Charles S, Batman, 
 
 Simmons&Wat 
 Book and Print Be, 
 
HISTOKICAL SKETCHES 
 
 OF THE 
 
 EEIGN OF GEOEGE SECOND 
 
 BY 
 
 MRS OLIPHANT 
 
 " THE WEB OF OUR LIFE IS OF A MINGLED YARN, GOOD AND ILL TO- 
 GETHER ; OUR VIRTUES WOULD BE PROUD IF OUR FAULTS WHIPPED 
 THEM not; AND OUR CRIMES WOULD DESPAIR IF THEY WERE NOT 
 NOURISHED BY OUR VIRTUES." 
 
 —All's Well that Ends Well. 
 
 SECOND EDITION 
 
 WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS 
 
 EDINBURGH AND LONDON 
 
 MDCCCLXX 
 
 The Bight of Translation is reserved 
 

 \ 
 
 ^ 
 
 
TO 
 
 LEILA MACDONALD 
 
 THIS BOOK 
 
 IS AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED 
 
 26532G 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. THE QUEEN, 1 
 
 II. THE MINISTER, 46 
 
 III. THE MAN OF THE WORLD, 91 
 
 IV. THE WOMAN OF FASHION, 127 
 
 V. THE POET, Vbbe. 166 
 
 VI. THE YOUNG CHEVALIER, 207 
 
 VII. THE REFORMER, 248 
 
 VIIL THE SAILOR, . . . 295 
 
 IX. THE PHILOSOPHER, 332 
 
 X. THE NOVELIST, 378 
 
 XI. THE SCEPTIC, 416 
 
 XIL THE PAINTER, . . 458 
 
THE QUEEN. 
 
 There is something in the position of sovereign which seems 
 to develop and call forth the qualities of a woman beyond 
 that of any other occupation. The number of reigning women 
 has no doubt been very limited, but it is curious to note how 
 kindly the feminine mind takes to the trade of ruling when- 
 ever the opportunity occurs to it. It is, perhaps, the only 
 branch of mental work in which it has attained a true and 
 satisfactory greatness. The only queen-regnant we know of 
 who was nobody was our own placid Queen Anne. Such 
 names as those of Isabella of Castile, of Elizabeth, and Maria 
 Theresa, are very illustrious examples of this fact. The 
 historian cannot regard those princely personages with the 
 condescending approbation which critics in every other branch 
 of science and art extend to women. They are great 
 monarchs, figures that stand fully out against the background 
 of history in the boldest and most forcible lines ; and that 
 in very absolute contradiction to all conventional theories. 
 The name at the head of this page is not that of a historical 
 personage of the first eminence ; but it is that of a very 
 remarkable woman, who holds no insignificant rank in the 
 long line of English sovereigns. The period is called the 
 reign of George II. ; but so long as her life lasted, it was 
 Caroline who was the Queen. 
 
 The Guelph family, at least in its beginning, does not fur- 
 nish us with any very interesting or dramatic group. The 
 first Georges are historical characters only because they can- 
 not help themselves — fate and the Protestant succession hav- 
 / #' * A 
 
^^:%:* '• •:: : /• • the queen. 
 
 ing been too many for them. They would without doubt 
 have been more honoured, more respectable, more at then- 
 ease in every way, had the prickly circlet, of which the fifth 
 Harry complained, never been placed upon their homely brows. 
 It was no doubt a painful metamorphosis for the German 
 " Lairdie," the obscure Elector, whom nobody expected to 
 cope with a Grand Monarque, or take up the traditions of an 
 imperial court, to emerge out of his jolly little uncleanly 
 Teutonic paradise, and submit himself to the caustic insjDec- 
 tion of Whig wits and Jacobite sneers. It was the greatest 
 sacrifice of comfort to grandeur that has been made in modern 
 times. These royal gentlemen have been weighed in a great 
 many balances of late years, and the result has not been 
 flattering to them, though it has not left them altogether 
 without credit. We do not propose to reopen the record. 
 The little monarch, with " his right leg well forward," and 
 his " eyes a fleur de tetel^ and the " dapper George " who 
 succeeded him, have had more than their share of discussion. 
 But from the year 1727 to 1737 there was another monarch 
 in England whose name was not George — a woman not unfit 
 to take her place among the reigning princesses. Queen 
 Caroline is even a greater contradiction to every ordinary 
 theory which ordinary men frame about women, than are the 
 other sovereigns who have proved the art of government to 
 be one of the arts within a woman's powers. Every ideal of 
 a good wife which has ever been conceived by man makes 
 out the model woman to be furiously jealous and vindictive 
 over the mere suspicion of infidelity in her husband. Has 
 not some one said that every wife is a Queen Eleanor in her 
 heart ? — and it is not only the good woman who is subject 
 to this infirmity : the light-minded, the careless, even the 
 guilty, show the same ruling passion. She who sins herself 
 is not made indulgent thereby to her partner's iniquity. It 
 is the one fault which no woman forgives. And again, 
 the popular imagination supposes that maternity destroys all 
 power of discrimination in a mother. She may be wounded, 
 injured, insulted by her children; she may see them do 
 everything that is base and miserable ; she may watch them 
 sink into the lowest depths of degradation ; but she will love 
 and believe in them still. To these two fundamental princi- 
 ples of a woman's nature there is scarce a creature in Christen- 
 
THE QUEEN. 3 
 
 dom who would not seal his or her adhesion. They lie 
 beyond or above all argument. They are proved, and over 
 again proved, every day. 
 
 Queen Caroline gives a dead contradiction to both. She 
 was an admirable wife ; but her husband made her the con- 
 fidante of his amours, and told her about his Rosamonds, 
 and yet she never poisoned, nor thought of poisoning, one of 
 them. She does not even seem to have been jealous. Her 
 historians, moved by the utter impossibility, according to all 
 preconceived notions, of such extraordinary philosophy, pick 
 out here and there the faint little snub bestowed upon " my 
 good Howard," to show that in her heart this instinct of 
 nature existed warmly enough, though in constant control. 
 But the examples do not bear out the suggestion : for it is 
 hard if a lady, not to say a queen, may not snub her bed- 
 chamber-woman for her pleasure without any deeper motive. 
 And she despised and disliked her son. We are aware that 
 to say these words is as much as to give her cause over 
 before every domestic tribunal. Monster ! does not every 
 one say ? Yet Caroline was no monster. She was a woman 
 and a foreigner, and yet she was more actively and urgently 
 Queen of England than any other except Elizabeth : she was 
 a wife, and yet she varied the form of conjugal wickedness 
 by almost encouraging her husband in his infidelities : she 
 was a mother, yet gave up, despised, and opposed her son. 
 For the first of her contradictory qualities, that of power, she 
 sins in company with other illustrious exceptions to the com- 
 mon theory ; but in her other faults she stands alone, or almost 
 alone. 
 
 It is a difficult task to apologise for or explain such won- 
 derful incongruities. They contradict at once the conclusions 
 of experience and those certainties which are intuitive and 
 above discussion. If a woman in fiction had been created 
 with such failings, even had she been the highest heroine of 
 tragedy, she would have been flouted as an impossible crea- 
 ture. She would be false to nature. But the real woman is 
 very true in fact, and takes no heed about being true to 
 nature. It is the one great advantage which fact has over 
 invention, and the historic over every other Muse. There are 
 no unities, no consistencies, no rule of probability, to bind 
 the free current of real life. What a poet dare not dream 
 
4 THE QUEEN. 
 
 of, existence produces calmly, contradicting its own laws, 
 setting aside the very principles on which its continu- 
 ance and stability are founded. But the character in 
 which such extraordinary contradictions exist cannot be a 
 simple or superficial one. And the ofiSce of the historical 
 student is not to defend, notwithstanding the general rage 
 for rehabilitation, which has changed or attempted to change 
 so many of our landmarks, but only to record, and if possible 
 to explain. 
 
 Caroline was born the daughter of a Duke of Anspach, one 
 of the cluster of little German houses to which, for so many 
 generations, we have owed our royal wives and husbands. 
 She was brought up under the care of a princess of the house 
 of Brunswick, the mother of Frederick the Great, and the 
 daughter of the old Electress Sophia, of a stock to all appear- 
 ance both sweeter and stronger in its feminine branches than 
 it has ever been in its men. The first event in her life is as 
 contradictory at the first glance to all its future tenor, as the 
 strange qualities which distinguished her in after-life are con- 
 tradictory to her womanhood. It is said that she was chosen 
 by the King of Spain as his bride, under condition of abandon- 
 ing the Protestant faith and becoming a Catholic. Such a 
 change was (and indeed we suspect is) no such dreadful 
 matter in the German matrimonial market, where princesses 
 are trained to bless the world. And Caroline, far from being 
 a bigot, or disposed to exaggerate the importance of religious 
 distinctions, shows few symptoms of any religious conviction 
 whatever. She refused, however, this advantageous bargain. 
 Her faith, such as it was, seems to have been more to her 
 than the unlucky but then splendid crown which was laid at 
 her feet. "She could not be prevailed on to buy a crown at 
 so dear a rate," says Bishop Burnet. Perhaps at that early 
 period of her existence some lingerings of childish devout- 
 ness might be in the mind of the young princess ; but there 
 can have been very little piety round her, and she showed 
 small sign of any in her after-life. The real cause of her 
 resistance probably was, that her mind, though not religious, 
 was essentially Protestant, as a great many minds are, espe- 
 cially in Germany. The Protestant intellect still exists and 
 flourishes, though not always in distinct connection with a 
 Protestant faith ; and is a far less conquerable thing than 
 
THE QUEEN. 6 
 
 any system of doctrine. In such a constitution, a deter- 
 mined dislike to submit to authority, to bind the spirit down 
 to obedience, or even to profess subjection in matters with 
 which the intellect has so much to do, is infinitely stronger 
 than the faculty of belief. Caroline, we suspect, would have 
 been very vague in any confession of her faith; but it is easy 
 to perceive how difficult the profession of Catholicism would 
 be to a woman of such a character and mind. 
 
 '^ Her pious firmness," adds the bishop-historian, ''is 
 likely to be rewarded even in this life with a much better 
 crown than that which she rejected." 
 
 It was to make Great Britain happy, as all the poets 
 twittered, that the choice was made ; and she married her 
 George shortly after, and lived with him, in the most sing- 
 ular version of married life perhaps ever set before the world, 
 for more than thirty years. To judge it or her by the rules 
 current among ourselves at the present day would be both 
 unjust and foolish ; but happily the chroniclers of the time 
 have left us in little doubt about the manners and customs of 
 that babbling and talkative age. It is painful to think how 
 little of the same kind of pleasure our descendants, a hundred 
 years hence, will get out of us. Thanks to Sir Kowland 
 Hill (and many thanks to him), we, as a nation, write letters 
 no more. And somehow, notwithstanding the contradiction 
 which statistics would throw in our face did we venture on 
 such an assertion, there do not seem to be so many of us 
 afloat in the world nowadays as there were in the period 
 when Horace Walpole corresponded with his friends. There 
 is no such hum as of a crowd breathing out of the mingled 
 mass of society where fashion and politics rival and aid each 
 other. In the days of the great Horace the buzz filled the 
 air; quiet people heard it miles off, counties off; now a great 
 bourdonnement, filling their ears like the sound of the waves 
 of life in the City when you stand within the silent aisles of 
 St Paul's, and listen ; — now scraps of distinct talk, like those 
 you catch by intervals on the skirts of every assembly; now 
 an opening of the crowd as some one comes or goes — now a 
 gathering of the countless mass, as some pageant forms 
 within its enclosure. We are more listless now, and speak 
 lower, and don't enjoy it. It is a polite whisper, or it is a 
 slow funeral drawl, the words dropping dolefully and at in- 
 
6 THE QUEEN. 
 
 tervals, like signal guns, which alone reaches us out of the 
 crowd. And soQiehow there does not seem so many people 
 about ; they are climbing the Alps, and crossing the seas, 
 and lecturing at Mechanics' Institutes, and writing pretty 
 books — perhaps ; or perhaps they are only of a lower vitality, 
 and make less noise, like the good children. When our 
 great-grandsons write our history, they will feel the differ- 
 ence ; for the newspapers, which none of us much believe in, 
 will probably have made themselves utterly incredible by 
 that time, and have ceased to be referred to. Let us hope 
 that the New Zealander will bring over with him some old 
 packets of yellow letters written to the first colonists. In 
 these, and in the big mails that go to India, the budgets of 
 news for the boys who are out in the world, lie our only hope 
 of domestic records in the present silent age. 
 
 The Court of George IT., however, lies open in a full flood of 
 light. Not only do everybody's letters contribute towards its 
 illumination, but the curious Memoirs of Lord Hervey, unique 
 in history, present it before us with a remorseless and impar- 
 tial distinctness. To say that we know it as well as if we 
 had lived in it, is little. We know it infinitely better. We 
 know what everybody said when the royal doors were closed, 
 and minister or bishop discussed the most important of 
 national affairs with king or queen. Had we but been about 
 Court at the moment, the extent of our observation could 
 not have gone further than to remark how Sir Eobert looked 
 when he left the royal presence, or if Bishop Hoadley was 
 cheerful after his audience. And it is not a pleasant spec- 
 tacle. The age was not one in which man believed in man, 
 nor in woman either, for that matter. If wits were not 
 sharper, the tongue at least was less under restraint. And 
 morality, as we understand it nowadays, does not seem to 
 have had any existence. Most people behaved badly, and 
 nobody was ashamed of it. To be sure, a great many people 
 behave badly at all times ; but, at least, the grace of conceal- 
 ment, of decent hypocrisy, of outward decorum, is general in 
 the world. There was no concealment in those days. The 
 ruling classes lived coarsely, spoke coarsely, sinned coarsely, 
 without any illusion on the subject. The innocent and 
 virtuous were little less indecent than the gross and wicked. 
 Good wives, and even spotless maidens, discussed, without 
 
THE QUEEN. 7 
 
 any pretence of sliame or attempt at secrecy, the nasty 
 adventures going on around tliem. The age was depraved, 
 but it was more than depraved — it was openly unclean. And 
 yet many notable figures circulate in this wicked and gossip- 
 ing and unsavoury crowd. The wickedness and unsavouri- 
 ness have been largely discussed and set forth to the fullest 
 vantage ; yet there are higher matters to discuss, into which 
 it is possible to enter without falling absolutely into the 
 mire. It is hideous to hear the old King talking of his 
 favourites to his wife's unoffended ears ; but the story of their 
 life together — of her rule, of her wisdom, her extraordinary 
 stoicism and patience, her good sense and infinite reasonable- 
 ness — is a very curious, almost unique, and often most touch- 
 ing tale. 
 
 There is one thing to be remarked to begin with, as a cir- 
 cumstance which explains much in the life of Caroline. It 
 is only after she had attained the fullest maturity of mind 
 that she takes her place in history. Such a hapless passion- 
 ate existence as that of Mary Stuart is over and closed for 
 ever before the age at which Caroline begins to be fully 
 apparent to us. Therefore, naturally, her virtues and her 
 faults are both of a different kind from those which are likely 
 to distinguish the earlier half of life. This of itself throws 
 a certain light upon her wonderful conjugal tolerance. She 
 was above forty when she came to the throne of Great 
 Britain. Before a woman comes to that age she has learned 
 much which seems impossible to youth. In a barren soil, it 
 is true, cultivation can do but little, and there is many a 
 woman who is as much a fool at forty as if she had still the 
 excuse of being in her teens. But with the greater portion 
 of reasoning creatures maturity makes a difference. It 
 teaches patience first of all ; it teaches the absolute want of 
 perfection that exists everywhere, even in one's self It 
 makes the human soul aware of its incapacity to enter alto- 
 gether into another, and to be possessed of its most intimate 
 motives ; and it exalts the great objects of family peace, 
 honour, and union, of prosperity and general respect, and 
 sober duty, above those enthusiasms of love and perfectness 
 which are natural and seemly in youth. A young woman 
 who had been as tolerant as Caroline would have been simply 
 a monster. But a royal soul, on the heights of middle age, 
 
8 THE QUEEN. 
 
 having lived through all the frets and passions of youth, 
 without becoming a whit less natural, separates itself from 
 much that once seemed necessary to its existence. Far be 
 it from us to say that love perishes in the growth and pro- 
 gress of the mind. But love changes. It demands less, it 
 gives more. Its gifts are not always flattering to the 
 receiver, because it is — alas ! — impossible that it should 
 always retain the fairy glamour in its eyes, and think all 
 excellence centred in the object of its regard. It is a 
 favourite theory with young people, and chiefly with young 
 women, though one to which common life gives the lie daily, 
 that when respect is gone love dies. Love, let us be thank- 
 ful, is a much more hardy and vigorous principle ; it survives 
 everything — even imbecility, even baseness. Its gifts, we 
 repeat, are not always flattering to the receiver ; instead of 
 the sweet thoughts, the sweet words, the tender caresses, 
 and admiring enthusiasm of its earlier days, it often comes 
 to be pity, indulgence, even endurance, which it gives ; and 
 that with a terrible disinterestedness — " all for love, and 
 nothing for reward,'' with no further expectation of the 
 recompense without which young love breaks its heart and 
 dies. Old Love, by long and hard training, finds out that it 
 cannot die ; it discovers that it can live on the smaller and 
 ever smaller footing which experience leaves it. Like a 
 drowning creature on its one span of rock, it lives and sees 
 the remorseless tide rising round it. It survives ill-usage, 
 hardship, injury of every kind, even — and this is a mystery 
 and miracle, which few can understand — in some strange 
 way it survives contempt. Men and women continue steadily 
 • — as the evidence of our own eyes and ears will tell us — to 
 love women and men upon whom they cannot possibly look 
 but with a certain scorn. They are disenchanted, their eyes 
 are opened, no halo hangs any longer over the feeble or 
 foolish head which once looked like that of a hero. His wife 
 has to shield the man from other people's contempt, from 
 blame, and the penalties of misdoing. She cannot, standing 
 so near him, shield him from her own ; but her love, changed, 
 transfigured, embittered, exists and warms him still. 
 
 The only distinct incident of Caroline's youth which has 
 escaped oblivion is that about the offered crown which she 
 would not buy with the sacrifice of her Protestant birth- 
 
THE QUEEN. 9 
 
 right. History is silent as to her early married life, and 
 perhaps it is as well. How she may have struggled against 
 her fate we cannot tell ; and probably it would not be an 
 edifying tale. She came to England in 1714, a young 
 mother with her children, and not till some years after does 
 she even appear as a centre of society in her new country. 
 When the quarrel between her husband and his father broke 
 out openly, the Princess of Wales began her individual 
 career. The pair did what so many heirs-apparent have 
 done — they set up their Court in avowed opposition to the 
 elder Court, which rarely holds its own in such a struggle. 
 In this case it had less than the usual chance. The elder 
 Court was dull, and coarse, and wicked. It had no legiti- 
 mate queen ; and no charm, either of wit or beauty, recom- 
 mended its feminine oracles, who were destitute of any 
 claim on the respect of the nation, and were openly sneered 
 and jeered at by high and low. On the other hand, the 
 Court of the " Waleses," to quote the familiar phraseology 
 of the nineteenth century, was young, gay, and bright, full 
 of pretty women and clever men. The Princess herself was 
 in the bloom of her age, handsome, accomplished, and agree- 
 able. Among her attendants were some of the heroines of 
 the time — the " fair Lepell," the sweet Mary Bellenden, the 
 " good Howard," whose names are still as familiar as if they 
 had been shining yesterday upon an admiring world. " The 
 apartments of the bedchamber-woman in waiting," says 
 Walpole, "became the fashionable evening rendezvous of the 
 most distinguished wits and beauties." Pleasure of every 
 kind and complexion was the occupation of this royal house- 
 hold. It had little influence in public affairs, and no place 
 iu the, national economy. It was free to enter into all the 
 gaieties of a private house, with all the splendour of a 
 palace. Such a position, unofficial, unrestrained, without 
 the curb either of filial or public duty, is in most cases more 
 pleasant than safe. 
 
 But the breach between the father and son was too des- 
 perate to give the Prince any power of mischief, so far as 
 the aifairs of the country were concerned. And he was not 
 more depraved than it seems to have been considered his 
 princely duty to be, as a man equal to the responsibilities 
 of his position. He had a " favourite," because, in the 
 
10 THE QUEEN. 
 
 abominable code of the time, such an appendage was 
 thought necessary ; and George^s dull sense of his duty in 
 this respect would be whimsical if it was not vile. But, 
 strangely enough, he was all the time a man under the most 
 perfect domestic management- And, more strange still, the 
 woman who was his mistress gives even a prejudiced in- 
 quirer an impression of genuine goodness^ sweetness, and 
 truth, which it is hard to reconcile with her miserable posi- 
 tion. For ten years a racket of pleasuring was kept up at 
 Leicester Fields. The laughing Opposition jeered and 
 jested, and made epigrams, and made love. The saucy 
 maids of honour laughed at the little Prince to his face. 
 They indulged in all kinds of obsolete merry-makings. 
 They hated the King and his Dutch Queens, and his power- 
 ful Minister. When the old George ended, and the new 
 George began, what change was to be in the universe ! 
 Other laws, other policy, a different regime, with everybody 
 in place who was out, and everybody out who was in, and a 
 general reversal and delightful jumble of heaven and earth. 
 So everybody believed, and so the Prince of Wales fully 
 intended in his choleric soul. But master and servants 
 alike reckoned without their Princess. While the racket 
 went on around her, while her naughty little husband made 
 love before her face, and his courtiers laughed in their 
 sleeves, wise Caroline kept her bright eyes open — those 
 eyes of which Walpole says, " that they expressed whatever 
 she had a mind they should " — and looked on and pondered. 
 She was ^' cette diablesse Madame la Princesse^' to her charm- 
 ing father-in-law. She was in opposition, like the rest, 
 naturally set against the powers that were. From her, even 
 more than from her husband, might have been expected a 
 desire to cross, and thwart, and run in the face of everything 
 that had been before her. Nous allons changer tout cela. 
 What other sentiment could be expected to rise in the 
 breast of a clever and impatient woman, as she stood by for 
 years and watched the Germans at St James's buying and 
 selling, and the old King who had driven herself out of his 
 palace, and kept her daughters as hostages, petting his 
 favourite Minister? Could anybody doubt what her feelings 
 must have been to the whole obnoxious group — King, Jeze- 
 bels, Premier — who kept all influence out of her hands? 
 
THE QUEEX. 11 
 
 And she was German, like all the others, and knew as little 
 by nature what British policy ought to be. She must have 
 sat still, impotent, and watched what they were about, as 
 she ruled her little Court, and led its pleasures, for ten long 
 years. And the country, and the Prince, and the expectant 
 statesman, and even the Prime Minister himself, felt in their 
 hearts, when the end came, how it must be. 
 
 It would be curious to inquire how it was that this woman 
 knew better than all the people about her ; how it was that 
 she resisted the natural impulse of opposition, and all the 
 temptations of vengeance and novel delights of power. 
 There are various petty explanations suggested, as might 
 have been expected. Sir Kobert Walpole believed that it 
 was his own cleverness in finding out from the first that her 
 influence and not that of her rival was all-powerful with the 
 King. Others considered it to be the direct court which his 
 adversaries paid to Lady Suffolk. Caroline's conduct gives 
 little warrant either to the one supposition or the other. A 
 far more rational and obvious conclusion, as well as one 
 infinitely more worthy and more characteristic, would be, 
 that the spectator thus standing aside so long to watch with 
 the keen interest of a future ruler the course of affairs, 
 honestly perceived that the most skilful hand in the country 
 was already at the helm, and made up her mind to sacrifice 
 her prepossessions to the good of the empire. Not Prince 
 Hal when he rebuked his ancient ally more startled and 
 amazed his expectant followers than did the new King 
 when, sulky and unwilling, he took his father's Minister to 
 his counsels, and turned the comforters of his humiliation 
 away. How "he as King came to consult those whom he 
 never would speak to as Prince, and to admit no farther than 
 the drawing-room at St James's those favourites who had 
 ever been of the Cabinet at Leicester House ; in short, how 
 he came to pursue the very same measures in his own reign 
 which he had been constantly censuring and exploding in 
 his father's," is, Lord Hervey concludes, a wonder which 
 everybody will be curious to know the reason of. Curiosity 
 on this point has much decreased, no doubt, since he wrote ; 
 but it is as striking a political event as any in our modern 
 history. And at this distance, when all the figures are 
 rounded by time, and the far-off beholder has a chance of 
 
]2 THE QUEEN. 
 
 arriving at a more correct judgment than the spectator who 
 is on the spot and sees too much, the question is still inter- 
 esting. George made this lame but wise conclusion as 
 unwillingly as ever man did anything he could not help 
 doing; and he did it because Caroline had been studying 
 all the circumstances while he was amusing himself, and 
 because she had the true wisdom, the supreme good sense, 
 of putting her animosities in her pocket, and electing to do 
 that which was best for the nation, as well as for the stabi- 
 lity of her own family and throne. 
 
 When the news of the death of George I. reached Eng- 
 land, the first act of the new King was exactly what was 
 expected of him. He referred Sir Eobert Walpole, who 
 brought him the news, at once and ungraciously to Sir 
 Spencer Compton, who had been his treasurer as Prince, 
 and acknowledged partisan. Sir Eobert accepted the decision 
 as the most likely and natural one. " It is what I, as well 
 as the rest of the world, expected would be whenever this 
 accident happened," he said, according to Lord Hervey's 
 report, to the new authority. '' My time has been : yours is 
 beginning." Then there came an awful pause of fate. Eng- 
 land, which needed wary steering in those days, found her- 
 self suddenly for a breathless moment in the hands of George 
 and Sir Spencer Compton. There is a certain grim fun in 
 the situation, as of a couple of astounded pigmies left sud- 
 denly all at once to do a giant's work. Perhaps the King, 
 had he been his own man, and not under lawful rule and 
 governance, would have had courage to try it ; and for a 
 moment the crowding spectators who came to kiss hands, 
 and those who made Leicester Fields ring with the sound 
 of their applauses, expected it was to be so. But the second 
 of the dwarfs was not so brave as his master. Either the 
 joy of the triumph or the fear of responsibilty overwhelmed 
 the poor man. He had a speech to make for the King, and 
 making King's speeches was not his metier. He turned 
 abject and dismayed to the dismissed Minister who had just 
 asked and received the promise of his protection. He 
 begged like a schoolboy over his verses that Sir Eobert 
 would do it for him this time, till he got into the way of it. 
 It was pure imbecility, or fate ; for, as Lord Hervey re- 
 marks, " if this precedent-monger had only turned to the 
 
THE QUEEN. 13 
 
 old Gazettes publislied at the beginning of former reigns, he 
 might have copied fall as good a declaration from these 
 records as any Sir Kobert Walpole could give him." Such 
 acts of folly mark the difference between the man who can 
 and him who cannot. Sir Kobert, no doubt, smiled as he 
 retired into a room by himself, to do his rival's work. He 
 had promised not to tell, " even to the people in the next 
 room ; " but when the new Minister had taken the speech in 
 his own handwriting to the King, a discussion arose about 
 it, in which again Sir Spencer appealed to his predecessor. 
 Queen Caroline, we are told,* a better judge than her husband 
 of the capacities of the two men, who had silently watched 
 for a proper moment to overturn the new designations, did 
 not lose a moment in observing to the King how prejudicial 
 it would be to his affairs to prefer a man in w^hose own 
 judgment his predecessor was the fittest person to execute 
 the office." She had already given a public proof that with 
 her the late holders of ofiBce were not disgraced. On the 
 very day after the accession, when "all the nobility and 
 gentry in town crowded to kiss hands ; " when the " common 
 face of a Court was quite reversed," and " there was not a 
 "creature in office who had not the most sorrowful and de- 
 jected countenance of distress and disappointment," Caroline 
 was the only woman in that servile crowd who took any 
 notice of Lady Walpole — the wife of the Minister, whose 
 " late devotees " kept her with " scornful backs and elbows " 
 from approaching the royal presence ; " but no sooner was 
 she descried by her Majesty," writes her son, with natural 
 triumph, than the Queen cried aloud, ' There, I am sure I 
 see a friend!'" An inferior mind might well have taken 
 that little bit of vengeance on the former Court which had 
 expelled and tabooed herself. But Caroline was either 
 altogether superior to the temptation, or too wise, even in 
 the first moment of triumph, to avail herself of it. All the 
 elaborate machinery by which she ruled was already in ope- 
 ration to keep the tried and trusty public servant who had 
 managed the country for so long, and knew its wants so 
 well, at the head of affairs. She had the penetration to see 
 that here was the friend and defender of whom her family 
 stood in need. 
 
 * Horace "Walpole's Reminiscences. 
 
14 THE QUEEN. 
 
 It would be vain to attempt to say that the means by 
 wbicli Caroline procured her will were of the most dignified 
 kind. They were such means as we see continually em- 
 ployed in private life, when a clever and sensible woman is 
 linked (unfortunately, not a very uncommon circumstance) 
 to an ill-tempered, headstrong, and shallow man. They are 
 means to which a pure and elevated mind would find it very 
 hard, even impossible, to stoop; but there can be little doubt 
 that by their partial use many a family has been kept united 
 and prosperous, and many a commonplace personage carried 
 through the world with something like honour and credit, 
 whose affairs would have fallen into hopeless loss and ruin 
 had his wife suifered the natural disgust and impatience of 
 a superior mind to move or be apparent in her. Queen 
 Caroline, perhaps, as her stake was greater than most, carried 
 those means of power to such a perfection as few have been 
 able to reach. 
 
 " The Queen, by long studying and long experience of liis temper," 
 says Lord Hervey, " knew how to instil her own sentiments while she 
 affected to receive his Majesty's. She could appear convinced while she 
 was controverting, and obedient while she was ruling ; and by this means 
 her dexterity and address made it impossible for anybody to persuade 
 him what was truly his case — that wliilst she was seemingly on every 
 occasion giving up her opinion and her will to his, she was always in 
 reality turning his opinion, and binding his will to hers. She managed 
 this deified image as the heathen priests used to do the oracles of old, when, 
 kneeling and prostrate before the altars of a pageant god, they received 
 with the greatest devotion and reverence those directions in public which 
 they had before instilled and regulated in private." 
 
 Her labours were unremitting at this grand crisis of fate. 
 And if it be remembered how very ticklish the position w^as, 
 the immense importance at once to her family and to the 
 country of an agent so judicious and unexcitable can scarcely 
 be overcalculated. A young dispossessed legitimate heir 
 was growing up with all those circumstances in his favour 
 which naturally attend a new life. The old Pretender might 
 have committed himself to many follies — the young Preten- 
 der was as yet unstained by any independent act. It might 
 become at any moment the policy of one of the great Conti- 
 nental powers to take up the boy's cause, as indeed they 
 were all well enough inclined to do. He had still a party in 
 
THE QUEEN. 15 
 
 England, strong in rank, if not in mucli else, and a yet 
 stronger in Scotland. The newly-imported German family, 
 which scarcely pretended to love or sympathise with its new 
 subjects, was totally unbeloved by them. Mere policy, and 
 nothing else, an act of national necessity, desperation, so to 
 speak, had brought them over. They had neither traditional 
 loyalty nor personal affection in their favour, nor the powers 
 of mind, or even attraction of manners and appearance, which 
 win popularity. Caroline was as far sensible of this as any 
 individual can be expected to be sensible of the disadvant- 
 ages of her own immediate family. Though her life abounds 
 in similar situations, there are none more expressive of the 
 mingled tragedy and comedy, the curious junction of the 
 greatest and pettiest interests, than this first scene in her 
 life as queen. It is ludicrous, yet, if one but thinks what 
 is involved, it is solemn. There is the little King strutting 
 and storming, " losing no opportunity to declare that the 
 Queen never meddled with his business," and strong in the 
 notion of inaugurating a new regime: and the faltering un- 
 prepared new Minister who stammers, and hesitates, and 
 turns to his rival and predecessor for instruction what to do; 
 and burly Sir Kobert standing by, not without a humorous 
 twinkle in his eye, aware that his own interests, as well as 
 those of the country, are at stake, yet not quite able to resist 
 the comic features of the scene; and Caroline behind, cau- 
 tiously pulling the strings that move her royal puppet, anxi- 
 ously watching the changes of his temper and his counte- 
 nance. Not a noble method of managing imperial business; 
 yet without it a deadlock must have ensued, and the busi- 
 ness could not have been managed at all. 
 
 George had formed a very ditferent idea, as Lord Hervey 
 informs us, of his royal duties. 
 
 ** His design at his first accession to the throne was certainly, as Boileau 
 says of Louis XIV., 
 
 ' Seiil, sans ministre, a I'exemple des Dieux, 
 Faire tout par sa main, et voir tout de ses yeux.' 
 
 He intended to have all his ministers in the nature of clerks, not to give 
 advice, but to receive orders ; and proposed what by experiment he found 
 impracticable, to receive applications and distribute favours through no 
 principal channels, but to hear from all quarters, and employ indifferently 
 in their several callings those who by their stations would come under 
 the denomination of ministers. But it was very plain from what 1 have 
 
16 THE QUEEN. 
 
 just related from the King's own lips, as well as from many other circum- 
 stances in his present conduct, that the Queen had subverted all his no- 
 tions and schemes, and fully possessed his Majesty with an opinion that 
 it was absolutely necessary, from the nature of the English government, 
 that he should have but one Minister, and that it was equally necessary, 
 from Sir Robert's superior abilities, that he should be that one. But 
 this work, which she now (1733, five years after the accession) saw com- 
 plete, had been the work of long time, much trouble, and great contriv- 
 ance ; for though, by a superiority of understanding, thorough knowledge 
 of his temper, and much patience in her own, she could Avork him by de- 
 grees to any point where she had a mind to drive him, yet she was forced 
 to do it often by slow degrees, and with great caution ; for as he was in- 
 finitely jealous of being governed, he was never to be I'ed but by invisible 
 reins ; neither was it ever possible for her to make him adopt her opinion 
 but by instilling her sentiments in such a manner as made him think they 
 rose originally from himself. She always at first gave in to all his notions, 
 though never so extravagant, and made him imagine any change she 
 wrought in them to be an afterthought of his own. To contradict his 
 will directly was always the way to strengthen it ; and to labour to convince 
 was to confirm him. Besides all this he was excessively passionate, and 
 his temper upon these occasions was a sort of iron reversed ; for the hotter 
 it was, the harder it was to bend, and if ever it was susceptible of any im- 
 pression or capable of being turned, it was only when it was quite cool." 
 
 " The Queen's power was unrivalled and unbounded," 
 Lord Hervey says at another period; and he adds, "How 
 dearly she earned it will be the subject of future considera- 
 tion in these papers." It is, indeed, the chief subject of bis 
 remarkable Memoirs, in which Caroline appears in all the 
 intimacy of private friendship, enhanced as it is by the ab- 
 solute want of privacy that attends a royal existence. The 
 position, as we have said, is in many respects undignified. 
 The real rulers of the kingdom, herself and Sir Robert Wal- 
 pole, have to meet each other in long secret consultations, 
 like two conspirators. The highest designs of State, when 
 they have been decided on between the two, have to be art- 
 fully filtered into the intelligence of the King. He has to 
 be prepared, screwed up) and down to one pitch or another, 
 tempered to the necessary heat or coolness; they watch him 
 with the most minute and anxious scrutiny — they propitiate 
 him with little flatteries, with compliances and indulgences, 
 which, as from the Queen at least, are at once unseemly and 
 ■unnatural — they attend upon his humour with a servile ob- 
 sequiousness that is simply bewildering. His naughty tern- 
 
THE QUEEN. 17 
 
 per, his nasty ways, his wicked little tongue, are endured 
 with steady patience. Worst of all, perhaps, poor Caroline 
 has to submit to his company, seven or eight hours of it 
 every day, which is evidently the greatest infliction she has 
 to bear. The picture is miserable, dreadful, whimsical, ab- 
 surd, and touching. For at the worst, when all is said, 
 these two who have lived together so long, who have their 
 children round them, who are not of different countries to 
 make the manners of one repulsive to the other — two Ger- 
 mans, bred in the same ideas, in the same small Courts, who 
 have come to this wonderful preferment together — must have, 
 all errors notwithstanding, lived in such a union as few 
 people ever attain to — a union which seems characteristic of 
 the house of Hanover. No doubt when it is the weakness 
 of the woman which leans upon the man, the picture is more 
 consistent with the arrangements of society, and more beau- 
 tiful to behold as a matter of aesthetics. But when a strong, 
 calm, enduring woman, unimpassioned yet tender, backs 
 steadily with all her strength, all her life, the weak, unstable, 
 and uncertain man, who, with all his imperfections, is her 
 husband, it would be hard to refuse a certain admiration at 
 the sight. His sacred Majesty was an intolerable little 
 monster in many respects — yet for more than thirty years 
 they clung to each other, shared each other's good and evil 
 fortunes, were cast into the shade together, and together 
 burst into power; discussed every public matter, every do- 
 mestic incident, every inclination, wicked or otherwise, in 
 that grand committee of two which is, wherever it is to be 
 found, the great consolation and strength of life. If the 
 King brought little wisdom to his council, he yet brought 
 himself — a malleable and shapeable being. The heart of 
 the spectator melts to him a little as it becomes evident how 
 very shapeable he was. The Eoyal George was clay in the 
 hands of the potter. He " strutted" out of doors; he strut- 
 ted even and snubbed his wife when there was only Lord 
 Hervey and some poor tedious German dependant looking 
 on. But he never forsook her, or resisted the inevitable 
 moulding which took place when they were alone. The 
 extent of his '' strutting" seems to have been extraordinary. 
 He grew at once facetious and historical in his certainty of 
 being master. In other reigns, he informed his courtiers, it 
 
 B 
 
18 THE QUEEN. 
 
 had been otherwise. Charles I. had been governed by his 
 wife; Charles II. by his mistresses; King William by his 
 men — and Queen Anne by her women — favourites; his own 
 father by anybody who could get at him. Then, *' with a 
 significant, satisfied, triumphant air," the ridiculous little 
 monarch turned to his auditors, " And who do they say gov- 
 erns now?" he said, swelling with royal pride and content. 
 One can imagine how my lords bowed, and how the muscles 
 twitched about their courtly mouths. But neither within 
 doors nor without was there any echo of his Majesty's com- 
 placency. There are moments in our own time when the 
 newspapers are impertinent, and ' Punch' ventures on a joke 
 which is a little less than loyal. But speech was very free 
 in the middle of the eighteenth century. 
 
 '* You may strut, dapper George, but 'twill all be in vain; 
 We know 'tis Queen Caroline, not you, who reign," 
 
 sang boisterously the popular muse. It was the terror of her 
 life that he should find out that he was ruled ; it was the de- 
 light of his that he was unquestionably lord and master of all. 
 Sir Robert Walpole's authority, thus once established, 
 lasted five years longer than the life of his royal mistress. 
 The politics of the time, involved as they are with foreign 
 affairs to an extent which seems strange in these days of non- 
 intervention — though indeed non-intervention had already 
 taken shape, and was a principle to which Walpole clung 
 with much tenacity — are too elaborate to be here discussed. 
 The greatest of all matters to England at the moment was 
 the steady continuance of things as they were, and settlement 
 of the new dynasty, with at least such additional power as 
 the habit of seeing them there could give, on the throne. 
 The country had no love to give them ; but so long as it had 
 no positive offence — so long as it was kept content, and 
 things went on to the moderate satisfaction of the people — 
 every day that passed safely over the heads of the new 
 monarchs was an advantage to them. Nothing is more 
 curious than the account of the relations between the Court, 
 the Cabinet, and the Houses of Parliament, which is inciden- 
 tally given in Lord Hervey's narrative. Everything that 
 was done in the country was done by Queen Caroline and Sir 
 Eobert Walpole, in private committee assembled. The com- 
 
THE QUEEN. 19 
 
 plaisant Cabinet adopted their resolutions, signed their let- 
 ters, and did whatever it was told to do. The Parliament, if 
 not always so obedient, did its spiriting very gently ; and 
 when a majority was not to be had otherwise, there were 
 always means of getting it, according to the method adopted 
 on the Prince of Wales's rebellious demand for more money. 
 That majority cost the King only £900, Lord Hervey tells 
 us ; and it is evident that everybody thought it a great bar- 
 gain. But the country out of doors made itself audible and 
 visible now and then, as in the commotion about the Excise 
 Bill, and in that marvellous mob-episode, the Porteous Eiot 
 in Edinburgh. The one was a constitutional, the other an 
 unconstitutional outbreak ; but in both cases the people had 
 their way, and the Court had to put np with the affront. On 
 the whole, there seems to have been some resemblance be- 
 tween the blustering King and his people at this period. 
 They were both given to illegitimate pleasures ; they were 
 both very foolish, hot-headed, and obstinate. Both of them 
 would pull up short at a bit of a measure which a little while 
 afterwards they would swallow whole without the least reluct- 
 ance. Sir Kobert managed the nation much as Caroline 
 managed her husband. He gave in, or appeared to give in, 
 to it by times. Then after the many-headed mass had for- 
 gotten a little, he would come back to his abandoned measure, 
 and get it over easily. His was light work, however, in 
 comparison with the unceasing diplomacy and weary unend- 
 ing strain which was made on the Queen's strength by her 
 master. She had seven or eight hours of him every day. 
 She had to keep on her mask, and never to forget herself or 
 her object in her most private moments. Such martyrs there 
 are in ordinary life, whom nobody suspects. And there are 
 some scenes in the Queen's history, trivial and miserable and 
 exasperating, which most people have seen reflected in little 
 episodes of domestic history in households much less exalted 
 than those of kings and queens. 
 
 There are several other particulars equally noticeable. 
 We do not speak of the general coarseness of talk, though 
 that seems to have been universal ; and indeed the fact of 
 its being universal takes to some extent the meaning out of 
 it. It was an odious fashion, but it was a fashion. The 
 sweet Mary Bellenden, whom Horace Walpole describes as a 
 
20 THE QUEEN. 
 
 perfect creature, talks in her friendly letters to Lady Suffolk 
 as we presume women of the very lowest class, short of 
 infamy, would be ashamed to talk now — and does it as a fast 
 girl of the present day talks slang, from mere thoughtlessness 
 apparently, and high spirits. We remember once to have 
 walked for five minutes down a street in Glasgow behind a 
 group of merry mill-girls, with bare feet and coiffure as 
 elaborate as if each had employed a separate artiste; and 
 their talk, which, after an interval of twenty years, still 
 haunts the horrified ear, resembled the choice phrases with 
 which Horace Walpole's " perfect creature " sprinkles her 
 familiar epistles. Yet she was a woman against whom 
 scandal had not a word to say. It would be vain, then, to 
 expect from Queen Caroline and her Court the purity of tone 
 which prevails in our own ; nor have we any right to blame 
 individuals for what was at once a fault and fashion of the 
 age. We have no intention or desire to enter into that fossil 
 nastiness. Thank heaven ! the mode has changed. 
 
 But it is curious also to contrast the impartial attitude so 
 strenuously maintained by the Sovereign in our own day 
 with the complete absorption in politics and the cares of 
 government which distinguishes Queen Caroline, and, in a 
 lesser degree, her husband. It was her vocation — the work 
 of her life. She enters into every detail as if she were a 
 Lord of the Treasury. Probably no Lord of the Treasury 
 nowadays gives himself up so entirely to the work of ruling. 
 Nor was there any public pretence of constitutional indiffer- 
 ence. The Ministerial party is called the Court party without 
 disguise ; the Opposition are his Majesty's enemies. And 
 when anything goes wrong, an insubordinate Secretary or dis- 
 appointed Chamberlain does not hesitate to give the Queen a 
 bit of his mind. Fancy Lord Carnarvon or General Peel, when 
 circumstances went against them, rushing into the presence of 
 our liege Lady, and making speeches to her of a dozen pages, 
 to the eff'ect that she is deceived in her trust, that her Prime 
 Minister is a rogue, and that she will repent in the end! 
 Such was the mission of Lord Stair on occasion of the famous 
 Excise Bill, on which Sir Eobert Walpole was defeated by 
 the country in one of its wild, and to all appearance unreason- 
 able, epidemics of resistance. The whole transaction is suffi- 
 ciently interesting to be told in full. 
 
THE QUEEN. 21 
 
 The scheme itself was simple enough. It was an expedient 
 to diminish the land-tax, which in the time of war had been 
 as high as four shillings in the pound, by an excise duty 
 upon tobacco and wine, which, along with the salt duty, was 
 to balance the subtraction of a shilling in the pound from 
 the tax on land ; and Sir Kobert, we are told by Lord Her- 
 vey, expected nothing but increased popularity from the pro- 
 posal. Instead of this it set the country in a blaze. '' Every- 
 body talked of the scheme as a general excise ; they believed 
 that food and raiment, and all the necessaries of life, were to 
 be taxed ; that armies of excise officers were to come into 
 every house, and at any time they pleased ; that our liberties 
 were at an end, trade going to be ruined, Magna Charta over- 
 turned, all property destroyed, the Crown made absolute, and 
 Parliament themselves no longer necessary to be called." 
 To aid this hubbub, a small party of lords, all in office, sent 
 a messenger in the person of Lord Stair to remonstrate with 
 the Queen. He informed her Majesty that her Prime Minis- 
 ter was more universally odious than any minister in any 
 country had ever been ; that he was hated by the army, 
 hated by the clergy, hated by the city of London^ and hated 
 by the Scotch to a man (the speaker himself, and half of the 
 party he represented being Scots lords). 
 
 " That he absolutely governs your Majesty, nobody doubts," 
 said this astute and amiable messenger ; and he proceeded 
 to inform Caroline that the scheme was so wicked, so dis- 
 honest, and so slavish, that his conscience would not permit 
 him to vote for it. The Queen had listened to him calmly 
 up to this point, but here her patience failed. ^' When Lord 
 Stair talked of his conscience with such solemnity, she cried 
 out, ' Ah, my lord, ne me parlez point de conscience : vous me 
 faites evanouir ! ' " Such was the way in which deputations 
 conducted themselves, and were received, in those days. 
 When her visitor, however, w^ent on to say that the profligacy 
 of mankind could not be so great as that the House of Com- 
 mons should pass a bill so opposite to the interests of their 
 constituents, and so opposed to their wishes, Caroline answered 
 with the following sharp retort : — 
 
 " Do you, my lord," she asks, with a certain fine scorn, ** pretend to 
 talk of the opinion of the electors having any influence on the elected ? 
 You have made so very free with me in this conference, my lord, that I 
 
22 THE QUEEN. 
 
 hope you will think I am entitled to speak my mind with as little reserve 
 
 to you I must therefore, once more, ask you, my lord, how you 
 
 can have the assurance to talk to me of your thinking the sense of con- 
 stituents, their interest or their instructions, any measure or rule for the 
 conduct of their representatives in Parliament ; or if you believe I am so 
 ignorant or so forgetful of all past proceedings in Parliament as not to 
 know that in the only occasion when these considerations should have 
 biassed you, you set them all at nought ? Remember the Peerage Bill, 
 my lord. Who then betrayed the interests of their constituents ? Who 
 deprived their constituents of all chance of ever taking their turn with 
 those whom they then sent to Parliament ? The English lords in passing 
 that bill were only guilty of tyranny, but every Scotch lord was guilty 
 of the last treachery ; and whether you were one of the sixteen traitors, 
 j''our own memory, I believe, will serve to tell you without the assistance 
 of mine." 
 
 This stormy interview concluded with the exit of Lord 
 Stair in " a violent passion," exclaiming, " Madame, vous etes 
 trompee, et le Roi est trahi! " 
 
 The King was occupied, one does not know how, while 
 this was going on — eating bread and honey perhaps — while 
 the Queen was in her parlour with this passionate peer. But 
 he was roused to interest when the kingdom began to heave 
 and give forth volcanic groans. On the night of the debate, 
 ^'justices of the peace, constables, and civil magistrates, were 
 all astir to preserve the public peace ; secret orders were 
 given to the Horse and Foot Guards to be in readiness at a 
 moment's warning." And *' the mob came down to West- 
 minster," crowding the lobby and the surrounding precincts, 
 as we have seen it do in our own day. Notwithstanding all 
 this commotion, the Bill was passed by a majority of sixty- 
 one. Lord Hervey had to send word from the House how 
 things were going, to satisfy the anxious couple at the 
 Palace ; and when he got back to St James's, " was carried 
 by the King into the Queen's bedchamber, and there kept 
 without dinner (poor Chamberlain!) till near three in the 
 morning, asking him ten thousand questions, relating not only 
 to people's words and actions, but even to their looks." 
 
 Notwithstanding the majority, however, the Bill was 
 finally given up, after various other incidents which we 
 cannot enter into. The anxiety of the whole " Court party " 
 seems to have been intense. Sir Eobert Walpole offered 
 his resignation, or rather, as it seems, suggested to their 
 
THE QUEEN. 23 
 
 Majesties that perhaps it would be proper that he should 
 resign. " The Queen chid him extremely for having so ill 
 an opinion of her, as to think it possible for her to be so 
 mean, so cowardly, and so ungrateful as to accept of such 
 an offer; and assured him that as long as she lived she 
 would not abandon him. When Sir Kobert made the same 
 offer to the King, his Majesty (as the Queen told me) made the 
 most kingly, the most sensible, and the most resolute answer 
 that it was possible for a wise, a just, and a great prince to 
 make to the most able and the most meritorious servant. 
 But whether she dictated the words before he spoke them or 
 embellished them afterw^ards," says the sceptical Hervey, 
 never very enthusiastic about his royal master, " I know 
 not/' She had been " weeping plentifully " when her faith- 
 ful attendant and chronicler w^ent up to the drawing-room. 
 One wonders if Queens and Ministers, not to speak of Kings, 
 are as much moved at the present day when a favourite mea- 
 sure has to be abandoned. " The King walked about the room 
 in great anger and disorder, and ordered poor Lord Hervey 
 to send bulletins from the House. Sir Eobert " stood some 
 time after the House was up leaning against the table, with 
 his hat over his eyes, and some few friends with melancholy 
 countenances rgund him." The Queen, when she said, *' It 
 is over, we must give way," had the tears running down her 
 cheeks. It is strange to hear of so much emotion all about 
 an abortive measure, which, in its own essence, was not of 
 fundamental importance, and which came to nothing. Sir 
 Eobert was very near paying for it dearly, from the insults 
 and assaults of the mob. To show, however, the latent fire 
 always ready to burst forth which existed in the country, it 
 may be added that in the rejoicings made at Oxford over 
 the defeat of Ministers, the health of James III. was publicly 
 drunk. This was a very gaseous and harmless sort of 
 treason, as we know now ; but it looked dangerous and 
 alarming enough then. 
 
 During the ten years of Caroline's reign, her lord made 
 repeated visits to Hanover, during which intervals she was 
 Queen-Eegent, and was at liberty to act in her own person 
 without the trouble of influencing him. He wrote to her 
 constantly during these absences — letters of forty or fifty 
 pages each. Lord Hervey says ; a long and close journal of 
 
24 THE QUEEN. 
 
 all his proceedings, even of sucli proceedings as were unfit 
 to be reported to any woman's ear, much, less to his wife's. 
 It was pretty Fanny's way, and there was apparently 
 nothing to be done but to give in to it. We repeat, a high- 
 spirited and pure-minded woman could not have given in to 
 it ; which, perhaps, only means, however, that no one could 
 have done so who had lived into the nineteenth century and 
 thought as we did. But Caroline was of the eighteenth 
 century, and she did not think as we do. A mistress more 
 or less did not matter in these days ; it seemed to have been 
 a thing taken for granted. And the Queen was a queen as 
 much as she was a wife. She had come to her natural 
 occupation when she ascended the new yet old throne upon 
 which necessity and Protestantism had placed her race. 
 She was necessary to the country — at least as much as 
 any human creature can be said to be necessary to a world 
 which, when its best and most powerful rulers are removed, 
 still finds it can get on reasonably well without them. The 
 price of her high position, her unbounded influence, her 
 reign, in short — for reign it was — was her continuance of 
 the unswerving indulgence and support which she had 
 always given to the King. She had borne Lady Suffolk 
 very quietly. Nothing can be more visionary than the 
 instances of trifling spite which she is alleged to have 
 shovm to that mild woman. Without doubt her own 
 favourite, Mrs Clayton, could have produced parallel pas- 
 sages had anybody taken the trouble to look them up. She 
 seems, on the contrary, to have been very good to her 
 " good Howard," and remonstrated with her on her leaving 
 Court, bidding her to recollect that she, like her Majesty's 
 self, was no longer young, and that she must learn philo- 
 sophy, and not resent the failure of her royal lover's atten- 
 tion, of which she had complained — an almost incredible 
 conversation to take place between the man's wife and his 
 " favourite " — yet true. " The Queen was both glad and 
 sorry" (of Lady Suffolk's retirement), says Lord Hervey. 
 " Her pride was glad to have even this ghost of a rival 
 removed ; and she was sorry to have so much more of her 
 husband's time thrown on her hands, when she had already 
 enough to make her often feel heartily weary of his com- 
 pany." This is the point of view which seems to have 
 
THE QUEEN. 25 
 
 struck the Princess Royal, who, with the frankness of the 
 period, has also her word to say about the domestic in- 
 cident " I wish with all my heart/' said this young lady, 
 " that he would take somebody else, that mamma might be 
 a little relieved from the ennui of seeing him always in her 
 room/' Few people, perhaps, would venture upon the same 
 boldness of suggestion ; but yet we do not doubt there is 
 something in poor Queen Caroline's dismay at the prospect 
 of having more than her share of her husband's company, 
 which will go to the hearts of many sympathetic women 
 who know what it is. We may here quote a few instances 
 of what the poor lady had to bear. 
 
 It was on his second visit to Hanover that George fixed 
 his affections on Madame Walmoden, afterwards created by 
 him Countess of Yarmouth. He had nobody to interfere 
 with him in his nasty little Paradise ; no Queen, no Minister 
 to disturb his leisure with their projects, no House of Com- 
 mons to worry him with doubtful majorities ; and he enjoyed 
 himself, it is evident, in his own refined way. He was 
 very reluctant to return out of that Armida's garden to the 
 realities of life in England. His people, such as they were, 
 were fond of him in Hanover ; his Ministers were obsequi- 
 ous, and he was free to take his pleasure according to his 
 fancy. When he left that Eden it was under the promise 
 of returning some months later, a promise which he was 
 careful to keep; but he came home possessed of such a 
 demon of ill-temper as made the lives of the unfortunate 
 inhabitants of St James's a burden to them. Nothing 
 English pleased the King. " No English or even French 
 cook could dress a dinner; no English confectioner set 
 out a dessert; no English player could act; no English 
 coachman could drive, or English jockey ride ; no English- 
 man knew how to come into a room, nor any Englishwoman 
 how to dress herself. Whereas at Hanover all these things 
 were in the utmost perfection." He came into his splendid 
 banishment like an east wind, biting and blighting every- 
 thing ; everything he saw was wrong. The Queen had 
 caused some bad pictures to be removed out of the great 
 drawing-room at Kensington and replaced them with good 
 ones — an arrangement which his Majesty immediately coun- 
 termanded ; he snapped at his Ministers for going into the 
 
26 THE QUEEK 
 
 country *' to torment a poor fox that was generally a much 
 better beast than any of them that pursued him ; " he 
 behaved to his wife with the coarsest and most invariable 
 ill-temper, and generally made himself disagreeable to 
 everybody. 
 
 " One evening among the rest, as soon as Lord Hervey came into the 
 room, the Queen, who was knotting while the King walked backwards 
 and forwai'ds, began jocosely to attack Lord Hervey upon an answer just 
 published to a book of his friend Bishop Hoadley's upon the Sacrament, 
 in which the Bishop was very ill treated ; but before she had uttered 
 half what she had a mind to saj'-, the King interrupted her, and told her 
 she always loved talking of such nonsense and things she knew nothing 
 about ; adding, that if it were not for such foolish people loving to talk ot 
 those things when they were written, the fools who wrote upon them would 
 never think of publishing their nonsense and disturbing the Government 
 with impertinent disputes that nobody of any sense ever troubled himself 
 about. The Queen bowed, and said, ' Sir, I only did it to let Lord 
 Hervey know that his friend's book had not met with that general appro- 
 bation he had intended. ' ' A pretty fellow for a friend ! ' said the King, 
 turning to Lord Hervey. * Pray what is it that charms you in him ? 
 His pretty limping gait (and then the King acted the Bishop's lameness) 
 or his nasty stinking breath — phaugh ! or his silly laugh when he grins 
 in your face for nothing, and shows his nasty rotten teeth ? ' — (and so on 
 for a couple of pages. ) . . . 
 
 " Lord Hervey, in order to turn the conversation, told the King that 
 he had that day been with a bishop of ,a very different stamp, . . . 
 who had carried us to "Westminster Abbey to show us a pair of old 
 brass gates to Henry VII. 's Chapel. . . . Whilst Lord Hervey was 
 going on with a particular detail and encomium on these gates — the 
 Queen asking many questions about them, and seeming extremely 
 pleased with the description — the King stopped the conversation short by 
 saying, ' My lord, you are always putting some of these fine things in the 
 Queen's head, and then I am to be plagued with a hundred plans and 
 workmen.' Then turning to the Queen, he said, 'J suppose I shall see 
 a pair of these gates to Merlin's Cave to complete your nonsense there ' 
 (this Merlin's Cave was a little building so christened which the Queen 
 had lately finished at Eichmond). . . . ^ A'propos,' QaiiJL the Queen, 
 ' I hear the * Craftsman ' * has abused Merlin's Cave. ' ' I am very glad of 
 it,' interrupted the King; 'you deserve to be abused for such childish 
 silly stuff, and it is the first time I ever knew the scoundrel to be in the 
 right.' 
 
 * The opposition newspaper, in which King, Queen, and Minister were 
 very roughly handled. 
 
THE QUEEN. 27 
 
 "This the Queen swallowed too, and began to talk on something else, till 
 the conversation, I know not by what transition, fell on the ridiculous 
 expense it was to people, by the money given to servants, to go and stay 
 two or three days with their acquaintance in the country ; u})on which 
 the Queen said she had found it a pretty large expense this summer, to 
 visit her friends even in town. * That is your own fault,' said the King ; 
 ' for my father, when he went to people's houses in town, never was fool 
 enough to be giving away his money.' The Queen pleaded for her 
 excuse that she had only done what Lord Grantham had told her she 
 was to do ; to which his Majesty replied that my Lord Grantham was a 
 pretty director ; that she was always asking some fool or other what she 
 was to do ; and that none but a fool would ask another fool's advice. 
 The Queen then appealed to Lord Hervey, whether it was not now as 
 customary to give money in town as in country. He knew it was not, 
 hut said it was. He added, too, that to be sure, were it not so for parti- 
 culars (private persons), it would certainly be expected from her Majesty. 
 To which the King said, * Then she may stay at home as I do. You do 
 not see me running into every puppy's house to see his new chairs and 
 stools ; nor is it for you,' said he, addressing himself to the Queen, 
 ' to be running your nose everywhere, and trotting about the town to 
 every fellow that will give you some bread and butter, like an old girl 
 that loves to go abroad, no matter where, or whether it be projier or no.' 
 The Queen coloured and knotted a good deal faster during this speech 
 than she had done before, whilst the tears came into her eyes, but she 
 said not one word. Lord Hervey (who cared not wliether he provoked 
 the King's wrath himself or not, provided he could have the merit to the 
 Queen of diverting his Majesty's ill-humour from her) said to the King, 
 that as the Queen loved pictures, there was no way of seeing a collection 
 but by going to people's houses. * And what matter whether she saw a 
 collection or not ? ' rej)lied the King. ' The matter, sir, is that she satisfies 
 her own curiosity, and obliges the people whose houses she honours with 
 her presence.' 'Supposing,' said the King, 'she had a curiosity to see 
 a tavern, would it be fit for her to satisfy it ? and yet the innkeeper 
 would be very glad to see her.' ' If the innkeepers,' replied Lord Her- 
 vey, ' were used to be well received by her Majesty in her palace, I 
 should think the Queen seeing them at their own houses would give no 
 additional scandal.' The King then, instead of answering Lord Hervey, 
 turned to the Queen, and with a good deal of vehemence, poured out an 
 unintelligible torrent of German, to which the Queen made not one word 
 of reply, but knotted on till she tangled her thread, then snuffed the 
 candles that stood on the table before her, and snuffed one of them out ; 
 upon which the King, in English, began a new dissertation on her 
 Majesty, and took her awkwardness for his text." 
 
 Perhaps the reader may some time in his life have assisted 
 at a similar scene. One can imagine the furious feeble little 
 
28 THE QUEEN. 
 
 man strutting and raging about the room, twisting every new 
 subject, painfully started in the hope of diverting his ill- 
 humour, into a new channel for its outlet. And the Queen, 
 at her table by the light of her candles, anxiously talkative 
 at first, then silent, knotting ever faster and faster, with 
 trembling hands and tangling thread ; and the courtier stand- 
 ing by grieved for her, yet half amused in his own person, 
 ready to tell any fib, or make any diversion of the master's 
 wrath upon his own head — knowing it was not, but saying it 
 was, and telling us so with a beautiful candour. It was for 
 want of Herrenhausen and his German enchantress that the 
 wicked little monarch was so cross. On other occasions he 
 would take up one of his wife's candles as she knotted, and 
 show Lord Hervey the pictures of his Dutch delights, which 
 with characteristic good taste he had had painted and hung 
 in Caroline's sitting-room, dwelling upon the jovial interest 
 which was the subject of each with mingled enthusiasm and 
 regret. He had vowed to go back to his love in May, and 
 all the winter was spent in those sweet recollections and fits 
 of temper. Nor was this all the poor Queen had to bear. 
 Her Minister assured her coarsely and calmly that nothing 
 was more natural ; that she was herself old and past the age 
 of pleasing ; and that, in fact, there was nothing else to be 
 looked for. He had the incredible audacity to propose to 
 her, at the same time, that she should send for a certain 
 Lady Tankerville, " a handsome, good-natured, simple 
 woman," to make a balance on the side of England to the 
 attractions at Hanover. We are not told that Lady Tanker- 
 ville, whose recommendation was that she would be " a safe 
 fool," had done anything to warrant the Minister's selection 
 of her. Caroline laughed, Sir Robert said, " and took the 
 proposal extremely well." But her laugh. Lord Hervey 
 wisely remarks, was no sign of her satisfaction with so pre- 
 sumptuous and injurious an address. 
 
 Lord Hervey throughout the whole seems to have been 
 her chief support and consolation. He was with her con- 
 stantly, spent the mornings with her, brought her all the 
 news of the town, the Parliament, and what people were say- 
 ing. When the Court went hunting, which was a very com- 
 mon ceremony, Lord Hervey, not the kind of man to care for 
 that simple excitement, rode on a hunter she had given him 
 
THE QUEEN. 29 
 
 by the side of the Queen's chase ; and while the noisy crowd 
 flew past them the two discussed every movement in the 
 country — every project of State, — every measure projected 
 or proposed for the rule of England, as well as the involved 
 and tangled web of wars and negotiations abroad. There is 
 an amusing little sketch, included in the Memoirs, written 
 by Lord Hervey for the amusement of his royal mistress, and 
 setting forth, under a dramatic form, the manner in which 
 the news of his death would be received by the Court, which 
 gives, perhaps, a more distinct view of that curious royal 
 interior than anything else which has come to our hands. 
 
 THE DEATH OF LOED HERYEY ; • OR, A 
 MORNING AT COURT. - 
 
 A DRAMA. 
 
 Act. I. 
 
 Scene. — The Queen's Gallery. The time, nine in the morning. 
 {Enter the Queen, Princess Emily, Princess Caroline, followed by 
 Lord Lifford ( a Frenchman) and Mrs Purcel.) 
 
 Queen. — Man Dieu, quelle chaleur/ en verite on etouffe. Pray, open 
 a little these windows. 
 
 Lord Liffoed. — Has-a your Majesty hear-a de news ? 
 
 Queen. — What news, my dear lord ? . 
 
 Lord L. — Dat my Lord Hervej'-, as he was coming last night to tone, 
 was rob and murdered by highwaymen, and tron in a ditch. 
 
 P. Caroline. — Eh, grand Lieu! 
 
 Queen {striking her hand upon her knee). — Comment, est it veritable- 
 ment mort ? Purcel, my angel, shall I not have a little breakfast ? 
 
 Mrs Purcel. — What would your Majesty please to have ? 
 
 Queen. — A little chocolate, my soul, if you give me leave ; and a little 
 sour cream and some fruit. 
 
 {Exit Mrs Purcel.) 
 
 Queen {to Lord Lifford). — EJi lien ! my Lord Lifford, dites nous unpeu 
 comment cela est arriv4. I cannot imagine what he had to do to be put- 
 ting his nose there. 
 
 Lord L. — Madame, on SQait quelque chose de cela de Mon. Ifaran qui 
 d'abord quHl a mc de voleurs s'est enfui et venu d, grand galoppe a Londres, 
 and after dat a waggoner take up de body and put it in his cart. 
 
 Queen {to Princess Emily). — Are you not ashamed, Amalie, to laugh ? 
 
 P. Emily. — I only laughed at the cart, mamma. 
 
 Queen. — Ah ! that is a \evy fade plaisanterie. 
 
30 THE QUEEN. 
 
 P. Emily, — But if I may say it, mamma, I am not very sorry. 
 
 Queen. — Fi done! Eh bien, my Lord Lifford ! My God, where is this 
 chocolate, Purcel ? 
 
 {Re-enter Mrs Purcel, with the chocolate and fruit). 
 
 Queen {to Mrs Purcel). — Well, I am sure Purcel now is very sorry for 
 my Lord Hervey : have you heard it ? 
 
 Mils P. — Yes, madam ; and I am always sorry when your Majesty 
 loses anything that entertains you. 
 
 Queen. — Look you there, now, Amalie, I swear now Purcel is a thou- 
 sand times better as you. 
 
 P. Emily. — I did not say I was not sorry for mamma ; but I am not 
 sorry for him. 
 
 Queen.— And why not? 
 
 P. Emily.— What ! for that creature ? 
 
 P. Caroline. — I cannot imagine why one should not be sorry for him : 
 I think it very diire not to be sorry for him. I own he used to laugh 
 malapropos sometimes, but he w^as mightily mended ; and for people that 
 were civil to him, he was always ready to do anything to oblige them ; 
 and for my part I am sorry, I assure. 
 
 P. Emily. — Mamma, Caroline is ducUich : for my part, I cannot 
 paroUre. 
 
 Queen. — A.h, Ah ! You con 2JaroUre and be duchtich very well some- 
 times : but this is no paroitre ; and I think you are very great brutes. I 
 swear now he was \exy good, poor my Lord Hervey ; and with people's 
 lives that is no jest. My dear Purcel, this is the nastiest fruit I have 
 ever tasted ; is there none of the Duke of Newcastle's ? or that old fool 
 Johnstone's ? II etait hienjoli quelquefois, Taj Lord Hervey ; was he not, 
 Lifford ? 
 
 Lord L. {talcing snuff). — Ees, ended he vas ver pretty company some- 
 times. 
 
 (P. Emily shrugs her shoulders o.nd laughs again. ) 
 
 Queen {to Princess Emily). — If you did not think him company, I am 
 sorry for your taste. {To Princess Caroline) My God, Caroline, you will 
 twist off the thumbs of your glove ! Mais^ my Lord Lifford, qui vous a 
 conte tout ga des voleurs, da ditch, et des waggoners ? 
 
 Lord L. — I have hear it at St James's, et tout le monde en parle. 
 
 Queen {to Mrs Purcel). — Have you sent, Purcel, to Vickers about my 
 clothes ? 
 
 Mrs p. — He is here, if your Majesty pleases to see the stuffs. 
 
 Queen. — No, my angel, I must write now. Adieu, Adieu, my Lord 
 Lifford. 
 
 Act IL 
 
 Scene. — The Queen's dressing-room. The Queen is discovered at her 
 toilet cleaning her teeth ; Mrs Purcel dressing her Majesty's head. 
 The Princesses, Lady Burlington and Lady Pembroke, Ladies of the 
 
THE QUEEN. 31 
 
 Bedchamber, and Lady Sundon, woman of the Bedchamber, standing 
 round. Morning prayers saying in the next room. 
 
 1st Parson {behind the scenes). — From pride, vainglory, and hypocrisy, 
 from envy, hatred, and malice, and all uncharitableness — 
 
 2nd Parson. — Good Lord, deliver us!* 
 
 Queen. — I pray, my good Lady Sundon, shut a little that door ; these 
 creatures pray so loud one cannot hear one's self speak. {Lady Sundon 
 goes to shut the door). So, so, not quite so much ; leave it enough open 
 for those parsons to think we may hear, and enough shut that we may 
 not hear quite so much. {To Ladg Burlington) What do you say, Lady 
 Burlington to poor Lord Hervey's death ? I am sure you are very sorry. 
 
 Lady P. {sighing and lifting up her eyes). — I swear it is a terrible 
 thing. 
 
 Lady B. — I am just as sorry as I believe he would have been for me. 
 
 Queen. — How sorry is that, my good Lady Burlington ? 
 
 Lady B. — Not so sorry as not to admit of consolation. 
 
 Queen. — I am sure you have not forgiven him his jokes upon Chis- 
 wick. 
 
 {Enter Lord Grantham.) 
 
 But what news do you bring us, my Lord Gran- 
 
 r. — Your Majesty has hear de news of poor my Lord Hervey ? 
 — Ah, mon cher my lord, c^est imc viellerie : ily a cent ans qu'on 
 
 Queen. 
 tham ? 
 
 Lord G 
 
 Queen. 
 le sgait. 
 
 Lord G. — I have just been talking of him to Sir Eobert. Sir Ptobert 
 is prodigiously concerned ; he has seen Monsieur — how you call ? — 
 Marant. 
 
 Queen. — 3laran vous voudrez dire. I pray, my good child, take away 
 all these things, and let Sir Robert come in. 
 
 (Lord Grantham brings in Sir Robert Walpole, and all but Sir 
 Robert and the Queen go 07it.) 
 
 Queen. — Come, come, my good Sir Robert, sit down. Well, how go 
 matters ? 
 
 Sir R. — Everything very well, madam — pure and well. I have just 
 had intelligence out of the city ; all is very quiet there. . . . But 
 what news from Hanover, madam ? 
 
 Queen — There is a letter of five-and-forty pages from the King ; I 
 have not time now, but there are some things in it that I must talk to 
 you about. 
 
 Sir R — I have had a long letter, too, from Horace. 
 
 * It was the pious custom of the period to read prayers in the ante-room, 
 while the Queen dressed— thus saving at once time and appearances. 
 
32 THE QUEEN., 
 
 Queen. — Oh, mon Dieu ! not about his silly ladder-story again. My 
 good Sir Robert, I am so tired and so sick of all that nonsense that I can- 
 not bear to talk or think of it any more. Apropos poor my Lord Hervey, 
 I swear I could cry ! 
 
 Sir R, — Your Majesty knows I had a great partiality for him ; and 
 really, madam, whatever faults he might have, there was a great deal of 
 good stuff in him. I shall want him, and your Majesty shall miss him. 
 
 Queen. — Oh ! so I will. . . . Adieu, my good Sir Robert, I believe 
 it is late. I must go a moment into the drawing-room ; do j'^ou know who 
 is there ? 
 
 Sir R. — I saw the Duke of Argyle, madam. 
 
 Queen. — Oh, mon Dieu ! I am so weary of that Felt-Marshal and his 
 tottering head and his silly stories about the bishops, that I could cry 
 whenever I am obliged to entertain him. And who is there more ? 
 
 Sir R. — There is my Lord President, madam. 
 
 Queen, — Oh, that's very well, I shall talk to him about his fruit, 
 and some silly council at the Cock-pit, and the Plantations ; my Lord 
 President loves the Plantations, . . . But who is there beside ? 
 Adieu, adieu, my good Sir Robert ; I must go, though you are to-day 
 excellent conversation. 
 
 Act III. 
 
 Scene changes to great drawing-room. All the courtiers ranged 
 in a circle. 
 {Enter the Queen led by Lord Grantham, followed by the Princesses and 
 all her train. Queen curtsies very slightly : Drawing-room bows 
 and curtsies very low.) 
 
 Queen (to the JDuke of Argyle). — Where have been, my Lord ? One 
 has not had the pleasure to see you a great while, and one always misses 
 you. 
 
 Duke of A I have been in Oxfordshire, madam, and so long that I 
 
 was asking my father. Lord Selkirk, how to behave. I know nobody 
 that knows the ways of a Court so well, or that has known them so long. 
 
 Lord Selkirk. — By God ! my lord, I know nobody knows them better 
 than the Duke of Argyle. 
 
 Duke of A. — All I know, father, is as your pupil ; but I told you I 
 was grown a country gentleman. 
 
 Lord S. — You often tell me things I do not believe. 
 
 Queen (laughing). — Ha ! ha ! ha ! you are always so good together, 
 and my Lord Selkirk is always so lively. [Turning to Lord President) 
 1 think, my lord, you are a little of a country gentleman too — you love 
 Chiswick mightily ; you have very good fruit there, and are very curious 
 in it ; you have very good plums. 
 
 Lord President. — I like a plum, madam, mightily ; it is a very 
 pretty fruit. 
 
THE QUEEN. 33 
 
 Queen, — The greengage, I think, is very good. 
 
 Lord Pkes.— There are three of that sort, madam; there is the true 
 greengage, and there is the Drap d'Or, that has yellow spots ; and there 
 is the Reine Claude, that has red spots. 
 
 Queen. — Ah, ah ! One sees you are very curious, and that you under- 
 stand these things perfectly well. Upon my word, I did not know you 
 was so deep in these things. You know the plums as Solomon did the 
 plants, from the cedar to the hyssop. 
 
 Queen {to 1st Court Ladij). — I believe you found it very dusty ? 
 
 1st Court Lady, — Very dusty, madam. 
 
 Queen {to 2d Court Lady). — Do you go soon into the country, 
 madam ? 
 
 2d Court Lady, — Very soon, madam. 
 
 Queen {to M Court Ladi/).—Th.e town is very empty, I believe, 
 madam ? 
 
 3d Court Lady, — Very empty, madam. 
 
 Queen {to itJi Court Lady). — I hope all your family is very well, 
 madam ? 
 
 4th Court Lady, — Very well, madam. 
 
 Queen {to 5th Court Lady). — We have had the finest summer for walk- 
 ing in the world. 
 
 5th Court Lady. — Very fine, madam. 
 
 {Enter Lord Grantham, in a 
 Lord Grantham. — Ah, dere is my Lord Hervey in your Majesty 
 gallery ; he is in de frock and de bob, or he should have come in. 
 Queen. — Mon Dieu ! my Lord Grantham, you are mad ! 
 Lord G. — He is dere, all so live as he was ; and has play de trick to 
 see as we should all say. 
 
 Queen. — Then he is mad. AUons voir qu'est ce que c'est que tout ceci. 
 
 {Exeunt omnes.) 
 
 There is also a short conversation in this clever jeu 
 d' esprit between the Queen and Walpole, which throws a 
 gleam of light upon the difficulties Caroline had to con- 
 tend with in learning to comprehend English laws and 
 liberties. Some riots had arisen in London, beginning 
 with a purely local practical remonstrance made by the 
 weavers of Spitalfields against the introduction of cer- 
 tain competitors — " Irishmen working at a lower rate than 
 the English journeyman." It " began with railing against 
 Irishmen," says Lord Hervey, ''but came in twenty-four 
 hours to cursing of Germans, reviling the King and Queen, 
 and huzzaing for James III/' The troops were sent 
 
 C 
 
34 THE QUEEN. 
 
 to assist the civil magistrate in quelling this tumult ; but 
 the magistrate who read the proclamation to disperse the 
 rioters made a great blunder by seizing some persons after 
 he had read the proclamation before the hour was expired 
 which the Act allows to the rioters to disperse. " We must 
 hang some of these villains," says the Queen, with royal 
 brevity ; to which Walpole answers as follows, not without 
 a certain enjoyment, one can imagine, in her bewilder- 
 ment : — 
 
 We will if we can, madam. I had my Lord Chancellor and my Lord 
 Hardwicke with me this morning, and I told them the circumstances of 
 the fellows we had taken. 
 
 Queen. — I must do my Lord Chancellor and my Lord Hardwicke jus- 
 tice. They have behaved both exceeding well ; exceeding well, upon my 
 word. I am sure they will hang these rogues. 
 
