faculty was the power of painting the qualities of the sitter the power which, along with the lineaments of Thurlow, could depict his sapience and temper. "Sir Joshua dived," says Malone, "into the minds and habits, and manners of those who sat to him, and accordingly the majority of his portraits are so appropriate and characteristic, that the many il- lustrious persons whom he has deline- ated will be almost as well known to posterity as if they had seen and con- versed with them." Northcote, who has stamped this passage with his ap- proval, adds his own opinion that in character the portraits of Reynolds surpassed those of every painter in the world. His range was unlimited. He was great in rendering the traits of all ages, temperaments, and callings men and women, boys and girls, soldiers and men of letters, the gay and the thoughtful, the vicious and the good. Whatever may be the look it has the air of being native and spontaneous. Amid the vast variety of expression in his female heads, the most frequent is some form of pensive tenderness, which was doubtless the quality that usually preponderated in the originals His finest works of this kind are an absolute impersonation of all that is gentlest and purest in womankind. He appears too in his glory in his rep- resentations of children. In spite of 176 SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS. the host of affections which gather round the young, the distinctiveness of their ways, and the attractiveness of nature fresh and unsophisticated, this singularly winning and pictures- que stage of life had been almost over- looked by preceding masters. The painters of. religious subjects repre- sented children as seraphic beings, and the painters of portraits represented them with the formal air which they wore when they sat for their pictures. The happy idea occurred to Reynolds of representing them as they are seen in their daily doings, when animated by the emotions which typify their lives to us. The fondest parent could not observe them more closely, or take a keener delight in their dawning traits and engaging simplicity. He said, "that all their gestures were graceful, and that the reign of distor- tion and unnatural attitudes com- menced with the dancing master." He has recorded on canvas the whole round of boyish and girlish existence. He presents them to us in their games, their pursuits, their glee, and their gravity. Their archness and their art- lessness, their spirit and their shy- ness, the seriousness with which they engage in their little occupations, and the sweet and holy innocence which is common to the majority of the young, are all embodied with unrivalled felic- ity. No class of his works abounds equally with examples of that tran- sient expression which, he said, " lasts less than a moment, and must be painted in as little time." He called it "shooting flying," and considered that the power of fixing these passing emotions was "the greatest effort of the art." Nor did his hand lose its cunning in passing from the softest graces of women and children to the attributes of men. His male heads redound with masculine vigor, and are discriminated by the strongest traits of individuality. "Sir Joshua's por- traits," said Northcote to Hazlitt, " have always that determined air and character, that you know what to think of them, as if you had seen them en- gaged in the most decided action." A memorable event in the life of Reynolds occurred during his residence in Great Newport Street. The Miss Cotterells, who lived opposite to him, were acquainted with Johnson. Rey- nolds met him at their house in 1753 or 1754, and a lasting friendship en- sued. The intimacy imparted a new impulse to the active intellect of the painter. " Whatever merit," he wrote towards the close of his career, " my Discourses have, must be imputed, in a great measure, to the education which I may be said to have had un- der Dr. Johnson. I do not mean to say, though it certainly would be to their credit if I could say it with truth, that he contributed even a single sen- timent to them, but he qualified my mind to think justly. No man had, like him, the faculty of teaching infe- rior minds the art of thinking. The observations which he made on poetry, on life, and on everything about us, I applied to our art." " Nothing," said Burke, " showed more the greatness of Sir Joshua's parts than his taking ad- vantage of the writings and conversa- tion of Johnson, and making some ap plication of them to his profession, when Johnson neither understood, noi SIE JOSHUA REYNOLDS. 177 desired to understand, anything of painting." In 1758, Reynolds raised his prices to twenty, forty, and eighty guineas for a head, half-length, and whole- length. From the unusual number of the works he threw off, Northcote says that his profession was more lucrative at this period than when his charges became higher. The celerity with which he turned out a picture was ex- traordinary. Mr. Taylor finds from his pocket-books that in 1758 he had one hundred and fifty-nine sitters, which is at the rate of rather more than a portrait to every two days. His facility was not even then at its height. " He took," said Fuseli, " in- finite pains at first to finish his work, but afterwards, when he had acquired a greater readiness of hand he dashed on with his brush." The freedom and boldness of his execution increased for many years to come. Here and there we are informed of the time he be- stowed upon particular productions. In 1762 he painted in a week the cele- brated picture of Garrick between Tra-. gedy and Comedy, and in 1773 he com- pleted the head of Beattie and sketched the rest of the figure, in a single sit- ting of five hours. He did not con- sider it a disadvantage to be hurried, but held that the concentration of ef- fort made amends for more leisurely workmanship. The rapid succession with which his portraits followed each other renders more surprising the va- riety of his designs, which would be supposed to have demanded deliberate thought. In the formal parts he could sail in the help of assistants. He had several drapery men in his employ, and 23 such was the advantage of their me- chanic aid, that Northcote had heard him observe that no one ever acquired a fortune by his own hands alone. In 1762 he was making, as Johnson wrote word to Baretti, six thousand a year, and once, when lamenting the inter- ruptions from idle visitors, he dropped the remark, " Those people do not con- sider that my time is worth five gui- neas an hour." The influx of riches did not relax his exertions, for his art was his passion. Till he laid aside his pencil for ever he was constant to his painting-room from ten to four, and he himself says that he went on " laboring as hard as a me- chanic working for his bread." He was sometimes enticed into paying a visit to a country seat, and he always returned from the relaxation and lux- uries with the feeling that "he had been kept from his natural food." His speedy attainment to wealth and fame had no effect in corrupting his sim- plicity. "There goes a man," said Johnson, " not to be spoiled by pros- perity ; " and Burke records that " his native humility, modesty, and candor never forsook him." Reynolds changed his quarters in 1760, having purchased a forty-seven years' lease of a house in Leicester- square for 1650. He expended 1500 more in building a picture gallery " for the exhibition of his works," and paint ing-rooms for himself, his pupils, and his assistants. The outlay absorbed the greater part of his savings. His enlarged establishment included a cha- riot with carving and gilding on the wheels, and allegorical figures of the seasons on the panels. His sister ob 178 SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS. jected that it was too showy, and her brother replied, "What! would you have one like an apothecary's car- riage?" He had little occasion for a carriage himself, and much to the annoyance of Miss Reynolds, who was exceedingly shy and shrunk from the notice which the equipage attracted, he insisted that she should use it. He gave a ball on taking possession of his house. He was not much addicted to mere gaiety, but no man had a keener zest for mental intercourse. " He was as fond of London," says Malone, " as Dr. Johnson, always maintaining that it was the only place in England where a pleasant society might be found." He later erected a villa on Richmond Hill, and often spent a summer evening there with his friends ; but notwithstanding his fine sense of the beauties of nature, he rarely remained a night. He used to say "that the human face was his landscape," and he would not sacrifice the stir of London for rural scenes and fresh air. He belonged to various so- cial clubs, he was a frequent diner out, and every week he gave one or more dinners himself. An important measure, which is said by Barry to have originated with Rey- nolds, was adopted in 1760. The paint- ers commenced an annual exhibition, out of which after several years of ex- periment, grew the incorporated Royal Academy, of which, by common con- sent, Reynolds was appointed presi- dent. To confer dignity on his office he was knighted, which occasioned much rejoicing among his friends. Burke de- clared that there was a natural fitness in his name for the title, and Johnson, after ten 3 ears' abstinence from wine, drank a glass to his health on the oc casion. Reynolds delivered a discourse at the opening of the Academy in Janu- ary, 1769. This was followed by a second in December, when he dis- tributed the prizes. The plan of the academy comprised a school for train- ing artists, and a gold medal was an- nually to be conferred upon the student who produced the best attempt at an historical picture. The president felt that formal compliments would become flat by repetition, and he determined to seize the opportunity to put beginners in possession of the lessons he had learned by years of observation, reflec- tion, and practice. Talent was of slow- er growth than had been anticipated, and after 1772 the gold medal was re- served for alternate years, when the discourses of the president became bi- ennial also. From the long intervals between them he could not enter upon a systematic course of instruction ; but more methodical lecturers have not had equal success in placing the student up- on the vantage ground occupied by the master. He expatiated upon the quali- ties which go to form a fine picture he described the various schools of painting, with the merits and defects of each he specified the characteris- tics of the several masters, showing what was to be imitated and what to be avoided and he detailed to learn- ers the modes of proceeding which would best enable them to appropriate the beauties of their forerunners. His style was clear and chaste, and had the elements of an elegance which proved that if he had not been a celebrated painter he had it in his power to become SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS. 17& a celebrated author. The excellence of the composition gave rise to a report that the Discourses were the work of Johnson or Burke. Malone and North- cote have refuted a charge which must appear ridiculous to any one who has the least acquaintance with the style of the pretended authors. No refuta- tion was required. An accusation which is unsupported by a tittle of trustworthy evidence is simply slander. He exhibited a large historical pic- ture in 1779. This was the Nativity, which he painted as a design for the chapel window at New College. The original was burnt at Belvoir Castle, and was a master-piece of color. Sir Joshua borrowed from Correggio the idea of making the Saviour the source of a supernatural light, " but his exe- cution," says Northcote, " both in man- ner arid circumstance gave it the effect of novelty." The University of Oxford offered its tribute to the illustrious president by conferring on him, in 1773, the degree of D.C.L. He frequently painted him- self afterwards in his academical dress, partly, perhaps, for its pictorial effect, and partly because he prized honorary titles. " Distinction," he said, " is what we all seek after; and the world does set a value on them, and I go with the great stream of life." When Ferguson, the self-educated astronomer, was elec- ted a fellow of the Royal, Society, he exclaimed, " Ah ! I do not want honor ; I want bread." Reynolds replied that, " to obtain honors was the means to ob- tain bread :" which is commonly true when the badge is held in estimation by the public, and he who receives it has proportionate merit. A compli- ment which Sir Joshua rated higher than his degree was paid him the same year. He was chosen Mayor of Plymp- ton. He told the king, who met him walking in Richmond Gardens, that it gave him more pleasure than any other honor he had ever received. As he ut- tered the words he remembered his knighthood, and added, " except that which your majesty was pleased to be- stow upon me." On his accession to the mayoralty, Reynolds presented his portrait to the corporation, and request- ed that it might be hung in a good sit- uation. He was informed in reply that it had been put between two old pic- tures, which acted as a foil, and set it off to great advantage. The two old pictures were portraits of naval officers which he himself had painted before he went to Italy Wilkie, who saw them in 1809, said that " for composition they were as fine as anything he ever did afterwards." From July 24th to September 16th, 1 781,Reynolds was absent from London on a tour through Holland and the Neth- erlands. His admirable criticisms on the Dutch and Flemish painters were mostly written during this journey. He was fascinated by the gorgeous hues of Rubens, and on his return he thought the coloring of his own pic. tures deficient in force. He made an- other excursion into the Low Countries in 1783, when the works of Rubens ap- peared less brilliant than before. In 1784 Reynolds exhibited his Mrs. Sid- dons as the Tragic Muse, which was said by Barry to be " both for the ideal and execution the finest picture, per- haps, of the kind in the world," and whic/h Lawrence pronounced to be in. 180 SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS. dubitably the finest female portrait every painted. The days of Reynolds continued to flow on with a prosperity which seem- ed almost exempt from the common casualties of life. With the exception of his slight paralytic attack, in 1782, he had been hardly acquainted with illness. He was congratulated at the age of sixty-six on his healthy and youthful appearance, and he replied that he felt as he looked. Just at this time the scene suddenly chang- ed. In July, 1789, his left eye became affected by gutta serena, and in a few weeks his sight had perished. There was reason to believe that the right eye was ready to give way, and the hazard of exerting it compelled Rey- nolds to abandon his profession. Artists had usually painted sitting till Rey-- nolds introduced the custom of paint- ing standing. Hie object in the change was that he might be able to see the effect of his work by stepping back- wards. Malone supposed that the habit had answered the additional end of protecting Reynolds from the evils ;>f a sedentary calling. His sedentary life, however, was probably the cause of his malady, which was subsequently found to be associated with derange- ment of the liver. He was neither a tippler nor a glutton, but he ate and drank freely, while he took little exer- cise beyond what the practice of his art afforded. His excellent consti- tution had been slowly gathering the seeds of disease, and when the crisis arrived the mischief had proceeded too far to be checked. " In the fifteen years," says Malone, ' during which I had the pleasure of living with Sir Joshua on terms of great intimacy, he appeared to me the happiest man I had ever known.' Boswell shared the impression, ana Johnson quoted him as an instance of a thinking person who was never troubled with melancholy, but was the same all the year round. He was now deprived of his life-long occupa- tion in a moment. He had early adop- ted the maxim that " the great princi- ple of being happy was not to be af fected by small things." He showed in his closing days that he could ap- ply the principle under grievous afflic- tion. He made the most of the re- sources which remained to him. He looked with the old enthusiasm at the master-pieces in his gallery, he occa- sionally cleaned and touched a dam aged picture, and he found some occu- pation in the business of the academy. Mr. Leslie remarks that his fondness for birds appeared by the manner in which he introduced them into his pictures, and he solaced part of his weary leisure with a little bird he had tamed. His favorite flew away, and he wandered for hours round Leices- ter Square in the fruitless hope of re- claiming it. He was fortunate in his domestic circumstances. When his sis- ter left his house he had two Miss Pal- mers, his nieces, for inmates. One had since become Mrs. Gwatkin ; the other, afterwards Marchioness of Thomond, remained to tend upon him with as- siduous affection. His friends gather- ed round him, and strove to beguile the tedium of his existence. He had all the amusement which could be de- rived from dinners, conversation, whist, and country visits. To some his social SIE JOSHUA REYNOLDS. 181 ease might seem an enviable lot, but a perpetual holiday was a heavy burthen to a man whose profession had been his pleasure for fifty years. He delivered his final Discourse on Dec. 10th, 1790, when he informed his auditors that " his age, and his infirmi- ties still more than his age," would probably never permit him to address them again. His lecture was chiefly devoted to the mighty master from whom he had derived in his youth his highest inspiration, and he wound up with saying, that the last words he wished to pronounce from the chair of the academy was the name of Michael Angelo. His disorders made rapid progress. Miss Burney saw him in July, 1791, when he was greatly dejected by the apprehension that the failing sight of the right eye would soon consign him to total darkness. The enormous en- largement of his liver, which was over- looked by his physicians, was the secret cause of a deeper melancholy. His wonted cheerfulness forsook him, and his Mends could no longer dissipate his abiding despondency. In Decem- ber he was aware that death was ap- proaching. A friend tried to comfort him with the hope of returning health, and he answered, "I know that all things on earth must have an end, and . I have come to mine." His composure returned when he became sensible that his departure was at hand. " Nothing," wrote Burke on Jan. 26th, 1792, "can equal the tranquility with which he views his end. He congratulates him- self on it as a happy conclusion to a happy life." Enthusiasm for his art had enticed him in his prosperity into a partial neglect of his religious duties. His sister, Mrs. Johnson, had earnestly remonstrated with him for painting on Sundays ; and the last request of his dying friend, Dr. Johnson, was that he would give up his Sunday painting and read his Bible. But though he sometimes relaxed his strictness, his reverence remained. " All this excel lence," he said, in his notice of Moser, the keeper of the Royal Academy, " had a firm foundation. He was a man of sincere and ardent piety, and has left an illustrious example of the exactness with which the subordinate duties may be expected to be discharged by him whose first care is to please God." Such was the creed of Reynolds in 1783 ; and, with his simple mind and sweet disposition, we might be sure that he had never relinquished the faith in which he had been trained by his father. " He had from the be- ginning of his malady," said Burke, "a distinct view of his dissolution," and the peaceful hope with which he looked forward to the consumma- tion continued with him to the last. He died on the evening of Feb. 23d, 1792. He had requested that he might be buried, without expense, in St. Paul's cathedral. Burke and the other exec- utors were of opinion that the brilliant era he had created in art demanded a public funeral. His body was remov- ed to the academy at Somerset House, and on Saturday, March 3d, a long pro- cession of men of eminence and rank followed the remains of the great anc good academy president to the tomb. MARTHA WASHINGTON name of Washington rarely -L suggests to an American aught but the patriot hero, or the grave and dignified statesman and father of his country. Washington seems to be es- sentially a part and parcel of the his- tory of our native land. We think of him usually as displaying those noble, manly qualities of head and heart for which he was distinguished; and we are apt to regard him so constantly as the great leader in the Revolution, as the presiding officer of that band of patriots and statesmen who framed the Constitution of the United States, as the first president under the Constitu- tion in its most critical of all periods, and as the venerable sage and coun- sellor after his retirement from public life, that he hardly appears to have been at any time young, or in any wise a partaker of the ordinary feelings, hopes and aspirations of our youthful common humanity. It is quite a mistake, however, to look upon our pater patrice in this light alone. Washington, it is well to remember, was once a boy like other boys, full of feeling which belongs to that age, a boy of excellent common aense, and not without high and worthy (183) aims in life. And more than this, as we may here appropriately state, Wash- ington during his boyhood was so sore- ly smitten with the charms of a "low- land beauty," that he went through all the heats and colds, the elevations of hope and the sinkings of despair, pe- culiar to youthful love, both before and since his time. Who would think it ? The grave, reserved, almost stern warrior and sage, whose self-control was nearly perfect, was, underneath, all alive with quick impulses, and peculiarly sen sible to female beauty and attractive ness. Hardly had he entered upon his career as a man, and begun to be a lover of Mars and the sterner du- ties of the field, when he was smitten again with the tender passion, and his beating heart palpitated under the be- witching influence of a beautiful maid- en of New York. This was Miss Mary Philipse, sister of Mrs. Beverley Robin- son, who was living at the time in the city of New York. Washington was at the impressible age of twenty-three, and it is reported that he formally asked the lady's hand and was refused, But the report may reasonably be doubted. Washington, though a hero MAKTHA WASHINGTON. 183 in the fight, was by nature very diffi- dent and bashful in the presence of ladies, and as Ms stay in the city was but brief, and troubles on the frontier speedily summoned him to Virginia, it is more than likely that he did not tell his love or urge his suit. In due time, however, to speak after the manner of story-tellers, he met his fate, and the accomplished lady who forms the subject of these pages smiled upon him and became his wife. His first meeting with her was quite ro- mantic in its character It appears that, in 1758, while Washington was hurrying forward to Williamsburg, Virginia, he chanced to cross the Pa- munkey, and was seized upon by Mr. Chamberlayne with old fashioned Vir- ginia hospitality, which would hear of no denial. As an additional induce- ment to spend the day at his house, Mr. Chamberlayne promised to intro- duce his guest to a blooming widow who was at the time an inmate of his mansion. Washington reluctantly yielded, with the firm resolve however to push forward that same evening. But when he met the beautiful Mrs. Custis, and came within the sphere of her many attractions, his resolve faded away, and he spent not only that day, but nearly all the next in company with the charming widow. So soon, too, as he could, after dispatching his business at Williamsburg, he continued his attentions to the lady who had evi- dently captivated him, and was in turn captivated herself by the brave and tnanly George Washington. Her resi- dence at the White House, New Kent County, was readily accessible, and Washington urged his suit with so much ardor that they mutually pledged their faith, and it was arranged that the marriage should take place at the close of the campaign against Fort Du Quesne. Martha Dandridge, who was de- scended from an old family that had early migrated to Virginia, was born in the county of New Kent, in May, 1732. She received such education as was ac- cessible in those days, and was quite distinguished among the young ladies of that region for mental excellence, amiability, beauty and fascinating manners. She was only seventeen when she was married to Colonel Daniel Parke Custis, also a native of New Kent County, and a wealthy and suc- cessful planter. Two children were the fruit of this marriage ; but Colonel Custis died within five or six years, leaving his widow with the cares and responsibilities of a large fortune upon her hands, and the training of her chil dren in the path of virtue and good- ness. In this state of affairs, she man- ifested those qualities of prudence, dis- cretion and good sense which pertained to her through life, and rendered her a helpmate indeed to the father of his country. Washington, as above stated, having been successful in his suit, the marriage took place on the 6th of January, 1759, at the White House, the residence ol the bride. It was attended by large numbers of relatives and friends, and was marked by the overflowing and bounteous hospitality of Virginia in colonial times, and seemed to promise as much happiness as is ever vouch safed to mortals in this world of iron ble and uncertainty. 184 MAKTHA WASHINGTON. A few months later, Washington took up his residence at Mount Ver- non, his favorite place of abode and where he spent many of the pleasantest years of his life. His marriage was unblessed with children, which was a source of deep regret to him as well as his estimable spouse, although it may be questioned whether, if there had been a child or children, the lofty eminence attained by Washington in later years, would have been duly sus- tained by his descendants. Under the circumstances, Washington assumed the guardianship of his wife's two children, and in this, as in everything, exhibited the most scrupulous care and exactitude in the discharge of his trust. His deep interest in the educa- tion and training of these young peo- ple could hardly have been exceeded had they been his own children, and it is pleasing to know that they rev- erenced and loved him with all the fervor and devotion of their nature. Miss Custis, we may here mention, died at the early age of seventeen ; her brother, John Parke Custis, mar- ried very early, and from his son we have on record many very curious and valuable recollections of Washington's life and career. It was Mrs. Washington's habit, as well as sincere pleasure, to enter heart- ily into all those enjoyments of home life which were peculiarly acceptable to her husband. Having added her own fortune to that of Washington she was enabled to practice the free- handed hospitality to which we have before alluded, and her mansion was almost constantly furnished with g-uests, who came and went as inclina- tion urged, charmed with the graceful courtesy and dignity of their accom plished hostess. As befitting her rank and wealth, Washington provided for his wife and her lady visitors a chariot and four, with black postillions in livery; he himself always preferred to appear on horseback. Early hours were observed; industry, order, neat- ness and the like, were everywhere en forced ; and vast as was the household, with its numerous dependencies and varied occupants, there was plainly visible the firm but gentle hand of both mistress and master throughout the daily routine. Washington was also a vestryman of two parishes, Fair- fax and Truro, and the Episcopal church at Pohick, about seven miles distant from Mount Vernon, was rebuilt in great measure at his expense. Every Sunday, he and his family attended church, if the weather and roads al- lowed, and it was noted that his de- meanor was always devout and be- coming in the house of God. Both Mrs. Washington and himself were communicants, and in the varied trials and hardships of subsequent years, were enabled to find grace and strength to bear with them as becomes every true Christian. Years passed in this wise ; but they were not unaccompanied with fore- shadowings of the trouble and distress about to be visited upon the country. The Revolution was at hand, and Wash- ington, though ardently attached to his home life audits enjoyments, was no un interested spectator of passing events. By correspondence as well as personal intercourse with prominent men of the day, he kept himself well acquainted MAETHA WASHINGTON. 185 with the progress of affairs, and re- solved, long before the actual struggle of arms commenced, to devote his life and fortune to the support of the liberties of his native country. In this sacrifice to his sense of duty, Martha Washington was his counsel- lor and helper. No merely womanly feeling stood in the way, although the result must be separation from him ; her home virtually broken up ; her mind and heart kept constantly in a state of uncertainty and excitement, and her per- sonal comfort and enjoyment sacrificed to the exigencies of the time. We do not find that she ever interposed any obstacles. So far from this, it is plain that she not only acquiesced cheerfully and pleasantly in what was perhaps inevitable, but she also helped to encourage and nerve and sustain her husband in that which was plainly the path of duty. The appeal to arms had come be- yond all possibility of further evasion. Blood had been shed at Lexington ; the whole country was roused ; the battle of Bunker's Hill took place in June, 1774; and only a few days after, and before the news had reached Phil- adelphia, the Continental Congress had Appointed Washington to the high and responsible post of Commander-in-chief. In accepting this position Washington was by no means insensible - to the ef- fect which it must produce upon his beloved wife. In a letter to her at this date he writes, in a tender and manly tone, worthy, v. e think, of them both, " You may believe me, when I assure you, in the most solemn man- ner, that, so far from seeldng this ap- pointment, I have used every endeavor in my power to avoid it, not only from my unwillingness to part with you and the family, but from a concious- ness of its being a trust too great for my capacity ; and I should enjoy more real happiness in one month with you at home, than I have the most distant prospect of finding abioad, if my stay were to be seven times seven years. But as it has been a kind of destiny that has thrown me upon this service, I shall hope that my undertaking it is designed to answer some good pur- pose I shall rely con- fidently on that Providence which has heretofore preserved and been bounti- ful to me, not doubting but that I shall return safe to you in the fall. 1 shall feel no toil or danger of the cam- paign ; my unhappiness will flow from the uneasiness I know you will feel from being left alone. I therefore beg that you will summon your whole for- titude, and pass your time as agreeably as possible. Nothing will give me so much sincere satisfaction as to hear this, and to hea* it from your own pen." In writing also to his brother John Augus- tine, whom he seemed specially to have loved, Washington referring to his wife, says : " I shall hope that my friends will visit and endeavor to keep up the spirits of my wife as much as they can, for my departure will, I know, be a cutting stroke upon her ; and on this account alone I have many disagreeable sensations." Intense and wearing as were the care and anxiety of the Commander' in-Chief, after he had entered upon his duties near Boston, his thoughts fre- quently reverted to home affairs at Mount Yeraon. Through his agent 186 MAKTHA WASHINGTON. ue kept himself advised of all that was going on, on the banks of the Po- tomac ; and finding that he should not be able to return to Virginia in the au- tumn, as he anticipated, he wrote to Mrs. Washington by express in Novem- ber and invited her to join him at the camp. The invitation was readily ac- cepted, and taking her own carriage and horses, and accompanied by her son and his wife, she proceeded, by easy stages, on her journey to the north. Everywhere she was the recipient of cniards of honor and escorts, and eve- 1 rything was done to manifest the peo- ple's regard for one to whom, by a sort of spontaneous homage, was given the title, "Lady Washington." On reaching Cambridge, she was gladly welcomed by all, and her chariot and four, with black postillions in scarlet and white liveries, excited much admi- ration. Mrs. Washington's presence not only gladdened her husband, but was espe- cially valuable in all those matters ivhere a woman's tact and Ability are requisite to meet and smooth over social and other difficulties. She pre- sided at head-quarters with dignity and ease, and gave a refining and improv- ing character greatly to be desired in military life. She also took a lively interest in every movement calculated to enliven the dullness of camp, and prevailed on Washington to celebrate twelfth night in due style as the anni- versary of their wedding. After the evacuation of Boston, in March, 1776, Mrs. Washington accom- panied the general to New York, from which city at the close of May, she proceeded to Philadelphia, and thence home to Mount Vernon. It became her custom thenceforward to pas? the winters with her husband, and Wash- ington regularly, at the close of each campaign, sent an aide-de-camp to es- cort her to head-quarters. She was al ways welcomed with much satisfaction, and as her example was followed by the wives of other general officers, much was done to mitigate the hard and stern severities of the revolution ary struggle, and to exercise a cheering, genial influence in seasons of unusual disaster and depression. It was in February, 1788, during the winter of unutterable suffering at Valley Forge, that Mrs. Washington was again at head-quarters. " The general's apartment," she wrote to Mrs. Warren, " is very small ; he has had a log cabin built to dine in, which has made our quarters much more tol erable than they were at first." We have it on good authority, that her cheerful submission to the exceeding privation and hardship of that bitter winter helped much to strengthen the fortitude of the half-starved and half- frozen troops, and to give them hope and confidence in the ultimate results of their struggles in behalf of inde- pendence. She was conspicuous in endeavoring to soften the distresses of the sick and destitute, and minister- ing relief to the full extent of her power. Lady Stirling, Mrs. Knox> wife of Gen. Knox, and other ladies who were in camp, joined with Mrs. Washington in these acts and offices of love and devotion to the cause in which each was perilling his all. The alliance with France, which took place this same year, was cele MARTHA WASHINGTON. 181 brated with great joy throughout the country, and an entertainment was given in camp in the pleasant month of May, at which Mrs. Washington and a number of distinguished women were present. Ladies and gentlemen also from the vicinity were largely in at- tendance, and it was altogether a grand affair under the circumstances. Beside the military display and the roar of cannon, there was dancing in the eve- ning and brilliant fireworks. Wash- ington himself opened the ball, and though the preparations and material of every kind were home-made, yet the enjoyment of the company was none the less hearty and satisfactory. The surrender of Cornwallis, at York- town, in Oct., 1781, virtually brought the Revolution to a close. Mrs. Wash- ington's son died shortly after, leaving to her care her son's widow and four grandchildren. Washington had tak- en such lively interest in the young man, and had done so much towards fitting him for the useful and honora- ble station which he filled, that the death of Mr. Custis was keenly felt by him, and he spent several days with his bereaved wife and family in order to comfort them in their affliction. ' Pub- lic duties, however, "were imperative, and the great and good man who had been the means of accomplishing so much, could not now become derelict when his country's interests were at stake. In January, 1783, a treaty of peace with Great Britain was signed at Par- is, and by the close of March, the news reached the United States. In Novem- ber, New York was evacuated ; Wash- ington parted with his beloved compan- ions in arms; was everywhere hailed with acclamations of love and grati- tude ; met Congress at Annapolis in De- cember; resigned his commission into their hands ; and the very next day hastened to his house at Mount Yer- non, arriving there on Christmas eve, under feelings and emotions too deep for utterance. " The scene is at last clos- ed," he said, writing to Governor Clin- ton : " I feel myself eased of a load of public care. I hope to spend the re- mainder of my days in cultivating the affections of good men, and with prac- tice of the domestic virtues." Once more at home, and released from the heavy cares so recently press- ing upon him, Washington gave him- self up to the enjoyments which agri- cultural life always afforded him; and Mrs. Washington, who was in her ele- ment at home, presided with grace and dignity at the simple board at Mount Yernon. She was noted as a house- keeper in every department, and pos- sessing as she did excellent good sense and cheerfulness of spirit, she was al- ways an agreeable companion, a boun- teous hostess, and an admirable mana- ger ; much of her time also was spent in the care and training of her grand- children recently deprived of their father. For a brief period only was Wash- ington permitted to remain at Mount Yernon, in the occupation which lie loved and which he had resolved never again to abandon. The perilous con- dition of the country subsequent to the war and before a national government was organized weighed heavily on his mind ; and it was felt in every part of the country that his further services 188 MAETHA WASHINGTON. could not be dispensed with in any wise. Constant correspondence, and the urgent solicitations of the noble band of patriots, who with him were anxiously watching the course of events, brought him to the conviction that he must be present at the Federal Conven- tion. Accordingly he set out from Mount Vernon early in May, 1786, and reached Philadelphia about the middle of the month. Here he presid- ed with dignity and judgment, until that great work, the Constitution of the United States, was completed and reported by him to Congress in Sep- tember. Meanwhile, "Washington returned to the bosom of his family, quietly wait- ing the action of the several States in respect to the ratification of the Con- stitution, and looking forward with in- tense earnestness to witness its actual operation. Of course, as we all know, there was but one sentiment through- out the country ; Washington was unanimously elected president, and, though with great reluctance, he ac- cepted the position. Although Mrs. Washington was not present at the inauguration, April 30th, and at the festivities immediately con- nected therewith, she took an early day to leave Mount Vernon and go to take her rightful place at the head of the president's family. She was now well advanced in years, being within a few months of the same age with Washing- ton, viz., fifty-seven ; but she did not shrink from the arduous task before her, a task all the more arduous be- cause perfectly new and untried ; nei- ther did she refuse or make any diffi- culty about assuming the position which duty laid upon her, although as she well knew, both herself and hei husband would be subjected to search ing scrutiny, and very probably ill natured, unhandsome criticism. On the 17th of May, accompanied by her grandchildren, she set out for the seat of government at New York. Everywhere, throughout her journey, she was received with marked atten tion and respect, and having met the president at Elizabethtown, N. J., she proceeded with him by watei in a splen did barge, manned by thirteen master pilots, and landed at Peck Slip, near the president's house, amid the enthu- siastic cheers of a vast multitude. On the Friday following, Mrs. Wash- ington had a general reception, which was attended by the first society in the city and by men of high official rank and position. This same evening became thenceforward the regular one for receptions at her house, to which all persons of respectability had ac- cess, without special invitation, and at which Washington was always pres- ent. The hours were from eight to ten o'clock. These levees, thought not justly chargeable with ostentation or aping of foreign courtly manners and cere- monies, were nevertheless always dig- nified and marked by less of that dem- ocratic freedom which has since pre- vailed. Mrs. Washington, estimable and excellent a lady as she was, was essentially aristocratic in her tastes and appreciations ; and the reader need not be surprised that, in certain quarters, her receptions were found fault with, and were cavilled at as " court-like levees," and " queenly drawing-roonm" MAKTHA WASHINGTON. The fault-finding, however, was as un- generous as it was unjust, for the wife of the president was beloved by all who -knew her, and though occupying so elevated a station was as earnest in her desire as her husband to retire from it at the earliest moment practi- cable and resume her duties at home in her own house. Writing to an intimate friend, at this date, Mrs. Washington says : " It is ow- ing to the kindness of our numerous friends in all quarters that my new and unwished for situation is not indeed a burden to me. When I was much young- er, I should probably have enjoyed the innocent gaieties of life as much as most persons of my age; but I had long since placed all the prospects of my future worldly happiness in the still enjoyments of the fireside at Mount Vernon. I little thought, when the war was finished, that any circum- stances could possibly happen, which would call the general again into pub- lic life. I had anticipated that from that moment we should be suffered to grow old together in solitude and tran- quility. That was the first and dearest wish of my heart." During the entire period of Wash- ington's presidency, his wife gave her- self to the duties and responsibilities of her station with a devotion and carefulness worthy of all praise. It is true, that, as she afterwards expressed herself, she looked upon the years of public life spent in New York and Philadelphia, as in some sense among th " lost days " of her life ; but she did not on that account neglect the re- quirements of her position, and she knew well to what an extent her hon- ored husband relied upon her for co- operation and support. When the time came that Washington completed the second term of his presidency, it need no vivid imagination to picture to one self the delightful eagerness with which the venerable pair, whom all united ir loving and admiring, hastened to the haven of rest at Mount Vernon. " The remainder of my life, which in the course of nature cannot be long," Washington remarks, in a letter to an old compan- ion in arms, " will be occupied in rural amusements; and though I shall se- clude myself as much as possible from the noisy and bustling world, none would more than myself be regaled by the company of those I esteem, at Mount Vernon ; more than twenty miles from which, after I arrive there, it is not likely that I shall ever be. ... To-morrow, at dinner, I shall, as a ser- vant of the public, take my leave of the president elect, of the foreign char- acters, the heads of departments, etc., and the day following, with pleasure, I shall witness the inauguration of my successor in the chair of government." Age had now begun to tell upon the great and good man who found his highest happiness in resigning power and pre-eminence, usually so attractive to man. He accordingly invited his O / nephew, Lawrence Lewis, to take up his residence at Mount Vernon, and relieve both him and Mrs. Washington from some of the numerous calls upon their time and attention which needful hospitality and the visits of strangers had rendered burdensome. Mr. Lewis accepted the kindly expressed in- vitation of his uncle; and therefrom certain consequences sprang, which 190 MAKTHA WASHINGTON. were of no little concern to "Lady Washington." At this time, her grandchildren were at home; and Miss Nelly Custis, who was a sprightly young lady, a great fa- vorite with the general and well cal- culated to stir up a young man's blood, fell at once across the path of Lewis. The old, old story was repeated again ; the young people followed the exam- ple of their elders; an engagement took place in due time ; and, much to Washington's satisfaction, the nuptials were celebrated at Mount Vernon. on his birth-day, February 22d, 1799. It is supposed that Mrs. Washington fa- vored another suitor, in preference to Mr. Lewis; but if so, she in no wise interfered with the course of true love, and welcomed the husband of her grand- daughter to his place in the family, with all the heartiness and sincerity of her nature. Although Washington had left pub- lic life, as he thought and purposed, forever, still he could not escape from the call which was again made upon him. It will be remembered that the French government at this date, saw fit to take ground of such a nature, and to behave generally, in its inter- course with the United States, in such wise as rendered it impossible to en- dure its arrogance and insolence. Pres- ident Adams, in the discharge of his duty, felt called upon to urge prepar- ations for war, if war must needs be, and Washington was immediately looked to for advice, counsel and action in the emergency. He was again ask- ed to be commander- in-chief, and to take upon him the oversight of all the steps necessary to put the country in a state of defence. The venerable chief did not refuse to listen to the call ; but, notwithstanding he was compelled to be away from home, and to cause new anxieties to Mrs. Washington, he zeal- ously performed his work. Happily, the French government returned to itb senses, and all difficulties were dis- posed of, without resorting to the last arbitrament of arms, greatly to the re lief of Washington and his beloved wife. The winter of 1799 had uow fully set in. Washington, actively occupied in va- rious improvements and changes in his favorite estate, was constantly in mo- tion, riding about in every direction, overseeing, planning, arranging matters for the future, and, among other things, ordering a new family vault. This, he said, with a sort of melancholy present- iment, as it seemed, must be made first of all ; " for," he continued, " I may require it before the rest." On the 1 2th of December, he was on horseback as usual ; but the day turned out to be cold, raw, and snowy, mixed with hail. He became chilled through ; was seized with a violent sore throat ; in a day or two he grew worse and seemed to be conscious that this was his last sick- ness. Despite all the efforts of the physicians, his disease, acute laryngitis, made rapid progress, and the end speed- ily came. Mr. Lear, his secretary and devoted friend, has furnished an intf resting nar- rative of the last days of Washington. " While we were fixed in silent grief," he says, in speaking of the moment of departure, "Mrs. Washington, who was seated at the foot of the bed, ask- ed, with a firm and collected voice, 'Is MARTHA WASHINGTON. 191 he gone ?' I could not speak, but held up my hand as a signal that he was no more. l 'Tis well,' she said, in the same voice. ' All is *xow over ; I shall soon follow him ; I have no more trials to pass through.'" Thus, on the night of Saturday, December 14th, between the hours of ten and eleven, the great and good man sank to his rest in the fullness of his well-spent life, in the en- joyment of his mental faculties, sur- rounded by his family, and sustained by the faith and hope of the Christian, who lies down in the grave in the con- fidence of a joyful resurrection at the last day. It needs not that we dwell here upon the last sad offices for the dead. The funeral services were conducted with simplicity, dignity and manifest pro- priety, and "Washington's mortal re- mains were buried at Mount Vernon, the place which he loved above all others in the world. Mrs. Wash- ington received visits of condolence from President Adams and many others; and from every quarter, not only- in the United States but in foreign lands, tributes of sympathy and sorrow came to soothe, as far as possible, the heart of th( bereaved widow. With the same earnest devotion to duty that had ever marked her course of life, the venerable lady at Mount Vernon continued faithfully to per- form her manifold obligations ; she re- ceived visitors as usual at her home ; and gave attention to domestic cares and responsibilities, and to the carry- ing out the wishes of the illustrious deceased. But it was not for a long: 3 period that she was called upon thus to act and bear her lot alone. Some two years later, she was* at tacked by a dangerous fever, and was unable to rally. When conscious that the last hour was near at hand, she summoned her grandchildren to her bedside ; she uttered words of mingled comfort and warning; she pointed them to that hope which was hers, as well as his who had not long before gone to his rest ; and she quietly and peacefully passed away, on the 22d of May, 1802, and in the seventy-first year of her age. All that was morta] of Martha Washington was interred in the sr.me vault where her husband's body was laid at Mount Vornon. BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. WHEN Benjamin Franklin, in the autumn of life sat down, sur- rounded by the pleasant family circle of the good Bishop of St. Asaph, Dr. Shipley, at Twyford, to relate to his son the events of a career which seemed to him to offer some cheer and guidance to the world, he commenced that delight- ful Autobiography with a far back- ward glance to the ancestors upon whose native soil he was then tread- ing. "I have ever had a pleasure," he says, "in obtaining any little an- ecdotes of my ancestors." Indeed, he once made a special pilgrimage for the purpose, when he succeeded in tracing his family of the Franklins, through a " long pedigree of toil," in the little village of Ecton, in Northamp- tonshire, to the middle of the six- teenth century. For generation after generation, down to Franklin's day, they were the blacksmiths of the town, holding their own on a few acres, and living in an old stone house, which was still called by their name, though it had passed out of the family some years before the visit of its illustrious member in 1758. We may see him on that visit, so faithfully recorded in a letter to Mrs. (192) Franklin, in America, standing with the wife of the parish clergyman among the thick graves of the centuries, as the old tombstones were scoured that his son might copy the family in- scriptions. Tne last Franklin who lived in the lady's recollections was Thomas, his father's brother. The nephew expresses himself " highly en- tertained and diverted " with what he heard of him ; for he recognized much in common between this uncle's genius and his own. "He set on foot" Franklin himself is the narrator " a subscription for erecting chimes in their steeple and completed it, and we heard them play. He found out an easy method of saving their village meadows from being drowned, as they used to be sometimes by the river, which method is still in being; but when first proposed; nobody could con- ceive how it could be ; ' but, however, they said, ' if Franklin says he knows how to do it, it will be done.' His advice and opinion were sought for on all occasions, by all sorts of people, and he was looked upon, she said, by some, as something of a conjurer." There was another uncle, Benjamin, the poetaster, who came to Boston, .i. ./riguu'ij- oui/ina 'UJ^jjje ui i&possess-un crtc BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 193 was a collector of historical pamphlets, a patient digester of Puritan discourses, stood godfather to his namesake, wrote poetical directions for his conduct in an acrostic, and died at a good old age. ^ Josiah Franklin, the father, emigrated to New England under the non-con- formity impulse about 1685, bringing with him his wife and children. Ben- jamin came into the world at a house in Milk street, Boston, January 17, 1706, the fruit of a second marriage in America, the fifteenth child of his father's family of seventeen. His mother was the daughter of the old Nantucket poet, Peter Folger, who rhymed, in his " Looking-Glass for the Times," of the Fathers and their back- sliding descendants. There is less told than we should like to know of Frank- lin's parents. The cares of a large family doubtless absorbed their atten- tion, and the greater part of life was spent in little duties without much claim upon the notice of the world. The father's calling, that of a soap- boiler and tallow-chandler, is not sug- gestive of very various accomplish- ments ; but we are told " he could draw prettily, and was skilled a little in music," that his understanding was sound, and that he was much consulted by his neighbors. Of the mother we are told less : but that little is enough for goodness, if not for fame. "He was a pious and prudent man, she a discreet and virtuous woman," says the inscription written by their son on the tomb at Boston which covers the remains of Josiah Franklin and Abiah his wife. At eight Benjamin was sent to the 25 public grammar school, where the vene- rable Cheever having, in the apt lan- guage of Mr. Everett, " feruled his last boy," had lately departed, obedient to the wand of a more imperious usher, and Nathaniel Williams birched in his stead. Benjamin remained there a year, making his way upward with the good purposes of a boy destined for college and the pulpit, with the pro- mise of his uncle's short-hand abridg- ments of the Puritan sermons he had listened to, as stock in trade when he should learn to dechipher them, and be set up in the vocation. The pressure of Josiah Franklin's large family, and " the little encouragement that line of life afforded to those educated for it, " induced him to forego these liberal intentions, and a little plain writing and arithmetic, inculcated by Mr. George Brownwell, was substituted for the sweet sister Muses. Perhaps in contrast to that thorny pathway to Helicon, the grammar school, the pupil records of his new teacher that he employed the mildest and most en- couraging methods. The young Ben- jamin learnt to write a good hand his manuscripts are always neat and ele- gant but he tells us he failed entirely in arithmetic. The boy, however, had not much discipline of this kind to undergo, for, at ten, he was taken into the paternal tallow chandlery, when the longs and shorts to which his at- tention was directed had reference, not to Homer and Virgil, but to dips and moulds. The flavor was not to the boy's taste, and he cast his eyes to the ocean. His father took a not irrational mode of ascertaining his tastes, by leading him about oa a survey of thn 194 BENJAMIN FKANKLIN. trades of tlie town; but the exper- iment did not succeed, if it was due to this proceeding that he hit upon the business of a cutler. The arrival from London of his cousin, who was in that calling, probably had more to do with the choice ; fortunately he was exact- ing in his apprentice fee, and the thing fell through. If Josiah Franklin wished to ascer- tain his son's disposition, it was not necessary for him to perambulate the town and review all its handicrafts : the books which the boy so constantly had in his hand might have guided him, as, indeed, this taste for reading did when his father determined to make him a printer. His brother James, having brought printing materials from England, Benjamin was apprenticed to him in his twelfth year. The boy will now court the Muses for himself, with- out the interposition of any of Master Cheever's successors. He takes to books as his native element. " About this time I met with an odd volume of the l Spectator,' " reads the Autobio- graphy. By how many men who have risen to fame, since the gentle Addison closed his lucubrations, might not this sentence have been gratefully written. Franklin hit upon an excellent plan to learn the art of writing. He stud- ied one of the charming essays just alluded to, made brief notes, and, when the words had passed from his memory, attempted to reproduce the whole in language of his own, which he compared with the original. Find- ing himself at a loss for words, he be- thought himself of the necessities of rhymers, and enlarged and strength- ened his vocabulary by turning a " Spectator " into verse. He appears to have had some talent for rhyming, or he may simply have shared the uni- versal weakness of the old Puritans of the place, who, as old Fuller says of some kindred excellence, " oftener snorted than slept on Parnassus." Wo hear of his writing street ballads for his brother ; " The Light-house Trage- dy," and a sailor's song on the capture of Black Beard " wretched stuff," he candidly tells us, but the first, he adds, " sold prodigiously." He became at this time, too, something of a dispu- tant, chopping logic on religious topics, the old Puritan machinery getting a little out of gear, as he caught enough of the method of Socrates to puzzle ig- norant people with the matter of in- fidel Shaftesbury and Collins. His tastes in books, however, led him to others which were more to his advan- tage. Cotton Mather's " Essay to do Good," and De Foe's " Essay on Pro- jects," he mentions particularly as giv- ing him " a turn of thinking that had an influence on some of the principal future events of his life." Two or three years after the com- mencement of the apprenticeship, his brother set up the fourth newspaper 1 published in America, the " New Eng- land Courant." The press naturally took root in America. From the first, it has called forth the best talent of the country, and in Franklin's day was pretty much the only avenue open for miscellaneous literature. The young Franklin caught the mania of writing from the consequence it gave the con- tributors to the paper, and, knowing that a prophet has no honor in tht guise of a printer' ^ devil, slipped his BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 195 anonymous offerings by night under the door and awaited the result. He 'iad the satisfaction of hearing them read with becoming admiration, and probably the luxury of setting them in type himself. The " Courant " was what would be called in modern slang a "spicy" paper trenchant and sa- tirical. It took some liberties with the powers that were the church, state, and the " college " of those times freedoms which would probably pass for civilities as such things go now-a-days. The Assembly, in con- sequence, tyranically ousted James Franklin. This led to cancelling his brother's indentures, that the paper might appear with Benjamin's name. The relations of master and appren- tice in the good old times allowed greater indulgence to the temper of the employer than we hope is permis- sible at present. Quarrels arose be- tween the brothers ; one perhaps was saucy, the other passionate, and blows sometimes followed. Benjamin, taking advantage of the broken indentures, . resolved to leave ; obstacles were then interposed ; he managed to evade them, raised money by the sale of his books, I , and embarking in a sloop, fled to New i York. Finding no opportunity in that city, he pursued his way, with various adventures of considerable interest, as related in the Autobiography, to Phil- adelphia, making his first entrance into the place, in which he was after- wards to play so important a part, from a boat which he had assisted in vowing down the Delaware, one mem- orable Sunday morning, in October, 1723, at the as;e of seventeen. He was 7 O clad in bis working dress, soiled by ex- posures on the way ; fatigued, hungry, and almost penniless. The incident* of that first day are as familiar as any thing in Robinson Crusoe. Every boy has seen the young Benjamin Franklin walking along Market Street, with the "three great puffy rolls," passing the door of his future wife, noticed not very favorably by that lady, making the circuit of the town, sharing those never-to-be-forgotten loaves with a mother and her child, till he finds shelter in sleep, in a silent meeting of the Quakers. He immediately sought employment in the printing offices of the city, going first to Andrew Bradford, by the advice of whose father, the printer, William Bradford, of New York, he had left that place for Philadelphia. The old gentleman introduced him to Samuel Keimer, an original, a compound of the knave and the enthusiast, whom he found literally composing an elegy, stick in hand, at the case, upon Aquila Rose, a young printer of the city, re- cently deceased. Keimer was one of a host of odd people, with whom Franklin, in the course of his life, came in contact, of whom there are amusing traces in his letters and Au- tobiography. He always delighted to study human nature in her varieties, and no man ever had a better opportu- nity, or pursued it more profitably. He had soon the means of making the acquaintance of two royal governors; for there seems to have been some in- fluence in Franklin's star which threw him out of the society of vagabonds among titled personages. One of these was Sir William Keith, the Governor of Pennsylvania, who was attracted to 190 BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. the youth by a letter that had acci- dentally come to his knowledge, in which the apprentice stated his rea- sons for leaving Boston. He made the most flattering overtures to Frank- lin, recommending him to open a print- ing office in the province, and gave him a letter to smooth the way for the project, with his father. The epistle assisted the youth's consequence on his visit to Boston, produced some surprise and good wishes for the fu- ture, but no money. On his way back to Philadelphia, the young printer had the honor of an interview with Gover- nor Burnet, a son of the bishop, then in office at New York. It is evidence of the size and character of the present metropolis at that time that the gover- nor heard from the captain who had brought him to the place, of a passen- ger, with a number of books on board, and that he invited him in consequence to see his library. Governor Keith was as enthusias- tic as ever on the scheme for a good printer in the province, and directed Franklin to make out a list of what would be wanting, and proceed by the packet to England, with a letter of credit for the necessary funds, with which he would provide him. There are men in the world whose imagina- tions give them the faculty of seeing a thing in the strongest light at a dis- tance, who have no capacity to grapple with it close at hand. Keith appears to have been one of these ; a man of words and not of deeds. Franklin was ready ; not so the letter of credit ; it was deferred with promises to be sent to one place and another, and finally on ship board. The result was that Franklin found himself in London, ic 1724, on a fool's errand. Some fifty years afterwards, in the Autobiogra- phy, he summed up the character of his eminent friend philosophically enough " He wished to please every body; and, having little to give, he gave expectations. He was otherwise an ingenious, sensible man, a pretty good writer, and a good governor for the people." Thus Franklin was thrown upon the great metropolis. Fortunately, within the limits of the civilized world, a printer, wherever cast, will always alight upon his feet. Franklin soon found employment, and supported him- self at his trade during his eighteen months' residence in London. His industry at this time was great as ever, but, unhappily, the principles in which he had been indoctrinated at home had been gradually relaxed. He had a shabby companion in Ralph, who came with him from Philadelphia, and sub- sequently grew into a voluminous po- litical writer, under the patronage of Bubb Doddington. The two cronies lived together in Little Britain; we are sorry to say their principles were not of the best; theoretical infidelity appears to have been their amusement, and both were faithless to their obli- gations to the fair they had left in America. Franklin forgot the lady Miss Read, whom he had courted in Philadelphia, and Ralph rather prided himself on his abandonment of his wife and child. The conclusion of the inti- macy between the chums was Ralph's borrowing Franklin's money, and Franklin making love to his friend's mistress in his absence. BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 191 Franklin also published, at this time, * A Dissertation on Liberty and Neces- sity, Pleasure and Pain," inscribed to his friend ; another erratum, of his life, he frankly admits. It led, however, to his introduction to Dr. Mandeville, and a club which he maintained. A casual introduction to Sir Hans Sloane, who called upon him to purchase a purse of asbestos, may be mentioned as a sug- gestive fact in the history of the future man of science. It is remarkable, again, how men of eminence are attracted to this printer's boy, Franklin. Sir William Wynd- ham, afterwards Earl of Egremont, hearing of his excellent qualifications as a swimmer, was desirous of secur- ing his services as the instructor of his sons. Franklin had now, however, made up his mind to return home, led by the inducements held out to him in a trading scheme by a Mr. Denham, whose acquaintance he had made on the outer voyage. On his return to Pennsylvania, in the summer of 1726, he turned over a new leaf, with fewer errata than the blotted London pages. It is much to be regretted that the plan for regu- lating the future conduct of his life, which he drew up on the voyage, al- luded to in the Autobiography, is miss- ing from the very interesting journal of occurrences at sea to which we are referred. He was now twenty, with confirmed habits of industry, a mind trained to observation, an extraordi- nary acquaintance with the world for one of his years, and, for his time and country, a rare felicity in composition, to state in print what he might think or desire to accomplish. His style was already formed in sentences, clear, dis- tinctly separated, terse and pointed, ar index of his mind and character, and an admirable vehicle for his peculiar sagacity and humor. We may see the young man on the deck of the Berk- shire, in mid Atlantic, calmly weigh- ing his past career, rebuking its graver offences, commending the diligence which had been his preserver, scruti- nizing carefully those minor morals, as they have been called, of temper and the proprieties, which may be cultivated to promote the great successes of life. At Philadelphia he found his offi- cious friend, Governor Keith, walking the streets a private citizen, and his neglected Ariadne, Miss Read, the wife of "one Rogers, a potter." His en- gagement with Denham in store-keep- ing prospered for a time, but was speedily interrupted by the death of that friend, and Benjamin, who thought he had bid farewell to stick and case forever, resumed his old employment with Keimer, who had prospered in the world. One of his first steps in this new residence at Philadelphia, was the for- mation of his friends into a social and literary club, to which he gave the name The Junto. This society, founded for mutual improvement by a few in- telligent clerks and mechanics, lasted for forty years, and became the basis of the American Philosophical Society. Out of this Junto came the great PhiL adelphia Library, "the mother of all the North American subscription li- braries." It was suggested by the lit- tle joint-stock collection of books of Franklin's knot of scriveners, joiners, and shoemakers. 198 BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. While these things were going on, and Franklin was drawing up all sorts of plans for knowledge and improve- ment, he did not neglect the practical part of life. His business as a printer ho was now in partnership with his friend Meredith, master of his own office was not neglected ; on the con- trary, it throve wonderfully with his ingenuity and application. One of his early projects was the establishing of a newspaper, for which there was then an opening. He unhappily communi- cated the plan, before he was quite ready for its accomplishment, to one of his acquaintances in the profession, who carried it to his rival, Keimer, by whom he was anticipated. To counter- act the influence of the new journal, he threw the weight of his talents into Andrew Bradford's gazette, "The Weekly Mercury," to which he con- tributed some half dozen capital es- says of a series entitled "The Busy Body." Keimer's feeble attempt fell through before the end of a year, when the "Pennsylvania Gazette" became the property of Franklin and Mere- dith. The two friends commenced the publication of the Gazette, September 25th, 1729. It was long continued under the editorship of Franklin. The year 1730 brought about Frank- lin's match with Deborah Read, the lady to whom we have seen him en- gaged before his visit to Europe, and who was married in his absence. Her husband proved to be a " worthless fel- low," got into debt, and ran away to the West Indies. He was, moreover, laboring under the suspicion of having another wife living in England. Frank- lin took the risk of his coming back, which fortunately never happened, and secured "a good and faithful help mate," the honored companion for for- ty-four years of his long life, sharing his rising efforts, living to witness his brilliant successes in philosophy, and rapidly growing importance in the State. In 1732 Franklin began the publi- cation of his famous " Poor Richard's Almanac," which appeared annually for a quarter of a century. It was a great favorite with our forefathers, as it well might be in those days with its stock of useful information, and the cheerful facetiousness and shrewd worldly-wise maxims, of temperance, health, and good fortune, by its editor, Richard Saunders, Philomath, as he called himself for Franklin appeared on its title-page only as printer and publisher. The maxims at the close of the work in 1758 were collected into a famous tract, " The Way to Wealth," which, printed on broad sheets, and translated into various languages, has been long since incorporated into the proverbial wisdom of the world. By some persons its lessons have been thought to give a rather avaricious turn to the industry of the country ; but there was nothing really in Frank- lin or his philosophy to encourage par- simony. Benevolence and true kind- ness were laws of his nature, and if he taught men to be prudent and economical, it was that they might be just and beneficent. We have not only such spurs to activity as " Dili- gence is the mother of good luck," and " One to-day is worth two to-mor rows," but a charitable word foi the unfortunate, and those who fall in BENJAMIN FKANKLIN. 199 the race. " It is hard," he says, " for an empty sack to stand upright." Public duties now began to flow in upon Franklin apace. In 1736 he was chosen clerk of the General Assembly, which gave him some incidental ad- vantages in securing the printing of the laws, and the following year was appointed Deputy Postmaster in Phil- adelphia. His hand is in everything useful which is taking its rise in Phil- adelphia. He is the Man of Ross in the place, setting on foot a building for Whitefield to preach in, instituting fire companies, editing and publishing his newspaper, printing books, issuing, in 1741, the "General Magazine and Historical Chronicle," inventing his Franklin stove in 1742, drawing up a proposal for the establishment of an Academy in 1743, out of which grew the University of Pennsylvania ; the next year projecting and establishing the American Philosophical Society ; afterwards assisting in founding the Pennsylvania Hospital. The public business of the country is now to raise Franklin to a wider field of exertion than the city limits of Philadelphia. In 1753 he is appoint- ed by the department in London, Post- master-General for the Colonies. The following year he is sent by the Penn- sylvania House of Assembly as a member to the Congress of Commis- sioners, meeting at Albany, to confer with the Chief of the Six Nations, on common means of defence. On his way he draws up a plan for a general system of Union of the Colonies, for purposes of defence and the like, which is the first time the word Union is distinctly sounded among the States. The Home Government saw too much independence in the scheme, and sent over General Braddock and his army to fight the battles of the provincials for them. Franklin waited upon the consequential Englishman on his arri- val, at Fredericktown, in Maryland, assisted him greatly in his equipment by means of his influence over the re- sources of Pennsylvania, and proffered some good advice as to Indian ambus- cades, which the general was too fool- hardy to listen to. Franklin shook his head over the grand march through the wilderness. He was called upon at Philadelphia for a subscription to the fire- works for the expected victory. Upon his hesitating, one of the appli- cants said with emphasis, " Why, you surely don't suppose that the fort will not be taken !" " I don't know," he replied, " that it will not be taken ; but I know that the events of war are subject to great uncertainty." There was one man at least in the land who was not taken by surprise at the news of Braddock's defeat. After this, Franklin is himself employed by his State in superintending its western defences against the French and In- dians; but when Governor Morris talks of his making a military expedi- tion against Fort Du Quesne, he shows no disposition to follow in the foot- prints of Braddock. The philosophical studies of Frank- lin were now taking form in numerous experiments and inventions. His at- tention appears to have been first call- ed to the subject on a visit to Boston, in 1746, when he witnessed the experi- ments of Dr. Spence, who had lately come from Scotland. The arrival of a 200 BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. glass tube in Philadelphia, sent by the ingenious Peter Collinson, of London, with directions for its use, also stimu- lated inquiry, which Franklin carried on to advantage with the important assistance of his friend, Ebenezer Kin- nersley. His first observations, in- cluding his discovery of positive and negative electricity, were communicat- ed in a letter to Collinson, dated July llth, 1747. In 1749, he suggests the use of pointed rods the invention of the lightning-rod to draw electricity harm- lessly to the ground or water. His celebrated kite experiment, identify- ing lightning and electricity, was made at Philadelphia in the summer of 1752. As his researches went on, the results were communicated, through his cor- respondent Collinson, to the Royal So- ciety, but their publication at first fell into the hands of Cave, the celebrated publisher of the " Gentleman's Maga- zine," by whom they were issued in quarto. Of the style and philosophi- cal merit of these communications, which have a place in every history of the science, we may cite the generous testimony of Sir Humphrey Davy. " A singular felicity of induction," he says, " guided all Franklin's researches, and by very small means he establish- ed very grand truths. The style and manner of his publication on elec- tricity are almost as worthy of admi- ration as the doctrine it contains." The honor conferred upon Franklin for these communications and discov- eries, by the Royal Society, in making him a fellow, in 1756, was, contrary to the regulations of that body, be- stowed unsolicited when he was America. m One period of the life of Franklin has now closed ; the printer and edi- tor is henceforth to be lost in the pub- licist and statesman. He had been continued in the Legislature, counsel- ling and assisting in the affairs of the Province, studying thoroughly the vices and defects of its mongrel gov- ernment, occasionally casting his eye upon the map of the whole country, when he was one day chosen by the Assembly Agent of Pennsylvania to represent its interests with the proprie- taries and the government in England. He arrived in London, the second time, July 27th, 1757. The immediate business which car- ried Franklin to London, was the refu- sal of the Proprietaries, the sons of William Penn, the possessors of large territory, and entitled to important political control, to submit their lands to a tax for the general welfare, which the Assembly had imposed upon the whole State. Reasonable as the pro- position appears, it was so hedged in by prescriptive rights and legal diffi- culties, consultations with the Proprie- taries, arguments before the Board of Trade, and impinged so greatly upon the royal prerogative, that it was three years before the vexed discussion was brought to a close in favor of the Pro- vince. "While this political litigation was pending, a memorable publication, the "Historical Review of Pennsyl- vania," appeared in London. It was a pungent account of the Provincial management, was written with ability, and was generally attributed to Frank- lin ; but he appears only to have as- sisted in its preparation. He, however, published anothei BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 203 pamphlet of wider scope, which ren- dered a signal service to his country. This was his tract entitled " The Inter- est of Great Britain Considered," a re- view of the motives for retaining Canada in the approaching peace with France. In this year of the publica- tion of the Canada pamphlet, Frank- lin was elected a member of the Coun- cil of the Royal Society ; and we find him subsequently placed on its com- mittees in reference to the introduc- tion and use of lightning rods. Franklin the University of Oxford had now made him Doctor of Laws returned to America in 1762, honored as a philosopher abroad, with many noble friendships with good and active minded men ; to be greeted at home with enthusiasm for the discharge of his agency, and assigned new employ- ment in the provincial service. Two years later, the turn of events brings him again in London, as the agent of his State, which, in common with the other colonies, listened with alarm to rumors of Stamp Acts and other ag- gressions of the mother country. No more astute counsellor could be for- warded to cope with the diplomacy of the old world. It is soon perceived through the length and breadth of America. Georgia, at one extremity, adds him to her delegation, and Massa- chusetts at another. He is also agent for New Jersey. Called before par- liament in 1766, without special pre- paration, he answers fully and shrewd- ly all questions proposed. There is enough wisdom in his responses to save an empire, if the British repre- sentatives had ears to hear. Shrewdly again, six years later so long a time 26 is given the British nation for reflec- tion before this fatal drama is hurried to its catastrophe does he manage that affair of the intercepted Hutchin- son Letters, which removed the last veil from the insincerity of British placemen in America, opening the eyes, not only of Massachusetts, but of a continent, to the necessity before it. Events were now rapidly approach- ing a crisis. The old Continental Con- gress met in Philadelphia, and for- warded its eloquent, weighty remon- strances to king, parliament and peo- ple. Franklin incorporated their sug- gestions with wisdom of his own in pleas and remonstrances; Lord Chat- ham heard him gladly and strength- ened his own convictions by his warn- ings; there was talk of rconciliation and adjustments within parliament and without all circling about Frank- lin,, and all came to nothing. The phi- losopher kept his finger on the pulse of the nation; he saw the madness fixed, and, having no relish for an idle residence in the Tower on bread and water, opportunely departed for Ainer ica, after ten years of fruitless moni tions to England. Landing in America the 5th of May, 1775, he heard of the battle of Lexing- ton. It was fought while he was on the Atlantic, perhaps while the philo- sopher was meditating those experi- ments on its waters which resulted in the discovery of the temperature of the Gulf stream. He was now to study the fever heats of his countrymen, and distinguish between lukewarmness and resolution among men. He was elected immediately to the second Continental 202 BENJAMIN FEANKLIX. Congress, counselling with the wisest of his land while he assisted in the military defence of his State as a mem- ber of its Committee of Safety. In Congress he drafted articles of Con- federation, was appointed Postmaster- General, visited the camp of Wash- ington at Cambridge think of the runaway apprentice of half a century before taking this glance at his native town is sent to Canada to negotiate insurrection, and on that memorable day of July, at the age of seventy, puts his neat, flowing signature to the Declaration of Independence. " We must be unanimous," said Hancock, on this occasion; "there must be no pulling different ways; we must all hang together." "Yes," answered Franklin, " we must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately." This Ulysses of many counsels is next at the head of a Convention at Philadelphia, framing a State Consti- tution, in which, "with less wisdom than usual, he advocated a single leg- islative assembly; anon we find him travelling to Staten Island, sleeping in the same bed with John Adams, and philosophically arguing that statesman to repose with a curtain dissertation on opening the window for ventila- tion,* as the commissioners pursued their way to a fruitless interview with Lord Howe. A month later and he is on his way to Paris, accompanied by his grandsons, William Temple Frank- lin and Benjamin Franklin Bache, a commissioner to negotiate a treaty and * This incident, related by John Adams in his Autobiography (Works, III., 75), is too sharacteristic to be omitted. alliance with the French monarch. His residence at the capital, apart from the toilsome business of his American ne- gotiations, which taxed all his re- sources and equanimity, has an air of genteel comedy and stage triumph He is courted and flattered by ladies of distinction; there is a very pretty mot complimentary to the philosopher, of Madame de Chaumont, when the young and beautiful Mademoiselle de Passy is married to the Marquis de Tonnere, " Helas ! tous les conduc- teurs de Monsieur Franklin n'ont pas empeche le tonnerre de tomber sur Mademoiselle de Passy ; " writes out for Madame Brillon and the rest his pretty, wise fables in most delightful prose; the venerable sage trifles as gallantly as a youth of twenty; his portraits and bust are everywhere. Turgot writes his splendid epigraph " Eripuit coelo fulmen, sceptrumque tyran nis " the statesman and philosopher is in troduced to the king and court at Ver- sailles, and thus the man diligent in business comes to realize the proverb and stand before kings, not before mean men. It is his own application somewhere in his Autobiography of the saying of Solomon. We may not here pause over the negotiations at Paris, which belong as well to others and altogether to the general page of history, but must hasten to the final settlement. Suffice it that in the most intricate perplex- ities, civil, naval and military, of em barrassed finance and threatened polit- ical actions, perplexed by Arthur Lee, supporting Jay at Madrid and Paul Jones on the ocean, smoothing, aiding BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 203 contriving and assisting by word and by pen, always sagacious, always to the point, whether commissioner or plenipotentiary, he steers the bark of his country to the desired haven. He signs with. Jay the preliminary Treaty of Peace with Great Britain and its final ratification, September 3d, 1783. Continuing his duties for awhile, he finally, burdened with infirmities, left Paris in July, 1785, passed a few days in England, and reached Philadelphia in September. A grateful nation, from the highest to the lowest, honored his return. America, too, had yet other duties in store for her rep- resentative son. He held for three years the Presidency of Pennsylvania under its old Constitution, and when, at the instigation of Hamilton and Madison, the chiefs of the nation assembled, under the Presidency of Washington, to form the Constitu- tion of the United States, Franklin was there, counselling and suggesting as ever, and pouring oil on the trou- bled waters of controversy. The venerable Nestor of three gene- rations; born in the old Puritan time, with the shades of the past hanging about his home; traversing the mili- tary period of two wars, from Wolfe to Washington, from Quebec to York- town; privileged to partake of the new era of laws and legislation the old sage, full of years and honors, has now at length finished his work. He has inaugurated a new period in phi- losophy ; he has heralded new princi- ples in politics; he has shown his countrymen how to think and write ; lie has embalmed the wisdom of his life in immortal compositions ; he has blessed two great cities with associa- tions of pleasure and profit clustering about his name; he has become the property of the nation and the world : there is nothing further but retirement and death. His daughter, Mrs. Bache, and his family of grandchildren were with him in his home in Market Street, Philadelphia, as the inevitable day came on. He suffered much from his disorder, the stone, but was seldom without his mental employments and consolations. His homely wisdom and love of anecdote, it is pleasing to learn, kept him company to the last. He died about eleven o'clock at nighty April 17th, 1790. Is it necessary to describe the person or draw the character of Franklin? His effigy is at every turn ; that figure of average height, full a little pleth oric, perhaps the broad countenance beaming benevolence from the specta- cled grey eye the whole appearance indicating calmness and confidence. Such in age, as we all choose to look upon him, was the man Franklin. Within, who shall paint, save himself, in the small library of his writings, the mingling of sense and humor, of self-denial and benevolence, the whim- sical, sagacious, benevolent mind of Franklin, ever bent upon utility, ever conducting to something agreeable and advantageous ; the great inventor, the profound scientific inquirer, the far seeing statesman ; masking his worth by his modesty; falling short, perhaps of the loftiest heights of philosophy but firmly treading the path of com mon life, sheltering its nakedness, and ministering in a thousand ways to its comforts and pleasures. ROBERT BURNS. OOBERT BURNS belonged by 4-* birth to the peasant or small far- mer class of Scotland, his father, Wil- liam Burness, as he wrote the name, the son of a farmer in Kincardineshire, having been driven by family misfor- tunes in his youth, on the breaking up of his home, to seek employment as a gardener in the neighborhood of Ed- inburgh, whence he travelled to Ayr- shire, and after some employment in gardening took a lease of seven acres of land hard by the town of Ayr, with the intention of carrying on the busi- ness of a nurseryman. He married in December, 1757, Agnes Brown, the daughter of a Carrick farmer, whom he brought to reside in a humble clay cottage which he had built with his own hand on his land. On that spot, within a short distance of two famous objects celebrated in his writings, the bridge of Boon and Kirk Alloway, the poet, Robert Burns, was born, on the 25th of January, 1759. The cot- tage, which now presents a pretty sta- ble appearance to the observation of literary pilgrims, at the time of Rob- ert's birth was but a crude attempt at architecture, for a few nights after that evont, tire gable was driven out in a 204) severe storm, and the building so shat tered that the mother was compelled to flee with her son through the in clemency of the weather and take re fuge in a neighbor's house. The father of the poet was a man of integrity and strength of character, and had that trait of the best Scot- tish peasantry, which has done so much to raise them in the estimation of the world, a high regard for the value of education to his children. He is de- scribed by his son as possessed, from his many wanderings and sojournings, of " a pretty large quantity of obser vation and experience." He had met with few, he says, " who understood men, their manners and their ways equal to him," and that he was in- debted to him " for most of his little pretensions to wisdom." The world know something of the man and of his earnest religious feelings from that genial picture of a Scottish peasant's household, " The Cotter's Saturday Night," in which Kneeling down to heaven's eternal King, The saint, the father and the husbaml prays The poem was inspired by the author's vivid impressions of the simple sei Johnson ."Wilson Sc Co. 1 Publiaherg,New r ffiik. ROBERT BURNS. 205 vices daily before him at home. It is customary to refer the abilities of men of genius to qualities derived from their mothers, perhaps without sufficient ex- amination of the claims of their fathers : but Burns certainly owed much to Ms father ; while he was no doubt also greatly indebted to his mother, the worthy, patient, affectionate wife who relieved the hours of wearisome toil by chaunting the old ballads of Scot- land, one of which in particular as it came from her lips, " The Life and Age of Man," made a great impression upon Robert, and is said to have left its traces in his well-known lyric, " Man was made to Mourn." At the time of the birth of the poet, his father, not having succeeded in establishing the nursery which he proposed, engaged as gardener and overseer to a gentleman who had a small estate in the neighborhood He continued in this position for six or seven years and acquitted himself so well in it that at the expiration of that time Mr. Ferguson, his employer, leas- ed him a farm of about seventy acres called Mount Oliphant, assisting him with a loan for stocking it, and the next twelve years of his life were pass- ed in laborious and unprofitable efforts in its cultivation. The land was of the poorest quality, involving the fa- ther with his increasing family in a hard fight for existence a contest which he maintained with heroic reso- lution that he might assist his children at home. In 1777 this barren farm was left for another named Lochlea, with a better soil, some ten miles distant ; but difficulties arose respecting the lease, the elder Burns was harassed by a law- suit growing out of them, and in this state of perplexity and despair, ruined in fortune, died a broken-hearted man in 1784. The period of these strug- gles, twenty-five years, passed in hard ship and privation, fully developed the character of Robert Burns, one of Scotland's greatest poets. It is a mis- take to rank him at any time of his life with rude, uneducated peasant poets. He had humble fortunes, want, penury, involving coarse and hard labor, to contend with ; it was a wonderful thing for him to arise to the height of literary excellence which he attained, requiring that species of inspiration which is called genius ; but from his earliest years he was never without some good influences of education and even of literature and learning. In his sixth year he was sent to a school in the vicinity of his birth-place at Al- loway Miln, kept by a teacher named Campbell, and when this person left to take charge of the workhouse at Ayr, William Burns, Robert's father, with several of his neighbors, engaged a new instructor to take his place. This was John Murdoch, a man wor- thy of honorable mention in the biog- raphy of Burns. He was of an ami- able disposition, skilled in grammatical studies, with an excellent knowledge of French, indeed a proficient in that lan- guage, having taught it in France and being the author of one or two books on its pronunciation and orthography. After two or three years Murdoch left Ayrshire for another part of the coun- try. In the absence of the teacher the father supplied his place. When the labors of the day were over, he instruo 206 KOBEBT BURNS. tied his children in the evening in arith- metic. He taught them something of history and geography from Salmon's Geographical Grammar, and of astrono- my and natural history from Derham's Physics and Astro-Theology and Ray's Wisdom of God in the Creation, all of which works he borrowed for the occa- sion. Robert, we are told, read all these books with avidity and industry, and any others which fell in his way as he grew up. The collection was not a large one, but it was sufficiently mis- cellaneous, including Stackhouse's His- tory of the Bible, from which he gath- ered a knowledge of ancient history ; a collection of English letters by the most eminent writers, which set him upon epistolary composition, in which he af- terwards became a great proficient ; and, within a few years, Richardson's Pame- la, which was the first novel he read; Smollett's Peregrine Pickle and Count Fathom, some plays of Shakespeare, The Spectator, Pope's translation of Homer, Locke on the Human Under- standing, Hervey's Meditations, with several others, the most important of which were the works of Allan Ram- say, and a collection of English songs, entitled the Lark. These, with that accompaniment to all Scottish homes, however humble, the Holy Bible, cer- tainly afforded no mean mental nour- ishment to a youth of genius. Nor was this all the direct education the future poet received. His father, still careful for his instruction, after the withdrawal of Murdock, sent him to a school at Dalrymple, two or three miles away, to gain improvement in his hand- writing, and when Murdock some time ifter w as settled as master of the Eng- D lish school in the town of Ayr, Robert passed three weeks with him, which were employed in revising his gram- matical studies, and gaining some knowledge of French, a study which he pursued with such zeal, that he was in a short time able to read any ordi- nary prose in the language. To Latin he took less kindly, making very tri- fling progress in that tongue. All this was much, very much, for a youth who was constantly engaged from sheer necessity in toiling in the farm labor to assist his overworked parent in gaining the daily bread of the family. He worked faithfully and industriously, assisted his parents with his best efforts, and found his solace in the gratification of his tender humane disposition for we read that he was kind above measure to the young reap- ers in the field, and that the very cat- tle were affectionately treated by him and he had moreover the old Scottish songs to cheer him, and his growing ac- quaintance with the wealth of English literature. But above all, there was early developed in him, with a fervor of passion inconceivable by a duller nature, a romantic and engrossing love of woman. This was the great solace of his life, and this was the first and most constant inspiration of his muse. The poet's course after this time, as the boy was developed into the man, was upward and onward. The rugged farm life was somewhat mitigated under his father's lease of the new land at Lochlea, in the parish of Tarbolton. The lease was continued for seven years and ended, as we have seen, in failure and bankruptcy, with the death of the elder Burns This period em EGBERT BURKS. 207 braced the life of Robert from his nineteenth to his twenty-sixth year. It furnishes a number of incidents of much interest in his history, relating to his opening acquaintance with the world, his observations of life and the development of his poetic faculty. It has been thought worth recording by his biographers that at the age of eighteen he was taught dancing, a fact perhaps of some importance in reference to his subsequent free par- ticipation in country revels and junk- etings, in which he picked up many a subject for his muse. A circumstance of at least equal consequence was his being sent at nineteen by his parents to learn mensuration and surveying from a noted mathematician who kept a school at Kirkoswald, on the Carrick coast, overlooking the Firth of Clyde. It was his mother's parish, and Robert was sent to stay with an uncle residing there. The place was famous for smuggling, and Burns added consider- ably to his knowledge of what is called " life," by the acquaintance which he made with the wild revellers who car- ried on the contraband trade. " Scenes of swaggering riot and roaring dissi- pation," says he, " were till this time new to me ; but I was no enemy to social life. Here, though I learnt to fill my glass, and to mix without fear in* a drunken squabble, yet I went on with a high hand in my geometry, till the sun entered Virgo, a month which is always a carnival in my bosom, when a charming fillette, who lived next door to the school, overset my trigo- nometry and set me off at a tangent from the sphere of my studies. I, however, struggled on with my sines and co-sines for a few days more ; but stepping into the garden one charming noon to take the sun's altitude, there I met my angel, ' Like Proserpine, gathering flowers, Herself a fairer flower.' It was in vain to think of doing any more good at school. The remaining week I stayed, I did nothing but craze the faculties of my soul about her, or steal out to meet her; and the two last nights of my stay in the country, had sleep been a mortal sin, the image of this modest and innocent girl had kept me guiltless." The rustic damsel who produced this extraordinary effect upon the youthful enthusiast was named Peggy Thompson. But the time of Burns was not all given to love and mathematics. He had an acquaintance in a fellow schol- ar with whom he walked apart and discussed various questions of manners and morals, such as form the staple of the exercises in youthful debating so cieties. The master heard of this, and undertook to rebuke what he consid- ered their nonsensical disputations. The topic of the day upon which he fell foul of them, happened to be, " Whether a great general or a respec- table merchant was the most valuable member of society." He laughed at this as incomparably silly, when Burns proposed to him that if he would take either side of the question, he would maintain the other before the school. The mathematical pedagogue in an evil moment assented, and took up the de- fence of the military hero, when Burns bore down upon him so triumphantly with his eloquent assertion of -the pi*e 208 ROBERT BURNS. tensions of the merchant, that the dis- comfited master was compelled to break up the house in confusion. Under or- dinary circumstances, the anecdote would not be worth much, for no wise school-master would risk a contest be- fore an audience of his own scholars but it exhibits in Burns an unusual de- velopment of the logical and conversa- tional powers which greatly distin- guished him in after life. At Kirkos- wald, also, Burns studied various hu- mors of men, particularly of a certain Douglas Graham, somewhat addicted to smuggling, and his superstitious wife, Helen McTaggart, living on their farm of Shanter who subsequently furnish- ed the poet with the leading characters of his immortal " Tarn O' Shanter." The poet likewise at this time added to his store of reading the works of Thomson and Shenstone, both fruitful in his lit- erary growth ; while on leaving the place he engaged several of his school- fellows to keep up a correspondence with him. " This," he says, " improv- ed me in composition. I had met with a collection of letters by the wits of Queen Anne's reign (already alluded to), and I pored over them most de- voutly : I kept copies of any of my own letters that pleased me ; and a compar- ison between them and the composition of most of my correspondents flattered my vanity. I carried this whim so far, that though I had not three farthings' worth of business in the world, yet al- most every post brought me as many letters as if I had been a broad plod- ding son of day-book and ledger." On his settling down again at the paternal farm, Burns, faithful to his labors in ploughing and tilling, yet found time for social amusements and mental improvement, which, with his cordial disposition, he pursued with his friends. In the year 1780, we find him engaged in planning and conduct- ing a " Bachelors' Club " at Tarbolton, with his brother and some half dozen other associates, young men of the place, who met to discuss familiar topics of every-day life, among which love and matrimony seem to have held an espe- cial place. One of the members of this " Bache- lors' Club," was David Sillar, a young man with something of the poetic fac- ulty, who is numbered among the po- ets of Scotland, having published a volume of verses at Kilmarnock, some years after the date of the events we are recording, in 1789. He was an in- telligent associate of Burns, was on intimate terms at his father's house, and accompanied the poet on his walks, discussing topics of high import, till one of the fair sex came in sight, when, farewell to discourse and companion- ship. Burns was by the side of the charmer in a moment, talking with her with an ease and freedom of conversa- tion which Sillar confesses that he ad- mired and envied. With this social development, came now and then a new book or two, and all of the right sort, fit aliment for the poet's mental and moral growth. Foremost among these he mentions as his " bos- om favorites," the works of Sterne and Mackenzie, " Tristram Shandy " and " The Man of Feeling," the latter, he says about this time, on another occa- sion, " I prize next to the Bible ;" while of the writings of Sterne, he es pecially singles out for admiratloi ROBERT BURJSTS. 209 that most exquisite of all novelettes, " Tlie Sentimental Journey." New loves were in the meantime in- spiring new poems. " Poesy," he writes, "was still a darling walk for my mind, but it was only indulged in according to the humor of the hour. I had usually half-a-dozen or more pieces on hand ; I took up one or the other, as it suited the momentary tone of the mind, and dismissed the work as it bordered on fatigue. My passions, when once lighted up, raged like so many devils, till they got vent in rhyme ; and then the conning over my verses, like a spell, soothed all into quiet." Meanwhile, in his twenty-third year, he attempted a diversion from the rug- ged home agricultural life, with a view of bettering his fortunes and with the honorable motive of placing himself in a situation to marry. He had, with his brother Gilbert, for several years, cultivated a portion of the farm in raising flax on their own account. He thought he could add to his profits by engaging in the business of flax-dress- ing. He accordingly joined himself to a flax-dresser in the neighboring town of Irvine, and wrought for six months at the new occupation, which he found in accordance with neither his health nor inclination. " It was an unlucky affair," he says, in his autobiography, and had a characteristic ending. " To finish the whole, as we were giving a welcome carousal to the new year, the shop took fire and burnt to ashes, and I was left, like a true poet, not worth a sixpence." While at Irvine, he became a freemason, and was consequently in- troduced to a more convivial life than 27 that to which he had been accustomed, and made the acquaintance of some reckless persons who led him something astray from the simplicity of his fath- er's household. A more noticeable ac- quaintance, however, than any other which he made at Lochlea, was that of that thoroughly Scottish poet, Robert Ferguson, who taught him how to em- ploy his muse upon the characters of familiar every-day life. He preceded Burns in authorship some fifteen years, and in the words of Chambers, " may be considered his poetical progenitor." What Ferguson had done for the town humors of Edinburgh, his successor was soon to accomplish, with greater unction, for the provincial life of Ayr shire. Returning to Lochlea, he wit- nessed in sorrow, almost in despair, the hardships and misfortunes of the last few years of his venerated father's life. Immediately after the death of this parent, in the spring time of 1784, Robert and his brother Gilbert entered upon the cultivation of a farm in the neighboring parish of Mauchline, which they had engaged in anticipation of the bankruptcy proceedings of the land- lord at Lochlea. This was Mossgiel, a spot memorable in the poet's history, for there, during his two years' resi- dence, he produced some of his most felicitous poems, and there too formed his acquaintance with Jean Armour, whom he celebrated in verse as fore- most among the belles of Mauchline ; with whom he engaged in an irregular attachment, and to whom, after much embarrassment from their illicit inter course, he was finally married. " It is a remarkable circiimstance," writes 210 ROBERT BURKS. Robert Chambers in Ms exhaustive memoir of Burns, "that the mass of the poetry which has given this extra- ordinary man his principal fame, burst from him in a comparatively short space of time certainly not exceeding fifteen months. It began to flow of a sudden, and it ran on in one impetuous brilliant stream, till it seemed to have become, comparatively speaking ex- hausted." The period thus denoted was between the poet's twenty-sixth and twenty-eighth years. Somehow, about this time, the poet got athwart the clergy, and satirized the old Calvinistic spirit as it ran counter to the latitudinarian tenden- cies of the New Lights, as the members of the moderate party, which about that time arose in the Scottish church, were called. The poet had been senti- mental and playful in his earlier effu- sions; but in such compositions as " Holy Willie's Prayer " he showed the power and severity of his muse. There was a fiery element in the soul of this high-spirited plowman, keen and sub- tle as that of Dante, on occasion. Con- trasting with the bitter but humorous satire of the poems to which we allude, are such productions as that happy rustic idyll "Halloween," and the heartfelt home beauty of religion in her best attire in " The Cotter's Satur- day Night." Take one other poem of the series where all are excellent, " The Jolly Beggars," upon the whole, per- haps, in its peculiar kind, the finest exhibition of the author's powers, in which character, manners, a novelist's description of real life humorous to the highest degree, with a high gusto of poetical expression, are penetrated throughout by a glowing imagination. It is a Teniers picture of low life of the richest warmth and coloring. Singularly enough, this poem, now one of the most valued of the author's works, was for a long time denied a place in the collection. It does not appear in the Kilmarnock or Edin- burgh editions of the poet's lifetime, or in that prepared by Dr. Currie after his death. The subject and its hand- ling are peculiarly adapted for artistic illustration. The poem fortunately at- tracted the attention of George Cruik- shank, when at the height of his powers. His series of etchings in illustration of the operetta, for such it is, admirably supplements its rare humors. Every one must regret that, in consequence of the early neglect to produce the poem in print, two of its songs, connected by a few verses of recitative matter ex- hibiting the character of a chimney sweep and a sailor, omitted by the au- thor after the first copy, have been ir- recoverably lost. The exercise of his faculties in po- etry must have been to Burns during these months of 1784 and 1785 his best consolation, for his farming operations, in spite of his efforts and the prudence of his brother, were proving a failure, and he had entangled himself in the most unhappy manner in his love affair with Jean Armour. She was about to become a mother. Her father was in- exorable, refusing to accept a written acknowledgment of her as his wife given by Burns, a document which, according to the law of Scotland, was sufficient to constitute a valid though irregular marriage. He had no ex pectation of good fortune from a thrift- EGBERT BURNS. 211 less poet, and induced Ms daughter to forsake a man who might now have been considered as her husband. The unhappiness growing out of these cir- cumstances cast Burns into the deepest misery, of which we have the most touching expression in his poem enti- tled " The Lament, occasioned by the unfortunate issue of a friend's amour." "In this perplexity he turned his thoughts to exile in the new world, resolving to go to the West Indies, where many of his countrymen were employed on the plantations as over, seers. He made his preparations and actually engaged himself as book- keeper to a Mr. Douglas, on his estate in Jamaica. To raise money for his passage, it was suggested to him that he should publish his poems by sub- scription. There was naturally much that was pleasing to him in the pro- posal. "I was pretty confident," he writes, "my poems would meet with some applause ; but, at the worst, the roar of the Atlantic would deafen the voice of censure, and the novelty of West Indian scenes make me forget neglect." This was in the spring of 1736. Sub- scription papers for an edition of his poems were printed and circulated among the author's friends, who now numbered most of the cultivated gen- tlemen, professional and others, of Ayr- shire. While the proposals were being distributed the author penned several new poems, reflecting with much deli- cacy and feeling the melancholy which now oppressed him. One of these is among the best known and most high- ly appreciated of his compositions, the verses, 'To a Mountain Daisy, on turn. ing one down with the plow in April, 1786." By the side of the beautiful picture in the poem of the lark spring- ing blithely upward " to greet the pur- pling east, " and the lowly beauty of the tender flower crushed in the fur- row, we read in the poet's broken af- 'fections the secret of this sympathy with nature. This poem we are told by the poet's brother Gilbert was com- posed on the occasion and while the author was holding the plow, "hold- ing the plow being a favorite situation with Robert for poetic compositions, and some of his best verses produced while he was at that exercise." There is, indeed, a free open-air flavor about them all. The titles of other poems, " Despond- ency," " To Ruin," are equally suggest- ive of sorrow and suffering. An " Epistle to a young friend," the son of his patron Robert Aiken, also bears witness to the poet's generous nature, magnanimous alike in its penitence and manly aspirations. There are other poems in the au- thor's first collection tinged with the melancholy of this period of the au- thor's life, as that dirge of humanity, " Man was Made to Mourn." We are not to suppose, however, that Burns, overpowering as seemed to be his afflictions, was wholly given up to melancholy. The same force of imagination which aggravated his sense of disappointment and stimu- lated those feelings of remorse which only a generous nature can feel in their intensity, hurried him at other mo-. ments into a vivid enjoyment of the fleeting pleasures of the hour. He was easily inoved as ever by the f h arras 212 ROBERT BURNS. of love and friendship. If lie was for tne time deserted by his " bonny Jean," his friends, who warmly appreciated bis poetical productions and had the warmest affection for the man, were faithful. Nor was the elegiac poet without resources in his distress with that sex which was associated with so much of his misery. A new passion on the instant took possession of his heart. Rejected by the Armours, he turned his thoughts to a young girl of his acquaintance, Mary Campbell, " a sweet, sprightly, blue-eyed creature," of decent Highland parentage, whose early and unhappy death awakened all the poet's sympathies and is commem- orated in one of the finest of his lyrics. In a short time the subscription to the poems was sufficient to secure an arrangement for their publication with John Wilson, a bookseller at Kilmar- nock. Six hundred copies were print- ed, of which three hundred and fifty Were subscribed for before the work was issued, about the beginning of August, 1786. The remainder were rapidly disposed of, twenty pounds falling to the author after all expenses were paid. A part of the proceeds was appropri- ated to a steerage passage in a vessel which was to sail from Greenock to Jamaica in September. Happily the sailing of the ship was delayed and in the interim the rapid success of the volume of Poems inspired the author with new hopes and led to the aban- donment of the voyage altogether. The merits of the thirty-six poems which composed the volume, com- mencing with that exquisitely humor- ous and truthful picture of high and low life, "TheTwa Dogs," and includ- ing such striking exhibitions of geniua and originality as "Poor Maillie," "Halloween," "The Holy Fair," with the various songs and epistles, were not to be mistaken. The variety was extraordinary in the forms of com- position and the spirit which animated them " from grave to gay, from lively to severe." There was rare descrip- tive talent, invention in incident, char- acter and grouping, philosophical re flection, sentiment and satire in song and story. The subtlest humor, the lively current of the blood, ran through the whole. The subjects were famil- iar, personal, domestic and patriotic. There was not a bright intellect or a feeling heart in all Scotland which could be insensible to their treatmeot. It was a book for all classes, which could be appreciated by the educated and uneducated, for it united the rarest simplicity with the purest art. Among the persons in the poet's neigh borhood who appreciated the volume was a clergyman of the moderate party, the Rev. George Lawrie, who was in intimate communication with a num- ber of the distinguished literati of Edinburgh. He sent a copy of the poems to one of these personages who was held in great esteem as a critic, the Rev. Dr. Blacklock a character of some note in the metropolis, for though blind from his infancy, he had attained celebrity as a poet and cler gyman, and was universally esteemed for his amiability. He received the gift with a genuine expression of ap- plause. " There is," he said in the let- ter which he sent in return, " a pathos and delicacy in the serious poems, a vein of wit and humor in those of a EGBERT BUKNS. 