I I, ^01 
 
 M
 
 WRITERS AND READERS.
 
 WRITERS AND READERS 
 
 GEORGE BIRKBECK HILL, D.C.L. 
 
 (Pembroke College, Oxford) 
 
 Dreams, books, are each a world ; and books we know 
 Are a substantial world both pure and good." 
 
 Words-worth. 
 
 G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 
 
 NEW YORK LONDON 
 
 87 WEST TWENTY-THIRD STREET 24 BEDFORD STREET, STRAND 
 
 Sin f.nuherbot!ur JJress 
 1892
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 ''T~ A HE lectures which form this little work were 
 -* read in the Hall of New College, before the 
 members of the Teachers' University Association, 
 who were in residence in Oxford during part of 
 the Long Vacation of 1891. 
 
 2072134
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 LECTURES I.-IV. REVOLUTIONS IN LITERARY TASTE. 
 
 LECTURES V.-VI. THE STUDY OF LITERATURE AS A 
 PART OF EDUCATION.
 
 LECTURE /.
 
 LECTURE I. 
 
 T AM often amused by the confident air with 
 -*- wnich not only chance readers, but even 
 students of literature appoint, as it were, the 
 books which are to be the delight of posterity. 
 Posterity, it has been well said, is the author's 
 friend. The writer who cannot catch the ear of 
 his own public pleases himself with the thought 
 that his voice will be prolonged by the echoes 
 of time, and will sound the more loudly the 
 farther it has to travel. Southey, who with all 
 his great merits as an ardent and thorough student, 
 is scarcely known to the present generation but 
 by one or two ballads and one biography, was 
 supported through the neglect which his works 
 encountered by the confident belief that posterity 
 would do him justice. He talks in one place "of 
 exposing the real character and history of the 
 Romish Church, systematically and irrefragably,
 
 12 WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 which (he says) I can and will do, in books which 
 will be read now and hereafter ; which must make 
 a part hereafter of every historical library, and 
 which will live and act when I am gone." Speaking 
 of the need under which he had always lived of 
 gaining his livelihood by the pen, he says : " Under 
 more favourable circumstances I might have accom- 
 plished more and better things. But when the 
 grave-digger has put me to bed and covered me 
 up, it will not be long before it will be perceived 
 and acknowledged that there are few who have 
 done so much." Of his poem of " Madoc " he writes : 
 " Unquestionably the poem will stand and flourish. 
 . . . William Taylor has said it is the best English 
 poem that has left the press since the ' Paradise 
 Lost ' ; indeed this is not exaggerated praise, for 
 unfortunately there is no competition." His 
 " History of Brazil," he prophecies, " will ages 
 hence be found among those works which are not 
 destined to perish ; it will secure for me a remem- 
 brance in other countries as well as in my own ; it 
 will be to the Brazilians what the work of Hero- 
 dotus is to Europe." J 
 
 Who can be churlish enough to grudge to an 
 honest worker, one of the most laborious authors 
 
 1 Southey's "Life and Correspondence," ed. 1850, ii. 359; 
 iv. 354 ; v. 274, 321.
 
 L APPEALS TO POSTERITY. 13 
 
 that the world has ever seen, the comfort which he 
 found for the neglect under which he was suffering? 
 His books, it is true, were encumbering his pub- 
 lisher's warehouse. What of that? He appealed 
 to future generations, to those happy times when 
 the bubbles shall have burst which are raised in 
 the vast whirlpools of fashion, and the bark of the 
 poet and the historian, clear of the froth, shall be 
 seen floating securely and quietly and triumphantly 
 down the stream of time. Had he been of a less 
 hopeful mind he might have got chilled by the 
 words with which the learned Person ends his 
 Preface to his famous " Letters to Archdeacon 
 Travis": " Mr. Travis and I may address our letters 
 to posterity, but they will never be delivered 
 according to the direction." Astronomers tell us 
 that the nearest fixed star is at so vast a distance 
 from us that, in spite of the incredible rapidity 
 with which light travels, all we can know for 
 certain is that it was shining at the time of the 
 birth of a man of middle age. There are other 
 stars so remote that we cannot feel sure that they 
 did not fall with Julius Caesar, when men were 
 scared by seeing 
 
 " The strange impatience of the heavens." 
 Were a new constellation formed to-day at some
 
 14 WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 comparatively moderate distance, its light would 
 perhaps first strike upon the world when the 
 grandchild of the youngest person here present 
 was falling into his dotage. Not a few of our 
 literary luminaries, if we are to trust what they 
 say of themselves and what is said of them, are in 
 somewhat the same case. Their light has not yet 
 reached us, the denseness through which it has to 
 travel having much the same effect as space ; but 
 it will strike upon our descendants. No heart 
 surely can be so hard as to refuse to a disappointed 
 author his islands of the blest, on the other side, 
 not of the western waves, but of the centuries. 
 But the case is altogether different when pity no 
 longer operates, when every reader presumes to 
 settle who they are who are to be welcomed on 
 those happy shores " with the sound of bells and 
 acclamations of the people." What is freely allowed 
 to compassion must not be conceded to ignorance 
 and conceit. The taste of one generation is not 
 to be fixed by the taste of another. We may give 
 our favourite authors all the immortality we please. 
 We may refuse to believe that an age can ever 
 come so lost to good taste as to decline to admire 
 those who are our delight. In matters of taste 
 each age will judge for itself, and our descendants, 
 if they examine into our judgments and our pro-
 
 /. DIRECTIONS TO POSTERITY. 15 
 
 phecies, will certainly obtain from them some 
 amusement, but perhaps very little profit, unless 
 they take the trouble to investigate the causes that 
 rendered them so faulty. 
 
 Nevertheless, with how -confident an air do we 
 hear maintained what shall be the reading, not only 
 of the next, but even of succeeding centuries. The 
 guardian angels seem almost to be heard chanting, 
 not only that Britons never shall be slaves, but 
 that they never shall cease to be readers of Macau- 
 lay or Carlyle, of Herbert Spencer or Ruskin, of 
 Browning or of George Eliot. Nay, there are 
 minor stars, whose names I but imperfectly retain 
 in my memory, who are to shine with increasing 
 splendour for many a long day yet. No great 
 while ago I heard in this University of Oxford a 
 learned man maintain that a certain novelist, 
 whose works I had never even glanced at, and 
 whose name I have now forgotten, will be read 
 five hundred years hence. When, as sometimes 
 happens, my opinion is demanded, when I am 
 asked whether this favourite author and that 
 favourite author will not be the delight of our 
 grandchildren and our great-grandchildren, I never 
 venture to go beyond a negative kind of prophecy. 
 I have little difficulty in coming to a decision as to 
 those who will not be read ; but no prudent man,
 
 16 WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 who sees names which once filled everybody's 
 mouth now scarce known to the student, who sees 
 books which were once the pride of every library 
 now on some huckster's stall, labelled " All in this 
 lot at a penny a volume," will venture to foretell 
 immortality, or even a long duration of popularity, 
 to any work whatsoever of his own day. In mat- 
 ters of taste there is only one sure judge, and that 
 is time. "About things," says Johnson, "on which 
 the public thinks long it commonly attains to 
 think right." It is not one or two, perhaps not 
 even three generations which can arrive at a final 
 judgment of a work. The vast majority even of 
 those books which make a great noise are for- 
 gotten long before the third generation is reached ; 
 but the works of men of real genius require at least 
 the greater part of a century before their value can 
 be accurately ascertained. At first by their very 
 originality they often excite anger and even 
 contempt, running as they do against the fashion 
 of the day. Before they can get justice done them 
 they must establish a school of their own; but 
 their scholars are apt to pass into worshippers. 
 The neglect which they at first encountered gives 
 way to extravagant admiration ; they are rendered 
 ridiculous by their servile imitators ; a reaction 
 sets in, and once more they are placed below their
 
 I.NE W SCHOOLS OF POE TRY. 17 
 
 just level. Then there begins a fresh reaction in 
 their favour, till the balance which has swung now 
 too much up, and now too much down, settles at 
 last, and marks their real weight. There is a 
 passage in Johnson's " Life of Gray " which, I have 
 always thought, illustrates the career of the poet 
 who strikes into fresh paths. " In 1757," he writes, 
 "Gray published 'The Progress of Poetry' and 
 ' The Bard,' two compositions at which the readers 
 of poetry were at first content to gaze in mute 
 amazement. Some that tried them confessed their 
 inability to understand them, though Warburton 
 said that they were understood as well as the 
 works of Milton and Shakespeare, which it is the 
 fashion to admire. Garrick wrote a few lines in 
 their praise. Some hardy champions undertook 
 to rescue them from neglect, and in a short time 
 many were content to be shown beauties which 
 they could not see." 
 
 Of how many poets whom we of this age admire 
 might the same be said ! At the compositions 
 of Wordsworth, of Tennyson, of Browning, " the 
 readers of poetry were at first content to gaze 
 in mute amazement." Many who tried them either 
 could not understand them, or thought that there 
 was nothing in them to understand. Champions 
 soon arose ; the difficulty experienced in discover- 
 
 2
 
 1 8 WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 ing their merits, when overcome, became a source 
 of pride ; and of those who remained blind, " many 
 were content to be shown beauties which they 
 could not see." 
 
 Jeffrey, the great Edinburgh reviewer, had treated 
 Wordsworth with a contempt that was almost 
 gross in its violence. His " Lyrical Ballads " he 
 " looked upon in a good degree as poetical 
 paradoxes maintained experimentally^ in order 
 to display talent and court notoriety ; and so 
 maintained with no more serious belief in their 
 truth than is usually generated by an ingenious 
 and animated defence of other paradoxes." x 
 Jeffrey was no common man ; in him there was 
 no natural dulness of fancy and imagination. 
 Carlyle has described his " bright-beaming, swift 
 and piercing hazel eyes, with their accompaniment 
 of rapid keen expression in the other lineaments 
 of face. He was," he adds, "by no means the 
 supreme in criticism or anything else; but it is 
 certain there has no critic appeared among us 
 since who was worth naming beside him." 2 
 Nevertheless, with all his fine endowments, he 
 could discover in the great poet of Nature little 
 beyond talent displayed and notoriety courted. 
 
 1 Edinburgh Review, November, 1814, p. 4. 
 * Carlyle's "Reminiscences," ed. 1881, ii. 65.
 
 I JEFFREY AND WORDSWORTH. 19 
 
 I would be content as a warning to all critics to 
 reprint this review of his with one single note. It 
 should consist of the quotation, without a single 
 word of comment, of the following lines, almost 
 unrivalled, in my belief, in the beauty of the 
 thought and the perfection of the language and the 
 rhythm by any poem of any poet in this century : 
 
 " Three years she grew in sun and shower, 
 Then Nature said, ' A lovelier flower 
 
 On earth was never sown ; 
 This Child I to myself will take ; 
 She shall be mine, and I will make 
 A Lady of my own. 
 
 ' Myself will to my darling be 
 
 Both law and impulse : and with me 
 
 The Girl in rock and plain, 
 In earth and heaven, in glade and bower, 
 Shall feel an overseeing power 
 
 To kindle or restrain. 
 
 ' She shall be sportive as the Fawn 
 That wild with glee across the lawn 
 
 Or up the mountain springs ; 
 And hers shall be the breathing balm, 
 And hers the silence and the calm 
 
 Of mute insensate things. 
 
 ' The floating Clouds their state shall lend 
 To her ; for her the willow bend ; 
 Nor shall she fail to see
 
 20 WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 Even in the motions of the Storm 
 Grace that shall mould the Maiden's form 
 Ey silent sympathy. 
 
 ' The Stars of midnight shall be dear 
 To her ; and she shall lean her ear 
 
 In many a secret place 
 Where Rivulets dance their wayward round| 
 And beauty born of murmuring sound 
 
 Shall pass into her face. 
 
 ' And vital feelings of delight 
 
 Shall rear her form to stately height, 
 
 Her virgin bosom swell ; 
 Such thoughts to Lucy I will give 
 While she and I together live 
 
 Here in this happy Dell.' 
 
 Thus Nature spake The work was done 
 How soon my Lucy's race was run ! 
 
 She died, and left to me 
 This heath, this calm and quiet scene ; 
 The memory of what has been, 
 
 And never more will be." 
 
 The critic who could charge Wordsworth with 
 courting notoriety when he wrote these lines, 
 might in an earlier age have charged Gray with 
 courting undertakers when he wrote his " Elegy." 
 Jeffrey lived long enough to see his judgment-seat 
 scorned and deserted by a younger generation. 
 Fourteen years after he declared that Wordsworth 
 with all his great natural gifts was " finally lost
 
 I.MILL AND WORDSWORTH. 21 
 
 to the good cause of poetry," a young thinker, 
 who had been trained in the straightest school of 
 the Utilitarians, found in the despised poet that 
 mental relief which in his misery he had elsewhere 
 sought in vain. " I had learnt by experience," 
 writes John Stuart Mill, " that the passive sus- 
 ceptibilities needed to be cultivated as well as the 
 active capacities, and required to be nourished and 
 enriched as well as guided. . . . The cultivation 
 of the feelings became one of the cardinal points 
 in my ethical and philosophical creed. ... I now 
 began to find meaning in the things which I had 
 read or heard about the importance of poetry and 
 art as instruments of human culture." He goes on 
 to describe the curious dejection into which he had 
 fallen, and the vain attempts which he had made 
 to find relief in books. Byron he had tried, but 
 from him he got no good. He took up Words- 
 worth, and found in his poems a medicine for his 
 mind in that " they expressed not mere outward 
 beauty, but states of feeling, and of thought 
 coloured by feeling, under the excitement of 
 beauty. "They seemed," he continues, "to be the 
 very culture of the feelings which I was in quest of. 
 ... I found that he, too, had had similar experience 
 to mine ; that he also had felt that the first fresh- 
 ness of youthful enjoyment of life was not lasting ;
 
 22 WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 but that he had sought for compensation, and 
 found it in the way in which he was now teaching 
 me to find it. The result was that I gradually, but 
 completely, emerged from my habitual depression, 
 and was never again subject to it." He met John 
 Sterling, whose life Carlyle has so admirably 
 written. " He told me," says Mill, " how he and 
 others had looked upon me (from hearsay infor- 
 mation) as a ' made' or manufactured man, having 
 had a certain impress of opinion stamped on me 
 which I could only reproduce ; and what a change 
 took place in his feelings when he found that 
 Wordsworth, and all which that name implies, 
 ' belonged ' to me as much as to him and his 
 friends." ' 
 
 However strongly the current of opinion set in 
 a new direction, it swept past the old reviewer, 
 and left him unmoved and unchanged. Jeffrey, in 
 his old age, finding how highly Wordsworth was 
 thought of, " resolved to re-peruse his poems, and 
 see if he had anything to retract." He was com- 
 forted by discovering that " except perhaps a con- 
 temptuous and flippant phrase or two " there was 
 nothing to withdraw. 2 
 
 There is a fine passage in Thackeray's " New- 
 
 1 "Autobiography of J. S. Mill," pp. 143, 148, 155. 
 * " Diary of H. C. Robinson," iii. 140.
 
 I. GODS, OLD AND NEW. 23 
 
 comes " where we read how the old Colonel was 
 puzzled when he gathered round him at dinner 
 his son's literary friends, " and the merits of their 
 poets and writers were discussed with the claret. 
 . . . He heard opinions that amazed and bewildered 
 him. He heard that Byron was no great poet, 
 though a very clever man. He heard that there 
 had been a wicked persecution against Mr. Pope's 
 memory and fame, and that it was time to reinstate 
 him ; that his favourite, Dr. Johnson, talked ad- 
 mirably, but did not write English ; that young 
 Keats was a genius to be estimated in future days 
 with young Raphael ; and that a young gentle- 
 man of Cambridge, who had lately published two 
 volumes of verses, might take rank with the 
 greatest poets of all. Dr. Johnson not write 
 English ! Lord Byron not one of the greatest 
 poets of the world ! Sir Walter a poet of the 
 second order! Mr. Pope attacked for inferiority 
 and want of imagination ! Mr. Keats and this 
 young Mr. Tennyson of Cambridge the chief of 
 modern poetic literature ! What were these new 
 dicta, which Mr. Warrington delivered with a puff 
 of tobacco smoke ; to which Mr. Honeyman 
 blandly assented, and Clive listened with pleasure? 
 Such opinions were not of the Colonel's time. He 
 tried in vain to construe ' QEnone,' and to make
 
 24 WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 sense of ' Lamia.' ' Ulysses ' he could understand ; 
 but what were these prodigious laudations bestowed 
 on it ? And that reverence for Mr. Wordsworth, 
 what did it mean ? Had he not written ' Peter 
 Bell,' and been turned into deserved ridicule by all 
 the reviews ? Was that dreary ' Excursion ' to be 
 compared to Goldsmith's 'Traveller,' or Dr. John- 
 son's ' Imitation of the Tenth Satire of Juvenal ' ? 
 If the young men told the truth, where had been 
 the truth in his own young days ; and in what 
 ignorance had our forefathers been brought up ? 
 Mr. Addison was only an elegant essayist and 
 shallow trifler! All these opinions were openly 
 uttered over the Colonel's claret, as he and Mr. 
 Binnie sat wondering at the speakers who were 
 knocking the gods of their youth about their 
 ears." * 
 
 Our gods, let us raise them on as lofty pedestals 
 as we please, and fall down before them as low as 
 we can, let us crown them with wreaths and chap- 
 lets, and send up the incense before them in clouds, 
 will, if only we live long enough, in all likelihood 
 be knocked about our ears too. The more ex- 
 travagant has been our adoration, the worse will 
 be the belabouring which they will receive. " Be it 
 known unto you, oh past generation," our children 
 1 " The Newcomes," chap. xxi.
 
 I. MR. RUSKIN. 25 
 
 will say, " that we will not serve your gods, nor 
 worship the golden images which you have set 
 up." In their rebellion they may even go a step 
 further, and maintain that the images were not 
 golden, but only gilt. 
 
 Mr. Ruskin, writing in the year 1857, when he 
 had all the ripeness of a man not far off his fortieth 
 year, said : " Mrs. Browning's ' Aurora Leigh ' is, so 
 far as I know, the greatest poem which the century 
 has produced in any language." Why in the cen- 
 tury, among foreigners, Goethe and Victor Hugo, 
 among Englishmen, Wordsworth, Scott, Keats, 
 Shelley, Byron, Landor, Tennyson, and Browning 
 had written either all or at least many of their 
 greatest poems. Before the best that the greatest 
 of these men wrote is to be placed "Aurora Leigh"! 
 Our amazement at such an assertion may be 
 tempered by respect, but, nevertheless, amazement 
 it remains. " Of reflective prose," says the same 
 writer, " read chiefly Bacon, Johnson, and Helps." 
 It is not easy to preserve one's gravity at this 
 strange fellowship. I can picture to myself the 
 feelings, first of bewilderment, and then almost of 
 despair, of some ardent disciple of the great master, 
 as he passed from Bacon's " Essays " through the 
 " Rambler " and " Rasselas " to Sir Arthur Helps's 
 " Friends in Council." I once tried a few pages of
 
 26 WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 it, but gave it up as hopelessly commonplace. He 
 has one chance for immortality ; he may be re- 
 membered as the otherwise unknown author who 
 was classed by Mr. Ruskin with Bacon and John- 
 son. 1 
 
 Two hundred years ago there was a City poet, 
 Elkanah Settle by name, of whom John Wilkes 
 said : " Elkanah Settle sounds so queer, who can 
 expect much from that name ? " At one time, 
 nevertheless, he was the rival of the great Dryden. 
 " Such," says Johnson, " are the revolutions of 
 fame, or such is the prevalence of fashion, that 
 the man whose works have not yet been thought 
 to deserve the care of collecting them, who died 
 forgotten in an hospital, and whose latter years 
 were spent in contriving shows for fairs, and carry- 
 ing an elegy or epithalamium, of which the begin- 
 ning and end were occasionally varied, but the in- 
 termediate parts were always the same, to every 
 house where there was a funeral or a wedding, 
 might with truth have had inscribed upon his 
 stone : 
 
 " ' Here lies the rival and antagonist of Dryden.' " a 
 Violent indeed are the revolutions in taste which 
 
 1 "Elements of Drawing," ist ed., p. 348. 
 Johnson's "Works," ed. 1825, vii. 277.
 
 I. BLAIR AND POMFRET. 27 
 
 the world has seen. Southey, writing fifty years 
 ago about those books of which the copyright was 
 of the greatest value, says that within his recol- 
 lection among the five most valuable of all would 
 have been Blair's " Lectures on Rhetoric " and 
 Blair's " Sermons." * In Mr. Alfred Morrison's 
 great collection of autographs is a letter from 
 Blair's publisher, William Strahan, announcing a 
 draft of ^500 as the last payment for the " Lectures 
 on Rhetoric." What the previous payments had 
 been I do not know. How popular his sermons 
 once were the bookstalls still testify ; into what 
 neglect they have fallen is shown by the price at 
 which they are offered for sale. Three-quarters of 
 a century after the death of the poet John Pomfret 
 it was said, that "perhaps no composition in our 
 language had been oftener perused than his 
 " Choice." 2 Another quarter of a century passed, 
 and the hundred years were complete ; yet we 
 find Southey asking : " Why is Pomfret the most 
 popular of the English poets ? The fact is certain, 
 and the solution would be useful." 3 It is not un- 
 likely that there is no one in this room but myself 
 who has read this poem. Let me read therefore 
 
 1 Southey's "Life and Letters," vi. 355. 
 a Johnson's " Works," vii. 222. 
 3 Southey's "Specimens," i. 91.
 
 28 WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 to you a few lines, that you may judge of the value 
 of popularity as a test : 
 
 " If Heaven the grateful liberty would give, 
 That I might choose my method how to live, 
 And all those hours, propitious Fate should lend 
 In blissful ease and satisfaction spend ; 
 Near some fair town I'd have a private seat, 
 Built uniform ; not little, not too great ; 
 Better, if on a rising ground it stood, 
 On this side fields, on that a neighb'ring wood ; 
 It should within no other things contain 
 But what are useful, necessary, p'ain : 
 Methinks 'tis nauseous, and I'd ne'er endure 
 The needless pomp of gaudy furniture. 
 A little garden, grateful to the eye, 
 And a cool rivulet run murm'ring by, 
 On whose delicious banks a stately row 
 Of shady limes or sycamores should grow ; 
 At th' end of which a silent study plac'd 
 Should be with all the noblest authors grac'd." 
 
 Our grandfathers or our great-grandfathers 
 might with some fair show of reason have 
 maintained that it was impossible to believe that 
 a poem which had so well stood the test of time 
 would ever sink into forgetfulness. Let me 
 suggest to you that if any one in your hearing 
 foretells immortality for some writer for whom 
 you have no relish, you should ask him at once 
 whether he has read Pomfret's " Choice." 
 
 I will contrast with these lines that fine
 
 ITHE CHOICE OF LIFE. 29 
 
 passage in which Johnson also describes a choice 
 of life. He tells the story of his own early years ; 
 he recounts the eager hopes with which he had 
 entered this great university, and the ills which 
 had assailed him in the outside world. In his 
 old age, when he was prosperous and famous, he 
 one day read the lines aloud. As all the troubles 
 he had undergone trooped back to his memory 
 he burst into a passion of tears. So in the court 
 of Alcinous Ulysses wept when he heard the 
 sweet singer tell of the sufferings of the Achaeans 
 beneath the walls of Troy. 
 
 "When first the college rolls receive his name, 
 The young enthusiast quits his ease for fame ; 
 Through all his veins the fever of renown 
 Spreads from the strong contagion of the gown ; 
 O'er Bodley's dome his future labours spread, 
 And Bacon's mansion trembles o'er his head. 
 Are these thy views ? Proceed, illustrious youth, 
 And virtue guard thee to the throne of truth ! 
 Yet, should thy soul indulge the gen'rous heat 
 Till captive science yields her last retreat ; 
 Should reason guide thee with her brightest ray, 
 And pour on misty doubt resistless day ; 
 Should no false kindness lure to loose delight, 
 Nor praise relax, nor difficulty fright ; 
 Should tempting novelty thy cell refrain, 
 And sloth effuse her opiate fumes in vain ; 
 Should beauty blunt on fops her fatal dart, 
 Nor claim the triumph of a letter'd heart ; 
 Should no disease thy torpid veins invade,
 
 3 o WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 Nor melancholy's phantoms haunt thy shade ; 
 Yet hope not life from grief or danger free, 
 Nor think the doom of man revers'd for thee : 
 Deign on the passing world to turn thine eyes, 
 And pause awhile from letters, to be wise ; 
 There mark what ills the scholar's life assail, 
 Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the gaol. 
 See nations, slowly wise and meanly just, 
 To buried merit raise the tardy bust. 
 If dreams yet flatter, once again attend, 
 Hear Lydiat's life, and Galileo's end." 
 
 The last line of manuscript that Sir Walter 
 Scott sent to press, the line with which he closed 
 his glorious series of poems and romances, was a 
 quotation from the " Vanity of Human Wishes." 
 
 If popularity is the measure of merit the pay- 
 ment of the publisher is often the measure of 
 popularity. Tried by this standard how ridiculous 
 is the general judgment. Goldsmith, when asked 
 at a Royal Academy dinner whether he was going 
 to bring out a new poem, replied : " I cannot 
 afford to court the draggle-tail muses, they would 
 let me starve." He had already given to the 
 world his "Traveller" and "Deserted Village." 
 He had not been dead twenty years when 
 Erasmus Darwin, for the second part of his 
 "Botanic Garden," was paid a thousand guineas 
 just fifty times as much as Goldsmith had 
 received for "The Traveller," sixty-six times as
 
 /. PA YMENTS OF A UTHORS. 31 
 
 much as Johnson had received for the second of 
 his great poems, "The Vanity of Human Wishes," 
 and more than a hundred times as much as 
 Milton had received for the " Paradise Lost." 
 Wordsworth's " Lyrical Ballads," and Coleridge's 
 " Ancient Mariner," which were published together 
 in one small volume fell still-born from the press. 
 Five hundred copies were printed, but so few 
 were sold that the publisher parted with the bulk 
 of them to a bookseller at a loss. The copyright 
 was looked upon as worthless, and was returned 
 to the authors. Wordsworth had almost reached 
 the age of fifty when in a letter to a friend, he 
 said : " I have never been much of a salesman 
 in matters of literature ; the whole of my returns 
 I do not say my net-profits, but returns from 
 the writing trade not amounting to seven-score 
 pounds." x By this time he had written all his 
 finest poems almost all that are included in 
 Matthew Arnold's selection and the wages of 
 these long years did not amount to the sum that 
 a leading barrister or a fashionable physician 
 sometimes makes in a single day. He had need 
 of plain living to support his high thinking. 
 
 Robertson, for his second work, " The History 
 of Charles V.," was paid 3,800, while Thomas 
 1 Wordsworth's "Life," ed. 1851, i. 122 ; ii. 207.
 
 32 WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 Carlyle, after twenty years of such labour as 
 Robertson never dreamed of, had not been able 
 with all his copyrights and his current earnings to 
 stretch his average yearly income beyond 150. 
 If his " French Revolution " failed, as his other 
 books had failed, " he had resolved to abandon 
 literature, buy spade and rifle, and make for the 
 backwoods of America." r He had reached his 
 fortieth year when he was thus hovering almost 
 on the brink of despair. 
 
 According to Addison "men of the best sense 
 are always diffident of their private judgment till 
 it receives a sanction from the public. Provoco ad 
 populum" he continues, " I appeal to the people, 
 was the usual saying of a very excellent dramatic 
 poet, when he had any disputes with particular 
 persons about the justness and regularity of his 
 productions." 2 In many cases, however, the 
 appeal to the people was worse even than the 
 appeal to the Court of Chancery in the days of 
 old. Unless the suitor in these literary cases had 
 means of his own he was likely to die of hunger 
 long before the final decision in his favour was 
 given. "What porridge had John Keats?" Even 
 when the decision has been given how wavering 
 
 1 Froude's " Life of Carlyle," Part I. ii. 477 ; Part II. ii. 161. 
 The Guardian, No. 98.
 
 I CARL VLB'S " REMINISCENCES" 33 
 
 often is the execution of the sentence ! If I can 
 trust my judgment no nobler chapter in biography 
 has been published these latter years than 
 Carlyle's brief life of his father, the stonemason 
 of Ecclefcchan. It was written nearly sixty years 
 ago, when his style was at its best ; written, too, 
 under deep feeling, for it was composed in " the 
 first dark days of death." It is a noble picture of 
 honest work and honest poverty, and manly 
 independence. It is a sermon on the text, " We 
 dare be poor for all that," and the preacher is not 
 unworthy of the poet. It is the very gospel of 
 labour. I would have it a reading book in every 
 school in England in Eton and Harrow, that 
 they might learn there the unworthiness of idle- 
 ness ; in Whitechapel and Stoke Pogis, that they 
 might learn there the full dignity of labour. 
 There would soon be no hanging the head for 
 honest poverty. I know how it has encouraged 
 me. As day after day, week after week, and 
 month after month I once toiled at a long, and 
 heavy, and dull piece of work, where the greatest 
 accuracy was needed, I was cheered and 
 strengthened by the thought of the old Scottish 
 stonemason so doing his work that it should 
 never have to be done again. " Let me write my 
 books as he built his houses," was his son's prayer.
 