 Sir R. — I told my Lord Chancellor that these fellows that the soldiers 
 had seized were some of the most clamorous and most audacious, that 
 they were holloaing in a most tumultuous manner at the head of the 
 mob, and crying " Come on, come on ! " and all that kind of stuff. 
 
 Queen. — And what did he say ? I am sure he was very zealous. He 
 is the best man in the world. 
 
 Sir E. — Madam, after hearing my story out he paused some time, and 
 seemed to decline giving any opinion at all ; at last he asked, and very 
 significantly, whether the hour given by the Riot Act for the dispersing 
 of the mob was expired before the men we proposed trying were taken. 
 
 Queen. — Mon Dieu ! that is always those silly lawyers* way, as if the 
 soldiers were to go against people in rebellion with watches in their 
 pockets, or to be asking what is o'clock when they should be serving 
 their Prince. And what said my Lord Hardwicke ? 
 
 Sir R. — He said, too, madam, that it was impossible to condemn these 
 fellows upon the Riot Act unless the hour was expired. 
 
 Queen. — Ah, mon Dieu ! they are all so ennuyant with their silly 
 forms and their silly Acts. But what did he say about pulling down and 
 disfacing — how do call you it ? — the houses ? 
 
 Sir R. — He said on that too, madam, that unless it could be proved 
 that the men we have taken assisted in defacing the houses, that their 
 being in company with those that did was not capital ; for though in 
 murder all present are deemed principals, yet in this law none were 
 deemed criminal but those who were proved accessory. 
 
 Queen. — There is your fine English liberty ! The canaille may come 
 and pull one by the nose, and unless one can prove which finger touched 
 one's nose, one has but to put a plaster to one's nose, and wait to punish 
 them till they pull it again ; and then, maybe, they shall pull one's eyes 
 out of one's head too. 
 
THE QUEEN. 35 
 
 Sir R. — I am afraid, madam, there are inconveniences and imperfec- 
 tions attending all systems of government, and these are ours ; but we 
 will see what's to be done, and if they are to be come at, they shan't 
 escape. 
 
 It is evident, however, tliat by times Caroline really 
 ■understood and appreciated the real blessings of English 
 freedom ; though it is scarcely to be expected that a woman 
 brought up in a despotic little German Court, and brought 
 up to reign, should have so entirely cast away prejudice 
 and prepossession as to receive it, with its unquestionable 
 imperfections, as the ideal government. Here is a whimsical 
 piece of commendation, extracted from her in the midst of 
 her royal discontents. 
 
 " I have heard her," says Lord Hervey, *' at different times speak with 
 great indignation against the assertors of the people's rights ; have heard 
 her call the King, not without some despite, the humble servant of Par- 
 liament — the pensioner of his people — a puppet of sovereignty that was 
 forced to go to them for every shilling he wanted, that was obliged to 
 court them that were always abusing him, and could do nothing of him- 
 self. ... At other times she was more on her guard. I have heard 
 her say, she wondered how the English could imagine that any sensible 
 prince would take away their liberty if he could. ' Mon Dieu ! ' she cried, 
 * what a figure would this poor island make in Europe if it were not for 
 its government ! It is its excellent free government that makes all its 
 inhabitants industrious, as they know that what they get nobody can 
 take from them ; it is its free government, too, that makes foreigners 
 send their money thither, because they know it is secure, and that the 
 prince cannot touch it ; and since it is its freedom to which this king- 
 dom owes everything that makes it great, what prince who had his 
 senses, and knew that his own greatness depended on the greatness of the 
 country over which he reigned, would wish to take away what made both 
 him and them considerable ? I had as lief,' she added, * be Elector of 
 Hanover as King of England if the government was the same. Quel 
 diable, that had anything else would take you at all, or think you worth 
 having, if you had not your liberties ? Your island might be a very 
 pretty thing in that case for Bridgeman and Kent to cut out into gar- 
 dens ; but for the figure it would make in Europe it would be of no more 
 consequence here in the AVest than Madagascar in the East ; and for this 
 reason, as impudent and as insolent as you all are with your troublesome 
 liberty, your princes, if they are sensible, will rather bear with your im- 
 pertinences than cure them — a way that would lessen their influence in 
 Europe full as much as it would increase their power at home.' " 
 
 Her education and early ways of thinking made it also 
 
36 THE QUEEN. 
 
 very difficult for the Queen to sympathise in the insular 
 policy which, in Sir Kobert Walpole's hands, had already 
 come into being. She was not convinced that it was for the 
 interest of England to stand apart and take no share in the 
 wars of the Continent — an opinion in which perhaps by this 
 time many of us are again beginning to join. In respect 
 to this a curious little circumstance is related to us, which 
 proves oddly enough at once the Queen's faithfulness to her 
 political adviser, even when she did not agree with him, and 
 the powerful nature of her agency. '' What is very surpris- 
 ing, yet what I know to be true," says Lord Hervey, refer- 
 ring to this question of non-intervention in the quarrels of 
 the Continental nations — " the arguments of Sir Kobert 
 Walpole, conveyed through the Queen to the King, so 
 wrought upon him that they quite changed the colour of his 
 Majesty's sejitiments, though they did not tinge the channel 
 througli which they flowed " — a singular instance, surely, 
 of candid dealing, and that rarest of all forms of truthfulness, 
 the perfectly honest transmission by one mind of the argu- 
 ments of another. Partly in spite of his royal clients, partly 
 with their consent, Sir Eobert kept the peace, and achieved 
 the position of peacemaker and final umpire for England, 
 which had been the height of his hopes. His arbitration, 
 it is true, was not for the moment successful, but that 
 was a secondary matter. England and Holland were the 
 maritime powers which literally, as well as figuratively, lay 
 on their oars, and waited for the moment to propose terms 
 of peace, which should bring France and Spain and the 
 Holy Empire, and poor Italy, always dismembered and 
 bleeding, once more to amicable terms. Curious junction ! 
 strange change ! — though indeed there may be doubts 
 whether England, shut up in her insularity, is not almost 
 as little likely now to hold the balance straight in a dis- 
 tracted world, or to act as umpire in an imperial quarrel, as 
 Holland itself. 
 
 We have left untouched one of the very worst points in 
 Caroline's life, her supposed hatred of, and certain estrange- 
 ment from, her eldest son. She had seven children ; and to 
 all the others it is evident that she was a tender and judici- 
 ous mother. But she was not the kind of woman with 
 whom love is blind. There is not one trace of wilful un- 
 
THE QUEEN. 37 
 
 kindness to Prince Frederick tlironghont the close narrative 
 of her life which we have been following. Though he 
 conducted himself on every occasion with the most insolent 
 disregard of his parents' wishes, and though it is evident 
 that Caroline's heart was alienated from him, and that the 
 weak and treacherous j^oung profligate had forfeited every 
 claim upon her affection, it is also clear that she treated him 
 throughout with a great deal of the same almost unearthly 
 tolerance which she showed to his father. Affairs came to 
 an actual breach between them only after two acts of his 
 which left no alternative possible between peace and war, — 
 his application to Parliament for an increase of the income 
 which came to him through his father's hands, and the un- 
 pardonable insult offered to both his parents on the occasion 
 of the birth of his first child. 
 
 This inconceivable piece of folly, with all its revolting 
 details, was enough to alienate and disgust the most patient 
 of mothers. The Koyal family and their attendants were at 
 Hampton Court enjoying such country pleasures as were 
 possible to them, '' hunting twice a- week," no doubt, as 
 usual, and spending their evenings over ombre, commerce, 
 and quadrille, as was their custom. On one of these quiet, 
 not to say dull, evenings, while the Koyal party sat tranquil 
 over their cards, the poor little Princess of Wales — a young 
 submissive creature, with no will of her own — was dragged 
 out of the palace by her husband and carried off to London, 
 while actually suffering from the acutest of human pangs. 
 Her child was born about an hour after her arrival. When 
 an express came from St James's in the middle of the night 
 to intimate this unlooked-for birth, Caroline, confounded, 
 called for her "night gown" and her coach, and set off at 
 half-past two in the morning to see into the incompre- 
 hensible affair. But neither at that exciting moment nor at 
 any previous period does she seem to have either done or 
 said anything unmotherly or unkind. On her second visit, 
 her son and her son's wife, and all the parasites surrounding 
 them, gave her to perceive that she was unwelcome ; and 
 after that, for the first time it is recorded that the Queen, 
 following the example of her husband, who for years had 
 never exchanged a word with his undutiful son, ceased to 
 speak to him when they met on public occasions, or even 
 
38 THE QUEEN. 
 
 when tliey dined together in public. Tliere is nothing re- 
 volting, nothing unnatural in her behaviour. She was the 
 medium of communication, such communication as there 
 could be, between the King and the Prince, even after this 
 supreme affront. But it is utterly impossible to conceive 
 that even the affection of a mother could sustain such a 
 stroke unmoved. Mothers can bear much — but it is the 
 foolish youth, the prodigal, the young creature led astray, 
 the child who still may return, and between whom and 
 herself no chasm of natural separation has been made, for 
 whom and from whom a woman endures everything. When 
 the son is a mature man, with separate connections, separate 
 interests, a standing in the world utterly distinct from hers, 
 it is not in nature that the mother should continue as blind 
 to his faults and as infatuated in his favour as in the days of 
 his youth. Caroline's son had placed himself at the head of 
 a faction against her; he had repudiated her influence, and 
 set her authority, her affection, herself, at nought ; he was 
 her political enemy, building his own hopes of success on 
 the overthrow of hers. Under such changed relations, the 
 maternal tie cannot but undergo some corresponding change. 
 During these later years of her life, the Queen and her 
 favourite and affectionate child, Caroline, talk much together, 
 with tears and indignation, of the, unmannerly and unmanly 
 lout. There is nobody who approves of him, even among 
 his own friends. The Princess Eoj^al Anne marries, with a 
 kind of fierce determination, the unlovely Prince of Orange, 
 in order that she may not be left in her brother's power. 
 The family is of one mind on the subject. And when, on 
 his return from Germany, King George is supposed to have 
 been shipwrecked and lost at sea, the anxiety of the Queen 
 as to her son's treatment of her shows how entirely all faith 
 in him either as son or man has left her. But yet Caroline 
 makes no reprisals, nor even reproaches. She treats with a 
 certain contemptuous kindness his poor little obedient wife, 
 believing her entirely under his sway. She bids God bless 
 the " little rat of a girl " who was painfully brought into a 
 disagreeable world after the flight above recorded. There 
 is nothing in her conduct to the rebel household which the 
 spectator even at this long distance can find fault with. 
 She is not an all-believing, all-hoping, all- enduring mother. 
 
THE QUEEN. 39 
 
 Such a 7^ole was impossible to her. But even in the midst 
 of her revolted affection, her indignation and displeasure, and 
 inevitable contempt, she is always considerate and tolerant 
 — never harsh or cruel. 
 
 In the year 1737 the quarrel came to a public climax, 
 when the dispute between the Prince of Wales and the King 
 in the question of his income was brought before Parliament. 
 There seems little doubt that, so far as simple justice went, 
 he had right on his side. In the immense Civil List granted 
 to the King, £100,000 had been tacitly allotted to the 
 Prince as his share : it is true that no express stipulation 
 had been made, but there appears no doubt that such was 
 the understanding. And George II., while Prince of Wales, 
 had himself enjoyed a similar income. He had, however, 
 kept his son on an uncertain allowance — giving him £30,000 
 before his marriage, and £50,000 after it. The Prince's 
 desire to get possession of the full income intended for him 
 was not, certainly, an unnatural one, though, in times so 
 ticklish, the attempt to extort it by Parliamentary inter- 
 ference, to humiliate the King, and force him into action 
 contrary at once to his pride and his wishes, was as unwise 
 as can be well conceived. It raised an extraordinary com- 
 motion in the agitated Court. '' The King took the first 
 notice of this business with more temper and calmness than 
 anybody expected he would,'' says Hervey ; " and the 
 Queen, from tlie beginning of the affair to the end of it, was 
 in much greater agitation and anxiety than I ever saw her 
 on any other occasion." She had borne the riots, the oppo- 
 sition, and threats of rebellion steadily ; she had borne her 
 husband's amazing sins and confessions with self-command 
 and true patience ; but when the son, to whom she is said 
 to have been so harsh a mother, thus ranged himself in 
 hostile array against her, Caroline's strength gave way. 
 
 '^Her concern was so great that more tears flowed on this occasion 
 than I ever saw her shed on all other occasions put together. She said 
 she had suffered a great deal from many disagreeable circumstances this 
 L\st year : the King's staying abroad ; the manner in which his stay had 
 been received and talked of here; her daughter the Princess Eoyal's 
 danger in lying-in ; and the King's danger at sea : but that licr grief and 
 apprehension at present surpassed everything she had ever felt before ; 
 that she looked on her family from this moment as distracted with 
 
40 THE QUEEN. 
 
 divisions of wliich she could see or hope no end — divisions which would 
 give the common enemies to her family such advantages as might one 
 time or other enable them to get the better of it: and though she had 
 spirits and resolution to struggle with most misfortunes and difficulties, 
 this last, she owned, got the better of her — that it was too much for her 
 to bear ; that it not only got the better of her spirits and resolution, but 
 of her appetite and rest, as she could neither eat nor sleep ; and that she 
 really feared it would kill her." 
 
 Poor Queen ! tins in her despondency no doubt seemed as 
 if it would be the end of all ; all her struggles to secure her 
 family upon that tottering unsteady throne, all her heroic 
 self-control, her hunfiliations, her tedious and lingering 
 labour, the thousand hard endeavours to which she bent 
 her spirit. She had supported the father's uncertain steps 
 and turned him, unwilling but submissive, at such cost to 
 herself as no one but herself could reckon, into the safe way. 
 And her struggle was all to be made of no avail by the 
 stubborn folly of her son. She had never been seen so sad. 
 He had not at any time been her best-beloved, and for years 
 she had been alienated from him ; but still it was for him 
 and his children she had toiled so hardly. And here was to 
 be an end of it all. Caroline v/as not alone in thinking so. 
 The Prince had moved heaven and earth to get a majority, 
 and everybody believed he had secured it. The day before 
 the debate was to come on, Sir Kobert Walpole managed to 
 move the King and Queen to send a proposal for a com- 
 promise, offering that the £50,000 should be settled on the 
 Prince without possibility of withdrawal, and that a jointure 
 of £50,000 should be given to the Princess. The proposal 
 was rejected, not without additional stings to Caroline, and 
 the debate came on accordingly. It does not seem, not- 
 withstanding the excitement that preceded it, to have been 
 a remarkable debate, and the Prince, contrary to all ex- 
 pectations, lost by a majority of thirty. '' Most people," 
 says Lord Hervey, calmly, " thought it (the majority) cost 
 a great deal of money ; but Sir Pobert Walpole and the 
 Queen both told me separately that it cost the King but 
 £900 — £500 to one man and £400 to another." In short, 
 it was an unprecedented bargain. At a later period Sir 
 Eobert indignantly bade his master reflect how cheap it had 
 been. '' £900 was all this great question cost him." When 
 
THE QUEEN. 41 
 
 victories were going at such a ruinous sacrifice, how could 
 a King have the audacity to complain ? 
 
 This was the last year of Caroline's life ; it was distracted 
 and embittered by ceaseless reopenings of the quarrel with 
 her son, carried on on his part by a succession of hypocritical 
 letters of apology, in which his utter ignorance of any in- 
 tention to offend is repeated with sickening plausibility. 
 The Queen on her side was no doubt driven to use language 
 which sounds both harsh and coarse to our ears, though it 
 was the usual style of speech in those days. She wishes 
 with angry tears that Lady Bristol, Lord Hervey's mother, 
 a violent and foolish woman, could but have the Prince, 
 whose friend she was, for her son, and leave to poor Caroline 
 the man whose almost filial duty was her own chief comfort. 
 This bitter quarrel, however, in the course of which their 
 own early history was raked up, seems to have brought the 
 Queen and King together. There is not a word of Hanover 
 or its goddess as the autumn falls. No public afi'airs seem 
 to have been in hand of importance enough to distract to 
 other things the painful and exaggerated feeling, which a 
 household engaged in a family struggle always fixes upon 
 that point. A few tracasseries^ and nothing more — questions 
 whether Sir Robert Walpole is as much in favour as before, 
 and if the Duke of Newcastle is to be kept in office — fliit 
 like shadows across the scene which is beginning to be 
 darkened by a more awful shadow. Caroline was not old. 
 She was but fifty-two, scarcely arrived at the boundary of 
 middle age ; but her course was very nearly over. No 
 doubt the pangs of that hard year had told upon her ; and 
 for ten years her life had been spent in a mixture of great 
 and little cares which were enough to have worn out any 
 constitution. But it was not the custom of the house of 
 Hanover to be ill or take care of health. She had taken no 
 care of hers. Horace Walpole tells us, though he does not 
 give his authority, that in her determination " never to 
 refuse a desire of the King's," she had risked her very ex- 
 istence in the wildest way. In order to be able to walk, 
 " more than once, when she had the gout in her foot, she 
 dipped her whole leg in cold water, to be able to attend 
 him," he says. And besides all these imprudences, she had 
 a serious disease, a rupture, which she concealed jealously, 
 
42 THE QUEEN. 
 
 giving lier biographers the trouble to make many wondering 
 oxcuses for her on the score that she would not make herself 
 disagreeable to the King. The King, however, was the 
 only, or almost the only, person in her painful secret ; and 
 no doubt the real reason w^as, a certain proud and farouche 
 modesty in all personal matters, which was very common 
 among women of former generations, however plain-spoken 
 or even light-minded they might be. She was taken ill one 
 November day, but got up, and " saw the company as 
 usual." Making some half-playful half-plaintive grumbles 
 to Lord Hervey, as she passed him, she went, as was her 
 wont, from one to another, and talked and did her painful 
 duty. 
 
 " Coming back again to Lord Hervey,' she said, * I am not able to en- 
 tertain people.' ' Would to God,' replied Lord Hervey, ' the King would 
 have done talking of the Dragon of Wantley and release you ! ' " (This 
 was a new silly farce which everybody at this time went to see.) " At 
 last the King went away, telling the Queen, as he went by, that she had 
 overlooked the Duchess of Norfolk. The Queen made her excuse for 
 having done so to the Duchess of Norfolk, the last person she ever spoke 
 to in public, and then retired, going immediately to bed, where she grew 
 worse every moment." 
 
 Thus began the awful story of a deathbed so extraordinary in 
 some points that it seems almost an unnecessary undertaking 
 to tell it over again. Nobody can have glanced at it in the 
 barest record and ever forget the scene. Caroline in harness 
 to the last, after her excuse to the overlooked Duchess, lay 
 for eleven days fighting with death, undaunted and resolute 
 as ever. The only thing that seems to have discomposed her 
 was the revelation of her secret, and the consequent mea- 
 sures that were taken. She turned her face to the wall and 
 shed tears when she could no longer conceal it — the only 
 tears she shed for herself But she did not hesitate to give 
 lierself over to the painful and useless operations with which 
 doctors of every age and degree of enlightenment torture 
 people who are past help. She knew it was of no use. She 
 would look at the Princesses and shake her head, when the 
 King told her how much better she was. When the hour of 
 her torture came, she turned wistfully to ask him if he ap- 
 proved what the surgeons proposed to do; and on receiving 
 his assurance that it was thought necessary, submitted with 
 
THE QUEEN. 43 
 
 that resolution wliicli liad never failed lier. Her two daugh- 
 ters were by her bedside night and day ; — the poor tender 
 Caroline, a little helpless and hysterical ; the Princess Amelia, 
 useful but somewhat hard in her kindness. As for the King, 
 he was heartbroken, but he w^as himself. He could not leave 
 her in peace at that last moment. By way of watching over 
 her, " he lay on the Queen's bed all night in his night-gown, 
 wliere he could not sleep, nor she turn about easily." He 
 went out and in continually, telling everybody, with tears, 
 of her great qualities. But he could not restrain the old 
 habit of scolding when he was by her side. '' How the devil 
 should you sleep when you will never lie still a moment!" he 
 cried, with an impatience which those who have watched by 
 deathbeds will at least understand. " You want to rest, and 
 the doctors tell you nothing can do you so much good, and 
 yet you always move about. Nobody can sleep in that man- 
 ner, and that is always your way; you never take the proper 
 method to get what you want, and then you wonder you 
 have it not." When her weary e3^es, weary of watching the 
 troubled comings and goings about her, fixed upon one spot, 
 the alarmed, excited, hasty spectator cried out, " with a 
 loud and quick voice." " Mon Dieu ! qu'est ce que vous 
 regardez ? Comment peut-on fixer ces yeux comme 9a ?" he 
 cried. He tortured her to eat, as many a healthful watcher 
 does with cruel kindness. " How is it possible you should 
 not know whether you like a thing or not?" he said. He 
 was half-crazed with sorrow and love, and a kind of panic. 
 And he was garrulous, and talked without intermission of 
 her and of himself, with a vague historical sense that their 
 united life had come to an end. 
 
 When the Queen had been given over, and was no longer 
 teased with false hopes, she gave her children her last ad- 
 vice and blessing. The eldest son, the Esau, who had sold 
 his birthright, was not there. He was at his own house in 
 town, flattering himself that " we shall soon have good news ; 
 she cannot hold out much longerT Nor was Anne, the Prin- 
 cess Koyal, at her mother's bedside. But she had her boy, 
 William — lie whom in this solemn domestic scene one grudges 
 to think of as Cumberland — and her younger daughters. 
 She enjoined her son to stand by the King, but never to do 
 anything against his brother. She committed to her daugh- 
 
44 THE QUEEN. 
 
 ter, Caroline, the charge of her two little girls, Mary and 
 Louisa. " Poor Caroline ! it is a fine legacy I leave you," 
 she said. She was the one calm and tearless amid her weep- 
 ing family. Then she turned to the King. It is here that 
 the scene rises to a horrible power, half-grotesque, almost 
 half-comic, amid the tragedy. She counselled him to marry 
 again, as he sat sobbing by her bedside. Poor man ! he 
 was hysterical, too, with grief and excitement. " Wiping 
 his eyes and sobbing between every word, with much ado 
 he got out this answer : " Non — -jaurai des inaitressesJ" To 
 which the Queen made no other reply than, ^^ Ah, mon 
 Dieu! cela rH empeche pas V Criticism stands confounded 
 before such an incident. Perhaps it is possible poor Caro- 
 line, sick and weary, did not wish for the successor she sug- 
 gested a life more perfect than her own had been ; and we 
 all know by experience, though we will never allow in 
 theory, that the near approach of death has as little moral 
 effect upon the mind as that of any other familiar accident 
 of life. 
 
 Then her Minister, the man whom she had made and 
 kept supreme in England, came to say his farewell. Per- 
 haps Caroline by that time had slid beyond the power of 
 those arts which she had practised all her life. She spoke 
 to Sir Robert, having little breath to spare, barely what 
 she meant, without considering the King, his temper, and 
 his pride. *' My good Sir Robert," she said to the kneeling 
 and alarmed Minister, who dropped some tears by her bed- 
 side, " you see me in a very indifferent situation. I have 
 nothing to say to you but to recommend the King, my child- 
 ren, and the kingdom to your care." Even in the presence 
 of the dying, Sir Robert's heart gave a throb of terror as he 
 scrambled up plethoric from his knees. Where was the 
 Queen's usual prudence and menagement ? Caroline had 
 come to the bare elements, and could now menager no more. 
 
 Then she had the Archbishop of Canterbury brought to her 
 by Walpole's coarse suggestion ; but w^e have no record of 
 what passed during the prayers, which were no longer said out- 
 side her room. She desired him to take care of Dr Butler, 
 the clerk of her closet, the famous author of the Analogy. 
 On the Sunday, weary of her suffering, she asked the doctor 
 how long it could last. It lasted only for the evening. " I 
 
THE QUEEN. 45 
 
 have now got an asthma/' she said, with what almost seems 
 a last faint playfulness. " Open the window" — and then 
 after an interval — " Pray." 
 
 This was her last word : with it the shadows fell around 
 one of the most remarkable lives that has ever been lived in 
 England. " Her Grace was in a heavenly disposition," the 
 prudent Archbishop said, as he stole through the questioning 
 crowd. Even her warmest panegyrist would scarcely venture 
 to affirm so much now of Caroline. Her life was little spiritual, 
 but it was very human. Her heart was most stout, resolute, 
 and faithful; and she had that quality which Queen Cathe- 
 rine adds, as a crowning grace to the excellences of the good 
 woman — she had a great patience. Never, perhaps, was 
 there such a wife, and seldom such a queen. 
 
II. 
 
 THE MINISTEE. 
 
 The name of Sir Eobert Walpole does not suggest a tempt- 
 ing or grateful subject for a biographical sketch. He is not 
 one of those heaven-born statesmen before whom the world 
 stands reverent as before so many true princes and sove- 
 reigns of mankind. He is not even such an irregular but 
 lofty genius as sometimes aims at statesmanship, leaving 
 only a series of splendid mistakes or fruitless efforts behind. 
 Nobody can deny that he was in his way a great ruler — no- 
 body can say that in fact and deed he was anything but a 
 true patriot and faithful servant of his country. For more 
 than twenty years, sometimes with the generous and intelli- 
 gent aid of a great princess, sometimes in spite of all the 
 baffling perversities of an ignorant and unenlightened king, 
 against opposition, conspiracies of friend and foe, popular 
 discontent, abuse, every kind of vexing contradiction, he 
 stood steadily at the helm of State, to use the most hack- 
 neyed yet the most true of similes, with a clear sight which 
 seldom failed bim, and a patience and steadfastness beyond 
 praise. He served England in spite of herself, earning little 
 gratitude by his exertions. He ruled her as a prudent man 
 rules his own household, regarding not so much any theory 
 of government as its practical needs and possibilities; with 
 a wonderful indifference to blame, and with something of 
 that noble self-confidence with which a man of genius feels 
 himself the only man answerable for an emergency. In 
 this brief description is embodied almost every characteristic 
 of a great statesman, a great patriot, a noble historical cha- 
 
THE MINISTER. 47 
 
 racter. And yet somehow this man, who ruled so wisely 
 and was of so much use in his generation, is not a great 
 historical character. The student approaches him without 
 reverence, without much admiration, with even a limited in- 
 terest. In every page of our national story appear the 
 names of men who have not done a tithe of his real work, 
 and who yet are ten times more venerable, more noble, and 
 more attractive. 
 
 It is hard to explain how this is, and yet the fact is too 
 patent to be denied. Perhaps one of the causes is that the 
 man has no special standing as a man, notwithstanding the 
 importance of his place in history. He has no private cha- 
 racter, so to speak, to catch the human eye. He stands 
 forth in his public capacity, wise, far-sighted, full of resource, 
 ever ready to make the best of everything; but his private 
 and individual existence skulks as it were behind that bench 
 in old St Stephen's and makes no sign of independent hu- 
 manity. A sort of rubicund shadow, drinking, toasting, trol- 
 ling forth lusty songs, swearing big oaths, full of healthy 
 heartlessness and good-humour and indifference to all codes 
 either of love or morals, faintly appears by moments about 
 the busy scene. Such a buxom apparition is apt to look 
 very limp and lifeless across the vista of a century. It 
 would have been a mere rude country squire, had it not been 
 Eobert Walpole. But being Kobert Walpole, though it 
 rouses a certain curiosity, and fills us with a certain interest, 
 it has no power over our affections, nor can it move our 
 respect. We admit the actual claims to greatness of a 
 Minister who possesses no greatness as a man; and we are 
 also obliged to allow that the burly shadow was that of a 
 man no worse than his neighbours. He was not coarser nor 
 more wicked than the other people who surrounded him. 
 He was not more corrupt, though he might be more able in 
 his use of corruption. He was always good-natured and 
 tolerant, never cruel. His children loved him, — even that 
 youngest child, so unlike him in every particular, and who 
 is calmly described, with the incredible composure of the time, 
 as not his son at all but somebody else's — the puny and 
 famous Horace. There is something in the way in which 
 that inexhaustible letter-writer says " my father" which con- 
 ciliates the critic in spite of himself. A man spoken of with 
 
48 THE MINISTER. 
 
 that indescribable softening of tone, must have been a lov- 
 able father, could not have been a bad man; but yet, we 
 repeat, Sir Eobert is a thankless subject for biography, and it 
 is very doubtful how far any distinct idea of his strange per- 
 sonality and want of personality can be conveyed. 
 
 The comparison is perhaps a whimsical one, and it may 
 strike some readers even as irreverent ; but yet there is 
 something in the position occupied by Shakespeare as play- 
 wright and caterer for the Globe Theatre, w^iich is recalled 
 to us by the position of Walpole as steward and house- 
 manager, so to speak, of the big establishment of England. 
 No doubt the conscious motive in the mind of our greatest 
 of poets was less the development of all those noble and 
 splendid figures with which he has enriched the world, than 
 the immediate necessity of keeping up his theatre, supplying 
 the needful variety, providing for his company and his 
 audience, and his own daily bread. His greatness grows 
 by the way. He is not without a certain half-divine delight 
 in the excellence of his work, such as belongs to the modesty 
 of genius, but it is the daily necessity and not the greatness 
 for which he consciously labours. Walpole, with his in- 
 ferior capabilities, does in a kind of shadow what Shake- 
 speare did. He works for his daily needs ; his office is to 
 keep things going, to avert war and expense, to hold a 
 certain balance of faction and national passion. Now it is 
 one danger, now another, that menaces his charge. Some- 
 times fear of dismissal hangs over him, sometimes fear of 
 internal mutiny. His practical instinct keeps him alert and 
 with his eyes open — and by dint of doing his work, though 
 there is no exalted motive in it, a certain greatness falls 
 upon the diligent soul by the way. Perhaps his deter- 
 mination to keep his place and to retain power in his own 
 hands, was in reality the highest intention he had ; but in 
 his struggle for this, what patience, what force of labour, 
 what infinite resource and genuine wisdom is in the man ! 
 It is a curious contradiction to all the higher theories of 
 human existence, and yet there is more in it than meets the 
 eye. It is, in its way, a fulfilment of that promise to him 
 who was faithful in little, notwithstanding the curious sense 
 one has of the inapplicability of a Scriptural promise to such 
 an unspiritual character as that of Walpole. He was not a 
 
THE MINISTER. 49 
 
 great patriot, aiming consciously at the prosperity and 
 honour and peace of his country. He was a man in office, 
 zealously determined to keep there, to keep his party in 
 power, his dynasty on the throne, his people solvent and 
 moderately content ; and by dint of following this purpose 
 steadfastly through every opposition, the greater end for 
 which he had not striven fell upon him by the way. England 
 was the stronger, the greater, the happier for Walpole ; and 
 yet Walpole meant nothing higher than to secure his own 
 position, and do his own work. He was more honest, true, 
 and worthy than he meant to be. With no other conscience 
 to speak of, he had a conscience for his individual trade, 
 that it should be well done, whatever might be neglected. 
 Such a principle carries a labouring man through his diffi- 
 culties, when many a higher motive fails. 
 
 Eobert Walpole, the third son of a Norfolk country gen- 
 tleman, was born at Houghton, which he afterwards took so 
 much pleasure in embellishing, in August 1676. He was 
 " naturally indolent, and disliked application," says his 
 biographer; but being a younger son, and continually re- 
 minded by his father that his fortune depended on his own 
 exertions, he " overcame the natural inertness of his dis- 
 position." He was educated at Eton on the foundation, and 
 following the use and wont of that noble institution, in a 
 manner still happily practicable by younger sons, went from 
 Eton to King's. Of neither period is there any particular 
 incident of interest recorded. He was " an excellent 
 scholar " (though this is a statement which the reader may 
 be permitted to doubt) Archdeacon Coxe assures us, and 
 loved Horace. And while at Cambridge he had smallpox 
 badly, and was so near coming to an abrupt end in that 
 malady, that his physician considered his *' singular escape " 
 as a sure indication that great things were to be expected 
 from him. At Eton he was the contemporary of Boling- 
 broke ; and when the latter and other Etonians of his time 
 began to distinguish themselves in Parliament, one of their 
 old masters is reported to have expressed himself impatient 
 to hear whether Robert Walpole had spoken, ''for I am con- 
 vinced he will be a good orator." Such prognostications 
 prove that there was promise in his youth. Other training 
 of a less humanising kind was not wanting. His elder 
 
 D 
 
50 THE MINISTEK. 
 
 brothers died, and at twenty-two he became the heir and 
 resigned his scholarship. Before this he had been, save the 
 mark ! destined for the Church ; but when these sad events 
 happened, he went home to the jovial Norfolk Manor, where 
 agriculture and conviviality were the only pursuits thought 
 of. There the young man, fresh from the University, with 
 whatever ambitions he might have bad in him, was set " to 
 superintend the sale of the cattle in the neighbouring towns," 
 and in the evening plunged into what was considered festive 
 enjoyment in these days. His father filled his glass twice 
 for every time he filled his own, and gave him paternal en- 
 couragement. " Come, Robert," said the jovial squire, "you 
 shall drink twice while I drink once ; for I cannot permit 
 the son in his sober senses to be witness to the intoxication 
 of his father." 
 
 This edifying precaution had evidently full effect; and 
 the son faithfully carried out the traditions of the house. 
 He was throughout his life one of the men upon whom dis- 
 sipation has no apparent effect. He feasted high and drank 
 deep, and did all that in him lay to ruin his constitution ; 
 but, with the marvellous health which belongs to the 
 species, was as clear-headed the morning after a carouse as 
 if he had been an anchorite. His head stood the trial of 
 these and worse vices. The morning air blew away the 
 fumes of the night's debauch ; with nerves of iron, and the 
 strength of a rock, he reappeared out of all the muddy 
 waves of dissipation with no apparent harm done to him. 
 There are such men at all times, and they abounded in the 
 eighteenth century ; perhaps because the race was then 
 more vigorous, perhaps because the man capable of continual 
 self-indulgence of this description, who survives it, is the 
 strong specimen, the selected one of modern science. But 
 he was very good-natured, tolerant, and genial, and helped 
 the old squire to make Houghton pleasant to the Norfolk 
 gentry. When he was about four-and-twenty he married 
 the daughter of a city knight, ^' a woman of exquisite beauty 
 and accomplished manners," says the Archdeacon ; and soon 
 after reigned in the stead of his father, with a rent-roll of 
 £2000 a-year, and everything handsome about him. It was 
 then, when set free from the old squire's agriculture and his 
 claret, that the young squire bethought himself of the big 
 
THE MINISTER. 61 
 
 world outside of Norfolk. Probably such a robust nature 
 had been able to accept the bucolic episode with little 
 annoyance, and perhaps even found pleasure in it. But it 
 says something for the higher instincts of his mind that one 
 of his first impulses on coming to his kingdom was to throw 
 himself into public life, and resume a higher career. 
 
 He entered Parliament in the year 1700, two years before 
 the death of William III., a young man of twenty-four, of 
 good family, good fortune, and good hopes, but not dis- 
 tinguished in any extraordinary degree by nature or Pro- 
 vidence. It was while England was still in the throes of a 
 transition period. William, the strong embodiment of a 
 successful revolution, was about over, and there were some ■ 
 fifteen years to come of relapse, as it were, into a period of 
 anticipation and suspense, until the new dynasty, the modern 
 race which was doomed to fix itself so firmly upon the 
 throne of the Stuarts, should enter on the scene. Such an 
 interregnum as that of Queen Anne's reign could not be 
 otherwise than a painful trial of the national temper and 
 strength. William had cut violently the thread of suc- 
 cession. Anne made a weak reunion of the separated 
 strands. Though she could not by any legitimist be con- 
 sidered the rightful sovereign, she was yet of the dispossessed 
 family, a Stuart, though it is hard to identify her with the 
 name, and the sister of the undoubted heir by right divine. 
 Nothing but a strong individuality could have given to such 
 a reign any other character than that of a period of suspense 
 and possible compromise. And Anne had no individuality 
 to speak of, some feeble family affection, and a natural 
 horror of her German cousin, rich in sons and grandsons, 
 whose family was to succeed her on her first father's throne. 
 During the first part of her reign these facts were neutralised 
 by the sway of Marlborough and Godolphin ; but when the 
 weak Queen fell into other hands, all the doubtful influences 
 natural to her position returned with double force. Nothing 
 was certain, and everything unsettled. At any moment the 
 country, smitten with compunction, and always very doubt- 
 ful whether it most loved or hated its ancient masters, might 
 have changed its mind in such a sudden caprice as once 
 before had seized it, and thrown up its cap for King James. 
 The Protestant succession might have collapsed altogether ; 
 
52 THE MINISTER. 
 
 or the young James, burdened by no antecedents, might 
 have turned Protestant : a hundred things might have hap- 
 pened to turn the waters back into their ancient channel. 
 It is evident that, though the noble old Electress with a 
 woman's hopefulness looked forward confidently to her 
 splendid inheritance, her descendants, more matter-of-fact, 
 considered the great windfall as still doubtful. The poli- 
 ticians of the time stood upon their watch-towers straining 
 their eyes to note all the comings and goings, and throwing 
 a thousand straws into the air to see how the wind blew. 
 On the whole, it is clear that most of them felt the slumbrous 
 wind from Whitehall to be breathing faintly and fitfully 
 towards the little peevish court under the trees at St Ger- 
 mains. 
 
 The reign of that faintest of Stuarts was an anachronism 
 — it was like putting back the hands of the national clock, 
 and making a weak postponement of everything that ought 
 to be settled. It was a time of vain proposals, of abortive 
 acts, of pretended statesmanship. Those who were schem- 
 ing the restoration of a Catholic monarch played for popu- 
 larity with a Protestant mob by such villanous means as 
 that of the Schism Act, a piece of paltry intolerance never 
 carried into execution. Keal national action and internal 
 rearrangement were paralysed. It was a pause between the 
 new and the old. The episode of William's energetic but 
 alien sway had been cut short. Was it the ancient rule that 
 was to return ; was it the new which was to be insisted on, 
 and brought in over all resistance ? Doubt was in every 
 man's mind. It was the Augustan age, so called, of England. 
 Amid the babble of wits who claimed to confer this character 
 upon their times rose the silvery voice of Addison, the ring- 
 ing tones of Steele, the first polished accents of Pope, the 
 deep diapason of Swift, the fine eloquence of Bolingbroke, 
 noble of style and poor of heart. But it was not a time of 
 great genius or originality of thought. The distinction of 
 the period was one not unnatural to such a moment of sus- 
 pense in the serious march of ages. An exquisite perfection 
 of style and skilful management of words were its prevailing 
 characteristic. No burden of prophecy was on the national 
 heart. There was no special message to deliver either from 
 God or man. The passing flutter of little doings came into 
 
THE MINISTER. 53 
 
 unusual note in the silence through which men listened for 
 the big breathless events which needs must come sooner or 
 later. The hoop, the powder, the rustle of the silken robes, 
 the lace on the fine gentleman's fine clothes, the tie of his 
 hair, the jingle of his sword, are all audible in the hush of 
 more important affairs. If " town " was the world then, the 
 world was more like a village than any imagination of the 
 present time could conceive. Marlborough, who had sent 
 the echo of his guns to freshen the air in the first half of 
 the reign, died off into the factious silence of exile in its 
 latter part, and the self-absorption of suspense swallowed up 
 all the nobler activities of national life. Literature pointed 
 its subtle pen, and played its dainty pranks, and called the 
 moment of anxious leisure an age of gold ; and " good Queen 
 Anne," one cannot tell how, became the proverbial title of 
 the heavy, sad, and desolate woman upon whose life so 
 many issues hung. Poor soul ! she was no more a " good " 
 than she was a bad queen. The mother of many children, 
 yet heirless, on her melancholy throne — swayed and insulted 
 by one imperious and too much favoured friend, swayed and 
 cajoled by another — her life little more than an obstruction 
 in the way of national progress, her death anxiously waited 
 and looked for by eager claimants — Heaven knows, her lot 
 was little to be envied ! It is the most pitiful ghost of 
 power that ever wore ermine and purple. Her father himself, 
 banished to the hamlet-court by the Seine, is scarcely so sad a 
 spectre as Anne in St James's, Queen of England, fought over 
 by her favourites, unloved, uncourted, and alone, with hungry 
 successors on either side of her contending for her crown. 
 
 Walpole appears to have made his debut as a speaker and 
 rising man in his party at a very early period. He had 
 been, as has been said, the schoolfellow at Eton of the 
 brilliant Bolingbroke, and a rivalry at once of character and 
 politics naturally existed between them. " St John soon 
 distinguished himself in the House of Commons, and became 
 an eloquent debater," says Coxe. "Repeated encomiums 
 bestov/ed on his rival roused the ardour of Walpole, and 
 induced him to commence speaker sooner than he at first 
 intended." But at the outset this impulse of competition 
 did not serve him in great stead. His gifts were of another 
 kind from those of his rival. His steadiness and tenacity, 
 
54 THE MINISTEK. 
 
 and close knowledge of his subject, were not qualities to be 
 made evident in a maiden speech, like the splendid diction 
 and natural oratory of St John. " He was," his partial bio- 
 grapher admits, "confused and embarrassed, and did not 
 seem to realise those expectations which his friends had 
 fondly conceived/' This hesitating commencement, how- 
 ever, had small effect upon his career. He was not a man 
 to sink under the discouragement of a partial failure. By 
 degrees his name found a place in all the debates, and his 
 powers of labour told with still more effect in the business 
 of the country. He was no unimportant acquisition to any 
 party. He came to his political leaders not only with the 
 great undeveloped powers afterwards so fully made use 
 of, but with the palpable and unmistakable advantage of 
 three boroughs in his pocket — a recommendation which no 
 minister could resist. In 1705 he had already received a 
 political appointment of secondary importance. In 1708 he 
 became Secretary at War. From that time until 1742, when 
 he fell, or rather until the moment of his death, which was 
 not much later, he never ceased to exercise a powerful influ- 
 ence on the affairs of the country. For the greater part of 
 the time they were entirely in his hand ; and even during 
 the short period which he spent in opposition, his place was 
 prominent in the public eye. He was a Whig as parties 
 were known in those days ; but not a Whig after the fashion 
 of recent times. The Tories of Queen Anne's day were the 
 disaffected party. Their eyes were bent over the seas, in 
 hope of change. They were allied with the Irish Papists 
 and the Highland clans, and in sympathy wdth revolution- 
 aries in general. Septennial Parliaments, which nowadays 
 every true Tory would fight for to the death, w^ere then 
 instituted in the face of their most strenuous opposition — 
 short Parliaments being. Archdeacon Coxe tells us, one of 
 their principles. " The two great contending parties," says 
 Lord Mahon, " were distinguished as at present by the nick- 
 names of Whig and Tory. But it is very remarkable that, 
 in Queen Anne's time, the relative meaning of these terms 
 was not only different but opposite to that which they bore 
 at the accession of William IV. In theory, indeed, the main 
 principle of each continues the same. The leading principle 
 of the Tories is the dread of popular licentiousness. The 
 
THE MINISTER. 55 
 
 leading principle of the Whigs is the dread of royal en- 
 croachment. It may thence perhaps be deduced that good 
 and wise men would attach themselves either to the Whig 
 or Tory party, according as there seemed to be greater 
 danger at that particular period from despotism or from 
 democracy. The same person who would have been a Whig 
 in 1712, would have been a Tory in 1830. For on examin- 
 ation it will be found that in nearly all particulars a modern 
 Tory resembles a Whig of Queen Anne's reign, and a Tory 
 of Queen Anne's reign a modern Whig." 
 
 Sir Kobert Walpole may therefore be described both at the 
 beginning of his career and during all its course as a Con- 
 servative. But he was above all things Parliamentary. His 
 confidence in the people was about as small as his confidence 
 in the sovereign. Of human nature, indeed, except under 
 strictly Parliamentary restrictions, he had evidently but a 
 small opinion. His end and source of all things was the 
 House of Commons. His policy was in all its characteristic 
 features a strictly domestic policy. He makes his appear- 
 ance before ns like the maitre ^ hotel of a great, comfortless, 
 wasteful, ill-regulated honse. He has an eye open upon his 
 neighbours that they may not take him at a disadvantage, but 
 for themselves, as neighbours, he cares next to nothing. His 
 aim is to reform his outgoings and incomings, to make both 
 ends meet, to establish and raise the credit of the vast and 
 disturbed household. Avoiding all radical changes such as 
 might still more upset the unsteady balance of affairs, he 
 watches closely where he can introduce an improvement, 
 and how he can regulate an abuse. He has to humour the 
 master, and keep the servants contented, not denying by 
 times a piece of lavish expenditure to the one, or a sacrifice 
 of principle to the other — ^but fighting his way gradually 
 through all his yieldings to a more entire sway over both, 
 binding them in with rule and limit on one side and the 
 other. Such a government can scarcely be formed upon any 
 lofty ideal. It is the reign of a practical intelligence very 
 far removed from optimism, and indeed actuated by a low 
 opinion of mankind in general. It is as difierent as can be 
 conceived from that noble but visionary traditionalism which 
 fixes its eyes upon the glories of the past, and devotes itself 
 to their emulation ; and from that splendid hope in the 
 
56 THE MINISTER. 
 
 future, that dream of Utopian perfection with which young 
 genuis so often sets out in the world. Walpole was un- 
 moved by either of these ideals. He had no worship for the 
 past, no special hope in the future. The thing that hath 
 been is that which will be. Such is the burden of his phil- 
 osophy ; and his work is to do the best he can, in practical 
 unheroic fashion, to set his country into a more comfortable 
 path, to prop up her weakness, to drag her through day after 
 day of special necessity. Not to do supreme good and put 
 down all evil — but to do as little harm as was inevitable, 
 and as much good as was possible, seems to have been the 
 secret of his system. Such a matter-of-fact mode of dealing 
 with national necessities has evidently an attraction for the 
 Anglo-Saxon mind. 
 
 The reign of Anne was divided into two periods, as most 
 readers of history are aware, — the first of which w^as the 
 reign of Sarah of Marlborough, with the great Duke as 
 general abroad, and Godolphin as minister at home. It was 
 during this period that Walpole took part for the first time 
 in the administration of the country. He shared the power, 
 and he also shared the overthrow, w^hen Mrs Masham 
 wrought her bedchamber triumph, and Harley and Boling- 
 broke came into office. At this period of party overthrow 
 Walpole' s conduct in opposition was natural and unexagger- 
 ated. He "defended his patron (Godolphin) with great 
 spirit" from the assault of Bolingbroke. He indignantly 
 refused to be influenced either by the overtures or the 
 threats of Harley. He put forth expositions of financial 
 policy which proved him, according to contemporary writers, 
 " the best master of figures of any man of his time ; " and 
 gradually made himself so formidable to his opponents that 
 a charge of corruption was trumped up against him, ap- 
 parently on no serious ground. " It is quite certain," says 
 Lord Mahon, who is at no time favourable to Walpole, 
 "from the temper of his judges, that even the most evident 
 innocence or the strongest testimonies would not have 
 shielded him from condemnation ; and that had he made no 
 forage contracts at all, or made them in the spirit of an 
 Aristides or a Pitt, he would have been expelled with equal 
 readiness by that House of Commons." He was, accord- 
 ingly, condemned, sent to the Tower, and declared incapable 
 
THE MINISTEE. 67 
 
 of again sitting in that Parliament — wliicli, however, as the 
 Parliament lasted only a year and a half, was no very serious 
 deprivation 
 
 This period of imprisonment seems on the whole to have 
 been a very pleasant little episode in Walpole's life. " His 
 apartments exhibited the appearance of a crowded levee," 
 says Coxe. Marlborough and his duchess, Godolphin, the 
 venerable Somers, heads and oracles of his party, did honour 
 to its martyr ; and his own colleagues and future opponents, 
 Sunderland and Pulteney, were among his constant visitors. 
 He had leisure to write and vindicate himself in the his- 
 torical calm of the place where so many a more heroic pris- 
 oner has languished ; and his seclusion was the subject of 
 popular ballads, one of which his biographer has preserved 
 in the narrative of Walpole's life. The "Jewel in the 
 Tower " is here dwelt upon wdth the lofty hyperbole common 
 to the popular muse. "If," says the enthusiastic ballad- 
 singer — 
 
 "If what the Tower of London holds 
 Is valued far more than its power, 
 Then counting what it now enfolds, 
 How wondrous rich is this same Tower ! " 
 
 " Lady Walpole," Coxe informs us, " who had a pleasing 
 voice, used to sing this ballad with great spirit and effect, 
 and was particularly fond of dwelling on the last verse, at 
 the time when the prophecy was fulfilled." The last verse 
 was as follows : — 
 
 *' The day shall come to make amends ; 
 This jewel shall with pride be wore. 
 And o^er his foes and with his friends, 
 Shine glorious bright out of the Tower." 
 
 This little touch of nature conciliates the spectator not- 
 withstanding the bad grammar and bathos by which both 
 ballad and sentiment are distinguished. Walpole and his 
 wife were far from being a model pair, if stories are true. 
 But they were still young at this period, and the exultation 
 of excitement, the flutter of sympathy, the sense of martyr- 
 dom and its laurels, give the position a certain interest. No 
 doubt there were many jibes less delicate than pungent, 
 
58 THE MINISTEE. 
 
 mucli laughter and merriment in the pathetic state-prison, 
 with which its jovial tenant was so much out of place ; but 
 yet Lady Walpole's song sung with "her pleasing voice," 
 '' with great spirit and effect," breaks in with a touch of 
 human feeling into the too exclusively political tale. 
 
 The same strain was probably roared or screamed by 
 popular songsters under Harley's windows, and within hear- 
 ing of the plotters in office as they concocted their treacherous 
 devices. They had discovered, no doubt, by this time that 
 dishonesty was bad policy, but they had nothing to expect 
 from the exasperated Whig leaders, and not much from the 
 Hanoverian monarch, between whom and King James England 
 hung suspended. As for Walpole, " his imprisonment," 
 Archdeacon Coxe informs us, " was called the prelude to his 
 rise." During his confinement he wrote his name on his 
 window, like so many prisoners ; and Lansdowne, who after- 
 wards occupied the same apartment, added the following 
 lines to his predecessor's autograph : 
 
 *' Good unexpected, evil unforeseen, 
 Appear by turns, as fortune shifts the scene : 
 Some raised aloft come tumbling down amain, 
 And fall so hard they bound and rise again." 
 
 The accession of George I. put an end to the humiliation 
 of the Whigs. This great event, for and against which all 
 England, not to say all Europe, had schemed and struggled, 
 took place quietly enough at last, as if in the most natural 
 order of things. Anne was consigned to the royal vault, and 
 George and the Protestant Succession reigned in her stead, 
 and none of all the conclusions that had been anticipated dis- 
 turbed the quiet of the nation. Perhaps it was the extreme 
 state of excitement and roused expectation with which the 
 country awaited this event which got it after all accomplished 
 so quietly. Every man held his breath and strained his eyes 
 to watch what his neighbour was about to do, and conse- 
 quently lost the opportunity of himself doing anything in the 
 emergency. George came over, on the death of the Queen, 
 not precipitately, but with a certain dignified half-reluctance, 
 not half believing in his own good fortune, while the nation 
 stood like an astounded bumpkin, not able on its side to 
 believe at all that the crisis it had been looking for so long 
 
THE MINISTER. 59 
 
 was thus summarily disposed of and got over. After the first 
 moment of breathless suspense, there ensued a sudden flurry 
 and scattering of all the holders of power which was little to 
 the credit of England and her Government. Queen Anne's 
 Ministers had all been tampering in a half-hearted way with 
 the banished Stuarts, thinking of bringing them in again, 
 thinking of making Protestants of them, thinking perhaps 
 some miracle might happen to execute their plans without 
 risking their heads. But they were refused the aid of miracle, 
 and natural overthrow fell upon them instead with a haste 
 and completeness which must have taken away their breath. 
 Bolingbroke and Ormond fled to France. Harley, who would 
 not fly, was impeached, and sent to the Tower. They had 
 ruled badly, and betrayed the national trust. They had 
 concluded the disgraceful peace of Utrecht, and they had 
 coquetted with the Pretender. But yet the hunting out of 
 one entire Administration by its successors was neither dig- 
 nified nor seemly ; and an unusual stroke of poetic justice 
 ere long overtook the victors. 
 
 The constitution of this Ministry, the first under the new 
 dynasty, is for the moment only interesting to us in conse- 
 quence of the curious State -intrigue which tore it asunder. 
 Walpole at first occupied only a secondary post. The leaders 
 of the Cabinet were Townshend, his close friend and brother- 
 in-law, and Stanhope, who seem to have held equal rank, the 
 one presiding over Home aff'airs, the other, a soldier and 
 diplomatist, managing the Foreign department. The Minis- 
 try seems to have been a model of what a Ministry ought to 
 be — composed of the best men in their different developments, 
 men of the same standing, each other's brothers in arms. 
 Yet this well-assorted band, united by every link that should 
 keep men together — sympathy, common opinions, gratitude, 
 and friendship — speedily fell off from each other, and made 
 as violent a disruption of their forces as ever tore a party 
 asunder, or set the temper of brethren on edge. 
 
 There are moments when History marches slowly, elabo- 
 rating her great efforts, and there are times when she goes 
 so fast that events hurry upon each other too quickly almost 
 to be identified. At such periods it often happens that a fact 
 of secondary importance thrusts forward into the first place 
 and keeps it, throwing matters of great magnitude into the 
 
60 THE MINISTER. 
 
 background. Sucli a tragic episode as that of the Eebellion 
 of 1715 is no doubt of much more national importance 
 than the cabals of the Cabinet or changes of Ministry ; but 
 while we are told, like a romance, the short and thrilling 
 and melancholy tale, the conspiracy on the next page to 
 unseat a Minister lingers about our ears somehow with a 
 smack of the true tedium and heaviness of a real event. 
 The Eebellion sweeps like a storm across the country. We 
 know beforehand its fatal devotion, its knight-errantry, its 
 ill-timed chills of prudence, all the woeful tragic story. Its 
 interest wrings our hearts and touches us to the quick, but 
 as a romance would touch us. It comes, it goes, it is over, 
 a strain of wild passion sinking into the wilder wail of an 
 inevitable catastrophe. The reader hastens, with the sob- 
 bing sigh of a sympathy which is too painful to have any 
 pleasure in it, to an exhibition of human passions less trying 
 and touching; and, with a curious force of contrast, the 
 scene lies ready to his hand. It is but a step, but the 
 turning of a page, which brings him back to statecraft and 
 chicanery, from the primitive outbursts of loyalty, valour, 
 and despair. 
 
 It was not more than a year after the Eebellion of 1715, 
 when the little coup d'etat of which Stanhope was the author, 
 and which drove Walpole into viplent opposition, took place. 
 A calm like that which succeeds a storm bad fallen on the 
 country. Though it is hard for us, in our peaceful days, to 
 ■understand how such a serious matter could be so quietly 
 got over, yet it is apparent that things had resumed their 
 usual course in England (so far, indeed, as that routine had 
 ever been disturbed) before the head of young Derwentwater 
 fell on the scaffold, or Nithsdale had taken advantage of that 
 favourable breeze, which could not have been better " had 
 some one been flying for his life.'' As soon as it was all 
 settled. King George, glad to be released, set off for his native 
 realm of Hanover, taking with him his Foreign Secretary, 
 Stanhope. Townshend stayed at home with his share of the 
 work, and with him Walpole, who had been raised to the 
 post of Chancellor of the Exchequer. It is easy to perceive 
 in the situation, not only the calm, but the feeling of refresh- 
 ment which naturally comes after such a tempest. The 
 danger had been hanging over them for a long time, dis- 
 
THE MINISTER. 61 
 
 couraging all their efforts ; now it was safely over, the air 
 was cleared and a new period begun. The Home Ministers 
 entered energetically into the task before them. For Wal- 
 pole there was the still more special attraction in it, that he 
 now found himself for the first time in his natural place. 
 The finance and practical management of the national affairs 
 were at last in his hands, and he threw himself with genuine 
 relish into the congenial labour. As became his office, the 
 debt with which the country was burdened, and for which 
 all statesmen had then a kind of insane terror, occupied his 
 chief attention. He had just "matured a very able and 
 well-considered scheme for its reduction" when trouble 
 arose. The manner in which the overturn came was as 
 follows. 
 
 King George, who was much more at home as Elector of 
 Hanover than he ever managed to be as King of England, 
 was naturally at the same time more keenly affected by the 
 politics and commotions of the Continent than an English 
 Prince could have been, or than it quite suited his insular 
 dignity to be. Stanhope, who accompanied him, was an 
 unquestionably able and honest statesman ; but it is evident 
 that the temptation common to diplomatists was powerful 
 with the Foreign Secretary. He could not understand how 
 anything in domestic affairs, anything in heaven or earth, 
 could be so important as the conclusion of a certain treaty 
 which he himself had painfully negotiated. At this moment 
 things were in a state of wild confusion on the Continent. 
 There were, heaven knows how many, treaties afloat, triple 
 and quadruple alliances, broken or half made, by which 
 everybody guaranteed the succession to everybody else's 
 throne. The young King of France, Louis XV., was sickly 
 and unlike to live, and the Eegent Orleans was bent upon 
 having the succession confirmed to his branch of the royal 
 family. The Emperor was moving heaven and earth to secure 
 his daughter after him on his imperial throne. As for Eng- 
 land, with her bran-new dynasty, and the principle of the 
 Protestant succession, which was periodically and violently 
 menaced by one Pretender and another, her policy was to 
 guarantee and support everybody in like difficulties. At no 
 moment could she be safe from possible invasion in the 
 name of her ancient kings. Spain, which looked on with 
 
62 THE MINISTER. 
 
 plaudits when the boy who was afterwards Prince Charlie 
 threw his hat on the soft Mediterranean waves, witli the cry, 
 " To England ! " might be moved to give the fallen family 
 more effectual help. France, who sheltered them in her 
 dominions, might send her armies any fine morning across 
 the Channel. Even Sweden, in which Charles XII., the last 
 of knights-errant, still reigned, turned her eyes ominously 
 towards our unprotected northern coast; and Eussia, big, 
 savage, and mysterious, stood behind ready to back her. 
 There was not a royal house or ancient government in 
 Europe which had not the sympathy of like for like with 
 the Stuarts. 
 
 Under such circumstances, a close alliance with France, 
 our nearest and most dangerous neighbour, was undoubtedly 
 of the first importance to England ; and it was natural that 
 Stanhope, surrounded by Continental politicians, and separ- 
 ated from all the assuring influences of home, should have 
 keenly felt its necessity, all the more after he had expended 
 his most strenuous efibrts in bringing this alliance about. 
 After all the vicissitudes of a long negotiation, the treaty 
 was finally agreed upon. Then there came a moment of 
 delay. Townshend at home, comfortable in the shelter of 
 the four seas, and in the sense that one rebellion had happily 
 and completely blown over, was, though equally convinced 
 of the advantage of an alliance with France, in no such 
 hurry as his colleague ; and the matter was complicated by 
 a personal point of honour raised by the Plenipotentiary 
 whose signature was necessary to the treaty, but who had 
 pledged himself not to sign it except in concert with the 
 Dutch, the old allies of England. Such a little pause in 
 the completion of an important piece of business might have 
 reasonably occasioned a momentary misunderstanding be- 
 tween colleagues, or even division in the Cabinet; but it 
 seems utterly inadequate as a reason for the dismissal of a 
 Minister. This, however, was what it came to. Without 
 any reference to Parliament, or indeed deliberation of any 
 kind, and with an appearance of treachery which excited 
 universal indignation, the King and Stanhope, in the irrita- 
 tion of the moment, dismissed Townshend, and overturned 
 the entire Administration. Lord Mahon in his valuable 
 history does manful battle for his ancestor. But the facts 
 
THE MINISTER. 63 
 
 are not favourable to Secretary Stanhope, who was at the 
 King's side, and who was personally wounded by the delay 
 which occurred in concluding his treaty. His colleagues at 
 home, who were working diligently at the internal renova- 
 tion of the country, had no warning of the sudden disgrace, 
 which fell upon them like an earthquake. They were in a 
 state of perfect repose and security, nay, even of self-con- 
 gratulation, believing the little mist of disagreement to have 
 blown happily over, when the thunderbolt fell. It is not 
 wonderful if a certain bitterness mingled with their humilia- 
 tion. Walpole, who was at once the relation and chief 
 colleague of Townshend, though not absolutely dismissed 
 with him, followed his chief after a short interval. The 
 Chancellor of the Exchequer closed his books, and laid 
 down his calculations, and gave up his office. It would be 
 taking but a very poor view of human nature to conclude 
 that it was leaving office alone which moved him. He was 
 leaving a very great piece of work, of work well worthy to 
 be accomplished, behind him. He was giving up the voca- 
 tion natural to him ; leaving others not so competent, not 
 so full of resource as he was, in his place. And he was 
 compelled to do all this without any sufficient reason, be- 
 cause there had been a little unintentional delay about the 
 signing of a treaty, and because the Ministers at home were 
 falsely accused to the King of being his son's friends. This 
 was the sole cause why their work was interrupted and 
 their party rent asunder. The position was very trying to 
 bear. 
 
 Walpole did not bear it well, as might be supposed. He 
 went into the most violent opposition. Against the Tories 
 he had been energetic, yet not unamiable ; but it was dif- 
 ferent when his opponents were his own familiar friends — 
 men whom he had trusted. Against them his virulence 
 knew no bounds. The unequivocal fury of his antagonism 
 brings down upon his head not only the condemnation of 
 more recent historians, but even the ponderous thunders of 
 his own biographer. The ejected Minister contradicted 
 without hesitation all his own antecedents, his expressed 
 opinions, his very actions. " When Walpole asserted in the 
 House," says Archdeacon Coxe, " that he never intended to 
 embarrass the affairs of Government, he either was not sin- 
 
64 THE MINISTER. 
 
 cere in his professions, or, if he was, did not possess that 
 patriotic and disinterested firmness which could resist the 
 spirit of party ; for almost from the moment of his resigna- 
 tion to his return into office we find him uniform in his 
 opposition to all the measures of Government." He leagued 
 himself with those who up to this moment had been his 
 bitterest adversaries. He opposed the most necessary and 
 inevitable devices of legislation. He resisted the repeal of 
 the Schism Act, though he had declared it oh a former 
 occasion to be more like a decree of Julian the Apostate 
 than a law enacted by a Protestant Parliament. He en- 
 larged, assuming a prejudice which his mind was much too 
 enlightened to entertain, against a standing army. And 
 finally, he gave up and allowed to drop the investigation 
 into the character of Oxford, which he had himself most 
 energetically begun. In short, he left no stone unturned to 
 discomfit and dishearten the members of his own party who 
 now formed the Ministry. They had his own measures to 
 carry through and his own policy to support ; and yet the 
 originator of these very measures put every possible obstacle 
 in their way. '^ No regard for the public, no feeling for his 
 own consistency, ever withheld him," says Lord Mahon. 
 " In short, his conduct out of ofiice is indefensible, or, at 
 least, is undefended even by his warmest partisans ; and in 
 looking through our Parliamentary annals I scarcely know 
 where to find any parallel of coalitions so unnatural, and of 
 opposition so factious." 
 
 This conduct, bad as it is, was perfectly characteristic of 
 the man, who had evidently no rule of principle or high 
 purpose to guide him. He was conscientious only in doing his 
 work when it was left in his own hands ; and it was almost 
 with the rage of an unreasoning creature that he saw that 
 occupation taken from him ; nor could he allow that any 
 other mind but his own could carry out the necessary 
 labours. Nothing, however, could have been a greater test 
 of his influence and power in the House of Commons. Not- 
 withstanding the evident factiousness of his opposition, he 
 lost none of the weight with which his previous services 
 had endowed him. He carried some measures by his indi- 
 vidual influence alone, in opposition to the Ministry; and 
 Coxe, having satisfied his conscience by lecturing his 
 
THE MINISTER. 65 
 
 hero, cleverly draws an argument in liia favour from the 
 evident power so uncomfortably exhibited. " Thus," he 
 says, " it appears that Walpole, even when in opposition, 
 almost managed the House of Commons ; and being in 
 opposition, he could not gain that ascendancy by the means 
 of corruption and influence which were afterwards so re- 
 peatedly urged against him, and which the same virulent 
 author calls ' some secret magic, of which he seemed to have 
 heen a perfect master.^ In fact, the magic which he applied 
 was derived from profound knowledge of finance, great skill 
 in debate, in which perspicuity and sound sense were emin- 
 ently conspicuous, unimpeached integrity of character, and 
 the assistance of party." 
 
 The argument is sound enough, and well applied ; and the 
 episode is one of the most curious which has ever occurred 
 in the life of a political leader. Few happily have been so 
 destitute of that sense of personal as well as party honour 
 which should have kept him at least no worse than silent, 
 when the measures he had himself originated were carried 
 out by others. But Walpole was not endowed with a fine 
 sense of what was fit. He was rabid when he was driven 
 from his post, notwithstanding the steadiness, the wisdom, 
 the good sense and moderation which he displayed when in it. 
 This is a paradox of which we do not pretend to offer any 
 explanation. It is one of the subtleties of individual char- 
 acter which it is most difficult to understand. In short, it is 
 character alone which can explain it at all : no principle nor 
 motive which we can suppose to have moved Walpole could 
 have led him to such a course of action. It was his nature, 
 and he could not go beyond the limits which that nature 
 had fixed. He could be almost great in power. He was 
 capable of honest work, of real exertions for the good of his 
 country. But he could not stand by, a magnanimous spec- 
 tator. Any violence, any meanness, was more possible to 
 him. After two years of a factious and violent opposition, 
 varied by sparks of enlightened antagonism to such mea- 
 sures as the Peerage Bill, which was defeated chiefly by 
 his exertions, he who had been dismissed from the import- 
 ant post of First Lord of the Treasury, crept humbly back 
 into office as Paymaster of the Forces. How he managed 
 to eat his own words and belie his own actions by this 
 
 E 
 
66 THE MINISTEK. 
 
 miserable submission, it would be hard to tell. He did it, 
 drawn back, it seems, by some irresistible attraction in 
 office simply as office, which is half ludicrous and half 
 touching. Office was his only safety, his best means of 
 making himself honest and true. He escaped from the 
 greatest dangers to which his temperament subjected him 
 when he stole back, though in an ignominious way. A 
 poor man who knows he would be better were he rich, and 
 steals a heap of money to bring himself into more favourable 
 circumstances for the development of his character, would be 
 in something of a similar position. And yet Walpole was 
 right in getting back, almost by any means. He was wanted 
 in England : unprincipled, unexalted as he was, he was the 
 most able craftsman in the matter of government that existed 
 in his country. And the means of his re-entry upon his 
 natural career were very soon banished from public recollec- 
 tion by the great piece of business which nobody but he could 
 have managed, and which was then growing into disastrous 
 magnitude and importance, in preparation for his skilful hand. 
 This was the extraordinary South Sea Scheme, the first 
 memorable outbreak of that singular and gigantic sys- 
 tem of gambling which has never since quite died out of 
 England, and from which we suffer in periodical spasms. 
 The South Sea Company was one which had been originated 
 long before by Harley, by way of paying off a certain por- 
 tion of the National Debt. The statesmen of the time of all 
 parties lived in a kind of insane panic of the National Debt. 
 It went " between them and their wits," according to the 
 Scotch saying. Shares in the newly-formed Company were 
 allotted to the proprietors of the floating debt in payment of 
 their claim upon the nation, and the monopoly of a trade to 
 the South Sea, or coast of Spanish America, was given to 
 them. It was something like giving them the monopoly of 
 a trade to El Dorado, in the ideas of the time. The riches 
 won by the pirate-adventurers of Elizabetl/s day had left an 
 uneffaced tradition behind ; "a rumour industriously cir- 
 culated that four ports on the coasts of Peru and Chili were 
 to be ceded by Spain, inflamed the general ardour ; the 
 prospect of exchanging gold, silver, and rich drugs for the 
 manufactures of England, was a plausible allurement for a 
 rich and enterprising nation j and the mines of Potosi and 
 
THE MINISTER. 67 
 
 Mexico were to cliff ase their inexhaustible stores through the 
 medium of the new Company." 
 
 Though all these promises turned out to be delusive, 
 though the privileges accorded by Spain dwindled to a 
 horrible " assiento," conferring upon the English merchants 
 the right of supplying the Spanish colonies for thirty years 
 with negroes, and the privilege of sending one ship laden 
 with ordinary merchandise yearly, the English mind, so 
 slow to depart from its first impression, still held the grant 
 as a charter of profit ; and in the year 1720, the Government, 
 left, by Walpole's absence from office, to its own devices in 
 the way of finance, received renewed proposals from this 
 Company, " to buy up and diminish the burden of the irre- 
 deemable annuities granted in the two last reigns, for the 
 term mostly of 99 years, and amounting at this time to 
 nearly £800,000 a-year." When this scheme was stated to 
 the House of Commons, " a profound silence ensued, and 
 continued for nearly a quarter of an hour." The magnitude 
 of the proposal took away the breath of honourable members. 
 To Walpole's clear eyes the weakness of the Scheme was 
 immediately evident. He was not so much superior to his 
 age as to be easy in his mind about the National Debt ; in 
 short, he had himself brought forward, and with the aid of 
 Stanhope succeeded in passing, bills which had for their 
 object the reduction of a certain portion of it by the legiti- 
 mate means of a sinking fund. It was not to the principle 
 of the South Sea Scheme he objected, but to its magnitude. 
 He desired that there should be no monopoly, but that the 
 Bank of England should be allowed to compete in the sub- 
 scription. He urged that to throw so much power into the 
 hands of one company, would place the nation itself as good 
 as under its feet, that " it would countenance the dangerous 
 practice of stock-jobbing," and that, " as the whole success 
 of the Scheme must chiefly depend on the rise of stock, the 
 great principle of the project was an evil of the first mag- 
 nitude ; it was to raise artificially the value of the stock, by 
 exciting and keeping up a general infatuation, and by pro- 
 mising dividends out of funds which would not be adequate 
 for the purpose. . . . He closed his speech by observ- 
 ing that such would be the delusive consequences that the 
 public would conceive it a dream." 
 
68 THE MINISTER. 
 
 With this solemn warning Walpole had to stand aside 
 and suffer the evil to be accomplished. Grieat as his influ- 
 ence was, it stopped short at that point where all influence 
 and all wisdom fails. His good sense could not convince 
 the folly of the crowd. All that he could gain was, that the 
 Bank should be permitted to compete for the advantages of 
 the new scheme. But the Bank, though willing to engage 
 in the competition, faltered before the prodigality of the 
 South Sea Company, and retired from the field. The bill 
 was carried accordingly amid the joy of the nation. Imme- 
 diately there occurred the strangest scene. The country 
 went wild over this gigantic speculation. In imitation of 
 the French enthusiasm for Law's equally wild inventions, 
 all London rushed to subscribe. Clerks sat in the streets 
 with their tables to receive the names ; and the neighbour- 
 hood of the Bank was occupied by mobs of eager capitalists. 
 It is impossible to tell you," says Mr Secretary Craggs 
 (who paid with his life very shortly after for the failure of 
 the vast speculation) to Lord Stanhope, " what a rage pre- 
 vails here for South Sea subscriptions at any price. The 
 crowd of those that possess the redeemable annuities is so 
 great, that the Bank, who are obliged to take them in, has 
 been forced to set tables, with clerks, in the streets." Not 
 merchants alone, but, as in every, scheme of the kind, the 
 helpless classes of the community, poor women, poor clergy- 
 men, country folks, embarked their all in the Company which 
 was to make everybody rich. Excitement gave voice and 
 expression to the decorous English crowd. The "actions 
 du Sud et les gallons d'Espagne," were the only subjects, 
 according to a French traveller, quoted by Lord Mahon, 
 on which Englishmen could talk. And the fever of 
 speculation once excited did not even confine itself to the 
 South Sea Company. Nearly two hundred other '' bubbles " 
 are enumerated in Anderson's ' History of Commerce,' some 
 of them being of the wildest character. One of these, which 
 has been often quoted, evidently reached the furthest limits 
 to which human credulity could stretch. " The most im- 
 pudent and barefaced delusion was that of a man who ad- 
 vertised that upon payment of two guineas the subscribers 
 should be entitled to a hundred pound share, in a project 
 which would he disclosed in a month. The extreme folly of 
 
THE MINISTER. 69 
 
 the public was such, that he received a thousand of those 
 subscriptions in one day, and then went off." 
 
 The folly of the public was encouraged and sustained by 
 the example set them in high places. Not only had all the 
 leaders of society embarked in the South Sea Scheme, but 
 the Prince of Wales himself lent the sanction of his name, 
 notwithstanding the remonstrances of the few sane by- 
 standers, to a company for smelting copper, of which he 
 became governor. " The Speaker and Mr Walpole could 
 not dissuade him from it," says Craggs, " though they told 
 him he would be prosecuted, mentioned in Parliament, and 
 cried in the alley, upon the foot of Onslow's insurance, 
 Chetwynde's bubble, Prince of Wales's bubble, &c." To 
 this is added the significant sentence, " He has already 
 gained £40,000 by it." What is still more extraordinary is 
 the fact that Walpole himself, though strenuously disap- 
 proving of the great Scheme, speculated in it like the rest 
 of the world, but with greater prudence and discernment, 
 managing his affairs so as to sell out when the stock was at 
 its highest — viz., £1000 per cent. His biographer, though 
 attributing this wonderful good-luck in great part to " his 
 own sagacity and the judgment and intelligence of his 
 agents," yet allows that these alone were not enough to have 
 saved him from the universal overthrow. " His good 
 fortune was still greater than his own discernment or the 
 intelligence of his agents, for he narrowly escaped being a 
 great sufferer in the last subscription by the precipitate fall 
 of stock. Some orders which he had sent from Houghton 
 to Sir Harry Bedingfield, together with a list of his friends 
 who wished to be subscribers, came too late to be exe- 
 cuted ; and the delay prevented his participating in the 
 general calamity." One, at least, of his friends profited by 
 his judgment. The Earl of Pembroke consulted him as a 
 financial authority, whether he should sell out or wait? 
 Walpole answered, " I will only acquaint you with what I 
 have done myself. I have just sold out at £1000 per cent, 
 and I am fully satisfied." The grateful Earl took his friend's 
 advice, and some year's after sent to Houghton a fine cast 
 in bronze of the ' Gladiator ' — an acknowledgment after the 
 statesman's own heart of his word in season. Whimsically 
 enough, Walpole's wife either did not receive or did not 
 
70 THE MINISTER. 
 
 profit by his advice, but held her stock and lost her money. 
 There can be no doubt that Walpole's participation in these 
 unparalleled profits must have neutralised the effect of his 
 wise opposition to the Scheme, and cast an equivocal light 
 upon all his virtuous severities towards it. But, at the 
 same time, what can be said for the general infatuation 
 which could believe in the maintenance of such a fictitious 
 rate of value, or the greed which still hoped for more than 
 even this £1000 per cent? A high-minded and stainless 
 hero would have kept himself clear of the bubble altogether, 
 as Stanhope alone of all the statesmen of the day seems to 
 have done ; but it was precisely one of the occasions in 
 which Walpole's worldly wisdom, robust self-regard, and 
 contempt for the folly of mankind in general, would most 
 effectually tell. And it is clear that it did not go against 
 his conscience to turn a penny by the way, even while con- 
 demning with a fervour more honest than his actions the 
 delusive character of the Scheme, and warning against it a 
 mad world which would not be warned. He advised them 
 wisely for their good, and they took no heed. He was not 
 the man to be restrained by any feeling of consistency from 
 a sagacious throw of the dice for his own advantage by the 
 way. 
 
 When this frenzy was at its height, and the whole nation 
 intoxicated with dreams of fortune, the two divided halves 
 of the Whig party began to draw together. It is in the 
 same breath with his intimation of the wonderful popularity 
 of the South Sea Scheme that Craggs adds, " There dined 
 yesterday at Lord Sunderland's, the Dukes of Devonshire 
 and Newcastle, Lord Carlisle, Lord Townshend, Lord Lum- 
 ley, the Speaker, Walpole, and I ; and we got some very 
 drunk and others very merry T At this dignified symposium 
 the preliminaries of the treaty by which Townshend and Wal- 
 pole returned sullenly to office were arranged ; and, as good 
 fortune would have it, the only man who could extricate 
 the country from the frightful collapse which was at hand 
 was thus brought back to the spot and prepared for the 
 emergency. 
 