212 more festive turn, which cannot be too much admired, nor too warmly ap- proved; and I think I shall never open the book without feeling my as- tonishment renewed and increased." The effect of this letter upon the poet in awakening his ambition may be imagined, coming as it did with other flattering evidences of the hold he had taken upon influential persons of emi- nence. He is presently entertained by Professor Dugald Stewart at his villa near Mossgiel, where he is intro- duced to a lord, a son of the Earl of Selkirk, a circumstance which he thought of importance enough to be celebrated in verse. The critical Dr. Blair also admired, pronouncing " The Holy Fair," a work " of a very fine genius," and the poet gained from the " Cotter's Saturday Night," the friendship of a lady, Mrs. Dunlop, of Dunlop, a lineal de- scendant of the hero Wallace, which was perpetuated in an uninterrupted correspondence through his life. En- couraged by these and the like atten- tions, Burns resolved upon the publi- cation of a new edition of his poems under his own supervision at Edin- burgh. He set out for the capital, some sixty miles distant from his home in Ayrshire, in the latter end of November, riding on a pony borowed for the occasion from his friend and neighbor at Ayr, Mr. Dalrymple. On his way he received what in the news- paper language of the present day is sailed an ovation. By previous ar- rangement he was to rest at the close O of his first day's travel at the house of one of the admirers -of his poetry, a Mr Prentice, in a village of Lanark- shire. A late dinner was provided, at which the farmers of the parish "were assembled and kept up the festivity in honor of their guest into the early hours of the morning. " Scotch drink " we may be sure flowed pretty freely on the occasion. The host was no half- way appreciator of the poet. A strict- ly moral and religious man himself, he said on one occasion when somebody was talking of an apologist for Burns " What ! do they apologize for him ! One-half of his good, and all his bad, divided among a score o' them, would make them a' the better men ! " On his arrival at Edinburgh he took refuge in the humble hospitality of a former acquaintance in Ayrshire who had been a clerk to his friend Hamilton, but who was now a writer's apprentice in the city. The two now occupied a common room and bed. Burns seems to have passed his first days in wanderings about the town and surveying the wonders of the scene from Arthur's Seat to the castle. He hunted up the unmarked grave of Ferguson in the church-yard of the Canongate and kneeling down kissed the sod which covered his remains. Before he left the city he took care that a stone should be erected on the spot for which he wrote a poetical in- scription. He owed many a hint in the composition of his poems to Ferguson, and there is something very pleasing in this prompt payment of the debt of gratitude. He also sought out the house which had been occupied by Allan Ramsay and took off his hat on entering it. Not many days passed before the poet was brought into no- tice. His masonic brotherhood here, 214 ROBERT BURNS. as on other occasions, served him. He was introduced by his friend Dalrym- ple, who appears to have been as much at home in Edinburgh as at Ayr, at a lodge meeting, to the Hon. Henry Erskine, Dean of the Faculty of Ad- vocates, a great favorite in the metrop- olis, who proved a powerful supporter of the poet. Of still more value to him was the friendship of the Earl of Glencairn, who having previously in- troduced the Kilmarnock volume to the notice of his friends, now made the author at home in his family and" assisted him greatly in the publication of the new edition of his poems. He not only found a publisher for the work in the bookseller Creech, but in- duced the members of the Caledonian Club to take each a copy at a guinea, four times the ordinary subscription price. For Lord Glencairn, Burns al- ways entertained the greatest admira- tion. No one of his readers can forget ( ;he noble "Lament" which he wrote in the occasion of his early death four years later. Writing to his friend Hamilton on the 7th of December, a week after his ar- rival in Edinburgh, Burns says : " For my own affairs, I am in a fair way of be- coming as eminent as Thomas a Kempis or John Bunyan ; and you may expect henceforth to see my birth-day inserted among the wonderful events in the Poor Robin's and Aberdeen Almanacs, along with the Black Monday and the battle of Bothwell-Bridge. By all proba- bility, I shall soon be the tenth worthy and the eighth wise man of the world." Among the notables who were the first to welcome him, was Henry Macken- zie, the author of the " Man of Feel- ing," who had become acquainted with his poems through Professor Stewart. The notice of no one could have been more acceptable to Burns ; from his ear- liest school days he had been an admirer of that author's works, and they had no unimportant influence in forming his tastes and directing his sensibili- ties. To be, thus early in his literary career, cherished and applauded by one to whom he had looked up with a feeling little short of reverence, must have moved in no ordinary degree the gratitude of a man who was always sensitive to the slightest manifestation of kindness ; and still more must this attention have been felt when the whole reading world of the day was invited to share in it. Mackenzie, ripe in fame and the affections of all Scot- land, was then engaged in publishing his classic series of periodical essays in the style of the Spectator, entitled The Lounger. In the number of the work for the 9th of December, he introduced a critique of Burns' Kilmarnock volume. A better service could not have been rendered to the poet, than by this thoughtful, sympathetic article. It sep- arated the poet at once from the humble class of writers springing up in lowly stations, whose chief claims to be notic- ed arose from the feeling of surprise that, under such circumstances, they should possess any merit whatever. Brush- ing this suggestion aside, he placed the author at once on the highest level of the literature of his country. He fully recognized the genius of this " heaven- taught ploughman," as he described him, in depicting the manners of men and ex- hibiting their passions in action, in a style which recalled to him the power EGBERT BURNS. 21ft and method of the greatest of drama- tists" that intuitive glance with which a writer like Shakespeare discerns tbe characters of men, with which he catches the many - changing hues of life, forming a sort of problem in the science of mind, of which it is easier to see the truth than to assign the cause." These are the very elements of genius ; and he who would thoroughly under- stand that much abused term, may find it illustrated in a very remarkable man- ner, in a study of the life and writ- ings of Robert Burns. Within a few weeks the poet, " the lion of the season," was at home in the best society of the metropolis, passing from his humble quarters in the room which he still shared with his compan- ion, the poor apprentice, to the fashion- able drawing-rooms where he met such persons as Dr. Robertson, Dr. Blair, Dr. Gregory, Dr. Adam Ferguson, and other magnates of the University. Lord Monboddo often had him at his house and table, where he fell into an exces- sive admiration of the lovely daughter of that eccentric scholar, Miss Eliza Burnet, whom he has immortalized in that noble " Address to Edinburgh," in which he more than repaid all the attentions and honors which were lav- ished upon him. On returning from a first visit to Lord Monboddo's house, he was asked by a friend, " Well, and did you admire the young lady ?" " I admired God Almighty more than ever !" was the reply ; " Miss Burnet is the most heavenly of all his works." This sentiment is incorporated in the poem " To Edinburgh," in which the lady is introduced in the midst of a glowing represertation of the wealth, the architecture, the business, the pride and importance of the historic monu- ments of the city. The new edition of the poems was published in April with a dedication to its liberal patrons, "the noblemen and gentlemen of the Caledonian Hunt," a dedication very unlike the old venal, nattering addresses which are prefixed to too many volumes of the earlier Brit- ish poets, his predecessors. Conscious of his powers, the poet unhesitatingly takes his position before the world, in his own words, as a Scottish bard, proud of the name, and whose highest ambition is to sing in his country's ser- vice. " The poetic genius of my country (he adds) found me, as the prophetic bard Elijah did Elisha, at the plough, and threw her inspiring mantle ovei me. She bade me sing the loves, tht joys, the rural scenes and rural pleas ures of my native soil, in my native tongue. I tuned my wild artless notes as she inspired." Two thousand eight hundred copies of the work were sub- scribed for by fifteen hundred sub scribers, an extraordinary proof of the interest excited by the poet in the wealthy and influential classes. The piofit of the author on a settlement with his bookseller, was about six hundred pounds. With the means now at his disposal, after a residence in Edinburgh of about six months, Burns left with a young friend, Mr. Ainslie, whose acquaintance he had made in the city, for a tour through the south-eastern part of the country, following the line of the Tweed, cross ing into Northumberland to Aln- wick and Newcastle, and returning in- to Scotland from Carlisle. On Iris 2i6 ROBERT BURNS. way lie visited several persons of ce- lebrity, including the traveller Bry- done, and at Jedburg was presented with the freedom of the town. July saw him with his family, at the farm at Mossgiel, which he left a few days af- ter his arrival for Edinburgh, and a tour by Stirling and Inverary, on his way round to his home again. In the autumn, he journeyed along the eastern region by Inverness and Aberdeen, and the next year passed much of his time in Edinburgh, where he was for awhile un- der the care of a surgeon, in consequence of an injury to his knee from the over- turning of a hackney coach. This gave him opportunity for reflection ; he saw his prospects clouded and fell into the most gloomy forebodings. His half- wife, as she might be termed, Jean Armour, was again to become a mother, which provoked fresh unkindness on the part of her father, and brought about the for- mal ceremony of a marriage between her and the poet. Though he had become a regular contributor to the collection of Scottish songs published by James Johnson, in the plan of which, with its revival of the old national airs with appropriate adaptations of the old words or with new compositions, he took much interest, he does not seem to have looked to literature as a pro- fession. Indeed, he contributed his po- ems to that work out of pure affection for the cause, without fee or reward. His thoughts were still turned to his former farming occupations as a means of livelihood. Concluding a negotia- tion which had been for some time in progress, in the spring of 1788, he en- tered upon the possession of the new farm of Elliesland. in Dumfrieshire where he was for many months em ployed in constructing a simple cot- tage, barely meeting the necessities of his mode of life. In December, he waa joined by his wife and children, and early in the following year, occupied his new house. His success as a farm- er, notwithstanding his earnest efforts, was not very encouraging. That re- quired closer calculation and more methodical industry than were to be expected from, the temperament and intellectual habits of the poet. He consequently was soon compelled to seek some additional means of living. While at Edinburgh, he had secured a commission in the excise department, which had given him some employ- ment in the Ayr district ; he was now appointed excise officer in the district in which he resided. While discharging these two-fold duties of farmer and ex- ciseman, he was contributing songs to Johnson's collection and producing va- rious minor occasional poems. An ac- cidental visit to the region of the Eng- glish antiquary, Captain Grose, led to the composition of one of the most ad- mired and perhaps the best known of his works, the tale of Tarn O'Shanter. Grose with his comical obese figure was a humorist of the first water, abounding in anecdote and merry stories. Burns met him at a friend's house, was de- lighted with his social qualities, and took a pleasant view of the object of his journey, which was to sketch and describe the antiquities of the country. With some quizzing, there is a deal of kindly feeling in the poem which he wrote on this redoubtable knight er rant's " peregrinations through Scot land." ROBEKT BUKNS. 217 Seeing these predilections, Burns bethought himself of the old kirk at Alloway, the familiar scene of his childhood and the burial place of his father, and suggested the old ruin as a suitable illustration for Grose's book, recommending it as the scene of various ghostly legends. The antiquarian promised to insert a sketch of the place if Burns would furnish a witch story to accompany it. This he undertook to do and Tarn o' Shanter was the re- sult, composed in one day while the poet was " crooning to himself" by the banks of the Nith, which ran by his abode. The poem, gathering up the humors of a life-time, the quintessence of many a study of provincial life, thus made its first appearance in Grose's Antiquities of Scotland. No one can think of the burly antiquarian without an emotion of gratitude for his having been the occasion of that poem ; nor of the engraver, Johnson's, and its sequel George Thomson's enter- prize, without recollecting what we in- cidentally owe to them for calling forth that wondrous series of Songs, fam- iliarized in every Scottish and English household in the world, which should cover with a redeeming mantle of char- ity any errors of the poet's life. What a splendid galaxy in the literary heaven they form the songs of Burns sacred to love and friendship, to pa- triotism and humanity, to history and common life, breathing the warmest 28 affections, inspired by the noblest sen- timents. Were it only for " Brace's Address to his Army at Bannock- bum," Scotland could never forget him ; were it only for " John Anderson my Joe," the universal heart of home would take him to its embrace. The ode commemorative of Bannock- burn was written while the poet re- sided at Dumfries, his last place of abode, whither, having given up his farm of Elliesland as unprofitable, he had gone in 1791 to be engaged exclu- sively in the discharge of his duties as exciseman with an income which reached about seventy pounds a year. He passed his time here actively em- ployed in his offi.ce, which did not pre- vent his partaking freely in such some- what reckless convivialities as the so- ciety of the place afforded, doubtless to the prejudice of his health ; and in engaging, not a little to the injury of any prospect of advancement in office he might have had, in the political fervors of the day in behalf of demo- cratic liberty engendered by the en- thusiasm of the French Revolution. In the autumn of 1795 he exhibited symp- toms of failing health, which increased at intervals during the ensuing months not without provocation from repeated indulgences, till, on the 21st of July, 1796, he breathed his last at his home in Dumfries. So fell at the age of thirty-seven the greatest of Scotland'* poets. CHARLOTTE CORDAY. THE fair assassin heroine of the French Revolution, Charlotte Corday, was born in the village of Ligneres, near d'Argentan, in Nor- mandy, in 1768. She was of noble family, Marie Anne Charlotte Cor- day D' Armans, as she was called be- fore the revolution had extinguished mch titles, and she was the grand- daughter of the great French dramatic writer, Corneille. Her father, Francois de Corday d' Armans, was one of those small landed proprietors of the old system, whose privileges secured them respect, while they were on the verge of poverty. In the midst of his agri- cultural labors, with a family growing up about him, he felt the pressure of want, and sharing the growing dis- content of the times, enlisted himself on the side of the reform movement in progress. Imbued with the new social philosophy, he wrote pamphlets against despotism and the law of primogeni- ture. His daughter was thus indoc- trinated in her infancy in the princi- ples of the coming era in France. Her mother dying while her family of five children were quite young, Char- lotte was left with her two sisters, as she is described by Lamartine, to live (218) on for some years at Ligneres '' almost running wild, clothed in coarse cloth, like the young girls of Normandy, and, like them, working in the garden, making hay, gleaning and gathering the apples on the small estate of their father." At the age of thirteen she became an inmate of an ancient and well-appointed monastery at Caen, where, with the enthusiasm of her nature and her pious disposition, she would probably under ordinary circumstances have heartily submitted to the genius of the place ; but the newborn philosophy of the times had found its way in the popular writings of the day into its retirement, and Charlotte became deeply imbued with its broad humanitarian spirit. The convents, moreover, were being suppressed, and she had to seek an- other home. Thus, with new views, but with old conservative traditions hanging about her, at nineteen she was driven into the world. Her fa- ther had now become still poorer. Her two brothers in the king's service had emigrated ; one of her sisters was dead, the other managed her father's home at Argentan. Charlotte was adopted by an old aunt, Madame Bretteville v Likeness after an original paunLuig by Johnson Wilson. 8c Co. PuVhsners M;-w Yor> OHAKLOTTE COKDAY. 219 and went to live with her in her old home at Caen. There, while assisting in the domestic duties of the place, she had abundant leisure to indulge in her favorite reading of romances and the writings of the philosophers then in vogue. She became familiar with the works of Rousseau and Ray- nal, and entered heartily into the re- vived study of Plutarch, by whose lives of the heroes of antiquity France was then fashioning herself. She had soon the motive and incentive to ex- press her visionary ideas in action. It was early in 1793, and the Giron- dists, who had failed in their aspira- tions to place liberty on a rational foundation, were on the eve of their final overthrow. Overpowered by the fury of the Jacobins, flying from their impending fate in Paris, numbers of them had taken refuge in the depart- ments and were endeavoring to rally the nation to sustain them against the ultra revolutionary party, of which the vulgar, blood-thirsty, remorseless Marat had become the most obnoxious leader. This fiend in human shape, by the use of his pen in constant ap- peals to the people in arousing their prejudices, and by his authority in the convention, was the unflinching oppo- nent of the Girondins, and would be satisfied with nothing less than their extermination. His character, odious at the best, was not likely to be look- ed upon with other feelings than those of the most intense hatred and dismay by the political refugees from his fury, gathered at Caen. Among the leaders of the Girondins assembled there, were Buzot, Salles, Petion, Barbaroux, Lou- yet, who sedulously employed them- selves in arousing opposition to the new prescriptive party and in the en- listment of volunteers for an army to march upon Paris for its overthrow. Charlotte listened eagerly to the ac- cusations of the Girondins, and the portentous shape of Marat assumed gigantic proportions in her mind, as the one great enemy of the liberty of France. The utmost ardor of her na- ture was excited by the spectacle of the volunteers, whose departure she witnessed from a balcony at Caen. A youth who warmly admired her, and to whom she had given her portrait, was among the number. But patriot- ism in her soul burnt with a keener flame than the passion of love. As she saw the battalion depart, Petion, who passed at the moment beneath the balcony, noticed her in tears. " Would you then be happy," said he to her, " if they did not depart ?" She an- swered nothing, blushed and withdrew. Her resolve was taken, at all hazards, herself, alone, to free France from the human monster that appeared to her. The prudence and secrecy with which she went about the fatal work proved the strength of her character. It was necessary that she should pre pare herself by information from the Girondin leaders, and she sought their presence without affording them the least intimation of her intentions. After various interviews she obtained from Barbaroux a letter to Duperret at Paris, one of the party who still held his seat in the Convention. There was nothing to compromise him in it. It was simply a letter of introduction. A greater seriousness was noticed in her conversation and demeanor at this 220 CHAKLOTTE COEDAY. time. Questioned by her aunt, she said, " I weep over the misfortunes of my country, over those of my relatives, and ver yours. Whilst Marat lives no one can be sure of a day's existence." Her aunt also afterwards called to mind going into her room to awaken her in the morning, and finding on her bed an open Bible at a passage of the book of Judith, of which she had marked a verse with a pencil, describ- ing the going forth of the daughter of Israel in her beauty to deliver the land from the hand of Holofernes. The entire, vivid narrative " beyond all Greek, all Roman fame," may well have been her inspiration. Armed with this resolve, on the 7th of July of this memorable year, 1793, when the revolution developed its pro- Roundest horrors, Charlotte visited Argentan to take a final leave of her father and sister, under the pretence of joining the refugee emigrants in Eng- land. Returning to her aunt she told her the same story in expectation of her departure on the morrow, which she had privately arranged, by the Paris diligence. Very touching are the in- cidents of her last hours at Caen as re- lated by Lamartine. They were " filled with gratitude, attention and tender- ness towards that aunt, to whom she owed such long and kind hospitality, and she provided, through one of her friends, for the old servant who had taken care of her in her youth. She ordered and paid in advance, at the tradespeople's shops in Caen, for some little presents of dresses and embroidery destined to be worn after her departure by some youthful companions of her early days. She distributed her favorite books amongst the young persons of hei acquaintance, and reserved none for her- self but a volume of Plutarch, as if she did not desire to separate herself in the crisis of her life, from the society of those great men with whom she had lived and wished to die. Finally, on the 9th of July, very early in the morning, she took under her arm a small bundle of the most requisite ar- ticles of apparel, embraced her aunt, and told her she was going to sketch the haymakers in the neighboring mea- dows. With a sheet of drawing pa- per in her hand, she went out to return no more. At the foot of the stair- case she met the child of a poor labor- er, named Robert, who lodged in the house, in the street. The child was accustomed to play in the court. She sometimes gave him little toys. ' Here ! Robert,' said she to him, giving him the drawing paper, which she no lon- ger required to keep her in counte- nance, ' that is for you ; be a good boy and kiss me ; you will never see me again.' And she embraced the child, leaving a tear upon his cheek. That was the last tear on the thresh hold of the house of her youth. She had nothing left to give but her blood." During the journey in the diligence to Paris, there was nothing to excite in her fellow-travellers any suspicion of a disturbed or disordered mind. She was perfectly mistress of herself throughout. During the first day she appeared to be simply entertaining a little girl whom chance had thrown by her side. The loud professions of attachment on the part of the passen- gers to the cause of the Mountain and its grim hero Marat, did not induce hei CHARLOTTE CORDAY. 221 by any unguarded word or look to be- tray her own sentiments. Her beauty attracted attention, and she was, ques- tioned as to her name and the object of her journey to Paris ; she answered eva- sively in few words, sometimes feign- ing sleep, while her modesty proved to her a sufficient guardian from further impertinence. A young man of the party with a respectful freedom ex- pressed his affection for her and talked of marriage. She rallied him on this sudden outburst of emotion and prom- ised to let him hear from her at some later time. In this way, winning the regard of all around her, she entered Paris on the llth of July, at noon, making her residence at the Hotel de la Providence, which had been recom- mended to her by her friends at Caen. She retired early and slept soundly till the next day, when, attiring herself in a simple dress, she presented herself at the lodgings of Duperret with the letter of introduction from Barbaroux. The deputy was not at home and would be away all day, as she learnt from his daughters. She then returned to her hotel and passed the time in solitude till evening, when she found Duperret, and requested him to present her to Garat, the minister of the interior; her object being on some pretext of business to gain information, by con- versation with the leading Girondists, which might assist her in her purpose to serve their cause. On parting with Duperret for the night, she advised him for his safety to quit Paris and join his brothers of the party in Caen. He replied that his post was at Paris and he would not leave it. " You are in error," said she ; " fly, fly, before to- rn orrow night." On the morrow, Du perret called on her at her lodging to conduct her to Garat ; they found the minister too much engaged to see her before evening. Duperret then led her to her residence, where he left her at the entrance. Leaving the hotel immedi- ately, she made her way, inquiring from street to street, to the Palais Royal, where, without being diverted from her purpose by the frivolity and gaiety of the scene, she found under the galleries the shop of a cutler, where she purchased a large knife which might serve for a dagger, and conceal- ed it under her dress. The weapon was intended for Marat. She had at first thought of reaching him when he should make his appearance at the ap- proaching ceremony of the federation, in commemoration of the triumph of liberty, to be held in the Champ-de- Mars; but this being postponed, she had then proposed to herself to strike her victim in his seat at the convention at the head of his party. Learning from Duperret that he would not ap- pear there, she was compelled to seek him by stratagem at his private lodg- ings. Continuing the story in the words of Lainartine who has devoted a " Book " of his " History of the Girondists " to the career of this heroic woman, " she returned to her chamber and wrote to Marat a billet, which she sent to the door of l the friend of the people.' ' I have just arrived from Caen,' she wrote. * Your love of country makes me pre- sume that you will have pleasure in hearing of the unfortunate events of that portion of th(- republic. I shall present myself at your abode about 222 CHARLOTTE CORD AY. one o'clock; have the goodness to re- ceive me, and grant me a moment's conversation. I will put you in a po- sition to be of great service to France.' Charlotte, relying on the effect of this note, went at the appointed hour to Marat's door, but could not obtain ac- cess to him. She then left with the portress a second note, more pressing aad insidious than the former. 1 1 wrote to you tnis morning, Marat,' she said ; 'did you have my letter? I cannot believe it, as they refuse me admit- tance to you. I hope that to-morrow you will grant me the interview I re- quest. I repeat that I am just arrived from Caen, and have secrets to disclose to you most important for the safety of the republic. Besides, I am perse- cuted for the cause of liberty; I am unhappy, and that I am so should give me a claim on your patriotism.' With- out awaiting his reply, Charlotte left her chamber at seven o'clock in the evening, clad with more than usual care, in order, by a more studied ap- pearance, to attract the persons about Marat. Her white gown was covered over the shoulders by a silk scarf, which, falling over her bosom, fastened behind. Her hair was confined by a Normandy cap, the long lace of which played against her cheeks. A wide green silk riband was bound round her brows, and fastened her cap. Her hair fell loose down her back. No paleness of complexion, no wildness of gaze, no tremulousness of voice, re- vealed her deadly purpose. With this attractive aspect she knocked at Ma- rat's door. " Marat inhabited the first floor of a dilapidated house in the Rue des Cor- deliers, now Rue de 1' Ecole de Mede- cine. His apartment consisted of an ante-chamber and a writing-room, look ing out on a narrow courtyard, a small room containing his bath, a sleeping- room and dining-room looking on the street. It was very meanly furnished. Numerous publications of Marat's were piled on the floor, the newspapers of the day, still damp from the press, were scattered about on the chairs and tables, printers' lads coming in and going out incessantly, women employ- ed in folding and addressing pamph- lets and journals, the worn steps of the stair- case, the ill-swept passages, all attested the movement and disorder which surround a man much occupied, and the perpetual crowd of persons in the house of a journalist and leader of the people. This misery, though a dis play, was yet real. Marat's domestic arrangements were those of an humble artisan. A female, who controlled his house affairs, was originally named Catherine Evrard, but was called Al- bertine Marat from the time when the friend of the people had given her his name, taking her for his wife one day in fine weather, in the face of open sun- shine, after the example of Jean Jacques Rousseau. One servant aided this woman in her household duties. A messenger, named Laurent Basse, did the out-door work. The incessant activity of the writer had not relaxed in consequence of the lingering disease which was consuming him. The in- flammatory action of his blood seemed to light up his mind. Now in his bed, now in his bath, he was perpetually writing, apostrophizing, inveighing against his enemies, whilst exciting OHAKLOTTE COKDAY. 223 the Convention and the Cordeliers. Offended at the silence of the Assembly on the reception of his messages, he had recently addressed to it another letter, in which he threatened the Con- vention that he would be carried in his dying condition to the tribune, that he might shame the representatives with their cowardice, and dictate to them fresh murders. He left no repose either to himself or to others. Full of the pre- sentiment of death, he only seemed to fear that his last hour, coming on too suddenly, would not leave him time to immolate sufficient criminals. More anxious to kill than to live, he hastened to send before him as many victims as possible, as so many hostages given by the knife to the completed revolution, which he desired to leave free from all enemies after his death. The terror which issued from Marat's house re- turned thither under another form the unending dread of assassination. His companion and his intimate asso- ciates believed that they saw as many daggers raised against him, as he raised over the heads of three hundred thou- sand citizens. Access to his residence was forbidden, as it would be to the palace of tyranny. None were admit- ted to his presence but assured friends or denouncers strongly recommended, and who had submitted to interroga- tories and severe examinations. " Charlotte was not aware of these obstacles, although she apprehended them. She alighted from the coach on the opposite side of the street, in front of Marat's residence. The day was on the wane, particularly in the quarter darkened by lofty houses and narrow streets. The portress at first refused to allow the young unknown to penetrate into the courtyard. She insisted, however, and ascended several stairs, regardless of the voice of the concierge. At these sounds Marat's mistress half-opened the door, and re- fused to allow a female whom she did not know to enter. The confused sound of the altercation between these women, one of whom entreated that she might be allowed to speak to the friend of the people, whilst the other endeavored to close the door in her face, reached Marat's ears, who com- prehended, by the few indistinct words that reached him, that the visitor was the stranger from whom he had re- ceived two notes during the day. In a loud and imperative voice he ordered that she should be admitted. Alber- tine, either from jealousy or distrust, obeyed with much ill-will and grum- bling. She showed the young girl into the small closet where Marat was, and left, as she quitted her, the door half- open, that she might hear the lowest whisper or the smallest movement of the sick man. The room was faintly lighted. Marat was in his bath, yet in this forced repose of his body he allowed his mind no leisure. A plank, roughly planed, laid across the bath, was covered with papers, open letters, and half-written articles for his pub- lication. He held in his right hand the pen which the arrival of the un- known female had suspended on its page. This was a letter to the Con- vention, to demand of it the judgment and proscription of the last Bourbons tolerated in France. Beside the bath, on a large block of oak, was a leaden inkstand, of the meanest fabric - 224 CHAELOTTE CORD AY. foul source whence, for three years, had flowed so many delirious outpour- ings, so many denunciations, so much blood. Marat, covered in his bath with a cloth filthy with dirt and spot- ted with ink, had only his head, should- ers, the upper part of his chest, and his right arm out of the water. There was nothing in the features of this man to affect a woman's eye with tenderness, or give pause to a meditated blow. His matted hair, wrapped in a dirty handkerchief, with receding forehead, protruding eyes, prominent cheek- bones, vast and sneering mouth, hairy chest, shrivelled limbs, and livid skin such was Marat. Charlotte took care not to look him in the face, for fear her countenance might betray the horror she felt at his sight. With downcast eyes, and her arms hanging motionless by her side, she stood close to the bath, awaiting until Marat should inquire as to the state of Nor- mandy. She replied with brevity, giving to her replies the sense and tone likely to pacify the demagogue's wishes. He then asked the names of the deputies who had taken refuge at Caen. She gave them to him, and he wrote them down, and when he had concluded, said in the voice of a man sure of his vengeance, l Well, before they are a week older, they shall have the guillotine ! ' At these words, as if Charlotte's mind had awaited a last offence before it could resolve on strik- ing the blow, she drew the knife from her bosom, and, with superhuman force, plunged it to the hilt in Marat's heart. She then drew the bloody weapon from the body of the victim, arid let it fall at her feet, ' Help, my dear help ! ' cried Marat, and then expired." The cry brought Albertine and the maid servant and Laurent into the room, where Charlotte was standing, without effort at escape. Laurent struck her to the ground with a blow on the head from a chair, and Albertine tram- pled upon her. The aroused popu- lace of the neighborhood demanded that the assassin should be cast out to them for speedy revenge. A body of soldiers then entered, the hands of Charlotte were confined by cords, and in this position, amidst the impreca- tions of the household of her victim, and the crowd who were present, re- plied to the usual preliminary interro- gations of the officer of justice, calmly confessing her deed. This proceeding being ended, she was conducted in the hackney coach which had brought her to the house, to the Abbaye, the near- est prison. An excited mob filled the street, and she was with difficulty pro- tected from their outrages. On a second examination at the prison, she was questioned minutely as to her motives, proceedings, and accomplices. To this she had a very simple reply to make. She had come from Caen with the de- cided resolution of assassinating Marat, and had communicated her intention to no one. A folded paper was notic- ed fastened in her dress. It proved to be an address which she had prepared " to Frenchmen friendly to the laws and peace." In this, the death of Marat was spoken of as already accomplished, and her countrymen were called upon to leave their unhappy divisions and arise for the redemption of France. Charlotte was presently removed to CHARLOTTE COKDAY. 225 the prison of the Conciergerie. She was allowed writing materials in her prison, and addressed a long letter, re- counting the circumstances of her jour- ney, and avowing her detestation of Marat, to Barbaroux. The epistle ex- presses her strong enthusiasm and a readiness to meet the fate she had invi- ted in behalf of her country. Its hap- piness, she said, was hers. " A vivid imagination and a sensitive heart," she adds with a philosophic self-conscious- ness, " promised but a stormy life ; and I pray those who regret me, to consid- er this, and rejoice at it." Writing to her father, she asked his pardon for the course she had taken, while she gloried in her deed. " I pray of you to rejoice at my fate the cause is noble. I embrace my sister, whom I love with all my heart. Do not forget this verse of Corneille, Le crime fait lahonte etnon pasl'echafaud."* The next morning, the 17th, was that appointed for her trial. The hall of the revolutionary tribunal was above the prison. On being conveyed thith- er in the opening scenes, as she had done before, she frankly avowed her act, and gloried in its motive and suc- cess. Being asked how long she had entertained her design, she said, " since the last day of May, when the de- puties of the people were arrested. I have 'killed one man to save a hundred thousand. I was a republican long be- fore the Revolution.' 1 ' 1 The counsel who * The crime and not the scaffold causes shame. 29 had been assigned her could urge only in her behalf the excitement of politi- cal fanaticism. She was not displeased with his plea, for it did not lessen her dignity or detract from the attitude in which she wished to appear before the world. While in prison she had re- quested permission to sit for her por- trait, that her memory might be better perpetuated. Observing an artist, M. Hauer, in court, sketching her likeness, she turned smilingly toward him, to as- sist him in his purpose. The painter, at her request, was allowed to follow her to the prison to finish his work. Before it was accomplished, the execu- tioner knocked at the door, and the painter, his work, interrupted, watched the final preparations for the scaffold. Charlotte, taking the scissors from the executioner, cut off a lock of her long hair, and gave it to the painter, who, was so struck by her appearance in the red chemise, in which she was in- vested for her death, that he subse quently painted her in that costume. To a priest sent to offer the last ser- vices of his order, she said, " I thank those who have had the attention to send you, but I need not your ministry. The blood I have spilt, and my own, which I am about to shed, are the only sacrifices I can offer the Eter- nal." So at eve of the day of her trial, she was borne to the guillotine. As she ascended the fatal cart, a vio- lent storm broke over the city, which gave way to the rays of the setting sun in the last scene upon the scaffold. JOHANN WOLFGANG GOETHE known ancestry of Goethe on the paternal side ascends to one Hans Christian Goethe, a farrier in the middle of the seventeenth cen- tury, in the little German town of Ar- tern, in Thuringia. His son Frederick was apprenticed to a tailor, and in the course of his travels from place to place, according to the custom of the country, reached Frankfort-on-the- Maine, where he pursued his calling, was admitted to citizenship, and " be- ing a ladies' man," married tbe daugh- ter of the master tailor. A second marriage with the widow, keeper and wealthy proprietor of a hotel changed his vocation to that of the landlord. By this union he had two sons, the younger of whom, Johann Caspar, was well educated, travelled into Italy, and became an imperial councillor in Frankfort. At the age of thirty-eight he was married to Kathrina Eliza- beth, a young lady of seventeen, the daughter of Johann Wolfgang Textor, of a distinguished family and the chief magistrate of the city. A year after this marriage, on the 28th of August, 1749, their son, the poet, Jo- hann Wolfgang Goethe, was born at Frankfort. Both parents were persons cf notico able character. The father is describ- ed by Goethe's latest and best biogra^ pher, Lewes, as " a cold, stern, formal, somewhat pedantic, but truth-loving, upright-minded man. He hungered for knowledge, and although in gen- eral of a laconic turn, freely imparted all he learned. In his domestic circle his word was law. Not only imperious, but in some respects capricious, he was nevertheless greatly respected, if little loved, by wife, children and friends." From him the poet inherited the well- built frame, the erect carriage and meas- ured movement of his later life, with the orderliness and stoicism which charac- terized him through life. The mother was of an excellent disposition and genius, " her simple, hearty, joyous and aifectionate nature endearing her to all, the delight of children, the fa- vorite of poets and princes." Being but eighteen when her son was born, she was the companion of his youth. " I and my Wolfgang," she said, " have always held fast to each other, because we were both young together." She was well read in German and Italian literature, of great vivacity of intel- lect, inventing imaginative stories foi JOHANN WOLFGANG GOETHE. 227 her children, in which she became as much interested as themselves ; a cheer- ful and happy woman, avoiding as far as possible all that was unpleasant in life and bearing its inevitable sorrows with equanimity. It was from his mother, says his biographer, that Goethe " derived those leading princi- ples which determined the movement and orbit of his artistic nature; the joyous, healthy temperament, humor, vivid fancy, susceptibility, and the marvellous insight which gathered up the scattered and vanishing elements of experience into new and living com- binations." The home in which the poet was born exercised its influence upon his impressible nature. The pic- turesque old city of Frankfort, with its ancient associations, was of itself a school for an imaginative child ; while within the house in which he was born the walls were hung with pictures of the antiquities of Italy which his fa- ther had brought with him from his travels. Under these and other influ- ences ,of education there were numer- ous precocious developments of the boy's intellect. Taught mostly at home at this early period, everything which he learned seems to have had an individual flavor. He was not one of a class getting lessons by rote, but at once absorbed and put in practice what he acquired. The anecdotes of his attainments and of his reflective powers are something marvellous. At six his mind was stirred by thoughts of Providence, excited by the over- whelming disaster of the great earth- quake at Lisbon, and in his next year we are told that after listening to a great deal of theological discussion in the family he resolved to set up an altar of his own. " For this purpose he selected some types, such as ores and other natural productions, and ar- ranged them in symbolical order on the elevations of a music stand; on the apex was to be a flame typical of the soul's aspiration, and for this a pastille did duty. Sunrise was await- ed with impatience. The glittering of the housetops gave signal ; he applied a burning-glass to the pastille, and thus was the worship consummated by a priest of seven years old, alone in his bedroom." He very early acquir- ed some knowledge of language, at eight, writing exercises in German, French, Italian, Latin and Greek, and not long after attacking English and even Hebrew. These were sometimes in the form of dialogue, exhibiting a playful turn for humor. Among other circumstances of his early life, of which he has given an account in his autobiography, he learnt much from the breaking up of the usual routine of home by the occupation of Frank- fort by the French in the Seven Years' War. The troops were billeted upon the inhabitants, an officer " of taste and munificence " falling to the lot of the Goethe house; while the usual life of the town was greatly en- hanced by military movements and tho opening of a cafe and theatre. Though the boy was too young to understand or appreciate the quickness of French comedy he admired the display and bustle and if he did not learn much before the scenes doubtless gathered up more behind them, for we find him, by the aid of a braggart companion, acquainted with the actors, " a fire 228 JOHANN WOLFGANG GOETHE. quenter of the green-room, and admit- ted into the dressing-room, where the actors and actresses dressed and un- dressed with philosophic disregard to appearances, which from repeated vis- its he learned to regard as quite natural." This was about the age of ten ; before he was fifteen he was in love with a certain Gretchen, the sister of one of his vagrant associates at this time, who appears to have given him but moderate encouragement and from whose society he was withdrawn by the mishap of some of her companions getting involved in fraudulent prac- tices, bringing them under the super- vision of the law. Gretchen, the fa- miliar designation of Margaret, long haunted his imagination and furnished the name for the heroine of Faust. He was at first much hurt by this dis- appointment of his youthful passion, especially when he found that it had awakened no very ardent emotion in the subject of it, but he had too much vivacity to suffer long from such a catastrophe, and he soon turned his mind to his favorite studies. With much multifarious knowledge in his head, and with some practice in writ- ing, at the age of sixteen he entered as a student the University of Leip- sic. It was his father's design that he should devote himself to the study of jurisprudence, and he accordingly on his first arrival set himself vigorously to work at the science under the guid- ance of the learned professor Bdhme. But he was of too volatile a nature to confine himself long to one pursuit. Versatility was always the character- istic of his attainments. He might, particularly in his early years, have said with Horace : Nullius addictus jurare in verba magistri Quo me cunque rapit tempestas deferor hospes. Diverted from the lectures on law by his intimacy with certain medical stu- dents who talked of nothing but medi- cine and botany, he occupied himself with these new studies, while, with his usual ardour he entered eagerly into society and soon accumulated a stock of experience which, in one form and another, he rendered into verse and thus became an author. He had come to Leipsic with some provincial oddities about him ; with a peculiar accent and a stock of colloquial expressions interspersed with proverbs and biblical allusions, which sounded strange in the politer society into which he was thrown. His dress, moreover, grotesquely made by one of his father's servants, gave him an absurd appear ance. But he soon cast off these in cumbrances of mind and body, and under the guidance of the accomplished Frau Bohme, appeared to advantage in the social circles of the town. It was not his disposition, however, to be contented with the usual amusements and intercourse of what is called good company. He demanded .intense men- tal activity and passionate emotion, which he found in a literary circle which gathered at the table d' hote of one Schonkopf , a peculiar German com- bination of the gentleman, wine mer- chant, and tavern keeper. He discussed poetry with the guests, got up private theatricals with the family, and played lovers' parts with the daughter, co- quetting with her affection, and, in JOHAN WOLFGANG GOETHE. 22S the end, something to his mortification, losing it. At this he is said to have been in despair, but it was a melan- choly which soon found relief in the composition of a few lyrics and a pas- toral play in which he introduced his lovers' quarrels a solace to which he often afterwards resorted in similar circumstances, and which never failed him. He is also said about this time to have had some experience of a less reputable kind of life, not at all of the conventional order, where human na- ture was to be seen in undress. The re- sult of this kind of observation was a dramatic piece which is published in his works entitled " The Fellow Sin- ners," in which there is a striking com- bination in wickedness on the part of all the characters. The theatre and the drama now oc- cupied much of his attention, with a new enthusiasm excited by his introduc- tion to the spirit of Shakespeare, with whom he first became acquainted in the " Beauties," selected by the famous Dr. Dodd. He was vividly impressed by the bold, romantic character of the great English dramatist, and his fear- less reliance upon nature as distin- guished from the artificial French school a powerful influence in the formation and encouragement of his literary convictions at this period. He also acquired some knowledge of art, taking lessons in drawing from Oeser, an eminent connoiseur, who had been the friend and instructor of Winckel- mann. Falling in at the same time with the " Laocoon " of Lessing, he eagerly imbibed the admirable philo- sophical distinctions laid down in that work respecting the bounds and capac- ities of poetry, painting and sculpture To enlarge his knowledge of the sub- ject he hurried of? secretly to D r esden to inspect its gallery of the old mas- ters, where he was more impressed with the pictures of everyday life of the Dutch school than with the ideal of the Italian. He made efforts in draw- ing, dabbled in engraving, and would have been an artist had nature second- ed his aspirations ; but he never at- tained any remarkable success in this walk. After about three years spent at Leipsic, he returned to Frankfort, seri- ously affected in health, which his bi- ographer attributes to " dissipation, bad d-iet .(especially the beer and cof- fee) and absurd endeavors to carry out Rousseau's preaching about returning to a state of nature." He had suffered from a violent hemorrhage, now fol- lowed on his recovery by a painful tumor on his neck. After this had yielded to surgical treatment, he was afflicted with a troublesome stomach disorder, for the relief of which the family physician, who would appear to have been something of a quack, brought out as a final remedy a cer- tain mysterious salt of which he had come to the knowledge in his pursuit of alchemy. The patient consented to take the prescription and recovered; when, as usual, profiting by chance currents in the sea of learning, he threw himself vigorously upon the writings of Paracelsus, Van Helmont and their associates in the vain search after the philosopher's stone a stu- dent's experience reproduced in Faust. His health being now restored, another effort was to be made in the study of 230 JOHAOT WOLFGANG GOETHE. jurisprudence, and with the design of gaining a doctor's degree, he was sent to Strasbourg. " He was now," says his biographer, " turned twenty, and a more magnifi- cent youth, never perhaps eLtered the Strasbourg gates. Long before he was celebrated, he was likened to an Apollo ; when he entered a restaurant, the peo- ple laid down their knives and forks to stare at him. Pictures and busts give a very feeble indication of that which was most striking in his appear- ance; they only give the cut of fea- ture, not the play of feature ; nor are they very accurate even in mere form. The features were large and liberally cut, as in the fine sweeping lines of Greek art. The brow, lofty and mas- sive, from beneath which shone large lustrous brown eyes of marvelous beauty, their pupils being of almost unexampled size ; the slightly aquiline nose was large and firmly cut; the mouth fall, with a short arched lip, very expressive, the chin and jaw boldly proportioned, and the head resting on a fine muscular neck : de- tails which are, after all, but the in- ventory of his appearance, and give no clear image of it. In stature, he was rather above the middle size ; but, al- though not really tall, he had the as- pect of a tall man, and is usually so described, because his presence was very imposing. His frame was strong, muscular, yet sensitive. Excelling in all active sports, he was almost a ba- rometer in sensitiveness to atmospheric influences." With personal advantages like these, and the varied education he had al- ready acquired, Strasbourg readily be- came a new theatre of mental acquisi tions and of social conquests. Love and learning, as at Leipsic, divided the young poet's attention. Law, as be- fore, was by no means his exclusive mistress. We find him heartily en- gaged also in the study of anatomy and chemistry, paying particular at- tention to the new wonders of elec- tricity disclosed by Franklin. Mys- tical philosophic writings occupied his time, with a special devotion to that martyr of science, the pantheistic Bruno ; while he gained a deeper spi- ritual insight from an intimacy which he formed with the religious enthu- siast, Jung Stilling, who ever after- wards remained his friend an associ- ation of signal honor to Goethe in the estimation of his character. " In- stinctively, he sought on all sides to penetrate the mysteries of humanity, and, by probing every man's experi- ence to make it his own. Here was a poor charcoal-burner, who, from tailor- ing had passed to keeping a school; that failing, he had resumed his needle ; and having joined a religious sect, had, in silent communion with his own soul, gained for himself a sort of culture which raised him above the ordinary height of men : what was there in hia life or opinions to captivate the riot- ous, sceptical, prosperous student 7 There was earnestness, there was genu ineness. Sympathizing with Stilling listening to him, and dexterously avoid ing any interference with his religious* faith, he was not only enabled to be his friend, but also to learn quietly and surely the inner nature of such men." Goethe formed another lasting ac quaintance at Strasbourg with Herdeij JOHANN WOLFGANG GOETHE. 231 who was five years his senior an im- portant difference at that period of life who taught him a philosophical admiration of the Hebrew and other national poetry to its latest and then fashionable exhibition in Ossian. We read at this time of a certain nervous irritability, in overcoming which he exhibited an extraordinary resolution and self-control. " Loud sounds were disagreeable to him ; dis- eased objects aroused loathing and horror, and he was especially troubled with giddiness, which came over him whenever he looked down from a height. All these infirmities he re- solved to conquer, and that somewhat violently In the evening when they beat the tattoo, he went close to the drums, though the powerful rolling and beating of so many seemed enough to make his heart burst in his bosom. Alone he ascended the highest pinna- cle of the cathedral, and sat in what is called the neck, under the crown, for a quarter of an hour before ventur- ing to step out again into the open air. Standing on a platform, scarcely an ell square, he saw before him a boundless prospect, the church and everything upon which he stood being concealed by the ornaments. He felt exactly as if carried up in a balloon. These pain- ful sensations he repeated until they became quite indifferent; he subse- quently derived great advantage from this conquest, in mountainous excur- sions and geological studies. Anatomy was also of double value, as it taught him to tolerate the most repulsive sights while satisfying his thirst for knowledge. He succeeded so well that no hideous sight could disturb his self-possession. He also sought to steel himself against the terrois of imagination. The awful and shudder- ing impressions of darkness in church- yards, solitary places, churches and chapels by night, he contrived to render indifferent so much so, that when a desire came over him to recall in such scenes the pleasing shudder of youth, he could scarcely succeed even by th^. strangest and most terrific images." The Strasbourg Cathedral, which was thus turned to account in fortifying his nerves was a perpetual school of art to him while residing in the city. It was the inspiration and centre of a group of ideas, the repre- sentative to him of the entire world of Gothic art. Valuable, however, as may have been his studies at Strasbourg, there were other lessons than those of books and architecture which he was learning. His devotion to anatomy and physiolo- gy was extended to the intellect and affections in their living representa- tions. It would doubtless be unfair to charge him with deliberately engag- ing the affections of the young ladies, with whom he was thrown in contact, for the purpose of a scientific experi- ment, a vivisection of the tenderest emotions of the heart. It is more na- tural to suppose that he fell in love with the really lovable from the force of sympathy, passion and admiration ; but we must still be impressed with the frequency of these attachments, and the cool superiority which he maintain- ed in conducting and abandoning them, taking care to preserve, for available literary purposes, the memory of all their incidents and entanglements The 232 JOHAOT WOLFGANG GOETHE. progress of these early love affairs, par- ticularly at Strasbourg, occupies an un- usually large proportionate space in his biography. There is the dramatic story of his adventure with the two daughters of his dancing master, with one of whom he was in love, while the other was in love with him, a game of cross proposes ending in breaking off the connection with the family in a highly dramatic style. Another intima- cy seemed at one time likely to lead to more important results the acquaint- ance with a certain Frederika, the daughter of the clergyman of a village in the vicinity of Strasbourg. It origi- nated in a kind of masquerading frolic in a visit to the family, which formed it- self in the mind of Goethe, as the coun- terpart of that described by Goldsmith in the Vicar of Wakefield a simple- minded pastor, two daughters and even the boy Moses. The intercourse which ensued exhibited some very pretty am- atory scenes, charming in themselves, delightful in a painting or a romance, furnishing most fascinating pages for future books ; but by no means to be developed in the sober graces of matri- mony. For a time these entanglements of the affections had a strong hold up- on him, if we may judge by the declar- ations of his correspondence and the sympathizing utterances of his friends. But it must be remembered that these things were occurring in a singularly demonstrative period, when it appears to have been the habit of the educated people of the country to indulge in the greatest freedom and openness in the expression of every feeling and senti- ment of the heart, whether relating to love or friendship. Such revelations were characteristic of the time and in fected its literature. They prevailed to a great extent in France and Ger- many, but they have always been alien to the English mind and character. The tendency which always exists where there is much talking about a thing was to excess and exaggeration. Words soon outrun realities. Sentiment rap- idly grew into sentimentality. It is not, perhaps, after all, that these loves of Goethe are so very much more re- markable than the common flirtations of other ardent young philosophers, as that they have an exceptional inter- est in his case from the freedom with which he laid them bare to his friends and to the public in the thin disguise of his writings. As it is, we may study the man in his works and his works in the man. The analytic process is that of the critic ; the synthetic is that of the biographer. After a residence in Strasbourg of something more than a year, Goethe returned home with the degree of Doc- tor of Laws, not, however, to settle down to the practice of jurisprudence, but to throw himself with greater fervor upon literary composition. His study of Shakespeare had impressed him with the capabilities of the drama in the re- vival of ancient historical incidents, while the spirit of the past had been brought vividly to his mind by his in- timate sympathy with the medieval as- sociations of the old cathedral city in which he had been living. A third element of interest was combined with these in the subject which he chose for the first important exercise of his pow- ers. This was the rough daring spirit of independence, fascinating his youth- JOHAKN WOLFGANG GOETHE. 233 ul energy and enthusiasm, which he found in the career of Gottfried von Berlichingen, of the Iron Hand, as he was called, a lawless feudal German baron of the Robin Hood or Rob Roy jrder, of the sixteenth century. The story of the exploits of this warrior chieftain Goethe found written in an old chronicle which he had dramatized somewhat after the fashion of Shakes- peare's historical plays, adding several striking characters of his own of a pure- ly romantic or melodramatic interest. He made it not a great tragedy, but a grand picturesque bustling narrative, bringing past events with startling effect before the mind of the modern spectator. It was original in its con- ception as it was vivid in expression, and with all its imperfections, it be- came the acknowledged precursor of two great divisions of our recent liter- ature, the modern historical drama, and the historical novel. " Gotz von Ber- lichingen" was first published in 1773. Six years later it appeared in an Eng- lish translation from the pen of Walter Scott, and was no unimportant means of fastening his attention upon the themes and treatment of his subsequent historical poems and novels. The next memorable work of Goethe, for he was all the while engaged in mi- nor literary compositions, in occasional writings and contributions to the aes- thetic journals of the day, was also to create quite as extraordinary an impres- sion on the times. This was the famous " Sorrows of Werther." After he had written " Gotz," and previously to its publication, Goethe, with the ostensi- ble purpose of pursuing the practice of the law, resided for a short time at 30 Wetzlar, where, as usual, he gave him- self up unreservedly to literature, so- ciety and friendship. Though, from his own account, he had hardly di- gested his inconsequential passion for Frederika, he was readily disposed, perhaps the more on that account to fill up the gap in his affections to fall into a new attachment. The attractive object was, at this time, no other than the original of the heroine, in his tear- ful, sentimental romance, a certain Charlotte Buff, a joyous maiden of sixteen, interesting rather than beau- tiful, of rare modesty and worth, and, happily, of a high degree of self-pos- session, for she was already betrothed to Kestner, a friend of Goethe, and, notwithstanding the excessive admira- tion and exquisite attentions of the latter, honorably maintained fidelity to her engagement. Nor did this per- severing gallantry interfere with the friendship between the husband elect and the ardent lover. On the contrary, he generously looked upon him, not with the jealousy of a rival, but with the sympathy of a philosopher, griev- ing that he should be distressed in so hopeless a way. This was the very magnanimity of friendship, and proof of a noble nature; it shows too that Goethe's conduct, allowing him the limits of a Platonic attachment, was not dishonorable. Goethe left Wetzlar, Charlotte was in due time married to Kestner, and the first fruit of the union, in compliment to the distinguished inamorato, was named Wolfgang. So far, the story of Werther, like that of his fondness for Frederika, could have furnished to the poet only a few idyllic scenes, a 234 JOHANN WOLFGANG GOETHE. other sketch for his books of graceful female tenderness. But Wetzlar was to furnish another incident, a tragic catastrophe to be inwoven with the plot. There was in the town, at the same time with Goethe, a certain youth with whom he became acquainted, named Jerusalem. He was attached to the Brunswick legation, was well educated, of a philosophic turn of in- tellect, and of a melancholy tempera- ment. He, too, formed a passionate attachment to the wife of a friend, was mortified by being refused admis- sion to the house, and being already in a diseased state of mind, committed suicide. Combining the two circum- stances, with Jerusalem for the unhap- py hero and Charlotte for the subject of his passion, Goethe, blending with the two a certain poetic and passionate melancholy of his own at this period, produced the " Sorrows of "Werther." The book in which all this was writ- ten a long melancholy wail of pro- found, yet sickly sentimentality, re- lieved by pictures of nature and idyl- lic scenes of the natural affections, of simple, human everyday life seemed to strike at once the heart of the world in giving expression to the deep discontent which was beginning to prevail in Europe, and which found its cure at last in the blood-letting at- tending the French Revolution and the subsequent wars of Napoleon, when there was something more practical on hand than dyspeptic sighing and la- mentation. For the time, however, its effect was transcendent. .The book ran the circuit of the reading world ; its progeny in one shape or other would fill a library. It was something for a young man of twenty-three tlus, in the production of " Gotz Yon Berli chingen" and the "Sorrows of Wer- ther," to have founded two great schools of popular literature. There were several other literary ef- forts of Goethe about this time savor- ing of honest thought and experience a projected drama on Mahomet, a striking conception fully planned, but of which only one song was written out ; a satire on Wieland for his mod- ern misrepresentation of the heathen gods, and " Clavigo," a dramatic version of an adventure of Beaumarchais, writ- ten at the playful command of another of the author's Platonic lady loves, the fascinating Anna Sybilla Munch. Still another flame, Anna Elizabeth Schone- mann, celebrated in his poetry as "Lili," an arrant coquette, furnished him soon after with emotional experi- ence sufficient for an opera, "Erwin and Elmira," in which he took his revenge in verse. The affair, however, was resumed, and a marriage seems at one time to have been determined on, which came to nothing without much difficulty. There was another play turning on the passion of love, " Stella,'' of the melodramatic order, the English translation of which suggested to Can- ning and Frere their famous parody, " The Rovers ; or, the Double Arrange- ment," in the An ti- Jacobin. His mental activity, with the force of his genius, which impressed itself upon whatever he undertook, had now gained him the respect and friendship of most of the eminent literati of Germany. He num- bered among his friends and corres- pondents, Klopstock, Herder, Lavater, Jacobi, and others of distinction, and a JOHAKN" WOLFGANG GOETHE. 235 oreater and more intimate than all, D ' Schiller, was soon to be added to the number. His talents, moreover, had gained him the marked attention of Karl August, the Duke of Saxe Wei- mar, who now invited him to pass some time at his court. He went, towards the close of 1775, and the capital of the lit- tle duchy became his home for life. Weimar was then a very plain little town, as yet without its beautiful park, its city walls inclosing under six or seven hundred roofs, a population of about seven thousand. The manners of the court were formal and provin- cial. An aristocratic system of exclu- siveness prevailed. But there appears to have been, judging from the free rollicking career Goethe led there, a great deal of sportive life in the place. The Dowager Duchess Amalia, a niece of Frederick the Great, was of a happy temperament, fond of pleasure, well in- structed in various accomplishments, a patron of Wieland, who taught her to read Aristophanes, and fond of having men of letters in her company. The Duchess Luise was a woman of deci- ded character, and her husband, the duke, was worthy by his talents and disposition to be the friend and com- panion of Goethe. They were both in those early days at Weimar young to- gether, sympathized heartily with each other in a passion for nature and ad- venture, had a common love of litera- ture, with a permitted freedom of in- tercourse which took away all pretence of patronage on the one side, or risk of servility on the other. It was truly " a merry, laughing, quaffing and unthink- ing time " which Goethe passed at that period with this versatile Prince Hal, in frolics, private theatricals and social amusements, not unmixed with graver duties of the petty state when he was appointed, contrary to all precedent, to the distinguished post at the court, of Geheime Legations Hath, with a seat in the privy council and a salary of twelve hundred thalers. The duke also soon presented him with an at- tractive little " garden house" for a residence, within the precincts of the present park, where the poet could enjoy a most delightful rural seclusion in the immediate vicinity of the town. Here he studied, wrote and indulged in sentimental reveries over a new passion, this time a lady of three and thirty, the mother of seven children, the accomplished woman of the world, who knew well how to take care of herself even with so charming an ad- mirer,^ the Frau von Stein of the court, wife of the Master of the Horse. A gallant mutual admiration and exchange of sensibilities was kept up between them for ten years. The age of thirty is marked by Goethe's biographer, Mr. Lewes, as a turning point in his career, the period at which he began seriously to think of life as something to be rigidly control- led and regulated for the most perfect application of his faculties and acquire- ments. The previous time had been a period of turbulence and unrest^ of fluctuations of feeling and passion, of experiment in the trial of his powers ; for the future he would realize the ideal, in the full and mature use of all h is powers. The fruits of his candid in- trospection and noble resolve are to be seen throughout his subsequent life and writings. His demeanor becomes more 236 JOHAOT WOLFGANG GOETHE. reserved ; his participation in the fro- licsome vanities of the day is gradually abandoned ; we no longer hear of him as engaged in such careless personal exhibitions of himself as that recorded by his biographer, when he was seen "standing in the market-place with the duke by the hour together, smack- ing huge sledge whips for a wager." On the contrary, his influence is employ- ed in restraining the wild follies of that reckless and dissipated noble personage ? and in guiding to a greater degree his literary and philosophical pursuits. If Goethe had sometimes heretofore play- ed the part of Falstaff to Prince Hal, the cast was now reversed and Fal- staff appeared, as he doubtless always had been in reality, the leader in so- briety and judgment. But it is in the finish and completeness of his lite- rary works that the effect of this pro- founder consciousness and more dili- gent application is to be seen. The artist henceforth predominates, sub- duing and concentrating in classic forms the irregularities of passion and emotion. "The Iphigenia in Tauris," produced in 1779, a modern transfu- sion of an ancient dramatic story, is a masterpiece of art, profound and orig- inal in conception. The drama of " Iphigenia " was fol- lowed at intervals by "Egmont," in which we are introduced to some of the most striking scenes in the war waged by the Netherlands against the tyranny of Spain, and " Torquato Tas- so," a dramatic version of the poet's life-histoTy in its inner consciousness. These works were produced in a period of about ten years, from 1778 to 1 788 Within that time the poet had been elevated to the nobility, pur sued various scientific studies in bota ny, natural philosophy, anatomy, seek ing not the^ mere knowledge of facts, but the discovery of principles and the hidden laws of organization, and had performed a memorable tour in Italy. That he might pursue his jour- ney with the greater freedom and in- dependence, he laid aside his nobility for the tour and travelled incognito with the assumed name of Herr Moller. Venice, Rome, Sicily, engaged most of his attention. He followed up his lit- erary and philosophical studies by the way, and made some laborious efforts to accomplish himself as a painter, sufficient to satisfy him that he was not born for the art. The influence of the tour, which lasted a year and a half, was felt in his subsequent tastes and culture. An experience of a cam- paign or two in France a year or two after was less in accordance with his disposition, when he accompanied his friend, the duke, in the expedition across the frontier of the Duke of Brunswick, in the vain attempt of the allies to stay by force the onward movement of the Revolution. We hear of nothing more remarkable occurring to him during this adventure than the expe- rience which he sought of the sensa- tions of a soldier under fire of the ene- my, an experiment to ascertain what sort of a thing the " cannon fever," as it was called, might be, and of which he wrote a vivid description. On his return from Italy, Goethe had been absolved by the duke from the discharge of his active duties about the court as President of the Chamber and Director of the War Department, JOHANN WOLFGANG GOETHE. 237 while lie still retained the privilege of a seat in the council and the superin- tendence of all scientific and artistic institutions, including the theatre. As his salary had been increased and he was in receipt of a handsome addi- tional income after the death of his father, which occurred in 1781, to say nothing of the proceeds of his writ- ings, his pecuniary circumstances were in the most favorable condition. In fact, he was in a perfectly independent position to pursue, with the greatest advantages, the system of intellectual culture upon which he had set his heart. The small rustic "garden- house," in which he had for some time resided, had been succeeded by a resi- dence in the town, granted him by the duke, which was rebuilt for him during his absence in the French campaign. This house became thoroughly identi- fied with the man, being gradually furnished and adapted according to his tastes and inclinations. He lived in it for the remainder of his life, and after his death, like the Abbotsford of Sir Walter Scott, it was regarded as a kind of living monument to the man. To complete the picture of the poet's home, it is necessary to refer to an important member of his family, the lady whom he had taken to his house as his acknowledged mistress, who became the mother of his children, and, after eighteen years passed in this irregular relation, was made his wife by marriage. This was Christiane Vulpius, with whom he became ac- quainted in a noticeable manner. As he was walking, one day, in the au- tumn of 1788, in the park at Weimar, a petition was presented to him by Christiane, " a fresh, young, bright- looking girl," asking his influence in procuring a post for her brother, the author of the celebrated romance, "Binaldo Binaldini." This was fol- lowed by the attachment which re- sulted, a year after, on her bearing him a son, in her formal introduction to his house, to the scandal, as may be supposed, of good society at Weimar. There is but little to be said by the greatest admirers of Goethe in apology for this flagrant violation of morality. His biographer, Mr. Lewes, speaks of his "abstract dread of marriage," which, in the discussion of such a question, sounds very much like a jest, and of the disparity in social station, which can hardly be considered of much greater consequence with a man so accustomed and privileged to act independently. There are two pic- tures presented to us, of her youth, when Goethe wrote poems in celebra- tion of her charms, and of her woman- hood when her beauty was spoiled by intemperance. Of the first it is writ- ten, " her golden-brown locks, laughing eyes, ruddy cheeks, kiss-provoking lips, small and gracefully rounded figure, gave her ' the appearance of a young Dionysos ! ' Her naivete, gayety and enjoying temperament completely fascinated Goethe, who recognized in her one of those free, healthy speci mens of nature which education had not distorted with artifice. She was like a child of the sensuous Italy he had just quitted with so much regret ; and there are few poems in any lan- guage which approach the passionate gratitude of those in which he recalls the happiness sh'j gave him." In the 238 JOHANN WOLFGANG GOETHE. account of her some fifteen years later we read, " Years and self-indulgence have now made havoc with her charms. The evil tendency, which youth and animal spirits kept within excess, has asserted itself with a distinctness v^hich her birth and circumstances may explain, if not excuse, but which can only be contemplated in sadness. Her father, we know, ruined himself by intemperance ; her brother impair- ed fine talents by similar excess ; and Christiane, who inherited the fatal disposition, was not saved from it by the checks which refined society im- poses, for she was shut out from socie- ty by her relation to Goethe. Fond of gayety, and especially of dancing, she was often seen at the students' balls at Jena; and she accustomed herself to an indulgence in wine, which rap- idly destroyed her beauty, and which was sometimes the cause 1 of serious domestic troubles." It was in this later period, at an odd time, five days after the battle of Jena, when all Wei- mar was in confusion and the French with Napoleon were in possession of the town, that the marriage took place. The union, ten years after, in 1816, was terminated by the death of the wife. Succeeding Goethe's more important dramatic productions, came his art novel, gathering up many years of thought and experience, " Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship and Travels." The motive of this work, which grew out of the author's active engagement in the superintendence of the court theatie at Weimar, was a representa- tion of the dramatic life, in its trials and capabilities : as it was continued it assumed a symbolical cast and was less an exhibition of the actual world. Having been translated by Carlyle, it is one of the best known to English readers of the author's works. In " Herrmann and Dorothea," which appeared in 1797, Goethe gave to the world one of the most perfect and thoroughly satisfactory of all his works. It is a series of idyllic pictures, a tale of love and affection, set in the frame- work of German village life, enriched by humor and sentiment, with the back-ground of the French revolution. The poem, tripping lightly on with the ease and strength of the hexame- ter in the hands of a master, is at once simple, quaint, picturesque and pro- found in feeling, and truthful in ex- pression. Art and nature were never united in a happier composition. The first part of the tragedy of " Faust," the consummate fruit of the genius of the author in his various at- tainments, was given to the world in 1806. It was the patient growth oi thirty years of intellectual labor and passionate experience. Traces of all his previous life-history appeared in it. The history of its composition is thus given by his biographer. " The Faust fable was familiar to Goethe as a child. In Strasbourg, during 1770-71, he con- ceived the idea of fusing his persona] experience into the mould of the old legend ; but he wrote nothing of the work until 1774-75, when the ballad of the King of Thule, the first mono- logue and the first scene with Wagner, were written ; and during his love affair with Lili, he sketched Gretchen's catastrophe, the scene in the street, the Gretchen's bed-room, the scene in JOHANN WOLFGANG GOETHE. scenes between Faust and Mephisto- pheles during the walk, and in the street, and the garden scene. In his Swiss journey, he sketched the first interview with Mephistopheles and the compact ; also the scene before the city gates, the plan of Helena, the scene between the student and Mephis- topheles, and Auerbach's cellar. When in Italy, he read over the old manu- script, and wrote the scenes of the witches' kitchen and the cathedral ; also the monologue in the forest. In 1797, the whole was remodelled. Then were added the two prologues, theWalpurgis night,and the dedication. In 1801 he completed it as it now stands, retouching it, perhaps, when it was published." A second part of Faust, symbolical, mystical and ob- scure, was the latest literary work of the author's closing years. Both por- tions, but more particularly the latter, have furnished inexhaustible materials for critics and commentators. The main work is sufficiently simple in its general design, setting forth with all the force of poetry and imagination the failure of the human mind in its pursuit of knowledge to satisfy the demands of the soul, and the triumph of sensuality over the distracted powers of life. The whole work has recently ap- peared in English in a justly admired translation from the pen of Bayard Taylor. In 1825, the fiftieth anniversary of Goethe's arrival at the court was cele- brated at Weimar with imposing cere- monial and the most fervent personal attentions. Less than three years af- ter, his old friend, the duke, was taken away, to be followed shortly by his wife, the grand duchess. Goethe bore himself through these trials with equa- nimity, according to his habit, and though suffering from the effects of age, was still employed in his literary labors. His last work was the com- pletion of Faust, already mentioned, in his eighty-second year. In the spring of 1832 he was taken ill with a cold, bringing on a nervous fever which, within a week, on the 22d ol March, resulted in his death. His laf audible words were " More light." JOHN PHILIP KEMBLE. HHHE records of the Kemble family -J- are the most brilliant in the an- nals of the British stage. There was a shadowy claim or tradition among them of a member of the race, a Kem- ble, who, in the great civil war, fought on the royal side at Worcester ; and of another, a Roman Catholic priest, who innocently suffered death at Hereford, a martyr to the fears of England in the panic consequent on that dar- ing imposition on religious credulity, known as the Titus Gates plot. ^Before he went to the scaffold, it is said, he called for a pipe of tobacco, and smoked it, which was commemo- rated in the region where he suffered, by a last pipe being called " Kemble's pipe." Henry Siddons claimed that the name Kemble and Campbell were originally the same, which opened an early and distinguished Scottish ances- try ; but as this was in a conversation with the author of " The Pleasures of Hope," it may only have been thrown out in a spirit of mutual compliment. The known dramatic ancestry in the long lineage of players of the tribe, carries us back in the early days of the eighteenth century to a person named (240) Ward, an actor of some reputation, a contemporary of Betterton, who, in 1723, took a leading part on the London boards in the production of the amia- ble poet Fen ton's "Mariamne." He subsequently became a strolling man- ager, his daughter, Sarah, acting with him before the country audiences. In the course of this random life, she fell in love with, and married it was a run- away match, without the consent of her parents Roger Kemble, a subor- dinate member of the company, a man of some education, with a gentle dispo- sition, of fine personal appearance, an- swering to her own beauty, of the us- ual poverty of his profession, and a Roman Catholic. Her father was re luctantly reconciled to the marriage, humorously expressing his forgiveness in a jest, at the expense of the bride- groom " Sarah, you have not disobey- ed me. I told you never to marry an actor, and you have married a man who neither is, nor ever can be an ac- tor." Notwithstanding this facetious anathema, Roger Kemble seems in his way to have played well his part, and when, at the age of seventy, brought into notice by his illustrious child rr n, From a painting by Sir '1'hatn.as Lawrence. Jolmson, 1 vVilsonA:Co.,PabliHlier8,N'ewYork JOHN PHILIP KEMBLE. 241 he appeared for the first time before the London public, at the Haymarket Theatre, on occasion of his daughter-in- law, Mrs. Stephen Kemble's benefit, he acquitted himself with credit in the character of the Miller of Mansfield. When Boaden, the dramatic biogra- pher, visited Roger Kemble and his wife in their old age, the latter fondly spoke of her husband, sitting apart in the room unconscious of her remarks, as the only gentleman Falstaff she had ever seen. Returning to their early married life, it was while Kemble was in charge of his father-in-law's itinerant company, to the management of which he had suc- ceeded, that their eldest son John Philip was born, the 1st of February, 1757, at Prescot, in Lancashire. He was the second child, a sister Sarah, the Sid- dons of the British stage, having pre- ceded him in the summer of 1755. The father being a Roman Catholic, and the mother a Protestant, it was arranged in the family that the sons were to be brought up in the former faith, the daughters in the latter. The stage, in the shiftless experience of the family, was not regarded as a desirable call- ing for either. Brother and sister, how- ever, were both in their childhood on the boards, to which in that strolling life access was so easy, and from which in the struggles of poverty, escape was hardly possible. From a play-bill of the year 1767, when the boy was but ten, it appears that they acted togeth- er at Worcester in Havard's once ad- mired tragedy, " Charles L," a play, freighted with the solemnity of a na- tion's grief, then celebrated for its pa- thetic interest. In this performance, John took the part of the Duke of York, and his sister that of Elizabeth, the children of the royal martyr. The passionate life of the stage was thus blended with their earliest thoughts and affections, and its influence never left them. John Kemble, indeed, was separated from it for a time in his youth in the pursuit of a very different class of studies, apparently with a view of adopting the clerical calling, being sent by his father, after a juvenile course at a school at Worcester, to the Roman Catholic seminary of Sedgeley Park, in Staffordshire, and thence to the notable English college of the same church, at Douay, in France. This new mode of life did not end in making Kemble a priest ; but it gave him the training and accomplishments of a scholar, with a taste for lettered re- finements which long afterwards colored his professional career. He became fa- miliar with the Fathers of the church, made the acquaintance of Greek and Ro- man authors, while he did not neglect the literature of his own land, acquiring, at the college a reputation for his grace- ful and harmonious recitations from the English poets. The actor, in fact, was not crushed, but developed by what he learnt at Douay. Returning to England, contrary to the wishes and expectations of his father, deliberately choosing the stage as a profession, he made his first appearance in a strolling company at Wolverhampton, as the hero in Lee's tragedy, " Theodosius." This was in January, 1776, the year of Garrick's retirement from the thea- tre. No one suspected tliat this hum- ble novice was to be his successor in fame, though in a very different style 242 JOHN PHILIP KEMBLE. of acting. Kemble was then at the age of nineteen, and had much to learn in fate and discipline before his fortune culminated in his established position at the head of the British stage. He was for several years at the beginning a strolling player, sharing the inclem- encies attending the craft. A rollick- ing Irish actor named Watson, whose life was spent in the provincial thea- tres, related to that amusing stage gos- siper, Michael Kelly, how, at this ear- ly period, Kemble and he "lived, or rather starved together." " At one time, in Gloucestershire," says Kelly, " they were left penniless ; and, after continued vicissitudes, Watson assured me, such was their distress, that at that time they were glad to get into a turnip field, and make a meal of its produce uncooked ; and, he added, it was while regaling on the raw vegetable, that they hit upon a scheme to recruit their finances ; and a lucky turn-up it turned out. It was neither more nor less than that John Kemble should turn Metho- dist preacher, and Watson perform the part of clerk. Their scheme was orga- nized ; and Tewkesbury was their first scene of action. They drew together in a field a numerous congregation ; and Kemble preached with such piety, and so much effect, that, positively, a large collection rewarded his labors. This anecdote Kemble himself told me was perfectly true."* After acting with some credit at Manchester and Liverpool, Kemble, at the close of 1778, in the language of Sir Walter Scott, " like Robinson Cru- soe in his escape from the raging ocean, * Reminiscences of Michael Kelly, Second Edi- tion, II. 95. began to touch ground." In othei words, he was promoted to a settled en- gagement in Tate Wilkinson's theatrical company, with its head-quarters estab- lished at York. He was at first engag- ed in playing such comedy characters as Captain Plume and Archer, in Farqu- har's plays, but soon found his way in- to his appropriate sphere of tragedy, appearing as Macbeth, Orestes, in which he was afterwards painted by Stuart, and other parts of serious declamation. Meanwhile, he had been somewhat en- gaged in authorship, producing " Belis- arius," a tragedy. In 1780, he publish- ed, at York, a small collection of juve- nile verses, entitled " Fugitive Pieces," copies of which, in after years, he was in the habit of destroying, whenever he could lay his hands upon them. Kemble also produced at York a year earlier, a comedy of his own composi- tion, " The Female Officer," the repre- sentation of which upon the stage was attended by an act of c^artesy on the part of Lord Percy, subsequently Duke of Northumberland, famous in the early scenes at Concord and Lex- ington, of the American war of Inde- pendence. Kemble had cast his eye upon a company of his lordship's dra- goons at York as serviceable in a stage procession, and had been refused the loan of the soldiers by the officer on duty. Appealing directly to Lord Percy, the favor was granted. Thus early was established the lasting friend- ship, founded on esteem for his talents, between the actor and this noble house. Taylor, in " Eecords of my Life," lays the scene of this story at Dorcester, on occasion of the performance of Kern- ble'a play " Belisarius," when hti re JOHN PHILIP KEMBLE. 243 quired the men to attend the entrance of his hero into Rome. At York, Kern- ble also gave recitations from the po- ets, Mason, Gray, and Collins, and the pathetic tales of Sterne. He deliver- ed with much effect at Edinburgh, a lecture written by himself on sacred and profane oratory. A less happy undertaking at this time, was a whim- sical alteration of Shakespeare's Come- dy of Errors, which he entitled, " Oh ! It's Impossible," his notion being still further to confound the Dromios in the eyes of the spectators by making them black servants. Fortunately, this com- position never was printed. After further distinguishing himself at York in Hamlet and other characters, he closed his engagement with Wilkinson in the summer of 1781, with the part of Jaffier, in Venice Preserved. At this time, Richard Daly, a bust- ling Irish actor of good education and of success on the stage, was about en- gaging in his undertaking, which soon became quite famous, of the revival and management of the Smock Alley Theatre, as it was called in Dublin. On the look out for ability, he lighted upon K enable at York, perceived his merits and secured his services for his new enterprise. His salary was fixed at five pounds a week, which was then considered a handsome remuneration. Shortly after the opening of the the- atre he appeared in Hamlet, which had already become one of his best accred- ited parts. He also played Alexander the Great in Lee's drama, and made a decided hit with his audience in his performance of Captain Jephson's Count of Nai bonne, a tragedy based on Horace Walpole's Castle of Otran- to. Jephson was a wit and humorist, with a military prestige, reputation as a brilliant speaker in the English parliament, and of recognized ability in literature; he was withal a great social favorite in Dublin, so that Kem ble's graceful and animated perform- ance in his play was doubly appreci- ated. Jephson took him by the hand and at his hospitable mansion, Blacls Rock, introduced him to the best com- pany of the capital. This advantage of moving in good society, for which his manners, disposition and education eminently fitted him, attended Kemble wherever he went. Among other parts in Ireland, during his two years' so- journ there at this time, he played Othello, Macbeth and Juba in Addi- son's tragedy to the Cato of Digges, " the gentleman actor," as he was call- ed. In his last season in Dublin, in the summer of 1783, Kemble was join- ed in Daly's company by his more il- lustrious sister, Mrs. Siddons. The extraordinary reputation which she had acquired on the London stage drew attention to other members of the family ; the name of Kemble wa& becoming known, .and the following season John Philip and his brother Stephen were both engaged for the metropolis. Stephen Kemble, the third child of the family, born the year after John, in 1758, was intended by his father for the medical profession, but, like Dick the apothecary in the farce, soon abandoned the pestle and mortar foi the stage. After serving the usual ap , prenticeship in strolling companies, following his brother, he had found his way to a small theatre in Dublin 244 JOHN PHILIP KEMBLE. where he made a first appearance in Shylock. While the managers of Drury Lane were negotiating with John Philip, Harris, the manager of the rival Covent Garden, secured Ste- phen, mistaking him, it is said, for the great Kemble," in which, if avoir- dupois had been a substitute in the scales for talent, he would have been perfectly right. In this capacity, with much preliminary puffing, he was brought out a week in advance of his brother in the part of Othello, which he acted with some ability, though the critics were not long in discovering the difference between physical and mental greatness. No force of managerial pre- tension could maintain him in tragedy in the presence of Mrs. Siddons and John Kemble ; but he appears to have held his own in comedy at the Hay- market, where he played Sir Christo- pher Curry in George Colman's "In- kle and Yarico." He subsequently became manager at Edinburgh and at N"ewcastle-upon-Tyne ; appearing oc- casionally in London, where he had the distinction among the Falstaffs of the stage of playing the part without stuf- fing. He died near Durham, in 1822, and was buried in the cathedral of that city. He bore an amiable char- acter. The poet Campbell, who had met him in his youth, when the actor touched a tender chord in quoting some of the poet's early verses, speaks of him with affection. " I have seen him," he writes, " often act in Edinburgh in my boyish days, and, if it was the pre- possession of youth and strong per- sonal friendship to believe him an un- paralleled comedian, I would go a igreat way to enjoy the same illusion again. Joy comes to my heart at the recollection of his Falstaff and Village Lawyer ; and the memory of the man, who was pleasantness personified, touches me with still deeper feelings." John Philip Kemble made his first appearance in London at Drury Lane Theatre, September 30th, 1783, in the character of Hamlet. It is noticeable in the accounts of this performance, of which there are several interesting con- temporary records, that though the actor had arrived only at the age of twenty-six, he had already acquired the leading characteristics which marked his later and maturer powers. His acting was even then the reflection of an educated mind, and of a strong vig- orous nature. All genuine art, of what- ever kind, whether in literature, paint- ing, sculpture, oratory, is but a trans- lation of the man the man with his peculiar disposition, talents and ac- quirements in action, a representation of his moral and intellectual capacity. Garrick, with lively French blood running in his veins, compact, graceful in person, nimble and forgetive in in- tellect, versatile in his powers, quick in appreciation, rapid in execution, il- lustrated on the stage the variety and prodigality of nature. Kemble, of a loftier build, dignified, yet graceful, slow and measured, arriving at results rather by study than intuition, was to exhibit, spite of defect of utterance, the perfection of declamation and statu- esque power in what may be called the heroic style of acting. The critics on his first London performance ad- mired and yet were somewhat " put out" by his course. It had the ad vantage and the disadvantage of being JOHN PHILIP KEMBLE. 245 original, and in the end, as is usual, the originality triumphed. His " new readings" were commented upon and discussed; he was pronounced "too scrupulously graceful." If the pres- tige of the success of his great sister, who had preceded him by a year in London, had not been in his favor, he might still have had a hard struggle for fame. As it was, the star of the Kembles was already in the ascendant, though it had not yet risen to its height in the theatrical firmament. Kemble repeated Hamlet five times within the month. His next Shake- spearian part was Richard III., early in November, followed by Sir Giles Overreach ; but he was generally kept to inferior characters, and, at this pe- riod of his career, had seldom the op- portunity of appearing with his sister, Mrs. Siddons, who was then perform- ing at Drury Lane. Like every actor who has attained distinction in London, he found, at the start, the stage occu- pied by some claimant who, by merit or custom, had acquired a species of prescriptive right to most of the lead- ing parts. A kind of conservatism, in consonance with the genius of the British institutions, long prevailed in the management of the theatres. The new actor, whatever his merit, required both effort and patience before he could displace the old. Kemble on his arrival found Henderson and William Smith in possession of the leading tragic characters; the former of the natural and impulsive school of Garrick, capable of genuine passion though laboring under defect of per- son ; the latter, " Smith the genteel, the airy, and the smart," as he is de- scribed in the verse of Churchill, of an easy commanding figure, accepted in Richard, Macbeth and other tragic per sonations, but far better qualified for the comedy of Farquhar and other po lite witty plays, in which, in Archer, Captain Plume and the like, he had gained his title, " Gentleman Smith." He had been long upon the London stage, now for thirty years, having commenced his career there immedi- ately on his expulsion from Cambridge University, from which he had been driven by some youthful irregularities. Garrick had brought him from Co vent Garden to Drury Lane, where he was at this time firmly established in public favor. When Mrs. Siddons performed in Lady Macbeth, Isabella in Measure for Measure, it was Smith and not Kemble who was called upon for Macbeth and the Duke. There was one character, however, which Kemble enjoyed from the beginning, Beverley, in the " Game- ster," in which Mrs. Siddons, as the wife, sustained one of her most im- passioned parts. He had also the op- portunity, by royal command, of acting King John with his sister's Constance. In due time the value of their joint performances was fully recognized. Meantime, Kemble was perfecting him- self by study and discipline. Among other performances, he was greatly ad- mired in a masque, entitled "Arthur and Emmeline," an alteration of 1 )ry- den's "King Arthur." He acted in this with Miss Farren. There is a beautiful small engraving by Heath, after a drawing by Stothard, of a pa- thetic scene in this play, where they are introduced together, with an air of equal gallantry and refinement. 246 JOHN PHILIP KEMBLE. ID the spring of 1785, Kemble acted Othello, with Mrs. Siddons as Desde- oiona. His dress was the uniform of a British general officer ; his perform- ance seems to have been marked by dignity rather than emotion, even the celebrated pathetic farewell to his oc- cupation, " coming rather coldly from him." Subsequently, a year or two after, he made a decided impression in Lear, Mrs. Siddons playing Cordelia. Boaden says he never again achieved the excellence of that first perform- ance of the part ; " subsequently, he was too elaborately aged, and quenched with infirmity the insane fire of the injured father. The curse, as he then uttered it, harrowed up the soul : the gathering himself together, with the hands convulsively clasped, the in- creasing fervor and rapidity, and the suffocation of the conclusive words, all evinced consummate skill and original invention. The countenance, too, was finely made up and in grandeur ap- proached the most awful impersonation of Michael Angelo." We have seen the younger brother Stephen on a London stage ; about the time of John Kemble's first appearance, there were also two other members of the family, besides Mrs. Siddons, act- ing in the metropolis, Frances the fourth, and Elizabeth, the fifth child, respectively at the ages of twenty-four and twenty-six. Like the other Kern- bles, they were distinguished for their beauty, and were not unsuccessful on the stage. Frances was married in 1786, to Francis Twiss, brother to the better known traveller of the name and compiler of an Index to Shakes- peare, " a most respectable man, though of but small fortune, and I thank God that she is off the stage," wrote Mrs. Siddons to her friend, Dr. Whalley, shortly after the event. Kemble acted with Elizabeth in Shirley's " Edward the Black Prince," in his first season at Drury Lane. She remained in the stock company, performing inferior parts till her marriage with Charles Edward Whitelock, god-son of the Pretender, who had given him hia name, the manager of the theatre at Newcastle-upon-Tyne. She came with her husband to America in 1794, and remained in the country several years, playing at Philadelphia, where she moved the great Washington to tears, at Charleston, New York and Boston. Returning to London, she revisited America in 1802 and again in 1812. Her latter days were passed in retire- ment in England, where she died in 1835, at the age of seventy-four. Mr. Kemble, at the age of thirty, made up his mind to matrimony. He had on one or two occasions, it is said, been peculiarly impressed with female charms in his stage career. There wag a report of something more than ten- derness in his regard for the amiable and romantic Mrs. Inchbald, a creature formed for the tender passion ; and much was also said of his admiration of the beautiful Miss Phillips, as she appeared at the same time with him in Dublin, the delightful singer snb sequently known as Mrs. Crouch, of whom a great deal is to be read in the " Reminiscences " of her friend and com- panion, Michael Kelly. There was also a rumor in circulation of a strong pas- sion entertained for him by the daugh ter of a noble earl, which he was tou JOHN PHILIP KEMBLE. 247 orach of a gentleman to take any ad- Vantage of. Whatever wounds he may have received from or inflicted on these attractive personages, his choice at last fell upon a young widow, Mrs. Brereton, an actress at Drury Lane, of a stage family, her mother being a clever per- former in old ladies' characters, and her father for several years discharg- ing the useful office of prompter at the theatre. As Miss Priscilla Hopkins, to distinguish her from an elder sister, to whose parts on her marriage with a gentleman of fortune she had succeed- ed, she had become known as a pleas ing actress of such characters as Peggy in the <; Country Wife," Selima in " Tamerlane," Aura in the " Country Lasses." She had then married Brere- ton, a young actor who had been in- structed by Garrick, begun his career in London at seventeen in the part of Douglas, and been brought into prom- inent notice as Jaffier, when Mrs. Sid- dons played Belvidera. He was taken ill with some afflictive malady accom- panied by loss of reason, and after a year in this condition, died in Febru- ary, 1787. Kemble had noticed the quiet virtue of the wife under these unhappy circumstances, admired her disposition, and before the year was out, proposed to her. They were mar- ried early in December, and a few eve- nings after the ceremony, appeared to- gether in Sir Giles Overreach and Mar- garet, in Massinger's tragedy. In 1788, Mr. Kemble, on King's retire- ment, became manager of Drury Lane, and was, of course, free to choose his characters and regulate his own ap- pearances. Nor had he any prominent rival at this time to encounter. Hen- derson, still in his youthful prime, died a few years before, at the age of thirty nine, and was buried in Westminister Abbey ; and the veteran Smith having married a fortune, had just closed his long career on the stage, taking leave of the public in his original part of Charles Surface. Macbeth was now brought on the stage with increased effect, Kemble, of course, acting with Mrs. Siddons. To this, among other leading personations, succeeded his Lear in Massinger's " Rule a Wife and Have a Wife." Henry VIII. was pro- duced with great brilliancy, with Mrs. Siddons as Queen Catharine, Kemble gracefully retaining Bensley in his es- tablished character of Wolsey, and aid- ing his sister in the subordinate Crom- well and Griffith. Henry V. was also revived after a stage neglect of twenty years, Kemble playing the King. This was followed \>y the Tempest, in which he acted Prospero. Somewhat later he appeared in Charles Surface, a charac- ter certainly ill-suited to his constitu- tional gravity. Sheridan professed to admire. Boaden, his biographer and eulogist, quietly remarks, " I should better have liked to see him in Joseph." A friendly newspaper critic of the day called the performance " Charles' Res- toration;" another, less friendly, said that it should rather be described as " Charles' Martyrdom." This, and some other freaks of Kemble's genius, are, doubtless, to be classed among the po- et's " follies of the wise." The management of Drury Lane, though it had its advantages to the interests of the Kembles, proved not altogether a bed of roses to the illus- trious incumbent. He once fairly risk 248 JOHN PHILIP KEMBLE. ed his life in a duel with a worthy but over spirited member of his corps ? James Aiken, who called him out for some fancied affront. Kemble met his antagonist in the field, received his shot, O ' and magnanimously fired his own pistol in the air. The afifair thus ended in a friendly manner. Whatever, however, may have been the internal difficulties of the manage- ment, there was one trancendent scene in the eye of the public which sur- passed them all. This was the pro- duction in April, 1796, of the cele- brated Vortigern, the culmination of the numerous Ireland Shakespearian forgeries which, with an audacity never perhaps equalled, had, during the pre- vious two months, been heaped upon one another in reckless profusion and extravagance of invention. The easy faith of antiquarians is an old subject of satire. On this occasion they seem- ed determined to verify all the jests which had ever been levelled at them. What was in the beginning but the freak or silly counterfeit of a young lawyer's clerk of eighteen, amusing himself at his desk with, to adopt the most charitable supposition,. the weak credulity of an aged parent, was speed- ily developed into an affair of national importance. It began with the produc- tion of an alleged lease, followed by a Protestant Confession of Faith, in the handwriting of Shakespeare, purport- ing to be derived from the family pa- pers of a descendant of a brother ac- tor of the great dramatist. Curiosity after curiosity of the most inviting character, among other things an epistle of the poet to Cowley, a love letter, with verses and a lock of hair to Ann Hathaway, a miniature, fragments of manuscript plays never published, and finally the complete historical tragedy of Vortigern, ancient king of Britain, were produced. Various literary com- mittees, composed of the respectabili- ties of literature, in which clergymen were well represented, sat upon these revelations, examined the documents and pronounced them genuine. The fa- mous Dr. Parr, learned in Greek, with his profound critical acumen, was among the loudest in their favor. When it was understood that a play capable of being acted was found with the treasures, there was quite a contest for it by the rival theatres. Sheridan secured it for Drury Lane by the pay ment of three hundred pounds and the promise of half the receipts for sixty nights, which it was surely expected to run. It was cast with the whole strength of the company, with the ex- ception of Mrs. Siddons, who begged to be excused, and happily the favor was granted to her. Kemble appear- ed as the hero ; his brother Charles was in it, with Bensley, Mrs. Powell, Mrs. Jordan and others not altogether forgotten. A large and distinguished audience assembled to witnesss this extraordinary performance. The re- sult was as might have been expected. The play was irretrievably damned on the instant ; though the company en- dured the flatulent dulness till toward the close it fell to Kemble to delivei a description of death, a mongrel trav- esty of several Shakespearian passages, in which occurred the line And when this solemn mockery is o'er. This was delivered by the tragedian in his most sepulchral tone and was JOHN PHILIP KEMBLE. 