 34 WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 This admirable memoir was published with 
 Carlyle's other " Reminiscences " as they are called. 
 In the rest of the book there was not a little that 
 justly roused indignation, and even anger, so harsh, 
 so arrogant, I might even say so insolent was often 
 his judgment of his contemporaries. Nevertheless, 
 with all its faults it is irradiated by genius. With 
 a rapid touch, but with the touch of a master, we 
 have sketched for us the likenesses of many a man 
 and woman renowned in the literary world of 
 London. We have the author's own likeness 
 drawn by himself with innumerable strokes a 
 man well worth studying, for he was cast in no 
 common mould. We must go back to Samuel 
 Johnson before we can find his fellow in the 
 strangeness and the rugged strength of his 
 character. The book came, as it were, like a gift 
 from the grave of one who, if never popular, was 
 at all events famous. Editor and publisher alike 
 must, with good reason, have counted on a great 
 sale. It reached no second edition. Some years 
 later, it is true, by a rival editor a revised text 
 was brought out, but this was due, not to the 
 popular demand, but to the natural and proper 
 desire to correct the strange blunders of the editor, 
 transcriber, or printer. Yet this is the age of 
 reminiscences and memoirs. Men who do not
 
 I. POPULAR MEMOIRS. 35 
 
 know how to write recount what was never worth 
 the telling. They publish what they call their 
 recollections. Their foolish and impertinent 
 gossip is eagerly brought up. It satisfies, to 
 borrow Coleridge's words, " those two contrary 
 yet co-existing propensities of human nature, 
 indulgence of sloth and hatred of vacancy." 
 " This genus of amusement," he continues, " com- 
 prises as its species, gaming, swinging or swaying 
 on a chair or gate, spitting over a bridge, smoking, 
 snuff-taking, tete-a-tete quarrels after dinner between 
 husband and wife ; conning word by word all the 
 advertisements of the Daily Advertiser in a public 
 house on a rainy day," &c., &c., &C. 1 These 
 memoirs have their day just as their authors have 
 their money. 
 
 " The earth hath bubbles, as the water has, 
 And these are of them." 
 
 One hundred years hence Carlyle's rugged 
 character will still interest the world and his 
 "Reminiscences" will still be read. Perhaps some 
 editor, a harmless drudge, will almost swamp the 
 text beneath an inundation of footnotes. 
 
 The judgments of men of letters and even of 
 genius are scarcely less faulty than those of the 
 1 Coleridge's " Biographia Literaria," p. 24.
 
 36 WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 common run. I once had in my study an un- 
 published autograph letter of David Hume, dated 
 January 30, 1773. It is written to his friend and 
 publisher, William Strahan, who had done all 
 that a friend and publisher could do to induce 
 him to carry his "History" two or three reigns 
 beyond the Revolution. Even George III. had 
 interested himself in this, and in augmenting the 
 historian's pension had laid it down as a condition 
 that he should continue his "History." Not a single 
 chapter for all that did he add. 1 When Strahan 
 found that his friend was obstinate in the indo- 
 lence of 1,100 a year, he suggested that the 
 task should be put into the hands of some other 
 writer. 
 
 Hume replied : 
 
 "Considering the Treatment I have met with, 
 it would have been very silly for me at my years 
 to continue writing any more ; and still more 
 blameless to warp my Principles and Sentiments 
 in conformity to the Prejudices of a stupid, factious 
 Nation, with whom I am heartily disgusted. 
 
 1 Smollett's continuation is, properly speaking, no con- 
 tinuation at all ; it is merely the concluding part of that 
 writer's " Complete History of England, from the descent 
 of Julius Caesar to the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748," 
 which was published earlier than six of the eight octavo 
 volumes of which Hume's " History" is composed.
 
 I. HUME ON ENGLISHMEN. 37 
 
 " I wish my Continuators good Success ; though 
 I believe they have sense enough not to care 
 whether they meet with it or not. Macpherson 
 has Style and Spirit, but is hot-headed, and 
 consequently without Judgment. Sir John Dal- 
 rymple has Spirit, but no Style, and still less 
 Judgment than the other. I should think Dr. 
 Douglas, if he would undertake it, a better hand 
 than either. Or what think you of Andrew 
 Stuart ? For as to any Englishman, that Nation 
 is so sunk in Stupidity and Barbarism and Faction 
 that you may as well think of Lapland for an 
 author. The best Book that has been writ by 
 any Englishman these thirty years (for Dr. 
 Franklyn is an American) is 'Tristram Shandy,' 
 bad as it is ; a Remark which may astonish you, 
 but which you will find true on Reflection." x 
 
 You may well wonder how Dr. Franklin's name 
 got hitched in here. It is highly probable that 
 Hume, who was a thorough Frenchman in his love 
 of paying pretty compliments, thought that this 
 passage would be shown to the American phi- 
 losopher. Strahan had added as a postscript to 
 his last letter, which Hume had just received : 
 " Dr. Franklin, who sits at my elbow, desires 
 
 1 " Letters of David Hume to William Strahan," ed. by 
 G. B. Hill, p. 255.
 
 38 WRITERS ANj> READERS. 
 
 to be affectionately remembered to you, and to 
 your worthy sister, who was so kind to him." In 
 whatever way it came to pass that he was men- 
 tioned, Hume clearly implies that his books were 
 better than any that had been written by English- 
 men within the last thirty years. That period had 
 not, it is true, been so rich in great works as many 
 other periods in our history. Nevertheless, even 
 when the works of Irishmen, Scotchmen, and 
 Welshmen were excluded, it could boast of having 
 given birth to " Clarissa " and " Sir Charles 
 Grandison," "Tom Jones" and "Amelia," the 
 great Dictionary, the " Rambler " and " Rasselas," 
 Blackstone's "Commentaries," Collins' "Odes," and 
 all Gray's " Poems." In " this nation so sunk in 
 stupidity and barbarism and faction," this Lapland 
 ..." This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this 
 England " it had once been called in it, I say, 
 at the time when this peevish genius was writing 
 were living, of various ages, some with their life 
 well-nigh lived, others with it just begun, but all 
 born of English stock Samuel Johnson, with his 
 " Lives of the Poets " not yet written ; Horace 
 Walpole, with his " Letters " not yet published ; 
 Gibbon, with his "History of the Decline and Fall " 
 already begun ; Blackstone, Cowper, Jeremy Ben- 
 tham, Fanny Burncy, Crabbe, Porson, Cobbett,
 
 I. HUME AND ROUSSEAU. 39 
 
 Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Sydney Smith. No 
 bad show for Lapland ! Wordsworth, we might 
 almost suspect, had felt the reproach that was thus 
 cast upon his cradle, for, speaking of Adam Smith, 
 he called him, "the worst critic, David Hume not 
 excepted, that Scotland, a soil to which this sort 
 of weed seems natural, has produced." r 
 
 A prophecy which Hume made about Rousseau 
 is not less absurd than the judgment which he 
 passed on English men of letters. At first there 
 were few who thought more highly than he did of 
 that unhappy genius. " I revere his greatness of 
 mind," he wrote, " which makes him fly obligations 
 and dependence, and I have the vanity to think 
 that through the course of my life I have en- 
 deavoured to resemble him in those maxims." He 
 places him " among the first writers of the age." 
 His " Treatise on Education " " carries," he says, 
 " the stamp of a great genius ; and what enhances 
 its beauty, the stamp of a very particular genius." 
 Suddenly Rousseau, in one of his fits of wild sus- 
 picion, in a letter that bears the mark both of 
 genius and madness, attacked his friend and bene- 
 factor. " He has had," wrote Hume to Adam 
 Smith, "the satisfaction during a time of being 
 much talked of; the thing in the world he most 
 1 Wordsworth's " Works," ed. 1857, vi. 367.
 
 40 WRITERS AJ\D READERS. 
 
 desires ; but it has been at the expense of being 
 consigned to perpetual neglect and oblivion." * 
 Into what kind of neglect and oblivion Rousseau 
 was to fall was shown two-and-twenty years after 
 this letter was written, by the outbreak of the 
 French Revolution. 
 
 It was not, however, only Scotchmen among 
 men of letters who last century were absurd in 
 their judgments. Goldsmith says of Dante that 
 " he addressed a barbarous people in a method 
 suited to their apprehensions ; united Purgatory 
 and the River Styx, St. Peter and Virgil, heaven 
 and hell together, and shows a strange mixture of 
 good sense and absurdity. The truth is he owes 
 most of his reputation to the obscurity of the 
 times in which he lived." 2 When Horace Walpole 
 saw Garrick for the first time he wrote : "All the 
 run is now after Garrick, a wine merchant, who is 
 turned player at Goodman's Fields. He plays all 
 parts, and is a very good mimic. His acting I 
 have seen, and may say to you, who will not tell it 
 again here, I see nothing wonderful in it." 3 Gray 
 agreed with Walpole in this. "Did I tell you 
 
 1 " Letters of David Hume to William Strahan," pp. 78, 
 83- 
 
 a " An Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learn- 
 ing," chap. iv. 
 
 3 Walpoles " Letters," i. 168.
 
 /. -' ' TRISTRA M SHAND F." 4 1 
 
 about Mr. Garrick," he writes, " that the town are 
 horn-mad after? There are a dozen dukes of a 
 night at Goodman's Fields sometimes ; and yet 
 I am stiff in the opposition." l Only nine years 
 after the last volume of Sterne's great novel was 
 published a work which I venture to think is as 
 likely to be immortal as it is certainly immoral 
 Johnson said : " Nothing odd will do long. ' Tris- 
 tram Shandy' did not last." Horace Walpole 
 called it " the dregs of nonsense." Goldsmith 
 described Sterne as a blockhead, and worse than a 
 blockhead. Dr. Farmer, Master of Emmanuel Col- 
 lege, Cambridge, the eminent Shakesperian critic, 
 said one day to the younger members of that 
 society : " You young men seem very fond of this 
 ' Tristram Shandy ' ; but mark my words, however 
 much it may be talked about at present, yet, 
 depend upon it, in the course cf twenty years 
 should any one wish to refer to it he will be 
 obliged to go to an antiquary to inquire for 
 it." 2 The young men grew, we may hope, to be 
 old men, but the learned critic's words they never 
 saw come true. Six-and-thirty years after Sterne's 
 first volume had been published Thomas Car- 
 
 1 Gray's " Works," ed. 1858, ii. 185. 
 * Boswell's "Life of Johnson," ed. by G. B. Hill, ii. 173, 
 449-
 
 42 WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 lyle was born. He was as bad as the under- 
 graduates of the Cambridge College. " My 
 first favourite books," he writes, "had been 
 Hudibras ' and ' Tristram Shandy.' " Sterne he 
 describes " as our last specimen of humour, 
 and with all his faults our best ; our finest 
 if not our strongest ; for Yorick and Corporal 
 Trim and Uncle Toby have yet no brother but 
 in Don Quixote, far as he lies above them." 
 Macaulay was no better than Carlyle. He cele- 
 brates "the exquisite skill with which Sterne 
 delineates a veteran who had fought at the 
 Boyne and at Namur." * If Dr. Farmer could see 
 nothing in " Tristram Shandy," a far greater man 
 could see nothing in Voltaire's " Candide." " I 
 could not read it for the dulness," wrote Charles 
 Lamb. 2 
 
 Hume wrote of John Home's play of " Douglas," 
 which lives, so far as it does live, somewhat 
 ridiculously in the line, "My name is Norval." 
 Hume, I say, wrote of this play : " I am persuaded 
 it will be esteemed the best, and by French critics, 
 the only tragedy of our language." He would 
 
 1 Froude's " Life of Carlyle," part i., vol. i. p. 396 ; Car- 
 lyle's " Miscellaneous Essays," i. 13 ; Macaulay's " History 
 of England," ed. 1873, iii. *t>9- 
 
 8 Lamb's "Letters," ed. by A. Ainger, i. 277.
 
 /. SHAKESPEARE AND HOME. 43 
 
 have joined in the cry of the gods of the gallery of 
 the Edinburgh theatre, "Where's Wully Shake- 
 speare noo ? " Dedicating to the author an edition 
 of his Essays, he says : " You possess the true 
 theatric genius of Shakespeare and Otway, refined 
 from the unhappy barbarism of the one, and licen- 
 tiousness of the other ? " In the Appendix to the 
 reign of James I. in his " History of England," he 
 writes of Shakespeare : " His total ignorance of all 
 theatrical art and conduct, however material a 
 defect, yet as it affects the spectator rather than 
 the reader, we can more easily excuse, than that 
 want of taste which often prevails in his pro- 
 ductions, and which gives way only by intervals to 
 the irradiations of genius." x 
 
 Adam Smith was not inferior to his friend in 
 perversity of taste. He regretted that in comedy 
 the English writers had not followed the model of 
 the French school in the use of rhyme. It is to 
 him more than to any other man that we owe 
 freedom of commerce. It was he who struck off 
 the fetters which cramped industry and trade. 
 But great as is our debt to him, we can hardly 
 forgive him for the wish that Shakespeare's 
 humour had been taught to pace in trammels, and 
 
 1 See notes in my edition, " Letters of David Hume 
 to William Strahan," pp. 11-16.
 
 44 WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 that honest Jack Falstaff and Dogberry had never 
 opened their mouths except in rhyming couplets. 
 Racine's " Phaedra " he looked upon as " perhaps 
 the finest tragedy that is extant in any language." x 
 Let me not forget, however, to do justice to the 
 great economist. In the list of subscribers to the 
 second edition of Burns's poems his name is entered 
 for four copies. 
 
 Even Burns himself does not fall short of his 
 famous countrymen in absurdity. In one of his 
 prologues, speaking of Scotland, he says : 
 
 " Here Douglas forms wild Shakespeare into plan." 
 
 As we read these extravagant laudations of this 
 new dramatist we are pleased at recalling that 
 there was one great writer who was not cheated 
 into mistaking "this farthing candle for the 
 northern lights." It was in a coffee-house in this 
 very city of Oxford that "Dr. Johnson called to 
 old Mr. Sheridan, ' How came you, sir, to give 
 Home a gold medal for writing that foolish play ? ' 
 and defied him to show ten good lines in it." 
 Sir Walter Scott, writing little more than sixty 
 years ago, maintained that " Douglas was a master- 
 piece." He added : " Even that does not stand 
 
 1 Stewart's " Life of Adam Smith," p. 71, and Smith's 
 11 Theory of Moral Sentiments," ed. 1801, i. 255.
 
 LGARRICK AND SHAKESPEARE, 45 
 
 the closet. Its merits are for the stage ; and it is 
 certainly one of the best acting plays going." T It 
 must be many a day since it has been represented, 
 at all events on the London stage. 
 
 Garrick, it might be thought, would have had 
 truer taste as regards Shakespeare, "the god of 
 his idolatry," than many of his contemporaries. 
 Yet he exulted that he lived long enough to 
 rescue Hamlet " from all the rubbish of the fifth 
 act" " I have," he wrote, a few months before his 
 retirement, "brought 'Hamlet' forth without the 
 gravedigger's trick and the fencing match." 2 
 
 1 Boswell's " Life of Jchnson," ii. 320 ; v. 360. 
 
 2 " Garrick Correspondence," ii. 126.
 
 LECTURE 11.
 
 LECTURE II. 
 
 IF we turn to an earlier century, we can see, 
 in the rise of what is called Pindarism, 
 how even men of great genius whose youthful 
 breeding was not in the artificiality of the age 
 of Queen Anne, and of the first two Georges, 
 but in one of the noblest ages of literature, could, 
 nevertheless, be depraved in taste. Cowley, 
 who was born but two years after Shakespeare's 
 death, while those mighty masters of prose, the 
 translators of the great English Bible were 
 many of them still living, looking upon the 
 Pindaric Odes as one of the lost inventions of 
 antiquity, " made a bold and vigorous attempt to 
 recover them." There can be no question that for 
 many a long year Cowley had far more readers 
 than Shakespeare or Milton. He was the founder 
 of a new style of composition which prevailed 
 about half a century, and even then was slow in 
 
 4
 
 50 WRITERS A AD READERS. 
 
 dying out. " Clarendon represents him as having 
 taken a flight beyond all that went before him ; 
 and Milton is said to have declared that the three 
 greatest English poets were Spenser, Shakespeare, 
 and Cowley." 1 He was the darling of Dryden's 
 youth. Addison, in his lines on "The Greatest 
 English Poets," after justly censuring him as 
 
 "O'er-run with wit, and lavish of his thought;" 
 who 
 
 " More had pleased us, had he pleased us less," 
 
 goes on to say : 
 
 " Pardon, great poet, that I dare to name 
 The unnumbered beauties of thy verse with blame." 
 
 In twenty-five years, between 1656 and 1681, 
 seven folio editions of his works were published. 
 The first edition of Shakespeare had been brought 
 out thirty-three years before Cowley's first ; but his 
 fourth not till four years after Cowley's seventh. 
 The " Paradise Lost," though it seems among 
 readers to have been superior in popularity to 
 Shakespeare, was inferior to Cowley, for of it in 
 twenty-one years only four editions were required. 
 
 1 Johnson's " Works," ed. 1825, vii. 36, 49,
 
 II. MIL TON AND CO WLE Y. 5 1 
 
 Milton was less applauded even than Waller. 
 Well does Dr. Warton write : " The noble con- 
 fidence and strength of mind in Milton is not in 
 any circumstance more visible and more admirable 
 than his writing a poem in a style and manner 
 that he was sure would not be relished or regarded 
 by his corrupt contemporaries." x 
 
 " Though fallen on evil days, 
 On evil days though fallen and evil tongues," 
 
 he yet could say : 
 
 " Still govern thou my song, 
 Urania, and fit audience find, though few." 
 
 Cowley's popularity gradually waned. He had 
 been dead about fourscore years when Pope 
 asked : 
 
 "Who now reads Cowley?" 
 
 while a few years later we find Samuel Richardson, 
 the novelist, wondering that he was so absolutely 
 neglected. 2 We may smile at the false taste which 
 placed Cowley before Milton and both Cowley and 
 Milton before Shakespeare. Yet had we been 
 living then, unless we had been blest with a singu- 
 
 1 Warton's " Pope's Works," vol. i. pp. Iv. 286. 
 * Pope's " Imitations of Horace," epis. ii. i. 75, and 
 Richardson's " Correspondence," ii. 229.
 
 52 WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 larly piercing judgment, we should in all likelihood 
 have been as confident in our admiration of the 
 favourite of our age as the members of the 
 Browning Club can be in their worship of Mr. 
 Browning. Let me read to you one of Cowley's 
 Pindaric Odes to show you what was the style at 
 which this great poet aimed in the conviction, as 
 he avowed, that " it was the highest and noblest 
 kind of writing in verse." r 
 
 THE PRAISE OF PINDAR. 
 
 I. 
 
 Pindar is imitable by none ; 
 The Phnenix Pindar is a vast species alone. 
 Who e're but Daedalus with waxen wings could fly 
 And neither sink too low, nor soar too high ? 
 
 What could he who follow'd claim, 
 But of vain boldness the unhappy fame, 
 
 And by his fall a Sea to name ? 
 
 Pindars unnavigable Song 
 Like a swoln Flood from some steep Mountain pours along. 
 
 The Ocean meets with such a Voice 
 From his enlarged Mouth, as drowns the Oceans noise. 
 
 II. 
 
 So Pindar does new Words and Figures roul 
 Down his impetuous Dithyrambique Tyde, 
 
 Which in no Channel deigns t' abide, 
 
 Which neither Banks nor Dikes controul. 
 
 Whether th' Immortal Gods he sings 
 
 In a no less Immortal strain, 
 
 1 Johnson's "Works," vii. 41.
 
 II. A PINDARIC ODE. 53 
 
 Or the great Acts of God-descended Kings, 
 Who in his Numbers still survive and Reign. 
 
 Each rich embroidered Line, 
 Which their triumphant Brows around, 
 
 By his sacred Hand is bound, 
 Does all their starry Diadems outshine. 
 
 ill. 
 
 Whether at Pisa's race he please 
 To carve in polisht Verse the Conqu'erors Images, 
 Whether the Swift, the Skilful, or the Strong, 
 Be crowned in his Nimble, Artful, Vigorous Song : 
 Whether some brave young mans untimely fate 
 In words worth Dying for he celebrate, 
 
 Such mournful, and such pleasing words, 
 As joy to his Mothers and his Mistress grief affords : 
 
 He bids him live and Grow in fame, 
 
 Among the Stars he sticks his Name : 
 The Grave can but the Dross of him devour, 
 So small is Deaths, so great the Poets power. 
 
 IV. 
 Lo, how th' obsequious Wind, and swelling Air 
 
 The Theban Swan does upwards bear 
 Into the walks of Clouds, where he does play, 
 And with extended Wings opens his liquid way. 
 
 Whilst alas, my tim'erous Muse 
 
 Unambitious tracks pursues ; 
 
 Does with weak unballast wings, 
 
 About the Mossy Brooks and Springs, 
 
 About the Trees new-blossom'd Heads, 
 
 About the Gardens painted Beds, 
 
 About the Fields and flowry Meads, 
 
 And all inferiour beauteous things 
 Like the laborious Bee, 
 
 For little drops of Honey flee, 
 And there with Humble Sweets contents her Industrie.
 
 54 WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 Strained and unnatural though this Ode is, 
 nevertheless it has great vigour of thought and 
 some beautiful lines. It contains one noble 
 couplet, or at least one noble half line : 
 
 "Whether some brave young man's untimely fate 
 In words worth dying for he celebrate." 
 
 If Cowley's thoughts are "most fantastic and out 
 of the way," they are nevertheless expressed " in 
 the most pure and genuine mother English." J 
 
 How it came to pass that " Pindarism," our 
 " Pindaric infatuation," " our Pindaric madness," 
 "the Pindaric folly," as Johnson justly styled it, 
 became so popular that great critic has clearly 
 pointed out. " This lax and lawless versification," 
 he says, "so much concealed the deficiencies of 
 the barren and flattered the laziness of the idle, 
 that it immediately overspread our books of poetry ; 
 all the boys and girls caught the pleasing fashion, 
 and they that could do nothing else could write 
 like Pindar." 2 This sentence with the change of 
 one or two words is applicable to every age. It is 
 not only laxness and lawlessness that are caught ; 
 smoothness and regularity have their day too. All 
 the boys and girls of every generation catch the 
 
 1 Coleridge's " Biographia Literaria," p. II. 
 * Johnson's " Works," vii. 41.
 
 II. FASHIONS IN WRITING. 55 
 
 pleasing fashion, and they who can do nothing 
 else can write like Pindar, or Pope, or Johnson, or 
 Byron, or Carlyle, or Macaulay, or Browning, or 
 the modern art critics, or the female novelists, or 
 the gentlemen whose easy task it is to fill a 
 column and a third of the newspaper with what 
 is called descriptive writing. What we can do 
 easily and successfully that we admire and uphold ; 
 our self-interest gets hopelessly entangled with our 
 judgment, and we set up as critics and prophets 
 when we are at best self-deceived advocates. Even 
 if we do not write we get scarcely less interested in 
 the cause as readers. It is our taste, we feel that 
 is on its trial quite as much as the taste of the 
 writer whom we have set up as an idol. " What ? " 
 asks Pope, " must be the priest, where a monkey is 
 the god ? " What, we ask, must be our state, if 
 our great writer can be shown to be a mere 
 pretentious piece of wordiness ? It is no doubt 
 true, as Coleridge has pointed out, in his curious 
 history of his own mental growth, that " no models 
 of past times, however perfect, can have the same 
 vivid effect on the youthful mind as the productions 
 of contemporary genius. . . . The great works of 
 past ages," he continues, " seem to a young man 
 things of another race, in respect to which his 
 faculties must remain passive and submiss, even
 
 56 WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 as to the stars and mountains. But the writings 
 of a contemporary, perhaps not many years older 
 than himself, surrounded by the same circum- 
 stances and disciplined by the same manners, 
 possess a reality for him, and inspire an actual 
 friendship as of a man for a man. His very admi- 
 ration is the wind which fans and feeds his hope. 
 The poems themselves assume the properties of 
 flesh and blood. To recite, to extol, to contend 
 for them is but the payment of a debt due to one 
 who exists to receive it." 
 
 The wind which fanned and fed Coleridge's hope 
 and the hope of Southey and Wordsworth, too, 
 was their admiration of a poet but a few years 
 their senior, William Lisle Bowles. His life was 
 prolonged to a great age. He outlived two of his 
 three disciples and his own fame. The gentle old 
 man was in no illusion about himself. " Many 
 years," he wrote, " after my gray head shall have 
 been laid at rest, some of those who may have seen 
 those poems of which Coleridge spoke in the days 
 of his earliest song so enthusiastically may inquire, 
 ' Who was W. L. Bowles ? ' " J It was this minor 
 poet, then, who gave the first impulse to two men of 
 great genius; but had they read Bowles alone, or the 
 
 * Coleridge's " Biographia Literaria," p. 5 ; Knight's 
 " Cyclopaedia of Biography," i. 875.
 
 II. COLERIDGE'S SCHOOLMASTER. 57 
 
 school of Bowles, neither Coleridge nor Wordsworth 
 would sit where they now sit on the serene heights. 
 It was by the great poets of all ages that their 
 thoughts had been nourished and their minds dis- 
 ciplined. Coleridge speaks with gratitude of " the 
 very sensible, though very severe" Master of Christ's 
 Hospital, by whom his youthful taste had been 
 formed. " He early moulded it to the preference of 
 Demosthenes to Cicero, of Homer and Theocritus 
 to Virgil, and again of Virgil to Ovid. = . . He made 
 us read Shakespeare and Milton as lessons. . . 
 In the truly great poets, he would say, there is a 
 reason assignable not only for every word, but for 
 the position of every word. In our own English 
 compositions he showed no mercy to phrase, meta- 
 phor, or image unsupported by a sound sense, or 
 where the same sense might have been conveyed 
 with equal force and dignity in plainer words. 
 Lute, harp, lyre, muse, muses and inspirations, 
 Pegasus, Parnassus, and Hippocrene were all an 
 abomination to him. I fancy I can almost hear 
 him now exclaiming, ' Harp ? Harp ? Lyre ? 
 Pen and ink, boy, you mean. Muse, boy, muse ? 
 Your nurse's daughter you mean. Pierian spring? 
 Oh, aye ! the cloister-pump, I suppose.' " * To a 
 mind thus disciplined the excessive worship of 
 1 "Biographia Literaria," p. 3.
 
 58 WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 contemporary writers could do little harm, for it 
 was certain not to last long. In Wordsworth it 
 did, I suspect, more mischief. His school training 
 had been less severe. Had he studied more 
 thoroughly the merits of a school of poets whom 
 he disliked, he might have avoided some of those 
 faults of feebleness and tediousness which rouse the 
 contempt of his enemies and the anger of those 
 who love him. 
 
 But to return to the more immediate subject of 
 my lectures the judgments passed on books by 
 the different generations. Bacon was born three 
 years before Shakespeare, and outlived him by ten. 
 A great part of their lives they dwelt in the same 
 town ; they must have jostled each other in the 
 street Yet the philosopher, it has been pointed 
 out, "in his multifarious writings nowhere either 
 quotes Shakespeare or alludes to him." 1 He is 
 almost worse than the worthy citizen who had lived 
 in Paris during the whole of the Reign of Terror 
 without discovering that anything unusual had 
 been going on. If there were any mind which 
 was capable of at once discovering Shakespeare's 
 transcendent greatness, surely it should have been 
 his who is only second to him among our poets, 
 and who was not separated from him by any gulf 
 1 Wordsworth's " Works," vi. 363.
 
 II. MILTON AS A CRITIC. 59 
 
 of time. Milton was a boy of seven when Shake- 
 speare died ; he entered Cambridge only about a 
 year after the first folio edition of the collected 
 plays was published. Yet his judgment seems to 
 be little sounder than David Hume's when, in the 
 preface to his " Samson Agonistcs," he speaks of 
 yEschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides as " the three 
 tragic poets, unequalled yet by any, and the best 
 rule to all who endeavour to write tragedy," and 
 when he " vindicates tragedy from the small esteem, 
 or rather infamy, which, in the account of many, it 
 undergoes at this day with other common inter- 
 ludes ; happening through the poet's error of 
 intermixing comic stuff with tragic sadness and 
 gravity, or introducing trivial and vulgar persons, 
 which by all judicious hath been counted absurd, 
 and brought in without discretion, corruptly to 
 gratify the people." 
 
 This "comic stuff'' was, I suppose, much the 
 same as that which Garrick calls " the rubbish of 
 the fifth act of ' Hamlet ;'" the buffoonery with 
 which Voltaire reproached Shakespeare ; those 
 admirable scenes in which the genius of the 
 mighty poet interwove in the web of life the 
 bright colours with the sad, and showed us man, 
 not as the unities would have him, but as Nature 
 has made him.
 