 In August the stock had risen, as we have said, to 1000, 
 and the excitement was at its height ; a dividend of 60 per 
 cent was announced ; groundless and mysterious reports were 
 
THE MINISTER. 71 
 
 circulated concerning valuable acquisitions in the South Sea 
 and hidden treasures. Again the popular muse burst into 
 song, thrilling the jubilant crowds in Change Alley. " Our 
 South Sea ships have golden shrouds," she sang, half joyous, 
 half satirical. Everything swelled the hopeful tide. The 
 Jacobites were crushed, and all thoughts of rebellion made an 
 end of. Who would rebel, when, without risk of trade or 
 fatigue of person, all the chances of a golden Utopia were 
 opening before him ? Such was the state of the popular mind 
 in August 1720. In the month of September stock was at 
 400, and the half of England was ruined. 
 
 So sudden, so great, and so overwhelming a catastrophe 
 has perhaps never occurred in the history of civib'sation, 
 except indeed the cognate ruin of the Mississippi Scheme in 
 France. We have had catastrophes enough in our own day 
 to know the effects of such a crash ; but in the present time 
 enterprise is so many-sided, and its resources so boundless, 
 that one disaster, however great, cannot make the same im- 
 pression on the world which was made by the collapse of the 
 great Company which had beguiled all England. " Despair 
 pervaded all ranks of the people." " At this awful moment 
 the clamour of distress was irresistible." " England had 
 never experienced so total a destruction of credit ; never was 
 any country in so violent a paroxysm of despondency and 
 terror." Such are the usual terms in which the catastrophe 
 is described. " Thousands of families will be reduced to 
 beggary," says Thomas Brodrick, writing to the Lord Chan- 
 cellor of Ireland, Middleton. " The consternation is inex- 
 pressible, the rage beyond expression, and the case soe des- 
 perate that I doe nott see any plan or scheme so much as 
 thought of for averting the blow, soe that I cannot pretend 
 to guesse att what is next to bee done." 
 
 This pause of utter consternation and misery endured for 
 several months. With a vain idea of getting some comfort 
 out of his presence, the King was summoned back from 
 Hanover, but was himself too much frightened to be of any 
 service. " In this alarming crisis," says Coxe, " the King 
 was pensive and desponding, uncertain how to act and by 
 whom to be directed." His German counsellors, in a still 
 greater panic, " suggested the rashest measures." Whis- 
 pers of abdication on the one side, and of such a coup d'etat 
 
72 THE MINISTEE. 
 
 as we have become familiar with in recent days on the other, 
 circulated among the Hanoverian coterie. Sullen rage and 
 despair were in the heart of the nation. A more appalling 
 emergency has scarcely ever occurred in popular story ; and 
 it was not one of those primitive difficulties which could be 
 solved by a change of government or even a change of 
 dynasty. The first complex crisis of over- civilisation seemed 
 to have developed all at once in the bosom of a society still 
 bearing many traces of its primitive character, and unac- 
 quainted with the necessary expedients to meet it. But 
 there was still one man in the country in whom everybody 
 had confidence, in matters of finance at least. He had been 
 snubbed and discountenanced in higher quarters, but every- 
 body remembered him when the necessity came, and there 
 could not be any more striking testimony to his character. 
 " In this moment of suspense and agitation, the public voice 
 called forth Walpole as the only man calculated to free the 
 nation from impending destruction." It was just after his 
 return to a secondary office, but he had taken little part in 
 the affairs of government as yet, and was at the time at 
 Houghton among his pictures and his trees. It is evident 
 that he did not hesitate for a moment to come to the help of 
 his country ; and his biographer naturally takes the oppor- 
 tunity of pointing out his public virtue. But this was not 
 one of the temptations under which he was likely to fall. 
 To desert his post at a time of danger, or to refuse to do his 
 best when called upon, was clearly not a kind of w^eakness 
 to which Walpole was liable. He went to the rescue promptly 
 and simply with manful quietness and composure. He had 
 to deal not only wdth a nation in despair, but with a nation 
 enraged and revengeful. He had to re-establish the falter- 
 ing balance of national credit ; he had to punish and yet to 
 save the men by whose agency the mind of the country had 
 been thus frightfuUy unsettled, and to give what relief was 
 possible to unprecedented and general distress. That tide 
 had come in his personal affairs which it is the highest test 
 of manhood to seize and take advantage of, and he was not 
 wanting either to his country or to himself. 
 
 In the midst of man}^ letters full of melancholy gossip 
 about friends and families overthrown, such as passed from 
 house to house during that winter of panic and dismay, we 
 
THE MINISTEK. 73 
 
 come at last and suddenly without any preparation upon 
 Walpole's statement of Lis plan to mend matters, in a letter 
 addressed to the King. It begins with a declaration that 
 " it was with great reluctance, and in obedience only to your 
 Majesty's commands, that I was prevailed upon to undertake 
 anything relating to the South Sea Scheme ; " but, after a 
 few paragraphs, goes on to set his proposal before the alarmed 
 and startled monarch. The details of the measure have 
 ceased to be interesting, and indeed were never carried out ; 
 but the mere fact that Walpole was at work on the difficulty 
 seems to have had a soothing effect -on the country. His 
 intervention to a certain extent restored popular confidence, 
 but it did not moderate the rage of the nation against the 
 unfortunate men, many of them great losers in their own 
 persons, who had been at the head of the Company. " Parlia- 
 ment met in a mood like the people's, terror-stricken, bewil- 
 dered, and thirsting for vengeance." Summary justice upon 
 the directors was demanded on all sides. " The Roman law- 
 givers had not foreseen the possible existence of a parri- 
 cide," said one speaker; "but as soon as the first monster 
 appeared he was sewn in a sack and cast headlong into the 
 Tiber ; and as I think the contrivers of the South Sea Scheme 
 to be the parricides of their country, I shall willingly see 
 them undergo the same punishment." Another, with grim 
 jocularity, which raised still more grim laughter in the furious 
 assembly, referred to the special need of hemp at that crisis ! 
 Petitions poured in from all parts of the country praying for 
 condign punishment on these "monsters of pride andcovetous- 
 ness," " the cannibals of Change Alley, the infamous be- 
 trayers of their country." " Let them only be hanged, but 
 hanged speedily," exclaimed a furious letter-writer in the 
 newspapers. The sneer of Steele at these unfortunate men, 
 as " a few ciphering citts, a species of men of equal capacity 
 in all respects (that of cheating a deluded people only ex- 
 cepted) with those animals who saved the Capitol I " sinks 
 into gentle comment before the blood and vengeance de- 
 manded by other contemporaries. When the committee of 
 investigation began its labours, it " exposed," says Coxe, 
 " a scene of fraud and iniquity almost unparalleled in the 
 annals of history." Fictitious stock to a large amount had 
 been created for distribution among different members of the 
 
74 THE MINISTER. 
 
 Ministry and influential persons to secure the passing of the 
 South Sea Bill. Sunderland himself, the head of the Govern- 
 ment, was credited with £50,000 worth of these false shares ; 
 and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Aislabie, was also 
 deeply involved. The latter was committed to the Tower, 
 while the city blazed with bonfires. Secretary Craggs died 
 suddenly of small-pox and excitement. Some of the direc- 
 tors fled ; all of them had their fortunes confiscated, with 
 the exception of some miserable remnant allotted to each to 
 save them from downright beggary. Sunderland was ac- 
 quitted, not because of any innocence on his part, but from 
 his party's need of him, and Walpole's strenuous support. 
 During all this period of vindictive fury, the man who alone 
 could bring any order out of the chaos was compelled to 
 stand aside and look on while the infuriated multitude 
 wrought its will. " Mr Walpole's corner sat mute as fishes," 
 says Brodrick, while describing to the Irish Chancellor the 
 badgering to which the unfortunate directors were subjected. 
 He could no more stem the tide of popular rage than he could, 
 not quite a year before, stay by his solemn warning the resist- 
 less eagerness for gain which had swept everybody to the 
 feet of these same directors. He seems to have stood by 
 with the only wisdom practicable under the circumstances, 
 and permitted the wild storm to rage itself out. Confisca- 
 tions, impeachments, disabilities, rained down out of the 
 angry skies without any possibility of restraint. And the 
 passive opposition with which AValpole met these violent 
 measures, as well as his ardent defence of Sunderland, a man 
 whom he had no occasion to love, gained him the name of 
 the Screen among his political enemies. Under the circum- 
 stances, it was a creditable title. 
 
 The final settlement of this melancholy business was made 
 by a second bill "for the restoration of public credit," which 
 was passed in the early part of the year 1721, by which 
 the proprietors of South Sea stock received on the whole 
 a composition of about 40 per cent of their debts. This 
 is the last of the ill-fated Scheme. Various ruined lords 
 had to seek for themselves colonial governorships and other 
 poor posts by way of escape. Oddly enough, except Wal- 
 pole himself, building galleries and collecting pictures in 
 his Norfolk manor, and the one lucky lord who sent him 
 
THE MINISTER. 75 
 
 that * Gladiator ' from Kome, no single shadow of good for- 
 tune appears among all the spectres of this universal and 
 overwhelming disaster. 
 
 With this strange scene all possibility of permanent opposi- 
 tion to the autocracy and genial despotism of Eobert Walpole, 
 the only man who had nerve, steadiness, and capacity suffi- 
 cient for the occasion, seems to have been at an end. Death, 
 too, and ruin aided him in a sad but effectual way. Stan- 
 hope, his only real rival, was so far one of the victims of the 
 South Sea business that in the passion and fury of debate 
 he was seized by violent illness, and died suddenly. The 
 younger Craggs, Secretary of State, died, as we have said, 
 while the report of the committee of investigation was being 
 given in, of smallpox, to which no doubt his anxiety and 
 excitement had rendered him specially liable. His father 
 committed suicide. Aislabie went to the Tower ; and in a 
 very few months after, the name of Lord Sunderland was 
 added to this melancholy bill of mortality. He died of dis- 
 ease of the heart. Thus the complaint of one of the sufferers 
 that the whole matter was to be settled without Hood was 
 tragically contradicted. It is evident that, guilty or inno- 
 cent, or rather guilty and innocent, — Stanhope for one being 
 above even the touch of suspicion, — these unfortunate states- 
 men were as much the victims of the South Sea Scheme as 
 if their heads had fallen on the scaffold. 
 
 Over these ruins and graves Walpole stepped quietly 
 into power. In face of so serious an emergency the fac- 
 tious heat of his period of opposition had entirely disap- 
 peared. He had done his best, evidently with all honesty 
 and zeal, for the colleagues and adversaries with whom he 
 had worked and fought, who had used him harshly enough 
 in their day of power, and to whom he had been in his 
 turn a very bitter adversary. Fortunately for his reputa- 
 tion, no one can accuse him of having taken any unfriendly 
 advantage of the great calamity which overwhelmed them. 
 He was Lord Sunderland's Screen. He took no part in the 
 violent proceedings against the directors, except to moder- 
 ate, when he could, the popular fury. His triumph, there- 
 fore, was one with no sting of self-reproach in it. Nor was 
 Walpole a man of delicate feeling to be cast down by this 
 strange and tragic sweeping away of his predecessors. He 
 
76 THE MINISTER. 
 
 stepped into power to the head of a unanimous Cabinet and 
 a large majority. "In the session of 1724, for example/' 
 says Lord Mahon, *' there was only one single public division 
 in the House of Commons." The Minister had it all his own 
 way henceforward for twenty years. From unanimous his 
 Cabinet became dutiful; his colleagues, even those whose 
 beginnings in public life had been anterior and superior to 
 his own, yielded to his sway, or were in their turn cast aside 
 by his irresistible influence. Now and then, it is true, a 
 shadow passed across his career. At one time, on the acces- 
 sion of George II., it seemed doomed to a summary conclu- 
 sion, but only came forth from the momentary trial stronger 
 and more fully established than ever. Even his failures did 
 not affect him as they affected other men. He threw the 
 whole country into commotion with his Excise Bill, and was 
 all but sacrificed to the fury of the mob, yet kept his seat, 
 and next day stood on the fragments of the abandoned 
 measure as strong and supreme as ever. Though English 
 society still heaved and fermented throughout its depths 
 with Jacobite plots ; though it was still possible that such 
 a man as Atterbury in the midst of his career should be 
 suddenly cut short, impeached, and banished as a traitor ; 
 though there was a D rapier in Ireland rousing the nation to 
 such sturdy and unanimous opposition as now^adays seems a 
 kind of miracle ; though there was a Porteous Mob in Scot- 
 land setting Government at bold defiance ; though every 
 kind of jarring element still existed in the three kingdoms, 
 and there were perpetual wars and tumults abroad, — yet 
 neither domestic rebellion nor foreign conflict disturbed 
 Great Britain. " The twenty years of Walpole's Adminis- 
 tration,- to their high honour be it spoken," says Lord Mahon, 
 " afford comparatively few incidents to history." A strong 
 and wise rule, powerful to resist, yet knowing when to yield ; 
 a consistent home policy, in which everything gave way to 
 the interest of the nation, and the as yet undeveloped doc- 
 trine of non-intervention abroad was pushed as far as was 
 possible to the temper of the time ; a practical tolerance, in 
 complete yet silent contradiction to many intolerant and 
 unchristian laws, which the Minister, while eluding them, 
 was too judicious to awaken into life by any agitation for 
 their repeal : such was the reign of Eobert Walpole. It 
 
THE MINISTER. 77 
 
 was such a reign as could have existed in no other country, 
 for nowhere else is practice permitted to controvert theory, 
 and Government to ignore the letter of the law. By times, 
 when there are men capable of it, such a sway seems to suit 
 England. But it is not a lofty fashion of government, nor 
 one of which we can be proud. No doubt what would be 
 simple selfishness if practised by an individual, becomes a 
 kind of patriotism when it is the internal welfare of a nation 
 which is pressed at all hazards, and by every shift and ex- 
 pedient. Yet at the same time it is apparent enough that a 
 policy which would be worldly, contracted, and ungenerous 
 in a private family, cannot become noble, dignified, and 
 great by being translated to a bigger area. Sir Eobert's 
 policy was perfectly adapted to the time in which he found 
 himself. It was of incalculable use in consolidating the new 
 regime and knitting the nation together. It strengthened our 
 credit and united our forces at home — it set the throne upon 
 surer foundations than could have been hoped for — it made 
 the nation prosperous beyond its dreams. It was, in short, 
 the government best adapted for the time. And yet it was 
 not a government either lofty or pure. 
 
 We have so lately sketched the earlier incidents of Sir 
 Kobert Walpole's rule as Minister of George II., with refer- 
 ence to the distinguished and remarkable princess who 
 entered with so much insight and interest into all his pro- 
 jects, that it is unnecessary to repeat the tale. The inter- 
 course between Caroline and Walpole is one of the most 
 striking features in his life. He seems to have recognised 
 in her, as she recognised in him, a counsellor really fit to 
 deliberate upon the greatest of national affairs, and to work 
 at that kingly work of reconstruction and consolidation to 
 which our modern England owes so much. The two who 
 in their day were the most fit governors to be found in the 
 country, evidently entertained no mean jealousy of each other. 
 Caroline was the only coadjutor of whom Walpole seems to 
 have been entirely patient. He spoke to her with a frank- 
 ness which to us in a different phase of society seems brutal 
 and disgusting. He ventured to discuss with her her most 
 private affairs, the relations between herself and her hus- 
 band, and to do it with the entire want of delicacy and 
 refinement of feeling which was natural to him ; and there 
 
78 THE MINISTEE. 
 
 must have been a certain visible weight of good intention 
 in tlie man, and friendship, honest in its way, or CaroHne 
 never could have tolerated his nauseous counsels. She 
 must have appreciated that curious truth to his trade, and 
 honesty in his work, which stood him in stead of high prin- 
 ciple and a sensitiA^e conscience. She was not a trustful or 
 confiding woman, nor one likely to err in judgment from too 
 favourable an estimate of the motives of those about her. 
 Yet it is evident that she had real trust in the man who was 
 capable of wounding every delicacy of her nature, yet who 
 stood up with unfailing steadfastness and courage in defence 
 of her husband's throne and the rights of her descendants. 
 She who went into all the details of business with him, and 
 was, in short, his colleague in the government of the country, 
 must have known what she was doing when on her deathbed 
 she commended the King and her family to the Minister's 
 care. So unelevated a soul was he that, even while receiv- 
 ing that supreme commendation, his mind was at sufficient 
 leisure to tremble and think of how the King would take it; 
 but it does not the less prove a confidence beyond all price 
 — the highest testimony that one human creature could give 
 to another. Nor was this high trust influenced by any per- 
 sonal prepossession. Lord Hervey records for us more than 
 one outbreak in which Caroline, so often stung by his per- 
 sonal advices, betrays her lively appreciation of the great 
 Minister's individual deficiencies. She bursts forth, on one 
 occasion, with a certain sore contempt, yet half compassion, 
 to wonder how any woman could tolerate such a lover : 
 "at?ec ce gros corps, ces jambes enflees, et ce vilain ventre!" 
 cries Caroline, with the coarse freedom of the time, and a 
 bitter secret self-reflection which even her keen biographer 
 does not seem to have divined. She was fond of her courtier 
 chamberlain, who amused and helped, and even had an affec- 
 tion for her in his way ; but it was not to him, though he 
 too had political ambitions, that Caroline confided her dying 
 charge. It was to Walpole, with all his brutality, coarse, 
 unsympathetic, and immoral, that she left this last trust. 
 He was, as we have just said, so unworthy to receive it, that 
 in that awful chamber of death, and with the eyes of the dying 
 Queen upon him, he was seized with a selfish panic lest the 
 King should be angry and dismiss him in consequence. 
 
THE MINISTEK. 79 
 
 But yet she knew that her trust was safe in Walpole's 
 hands ; and Caroline was right. 
 
 When the Queen died who had been so faithful to him, it 
 was supposed that Walpole's power would break down with 
 the same certainty as his downfall had been looked for on 
 the death of George I. ; but his enemies were again deceived. 
 In fact, it seldom happens that immediate results, however 
 closely calculated upon, follow upon any such public event. 
 In public as in private life, the most valuable and necessary 
 existence, the life upon which all hopes hang, and at whose 
 conclusion the very sun in heaven seems as if it must pale 
 ■ — when it actually ends at last, leaves the bystanders lost 
 in amaze that it should be so little missed. The world 
 which God has taken the trouble to make gets on moder- 
 ately well, and takes its own way, whoever may die or be 
 overthrown. Queen Caroline was no exception : she died, 
 and yet things continued as before. The King, in that one 
 point showing a touch of human feeling, was moved rather 
 than irritated by the fact that his dying wife had confided 
 him to the care of her Minister. And things went calmly 
 on without Caroline as they had done in her lifetime. But 
 though the storm had not immediately broken upon Wal- 
 pole, it was not long before his practical eye detected the 
 gathering clouds, and heard the growl of the rising wind. 
 The tempest that was to sweep him out of public favour rose 
 in a cloud no bigger than a man's hand. It was a quarrel 
 about merchandise and trading -vessels which at last dis- 
 turbed the serenity which England had so long enjoyed. 
 To all appearance it was something not unlike the offence 
 by which Spain not very long ago provoked our contemptu- 
 ous choler. In those days people were not contemptuous of 
 Spain; but England was then, 'as now, more sensitive to a 
 petty insult to her merchants and their ships than to great 
 political questions. Unfortunately the cause of quarrel was 
 associated with a piece of barefaced British dishonesty. It 
 had gradually become the custom to send forth in the train 
 of the one lawful South Sea ship permitted by the Spanish 
 authorities a crowd of others, freighted with English manu- 
 factures, which established themselves within reach, and 
 poured in their goods to swell the only legal cargo as it was 
 exhausted, so that the hold of the vessel became a very 
 
80 THE MINISTER. 
 
 widow's cruse, always emptied yet never decreased. Natu- 
 rally the Spaniards resented this barefaced smuggling ; and 
 they insisted on a right of search, and took possession of 
 ships and cargoes with probably insufficient warrant, as 
 happens when such international discussions are afloat. A 
 certain Jenkins, the captain of one of these vessels, whose 
 ear was asserted to have been cut off, and who carried the 
 severed member, wrapped up in cotton, about with him, for 
 the establishment of his arguments, came in with great 
 effect at this moment of irritation, and an outburst of popu- 
 lar fury helped the cabals of the politicians who were leagu- 
 ing themselves against Walpole. The country seems to 
 have grown tired of him on the whole. The King, notwith- 
 standing the lingerings of Caroline's influence, was a little 
 tired of him. His vigour was giving way. He was over 
 sixty, unwieldy, corpulent, threatened with disease. He 
 had not been self-denying or severely virtuous. He had 
 been magnificent and prodigal. His homely paternal house 
 at Houghton had given way to a splendid mansion, in which 
 twice a-year the convivial Minister held open house. His 
 private morals were utterly beyond excuse. Ere his beauti- 
 ful wife (herself, as we have said, not sans reproche) had 
 been dead a month, he had married his mistress, Miss Sker- 
 rett. Everything was against him in these days, as every- 
 thing had been in his favour at an earlier period. The quar- 
 rel with Spain, partly by its nature, which was one specially 
 irritating to England, and partly by means of party plots, 
 grew hotter and hotter. There was a weak and abortive 
 treaty proposed which made things worse. And at last it 
 became evident that nothing short of war would content the 
 nation. The King was, and had been for years, painfully 
 held in the leash by Walpole, and now was to be restrained 
 no longer. His faithful colleagues had broken their bonds of 
 allegiance to the Minister, and went each his several way. 
 The people were furious and unreasoning in their desire for 
 war. It would almost seem, indeed, as if war at any price 
 had replaced the peace-at-any-price theory which the great 
 Minister, without putting it into words, had steadily main- 
 tained. 
 
 It is the evident deduction from all this that Walpole, the 
 Minister of peace, should have retired, which he could have 
 
THE MINISTER. 81 
 
 done gracefully enough, from his laborious honours. Such 
 was the opinion both of friends and foes. His very his- 
 torian and panegyrist repeats in this respect everything his 
 sharpest opponent could say. "Thus situated and thus 
 embarrassed," says Coxe, " thwarted by the king, counter- 
 acted by the Cabinet, reviled by the nation, and compelled 
 to declare war against his own opinion, a single and natural 
 question arises, Why did he not resign ? Why did he still 
 maintain a post exposed to so many difficulties, and subject 
 to so much obloquy. His intimate friends urged him to 
 take this step when the convention was carried in the House 
 of Commons by a majority of twenty-eight. . . . Had 
 he come forward on this occasion, and declared that he had 
 opposed the war as unjust, and contrary to the interests of 
 his country, but finding that the voice of the people was 
 clamorous for hostilities, he had therefore quitted a station 
 which he could not preserve with dignity, as he was unwill- 
 ing to conduct the helm of Government when he could not 
 guide it at his discretion, and to be responsible for measures , 
 which he did not approve, — had he acted this noble and 
 dignified part, he would have risen in the opinion of 
 his own age, and have secured the applause of posterity. 
 The truth is, that he had neither resolution nor 
 inclination to persevere in a sacrifice which circumstances 
 seemed to require, and to quit a station which long possession 
 had endeared to him. But Ministers are but men : human 
 nature does not reach to perfection : and who ever quitted 
 power without a sigh, or looked back to it without regret ? " 
 To this explanation there may be added one we have al- 
 ready noted, and which is of a different character from the 
 fine sentiments of the Archdeacon. There is an instinct of 
 nature which moves a man, in spite of himself, to continue 
 in the post for which he feels himself the man most qualified 
 — an instinct very noble in its essence, and which enables 
 many to hold to their duty notwithstanding much fainting 
 of the flesh and weariness of spirit. Walpole was a better 
 Minister than he was a man ; no doubt in the depths of his 
 nature, in the silence which a character prone to superficial 
 and coarse expression of itself could never put into any 
 words, he felt that his work was the best part of him, and 
 that any salvation there could be for him lay in it. With 
 
 F 
 
82 THE MINISTEK. 
 
 siicli a dumb sense of the necessity of the effort, something 
 touching and pathetic is in his pertinacity. He was rich, 
 he was old, he was suffering — he could not gain more repu- 
 tation, greater advancement, than he had already won. 
 What worldly motive had the man to cling to his tedious, 
 laborious profession, to keep himself in the way of constant 
 assaults and rivalry ? He clung to his work — it is the only 
 interpretation which seems to us to throw any light upon 
 his persistence. He felt not only that he could do it best, 
 but that he was better in doing it. Therefore he stooped 
 and yielded as he had seemed to do before. War was pro- 
 claimed, though it was against his judgment, and the nation 
 was wild with delight. The joy-bells were rung in London, 
 and the procession of the heralds into the city with the pro- 
 clamation was accompanied by a joyous escort, headed by 
 the Prince of Wales himself. When Sir Robert heard the 
 peal, he said bitterly that the ringing of the bells would 
 soon be followed by a wringing of hands. He did not at- 
 tempt to disguise his dislike either from the public or his 
 friends, but stood at his post, and yielded to the measure 
 against his conscience, and laid himself open to all the 
 insults that could be heaped upon him. By this ignoble, 
 yet, when one thinks of it, pathetic sacrifice, he added two 
 years to his administration, and a million libels to himself. 
 
 It was within five years from Caroline's death that all 
 this happened to her favourite Minister. In the Cabinet to 
 which he had once dictated, he found himself contradicted 
 on all sides. Admiral Vernon, who was appointed to the 
 command of the squadron sent out, was " personally obnoxi- 
 ous " to him. When he took Porto Bello, the victory was 
 flaunted in Walpole's face as a thing calculated to vex him. 
 Yet when the expedition went astray and came to harm, the 
 blame was thrown, like every other, upon the Minister's 
 overladen shoulders. The opposition against him was led 
 by Pulteney, the acquaintance and ally of his youth. Here 
 and there he found a little capricious and uncertain support. 
 The King, when he requested leave to resign, refused it. 
 " What ! will you desert me in my greatest difficulties ? " 
 said George. Some of his old political opponents, men who 
 had grown grey in a continual combat with himself and his 
 party, gave him a magnanimous moral support by moments^ 
 
THE MINISTER. 83 
 
 But yet the clouds were gathering round the setting sun, 
 and it is impossible not to refuse him a certain sympathy. 
 When he was badgered about the squadron so unluckily 
 sent out, the old statesman burst into a pathetic and indig- 
 nant complaint. " I oppose nothing, I give in to every- 
 thing, am said to do everything, am to answer for every- 
 thing ; and yet, God knows, I dare not do what I think 
 right," he cries. " The war is yours," he says on another 
 occasion, in the King's antechamber, to the angry New- 
 castle. "You have had the conduct of it; I wish you joy of 
 it." To such a pass had the autocrat of Great Britain come. 
 
 The last scene of all was one rendered necessary appar- 
 ently by the custom of the time. After carrying a statesman 
 triumphant over a greater or lesser number of years, back- 
 ing him in every party measure he cared to enter into, and 
 luring him on often beyond his depths, it was the pleasant 
 fashion of the day to impeach him when his term of office 
 was over, and put him at the bar to plead, if not for his life, 
 yet for his honour and fortune. To this humiliation also 
 Walpole was exposed. There is a trifling incident belong- 
 ing to this period which shows how every petty possibility 
 of criticism was made use of. He had made a foolish 
 blunder in a quotation, and still more foolishly maintained 
 his false quantity by a bet with his opponent Pulteney. 
 When he was proved wrong he tossed the guinea to his 
 adversary. Pulteney caught it and held it up to the House. 
 " It is the only money which I have received from the Trea- 
 sury for many years," he said, with significant insolence, 
 " and it shall be the last." 
 
 For the final accusation made against Walpole was that 
 of corruption. It is true he was accused of everything from 
 the peace of Utrecht until the current moment. He was 
 held responsible for all as the sole Minister, sharing respon- 
 sibility with no one ; but the final particulars into which the 
 charge settled was that of corruption. On the first motion, 
 that he was unfit to serve his Majesty, Sir Eobert, however, 
 had a majority in his favour, chiefly procured by one curious 
 incident. His old and constant opponent Shippen, one of 
 the heads of the Jacobite party, a man with whom Walpole 
 had fought more or less during the whole course of his poli- 
 tical life, got up abruptly in the progress of the debate. He 
 
84 THE MINISTER. 
 
 said the motion appeared to him a plan for turning out one 
 minister and bringing in another, a matter which he would 
 give himself no trouble about; upon which he left the 
 House, followed by thirty-four of his friends. Harley, 
 brother to the Earl of Oxford, took a similar step. The 
 enemies of the falling man were kinder to him than his 
 former supporters. " Eobin and I are two honest men," 
 said the sturdy old Jacobite who did this manful bit of 
 opposition. "He is for King George, and I for King 
 James ; but those men with long cravats only desire 
 places, either under King George or King James." Of 
 the same stout old Tory, Walpole is reported to have 
 said, that he would not say who was corrupt, but he 
 would say who was not corruptible, and that was Shippen. 
 The honest man was a consistent, treasonable, scheming 
 Jacobite, working all his life in King George's Parliament 
 on the forlorn-hope of the Stuarts. Amid all the wickedness 
 and baseness of the time, there is a certain consolation in 
 this glimpse of him, and in his voluntary parallel of "Kobin 
 and I." 
 
 After this victory there is a fluctuating record of majori- 
 ties, sinking to the very lowest ebb of numbers. " One or 
 two more such victories will be the death of us," says 
 Horace Walpole, though he records them with a young 
 man's levity. His letters afford us the best picture of the 
 Minister himself at this trying moment. A few months 
 before the meeting of Parliament Sir Kobert's anxieties seem 
 to have been at their height. The King was absent, the 
 Continent was in a blaze, the Minister was unsupported and 
 alone. He " who was asleep as soon as his head touched the 
 pillow — for I have frequently known him snore ere they had 
 drawn his curtains — now never sleeps above an hour without 
 waking ; and he who at dinner always forgot he was Minis- 
 ter, and was more gay and thoughtless than all his com- 
 pany, now sits without speaking, and with his eyes fixed 
 for an hour together." It was in the silence that his heart 
 burned. When Parliament met again, and Walpole had the 
 daily struggle before him, which was the breath of his 
 nostrils, he shook oif his depression. " Sir Eobert is as well 
 as ever," Horace writes at Christmas, " and spoke with as 
 much spirit as ever at four o'clock (in the morning). This 
 
THE MINISTEE. 85 
 
 way they will not kill him. I will not answer for any other. 
 
 . . Sir Kobert is very sanguine. I hope, for his sake 
 and for his honour, and for the nation's peace, that he will 
 get the better ; but the moment he has the majority I shall 
 be very serious with him to resign." " It is a most shock- 
 ing sight," he proceeds a few days later, speaking of the 
 extraordinary efforts made to increase the division lists, " to 
 see the sick and dead brought in on both sides. Men on 
 crutches, and Sir William Gordon from his bed with a 
 blister on his head and flannel hanging out from under his 
 wig." And still Sir Kobert persisted, notwithstanding 
 everything — the entreaties of his friends and the attacks of 
 his foes ; but at last, by dint of repeated defeat, the hard 
 lesson was learnt. A majority of one enforced the convic- 
 tion which all the sermons in the world could not have pro- 
 duced ; and, with reluctant steps, the Minister went to his 
 last official audience. " When he kissed the King's hand 
 to take his first leave, the King fell on his neck, w^ept, and 
 kissed him, and begged to see him frequently," says Horace. 
 " I sit here writing to you, and receiving all the town, who 
 flock to this house. Sir Eobert has already had three levees 
 this morning, and the rooms still overflowing ! You will 
 think this the prelude to some victory. On the contrary, 
 when you receive this there will be no longer a Sir Eobert 
 Walpole ; you must know him for the future by the title of 
 the Earl of Orford. That other envied name expires next 
 week with the Ministry. . . . There were a few bonfires 
 last night, but they are very unfashionable, for never was 
 fallen Minister so followed." 
 
 " The fear of ill exceeds the ill we fear." The Minister 
 who had held office with so tenacious a grasp recovered his 
 balance, it is evident, and felt his foot firm on common earth 
 again the moment he had thrown down the fatal seals. It 
 is a kind of transformation scene, which suddenly dazzles 
 the amazed spectator. One day he is overwhelmed with 
 reproach and ingratitude, torn with anxiety, struggling for 
 very life, the object of everybody's abuse ; the next, and the 
 jovial figure has regained its force, the " heart's laugh " 
 rings out, the house is crowded with applauding guests, and 
 Sir Robert is himself, and more than himself, again. The 
 reader pauses in amaze, feeling half defrauded of his sym- 
 
86 THE MINISTEK. 
 
 pathy. Under the influence of the storm that raged round 
 him, and the steady valour with which the persecuted 
 Minister lifted his head against it, the looker-on had come 
 to feel a certain interest in him which his prosperous burly 
 figure does not excite by nature. The courage and con- 
 stancy of the badgered statesman, his loneliness among 
 those factious colleagues, between the peevish King and the 
 irritated country, had awakened a real sympathy. But lo, a 
 touch of the wand, a pull of the string, and the mist clears 
 away, and the storm is over. It is Antaeus who has touched 
 the earth and is refreshed. Sir Robert Walpole's day was 
 over ; but the Earl of Oiford tacks on a brilliant little post- 
 script to that long existence. Suddenly he glides into a 
 position more important still. He is the secret adviser of 
 his sovereign — he is the courted of " town " — his house 
 overflows — his disaster has turned into a triumph. The 
 change is as startling as a change in a play, and scarcely 
 seems more real. Yet it was not only real but natural. In 
 the moment when his tenacity, his love of his work, his 
 estrangement from all support, seemed to bring him out of 
 the conventional round, and restore him to the region of 
 human sentiment, one's heart expanded towards the fallen 
 man. But it was an unnecessary stretch of sympathy. Sir 
 Robert probably would have laughed at the uncalled-for 
 emotion. In presence of the Earl of Orford the shadow of 
 possible feeling dies away, the incipient tear dries up. A 
 man whose levees are more crowded than ever, whom the 
 King desires to see frequently, and whom his very rival 
 consults, touches our feelings and our tenderness no more. 
 
 Nor did what we may call the posthumous secret com- 
 mitte of inquiry into his past conduct do any further harm 
 to the dethroned statesman. When a man is virtually dead 
 and has come to the end of his career, it is vain to rake up 
 the past particulars of his conduct. Posterity and the world 
 judge him in the abstract, but not in detail ; and such an 
 inquiry, however hotly begun, cannot but languish, the ob- 
 ject being attained to commence with, and no practical 
 result remaining to be achieved. Even to his reputation, 
 however, the inquiry did good rather than harm. Lord 
 Mahon is so preoccupied with the comparison between Wal- 
 pole and his own ancestor, Lord Stanhope, that he gives 
 
THE MINISTEE. 87 
 
 less attention to the question on its own merits than might 
 be desired; but even he, always prejudiced against Sir 
 Kobert, frankly declares his good fame to be to a great de- 
 gree cleared by the investigation. 
 
 ** If Walpole's acts of bribery and corruption had been of such common 
 and daily occurrence as his enemies had urged — nay, even if they ap- 
 proached in any degree to the representations of them — it is impossible 
 that a band of determined enemies, armed with all ordinary powers, 
 should have failed to bring to light a considerable number. Instead of 
 these the Eeport can only allege that during one election at Weymouth, 
 a place had been promised to the Mayor and a living to his brother ; and 
 that some revenue officers who refused to vote for the Ministerial candi- 
 date had been dismissed. It denounces a contract with Messrs Beston 
 and Buller as fraudulent, because the contractors had gained 14 per cent, 
 forgetting that large profit in one case is often required to counterbalance 
 total loss in another. It then proceeds to express some loose suspicions 
 as to the applications of the sum for secret and special services. . . . 
 But if corruption had been common, flagrant, or unblushing, I ask again, 
 why should ,not the Committee have been able to trace and expose it ? 
 . . . On the whole, this Report of the Committee from which so 
 much had been expected, instead of exciting indignation against the 
 Minister, rather drew ridicule upon themselves, and, as we are told by a 
 contemporary, was received by the public with contempt. " 
 
 Three years later, Kobert Earl of Orford died — a com- 
 paratively insignificant incident in his history. He had 
 virtually ended when he took his leave of his master, at 
 that interview in which a certain human emotion struggles 
 against the unheroic features of the external scene. The un- 
 wieldy old Minister on his knees kissing the King's hand, and 
 the little old monarch crying over him, and " unable to raise 
 him from the ground," as in Coxe's account of the transac- 
 tion, is a sight which divides the reader between an im- 
 pulse to smile and an impulse to be sympathetic. The two 
 men had worked faithfully in their way, side by side, for 
 fifteen years ; they had backed each other steadily, not with 
 much refinement of friendship or mutual respect, but with a 
 practical support not too common in this world; and when 
 they thus parted, though there seems but little capacity for 
 sentiment in either, no doubt these were real tears. All the 
 possibility of feeling that was in Walpole indeed appears at 
 this emergency. " Last week there passed a scene between 
 him and me," writes Lord Morton, " which affected me more 
 
88 THE MINISTEE. 
 
 than anything T ever met with in my life. ... He has 
 been sore hurt by flatterers, but has a great and undaunted 
 spirit, and a tranquillity something more than human." 
 This tranquillity only seems to have returned to him when 
 he had accepted the position, and got over the bitterness of 
 political death. 
 
 If the reader has melted a little, as the writer has done, 
 towards this Minister in his overthrow, he will be glad to 
 learn that a certain Dominichino from the Zambeccari Palace 
 at Bologna was just then secured to Walpole for his Houghton 
 Gallery to comfort his discomfiture. Nor were other com- 
 forts wanting in that splendid retirement. His youngest 
 son, at least, attended him dutifully. His pictures smiled 
 upon him. Among other consolatory visits, an old, old 
 clergyman from Walsingham came to visit the old Minister, 
 telling him he had been his first master, and had predicted 
 that he would be a great man. When asked why he had 
 never made his appearance when his pupil was in power, 
 the patriarch answered, '' I knew that you were surrounded 
 with so many petitions asking preferment, and that you had 
 done so much for Norfolk people, that I did not wish to in- 
 trude. But," he added, in a strain of good-natured sim- 
 plicity, " I always inquired how Kobin went on, and was 
 satisfied with your proceedings." 
 
 It would be difficult to find a better conclusion. '' Old 
 Robin," whose dethronement the ballad-singers after a while 
 began to lament, is very much like himself in his postscriptal 
 life as Earl of Orford. The reader cannot refuse to share 
 the satisfaction with w4nch, when he meets his opponent 
 and pitiless persecutor, Pulteney, in that " house of invalids," 
 the Chamber of Peers, Lord Orford facetiously congratulates 
 Lord Bath that they are " a couple of as insignificant fellows 
 as any in England." Nor is it without a sense of satisfac- 
 tion that we find our Minister privately consulted by the 
 King ; moving behind the throne those secret springs which 
 affect the nation, and keeping his wisdom, his cool judg- 
 ment, his cynical sagacity to his last breath. But the end 
 of a life is always tragic. Houghton has other features 
 than its pictures. There are the Norfolk gentry whom young 
 Robert Walpole had to entertain at the outset of his career, 
 and whom his son Horace daintily sickens at ; " mountains 
 
THE MINISTER. 89 
 
 of roast-beef, roughly liewn out into the outlines of human 
 form," who " brandish their knives in act to carve," and 
 look " like savages that devour one another." " I don't 
 know what to do with them ; I don't know what to say to 
 them; I fling open the windows and fancy I want air, and 
 when I get by myself I undress myself, and seem to have 
 had people in my pockets, in my plaits, and on my shoulders," 
 Horace cries, with a wail. Perhaps Sir Robert, not so 
 dainty, felt it less. But he felt the tortures of disease; he 
 became " altogether unwieldy and helpless." The curtain 
 drops pitifully over the waning life. " With the posses- 
 sion of the greatest understanding in the world, not the least 
 impaired, to lie without any use of it ! — for to keep him 
 from pains and restlessness, he takes so much opiate that he 
 is never awake four hours out of the four-and-twenty. But 
 I will say no more of this," adds Horace, with that ache of 
 intolerable pity which is in all of us at once a tribute of 
 affection and a prognostic of decay. We say no more, like 
 him. Eobert Walpole ended in St James's, when he kissed 
 his gracious sovereign's hand, and was kissed and moistened 
 with the royal tears. Poor, old, unlovely pair ! — why should 
 the fact of one being fat and unwieldy, and the other small 
 and "strutting," turn the sentiment into bathos? for after 
 all it was iruish sentiment in its way. 
 
 We have omitted to touch upon what is as notable a point 
 as any in Walpole's life and reign — to wit, his utter indif- 
 ference to literature and contempt of authors, an indifference 
 which met with summary punishment in his lifetime, and 
 therefore need not be now brought up against him. Swift 
 and Gay* revenged their craft sufficiently, — we will not re- 
 peat their vengeance. But yet it is worth while to notice 
 the fact that intellect of a high order may be purely unliter- 
 ary, and indeed it is apparent often is so. The only refined 
 
 * It may be remarked, however, that the assaults upon " Bob the poet's 
 foe," which were so clearly apparent to his contemporaries in Gay's operas 
 and in ' Gulliver's Travels,' are only faintly and painfully discernible by 
 the modern reader. ' Polly ' was prohibited by the Lord Chamberlain, 
 and the Playhouse Act passed in consequence of the evident libels con- 
 tained in that very indifferent little performance upon the Minister. 
 One reads it like an ancient chronicle nowadays, and one cannot find 
 out wherein the libel lies. 
 
90 THE MINISTER. 
 
 taste visible in the great Minister is that love of pictures 
 which his doubtfal South Sea gains, and possibly some other 
 driblets of profit, which in the present day would seem still less 
 justifiable, enabled him to indulge in. A man may be coarse, 
 sensual, and worldly, and yet love his Guides, and be com- 
 forted in his downfall by the opportune arrival of a Domini- 
 chino. But neither his love of art, nor his lack of literature, 
 had any special effect upon the character of Eobert Walpole. 
 It is a particular not unworthy of the notice of that popular 
 school of philosophy which identifies all intellect, and every 
 high mental development, with literature and art. 
 
III. 
 
 THE MAN OF THE WOELD. 
 
 There are few things in the world so sad as biography; 
 which is but another way of saying that there is nothing so 
 sad as life when it runs its ordinary course and lasts its ap- 
 pointed time. History, being on a larger scale, saves itself 
 from the burden by the constant succession of new figures 
 which crowd after each other on its canvas. The tragic 
 element is kept in check by the larger story behind, in which 
 each individual has but a passing share. The literature of 
 imagination in all its varied forms, poetical, dramatical, or 
 simply narrative, occupies itself with but some culminating 
 point in life, some grand exceptional episode, some striking 
 incident — or the story of youth, ever new and ever varied, 
 though always the same. But the sober Muse of individual 
 biography, which traces over and over again the same inev- 
 itable career, is a veiled and mournful figure at her best. 
 Where her subject is one of those brief and passionate trage- 
 dies which sweep a great soul suddenly out of the world on 
 the fiery breath of battle, or by the fierce struggle of genius 
 with misfortune, she is at her happiest. Whom the gods 
 love die young : the sun that goes down at noon surrounds 
 itself with a thousand lurid clouds and wild reflections of 
 light in darkness ; but it avoids all the morne monotony, the 
 insufferable depression, the pitiful pathos and weariness of 
 the life which lingers out to its last moment amid the wreck 
 of all things. AgQ is sad, not so much because it is age, as 
 because the man who attains it stands on a pedestal of me- 
 lancholy isolation. Death upon death must have fallen 
 
92 THE MAN OF THE WORLD. 
 
 heavy on bis heart ere he could reach that point of unenvi- 
 able superiority. The air about him echoes dully with the 
 sound of lamentation; his friends have fallen around him 
 like the leaves in autumn; his hopes in all probability have 
 shared the same fate. If love survives for him at all, it is 
 the love of self-sacrifice — the devotion which leads some 
 child or friend to give up individual happiness for the sake 
 of duty — an offering bitter-sweet. Thus the story of men's 
 lives is always sad. There could be no more awful com- 
 mentary on existence than is implied in such a series of 
 sketches as we are at present engaged upon ; and in this 
 commentary there are few chapters more painfully instruct- 
 tive than that which concerns the courtly figure now before 
 us, the urbane and polished Chesterfield, statesman, orator, 
 and moralist, but, above all, man of the world. 
 
 Chesterfield was born to the possession of most of the 
 good things for which men sigh. The heir to an English 
 earldom, well-born (to use a word at which he himself scoffs), 
 highly educated, highly endowed, a man to whom every 
 prize of life was open, there is something in the very splen- 
 dour of the circumstances under which he made his entrance 
 into the world which, to a certain extent, explains his cha- 
 racter. He was full of individual ambition — the good things 
 won for him by his ancestors were, not enough to satisfy his 
 restless mind. To make greatness for himself, to advance 
 by his own merits, to secure admiration, applause, and ad- 
 vantage on purely personal grounds, was the great object of 
 his desire. The vantage-ground from which he set out was 
 to such a mind a positive injury. Had he been the son of a 
 poor gentleman compelled to win his way slowly, in the first 
 place to a living, and after to all attainable honours, the 
 chances are that Chesterfield would have been a better man. 
 But his position changed the character of all the rewards to 
 which he could aspire. It shut out the possibility of whole- 
 some toil for wholesome advantage. It made the favour of 
 a king, the admiration of society, his highest aim. From 
 his first outset in the world until the moment when, with a 
 certain pathetic humour, going out for his daily drive, he 
 explained to his French visitor that he was going to re- 
 hearse his interment, the man Chesterfield was swallowed 
 up in the actor whose part it was to please, to dazzle, to out- 
 
THE MAN OF THE WORLD. 93 
 
 shine all his surroundings, " to make every man he met like, 
 and every woman love" him. In pursuance of this object he 
 laboured as men labour for the noblest purposes of ambition 
 — he educated, polished, pruned, and cultivated himself as 
 at a later period he endeavoured, with less success, to cul- 
 tivate his son. He kept himself before the public eye; he 
 said his say upon everything, publicly with the fine periods 
 of elaborate oratory, privately with stinging epigrams of 
 wit. Even his pursuit of pleasure was laborious and for a 
 purpose. When he formed his style with all the pains of a 
 professional elocutionist, he was not more completely at work 
 than when he put himself through a course of such pleasant 
 vices as were then supposed to complete and ripen the repu- 
 tation of a gentleman. Consciousness of himself and his in- 
 tentions go with him through everything. Nothing spontane- 
 ous, nothing unpremeditated, is in the fatally well-balanced 
 being which rises before us in all his self-revelations. We 
 are not sure, even, how far it is possible to apply such a 
 word to the utterances of Chesterfield. The self which he 
 reveals is an artificial self. It is not the natural coxcombry 
 which calls forth a not unkindly smile, nor the wisdom which, 
 however limited, has some truth of experience in it, that 
 he places before us when he draws the curtain, but rather 
 the impersonation of a carefully-manufactured social creed, 
 a system which he himself knows to be hollow, though he 
 thinks it needful. What true self there was in the man, 
 what human sense there might be in him of the failure that 
 attended all his efforts — failure in himself, failure in his boy, 
 humiliation, loss, abandonment — there is not a word to say. 
 With a certain fidelity to his creed which is almost touching 
 in its steadfastness, the old man even tries, after these two 
 failures, to leave the inheritance of his philosophy, with his 
 lands and his titles, to the far-off kinsman who was his heir. 
 Strange faith, which almost outdoes in its pertinacity the 
 highest religious devotion ! The prophet had made but 
 little by it, and had failed totally in transmitting it to his 
 first disciple. But with the humility of a fanatic he is ready 
 to grant that his must have been the fault, and gives testi- 
 mony with the pale lips of the dying that his system it- 
 self was divine ! 
 
 Chesterfield was born in September 1694, and seems to 
 
94 thp: man of the world. 
 
 have been brought up chiefly by his grandmother, the Mar- 
 chioness of Halifax. In 1712 he went to Cambridge, from 
 which place he writes, with a curious evidence of the 
 difference of education in those days and in our own, to his 
 former tutor, M. Jouneau, a French pastor to whose care 
 his grandmother had confided him. It was the month of 
 August, and he had been passing a week with the Bishop of 
 Ely. " In this short time," writes the lad, " I have seen 
 more of the country than I had before seen in all my life, 
 and it is very pleasant hereabouts." A youth of eighteen 
 who could find a landscape like that which surrounds Ely 
 novel and agreeable, is indeed a variety upon the experienced 
 boys of our own day. Already, however, the young under- 
 graduate betrayed his tendency towards the study winch 
 was to distinguish his life. " I find this college," he adds 
 (Trinity Hall), " infinitely the best in all the University, for 
 it is the smallest, and is full of lawyers who have been in 
 the world, and qui savent vivre^ The account of his life at 
 Cambridge which he gives to his son forty years after, is far 
 from agreeing with the boyish wit and sophistication of his 
 letters. " At the University," he says (writing, no doubt, 
 at poor Philip, who loved learning better than the art of 
 savoir vivre)^ " I was an absolute pedant. When I talked 
 my best, I quoted Horace ; when I aimed at being facetious, 
 I quoted Martial ; and when I had a mind to be a fine 
 gentleman, I talked Ovid. I was convinced that none but 
 the ancients had common sense ; that the classics contained 
 everything that was necessary, useful, or ornamental to 
 men ; and I was not even without thoughts of wearing the 
 toga virilis of the Eomans instead of the vulgar and illiberal 
 dress of the moderns." 
 
 Lord Chesterfield plainly does himself injustice in this, 
 after the manner and with the same object as does the con- 
 verted coalheaver, who describes to his astonished audience 
 the horrible depths of iniquity in which he once wallowed. 
 His early letters show none of this pedantry. They are in 
 embryo very much what his later letters are — full of well- 
 turned sentences, a lively if somewhat elaborate wit, and 
 intense appreciation of all the arts and graces of society. 
 In one, indeed, the budding politician discloses himself with 
 a little outburst of youthful freedom. The accession of 
 
THE MAN OF THE WORLD. 95 
 
 George I., which occurs while he is in Paris, fills him with 
 satisfaction. If he had not liked it for himself, he says, the 
 sadness of the French and the English Jacobites on the 
 death of the Queen would have convinced him of its benefit. 
 " But when I see," he adds, " how far things had already 
 gone in favour of the Pretender and of Popery, and that we 
 were within an inch of slavery, I consider the death of this 
 woman (to wit. Queen Anne) as absolutely the greatest 
 happiness that has ever befallen England ; for if she had 
 lived three months longer, she would no doubt have estab- 
 lished her religion, and, as a natural consequence, tyranny; 
 and would have left us after her death a bastard king, as 
 foolish as herself, and who, like her, would have been led by 
 the nose by a band of rascals." This is strong language for 
 a man to use whose future efforts to lead kings by the nose 
 were most unwearied, though seldom successful. In the 
 same letter the young traveller gives an amusing description 
 of the way in which he had profited by his travels. " I 
 shall not give you my opinion of the French," he says, " be- 
 cause I am very often taken for one of them, and some have 
 paid me the highest compliment they think it in their power 
 to bestow, which is, ' Sir, you are like one of ourselves ! ' I 
 shall only tell you that I am insolent. I talk a great deal, 
 loudly and with arrogance ; I sing and dance as I walk ; 
 and, above all, I spend an immense sum in hair-powder, 
 feathers, and white gloves." 
 
 A curious story is told by Dr Maty, his biographer, of 
 Chesterfield's entrance into public life. He was elected 
 member for the borough of St Germains in Cornwall, in the 
 year 1715. It was the first Parliament under the house of 
 Hanover, and the young legislator took the earliest oppor- 
 tunity of letting loose his opinion with a freedom not unlike 
 that with which he had expounded it in writing, in the 
 letter we have just quoted. He said, speaking of Harley 
 and Bolingbroke, that " he was persuaded that the safety of 
 his country required that examples should be made of those 
 who betrayed it in so infamous a manner." When he had 
 ended his speech, a member belonging to the opposite party 
 went over to the new orator : he " complimented him upon 
 his coup d^essai,'^ and added " that he was exactly acquainted 
 with the date of his birth, and could prove that when he 
 
96 THE MAN OF THE WORLD. 
 
 was cliosen a member of the House he was not come of age, 
 and that he was not so now : at the same time he assured 
 him that he wished to take no advantage of this, unless his 
 own friends were pushed ; in which case, if Chesterfield 
 offered to vote, he would immediately acquaint the House 
 with it." The young man still wanted some weeks of being 
 one-and-twenty when this conversation took place, and he 
 knew the consequences, which were the instant annulling 
 of his election and a fine of £500. In such a case discretion 
 was evidently the better part of valour. Accordingly he 
 " answered nothing ; but making a low bow quitted the 
 House directly and went to Paris." Thus abruptly his first 
 attempt at politics came to a premature end. 
 
 Soon after this amusing incident the smouldering feud 
 between the King and Prince of Wales broke out into open 
 enmity, and Chesterfield, who had been appointed Lord of 
 the Bedchamber to the latter, was for nearly a dozen years 
 shut out from all preferment. With the hopes natural to 
 the adherents of a young prince, he bore this tacit exclusion 
 from all gains and honours, believing in a better time to 
 come. The Court at Leicester Fields was gay and young, 
 and much more worth frequenting than the heavy old 
 Hanoverian Court at St James's. And though Chesterfield 
 made the mistake of devoting himself to the special service, 
 not of the true mistress of the house and society, but of 
 Lady Suffolk, yet no doubt the life was one that suited him 
 and developed his mind. The wittiest men and the pret- 
 tiest women in England met there in the slipshod grandeur 
 of the time, with the high spirits of youth, and the stimulus of 
 a common butt as well as of a common expectation. The nasty 
 old Court half a mile off, the heavy wicked German women, 
 the old King with his hideous favourites, must no doubt have 
 afforded the best of subjects for social satire and high-spiced 
 gossip. How it could possibly have happened that Chester- 
 field found his wife there it is impossible to divine. But 
 there could not have been any question of Mademoiselle 
 Schulemberg when he and the wits of the time met the 
 pretty maids of honour in the apartment of the Princess's 
 bedchamber woman in waiting, "the fashionable evening 
 rendezvous," as Horace Walpole tells us, " of all the most 
 distinguished wits and beauties." 
 
THE MAN OF THE WOKLD. 97 
 
 Towards the end of this pleasant period of expectation, 
 Chesterfield was unwillingly obliged to go through his 
 share of domestic duty in the way of attending his father 
 during his last illness. The Earl bad been a harsh and un- 
 loving father, and, indeed, seems to have treated his eldest 
 son with downright injustice, preferring a younger brother, 
 upon whom he heaped favours — a circumstance which gives 
 what excuse is possible to the tone in which his son speaks 
 of him. Bretby, the seat of his family, to which Lord 
 Chesterfield's illness called his heir, was intolerable to the 
 young man of fashion. In the whole series of letters, ex- 
 tending over so many years of his life, only two are dated 
 from this ancestral house. In the first he declares that if 
 his imprisonment lasted much longer he should go mad of 
 it ; " this place," he writes, " being the seat of horror and 
 despair, where no creatures but ravens, screech-owls, and 
 birds of ill-omen seem willingly to dwell ; for as for the 
 very few human faces that I behold, they look, like myself, 
 rather condemned than inclined to stay here." Fortunately, 
 the sentiments of our grand seigneurs, as well as their 
 habits, have changed since that time. The modern country- 
 house system, with its heaps of visitors, seems to have been 
 attempted by Sir Eobert Walpole at Houghton, to the grave 
 displeasure and animadversion of his neighbours, to whom 
 it was an instance of luxe effrM. But Chesterfield loved 
 town, and clave to it. It was " filial piety " alone that 
 induced his exile, — a piety, he writes coarsely — though it 
 was Lady Suffolk, a woman not without delicacy of mind 
 and feeling, who was his correspondent, — surpassing that of 
 ^neas, " for when he took such care of his father he was 
 turned of fourscore, and not likely to trouble him long. . . . 
 Had his father been of the same age as mine, he would not 
 have been quite so well looked after." He was delivered, 
 however, from this bondage in a few months, and became 
 Earl of Chesterfield at the ripe age of thirty-two, shortly 
 before his Prince became King : so that all the good things 
 of life seemed about to fall at once into his expectant 
 hands. 
 
 These expectations were but poorly realised. The new 
 reign did not, as has been already described, produce the 
 overturn that was looked for, and the dependants of the 
 
 G 
 
98 THE MAN OF THE WOELD. 
 
 Court were grievonsly disappointed. Chesterfield, however, 
 seems to have been one of the few for whom the King, so 
 curiously baffled and cheated out of his own way at the 
 outset of his career, felt it incumbent upon him to do some- 
 thing. And accordingly the ambitious Lord of the Bed- 
 chamber was sent off as Ambassador to Holland, the 
 Minister probably being very glad to be rid of so sharp a 
 tongue and so keen a critic. It is at this point in his 
 career that Lord Hervey pauses in his story of Queen Caro- 
 line and her Court to describe with cutting and bitter force 
 the character and appearance of his rival courtier. We are 
 not told of any personal quarrel existing between them, but 
 the picture is so uncompromising, so venomous and vin- 
 dictive, that it is impossible not to see some sharper feeling 
 than mere political opposition behind. Chesterfield, with 
 other two subtle politicians, had paid court, as has been said, 
 to Lady Suffolk, the supposed possessor of George's affec- 
 tions, instead of his wife, his real sovereign ; and this piece 
 of over-wise folly was punished by the dislike and tacit 
 enmity of the Queen. But even Hervey's sympathy with 
 the Queen's dislike is not enough to point such periods as 
 those he devotes to the description of this new claimant 
 of honour. " His person was as disagreeable as it was 
 possible for a human figure to be without being deformed,^' 
 he says. " He was very short, disproportioned, thick and 
 clumsily made, with black teeth, and a head big enough for 
 a Polyphemus. One Ben Ashurst, who said few good things 
 though admired for many, told Lord Chesterfield once that 
 he was like a stunted giant, which was a humorous idea, 
 and really apposite." He then proceeds, evidently by way 
 of making his sketch more impressive, to compare tlie 
 character of Chesterfield with that of his friend Lord Scar- 
 borough. The latter, he tells us, "always searched after 
 truth, loved and adhered to it ; whereas Lord Chesterfield 
 looked on nothing in that light — he never considered what 
 was true or false, but related everything in which he had no 
 interest just as his imagination suggested it would tell best ; 
 and if by suiting, adding, or altering any circumstance, it 
 served either the purpose of his interest, his vanity, or his 
 enmity, he would dress it up in that fashion without any 
 scruple and often with as little probability; by which 
 
THE MAN OF THE WORLD. 99 
 
 means, as much as he piqued himself upon being distin- 
 guished for his wit, he often gave people a greater opinion 
 of the copiousness of his invention and the fertility of his 
 imagination than he desired. Lord Scarborough had under- 
 standing with judgment and without wit ; Lord Chesterfield, 
 a speculative head with wit and without judgment. Lord 
 Scarborough had honour and principle. Lord Chesterfield 
 neither : the one valued them wherever he saw them ; the 
 other despised the reality, and believed those who seemed to 
 have most had generally only the appearance, especially if 
 they had sense. Patriotism, adherence to a party, the love 
 of one's country, and a concern for the public, were his 
 common topics for ridicule ; he would not scruple to own 
 that he thought the laws of honour in man and the rules of 
 virtue in woman, like the tenets of an establii:*hed religion, 
 very proper things to inculcate, but what the people of sense 
 and discernment of both sexes professed without regarding, 
 and transgressed while they recommended. Nor were the 
 tempers of the two men more unlike than their under- 
 standing and their principles. Lord Scarborough being 
 generally splenetic and absent. Lord Chesterfield always 
 cheerful and present ; everybody liked the character of the 
 one without being very solicitous for his company ; and 
 everybody was solicitous of the company of the other with- 
 out liking his character. In short, Lord Scarborough was 
 an honest prudent man, capable of being a good friend ; and 
 Lord Chesterfield a dishonest, irresolute, imprudent creature, 
 capable only of being a disagreeable enemy." 
 
 It is strange to think that all this concentrated essence 
 of ill-will should have lain bottled up for more than a cen- 
 tury in a friendly English country-house, to be poured forth, 
 so long after both were dead, upon the memory of an ancient 
 rival. It will be clear to the reader that the harmless figure 
 of Scarborough is introduced only by way of foil to the 
 darker lines that describe his companion. And yet there 
 appears no quarrel between Hervey and Chesterfield to 
 justify this posthumous rancour. Unless in some secret 
 path unknown to history, they never seem to have come in 
 each other's way; and Chesterfield, though more immedi- 
 ately successful in public life than his painter, was never 
 successful enough to call forth the bitterness of envy to such 
 
100 THE MAN OF THE WORLD. 
 
 a point. The defects of liis personal appearance are evi- 
 dently exaggerated in this truculent sketch ; but his portrait 
 by Gainsborough, which is said to be the best, affords some 
 foundation for the picture. The face is heavy, rugged, and 
 unlovely, though full of force and intelligence ; and his un- 
 heroic form and stature are points which Chesterfield himself 
 does not attempt to conceal. 
 
 The embassy to Holland, Lord Mahon informs us, was his 
 first public appointment ; and it reveals a good point in his 
 character, a power of interesting himself, not for the moment 
 but permanently, in those whose public interests were placed 
 in his hand. Holland throughout his life continued one of 
 the objects of his care. Besides his letters to the Minister, 
 which are filled with public affairs, there are a few addressed 
 to Lady Suffolk, in which the private life of the Ambassador 
 is reflected. He sends a "tea and chocolate service "for 
 the Queen's acceptance, made " of metal enamelled inside 
 and out with china of all colours " — and is " extremely sen- 
 sible " of the honour she does him in accepting it ; and he 
 informs his fair correspondent that " there is an extreme fine 
 Chinese bed, window-curtains, chairs, &c., to be sold for 
 between seventy and eighty pounds," which he imagines 
 she might like for her retirement at Marble Hill. He gives 
 her at the same time a sketch of his daily existence. " I 
 have all the reason in the world," he says, " to believe that 
 my stay here will be beneficial both to my body and soul ; 
 here being few temptations, and still fewer opportunities to 
 sin. . . . My morning," he adds, " is entirely taken up 
 in doing the King's business very ill, and my own still 
 worse ; this lasts till I sit down to dinner with fourteen or 
 fifteen people, when the conversation is cheerful enough, 
 being animated by the patronazza and other loyal healths. 
 The evening, which begins at five (!) o'clock, is wholly 
 sacred to pleasures : as, for instance, the Fornalt (a public 
 promenade) till six ; then either a very bad French play, or 
 a reprise at quadrille with three ladies, the youngest upwards 
 of fifty, at which with a very ill run one may lose, besides 
 one's time, three florins ; this lasts till ten o'clock, at which 
 time I come home, reflecting with satisfaction on the inno- 
 cent amusements of a well-spent day which leave no sting 
 behind them, and go to bed at eleven with the testimony of 
 
THE MAN OF THE WOl^Lto. ' ' '• ' ' 'i(jl' 
 
 a good conscience. Tn this serenity of mind I pity you who 
 are forced to endure the tumultuous pleasures of London." 
 For these pleasures of course the exile sighs — but he bears 
 with sufficient equanimity his banishment among the Dutch- 
 men, entering into all their affairs with a zeal which made 
 him ever after an authority on the subject, yet with an eye 
 upon the West Indian ships and their curiosities, as well as 
 on the sentiments of the Pensionary and the politics of 
 Europe in general. It would seem that he did so well as 
 to merit on his return not only the white wand of Lord 
 Steward, but the greater honour of the Garter, for which he 
 had addressed a petition to Lord Townshend during his exile, 
 and which was bestowed upon him at his return. 
 
 It was after the conclusion of this mission that his mar- 
 riage took place — an event to all appearance utterly un- 
 important in his life, and difficult to account for in any way. 
 His wife was Melusina Schulemberg, niece, or, as some 
 thought, daughter, of the Duchess of Kendal, the mistress 
 of George I., a woman belonging to a totally different milieu 
 from his, and who had by no means escaped with clean 
 hands from the intrigues of the shameless German council 
 which surrounded the Hanoverian King. Hervey describes 
 her somewhere as " an avaricious fury ; " but Hervey, as we 
 have seen, could be bitter. Only a few years before she had 
 been one of the central figures in a scheme for the recall 
 of Bolingbroke, for which little business twelve thousand 
 pounds were, it is said, paid to her by his French wife. She 
 had been created Countess of Walsingham in her own right 
 by George I., and " her fortune," Dr Maty tells us, " was 
 suitable to her rank." Had this marriage taken place in 
 the previous reign, it might have been supposed a step in 
 that elaborate pursuit of success which was Chesterfield's 
 object in life ; but this could not be the case in the reign of 
 Caroline. According to Dr Maty, however, it had been pro- 
 jected years before, but was prevented by George I. on the 
 ground of the lover's gambling habits ; by which suggestion 
 two very unromantic figures are quaintly placed before us 
 as plaintive victims of a long engagement, like any suffering 
 curate and his humble love. The result, however, of the 
 postponed union, and the difficulties with which love had 
 to struggle in this case, is curious enough. '' On changing 
 
102 THE MAN OF THE WORLD. 
 
 her condition," says the same authority, " she did not leave 
 the Duchess of Kendal ; and Lord Chesterfield, who was their 
 next-door neighbour in Grosvenor Square, most constantly 
 divided his time between his business in his own house and 
 his attentions and duties in the other. Minerva presided in 
 the first, and in the last Apollo with the Muses ! " Chester- 
 field, perhaps, of all historical figures, is the one that har- 
 monises best with the droll idea of having a wife who lived 
 next door ! 
 
 After this marriage, however, we hear next to nothing of 
 Lady Chesterfield ; the only reply her husband makes to 
 the congratulations of a friend at so early a date as a month 
 after, is the composed remark, " I will not take up your time 
 with any compliaients to you upon the part you are so good 
 
 as to take in whatever concerns me " ! Her name does 
 
 not occur half-a-dozen times in his correspondence. They 
 had no children; and the wife, it is evident, made little 
 difference in, and was of very small importance to, his life. 
 
 A short time previous to this marriage, however, a little 
 event had occurred which was of more account to the hard 
 and brilliant man of the world than all the revolutions of 
 Europe. A poor little illegitimate boy stole into th6 world 
 in which he had no business to be ; a creature without 
 rights, or name, or any lawful place on this earth : and 
 straightway a miracle happened greater than any in Moses. 
 The dry rod budded, and felt through all its arid fibres the 
 rushing in of new life ; a heart woke in the cold bosom, 
 filling it with the strangest inspiration that ever possessed 
 a man. It was love, half noble, wholly pathetic in its de- 
 votion, which thus sprang up in the hitherto barren exist- 
 ence, — such a love as few have felt, and none except himself 
 revealed ; divine, yet most earthly, ^patient, tender, pure, 
 ignoble, vile. We give for form's sake the record of Chester- 
 field's existence — so many years in office, so many incidents, 
 pleasures, and honours. But he himself has presented to us 
 the quintessence and sublimated spirit of his life, the best 
 and worst of him, blended in one of those amazing human 
 combinations which nothing can resolve into their absolute 
 elements. This new-created heart, where no one ever ex- 
 pected a heart to be, beating high with tenderness, yearn- 
 ing, fond ambitions, fears, and hopes — yet so mean in its 
 
THE MAN OF THE WORLD. 103 
 
 liigliest flight, so earthly, base, and sensual, so heavenly 
 patient and forbearing, so devilish in counsel, so wise in 
 care, brooding with an infinite and untiring love over every 
 minute detail of the life of the cherished being dependent 
 on it — is one of the strangest sights that ever was opened 
 up for the wonder of men and angels. Philip Stanhope was 
 no more- worthy to be the object of it than Lord Chesterfield 
 was to exhibit this typical, awful, divine passion ; at once 
 the love of a devil and the love of a God. 
 
 It began in 1732 with the life which this wonderful 
 paternal affection alone made remarkable. The urchin could 
 scarcely have been out of petticoats, before, amid all his 
 political occupations, between the cares of office and the 
 cabals of opposition, the statesman, happy in his task, wrote 
 out his little epitomes of history, his little sketches of school- 
 boy mythology : " Eomulus and Eemus were twins, and 
 sons of Khea Sylvia," writes the father ; and next moment 
 turns to the affairs of Europe, to hot debates in Parliament, 
 to all the whirl of imperial business. Nothing distracts him 
 from that sweet occupation. He could not transmit either 
 name or rank to the one creature whom he loved ; but he 
 would make of him, if mortal might could do it, the most 
 shining man of his generation, the captain of a new age. 
 Poor Chesterfield ! If he had been a better man, and his 
 aim a nobler aim, it is possible that the heart of the by- 
 stander would have felt an ache less keen for all his wisdom 
 and folly and downfall. As we look at him in his many 
 occupations in that bustling world so different from our own, 
 there is little to love, little to honour in the brilliant world- 
 ling ; but to see him smile over his little letters, and com- 
 pose his careful abridgments, makes the heart melt and the 
 eye fill with tears. There is nothing in history more touch- 
 ing, more pathetic than this picture ; especially as all along, 
 from the tender childish beginning, throughout the patient 
 course of years, the spectator standing far off, and seeing 
 all, knows that this grand enterprise, in which the man has 
 embarked his life, must fail. 
 
 Lord Chesterfield's personal political career was a curiously 
 unsuccessful one. His powers seem to have been fully ac- 
 knowledged on all sides. He not only studied to be, but 
 was, a good speaker ; though Dr Maty admits that he was 
 
104 THE MAN OF THE WORLD. 
 
 more popular in the House of Lords than he had ever been 
 in the House of Commons. There were, however, reasons 
 for this, which his biographer gives with delicious gravity. 
 " A nobleman was not heard with so much applause in the 
 Lower as in the Upper House," he says. " Kefined wit and 
 delicate irony are often lost in popular and numerous assem- 
 blies. Strength either of argument or voice, a flow of pom- 
 pous words, and a continual appeal to the passions, are in 
 such places the best arms to support a good cause or to 
 defend a bad one. The case is very different in the House 
 of Peers, Minds cast in a finer mould affect to despise what 
 they call the vulgar arts ; and, raised equally above fears and 
 feelings^ can only be affected by wit and ridicule, and love 
 to find some of that elegant urbanity and convivial pleasantry 
 which charms them in private life." This explanation is as 
 fine as the minds of those peers to whom the physician-bio- 
 grapher looks up with naif and loyal adoration. Horace 
 Walpole, however, though nothing but a commoner, seems to 
 have been capable of comprehending the qualities of Chester- 
 field, and describes him on one occasion as having made 
 " the finest oration I ever heard." Even Lord Hervey ad- 
 mits " that he was allowed by everybody to have more con- 
 versable entertaining wit than any man of his time."' Thus 
 popularly gifted, and at the same time a man of really en- 
 lightened views on some points, a sturdy partisan, faithful 
 to his friends, and considerate of his dependants, and a per- 
 sonage of sufiScient importance in the public eye to be worth 
 any minister's attention, Chesterfield was yet invariably 
 snubbed, held at arm's length, and kept down by everybody 
 in power. Considering what was his peculiar ambition, and 
 the immense efforts he made to further it, the fact of his con- 
 stant failure is very curious. The few essays he was per- 
 mitted to make in government seem to liave been decidedly 
 successful, especially his Lord-Lieutenancy of Ireland. But 
 his useful work stood him in as small stead as his gift of 
 oratory, or his brilliant social powers. Notwithstanding that 
 he had every quality necessary to command success, he at- 
 tained it only by moments. In the time of the first George 
 he was related to the powerful minister Stanhope, but neu- 
 tralised this advantage by attaching himself to the interests 
 of the Prince of Wales ; and when his Prince became King, 
 
THE MAN OF THE WOHLD. 105 
 
 Chesterfield, once more unlucky, lost the benefit of his favour 
 with the Sovereign by opposition to the Queen and her 
 Minister. He was one of the men whose fortune it is to be 
 perpetually in opposition. His first embassy to the Hague 
 won him, as we have already said, a Garter and a place in 
 the Household ; but he lost the latter very shortly after by 
 opposing Walpole in his Excise scheme. This was in 1732. 
 For ten years afterwards he not only set himself in bitter 
 enmity against the Government, but was even an exile from 
 Court, the home of his soul, so to speak, and betook himself 
 to the new Prince of Wales as by a decree of fate. Even 
 Walpole's downfall did not bring back his adversary into 
 office. The new Ministry had maintained a troubled exist- 
 ence for two or three years, before necessity compelled the 
 King and Cabinet to receive the obnoxious statesman among 
 them. In 1744, when it was thought his influence with his 
 old friends the Dutch might be of use, he was called back 
 to office, with a grudging promise of the Lord-Lieutenancy in 
 Ireland after he fulfilled his mission. His mission was to 
 persuade the Dutch to join in the war then being waged 
 throughout Europe on behalf of Maria Theresa. The trifling 
 circumstance that he did not approve of this war, does not 
 seem to have been taken into account either by himself or 
 his colleagLies ; though it is stated with delightful perspica- 
 city by Dr Maty, " Were the account he is said to have 
 written of this embassy ever to see the light," says that 
 candid historian, " it would appear how earnest he was to 
 obtain from the Dutch what he believed they ought to, and 
 perhaps wished they would, refuse." After he had fulfilled 
 with indifierent success this uncongenial mission, he went to 
 Ireland — a post in which he remained for less than a year, 
 and where he distinguished himself by good intentions at 
 least, and a desire for the real advantage of the country, 
 which, according to Dr Maty, made his name "revered by 
 all ranks and orders of men;" and of which Lord Mahon, 
 less ecstatic and at a greater distance, can still say, — " His 
 name, I am assured, lives in the honoured remembrance of 
 the Irish people as perhaps next to Ormond, the best and 
 worthiest of their long viceregal line." 
 
 This is a great deal to say, if we could have the least con- 
 fidence that the Irish people herein mentioned were in any 
 
106 THE MAN OF THE WORLD. 
 
 way identical with the real nation as now recognised.. We 
 fear it is not possible to come to any such conclusion. The 
 Ireland which Lord Chesterfield, briefly and justly, according 
 to the views of his time, governed, was one from which he 
 hoped to be able to extirpate the " Popish religion and in- 
 fluence '"' by "good usage, supporting the charity schools, 
 and adhering strictly to the Gavel Act." This Gavel Act 
 (heaven be praised not one in a thousand of the present 
 generation so much as know it by name !) was a law by which 
 " all Popish estates at the death of the Popish possessor were 
 divided in equal parts, share and share alike, among his Pop- 
 ish relatives who are the nearest of kin, if they all continue 
 in their religion ; but if one of them turn Protestant, he be- 
 comes the heir-at-law." The Irish nation which applauded 
 Chesterfield — the people who a few years before had been 
 roused by Swift into a unanimous popular opposition against 
 Walpole's copper money — could only have been the dominant 
 Protestants, who had still their foot upon the neck of the con- 
 quered country, and who have left us so many pleasant tan- 
 gles to unravel. 
 
 It was in '45, that fatal date for the Highlanders and the 
 Stuarts ; and the last, most sad, hopeless, and magnanimous 
 of rebellions was in full career when Chesterfield landed in 
 Ireland, of which great fears were also entertained. " In an 
 island esteemed not less boisterous than the element that 
 surrounds it, he was particularly happy in quieting and cap- 
 tivating the turbulent disposition of the inhabitants ; and 
 Cicero, whom he had constantly before his eyes as an orator, 
 became also the object of his imitation in his government," 
 says his biographer. He addressed himself, in opening the 
 Irish Parliament, Dr Maty also tells us, to " a feeling people, 
 with the authority of a ruler, and the affection of a father." 
 But he did a great deal better than propose to himself the 
 example of Cicero, or please the "feeling people" with 
 addresses. He was wise enough not to irritate the Popish 
 helots into too much sympathy with their rebel brethren in 
 Scotland. He did not follow the example set him in England 
 of shutting up the Eoman Catholic chapels, and banishing 
 the priests, but let everything go on as usual, keeping a 
 wary eye upon possible malcontents, and warning them that, 
 indulgent as he was, not Cromwell himself could be harder, 
 
THE MAN OF THE WOELD. 107 
 
 if once roused. He was as tender of their finances as if they 
 had been his own ; he took pains to provide arms and other 
 munitions through means of honest men, and not by ruinous 
 and villanous contracts. He saw justice done impartially, 
 without respect of creed ; and did everything in his power 
 to promote the beginnings of industrial enterprise, in which, 
 he was enlightened enough to see, lay the real hopes of Ire- 
 land. In the letters which he wrote after his return to 
 various people in Ireland, this subject is the continual bur- 
 den. He suggests the manufacture of bottles, of paper, of 
 potato-starch, of every new invention he can hear of, " These 
 are the sort of jobs," he writes to his correspondent, Prior, 
 who was a member of the Dublin Society, and a man of 
 energy and public spirit, " that I wish people in Ireland 
 would attend to with as much industry and care as they do 
 jobs of a very different nature. Those honest arts would 
 solidly increase their fortunes, and improve their estates, upon 
 the only true and permanent foundation, the public good. 
 Leave us and your regular forces in Ireland to fight for you ; 
 think of your manufactures at least as much as of your 
 militia, and be as much upon your guard against Poverty as 
 against Popery ; take my word for it, you are in more danger 
 of the former than of the latter." 
 