249 the signal for the final explosion, which came, says a person who was present, in "the most discordant howl that ever assailed the organs of hearing." When, after some minutes, it subsided, Kemble again pointed the moral of the whole by repeating the line with his utmost solemnity. He had never com- mitted himself to the authenticity of the play ; he was too good a scholar for that ; his ear was too well attuned to the language of Shakespeare, and he had, besides, a prudent adviser in his friend Malone, who had been unsparing in his contempt and indignation at the whole Ireland proceedings. He had been simply passive in the affair ; but it cost him much vexation in the squabble of the day over this absurd business. To return to his more legitimate performances during the twelve years in which, with the exception of a short interval, he was connected with the management of Drury Lane. The theatre in that time had been rebuilt and witnessed the growth and devel- opment of his great dramatic triumphs. He introduced many improvements on the stage in scenery and costume. In " Coriolanus," " All's Well that Ends Well," "Measure for Measure," and " Cymbeline," in which he played the part of Posthumas, and other revivals already mentioned, he had, with the powerful assistance of the Siddons, and the resources of his " so potent art," awakened a new interest in the Shakespearian drama. He had pro- duced the utmost effect in his original parts of Octavian, the Stranger, and Rolla, in which his fine physical pow- ers and impassioned declamation were 32 carried to the highest pitch. One of his finest attitudes in the piece, that in which he bears aloft the child at a crisis of the action, is even at this day familiar to the admiration of the pub- lic in the engravings after a picture painted by his friend, Sir Thomas Lawrence. In these, as in all his best performances, like his sister, Mrs. Sid- dons, he was terribly in earnest. He was slow, deliberate and painstaking in study and preparation, but in the moment of action he impressed all his powers upon his work. He could not otherwise have been a great actor. Some of his peculiarities, however, continued to afford food for the critics and wits, who wrote epigrams at his expense. Many were the jests popularly current, levelled at the slowness of his utterance, tragic solemnity and occasional somewhat pedantic refine- ments in delivery. Talking over with Sheridan some proposed piece for the stage, that arch wit is said to have ad- vised him to introduce music between the pauses. Kelly, the privileged Irish actor, once disturbed his silent gravity in company with an appeal from Ham- let, " Come, Kemble, ' ope thy ponder- ous and marble jaws ' and give us an opinion !" George Colman said of his performance of Don Felix in the " Wonder," that it had too much of the Don and too little of the Felix. But the greatest efforts "of the wits were directed at his pronunciation of " aches " in a line in the " Tempest " Fill all thy bones with aches, make thee roar. Following the requirement of the me- tre he made this a word of two sylla- bles, pronouncing it aitches. The pit 250 JOHN PHILIP KEMBLE. demurred, but Kemble persisted, and tvhen, in the absence of the manager in consequence of an attack of rheumatism, George Frederick Cooke was called upon to play the part, he got over the difficulty by omitting the passage alto- gether. Like numerous actors and many persons of eminence off the stage, Kemble was attracted to attempt the very opposite of that which was suited to his genius, and in which he was most successful. We have noticed his performance of Charles Surface, with the sport of the wits on that oc- casion. He had his eye for a while steadily on Falstaff, whom he proposed to relieve of his usual grossness on the boards and introduce in his intel- lectual and gentlemanly capacity as " Sir John to all Europe." He even got so far as to make choice of a beard for the character ; but he never brought it on the stage. Sir Walter Scott tells a story of his imperturbable self-com- mand while engrossed with this favor- ite idea. They were siting together at the annual entertainment given by the artists at the private opening of the Royal Academy Exhibition. Kemble was in the midst of a dissertation em- bodying his views of Falstaff, when the nuge chandelier above the table descended, crushing glass and china, and threatening the illustrious com- pany with destruction. All was panic and confusion save in the mind and speech of Kemble, and Scott, as he confesses, meditating retreat, was firm- ly held to the lofty analysis of the humorous old knight. At the close of the season in the summer of 1802, Kemble finally with- drew from the management of Drury Lane, with a view of becoming one of the proprietors of Covent Garden. Be- fore entering upon this new field, he employed an interval of leisure in a trip on the continent : on his way to Paris, he visited Douay, the scene of his early studies, and found it suffer- ing sadly from the disorders of the country, in a state of ruin, poverty and desolation not to be described. "I had not the heart," he writes in a let- ter to his brother Charles, " to go up to my old room." Paris he paints in few words: "such a scene of mag- nificence, filth, pleasure, poverty, gai- ety, distress, virtue and vice, as consti- tutes a greater miracle than was ever chronicled in history." Here he moved in the best English society, of which Lord and Lady Holland were the lead- ers, and became acquainted with many of the French actors, particularly with Talma, who expressed a desire to adapt Pizarro to the French stage. Passing thence to Spain, he spent some time at Madrid, perfecting himself in the Spanish language. At this place he was informed of the death of his father, the venerable Eoger Kemble, who passed away at the age of eighty- two. Writing to Charles, who had communicated the event to him, he expressed the most tender feelings of sympathy with his mother, and says of his father with a kindly touch of nature : " How in vain have I delighted myself in thousands of inconvenient oc- currences on this journey, with the thought of contemplating my father's cautious incredulity while I related them to him. Millions of things un- interesting, it may be, to any body else, I had treasured up for his surprise and JOHN PHILIP KEMBLE. 251 scrutiny. It is God's pleasure that he is gone from us ; once more, the peace of the just be with him." Having perfected the Covent Garden arrangement by the purchase of a share of one-sixth of the property for twenty- three thousand pounds from the vet- eran comedian, Lewis, the stage man- ager, Kemble became his successor, making his first appearance at the theatre in September, 1803, in his favorite character of Hamlet. Mrs. Siddons was again with him, and no less a personage than George Frederick Cooke, who for two or three years had been established at Covent Garden as something of a rival of Kemble. This did not prevent the manager from giv- ing him every opportunity for the ex- ercise of his extraordinary powers. Kemble acted Richmond to Cooke's Richard, one of his great parts; old Norval to Cooke's Glenalvon, Mrs. Sid- dons acting Lady Randolph ; and An- tonio to Cooke's Shylock. Here was a brilliant opportunity, but Cooke's irregularities were in the way of any advantage to his reputation. In the midst of the efforts of the new man- ager for the reputation of the stage, in the winter of 1804, came the Master Betty flurry, when that juvenile prod- igy came heralded from the provinces to create an unprecedented excitement among the playgoers of Covent Garden and Drury Lane, for he acted at both theatres. The representative for the time on the London stage of Douglas, Romeo and Hamlet, in the presence of Kemble, was a boy of thirteen. After this wa,s over, there was a return to more legitimate performances, and Kemble and Siddons were again su- preme in the Shakespearian drama. The great Roman plays, Coriolanus and Julius Caesar, with which must be included Addison's Cato, became now, in these later years of his career, more than ever the stronghold of his genius. His powers were admirably suited to them ; they afforded, in their calm com- posure and bursts of passion, fine scope for his stately dignity of mien, his graceful attitude and studied declam- ation ; he was greatly admired in them by the best judges, and in them he has had no successor. An actor's life is exposed to many vicissitudes. The destruction of Co- vent Garden Theatre by fire in Sep- tember, 1808, fairly tested the philoso- phy of our stoic performer. He had now to put the principles in action he had so often feigned upon the stage. At first he appears to have been somewhat overcome, if we may so in- terpret the peculiar stage language in which he expressed his feelings. Boa- den visited the family in Great Rus- sel street the morning after the fire. Mrs. Kemble was in tears at the pros- pect of beginning life over again in the repairs of their shattered fortunes ; Charles Kemble sat in silence ; King John seemed totally absorbed in the contemplation of affairs, but was feed- ing his imagination with the melan- choly details. At last he broke out with this pattern declamation, " Yes, it has perished, that magnificent the- atre, which for all the purposes of ex- hibition or comfort was the first in Europe. It is gone, with all its treas- ures, that library which contained all those immortal productions of our countrymen, prepared for the purposes 252 JOHN PHILIP KEMBLE. of representation ! That vast collec- tion of music, composed by the greatest geniuses in that science by Handel, Arne and others ; most of it manu- script in the original score ! That wardrobe, stored with the costume of all ages and nations, accumulated by unwearied research, and at an incred- ible expense. Scenery, the triumph of the art, unrivalled for its accuracy, and so exquisitely finished that it might be the ornament of your draw- ing-rooms, were they only large enough to contain it. Of all this vast treasure nothing now remains but the arms of England over the entrance of the theatre, and the Roman eagle standing solitary in the market place." The Roman eagle he no doubt felt to be typical of himself. A noble friend came to the rescue. Lord Percy, who assisted him with the company of soldiers for his stage per- formance at Alnwick at his setting out in the world, was now the Duke of Northumberland, and felt under some obligation to Kemble for instructing his son, another Lord Percy, in elocu- tion. The duke, ever an admirer of Kemble's ability, with prompt sym- pathy for his misfortune, placed the sum of ten thousand pounds at his dis- posal. Kemble accepted it as a loan, upon which interest was to be paid. The corner-stone of the new theatre was, in due time, laid by the Prince of Wales, with brilliant ceremonials, and at the dinner which followed, his grace of Northumberland crowned the fes- tivities by sending the cancelled bond, as he expressed it, to light the bonfire on the joyful occasion. It was a mu- nificent gift, and felt to be no less a tribute to the actor's genius, than to his necessity. When the theatre was finished, as if to offset the felicity of the occasion, on the very opening night arose that unprecedented commotion, famous in English theatrical history as the O. P. riots. The improvements and decoration of the new theatre having involved a vast expense, to secure some adequate remuneration an additional portion of the house was set apart for private boxes, and the tickets of admis- sion were raised, a shilling for the boxes, and sixpence for the pit. The house opened on the 18th of September, 1809, with Kemble and Mrs. Siddons in Macbeth, but the performance was in- terrupted from the beginning by hide- ous noises. The actors went through their parts, but not a sentence w r as suf- fered to be heard. There was an ef- fort to put an end to the disturbance by the police, and it proved insuffi- cient. The next night the disorder was renewed. The mob, paying for their tickets, demanded the abolition of the boxes, w r hich interfered with the gallery privileges of the people, and set up the cry O. P. or Old Prices. The theatre, for no fewer than sixty- six nights, was turned into a scene, a very pandemonium, of the wildest rev- elry and riot. The proprietors intro- duced prize-fighters into the arena to quell the ruffians. This only exaspe- rated them the more. It became a nightly entertainment for the worst oi all mobs, a British mob. A respect- able lawyer, named Clifford, who ima gined he was serving the cause of Eng- lish liberty, led and fomented the agi- tation, and when he was arrested bj the box-keeper, one Brandon, was dis JOHN PHILIP KEMJBLE. 253 charged by the court, and instituted an action for false imprisonment, in which he was successful. The O. P. riots in the theatre, with the O. P. songs and dances, became the mania and fashion of the day, as brutality in large cities is apt to become. It was for the time a kind of Tom and Jerry life, acted in the pit instead of upon the stage a rare opportunity for the fancy shop boys and disreputable row- dies of the metropolis, who managed with great adroitness, spite of every precaution, to introduce into the house various cumbrous instruments of of- fence, watchman's rattles, dustman's bells, postboy's horns, trombones, blud- geons and gigantic placards. Kemble was jeered and insulted by every form of caricature and annoyance, and at length, to the disgrace of the muni- cipal law and police of the city, was compelled to yield. The private boxes were reduced to their old number and the pit admission to its old rate ; the ex- tra shilling for the boxes was permitted to stand ; but the spirited door-keeper, Brandon, was meanly required to be dismissed, and offensive personal apol- ogies were exacted from Kemble. The next year, when a few private boxes were again added, the riot broke out anew, and Kemble, with his brother proprietors, were again obliged to suc- cumb to the portentous outcry, O. P. Kemble continued, with an interval of absence from London, several years longer on the stage, illustrating the period, though it was a season of failing fortunes with the theatre, by his mag- nificent performance of his great Ro- man plays. In King John, Penruddock, Hamlet, Wolsey and Macbeth he held his own to the last. As the time which he had determined upon for his retirement approached, he visited Ed- inburgh and gave a series of perfor- mances, closing with Macbeth, when he recited an epilogue written for the occasion by one of his noblest appre- ciators, Sir Walter Scott. His fare- well performance on leaving the stage took place at Covent Garden on the 23d of June, 1817, when he acted Cor iolanus before one of the most distin- guished audiences ever gathered in the metropolis. A dinner given in his honor by his friends and brother ac- tors followed, memorable for the array of genius which was present. Lord Holland presided, supported by the Duke of Bedford. The French actor, Talma, was among the guests. Re- marks were made by West, the Pres- ident of the Royal Academy; Young the inheritor on the stage of the depart- ing actor's honors ; Charles Mathews ; and others of hardly less renown. Flax- man, the sculptor, was present and had contributed the design for the silver vase presented to Kemble on the occa- sion. But the most enduring memorial of the evening is the noble ode written by the poet Campbell and recited to the company by Young. "Pride of the British Stage A long and last adieu. ***** Time may again revive, But ne'er efface the charm, When Cato spoke in him alive, Or Hotspur kindled warm. What soul was not resign'd entire To the deep sorrows of the Moor I What English heart was not on tire, With him at Agincourt ? " Kemble, worn in health, suffering from an asthmatic affection, which is 254 JOHN PHILIP KEMBLE. said to have imparted that peculiar hoarse and sepulchral tone which at times marked his delivery, turned a^ain to the continent for recreation o and repose. Benefited in health, he passed several seasons with his wife at Toulouse, till the acrimony of the French political parties of the place, and their general dislike to English- men drove him to Switzerland. Pre- viously to settling down in his new abode he visited England on business connected with his interest in Covent Garden, and made arrangements for the sale of his fine library, which it was not convenient for him to carry with him abroad ; while the money which it produced was an object to him, in the increase of a somewhat narrow income. Like Garrick he had been a diligent and successful collector of old plays. This portion of his library was sold to the Duke of Devonshire for two thousand pounds. His miscellaneous books, under the hammer of Evans, brought as much more, and his theatrical engravings about three hundred pounds. The Swiss residence, which contin- ued his home for the remainder of his life, was a delightful villa at Lausanne, on the edge of the town, overlooking the lake, with fine views of Mont Blanc and the surrounding mountains. The cultivation of his garden, with his enjoyment of his usual intellectual pursuits and the excellent society of the place, filled up the outline of a life doubtless peopled also with many strange and exciting visions of the past. Mrs. Siddons came to visit him in this retirement. " Both he and Mrs, Kemble," wrote her daughter, who ac- companied her, " seem as perfectly hap- py as I ever saw two human beings. Their situation is a blessed one." In the winter of 1822, Kemble with his wife visited Italy and observed with interest the historical monuments of Rome, but in no pedantic spirit ; he was more moved by the degradation of the people, under the influences of bad government in the present. Fail- ing health began to press sorely upon him. He returned to Lausanne with difficulty, and a few months after, on the 26th of February, 1823, died sud- denly of apoplexy. His remains were interred in a graveyard at Lausanne, They might worthily have found their rest by the side of Garrick in West- minster Abbey. He is represented, however, in that national gathering oi English heroes, by a statue, sketched by Flaxman, in which he is exhibited in his personation of Cato. His wife, making her home in England, survived him twenty-two years, dying in 1845, at the age of ninety. She had retired from the stage a few years after her marriage, her last performance being in 1796. ^n j From an, original painting by Gilbert Stzuwt. Jahn9on.,"Wilsor! SK Ca.Pubhshei\s,NewYork ABIGAIL ADAMS. THE wife of John Adams, second president of the United States, was born at Weymouth, Massachusetts, November 22d, 1744. Her maiden name was Abigail Smith, and she came from the old stock of New-Eng- land colonists. Her father was the Congregational minister at Weymouth for more than forty years ; and on her mother's side, the Quincy family, she inherited a claim to belong to those who were distinguished and prominent in the educational and religious move- ments of the early Puritans. Abigail was the second of three daughters, and when a girl, being rather delicate, was not sent to school with other girls of her age and position. Her education and training, consequently, consisted in great measure in a somewhat discur- sive course of reading, and she owed a deep and abiding debt of gratitude to her grandmother, Elizabeth Quincy, who contributed largely towards form- ing and improving her taste and judg- ment, and assisting her in learning les- sons of practical wisdom and goodness. Mrs. Adams, however, we are assured by her son, John Quincy Adams, was well versed in the best literature of the period, and was possessed with a warm relish for the beauties and high moral principles of the poets and moralists of the reign of Queen Anne. Abigail and her sisters " were familiar with the pages of Shakespeare and Milton, of Dryden and Pope, of Addison and Swift, no less than with those of Til- lotson and Berkeley; nor were they unacquainted with those of Butler and Locke Perhaps no writer of any age or nation ever exercised a more beneficent influence over the taste and manners of the female sex, than Addison, by the papers of the Specta- tor, Guardian and Tatler. With these the daughters of Mrs. Smith were, f rora their childhood, familiar. The senten- tious energy of Young, sparkling amid the gloom of his Night Thoughts, like diamonds from the lamp of a sepulchre ; the patriotic and profound sensibilities of Thomson and Collins, preeminently the poets of freedom, kindling the love of country with the concentrated ra- diance and splendors of imagination, were felt and admired by Mrs. Adams, in her youth, and never lost their value to her mind in mature age." Trained under such influences, the superior na- tive powers and faculties of Mrs. Ad- ams, found their full development, and 'J355) 256 ABIGAIL ADAMS. she became the wisest, safest and most reliable counsellor of her husband in the busy and somewhat stormy career of political life. Her marriage took place October 25th, 1764, and John Adams being at the time an active and rather ambitious young lawyer, she spent the first eight or ten years of wedded life in the discharge of home duties and in full sympathy with the patriotic movements which soon after led to a collision between the colonies and the British govern- ment. Entrance into the public service seem- ed almost a necessity at this period to a man of John Adams' native capa- bilities and prominent position. The course of events which brought Boston into the forefront in the struggle with the mother country, naturally aroused every man of note and character in New England. Adams was chosen as one of a committee to meet other public spirited men in a Congress at Philadel- phia, September, 1774, in order to con- sult upon existing and threatened dan- gers, and to provide as far as possible for combined effort in the common be- half. Beginning at this date, and con- tinuing all through life, as far as occa- sion permitted or required, Mrs. Ad- ams and her husband kept up a regu- lar confidential correspondence, in which she bore her full part and justified the high praise we have bestowed upon her. "I must entreat you," Adams wrote, " my dear partner in all the joys and sorrows, prosperity and adversity of my life, to take a part with me in the struggle. I pray God for your health, and entreat you to rouse your whole attention to the family, the stock, the farm, the dairy. Let every article of expense, which can possibly be spared, be retrenched. Keep the hands atten- tive to their business, and let the most prudent measures of every kind be adopted and pursued with alacrity and spirit," Mrs. Adams, at this time, while her husband was absent at Philadelphia, was residing at their cottage at Brain- tree, with four little children, the eld- est not ten years old. The battle < f Lexington had taken place, and the whole country around Boston was alive with men eager to besiege the king's troops, and bring the contest to a distinct issue. Danger was imminent, and no one could tell from what quar- ter it might come, or say where the hand of the depredator might strike. Writing to her husband, under date of May 24th, 1775, Mrs. Adams gives a graphic account of the alarm j list then occasioned by the approach of a small body of British soldiers. " Our house has been, upon this alarm," she says, " a scene of confusion. Soldiers com- ing in for a lodging, for breakfast, for supper, for drink, etc. Sometimes ref- ugees from Boston, tired and fatigued, seek an asylum fbr a day, a night, a week. You can hardly imagine how we live My best wishes at- tend you, both for your health and happiness; and that you may be di- rected into the wisest and best meas ures for our safety, and the security of our prosperity. I wish you were nearer to us. We know not what a day will bring forth, nor what distress one hour may throw us into. Hither- to I have been able to maintain a calm- ness and presence of mind ; and hope ABIGAIL ADAMS. 257 I shall, let the exigency of the time be what it will." The value of John Adams' presence and services were so great in Congress, that he could not be spared, and con- sequently Mrs. Adams was called up- on to exercise all her fortitude, and bear up, in great measure alone, under the terrible trials of war, pestilence and such like evils. Yet she did not mur- mur, and she sympathized fully in the glowing words of her husband, who had been the great and eloquent de- fender of the Declaration of Independ- ence in July, 1776. "You will think me transported with enthusiasm," he writes, "but I am not. I am well aware of the toil and blood and treas- ure that it will cost us to maintain this declaration, and support and defend these States. Yet, through all the gloom, I can see the rays of ravishing light and glory. I can see the end is more than worth all the means, and that posterity will triumph in that day's transaction, even although we should rue it, which I trust in God we shall not." Early in the spring of 1778, Mrs. Ad- ams was under the necessity of parting with her husband and eldest son for a season. Adams was sent to France to join with Franklin and others in efforts to induce the government to extend aid to the United States. Adams returned home in the summer of the next year, and was again deputed to foreign ser- vice. After a tedious and dangerous voy- age, he reached Paris, in February, 1780 ; thence he proceeded to Holland, and accomplished there what his grand- Bon terms " the greatest triumph of his life, in persuading the Dutch to give 33 material aid to our country, and to enter into a treaty, October, 1782, between the ancient republic and its newly born sister. Mrs. Adams did not accompany her husband at this time, but remained at her post at home, in the cheerful dis- charge of the duties incumbent upon her, and in both waiting and watching for the future of her native land. The public service requiring Adams to remain abroad, his wife and only daugh- ter joined him, on the continent, in the summer of 1784. "Her arrival com- pletely altered the face of his affairs. He forgot the ten years of almost con- stant separation which had taken place, and became reconciled at once to a long- er stay abroad. No man depended more than he upon the tranquil enjoy- ments of home for his happiness. He took the house at Auteuil, near Paris, to which he had been removed in the preceding year for recovery from his illness, and returned to a state of life placid and serene. With his wife, his eldest son, John Quincy, then just ris- ing into a youth of the greatest prom- ise, and a daughter, in whom any body would have felt a pride, about him, near the society of a cultivated me- tropolis, into which his official position gave him free admission, he had little to do but to enjoy the day as it passed, heedless of the morrow. Some little notion of his way of life may be gath- ered from the fresh and sprightly let- ters of Mrs. Adams, addressed, during this time, to her friends and relations at home, which have been already giv- en to the world." In the spring of 1785, Mrs. Adams accompanied her husband to England, he having been appointed the first 258 ABIGAIL ADAMS. American Minister to the Court of St. James. It was a position of no little difficulty as well as importance to both Mr. and Mrs. Adams. The pride and haughtiness of the nobility, the stub- born will of George III., the entirely undefined position and rank of an am- bassador just arrived and coming from a land recently in subjection to the British crown, all portended difficul- ties and annoyances not altogether easy to endure ; and in addition, so far as his wife was concerned, the lofty assumptions of the leaders and rulers of society, and their ill conceal- ed contempt for parvenus, like Ameri- cans, foreshadowed trials quite as dif- ficult in their way to be borne, as those to which Adams was subjected. It is a marked confirmation of the high estimate which we have expressed respecting Mrs. Adams, that she bore herself with most admirable skill and spirit in her difficult position. A true and genuine Christian lady, without pretension or affectation, claiming nothing for herself beyond what every lady is entitled to, and expecting and requiring from the haughtiest the con- sideration due to her rank as represent- ing the women of her native country, she seems to have charmed the nobili- ty and votaries of fashionable life by her unaifected simplicity, gentleness, refinement and courtesy, and fully to have sustained the character which her countrywomen may well have admired. Annoyances there were, it is true, and enough of them ; but Mrs. Adams al- ways proved herself equal to every emergency, and nevei tarnished the fair fame of the people to whom she belonged. Her letters, as we have noted, give a clear insight into matters of interest and value to herself and her native land. Writing to her sister, on one occasion, she says : " When I reflect on the advantages which the people of America possess over the most polished of other nations, the ease with which property is obtained, the plenty which is so equally distributed, their personal liberty and security of life and pro- perty, I feel grateful to heaven who marked out my lot in this happy land ; at the same time I deprecate that rest- less spirit, and that baneful ambition and thirst for power, which will finally make us as wretched as our neigh- bors." In the spring of 1788, Mrs. Adams, with her husband and family, bade adieu to Europe, and returned to the United States. Adams was elected vice-president, and for eight years dis- charged the duties of his office with dignity, conscientiousness and success. Mrs. Adams, who had so well sustain- ed her difficult position abroad, was now fully alive to the present duties and obligations. Abundant evidence exists of the admirable way in which she presided in her residence at New York and afterwards at Philadelphia, and displayed those superior excel- lences of mind and temper for which she was distinguished. Her hus- band's reliance upon her sympathy, her judgment, her clear insight, was unbounded, and it cannot be doubted that she exercised an influence over him most happy and beneficial in its effects. On taking up his abode in New York, Mr. Adams secured the beauti ful rural residence of Mrs. Jephson at ABIGAIL ADAMS 259 Richmond Hill. It was, we are assur- ed, the most agreeable place on the island, and admirably adapted to the views of both the vice-president and his wife. In the autumn of 1790, Mrs. Adams was subjected to the annoyance of su- perintending the removal of her house- hold to Philadelphia, this city having been selected for the national capital during the following ten years. It was a tedious and toilsome operation, but was bravely endured and success- fully accomplished. Writing to her daughter, she says: "Though there remains neither bush nor shrub upon it, and very few trees, except the pine grove behind it, yet Bush Hill (her new residence), is a very beautiful place ; but the grand and the sublime I left at Richmond Hill. The cultiva- tion in sight and the prospect are supe- rior ; but the Schuylkill is no more like the Hudson than I to Hercules." Society in Philadelphia, at this date, was distinguished for its brilliancy and liveliness. The number of beau- tiful women was unusually large, and as, in addition to personal attrac- tiveness, there were superadded the higher elements of intellectual culture, the Quaker City was more gay than it has ever been since, or is ever likely to be again. " I should spend a very dissipated winter," Mrs. Adams wrote, " were I to accept one-half of the invi- tations I receive, particularly to the routs or tea-and-cards." During the recess of Congress, and when occasion served, or the state of her health required, Mrs. Adams was absent from the seat of government, arid sought relaxation and pleasure in her country home at Quincy, Massa- chusetts. She kept up a regular cor- respondence with her husband, and was always the cheerful, genial, saga- cious wife and counsellor. Writing to his wife, in February, 1794, Adams said : " You apologize for the length of your letters, and I ought to excuse the shortness and emptiness of mine. Yours give me more enter- tainment than all the speeches I hear. There are more good thoughts, fine strokes, and mother wit in them than I hear in the whole week. An ounce of mother wit is worth a pound ol clergy; and I rejoice that one of my children, at least, has an abundance of not only mother wit, but of his moth er's wit. It is one of the most amia ble and striking traits in his composi- tion. If the rogue has any family pride, it is all derived from the same source." To this Mrs. Adams replied, in a like genial strain : " You say so many handsome things to me, respect- ing my letters that you ought to fear making me vain ; since, however, we may appreciate the encomiums of the world, the praises of those whom we love and esteem are more dangerous, because we are led to believe them the most sincere." John Adams having been elected successor of Washington in the first and highest office in the country's gift, his wife wrote to him in terms of so great womanly dignity and appreci- ativeness, that we give her letter in full. It was dated at Quincy, Febru- ary 8th, 1797: " The sun is dressed in brightest beams, To give honor to the day. "And may it prove an auspicious 260 ABIGAIL ADAMS. prelude to each ensuing season. You ha ye this day to declare yourself head of a nation. * And now, O Lord, my God, thou hast made thy servant ruler over the people. Give unto him an understanding heart, that he may know how to go out and come in before this great people ; that he may discern be- tween good and bad. For who is able to judge this, thy so great a people ? ' were the words of a royal sovereign ; and not less applicable to him who is invested with the chief magistracy of a nation, though he wears not the crown nor the robes of royalty. " My thoughts and my meditations are with you, though personally ab- Bent ; and my petitions to Heaven are that ' the things which make for peace may not be hidden from your eyes.' My feelings are not those of pride or ostentation upon the occasion. They are solemnized by a sense of the obli- gations, the important trusts and nu- merous duties connected with it. That you may be enabled to discharge them with honor to yourself, with justice and impartiality to your country, and with satisfaction to this great people, shall be the daily prayer of your "A. A." During the somewhat tempestuous administration of the second president, Mrs. Adams was called upon to exer- cise all her admirable powers in sooth- ing, quieting, encouraging her husband, and in moderating and in a measure dis- arming the violence of political parti- zanship and struggles. Her health suf- fered materially in the early part of Adams's administration, and for a lono- 7 o time she lay stretched on the bed of Illness, nickering between life and death, at her home in Massachusetts. Her recovery was slow, and her health remained but delicate thenceforward. Her husband's allusions to this dis tressing part of his trials are frequent and touching: "Your sickness last I summer, fall, and winter, has been to me the severest trial I ever endured.'* " Oh, how they lament Mrs. Adams's absence ! She is a good counsellor ! " In the summer of the year 1800, by direction of President Adams, the pub- lie offices; papers, etc., were removed to the new federal city on the banks of the Potomac, where Congress was to hold its next session, on the third Mon- day of November. In this connection, Mrs. Adams's letter to her daughter may aptly be quoted, giving, as it does, a graphic description of the city of Washington in the days of its in- fancy. The letter was written in No- vember, 1800. "I arrived here," she says, "on Sunday last, and without meeting any accident worth noticing, except losing ourselves when we It lit Baltimore, and going eight or nine miles on the Frederick Road, by which means we were obliged to land, of whom he became suddenly enamored at first sight, in the cathe- dral at Chester, while travelling on his way home to Ireland. The story of this engagement is somewhat humorously told by their descendant, Richard Lo- veil Edgeworth, who, as we shall see, had naturally a sympathy with such affairs of the heart. The lady, it ap pears, when seen in church, had a full blown rose in her bosom. As she was coming out, the rose fell at the gallant captain's feet. "The lady was hand- some so was the captain he took up the rose and presented it with so muct grace to Mrs. Bridgman, that, in con (291) 294 MARIA EDGEWORTH; sequence, they became acquainted and were soon after married." The lady had a daughter, an heiress, by her first marriage ; the captain, as we have seen, a son by his. In due time, and that, as is not uncommon in Ireland, was a very early time, when their joint ages amounted to thirty, this young pair were married. The mother, being averse to the match, and there being a law against running away with an heiress, the young lady to avoid any suspicion of this charge, carried her nusband behind her on horseback to church. This precocious couple had the recklessness and improvidence of youth and old Ireland. "Upon an excursion to England," we are told, fl they mortgaged the wife's estate in Lancashire, and carried the money to London in a stocking, which they kept on the top of their bed. To this stock- ing, both had free access, and, of course, its contents soon began to be very low. The young man was handsome and very fond of dress. At one time, when he had run out all his cash, he actually sold the ground plot of a house in Dublin, to purchase a high-crowned hat and feathers, which was then the mode. He lived in high company at court. Upon some occasion, King Charles the Second insisted upon knighting him. His lady was pre- sented at court, where she was so much taken notice of by the gallant monarch, that she thought it proper to intimate to her husband, that she did not wish to go there the second time, nor did she ever after appear at court, though in the bloom of youth and beauty." This Lady Edgeworth was a believers in fairies, and was in consequence imposed upon by the peo- ple of her neighborhood in Ireland, who sent children by night with lights, atter the fashion of the Merry Wives of Windsor, to play their gambols on a mount opposite her castle of Lissard. She was frightened at this, but she was a woman of courage notwithstanding, as an anecdote, related of her, proves. " While she was living at Lissard, she was, on some sudden alarm, obliged to go at night to a garret at the top of the house for some gunpowder, which was kept there in a barrel. She was follow- ed upstairs by an ignorant servant- girl, who carried a bit of candle, without a candlestick, between her fingers. When Lady Edgeworth had taken what gunpowder she wanted, had locked the door, and was half-way down stairs again, she observed that the girl had not her candle, and asked what she had done with it; the girl recollected and answered, that she had left it ' stuck in tlie barrel of Hack salt. 1 Lady Edgeworth bid her stand still, and instantly returned by herself to the room where the gunpowder was; found the candle as the girl had de- scribed put her hand carefully un- derneath it carried it safely out, and when she got to the bottom of the stairs, dropped on her knees, and thanked God for their deliverance.' As he grew older, her husband mended his ways and his fortunes. The eldest child of this marriage was Francis Edgeworth, colonel of a loyal regiment in King William's time, a gallant sol- dier and a spendthrift. He had an extraordinary passion for play. " One night, after having lost all the money he could command, he staked his wife's MARIA EDGEWORTH:. 295 diamond ear-rings, and went into an ad- joining room, where she was sitting in company, to ask her to lend them to him. She took them from her ears, and gave them to him, saying that she knew for what purpose he wanted them, and that he was welcome to them. They were played for. My grandfather (Richard Lovell Edge- worth is the narrator) won upon this last stake, and gained back all he had lost that night. In the warmth of his gratitude to his wife, he, at her desire, took an oath, that he would never more play at any game with cards or dice. Some time afterwards, he was found in a hay-yard with a friend, drawing straws out of the hay-rick, and betting upon which should be the long- est." This gentleman of the old school left a son who became a lawyer, and married Jane Lovell, the daughter of a Welsh judge. Of this marriage was born, one of eight children, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, the father of Maria. This Richard Lovell Edgeworth, who came into the world at Bath, in 1744, proved a very extraordinary person- age. The " Memoirs " which he has left us tell us all about him and much about his daughter, who was intimate- ly associated with him after she grew up, in his literary occupations. His mother, though greatly afflicted in health, was cheerful in disposition and, an unusual thing for the sex in her day, was fond of reading. She read to her son, in his childhood, the Roman plays of Shakespeare, and implanted in his mind sound maxims for the conduct of life. Her last injunction to him on her death-bed was, " My son, learn how to Bay No !" He was taught Latin by a clergyman who had been the instruc- tor of the poet Goldsmith, and at six- teen, entered Trinity College, Dublin, where he appears to have passed his time in dissipation, which caused hia removal to Oxford, where he was con- .signed to the care of a friend of hia father, a Mr. Elers, who rejoiced, in hia residence at Black Bourton, in the pos- session of several pretty daughters. From what we have seen of the blood of the Edgeworths, it was a danger- ous position for a youthful scion of the house. In fact, young as he was, he had been married already when he was twelve or fourteen after a dancing frolic, standing up with hia partner in a mock ceremony performed by one of his companions in a white cloak for a surplice, and with the key of the door for a ring. It was a piece of nonsense, but his father thought it important enough to have it annulled in an Irish ecclesiastical court. This time it was more serious. The young Oxford student did apply himself to his studies, and was at the same time attentive to one of the young ladies, whom, before his college course was finished, he ran away with to Gretna Green, married, and by her had a son before he was twenty. This affair broke up his Oxford residence, and sent him back to Ireland, where he passed a year dabbling in science and improv- ing a turn for mechanics in the con- struction of an orrery. Returning to England with the intention of study- ing for the law, he took up his resi- dence at Hare Hatch, in the vicinity of Reading, in Berkshire, a place of easy access to London. Here his daughter Maria was born, on the first day of Jan- 296 MAKIA EDGEWOKTH. uary, 1767. Her early childhood was passed with the family in Oxfordshire, till her mother's death, six years after- ward, in 1773. During this time va- rious incidents were happening in her father's career which influenced her fu- ture education and character. The most important of these was his falling in with the social literary clique which gathered about that famous blue stock- ina: of her time, Miss Anna Seward. at O ' ' her father's residence he was canon of the cathedral in the Bishop's pal- ace at Lichfield. One of the leading members of this circle was Dr. Darwin, who was then practicing medicine in the city, a gentleman of great intelli- gence and benevolence, destined after- wards to be known to the world by his poetic and philosophic writings. A com- mon liking for mechanical and scientif- ic pursuits brought Darwin and Edge- worth together. They first met at the doctor's house in Lichfield, to which Edgeworth was invited as a guest ; and by the doctor he was introduced to Miss Seward. It was quite characteristic of our Irish visitor to be delighted with the lady at first sight. The very eve- ning after his arrival, at an evening party at Darwin's, in the midst of his impressive attentions to Miss Seward at table, he was suddenly called to his senses by Mrs. Darwin proposing the liealth of Mrs. JEdgeworih, a personage whose existence her husband seemed on all occasions when he could, very ready to forget. His state of mind to- wards that lady is, indeed, very frank- ly confessed in his " Memoirs," where he describes her as " prudent, domestic, and affectionate, but not of a cheerful temper. She lamented about trifles; and the lamenting of a female with whom we live does not render home delightful." He suggests to be sure that there was a touch of feminine spite in Mrs. Darwin's interruption. Miss Sew ard, who was at this time in the height of her charms, having been her rival with the doctor. Escaping, however, for the present, the seductive beauties of Lich- field, he returned to his home in Berk- shire to apply himself with fresh vigor to his ingenious mechanical contriv- ances and the education or rather non- education of his infant son after the method proposed by Rousseau. He now made the acquaintance of a personage rather more notional and extraordinary than himself. This was the eccentric Mr. Thomas Day, the au- thor of that ingenious boy's book, " The Adventures of Sandford and Merton." He was a man of great integrity and generosity, well versed in literature, of constant activity of mind, and great- ly given to metaphysics, and, being possessed of a liberal estate, he was enabled very much to have his own way. He had views of his own on all sorts of themes, and particularly on the subject of female education. Rude and clumsy in his own person, with a countenance ill-favored from the small- pox, inattentive to or ignorant of the refined graces of life, he was disposed to resent as impertinent or injurious, the usual intercourse of fashionable so- ciety. With little of the passion of love, he was a constant attendant upon women with a sort of mathematical af- fection. The life of a woman was. in his view, to be worked out and demon strated like a problem. Day accom- panied Edgeworth on a visit to hia MAEIA EDGEWOKTH. . 297 father in Ireland, and fell in love with his sister. It was a peculiarity of his attachments, that they proceeded to a certain extent and went no farther. The lady first received him with sus- picion and distrust, for women are nat- urally aristocrats, and dislike ultra so- cial reformers ; then recognizing in him through the wonders of his conversa- tion the man of genius, she takes pride in his attentions and amiably devotes herself to metaphysics, of which she soon gets tired, and there the matter ends. This is in general the natural history of Day's love* affairs. There was a prospect of his becoming the brother-in-law of his friend, but he did not. Despairing of making any- thing of the spoiled daughters of civil- ization, he determined to form, a woman for himself, and, to have a choice in the result, he chose two for the experiment. He selected these girls from a number of orphans, one of them from the Foundling Hospital in London, adopt- ed both, and set to work to educate them with a view of making one of them his wife. One he named Sabrina Sidney, in compliment to his favorite river, the Severn, and to his favorite political philosopher, Algernon Sid- ney ; the other, after the chaste Roman matron, Lucretia. They were at the age of eleven or twelve, healthy, and of promising, cheerful disposition. In pursuance of his plan, to separate them from the sophistications of England, he took them to France, where their ig- norance of the language of the country, which he purposely took no pains to remove, left them more to his direction. His main instrument of education was his continual conversation and advice. 38 When he got back to England, he made up his mind that Lucretia was so incorrigibly stupid as to be worth no further attention; so he gave her a dowry of a few hundred pounds, which soon procured her a small shopkeeper -for a husband, with whom she lived happily, and became the mother of a numerous family. Sabrina, still re- maining on his hands, he took her to his new residence at Stow Hill, in the vicinity of Lichfield. Meanwhile, Edgeworth, by the death of his father, became possessed of the family estate in Ireland; gave up in consequence all further thoughts of the law, and was free to follow out his scientific pursuits. He still kept up his residence in England, and pleas- antly passed the Christmas season of 1770 with his friend Day at Lichfield. Here he found a new object for his affections in Miss Honora Sneyd, the daughter of a gentleman of Stafford- shire, who, after the death of her mother had found a home with the Sewards. She was young, beautiful and intelli- gent. " I was six and twenty," writes Edgeworth, "and now, for the first time in my life, I saw a woman that equalled the picture of perfection which existed in my imagination. I had long suffered much from the want of that cheerfulness in a wife, without which, marriage could not be agreeable to a man of such a temper as mine. I had borne this evil, I believe, with pa- tience; but my not being happy at home, exposed me to the danger of being too happy elsewhere." He con- sequently fell into a very ardent ad miration of Miss Sneyd, and must have been greatly disturbed bv the arrival 298 MAEIA EDGEWORTH. of a gentleman who bad recently fallen m love with her while on a visit to Matlock, in Derbyshire. This was no other than the elegant and accomplish- ed Major Andre, who had not then en- tered the army, but, following in the footsteps of his father, was engaged in mercantile business. Though assisted by Miss Seward, to whom he addressed several sprightly letters inspired by his passion, he made little progress in his suit. A young clerk without for- tune was not in a position to marry; BO Andre went to the war in America, and, not unwept, met his inglorious fate on the Hudson. Soon another lover of Honora appears in Edge- worth's friend Day, who for the time is forgetful of the now blooming Sa- brina, whom he had placed at a board- ing-school. Day talks and converses, is charmed with the intellect of the lady, and finally the siege is ended in articles of capitulation in a proposal covering several sheets of paper, stipu- lating for retirement from the world, exclusive personal devotion, in fine, the relinquishment of every thing for the instructive conversation of Thomas Day. To this the lady replied in a letter equally logical, enforcing the rights of her sex, expressing her satis- faction with the world around her, and declining to leave it for his scientific embrace. Upon the receipt of this, Day was taken ill for some time, and Dr. Darwin was called in to bleed him and administer brotherly philosophic consolation. After his" recovery he paid his addresses to the lady's sister Elizabeth, and succeeded so far as to engage her in a course of reading which he pointed out. Honora being freed from her lovers, Edge worth revived his attachment to her, which, in pure self-sacrifice had been held in abeyance during the courtship of his friend Day The latter saw its force and its dan- ger for poor Mrs. Edgeworth was yet alive and her husband sought the only way of safety open to him, in flight. Day accompanied him to France, where Edgeworth passed some time at Lyons, where he undertook, in connec- tion with the authorities, the feat of enlarging the bounds of the city by a mechanical division of the river Rhone. He had his son with him, a boy of seven or eight, whose education, after the manner of Rousseau, was develop- ing in him a very self-reliant, head- strong, conceited disposition. The freedom of nature proved an excellent thing for the body; but the moral nature wanted guidance and repres- sion. Under the influence of his at- tachment for Elizabeth Sneyd, Day, following for once a lady's advice, was submitting himself at Lyons to the tortures of a French posture master, who engaged in a vain attempt to in- struct him in dancing, and bring his knees, by a cruel machine, into a straight line. " I could not," writes Edgeworth, " help pitying my philosophic friend, pent up in durance vile for hours to- gether, with his feet in the stocks, a book in his hand and contempt in his heart." Mrs. Edgeworth joined her husband at Lyons for a few months, returning to England to die in child-birth, in March, 1773. Upon news of this event, Edgeworth hastily returned to Eng- land, renewed his addresses to Honora Sneyd, and was married to her in the MAEIA EDGEWOKTH. 290 catliedral at Lichfield in the ensuing month of July. As for Day, notwith- standing his devotion to the graces in France, he was rejected on his return by the fair Elizabeth, and was about to many Sabrina, whose education was now accomplished, when an indiscre- tion on her part in wearing certain Ions: sleeves or some handkerchief dis- O tasteful to him, alienated his mind from her utterly. With this new vacu- um in his affections, he at last fell in with a maiden lady, Miss Milnes, whose understanding and acquirements had gained her the name of Minerva. She had also his desiderata in a wife, white and large arms, and wore long petti- coats ; her only defect, in the eye of our philosopher, was her fortune, which he affected to despise. They were mar- ried, however, and entered upon the free and uninterrupted enjoyment of an unlimited series of philosophical conversations. Their life was a happy one for many years, till Day fell a vic- tim to his benevolence. Dreading: the O brutality practiced by horse-breakers, he had trained a favorite horse himself by gentle means. The horse took fright when Day was riding out; he was thrown and instantly killed by the fall. His wife survived him two years. Sabrina, after residing some time in the country, was married to Mr. Bicknel, the author in conjunction with Day of a once popular poem entitled "The Dying Negro," w r hich Miss Edge worth predicted would " last as long as manly and benevolent hearts exist in Eng- land." Bicknel was an early friend of Day, and had been with him and assisted in his selection of Sabrina when he made choice of her from a number of orphans for adoption. Nothing is more singular than the matrimonial developments of Edgeworth and his friends. Bicknel died after three years of wedded life, leaving Sabrina unpro- vided for, with two infant sons. Miss Edgeworth characteristically writes of the event: "Some thought her more unhappy for the felicity she had tran- siently enjoyed. But this was not my father's doctrine. Two years of happiness he thought a positive good secured, which ought not to be a subject of regret, and should not embitter the remainder of life. Indeed, the system of rejecting present happiness, lest it should, by contrast, increase the sense of future pain, would fatally diminish the sum of human enjoyment ; it would bring us to the absurdity of the stoic philosophy, which, as Swift says, 'would teach us to cut off our feet, lest we should want shoes.' r On .the marriage of Edgeworth to Honora Sneyd, Maria, then six years old, was taken with them to the pa- ternal seat at Edgeworth Town in Ire- land, which, thenceforth, with a few intervals of absence, became the fam- ily residence. It required, however, some years' application of the inventive genius of Edgeworth to make it an enjoyable home. After three years passed at this place in retirement, Edgeworth visited his English friends, and established himself for a time at a house in Hertfordshire. His daugh- ther, Maria, meanwhile, was placed at school at Derby with a schoolmistress who doubtless found her a very bright and intelligent pupil; for the educa- tion of his children was a hobby with Edgeworth, and he never lost an op 300 MARIA EDGEWOETH. portunity of improving their infant minds. A year or two after this, her Btep-mother, Honora, fell into a con- sumption, which terminated in her death in May, 1780. A letter written by Edgeworth to Maria on this event, exhibits the turn of his mind in the advisory method he had already formed in directing her education. It indi- cates also a certain maturity in the child of thirteen to whom it was ad- dressed : " My dear daughter At six o'clock on Sunday morning your ex- cellent mother expired in my arms. She now lies dead beside me, and I know I am doing what would give her pleasure, if she were capable of feeling anything, by writing to you at this time to fix her excellent image in your mind. . . . Continue, my dear daughter, the desire which you feel of becoming amiable, prudent and of use. The ornamental parts of a character, with such an understanding as yours, necessarily ensue : but true judgment and sagacity in the choice of friends, and the regulation of your behavior, can be had only from reflection and from being thoroughly convinced of what experience teaches in general too late, that to be happy we must be good." In her last illness Honora advised her husband to marry her sister Eliza- beth, and, to do Edgeworth credit, he lost no time in obeying Hs wife's dy- ing request. " Nothing," writes Edge- worth in his Memoirs, with his usual philosophy and candor, "is more erroneous than the common belief, that a man who has lived in the greatest happiness with one wife, will be the most averse to take another. On the contrary, the loss of happiness, which he feels when he loses her, necessarily urges him to endeavor to be again placed in a situation which had con stituted his former felicity. I felt that Honora had done wisely, and from a thorough knowledge of my character, when she had advised me to marry again, as soon as I could meet with a woman who would make a good mother to my children and an agreeable companion to me. She had formed an idea, that her sister Elizabeth was better suited to me than any other woman ; and thought that I was equally well suited to her." The matter, therefore, was soon ar- ranged with Miss Elizabeth Sneyd, who, happily, as we have seen, had not been too deeply committed in her re- ception of the attentions of the phil- osophic Mr. Day. Edgeworth had the advantage of being quite as much of a philosopher and a great deal more of the man of the world. Another sui- tor, to be sure, had succeeded Day in the affections of the lady ; but he had fortunately gone abroad, and though Elizabeth pleaded this attachment and said, as Edgeworth himself informs us, that he was the last man she should have thought of for a husband, and, in concert with English opinion, was em barrassed at the idea of marrying so near a relative, there was but a short courtship before the wedding was per formed. There was a slight hitch in the affair, however. At the last mo- ment, when the parties were assembled in the church at Scarborough, the cler- gyman, frightened by a letter which he had received, written probably by some stickler for marriage according MARIA EDGEWORTH. 301 to the Levitical degrees, for the coun- try around seems to have been consid- erably agitated by this threatened in- fringement of the canon, was delicate- ly excused from going on with the cer- emony. The couple then betook themselves to London, where on Christ- mas day, 1780, about six months after the death of Honora, they were mar- ried at St. Andrew's church, Holborn. The jilted and philosophic Day came to the assistance of his friend and was present on the occasion. Maria was now promoted to a fash- ionable school " Establishment " in London kept by a Mrs. Davis, who gave her the benefit of an elaborate system, of gymnastics, excellent mas- ters putting her through all the usual tortures of back boards, iron collars and dumb-bells, with the unusual one of being swung by the neck to draw out the muscles and increase the growth, which turned out a signal failure, for the little girl became a small woman and so continued to the end of her days. She was taught, however, to dance well, which was one of the ac- complishments of her father, and was quite an adept in the execution of Italian and French exercises, writing them off for the whole quarter at once, which gave her the more time for amusing reading. While her school- fellows were playing she would be completely absorbed and unconscious of the uproar around her, in the per- usal of some favorite volume. She also, at this time, kept her fellow- boarders awake at night by her enter- taining stories. After about two years of this school life in London, at the age of fifteen she was taken with her father and new stepmother to the old home In Ireland. The estate was in disorder, and so was the whole coun- try, socially and politically. Edge- worth on his arrival was plunged into a most distressing sea of Irish affairs the house at Edgeworth Town gone to ruin, needing rebuilding and repairs, the relations of landlord and tenant in inextricable hostility and confusion, criminations and re-criminations all around him, a people to educate, riot and rebellion in the national atmosa phere. A landowner like Edgeworth was also a magistrate. Under these circumstances even his resources of philosophy and ingenuity were taxed to the uttermost. But he succeeded in educing order from the chaos around O him. At once firm and self-sacrificing, a strict observer of justice and impar- tiality, he pressed no undue advan tages ; showed his sagacity in conform- ing to the laws of political economy in the avoidance of unnecessary restric- tions; exhibited generosity, and was no doubt assisted by his wit and turn for humor in gaining from the tenantry about him, the highest compliment an Irish laborer can pay. He was pro- nounced " a real gentleman." His daughter Maria became a kind of sec- retary to him in these affairs, and gath- ered thus early many an instructive hint for her future volumes. In the continuation of her father's "Autobiog- raphy " or " Memoirs," which she takes up at this period, we have a most in- teresting narrative of her youthful days in Ireland. " I was with him," she writes, " constantly, indlwas amused and interested in seeing how he made his way through complaints, petitions 302 MARIA EDGEWOETH. and grievances, with decision and de- spatch ; he, all the time in good hu- nior with the people, and they de- lighted with him; though he often rated them roundly,' when they stood before him perverse in litigation, help- less in procrastination, detected in cun- ning, or convicted of falsehood. They saw into his character, almost as soon as he understood theirs. The first re- mark which I heard whispered aside among the people, with congratulatory looks at each other, was ' His honor, anyway, is good pay !' ' : In the Edge- worth family, and it was an important part of the instruction ever going on, the children were taken in as confi- dants in all the business and affairs of the house. His "building operations and various scientific inventions exer- cised their faculties ; and with a knowl- edge of things he introduced them to the poetic and imaginative creations of the great artists. "He took delight himself," says his daughter, " in ingen- ious fictions, and in good poetry; he knew well how to select what would amuse and interest young people ; and he read so well, both prose and poetry, both narrative and drama, as to delight his young audience, and to increase the effect upon their minds of the in- terest of any story, or the genius of any poet. From the Arabian Tales to Shakspeare, Milton, Homer and the Greek tragedians, all were associated in the minds of his children with the de- light of hearing passages from them first read by their father." The in- fluence of society, outside of the family, was slight at this early period of their residence in Ireland. Yet Edgeworth had a friend, Lord Longford, at Paken- ham Hall, twelve miles distant, valued for his wit and humor; and as his daughter grew up the company there and at Castle Forbes, the seat of the Earl of Granard, afforded her opportii- nities for the best social intercourse. A cultivated clergyman named Brooke, related to the author of " The Fool of Quality," lived in the neighborhood, and added to the common stock of the household an enthusiasm for classical learning. Maria was early marked out for an author. When she w T as at her first school at Derby, shortly after her mother's death, her father writes to her, " I beg that you will send me a tale about the length of a ' Spectator, upon the subject of Generosity; it must be taken from history or romance, and must be sent the day or night after you receive this, and I beg you will take some pains about it." The story was written and was admired, being pronounced very much better than one produced at the time on the same theme as a rival effprt by a young gen- tleman from Oxford. This was Maria Edge worth's first written story. Un- fortunately for the amusement of her readers, it has not been preserved. As soon as she was settled at Edge- worth Town, her father set her to trans- latino- Madame de Genlis' " Adele et o Theodore," of which she had completed one volume when Holcrof t's version ap- peared and rendered the continuance of her work useless for publication. After this some years passed before we hear of any further attempt at authorship. Her next efforts leading in this direc- tion were in common with her father, and grew out of his plans of educa EDGEWOKTH. 303 tion. It was his custom to keep a reg- ister of observations and facts relative to Ins children, in which he was assist- ed by his wife Elizabeth, as he had been by his wife Honora. When his daughter Maria grew up she was also employed in this way. Besides these she wrote, for her own amusement and improvement, accounts of his instruc- tive conversations, with the questions and explanations and answers of the children. A favorite idea of her fa- ther had been to facilitate the early mental and moral improvement of children by the composition of books suited to en^as^e their attention. As o o early as 1778 he began something of this kind with his wife Honora. The story of Harry and Lucy, afterwards incorporated in Miss Edgeworth's " Early Lessons, 1 ' was then written and printed, though not published. Mr, Day being consulted, was so pleas- ed with the idea that he composed " Sandford and Merton," which he at first designed as a short story to be inserted in his friend's book. Thirteen years afterward we find Maria writing her second story, " The Bracelets," with others of the same class, which she subsequently published. In these she was guided by her father, whom she constantly consulted. The consulta- tions ended in a joint literary partner- ship. In 1795 her first work appeared, "Letters for Literary Ladies," -growing out of her recollections of Day's remon- strances against female authorship, when she was translating Madame de Geulis, and of her father's reply. The " Parent's Assistant," that admirable collection of juvenile stories, so well calculated to arrest the attention of the young, stored as they are with sense and exciting sensibility, appeared the following year. In 1798 her first joint publication with her father, the work entitled "Practical Education," was issued, a series of essays on the art of teaching in the various branches of instruction. Of this she wrote the greater part. When this appeared Ireland was in the throes of revolution, and Edgewo/th was taking to himself a fourth wife. The health of Mrs. Edgeworth had long been delicate ; like her sister, she became consumptive, and the disease ended her life in November, 1797. Edgeworth was now a man of fifty- three, and the lady upon whom he next fixed his attention had attained little more than half that period ; in- deed he had first noticed her on a cas- ual introduction to her father when she was a child of but six years old and he a man of thirty. He can hardly, as in the case of his other early mar- riage acquaintances, have had any expectation of wedlock at that time. He met the father, the Rev. Dr. Beaufort, occasionally afterwards in the course of his scientific pursuits, and when " Parents' Assistant " was published, was shown some designs for the work sketched by the daughter. He criti- cised them very freely, and the lady took the censure in good part, which gave him a favorable opinion of hei understanding. So that when she visited Edgeworth Town with her family in 1798, Edgeworth in the words of his daughter Maria, " had an opportunity of discerning that she possessed exactly the temper, abilities and disposition, which would ensure 304 the happiness of his family as well as his own, if he could hope to win her affections." This task he soon accom- plished, and thus announced the event in a letter to his friend Dr. Darwin : " I am going to be married to a young lady of small fortune and large accom- plishments, compared with my age, much youth (not quite thirty), and more prudence some beauty, more sense uncommon talents, more un- common temper liked by my family, loved by me. If I can say all this three years hence, shall not I have been a fortunate, not to say a wise man?" The marriage again turned out well, for Edgeworth was not only a very rational theorist, but a highly practical follower of his own advice. At any rate the lady made him a good wife for the nineteen remaining years of his life ; and what he was equally to be congratulated upon, his loving daughter Maria was pleased and hap- py under the new family arrangement. After an extraordinary interview with her father, in which he laid his mind and heart open to her, she signified her acceptance of the coming mother- in-law in a letter addressed to her full of cordial pleasantry, in which she complimented a union deepened in its affection by the cultivation of the un- derstanding, and promised herself to be gratefully exact en belle fillc, con- cluding with a playful allusion to her own petite figure. " As for me, you see, my intentions, or at least my theories, are good enough ; if my practice be but half as good, you will be content, will you not \ But theory was born in Brobdignag and practice in Lilli- put. So much the better for me? The MAKIA EDGEWORTH. lady to whom this letter was address- ed was a year or so younger than its writer. The marriage thus amicably settled took place at Dublin the last day of May, 1798, six months after the decease of the third wife. Again The funeral bak'd meats Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables. These brilliant, rapid matrimonial performances of Edgeworth recall to us the humors of that delightful O work of English fiction, the " Adven tures of John Buncle," which Hazlitt called "The English Eabelais " John Buncle, who passes with the utmost enthusiasm of sorrow and affection from the embrace of one delightful lady to another, all equally attractive and refined, formed for love and learn- ing, with charms of person rivalled only by the accomplishments of the mind. " Castle Rackrent," the first of Misa Edgeworth's novels in which she de- picted the motley life of her country people as it was exhibited about her, followed " The Parents' Assistant " in 1800. It soon reached a second edition, was translated into German, and was everywhere received with favor. It was original in its subject, forcible in its delineation of character, and enliv- ened by a captivating humor a hap- py exchange for the lifeless twaddle and empty sentimentality of the circu- lating library novels which constituted the stock in trade of fiction of the time. It had the rare merit of truthfulness as a picture of actual life and manners, re- cording as it did, the first vivid impres- sions of the rude society, in the midst of which the author had been sudden ly thrown. It was the next year sue- MARIA EDGEWORTH. 305 ceeded by another novel, " Belinda," in which the story of Virginia and Clar- ence Hervey was suggested by the matrimonial experiment of Mr. Day in the education of Sabriua. In 1802, a second partnership work of the father and daughter appeared having both their names on the ti- tle page, the " Essay on Irish Balls." The first design of this book, Miss Edgeworth tell us in the "Memoirs," was her father's: "Under the sem- blance of attack, he wished to show the English public the eloquence, wit and talents of the lower classes of peo- ple in Ireland. Working zealously upon the ideas which he suggested, sometimes, what was spoken by him, was afterwards written by me ; or when I wrote my first thoughts, they were corrected and improved by him ; so that no book was ever written more completely in partnership. On this, as on most subjects, whether light or serious, when we wrote together, it would now be difficult, almost impos- sible, to recollect, which thoughts originally were his, and which were mine. All passages, in which there are Latin quotations or classical allu- sions, must be his exclusively, because I am entirely ignorant of the learned languages. The notes on the Dublin shoe-black's metaphorical language, I recollect, are chiefly his." As the story itself is brief, we may reproduce it here as a specimen of the humor of the book, referring the reader to the work itself for Edgeworth's full ex- planatory comments. One shoe-black playing with another at pitch farthing, had a small paving stone thrown at him, and returns the assault by plung- 39 ing his knife into his companion'sbreast. The blade was stamped with the name of Lamprey, an eminent Dublin cutler. The survivor in this affray gives the fol- lowing account of it in court to the judge " Why, my lord, as I was going past the Royal Exchequer, I meets Bil- ly 'Billy,' says I, 'will you sky a copper ?' 'Done,' says he ' Done,' says I and done and done's enough be- tween two jantlemen. With that I ranged them fair and even with my hook-em-snivey up they go ' Music !' says he ' Skull !' says I and down they come three brown mazzards. ' By the holy you fleshed 'em,' says he. ' You lie, 7 says I With that he ups with a lump of a two year old and let's drive at me I outs with my bread earner, and gives it him up to Lamprey in the bread-bas. ket." This is pure slang, but it is slang, as Edgeworth argues, of a highly imag- inative character, and the exercise of the imagination fertile with poetry is the Irishman's apology for the absurdi- ties into which it occasionally leads him. The shoe-black's brief story is fanciful and figurative throughout. The sublimity, for instance, of "sky- ing " so insignificant a thing as a cop per; Music, a brilliant generalization for the harp on the Irish half -penny; the oath, "by the holy," which writ- ten out at large, would be "by the holy poker of hell," which wakes up all Dante's Inferno ; the " lump of a two year old," a grazing metaphor for a stone transferred from the relative size of a calf to an ox. " I have heard," says Maria, " my father tell that story with all the natural, indescribable Irish tones and gestures, of which written language can give but a faint idea. 306 MAKIA EDGEWOETH. He excelled in imitating the Irish be- cause he never overstepped the modes- ty or the assurance of nature. He mocked exquisitely the happy confi- dence, the shrewd wit of the people, without condescending to produce ef- fect by caricature. He knew not only their comic talents, but their powers of pathos ; and often when he had just heard from them some pathetic com- plaint, he has repeated it to me while the impression was fresh." The " Es- say " is a kind of miscellaneous repro- duction of all the various elements of Irish wit and humor, with several long- er stories of pathetic interest as well. The title of the book was the occasion of a humorous incident. A gentleman interested in the improvement of the breed of cattle, seeing the advertisement of the work, sent for it, and as Miss Edgeworth tells us, "was rather con- founded by the appearance of the clas- sical bull at the top of the first page, which I had designed from a gem, and when he began to read the book, he threw it away in disgust : he had pur- chased it as secretary to the Irish Ag- ricultural Society." Sydney Smith on its appearance, reviewed the book in the " Edinburgh," with kindred humor, complimenting " Edgeworth and Co.," on their inimitable Irish painting, their mastery of the pathetic, and the service they were doing to their country in bringing forward the excellent quali- ties of the Irish. Of Edgeworth him- self he says, catching an insight into his character from his manner of writing, he " seems to possess the sentiments of an accomplished gentleman, the infor- mation of a scholar, and the vivacity of a tint-rate harlequin. He is fuddled with animal spirits, giddy with ugh Napoleon remained in Paris in attendance on his new consort, his plans of ambition suffered no interruption. In 1810, he deposed his brother Louis, who thought too much of the welfare of his own subjects ; and annexed Hol- land, together with the Hanse Towns and the whole sea-coast of Germany, to the French empire. The election of the French Marshal Bernadotte to the crown of Sweden seemed to place all Europe, except England, Russia, and the Peninsula, in the power of France. On the departure of Napoleon from Spain, in 1809, England again attempt- ed to deliver the Peninsula ; and, dur- ing the two succeeding years, Welling- ton did much towards effecting this object. The Emperor of Russia, who, at the treaty of Tilsit, was supposed to have agreed with Napoleon on the division of the European world, now found the power of the latter danger- ous to his own kingdom, which also suffered greatly from the prohibition yf commerce with England. Napoleon, perceiving that his brother einperoi designed to avail himself of the revers- es in the Peninsula to insist on a more liberal .coiirse of policy, and security against future aggression, determined on war. In 1812, he invaded Russia, with the largest army that had ever been assembled under one European leader. After beating the Russians at Smolensko and Borodino, he took pos session of Moscow, September 14th. But the approach of winter, the burn- ing of the city, and the consequent want of food and shelter, rendered it impossible to remain there; and the Czar refusing to listen to proposals for peace, Napoleon, after five weeks' res- idence at Moscow, was obliged to with- draw. In the celebrated retreat which followed, the French army was utterly destroyed, more by the climate than by the enemy ; the emperor himself es- caped with difficulty. The spirit of the French people waa roused by this disaster, and Napoleon speedily found himself at the head of another vast army. But Prussia and Sweden now joined the league against him, and experience had made his ene- mies more fit to cope with him; and though, in 1813, he won the battles of Lutzen and Bautzen in Saxony, he de- rived no material advantage from them. Having refused to accede to the terms proposed through the mediation of Austria, which would have restricted France to her ancient power and boun- daries, this state also took part with the allies against him. After gaining the battle of Dresden, in August, Na- poleon was compelled, by the succes- sive defeat of four of his marshals, to abandon his position on the Elbe, and NAPOLEON BONAPARTE. 351 retire on Leipsic. In October was fought the great battle of Leipsic, where, in three days, the French lost upwards of fifty thousand men. The emperor then retreated across the Rhine. The Rhenish Confederacy was forth with dissolved, and the pope and Ferdinand were permitted to return to their respec- tive dominions. Napoleon having thus lost all his allies and foreign possessions, still re- fused the reasonable terms of peace which were offered to him, and pre- pared to defend France against inva- sion. Wellington crossed the Pyrenees in 1814, and about the same time the Russian and German armies passed the Rhine. During this campaign Napoleon showed wonderful energy in encountering his numerous enemies, but still adhered, with obstinate ar- rogance, to what he considered due to his own personal glory, and re- fused to treat for peace. After losing the battles of Brienne and La Rothiere, in February, he entered on a negotia- tion with the allies ; during the discus- sion of which he attacked and defeated the Prussians on the Marne; and, on the 17th and 18th, with a perfect knowledge that his minister had sign- ed the preliminaries of peace, he as- saulted the Austrians and defeated them at Nangis and Montereau. These successes were useless, and only served to exasperate his foes. In March he was beaten at the battles of Craonne and Laon, and finding the allies getting the superiority, he skilfully marched on their rear with the view of inclos- ing them between his own army and the capital. But the allies obtained possession of Paris, and finding the people alienated by the tyranny of the emperor, declared they would no more treat with Napoleon Bonaparte. The weakened state of his army, and the defection of most of his ministers and generals, left him without resources. On the llth of April, Napoleon re- nounced, for himself and his heirs, the thrones of France and Italy. The allies having left Napoleon the choice of his retreat, he chose the island of Elba, near to his native Cor- sica, and set out, accompanied by four commissioners, one from each of the great allied powers. He was allowed to retain the title of Emperor, and to take along with him a small number of those veteran soldiers who had accom- panied him in so many dangers and whose attachment was not shaken by his misfortunes. On the 4th of May he landed in Elba, wherein, be- ing separated from his wife and son, and without any projects for the future, he seemed to regard himself as politically dead to Europe, with no other task remaining for him to per- form but that of writing the history of the rise and fall of his power. Napoleon anxiously watched the progress of events, which outran his expectations ; he was also well inform- ed as to what passed at the congress of Vienna; and having learned in time that the ministers of Louis XVIII. had proposed to the congress to remove him from Elba, in order to send him in exile to St. Helena, he conceived a project which circumstances indicated as the only reasonable course to be followed. He resolved to return to France. His preparations were not long; he 358 .NAPOLEON BONAPAKTE. brought nothing with him but arms, and trusted that France would pro- vide the rest. After a passage of five days, he landed without opposition at Cannes, near the spot where, fifteen years before, he had disembarked on his return from Egypt. This memorable event took place on the 1st of March, 1815. He had no determinate plan, because he wanted particular data as to the state of affairs; his intention was to be guided by events, making provision only for probable contin- gencies. Nor was he at all embar- rassed as to the route he should take ; for he required a point of support, and as Grenoble was the nearest fortress, le lost no time in directing his march on that place, which opened its gates to receive him. The enthusiasm of the troops knew no bounds, and the reception which he . everywhere met with confirmed him in his project. In fact, his march to Paris was through- out a triumphal procession. In twenty days this new revolution was termina- ted without having cost a single drop of blood. Amidst the acclamations of all France, Napoleon was reinstated on the throne. The grandeur of his enterprise had effaced the recollection of his misfortunes ; it had restored to him the confidence of the French peo- ple ; and he was once more the man of their choice. In a proclamation published by the Congress of Vienna to all Europe, it was declared that Napoleon, " by ap- pearing again in France, had deprived himself of the protection of the law, and manifested to the world that there could neither be peace nor truce with him.' Nothing remained, therefore, but to commit the future destiny of Europe to the arbitrament of arms. Various attempts were made to open a negotiation with the allies, but all proved abortive ; and as Napoleon had no intention to await the onset of his enemies, he resolved to fall upon the Anglo-Prussians, before the troops of Austria or Russia could be in a condi- tion to take part in the conflict. By the end of May he had about 180,- 000 men ready to take the field, and by the middle of July this number would have been increased to 300,000; but by transporting the seat of war into Belgium, he would save France from invasion, and perhaps take the ene- my unprepared. These considera- tions decided him to become the as- sailant. On the 12th of June he set out from Paris, and on the 14th he es tablished his head-quarters at Beau mont, where, in order to profit by the dissemination of the enemy, he judged it necessary to open the campaign without a moment's delay. Accordingly, he passed the frontier of Belgium on the 15th, and on the following day advanced to Fleurus, where he discovered the Prussian army ranged in order of battle between St Amand and Sombref. Ney had receiv ed orders to push forward with 42,000 men by the Brussels road as far as Quatre Bras, an important point sit- uated at the intersection of the roads leading to Brussels, Neville, Charleroi, and Namur, and there to keep the English in check and prevent them from advancing to the aid of the Prus- sians, whom Napoleon proposed to at- tack with the 72,000 men that remain ed under his command. The battle of NAPOLEON BONAPARTE. 359 Ligny followed, in which the Prussians were defeated; and so complete was (;he rout, that, of 70,000 men, their generals were never afterwards able to assemble more than about 30,000. A night pursuit would have annihilated them. But Ney had been much less fortunate at Quatre Bras, where he displayed great infirmity, neither bring- ing his whole force to bear on the Eng- lish, nor throwing himself back on Bry to act on the rear of the Prussians. The Prussian army being thus defeat- ed, Grouchy was detached in pursuit of it with 35,000 men, whilst Napoleon proceeded to turn his efforts against Wellington. In the great battle of Waterloo, the fate of Bonaparte was decided, and with it that of Europe. The result, more fatal to France than that of either Agincourt or Poictiers, is known to every one. By the time- ly arrival of the Prussians, who had given the slip to Grouchy, and their junction \vith the English, the French army was not only defeated, but total- ly dispersed. Napoleon returned to Paris, in the hope that the national spirit might be roused, and that all good Frenchmen would unite in defending their coun- try against another foreign invasion. But he soon found that he had deceiv- ed himself. Misfortune had deprived him of all consideration ; he experienc- ed opposition where he least expected it ; the chambers rose in a state of in- surrection against him ; and, in a short time, he was compelled to sign a sec ond abdication. He then decided to retire to America, and at first proposed to embark at Bordeaux, where his brother Joseph had hired a merchant- vessel for the purpose. But he after- wards changed his purpose, and set out for Rochefort, where he arrived on the 3d of July. Finding it impos- sible, however, to put to sea, and near- ly equally perilous to return to the in- terior, he took the resolution of throw- ing himself upon the generosity of the prince regent of England ; and, on the 15th, embarked on board of the Bel- lerophon, in Aix Roads. By a formal decision of the English government, he was sent as a prisoner of war to St. Helena, where he pined away in hope- less exile, until death put an end to his existence on the 3d of May, 1821. In his will he had expressed a desire that his body should be conveyed to France and buried on the banks of the Seine ; " amongst the French people whom he had loved so well;" but this request could not, it seems, be complied with until 1840, when, at the request of the government of Louis Philippe, Britain permitted the removal of his remains to France. The body was accordingly deposited with unparalleled pomp and display in the Hotel des Invalides, on the 15th December, 1840.* * Abridged from the Encyclopedia Britannica and the "Galleiy of Portraits" of the Society for the Diffusior of Useful Knowledge. rjlHIS distinguished mechanician JL and original inventor was a gen- uine product of the American soil. The genius, indeed, of the men whom America produced in various depart- ments of science in the last century, the Franklins, the Rittenhouses, the Kinnersleys, the Whitneys, should be more highly estimated than the paral- lel attainments of our own day. At present thousands of instructors and thousands of new influences are pav- ing the way to fresh inventions. Com- mon schools and academies furnish the pupil with profound elementary knowl- edge ; libraries disclose the myriad achievements of the past ; special news- papers and magazines carry knowledge to every hamlet ; kindred sciences wel- come and assist one another ; social or- ganizations encourage new discovery ; government offers its prizes ; accumu- lated commercial and manufacturing wealth rewards the inventor on the instant. How different this splendid triumphal procession, from the first ele- ments of science to fame and fortune, from the groping into light of the hea- ven-sown genius in the infant society of America a hundred years ago ! It must needs have been a plant of no (360) common hardihood, fully predestined to growth and vitality, which could then penetrate the crust of the world in our western wilderness. It has been remarked as a notewor- thy coincidence, that Benjamin West and Robert Fulton came into the world in the same vicinity, in what was, at the time of their birth, a wild and un- cultivated portion of the country, more remote from the seaboard in means of access and culture, than Arkansas is at present. It is owing to one of these men that the distance has been dimin- ished, and that we are enabled to make this truthful comparison. West was born at Springfield, Pa., in 1738. Rob- ert Fulton first saw the light in a town- ship of Lancaster County, Pa., then called Little Britain, but now bearing the name of Fulton, in the year 1765. His father, of the same name, was an emigrant from Ireland. He was at one time, we are told, a tailor, but at his son's birth was the occupant of a farm. He died too early to influence the child's education, which was pick- ed up mainly by himself, though we hear of his being at school, and, as is not uncommon with boys of geni us, of being accounted a dull fellow. This Fwm, an origmai painting ~bv Chappel uz the possession of die publishers. ROBERT FULTON. 361 in such cases, means simply that na- ture is working in a way of her own, independent of the schoolmaster. Of the anecdotes related of his inter- course with his Quaker schoolmaster, Caleb Johnson, there is one of peculiar significance. " I have," said that zeal- ous instructor, in answer to the inqui- ries of the boy's mother, " used my best endeavors to fasten his attention upon these studies, but Robert pertinacious- ly declares his head to be so full of original notions that there is no vacant chamber to store away the contents of any dusty books." * The busy brain jf the boy in fact teemed with notions. At fourteen, he is at home in all the workshops of the place. He contrives for his companions a paddle-wheel worked by a crank, for their flat-bot- tomed fishing-boat, to relieve the cum- brous poling on the Conestoga. He has got the nick-name of " Quicksilver Bob " among the workmen at the smithery where the government arms were made in those days of the Revo- lution, in consequence of his ready cal- culations of balls and distances, and his consumption of that article in his private experiments. He has also a talent for drawing, displayed in cari- caturing the Whig and Tory boys in their fights in the streets of Lancaster. At the age of seventeen, following the track of West, he finds his way to Philadelphia, with the intention of supporting himself as a painter, and is so successful in the pursuit that at the age of twenty-one he is enabled to es- tablish his mother on a farm of eighty- * Reigart's Life of Fulton, Philadelphia, 1856 a book which contains numerous anecdotes of these early years. 46 four acres, in the distant Washington County of the State, the consideration for which expressed in the deed is eighty pounds " lawful money paid by Robert Fulton, miniature painter, of the city of Philadelphia and State aforesaid ; " lawful money, truly, and very creditable not only to the youth's industry and family piety, but to the appreciation of the good people of Philadelphia. It is pleasant to know, from the enthusiastic narrative of Mr. Reigart, that for fourteen years, the remainder of her life, "this earthly heritage gave peace and comfort to the widow's heart," and was after- wards enjoyed by her daughter. Some symptoms of disease, of a dis- tressing pulmonary character, coming upon him at this time, and his artistical reputation being somewhat establish- ed, he was induced by his friends to visit England, with the expectation of improved health, and aid and counsel in his profession from Benjamin West, who had become established in the favor of the court and patrons of art of that country. The kind Quaker painter received him with friendly hos- pitality, making him a sharer of his home and artistic resources for several years. At the end of this genial ap- prenticeship, or, as we should rather say, fellowship, Fulton pursued hia course about England, with the design of studying the masterpieces of art congregated in the rural mansions of the nobility. He was for a time at Powderham Castle, the seat of the Courtenays in Devonshire, engaged in copying the works of the masters on its walls. He seems to have resided in this princely abode under the pro. 362 EGBERT FULTON. lection of the steward, a man of conse- quence on such estates. It was while he was in the neighborhood of Exeter that he made the acquaintance of the Earl of Bridgewater, the famous parent of the canal system in England. By his advice and example and the kin- dred encouragement of Lord Stanhope, with whom he was intimate, it would appear that Fulton was led to adopt the profession of a civil engineer, in which, and not as a painter, he was destined to become so well known to the world. At this time, in 1793, he addressed a letter to Lord Stanhope on the sub- ject of some experiments in the appli- cation of steam to navigation, contain- ing the views .which he afterwards put in practice on the Hudson, and which, if heeded by the noble earl, " the important invention of a success- ful steamboat," says Professor Ren- wick, " might have been given to the world ten years earlier than its actual introduction." Fulton now took up his residence at Birmingham, then illuminated by the genius of James Watt, to whom he was naturally attracted, and with whose labors on the steam-engine he became acquainted. He employed himself particularly in the study of canals, and took out a patent for a double-inclined plane of his invention for measuring inequalities of height, the principle of which was exhibited in the treatise on the improvement of canal navigation which he published in London in 1796, with numerous well-executed plates from designs by his own hand. A copy of this work was sent by the author to President Washington, with the intention of bringing its theories into practical use in America. Another was forwarded with a letter to Governor Mifflin, of Pennsylvania, urging, with numerous calculations, the introduction of a canal system into that State, "as a great national question." Fulton also patented in England a mill for sawing marble, for which he received the thanks of the British So ciety for the Promotion of Arts and Commerce, and an honorary medal; also machines for spinning flax, mak- ing ropes, and an earth-excavator for digging canals. In 1797, he passed over to Paris, with, the design of bringing to the no- tice of the French Government his in- vention of the torpedo, a device for the blowing up of enemies' vessels by at- taching beneath the water a copper canister of gunpowder, to be dis- charged by a gunlock and clockwork. He found his ingenious countryman, Joel Barlow, in the French capital, a kindred spirit with whom he formed an acquaintance, which, as in the case of West, was intimately continued for years under the same roof. Fulton availed himself of this opportunity to study the French and German and Italian languages, and improve his ac- quaintance with the higher branches of mechanical science. Among other employments, he projected, it is said, two buildings for the exhibition of panoramas, the success of which owed much to his assistance. On the arrival of Chancellor Livingston in France, in 1801, as minister, he found a ready as- sistant in Fulton to the schemes of steam navigation in which he had been EGBERT FULTON. 363 already engaged on the Hudson. Ex- periments were set on foot in the two following years which resulted in suffi- cient success in the movement of a boat of considerable size, propelled by steam on the Seine, to justify the pro- secution of the work in America. An engine of a peculiar construction, plan- ned by Fulton, was ordered in Eng- land from Watt and Bolton at Bir- mingham. The preparation of this machinery was in part superintended by Fulton himself. He had not, it would seem, relin- quished his favorite schemes of tor- pedo warfare, and finding little en- couragement or success in his opera- tions at Brest, under the auspices of Napoleon, entered into a negotiation, at the instance of Earl Stanhope, who thought the thing of importance, with the English Government. This, how- ever, also proved fruitless. The steam- engine was completed and sent to New York in 1806. In Decen' ber of the same year Fulton arrived in that city, and immediately directed his attention to his favorite projects. He enlisted the Government in his scheme of " tor- pedo warfare," which he brought to the attention of the citizens in a lec- ture before the magistrates and a few invited persons on Governor's Island, and a notable experiment in the har- bor in July, 1807, when an old brig was exploded by one of his heavily charged canisters. A pleasant account of the excitement into which the town was thrown by these experiments may be read in one of the numbers of Wash- ington Irving's " Salmagundi," in which Will Wizard undertakes to give an ac- count of the affair. The pretensions of " The North Kiver Society," which it was alleged was intended to set that river on fire, were a frequent subject of merriment with the young wags of this merry periodical, and Fulton's pro- ject seemed to bring the thing to a head. "The society have, it seems," says the number for July, 1807, "in- vented a cunning machine, shrewdly yclept a Torpedo / by which the stout- est line-of-battle ship, even a Santissi- ma Trinidad may be caught napping and decomposed in a twinkling ; a kind of submarine powder magazine to swim under water, like an aquatic mole or water rat, and destroy the enemy in the moments of unsuspicious security." We shall presently see Fulton return ing to these inventions. In the mean time he was proceeding with the construction of the steamboat, which was to be a greater marvel to the quidnuncs of the town than the torpedo itself. By a privilege already granted by the Legislature of the State, the exclusive right of navigating its waters was reserved to himself and Livingston. To supply funds for the completion of his vessel, he offered one-third of his patent right for sale ; but no one was found with faith enough in the enterprise to induce him to come forward as the purchaser. The boat was, however, at last launched on the East Kiver, and, contrary to the public expectation, was actually moved by her machinery to her station on the Hudson* The Clermont the boat was thus named from the seat of Chancellor Liv- ingston on the Hudson was next ad vertised to sail for Albany; and ac- cordingly took her departure on Mon 364 EOBEET FULTON. day afternoon, September 14th, 1807, from a dock in the upper part of the city on the North Kiver. In thirty- two hours she made her destination, a distance of one hundred and fifty miles. On her return to New York, a few days after, the voyage was made in thirty hours. A passage from the letter of Fulton to his friend, Joel Barlow, af- fords an interesting memorial of the occasion. After stating that the voy- age had turned out rather more favor- ably than he had calculated, and re- marking that, with a light breeze against him, he had, solely by the aid of the engine, " overtaken many sloops and schooners beating to windward, and parted with them as if they had been at anchor," he adds, " The power of propelling boats by steam is now fully proved. The morning I left New York, there were not perhaps thirty persons in the city who believed that the boat would ever move one mile an hour, or be of the least utility ; and pdiile we were putting off from the wharf, which was crowded with spec- tators, I heard a number of sarcastic remarks. This is the way in which ignorant men compliment what they call philosophers and projectors. Hav- ing employed much time, money and zeal in accomplishing this work, it gives me, as it will you, great pleasure to see it fully answer my expectations. It will give a cheap and quick convey- ance to the merchandise on the Missis- sippi, Missouri and other great rivers, which are now laying open their treas- ures to the enterprise of our country- men; and although the prospect of personal emolument has been some in- ducement to me, I feel infinitely more pleasure in reflecting on the immense advantage my country will derive from the invention." "We find Fulton thus alluding to the navigation of the Mississippi. It was the original intention in the model of the Clermont, which was especially adapted for shallow waters. Indeed, up to this time, as remarked by Pro- fessor Renwick, " although the exclu- sive grant had been sought and ob- tained from the State of New York, it does not appear that either Fulton or his associate had been fully aware of the vast opening which the navigation of the Hudson presented for the use of steam." The demand for trave] soon outran the narrow accommoda- tions of the Clermont, now put upon her regular trips upon the river ; an- other vessel was built, larger and of finer appointments; punctuality was established, and the brilliant steam- boat service of the Hudson fairly com menced. After a review of the pretensions of all claimants, the honor appears fairly due to Fulton, of the first practical application of steam, worthy the men- tion, to navigation. There had indeed been earlier attempts, both in this country and abroad ; but, as shown in the concise yet comprehensive sum- mary of Professor Renwick, they could be of but little importance before James Watt, in 1786, completed the structure of the double-acting conden- sing engine. After this invention be- came known, the chief rival claimant is Patrick Miller, of Dalswinton, who does appear to have thought seriously of the thing in 1787, and employed the engineer Symington to complete a EGBERT FULTON. 365 model for Mm in 1791. "If we may credit the evidence which has been ad- duced," says Ren wick, " the experi- ment was as successful as the first at- tempts of Fulton ; but it did not give to the inventor that degree of confi- dence which was necessary to induce him to embark his fortune in the en- terprise." Symington's subsequent at- tempt, in 1801, was but a renewal of the idea and plan of Miller. Fulton's first letter on the subject, to Earl Stan- hope, it will be remembered, was in 1793, and his practical experiments in France began in 1802. In the history of inventions, it is not uncommon to find in this way claimants starting up after the fact is established; men of half ideas and immature efforts; in- telligent dreamers, perhaps, but want- ing confidence or ability to put their visions into act. It is emphatically the man who accomplishes, who makes a living reality of the immature pro- ject, who is entitled to the credit. The world thus pays a respect to Franklin for his discoveries in electricity, which he would never have gained had he not demonstrated their truth by draw- ing down the lightning from heaven. Potentially, the steamboat of Fulton lay in the steam-engine of Watt. Prac- tically, it did not exist before the American inventor . directed the Cler- mont along the waters of the Hudson, " a thing of life." His successive adapt- ations and improvements in the appli- cation of the steam-engine to naviga- tion are freely admitted, even by those who dispute the honor of the first in- vention. We may here pause with Professor Hen wick, the biographer of Fulton, to dwell for a moment upon this period of success, consecrated to felicity in the marriage of the triumphant in- ventor with the niece of his friend and partner Chancellor Livingston. Miss Harriet Livingston was the ornament of the society of which her eminent uncle was the head. "Preeminent," we are told, " in beauty, grace and ac- complishments, she speedily attracted the ardent admiration of Fulton ; and this was returned by an estimate of his talent and genius, amounting al- most to enthusiasm. The epoch of their nuptials, the spring of 1808, was that of Fulton's greatest glory. Every- thing, in fact, appeared to concur in enhancing the advantages of his posi- tion. Leaving out of view all ques- tions of romance, his bride was such as the most impartial judgment would have selected; young, lovely, highly educated, intelligent, possessed of what, in those days, was accounted wealth. His long labors in adapting the steam- engine to the purposes of navigation, had been followed by complete suc- cess ; and that very success had opened to him, through the exclusive grant of the navigation of the Hudson, the prospect of vast riches. Esteemed and honored, even by those who had been most incredulous while his scheme was in embryo, he felt himself placed on the highest step of the social scale." Then followed what may be called the reaction the test to which every species of prosperity is in some way exposed. The most ordinary acquisi tion of wealth requires the exercise of new arts and ability to retain it. Much more is the successful inventor trncked by a new swarm of opponents. The 366 KOBEET FULTON. very men, perhaps, who laughed at his folly before his invention was com- pleted, may assist in robbing him of its results. Success, too, is sometimes expensive. It requires constantly new outlay to meet its own vociferous de- mands. What with the rapid increase of travel, the consequent enlarged ex- penditure, the necessary dependence upon stewards, and above all the legal attacks upon his patent, Fulton may have felt with Frankenstein, that his mechanism had given birth and powers to a monster, destined to vex and crush him in its embrace. Instead of reap- ing the rewards of the invention, he was entangled in a business enterprise of a costly character, beset with legal difficulties. The exclusive navigation of the waters of New York was too wide a privilege to be given by the Legislature of a single State ; so that the discussion of the grant became a grave political question. This conflict of laws was especially disastrous to Fulton, in the difficulties which arose in New York and New Jersey in respect to the ferry, at the city, between the opposite shores, from which he expected a considerable rev- enue. Having now seen Fulton place steam- boat navigation on a permanent foot- ing on the Hudson, we may return to his favorite studies of the arts of mili- tary warfare, in the destruction of ene- mies' ships afloat. We find him follow- ing up the successful exhibition of the 'torpedo' off the Battery, by fresh appeals to Government, seconded by the social influence of his friend, Joel Barlow, who had now established him- self at his seat, Kalorama, at Washing- ton. A work was published by Ful ton, fully describing his proceedings, entitled, "Torpedo-war; or, Submarine Explosions" with the motto, The Lib- erty of the Seas will be the Happiness of the Earth. An appropriation was made by Congress, and new experiments or- dered at New York, before a board of observation, in 1810. Commodore Rod gers was at the head of the commission. Extraordinary precautions were taken to defend the vessel exposed to attack which had the effect of baffling the inventor's efforts, while they proved the formidable nature of the assailant which they were intended to guard against. Old naval officers are chary of new inventions, and, it was thought by some, hardly showed Fulton's con- trivances fair play. The report to the Government was a mutilated affair, which, if it did not censure, found lit- tle to commend. The invention, how- ever, was not lost sight of when a period of actual warfare called such defences into requisition. His devices seem to have had the effect, at least, of infusing a wholesome dread into the minds of British officers, cruising about the waters in the vicinity of New York. An incident related of Fulton, about this time, by his earliest biographer, Cadwalader D. Colden, may be narra- ted as an amusing exhibition of a not uncommon popular absurdity. An unscrupulous, scientific quack, named Redheffer, had deluded the Philadel phians into the belief of his discover- ing a species of perpetual motion. He succeeded in a thorough mystification, it is said, of some very clever people, whose brains were entangled in hia wheels and weights; for there is, at EGBERT FULTON. 367 times, no more credulous person than your man of science, who spins a web for his own imprisonment. Ingenious theories were not wanting to account for the prodigious working of the ma- chine. Some recondite speculations, well-fortified with figures, will be found in the old " Port Folio." The apparatus was brought to New York, and set up to the admiration of the gaping crowd, who dropped their dol- lar at the door into the pockets of the showman, capacious as their own cre- dulity. Fulton was, at length, induced to join the crowd. The machine was in an isolated house in the suburbs of the city. Fulton had hardly entered, when his practiced ear detected an ir- regular crank motion. The whole secret was betrayed to him in this whisper. Presently entering into con- versation with the showman, he de- nounced the whole thing as an impo- sition; the usual amount of virtuous indignation was expended by the ex- hibitor; the visitors became excited; Fulton was resolute. He proposed an inspection behind the scenes, promis- ing to make good any damage in the process. A few thin strips of lath were plucked away, apparently used only to steady the machinery, which betrayed a string of catgut, connecting the work with something beyond. Fol- lowing this clue through an upper room, there was found, at its termina- tion, the secret of the wondrous effect, in " a poor, old man, with an immense beard, and all the appearances of hav- ing suffered a long imprisonment, seat- ed on a stool, quite unconscious of what had happened below, with one hand gnawing a crust, and with the other turning a crank."* The mob demolished the machine, and Redhef- fer disappeared with his vaporous de- lusion. In these later years of his life, for unhappily he was now approaching its close, Fulton was mainly employed at New York, in building and equipping, under the supervision of Government, his famous cannon-proof steam-frigate, named after him, The Fulton, and in perfecting his favorite devices of sub- marine sailing vessels, in connection with the torpedo warfare. The steam- frigate was launched in October, 1814, but its projector did not live to wit- ness its completion. He may be said, indeed, to have been a martyr to the undertaking. His constitution, not of the strongest, was exposed to a severe test in mid- winter, in January, 1815, in a passage across the Hudson, amidst the ice in an open boat. He was re- turning from the Legislature of New Jersey, at Trenton, whither he had gone to give evidence in the protract- ed steamboat controversy. He was taken ill on his return home, and be- fore he was fully restored, ventured out to superintend some work on the exposed deck of the Fulton. This brought on increased illness, which speedily terminated in death, Febru ary 24th, 1815. * Colden's Life of Fulton, p. 219. MADAME DE STAEL. ANNE-MARIE LOUISE NECK- ER was born at Paris in 1766. Both her parents were remarkable per- sons. Her father, James Necker, a simple citizen of Geneva, began life as clerk in a banker's office in Paris, speedily became a partner, and by skill, diligence, sound judgment, and strict integrity, contrived in the course of twenty years to amass a large for- tune and to acquire a lofty reputation. While accumulating wealth, however, he neglected neither literature nor so- ciety. He studied both philosophy and political economy ; he associated with the Encyclopedists and eminent literati of the time ; his house was frequented by some of the most remarkable men who at that period made the Parisian salons the most brilliant in Europe; and he found time, by various writings on financial matters, to create a high and general estimation of his talents as an administrator and economist. His management of the affairs of the French East India Company raised his fame in the highest political circles, while, as accredited agent for the Republic of Geneva at the court of Versailles, he obtained the esteem and confidence both of the sovereign and the minis- (368) ters. So high did he stand both in popular and courtly estimation, that, shortly after the accession of Louis XVI., he was appointed, although a foreigner, Comptroller-General of the Finances. He held this post for five years, till 1781 ; and contrived not only to effect considerable savings, by the suppression of upwards of six hun- dred sinecures, but also in some small degree to mitigate and equalize taxa- tion, and to introduce a system of or- der and regularity into the public ac- counts to which they had long been strangers. As proved by his celebrated Compte rendu, which, though vehe- mently attacked, was never success- fully impugned, he found a deficit of thirty-four millions when he entered office, and left a surplus of ten millions when he quitted it, notwithstanding the heavy expenses of the American war. In the course of his administra- tion, however, Necker had of course made many enemies, who busied them- selves in undermining his position at court, and overruled the weak and vacillating attachment of the king. Necker found that his most careful and valuable plans were canvassed and spoiled by his enemies in the council MADAME DE STAEL. 