 6o WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 Dryden, I must admit, recognised to the full 
 that genius which Milton had seen only in part. 
 In his " Essay of Dramatick Poesie," written in 
 the year 1668, three years earlier than " Samson 
 Agonistes," he had said : " Shakespeare was the 
 man who of all modern, and perhaps ancient, 
 poets, had the largest and most comprehensive 
 soul. All the images of nature were still present 
 to him, and he drew them, not laboriously, but 
 luckily : when he describes anything, you more 
 than see it, you feel it too. Those who accuse 
 him to have wanted learning give him the greater 
 commendation ; he was naturally learned ; he 
 needed not the spectacles of books to read 
 nature ; he looked inwards and found her there. 
 I cannot say he is everywhere alike ; were he so, 
 I should do him injury to compare him with the 
 greatest of mankind. He is many times flat, 
 insipid ; his comic wit degenerating into clenches, 1 
 his serious swelling into bombast. But he is 
 always great when some great occasion is pre- 
 sented to him. No man can say he ever had 
 a fit subject for his wit, and did not then raise 
 himself as high above the rest of poets. 
 
 1 " Clinch : a pun ; an ambiguity " (Johnson's Dic- 
 tionary).
 
 II. SHAKESPEARE AND DRYDEN. 61 
 
 ' Quantum lenta solent inter viburna cupressi.' " * 
 
 In his lines to Sir Godfrey Kneller, who, it is con- 
 jectured, had sent him a copy of the Chandos 
 portrait of Shakespeare, Dryden says : 
 
 ' Shakespeare, thy gift, I place before my sight, 
 With awe I ask his blessing ere I write, 
 With reverence look on his majestic face ; 
 Proud to be less, but of his god-like race." 
 
 But even Dryden, with all his admiration for 
 Shakespeare, ventured to lay an impious hand on 
 " The Tempest," and to re-write it for the stage. 
 He must have known how shameful was his usage ; 
 yet we may perhaps forgive him for one fine 
 passage. He makes Prospero say : 
 
 " On what strange grounds we build our hopes and fears : 
 Man's life is all a mist, and in the dark 
 Our fortunes meet us." 
 
 In spite of the weight which, by his preface, he 
 threw into the scale, the balance swung against 
 Shakespeare till time and the world's long thinking 
 set it right. In Drvden's time, he tells us, two of the 
 plays of Beaumont and Fletcher were acted for 
 one of Shakespeare's. In the two theatres of the 
 Restoration only three of his plays were revived in 
 the one, and about five in the other. For nearly 
 1 " As towers the cypress tall above the lowly shrubs."
 
 62 WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 eighty years " Romeo and Juliet " had lain 
 neglected by the actors, when Garrick brought it 
 out at the end of 1748. On March I, 1662, Pepys 
 had gone in a coach with his wife to see it, and 
 had recorded in his diary : " It is a play of itself 
 the worst that ever I heard, and the worst acted 
 that ever I saw these people do." J But even 
 Garrick, as I have shown, was little sensible of 
 the vast genius of Shakespeare, and as he had 
 "cleared 'Hamlet' from rubbish," so now he 
 cobbled that beautiful tragedy, " The Story of 
 Juliet and her Romeo." He saw, as we are told 
 by the critic and play-writer, Arthur Murphy, that 
 the catastrophe might be made more affecting. 
 He therefore altered the fifth act " and rendered 
 the catastrophe (I again quote Murphy) the 
 most affecting in the whole compass of the 
 drama." 2 
 
 It is an undoubted fact, nevertheless, that Garrick 
 did much to render Shakespeare more widely 
 known. In the twenty years before he undertook 
 the management of Drury Lane "not more than 
 eight or nine of Shakespeare's comedies and trage- 
 
 1 " An Essay of Dramatick Poesie ; " Dryden's " Plays," 
 ed. 1701, i. 20 ; Davies's " Dramatic Miscellanies," iii. 161 ; 
 Davies's "Life of Garrick," i. 124; Pepys's " Diary," ed. 
 1851, i. 330. 
 
 ' Murphy's "Life of Garrick," p. 100.
 
 ILTPIE SHAKESPEARIAN REVIVAL. 63 
 
 dies were in possession of the stage ; " while he used 
 to have played every year seventeen or eighteen at 
 his theatre. 1 I find that in five weeks of the 
 autumn of 1754 there were at the two theatres of 
 Drury Lane and Covent Garden nineteen nights 
 on which Shakespeare was acted, and that nine 
 of his plays were represented "Hamlet," "Mac- 
 beth," "Othello/' "Romeo and Juliet," " Corio- 
 lanus," "Richard III.," "Henry VIII.," "The 
 Merchant of Venice," and "Much Ado About 
 Nothing." We have the impudence to despise 
 the eighteenth century for its ignorance and 
 neglect of real poetry. London at that time had 
 but two theatres. In the sixty representations 
 which were given in these five weeks nineteen were 
 of plays of Shakespeare. Nor was there anything 
 unusual in this. Two years earlier in fifty-seven 
 nights his plays were acted twenty times. 1 The 
 evil days had not been yet invented of splendid 
 and costly scenery with long runs, which alone 
 could pa) r for the extravagance of the outlay. 
 
 It was not only or even chiefly to Garrick that 
 was due this Shakespearian revival. The great actor 
 was following the tide, and not heading it. The 
 ladies, be it said to their honour, some time before 
 
 1 Davies's " Life of Garrick," i. 120. 
 
 * Gentkmaris Magazine, 1752, p. 479 ; 1754, p. 533.
 
 64 WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 his first appearance on the stage, had formed them- 
 selves into a Shakespeare Club, and bespoke every 
 week some favourite play of our immortal poet. 1 
 Edition after edition of his works had appeared. 
 Rowe had been followed by Pope, and Pope by 
 Theobald, to be soon followed in turn by Hanmer, 
 Warburton, and Johnson. The eighteenth century 
 had been satisfied with four editions of his collected 
 plays. In the first hundred years after his death 
 there were but six ; in the next fifty there were 
 three-and-twenty. 
 
 The reaction from the evil days of the Resto- 
 ration had long set in. Even Colley Gibber, who 
 was old enough to have borne arms on the side of 
 the Prince of Orange in the glorious Revolution, 
 writing of our great poet, says : " A hundred 
 years are wasted, and another silent century 
 well advanced ; and yet what unborn age shall 
 say Shakespeare has his equal ? " The Earl 
 of Shaftesbury, in the reign of Anne that 
 age which is reproached for its artificiality 
 describes " Hamlet " as the play " which appears 
 to have most affected English hearts." 3 Never- 
 theless, in the very year in which this was written 
 
 1 Davies's " Life of Garrick," p. 20. 
 
 * Gibber's "Autobiography," ed. 1826, p. 58 ; " Character- 
 istics," ed. 1714, i. 275.
 
 I I. -THE " TATLER'S" IGNORANCE. 65 
 
 a curious instance is to be found of the un- 
 familiarity of the polite reader with Shakespeare's 
 less important works. In the Tatler for Sep- 
 tember 30, 1710, a story is told in illustration of 
 " the proverbial expression of taking a woman 
 doivn in her wedding shoes, if you would bring her 
 to reason. An early behaviour of this sort," con- 
 tinues the writer, " had a very remarkable good 
 effect in a family wherein I was several years an 
 intimate acquaintance." He goes on to tell the 
 story of the youngest daughter of a gentleman in 
 Lincolnshire, which Shakespeare had long before 
 told of Signer Baptista, of Padua, the father of 
 "the curst shrew" whom Petruchio tamed. In 
 spite of this curious instance of gross ignorance, it 
 is abundantly clear that Shakespeare in his great 
 plays, even early in the eighteenth century, had 
 laid hold of the hearts of the people, or, at 
 all events, of the hearts of the playgoers. Pope, 
 who as a poet is as widely removed from him as 
 the north pole is from the south, speaks of him as 
 "justly and universally elevated above all other 
 dramatic writers. His poetry," he adds, " was 
 inspiration indeed ; he is not so much an imitator 
 as an instrument of nature ; and 'tis not so just to 
 say that he speaks from her as that she speaks 
 through him." Richardson, who, like Pope, was 
 
 5
 
 66 WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 born in the seventeenth century, makes his 
 heroine, Miss Byron, on her arrival in London, 
 write to her friend : " If you find that I prefer the 
 opera itself well as I love music to a good play 
 of our favourite Shakespeare, then, my Lucy, let 
 your heart ache for your Harriet." Horace Wai- 
 pole, who, as a boy of ten, had knelt down and 
 kissed the hand of George I., and who is often 
 looked upon as a bundle of clever affectations, in 
 one of his " Letters " speaks of " all my enthu- 
 siasm for Shakespeare." Gibbon, who was born 
 early in the reign of George II., and who entered 
 Magdalen College 139 years ago, recounts how 
 at Lausanne, on the Lake of Geneva, where he 
 spent nearly five of the years of his youth, he was 
 allowed to attend the little theatre which Voltaire 
 had set up there for the performance of his own 
 plays. " The habits of pleasure," he continues, 
 " fortified my taste for the French theatre, and 
 that taste has perhaps abated my idolatry for the 
 gigantic genius of Shakespeare, which is inculcated 
 from our infancy as the first duty of an English- 
 man." This idolatry Mrs. Barbauld thus mentions 
 in one of her letters written in 1776: "I am of 
 your opinion that we idolize Shakespeare rather 
 too much for a Christian country." x 
 
 1 Pope's " Preface to Shakespeare " ; " Sir Charles Grandi-
 
 IL GERMAN PRETENSIONS. 67 
 
 It had been by those who frequented the theatres 
 that Shakespeare had been first worshipped. The 
 fewness of the editions of his works that were 
 printed in the first hundred years after his death 
 is a convincing proof that he had no great popu- 
 larity among readers. Early in the eighteenth 
 century, as I have shown, a great change had set 
 in. He was to pass from the stage to the library, 
 and from the library to the parlour. 
 
 I would turn aside to attack for a moment the 
 foolish vanity of some of the Germans, who impu- 
 dently assert that their nation was the first to 
 discover Shakespeare's genius, and that they 
 showed us Englishmen how vast was the treasure 
 which, as it were, had lain hidden in our soil, just 
 as strangers from across the sea were the first to 
 discover the gold reefs which had escaped the 
 notice of the stupid savages of Australia. When 
 as yet there was scarcely an Englishman who 
 could read a line of German, except one or two 
 courtiers who had learnt it in the hope of winning 
 the favour of George I., and one religious enthusiast 
 who had resolved to study in the original the works 
 of the mystic shoemaker, Jacob Behmen, two 
 
 son," ed. 1754, i. 24 ; Walpole's " Letters," ix. 124 ; Gibbon's 
 " Miscellaneous Works," i. 104 ; Mrs. Barbauld's "Works," 
 ii. 14.
 
 68 WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 Englishmen, who almost in succession were at the 
 head of the world of letters, as no two Englishmen 
 have ever been since their time Alexander Pope 
 and Samuel Johnson brought out editions of his 
 works. As a rival in their labours, and coming 
 between them in point of time, we find War- 
 burton, whose name, if it is now well-nigh for- 
 gotten, was amongst the foremost in the middle of 
 last century. It was Lessing, says Carlyle, who 
 by " his ' Dramaturgic ' first exploded the pre- 
 tensions of the French Theatre, and with irresis- 
 tible conviction made Shakespeare known to his 
 countrymen." But the " Dramaturgic " was not 
 published till 1767-8, just one hundred years after 
 Dryden had declared that " Shakespeare was the 
 man who of all modern and perhaps ancient poets 
 had the largest and most comprehensive soul." It 
 may indeed be the case that Lessing, as Coleridge 
 maintains, " first proved to all thinking men even 
 to Shakespeare's own countrymen the true nature 
 of his apparent irregularities" those deviations 
 from the models of the Greek dramas which Cor- 
 neille and Racine had so servilely followed. 1 But 
 Lessing was only carrying further what Dryden 
 and Johnson had begun. Dryden, in the preface 
 
 1 Carlyle's " Miscellaneous Essays," i. 37 ; Coleridge's 
 ,' Biographia Literaria," p. 275.
 
 II. DR YDEN AND JOHNSON. 69 
 
 to that fine play, " All for Love ; or the World 
 Well Lost," so early as the year 1678, had attacked 
 those critics " who wholly form their judgments by 
 the French poets. For my part," he says, " I 
 desire to be tried by the laws of my own country ; 
 for it seems unjust to me that the French should 
 prcsciibe here till they have conquered. . . . Their 
 heroes are the most civil people breathing, but 
 their good-breeding seldom extends to a word of 
 sense. All their wit is in their ceremony ; they 
 want the genius which animates our stage ; and, 
 therefore, 'tis but necessary, when they cannot 
 please, that they should take care not to offend. 
 But as the civillest man in the company is com- 
 monly the dullest, so these authors, while they are 
 afraid to make you laugh or cry, out of pure good 
 manners make you sleep." Johnson, moreover, two 
 or three years before Lessing wrote, had ridiculed 
 the charge brought against Shakespeare that he 
 had neglected " those laws which have been insti- 
 tuted and established by the joint authority of 
 poets and of critics. To the unities of time and 
 place," he continues, " he has shown no regard ; 
 and perhaps a nearer view of the principles on 
 which they stand will diminish their value, and 
 withdraw from them the veneration which, from 
 the time of Corneille, they have very generally
 
 70 WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 received, by discovering that they have given 
 more trouble to the poet than pleasure to the 
 auditor." 
 
 Addison also in an Essay which he wrote when 
 Johnson was a little child, says : " Our inimitable 
 Shakespeare is a stumbling-block to the whole 
 tribe of these rigid critics. Who would not rather 
 read one of his plays, where there is not a single 
 rule of the stage observed, than any production of 
 a modern critic where there is not one of them 
 violated ? " Yet it was Addison's own play which 
 led Voltaire to "express his wonder that Shake- 
 speare's extravagancies are endured by a nation 
 which has seen the tragedy of Cato." J Lessing's 
 criticism may have gone far deeper than Dryden's 
 and Johnson's, but it was by English writers that 
 Shakespeare's defence was first undertaken, and it 
 was by the English people that the transcendency 
 of his genius was first maintained. How ignorant 
 we were of German, even at the close of last 
 century, is shown in the preface to the translation 
 of " The Sorrows of Werter," published in London 
 in 1794. By that time Goethe was thirty-five 
 years old, and had written four of his plays. The 
 translator, speaking of him as " Mr. Goethe," 
 
 1 Johnson's "Works," v. 118, 126; The Spectator, No. 
 592.
 
 II.- GEORGE THE THIRD. 7' 
 
 describes him in a footnote as " Doctor of Civil 
 Law and author of some dramatic pieces which 
 are much esteemed." 
 
 There was, indeed, one famous critic who, though 
 he gloried in being born a Briton, was a German 
 by origin, and a master of the German tongue 
 His Majesty, King George III. His criticism on 
 Shakespeare, though it was not published till after 
 his death, is, I suppose, one of the earliest made 
 by any one who was skilled in both languages. 
 Justice to the Germans will not allow me to pass 
 it over in silence. " Was there ever," he cried to 
 Miss Burney, " such stuff as great part of Shake- 
 speare ? Only one must not say so! But what 
 think you? What? Is there not sad stuff? 
 What ? What ? " 
 
 " Yes, indeed, I think so, sir, though mixed with 
 such excellencies that " 
 
 " Oh ! " cried he. laughing good-humouredly, " I 
 know it is not to be said ! but it's true. Only it's 
 Shakespeare, and nobody dare abuse him." * 
 
 There was a far greater man than George III. 
 a man neglected by him when he set up as the 
 patron of literature who seems to have been 
 insensible to Shakespeare's genius. There is a 
 touch of scorn when Oliver Goldsmith makes 
 * Madame D'Arblay's " Diary," ii. 398.
 
 72 WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 "the whole conversation run," in the Vicar of 
 Wakefield's parlour, "upon high life and high- 
 lived company, with pictures, taste, Shakespeare, 
 and the musical glasses." In his " Enquiry into 
 the Present State of Polite Learning " his contempt 
 is still more openly shown. There, speaking no 
 doubt of the plays which Garrick was bringing 
 back to the stage he says : " Old pieces are 
 revived, and scarcely any new ones admitted . . . 
 the public are again obliged to ruminate over 
 those hashes of absurdity, which were disgusting 
 to our ancestors even in an age of ignorance. . . . 
 We seem to be pretty much in the situation of 
 travellers at a Scotch inn ; vile entertainment is 
 served up, complained of, and sent down ; up 
 comes worse and that also is changed, and every 
 change makes our wretched cheer more unsavoury. 
 What must be done? Only sit down contented, 
 cry up all that comes before us, and admire even 
 the absurdities of Shakespeare. ... In fact, the 
 revival of those pieces of forced humour, far- 
 fetched conceit, and unnatural hyperbole which 
 have been ascribed to Shakespeare is rather 
 gibbeting than raising a statue to his memory," J 
 It may, however, be the case that this censure was 
 
 K The Vicar of Wakefield," chap. x. ; " An Enquiry," 
 chap. xii.
 
 II.-O LIVER GOLDSMITH. 73 
 
 due not altogether to bad taste and imperfect 
 sympathies. Goldsmith unhappily, with all his 
 fine qualities, was a man too much subject to envy. 
 He was, perhaps, jealous of the homage paid to 
 the mighty dead. He owned indeed to Horace 
 Walpole that he envied Shakespeare. " Fame," 
 we are told, " he considered as one great parcel, 
 to the whole of which he laid claim. Whoever 
 partook of any part of it, whether dancer, singer, 
 sleight-of-hand man, or tumbler, deprived him of 
 his right." He too had suffered from neglect. 
 " Whenever I write anything," he once said, " the 
 public make a point to know nothing about it." 
 One of his comedies was refused by Garrick and 
 the other by Colman. 1 
 
 In the praise that was so liberally bestowed, 
 and bestowed without ridicule, on Mrs. Montagu's 
 silly essay, we see that there were others besides 
 George III. and Oliver Goldsmith by whom 
 Shakespeare's full greatness was not recognized. 
 She did not hesitate to say at one time that " she 
 trembled for Shakespeare," and at another time 
 that "she was a little jealous for poor Shakespeare." 
 The admiration excited by her dull and pompous 
 
 1 Walpole's " Letters," vi. 379 ; Northcote's " Life of 
 Reynolds," i. 248 ; BoswelPs " Life of Johnson," iii. 252, 
 320.
 
 74 WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 Essay might raise not only our surprise but even 
 our contempt for the understanding of our fore- 
 fathers, had we not seen the stir which has been 
 made by the silly fellow from over the Atlantic 
 with his nonsense about Bacon. Mrs. Montagu, 
 let us do her the justice to admit, did pack her 
 nonsense into a book so small that it can be read 
 at a sitting ; while he has swollen his to a bulk 
 that might with great advantage be used in any 
 well-regulated prison as a severe form of punish- 
 ment in the case of all prisoners of intelligence. 
 
 In spite, however, of the evidence that is afforded 
 by George III., Goldsmith, and the patronage of 
 Mrs. Montagu, it is certain that even somewhat 
 early in last century Shakespeare's fame over- 
 shadowed all other English writers. Yet it had 
 taken the dull old world the best part of a hundred 
 years before it discovered his genius in all its 
 breadth and length and depth and height. Had 
 this lecture been given in the days of the Restora- 
 tion or even a little later, it is quite possible that 
 his name and works might have been passed over 
 in silence, and that the omission might have been 
 scarcely noticed by the audience. In 1690, Sir 
 Thomas Blount published a work in which he had 
 collected the judgments passed by learned men on 
 the most famous writers of all ages. Among these
 
 II. MISS BURNEY. 75 
 
 famous writers are not found Spenser, Shakespeare 
 and Milton. 
 
 In every part of literature we discover the vast 
 and sometimes very rapid changes that take place 
 in literary taste. Let those who foretell im- 
 mortality for Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot 
 meditate on the fate that has come upon Fanny 
 Burney. The men who admired her were greater 
 than those who admired these two novelists of 
 our day. Johnson not only read her stories with 
 delight, but, as it were, acted them in his playful 
 talk at the Thrales' house at Streatham. There 
 were passages in " Evelina," he said, which might 
 do honour to Richardson. Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 sat up all night to finish it. When Boswell 
 mentioned to Johnson her novel of " Cecilia," 
 " sir," said he, " with an air of animated satisfac- 
 tion, if you talk of ' Cecilia,' talk on." The book 
 came out just as Mrs. Siddons became famous, 
 and both women were the talk of the day. 
 Johnson, at one of the gay assemblies of the 
 Hon. Miss Monckton, that lively lady famous 
 for having at her house " the finest bit of blue " 
 Johnson, I say, exclaimed : " How these people 
 talk of Mrs. Siddons ! I came hither in full 
 expectation of hearing no name but the name I 
 love and pant to hear, when from one corner to
 
 76 WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 another they are talking of that jade, Mrs. Siddons! 
 till, at last wearied out, I went yonder into a 
 corner, and repeated to myself Burney ! Burney ! 
 Burney! Burney!" "Ay, sir," said Mr. Metcalf, 
 " you should have carved it upon the trees." " Sir, 
 had there been any trees, so I should ; but there 
 being none, I was content to carve it upon my 
 heart." * 
 
 Mrs. Siddon's fame, I may remark, is still fresh ; 
 but it is quite possible that her style of acting 
 would be called stilted or conventional by a 
 modern audience, and that she is chiefly praised 
 because she is unknown. Had not a single copy 
 of Miss Burney's novels been preserved, we might 
 be mourning over that youthful female genius who 
 kept some of England's greatest men from their 
 work and their sleep. For the admiration of 
 Johnson and Reynolds was shared by their great 
 contemporaries. Gibbon boasted that he had read 
 the whole of the five volumes of " Cecilia " in a 
 day. " Tis impossible," cried Edmund Burke ; 
 " it cost me three days, and you know I never 
 parted with it from the day I first opened it." 
 Even Horace Walpole, who was out of harmony 
 with so many of the best writers of his age, read 
 
 1 Madame D'Arblay's " Diary," i. 57 ; ii. 196-7 ; Bosvvell's 
 " Life of Johnson," iv. 223.
 
 //. HENRY FIELDING. 77 
 
 it through, though he found it immeasurably long. 
 He admitted that it had, with all its faults, "a 
 thousand beauties." * 
 
 How splendid is the tribute paid by the author 
 of the " Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire " 
 to Henry Fielding. " Our immortal Fielding was 
 of the younger branch of the Earls of Denbigh, 
 who draw their origin from the Counts of Habs- 
 burgh, the lineal descendants of Eltrico, in the 
 seventh century, Duke of Alsace. Far different 
 have been the fortunes of the English and German 
 divisions of the family of Habsburgh : the former, 
 the knights and sheriffs of Leicestershire, have 
 risen sloyly to the dignity of a peerage ; the 
 latter, the Emperors of Germany and Kings of 
 Spain, have threatened the liberty of the Old, and 
 invaded the treasures of the New World. The 
 successors of Charles V. may disdain their brethren 
 of England ; but the romance of ' Tom Jones,' that 
 exquisite picture of human manners, will outlive 
 the palace of the Escurial, and the imperial eagle 
 of the House of Austria." Yet Johnson called 
 Henry Fielding a blockhead, a barren rascal ; 
 though he owned that he had read his novel of 
 " Amelia " at a sitting. Richardson, Fielding's 
 
 "Madame D'Arbla^s "Diary," ii. 127; Walpole's 
 "Letters," viii. 285, 508.
 
 78 WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 great rival, had only been able to get through the 
 first volume ; " for I found," he writes, " the 
 characters and situations so wretchedly low and 
 dirty that I imagined that I could not be in- 
 terested for any one of them." x But Richardson, no 
 doubt, was influenced by jealousy and resentment, 
 though it must be admitted that even with the 
 best goodwill he would have found it hard to 
 discover much to admire in a writer who in 
 sentiment was as far apart from him as a man 
 well could be. When we come to examine into 
 Gibbon's prophecy for Fielding of undying fame, 
 we are forced to own that that great novelist is 
 much more known than read. He who outside 
 the society of men of letters alludes to any 
 incident in his stories is little likely to be under- 
 stood. His strange medley of innkeepers and their 
 wives, excisemen, attorneys, doctors, parsons, 
 squires, lieutenants, recruiting sergeants, lady's 
 maids, beaus, fine ladies, rakes, keepers of prisons, 
 gamblers, bailiffs, have well-nigh passed across the 
 stage, and found their final exit If I could 
 believe that it was the profligacy of his writings 
 which had brought about this change, then there 
 
 1 Gibbon's " Miscellaneous Works," i. 4 ; BoswelPs " Life 
 of Johnson," ii. 174 ; Richardson's " Correspondence," iv. 
 60.
 
 II. MODERN NO VELS. 79 
 
 might be some cause for rejoicing. For profligate 
 they undoubtedly were, though they were read by 
 three of the purest-minded women of their age 
 Hannah More, Fanny Burney, and Anna Laetitia 
 Barbauld. But I see lying on drawing-room tables 
 novels which are ten times as corrupting as Henry 
 Fielding's worst. If far too often he weakened 
 the delicacy of the moral sense, yet he had a 
 true eye for moral beauty. In his Amelia, his 
 Sophia Western, he has given us women of the 
 most beautiful purity and loveliness of character. 
 But grievous though his failings were, he did not 
 add one more to them. He never degrades the 
 intellect. In his writings there is no intellectual 
 corruption. " They have salt enough to keep 
 them sweet, wit enough to preserve them from 
 putrefaction." I could wish to see no young girl 
 read "Tom Jones," or even "Joseph Andrews," 
 though in it is enshrined that first of all English 
 parsons, the simple, high-minded, learned, and most 
 slovenly priest, Mr. Abraham Adams. But I 
 would rather see her read Fielding, who would 
 teach her much that is good, who would train 
 her in wit and in the knowledge of some of the 
 best qualities of the heart, than the works of 
 many modern female novelists, who are popular 
 though they are a disgrace to their sex; whose
 
 8o WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 views of life are as low and base as the style in 
 which they write, and as inaccurate as their 
 English ; and who have neither wit, nor humour, 
 nor sense, nor learning, nor knowledge, to throw 
 into the scale as a balance to the vast weight of 
 unworthy qualities which they have heaped up on 
 the other side. The day will come, I trust, when 
 our descendants, purified by some nobler strain of 
 thought, will look back upon many of the favourite 
 novelists of this age, male as well as female, as 
 men looked back upon the evil days of the 
 Restoration. The work will have to be done over 
 again which Addison did for the men of his time, 
 whose praise Johnson has celebrated in the follow- 
 ing fine passage : 
 
 " It is justly observed by Tickell that Addison 
 employed wit on the side of virtue and religion. 
 He not only made the proper use of wit himself, 
 but taught it to others ; and from his time it has 
 been generally subservient to the cause of reason 
 and of truth. He has dissipated the prejudice 
 that had long connected gaiety with vice, and 
 easiness of manners with laxity of principles. He 
 has restored virtue to its dignity, and taught 
 innocence not to be ashamed. This is an elevation 
 of literary character 'above all Greek, above all 
 Roman fame.' No greater felicity can genius attain
 
 //. INTELLECTUAL CORRUPTION. 81 
 
 than that of having purified intellectual pleasure, 
 separated mirth from indecency, and wit from 
 licentiousness ; of having taught a succession of 
 writers to bring elegance and gaiety to the aid 
 of goodness ; and, if I may use expressions yet 
 more awful, of having ' turned many to righteous- 
 ness.' " * 
 
 The task of the future reformer will be not a 
 little different and perhaps somewhat harder. 
 " The wits of Charles," corrupt though they were, 
 were corrupt wits. They stimulated even though 
 they debased the mind. They gave it a quickness, 
 an alertness, which might be turned to better ends. 
 But the novelists of whom I am speaking deaden 
 every part of the intellect. They are dull them- 
 selves and the cause of dulness in others. They 
 leave those who largely indulge in them in- 
 tellectually unfit for any work which requires 
 sustained thought. They are the dram-shop 
 keepers of the world of letters. 
 
 1 Johnson's " Works," vii. 451.
 
 LECTURE III.
 
 LECTURE III. 
 
 I HAVE been led far away from the judgment 
 which some of the first men of the last century 
 passed on Fielding. Surely we ought to look upon 
 our own decisions as full of uncertainty when we 
 find two such men as Johnson and Gibbon wide as 
 the poles asunder in their criticisms on their famous 
 contemporary. The barren rascal, the blockhead 
 of one man will, says the other, outlive the palace 
 of the Escurial and the imperial eagle of the house 
 of Austria. There was one early indication that 
 Fielding did not merit the proud title that was 
 conferred on him of the Prose Homer of Human 
 Nature. It has been justly observed that distance 
 has somewhat the same effect as time in the 
 estimate which we form of authors an effect, 
 however, which is rapidly lessening with the 
 increasing facilities of communication, and the 
 mingling of nations. If a writer was understood
 
 86 WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 and admired by distant nations, there was a greater 
 likelihood of his being understood and admired by 
 distant ages. Now Fielding was little read on the 
 Continent. "The foreigners," said a traveller of 
 the time, " have no notion of his books, and do not 
 understand them, as the manners are so entirely 
 English." It is true that a French writer com- 
 plained that the Anglomania was gaining on his 
 countrymen. " After 'Gulliver' and ' Pamela' here 
 comes 'Tom Jones,' and they are mad for him." 1 
 The madness, however, neither extended far nor 
 lasted long. 
 