 In other letters, Chesterfield repeats and enlarges upon 
 this advice, with many warnings against the familiar demon 
 claret, which was wasting the means of the Irish gentry. 
 "I wish my country-people," he says, — "for I look upon 
 myself as an Irishman still — would but attend half as much to 
 those useful objects as they do to the glory of the militia and 
 the purity of their claret. Drinking is a most beastly vice 
 in every country, but it is really a ruinous one to Ireland. 
 Nine gentlemen in ten are impoverished by the great quan- 
 tity of claret which, from mistaken notions of hospitality and 
 dignity, they think it necessary should be drunk in their 
 houses. This expense leaves them no room to improve their 
 estates by proper indulgence upon proper conditions to their 
 tenants, who must pay them to the full, and upon the very 
 day, that they may pay their wine merchants." " It may 
 seem vain to say so," he continues in another letter, " but 
 I will own that I thought I could, and began to hope that T 
 should, do some good in Ireland. I flattered myself that I 
 
108 THE MAN OF THE WOKLD. 
 
 had put jobs a little out of fashion, and your own manufac- 
 tures a little in fashion, and that I had in some degree dis- 
 couraged the pernicious and beastly practice of drinking, 
 with many other pleasant visions of public good. . . 
 Fortune, chance, or providence — call it which you will — has 
 removed me from you, and has assigned me another destina- 
 tion, but has not, I am sure, changed my inclinations, my 
 wishes, or my efforts, upon occasion, for the interests and 
 prosperity of Ireland, and I shall always retain the truest 
 affection for and remembrance of that country — I wish I 
 could say, of that rich, flourishing, and industrious nation." 
 These anxious wishes and affectionate sentiments sprang 
 from a connection with Ireland which lasted little more than 
 six months. At the first glance it does not seem a likely 
 post for Chesterfield. But he liked it, took to it kindly, and 
 threw himself into it heartily ; which, of course, was reason 
 enough why he should be called away and the post given to 
 an utterly indifferent man, who cared nothing about Ireland. 
 He left his viceregal court to go to Bath, being ill, with the 
 intention of making a speedy return. But the Ministry 
 were at the time in great difficulties, labouring betw^een peace 
 and war, and unable to hold together, and Chesterfield had 
 recovered in some degree his ancient favour with King 
 George, and was useful to them. He amused the King, or 
 rather, to use the much finer language of Dr Maty, " he was 
 assiduous in paying his court at those hours when kings may 
 sometimes lay aside majesty and remember they are men ; 
 and, ready to seize any opportunity to divert and to please, 
 he sometimes succeeded in unbending the bow of his master, 
 and seducing him into a laugh," a sublime result of which 
 an instance is given. An important place in the Government 
 had been allotted to some one personally disliked by the 
 King, and to whose .nomination he refused his consent. 
 When matters went so far that nobody dared speak of this 
 appointment again. Lord Chesterfield took it in hand. '' As 
 soon as he mentioned the name, the monarch angrily refused, 
 and said, ^ I would rather have the devil!' 'With all my 
 heart,' said the Earl ; 'I only beg leave to put your Majesty 
 in mind that the commission is indited to our right trusty and 
 right well-beloved cousin.' This sally had its effect. The 
 King laughed, and said, ' My lord, do as you please.'" 
 
THE MAN OF THE WORLD. 109 
 
 When a man could be had to lighten in this way the com- 
 munications between the King and his Ministers, it was not 
 to be supposed that he could be permitted to return to Ire- 
 land, especially as one of the Secretaries of State, Lord Har- 
 rington (another Stanhope) finding himself crossed, balked, 
 and humiliated by his colleague the Duke of Newcastle, had 
 just resigned his office. It was conferred upon Chesterfield 
 "in a manner," his biographer says, "which made refusal 
 impossible," and he was "transferred from a post where he 
 enjoyed ease, dignity, and profit, to one attended with great 
 difficulties, and, in the present circumstances, with danger." 
 His post was that of " Secretary of State for the Northern 
 Department," and the ticklish condition of the States of 
 Holland, in which he had a special interest, was, or ought 
 to have been, his particular charge. But Chesterfield was 
 not more fortunate than Harrington had been. He found 
 his efforts neutralised, and his labour made vain, by the 
 interference of his colleague, " who left him scarce a shadow 
 of power." The one thing he seems to have succeeded in 
 doing was getting his friend Mr Dayrolles, one of his chief 
 correspondents, appointed Eesident at the Hague. But as 
 for any real influence over the troubled affairs of the time, 
 it is evident that Chesterfield might as well have been in 
 Ireland or at the end of the world. " The two brothers " 
 were managing or mismanaging the allied armies abroad. 
 Holland was on the brink of general ruin and bankruptcy, 
 with nobody ready to help her, Marshal Saxe on her borders, 
 and England her only ally, refusing terms of peace, yet 
 unprepared for war. Chesterfield struggled his best, but 
 was thwarted on every side by secret correspondences and 
 underhand intrigues. " Charles Bentinck arrived here the 
 day before yesterday," he writes to Dayrolles ; " but what 
 his business is is yet a secret to me, neither his brother 
 nor he thinking it necessary to communicate anything to 
 me, though in my department. The affairs are all trans- 
 acted secretly with the Duke of Newcastle, Sandwich, and 
 Chabannes." " You judge very right," he adds, " in think- 
 ing that it must be very disagreeable to tug at the oar with 
 one who cannot row, and yet will be so paddling as to hinder 
 you from rowing. . . . Neither the state of foreign nor 
 domestic affairs will permit me to continue much longer 
 
110 THE MAN OF THE WOKLD. 
 
 in my present situation. I cannot go on writing orders of 
 which I see and foretell the fatal tendency. I can no longer 
 take my share of either the public indignation or contempt 
 on account of measures in which I have no share. I can no 
 longer continue in a post in which it is well known that I 
 am but a commis, and in which I have not been able to do 
 one service to any man, though ever so necessitous, lest I 
 should be supposed to have any power, and my colleague 
 not the whole." 
 
 Thus disgusted with the plottings which took away every- 
 thing but the semblance of power from his hands, he resigned 
 his office, and with it political life. This was in the begin- 
 ning of the year 1748; so that, notwithstanding his long 
 devotion to politics, he was in office altogether only about 
 six years out of the two-and~twenty which he had spent in 
 the service of the public. When it is considered how great 
 and versatile his talents were, what a thirst for " pleasing " 
 possessed him, and how many advantages he had in the 
 outset of his career, this is very unaccountable. No other 
 statesman of his day was so continually thwarted, so thrust 
 aside by every possible rival. The scraps of power he 
 enjoyed were wrung from the governments under which he 
 held office chiefly by the impossibility of finding any one else 
 fit for the post. No party wanted him or sought his sup- 
 port. And yet, in addition to his personal claims, he had 
 the positive recommendation of having done all the work 
 intrusted to him well, and of having, in one case at least, 
 shown real meaning and intention, and a true idea of the 
 position. Whether it might be that he was too clever for 
 his colleagues, none of whom were men of genius, or in 
 reality too subtle for the work itself, going about it with 
 craft that overshot its mark, as in his idea of ruling George 
 II. by means first of Lady Suffolk and then of Lady Yar- 
 mouth, it is impossible to say. But notwithstanding that 
 success was the object of his life, notwithstanding what has 
 been called the marketable morality which moved him, and 
 the want of any harsh and uncompromising principle that 
 could have stood in his way, it is evident that Chesterfield's 
 political life was a failure — a weary, thankless, hopeless 
 struggle for an end which he could never attain. 
 
 A curious evidence of the conscientiousness of a man from 
 
THE MAN OF THE WORLD. Ill 
 
 whom we are little disposed to expect such a quality is con- 
 veyed to us in the fact that, though intensely addicted to 
 gambling, he gave it up entirely while in office. The night 
 after his resignation he went back to his favourite weakness ; 
 an example of public, if not of personal virtue. 
 
 All this time, however, while he had been fighting in 
 opposition and struggling in office, "the boy," the great 
 object of his life, had been growing into intelligence and 
 early manhood. We have no absolute ground on which to 
 form a judgment of what this boy was. He appears to us 
 in the curious seclusion of a being continually addressed but 
 never replying, covered as with a veil of silence and passive 
 opposition. We do not know that he put himself in opposi- 
 tion ; indeed what evidence there is would seem to say that 
 he never opposed anything in actual words ; but the fact 
 that ail the volumes addressed to him are left without aud- 
 ible reply, invests the unseen figure with this air of resist- 
 ance, silent and unexpressed. So far as appears, Philip 
 Stanhope must have been a lout of learning, sufficiently 
 good intentions, and talent enough to be the despair of any 
 ambitious father — a boy capable of solid instruction to any 
 amount, taking in his education with a certain stolid persist- 
 ence, and following the counsels addressed to him with ex- 
 asperating docility, but no sort of spontaneous impulse. As 
 we glance over these brilliant, worldly, hideous pages — the 
 often repeated injunctions, the elaborately varied advice, 
 the repetition, line upon line and precept upon precept, of 
 all that code of manners and morals, — a profound pity for 
 the unhappy lad upon whom this stream descended will by 
 times move the mind of the reader. How it must have 
 worried, vexed, disquieted, and discouraged the cub who 
 was more bear than lion ! — how his languid ambition must 
 have sickened and his feeble desires languished under the 
 goad of that enthusiasm which never flags ! — how he must 
 have hated the mere idea of " pleasing " or attempting to 
 please 1 We have no record that the boy was wicked, as 
 he might well have been. Judging by human nature in 
 general, indeed, one would be more disposed to believe that 
 he must have subsided into dull virtue, of that tame domestic 
 order which dismayed his father's soul. Such a hypothesis 
 would be justified by the discovery of his marriage, which 
 
]12 THE MAN OF THE WOELD. 
 
 Chesterfield made only after his death. In his wanderings 
 over the Continent and in his life in Paris he appears but 
 dimly, under the rain of command, counsel, direction, criti- 
 cism, raillery, and persuasion, which shrouds him round like 
 a mist. The position is tragic from the father's side, but it 
 is half absurd and half pitiful on that of the son. If any 
 kind of response had but come now and then out of the still- 
 ness, it would have broken the spell a little. But the voice- 
 less soul stands mute, and takes all in — or throws all oft' 
 from the armour of amour propre and self-will — one cannot 
 tell which. It is the most curious situation, humorous, 
 touching, laughable. 
 
 Out of the clouds and darkness appears the one man talk- 
 ing eagerly, straining his eyes, straining all his faculties, 
 employing all the resources of infinite skill and patience to 
 touch and influence the other; and that other opposing a 
 dead silence, a heavy acquiescence, a passive resistance to 
 all this vehemence, eagerness, and passion. The poor fel- 
 low's brains must have got confused with the eloquence 
 poured forth upon him, the keen pricks of ridicule, the in- 
 structions which omit nothing and leave nothing to private 
 judgment. The spectator weeps a tear of blood for the 
 father, thus staking all upon one throw ; but there is also a 
 certain pity in his mind for the boy. What effect could such 
 perpetual stimulants have upon a tame nature incapable of 
 any sovereign impulse ? Philip Stanhope must have listened 
 with weariness, with dull struggles of impatience, with a 
 growing bewilderment — he must have sought refuge in 
 silence, in obscurity and concealment. No doubt he felt 
 with the infallible certainty of self-consciousness that he 
 was not a man who could ever fill up the ideal set before 
 him. The desire of his soul must have been to be let alone. 
 On the other side, that passion of parental love which insists 
 on perfection, and demands success — which would give its 
 last drop of blood for its child, yet requires from him a strain 
 of excellence, a height of attainment to which only genius 
 could reach — has, notwithstanding all its faults, but too sure 
 a claim upon our sympathies. 
 
 Nothing could be more careful and elaborate than Philip 
 Stanhope's education. When the child had attained his 
 eighth year, we find him in the hands of three masters — 
 
THE MAN OF THE WORLD. 113 
 
 Mr Maittaire, who seems to have had the principal charge 
 of him: a classical tutor, and a French one — besides the 
 unceasing letters of his father, who had already begun to 
 discourse to him on his own improvement, mental, social, 
 and spiritual. Already at this early age a thousand in- 
 ducements, warnings, subtle little strokes of wit, and delicate 
 railleries, are poured forth upon the boy to convince him of 
 the necessity of those graces which he seems from the be- 
 ginning to have held at arm's length. It must have been a 
 certain hunger of the heart, and aching need of companion- 
 ship, which induced Chesterfield to set up this little boy 
 into the position of a reasoning and reasonable creature, and 
 address him almost as man to man ; or else the child must 
 have revealed his character at a singularly early period to 
 the keen eye which scrutinised him from every point, and to 
 which nothing that concerned him was indifferent. At 
 eight years old the burden of the strain is very much what 
 it is at eighteen. " II suive souvent," the anxious father 
 says to the awkward urchin, " qu'un homme qui a beaucoup 
 d'esprit, et qui ne sait pas vivre, est moins bien re9u qu'un 
 homme qui a moins d'esprit mais qui a du monde. 
 Get objet merite votre attention : pensez y done, et joignez 
 la modestie a une assurance polie et aisee." A little later 
 Philip was sent to Westminster School, where, Dr Maty 
 informs us, " he acquired a great fund of classical erudition," 
 and where his progress in every possible way was watched 
 over and accompanied by the same running commentary of 
 advice, encouragement, soft raillery, the tender humour of a 
 much- experienced man flowing forth on the young soul 
 from whom he expects everything with a hopefulness of love 
 which no experience can teach. " Whatever is worth doing 
 at all, is worth doing well," he says, and goads the boy 
 thereupon with playful pricks of ridicule. Chesterfield was 
 busy in his short reign in Ireland at this moment, and his 
 letters were few. But his many occupations did not inter- 
 fere with the one correspondence of his life. Amid all his 
 cares he had time to attend to " the book that I published 
 not quite fourteen years ago. It is a small quarto," he says, 
 with that soft laugh in his voice which is so near tears and 
 so tremulous with love ; " and though I say it myself, there 
 is something good in it : but at the same time it is incorrect, 
 
 H 
 
114 THE MAN OF THE WOELD. 
 
 and so inaccurate that I must have a better edition of it 
 published, which I will carefully revise and correct. It will 
 soon be much more generally used than it has been yet," 
 he adds, with fond hopefulness ; " and therefore it is neces- 
 sary that it should ^ prodire in lucent multo emendatior.' " 
 
 And here begins the tragedy of Chesterfield's life — his 
 chief claim on human regard, detestation, and sympathy. 
 The reader will be more than man to whose eye there steals 
 no moisture, and whose heart swells with no emotion, before 
 this wondrous record. The soul of the scheming man of 
 the world was moved with the purest, the noblest ambition. 
 A fresh life, a new creature was in his skilled and able 
 hands. He would mould it to the highest form that manhood 
 could take. The excellence of all the nations should con- 
 centrate in this English boy. Whatever wisdom, love, 
 wealth, troops of friends, the power of literature, the grace 
 of courts could do to inform and improve, should be done 
 for him. The stuff was there, the father said to himself, 
 with proud affection — it wanted but cultivation, labour, care ; 
 and he himself, master of all arts, with masters of every art 
 under the sun to back him, was ready for the work. He 
 saw his son already the chief diplomatist in Europe, the 
 greatest statesman in England, adding a new lustre to the 
 name of Stanhope, though he could make no claim to its 
 titles. When he accepted, reluctantly, the post of Secretary 
 of State, it was with an eye, his biographer tells us, to the 
 probable fulfilment of its duties, one day or other, by his 
 boy. From the moment of Philip's entry into the world, a 
 self-abnegation, most touching and perfect, a reference of 
 everything to the new life, appears in his father's mind. 
 Henceforward his studies, his labours, his ambition, have all 
 an object out of himself. His friends become precious to 
 him chiefly in proportion to their power to serve his son ; his 
 wealth, his position, the prestige of his own talents and 
 powers, stream all into one current, tributary to the advance- 
 ment and perfection of Philip Stanhope. It is a standing 
 wonder to the reader how any man could have so enlarged 
 on one subject without becoming utterly monotonous and 
 wearisome ; and it is a greater wonder still to mark the 
 sublime love which inspires the whole, which condescends 
 to the most trifling subjects, and stoops to the lowest vices, 
 
THE MAN OF THE WOKLD. 115 
 
 yet never altogether loses its innate divinity. It is a love 
 which goes so far as to veil itself, to abjure all its natural 
 majesty, to bring itself to the level of its object, and dis- 
 course to him with the assumed calm of an ordinary com- 
 panion. AVe doubt whether such a sight has ever been seen 
 in the world either before or since. Even in the estimate 
 which has been made of him by posterity, it is as the author 
 of a system of social philosophy, a polite moralist and sage, 
 that Chesterfield holds rank ; and not as a martyr and 
 prophet of sovereign and fatal love. 
 
 When the boy was still very young, he was sent to 
 travel under the charge of a tutor, " Mr Harte, a gentleman 
 of Oxford," — " d'une erudition consommee," as Chesterfield 
 describes him to his friend Madame de Monconseil, but 
 whom Dr Maty gives no very good account of He " cer- 
 tainly had none of the amiable connecting qualifications 
 which the Earl wished in his son," says the biographer. 
 " Whoever will take the trouble of tracing the different steps 
 of Mr Stanhope's education, will perceive that this fun- 
 damental error in the plan was the source of all the future 
 mistakes in his conduct." Under the charge of Mr Harte, 
 the boy went to pursue his studies first in Lausanne and 
 then in Leipzig, followed everywhere by his father's letters, 
 which exhorted him to learn everything that was to be 
 learned, to make himself acquainted with the national 
 economy of every place he passed through, with its history 
 and relations to other countries, and with everything that 
 could be of use to him in his future career as a diplomatist. 
 His residence in Leipzig was specially with the intention of 
 learning German, an accomplishment so uncommon in those 
 days, that he is supposed to be " almost the only English- 
 man who either can speak or understand it.'' But, above 
 all, it was good manners, good breeding, politeness, the arts 
 of society, which Philip was required to cultivate. On this 
 subject his tender counsellor is diffuse, — he cannot exhaust 
 it, or come to an end of the exhortations, the entreaties, the 
 examples, and warnings he thinks necessary. " My plan 
 for you from the beginning has been to make you shine," he 
 says. " Les manieres nobles et aisles, la tournure d^un homme 
 de condition, le ton de la honne compagnie, les graces, le je ne 
 sqais quoi qui plaitj are as necessary to adorn and introduce 
 
116 THE MAN OF THE WOKLD. 
 
 your intrinsic merit as the polish is to the diamond." " Yon 
 must always expect to hear more or less from me upon that 
 important subject of manners, graces, and addresF." This is 
 the prevailing tone of the long and patient letters lavished 
 upon the boy. The skill with which the subject is varied 
 is wonderful. When the heavier labour of education is over, 
 the young fellow goes to Italy to begin in earnest that 
 process of polish to which all his life his father has been 
 directing him — and then there comes to be a certain 
 solemnity in the paternal exhortations. It is thus that 
 Chesterfield explains to his son, aged seventeen, the system 
 of education according to which he had been brought up : — 
 " From the time that you have had life, it has been the 
 principal and favourite object of mine to make you as perfect 
 as the imperfections of human nature will allow ; in this 
 view, I have grudged no pains nor expense in your edu- 
 cation ; convinced that education more than nature is the 
 cause of that great difference which we see in the characters 
 of men. While you were a child, I endeavoured to form 
 your heart habitually to virtue and honour before your un- 
 derstanding was capable of showing you their beauty and 
 utility. Those principles which you thus got, like your 
 grammar rules, only by rote, are now, I am persuaded, fixed 
 and confirmed by reason. And, indeed, they are so plain 
 and clear that they require but a moderate degree of under- 
 standing either to comprehend or practise them. Lord 
 Shaftesbury says, very prettily, that he would be virtuous 
 for his own sake if nobody were to know it, as he would be 
 clean for his own sake though nobody were to see him. I 
 have, therefore, since you have had the use of your reason, 
 never written to you on these subjects : they speak best for 
 themselves ; and I should now just as soon think of warning 
 you gravely not to fall into the dirt or the fire as into dis- 
 honour or vice. This view of mine I consider as fully 
 attained. My next object was sound and useful learning. 
 My own care first, Mr Harte's afterwards, and of late (I will 
 own it to your praise) your own application, have more than 
 answered my expectations in that particular, and I have reason 
 to believe will answer even my wishes. All that remains 
 for me then to wish, to recommend, to inculcate, to order, 
 and to insist upon, is good-breeding, without which all your 
 
THE MAN OF THE WORLD. 117 
 
 other qualifications will be lame, unadorned, and to a certain 
 degree unavailing. And here I fear, and have too much 
 reason to believe, that you are greatly deficient." 
 
 " A man of sense," Chesterfield adds, in another letter, 
 " carefully attends to the local manners of the respective 
 places where he is, and takes for his models those persons 
 whom he observes to be at the head of the fashion and 
 good-breeding. He watches how they address themselves 
 to their superiors, how they accost their equals, and how 
 they treat their inferiors ; and lets none of those little 
 niceties escape him, which are to good-breeding what the 
 last delicate and masterly touches are to a good picture, and 
 of which the vulgar have no notion, but by which good 
 judges distinguish the master. He attends even to their 
 air, dress, and motions, and imitates them liberally and not 
 servilely — he copies, but does not mimic. These personal 
 graces are of very great consequence — they anticipate the 
 sentiments before merit can engage the understanding — 
 they captivate the heart, and give rise, I believe, to the 
 extravagant notion of charms and philters. Their effects 
 were so surprising that they were reckoned supernatural. 
 The most graceful and best-bred men, and the handsomest 
 and genteelest women, give the most philters ; and, as I 
 verily believe, without the least assistance of the devil. 
 Pray be not only well-dressed, but shining in your dress — 
 let it have du hrillant. I do not mean by a clumsy load of 
 gold and silver, but by the taste and fashion of it. Women 
 like and require it : they think it an attention due to them : 
 but, on the other hand, if your motions and carriage are not 
 graceful, genteel, and natural, your fine clothes will only 
 display your awkwardness the more. But I am unwilling 
 to suppose you still awkward ; for surely by this time you 
 must have catched a good air in good company. 
 If you will be pleased to observe what people of the first 
 fashion do with their legs and arms, heads and bodies, you will 
 reduce yours to certain decent laws of motion. You danced 
 pretty well here, and ought to dance very well before you 
 come home ; for what one is obliged to do sometimes, one 
 ought to be able to do well. And you should endeavour to 
 shine. A calm serenity, negative merits and graces, do not 
 become your age. You should be alerte, adroit, vif: be 
 
118 THE MAN OF THE WORLD. 
 
 wanted, talked of, impatiently expected, and unwillingly 
 parted with in company. I should be glad to hear half-a- 
 dozen women of fashion say, ^ Ou est done le petit Stanhope ? 
 Que ne vient-ilf Ilfaut avouer quit est aimable.' All this I 
 do not mean with regard to women as the principal object, 
 but with regard to men, and with a view of making yourself 
 considerable. For, with very small variations, the same 
 things that please women, please men ; and a man whose 
 manners are softened and polished by women of fashion, and 
 who is formed by them to an habitual attention and com- 
 plaisance, will please, engage, and convince men much 
 easier and more than he would otherwise." " 
 
 Alas, poor Philip ! Pleasing was not his occupation in 
 this world. All these, and a thousand more advices to the 
 same effect, he must have received with the docility of habit 
 and despair. His unwearied Mentor lays curious tender 
 transparent traps for him in the shape of letters he professes 
 to have received about le petit Stanhope — all couched in 
 Chesterfieldian language, noting the same advantages and 
 the same defects ; he approaches the everlasting subject 
 now from one side, now from another ; he embodies it in 
 sparkling little treatises ; he drags it in unawares in unex- 
 pected postcripts ; he prays, bribes, threatens, shows how 
 easy it is, how indispensable, how attractive. Two large 
 and closely printed vohimes, of which this is the perpetual 
 burden, were shed upon the lad, notwithstanding all the 
 double difficulties of posts and distances in those days, 
 between his eighth and his one-and-twentieth year; but 
 Philip major and Philip minor seems to have remained the 
 same lout, with the same deficiencies throughout all. 
 
 We may remark, while quoting these letters, that they con- 
 tain some very remarkable bits of literary criticism, in one of 
 which he assures his son that the works he finds difficult to 
 understand are generally not worth reading ; giving as an 
 instance " Dante, whom the Italians call II Divino," but whom 
 Chesterfield himself never could read, and thought, "depend 
 upon it," not worth the while ! 
 
 Philip was launched upon the world in Paris before he 
 had attained his nineteenth year, and his father's instruc- 
 tions were redoubled. At even an earlier age, Chesterfield 
 
THE MAN OF THE WOELD. 119 
 
 had not hesitated to address his son familiarly on the subject 
 of those common vices which nowadays are shrouded in 
 decent silence, and certainly do not form a common subject 
 of discussion between (comparatively) innocent sons and 
 (comparatively) well-behaved fathers. It is in this respect 
 that these pages become hideous. The man whose care for 
 his boy is as anxious and as minute as that of a mother, gives 
 to his eighteen-year-old pupil direct injunctions to licentious- 
 ness. He does what he can to fix his wavering youthful 
 fancy on one or half-a-dozen persons, and urges upon him as 
 a duty to himself the breach of all honour, purity, and 
 decency — indicating even by name the individuals to whom 
 he ought to attach himself. These horrible suggestions are 
 made with a composure and good faith which astounds the 
 reader. It is evident that Chesterfield meant no particular 
 harm, that he was only recommending to his boy such con- 
 duct as became a young man of spirit, and would be to his 
 credit and advantage. The same letters which convey 
 these hideous instructions, convey also the best of advice, 
 the evidence of the tenderest anxiety. The glimpse herein 
 afforded of the corruption of society is appalling. It was a 
 corruption which had even lost all conscience of itself. No- 
 body can be more emphatic than is Chesterfield against loiv 
 vice — the wretchedness that dragged a man down to the 
 lower classes of society. But things bore a different aspect 
 on the higher levels. " Above all," he cries, " may I be 
 convinced that your pleasures, whatever they may be, will 
 be confined within the circle of good company and people of 
 fashion. These pleasures I recommend to you ; I will pro- 
 mote them, I will pay for them ; but I will neither pay for nor 
 suffer " (says the stern father) " the unbecoming, disgraceful, 
 and degrading pleasures — they cannot be called pleasures — 
 of low and profligate company. I confess the pleasures of 
 high life are not always strictly philosophical ; and I believe 
 a Stoic would blame my indulgence ; but I am yet no Stoic, 
 though turned of five-and-fifty ; and I am apt to think you 
 are rather less so at eighteen. The pleasures of the table 
 among people of the first fashion may, indeed, sometimes by 
 accident run into excesses, but they will never sink into a 
 continued course of gluttony and drunkenness. The gal- 
 lantry of high life, though not strictly justifiable^ carries at 
 
120 THE MAN OF THE WOELD. 
 
 least no external maks of infamy about it; neither the heart 
 nor the constitution are corrupted by it ; and manners pos- 
 sibly are improved." 
 
 This fine distinction, and the still finer indignation with 
 which the line is drawn, takes away the spectator's breath. 
 He stands astonished and listens.; to the good father recom- 
 mending with a benign smile to his son's assiduities a cer- 
 tain fair young matron whom nobody had yet beguiled from 
 her duty. Chesterfield does it with such an air of indicating 
 the right thing to do, that the reader, as we have said, is too 
 much amazed to be able for the moment to realise any other 
 feeling. When the poor boy was but fifteen, in Switzer- 
 land, his father had asked him playfully if he had yet found 
 " quelque belle, vos attentions pour laquelle contribueroient 
 a vous decrotter." He was not twenty when this other vil- 
 lanous piece of advice was given to him. What can be 
 said for such a counsellor? He is awful in his smiling 
 experience, his horrible suggestions. Of all depravity in 
 the world there can be none so great as that of the father 
 who would corrupt his boy. And yet this devil's counsellor, 
 with his wicked words on his lips, looks out over sea and 
 land after his nursling with a yearning love that is almost 
 divine. Such problems are beyond human power to solve. 
 They can be cleared up only by One who knows and sees, 
 not in part, but all. 
 
 At the very moment when he ofiered these abominable 
 advices to his son, Chesterfield placed him, with many a 
 detail of his wants and wishes, under the care of various 
 ladies in Paris, among others of Lady Hervey, the " sweet 
 Lepell " of old, a woman against whom scandal had never 
 breathed. He conciliates these ladies, especially Madame 
 de Monconseil, with the delicate flattery of confidence at 
 once in her friendliness and her powers : " votre gargon 
 — votre fils adoptif," he calls the boy, and receives her 
 report of him, and artfully acts upon it in his letters, while 
 concealing from Philip who his critic was. It would 
 seem that the worst of which the poor boy could be ac- 
 cused was an ungraceful manner, — " une pente h desap- 
 prouver tout, et un penchant k disputer avec aigreur et 
 empire," — sins which w^ere natural enough in a youth forced 
 to premature blossom, and more highly educated than almost 
 
THE MAN OF THE WORLD. 121 
 
 any one lie knew. His sojourn in Paris, with all the care of 
 the ladies, and all his father's appeals, does not seem to 
 have had any effect upon him ; nor indeed had anything. 
 A bear he had come into the world, and a bear evidently to 
 the last he remained. His establishment in Paris would 
 have been sufficient had he been heir of all the Stanhopes. 
 " You will have your coach, your valet-de-chambre, your 
 own footman, and a valet-de-place, which, by the way, is one 
 servant more than I had. ... I would haA'^e you very 
 well dressed," Chesterfield adds, " by which I mean dressed 
 as the generality of people of fashion are — that is, not to be 
 taken notice of for being more or less fine than other people ; 
 it is by being well dressed, not finely dressed, that a gentle- 
 man should be distinguished." All these expenses, how- 
 ever, the young man was to keep up on two thousand francs 
 a-month — a proof that Paris was a less expensive place a 
 hundred years ago than it is now. 
 
 Politeness and good manners, les graces, though they hold 
 the largest place in these letters, leave space for another 
 subject which is urged upon the neophyte with almost as 
 great persistency ; and that is the art of public speaking. 
 Orator fit is the text of many a discourse. Everything can 
 be made but a poet, Chesterfield adds, with steady adher- 
 ence to the proverb. " It is in Parliament that I have set 
 my heart upon you making a figure," he says ; "it is there 
 I want you to be justly proud of yourself, and to make me 
 justly proud of you. This means that you must be a good 
 speaker there ; I use the word must, because I know you 
 may if you will. . . . Let you and I analyse this good 
 speaker, . . . and we shall find the true definition of 
 him to be no more than this : A man of good common-sense 
 who reasons justly and expresses himself eloquently on 
 that subject upon which he speaks. There is surely no 
 witchcraft in this. A man of sense without a superior and 
 astonishing degree of parts, will not talk nonsense upon any 
 subject, nor will he, if he has the least taste or application, 
 talk inelegantly. ... I have spoken frequently in 
 Parliament and not always without some applause, and 
 therefore I can assure you from my experience that there 
 is very little in it. The elegancy of the style, and the turns 
 of the periods, make the chief impression on the hearers. 
 
122 THE MAN OF THE WORLD. 
 
 Give them but one or two round and harmonious periods in 
 a speech which they will retain and repeat, and they will 
 go home as well satisfied as people do from an opera, hum- 
 ming all the way one or two favourite tunes that have struck 
 their ears and were easily caught. Most people have ears, 
 but few have judgment ; tickle those ears, and depend upon 
 it you will catch their judgments such as they are." " You 
 will be of the House of Commons as soon as you are of age," 
 he continues, in another place, " and you must first make a 
 figure there, if you would make a figure or a fortune in your 
 country. ... In your destination you will have fre- 
 quent occasions to speak in public — to Princes and States 
 abroad, to the House of Commons at home : judge then 
 whether eloquence is necessary for you or not; not only 
 common eloquence, which is rather free from faults than 
 adorned by beauties — but the highest, the most shining 
 degrees of eloquence. For God's sake have this object 
 alw^ays in your view and in your thoughts. Turn your 
 tongue early to persuasion ; and let no jarring dissonant 
 accents ever fall from it. Contract a habit of speaking well 
 upon every occasion, and neglect yourself in no one. Elo- 
 quence and good-breeding alone, with an exceeding small 
 degree of parts and knowledge, will carry a man a great 
 way ; with your parts and knowledge, then, how far will 
 they not carry you ? " 
 
 Thus flattering, arguing, remonstrating, entreating, the 
 anxious artist laboured at the work which he was determined 
 to elaborate into perfection. Alas for such determinations ! 
 Had Chesterfield been working in clay or marble, his perse- 
 verance must have had its reward. But the material in 
 which he worked was one which even genius cannot move. 
 The boy on whom all these efforts were spent defeated them 
 by that dumb power of human stupidity wdiich is perhaps 
 the most awful of all forces. Nothing could be higher than 
 the ambition which his father entertained for him in those 
 days of his youth, when everything might yet be hoped. 
 That he should make a figure in Parliament was the indis- 
 pensable and undoubted beginning, anxiously looked for- 
 ward to, yet still a matter of course ; and that being secured, 
 everything else would naturally follow. " If to your merit 
 and knowledge you add the art of pleasing," he writes, 
 
THE MAN OF THE WORLD. 123 
 
 *' you may very probably come in time to be Secretary of 
 State ; but take my word for it, twice your merit and know- 
 ledge without the art of pleasing would at most raise you 
 to the important post of Kesident at Hamburg or Eatisbon." 
 The father did not know when he said these words that he 
 was uttering an unconscious prophecy. Almost the only 
 posts which poor Philip ever held were these two very mis- 
 sions which are here mentioned with contempt. 
 
 At last the moment arrived when all these anxious pre- 
 parations were to come to the trial. The boy took his seat 
 in Parliament at the age of twenty-one ; and with '' infinite 
 pains" his father attempted "to prepare him for his first 
 appearance as a speaker." " The young man seems to have 
 succeeded tolerably well on the whole," says Dr Maty, '^ but 
 on account of his shyness was obliged to stop, and, if I am 
 not mistaken, to have recourse to his notes. Lord Chester- 
 field used every argument in his power to comfort him, and 
 to inspire him with confidence and courage to make some 
 other attempt ; but I have not heard that Mr Stanhope ever 
 spoke again in the House." 
 
 Thus came to an end all the high expectations with 
 which Chesterfield for twenty years had beguiled his own 
 troubles, the tedium of declining health, of forced inactivity, 
 and an unsuccessful public career. His son had been to 
 mend all and create a new lustre for the fading life ; and 
 now the cherished boy had taken his first step, not within 
 the brilliant boundaries of success, but to that flat plain of 
 mediocrity from which no efforts could ever raise him. The 
 event was one of as great importance in the life of Chester- 
 field as the loss of an empire, and his personal condition was 
 such as to give every blow of the kind double weight ; but 
 not a moan, not a complaint, escapes from the lips of the 
 vanquished man. He must have reconciled himself to the 
 extinction of all his hopes with an incredible force of will, a 
 power of self-restraint which reaches the sublime. He de- 
 scribes himself with pathetic playfulness as " conversing 
 with my equals the vegetables " in his Blackheath garden 
 immediately after. " All the infirmities of an age still more 
 advanced than mine crowd in upon me," he says. " I must 
 bear them as well as I can, — they are more or less the lot 
 of humanity, and I have no claim to an exclusive privilege 
 
124 THE MAN OF THE WORLD. 
 
 against tliem. In this situation you will easily suppose that 
 I have no very pleasant hours ; but, on the other hand, 
 thank God," adds the indomitable soul, "I have not one 
 melancholy 6ne, and I rather think my philosophy increases 
 with my infirmities." Thus he takes up his burden with a 
 patience worthy a nobler creed. No more hope for him — 
 no dream of tender glory in his boy. Life over, health over, 
 the dear fiction scattered to the winds that had been his joy. 
 But not a word breaks from the father's compressed lips — 
 not to Dayrolles even, not to Madame de Monconseil, who 
 had shared his hopes and schemes, does he ever acknow- 
 ledge that Philip has failed. Never was there a picture of 
 proud patience, love, and self-command more complete. 
 
 Some years after, young Stanhope went to Hamburg as 
 Kesident there, a post which his father immediately, with 
 the strange half-conscious cunning of affection, represents 
 to himself and everybody else as for the moment exception- 
 ally important. He afterwards went to Eatisbon, as if a 
 certain fate had attended Chesterfield's words. A better ap- 
 pointment, that of Kesident at Venice, of which he had been 
 confident, was refused by the King himself, on account of 
 his illegitimate birth — a sting which his father must have 
 felt in all its keenness. Finally he went to Dresden, and 
 after repeated attacks of illness, died there at the age of 
 thirty-six. The fact of his failure does not diminish Chester- 
 field's care of him, nor make his eagerness to seize every 
 opportunity of advancing or improving both him and his 
 position less apparent. But the interest of the reader fails 
 in Philip when his education is over. From the moment 
 we ascertain how little credit he will ever do to all those 
 pains, how little he will ever realise all those hopes, a cer- 
 tain anger and contempt takes possession of the spectator's 
 mind. We are less patient with him than is his father. 
 Indignation takes the place of forbearance. But yet the 
 unfortunate young fellow, forced upwards to a point of at- 
 tainment which nature forbade him to reach, put upon a 
 strain to which his strength was totally unequal, is not 
 without a certain claim upon our sympathy. No doubt 
 his father at the last, opening his sad eyes, came to 
 recognise the limits of nature, and suffered the last pang 
 of paternal pride,— the consent of his own judgment that 
 
THE MAN OF THE WORLD. 125 
 
 nothing else was possible — the melancholy indulgence of 
 contempt. 
 
 After Philip's death a discovery almost more miserable 
 was made by his father. The son for whom he had done 
 so much, and with whom he had given up, as it were, the 
 privileges of a father, to insure perfect confidence and trust, 
 had contracted a secret marriage, which he had not the 
 courage, even on his deathbed, to reveal. "We judge of the 
 effect of this communication only by analogy, for Chester- 
 field still says not a word of his own pangs ; no plaint 
 breaks from him on his son's death, no word of reproach or 
 unkindness disturbs the grave politeness with which he ad- 
 dresses the widow of whose existence he had no idea. There 
 is something awful in the silence with which the old man 
 shrouds his heart, — that heart which had spoken so lavishly, 
 so minutely, so tenderly in the old days. Deaf, old, feeble, 
 racked with pain, worn out with the exquisite contrivances 
 of suffering which are permitted to strike us, body and soul, 
 in our most susceptible parts, not one cry still breaks from 
 his lips. Half Christian, half Stoic, he stands alone and 
 sees everything he had loved and trusted crumble down 
 around him ; and says nothing. It is as a polished trifler, 
 a social philosopher, an instance of extreme cultivation, 
 finesse, and falsehoood, that the ordinary English reader 
 looks upon Chesterfield ; yet there he stands, sad as any 
 prophet, stern as a Eoman, patient as a Christian, forgiving 
 all things, bearing all things. Strange, solemn, almost sub- 
 lime ending to an unheroic life. 
 
 For at the very last of all, after all those griefs, his heart 
 does not close np, as a heart ravaged by overmuch love 
 might well be expected to do. He could still take thought 
 for his heir, and put down, over again for his use, his own 
 epitome of philosophy ; and the last letter we shall quote is 
 one addressed to his grandsons, Philip's boys, born in secret, 
 whose very being he might have taken as an injury, had he 
 been as worldly a man as he gave himself out to be, but 
 whom, on the contrary, he took to his heart, and at once 
 undertook to provide for from the moment he was aware of 
 their existence. It is thus he writes in the last year of his 
 life, when worn down by weakness and suffering, to these 
 two children : — 
 
12G THE MAN OF THE WORLD. 
 
 TO CHARLES AND PHILIP STANHOPE. 
 
 *' I received a few days ago two of the best written letters I ever saw 
 in my life— the one signed Charles Stanhope, the other Philip Stanhope. 
 As for you, Charles, I did not wonder at it, for you will take pains, and 
 are a lover of letters ; but you idle rogue, you Phil, how came you to 
 write so well that one can almost say of you two, Et cantare pares et 
 respondere parati 1 Charles will explain this Latin to you. 
 
 " I am told, Phil, that you have got a nickname at school from your 
 intimacy with Master Strangeways, and that they called you Master 
 Strangerways— for to be sure you are a strange boy. Is this true ? 
 
 "Tell me what you would have me bring you both from home, and I 
 will bring it you when I come to town. In the mean time, God bless 
 you both ! " 
 
 With this last touch of nature let us wind up the pathetic 
 record. " Give Dayrolles a chair," were the dying man's 
 last words, they say; and the attendant doctor calls the 
 world to observe that " his good-breeding quitted him only 
 with his life." But with all deference to established pre- 
 judices, we believe our readers wall conclude with us that 
 the tender little letter above is a more true conclusion to 
 that strange force of paternal love which lasted as long as 
 Chesterfield's life. 
 
 We are aware that in all this we have departed entirely 
 from the traditional usage which should have made Chester- 
 field's Letters and his system of philosophy our subject in- 
 stead of himself These Letters are within everybody's 
 reach : but they are not so wonderful, so unique, or so 
 manifold, as was the man. 
 
IV. 
 THE WOMAN OF FASHION. 
 
 The figure of a brilliant, vivacious, and graceful woman of 
 fashion, when we meet with it in the sober paths of history, 
 acts as one of the lights in the picture. It is not only the 
 sparkling point itself that charms the eye, but the depth of 
 contrast with which it relieves the masses of shade, and 
 clears up the misty vista. Crowds of human creatures, 
 especially when they are dead and past, mass themselves 
 up like trees, with an instinctive huddling together and 
 interlacing of passions and interests. The loftier figures, 
 which stand well apart from the throng, are too much raised 
 above it, in most cases, to throw much light on anything 
 but the upturned heads, the eyes of eager attention, hope, 
 or despair, with which the multitude regards its masters. 
 The statesmen, the great soldiers, the great poets, throw 
 only such lights as this from above upon the expectant mass 
 below them. But there are actors less splendid, who thread 
 out and in through the obscure crowd, leaving each a track 
 among the nameless throng, by means of which we can dis- 
 tinguish the antique disused garments, the forgotten habits, 
 the ancient forms of speech. Through the opening ranks it 
 is a pleasure to watch the light soul tripping in airy old- 
 fashioned measures to the quaint strains that are heard no 
 longer — to observe the dim partners in its dance which it 
 selects from the crowd — to see it clasping visionary hands, 
 and exchanging shadowy embraces with the half-seen crea- 
 tures upon whom it casts a little of its own light. That 
 light may be but the glow-worm glitter of a bright conversa- 
 
128 THE WOMAN OF FASHION. 
 
 tional superficial soul — it may- be only the shimmer of a 
 court suit of cloth-of-gold — but we follow it with an interest 
 which is often above its deserts ; for so much as human 
 instrumentality can, it opens the common ranks to us, and 
 makes our ancestors visible, not in the grave shape of their 
 wars and their politics, but in their form and fashion as 
 they lived. 
 
 This office is not one which is specially reserved to women. 
 Far different is the apparition of the heroic Maid or the 
 patriot Queen. Women crowd closely upon the great high- 
 road of the past. The unobtrusive domestic creature which 
 is held up to us as the great model and type of the sex, 
 could never be guessed at as its representative, did we form 
 our ideas according to experience and evidence, instead of 
 under the happy guidance of the conventional and imagin- 
 ary. Every other kind and fashion of woman, except that 
 correct and abstract being, is to be found in history ; women 
 who are princes, heroines, martyrs, givers of good and of evil 
 counsel, leaders of parties, makers of wars. Their robes 
 mingle with the succincter garments of statesmen and sol- 
 diers round them, with an equality of position and interest 
 such as no theory knows. Nor is the butterfly-woman any 
 commoner than the man-butterfly in the world of fashion 
 and gossip dead and gone. The example we choose is of 
 the best kind of the species, a higher specimen than the 
 twin-creature, Horace Walpole, for example, who occupies 
 something like a similar rank in the unimpassioned chronicle. 
 There are qualities in Lady Mary which are quite above the 
 range of her brother gossip, and a human interest which 
 transcends any claim of his ; but yet the light which flashes 
 out from her delicate lantern upon every scene through 
 which she passes, and upon the voiceless, unluminous mass 
 around her, is the kind of light to which we have just re- 
 ferred — not the illumination from above, but the level ray 
 which goes in and out amid the crowd, and reveals every- 
 where, in the little spot of radiance round her figure, 
 the thronging forms, the half-seen faces, the gestures and 
 fashions, the cries and exclamations of a generation which 
 is past. 
 
 Mary Wortley Montagu was born Mary Pierrepont, of 
 noble family and many gifts — Lady Mary, softest and sweet- 
 
THE WOMAN OF FASHION. 129 
 
 est of all titles, from her birth — in the year 1690. We do 
 not pretend that she ever came up to the ideal of her name ; 
 but the young creature was sweet and fair, as well as sprightly 
 and full of life, in the early days which she makes dimly 
 apparent in her letters. The first incident in her story con- 
 veys a curious foretaste and prevision of her whole career. 
 Her mother died when she was a child ; and her father was 
 one of those gay and easy men of pleasure who are the 
 sternest and most immovable of domestic tyrants. He was 
 very fond of her so long as she was a baby unable to cross 
 his will — proud of her infant beauty and wit, and the first 
 rays of an intelligence which was afterwards one of the 
 keenest and brightest of her time. He was a Whig and a 
 man of the highest fashion, and " of course belonged to the 
 Kitcat Club." At one of the meetings of this " gay and 
 gallant community," the object of which was "to choose 
 toasts for the year," Lord Dorchester (such being his title at 
 the time ; he was afterwards Duke of Kingston) nominated 
 his little daughter, aged eight, declaring that she was far 
 prettier than any lady on their list. The other members of 
 the Club objected that their rules forbade the election to 
 such an honour of any unknown beauty, upon which ensued 
 the following characteristic scene : — 
 
 " ' Then you shall see her ! ' cried he ; and in the gaiety of the moment sent 
 orders home to have her finely dressed and brought to him at the tavern, 
 where she was received with acclamations, her claim unanimously allowed, 
 her health drunk by every one present, and her name engraved in due 
 form on a drinking-glass. The company consisting of some of the most 
 eminent men in England, she went from the lap of one poet, or patriot, 
 or statesman, to the arms of another, was feasted with sweetmeats, over- 
 whelmed with caresses, and what, perhaps, already pleased her better 
 than either, heard her wit and beauty loudly extolled on every side. 
 Pleasure, she said, was too poor a word to express her sentiments — they 
 amounted to ecstasy; never again throughout her whole future life did 
 she spend so happy a day. . . . Her father carried on the frolic, and, 
 we may conclude, confirmed the taste, by having her portrait painted 
 for the club-room, that she might be enrolled a regular toast." 
 
 This is the first appearance of the poor motherless child 
 in the gay world she was to amuse and influence so long. 
 After so ecstatic a glimpse of the triumphs which awaited 
 her, she was sent back to the obscurity and seclusion which 
 
 I 
 
130 THE WOMAN OF FASHION. 
 
 is the common fate of youngwomanbood in the bud ; but 
 which, no doubt, after the above scene, was still more dis- 
 tasteful to the little beauty than it is in general to the cap- 
 tive princesses in their pinafores. There is a little contro- 
 versy as to the mode of her education, of which her first 
 polite biographer declares that " the first dawn of her genius 
 opened so auspiciously that her father resolved to cultivate 
 the advantages of nature by a sedulous attention to her early 
 instruction. A classical education was not usually given to 
 English ladies of quality when Lady Mary Pierrepont re- 
 ceived one of the best," adds the courtly historian. " Under 
 the same preceptors as Viscount Newark, her brother, she 
 acquired the elements of the Greek, Latin, and French 
 languages with the greatest success. When she had made 
 a singular proficiency, her studies were superintended by 
 Bishop Burnet, who fostered her superior talents with every 
 expression of dignified praise." This is very fine language, 
 and there is a dignified consciousness throughout the narra- 
 tive that its subject is a person of quality, and not to be 
 spoken of in the vulgar tongue ; but the fact is very doubt- 
 ful, and seems to have had no greater foundation than the 
 existence of a translation of the ' Enchiridion ' of Epictetus 
 which Lady Mary executed in the ambition of her youth, 
 and which Bishop Burnet corrected' for her. 
 
 She describes herself in one of her youthful letters as liv- 
 ing surrounded with dictionaries, and teaching herself the 
 learned tongue which was so great a distinction to her in 
 those days. '^ My own education was one of the worst in 
 the world," she says, when writing to her daughter nearly 
 half a century after, " being exactly like Clarissa Harlowe's; 
 her pious Mrs Norton so perfectly resembling my governess, 
 who had been nurse to my mother, I could almost fancy the 
 author was acquainted with her. She took so much pains 
 from my infancy to fill my head with superstitious tales and 
 false notions, it was none of her fault that I am not at this 
 day afraid of witches and hobgoblins, or turned Methodist." 
 There were three girls brought up in this way in the family 
 house at Thoresby, which, like all the country houses of the 
 period, was a place of penance and suffering to the possessors. 
 " Don't you remember how miserable we were in the little 
 parlour at Thoresby?" Lady Mary writes to her sister 
 
THE WOMA^ OF FASHION. 131 
 
 Lady Mar, when they were both in full possession of the 
 freedom of maturer life, though life had not turned out so 
 triumphant as the girls supposed. " We then thought marry- 
 ing would put us at once into possession of all we wanted," 
 she adds, no doubt with a sigh over the vain supposition. 
 And yet the parlour at Thoresby cannot have been so very 
 dull after all, and a pretty picture of girlish occupation might 
 be made out of the few indications supplied by Lady Louisa 
 Stuart in her introductory anecdotes to her grandmother's 
 letters. " She possessed and left after her the whole library 
 of Mrs Lennox's ' Female Quixote,' ' Cleopatra,' ' Cassandra,' 
 ' Clelia,' 'Cyprus,' 'Pharamond,' 'Ibrahim,' &c. &c., all, like 
 the Lady Arabella's collection, ' Englished ' mostly by persons 
 of honour." In a blank page of one of these great folios "Lady 
 Mary had written in her fairest youthful hand the names and 
 characteristics of the chief personages, thus : ' The beautiful 
 Diana, the volatile Climene, the melancholy Doris, Celadon 
 the faithful, Adamas the wise,' and so on," — a pretty piece 
 of girlish enthusiasm which everybody who has had to do 
 with such budding creatures will appreciate. She " got by 
 heart all the poetry that came in her way, and indulged her- 
 self in the luxury of reading every romance as yet invented," 
 a custom which stood her in great stead in after-life, and at 
 the same time did not prevent the translation of Epictetus, 
 nor the perusal apparently of many grave authors. Besides 
 all these labours and recreations, the girl, as she grew up, had 
 the duties of the mistress of the house laid on her shoulders 
 — no small matter in those days. No diner Eusse, blessed 
 modern invention, had then been thought of. Poor Lady 
 Mary had to take lessons three times a-vveek from " a pro- 
 fessed carving-master, who taught the art scientifically," in 
 order to be prepared for her father's " public days ; " and on 
 these public days ate her own dinner alone before the labori- 
 ous social meal came on, to be fortified for its duties. 
 
 " Each joint was carried up in its turn to be operated upon by her, and 
 by her alone, since the peers and knights on either hand were so far from 
 being bound to offer their assistance that the very master of the house, 
 posted opposite to her, might not act as her croupier ; his department was 
 to push the bottle after dinner. As for the crowd of guests, the most in- 
 considerable among them — the curate, or subaltern, or squire's younger 
 brother — if suffered though her neglect to help himself to a slice of 
 
132 THE WOMAN OF FASHION. 
 
 mutton placed before him, would have chewed it in bitterness, and gone 
 home an affronted man, half inclined to give a wrong vote at the next 
 election." 
 
 Hot from such tedious and trying labours, no wonder the 
 girl was glad to take refuge in the Grand Cyrus, or bury her 
 anatomical woes in Latin, whether that Latin was acquired 
 legitimately under her brother's tutor or by private efforts of 
 her own. 
 
 When Lady Mary was twenty she sent her translation of 
 Epictetus to Bishop Burnet, with a letter in which the charm- 
 ing unconscious pedantry of youth breaks out in curious con- 
 trast with the light and not particularly refined epistles which 
 at the same period she was writing to her youthful friends. 
 It was " the work of one week of my solitude," she says ; 
 and with simple artfulness begs her correspondent to believe 
 that her sole object in sending it to him was " to ask your 
 lordship whether I have understood Epictetus ? " " My sex 
 is usually forbid studies of this nature," adds the girl, with 
 the oft-repeated plaint of womankind. " We are taught to 
 place all our art in adorning our outward forms, and permit- 
 ted without reproach to carry that custom even to extrava- 
 gancy, while our minds are entirely neglected, and, by dis- 
 use of reflection, filled with nothing but the trifling objects 
 our eyes are daily entertained with. This custom, so long 
 established and industriously upheld, makes it even ridicu- 
 lous to go out of the common road, and forces one to find as 
 many excuses as if it were a thing altogether criminal not to 
 play the fool in concert with other women of quality." The 
 young lady goes on to give her reverend counsellor a curious 
 sketch of the manner in which '' any man of sense that finds 
 it either his interest or his pleasure " can corrupt women of 
 quality, in consequence of their careless education, — a matter 
 which Lady Mary and everybody belonging to her evidently 
 thinks a quite natural and edifying subject for discussion on 
 the part of a young woman just out of her teens ; and the 
 letter is concluded by a long Latin quotation from Erasmus. 
 But for that one wonderful touch about the man of sense and 
 the women of quality, the letter is amusingly natural in its 
 artificialness and eager strain after the calm of learning. It 
 is the only bit of pedantry in the collection. Lady Mary 
 and her descendants to the fourth and fifth generation evi- 
 
THE WOMAN OF FASHION. 133 
 
 dentlj bear a modest consciousness that this ' Enchiridion' is 
 a feather in the family cap. 
 
 But she had other things on her hands than translations. 
 Among her friends one of the best-beloved was a certain 
 Mistress Anne Wortley, whose acquaintance was to determine 
 Lady Mary's life. Mrs Anne had a brother, young, hand- 
 some, and promising — a young man of family and fashion. 
 This hero of the tale was in general, we are told, superior to 
 female society. His granddaughter is indignant at the idea 
 that Mr Edward Wortley was " a dull, phlegmatic, countiy 
 gentleman, of a tame genius and moderate capacity, of parts 
 more solid than brilliant," as has been unkindly said. But 
 the fact is, that the impression to be derived of Lady Mary's 
 husband from the sole record in which he figures — that in 
 which his wife stands out so clear and crisp and vivid — is 
 of the vaguest and faintest character. He is as indistinct as 
 the hero in a lady's novel. Certain general ideas of truth, 
 straightforwardness, sternness, &c., are shadowed forth in 
 him; but as to individuality, the man does not possess such 
 a thing, either from the fault of the writer — which is scarcely 
 to be supposed — or from his own. This dim being was, 
 liowever, young when the two met. He was, we are told, 
 "a first-rate scholar." " Polite literature was his passion." 
 He was the friend of Addison, and formed part of the brilliant 
 society which encircled that delicate wit. With all this 
 prestige surrounding him, and clothed with that indefiniteness 
 of youth which it is so easy to suppose full of hope and 
 promise, no doubt he was a striking apparition in the eyes of 
 the girl who chafed at her own ignorance, and courted the 
 approach of genius. Few things have ever proved more 
 charming to the feminine imagination in youth, than that 
 lordly superiority which, alas ! so seldom stands a closer 
 examination. Female education. Lady Louisa Stuart informs 
 us, was at so low an ebb, " that Mr Wortley, however fond 
 of his sister, could have no particular motive to seek the 
 acquaintance of her companions." But yet Fate beguiled the 
 young hero, notwithstanding the debasement of womankind 
 and his own lofty sense of a higher being. This was how 
 his downfall befell : — 
 
 *'His surprise and delight were all the greater when, one afternoon, 
 having by chance loitered in her apartment till visitors arrived, he saw 
 
134 THE WOMAN OF FASHION. 
 
 Lady Mary Pierrepont for the first time ; and on entering into conversa- 
 tion with her, found, in addition to beauty that charmed him, not only 
 brilliant wit, but a thinking and cultivated mind. He was especially 
 struck with the discovery that she understood Latin, and could relish his 
 beloved classics. Something that passed led to the mention of Quintus 
 Curtius, which she said she had never read. This was a fair handle for 
 a piece of gallantry. In a few days she received a superb edition of the 
 author, with these lines facing the title-page : — 
 
 " ' Beauty like this had vanquished Persia shown, 
 Tlie Macedon had laid his empire down, 
 And polished Greece obeyed a barbarous throne. 
 Had wit so bright adorned a Grecian dame. 
 The amorous youth had lost his thirst for fame. 
 Nor distant India sought through Syria's plain ; 
 But to the Muses' stream with her had run, 
 And thought her lover more than Amnion's son.' " 
 
 So changed have manners become since those days, that 
 the nearest analogy to this curious beginning of courtship 
 must be looked for among our housemaids and the faithful 
 youths who " keep company" with them. But we suppose 
 it was all right in 1710, or anyhow Lady Mary had no 
 mamma to do what was proper, and send back the premature 
 offering. Perhaps it was the first time that Quintus Curtius 
 had served such a purpose. The correspondence was carried 
 on for some time by means of Mistress Anne, who is sus- 
 pected of having sent her brother's fervid communications 
 under her own name to her dear Lady Mary. Very soon, 
 however, poor Mistress Anne died in the bloom of her beauty 
 and youth ; and the two, who were by this time, in their way, 
 lovers, had to carry on their traffic directly, without any 
 intermediary. Then the character of the correspondence 
 changed. We cannot but suspect that the lover must have 
 been something of a prig. He who began his wooing by 
 means of Quintus Curtius soon found out that though he was 
 in love he did not approve of himself for it ; nor did he at 
 all approve of her, the cause of his unsuitable passion. He 
 loved her because he could not help it; against his wilL 
 His taste and his heart might be satisfied, but the same could 
 not be said for his judgment. His letters are (again) like 
 those of the superior hero of a novel, bound to the frivolous, 
 flighty, beautiful creature whom he doubts and disapproves 
 of, but cannot tear himself away from. Nor was this all. 
 When he had at last screwed his courage to the point of a 
 
THE WOMAN OF FASHION. 135 
 
 proposal, other obstacles came in the way. Mr Wortley was 
 a theorist, a doctrinaire, a man of opinions. He was opposed, 
 like the 'Spectator' and 'Tatler,' to the laws of entail. Indeed, 
 his historian insinuates that on this point it must have been 
 he who inspired Steele and Addison, neither of these worthies 
 having anything to entail — a true piece of characteristic con- 
 tempt for the mere professional writer, worthy of a person of 
 quality. But Lord Dorchester did not appreciate Mr Wort- 
 ley's fine sentiments. When every argument had failed to 
 convince the philosophical lover, the treaty came to an end, 
 and poor Lady Mary, the only one of the parties concerned 
 in whom the reader feels any interest, was peremptorily con- 
 demned, after all the pretty preliminaries of her quaint court- 
 ship, to forget her doctrinaire and accept another suitor. The 
 girl resisted, but in vain. She begged to be but left alone 
 — to be allowed to give up both wooers, and remain in her 
 father's house — but without success. The few letters to her 
 friends which are preserved belonging to this period of her 
 life are not more refined than the age ; but her conduct at 
 this crisis is decidedly more refined and delicate than was to 
 be expected in the beginning of the eighteenth century. It 
 is true she kept up a private correspondence with the philo- 
 sophical Wortley, and finally ran away with him ; but her 
 letters are free from every taint of coarseness, and full of 
 modest and womanly sentiment, scarcely to be looked for in 
 the circumstances. 
 
 A more curious correspondence between lovers was never 
 given to the world. On his side there is no doubt a certain 
 glow of restrained passion kept in curb by an almost dis- 
 like, a sense of superiority and unsuitability, which becomes 
 comical in its seriousness. On hers there is no passion. 
 She is grateful for the love by which she has been distin- 
 guished from a man whom, in her girlish humility, she is 
 ready to take at his own estimate, and consider as superior 
 as he believes himself to be. No doubt Quintus Curtius and 
 the classics, and the flattering sense that it was her own 
 superiority to most women which had determined his choice 
 of her, had dazzled the young creature. She is affectionate, 
 and humble in her affection ; puzzled, but anxious to do 
 what will please him, if only he will be candid, and let her 
 know what he is aiming at. It is a virgin soul which 
 
136 THE WOMAN OF FASHION. 
 
 speaks, unmoved by any fiery inspiration of love, tenderly 
 unimpassioned, willing to be his wife, most unwilling to be 
 the wife of another man. Perhaps this calm but anxious 
 condition of mind might be disappointing to a fervent lover 
 — but it is a pretty attitude for the young soul, and one 
 which charms the spectator. Mary Pierrepont looks a very 
 different creature from Mary Wortley Montagu. She is 
 standing on the brink of the transition when the following 
 letters pass between her and her lover. The first which we 
 shall quote refers apparently to his first proposal : — 
 
 " Give me leave to say it (I know it sounds vain)," writes the spirited 
 and sensible girl, with a mingling of indignation in her candour, *' I know 
 how to make a man of sense happy ; but then that man must resolve to 
 contribute something towards it himself. I have so much esteem for you, 
 I should be very sorry to hear that you were unhappy, but for the world 
 I would not be the instrument of making you so ; which, in the humour 
 you are, is hardly to be avoided, if I am your wife. You distrust me — I 
 can neither be easy nor loved when I am distrusted, Nor do I believe 
 your passion for me is what you pretend it — at least I am sure, were I in 
 love, I could not talk as you do. Few women would have wrote so plain 
 as I have done, but to dissemble is among the things I never do. I take 
 more pains to approve my conduct to myself than to the world, and 
 would not have to accuse myself of a minute's deceit. 1 wish I loved you 
 enough to devote myself to be for ever miserable for the pleasure of a day 
 or two's happiness. I cannot resolve upon it. You must think other- 
 wise of me, or not at all. I don't enjoin you to burn this letter — I 
 know you will. 'Tis the first I ever wrote to one of your sex, and shall 
 be the last. You may never expect another. I resolve against all cor- 
 respondence of the kind — my resolutions are seldom made, and never 
 broken " 
 
 Notwithstanding this very determined conclusion, the 
 same day, or perhaps the next morning, throws new lights 
 on the lover's letter which had drawn from her this spirited 
 reply ; and, forgetting her resolve. Lady Mary puts pen to 
 paper once more, to repeat and strengthen, in a womanish 
 way which has not yet gone out of fashion, the answer which 
 she had already given, and which was decisive enough. 
 
 " Eeading over your letter as fast as ever I could," she recommences 
 abraptly, '* and answering it with the same ridiculous precipitation, I 
 find one part of it escaped ray sight, and the other I mistook in several 
 places. . . . Your letter is to tell me you should think yourself un- 
 done if you married me ; but if I could be so tender as to confess I should 
 
THE WOMAN OF FASHION. 137 
 
 break my heart if you did not, then you would consider whether you 
 would or no ; but yet you hoped you should not. I take this to be the 
 
 right interpretation of 'even your kindness can't destroy me of a 
 
 sudden. I hope I am not in your power. I would give a good deal to 
 be satisfied, &c.' . . . You would have me say that I am violently 
 in love ; that is, finding you think better of me than you desire, you 
 would have me give you a just cause to contemn me. I doubt much 
 whether there is a creature in the world humble enough to do that. I 
 should not think you more unreasonable if you were in love with my face, 
 and asked me to disfigure it to make you easy. I have heard of some 
 nuns who made use of this expedient to secure their own happiness ; 
 but amongst all the Popish saints and martyrs I never read of one whose 
 charity was sublime enough to make themselves deformed or ridiculous 
 to restore their lovers to peace and quietness. " 
 
 Perhaps the young man who received these letters was 
 wise enough to see that the smart of wounded pride in them 
 was too sharp to be compatible with absolute indifference ; 
 at least he seems to have taken them as no decisive answer, 
 and to have pursued his suit in a way which clearly points 
 him out as the original type of many gentlemen who have 
 since enlightened and entertained the world, from Mr 
 Eochester and Felix Holt down to the detestable prigs of 
 American fiction — gentlemen who carry on their wooing by 
 a series of insults and lectures. Mary Pierrepont was not 
 a meek heroine, but still she seems to have yielded in some 
 degree to the tantalising power of this strange kind of 
 wooing. She struggles, she resists, she breaks out into 
 little appeals ; she restates her case, sometimes indignantly, 
 sometimes half tenderly, and bids him farewell over and 
 and over again. But perhaps the lady doth protest too 
 much. It is evident that she had no desire to terminate 
 the correspondence, which must have been an exciting 
 break to the dulness of the Thoresby parlour. ^' While I 
 foolishl}'- fancied you loved me," she cries — brought up to 
 this pitch, it is apparent, by much aggravation — *' there is 
 no condition of life I could not have been happy in with 
 you, so very much I like you — I might say loved, since it 
 is the last thing 111 ever say to you. This is telling you 
 sincerely my greatest weakness ; and now I will oblige you 
 with a new proof of generosity — I'll never see you more. I 
 shall avoid all public places, and this is the last letter I 
 shall send. If you write, be not displeased that I send it 
 
13S THE WOMAN OF FASHION. 
 
 back unopened. I shall force my inclinations to oblige 
 yours; and remember that you have told me I could not 
 oblige you more than by refusing you." The next page, 
 however, shows a change of sentiment. There is no longer 
 question of a last letter, an eternal separation ; on the con- 
 trary, she discusses calmly her own character and his mis- 
 taken estimate of it, and even goes into such a matter of 
 detail as the comparative excellences of life in the country 
 and life in town. " You think if you married me I should 
 be passionately fond of you one month, and of somebody 
 else the next," she says ; " but neither would happen. I 
 can esteem, I can be a friend, but I don't know whether I 
 can love. Expect all that is complaisant and easy, but 
 never what is fond in me. . . . When people are tied 
 for life," the young philosopher goes on discussing the dis- 
 advantages of retirement, which her lover seems to have 
 proposed, " 'tis their mutual interest not to grow weary of 
 one another. If I had all the personal charms I want, a 
 face is too slight a foundation for happiness. You would be 
 soon tired of seeing every day the same thing. When you 
 saw nothing else, jou would have leisure to remark all the 
 defects, which would increase in proportion as the novelty 
 lessened, which is always a great charm." 
 
 This composed state of mind, however, does not last long. 
 Next time she writes it is again with the determination of 
 saying farewell for ever. 
 
 "I begin to be tired of my humility," she exclaims. **I have carried 
 my complaisances to you farther than I ought. You make new scruples, 
 you have a great deal of fancy, and your distrusts, being all of your own 
 making, are more immovable than if there were some real ground for 
 them. Our aunts and grandmothers always tell us that men are a sort of 
 animals that, if ever they are constant, 'tis only when they are ill-used. 
 'Twas a kind of paradox I never could believe. Experience has taught 
 me the truth of it. You are the first I ever had a correspondence with, 
 and I thank God I have done with it for all my life. ... I have 
 not the spirits to dispute any longer with you. You say you are not 
 determined ; let me determine for you, and save ^you the trouble of 
 writing again. Adieu for ever ! Make no answer. I wish, among the 
 variety of your acquaintance, you may find some one to please you, and 
 can't help the vanity of thinking, should you try them all, you won't 
 find one that will be so sincere in their treatment, though a thousand 
 more deserving, and every one happier." 
 
THE WOMAN OF FASHION. 139 
 
 Then it is the lover who comes in, tantalising and tanta- 
 lised : — 
 
 " Every time I see you," writes Mr Wortley, on his side, " gives me a 
 fresh proof of your not caring for me ; yet I beg you will meet me once 
 more. How could you pay me that great compliment of loving the 
 country for life, when you would not stay with me a few minutes longer ? 
 Who is the happy man you went to ? I agree with you, 1 am often so 
 dull I cannot explain my meaning, but will not own the expression was 
 so very obscure when I said if I had you I should act against my opinion. 
 Why need I add, I see what is best for me ? I contemn what I do, and 
 yet I fear I must do it. If you can't find it out that you are going to be 
 unhappy, ask your sister, who agrees with j'ou in everything else, and 
 she will convince you of your rashness in this. She knows you don't 
 care for me, and that you will like me less and less every year, perhaps 
 every day of your life. You may with a little care please another as 
 well, and make him less timorous. It is possible I too may please some 
 of those that have but little acquaintance ; and if I should be preferred 
 by a woman for being the first among her companions, it would give me 
 as much pleasure as if I were the first man in the world. Think again, 
 and prevent a misfortune from falling upon both of us." 
 
 This letter concludes with instructions how they are to 
 meet in the house of Steele by aid of his wife. And so the 
 duel goes on. It is like the scene in Moliere, which he 
 repeats in several of his comedies, between offended lovers. 
 No doubt the great dramatist repeated it because the quarrel 
 of the two, their fury, their eternal farewell, their stolen 
 looks, their relenting, and the sudden leap into each other's 
 grasp of their eager reluctant hands, was such a piece of 
 pretty fooling as no audience could resist. And here, in 
 real English flesh and blood, in laced coat and quilted petti- 
 coat, in peruke and powder, stands Dori and Dorimene, 
 performing their charming interlude. By-and-by matters 
 become more serious. The formal negotiations are broken 
 off, and there is the other lover, who offers £500 a-year of 
 pin-money and a house in town, and on whose behalf Lord 
 Dorchester lays out £400 in wedding-clothes. Things come 
 to such a pitch at last that there is nothing for it but " a 
 coach to be at the door early Monday morning," and an 
 entire surrender into the hands of the honourable if aggra- 
 vating bridegroom. " I tremble for what we are doing," 
 the girl writes, in a fright, on the evening of the Friday 
 before this momentous day. " Are you sure you shall 
 
140 THE WOMAN OF FASHION. 
 
 love me for ever ? Shall we never separate ? I fear and I 
 hope — I foresee all that will happen. I shall incense my 
 family in the highest degree. The generality of the world 
 
 will blame my conduct, and the relations and friends of 
 
 will invent a thousand stories of me ; yet 'tis possible you 
 may recompense everything to me. In this letter, which I 
 am fond of, you promise me all I wish. Since I writ so far 
 I received your Friday letter. I will be only yours, and I 
 will do what you please." 
 
 And accordingly " early Monday morning " they ran 
 away. 
 
 It is the pleasant privilege of fiction to end here. In 
 such a case where could there be found a more charming, 
 graceful story? People who had spoken their minds so 
 freely to each other before their marriage, whose love had 
 been tried by so many frets, and one of whom at last con- 
 cluded the matter in such beautiful dispositions, what could 
 they do but live happy ever after? " I will be only yours, 
 and I will do what you please." What prettier ending 
 could close the youthful tender tale ? Alas ! the story of 
 this Lady Mary did not end with these words, but only 
 began. 
 
 There is something humbling and disappointing in drop- 
 ping down to the calm level of ordinary life, after that 
 moment of exalted sentiment and idealism. The happiest 
 and the least pretentious marriage shares this revulsion 
 with the most showy and the most unfortunate. After that 
 strain of passionate feeling, that sense of new life beginning, 
 those noble resolutions and beautiful dreams, to wake and 
 find after all that the obstinate earth is still the same, that 
 the still more obstinate self is unchanged, and that life falls 
 back into its accustomed channel, taking incredibly little 
 heed of that one alteration of circumstances which, before it 
 was made, seemed so radical and overwhelming, is hard 
 upon any susceptible imagination. Neither bride nor bride- 
 groom in the case before us seems to have entertained any 
 high-flown expectations ; but yet it is not very long before 
 Lady Mary begins to feel that a careless husband is a much 
 less piquant and amusing interlocutor than a disapproving 
 lover. It is evident that she spent a great part of the first 
 few years of her married life alone. She writes to the errant 
 
THE WOMAN OF FASHION. 141 
 
 husband, at first with pleasant expressions of her happiness, 
 but afterwards with alternations of petulance and melan- 
 choly, and repentance for both. " I assist every day at 
 public prayers in this family," she says in what it is evident 
 is her first letter, a month or two after the marriage, when 
 her heart is soft with unaccustomed happiness, and moved, 
 in consequence, to a superficial religiousness, — " and never 
 forget in my private ejaculations how much I owe to heaven 
 for making me yours." 
 
 This blessed state of affairs, however, does not last very 
 long. Within the first year a pensive sense of loneliness 
 comes over the young wife ; she does not complain, but she 
 wonders at his absence and his silence ; now and then she 
 is sick and sad, and moralises. " Life itself, to make it sup- 
 portable, should not be considered too nearly," she says. 
 "It is a maxim with me to be young (the poor soul was 
 three-and-twenty !) as long as one can ; there is nothing 
 can pay one for that invaluable ignorance which is the com- 
 panion of youth ; those sanguine groundless hopes, and that 
 lively vanity which makes all the happiness of life. To my 
 extreme mortification, I grow wiser every day." A little 
 later she calls her fortitude to her, and is obstinately con- 
 tented. " I discovered an old trunk of papers," she writes 
 from the solitude of Hinchinbroke, " which to my great 
 diversion I found to be the letters of the first Earl of Sand- 
 wich. ... I walked yesterday two hours on the 
 terrace — these are the most considerable events that have 
 happened in your absence, excepting that a good-natured 
 robin-redbreast kept me company almost the whole afternoon 
 with so much good-humour and humanity as gives me faith 
 for the piece of charity ascribed to these little creatures in 
 the ' Children in the Wood.' " Some time after this she 
 becomes indignant : "I am alone, without any amusement 
 to take up my thoughts ; I am in circumstances in which 
 melancholy is apt to prevail even over all amusements, dis- 
 spirited and alone, and you write me quarrelling letters, 
 . . . Should I tell you that I am uneasy, that I am out of 
 humour and out of patience, should I see you half an hour 
 
 the sooner? " . . . and then the poor young creature 
 
 is penitent, and excuses herself for complaining. The 
 bright, beautiful, high-spirited young woman, removing from 
 
142 THE WOMAN OF FASHION. 
 
 one doleful country house to another, estranged from all her 
 natural friends, bearing all the physical ills natural in the 
 circumstances, consuming her heart in enforced solitude, 
 while the curmudgeon of a husband, the cause of all her 
 troubles, amuses himself in the great world, and writes her, 
 when he writes at all, " quarrelling letters," are set forth 
 before us with the greatest distinctness. Poor Lady Mary 
 had, apparently, no high religious or any other kind of 
 principle to support her. She was not a woman of the 
 noblest kind, nor is her character a model one in any way : 
 yet her courage, and spirit, and patience ; her eagerness to 
 make the best of everything ; the comfort she takes in the 
 kind robin and the old letters ; her endurance ; her fancies ; 
 her occasional little outbursts, make up a picture at once 
 pretty and affecting. Had she been less reasonable and 
 more passionate, the story of what was evidently an unsuit- 
 able and uncomfortable marriage would no doubt have been 
 more dramatic. But the age was one in which people were 
 very composed in their affections ; and she, it is apparent 
 from first to last, was an eminently unimpassioned woman. 
 But that she was chilled, wounded, mortified, lowered in her 
 own estimation, and cut short in all possible blossoming of 
 her affections, is clear enough. We wonder, if the story had 
 been traced after marriage of all our modern heroes whose 
 role it is to scold and find fault, like Mr Wortley, whether a 
 similar result might not be perceptible. The consequence 
 in this case to all readers will be a hearty pity and liking 
 for Lady Mary, and a wholesome contempt for the narrow 
 pedant whom, by bad luck, she had made the controller of 
 her heart and fate. 
 