369 where lie was not present to defend them, and that, in fact, he had not and could not have fair play while he con- tinued excluded from the Cabinet. He demanded, therefore, the entry of the Privy Council, resigned when it was refused him, and retired to write the celebrated work on the Administration of the Finances, which at once placed him on the pinnacle of popularity and fame. Eighty thousand copies were sold ; and henceforth Necker was the man on whom all eyes were turned in every financial crisis, and to whom the nation looked as the only minister who could rescue them from the difficulties which were daily thickening around them. Then followed the reckless adminis- tration of Cal&ane, whose sole princi- ple was that of " making things pleas- ant," and who, in an incredibly short time, added one thousand six hundred and forty-six millions to the capital of the debt, and left an annual deficit of one hundred and forty millions, instead of an annual excess of ten. Brienne attacked him, and succeeded him ; but things went on from bad to worse, till, when matters were wholly past a rem- edy, in August, 1788, Necker was re- called and reinstated. He struggled with manly, but not hopeful courage, for a terrible twelve months; using his great credit to procure loans, spend- ing his vast private fortune to feed the famishing populace of Paris ; commenc- ing the final act of the long inchoate revolution, by calling the States-Gene- ral; insuring its fearful triumph by the decisive measure of doubling the numbers of the tiers-etat, and permit- ting the stat^ to deliberate in com- 47 mon ; devising schemes of finance and taxation which were too wise to be palatable, and too late to save; com- posing speeches for the monarch to de- liver, which the queen and the cour- tiers ruined and emasculated before they were made public; and bearing the blame of faults and failures not his own. At length his subterranean enemies prevailed : he received his se- cret conge from the king in July, 1789, and reached Basle, rejoicing at heart in his relief from a burden of which, even to one so passionately fond of popularity as he was, the weight was beginning to be greater than the charms. The people were furious at the dis- missal of their favorite : the Assembly affected to be so. Riots ensued; the Bastile was stormed; blood was shed; the court was frightened ; and Necker was once more recalled. The royal messenger overtook him just as he was entering 'Switzerland, with the com- mand to return to Paris, and resume his post. He obeyed the mandate with a sad presentiment .that he was returning to be a useless sacrifice in a hopeless cause, but with the convic- tion that duty left him no alternative. His journey to Paris was one long ova- tion ; the authorities everywhere came out to greet him ; the inhabitants thronged around his path ; the popu- lace unharnessed his horses and drew his carriage a great part of the way; the minister drank deeply of the in- toxicating cup of national gratitude and popular applause; and if he re- lished it too keenly and regretted it too much, at least he used it nobly and had earned it well. It would have 370 MADAME DE STAEL. been far better for his own fame and happiness if he had not returned to power: it could scarcely have been worse for his adopted country. His third and last administration was a series of melancholy and perhaps ine- vitable failures. The torrent of popu- lar violence had become far too strong to stem. The monarchy had fallen to a position in which it was impossible to save it. Necker's head, too, seems to have been somewhat turned by his triumph. lie disappointed the people and bored the Assembly. The stream of events had swept past him, and left him standing bewildered and breath- less on the margin. Disheartened, in despair of the for- tunes of France, he retired to his resi- dence at Coppet, in Switzerland, where Gibbon, who saw much of him at this period of his career, says that he should have liked to shew him in his then con- dition to any one whom he desired to cure of the sin of ambition. By de- grees, however, this depression left him, and he roused himself again to interest and action. He sent forth pamphlet after pamphlet of warning and remonstrance to hostile readers and unheeding ears. He offered him- self to Louis as his advocate when that monarch was brought to trial, and, when his offer was declined, published a generous and warm defence of his old master. The remainder of his life was passed in the enjoyment of family affection, of literary labors, and of phi- losophical and religious speculations ; and he died in 1804, at the age of sev- enty-two, happy in the conviction that he was on]y exchanging the society of his cherished daughter for that of his faithful and long-respected wife, who had died some years before. Madame Necker, too, was, in her way remarkable enough. The- daughter oi a Swiss Protestant minister of high re- pute for piety and talent, and herself early distinguished both for beauty and accomplishments, her spotless character and superior intellectual powers at- tracted the admiration of Gibbon dur- ing his early residence at Lausanne. He proposed and was accepted; but his father imagining that his son might well aspire to some higher connection, was very indignant, and forbade the fulfilment of the engagement. Gibbon submitted and moralized: "I sighed as a lover (says he), and obeyed as a son, and Mademoiselle Curchod is now the wife of the favored minister of a great kingdom, and sits in the high places of the earth." They renewed their acquaintance in after years, and remained fast friends till death. How such a child as Mademoiselle Necker came to spring from two pa- rents who resembled her so little, were a vain conjecture. She was from the first the very incarnation of genius and of impulse. Her precocity was extraordinary, and her vivacity and vehemence both of intellect and tem- perament baffled all her mother's efforts at regulation and control. Her power of acquisition and mental assimilation were immense. At twelve years of age she wrote a drama of social life, which was acted by herself and her young companions. Her remarkable talent for conversation, and for under- standing the conversation of others, even at that early period, attracted the attention and excited the affectionate MADAME DE STAEL. interest of many of the celebrated men who frequented her father's salon; and in spite of Madame Necker's dis- approving looks, they used to gather round her, listening to her sallies, and provoking her love of argument and repartee. " We entered the drawing- room," writes Mdlle. Huber. "By the side of Madame Necker's arm-chair was a little wooden stool on which her daughter was expected to sit, and to keep herself very upright. Hardly had she taken her accustomed place, when three or four old people came round her, and spoke to her with the deepest interest. One of them, who wore a little round wig, took her hands in his, where he kept them a long time, talking to her all the while, as if she had been five-and-twenty years old. This was the Abbe Eaynal ; the others were MM. Thomas, Marmontel, the Marquis De Pesay, and Baron De Grimm. Mademoiselle Necker at that time was only eleven." We can well comprehend the stimu- lus which the intercourse with such minds must have given to the bud- ding intellect of the daughter. The frivolity of French society was already wearing away under the influence of the great events which were throwing their shadows before them ; and even if it had not been so, Necker's own taste would have secured a graver and more solid tone than prevailed in com- mon circles. The deepest interests of life and of the world were constantly under discussion. The grace of the old era still lingered ; the gravity of fche new era was stealing over men's minds ; and the vivacity and brilliancy has never been wholly lost at Paris, bound the two elements togeth er in a strangely fascinating union. It was a very hot-bed for the develop- ment of a vigorous young brain like that of Mademoiselle Necker. Her father, too, aided not a little to call forth her powers ; he was proud of her talents, and loved to initiate her into his own philosophic notions, and to inocu late her with his generous and lofty purposes; and from her almost con- stant intercourse with him, and his tenderness and indulgent sympathy so different from her mother's uncaress- ing and somewhat oppressive formal- ism sprung that vehement and ear- nest attachment with which she re- garded him through life. At the age of twenty she had at- tained a dangerous reputation as a wit and a prodigy ; she was passionately fond of the brilliant society in which she lived, but set at naught its re- straints, and trampled on its conven- tionalities and bienseancs in a style that was then rare, especially among young women, but which the men for- gave in consequence of her genius, and the women in consideration of her ug- liness. Her intellect was preternatu- rally developed, but her heart seems not to have been touched ; she wrote and spoke of love with earnest- ness, with grace, even with insight, but as a subject of speculation and de- lineation only, not of deep and woful experience. At this time, in 1786, she made a mariage de convenance with as cool and business-like an indifference as if she had been the most cold and phlegmatic of women. She was a great heiress, and Eric Baron de Stae'l was a handsome man, of noble birth and 372 MADAME DE STAEL. good character. The consideration which appears to have chiefly decided the choice, both of herself and her pa- rents, was that he was an attache to the Swedish Embassy, was to become ambassador himself, and was expect- ed to reside permanently at Paris. Parisian society had now become, what it always remained, an absolute necessi- ty of existence to Mademoiselle Necker ; and in the arrangement she now made, she married it rather than the baron. The three years that followed her mar- riage were probably the happiest of her life. She was in Paris, the centre of a varied and brilliant society, where she could not only enjoy intercourse with all the greatest and most celebra- ted men of that remarkable epoch, but could give free scope to those wonder- ful and somewhat redundant conver- sational powers which were at all times her greatest distinction. We can well imagine that her singular union of brilliant fancy, solid reflection, and French vivacity, must have made her, in spite of the entire absence of per- sonal beauty, one of the most attrac- tive and fascinating of women. The times too were beyond all others preg- nant with that strange excitement which gives to social intercourse its most vivid charm. Everywhere the minds of men were stirred to their in- most depths; the deepest interests were daily under discussion ; the grand- est events were evidently struggling towards their birth; the greatest in- tellects were bracing up their energies for a struggle " such as had not been seen since the world was ;" the wild- est hopes, the maddest prospects, the most sombre terrors, were agitating society in turn ; some dreamed of the regeneration of the world days of halcyon bliss a land flowing with milk and honey ; some dreaded a con- vulsion, a chaos, a final and irrecover- able catastrophe ; everything was hur- rying onward to the grand denouement / and of this denouement Paris was to be the theatre, and Necker, the father of our heroine, the guiding and presiding genius. All her powers were aroused, and all her feelings stimulated to the uttermost ; she visited, she talked, she intrigued, she wrote ; her first literary performance, the "Lettres sur Rous- seau," belong to this date. They are brilliant and warm in style ; but their tone is that of immaturity. These days soon past. Then follow ed the Reign of- Terror. And now it was that all the sterling qualities of Madame de Stael's character came forth. Her feelings of disappointment and disgust must have been more vivid than those of most, for her hopes had been pre-eminently sanguine, and her confidence in her father's powers and destiny unbounded. Now all was lost ; her father was discarded, her monarch slain, her society scattered and deci- mated, and Paris had lost all its charms. Still she remained ; as Necker's daugh- ter she was still beloved by many among the people; as the wife of an ambassador she was as inviolable as any one could be in those dreadful days With indomitable courage, with the most daring and untiring zeal, and the most truly feminine devotion, she made use of both her titles and influence to aid the escape of her friends, and to save and succor the endangered. She succeeded in persuading to temporary MADAME DE STAEL. 373 mercy some of the most ferocious of the revolutionary chiefs ; she concealed some of the menaced emigres in her house ; and it was not till she had ex- hausted all her resources, and incurred serious peril to herself and her children, that she followed her friends into exile. Her husband, whose diplomatic char- acter was suspended for a while, re- mained in Holland, to be ready to resume his functions at the first favor- able opening. Madame de Stael join- ed her friends in England, and estab- lished herself in a small house near Richmond, where an agreeable society soon gathered round her, consisting, besides a few English, of M. de Talley- rand, M. de Narbonne, (whose life she had saved by concealing him in her house, and then dismissing him with a false passport,) M. d'Arblay, (who afterwards married Miss Burney,) and one or two female friends. Here, in spite of poverty, exile, and the mortifi- cation of failure, and the fearful tidings which reached them by nearly every post, they continued to lead a cheerful and not unprofitable life. When the re-establishment of some- thing like regular government in France, in 1795, permitted the Swed- ish ambassador to resume his functions, Madame de Stael returned to Paris, and passed her time very happily for the next four years, alternately there and with her father at Coppet. Then came the establishment of the Napole- onic rule, and with that ended Madame de Stael's peace and enjoyment for nearly fifteen years. Bonaparte dis- liked her, feared her, persecuted her, exiled her, and bullied and banished every one who paid her any attentions, or showed her any kindness. He first prohibited her residence in Paris, then in France ; and exile from her native land, and from the scene of her social pleasures and social triumphs, was to her almost as dreadful as a sentence oi death. Of course she repaid her ty- rannical persecutor in his own coin, and with liberal interest. We need not seek far for the explanation of their mutual animosity. They were antipathic in their views, in their posi- tion, in every feeling of their hearts, in every fibre of their character. Mad- ame de Stael was a passionate lover of constitutional liberty : Bonaparte was bent upon its overthrow. The bril- liancy and varied attractions of Mad- ame de Stael's society made her an actual power in Paris ; and Bonaparte hated rivalry and could "bear no brother near the throne." He loved incense and homage ; and after the 18th Brumaire, she would render him nei- ther. She would not flatter him, and he could not in his heart despise hei as he desired to do, and as he wished it to be imagined that he did. Then, whenever they met in society, she bor- ed him dreadfully, and he snubbed her rudely. He was cold and reserved, she was vehement and impulsive. She stigmatized him as an enemy to rational freedom ; and he pronounced her to be an intriguing and exaltee wo man. They both loved influence dear- ly ; and neither would succumb to the influence of the other. All the em peror's power and prestige could not extort from the woman one instant ot submission or applause, all the wo- man's weapons of fascination and per suasion were wasted and blunted on 374: MADAME DE STAEL the impenetrable cuirasse of the des- pot. Their hatred was something in- stinctive, and almost physical, as nat- ural and incurable as that of cat and dog. During her fourteen years of exile, Madame de Stael led a wandering life ; sometimes residing at Coppet; ever and anon returning for a short time to France, in hopes of being allowed to remain there unmolested, but soon re- ceiving a new order to quit. She visited Germany twice, Italy once, and at length reached England, by way of Russia, in 1812. It was at this period of her life that she produced the works which have immortalized her " De la Litterature, De 1'Allemagne, and Co- rinne," and enjoyed intercourse with the most celebrated men of Europe. Nevertheless, they were years of great wretchedness to her; the charms of Parisian society, in which she lived, and moved, and had her being, were forbidden to her; she was subjected to the most annoying and petty, as well as to the most bitter and cruel perse- cutions ; one by one her friends were prevented from visiting her, or punish- ed with exile and disgrace if they did visit her; she was reduced nearly to solitude a state which she herself describes as, to a woman of her viva- cious feelings, almost worse than death. Her sufferings during this part of her life, are described with painful fidelity in her " Ten Years of Exile." ^ Several of the great men whose so- ciety she enjoyed during these memor- able years of wandering, have left on record their impression of her genius and manners ; and it is curious to ob- werve how uniform and self- consistent this impression everywhere was. She seems to have excited precisely the same emotions in the minds of both German literati and of English politi- cians vast admiration and not a little fatigue. Her conversation was bril liant in the extreme, but apt to become monologue and declamation. She was too vivacious for any but Frenchmen . her intellect was always in a state of restless and vehement activity ; she seemed to need no relaxation, and to permit no repose. In spite of her great knowledge, her profound and sa- gacious reflections, her sparkling wit, and her singular eloquence^ she nearly always ended by wearying even her most admiring auditors : she left them no peace ; she kept them on the stretch ; she ran them out of breath. Schiller, with whom she was often in company at Weimar, while he fully recognized the interest of her conver sation in its exhibition of French cul ture, and " the clearness, decidedness and rich vivacity of her nature," was overpowered by her oppressive mono- logue and declamation. " One's only grievance," he wrote to Goethe, " is the altogether unprecedented glibness of her tongue : you must make yourself all ear if you would follow her." Goethe also complained of her impatience in conversation, " never granting, on the most important topics, a moment of reflection, but passionately demanding that we should despatch the deepest concerns, the mightiest occurrences, as lightly as if it were a game at shuttle- cock." Sir James Mackintosh, who saw much of her in England and greatly admired her talents, says of her MADAME DE STAEL. 375 '* She is one of the few persons who surpass expectation; she has every sort of talent, and would be universal- ly popular if, in society, she were to confine herself to her inferior talents pleasantry, anecdote and literature which are so much more suited to con- versation than her eloquence and gen- ius." Lord Byron says of her in his Diary, " Her works are my delight, and so is she herself for half an hour. But she is a woman by herself, and has done more intellectually than all the rest of them together ; she ought to have been a man." Again, when in Switzerland, he wrote : " Madame de Stael has made Coppet as agreeable as society and talent can make any place on earth." . . . . " She was- a good woman at heart, and the clever- est at bottom, but spoilt by a wish to be she knew not what. In her own house she was amiable : in any other person's you wished her gone, and in her own again." In the more intimate relations of life few persons were ever more seriously or steadfastly beloved. She was an excellent hostess, and one of the most warm, constant, and zealous of friends on the whole, an admira- ble, lovable, but somewhat overpow- ering woman. On the abdication of Napoleon she rushed back to Paris, and remained there with few intervals till her death, filling her drawing-rooms with the brilliant society which she enjoyed so passionately, and of which she was herself the brightest ornament. But she survived the restoration of the Bourbons only a short time ; her con- stitution had been seriously undermin- ed by the fatigues and irritations she had undergone, and she died at Paris, July 14th, 1817, the anniversary of the taking of the Bastile, at the age of fifty-one. Her husband, the Baron de Stael, died in 1802. After many years of widowhood, during her residence at Coppet, she was privately married to Le Rocca, of an old family of Geneva.* The chief literary productions upon which the fame of Madame de Stael as an author rests, are her essays on "Literature considered in its relations with Social Institutions ;" her novels "Delphine" and "Corinne;" and her work on " Germany." A common philosophical spirit runs through them all. In the discussions of literature and society in their influence upon one another, she opened a field of specula- tion which has been greatly improved since she wrote, but which she was one of the first, certainly the foremost of her sex, to cultivate. It was something new to listen to a woman, gifted with the analytic and combining faculties, discoursing in a philosophical vein of the laws which govern the history of the human mind and of the bearing of mental development upon the improve- ment of the world. "While other female writers," wrote Jeffrey, "have contented themselves, for the most part, with embellishing or explaining the truths which the more robust intel- lect of the other sex had 'previously es- tablished, in making knowledge more familiar, or virtue more engaging, or, at most, in multiplying the finer dis- tinctions which may be detected about the boundaries of taste or of morality * For the previous portion of this notice we are indebted to an article on " The Life and Times of Madame de Stael." in the " North British Review." 876 MADAME DE STAEL. and in illustrating the importance of the minor virtues to the general happiness of life, this distinguished person has not only aimed at extending the boundaries of knowledge, and rec- tifying the errors of received opinions upon subjects of the greatest impor- tance, but has uniformly applied her- self to trace out the operation of gen- eral causes, and, by combining the past with the present, and pointing out the connexion and reciprocal action of all co-existent phenomena, to devel- op the harmonious system which actual- ly prevails in the apparent chaos of human affairs ; and to gain something like an assurance as to the complexion of that futurity towards which our thoughts are so anxiously driven by the selfish as well as the generous prin- ciples of our nature. We are not acquainted, indeed, with any writer who has made such bold and vigorous attempts to carry the generalizing spirit of true philosophy into the his- tory of literature and manners, or who has thrown so strong a light upon the capricious and apparently unaccount- able diversity of national taste, genius and morality, by connecting them with the political structure of society, the accidents of climate and external rela- tion, and the variety of creeds and su- perstitions.'"' By the side of the spirit of enquiry in the mind of Madame de Stae'l there was a certain intensity and enthusiasm of genius which tinctured all her thoughts and actions. Both were ex- hibited in her work on Literature. By the one she marshalled the facts supplied by different countries bearing upon her theme; the other was ex- pressed in her theory of human per fectibility. She sought unity in her subject by connecting its scattered parts in a law of progress to be detect- ed mainly in the growth and advance of philosophical speculation acting upon the welfare of the world. Com mencing with the literature of Greece she traces with much insight and sym- pathy the influence upon its great au- thors of the peculiar mythology and political institutions of the country, and passing thence to Rome finds the secret of her literature in the conditions of her national existence, as in the ad- option of the self-reliant Stoic philos- ophy. Through, all the predominance of the intellect is exhibited. In the breaking up of the empire, and the great change which was brought about by the descent of the northern nations, the amelioration of the barbarian is mingled with the new life of strength and courage infused into the conquered races. Christianity, kept alive in the institutions of the Middle Ages, with the respect for woman which attended its progress, prepared the way for mod- ern civilization, when letters and phi- losophy in the awakening of the human mind again assumed their authority. Under this general view is comprehen- ded a special estimate of the literature of the various European nations, in which, if there is often something de- ficient or erroneously conceived, it is yet impossible not to admire the vivac- ity and force of the author's mind, and the wide range of her studies, pursued under the disadvantages of her cheq uered life. The heroines of her novels, Delphine and Corinne, are representations of MADAME DE STAEL. 3T7 herself at different periods of life, the former in the turbulence of youth, the latter in the maturity and under the disappointments of middle life. Pas- sion tinged with melancholy is the in- forming spirit of Corinne, which has retained its hold upon the reading world by its glowing pictures of Italian art and scenery. " With few features of a story," writes "William Roberts, in a comparison of her genius with that of Hannah More, " the tale is so contrived as to keep attention and expectation constantly on the stretch, and to occupy the heart and engage its sympathies in deep and continuous emotion. The reader is hurried on without a breath- ing interval, with his eyes forever on Corinne, overlooking a multitude of absurdities and contradictions for her sake. All is in subjection to the bright lady of the ascendant. There is cer- tainly something very admirable in the art by which the author has contrived to merge the vanity of her principal character in the brilliancy with which she has surrounded it. When Corinne comes forth in the panoply of her en- dowments, we think no more of her vanity than of the Roman general pro- ceeding with his trophies in triumph to the capitol. There is a gayety and a grace accompanying all she acts and speaks, a majesty in her brow, a god- dess-like gait in her approach, that affects us almost supernaturally. A fatal passion seizes her: the Graces and the Muses gradually forsake her : the diadem drops from her temples : the incense of praise is withdrawn : a rapid dereliction of her powers lets her down to the level of common beings: she sinks into obscurity and dies a pitiable death." The work of Madame de Stael oii Germany, originally printed in Paris in 1810 and suppressed by order of Napoleon, was the first to present to foreign nations a general review of the growing intellectual wealth of the na- tion. It is divided into four parts treating respectively of " Germany and the manners of the Germans;" of "Lit- erature and the Arts ;" of " Philosophy and Morals ;" of " Religion and Enthu- siasm." "The voice of Europe," said Sir James Mackintosh in his analysis of the work, " has already applauded the genius of a national painter in the author of Corinne. But it was there aided by the power of a pathetic fiction by the variety and opposition of national character and by the charm of a country which unites beauty to renown. Her work on Germany is certainly the most ' vigorous effort of her genius, and probably the most elaborate and masculine production of the faculties of woman. What other woman, indeed, or (to speak the truth without reserve) what liv ing man could have preserved all the grace and brilliancy of Parisian society in analyzing its nature; ex plained the most abstruse metaphysic- al theories of Germany precisely, yet perspicuously and agreeably; and combined the eloquence which inspires the most pure, the most tender, and the most sublime sentiments of virtue with the enviable talent of gently in dicating the defects of men or of nations by the skilfully softened touches of a polite and merciful pleasantry ? " HORATIO NELSON TTORATIO NELSON, the son of JL _L Edmund and Catherine Nelson, vas born on the 29th of September, 1758, at the parsonage-house of Burn- ham-Thorpe, a village in the county of Norfolk, of which his father was rec- tor. The maiden name of his mother was Suckling; her grandmother was an elder sister of Sir Robert Walpole, and the subject of this notice was named after the first Earl of Orford. Mrs. Nelson died in 176 7, leaving eight out of eleven children. Upon this oc- casion her brother, Captain Maurice Suckling, of the navy, visited Mr. Nel- son, and promised to take care of one of the boys. Three years afterwards, when Horatio was only twelve years of age, and with a constitution natu- rally weak, he applied to his father for permission to go to sea with his uncle, recently appointed to the Raisonnable, of sixty-four guns. The uncle was ac- cordingly written to, and gave a reluc- tant consent to the proposal. " What," said he, in reply, " has poor Horatio done, who is so weak, that he should be sent to rough it out at sea ? But let him come, and the first time we go into action a cannon-ball may knock off his Abridged from the "Encyclopaedia Britannica." (378) head, and provide for him at once,' The Raisonnable, on board of which he was now placed as a midshipman, was soon afterwards paid off, and Cap. tain Suckling removed to the Triumph of seventy-four guns, then stationed as a guard-ship in the Thames. This, however, was considered as too inac- tive a life for a boy, and Nelson was therefore sent on a voyage to the West Indies in a merchant ship. "From this voyage I returned," he tells us in his "Sketch of my Life," "to the Tri umph at Chatham in July, 1772 ; and, if I did not improve in my education, I returned a practical seaman, with a horror of the royal navy, and with a saying then constant with the seamen, 'Aft, the most honor; forward, the better man.' ' ; While in connection with this guard-ship, he had the oppor- tunity of becoming a skilful pilot, an acquirement which he afterwards had frequent occasion to turn to account. Not many months after his return, his inherent love of enterprise was ex- cited by hearing that two ships were fitting out for a voyage of discovery towards the North Pole. From the difficulties expected on such service, these vessels were to take out none .'fc- tmisaf-, Wilson . Co..Pablisliers New York. HORATIO JtfELSOK 379 bat effective men, instead of the usual number of boys. This, however, did not deter Nelson from soliciting to be received, and by his uncle's interest he was admitted as cockswain under Captain Lutwidge, the second in com- mand. The voyage was undertaken in consequence of an application from the Royal Society ; and the Honorable Captain John C. Phipps, eldest son of Lord Mulgrave, volunteered his ser- vices to command the expedition. The Racehorse and Carcass, bombs, were selected as the strongest ships, and the expedition sailed from the Nore on the 4th of June, 1773, and returned to England in October. During this voy- age Nelson gave several indications of that daring and fearless spirit which ever afterwards distinguished him. The ships were paid off shortly after their return, and the youth was then placed by his uncle with Captain Far- mer, in the Seahorse, of twenty guns, which was about to sail for the East Indies in the squadron of Sir Edward Hughes. In this ship he was rated as a midshipman, and attracted attention by his general good conduct. But, when he had been about eighteen months in India, he felt the effects of the climate of that country, so peril- ous to European constitutions, and be- came so enfeebled by disease that he lost for a time the use of his limbs, and was brought almost to the brink of the grave. He embarked for Eng- land in the Dolphin, Captain Pigot, with a body broken down by sickness, and spirits which had sunk with his strength. But his health materially improved during the voyage, and his nati ve air speedily repaired the injury it had sustained. On the 8th of April, 1777, he passed, with much credit to himself, his examination for a lieuten- ancy, and next day received his com- mission as second lieutenant of the Lowestoffe, of thirty-two guns, then fitting out for Jamaica. In this frigate he cruised against the Ajnerican and French privateers which were at that time harassing the English trade in the "West Indies; distinguished him- self on various occasions by his activ- ity and enterprise ; and formed a friendship with his captain, Locker, of the Lowestoffe, which continued during his life. Having been warmly recom- mended to Sir Peter Parker, the com- mander-in-chief upon that station, he was removed into the Bristol flag-ship, and soon afterwards became first lieu- tenant. On the 8th of December, 1778, he was appointed commander of the Badger brig, in which he rendered important assistance in rescuing the crew of the Glasgow, when that ship was accidentally set on fire in Montego Bay, Jamaica. On the llth of June, 1779, he obtained the rank of post-cap- tain, and with it the command of the Hinchinbrook, of twenty-eight guns. As Count d'Estaing, with a fleet of 125 sail, men-of-war and transports, and a reputed force of 25,000 men, now threatened Jamaica from St. Domingo, Nelson offered his services to the ad- miral and governor-general, Dalling, and was appointed to command the batteries of Fort Charles at Port Royal, the most important post in the island. D'Estaing, however, attempted noth- ing with this formidable armament, and the British general was thus left to execute a design which he had 380 HOEATIO NELSOK formed against the Spanish colonies. This project was to take Fort San Juan, situated upon the river of that name, which flows from Lake Nicara- gua into the Gulf of Mexico ; to make himself master of the lake itself, and of the cities of Granada and Leon ; and thus to cut off the communication be- tween the northern and southern pos- sessions of Spain in America. Nelson was appointed to the command of the naval department, and distinguished himself greatly in the siege of Fort San Juan and in taking the island of St. Bartolomeo. Pestilence, however, decimated the crew of the Hinchin- brook; and her gallant young com- mander, prostrated by sickness, was compelled to return to England. He was taken home in the Lyon, by Cap- tain, afterwards Admiral, Cornwallis, to whose care and kindness he believed himself indebted for the preservation of his life. In three months, however, his health was so far re-established that he applied for employment; and, being appointed to the Albermarle, of twenty-eight guns, he was sent to the North Seas, and kept there cruising during the whole winter, which he did not at all relish. In this cruise, how- ever, he gained a considerable knowl- edge of the Danish coast and its sound- ings. On his return he was ordered to Quebec, and during the voyage the Al- bermarle had a narrow escape from four French sail of the line and a frig- ate, which, having come out of Boston, gave chase to her. Confiding in his own skill and pilotage, Nelson, per- ceiving that they gained on him, boldly ran among the numerous shoals of St. George's Bank, and thus escaped. In October, 1782, he sailed from Queber with a convoy of transports for New York, where he joined Lord Hood, and accompanied him to the West Indies. At the peace of 1783, the Albemarle returned to England and was paid off. After his arrival in England, Nelson, finding it prudent to economize his half pay during the peace, went to St. Omer, where he remained till the spring of the following year. On his return, he was appointed to the Boreas, of twenty- eight guns, which had been ordered to the Leeward Islands as a cruiser. Whilst on this station, where he found himself senior captain, and consequent- ly second in command, he evinced the utmost zeal and activity in protecting British interests, and in enforcing the Navigation Act, which brought him in contact with American interests in the West India Islands ; a line of conduct which involved him in much trouble, without procuring him reward or even acknowledgment the thanks of the Treasury having been transmitted to the commander-in-chief, who had thwarted instead of encouraging him in the discharge of an arduous and im- portant duty. On the llth of March, 1787, Nelson married the widow of Dr. Nisbet, a physician, and daughter of Herbert, the president of the island of Nevis. The Boreas returned to Eng- land in June, but was not paid off till the end of November, having been kept nearly five months at the Nore as a slop and receiving ship. Nelson was still in a very precarious state of health; and this treatment, whether proceeding from intention or neglect, excited in his mind the strongest indignation, His resentment, however, was appeased HOEATIO NELSON. 381 by tlie favorable reception which he met with at court, when presented to his majesty by Lord Howe ; and hav- ing fully explained to that nobleman the grounds upon which he had acted, he retired to enjoy the pleasures of domestic happiness at the parsonage- house at Burnham-Thorpe, which his father had given him as a residence. But the vexatious affair of the Amer- ican captures was not yet terminated. He was harassed with threats of pro- secution, and, in his absence on some business, a writ or notification was served on his wife, upon the part of the American captains, who now laid their damages at twenty thousand pounds. When presented with this paper, his indignation was excessive; and he immediately wrote to the Trea- sury, that unless he was supported by government he would leave the coun- try. " If sixpence would save me from prosecution," said he, "I would not give it." The answer he received, how- ever, quieted his fears; he was told to be under no apprehension, for he would assuredly be supported; and here his disquietude upon this subject seems to have ended. At the commencement of the French war, it was judged expedient again to employ Nelson ; and on the 30th of January, 1793, he was appointed to the Agamemnon, of sixty-four guns, and placed under the orders of Lord Hood, then holding the chief command in the Mediterranean fleet. Being sent to Corsica with a small squadron, to co-operate with Paoli and the party opposed to France, he undertook the siege of Bastia, and in a short time re- duced it. The place capitulated on the 19th of May, 1794. He next pro- ceeded in the Agamemnon to co-ope rate with General Sir Charles Stuart in the siege of Calvi. Here Nelson had less responsibility that at Bastia ; he was acting with a man after his own heart, who slept every night in the advanced battery. Nelson here re- ceived a serious injury. A shot, having struck the ground near him, drove the sand and small gravel into one of his eyes. He spoke of it lightly at the time, and in fact suffered it to confine him only one day ; but the sight of the eye was nevertheless lost. After the fall of Calvi his services were, by a strange omission, altogether overlooked, and his name was not even mentioned in the list of wounded. Nelson felt him self not only neglected, but wronged. " They have not done me justice," said he ; " but never mind, I '11 have a ga- zette of my own." And on another occasion the same second-sight of glory- led him to predict that one day or other he would have a long gazette to himself. " I feel," said he, " that such an opportunity will be given me. If I am in the field of glory, I cannot be kept out of sight." Lord Hood now returned to Eng- land, and the command devolved upon Admiral Hotham. Tuscany had now concluded peace with France ; Corsica was in danger ; Genoa was threatened ; and the French challenged the English on the sea. Having a superior fleet in the Mediterranean, they now sent it out with the express orders to seek the English and engage them. In the ac- tion which followed between the Eng- lish fleet under Admiral Hothain, and that which had come out from Toulon 382 HOEATIO NELSON. Nelson greatly distinguished himself, manoeuvring and fighting his ship with equal ability and determination ; and when the action was renewed the fol- lowing day, he had the honor of hoist- ing the English colors on board of the Qa Jra and the Censeur, which both struck to him, and were the only ships of the enemy taken on that occasion. About this time Nelson was made colonel of marines, a mark of approba- tion which he had rather wished for than expected; and soon afterwards the Agamemnon was ordered to Genoa to co-operate with the Austrian and Sardinian forces. This was indeed a new line of service, imposing multi- farious duties, and involving great re- sponsibility ; yet it was also one for which Nelson had already evinced a singular aptitude, and in which, had he been at all seconded by the land forces, his assistance would have led to important results. Through the gross misconduct, however, of the Aus- trian general, Devins, the allies were completely defeated by an army of boys, and the French obtained posses- sion of the Genoese coast from Savona to Voltri, thus intercepting the direct communication between the Austrian army and the English fleet. After this disgraceful affair, the Agamemnon was recalled, and sailed for Leghorn to re- fit, being literally riddled with shot, and having all her masts and yards seriously damaged. Sir John Jervis having arrived to take the command in the Mediterra- nean, Nelson sailed from Leghorn in the Agamemnon, which had now been repaired, and joined the admiral in St. Fioremo Bay. When the French took possession of Leghorn, he blockaded that port, and landed a force in the Isle of Elba to secure Porto Ferrajo. Soon afterwards he took the island of Capraja ; and the British cabinet hav- ing resolved to evacuate Corsica, he ably performed this humiliating ser- vice. He was then ordered to hoist his broad pennant on board of the Mi- nerve frigate, Captain George Cock- burn, and to proceed with the Blanche to Porto Ferrajo, and bring away the troops and stores left at that place. On his way thither he fell in with two Spanish frigates, the Sabina and Ceres, the former of which, after an action of three hours, during which the Span- iards lost one hundred and sixty-four men, struck to the Minerve. The Ceres, however, had got off from the Blanche ; and as the prisoners had hardly been conveyed on board of the Minerve when another enemy's frigate came up, Nelson was compelled to cast off the prize and go a second time into action. But, after a short trial of strength, this new antagonist wore and hauled off ; and as a Spanish squadron of two sail of the line and two frigates now came in sight, the commodore made all sail for Porto Ferrajo, whence he soon re- turned with a convoy to Gibraltar. Off the mouth of the Straits he fell in with the Spanish fleet, and reaching the station off Cape St. Vincent on the 13th of February, 1797, he communi- cated this intelligence to Sir John Jer- vis, by whom he was now directed to shift his broad pennant on board the Captain of seventy-four guns. Before sunset the signal was made to prepare for action, and to keep in close order during the night ; and at daybreak on HOEAT1O NELSON. 383 the 14th the enemy wore in sight. The British force consisted of two ships of 100 guns, two of 98, two of 90, eight of 74, and one of 64, with four frigates, a sloop, and a cutter; the Spaniards had one ship of 136 guns, six of 112 guns each, two of 84, and eighteen of 74, with ten frigates and a brig. The admiral, Sir John Jervis, made signal to tack in succession. Nelson, whose station was in the rear of the British line, perceiving that the Spaniards were bearing up before the wind, with an in- tention of forming line and joining their separated ships, or of avoiding an en- gagement, disobeyed the signal with- out a moment's hesitation, and ordered his ship to be wore. This at once brought him into action with seven of the enemy's ships, four of which were first-rates. After a desperate conflict, in which Nelson was nobly supported by Troubridge in the Colloden and by Collingwood in the Excellent, the Sal- vador del Mundo and San Isidro drop- ped astern, and the San Josef fell on board the San Nicolas. The Captain being now incapable of further service, either in the line or in chase, Nelson directed the helm to be put a-starboard, and calling the boarders, ordered them to board. The San Nicolas was carried after a short struggle, Nelson himself boarding her through the cabin win- dows. The San Josef was instantly boarded from the San Nicolas, the gal- lant little commodore leading the way, and exclaiming, " Westminster Abbey or victory ! " This was the work of an instant; but before Nelson could reach the quarter-deck of the Spanish ship, an officer looked over the rail and said they surrendered. This daring achievement was effected with com- paratively small loss, and Nelson him- self received only a few bruises. The Captain, however, had suffered severely in the action. She had lost her fore- topmast; not a sail, shroud, nor rope was left; her wheel had been shot away ; and a fourth part of the loss sustained by the whole squadron had fallen upon that single ship. As soon as the action was discontinued, Nelson went on board the admiral's ship. Sir John Jervis received him with open arms, and said he could not sufficiently thank him. For this victory the com- mander-in-chief was rewarded with a peerage and the title of Earl St. Vin- cent; whilst Nelson, who, before the action was known in England, had been advanced to the rank of rear-ad- miral, was knighted, and received the insignia of the Bath, and a gold medal from his sovereign. In April, 1797, Sir Horatio Nelson, having hoisted his flag as rear-admiral of the blue, was sent to bring away the troops from Porto Ferrajo ; and having performed this service, he shifted his flag to the Theseus, a ship which had taken part in the mutiny in England. Whilst in the Theseus he was employ- ed in the command of the inner squad- ron at the blockade of Cadiz. During this service his personal courage was eminently signalized. In a night at- tack upon the Spanish gun-boats (3rd of July, 1797), his barge was assailed by an armed launch, carrying twenty- six men, whilst he had only the usual complement of ten men and the cocks- wain, besides Captain Freemantle. Af- ter a severe conflict, hand to hand, eighteen of the enemy weie killed, all 884 HORATIO NELSON". the rest wounded, and the launch taken. Twelve days after this rencon- tre, Nelson sailed at the head of an ex- pedition against Teneriffe. It having been ascertained that a homeward- bound Manilla ship had recently put into Santa Cruz, the expedition was undertaken in the hope of capturing this rich prize. But it was not fitted out upon the scale which Nelson had proposed ; no troops were embarked ; and although the attack was made with great intrepidity, the attempt failed. The boats of the squadron being manned, a landing was effected early in the night, and Santa Cruz taken and occupied for about seven hours; but the assailants, finding it impracti- cable to storm the citadel, were obliged to prepare for retreat, which they ef- fected without molestation, agreeably to stipulations which had been made with the Spanish governor by Captain Troubridge, whose firmness and pre- sence of mind were conspicuously dis- played on this occasion. The total loss of the English in killed, wounded, and drowned, amounted to two hundred and fifty. Nelson himself was amongst the wounded, having, in stepping out of the boat to land, received a shot through the right elbow, which shat- tered the whole arm, and rendered am- putation necessary. Nelson was now obliged to return to England, where honors awaited him sufficient to cheer his mind amidst the sufferings occa- sioned by the loss of his arm. Letters were addressed to him by the first lord of the Admiralty and the Duke of Clarence ; the freedom of the cities of London and Bristol was transmitted to him ; he was invested with the order of the Bath; and he also received a pension of one thousand pounds a year. His sufferings from the lost limb, however, were long and painful. In April, 1798, he had so far recovered, however, as to hoist his flag on board the Vanguard, and was ordered to re- join Earl St. Vincent. Immediately on his arrival, he was despatched to the Mediterranean with a small squad ron, to ascertain, if possible, the object of the great expedition which was then fitting out at Toulon. He sailed from Gibraltar on the 9th of May for the Mediterranean, with three seventy fours, four frigates, and a sloop of war. On the 19th the squadron reached the Gulf of Lyons; and on the 22d a violent storm inflicted very serious in- jury on the Vanguard ; but after ex- traordinary exertions, the Vanguard was refitted in four days, and he re- ceived a reinforcement of ten ships of the line and one of fifty guns, under the command of Commodore Trou- bridge. Baffled in his attempts to get sight of the French fleet, he kept scouring the Mediterranean waters un- der a press of sail night and day for nearly two months, till, on the 1st of August, 1798, he came in sight of Al- exandria, and at four in the afternoon descried the French fleet. For several days previous to this the admiral had scarcely taken either food or sleep. He now ordered his dinner to be served, whilst preparations were making for battle ; and when his officers rose from table to repair to their several stations, he said to them, " Before this time to- moiTow I shall have gained a peerage, or Westminster Abbey." Brueys, the admiral of the French HOEATIO NELSON. 385 fleet, had moored his ships in Aboukir Bay, in a strong and compact line of battle ; the headmost vessel being close to a shoal on the north-west, and the rest of the fleet forming a kind of curve along the line of deep water, so as not to be turned by any means on the south-west. The advantage of num- bers, both in ships, guns, and men was in favor of the French. They had thirteen ships of the line and four frig- ates, carrying 1196 guns, and 11,230 men. The English had the same num- ber of ships of the line, and one fifty- gun ship, carrying in all 1012 guns and 8068 men. The English ships were all seventy-fours ; the French had three eighty-gun ships, and one three- decker of 120 guns. Nelson, accord- ing to the preconceived plan of attack, resolved to keep entirely on the outer side of the French line, and to station his ships, as far as he was able, one on the outer bow, and another on the outer quarter, of each of the enemy's, thus doubling on a certain portion of their line. The battle commenced at half-past six o'clock, a little before sunset. As the squadron advanced, the enemy opened a steady fire from the starboard side of their line into the bows of the leading British ships. It was received in silence, whilst the men on board of each ship were employed aloft in furling the sails, and below in tending the braces and making ready for anchoring; a proceeding which told the enemy that escape was impossible. Four ships of the British squadron, having been detached previously to the discovery of the French fleet, were at a considerable distance when the battle commenced, and, on coming up, 49 the Culloden, the foremost of these ships, suddenly grounded in the dark- ness, and, notwithstanding the great- est exertions, could not be got off in time to bear a part in the action. The first two ships of the French line had been dismasted within a quarter of an hour after the commencment of the action ; and the others had suffered so severely that victory was already cer- tain. At half-past eight o'clock the third, fourth, and fifth were taken possession of. In the meantime Nel- son had received a severe wound on the head from a langridge shot, which cut a large flap of skin from the fore- head, and occasioned such an effusion of blood that the injury was at first be- lieved to be mortal. But when the surgeon came to examine the wound, he found that the hurt was merely su- perficial, and requested that the admi- ral would remain quiet. Nelson, how- ever, could not rest, and having called for his secretary, had begun to dictate his dispatches, when suddenly a cry was heard upon deck that L' Orient was on fire. In the confusion, he found his way up unassisted and un- noticed, and having appeared on the quarter-deck, immediately gave orders that boats should be sent to the relief of the enemy. It was about ten min- utes after nine o'clock when the fire broke out in L' Orient. Brueys was dead. He had received three wounds, yet would not leave his post; and when a fourth cut him almost in two, he desired to be left to die upon deck. In the meanwhile the flames soon mas- tered the devoted ship, and by the light of the conflagration, the situa- tion of both fleets could be perceived, 386 HOEATIO KELSOK. their colors being clearly distinguish- able. About ten o'clock the ship blew up with a tremendous explosion, which was followed by a pause not less awful. The firing immediately ceased ; and the first sound which broke the silence was the dash of her shattered masts and yards falling into the water from the vast height to which they had been projected by the explosion. The com- bat recommenced with the ships to lee- ward of the centre, and continued till about three in the morning. Of thir- teen sail of the line, nine were taken, two burnt, and two escaped ; and of four frigates, one was burnt and an- other sunk. In short, it was a con- quest rather than a victory. The French fleet had been annihilated ; and if the English admiral had been provided with small craft, nothing could have prevented the destruction of the store- ships and transports in the harbor of Alexandria. Nelson was now at the very summit of glory. Congratulations, rewards, and honors were showered upon him by all the foreign states and powers, to which his victory promised a respite from French aggression. In his own country he was created Baron Nelson of the Nile and of Burnham-Thorpe, with a pension of 2,000 a year for his own life and those of his two immediate successors. A grant of $10,000 was voted to Nelson by the East India Company : the Turkish company pre- sented him with a piece of plate ; the city of London bestowed honorary swords on the admiral and his cap- tains ; and the thanks of the parlia- ment and gold medals were voted to Him and all the captains engaged in the action. In the distribution of re- wards he was particularly anxious that the captain and first lieutenant of the Culloden should not be passed over because of their misfortune. " It was Troubridge," said he, in addressing the admiralty," who equipped the squadron so soon at Syracuse ; it was Troubridge who exerted himself for me, after the action ; it was Troubridge who saved the Culloden, where none that I know in the service would have attempted it." Having made the necessary arrange- ments in regard to the prizes, and left a squadron before Alexandria, Nelson stood out to sea on the seventeenth day after the battle, and early on the 22d of September appeared in sight of Naples, where the Culloden and Alex- ander had preceded him, and given no- tice of his approach. Here he was re- ceived with every demonstration of joy and triumph, both by the royal family and the people ; and it was here he formed that unfortunate connection with Lady Hamilton which exercised so baneful an influence on the rest of his life. The state of Naples at this period was deplorable. The king, like the rest of his race, was passionately fond of field sports, and cared for al- most nothing else. The queen had all the vices of the house of Austria, with little to mitigate and nothing to enno- ble them. The people were sunk in ignorance and debased by misgovern- ment ; at once turbulent and cowardly, ferocious and indolent, irreligious and fanatical. Nelson was fully sensible of the depravity and weakness of all by whom he was surrounded ; yet, se- duced by the blandishments of the HOEATIO NELSON. 387 queen, the flatteries of the court, and the pernicious influence which Lady Hamilton now began to exercise over his mind, he suffered himself to be im- plicated in transactions which, to say the least of it, were not calculated to bring honor to his country, or to heighten his own fame. The defeat of Mack at Castellana, and the advance of the French towards Naples, were followed by the flight of the royal family, who were conveyed by Nelson to Palermo. After this an armistice was signed (10th of January, 1799), by which the great- er part of the kingdom was given up to the enemy ; and this cession neces- sarily led to the loss of the whole. Naples was occupied by the French under Championnet, and the short-liv- ed Parthenopean republic soon after- wards established. But the successes of the allies in Italy speedily changed the face of affairs, and prepared the way for the restoration of the exiled monarch. Relying on the diminished numbers of the enemy, whose force had been greatly reduced, the royalists took the field, and Cardinal Ruffo appeared at the head of an armed rabble, which he called the Christian army. Captain Foote, in the Seahorse, with some Nea- politan frigates, and a few smaller ves- sels, was ordered to co-operate with this force, and to give it all the assistance in his power. Ruffo, advancing with- out any plan, but ready to take advan- tage of any accident which might oc- cur, now approached Naples. Fort St. Elmo, which commands the city, was garrisoned by French troops; but the castles of Uovo and Nuovo, commanding the anchorage, were chief- ly defended by the Neapolitan " patri ots," the leading men amongst them having taken shelter there. As the possession of these castles would great- ly facilitate the reduction of Fort St. Elmo, Ruffo proposed to the garrison to capitulate, on condition that their persons and property should be re- spected, and that they should at their own option, either be sent to Toulon or remain at Naples, without being molested in their persons. These terms were accepted, and the capitulation was signed by the cardinal, the Rus- sian and Turkish commanders, and al- so by Captain Foote as commanding the British force. But Nelson, who soon afterwards arrived in the bay with a large fleet, made a signal to an- nul the treaty, declaring that he would grant to rebels no other terms than those of unconditional submission ; and notwithstanding the strenuous opposi- tion of the cardinal, the garrisons of the castles were delivered over as reb- els to the vengeance of the Sicilian court. This questionable transaction was followed by the execution of Car- accioli. This aged prince, a man who hitherto had borne a high character, and who was a commodore in the Nea politan navy, had, from some motive or other, joined the enemy ; and after be- ing tried by a court-martial of Neapol- itan officers assembled on board of the British flag-ship, was found guilty, and sentenced to death. This sentence Lord Nelson ordered to be carried into exe- cution the same evening, on board the Sicilian frigate La Minerva. As a re- ward for these services, which have, in the judgment of many, left a blot on the scutcheon of the great admiral. 388 HOKATIO NELSON. Nelson received from the Sicilian court a sword splendidly enriched with dia- monds, in addition to the dukedom of Bronte, with a domain worth about 3,000 a year. After the appointment of Lord Keith to the chief command of the fleet in the Mediterranean, Nelson was so deeply mortified that he made preparations for his return to England; and, as a ship could not be spared to convey him thither, he traveled through Germany to Hamburg, in company with Sir William and Lady Hamilton, and hav- ing embarked at Cuxhaven, landed at Yarmouth on the 6th of November, 1800, after an absence of three years from his native country. He was wel- comed in England with every mark of popular respect and admiration ; in the towns through which he passed the people came out to meet him, and in London he was feasted by the city, drawn by the populace, thanked for his victory by the common council, and presented with a gold-hilted sword studded with diamonds. He had now every earthly blessing except domestic happiness, which, in consequence of his infatuated attachment to Lady Hamilton, he had forfeited forever. Before he had been three months in England he separated from Lady Nel- son, after much uneasiness and recri- mination on both sides. On taking final leave of her, on 13th January, 1801, he emphatically said, " I call God to witness there is nothing in you or your conduct I wish other- wise." His best friends remonstrated against this causeless and cruel deser- tion ; but their expostulations produc- ed no other effect than to make him displeased with them, and dissatisfied with himself. The three northern courts of Den> mark, Sweden, and Russia, had now formed a confederacy for the purpose of setting limits to the naval preten- sions of Great Britain ; and as such a combination, under the influence of France, would soon have become for- midable, the British cabinet instantly prepared to crush it. With this view a formidable fleet was fitted out for the North Seas, and the chief com- mand of it given to Sir Hyde Parker ; under whom Nelson, who had recently been made vice-admiral of the blue, \ * consented to serve as second in com- mand. The fleet sailed from Yarmouth on the 12th of March, 1801 ; and on the 30th of the same month, Lord Nel- son, having shifted his flag from the St. George to the Elephant, led the way through the Sound, which was passed without any loss. The Danea had made every preparation for a deter- mined resistance. Besides, the navi- gation was little known and extremely intricate; all the buoys had been re- moved ; the channel was considered as impracticable for so large a fleet ; and in a council of war, held on board of the flag -ship, considerable diversity of opinion prevailed. Nelson, however, cut short the discussion by offering his services for the attack, requiring only ten sail of the line and the whole of the smaller craft. Sir Hyde Parker assented, but gave him two more line- of-battle ships than he had asked, and left everything to his own judgment. On the morning of the first of April, the whole fleet moved to an anchorage within two leagues of the town ; and HORATIO NELSON. 389 about one o'clock, Nelson, having com- pleted his last examination of the ground, made the signal to weigh, which was received with a shout throughout the whole division destin- ed for the attack. They weighed with a light and favorable wind, the small craft pointing out the course to be fol- lowed ; and the whole division, having coasted along the shoal called the Mid- dle Ground, doubled its farther extrem- ity, and anchored there just as the dark- ness closed, the signal to prepare for action having been made early in the evening. As his anchor dropped, Nel- son exclaimed, u I will fight them the moment I have a fair wind." On the following morning, at half- past nine, the signal was made for the ships to weigh in succession; at ten minutes after ten the action commenc- ed, at the distance of about half a ca- ble length from the enemy ; and by half-past eleven the battle became gen- eral. The plan of attack had been com- plete; but seldom had any project of the kind been disconcerted by more untoward accidents. Three of the ships had grounded, and only one gun- brig and two bomb-vessels could be got fairly into action. Nelson's agita- tion was extreme when he found him- self, before the action began, deprived of a fourth part of his force ; but no sooner was he in action than the wild music of the fight seemed to drive away all anxious thoughts ; his coun- tenance brightened, and his conversa- tion became joyous, animated, and de- lightful. At one o'clock the enemy's fire continued unslackened ; and the commander-in-chief, despairing of suc- cess, made the signal for discontinuing the action. At this moment, whilst Nel- son was pacing the quarter-deck in all the excitement of battle, a shot, passing through the main-mast, knocked the splinters about. "It is warm work," said he, " and this day may be the last to any of us at a moment ; but, mark you," he added, " I would not be else- where for thousands." The signal- lieutenant now called out that the sig nal for discontinuing the action had been thrown out by the commander- in-chief. Nelson continued to walk the deck, and appeared not to notice it. At the next turn, the lieutenant asked if he should repeat the signal. " No," replied Nelson ; " acknowledge it." He then called to know if the signal for close action was still hoist- ed ; and being answered in the affirm- ative, said, " Mind you keep it so." A little after, " I have a right to be blind sometimes, Foley," added he, ad- dressing the captain ; then putting the glass to his blind eye, in a mood of sport- ive bitterness, which gives an inexpress- ible interest to the scene, "I really do not see the signal," he exclaimed ; and after a pause, " Keep mine for closer battle flying ; that's the way I answer such signals ; nail mine to the mast." Between one and two o'clock, how- ever, the fire of the Danes slacken- ed : by half -past two the action had ceased, except with the Crown batter- ries, and one or two ships which had renewed their fire, though with but little effect. At this critical moment, Nelson, with his accustomed presence of mind, resolved to secure the advan- tage he had gained, and to open a ne- gotiation. He retired into the stero 390 HORATIO NELSON. gallery, and wrote to tlie Crown Prince thus : " Vice- Admiral Lord Nelson has been commanded to spare Denmark when she no longer resists. The line of defence which covered her shores has struck to the British flag; but if the firing is continued on the part of Den- mark, he must set on fire all the prizes he has taken, without having the pow- er of saving the men who have so nobly defended them. The brave Danes are the brothers, and should never be the enemies of the English." This, after an interchange of communications, led to an interview between Nelson and the Crown Prince, at which the pre- liminaries of negotiations were adjust- ed; and a treaty was at length con- cluded, by which the northern confed- eracy was dissolved, and the maritime superiority of Britain unequivocally recognized. For the battle of Copen- hagen, Nelson was raised to the rank of viscount, and, on the recall of Sir Hyde Parker, appointed to the chief command in the North Sea. Having settled affairs in the Baltic, Lord Nelson returned in a frigate to England. But he had not been many weeks ashore when he was called upon to attack the flotilla which had been prepared at Boulogne for the threaten- ed invasion of England. The enemy were fully prepared, however, and though nothing could exceed the gal- lantry with which they were assailed, the enterprise proved unsuccessful. He now desired to be relieved from this boat-service, thinking it an unsuitable employment for a vice-admiral; and his wishes were speedily gratified by the signature of the preliminaries of peace He had purchased a house and an estate at Merton in Surrey, meaning to pass there, the remainder of his days, in the' society of Sir William and Lady Hamilton. But the happi- ness which he had promised himself was not of long continuance. Sir William Hamilton died early in 1803. A few weeks subsequent to this event the war was renewed ; and the day after his majesty's message to parlia- ment, announcing the recommencement of hostilities, Lord Nelson departed to assume the command of the fleet in the Mediterranean. On the 20th of May, 1803, he hoist- ed his flag on board the Victory, and having taken his station immediately off Toulon, he there waited with inces- sant watchfulness for the coming out of the enemy ; yet notwithstanding all his vigilance, the Toulon fleet put to sea on the 18th of January, 1805, and shortly afterwards formed a junction with the Spanish squadron at Cadiz. Nelson had formed his own judgment of their destination, when Donald Campbell, then an admiral in the Por- tuguese service, went on board the Vic- tory, and communicated his certain knowledge that the combined French arid Spanish fleets were bound for the West Indies. The enemy had five and thirty days' start ; but Nelson calcula- ted that he should gain eight or ten days by his exertions. To the West Indies therefore he bent all sail with his ten ships, in eager pursuit of eigh- teen, and on the 4th of June reached Barbadoes, whither he had sent dis- patches before him. Deceived by false intelligence, he then stood to the south- ward in quest of the enemy ; but ad HOKATIO NELSON. vices having met Mm by the way that the combined fleets were at Martinique, he immediately sailed for that island, where he arrived on the 9th, and re- ceived certain intelligence that they had passed to the leeward of Antigua the preceding day, and taken a home- ward-bound convoy. It was now clear that the enemy, having accomplished the object of their cruise, were flying back to Europe ; and accordingly, on the 13th, he steered for Europe in pur- suit of them. On the 17th July he came in sight of Cape St. Vincent, and directed his course towards Gibraltar, where he soon afterwards anchored, and went on shore for the first time since the 16th of June, 1803. The combined fleet having thus eluded his pursuit, he returned almost inconsola- ble to England, to reinforce the Chan- nel fleet with his squadron, lest the enemy should bear down upon Brest with their whole collected force. Having landed at Portsmouth, Lord Nelson at length received news of the enemy's fleet. After an inconclusive action, in which they had run the gauntlet through Sir Robert Calder's squadron on the 22d of July, about sixty leagues west of Cape Finisterre, they had proceeded to Ferrol, brought out the squadron which there awaited their arrival, and with it entered Cadiz in safety. Upon receiving this intel- ligence, Nelson again offered his ser- vices, which were willingly accepted. The Victory, destined once more to bear his flag, was refitted with incredi- ble dispatch ; and such was his impa- tience to be at the scene of action, that although the wind proved adverse, he worked down the Channel, and, after a rough passage, arrived off Cadiz on the 29th of September, the day on which the French admiral, Villeneuve, had received peremptory orders to put to sea the very first opportunity. Fear ing that the enemy, if they knew hia force, might be deterred from ventur- ing to sea, he kept out of sight of land ; desired Collingwood to hoist no colors, and fire no salute ; and wrote to Gib- raltar to request that the force of the fleet might not be inserted in the ga- zette published there. The station which he chose was some fifty or sixty miles to the westward of Cadiz, off Cape St. Mary's. On the 9th of October, Lord Nelson communicated to Admiral Collingwood his plan of attack. The order of sailing was to be the order of battle. His ob- ject he declared to be close and decisive action. "In case signals cannot be seen or clearly understood," said he, "no captain can do wrong if he place his ship alongside that of an enemy." This was what he called the Nelson- touch. It was a mode of attack equal- ly new and simple. Every one com- prehended it in a moment, and was convinced that it would succeed. In fact it proved irresistible. Villeneuve, relying upon the infor- mation he had received, put to sea on the 19th, and at daybreak, on the 21st of October, 1805, the combined fleets were distinctly seen from the deck of the Victory, formed in a close line ahead, about twelve miles to the lee- ward, and standing to the southward, off Cape Trafalgar. The British fleet consisted of twenty-seven sail of the line and four frigates; the enemy's fleet of thirty-three sail of the line and 392 HOKATIO NELSOK seven frigates. But their superiority was greater in size and in weight of metal than in numbers; they had 4,000 troops on board; and the best riflemen who could be procured, many of them Tyrolese, were dispersed throughout the ships. Soon after daylight Nelson came on deck, and the signal was made to bear down on O the enemy in two lines, upon which the fleet set all sail ; Collingwood, in the Royal Sovereign, leading the lee line of thirteen "ships, and Nelson, in the Victory, leading the weather line of fourteen. Having seen that all was right, he retired to his cabin, and wrote a devout prayer, in which, after be- seeching the Almighty to grant a great and glorious victory, he committed his life to the God of Battles ; and in an- other writing which he annexed in the same diary, he bequeathed Lady Ham- ilton as a legacy to his king and coun- try, and commended to the public be- nificence his adopted daughter, Hora- tia, desiring that in future she would use the name of Nelson only. Black- wood went on board the Victory about six, and found him in good spirits, but very calm, and with none of that ex- hilaration which he had displayed on entering into battle at Aboukir and at Copenhagen. With a prophetic antici- pation, he seems {o have looked for death with almost as certain a convic- tion as for victory. His whole atten- tion was fixed upon the enemy, who now formed their line with much skill on the larboard tack. Then appeared that signal Nelson's last signal - which will be remembered as long as the language or even the memory of England shall endure : u England ex- pects every man to do his duty." It was received throughout the fleet with a responsive burst of acclamation, ren- dered sublime by the spirit which it breathed, and the determination which it expressed. " Now," said Nelson, " I can do no more. We must trust to the great disposer of all events, and the justice of our cause. I thank God for this great opportunity of doing my duty." On this memorable day Nelson wore, as usual, his admiral's frock-coat, bear ing upon the left breast the various orders with which he had at different times been invested. Decorations which rendered him so conspicuous a mark to the enemy were beheld with ominous apprehension by his officers, especially as it was known that there were riflemen on board the French ships, and it could not be doubted that his life would be particularly aimed at. This was a point, however, on which it was hopeless to reason or remonstrate with him. " In honor I gained them," said he, when allusion was made to the insignia he wore, "and in honor I will die with them." Nevertheless, Captain Black- wood, and his own captain, Hardy, having represented to him how ad- vantageous it would be to the fleet were he to keep out of action as long as possible, he consented that the Tern- eraire and the Leviathan, which were sailing abreast of the Victory should be ordered to pass ahead. But the order was unavailing ; for these ships could not pass ahead if the Victory continued to carry all her sail ; yet, so far from shortening sail, Nelson took an evident pleasure in pressing on. and rendering it impossible for them, to HORATIO NELSON. 393 obey his own order. As the enemy showed no colors till late in the action, the Santissima Trinidad was distin- guishable only by her four decks ; and to the bow of his old opponent in the action off Cape St. Vincent he ordered the Victory to be steered. In the meantime, an incessant raking fire was kept up on the Victory; and as the ship approached, Nelson remarked, " This is too warm work to last long." She had not yet returned a single gun, though by this time fifty of her men had been killed or wounded, and her main-top-mast, with all her studding- sails and booms, shot away. A few minutes after twelve, however, she opened her fire from both sides of her deck, and soon afterwards ran on board the Redoubtable, just as her tiller ropes were shot away. Captain Harvey, in the Temeraire, fell on board the Re- doubtable on the other side ; and an- other enemy's ship, the Fougueux, fell on board the Temeraire ; so that these four ships formed as compact a tier as if they had been moored together, their heads lying all the same way. The lieutenants of the Victory now de- pressed their guns, and fired with a diminished charge, lest the shot should pass through and injure the Temeraire ; and as there was danger that the Redoubtable might take fire from the lower-deck guns, the muzzles of which when run out, touched her sides, the fireman of each gun stood ready with a bucket of water, which, as soon as the gun had been discharged, he dashed into the hole made by the shot. In this situation, the Victory kept up an incessant fire from both sides, directing her larboard 50 guns on the Bucentaur and Santissima Trinidad. But Nelson's hour was now come. It had been part of his prayer that the British fleet might be as distinguished for humanity in victory as for bravery in battle. Setting an example himself he twice gave orders to cease firing upon the Redoubtable, supposing she had struck, because her great guns were silent ; for as she carried no flag, 7 O7 it was impossible instantly to ascertain the fact. From the ship which he had thus twice spared he received his death- wound. In the heat of the action, about a quarter after one o'clock, a musket-ball from the mizen-top of the Redoubtable struck the epaulette on his left shoulder ; and he fell upon his face on the spot covered with the blood of his secretary, Mr. Scott, who had been killed a short time befora " They have done for me at last, Hardy," "said he, as a Serjeant of marines and two seamen raised him from the deck. " I hope not," replied Captain Hardy. "Yes," he rejoined; "my back-bone is shot through." But, though mortally wounded, he did not for a moment lose that presence of mind for which he was ever distinguished. As they were carrying him down the ladder to the cockpit, he observed that the tiller ropes, which had been shot away early in the action, were not yet replaced, and ordered that new ones should be immediately rove. He was laid upon a pallet in the midshipman's berth, and the surgeon being called it was soon perceived that the wound he had received would speedily prove mortal ; but this was concealed from all except Captain Hardy, the chaplain, and the 394 HOKATIO NELSOX. medical attendants. Being certain, however, from the sensation which he felt in his back, and the gush of blood within his breast, that no human aid could avail him, he insisted that the surgeon should leave him, and attend O ' to those to whom he might be useful. " You can do nothing for me," said he. Suffering from intense thirst, and in great pain, he expressed much anxi- ety as to the fate of the action ; and his countenance brightened with a gleam of joy as often as the hurrah of the crew of the Victory announced that an enemy's ship had struck. At length he became very impatient to see Captain Hardy, whom he re- peatedly sent for; but that officer could not leave the deck, and upwards of an hour elapsed before he could quit his station. When they met they shook hands in silence, Hardy strug- gling to suppress his emotions. " Well, Hardy," said Nelson, " how goes the day with us ? " " Very well," replied the captain; "ten ships have struck, but five of the enemy's van have tacked, and show an intention of bearing down on the Victory. I have called two or three of our fresh ships around and have no doubt of giving them a drub- bing." " I hope " said Nelson, " none :>f our ships have struck." " There is no fear of that " answered Hardy ; upon which the dying hero said, " I am a dead man: I am going fast; it will soon be all over with me ; my back is shot through." Hardy, unable any longer to suppress his feelings, hastened upon deck ; but in some fifty minutes returned, and taking the hand of his dying commander, congratulated him on having gained a complete victory. He 'did not know how many of the enemy had struck, as it was impossible to perceive them distinctly; but four teen or fifteen at least had surrendered. " That's well," answered Nelson ; " but I had bargained for twenty." Then, in a stronger voice, he said, "Anchor, Hardy, anchor ; " and again, most ear- nestly, "Do you anchor." Next to his country, Lady Hamilton occupied his thoughts. " Take care of my dear Lady Hamilton, Hardy ; take care of poor Lady Hamilton ; " and a few minutes before he expired, he said to the chaplain, " Remember that I leave Lady Hamilton and my daughter Ho- ratia as a legacy to my country." The last words he was heard to utter dis- tinctly were, "I thank God, I have done my duty." He expired at half- past four o'clock, three hours and a quarter after he had received his fatal wound. The total loss of the British in the battle of Trafalgar amounted to 1587. Twenty of the enemy struck, and of the ships which escaped, four were afterwards taken by Sir Richard Stra- han. But unhappily the fleet did not anchor, as Lord Nelson with his dying breath had enjoined; a heavy gale came on from the S. W.; some of the prizes went down, some were driven on the shore, one effected its escape into Cadiz, others were destroyed, and four only were by the greatest exer- tions, saved. Still, by this mighty achievement, the navies of France and Spain received a blow from which they were not destined soon to recover; the gigantic combinations of Napoleon with a view to a descent upon England were completely baffled ; and the sue- HOEATIO NELSON. 39ft cess of his campaign of Austerlitz was in a great measure neutralized. The remains of Lord Nelson were buried at St. Paul's on the 9th of January, 1806. It is needless to add, that all the honors which a grateful country could "bestow were heaped on the memory of the man who had achieved this unequalled victory. Lord Nelson's brother, the Rev. William Nelson, D. D., was created Earl Nelson of Trafalgar and of Merton on the 20th November, 1805, with an annual grant of 6000, and with per- mission from his majesty to inherit his deceased brother's Sicilian dukedom of Bronte. Besides 100,000 for the purchase of an estate, 10,000 were voted to each of the hero's sisters. His dying request in behalf of Lady Hamilton and his " adopted daughter Horatia Nelson Thompson," the Brit- ish nation saw fit to utterly disregard. The one he left, in a codicil to his will written a few hours before his fall, " a legacy to my king and country ;" and the other "to the beneficence of my country." "These" continues the document, " are the only favors I ask of my king and country at this mo ment, when I am going to fight their battle ;" yet this codicil was virtuously concealed by the hero's reverend bro- ther until the parliamentary grant to himself was duly completed. Lady Hamilton died at Calais in extreme poverty and great distress on the 6th January, 1814. Nelson's daughter Horatia, was married in February,! 8 2 2, to the Rev. Philip Ward, an English clergyman. JOHN PHILPOT CURRAN JOHN PHILPOT CURRAN, the t-J wittiest and most eloquent lawyer of his day, was born at Newmarket, a small village of the county of Cork, Ireland, on the 24th of July, 1750. He was thus four years younger than his great associate in fame, Henry Grat- tan. Much has been said about his humble origin; but his ancestry was respectable, and though he rose in life by the exertion of his own talents with little aid from fortune, he can hardly be classed with those who have had to contend in the pursuit of knowledge with extraordinary difficulties. His father, James Curran, descended, we are told, from one of the soldiers who came over from England to assist in the ruthless subjugation of Ireland, in Cromwell's army, held the position of seneschal of a manor court at Newcastle and possessed some acquirements above his station, having some acquaintance with the Greek and Roman classics. Phillips in his animated work on " Cur- ran and his Contemporaries" speaks rather slightingly of these attainments, saying that " Old James Curran's ed- ucation was pretty much in the ratio of his income," which, he tells us, " be- sides the paltry revenue of his office, (396) was very moderate." All parties agree, however, in their tributes to the bright intellectual qualities of the mother, which conquered all defects of educa- tion. This lady, whose niaiden name was Philpot, belonged to a respectable family and was noted for the impres- sion made by her character upon those about her. She was witty, humorous, renowned in her neighborhood for her good stock of legendary lore. " The only inheritance," Curran would say in after life, " that I could boast of from my poor father, was the very scanty one of an unattractive face and person like his own ; and if the world has ever attrib- uted to me something more valuable than face or person, or than earthly wealth, it was that another and a dearer parent gave her child a portion from the treasure of her own mind."* She lived to witness her son's succes? at the bar, and, when she died about the year 1783 at the age of eighty, her son recorded his sense of his obligations to her in this monumental inscription, " Here lies the body of Sarah Curran. She was marked by many years, many talents, many virtues, few failings, no * Life of Curran, by his son, William Henrj Curran. Johnson "Wilson. to his carriage and drawn home by an applauding populace.' It was a great treat to hear Curran describe this scene, and act it" Various state trials followed, in which Curran appeared for the defend- ants, in vain exerting his eloquence to repel the system of information and the strong tide of severity which waa setting in, in the prosecutions of the 406 JOHN PHILPOT CURRAtf. dominant party. On the trial of the Rev. William Jackson, a clergyman of the Church of England, who was con- victed of high treason, for being the medium of communication between the Committee of Public Safety in Paris, and the Irish malcontents who looked for aid in their schemes from France, Curran sought in vain to influence the jury by a withering sketch of the in- famous Cockaigne, the single witness, the paid agent of Pitt, who had shared in the treasonable transactions that he might act the part of a spy and in- former. But when the prisoner was brought up for judgment, the law was disappointed in its victim. Before sentence could be pronounced, Jack- son, who had taken poison, fell dead In the dock. Another case which ex- cited much interest, and in which the eloquence of Curran saved his client,was that of a Mr. Peter Finnerty, the pub- lister of a newspaper called the " Press," who was tried for a libel on Lord Carn- den's administration, in publishing an article on the execution of "William Orr, a victim of these unhappy times, whose offence had been the adminis- tration of the unlawful United Irish- man's oath. On this Finnerty trial, Curran put forth his utmost powers in an exhibition of the character and pro- ceedings of the chief witness in the case, the informer, James O'Brien, whose name he made for ever memor- able in the history of this disastrous period. The Rebellion of 1798 ensued. In the year previously, Curran, in com- pany with Grattan and others, unable to realize their patriotic ideas for the welfare of their country or affect with moderation the dominant party in the harsh repressive work at hand, had withdrawn from their seats in the Irish House of Commons. "I agree," said Curran, in his parting words to his fel- low members, " that unanimity at this time is indispensable ; the house seems pretty unanimous for force; I am sorry for it, for I bode the worst from it : I shall retire from a scene where I can do no good, and where I certainly should disturb that equanimity ; I can not, however, go without a parting en treaty, that men would reflect upon the awful responsibility in which they stand to their country and their con- science, before they set an^example to the people of abandoning the consti- tution and the law, and resorting to the terrible experience of force." It is to the credit of Curran, that in the bloody scenes that followed, as well as in those which had gone before, his best services were ever at the call of the unhappy victims, whether' of their own treasonable folly or of the system of repression adopted by the govern- ment. Much of the peculiar force and variety of talent which he brought to this forensic work, perishing with the occasion, has been inevitably lost to his posterity. Few of his speeches were preserved, and tnose few were inade- quately reported, and necessarily so, for what skilled reporter, if such a one had been present, could render the thousand momentary graces of expres- sion, elicited on the instant and de- pendent upon some sudden and fleet- ing exigency of the case ? The words of Hamlet are in everybody's hands, but who could supply the acting of Garrick? "Of all orators, "says the JOHN PHILPOT CUKKAK 407 Rev. George Croly, "Curran was the most difficult to follow by tran- scription. The elocution rapid, exu- berant, and figurative in a singular degree was often compressed into a pregnant pungency which gave a sen- tence in a word. The word lost, the charm was undone. But his manner could not be transferred, and it was created for his style: his eye, hand and figure were in perpetual speech. Nothing was abrupt to those who could see him nothing was lost, ex- cept when some flash would burst out, of such sudden splendor as to leave them suspended and dazzled too strongly to follow the lustres that shot after it with resistless illumina- tion." In 1803 came that ill-judged and mel- ancholy sequel to the rebellion which had paid the penalty of its daring in the death or exile of its unhappy abet- tors. This was the short-lived effort at insurrection of Robert Emmet and his friends in Dublin. To add to Cur- ran's embarrassment in this hopeless affair in which he was much too wise to participate, the arrest of Emmet, by an accident of fortune, was connected with an attachment which he had formed for Curran's daughter, Sarah. He might, it is said, have escaped from the country with his life, but he would not leave without seeking an interview with the lady to whom he was ardently devoted ; so he took refuge in a house situated between Dublin and Curran's country seat, where he might have the opportunity of carrying out his inten- tions. In this place he was arrested, and some papers being found upon his person exhibiting his correspondence with Miss Curran, her father's house was searched for further letters, by which means Curran first became ac- quainted with this intimacy on the part of his daughter. His own posi- tion was above suspicion, and the pain- fulness of the affair was confined to his private domestic sorrow. Had it not been for these unhappy circumstances, he would doubtless have acted as the counsel for Emmet on his trial, for whose character he had great regard, and whose melancholy fate, endured with the most chivalric spirit, no one could have more sincerely lamented. Sympathy for the daughter of Curran still survives in the hearts of all readers touched by the feeling and graceful tribute of tKe poet Moore, and em- balmed in that plaintive utterance of Washington Irving, the paper entitled "The Broken Heart," in the "Sketch- Book." " She is far from the land where her young hero sleeps, And lovers around her are sighing ; But coldly she turns from, their gaze, and weeps, For her heart in his grave is lying." When these public and private trou- bles were over and Ireland had settled down under the Union, Curran, on the Whigs coming into power in 1806, was, ^pointed Master of the Rolls in Ire- land, and a member of the Privy Coun- cil, a judicial position wl ch he held for about eight years, when failing health compelled him to relinquish it. It was in this period of his career that the eminent Counsellor Phillips, to whose glowing narrative of his career, which Lord Brougham pronounced " one of the most extraordinary pieces of biography ever produced, Boswell 408 JOHN PHILPOT CUKE AN. minus Bozzy," we have been much indebted in this sketch, first made Cumin's acquaintance. Nothing can be more graphic than the words in which he has related his impressions of the man at this mature period of his career. " When I was called to the bar," says he, " he was on the bench ; and, not only bagless, but briefless, I was one day, with many an associate, taking the idle round of the Four Courts, when a common friend told me he was commissioned by the Master of the Rolls to invite me to dinner that day at the Priory, a little country villa about four miles from Dublin. Those who recollect their first introduction to a really great man, may easily com- prehend my delight and- my consterna- tion. Hour after hour was counted as it passed, and, like a timid bride, I feared the one which was to make me happy. It came at last, the important jive o'clock, the ne plus ultra of the guest who would not go dinnerless at Curran's. Never shall I forget my sen- sations when I caught the first glimpse of the little man through the vista of his avenue. There he was, as a thou- sand times afterward I saw him, in a dress which you would imagine he had borrowed from his tip-staff his hands on his sides his face almost parallel with the horizon his under lip pro- truded, and the impatient step and the eternal attitude only varied by the pause during which his eye glanced from his guest to his watch, and from his watch reproachfully to his dining- room. It was an invincible peculiarity, one second after five o'clock, and he would not wait for the viceroy. The moment he perceived me, he took me by the hand, said he would not have any one introduce me, and with a man- ner which I often thought was charmed, at once banished every apprehension and completely familiarized me at the Priory. I had often seen Curran often heard of him often read him but no man ever knew anything about him who did not see him at his own table with the few whom he selected. He was a little convivial deity. He soared in every region, and was at home in all ; he touched everything, and seem- ed as if he had created it ; he mastered the human heart with the same ease that he did his violin. You wept and you laughed, and you wondered ; and the wonderful creature who made you do all at will, never let it appear that he was more than your equal. After this, we have but little to re- cord, though the detail of his strongly marked personal character as given by his appreciative biographers might sup- ply many a page of amusing and in- structive incident. His last years were passed in broken health, chiefly in Dub- lin and London, in intimacy with the society gathering about the brilliant Whig leaders of the time. His death, following upon an attack of apoplexy, occurred at his lodgings at Brompton, a suburb of London, on the 14th of October, 1817, in the sixty-eighth year of his age. His remains were privately interred in a vault of one of the Lon- don churches, and seventeen years after, were removed to a public ceme- tery at Dublin, where they repose in a massive sarcophagus, simply inscribed with the name of CUKEAN. JANE AUSTEN. readers of the novels of Jane -- 'Austen, and the class includes a large number of persons of taste and refinement, have only of late had the opportunity of becoming, as it were, personally acquainted with her, in the possession of any adequate notice of her modest, unobtrusive life, outside of a private circle of family and friends. She was slightly known to her own generation, except by her writings ; and as these were not published till the later years of her short life, and her name was not given on the title- page of any of them till after her death, though there was no mystery of con- cealment, she attracted but little of the notice of her contemporaries. There is probably no other example in the history of English literature of an au- thor of so much merit having courted or received so little personal attention. This arose from no defect on either side. The fair authoress, if she had sought the society of the literary celebrities of the day, might have been received with as much distinction as her predecessor, Miss Burney; but her lot was cast apart from the great world of London, in a happy sphere of provincial life, congenial and all-sufficient to her hab- 52 its and inclinations, and she had ap- parently no wish to go beyond it. It is of this serene home-life, though it might have been suspected from her writings, that the reading world has its first accurate knowledge in a singu- larly appropriate Memoir, published in 1870, more than half a century after her death, by her nephew, J. E. Austen- Leigh, vicar of a country parish in Eng- land. Jane Austen was born December 16th, 1775, at the Parsonage House of Steventon, in Hampshire, England. Her father, the Rev. George Austen, rector of the parish, was of an old established family in Kent; he had been well educated, and had obtained a fellowship at St. John's College, Ox- ford. He was married to the daughter of a fellow clergyman, the Rev. Thomas Leigh, of Warwickshire, a younger brother of Dr. Theophilus Leigh, cele- brated for his longevity he held the mastership of Baliol College at Oxford for more than half a century and for his ready wit, which would have de- lighted Sydney Smith. Of this we have an instance in a letter of Mrs. Thrale to Doctor Johnson, written when the Master was eighty-six. "I never (409) 410 JANE AUSTEN. heard," she says, " a more perfect or excellent pun than his, when some one told him how, in a late dispute among the privy counsellors, the Lord Chan- cellor struck the table with such vio- lence that he split it. ' No, no, no,' re- plied the Master ; 1 1 can hardly per- suade myself that he split the table, though I believe he divided 'the Board" His humorous cheerfulness remained with him to the last. Only three days before he expired, at the age of ninety, he was told that an old acquaintance was lately married, who had recovered from a long illness by eating eggs, and that the wits said that he had been egged on to matrimony. " Then," said he, on the instant, " may the yoke sit easy on him." " I do not know," says Mr. Austen-Leigh, "from what com- mon ancestor the Master of Baliol and his great-niece, Jane Austen, with some others of the family, may have derived the keen sense of humor which they certainly possessed." The Austens, the father and mother of Jane, lived at Steventon for about thirty years, a family of five sons and two daughters growing up about them. Of the sons, the oldest, James, the fath- er of our biographer, in his youth at Oxford, was the projector and chief supporter of the collection of essays on University subjects entitled, " The Loiterer;" the second, adopted by his cousin, Mr. Knight, a wealthy gentle- man in Hampshire, came into posses- sion of his name and property; the third became a clergyman, and the two youngest entered the navy, both at. taining the rank of admiral. The elder of the two sisters, Cassandra, to whom Jane was devotedly attached, is spoken of as remarkable for her prudence and judgment. Educated by their father, the children all proved in their sever- al walks of life, persons of intelligence and character, acting well their parts in the world, repaying to their home the benefits of its amiable culture. " This was the small circle, continually enlarged, however, by the increasing families of four of her brothers, within which Jane Austen found her whole- some pleasures, duties and interests, and beyond which she went very little into society during the last ten years of her life. There was so much that was agreeable and attractive in this family party, that its members may be excused if they were inclined to live somewhat too exclusively within it. They might see in each other much to love and esteem, and something to ad- mire. The family talk had abundance of spirit and vivacity, and was never troubled by disagreements, even in lit- tle matters, for it was not their habit to dispute or argue with each other: above all, there was strong family af- fection and firm union, never to be broken but by death. It cannot be doubted that all this had its influence on the author in the construction of her stories, in which a family party usually supplies the narrow stage, while the interest is made to revolve round a few actors. The parsonage at Steventon was pleasantly situated in the midst of a generally agreeable rural district, and a sufficiently commodious dwelling, large enough not only for the rector's family, but for the accommodation of pupils, by whose instruction he added to his income. It was the seat of a liberal, JAKE AUSTEJN. 411 hospitable mode of living, representing the upper rank of the prosperous mid- dle class of England, with the advan- tages of a superior education on the part of the inmates. A carriage and pair of horses were kept, and the society of the family at home and in its various con- nexions, was enlarged by intimacy with many cultivated persons of the neigh- borhood. In the midst of these asso- ciations, Jane developed an early taste for composition. "It is impossible," writes her biographer, " to say at how early an age she began to write. There is extant an old copy-book containing several tales, some of which seem to have been composed while she was quite a girl. These stories are of a slight and flimsy texture, and are gen- erally intended to be nonsensical ; but the nonsense has much spirit in it. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about them is the pure and idiomatic English in which they are composed, quite different from the ornamented style which might be expected from a very young writer." Succeeding these first rollicking ef- fusions of her animal spirits, came an- other class of writings, also unpublish- ed, and very unlike those by which her fame was established. "Instead of presenting faithful copies of nature, these tales were generally burlesques, ridiculing the improbable events and exaggerated sentiments which she had mot with in sundry silly romances. Something of this fancy is to be found in ' Northanger Abbey' (the earliest written of her printed works), but she soon left it far behind her in her subsequent course. It would seem as if she were firs+ taking note of all the faults to be avoided, and curiously con- sidering how she ought not to write, be fore she attempted to put forth her strength in the right direction." The value of this discipline can hardly be overrated. Her writings were -to be the foundation of a new school of fiction in English literature, that of the quiet, natural yet humorous, and intelligent representation of the scenes of every-day life ; and to obtain mas- tery in this, it was necessary that she should free her mind of all the adverse influences in the distorted romantic or sentimental novels of tho day. Her sense of humor led her to ridicule their defects; so that when she fairly set about writing for the public, herself, she was not only on her guard, but extremely sensitive in rejecting every- thing which would mar the purity of her conceptions. Pure writing, free from all falsities and exaggerations, a just understanding of life and its rela- tions in the sphere within which she worked, had become to her matters of instinct, and when she put pen to pa- per, it was to utter the dictates, as it were, of her literary conscience. A more perfect illustration of unerring taste and self-knowledge, of natural powers so habitually under the control of judgment, is not probably to be found in the whole world of authorship in fiction. Her books in their kind are unique. Their peculiar charm of ease, simplicity, truthfulness and honestly won interest, has been felt by the finest minds. Cole- ridge, the most subtle of English critics, whose unerring genius penetrated every subject, pronounced them "in their way, perfectly genuine and indi ridua] 412 JANE AUSTEN. productions;" Mackintosh, a kindred spirit, admired the genius which had shown itself in "sketching out that new kind of novel ;" Whately brought his logical faculty to the analysis of their secret excellence ; Lord Holland was never weary of their humor ; and other illustrious eulogists might be cited, but the highest tribute of all, perhaps, is that paid to the author by Sir Walter Scott in his diary, where he records, in 1826, "Bead again, for the third time at least, Miss Austen's finely written novel of l Pride and Prejudice.' That young lady had a talent for describing the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life, which is to me the most wonder- ful I ever met with. The big bow-wow strain I can do myself like any now going; but the exquisite touch which renders ordinary common-place things and characters interesting from the truth of the description and the senti- ment, is denied to me. What a pity such a gifted creature died so early !" The novel thus admired by Scott was begun in 1796, before the writer was twenty-one years old, and comple- ted within the following ten months. She then proposed to call it " First Impressions." No sooner was it finish- ed than another was commenced on the basis of a still earlier composition, " Elinor and Marianne," the work in its new and enlarged form bearing the title, " Sense and Sensibility," the first published of her novels, though not till some twelve or thirteen years after the time at which it was written. " Northanger Abbey " was also compos- ed at this early date at Steventon. Much of the terseness and neatness of ex- pression which characterizes the style of these books is doubtless due to this long period of opportunity for revision. Changes had meanwhile taken place in the old home. Her father, at the age of seventy, resigned his rectory to his son, who was to be his successor, and removed with his family to Bath, where four years were passed till his death in 1805, after which the widow with her daughters resided an equal period at Southampton. In 1809 Jane Austen was finally settled with her mother at a house belonging to her brother, who, as we have mentioned, had assumed the name of Knight, at Chawton, still in her old county of Hampshire. Here the last eight years of the authoress were spent ; here she prepared her earlier writings for the press, and here she added to the stock several others, completing the standard series of her works. In their first reception by the trade we have the story, common enough in the history of literature, of the indifference of publishers to the merit of works, which on their appearance have proved decided favorites with the public. In 1797, immediately after its completion, the Rev. Mr. Austen wrote to Cadell the publisher, offering for his consideration the manuscript of "Pride and Prejudice," which he declined even to look at. In 1803 " Northanger Abbey " was sold to a publisher in Bath for ten pounds, and he thought so little of his purchase that he would not venture the further cost of printing, and kept the manu- script unused for years, till the success of the author's other works led to the repurchase of it by the family at the price which had been originally paid. JANE AUSTEN. 413 At length, in 1811, a publisher, Eger- ton, was found for "Sense and Sensi- bility;" "Pride and Prejudice" follow- ed in 1 8 1 3 ; " Mansfield Park " appear- ed the following year; "Emma," in 1815 ;" Northanger Abbey " and " Per- feuasion" appeared three years later, after the author's death. A uniform tone runs through these various compositions. The characters are chosen from the upper walks of English life, in that medium class be- low the nobility and above the vulgar ; such people, in fact, as the station of her father and the general prosperity of the family brought her in contact with. She wrote largely from her observation, indeed confined herself to the circle of her experience, yet she copied what she saw in no literal or servile spirit. Fond of producing the familiar scenes of common life, she yet infused into them a grace and manner of her own; so that the picture, whether heightened or subdued by her genius, was always distinguished by a certain harmony of expression. By patient thought and long discipline her natural powers were cultivated to an exquisite percep- tion of the proprieties. Writing to please herself and satisfy her own judgment, without dictation from pub- lishers or critics, she had nothing to turn her aside from that charming simplicity which was the law of her nature. It was impossible to di- vert her from the path which her own genius had marked out for her. To a suggestion from a friend, who had been appointed Secretary to Prince Leopold about the time of his marriage to the Princess Charlotte, that an historical romance illustrative of the House of Cobourgh would be an acceptable work from her pen, she replied that such a composition "might be much more to the purpose of profit or pop- ularity than any such pictures of do- mestic life in country villages as I deal ; but I could no more write a romance than an epic poem. I could not sit seriously down to write a serious ro- mance under any other motive than to save my life ; and, if it were indispen- sable for me to keep it up, and never relax into laughing at myself or at other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first chapter. No, I must keep to my own style, and go on in my own way ; and though I may never again succeed in that, I am convinced that I should to- tally fail in any other." The same friend had proposed for her consideration the character of a melancholy clergyman, passing his time between city and coun- try, absorbed in his literary studies. " The comic part of the character," she replies, " I might be equal to, but not the good, the enthusiastic, the literary. Such a man's conversation must at times be on subjects of science and philosophy, of which I know nothing ; or at least be occasionally abundant in quotations and allusions which a woman who, like me, knows only her own mother tongue, and has read little in that, would be totally without the pow- er of giving. A classical education, or at any rate a very extensive acquain- tance with English literature, ancient and modern, appears to me quite indis- pensable for the person who would do any justice to your clergyman ; and I think I may boast myself to be, with all possible vanity, the most unlearned JAKE AUSTEN. and uninformed female who ever dared to be an authoress." Again, in a letter to a friend, who appears to have been engaged in the composition of a ro- mance : h I am quite concerned for the loss your mother mentions in her letter. Two chapters and a half to be missing is monstrous ! It is well that I have not been at Steventon lately, and there- fore cannot be suspected of purloining them ; two strong twigs and a half towards a nest of my own would have been something. I do not think, how- ever that any theft of that sort would be really very useful to me. What should I do with your strong, manly, vigorous sketches, full of variety and glow? How could I possibly join them on to the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush, as produces little effect after much labor ? " It is precisely in this fine work and assiduous labor that the excellence of Miss Austen's writings consists. By this they have outlived whole genera- tions of fiction perishing on the shelves of circulating libraries their subject matter being of a general, not merely local or particular interest. An inti- mate study of human nature was the author's great resourse. It would seem harsh to compare her delicate products with the coarser works of Fielding and O Smollett, yet, in a far gentler walk, she was a pupil with them of the same school, interpreting life and manners, and the actions of the heart. Her char- acters thus, spite of the change of hab- its, are alive among us at the present day, and it is because we see the per- sons of our acquaintance reflected in their various moods upon her page, that we enjoy and admire her books, Macaulay in his comparison of her ge- nius with that of Madame D'Arblay, has gone so far as to class her in this portraiture of character with the great- est of dramatists. " Shakespeare," says he, " has had neither equal nor second. But among the writers who, in the va- riety which we have noticed, have ap- proached nearest to the manner of the great master, we have no hesitation in placing Jane Austen, a woman of whom England is justly proud. She has giv- en us a multitude of characters, all, in a certain sense, commonplace, all such as we meet every day ; yet they are all as perfectly discriminated from each other as if they were the most eccentric of human beings. There are, for in- stance, four clergymen, none of whom we should be surprised to find in any parsonage in the kingdom, Mr. Edward Ferrars, Mr. Henry Tilney, Mr. Edmund Bertram, and Mr. Elton. They are all specimens of the upper part of the mid- dle class. They have all been liberally educated. They all lie under the re- straints of the same sacred profes- sion. They are all young. They are all in love. Not one of them has any hobby-horse, to use the phrase of Sterne. Not one has a ruling pas- sion, such as we read of in Pope. Who would not have expected them to be insipid likenesses of each other ? No such thing. Harpagon is not more un like to Jourdain, Joseph Surface is noi more unlike to Sir Lucius O'Trigger, oo / than every one of Miss Austin's young divines to all his reverend brethren. And almost all this is done by touches so delicate, that they elude analysis, that they defy the powers of descrip JANE AUSTEN. 