 When we turn to Fielding's great rival, Richard- 
 son, we find at all events that outward sign of 
 future fame. The novels of the awkward, vain, 
 middle-aged English bookseller spread rapidly 
 from land to land. I have seen an autograph 
 letter written to David Hume by the Marquis of 
 Mirabeau, Vami du peuple, as he was called, the 
 father of the great Mirabeau, in which he says that 
 Richardson alone, the man in his eyes of the 
 greatest worth, made him often regret his ignorance 
 of English. Grimm, the great critic, seems to rank 
 him with Homer, Sophocles, and Raphael. John- 
 son's admiration of him was very great. He was 
 
 1 " Letters of Mrs. Calderwood," p. 208 ; Jusserand's 
 " English Novel," p. 24.
 
 III. SAMUEL RICHARDSON, 87 
 
 one of the few men " whom he sought after." 
 " There is," he said, " more knowledge of the heart 
 in one of his letters than in all ' Tom Jones.' " 
 When the Hon. Thomas Erskine, afterwards the 
 famous Lord Chancellor, objected : " Surely, sir, 
 Richardson is very tedious," Johnson replied, 
 " Why, sir, if you were to read Richardson for the 
 story, your impatience would be so much fretted 
 that you would hang yourself. But you must read 
 him for the sentiment, and consider the story as 
 only giving occasion to the sentiment." Lord 
 Chesterfield, " the undisputed sovereign of wit and 
 fashion," said of him : " To do him justice he 
 never mistakes nature, and he has surely great 
 knowledge and skill both in painting and in 
 interesting the heart." Horace Walpole, I must 
 admit, spoke of him as one " who wrote those 
 deplorably tedious lamentations, ' Clarissa ' and 
 ' Sir Charles Grand ison,' which are pictures of high 
 life as conceived by a bookseller, and romances 
 as they would be spiritualized by a Methodist 
 teacher." But Walpole had not the world with 
 him, above all, he had not the foreign world with 
 him. " Clarissa " was " one of the most popular 
 books in the German language," its two rivals 
 being Young's " Night Thoughts " and Hervey's 
 " Meditations among the Tombs." According
 
 88 WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 to Coleridge, it greatly influenced Schiller's 
 " Robbers." Fifty years after the great novelist's 
 death, Mrs. Barbauld, no mean critic, while ad- 
 mitting that " his works were not found to be so 
 attractive to the present generation as they were to 
 the past," added : " His fame stands higher abroad 
 than it does at home. He is as highly valued by 
 foreigners as Rousseau is by us ; and whatever be 
 his defects, his intrinsic merit is too great not to 
 place him above the varying taste of the day. 
 When a hundred novels that are now read are 
 passed away and forgotten, " Clarissa " will hold 
 its place among those standard works that adorn 
 the literature of our country." J 
 
 Jeremy Bentham describes how, in his childhood, 
 while staying at his grandmother's house in Berk- 
 shire, he "used to climb a lofty elm and read in its 
 branches. I was," he continues, " the more fond of 
 this while the labourers were thrashing corn in the 
 neighbourhood, as I was delighted to be in society 
 with which I was not compelled to mix. No 
 situation brought with it more felicity than to hide 
 myself in the tree, and having read for some time 
 
 1 Sainte-Beuve's " Causeries de Lundi," vii. 311; Bos- 
 well's "Life of Johnson," ii. 174, iii. 314; Walpole's 
 " Letters," iv. 305 ; Coleridge's " Biographia Literaria," p. 
 276 ; Barbauld's edition of " Clarissa," vol. i. p. xlvi.
 
 III. RICHARDSON AND BENTHAM. 89 
 
 to descend to gather up wheat for the peasants to 
 thrash, and then to mount again to my leafy 
 throne." Among the books over which he pored 
 was Richardson's famous novel. " ' Clarissa ' kept 
 me day after day incessantly bathed in tears." * 
 He would have done his own great work far more 
 easily and quickly had he gone on feeding his 
 imagination. He stifled it in himself and in his 
 disciples too, training them to be rather reasoning 
 machines than men and women. He forgot the 
 lesson which he learnt in his leafy throne ; he for- 
 got the whispering wind, the rustling leaves, the 
 swaying branch, the sound of the falling flail, all 
 in delightful harmony with the words of the great 
 master of the feelings ; he put far from him grace- 
 fulness of language and tenderness of thought, and 
 all that wins its way to the head through the 
 heart. He struggled hard and long for man's wel- 
 fare, but no words of his moved men to tears. He 
 had no persuasiveness, and was not understood till 
 he had found interpreters. That Richardson should 
 thus have affected the founder of the Utilitarian 
 Philosophy is indeed a striking proof of his power. 
 When those who were in their infancy when the 
 author of " Clarissa " died had now, if they sur- 
 vived, reached man's limit of fourscore, Macar'ay 
 1 Bentham's " Works," x. 22.
 
 90 WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 in his famous speech on copyright said of him in 
 the House of Commons : " No writings have done 
 more to raise the fame of English genius in foreign 
 countries. No writings are more deeply pathetic. 
 No writings, those of Shakespeare excepted, show 
 more profound knowledge of the human heart." 
 Thackeray has described to us the great historian's 
 admiration of the famous novelist. " I spoke to 
 him once about ' Clarissa.' " "Not read 'Clarissa'!" 
 he cried out. "If you have once read 'Clarissa/ 
 and are infected by it, you can't leave it. When I 
 was in India I passed one hot season in the Hills ; 
 and there were the Governor-general, and the 
 Secretary of Government, and the Commander- 
 in-chief, and their wives. I had ' Clarissa ' with 
 me ; and as soon as they began to read, the whole 
 station was in a passion of excitement about Miss 
 Harlowe and her misfortunes, and her scoundrelly 
 Lovelace. The Governor's wife seized the book, 
 the Secretary waited for it, the Chief Justice could 
 not read it for tears." He acted the whole scene ; 
 he paced up and down the Athenaeum library. I 
 dare say he could have spoken pages of the book : 
 of that book, and of what countless piles of 
 others." x But Richardson has passed away. 
 
 1 Macaulay's "Miscellaneous Works," ed. 1871, p. 615; 
 Trevehan's " Life of Macaulay," ed. 1877, i. 381.
 
 III. SCOTTISH ASSOCIATIONS. 91 
 
 Even so far back as my boyhood I remember 
 hearing wonder expressed when in company a lady 
 said that she had read " Sir Charles Grandison " 
 from beginning to end. Since then there has been 
 a certain revival of interest in him a revival due, 
 as most such revivals are, rather to students of 
 literature than to any change in the popular taste. 
 For one reader of his novels there are perhaps ten 
 readers of his rival's, neglected though Fielding is. 
 Of all the changes in literary taste, I know of 
 none more sudden and more striking than that 
 which brought Scotland, the Scotch language, and 
 the Scotch people into general popularity. Let 
 me read to you a passage, which, when I first read 
 it, led me to wonder almost as much as a traveller 
 might wonder who, returning to some spot in the 
 Western States of America, which a few years 
 before he had known as a wilderness, should find 
 there some large and thriving town. The writer 
 says : " The influence of Scottish associations, so 
 far as it is favourable to antiquity, is confined to 
 Scotchmen alone, and furnishes no resources to 
 the writer who aspires to a place among the 
 English classics. Nay, such is the effect of that 
 provincial situation to which Scotland is now 
 reduced, that the transactions of former ages are 
 apt to convey to ourselves exaggerated concep-
 
 92 WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 tions of barbarism, from the uncouth and degraded 
 dialect in which they are recorded." Now it was 
 no Englishman, no Southron, who wrote this. 
 They are the words of the famous Scotch pro- 
 fessor, Dugald Stewart, in whom glowed the 
 perfervidum ingenium Scotorum. It was written 
 in a memoir of the Scotch historian, Robertson, 1 
 and it was read before the Royal Society of Edin- 
 burgh. It was but nine years later that Walter 
 Scott published his " Lay of the Last Minstrel," 
 and but eighteen years later that he published his 
 " Waverley." He may have been present when 
 this paper was read, for of this honourable Society 
 in later years he was the President. The blood 
 perhaps flowed faster in his youthful veins, as he 
 listened to these words, and his pulse beat quicker, 
 as he felt hidden powers stirring within him 
 powers which should break through the narrow 
 bonds of mere locality, and extend " the influence 
 of Scottish associations," from one end of the wide 
 world to the other. Scott seems to me to have 
 answered the plaintive question, which only two 
 years before the " Lay of the Last Minstrel " was 
 written, was put by the great English poet as, in 
 his wanderings in the Highlands, he heard the 
 Solitary Reaper singing to herself 
 1 Page 185.
 
 JJ1.-SIR WALTER SCOTT. 93 
 
 ** Will no one tell me what she sings ? 
 Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow 
 For old, unhappy, far-off things, 
 And battles long ago : 
 Or is it some more humble lay, 
 Familiar matter of to-day ? 
 Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain, 
 That has been, and may be again." 
 
 Scott has told us all that the wandering poet had 
 asked. He has told us of the 
 
 "unhappy far-off things 
 and battles long ago ; " 
 
 he has told us of 
 
 " Familiar matters of to-day, 
 
 Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain, 
 That has been, and may be again," 
 
 and he has so told his tale that it is listened to by 
 old and young, by rich and poor, by learned and 
 unlearned, by all peoples, nations, and languages. 
 
 To him who has studied the history of the 
 eighteenth century the change which he has 
 wrought is indeed wonderful. Not only in Eng- 
 land, but also in Lowland Scotland, the High- 
 landers in the days of our great-grandfathers were 
 looked upon with a mixture of terror and con- 
 tempt. When Johnson and Boswell in the
 
 94 WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 country between Loch Ness and the western sea, 
 in their mid-day halt, were surrounded by the 
 M'Craas, " I observed to Dr. Johnson," Boswell 
 records, " it was much the same as being with a 
 tribe of Indians." "Yes, sir," replied Johnson, 
 " but not so terrifying." " The villagers," writes 
 Johnson, " gathered about us in considerable num- 
 bers, I believe without any evil intention, but with 
 a very savage wildness of aspect and manner." 
 Ray, in his "History of the Rebellion of 1745," 
 speaks of the Young Pretender's army as " the 
 barbarians that overrun the country." Hume, 
 describing them " as a people who from the miser- 
 able disadvantages of their soil and climate were 
 perpetually struggling with the greatest necessities 
 of nature ; who from the imperfections of govern- 
 ment lived in a continual state of internal hostility; 
 ever harassed with the incursions of neighbouring 
 tribes, or meditating revenge and retaliation on 
 their neighbours" Hume, I say, thus describing 
 them, asks : " Have such a people leisure to think 
 of any poetry, except perhaps a miserable song or 
 ballad, in praise of their own chieftain, or to the 
 disparagement of his rivals ? " Adam Smith, con- 
 sidering them as soldiers, says : " In point of 
 obedience they were always much inferior to what 
 is reported of the Tartars and Arabs. As, too,
 
 III. JOHN HOME. 95 
 
 from their stationary life they spend less of their 
 time in the open air, they were always less accus- 
 tomed to military exercises, and were less expert 
 in the use of their arms than the Tartars and Arabs 
 are said to be." John Home, the dramatist, in the 
 year 1769 had written a tragedy on a Highland 
 story, and called it " Rivine." " The names of the 
 persons of the pieces," wrote Murphy, more than 
 thirty years later, " are grating to an English ear, 
 Kastrecl, Dunton, Connon, and the like are exotics, 
 beneath the dignity of tragedy. The play might 
 as well be written in Erse. It was not fit to be 
 represented anywhere on this side of Johnny 
 Groats, at the remotest part of Scotland." " Gar- 
 rick," says Dr. Alexander Carlyle, "justly alarmed 
 at the jealousy and dislike which prevailed at that 
 time against Lord Bute and the Scotch," had pre- 
 vailed on Home " to change the title of ' Rivine ' 
 into that of ' The Fatal Discovery,' and had pro- 
 vided a student of Oxford, who appeared at the 
 rehearsals as the author." * 
 
 How vast is the change in sentiment that has 
 been wrought since the days when a Highland 
 
 1 Boswell's " Life of Johnson," v. 142 ; James Ray's 
 " History of the Rebellion of 1745," p. vii. ; Burton's " Life 
 of Hume," i. 479; "Wealth of Nations," ed. 1811, iii. 83; 
 Murphy's " Life of Garrick," p. 295 ; "Autobiography of Dr. 
 A. Carlyle," p. 509.
 
 96 WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 name was thought sufficient to damn a play. 
 Now, not only Lowlanders, but even Englishmen, 
 when they go to " the mountains of the North " 
 are proud to disguise themselves in a dress which 
 their forefathers in Edinburgh or in London would 
 have looked on with a feeling of scorn not alto- 
 gether unmingled with fear. Perhaps by the end 
 of the twentieth century the descendants of the 
 Orangemen of Belfast and Londonderry, and 
 people of rank and fortune from England, when 
 they go to shoot and fish in the wilds of Kerry or 
 Connemara, will hope in their long frieze coats, 
 their knee-breeches, and their worsted stockings, to 
 be taken for the children of the soil. 1 It was to 
 Sir Walter Scott that this vast and most sudden 
 change was greatly due. Something, no doubt } 
 had been done by causes which I have not time to 
 examine. But he was the mighty wizard of the 
 north who waved his magic wand, and swept away 
 the prejudices of men, and some of their sounder 
 judgments too. 
 
 Dugald Stewart was by no means alone among 
 Scotchmen in his contempt of "the uncouth and 
 degraded dialect " of his forefathers. Hume, in his 
 " History of England," describes how in the 
 beginning of the Great Rebellion the chaplains of 
 1 " Letters of D. Hume to W. Strahan," p. 62.
 
 ///. VULGAR BROAD SCOTCH. 97 
 
 the Scottish Commissioners in London were run 
 after by eager listeners. The church which had 
 been assigned to them would not hold the multi- 
 tudes of all ranks who crowded to it. " Those 
 who were excluded," he continues, " clung to the 
 doors or windows in hopes of catching at least 
 some distant murmur or broken phrases of the 
 holy rhetoric. All the eloquence of Parliament, 
 now well refined from pedantry, animated with the 
 spirit of liberty, and employed in the most 
 important interests, was not attended to with such 
 insatiable avidity as were these lectures, delivered 
 with ridiculous cant, and a provincial accent full of 
 barbarism and of ignorance." Beattie, a professor 
 at Aberdeen, Burns's " sweet, harmonious Beattie," 
 in his " Essays on Poetry and Music," speaking 
 of what he calls " the vulgar broad Scotch," says : 
 " To write in that tongue, and yet to write 
 seriously, is now impossible ; such is the effect of 
 mean expressions applied to an important subject ; 
 so that if a Scotch merchant, or man of business, 
 were to write to his countryman in his native 
 dialect the other would conclude that he was in 
 jest. Not that this language is naturally more 
 ridiculous than others. But for more than half a 
 century past it has even by the Scots themselves 
 been considered as the dialect of the vulgar." Of 
 
 7
 
 98 WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 Ramsay's "Gentle Shepherd" he says: "To an 
 Englishman who had never conversed with the 
 common people of Scotland the language would 
 appear only antiquated, obscure, or unintelligible ; 
 but to a Scotchman, who thoroughly understands 
 it, and is aware of its vulgarity, it appears ludicrous, 
 from the contrast between meanness of phrase and 
 dignity or seriousness of sentiment." J Ten years 
 after the Aberdeen professor and poet had pro- 
 claimed to the world the degradation of his 
 mother-tongue, there was printed in a little 
 country town in the south-west of Scotland a 
 small volume entitled " Poems, chiefly in the 
 Scottish Dialect," by Robert Burns. If the 
 " Cotter's Saturday Night " did not make Beattie 
 blush for the wrong he had done his native 
 language, he must indeed have been steeped in 
 prejudice and affectation. His blushes could not 
 undo the harm he had done. It was perhaps this 
 very passage in his writings which led Burns in 
 this noble poem suddenly to drop his natural 
 dialect when he came to describe the reading of 
 " the big Ha' Bible," and to take to English, in 
 which he rarely moved with ease or grace. 
 
 Who with such examples before him of the in- 
 
 * Hume's " History of England," ed. 1773, vi. 385 ; 
 Beattie's "Essays," ed. 1779, P- 381.
 
 ///. LITERARY PARTISANSHIP. 99 
 
 firmity of human foresight can be bold enough to 
 forecast the future of literature ? Who, remember- 
 ing Dugald Stewart's lament as a man of letters 
 over "the provincial situation to which Scotland 
 is now reduced," can forbear reflecting on the 
 changes that may be wrought in the world of 
 readers by one single man of commanding genius ? 
 Surely these vast revolutions in literary taste 
 which I have been describing revolutions in which 
 old favourites are pulled down and new favourites 
 set up will inspire us, if we are wise, with a great 
 mistrust of our own judgment, and a great willing- 
 ness to accept the judgment of the world, when it 
 has stood the test of many generations. Yet such 
 is the ardour with which in our youth we join our- 
 selves, even in literature, to a party, that we are as 
 unjust in our judgments as if we were nothing 
 better than a set of mere politicians. If from 
 pleasure we read those whom we admire, from a 
 kind of ridiculous pride we abuse those of whom 
 we know next to nothing. When I look back on 
 my early years there are few things that I more 
 regret than this ignorant partisanship. I was 
 brought up among those whose canon of taste was 
 contained in the Edinburgh Review. I sat, as it 
 were, at the feet of Jeffrey and Macaulay. Not 
 a doubt did I ever hear cast on their infallibility.
 
 ioo WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 In them was contained all the law and the 
 prophets. Byron's " English Bards and Scotch 
 Reviewers " was constantly in the hands and on the 
 tongues of my young associates. We learnt to 
 laugh with the insolent poet at far better and far 
 nobler men than himself. Wordsworth was our 
 scoff. Yet I have the satisfaction of thinking that 
 though it was against the faith in which I had 
 been brought up, I could not help taking pleasure 
 in " We are Seven," and the few simpler poems of 
 his that I chanced to see. It is a pleasure to me 
 now to reflect that I did not let slip the chance 
 that I once had of seeing that great poet When 
 I was a boy of perhaps thirteen or fourteen I was 
 told, as I was walking through Ambleside, that 
 Mr. Wordsworth was just ahead in his chaise. I 
 ran after him, and caught him up there where the 
 old market-cross used to stand. He, I fancied, 
 seeing a lad eagerly running and guessing what was 
 in his heart, good-naturedly checked his horse and 
 looked full round. I saw his venerable face, but I 
 little knew at the time how dear he was to become 
 tome. 
 
 I entered Oxford as ignorant of the new School 
 of Poetry as any one well could be. I do not think 
 that I had ever seen a single poem of Keats or 
 Shelley. Mr. Browning's name was, I believe, un-
 
 III. ALMA MATER. 101 
 
 known to me. Of Wordsworth and Mr. Tennyson 
 I had read only a very few poems. Tennyson I 
 had heard treated with the same scorn as his great 
 forerunners. It was for me a most happy day 
 which first brought me within the influence of this 
 noble University, though the first experience was 
 bitter enough. The coat of ignorance and conceit 
 which had formed round me had to be stripped off, 
 and it had grown so close, that, in stripping, it 
 seemed to bring with it not a little of the skin. 
 When once more I began to breathe freely, I 
 exultingly owned that, 
 
 " Largior hie campos aether et lumine vestit 
 Purpureo ; Solemque suum, sua sidera norunt." 
 
 (" Therein a more abundant heaven clothes all the meadows' 
 
 face 
 
 With purple light ; and their own sun and their own stars 
 they have.") 
 
 Let me here show how much in the happy 
 season of youth, when fresh forms are so easily 
 taken, when custom does not yet 
 
 " lie upon us with a weight 
 Heavy as frost and deep almost as life,'' 
 
 how much in that bounteous time one friend can 
 do for another. It so chanced that in my second
 
 102 WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 term I every day sat at dinner in hall by a man 
 very much my senior. In fact, shortly after I 
 entered he took his Bachelor's degree. Something 
 in my talk must, I suppose, have interested him. 
 At all events he thought me worth taking in hand. 
 He was, I remember, amused at the boldness, I 
 might say the impudent audacity, of my literary 
 judgments, and surprised, moreover, both at the 
 extent and the narrowness of my reading. He 
 proposed that he should come into my room every 
 evening, and over a cup of tea should read with me 
 the " In Memoriam." We went carefully through 
 the whole poem, and by the end of it I belonged 
 to the new school. So ardent an admirer did I 
 become of its author, that I not only upheld his 
 merit in our College Debating Society against a 
 strong opposition, but scarcely had I taken my 
 degree before, in the very village in which I had 
 been brought up, at the very feet, as it were, of 
 Gamaliel, in a lecture which I gave at the 
 Mechanics' Institute, I boldly challenged for him 
 a place among our great poets. Unhappily for 
 me my friend had that failing of a literary apostle 
 against which I have been warning you. He was 
 so clear-sighted to the merits of the modern 
 school that he was blind to the merits of that 
 which it had supplanted. From him and his
 
 III. RIVAL SCHOOLS. 103 
 
 friends I learnt to speak of Pope with the same 
 ignorant contempt as I had before spoken of 
 \Vordsworth and Tennyson. I went on to read 
 Mr. Browning, and as my admiration for him in- 
 creased, so increased my scorn for the poets who 
 were of a widely different school. 
 
 I think with grief of the time, the pleasure and 
 the improvement which I have lost by this con- 
 tempt of ignorance. He who refuses to read Pope 
 loses, if nothing else, the delight that is given by 
 perfect versification. " Sir," said Johnson, " a thou- 
 sand years may elapse before there shall appear 
 another man with a power of versification equal to 
 that of Pope." Listen to the melody of these 
 lines, which he wrote when he was but sixteen 
 years old " the marvellous boy " that he was, 
 marvellous far than Chatterton. 
 
 11 No grateful dews descend from evening skies, 
 Nor morning odours from the flowers arise ; 
 No rich perfumes refresh the fruitful field, 
 Nor fragrant herbs their native incense yield. 
 The balmy zephyrs, silent since her death, 
 Lament the ceasing of a sweeter breath ; 
 The industrious bees neglect the golden store ; 
 Fair Daphne's dead, and sweetness is no more." 
 
 But there is far more than versification. Pope 
 is a great poet, the greatest perhaps in his class,
 
 104 WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 though his class certainly is far below the highest. 
 Which of us is so rich in poetic thought that he 
 can venture to scorn those few lines in which he 
 describes the poor Indian's hope of finding 
 
 " Behind the cloud-topt hill an humbler heav'n ; ' 
 
 or that noble passage in which speaking of the 
 Deity he says : 
 
 " Who sees with equal eye. as God of all, 
 A hero perish, or a sparrow fall, 
 Atoms or systems into ruins hurl'd, 
 And now a bubble burst, and now a world." 
 
 Was the man no poet who asks 
 
 " Is it for thee the lark ascends and sings ? 
 Joy tunes his voice, joy elevates his wings. 
 Is it for thee the linnet pours his throat? 
 Loves of his own and raptures swell the note." 
 
 As we study his perfect versification, we may 
 justly apply to him one of his finest couplets, 
 
 " The spider's touch, how exquisitely fine ! 
 Feels at each thread, and lives along the line." 
 
 Pope's touch, exquisitely fine, does indeed seem 
 to live along almost every line which he wrote. In
 
 HI. ALEXANDER POPE. 105 
 
 his " Satires " and his " Moral Essays," " the position 
 and choice of words," is surely, as Coleridge main- 
 tained, " almost faultless." r The more we study 
 style, the more we train our ear to the melody of 
 sentences and the sweetness of sound, the more we 
 train our understanding to the precise use of 
 words, the more shall we find to admire in Pope. 
 We shall not, therefore, mistake his position as a 
 poet, or assign to him a place in the first rank. 
 He will still be far, immeasurably far below Shake- 
 speare and Milton, but he will be among the first, 
 if, indeed, he is not the very first, in the class to 
 which he belongs. He is equal to Horace, and 
 Horace has defied " the effacing fingers," of nearly 
 two thousand years' decay. There are those who 
 refuse to read him because his school of poetry is 
 essentially artificial. He may be at the very top ; 
 but top or bottom they will have none of it. Men 
 who are far beneath him in the writer's art are 
 more to their taste, if only they belong to a more 
 natural school. They would more willingly con- 
 sort with one who serves in heaven than with him 
 who reigns in hell. Pope, it is true, if all his ex- 
 cellencies were increased a thousand-fold, would 
 never be a step nearer to Shakespeare and Milton. 
 The lofty and lonely heights on which they sit are 
 1 " Biographia Literaria," p. 19.
 
 io6 WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 separated by a great gulf from the pleasant hill to 
 which he has climbed ; while far beneath them, 
 but still on the same range, are Wordsworth, Keats 
 and Shelley, Tennyson and Browning. The foolish 
 worshippers of Browning, indeed, in their wild 
 extravagance place him above Milton ; but I will 
 not do them the injustice to believe that they have 
 ever read the " Paradise Lost." They are " shallow 
 in themselves," without being " deep-versed in 
 books." In the case of these five poets we could 
 conceive that, if their genius and their art had 
 been multiplied again and again, they might have 
 stood on "the starry threshold" by the side of 
 Milton, close before the throne of Shakespeare. 
 But though the poetry of even the lowest of the 
 five is far truer to nature than Pope's, yet his art 
 may be so much greater as to strike the balance. 
 Let me read to you what one of the masters of 
 their school says of the French tragedians. " How- 
 ever meanly I may think of their serious drama, 
 even in its most perfect specimens, the French 
 tragedies are consistent works of art, and the off- 
 spring of great intellectual power. Preserving a 
 fitness in the parts, and a harmony in the whole, 
 they form a nature of their own, though a false 
 nature. Still they excite the minds of the spec- 
 tators to active thought, to striving after ideal
 
 III. POPE AND ADD1SON. 107 
 
 excellence." z That kind of excellence which can 
 be attained by a laborious study and practice of 
 style should surely be set before our eyes, for at 
 few times in the history of our country has slovenly 
 and eccentric writing more thriven than in these 
 latter days. We shall not take Pope as our model ; 
 but we can, at least, be stirred up to strive after 
 ideal excellence by the perfection to which he 
 attained. Where can we find so many faultless 
 lines together as those famous two-and-twenty in 
 which he attacks Addison : 
 
 " Peace to all such ! but were there one whose fires 
 True genius kindles, and fair fame inspires ; 
 Bless'd with each talent and each art to please, 
 And born to write, converse, and live with ease ; 
 Should such a man, too fond to rule alone, 
 Bear, like the Turk, no brother near the throne, 
 View him with scornful, yet with jealous eyes, 
 And hate for arts that caused himself to rise ; 
 Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer, 
 And, without sneering, teach the rest to sneer ; 
 Willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike, 
 Just hint a fault, and hesitate dislike ; 
 Alike reserved to blame or to commend, 
 A timorous foe, and a suspicious friend ; 
 Dreading e'en fools, by flatterers besieged, 
 And so obliging that he ne'er obliged ; 
 Like Cato, give his little senate laws, 
 And sit attentive to his own applause ; 
 
 Coleridge's " Biographia Literaria," p. 257.
 
 io8 WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 While wits and Templars every sentence raise, 
 And wonder with a foolish face of praise 
 Who but must laugh, if such a man there be ? 
 Who would not weep, if Atticus were he ? " 
 
 "Time," writes Johnson, " quickly puts an end 
 to artificial and accidental fame; and Addison is 
 to pass through futurity protected only by his 
 genius." 1 He is protected, too, by the genius of 
 his enemy. It is impossible that this passage, 
 perfect wit in perfect language, can ever be for- 
 gotten. As long as men read it they will seek to 
 know more of this Atticus, and they will feel how 
 stainless must have been the character of a man, 
 how bright his wit, how delightful his writings, who 
 sustained such an attack unhurt and untarnished. 
 Pope, as he watched the effect of his blow at the 
 reputation of his great rival, might well have 
 exclaimed : 
 
 " We do it wrong, being so majestical, 
 To offer it the show of violence ; 
 For it is, as the air, invulnerable, 
 And our vain blows malicious mockery." 
 
 Perfect as Pope is in satire, no less perfect is he 
 in praise. In the same poem in which he attacks 
 Addison, a few lines earlier he had thus celebrated 
 his friends. 
 
 1 Johnson's " Works," vii. 451.
 
 Ill A POETS DECORATIONS. 109 
 
 " Why did I write ? what sin to me unknown 
 Dipp'd me in ink, my parents', or my own ? 
 As yet a child, nor yet a fool to fame, 
 I lisp'd in numbers, for the numbers came ; 
 I left no calling for this idle trade, 
 No duty broke, no father disobey'd : 
 The muse but served to ease some friend, not wife, 
 To help me through this long disease, my life ; 
 To second, Arbuthnot, thy art and care, 
 And teach the being you preserved to bear. 
 
 But why then publish ? Granville the polite, 
 And knowing Walsh, would tell me I could write ; 
 Well-natured Garth inflamed with early praise, 
 And Congreve loved, and Swift endured my lays ; 
 The courtly Talbot, Somers, Sheffield read, 
 E'en mitred Rochester would nod the head, 
 And St. John's self (great Dryden's friends before) 
 With open arms received one poet more." 
 