 Matters had come to such a pass between the two who, 
 by a runaway marriage, had given what is generally sup- 
 posed the strongest evidence of love, within two years after, 
 that the young wife was moved to formal remonstrance. 
 
 *' I cannot forbear any longer telling you," she writes, " I think you 
 use me very unkindly. I don't say so much of your absence as I should 
 do if you was in the country and I in London, because I would not have 
 you believe that I am impatient to be in town when I say I am impatient 
 to be;^ith you ; but I am very sensible I parted with you in July, 
 and 'tis now the middle of November. As if this was not hardship 
 enough, you do not tell me you are sorry for it. You write seldom, and 
 
THE WOMAN OF FASHION. 143 
 
 with so much indifference as shows you hardly think of me at all. I 
 complain of iM-health, and you only say you hope it is not so bad as I 
 make it. You never inquire after your child. . . . You should 
 consider solitude, and spleen the consequence of solitude, is apt to give 
 the most melancholy ideas, and thus needs at least tender letters and kind 
 expressions to hinder uneasiness almost inseparable from absence. I am 
 very sensible how far I ought to be contented when your affairs oblige you 
 to be without me. I would not have you do yourself any prejudice, but 
 
 a little kindness will cost you nothing I have concealed as 
 
 long as I can the uneasiness the nothingness of your letters have given 
 me under an affected indifference ; but dissimulation always sits awk- 
 wardly upon me. I am weary of it, and must beg of you to write me no 
 more if you cannot bring yourself to write otherwise. Multiplicity of 
 business or diversions may have engaged you, but all people find time to 
 do what they have a mind to. If your inclination is gone, I had rather 
 never receive a letter from you than one which in lieu of comfort for your 
 absence gives me a pain even beyond it." 
 
 Notwitlistanding all this, no sooner does the political 
 horizon change, and an opening become visible for Wortley, 
 if he can avail himself of it, in public life, than his v^ife 
 springs eager to his side to encourage and stimulate him. 
 And very strange to be uttered by a young woman of four- 
 and-twenty, from the depths of rustic quiet, do her ex- 
 hortations sound. The period is just after the accession of 
 George I. — a new reign, a new era — when all the possibilities 
 of power and influence lay before any new man who had 
 force enough to seize them. Probably Lady Mary's faith in 
 her husband's superiority had begun to fail, and, in conse- 
 quence, she is great on the merits of boldness in opposition 
 to modesty, which she evidently tries to persuade herself is 
 all he wants to insure success. Here is the opening note of 
 the triimpet with which, in mingled flattery and menace, she 
 attempts to stir him up : — 
 
 " Though I am very impatient to see you, I would not have you, by 
 hastening to come down, lose any part of your interest. . . . I am 
 glad you think of serving your friends. I hope it will put you in mind 
 of serving yourself. I need not enlarge upon the advantages of mone}'^ — 
 everything we see and everything we hear puts us in remembrance of it. 
 If it were possible to restore liberty to your country, or limit the en- 
 croachments of the prerogative, by reducing yourself to a garret, I should 
 be pleased to share so glorious a poverty with you ; but as the world is 
 and will be, 'tis a sort of duty to be rich that it may be in one's power 
 to do good — riches being another word for power, towards the obtaining 
 
144 THE WOMAN OF FASHION. 
 
 of which the first necessary qualification is impudence, and (as Demos- 
 thenes said of pronunciation in oratory) the second is impudence, and 
 the third still impudence. No modest man ever did or ever will make 
 his fortune. Your friend Lord Halifax, R. "Walpole, and all other re- 
 markable instances of quick advancement, have been remarkably im- 
 pudent. The Ministry is like a play at Court : there's a little door to 
 get in, and a great crowd without, shoving and thrusting who shall be 
 foremost: people who knock others with their elbows, disregard a little 
 kick of the shins, and still thrust heartily forward, are sure of a good 
 place. Your modest man stands behind in the crowd, is shoved about 
 by everybody, his clothes torn, almost squeezed to death, and sees a 
 thousand get in before him that don't make so good a figure as himself, 
 I don't say it is impossible for an impudent man not to rise in the world ; 
 but a modest merit, with a large share of impudence, is more probable to 
 be advanced than the greatest qualifications without it. If this letter is 
 impertinent, it is founded upon an opinion of your merit, which, if it is 
 a mistake, I would not be undeceived. It is my interest to believe, as I 
 do, that you deserve everything, and are capable of everything ; but no- 
 body else will believe it if they see you get nothing." 
 
 Whether by means of the noble quality of impudence thus 
 strenuously recommended to him, or by his relationship to 
 Montagu Earl of Halifax, Mr Wortley got into office, and was 
 for some time a Lord of the Treasury ; the principal use of his 
 advancement, so far as the public was concerned, being, that 
 his sprightly and beautiful wife could no longer be kept in 
 banishment. Lady Louisa Stuart informs us that Lady Mary 
 became a favourite in both of the royal households. The 
 Prince of Wales is said to have " admired her rather more 
 than the Princess, though not usually jealous, could approve. 
 Once in a rapture he called her Eoyal Highness from the 
 card-table to look how becomingly Lady Mary was dressed. 
 ' Lady Mary always dresses well,' said the Princess dryly, 
 and returned to her cards." This anecdote, which is taken 
 from the diary destroyed by Lady Bute, Lady Mary's only 
 daughter, does not look particularly true; for, if we may 
 credit other descriptions of her, and her own expression of 
 her tastes not many years before, dress was never her forte, 
 nor is she mentioned in any other description of the Prin- 
 cess's Court. The other old Court at St James's, where 
 King George the First with dulness and the Duchess of 
 Kendal presided over the tedious circle, was enlivened by 
 the triumphant young beauty. She was so popular there, 
 
THE WOMAN OF FASHION. 145 
 
 that Secretary Craggs, meeting her on her way out, and hear- 
 ing that her early departure was much regretted by his Majesty, 
 loyally snatched her up in his arms and carried her back again 
 to the royal presence, that his master might have his will. 
 
 After two years of this gay life, Mr Wortley was appointed 
 ambassador to Constantinople, a mission upon which his wife 
 with her baby — the precious only son of whom in his in- 
 fancy she writes with so much tenderness, and who in his 
 manhood brought her both shame and grief — accompanied 
 him. She seems to have accepted this splendid banishment 
 with the liveliest satisfaction and excitement. Change, ad- 
 venture, movement, new things to see and hear and find out 
 — everything her brilliant and curious intelligence required — 
 were thus supplied to her; and there never had been so 
 clear a picture of the mysterious East as that which the gay 
 young English ambassadress sent thereafter in long letters 
 sparkling with wit and observation and real insight to all 
 her English friends. She found, as other travellers have 
 found since, that no previous authority was in the least re- 
 liable, and that all the ordinary common-places of Western 
 belief about the Orientals were at once false and foolish. 
 In the warmth of her enthusiasm for the new world which 
 she must have felt she had discovered, she set forth the 
 favourable side of all its institutions — found its women the 
 freest of the free, notwithstanding their supposed slavery; 
 its men the most faithful, its religion the most pure, and its 
 scenery the most lovely. Perhaps her own freedom in the 
 intoxicating novelty of the new position had something to 
 do with it. Her child throve notwithstanding the terrible 
 journey across the Hungarian wilds — her husband probably 
 was occupied, and did not oppress her with his company. 
 She adopted the dress of the country, and, light-hearted as 
 a child in " my ferigee and asmdsk," she says, " I ramble 
 every day about Constantinople and amuse myself with see- 
 ing all that is curious in it/' To the bazaars, the baths, 
 the mosques, everywhere where a veiled woman could pene- 
 trate, or an ambassadress command entrance, the sprightly 
 observer roves. And she sees everything through rose- 
 coloured spectacles. Her letters glow with descriptions of 
 the beauty of the women, given with a freedom which only 
 a woman could use (and be it said by the way, there are no 
 
 K 
 
146 THE WOMAN OF FASHION. 
 
 such admirers as women of beauty in the abstract, whether 
 the current sneer about their jealousy of individual instances 
 be worth more than other popular fictions or no), their po- 
 lished skins, their dazzling jewels, their glorious hair, their 
 tissues of gold and silver. Nothing escapes those bright 
 eyes which already more than one poet had sung. One 
 moment it is an embroidered napkin, at another a long Latin 
 inscription which attracts her notice and fills her letter. 
 From the presence-chamber of the lovely Sultana Fatima, 
 she flies by a natural transition to Turkish poetry and the 
 romance of the Kose and Nightingale, and from thence to St 
 Sophia and to the monastery of the dervishes with its weird 
 worship. She makes merry over the extraordinary com- 
 missions sent to her — as, for instance, that of purchasing a 
 Greek slave, which Pope playfully and by way of flattery, 
 but one good woman among her correspondents gravely and 
 in good faith, requests her to do — and laughingly describes 
 the terrible consequences to her own beautiful face of a cer- 
 tain balm, of which the English ladies had heard as an unfail- 
 ing cosmetic. She tells how, at the bath, being requested to 
 undress like the others, she silenced all cavillers by show- 
 ing her stays, which they immediately concluded to be a 
 machine holding her fast, of which her husband kept the 
 key, and considered a very natural and reasonable arrange- 
 ment. She describes her long theological conversations 
 with a certain Eff'endi, in whose house she and her husband 
 were lodged, and his amiable intellectual scepticism. She 
 has information for each of her correspondents — the poem 
 for Pope, the Sultanas for her sister, the religious discus- 
 sions for her abbe — who must have been a most tolerant 
 Catholic. She is even so good-natured as to describe a 
 camel to some good rural gentlewoman. Altogether, there 
 never was a more spontaneous, sprightly, and picturesque 
 narrative of travel than this, which the light-hearted young 
 woman with bright English eyes, which noted everything 
 under her flowing Eastern veil, despatched to the little knot 
 of men and women who followed her wanderings with the 
 interest of friends. The country was all new and strange, 
 the observer all life, vivacity, and intelligence. Under such 
 conditions, the most uninteresting land grows curious and 
 full of wealth. 
 
THE WOMAN OF FASHION. 147 
 
 Among the letters which contain these sparkling sketches 
 appear certain epistles from Pope — strange preliminaries to 
 the deadly war of words which afterwards raged between 
 the two. They must have made acquaintance in the short 
 interval of town life which Lady Mary passed in London 
 before her husband became ambassador. We will not here 
 discuss the poet's style in letter-writing; but it is curious 
 to contrast these elaborate compositions with the pleasant 
 freedom of the answers to them, and of the general cor- 
 respondence in which they are enclosed. There is an arti- 
 ficial solemnity in the adoration with which Pope approaches 
 the lady of his dreams, which already shadows forth the 
 half-authenticated scene in the Twickenham garden, where 
 the unhappy little man spoke out his passion, and the bril- 
 liant beauty was surprised into a peal of laughter — laughter 
 never to be forgiven. But the comparison is not in favour 
 of the maa of genius; the woman's letters are incomparably 
 fresher, brighter, more natural and easy than his. She puts his 
 stilted rhapsodies aside with an unconsciousness which doubt- 
 less was in some degree assumed, and does her best to tone 
 down his extravagance with a serene friendliness which is 
 full of charm. There is all the difference between them that 
 there is between a manufactured article and a spontaneous 
 natural production. Lady Mary, no doubt, like all the 
 letter-writers of her period, preserved and cherished her 
 letters as things interesting to the w^orld in general; but 
 there is no sense of this fact underlying their graceful strain. 
 The first and immediate purpose of telling her story happily 
 shuts out from her eyes the cold shade of posterity listening 
 in the background. They are not the effusions of an author 
 to the world, but the spontaneous communications — what- 
 ever may happen to them afterwards — of a woman to her 
 friends. 
 
 Let us quote, in passing, her description of the French 
 ladies whom, fresh from the polished limbs and majestic 
 bearing of her Turkish friends, she sees in Paris on her way 
 home. It is an amusing contribution to the history of 
 Fashion, and shows against what perpetual ingratitude from 
 a disdainful world the disciples of that goddess, especially 
 in Paris, her metropolis, have long and bravely struggled. 
 
 "I must tell you something of the French ladies," she writes. "I 
 
148 THE WOMAN OF FASHION. 
 
 have seen all tlie beauties, . . . such nauseous creatures ! so fan- 
 tastically absurd in their dress ! so monstrously unnatural in their paints ! 
 their hair cut short and curled round their faces, and so loaded with 
 powder that it makes it look like white wool ! and on their cheeks to 
 their chins, unmercifully laid on a shining red japan, that glistens in a 
 most flaming manner, so that they seem to have no resemblance to human 
 faces. . . . 'Tis with pleasure I recollect my dear pretty country- 
 women ; if I was writing to anybody else, I should say that these gro- 
 tesque daubers give me still a higher esteem of the natural charms of 
 dear Lady Kich's auburn hair, and the lively colours of her unsullied 
 complexion." 
 
 Mr Wortley's embassy lasted not much more than a year; 
 and within two years his family, increased by a daughter, 
 afterwards Lady Bute, who had been born in Constantinople, 
 was again in England. But during that short time Lady 
 Mary had managed not only to collect all the curious infor- 
 mation embodied in her letters, and to learn — enough, at 
 least, to enable her to translate — the Turkish language, but 
 had acquired knowledge of a more serious kind, which only 
 a woman of high courage and spirit, rising almost to the 
 height of heroism, would have had the boldness to act upon. 
 She found the system of inoculation for smallpox to be in 
 universal practice around her, and, emboldened by the fact 
 that she had already passed through that dreadful disease 
 (with the loss of her eyelashes, which, it is said, made her 
 brilliant eyes look fierce), Lady Mary, with enlightened 
 curiosity, examined into it. She describes it thus to one 
 of her correspondents : — 
 
 " Apropos of distempers, I am going to tell you a thing that will make 
 you wish yourself here. The smallpox, so fatal and so general among 
 us, is here entirely harmless, by the invention of ingrafting, which is the 
 term they give it. There is a set of old women who make it their busi- 
 ness to perform the operation every autumn, in the month of September, 
 when the great heat is abated. People send to one another to know if 
 any of their family has a mind to have the smallpox : they make parties 
 for this purpose, and when they are met, commonly fifteen or sixteen 
 together, the old woman comes with a nutshell full of the matter of the 
 best sort of smallpoxes, and asks what vein you please to have opened, 
 . . . The children or young patients play together all the rest of the 
 day, and are in perfect health to the eighth. Then the fever begins to 
 seize them, and they keep their beds two days, very seldom three. They 
 have very rarely above twenty or thirty in their faces, which never mark ; 
 and in eight days they are as well as before their illness. . . . Every 
 
THE WOMAN OF FASHION. 149 
 
 year thousands undergo this operation; and the French amhassador says 
 pleasantly that they take the smallpox here by way of diversion, as they 
 take the waters in other countries. There is no example of any one that 
 has died in it; and you may believe I am well satisfied of the safety of 
 this experiment since I intend to try it on my dear little son. I am 
 patriot enough to take pains to bring this useful invention into fashion in 
 England." 
 
 This information was acquired, and the resolution formed, 
 very shortly after Lady Mary's arrival in Turkey. With 
 heroic courage she tested it upon her boy, who came through 
 the trial successfully; and when the Turkish ambassador's 
 pretty wife came back to England, it was not as a mere wit 
 and beauty, strong as were her claims to both distinctions, 
 but with a " mission '' such as few young women of fashion 
 would have had the courage to take up. She had already 
 declared her total want of confidence in doctors, and cer- 
 tainty that " that distemper is too beneficial to them not to 
 expose to all their resentment the hardy wight that should 
 attempt to put an end to it." Inoculation has been so en- 
 tirely superseded that a critic of the present day, unless 
 possessed of special medical knowledge, does not even know 
 the extent of its use, or what amount of good it did. But 
 there can be no doubt about the disinterested regard for her 
 fellow-creatures, and dauntless spirit which inspired this 
 young mother, and kept her up in the struggle which her 
 granddaughter describes as follows : — 
 
 " "What an arduous, what a fearful, and, we may add, what a thankless 
 enterprise it was, nobody is now in the least aware. Those who have 
 heard her applauded for it ever since they were born, and have also seen 
 how joyfully vaccination was welcomed in their own days, may naturally 
 conclude that, when once the experiment had been made and proved 
 successful, she would have nothing to do but to sit down triumphant, and 
 receive the thanks and blessings of her countrymen. . . . Lady 
 Mary protested that, in the four or five years immediately succeeding 
 her arrival at home, she seldom passed a day without repenting of her 
 patriotic undertaking ; and she vowed that she would never have attempted 
 it if she had foreseen the vexation, the persecution, and even the obloquy, 
 it brought upon her. The clamours raised against the practice, and 
 of course against her, were beyond belief. The faculty all rose in amis to 
 a man, foretelling failure and the most disastrous consequences ; the 
 clergy descanted from their pulpits on the impiety of thus seeking to 
 take events out of the hand of Providence ; the common people were 
 
]50 THE WOMAN OF FASHION. 
 
 tauglit to hoot at lier as an unnatural mother who had risked the lives of 
 her own children. And notwithstanding that she soon gained many- 
 supporters amongst the higher and more enlightened classes, headed by 
 the Princess of Wales (Queen Caroline), Avho stood by her firmly, some 
 even of her acquaintance were weak enough to join in the outcry. We now 
 read in grave medical biography that the discovery was instantly hailed, 
 and the method adopted by the principal members of that profession. 
 . . . But what said Lady Mary of the actual fact and time ? Why, 
 that the four great physicians deputed by Government to watch the pro- 
 gress of her daughter's inoculation, betrayed not only such incredulity 
 as to its success, but such an unwillingness to have it succeed, such an 
 evident spirit of rancour and malignit}^, that she never cared to leave the 
 child alone with them one second lest it should in some secret way suffer 
 from their interference. Lady Bute herself could partly conlirm her 
 mother's account by her own testimony, for afterwards the battle was 
 often fought in her presence. As inoculation gained ground, all who 
 could make or claim the slightest acquaintance with Lady Mary Wortle}'' 
 used to beg for her advice and superintendence while it was going on in 
 their families ; and she constantly carried her little daughter along with 
 her to the house, and into the sick-room, to prove her security from 
 infection." 
 
 Women are getting such very hard measure in these days, 
 that a little incident like this is worth recording in favour 
 of the maligned section of humanity. Bad as they may be 
 to-day, they are not so bad as they were in that unclean age. 
 Yet this very striking instance of enlightened observation 
 and the highest public spirit is entirely to be attributed to 
 those mothers whose education, according to the common 
 theory, made them unfit to be their husbands' companions 
 or the instructors of their children. Fancy Mr Wortley 
 taking any trouble to introduce a custom which only saved 
 other people's lives and did himself no immediate advantage ! 
 or little George, the second of that blessed name, standing 
 by him in his undertaking ! Lady Mary did it, having at 
 once the eye to see, and the heart to dare ; and princely 
 Caroline stood by her, with the same breadth of perception, 
 and steady valour of soul. It is not to be expected that any 
 such fact, however picturesque, should for a moment stand 
 before the force of theory, but still the story is remarkable 
 in its way. 
 
 Lady Mary remained in England after her return from 
 Constantinople for twenty-one years, during which, no doubt, 
 the most important events of her life took place, though they 
 
THE WOMAN OF FASHION. 161 
 
 are not those in which we know her best. She was at home, 
 and consequently, except to her sister, the wife of the 
 banished Earl of Mar, she wrote but few letters. Whatever 
 cause there might be for the clouds that have rested on her 
 good name arose during this period. She quarrelled with 
 Pope, and was assailed by him with a pitiless spite and 
 venom which goes far to defeat itself; she lived and shone 
 in London, and enjoyed the social life and triumphs for 
 which her wit and talent so well qualified her, and doubt- 
 less did some equivocal things which her biographer is not 
 sorry to have no very distinct particulars of. The quarrel 
 with Pope is, like other incidents of this part of her life, left 
 in much uncertainty. What is quite clear is, that he wrote 
 to her while she was in Turkey frequent letters full of 
 fantastical and elaborate adulation, just warmed with a 
 flicker of real feeling — that he entreated her on his knees, 
 metaphorically speaking, to go to Twickenham, where, ap- 
 parently in consequence of his ai'guments, and to recruit the 
 travellers after their journey, Mr Wortley took a house. 
 Some time after, the poet, without a word of explanation 
 given, turns from his worship to downright blasphemy, and 
 assaults with every expression of rage and contempt the 
 " Sappho " whom he had heretofore adored. It is true that 
 it was on no meek and silent sufferer that his insults were 
 poured. Lady Mary was quite able to defend herself, and 
 meets him at his own weapons with scorn that equals his, if 
 not with equal powers. But the description she gives of 
 the quarrel is the only one in which there is any vraisem- 
 hlance. At an unlucky moment, her granddaughter tells us, 
 " when she least expected what romancers call a declaration, 
 he made such passionate love to her, as, in spite of her 
 utmost endeavours to be angry and look grave, provoked an 
 immoderate fit of laughter." It is easy to believe that the 
 ridicule of the fair creature by his side was more bitter to 
 the unhappy little poet than any other punishment could 
 have been. If his heart was really interested, as might very 
 well be from the tone of his letters, what a frightful morti- 
 fication must have fallen upon him in that burst of laughter ! 
 It was enough to turn the milk into gall, the love into 
 hatred. " From that moment he became her implacable 
 enemy," adds the story ; and but that Pope has fallen a little 
 
152 THE WOMAN OF FASHION. 
 
 out of the knowledge of this generation, it would be unne- 
 cessary to recall the remorseless lines in which the en- 
 chantress is handed down to the justice of posterity. Our 
 space forbids us to enter here into one of the bitterest of 
 literary feuds. Lady Mary, as we have said, was no harm- 
 less sufferer ; she turned upon her assailant, if it is true that 
 she had a hand in the verses to the Imitator of Horace, with 
 virulence at least equal to his own ; and even if guiltless in 
 this respect, spoke of him with a contempt which, like his 
 bitterness, overshot its mark. If Lady Mary ever were 
 vulgar, it would be in the passage in a letter to Arbuthnot, 
 where she suggests that, if Pope is " skilled in counter- 
 feiting hands," he will not only gratify his malice but 
 increase his fortune by these means, and so she hopes she 
 will see him exalted according to his merits. But it is hard 
 to be just, or even generous, in a quarrel of this description, 
 and there is nothing to prove that at the beginning of it 
 Lady Mary was to blame. 
 
 Her entire life worked itself out in these twenty years — 
 the time of her maturity, her highest bloom of beauty, and 
 full force of intellect. Her children, whom she brought back 
 to England infants, grew up, the one to a disreputable and 
 wretched manhood, the other to the life of a fortunate mat- 
 ron and good mother. She had all she had hoped for in the 
 dreary moments of her seclusion, or so at least it would ap- 
 pear. Her letters to her sister afford us, for some time, vari- 
 ous glimpses of her satisfaction with her actual circumstances. 
 " I see everybody, but converse with nobody but des amies 
 choisies" she says, when she had been for six or seven years 
 established in England, and had arrived al mezzo del cammin 
 di nostra vita. " I see the whole town every Sunday, and 
 select a few that I retain to supper ; in short, if life could 
 be always what it is, I believe I have so much humility in 
 my temper that I could be contented without anything better, 
 this two or three hundred years." ..." I write to you at 
 this time piping hot from the birth-night," she says again, 
 " my brain warmed with all the agreeable ideas that fine 
 clothes, fine gentlemen, brisk tunes, and lively dances can 
 raise there. . . . First you must know that I led up the ball, 
 which you'll stare at ; but, what is more, I believe in my 
 conscience I made one of the best figures there ; to say 
 
THE WOMAN OF FASHION. 153 
 
 truth, people are grown so extravagantly ugly, tliat we old 
 beauties are forced to come out on show-days to keep the 
 Court in countenance." It was the kind of life she had 
 longed for, when it had seemed unattainable ; and so long 
 as her children were babies, it was a pleasant life : a fact 
 which she acknowledges with characteristic frankness, 
 though the acknowledgment is one which, even in the 
 most favourable circumstances, few people care to make. 
 But Lady Mary's satisfaction with her existence does not 
 seem to have lasted longer than that brief lull from anxiety, 
 the moment when her children were young. Probably she 
 had fallen into relations with her husband such as are un- 
 fortunately common enough in all ages ; had given up any 
 expectation of support or tenderness from him, and trans- 
 ferred her hopes, as so many women do, almost without 
 knowing it, to the children, in whom her existence had 
 begun afresh. To Lady Mary, as to so many another 
 mother, this expectation too, the last and most precious, 
 failed like the others. As the years go on, it is in this 
 changed cadence that her thoughts find utterance — a strain 
 still fuU of courage and unconquerable spirit, but to which 
 its very tone of determined optimism gives an expression 
 more sad than absolute complaint : — 
 
 "All these things, and five hundred more, convince me (as I have the 
 most profound veneration for the Author of Nature) that we are here in 
 an actual state of punishment : I am satisfied I have been one of the con- 
 demned ever since I was born ; and, in submission to the divine justice, I 
 don't at all doubt that I deserved it in some former state. I will still 
 hope that I am only in purgatory ; and that, after Avhining and granting 
 a certain number of years, I shall be translated to some more happy 
 sphere, where virtue will be natural and custom reasonable. I grow very 
 devout, as you see, and place all my hopes in the next life, being totally 
 persuaded of the nothing of this. Don't you remember how miserable 
 we were in the little parlour at Thoresby ? "VVe then thought marrying 
 would put us at once into possession of all we wanted. . . . Though, 
 after all, I am still of opinion that it is extremely silly to submit to ill 
 fortune. One should pluck up a spirit and live upon cordials, when one 
 can have no other nourishment. These are my present endeavours ; and 
 I run about, though I have five thousand pins and needles running into 
 my heart. I try to console myself with a small damsel who is at present 
 everything I like ; but, alas ! she is yet in a white frock. At fourteen 
 she may run away with the butler: — there's one of the blessed con- 
 
]54 THE WOMAN OF FASHION. 
 
 sequences of great disappointments : you are not only hurt by the thing 
 present, but it cuts off all future hopes, and makes your very expecta- 
 tions melancholy. Quelle ■vie/" "My girl gives me great prospect of 
 satisfaction," she writes a little later ; "but my young rogue of a son is 
 the most ungovernable little rake that ever played truant." And again, 
 "I am vexed to the blood by my young rogue of a son, who has con- 
 trived, at his age, to make himself the talk of the whole nation. He is 
 gone knight-erranting, God knows where ; and hitherto it is impossible 
 to iind him. Nothing that ever happened to me has troubled me so 
 much " 
 
 Thus after lier moment of repose, after the disappoint- 
 ments of youth had come to be buried out of sight, and life, 
 no longer craving for actual happiness, had grown contented 
 with the reflection of it — the round of occupation, the chosen 
 friends, the little damsel in her white frock — fate awakes, 
 and the grand tumult recommences. Joy not being possible, 
 the woman had contented herself with peace ; but such an 
 escape was not to be. The course of pain begins over 
 again, the lull is over, the storms rise ; the " young rogue," 
 by steps that no doubt rang heavier, and ever heavier, upon 
 his mother's heart, sank into a ruined and despicable man, 
 about whose unworthiness even love could not deceive 
 itself; the little maiden grew up and married, and went 
 away. The loneliness which had been too much for her iti 
 early days, when it was her husband who forsook her, fell 
 back in full force upon the woman who had now no new life 
 to hope for. She did what it was like her high spirit to do. 
 She fled from it all, with or without the hope that her hus- 
 band would join her. Like enough, the houses in which 
 abode the ghosts of that child in white, and of that ruined 
 boy, were intolerable to a mind which never could sink into 
 the pathos of desertion. It was her nature to throw off the 
 burden, so far as mortal powers could shake it off. The 
 impatience of a temperament to which monotony was insup- 
 portable, drove lier to seek remedies, if not of one kind, then 
 of another. She could not have her children back, nor re- 
 model her life. But she could rush away to the ends of the 
 earth, with a desperate tranquillity, which nobody guessed 
 at, and with a faith in her own power of being amused and 
 interested, her own unquenchable vitality, which is pathetic 
 in its utter abstinence from all appeals to our sympathy. 
 
THE WOMAN OF FASHION. 155 
 
 She knew that her eyes could not refuse to see, nor her 
 faculties to note, nor her thoughts, which were ever young, 
 to rush into new channels, however heavy the heart might 
 be. And thus, at an age when tame natures think them- 
 selves beyond all novelties of movement, and take refuge in 
 chimney-corners. Lady Mary, incapable of such consolation, 
 arose and fled into new scenes, as many an imprisoned soul 
 at this very day — unable to die, incapable of vegetation, 
 compelled by God's will, and a vitality stronger than all 
 griefs and troubles, to live in the fullest sense of tlie word — 
 would be but too glad to do. A woman more bound by the 
 real or imaginary bond of duty, more limited by conventional 
 claims and regard for the world's opinion, would no doubt 
 have stayed at home and devoured her heart in silence ; but 
 Lady Mary did not care for the world's opinion. Her char- 
 acter for eccentricity, her self-will and independent habits, 
 must all have helped in her decision. When her daughter 
 was married, and her son hopeless, and her life unsupport- 
 able, the daring woman at fifty went off alone into new 
 scenes. To such a mind and temperament as hers, it was 
 the natural thing to do. 
 
 And no doubt the unsympathetic, respectable critic wonders 
 much how she could have left the everyday life, which was 
 so tempting, and Mr Wortley's sweet society — why she 
 could not have taken to knotting, and to gossip, and lived 
 as other people did — for what reason she could not bear 
 the son's shame and the daughter's absence as other people 
 have to do? And the painstaking literary observer, with 
 this problem before him, roots out gravely from the ashes of 
 the past, a M. Ruremonde, a rash French speculator, and 
 disappointed lover, who gave her his money to invest in 
 South Sea stock, and raved at her when it was lost Perhaps 
 this was the reason why she left England for two-and-twenty 
 years ; perhaps the high-minded Wortley sent his wife away. 
 " Causes for this separation have been rumoured, of a nature 
 which, of course, never could have reached her granddaughter, 
 which make it wonderful only that Mr Wortley should have 
 so long borne with such eccentricities of conduct and temper, 
 and should have arranged the separation with so much feel- 
 ing and good sense," says one of these sages. But rumours 
 are poor things to hold up before us at a distance of a hun- 
 
156 THE WOMAN OF FASHIOX. 
 
 dred and thirty years — and even Horace Walpole, even 
 Pope, has nothing but vague irritation to vent against Lady 
 Mary. And Mr Wortley's letters after his wife's departure 
 give us for the first time a certain friendliness for the heavy 
 man, who is glad of her comfort in his composed way, and 
 tiTists her in their common concerns, and cares for her 
 health and wellbeing. The two would seem after their 
 stormy beginning to have grown into a certain friendship 
 with the years. Perhaps he meant to join her, as several 
 of his letters imply ; or perhaps he permitted her to believe 
 that he meant to join her ; or perhaps it was held vaguely 
 possible, as a thing that might or might not be, indifferent 
 to the world, not over-interesting even to themselves. They 
 had never been a fond pair — but they never seem to have 
 been more thoroughly friendly, more at their ease with one 
 another, than at the moment when, according to charitable 
 critics, Mr Wortley, unable to bear it any longer, sent his 
 brilliant wdfe away. 
 
 Their correspondence clearly contradicts such a hypo- 
 thesis, whatever Lady Mary^s faults either of temper or con- 
 duct might have been. But the fact remains, that at an 
 age when most people begin to feel doubly the want of 
 friends and comforters around them, this woman tore herself 
 up by the roots from the place where she had lived so long, 
 and went forth alone into new scenes and among new faces. 
 She fled into the wilderness like the typical woman of Scrip- 
 ture — where her past happiness could not stare her too 
 closely in the face, nor the present blank of existence crush 
 her quite ; where her feuds and controversies and enmities 
 could not affect the new, white, gentle life of her good child ; 
 nor the miserable story of her evil one surround her with 
 malicious whispers and the pity of the crowd. It was a 
 strange, unprecedented sort of self-banishment ; and yet for 
 such a woman it was a natural thing to do. 
 
 Thus we arrive at the last period of Lady Mary's life. 
 We have said that she never was an impassioned woman. 
 No more futile parallel was ever made than that which calls 
 her the English Sevigne. The two natures are as distinct 
 as ever two natures were. It is possible that the character 
 of Madame de Sevigne may have affected and moulded the 
 ideal of her nation, as it certainly reaches in her its fullest 
 
THE WOMAN OF FASHION. 167 
 
 impersonation. The highest type of excellence to the 
 French mind is the woman who has no passion in her life 
 but that of motherhood, who lives but for her children, and 
 who is made by them, and by the race in general, into a 
 tender idol, worried, no doubt, and vexed and wounded in 
 the ordinary course of existence, but always theoretically 
 worshipped. Madame de Sevign^ is the highest type of this 
 saintly creature ; more tender, more constant, more impas- 
 sioned, than any lover, giving all, asking nothing except 
 that little recompense of love which she well knows is but 
 a shadow of her own ; content to give up all individual life, 
 to regard the events of her existence only as so many means 
 of interesting or amusing her absent child, living upon that 
 child's recollection, longing for her presence, turning every 
 scene around her into a shrine for the object of her soft 
 idolatry. Such is the Frenchwoman. Her own many gifts, 
 the tender brilliancy of her genius, her wit, her lively apjDre- 
 hension, are all handmaids to the love which is the one con- 
 scious principle of her being. They enable her to woo, with 
 many a gentle art, the perhaps dis.tracted attention of the 
 absent ; they furnish her with all those sweet wiles of affec- 
 tion, devices sometimes pathetic, always beautiful, to call 
 back by moments the heart which once was her own, but 
 now has gone from her to the stronger claims of husband 
 and children. One weeps and one smiles over the tender 
 record. Never was purer passion nor self-abandonment 
 more complete. 
 
 Lady Mary Wortley is of an entiiely different character. 
 Love and longing for the absent may be, and no doubt are, 
 gnawing at her heart also ; but her philosophy is to make 
 herself independent of these, to occupy herself, to fill the 
 remnant of her life with interests which may break the force 
 of that painful longing. Instead of concentrating her heart 
 and thoughts upon the chance of a momentary meeting now 
 and then, which may cheat with a semblance of reunion 
 only to pierce the sufferer with new pangs of parting, she 
 makes up her mind with a stern but not ignoble philosophy 
 that all such sweet possibilities are over. She takes herself 
 away to hide her solitude, to withdraw the shadow of her 
 deserted life from that of her child. She sets forth in her 
 letters all her surroundings, all her occupations, not by way 
 
158 THE WOMAN OF FASHIOX. 
 
 of amusing her correspondent alone, but by way of showing 
 that her own life is yet worth living, and her individuality 
 unimpaired. It is possible that in this steady and unfalter- 
 ing purpose there may be almost a higher principle of affec- 
 tion than that which moves the tender outpourings of the 
 other mother's heart; but it is the tenderness of a stoic, 
 content to take what is possible, and to resign what cannot 
 be hoped for, and not the effusion of love which dies for a 
 response. Madame de Sevigne, but for the soft dignity 
 which was inalienable from her as her child's mother, would 
 have been a servant for her love. Lady Mary could not but 
 live her own life, and preserve her independence and per- 
 sonality. In her Italian villa, queen of the alien hamlet, 
 legislator for her neighbour cottages, the English lady took 
 her forlorn yet individual place ; filling her days with a 
 thousand occupations, dazzling the strange little world about 
 her with brilliant talk, seeking forgetfulness in books, living 
 and growing old in her own way with a certain proud rea- 
 sonableness and philosophy; deluding herself with no dreams, 
 forbidding her heart to brood over the past, and making a 
 heroic and partially successful attempt to be sufficient to 
 herself. We follow her brave spirit through the haze of 
 years with a certain wondering sympathy, a surprised re- 
 spect. "Keep my letters," said Lady Mary, in the heyday 
 of her life ; " they will be as good as Madame de Sevigne's 
 forty years hence." But no sacredness of time and no 
 warmth of appreciation could ever make the two works 
 equal. They spring from an altogether different inspira- 
 tion, and reveal a totally diverse soul. 
 
 The period of exile imposed upon herself by this singular 
 woman was almost a third part of her whole life. She was 
 twenty-two years in Italy, not always resident in the same 
 place, though Venice was her chief abode, and the little 
 watering-place of Louvere seems to have been her favourite 
 refuge from the summer heats ; during which time her 
 correspondence with her husband and daughter was unin- 
 terrupted except by the vicissitudes of the post, and the 
 contrariety of ambassadors and consuls. Even then in her 
 waning years she was not an inoffensive personage ; but 
 always a woman of mark, making enemies as well as friends. 
 Her letters undergo a gradual change as her life changes. 
 
THE WOMAN OF FASHION. 159 
 
 From London she had written to her sister as one woman of 
 the workl, active and full of life, might be expected to write 
 to another. In her Italian correspondence her voice grows 
 sober, her style composed. It is the wisdom of years, not 
 lofty, but yet full of sense and reason, and unexaggerated 
 reality. She gives her opinion with the fulness of detail 
 and calm of experience which belong to her age ; but she 
 does not insist on her opinion being received. She consents 
 to the different views of her daughter with a quiet tolerance. 
 " You see I was not mistaken in supposing we should have 
 disputes concerning your daughters, if we were together, 
 since we can differ even at this distance," she writes, appar- 
 ently after receiving Lady Bute's reply to two or three long 
 and careful letters upon education. " The sort of learning," 
 she adds, " that I recommended is not so expensive, either 
 of time or money, as dancing, and, in my opinion, likely to 
 
 be of much more use to Lady , if her memory and 
 
 apprehension are what you represented them to nje. How- 
 ever, every one has a right to educate their children their 
 own way, and I shall speak no more on that subject." 
 
 Thus she withdraws from every appearance of controversy. 
 Her life had been marked by broils enough, but here it is 
 evident she put force on herself, and would give no excuse 
 for estrangement. And as even this subject, which she felt 
 herself to be an authority on, was dangerous ground, the 
 exile, in her wonderful self-control, turns from it without a 
 word of reproach, and goes back to the subject of her vine- 
 yards and gardens, her villages and her books. She tells her 
 daughter how she has sat up all night over ' Clarissa Harlowe' 
 and wept over it ; but adds the most sagacious criticism upon 
 the defects of the school of fiction to which it belongs, and 
 the book's individual weaknesses. " I fancy you are now 
 saying, 'tis a sad thing to grow old," she says at the end of 
 a long letter on literary subjects, with a half apology, which 
 is wonderfully pathetic. " What does my poor mamma mean 
 by troubling me with criticisms on books which nobody but 
 herself has ever read? You must allow something to my 
 solitude. I have a pleasure in writing to my dear child, and 
 not many subjects to write upon." Thus she lives her soli- 
 tary life, and takes what forlorn pleasure she can out of it. 
 " I find by experience more sincere pleasures with my books 
 
160 THE WOMAN OF FASHION. 
 
 and garden tban all tlie flutter of a court could give me," 
 she says. But the picture has taken a sober colouring ; an 
 air of loneliness breathes through it. Not the restless palpi- 
 tating loneliness of the young Lady Mary, years before, on 
 the Hinchingbroke terrace, when all the brilliant world lay 
 within reach, yet the robin-redbreast, with "good-humour 
 and humanity," alone bore her company; but a calm soli- 
 tude, undisturbed by anticipation, and without hope. Kesolu- 
 tion steady and gentle, yet almost stern in its constancy, 
 inspires the strange record. Never to murmur at the inevit- 
 able, to be no burden, no shadow upon any one, to make the 
 best of her life, and get some good out of its most unprom- 
 ising conditions ; to be herself, let everything change around 
 her. Such is the quiet determination that underlies all her 
 pretty descriptions, all her accounts of places and people, 
 her criticisms and her arguments. She is no melancholy 
 suppliant bidding for pity, striving after a reluctant love ; 
 but a composed observer, reticent and unexacting upon 
 others, because she has wisely preserved a life of her ovvn. 
 That life is not one that could have had many charms for a 
 less powerful or self-sustaining spirit ; but there is in it an 
 inalienable dignity of self-command, and that mingled sub- 
 mission to, and resistance of, the fatal coil of circumstances 
 which display the highest qualities of humanity. Lady 
 Mary submitted and made the best of the changes which 
 she could not help ; but at the same time she made props 
 to herself of her own abounding vital force, of her faculty of 
 amusement, even of the eccentricities of her character, to 
 save herself from being crushed by them. In doing so, she 
 transgressed many of the chief articles in the code of re- 
 spectability, which ordains that a woman, when lonely and 
 abandoned, shall make up her mind to it, and die or sink 
 into apathy without showing any frivolous inclinations 
 towards a life which the world has pronounced over for her. 
 The woman whose story we have so far traced was not one 
 who could die, or who could consent to be crushed into 
 inanity. She fled from that life-in-death. It was not pos- 
 sible to her to do less than live so long as existence lasted ; 
 and we believe it would be better for humanity, better for our 
 common chances of happiness, if the wounded, the lonely, 
 and the deserted shared her instinctive wisdom, and asserted 
 
THE WOMAN OF FASHION. 161 
 
 their forlorn right to such existence as suited their constitu- 
 tions, instead of sinking into the tedium of forced uniformity, 
 as so many shipwrecked people do. 
 
 It is curious to turn from the subdued yet lifelike colours 
 of this picture to the daub marked with the same name on 
 the walls of Horace Walpole's endless gallery. She was old 
 when he met her at Florence, and he was not the sort 
 of young man whom an ancient beauty would inspire with 
 any respectful or sympathetic feeling. Although she found 
 him " wonderfully civil," Lady Mary was an old hag to the 
 lively youth, as old women of every description often are in 
 the eyes of the younger generation. " Her dress, her avarice, 
 and her impudence must amaze any one that never heard 
 her name," says Horace. *' She wears a foul mob that does 
 not cover her greasy black locks, that hang down never 
 combed nor curled ; an old mazarine blue wrapper that gapes 
 open and discovers a canvas petticoat ; the face swelled vio- 
 lently on one side, partly covered with a plaster, and partly 
 with white paint, which for cheapness she has bought so 
 coarse that you would not use it to wash a chimney. In 
 three words I will give you her picture as we drew it in the 
 sortes Virgiliance — 
 
 'Insanum vatem aspicies.' 
 I give you my honour we did not choose it." 
 
 This description chimes in badly with the idea conveyed 
 by her letters ; but yet, alas ! the evidence of tradition would 
 seem to prove, as might be made plain by various unsavoury 
 and unquotable anecdotes, that Lady Mary was not distin- 
 guished by that scrupulous regard to cleanliness of person 
 which is one of the chief articles nowadays in the social 
 code. It was not of the first importance then, and we fear 
 there is nothing to be said on this subject for the old woman 
 of fashion. "When the Prince of Wales bade his wife observe 
 how becomingly Lady Mary was dressed, he gave her the only 
 tribute which in this particular she ever seems to have 
 received. Even in her earliest years she herself expressed 
 boldly her indifference and almost contempt for dress ; and 
 though she warms to a certain degree of womanly enthusiasm 
 about the decorations of the harem, her admiration was sti- 
 mulated by many extraneous causes. Possibly the young 
 people in the Florentine palaces, when they gazed at the old 
 
 L 
 
162 THE WOMAN OF FASHION. 
 
 Englishwoman, with her careless garb and her strange repu- 
 tation, laughed with Horace Walpole ; a circumstance with 
 which we, whose aim is to draw the picture of her mind and 
 heart from materials which she alone could furnish, have but 
 a secondary concern. But at the same time the contrast 
 between the sketch made from without and the picture which 
 grows under her own fingers within is worth notice. No 
 doubt there are other instances, as well as that of Lady 
 Mary, in which the old-fashioned figure, worn with age, and 
 subject to all the quips and cranks of time, yet clinging with 
 what seems an unnatural frivolity to the amusements of the 
 world, at which the young people laugh, would be found, if 
 the spectator looked deeper, to be but balancing itself by 
 these contemptible means on the frail plank that bridges 
 over those abysses of self-annihilation and nonentity which 
 are worse than death. 
 
 We will give a last sketch of this indomitable old woman 
 in her own words, as addressed to the friends of her old age, 
 Sir James and Lady Frances Stewart, to whom, when nearly 
 seventy, she addresses letters as full of playful wit and cor- 
 dial friendship as if her faculties had been at their freshest, 
 and in whose behalf she employs what interest she has with 
 her son-in-law Lord Bute, then in full favour with the young 
 King George III. : — 
 
 "Solitude begets whimsies ; at my time of life one usually falls into 
 those that are melancholj'-, though I endeavour to keep up a certain 
 sprightly folly that (I thank God) I was born with. . . . My chief 
 study all my life has been to lighten misfortunes and multiply pleasures 
 as far as human nature can. . . . You know I am enthusiastic in my 
 friendships. I also hear from all hands of my daughter's prosperity ; 
 you, madam, who are a mother, may judge of my pleasure in her happi- 
 .ness, though I have no taste for that sort of felicit3^ I could never en- 
 dure with patience the austerities of a court life. I was saying every 
 day from my heart (while I was condemned to it), the things that I 
 would do, these I do not ; and the things I would not do, those do I daily ; 
 and I had rather be a sister of St Clara than lady of the bedchamber to 
 any Queen in Europe. It is not age and disappointment that have given 
 me these sentiments ; you may see them in a copy of verses sent from 
 Constantinople in my early youth to my uncle Fielding, and by his well- 
 intended indiscretion shown about, copies taken, and at last miserably 
 printed. I own myself such a rake I prefer liberty to chains of diamonds, 
 and when I hold my peace (like King David) it is pain and grief to me." 
 
THE WOMAN OF FASHION. 163 
 
 Mr Wortley died in 1761, leaving behind him an enormous 
 fortune. Whether the family business connected with this 
 brought Lady Mary to England, or whether she was drawn 
 home by the instinct of all dying creatures, we are not 
 informed. It is evident, however, that her return had been 
 spoken of for some time previously. " I have outlived the 
 greatest part of my acquaintance," she writes to her daughter 
 in the year 1760 ; *' and, to say the truth, a return to crowd 
 and bustle after my long retirement would be disagreeable to 
 me. Yet if I could be of use either to your father or your 
 family, I would venture the shortening of the insignificant 
 days of your affectionate mother." Still later she writes to 
 Sir James Stewart, " I confess that though I am (it may be) 
 beyond the strict bounds of reason pleased with my Lord 
 Bute's and my daughter's prosperity, I am doubtful whether 
 I will attempt to be a spectator of it. I have so many years 
 indulged my natural inclinations to solitude and reading, I 
 am unwilling to return to crowds and bustle, which would 
 be unavoidable in London." But her husband's death seems 
 to have decided the step which she thus regarded, and in the 
 beginning of 1762 she had reached her native country. 
 Walpole once more comes in at this point with the only de- 
 scription we have of the ancient beauty, now seventy-two, 
 and in very broken health. He had sent her a copy of his 
 book, ' Royal and Noble Authors.' Notwithstanding his con- 
 temptuous comments on her, he had been "wonderfully civil," 
 she herself tells us, in Florence, and hastened to pay his re- 
 spects on her arrival in London, but yet he cannot resist the 
 temptation of making another ill-natured sketch of her : — 
 
 "I went last night to visit her," writes Horace. ** I give you my 
 honour, and you who know her will believe me without it, the following 
 is a faithful description : I found her in a little miserable bedchamber of 
 a ready-furnished house, with two tallow candles and a bureau covered 
 with pots and pans. On her head, in full of all accounts, she had an old 
 black-laced hood wrapped entirely round so as to conceal all hair or want 
 of hair ; no handkerchief, but instead of it a kind of horseman's riding-coat, 
 calling itself a pet-en-V air, made of a dark-green brocade, with coloured 
 and silver flowers, and lined with furs ; bodice laced ; a full dimity petti- 
 coat sprigged ; velvet mufFetees on her arms ; grey stockings and slippers. 
 Her face less changed in twenty years than I could have imagined. 
 I told her so, and she was not so tolerable twenty years ago that she 
 should have taken it for flattery ; but she did, and literally gave me a box 
 
164 THE WOMAN OF FASHION. 
 
 on the ear. She is very lively, all her senses perfect, her language as im- 
 perfect as ever, her avarice greater. She entertained me at first with no- 
 thing but the cheapness of the provisions at Helvoet. With nothing but 
 an Italian, a French, and a Prussian, all men-servants, and something she 
 calls an old secretary, but whose age, till he appears, will be doubtful, 
 she has travelled everywhere. She receives all the world who go to 
 homage her as queen-mother, and crams them into this kennel. " 
 
 Yet Horace was one of the first to visit her, and the most 
 ready to flatter, though he could not deny himself even here 
 the monstrous insinuations about the old secretary of a wo- 
 man of seventy-two ! dislike evidently rendering him blind. 
 '' Those who could remember her arrival," writes Lady 
 Louisa Stuart, on the other hand, " spoke with delight of the 
 clearness, vivacity, and raciness of her conversation, and the 
 youthful vigour which seemed to animate her mind. She did 
 not appear displeased at the general curiosity to see her, nor 
 void of curiosity herself concerning the new things and peo- 
 ple that her native country presented to her view after so 
 long an absence. . . . ' I am most handsomely lodged,' 
 she said; ' I have two very decent closets and a cupboard on 
 each floor.' This served to laugh at, but could not be a plea- 
 sant exchange for the Italian palazzo." She came with her 
 old prepossessions and enmities to a new world, in which her 
 daughter had taken a new place of her own, and into which 
 a new generation had grown up. But for that same daughter, 
 — no longer her " little damsel in white," the girl whose life 
 had been, as she says, her passion — but Lord Bute's wife, 
 and mother of nine or ten children, each one of whom, doubt- 
 less, was of much more consequence to her than her mother, 
 — Lady Mary must have felt herself more utterly a stranger 
 than among the palaces of Venice or the rural byways of 
 Louvere. She brought her death with her to her native 
 country in the most terrible shape that death can come. A 
 secret cancer, like the fabled fox that gnawed the Spartan's 
 vitals, had been undermining her health for some time, and 
 in ten months after her return to England, Lady Mary died. 
 
 Thus the tragedy ended like all tragedies, the last act in 
 it being the least tragic, the least sorrowful of all. This 
 woman of the world, too, had her speechless weight upon her, 
 her burden patiently borne. She carried it heroically, with- 
 out a word, trying ever with supreme valour to conceal it 
 
THE WOMAN OF FASHION. 165 
 
 from herself, and refuse to herself the sad luxury of brooding 
 over it. It is with a sigh of relief that we turn from this as 
 from so many other graves. The labouring man had gone 
 out to his toil and labour till the evening ; and now the soft 
 night, wrapping all griefs in its darkness and stillness, weep- 
 ing all nameless agonies with its mild dews, had come. 
 
 There is little to be said about Lady Mary Wortley's writ- 
 ings. Her life and soul and curious personality live in her 
 letters. In her verses there is only the artificial reflex of an 
 age and style of the highest artificiality, with sparkles of 
 wit, no doubt, and full of the wonderful clearness of a keen- 
 eyed, quick-observing woman of the world. But she too, 
 like most other persons with whom one comes in contact in 
 the long vistas of history, is in herself more interesting, more 
 curious, a thousand times closer to ns, than any of her 
 works. 
 
THE POET. 
 
 In a rich, leafy, luxuriant country, wealthy with great trees 
 and sweeps of immemorial turf, the soul of which is Windsor 
 and its great Park, still shading off into broken relics of 
 forest, lies, among the oaks and elm-trees, the scattered 
 hamlet of Binfield, in which Pope's early days were spent — 
 a place so tiny and so rude that it scarcely counts as a vil- 
 lage. The remains of the house in which he lived, and 
 which is still identified by popular recollection as the house 
 of Pope the poeter — remains not ruinous and picturesque, 
 but quite comfortable and respectable — are now inclosed in 
 numberless additions and improvements, and form the heart 
 of a modern villa. One homely wainscot room has survived, 
 and so has the local distinction of the '' Poeter's " reputation. 
 Such a title bestowed by the lips of a bumpkin among those 
 silent fields is the best proof that there is still such a thing 
 as abstract fame. It is no longer 
 
 ' ' A little house witli trees a-row, 
 And, like its master, very low," 
 
 but it retains the row of big-branched storm-worn firs, with 
 great trunks gleaming red in the sunset, which doubtless 
 inspired the description ; and on the lawn a rusty, melan- 
 choly cypress, said to have been planted by the poet. 
 
 To this leafy, level land, just where it begins to break and 
 undulate — where oaks twist their great arms and throw 
 their vast shadow, and rugged hollies grow to forest-trees — 
 Alexander Pope, a poor little deformed boy, was brought out 
 
THE POET. 167 
 
 of hot and busy London by an honest, worthy tradesman- 
 pair of parents in the end of the seventeenth century. He 
 was born in 1688, it is said, in Lombard Street, where his 
 father, '' an honest merchant, dealt in Hollands wholesale." 
 Pope the elder had made money enough to retire from busi- 
 ness at a comparatively early age. He had made ten thou- 
 sand pounds, says one ; and another raises the amount to 
 twenty thousand. Yet, notwithstanding the proof of some 
 knowledge of the world which is conveyed by the making of 
 a moderate fortune, he is supposed to have " found no better 
 use for his money than that of locking it up in a chest and 
 taking from it what his expenses required " — a waste of 
 capital which has no analogy with the shrewd character 
 which he seems to have transmitted to his son, nor, indeed, 
 is it consistent with various ascertained particulars of their 
 life. The house at Binfield, with twenty acres of land, was 
 his own, and he had rent-charges on other property, and 
 investments abroad, which rescue his name from this stigma 
 of foolish improvidence. The few particulars that remain on 
 record of this unobtrusive father reveal a shadow of peaceable 
 respectability, retired and contented, a man busy in his gar- 
 den, proud of his vegetables, interfering with little meaning 
 yet some success in his boy's childish studies. Pope, like his 
 father, was deformed and weakly from his birth — a dwarfish, 
 amiable, invalid boy, with a sweet childish voice, and general 
 indications of precocity. The tiny little house has every 
 appearance of having been inspired by that extreme regard 
 for personal comfort and narrow domesticity common to the 
 class which its inmates belonged to. The good couple fond- 
 led and watched over their only child, but were not without 
 a careful eye to his education. They were Koman Catholics, 
 and, as their son grandiloquently explains — 
 
 " Certain laws, by sufferers thought unjust, 
 Denied all posts of profit or of trust. " 
 
 But there is no indication of anything in the elder Pope 
 above the level of a retired shopkeeper, or which could have 
 made this denial of office a personal injury to him. No doubt 
 he pottered about his garden, and sat in the sun before his 
 little country-house as calmly as if he had been eligible to 
 the post of Prime Minister. Many years after, when Pope 
 
168 THE POET. 
 
 was at the height of his fame, it seems to have occurred to 
 him that the homely pair to whom he was always so faithful 
 stood in need of embellishment; and he would appear to 
 have invented a pedigree for them which rests on no founda- 
 tion but that of his own word. According to this apocry- 
 phal description, the poet's father sprang from the younger 
 branch of a family of good repute in Ireland, and related to 
 Lord Downe — an origin afterwards changed and elaborated 
 into " a gentleman's family in Oxfordshire, the head of which 
 was the Earl of Downe, whose sole heiress married the Earl 
 of Lindsay." It is evident, however, that there is not a mor- 
 sel of evidence to support the story ; it " had never been 
 heard of" by his relatives, and was probably set up, says 
 his latest biographer, "to shame Lord Hervey and Lady 
 Mary," who had driven him frantic by a taunt at his " birth 
 obscure." The family of Pope's mother is less mysterious, 
 and apparently had some claims to gentility ; but the old 
 people themselves, it is evident, made no pretensions to rank, 
 and lived their quiet, virtuous, humdrum life in irreproach- 
 able independence and modesty, tenderly indulgent to and 
 pathetically proud of their poor little crooked, puny, sweet- 
 voiced boy. 
 
 The education of the poet does not seem, however, to have 
 been retarded by his bodily weakness. He was taught to 
 read at home, and taught himself to write by copying the 
 printed letters from books, an accomplishment he retained 
 all his life. His first education, he himseli says, " was 
 extremely loose and disconcerted." He fell into the hands 
 of priests, one after another, and seems to have taken what 
 learning they could give him without any of the bile with 
 which, in such a time, a proscribed class would be likely to 
 mingle it. At eight years old he was sent to a school in 
 Hampshire, and learnt the Greek and Latin rudiments to- 
 gether, growing acquainted at the same time with the first 
 beginnings of poetry in Ogilby's ' Iliad ' and Sandys's * Ovid.' 
 He was transferred shortly after to Twyford, a Catholic 
 school near Winchester, where the precocious imp wrote a 
 lampoon on his master, for which he was flogged. The 
 punishment, however, was not allowed to work its due effect ; 
 for the indulgent father, thinking of his boy's weakness, 
 doubtless, and not of a ' Dunciad ' to come, withdrew the juve- 
 
THE POET. 169 
 
 nile satirist in high offence, and placed him at a school in 
 London, where his budding inclinations were cultivated in 
 another direction. " He used sometimes to stroll to the 
 playhouse," says Dr Johnson, " and was so delighted with 
 theatrical exhibitions that he formed a kind of play from 
 Ogilby's 'Iliad,' with some verses of his own intermixed, which 
 he persuaded his schoolfellows to act, with the addition of 
 his masters gardener, who personated Ajax." This was 
 when he was about twelve, and was not apparently his first 
 commencement as a maker of verses. " I began writing 
 verses," he says, " farther back than I can well remember." 
 He " lisped in numbers," in short ; and the father at home 
 set the boy subjects for his baby doggerel, and was his first 
 critic, sending him often back to " new-turn them," according 
 to his mother's evidence, saying, " These are not good 
 rhymes " — a characteristic beginning for the polished, elabo- 
 rate, and much-corrected verse which he was thereafter to 
 produce. 
 
 At this age he had already so great an enthusiasm for 
 poetry that he induced some of his friends to take him to 
 Will's Coffeehouse, where he saw Dryden. It was but for 
 a moment, but it was one of the recollections upon which he 
 loved to dwell. He had already written an ' Ode to Solitude,' 
 '' in which there is nothing more than other forward boys 
 have attained," says Dr Johnson ; but to the critic not 
 imbued with that love of " correct " verse which belonged, 
 among its other virtues, to the eighteenth century, the soft 
 cadence of this schoolboy ode is more pleasing than the 
 blank, harmonious waste of the ' Pastorals ' or the other early 
 poems. 
 
 '* Happy the man whose wish and care 
 A few paternal acres bound, 
 Content to breathe his native air 
 In his own ground," 
 
 says the philosopher of twelve, in a not unusual strain of 
 holiday satisfaction with his home. Some prophecy of the 
 tall talk of his subsequent life is in the quaint grandeur of 
 the title of " paternal acres " bestowed upon the little bit of 
 forest land at Binfield, which had been no longer in his 
 father's possession than he himself, the heir of the property. 
 
170 THE POET. 
 
 had been ; but yet the verses are pretty, and have an echo in 
 them of an older and richer strain than that which was to be 
 eventually his. 
 
 Such seems to have been, so far as the formalities of teach- 
 ing go, the entire sum of Pope's education. He had noth- 
 ing more to do with schoolmasters. He went home, and 
 with boyish zeal attacked by himself every book he could 
 lay hold of. Perhaps the weakness of his little distorted 
 frame may have accounted for the strange life of mental ex- 
 citement and indiscriminate study into which the boy threw 
 himself, with all the trees and all the glades of Windsor call- 
 ing upon him all day long to pursuits of a very different 
 kind. Whether he might not have been a greater poet had 
 he tossed the books aside and taken his inspiration from the 
 soft slopes of the fair country round, the big-boled beeches, 
 the play of sunshine on the multitudinous leaves, all the 
 sights and sounds that make of a forest land a leafy paradise, 
 it is impossible now to tell. Such was not the instinct of 
 the growing poet. This is the highest picture with which 
 observation and genius could furnish him, of those glorious 
 shades and breezy breadths of champaign amid which his 
 youth was passed : — 
 
 " Here waving groves a checkered scene display, 
 And part admit and part exclude the day. 
 As some coy nymph her lover's warm address 
 Nor quite indulges nor can quite repress ; 
 There, interspersed in lawns and opening glades, 
 There trees arise that share each other's shades ; 
 Here in full light the russet plains extend, 
 There wrapt in clouds the bluish hills ascend : 
 Even the wild heath displays her purple dyes, 
 And 'midst the desert fruitful fields arise, 
 That crowned with tufted trees and springing corn, 
 Like verdant isles the sable waste adorn." 
 
 To be sure, it was not his fault if the bad taste of his 
 time foisted a coy nymph into the breathing silence of those 
 soft, solemn woods. But it is curious how entirely un- 
 touched were his soul and his style by his early knowledge 
 of one of the most beautiful phases of nature. Oaks do 
 not grow, nor silken beech-leaves open out of the wondrous 
 husk, in any scene of his choosing. He is ignorant how the 
 
THE POET. 171 
 
 little birds answer eacli other among the trees, and how the 
 wood-pigeons coo. The mavis and the merle are never 
 singing among the branches, nor is it a " good greenwood " 
 to the boy-poet. There is no musing nor silence in him. 
 Instead of the long summer dreams under the whispering 
 leaves, with all the doors and windows of the young soul 
 open, and " influences of soul and sense " stealing in uncon- 
 scious, it is a very different scene that opens on us when we 
 glance at the lad at Binfield. He shut himself up in his 
 room, built himself up with books, read till the stars twink- 
 led in upon him unheeded, read while all the wonders of the 
 sun-setting and sun-rising passed by unknown. He had 
 nothing to do with the beauty outside. The dews fell 
 not, the balm breathed not, for him. So far as this was the 
 work of his weak and sickly body the pitiful spectator could 
 but mourn over the young recluse ; but it is evident that 
 art was more congenial to him than nature, then as through- 
 out all his life : — 
 
 *'My next period," he says, "was in Windsor Forest, where I sat 
 down with an earnest desire of reading, and applied as constantly as I 
 could to it for some years. I was between twelve and thirteen when I 
 went thither, and I continued in this close pursuit of pleasure and lan- 
 guages till nineteen or twenty. Considering how very little I had when 
 I came from school, I think I may be said to have taught myself Latin 
 as well as French and Greek ; and in all these my cliief way of getting 
 them was by translation. . . . The epic poem which I began a little 
 after I was twelve was ' Alcander, Prince of Ehodes. ' There was an under- 
 water scene in the first book ; it was in the Archipelago. I wrote four 
 books toward it, of about a thousand verses each, and had the copy by 
 me till I burnt it by the advice of the Bishop of Kochester a little before 
 he went abroad. I endeavoured," said he, smiling, "in this poem to col- 
 lect all the beauties of the great epic writers into one piece. There was 
 Milton's style in one part, and Cowley's in another ; here the style of 
 Spencer imitated, and there of Statius ; here Homer and Virgil, and 
 there Ovid and Claudian. . . . There were also some couplets in it 
 which I have since inserted in some of my other poems without altera- 
 tion, — as in the * Essay on Criticism ' — 
 
 • Whose honours with increase of ages grow, 
 As streams roll down, enlarging as they flow.' 
 
 Another couplet in the * Dunciad ' — 
 
 ' As man's meanders to the vital spring, 
 Roll all their tides, tlien back their circles bring.' 
 
172 THE POET. 
 
 " In the scattered lessons I used to set myself about that time, I trans- 
 lated above a quarter of the * Metamorphoses,' and that part of Statius 
 which was afterwards printed with the corrections of Walsh. My next 
 work after ray epic was my ' Pastorals, ' so that I did exactly what Virgil 
 says of himself : — 
 
 * Cum canerem reges et prselia, Cynthius aurem 
 Vellit, et adinonuit ; pastorem, Tityre, pingues 
 Pascere oportet oves ; deductum dicere carmen. ' 
 
 " I translated TuUy's piece, ' De Senectute,' in this early period, and 
 there is a copy of it in Lord Oxford's library. My first taking to imitat- 
 ing was not out of vanity but humility. I saw how defective my own 
 things were, and endeavoured to mend my manner by copying good 
 strokes from others. My epic was about two years in hand — from thir- 
 teen to fifteen." 
 
 In this curious mental workshop, accordingly, the boy 
 lived and laboured, with his windows shut, we may be sure, 
 and the fever of toil on his worn face. It was a juvenile 
 manufactory, where verse was already turned and re-turned, 
 and where a , correct couplet was reckoned the highest pro- 
 duct of earth or heaven. 
 
 All this unintermitting study must have raised to the 
 point of positive worship the pride and faith of the father 
 and mother in their gifted son. No doubt it was to them, 
 as to most partially educated people, the crowning evidence 
 of genius ; and a degree of freedom most unusual at the 
 time must have been granted to him in consequence ; for 
 we find him, in his fifteenth year, setting out for London on 
 his own motion, and apparently alone, to add to the classic 
 languages — which, no doubt, he believed himself to have 
 completely mastered — a knowledge of French and Italian. 
 It was thought " a wildish sort of resolution,'' but still it 
 was given in to with an indulgence which speaks either of 
 unbounded faith on the part of the elder Popes in their son's 
 power of taking care of himself, or of an immense power of 
 self-will in the precocious lad. It would appear — for there 
 are no dates to speak of in the story — that he spent about a 
 year in London with this object or pretence, and learned at 
 least to read French ; though the fact of his addressing a 
 letter in after days "J.w Mademoiselles Mademoiselles de 
 Maple-Durham" says little for his knowledge of the lan- 
 guage. 
 
THE POET. 173 
 
 " He removed for a time to London," says Dr Johnson, 
 "that he might study French and Italian, which, as he 
 desired nothing more than to read them, were, by diligent 
 application, soon despatched/' Thus the imperfect, superfi- 
 cial self-education, with all its attendant vices of self-satis- 
 faction and conceit, was completed. He seems to have 
 obtained to perfect independence at this early age, and had 
 already begun to correspond with the old roues of the 
 coffeehouses, Wycherley and Congreve, and to ape the man. 
 
 " He then returned to Binfield," proceeds Dr Johnson, 
 " and delighted himself with his own poetry. He tried all 
 styles and many subjects. He wrote a comedy, a tragedy, 
 an epic poem, with panegyrics on all the princes of Europe ; 
 and, as he confesses, thought himself the greatest genius 
 that ever was." This perpetual unwholesome work and 
 seclusion produced their natural results. He became very 
 ill, " and in despondency lay down prepared to die," says 
 Mr Carruthers, his latest biographer. " He sent farewells to 
 his friends ; and among these was a priest, Thomas South- 
 cote, who, on receiving Pope's valedictory communication, 
 went immediately to consult Dr EadclifFe, the eccentric but 
 able physician. Eadcliffe's prescription was a very simple 
 one : the young man was to study less, and ride on horse- 
 back every day. With this recipe the father posted to Bin- 
 field ; and Pope, having the good sense to follow the pre- 
 scribed course, speedily got well." This good office was 
 kindly thought of and repaid. Twenty years after, Pope 
 used all his influence through Sir Kobert Walpole to get an 
 abbacy in France for Southcote ; one among many friendly 
 offices which embellish his life. 
 
 The boy, even at this early period, was not without 
 friends of a class who might have been supposed likely to 
 polish and refine him. " He was, through his whole life, 
 ambitious of splendid acquaintance," says Johnson, with 
 that latent contempt for the character of his hero which 
 throws a curious tinge of depreciation into his narrative.- 
 One of his neighbours, Sir William Trumbull — a man ex- 
 perienced in the world, and who had retired to the precincts 
 of the Forest after a long diplomatic career — took up young 
 Pope with much warmth of interest. " They rode out to- 
 gether almost daily, read their favourite classic authors 
 
174 THE POET. 
 
 together, and, when absent, kept up a correspondence." 
 Sir William was sixy, and his young friend but sixteen ; but, 
 no doubt, the society of the accomplished little humpback 
 made a diversion to the old statesman from the monotony of 
 the woodland rides and the dulness of country neighbours. 
 When the ' Pastorals ' were written they were carried to this 
 earliest patron to be criticised and approved ; and Sir Wil- 
 liam must have felt his liking justified. Of the few letters 
 that passed between this pair of friends, the old man's are 
 pleasant, indulgent, and affectionate ; and the replies are as 
 fine, abstract, and artificial as the letters of such a youth 
 might be expected to be. The fact is, indeed, that almost 
 everybody whose letters to him are preserved surpasses the 
 letters of Pope, which are always, in the first half of his life, 
 made-up specimens of composition manufactured into the 
 sprightly, the solemn, the poetic, and the gallant, according 
 as they were wanted, and in each vein overdoing the part. 
 How anybody, much less a boy of sixteen, could manage to 
 fill so many sheets of paper without giving a single clue to 
 his own individuality, or to the circumstances surrounding 
 him, is very extraordinary. He writes about poetry — his 
 own or other people's ; he makes handsome cut-and-dry 
 remarks about friendship, and the delights of study, and 
 other cognate subjects ; but what or who he was — what 
 were his surroundings, his position, the human circumstances 
 about him — there is absolutely nothing to tell. Almost the 
 only indication we have of the dim world about Binfield is in 
 the following description ; — 
 
 *' I have now changed the scene," he writes to Wycherley, "from the 
 town to the country— from Will's Coffeehouse to "Windsor Forest. I find 
 no other difference than this betwixt the common town-wits and the 
 downright country-fools : that the first are partly in the wrong, with a 
 little more flourish and gaiety, and the last neither in the right nor the 
 wrong, but confirmed in a stupid, settled medium betwixt both. . . . 
 Ours are a sort of modest inoffensive people, who neither have sense nor 
 pretend to have any, but indulge a jovial sort of dulness. They are com- 
 monly known in the world by the name of honest, civil gentlemen. 
 They live as much as they ride — at random ; a kind of hunting-life, pur- 
 suing with earnestness and hazard something not worth the catching — 
 never in the way nor out of it. I can't but prefer solitude to the 
 company of all these." 
 
 A little later, he once more becomes conscious for a 
 
THE POET. ]75 
 
 second of tlie outer world. " I assure you I am looked on 
 in the neighbourhood for a very well-disposed person," he 
 says ; " no great hunter, indeed, but a great admirer of the 
 noble sport, and only unhappy in my want of constitution 
 for that and drinking. They all say 'tis a pity I am so 
 sickly ; and I think 'tis pity they are so healthy," the young 
 man adds, with a certain sense of humour. These brief 
 notices are the only indications of his external life that can 
 be gleaned out of one large volume of letters. Here and 
 there in his poems he gives, it is true, an artful sketch of 
 his home, in which the Pope household is seen as through a 
 magnifying-glass — elevated, enlarged, and heightened. It 
 is the kind of sketch which would have been suitable for 
 the inmates of Chatsworth or Arundel — but is ludicrously 
 grand when it refers to the cottage at Binfield with its 
 twenty acres, however kindly and affectionate that home 
 may have been. 
 
 There are many curious and very evident differences be- 
 tween the life of a man of letters in the eighteenth century 
 and at the present moment. A certain freshness of interest 
 and curiosity as to the genus Author seems to have existed 
 amid all the artificial and conventional features of an age 
 much less spontaneous and natural than our own. Perhaps 
 the reason was, that literature was kept within a much 
 smaller circle, and the credit of all who professed to be of the 
 Kepublic of Letters was involved in elevating the pre- 
 tensions of genius. Gray, whose powers were but of a 
 secondary order, and who began life in a linen-draper's shop, 
 was soured and spirit-broken by being offered only an ap- 
 pointment as gentleman-usher at Court, in consequence of 
 his poetic fame ; and Pope, a greater genius, though accept- 
 ing no rewards, seems to have stepped at once into the best 
 society which England could give him on the sole score of 
 his poetry, and without even the social gifts or power of con- 
 versation which sometimes supplement such claims. Now- 
 adays, the young aspirant has less easy work. Success 
 brings him a substantial and honest reward, no doubt, but it 
 does not bring him the adulation, the compliment, the social 
 elevation of old. Ijiterature has become a profession like 
 any other in our days. The man who reaches its highest 
 pinnacle makes for himself a place in the world exactly as a 
 
176 THE POET. 
 
 great soldier, a great doctor, or lawyer does ; but his genius, 
 of itself, does not make him free of all classes, or give him a 
 position of universal privilege, as it was once supposed to 
 do. Young writers would save themselves some pangs did 
 they fully recognise this fact. A young poet, whatever his 
 genius, issuing from a humble household like that of Binfield, 
 would have no more chance of being petted by maids of 
 honour and flattered by lettered nobles in the present day, 
 than he would have of being made Prime Minister. This 
 discovery often adds a special twinge to the many lesser 
 miseries of the literary profession ; for the failure of false 
 expectations is always accompanied with a touch of bitter- 
 ness, more stinging and painful, because less noble and 
 elevated, than the pang which follows the destruction of real 
 hopes. 
 
 The ' Pastorals ' were sent by Sir William Trumbull to 
 Wycherley, and from Wycherley passed into the hands of 
 Walsh, and had a private circulation, sufficient in those days 
 to give fame, before they were presented to the general 
 public. '' Pope had now declared himself a poet," says Dr 
 Johnson ; " and thinking himself entitled to poetical con- 
 versation, began at seventeen to frequent Will's, a coffee- 
 house on the north side of Kussell Street, in Covent Garden, 
 where the wits of that time used to assemble." His ac- 
 quaintance multiplied. Walsh, one of the aforesaid " wits," 
 himself a minor poet and kindly critic, instantly extended 
 his friendship to the youth, and invited him to his house. 
 He is recorded also to have given Pope at least one piece of 
 advice which is memorable and characteristic. " We had 
 several great poets," he told the young author, " but we 
 never had one great poet who was correct ; and he desired 
 me to make that my study and aim ;" an advice which it is 
 evident was thoroughly laid to heart. The private circulation 
 of the ' Pastorals ' at last brought them under the notice of 
 one of the enterprising publishers of the day, and led to the 
 following proposal : — 
 
 " Sir, — I have lately seen a pastoral of yours in Mr Walsh's and Con- 
 greve's hands, which is extremely fine, and is approved by the best judges 
 of poetry. I remember I have formerly seen you in my shop, and am 
 sorry I did not improve my acquaintance with you. If you design your 
 poem for the press, no one shall be more careful in printing it, nor no 
 
THE POET. 177 
 
 one can give greater encouragement to it than, sir, your most obedient 
 humble servant, Jacob Tonson." 
 
 Alas for the good old days ! Where is there now to be 
 found a publisher at once so frank and so condescending ? 
 
 The ' Pastorals/ we avow with humility, are to ourselves 
 impossible reading, and we cannot pretend to give any 
 opinion on them ; but if the reader would like to have Mr 
 Walsh's views, his opinion was, that " 'tis no flattery at all 
 to say that Virgil had written nothing so good at his age ; " 
 and that though " he has taken very freely from the ancients, 
 what he has mixed of his own with theirs is not inferior to 
 what he has taken from them." They were published in 
 1709, when the author was twenty-one, though written four 
 or five years before. In the same volume were the Pastorals 
 of Ambrose Phillips, works happily gone out of human ken 
 by this time, but which were the means of bringing Pope 
 into the lists of personal strife, and awakening all the ex- 
 pedients of mad and bitter vanity in which his genius was 
 so fruitful. This is not a criticism on his works, but an 
 account of his life ; and the quarrels, attacks, subterfuges of 
 all kinds, plots and conspiracies full of endless ingenuity, 
 perpetual self-assertion and wild struggling for the pre- 
 eminence, of which his life is full, cannot but come forward 
 at a very early period into any narrative of an existence so 
 full of war and commotion. So long as he had not dared 
 the ordeal of public criticism, the young man's temper seems 
 placid enough. He was master of his own actions, his own 
 teacher, a law to himself ; nobody seems to have attempted 
 to curb or interfere with him. His superiority to all his 
 poetical contemporaries was so unquestionable that his 
 temptations to self-regard must have been something like 
 those of a king, who stands alone. His early critics fed 
 him with compliments, nourishing the appetite for praise 
 which was evidently fierce within him. Every circumstance 
 of his early education conspired against the undisciplined 
 boy. He was in full possession of that " little learning " 
 which, with curious unconsciousness, he characterises so 
 justly. Wycherley, who had then a certain rank as a poet, 
 respectfully submitted his compositions to the criticism of 
 the lad, and was mauled by him with the frank insolence of 
 youth ; but when it came to his own turn Pope could not 
 
 M 
 
178 THE POET. 
 
 bear it. His wars began almost as soon as he bad made his 
 first public appearance ; but before entering upon that 
 stormy tale, we will pause to note the sweeter side of the 
 poet's life. 
 