415 tion, and that we know them to exist only by the general effect to which they have contributed." A similar remark has been made by Arch- bishop Whately in a noticeable pas- sage of his article on the writings of Miss Austen, in the " Quarterly Re- view." " She has not been forgetful," he writes, " of the important maxim, so long ago illustrated by Homer, and afterwards enforced by Aristotle, of saying as little as possible in her own person, and giving a dramatic air to the narrative, by introducing frequent conversations, which she conducts with a regard to character hardly exceeded even by Shakspeare himself. " Passages like these might be multi- plied from the tributes paid to the ge- nius of Miss Austen by her critics. But we have cited enough to indicate to the reader her refined and substan- tial merits. Turning from her books to the authoress herself, we find her rep- resenting in her own character the best qualities of her fictitious personages, cheerful, self-denying, constant in her affections, always relied upon for her prudence and judgment. " In person," as she is described by her biographer, "she was very attractive; her figure was rather tall and slender, her step light and firm, and her whole appear- ance expressive of health and anima- tion. In complexion, she was a clear brunette with a rich color; she had full round cheeks, with mouth and nose small and well formed, bright hazel eyes, and brown hair forming natural curls close round her face. If not so regularly handsome as her sister, yet her countenance had a peculiar charm of its own to the eyes of most beholders. At the time of which I am now writing, she was never seen either morning or evening without a cap ; I believe that she and her sister were generally thought to have taken to the garb of middle age earlier than their years or their looks required ; and that, though remarkably neat in their dress as in all their ways, they were scarcely sufficiently regardful of the fashionable, or the becoming." Referring the reader for many inter- esting details of Miss Austen's personal habits to the memoir by her nephew and to an appreciative review of it by a female writer of our own day of ge- nius kindred to her own,* we must hasten to the closing scene of this fair maiden's life. In 1816, symptoms be- gan to be apparent of the progress of the fatal consumptive malady which had settled upon her. Her strength was declining, but not her constitu- tional cheerfulness, which sustained her to the last. She went on with the work she had in hand, her novel " Per- suasion," and re- wrote two of its most important chapters. This was finished in the summer. In the spring of the following year, 1819, she removed foi medical advice to Winchester, where, lovingly attended by her sister, she lingered in increasing feebleness till her death, on the 18th of July. Her last words, on being asked by her at- tendants whether there was any thing she wanted, were, " Nothing but death." Her remains were interred in "Win- chester Cathedral. A slab of black marble marks the place, near the tomb of William of Wykeham. * Miss Thackeray, in the " Ccrnhill Magazine " for August, 1871. WILLIAM WILBERFORCE. TTTILLIAM WILBERFORCE was born at Hull, in Yorkshire, England, the 24th of August, 1759. Though the first of his name to bring the family into prominent notice be- fore the public, he came of an ancient stock. His grandfather, who was twice mayor of Hull, changed the name from its older form,Wilberfoss. He was pos- sessed of considerable property by in- heritance and was engaged in business in the Baltic trade, at the head of a mer- cantile house in which his son Robert had a share. The latter was married to the daughter of Thomas Bird, of Barton, in Oxfordshire. Four children were the offspring of this marriage, of whom William was the third the only son. Me was apparently of weak constitu- tion in his infancy, small and feeble, but with indications of a vigorous intel- 1 ect. His disposition in these early years s spoken of as singularly affectionate. At the age of seven, he was sent to the grammar-school of his native place, pre- sided over by Joseph Milner, elder brother of the celebrated Isaac Milner, Dean of Carlisle, who was at this time his assistant. Wilberforce was noticed at the school for the beauty of his elo- cution, his recitations being held forth (416) to the other boys as a model for imi- tation. His father dying when his son was but nine years old, he was trans- ferred to the care of his uncle, William Wilberforce, at London, who placed him as a parlor boarder in a school at Wimbledon, kept by a Scotchman chiefly frequented by the sons of mer- chants, where, as he afterwards said, " they taught everything and noth- ing." Here he remained two years, passing his holidays at his uncle's house, with occasional visits to Not- tingham and Hull. The example or exertions of his aunt, a member of the Thornton family, a great admirer of the preaching of Whit efi eld, seemed likely permanently to affect his relig ious character by drawing him within the fold of Methodism, for which his mother, who was afterwards described by Wilberforce himself, as "what I should call an Archbishop Tillotson Christian,^' seemed to have little sym- pathy, if not a decided repugnance. Becoming acquainted with the impres- sions thus made upon his mind, she promptly withdrew him from what the family considered a dangerous influ- ence and brought him home again. The views of his grandfather on the WILLIAM WILBEKFORCE. 417 subject were expressed in the promise that when he came of age he should travel with Isaac Milner, accompanied by the threat that if he turned Method- ist he should not inherit a sixpence of his money. His friends also set about to effect a diversion by engaging the youth he was then but twelve in a round of social entertainments and amusements. Hull, as he wrote in a reminiscence of this period of his life, " was then as gay a place as could be found out of London. The theatres, balls, great suppers and card parties were the delight of the principal fam- ilies in the town. The usual dinner hour was two o'clock, and at six they met at sumptuous suppers. This mode of life was at first distressing to me, but by degrees I acquired a relish for it, and became as thoughtless as the rest. As grandson to one of the prin- cipal inhabitants, I was everywhere invited and caressed; my voice and love of music made me still more ac- ceptable. The religious impressions which I had gained at Wimbledon continued for a considerable time after my return to Hull, but my friends spared no pains to stifle them. I might almost say that no pious parent ever labored more to impress a beloved child with sentiments of piety than they did to give me a taste for the world and its diversions." He was now, while partaking of these gayeties, pursuing his studies for the university in the grammar-school at Pocklington, in Yorkshire. One of his school-fellows afterwards recalled the circumstance that he placed in his hands a commu- nication for the York paper, which he said was "in condemnation of the 53 odious traffic in human flesh," an indi cation that in his disposition the boy was father of the man. He was fond of English poetry, and excelled in composition, for which he had great readiness, and being sufficiently in- structed in the classics entered St John's College, Cambridge, in the au tumn of 1776, at the age of seventeen. Coming into possession of a large property by the death of his grand- father and uncle, he was now left free in a great measure to follow his own inclinations, and appears at the outset of his college life to have fallen in, to some slight extent, with the dissipa- tions of his fellow-students. " On the first night of my arrival at Cambridge," he writes, " I was introduced to as li- centious a set of men as can well be conceived. They drank hard, and their conversation was even worse than their lives. I lived amongst them for some time, though I never relished their society ; often, indeed, I was hor- ror struck at their conduct, and after the first year I shook off in great mea- sure my connection with them." He was never, indeed, censurable for any gross immoralities. Though accustom- ed in later years to judge himself some- what severely, he admitted in his favor that though he had altered his mode of life and thinking, he was in his col- lege days, " so far from being what the world calls licentious, that he was rather complimented on being better than young men in general." He soon, while he remained at the university, sought the acquaintance of the higher circle of the place, became intimate with the Fellows, and, though he charged himself with neglecting the 418 WILLIAM WILBERFOKCE. mathematics, much to his disadvantage as he came to think, he was yet a good scholar and acquitted himself well at the examinations, and obtained a de- gree. Before leaving the university, the mercantile business, in which he might have engaged, being no longer a ne- cessity to him, he had turned his thoughts towards political life, and a speedy dissolution of parliament being expected, looked forward to the repre- sentation of his native town of Hull. In anticipation of this event, he en- gaged actively in the canvass on the spot, and followed up a body of the freemen of the place who resided in the. vicinity of the Thames in London, entertaining them at suppers at Wap- ping, and practicing the art of popular eloquence in addressing them. The dissolution opportunely came off just after he arrived at age, an event which was duly celebrated with the roasting of an ox and other festivities on his own grounds. In the election which followed he was successful against powerful opposition in the county, ac- cording to the custom of the day pay- ing the voters freely for their suffrages. The election cost him over eight thou- sand pounds. His success gave him a brilliant introduction to the capital. " When I went up to Cambridge," he said, " I was scarcely acquainted with a single person above the rank of a country gentleman ; and even when I left the university, so little did I know of general society, that I came up to London stored with arguments to prove the authenticity of Rowley's Poems; and now I was at once im- mersed in politics and fashion. The very first time I went to Boodle's, I won twenty-five guineas of the Duke of Norfolk. I belonged at this time to five clubs, Miles and Evans's, Brookes's, Boodle's, White's, Goos- tree's. The first time I was at Brookes's, scarcely knowing any one, I joined from more shyness in play at the faro-table, where George Selwyn kept bank. A friend who knew my inexperience, and regarded me as a victim decked out for sacrifice, called to me, ' What, Wilber- force, is that you ? ' Selwyn quite re- sented the interference, and turning to him, said in his most expressive tone, "O, sir, don't interrupt Mr. Wilber- force, he could not be better employed.' Nothing could be more luxurious than the style of these clubs. Fox, Sheri- dan, Fitzpatrick and all your leading men, frequented them, and associated upon the easiest terms; you chatted, played at cards, or gambled, as you pleased." Wilberforce had formed the ac- quaintance of Pitt at Cambridge ; they were born in the same year, and com- menced their parliamentary career about the same time. An intimacy was formed between them in their friendly association at the club at Goostree's, of which Pitt at this time was a constant frequenter, and where the society was composed mostly of a number of intellectual young men re- cently from their university studies, and then entering upon public life. " Pitt," says Wilberforce, in his memo- randa of this period, "was the wittiest man I ever knew, and what was quite peculiar to himself, had at all times his wit under perfect control. Others ap- peared struck by the unwonted asso- WILLIAM WILBER FORCE. 419 ciation of brilliant images ; but every possible combination of ideas seemed always present to his mind, and lie could at once produce whatever he de- sired. I was one of those who met to spend an evening in memory of Shak- speare at the Boar's Head, Eastcheap. Many professed wits were present, but Pitt was the most amusing of the party, and the readiest and most apt in the required allusions. He entered with the same energy into all our different amusements; we played a good deal at Goostree's, and I well remember the intense earnestness which he displayed when joining in those games of chance. He perceived their fascination, and soon after suddenly abandoned them for ever." Wilberforce himself, as he intimates, was inclined to play deeply. He more than once lost a hundred pounds at the faro-table. One night, in the absence of the person who kept the bank, he accepted a playful chal- lenge to preside himself, and rose a winner of six hundred pounds. As much of this fell upon young men, heirs in expectancy, whose pockets were not over supplied with money, Wilber- force was naturally pained at the an- noyance to which they were subjected, and was thus cured, say his biogra- phers, of his fondness for the gambling- table. He was in the meantime closely at- tentive to his parliamentary duties, watching the debates and studying the House of Commons. He main- tained his independence ; though gen- erally in opposition to Lord North's administration, particularly on the American question, sometimes acting workmen were "sent to the bottom," as Stephenson had promised. George Stephenson received ten pounds as a present, and was appoint ed engine-man to the Killingworth en gine at good wages. His skill as an engine doctor became noised abroad, and he was called on to cure all the old, wheezy and ineffective pumping machines in the district. He soon beat the "regular" engineers, though they treated him as a quack. In 1812, the colliery engine-wright at Killingworth having been accidentally killed, George Stephenson was appointed to succeed him at a salary of one hundred pounds a year, and the use of a horse and now he was on the high road to fortune. The idea of applying steam power to the propulsion of wheel carriages had occupied the attention of many inventors from the time of Watt. The earlier notions all resolved them- selves into its application to carriages on ordinary roads. Trevethick appears to have been the first to put together the two ideas of the steam horse and the iron way. In 1804, he constructed an engine to pass along a tram-way at Merthyr Tydvil, but although it suc- ceeded in dragging after it several wagons containing ten tons of iron, at the rate of five miles an hour, this engine proved a failure, and was speed- ily abandoned in consequence chiefly of the imaginary notion, which Treve- thick adopted, that a smooth-wheeled engine would not " grip " or " bite," upon a smooth rail. Trevethick sub- sequently made two other engines on the same principle for Mr. Blackett, the owner of the Wylam Colliery, on which George Stephenson was born 436 GEORGE STEPHENSON. The first of these was never used at all, and the second, having been pnt upon the road with infinite labor, would not move an inch, but flew to pieces when the machinery was set in motion. This was in 1812. In 1813, Mr. Blackett, continuing his experi- ments, built an engine of his own, which " crept along at a snail's pace, sometimes taking six hours to travel the five miles down to the loading place. It was also very apt to get off the rail and then it stuck. On these occasions the horses had to be sent out to drag on the wagons as before." Whilst Mr. Blackett was thus experi- menting, to the amusement of his friends, who pronounced that his ma- chines would "never answer," George Stephenson was directing his attention to the best means of effecting some economy in the haulage of coal from the Killingworth Collieries to the river side. The high price of corn rendered the maintenance of horses very expen- sive, and with a view to save the keep of as many as possible, he laid down inclined planes, where the nature of the ground permitted, and let down his loaded coal wagons by a rope, of which the other end was attached to a train of empty wagons on a parallel incline. The rope ran upon wheels fastened to the train-road. But this plan did not satisfy him. He recurred to the idea of a locomo- tive, and determined to go over to Wylam and see Mr. Blackett's "Black Billy." After mastering its arrange- ments, he declared " his full conviction that he could make a better engine one that would draw steadier and work more cheaply and effectively." He proceeded to bring the subject un der the notice of the Killingworth lessees, and Lord Ravensworth, the principal partner, having formed a very favorable opinion of him, author- ized him to construct a locomotive, and promised to advance the money for the purpose. In defiance of the theoretical difficulty which had possessed the mind of Trevethick, he made all its wheels smooth, and it was the first en gine which was so constructed. It was placed on the Killingworth railroad, on the 25th of July, 1814, and its powers were tried the same day. " On an ascending gradient of ^1 in 450, it succeeded in drawing after it eight loaded carriages, of thirty tons weight, at about four miles an hour ; and foi some time after it continued regularly at work." When this engine was put upon the rail, Mr. Stephenson was almost the only person who had implicit faith in the contrivance. Mr. Blackett's engines at Wylam were believed to be working at a loss ; the machines tried elsewhere had proved failures, and had been abandoned; and even the colliery owners, who were supposed to be the only persons who could possibly profit by them, were not generally favorable to locomotive traction, and were not given to encourage experiments. " Ste- phenson alone remained in the field, after all the improvers and inventors of the locomotive had abandoned it in despair. He continued to entertain the most confident expectations as to its eventual success. He even went so far as to say that it would yet super sede every other tractive power." His whole thoughts were now em GEORGE STEPHEIS^SOK 437 ployed on the perfecting of this ma- chine, and of the road on which it was to work, for he was in the habit of re- garding them as one, speaking of the rail and the wheel as " man and wife." He began by improving the joints of the rails, then by devising a new chair for them to rest on. He next turned his attention to the wheels of the loco- motive, making them lighter, as well as more durable. He afterwards in- vented a "steam spring," which re- mained some time in use, until super- seded by a better article. Subse- quenly he studied the question of re- sistance, which included the whole subject of gradients, and on which he arrived at the conclusion, from which he never afterwards deviated, that the power of the locomotive was best adapted to level roads. Several years passed away before Geoi'ge Stephenson obtained another opportunity. During that time his locomotive engine was in daily use on the Killingworth railway, without ex- citing much attention, But in 1819, the owners of the Hetton Colliery, in Durham, determined to have their wagon- way constructed for locomotive engines. They invited George Ste- phenson to act as their engineer; and on the 18th of November, 1822, he opened a line of railway of about eight miles long, from the Hetton Colliery to its shipping-place upon the Wear, on which five locomotives of his own construction were worked, capable of traveling at the rate of four miles an hour, and of dragging a train of seven- teen coal- wagons weighing about sixty- four tons. In the year 1821, Mr. Pease of Dar- lington, and other gentlemen of the vicinity, obtained an act of parlia ment, enabling them " to make a rail- way, or tram-road, from Stockton fr Witton Park Colliery (by Darling ton)." The object was " to facilitate .the conveyance of coal, iron, lime, corn and other commodities ; " and the pro- moters purposed to work the railway " with men and horses, or otherwise." It was in the winter of 1821, that George Stephenson, having heard of this project, went over to Darlington, with a letter from Mr. Lambert, the manager at Killingworth, and intro- duced himself to Mr. Pease. The plans of the road were undetermined. Ste- phenson strongly persuaded him to adopt a railway in preference to a tram-road, and a locomotive engine in preference to horse power. Mr. Pease communicated these ideas to the di- rectors, who asked Stephenson to sur- vey the country for them, which he did in company with his son. The first rail of the line was laid on the 23d of May, 1822. Shortly after this date, Mr. Pease paid a visit to Killingworth, in company with u his friend," Thomas Richardson (the then head of the firm of Richardson, Overend, Gurney & Co., in Lombard Street), for the pur- pose of examining the locomotive. Stephenson soon had it brought up, made the gentlemen mount it, and showed them its paces. Harnessing it to a train of loaded wagons, he ran it along the railroad, and so thoroughly satisfied his visitors of its powers and capabilities, that from that day Edward Pease was a declared supporter of the locomotive engine. In preparing, in 1823, the amended Stockton and Dar GEOKGE STEPHENSOK i ngton Act, at Mr. Stephenson's urgent request Mr. Pease had a clause insert- ed, taking power to work the railway by means of locomotive engines, and to employ them for the haulage of passengers as well as of merchandise ; and Mr. Pease gave a further and still stronger proof of his conviction as to the practical value of the locomotive, by entering into a partnership with Mr. Stephenson, in the following year, for the establishment of a locomotive foundry and manufactory in the town of Newcastle the northern centre of the English railroad system. The second Stockton and Darlington Act was obtained in the session of 1823, not, however, without opposition. Mr. Stephenson was regularly appointed the company's engineer, at a salary of three hundred pounds per annum, and he forthwith removed with his family from Killingworth to Darlington. The Stockton and Darlington rail- way was opened for traffic on the 27th of September, 1825, and was the ear- liest public highway of the kind. Mr. Stephenson himself drove the first en- gine. The train consisted of six wagons loaded with coals and flour ; after these came a passenger-coach, occupied by the directors and their friends ; then twen- ty-one wagons, fitted up for other pas- sengers, and lastly, six wagon-loads of coals, making in all thirty-eight vehi- cles. The train went at a steady pace of from four to six miles an hour, and its arrival in Stockton excited deep in- terest and admiration. From the very outset, this railway was most successful. The traffic on which the company had estimated their profit was greatly exceeded. Instead i of sending ten thousand tons of coal a year to Stockton, as they had calcu lated, their shipments in a few yearp were above five hundred thousand tons, and have since far surpassed that amount. At first, passengers were not thought of, but they wanted to be taken, and, by George Stephenson'a advice, passenger-carriages were placed upon the line. One striking result of this railway was the creation of the town of Middlesborough-on-Tees. When the railway was opened in 1825, the site of this future metropolis of Cleveland was occupied by a solitary {arm-house and its out-buildings. All round was pasture-land or mud-banks ; scarcely another house was within sight. But when the coal export trade, foster- ed by the halfpenny maximum rate im posed by the Legislature, seemed likely to attain a gigantic growth, and it was found that the accommodation furnish- ed at Stockton was insufficient, Mr. Edward Pease, joined by a few of his Quaker friends, bought about five or six hundred acres of land, five miles lower down the river the site of the modern Middlesborough for the pur- pose of forming a new seaport for the shipment of coals brought to the Tees by the railway. The line was accord- ingly shortly extended thither, docks were excavated, a town sprang up, churches, chapels, and schools were built, with a custom-house, mechanics' institute, banks, ship-building yards, and iron factories ; and in a few years the port of Middlesborough became one of the most important on the north-east coast of England. In the year 1845. fifty thousand five hundred and forty eight tons of coals were ship GEOEGE STEPHE^SOK ped in the nine-acre dock, by means of the ten coal-drops abutting thereupon. In about ten years, a busy population of about six thousand persons (since swelled into fifteen thousand) occupied the site of the original farm-house. More recently, the discovery (by Mr. John Phillips) of vast stores of iron- stone in the Cleveland Hills, close ad- joining Middlesborough, has tended still more rapidly to augment the pop- ulation and increase the commercial importance of the place. Iron furnaces are now blazing along the Vale of Cleveland, and new smelting- works are rising up in all directions, fed by the railway which brings to them their supplies of fuel from the Durham coal- fields. A line of railway, to be worked by horses, had been projected from Liver- pool to Manchester, in 1821 ; the op- position, however, was so powerful, that the idea was laid aside ; in 1823, it was again proposed, to be again dropped; in 1824, it was once more revived, and the promoters determined to send a deputation to Killingworth to see George Stephenson's engine. Being amply satisfied with what they saw, they offered him the post of engineer to lay out their line. In the face of extraordinary difficulties, he proceeded to make a survey of the country. The bill for the railway went into commit- tee of the House of Commons on the 21st of March, 1825. It was vehe- mently opposed by the canal compa- nies, the land-owners, and almost every one interested. "When I went to Liverpool," says Stephen son, " to plan a line from thence fco Manchester, I pledged myself to the directors to attain a speed of ten milea an hour. I said I had no doubt the locomotive might be made to go much faster, but that we had better be mo derate at the beginning. The direc- tors said I was quite right ; for that if, when they went to parliament, I talked of going at a greater rate than ten miles an hour, I should put a cross upon the concern. It was not an easy task for me to keep the engine down to ten miles an hour, but it must be done, and I did my best. I had to place myself in that most unpleasant of all positions the witness-box of a parliamentary committee. I was not long in it before I began to wish for a hole to creep out at ! I could not find words to satisfy either the committee or myself. I was subjected to the cross-examination of eight or ten bar. risters, purposely, as far as possible, to bewilder me. Some member of the committee asked if I was a foreigner, and another hinted that I was mad. But I put up with every rebuff, and went on with my plans, determined not to be put down." The great difficulty in making a rail way from Liverpool to Manchester was the passage across Chat-Moss a bog about four miles broad and more than thirty-feet deep. Mr. (afterward Baron) Alderson described it to the committee as " an immense mass of pulp, and noth- ing else. It actually rises in height," he said, "from rain, swelling like a sponge, and sinks again in dry weather. If a boring instrument is put into it, it sinks immediately by its own weight. Who but Mr. Stephenson," asked Mr. Alderson, "who but Mr. Stephenson would have thought of carrying a rail GEORGE STEPHENSOJV. way across Chat-Moss ? " " It was," he said, " ignorance inconceivable ; it was perfect madness. The man had ap- plied himself to a subject of which he had no knowledge, and to which he had no science to apply!" Pro- fessed engineers were called who con- firmed these opinions. No one was found to support Mr. Stephenson, and ultimately, although the committee de- clared the preamble to be proved by a majority of only one (thirty-seven to thirty-six), they refused the company compulsory power to take land to make the railway; and thus the bill was virtually lost. But -the necessity of a new line of communication between Liverpool and Manchester had been established, and the Liverpool merchants were deter- mined to obtain it. They went to par- liament in the next session for another bill, which appears to have been of a less ambitious character, and to have been framed upon the precedent of the Stockton and Darlington. In the evidence before the House they avoid- ed the case of Chat-Moss, and proposed to work their railway by the applica- tion of horse-power. The act was granted, and Mr. Stephenson at once made arrangements to commence the works. He began with the " impossi- ble" to do that which the most dis- tinguished engineers of the day had declared that no man in his senses would undertake to do, namely, to make a road across the Chat-Moss. The draining of the Moss was com- menced in June, 1826. It was indeed a most formidable undertaking; and it has been well observed that to carry fi railway along, under, or over such a material, could never have been con templated by any ordinary mind. Mr Stephenson proceeded to form the line in the following manner: He had deep drains cut about five yards apart, and when the moss between those drains had become perfectly dry, it was used to form the embankment where necessary; and so well did it succeed, that only about four times the quantity was required that would have been necessary on hard ground. Where the road was to be on a level, drains were cut on each side of the intended line, by which, intersected by occa- sional cross drains, the upper part of the moss became dry and tolerably firm ; and on this hurdles were placed, either in double or single layers, as the case required, four feet broad and nine feet long, covered with heath. The ballast was then placed on these floating hurdles ; longitudinal bear- ings, as well as cross sleepers, were used to support the rails where neces- sary, and the whole was thoroughly drained. In the cutting the work had to be accomplished by drainage alone. The only advantage in favor of these operations was, that the surface of the moss was somewhat higher than the surrounding country, which circum- stance partially assisted the drainage In proceeding with these operations, however, difficulties from time to time presented themselves, which were over- come with singular sagacity by the en- gineer. Thus, when the longitudinal drains were first cut along either side of the intended railway, the oozy fluid of the bog poured in, threatening in many places to fill it up entirely, and bring it back to the original level. Mi GEOKGE STEPHENSON. 441 Stephenson then hit upon the follow- ing expedient. He sent up to Liver- pool and Manchester and bought up all the old tallow casks that could be found; and, digging out the trench anew, he had the casks inserted along the bottom, their ends thrust into each other, thus keeping up the continuity of the drain. The pressure of the bog, however, on both sides of the casks, as well as from beneath, soon forced them out of position,* and the line of casks lay unequally along the surface. They were then weighted with clay for the purpose of keeping them down. This expedient proved successful, and the drainage proceeded. Then the moss between the two lines of drains was spread over with hurdles, sand and arth, for the purpose of forming the road. But it was soon apparent that this weight was squeezing down the moss and making it rise up on either side of the line, so that the railway lay as it were in a valley, and formed one huge drain across the bog. To correct this defect, the moss was weighted with hurdles and earth to the extent of about thirty feet outside of the line on either side, by which means the adjacent bog was forced down, and the line of rail- way in the centre was again raised to its proper position. By these expedi- ents, the necessity for devising which was constantly occurring, and as con- stantly met with remarkable success, the work went forward, and the rails were laid down. The formation of the heavy embank- ment, above referred to, on the edge of the moss, presented considerable diffi culties. The weight of the earth pressed it down through the fluid, and thou- 5f> sands of cubic yards were engulfed be- fore the road made any approach to the required level. For weeks the stuff was poured in, and little or no progress seemed to have been made. The di- rectors of the railway became alarmed, and they feared that the evil prognos- tications of the eminent civil engineers were now about to be realized. Mr. Stephenson was asked for his opinion, and his invariable answer was, " We must persevere." And so he went on ; but still the insatiable bog gaped for more material, which was emptied in truck-load after truck-load without any apparent effect. Then a special meet- ing of the board was summoned, and it was held upon the spot, to determine whether the work should be proceeded with or abandoned! Mr. Stephenson himself afterwards described the trans- action at a public dinner given at Bir- mingham, on the 23d of December, 1837, on the occasion of a piece of plate being presented to his son, the engineer of the London and Birming- ham railway. He related the anecdote, he said, for the purpose of impressing upon the minds of those who heard him the necessity of perseverance. "After working for weeks and weeks," said he, " in filling in materials to form the road, there did not yet ap- pear to be the least sign of our being able to raise the solid embankment one single inch ; in short, we went on fill- ing in without the slightest apparent effect. Even my assistants began to feel uneasy, and to doubt of the suc- cess of the scheme. The directors, too, spoke of it as a hopeless task, and at length they became seriously alarmed, so much so, indeed, that a board meet- 442 GEOEGE STEPHENSOK ing was held on Chat-Moss to decide whether I should proceed any farther. They had previously taken the opin- ions of other engineers, who reported unfavorably. There was no help for it, however, but to go on. An im- mense outlay had been incurred, and great loss would have been occasioned had the scheme been then abandoned and the line taken by another route. So the directors were compelled to al- low me to go on with my plans, in the ultimate success of which I myself never for one moment doubted. De- termined, therefore, to persevere as be- fore, I ordered the works to be carried on vigorously ; and, to the surprise of every one connected with the under- taking, in six months from the day on which the board had held its special meeting on the Moss, a locomotive en- gine and carriage passed over the very spot with a party of the directors' friends on their way to dine at Man- chester." The idea which bore him up in the face of so many adverse opinions, in assuming that a safe road could be formed across the floating bog, was this : that a ship floated in water, and that the moss was certainly more capa- ble of supporting such a weight than water was; and he knew that if he could once get the material to float he would succeed. That his idea was cor- rect is proved by the fact that Chat- Moss now forms the very best part of the line of railway between Liverpool and Manchester. Nor was the cost of construction of this part of the line ex- cessive. The formation of the road across Chat-Moss amounted to about twenty-eight thousand pounds, Mr. Giles's estimate having been two hun dred and seventy thousand pounds ! The directors of the Liverpool and Manchester line remained long unde cided as to the mode in which it should be worked. They were inundated with projects, but no one, except George Stephenson, ever pressed upon them the locomotive engine. With unwea- ried earnestness he continued to repre- sent his favorite machine as superior to every other power; till at length the directors determined to send two professional engineers of high standing Mr. Walker, of Limehouse, and Mr. Rastrick, of Stourbridge (to visit Dar- lington, and report upon the working of that machine. Although admitting with apparent candor that improve- ments were to be anticipated in the locomotive engine, the reporting engi- neers clearly had no faith in its power nor belief in its eventual success ; and the united conclusion of the two was that, " considering the question in every point of view ^taking two lines of road as now forming, and having reference to economy, dispatch, safety and con- venience our opinion is that, if it be resolved to make the Liverpool and Manchester railway complete at once, so as to accommodate the traffic, or a quantity approaching to it, the station- ary reciprocating system is the best." And in order to carry the system re- commended by them into effect, they proposed to divide the railroad be- tween Liverpool and Manchester into nineteen stages of about a mile and a half each, with twenty-one engines fixed at the different points to work the trains forward. Here was the re- sult of all George Stephenson's labors ! GEOEGE STEPHENSOK 443 The two best practical engineers of the day concurred in reporting against the employment of his locomotive ! Not a single professional man of eminence could be found to coincide with him m his preference for locomotive over fixed engine power. Still he did not despair. With the profession against him, and public opinion against him for the most frightful stories were abroad respecting the dangers, the un- sightliness and the nuisance which the locomotive would create Mr. Stephen- son held to his purpose. He pledged himself that, if time were given him, he would construct an engine that would satisfy their requirements, and prove itself capable of working heavy loads along the railway with speed, regularity and safety. The directors determined to offer a prize of five hun- dred pounds for a locomotive engine that would work under certain prescribed conditions. On the day appointed for the trial, four engines came upon the ground, and Mr. Stephenson's "Rock- et " carried off the prize. With the success of the " Rocket " the railway system may be said to have been established. On the 1st of Jan- uary, 1830, the winning engine, with a carnage full of directors, passed over the whole of Chat-Moss and the greater part of the road between Liverpool and Manchester a double triumph to George Stephenson the triumph both of his road and of his locomotive. On the 15th of September, 1830, the line was opened ; and, as in the case of the Stockton and Darlington railway, the commercial results were decisive : four hundred passengers a-day were calcu- lated on, but one thousand two hun- dred were carried on the average, at the very commencement, and the num- ber soon rose to half a million yearly. The land near the line increased great- ly in value, and even Chat-Moss itself became studded with valuable farms. After the Liverpool and Manchester line was made, the crop of railways soon became plentiful as blackberries. Among the first with which the name of George Stephenson was associated were the lines from Canterbury to Whitstable, and from Leicester to Swannington. The great work of the London and Birmingham, now called the London and North-western, was constructed by his distinguished son, although in his remarkable address, on his election as president of the Insti- tution of Civil Engineers, he tells us, with appropriate modesty, that "all he knows and all he has accomplished is primarily due to the parent whose memory he cherishes and reveres." Having, in conjunction with this wor- thy inheritor of his great name, suc- cessfully inaugurated our most impor- tant railway systems, George Stephen- son retired from the anxieties of pub- lic life. Had he been a man of more ambitious pretensions, he would prob- ably have remained longer in the field ; but, having lived to see his projects car- ried into effect to an extent far beyond any anticipations he could possibly have formed at the outset, he wisely resolved to enjoy the sweets of do- mestic repose for the remainder of his days, and withdrew himself to the en- joyment of rural pursuits. There were, however, few great works on which he was not consulted ; and he may be re garded as, emphatically, the engineer 444 GEORGE STEPHENSON. fco whose intelligence and perseverance is due the introduction of railways into England, and who set the first example in that country of works which others have successfully carried into execution throughout the world. From his earliest period, George Ste- phenson, inheriting the feelings of his father, had cherished an ardent love for natural history. The latter days of his life were spent on an estate in Derby- shire, adjacent to the Midland railway, where, engaged in horticulture and in farming, he lived amongst his rabbits, dogs and birds. He died of an inter- mittent fever, contracted amid the noxious atmosphere of one of his forc- ing-houses, on the 12th of August, 1848, at the not very advanced age of sixty-seven, leaving behind him the highest character for simplicity, kind- ness of heart, and absolute freedom from all sordidness of disposition. His remains were followed to the grave by a large body of his work-people, by whom he was greatly admired and be- loved. They remembered him as a kind master, who was ever ready act- ively to promote all measures for their moral, physical and mental improve- ment. The body was interred in Trin- ity Church, Chesterfield, where a sim- ple tablet marks the great engineer's last resting-place. A statue, by Gibson, which the Liverpool and Manchester and Grand Junction companies had commissioned, was on its way to England when Ste- phenson's death occurred. It was placed in St. George's Hall, Liverpool. A full length statue by Bailey was also erected a few years later in the vestibule of the London and North- western station, in Euston Square. A subscription for the purpose was set on foot by the Society of Mechanical Engineers, of which he had been the founder and president. A few adver tisements were inserted in the papers inviting subscriptions, when the vo- luntary offerings shortly received in eluded an average of two shillings each from three thousand, one hundred and fifty working men, who embraced this opportunity of doing honor to their distinguished fellow workman. The portrait of George Stephenson exhibits a shrewd, kind, honest, manly face. His fair, clear countenance was ruddy, and seemingly glowed with health. The forehead was large and high, projecting over the eyes; and there was that massive breadth across the lower part, which is usually ob- served in men of eminent constructive skill. The mouth was firmly marked ; and shrewdness and humor lurked there as well as in the keen grey eye. His frame was compact, well-knit and rather spare. His hair became grey at an early age, and towards the close of his life it was of a pure silky whiteness. He dressed neatly in black, wearing a white neckcloth ; and his face, his per- son, and his deportment at once ar- rested attention, and marked the gen- tleman. " The whole secret of Mr. Stephen- son's success in life," says his biogra- pher, Mr. Stiles, in his concluding chap- ter, summing up his character, " was his careful improvement of time, which is the rock out of which fortunes are carv- ed and great characters formed. He believed in genius to the extent that Buffon did when he said that ' patience GEOKGE STEPHENSON". 443 is genius;' or, as some other thinker put it, when he defined genius to be the power of making efforts. But he never would have it that he was a ge- nius, or that he had done anything which other men, equally laborious and persevering as himself, could not nave accomplished. He repeatedly said to the young men about him: ' Do as I have done persevere ! ' He perfected the locomotive by always working at it and always thinking about it. . . Whether working as a brakeman or an engineer, his mind was always full of the work in hand. He gave himself thoroughly up to it. Like the painter, he might say that he had become great ' by neglecting noth- ing.' Whatever he was engaged upon, he was as careful of the details as if each were itself the whole. He did all thoroughly and honestly. He was ready to turn his hand to any- thing shoes and clocks, railways and locomotives. He contrived his safety- lamp with the object of saving pit- men's lives, and perilled his own life in testing it. Many men knew far more than he; but none was more ready forthwith to apply what he did know to practical purposes. . . In his deportment, he was simple, mod- est and unassuming, but always man- ly. He was frank and social in spirit. When a humble workman, he had care- fully preserved his sense of self-respect. His companions looked up to him, and his example was worth even more to many of them than books or schools. His devoted love of knowledge made his poverty respectable, and adorned his humble calling. When he rose to a more elevated station and associated with men of the highest position and influence in Britain, he took his place amongst them with perfect self-posses- sion. "About the beginning of 1847, Mr. Stephenson was requested to state what were his ' ornamental initials,' in order that they might be added to his name in the title of a work proposed to be dedicated to him. His reply was characteristic: 'I have to state,' said he, 'that I have no flourishes to my name, either before or after; and I think it will be as well if you merely say " George Stephenson." It is true, that I am a Belgian knight, but I do not wish to have any use made of it. I have had the offer of knighthood of my own country made to me several times, but would not have it. I have been invited to become a Fellow of the Royal Society, and also of the Civil Engineers' Society, but objected to the empty additions to my name. I am a member of the Geological Society ; and I have consented to become president of, I believe, a highly respectable Me- chanics' Institution at Birmingham.' To quote his own modest words, in conclusion, as expressed at a meeting of engineers in Birmingham, towards the close of his career : 1 1 may say, with- out being egotistical, that I have mixed with a greater variety of society than perhaps any man living. I have dined in mines among miners, and I ha\e dined with kings and queens and with all grades of the nobility, and have seen enough to inspire me with the hope that my exertions have not been without their beneficial results that my labors have not been in vain. THE central figure of the Kemble family on the stage is, after all, Mrs. Siddons. John Philip Kemble, indeed, sustained the Shakespearean drama with a power and propriety ranking him as a worthy successor to the honors of the great Garrick ; but he left behind him others who already, at the time of his death, shared with him the admiration of the public. With all his admitted weaknesses, he was, undoubtedly, yet an actor of the heroic pattern, with something colossal in his reputation. But his illustrious sister was all this and more. As there was no one on the British stage before her with whom she can be fully com- pared ; so no one has come after her to divide her honors with posterity. She stands singly and alone where the ge- nius of Reynolds placed her, a grand impersonation of the tragic muse. In the biography of John Kemble, we have traced the early history of the family. Sarah Siddons, the eldest child of Roger and Sarah Kemble, was born at Brecon, in South Wales, July 5th, 1755, at a public-house in the town which long bore and probably still bears the sign, " The Shoulder of Mut- ton." Her father was at the time the (446^ manager of an itinerant theatrical company, and had taken Brecon in the course of his wanderings, a sensible person, as he is described, pf a fine ap- pearance, with the manners of a gen- tleman, and views of life beyond his humble profession. The mother was noted for her beauty and a certain im- pressive stateliness. "Her voice," we are told by the poet Campbell, who saw her in her old age, " had much of the emphasis of her daughter's; and her portrait, which long graced Mrs. Siddons's drawing-room, bore an intel- lectual expression of the strongest power: she gave you the idea of a Roman matron." These traits of the parents, inherited by the children, were the germs of their great dramatic ex- cellence. The life of the players to which they were introduced in their childhood rapidly developed them. It was a life, of course, of shifts and ex- pedients, that of these strolling play- ers : none better, perhaps, adapted to develop the faculties of mind and body, and bring a young being at the soon- est into contact with the joys and sor- rows, the aspirations and the littleness- es of humanity. Hogarth has given us a wonderful picture behind the scenes SAEAH SIDDONS. of its humorous, fantastical realities, of its grotesque assumptions and absurd contradictions, and the poet Crabbe, in truthful and sympathetic verse, has depicted the motley fortunes of the tribe. Children of Thespis, welcome I knights and queens ! Counts ! barons ! beauties ! when before your scenes, And mighty monarchs thund'ring from your throne ; Then step behind, and all your glory's gone : Of crown and palace, throne and guards bereft, The pomp is vanish'd, and the care is left. That John Kemble and his sister emerged from the coarseness habitual to. this gregarious existence, untainted and unblemished, is proof at once of the parental solicitude and of the na- tive virtue of their characters. We get a glimpse of their young life, with some of its vulgar associations, in the memoirs of the dramatist Holcroft, the shoemaker's son, who escaped from poverty and obscurity through this poor player's portal on his way to lite- rary fame. A vagrant seeking bread, he joined Roger Kemble's strolling company, and we are told how, when, on a benefit night for one of the family, Miss Kemble, then a little girl, was brought forward in some part as a ju- venile prodigy, she was disconcerted by the noisy opposition of the gallery and was about retiring, when her moth- er led her forward to the front of the stage and caused her to repeat the fable of the Boys and the Frogs, which quite changed in her favor the humor of the house. A resident of Warwick, Walter Whiter, the commentator on Shake- speare, when she had grown to be known the world over, recalled one of 447 the sights of his boyhood in the town, the spectacle of the daylight procession of old Roger Kemble's company adver- tising and giving a foretaste of the evening's entertainment, a little girl, the future Mrs. Siddons, marching along in white and spangles, her train held by a handsome boy in black vel- vet, John Philip Kemble, of the All hail hereafter ! This little girl, at ten, had made the acquaintance of Milton's Paradise Lost, and, inadequate as any just apprecia- tion of that work must then have been, it was characteristic of her undeveloped powers that she admired it at all ; she, who was to give utterance to the Mil- tonic energy in Shakespeare. There is the record in an old play-bill of a per- formance by " Mr. Kemble's Company of Comedians," at Worcester, on the 12th of February, 1767, of Havard's tragedy, " Charles I.," in which, " Master J. Kemble " and " Miss Kemble " are set down for James, Duke of York, and "the young Princess Elizabeth," the children of the suffering king. On another occasion, Miss Kemble appears as Ariel in the " Tempest," and on anoth- er, as Rosetta in " Love in a Village." Her education, meanwhile, was not neglected; she was taught vocal and instrumental music, and her father would have had her instructed in elo- cution by William Combe, a person who afterwards attained a peculiar dis tinction as the author of the "Letters" ascribed to Lord Lyttleton and "The Adventures of Doctor Syntax," and other kindred publications. He was then a young man, had been educated at Eton and Oxford, run through a for- tune in fashionable dissipation, enlist- 4AS SAEAH SIDDONS. ed as a common soldier and was quar- tered at Wolverhampton, where his talents and attainments were discover- ed, and where he made the acquaint- ance of Roger Kemble, who gave him a benefit with which he secured his dis- charge. He then set up for a teacher of elocution, and Kemble engaged him as a tutor for his daughter, but her mother, thinking him too much of a scapegrace for such an intimacy, put an end to the arrangement. Miss Kem- ble was much courted for her beauty, and it was not long before her affec- tions were engaged by Mr. Siddons, a versatile actor of her father's com- pany, who could play Hamlet or Har- lequin, as it might be. The affair seemed to be getting along pretty smoothly, with the reluctant permis- sion of the parents, till a well-to-do squire of the neighborhood interposed as a lover, enamored by the fair one's singing an opera song, " Robin, Sweet Robin." This created new expecta- tions in the family, and Siddons, to precipitate matters, proposed an elope- ment, which the lady declined. He was then dismissed from the company with a farewell benefit, of which he "took an unhandsome advantage by singing at the close of the entertain- ment, a song of his own composition, addressed to the good people of Brecon, narrating the whole course of his love affair, and how it was thwarted by the money of the squire. In this shabby performance, Colin, as he designated himself, had the applause of a crowded house, but when he left the stage, he was met by the indignant mother, who soundly boxed his ears for his imper- tinence. The lady herself must have been very much in love with him, or very good-natured to forgive this ex- traordinary proceeding. She did so. however, and it was agreed between them that a marriage should take place when her parents should consent to it. In the meantime, the daughter was re- moved from the scene by an engage- ment as lady's maid to Mrs. Great- head, at Guy's Cliff, Warwickshire, This introduced her, though in a sub- ordinate capacity, to good society, while her talents were appreciated and en- couraged by the admiration she re- ceived in her dramatic readings. Mr Siddons visited her in this retirement ; he was at length accepted by the pa- rents, and in November, 1773, the lovers were married at Trinity Church, Coventry. Husband and wife now ap- peared together on the stage in the pro- vincial circuit. Acting one night at Cheltenham, in "Venice Preserved," Mrs. Siddons 7 performance of Belvi- dera was witnessed by a party of some distinction, Lord Bruce, shortly after Earl of Aylesbury, and his accomplish- ed lady, with her daughter by her first husband, the honorable Miss Boyle, a lady of great beauty, taste and sensi- bility, the author of several poems ad mired in their day. The young act- ress, timid and sensitive, fearino- the 7 ' O indifference or contempt of her fashion- able audience, and interpreting some noises in the theatre as signs of dis- pleasure, was quite dispirited after thn play, and was, of course, proportion- ably delighted on the morrow, upon learning that she had made the most favorable impression. Miss Boyle call- ed upon her, assured her of her powers, gave her confidence, assisted her in the SAEAH SIDDONS. 449 preparation of her wardrobe for the stao^e, and became her friend for life. o * To the fair youthful actress, conscious yet distrustful of her powers, craving sympathy, the advent of this kindred titled beauty must have appeared as that of a very angel of light. The Aylesbury family communicated their impressions of the new charming per- sonage they had discovered in the pro- vinces to Garrick, who was then en- tering upon his closing season, and he sent down one of the most eminent members of his company, King, the original " Lord Ogleby," to witness her performance. He saw her at Chelten- ham, in the " Fair Penitent," admired, and reported accordingly. The result was an invitation to Drury Lane, with a salary of five pounds a week. Her ap- pearance in the green-room, among the privileged actresses of the theatre, would afford a fine subject for a pain- ter in depicting the wayward and im- perious beauties, the Yates, Abington and Younge, the bustling Garrick lav- ishing his attentions in their presence upon the new expectancy of the stage. Though but recently recovered from the illness attending the birth of her second child, her beauty was remark- able enough to induce the manager to assign her the distinguished character of the goddess Venus in a revival of his celebrated Shakespeare " Jubilee " procession, in which the entire strength of the company was called out. This appears to have excited the jealousy of the other ladies, who crowded before her to obscure her glory in the last scene, which Garrick, with his quick, brilliant eyes perceived, and restored her to the full blaze of popular admira- 57 tion. Had not the manager interposed, wrote Mrs. Siddons, subsequently, of this event, and "brought us forward with him with his own hands, my little Cupid and myself, whose appointed sit- uations were in the very front of the stage, might have as well been in the island of Paphos at that moment." The Cupid, by the way, turned out to be no less a person in after life than the fa- mous actor, dramatist and song writer, Thomas Dibdin. He remembered how on this interesting occasion Venus brought the requisite smile to his countenance by the pleasant inquiry what sugar-plums he liked best, prom- ising a good supply after the scenes, and how she kept her word. Mrs. Siddons first dramatic perform- ance at Drury Lane was on the 29th of December, 1775, in the character of Portia, in the "Merchant of Venice," King acting Shylock. She was an- nounced on the bills simply as "a young lady, being her first appear- ance." The reports of the performance in the papers of the day vary as to its merit ; but there is a general impres- sion conveyed of a certain degree of failure, arising from timidity and nerv- ousness. Expectation in fact had been highly raised, comparisons provoked, and there was much disappointment. The friendly interpretation, however, of Parson Bate, an anomalous clerical dramatist of the day who hung about the theatre, opened a prospect of future eminence. Noticing her fine figure, expressive features, graceful and easy action, her " whole deportment that of a gentlewoman," he detected in her a faculty of " enforcing the beauties of her author by an emphatic though easy 450 SAKAH SIDDONS. art, almost peculiar to herself." Her acting upon the whole seems to have lacked force; though there was no great opportunity for her in Portia. A second character, Epiccene, in Col- man's adaptation of Ben Jonson's " Si- lent Woman," was hardly more to her advantage; nor could she gain much reputation from Julia, in Parson Bate's comic opera, " The Blackamoor Wash- ed White ; " or the subordinate parts in which she was cast in Mrs. Cowley's " Runaway," and a farce by Vaughan, a man about town who figures as Dapper in " The Rosciad," and is said to have suggested the portrait of Bangle in " The Critic." It was some- thing more to the purpose that she was cast as Mrs. Strictland in "The Suspicious Husband," when Garrick played Ranger, and that he chose her for Lady Anne when he revived the performance of " Richard III.," after an interval of several years. On this lat- ter occasion she was somewhat discon- certed by the energy of Garrick. He had given her a particular direction when addressing him on the stage to turn her back to the audience, that his countenance might be in full view of the house. Upon her neglecting this, Garrick cast upon her a withering look of rebuke which she never forgot or forgave. The season shortly after closed, and during the recess, Garrick having now retired from the stage, she was informed that the new managers had no occasion for her services. Thus closed her first London engagement. It was a grievous disappointment, but probably a real advantage to her act- ing. She was yet quite young, at the age of twenty, and needed further con- fidence and strengthening of her pow ers. Judging by the admiration she immediately after excited in the pro- vinces, it would seem she either had not a proper opportunity to exhibit her talents in London, or had not been adequately appreciated. It is to the credit of Mrs. Abington that she re- cognized her merits and warned the managers of their mistake in parting with her. The impression, however, which she had made in London was not a commanding one, and had she remained, she would, under many disadvantages have found the progress upward slow and difficult. When she re-appeared, after a brief interval, it was to strike with a fresh impulse and triumph once and forever. In the meantime, she was gaining new laurels in the provinces in gen- teel comedy, and in such passionate performances as Euphrasia in the " Grecian Daughter," and Alicia in "Jane Shore," parts which offered good situations, but, compared with the teeming language of Shakespeare, were skeleton words to be supplement- ed and embodied in the emotions of her own generous nature. Shakespeare sustains himself on the stage ; the poor- est acting cannot altogether drag him down; but Rowe and Southerne re- quire "the foreign aid of ornament." The secret of Mrs. Siddons' great suc- cess in parts now thrown aside as ut- terly barren, is to be attributed nut so much to the different literary tastes of her day, but simply to her own power- ful sympathies and energies. When we have another Mrs. Siddons, the Ca- list as, Euphrasias and Alicias may SAEAH SIDDONS. 451 again be the wonder and delight of the stage. After leaving London in the sum- mer of 1776, Mrs. Siddons appeared at Birmingham, acting with Henderson, the successor to Garrick, till he was succeeded by John Philip Kemble. Henderson saw and felt her powers, declaring " she never had an equal and never would have a superior," a pro- phecy often recalled at the height of her fame and still warranted in the ex- perience of posterity. Early in the fol- lowing year she played at Manchester, and among other characters was much admired in " Hamlet." Nor are we to suppose that this was a mere eccen- tricity, the freak of a handsome woman in male attire seeking a momentary ap- plause. Boaden, who did not witness the performance, fancies its effect in comparing it with that of her brother, John Kemble. " The conception would be generally bolder and warmer, not so elaborate in speech, nor so syste- matically graceful in action." From Manchester, Mrs. Siddons pass- ed the same season to York, where Tate Wilkinson, the celebrated manager, now held sway. He played with her in the Grecian Daughter, and has record- ed in his " Memoirs," his recollections of her appearance and acting at this time. Though suffering from ill-health, she created the most powerful impres- sion : " All lifted up their eyes with astonishment that such a voice, such a judgment and such acting, should have been neglected by a London audience, and by the first actor in the world." John Palmer was then the manager at Bath, the most important of the pro-* rincial theatres, and by the advice of Henderson engaged Mrs. Siddons in his company. Here, supported by the cultivated society of the place, at that period the centre of witty and fashion, able life out of London, she soon found congenial support. Her affections were enlisted by warm-hearted friends, and her efforts on the stage encouraged by the learned and refined. In this society there was an accomplished clergyman, Dr. Thomas Sedgewick Whalley, a gen- tleman of taste and fortune, and of some literary celebrity as the author of a long narrative poem, " Edwy and Edilda." He occupied one of the finest houses on the Crescent, was intimate with Madame Piozzi, corresponded with that voluminous letter- writer, Miss Seward, and was in fact a fine specimen of a dilettante gentleman of the old school, with something femi- nine in his disposition, generous even to prodigality, tempering a love of the world in its gentler enjoyments with the respectability of his profession. Mrs. Siddons found in him and the ladies of his family warm friends; she corresponded with them, when they were separated, without reserve, and some of the most delightful revelations of her character are to be found in her letters preserved in the Whalley cor- respondence. In one of the earliest of these, addressed to Dr. Whalley from Bristol, where Mrs. Siddons frequently acted in connection with her engage- ment at Bath, travelling rapidly from one place to the other, we have a reve. lation of her consciousness of those natural powers and impulses which gave its peculiar effect to her acting, and distinguished it from that of most other tragic heroines. Mrs. Siddon? 452 SAEAH SIDDONS. was always a severe student ; it was impossible for her to take things easily ; and never was she harder at work, per- fecting herself in her art, than during the two or three years in which she was acting at Bath. Her salary was three pounds a week, and for this she had to practice a ready obedience to the necessity or caprice of the stage, acting subordinate parts in comedy till she had by patient occasional efforts created a demand for her better tragic performances. " My industry and per- severance," she long afterwards wrote of this period, "were indefatigable. When I recollect all this labor of mind and body, I wonder that I had strength and courage to support it, interrupted as I was by the cares of a mother, and by the childish sports of my little ones, who were often most unwillingly hush- ed to silence for interrupting their mo- ther's studies." At length, when the inevitable time came when she was to be called again to London, it was with this plea of maternity that she recon- ciled herself and her friends to her de- parture from the friendly circle at Bath. On her farewell performance she deliv- ered a poetical address of her own com- position, in which, among other things, she disclosed the three reasons which she had mysteriously declared as gov- erning her separation from her friends. After enumerating the favors she had received at Bath, her three children, Henry, Sarah and Maria were brought upon the stage : These are the moles that bear me from your side, Where I was rooted where I could have died. Stand forth, ye elves, and plead your mother's cause : Ye little magnets, whose soft influence draws Me from a point where every gimtle breeze Wafted my bark to happiness and ease Sends me adventurous on a larger main, In hopes that you may profit by my gam. London was now before her with fears and anticipations heightened to the extreme of sensibility by her pre- vious disappointment in the metropo- lis. She approached the new trial of her powers which was to decide her fate as an actress with much anxiety. The time appointed for her re-appear- ance at Drury Lane was the 10th of October, 1782, and the play chosen for her performance, by the advice of the elder Sheridan, was Southern's tragedy of "Isabella, or the Fatal Marriage." For a whole fortnight before the day, she suffered, as she herself tells us, " from nervous agitation more than can be imagined." The fate of her family and of herself, she felt hung upon the issue, and what if she should be compelled to return to the provinces disgraced after a second failure in the metropo- lis ? At the first rehearsal she feared to throw out her voice till she uncon- sciously gained force and was applaud ed by King, the manager. Before the time came she was dismayed by a nerv- ous hoarseness " which made her per- fectly wretched. Happily, this cleared away with days of fine sunshine, and at last her father came to re-assure her and accompany her to the theatre. Her husband was too agitated to be pres- ent. The part of Isabella was well adapted to display her peculiar pow- ers. It is in reality the whole of the piece : the heroine is in the eye of the audience from the first moment to the last ; the remaining actors simply con- tribute the situations. The story i SABAH SIDDONS. 453 very simple. Biron, contrary to the wishes of his father, a haughty, world- ly-minded nobleman, marries Isabella, and after the birth of a son engages in foreign wars and is reported to be slain in battle. The wife makes her appearance with her child in the open- ing scene in great distress, appealing in vain for pity to her father-in-law, and is about to be arrested for debt when her suitor Villeroy, whose at- tentions, immersed as she was in grief for the loss of her husband, she had resolutely thrust aside, pays her obli- gations, and with the motive for pro- tection to her child urged upon her, she reluctantly consents to the mar- riage. This is hardly concluded before Biron returns, is recognized by her with old affection and there is nothing left to her distracted life but death. This is the outline which Mrs. Siddons had to fill up with passion and emo- tion. Compared with the fulness of the Shakespearean drama, it is but a mere sketch; but it is a sketch skil- fully drawn by an able author, with a tinge of the Greek melancholy, which is the noblest melancholy on the stage, and in one of its most important scenes, that following the recognition, it has something of the Greek manner of exe- cution. From the beginning, the au- dience was captivated by the perform- ance, from the first touches of maternal tenderness it was her own child Henry who was with her on the stage the dignity of a noble sorrow, the energy of a lofty nature called forth by persecution and distress, through scenes of perplexity and dismay, to the final terrors of insanity and death, slosing with that hysterical laugh of despair at the moment in which she stabs herself, celebrated by Madame De Stael in one of the chapters of Corinne, and never to be forgotten by those who heard it. It was a great triumph; such mingled grace and power; so natural an expression of emotion, touching the soul to the quick, were new to the stage, and the spon- taneous surrender of the audience in tears and ecstacy, was followed on the morrow by the cooler admiration of the critics. The performance of that night marks an era in the history of the British stage. The established fame of the Kembles dates from it. A woman accomplished the work. It prepared the way for John Philip Kemble and the revival of the drama in its noblest forms. So great was the appreciation of Mrs. Siddons in Isabella, that it was repeat- ed in the course of the month eight times. It was then succeeded by Eu- phrasia in Arthur Murphy's " Grecian Daughter," which gave her an ample opportunity for heroic action in vari- ous effective stage points. This was followed by Jane Shore in Howe's tra- gedy, Calista in the "Fair Penitent," Belvidera in Otway's " Venice Pre- served, " and Zara in Congreve's " Mourning Bride ; " characters in which she traversed the whole round of the passions, of pitiful suffering, anguish in distress, love, remorse in in- famy, pride and indignation, and mad- ness. In all these plays, with their various merits, she had to sustain the character by her own transcendent ex- ertions. Her acting was not so much what she found in these several parts, as what she brought to them in her 454 SAEAH SIDDOffS. generously gifted nature, her grandeur of niien, her soul-subduing pathos, the strength, freedom and spontaneity of her emotions. In private life, if we may call that private life which embraced the vast circle of London literary, political, artistical and fashionable society, Mrs. Siddons received the most flattering and at times annoying attentions. A scene of this kind is famous in the social annals of the metropolis. Miss Monckton, daughter of Viscount Gal- way, married a few years after to the Earl of Cork, was then in the prime of her maiden vigor, the princess of lion hunters in the metropolis, a char- acter in which she long maintained her reputation, surviving till 1840, and at- taining the advanced age of ninety- four. Her soirees had been honored by the company of Dr. Johnson ; Mrs. Thrale was among her visitors ; Lord Erskine, Monk Lewis, and a host of others; in fact, pretty much all the celebrities of her long reign to the days of the Key. Sydney Smith. So distinguished a person, as Mrs. Siddons suddenly became, was not likely long to escape her attentions. She secured her for what the actress thought a quiet visit on a Sunday evening, for she avoided large parties, and the host- ess had solemnly promised her there should be no crowd, only half a dozen friends. Mrs. Siddons went early, dressed plainly, taking her young son with her, and was enjoying the society of a few lady acquaintances, when, as she w as about taking leave, there was a sudden irruption of blue stockings and notabilities, who came thronging in and fell upon her with the most ex- traordinary avidity. " I was therefore obliged," she writes in her memoranda, " in a state of indescribable mortifica- tion, to sit quietly down till I know not what hour in the morning ; but for hours before my departure, the room I sat in was so painfully crowded, that the people absolutely stood on the chairs, round the walls, that they might look over their neighbor's heads to stare at me ; and if it had not been for the benevolent politeness of Mr. Erskine, who had been acquainted with my arrangement, I know not what weakness I might have been sur- prised into, especially being torment- ed, as I was, by the ridiculous inter- rogations of some learned ladies, who were called blues, the meaning of which title I did not at that time ap- preciate, much less did I comprehend the meaning of the greater part of their learned talk. These profound ladies, however, furnished much amusement to the town for many weeks after, nay I believe I might say, for the whole winter." This reception was afterwards served up in a highly humorous paper by Cumberland, in his " Observer," in which the hostess figures as Vanessa, and reviews her motley assembly with great spirit. " You was adorable last night in Belvidera," says a pert young person with a high toupee to the act- ress ; " I sat in Lady Blubber's box, and I can assure you she, and her daughters too, wept most bitterly but then that charming mad scene, by my soul it was a chef cPwuvre / pray, madam, give me leave to ask you, was you really in your senses ? " Miss Fanny Burney, whose " Evelina " had brought her plenty of this sort of admiration, was SARAH SIDDONS. 455 one of the company on this memorable occasion at Miss Monckton's, and re- cords the event in her diary, and how her father and Sir Joshua Reynolds ac- companied her. " We found Mrs. Sid- dons the actress there. She is a wo- man of excellent character, and there- fore I am very glad she is thus patron- ized, since Mrs. Abington, and so many frail fair ones, have been thus noticed by the great. She behaved with great propriety, very calm, modest, quiet and unaffected. She has a very fine coun- tenance, and her eyes look both intel- ligent and soft. She has, however, a steadiness in her manner and deport- ment by no means engaging. Mrs. Thrale, who was there said, 'Why, this is a leaden goddess we are all worshiping ! however, we shall soon gild it.' r The gilding came in a very substantial improvement upon the pit- tance she had received in the hard service of the provincial theatres. For, her eighty nights' performances, an ex- traordinary number, during the season, brought her about fifteen hundred pounds. One of her benefits, increased by presents, as was the custom of the time, produced nearly half this sum. The lawyers were so pleased with her that they sent her a purse of a hundred guineas, from so many subscribers among them. These personal atten- tions were crowned by the compli- ments Mrs. Siddons received at the hands of the royal family. George III. in his better days had a happy dispo- sition to be easily amused, and was fond of theatrical entertainments. On several occasions he distinguished the Kembles by calling for special per- formances at the theatre, and there were frequent " readings " by Mrs. Sid- dons at Buckingham House and Wind- sor Castle. Like most honors in the world, they were at some inconveni ence to the recipient. In her attire on the stage, as we have seen, she culti -vated simplicity; the passions speak- ing for her in such parts as Jane Sho^e, and not the dress. When she came to appear before the queen in these private receptions, she found that it was indis- pensable etiquette to wear an anoma- lous sacque with a hoop, treble ruffles and lappets, a costume in which she says, " I felt not at all at my ease." As the reading went on, she was several times urged to take some refreshment in the next room, which, though ready to drop with the exertion, and the fatigue of standing, she was unwilling to ac- cept ; fearing to " run the risk of fall- ing down by walking backwards out of the room, a ceremony not to be dis- pensed with, the flooring, too, being rubbed bright. I afterwards learnt," she adds, " from one of the ladies who was present at the time, that her majesty had expressed herself surprised to find me so collected in so new a position, and that I had conducted myself as if 1 had been used to a court. At any rate, I had frequently personated queens." The acquaintance of Mrs. Siddons with Dr. Johnson, which afforded her in after life one of the most, pleasing reminiscences of her career, was formed in the autumn of 1783. It was about a year before his decease, when, op- pressed with the infirmities of failing health, he was confined to his lodgings in Bolt Court. At his particular re- quest, conveyed by her friend, Mr. Windham, she visited him there and 456 SAEAH SIDDONS. took tea with him. On her entering, he made her a very handsome compli- ment. There was some delay in his servant Frank providing her with a chair. " Madam," said he, " you, who so often occasion a want of seats to other people, will the more easily ex- cuse the want of one yourself."* The doctor then entertained her with his reminiscences of the old British stage, of Mrs. Porter, Mrs. Clive and Mrs. Pritchard, with a fine eulogium upon his friend Garrick, whom he said he admired more in comedy than tragedy, and whose social talents at the head of a table were more to be envied than even his performances on the stage. He talked of his favorite female char- acter in Shakespeare, Queen Katharine, which Mrs. Siddons promised to act for him, offering him an easy chair at the stage door, where he might hear and see to advantage, for, as he said, he was too deaf and too blind to sit at a dis- tance, and he had little inclination to expose himself to the public gaze in a stage-box. The good doctor, however, never witnessed the performance. He died before Mrs. Siddons was brought forward in the play and it became one of her enduring triumphs. Johnson was greatly charmed with her " mo- desty and propriety " in this interview, of which he wrote to Mrs. Thrale, "Neither praise nor money, the two powerful corrupters of mankind, seem to have depraved her. I shall be glad to see her again." She paid him a few morning visits afterwards, when she was received with studied attention and politeness. * John Philip Kemble's Memoranda in Bos- veil's Life of Johnson. Ed. 1835, viii. 237. Not inferior to this affection of John- son, was the regard entertained for her by Sir Joshua Reynolds. We have met him in that dilettante crowd at Miss Monckton's, among her trouble- some worshipers. He became a fre- quent attendant upon her perform- ances in those days which she loved to recall when she was surrounded by the intellectual nobility of England. "He approved," she writes, "very much of my costumes, and of my hair without powder, which at that time was used in great profusion, with a reddish-brown tint, and a great quan- tity of pomatum, which, well kneaded together, modelled the fair ladies' tres- ses into large curls like demi-cannon. My locks were generally braided into a small compass, so as to ascertain the size and shape of my head, which, to a painter's eye, was of course an agree- able departure from the mode. My short waist, too, was to him a pleasing contrast to the long stiff stays and hoop petticoats, which were then the fashion, even on the stage, and it ob- tained his unqualified approbation, He always sat in the orchestra; and in that place were to be seen, O glori- ous constellation ! Burke, Gibbon, She- ridan, Windham ; and, though last, not least, the illustrious Fox, of whom it was frequently said, that iron tears were drawn down Pluto's gloomy cheeks. And these great men would often visit my dressing-room, after the play, to make their bows, and honor me with their applauses. I must repeat, O glo- rious days ! Neither did his royal highness the Prince of Wales withhold this testimony of his approbation." This was much, but happily the ge SAKAH SIDDOrT 457 nius of Reynolds transferred the glow- ing impression of the moment in its most exalted form to his canvas, and has left us in his great painting of Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse, an imper- ishable record of her triumphs. Bor- rowing a conception of his favorite Michael Angelo from the attendants upon one of his prophets in the Vati- can, he painted the actress sitting in a chair of state supported by two figures of human fate, of pity and terror, hold- ing the dagger and the bowl. Her figure in an attitude of elevated atten- tion, of dramatic inspiration, is sug- gestive at once of repose and action, the right hand reclining, the left with the pointing fore-finger raised, suggest- ive of the emotion passing within, while a tiara and necklace and gorgeous folds of drapery enhance the grandeur of the position. The attitude was as- sumed by Mrs. Siddons in the studio at the first sitting, and it appeared to the painter so happy an inspiration that he adopted it on the instant. The picture has been generally held as one of the noblest of the painter's works, in the language of Mr. Tom Taylor, the latest of his biographers, "the finest example of truly idealized por- traiture, in which we have at once an epitome of the sitter's distinction, call- ing or achievement, and the loftiest expression of which the real form and features are capable." Burke followed its progress in the artist's studio with the greatest interest, and Barry pro- nounced it " both for the ideal and the execution the finest picture of the kind perhaps in the world, something, indeed, more than a portrait, serving to give an excellent idea of what an enthusi- 58 astic mind is apt to conceive of those pictures of confined history, for which Apelles was so celebrated by the an- cient writers." The artist himself was so pleased with it that, contrary to his usual custom, he placed his own name upon it, written on the skirt of the arc pie drapery, gallantly remarking to the lady, " I could not lose the honor this opportunity offered to me for my name going down to posterity on the hem of your garment.* There was one friendly admirer of Mrs. Siddons, how- ever, who did not appreciate Sir Josh- ua's management of this apotheosis of her genius. Miss Seward, writing to the poet Hayley, remarks, " The defects and incongruities of the situation and drapery amaze me a heavy theatrical chair of state on the clouds, gold-lace and pearls, plaited hair, and the im- perial tiara upon an allegorical figure, which sorrow and high-souled resolve must be supposed to have incapaci- tated for the studied labors of the toi- lette." But what woman, however well disposed, was ever satisfied with the dress of another? The subject, too, demanded the pomp and luxury of art for its aggrandizement. In the same year, 1784, in which this picture was exhibited, Gainsbo- rough painted a portrait of Mrs. Sid- dons at the height of her youthful beauty, also a chef-d'oeuvre of art. In this, too, Mrs. Siddons is seated, wearing a black hat and feathers, and a blue and buff striped silk dress. " A more exquisitely graceful, refined and harmonious picture," says Mrs. Fanny * We give the anecdote as it was told by Mrs. Siddons to Northcote, who relates it in his Life of Reynolds, i. 246. 158 SAEAH SIDDONS. Kemble, " I have never seen ; the deli- cacy and sweetness, combined with the warmth and richness of the coloring, make it a very peculiar picture." We have the testimony also of Mrs. Jamie- son to its fidelity. She saw Mrs. Sid- dons two years before her death seated near the picture, and, looking from one to the other, she says, " it was like her still at the age of seventy." * An en- graving after this painting accompanies this sketch. The rising genius of Law- rence, in his youth, had already been displayed upon a sketch of Mrs. Sid- dons at Bath, in hat and feathers, which is said to have suggestedGainsborough's picture, and which was the precursor of the numerous fine drawings and paint- ings of the Kemble family which the pencil of the President of the Royal Academy gave to the world. Mrs. Siddons was also, at this early period of her career, in the fulness of her beauty, painted by Hamilton in the character of Zara. There is a fine en- graving by Caroline Watson, after a painting by Charles Shirreff, taken in 1?85, of Mrs. Siddons and Mr. Kemble in the characters of Tancred and Sigis- munda, with which Mrs. Siddons was much pleased at the time, in one of her letters to Dr. Whalley pronouncing it ' l charming." Two or three years before, Cosway, a delightful painter of women, produced an exquisite miniature of her. Stothard, who considered her one of the two most beautiful women he- had ever known, the other being Mrs. Fitzherbert, somewhat later, made her the subject of several of his graceful theatrical drawings. Turning from these tributes to the * Fulcher's Life of Gainsborough, 130. rising fame of the actress, to the record of her career upon the stage, we find her at the close of her first season in London, in the summer of 1783, cross- ing the channel to perform an engage- ment in Dublin. She was accompanied by Mr. Siddons and Brereton the actor, whose young widow subsequently became Mrs. John Kemble. The inci- dents of her journey and of her first arrival in the Irish capital are related by her with much spirit in a letter to her friend, Dr. Whalley. " We arrived in Dublin," she writes," "the 16th of June, half -past twelve at night. There is not a tavern or a house of any kind in this capital city of a rising kingdom, as they call themselves, that will take a woman in ; and do you know I was obliged, after being shut up in the custom-house officer's room, to have the things examined, which room was more like a dungeon than anything else, after staying here above an hour and a half, I tell you I was obliged, sick and weary as I was, to wander about the streets on foot, for the coaches and chairs were all gone off the stands, till almost two o'clock in the morning, raining too, as if heaven and earth were coming together. A pretty be- ginning ! thought I ; but these people are a thousand years behind us in every respect. At length, Mr. Brere- ton, whose father had provided a bed for him on his arrival, /entured to sa^r he would insist on having a bed for us at the house where he was to sleep. Well, we got to this place, and the lady of the house vouchsafed, after many times telling us that she never took in ladies, to say we should sleep there that night. T never was so weary SARAH SIDDONS. 459 and so disgusted in my life." Nor was she nmch better pleased with the Irish people on this first hasty acquaintance ; she thought them ostentatious and in- sincere; "in their ideas of finery very like the French, but not so cleanly, and tenacious of their country to a degree of folly that is very laughable." This, however, is the expression of a familiar letter. She was well received on the stage, where her brother, John Kemble, making his way upward from the pro- vinces, was well established in popular favor. Her short engagement brought her a thousand pounds. Her second season in London, com- mencing in October, like the first, opened with Isabella, the king and queen, with several members of the royal family honoring the occasion by their presence. She acted her former characters with the addition of two Shakespearean performances, Isabella in " Measure for Measure," and Lady Constance in "King John." In the former, she was the embodiment in her lofty bearing of the noblest principle, and in the latter of heroic action com- bined with the tenderest emotions. The play was brought upon the stage by request of the king, who wished to see the brother and sister acting to- gether ; for Kemble, led by the fame of the Siddons, was now performing with much eclat at Drury Lane. King John became one of his accepted char- acters, as Constance was peculiarly suited to the genius of Mrs. Siddons. As evidence of the realism with which she entered into the part, throwing her whole life for the time into it, a trait of her acting which made it the really great thing it was, we may cite a por- tion of her remarks on the perform- ance. " Whenever," she writes, " I was called upon to personate the character of Constance, I never, from the begin ning of the play to the end of my part in it, once suffered my dressing-room door to be closed, in order that my at tention might be constantly fixed on those distressing events, which, by this means, I could plainly hear going on upon the stage, the terrible effects of which progress were to be represented by me. Moreover, I never omitted to place myself, with Arthur in my hand, to hear the march, when, upon the reconciliation of England and France, they enter the gates of Angiers to rat- ify the contract of marriage between the Dauphin and the Lady Blanche ; because the sickening sounds of that march would usually cause the bitter tears of rage, disappointment, betrayed confidence, baffled ambition, and, above all, the agonizing feelings of maternal affection, to gush into my eyes. In short, the spirit of the whole drama took possession of my mind and frame, by my attention being incessantly riv- eted to the passing scenes." The entire analysis of the character of Constance in reference to its demands upon the actress, from which this passage is taken, shows the nicest discrimination and most thorough appreciation of the drama of Shakespeare. " I cannot con- ceive," she says, "in the whole range of dramatic character, a greater diffi- culty than that of representing this grand creature. . . Her gorgeous affliction, if such an expression is al- lowable, is of so sublime and so intense a character, that the personation of ita grandeur ; with the utterance of its 4:60 SAEAH SLDDONS. rapid and astonishing eloquence, almost overwhelms the mind that meditates its realization, and utterly exhausts the frame which endeavors to express its agitations." At the end of her second season in London, Mrs. Sid dons, in May, 1784, played an engagement of twelve nights in Edinburgh, in which the heads of some of the gravest folk of that grave metropolis were fairly turned by her exhibitions of pathos and distress in Belvidera, Mrs. Beverly, Isabella and the like soul-harassing parts. Dr. Blair, Hume, Beattie, Mackenzie, the author of " The Man of Feeling," were among the appreciators of her genius, with Home, who attended the theatre to witness her performance in his tra- gedy, " Douglas." The story is told of a venerable and highly respectable gen- tleman of the old town and old school, who was drawn to the theatre for the gratification of his daughter to see " Ve- nice Preserved." He sat with perfect composure through the first act and into the second, when he asked his daughter, "Which was the woman Siddons ? " As there was but one fe- male in the play, she had no difficulty in answering the question. Nothing more occurred till the catastrophe, when he was moved to the inquiry, "Is this a comedy or a tragedy?" " Why, bless you, father, a tragedy." " So I thought, for I am beginning to feel a commotion." Even so with the audiences at the beginning. The actress was quite disheartened at the cold re- ception of her most thrilling passages, till after one desperate effort she paused for a reply. It came at last, when tlie silence was broken by a single voice exclaiming, " That's no bad ! " a home- ly native tribute, which was the signal for unbounded applause. The oppres- sion of the heat was so great in the crowded and ill-ventilated theatre, that an illness which spread through the town was humorously attributed to this cause, and was called the Siddona fever. In fact, the audiences were now so moved that the passion for fainting at her performances ran into a fashion- able mania. There was a humorous surgeon of much distinction then in Edinburgh, familiarly called Sandy Wood, who had a shrewd wit in prob- ing the follies of his patients and the town. He was withal, ^a, great ad- mirer of the acting of Mrs. Siddons. One night, when he was at the theatre, he was called from his snug post of observation in the pit to attend upon the hysterics of one of the fashionable ladies who were falling around him. On his way through the thronged house, a friend said to him, alluding to Mrs. Siddons, " This is glorious act- ing, Sandy," to which Wood, looking round at the fainting and screaming la- dies in the boxes, answered, " Yes, and a d d deal o't too." The rage for seeing her was so great, that one day there wert more than twenty-five hundred appli- cations for about six hundred places. Campbell tells us how a poor servant- girl, with a basket of greens on her arm, one day stopped near her in the High Street, and hearing her speak, said, " Ah ! weel do I ken that sweet voice, that made me greet sae sair the streen." The engagement produced her, by share of the house, a benefit and subscriptions, more than a thou- sand pounds. The summer of the next SAKAH SIDDONS. 461 year slie repeated her visit to Edin- burgh with like success. There is an interesting memorial of her represent- ation of Lady Randolph in " Douglas," in one of the etchings of Kay, the bar- ber caricaturist, who has left us such a wonderful exhibition of the humors of the old town. The representation was witnessed by the author himself. After her first engagement at Edin- burgh, Mrs. Siddons proceeded on a second visit to Dublin, where she was, as before, greatly admired upon the stage, and in private life received dis- tinguished attentions from the first families, particularly from her early Cheltenham friend, the Honorable Miss Boyle, who had now become Lady O'Neill, and was living in great mag- nificence at Shane's Castle, where there appears to have been a constant round of feasting and festivity. " The luxury of this establishment," she writes, " al- most inspired the recollections of an Arabian Night's entertainment." Her Isabella in the " Fatal Marriage," with which she opened, was as great a suc- cess as it had been in London. She encountered, however, some difficulties in the conceit of the manager, Daly, who appears to have been mortified at the indifferent impression his per- sonal claims made upon her. His van- ity was wounded in his being com- pelled by the actress to stand aside on the stage when she was acting Falcon- bridge in " King John," that Lady Con- stance might secure one of the best ef- fects in the play. While profiting by the proceeds of the very successful en- gagement, he was wounding the per- former who was filling his pockets, by encouraging the newspapers in per- sonal attacks upon her character. Her life was always so pure that there was no room for scandal on the score of morality ; but she was charged with avarice in regard to other actors, and with especial indifference to the claims of the superannuated Digges, an old favorite in Dublin, for whom she was expected to give a benefit-night. There was some difficulty in making the ar- rangement for this, and after it came off, it was said that she exacted fifty pounds out of the proceeds for her services. The complaint was altogether false, for she had taken nothing, but it filled the newspapers and, aggravated by va- rious petty misunderstandings and much downright injustice, went before her to London. On her re-appearance in the metrop- olis at Drury Lane, in the autumn of 1784, in the " Gamester," with John Kemble, she was received with a tem- pest of hootings and hissings, which utterly prevented her being heard. Being led from the stage by her broth- er, she fainted in his arms. " After I was tolerably restored to myself," she says in her memoranda, "I was in- duced, by the persuasions of my hus- band, my brother and Mr. Sheridan, to present myself again before that audi- ence by whom I had been so savagely treated, and before whom, but in con- sideration of my children, I would have never appeared again." The play was then suffered to proceed without further interruption, all this brutality being simply an exhibition of idle and unprovoked hostility. It was one of the incidents of the old British stage and the American theatre has had dis- graceful examples of the same license 462 SARAH SIDDONS. a l go that the performers, however worthy, were at the mercy of any small party or clique who might choose to insult them. During the remainder of the season, Mrs. Siddons was received with the utmost enthusiasm, adding to her characters, Zara in Hill's tragedy after Voltaire, Matilda in Cumber- land's " Carmelite," and in 'February, 1785, appearing in Lady Macbeth. She had acted the part frequently in her early days in the provinces, and doubt- less not without the impression of her peculiar powers ; but it was now to as- sume new proportions on a grander scene, and become the one permanent, lasting representation of her genius. When we think now of Mrs. Siddons on the stage, it is in the character of Lady Macbeth that she first presents herself. In grandeur, in pathos, in all that inspires the imagination or touch- es the feelings, it has never been sur- passed. Happily, we have from her own hand an elaborate analysis of the character, entering fully into its finer poetical and philosophical elements a rare thing to proceed from an actress or any actor, for the profession is won- derfully tied down to the business tra- ditions and matter-of-fact notions of the stage. It was the merit of Mrs. Siddons that she lifted her conceptions into the world of ideas, and in her grand Shakespearean parts shed a su- pernatural light upon the actual. She regarded Lady Macbeth as a lofty im- personation of ambition in its highest and most sublimated form, allied in its keenness and subtlety to the pure spirit of evil in the ghostly creatures whose breath is the very atmosphere of the tragedy. Everything shrinks and disappears in the presence of thia concentration of soul and intellect. Pity for the time is suppressed till the fatal act is accomplished. Then cornea remorse, and the soul of the spectator, as it has been excited by terror, is to be moved in its lowest depths by pity. To relieve this picture of incarnated evil, she fancied Lady Macbeth ex- ceedingly beautiful, thus casting an additional spell over the feeble mind of her husband, and the beauty, in her view, and this was an original con- ception with her, was of a very deli- cate feminine quality. Here, too, her own loveliness and sensibility w^re re- flected. Lady Macbeth .was no mascu- line virago in her hands. Such was Mrs. Siddons' conception of the character of Lady Macbeth, pow- erful alike in its strength and weak- ness. "With what spirit she entered into it on the stage, the testimony of her contemporaries bears abundant wit- ness. How she approached it may be gathered from the impression made upon her by her first study of the part in early life for some provincial theatre. " It was my custom," she says, " to study my character at night, when all the do- mestic cares and business of the day were over. On the night preceding that in which I was to appear in this part for the first time, I shut myself up, as usual, when all the family were retired, and commenced my study of Lady Macbeth. As the character is very short, I thought I should soon accomplish it. Being then only twenty years of age, I believed, as many others do believe, that little more was neo^s sary than to get the words into my head ; for the necessity of disorimina SAEAH SIDDONS. 463 fcion and the development of character, at that time of my life, had scarcely entered into my imagination. But, to proceed. I went on with tolerable composure, in the silence of the night, a night I never can forget, till I came to the assassination scene, when the horrors of the scene rose to a degree that made it impossible for me to get further. I snatched up my candle and hurried out of the room in a paroxysm of terror. My dress was of silk, and the rustling of it, as I ascended the stairs to go to bed, seemed to my panic- struck fancy like the movement of a spectre pursuing me. At last I reached my chamber, where I found my hus- band fast asleep. I clapt my candle- stick down upon the table, without the power of putting the candle out ; and I threw myself on my bed, with- out daring to stay even to take off my clothes." Sir Joshua Reynolds took a particular interest in her performance of the character. He was present at his seat in the orchestra, privileged to sit there on account of his deaf- ness, at the first representation in London, and devised the dress worn by the actress in the sleep-walking scene.* Mrs. Siddons' Lady Macbeth was shortly followed by her appearance in Desdemona, which she acted with great feeling and tenderness. " You have no idea," she writes to Dr. Whalley, " how the innocence and playful simplicity of the character have laid hold on the hearts of people. I am very much flattered by this, as nobody has ever done anything with it before." This * Boaden's Life of Kemble, i. oh. .10. & Taylor's Reynolds, i. 384. Leslie was succeeded by the still gentler part of Rosalind in " As You Like It." Miss Seward, ever a diligent attendant upon her performances in her visits to Lon- don, writes to Dr. Whalley, in her some- what affected way, " It was not given me to taste the luxury of Siddonian sorrow, but I saw the glorious creature in Rosalind. In spite of the disadvan- tage of a very vilely chosen dress, I en- tirely agree with you, against the cla- mor of the multitude, that her smiles are as fascinating as her frowns are magnificent, as her tears are irresisti- ble." Miss Burney, who witnessed her acting in this part at a later occasion, says, " She looked beautifully, but too large for that shepherd's dress; and her gayety sits not naturally upon her it seems more like disguised gravity. I must own my admiration for her is confined to her tragic powers; and there it is raised so high that I feel mortified, in a degree, to see her so much fainter attempts and success in comedy." Yet, even after her reputa- tion was paramount and fully estab- lished in her great tragic parts, she ,was often called upon to appear in comedy, in such parts as Mrs. Love- more in the " Way to Keep Him," Lady Restless in " All in the Wrong," Mrs. Oakley in "The Jealous Wife," and what not. Where the characters of genteel comedy touched upon the pathetic or bordered upon tragedy as in Lady Townley, she was of course in her element. Her letters show that she had a ready sense of humor and no contemptible faculty of giving it ex- pression in writing ; but her best op- portunities were unquestionably in tra- gedy. V" 464 SAEAH SIDDOffS. The revival of " Henry VIII.," after an absence from the stage of half a century, by John Kemble at Drury Lane in 1788, afforded Mrs. Siddons the opportunity which Dr. Johnson had so eagerly desired of making her appearance in Queen Katharine, which thenceforth became one of her leading impersonations. It fairly ranks with Lady Macbeth in her line of Shake- spearean characters. It was grand and elevated throughout in all its quick transitions of emotion from withering scorn and rebuke to sorrow and suf- fering. Every gradation of passion was marked with an artist's touch and those impulses of natural feeling which suggested an almost absolute identifi- cation with the royal victim. One of her most striking attitudes is preserved in the famous Kernble picture by Har- low, of the trial scene, as it was repre- sented at a later period at Covent Gar- den. The picture was a study from the life, the artist, by the advice of Sir Thomas Lawrence, taking his posi- tion in the front row of the pit for several nights of the performance, that he might study the expression of the countenance in action. John Kemble appears in this as Cardinal Wolsey; Charles Kemble is seated as secretary at the council-table. It is surprising, as in the case of Garrick, how much of her time was wasted upon inferior original plays. There seemed to be in her day a kind of recognized necessity that everybody who put pen to paper should produce a tragedy for the stage ; and Mrs. Sid- dons, as a favorite in society as well as with the public, was marked out for its performance. There were at various sea- sons, among others, Prince Hoare, with his forgotten, "Julia, or Such Things Were," which even Mrs. Siddons could keep hardly a week upon the stage ; Vi- tellia in Jephson's " Conspiracy," acted to an empty house on the second night ; Poet Laureate Pye's dismal "Ade- laide;" Miss Burney's unfortunate "Edwy and Elgiva," which expired on its first performance amidst roars of laughter; even good Dr. Whalley must bring his friend to recite his hopeless vers^ in " The Castle of Mont- val," the plot of which was unfortu- nately anticipated by the " Castle Spectre," so that went out after a few nights as a twice-told tale, though Miss Seward wrote to congratulate the author on its success, having heard from numbers of her acquaintance that it was " charming." In one instance, at least, as may be read in the " Whal- ley Correspondence," with admiration of her keen appreciation of the rigor- ous requirements of the drama, Mrs. Sid- dons made a determined stand, in reference to the production of a play by a younger member of the Greathead family, among whom she had, as will be remembered, been domesticated at the outset of her career as a lady's- maid, and from whom she had since received various hospitalities and at- tentions. In another instance, also her good judgment befriended her. She was cast to appear in Ireland's pre- tended Shakespeare tragedy "Vorti- gern," and was actually engaged in studying a part ; but, at her particular request, she was excused and escaped the mortification suffered by her broth- ers who appeared in the play. When Master Betty held possession of the SAEAH SIDDONS. 465 town, slie quietly stood aside and let that foolish mania run its day, con- tenting herself with the remark to an English nobleman, who praised his act- ing, "My lord, he is a very clever, pretty boy, but nothing more." The remaining career on the stage of Mrs. Siddons was varied by the vi- cissitudes common to the profession, the fortunes of Drury Lane manage- ment under the direction of Sheridan, and the annoyances attending the open- ing of the new Covent Garden Theatre during the disgraceful O. P. riots. In private life she was more than ever an object of attention and interest, passing her summer holidays at the country seats of her distinguished friends, when she was not called by new en- gagements to Edinburgh or Dublin. At times she suffered from ill-health, and family losses preyed upon her. She suffered much from the loss of a daughter, and a few years later, in 1808, her husband died at Bath. She had acquired an independent property by her exertions on the stage, and, though still holding her old supremacy in her familiar round of characters, be- gan to think seriously of retirement. At the close of the season in 1812, on the 29th of June, she took a farewell leave of the stage at Covent Garden in Lady Macbeth. This, however, was not her last appearance on the stage. The fol- lowing season she gave readings from Milton and Shakespeare in public in London, which were much admired. She also read by special invitation be- fore the royal family at Frogmore, and private parties of the university folk at Oxford and Cambridge. She per- formed in 1813, three times; for the Covent Garden Theatrical Fund, at Charles Kemble's benefit, and at Drury Lane for the fund of the theatre. In 1814, when France was again open to British travellers, she visited Paris. The following year, she was called to mourn the loss of her son Henry, who died at the age of forty, while man- ager of the Edinburgh theatre. This event brought her to the stage again. She acted ten nights at Edinburgh the same year for the benefit of the family. In 1816, she acted for a few nights in London, at the command of the Prin- cess Charlotte. Her last performance was in June, 1819, in Lady Randolph, for the benefit of Charles Kemble. In 1821, she travelled to Switzerland to visit her brother, John Philip Kem- ble, who had retired broken in health to end his days at Lausanne. Her later years were passed in quiet retire- ment. In 1829, she witnessed the suc- cessful first appearance of her niece, Fanny Kemble, and was affected by it to tears. That night at Covent Gar- den must have brought before her the whole of her own theatrical career. She did not long survive. She had been for several years subject to at- tacks of erysipelas. At the last the malady increased in force ; a fever set in, and on the 8th of June, 1831, at the age of seventy-six, she expired at her residence in London. Her remains were interred in the church burial- ground at Paddington. A statue of her, by Chantrey, the gift of the emi- nent tragedian, Macready, stands by the side of her brother's monument in Westminster Abbey. 59 ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT. T71REDERIC HENRY ALEXAN- DER VON HUMBOLDT was born at Berlin, the capital of Prussia, on the 14th of September, 1769. His father, the baron Alexander George von Humboldt, a man of property and in- fluence in the country, having been in the service of Frederic the Great in the Seven Years' War, and subsequently at the court of that monarch, married the widow of Baron von Holwede, a lady of French descent, her family of Colomb having emigrated from Burgundy to take up their residence in Germany, in consequence of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. The Baron Alexander von Humboldt had consequently Hu- guenot blood in his veins. He was the second of two sons, his elder brother "William, the celebrated philologist, having been born in Potsdam, before his father's removal to Berlin, in 1767. The youth of the two boys was passed at the old castle of Tegel, a romantic residence occupied by their parents, situated in the vicinity of Berlin in a beautiful neighborhood of varied natural scenery, a former royal hunting establishment of 'Frederic the Great. Here the early education of the brothers was entirely conducted by tutors, of whom there is (466) always a good supply in Germany men of learning and character, with those peculiar qualities which fit them to influence the youthful mind. Major von Humboldt, the father, found such a one in Campe, a field chaplain of a regiment at Potsdam, whom he took into his house as the instructor of his The choice was well made, for sons. Campe developed faculties which raised him to a high rank in the critical lite- rature of Germany ; and not only ex- ercised a powerful influence over his pupils in their childhood, but became in their maturer years their friend and intimate during his life. He was a man impressed with the new ideas of the time encouraged by the writings of Rousseau on the subject of educa- tion, making it not a matter of slavish routine, but a living principle of use- ful, active inquiry. " He had plainly seen," writes Humboldt's biographer, Klencke, " that the mode of education and tuition till then adopted in fami- lies and institutions, only tended to develop the memory, not the mind of the student ; he opposed from the first the mechanical training of youth, and endeavored to develop the susceptibil- ity of the youthful mind and spirit by ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT. 461 a perception of the world, of foreign nations, men and manners. Could not then, this man, who edited Robinson Crusoe, and enriched the juvenile li- brary with imaginative delineations of bold voyages, could he not, as Hum- boldt s first teacher, have influenced the imagination and the reason of his pupils, and laid the foundation in Al- exander for his love for exploratory voyages in distant regions ? " This teacher was, however, but a year in the old castle when he was called away for more public employ- ment in the work of education. As Alexander was but seven years . old when he left, his influence must have been limited; but it was something even then to avoid depressing condi- tions, and be put upon the right road to learning. Campe was soon succeeded by another tutor, a young man named Christian Kunth, so poor that he had to discontinue his academical studies for lack of means, yet possessed of an extraordinary knowledge of German, Latin and French literature, acquisi- tions which, to the credit of the coun- try, gave him a good position in the best German society, where Major von Humboldt became acquainted with him. Kunth had a genius and disposi- tion for universality of knowledge, and endeavored, we are told, to make every- thing within his reach at Berlin avail- able and useful for the development of his pupils, while he avoided any- thing like shallow pretensions to learn- ing. From the wide field before them his scholars were thus enabled to se- lect from the mass of human knowledge what was best adapted to their pow- ers and dispositions. Consequently, while William pursued with avidity the more subjective studies of philoso- phy and especially of language, Alex- ander followed his inclination in the pursuit of the natural sciences. The death of their father, in 1779, left the boys, under the direction of their mother, more particularly to the care of this instructor, who soon had an im- portant assistant in a now constant visitor to the household, the family physician, Dr. Heim, who, being expe- rienced in botany, taught that science to the brothers according to the new principles of Linnaeus. It is said that in these lessons he was much more im- pressed with the capacity of William than of Alexander, who, indeed, at one time was considered by mother and tutor, " not at all fitted for study." When Alexander was about four- teen, the brothers, the better to pursue their education, took up their residence at Berlin. At this time and later, AL exander was delicate in health, which has been attributed to his earnest ef- forts to keep pace with his hardier and more advanced brother in his intel- lectual acquirements. Other teachers were now employed in assistance of Kunth, eminent instructors in Greek, philosophy, law and political economy, who carried the pupils through private courses of. lectures. Their social ad- vantages in Berlin, from the standing of the family, doubtless also greatly aided their mental development. Some years earlier than the period of which we are now speaking, in the lifetime of their father, Goethe had visited the castle of Tegel and seen the two boys, the associates in his studies of aftei life. Being now fully prepared .or an ALEXANDER YON HUMBOLDT. academical career, the brothers, in 1786, entered together the University of Frankfurt-on-the-Oder, where, while William devoted himself to the study of law, Alexander chose that of politi- cal economy as more accordant with his tastes. They were still under the guardianship of the faithful Kunth, rho resided with them in the house of Professor Loftier, who had given them lessons in Greek at Berlin. Apart from their special separate studies, the youths pursued together those of phi- losophy, philology and natural history, in which Alexander was becoming a proficient. Removing after two years to the University of Gottingen, he was still further encouraged in his favorite studies by the lectures of three of its most distinguished professors, Blumen- bach in natural science, Heyne in archae- ology, and Eichorn in history. " Archae- ology and history were the domains of learning," says Klencke, " on which the two brothers worked in common ; the classical antiquity, with its philologic and artistic studies, attracted both ; his- tory, in its philosophic view, interested William, and served Alexander to col- lect the materials for cosmography and ethnology. While "William made him- self more intimate with classic litera- ture and the writings of -the philoso- pher Kant, Alexander gave himself up to the instruction and personal influ- ences of Blumenbach, but both broth- ers found a common point of union in the congenial intercourse with Pro- fessor Heyne, who soon esteemed the young men highly, and exercised a great influence on their future stu- dies." Another influence, of a somewhat different nature, destined to mould the life of Alexander, was exerted in the acquaintance of the brothers at this time with George Forster, the son-in law of Heyne, who had accompanied the celebrated navigator, Captain Cook, round the world in the capacity of naturalist. Forster was a man of en- thusiasm, not only in his peculiar pro- vince of study, but in his views of life and society, travelling having develop ed a cosmopolitan feeling and indomit able love of freedom which were readily imbibed by his willing listener, Alex- ander von Humboldt. After the com- pletion of his course at the university in 1789, he kept up a constant corres- pondence with Forster on scientific topics, and in the following year we find him making a journey with that naturalist as a companion through Holland and England. As a result of this journey, while Forster prepared his work, "The Views of the Lower Rhine," Humboldt published his first work as a naturalist, entitled " Mine- ralogical Considerations on Certain Basaltic Formations on the Rhine," which was issued at Brunswick in 1790. The brothers were now both looking forward to official employment under government. William was al- ready on the track as councilor of le- gation and assessor to the Court of o Berlin, and Alexander, having had his attention turned in that direction on his journey with Forster, was now qualifying himself for employment in the mining operations of the countiy For this purpose he went for a short time to a commercial academy at Ham burgh to familiarize himself with ac- counts, and also occupied himself witL ALEXANDER YON HUMBOLDT. 