 The greatest monarch could not confer such 
 honours as these. What was Lewis XIV. among 
 his courtiers in the great gallery of Versailles, what 
 was Napoleon at the Tuileries among the marshals 
 of France, bestowing titles and ribands and crosses, 
 compared with the sickly crook-backed dwarf thus 
 decorating his friends ? As we read the lines we 
 seem to be passing through some lofty hall hung 
 with portraits by Vandyck. How poor was the 
 coronet given to St. John by the Queen, when set 
 side by side with the honours which Pope was 
 never tired of heaping on his friend ! The blue
 
 1 10 WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 riband of the Garter should have seemed worthless 
 to the man to whom the poet had written those 
 four lines unsurpassed for the splendour of the 
 compliment : 
 
 " Oh ! while along the stream of time thy name 
 Expanded flies, and gathers all its fame ; 
 Say, shall my little bark attendant sail 
 Pursue the triumph, and partake the gale ? '
 
 LECTURE
 
 LECTURE IV. 
 DRYDEN" himself, the poet of 
 
 "The varying verse, the full resounding line, 
 The long majestic march and energy divine," 
 
 the " glorious John " of our forefathers, lies in even 
 deeper neglect than Pope. Yet his genius was 
 probably greater, though his art was certainly less. 
 I know of few more manly writers. The reader who 
 has nourished himself on his vigorous genius, and his 
 strong common-sense, supported and set forth as 
 they are by his learning, will have little relish for 
 weak fancy and mere tricks of language. What 
 Dryden might have done had he been as careful in 
 his workmanship as Pope we can only imagine. He 
 rose to heights above the younger poet's flight, but 
 in his careless haste he often sank far beneath him. 
 When he puts forth all his strength how great is 
 he ! Who can read unmoved his " Songs for St. 
 Cecilia's Day"? They rouse us as soldiers are 
 
 8
 
 114 WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 roused by the sound of the trumpet. He was 
 daring enough and daring never went to greater 
 heights to do once more what Shakespeare had 
 already done pre-eminently well, and to tell a 
 second time the story of Antony and Cleopatra. 
 He knew his strength, and he has not failed. 
 Shakespeare's play perhaps ranks next, and only 
 next, to the four great tragedies, " Hamlet," " Mac- 
 beth," " King Lear," and " Othello." Nevertheless, 
 Dryden's " All for Love, or the World Well Lost," 
 even though we have the echo of the other ever in 
 our ear, is a great performance. How noble is the 
 passage where Antony, in an outburst of shame, 
 confesses his fault : 
 
 " ANTONY. I have been a man, Ventidius. 
 
 VENTIDIUS. Yes, and a brave one ; but 
 
 ANTONY. I know thy meaning. 
 
 But, I have lost my reason, have disgraced 
 The name of soldier with inglorious ease. 
 In the full vintage of my flowing honours 
 Sate still, and saw it pressed by other hands. 
 Fortune came smiling to my youth and woo'd 
 
 it, 
 
 And purpled greatness met my ripened years. 
 When first I came to empire I was borne 
 On tides of people, crowding to my triumphs; 
 The wish of nations ; and the willing world 
 Received me as its pledge of future peace ; 
 I was so great, so happy, so beloved, 
 Fate could not ruin me ; till I took pains
 
 IV. JOHN DR YDEN. \ 1 5 
 
 And worked against my fortune, chid her 
 
 from me, 
 And turned her loose ; yet still she came 
 
 again. 
 
 My careless days and my luxurious nights 
 At length have wearied her, and now she's 
 
 gone, 
 Gone, gone, divorced for ever." 
 
 How beautiful are the closing lines when the 
 Priest of Isis, before the dead bodies of Antony 
 and Cleopatra, exclaims : 
 
 " Sleep, blest pair, 
 
 Secure from human chance long ages out, 
 While all the storms of fate fly o'er your tomb." 
 
 How fine are the lines in " The Hind and the 
 Panther," in which Dryden justifies, or attempts to 
 justify, his conversion to the Church of Rome : 
 
 "What weight of ancient witness can prevail, 
 If private reason hold the public scale ? 
 But, gracious God, how well dost thou provide 
 For erring judgments an unerring guide ! 
 Thy throne is darkness in the abyss of light, 
 A blaze of glory that forbids the sight ; 
 Oh, teach me to believe Thee thus concealed, 
 And search no farther than Thyself revealed ; 
 But her alone for my director take, 
 Whom Thou hast promised never to forsake ! 
 My thoughtless youth was winged with vain desires ; 
 My manhood, long misled by wandering fires, 
 Followed false lights ; and when their glimpse was gone, 
 My pride struck out new sparkles of her own.
 
 ii6 WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 Such was I. such by nature still I am ; 
 
 Be thine the glory, and be mine the shame ! 
 
 Good life be now my task ; my doubts are done ; 
 
 What more could fright my faiih, than three in one?" 
 
 Such writings as these we surely cannot afford 
 to neglect, though they are cast in a mould which 
 has been long broken and thrown on one side. I 
 remember hearing a story told of a humorous old 
 painter who was visited in his studio by a young 
 gentleman fresh from a tour in Italy. " I have been 
 to Italy," said the young man, " and, to tell you the 
 truth, I don't see much in it." His old friend went 
 on quietly painting, saying in a low tone, as if to 
 himself, "Poor devil! Been to Italy! Does not 
 see much in Italy ! Poor devil ! " Well, I must 
 confess that in my undergraduate days contempt 
 of Dryden and Pope I was almost as poor a devil 
 as the young gentleman fresh from Italy. In truth 
 we are most of us, at one time or other of our lives, 
 so many Dogberrys in point of literature. We are 
 proud of our losses. We boast, not only that we 
 have two gowns and everything handsome about 
 us, in other words, that we can see the beauties of 
 Shelley and Browning, but that we have had losses, 
 in other words, that we have no pleasure in Dryden 
 and Pope. I have known a lad proud of never 
 eating apple-pie. We all know the air with which
 
 IV. LORD MA CA ULA Y. 117 
 
 a young man, who is free by a year or two from the 
 temptations of the toffee-shop, announces to his 
 hostess at dinner the important fact that he never 
 eats sweets. If we are to indulge in this affecta- 
 tion, let us confine it to the table, and not let it 
 spread to our bookshelves. Let us never forget 
 that every writer who has stood the test of time 
 must have in him something good, and almost 
 certainly has something great If we cannot dis- 
 cover it, let us not be unwilling to own to ourselves 
 that it is in ourselves, and not in him, that the fault 
 lies. He who has learnt to enjoy a great writer, or 
 a school of great writers, to whose beauties he was 
 before insensible, has opened for himself a fresh 
 inlet of happiness, and has enlarged the borders of 
 his understanding. Let me illustrate this by an 
 interesting passage from Sir George Trevelyan's 
 Life of his uncle, Lord Macaulay. 
 
 " Macaulay had a very slight acquaintance with 
 the works of some among the best writers of his own 
 generation. He was not fond of new lights, unless 
 they had been kindled at the ancient beacons ; and 
 he was apt to prefer a third-rate author, who had 
 formed himself after some recognized model, to a 
 man of high genius, whose style and method were 
 strikingly different from anything that had gone 
 before. In books, as in people and places, he loved
 
 Ii8 WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 that, and that only, to which he had been accustomed 
 from boyhood upwards. Very few among the stu- 
 dents of Macaulay will have detected the intensity 
 and in some cases, it must be confessed, the wilful- 
 ness, of his literary conservatism : for, with the 
 instinctive self-restraint of a great artist, he per- 
 mitted no trace of it to appear in his writings. In 
 his character of a responsible critic, he carefully 
 abstained from giving expression to prejudices in 
 which, as a reader, he freely indulged. Those 
 prejudices injured nobody but himself; and the 
 punishment which befel him, from the very nature 
 of the case, was exactly proportioned to the offence. 
 To be blind to the merits of a great author is a sin 
 which brings its own penalty ; and, in Macaulay 's 
 instance, that penalty was severe indeed. Little as 
 he was aware of it, it was no slight privation that 
 one who had by heart the * Battle of Marathon,' as 
 told by Herodotus, and the ' Raising of the Siege 
 of Syracuse/ as told by Thucydides, should have 
 passed through life without having felt the glow 
 which Mr. Carlyle's story of the charge across the 
 ravine at Dunbar could not fail to awake even in a 
 Jacobite ; that one who so keenly relished the 
 exquisite trifling of Plato should never have tasted 
 the description of Coleridge's talk in the ' Life of 
 John Sterling' ; that one who eagerly and minutely
 
 IV L ORD MA CA ULA Y. 119 
 
 studied all that Lessing has written on art, or 
 Goethe on poetry, should have left unread Mr. 
 Ruskin's comparison between the landscape of the 
 1 Odyssey ' and the landscape of the ' Divine 
 Comedy,' or his analysis of the effect produced on 
 the imagination by long continued familiarity with 
 the aspect of the ' Campanile ' of Giotto." 
 
 Sir George Trevelyan, after thus forcibly pointing 
 out his famous uncle's losses, goes on to make 
 them of very little moment. He says : 
 
 " Great beyond all question, was the intellectual 
 enjoyment that Macaulay forfeited by his unwilling- 
 ness to admit the excellence of anything which had 
 been written in bold defiance of the old canons; but, 
 heavy as the sacrifice was, he could readily afford 
 to make it. With his omnivorous and insatiable 
 appetite for books there was, indeed, little danger 
 that he would ever be at a loss for something to 
 read." ' 
 
 Is there, then, nothing but a loss of enjoyment 
 in such a state of mind as this ? Is that all the 
 sacrifice that was made? Did Macaulay lose 
 nothing by not attempting to understand two 
 writers who have so deeply touched and even 
 changed the thoughts of men ? It is too early to 
 estimate the influence which Mr. Carlyle and Mr. 
 1 " Life of Lord Macaulay,'' ii. 463.
 
 120 WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 Ruskin have exerted on their time. That can 
 only be done by thinkers scarcely yet born ; but 
 that their influence has been great, I might almost 
 say vast, can hardly be denied. To all this influence, 
 though it was working all around, Macaulay was in- 
 sensible. It was his proud hope and noble ambition 
 that he was writing for far distant ages. " I have 
 aimed high," he writes, in speaking of his " History 
 of England " ; "I have tried to do something that 
 may be remembered ; I have had the year 2000, 
 and even the year 3000 often in my mind. I have 
 sacrificed nothing to temporary fashions of thought 
 and style." Eight years later he wrote, just after 
 the publication of the third and fourth volumes, 
 " The victory is won. The book has not disap- 
 pointed the very highly raised expectations of the 
 public. The first fortnight was the time of peril. 
 Now all is safe." x Surely when he wrote these 
 triumphant words the far out-look on the distant 
 centuries must have been closed to him for a time. 
 He needed some Solon to read to him the lesson 
 that was read to the Lydian King, and to tell him 
 that between the years 1856 and 3000 there were 
 29,744 fortnights, " whereof not one but will produce 
 events unlike the rest" Schools of style, of thought, 
 of feeling, will rise and pass away, and time will go 
 1 " Life of Lord Macaulay," ii. 247, 392.
 
 IV.-IMPERFECT SYMPATHIES. 121 
 
 on, as time ever has gone on, endlessly sifting the 
 works of men, and casting on one side among the 
 rubbish of the centuries much that is good, much that 
 is beautiful, much even that bears the mark of high 
 and noble genius, but which reflects too faithfully 
 the age in which it was written, and too little the 
 common feelings of all mankind. Had Macaulay 
 been able to enter into the thoughts of men whose 
 genius was eccentric as well as great ; who, to use 
 Johnson's phrase, " delight to tread upon the brink 
 of meaning," the shout of the first fortnight would, 
 I believe, have been far less loud, but the echo 
 might have rolled from age to age. For if any- 
 thing is fatal to his fame, it will be this imperfect 
 sympathy of his with men who did not, to use 
 Carlyle's humorous phrase, agree with him in look- 
 ing upon the Divine government of the world as 
 a limited whig monarchy. Had he, in the vast 
 sweep of his reading, been able with understanding 
 and sympathy to study the works of writers to 
 whom, by the constitution of his mind, he was most 
 strongly opposed, then we might with good and 
 reasonable hope have joined in the proud thought 
 that men who are separated from us by a greater 
 interval of time than we are separated from King 
 Alfred, will delight in our great historian, who, with 
 all his failings, is certainly one of the chief glories
 
 122 WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 of his age. But I find few traces in his writings or 
 his " Life " that he was aware of the need under 
 which we all lie, of trying to understand those with 
 whom by nature we are most at variance, and of 
 trying by their perfections to piece our imperfec- 
 tions. " Unto the Jews a stumbling-block, and 
 unto the Greeks foolishness" is a text that can be 
 applied in literature as well as in religion. George 
 Fox, the Quaker, was to Macaulay a stumbling- 
 block and a foolishness, and so was James Boswell, 
 and so even, in some respects, was Samuel Johnson. 
 I can never read his famous article in the Edinburgh 
 Review on Boswell's " Life of Johnson " without a 
 feeling of amazement that, with all its brilliancy, it 
 could have been written by a man who was thirty 
 years of age. In its gross ignorance of human 
 nature it was scarcely worthy even of a hopeful lad, 
 a scholar of Balliol, or of Trinity College, Cam- 
 bridge, in his freshman's year. 
 
 The temptations to which the clever young 
 students of the present age are exposed are very 
 different from those which beset our fathers and our 
 grandfathers. There is no fear at present lest 
 common sense should be set up as the image 
 before which we are all to fall down and worship. 
 The path which leads to the shrine of that deity 
 seems likely to become a little grass-grown. In
 
 IV. SUBTLE THINKERS. 123 
 
 a college common room in this university I 
 happened to observe that there never had been, 
 I believed, a time in which men who knew so 
 much wrote so ill. Every age, I said, has its 
 affectations, but the peculiarity of this age was, 
 that men of some learning learning at all 
 events which had been decorated with high uni- 
 versity distinctions, with first-classes, with prizes, 
 with fellowships that men so distinguished often 
 wrote nonsense flowery nonsense it might be, but 
 none the less nonsense. A young man in the 
 company replied that men now-a-days were so 
 much more subtle in their thoughts that language 
 failed them, and that it was not they, but the im- 
 perfections of our tongue that were at fault. It 
 may be so ; but, nevertheless, I shall not easily be 
 persuaded that this English of ours which, in the 
 hands of so many mighty poets and thinkers and 
 writers of every style, has been a perfect and most 
 beautiful instrument, answering the master's touch, 
 whatever note he struck, however high or however 
 low, is too imperfect for these modern thinkers. 
 As we see Shakespeare play upon it we feel as 
 Jubal's brethren felt 
 
 " When Jubal struck the chorded shell, 
 His listening brethren stood around, 
 And wondering on their faces fell
 
 124 WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 To worship that celestial sound : 
 
 Less than a God they thought there could not dwell 
 
 Within the hollow of that shell, 
 
 That spoke so sweetly and so well." 
 
 And now this " chorded shell " is not good 
 enough for our subtle thinkers ! I see no such 
 predominance of thought in my contemporaries 
 as can justify the haze in which they are so often 
 enveloped. He who thinks clearly writes clearly 
 in all ages of the world. When I think of the 
 redundancy and the folly of the words by which 
 many of our popular writers seem both to give 
 pleasure to their readers and to fill their own 
 pockets, I can easily fancy that when they were 
 launched into the world their Genius addressed 
 them as the Host in the " Merry Wives of Wind- 
 sor " addresses Bardolph, when he engages him as 
 tapster : " Let me see thee froth and live." Surely 
 these authors are the very tapsters of literature. 
 Their whole art consists in serving up poor liquor 
 with what is called, in the slang of the tavern bar, 
 a head to it : they do indeed froth and live ! How 
 admirable, by the way, is Falstaff's indignation in 
 the same play when he is mocked by Sir Hugh 
 Evans ! " Seese and putter ! have I lived to stand 
 in the taunt of one that makes fritters of English?" 
 Fritters now-a-days are made of English by men
 
 1V.-WRITING IN TRACK. 125 
 
 who have not the excuse of the honest Welsh 
 parson men to whom " Chatham's language is 
 their mother tongue," men who have studied 
 letters in a great university. 
 
 There is, I suppose, scarcely a single age to be 
 found in which the writers of all classes below the 
 first are entirely free from affectation : " We not 
 only think in track," as Goldsmith said ; but we 
 write in track. Among "the depravations in the 
 republic of letters " he places first " affectation in 
 some popular writer leading others into vicious 
 imitation." At the time when he wrote this there 
 was setting in a vicious imitation of Johnson's 
 style. A young student of Queen's College has 
 left a curious account of the lectures given in 
 Oxford in the year 1779 by Dr. Scott, at that time 
 a Fellow of University College, and Professor of 
 Ancient History, but afterwards the famous Judge 
 of the Admiralty Court and Lord Stowell. " Scott 
 is intimate with Dr. Johnson," the young student 
 writes, " and has a good deal of his manner : 
 elevated style, pointed antithesis, rounded periods, 
 moral and penetrating remarks. Sometimes, how- 
 ever, he copies the Doctor's faults, such as his 
 turgid expressions, and that care to avoid the 
 mention of anything mean or familiar by its com- 
 mon name. This is a grand source of burlesque.
 
 126 WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 For how does a man stare when at the bottom of a 
 grand-sounding sentence he discovers what is as 
 well known to him by its usual appellation as his 
 gloves or his pocket handkerchief. This was 
 sometimes the case with our lecturer, when he 
 was forced to descend to familiar topics. He 
 turned, doubled, and practised all the windings of 
 a hunted hare, in order to avoid that odious word 
 butter or cheese, and talked with great ingenuity 
 about shoes for several minutes without naming 
 them. Describing the houses of the Athenians he 
 acquainted his audience 'that they had no con- 
 venience by which the volatile parts of fire could 
 be conveyed into the open air.' How would a 
 bricklayer stare at being told that he meant no 
 more than that the Athenians had no chimneys ! 
 One great inconvenience attended this constant 
 and studied elevation, for whenever he popped 
 out a familiar word, for which it was impossible to 
 substitute a synonym, it came from him with as 
 ill a grace as an oath would from a bishop, or the 
 language of Billingsgate from a fine lady." J John- 
 son, I may remark, would not have hesitated for 
 one moment to call shoes, shoes, and a chimney a 
 chimney. He tells us of Milton's pipe of tobacco, 
 
 1 Goldsmith's " Present State of Polite Learning," chap, 
 iv., xi. ; " Letters of Radcliffe and James,* p. 92.
 
 IV. FASHIONS IN STYLE. 127 
 
 and of the silver saucepan to which Pope's death 
 was imputed. He could call a spade a spade as 
 well as any man. 
 
 More than twenty years after Dr. Scott had thus 
 amused the undergraduates of Oxford, Dugald 
 Stewart, the great rhetorical philosopher, gave his 
 first course of lectures on Political Economy at 
 Edinburgh. " It was not unusual," says one who 
 was present, " to see a smile on the face of some 
 when they heard subjects discoursed upon seem- 
 ingly beneath the dignity of the academical chair. 
 The word corn sounded strangely in the moral 
 class, and draivbacks seemed a profanation of 
 Stewart's voice." J 
 
 When at length the vicious imitation of John- 
 son's style ceased to be fashionable, the world was 
 none the freer from affectation. Goldsmith would 
 still have found a depravation in the republic of 
 letters. One hundred years or so after he uttered 
 his complaint most of the young authors were 
 under the influence of a man as unlike Johnson 
 in his style as he was like him in his sturdy inde- 
 pendency, his fearlessness, his truthfulness, his 
 rugged tenderness, and his natural piety Thomas 
 Carlyle. Now I would apply to Carlyle's style a 
 passage in which Macaulay describes his own. " I 
 1 Cockburn's " Memorials of his Time," p. 174.
 
 128 WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 looked," he records in his diary, " through 's * 
 
 two volumes. He is, I see, an imitator of me. But 
 I am a very unsafe model. My manner is, I think, 
 and the world thinks, on the whole a good one ; 
 but it is very near to a very bad manner indeed, 
 and those characteristics of my style which are 
 most easily copied are the most questionable." 2 
 Whatever may be the merits of Carlyle's style 
 and that it has great merit most men allow, even 
 those who most clearly see the great faults by 
 which it is marred it is certainly true of it also 
 " that those characteristics which are most easily 
 copied are the most questionable." Sir George 
 Trevelyan regretted, as you have seen, that his 
 uncle could not relish Carlyle's descriptive writings. 
 Much as I have enjoyed them myself, I have been 
 sometimes inclined to think that in the long run 
 they have caused me more misery than pleasure. 
 It was my fortune for many a year to be a Satur- 
 day Reviewer one before whose judgment-seat 
 passed a great variety of writers, most of them, I 
 regret to say, criminals more or less guilty ; worthy 
 if not of death, at least of stripes. I look back 
 even now, when they trouble me no longer, with a 
 kind of horror on the word-painters, as, I suppose, 
 
 1 Mr. Froude, I conjecture. 
 
 " Life of Lord Macaulay," ii., 456.
 
 IV. CARLYLE AND RUSKIN. I2y 
 
 they may justly be called, for their worthless art is 
 called word-painting. 
 
 Carlyle, with all the power of a great master, 
 has described the field of Dunbar or "the beach 
 of Kirkaldy in summer twilights, a mile of the 
 smoothest sand, with one long wave coming on 
 gently, steadily, and breaking in gradual explosion 
 into harmless melodious white, at your hand all 
 the way ; the break of it rushing along like a mane 
 of foam, beautifully sounding and advancing." x 
 Mr. Ruskin, lecturing at Edinburgh, thus brings 
 before the mind's eye a distant city of Italy : 
 
 " Now I remember a city, more nobly placed 
 even than your Edinburgh, which, instead of the 
 valley that you have now filled by lines of railroad, 
 has a broad and rushing river of blue water sweep- 
 ing through the heart of it ; which, for the dark 
 and solitary rock that bears your castle, has an 
 amphitheatre of cliffs crested with cypresses and 
 olive ; which, for the two masses of Arthur's Seat 
 and the ranges of the Pentlands, has a chain of 
 blue mountains higher than the haughtiest peaks of 
 your Highlands ; and which, for your far-away Ben 
 Ledi and Ben More, has the great central chain of 
 the St. Gothard Alps : and yet as you go out of 
 the gates, and walk in the suburban streets of that 
 1 " Reminiscences of Thomas Carlyle," i. 104. 
 9
 
 130 WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 city I mean Verona the eye never seeks to rest 
 on that external scenery, however gorgeous ; it 
 does not look for the gaps between the houses, as 
 you do here ; it may for a few moments follow 
 the broken line of the great Alpine battlements ; 
 but it is only where they form a background for 
 other battlements, built by the hand of man. 
 There is no necessity felt to dwell on the blue 
 river or the burning hills. The heart and eye 
 have enough to do in the streets of the city itself; 
 they are contented there ; nay, they sometimes 
 turn from the natural scenery, as if too savage and 
 solitary, to dwell with a deeper interest on the 
 palace walls that cast their shade upon the streets, 
 and the crowd of towers that rise out of that 
 shadow into the depth of the sky." x 
 
 The art of Carlyle and Ruskin, because of its 
 ease, seems easy ; and so a host of servile imitators 
 spring up like mushrooms in a September night. 
 Everything is described in the heavens above, or 
 in the earth beneath, or in the waters under the 
 earth, and is described at a length that justifies 
 the suspicion that the payment, as indeed often is 
 the case, is at the rate of penny-a-line more or less. 
 Description runs mad, and vulgarly mad ; for the 
 infinitely little and the infinitely base are painted 
 
 1 " Lectures on Architecture and Painting," ed. 1855, p. 3.
 
 IV. DESCRIPTIVE WRITING. 131 
 
 with words as many and as fine as the beautiful 
 and the sublime. How often, as I have toiled 
 through the piled-up epithets, each substantive 
 duly supported by its triplet of adjectives, and 
 each verb by at least a brace of adverbs, while the 
 writer is painting perchance the beginning of 
 spring, have I called to mind the master-touches 
 in which in two lines the poet does what these 
 word-painters fail to do in twice two hundred : 
 
 "He felt the cheering power of spring, 
 It made him whistle, it made him sing." 
 
 Do we ask for a picture of a spring day ? This 
 single couplet at once brings the April in our eyes. 
 Let me quote a passage from a writer who as- 
 suredly had very little observation of the face of 
 nature, and whose powers of description were 
 therefore small, to show you in how few words, 
 when they are well chosen, a wild and striking 
 scene may be brought before us. Dr. Johnson is 
 describing his ride on a wild and stormy night of 
 late autumn through the Highlands of Argyle. 
 
 " The wind was loud, the rain was heavy, and 
 the whistling of the blast, the fall of the shower, 
 the rush of the cataracts, and the roar of the 
 torrent, made a nobler chorus of the rough music
 
 132 WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 of nature than it had ever been my chance to hear 
 before." 
 
 What better description of a wild mountain ride 
 could we have had even though the writer had 
 heaped up his words as if he were piling Ossa on 
 Pelion, and leafy Olympus on Ossa ? 
 
 Goldsmith, in the humorous account which he 
 gave to Sir Joshua Reynolds of the arrival of him- 
 self and his friends at Calais, says : " Upon landing 
 two little trunks, which was all we carried with us, 
 we were surprised to see fourteen or fifteen fellows 
 all running down to the ship to lay their hands 
 upon them ; four got under each trunk, the rest 
 surrounded and held the hasps ; and in this manner 
 our little baggage was conducted with a kind of 
 funeral solemnity till it was safely lodged at the 
 Custom-house." 2 Now the words of many of the 
 modern descriptive writers bear much the same re- 
 lation to the thoughts which they, as it were convey, 
 as these Calais porters bore to the luggage. There 
 is a struggling procession of substantives, adjectives, 
 verbs, and adverbs, all bustling along, knocking 
 one against the other, tripping over one another's 
 heels, stunning the ears with a confused din, bear- 
 
 1 Southey's " Inchcape Bell"; Johnson's "Works," ix. 
 
 155. 
 * Forster's " Life of Goldsmith," ed. 1871, ii. 216.
 
 IV. WORD PAINTERS. 133 
 
 ing along in triumph a couple of empty band-boxes. 
 I have one great hope that this word-painting will 
 have but a brief existence, and " with all its trum- 
 pery " will pass away for ever. " Tis," as Hamlet 
 says, " as easy as lying," and so can be practised 
 by every one. It is the kind of stuff that " a man 
 might write for ever, if he would abandon his 
 mind to it" Since then every man, every woman, 
 and every child can become his own word-painter, 
 the art must cease to be profitable. Moreover, 
 happily, in every case there does come at length a 
 surfeit of bad taste. The world may remain as 
 foolish as ever ; the common stock of folly may 
 keep as large as ever, whatever changes may take 
 place ; folly, as Horace Walpole says, may be 
 matter, and, therefore, cannot be annihilated ; 
 nevertheless, a change the world will have, even 
 though it is only a change of foolishness. It is 
 my hope, my confident hope, therefore, that from 
 word-painting the land will soon have rest ; if not 
 for ever, nevertheless, for a period far exceeding 
 in length the scriptural one of forty years. That 
 this blessed time may the sooner begin, let me beg 
 you one and all to make a vow of abstinence from 
 the use of the dozen or two of epithets with which 
 these word-painters mix all their colours. Try to 
 pass a whole twelvemonth without so much as
 
 134 WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 once writing, or even uttering, sheen and sheer, 
 shimmer and subtle and weird and opalescent 
 and glint and the rest. Your mothers and your 
 grandmothers got through life comfortably enough 
 without the use of any one of them. Do not have 
 the reproach cast on you which was cast on the 
 schoolmaster and the curate in " Love's Labour 
 Lost " " They have been at a great feast of 
 languages and stole the scraps." Do not be con- 
 tent to live " on the alms-basket of words." Lay 
 to heart the advice which Charles Lamb gave to 
 a friend who had sent him his poems : " If you 
 count," he wrote, "you will wonder how many 
 times you have repeated the word unearthly; 
 thrice in one poem. It is become a slang word 
 with the bards ; avoid it in future lustily." * 
 
 There will also be before long, I trust, a return 
 to that clearness of writing which was perhaps the 
 most distinguishing mark of the writers of the 
 eighteenth century a clearness which was due 
 mainly to clear thinking, but partly also to the 
 trouble which they took to write clearly. Of style 
 they made a careful and even a laborious study. 
 " How little," wrote Macaulay more than forty years 
 ago, "how little the all-important art of making 
 meaning pellucid is studied now ! Hardly any 
 1 " Letters of Charles Lamb," ed. A. Ainger, ii. 107.
 
 IV. MA CA ULA Y'S STYLE. 135 
 
 popular writer, except myself, thinks of it. Many 
 seem to aim at being obscure. Indeed, they may 
 be right enough in one sense, for many readers 
 give credit for profundity to whatever is obscure, 
 and call all that is perspicuous shallow. But 
 coraggio! and think of A.D. 2850. Where will your 
 Emersons be then ? But Herodotus will still be 
 read with delight We must do our best to be 
 read too." x 
 
 Macaulay often fell into the opposite error, and 
 wrote too clearly, for he leaves nothing for his 
 readers to do but understand him without the 
 slightest exertion on their part He never goes 
 shares with them, to use Charles Lamb's expres- 
 sion. He writes like a skilled rhetorician who, 
 when addressing an audience, does not hesitate to 
 repeat himself, so long as he varies the words, 
 knowing well that either through inattention or 
 stupidity much of what he says would be otherwise 
 lost. What may be a merit in a spoken speech is 
 a defect in a written book. Macaulay's conde- 
 scending clearness becomes at times very tedious. 
 When we have once firmly grasped the fact that 
 two and two make four, we do not care to be told 
 that by the addition of two and two is composed 
 the fourth numeral. The obscurity under which 
 1 " Life of Lord Macaulay," ii. 273.
 