 This softer strain in the unmelodious existence can 
 scarcly be called a romance ; and yet it was all that stood 
 for romance in Pope's history. He became acquainted with 
 the sisters Martha and Teresa Blount at a very early period, 
 when all three, it is supposed, were under twenty. They 
 were daughters of one of the Catholic families of the country- 
 side, and accordingly had the link of a common faith (such 
 as it was) to the young poet. Their home was at Maple- 
 Durham, on the banks of the Thames, not far from Beading ; 
 and Pope was familiar at the same time in the house of their 
 uncle, Mr Englefield, at Whiteknights in the same neigh- 
 bourhood. The two fair young women, above him in rank, 
 touched by the enthusiasm for poetry, which was then a 
 mark of superiority, and no doubt feeling the little hunch- 
 back a very safe acquaintance, evidently received his atten- 
 tions and answered his letters, and made a pleasant little 
 excitement out of his friendship, in its earlier days at least. 
 He was not a man whom it was possible to marry ; a fact 
 which in itself, though not complimentary to the hero, was, 
 as it continues to be, a wonderful- recommendation to female 
 friendship. It is indeed the only thing wanting to make 
 that much-disputed possibility, a true and warm friendship 
 between man and woman without any mixture of love, into 
 a real and pleasant fact. Fools will scoff, no doubt, and 
 critics of impure imaginations revile ; but it must be a very 
 lively fancy indeed which can suppose any closer bond be- 
 tween the little poet and these two beautiful sisters. The 
 tie was closer, softer than that of any other friendship : 
 hovering over it, like the figures of his own sylphs, were re- 
 flections as it were of other bonds ; mutual admirations, such 
 as men cannot entertain for each other, soft railleries, a touch 
 of tenderness more familiar, more respectful than anything 
 that could be exchanged between Jack and Tom ; altogether, 
 a union refined and visionary, as well as constant and real. 
 Martha Blount made up to Pope for the sister whom he had 
 not, for the wife whom he could not have, and yet was unlike 
 both wife and sister. The link is one so fine, so delicate, so 
 
THE POET, 179 
 
 natural, that it is next to impossible to define it ; and all the 
 more so, as vanity on both sides so seldom permits any 
 realisation of this touching and consolatory bond. To Pope 
 in his youth it was evidently as good as any love-maliing, 
 and developed what humanity was in him ; and it is one of 
 the few green spots in his maturer life. His formal stilted 
 letters melt into a kind of nature when he addresses the 
 sisters ; his hard notes about business warm with a kind of 
 domesticity when he sends his correspondent the kind wishes 
 of "Mrs Patty." One last exclamation on her part, re- 
 ported at second or third hand by his biographers, seems to 
 imply that she had grown weary at the end of his long 
 invalidism ; but it is clear that to the last he at least was 
 faithful to the friend of his whole life. 
 
 The beginning of the friendship is lost in conjecture, and 
 at first opinions are divided as to which of the sisters was 
 his favourite correspondent. And the letters themselves in 
 these early days, when the trio were still between twenty 
 and thirty, and many things may have seemed possible which 
 after-existence forbade, are curiously diversified with cool- 
 nesses and reconciliations. It is Teresa, the elder, who 
 first calls forth the homage of the poet. The Lines " to a 
 Young Lady, with the works of Yoiture," were published in 
 1712, and were contained in a volume sent with a cer- 
 tain lover-like art to Martha ; but there is not the smallest 
 trace of love in the verses themselves, unless the warmth of 
 the poet's expostulation against marriage should mean more 
 than lies on the surface. " Ah," he cries, addressing a beau- 
 tiful young woman of three or four and twenty — 
 
 " Ah, quit not the free innocence of life 
 For the dull glory of a virtuous wife, 
 Nor let false shows nor empty titles please ; 
 Aim not at joy, but rest content with ease. 
 
 But, madame, if the fates withstand, and you 
 
 Are destined Hymen's willing victim too. 
 
 Trust not too much your now resistless charms — 
 
 Those age or sickness soon or late disarms ; 
 
 Good-humour only teaches charms to last, 
 
 Still makes new conquests, and maintains the past. " 
 
 This philosophical strain does not sound much like love. 
 
180 THE POET. 
 
 Neither is there the slightest appearance of passion in the 
 clear description of her changed occupations when she leaves 
 town, and goes from its delights : — 
 
 " To plain work and to purling brooks, 
 Old-fashioned halls, dull courts, and croaking rooks, 
 She went, from opera, park, assembly, play, 
 To morning walks and prayers three times a-day, 
 To part her time 'twixt reading and bohea, 
 To muse and spill her solitary tea. 
 Or o'er cold coffee trifle with the spoon ; 
 Count the slow clock, and dine exact at noon, 
 Divert her eyes with pictures in the fire, 
 Hum half a tune, tell stories to the squire ; 
 Up to her godly garret after seven, 
 There starve and pray, for that's the way to heaven." 
 
 In this poem there is again a hint at the miseries of wed- 
 lock, and the rude squire, '' whose game is whist, whose treat 
 a toast in sack " — 
 
 "Whose laughs are heart}^, though his jests are coarse, -, 
 
 And loves you best of all things — but his horse. " 
 
 The inference of the unprejudiced reader would be, that in 
 Pope's opinion Teresa Blount was likely to make a loveless 
 and interested match — an idea still further justified by the 
 very curious and unexplained gift to her, made five years 
 after, of an annuity of forty pounds a-year for six years, on 
 condition that she should not be married during that time. 
 Her father had died, and the sisters, with their mother, were 
 poorer than when at Maple-Durham ; but still they do not 
 seem to have been in sufficient poverty to make such a bene- 
 faction necessary. It is supposed by some one of the many 
 commentators on the subject to have been preliminary to a 
 " connubial settlement ;" but all this is matter of the merest 
 conjecture, and there is nothing in the letters to justify the 
 opinion that love or marriage (except in the abstract) had 
 ever been spoken of between them. " All I am good for," 
 he writes to her, "is to write a civil letter, or make a fine 
 speech. The truth is that, considering how often and how 
 openly I have declared love to you, I am astonished and a 
 little affronted that you have not forbid my correspondence, 
 and directly said, See mi/ face no more. . . . All I mean 
 
THE POET. 181 
 
 by this is, that either you or I cannot be in love with 
 the other : I leave you to guess which of the two is that 
 stupid and insensible creature, so blind to the other's excel- 
 lences and charms." 
 
 Presently, however, the skies cloud over between the two 
 friends. Teresa becomes offended, one does not know why. 
 There are some brief deprecatory notes from Pope, remonstrat- 
 ing. One day he says, '' It is really a great concern to me 
 that you mistook me so much this morning.'" In another 
 letter it has come to the final issue : " Either you would have 
 me your friend, or you would not. If you would, why do you 
 refuse any service I can do you ? If you would not, why do 
 you ever receive any? " Day by day the breach evidently 
 grew more serious. He would seem to have had her business 
 affairs in his hands, and either to have dissatisfied her by his 
 management, or to have affronted her in some unknown way 
 which makes everything he does unpalatable to her. He 
 writes at greater length as the misunderstanding grows : — 
 
 " Madam, — I am too much out of order to trouble you with a long let- 
 ter ; but I desire to know what is your meaning, to resent my complying 
 with your request, and endeavouring to serve you in the way you proposed, 
 as if I had done you some great injury ? You told me if such a thing was 
 the secret of my heart you should entirely forgive, and think well of me. 
 I told it, and iind the contrary. You] pretended so much generosity as 
 to offer your service in my behalf. The minute after you did me as ill 
 an office as you could, in telling the party concerned it was all but an 
 amusement, occasioned by my loss of another lady. 
 
 ** You express yourself desirous of increasing your present income upon 
 life. I proposed the only method I then could find, and you encouraged 
 me to proceed in it. When it was done you received it as if it were an 
 affront ; since when I find the very thing in the very manner you wished, 
 and mention it to you, you don't think it worth an answer. If your 
 meaning be that the very things you ask and wish become odious to you, 
 when it is I that comply with them or bring them about, pray own it, 
 and deceive me no longer with any thought but that you hate me. My 
 friendship is too warm and sincere to be trifled with ; therefore if you 
 have any meaning tell it me, or you must allow me to take away that 
 which perhaps you don't care to keep." 
 
 The controversy proceeds in the same pathetic strain — if 
 that can be called a controversy of which the reader 
 sees only one side. The pathos of the letters is very unlike 
 anything Pope ever wrote before or after. Perhaps he felt 
 
182 THE POET. 
 
 it was the only light in his life which he was thus losing. 
 In the next the injured resignation reaches a still higher 
 tone : — 
 
 "Madam, — Your letter gives me a concern which none but one who (in 
 spite of all accidents) is still a friend can feel. I am pleased, however, 
 that anything I said explains my past actions or words in a better sense 
 than you took them. I know in my heart (a very uncorrupt witness) 
 that I was constantly the thing I professed myself to be to you — that was 
 something better, I will venture to say, than most people were capable 
 to be to you or anybody else. As for forgiveness, I am approaching, I 
 hope, to the time and condition in which everybody ought to give it, and 
 to ask it of all the world. I sincerely do so with regard to you, and beg 
 pardon also for that fault of which I taxed others — my vanity — which 
 made me so resenting. . . . I desire extremely to see you both again; 
 yet I believe I shall see you no more — and I sincerely hope as well 
 as think both of you will be glad of it. I therefore wish you may each of 
 you find all you desired I should be in some one whom you may like better 
 to see. In the mean time, I bear testimony of both of you to each other 
 that I have certainly known you, truly and tenderly, each other's friend, 
 and wish you a long enjoyment of each other's love and affection." 
 
 And finally the strain reaches the sublime of unappreciated 
 but always faithful affection : — 
 
 *' Ladies, — Pray think me sensible of your civility and good meaning 
 in asking me to come to you. 
 
 " You will please to consider that my coming or not is a thing indif- 
 ferent to both of you. But God knows it is far otherwise to me in respect 
 to one of you. 
 
 "I scarce ever come but one of two things happens, which equally 
 affect me to the soul — either I make her uneasy or I see her unkind. 
 
 * ' If she has any tenderness, I can only give her every day trouble and 
 melancholy. If she has none, the daily sight of so undeserved a coldness 
 must wound her to death. 
 
 *' It is forcing one of us to do a very hard and very unjust thing to the 
 other. 
 
 ' ' My continuing to see you will, by turns, tease all of us. My staying 
 away can at worst be of ill consequence only to myself. 
 
 "And as one of us is to be sacrificed, I believe we are all agreed who 
 shall be the person. " 
 
 To this rhythmic utterance was the poor poet brought at 
 last. And certainly the quarrel must have been a very des- 
 perate one to warrant such despair. Teresa Blount soon after 
 disappears altogether from the story. There is a world 
 
THE POET. 183 
 
 of conjecture as to the reason ; but the materials for forming 
 a judgment are only those here given — and what it was is 
 never now likely to be known, nor indeed is it of any great 
 importance. Martha continued the poet's bosom friend. If 
 any of his letters could be called familiar, it would be 
 his letters to her. He opened himself to Mrs Patty if to any 
 human being. He described his journeys to her, and 
 (minutely) the different places he visited ; though, when the 
 moment came to make merchandise of these letters, he did 
 not hesitate to cut out the bit of description or the fine sen- 
 timent he wanted, and add it to any other that might chance 
 to need embellishment. But to the end of his life he was 
 faithful to her. " Their acquaintance began early," says Dr 
 Johnson — "the life of each was pictured on the other's mind 
 — their conversation, therefore, was endearing; for when they 
 met there was an immediate coalition of congenial notions." 
 And there is something in this long faithfulness of a life to 
 a tie which was enforced by no bonds either of law or cus- 
 tom, which in itself has a certain nobleness. It is supposed 
 that Mrs Martha fell into evil repute with some strait-laced 
 people in consequence of this close friendship ; but it is one 
 of the cases in which evil thinking must have been driven to 
 the last strait to compound its fables. If anybody might 
 have been allowed the solace of a sympathetic woman's 
 friendship, it surely should have been the deformed and 
 invalid Pope. 
 
 We have, however, left the main stream of his life for this 
 little current of tender sentiment. The publication of his 
 ' Essay on Criticism ' was the beginning of strife. It was 
 a curious subject for a young poet who had as yet suffered 
 nothing from criticism ; and the belligerent impulse of youth, 
 always prone to set things in general to rights, tempted him 
 to introduce an individual portrait which was unmistakable. 
 
 ** Appius reddens at each word you speak, 
 And stares tremendous with a threatening eye, 
 Like some grim tyrant in old tapestry," 
 
 says the rash and irreverent youth. Dennis, who had writ- 
 ten a tragedy on the subject of Appius and Virginia, was 
 one of the foremost critics of the period. No doubt the 
 terse little sketch is very graphic, and, minute as it is, 
 
184 THE POET. 
 
 brings the victim before ns with appalling distinctness. 
 As soon as it was known who the author was — for the poem 
 was published anonymously — the offended critic retaliated. 
 He conceived himself to have been " attacked in his person 
 instead of his writings/' and did not hesitate to repay his 
 assailant in kind. " Inquire," he says, " between Sunning- 
 hill and Oakingham for a young short squat gentleman, the 
 very bow of the god of love, and tell me whether he be a 
 proper person to make personal reflections. He may extol 
 the ancients, but he has reason to thank the gods that he 
 was born a modern ; for had he been born of Grecian par- 
 ents, and his father consequently had by law had the absol- 
 ute disposal of him, his life had been no longer than that of 
 one of his poems — the life of half a day. Let the person of 
 a gentleman of his parts be never so contemptible, his in- 
 ward man is ten times more ridiculous ; it being impossible 
 that his outward form, though it be that of downright 
 mockery, should differ so much from human shape as his 
 unthinking immaterial part does from human understand- 
 ing." Such was the amiable manner in which literary 
 quarrels were conducted in the Augustan age. 
 
 Of this assault Pope writes with dignified calm, which 
 unfortunately was very shortlived, to his correspondent Mr 
 Caryl. ''I shall certainly never make the least reply to 
 him," he says, "not only because you advise me, but 
 because I have ever been of opinion that if a book can't 
 answer for itself to the public, 'tis to no sort of purpose for 
 its author to do it." He repeats a similar sentiment in a 
 letter to Addison, when condoling with him two years later, 
 in 1713, on an attack made by the same scandalous critic. 
 " Your opinion that it is entirely to be neglected would 
 have been my own had it been my own case," he says ; 
 " but I felt more warmth here than I did when first I saw 
 his book against myself (though, indeed, in two minutes it 
 made me heartily merry)." These are very fine sentiments 
 from the author of the * Dunciad.' Addison made up to him 
 by a most favourable notice in the ' Spectator,' for which 
 Pope wrote him a letter full of the humblest thanks ; then, 
 lest he should have deceived himself, and Steele should be 
 the author of the notice, the wily poet sent his acknowledg- 
 ments also to Addison's coadjutor. The correspondence 
 
THE POET. 185 
 
 thus begun with the representatives of what was periodical 
 literature in these days brought Pope temporarily into their 
 circle, and led to the publication of his ' Messiah,' and of the 
 well-known and much-commended ode, " A Dying Christian 
 to his Soul/' in the ' Spectator/ He maintained a corres- 
 pondence for some time both with Addison and Steele, and 
 wrote a prologue to the play of ' Cato," by way of homage 
 to the most popular man of letters that ever reigned in Eng- 
 land. Pope himself gives a graphic description of its suc- 
 cess. " Cato," he says, "was not so much the wonder of 
 Kome in his day as he is of Britons in ours. The numerous 
 and violent' claps of the Whig party on one side of the 
 theatre were echoed back by the Tories on the other. This 
 was the case, too, of the prologue writer, who was clapped 
 into a stanch Whig, sore against my will, at almost every two 
 lines/' The prologue was afterwards printed in the ' Spec- 
 tator,' with some lines of commendation from Steele. 
 
 Pope's admiration for Addison, or his natural spite, or 
 some other mingled reason, led him, however, on the same 
 occasion, into a very different kind of performance. Dennis 
 attacked * Cato ' in a violent pamphlet, and gave the poet 
 an opportunity of vengeance. He appears first to have 
 offered his services to Addison — "not in any direct reply to 
 such a critic, but only in some little raillery," he explains ; 
 " not in defence of you, but in contempt of him." It is 
 evident that Addison discouraged the suggestion, but Pope 
 was not to be balked. The ' Narrative of Dr Eobert Norris 
 on the Frenzy of F. D.' was published a few months after 
 the first appearance of ' Cato.' There is no attempt in this 
 extraordinary production to defend Addison or his play. It 
 is a mere personal attack of the fiercest and coarsest kind, 
 neither graphic nor amusing, even in its villanous way — an 
 onslaught perhaps worthy the victim, but certainly no credit 
 to the assailant. '^ Norris was an apothecary or quack in 
 Hatton Garden, where he displayed his sign of the Golden 
 Pestle and Mortar, and professed to have thirty years' 
 experience in the expeditious cure of lunatics." This prac- 
 titioner is represented as being called to the bedside of 
 Dennis up three pair of stairs^ in a miserable room, where 
 Lintot the bookseller is found ministering to the raving 
 critic. No piece of local spite launched by one angry 
 
186 THE POET. 
 
 Yestryman at another could be more contemptible than this 
 ebullition of the greatest poet of the age. It yields the 
 palm of grossness only to another performance of the same 
 description on the alleged poisoning of Curll, afterwards pro- 
 duced by the same hand, which is perhaps a little more 
 filthy, though not more despicable. Commentators, of 
 course, are to be found who find humour in these detestable 
 pages, but even Warburton confesses the ' Narrative ' to 
 have been '^ a mean performance, but dictated by the most 
 generous friendship ; " which, he adds, "meeting in the per- 
 son defended a heart incapable of the like exertion of virtue, 
 was not received v^ith that acknowledgment which such a 
 service deserved." 
 
 Fortunately for Addison's character, he did the very 
 reverse of acknowledging the service. At the risk of 
 making himself a more dangerous enemy than Dennis, he 
 immediately disclaimed all share in the villanous publica- 
 tion. " Mr Addison desires me to tell you," Steele writes to 
 Lintot, " he wholly disapproves the manner of treating Mr 
 Dennis in a little pamphlet, by way of Dr Norris's account. 
 When he thinks fit to take notice of Mr Dennis's objections 
 to his writings, he will do it in a way Mr Dennis will have 
 no just reason to complain of." What Addison could have 
 done else it is hard to imagine ; though the fashion of the 
 time was perhaps as much to blame as the poet who thus 
 demeaned himself. Unfortunately this disavowal sowed 
 seeds of enmity in Pope's mind, which afterwards came to 
 bitter and enduring fruit. 
 
 The end of his connection with the editors of the ' Spec- 
 tator ' and ' Guardian ' was marked by another curious little 
 episode in literary history. A series of papers written by 
 Tickell had appeared in the ' Spectator,' reviewing the 
 Pastoral poets from Theocritus downwards, in which Phillips 
 was largely quoted, and pronounced to be the legitimate 
 successor of Spenser. It w^as the same' Phillips whose 
 Pastorals had been published along with Pope's in Tonson's 
 ' Miscellany,' and the praise is said to have been " dictated 
 by friendship," — a motive-power of literary criticism with 
 which we are all acquainted. Fired with the injustice done 
 him, Pope wrote for the 'Guardian' an affected "Continua- 
 tion of some former Papers on the Subject of Pastorals," in 
 
THE POET. 187 
 
 whicli he makes an elaborate comparison between bis own 
 work and that of Phillips, to the pretended advantage of the 
 latter. Phillips, he says, excels in simplicity, a quality in 
 which even Virgil fails, " who has been thought guilty of 
 too courtly a style. ... Mr Pope has fallen into the 
 same error as Virgil," he adds, with mock solemnity ; and 
 goes on to applaud the judgment of Phillips in describing 
 wolves in England, and the fertility of his genius in pro- 
 ducing "finer beds of flowers than the most industrious 
 gardener," his roses, endives, lilies, kingcups, and daffodils 
 all blowing in the same season. " With what simplicity he 
 introduces two shepherds singing alternately," says the 
 malicious critic, instancing two of poor Phillips's nonsense 
 verses ; " while our other Pastoral writer," he adds, bringing 
 in with equal vanity and skill two of his own polished and 
 melodious stanzas, "in expressing the same thought, 
 deviates into downright poetry ! " He then goes on to in- 
 stance some specimens of the native English Pastoral, which 
 he applauds his rival for having caught the strain of — 
 
 ** Diggon Davy, I bid hur good-day, 
 Or Diggon liur is, or I mis-say." 
 
 And another, "the most beautiful example of the kind I 
 ever met with " — a west-country ballad, in which Cicely 
 begs her lover — 
 
 "Koger, go vetch the Kee, or else tha Zun 
 Will quite bego, bevore a'have half a don." 
 
 " After all that has been said," he concludes, " I hope 
 none can think it any injustice to Mr Pope that I forbore to 
 mention him as a Pastoral writer, since, upon the whole, he 
 is of the same class as Moschus and Bion, whom we have 
 excluded from that rank ; and of whose Eclogues, as well 
 as of some of Virgil's, it may be said that (according to the 
 description we have given of this sort of poetry) they are 
 by no means Pastorals, but something better." 
 
 This amazing production was inserted by Steele, either in 
 fright or bewilderment, and raised such a ferment as may be 
 supposed, setting the wits agape at its daring insolence and 
 vanity, and driving the pastoral Phillips half-mad with rage. 
 He is said to have put up a rod in the public room at Britten's 
 coffeehouse, with which to take vengeance upon his critic. 
 
188 THE POET. 
 
 While all this was going on, better work proceeded with 
 it, by that curious and blessed inconsistency of human 
 nature which permits the sweetest fruit to grow along with 
 the bitterest. The ' Rape of the Lock,' the ' Elegy to an 
 unfortunate Lady,' the ' Eloise and Abelard,' were all written 
 before Pope had reached the age of thirty. The rank which 
 these poems take in the permanent literature of the country 
 it is very difficult to define. They are too perfect in expres- 
 sion to fall into the second class, and too artificial to rise to 
 the first. But they were undoubtedly the first and most 
 powerful productions of their age in poetry, and were the 
 subject of unbounded panegyric from his contemporaries. 
 It is curious to read the pages of elaborate comment with 
 which they are accompanied. " If it should be thought," 
 says Warton, in one of his many notes to the ' Rape of the 
 Lock,' after a comparison of the occupations of Ariel in the 
 ' Tempest' with those of Ariel in Pope's masterpiece, "that 
 Shakespeare has the merit of being the first who imagined 
 proper employments to imaginary persons, yet it must be 
 granted that, by the addition of the most delicate satire to 
 the most lively fancy. Pope,, in a following passage, has 
 equalled anything in Shakespeare, or perhaps in any other 
 author/' The following passage is this : — 
 
 * ' Our humble province is to guard the Fair ; 
 Not a less pleasing though less glorious care, 
 To save the powder from too rude a gale, 
 Nor let the imprisoned essences exhale ; 
 To draw fresh colours from the vernal flowers ; 
 To steal from rainbows ere they drop in showers 
 A brighter wash ; to curl their waving hairs, 
 Assist their blushes, and inspire their airs ; 
 Nay, oft in dreams invention we bestow 
 To change a flounce or add a furbelow. " 
 
 This is put in comparison with that account of Ariel's 
 employments in which he " runs upon the sharp wind of the 
 north," dives "■ into the fire," "rides on the curled clouds," 
 and fetches " dew from the still vext Bermoothes ! " The 
 commentators again and again remark upon " the exquisite 
 skill, humour, and pleasantry" of the poem, the "beautiful 
 fiction " of this and that passage. " There is much plea- 
 santry in the conduct of this scene," says Warburton. When 
 
THE POET. 189 
 
 Pope himself intimates a point at which four lines were 
 added — "Added with great dexterity, beauty, and pro- 
 priety!" says his admiring editor. In the 'Elegy,' the 
 footnotes point out with what " great tenderness and pathos " 
 the circumstances of the story are touched, and the striking 
 character of the opening metaphor. " Can anything be 
 more naturally pathetic ? " again cries Warburton. The 
 same critic tells us, when we reach the Prologue to Addi- 
 son's ' Cato,' that this and the Epilogue to ' Jane Shore,' 
 which follows, " are the most perfect models of this species 
 of writing." Thus the poet is accompanied at every step 
 by a chorus of commentators ready to point out any beauty 
 to the reader, who otherwise might miss it. Pope himself 
 published a ' Key to the Lock ' — a pamphlet intended to 
 insinuate that the poem had a political meaning ; but this 
 seems to have been a mere expedient to widen the popu- 
 larity for which he had an unquenchable thirst. 
 
 Great as was the fame of these poems, however, they seem 
 to have produced more praise than pudding to their author; 
 and struck by some whimsy, or moved by some impulse of 
 supposed prudence, he put himself under the charge of his 
 friend Jervase the painter, to learn that art — an undertaking 
 which came to nothing. " All his poetry, we are told, had 
 not brought him a hundred pounds,'' and the young author 
 wanted money and remunerative work. Long before. Sir 
 William Trumbull, in the depths of the Forest, had suggested 
 to him a translation of the ' Iliad,' and the advice had been 
 echoed by Addison and other competent counsellors. It 
 was in the year 1713 that he decided to act upon this sug- 
 gestion, and began his translation. The work was to be 
 published by subscription, in six volumes, at one guinea 
 each ; and Pope's friends immediately undertook to fill up 
 his list of subscribers. " The author shall not begin to print 
 tiU I have a thousand guineas for him," said Swift, swagger- 
 ing in an antechamber at Court. As for the work itself, it 
 was soon found to be no light or easy task. His education 
 makes it impossible to suppose that his own learning could 
 have been equal to the undertaking ; and though he assures 
 Addison, at the outset, that " the Greek fortification, upon a 
 nearer approach, does not appear so formidable as it did, and 
 I am almost apt to flatter myself that Homer secretly seems 
 
190 THE POET. 
 
 inclined to a correspondence with me in letting me into a 
 good part of his intentions," to his more familiar friends he 
 expressed other sentiments. " In the beginning of my 
 translating Homer/' he said to Spence, " I wished anybody 
 would hang me a hundred times. It sat so very heavily on 
 my mind at first, that I often used to dream of it, and even 
 do so sometimes still to this day. My dream usually was 
 that I had set out on a very long journey, puzzled which 
 way to take, and full of fears that I should never get to the 
 end of it." " My time and eyes have been wholly employed 
 upon Homer, whom I almost fear I shall find but one way 
 of imitating, which is in his blindness," he writes to another 
 correspondent. " I am perpetually afflicted with headaches, 
 that very much affect my sight." 
 
 Then matters began to get a little better. When he fell 
 into the methodical ways of a translator, whose work is cut 
 and dry before him, and got into the habit of doing thirty or 
 forty lines in the morning before he got out of bed, his work 
 became easier to him. " Adieu ! I am going to forget you," 
 he says to Mr Digby ; " this minute you took up all my 
 mind — the next, I shall think of nothing but the reconcilia- 
 tion with Agamemnon and the recovery of Briseis. I shall 
 be Achilles's humble servant these two months. ... It is^ 
 not to be expressed how heartily' I wish the death of all 
 Homer's heroes, one after another." " When people talk of 
 going to church," he says to his friend Jervase, " I think of 
 sacrifices and libations ; when I see the parson, I address 
 him as Chryses, priest of Apollo. ... I have the great- 
 est proof in nature at present of the amusing power of poetry, 
 for it takes me up so entirely that I scarce see what passes 
 under my nose, and hear nothing that is said about me. 
 . . . I now and then just miss you as I step into bed. 
 This minute, indeed, I want extremely to see you ; the next, 
 I shall dream of nothing but the taking of Troy or the re- 
 covery of Briseis." 
 
 As for the work itself, Dr Johnson, who has no confidence 
 in Pope's scholarship, evidently gives him credit for having 
 come to a clear perception of the sense of his author, chiefly 
 through the translations which abounded in Latin, French, 
 and English. " When he felt himself deficient he sought 
 assistance ; and what man of learning would refuse to help 
 
THE POET. 191 
 
 Lim ? " Some men of learning were, indeed, employed to 
 help him, one of whom, " the celebrated Jortin," made notes 
 for him from Eustathius for three or four guineas a-book. 
 Toilsome as the labour was, it had its substantial reward — a 
 reward, perhaps, unprecedented and unequalled in its way, 
 though the actual amount of money gained has been sur- 
 passed in other branches of literature. He had two hundred 
 pounds for each volume from the publisher, beside the sub- 
 scriptions ; and the work altogether produced a sum of 
 £5320. " No such encouragement to literature had ever 
 before been manifested," says Mr Carruthers. The poet 
 was at once delivered out of his supposed embarrass- 
 ments; and was henceforward able to act for himself, to 
 choose his own residence, and feel himself an independent 
 man. 
 
 The disposal of this sum is very curious, and will make 
 the mouths of the owners of small fortunes water. " With 
 the produce of this subscription, which he had too much 
 discretion to squander, he secured his future life from want 
 by considerable annuities. The estate of the Duke of Buck- 
 ingham was found to have been charged with five hundred 
 pounds a-year, payable to Pope, which, doubtless, his tran- 
 slation enabled him to purchase." And, in addition to this, 
 he bought the lease of his house at Twickenham. One rubs 
 one's eyes over the marvellous balance-sheet. Five hundred 
 a-year and a villa out of five thousand pounds ! It is tan- 
 talising to have such a difference held up before us ; the 
 entire capital nowadays would not purchase the villa, not to 
 speak of the annuity. It is curious, at the same time, to 
 note the. way in which this large sum was attained. The 
 subscribers seem to have given what they pleased, though 
 the price was fixed at a guinea the volume ; and the warmer 
 the friendship, no doubt, the larger would be the subscrip- 
 tion. The King, for instance, gave two hundred pounds, 
 and the Prince one hundred pounds, for their copies. There 
 is a mixture of charity, or at least alms, in the transaction, 
 which might be unpalatable to a modern author; though it 
 hurt nobody's feelings in those days. But how literary 
 enthusiasm should affect rates of interest is a more puzzling 
 question, and the startled observer is left uninformed. The 
 greatest poet now would find it difficult to purchase for five 
 
192 THE POET. 
 
 thousand pounds a villa on the Thames, and an income of 
 five hundred a-year. 
 
 Before he came to his fortune, however, Pope's family had 
 left Binfield. He writes to a friend, in his magnificent way, 
 that his father and mother "had disposed of their small 
 estate" (the twenty acres), and that he had " found an asylum 
 for their old age at Chiswick, under the wing of my Lord 
 Burlington." This asylum was one of a row of houses called 
 Mawson's Buildings, which, it is said, still remain near the 
 landing-place. Here the father died to whom Pope had 
 been a good son, and whose death he lamented with great 
 feeling. 
 
 There is a touching little note extant addressed to Martha 
 Blount which bears all the traces of genuine grief: "My 
 poor father died last night. Believe, since I don't forget you 
 this moment, I never shall," he writes, with rare and affect- 
 ing simplicity, to the friend of his whole life. Every evi- 
 dence unites in proving him a good son, as well as a steady 
 and constant friend. 
 
 Such little touches as these — so few, so brief, so scantily 
 sown along the arid course of years — are all the traces of a 
 real human life that are to be found in Pope's history. Let 
 us pause once more at the Twickenham villa, procured by 
 his new wealth, which, in the barren tale filled from begin- 
 ning to end with shadows instead of realities, may be sup- 
 posed to stand for the happiness of the poet's life. 
 
 The house which now occupies the site, it is right to say, 
 has nothing to do with Pope. It is not even enlarged from 
 the nucleus of his little house, like the villa at Binfield. The 
 original habitation, which consisted of " a small hall paved 
 with stone, and two small parlours on each side," with a 
 corresponding upper floor — the stereotyped arrangement still 
 faithfully retained by the homely British architect — has totally 
 disappeared. A stately house, with wings, and accommoda- 
 tion for a family of distinction, as auctioneers say, looks now 
 over the pretty lawns upon the everlasting river, which takes 
 no heed of such changes. Most people know that suburban 
 paradise. Of its kind there is no lovelier spot. The soft 
 slopes of Kichmond rise close at hand ; the broad, silvery 
 thread of the Thames gives life and interest to the country. 
 Noble cedars, for which the neighbourhood is famous, stand 
 
THE POET. 193 
 
 here and there upon the perfect lawns ; pensive willows 
 sweep their long branches to the water's edge ; here and 
 there the foliage breaks and reveals to the spectator in his 
 boat, like a sudden secret, a house withdrawn in its little 
 open, amid velvet turf and flowering shrubs and brilliant 
 flower-beds. It is nature, trained and trimmed and polished 
 to the last perfection, but still it is nature ; a full, great, 
 silent, eloquent river — a world of stately, responsive trees — 
 and, at every comer you turn, a human habitation, concealed 
 with dainty art from the ruder side of the world, revealing 
 itself with sudden frankness, with open windows, with family 
 groups upon its lawns, to the friendly stream. It is probable 
 that Pope had felt the charm of the river in his temporary 
 residence at Chiswick. Its soft monotony of rhythm must 
 have found some answer in the mind which could give vent 
 to streams of verse almost as perfect. In this sweet retire- 
 ment he established himself in the end of the year 1717, 
 being then nearly thirty, a careful, thrifty, and not unacute 
 man of business. His father had left him, he says, "the 
 ticklish management of so narrow a fortune, that any one 
 false step would be fatal." But he had his five thousand 
 pounds beside, and, it is evident, was very well to do. The 
 house was " small and bad," Horace Walpole tells us. 
 
 ' ' Close to the grotto of the Twickenham bard — 
 Too close — adjoins a tanner's yard," 
 
 says a contemporary epigram ; but probably Pope was not 
 very fastidious. His small parlours were enough for him, 
 and his river and trees could not be surpassed. " It was a 
 little bit of ground of five acres, enclosed with three lanes, 
 and seeming nothing," Horace informs us. " Pope had 
 twisted and twirled, and rhymed, and harmonised this, till it 
 appeared two or three sweet little lawns, opening and open- 
 ing beyond one another, and the whole surrounded with 
 thick impenetrable woods." This process cost him, his ser- 
 vant reports, £6000, which is another proof of the curious 
 multiplication of money in his fortunate hands. The pride 
 of the establishment, however, was a grotto, made up with 
 spar, fossils, and bits of looking-glass, and which, to the 
 altered taste of the present age, sounds very like a bit of 
 Cremorne. Pope himself describes it with pride to his friend 
 Edward Blount for the edification of certain young ladies 
 
 N 
 
194 THE POET. 
 
 who, " in their green gowns," had been used to trip about 
 the little lawn. To do him justice, the grotto was not pure 
 invention on his part, but an expedient to make the most of 
 an underground passage from one part of his grounds to the 
 other, his limited space being cut in two by the highroad to 
 London. "From the river Thames you see through my 
 arch up a walk of the wilderness, to a kind of open temple 
 wholly composed of shells in the rustic manner," he says ; 
 *' and from that distance under the temple you look down 
 through a sloping arcade of trees, and see the sails on the 
 river passing suddenly and vanishing, as through a perspec- 
 tive glass." The delusive splendour which it was the poet's 
 way to throw over all his surroundings, has its ordinary 
 dilating effect, no doubt, upon Twickenham as upon his for- 
 mer home. The picture he leaves us is one of an elegant 
 retirement, not without fantastic traces of the bad taste of 
 the time, but redeemed by the sweep of green lawn and fine 
 trees — a house of refined freedom, with open doors to all the 
 worthiest, and a simple, liberal, refined hospitality. 
 
 " Know, all the distant din that world can keep 
 KoUs o'er my grotto and but soothes my sleep ; 
 There my retreat the best companions grace, 
 Chiefs out of war and statesmen out of place. 
 There St John mingles with my friendly bowl , 
 The feast of reason and the flow of soul ; 
 And he whose lightning pierced the Iberian pines, 
 Now forms my quincunz, and now ranks my vines." 
 
 Nor is their wanting lowlier company than Bolingbroke 
 and Peterborough. Here is a still more extended sketch of 
 the plentiful simplicity of the poet's house. He declares 
 himself as happy in his elegant humility as if he had been 
 (as once he hoped, " in South Sea days ") the lord of thou- 
 sands ; or (with the usual pleasant delusion about little 
 Binfield),— 
 
 *' In forest planted hy a father's hand. 
 
 As in five acres now of rented land, 
 
 Content with little, I can peddle here, 
 
 On broccoli and mutton round the year. 
 
 But ancient friends, though poor or out of play, 
 
 That touch my bell, I cannot turn away. 
 
 'Tis true no turbots dignify my boards. 
 
 But gudgeons, flounders, — what my Thames affords. 
 
THE POET. 196 
 
 To Hounslow Heath I point, and Banstead Down, 
 Thence comes my mutton, and these chicks my own. 
 From yon old walnut-tree a shower shall fall, 
 And grapes long lingering on my only wall, 
 And figs from standard and espalier join — 
 The devil's In you if you cannot dine. 
 
 My lands are sold, my father's house is gone ; 
 
 I'll hire another's ; is not that my own. 
 
 And yours, my friends ? through whose free opening gate 
 
 None comes too early, none departs too late." 
 
 This profusion of hospitality is curiously commented upon 
 by Dr Johnson's account of Pope's remarkable frugality, 
 which was shown, says his biographer, " in a niggardly re- 
 ception of his friends and scantiness of entertainment ; as 
 when he had two guests in his house, he would set at supper 
 a single pint upon the table, and having himself taken two 
 small glasses, would retire and say, ' Gentlemen, I leave you 
 to your wine ! ' " 
 
 It was at Twickenham that the one little gleam of passion 
 which seems for a time to have flashed over his life came to 
 an end. If he loved Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, or if he 
 only admired her, it is hard to tell; but there are signs 
 which lead the observer to suppose that the beautiful and 
 brilliant woman had actually struck the rock and called 
 forth some natural gush of emotion. The following verses 
 would almost prove such a miracle ; they were evidently 
 written while he was employed in the beautifying of his 
 gardens and. house : — 
 
 " Ah, friend, 'tis true — this truth you lovers know — 
 In vain my structures rise, my gardens grow ; 
 In vain fair Thames reflects the douhle scenes 
 Of hanging mountains and of sloping greens. 
 Joy dwells not there ; to happier seats it flies. 
 And only dwells where Wortley casts her eyes. 
 "What are the gay parterre, the checkered shade, 
 The morning bower, the evening colonnade. 
 But soft recesses of uneasy minds. 
 To sigh unheard into the passing winds ? 
 So the struck deer in some sequestered part 
 Lies down to die, the arrow at his heart. 
 There, stretched unseen in coverts hid from day. 
 Bleeds drop by drop, and pants his life away." 
 
196 THE POET. 
 
 Not long after these beautiful verses were written, the 
 poet branded the object of his admiration in such couplets 
 as the critic cannot quote. The cool and concentrated hate 
 with which he impales too many other victims is an alto- 
 gether different sentiment from the furious rage with which 
 he flies at the name of Sappho whenever he can bring it in. 
 If it was unrequited love which produced such venomous 
 fury, it is, Heaven be praised! a rare exhibition. The story 
 is too fragmentary to be entered into ; but the two names 
 must be associated as long as the literature of that strange, 
 squabbling, abusive age continues to interest the world. 
 
 Pope was at the height of his fame and prosperity when 
 he arranged the smooth lawns, and planted the artful bosquets 
 about his little Twickenham house ; he had published his 
 best works, and got successfully through his hardest bit of 
 literary toil; and honour and success had rewarded him. 
 And yet, in the midst of all those softening influences of 
 personal wellbeing, the fountain of bitterness was again 
 opened. It flowed forth first upon Addison, who had again, 
 as Pope believed, sinned against him. Tickell, one of Ad- 
 dison's literary followers, was, it appears, engaged on a 
 translation of the first books of the ' Iliad' when Pope took 
 up the same work. When both .books appeared, Addison, 
 out of friendship for Tickell or jealousy of Pope, or inad- 
 vertence, or bad taste, declared that though " both were 
 good, Tickell's was the best that had ever been written." 
 This opinion sent the poet ablaze ; wild plans of revenge 
 seem to have shot through his brain. He determined to 
 publish together " the four versions of Dryden, Mainwaring, 
 Tickell, and his own, that they might be readily compared 
 and fairly estimated." He intended to publish a vigorous 
 criticism of TickelFs translation, " and had marked a copy 
 which I have seen,"' says Dr Johnson, " in all places that 
 appeared defective." In short, he went mad with mortified 
 vanity, jealousy, and rage. Balked in both those dignified 
 and charitable intentions, the whole bitterness of his heart 
 poured forth upon Addison. What was probably a mere ex- 
 pression of friendship and favouritism, gradually grew and 
 magnified under Pope's gaze till it became a deliberate and 
 malicious intention to forestall him in his work, and cut him 
 off from his reward. He got at last to believe, or to pretend 
 
THE POET. 197 
 
 to believe, tliat the other translation was Addison's own, and 
 not Tickell's; and the result of all his gathering rage was 
 the well-known satire, of which almost every line has be- 
 come a proverb, and which has served the purpose of many 
 another mortified and embittered soul : — 
 
 " "Were there one whose fires 
 True genius kindles and fair fame inspires, 
 Blest with each talent, and each art to please, 
 And born to write, converse, and live at 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. 
 
 Like Cato give his little senate laws. 
 And sit attentive to his own applause ; 
 "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?" 
 
 This piece of concentrated abuse Pope says he sent to 
 Addison in a letter, animadverting freely on his sins towards 
 himself. " He used me very civilly ever after," says the poet. 
 But unfortunately Pope's word does not carry the weight 
 necessary to win faith for such a story; and there is no evi- 
 dence to support it. It was only after Addison was dead 
 and incapable of response that this character of him glided 
 into print. Its power and intensity are extraordinary; and 
 probably, of its kind, nothing in literature is more perfect. 
 Atterbury is said to have considered it the best thing Pope 
 had ever done. " Since you now, therefore, know where 
 your real strength lies, I hope you will not suffer that talent 
 to lie unemployed," the Bishop writes, with a political ap- 
 preciation of the bitter gift; and the advice was fatally well 
 followed. 
 
 Dennis and Curll had called forth from Pope's hands only 
 the gross abuse and personality which came natural at 
 the period; but his enemies were henceforth to be treated 
 
198 THE POET. 
 
 with sharper and daintier weapons. The verses on Addison 
 were pubHshed in 1722, and already two other "unfortunates 
 gasped impaled in his company: " Bufo," Lord Halifax, and 
 " Sporus," Lord Hervey. Lady Mary, the Duchess of Marl- 
 borough, and a host of lesser victims, afterwards followed. 
 To Pope and to his friends this kind of personal crucifixion, 
 which is now banished, if it exists at all, to the lowest class 
 of scribblers, or to the' utterances of the parish muse, seems to 
 have been considered a perfectly legitimate literary exercise. 
 Swift employed the same expedient freely, and Gay built 
 his little fortune and his troubles at once on the same dis- 
 reputable foundation. There is a comedy called 'Three 
 Hours after Marriage,' in which Gay is said to have been 
 aided by Pope and Arbuthnot. " Fossile the husband was 
 intended to ridicule Dr Woodward; Sir Tremendous, the 
 greatest critic of the day, was Dennis," &c. &c. The popu- 
 lar mind has scarcely yet lost the stinging impression of 
 these social treacheries, and still retains a lingering distrust 
 of the writer who has it in his power to hold up his neigh- 
 bour to the laughter of the world. But fortunately the fashion 
 is over, and poets do not now promote their own reputation 
 by ruthless slaughter of the good fame of others. 
 
 The successful ' Iliad" led to a translation of the ' Odys- 
 sey,' in which Pope was assisted by " two of his friends," 
 Elijah Fen ton and Broome, whose labours, however, were 
 acknowledged in a very niggardly way. They translated 
 twelve books between them, but were credited in the pre- 
 face with only five. For this piece of work Pope received 
 £2885 — after paying £700 to his assistants; but we are not 
 informed whether he laid it out to equal advantage with his 
 first gains. 
 
 None of these works, however, serious as they were, oc- 
 cupied so much of his life or filled his thoughts half so in- 
 tensely as did the ' Dunciad,' a work which has now little 
 more than an archaeological interest. The idea of a grand 
 epic, mock-heroic, of the same character as that which had 
 already brought him such fame, embodying the reign of 
 Dulness and her chief leaders and champions, had long 
 pleased Pope's imagination. And it was an idea which 
 naturally charmed his friends, living as they did in a kind 
 of Ishmaelitish warfare with everybody who opposed or 
 
THE POET. 199 
 
 threatened tliem. With such a gladiator as Swift by his 
 side, the natural instinct which makes any creature possess- 
 ed of a sting use it with prompt and unhesitating readiness, 
 was not likely to be softened in the irritable little poet. 
 But the men he satirised are dead and gone beyond even 
 the power of the poet to bring them back to life — their 
 names, as he himself prophesied, last but as flies in amber, 
 shut up in the meshes of his verse. 
 
 " The things, we know, are neither rich nor rare. 
 But wonder how the devil they got there. " 
 
 What is Tibbalds to us far down in the nineteenth century, 
 or Phillips, or Dennis, or Gibber? To Pope they were his 
 enemies, and therefore important; but not even the charms 
 of his verse can make them interesting. While Pope was 
 busy about this thankless and unworthy labour. Swift w^as 
 with him at Twickenham; and here is the picture he gives 
 — a glimpse unusually distinct — of the odd little workshop, 
 were poems were made and reputations killed : — 
 
 *' Pope has the talent, well to speak, j 
 But not to reach the ear ; 
 His loudest voice is low and weak, 
 The Dean too deaf to hear. 
 
 Awhile they on each other look, 
 
 Then different studies choose ; 
 The Dean sits plodding on a book. 
 
 Pope walks and courts the Muse. 
 
 Now backs of letters, though designed 
 
 For those who more will need 'em. 
 Are filled with hints, and interlined, 
 
 Himself can hardly read 'em. 
 
 Yet to the Dean this share allot. 
 
 He claims it by a canon, 
 That without which a thing is not, 
 
 Is causa sine qud non. 
 
 Thus, Pope, in vain you boast your wit, . 
 
 For had our deaf divine 
 Been for your conversation fit 
 
 You had not writ a line. " 
 
200 THE POET. 
 
 The serious works produced in the latter part of Pope's 
 life were his epistles, and specially the 'Essay on Man/ 
 which Bolingbroke is supposed to have inspired. It was 
 published anonymously, with one of the author's usual wiles, 
 his friends being employed to go about whispering that now 
 at last Pope had a real rival. He himself, in his preface, 
 hypocritically (but always with characteristic self-conceit) 
 professes that he " imitates no man," and "would be thought 
 to vie with no man in these epistles ; particularly with the 
 noted author of two lately published^ This trick put out the 
 instinct of the public ; and many other artifices of the same 
 kind, elaborate appeals to critics here and there what they 
 thought of it, kept up for a time the illusion. The poet, 
 however, had one prick of an amusing kind. He inquired 
 of Mallet, who had become one of his retinue, what new 
 things there were in literature ? Nothing, he was answered, 
 worth notice ; only a thing called an ' Essay on Man,' poor in 
 poetry and in philosophy. The furious little poet, unpre- 
 pared, started up in arms. " I wrote it," he said, in sudden 
 rage ; and the reader is glad he had that one requital of his 
 own perpetual sting. Other epistles, addressed to various 
 persons, preceded and followed the Essay; the 'Imitations 
 of Horace,' with all their provoking stabs, and the ' Epistle 
 to Arbuthnot,' in which lay, keen atid bitter, the posthumous 
 murder of Addison. All' of them were sharpened by darts 
 of offence to everybody who had ever crossed his path, and 
 to some who had not. The assault on the Duchess of Marl- 
 borough, in the character of Atossa (to withdraw which he 
 is proved to have accepted a thousand pounds : he took the 
 money and printed the character !), and that on the Duke of 
 Chandos, persons who had never harmed him, must have 
 been done in the mere wantonness of mischief. His hand 
 was against every man, except, indeed, the few who praised 
 and supported him, to whom he was, after his kind, a warm 
 friend. To Warburton, who defended the Essay from imputa- 
 tions of scepticism, he was the means of bringing high 
 advance in fortune ; and to all appearance he was charitable, 
 and ready to give even above his means ; but it is evident 
 that the temptation of the sting was as much too much for 
 Pope as it is to the wasp who pursues us when the windows 
 are open, and the domestic table exposed in the deshabille of 
 
THE POET. 201 
 
 summer. Whoever touched him, looked at him, interposed 
 between him and the sun, suffered on the spot, without 
 warning or time to escape. And some of his finest efforts 
 are unquestionably contained in these attacks ; their con- 
 ciseness, and closQ, desperate, well-aimed blows are perfect 
 in their way. 
 
 The society at Twickenham during all this period, not- 
 withstanding " the single pint " for supper, must have been 
 as brilliant as wit and fame could make it. Swift paid one 
 visit of five months to his friend ; and Bolingbroke, Peter- 
 borough, and Chesterfield, all frequented the little house. 
 Voltaire, when a visitor at St John's House of Dawley, also 
 visited his brother poet, and talked, it is said, so grossly, 
 that Mrs Pope was driven from the table. And there, too. 
 Gay, Arbuthnot, and a hundred lesser lights, twinkled with 
 mild radiance. On one of Swift's visits a joint miscellany 
 was planned, which the Dean, Gay, and Pope compounded 
 together. In their preface to this joint performance the 
 poets complain that they have been " extremely ill-used by 
 some booksellers," who had given to the world every loose 
 paper in prose or verse, obtained from the authors by impor- 
 tunity, or by the indiscretion of friends, and that even the 
 papers of the dead had been ransacked to find letters ; a 
 curious statement, for which there seems to have been no sort 
 of foundation. It would " seem to have been hazarded with a 
 view of preparing for some subsequent publication of let- 
 ters," says Mr Carruthers, who has set forth all the curious 
 intrigues which followed. This was indeed a favourite sub- 
 ject of complaint with Pope, whose restless vanity pleased 
 itself with such a supposed evidence of his importance. He 
 plays with the notion in many of his letters, as if he 
 loved it. 
 
 "This letter (like all mine) will he a rhapsody," he says, affectedly, 
 when writing to Swift ; "it is many years ago since I wrote as a wit. 
 . . . I write to you more negligently — that is, more openly — and 
 what all but such as love one another would call writing worse. I smile 
 to think how Curll would he bit, were our epistles to fall into his hands, 
 and how gloriously they would fall short of every ingenious reader's ex- 
 pectations ! . . . Some letters of mine (to Wycherley) the booksellers 
 have got and printed. ... I don't much approve of it, though there 
 is nothing in it for me to be ashamed of, because I will not be ashamed 
 of anything I do not do myself, or of anything that is not immoral, but 
 
202 THE POET. 
 
 merely dull ; as, for instance if they printed this letter I am. now writing, 
 which they easily may, if the underlings at the post-office please to 
 take a copy of it." 
 
 From all this it is easy to perceive that, long accustomed 
 as Pope ought to have been by this time to his fame, it still 
 sat on him like a ploughboy's Sunday clothes. He wanted 
 to be sure that everybody knew it was he, and saw his 
 finery, and pleased himself with the idea of a universal 
 curiosity, the very importance of which was a tribute to his 
 greatness. At a later period, when Gay, whom he loved, 
 was dead, and Swift dying, and Bolingbroke.' in France, he 
 took the most curious means of securing for himself the 
 notoriety he loved. Let us hope that it was the weariness 
 of waning life, and the loneliness that had fallen upon him, 
 which moved the poet to so strange a diversion for his soli- 
 tude. It is thus it came about. 
 
 In the year 1733, Pope being then a man of about forty- 
 five, precisely at the age when men in general are most 
 scrupulous about the privacy of their personal life, a mysteri- 
 ous communication was made to Curll the bookseller, touch- 
 ing a large collection of the poet's letters from his youth to 
 the year 1727. Curll communicated with Pope himself on 
 the subject, informing him that he meant to publish them ; 
 and Pope's reply was made by advertisements in the news- 
 papers, proclaiming to all the world that he had nothing to 
 do with Curll, that he knew of no such collection of letters, 
 and that he should not trouble himself about the matter. 
 Finally, after much mysterious communication between the 
 publisher and his unknown correspondents, the book, already 
 printed by these darkling conspirators, was given to the 
 public. It was advertised with the names of the persons to 
 whom and from whom the letters came ; " Mr Pope's Literary 
 Correspondence for thirty years ; being a collection of letters, 
 regularly digested, written to him by the Eight Hon. the 
 late Earl of Halifax, Earl of Burlington, Secretary Craggs, 
 Sir William Trumbull, &c. &c. &c." Curll's advertisement 
 was a direct infringement of a rule of the House of Lords, 
 which prohibited the publication of any peer's letters with- 
 out his consent, and as such was brought under the notice 
 of the House ; upon which the books were seized, the 
 printer and publisher summoned to the bar, and notoriety in 
 
THE POET. 203 
 
 its fullest and sweetest extent obtained on all hands, Pope 
 himself meanwhile fulminating in the newspapers against 
 the surreptitious publication, and offering rewards to the 
 apocryphal persons who had betrayed him. His next move 
 was made with the indignant grandeur of injured virtue. 
 " Whereas several booksellers have printed surreptitious 
 and incorrect editions of letters as mine, some of which are 
 not so, and others interpolated, ... I think myself 
 under a necessity to publish such of the said letters as are 
 genuine, with the addition of some others of a nature less 
 insignificant," he proclaims, in princely guise, in the ' London 
 Gazette.' The trial had succeeded more perfectly than he 
 could have hoped. " Being desirous of printing his letters, 
 and not knowing how to do without imputation of vanity 
 what has in this country been done very rarely. Pope," says 
 Dr Johnson, " contrived an appearance of compulsion, that 
 when he could complain that his letters were surreptitiously 
 published he might decently and defensively publish them 
 himself" 
 
 The artifice succeeded, but it does not seem to have de- 
 ceived any one. The world in general, always so much 
 better aware than the juggler supposes of the way in which 
 his tricks are elaborated, saw the hand behind the scenes 
 that moved all, and knew for what motive the House of 
 Lords was moved to question, and the newspapers rang with 
 counter-advertisements. But the poet, blowing his own 
 trumpet till his cheeks ached, did not perceive that every- 
 body saw him, and saw through his inventions. The re- 
 velation which he affected to be forced from him, and which 
 he pretended was honest and complete, was in reality as 
 careful a work of art as any he had produced. The letters 
 were squeezed and pared and fitted into shape like the feet 
 of Cinderella's sisters. Names were transposed, sentiments 
 transferred — the apologies, professions, and offers of friend- 
 ship made to one man were handed over to another — the 
 verses addressed to one woman made to do service for a 
 second — a hundred tricks played with the correspondence 
 which remorseless time, and the eyes of critics, and the 
 British Museum, have pitilessly discovered. The " surrep- 
 titious edition " was as carefully " corrected " and manipu- 
 lated as the genuine one. Never was there a more elaborate 
 
204 THE POET. 
 
 offering laid on the altars of vanity, and seldom has so 
 curious an incident occurred in literary history. '' Pope's 
 private correspondence thus promulgated filled the nation 
 with praises of his candour, tenderness, and benevolence, the 
 purity of his purposes, and the fidelity of his friendship/' 
 He had thus the gratification of, as it were, posthumous 
 praise and personal glorification while still in the prime of 
 his life, and with possible laurels still before him to win. 
 
 Pope's prime, however, was not like that of a man of 
 ordinary health and size. He had been forced, or had forced 
 himself, into premature bloom, and premature decay had 
 followed. He who had been a precocious man and philo- 
 sopher at sixteen, was, at forty-six, old, querulous, and 
 decaying. " The changes of the weather affect me much," 
 he writes. " The mornings are my life ; in the evenings I 
 am not dead, indeed, but sleep, and am stupid enough. I 
 love reading still better than conversation, but my eyes fail, 
 and at the hours when most people indulge in company I 
 am tired, and find the labour of the past day sufficient to 
 weigh me down ; so I hide myself in bed, as a bird in his 
 nest, much about the same time." His health failed 
 gradually, and infirmities crept upon him. Yet up to almost 
 the last year of his life he was still employed, with the aid 
 of Warburton, in slaughtering with cruel tortures every new 
 butterfly that fluttered across his path, every fly that had 
 ever ventured to buzz at Pope. Kevenge went to the length 
 of the tiniest insect ; and not the most elaborate system of 
 notes can wake any interest in the bosom of the living 
 reader as to the dead triflers of the * Dunciad.' But though 
 thus remorseless and vindictive to his critics, the poet clung 
 to his friends with pathetic fidelity. He made efforts to 
 visit them, though his poor little frame was dropping to 
 pieces. " Yes, I would see you as long as I can see you," 
 he writes to Bolingbroke, " and then shut my eyes upon the 
 world as a thing worth seeing no longer. If your charity 
 would take up a small bird that is half-dead of the frost, and 
 set it chirping for half an hour, I will jump into my cage 
 and put myself into your hands to-morrow at any hour you 
 send." Up till very nearly the last, he still managed to 
 glide along the river-side in his boat as far as Battersea, 
 where Bolingbroke was, and was carried up in his chair to 
 
THE POET. 205 
 
 dine with his friend. The reader will see more trace of a 
 human nature in those last glimpses of the dying poet than 
 have been visible through all his previous life. The husk 
 peels off with the long friction of time ; with some the 
 process is shorter, with some longer. Pope had so small a 
 soul, so tiny a central point of humanity, that the very last 
 covering of all has almost fallen away before the spirit 
 shows. But it does become visible at the end. As he sits 
 in the sun on his terrace talking feebly with his friends — 
 smiling faintly at himself, the poor old bird half-dead in the 
 frost — casting faint looks of faithful friendship at Martha 
 Blount, who, they say, was indifferent — and at Bolingbroke, 
 whose heart was touched — a certain interest gathers round 
 him. " It was very observable," during this last illness, that 
 Mrs Blount's coming in gave him a new turn of spirits or a 
 temporary strength. She was a little lively old woman by 
 that time, in the eyes of the younger generation ; but that 
 did not affect her charm to her friend. Gleams of a spiritual 
 atmosphere about him appear faintly in those waning days, 
 — he saw strange colours in the rooms, and an arm stretch- 
 ing out from the wall, it is said, at one time, and asked 
 eagerly, "What's that?" Then, with a smile of pleasure, 
 added, " It was a vision!" Bolingbroke wept, crying out 
 with theatrical sentiment, "Oh, great God, what is man?" 
 but the dying poet made no bewailing over his own state. 
 " I am dying of a hundred good symptoms," he said, with a 
 certain soft humour, when they mocked him, as injudicious 
 friends will do, with assurances that he was better. Thus 
 he died, so quietly that no one could tell the moment, in his 
 own house, with kindness and almost love around him ; 
 almost snatching a kind of life from the touch of death — 
 growing, as he crossed the threshold into the darkness, at 
 last into the semblance of a man. 
 
 There is, as has been often said, an unseen tragedy in 
 almost every life. Here there is no tragedy to speak of 
 except the technical one, that the story ends, as all stories 
 must, in death. But the reason is, that Pope had no life, no 
 personal existence, no thread of individual fate : he worked, 
 he studied, he produced poems greater than his nature ; he 
 hated, reviled, and beguiled his fellow-creatures ; he mag- 
 nified and deified himself, and that genius, which, divine 
 
206 THE POET. 
 
 thing as it is, can yet exist amidst so much garbage ; and 
 he liked with sufficient faithfulness a few people in the 
 world, who were very good, very obliging, flattering, and 
 satisfactory to him. But he neither lived in his own person, 
 nor threw himself heart and soul into any other life ; nothing 
 tragic, nothing serious, no real interest to any human soul, 
 is in him. A certain curiosity about the habits and natural 
 history of the strange little phenomenon, a critic's interest in 
 his poetry, a historian's attention to the curious phase of 
 national life across which his little shadow passed — such is 
 all that can be given to Pope. 
 
 In literature he stands unique in England. His age, with 
 its sharp emulation of wits, its graces and gracelessness, its 
 frightful licence of speech and insensibility to all social 
 codes of honour, is reflected in his pages as in the pitiless 
 clearness of a mirror. Some of his satires rise to the very 
 sublime of character-painting. In all other ways he has 
 been surpassed — in this he stands supreme ; and thousands, 
 we might say millions, in both hemispheres, quote daily 
 those matchless bitter lines without knowing whom they 
 quote. As a poet he wrought out his vein. Nobody could 
 venture to come after, except in humble paths of imitation, 
 so great a master of his art. He was the culmination and 
 perfect blossom of his school. It had to fall when he was 
 gone, nothing greater being possible, and to leave the way 
 open to a poetry less polished and less correct ; more spon- 
 taneous in genius, and less elaborate in art. 
 
VI. 
 
 THE YOUNG CHEVALIEE. 
 
 There are some landscapes in the -world in whicli foreign 
 memories, alien to the place, and in some cases less touch- 
 ing and momentous than the natural local associations, 
 thrust themselves in, and obscure to the spectator at once 
 the nationality and individual character of the spot. The 
 English traveller when he climbs the height of Tusculum, 
 has a scene before him full of the grandest memories of a 
 past which is the common inheritance of the whole civilised 
 world. His boyish lessons, his youthful studies, if they 
 have done anything for him, have qualified him to identify 
 every hillock, and hear a far-off voice out of every tomb. 
 Or if it is not oM but modern Kome that charms him, there 
 are a hundred lights on that Campagna, a thousand in- 
 fluences of sonnd and sense about, enough to move the least 
 imaginative soul. Eome lying distant on the great plain — 
 and the dome that Buonarotti hung between earth and 
 heaven standing out the one thing visible, full of suggestions 
 of the treasures lying under and about it — are sufficient to 
 overbrim the eager brain. How is it that, as we stand upon 
 the wistful plateau with that great scene before us, Rome 
 and her memories fade from our eyes ? " Shrivelling like 
 a parched scroll," the plain rolls up and passes away. The 
 Highland hills all black with storms, the lonely, desolate, 
 northern seas, the wild moors and mountain-passes, rise up 
 a sad phantasmagoria over the grey olives and clustering 
 vines. It is the wild pibroch that rings in our ears, it is the 
 heather that rustles below our feet, and the chill of the north 
 
208 THE YOUNG CHEVALIER. 
 
 that breathes into our faces. Why ? Because yonder in the 
 Duomo a line of inscription has caught the traveller's eye, 
 obliterating Frascati and Eome, and all Italian thoughts : 
 " Karolus Odoardus, Filius Jacobi," These are the words ; 
 and there lies the high heart mouldered into dust which 
 once beat against the breast of the Young Chevalier ! 
 
 It was in Kome that the life of Charles Stuart began, as it 
 ended, in exile, in an unhappy distracted household, torn 
 asunder by domestic dissensions, divided between a disap- 
 pointed, injured, high-spirited wife — sometimes in open, 
 sometimes in tacit rebellion — and an unfaithful exacting hus- 
 band, weak, but tyrannical, wicked, yet religious as princes 
 sometimes are permitted to be. Strangely enough, though 
 Queen Clementina, as she was called, would seem to have 
 been of a higher and stronger character than her husband, 
 there is no reference to her in any of her son's letters, and 
 little in the contemporary records. James, w^hatever his sins 
 were, and they were many, seems to have kept, at least, the 
 affection of his children. But it is impossible to imagine a 
 worse atmosphere for the growth of young lives. The me- 
 lancholy dispossessed Family was surrounded by a little co- 
 terie of a court — a community which, under the best of cir- 
 cumstances, has much of the pettiness, personal squabbles, 
 rumours, and gossip of a village ; and which was embittered 
 and set on edge in this case by the fact that its mem- 
 bers were discontented and broken men, whose hopes and 
 hearts were elsewhere, and to whom intrigue and conspiracy 
 were daily bread. Plots and counter-plots of all kinds went 
 on in the unquiet household. Every day a gloomy train at- 
 tended the mimic king across the piazza to the Church of the 
 Holy Apostles, where he went to pay his devotions. Med- 
 dlers of all kinds, ruined soldiers, broken-down statesmen, 
 shifty priests, surrounded the boys thus growing up to an 
 inheritance of false hopes and idle greatness. The bells of the 
 Santi Apostoli, and many a church beside, kept ringing in 
 their young ears with unbroken monotony ; the flat ceremo- 
 nials of the priestly court, of which they were half-depen- 
 dants, mocked the exiles. Now and then they gave a con- 
 cert at their palace, to which the wandering English cubs, 
 with their " governors," of whom Lord Chesterfield and 
 Lady Mary Wortley give so uncomfortable a description, 
 
THE YOUNG CHEVALTEE. 209 
 
 came in crowds to stare at the handsome gallant lad, conde- 
 scending to play for their amusement, who was, so far as 
 blood and hereditary right went, the undoubted heir of Eng- 
 land. And sometimes the poor young Princes would rush 
 forth across the Campagna to cheat their inactivity with the 
 commotion of a hunting-party — poor copy of the stir of life. 
 But all this while out in the world cannons were roaring, 
 battles fighting. Young William of Cumberland, as yet 
 unmarked by his terrible nick-name, was getting himself 
 glory at Dettingen at the head of those English who were 
 not his countrymen, that he should have the credit of them. It 
 requires little imagination to conceive how this contrast must 
 have rankled in the high, courageous, adventurous soul of the 
 young Stuart, rightful leader of these Englishmen, who, but 
 for the folly of his fathers, might have been at their head 
 instead of the Hanoverian. When these events were hap- 
 pening, Charles was five-and- twenty, and had been, no doubt, 
 for years consuming his heart in the tedious bustle of the 
 ecclesiastical capital. All his biographers echo the general 
 note of wonder how a prince, trained under soft Italian skies, 
 amid the supposed effeminacy of Italian customs, could have 
 been fit for the hardships of his after-life. But it is evident 
 that he had trained himself, by such experience as that 
 climate and those customs give, to bear heat and cold, the 
 two great extremes, accustomed himself to long walks and 
 scant fare, and all the natural hardships which fall in the way 
 of a hunter among the hills. Italy is not like Scotland ; but 
 the one country has by times chills as bitter as are ever 
 known in the other, and danger and privation are the same 
 everywhere. 
 
 It was in the depth of the winter of 1744 that the long- 
 expected call to action came to the eager young man. 
 France, with plans of her own in her mind, had suddenly 
 bethought herself of the Stuarts, by way, not necessarily of 
 restoring them, but of occupying the attention of England 
 with her ovm affairs, and making her recall not her troops 
 only, but the money, with which an obsequious Ministry 
 enabled King George to subsidise all the world. The sum- 
 mons was secret and sudden, known only to the father and 
 son and their most intimate counsellors. Out of the brief 
 overwhelming excitement of the moment a few words reach 
 
 
 
210 THE YOUNG CHEVALIEK. 
 
 US full of natural feeling. " I trust, by the aid of God," — 
 said the youth, trembling with hope and eagerness, as he set 
 out on his enterprise, to the old man who had gone through 
 that phase and left his hopes behind him ages ago in the cold 
 blank of the past — " that I shall soon be able to lay three 
 crowns at your Majesty's feet." The father answers tenderly, 
 out of his life-in-death. " Be careful of yourself, my dear 
 boy. I would not lose you for all the crowns in the world," 
 he says, with, one can imagine, what smile and what sigh ! 
 Weak, feeble, futile old Pretender — and yet with a heart to 
 be wrung for his boy, like other men. 
 
 It was on a night in January 1744 — the 9th — that the 
 young Chevalier set forth on one of the most extraordinary, 
 splendid, and hopeless expeditions ever recorded in history. 
 " A little after midnight," a heavy coach, followed by a 
 groom leading another horse, rattled through the stony Eo- 
 man streets to the Lateran Gate. The keys had been left 
 overnight with the captain of the guard, that no hindrance 
 might be given to the Prince's hunting-party, on which his 
 eagerness carried him forth so early. Gentle Prince Henry, 
 he who was afterwards Cardinal York, was left behind asleep, 
 and, knowing nothing, set out leisurely in the morning to 
 meet the fiery young Nimrod who had preceded him, little 
 thinking on what wild chase it was that his elder brother had 
 gone forth. The chaise and the faithful groom behind went 
 on, across the wintry Campagna in the deep darkness, till 
 they came to the stony causeway, everlasting like alloldEoman 
 work, which ascends the Alban hill. There, under some pre- 
 text, the young Adventurer left his companion in the coach 
 and mounted his horse. The story goes on to tell how he stood 
 still " at the turning," alone with his faithful Norman groom, 
 until the heavy coach, with Dunbar in it, who for his part 
 pretended to know nothing, lumbered on upon the resounding 
 road towards the hunting tryst. When the carriage was gone, 
 Charles Edward turned his horse's head the other way, and,fac- 
 ingtowardsFrascati, towards Florence and Paris and England, 
 " gave his bridle-reins a shake," and escaped into the world. 
 
 When this romantic incident occurred, the artificial world 
 held on its babbling course at home as if there had been no 
 such startling primitive chances in existence. The armies 
 and commanders of England were on the Continent fighting 
 
THE YOUNG CHEVALIER. 211 
 
 for other contested successions, and hiring German troops to 
 aid their arms. The Ministers in London were busy making 
 treaties and granting subsidies, struggling to please King 
 George, whose heart was rather that of an Elector of Han- 
 over than of a King of England. The world of fashion flut- 
 tered and amused itself as one reads in Horace Walpole's 
 letters, its Tories pretending to hope for, and its Whigs, af- 
 fecting to fear, the exiled Stuarts in their distant retirement ; 
 but one party jast as ready as the other with fine birthday 
 clothes at the Hanoverian Court, and traditionary Jacobitism 
 falling into the constitutional opposition of more recent times. 
 Never was there an age when men were less likely to sacri- 
 fice themselves, and put their fortunes and lives in peril, for 
 a banished and half-forgotten King. There were a hundred 
 solid reasons why George and his family should lie heavy on 
 the English mind. He was no Englishman, nor ever pre- 
 tended to be. He had none of the qualities that make a man 
 personally popular, except courage. He gave the world an 
 example of dull profligacy on the one side, and unnatural 
 family discords on the other, such as the public mind, how- 
 ever little toned to virtue, invariably resents. In all his 
 public acts he made it apparent that his new kingdom was 
 nothing to him in comparison with his native principality — 
 " a province to a despicable electorate," as Pitt boldly and 
 bitterly said. Yet so deeply had the dangers of civil war 
 stamped themselves on men's minds ; or so bent were all on 
 personal wellbeing, safety, and such success as was practi- 
 cable ; or so dull was the level of public feeling at a moment 
 when no public leader possessed the thrill of sympathetic 
 genius, and every man schemed and struggled for himself, 
 that notwithstanding all the drawbacks that attended the 
 Hanoverian race, no touch of ancient love seems to have 
 awakened in the English heart towards the young, noble, 
 and hopeful Pretender, who thus set out with his life in his 
 hand to claim his hereditary place. The whole nation, 
 occupied with its own affairs, and sullenly awaiting the 
 result of its last experiment in kingmaking, abstracted itself 
 from all new contests, and looked on, angry to have its quiet 
 disturbed, indignant at the thought of new expenses, un- 
 moved by the romance of the situation or by the daring of 
 the Adventurer. 
 
212 THE YOUNG CHEVALIER. 
 
 At this moment of his career there can be no doubt that 
 of all the young princes in Europe Charles Edward was per- 
 sonally one of the most promising. His education had been 
 bad, but his mind was open. He was full of noble natural 
 gifts, if not of intellect at least of character — a gracious, mag- 
 nanimous, valiant gentleman, with all the charm of manner 
 and person peculiar to his race. There seems every reason 
 to believe that such a nature, sweetened by prosperity, might 
 have come to a finer development than ever Stuart yet had 
 attained since the first James of Scotland, the poet of the 
 race. But such was not the intention of Providence, in all 
 things so inscrutable, and in none more so than in the de- 
 termination of the influences which cramp or guide the de- 
 velopment of character. England did but stand and look 
 on while the young Chevalier drew near her coasts, greet- 
 ing him with the movement of alarm which might be sup- 
 posed to startle a shopkeeper at the appearance of any riot 
 likely to put his goods and traffic in danger — putting up her 
 shutters, locking her till, in unheroic tremor and still more 
 unheroic calm, awaiting the issue. The noblest of Jacobite 
 families, they who had kept up anxious relations with the 
 exiled Court for years (and there was scarcely one family of 
 importance, scarcely one eager statesman, who had not one 
 time or other offered services to or excited the expectations 
 of that Court), adopted this attitude. So long as nothing was 
 to be done, they were content to speak of the Prince's 
 advent as if it would bring them salvation ; but as soon as 
 he appeared, the warmest prayer they had to utter was, that 
 he would keep away from them and depart from their coasts. 
 Men who are in possession of all the best gifts of fortune 
 may be pardoned for not rushing blindly into an enterprise 
 which is likely to conduct them to the Tower and the block ; 
 but yet it must be recollected that the men who thus stood 
 apart and let their Prince dash himself to pieces against the great 
 wall of a nation's passive resistance, had given him for years 
 a theoretical allegiance, had supported his pretensions, kept 
 up his hopes, and maintained before his eyes a gleam of per- 
 petual possibility. They were all waiting, they professed, 
 for the moment when it would be wise to make the attempt. 
 Such waiting was no matter of life and death to them. Their 
 circumstances were in no way desperate — their lands and 
 
THE YOUNG CHEVALIEK. 213 
 
 livings were secured, and even public life was not shut 
 against them. But with him it was life or death. 
 
 Charles Edward went first to Paris, where he was kept for 
 some time in great retirement, seeing nobody, not even the 
 King — and afterwards to Gravelines, a little fortified town on 
 the dreary line of coast between Calais and Dunkirk, where 
 he lived in more utter seclusion still, attending the prepara- 
 tions for the expedition, and watching their progress. From 
 this spot, for the first time, amid the mists and storms of 
 winter, he looked across the angry Channel upon England 
 with such thoughts as may be conceived. On that monoto- 
 nous shore, lingering upon the margin of the wild sea, catch- 
 ing glimpses, as the clouds lifted and fell, of the island-king- 
 dom of his forefathers, the Adventurer becomes his own his- 
 torian ; but his record is of facts only, not of sentiments and 
 feelings. His sole attendant was a Highland gentleman, one 
 of the busy conspirators of the time, in whom he seems to 
 have been able to repose scanty faith. " The situation I am 
 in is very particular," he writes, " for nobody knows where 
 I am, or what is become of me, so that I am entirely buried 
 as to the public, and cannot but say that it is a very great 
 constraint upon me, for I am obliged very often not to stir 
 from my room for fear of somebody noticing my face. I very 
 often think that you would laugh heartily if you saw me 
 going about with a single servant, buying fish and other 
 things, and squabbling for a penny more or less. I have 
 every day large packets to answer, without anybody to help 
 me but Bohaldie. Yesterday I had one that cost me seven 
 hours and a half." These packets included the correspon- 
 dence of secret agents, of friends in England, and of the 
 councillors about the French King — all the diff'erent machi- 
 nery by which the great invasion was to be completed. Thus 
 he waited secluded, with England in sight, till the ships were 
 fitted out and the soldiers marshalled which should enable 
 him to put his fortune to the touch — a moment of supremo 
 anxiety, and yet more supreme hope. 
 
 The news reached London before long, and made the peace- 
 ful population tremble. Early in February, Horace Walpole, 
 scoffing, supposes " the Pretender's son," then in Paris, was 
 " as near England as ever he is like to be." But a week 
 after his tone is mightily changed. The " imminence of 
 
214 THE YOUNG CHEVALIEB. 
 
 our danger " are the words on Horace's lips. " Don't be 
 surprised if you hear that this crown is fought for on land," 
 he writes. " As yet there is no rising ; but we must expect 
 it on the first descent." " There is no doubt of the invasion," 
 he adds, on the 23d February ; " the young Pretender is at 
 Calais, and the Count de Saxe is to command the embarka- 
 tion." His letters are full of excitement, alarm, and doubt. 
 Nobody knew, it is evident, how far the people were to be 
 calculated upon. The agitated Whig world, which felt itself 
 on the edge of a revolution, on one side of the Channel, with 
 Walpole for an interpreter, waiting an event which "to me 
 must and shall be decisive," as he says, with an earnestness 
 which, considering his perfectly private position, seems un- 
 called for ; and, on the other, on the border of the separating 
 sea, Charles Edward, eager, breathless, full of hope, waiting 
 with a still more burning eagerness for the outset of the 
 expedition, — make a curious picture. So deep were the 
 apprehensions of the ruling Whigs among whom Horace lived, 
 that the only real gleam of comfort he has is, that the popu- 
 lace, always so ready to be led away by a name, had been 
 seized with a horror of the French invasion. " The French 
 name will do more harm to the cause than the Pretender's 
 service," he says. All this fright on the one hand, and hope 
 on the other, came to an end without the striking of a blow. 
 The French fleet was watched and pursued, and let slip, by 
 the English admiral, old and prudent, who had been sent out 
 to look for it; but another guardian, more potent than even 
 an English fleet, watched the British coasts. " There Lave 
 been terrible winds these four or five days," Horace writes, 
 catching at the straw of good fortune. The storm " blew 
 directly upon Dunkirk,^' beating back the invading vessels. 
 " Some of the largests ships, with all the men on board, were 
 lost," says Lord Mahon ; " others were wrecked on the coast, 
 and the remainder were obliged to put back to the harbour 
 with no small injury." 
 