469 mineralogy and botany. After this, in the spring of 1791, lie entered the mining academy at Freiberg as a stu- dent, where he devoted a year to its Bpeeial sciences. In 1792, he was ap- pointed assessor to the mining and smelting department of Berlin, and was the same year removed to Bayreuth as superintendent of mines in the newly acquired Franconian districts a situ- ation under the Prussian government. Here he remained two years, employ- ing himself with various experiments on the physical and chemical laws of metallurgy and supporting the Nep- tunian theories of Werner, his professor at the Freiberg academy. He contrib- uted treatises on these subjects to sev- eral German and French scientific peri- odicals, and in 1793, published a sepa- rate botanical work, the result of his personal observations, entitled " Speci- men of the Flora of Freiberg, exhibit- ing the Cryptogarnic and especially the Subterranean Plants of the district, to which are added Aphorisms on the Chemical Physiology of Plants." The following year he accompanied the provincial minister, Von Hardenburgh, to the Khine, and presently availed himself of other opportunities of travel growing out of his calling, journeying through the Alp districts and Silesia, and visiting the province of Prussia and Poland. These were but prepa- rations for his future extended travels. In 1795, he resigned his office of master of the mines and went to Vienna, where he employed himself in botany and other natural sciences, planned a jour- ney into Switzerland and visited North- ern Italy, his intention at this time of Bxploring the volcanic regions about Naples being checked by the war in progress. The death of his mother now recalled him to his brother, with whom he passed some months at Jena in the beginning of 1797, following up the newly-developed study of galvanism, associating with Goethe and Schiller, and meditating .and planning a journey to the West Indies. The result of his experiments in galvanism was this year given to the public in a treatise enti- tled "Investigations on the Muscles and Nerve-Fibres, with Conjectures on the Chemical Process of Life in the Animal and Vegetable World." The passion for travel, strengthened by his studies, was now firmly implant- ed in his nature. It was almost born with him. "From my earliest youth, he writes, "I felt an ardent desire to travel into distant regions, seldom visited by Europeans. This desire is characteristic of a period of our exist- ence when life appears an unlimited horizon, and when we find an irresist- ible attraction in the impetuous agi- tations of the mind, and the image of positive danger." His brother, sharing with him these feelings, journeys were projected by them in Italy and else- where, which were thwarted by the military operations of the time. In the spring of 1798, they were together in Paris, where Alexander was forming an engagement for an extended tour in Egypt, with the design of ascending the Nile to Assouan, and afterwards travelling through Syria and Palestine. This, too, had to be abandoned in con sequence of the political aspects of the period; but the new world seemed to hold out an uninterrupted prospect An exploration for discovery iu the 470 ALEXANDER VON IIUMBOLDT. Southern hemisphere was at that time projected by the French government, and apparently on the point of being realized. The plan was to visit the Spanish possessions of South America, from the mouth of the river Plata to Quito and the isthmus of Panama. The voyage was to extend to the archi- pelago of the Pacific and return by the Cape of Good Hope. Humboldt ob- tained permission to join in this sur- vey, which was to have the services of the naturalists, Michaux and Bon- pland. But here again the war inter- fered. The funds to be diverted to this purpose were needed by Napoleon for new military operations, and the voyage of exploration was abandoned. Disappointed in this, but determined at all hazards to carry oat the plans of his life, he formed an engagement with Bonpland to visit an unexplored portion of the Mediterranean coast of Africa, and thence extend the jour- ney to Egypt. They were, by an ar- rangement with a Swedish consul, to embark at Marseilles on a national vessel of that government, appointed to carry presents to the Dey of Algiers ; but delays interposed ; the barbarous hostilities of the authorities at Tunis were reported as alarming, and a visit to Spain was meanwhile undertaken in place of the projected voyage, still with a view to wider plans of travel. The hospitable reception which the travel- lers experienced at Madrid might well have induced them to prolong their stay in that country; but they had other objects before them. Possessed of sufficient wealth for the purpose, Humboldt resolved on his own ac- .ount to visit the interior of South America. His plans were presented to the court, and every facility waa granted him towards carrying cutjiis intentions. At length he was to start on his grand voyage ; but it was im- peded to the last, for, on his arrival at Corunna, the port of embarkation, he found it blockaded by English cruis- ers, cutting off the communication be- tween Spain and her colonies. Watch- ing, however, an opportunity, the cor- vette "Pizarro," which was to carry them to Havana and Mexico, was enabled to set sail on the 4th of June, 1799, an important date in the life of our travel- lers, for it was the commencement of the realization of his long cherished schemes. The details of the voyage, as related by himself, are of the highest interest, not more for their constant ex- hibition of sea phenomena new to the travellers, but for the simple and earn est spirit which gives life to the narra- tive. Without obtrusion of himself, the generous personality of the writer is ever present to the reader through- out his books. His powers of observa- tion, of the finest order, are always actively displayed, and an informing mind is constantly at work in giving to the minutest facts and circumstances the interest of method, order and gen- ralization. The personal narrative of Humboldt is carried on with the highest gusto, every paragraph supplying some clear- ly defined picture of nature enlivened by comparison, or the reflections of the traveller who has probably never been surpassed in this field of literature. Thoroughly furnished by his previous studies with the means of observation, his perceptive faculties are alive tc ALEXANDEK YON HUMBOLDT. 4T1 every incident in the landscape, the grand or the minute ; while a sympa- thy with the men of every clime in their mora 1 and political relations, gives that impress to their regions of abode, which can be derived only from a human interest. His observations of the island of Teneriffe, with his ac- count of an ascent of its celebrated Peak, are instinct with the best spirit of philosophic research, as the sensitive traveller walks hand in hand with nature. It is by this union of the par- ticular with the general, that Hum- boldt secured at the beginning, and spite of the increase of knowledge on various subjects which he treated, has since maintained, his interest as a trav- eller. Taking this single object alone, the Peak of Teneriffe, the reader may form no inadequate idea of the range of his attainments, and the acuteness of his perceptions, as he pursues with him the geological and other inquiries relating to vegetation and other phe- nomena brought into view, with the speculations arising from them on a survey of the region. But this feeling of admiration will be much enhanced with the continuance of the journey, in the examination of the wonders of a country where a thousand additional objects are added to the prospect. The voyage from the Canary Islands to the northern coast of South America was rapidly made by the "Pizarro." Twenty days brought the voyagers on their path of beauty through the gen- tle equatorial region to their destined haven of Cumana. On the way, our travellers, delighted with the mildness of the climate, were carefully observant of winds and currents, the weeds float- ing on the sea, the flying-fish sporting in the air, and the stars of another sky above them. Humboldt, indeed, with an ardent love of astronomical studies, never neglects the heavenly appear- ances in his landscape. On the 4th of July, he particularly records that he saw for the first time, the great con- stellation of the Southern Cross, the appearance and associations with which he describes with effect. When Humboldt and his friend Bon- pland reached Cumana on the 16th of July, 1799, they had before them, in South America, literally a new world for scientific observation and discovery, the fertility of which, in its natural phenomena, has, as the century wears to its termination, not yet been exhaust- ed by the careful student. It was then a virgin soil. As the arts which Humboldt brought, with their appa- ratus and processes, were, during his whole journeyings, a constant wonder to the inhabitants ; so he also found in- exhaustible opportunities for discovery in their employment. The day on which he landed among these marvels of nature, was to him a memorable one. Henceforth, for five years the travellers were constantly employed in explorations, of the western continent, travelling its great water courses, plains and mountain regions. Commencing with a laborious survey of the country watered by the Orinoco and its tribu- tary streams, in which they were seven- ty-five days exposed to the burning sun of the equator in a small boat, they passed from Venezuela towards the close of the year to the island of Cuba, where several months were spent in the study of its soil, climate, mode of 472 ALEXANDEE VON IIUMBOLDT. government and society, and its pecu- liar institution of slavery. Returning to the South American continent in March, they sailed up the Magdalena river, in New Granada, as far as Honda, in the interior, whence they proceeded on mules to the capital, Santa Fe de Bogota. After they had completed their observations of this locality and its grand natural features of mountain scenery, they crossed the Andes to Po- payan on the Pacific, and thence ex- tended their journey to Quito, where they arrived early in January, 1802. Lima, in Peru, was then visited, the va- rious journeyings in these regions in- volving the crossing of the chain of the Andes five times, under circum- stances of various hardship and ad- venture. From Callao, at the begin- ning of 1803, they sailed in a Spanish frigate, by way of Guayaquil, for Aca- pulco, on the Mexican coast, where they landed in March. About a year was given to experiments and observations in the various districts of Mexico, par- ticularly in relation to its mineral re- sources, including a residence at the capital, when the travellers sailed from Vera Cruz for the United States, ar- riving at Philadelphia in April, 1804. At "Washington, Humboldt made the acquaintance of Jefferson, and during his two months' stay in the country, was diligently employed in the study of its political and social conditions. In the month of August, he landed in Europe at Bordeaux. He had now to methodize and ar- range the vast accumulation of obser- vations on well-nigh every department of scientific investigation which he had made in the New World, including ge- ography, geology, climatology, meteor ology, botany, zoology, as well as his deductions and speculations relating to the inhabitants of the country he had visited in archaeology, ethnology and their existing forms of civilization. This work was mainly performed at Paris, where Humboldt was engaged in its prosecution, more or less, for the next twenty years, encouraged and as- sisted at the beginning by the most eminent and scientific men of France, as Cuvier, Gay-Lussac, Arago and others. The following is an enumera- tion of his successive publications, growing out of his travels, given in the " English Cyclopaedia." Under the general title of " Travels of Humboldt and Bonpland in the Interior of Amer- ica in the years 1799-1804," a succes- sion of six or seven works of large di- mensions, with illustrative plates and atlases, was issued between 1807 and 1817, each work being devoted to ob- servations in a particular department ; and even then, leaving the total mass of results unexhausted. The first part of the general work published in 1807, was by Humboldt himself, and was on the geography and distribution of plants in the equinoctial regions ; the second, by Humboldt and Bonpland jointly, was on the zoology and com- parative anatomy of the expedition; the third, by Humboldt, was a politi- cal essay on the Kingdom of New Spain, in two quarto volumes; the fourth, edited by Oltmanns, contained a digest of observations in astronomy and magnetism ; and the fifth, forming a huge work by itself, was specially botanical, and was entitled " Equinoc- tial Plants gathered from Mexico, ic ALEXANDER HUMBOLDT. 473 the island of Cuba, in the provinces of Caraccas, Cumana and Barcelona; from the Andes of New Granada- Quito and Peru, and on the borders of the Rio Negro, Orinoco and the Amazon rivers." All these instal- ments of the main work appeared originally in Paris; where also ap- peared, in six volumes folio (1815- 1818), a separate work in Latin by C. S. Kunth, " On the new Genera and Orders of Plants collected in their Ex- ploration of the New World, by Aime" Bonpland and Alexander von Hum- boldt, and by them described and partly sketched." Works also ap- peared in Germany and England, giv- ing, in a more popular form, the results of the great American Exploration ; the most notable of which in England wers "Researches concerning the In- habitants of America, with descriptions and views of Scenes in the Cordil- leras," and " Personal Narrative of Travels in the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent during the years 1799-1804, by Alexander Von Hum- boldt and Aime Bonpland," both translated and edited by Helen Maria Williams. It was not till about the year 1817 (if we except an "Inquiry concerning Electrical Fishes," pub- lished in Erfurt in 1806), that Hum- boldt had leisure for works not imme- diately growing out of his American travels. In that year he published a general essay entitled "Prolegomena concerning the geographical distribu- tion of Plants according to the tem- perature of the atmosphere and the height of mountains." The style in which Humboldt's Am- erican works were issued, and the luxu- 60 ry of the printing and illustrations, may be estimated from the account of their cost, given by Klencke. In 1844, in which this gigantic work was still in- complete, the cost of a copy of the folio edition was twenty-seven hun- dred dollars. This is twice the cost of the celebrated French national work, " Description de 1'Egypte,' toward the preparation of which the government of that country advanced about one-eighth of a million of pounds sterling. A simple calculation will show how great must have been the expense of the whole work; but it will become more evident when we state that the printing, paper and cop. per-plates alone, have cost more than 226,000 dollars. In addition to the books thus enu- merated, which were for the most part in the French language, Humboldt was the author of another work written in his native German, drawn from his American experiences " in the presence of the noblest objects of nature, on the ocean, in the forests of the Orinoco, in the savannahs of Venezuela, and in the solitudes of the Peruvian and Mexican mountains." It is impor- tant also as the germ out of which many years after, sprang his compre- hensive " Cosmos. " This was his " Views of Nature ; or, Contempla- tions on the Sublime Phenomena of Creation ; with Scientific Illustrations," as the title is given in the translation published in English, in 1850, by Messrs. Otte and Bohn. The original work was written, or at least com menced, in Berlin, in 1807, when he passed a year or so in that city, taken out of his long Parisian residence 474 ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT. and was published in 1808 when he had returned to the French capital. Alexander von Humboldt, on his return from America to Europe, found his brother, who had earned a high re- putation by his critical abilities, occu- pying the post of resident Minister at the court of Rome. Thither Alexan- der proceeded in the Spring of 1805, and passed some time with William, whom he found surrounded by the best society in the capital, Madame De Stael, A. W. Schlegel, Sismondi, and others. In the summer he proceeded, with his friends Von Buch and Gay Lussac, who had come to Italy for the purpose, to visit Mount Vesuvius, which was then in a state of eruption. Re- turning to Germany, he left William at Rome as ambassador, where the lat- ter received the "Views of Nature," which was dedicated to him. After this, William was employed at Berlin in the home ministry, and subsequent- ly in various diplomatic situations abroad, at Vienna, where he was visited by Alexander, and elsewhere. In 1818 he was Prussian Ambassador in Lon- don, where he was again visited by Alexander. When the latter left France to reside for a time in Berlin, in 1818, the brothers were together in that city ; but Paris, with its scientific opportunities, and the necessities of his great publication, again withdrew Alex- ander to that city, and it was not till 1827 that, at the express desire of the King of Prussia, he established him- self in Berlin. Henceforth it was his home, and, with the exception of his journey to Central Asia, he was never long away from it. This scientific expedition, for which he was long preparing, had been great ly favored by the King of Prussia, and was finally entered upon at the express request of the Emperor of Russia, through whose countries it was to pass. After some delays it was commenced in the Spring of 1829. The Emperor undertook the expense of the whole ; and to give dignity to the position of Humboldt, the King of Prussia, before his departure, conferred upon him the official position of acting privy coun- cillor, with the -title of " Excellency." He was accompanied to Russia by two naturalists, his associates at Berlin, Rose and Ehrenberg, who went with him as scientific partners in the ex- pedition. In the distribution of their several labors, the observations on mag netism, the results of geographical as- tronomy, and the general preparation of the geognostic and physical plan of North-western Asia, were undertaken by Humboldt ; the chemical analysis of mineralogy and the keeping of the travelling diary fell to Rose ; and the botanical and zoological departments were assigned to Ehrenberg. Leaving Petersburg towards the end of May the party proceeded to Moscow, and thence to the Wolga, visiting Kasan and inspecting the ancient Tartar ruins of Bulgar. Resting for several weeks at Jekatharinenburg, on the Asiatic side of the Ural, important observa- tions were made of the formation of that mountain chain with its exten- sive mineral resources. The journey was thence continued to Tobolsk, and easterly to Tomsk Barnaul, and the range of the Altai and the border of China. Returning thence, the expedi- tion was extended to the Caspian Sea, ALEXANDEK YON HUMBOLDT. 475 which was reached in the middle of October. New and valuable researches and experiments were here made, after which the travelers, traversing the ter- ritory of the Don Cossacks, returned by way of Moscow to St. Peters- burgh, which they reached in the mid- dle of November, and, at the close of the year, Humboldt was again at his home in Berlin, having in the course of eight months and a half, performed a journey of twenty-five hundred miles. As, in the case of his American explorations, it was some time before the results of these new observations could be given to the world. Humboldt's portion, entitled, " Fragments of Asiatic Geol- ogy and Climatology," appeared in Paris, in two volumes, in 1831. This was afterwards supplemented by his work on " Central Asia," its mountains and climates, published in 1843. These works are purely of a scientific charac- ter. Of Humboldt's subsequent works, the chief, in addition to many contri- butions to scientific journals, are his " Critical Examination of the History of the Geography of the New World, and of the Progress of Astrology in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries," published in Paris from 1836 to 1839, and, the crowning labor of his long life, his " Cosmos : a Sketch of a Phys- ical Description of the Universe," the first volume of which appeared in 1845 7 and the fifth and last was finished on his eighty-ninth birth-day, in 1858- The work generally comprises a sketch of all that is at present known of the physical phenomena of the uni- verse ; a distinct portion of it treats of the incitements to the study of nature, afforded in descriptive poetry, land- scape painting, and the cultivation of plants, while another is given to the consideration of the different epochs in the progress of discovery and of the corresponding stages of advance in hu- man civilization. Separate volumes are also given to astronomy and the phenomena of earthquakes, etc., in their varied relations. In his later years, Humboldt waa closely attached to the Court at Ber- lin, and was frequently employed in matters of State and Diplomacy. But he allowed himself few indulgences on the score of age or station, and never abandoned his love and pursuit of science. The details of his systematic intellectual employment in his later years are something marvellous. At length, on the 6th of May, 1859, the long career was brought to an end. Alexander Von Humboldt expired on that day, in his ninetieth year, ripe in the fullness of his fame, and in the af- fections of the civilized world. Never has a man of science been more greatly honored at his death. His labors had taken the world in their embrace, and wherever a star shone, or a tide roiled, the report of his attainments had been carried. The great nations of Europe vied with one another in paying respect to his memory; and the New World ? which he had explored, and which had risen in his lifetime, so greatly in the advantages of the civilization which he had cherished, was not wanting in these honors. WALTER SCOTT. WALTER SCOTT was born' at Edinburgh on the loth of Au- gust, 1771.* " My birth," says he, " was neither distinguished nor sordid. Ac- tording to the prejudices of my country, t was esteemed gentle, as I was connect- ed, though remotely, with ancient fam- ilies, both by my father's and mother's side." His paternal great-grandfather was a cadet of the border family of Harden. His grandfather became a farmer in Roxburghshire, and married a lady who was a relative of his own ; and his father, Walter Scott, was a writer to the signet in the Scottish capital. The poet's mother, Anne Rutherford, who was likewise of hon- orable descent, was the daughter of one of the medical professors in the University of Edinburgh. Delicacy of constitution, accompanied by a lameness which proved permanent, ex- hibited itself before he completed his second year, and caused soon after his removal to the country. There, at his grandfather's farm-house of Sandy- knowe, situated beneath the crags of a ruined baronial tower, and overlook- ing a tract of many miles studded with * This narrative is abridged from the " Ency- clopaedia Britannica." spots famous in border-history, the poet passed his childhood till about hia eighth year, with scarcely any inter- ruption but that of a year spent at Bath. Of this early period there are related several interesting anec- dotes of his sympathy with the grand- eur and beauty of nature. The tenaci- ty of his infantine recollections gave promise of what was afterwards so re- markable a faculty in his mind ; and the ballads and legends, which were recited to him amidst the scenes in which their events were laid, co-op- erated in after-days with family and national pride to decide the bent of the border-minstrel's fancy. His health being partially confirm ed, he was recalled home; and froni the end of 1779 until 1783, his educa tion was conducted in the High School of Edinburgh, with the assistance of a tutor resident in his father's house. In the years immediately preceding this change, he had shown decided activity of intellect, and strong symptoms of its diversion towards literary pursuits ; but now, introduced with imperfect preparation into a large and thorough- ly trained class, and thrown, for the first time in his life among a crowd of (476) f , tfo original painting ty Sir Thomas Lawrence Johnson, Wilson !k Co, Publishers. WALTER SCOTT. 477 boisterous boys, his childish zeal for learning seems to have been quenched by ambition of another kind. His memory, it is true, was still remarka- ble, and procured for him from his master the title of historian of the class ; while he produced some school- verses, both translated and original, which were at least creditable for a boy of twelve. Even his intellectual powers, however, were less active in the proper business of the school than in enticing his companions from their tasks by merry jests and little stories ; and his place as a scholar scarcely ever rose above mediocity. But his repu- tation stood high in the play-ground, where, possessed of unconquerable courage, and painfully eager to defeat the scorn which his physical defects excited, he is described as performing hazardous feats of agility, and as gain- ing pugilistic trophies over comrades who, that they might have no unfair advantage over the lame boy, fought, like him, lashed face to face on a plank. At home, his tutor, a zealous Presby- terian, initiated him, chiefly by means of conversation, in the facts of Scottish history, political as well as ecclesiasti- cal, though without being able to shake those opinions which the boy had already taken up as an inheri- tance descending from his Jacobite an- cestors ; and he pursued, with eager- ness, a wide course of miscellaneous reading. "I left the High School," says te, "with a great quantity of general information, ill arranged, in- deed, and collected without sys- tem, yet deeply impressed upon my mind, readily assorted by my pow- er of connexion and memory, and gilded, if I may be permitted to saj so, by a vivid and active imagina tion." His perusal of histories, voyages, and travels, fairy tales, romances, and Eng- lish poetry, was continued with in- creasing avidity during a long visit which, in his twelfth year, he paid to his father's sister at the village of Kel- so, where, lying beneath a noble plane- tree in an antique garden, and behold- ing around him one of the most beau- tiful landscapes in Scotland, the young student read for the first time, with en- tranced enthusiasm, " Percy's Reliquea of Ancient Poetry." This work, be- sides the delight which was imparted by the poems it contained, influenced his mind by giving new dignity, in his eyes, to his favorite Scottish ballads, which he had already begun to collect from recitation, and to copy in little volumes. " To this period, also," he tells us, " I can trace distinctly the awak ing of that delightful feeling for the beauties of natural objects, which has never since deserted me. The roman tic feelings which I have described aa predominating in my mind, naturally rested upon and associated themselves with the grand features of the land- scape around me; and the historical incidents or traditional legen Is con- nected with many of them gave to my admiration a sort of intense im- pression of reverence, which at times made my heart feel too big for its bos- om. From this time the love of natur- al beauty, more especially when com- bined with ancient ruins, or remains of our fathers' piety or splendor, be. came with me an insatiable passion, which, if circumstances had permitted; 478 WALTER SCOTT. I would willingly have gratified by traveling over half the globe." In November, 1783, Scott became a student in the University of Edin- burgh, in which, however, he seems to have attended no classes but those of Greek, Latin, and logic, during one session, with those of ethics and uni- versal history at a later period, while preparing for the bar. About this time, he also acquired French, Italian, and Spanish, all of which he after- wards read with sufficient ease; and the German language was learned a few years later. It was some time be- tween his twelfth and his sixteenth year that his stores of romantic and poetical reading received a vast in- crease, during a severe illness which long confined him to bed ; and one of his schoolfellows has given an interest ing account of excursions in the neigh- borhood of the city, during this period^ when the two youths read poems and romances of knight-errantry, and exer- cised their invention in composing and relating to each other interminable tales modeled on their favorite books. The vocation of the romance-writer and po- et of chivalry was thus already fixed. His health likewise became permanent- ly robust. The sickly boy grew up into a muse ular and handsome youth ; and the lameness in one leg, which was the sole remnant of his early complaints, was through life no obstacle to his habits of active bodily exertion, or to his love for out-of-door sports and exercise. The next step in his life did not seem directed towards the goal to which all his favorite studies pointed. His father, a formal, though high-spir- ited and high-principled man, whose manners are accurately described in his son's novel of " Redgauntlet," designed him for the legal profession ; and, a* though he always looked wishfully forward to his son's embracing the highest department of it, considered it advisable, according to a practice not uncommon in Scotland, that he should be prepared for the bar by an educa- tion as an attorney. Accordingly, in May, 1786, Scott, then nearly fifteen years old, was articled for five years as an apprentice to his father, in whose chambers he thenceforth continued, for the greater part of every day, to dis- charge the humble duties of a clerk ) until, about the year 1790, he had, with his father's approbation, finally resolved on coming to the bar. ' Of the amount of the young poet's profession- al industry during those years of servi- tude we possess conflicting representa- tions; but many circumstances in his habits, many peculiarities in the knowl- edge he exhibits incidentally in his works, and perhaps even much of his resolute literary industry, may be safe- ly referred to the period of his appren- ticeship, and show satisfactorily that at all events he was not systematically negligent of his duties- Historical and imaginative reading, however, contin ued to be prosecuted with undiminish ed ardour ; summer excursions into the Highlands introduced him to the scenes, and to more than one of the characters, which afterwards figured in his most successful works; while in the law- classes of the university, as well as in the juvenile debating societies, he formed, or renewed from his school day?, acquaintance with several who WALTER SOOTT. 479 became in manhood his cherished friends and his literary advisers. In 1791, the Speculative Society made him acquainted with Mr. Jeffrey. His attempts in poetry had now become more ambitious; for, it is said, about the completion of his fifteenth year, he had composed a poem in four books on the Conquest of Granada, which, how- ever, he almost immediately burned, and no trace of it has been preserved. During some years after this time, we hear of no other literary composition than essays for the debating societies. In July, 1792, being almost twenty- one years of age, he was called to the bar. Immediately after his first cir- cuit, he commenced that series of " raids," as he playfully called them, or excursions into the secluded border dis- tricts, which in a few years enabled him to amass the materials for his first considerable work. His walks on the boards of the Parliament House, the Westminster Hall of Scotland, if they gained him for a time few professional fees, speedily procured him renown among his fellow-lawyers as a story- teller of high excellence ; his father's connections and his own friendships opened for him a ready admission into the best society of the city, in which his cheerful temper and his rich store of anecdotes made him universally pop- ular ; and his German studies produc- ed, in 1796, his earliest poetical efforts that were published, namely, the trans- lations of Burger's ballads, "Lenora and the Wild Huntsman." The same year witnessed the disappointment of a long and fondly-cherished hope, by the marriage of a young lady, whose image, notwithstanding, clung to his memory through life, and inspired some of the tenderest strains of his poetry. In the summer of 1797, however, on a visit to the watering-place of Gilslaud, in Cumberland, he became acquainted with Charlotte Margaret Carpenter, a young lady of French birth and par- entage, whose mother, the widow of a royalist of Lyons, had escaped to Eng- land, and there died, leaving her chil- dren to the guardianship of their fath- er's friend, the Marquis of Downshire- A mutual attachment ensued ; and, af- ter the removal of prudential doubts, which had arisen among the connec- tions on both sides, Scott and Miss Carpenter were married at Carlisle, in December of the same year. The German ballads, which, though they met with very little sale, had been justly praised by a few competent crit- ics, served as the translator's introduo to the then celebrated Matthew Greg- ory Lewis, who enlisted him as a con- tributor to his poetical " Tales of Won- der ;" and one cannot now but smile to hear of the elation with which the author of Waverley at that time cor.- templated the patronizing kindness ex- tended to him by the author of " The Monk." Early in 1788 was published Scott's translation of Goethe's " Goetz von Berlichingen,"'which, through Lew- is's assistance, was sold to a London bookseller for twenty-five guineas; but though favorably criticised, it was re- ceived by the public as coldly as the preceding volume. In the summer of 1799, the poet wrote those ballads which he has himself called his first serious attempts in verse ; the " Glen> finlas," the " Eve of St. John," and the " Grey Brother " 480 WALTER SCOTT. After Scott's marriage, several of his summers were spent in a pretty cot- tage at Lasswade, near Edinburgh, where he formed, besides other ac- quaintances, those of the noble houses of Melville and Buccleuch. The influ- ence of these powerful friends, willingly exerted for one whose society was agree- able, whose birth connected him, though very remotely, with the latter of those titled families, and who in politics was decidedly and actively devoted to the ruling party, procured for him, in the end of the year, 1799, his appoint- ment as sheriff-depute of Selkirkshire, an office which imposed very little du- ty, while it gave him a permanent sal- ary of 300 per annum. His father's death had recently bestowed on him a small patrimony ; his wife had an in- come which was considerable enough to aid him greatly; his practice as a lawyer yielded, though not much, yet more than barristers of his standing can usually boast of; and, altogether, his situation in life, if not eminent, was at least strikingly favorable when com- pared with that which has fallen to the lot of most literary men. Scott, how- ever, now twenty-eight years of age, had done nothing to iound a reputa- tion for him as a man of letters; and there appeared as yet to be but little probability that he should attach him- self to literature as a profession, or consider it as any thing more than a relaxation for those leisure hours which were left unoccupied by business and ^he enjoyments of polite society. In 1800 and 1801, those hours were employed in the preparation of the Border Minstrelsy, the fruit of his childish recollections, and of his vouth- ful rambles and studies. The first two volumes appeared in the beginning of the next year, and the edition, consist ing of eight hundred copies, was sold off before its close. This work, how- ever, the earliest of his which can be said to have given him any general fame, yielded him about eighty pounds of clear profit ; being very far less than he must have expended in the investi- gations out of which it sprang. In 1803, it was completed by the publi- cation of the third volume. " One of the critics of that day," remarks Mr. Lockhart, " said that the book contain- ed ' the elements of a hundred histori- cal romances;' and this critic was a prophetic one. No person who has not gone through its volumes for the express purpose of comparing their contents with his great original works, can have formed a conception of the endless variety of incidents and im- ages, now expanded and emblazoned by his mature art, of which the first hints may be found either in the text of those primitive ballads, or in the notes which the happy rambles of his youth had gathered together for their illus- tration." But before the publication of the " Border Minstrelsy," the poet had be- gun to attempt a higher flight. "In the third volume," says he, writing to his friend George Ellis, in 1804, " I in- tend to publish a long poem of my own. It will be a kind of a romance of border chivalry, in a light -horseman sort of stanza." This border romance was the " Lay of the Last Minstrel," which, however, soon extended in plan and dimensions, and, originating as a ballad on a goblin story, became at WALTEE SCOTT. 481 . length a long and varied poem. The first draught of it, in its present shape, was written in the autumn of 1802, and the whole history of its progress has been delightfully told by the author himself, and is well illustrated by his biographer. In 1803, during a visit to London, Scott, already familiarly acquainted with Ellis, Heber, and other literary men, and now possessing high reputa- tion himself in virtue of the " Minstrel- sy," was introduced to several of the first men of the time ; and, thenceforth, bland as he was in manner, and kind in heart, indefatigable and successful in his study of human character, and always willing to receive with cordial- ity the strangers whom his waxing fame brought about him, it is not sur- prising to find, that not to know per- sonally Walter Scott, argued one's self unknown. The toleration and kind- liness of his character are illustrated by the fact, that, firm as his own polit- ical opinions were, and violently as ex- citement sometimes led him to express them, not only did he always continue on friendly terms with the chief men of the opposite party in Edinburgh, but several of them were his intimate friends and associates ; and he even was for some years an occasional con- tributor to the Edinburgh Eeview. In 1804, was published his edition of the ancient poem of Sir " Tristram," so valuable for its learned dissertations, and for that admirable imitation of the antique which appears as a continuation of the eai ly minstrel's work. During that year and the preceding, the Lay was freely communicated to all the author's friends, Wordsworth and 61 Jeffrey among the rest ; and,' after un- dergoing various changes, and receiv- ing enthusiastic approval in several quarters from which commendation was wont to issue but sparingly, it was at length published, in the first Week of 1805. The poet, now thirty- three years of age, took his place at once as a classic in English literature. Its circulation immediately became im- mense, and has since exceeded that of any other English poem. But exactly at this culminating point of the poet's life, we must turn aside from the narrative of his literary tri- umphs, to notice a step of another kind, which proved the most important he ever took. In one of those interesting communications of 1830, which throw so much light on his personal history, he has told us, that from the moment when it became certain that literature was to form the principal employment of his days, he determined that it should at least not constitute a necessary source of his income. Few literary men, per- haps, have not nourished a wish of this sort ; but very few indeed have pos- sessed, like Scott, the means of con- verting the desire into an effectual res- olution. In 1805, as his biographer tells us, he was, " independently of practice at the bar and of literary profits, in possession of a fixed reve- nue of nearly, if not quite, 1,000 a year." To most men of letters this in come would have appeared affluence; but Scott has frankly avowed that he did not think it such. The fame of a great poet, now within his reach, if not already grasped, seemed to him a little thing, compared with the dig- nity of a well-descended and wealthy 82 WALTER SCOTT. Scottish land-holder; and, while neither he nor his friends could yet have for- eseen the immensity of those resources which his genius was afterwards to place at his disposal for the attain- ment of his favorite wish, two plans occurred and were executed, which promised to conduct him far at least towards the goal. The first of these was the obtaining of one of the principal clerkships in the Scottish Court of Session, offices of high respectability, executed at a moderate cost of time and trouble, and remunerated at that time by an income of about 800 a year, which was afterwards increased to 1,300. This object was attained early in 1800, through his ministerial influence, aid- ed by the consideration paid to his tal- ents ; although, owing to a private ar- rangement with his predecessor, he did not receive any part of the emoluments till six years later. The second plan was of a different sort, being in fact a commercial specu- lation. James Ballantyne, a school- fellow of Scott, a man possessing a good education, and considerable liter- ary talent of a practical kind, having become the editor and printer of a newspaper in Kelso, had been em- ployed to print the " Minstrelsy," and acquired a great reputation by the el- egance with which that work was pro- duced. Soon afterwards, in pursuance of Scott's advice, he removed to Edin- burgh, where, under the patronage of the poet and his friends, and assisted by his own character and skill, his printing business accumulated to an extent which his capital, even with pe- cuniary aid from Scott, proved inade- quate to sustain. An application for a new loan was met by a refusal, ac- companied, however, by a proposal, that Scott should make a large ad- vance, on condition of being admitted as a partner in the firm, to the amount of a third share. Accordingly, in May 1805, Walter Scott became regularly a partner of the printing-house of James Ballantyne and Company, though the fact remained for the public, and for all his friends but one, a profound se- cret. "The forming of this commer- cial connexion was," says his son-in- law, " one of the most important steps in Scott's life. He continued bound by it during twenty years, and its in- fluence on his literary exertions and his worldly fortunes was productive of much good and not a little evil. Its effects were in truth so mixed and balanced during the vicissitudes of a 2 sympathy, respect, and admiration of every one who was privileged to know her. The Federal party having been over- thrown, and Jefferson having come in- to power, in consequence of the " Re publican revolution" of 1801, James Madison was appointed Secretary of State by the new President. This ne- cessitated his removal to Washington, and Mrs. Madison accordingly was called upon to enter on a new sphere of duty. At this date, the national capital was almost a wilderness. Hard- ly any buildings were yet erected. The Capitol was but partially completed ; and the President's house was in a very doleful state indeed. Woods and forests prevailed, and the houses of the occupants of the place, or new city, were few and far between. New comers of all sorts and from all parts of the country came to Washington, either from duty or necessity, or in search of advantages expected to be found in the Metropolis of the United States. As was but natural, society, made up of such various materials, formed a rather motley throng; and it was evi dent that each needed the aid and sympathy of the other, to render life tolerable and pleasant. In this respect, Mrs. Madison was of peculiar value to the social condition and progress of j ,'iffairs in the capital. Her genial I spirit, her attractive manner, her ready tact, her sincerity, gentleness and good taste all combined, gave her an influence unsurpassed in W ashington ; and when, in the absence of Jefferson's daughter, she presided in the President's house, she seems to have had the happy faculty of uniting all the varying element? d90 DOROTHY PAYNE MADISON. around her ; so much so, that Jefferson afterwards spoke in very laudatory terms of the condition of things at the capital, and said, " we were like one family." In her own house, Mrs. Madison ex- ercised no less influence. Foreign ministers, the diplomatic corps in gen- eral, senators, representatives, and others, met in the hospitable mansion of the Secretary of State, and were there entertained and charmed by the graceful and affable hostess. The un- ruly demon of party spirit was in a measure, and for the time, laid to rest ; and this estimable lady rarely, if ever, failed to make friends, and conciliate whatever jealous or hostile feeling found place in the hearts of those who were politically or personally opposed to the head of the department of state. Madison continued in his position during the whole of Jefferson's Presi- dency, and, when the time came for the election of a fourth President, he was the prominent candidate of the Republican or Democratic party. Of course, he was not exempt from that abuse of an unbridled and licentious press which even Washington was subjected to; and calumnies and false- hoods were circulated largely, with the intent of breaking down the able, energetic, and incorruptible friend and successor of Jefferson. All efforts of this kind, however, failed ; and, though it is not possible to point out exactly how much the disarming of enemies, and the acquiring of new friends were due to Mrs. Madison, yet, we are sure, there is little danger of overestimating her influence in this particular; for she continued to be the same gentle, frank, and courteous hostess that she always had been, and political aui mosity was quelled in her presence. She made no invidious distinctions in her courtesies; she treated opponents with that mildness and winning charity which are sure in the end to gain the victory. Madison himself was rather stiff and reserved in manners ; and, we are declined to think, that he, as well as many another man, owed more of his success, politically and per- sonally, to his wife, than writers of biography and history are in the habit of admitting and putting on record. The new President entered upon his duties in March, 1809, and Mrs. Madi- son took her rightful place at the head of the executive mansion. Brilliant festivities marked the opening of the new administration, and the wife of the President thenceforward was the centre of a gay and lively circle, where beauty and fashion found fitting room for display. Most of the courtly eti- quette and high ceremonial of " Lady Washington's" days was now banished, and the utmost freedom of manners was allowed, consistent with propriety and true politeness. It was in Madison's second term that a change came over the scene. Our relations with Great Britain had for some time been getting more and more unsatisfactory ; and, though the President would have much preferred peace to war, yet, as that haughty na- tion pursued its ungenerous, overbear- ing, and insulting course to a point beyond any possibility of endurance, war was finally declared in 1812, and j a second time the sword was drawn against England The history of tht? DOROTHY PAYNE MADISON. 49] war is not material to our present pur- poses. All that we need notice here, in connection with the President's family, is that Vandal-like attack upon Washington by the British, in 1814, utterly purposeless as regarded any effect upon the war. So unlocked for was this attack, that widespread panic and confusion prevailed in the capital and its vicinity. Every one that could, ran away, and carried with them all that was possible; all except Mrs. Madison. The President had gone to hold a council of war, and numerous friends came and begged his wife to leave the city at once ; but she utterly refused to do so, in his absence ; she was resolved to wait his return and have his company. We give here an extract from a let- ter of hers at this juncture, which will enable the reader to form a more vivid idea of the actual state of affairs than we could possibly set forth by any elaborate description : " Tuesday, August 23d, 1814. " DEAR SISTER : My husband left me yesterday to join General Winder. He enquired anxiously whether I had courage or firmness to remain in the President's house until his return on the morrow, or succeeding day ; and on my assurance that I had no fear, but for him and the success of our army, he left me, beseeching me to take care of myself, and of the Cabinet papers, public and private. I have since re- ceived two despatches from him, writ- ten with a pencil ; the last is alarming, because he desires that I should be ready, at a moment's warning, to enter my carnage and leave the city ; that the enemy seemed stronger than had been reported, and that it might hap pen that they would reach the city, with intention to destroy it I am accordingly ready ; I ha\ e pressed as many cabinet papers into trunks as to fill our carriage ; our private proper- ty must be sacrificed, as it is impossi- ble to procure wagons for its transpor- tation. I am determined not to go myself until I see Mr. Madison safe, and he can accompany me, as I hear of much hostility towards him Disaffection stalks around us My friends and acquaintances are all gone, even Col. C., with his hundred men, who were stationed as a guard in this enclosure French John (a faithful domestic), with his usual activity and resolution, offers to spike the cannon at the gate, and to lay a train of powder which would blow up the British, should they enter the house. To the last proposition I pos- itively object, without being able, how- ever, to make him understand why all advantages in war may not be taken. " Wednesday morning, twelve o'clock : Since sunrise I have been turning my spy -glass in every direction, and watch- ing with unwearied anxiety, hoping to discern the approach of my dear hus- band and his friends ; but, alas, I can descry only groups of military wander- ing in all directions, as if there was a lack of arms, or of spirit to fight for their own fire-sides ! " Three o'clock : Will you believe it, my sister? we have had a battle or skirmish near Bladensburgh, and I am still here within sound of the cannon ! Mr. Madison comes not ; may God pro tect him ! Two messengers covered with dust come to bid me fly ; but I waii 492 DOROTHY PAYNE MADISON. for him. ..... At this late hour, a wagon has been procured; I have had it filled with the plate and most valuable portable articles belonging to the house; whether it will reach its destination, the Bank of Maryland, or tall into the hands of British soldiery, events must determine. u Our kind friend. Mr. Carroll, has come to hasten my departure, and is in a very bad humor with me because I insist on waiting until the large picture of General Washington is secured, and it requires to be unscrewed from the wall. This process was found too te- dious for these perilous moments; I have ordered the frame to be broken, and the canvass taken out. It is done, and the precious portrait placed in the hands of two gentlemen of New York for safe keeping. And now, dear sis- ter, I must leave this house, or the re- treating army will make me a prisoner in it, by filling up the road I am directed to take. When I shall again write to you, or where I shall be to-morrow, I cannot tell." Happily, this second war with Eng- land was not of long duration, and Mrs. Madison did the honors of her house, on the receipt of the news of peace, in 1815, with unusual brilliancy and effectiveness. Washington Irving is reported as characterizing her, at this date, " as a fine, portly, buxom dame, who has a smile and pleasant word for every body." For the re- mainder of Madison's presidential term, he resided in a private house where, however, was continued to be dispens- ed the liberal hospitality which always marked his establishment. On retiring from office, in 18 IT, and giving the reins of government into the hands of his successor, James Monroe, Madison left Washington, and sought with delight his mountain home at Montpelier. He was now well advanc- ed in age, being about sixty-six years old ; and, with occasional absences, he spent the remainder of his life in the quiet enjoyments of home and family. Jefferson's residence at Monticello was within a day's ride, and these venera- ble men, who had both been so large- ly concerned in the history and pro gress of affairs, used to meet, and dis- course of the past and present, and give utterance to vaticinations of the future. A large and commodious mansion, built rather for comfort than display, beau tiful garden and grounds, picturesque and striking scenery, and abundance of means wherewith to follow the Apostolic precept, " given to hospitali- ty," these and the like rendered Mont- pelier extremely attractive, and enabled Mrs. Madison to play the part of the benignant hostess to her heart's content. In one of her letters, written to her sister, in July, 1820, she says : " Yes- terday we had ninety persons to dine with us at our table, fixed on the lawn under a large arbor. The dinner was profuse and handsome, and the com- pany very orderly. Many of your old acquaintances were here, among them the two Barbours. We had no ladies, except mother Madison, Mrs. Macon, and Nelly Willis. The day was cool, and all pleasant. Half a dozen only staid all night, arid are now about to depart. President Monroe's letter this morning announces the French Minis- ter; we expect him this evening, or perhaps sooner, though he may no^ DOEOTHY PAYNE MAD1SOK 493 3ome until to-morrow; but I am less worried liere with a hundred visitors than with twenty-five in Washington, this summer especially. I wish you had just such a country house as this, as I truly believe it is the happiest and most independent life, and would be best for your children." During the latter years of his life Mr. Madison was a confirmed invalid, and suffered severely and continually from debility and disease. He needed constant attendance and watchful care and consideration. It was in this posture of affairs, that Mrs. Madi- son displayed the depth and force of those estimable qualities which belong- ed to her. Having reached to a point far beyond the allotted four - score years, Madison died, Juue 28th, 1836, in the eighth-sixth year of his age, and left his sorrowing widow to pass the remainder of her pilgrimage alone. Her biographer speaks of her in terms which may fitly b quoted. " Much as Mrs. Madison graced her public station ? she was not less admirable in domestic life. Neighborly and companionable among her country friends, as if she had never lived in a city ; delighting in the society of the young, and never better pleased than when promoting every youthful pleasure by her partic- ipation, she still proved herself the affectionate and devoted wife during the eighteen years of suffering health of her excellent husband. Without neglecting the duties of a kind host- ess, a faithful friend and relative, she smoothed and enlivened, occupied and amused the languid hours of his long confinement." Mrs. Madison's own health broke down for a season, subsequent to her husband's death, and after a brief so- journ at the White Sulphur Springs in Virginia, she concluded to take up her residence in Washington, which she did in the autumn of 1837. Although by no means a recluse, she took but moder- ate share in society and its gaieties. She was, however, the same genial-hearted, amiable, excellent woman that she al- ways had been, and was as ready as ever to administer, to the extent of her means, to the wants and necessities of all around her. Unhapily, financial embarrassments compelled her to con sent to the sale of Montpelier, a trial which she bore with sweet submission, but felt none the less keenly. The latter years of her life were marked by great debility of her bodily powers, while her mental faculties were spared to her in their full vigor. Mrs. Ellet relates that she took great de- light in hearing the Bible read, and that it was while listening to a portion of St. John's Gospel that she sunk in- to that peaceful slumber preceding final dissolution. Her death took place July 8th, 1849, in the seventy-eighth year of her age. Her mortal remains were deposited for a period in the Congressional Cemetery at Washing- ton ; but in January, 1858, they were removed to the family burial-ground at Montpelier, and placed by the side of her husband. A chaste but appro- priate monument has been erected to her memory, and records, as far as the cold marble can, her many virtues and her rightful claim to be held in esteem by succeeding generations. HENRY, LORD BROUGHAM. T^HE family of Lord Brougham on the paternal side, is traceable, in England, through an ancient ances- try; the Broughams having been set- tled in Westmoreland since the con- quest. When towards the close of his life, he sat down to write Tiis autobio- graphy, he affected to make light of their pretensions, characterizing their existence in general as " a state of re- spectable mediocrity," and asserting that, so far as he could discover, none of these long line of predecessors " were ever remarkable for anything," and that even in the warlike adventures upon which they had been forced in their troublous times, " Even in that career of doubtful usefulness, they were ra- ther prudent than daring," of which, in a humorous way, he gives some in- stances. But Brougham, the artificer of his own fortunes, could afford to be contemptuous of his ancestry. He, however, prided himself upon his ma- ternal descent, attributing much of his prosperity to the Celtic blood which his mother brought from the ancient Highland clans of Struan and Kinloch- Moidart. She was the only child of the sister of the celebrated Scottish historian, Robertson. Brougham's fa- (494) ther, who had been educated at Eton had travelled on the continent, and after his return to the family seat in Westmoreland, had become engaged to his cousin Mary Whelpdale, the heiress to a neighboring estate, from whom he was suddenly separated by her death, which occurred the very day before that appointed for the wedding. Subsequently visiting his father's very intimate friend, Lord Buchan, at Edin- burgh, he met at his house the niece of Dr. Robertson, Eleanor Syme, the daughter of the Rev. James Syme, one of the city clergymen. On his mar- riage to this lady, the couple for a time resided at the dwelling of Lord Buchan in St. Andrew's Square, and there, their eldest son, Henry Brougham, was born on the 19th of September, 1778. From some " Notes about Henry '' given in Lord Brougham's autobio- graphy, written by his mother, we learn that he was distinguished for his mental activity even in his infancy. "From a very tender age," this fond parent writes, long after her son had become celebrated, "he excelled .'ill his contemporaries. Nothing to him was a labor no task prescribed that was not performed long before thr Likeness from the last Photograph from life- JohnsonWilson &: Co. .Publishers, Newark HENRY, LORD BROUGHAM. 495 time expected. His grandmother, a . very clever woman, was an enthusias- tic admirer of all intellectual acquire- ments, and used to compare him to the Admirable Crichton, from his excelling in everything he undertook. From mere infancy he showed a marked at- tention to everything he saw, and this before he could speak ; afterwards, to everything he lieard / and he had a memory the most retentive. He spoke distinctly several words when he was eight months and two weeks old ; and this aptitude to learn continued pro- gressive." To the mother of this lady, his grandmother, says Lord Brougham, writing in the fulness of his fame, " I owe all my success in life. From my earliest infancy till I left college, with the exception of the time we passed at Brougham with my tutor, Mr. Mitchell, I was her companion. Re- markable for beauty, but far more for a masculine intellect and clear under- standing, she instilled into me from my cradle the strongest desire for in- formation, and the first principles of that persevering energy in the pursuit of every kind of knowledge, which more than any natural talents I may possess, has enabled me to stick to, and to accomplish, how far successfully it is not for me to say. every task I ever undertook." Having been taught by his father to read, Henry began his school edu- cation, when very young, at a sort of infant school in Edinburgh, attended by girls as well as boys ; and when at the age of seven he had outgrown this establishment, he was sent to the fa- mous High School of the city, where he was at first taught by Luke Fraser. Assisted daily in his studies by hia grandmother, he was, on one occasion, by the aid of the accomplished lady enabled to vanquish this preceptor OL a disputed bit of Latinity for which the day before he had been punished. The master admitted the error, and in justice should have had the flogging if that was the penalty returned on his own back. Young Harry, how- ever, got immense credit with his schoolfellows as "the boy that had licked the master," and was content with this purely intellectual triumph ; for, in telling this story in his Me- moirs, he adds in a sufficiently humble spirit : " I am bound to say Mr. Fraser bore no malice ; and, when I left him, at the end of four years, to go into the rector's class, we parted the best of friends." Fraser was fortunate in his pupils, having the good luck to turn out, from three successive classes, Wal- ter Scott, Francis Jeffrey and Henry Brougham. The rector under whose immediate direction the last came, was the amiable Dr. Alexander Adam, whose excellent Latin grammar is fa- miliar to so many of the youths of America. The first of the two re- maining years of the school course was impaired, so far at least as pub- lic instruction went, to young Broug- ham by his ill state of health, which kept him at home ; but the time was not lost, as no time was ever lost to this indefatigable writer. Dr. Adam had one of the best gifts of a teacher the faculty of exciting both an ardent love of the subjects he taught, and a spirit of inquiry into all that related to them. " Stirred by his precepts and example (continues Brougham,) 490 HENRY, LORD BROUGHAM. I spent the months during which I was kept Irom school by indisposition, in reading and trying my hand at composition. The progress I made during this illness clearly proved to me two things : first, the importance of allowing boys sufficient time for reading, instead of devoting the whole day, as at school, to Latin and Greek exercises; next, the great benefit of having a teacher who could dwell up- on subjects connected with the lessons he taught, but beyond those lessons, thus exciting the desire of useful knowledge in his pupils." Dr. Adam, indeed, was a preceptor whom his pupils delighted to honor. Walter Scott, who had also passed un- der his instructions from those of Luke Fraser several years before, acknowl- edges himself much indebted to the gen- tle directions and insinuating scholar- ship of the worthy rector. Under his encouragement he distinguished him- self in poetical versions from Horace and Virgil. The doctor noticed par- ticularly his extraordinary memory, which he often appealed to for the de- tails of battles and other events, call- ing him the historian of the class. " It was from him," says Scott, " that I first learned the value of the knowledge I had hitherto considered only as a bur- densome task." Jeffrey " through life," as we are told by his biographer, " re- collected him with the same judicious gratitude." Brougham was fond of expatiating on his merits; and in a passage of his autobiography has nar- rated with feeling the early struggles of this scholar with poverty, and how he overcame them by his zeal for study, and inspired his pupils with his pas- sionate love of knowledge in its most liberal forms, as " with great natural . eloquence" he dwelt upon the lessons of history, constantly referring to in- dividuals, and enriching his discourse by classical citations. He was, too, a great deal of a moralist, inculcating a love of independence; and in times when toryisrn was largely the fashion, was quite a liberal. His pupil, no doubt, afterwards profited much by his prolonged dissertations on the an- cient orators, whose method and elo- quence the rector was never weary of discussing. Brougham must have been a good student at the High School, though he objected to Lord Cockburn and others fancying that he at all dis- tinguished himself there ; for he came out with title of dux head of his class and the school. "Having finished with the High School," says he, "I passed the next fourteen months, from August, 1791, to October, 1792, at Brougham, (the family seat in Westmoreland,) where Mr. Mitchell was my first tutor a man of excellent temper as well as sound learning, who intended to take orders in the Scotch Church. By his conversation on every subject it was impossible not to profit ; and his moral maxims were as enlightened as his opinions on literary and scientific sub- jects. The time was principally de- voted to Greek and Latin ; and I was further instructed in such duties by my father, who retained his love of and familiarity with the classics ; and, encouraged by him, I tried my hand at writing English essays, and even tales of fiction." Of the latter, he gives, in the autobiography, with a rather con HENRY, LORD BROUGHAM. 497 teinptuous toss of the pen, a tale en- titled " Memnon, or Human Wisdom," as one that had " survived the waste- paper basket." Oddly enough, this proves to be a translation from Vol- taire, which, in the long lapse of time, he had mistaken for his own compo- sition. The error, undiscovered by his editor, was left to be corrected by the " Edinburgh Review," of which he had been one of the founders seventy years before.* The reviewer, however, ad- mits it to be a spirited translation. In- deed, he was at this early period, much employed upon translations, which were especially enjoined upon him by his relative, Dr. Robertson, who con- sidered its exact requirements a better discipline for the mind, in the selection and choice of terms, than the freer license of original composition follow- ing the mood of the writer. In compli- ance with his wishes, young Brough- am translated the whole of the Latin history of " Florus." In connection with this, he tells us that the only efforts which he had made in verse were, " from the entire want of poetical faculty, confined to translation, having nothing to distinguish them but the vigorous closeness, the whole poetical merit clearly belonging to the origi- nal." When Brougham entered the Uni- versity of Edinburgh, at the age of fourteen, in the autumn of 1792, Dr. Robertson was still principal, and Playfair, Dugald Stewart, and Black, at the height of their reputation in the several chairs of mathematics, philoso- * The " Edinburgh Review," April, 1872. Arti- cle, "The Life and Times of Henry, Lord Broug- ham." 63 phy, and chemistry. To all of these studies Brougham paid particular at- tention, distinguishing himself par- ticularly in the departments of mathe- mathics and natural philosophy. He soon, by the aptness of his apprehen- sion, became a favorite with Playfair ; and, with characteristic ardor and con- fidence, before he was seventeen, trans- mitted to the Royal Society at London a paper of his composition detailing some experiments of his own on light and -colors. The article was well re- ceived, and printed in the " Philosophi- cal Transactions," with the omission of a part, which the editors considered to belong rather to the arts than the sciences. "This," writes Brougham, " was very unfortunate ; because, I having; observed the effects of a small o hole in the window-shutter of a dark- ened room, when a view is formed on white paper of the external objects, I had suggested that if that view is formed, not on paper, but on ivory rubbed with nitrate of silver, the pic- ture would become permanent ; and I suggested improvements in drawing founded upon this fact. Now this is the origin of photography; and had the note containing the suggestion -in 1795 appeared, in all probability it would have set others on the examina- tion of the subject, and given us pho- tography half a century earlier than we had it."* Besides two optical pa- pers, printed in 1796 and 1797, there was one on Porisms, by Brougham, in serted in the "Philosophical Transac- tions" of 1798.. Of the accomplished Black's University Chemical Lectures, * "The Life and Times of Lord Brougham.' Am. ed., I., 59. 498 HENKY, LOED BKOUGHAM. Brougham, in his "Autobiography" and "Lives of the Philosophers," speaks in terms of unbounded admiration. His grace and skill in experiments, and the exactness and unerring facility with which he commented upon them, are described by him as perfect, with every merit in the highest degree attributed to Faraday in our time. Much as he was interested in these scientific studies, the youthful Brough- am's attention was by no means con- fined to them. Already marked out for an advocate and public speaker, he was a leading member of the debating society composed of the University students Before entering the " Specu- lative Society," famed for its training, of lawyers and statesmen, Brougham had, with some of his friends, at the close of 1792, established a debating club of their own, to which they had given the name of " The Juvenile Lit- erary Society." Several persons of English and local fame, as the Whig politician Francis Horner, and An- drew Thomson, the Scottish preacher, belonged to it. The questions dis- cussed were such as time out of mind have engaged the attention of histori- ans and essayists, as the character of Mary Queen of Scotts, the act of Bru- tus in slaying Caesar, and the moral and economical agitation of the rela- tive injuries or inconveniences of the Miser and the Profligate. The busi- ness of the house was attended to at the meetings with extreme punctilio and regularily, " so that the example of these boys," as Brougham says, "might be a lesson to their seniors in other assemblies." The far-famed M Speculative Society " with a hall and library of its own in the college, then established for more than a quarter of a century, was of a higher grade. Jeffrey, in his preparation for the bar, owed much to it, and was a member of it at the time when Brougham joined it. Walter Scott also belonged to it at this time, and was reading pa- pers to be discussed by his associates, according to the plan of the meetings, on "The Origin of the Feudal Sys- tem," " The Authenticity of the Poems of Ossian," and on sundry questions of public morality and political economy. Scott was also Secretary of the Society. Horner was a member; and, among others of subsequent celebrity, Lord Henry Petty, afterwards Marquis of Lansdowne, and Cockburn, who be- came an eminent Scottish judge ; and who recalls, in his biography of Jeffrey, the kindling debates of the Society- " It has scarcely," he writes, " ever fallen to my lot to hear three better speeches than three I heard in that place : one on national character, by Jeffrey ; one on the immortality of the soul, by Horner ; and one on the power of Eussia, by Brougham." Besides his exertions in this field, Brougham was an attentive observer of the elo- quence of the Scotch bar, displayed by Harry Erskine and Charles Hope. It was a hearty, happy, as well as devoted, studious life, Brougham led with his young associates at the Uni versity, in the vacations, making walk- ing tours through different parts of the Highlands, "wild scrambling ex- cursions, but abounding in mirth and jollity," as he recalled them ; " for we were young, active and overburdened with high spirits." HENTIY, LOKD BROUGHAM. 499 One of his northern excursions, in the summer of 1799, assumed larger proportions than those to which he had been hitherto accustomed. Join- ing a yachting expedition fitted out by a Mr. Henry, a wealthy Irish gentle- man who had pursued his studies in Scotland, accompanied by his friend Charles Stuart, Brougham cruised about the Western Islands to remote St. Kilda, with the intention, on the part of the company, of prosecuting the voyage to Iceland. The season, at the beginning of September, however, proved too far advanced for this, and Brougham, with his friend Stuart, sep- arating from the rest, sailed for Copen- hagen instead. The tour, continued for three months, was extended through Denmark and Scandinavia. Brough- am's observations on this journey, in the form of a journal kept at the time, supplies one of the largest and most interesting chapters of his Me- moirs. He was, of course, a diligent traveller, overlooking little of interest on his way, but particularly attentive to scientific and political matters, not forgetting the social and economical habits of the people among whom he sojourned. His University course having been concluded, and the law chosen for his profession, in June, 1800, he "passed advocate" at Edinburgh, a technical Scottish expression equivalent to the English being " called to the bar." His first efforts in the profession in attending the Assizes in the counties of Berwick, Roxburgh and Selkirk, were not very productive, being con- fined to the defence of prisoners who were unable to pay for professional as- sistance. He had at this time, as he tells us, "an invincible repugnance" to the calling, and was anxious to find some means of escape for it in " diplo rnacy," meaning, we presume, employ- ment under government. He went so far as to seek the influence in this di- rection of Sir Joseph Banks, then in the height of his social ascendancy, with, whom he had corresponded on scientific subjects. Nothing coming of this, he continued to occupy himself with the composition of an elaborate treatise, on "The Colonial Policy of the European Powers," the main ob ject of which was to prove the advan- tageous effects likely to result to the colonies in the suppression of the slave-trade, slavery being accepted as a settled institution, capable of ameli- oration when the foreign traffic should be discontinued. This work appeared at Edinburgh, in two volumes, in 1803, and attracted much attention as the work of so young a man, as well as by its indications of talent. " The most careless eye," says one of the author's critics, "will readily discern in it the germ of those peculiarities of temper- ament, thought and style, which after- wards developed themselves into such luxuriance. Vigor and facility of ex- pression, bitter sarcasm, exaggerated statements, and singular brilliancy of illustrations run through volumes in- tended to elucidate and enforce a theory of colonial policy which sub- sequent events have deprived of all interest or present applicability."* Before the " Colonial Policy " was issued, its author had appeared as a * Art. "Lord Brougham." "Chambers' Pa- pers for the People," No. 88. 500 HENRY, LORD BROUGHAM. leading contributor and contriver of a work, new in its scope in periodical literature, with which his labors were Ions to be identified. The "Edin- O burgh Review." the first number of O ' which was published in October, 1802, originally suggested by Sydney Smith, was planned in a little coterie, of which Brougham was a prominent member. His account of the inception of the work is given in a passage of the Au- tobiography. " I can never forget Buc- cleuch-place (where Jeffrey resided); for it was there, one stormy night in March, 1802, that Sydney Smith first announced to me his idea of establish- ing a critical periodical, or review of works of literature and science. I be- lieve he had already mentioned this to Jeffrey and Horner ; but on that night the project was for the first time seri- ously discussed by Smith, Jeffrey, and me. I at first entered warmly into Smith's scheme. Jeffrey, by nature al- ways rather timid, was full of doubts and fears. It required all Smith's overpowering vivacity to argue and laugh Jeffrey out of his difficulties. There would, he said, be no lack of contributors. There was himself, ready to write any number of articles and to edit the whole ; there was Jeffrey, facile princess in all kinds of litera- ture ; there was myself, full of mathe- matics, and everything relating to col- onies; there was Horner for political economy, Murray for general subjects ; besides, might we not, from our great and never-to-be-doubted success, fairly hope to receive help from such levia- thans as Playfair, Dugald Stewart, Robinson, Thomas Brown, Thomson, and others? All this was irresistible, and Jeffrey could not deny that he hac. already been the author of many im portant papers in existing periodicals.' With this enthusiastic impulse oi Sydney Smith, the "Review" wag agreed upon. It was seven months however, before it could be brought to the light, so many petty obstacles were interposed in the negotiations for a publisher, getting together the con- tributors, and other difficulties, seem- ingly inseparable from a new under- taking of the kind. Brougham, who proved one of its stanchest supports, was balky at the start, and at one time declined to have any connection with it. This, he tells us, was from doubts of its management and its proper in dependence. When he found that Jeffrey was to be its editor, and that the publishers were to have no control over its papers, he assented, and wrote no fewer than seven articles for the first number, four of them on books of travels, two on science reviews of Wood's Optics and Playfair's Illustra- tions of the Huttonian Theory, and one on his peculiar topic, the " Crisis of the Susrar Colonies." Of five arti- O cles which he contributed to the second number, four were on scientific topics. In the fourth he reviewed the " Trans- actions of the American Philosophical Society." In the first twenty numbers of the Review, seventy-five articles were writ ten by Jeffrey, twenty-three by Sydney Smith, fourteen by Horner, and eighty by Brougham. These were essentially the founders of the Review. Its suc- cess was immediate. The numbers were reprinted, and a large circulation established. There were good reasons HEN BY, LORD BROUGHAM. 501 (or this in the boldness and even reck- less independence of the work, the variety and spirit of its articles, and the intellectual harvest it was reaping from the first glowing efforts of con- tributors destined to high distinction in the literary world. But its main strength lay in the cause of Reform, which it supported. "Its great im- portance," writes Brougham, " can only be judged of by recollecting the state of things at the time Smith's bold and sagacious idea was started. Protection reigned triumphant parliamentary representation in Scotland had scarce- ly an existence the Catholics were unemancipated the Test Acts unre- pealed men were hung for stealing a few shillings in a dwelling-house no counsel allowed to a prisoner accused of a capital offence the horrors of the slave-trade tolerated the prevailing tendencies of the age, jobbery and cor- ruption." In the autumn of 1804, Brougham ventured upon a tour on the Continent, an undertaking liable to painful inter- ruption to an Englishman at that time, under the system of reprisals adopted by the Napoleonic government. To obviate this, Brougham went as an American, furnished with an Ameri- can passport and papers. His first point was Holland, which he visited to obtain information on the slave- trade, the first great public question to which, as we have noted, he was directing his talents. At the Hague he had opportunities of discussing the question with the leading statesmen of the country, while he noticed the do- mestic slavery of the Hollanders under fche exactions of France. In October he reached Venice ; and his diary, an off-hand piece of work, without effort at finish, is filled with jottings of pic- tures, theatres, manners, and costumes Meanwhile he is writing an article for the Edinburgh Review " On the Mili- tary Character of the different Euro- pean Armies," on the completion of which he solaces himself with a gon- dola for two or three hours " to enjoy the lagune," and immediately after- wards attends high mass, and finds "something solemn in the thing," though it was performed by the parish priest, " with a courier-like velocity " perhaps on that account, the more ac- ceptable to the mercurial and haste- loving traveller. After three or four days' rapid journeying over rough roads, with an expedition worthy his assumed American character, " fa- tigued and jolted to shivers," he came in sight of the Eternal City, an event recorded in the following memoran- dum: "The distant view is fine; but all the Campagna di Roma is absolutely a waste of waving ground in heath, lean grass, and scattered, stunted vegeta- tion, with a cottage, church, and chapel, and crucifix here and there. Met vast flocks of sheep and lambs. The shepherds seem an odd race of peasants, covered with hairy skins; dos;s all crossed with the wolf. View O of Rome at a distance very fine, from the unevenness of its foundations and the number of cupolas. St. Peter's looks like St. Paul's, only on a gigan- tic scale. Passed the Tiber red, rather than l flavus Tiberis ' by an old bridge. Passport civilly looked at at the Porta del Poj olo fine obe- lisk. Came through tho Corso ; passed I HEXRY, LOED BEOTIGHAM. Trajan's pillar and some fine buildings ; arrived here in the Venetian house of the minister and couriers a very (arge, good palace, surrounded by others, some of which have eighty- four windows on a side. After dining at the Cafe di Venezia, and sleeping, which was necessary to remove a fever which was oppressing me, went to the opera; neat, but small. An opera buffa and a comedy in one act. Music very pretty. Tiers of stage boxes are called after the great composers. Ac- tors very submissive, as usual bow when applauded." The next day is giving to sight-seeing, and at its close the feverish traveller is off for Naples, glances at Vesuvius, hurries through the Virgilian localities, is back to Rome at the end of a week, gives a month to Austria and, at the close of January, is again in England. In the following year, 1806, arrived the desired opportunity for diplomatic employment, when the Whigs came nto power for a short time, on the death of Pitt. An expedition to Por- tugal was determined upon, to prevent the threatened occupation of the coun- try by Buonaparte. A mission was appointed, consisting of the Earl of Rosslyn, the Earl of St. Vincent, and Lt.-General Simcoe, and Brougham ' o was selected by Fox to accompany it as Secretary. Gen. Simcoe being taken ill on the voyage to Lisbon, and compelled to return immediately to England, the work of the commission was carried on by Brougham and the others. The conduct of this affair brought our young advocate directly into relation with the public events of the conti- aent and the embassy lost nothino- from any lack of activity or intrepid ity on the part of its Secretary during the few months it was employed in Portugal. After his return, Brougham became a resident of London, and was in constant communication with the Whig leaders in the discussion of pub- lic questions, though their short tenure of power enabled them to do nothing for his official advancement. In the meantime he was admitted to the Eng- lish bar, in 1808, with a view of prac- ticing on the influential Northern Cir- cuit. He was successful in this, though by no means disposed to surrender himself wholly to the profession, poli tics and literature being still his fa- vorite pursuits. His Whig friends were ' desirous of securing his aid in Parliament; and in January, 1810, he was offered by the Duke of Bedford, through Lord Holland, a seat for the borough of Camelford, under the Duke's control as successor to Lord Henry Petty, on his accession to the peerage as Marquis of Lansdowne. The offer was accepted, and thus the great advocate of the Reform Bill de- stroying such opportunities, came intc Parliament a representative of a pri- vate borough. His first speech on the 2d of March, was in support of a mo- tion of Whitbread, of a vote of cen- sure on the government for keeping private a report of the Expedition to the Scheldt, worthy of notice here for the testimony borne by Homer to the success of Brougham on its delivery. His language and manner were said by him to be thoroughly in harmony with the style which Parliament demanded. During the first session he also spoke on one of those reform questions which i HENRY, LORD BROUGHAM. 503 afterward so much engaged his atten- tion the abuse of flogging in the army and navy. This was followed by no action in Parliament ; but out- side of it, in no long time, Brougham had the opportunity of vindicating his principles, as well as of asserting the liberty of the press in court, in the successful defence of the Hunts against a criminal information growing out of their publishing an alleged libellous article on the subject in their news- paper, " The Examiner." The most important speech of Brougham in Parliament during this first session was in support of further legislation to repress the traffic in slaves, which, for lack of sufficient penalties, still existed, notwithstand- ing the Act passed for the abolition of the trade several years before. In his speech in June, he thus vigorously at- tacked the abettors of the nefarious traffic : " It is not commerce but crime that they are driving. Traders, or merchants, do they presume to call themselves ! and in cities like London and Liverpool, the very creations of honest trade? I will give them the right name, at length, and call them cowardly suborners of piracy and mer- cenary murder." A bill, which he subsequently intro- duced, declaring a participation in the slave- trade a felony punishable with transportation or imprisonment, was passed without a dissenting vote. His next great success, upon which he after- wards greatly prided himself, was that which, in 1812, attended his efforts for the repeal of the Orders in Council, equally injurious to the country and unjust to neutral powers, by which Parliament, in a hazardous exercise of authority or assumption of power, had endeavored to retaliate upon the com- mercial policy of Napoleon in his issue of the Berlin and Milan Decrees. "The repeal of the Orders in Council," .says Brougham in his Memoirs, "was my greatest achievement. It was sec- ond to none of the many efforts made by me, and not altogether without success, to ameliorate the condition of my fellow-men. In these I had the sympathy and aid of others, but in the battle against the Orders in Council I fought alone." Parliament being dissolved in 1812, and the borough of Camelford having been sold, being no longer at the Duke of Bedford's disposal, Brougham en- tered upon the open contest for Liver- pool, in which he suffered a defeat, Canning being elected. In a speech to the electors he attacked with great elo- quence the policy of Pitt, turning to account the news which had that day been received of the burning of Mos- cow. For the ensuing three years Brough- am remained out of Parliament, not entering it again till 1816, when fie was returned by the influence of the Earl of Darlington for the borough of Winchelsea, which he continued to represent for fourteen years. He now identified himself closely with various questions of reform, legal and parlia- mentary, and began his labors in the cause of education by instituting an inquiry into the instruction of the poor in the metropolis. The revela- tions resulting from this investigation led him to further efforts in the cause outside of Parliament, in aiding in the 504 HEKRY, LORD BROUGHAM. formation of the London Mechanics' Institution in 1823, and the subsequent publication, entitled, "Practical Ob- servations on the Education of the People, addressed to the Working Classes and their Employers," which ran through twenty editions. In 1825 he was elected to the honorary office of Lord Rector of the University of Glasgow, as the successor to Sir James Mackintosh, in preference to Sir Wal- ter Scott. In furtherance of the work of education, he became largely inter- ested in the foundation of the Univer- sity of London, and in establishing, in 1827, the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, of whose commit- tee he long acted as Chairman, and to whose numerous valuable publications in various departments of literature he led the way, by the composition of their first work issued from the press, his admirable discourse " On the Ob- jects, Pleasures and Advantages of Science." All this was done within his second parliamentary period, from, 1816 to 1830. That included also his series of legal exertions in the service of the Princess of Wales, as her Coun- sel during her difficulties with the Prince Regent, culminating in his de- fence in 1821, of that lady, when, by the death of George III., she had at- tained the rank of Queen, and was brought to trial on the charge of in- fidelity to her husband, before the House of Lords. The peculiar nature of the accusations brought against her, with the well-known libertine char- acter of George IV., and the part the Tory authorities took in the prosecu- tion ; sympathy for the woman, justly regarded by a large party as the vic- tim of an unscrupulous opposition the political prejudices naturally ex cited by the contest all drew the at- tention of the people to the advocate of the distressed Queen, whom she had appointed her attorney-general. With many in the country it was the King rather than the Queen who was on trial and Brougham was regarded by them, not only as the chivalrous champion of a much-injured lady, but a vindi- cator of the popular liberties in de- nouncing a series of bold acts of op pression, implicating the highest pub- lic officers in the realm. He devoted himself to the defence with his unusual unwearied energy and dexterous re- sources, and his exertions were reward ed by the acquittal of the Queen. The year 1828 was memorable for Brougham's earnest engagement in the work of Law Reform, the cause with which his later years were identified, and which, in its beneficent success, sheds the greatest glory upon his life. In an elaborate speech in February, continued through nine hours, he sur- veyed the whole field, concluding with an appeal to the House of Commons, in which he introduced with effect the victory over Napoleon, again to be van- quished in the acts of peace. The con- test upon which he thus entered was a long one; but it was triumphant in the end, and he lived to witness its success. In 1830, on the death of George IV., a dissolution of Parliament took place, when Brougham was invited to stand for Yorkshire, the county famed for its liberal principles, which had so nobly sustained Wilberforce in his long con- test with slavery, and was now seeking HEKRY, LOED BROUGHAM. 505 a candidate to promote the great work of Parliamentary Reform. In Brough- am they had such an advocate, and he was triumphantly returned. He felt the value of this mark of confidence ; for he had previously sat in Parlia- ment by the favor of influential friends, a representative of private boroughs ; he was now chosen by the most dis- tinguished and powerful constituency in the country. He at once became the leader of the Liberal party, and was about engaging, on the opening of Parliament, in the work of reform in that body, when, Earl Grey being sud- denly called to office, in the political adjustments which ensued in the for- mation of the new ministry, he was promoted to the peerage as Lord Chan- cellor, with the title of Baron Brough- am and Vaux the latter name being derived from an old family in Nor- mandy with which his ancestors were connected. With characteristic energy, on the very day on which his peerage was made out, the 23d of November, 1830, he introduced into the House of Lords four bills relating to the reform or reorganization of the Courts of Law, two of them affecting the practice of the Court of Chancery to which he was then just introduced. " Look at the gigantic Brougham," said Sydney" Smith, in his Speech on the Keform Bill, " sworn in at twelve o'clock, and before six P.M. he has a bill on the ta- ble abolishing the abuses of a court which has been the curse of the peo- ple of England for centuries. For twenty-five long years did Lord Eldon sit in that Court, surrounded with misery and sorrow, which he never held up a finger to alleviate. The 64 widow and the orphan cried to him as vainly as the town-crier when he offers a small reward for a full purse. The bankrupt of the Court became the lunatic of the Court. Estates mould- ered away and mansions fell down, but ' the fees came in and all was well ; but in an instant the iron mace of Brougham shivered to atoms the House of Fraud and of Delay. And this is the man who will help to govern you who bottoms his reputation on doing good to you who knows that to reform abuses is the safest basis of fame, and the surest instrument of power who uses the highest gift of reason and the most splendid efforts of genius to rectify all those abuses, which all the genius and talent of the profession have hitherto been employed to justify and protect. Look you to Brougham, and turn you to that side where he waves his long and lean finger, and mark well that face which nature has marked so forci- bly which dissolves pensions, turns jobbers into honest men, scares away the plunderer of the public, and is a terror to him who doth evil to the people !" Lord Brougham held the Chancel- lorship for four years, going out of office with a change of ministry in 1834. This period was distinguished by his successful engineering of the Reform Bill, which was carried in the House of Lords by his bold handling of the King, in inducing him to con- sent, if it should be needed, to a large creation of new peers. This act of prerogative being secured, the threat proved sufficient, and the bill was passed. Other measures of import- ance in which he assisted, enumerated 506 HENRY, LORD BROUGHAM. by liiinself, marked the &\v years of nis administration as Chancellor un- der the first Eeform Parliament, the abolition of slavery in the Colonies; the opening of the East India trade, and destruction of the Company's mo- nopoly ; the amendment of the criminal laws ; vast improvements in the whole municipal jurisprudence, both as re- gards law and equity ; the settlement of the Bank Charter ; the total reform of the Scotch municipal corporations ; the entire alteration of the Poor Laws ; an ample commencement made in re- forming the Irish Church, by the abo- lition of ten bishoprics. After his retirement from the Chan- cellorship, Lord Brougham never held office in any administration of his party, a neglect attributed to his pe- culiarities of temper and conduct ; but he continued, in the House of Lords, his advocacy of measures of reform, chief- ly in reference to the administration of the law. He became also much em- ployed in various literary productions of a philosophical and critical char- acter, including a series of Lives of the Men of Letters and Science, and the Statesmen of the time of George III., comprising, in natural philosophy, Black, Watt, Priestley, Cavendish, and their fellows; in literature, Voltaire Rousseau, Hume, Robertson, Johnson and Gibbon; and in statesmanship, Chatham, Lord North, Burke, Fox, Pitt, Sheridan and others. A work on "Political Philosophy," published in three volumes, 1840-'44, is one of the most valuable of his contributions to this department of study. He also wrote a volume on Natural Theology His works, as collected by himself, in 1837, are comprised in ten octavo volumes; to which hav subsequently been added three volumes of collected " Contributions to the Edinburgh Re view." Lord Brougham was married in 1819 to Mary Anne, eldest daughter of Thomas Eden, brother of Lord Auck- land. She was the widow at the time of this marriage of a Mr. Spalding. Two daughters were the fruit of thia union, one dying in infancy, the other in 1839. In his later years the health of Lord Brougham was much impaired, and he frequently resorted, for the sake of the milder climate, to a residence at Cannes in the south, of France, in a chateau which he had built for him- self. Here his death occurred on the 7th of May, 1868, in the ninetieth year of hi 3 age. Kappel LiJgerusss after a painting fry TJwm-as Phillips. Johnaon.'Vfilson fc Co..Publialiers,New"York LORD BYRON. rTIHE family of Lord Byron traces -L its descent to the Byrons of Nor- mandy, who came to England with William the Conqueror.* In Domes- day-book the name of Ralph de Burun ranks high among the tenants of land in Nottinghamshire; and in the suc- ceeding reigns, under the title of Lords of Horestan Castle, we find his de- scendants holding considerable posses- sions in Derbyshire, to which, afterward, in the time of Edward I., were added the lands of Rochdale in Lancashire. Its antiquity, however, was not the only distinction by which the name of By- ron was recommended to its inheritor ; those personal merits and accomplish- ments which form the best ornament of a genealogy seem to have been dis- played in no ordinary degree by some of his ancestors. At the siege of Cal- ais, under Edward III., and on the memorable fields of Cressy, Bosworth, and Marston Moor, the Byrons reaped honors both of rank and fame, of which their young descendant has shown himself proudly conscious. In the reign of Henry VIII., upon the disso- lution of monasteries, the church and * Abridged from, the "Life and Correspond- ence " by Thomas Moore. priory of Newstead, with the lands adjoining, were added to the posses- sions of the Byron family. These spoils of the ancient religion were conferred upon the grand-nephew of the gallant soldier who fought .by the side of Richmond at Bosworth, and was distinguished as " Sir John Byron the Little with the great beard." At the coronation of James L, we find an- other representative of the family se- lected as an object of royal favor, be- ing made on this occasion a Knight of the Bath. From the following reign (Charles I.), the nobility of the By- rons dates its origin. In the year 1643, Sir John Byron, great grandson of him who succeeded to the rich do- mains of Newstead, was created Baron Byron of Rochdale, and seldom has a title been conferred for more high and honorable services than those of this nobleman. Through the history of the Civil Wars, we trace his name in connection with the varying fortunes of the king, and find him faithful, per severing, and disinterested to the last. Such are a few of the gallant and distinguished personages of this noble house. By the maternal side also Lord Byron had to pride himself on a lino 508 LORD BYRON of ancestry as illustrious as any that Scotland can boast, his mother, who was one of the Gordons of Gight, having been a descendant of that Sir William Gordon, who was the third son of the Earl of Huntley by the daughter of James I. After the eventful period of the Civil Wars, the celebrity of the name appears to have died away for near a century. About the year 1750, the shipwreck and sufferings of Mr. By- ron, afterward Admiral, awakened in no small degree the attention and sympathy of the public. Not long after, a less innocent notoriety attach- ed itself to two other members of the family one, the grand-uncle of the poet, and the other, his father. The former, in the year 1765, stood his trial before the House of Peers for killing, in a duel, or rather scuffle, his relation and neighbor, Mr. Chaworth ; and the latter, having earned off to the Continent the wife of Lord Car- marthen, on the marquis obtaining a divorce from the lady, was married to her. Of this short union, one daugh- ter only was the issue, Augusta Byron, afterwards the wife of Colonel Leigh. The first wife of the father of the poet having died in 1784, he, in the following year, married Miss Cathar- ine Gordon, only child and heiress of George Gordon, Esq., of Gight. In addition to the estate of Gight, this lady possessed no inconsiderable prop- erty, and it was known to be solely with a view of relieving himself from his debts that Mr. Byron paid his ad- dresses to her. Soon after the mar- riage they removed to Scotland. The creditors of Mr. Byron now lost no time in pressing their demands; and not only was the whole of her ready money, bank shares, fisheries, etc., sac- rificed to satisfy them, but a large sum raised by mortgage on the estate for the same purpose. In the sum- mer of 1786 she and her husband pro- ceeded to France ; and in the follow- ing year the estate of Gight itself was sold and the purchase money applied to the payment of debts, with the ex- ception of a small sum invested in trustees for the use of Mrs. Byron. From France Mrs. Byron returned to England at the close of the year 1787, and on the 22d of January, 1788, gave birth, in Holies-street, London, to her first and only child, George Gor- don Byron. From London she pro- ceeded with her infant to Scotland, and in the year 1790, took up her resi- dence in Aberdeen, where she was soon after joined by Captain Byron. Here for a short time they lived together but, their union being by no means happy, a separation took place between them, and Mrs. Byron removed to lodg- ings at the other end of the street, Notwithstanding this schism, they con- tinued to visit each other ; but the el- ements of discord were strong on both sides, and their separation was, at last, complete and final. By an accident which, it is said, oc- curred at the time of Byron's birth, one of his feet was twisted out of its natural position; and this defect (chief- ly from the contrivances eniploj^ed to remedy it) was a source of much pain and inconvenience to him, during his earlier years. The expedients first made use of to restore the limb tc shape were adopted by the advice of LOKD BYRON. 509 the celebrated surgeon, John Hunter; and his nurse, to whom fell the task of putting on these machines or band- ages at bedtime, would often sing him to sleep, or tell him stories or legends, in which, like most other children, he took great delight. It is a remarkable fact, indeed, that through the care of this woman, who was herself of a very religious disposition, he obtained a far earlier and more intimate acquaintance with the Sacred Writings than falls to the lot of most young people. Captain Byron now determined to retire to France, and previous to his departure he returned to Aberdeen, which he had left some time after his quarrel with his wife. As on the for- mer occasion, his object was to entreat more money from the unfortunate wo- man whom he had beggared ; and, so far was he successful, that during his last visit, she contrived to furnish him with the money necessary for his jour- ney to Valenciennes, where, in the fol : lowing year, 1791, he died. When not quite five years old, young Byron was sent to a day-school in Ab- erdeen, taught by Mr. Bowers ; and he remained there, with some interrup- tions, during a twelvemonth. The terms of this school were only five shillings a quarter for reading ; and it was evidently less with a view to the boy's advance in learning than as a cheap mode of keeping him quiet, that his mother had sent him there. Of the progress of his infantine studies at Aberdeen, Lord Byron gives some par- ticulars in one of his journals. " I was sent at five years old or earlier, to a school kept by Mr. Bowers. I learned little there, except to repeat by rote the first lesson of monosyllables, with- out acquiring a letter. Whenever proof was made of my progress at home, I repeated these words with the most rapid fluency, but on turning over a new leaf, I continued to repeat them, so that the narrow boundaries of my first year's accomplishments were de- tected, and my intellects consigned to a new preceptor. He was a very de- vout, clever little clergyman, named Ross, afterwards minister of one of the kirks. Under him I made astonishing progress, and I recollect to this day his mild manners and good-natured painstaking. The moment I could read, my grand passion was history ; and why, I know not, but I was par- ticularly taken with the battle of Lake Regillus, in the first Roman history put into my hands. Four years ago, when standing on the heights of Tus- culum, and looking down upon the lit- tle round lake that was once Regillus, and which dots the immense expanse below, I remembered my young enthu- siasm and my old instructor. After- ward I had a very serious, saturnine, but kind young man, named Pater son, for a tutor. He was the son of my shoemaker, but a good scholar, as is common with the Scotch. He was a rigid Presbyterian also. With him I began Latin in Ruddiman's gram- mar, and continued till I went to the grammar school; where I threaded all the classes to the fourth, when I was recalled to England by the demise of my uncle. I acquired this handwrit- ing, which I can scarcely read myself, under the fair copies of Mr. Duncan of the same city. The grammar school might consist of a hundred and fifty 510 LOKD BYRON. of all ages under age." Byron was much more anxious to distinguish himself among his school-fellows by prowess in all manly sports and exer- cises, than by advancement in .earn- ing. Though quick, when he had any study that pleased him, he was in gen- eral very low in the class, nor seemed ambitious of being promoted any high- er. In the summer of 1796, after an attack of scarlet-fever, he was removed by his mother for change of air into the Highlands ; and it was either at this time, or in the following year, that they took up their residence at a farm-house in the neighborhood of Ballater, a fa- vorite summer resort for wealth and gaiety, about forty miles up the Dee from Aberdeen. By the death of the grandson of the old lord at Corsica in 1794, the only claim- ant that had hitherto stood between little George and the peerage was re- moved ; and the increased importance which this event conferred upon them was felt, not only by Mrs. Byron, but by the young future Baron of New- stead. The title of which he thus early anticipated the enjoyment, devol- ved to him but too soon. Had he been left to struggle on for ten years long- er as plain George Byron, there can be little doubt that his character would have been, in many respects, the better for it. In the year 1798, his grand- uncle, the fifth Lord Byron, died at Newstead Abbey, having passed the latter years of his life in a state of austere, almost savage seclusion. The cloud which, to a certain degree unde- servedly, his unfortunate affray with Mr. Chaworth had thrown upon his character, was deepened and confirmed by the eccentric and unsocial course of life to which he afterward betook himself. The only companions of his solitude besides a colony of crickets, which he is said to have amused him- self with rearing and feeding were Old Murrav, afterward a favorite ser- / " vant of his successor, and a female do- mestic. Though living in this sordid and solitary style, he was frequently much distressed for money; and one of the most serious injuries inflicted by him upon the property, was his sale of the family estate of Rochdale, in Lancashire. On account of his ina- bility to make out a title, v proceedings were instituted during the young lord's minority for its recovery, which after some years were successful. At New- stead the mansion and the grounds around it were allowed to fall hope- lessly into decay. On the death of his grand-uncle. Lord Byron, having become a ward in Chan eery, the Earl of Carlisle, who was in some degree connected with the family, was appointed his guardian ; and in the autumn of 1798, Mrs. Byron and her son, attended by their faithful Mary Gay, left Aberdeen for New- stead. On their arrival, Mrs. Byron, with the hope of having his lameness removed, placed her son under the care of a person who professed the cure of such cases, at Nottingham. The name of this man, who appears to have been a mere empirical pretender, was Lavender, and the manner in which he is said to have proceeded, was first by rubbing the foot with oil, and then twisting the limb forcibly around, and screwing it in a wooden machine. That the boy might not LORD BYEOK. 