 136 WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 we are now suffering differs not a little from that 
 of which Macaulay complained. The writers whom 
 he attacked affected a depth of thought German 
 thought, if I may so term it which in its own 
 nature, they maintained, could not but be obscure. 
 We have still, as I have shown, this pretence of 
 thinking beyond the powers of clear utterance ; 
 but added to it, we have a profusion of epithets 
 apparently often chosen at random, and pitched 
 into the midst of the sentence for their picturesque- 
 ness, not for any meaning that they have or purpose 
 that they serve. At their best they are but 
 
 " Rich windows that exclude the light ; " 
 at their worst they are 
 
 " Passages that lead to nothing." 
 
 Even those authors who manage this modern style 
 best fatigue by their very brilliancy. A brilliant 
 writer indeed tries poor human patience almost as 
 much as a brilliant performer on the pianoforte. 
 How good was the advice given by " the old tutor 
 of a college to one of his pupils " Read over your 
 compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage 
 which you think is particularly fine, strike it out" * 
 But in this particular brilliant style which I am 
 
 1 Boswell's " Life of Johnson," ii. 237.
 
 IV. BRILLIANT WRITERS. 137 
 
 attacking there is nothing but bright-coloured 
 patches nothing but shreds of purpureus pannus 
 stitched together after the fashion of a coverlet that 
 is made up by piecing together the gaudiest snip- 
 pings, the gatherings of many years. Every thread 
 of every patch is made as bright as the brightest. 
 There is nothing but glare. I would as soon walk 
 along the eastern bank of a stream in the late 
 afternoon of an unclouded day in summer, and be 
 distressed by the dazzling reflection of the sinking 
 sun in the water as read such writers as these. 
 There is no good to be got from them. To write 
 fine passages, such as those which the old tutor 
 told his pupil to strike out, may be a useful exer- 
 cise ; for from the practice of rhetoric comes a 
 facility of writing. I hold, indeed, that a young 
 man gives not a little promise as a writer, who in 
 the first draft often writes finely, but who in the 
 revision has good taste enough to detect the tinsel, 
 and courage enough to rip it off. But when all 
 is brilliancy, then nothing can be cut away. The 
 whole must go or nothing. 
 
 Nourished as I have chiefly been on writers of 
 a very different school from those who are the 
 favourites of the present day, I may see too clearly 
 and attack too strongly the faults of a school which 
 I detest. Nevertheless, I cannot be wrong when I
 
 
 133 
 
 WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 maintain that as every age of writers has faults, and 
 faults peculiar to itself, he who wishes to write well 
 must study writers of different ages and widely 
 different styles. A language, like a country in 
 unsettled times, is threatened on all sides with 
 constant invasions ; but it has this great danger 
 added that the young recruits are too apt to turn 
 deserters, and not only to throw open the gates to 
 the invaders who are pouring in, but even to deck 
 themselves with their foreign badges. We are 
 often blinded, moreover, to that duty which we 
 owe to our noble language by some of our best 
 affections. We see so strongly the merits of some 
 great teacher that we refuse to see his faults. 
 " We cannot love without imitating," says Landor ; 
 " and we are as proud in the loss of our originality 
 as of our freedom." z "I have such a love for Mr. 
 Ruskin," said an earnest student to a friend of 
 mine, "that even when I know that what he writes 
 is absurd, I do my best not to see it." " Amicus 
 Plato, sed magis arnica veritas." Mr. Ruskin is 
 is doubtless dear, but truth should be still dearer. 
 The only safeguard against this excessive, this 
 superstitious hero-worship, is to be found in the 
 number and in the diversity of our heroes. He 
 who enjoys a great variety of styles is much less 
 1 " Pericles and Aspasia," ed. by C. G. Crump, i. 69.
 
 IV. THE STUDY OF STYLE. 139 
 
 likely to fall into the faults of any single one. 
 Had we lived a hundred years ago, while we 
 studied in the " Rambler " or the " Lives of the 
 Poets" the force, the clearness, and the cadence 
 which had been given to our language by Johnson, 
 we should, if we were wise, have carefully guarded 
 ourselves against a mode of composition which was 
 essentially faulty, to whose fascinations, nevertheless, 
 some great writers yielded far too much. In fact, 
 we should have done well to follow Johnson's own 
 advice when he says that " whoever wishes to attain 
 an English style, familiar but not coarse, and ele- 
 gant but not ostentatious, must give his days and 
 nights to the volumes of Addison." 1 
 
 The advice which I am giving is, I am well 
 aware, by no means easy /to follow. We have our 
 prejudices against us, and, as I have said, our 
 affections too. We do not easily mingle minds 
 with those from whom we are widely different. In 
 our youth we are hero-worshippers, and when age 
 begins to steal upon us the indolence of the growing 
 years whispers to us that the study of new schools 
 of thought is certainly hard, and not certainly pro- 
 fitable. Yet the effort must be made. Taste can 
 be ruined, and on the ruins of taste countless are 
 the evils which spring up and thrive. 
 1 Johnson's " Works," vii. 473.
 
 LECTURE V.
 
 LECTURE V. 
 
 IN this lecture and my next I wish to examine 
 the part which the study of literature should 
 play in education. What is our chief, our highest 
 aim I would ask, in the education which we give to 
 the young, and which, if we are wise, we never cease 
 to give to ourselves ? It is a question to which a 
 different answer is far too commonly given now 
 from what was given of old. The world is looked 
 upon as a vast battle-field in which the exceeding 
 great reward is not the inner life nobly lived, but 
 the outer life nobly recompensed. It is not a 
 race against ourselves, but a race against outsiders. 
 It is not a race where all who run, if they have 
 laboriously trained themselves are sure of a prize, 
 but one in which the runners are many and the 
 prizes few. The child, the boy, the young man are 
 not taught that their chief competitors are them-
 
 144 WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 selves. It is not themselves but their companions 
 that they must strive to overcome. As if this strife 
 were not enough we are terrified by the sound 01' 
 foreign competition. Unless our children are 
 taught the natural sciences, French and German, 
 shorthand, and what not, we shall be beaten out of 
 all the markets of the world. The laborious Ger- 
 mans have already supplanted us, we are told, in 
 many a distant mart ; the manufactures of England 
 must dwindle away because our lads know nothing 
 of chemistry, while the ignorance of our commer- 
 cial travellers and clerks of modern languages will 
 make the sun of England's glory set The day 
 will come before long when it will be said that : 
 
 " She whom mighty nations curtsied to, 
 Like a forlorn and desperate castaway 
 Did shameful execution on herself," 
 
 by her neglect of what is vulgarly known as the 
 modern side. Such was not the view of education 
 maintained by Samuel Johnson in that fine passage 
 in which he criticizes Milton's scheme : 
 
 " But the truth is, that the knowledge of external 
 nature, and the sciences which that knowledge 
 requires or includes, are not the great or the 
 frequent business of the human mind. Whether 
 we provide for action or conversation, whether we
 
 V.MIL TON A GAINST SOCRA TES. 145 
 
 wish to be useful or pleasing, the first requisite is 
 the religious and moral knowledge of right and 
 wrong; the next is an acquaintance with the 
 history of mankind, and with those examples 
 which may be said to embody truth, and prove by 
 events the reasonableness of opinions. Prudence 
 and justice are virtues and excellencies of all times 
 and of all places ; we are perpetually moralists, 
 but we are geometricians only by chance. Our 
 intercourse with intellectual nature is necessary ; 
 our speculations upon matters are voluntary, and 
 at leisure. Physiological learning is of such rare 
 emergence, that one may know another half 
 his life, without being able to estimate his skill in 
 hydrostatics or astronomy ; but his moral and 
 prudential character immediately appears. 
 
 " Those authors, therefore, are to be read at 
 schools that supply most axioms of prudence, 
 most principles of moral truth, and most materials 
 for conversation ; and these purposes are best 
 served by poets, orators, and historians. 
 
 " Let me not be censured for this digression, as 
 pedantic and paradoxical ; for, if I have Milton 
 against me, I have Socrates on my side. It was 
 his labour to turn philosophy from the study of 
 nature to speculations upon life ; but the inno- 
 vators whom I oppose are turning off attention 
 
 10
 
 146 WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 from life to nature. They seem to think that we 
 are placed here to watch the growth of plants, or 
 the motions of the stars. Socrates was rather of 
 opinion that what we had to learn was, how to 
 do good and avoid evil. 
 
 " OTTI TOI kv fjiiydpoiffi KO.KOV T&jaQov rt TBTVKTO.I " * 
 
 I am very far from holding with Johnson in all 
 that he says, as I shall presently show ; but this I 
 do hold, that whether we are dealing with the child 
 of a ploughman or the child of a king, it is at the 
 perfection of his manhood that we should aim. 
 We are to be made men first, and ploughmen, mer- 
 chants, manufacturers, artisans, authors, teachers, 
 barristers, priests, or kings afterwards. We must 
 teach first nobility of life ; we must teach cha- 
 racter ; we must teach the love of honest, thorough 
 work and its dignity ; we must teach the love of 
 knowledge ; we must teach the enjoyment of what 
 is simple, innocent, beautiful, and noble ; we must 
 teach that sober reasonableness, that knowledge of 
 the art of life, that wisdom by which alone we can 
 guide our little bark in safety down the rapid 
 brawling stream of life. And to teach all these 
 good things we must first learn them. 
 
 x "What good, what ill hath in thine house befallen ' 
 (Johnson's "Works," vii. 76).
 
 V. THE A IM OF ED UCA TION. \ 47 
 
 " But Cristes lore, and his apostles twelve 
 He taught, but first he followed it himselve." 
 
 The pettiness, the coarseness, the meanness, the 
 selfishness, the brutality of life meet us on all 
 sides. 
 
 " Shades of the prison-house begin to close 
 Upon the growing boy." 
 
 As we grow older cares and trouble come upon 
 us ; hopes are baffled, affections are wounded ; 
 death, who has silently watched our plan of life, 
 the pleasant habitation which we are slowly raising, 
 with a sudden rush sweeps one-half of it away ; 
 disease attacks us, and "Melancholy's phantoms 
 haunt our shade." We may have, too, our times 
 of prosperity, when all goes well with us. In our 
 youth we may gain prizes and exhibitions, scholar- 
 ships and fellowships ; we may thrive in business, 
 and grow in wealth ; we may be distinguished 
 schoolmasters, eminent physicians, leading queen's 
 counsel, great members of parliament, famous 
 divines ; we may have swum " this many summers 
 in a sea of glory," and the bladders on which we 
 float may never yet have burst. In all these 
 shifting scenes of life how is the balance of the 
 mind to be kept? The answer was given long 
 ages ago. " Wisdom is the principal thing, there-
 
 148 WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 fore get wisdom, and with all thy getting get 
 understanding." 
 
 No one, not even the outcast, not even the 
 poorest workhouse boy is to be trained as a mere 
 producing machine. He is to be made a man first 
 and a producer afterwards. "Misery," said Carlyle, 
 in describing his father's hard childhood, " misery 
 was early training the rugged boy into a stoic 
 that one day he might be the assurance of a 
 Scottish man." But misery is a hard and most 
 uncertain mistress. For the most part the children 
 trained by her sink to a lower level than the brutes. 
 It was not misery alone which trained James 
 Carlyle. He trusted besides, to use his son's 
 words, " to the scanty precepts of his mother, and 
 to what seeds or influences of culture were hanging, 
 as it were, in the atmosphere of his environment." J 
 Happy the household, however poor, where these 
 seeds, these influences are found ! Happy the 
 children who, in the talk round the family table, 
 hear tell of" golden days, fruitful in golden deeds ! " 
 Happy, too, are those whose "imagination is 
 stretched" while they are young, ere 
 
 " Custom lie upon them with a weight, 
 Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life." 
 
 1 Carlyle's " Reminiscences," i. 36-7.
 
 V. ROBERT BURNS. 149 
 
 Look at the childhood of the greatest of Scottish 
 peasants Robert Burns. He was brought up in 
 the hard school of poverty " with the unceasing 
 moil," as he describes it, " of a galley-slave." But 
 his father had struggled " to keep him and his 
 other children under his own eye till they could 
 discern between good and evil. He understood 
 men, their manners, and their ways," and what he 
 had learnt he taught his children. But the boy 
 had another teacher, an old woman who resided in 
 the family, " remarkable," Burns says, " for her 
 ignorance, credulity, and superstition " ; but I will 
 venture to maintain a better infant schoolmistress 
 for a young poet than any training-school could 
 turn out. " She had the largest collection in the 
 country of tales and songs concerning devils, 
 ghosts, fairies, brownies, witches, warlocks, spun- 
 kies, kelpies, elf-candles, dead-lights, wraiths, appa- 
 ritions, cantraips, giants, enchanted towers, dragons, 
 and other trumpery. This," Burns continues, 
 " cultivated the latent seeds of poetry." Old 
 Northcote the painter, who in his boyhood had 
 touched the skirt of Sir Joshua Reynolds's coat, 
 who had known Goldsmith, and who lived to be 
 asked by a little child named John Ruskin why 
 there were holes in his carpet Northcote, I say, 
 talking one day to Hazlitt, said : " 'Jack the Giant
 
 150 WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 Killer' is the first book I ever read, and I cannot 
 describe the pleasure it gives me even now. I 
 cannot look into it without my eyes filling with 
 tears. I do not know what it is, whether good or 
 bad, but it is to me, from early impressions, the 
 most heroic of performances. I remember once 
 not having money to buy it, and I transcribed it 
 all out with my own hand. Had I been bred a 
 scholar," he continues, " I dare say Homer would 
 have been my Jack the Giant Killer." Charles 
 Lamb, lamenting to Coleridge the banishment " of 
 all the old classics of the nursery," says : " Think 
 what you would have been now, if instead of being 
 fed with tales and old wives' fables in childhood, 
 you had been crammed with geography and 
 natural history." It was not only with old wives' 
 fables that Burns had been fed. By the village 
 schoolmaster he was taught English, and taught it 
 well. " The earliest composition," he says, " that 
 I recollect taking pleasure in was ' The Vision of 
 Mirza,' and a hymn of Addison's, beginning, ' How 
 are Thy servants blest, O Lord ! ' I particularly 
 remember one half stanza, which was music to 
 my boyish ears : 
 
 ' For though on dreadful whirls we hung 
 High on the broken wave.'
 
 VIMA GIN A TION KILLED. 1 5 1 
 
 I met with these pieces in Mason's ' English Collec- 
 tion,' one of my school-books. The two first books 
 I ever read in private, and which gave me more 
 pleasure than any two books I ever read since, were 
 'The Life of Hannibal' and 'The History of Sir 
 William Wallace.' Hannibal gave my young ideas 
 such a turn that I used to strut in raptures up and 
 down after the recruiting-drum and bagpipe, and 
 wish myself tall enough to be a soldier ; while the 
 story of Wallace poured a Scottish prejudice into 
 my veins, which will boil along there till the flood- 
 gates of life shut in eternal rest." z 
 
 The flood-gates of life were not shut till the 
 poet, with the old story still working in him, on the 
 field of Bannockburn wrote his hymn of liberty. 
 
 There is no quality which more needs cultivating 
 at the present day than imagination. It is killed 
 by our civilization, it dies in the meanness of our 
 great towns in that "endless addition of littleness 
 to littleness " to use Edmund Burke's description 
 of London. 2 Not but that theve are quarters in 
 our great city where it may still be nourished. In 
 the roar of its streets ; the hurrying to and fro of 
 
 1 Burns's " Poems," ed. 1846, p. 15; "Conversations of 
 Northcote," ed. 1830, p. 96 ; " Letters of Charles Lamb," ed. 
 by A. Ainger, i. 189. 
 
 2 " Correspondence of Edmund Burke," iii. 422.
 
 152 WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 eager multitudes ; the gathering together of 
 travelled men from almost all the countries of the 
 world ; the strange assemblage of commodities 
 where the East meets the West, and the North the 
 South ; in the quiet courts and ancient buildings 
 lying so close to " the way of common trade," but 
 not of it; "the sky-like dome" of the great 
 cathedral ; Westminster Abbey with its tombs of 
 "kings and counsellors of the earth," and its 
 Poets' Corner, where sleep men greater than kings 
 and counsellors ; the Tower of London with its 
 little chapel " where the prisoners rest together " ; 
 Smithfield with its memory of the martyrs in all 
 these we find abundant food for the imagination- 
 In spite of the vast growth of the unwieldly city, 
 and the ever-deepening gloom of its canopy of 
 smoke, now and then early in a summer morning, 
 or on a Sunday when ten thousand furnaces are 
 extinct, when the freshening wind or a passing 
 shower has cleared the air, we can still, as the 
 Thames flows beneath us, partake of the deep 
 feeling which moved Wordsworth, when eighty- 
 eight years ago standing on Westminster Bridge, 
 he composed his noble sonnet : 
 
 " Earth has not anything to show more fair ; 
 Dull would he be of soul who could pass by 
 A sight so touching in its majesty
 
 V. LONDON. 153 
 
 This city now doth like a garment wear 
 
 The beauty of the morning ; silent, bare, 
 
 Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie 
 
 Open unto the fields, and to the sky ; 
 
 All bright and glittering in the smokeless air 
 
 Never did sun more beautifully steep 
 
 In his first splendour valley, rock, or hill ; 
 
 Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep ! 
 
 The river glideth at his own sweet will : 
 
 Dear God ! the very houses seem asleep ; 
 
 And all that mighty heart is lying still 1 " 
 
 To have such thoughts as these set stirring in 
 us, it must be with a mind not unstored with 
 knowledge that we wander through the streets. 
 " He who would bring home the wealth of the 
 Indies must carry the wealth of the Indies with 
 him." But whatever impulses can be given to the 
 imagination by the full and varied life of old 
 London, how miserably is it starved by " the long 
 unlovely streets " of the western quarter, and by 
 the meanness of the poorer suburbs ! I not un- 
 frequently have to make my way from Holborn to 
 Hampstead. On Staple Inn, with its fine old 
 gables and its memories of Samuel Johnson, I 
 cast " one longing, lingering look behind," and 
 plunge into three or four miles of dejection. The 
 eye droops and the spirit with it at the sight of 
 prolonged and unmixed meanness. For a moment
 
 154 WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 they may revive a little as I pass a large church- 
 yard where flowers and trees have been lately 
 planted, and walks thrown open, where the young 
 play and the old rest ; they may even revive at the 
 great Midland Railway Station at St. Pancras, for 
 there man has aimed at magnificence ; but Camden 
 Town, " that dismal world," beats them down lower 
 than ever. They sink to rise no more. Few 
 sadder thoughts come into my mind than when 
 from the roof of the tramcar I look down upon 
 street after street of children brought up in the 
 midst of this ugly meanness, with their imagination 
 hopelessly starved. They may be happy enough 
 under their smoky sky: they may "shout 'neath 
 their sulphurous canopy " ; but it is the happiness 
 of stunted growth, the shout far too often of coarse 
 joy. One of the noblest qualities of the mind has 
 in them received no nutriment. It is starved more- 
 over by the advance of science, that is rapidly 
 dispelling those clouds of superstition which, irra- 
 diated by fancy, often cast a glow of beauty on 
 every-day life. 
 
 " They fade into the light of common day." 
 
 It is with deep thankfulness that I see these 
 clouds scattered, for they brought with them not
 
 V. GREECE AND HOMER. 155 
 
 only beauty, but gloom and terror and cruelty. 
 But while we acknowledge the gain, let us not 
 shut our eyes to the loss. It was of this loss which 
 Lamb was thinking when he mourned over " the 
 old classics of the nursery." It was this loss 
 which moved Wordsworth so deeply when he 
 cried out : 
 
 " The world is too much with us ; late and soon, 
 Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers : 
 Little we see in Nature that is ours ; 
 We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon ! 
 This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon ; 
 The winds that will be howling at all hours, 
 And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers ; 
 For this, for everything, we are out of tune ; 
 It moves us not. Great God ! I'd rather be 
 A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn ; 
 So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, 
 Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn ; 
 Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea ; 
 Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn." 
 
 Happy as Greece was in her mountains, and her 
 valleys, her clear sky and her deep blue sea with 
 its countless inlets and islands, still happier, I have 
 often thought, was she in her Homer. In the Iliad 
 and Odyssey she had two great poems which could 
 equally delight the child and solace the aged man. 
 No one was too young for them, no one too old. 
 The same splendid luminary which in every man
 
 156 WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 ushered in the dawn of thought and fancy, gave 
 light to his matured understanding, and with its 
 radiance did not desert his declining years. By 
 Homer's verse the ear of the child, while yet his 
 mind caught but little of its meaning, was trained 
 in the beauty of words and of rhythm ; by the 
 strange stories his imagination was stretched and 
 his eager curiosity awakened. By the praise of 
 great men and noble deeds his love of virtue and 
 of his country was roused. Much he could not at 
 first follow, but his little thoughts would be set 
 working. There was no writing down to his 
 understanding. He would struggle to rise to the 
 poet's level ; no bard of poems in words of one 
 syllable was required to come down to his. Single 
 lines, and then whole passages would fix them- 
 selves in his memory, where they would remain as 
 long as memory itself remained. They would 
 come back to him in the time of trial, in the Bay 
 of Salamis, and on the Plain of Marathon. They 
 would clothe the world in a vesture of beauty; they 
 would provide him with a refuge from the squalor 
 and meanness of his own surroundings ; they would 
 give him a deep sense of the dignity of man ; they 
 would inspire him with a pride in his city. That 
 place, he was resolved, should be no mean city of 
 which he was a citizen. " Our poorest citizens,"
 
 V. THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 1 5 7 
 
 said Pericles, "have a keen relish for fine poetry, 
 eloquence, art and grace of every kind." This, 
 added Grote, "is what was true of Athens, and has 
 never perhaps been true of any community since." 
 It was mainly by Homer Homer who accom- 
 panied the Athenian citizen from his cradle to his 
 grave, that this relish was given. How deeply 
 their great national poet moved the Greeks we can 
 in some measure judge by the way in which it 
 moves even us, who are strangers to their land, 
 and parted from them by a wide waste of years. 
 "I walked far into Herefordshire," writes Macaulay 
 on a certain day in August, 1851, "and read, while 
 walking, the last five books of the Iliad, with deep 
 interest and many tears. I was afraid to be seen 
 crying by the parties of walkers that met me as I 
 came back : crying for Achilles cutting off his hair ; 
 crying for Priam rolling on the ground in the 
 courtyard of his house ; mere imaginary beings, 
 creatures of an old ballad-maker who died near 
 three thousand years ago." x 
 
 Our English Bible, while it does much for us 
 that Homer could never do, might have done far 
 more for the imagination had it not been " soiled 
 by all ignoble use." It is as noble a piece of prose 
 
 1 " Life of George Grote," p. 203 ; " Life of Lord Ma- 
 caulay," ed. 1877, ii. 297.
 
 158 WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 as any tongue can boast of; io its language it 
 stands side by side with Shakespeare. They are 
 the great twin brethren of English literature. But 
 on it have been hung system after system, creed 
 after creed. It has been used as the battle-field of 
 bigotry and dulness ; as the torture chamber of 
 childhood ; as a dark hole in which imagination 
 and fancy, gaiety and all the joys of living should 
 be stifled. It has been turned into a task-book, 
 a book of impositions and punishments. It has 
 been treated as no other great work has ever 
 before been treated. Its most beautiful verses 
 have been stretched and expanded and paraphrased 
 till they cover more roods of print than Milton's 
 Satan covered of the burning flood. "Jesus wept" 
 was turned by the Rev. Dr. Harwood in his 
 " Liberal Translation of the New Testament" into 
 " the Saviour of the world burst into a flood of 
 tears." " Puppy," exclaimed Dr. Johnson, as he 
 contemptuously threw the book aside. But in the 
 church or chapel the child or youth cannot cry out 
 "Puppy! " when for three-quarters of an hour some 
 dull fellow turns a noble and beautiful thought into 
 a dreary wilderness of words. If he did he would 
 be caned by the beadle or indicted for brawling. 
 Then, too, there are those who, with what Addison 
 calls "a natural uncheerfulness of heart, are scan-
 
 V.THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 159 
 
 dalized at youth for being lively, and at childhood 
 for being playful. They sit at a christening 
 or a marriage-feast as at a funeral, sigh at 
 the conclusion of a merry story, and grow devout 
 when the rest of the company grow pleasant." 1 In 
 the hands of such people as these the Scriptures 
 are only used as a rude weapon of offence, as a 
 stick to beat a sinner with. In after days by that 
 strange association of ideas which plays such freaks 
 with us, it only too commonly happens that the 
 sight of the Bible, after this cruel misuse of it, at 
 once rouses in the mind a feeling of dulness and 
 depression. To many, I gladly own, it always re- 
 mains the freshest of books. It fed John Bunyan, 
 a man unsurpassed in imagination. From it John 
 Milton drew one-half of his inspiration, and John 
 Bright the best part of his noble oratory. Even 
 with all its misuse it is the book which most of all 
 has carried imagination into children's hearts. It 
 might in all of us remain throughout life the chief 
 source of that sublime faculty were it not degraded 
 from its high post by man's dulness. In these 
 latter days a worse evil than ever has befallen it ; 
 it has got into the stifling grasp of school-inspec- 
 
 1 BoswelPs " Life of Johnson," Hi. 39 ; The Spectator, 
 No. 494.
 
 160 WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 tors and examiners. Against them "even the 
 Gods strive in vain." 
 
 In the dulness of modern life imagination is still 
 further starved. Of old in the stately processions 
 of the court, of the church, and of the guilds a 
 rich and varied colouring was given to our streets. 
 The signboards over the shops, with their pictures 
 of more animals than are known to nature, and 
 the bright colours of the clothes commonly worn, 
 lent life and animation to the scene. Even the 
 men of last century, scorned as they are for their 
 want of fancy, wore coats of blue and green and 
 scarlet. Goldsmith's bloom-coloured coat must 
 have helped to brighten Fleet Street. The God- 
 dess of Dulness had not yet appeared under her 
 new name of Respectability, with her worshippers 
 wearing black coats and tall silk hats. 
 
 " Before her fancy's gilded clouds decay, 
 And all its varying rainbows die away." 
 
 Even Oxford has turned traitor. The gown 
 which gave so picturesque a look to her streets is 
 now but little worn, and is likely before very long 
 to become a relic of the past. Men are afraid of 
 being suspected of taking pride in wearing it. 
 Strangers in the coming century will be heard 
 saying, with the change of but one word in 
 Tennyson's lines :
 
 V. SCHOOLBOY GAMES. 161 
 
 " I past beside the reverend walls 
 In which of old they wore the gown." 
 
 Even in our very playgrounds imagination is 
 struck with decay. It was said by Dr. Arbuthnot, 
 that " most universal genius " of Queen Anne's 
 days, "that nowhere is tradition preserved pure 
 and incorrupt but among schoolboys, whose games 
 and plays are handed down invariably the same 
 from one generation to another." z A single 
 generation has, however, seen more games die out 
 than it took fifty generations to invent. They 
 may, perhaps, linger in the smaller schools in out- 
 of-the-way places, but they are everywhere, I 
 fear, fast disappearing. Lads play solemnly and 
 by system. They take their games as their fore- 
 fathers were said to take their pleasures sadly. 
 We no longer see 
 
 " Four-and-twenty happy boys 
 Come bounding out of school." 
 
 They first put on their flannels, and then stride 
 forth majestically. The delightful naturalness of 
 games, the unbounded freedom, the perfect sim- 
 plicity in which all was forgotten but the joy of 
 playing is known no more. Jack runs and jumps, 
 not because 
 
 1 Swift's "Works," ed. 1803, xxiii. 22. 
 ii
 
 1 62 WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 " He lightly draws his breath, 
 And feels his life in every limb ; " 
 
 but that he may run a hundred yards in a quarter 
 of a second less than Harry, or jump an eighth of 
 an inch higher than Tom. A cricket match is 
 carried on with a gravity which would not disgrace 
 a set of undertakers. Every part of it is after- 
 wards dissected as minutely as the anatomist 
 dissects a muscle, and analyzed as carefully as a 
 new substance in chemistry. Averages are struck 
 and results are published with far greater accuracy 
 than we can hope ever to see attained in the census 
 paper. Football is put under law-givers almost as 
 severe as Draco, and is managed by marshals who 
 at every moment are throwing their warders down. 
 Many a game which delighted my boyhood as, 
 no doubt, it had delighted the boyhood of 
 countless generations is no longer played. For 
 every five games I knew, my sons, I verily believe, 
 when they were at school, scarce knew one. When 
 the modern Etonian reads perhaps I should say 
 if he reads Gray's " Distant Prospect of Eton 
 College," with what a smile of disdain must he 
 learn " that his predecessors " chased the rolling 
 circle's speed " : in other words, bowled a hoop. 
 Low as Eton once was, Harrow was almost lower. 
 One hundred and thirty years ago, two boys, after-
 
 V.HARRO W LAST CENTUR Y. 1 63 
 
 wards famous as great scholars Sir William Jones 
 and Dr. Parr " divided the fields in the neigh- 
 bourhood of the school, according to a map of 
 Greece, into states and kingdoms ; each fixed upon 
 one as his dominion, and assumed an ancient 
 name. Some of their schoolfellows consented to 
 be styled barbarians, who were to invade their ter- 
 ritories and attack their hillocks, which were 
 denominated fortresses. The chiefs vigorously 
 defended their respective domains against the 
 incursions of the enemy : and in these imitative 
 wars the young statesmen held councils, made 
 vehement harangues, and composed memorials 
 all doubtless very boyish, but calculated to fill 
 their minds with ideas of legislation and civil 
 government." So wrote Sir William Jones's 
 biographer, Lord Teign mouth, a man who holds 
 a high post among the legislators and governors 
 of India. 
 