 After all these elaborate preparations, this one storm suf- 
 ficed to discourage France from her project. The royal exile, 
 who had embarked so eagerly, was put ashore again, in that 
 dejection which follows too triumphant hopes. A plan, so 
 large and elaborate, collapsing so suddenly and utterly, has 
 few parallels in history. In England, it is evident, nobody 
 
THE YOUNG CHEVALIER. 215 
 
 believed it was finished by this one encounter with the 
 winds. " That great storm certainly saved ns from the 
 invasion then/' writes Horace Walpole, in the middle of March. 
 But of all the expedition, the only individual who seems 
 to have thought more of it after setting foot on French soil, 
 was the one princely heart, sick with disappointed hope, 
 downcast, and heavy, but not crushed or helpless, who went 
 back once more alone to the dreary little seaport, to wait 
 some gleam of better fortune. To all the world around him 
 his business was secondary. France, politely regretful, 
 turned aside and went off to her own concerns. Jacobite 
 England gave a doubtful, distant, sentimental homage, so 
 long as the Deliverer would but keep away from her. Had 
 the Prince been a man of his father's calibre, no doubt he 
 would have dropped salt tears into the angry surf of the 
 Channel that lay between him and his kingdom, and aban- 
 doned the hopeless desperate attempt. But Charles Edward 
 was of other mettle. The moment had come when he must 
 do or die. Wild hopes of victory, no doubt, were in his 
 mind ; but it is evident that other thoughts — visions of the 
 possibility of death on the field, a violent glorious end — 
 were also present before him. The only thing impracticable 
 was to return to the languid misery of Italian dependence — 
 the death-in-life of his Koman captivity. 
 
 No hereditary enthusiasm for the house of Stuart moves 
 the mind of the present writer ; but he would be a passion- 
 less observer, indeed, who could look upon the forlorn and 
 dauntless figure of this princely young man, gazing on his 
 hereditary kingdom across the salt and bitter waves, and 
 making up his mind to all the dangers, all the toils and 
 hardships, of one last struggle for his rights, without a thrill 
 of generous sympathy. He was no philosopher, to consider 
 the weeping train of orphans whom his enterprise would 
 leave fatherless ; his was no cruel imagination, capable of 
 realising the pitiless horrors with which a frightened country 
 should stamp out the remnants of rebellion. Himself brave, 
 clement, tender, and magnanimous, how could Charles Stuart 
 conceive of the butcheries of Cumberland? The spirit of 
 his race rose in him to its one last outburst. Error and mis- 
 fortune ran in the blood — but the Adventurer on that lonely 
 shore seems to have cast off for the moment the dreary 
 
216 THE YOUNG CHEVALIER. 
 
 memories of the English Stuarts and served himself heir to 
 the noble old Jameses — gallant monarch s of a barbarous- 
 gallant people — the Commons' kings ! The time had come 
 when all the nobleness, patience, valour, and courage of the 
 old stock should burst again into flower — one of its best 
 blossoms, and its last. 
 
 So eager was the Prince to enter upon the great work of 
 his life, that he proposed to the brave old Earl Mareschal to 
 embark in a herring-boat and make his way to Scotland, with 
 characterestic trust in the ancient heroic kingdom. But 
 though it came to something very much like this in the end, 
 at that moment he was dissuaded from such a venture. 
 After a while he went to Paris, where he lived privately, 
 wearily waiting for succour and encouragement from the 
 French Court, then actually at war with England. " I have 
 taken a house within a league of this town, where I live like 
 a hermit," he writes to his father in the beginning of June. 
 In November he is still no farther advanced. " As long as 
 there is life there is hope, that's the proverb," he writes, in 
 his weariness. " You may imagine how I must be out of 
 humour at all these proceedings, when for comfort I am 
 plagued out of my life with tracasseries from our own people, 
 who, it would seem, would rather sacrifice me and my affairs 
 than fail in any private view of their own." Already he had 
 begun to see the disastrous influences which were in the 
 field against him, and that the difficulties in his own camp 
 would be as heavy a strain on his courage and patience as 
 any without. '' Our friends in England are afraid of their own 
 shadow, and think of little but diverting themselves,'^ he 
 adds, mournfully, " otherwise we should not want the King 
 of France." By degrees he learned also that the King of 
 France was little likely to aid him with more than vague 
 promises of service. He was ready himself to set out with 
 a single footman if necessary — to " put himself in a tub, like 
 Diogenes ! " he says, with half-ironic, half-pathetic humour. 
 He begs his father to pawn his jewels, which " on this side 
 the water he would wear with a very sore heart," in order to 
 furnish the necessary funds for the undertaking. "The 
 French Court sticks at the money," he writes in the spring 
 of 1745, but he himself would rather "pawn his shirt" than 
 fail. Those letters, though badly written and badly spelled, 
 
THE YOUNG CHEVALIEE. 217 
 
 convey anything but an idea of an untrained or dull intelli- 
 gence. All the grand drawbacks to success are clearly indi- 
 cated in them — the indifference of France, the timidity and 
 supineness of the English Jacobites, the factions and feuds 
 and self-will of the Scotch. It is thus that he defends and 
 explains his own motives, and the causes which led him to 
 take the final step, in a remarkable letter, dated June 12, 
 1745, about six weeks before his arrival in Scotland : — 
 
 "After such scandalous usage as I have received from the French 
 Court, had not I given my word to do so, or got so many encouragements 
 from time to time as I have had, I shouhl have been obliged in honour, 
 and for my own reputation, to have flung myself into the arms of my 
 friends, and die with them, rather than live longer in such a miserable 
 way here, or be obliged to retufn to Rome, which would he just giving 
 up all hopes. I cannot but mention a parable here, which is, a horse 
 that is to be sold, if spurred, does not skip or show some sign of life, 
 nobody would care to have him even for nothing ; just so, my friends 
 would care very little to have me, if, after such usage, which all the 
 world is sensible of, I should not show that I have life in me. Your 
 Majesty cannot disapprove a son's following the example of his father. 
 You yourself did the like in the year '15 ; but the circumstances now are 
 indeed very different by being much more encouraging, there being a 
 certainty of succeeding with the least help, the particulars of which 
 would be too long to explain, and even impossible to convince you of by 
 writing, which has been the reason that I presumed to take upon me the 
 managing all this without even letting you suspect that such a thing 
 was brewing. . . . Had I failed to convince you, I was then afraid 
 you might have thought what I had a mind to do to be rash, and so 
 have absolutely forbid my proceedings, thinking that to acquire gloiy I 
 was capable of doing a desperate action. But in that case I can't be 
 sure but I might have followed the example of Manlius, who disobeyed 
 his father's orders on a like occasion. . . . Let what will happen, 
 the stroke is struck, and I have taken a firm resolution to conquer or die, 
 and stand my ground as long as I have a man remaining with me. I 
 think it of the greatest importance your Majesty should come as soon as 
 possible to Avignon, but take the liberty to advise that you would not 
 ask leave of the French Court ; for if I be not immediately succoured, 
 they will certainly refuse you. And this refusal will be chiefly 
 occasioned by our own people, who will be afraid to have you so near for 
 their own private views, and so suggest things to the French Court, to 
 prevent you coming till all shall be decided. I am certain if you were 
 once at Avignon you would never be obliged to remove, but in order to 
 our happy meeting on the other side of the sea. 
 
 "Your Majesty may be well assured I shall never be at rest, or leave 
 
218 THE YOUNG CHEVALIEE. 
 
 other people so, until I bring about the happy day of our meeting. It 
 is most certain that the generality of people will judge of this enterprise 
 by the success, which, if favourable, I shall get more honour than I 
 deserve. If otherwise, all the blame will be thrown upon the French 
 Court for having pushed a young Prince to show his mettle, and rather 
 die than live in a state unbecoming himself. Whatever happens un- 
 fortunate to me cannot but be tlie strongest engagement to the French 
 Court to pursue your cause. Now, if I were sure they were capable of 
 any sensation of this kind, if I did not succeed, I would perish as Curtius 
 did to serve my country and make it happy, it being an indispensable 
 duty on me, as far as lies in my power. Your Majesty may now see my 
 reason for pressing so much to pawn my jewels, which I should be glad 
 to have done immediately, for I never intend to come back, and money, 
 next to troops, will be of the greatest help to me. . . . 
 
 " I should think it proper (if your Majesty pleases) to be put at his 
 Holiness's feet, asking his blessing on this occasion ; but what I chiefly 
 ask is your own, which I hope will procure me that of God Almighty upon 
 my endeavours to serve you, my family, and my country, which will ever 
 be the only view of your Majesty's most dutiful son, Chaeles P." 
 
 This letter is sufficient to demonstrate that Charles's im- 
 perfect education had tolerably well answered the purpose 
 of all true training. Spelling was an art less considered in 
 these days than now ; but not the most chaotic spelling or 
 schoolboy penmanship could obscure the manly, straight- 
 forward sentiments, or the serious,, moderate resolution ex- 
 pressed in these lines. The father to whom they were 
 addressed was an elegant penman, correct in style and 
 orthography; but Prince Charles's homely sentences ring with 
 a mettle and meaning unknown to the softer hero of the 
 Fifteen — his style, if not that of a scholar, is always that of 
 a man. 
 
 At last the little expedition got under way. It was in 
 the middle of July, sixteen months after the failure of the 
 proposed invasion, that Charles at last set sail from St 
 Nazaire, at the mouth of the Loire. The vessel in which 
 he embarked he describes as " a frigate " carrying " twenty 
 odd guns, and an excellent sailer," which had been procured 
 for him by "one Kutledge and Walsh," the latter of whom 
 commanded the ship. A man-of-war of sixty-seven guns 
 had been procured by the same private individuals, "to 
 cruise on the coast of Scotland, and is luckily obliged to go 
 as far north as I do, so that she will escort me without 
 appearing to do it." In his own vessel he had "fifteen 
 
THE YOUNG CHEVALIER. 219 
 
 hundred fusees, eigliteen hundred broadswords mounted, a 
 good quantity of powder, ball, flints, dirks, brandy, &c. I 
 have also got twenty small field-pieces, two of which a mule 
 may carry, and my cassette will be near four thousand louis 
 d'or." In the man-of-war was " a company of sixty volun- 
 teers, all gentlemen, whom I shall probably get to land with 
 me, which, though few, will make a show, they having a 
 pretty uniform." With these provisions the Adventurer set 
 out dauntless, to invade a great, rich, and warlike kingdom. 
 On the way his escort encountered a British man-of-war, 
 and, disabled with the conflict, had to put back, carrying 
 the sixty volunteers and their pretty uniform away to France 
 again. Nor was it Charles's fault that his own vessel did 
 not join in the combat. His captain threatened to order 
 him down to the cabin ere he would cease his entreaties to 
 that effect. At length the lonely little ship, not without 
 pursuit from other wandering cruisers, reached, after a fort- 
 night's voyage, the Western Isles. As the invader ap- 
 proached the shore of one of those wild and rocky islands, 
 an eagle came hovering round the ship. *' Old TuUibardine, 
 who first spied the bird, did not choose to take any notice 
 of it, lest they should have called it a Highland freat in 
 him." But when he saw the royal creature following the 
 course of the ship, the heart of the old Highlander rose 
 within him. " Sir, I hope this is an excellent omen,'^ he 
 said ; " the king of birds is come to welcome your Koyal 
 Highness." At such a moment the whole party, thus 
 arrived at the crisis for which they had been so long pre- 
 paring, were naturally open to all influences ; they looked 
 " with pleasure " upon their winged attendant — at first the 
 only mountain prince who welcomed Charles Stuart to the 
 home of his fathers. 
 
 The story is so well known that it seems almost a work 
 of supererogation to follow its details. The Prince's wel- 
 come was undoubtedly cold. He had been invited to Scot- 
 land by a parcel of conspirators — men whose lives were 
 always in danger, and to whom a little risk, more or less, 
 did not matter — not by the chiefs to whom he now appealed, 
 who had life and lands, and the lives of their clansmen, to 
 answer for. The condition of their rising had always been 
 the support of a body of French troops — a kind of assist- 
 
220 THE YOUNG CHEVALIER. 
 
 ance which was not so revolting to the Scottish, still less to 
 the Highland mind, as it was to the English. When they 
 found he had come among them alone, with seven men only 
 in his company, a thrill ran through the islesmen. They tried 
 hard to support each other in entreaties that he would give 
 up his enterprise, and protestations that it was hopeless ; 
 but Charles had a thousand weapons to nse against this 
 simple heroic race. While he discussed the matter with 
 several influential Macdonalds, headed by Clanranald him- 
 self, his quick eye noted a young Highlander standing apart, 
 in whose face the tide of emotion ran high. While Ranald 
 followed with moving lip and gleaming eye the course of 
 argument — all entreaty on one side, all resistance and 
 reason on the other — his hand sometimes seeking his dirk, 
 his foot beating impatiently on the deck, the Prince saw 
 before him the final plea by which he could overcome. 
 Turning suddenly towards the agitated youth, "You at 
 least will help me ? " he said. Such an appeal could only 
 have been made by a man himself still thrilling with the 
 self-abandonment of youth. " I will ! " cried the lad, with 
 Highland fervour ; " though not another man in the High- 
 lands should draw a sword, T am ready to die for you!" 
 This eager outburst of devotion, and the sudden emotion with 
 which Charles, wound up to the uttermost, and at the point 
 of despair, received the frank allegiance, was the spark that 
 was needed to light the flame. Clanranald and his Duinhe- 
 wassels, impervious to reason, had no shield to defend them 
 from this sudden enthusiasm. They do not even appear to 
 have made any effort to resist it. The fire was set to the 
 heather, and henceforth every passing breath did but fan the 
 flame. 
 
 While this momentous conference was going on, other 
 Macdonalds waiting at the other end of the deck, half in- 
 formed of what was passing, and full of excitement, saw *' a 
 tall youth of a most agreeable aspect," whose looks moved 
 them, they scarcely knew why. They were told sometimes 
 that he was a young Englishman, sometimes a French 
 abbe, anxious to see the Highlands ; yet nature told them 
 otherwise. "At his first appearance I found my heart 
 swell to my very throat," says one spectator. One laird 
 after another came and went from the isles and misty main- 
 
THE YOUNG CHEVALIEE. 221 
 
 land to the little ship, the centre of so many fears and hopes. 
 Each of them came with his burden of remonstrances, his 
 intended protest against the mad enterprise ; and each, like 
 young Ranald, went away wdth fire in his heart and in his 
 eyes, to raise his men and risk his life for the "native 
 Prince," who had thus thrown himself on Highland devo- 
 tion. Hugh of the house of Morar warned Donald of Kiii- 
 lochmoidart that he " did not like the expedition at all, and 
 was afraid of the results." "I cannot help it," said the 
 other : " if the matter go wrong, I'll certainly be hanged, 
 for I am engaged already." When Hugh himself went on 
 into the all-fascinating presence, he lifted his voice, as they 
 all did, in warning. The Prince made answer that " he did 
 not choose to owe his restoration to foreigners, but to his own 
 friends ; and that could he get but six trusty men to join 
 him, he would choose far rather to skulk with them among 
 the mountains of Scotland than to return to France." The 
 next glimpse we have of this protesting Hugh, he is impor- 
 tuning "his young chieftain (Clanranald) to go ashore im- 
 mediately, and raise as many men as might be sufficient to 
 guard the Prince's person ! " Thus Charles played upon 
 them as a musician on his strings. They could not resist 
 the contagion of his high spirit and chivalrous trust in 
 them. What were lives or lands in comparison with that 
 appeal that went to their hearts? Lochiel, too, "came 
 convinced of the rashness, nay madness, of the enterprise," 
 as Lord Mahon tells us in his admirable narrative, " and de- 
 termined to urge Charles to desist from it and return to France 
 till a more favourable opportunity." His brother Fassifern 
 entreated him to send his decision by letter. "H this 
 Prince once sets eyes on you," says the sagacious High- 
 lander, '* he will make you do what he pleases." But 
 Lochiel, strong in his own prudence, went on like the rest 
 to protest and remonstrate. The argument was long be- 
 tween the Adventurer and the chief. At last Charles 
 brought it to a climax. " I am resolved to put all to the 
 hazard," he said. " In a few days I will raise the Royal 
 Standard, and proclaim to the people of Britain that Charles 
 Stuart is come over to claim the crown of his ancestors, or 
 perish in the attempt. Lochiel, who, my father has often 
 told me, was our firmest friend, may stay at home and learn 
 
222 THE YOUNG CHEVALIER. 
 
 from the newspapers the fate of his Prince." Against this 
 final argument no Highland heart could stand. "■ Not so," 
 said Lochiel, moved out of all prudence ; "I will share the 
 fate of my Prince, whatever it may be, and so shall every 
 man over whom nature or fortune has given me any power." 
 
 This was the result of every personal meeting between 
 Charles and the Highland chiefs. Those who kept aloof, in 
 some instances, escaped the fascination. Sir Alexander 
 Macdonald and the Chief of Macleod stood out prudently, 
 withdrawing themselves from all intercourse with the royal 
 suppliant. He landed on the mainland on the 25th July, 
 surrounded by Highland guards, and a devotion all the 
 more intense and priceless that it was tinged with despair, 
 and began in that distant corner of the empire which he in- 
 tended to conquer, the brief, brilliant, extraordinary campaign, 
 four months of unexpected and half-miraculous triumph, 
 which was to be followed by such overthrow, such suffering 
 and calamity, as reason had predicted and enthusiasm defied. 
 
 We are obliged, in practical life, to judge by the common 
 human standard of failure or success. And according to 
 that standard, this enterprise, doomed from its beginning, 
 and which even in the heart of its leaders was an alternative 
 of despair, can be considered only as a piece of tragic folly, 
 madly conceived and bitterly punished. But there are other 
 views which, in the calm of ages, even the most pitiful 
 spectator may be allowed to take, and which point out the 
 great but difficult truth, that pain, calamity, and havoc are 
 not the worst misfortunes that can befall either a nation or 
 an individual. It is evident that Charles Stuart, with the 
 instinct of a doomed man, felt that nothing which could 
 overtake him could be so fatal and terrible as a return to 
 his captivity. Had he died on CuUoden field, had his boat 
 been swamped by the bitter northern waves, and he him- 
 self disappeared for ever into their stormy abysses, it would 
 have been well for the exile. What was ill for him was to 
 leave that land in which he found himself, even in his worst 
 privations, a man and a Prince, with an independent exis- 
 tence, and not a miserable puppet of fortune. Neither, per- 
 haps, could better have been for the country itself, which 
 thus rushed upon a glorious destruction, killing by one 
 splendid act the old life which was doomed too, and must 
 
THE YOUNG CHEVALIER. 223 
 
 have died by inches had there been no Forty-five. It is 
 something to call forth that highest bloom of antique virtue, 
 that unequalled faithfulness, devotion, and honour which 
 throw an everlasting glory upon the death-struggle of the 
 Highland clans. It is something for a man to prove him- 
 self generous in victory, gay, friendly, magnanimous, and 
 gentle, when fortune smiles on him — patient, tender, cheer- 
 ful, and unrepining in the heaviest calamities. The man 
 and the race embarked together in a venture which could 
 not but bring tragic and terrible consequences to both. 
 They did their best to overthrow the foundations of all our 
 national peace, and plunge us once more into the chaos from 
 which we were escaping. They put everything on the cast, 
 pledging their very existence, with scarce a possibility of ulti- 
 mate success, and no hopes but those roused by emotion and 
 excitement, without foundation or reality. Yet who can say 
 that they did amiss ? Ages of pitiful quiet in a borrowed 
 palace were not worth that one brief year of life to the leader 
 of this wildest of forlorn-hopes. And what would have been 
 a century of ebbing existence, struggles with new customs, 
 and sick efforts to retain the past, in comparision with the 
 passion and agony of Celtic Scotland, thus accomplished, as 
 it were, at a stroke, with accompaniment of some of the 
 noblest emotions and greatest acts of which human nature 
 is capable? They marched with the wild pibroch wailing 
 over them, with waving plaids and antiquated shields, and 
 hearts full of primitive virtues, passions, and errors, for 
 which the world had grown too old, straight into the jaws of 
 destruction — into the valley of death, into the mouth of 
 hell. It was the end of a race, of a condition of things, of 
 an ancient, noble, and most unfortunate dynasty. Valour 
 unsurpassed, fidelity unequalled, mercy even, unlooked-for 
 companion, marched with them, a guard of honour to the in- 
 evitable tomb. And in face of all after-horrors, all suffering, 
 death, and ruin, let us say it was done well. 
 
 The standard was raised on the 19th of August in Glen- 
 finnan. On the eve of this ceremony a party of Keppoch's 
 men, aided by a detachment of Cameron s, surprised and 
 took captive two companies of soldiers on their way to rein- 
 force the garrison at Fort William — an auspicious beginning 
 to the struggle. When Charles approached Glenfinnan with 
 
224 THE YOUNG CHEVALIER. 
 
 his body-guard of Macdonalds, he was chilled and disap- 
 pointed to find it silent and desert, not a man yet of his host 
 having assembled at the try sting- pi ace. " Uncertain, and 
 anxious ^or his fate," says Lord Mahon, " the Prince entered 
 one of the neighbouring hovels, and vt^aited for about two 
 hours " — a dreary break in the high current of excitement 
 which must have carried him along. At length the Camerons 
 appeared defiling over the hill, six hundred valiant men, 
 advancing " in two lines of three men abreast, between which 
 were the English companies taken on the 16th, march- 
 ing as prisoners, and disarmed." This sight alone was 
 enough to raise to certainty the hopes of an enthusiastic and 
 imaginative race. In presence of the triumphant High- 
 landers and the captive Southrons — emblems of the two 
 races, no doubt, in many a sparkling Celtic eye — the stand- 
 ard flew forth to the Highland winds. It was unfurled by 
 old Tullibardine — the Duke of Athole, as he was called, 
 though his younger brother at the moment enjoyed the title 
 and possessions of the house. " Such loud huzzas and 
 schiming of bonnets up into the air, appearing like a cloud, 
 was not heard of for a long time," says a certain Terence 
 Mulloy, evidently repeating the description given by one of 
 the prisoners. Old Athole was above seventy when he 
 threw forth those crimson folds into the Highland air and 
 proclaimed King James. Gallant old age, dauntless youth, 
 the enthusiasm of victory, the sullen silence of the cap- 
 tives amid all that wild outburst of rejoicing, make up 
 another of the wonderful pictures of which this story is 
 full. When Charles had addressed his Highlanders, he 
 turned, courteous as a true Prince, to the English captain, 
 who stood by. " You may go to your General," he said ; 
 *' tell him what you have seen, and add that I am coming to 
 give him battle ; " and thus dismissed with chivalrous promp- 
 titude the honourable enemy. " No gentleman could be better 
 used than he was," adds the authority we have just quoted. 
 In word and deed, as in outward bearing, the young paladin 
 bore himself like a knight of romance. He put on with his 
 Highland garb the spirit of his earlier forefathers. 
 
 Immediately after this ceremony, and not more than a 
 month from the moment of his landing, in his eagerness to 
 encounter Cope, whom he had thus promised to meet, Charles 
 
THE YOUNG CHEVALIER. 225 
 
 marched sixteen miles in his boots ; " and one of the heels 
 coming off, the Highlanders said they were unco glad to 
 hear it, for they hoped the want of the heel would make him 
 march more at leisure. So speedily he marched that he was 
 like to fatigue them all." Whatever his army had to bear, 
 he took a share in their privations. He lived hardly, slept 
 on the heather by their side, marched at their side across 
 moor and hill, watched late and rose up early, like a man to 
 the manner born. He did what was more astonishing still 
 in that age and on such an enterprise. He paid for every- 
 thing his army consumed, insisted on the strictest discipline, 
 punished all marauders, and had his accounts kept with the 
 precision of a private household. The wild clans came 
 down from the hills full of the instinct of plunder, with the 
 Adventurer at their head, who firmly believed himself the 
 rightful Prince of the rich country through which they passed. 
 Had they cleared everything before them, it would have been 
 a natural result to be expected in the circumstances ; but 
 nothing of the kind appears to have taken place. " It was 
 not uncommon, indeed," says Lord Mahon, "for the High- 
 landers to stop some respectable portly citizen as he passed 
 along, levelling their muskets at him with savage and threat- 
 ening gestures ; but on being asked by the trembling towns- 
 man what they wanted, they usually answered, 'A bawbee ! ' " 
 Charles himself levied contributions from the towns through 
 which he passed, but he suffered no invasion of the rights of 
 private property. In the ' Jacobite Memoirs ' will be found an 
 entire account-book, with all its quaint details, interspersed 
 with bits of pathetic history, showing the careful regulation 
 of his expenditure. " The Prince paid well for everything 
 he got," says the steward who furnished this remarkable 
 record, " and always ordered drink-money to be given liber- 
 ally where he lodged." His courteous generosity to his 
 prisoners has already been mentioned. When called upon 
 to rejoice that his enemies were at his feet, he turned away 
 compassionate, lamenting the fate of " his fathers deluded 
 subjects." And when urged to make reprisals upon the 
 English captives for cruelties inflicted on his friends, his 
 high nature revolted against the suggestion. " I cannot in 
 cold blood take away lives which I have spared in the heat 
 of action," said the noble young Adventurer ; nor would he 
 
 P 
 
226 THE YOUNG CHEVALIER. 
 
 even threaten to do so, saying, with still greater magnani- 
 mity, that it was below him to make empty threats which he 
 never would put into execution. It was with the greatest 
 difficulty that he was forced to answer the proclamation of 
 the Government offering a reward for his own head, by a 
 counter-proclamation setting a price on that of the Elector 
 of Hanover. His rival and contemporary Cumberland, un- 
 fortunately, was not moved by so fine a sense of honour. 
 Throughout the story, indeed, Charles shows himself the 
 preux chevalier to whom, alas ! permanent victory is slow to 
 come. His was not the genius of battle, nor the merciless 
 policy which could take advantage of all chances. A tender 
 heart and noble consideration for others are, no doubt, quali- 
 ties of a great leader ; but these have rarely been exhibited 
 for the benefit of the enemy. Charles was not a great 
 leader ; he was a spotless knight. His foe disarmed was, if 
 not his friend, at least his fellow- creature, to be dealt with 
 in a spirit of splendid humanity : the very assassins who 
 threatened his own life called forth, at worst, a pitiful con- 
 temptuous mercy. Such a character, while it rouses all the 
 generous admiration of which the mind is capable, awakes 
 at the same time a pang of compassion. It is doomed from the 
 commencement of its career. It is unqualified for that bloody 
 arena which is no longer governed by the laws of knighthood. 
 The general whose compassionate soul melts over his enemy^s 
 forces, who has not the heart to shoot a traitor or keep a 
 prisoner, whose mind is set on conducting his warfare by feats 
 of personal valour, by lofty generosity and consideration, can 
 never win more than Charles won — a swift, short, brilliant 
 campaign ; until the common herd, surj)rised, takes courage 
 in its numbers ; and the rude soldier, careless of blood or 
 suffering, resumes his hard supremacy. It is Cumberland, 
 shooting the wounded on the field, giving no quarter, crush- 
 ing down the country with his iron boot, who wins the day. 
 The march of the Prince and his followers as far as Edin- 
 burgh was in its way a royal progress. Cope having taken 
 himself out of the way, too timid or too prudent to try his 
 fortune among the Highland passes, had withdrawn by sea 
 to the low country, and left the path clear for the invaders. 
 As they marched, stream after stream joined them ; here an 
 entire clan, there a smaller party. The gentlemen of the 
 
THE YOUNG CHEVALIER. 227 
 
 country joined the Prince's march after the Highland line was 
 passed, bringing true hearts and stout courage, if not so 
 many additional broadswords. When any doubtful man fell 
 in his way, his eloquence and charm of manner had its usual 
 eflfect. " An angel could not resist such soothing close 
 applications," said Cluny Macpherson, lately captain in the 
 Hanoverian service, but soon at Charles's side with all his 
 clan. He lived with them all like a brother, falling into 
 their patriarchal familiar habits. Even his own royal affairs 
 and melancholy family life were talked of among the genial 
 affectionate company. At Nairn House, on the way south, 
 " one of the company happened to observe what a thought- 
 ful state his father would now be in, from the consideration 
 of those dangers and difiSculties he had to encounter with, 
 and that upon this account he was much to be pitied, 
 because his mind behoved to be much upon the rack. The 
 Prince replied that he did not half so much pity his father as 
 his brother ; ' for,' said he, ' the King has been inured to dis- 
 appointments and distresses, and has learnt to bear up easily 
 under the misfortunes of life ; but poor Harry 1 his young 
 and tender years make him much to be pitied, for few 
 brothers love as we do.' " 
 
 This reference to the melancholy Eoman home completes 
 the picture. In the midst of his dangers the Prince has a 
 sigh to spare for the brother into whose life this wild and 
 bright romance was never to fall. Poor Harry ! who made 
 no struggle for any rights, real or supposed, but placed his 
 cardinal's hat, like a weight of stone, forbidding all possi- 
 bility of resuscitation, upon the grave of the Stuarts. No 
 such possibility was then apparent ; but yet his gallant 
 brother grieved for the lad, left alone, with nothing better 
 than a hunting-party to stir his blood, in place of the swell- 
 ing tide of life in his own veins. In Athole " he was very 
 cheerful, taking his share in several dances, such as minuets 
 and Highland reels." In almost every great house he 
 passed, some little feast was prepared for the Chevalier. 
 Wlien he entered Perth it was amid acclamations, but with 
 one louis d'or only in his pocket, the last of the 4000 he had 
 brought with him. Thus the most fatal risk and the 
 strangest triumph, universal acclamations and absolute desti- 
 tution, all lightly borne with the sweet daring of youth, 
 
228 THE YOUNG CHEVALIER. 
 
 mingled in his life. The merchants at the fair, notwith- 
 standing his poverty, " received passports to protect their 
 persons and goods ; " and to one of them, a linendraper from 
 London, the royal gentleman courteously addressed himself, 
 bidding him tell his townsfolk that he should be at St 
 James's in two months. In the morning he rose early to 
 drill his troops ; in the evening left the ball, as soon as he had 
 danced one measure, to visit his sentry-posts. No time was 
 there in his busy life for unprofitable thoughts. And yet 
 there was time enough for full consideration of what he was 
 doing in all its aspects. We cannot refrain from quoting here 
 a remarkable letter, printed in the ' Jacobite Memoirs,' and 
 said to be written from Perth to his father in Eome, though we 
 are obliged to add that the only evidence for its authenticity 
 is the fact that it was found in Bishop Forbes's collections. 
 It expresses, at least, sentiments which we know by indis- 
 putable testimony to have been spoken by Charles : — 
 
 "Perth, September 16th, 1745. 
 
 " Sir, — Since my landing, everything has succeeded to my wishes. It 
 has pleased God to prosper me hitherto even beyond my expectations. I 
 have got together thirteen hundred men, and am promised more brave de- 
 termined men, who are resolved to die or conquer with me. The enemy 
 marched a body of troops to attack me ; but when they came near they 
 changed their mind, and, by taking a different route and making forced 
 marches, have escaped to the north, to the great disappointment of my 
 Highlanders ; but I am not at all sorry for it ; I shall have the greater 
 glory in beating them when they are more numerous, and supported by 
 their dragoons. 
 
 *' I have occasion every day to reflect on your Majesty's last words to 
 me — that I should find power, if tempered with justice and clemency, an 
 easy thing to myself, and not grievous to those under me, 'Tis owing to 
 the observance of this rule, and to my conformity to the customs of these 
 people, that I have got their hearts to a degree not to be easily conceived 
 by those who do not see it. ... I keep my health better in these 
 wild mountains than I used to do in the Campagna Felice^ and sleep 
 sounder lying on the bare ground than I used to do in the palaces in Eome. 
 
 ** There is one thing, and but one, in which I had any diff'erence with 
 my faithful Highlanders. It was about the price upon my kinsman's 
 head, which, knowing your Majesty's generous humanity, I am sure will 
 shock you, as it did me, when I was shown the proclamation setting a 
 price on my head. I smiled, and treated it with the disdain I thought 
 it deserved ; upon which they flew into a violent rage, and insisted on my 
 doing the same by him. As this flowed solely from the poor men's love 
 
THE YOUNG CHEVALIER. 229 
 
 and concern for me, I did not know how to be angry with them for it, and 
 tried to bring them to temper by representing that it was a mean, bar- 
 barous principle among princes, and must dishonour them in the eyes of 
 all men of honour ; that I did not see how my cousin's having set me the 
 example would justify me in imitating that which I blame so much in 
 him. But nothing I could say would pacify them. Some even w^ent so 
 far as to say, * Shall we venture our lives for a man who seems so in- 
 different of his own ? ' Thus have I been drawn in to do a thing for 
 which I condemn myself. Your Majesty knows that in my nature I am 
 neither cruel nor revengeful ; and God, who knows my heart, knows that 
 if the Prince who has forced me to this (for it is he that has forced me) 
 was in my power, the greatest pleasure I could feel would be in treating 
 him as the Black Prince treated his enemy, the King of France— to make 
 him ashamed of having shown himself so inhuman an enemy to a man 
 for attempting a thing, whom he himself (if he had any spirit) would 
 despise for not attempting. 
 
 ** I beg your Majesty would be under no uneasiness about me. He is 
 safe who is in God's protection. If I die, it shall be as I lived, with 
 honour ; and the pleasure I take in thinking I have a brother in all 
 respects more worthy than myself to support your just cause, and redeem 
 your country from the oppression under which it groans (if it will suffer 
 itself to be rescued), makes life more indifferent to me. As I know and 
 admire the fortitude with which your Majesty has supported your mis- 
 fortunes, and the generous disdain with which you have rejected all offers 
 of foreign assistance, on terms which j'ou thought dishonourable to your- 
 self and injurious to your country; if bold but interested friends should 
 at this time take advantage of the tender affection with which they know 
 you love me, I hope you will reject their proposals with the same mag- 
 nanimity you have hitherto shown, and leave me to shift for myself as 
 Edward III. left his brave son, when he was in danger of being oppressed 
 by numbers in the field. No, Sir, let it never be said that to save your 
 son you injured your country. When your enemies bring in foreign 
 troops, and you reject all foreign assistance on dishonourable terms, your 
 deluded subjects of England must see who is the true father of his people. 
 For my own part I declare, once for all, that while I breathe I will never 
 consent to alienate one foot of land that belongs to the crown of England, 
 or set my hand to any treaty inconsistent with its sovereignty and in- 
 dependency. * If the English will have my life, let them take it if they 
 can ; but no unkindness on their part shall ever force me to do a thing 
 which may justify them in taking it. I may be overcome by my enemies, 
 but I will not dishonour myself; if I die, it shall be with my sword in 
 hand, fighting for the liberty of those who fight against me. 
 
 * This would seem to refer to an offer of assistance from France, on 
 condition of the surrender of Ireland, which is mentioned in some cou- 
 temporary documents. 
 
230 THE YOUNG CHEVALIER. 
 
 *' I know there will be fulsome addresses from the dififerent corporations 
 of England ; but I hope they will impose on none but the lower and more 
 ignorant people. They will no doubt endeavour to revive all the errors 
 and excesses of my grandfather's unhappy reign, and impute them to 
 your Majesty and me, who had no hand in them, and suffered most by 
 them. Can anything be more unreasonable than to suppose that your 
 Majesty, who is so sensible of and has so often considered the fatal error 
 of your father, would with your eyes open go and repeat them ? 
 
 "Notwithstanding the repeated assurance your Majesty has given in 
 your declaration that you will not invade any man's property, they en- 
 deavour to persuade the unthinking people that one of the first things 
 they are to expect will be to see the public credit destroyed ; as if it 
 would be your interest to render yourself contemptible in the eyes of all 
 the nations of Europe, and make all the kingdoms you hope to reign 
 over poor at home and insignificant abroad. . . . 
 
 " I find it a great loss that the brave Lord Marishall is not with me. 
 His character is very high in the country, and it must be so wherever it 
 Is known. I had rather see him as a thousand French, who, if they 
 should come only as friends to assist your Majesty in the recovery of 
 your just rights, the weak people would believe came as invaders. There 
 is one man in this country whom I could wish to have my friend, and 
 that is the Duke of Argyll, who I find is in great credit among them, on 
 account of his great abilities and quality, and has many dependants by 
 his large fortune ; but I am told I can hardly flatter myself Avith the 
 hopes of it. The hard usage which his family has received from ours has 
 sunk deep into his mind. What have those princes to answer for who by 
 their cruelties have raised enemies not only to themselves but to their 
 innocent children? " 
 
 On the 15tli of September the city of Edinburgh, in which 
 the Whig party had a stronghold, was plunged into the 
 wildest commotion. The fire-bell was set tolling on the 
 sober Sunday afternoon while all the population were at 
 church. Frightened and excited, the townspeople rose in the 
 midst of the sermons, some of which at least were far from 
 complimentary to the approaching Prince, and rushed out into 
 the streets, where the train -bands of the town were assembled, 
 and through which Hamilton's dragoons were marching on 
 the way to defeat and flight. Then there ensued a scene 
 of extravagant farce in the midst of the heart-rending tra- 
 gedy. It is almost Shakespearian in the depth of contrast. 
 The volunteers cheered the dragoons; and the dragoons, 
 scarcely less faint-hearted in the moment of danger than 
 their amateur coadjutors, replied by answering cheers and 
 
THE YOUNG CHEVALIER. 231 
 
 the clash of their doughty swords. At these sounds the 
 Edinburgh wives and mothers, fresh from the influences of 
 the interrupted sermon, were seized with such a panic as, to 
 do them justice, women are seldom assailed by when patriot- 
 ism demands a sacrifice from them. They clung to their 
 valiant defenders with tears and outcries. Why should a 
 husband and father risk his precious life against the wild 
 Highlander, w^hose trade was fighting ? The honest burghers 
 felt with their wives that the idea was monstrous. They 
 melted away imperceptibly, stealing off" through friendly 
 close and sheltering wynd ; and when their captain looked 
 round outside the gate, he found himself followed by the 
 merest handful, not more than a score of men ! Such a 
 satire upon human nature could scarcely have been perpe- 
 trated by any poet. It is history alone which dares to in- 
 dulge in such wild ridicule of its subordinate figures. While 
 the trembling militia pulled off" their rusty blades in the 
 sacred seclusion of home, the wild eager enemy outside their 
 gates dispersed almost by a breath the troopers who had 
 made bold to go and look at them ; and its chiefs once more 
 summoned the city to surrender. The bailies met and talked 
 and trembled, and could not tell what to do. They tried to 
 gain time and negotiate, hoping in Sir John Cope, who was 
 about landing at Dunbar. All the next day was spent in 
 their futile frightened struggles. But early on Tuesday 
 morning, Lochiel, with five hundred Cameron s, took the 
 matter in hand ; and the burghers and their wives woke up 
 to find that, with less trouble than they had experienced in 
 getting out of their uniforms, the Highlanders had taken pos- 
 session of their city I — a strange little dramatic touch of 
 laughter in a story too full of tears. 
 
 The scenes that followed have been so described as that 
 none may venture to repeat them. Yet as the stranger 
 treads the long-deserted floors, and lingers in the recessed 
 windows of that gallery at Holyrood, hung with all its im- 
 possible kings, he will find another picture come up before 
 him with a pathos too profound for words. All those gallant 
 soldiers doomed to so speedy and violent an end — the wind- 
 ing-sheet high on their breasts, as the superstition of their 
 country says — some to perish on the scaffold, some under 
 the brutal coup de grace of Cumberland's butchers ; one, the 
 
232 THE YOUNG CHEVALIER. 
 
 highest of all, reserved for a more lingering, more dreadful 
 fate ; — all those fair women, whose hearts, for a moment 
 gay, were to be wrung with what tortures of anxiety, what 
 vain efforts, what sickening hopes ! Never could be more 
 pathetic merry-making than Charles Edward's ball in the 
 old house of his fathers. The coronach seems to sound over 
 the strathspey, mingling its wail with the rustle of the light 
 feet, with the " snap " of the characteristic melody. We are 
 all familiar with the poetic contrast between that " sound of 
 revelry by night" and the distant echo of the fatal guns 
 which broke up the brilliant crowd. Bat the eve of Water- 
 loo was nothing to that eve, behind which shadowed darkly 
 not only Culloden, but the Tower and the block — the traitors' 
 heads set up on the gates, the noble hearts plucked quiver- 
 ing out — all the nameless horrors of the scaffold ; or that 
 escape at the cost of all that makes life supportable, which 
 in some cases was more terrible still. 
 
 We cannot go over in detail all the military vicissitudes 
 of that strange year. It is evident that almost from the first 
 there was a conflict of authority. Lord George Murray, an 
 able and experienced but stubborn and self-willed general, 
 defends himself in his narrative with a vehemence which 
 savours something of wrong on his part ; but throughout 
 the story the persistent shadow of another figure, almost as 
 active as his own, comes in to spite and harass the move- 
 ments of the Commander-in-Chief. " Mr O'Sullivan then 
 came up," is the signal for confusion, for contravention of 
 legitimate orders, and loss of men. O'Sullivan, one of 
 Charles's companions from the outset — an Irishman, doubt- 
 less, bristling with points of national opposition to the kin- 
 dred yet different race — does not send any voice out of the 
 darkness to explain his own conduct ; but it is evident that 
 he headed such an opposition as, useful enough in constitu- 
 tional struggles, is fatal in war, and that he thwarted wher- 
 ever he was able, and set permanently on edge, the only 
 captain of the Highland forces who had the head of a general. 
 Lord George was interfered with, stopped in his work, 
 driven to the length of resignations, self-defences, despair 
 of any real good ; while Charles, no doubt, felt over again 
 more bitterly than ever, what he had said before the begin- 
 ning of his enterprise, that his friends would " rather sacri- 
 
THE YOUNG CHEVALIER. 233 
 
 fice me and my affairs than fail in any private view of their 
 own." He had nobody great enough to take the lead by 
 such force of genius as could not be withstood. 
 
 "0 for one hour of Wallace wight, 
 Or well-skilled Bruce, to rule the fight ! " 
 
 he might well have exclaimed ; or even, if not that, of Ber- 
 wick or Maurice of Saxe to be supreme and above all question. 
 What downright valour could do the little army did. It 
 stormed across Scotland, sweeping before it the panic-stricken 
 troopers who had fought well enough on other fields. It 
 defied, with claymore in hand, with wild outbursts of con- 
 temptuous triumphant song, not only Johnnie Cope, but 
 more manful leaders. " Follow me, gentlemen," said the 
 Adventurer, on that field of Prestonpans, in the chill day- 
 break, " and by the blessing of God I will this day make 
 you a free and happy people ! " He had slept among his 
 Highlanders that night on the pease-straw among the ricks. 
 He had crossed the moss with them, sinking in the uncer- 
 tain soil. When the sudden shameful rout of their opponents 
 left them masters of the field, he remained there through the 
 day to give orders for the care of the wounded and the safety 
 of the prisoners. But his was not the genius which could 
 combine and direct. He could animate, encourage, fight 
 with his soldiers, share all their hardships ; and a certain 
 intuition of what was wisest, being boldest, seems to have 
 been in him ; but he himself was not born to be a great 
 general — which was well for England, perhaps, though ill 
 for him. 
 
 In four months the handful of men which at the outset had 
 been scorned as banditti and helpless savages, had won all 
 Scotland, with the exception of two or three strongholds, and 
 had overrun England in such a rapid raid as other Stuarts in 
 other days had attempted, — without meeting with any check. 
 The Prince reached Derby on the 4th of December. His 
 rapid progress and amazing successes struck the very soul 
 of the English Government with terror. Horace Walpole, 
 once more discussing the situation, gives up Scotland as lost; 
 and London itself thrilled with terror, less perhaps of the 
 new reign than of the petticoated Highlanders, who were 
 likely to carry havoc into the city. And yet the invaders 
 
234 THE YOUNG CHEVALIER. 
 
 were totally unequal to the defensive forces of the country. 
 Marshal Wade had ten thousand men at Newcastle when the 
 Highland army passed the Border. The Duke of Cumber- 
 land was forming another army in the midland counties — 
 militia was being raised on all sides — and the whole wealth 
 and credit of the empire were embarked against the Adven- 
 turer. The reader stands aghast to see the little army, 
 " barely five thousand fightiug men," in the very heart of 
 England, with all the troops of the kingdom in arms against 
 them, and more than their own number of Hessians just im- 
 ported to help King George to hold his own. How did they 
 get there ? how did they get away again through the mazes of 
 successive armies ? A march more marvellous, a success so 
 wonderful, has scarcely ever been recorded in history. Al- 
 most every qualified critic concurs in the conclusion, that 
 had Charles and his soldiers had their simple will and pushed 
 on, blind to the tremendous risks of their position, to London, 
 they would have carried victory with them, and taken posses- 
 sion of the capital of England as easily as they did of Edin- 
 burgh. It is said that the trembling Premier shut himself 
 up for a day, to consider whether he had not better declare 
 for Charles, when the news came of his arrival at Derby; and 
 that King George had his treasures embarked and his vessels 
 prepared at the Tower ready for escape. The armies stood 
 impotent, gazing at the unexampled foray — the nation stood 
 passive, with a stupid amaze, gazing too, to let events settle 
 themselves. The only active living figures in that grim pause 
 of fate against the great silent background of expectant 
 England, are the wild forms of the mountaineers, daring and 
 eager — the princely young Captain at their head, as eager, 
 simple, and fearless — and the anxious chiefs between. They 
 were less than a hundred and thirty miles from London. 
 They had driven away like chaff every antagonist that had 
 yet ventured to look them in the face. They had glided 
 between and around the stupid masses of soldiery, who out- 
 numbered them twice over. What was to arrest their victo- 
 rious course ? Fortune for once was on the Stuarts' side : a 
 few days longer, and all would have been won. 
 
 It was at this moment, against all probability and all true 
 wisdom, that the Highland leaders seem to have come to their 
 senses. The laws of ordinary prudence suddenly, at the 
 
THE YOUNG CHEVALIEK. 235 
 
 most unpropitious hour, came back to tliem. They opened 
 their eyes as from a trance, and felt their position untenable. 
 What they do not seem to have perceived was, that their 
 position had been untenable from the first outset ; that laws 
 of every kind had been defied ; and that in the utter daring 
 and mad valour of their expedition had been and might be its 
 success. By all military laws they had no right to be where 
 they were. The conclusion they ought to have drawn from 
 this was clearly the simple unscientific conclusion drawn by 
 Charles and the common men of his army^ to persevere in 
 their wild triumphant way to the end. But the trained sol- 
 diers thought otherwise. At Derby, heaven knows why, 
 neither sooner nor later, they awoke from their passion of 
 fight and victory. The light of common day returned to 
 them. A panic of reasonableness, good sense, and strate- 
 gical rule came back upon them. It was such an exhibition 
 of the foolishness of wisdom as seldom strikes the eye. Why 
 they should have pulled up there of all spots in the world ; 
 how it was that tlie eloquence, the entreaties, " the soothing 
 close applications," the tragic protest of the unhappy Prince, 
 which had once moved them to the risking of life and fortune, 
 should have lost all its potency now, who can tell? It was 
 as if a forlorn-hope, carrying all before it, had suddenly be- 
 thought itself that it was a branch of a regular army, and 
 must return to the punctilios and symmetrical movements of 
 dignified warfare. Such was the strange revolution of feel- 
 ing that arrested Charles on his way. It was no defection of 
 heart, no faltering of courage. These men were all as ready 
 to die for him as when, hopeless yet dauntless, they had 
 pledged him their Highland faith. But all at once it had 
 flashed upon them that they were doing their work as men 
 had never done it before ; " G'est magnifique, mais ce n'' est pas 
 la guerre!' The danger was no way increased, the path was 
 as open, every augury of success as fair before them as at the 
 moment of starting ; but at last the irregular impetus had 
 failed, and the laws of their trade, and the long-forgotten 
 precautions of prudence, came back too late to the minds of 
 the generals. Prudence was madness in their then position, 
 but, mad as it w^as, it carried the day. 
 
 To this awakening, however, many different reasons had 
 conduced. First of all was the old and stubborn Scottish 
 
236 THE YOUNG CHEVALIEE. 
 
 prejudice against leaving or remaining long absent from tlieir 
 native soil — a prejudice, no doubt, built upon very sufficient 
 foundation and recollections of disaster, but put in force too 
 late, when retreat was worse than advance. Then the fact 
 that England did but stare at them and stand aloof, had no 
 doubt an intensely depressing effect upon men who were 
 compelled to take all the circumstances into consideration, 
 and could not go on blindly like knights- errant. It had been 
 promised them that England was ready to take up arms, that 
 France was ready to send help and succour. Such promises 
 had been made to Charles himself, and he too in his silent 
 heart had borne the shock of disappointment. But his gen- 
 erals could not take it silently. To this let us add, that the 
 divisions among them were gradually growing more bitter. 
 It is said that Charles himself was wilful, and fond of his own 
 way ; but of this there is little direct evidence, so far as the 
 conduct of the war is concerned. He had all but forced 
 them over the Border, it is true, vowing that he would go 
 alone if no man would follow him ; but there is little trace 
 in the various narratives of absolute interference on his part. 
 Lord George, though evidently feeling himself an injured 
 man, repeatedly records the fact that the Prince relinquished 
 his own will in deference to the opinions of his officers. But 
 with all these adverse circumstances against them, and little 
 more than tlieir attachment to the Prince's person to inspire 
 their courage, it is natural enough that their endurance, 
 strained to the uttermost, should have given way. Unfor- 
 tunately, a sudden fit of prudence after daring is in most 
 cases fatal. They had gone too far to go back. When they 
 turned they virtually gave up the conflict, renewed the cour- 
 age of their adversaries, and relinquished the immense ad- 
 vantages of enthusiasm and confidence which had been their 
 own. 
 
 To Charles this blow was all the more terrible that it was 
 quite unexpected. " He arrived at Derby in high spirits," 
 says Lord Mahon, " reflecting that he was now within a 
 hundred and thirty miles of the capital, and that neither 
 Wade's nor Cumberland's forces any longer lay before that 
 object of his hopes." He had even begun in the lightness 
 of his heart to consider the question whether he should enter 
 London on foot or on horseback, in an English or Highland 
 
THE YOUNG CHEVALIER. 237 
 
 dress. It was the last night of triumph to the Chevalier. 
 The dawn of the winter morning brought with it a miserable 
 change. The chief officers of his army waited on him at 
 break of day, headed by Lord George, the Commander-in- 
 Chief. The proposition they laid before him was nothing 
 less than to abandon the attempt on England, which up to 
 this time had been so strangely uninterrupted, and to retreat 
 to Scotland. They laid before him their diminished num- 
 bers, the apathy of England, the silence of France, the thirty 
 thousand men who might at any moment gather round them, 
 and prevent the escape of a single soldier ; the risk of his 
 own person. All these arguments were suddenly poured 
 upon Charles's indignant astonished ear. He tried again his 
 powers of remonstrance, of entreaty, of sudden appeal — all 
 the arts that had once vanquished his fond yet half-unwilling 
 supporters. What was his life to him in comparison with 
 his cause ? " Rather than go back I would wish to be 
 twenty feet under ground !" he cried. With the fervour of 
 a man arrived at the crisis of his life, and to whom the ques- 
 tion was desperate, he confronted all those gloomy dis- 
 appointed chiefs who had been so true to him, and yet so 
 hard upon him. It might mean a scaffold to them : to 
 Charles it meant death spiritual and moral, shame, downfall, 
 a lingering agony. Desperately he pleaded with them, im- 
 ploring them to do anything but retreat. Of all the silent 
 stubborn assembly, Perth alone, young, chivalrous, and hope- 
 ful as himself, stood by him ; and he who once had fascinated 
 all hearts — he whose words had charmed away prudence, 
 and made life itself seem but sweet as a weapon to serve him 
 — had to see his prayers put aside, his arguments neglected, 
 and no answer given to his appeal. The debate went on for 
 hours, but the unhappy Prince would not yield. When the 
 council broke up, he tried once more pathetically what his 
 old skill in persuasion was good for. They had baffled him 
 together ; they might yield to him separately. Something 
 of the simplicity of an untrained mind is in this last attempt. 
 He trusted in his power of moving their hearts as a girl 
 might trust in her beauty ; but the influence was no longer 
 fresh and novel. His captains had become used to the plead- 
 ings of their Prince. Perhaps he had tried too often that mode 
 of government. The moment was come when fact and pro- 
 
238 THE YOUNG CHEVALIER. 
 
 bability Lad returned to reign over them, shutting their 
 ears to all appeals. The men faced him, when he sent for 
 tliem, as steadily alone as they had done together. His hour 
 and power were over. At that moment, when fortune still 
 seemed to smile on him, and his neighbourhood struck terror 
 into the hearts of his enemies, Charles must have passed 
 through the very bitterness of death. 
 
 The same evening the council was again called together, 
 and " Charles sullenly declared his consent to a retreat." 
 Sullenly perhaps, sadly — with his heart broken and his high 
 hopes quenched, who can doubt? Disappointed of the prize 
 that seemed so near, the last stroke which would have roused 
 all his friends to his succour; disappointed in the very love 
 which now seemed to fail him — in the dead silence of the 
 country round, out of which so many promises had come — 
 in the sickening unresponsive quiet in which he was left, to 
 do his best or worst, heaven and earth looking on, not aiding. 
 It was then, and not when the stimulus of personal danger 
 called him back to himself, that Charles Stuart bore the blow 
 that was worse than death. There, and not on Culloden, the 
 natural result of that decision, should be noted the real end 
 of his extraordinary campaign. 
 
 Nor was he alone in his misery. Next morning, when 
 the army set out in the grey twilight, " the inferior officers 
 and common men believed that they were going to fight the 
 Duke of Cumberland, at which they displayed the utmost 
 joy. But when the daybreak allowed them to discern the 
 surrounding objects, and to discover that they were retracing 
 their steps, nothing was to be heard throughout the army 
 but expressions of rage and indignation. " If we had been 
 beaten," said one of their officers, " the grief could not have 
 been greater." But the soldiers had to yield, silent with 
 rage and dismay, and trudge back again the weary dangerous 
 way, uncheered by the glorious hopes which had drawn them 
 thither ; while the Prince, ready to weep such tears as would 
 not have misbecome his manhood — his heart broken, his 
 countenance changed, all his princely suavity and charm 
 gone from him — came tardily and dully in the rear. At that 
 terrible moment his dignity forsook him along with his 
 hopes. In the frightful revulsion of feeling the poor young 
 hero, still so young, shows for a moment like a petulant 
 
THE YOUNG CHEVALIER. 239 
 
 cliild. Instinctively lie felt that all he had struggled for 
 was lost. What need now to be up with the sun, to brush 
 away the early dew, to hold out the longest and march the 
 strongest of any of his men ? He had done so, and this was 
 the end. Now he fell back into the exhaustion of lost hope. 
 On his way south he had given up his carriage to one of his 
 aged followers, and had traversed the long plains merrily on 
 foot, sometimes at the head of one clan, sometimes of 
 another, in the Highland dress, with his target slung over 
 his shoulder. He would not even stop to eat, but snatched 
 his dinner when he could, threw himself lightly on whatever 
 bed might be possible — the open field, if no better was to 
 be had — and slept till four o'clock in the morning, when he 
 was astir again. But now all this was over. Every other 
 trial he had borne bravely, but this Charles did not bear well. 
 He could not hide the change in his face ; he made no fur- 
 ther effort ; lingering in the rear, late in the march, he rode 
 on moody with a petulant misery. The test of this disap- 
 pointment was too much for him. It is the only point in the 
 brief and wonderful story in which the hero falls below his 
 position. And yet the reader forgives the unhappy Cheva- 
 lier. If ever man had reason to be cast down, it was he. 
 
 " I believe," says Lord Mahon, in whose careful and close 
 narrative the mass of existing material is condensed and set 
 forth with equal judgment and power, and whose principles 
 do certainly not incline him to favour the Stuarts' cause — " I 
 believe that had Charles marched onwards from Derby he 
 would have gained the British throne." It is evident that 
 he felt this conviction himself to the depths of his heart. 
 But Providence did not mean to give the race that last 
 chance. When the Highlanders turned their back upon 
 England, the last possibility was over for the house of 
 Stuart. 
 
 The retreat thus sadly begun was scarcely less wonderful 
 than the march. It was accomplished with a speed and 
 safety quite extraordinary in the circumstances ; but, never- 
 theless, it moved like a funeral procession across the western 
 border, men and leaders having alike lost temper and lost 
 heart. The strict discipline of the earlier part of the cam- 
 paign failed under this trial. The mountaineers, lowered in 
 their own estimation, went back to their old instinct of plun- 
 
240 THE YOUNG CHEVALIER. 
 
 der. The Prince, sore at heart, exacted fines from the towns 
 he passed, where the popular entbusiasm for the successful 
 leader had changed, with the usual treachery of the mob, 
 into vexatious opposition. Manchester was mulcted in 
 £5000 ; Dumfries in £2000. Glasgow, always adverse, was 
 laid under " a most heavy requisition to refit the Highland 
 army." One transient gleam of renewed success burst upon 
 them at Falkirk, reviving the spirit at once of the soldiers 
 and of their leader ; and a decisive battle seemed imminent. 
 The prospect roused all the old enthusiasm. It was Cum- 
 berland this time who was advancing to meet them, and the 
 hearts of the Highlanders were all aglow. But again the 
 chiefs stepped in with proposals for retreat, A kind of 
 infatuation seems to have possessed these fated men. Their 
 mountains attracted them with some unreasonable fatal fas- 
 cination. They promised Charles in spring an army of 
 " 10,000 eff'ective Highlanders," and in the mean time the 
 reduction of the northern forts, if he would but withdraw 
 now, and seek safety among the hills. Only the night 
 before. Lord George, once more at the head of the malcon- 
 tents, had shown to the Prince a plan for the battle with 
 Cumberland's army, which Charles had corrected and ap- 
 proved. Once more the rage of disappointment overwhelmed 
 the unfortunate Adventurer. " Good God ! have I lived to 
 see this ?" he cried, dashing his head against the wall with 
 the wild passion of his southern training. But again the 
 chiefs, masters more absolute than any king, prevailed. The 
 inevitable battle was postponed from the links of Forth, 
 where their followers were gay with victory, to the dreary 
 Culloden moor, where, starving, destitute, and desperate, the 
 hopeless encounter had at length to be. Thus the bitter 
 crisis was re-enacted. And hard must the heart be, and dull 
 the imagination, which will not own at such a moment a 
 pang of intolerable pity for the heart-broken Chevalier and 
 his lost cause. 
 
 The retreat, for the first time, w^as made in confusion, of 
 which poor Charles, sick at heart, yet ever generous, took 
 the blame upon himself. Drearily, with heavy thoughts and 
 lessening numbers, the little host pursued its fatal way 
 towards the hills. As the disastrous march proceeded, 
 money failed, and even food, as well as patience and hope. 
 
THE YOUNG CHEVALIER. ' 241 
 
 The wild winter-bound mountains afforded no supplies to the 
 wanderers. The succours which had always continued to 
 drop in in minute doles from France fell into the enemy's 
 hands — one ship in particular, with £10,000 in gold and 150 
 soldiers. The Highlanders had to be paid in meal, " which 
 the men, being obliged to sell out and convert into money, 
 it went but a short way for their other needs." Even the 
 meal failed by-and-by. On the eve of Culloden, one bis- 
 cuit served to each man was the sole provision of the 
 5000, who, weary, dispirited, and chilled to the heart, 
 had to meet, on this poor fare, an army of nearly 9000 well- 
 fed and carefully-appointed soldiers. Courage alone held 
 out, the last prop of the unfortunate. When Lord George 
 advised a night-march to surprise Cumberland in his camp, 
 even at this dismal conjuncture Charles rose and embraced 
 the general who had served him so ably and thwarted him 
 so cruelly. But Drummossie Moor and Prestonpans were 
 different. The men were worn out. The wintry darkness 
 and cold, intensified by want, stupefied even the moun- 
 taineers. Their progress was so slow that this project, like 
 so many others, had to be given up. Wearily the doomed 
 army went back to arrange itself in line on the black hope- 
 less moor, and wait the battle. Nobody seems to have had 
 heart enough left even to compare the dismal omens of this 
 field with what might have been had Cumberland been met 
 at Falkirk, or to cast the contrast in the teeth of the captains 
 who had retreated only for this. Hungry, cold, and worn 
 out, after a sleepless night and foodless day, the Highlanders 
 stood up to meet their fate. The Macdonalds had not their 
 usual place, which seems to have moved them more than 
 fatigue or want. " We of the clan Macdonald thought it 
 ominous that we had not the right hand in battle as formerly 
 at Gladsmuir and Falkirk, and which our clan maintains we 
 had enjoyed in all our battles and struggles since the battle 
 of Bannockburn." This punctilio did what starvation could 
 not do. '' My God ! have the children of my clan forsaken 
 me V cried gallant Keppoch, in his death-pang, — no doubt 
 with a pang more sharp than death. While the Macdonalds 
 stood sullen without striking a blow, the other clans, fight- 
 ing the fight of despair, broke, fell, and perished before the 
 fatal force and overwhelming numbers of their adversaries. 
 
 Q 
 
242 THE YOUNG CHEVALIER. 
 
 " Nowhere/' says Lord Mahon, moved out of his composure 
 to a swell of sympathetic eloquence, — " not by their fore- 
 fathers at Bannockburn — ^not by themselves at Preston or at 
 Falkirk — not in after years, when discipline had raised and 
 refined the valour of their sons — not on the shores of the 
 Nile — not on that other field of victory, where their gallant 
 chief, with a prophetic shroud (it is their own superstition) 
 high upon his breast, addressed to them only these three 
 words, ''Highlanders, rememher Egypt V — not in those hours 
 of triumph and glory was displayed a more firm and resolute 
 bravery than now in the defeat at Culloden." But human 
 strength has its limit, if not human bravery. For the first 
 time since they set out from their mountains eight months 
 before, the Highlanders fell before their enemies. The tide 
 had turned — their day was over — and the first lost battle 
 was the last. 
 
 And Charles, into whose mind it is evident such an idea 
 had never entered — Charles, who could not believe that 
 when the encounter carae, man to man, anything on earth 
 could stand before his mountaineers — saw this destruction 
 from the height where he stood watching, with sudden tears 
 of passion and anguish, with wonder, incredulity, and des- 
 pair. He could not believe it. Probably it was the stupe- 
 faction of amaze and horror that prevented him rushing 
 down into the fatal melee and dying like his ancestor at Flod- 
 den, the best fate his best friend could have wished him. 
 " In the lost battle, borne down by the flying," he stood 
 aghast in a terrible surprise. He was urged, some say, to 
 put himself at the head of the stubborn Macdonalds and 
 attempt another charge ; others tell us that he was prevented 
 by force from taking this desperate step, O'Sullivan seizing 
 his horse by the bridle and forcing him from the field. All 
 the narratives combined leave upon the reader's mind the 
 impression that Charles was stupefied by the unexpected 
 calamity. He had felt his cause was lost, but never that it 
 was so lost as this. As he turned his back upon the fatal 
 moor where his poor Highlanders lay dying, in this bewilder- 
 ment of amaze and despair, a certain Ned Burke, a poor 
 Highland caddie from Edinburgh, came up to the little knot 
 of reluctant fugitives which surrounded the Prince. " There 
 were very few along with him," the faithful fellow says, 
 
THE YOUNG CHEVALIER. 243 
 
 " and he had no guide." " If you be a true friend, endea- 
 vour to lead us safe off," said Charles ; while the enemy's 
 fire, according to this humble observer's story, was so close 
 and hot about that his horse was killed under him, and his 
 groom by his side. This address was " an honour Ned was 
 not a little fond of, and promised to do his best ; " and thus 
 began the most wonderful tale of adventure, privation, abso- 
 lute trust, and unequalled fidelity that our records or those 
 of any country have ever known. 
 
 The little party seems at this time to have consisted of 
 two of the Irish gentlemen whom Charles had brought with 
 him. Lord Elcho, and an aide-de-camp called Macleod. For 
 several days they wandered sadly, but not entirely without 
 hope, finding refuge in the houses of the lairds, most of 
 whom, like themselves, were fugitives, if not slain on the 
 field — houses where shelter was to be had, if nothing else. 
 But this life was too luxurious to last. Some ten days after, 
 having worked their way northward, the forlorn party took 
 boat and set out for the isles. Here another heroic High- 
 lander, Donald Macleod of Gualtergill, in Skye, came to the 
 aid of the little company. He was their guide by sea as 
 Burke was by land. His clan was one of those which had 
 held aloof ; his chief was (in words at least) an active enemy 
 of Charles ; and he himself was an old man, beyond the im- 
 pulses of youth. But all these deterring influences did not 
 hold him back. He met the Prince " in a wood all alone," 
 and his heart swelled within him. " You see, Donald, I am 
 in distress," said the Chevalier, with his old grace ; " I throw 
 myself into your bosom : I know you are an honest man, and 
 fit to be trusted." " When Donald was giving me this part 
 of his narrative," says Bishop Forbes, " he grat sore ; the 
 tears came running down his cheeks, and he said, ' Wha deil 
 could help greeting when speaking on sic a sad subject?'" 
 
 No eloquence can surpass these words. With this faith- 
 ful pilot at the helm, the forlorn party coasted the barren 
 isles, putting in now and then for rest or food, encountering 
 all the storms of that wild sea, drenched with its frequent 
 rain, sometimes hungry, always weary, outcasts of the land 
 and sea. Yet, stransre to tell, in these miserable wander- 
 ings, the reader, with a lump in his throat, finds again the 
 gallant young Chevalier of Glenfinnan and Holyrood. He 
 
?44 THE YOUNG CHEVALIER. 
 
 of the retreat, petulant, complaining, reproacliful, came to 
 an end in the last catastrophe which completed his ruin. 
 In the toilsome mountain-paths, in the huts he had to creep 
 into on hands and knees, in the boat storm-tossed upon that 
 melancholy sea, it is no sullen fugitive, but a noble, cheer- 
 ful, gallant soul, making the best of everything that be- 
 falls, uttering no plaint and refusing no human sympathy, 
 that appears before us. He makes merry, like the valiant 
 gentleman he was, over his privations. When no better 
 fare is to be had, he swallows the Highland drammoch^ oat- 
 meal mixed with water — on this occasion sea- water — and calls 
 it " no bad food." Nothing daunted him in this last chap- 
 ter of his wondrous adventures. When his poor followers 
 were sinking under fatigue and want, he sang them songs to 
 keep up their hearts — sometimes their native Gaelic songs 
 — sometimes, doubtless, God help him ! the soft Italian 
 strains he had sung in the Palazzo Muti, with gaping Eng- 
 lish spectators looking on, and a hundred impatient ignorant 
 hopes in his heart. Never once do we find him flagging 
 from his wonderful patience. From wild isle to isle, from 
 tempest to tempest, now almost within prick of the bayonets 
 sent out against him, now tossed on waves that threatened 
 every moment to swallow his poor boat, a ruined, destitute, 
 forsaken wanderer, his high spirit never failed him. A price 
 of £30,000 was set upon his head, and every island and bay 
 swarmed with soldiers eager to win that reward. Yet the 
 Prince went fearless from cabin to cabin, from guide to 
 guide, trusting everybody, and never trusting in vain. The 
 extraordinary fidelity of the crowd of lowly mountaineers, 
 who might have betrayed him, has been celebrated to the 
 echo : never was there a more wonderful instance of popular 
 honour and devotion. But the man who trusted so fully 
 should not go without his share of honour. He was afraid 
 of no man, chief, vassal, or robber ; he threw himself upon 
 them with a generous confidence. Perhaps a forlorn hope 
 that he might yet find himself at bay and sell his life dearly, 
 may have crossed the mind of Charles. But whatever it 
 might be that buoyed him up, the fact is clear, and it is a 
 noble one, that never word or murmur broke from him amid 
 all his hardships. His playful talk, his jests, the songs he 
 sung to his poor followers, the smiling, patient front with 
 
THE YOUNG CHEVALIER. 245 
 
 "which he met all his sorrows, form another picture as 
 touching, as nohle, and as melancholy as ever was made 
 by man. 
 
 We cannot linger even on that romantic episode of Flora 
 Macdonald, which has proved so attractive to all romancers. 
 The brief bit of heroism has writ the name of the Highland 
 girl on the immortal page of history, higher than many that 
 have taken a far greater place in the world's eye. Even at 
 this saddest strait of Charles's fortunes there is that gleam 
 of humour in the gloom which makes the story more pathetic 
 than any outcry of sorrow. When Flora and Lady Clanran- 
 ald went to dress the fugitive in the woman's dress he was 
 to wear, " it was not without some mirth and raillery pass- 
 ing amid all their distress and perplexity, and a mixture of 
 tears and smiles." When he parted with the brave girl, 
 whom he called with tender grace our lady^ a momentary 
 gleam again came upon the anxious faces of the spectators 
 at the scandalised looks of another lady's-maid, who des- 
 cribed Miss Flora's attendant as " the most impudent-look- 
 ing woman she had ever seen." " They call you a Pretender," 
 said good Kingsburgh, into whose hands he fell next, still in 
 those troublesome garments which he did not know how to 
 manage, " but you are the worst of your trade I ever saw." 
 In Kingsburgh's homely house, while all the inhabitants 
 were thrown into wild anxiety for his safety, he himself, 
 glad as a wanderer only could be of the night's rest and 
 comfort, playfully struggled with his host for a second 
 bowl of punch, and "laughed heartily" as he put on again 
 his feminine gear. His long walks, now with one guide, 
 now with another, are full of a simple human fellowship 
 which goes straight to the heart ; though the reader at the 
 same moment perceives with a thrill of pitifal emotion, in the 
 snatches of rude conviviality which now and then break in 
 upon the gravity of the record, one of the germs of ultimate 
 ruin. Be it Malcolm Macleod, or Donald Koy, or any other 
 of his many conductors, the heart of the wanderer unfolds 
 itself to the humble friend by his side with a brotherly 
 openness. When his anxious companion proposes with 
 Highland brevity to shoot a suspicious wanderer who may 
 chance to be a spy, the generous Prince at once interferes. 
 " God forbid that any poor man should suffer for us, if we can 
 
24G THE YOUNG CHEVALIER. 
 
 but keep ourselves any way safe ! " he cries. " He used to 
 say that the fatigues and distresses he underwent signified 
 nothing at all, because he was only a single person ; but 
 when he reflected upon the many brave fellows who 
 suffered in his cause, that, he behoved to own, did strike 
 him to the heart." When he dozed in his weariness, he 
 would wake with a start, crying, " Oh, poor England ! poor 
 England ! " yet the next moment, when his boatmen were 
 struggling with the waves, " to divert the men from think- 
 ing of the danger, he sung them a merry Highland song." 
 Thus cheerful, sorrowful, resolute, and all-enduring, Charles 
 Stuart struggled through six months of such hardship as 
 would have killed any ordinary man. If it was the mere 
 instinct of life which kept him afloat, the mere necessity 
 which makes it impossible for a valiant spirit to yield and 
 acknowledge itself beaten, or if some desperate hope of 
 better things, waxing stronger as his circumstances grew 
 worse, sustained him, it is impossible to tell. He went 
 through a hundred deaths, and survived them all. There is 
 even some indications that this terrible interval was bitter- 
 sweet to him, full as it was of friendship and devotion. 
 And the observer feels that here he should have died. 
 Death would have made the story complete — an epic beyond 
 all competition of poetry ; but death under such circum- 
 stances must be a crown too splendid for the exigencies of 
 common humanity. It does not come when its presence 
 would complete and perfect the round of life. Charles lived 
 as Napoleon lived, as men live every day after existence is 
 over for them ; surviving to add some vulgar or pitiful post- 
 script to the tragedy which might have been completed so 
 grandly — a postscript more tragically instructive, perhaps 
 more painful and appalling, tlian that brief and solemn 
 dropping of the curtain which follows a well-timed death. 
 And accordingly Charles survived. He lived to get back 
 to France, to reign the hero of the moment in Paris until the 
 time came when France and England swore peace. A year 
 after his return from Scotland, such hopes as might have 
 preserved a feverish life within him were crushed to the earth 
 by the news that his young brother Henry had become an 
 ecclesiastic, and received the Cardinal's hat — an act which 
 was nothing less than rolling the stone to the door of the 
 
THE YOUNG CHEVALIER. 247 
 
 sepulchre in which hope was buried. Nevertheless he went 
 and came, to Spain, to the French Court, wherever he could 
 get a hearing, to seek help for a new expedition, with a 
 longing after England which is more touching than mere 
 ambition. It is like the efforts of the drowning man to 
 snatch at any straw which might preserve him from the 
 cold waters of death in which he felt himself sinking. But 
 nobody held out a hand to the lost soul. One vain last 
 struggle he made, not to be sent out of France, resisting 
 foolishly, with something of the petulance he had shown on 
 his retreat, the power against which he could not stand. 
 But fate was against him in all his struggles. Against his 
 will, in spite of a mad resistance, the deadly quiet of Kome 
 sucked him back. Shipwrecked, weary of life, shamed by 
 his knowledge of bitter things, consumed by vain longings 
 for a real existence such as never could be his, the Chevalier 
 sank as, God help us ! so many sink into the awful abyss. 
 To forget his misery, to deaden the smart of his niin, what 
 matters what he did ? He lost, in shame, in oblivion, and 
 painful decay, the phantasm which was life no longer — with 
 other fantastic shadows — ill-chosen wife, ill-governed house- 
 hold, faithless and foolish favourites, a staring silly spectator- 
 crowd — flitting across the tragic mist. A merciful tear 
 springs to the eye, obscuring the fatal outlines of that last 
 sad picture. There sank a man in wreck and ruin who was 
 a noble Prince when the days were. If he fell into degrada- 
 tion at the last, he was once as gallant, as tender, as spotless 
 a gentleman as ever breathed English air or trod Scot- 
 tish heather. And when the spectator stands by Canova's 
 marble in the great Basilica, in the fated land where, with 
 all the Ccesars, Charles Edward has slept for nearly a cen- 
 tury, it is not the silver trumpets in the choir, nor the 
 matchless voices in their Agnus Dei, that haunt the ear in 
 the silence ; but some rude long-drawn pibroch note wailing 
 over land and sea — wailing to earth and heaven : for a lost 
 cause, a perished house, and, most of all, for the darkening 
 and shipwreck and ruin of a gracious and princely soul. 
 
VII. 
 
 THE EEFOEMER. 
 
 It is difficult, either from the bare facts of history or from 
 disjointed scenes in it, to arrive at any clear idea of the 
 general state of feeling and thought at any special period. 
 It is only, indeed, within recent days, that modern history 
 has troubled itself with any endeavour to realise the spiritual 
 fashion and wont of the age it painted. So many things 
 happened — so many battles were fought — so many kings 
 reigned, — its audience asked no more. The reigns of the 
 first Georges were occupied with a struggle to establish 
 their dynasty ; to set the constitutional government of the 
 country on sure foundations ; to settle a great many questions 
 on the Continent, with which England had not A^ery much to 
 do. Such is the record ; and a very bare record it is, notwith- 
 standing the depths of individual interest that are contained 
 underneath. But, fortunately, the public mind has nowadays 
 taken to a certain curiosity about how things came about ; 
 and there are few subjects which could more call for such a 
 preliminary inquiry than the one on which we are about to 
 enter. Such a figure as John Wesley does not arise in a 
 country without urgent need, or without circumstances that 
 account for most of the angles in it. To consider the appari- 
 tion by itself, without considering these, is to lose lialf its 
 significance, as well as to judge unjustly, in all probability, 
 of the chief personage of the narrative — a man not rising 
 vaguely out of society, without any call or necessity, but 
 tragically demanded by a world ready to perish, and born 
 out of the very hopelessness of its need. 
 