511 . lose ground in his education, during this interval he received lessons in Latin from a respectable schoolmaster, Mr. Rogers, who read parts of Virgil and Cicero with him, and represents his proficiency to have been, for his age, considerable. Finding but little bene- fit from the Nottingham practitioner, Mrs. Byron, in the summer of the year 1799, thought it best to remove her boy to London, where, at the sug- gestion of Lord Carlisle, he was put un- der the care of Dr. Baillie. It being an object, too, to place him at some quiet school, where the means adapted for the cure of his infirmity might be more easily attended to, the establish- ment of Dr. Glennie, at Dulwich, was 2hosen for the purpose. When he had been nearly two years vmder the tuition of Dr. Glennie, his mother, discontented at the slowness of his progress although she herself, by her interference, was the cause of it entreated so urgently of Lord Carlisle to have him removed to a public school, that her wish was at length acceded to ; and " accordingly," says Dr. Glen- nie, " to Harrow he went, as little pre- pared as it is natural to suppose from two years of elementary instruction, thwarted by every art that could es- trange the mind of youth from precep- tor, from school, and from all serious study." To a shy disposition, such as Byron's was in his youth, a transition from a quiet establishment, like that of Dulwich Grove, to the bustle of a great public school, was sufficiently trying. We find from his own account that, for the first year and a half, he hated Harrow. The activity and soci- ableuess of his nature, however, soon conquered this repugnance ; and from being, as he says, " a most unpopular boy," he rose at length to be a leader in all the sports, schemes, and mischief of the school. At Harrow, Lord Byron was remarked for the great readiness of his general information, but in all other respects idle, capable of great sudden exertions, but of few continu- ous drudgeries. His qualities, at this time, seemed much more oratorical and martial, than political ; and it was the opinion of Dr. Durry, the head master, that he would turn out an orator. His first verses (in English) were received but coolly. We come now to an event, which according to his own deliberate persua- sion, exercised a lasting influence over the w^hole of his subsequent character and career. It was in the year 1803, that he conceived an attachment, which sank so deep into his mind as to give a color to all his future life. On leav- ing Bath, Mrs. Byron took up her abode in lodgings at Nottingham Newstead Abbey being at that time let to Lord Grey de Ruthen and during the Har- row vacations of this year she was joined there by her son. So attached was he to Newstead, that he was con- tinually in its neighborhood. An inti- macy soon sprang up between him and his noble tenant, and an apartment in the Abbey was henceforth always at his service. To the family of Miss Chaworth, who resided at Annesley, in the neighborhood, he had been made known some time before in London, and he now renewed his acquaintance with them. The young heiress pos- sessed much personal beauty, with a disposition the most amiable and at 512 LORD BYSOJS'. t aching. Byron at this time was in his nineteenth year, and the object of his adoration two years older. The six short summer weeks which he now passed in her company, were sufficient to lay the foundation of a feeling for all life. At first he used to return to Newstead Abbey every night ; but, be- ing induced one evening to remain at Annesley, he stayed there during the rest of his visit. His time here was mostly passed in riding with Miss Cha- worth and her cousin; sitting in idle reverie, as was his custom, pulling at his handkerchief, or in firing at a mark. During all this time he had the pain of: knowing that the heart of her he loved was occupied by another that, as he himself expressed it : "Her sighs were not for him; to her he was Even as a brother but no more 1" Neither is it probable that, had even her affections been disengaged, Lord Byron would have been selected as the object of them. Miss Chaworth look- ed upon him as a mere schoolboy. He was in his manners, too, at that period, rough and odd, and by no means pop- ular among girls of his own age. If at any moment he had flattered him- self with the hope of being loved by her, a circumstance mentioned in his " memoranda," as one of the most pain- ful humiliations to which the defect in his foot had exposed him, must have let the truth in, with the dreadful cer- tainty, upon his heart. He was either told of, or overheard, Miss Chaworth saying to her maid, " Do you think I could care anything for that lame boy ?" This speech, as he himself de- scribed it, was like a shot through his heart. Though late at night when he heard it, he instantly darted out of the house, and scarcely knowing whither he ran, never stopped, till he found himself at Newstead. In one of the most interesting of his poems, "The Dream," he has drawn a picture of this youthful love. In the following year, 1805, Miss Chaworth was mar- ried to his successful rival, Mr. John Winters. In the month of October, 1805, he was removed to Trinity College, Cam- bridge, and it was in the summer of this year that he first engaged in pre- paring a collection of his vpoems for the press; the idea of printing them first occurred to him during his vaca- tion at Southwell. From this moment the desire of appearing in print took entire possession of him, though for the present his ambition did not ex- tend in view beyond a small volume for private circulation. In consequence of the objection of his friend, the Rev. Mr. Becher, to a certain poem in this volume, the edition was suppressed, and Lord Byron set about preparing another, which was produced about six weeks after. The fame which he now reaped within a limited circle, made him more eager to try his chance on a wider field. The hundred copies of which this edition consisted were hard- ly out of his hands, when with fresh activity he went to press again, and his first published volume, the " Hours of Idleness," made its appearance. Some new pieces which he had written in the interim were added, and no less than twenty of those contained in the former volume omitted. The rank and name of Lord Byron gained for this LORD BYKOK. 513 volume a considerable circulation in the fashionable world of London, which, perhaps, the merits of the poetry alone might not have attained. Upon his return to Cambridge he again engaged in all the dissipations that were at that time so frequent among young men of rank and fashion. In the spring of this year, 1808, ap- peared the memorable critique upon the " Hours of Idleness " in the Edin- burgh Review. The effect this critic- ism produced upon him can only be conceived by those who, besides hav- ing an adequate notion of what most poets would feel under such an attack, can understand all that there was in the temper and disposition of Lord Byron to make him feel it with ten- fold more acuteness than others. From his sensitiveness to the praise of the meanest of his censors, we may guess how painfully he must have writhed under the sneers of the highest. A friend, who found him in the first mo- ments of excitement after reading the article, inquired anxiously whether he had received a challenge, not knowing how else to account for the fierce defi- ance of his looks. Among the less sentimental effects of this review upon his mind, he used to mention that on the day he read it, he drank three bot- tles of claret, to his own share, after dinner ; that nothing, however, relieved him till he had given vent to his indig- nation in rhyme, and that " after the first twenty lines he felt himself con- siderably better." His time at Newstead during the autumn was principally occupied in enlarging and preparing his satire for the press. This work, which owed its 65 force and spirit chiefly to the article we have just spoken of, had been com menced by Lord Byron a long time before. Tfye importance of this ne\^ move in literature seems to have been fully appreciated by him. He saw that his chances of future eminence now depended upon the effort he was about to make, and therefore deliber- ately collected all his energies for the spring ; and the misanthropic mood of mind into which he had fallen at this time, from disappointed affections and thwarted hopes, made the office of satirist but too congenial and welcome to his spirit. His coming of age in 1809 was cele- brated at Newstead by such festivals as his narrow means and society could furnish. It was not till the beginning of this year that he took his satire to London. During the progress of this poem through the press he increased its length by more than a hundred lines, and the alterations which he constantly made, show to what a de- gree his judgment and feelings were affected by the impressions of the mo- ment. On the 13th of March, Lord Byron took his seat in the House of Lords ; and a few days after, the " Eng- lish Bards and Scotch Reviewers" made its appearance. This satire was issued anonymously, but it was not long before the name of the author was generally known. Lord Byron, immediately upon its publication, had retired into the country. He was soon, however, called back to London to superintend a new edition, in conse- quence of the rapid sale of the first To this second edition he made con- siderable additions, and prefixed his 514 LORD BYKOK name. He now made up his mind to leave England with his friend Mr. Hobhouse, early in the following June, for an extended tour in Spain, and the East. Having put the finishing hand to his new edition, he took leave of London, on the llth of June, and in about a fortnight after sailed for Lisbon in company with his friend, Mr. Hob- house, taking with him his valet, Fletcher, Murray, the old family ser- vant, a German attendant, and a boy named Robert Rushton, who is intro- duced as his page, in the First Canto of " Childe Harold." From Lisbon he traveled on horseback through Portu- gal and Spain, visiting, on the way, the beautiful scenes of Cintra and Ma- fra, Seville and Cadiz, and thence in the " Hyperion " frigate to Gibraltar. His Betters of the time record, in a most lively manner, the adventures which he met with during this hasty passage. The dark -eyed beauties of Andalusia appear to have made deep impressions upon the heart of Byron, to judge from the frequent allusions in his poems of this period. Having made a short stay at Gibraltar, on the 15th of August he sailed for Malta. Here, through some trifling misunderstand- ing, he was at the point of fighting a duel with an officer of the garrison. Lord Byron was on the ground at the time appointed, but, through some mis- take in the arrangements, his adversary did not appear ; but, an hour after, an officer deputed by him arrived, and not only accounted for the delay, but made every explanation with respect to the supposed offence that could be re- quired This incident is interesting, as showing the manly courage and cool ness of Lord Byron, in the only action of the kind that he was ever engaged in. The route which he now took through Albania, and other parts of Turkey, may be traced, by those who desire the details, in Mr. Hobhouse's account of his travels. He passed from Prevesa / where he landed, through Acarnania and ^Etolia, viewing the famous sites of Actium and Lepanto, and the classic ground of Delphi and Parnassus, and after crossing Mount Cithoeron, he arrived at Athens, the city of his dreams, on Christmas-day, 1809. Here he made a stay of be- tween two and three months. On the 5th of March, the travelers took a reluctant leave of Athens, and continued their journey to Smyrna, where, with the exception of a visit to the ruins of Ephesus, they remained for about a month. It was during this time, as appears from a memorandum of his own, that he finished the first two Cantos of " Childe Harold." From Smyrna he sailed up the Dardanelles to Constantinople. During his pass- age up the straits, Lord Byron repeat- ed Leander's famous exploit of swim- ming across the Hellespont, a feat to which he afterward all ades in his let- ters. Another year w,s now passed in the East, at Constantinople and Athens, and among the islands of the Archi- pelago ; and about the middle of July, 1811, we find him again in England. He had no sooner arrived in England than he set about preparing for the press some of the poems which he had written while abroad. His first atten- tion was given to a paraphrase of the " Ars Poetica '' of Horace, a poc m hardly LOKD BYEOIST. 515 worthy of his genius, but which, with that strange blindness of authors to the merits of their own works, he per- ferred to his glorious " Childe Harold." Happily, the better judgment of his friends averted the risk to his reputa- tion which would have been the conse- quence of his giving this poem to the press at this time, and he at length consented to the immediate publication of " Ohilde Harold," and it was put into the hands of Mr. Murray for that pur- pose. While thus busily engaged in his literary projects, he was called away to Newstead by the intelligence of the illness of his mother. She had been indisposed for some time, but not to any alarming degree. At the end of July her illness took a new and fatal turn; and so strangely characteristic was the close of the poor lady's life, that a fit of rage, brought on, it is said, by reading over the upholsterer's bills, was the ultimate cause of her death. Although Lord Byron started from town as soon as he heard of the attack, he was too late, she had breathed her last. " Childe Harold " was not ready for publication until February of the fol- lowing year. A few days previous to its appearance, Lord Byron made the first trial of his eloquence in the House of Lords. The subject of debate was the Nottingham Frame-breaking Bill. In reference to his parliamentary dis- plays, he says : " I spoke once or twice ; but dissipation, shyness, haughty and reserved opinions, together with the short time I stayed in England, pre- vented me from repeating the experi- ment : as far as I went, it was not dis- couraging, particularly my first speech (I spoke three or four times in all), but just after it my poem of " Childe Harold" was published, and nobody ever thought of my prose afterward, nor, indeed, did I." . Two days after his speech, the poenc appeared; and the impression which it produced upon the public was as in- stantaneous as it proved deep and last- ing the effect was electric; his fame had not to wait for any of the ordinary gradations, but seemed to spring up, like the palace in the fairy tale, in a night. As he himself briefly described it in his memoranda : " I awoke one morning and found myself famous." The first edition of his work was dis- posed of instantly. " Lord Byron " and " Childe Harold " became the theme of every tongue. At his door most of the leading men of the day presented themselves; from morning till night the most flattering testimo- nies of success crowded his table ; he saw the whole splendid interior of high life thrown open to receive him, and found himself its most distinguish- ed object. The copyright of his poem, which was purchased by Mr. Murray for 600, he presented to his friend, Mr. Dallas, saying that "he never would receive money for his writings," a resolution, the mixed result of gen- erosity and pride, which he afterwards wisely abandoned. Early in the spring of 1813, he brought out, anonymously, his poem on "Waltzing," and in the month of May appeared his wild and beautiful " Fragment," the " Giaour." The pub- lie hailed this new offspring of hia genius with wonder and delight, This 516 LOKD BYROK poem, which when first published was contained in four hundred lines, was increased by subsequent additions to fourteen hundred. The plan, indeed, which he had adopted, of a series of fragments, left him free to introduce, without reference to more than the general complexion of his story, what- ever sentiments or images his fancy, in its excursions, could collect. This was succeeded by the " Bride of Abydos," which was published at the beginning of December of the same year, having been struck off, like its predecessor, in one of those paroxysms of passion and imagination, which adventures such as the poet was now engaged in were, in a temperament like his, calcu- lated to excite. About a year before, Lord Byron had been induced to turn his thoughts seriously to marriage, at least as seri- ously as his thoughts were ever capa- ble of being so turned, and, chiefly by the advice and intervention of his friend, Lady Melbourne, to become a suitor for the hand of a relation of that lady, Miss Milbanke. Though his proposal was not then accepted, every assurance of friendship and regard ac- companied the refusal; a wish was even expressed that they should con- tinue to write to each other, and a cor- respondence ensued between them. His own account of the circum- stances which led to his second propo- sal for Miss Milbanke, is, in substance as follows: A person, who had for some time stood high in his "affection and confidence, observing how cheer- less and unsettled was the state both of his mind and prospects, advised him strenuousl} to marry; and, after much discussion, he consented. Thb next point for consideration was, who was to be the object of his choice; and while his friend mentioned one lady, he himself named Miss Mil banke. To this, however, his adviser strongly objected, as Miss Milbanke had at present no fortune, and that his own embarrassed affairs would not permit him to marry without one, and that she would not at all suit him. In consequence of these representations, he agreed that his friend should write a proposal for him to the other lady name.d, which was accordingly done ; and an answer containing a refusal, ar- rived, as they were, one morning, sit- ting together. "You see," said Lord Byron, " that after all, Miss Milbanke is to be the person ; I will write to her." He accordingly wrote on the moment, and a few days after he re- ceived a very flattering acceptance of his offer. The die was cast now, and he had no alternative but to proceed. Accordingly, at the end of December, accompanied by his friend, Mr. Hob- house, he set out for Seaham, the resi- dence of Sir Kalph Milbanke, the lady's father, in the county of Durham ; and on the 2d of January, 1815, he was married. After the wedding, Lord Byron re- sided with his wife for some time at Seaham, but he soon wearied of the monotony of country life ; and to- wards the end of March, he returned to London, where, on the 10th of De- cember of the same year, his daughter Augusta Ada, was born. The strong and affectionate terms in which, after his marriage, he had in some of his O f letters declared his own happiness LOKD BYRON. tended to still those apprehensions which the first view of his alliance gave rise to. These indications of a contented heart, however, soon ceased. His mention of the partner of his home became rare and formal ; and a feeling of unquiet and weariness ap- peared, which brought back all the worst anticipations of his fate. About a month after the birth of her child, Lady Byron most unexpect- edly adopted the resolution of sepa- rating from her husband. She had left London at the latter end of Janu- ary, on a visit to her father's house, in Leicestershire, and Lord Byron was, a short time after, to accompany her. They ha'd parted in the utmost kind- ness, she wrote him a letter, full of playfulness and affection, on the road ; and immediately on her arrival at Kirkby Mallory, her father wrote to acquaint Lord Byron that she would return to him no more. At the mo- ment when he had to stand this unex- pected shock, his pecuniary embarrass- ments, which had been fast gathering around him during the whole of the last year, (there having been no less than eight or nine executions in his house within that period,) had arrived at their climax ; and at a moment, when, to use his own expression, he "was standing alone on his hearth, with his household gods shivered around him," he was doomed to receive the startling intelligence that the wife who had just parted with him in kindness had part- ed with him forever ! The poet now determined to leave England for a tour through Swit- zerland, the Netherlands, and Italy. his early travel in the East, his thoughts had often fondly reverted to those southern lands which had so powerfully impressed his imagination and he now turned away without re gret from the country which had given him up, and the friends who had for- saken him. During the month of Janu- ary and part of February, his poems of the Siege of Corinth" and "Pa- risina," were in the hands of the prin- ters, and about the end of the latter month, they made their appearance. Although Lord Byron was in the most embarrassed circumstances, and hi? creditors, animated by the general out- cry, were pressing their claims with more severity than ever, he still re- fused to accept any compensation for his works. It was under these disas- trous and almost humiliating circum- stances that Lord Byron took his final leave of England. On the 25th of April he sailed for Ostend, accom- panied by Dr. Polidori, two foreign servants, and William Fletcher and Robert Rushton, the same " yeoman " and " page " who had set out with him in his youthful travels in 1809. The course which he now pursued through Flanders, and by the Rhine, may best be traced in his own match- less verses in the Third Canto of "Childe Harold." At Geneva, he took up his residence at the Hotel Lecheron, on the banks of the lake. Here he first made the acquaintance of Shelley and his wife, who were living in the same hotel. The con- stant intercourse of the poets, thus thrown together, produced an inti- macy between them which lasted with unabated warmth until the death of Shelley. The opinions and theories oi 518 LOED BYRON. bis new companion were not without their influence upon the impression- able mind of Lord Byron, and among those fine bursts of passion and de- scription which abound in his later poetry, may be discovered traces of that mysticism of meaning that sub- limity losing itself in vagueness, which characterized the writings of his extra- ordinary friend. After a stay of a few weeks at this place, he removed to a villa in the neighborhood, called Dio- dati, very beautifully situated on the high banks of the lake, where he es- tablished his residence for the remain- der of the summer. The effect of the late struggle upon his mind, in stirring up all its resources and energies, was visible in the great activity of his genius during the whole of this period, and the rich variety, both in character and coloring, of the works with which it teemed. Besides the Third Canto, and the " Prisoner of Chillon," he pro- duced also his two poems, " Darkness " and " The Dream," the latter of which must have cost him many a tear in writing, being, indeed, the most mourn- ful, as well as picturesque " story of a wandering life," that ever came from the pen and heart of man, Soon afterward, upon the arrival of his friends, Mr. Hobhouse and Mr. S. Davies, he set out with the former on a tour through the Bernese Alps. He has left a journal of this excursion, in which he records, in hasty memoranda, the first impressions produced upon his mind by the magnificent scenery through which he traveled ; and it is interesting to trace in these careless notes, the germs of his most splendid imagery in "Manfred" and "Childe Harold." After accomplishing this journey, about the beginning of Octo- ber, he took his departure for Italy. After a month spent at various places on the way, chiefly at Milan and Ve- rona, he reached Venice, where he in- tended to reside for the winter. All the restraint of popular opinion being now removed ; and rendered desperate and careless of his reputation by the constant recollection that he was an outcast from his native land, Lord By- ron plunged into all the disipations which were offered to him in the li centious society and easy morals of an Italian city. During - this time, however, his literary occupations were not entirely neglected ; he finished his extraordinary creation of " Manfred," and wrote several smaller pieces. He usually devoted part of the morning to the study of Armenian, at the con- vent of the Armenian monks on one of the islands of the lagoon. In this language he does not seem to have at- tained much proficiency, although he took some part in the translation of an Epistle of St. Paul, not generally con- sidered genuine, which had been pre- served in the Armenian writings. The irregular course of life which he had adopted, soon showed its effect upon his health, and in a few months he was attacked with a low fever, which left him quite weak. In order to escape the unhealthy season at Venice, and to recruit his constitution by a change to the purer and more wholesome air of the main land, he removed for the sum- mer to a villa at La Mira, on the Brenta, not far from the city. Some time before this, Lord Byron had made a hurried trip to Florence LORD BYROK 519 and Rome, which was sufficient, how- ever, to store his mind with the vivid impressions of these famous cities, and their treasures of art and antiquity, which enrich his poems. In fact, so far from the powers of his intellect be- ing weakened by his irregularities, he was, perhaps, at no time of life so ac- tively in the full possession of his en- ergies, for it was at this time that he produced the fourth and last canto of " Childe Harold," which was consider- ed even to surpass its predecessors. About this period, his humorous story of " Beppo," descriptive of Italian life, was also published. Lord Byron in one of his letters re- marks, that the ancient beauty of the Venetian women had deserted the " dame " or higher orders, and that the faces which adorn the canvass of Titian and Giorgione were now only to be found under the "fazziole," or ker- chiefs of the lower. It was unluckily among these latter specimens of the " bel sangue " of Venice, that he was now, by a sudden descent in the scale of refinement, to select the companions of his disengaged hours. A proof, however, that in this short and despe- rate career of libertinism, he was only seeking relief for a wronged and mor- tified spirit, is that, sometimes, when his house was in possession of such vis- itants, he would hurry away in his gon- dola, and pass the greater part of the night upon the water, as if hating to return home. It is, indeed, certain that he always looked back to this pe- riod of his life with self-reproach ; and the excesses to which he had there abandoned himself, were among the prominent causes of the detestation which he afterwards felt for Venice. It was while these different feelings were struggling in his breast, that he conceived and began his poem of " Don Juan ;" and never did pages more faith- fully represent every variety of emo- ,tion, and whim, and passion, that, like the rack of autumn, swept across the author's mind in writing them. The cool shrewdness of age, with the vivaci- ty and glowing temperament of youth the wit of a Voltaire, with the sensibil- ity of a Rousseau the minute practi cal knowledge of a man of society, with the abstract and self-contempla- tive spirit of a poet a susceptibility of all that is grandest and most affect- ing in human virtue, with a deep, withering experience of all that is most fatal to it the two extremes in short, of man's wild and inconsistent nature; such was the strange assemblage of contrary elements all meeting in the same mind, and all brought to bear, in turn, upon the same task, from which alone could have sprung this extraor- dinary poem, the most powerful in many respects, the most painful dis- play of the versatility of genius that has ever been left for succeeding agea to wonder at and deplore. It was about the time that a full consciousness of the evils of this course of life broke upon him, that an attach ment, differing altogether, both in du- ration and intensity, from any of those that, since the dreams of his boyhood had inspired him, gained an influence over his mind which lasted through his few remaining years ; and, undenia- bly wrong and immoral, even from an Italian point of view, as was the na ture of this wnnection, we can hardlj 520 LOKD BYRON. perhaps taking into account the far worse wrong from which it rescued hi m consider it otherwise than fortu- nate. The fair object of this last love was a young Romagnese lady, the Countess Guiccioli, the daughter of Count Gamba, of Kavenna. Her hus- band had, in early life, been the friend of Alfieri, and had distinguished him- self in the promotion of a national theatre, in which cause he joined his own wealth to the talents of the poet. Notwithstanding his age, and a char- acter by no means reputable, his opu- lence made him a prize which all the mothers of Ravenna strove to secure for their daughters, and the young and beautiful Teresa Gamba, just emanci- pated from a convent and only eight- een, was the selected victim. The first time that Lord Byron met this lady was at the house of the Countess Albrizzi, in the autumn of 1818. No acquaintance, at this time, ensued be- tween them, and it was not till the following spring that they were intro- duced to each other. The love that sprang up at this interview was instan- taneous and mutual. "From that eve- ning," she says, "we met every day as long as I remained at Venice." About the middle of April the Countess was obliged to quit Venice with her hus- band, for Ravenna. From every place on the road she wrote letters to her lover, expressing in the most passion- ate and pathetic terms her despair at leaving him. So great was her afflic- tion that it produced a dangerous ill- ness, which, by the time that she reach- ed the end of her journey, had assumed such an alarming aspect that her life was despaired of. The timely arrival of Lord Byroa at Ravenna had, how ever, a most favorable effect ; and she was soon sufficiently recovered to go to Bologna, whither he accompanied her The state of her health before long, however, obliged her to return to Ve- nice ; her husband, being unable to go with her, consented that Lord By- ron should be the companion of her journey. The air of the city not agreeing with the countess, they short- ly afterward took up their residence at a villa on the Brenta. This arrange- ment, as might be expected, hardly pleased the count, her husband ; and in the winter he returned^ to Venice to claim his absent spouse. He imme- diately insisted that his lady should return with him, and after some nego- tiations she reluctantly consented to accompany her lord. Lord Byron now turned his thoughts towards England. For some time he had contemplated a visit to his native land to attend to his affairs at home; and now he had at last, though unwillingly, resolved upon the journey, and fixed the time for his departure, when the tidings reached him that the countess was again alarmingly ill at Ravenna. Her sorrow at their separation had so preyed upon her mind, that even her own family, and her husband, fearful of the consequences, had withdrawn all opposition to her wishes, and en- treated her lover to hasten to her side. Lord Byron, only too glad oi any ex- cuse for abandoning his journey, and eager to return to the woman for whom he felt the deepest passion that had, since his boyhood, animated his exist ence, and who had shown such a de- voted attachment to him, more touch LORD BYRON. 521 ing amid the coldness and ingratitude that he had lately met with, lost no time in responding to the summons. His presence, as before, revived her sinking health. He now transferred his wandering household to Ravenna, when he fell into his usual routine of daily employments : riding in the pine forest celebrated by Boccaccio in the afternoon, and passing his evenings in the company of his inamorata, or go- ing occasionally into the society of the place. At this time, all connection with his own countrymen, except by correspondence, had almost entirely ceased. There were no resident Eng- lish at Ravenna, and travelers seldom came there, and never stayed long. He was surrounded by a retinue of Italian servants, and the only person that he ever saw who spoke his native tongue, was his valec Fletcher, and he, he says, spoke Nottinghamshire dialect. At that time the state of Italy was very much disturbed by the talk of revolu- tions and secret leagues against the ex- isting foreign government. Lord By- ron, as it appears from many allusions in his letters, took a warm interest, if not a more active part, in these move- ments. Before long, these agitations excited so much alarm in the hearts of the rulers of Italy, that they issued a sen- tence of proscription and banishment against all those whom they supposed had in the remotest degree contributed to them. The two Gambas, the father and brother of the Countess Guiccioli, were, of course, as suspected chiefs of the Carbonari of Romagna, included. About the middle of July, the Count- ess wrote to inform Lord Byron that 66 her father, in whose palazzo she wa now residing, and her brother, had just been ordered to quit Ravenna within twenty-four hours. She her- self found, a few days after, that she must also join the crowd of exiles. Lord Byron himself had become an object of strong suspicion to the gov- ernment ; but, not daring to attack him directly, they hoped that by driving his Mends away, he would be induced to share their banishment. The de- sired result was obtained ; for, a short time afterward, he joined them at Pisa, in Tuscany, which place they had agreed upon for the winter. In his journey to this place, he met at Bo- logna, by a previous appointment, the poet Rogers, who has introduced the circumstance in his " Italy." Upon his arrival at Pisa, Lord By- ron took up his residence in a famous old feudal palazzo on the Arno, the Lanfranchi Palace. Soon after his removal from Ravenna, he received the sad intelligence that his natural daughter, Allegra Byron, whom he had left at the convent of Bagna Ca- vallo for the care of her education, was dead. The blow was a heavy one, but after the first violent burst of grief, he bore up against it with a firmness and composure unusual to his temperament. While he was at Pisa, a serious affray occurred, in which he was personally concerned. Lord By-, ron, with some of his friends, was rid- ing near the gates of the city, when a dragoon, whom he mistook for an offi- cer, but who afterward turned out to be only a sergeant-major, called upon the guard to arrest them. Lord Byron and another, an Italian, rode through 522 LORD BYBON. the guard, without heeding them, bat they detained the rest. He then rode home, and sent his secretary to give an account of the affair to the government and procure their release. Upon re- turning to the spot, he met the same dragoon, and had some words, with him, and supposing him to be a gen- tleman, asked him his name and ad- dress. As the dragoon was riding away, he was stabbed and dangerous- ly wounded by one of Lord Byron's servants, wholly, however, without his direction or approval. The conse- quence of this rencontre was, that the two Gambas and Lord Byron's ser- vants were banished from Pisa. He himself was advised to leave it. As the Countess went with her father, he a short time after joined them at Leg- horn, and spent six w^eeks at Monte- nero, in the neighborhood. His return to Pisa was occasioned by a new prose- cution of the family of the Gambas. They were commanded to leave the Tuscan states in four days. After their departure, the Countess Guiccioli and Lord Byron returned to the Lan- franchi Palace. During all this time he had not been idle with his pen. " The Prophecy of Dante," " Sardanapalus," a tragedy ; " Heaven and Earth," a mystery ; and "Cain," a mystery, were written at Ravenna. The last production called forth the severest denunciations, for what appeared to be its impiety in questioning the benevolence of Provi- dence. From this the author defended himself on the ground that it was strictly a dramatic work; that if it was blasphemous, so also must be Milton's " Paradise Lost," with Satan's "Evil, be thou my good." At Pisa he wrote, however, a tragedy, " The Deformed Transformed," and contin- ued " Don Juan " through the Seven- teenth Canto. We now come to a period in Byron's career when a new start was to be taken by his daring spirit, and a course, glori- ous as it was brief and fatal, entered upon. At the beginning of the month of April, 1823, Lord Byron received a visit from Mr. Blaquiere, the agent of the Greek Committee, in England. He had been directed to stop at Genoa and communicate with Lord Byron, as it was thought that he might feel in clined to aid the revolutionists. In this way, Lord Byron's active partici pation in the struggle began, and he found himself, almost before he had time to form a decision, or well knew what he had undertaken, obliged to set out for Greece. The preparations for his departure were now hastened. All was soon ready, and on the 13th day of July, he slept on board the Hercules, an English brig, which had been taken to convey him to the East. His suite, at this time, consisted of Count Gamba, Mr. Trelawney, Dr. Bruno, and eight domestics. About sunrise the next morning they suc- ceeded in clearing the port, but after remaining in sight of Genoa the whole day, they were obliged, by adverse winds, to return. This incident was regarded by Byron as a bad omen, and tended still more to depress his spirits. When, however, they had fairly got to sea on the next day, and he was wholly disengaged, as it were, from his formei existence, the natural power of his spirit shook off this despondency, and LOKD BYRON. 523 the light and life of his better nature again shone forth. After a passage of five days they reached Leghorn, where they were to stop to take in a supply of powder and other English goods, not to be had elsewhere. On the 24th of July, after a most favorable voyage, they cast anchor at Agostoli, the chief port of Cephalonia. It had been thought prudent that Lord Byron should first direct his course to one of the Ionian islands, from whence, as a post of observation, he should be able to ascertain the exact position of affairs on the mainland. With this view he determined not to land at Agostoli, but to await on board of his vessel further information from the grovern- o ment of Greece. While awaiting the return of his messengers, he employed his time in a visit to the neighboring island of Ithaca. Unchanged since his early travels, he still preferred the wild charms of nature to the classic as- sociations of art and story, although he viewed with much interest those places which tradition had sanctified. The benevolence, which was one of the chief motives of his present course, had opportunities of showing itself, even during his short stay in Ithaca. On hearing that a number of destitute families had fled thither for refuge from Scio, Patras, and other parts of Greece, he sent to the commandant three thousand piastres for their relief. Upon Lord Byron's return to Cepha- lonia, a messenger brought him a let- ter from Marco Botzari, one of the chiefs of the insurrection in Western Greece. He hailed his arrival with enthusiasm, and thanked him for the aid which he had already given to the cause, in arming forty Suliotes, and sending them to assist in the relief of Missolonghi, at that time besieged by the Turks. This letter preceded, only by a few hours, the death of the writer. The same night he led his band into the midst of the Turkish camp, and fell at last close to the tent of the Pacha himself. This glorious enterprise checked, but did not prevent the ad- vance of the Turks. After the battle, Lord Byron transmitted bandages and medicines, of which he had a large supply, and also pecuniary assistance to the wounded. Aware that, to judge deliberately of parties, he must keep out of their vortex, and warned of the risk he should run by connecting himself with any, he resolved to remain for some time longer at Cephalonia. During the six weeks that he had been here, he had been living in the most com- fortless manner, on board the vessel which brought him. Having made up his mind to prolong his stay, he decided upon fixing his residence on shore, and he retired, for the sake of privacy, to a small village called Metaxata, about seven miles from Agostoli. Before his removal he despatched Mr. Trelawney and Mr. Hamilton Browne with a letter to the existing government, explaining his own views and those of the committee whom lie represented ; and it was not till a month after, that intelligence from these gentlemen reached him. The picture they gave of the state of the country was confirmatory of what has already been described, incapacity and selfishness at the head of affaiyi, LORD BYRON. disorganisation throughout the body politic ; but still, with all this, the heart of the nation sound, and bent on resis- tance. His lordship's agents had been received with all due welcome by the government, who were most anxious that he should set out for the Morea without delay ; and pressing letters to this purport were sent to him, both from the legislative and executive bodies. Here, in his retirement, while await- ing more positive assurances to direct his movements, conflicting calls were ' O reaching him from all the various scenes of action , Metaxa, at Missolonghi, en- treated him to hasten to the relief of that place, which the Turks were now blockading by sea and land ; the head of the military chiefs, Colcotroni, was no less urgent that he should present himself at the approaching congress of Salamis, where, under the dictation of these rude warriors, the affairs of the conn try were to be settled ; while from another quarter, the great opponent of these chieftains, Mavrocordato, was, with more urgency, as well as more ability than any, endeavoring to impress upon him his own views, and imploring his presence at Hydra, whither he had been forced to retire. Byron listened with equal attention to all these conflicting appeals, and, not committing himself to any party, strove in his own way to discover the truth, and to form his judgment from it. Besides the aid which he had already afforded to the Greeks, in many differ- ent ways, Lord Byron assisted the government by the loan of large sums of money, to raise which he sold his manor of Rochdale, and drew large- ly upon his income for the ensuing year. The Grecian squadron, which had been long expected at Missolonghi, had now arrived, and Mavrocordato, the only leader worthy of the name of statesman, having been appointed to organize Western Greece, the time for Lord Byron's presence on the scene of action seemed to have arrived, and he set about preparing for his departure. His friends endeavored to dissuade him from fixing on such an unhealthy spot as Missolonghi for his residence, but his mind was made up, the prox- imity of the port in some degree tempting him, and having hired for himself and suite a light fast-sailing vessel, with a boat for part of his baggage, and a larger vessel for the horses, etc., he was on the 26th of December ready to sail. This short voyage was not without its accidents. Several hours before daybreak, while waiting for the other party to come up, Lord Byron found himself close under the stern of a large vessel, which was soon found to be a Turkish frigate. By good fortune, they were mistaken for a Greek fire-ship by the Turks, who therefore feared to fire, but with loud shouts frequently hailed them. By maintaining perfect silence, and under cover of the darkness, Lord Byron's vessel was enabled to get away safely ; and took shelter among the Scrofes, a cluster of rocks but a few hours' sail from Missolonghi. Finding his position here untenable in case of an attack, he thought it right to venture out again, and making all sail, got safe to Dragomestina, a small sea-port town on the coast of Acarnania LOKD BYRON. 525 The other boat, with Count Gamba on board, was not so fortunate, having been brought to by the Turkish frigate and carried into Patras, where the commander of the squadron was sta- tioned. Here after an interview with th3 Pacha, by whom he w r as treated most courteously, during his detention he had the good fortune to procure the release of his vessel and freight, and on the 4th of January he arrived at Missolonghi, where, on the next day, he was joined by Lord Byron, who was received by the garrison and the in- habitants with the greatest demon- strations of enthusiasm. The whole population of the place crowded to the shore to welcome him; the ships anchored off the fortress fired a salute as he passed, and all the troops and dignitaries of the place, with Prince Mavrocordato at their head, met him on his landing, and accompanied him, amid the mingled din of shouts, wild music, and discharges of artillery, to the house that had been prepared for him. An expedition against Lepanto, a fortified town on the gulf of Corinth, was now proposed, and the command was given to Lord Byron, who entered into the project with great enthusiasm. The delay of Parry, the engineer, who was expected with supplies necessary for the formation of a brigade of artil- lery, for some time checked this impor- tant enterprise, and a still more for- midable embarrassment presented itself in the turbulence and insubordination of the Suliote troops, on whose services it depended. Presuming upon the generosity of Lord Byron and their own military importance, they never ceased to rise in the extravagance of their demands. They pleaded the utterly destitute and homeless state of their families, whom they had been compelled to bring with them, as r pretext for their exaction and discon- tent. A serious riot, which occurred between the Suliotes and the people, and in which several lives were lost, also added much to the anxiety of Lord Byron, who deeply felt the disappointment which the ill success of his endeavours had caused him. Towards the middle of February, the indefatigable activity of Mr. Parry having brought the artillery brigade into such a state of forwardness as to be almost ready for service, an inspec- tion of the Suliote corps took place preparatory . to the expedition ; and after much of the usual deception and unman agebleness on their part, every obstacle appeared to be at length surmounted. It was agreed that they should receive a month's pay in ad- vance ; Count Gamba, with three hundred of their corps as a van-guard, was to march next day, and take up a position under Lepanto, and Lord Byron with the main body and the artillery was speedily to follow. New difficulties, however, were soon started by these intractable mercenaries, and at the instigation, as it afterwards appeared, of Colcotroni, the great rival of Mavrocordato, they put forward their exactions in a new shape, by requiring the government to appoint generals, colonels, captains, and inferior officers out of their own ranks, to the extent that there should be, out of three or four hundred Suliotes, one hundred and fifty above the rank of private. This audacious dishonesty 526 LORD BYROK roused the anger of Lord Byron, and he at once signified to the whole body that all negotiation with them was at an end ; that he could no longer have confidence in persons so little true to their engagements; and, although he should still keep up the relief which he had given to their families, all his engagements with them were thence- forward void. It was on the 14th of February that this rupture with the Suliotes took place; and though on the following day, in consequence of the full submis- sion of their chiefs, they were again received into his service on his own terms, the whole affair, combined with other difficulties that beset him, agi- tated his mind considerably. While these vexatious events were occurring, the interruptions of his accustomed exercise by the rains in- creased the irritability that these delays excited; and the whole together, no doubt, concurred with whatever pre- disposing tendencies were already in his constitution to bring on that con- vulsive fit the forerunner of his death, which, on the evening of the 15th of February, seized him. He was sitting, at about eight o'clock, with only Mr. Parry and Mr. Hesketh, in the apart, ment of Colonel Stanhope, talking jestingly upon one of his favorite topics, the difference between himself and this latter gentleman, and saying that " he believed, after all, the author's brigade would be ready before the soldier's printing-press." There was an unusual flush on his face, and from the rapid changes of his countenance it was manifest that he was suffering ander some nervous agitation. He then complained of being thirsty, and calling for some cider, drank it upon which, a still greater change being observable over his features, he rose from his seat, but was unable to walk, and, after staggering a step or two, fell into Mr. Parry's arms. In another minute his teeth were closed, his speech and senses gone, and he was in strong convulsions. The fit was, however, as short as it was violent: in a few minutes his speech and senses returned ; his features, though still pale and haggard, resumed their natural shape, and no effect remained from the attack but excessive weakness. % The next morning he was found to be better, but still pale and weak, and he com- plained much of a sensation of weight in his head. Leeches were therefore applied to his temples, but on their removal it was some time before they could stop the blood, which flowed so copiously that he fainted from exhaus tion. While he was thus lying pros- trate upon his bed, a party of mutinous Suliotes rushed into the room, covered with dirt and splendid attire, franti- cally brandishing their arms, and wild- ly insisting upon compliance with their demands. Lord Byron, electrified by this unexpected act, seemed to recover from his sickness, and the more they raged the more his calm courage re- turned. His health now slowly im- proved, and his strength increased so that, in a few days, he was enabled to take his daily rides in the neighbor- hood. On the 9th of April, Lord Byrou went out on horseback with Count Gramba. About three miles from Missolonghi they were overtaken by a LOKD BYRON. 527 heavy shower, and returned to the walls wet through, and in a state of O / violent perspiration. It Lad been their usual practice to dismount at the walls, and return to their house in a boat; but on this day, Count Gamba, repre- senting to Lord Byron how dangerous it would be, warm as he then was, to sit exposed so long to the rain in a boat, entreated him to go back the whole way on horseback. To this Lord Byron would not consent, and they accordingly returned as usual. About two hours after his return home he was seized with a shuddering, and complained of a fever and rheu- matic pains. " At eight this evening," says Count Gamba, " I entered his room. He was lying on a sofa, rest- less and melancholy. He said to me, ' I suffer a great deal of pain. I do not care for death, but these agonies I cannot bear.' " The following day he rose at his accustomed hour, transacted business, and was even able to take his ride in the olive - woods. He com- plained, however, of perpetual shud- derings, and had no appetite. On the evening of the llth, his fever, which was pronounced to be rheumatic, in- creased; and on the 12th he kept his bed all day. The two following days, although the fever apparently dimin- ished, he became still more weak, and suffered much from pains in his head. About three o'clock in the afternoon of the 18th, Lord Byron rose and went into the adjoining room. He was able to walk across the chamber, leaning on his servant Tita; and, when seated, asked for a book, which was brought to him. After reading, however, for a few minutes, he found himself faint ; and again taking Tita's arm, tottered into the next room and returned to bed. At this time, the physicians, becoming alarmed, held a consultation It was after this consultation, as it appears, that Lord Byron first became aware of his approaching end. Mr. Millingen, Fletcher and Tita were standing around his bed ; but the two first, unable to restrain their tears, left the room. Tita also wept, but as Byron held his hand, he could not retire. He, however, turned away his face ; while Byron, looking at him steadily, said, half smiling, "Oh, questa e una bella scena ! " He then seemed to reflect a moment, and ex- claimed, " Call Parry." Almost immt diately afterward, a fit of delirium ensued, and he began to talk wildly, as if he were mounting a breach at an assault, calling out half in English^ half in Italian, "Forward, forward courage follow," etc. On coming again to himself, he asked Fletcher whether he had sent for Dr. Thomas, as he desired. On being told that he had, he expressed his satisfaction. It was now evident that he knew he was dying; and between his anxiety to make his servant know his last wishes, and the rapid failure of his powers of utterance, a most painful scene ensued. On Fletcher offering to bring pen and paper to take down his words " Oh, no," he replied, "there is no time, it is now nearly over. Go to my sister tell her go to Lady Byron you will see her, and say " Here his voice / faltered, and gradually became indis- tinct, so that only a few words could be heard. The decision adopted by the consul LORD BYEON. tation had been, contrary to the opinion of Mr. Millingen and Dr. Freiber, to administer to the patient a strong anti- spasmodic potion, which, while it produced sleep, possibly hastened his death. After taking some of this, he fell into a slumber. In about half an hour he again woke, when a second dose was given to him. His speech now became very indistinct, though he still kept on muttering to himself so incoherently that nothing could be understood. About six o'clock on the evening of this day, he said, "now I shall go to sleep ;" and then, turning round, fell into that slumber from which he never awoke. For the next twenty-four hours he lay incapable of either sense or motion with the excep- tion of, now and then, slight symptoms of suffocation, during which his ser- vant raised his head and at a quarter past six on the following day, the 19th of April, 1824, he was seen to open his eyes, and immediately shut them again. The physicians felt his pulse he was no more ! The funeral ceremony took place in the church of Saint Nicholas, at Miss<> longhi, on the 22nd of April. His remains were borne to the church on the shoulders of the officers of his corps, in the midst of his own brigade, with almost the whole population following. The coffin was a rude, ill- constructed chest of wood; a black mantle served for a pall ; and on it were placed a helmet and a sword, with a crown of laurel. After the funeral service was read, the bier was left in the church until the next day, that all might view, for the last time, the features of their benefactor. The first step taken, before any decision as to its ultimate disposal, was to have the body conveyed to Z mediate ancestor of the present family in Norfolk being John Gurney, born in the middle of the seventeenth cen- tury, who in early life joined the So- ciety of Friends, when the sect was first instituted by George Fox. His son inherited his Quaker tenets, which had been transmitted through three succeeding generations, when Eliza- beth Gurney, the subject of this no- tice, came into the world. Her father was a successful merchant and banker, which implied free intercourse with the world, and some relaxation of the stricter requirements of his sect. He is described as " a man of ready talent, of bright, discerning mind, singularly vvarm-hearted and affectionate, very 67 benevolent, of a naturally social dis position, inducing unusual liberality of sentiment towards others, and in manners courteous and popular." He was married to a lady of much personal beauty, of an amiable dispo- sition, inclined to literary society, alive to the beauties of nature, and of that cultivated conscientiousness in the duties of religion which is the best characteristic of the Society of Friends. Living in ease and luxury, she care- fully implanted in the minds of her children growing up about her a pro- per sense of the duties of life, sup- ported and strengthened by personal piety. Her scheme of education for the young members of her family, as left by her in some private memoran- da, also shows a liberal appreciation of intellectual culture, and may be re- ferred to as an illustration of the sim pie and refined ideal of household life, under favorable circumstances, in the last century. The home in which these virtues were practiced was mostly in the ru- ral vicinity of Norwich, first at Bram- erton, a pretty country village, and afterwards at the more costly resi- dence of Eastham Hall, a fine old (539) 530 ELIZABETH FJRY. house in a well-wooded park, with a winding stream flowing by it. At Bramerton, which the family left when Elizabeth was five years old, she had already been taught, in walks with her mother, that care and attention for the poor by which she was to be so great- ly distinguished in her later life. " My mother," she wrote, nearly forty years afterwards, " was most dear to me, and the walks she took with me in the old-fashioned garden, are as fresh with me as if only just passed ; and telling me about Adam and Eve be- ing driven out of Paradise: I always considered it must be just like our garden at Bramerton." It is worth noticing that, in her childhood, Eliza- beth exhibited great sensibility and even timidity. She was of a nervous susceptibility through life, and in a proper estimate of her character and labors, this should not be forgotten. Great boldness and resolution came to be required of her, so that it would appear these last qualities were not built up, without something of effort and self-sacrifice in the suppression of natural weakness. It was doubtless her delicacy and impressibility of temperament, her very fears and anx- ieties, which supplied the first incen- tives to that desire of doing good to the suffering and afflicted, however painful the contact might be, which became the ruling passion of her life. Her mother dying when Elizabeth was at the age of twelve, she was left with her sisters, two of them older than herself, to grow up under the social and other influences of a resi- dence on a wealthy country estate, vrith free access to the company of a neighboring large provincial town. Though following the customs of the Quakers in attendance upon Friends' meetings, the Gurneys at Eastham were not to be ranked among the strictest members of the sect. Mr. Gurney, in his business, was associ- ated familiarly with persons of all de- nominations ; music and dancing, gen- erally forbidden, or regarded with great suspicion by the fraternity, were "by no means probibited in his household, where Elizabeth might be heard, with a natural sweetness and pathos, sing- ing a duet with her sister Rachel ; or, at the provocation of health and spirits, be seen gracefully engaged in the dance. In the Memoir of her Life, edited by her two daughters, from which the present narrative is drawn, we are told, with a candor somewhat unusual with biographers, that " she was not studious by nature, and was as a child, though gentle and quiet in temper, self-willed and de- termined. Her dislike to learning proved a serious disadvantage to her after she lost her mother; her educa- tion, consequently, being defective and unfinished. In natural talent, she was quick and penetrating, and had a depth oi originality very un- common. As she grew older, enter prise and benevolence were two pre dominant features in her character.'' With these qualities of her child- hood Elizabeth grew up towards wo- manhood in the wealthy and refined home at Eastham, enjoying its social opportunities, and moved at times by the visits of earnest inquirers after truth, to that personal religious intro spection always favored by her sect. ELIZABETH FEY. 531 A. private journal, which she kept in her seventeenth year, shows a .self- questioning disposition, with a desire for the improvement of life, which were gradually preparing her for ear- nest convictions of Christian faith and duty. Unlike many diaries of the kind, there is nothing of a morbid character in the little record ; but, on the contrary, a decidedly practical turn. Writing on a bright summer morning in June, she says : " Is there not a ray of perfection amidst the sweets of this morning? I do think there is something perfect from which all good flows." She appears to have been often drawn by the beautiful scenery around her, in her own quota- tion of the poet, " to look through Na- ture up to Nature's God ;" and this re- ligious sentiment is associated in her mind with a desire to do good to others. She is thus early learning to govern herself, to subdue vanity and selfishness. " We should first look to ourselves," she Avrites, " and try to make ourselves virtuous, and then pleasing. Those who are truly virtu- ous, not only do themselves good, but they add to the good of all. All have a portion entrusted to them of the general good, and those who cherish and preserve it are blessings to so- ciety at large ; and those who do not, become a curse. It is wonderfully ordered, how in acting for our own good, we promote the good of others. My idea of religion is, not for it to unfit us for the duties of life, like a nun who leaves them for prayer and thanksgiving; but I think it should stimulate and capacitate us to perform these duties properly." Another day she writes : " Some poor people were here ; I do not think I gave them what I did with a good heart. I am inclin- ed, to give away; but for a week past, owing to not having much money, I have been mean and extravagant. Shameful ! Whilst I live, may I be generous ; it is in my nature, and I will not overcome so good a feeling. I am inclined to be extravagant, and that leads to meanness; for those who will throw away a good deal, are apt to mind giving a little." An acute re- mark, this last, for a young girl living in the midst of abundance a key to a proper economy a profound maxim in the administration of wealth. At the end of a year, the passages given from the diary present the following striking entries : " My mind is in a state of fermentation ; I believe I am going to be religious, or some such thing. * * * I am a bubble, with- out reason, without beauty of mind or person, I am a fool ; I daily fall lower in my own estimation. What an in- finite advantage it would be for me to occupy my time and thoughts well." In this state of mind, with the pro- blem of her destiny in a life of religi- ous faith and active devotion to benefi- cence half worked out, at a Friends' Meeting at Norwich, in February, 1798^, she listens to an address by William Savery, an American preacher of the Society of Quakers, one of that faithful band of missionaries of the sect in the last century who, in various lands, bore their testimony to the in- finite value of the soul of man, and the superiority and strength of the spiritual life above and beyond all accidental conditions. The Americar 532 ELIZABETH FEY Colonies, not always grateful for the gift, too often returning hatred and persecution for love, and brotherly kindness, and religious freedom, owed much in their imperfect civilization to these itinerant disciples of George Fox ; and now one of them, on a visit to England, was to repay the obliga- tion in the formation and development of one of her leading philanthropists. Her own account, in her diary, of the first meeting with Savery, exhibits a somewhat tumultuous feeling, verg- towards enthusiasm ; but regulated by a characteristic caution and distrust. " I have had a faint light spread over my mind," she writes, " at least I be- lieve it is something of that kind, owing to having been much with, and heard much excellence from one who appears to me a true Christian. It has caused me to feel a little religion. My imagination has been worked upon, and I fear all that I have felt will go off. I feel it now ; though at first I was frightened, that a plain Quaker should have made so deep an impres- sion upon me; but how truly preju- diced in me to think, that, because good came from a Quaker, I should be led away by enthusiasm and folly." This remark sounds a little oddly, coming from a member t of a family which had so long been in the sect ; but it marks a very prominent distinc- tion, which had grown up between what she called the " plain," and what may be termed the latitudinarian division of the fraternity. The banker's household were evidently of the latter way of thinking, less restricted in dress, amusements and intercourse with the world ; and Elizabeth, accustomed to think for herself, may have shown an unusual degree of independence, while her youth and sprightliness were likely to attract to her sotne of the vanities of life. Two days after the preaching of Savery, there is a charac- teristic entry in the diary : " My mind has by degrees flown from religion. I rode to Norwich, and had a veiy serious ride there ; but meeting, and being looked at, with apparent admir- ation by some officers, brought on vanity ; and I came home as full of the world, as I went to town full of heaven." Her more serious emotions, however, preponderate, while on a visit the same month to London with its gaieties and amusements in prospect, which is to test the young lady's resolutions of self-denial more severely than the casual glance of the military gentlemen quartered at Norwich. There is one safeguard, however ; William Savery is to be in the great metropolis at the same time, and she will " see him most likely, and all those plain Quakers." Looking back upon this visit to London, after an interval of thirty years, Mrs. Fry regarded it as as an important experience of the pleasures of the world in which she had found much that was questionable, and which she was enabled to relinquish, on proof of their vanity and folly. At the time, she was pleased to think, as she records in her diary, that she did not " feel Eastham at all dull after the bustle of London ; on the contrary, a better relish for the sweet innocence and beauties of nature." A timely letter from William Savery, written with that simplicity and feeling and ELIZABETH FEY. fulness of religious hope and consola- tion derived from the Gospel, which characterizes in so remarkable a man- ner the compositions of the early Quakers, where their piety seems to inspire their style with a rare grace and sweetness beyond the reach of artificial rhetoric, this affectionate letter, peculiarly adapted to her state of mind, may well have strengthened her resolution to an advancement in the life of holiness upon which she had already entered. It is noticeable how soon this counsel influenced her life in the practical work of doing good. One of her very first acts on her return from London, was to devote herself to an old dying servant living at a cottage in the park, and we pres- ently hear of a plan of gathering poor children about her for Biblical and religious instruction on Sunday even- ings. Meantime, she lays down for herself these golden rules of living. " First, never lose any time ; I do not think that lost which is spent in amusement or recreation, some time every day ; but always be in the habit of being employed. Second, never err the least in truth. Third, never say an ill thing of a person, when I can say a good thing of them ; not only speak charitably, but feel so. Fourth, never be irritable nor unkind to anybody. Fifth, never indulge myself in luxuries that are not necessary. Sixth, do all things with consideration, and when my path to act right is most difficult, feel confidence in that power that alone is able to assist me, and exert my own powers as far as they go." While these new and more earnest views of life were being formed in her mind she is preparing to assimilate in some external matters to the habits of the more rigid Quakers finding it impossible, as she says, to keep up to their principles without altering her dress and speech. "Plainness," she is ready to vindicate, " as a sort of pro- tection to the principles of Christian- ity in the present state of the world." At length the cap and close handker- chief of the Society of Friends are adopted with their other peculiarities, and she henceforth appears as she is represented in the portrait which ac- companies this biography, fully a Qua- keress to outer view as in her inner life. And all this change was accom- plished while she was living in ease and affluence, by the time she was twenty. It was early in the year 1780 that she received proposals of marriage from Joseph Fry, a wealthy merchant of London ; a strict member of the Society of Friends. After considerable anxiety, with " many doubts, many risings and fallings about the affair " in relation to o her spiritual welfare, the offer was looked upon, as it is apt to be in such cases, as a call of duty, and accepted. The marriage, accordingly, took place in August, at the Friends' Meeting House, in Norwich. Mrs. Fry now, for some years, accord- ing to the custom of the day, resided with her husband in the large commo- dious house in which his business was transacted, in St. Mildred's Court, in London. Her associations were with the stricter members of the Society of Friends, of whom, from time to time, she met with many of the most distin guished, and was encouraged in the 534 ELIZABETH FEY. practical work of philanthropy upon which she had already set her heart. Her diary, which was regularly kept up, exhibits more of an introspective character, showing her thoughts oc- cupied in her religious culture and in the vicissitudes of her large family connexion. She herself became the mother of a numerous offspring, ten children in all, the last being born in 1816, so that much of her time was engrossed in household cares. In 1809, on the death of her father-in-law, she removed from London, with her hus- band, to his country residence at Flas- ket House, in Essex, where she was again surrounded by the rural associa- tions of her youth, and returned to that enjoyment of the beauties of na- ture which was always a passion with her. Here, too, she developed those schemes for the improvement of the poor which she had early entertained, visiting the sick and laborers in their cottages, providing them with the necessaries of life and assisting in open- ing a school for girls, in accordance with the method of Joseph Lancaster, .v nose school for poor children she had visited in London, where she had also been appointed visitor to a school of the Society at Islington. After her father's death, which happened in the autumn of this year, she occasionally spoke in the meetings, and after a year or so was duly recognized as a Minister or Preacher of the Society to which she was attached. In 1813 we find her attending some of the prominent meetings in London in this capacity, and in January of that year making her first visit to Newgate Prison, which was soon to become the scene of her philanthropic labors, destined in theij progress to render important aid in one of the great works of reform of the century. She was led to Newgate, in consequence of the representations of several members of the Society of Friends of her acquaintance, who had visited some persons about to be ex- ecuted. " Mrs. Fry was accompanied in her visit by a sister of the eminent philanthropist, Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton, who had a few years before married her own sister Hannah. They found the female prisoners in a lamen- table condition of neglect and destitu- tion. Though the care of her rapidly in- creasing family was quite sufficient to occupy her attention during the ensu- ing four years her zeal was kept alive by the efforts of her brother-in-law. Samuel Hoare, and Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton, in their work of prison reform and discipline in relation to juvenile offenders. She visited, with Hoare, the women in Cold Bath Fields House of Correction, where she witnessed tht evils of the neglect into which institu tions of its class in England had gener- ally fallen. But it was not till the close of 1816 that she fairly herself entered upon her practical work of reform among the female prisoners of Newgate. At her own request, on this her second visit to the prison, she was left alone with the women for some hours a memorable scene, suggesting much to the imagination in its wild details, of which we have no more par- ticular notice than that Mrs. Fry read to the assembly the parable of the Lord of the vineyard, from the Gospel of St. Matthew, and appealed to the hearts ELIZABETH FEY. 535 of her hearers, by the proffers of mercy from the Saviour, even at the eleventh hour. Calling the attention of the mothers to. the forlorn and suffering slate of their children, she proposed to open a school for them and look after their welfare. This was the readiest way of reaching the hearts of the par- ents, who joyfully entertained the sug- gestion. Mrs. Fry wisely left them to think over the matter and choose a governess from among themselves. They did so, and made an admirable selection in a young woman (Mary Connor) who had been recently com- mitted for stealing a watch. Presently, with the consent of the Sheriffs of London, and the officials of the prison, this person was installed as school- mistress, in a vacant cell appropriated for the purpose, over a group of child- ren and young persons under twenty- five years of age. Mrs. Fry was pres- ent at the opening of the school, ac- companied by her friend Mary Sander- son, of whose sensations on the occas- ion we have this incidental notice : " The railing was crowded with half naked women, struggling together for the front situations, with the most boisterous violence, and begging with the utmost vociferation. She felt as if she were going into a den of wild beasts ; shuddering when the door closed upon her, and she was locked in with such a herd of novel and desper- ate companions." The prison authori- ties, though they approved of the at- tempt, had little faith in its success; indeed, they regarded the scheme as visionary and hopeless. It was left to a few benevolent women to prove it otherwise. Mrs. Fry, joined with a few associates, persevered, overcoming all obstacles by the influence of kind- ness; and, at the end of a month, hav- ing proved the practicability of the undertaking by actual experiment, a society was, in April 1817, formed, consisting of the wife of a clergyman and eleven members of the Society of Friends, entitled " An Association for the Improvement of the Female Pris- oners in Newgate." Their object was " to provide for the clothing, the in- struction, and the employment of the women ; to introduce them to a know- ledge of the Holy Scripture, and to form in them, as much as possible, those habits of order, sobriety and in- dustry which may render them docile and peaceable while in prison, and re- spectable when they leave it." A body of rules, twelve in number, necessary for carrying out these de- signs, was prepared and submitted severally to the prison women, who voted upon each, every hand being held up in approbation. By these rules a matron was to be appointed for the general superintendence; suitable employment was to be engaged ; clas- ses were to be formed, with a directing monitor over each ; cleanliness and order were fully secured ; instruction was to be given by reading, chiefly from the Scriptures. To render the work more permanent and responsible, on proof of its practicability, it was adopted by the proper authorities, and became a part of the prison system of the city. At first it was confined to the prisoners who had undergone trial ; and was afterwards extended to the other prison of the untried, but with less success. Owing to the uncertainty 536 ELIZABETH FRY. of their condition, this class of persons was less willing to work and submit to restraint. The matron, who was appointed, was paid in part by the Corporation and partly by the funds subscribed for the Ladies' Association- Other expenses were provided for by charitable contributions, largely from the wealthy Quaker merchants. In the course of a few months, in the au- tumn of the year, the success of the experiment was noticed, in corrobora- tion of his own views, in one of the addresses to the public, of the eminent reformer, Robert Owen, of Lanark. In February of the following year such an interest in the general subject had been awakened that Mrs. Fry had the honor of being called upon to give her testimony of the working of the Ladies' Association before a Committee of the House of Commons, appointed to re- port on the Prisons of the Metropolis. Her endeavor on that occasion marks the opening of a new era in the work of prison reform. It appears from Mrs. Fry's statement that, during the whole time which had intervened, some eight or nine months, since the plan had been put in operation, she had never punished or proposed punish- ment for any woman ; that the rules had been strictly attended to; that nearly twenty thousand articles of wearing apparel had been made by the prisoners, averaging in earning for each person of about eighteen pence per week, which was generally spent in assisting them to live and helping to clothe them by a voluntary sub- scription on their part, supplemented by double the sum thus furnished, given by the Association; that the Scripture readings were earnestly re ceived, while many had been taught to read a little themselves, the read ings avoiding matters of doctrine, and being confined to the plain morals of the Bible, the duties towards God and man. In reply to various questions, much was elicited illustrating, in a very striking manner, peculiarities of the unhappy condition of the persons thus benefited, and bearing upon the general subject of prison improvement. It was fortunate for the cause, that this first experiment was tried in so conspicuous a place as Newgate. For the civilized world, London, is a city set upon a hill ; and here the work of benevolence was carried on at its very heart. There was at once the most to be done, and the best help toward ac- complishing it. A success thus open to the eyes of the world, and recog- nized by Parliament, could not fail in finding support and encouragement elsewhere. But it was reserved es- pecially for Mrs. Fry, by her personal exertions and influence, to perfect in her day what the philanthropist John Howard had striven to accomplish a generation or two before. That, after his distinguished labors in prison re- formation, so much was left for her to accomplish, is a humiliating proof of the tendency to abuse in the adminis- tration of government under what might be considered highly favorable circumstances, and of the slow pro- gress of apparently the most obvious improvements. The whole plan or scheme of .Mrs. Fry now seems very simple, involving only ordinary atten- tion to the decencies of life, the hum- blest means of religious instruction. ELIZABETH FEY. 537 with the plain resources of an indus- trial school. By the aid of these sim- ple elements, the employment of time, with a certain customary and moral discipline, controlled by Christian kindness, a great work was to be effected throughout the world. It is not too much to say that the con- science of legistators was awakened throughout Christendom by that sim- ple experiment of one benevolent Quaker lady, and a few associates, in the prison of Newgate. Its first fruits were in the widening circle of benevo- lent supervision, extending to the care of the convicts on their way to trans- portation, thence in the ships at sea, and then on their landing at their place of destination. Before Mrs. Fry appeared upon the scene, the most dis- gusting condition of things prevailed at each of these stages. There had been riot and destruction on leaving the prison, breaking of windows, fur- niture, and the like ; soon all was or- der and quiet. The convicts had been generally conveyed to the water-side in open wagons, amidst noisy and vici- ous crowds ; by Mrs. Fry's influence, the women were decently removed in hackney-coaches, without exposure to insult. Her kind solicitude followed them on shipboard, suggesting (what was adopted) an organization into classes, with monitors, chosen by themselves, for the preservation of order. In correspondence with the proper authorities, she urged that a suitable provision be made for their reception on their arrival in Van Die- man's Land. She also took earnestly to heart, and enforced by examples drawn from her own observation, the 68 evils of the wide adoption of capital punishment, which then prevailed in the administration of English criminal law, and w^hich has since been so greatly curtailed. Like Howard, Mrs. Fry accomplish- ed much in her journeys about Great Britain and Europe. The first of these, in 1818, with her brother Joseph John Gurney, primarily connected with the concerns of the Society of Friends, in which it will be remembered she had been for some time an active leader, led her through the north of England in- to Scotland, where, in many places, the jails were found to be in the most lamentable condition, with great suf- fering on the part of the inmates a terrible picture of human misery which was presented to the public in all its howid details, that they might be at once alleviated, in a narrative of the tour by Mr. Gurney. The treat- ment of the insane, which would have been disgraceful if practised towards wild beasts, which she witnessed, it need not be said awakened her deepest sympathies and earnest efforts for its reform. Humanity shudders at the recital of what this brother and sister encountered in their pilgrimage in be- half of their oppressed and suffering fellow-beings. That such inflictions are almost impossible at present, is largely due to the Christian exertions of this devoted Quaker mother. In 1827, she visited Ireland, paying particular attention to the prisons at Dublin, and, in the succeeding years, traveled largely through England, and sojourned for a time in the island of Jersey, where she undertook, and eventually accomplished, much in 538 ELIZABETH FRY. work of prisoii reform. She also, about this time, procured the introduction of libraries at the coast-guard stations and on the government packets a work of enlightenment, which, in its extension, is one of the most benefi- cent social improvements of our own day. She paid her first visit to Paris in 1838, and was received with dis- tinguished attentions, examining care- fully, under the best auspices, the va- rious prisons of the metropolis, was in communication with various celebri- ties, and was entertained by Louis Philippe and the Eoyal family. On her return home, we find her medi- tating a visit to the United States, where her brother, Joseph John Gur- ney, was pursuing his labors as a min- ister of the Gospel. A second journey to the Continent follows, the next year; Paris, its prisons and hospitals are again visited ; and the tour is extend- ed through various parts of France, and into Switzerland. In 1840, she travels through Belgium, Holland, and Germany; countries which she again visits a year or two later. She is also in correspondence with the authorities in St. Petersburgh in all, whether by person or by letter, with a single eye to her constant work of philanthropy. Her last visit to the Continent, chiefly confined to Paris, was in 1843. After her return to England, we read of her health failing, which continued, with more or less of suffering and privation, in the midst of family afflictions, till her own life, too, was terminated at Ramsgate, on the 12th of October, 1845. She died as she had lived, at peace with herself, and charity with the world, in the enjoyment of the consolations of her simple Christian faith. Her remains were interred in the Friends' burying-ground at Bark- ing. No better inscription to her memory can be penned, than the lines written by Hannah More, in a copy of her work on " Practical Piety." TO MRS. FRY. PBESENTED BY HANNAH MORE. As a token of veneration Of her heroic zeal, Christian charity, And persevering kindness, To the most forlorn Of human beings. They were naked, and she Clothed them ; In prison, and she visited them ; Ignorant, and she taught them, For His sake, In His name, and by His Word, Who went a> out doing good. JohrisoixWilson Ik. Co., Pub: : ROBERT PEEL rpHE RIGHT HONORABLE SIR JL ROBERT PEEL, Bart, twice prime minister, and for many years the leading statesman of England, was born on the 5th of February, 1788, in a cottage near Chamber Hall, the seat of his family, in the neighborhood of Bury Chamber Hall itself being at the time under repair. He was a scion of that new aristocracy of wealth which sprang from the rapid progress of mechanical discovery and manufac- tures in the latter part of the eight- eenth century. His ancestors were Yorkshire yeomen in the district of Craven, whence they migrated to Blackburn, in Lancashire. His grand- father, Robert Peel, first of Peelfold, and afterwards of Brookside, near Blackburn, was a calico-printer, who, appreciating the discovery of his towns- man, Hargreaves, took to cotton-spin- ning with the spinning- jenny, and grew a wealthy man. His father, Robert Peel, third son of the last-named, car- ried on the same business at Bury, with still greater success, in partner- ship with Mr. Yates, whose daughter Ellen, he married ; made a princely Abridged from the " Encyclopaedia Britan- Pica.' fortune; became the owner of Dray- ton Manor, and member of Parliament for the neighboring borough of Tarn worth ; was a trusted and honored, ap well as ardent, supporter of Mr. Pitt contributed magnificently towards the support of that leader's war policy; was rewarded with a baronetcy ; and founded a rich and powerful house, on whose arms he emblazoned, and in whose motto he commemorated, the prosperous industry from which it sprang. The great minister was always proud of the self-won honors of his family ; and as a public man his heart strongly felt the bias of his birth. He was sent, however, to be educated with the sons of the old nobility and gentry at Harrow, one of the most aristocratic of English schools, and at Christ Church, then the most aristo- cratic of English colleges. At Har- row, according to the accounts of his contemporaries, he was a steady, in- dustrious boy ; the best scholar in the school ; fonder of solitary walks than of the games of his companions, but ready to help those who were duller than himself ; and not unpopular among his fellows. At Christ Church where he entered as a gentleman com (539) 540 EOBEKT PEEL. moner, he studied hard, and was the first who, under the new examination statutes, took a first class both in classics and in mathematics. His ex- amination in the Schools for his B.A. degree in Michaelmas term, 1808, was an academical ovation in presence of a numerous audience, who came to hear the first man of the day ; and a rela- tion who was at Oxford at the time has recorded that the triumph, like both the triumphs and reverses of after-life, was calmly borne. From his classical studies Sir Eobert derived, not only the classical, though some- what pompous character of his speeches, and the Latin quotations with which they were often happily interspersed, but something of his lofty ideal of political ambition. Nor did he ever cease to love these pur- suits of his youth ; and, in 1837, when elected Lord Rector of Glasgow Uni- versity, he, in his inaugural speech, passed a glowing eulogy on classical education. To his mathematical train- ing, which was then not common among public men, he no doubt owed in part his method, his clearness, and his great power of grasping steadily and working out difficult and complicated questions. His speeches show that, in addition to his academical knowl- edge, he was well versed in English literature, in history, and in the prin- ciples of law. In after-life he had a taste for art, though none for music, and took an interest in science, though he had no scientific education. While reading hard, he did not neglect to develop his tall and vigorous frame, and fortify his strong constitution, by manly and gentlemanlike exercises; and .though he lost his life partly through his ba.d riding, he was al- ways a good shot and an untiring walker after game. Sprung from the most religious class of English so- ciety, he grew up and remained through life a religious man; and from that source drew deep con- scientiousness and tranquillity under all difficulties and in all fortunes. His Oxford education confirmed him in the principles of the Protestant Church of England. His practical mind remain- ed satisfied with the doctrines of his youth ; and he never showed that he had studied the great religious contro- versies, or that he understood the great religious movements of his day. In 1809, being then in his twenty- second year, he was brought into Par- liament for the close borough of Cash el, which he afterwards exchanged for Chippenham ; and commenced his par- liamentary career under the eye of his father, then member for Tamworth, who fondly saw in him the future leader of the Tory party. In 1811, he was made Under-Secretary for the Colonies. In 1812, being then only in his twenty-fifth year, he was trans- ferred by Lord Liverpool to the more important post of Secretary for Ire- land. There he was engaged till 1817, when he obtained the highest parlia- mentary distinction of the Tory party, by being elected member for the Uni- versity of Oxford an honor for which he was chosen in preference to Canning, on account of his hostility to Catholic emancipation, Lord Eldon lending him his best support. In the following year he resigned the Irish secretary- ship, of the odious work of which he KOBEKT PEEL. 541 had long been very weary, and re- mained out of office till 1822. In that year lie consented to strengthen the enfeebled ministry of Lord Liverpool by becoming Home Secretary ; and in that capacity he had again to under- take the office of coercing the growing discontent of Ireland, of which he re- mained the real administrator, and had again to lead in the House of Com- mons the opposition to the rising cause of Catholic emancipation. In 1825, being beaten on the Catholic question in the House of Commons, he wished to resign office ; but Lord Liverpool pleaded that his resignation would break up the government. He found a happier and more congenial task in reforming and humanizing the criminal law, especially those parts of it which relate to offences against property and offences punishable by death. The five acts in which Mr. Peel accomplished this great work, the first step towards a complete and civilized code, as well as the great speech of March 9, 1826, in which he opened the subject to the House, will form one of the most solid and endur- ing monuments of his fame. In January, 1828, after Canning's death, the Duke of Wellington formed a Tory government, in which Mr. Peel was Home Secretary, leader of the House of Commons, and probably vir- tual prime minister. The policy of the cabinet was to endeavor to stave off the growing demand for organic change by administrative reform, and by lightening the burdens of the people. The civil list was retrenched with an unsparing hand, and the public expen- diture was reduced. Mr. Peel also in- troduced into London the improved system of police which he had previ- ously introduced with so much success into Ireland. When the question of Catholic emancipation was brought to a crisis by the menacing power of the Catholic Association and the election of O'Connell for the county of Clare, Mr. Peel expressed to the Duke of Wellington his conviction that it must be settled. The Duke consented. The consent of the king, which could scarcely have been obtained except by the Duke and Mr. Peel, was extorted, withdrawn (the ministers being out for a few hours), and again extorted ; and on the 5th of March, 1829, Mr. Peel proposed Catholic emancipation in a speech of five hours and a half, which was listened to with unflagging attention, and concluded amidst cheers which were heard in Westminster Hall. The apostate was overwhelmed with obloquy. Having been elected for the University of Oxford as a leading opponent of the Catholics, he had thought it right to resign his seat on being converted to emanci- pation. His friends put him again in nomination, but he was defeated by Sir R. H. Inglis, though the great ma- jority of distinction and intellect was on his side. He took refuge in the close borough of Westbury, whence he afterwards removed to Tarn worth, for which he sat till his death pre- ferring that secure and friendly con- nection to the offers of larger con- stituencies. While in office, Mr. Peel succeeded to the baronetcy, Drayton Manor, and a great estate, by the death of his father, May 3, 1830. The ability and obstinacy of Sh 542 ROBERT PEEL. Robert Peel's opposition to the Re- form Bill won back for him the alle- giance of his party. His opposition was able and obstinate; but it was temperate, and not such as to inflame the fierce passions of the time, delay the return of civil peace, or put an insurmountable barrier between his friends and the more moderate among their opponents. The general election of 1832, after the passing of the Re- form Bill, left him with barely a hun- dred followers in the House of Com- mons ; but this handful rapidly swell- ed under his management into the great Conservative party. In 1834, on the dismissal of the Melbourne ministry, power came to Sir Robert Peel before he expected or desired it. He hurried from Rome at the call of the Duke of Wellington, and be- came Prime Minister, holding the two offices of First Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer. A dissolution gave him a great increase of strength in the House, but not enough. He was beaten on the elec- O tion of the Speaker at the opening of the session of 1835, and, after strug- gling on for six weeks longer, was finally beaten, and resigned on the question of appropriating the surplus revenues of the Church in Ireland to national education. From 1835 to 1840 he pursued the same course of patient and far-sighted opposition, the end of which, sure, though distant, was not only office, but power. At length, in the autumn of 1841, becoming First Lord of the Treasury, with a com- manding majority in both Houses of Parliament, the country in his favor and a staff of colleagues and subordi- nates unrivalled perhaps in the annala of English administrations, he grasped with no doubtful grasp the reins of power. The crisis called for a master-hand. The finances were in disorder. Dis- tress and discontent reigned in the country, especially among the trading and manufacturing classes. The great financier took till the spring of 1842, to mature his plans. He then boldly supplied the deficit by imposing an in- come-tax on all incomes above a cer ' tain amount. He accompanied this tax with a reform of the tariff, by which prohibitory duties were removed and other duties abated on a vast number of articles of import, especially the raw materials of manufactures and prime articles of food. The 4 increased consumption, as the reformer expected, countervailed the reduction of duty. The income-tax was renewed, and the reform of the tariff carried still further on the same principle, in 1845. The result was, in place of a deficit of up- wards of two millions, a surplus of five millions in 1845, and the removal of seven millions and a half of taxes up to 1847, not only without loss, but with gain to the ordinary revenue of the country. In 1844, another great financial measure, the Bank Charter Act, was passed. In Ireland, O'Con nell's agitation for the repeal of the Union had now assumed threatening proportions, and verged upon rebel- lion. The great agitator was prose- cuted, with his chief adherents, for con- spiracy and sedition ; and though the conviction was quashed for informal ity, Repeal was quelled in its chief. At the same time a healing hand was KOBEET PEEL. 543 extended to Ireland. The last rem- nants of the penal laws were swept from the statute-book, and justice was extended to the Roman Catholic Church in Canada and Malta. But there were malcontents in Sir Robert Peel's party whose presence often caused embarrassment. The fa- tal question was Protection, which was being fast brought to a crisis by public opinion and the Anti-Corn Law League. Sir Robert Peel, who had been long in principle a free trader, proposed to his cabinet the repeal of the Corn Laws. Lord Stanley and the Duke of Buccleuch dissented, and Sir Robert resigned. But Lord Russell failed to form a new govern- ment. Sir Robert again came into office; and now, with the consent of all the cabinet but Lord Stanley, who retired, he, in a great speech on the 27th of January, 1846, brought the repeal of the Corn Laws before the House of Commons. His measure was carried; but immediately afterwards the offended Protectionists, goaded by Lord George Bentinck and Mr. Dis- raeli, coalesced with the Whigs, and threw him out on the Irish Coercion Bill. He went home from his defeat, escorted by a great crowd, who un- covered as he passed, and immediately resigned. Though out of office, he was not out of power. He had "lost a party, but won a nation." The Whig ministry which succeeded him leaned much on his support, with which he never taxed them. He joined them in carry- ing forward free trade principles by the repeal of the Navigation Laws He joined them in carrying forward the principle of religious liberty by the bill for the emancipation of the Jews. One great measure was his own. It was the Encumbered Estates Bill for Ireland, which transferred the land of that country from ruined landlords to solvent owners capable of performing the duties of property towards the people. On the 28th of June, 1850, he made a great speech on the Greek question against Lord Palmerston's foreign policy of interference. This speech being against the government, was thought to show that he was ready to return to office. It was his last. On the following day he was thrown from his horse on Constitution Hill, and mortally injured by the fall. Three days he lingered in all the pain which the quick nerves of genius can endure. On the fourth (July 2, 1850,) he took the sacrament, bade a calm farewell to his family and friends, and died ; and a great sorrow fell on the whole land. All the tributes which respect and gratitude could pay were paid to him by the Sovereign, by Par- liament, by public men of all parties, by the country, by the press, and, above all, by the great towns and the masses of the people to whom he had given "bread unleavened with injus- tice." He would have been buried among the great men of England in Westminster Abbey, but his will de- sired that he might be laid in Drayton Church. It also renounced a peerage for his family, as he had before de- clined the garter for himself when offered him by the Queen through Lord Aberdeen. WILLIAM WORDSWORTH. , a er- TTTILLIAM WORDSWORTH W wa s born at'^Cdcker] small town near th%Jbanks of went, in Cumberland County ,Jng' on the 7i|p)yVprir 1770. ijis fatli'^r, John W^plsWorth, descended from an an cienlyf jtmily, which, had beeif settled in YorlujRyfc, was an attorney-at-law by profession, and law agent to the Earl of Lonsdale. He was maMed in 1766 to Anne, daughter of William Cookson, mercer, of Penrith, and of Dorothy Crackanthorp, a descendant of the ancient family of that name which from the days of Edward III. had occupied Newbiggen Hall, in Westmoreland. There were five child- ren of this union : Richard, who be- came a lawyer and died in 1816 ; Wil- liam, the Poet ; Dorothy, born in 1771 ; John Wordsworth, who was lost at sea off Weymouth, in command of an East Indiaman, in 1805 ; and Chris- topher, a divine and author of emi- nence, the father of the Bishop of Lincoln, the poet's biographer. John Wordsworth, the poet's father, is des- cribed as "a person of considerable mental vigour and eloquence." He was rapidly rising in his profession when a dark shadow passed over his (544) life in the death of his wife in 1778, after which, his son, the poet, tells us he never recovered his usual cheerful ness of mind. He survived the event less than six years, being carried off by illness resulting from a cold caught from exposure at night in a profes sional ride in which he had lost his way among the mountains of the country. At his death, his son Wil- liam was in his fourteenth year. His education up to this time, so far as school instruction went an important qualification in the case of a man who was so little indebted to teachers for the developement of his mental acquir- ments had been assisted by an an- cient dame at Penrith, a schoolmistress of the old school who is reported to have been more intent on exercising the memory than prematurely testir.g the reasoning faculties of her pupils a neglect or forbearance for which Wordsworth appears to have been duly grateful in after-life, thinking it the most philosophical method. His father also, we are told, " set him very early to learn portions of the works of the best English poets by heart, so that at an early age he could repeat large portions of Shakespeare, Milton, WILLIAM WORDSWORTH. 545 and Spencer." He was also instructed in the rudiments of learning, at Cockr ermouth, by the Rev. Mr. Gilbanks; and, in his ninth year, was sent with his elder brother to an ancient public school at Hawkshead, in Lancashire, founded by Archbishop Sandj^s, in the sixteenth century. Here, as in his na- tive village, he was surrounded by those favorable influences of nature which always had so beneficial an effect upon his moral and intellectual character influences so gratefully ac- knowledged on many pages of his writings. Thus, in that autobiograph- ical poem mainly devoted to his early life, "The Prelude, or Growth of a Poet's Mind," he writes : "Fair seed-time had my soul, and I grew up, Fostered alike by beauty and by fear : Much favored in my birth-place, and no less In that beloved Vale, to which, ere long, We were transplanted there were we let loose For sports of wider range. " The vale was the beautiful vale of Esthwaite, with its lake, near which Hawkshead was situated. It was the custom for the pupils of the school to board with the dames of the village and neighboring hamlets, which intro- duced them to an honest simplicity of living, which ever dwelt gracefully in the recollection of our poet, as in these lines of the Prelude, directly commem- orating the scene : ' ' Ye lowly cottages, wherein we dwelt, A ministration of your own was yours ; Can I forget you, being, as you were, So beautiful among the pleasant fields In which ye stood ? or can I here forget The plain and seemly countenance with which Ye dealt out your plain comforts ? " with that quaint idyllic scene which 69 follows in the verse, picturing the evening indoor studies of the youth? , and the amusement they extracted from a well-worn, dilapidated pack of cards : "Those sooty knaves, precipitated down .With scoffs and taunts, like Vulcan out of heaven : The paramount ace, a moon in her eclipse, Queens gleaming through their splendor's last decay ; And monarchs surly at the wrongs sustained By royal visages." Meanwhile, for the Muse of Words- worth, impatient of confinement with- in, must soon turn to Nature with- out: "Abroad Incessant rain was falling, or the frost Raged bitterly, with keen and silent tooth ; And, interrupting oft that eager game, From under Esthwaite's splitting fields of ice The pent-up air, struggling to free itself, Gave out to meadow grounds and hills a loud Protracted yelling, like the noise of wolves Howling in troops along the Bothnic Main." While Wordsworth was at Hawks- head school, the head master, Taylor, died, and the upper boys, Wordsworth among them, were called to a leave- taking at his death-bed a scene which is also spoken of in the Prelude, with this tribute to the master : " He loved the Poets, and, if now alive, Would have loved me, as one not destitute Of promise, nor belying the kind hope That he had formed, when I, at his command, Began to spin, with toil, my earliest songs." These early verses, on subjects set by the master, were on "The Summer Vacation," and an elaborate effort in the versification of Pope's heroic cou plets in celebration of the two-hun dredth anniversary of the foundation 540 WILLIAM WORDSWORTH. of the school. The task completed, the youthful poet was moved to write to please himself ; and, as he tells us, he composed, while yet a school-boy, a long poem, running upon his own adventures, and the scenery of the country in which he was brought up. Of this, only a single passage has been preserved, which stands in the classifi- cation of the author's poems, at tho head of those written in youth. They are certainly good lines for a boy of fourteen, and noticeable for a vein of sentiment, entertained thus early, which was to pervade the writer's long life. Wordsworth, always demanding for himself personal freedom, in a fragment of autobiography, expresses his satis- faction with his school-days, pronounc- ing them " very happy ones, chiefly be- cause I was left at liberty, then, and in the vacations, to read whatever books I liked. For example, I read all Fielding's works, Don Quixote, Gil Bias, and any part of Swift that I liked ; Gulliver's Travels, and the Tale of a Tub, being both much to my taste." Besides this private stock of English literature, to which is to be added his early acquaintance with the poets, Wordsworth carried away with him from school a respectable knowl- edge of Latin, for which, he tells us, he was mainly indebted to one of the ushers at Hawkshead, who taught him more of the language in a fortnight than he had learned in his preceding two years' study at the school at Cock- ermouth. Before leaving this early period of fche poet's life, the reminiscences must not be forgotten, which he has given us of his mother, who once said to one of her female friends, that u the only one of her five children, about whose future life she was anxious, was Wil- liam ; and he, she said, would be re- markable either for good or evil, the cause of this saying being that I was of a stiff, moody and violent temper." This element of his character was con- quered, not by restraint, but by free- dom, by leaving nature, under favora- ble circumstances, to work out her own cure, when, what would otherwise have been a calamity, became a con- dition of strength. It is noticeable how the poet, again and again, in his writings, advocates this life of liberty. In his poetical notice of his mother, it is her main eulogy that she could trust much to God's good government of the world, in the unfettered de\ 7 elop- ment of the life of her child. The father of Wordsworth dying, as we have stated, while his son was yet a school-boy, he was left, with his brothers, to the care of their two un- cles, Richard Wordsworth and Chris- topher Crackanthorpe, by whom he was sent, in 1787, in his eighteenth year, to the University of Cambridge, and became a member of St. John's College. The estate left by his father, suddenly cut off in the midst of his professional pursuits, with a fortune in prospect, rather than in possession,was necessarily small, and it was dimin- ished by the expenses of litigation in a protracted suit to recover a debt due from Lord Lonsdale ; but enough was left, with economy, for the honorable maintenance of the family. Words worth, in the portion of the " Prelude ' devoted to his College life, tells us of WILLIAM WORDSWOKTH. 547 the contrast to his former habits in his first days at Cambridge, when "As if the change Had waited on some Fairy's wand, at once Behold me rich in monies, and attired In splendid garb, with hose of silk, and hair Powdered like rimy trees, when frost is keen. My lordly dressing-gown. I pass it by, With other signs of manhood that supplied The lack of beard. The weeks went roundly on, With invitations, suppers, wine and fruit, Smooth housekeeping within, and all without Liberal, and suiting gentleman's array." Expense, however, was never a charac- teristic of Wordsworth's mode of life. " Plain living and high thinking," was his motto, and the world owes him much for this simple collocation of words, with such a wealth of prosperity in them for one who can appreciate and act upon the lesson. The " splen- did garb," and other personal accessor- ies are mentioned by the poet, evi- dently as exceptional, circumstances in contrast to his former mode of liv- ing, to which, we shall see, he pre- sently returns with greater avidity than ever. His University career was, in some respects, peculiar. He never was the close student, or devotee to the honors of the place, which other members of the family became; his younger brother, Christopher, for ex- ample. He was too wayward and self-willed, or rather, too much under the influence of previously acquired habits of physical freedom and moral independence, to set a very high value upon academical contests in the pur- suit of learning, or submit to the severe study and training needed to carry off the college prizes. Other- wise he might have taken a fellowship, and become an able divine, as his friends expected. But he was, by no means, a mere idle looker on; while his sympathetic mind could not allow him to be insensible to the genius of the place. In many respects he re- sembled Milton, and as Milton before him, at Cambridge, had exhibited his spirit of independence, in contact with the College authorities, so Wordsworth justified his indifference to some of the requisitions, as the frequent attend- ance upon chapel, by the laxity and absence of high principle which he saw around him in the leaders of the flock. He looked for an ideal sanctity and sincerity in his learned guides-; and, not finding these high qualities, withdrew to the prosecution of his own thoughts, in the woods and fields, ever the aids of his inspiration. Yet, he dwelt with fondness upon the past life of the place, in its associations with the generations of illustrious men, whose presence had consecrated the spot ; and the poets, as we might expect, were not forgotten among them. There follows this in the poem, the confession of an excess of indulgence unique in the poet's life. Having among his associates the occupant of the very room in which Milton had resided, the friends, in company with some festive companions, quaffed liba- tions to the memory of the illustrious bard, till, as he tells us, "Pride And gratitude grew dizzy in a brain Never excited by the fumes of wine Before that hour, or since." The poet's first summer vacation was passed at Esthwaite, the scene of his 548 WILLIAM WOKDSWOKTH. ringing with his shrill voice, the swan in his pomp of movement upon the lake showing "How graceful pride can be, and how majestic ease!" the poor beggar-woman cherished with her children by these prodigalities of summer, to be fatally overcome by the hostility of winter. The author tells us, and the reader can well believe it, that there is not an image in the poem which he had not drawn from obser- vation; and he mentions a particular couplet, descriptive of the effect of the evening shadows among the boughs and leaves of an oak, the notice of which, as he saw it on the way between Hawkshead and Ambleside, marked an important moment in his poetical his- tory. " For," says he, " I date from it my consciousness of the infinite varie- ty of natural appearances, which had been unnoticed by the poets of any age or country, so far as I was acquaint- ed with them; and I made a resolu- tion to supply in some degree the defi- ciency. I could not have been at that time above fourteen years of age," The last summer college vacation of Words- worth was passed in a pedestrian tour in France. He had for his companion in this journey a brother collegian, Robert Jones, of Wales, subsequently the incumbent of a parsonage in Ox- fordshire, a character formed for Mend- ship, with those lights and shades dis- playing a versatility meet for all occa- sions. The man is delightfully sketched by the poet in some of his more play- ful verses. With such a companion of whom all this can be said, and youth and geniu* school life, where he found, not only familiar nature, but the welcome coun- tenances of friends, not the less en- deared to him for their plain homely life; nor was, among his favorites, the dog forgotten, who had accompanied him in his solitary walks. There he received, with new feelings of affec- tion, added to his previous sense of wonder and delight, the inspiration which nature yields only to the poetic mind. The poet, the hierophant and inter- preter of nature, was thus already dedi- cating himself to his life-long work. Among his earliest poems, there is one of some length, entitled " An Evening Walk, addressed to a young lady." That lady was his sister, Dorothy, hardly two years younger than himself, whose gentle disposition and sympathy with nature, prompt as his own, made her the confidant of his thoughts and his companion in many a rural excursion. She had been separated from him dur- ing his school-days, living with her maternal grandfather at Penrith, in Cumberland. In his college holidays, they were now again brought together, and together explored those scenes on the banks of Emont, in the vi- cinity of her residence, which live on many a bright page of the poet's song. The "Evening Walk," dedicated to her, embodies the poetic studies of several years. It includes a general sketch of the lake country, with particular description of the several seasons of the day, from morn to mid- night, the landscape being enlivened by the introduction of animal and hu- man life, the cock strutting ferociously round his native walks, the mountain 1 WILLIAM WORDSWORTH. 