 Just as young Jones had turned the fields of 
 Harrow into Grecian states, so a few years later, 
 in the north of Scotland, James Mackintosh, who, 
 like Jones, was destined to become known as an 
 Indian judge and famous as a scholar, turned his 
 school into the Roman Empire. "Before I was 
 fourteen," he writes, " I read the old translation of 
 Plutarch's 'Lives' and Echard's 'Roman His-
 
 j 64 WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 tory.' I well remember that the perusal of the 
 last led me into a ridiculous habit, from which I 
 shall never be totally free. I used to fancy myself 
 Emperor of Constantinople ; I distributed offices 
 and provinces amongst my schoolfellows. I 
 loaded my favourites with dignity and power, and 
 I often made the object of my dislike feel the 
 weight of my imperial resentment. I carried on 
 the series of political events in solitude for several 
 hours ; I resumed them and continued them from 
 day to day for months." * 
 
 Games such as these, if they did not swell to the 
 full the calves of the legs and the muscles of the 
 arms, at all events fed the imagination. I look 
 back with delight to the sports of my childhood, 
 free and full of variety, changing sometimes with 
 the seasons, but more often with our caprices, 
 unvexed by training and competition, and un- 
 tainted by publicity and prizes. As I charged at 
 a rough game called " hoppy," I used to think 
 myself the Black Knight or Ivanhoe ; as I stole 
 through the trees at hide-and-seek, I was the Last 
 of the Mohicans or Deerslayer. How delightful 
 was the paper-chase in the forest, as the hares led 
 us we knew not where, from thicket to thicket and 
 
 1 " Life of Sir William Jones," p. 25 ; " Life of Sir James 
 Mackintosh," i. 5.
 
 V.THE SOLEMNITY OF GAMES. 165 
 
 from glade to glade ! At the present time in the 
 great schools, I am told, the course they shall take 
 is all laid down beforehand. It is along roads, 
 not through woods and fields, that they are to run, 
 and glory, not joy, is the reward of the chase. 
 Watch in hand, the umpire awaits their return, 
 who, with the accuracy of an astronomer and the 
 gravity of a judge, records the exact number of 
 minutes and seconds each has taken, and then 
 prepares his report for the next number of the School 
 Magazine, or even of some sporting newspaper. 
 
 Formality and dulness, which had long been 
 contented with their empire over religion and 
 learning have indeed with rapid advance extended 
 their sway over our playing-fields. They have 
 gathered under it not only those who do play, but 
 also those who do not. A football match is going 
 on : fifteen youths on either aide are rapidly 
 covering themselves with mud and glory ; but 
 however plentiful may be the mud, their glory 
 cannot be complete without a large ring of spec- 
 tators. The whole school must be swept together 
 to stand round and applaud. The boy who loves 
 the fields and nature, solitude and meditation, and 
 who wanders away, 
 
 "Step following step, and thought by thought led on,"
 
 166 WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 is reproached not only by his playmates, but by 
 his dull masters with his want of "patriotism.' 
 " Patriotism " Johnson defined as " the last refuge 
 of a scoundrel " ; had he lived now he would have 
 been indignant at the base use to which it can be 
 put by a blockhead. Let us hope that, in defiance 
 of the law of public opinion, not less strong 
 because it is unwritten, and in spite of the 
 reproaches cast upon them, in scorn of the strong 
 man's contumely, 
 
 " Some bold adventurers disdain 
 The limits of their little reign, 
 And unknown regions dare descry : 
 Still as they run they look behind, 
 They hear a voice in every wind, 
 And snatch a fearful joy." 
 
 One such adventurer, a poet ever dear to him to 
 whom Nature is dear, thus describes his schoolboy 
 rambles : 
 
 " For I have loved the rural walk through lanes 
 Of grassy swarth, close-cropt by nibbling sheep, 
 And skirted thick with intertexture firm 
 Of thorny boughs : have loved the rural walk 
 O'er hills, through valleys, and by river's brink, 
 E'er since a truant boy I passed my bounds 
 T' enjoy a ramble on the banks of Thames. 
 And still remember, nor without regret 
 Of hours that sorrow since has much endear'd, 
 How oft, my slice of pocket store consumed,
 
 V.SCHOOLDA Y RAMBLES. 167 
 
 Still hung'ring, pennyless, and far from home, 
 I fed on scarlet hips and stony haws, 
 Or blushing crabs, or berries that imboss 
 The bramble, black as jet, or sloes austere." 
 
 It was not with the ramble that the enjoyment 
 ceased. It remained with Covvper through the 
 long years of his troubled life. 
 
 " Youth repairs 
 
 His wasted spirits quickly, by long toil 
 Incurring short fatigue ; and though our years, 
 As life declines, speed rapidly away, 
 And not a year but pilfers as he goes 
 Some youthful grace that age would gladly keep, 
 A tooth or auburn lock, and by degrees 
 Their length and colour from the locks they spare ; 
 Th' elastic spring of an unwearied foot 
 That mounts the stile with ease, or leaps the fence, 
 That play of lungs inhaling and again 
 Respiring freely the fresh air, that makes 
 Swift pace or steep ascent no toil to me, 
 Mine have not pilfer'd yet ; nor yet impair'd 
 My relish of fair prospect ; scenes that sooth'd 
 Or charmed me young, no longer young, I find 
 Still soothing and of power to charm me still." 
 
 If modern patriotism came to an end with 
 schooldays, though the mischief done would still 
 be vast, a partial cure might yet be found. But 
 this patriotic habit, once formed, follows our youths 
 from the school to the university. In the autumn
 
 168 WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 term, two or three times every week, a dense ring 
 is formed in the Parks round the football-ground. 
 On some bright day early in November, when the 
 beauty of the late autumn calls us forth with a 
 summons that cannot be withstood, not only 
 because the beauty is so great, but because we 
 know that its life is so brief, a thousand of these 
 patriots are massed together. What care they 
 that the wind is blowing fresh on Cumner Hurst 
 or on Shotover ? what care they that " the flying 
 gold of the ruined woodland drives through the 
 air " ? Their duty requires them for the space of 
 one hour to bawl out in their vile slang, " Well 
 played 'Varsity ! " They know nothing of country 
 rambles, the delight of country walks. If a friend 
 tries to tempt them abroad, they sternly push him 
 aside, as Regulus pushed aside his kinsmen and the 
 crowd who would delay his return to Carthage and 
 to death. I once met in Switzerland two Oxo- 
 nians, fine young fellows and great athletes, but as 
 ignorant as a child in long clothes of the art of 
 walking. Apparently they had not so much as 
 heard that there was a country round about 
 Oxford. Their outdoor life, both here and at 
 school, had been all spent in the cricket-field or 
 the football-ground. With the son of Alcinous, 
 they would have said :
 
 V. SPORTING NEWSPAPERS. 169 
 
 u Ou fiiv yap fitlov xrXjoc avfpof, oQpu Kfv, fftv, 
 
 re 
 
 " For greater praise 
 
 Hath no man while he lives, than that he know 
 His feet to exercise and hands aright." 
 
 How far otherwise had Thysis sought his strength, 
 that refined and gentle poet whom his brother 
 bard, now himself taken from us, so gracefully 
 lamented : 
 
 " And this rude Cumner ground, 
 
 Its fir-topped Hurst, its farms, its quiet fields, 
 Here cam'st thou in thy jocund youthful time, 
 Here was thine height of strength, thy golden prime ! 
 And still the haunt beloved a virtue yields." 
 
 A man of my time of life must mourn with Cowper 
 over many things that the years have taken from 
 him, but over one thing he may rejoice. He was 
 born when games were still thoughtless and free. 
 
 " Ere the base laws of servitude began, 
 When wild in woods the happy schoolboy ran." 
 
 Happy, too, were we that we had to seek our 
 heroes elsewhere than in the columns of sporting 
 newspapers. In those simple days there was, I 
 believe, but one paper of that dull class published 
 in the whole of England. It came forth but once 
 a week and cost sixpence. No names of mighty
 
 i;o WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 cricketers, football players, jumpers and runners 
 were familiar in our mouths. I cannot call to 
 mind that even in my undergraduate days their 
 fame troubled us. In our eager talk we travelled 
 far and wide, but on athletics we never touched. 
 In the university " sports," as they are called, 
 were unknown, and, so far as my memory serves, 
 so also were football matches. At all events, if 
 they went on, they were not conspicuous. Even 
 the Oxford and Cambridge cricket match at 
 Lord's was watched by few. He who strolled in 
 to see it sauntered where he wished, or lay at full 
 length on the grass with no one to obstruct the view. 
 Had Themistocles lived now-a-days it would not 
 have been the trophies of Miltiades which would 
 not suffer him to sleep, but the live ox carried by 
 Milo over the race-course of Olympia. Had he 
 come up to Oxford, it would not have been " o'er 
 Bodley's Dome," but over the Parks that his 
 future labours would have spread. In my first 
 lecture I read to you the fine passage in which 
 Johnson describes a scholar's career. I will now 
 venture to read a parody on it which I published 
 last year in the Speaker : 
 
 " When first the College rolls receive their names 
 The young enthusiasts quit their work for games : 
 Through all their limbs the fever of renown
 
 V.THE DOOM OF MAN. 171 
 
 Leads them to scorn the labours of the gown : 
 O'er football fields their future labours spread, 
 And many a foe they tumble on his head. 
 Are these your views ? Proceed illustrious souls 
 And hacking bring you to the football goals. 
 Yet, should your limbs succeed in every heat 
 Till all your records there is none to beat ; 
 Should training guide you in the wisest way 
 And send you perfect to the racing day ; 
 Should no false kindness lure to drink all night, 
 No pipes relax, nor early risings fright ; 
 Should tempting pastrycooks your rooms refrain, 
 And sloth effuse Virginian fumes in vain ; 
 Should beauty blunt on dons her fatal dart, 
 Nor claim to triumph o'er the trainer's art ; 
 Should no disease spoil ' Torpids' or the 'Eights,' 
 Or melancholy thoughts of coming ' Greats ' ; 
 Yet hope not life from schools or cramming free, 
 Nor think the doom of pluck reversed for ye. 
 Deign on the passman's world to turn your eyes, 
 And pause awhile from kicking to be wise. 
 There mark what ills the athlete's life attack, 
 Sprains, bruises, bumps, at times a broken back. 
 See Guardians, wisely slow and meanly just 
 To worn-out athletes throw the workhouse crust ; 
 If ' Blues ' yet flatter, once again attend, 
 Or else in looking blue your life will end." 
 
 It is a melancholy change when in the columns 
 of sporting papers not in the pages of poetry, 
 romance and history ; in the record of " events," 
 as they are absurdly called, not in Froissart, 
 Shakespeare, Defoe, and Scott, that our heroes are 
 sought for and found. " Teach us to admire," the
 
 i;2 WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 Master of Balliol is reported to have said to a 
 newly-appointed Professor of Poetry. It is a 
 lesson that should not have to be taught in such 
 a spot as this. If he were to keep silence the 
 very stones would cry out. Listen to the words 
 which one of the great band of poets who are the 
 peculiar glory of Cambridge wrote of his famous 
 College : 
 
 " I could not print 
 
 Ground where the grass had yielded to the steps 
 Of generations of illustrious men, 
 Unmoved. I could not always lightly pass 
 Through the same gateways, sleep where they had slept, 
 Wake where they waked, range that enclosure old, 
 That garden of great intellects, undisturbed."
 
 LECTURE VI.
 
 LECTURE VI. 
 
 r I ""HE feelings which would naturally rise in 
 J. us on hearing of great men and great 
 deeds may be stifled in our youth. Chill pedantry 
 quite as much as chill penury may 
 
 " repress the noble rage 
 And freeze the genial current of the soul." 
 
 " What would you give my lad," said Johnson to 
 a boy who was sculling him and Boswell on the 
 Thames, " what would you give to know about the 
 Argonauts ? " " Sir," said the boy, " I would give 
 what I have." Johnson turning to Boswell, " sir," 
 said he, " a desire of knowledge is the natural 
 feeling of mankind ; and every human being, 
 whose mind is not debauched, will be willing to 
 give all that he has to get knowledge." There are 
 many things which may debauch the mind. It 
 may be debauched by competition and cramming.
 
 i;6 WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 The love of knowledge cannot be planted by 
 examiners or watered by inspectors. It is not 
 they who can give the increase. I am not so 
 foolish as to deny that examiners and inspectors 
 have their use. A needful, nay a great part, of 
 teaching consists in implanting habits of accuracy 
 and in giving the power of mastering subjects 
 which are difficult and sometimes dry and dis- 
 tasteful. " It is no doubt," wrote John Mill, " a 
 very laudable effort in modern teaching to render 
 as much as possible of what the young are re- 
 quired to learn easy and interesting to them. But 
 when this principle is pushed to the length of not 
 requiring them to learn anything but what has 
 been made easy and interesting, one of the chief 
 objects of education is sacrificed. I rejoice in the 
 decline of the old brutal and tyrannical system of 
 teaching, which, however, did succeed in enforcing 
 habits of application ; but the new, as it seems to 
 me, is training up a race of men who will be 
 incapable of doing anything which is disagreeable 
 to them." * 
 
 I am as fully alive as any one to the evils of 
 what he meant by the new system, for under it 
 my own education greatly suffered. But while to 
 
 1 Boswell's "Johnson," i. 458 ; "Autobiography of Mill," 
 p. 52.
 
 VI. EXAMINERS AND INSPECTORS. 177 
 
 guard against these evils, and against indolent and 
 inaccurate teaching also, we use examiners and 
 inspectors, let us resist, as far as we can, their 
 invasion of that part of the mind where they can 
 only work havoc. " A cow is a very good animal 
 in a field, but we turn her out of a garden." 
 Examiners and school inspectors like cows are 
 always trying to break in where by their clumsy 
 trampling they can only do mischief. To keep 
 them out needs a far stronger hedge than as yet 
 has anywhere been provided. They encourage 
 display a great evil in every part and period of 
 life, but doubly great in education. For it is most 
 successfully made not by the good, but by the 
 dexterous teacher ; not in the higher, but in the 
 lower faculties of the mind. It is not the reason- 
 ing powers, not the powers of the fancy and 
 imagination which are tested and exhibited. It 
 is not the eager desire for knowledge, the teacher's 
 crowning glory, that can be measured. He who 
 has implanted that has done even more than the 
 Sirens promised. Whoever comes to us, they 
 sang, goes on his way full of delight and with 
 increase of knowledge. But to delight and 
 knowledge the good teacher adds a still greater 
 gift an ardent and noble curiosity, an eager 
 desire to know more. " I will back Shenstone's 
 
 12
 
 1 78 WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 schoolmistress," says Wordsworth, " by her winter 
 fire and in her summer garden-seat against all Dr. 
 Bell's sour-looking teachers in petticoats that I 
 have seen." We can easily believe that, partly 
 because he looked on all things too much with the 
 eye of a solitary poet, and partly because as age 
 came on him he clung too much to the past, he 
 failed to see whatever there was of good in the 
 new system of education. Nevertheless, his ad- 
 miration of Shenstone's Village Dame had some 
 justification. Her children would scarcely, perhaps, 
 have passed the lowest standard ; yet she may 
 have had one or two of the best qualities of the 
 teacher. History certainly has often been far 
 worse taught The poet describes her garden and 
 continues : 
 
 " Here oft the dame, on Sabbath's decent eve, 
 Hymned such psalms as Sternhold forth did mete ; 
 If winter 'twere, she to her hearth did cleave ; 
 But in her garden found a summer-seat : 
 Sweet melody ! to hear her then repeat 
 How Israel's sons, beneath a foreign king, 
 While taunting foemen did a song entreat, 
 All for the nonce untuning every string, 
 Uphung their useless lyres small heart had they to sing. 
 
 For she was just, and friend to virtuous lore, 
 And pass'd much time in truly virtuous deed ; 
 And, in those elfins' ears, would oft deplore
 
 VI. SCHOOL HISTORIES. 179 
 
 The times when Truth by Popish rage did bleed, 
 
 And tortious death was true Devotion's meed ; 
 
 And simple Faith in iron chains did mourn, 
 
 That nould * on wooden image place her creed ; 
 
 And lawny saints in smouldering flames did burn ; 
 
 Ah ! dearest Lord 1 forfend thilk days should e'er return.' 
 
 Her history, if it was rude, was at all events a 
 living thing. It was no " old almanac," no mere 
 system of dull chronology and empty lifeless 
 names. It was the imagination, and not the 
 memory she exercised. England of the Reforma- 
 tion was to her a real and terrible, but very noble 
 thing, which must be pictured to her little scholars 
 so that when they grew up they might each to the 
 utmost strive against " the triple tyrant" She had 
 her learning, no doubt, fresh from Fox's " Book 
 of Martyrs " and " The Pilgrim's Progress." 
 School histories, those instruments of torture, 
 had not yet been invented. They are like the 
 dungeon in the Tower of London called Little 
 Ease, where the unhappy prisoner could not stand, 
 sit, or lie in any comfort. They cramp the under- 
 standing, they choke the imagination. They are 
 worse than no food at all, for they take away 
 appetite and they afford no nourishment. Happily 
 for me when I was young, Goldsmith unabridged 
 1 Nould is would not.
 
 i8o WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 Goldsmith had not been banished from the 
 schoolroom, and in his delightful pages Greece 
 and Rome had a real life. Into errors enough he 
 fell no doubt, for accuracy was not his strongest 
 point. In his "Animated Nature" he makes the 
 cow shed her horns every year. But he did not 
 fall into dulness. His Greeks and Romans lived 
 for us ; I loved the just Aristides and the mild 
 Camillus. They were as real to me as Robinson 
 Crusoe and Friday. No place on earth was dearer 
 to me than the little town of Plataea. Its sad and 
 glorious story as told in Dr. Smith's " School 
 History" could not ruffle the surface of the mind 
 for a single moment, or remain in it, unless 
 supported by the hope of rewards or the fear of 
 punishment, for a single week But I read it in 
 the pages of Goldsmith, that 
 
 " Affectuum potens at lenis dominator ;" 
 that gentle master of passion, who 
 
 " sways it to the mood 
 Of what he likes or loathes," 
 
 and having there read it, I am still inspired, after 
 the lapse of six and forty years, with a love of the
 
 VI. GOLDSMITH'S HISTORIES. 181 
 
 little town, and a longing to visit the spot where 
 it once stood. 
 
 What a difference, too, do we find in the story 
 of the ostracism of Aristides as narrated by the 
 man of industry and the man of genius! "We 
 are told," writes Dr. Smith, "that an unlettered 
 countryman gave his vote against Aristides, at the 
 ostracism, because he was tired of hearing him 
 always called the ' Just.' " Here we certainly have 
 all that we need have to enable us to appear with 
 confidence before an examiner. Question. " Why 
 did a countryman vote against Aristides ? " 
 Answer. " Because he was tired of hearing him 
 always called the Just." Result a good mark 
 scored down by the examiner, and the story in 
 a few days forgotten by the boy. Now listen 
 to Goldsmith's story : " It was on this occasion 
 that a peasant who could not write, and did not 
 know Aristides personally, applied to him himself 
 and desired him to write the name of Aristides 
 upon the shell by which his vote was given against 
 him. ' Has he done you any wrong ? ' said 
 Aristides, 'that you are for condemning him in 
 this manner?' 'No,' replied the peasant, 'but 
 I hate to hear him praised for his justice.' 
 Aristides, without saying a word more, calmly 
 took the shell, wrote down his name upon it.
 
 182 WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 and contentedly retired into banishment." That 
 is a story that might surely stir a child's heart, 
 and inspire him with a generous sentiment which 
 should last his life through. Goldsmith, if he tells 
 a thing at all, tells it fully and well. He was not 
 cramped by the need of getting into his narrative 
 everything on which a question could by any 
 possibility be founded. If an incident could move 
 the mind he dwelt on it ; if it was uninteresting 
 in itself he passed it over. 
 
 Happy as the Greeks were in their poet, scarcely 
 less happy were they in their historian. Herodotus, 
 like Homer, could delight childhood and old age 
 alike. There is nothing in his pages which the 
 schoolboy would have skipped because he could 
 not understand it, or the old man because it was 
 childish. It delights us still. 
 
 " Age cannot wither it, nor custom stale 
 Its infinite variety." 
 
 Though we have no Homer or Herodotus, 
 nevertheless we can still to a large extent keep 
 our children in the company of great writers. 
 In poetry, in fiction, in history, in biography, I 
 would almost add in geography, I would have 
 none read but great authors authors whom we 
 should love the more in our old age because they
 
 VL GREAT WRITERS. 183 
 
 had been the delight of our youth. Through the 
 whole of English history we could not take a boy 
 in the narrative of one great writer as a young 
 Athenian could have been taken in the narrative 
 of Herodotus ; nevertheless, by means of selections, 
 we could keep him almost always among big men. 
 It would matter little that there were gaps in his 
 knowledge ; there are great gaps in every one's 
 knowledge, even in the knowledge of examiners. 
 If we have succeeded in making the past really live 
 for the child in a single century, nay, I will say in a 
 single year ; if we have made him feel that, "in the 
 dark backward and abysm of time," men " lived 
 and moved and had their being," our teaching has 
 not been in vain. I remember talking to a country- 
 man at Old Sarum, where a huge mound marks 
 the site of an ancient town. He told me that some 
 graves had lately been found there of men who 
 had fallen in a great battle. " But that was afore 
 my time," he added, by way of apology for his 
 want of accurate information. I remember like- 
 wise telling another countryman of the war which 
 had just broken out between France and Germany. 
 " I hope it won't do my brother any harm," he said. 
 " Your brother," I replied, " How should he be 
 harmed? " " Why, he has lately gone to America," 
 was the answer. To the rude mind there are but
 
 1 84 WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 two times and two places " my time," and what 
 was "afore my time"; " my village," and the rest 
 rest of the world. Both these countrymen had, I 
 daresay, attended school ; one of them certainly 
 had. But what notion can be formed of the wide 
 world by mere maps and barren books of geography, 
 or what of the succession of time by tables of 
 chronology and bald statements of events ? What 
 knowledge of the past has the child got, though he 
 knows perfectly the succession of the Kings of 
 Israel, and can tell without a moment's hesitation 
 that Pekah succeeded Pekahiah and not Pekahiah 
 Pekah ? " What is Hecuba to him or he to 
 Hecuba ? " If all these kings are anything more 
 to him than mere names, they are all " afore his 
 time," and all no farther or nearer off than the 
 kings of England. It is by imagination alone 
 that we throw a bridge across time and space. If 
 imagination is not made the foundation and the 
 buttress, their labour is but lost that build it. It 
 is a quality inherent in all but the lowest natures, 
 though far too often it is never developed. Often, 
 too, though fanned into life in the nursery by 
 stories of fairies and giants, it is deadened in the 
 parlour by dulness and respectability, and finally 
 destroyed in the schoolroom by school-books and 
 bad teaching. It may be destroyed even by great
 
 VI. THE MISUSE OF POETS. 185 
 
 writers if they are either forced upon us at an age 
 when we are unfit for them, or if they are misused 
 as instruments of teaching. A friend of mine in 
 this University told me that before he had come 
 up to Oxford he had read the"^Eneid" through 
 with great delight. Here, in preparing for the 
 examination known as Moderations, he was taken 
 through it by his tutor once more, who treated 
 Virgil not as a great poet, but as a convenient 
 instrument of instruction in the niceties of grammar. 
 Under the guidance of this teacher 
 
 " One whose hand, 
 
 Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away, 
 Richer than all his tribe " 
 
 my friend gained his first class and lost for ever his 
 enjoyment of the " JEneld." 
 
 The man who would use a great poet for 
 beating grammar into a boy, who would parse 
 " Hamlet " and analyze the " Paradise Lost," 
 would not for one moment hesitate to 
 
 " botanize 
 Upon his mother's grave." 
 
 The proper destination for bad poets should not 
 be the shop, 
 
 " Where pepper, odours, frankincense are sold, 
 And all small wares in wretched rhymes enrolled,"
 
 186 WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 but the school grammar. Cobbett went to King's 
 Speeches for his examples of bad English. 
 Rxperimentum fiat in corpore vili. If you must 
 teach grammatical analysis get it out of Tupper. 
 Remember how the Ensign in " Tom Jones " 
 damned Homer with all his heart, saying that he 
 carried the marks of him on his back. When, in 
 still coarser language, he goes on to reproach 
 Corderius's mother with want of virtue, we listen 
 to his abuse with more patience. For between 
 Corderius and Homer there is almost as much differ- 
 ence as between Lindley Murray and Shakespeare. 
 Happy is the child who has the run of a good 
 library, and who for a certain part of every day is 
 allowed to read at random ; who is turned loose in 
 the rich pasture of English literature to browse 
 where he pleases ! It would be a wise practice 
 in every school, with as much regularity as the 
 morning prayer comes round, to read aloud some 
 fine or interesting passage from a book which was 
 accessible to him who wished to read more. A 
 friend of mine took into her house a poor child 
 who had fallen sick in one of the London board 
 schools. Seeing " Ivanhoe " on the shelf, he asked 
 for leave to read it. Having in some book of ex- 
 tracts read the storming of Front-de-Boeufs castle, 
 he longed to know the rest of the story. It is not
 
 VL WRITING DOWN TO CHILDREN. 187 
 
 needful that every word of what is read aloud 
 should be understood by the hearers. If that were 
 the case, the Epistles of St. Paul would be a sealed 
 book to all but scholars. Sir Walter Scott, in his 
 too brief " Autobiography," writing of an old friend 
 of his father's who was the original of " Jonathan 
 Oldbuck" in the Antiquary ', says: "He was the 
 first person who told me about Falstaff and 
 Hotspur and other characters in Shakespeare. 
 What idea I annexed to them I know not, but I 
 must have annexed some, for I remember quite 
 well being interested in the subject. Indeed, I 
 rather suspect," he goes on to say, " that children 
 derive impulses of a powerful kind in hearing 
 things which they cannot entirely comprehend ; 
 and therefore that to write down to children's 
 understanding is a mistake ; set them on the scent 
 and let them puzzle it out" l Something they can 
 always grasp ; and what they cannot understand 
 they either supply by some strange meaning of 
 their own, or else let it pass by unheeded. Let me 
 illustrate this by a little anecdote. At the time of 
 the Hungarian War of Independence my grand- 
 father, whose sight was dimmed by eighty-six 
 years, had the newspaper read aloud to him by a 
 lad from the village school. One of his daughters, 
 1 Lockhart's " Life of Scott," ed. 1839, i. 34.
 
 i88 WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 coming one morning into his room, was astonished 
 at hearing some such account of the campaign as 
 the following : " Early in the morning General 
 Jerusalem, breaking up his quarters, led his sol- 
 diers to Jerusalem, where they fell on Marshal 
 Jerusalem's army, which they drove in headlong 
 flight as far as Jerusalem, where they found an 
 unexpected support in Colonel Jerusalem's cavalry." 
 "Why, father," said his daughter, in amazement, 
 "what strange stuff is this?" "Oh," replied the 
 old gentleman, with a chuckle, "the boy could 
 make nothing of the names of the Hungarians, 
 Russians, and Austrians ; so I said to him : ' Do 
 as the dame-school mistress bade her scholars do 
 when they came to a hard word in reading the 
 Bible, "Say Jerusalem, my dears, and pass on."' 
 A child can say Jerusalem for himself without 
 being told to, and will willingly go on saying it, 
 provided that there is enough left that he can 
 understand and enjoy. " He should not be dis- 
 couraged from reading anything that he takes a 
 liking to, from a notion that it is above his reach. 
 If that be the case, he will soon find it out and 
 and desist." J By wandering, as it were, among 
 books, each one finds out where his strength and 
 enjoyment most lie. 
 