549 inspirers of the way and the heart of Europe for the scene, there could be but one spirit, that of joy and exulta- tion, on the journey. It introduced the poet to the wonders of the Alps, and the sweet landscape upon which the mountains descend in Northern Italy. For fourteen Aveeks, from July to Oc- tober, they traversed, mostly on foot, France , from Calais to Lyons, passing through Switzerland, crossing by the Simplon to the lake of Como, and re- tracing their steps by a different route to Constance and the Rhine. It was the memorable year 1790, and they landed in France on the eve of the day when the whole nation, with a sense of triumph, was to receive the King's oath of fidelity to the Constitution. Even Calais was lighted up by the general exhilaration of that summer hour , for, in the traveler's words, "There we saw, In a mean city, and among a few, How bright a face is worn when joy of one Is joy for tens of millions." The general animation attended them as they journeyed through the country in that new-born light of lib- erty, hailed by our poet, in common with so many noble minds of the pe- riod, as the life and regeneration of Europe. The very spirit of the time breathes again in a scene so graphi- cally described by the poet in "The Prelude." But a shadow was cast over the time, as the travelers passed onward to the Convent of Chartreuse, and its awful solitude, about to be invaded by a band of revolutionary destroyers. The poet, whose Protestantism, unlike that of Milton, never failed in appreciation of what was excellent in Roman Cath- olic devotion, keenly felt the crime oi this unhallowed and unprovoked pro- ceeding; and he has traced with no grudging hand the sanctities and sen- sibilities, the aids to humanity of such institutions. It would be vain here to attempt to pursue the poet through the influences and associations of this tour. A more particular account of the journey, especially in relation to the scen- ery of the regions visited, may be found by the reader in the elaborate poem entitled, "Descriptive Sketch- es taken during a pedestrian tour among the Alps," written by Words- worth within a year or two after his return. Leaving Cambridge in January, 1791, with the degree of Bachelor of Arts, Wordsworth passed several months in London, followed by a pedestrian tour with his friend Jones in Wales. His residence in the metropolis furnished the theme of an entire book of "The Prelude " a delightful picturesque narrative, full of youthful wonder, the common incidents of city life striking his sense as only a poetical mind can appreciate them. Being still without a fixed purpose in life, and unwilling to take holy orders, as some of his rela- tives urged him, in the month of No- vember, he set out alone for France, with the intention of passing the win- ter at Orleans. On this, his second visit, he found the country more deep- ly involved in the perils of the Revo- lution, on the eve of its more sangui- nary epoch. His course lying through Paris, he visited all objects of recent oi present interest, WILLIAM WORDSWORTH. " From the field of Mars Down to the suburbs of St. Anthony, And from Mont Martyr southward to the Dome of Geiievieve." saw the revolutionary power surg- ing in " the clamorous halls " of the o National Synod and the Jacobins, and watched with keen inspection the motley rout, observing the passions blended with the gaiety of the time. At Orleans, where he spent some time, he became acquainted with a band of military officers, with whom he entertained the hopes and aspira- tions of the day ; and he has recorded in particular his intimacy with the philosophic soldier, Beaupere, their discussions of social questions and their longings for human welfare in all no- bleness and simplicity of living. We have some vivid glimpses also of the royalists, as yet undecided in the re- publican ranks, particularly of one powerfully moved at the reception of the ill-omened reports from the capital. " While he read, Or mused, his sword was haunted by his touch Continually, like an uneasy place In his own body." Wordsworth passed, in the succeed- ing spring, to Blois, where news came to him of the civil slaughter in the capital; and, shortly after the massa- cre of September, was again in Paris, where the recent events wrought upon him, in his solitary lodging, v ell as conven- ience, he afterwards distributed the task of narration among the chief per- sonages of the tale. The great diffi- culty, however, of managing in rhyme the minor details of a story, so as to be clear without growing prosaic, and still more, the diffuse length to which he saw narration in verse would ex- tend, deterred him from following this plan any further; and he then com- menced the tale anew in its present prose shape. Of the poems written for the first experiment, a few speci- mens were introduced into the prose story. The remainder were thrown aside and remained neglected for many years after, till the author's friend, Mr. Macrone, the London publisher, calling upon him for some new poem or story, to be illustrated by Turner the artist ; unable to gratify this wish, it was pro- posed to publish such an illustrated edition of the " Epicurean," the copy- right of which was still in the hands of the author. To add to the bulk of the work, which was hardly sufficient for the publisher's purpose, Moore re- vived the original poems, and issued them with the tale, with the title, " Alciphron." The whole thus ap- peared with four brilliant designs by Turner in 1839. In his preface to this 604 THOMAS MOORE. work, the author says : " In the letters of Alciphron will be found, heighten- ed only by a freer use of poetic color- ing, nearly the same detail of events, feelings and scenery which occupy the earlier part of the prose narrative ; but the letter of the hypocritical high priest, whatever else its claim to at- tention, will be found, both in matter and form, new to the reader." Several separate publications, " Odes on Cash, Corn, Catholics, etc.," 1829; "Even- ings in Greece," the same year ; " The Snmmer Fete," 1832 ; " The Fudges in England," a sequel to "The Fudge Family in Paris," severally partaking of the characteristics of Moore's previ- ous volumes, with a large number of minor poems, satirical or sentimental, complete the series of his poetcal works. In 1830 appeared Ijis best-known biographical work, the "Letters and Journals of Lord Byron, with Notices of his Life." For this work, he re- ceived from Murray four thousand guineas. It is essentially composed of the letters of Byron, very many of them being addressed to the editor, Moore having been for a long period Byron's constant correspondent; its interest, therefore, lies mainly in the writings of Byron himself. This re- lieved the author from what would at the time have been a most inconven- ient, if not impracticable task, the con- struction of a perfect biography. In- deed, after all the attempts, such a work yet remains to be written. But Moore had a large stock of novel ma- terials to communicate to the public, and his book was consequently seized upon with avidity. There remains to be mentioned, to complete the list of Moore's publica tions, another biographical work, " The Life and Death of Lord Edward Fitz- gerald," a narrative of the Irish Kebel lion ; " Travels of an Irish gentleman in search of a Religion," a learned de- fence of Roman Catholicism; and a " History of Ireland," written for Lardner's " Cabinet Cyclopaedia ;" which appeared in 1835. " Alciphron," the poem already spoken of, was his latest work in 1839. In 1835, under the administration of Lord Melbourne, a pension of three hundred pounds a year was granted him by the Queen. The last years of Moore's life were clouded by loss of memory and utter helplessness. His published " Diary " closes with an entry in May, 1847. He was then alone in the world with his wife, the sole survivor of his family, His father died in 1825 ; his mother in 1832; not one survived of his five children. " Yet," says his biographer, Earl Russell, " he preserved his inter- est about his friends ; and when I saw him for the last time, on the 20th of December, 1849, he spoke rationally, agreeably and kindly on all those sub- jects which were the topics of our con- versation. But the death of his sister Ellen, and of his two sons, seem to have saddened his heart and in his last years obscured his intellect. Moore, having nearly completed his seventy -third year, expired calmly and without pain on the 26th of February, 1852. His wife survived this event thirteen years. Both, with three of their children, lie buried in the church- yard of Bromham, in the vicinity of the poet's cottage. /'/ // tfie onqmal painliruMy Chappel in the possession of the pablisJiers . JoiririOTL"v'.TiGon & Co., Publishers, New^Srk. v'NIYERSJTY or LYDIA HUNTLEY SIGOURNEY. r F!HIS amiable lady, whose contri- -*- butions to American literature extended over a period of half a cen- tury, and who combined in her writ- ings much of the talent and dispositions of Hannah More and Mrs. Hemans, was born at Norwich, Connecticut, on the first of September, 1791. The family from which she sprang was of the good old New England stock. Her grand- father, on the paternal side, a native of Scotland, emigrated to America in early life, and married a Miss Mary Wai bridge. He was a soldier in the old French war in the Colonial Era; and, returning from the campaign of 1760, contracted the small-pox, and died before he reached home. He left a son eight years old, Ezekiel Hunt- ley, born at Frankfort, in the vicinity of Norwich, in 1752, who, in his early manhood, bore his part with his fel- low patriots in Connecticut, in the military work of the Revolution, and, at its close, married Sophia Went- worth. Of this parentage, our author- ess was born. Her childhood was passed very happily under the most favorable circumstances for her men- tal and moral development. At the time of her birth, and for many years after, she resided with her parents on the wealthy estate of Madame Lathrop, the widow of Dr. Daniel Lathrop, and the daughter of the Hon. John Talcott, who had been, for a number of years, governor of the State. Mr. Huntley, early in life, had become a member of the family of Dr. Lathrop, who, finding the medical profession, to which he had been educated, press- ing too severely upon his sensibilities, abandoned it for mercantile pursuits, which brought him a large fortune. Huntley was brought up as one of his clerks ; and, on his death, was employ ed by the widow in the management of her estate. In the autobiographic work, published after her death, enti- tled " Letters and Life," Mrs. Sigour- ney dwells fondly on the associations of her early years, passed in the ample, well- furnished Lathrop family man- sion, in which the Huntley s lived with the estimable, aged widow proprietor in a perfectly independent manner a description which may be referred to as a specimen of Mrs. Sigourney's culti- vated prose style; and particularly for its exhibition of her unaffected na- tural sympathies, which, throughout her life, found the utmost delight in (605) 606 LYDIA HUNTLEY SIGOURNEY. 3oinmon familiar objects. Indeed, we know not where the art of pleasing and being pleased is better taught than in her writings. Ranging at will in her childhood ovei this charming domain, her earlier enjoyments were drawn from the life and beauty of nature. The flowers and fruits were to her a passion, as she watched their growth, and looked upward to the benificence of the Almighty giver. The domestic animals about the place were taken to her heart as friends. She delighted to minister to their wel- o fare, and wreathed her affections so kindly with their mute appeals, that she could never afterwards witness their discomfort or oppression without feeling " an almost morbid distress." A large black horse " of mild temper- ament," was an especial favorite ; but pussy, upon the whole, seems to have awakened the greatest interest and regard. "I studied cat-nature," says she, " like a philosopher." . Nor with these accessories of the mansion, is to be forgotten its large rambling old-fashioned garret, a capa- cious lumber-room and museum, with memorials scattered around, of the past fortunes of the family, notably the relics of her father's military career in the Revolution, a collection of twisted powder-horns, a brass-hilted sword, and cumbrous pistols, with a long -barreled gun, which the little Lydia, in her active young imagina- tion, invested with life, " talking with each about Bunker Hill, and York- town, and Washington, till I half fan- cied I had listened to the war-thunder of battle; and looked upon the god- like form of the Pater Patrise." Here, too, was an old-fashioned, heavy carv- ed buffet, a condemned article of fur niture, whose curved shelves afforded an excellent opportunity for the dis play of the child's dolls " according to their degrees of aristocracy." There were immense trunks, too, in that gar- ret. " Untold treasures I supposed them to contain ; but rummaging was in those days forbidden to children. One of them was open and empty, and lined with sheets of printed hymns. I stretched myself within its walls and perused those hymns, being able to read at three years old. Afterwards, I grieve to say, that I made use of that hiding-place for a more question- able purpose. Finding a borrowed copy of the ' Mysteries of Udolpho ' in the house, and perceiving that it was sequestrated from childish hands, I watched for intervals when it might be abstracted unobserved, and, taking refuge in my trunk, like the cynic in his tub, revelled among the tragic scenes of Mrs. Ratcliffe ; finding, how- ever, no terror so formidable as an ap- proaching footstep, when, hiding the volume, I leaped lightly from my cav- ernous study. It was the first surrep- titious satisfaction, and not partaken without remorse. Yet the fascination of that fearful fiction-book seemed to me too strong to be resisted." In the midst of this charming idyl- lic life of the old New England farm- house, the education of the child, no- ticeable for her precocity, though not oppressed by it, grew apace. At home she enjoyed the best moral training in the influence and example of those about her. Her religious impressions were encouraged and confirmed with LYDIA HUNTLEY SIGOUKNEY. 607 out austerity, leaving upon her charac- ter the permanent mark of a natural unaffected piety, true to its convic- tions and spontaneous in the expres- sion of them, simply because they were natural and an inseparable por- tion of her life. Her tastes and habits all tended to simplicity ; and good health of body and soul led to con- tentment. She had an excellent guide to her first studies, in her venerable friend, Madame Lathrop, who surviv- ed through her period of girlhood, a genuine lady of the old school, amiable and dignified, and familiar with the English literature of her day. As she grew up, a succession of competent teachers introduced her to various branches of knowledge. Reading, as we have seen, at three years old, she became such a proficient, that at the age of eight, she actually planned and commenced a novel in the epistolary style, with the scene partly laid in Italy a thing of the least conse- quence, of course, if it had been finish- ed, but noticable enough in connextion with her after-literary career. Among her instructors, was one of that unfail- ing supply in America in those days from Trinity College, Dublin. This Irish preceptor was strong in mathe- matics, and imbued his pupil with a love of the science, so that she became enthusiastic in the study, and was al- ways thankful for it as a valuable dis- cipline of her powers. Yale College furnished another beneficent teacher in Pelatiah Perrit, who taught the Greek and Latin classics to a select class of twenty-five, and who after- wards became distinguished as a mer- chant and philanthropist in New York. She afterwards learnt history and mental philosophy, and took so kind ly to Latin as to employ herself in translations from the ^Eneid. French, and even a considerable knowledge of Hebrew, were added to her early ac- complishments, as she entered with the full ardor of her imagination into the story of Jonah, the lyrical beauty of which she expressed in a happy rhythmical translation. And all this was accomplished at the age of four- teen. There is quite a remarkably diary of her composition, preserved in the " Letters " which she wrote at this time, giving an account of a little journey to Hartford. The occasion of this jaunt is noticeable for its indication of the girl's susceptible nature. The death of her venerable " benefactress," as she always loved to call Mrs. Lath- rop, so preyed upon her spirits as se- riously to affect her health. Though her friend had departed full of years, at the age of eighty-eight, and had, of course, for some time required much anxious attention, the kind Lydia had never felt the burden, but had cheer- fully humored her ways and smoothed the pillow of declining life. " I could not understand," she writes, " why any should say that patience was tried by the mind's brokenness. To me it was a fresh delight to tell her the same thing many times, if she required it. Sometimes, when restlessness oppressed her, she called me to come within her curtains, and sing the simple melodies that she had early taught me. This I did in low, soothing tones, joining my cheek to hers, when she was com- forted, and slept, holding often my 608 LYDIA HUNTLEY SIGOUKKEY. hand long in her own." Lydia was with her when she died, and felt her loss like that of a mother. Seeing her health so visibly affected after this event, her parents called in a physi- cian, Dr. Philemon Tracy, a man in advance of his time, for he had more faith in studying the constitution of his patients and putting them under conditions where nature might exert her powers to the best advantage for recovery, than in any administration of drugs. For the cure of the child torn with spasms, he simply recom- mended that she should be clothed in soft red flannel, and sent on a visit to Mrs. Lathrop's relations in Hartford. The cure was perfect, the novelty and interest of the scene to which she was introduced, and the kindness of her friends, in a fortnight fully brought about her recovery. The family by which she was received, was that of the Wadsworths, who concentrated within their circle the best qualities and resources of that high-minded, truly hospitable period. Colonel Jer- emiah Wadsworth, the nephew of Mrs. Lathrop, was no longer living, but his widow, with two of his sisters, lived in the family mansion, and in their con- versation vividly brought before their young guest the recent glories of the house, when it had been visited by Washington and other notables of the Revolution, Lafayette, De Grasse, Roch- embeau, Greene, Putnam, and the rest, with the wily Talleyrand in exile. Under such influences, Hartford, past and present, was thoroughly learnt and understood by the youthful visitor. A year or two before, she had begun a journal; and she had now much to her that was memorable to record in it. We can hardly real- ize, while reading the portions of it in the "Letters," that it was written by a girl of fourteen for it is as well penned and with much the same talent at description, as that subsequently giv- en to the world in the New England Travels by the great President Dwight himself. But Mrs. Sigourney appears always to have had an old head on young shoulders. So she describes places and scenes with fidelity and unaffected admiration ; and, not con- tent with excellent prose, runs over in very creditable blank verse, in apos- trophes to the great historic shrine of the place, the venerable Charter-Oak. This was written in the autumn of 1805. Fifty years afterwards, when the tree was prostrated in a storm, she wrote a dirge in commemoration of its fall. Returning with restored health to Norwich, she finds her parents about to remove from the old Lathrop man- sion, to a neighboring home of their own, a farm-house with a spacious gar- den, and appointments, which had been to her so great a delight in childhood. She entered heartily into the new life, sharing its burdens of industry and economy cheerfully ; for the family lived in a greatly independent way, much helping themselves. The daugh ter and only child Lydia, was wel] qualified to assist wherever her ser- vices might be required. The litera- ture and love of poetry which she had acquired, were not at the expense of humbler accomplishments. Expert with the needle, from the age of eight, as she tells us, "I had been LYDIA HUOTLEY SIGOURNEY. 609 promoted to the office of shirt-maker for my father. I now adventured up- on his vests, cutting to pieces an old one as a pattern. For a hall in the second story, which was carpetless, I cut squares of flannel, about the size of the compartments in a marble pave- ment, and sewed on each a pattern of flowers and leaves cut from broad- cloth, of appropriate colors. The effect of the whole was that of rich, raised embroidery. With the true New Eng- land spirit of turning fragments to good account, I constructed of the pieces which were too small for the carpet, a gay counterpane for a little bed, used when we had children among our nightly guests. I also braided white chip, and fine split- straw, for the large and very pretty hats which were then in voo;ue." The O industrious Lydia also furnished her father with stockings of her own knit- ting, an exclusive privilege of her own; and, with the aid of a tenant weaver on the premises, spun for him an en- tire suit of clothes of the choicest wool. She was also greatly busied with him in his agricultural and horti- xiiltural pursuits, in planting and cul- tivating. Industry and happiness in cheerful employment ruled the hour in the Connecticut homestead, which, so great have been the changes and departures from it, looking back upon it now, seems hardly a possibility of the present century. There were amusements, too, and accomplish- ments, in abundance. With a due observance of the Sabbath, there was no Puritan austerity in the household to exclude dancing and the innocent gaieties of social intercourse. Music 77 came with the singing-school, and a soldierly Frenchman taught dancing with the stiff graces and inflexible exactness of a military drill-sergeant. Among other acquisitions in this youthful period, were a great deal of painting and drawing, of which lit- tle came, while a great good resulted from acquaintance with books, and especially the poets. There was one excellent practice, in the pursuit of literature, well worthy of revival at any time. "Committing passages from the poets to memory was a sys- tematic exercise. Cowper and Gold- smith were among the first chosen for that purpose. The melody of the lat- ter won both the ear and heart ; and 1 The Deserted Village,' or < The Travel- ler,' were voicelessly repeated, after retiring at night, if sleep, 'Like parting summer's lingering bloom de- lay 'd.' With the earnest perusal of Shakes- peare and Thomson, was interspersed that of the German poets, Klopstock and Kotzebue, and also some of the modern travelers and ancient histon ans. Among the latter was Josephus, whose study did not, on the whole produce any great satisfaction. I found myself more attracted by the histori- ans of the Mother Land, still, with im- maturity of taste, prefering the con- ciseness of Goldsmith to the discursive and classic Hume. A reading society of a few young people was commenced, and sustained with various fluctua- tions, where the prescribed course was the history of our own country, with a garnish of the poems of Walter Scott. Attached to this circle were some fine 510 LYDIA HTINTLEY SIGOURNEY. readers, among whom I recollect, with unalloyed pleasure, the perfect enunci- ation and emphasis of a lady, who afterwards, as the wife of the Rev. Samuel Nott, went out with our first, band of missionaries to Asia." But we must not linger over pass- ages like these, though nothing can give so true and vivid an impression of the author's life ; of those mental habits and training, and those cheerful virtues which have rendered the auth- oress the delight of all who knew her or her writings. It is another very noticeable thing in her early career, that this young lady was inspired from her very childhood with a love of teaching, usually rather a repulsive idea to juvenile people. In her earli- est years, she tells us, " the doll-genus were not at all essential to my happi- ness. They were of the most conse- quence when, marshalled in the char- acter of pupils, I installed myself as their teacher" As she grew older, she pursued the idea with a passionate at- tachment. When she was about the age of eighteen, she seriously set about its accomplishment. " My father/' says she, "marvelled at my prefer- ence, but not more than I at his pro- posal to fit up one of our pleasantest apartments for my chosen purpose. With what exultation I welcomed a long desk and benches, neatly new made of fair, white wood ! To these I proceeded to add an hour-glass, and a few other articles of convenience and adornment. My active imagina- tion peopled the room with attentive scholars, and I meditated the opening address, which, I trusted, would win their hearts, and the rules which were to regulate their conduct. Without O delay I set forth to obtain those per sonages, bearing a prospectus, very beautifully written, of an extensive course of English studies, with in- struction in needlework. My slight knowledge of the world induced me to offer it courageously to ladies in their parlors, or fathers in their stores, who had daughters of an age adapted to my course. I did not anticipate the difficulty of one, at so early an age, suddenly installing herself in a position of that nature, especially among her own people. Day after day I returned from my walk of so- licitation without a name on my cata- logue. Yet with every morning came fresh zeal to persevere. At length, wearied with fruitless pedestrian ex- cursions, and still more depressing refusals, I opened my school with two sweet little girls of eleven and nine years old. Consolatory was it to my chastened vanity that they were of the highest and most wealthy families among us. Cousins were they, both bearing the aristocratic name of La- throp. Very happy was I with these plastic and lovely beings. Six hours of five days in the week, besides three on Saturday, did I sedulously devote to them, questioning, simplifying, il- lustrating, and impressing various de partments of knowledge, as though a larger class were auditors. A young lady from Massachusetts, of the name of Bliss, being in town for a short time, also joined us during that inter- val, to pursue drawing, and painting in water-colors. At the close of OUT term, or quarter, as it was then called, was aii elaborate examination in al] LYDIA HU-STL3Y fill the studies, with which the invited guests signified their entire approba- tion." There was nothing very profitable in all this, though the forms were com- plied with in so exemplary a manner. Not discouraged, however, Miss Hunt- ly was prepared to make another at- tempt. It was deliberately planned, for she associated with herself a favor- ite companion of a like way of think- ing, her friend, Miss Nancy Maria Hyde, who also wished to render some assistance to her father, who had suf- fered a reverse of fortune; and the two proceeded together to enter a seminary at Hartford, where they might gain instruction in some of the ornamental branches of female educa- tion, as drawing, painting in water- colors, embroidery, and the like. The design was carried out, and on their return, after a short absence, they opened together a school at Norwich, which was successful from the start so much was accomplished by the prestige of a little foreign education. Being six months the older of the two, the responsibility of opening the school with prayer, which, though something unusual in those days, had been planned by Miss Huntley, de- volved upon her. The school was, in its way, a model one, extensive in its course of study, and thorough, with especial attention to a good handwriting. Those who have seen specimens of Mrs. Sigour- ney's manuscript, will remember its distinctness and regularity an index of her mind and character. There was also good attention to useful needle- work a very important thing, too, ministering equally to the usefulness and happiness of those who are skil- ful in it. Soon the school so grew in numbers, that larger accommodations were required for it, and a new build- ing was taken. This prospered also ; but teaching was but slightly remun- erated in those days, the price for the quarter's tuition being but three dol- lars, so that there could be no great pecuniary gain. A better prospect, however, was opened on a visit of Miss Huntley to Hartford, when Mr. Daniel Wadsworth proposed that, re- siding in the family mansion, she should take charge of a select num- ber of young ladies, the children of his friends. She accepted the offer; the new home; so rich and liberal in all goodness and advantages, was en- tered, and the school was opened, and continued there for five years. The conclusion of this period brought her to the age of twenty-eight, when an entire change in her life occurred, con- sequent upon her marriage to Mr. Charles Sigourney, a highly educated and accomplished gentleman of min- gled Huguenot and Scottish descent, who had been educated in England, and brought up to business affairs, and at the time of this union was established in Hartford, a wealthy hardware merchant. He was a wid- ower, with a son and two daughters, all three in their childhood. Being attached to the Protestant Episcopal Church, his new wife joined him in attendance upon its services, and be- came one of its most honored mem- bers. They resided together for eigh- teen years, at a beautiful rural resi- dence overlooking Hartford, which, 612 LYDIA HUNTLEY SIGOURNEY. owing to the loss of property by her husband, was then exchanged for a simpler residence, a small but pic- turesque cottage within the limits of the city, where Mrs. Sigourney passed the remainder of her life. A son and daughter were born to her in her first residence. The former was taken from her while a student in college, at the age of nineteen ; and about four years after, his father followed him to the grave by a sudden stroke of apoplexy, at the age of seventy-six. The daugh- ter was married the year after to the Rev. F. T. Russell, a clergyman of the Episcopal Church. Leaving for the moment these no- tices of her more purely domestic life, we have now to trace her public liter- ary career. This began in her twenty- fourth year, with the publication in 1815 of a volume entitled "Moral Pieces in Prose and Verse," a collec- tion largely reflecting her tastes and habits of mind as a teacher, the prose essays being introduced with the ex- planation that they had been address- ed to " a number of ladies under her care." The occasional verses exhibited facility of execution. A religious tone pervaded the whole. The book was prepared at the suggestion of the writer's kind friend and patron, Mr. Daniel Wadsworth, who gathered sub- scriptions for it, and saw it fairly through the press. It was well re- ceived, and gave that encouragement to the author which led her to a con- stant employment of her talents in literary production. The death of her friend and fellow-teacher, Miss Hyde, the following year, was the occasion of her next appearance before the pub- lic, with a biography of that lady pre fixed to a selection from her writings. Of her next publication, in 1819, she gives the following account. " TJie Square Table, was the first literary production after my marriage, written by snatches while I was becoming ini tiated into the science of housekeep- ing, with the shell of the school-mis- tress still on my head. It was miscel- laneous, and in reply to "Arthur's Round Table," a somewhat satirical work which had recently appeared. So strict was its incognita, that I had great amusement in hearing its merits discussed, and its authority inquired after in the circles where I visited. It was issued in pamphlet form, but not long continued, as I found the mystery on which its existence depended in danger of being unravelled." In 1822 Mrs. Sigourney published a poem in five cantos, entitled, "Traits of the Aborigines of America," written before her marriage, and stimulated by her interest in a Mohegan tribe of In- dians, who then resided but a few miles from her home at Norwich. This book, she tells us, " was singularly un- popular ; there existing in the commu- nity no reciprocity with the subject." With her characteristic benevolence, Mrs. Sigourney was always inclined to take a favorable view of the Indian character, and attribute much of their misfortunes to the injustice which they received at the hands of the govern- ment and their white brethren. Her imagination was attracted to their old mode of living in their ancient occu pancy of the country, and she delight- ed to trace the relics of their history in the names which they had given to LYDIA HUNTLET SIGOUKNEY. 613 many natural features of the land. She gave expression to this feeling in one of the most admired of her subse- quent poems. Ye say they all have passed away, That noble race and brave, That their light canoes have vanished From off the crested wave ; That mid the forests where they roamed There rings no hunter's shout; But their name is on your waters, Ye may not wash it out. Nearly twenty years afterwards, we find Mrs. Sigourney returning to these themes, in her poem of " Pocahontas," stimulated by her having visited the ruins of the church at Jamestown, where the Indian princess received the rite of baptism, a subject commemora- ted in some of her best lines, as she pictured the devotion of the early settlers. In 1824 Mrs. Sigourney published a volume of much interest, a " Sketch of Connecticut, Forty Years Since," a valuable contribution to the social history of the preceding age, tracing primitive habits and traditions, with some intermingling of fiction, the scene being laid among the wild and beautiful regions of her native place, and the object of its construction being, as she tells us, u to embalm the memory and virtues of an ancient lady, my first and most loved benefactress." This, of course, was Madame Lathrop. " It was meant," she adds, " to be an offering of gratitude to her whose in- fluence, like a golden thread, had run through the whole woof of my life. Her relatives, as if by a heritable affection, continued to brighten its course and coloring; and, through their deeds of kindness, she, being dead, yet spake. Truly and devoutly would I apostrophize her, whose hal- lowed hand wrought among the ele ments of my being ' If some faint love of goodness glow in me, Pure spirit ! I first caught that flame from thee.' " The poems of Mrs. Sigourney, of which a first collection appeared in 1829, followed by numerous others in the next thirty years, may be generally classed in the rank of occasional verses, inspired by some emotional feeling, or suggested, as was frequent- ly the case, by some object appealing to her sympathy or imagination in her travels. Her journeys in her early married life were frequent, to Virginia, through New York to Niagara, Canada, into Pennsylvania, and in summer to the coast scenery of the New England States. Her visits to all of these places may be traced in her poems. A special gathering of her compositions of this kind was made by her in 1845, in the volume of mingled poetry and prose entitled "Scenes in My Native Land." It begins and ends with Niagara, a theme which has thus far baifled the attempt? of poets. The numerous descriptions of the book are marked by their sim- plicity and fidelity. There is no straining for effect ; all is truthfully and plainly narrated as it meets her eye. In 1840 she took a more extend ed tour, crossing the Atlantic and visiting many interesting scenes in England, Scotland and France. Hex volume entitled " Pleasant Memories of Pleasant Lands," gives an account of these journeys, in which her faculty of receiving pleasure from every LYD1A HUNTLEY SIGOUKNEY. worthy object is, as in all her writings, distinctly noticeable. Another class of Mrs. Sigourney's writings are simply moral and didac- tic prose compositions, of a religious bearing, illustrating the lessons of every-day life, somewhat in the man- ner of the essays of Hannah More, as the "Letters to Young Ladies," and to " Mothers," which have passed through various editions from the press of the Messrs. Harper ; books full of kindly, practical suggestions ; virtuous with- out being ascetic; teaching how the dangers and disagreeable incidents of life may be overcome ; how tastes and tempers may be regulated ; the soul instructed ; time gracefully employed, and life be made more honorable and happy. The list of Mrs. Sigourney's publications, as enumerated by her- self, reaches no less than fifty-six ; some of them new collections of previous writings ; none without some attrac- tive quality or benevolent purpose. In the production of these works the life of the amiable author seemed to be extended. Living quietly at her home in Hartford, surrounded by affection- ate and admiring friends, tributes came to her from the English reading public in Great Britain and America, solacing her with the consolation that her life had not been spent in vain ; and when the end came, after more than twenty years of widowhood, it found her ripe in fame as in age. The single talent given her was well em- ployed. Her last poem, a fragment entitled " The Valedictory," a portion of a projected longer work to be called " The Septuagenarian " was written by her less than four weeks before her death. It is very characteristic of her cheerful, beneficent, untroubled life. Here is my Valedictory. I b:ing A basket of dried fruits autumnal leaves, And mosses, pressed from ocean's sunless tides. I strew them votive at your feet, sweet friends. Who've listened to me long with grateful thanks, For favoring smiles, that have sustained and cheered All weariness. I never wrote for fame- The payment seemed not to be worth the toil ; But wheresoe'er the kind affections sought To mix themselves by mnsic with the mind, That was my inspiration and delignt. And you, for many a lustrum, have not frowned Upon my lingering strain. Patient you 've been, Even as the charity that never fails ; And pouring o'er my heart the gentlest tides Of love and commendation. So I take These tender memories to my pillowed turf, Blessing you for them when I breathe no more. Heaven's peace be with you all ! Farewell 1 Farewell ' And with like thoughts of peace and good will, in love with all noble things to the last, soothed by the kindness of all about her, still think- ing how she might do good to others ; recalling in one of her last hours a verse from her own earlv translation of the Hebrew prophet "In the fainting away of my life, I will think upon Jehovah, and He shall send forth strength for me from His Holy Tem- ple," consoled by the ministers of the church of her affections, this gentle lady passed away from earth, at her home in Hartford, on the 10th of June, 1865. em, ffit. anginal pam&ng fy Ctuiprpel Johnso ANDREW JACKSON. A NDKEW JACKSON was of Ir- -CX ish parentage. His father, of the same name, belonged to a Protes- tant family in humble life which had been long settled at Carrickfergus, in the north of Ireland, whence he brought his wife and two children to America, in 1765. They were landed at Charles- ton, South Carolina, and proceeded at once to the upper region of the coun- try, on the Catawba, known as the Waxhaw settlement. They came as poor emigrants to share the labors of their friends and countrymen who were settled in the district. Andrew Jackson, the elder, began his toilsome work in clearing the land on his plot at Twelve Mile Creek, a branch of the Catawba, in what is now known as Union County, North Carolina, but had barely established himself by two years' labor when he died, leaving his widow to seek a refuge with her brother-in-law in the neighborhood. A few days after her husband's death, on the 15th March, 1767, she brought forth a third son, Andrew, of whose life we are about to give an account. The father having left little, if any, means of support for his family, the mother found a permanent home with another brother-in-law named Crawford, resided on a farm just over the border in South Carolina. There the boyhood of Jackson was passed in the pursuits incident to youth, in frontier agricultural life. His physical powers were developed by healthy sports and exercise, and his mind received some culture in the humble rudiments of education in the limited schooling of the region. It is probable that some- thing better was intended for him than for most of the boys in his posi- tion, since we hear of his being at an Academy at Charlotte, and of his mo- ther's design to prepare him for the calling of a Presbyterian clergyman. Such, indeed, might well have been his prospects, for he had a nature capable of the service, had not the war of the Revolution, now breaking out afresh in the South, carried him in quite a different direction. In 1779 came the invasion of Smith Carolina, the ruthless expedition of Pro- vost along the seaboard preceding the arrival of Clinton, and the fall of Charleston. The latter event occurred in May of the following year, and Cornwallis was free to carry out his plan for the subjugation of the coun 1615) 616 ANDEEW JACKSON. try. Sending Tarleton before him, the very month of the surrender of the city, the war of devastation was carried to the border of the State, the very home of Jackson. The action at the Waxhaws was one of the bloodiest in a series of bloody campaigns, which ended with only the final termination of hostilities. It was a massacre rath- er than a battle, as American blood was poured forth like water. The mangled bodies of the wounded were brought into the church of the settle- ment, where the mother of the young Jackson, then a boy of thirteen, with himself and brother he had but one now, Hugh having joined the patriots and fallen in the affair at Stono at- tended the sick and dying. That "gory bed" of war, consecrated by the spot where his father had wor- shipped, and near which he reposed in lasting sleep, summoned the boy to his baptism of blood. He was not the one to shrink from the encounter. We accordingly find him on hand at Sumter's attack, in the following Au- gust, on the enemy's post at Hanging Rock, accompanying Major Davies' North Carolina troop to the fight, though he does not appear to have en- gaged in the battle. A few days after, Gates was defeated at Camden, and Mrs. Jackson and her children fled be- fore the storm of war to a refuge in the northern part of the district. The es- cape was but temporary, for, on her return in the spring, her boys were en- tangled, as they could not well fail to be in that region, in the desultory, seldom long intermitted partizan war- fare which afflicted the Carolinas. In the preparation for one of the frequent skirmishes between Whig and Tory, the two brothers were surprised, es- caped in flight, were betrayed and captured. It was on this occasion that the scene, often narrated, occur- red, of the indignity offered by the British officer, met by the spirited re- sistance of the youth. Andrew was ordered by the officer, in no gentle tone, to clean his boots. He refused per- emptorily, pleading his rights as a prisoner of war, an argument which brought down a rejoinder in a sword- thrust on the head and arm raised for protection, the marks of which the old hero bore to his last day. A similar wound, at the same time, for a like offence, was the cause of his brother's death. Their imprisonment at Camden was most cruel; severely wounded, without medicine or care, with but little food, exposed to contagion, they were brought forth by their mother, who followed them and managed their exchange. Few scenes of war can be fancied, more truly heroic and pitiful than the picture presented by Mr. Parton, in his faithful biography of this earnest, afflicted, patriotic mother receiving her boys from the dungeon, "astonished and horrified" at their worn, wasted appearance. The elder was so ill as not to be able to sit on horseback without help, and there was no place for them in those troub- led times but their distant home. It was forty miles away. Two horses, with difficulty we may suppose, were procured. " One she rode herself. Robert was placed on the other, and held in his seat by the returning pris- oners, to whom his devoted mother had just given liberty. Behind the AKDRETV JACKSON". 617 sad procession, poor Andrew dragged his weak and weary limbs, bareheaded, barefooted, without a jacket." Before the long journey was thus painfully accomplished, " a chilly, drenching, merciless rain" set in, to add to its hardships. Two days after, Robert died, and Andrew was, happily, per- haps, insensible to the event in the de- lirium of the small-pox, which he had contracted in prison. What will not woman undertake of heroic charity? This mother of Andrew Jackson had no sooner seen her surviving boy re- covered by her care, than she set off with two other matrons, on foot, tra- versing the long distance to Charles- ton to carry aid and consolation to her nephews and friends immured in the deadly prison-ships in the harbor. She accomplished her errand, but died almost in its execution, falling ill of the ship fever at the house of a relative in the vicinity of the city. Thus sank into her martyr's grave, this woman, worthy to be the mother of a hero, leaving her son Andrew, " before reaching his fifteenth birth-day, an orphan ; a sick and sorrowful orphan, a homeless and dependent orphan, an orphan of the Revolution." The youth remained with one of the Crawiords till a quarrel with an American commissary in the house this lad of spirit would take indignity neither from friend or foe drove him to another relative, whose son being in the saddler's trade, led him to some six months' engagement in this mecha- nical pursuit. This was followed by a somewhat eager enlistment in the wild youthful sports or dissipations of the day, such as cockfighting, racing and 78 gambling, which might have wrecked a less resolute victim ; but his strength to get out of this dangerous current was happily superior to the force which im- pelled him into it, and he escaped. He even took to study and became a school- master, not over competent in some re spects, but fully capable of imparting what he had learnt in the rude old. field schools of the time. We doubt not he put energy into the vocables, as the row of urchins stood before him, and energy, like the orator's action, is more than books to a schoolmaster. A year or two spent in this way, not without some pecuniary profit, put him on the track of the law, for which there is always an opening in the business arising from the unset- tled land titles of a new country, to say nothing of those personal strifes and traditions which follow man wherever he goes. The youth he was yet hardly eighteen accordingly offered himself to the most eminent counsel in the region that is, within a hundred miles or so alighting at the law office of Mr. Spence McCay, a man of note at Salisbury, North Caro lina. There he passed 1785 and the following year, studying probably more than he has credit for, his repu- tation as a gay young fellow of the town being better remembered, as is natural, than his ordinary office rou- tine. He had also the legal instruc- tions of an old warrior of the Revolu- tion, brave Colonel Stokes, a good lawyer and mixture of the soldier and civilian, who must have been quite to Andrew Jackson's taste. Thus forti- fied, with the moderate amount of learning due his profession in those 618 AXDKEW JACKSOJN. days, he was licensed and began the practice >f the law. His biographer, Mr. Parton, pleased with having brought him thus far suc- cessfully on the stage of life, stops to contemplate his subject at full length. His points may be thus summed up : " A tall fellow, six feet and an inch in his stockings ; slender, but graceful ; far from handsome, with a long, thin, fair face, a high and narrow forehead, abundant reddish-sandy hair, falling low over it hair not yet elevated to the bristling aspect of later days eyes of a deep blue, brilliant when aroused, a bold rider, a capital shot." As for the moral qualities which he adds to these physical traits, the pru- dence associated with courage and "that omnipotent something which we call a presence," which faithful Kent saw in his old discrowned mon- arch Lear, as an appeal to service and named " authority," it is time enough to make these reflections when the man shall have proved them by his actions. He will have opportunity enough. After getting his " law," the young advocate took a turn in the miscella- neous pursuits of the West, as a store- keeper at Martinsville, in Guildford County, keeping up his connection with his profession, it is reported, by performing the executive duties of a constable. He has now reached the age of twenty-one, when he may be said fairly to have entered upon his career, as he received the appointment of solicitor or public prosecutor in the western district of North Carolina, the present Tennessee. This carried him to Nashville, then a perilous journey through an unsettled country, filled ' with hostile Indians. He arrived at this seat of his future home, whence his country was so often to summon him in her hour of need, in October, 1788, and entered at once vigorously on the practice of his profession, which was very much an off-hand, extempore affair, requiring activity and resolution more than learning, especially in the main duties of his office as collector of debts. A large extent of country was to be traversed in his circuits of the wilderness, on which it was quite as important to be a good woodman as a well-informed jurist. Indeed, there was more fear of the Indian than of the Opposite Counsel. Jackson had the confidence of the mercantile com- munity behind him, and discharged his duties so efficiently, and withal was so provident of the future which his keen eye foresaw, that he prosper- ed in his fortunes, and in a few years became a considerable landed proprie- tor. In 1791 an event occurred which became subsequently a matter of fre- quent discussion, and which certainly required some explanation. Andrew Jackson married at Natchez, on the Mississippi, Mrs. Robards, at the time not fully divorced from her husband, though both Jackson and the lady be- lieved the divorce had been pronounced. The error, after the sifting which the affair received when it became a ground of party attack, and the blazing light of a Presidential canvass was thrown upon it, is easily accounted for. The cirum stances of the case may be thus briefly narrated : A Colonel Donel- son, one of the founders of Nashville, brought with him to that settlement, ANDREW JACKSON. 019 not many years before, his daughter Rachel, who, at the time of Jackson's arrival, was married to a Mr. Robards, of Kentucky. The young " solicitor " found the pair living v/ith the lady's mother, Mrs. Donelson, in whose house Jackson became an inmate. Robards appears to have been of jealous tem- perament, and moreover of unsettled habits of living. At any rate, he had his home apart from his w~ife, and we presently find him, in the second win- ter after Jackson's arrival, applying as a Kentuckian, to the Virginia legisla- ture, for a divorce. He procured an order for the preliminary proceedings, which were understood, or rather mis- understood by the people of Tennes- see, as an authoritative separation. With this view of the matter, as the explanation is given, the marriage took place. The divorce was legally completed in 1793. When Jackson then learnt the true state of the case, he had the marriage ceremony per- formed a second time. During the whole of the affair from the begin- ning, though he acted as a friend of <_>7 O the lady, he appears to have conduc- ted himself toward her with the great- est propriety. Indeed, a certain innate sense of delicacy and pure chivalrous feeling toward woman, was always a distinctive trait of his character. It was constantly noticed by those most intimate with him, as a remarkable characteristic, in a man roughly tak- ing his share in the wild pursuits and dissipations of the day. He was no doubt early an admirer of the lady, whose gay, spirited qualities and ad- venturous pioneer life were likely to fascinate such a man, and made no secret of his contempt for the husband, threatening on one occasion, when he was pestered by his jealousies, to cut out his ears. The story of his mar- riage was of course variously interpre- ted, but he allowed no doubtful inti- mations of the matter in his presence. It was a duel or war to the knife when any hesitation on that subject was brought to his hearing. The region into which Jackson had emigrated, having passed through its territorial period, when the solicitor became atttorney-general, reached its majority in a State name and govern- ment of its own in 1796. He was one of the delegates to the convention at Knoxville, which formed the consti- tution of Tennessee, and one of the two members of each county, to whom was intrusted the drafting of that instru ment. When the State was admitted into the Union, Andrew Jackson was chosen its first, and, at that time, only representative to Congress. He took his seat at the beginning of the session, at the close of the year, and was con- sequently present to receive the last opening message of George Washing- ton, it being usual in those days for the President to meet both houses to- gether at the commencement of their sitting, and deliver his speech in per- son what is now the President's mes- sage. In like manner, according to the usage of the English Parliament, a re- ply was prepared and voted upon by each house, which was carried in per son by the members to the President's mansion. The reply, in this instance, proposed in the House of Representa- tives by the Federalist committee, waa thought too full an indorsement of the 820 ANDREW JACKSON. policy of the administration, and met with some opposition from the Repub- lican minority, Andrew Jackson ap- pearing as one of twelve, by the side of Edward Livingston, and William B. Giles, of Virginia, voting against it. He did not speak on the question, and his vote may be regarded simply as an indication of his party sentiments, though, had he been an ardent admirer of Washington, he might, spite of his Tennessee politics, have voted with Gallatin for the original address. That he did not, does not imply necessarily any disaffection to Washington; but there was probably little of personal feeling in the matter to be looked for from him. The independent life of the South and West had never leaned, as the heart of the Eastern and Atlan- tic regions, upon the right arm of Washington. The only question upon which he spoke during the session was in favor of assuming certain expenses incurred in an Indian expedition in his adopted State; and the resolution which he advocated was adopted. His votes are recorded in favor of appro- priations for the navy, and against the black mail paid to Algiers. His suc- cess in the Indian bill was well calcu- lated to please his constituents, and he was accordingly returned the next year to the Senate. It was the first session of the new administration, and all that is told of his appearance on the floor is the remark of Jefferson in his old age to Daniel Webster, that he had often seen him, from his Vice- President's chair, attempt to speak, and " as often choke with rage." Mr. Parton adds to this recollection the bare fact that he made the acquaint- ance of Duane of the " Aurora," Aarou Burr and Edward Livingston. He re tired before the end of the session, and resigned his seat. Private affairs call- ed him home ; but he could not have been well adapted to senatorial life, or he did not like the position, else he would have managed to retain it. It was an honor not to be thrown away lightly by an ambitious young man. We next behold him chosen by the legislature a judge of the Supreme Court of Tennessee a post, one would think, of severer requisitions than that of United States senator, since a mem- ber of a legislative body may give a silent vote or be relieved of an onerous committee, while the occupant of the bench is continually called upon to ex- ercise the best faculties of the mind. It is to Jackson's credit that he held the position for six years, during which, as population flowed into the State and interests became more involved, the re- quisitions of the office must have been continually becoming more exacting. Its duties carried him to the chief towns of the State, where he was ex- posed to the observation of better read lawyers than himself. As no record was kept of his decisions, we have to infer the manner in which he acquit- ted himself from what we know his qualifications. He no doubt made himself intelligible enough on simple questions, and decided courageously and honestly what he understood ; but in any nice matter he must have been at fault from want of skill in statement, if we may judge of his tal ents in this respect by his printed cor respondent, which is ill spelt, ungram matical, ana confused. ANDREW JACKSON. 621 His personal energy, however, doubt- less helped him on occasion, as in the famous incident of his arrest of Russell Bean. This strong villain, infuriated by his personal wrongs, was at war with society, and bade defiance to jus- tice. It was necessary that he should be brought before the court where Jackson presided, but it was pro- nounced impossible to arrest him. The sheriff and his posse had alike failed, when the difficulty was solved by the most extraordinary edict which ever issued from the bench. " Sum- mon me," said the judge to the law officer. It was done and the arrest was made. It is curious to read of a judge of the Supreme Court planning duels and rough personal encounter with the governor of the State, as we do of Judge Jackson in his quarrel with Governor Sevier. No stronger evidence could be afforded of the im- perfect social condition of the country. It was a rude, unfinished time, when life was passed in a fierce personal contest for supremacy, and wrongs real and imaginary were righted at sight by the pistol. This period of Jackson's career, including the ten years following the retirement from the bench, are filled with prodigious strife and altercation. The dueling pistols are always in sight, and dreary are the details of wretched personal quarrels preliminary to their use. The first of these encounters in which Jackson Avas a principal, occurred as early as 1795, when he was engaged in court and challenged the opposite counsel on the spot for some scathing remark, writing his message on the blink leaf of a law book. Shots were exchanged before the parties slept. The most prominent of Jackson's al- tercations, however, was his duel with Dickinson, a meeting noted among nar- ratives of its class for the equality of the combat, and the fierce hostility of the parties. It was fought in 180C, on the banks of Red River in Kentucky. Charles Dickinson was a thriving young lawyer of Nashville, who had used some invidious expressions regarding Mrs. Jackson. These were apologized for and overlooked, when a roundabout quarrel arose out of the terms of a horse race, which, after involving Jack- son in a caning of one of the parties, and his friend Coffee in a duel with another, ended in bringing the former in direct collision with Dickinson. A duel was arranged. The principals were to be twenty-four feet apart, and take their time to fire after the word was given. Both were excellent shots, and Dickinson, in particular, was sure of his man. So certain was Jackson of being struck, that he made up his mind to let his antagonist have the first fire, a deliberate conclusion of great courage and resolution, based on a very nice calculation. He knew that his antagonist would be quicker than himself at any rate, and that if they fired together his own shot would V <-S probably be lost in consequence of the stroke he must undoubtedly receive from the coming bullet. He conse- quently received the fire, and was hit as he expected to be. The ball, aimed at his heart, broke a rib and grazed the breast-bone. His shoes were filling with blood as he raised his pistol, took deliberate aim, readjusted the trigger as it stopped at half cock, and shot hia 622 ANDREW JACKSOK adversary through the body. Dickin- son fell, to bleed to death in a long day of agony. Jackson desired his own wound to be concealed, that his opponent might not have the gratifica- tion of knowing that he had hit him. at all. Such was the courage and such the revenge of the man. After leaving the judgeship, Jack- son he was now called General Jack- son, having been chosen by the field officers major-general of the State mili- tia in 1801, gaining the distinction by a single vote employed himself on his plantation, the Hermitage, near Nashville, and the storekeepiug in which he had been more or less engaged pince his arrival in the country. In partnership with his relative, Coffee, he was a large exchanger of the goods of the West for the native produce, which he shipped to New Orleans ; and it was for his opportunities of aiding him in procuring provisions, as well as for his general influence, that Colonel Burr cultivated his acquaint- ance in his western schemes in 1805, and the following year. General Jack- son, at first fascinated by the man, who stood well with the people of the country as a republican, introduced him into society and entertained him at his house ; but when suspicion was excited by his measures, he was guard- ed in his intercourse, and stood clearly forth on any issue which might arise, involving the preservation of the in- tegrity of the Union. On that point no friendship could bribe him. Ac- cordingly he offered his services to President Jefferson, and receiving or- lers to hold his command in readiness, here was great military bustle of the major-general in Nashville, raising and reviewing companies, to interrupt the alarming proceedings of Colonel Burr on the Ohio. When it was found there was nothing formidable to arrest, Jackson's feeling of regard for Burr revived, he acquitted him of any trea- sonable intent, and resolutely took his part during the trial at Richmond. On the breaking out of the war with England, in 1812, General Jackson was one of the first to tender his services to the President. He called together twenty -five hundred volunteers and placed them at the disposal of the Government. The proffer was accept- ed, and in December, Jackson was set in motion at the head of two thousand men to join General Wilkinson, then in command at New Orleans. The season was unusually cold and incle- ment; but the troops, the best men of the State, came together with alacrity, and by the middle of February were at Natchez, on the Mississippi. Jack son's friend and relative, Colonel Cof- fee, led a mounted regiment overland, while the rest descended the river. Colonel Thomas H. Benton also ap- pears on the scene as General Jackson's aid. At Natchez, the party was ar- rested by an order from Wilkinson, and remained in inaction for a month, when a missive came from the War Department disbanding the force. Thus was nipped in the bud the ardent longing of the general, and the promise of one of the finest bodies of men ever raised in the country. Jack- son, taking the responsibility, resolved that they should not be dismissed till, as in duty bound, he had returned them home. He accordingly led them back ANJDKEW JACKSON. 623 by land, and so solicitous was he for their welfare by the way, so jealous of their rights, carelessly invaded by the government, that his popularity with the men was unbounded. The fiery duellist, " sudden and quick in quar- rel," gained by his patient kindness and endurance on that mareh, the en- dearing appellation, destined to be of world-wide fame " Old Hickory." He had taken, as we have said, the responsibility in bringing home the troops. This involved an assumption of their debts by the way, for it was not certain, though to be presumed, that the government would honor his drafts for the expenses of transporta- tion. It did not. The paper was pro- tested and returned upon his hands. In this strait, Colonel Benton, going to Washington, undertook the manage- ment of the affair, and by a politic ap- peal to the fears of the administration, lest it should lose the vote of the State, secured the payment. As he was about returning to Nashville, warmed by this act of friendship, he received word from his brother that General Jackson had acted as second in a duel to that brother's adversary a most ungracious act, as it appeared, at a moment when the claims of gratitude should have been uppermost. The explanation was that Carroll, who received the challenge, was unfairly assailed, and appealed, as a friend, to the generosity of Jackson to protect him. Making a duel very much as an everyday affair, the latter proba- bly thought little of the absent Benton. The meeting came off, and Jesse Ben- ton was wounded. An angry .letter was written to Jackson by his brother, who came on to Nashville, venting his wrath in the most denunciatory terms for Benton's vocabulary of abuse, though not more condensed, was more richly furnished with expletives than that of his general. This coming to the hearing of Jackson, he swore his big oath, " by the Eternal, that he would horsewhip Tom Benton the first time he met him." The Bentons knew the man, did not despise the threat, but waited armed for the onset. It came off one day at the door of the City Ho- tel in Nashville. There were several persons actors and victims in the affair. These are the items of the miserable business. The two Bentons are in the doorway as Jackson and his friend Co- lonel Coffee approach. Jackson, with a word of warning to Benton, brandish- es his riding- whip; the Colonel fum- bles for a pistol ; the General presents his own, and at the instant receives in his arm and shoulder a slug and bullet from the barrel of Jesse Benton, who stands behind. Jackson is thus dropped, weltering in his blood with a desperate wound. Coffee thereupon thinking Tom Benton's pistol had done the work, takes aim at him, misses fire, and is making for his victim with the butt end, when an opportune cellar stair- way opens to the retreating Colonel, who is precipitated to the bottom. Meanwhile Stokely Hays arrives, intent on plunging the sword, which he drew from his cane, into the body of Jesse Benton. He deals the thrust with unc- tion, but striking a button, its force is lost and the weapon shivered. A struggle on the floor then ensues be- oo tween the parties, the fatal dagger of Hays being raised to transfix his wound- ed victim, when it is intercepted by 624: ANDREW JACKSOK a bystander, and the murderous and bloody work is over. Such was the famous Benton feud. It laid Jackson ingloriously up for several weeks, and drove Colonel Benton to Missouri. There was a long interval of mutual hostile feeling, to be succeeded by a devoted friendship of no ordinary in- tensity. This Benton affray took place on the 4th of September, 1813. A few days before, on the 30th of August, oc- curred the massacre by the Creek In- dians of the garrison and inhabitants at Fort Minims, a frontier post in the southern part of Alabama. A large number of neighboring settlers, anxious for their safety, had taken refuge with- in the stockade. The assailants took it by surprise, and though the defend- ers fought with courage, but few of its inhabitants escaped the terrible car- nage. The Indians were led by a re- doubtable chieftain, named Weathers- ford, the son of a white man and a Se- minole mother, a leader of sagacity, of great bravery and heroism, and of no ordinary magnanimity. He was unable, however, to arrest, as he would, the fiendish atrocities committed at the fort. Women and children were sacrificed in the horrible rage for slaugh- ter, and the bloody deed was aggrava- ted by the most indecent mutilations. A cry was spread through the South- west similar to that raised in our own day in India, at the Sepoy brutalities. Vengeance was demanded alike for safety and retribution. On the 18th of September, the news had reached Nashville, four hundred miles distant, and General Jackson was called into Consultation as he sat, utterly disabled with his Benton wounds, in his sick room. It was resolved that a large body of volunteers should be sum- moned, and, ill as he was, he promised to take command of them when they were collected. Still suffering severely, before they were ready to move he joined them at Fayetteville, the place of meeting. He arrived in camp the seventh of October, and began his work of organizing the companies. Everything was to be done in drill and preparation for the advance into a wil- derness where no supplies were to be had ; yet in four days, a report having reached him that the enemy were ap- proaching, he led his troops, about a thousand men, an afternoon march of thirty-two miles in six hours to Hunts- ville. The Indians, however, were not yet at hand, and joining Colonel Coffee, whom he had sent forward with a cav- alry command, on the banks of the Tennessee, he was reluctantly com- pelled to wait there too long a time for his impatience, till something could be done in providing stores, in which the army was lamentably deficient. A post was established on the river, named Fort Deposit, whence Jackson, still inadequately provided, set out, on the twenty-fifth of the month, on hia southward march, and carried his force to an encampment at Ten Islands, on the Coosa River. There Coffee was detached to attack a body of In- dians at their town of Talluschatches, He performed the service with equal skill and gallantry; and though the Creeks, as they did throughout the war, fought with extraordinary valor, urged on by religious fanaticism, he gained a brilliant victory. One of the ANDREW JACKSOK 625 incidents of the bloody field was the accidental slaughter of an Indian mo- ther clasping her infant to her breast. The child was carried to Jackson, who had it tenderly cared for, and finally taken to his home. The boy, named Lincoyer, was brought up at the Her- mitage, and suitably provided for by the general. The next adventure of the campaign was an expedition led by Jackson him- self to relieve a camp of friendly In- dians at Talladega, invested by a large band of hostile Creeks. The very night on which he received the message asking aid, brought by a runner who had escaped from the beleaguered fort in disguise, he started with a force of two thousand men, eight hundred of whom were mounted, and in a long day's march through the wilderness traversed the intervening distance, some thirty miles, to the neighborhood of the fort. The dawn of the next morning saw him approaching the ene- my a thousand picked warriors. Dis- posing the infantry in three lines, he placed the cavalry on the extreme wings, to advance in a curve and in- close the foe in a circle. A guard was sent forward to challenge an engage- ment. The Indians received its fire and followed in pursuit, when the front line was ordered up to the combat. There was some misunderstanding, and a portion of the militia composing it retreated, when the general promptly supplied, their place by dismounting a corps of cavalry kept as a reserve. The militia then rallied, the fire became general, and the enemy were repulsed in every direction. They were pursued by the cavalry and slaughtered in great 79 numbers, two hundred and ninety being left dead on the field and many more bore the marks of the engagement. The American loss was fifteen killed and eighty-five wounded. The friendly Creeks came forth from the fort to thank their deliverers, and share with them their small supply of food. This was emphatically, contrary to all the rules of war, a hungry campaign. On his return to his camp, to which, having been fortified, the name Fort Strother was given, Jackson found the supplies which he had urgently demand- ed, and which he so much needed, not yet arrived. His private stores, which had been bought and forwarded at his expense, were exhausted to relieve the wants of his men. He himself, with his oificers, subsisted on unseasoned tripe, like the poor and proud Spanish grandee in the Adventure of Lazarillo de Tormes, eulogizing the horse's foot, maintaining that he liked nothing bet- ter. The story is told of a starving soldier approaching him at this time with a request for food. " I will give you," said the general, " what I have," and with that he drew from his pocket a few acorns, " my best and only fare." Food, food, was the constant cry of Jackson in his messages to the rulers in the adjoining States. It was long in coming, and in the meanwhile the commander, eager to follow up his suc- cesses and close the war, was con- demned to remain in inactivity the hardest trial for a man of his temper Scant subsistence and the hardships common to all encampments brought discontent. The men longed to be at home, and symptoms of revolt began to appear. The militia actually com- 026 ANDREW JACKSON. menced their march backward; but they had reckoned without their leader. On starting they found the volunteers drawn up to oppose their progress, and abandoned their design. Such was the force of Jackson's authority in the camp, that when these volunteers, who were in reality disappointed that the movement did not succeed, attempted in their turn to escape, they were in like manner met by the militia. The occasion required all Jackson's ingenu- ity and resolution, and both were freely expended. His iron will had to yield something in the way of compromise. Appealing to his men, he secured a band of the most impressible to remain at Fort Strother, while he led the rest in quest of provisions toward Fort De- posit, The understanding was that they were to return with him when food was obtained. They had not gone far when they met a drove of cat- tle on their way to the camp. A feast was enjoyed on the spot ; but the men were still intent on going homeward. Nearly the whole brigade was ready for motion, when Jackson who had ordered their return, was informed of their intention. His resolution was taken on the instant. He summoned his staff, and gave the command to fire on the mutineers if they attempted to proceed. One company, already on the way, was thus turned back, when, going forth alone among the men, he found the movement likely to become general. There was no choice in his mind but resistance at the peril of his life, for the men once gone, the whole campaign was at an end Seizing a musket, he rested the bairel on the neck of his horse lie was unable, from his wound, to use his left arm and threatened to shoot the first who should attempt to advance. An intimation of this kind from Jackson was never to be despised. The men knew it, and re- turned to their post. They yielded to the energy of a superior mind, but they were not content. Their next resource was, an assertion of the termi- nation of their year's enlistment, which they said would expire on the tenth of December; but here they were met by the astute lawyer, who reminded them that they were pledged to serve one year out of two, and that the year must be an actual service in the field of three hundred and sixty-five days. The argument, however, failed to con- vince, and as the day approached, the men were more resolute for their de- parture. They addressed a courteous letter to their commander, to which he replied in an earnest expostulatory ad- dress. " I know not," he said, " what scenes will be exhibited on the tenth instant, nor what consequences are to flow from them here or elsewhere ; but as I shall have the consciousness that they are not imputable to any mis- conduct of mine, I trust I shall have the firmness not to shrink from a dis- charge of my duty." The appeal was not heeded, and on the evening of the ninth the signs of mutiny were not to be mistaken. The general took his measures accordingly. He ordered all officers and soldiers to their duty, and stationed the artillery company with their two pieces in front and rear, while he posted the militia on an eminence iL. advance. He himself rode along the line and addressed the men, in their companies, with great earnestness. ATsDKEW JACKSON. 027 He talked of the disgrace their conduct would bring upon themselves, their families and country ; that they would succeed only by passing over his dead body : while he held out to them the prospect of reinforcements. " I am too," he said, " in daily expectation of receiving information whether you may be discharged or not ; until then, you must not and shall not retire. I have done with entreaty ; it has been used long enough. I will attempt it no more. You must now determine whe- ther you will go, or peaceably remain ; if you still persist in your determina- tion to move forcibly off, the point be- tween us shall soon be decided." There was hesitation. He demanded a posi- tive answer. Again a slight delay. The artillerist was ordered to prepare the match. The word of surrender passed along the line, and a second time the rebellious volunteers suc- cumbed to the will of their master. These, it should be stated, were the very men, the original company, whom Jackson had carried to Natchez, and for whose welfare on their return he had pledged his property. But in vain he reminded them of the fact, and ap- pealed to their sense of generosity to remain in the service. He gave them finally the choice to proceed to Tennes- see or remain with him. They chose the former, and he let them go. The men he had left with him were enlisted for short periods, or so under- stood it. There was little to build upon for the campaign, and he was even advised by the Governor of Ten- nessee, to abandon the prosecution of the war, at least for the present, or till the administration at Washington should provide better means for carry- ing it on. This was not advice, des- perate as appeared the situation, to be accepted by Jackson. His reply was eminently characteristic charged with a determined self-reliance which he sought to infuse into his correspondent. " Take the responsibility " is written all over it. The governor had said that his power ceased with the call for troops. "Widely different," replies Jackson, " is my opinion. You are to see that they come when they are called. Of what avail is it," he urges with an earnestness . savoring of sar- casm, " to give an order if it be never executed, and may be disobeyed with, impunity ? Is it by empty mandates that we can hope to conquer our ene- mies and save our defenceless frontiers from butchery and devastation? Be- lieve me, my valued friend, there are times when it is highly criminal to shrink from responsibility, or scruple about the exercise of our powers. There are times when we must disre- gard punctilious etiquette and think only of serving our country." He also presented, in like forcible terms, the injurious effects of abandoning the frontiers to the mercy of the savage. The governor took the advice to heart, pointedly as it was given ; he ordered a fresh force of twenty -five hundred militia into the field, and seconded General Jackson's call upon General Cocke for the troops of East Tennessee. Meantime, however, Jackson's force at Fort Strother was reduced to a mini mum ; the militia, enlisted for short terms, would go, and there was great difficulty in getting new recruits on to their places. The brave Coffee 628 ANDEEW JACKSON. failed to reenlist Ms old regiment of cavalry. There was a strange want of alacrity through the early period of this war, in raising and disciplining the militia. With a proper force at his command, duly equipped and sup- plied, Jackson would have brought the savages to terms in a month. As it was, nearly a year elapsed ; but the ighting period, when he was once ready to move, was of short duration. While he was waiting for the new Tennessee enlistments, he determined to nave one brush with the enemy with such troops as he had. He according- ly set in motion his little force of eight hundred raw recruits on the fifteenth of January, on an excursion into the Indian territory. At Talladega he was joined by between two and three hun- dred friendly Cherokees and Creeks, with whom he advanced against the foe, who were assembled on the banks of the Tallapoosa, near Emuckfau. He reached their neighborhood on the night of the twenty-first, and prepared his camp for an attack before morning. The Indians came, as was expected, about dawn ; were repulsed, and when daylight afforded the opportunity, were pursued with slaughter. There tvas another sharp conflict about the middle of the day, which ended in a victory for the Americans, at some cost to the conquerors, who, ill-prepared to keep the field, moved back toward the fort. Enotochopco Creek was reached and crossed by a part of the force, when the Indians fell upon the rear guard, who turned and fled ; the artil- lery, however, still left on that side of the river, gave the savages a warm re- ception, when they were pursued by the cavalry, which had recrossed tne stream. By this time the country was roused to some adequate support of its gene- ral in the field. At the end of Febru ary, Jackson was reinforced by the ar rival at Fort. Strother of a force from East and West Tennessee of about five thousand men. By the middle of the next month he was in motion, terribly in earnest for a short and summary ex tirpation of the savages. The execu- tion of John Woods, a Tennessee youth who had shown some insubordi- nation in camp, was a prelude to the approaching tempest. The commander thought it necessary to the unity and integrity of the service. Fortunately for the purposes of this new invasion, the chief warriors of the nation assem- bled themselves at a place convenient enough for defence, but where defeat was ruin. It was at Tohopeka, an In dian name for the horse-shoe bend of the Tallapoosa, an area of a hundred acres inclosed by the deep waters of the river, and protected at its junction with the land by a heavy breastwork of logs pierced for musketry and skill- fully arranged for defence. Within this inclosure, at the time of Jackson's arrival,on the twenty-seventh of March, with less than three thousand men, in- cluding a regiment of regulars under Colonel Williams, were assembled some eight or nine hundred warriors of the Creeks. The plan of attack was thus arranged. Sending General Coffee to the opposite side of the river to effect a diversion in that quarter, Jackson himself directed the assault on the works at the neck. He had two field pieces, which were advantageously ANDREW JACKSON. 629 planted on a neighboring eminence. His main reliance, however, was at close quarters with his musketry. On the river side General Coffee succeeded in inclosing the bend and cutting off escape by the canoes, which he cap- tured by the aid of his friendly In- dians, and used as a means of landing" 7 o in the rear of the enemy's position. This success was the signal for the as- sault in front. Regulars and volun- teers, eager for the contest, advanced boldly up. Reaching the rampart, the struggle was for the port-holes,through which to fire, musket meeting musket in the close encounter. " Many of the says Eaton, " were enemy s balls," welded between the muskets and bay- onets of our soldiers. Major Montgo- mery, of Willianis's regiment, led the way on the rampart, and fell dead sum- moning his men to follow. Others succeeded, and the fort was taken. In vain was the fight kept up within, from the shelter of the fallen trees, and equally hopeless was the attempt at escape by the river. No quarter was asked, and none given, for none would be received. Women and children were the only prisoners. It was a des- perate slaughter. Nearly the whole band of Indians perished, selling their lives as dearly as possible. The Amer- ican loss was fifty-five killed and about thrice the number wounded ; but the Cherokee dead were to be counted by hundreds. Having struck this fearful blow, Jackson retired to Fort Williams, which he had built on his march, and issued, as was his wont he was quite equal to Napoleon in this respect an inspiriting address to his troops. If the words are not always his, the sen- timent, as his biographer suggests, is ever Jacksonian. Somebody or other was always found to give expression to his ardent ejaculations, which need only the broad theatre of a European battlefield to vie with the thrilling manifestoes of Bonaparte. " The fiends of the Tallapoosa will no longer mur- der our women and children, or disturb the quiet of our borders. Their mid- night flambeaux will no more illumine their council-house, or shine upon the victim of their infernal orgies." The gratifying event was nearer even than the general anticipated. He looked for a further struggle, but the spirit of the nation was broken. Advancing southward, he joined the troops from the south at the junction of the Coosa and Tallapoosa, the " Holy Ground " of the Indians, where he received their offers of submission. The brave chief- tain, Weathersford, voluntarily surren dered himself. A portion of the In- dians fled to Florida. Those who were left were ordered to the northern parts of Alabama, Fort Jackson being established at the confluence of the rivers to cut off their communication with foreign enemies on the seaboard. The war had originally grown out of the first English successes and the movements of Tecumseh on the north- ern frontier, and was assisted by Span ish sympathy on the Gulf. J ackson was now at liberty to return to Nashville with the troops who had shared his victories. He had of course a triumphant reception in Tennessee, and his services were rewarded at Washington by the appointment of major-general in the army of the Uui ted States, the resignation ol Genera] 030 ANDREW JACKSON. Harrison at the moment placing this high honor at the disposal of the gov- ernment. It was an honor well de- served, earned by long and patient ser- vice under no ordinary difficulties difficulties inherent to the position, aggravated by the delays of others, and some, formidable enough to most men, which he carried with him bound up in his own frame. We so naturally associate health and bodily vigor with brilliant military achieve- ments that it requires an effort of the mind to figure Jackson as he really was in these campaigns. We have seen him carrying his arm in a sling, unable to handle a musket when he confronted his retiring army ; but that was a slight inconvenience of his wound compared with the gnawing disease which was preying upon his system. " Chronic diarrhoea,' 7 says his biographer, " was the form which his complaint assumed. The slightest im- prudence in eating or drinking brought on an attack, during which he suffered intensely. While the paroxysm lasted be could obtain relief only by sitting on a chair with his chest against the back of it and his arms dangling for- ward. In this position he was some- times compelled to remain for hours. It often happened that he was seized with the familiar pain while on the march through the woods at the head of the troops. In the absence of other means of relief he would have a sap- ling half severed and bent over, upon which he would hang with his arms downward, till the agony subsided." In July, General Jackson was again at the South, on the Alabama, presid- ing at the Treaty Conference with the Indians. The terms he proposed were thought hard, but he was inexorable in requiring them. The treaty of Fort Jackson, signed on the tenth of Au- gust, stripped the Creeks of more than half of their possessions, confining them to a region least inconvenient to the peaceful enjoyment of the neigh- boring States. " As a national mark of gratitude," the friendly Creeks be- stowed upon General Jackson and his associate in the treaty, Colonel Haw- kins, three miles square of land to each, with a request that the United States Government would ratify the gift ; but this, though recommended to Congress by President Madison, was never carried into effect. While the treaty was still under ne- gotiation, Jackson was intent on the next movement of the war, which he foresaw would carry him to the shores of the Gulf. He knew the sympathy of the Spaniards in Florida with the English, and was prepared for the de- signs of the latter against the southern country. Having obtained informa- tion that British muskets were distri- buted among the Indians, and that English troops had been landed in Florida, he applied to the Secretary of War, General Armstrong, for permis sion to call out the militia and reduce Pensacola at once. The matter was left to the discretion of the commander, but the letter conferring the authority did not reach him for six months. In the mean time he felt compelled to take the management of the war into his own hands. Fully aware of the im- pending struggle, he was in corres- pondence with Governor Claiborne of Louisiana, putting him 071 his guard ANDREW JACKSON. ann his road, he drew the British 632 ANDREW JACKSOK shipping to a position on that side, when, by a rapid march, he suddenly presented his main force on the other. He consequently entered the town be- fore the movement could be met. A street fight ensued, and a barrier was taken, when the governor appeared with a flag of truce. General Jackson met him and demanded the surrender of the military defences, which was conceded. Some delay, however, oc- curred, which ended in the delivery of the fortifications, of the town, and the blowing up of the fort at the mouth of the harbor. Having accomplished this feat, the British fleet sailed away before morning. Whither were they bound ? To Fort Bowyer and Mobile in all probability, and thither Jack- son, leaving the Spanish governor on friendly terms behind him, hastened his steps. Tarrying a few days for the British, who did not come, he took his departure for New Orleans, with his staff, and in a journey of nine days reached the city on the first of De- cember. If ever the force of a single will, the safety which may be provided for an imperilled people by the confidence of one strong right arm, were fully il- lustrated, it would seem to be in the military drama which was enacted in this and the following month on the banks of the Mississippi. Andrew Jackson was the chief actor. Louisia- na had brave men in her midst, numer- ous in proportion to her mixed popula- tion and still unsettled condition; but whom had she, at once with experience and authority, to summon on the in- stant out of the discordant materials a band strong enough for her preserva- ' tion? At the time of General Jack son's arrival a large fleet of the enemy was hovering on the coast, amply pro- vided with every resource of naval and military art, bearing a host of the ve- teran troops of England, experienced in the bloody contests under Welling- ton an expedition compared with which the best means of defence at hand for the inhabitants of New Or- leans resembled the resistance of the reeds on the river bank to Behemoth. It was the genius of Andrew Jackson which made those reeds a rampart 01 iron. He infused his indomitable cour- age and resolution in the whole mass of citizens. A few troops of hunters, a handful of militia, a band of smugglers, a company of negroes, a group of peace ful citizens, stiffened under his inspira tion into an army. Without Jackson, irresolution, divided counsels, and sur- render, might, with little reproach to the inhabitants, under the circumstan- ces, have been the history of one fatal fortnight. With Jackson all was union, confidence and victory. The instant of his arrival he set about the work of organization, re- viewing the military companies of the city, selecting his staff, personally ex amining the approaches from the sea and arranging means of defence. He was determined that the first step of the enemy on landing should be resis- ted. This was the inspiration of the military movements which followed, and the secret of his success. He did not get behind intrenchments and wait for the foe to come up, but determined to go forth and meet him on the way. He was not there so much to defend New Orleans, as to attack an army of AJXDBEW JACKSOK 633 insolent intruders and drive them into the sea. They might be thousands, and his force might be only hundreds ; but he knew of but one resolve, to fight to the uttermost, and he pursued the resolution as if he were revenging a personal insult. Events came rapidly on, as was an- ticipated, and attack was made from the fleet upon the gunboats on Lake Borgne. They were gallantly defend- ed, but compelled to surrender. This action took place on the fourteenth o? December. Now was the time, if ever, to meet the invading host. The spirit of Jackson rose, if possible, yet higher with the occasion. Well knowing that not a man in the city could be spared, and the inefficiency, in such emergen- cies, of the civil authority, he resolved to take the whole power in his own hands. On the sixteenth, he proclaim- ed martial law. Its effect was to con- centrate every energy of the people with a single aim to their deliverance. Two days after, a review was held of the State militia, the volunteer com- panies, and the battalion of free men of color, when a stirring address was read, penned by the general's secretary, Edward Livingston a little smoother than " Old Hickory's " bulletins in the Alabama wilderness, but not at all uncertain. The Tennessee, Mississippi, and Kentucky recruits had not yet ar- rived ; but they were on their way, straining every nerve in forced marches to meet the coming danger. Had the British moved with the same energy, tiae city might have fallen to them. It was not till the twenty-first, a week af- ter their victory on the lake, that they began their advance, and pushed a 80 portion of their force through the swamps, reaching a plantation on the river bank, six miles below the city, on the forenoon of the twenty-third. It was past mid-day when the word was brought to Jackson of their arri- val, and within three hours a force of some two thousand men was on the way to meet them. No attack was expected by the enemy that night; their comrades were below in numbers, and they anticipated an easy advance to the city the next morning. They little knew the commander with whom they had to deal. That very night they must be assailed in their position. Intrusting an important portion of his command to General Coffee, who was on hand with his brave Tennesseans, charged with surrounding the enemy on the land side, Jackson himself took position in front on the road, while the Carolina, a war schooner, dropped down on the river opposite the British station. Her cannonade, at half -past seven, throwing a deadly shower of grape-shot into the encampment, was the signal for the commencement of this night struggle. It was a fearful contest in the darkness, frequently of hand-to-hand individual prowess, par- ticularly where Coffee's riflemen were employed. The forces actually engaged are estimated on the part of the Brit- ish, including a reinforcement which they received, at more than twenty- three hundred ; about fifteen hundred Americans took part in the fight. The result, after an engagement of nearly two hours, was a loss to the latter of twenty- four killed, and one hundred and eighty-nine wounded and missing. The British loss was much larger sus 634 ANDREW JACKSOK taining as they did the additional fire of the schooner. Before daylight, Jackson took up his position at a canal two miles distant from the camp of the enemy, and con- sequently within four of the city. The canal was deepened into a trench, and the earth thrown back formed an em- bankment, which was assisted by the famous cotton bales, a device that proved of much less value than has been generally supposed. A fortnight was yet to elapse before the final and conclusive engagement. Its main inci- dents were the arrival of General Sir Edward Pakenham, the commander-in- chief, with General Gibbs, in the British camp, on the twenty-fifth, bring- ing reinforcements from Europe ; the occupation by the Americans of a po- sition on the opposite side of the river protecting their camp ; the destruction of the "Carolina" by red-hot shot on the twenty -seventh; an advance of the British, with fearful preparation of artillery, to storm the works the fol- lowing day, which was defeated by the Louisiana sloop advantageously posted in the river, and the fire from the American batteries, which were every day gaining strength of men and muni- tions ; the renewal of the attack with like ill success on the first of January ; the simultaneous accession to the Ame- rican force of over two thousand Ken- tucky riflemen, mostly without rifles ; a corresponding addition to the enemy on the sixth, and a general accumula- tion of resources on both sides, in pre- paration for the final encounter. On the eighth of January, a last attempt was made on the American front, which extended about a mile in a straight line from the river alonar the canal into the O wood. The plan of attack, which was well conceived, was to take possession of the American work upon the oppo- site bank of the river, turn its guns upon Camp Jackson, and, under cover of this diversion, scale the embankment, and gain possession of the battery. The first was defeated by the want of means, and loss of time in getting the necessary troops across the river ; the main attack, owing to some neglect, was inadequately supplied with scaling ladders, and the troops were marched up to slaughter from the murderous fire of the artillerymen and riflemen from behind the embankment. Throughout the whole series of engagements, the American batteries, mounting twelve guns of various calibre, were most skil- fully served. The loss on that day oi death was to the defenders but eight killed and thirteen wounded ; that of the assailants in killed, wounded, and missing, exceeded, in their official re- turns, two thousand. A monument in Westminster Abbey attests the regret of the British public for the death of the Commander-in-chief, a hero of the Pen- insular war, the lamented Pakenham. Ten days after, having endured var- ious hardships in the meantime, the British army, under the direction of General Lambert, took its departure. On the twenty-first, Jackson broke up his camp with an address to his troops, and returned to New Orleans in tri- umph. On the twenty-third, at his request, a Te Deum was celebrated at the cathedral, when he was received at the door, in a pleasant ceremonial, by a group of young ladies, representing the States of the Union. ANDREW JACKSON. 635 The conduct of Jackson throughout the month of peril, whilst the enemy was on the land, was such as to secure j him the highest fame as a commander. He had not been called upon to make any extensive manoeuvres in the field, but he had taken his dispositions on new ground with a rapid and profound calculation of the resources at hand. His employment of Lafitte and his men of Barrataria, the smugglers whom he had denounced from Mobile as " hellish banditti," is proof of the sagacity with which he accommodated himself to cir- cumstances, and his superiority to pre- judice. They had a character to gain, and turned their wild experience of gunnery to most profitable account at his battery. His personal exertions and influence may be said to have won the field ; and it should be remembered in what broken health he passed his sleepless nights, and days of constant anxiety. The departure of the British did not relax the vigilance of the energetic Jackson, Like the English Strafford, his motto was " thorough," as the good people of New Orleans learnt before this affair was at an end. He did not abate, in the least, his strict military rule, till the last possible occasion for its exercise had gone by. It was con- tinued when the enemy had left, and through days and weeks, when as- surance of the peace news was estab- lished to every mind but his own. He chose to have certainty, and the ; ' rigor of the game." In the midst of the ovations and thanksgivings, in the first moments of exultation, Le signed the death warrant of six mutineers, de- serters, who, as long before as Septem- ber, had construed a service of the old legal term of three months as a release from their six months' engagement; and the severe order was executed at Mobile. In a like spirit of military exactitude, New Orleans being still held under martial law, to the chafing of the citizens, he silenced a newspaper editor w r ho had published a premature, incorrect bulletin of peace; banished the French citizens who were disposed to take refuge from his jurisdiction in their nationality; arrested an impor- tant personage, M. Louaillier, a mem ber of the Legislature, who argued the question in print ; and when Judge Hall, of the United States Court, granted a writ of habeas corpus, to bring the affair to a judicial investiga- tion, he was promptly seized and im- prisoned along with the petitioner. The last affair occurred on the fifth of March. A week later, the official news of the peace treaty was received from Washington, and the iron grasp of the general at length relaxed its hold of the city. The civil authority succeeded to the military, when wounded justice- asserted its power, in turn, by summon- ing the victorious general to her bar, to answer for his recent contempt of court. He was unwilling to bj3 entan- gled in legal pleadings, and cheerfully paid the imposed fine of one thousand dollars. He was as ready in submit- ting to the civil authority now that the war was over, as he had been decided in exacting its obedience when the safety of the State seemed to him the chief consideration. Thirty years after, the amount of the fine, princi- pal and interest was repaid him by Congress. 636 ANDEEW JACKSON. The reception of the victorious de- fender of New Orleans, on his return to Nashville, and subsequent visit, in au- tumn, to the seat of government, was a continual ovation. On his route, at Lynchburgh, in Virginia, he was met by the venerable Thomas Jefferson, who toasted him at a banquet of citi- zens. The administration, organizing anew the military defence of the coun- try, created him major-general of the southern division of the army, the whole force being arranged in two de- partments, of which the northern was assigned to General Brown. It was not long before the name of Jackson was again to fill the public ear, and impart its terrors alike to the enemy and to his own government. The speck of war arose in Florida, which, what with runaway negroes, hostile Indians, filibustering adventur- ers, and the imbecility of the Spanish rule, became a constant source of irrita- tion to the adjoining American States. There were various warlike prelimina- ries, and at last, towards the end of 1817, a murderous attack by the Semi- noles upon a United States boat's crew ascending the Appalachicola. General Jackson was called into the field, chargecl with the suppression of the war. Eager for the service, he sprang to the work, and conducted it in his own fashion, " taking the responsibili- ty" throughout, summoning volunteers to accompany him from Tennessee with- out the formality of the civil authority, advancing rapidly into Florida after his arrival at the frontier, capturing the Spanish fort of St. Mark's, and push- ing thence to the Suwanee. General M'Intosh, the half-breed who accompa- nied his march, performed feats oi valor in the destruction of the Semi- noles. At the former of these places, a trader from New Providence, a Scotch- man named Arbutlmot, a superior member of his class, and a pacific man, fell into his hands ; and in the latter, a vagrant English military adventurer, one Ambrister. Both of these men were held under arrest, charged with complicity with the Indian aggressions, and though entirely irresponsible to the American commander of this mili- tary raid, "/ere summarily tried under his order by a court-martial on Spanish territory, at St. Mark's, found guilty, and executed by his order on the spot. He even refused to receive the recon- sideration of the court of its sentence of Ambrister, substituting stripes and imprisonment for death. Ambrister was shot, and Arbutlmot hung from the yard-arm of his own vessel in the harbor. During the remainder of Jack- son's life, these names rang through the country with a fearful emphasis in the strife of parties. Of the many difficulties in the way of his eulogists, this is, perhaps, the most considerable. His own explanation, that he was per- forming a simple act of justice, would seem, with his previous execution of the six mutineers, to rest upon a par- tial study of the testimony ; but thir responsibility should of course be di- vided with the members of his court- martial. The chief remaining events of the campaign were an angry corres- pondence with the governor of Georgia, in respect to an encroachment on his authority in ordering an attack on an Indian village, and the capture of POD sacola, in which he left a garrison. ANDREW JACKSON. 63'< Reckoning-day with the government was next in order. The debate in Con- gress on the Florida transactions was long and animated, Henry Clay bear- ing a conspicuous part in the opposi- tion. The resolutions of censure were lost by a large majority in the House.- The failure to convict was a virtual vote of thanks. Fortified by the result, the general, who had been in Washington during the debate, made a triumphal visit to Philadelphia and New York. At the latter place he was presented with the freedom of the city in a gold box, which, a topic for one of the poets of the " Croakers " at the time, has be- come a matter of interest since, in the discussion growing out of a provision of the General's will. He left the gift to the bravest of the New York officers in the next war. It was finally be- stowed, in 1850, upon General Ward B. Burnett, the colonel of a New York regiment distinguished in the Mexican war. The original presentation took place at the City Hall, in February, 1819. The protracted negotiations with Spain for the purchase of Florida being now brought to an end by the acquisi- tion of the country, General Jackson was appointed by President Monroe the first governor of the Territory. He was present at the formal cession at Pensacola, on the 17th of July, 1821, and entered upon his new duties with his usual vigor a vigor in one in- stance, at least, humorously dispropor- tioned to the scene, in a notable dis- pute with the Spanish government, in the course of which there was a fresh imbroglio with a United States judge, and the foreign functionary was ludi- crously locked up in the calaboose-- all about the delivery of certain unim- portant papers. On a question of au- thority, it was Jackson's habit to go straightforward, without looking to see what important modifying circum- stances there might be to the right or left. It was a military trait whjch served him very well on important oc- casions in war, and subsequently in one great struggle, that of the Bank, in peace; but in smaller mixed mat- ters, it might easily lead him astray. For this Don Callava's comedy, we must refer the reader to Mr. Parton's full and entertaining narrative not the most imposing, but certainly not the least instructive portion of his book. The Florida governorship was not suited to the demands of Jackson's nature; his powers were too limited and restricted ; the irritation of the Spanish quarrel was not calculated to lighten his disease, and Mrs. Jackson was at his side to plead the superior claims of home. Thither, after a few months' absence, he returned, doubt- less greatly to the relief of the Secre- tary of State, Mr. Adams, who said at the time to a friend, " he dreaded the arrival of a mail from Florida, not knowing what General Jackson might do next." The remainder of General Jackson's life may be regarded aa chiefly political ; it is rather as a man of action in politics, than as a theoreti- cal statesman, in any sense, that he ia to be considered. It is not at all surprising that such a man should be summoned to the Pre- sidency. He was nominated by tho legislature of his own State in 18-.-1, which sent him again to the Senate 638 ANDREW JACKSON. and be was highest on the list of the candidates voted for the following year he had ninety-nine out of two hundred and sixty-one votes when the election was carried into the House of Representatives, and Adams was chosen by the influence of Henry Clay. At the next election, he was borne tri- umphantly into the office, receiving more than double the number of votes of his antagonist, Mr. Adams. The vote was one hundred and seventy- eight to eighty-three. At the election of 1832, the third time Jackson's popu- larity was tested in this way, the vote stood for Clay forty-nine, for Jackson two hundred and thirty-nine. The record of these eight years of his Presidential service, from 1829 to 1837, is the modern history of the democratic party, of the exertions of its most distinguished representatives, of the establishment of its most che- rished principles its anti-bank creed, in the overthrow of the national bank, and origination of the sub-treasury system, which went into operation with his successor the reduction of the tariff the opposition to internal im- provements the payment of the na- tional debt. In addition to the settle- ments of these long agitated questions, his administration was signalized by the removal of the Cherokees from Georgia, and the Creeks from Florida ; while its foreign policy was candid and vigorous, bringing to a satisfactory adjustment the outstanding claims on France and other nations, and main- taining friendly relations with England. In all these measures, his energetic hand was felt, but particularly was his pecu- , liar character manifested in his veto oi 1832, and general conduct of the bank question, the collection of the French indemnity, and his enforcement of the national authority in South Carolina The censure of the Senate on the 28th March, 1834, for his removal of the. deposits of the public money from the bank as " an assumption of authority and power not conferred by the Consti- tution and laws, but in derogation of ' O both " a censure supported by the ex- traordinary coalition of Calhoun, Clay and Webster, measures the extent of the opposition his course encountered in Congress ; while the Expunging Re- solution of 1837, blotted out that con- demnation, and indicated the reception and progress of his opinions with the several States in the brief interim. The personal attack made upon him in 1835, by a poor lunatic at the door of the Capitol, "a diseased mind acted upon by a general outcry against a pub- lic man,"* may show the sentiment with which a large portion of the press and a considerable popular party habit- ually treated him. The love of Andrew Jackson for the Union deserves at, this time more than a passing mention. It was em- phatically the creed of his head and heart. He had no toleration for those who sought to weaken this great in- stinct of nationality. No sophism could divert his understanding from the plainest obligations of duty to his whole country. He saw as clearly aa the subtlest logician in the Senate the inevitable tendencies of any argu- ment which would impair the aiie- giance of the people of the States to the central authority. He could- * Benton's "Thirty Years' View," I. 523. AKDREW JACKSON. 639 not make such a speech as Web- ster delivered on the subject, but he knew as well as Webster the abyss into which nullification would plunge its advocates. His vigorous policy saved his own generation the trials to which ours has been subjected. Had his spirit still ruled at the proper mo- ment in the national administration, we too might have been spared the un- told evils of a gigantic rebellion. It is remarkable that it was predicted by him not in its extent, for his patriot- ism and the ardor of his temperament would not have allowed him to imagine a defection so wide-spread, or so la- mentable a lack of energy in giving encouragement to its growth but in its motive and pretences. When nulli- fication was laid at rest, his keen in- sight saw that the rebellious spirit which gave the doctrine birth was not extinguished. He pronounced the tar- iif only the pretext of factious and malignant disturbers of the public peace, "who would involve their coun- try in a civil war and all the evils in its train, that they might reign and ride on its whirlwinds, and direct the storm." Disunion and a southern con- federacy, and not the tariff, he said, were the real objects of the conspira- tors, adding, with singular sagacity, " the next pretext will be the negro or the slavery question."* Eight years of honorable repose re- mained to the victor in so many battles military and political, after his retire- ment from the Presidency. They were passed in his seat near Nashville, the home of his happy married life, but no * Letter to the Rev. Andrew J. Crawford. Washington, May 1, 1833. longer cheered by the warm-hearted, sincere, devout sharer of his manj trials. That excellent wife had been taken from him on the eve of his first occupation of the Presidential chaii, and her memory only was left, with its inviting lessons of piety, to temper the passions of the true-hearted" old man as he resigned himself to religion and the O . O cares of another and better world. He had early adopted, as his own sou, a nephew of his wife, and the child grew up, always fondly cherished by him. bore his name, and inherited his estate. " The Hermitage," the seat of a liberal hospitality, never lacked intimates dear to him. He had the good heart of Dr. Johnson in taking to his home and at- taching to himself friends who grew strong again in his manly confidence. Thus, in the enjoyment of a tranquil old age, looking back upon a career which belonged to history, he met the increasing infirmities of ill-health with pious equanimity, a member of the Presbyterian Church, where his wife had so fondly worshipped life slowly ebbing from him in the progress of his dropsical complaint till one summer day, the eighth of June, 1845, the child of the Revolution, an old man of sev- enty-eight, closed his eyes in lasting repose at his beloved Hermitage. Few of the eminent men of America, whose acts are recorded in these pages, entered upon the public stage so early and continued on it so late, as the sub- ject of this sketch. To no one but him- self was it reserved to bridge over so completely the era of the Revolution with the latest phase of political life in our day. The youth who had suffered wounds and imprisonment at the hands 840 ANDltEW JACKSOK of a British officer in the war of Inde- pendence, was destined long after, when a whole generation had left the stage, to close a second war with that power- ful nation by a triumphant victory; and when the fresh memory of that had passed away, and men were read- ing the record in history, the same hero, raised to the highest honor of the State, was to stand forth, not simply Presi- dent of the United States, but the ac- tive representative of a new order of politics, reaping a new harvest of favor in civil administration, which would throw his military glory into the shade. Nor was this all. These comprehen- sive associations, much as they include, leave out of view an entirely distinct phase of the wonderful career of this extraordinary man. A rude pioneer of the wilderness, he opened the path- way of civilization to his countrymen, and by his valor in a series of bloody Indian wars, made the terrors of that formidable race a matter of tradition in lands which he lived to see bloom- ing with culture and refinement. A hero in his boyhood, when Greene was leading his southern army to the relief of the Carolinas, he was in Congress the first representative of a new State, whei* Washington was President ; and when the successors of that chieftain, Adams and Jefferson, had at length disappear- ed from the earthly scene in extreme old age, he, a man more of the future than the past, sat in the same great seat of authority, with an influence not inferior to theirs. Surrounded by these circum- stances, in the rapid development of national life, in the infancy and prog- ress of the country, if he had been a common man he would have acquired distinction from his position ; but it was his character to form circumstances as well as profit by them. There are few cases in all history where, under adverse conditions, the man was so master of fortune. The simplest recital of his life carries with it an air almost of romance; his success mocked the wisdom of his contemporaries, and will tax the best powers of the future his- torians of America in its analysis. 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