 1 Boswell's " Life of Johnson," iv. 21.
 
 VI HARRIET MARJIKEAU. 189 
 
 It is often at a very early age that the mind is 
 influenced. Sir William Jones, we are told, was 
 only in his fifth year, " when one morning, turning 
 over the pages of a Bible in his mother's closet, 
 his attention was forcibly arrested by the sublime 
 description of the Angel in the tenth chapter of 
 the Apocalyse ; the impression which his imagi- 
 nation received from it was never effaced." x 
 
 Harriet Martineau, whose " Settlers at Home " 
 and " Feats on the Fiord " I hope still give to 
 children the pleasure which they gave to me, 
 tells how, one winter Sunday afternoon, when she 
 was seven years old, she was kept from chapel 
 by some ailment. " When the house-door closed 
 behind the chapel- goers," she continues, " I looked 
 at the books on the table. The ugliest-looking of 
 them was turned down open ; and my turning it 
 up was one of the leading incidents of my life. 
 That plain, clumsy, calf-bound volume was ' Para- 
 dise Lost,' and the common blueish paper, with 
 its old-fashioned type, became as a scroll out of 
 heaven to me. The first thing I saw was Argu- 
 ment, which I took to mean a dispute, and supposed 
 to be stupid enough ; but there was something 
 about Satan cleaving Chaos, which made me turn 
 to the poetry ; and my mental destiny was fixed 
 1 " Life of Sir William Jones," p. 17.
 
 i go WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 for the next seven years. That volume was hence- 
 forth never to be found but by asking me for it, 
 till a young acquaintance made me a present of a 
 little Milton of my own. In a few months, I believe 
 there was hardly a line in ' Paradise Lost ' that I 
 could not have instantly turned to. I sent myself 
 to sleep by repeating it ; and when my curtains 
 were drawn back in the morning, descriptions of 
 heavenly light rushed into my memory." * 
 
 Shenstone, who had learnt to read of the old 
 dame whom he has described in his " School- 
 mistress," " soon received such delight from books, 
 that he was always calling for fresh entertainment, 
 and expected that, when any of the family went 
 to market, a new book should be brought him, 
 which, when it came, was in fondness carried to 
 bed and laid by him. It is said that, when his 
 request had been neglected, his mother wrapped 
 up a piece of wood of the same form, and pacified 
 him for the night." Sir Joshua Reynolds was but 
 eight when he received his turn for painting by 
 reading the " ' Jesuit's Perspective,' a book which 
 happened to be in the parlour window in his 
 
 1 "Autobiography of Harriet Martineau," i. 42. We have 
 here an instance of that inaccuracy which too often marred 
 Miss Martineau's work. There is nothing in the "Argument' 1 
 about " Satan cleaving Chaos."
 
 VI. GIBBONS CHILDHOOD. 191 
 
 father's house." A blessing on the houses of old 
 which were built with walls thick enough for 
 window-seats, where people sat and read and left 
 books about for children to dip into. It was in a 
 window in his mother's room that Cowley, when a 
 little child, found Spenser's " Fairy Queen," and so 
 by reading it, " became, as he relates, irrecoverably 
 a poet" * 
 
 Gibbon, when a boy of ten, was well acquainted 
 with Pope's " Homer " and the " Arabian Nights." 
 " The verses of Pope," he writes, " accustomed my 
 ear to the sound of poetic harmony ; in the death 
 of Hector and the shipwreck of Ulysses I tasted 
 the new emotions of terror and pity ; and seriously 
 disputed with my aunt on the vices and virtues of 
 the heroes of the Trojan war." He had attended 
 school for a short time, but his twelfth year he 
 passed in his aunt's house where he had the com- 
 mand of a library. " I turned over," he continues, 
 " many English pages of poetry and romance, of 
 history and travels. Where a title attracted my 
 eye, without fear or awe I snatched the volume 
 from the shelf; and my aunt, who indulged herself 
 in moral and religious speculations, was more prone 
 to encourage than to check a curiosity above the 
 
 1 Johnson's "Works," vii. I ; viii. 408; Prior's "Life of 
 Malone," p. 389.
 
 192 WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 strength of a boy. This year I shall note as the 
 most propitious to the growth of my intellectual 
 stature." The most learned of English historians, 
 when he looked back on his past life, considered, 
 you will observe, that his mind grew the fastest in 
 in a year when he was under no regular teacher, 
 but was left to " that free, desultory reading, which 
 was," he tells us, " the employment and comfort of 
 his solitary hours." x 
 
 Johnson had the great good fortune to have the 
 run of a bookseller's shop, for his father was in that 
 trade. When he was quite a child the old man put 
 into his little boy's hands Martin's " Account of the 
 Western Islands of Scotland." It was the longing 
 excited in him by that book to see the places 
 therein described, which nearly sixty years later, 
 more perhaps than anything else, led him to under- 
 take his adventurous tour to the Hebrides. When 
 he was sixteen he left school. In the next two 
 years " he read a great deal in a desultory manner, 
 without any scheme of study, as chance threw 
 books in his way, and inclination directed him 
 through them. He used to mention one curious 
 instance of his casual reading, when but a boy. 
 Having imagined that his brother had hid some 
 apples behind a large folio upon an upper shelf in 
 1 Gibbon's " Miscellaneous Works," i. 34, 40.
 
 VI. SIR WALTER SCOTT. 193 
 
 his father's shop, he climbed up to search for them. 
 There were no apples ; but the large folio proved 
 to be ' Petrarch," whom he had seen mentioned in 
 some preface as one of the restorers of learning. 
 His curiosity having been thus excited, he sat 
 down with avidity, and read a great part of the 
 book." It was no doubt the remembrance of this 
 eager reading which made him say in his old age : 
 " That for general improvement, a man should 
 read whatever his immediate inclination prompts 
 him to ; though to be sure, if a man has a science 
 to learn, he must regularly and resolutely advance." 
 He added, "What we read with inclination makes a 
 much stronger impression. If we read without in- 
 clination half the mind is employed in fixing the 
 attention ; so there is but one half to be employed 
 on what we read." J Tranio in " The Taming of 
 the Shrew " had given much the same advice to 
 his master, Lucentio : 
 
 " No profit grows where is no pleasure ta'en ; 
 In brief, sir, study what you most affect." 
 
 A few years after Johnson visited Scotland, 
 Walter Scott was a little boy at the High School 
 of Edinburgh. "In the intervals of my school 
 hours," Scott writes, " I had always perused with 
 
 1 Boswell's " Life of Johnson," i. 57, 450 ; iii. 43. 
 13
 
 194 WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 avidity such books of history or poetry or voyages 
 and travels as chance presented to me not for- 
 getting the usual, or rather ten times the usual 
 quantity of fairy tales, eastern stories and ro- 
 mances. These studies were totally unregulated 
 and undirected. My tutor thought it almost a sin 
 to open a profane play or poem. I found in my 
 mother's dressing-room, where I slept at one time, 
 some odd volumes of ' Shakespeare,' nor can I 
 easily forget the rapture with which I sat up in 
 my shirt reading them by the light of a fire in her 
 apartment, until the bustle of the family rising 
 from supper warned me it was time to creep back 
 to my bed, where I was supposed to have been 
 safely deposited since nine o'clock." J 
 
 Wordsworth, writing of his life at Hawkshead 
 Grammar School, whither he was sent in his ninth 
 year, says : " Of my earliest days at school I have 
 little to say but that they were very happy ones, 
 chiefly because I was 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." This desul- 
 tory reading he carried on even at the University. 
 1 Lockhart's " Life of Scott," i. 49-
 
 Vl.GOD ALMIGHTY'S SCHOLARS, 195 
 
 " He did not tread," says his pompous biographer, 
 "in the beaten path, prescribed by academic 
 authority and leading to academic distinctions. 
 He appears to have indulged a feeling of intel- 
 lectual pride in taking a devious course much to 
 the disappointment of his relatives and friends. 
 His last summer vacation was not spent amid his 
 books, but among the Alps. The week before 
 he took his degree he passed his time in reading 
 ' Clarissa Harlowe.' " It is possible that " aca- 
 demic authority" was wrong, and the young poet 
 was right There are other " overseeing powers " 
 besides a University Senate, "to kindle or re- 
 strain." A Board of Examiners is not infallible; 
 that student may not do ill to whom, in contempt 
 of it, nature is " both law and impulse." There are 
 those whom Ferguson, " the self-taught philoso- 
 pher," calls " God Almighty's scholars." I knew 
 three undergraduates, contemporaries and friends 
 of my own in this University, who might be 
 reproached with " the same intellectual pride " as 
 Wordsworth, "in taking a devious course," who, 
 nevertheless, are not the least distinguished men 
 of their time Mr. Burne- Jones, Mr. Morris, the 
 
 1 "Life of William Wordsworth," ed. 1851, i. 10, 48; 
 James Ferguson's " Select Mechanical Exercises," ed. 1778, 
 p.xi.
 
 ig6 WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 author of the " Earthly Paradise," and Mr. Swin- 
 burne. 
 
 Charles Darwin, the greatest of naturalists, did 
 so little in the seven or eight years he passed at 
 Shrewsbury School, that his father one day, to his 
 " deep mortification," said to him : " You care for 
 nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching, and 
 you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your 
 family." " Nothing," Darwin writes, " could have 
 been worse for the development of my mind than 
 Dr. Butler's school, as it was strictly classical, 
 nothing else being taught except a little ancient 
 geography and history. Looking back," he con- 
 tinues, " as well as I can at my character during my 
 school life, the only qualities which at this period 
 promised well for the future were that I had strong 
 and diversified tastes, much zeal for whatever in- 
 terested me, and a keen pleasure in understanding 
 any complex subject or thing. ... I was fond of 
 reading various books, and I used to sit for hours 
 reading the historical plays of Shakespeare in an 
 old window in the thick walls of the school." Here 
 we have the old window-seat once more doing its 
 blessed work. 
 
 I may be told that all the men whom I have 
 instanced were cast in so great a mould that they 
 cannot fitly be used as examples for common life.
 
 VL JAMES CARLYLE. 197 
 
 It was to nature, it will be said, not to the accidents 
 of their training that their greatness was due. 
 Johnson, however, was not, I think, far wrong 
 when he maintained that, " the true genius is a 
 mind of large, general powers, accidentally deter- 
 mined to some particular direction." 1 Unless 
 liberty is given, a determining accident may never 
 occur, and the genius may never be unfolded. The 
 poet, as he surveyed the country churchyard, 
 mourned over the waste of intellect : 
 
 " Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid 
 Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire ; 
 Hands, that the rod of empire might have swayed, 
 Or waked to ecstasy the living lyre." 
 
 There is a passage in Carlyle's " Life of his 
 Father " which moved some of the critics to scorn, 
 but which seemed to me not unreasonable. " I 
 know Robert Burns," he writes ; " and I knew my 
 father. Yet were you to ask me which had the 
 greater natural faculty, I might perhaps actually 
 pause before replying." He goes on to say : " My 
 father's education was altogether of the worst and 
 most limited. I believe he was never more than 
 three months at any school. What he learned 
 there showed what he might have learned. . . . 
 1 Boswell's "Life of Johnson," ii. 437, n. 2.
 
 198 WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 Poetry, fiction in general, he had universally seen 
 treated not only as idle, but false and criminal. . . . 
 Oh ! when I think that all the area in boundless 
 space he had seen was limited to a circle of some 
 fifty miles diameter, and all his knowledge of the 
 boundless time was derived from his Bible and 
 what the oral memories of old men could give him, 
 and his own could gather, and yet that he was 
 such, I could take shame to myself. I feel to my 
 father so great, though so neglected, so generous 
 also towards me a strange tenderness, and mingled 
 pity and reverence peculiar to the case, infinitely 
 soft and near my heart. Was he not a sacrifice to 
 me ? Had I stood in his place could he not have 
 stood in mine, and more ? " 
 
 I see nothing absurd in all this. James Carlyle's 
 natural faculty might well not have been inferior 
 even to that of Burns. He had the gift of elo- 
 quence. " None of us," says his son, " will ever 
 forget that bold, glowing style of his, flowing free 
 from his untutored soul, full of metaphors (though 
 he knew not what a metaphor was), with all manner 
 of potent words, which he appropriated and applied 
 with a surprising accuracy." Had the right acci- 
 dent determined his " large general powers," it 
 might have been of books which he had written, 
 not of houses and bridges which he had built, that
 
 VI. ELIZABETHAN DA VS. 199 
 
 his son was to say that " nothing that he undertook 
 to do, but he did it faithfully and like a true man." 1 
 There is, I believe, the same number of good 
 brains born into the world in every generation, 
 and of the same quality, too. Every age might 
 be Elizabethan, were the children who belonged to 
 it equally favoured by their surroundings. But the 
 world, I fear, can never again witness that mighty 
 outburst of noble curiosity which followed on the 
 discovery of the New World, the translation of 
 the Bible, and of the great master-pieces of Greece 
 and Rome. As we look back upon that marvellous 
 age we may exclaim in Milton's noble words : 
 " Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant 
 nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, 
 and shaking her invincible locks ; methinks I see 
 her as an eagle muing her mighty youth, and 
 kindling her undazzled eyes at the full mid-day 
 beam ; purging and unsealing her long-abused 
 sight at the fountain itself of heavenly radiance." a 
 Each generation may, if it choose, rouse itself also. 
 The fountain of heavenly radiance never ceases to 
 flow. 
 
 " Labitur et labetur in omne volubilis aevum." 
 (" It runs and as it runs, for ever shall run on.") 
 
 1 " Reminiscences," i. 8, 18-20. 
 
 3 Milton's "Works," ed. 1806, i. 324.
 
 200 WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 Thither let us repair, and at its living waters 
 purge and unscale our long- abused sight If no 
 Golden Age of Literature can ever return, we shall 
 yet be gladdened by one of those Silver Ages, 
 which till late years almost in unbroken succession 
 had followed one upon the other. What clusters 
 of famous writers has our country seen, drawn 
 together, too, from a far smaller population ! Look 
 at the age of Anne, when there were not perhaps 
 in the whole of England more people than are now 
 living in London and its suburbs. Yet " these few, 
 these happy few" could boast of Defoe, Swift, 
 Addison, Pope, Steele, Congreve, Prior, Gay, 
 Arbuthnot, and Burnet. The last years of George 
 II., that German king of ours, " who cared neither 
 for Boets nor Bainters," and the first years of his 
 grandson, who gloried in the name of Briton, and 
 who set up as a patron of learning, are adorned by 
 the names of Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, 
 Johnson, Hume, Gray, Collins, Goldsmith, Young, 
 Burke, Bolingbroke, Horace Walpole, Adam Smith, 
 and Blackstone. How bright are the opening years 
 of the present century a brightness still more daz- 
 zling to us who are surrounded by the gloom of its 
 close ! What " radiant files " ushered it in Scott, 
 Wordsworth, Coleridge, Campbell, Southey, Rogers, 
 Lamb, Hazlitt, Cobbett, Jeffrey, Sydney Smith,
 
 VI. SILENT POETS. 201 
 
 Maria Edgeworth, Jane Austen ; and then fol- 
 lowing close behind them Byron, Shelley, Keats, 
 Landor, Moore, Leigh Hunt, and De Quincey ! 
 When we set our writers against the writers of the 
 least favoured of these generations how mean and 
 and beggarly is the show we make ! 
 
 " Though fallen on evil days, 
 On evil days though fallen and evil tongues? 
 
 we may bring back good days when tongues shall 
 once more speak as they spoke of yore, if only we 
 give imagination free play. Children of the finest 
 natures are indeed rare ; a schoolmaster may easily 
 pass through a long life of teaching, and not have 
 the good fortune to come across a single one. 
 Nevertheless, he may have not a few of those 
 whom Wordsworth calls " silent poets " men 
 " silently enthusiastic, loving all quiet things, and 
 poets in everything but words." Such a man was 
 his sailor brother who was lost with his ship off the 
 coast of Dorset. 
 
 " But thou a schoolboy, to the sea hadst carried 
 Undying recollections ! Nature there 
 Was with thee : she who loved us both, she still 
 Was with thee, and even so didst thou become 
 A silent Poet ; from the solitude 
 Of the vast sea didst bring a watchful heart
 
 202 WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 Still couchant, an inevitable ear, 
 
 And an eye practised like a blind man's touch." f 
 
 We can nurse, and even implant, that love of 
 reading which more than any institution or law 
 sweeps away the inequalities of rank and fortune. 
 " There is," it was finely said of old, " there is as 
 much difference between the learned and the un- 
 learned as between the living and the dead." Your 
 secondhand bookstall is a great leveller of all dis- 
 tinctions. Learning has a prescriptive right to go 
 ragged. It is one of the prerogatives of a scholar 
 to wear an old coat For a few pence well laid 
 out every week we can live in the best of all 
 company among the finest and truest gentlemen 
 the world has ever seen. When they come and 
 sit with us by our fireside Don Quixote, Sir 
 Roger de Coverley, my Uncle Toby, Parson Adams, 
 the Vicar of Wakefield we can look down with 
 quiet pity on those unfortunate people who, for 
 want of higher and better society, are reduced to 
 playing at baccarat with princes. Our carpet may 
 be ragged, our floor may even be bare of carpet, 
 our chairs may be of the hardest, and our fare of 
 the plainest, they will not be scorned by the fine 
 gentlemen whom we have invited. Draw the cur- 
 tain, trim the lamp, put a fresh lump of coal on 
 1 Wordsworth's " Life," i. 288 j "Works," i. 355.
 
 VI. A GOODLY COMPANY. 203 
 
 the fire, and then call in the goodly company. 
 There they stand waiting at your call with Shake- 
 speare, Milton, Scott, and a host of others ready to 
 usher them in. Farewell, outside world, with your 
 troubles and meanness, your brawls and strife, 
 your hard struggles and petty cares, your din of 
 politics, and your low mutterings of vast changes 
 in the very fabric of society ; farewell Tories, 
 Liberals, Radicals, Socialists ; farewell Church and 
 Dissent ; welcome thou world of history and of 
 fancy ! Thy fabric may be baseless, thy pageant 
 insubstantial ; thy actors, we shall soon have to 
 own, are 
 
 " All spirits, and 
 \re melted into air, into thin air," 
 
 yet while thou dost last, and they throng thy 
 roomy stage, the " radiant courts " of kings and 
 emperors have no more " majestic vision " than 
 that which fills our little parlour. In the palace 
 of King Alcinous a blind minstrel sang to the 
 company as they feasted. " The Muse," says 
 Homer, " loved him dearly, and she gave him both 
 good and evil ; of his sight she bereft him, but 
 granted him sweet song." Those who seek her 
 the Muse loves still " the silent poets " no less 
 than those who have utterance. Of much we may
 
 204 WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 have been bereft, but the solace of sweet song she 
 freely gives. By her we are 
 
 " taught to live 
 
 The easiest way ; nor with perplexing thoughts 
 To interrupt the sweet of life." 
 
 There are, however, minds of no low order which 
 find little pleasure in the study of the past, and 
 which turn with indifference from the great works 
 of imagination. Whether any one who has a soul 
 above that of an oyster is naturally indifferent to 
 such subjects I greatly doubt. I never yet came 
 across an intelligent child who did not delight in 
 listening to fairy stories. Nevertheless, whether it 
 comes about by nature or by stupid teaching, even 
 at a somewhat early age this indifference is mani- 
 fested. The great Darwin who, as I have shown, 
 in his boyhood had delighted in Shakespeare, after 
 the age of thirty could no longer find the slightest 
 enjoyment in the mighty poet, though to the end 
 of his life he could read novels, silly novels, too, if 
 onJy they ended happily. He mourned over his 
 mental atrophy, as he called it, but he could not 
 overcome it. This atrophy often manifests itself 
 at an early age. Many a man famous in science 
 had been pronounced a blockhead at school, to the 
 lasting disgrace of his teacher, who had failed to
 
 VI. THE STUDY OF SCIENCE. 203 
 
 discover his genius, or even worse, who had for the 
 time stifled its flame. In that criticism of Milton's 
 scheme of education which I read to you in my 
 last lecture, natures such as these, if they were 
 known to Johnson, were treated by him with 
 neglect. Poets, orators, and historians, you will 
 remember, were to form the sole reading of school- 
 boys, because they would supply them with axioms 
 of prudence, principles of moral truth, and materials 
 of conversation. The only result of forcing authors 
 such as these on those to whom they are utterly 
 distasteful is far too often to render the unwilling 
 students imprudent, immoral, and dull. Finding 
 no pleasure in the only knowledge which is given 
 them they look upon all knowledge as wearisome. 
 Had they been allowed to do what Johnson seems 
 to despise, "to watch the growth of plants or 
 the motions of the stars," they would have far 
 better learnt that lesson which in Socrates' opinion 
 was what we had to learn " how to do good and 
 avoid evil." " Whatever," said Johnson, speaking 
 of his visit to the ruins of lona, " whatever with- 
 draws us from the power of our senses, whatever 
 makes the past, the distant, or the future pre- 
 dominate over the present, advances us in the 
 dignity of thinking beings. Far from me and 
 from my friends be such frigid philosophy as may
 
 206 WRITERS AND READERS. 
 
 conduct us indifferent or unmoved over any ground 
 which has been dignified by wisdom, bravery, or 
 virtue. That man is little to be envied whose 
 patriotism would not gain force upon the plain of 
 Marathon, or whose piety would not grow warmer 
 among the ruins of lona." 
 
 But we may be withdrawn from the power of our 
 senses by other studies than those which deal with 
 the character of man. To the geologist the past 
 speaks in tones scarcely less deep and solemn than 
 to the student of history ; to the naturalist in his 
 study, as the endless tribes of living things in all 
 their variety and beauty "flash upon his inward 
 eye," the distant seems close at hand ; he is making 
 his way through the forests of the tropics, or sail- 
 ing among the islands of the East ; while to the 
 astronomer, as he considers that the earth is slowly 
 but surely slackening her daily course, till the day 
 must come when 
 
 " the great globe itself 
 Yea all which it inherit shall dissolve 
 And ... 
 Leave not a rack behind," 
 
 the future must with sadness often predominate 
 over the present. 
 
 Without the study of our great writers our
 
 VI.-THE GOOD TEACHER. 207 
 
 poets, philosophers, historians, biographers, and 
 moralists I do not think that the full wisdom ot 
 life can be attained. But if we cannot have the 
 best, let us go to the second best, or even to the 
 third best Let us not be content till we have 
 implanted in every child a love of something that 
 can withdraw him from the power of his senses. 
 He who can succeed in doing this, he who can give 
 the imagination strength and depth and purity, may 
 hope that, as the years go on, those who have come 
 under his happy influence, as each one finds 
 
 " from day to day his little boat 
 Rock in its harbour, lodging peaceably," 
 
 will give each his blessing and his praise to that 
 wise teacher 
 
 " Who gave him nobler loves and nobler cares.'
 
 INDEX. 
 
 ADDISON, Joseph, 24, 32, 50, 
 
 70, 80, 107, 139, 158 
 Arbuthnot, John, 161 
 Arnold, Matthew, 169 
 
 BACON, Francis, 58, 74 
 Barbauld, Anna Lietitia, 66, 79, 
 
 88 
 
 Beattie, James, 97 
 Behmen, Jacob, 67 
 Bentham, feremy, 88 
 Bible, The English, 157 
 Blair, Hugh, 27 
 Blount, Sir Thomas Pope, 74 
 Boswell, James, 75, 93, 122, 175 
 Bowles, William Lisle, 56 
 Bright, John, 159 
 Bronte, Charlotte, 75 
 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 25 
 Browning, Rol>ert, 17, 52, 100, 
 
 106 
 
 Bunyan, John, 159 
 Burke, Edmund, 76, 151 
 Burne-Jones, Mr. Edward, 195 
 Burney, Frances, 71, 75, 79 
 Burns, Robert, 44, 97, 98, 149, 
 
 197 
 Byron, Lord, 21, 23, loo 
 
 CARLYLE, Dr. Alexander, 95 
 Carlyle, James, 33, 148, 197 
 Carlyle, Thomas, 18, 22, 32, 33, 
 
 41,68, 118, 127, 128, 148, 197 
 Chesterfield, Earl of, 87 
 Cibber, Colley, 64 
 C lough, Arthur Hugh, 169 
 Cobbett, William, 186 
 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 31, 
 
 35. 55. 56, 68, 88, 107, 150 
 Colman, George, 73 
 Corneille, 68 
 
 Cowley, Abraham, 49, 191 
 Cowper, William, 1 66 
 
 DANTE, 40 
 
 Darwin, Charles Robert, 196,204 
 Darwin, Erasmus, 30 
 Dryden, John, 26, 50, 60, 68, 
 113-116 
 
 ELIOT, George, 75 
 Erskine, Lord, 87 
 Eton College, 162 
 
 FARMER, Richard, 41 
 Ferguson. James, 195 
 Fielding, Henry, 77, 85
 
 210 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Fox, George, 122 
 Franklin, Benjamin, 37 
 Froude, Mr. James Anthony, 
 128 
 
 GARRICK, David, 17, 40, 45, 59, 
 
 62, 72, 73. 95 
 George I., 66-7 
 George II., 200 
 George III., 36, 71, 200 
 German Critics, 67 
 Gibbon, Edward, 66, 76, 77, 85, 
 
 191 
 
 Goethe, 70 
 Goldsmith, Oliver, 24, 30, 40, 
 
 41, 71, 125, 132, 149, 160, 
 
 179-182 
 
 Gray, Thomas, 17, 20, 40, 162 
 Grimm, Baron, 86 
 Grote, George, 157 
 
 HARROW School, 162 
 Harwood, Thomas, 158 
 Ilazlitt, William, 149 
 Helps, Sir Arthur, 25 
 Herodotus, 182 
 Hervey, James, 87 
 Home, John, 42, 95 
 Homer, 155 
 Horace, 105 
 
 Hume, David, 36, 39, 42, 86, 
 94,96 
 
 JAMES, John, 126 
 Jeffrey, Francis, 18, 22, 99 
 Johnson, Samuel, 16, 17, 23, 26, 
 29.31, 34,41,44, 54, 68,75, 
 77, So, 85, 93, 108, 122, 125, 
 
 139, 144, 153, 158, 166, 170, 
 
 175, 192, 205 
 Jones, Sir William, 163, 189 
 Jowett, Professor, 172 
 
 KEATS, John, 23, 32, 100, 106 
 Kneller, Sir Godfrey, 6 1 
 
 LAMB, Charles, 42, 134, 135, 
 
 150 
 
 Landor, Walter Savage, 138 
 Lessing, 68 
 London, 151 
 
 MACAULAY, Lord, 42, 89, 99, 
 
 117-122, 127, 134, 157 
 Mackintosh, Sir James, 163 
 Martineau, Harriet, 189 
 Mill, John Stuart, 21, 176 
 Milton, John, 31, 50, 59, 75, 105, 
 
 144, 159, 189, 199 
 Mirabeau, Marquis of, 86 
 Monckton, Hon. Miss, 75 
 Montagu, Mrs., 73 
 More, Hannah, 79 
 Morris, Mr. William, 195 
 Murphy, Arthur, 62, 95 
 
 NORTHCOTE, James, 149 
 Novelists, Female, 79 
 
 OTWAY, Thomas, 43 
 
 PARR, Samuel, 163 
 Pepys, Samuel, 62 
 Pericles, 157 
 Pindarism, 49 
 Pomfret, John, 27
 
 INDEX. 
 
 211 
 
 Pope, Alexander, 23, 51, 55,65, ! 
 
 68, 103-110, 113 
 Person, Richard, 13 
 
 RACINE, 44, 68 
 
 Ramsay, Allan, 98 
 
 Ray, James, 94 
 
 Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 75, 132, 
 
 149. 190 
 Richardson, Samuel, 51, 65, 75, 
 
 77,86 
 
 Robertson, William, 31, 92 
 Rousseau, 39, 88 
 Ruskin, Mr. John, 25, 119, 129, 
 
 138, 149 
 
 SCHILLER, 88 
 School Histories, 179 
 Schoolboy Games, 161 
 Scott, Sir Walter, 23, 30, 44, 92, 
 
 96, 187, 193 
 Scott, William (Lord Stowell), 
 
 125 
 
 Scottish Associations, 91 
 Settle, Elkanah, 26 
 Shaftesbury, Earl of, 64 
 Shakespeare, William, 43, 45, 
 
 50, 58-74, 105, 123 
 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 100, 106 
 Shenstone, William, 177, 190 
 Sheridan, Thomas, 44 
 Siddons, Sarah, 75 
 Smith, Adam, 39, 43, 94 
 Smith, Dr. William, 180 
 Smollett, Tobias, 36 
 Socrates, 145 
 
 Southey, Robert, 11,27, 56, 131 
 
 Spenser, Edmund, 75 
 
 St. John, Henry (Viscount Bo- 
 
 lingbroke), 109 
 Sterling, John, 22 
 Sterne, Laurence, 37, 41 
 Stewart, Dugald, 92, 99, 127 
 Strahan, William, 27, 36 
 Swinburne, Mr. A. C., 196 
 
 TATLER, The, 65 
 Taylor, William, 12 
 Teignmouth, Lord, 163 
 Tennyson, Lord, 17, 23, 101, 
 
 102, 106, 160 
 Thackeray, W T illiam Makepeace, 
 
 22, 90 
 
 Travis, Archdeacon, 13 
 Trevelyan, Sir Georsje, 117 
 Tupper, M. F., ib6 
 
 VIRGIL, 185 
 
 Voltaire, 42, 59, 66, 70 
 
 WALPOLE, Horace, 40, 41, 66, 
 
 73, 76, 87, 133 
 Warburton, William, 68 
 Warton, Joseph, 51 
 Wilkes, John, 26 
 Word-painters, 133 
 Wordsworth, William, 17, 18, 
 
 21, 24, 31,39. 5 6 ' 5 s ' 92, ioo, 
 
 106, 152, 155, 172, 178, 194. 
 
 20 1 
 
 YOUNG, Edward, 87
 
 
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