THE EEFORMEE. 249 
 
 The sketches which have preceded this, though attempt- 
 ing no analysis or even description of the period, must have 
 failed altogether of their ead if they have not indicated an 
 age singularly devoid not only of religion, but of all spiritu- 
 ality of mind, or reference to things unseen. The noble 
 natural qualities of Queen Caroline, and her high devotion 
 to the view of duty, of which her mind was most capable — 
 the patriotism (such as it was) of Walpole — the amazing 
 paternal love of Chesterfield — are all as independent of any 
 religious motive or meaning as if those princely personages 
 had been as heathen in name as they were in reality. The 
 wonderful wifely support and countenance which Caroline 
 steadfastly gave, in spite of all the repugnance of nature, 
 to her faithless and often contemptible husband, gave at 
 the same time an unseemly countenance to vice. Walpole 
 served his country and the devil together, and laughed at 
 the very idea of goodness. Chesterfield, in devotion to one 
 of the most blessed of natural pieties, did not blush to en- 
 courage his young son in shameless wickedness. Pope bab- 
 bled loudly of the vice for which his weak frame incapaci- 
 tated him, and held his hereditary faith for honour's sake, 
 without the slightest appearance or pretence of any spiritual 
 attachment to it. They had some pagan virtues amid their 
 perpetual flutter of talk and dissipation : one was a good son, 
 another a good father, a third a most loyal and tender wife ; 
 and yet, take them either together or apart, it is clear as 
 daylight that thought of God, or care for religion, was not 
 in them. They were not impious except by moments ; but 
 they were godless, earthly, worldly, without consciousness of 
 anything more in heaven or earth than was dreamed of in 
 the most limited philosophy. 
 
 It was one of the moments in which the world had fallen 
 out of thought of God. Other ages may have been as wicked, 
 but we doubt whether any age had learned so entirely to 
 forget its connection with higher things, or the fact that a 
 soul which did not die — an immortal being akin to other 
 spheres — was within its clay. The good men were inopera- 
 tive, the bad men were dauntless ; the vast crowd between 
 the two, which forms the bulk of humanity, felt no stimulus 
 towards religion, and drowsed in comfortable content. It was 
 the age when the chaplain married my lady's maid, and ate 
 
250 THE REFORMEE. 
 
 at the second table, and would even lend a hand to carry my 
 lord to bed at night, after he had dropjDcd under the table, 
 and turn a deaf ear to the blasphemy with which his speech 
 was adorned. It was the age when delicate young women, 
 of the best blood and best manners in the land, talked with 
 a coarseness which editors of the nineteenth century can 
 represent only by asterisks ; and in which the most polished 
 and dainty verse, Pope's most melodious, correctest couplets, 
 were interspersed with lines which would damn for ever and 
 ever any modern poetaster. Personal satire, poor instrument 
 of vengeance which stings and wounds without any power 
 of amending, had such sway as it has never had before in 
 England ; but that sense of public honour which prevents 
 open outrage upon decency was not in existence. The pub- 
 lic liked the wicked story, and liked the scourge that came 
 after ; and laughed, not in its sleeve, but loudly, at blasphemy 
 and indecency and profanity. Even the sentiment of clean- 
 ness, purity, and honour, was lost to the generation. Its 
 soul was good for nothing but to point an oath. The name 
 of God was still used in public documents as giving victories 
 and confounding enemies, and such-like ; and in private very 
 freely, as the most round syllable to clench the perpetual 
 curse; but was of no more spiritual significance than the 
 name of George or James, and not half so much external 
 weight. Such was the age : a period of confused fighting, 
 here for Maria Theresa, there for Charles XII., again for the 
 fallen, ever-falling Stuarts ; with no principle in the strife, 
 and little good coming out of it to any man or kingdom, ex- 
 cept perhaps in the end, the Prussian ; and, so far as England 
 was concerned, a gradual weaning of the popular mind from 
 any belief or hope in excellence, or power of contrasting the 
 good with the evil. So long as Excise-bills were held aloof, 
 and tranquillity preserved, what did it matter whether light 
 or darkness was uppermost ? or, indeed, was not darkness the 
 rule, and light, if not painful, at least indifferent, to the eye, 
 ■ — not a matter to make any fuss about ? One of the most 
 hopeless unexalted ages that ever benumbed the faculties of 
 man. 
 
 " I have observed the clergy in all the places through 
 which I have travelled," says Bishop Burnet in 1713, not a 
 hard or difficult judge, — " Papists, Lutherans, Calvinists, 
 
THE REFOEMEE. 251 
 
 and Dissenters ; but of them all, onr clergy is much the 
 most remiss in their labours in private, and the least severe 
 in their lives/' " A due regard to religious persons, places, 
 and things has scarce in any age been more wanting," says 
 Atterbury in 1711. Twenty years later, the famous Non- 
 conformist Calamy laments the " real decay of serious 
 religion both in the Church and out of it." To this country 
 and age, lying in ignorance, in that sneering and insolent 
 profanity which is, of all others, the most hateful condition 
 into which humanity can fall, John Wesley was born — and 
 not a day too soon. 
 
 The Reformer, whose influence upon his generation was 
 so extraordinary, is not one of those who concentrate the 
 spectator's attention upon themselves, or move him to pas- 
 sionate sympathy, admiration, and love, blotting out, to some 
 extent, the meaner earth. His progress through life is 
 rather that of a moving light which throws gleams upon the 
 darkling mass around it. His very cradle illuminates a 
 quaint family picture, opening up to us one of the still pious 
 households which broke with their quaint religiousness and 
 formal order the level of reckless living. His father was 
 vicar of Epworth in Lincolnshire, a good man, of Noncon- 
 formist lineage, but a zealous Churchman ; his mother, the 
 daughter of one of the ejected ministers. Mr Samuel Wesley 
 had been driven out of the Dissenting body by the fierce 
 sectarianism of the community ; his wife, with more remark- 
 able individuality, "had examined the controversy between 
 the Dissenters and the Church of England with conscientious 
 diligence, and satisfied herself that the schismatics were in 
 the wrong." Such a pair at the head of a large family in 
 the little parsonage among the fens developed various quaint 
 features of religious opinionativeness which have worn out 
 of fashion in our day. The husband had gained his benefice 
 by a little book about the Revolution, which he dedicated to 
 Queen Mary. Years after, it struck the good man that at 
 prayers his wife did not say amen to his petition for Dutch 
 William ; and he found, on inquiry, that to her the King of 
 the Revolution was still Prince of Orange, an unnatural 
 usurper. She had said nothing about her dissent from his 
 opinions on this subject, being impressed, as Southey says, 
 by a deep sense of " the duty and wisdom of obedience." 
 
252 THE REFOEMER. 
 
 But in this case, as in most others, it is evident that the 
 husband did not see the beauty of that much commended but 
 highly unpleasant duty. He went off in a pet, as husbands 
 when " obeyed " are too apt to do, and vowed never to see 
 or communicate with the schismatic again till she had 
 changed her mind. This humorous incident is not, how- 
 ever, turned into a moral lesson by any change of mind on 
 the part of Mrs Susannah. The king died, which answered 
 the purpose just as well, and the husband came back, some- 
 what sheepishly one cannot but think, leaving the victory in 
 her hands. 
 
 Another controversy of a less amusing character which 
 arose between them shows that the duty of obedience, after 
 all, was not the first in Mrs Wesley's mind. Her husband, 
 evidently a self-willed and hot-headed man, though a good 
 and true one, was in the habit of attending the sittings of 
 Convocation, " at an expense of money which he could ill 
 spare from the necessities of so large a family, and at a 
 cost of time which was injurious to his parish." There was 
 no afternoon service at the church at Epworth during his 
 absences ; and, with a curious foreshadowing of what was 
 to come, the clergyman's wife took in hand a little domestic 
 service on the Sunday evenings,' praying and reading with 
 her children and servants as a mother and mistress may. 
 But by degrees a few neighbours dropped in, and Mrs Wesley 
 did not think it proper " that their presence should interrupt 
 the duty of the hour," The thing grew, so that at length 
 thirty or forty people would be present at the domestic 
 worship. Mr Wesley, busy with his Convocation squabbles, 
 heard and took fright at this unusual proceeding. It does 
 not seem to have moved him to the length of coming back 
 and looking after his own business ; but he made haste to 
 write' to her that her conduct "looked particular " — that, as 
 the wife of a public person, it behoved her to exercise 
 discretion — and that she ought to employ some one else to 
 read for her. To this she answered at length, in a, letter 
 whicli most singularly anticipates many of the views after- 
 wards proclaimed by her son : — 
 
 " As I am a woman," writes Mrs "Wesley, '* so I am also mistress of a 
 large family ; and though the superior charge of the souls contained in 
 it lies upon you, yet in your absence I cannot but look upon every soul 
 
THE REFORMER. 253 
 
 you leave under my care as a talent committed to me under a trust by 
 the great Lord of all the families both of heaven and earth. ... As 
 these and other suchlike thoughts made me at first take a more than ordi- 
 nary care of the souls of my children and servants, so, knowing our religion 
 required a strict observation of the Lord's day, and not thinking that 
 we fully answered the end of the institution by going to church unless 
 we filled up the intermediate spaces of time by other acts of piety and 
 devotion, I thought it my duty to spend some part of the day in reading 
 to and instructing my family. And such time I esteemed spent in a 
 way more acceptable to God than if I had retired to my own private 
 devotions. This was the beginning of my present practice : other 
 people's coming in and joining with us was merely accidental. Our lad 
 told his parents : they first desired to be admitted ; — then others that 
 heard of it begged leave also. So our company increased to about thirty ; 
 and it seldom exceeded forty last winter. 
 
 *' But soon after you went to London last, I light on the account of the 
 Danish missionaries. I was, I think, never more affected with anything. 
 I could not forbear spending good part of that evening in praising and 
 adoring the divine goodness for inspiring them with such ardent zeal for 
 His glory. At last it came into my mind, though I am not a man nor a 
 minister, yet I might do something more than I do. I thought I might pray 
 more for them, and might speak to those with whom I converse with more 
 warmth of afi"ection. I resolved to begin with my own children, in which 
 I observe the following method : I take such a proportion of time as I 
 can spare each night to discourse with each child apart. On Monday I 
 talk with Molly, on Tuesday with Hetty, Wednesday with Henry, 
 Thursday with Jacky, Friday with Patty, Saturday with Charles, and 
 with Emily and Sukey together on Sunday. 
 
 * * With those few neighbours that then came to me I discoursed more 
 freely and affectionately. I chose the best and most awakening sermons 
 we have. And I spent somewhat more time with them in such exercises 
 without being careful about the success of my undertaking. Since this 
 our company increased every night J for I dare deny none that ask 
 admittance. Last Sunday I believe we had above two hundred ; and yet 
 many went away for want of room to stand 
 
 " I cannot conceive why any should reflect on you because your wife 
 endeavours to draw people to church, and to restrain them from profaning 
 the Lord's day by reading to them, and other persuasions. For my part, 
 I value no censure on this account. I have long since shook hands with 
 the world ; and I heartily wish I had never given them more occasion to 
 speak against me. As to its looking particular, I grant it does. And 
 so does almost everything that is serious, or that may any way advance 
 the glory of God or the salvation of souls. 
 
 "As for your proposal of letting some other person read, alas ! you 
 don't consider what a people these are, I don't think one man among 
 them could read a sermon without spelling a good part of it. Nor has 
 
254 THE REFORMER. 
 
 any of our family a voice strong enough to be heard by such a number of 
 people. 
 
 "But there is one thing about which I am much dissatisfied— that is, 
 their being present at family prayers. I don't speak of any concern I 
 am under barely because so many are present. For those who have the 
 honour of speaking to the great and holy God need not be ashamed to 
 speak before the whole Avorld ; but because of my sex I doubt if it is 
 proper for me to present the prayers of the people to God. Last Sunday 
 I would fain have dismissed them before prayers ; but they begged so 
 earnestly to stay I durst not deny them." 
 
 This letter throws a strange light upon the rude little 
 village community, in which there was scarcely one who 
 could read without spelling, and on the first throb of spiri- 
 tual and intellectual life which thrilled, through means of 
 an " awakening" sermon, into the dull and nameless mass. 
 The brave, pious, warm-hearted woman, with her troop of 
 little children about her knees — her husband wandering 
 about, evidently for considerable periods, or such a story 
 would be incomprehensible — her mind strong enough to pass 
 conventional boundaries, but not too strong for religious 
 scruples about her sex — makes a very quaint and at the 
 same time a very attractive picture. Jacky, whom his 
 mother took apart on Thursday, was John Wesley, the pro- 
 phet of his age ; and there is little to wonder at in his future 
 life when we trace it to such a beginning. Mrs Wesley, 
 however, had not come to an end of the matter by this 
 letter. The curate, enraged by such an invasion of his pro- 
 vince, wrote complaining that a conventicle was held in the 
 parsonage ; and the absent husband replied, again in alarm, 
 forbidding the meetings. Then Mrs Wesley availed herself 
 of that weapon which law and virtue had put into her hand 
 — she offered to obey. " Do not tell me that you desire me 
 to do it, for that will not satisfy my conscience," she says, 
 " but send me your positive command.'''' " Wesley made no 
 further objections,'' says Southey, who does not see any 
 humour in it. He was " perhaps ashamed," the poet thinks. 
 It is curious enough, considering how much we make in 
 theory of the notion of conjugal obedience, that there is no 
 such prompt mode of driving a husband wild as a meek pro- 
 posal on his wife's part to obey him. When it comes to 
 that fatal point the well-conditioned male creature has 
 
THE EEFORMEIl. 255 
 
 nothing left but to give in. So little has the prettiest theory 
 to do with the actual necessities of life. 
 
 We are tempted to quote from another letter of this 
 remarkable woman, concerning the mode in which Jacky 
 and the rest were brought up. After the most detailed laws 
 (evidently unalterable as Holy Writ) of their management 
 from the cradle upwards ii^ respect to external habits, she 
 goes on to the discipline of the mind : — 
 
 **In order" (says Mrs Wesley) "to form the minds of children, the 
 first thing to be done is to conquer their will and bring them to an 
 obedient temper. To inform the understanding is a work of time, and 
 must, with chiklren, proceed by slow degrees, as they are able to bear it > 
 but the subjecting the will is a thing which must be done at once, and 
 the sooner the better. "When the will of a child is totally subdued, and 
 it is brought to revere and stand in awe of its parents, then a great many 
 childish follies and inadvertencies may be passed by. Some should be 
 overlooked and taken no notice of, and others mildl}'' reproved ; but no 
 wilful transgression ought ever to be forgiven children without chastise- 
 ment, more or less, as the nature and circumstance of the offence re- 
 quire. . . . They were quickly made to understand they might have 
 nothing they cried for, and instructed to speak handsomely for what they 
 wanted ; . . . nor were they ever permitted to call each other by their 
 proper narms without the addition of brother or sister. None of them were 
 taught to read till five years old except Kezzy, in whose case I was over- 
 ruled, and she was more years learning than any of the rest had been 
 months. The way of teaching was this. The day before a child began 
 to learn, the house was set in order, every one's work appointed them, 
 and a charge given that none should come into the room from nine to 
 twelve, or from two to five, which you know were our school-hours. One 
 day was allowed the child wherein to learn its letters, and each of them 
 did in that time learn all its letters, great and small, except Molly and 
 Nancy, who were a day and a half before they knew them perfectly, for 
 which I then thought them very dull ; but since I have observed how 
 long many children are learning the hornbook I have changed my 
 opinion. . . . There were several by-laws observed among us. I 
 mention them here, because I think them useful. 1. It had been ob- 
 served that cowardice and fear of punishment often leads children into 
 lying, till they get a custom of it which they cannot leave. To prevent 
 this, a law was made that whoever was charged with a fault of which they 
 were guilty, if they would ingenuously confess it and promise to amend, 
 should not be beaten. This rule prevented a great deal of lying, and 
 would have done more if one in the family would have observed it. 
 But he could not be prevailed upon, and therefore was often imposed on. 
 .... 3. That no child should ever be chid or beaten twice for the 
 
256 THE REFORMER. 
 
 same fault, and that if they amended they should never be upbraided 
 with it afterwards. 4. That every signal act of obedience, especially 
 when it crossed upon their own inclinations, should be always com- 
 mended and frequently rewarded according to the merits of the cause. 
 5, That if ever any child performed an act of obedience, or did anything 
 with an intention to please, though the performance was not well, yet 
 the obedience and intention should be kindly accepted. 6. That pro- 
 perty be inviolably preserved, and none suffered to invade the property of 
 another in the smallest matter, though it were but of the value of a farthing 
 or a pin. . . . This rule can never be too much inculcated on the 
 minds of children, and from the want of parents or governesses doing it 
 as they ought proceeds that shameful neglect of justice which we may 
 observe in the world. ... 8. That no girl be taught to work till 
 she can read very well. . . . This rule also is much to be observed ; 
 for the putting children to learn sewing before they can read perfectly is 
 the very reason why so few women can read fit to be heard, and never to 
 be well understood." 
 
 The reader will feel that he is gazing into an almost 
 Dutch interior as he reads this code of domestic law. The 
 solemnity of it, the minuteness, the sense of importance as 
 of a great ruler, the softly disapproving regretful memory 
 of Kezzy's mangled education in which the lawgiver was 
 overruled ; and of the more momentous regulation which 
 "one of the family" could not be made to observe, strikes 
 with a tender humour into the tale. Clear enough, " he " 
 who " could not be prevailed upon " to carry out this per- 
 fect system was something of a thorn in Mrs Wesley's flesh. 
 She had to bear with him by times, as well as to respect 
 and honour him. Strange things, too, happened at Epworth 
 to derange, had that been possible, the minute method of 
 the family. Wicked parishioners whom Mr Wesley admon- 
 ished of their sins, behaved themselves with a violence 
 characteristic of the age. Twice they tried to set his house 
 on fire, and at last, on a third attempt, did so, burning out 
 the too zealous parson, and all but sacrificing Jacky, then 
 six years old, in the flames. But these external troubles 
 were not all. Some tricksy spirit got possession of the 
 house, uttering dismal groans, rumbling up and down stairs, 
 sometimes with the step of a man, sometimes with heavier 
 inarticulate sounds. Knocks were heard about the beds, 
 and in various parts of the house, which nobody, alas ! was 
 then skilled to interpret. There were sounds of dancing in 
 
THE EEFORMER. 257 
 
 empty rooms, of bottles breaking, and a hundred other dia- 
 bolical-ridiculous noises. The family at first were full of 
 alarm, thinking the sounds were warnings of some approach- 
 ing calamity, the parents characteristically apprehending 
 danger to their eldest son. ''If thou art the spirit of my 
 son Sammy," said the perturbed father, "I pray, knock 
 three knocks and no more ; " but to the great relief of the 
 household no answer was made to this appeal. In time, 
 however, the devil ceased to alarm the cheerful house. The 
 young people became used to him, and adventured little 
 jokes on his character and propensities. The sisters gave 
 each a different account to the absent Sammy as soon as he 
 was ascertained to be safe and sound. Emily is indignant 
 that her father should have imagined it "to be some of us 
 young women that sat up late and made a noise. His in- 
 credulity, and especially his imputing it to us, or our 
 lovers, made me, I own, desirous of its continuance till he 
 was convinced," adds the candid girl. "I believe it to be 
 witchcraft," she says, a little after. "About a year since 
 there was a disturbance at a town near us, that was un- 
 doubtedly witches ; and if so near, why may they not reach 
 us ? . . . I do so really believe it to be one {i.e., a 
 witch), that I would venture to fire a pistol at it." Sister 
 Sukey, for her part, gets tired of the noisy visitor, whom 
 the girls had nicknamed Jeffrey, their very fright evidently 
 being unable to conquer fun. " Send me some news, for 
 we are secluded from the sight or hearing of any versal thing, 
 except Jeffrey," writes Susannah, although she has just de- 
 scribed a new incident, how, "to my father's no small 
 amazement, his trencher danced on the table a pretty while 
 without anybody stirring the table, when lo ! an adventurous 
 wretch took it up and spoiled the sport, for it remained still 
 ever after." The whole story is recorded with a mingled 
 seriousness and humour and perfect belief, which is very 
 quaint and amusing. Mr Wesley loses his temper and calls 
 the devil names, threatening it with a pistol on one occasion. 
 Samuel at a distance gravely writes to ask, " Have you dug 
 in the place where the money seemed poured at your feet ? " 
 although even he yields to a sense of humour when he is 
 told that the fiend objects to the prayers for the King. 
 " Were I the King myself, I should rather Old Nick was 
 
 R 
 
258 THE REFOEMER. 
 
 my enemy than my friend," he says. Southey, who gives 
 full details of these marvellous occurrences without the 
 least attempt (which indeed would have been folly) to assail 
 the veracity of the united family, has no words strong 
 enough at an after period to condemn Wesley's belief in the 
 extraordinary effects which were produced by his' preaching 
 — the bodily agonies, cries, and convulsions, which, however 
 little we may understand them, are phenomena too well 
 established to be set aside as mere delusion. It does not 
 seem to occur to him that the boy who had been familiar 
 with "Jeffrey," and whose relations, all in full possession 
 of a degree of intelligence and cultivation remarkable in 
 their sphere, fully believed these pranks to be played by 
 witches or spirits, was of all others least likely to forestall 
 his age, and reject the idea of supernatural interference in 
 the most important affairs of men. 
 
 It was from this kindly, cheerful, methodical, pious house, 
 full of quaint formality and fixed rule, but yet not without 
 the pleasant freedom of a large family, that the Eeformer 
 came. His life, as has been mentioned, was saved almost 
 miraculously when the house was burned. He was educated 
 at Charter-House under the distant inspection, it would 
 appear, of his brother Samuel, then usher at Westminster, 
 with whom was Charles, the youngest son of the house. 
 "Jack is with me, and a brave boy, learning Hebrew as 
 fast as he can," says the elder brother at some moment of 
 holiday. The big Carthusian boys stole their meat from 
 the little ones in that age, and Jack, for a great part of his 
 school-time, lived on bread only, training himself, perhaps, 
 by such means, to some of the asceticisms of his after life. 
 In the year 1720, when he was seventeen, he went to Christ 
 Church, Oxford. Nothing can be more graceful or pleasant 
 than the slight sketch which Southey gives of his early life 
 at the university. There is a grace of natural piety in the 
 young man's though tfulness, in his hesitations on the verge 
 of life, in his constant recourse to father and mother for 
 guidance, which is more pleasant to dwell upon than 
 the passion of religious earnestness which soon swallowed 
 up his life. When the time came at which it was 
 necessary to decide upon his future career, he paused 
 with natural reverence before taking orders, feeling the 
 
THE REFORMEE. 259 
 
 gravity of tlie decision. His father, with singular good 
 sense, understood and appreciated his difficulties, and en- 
 couraged him to wait and work before taking any decisive 
 step. His mother, on the other hand, with the practical 
 sense which belongs to such women, thought the stimulus 
 of a decided vocation would be of use to her boy. " Kesolve 
 to make religion the business of your life," she writes. " I 
 heartily wish you would now enter upon a strict examination 
 of yourself, that you may know whether you have a reason- 
 able hope of salvation by Jesus Christ. If you have the 
 satisfaction of knowing, it will abundantly reward your 
 pains ; if you have not, you will find a more reasonable 
 occasion for tears than can be met with in any tragedy." 
 
 Nor was it only on such important matters that he turned 
 homeward for advice. There is indeed in his life, as in that 
 of most emphatically religious men, a certain want of per- 
 spective, if we may use the word — an absence of the ordinary 
 variety of level which marks the more or less momentous 
 incidents of life. His difficulties about Thomas A'Kempis 
 seem to bulk as large in his mind as those about his ordin- 
 ation ; and on the smaller difficulty as well as the greater 
 he receives home counsel, once more varied according to 
 the characteristic peculiarities of father and mother. He 
 could not agree with A'Kempis, the young man lamented ; 
 he could not feel that mirth and pleasure were useless or 
 sinful, as does the author of the ' Imitatione.' Mrs Wesley 
 agrees with him in her reply, summing up her argument 
 with a maxim which is both pious and wise, " Would you 
 judge of the lawfulness or unlawfulness of pleasure," she 
 says, "take this rule: whatever weakens your reason, im- 
 pairs the tenderness of your conscience, obscures your sense 
 of God, or takes off the relish of spiritual things — in short, 
 whatever increases the strength or authority of the body 
 over the mind, that thing is sin to yon, however innocent it 
 may be in itself." The father, on the other hand, now 
 growing old, takes a less cheerful view ; he reminds his boy 
 that "mortification is an indispensable Christian duty," and 
 that a young man must be made to remember " that for all 
 these things God will bring him into judgment." The 
 book had been his own " great and old companion," and it 
 was full of " heroic strains of humility, piety, and devotion." 
 
260 THE REFORMER. 
 
 But he concludes by referring Jack to his mother, who 
 " had leisure to boult the matter to the bran." 
 
 Such leisure was now wanting to her husband. " Time 
 has shaken me by the hand, and Death is but a little way 
 behind him," he says. " My eyes and heart are now almost 
 all I have left, and I bless God for them." His advice in 
 this last stage of his life is full of a softened tenderness. 
 " If you love yourself or me, pray heartily,'' he says ; and at 
 a later period, when his son gained his fellowship, the old 
 man's voice sounds pathetic in its exultation ; " What will be 
 my own fate before the summer be over, God knows ; sedpassi 
 gravlora — wherever I am my Jack is fellow of Lincoln." 
 The two thus standing at either side of the young life, 
 watching with equal tenderness, throwing in words of ex- 
 perience and love, and often of practical wisdom, to keep 
 their son in the straight way, gives by far the most beauti- 
 ful human aspect which it ever wears to Wesley's history. 
 Their influence is so equal, yet so characteristically diifferent 
 in expression, so sensible, so full of that minute and detailed 
 consideration of his feelings and thoughts which perhaps 
 only the love of father and mother can give, that the heart 
 of the spectator is moved, as it has but too little occasion to 
 be in the after record. The father comforts his son about 
 the Athanasian Creed by a fine distinction which savours of 
 the schools — the favourite distinction of the Church of Kome 
 — between "wilful" and " involuntary " heresy ; while the 
 mother softly discourages too deep a consideration of those 
 articles of the Church which support the doctrine of predestin- 
 ation, assuring him that " such studies tend more to confound 
 than to inform the understanding." When the young man's 
 religious convictions impel him to a severer life than usual, 
 his father tells him it is callow virtue that cannot bear to be 
 laughed at; while the mother, half indignant at even so 
 mild a stigma on her son's fortitude, adds, " If it be a weak 
 virtue that cannot bear being laughed at, I am sure it is a 
 strong and well-confirmed virtue that can stand the test of 
 a brisk buffoonery ; " and counsels her boy, whom she at 
 least cannot bear to have ridiculed, "to shun the company 
 of profane wits." Such is the mingled influence which col- 
 ours the current of the young man's life. Happy the youth 
 who has such counsellors, and understands his good fortune 
 
THE REFORMER. 261 
 
 in having them ! The only thing that casts a shadow on 
 the picture is the extraordinary fact that Wesley, their son, 
 lived to believe that this wise, tender, and most Christian 
 pair were unenlightened, unconverted sinners at the very 
 time when they were thus guiding his feet into every good 
 and perfect way. 
 
 It was Jeremy Taylor, the most human and kindly of 
 ascetics, who finally moved the wavering youthful soul into 
 that entire self-consecration which decided his life. The 
 * Holy Living and Dying ' worked upon him like a revelation. 
 " Instantly I resolved to dedicate all my life to God," Wes- 
 ley himself says, " being thoroughly convinced there was no 
 medium ; but that every part of my life (not some only) must 
 either be a sacrifice to God or myself — that is, in effect, to 
 the devil." This decision immediately made itself visible 
 in his outward habits. Before his ordination in 1725, he 
 had formed for himself a system of life in which many fea- 
 tures of extreme High- Church manship are woven in with 
 much of that minute self-inquiry and study of moods and 
 feelings which we have since learned to identify chiefly with 
 the other extreme of religious opinion in England. He com- 
 municated every week ; he withdrew from all society which 
 was not distinctly religious, and gave himself over to that 
 anxious pursuit of perfection which so often turns the eye 
 inward instead of upward, and loses life itself, and such 
 gleams of heaven as are possible on earth, for the hope of a 
 fuller entry into blessedness hereafter. It is diflScult, per- 
 haps impossible, for a young man to take this step without 
 acquiring more or less that appearance of conscious spiritual 
 superiority which it is so hard to get rid of and so fatal to 
 possess. " When it pleased God to give me a settled resolu- 
 tion to be, not a nominal but a real Christian (being then 
 about twenty-two years of age)," he says, "my acquaintance 
 were as ignorant of God as myself. But there was this dif- 
 ference : I knew my ignorance ; they did not know theirs." 
 
 Wesley's first step in active life was that of serving the 
 little curacy of Wroote, which his father held in conjunction 
 with Epworth, but which his age and weakness prevented 
 him from himself attending to. Here he seems to have 
 spent a year or two in profitable obscurity, receiving priest's 
 orders, and completing his preparation for the stormy exist- 
 
262 THE EEFORMER. 
 
 ence on the verge of which he stood. No doubt, while thus 
 brought face to face with rural godlessness, and making 
 practical acquaintance with the deep-rooted profanity of the 
 time, Wesley found out how incapable was the comfortable 
 piety in which he had been brought up of rousing and re- 
 creating the immense dull hopeless mass of unbelief and 
 wickedness. There seems little record of this time of retire- 
 ment ; but it could not be other than a turning-point in his 
 life. That longing for seclusion which belongs to the phase 
 of religious development he had now reached, had come 
 upon him. Had he been a Koman Catholic, no doubt he 
 would have betaken himself to some hermit's cave to con- 
 sider all the momentous questions with which his brain was 
 teeming. Before going to Wroote, indeed, he had entertained 
 hopes of being appointed to a school in one of the Yorkshire 
 dales, which was described to him as a retreat from the world, 
 with " little company to be expected from without, and none 
 within." The idea of retirement pleased his fancy so much 
 that he breaks into verse when writing of it, and anticipates 
 his own satisfaction in giving voice to the inarticulate har- 
 monies of nature. 
 
 ** These praise their Maker as they can, 
 But want and ask the tongue of man," 
 
 he says, with a certain youthful elan towards the novel ex- 
 istence ; but has to content himself instead with the muddy 
 ways and heavy souls of Wroote, and to fight his battle as 
 he can, in the fervours and disgusts of youth, among the 
 Lincolnshire boors, with whom he had been familiar all his 
 life. On one occasion, it is recorded, he " travelled many 
 miles " to see a " serious " person in the barren and careless 
 countryside. '' Sir," said this man to the young priest, 
 ''you wish to serve God and go to heaven. Eemember you 
 cannot serve Him alone ; you must therefore ^rz^ companions 
 or make them : the Bible knows nothing of solitary religion.'^ 
 These were pregnant words, and must have thrown a new 
 light upon the world which had begun to struggle out of 
 chaos in the young man's perceptions. There is no more 
 talk of retirement or seclusion in his maturing life. 
 
 But it is curious enough to find that the first step towards 
 making those companions, whose society Wesley had thus 
 
THE REFORMER. 263 
 
 been directed to seek, was taken by his younger brother 
 Charles, then an undergraduate at Christ Church, who had 
 himself been awakened into deep religious earnestness, and 
 had obeyed the promptings of his warmer social nature by 
 drawing together a few fellow- students in the same circum- 
 stances as himself. These young men, moved by the first 
 thrill of that tide of feeling which was soon to sweep all over 
 England, had the courage to separate themselves from the 
 mass of young bucks and bloods, the roystering " men " of 
 their day, and to form themselves into an almost monastic 
 brotherhood, to the amazement of the University. Times 
 have changed wonderfully since then ; we are not un- 
 accustomed now to the severe youthful virtue of the tender 
 Kitualist, or to that curious pagan pietism which distin- 
 guishes the sect of young philosophers ; but even at the 
 present time such a brotherhood could scarcely originate 
 without some ridicule from the surrounding crowd. It was 
 the object of ceaseless darts of wit and a storm of merry- 
 making in that irreligious age. " They were called in 
 derision the Sacramentarians, Bible-bigots, Bible-moths, the 
 Holy or the Godly Club." One of their critics, less virulent 
 than the rest, applied to them an old name fallen into disuse, 
 which, indeed, is far from describing the character of un- 
 regulated enthusiasm and emotional excess which was then 
 and after attributed to the young Pietists. This name was 
 that of Methodists — a title lightly given, with little per- 
 ception of the importance it was to assume. To take it 
 according to its etymology, it might as well have been ap- 
 plied to the followers of Benedict or Francis as to those of 
 John Wesley ; and, in fact, this movement, of which no one 
 foresaw the importance, was at its beginning much more like 
 the foundation of a monastic order than anything else. Had 
 Wesley (we repeat) been a Koman Catholic, from his her- 
 mitage he would have come forth like Benedict to form a great 
 community. His country, his race, and birth were, however, 
 too many for him. There are few notable lives in which one 
 can trace so clearly the modifying influence of circumstances. 
 A body more opposed to Kome could scarcely be than the 
 religious society which acknowledges Wesley as its founder, 
 and yet no society could be more evidently established on 
 the very principles of Kome. 
 
264 THE EEFOEMER. 
 
 When tlie young Eeformer returned to Oxford to his 
 university duties in 1728, he was received at once as the 
 spiritual director of the little brotherhood, an office hitherto 
 unknown among Protestants. Under his guidance the 
 brethren fasted and prayed and devoted themselves to alms 
 and charity ; " they regularly visited the prisoners and the 
 sick ; communicated once a-week ; and fasted - on Wed- 
 nesdays and Fridays, the stationary days of the ancient 
 Church, which were thus set apart because on these days 
 our Saviour had been betrayed and crucified. They also 
 drew up a scheme of self-examination, to assist themselves, 
 by means of prayer and meditation, in attaining simplicity 
 and the love of God." Their principle was to " live by rule, 
 and to pick up the very fragments of time that not a moment 
 might be lost." This Scheme of Self-Examination, which 
 unfortunately we have not room to quote, was divided into 
 two tables like the Decalogue itself; and was a searching 
 self-inquisition into every passing thought and movement of 
 both mind and body. Its rules are almost identical with 
 those of the mystic codes of monastic piety, as indeed they 
 are with the expression of all intense religious feeling, 
 when driven, if we may say so, to a desperate stand against 
 the world. It is impossible to doubt that the mind must be 
 injured, and its grace and spontaneity destroyed, by such 
 perpetual and minute self-inspection ; but it must always be 
 remembered that such rules originate in times of desperation, 
 when the standard which has to be set up before the enemy 
 must be painted in the boldest colours, and when human 
 nature cannot refuse itself a certain exaggeration. Moder- 
 ation and good sense are well in their way, and so is the 
 natural involuntary grace of those sweet souls who some- 
 times seem from their cradles to share the tenderness and 
 indulgence as well as the purity of their Divine Master. 
 But such are not the fiery captains, the forlorn hope, of 
 Christianity ; and at this moment John Wesley's little band 
 of young, extravagant, ascetic knights -errant was England's 
 forlorn hope. 
 
 Not without certain picturesque circumstances, such as 
 attend intense bravery and resolution at all times, did the 
 brotherhood pursue its course. On the Sundays an eager- 
 eyed boy, homeliest of poor students, a servitor of Pembroke 
 
THE EEFOBMER. 265 
 
 by name George Whitfield, hereafter to be one of their 
 leaders, watched them wistfully as they made their way 
 through the jeers of the crowd to St Mary's, to receive the 
 communion, longing, poor lad, to follow, and not disinclined 
 at the same moment to bestow a stray buffet on the foul 
 mouths that laughed at the young saints. They were 
 hailed by, many an anxious prisoner as the only Christian 
 faces that ever looked in pitifully upon the reeking squalor 
 of an eighteenth -century jail. The sick and the poor 
 watched for them as they passed. They taught themselves 
 in a nerveless age the disused art of walking, to save money 
 for their pensioners ; and went without powder, with long 
 locks hanging on their young shoulders, with a delightful 
 boyish folly, to have a few pence the more for the same 
 blessed purpose. The father-confessor was but twenty-five, 
 and still turned his face towards his home for continual 
 counsel in his spiritual diflSculties. It is with a smile and a 
 tear that the spectator looks upon the lads in their excess of 
 zeal. Why should it be less beautiful than other youthful 
 enthusiasms because it was for the cause of all others most 
 important ? At such a white heat of devotion, no man, 
 perhaps not even a monk, could remain and live. But while 
 it lasts the young dream is sublime. To " recover the image 
 of God" — that was their object; and to communicate the 
 desire for this recovery and the means of attaining it to all 
 the world. If there was something to pardon, certain it is 
 that we forgive many extravagances for objects much less 
 divine. 
 
 The first intention of these young ascetics was to pursue 
 their legitimate studies steadily, while adding to them this 
 strange new practice of piety ; but in the heat of their self- 
 communings new questions arose. They began to doubt 
 whether carnal learning was a lawful pursuit, or whether 
 they were justified in thus employing time on which there 
 were more urgent calls. With a new anxiety in his mind, 
 Wesley writes to his mother on this subject. He proposes 
 the question to all who can understand it : 
 
 "And why not to you rather than any?" he says. "Shall I quite 
 break off my pursuit of all learning but what immediately tends to 
 practice ? I once desired to make a fair show in languages and philo- 
 sophy, but it is past. There is a more excellent way ; and if I cannot 
 
266 THE EEFORMEE. 
 
 attain to any progress in the one, without throwing up all thoughts of 
 the other, why, fare it well ! . . . I am to renounce the world, to 
 draw off my affections from the world, and fix them on a better ; but 
 how ? What is the surest and the shortest way ? ... In many 
 things you have interceded for me and prevailed ; who knows but in this 
 too you may be successful ? If you can spare me only that little part of 
 Thursday evening which you formerly bestowed upon me in another 
 manner, I doubt not but it would be as useful now for correcting my 
 heart as it was then for forming my judgment." 
 
 The answer to this appeal does not seem to have been 
 preserved ; but as the fervour of mysticism grew, the old 
 father, though full of pride and joy in the devotion of his son, 
 interposes a warning note in the midst of his satisfaction. 
 " Be not highminded," he says ; " preserve an equal temper 
 of mind under whatever treatment you meet with from a not 
 very just or well-natured world. Bear no more sail than is 
 necessary, but steer steady." Nothing could be more need- 
 ful than this advice ; but it was given at a time when the 
 mind of the young man was inaccessible to any counsel but 
 that which chimed in with his own desires. For a time he 
 goes on in his perilous career, not with less but more sail, 
 concentrating himself within the narrow limits he had chalked 
 out. One of his little band before long, worn by voluntary- 
 privation, sickened unto death, and Wesley himself seemed 
 in a fair way to follow. Constant fasting, not even diversi- 
 fied by generous fare on a festival ; constant work, perpetual 
 self-communion, scruples about this duty or that, watching, 
 exhortation, the continual intense strain of body and mind — 
 brought his vitality down to the lowest level. His mind, 
 absorbed with the awful but narrow anxiety to secure per- 
 sonal salvation at any cost, his body worn and strained 
 to its utmost, his soul full of a perpetual feverish ex- 
 citement, it soon became apparent to his friends that a 
 crisis was approaching. The movement in its first shape 
 had gone as far as mortal powers would permit. His 
 little brotherhood began to fail him, having come to the limit 
 of their strength. One became afraid of the ever-growing 
 singularity (a poor-spirited disciple this) of the position ; one 
 had been seduced into philosophy, and lost his reverence for 
 the authority over him ; one had been converted from fast- 
 ing by fever and a physician. Instead of seven-and-twenty 
 devout and hollow-eyed brethren, the young ascetic found 
 
THE REFORMER. 267 
 
 but five on his return after a short absence. The bitterness 
 of this mortification but intensified his personal zeal. He 
 clung with desperation to the post he held after it had 
 ceased to be tenable. " For friends, they were either trifling 
 or serious ; if triflers, fare them well, a noble escape ; if 
 serious, those who are more serious are left," he says, evi- 
 dently with the pang of disappointment in his heart. The 
 brotherhood had broken down, but its head held the faster to 
 his lost standing-ground. 
 
 The mortification of a forsaken leader is in the tenacity 
 with which he rejects all overtures to wholesome work else- 
 where. His father, from his deathbed, pleads with him to 
 take the living of Epworth, and carry out the work to which 
 he himself had devoted forty years of his life. He asks 
 pathetically whether his son can look on with indifference, 
 and see his long labour lost, the fences of God's vineyard 
 broken down, and " a mighty Nimrod," a certain Mr M., 
 brought in to complete the havoc ; whether he can despise 
 '^ the dear love and longing " of the people, the comfort of 
 his mother, a hundred tender reasons. He might as well 
 have prayed a beaten and embittered general to take the 
 peaceful plough in hand, instead of trying another wild cam- 
 paign to redeem his fortune. With a certain acerbity, from 
 the seclusion of his college, Wesley replies to these affec- 
 tionate entreaties. With curious spiritual egotism, which is 
 evidently a cover for wounded feeling, he declares that his 
 own salvation would be impossible at Epworth; that he 
 could not stand his ground there for a month against intem- 
 perance in sleeping, eating, and drinking ; and adds, with 
 growing heat, that the company of ordinary good men would 
 be fatal to him. " They undermine insensibly all my reso- 
 lutions, and quite steal from me the little fervour I have. I 
 never come from among those saints of the world (as John 
 Valdesso calls them), faint, dissipated, and shorn of all my 
 strength, but I say, God deliver me from a half Christian ! " 
 he cries, with a shrill of sharp and bitter feeling in his voice. 
 The self-pity and the self-assertion of a wounded spirit are 
 alike strong in these words. He will listen to no reasons, 
 however cogent — he will save himself, though no man cares 
 to be saved with him — he will hug contempt to his bosom, 
 since he is bom to be contemned — he will cling to Oxford 
 
268 THE EEFOKMER. 
 
 though Oxford does not want him. As for the love of the 
 people at Epworth, he cries, with the same perverse inge- 
 nuity of a mind set on edge, " How long will it last? Only 
 till I come and tell them plainly that their deeds are evil, 
 and to make a particular application of that general sentence, 
 to say to each, Thou art the man." 
 
 Thus he resists with a kind of desperation the attempt to 
 draw him into sober work, and the responsibilities of a social 
 position. Whether any touch of more human selfishness lay 
 below — whether he was reluctant to take upon himself the 
 care of his mother and sisters, which was one of the induce- 
 ments urged upon him to accept the cure of Epworth — the 
 story says nothing. The tone of injury which runs through 
 his self-defence might have been natural enough in the case 
 of a young man asked to sacrifice his own affections in order 
 to keep up the family home. But there is no whisper of dis- 
 appointed love in the record. He fights against the fate he 
 disliked with an acrid energy, probably drawn only from the 
 disturbed state of his own mind, from the darkening of the 
 sky over him, the desertion of his disciples, the sickening 
 doubt in his own spirit as to what this course of mysticism 
 could come to ; and so, fiercely, throws away the calm domestic 
 life, the moderate rural work, the comfort and quiet thus 
 pressed upon him — giving bitter selfish reasons, half-con- 
 sciously sophistical, not knowing what he is doing, following 
 out unawares the thread of a destiny unforeseen. 
 
 Why Wesley should, not more than a year after this deci- 
 sion, have accepted the office of missionary to Georgia, it is 
 very difficult to perceive. He resisted, we are told; but 
 his resistance must have been feeble in comparison with the 
 stand he made against his father. Perhaps the death of the 
 old man, which had taken place in the mean time, had tuned 
 him to a softer key ; perhaps his wound had healed with 
 time, and his self-will became less obstinate ; or perhaps the 
 romance of a mission to savages moved the excited soul, 
 which felt itself unable to contend with the ordinary matters 
 of life. It is comprehensible that such a man, absorbed in 
 the ebbs and tides of his own spiritual feeling, should have 
 had no eye for the supreme difficulty of a missionary's work, 
 or his own utter w^ant of adaptation to such a mission. He 
 thought he " would have the advantage of preaching to a 
 
THE KEFORMER. 269 
 
 people not yet beguiled by philosophy and vain deceit." 
 " Our end," he says, *' in leaving our native country was not 
 to avoid v^ant (God having given us plenty of temporal bless- 
 ings), nor to gain the dung and dross of riches and honour, 
 but simply this — to save our souls ; to live wholly to the 
 glory of God." Thus curiously does the apostle go forth 
 putting the selfish motive first, by an amazing inadvertence 
 of words, in which most modern apostles, but neither Peter 
 nor Paul, join him. To save his soul ! — not out of love to 
 God or love to man — a strange example of the way in which 
 good people insist on putting forward the meaner motive — 
 not in their hearts, whatever they may say, but in their words. 
 This mission lasted a little more than two years, and it 
 cannot be called in the smallest degree a successful one. So 
 far as preaching to the Indians was concerned, Wesley never 
 attempted it, for he did not even begin to learn their lan- 
 guage. He became chaplain to the colonists, a very different 
 office, and made his appearance among them in some such 
 fashion as a flaming Eitualist of the present day might make 
 his entry into an Evangelical parish. His austerities and 
 High-Churchmanship seem to have done more to puzzle the 
 not very fastidious society of the new colony than his devo- 
 tion did to enlighten them. He insisted on immersing the 
 baby Georgians who were brought to him for baptism. He 
 refused to bury the dead who had not been baptised in the 
 Church of England, and shut out from the communion-table 
 the devoutest Christian who could not stand this test. With 
 that curious want of discrimination which distinguished him, 
 he mixed up paltry matters of detail with great Christian 
 principles, preaching sermons one day against depravity and 
 drunkenness, the next against the pretty dresses with which 
 the colonial ladies came to church on Sunday. At first the 
 novelty of such plain-speaking seems to have impressed his 
 hearers. In the latter particular, for example, after he had 
 " expounded the Scriptures which relate to dress, and pressed 
 them freely on my audience in a plain and close application," 
 the effect was such that " all the time that I afterwards min- 
 istered at Savannah I saw neither gold in the church nor 
 costly apparel, but the congregation in general was almost 
 constantly clothed in plain clean linen or woollen." At another 
 time he had public prayers at church while a dance was going 
 
270 THE REFORMER. 
 
 on, and emptied the ball-room. Such duels between the 
 Church and the world, though sometimes momentarily suc- 
 cessful, are neither discreet nor dignified, and Wesley went 
 from step to step until he had alienated and disgusted the 
 greater part of his flock. He preached at his parishioners, 
 or so at least they thought, " making his sermons so many 
 satires upon particular persons." He interfered in family 
 quarrels and the broils of social life. He induced the Gov- 
 ernor to make paltry and harassing laws touching Sabbath 
 observance, and then vexed his soul with complaints against 
 transgressors of them. Such are the sins alleged against 
 him, and they are not at all out of keeping with his charac- 
 ter on the one hand, and quite sufficient to account for his 
 loss of reputation in the colony on the other. His brother 
 Charles, who had accompanied him, had even a worse fate. 
 Eunning a-tilt against everybody's prejudices, making moun- 
 tains out of molehills, and with no toleration for the inevit- 
 able shortcomings of a newly-formed society, the two brothers 
 armed everybody's hand against them. It was their first 
 encounter with the practical difficulties of life, and a more 
 entire failure could not be conceived. They had come from 
 their classic seclusion full of the conscious importance and 
 solemnity of apostles, just heightened by that ineffable great- 
 ness which hedges in a college' Don. And the colonists, 
 blind wretches, did not see it, but treated the young priests 
 like any other clergymen, growing impatient under their cen- 
 sures and angry with their interference. It must have been 
 at once a surprise and a disappointment to the young Ee- 
 former. Instead of planting the faith among the Indians, 
 and stirring the colonists into an austere life of prayer and 
 fasting, he left the American shores, all but driven out, with- 
 out a single reclaimed savage to witness his work, or grate- 
 ful Georgian to cherish his name. It would be strange if a 
 man of any candour of mind had kept faith in his own system 
 after such a downfall. 
 
 His work in the colony, however, though unfruitful to his 
 flock, was not unfruitful to Wesley himself. It was there he 
 came in contact with the Moravian brotherhood, a comm-u- 
 nity regulated by the rules of serai-monastic devotion which 
 were so dear to his heart ; but of a serenity and calm of faith, 
 and consequent sweetness of spiritual temper, such as he had 
 
THE REFOEMEK. 271 
 
 never been able to attain. All these years, while practising 
 with an anxious heart the utmost rigours of self-discipline, 
 he had been continually disturbed by doubts, which grew 
 more dreadful when any danger threatened him, and para- 
 lysed his spirit in many an emergency without teaching him 
 to be merciful to others in similar weakness. In his agitated 
 state of mind the very sight of the Moravians was at once a 
 comfort and a reproach to him — he could not understand 
 their calm, their love of God in which no terror mingled — 
 their genuine humbleness and meekness ; while they in their 
 turn looked with a mild surprise upon the excited feverish 
 Englishman who subjected himself to such religious discip- 
 line, and had so little real peace. One of them, to whom he 
 appealed for advice, asked him such plain and simple ques- 
 tions as made the ascetic, who hitherto had taught everybody 
 round him, falter and tremble. " Do you know Jesus Christ? 
 do you know He has saved you? do you know yourself ?" 
 asked the German ; and Wesley answered with a hesitation 
 he could not explain, feeling his heart rise within him in wild 
 self-inquiry and discontent. His mind recurred to them when 
 he was thrown again upon the world, and had once more to 
 set in order and reconsider his life on leaving America — and 
 it was their hands which gave the final form and perfection, 
 both to his character and his work. 
 
 This period of his life must not, however, be passed over 
 without a passing reference to the curious little romance, the 
 only one in his life, which here weaves itself into the unexpand- 
 ing story. Among the ladies of the colony was a certain Miss 
 Sophy, who, either moved by genuine liking for the preacher, 
 or by a coquette's desire to vanquish all, or, as Wesley's his- 
 torians say, by a deep-laid scheme to tempt him out of his 
 austerities, gave herself a great deal of trouble to reach the 
 heart of the austere young saint. It is an office which some 
 woman generally undertakes either for good or evil in the life 
 of most confessors. She became his penitent, with religious 
 difficulties to solve ; and his pupil, with a pretty thirst for 
 knowledge. She "dressed always in white, and with the 
 utmost simplicity, to please his taste" — she nursed him 
 through a fever. The young man fell a victim to these 
 wiles. It seems very doubtful whether she had any inten- 
 tion in the whole matter but that of amusing herself, as 
 
272 THE EEFOEMEE. 
 
 wicked young women will. When they had a quarrel she 
 threatened to return to England, and brought the poor priest 
 to his knees, half to heaven to move her to remain, half to 
 her to stay. His heart was torn with love and doubt and 
 much tribulation. On one occasion he records that " I ad- 
 vised Miss Sophy to sup earlier, and not immediately before 
 she went to bed. She did so ; and on this little circum- 
 stance," adds the lover, with quaint unconscious comicality, 
 *' what an inconceivable train of consequences depend." But 
 though thus observant of his wishes in respect to supper, Miss 
 Sophy was not fully satisfactory to himself, and much less to 
 his friends. At last, with a strange exhibition of the utter 
 want at once of passion and of delicacy in his nature, Wesley 
 determined to submit the question, whether or not be should 
 propose to marry her, to the Moravian Church ! The elders 
 sat upon it in solemn conclave, and advised him to proceed 
 no further in the business. " The will of the Lord be done," 
 said the pious [suitor. And yet it cost him a pang. On 
 " March 4," the day of this meeting, he says in his journal, 
 " God commanded me to pull out my right eye, and by His 
 grace I determined to do so ; but being slack in the execu- 
 tion, March 12, God being very merciful to me, my friend 
 performed what I could not." This latter ambiguous sen- 
 tence means that Miss Sophy on that day put him out of pain 
 by marrying another — a tolerably clear indication that her 
 sport with the poor clerical mouse had been but a cruel play. 
 It is evident that he felt this bitterly, being perhaps wounded 
 in his self-love as well as his affections to find that while he 
 was debating the possibility of giving her up as a religious 
 duty, she was preparing for another union. " It was the 
 day which completed the year from my first speaking to her," 
 says Wesley ; adding piteously, '' What thou doest, God, I 
 know not now, but I shall know hereafter I " " The word of 
 the Lord was come to me likewise," he adds with evident 
 reality of feeling, " saying. Son of man, behold, I take away 
 from thee the desire of thine eyes with a stroke ; yet neither 
 shalt thou mourn nor weep, neither shall thy tears run down. 
 The difficulty of obeying such a direction appeared to me 
 now more than ever before," says the wounded and mournful 
 lover. It is the only moment in which his heart shows itself, 
 and the very simpKcity of the plaint makes it more touching. 
 
THE KEFOEMER. 273 
 
 The story has the strangest conclusion that ever wound up 
 a tale of unrequited love. He could not be done with his 
 false love though she had forsaken him. After a while we 
 find him reproving her according to his ancient custom : but 
 the wife did not accept the reproof as the maiden Sophy had 
 done, and the consequence was that he took the rash and 
 unaccountable step of refusing her admittance to the com- 
 munion-table. This was the immediate cause of his half- 
 flight half-expulsion from Georgia. The story is character- 
 istic throughout, and not more so in its beginning than in its 
 close. 
 
 The voyage home was a very trying and troubled time for 
 Wesley — perhaps there was still the thorn rankling in this 
 wound, though he speaks of it no more ; but there was, at 
 least, the deep discomfiture of unsuccess, and a profound 
 discontent with himself and his religious state. His mind 
 was tossed upon a wild sea of doubt and uncertainty, while 
 his outer man sustained all the stormy vicissitudes of the 
 Atlantic. He utters his soul on his landing with pathetic 
 sincerity : — 
 
 *'It is now," he says, "two years and four months since I left my 
 native country to teach the Georgian Indians the nature of Christianity. 
 But what have I learnt myself meantime ? Why, what I the least of all 
 suspected, that I who went to America to convert others was never my- 
 self converted to God, I am not mad though I thus speak, but I speak 
 the words of truth and soberness ; if haply some of those who still dream 
 may awake and see that as I am so are they. Are they read in phi- 
 losophy ? so was I. In ancient or modern tongues ? so was I also. Are 
 they versed in the science of divinity ? I, too, have studied it many 
 years. Can they talk fluently upon spiritual things ? the very same 
 could I do. Are they plenteous in alms ? behold, I gave all my goods 
 to feed the poor. Do they give of their labour as well as their substance ? 
 I have laboured more abundantly than them all. Are they willing to 
 suffer for their brethren ? I have thrown up my friends, reputation, ease, 
 country. I have put my life in my hand, wandering into strange lands. 
 I have given my body to be devoured by the deep, parched up with heat, 
 consumed by toil or weariness, or whatsoever God shall please to bring 
 upon me. But does all this, be it more or less, make me acceptable to 
 God ? Does all I ever did or can know, say, give, do, or suffer, justify 
 me in His sight ? . . . This, then, I have learned in the ends of the 
 earth." 
 
 Though there is a certain grandiloquence in the words, 
 
 s 
 
274 THE EEFOKMEE. 
 
 yet the boast was no vain one ; he had intended all he 
 asserts; and though no donbt his own self-will, imperious 
 temper, and undiscriminating zeal had been at the bottom of 
 his sufferings, there is something touching in the return of 
 the self-disgusted missionary, half heart-broken, bowed down 
 by failure, disappointment, and grief, painfully parting with 
 his old hopes, painfully schooling himself to a humility more 
 real than asceticism. " I have no hope but that of being 
 justified freely through the redemption that is in Christ 
 Jesus," he says, as if it were some new discovery. One 
 would have supposed he had believed so all along, and yet 
 he states the truth as but acquired now. 
 
 He came home in this broken condition to find, strangely 
 enough, his true work begun. It is evident he had no thought 
 or idea of any mission waiting for him in England when he 
 landed disconsolate on the white cliffs once more. A gene- 
 ral discouragement overwhelmed him. On his way into the 
 port he passed an outward-bound vessel waiting a favourable 
 wind, in which, he ascertained on landing, George Whitfield, 
 his disciple and deputy, was on his way to Georgia, where 
 Wesley himself had called him. The apostle who had been 
 driven out of the colony could not let his brother go without 
 an effort to detain him. He went, as he would himself have 
 said, to God with his burden, and after much prayer, with 
 the strangest mixture of childishness and solemnity, drew a 
 lot which was to decide the matter. Immediately after a 
 messenger was despatched to the ship with a letter to the 
 outgoing preacher. " When I saw God by the wind which 
 was carrying you out brought me in, I asked counsel ^f God. 
 His answer you have enclosed." The enclosure was a slip 
 of paper with this sentence, "Let him return to London." 
 This strange command does not seem to have reached Whit- 
 field until some months later, when he was settled in 
 Georgia, conciliating with his softer temper and less arrogant 
 manners the flock which Wesley had set by the ears. And 
 he does not seem to have paid any attention to it ; but it is 
 a very singular instance of the arbitrary sway which the re- 
 ligious leader felt himself entitled to exercise, and the spark 
 of vindictiveness which lingered in his pious bosom. 
 
 Having sent forth this ordinance, Wesley went on sadly 
 to London, sore with his downfall, burdened with unsettled 
 
THE REFORMER. 275 
 
 convictions. With an attempt to preach himself, if nobody 
 else, into a clearer faith, he opened his lips once more in an 
 English pulpit, taking as his subject the new birth which ho 
 yearned to have accomplished in his own being. "If any 
 man be in Christ, he is a new creature," was his text ; and 
 it is not difficult to imagine the heaviness of spirit with 
 which the weary traveller, the unsuccessful missionary, the 
 trembling and uncertain believer, uttered those uncompro- 
 mising words. It was on the second day after his arrival in 
 London ; and he would seem to have been all but hopeless, 
 wounded in heart and broken in spirit. But unconsciously 
 he was taken up with a stronger grasp than that of a mere 
 orator the thread of Whitfield's fervent and eloquent ad- 
 dresses. Whether it was his doctrine, which was strange to 
 the contented moralists of the day ; or whether there was in 
 the earnestness of the preacher himself straining after the 
 way of salvation an indecorous reality which shocked his 
 calmer brethren, the result of this first sermon was that the 
 pulpit in which it was preached was henceforward closed to 
 Wesley. In the next which he entered, St Andrew's, Hol- 
 born, he met the same fate. No doubt he was a highly un- 
 comfortable interlocutor in the satisfied circles of the 
 slumbering church ; and in all likelihood this prohibition 
 helped to cheer and encourage the doubting preacher, by 
 proving to him that he was still Christian enough and dan- 
 gerous enough to provoke the enmity of "the world." 
 
 Ere long, however, Wesley began to recover himself, to 
 take courage, and perceive that a great mission was before 
 him. At no time had he been inclined to underrate the im- 
 portance of his own person and work ; and when the horizon 
 began to clear over him, all his characteristic energies 
 awoke. By degrees, while steadily persisting in preaching 
 to others, he found for himself the prize which he had long 
 sought in vain. Another Moravian, Peter Boehler by name, 
 seems to have completed the work which his community had 
 begun; and half consciously, while stumbling along these 
 doubtful paths, painfully finding out the way for himself, the 
 predestined Keformer began again to collect a company of 
 the faithful round him. Still less consciously he began to 
 yield to the new influences by which he was surrounded ; his 
 thoughts ceased to move in the groove of High-Churchman- 
 
 I 
 
276 THE EEFORMER. 
 
 ship; his heart ''became so full that he could not confine 
 himself to the forms of prayer" which were customarily used ; 
 and at an early period the instinct of a mind formed to 
 organise and administer moved him into the formation of a 
 little Church within the Church as it were, an innovation 
 without warrant or precedent. Not content with the ordi- 
 nary framework of a congregation, he classed his little 
 band of converts in groups, and gave to them a certain 
 novel shape and cohesion. The company thus organised 
 amounted to forty or fifty people, including a few stray 
 Moravians. Their bond of union was a strange but very 
 loyal allegiance to Wesley as their leader, and a rule drawn 
 out for them " in obedience to the commands of God by St 
 James, and by the advice of Peter Boehler."" " They were 
 to be divided into several bands or little companies, none 
 consisting of fewer than five or more than ten persons ; in 
 these bands every one in order engaged to speak as plainly, 
 freely, and concisely as he could the real state of his heart, 
 with his several temptations and deliverances since the last 
 
 meeting Any person who desired admission 
 
 into this society was to be asked what were his motives, 
 whether he would be entirely open, using no kind of reserve, 
 and whether he objected to any of the rules. The last 
 article provided that no member should be allowed to act in 
 anything contrary to any order of the society, and that any 
 person who did not conform to those orders after being thrice 
 admonished should no longer be esteemed a member." 
 
 Thus the germ of the great Society of Methodists, the 
 largest dissenting community in existence, and the most 
 orderly and symmetrical, came into being. Its constitution 
 was modelled on that of the Moravians, from whom, however, 
 it gradually diverged in its after- development. The little 
 nucleus of these forty pious companions had within a few 
 years thrown branches into every corner of England, and 
 taken root in America and all the British colonies ; and yet 
 no intention of separate existence, no sense of the formation 
 of an individual corporation, was in their minds. They did 
 it with the strange unconsciousness of human nature, believ- 
 ing that they sought edification and advance in godliness 
 alone. " Oh, what a work," cried Wesley, "has God begun! 
 Such a one as shall never come to an end till heaven and 
 
THE REFORMER. 277 
 
 earth pass away." Nothing less than the revivification of 
 the EngHsh Church and people was in his thoughts. And 
 though it did not come about in the way he dreamed, there 
 can be no doubt that the life which now swells and quickens 
 in the English Establishment, a more vigorous life than that 
 possessed by any other so-called Protestant Church, has re- 
 ceived its great modern impulse from the rising tide of new 
 vitality which warmed those little bands, and set up this 
 curious, fervent, intolerable, righteous brotherhood in face of 
 the world. 
 
 It was only after the formation of the " bands/' the first 
 beginnings of the body afterwards distinguished by his name, 
 that Wesley declared himself at last converted. The event 
 took place on Wednesday, May 28, 1738, about a quarter 
 before nine in the evening (so minute is the record), when 
 one of the humble brotherhood of the society in Aldersgate 
 Street was describing the change which God works in the 
 heart through faith in Christ. " I felt my heart strangely 
 warmed," says Wesley; "I felt I did trust Christ — Christ 
 alone for salvation ; and an assurance was given me that He 
 had taken away my sins, even mine^ and saved me from the 
 law of sin and death. ... I then testified openly to all 
 them what I now first felt in my heart." The announcement 
 of this certainty perhaps does not strike the reader with the 
 interest which a great event deserves. It rather startles 
 and shakes than arouses his faith in the hero of the story ; 
 but then the reader has not felt all the violent vicissitudes 
 of light and darkness through which Wesley's soul had 
 passed ; he has not been in alarm about the salvation of a 
 man so manifestly labouring hard to serve God, however mis- 
 taken he may have been by times. It is evident that to 
 Wesley himself the event was of the highest importance ; but 
 the new^s did nothing but vex and annoy everybody connected 
 with him. We share the feelings of surprise and partial irri- 
 tation with which the Buttons, good people, with whom he 
 was living at the time, received the announcement. The 
 master of the house had been calmly reading a sermon to his 
 family on the Sunday evening, in the half-cloistered quiet 
 of Dean's Yard at Westminster, when John Wesley suddenly 
 stood up and announced to the confounded household that 
 he had never been a Christian till within the last five days. 
 
278 THE KEFOKMEK. 
 
 Mr Hutton, stupefied by the intimation, called out with the 
 alarm of a respectable Churchman, " Have a care, Mr Wes- 
 ley, how you despise the benefits received by the two sacra- 
 ments ! " His wife, more ready-witted, answered with epi- 
 grammatic sharpness, " If you were not a Christian ever 
 since I knew you, you were a great hypocrite, for you made us 
 all believe you were one " — a response which sums up what 
 will be the feeling of most spectators on this difficult subject. 
 
 Sharper and warmer was the feeling of Samuel Wesley, 
 the elder brother. He thinks it likely that Jack must be 
 mad after such a statement ; " Perpetual intenseness of 
 thought and want of sleep may have disordered my brother," 
 he says in his trouble. And good Mrs Hutton, anxious for 
 an enthusiastic son of her own, who was being led astray, 
 suggests that Wesley should be confined if not converted 
 from this mad notion, " in charity to many honest, well- 
 meaning, simple souls/' Such was the efiect upon his anxious 
 friends ; for the new convert, not content with proclaiming 
 his own deliverance, had cast a fire-brand among his com- 
 panions by declaring that only in such a way — by personal 
 revelation — conviction, assurance — could any man be saved. 
 No wonder the good folks who walked humbly with their 
 God, but had no revelations from heaven, should have been 
 moved out of all patience. Wesley, however, left the domes- 
 tic storm to rage itself out, and went away at this critical 
 moment with his heart lightened of its load, and the glow 
 of an assured and perfect faith warming his heart, to Saxony, 
 to visit the house and sanctuary of his Moravian fathers in 
 the faith. 
 
 Our space does not permit us to enter into his visit to 
 Herrnhut, interesting and quaint as is the society he found 
 there, the spotless, monotonous, serene little church of the 
 Moravians, the only example of family monasticism in the 
 world. He learned much from them, and he learned that he 
 could not be of them, or affiliate himself to their strange little 
 hierarchy, having no mind to acknowledge any Pope but 
 John Wesley in the world. And the Moravians had already 
 their Pope in the person of Zinzendorf. When he returned 
 he found his bands, though watched over by his brother 
 Charles in his absence, had already got into trouble. They 
 had begun to quarrel among themselves ; and, to mend mat- 
 
THE REFORMER. 279 
 
 ters, had fallen foul of that doctrine of predestination which 
 has driven so many good Christians frantic. His presence 
 quelled the uproar almost as if by magic, and he soon found 
 time to write a letter to his late hosts, taking them soundly 
 to task for various matters which he disapproved of — a letter, 
 however, which he had the discretion not to send. Nothing 
 could be more singular than Wesley's position at this moment. 
 He was the acknowledged head of a body of fervent Chris- 
 tians, their spiritual director and guide, holding an authority 
 almost absolute over them : yet, while thus exercising some- 
 thing very like a spiritual episcopacy, he was a clergyman 
 withoutregular duty, with no pulpit of his own, no cure of souls, 
 no right to interfere in the instruction of the people. From 
 this curious platform of unofficial authority he admonished 
 everybody who came in his way, from the stone-breaker on a 
 country roadside to the Bishop of London, whom he not only 
 endeavoured to convert to his new views, but whom he took 
 upon himself to make suggestions to, urging upon him, for 
 example (of all things in the world), the duty of re-baptising 
 Dissenters ! It does not seem to have occurred to him to 
 seek a settled position of any kind. A clergyman without a 
 cure, a preacher without a pulpit, a spiritual father supreme 
 over his numerous penitents in what was then the most Pro- 
 testant of Churches — could any position be more anomalous ? 
 And the society over which he ruled ripened in natural de- 
 velopment from day to day ; its members increased ; its 
 meetings became daily more agitated and exciting; a society 
 which had seen, as it were, its Founder converted in its very 
 midst — had seen the Holy Ghost descend upon him, and 
 heard the outcry of his confession that only in that moment 
 did he know God — who can wonder if every new-comer there 
 hoped, like Wesley, to be seized by some rushing fiery im- 
 pulse — some divine flash of enlightenment, doing such a 
 work as ages of mere duty could not accomplish ? They 
 told each other strange tales, such as he had told them, of 
 the power of God in their souls. The very first rule of their 
 system was that each individual should narrate weekly the 
 secret story of his heart. Thus the fire burned, the excite- 
 ment grew, and Wesley stood by watching it, throwing oil on 
 the flames — his own position as exceptional, as unauthorised 
 and unprecedented as theirs — a leader with no lawful com- 
 
280 THE EEFOEMER. 
 
 mission — a clmrcliman under no legitimate authority — a man 
 out of all order of nature, born for the time. 
 
 For it is clear that all this unintentional lawlessness, this 
 wild vindication of the spirit against the letter, in its very 
 extravagance was the impulse needed to disturb the settled 
 composure of the age. What men had to be taught was — 
 a lesson never unnecessary, but at some times urgent above 
 all other needs — that the outside was not all, nor even the 
 most important part, of the life of man ; that to be made a 
 Christian by " the two Sacraments " was not enough ; nor 
 to go to church of Sundays, nor even to read a sermon to your 
 family on the evening of that heavy, slumberous, idle day. 
 It was Wesley's mission to proclaim, with such trumpet as 
 came to his hand, that all this and a world more, even per- 
 sonal goodness of a higher cast, even highest ritualism, as- 
 ceticism, external self-denial, giving goods to the poor and 
 body to be burnt, was not enough ; that nothing but a man's 
 heart and soul were fit offerings to God ; that the invisi- 
 ble, the impalpable, the great world of mystery above and 
 behind and around this speck of visible existence, was not 
 less but more real than that existence itself. Such was the 
 lesson he had to teach to a materialist age. He did it not 
 with the wisdom of a sage, but with all the force, the energy, 
 the foolishness, and high devotion of a true man. We are 
 not called upon to admire or to adopt his rhapsodies, the 
 visions of his disciples, the peculiarities of his doctrine, any 
 more than we are required to approve the arrogance and 
 imperiousness which were the natural defects of his character. 
 We can only say such was his work in the world. He did 
 it imperfectly and wildly ; — he might have chosen a better 
 way — he might have been less rude, less extravagant, more 
 shapely and gracious in the letters of fire he had to write for 
 us upon the wall. But the handwriting he traced with fal- 
 tering finger was the message of God most needful to the 
 world. He did it half unawares, involuntarily, not knowing 
 what was to come of it ; but with all his faults upon his 
 head, he did it thoroughly and well. 
 
 The height of excitement to which the new inspiration of 
 the brotherhood rose may be indicated by a brief account 
 given by Wesley of one of their meetings just after the return 
 of Whitfield to England :— 
 
THE REFOEMER. 281 
 
 ** On the first night of the New Year," he says, " Mr Hall, Kinchine, 
 Ingham, Whitfield, Hutchins, and my brother Charles, were present at 
 a love-feast, with about sixty of our brethren. About three in the morn- 
 ing, as we were continuing instant in prayer, the power of God came 
 mightily upon us, insomuch that many cried out for exceeding joy, and 
 many fell to the ground. As soon as we were recovered a little from that 
 awe and amazement at the presence of His Majesty, we broke out with 
 one voice, * We praise Thee, God : we acknowledge Thee to he the Lord. ' " 
 
 The names quoted here are almost all those of clergymen. 
 Such a passion of religious earnestness could not be shut up 
 within the narrow limits of the bands. The church, as a 
 whole, looked coldly on, shutting its pulpit-doors — at the 
 best, sneering with the world at the Methodists, monasticists, 
 men of the Kule, who stood up in its midst in such wild 
 raptures, proclaiming their fellowship with God. They 
 should have but little fellowship with man, said the phalanx 
 of orderly clergymen standing close and shutting their ranks. 
 The Bishops, though very mild and tolerant, could not be 
 supposed to be specially inclined towards the insubordinate 
 priests who were ready at a moment's notice to convert 
 them, or " deal faithfully " with their souls. And it was not 
 possible that so many educated men, trained to active work 
 — not to speak of the still less restrainable fervour of the 
 humbler brethren who thus felt themselves raised to the 
 rank of prophets and made a special people in the midst of 
 a darkened world — could content themselves long with the 
 monotonous existence of love-feasts and watchnights in one 
 obscure and limited circle. It was Whitfield who first 
 broke through the charmed circle. Less bound by the 
 punctilios of professional etiquette, with less standing to 
 lose, and free by his lowly birth and breeding from many of 
 the traditions of clerical respectability which bound the 
 Wesleys, Whitfield followed the warm impulse within him 
 without thought of policy or fear of results. The colliers of 
 Kingswood, near Bristol, were proverbial for their savage 
 character and brutality. They had no place of worship 
 near them, and nobody so much as dreamt of inquiring 
 whether by chance they too might have souls to be saved. The 
 wandering Evangelist saw, and with that instinct or inspira- 
 tion which in a great crisis often seems to direct the instru- 
 ment of Providence, saw his opportunity at a glance. On 
 
282 THE EEFORMEK. 
 
 the afternoon of Saturday, February 17, 1739, breaking tbe 
 iron decorum of the Church, but not a single thread of the 
 allegiance which bound him to her, he took his stand on a 
 little summit in the benighted heathen district, and pro- 
 claimed to the gaping, amazed populace the message they 
 had never heard before. Ere long, thousands gathered 
 round him, eager to see so new a thing, to hear so strange a 
 communication. Under the spring sunshine they gathered 
 " in an awful manner, in the profoundest silence," says the 
 preacher, moved to the heart by the unhoped-for magnitude 
 of his own work. The rude miners stood still as death, 
 turning their dark countenances towards him, weeping 
 w^hite tears down their grimy, coal-stained cheeks. Never 
 since barefooted friars had wandered that way, with the 
 wide and elastic commission of Eome, had preachers stood in 
 England by field and hedgerows, calling the lost sheep to 
 the fold. The eighteenth- century preacher, in his curled 
 wig and comely bands, is no such picturesque figure as the 
 Franciscan ; but yet nothing could have been more impres- 
 sive than the scenes he describes with an evident awe upon 
 his own mind. " The trees and hedges were full," he says. 
 '^ All was hushed when I began." Sometimes as many as 
 twenty thousand collected around ,the little hill — at times a 
 thrill of emotion ran through the crowd. They wept aloud 
 together over their sins ; they sang together with that 
 wonderful voice of a multitude which has something in it 
 more impressive than any music. The sun fell aslant over 
 the sea of heads, the "solemnity of approaching evening" 
 stole over the strange scene. Through the preacher's min- 
 ute, monotonous diary, there throbs a sudden fulness of 
 human feeling as he records it. It was sometimes " almost 
 too much " for him. And as he tells us the story at this 
 long distance, we are still touched by the tears in his voice. 
 This was the first outburst of the new light upon the 
 outer world. Hitherto it had been limited, shining as it 
 were underground, in obscure corners, where a pulpit could 
 be found, or a few faithful persons gathered together. It is 
 very difficult to disentangle the thread of Wesley's life at 
 this moment from that of the simpler, humbler, sweeter, less 
 conventional soul which acted as his pioneer, and began 
 with a kind of splendid inadvertence his greatest efforts. 
 
THE EEFOEMEE. 283 
 
 Whitfield went forth in quaint evangelical simplicity, and 
 did what his hand found to do, rather hoping to be per- 
 secuted for it, caring no more for his character or standing 
 than had he possessed neither ; and when the rough work 
 was done, sent for his leader with a loyalty little to be ex- 
 pected under the circumstances, yet such as Wesley seemed 
 to have had some innate faculty of winning. When the 
 work at Kingswood had reached the vast proportions just 
 described, the preacher wrote urgent letters, begging his 
 Pope and brother to come down and enter on his labours. 
 Then there ensued a curious scene. No doubt Wesley's 
 soul thirsted to enter upon this new mode of work, which 
 would open all England to him, and unloose in a moment 
 the conventional bonds in which he was still tied. But 
 ought he to do it ? At this grand crisis, the most import- 
 ant in his life, Wesley took the strangest way of deciding 
 his fate. He consulted the Bible — that is, he used it as an 
 oracle, as he had done in former cases, resolved to be guided 
 by the texts he should light upon. The texts were of the 
 most uncomfortable character. They seem to warn him of a 
 fatal issue to his mission. " I will show him how great 
 things he must suffer for my name's sake," was one, and the 
 most intelligible. At last, after many determined efforts to 
 make the sacred pages second his own wishes, he took re- 
 fuge in direct drawing of lots, and by this trustworthy 
 method was instructed to go. The members of the society, 
 however, who appear to have from a very early period 
 exacted payment from Wesley for their obedience to him, 
 by unlimited babble about his affairs, took to the oracle 
 again; and eliciting the fact from their Bibles that "Ahaz 
 slept with his fathers, and they buried him in the city, even 
 in Jerusalem," took leave of their leader mournfully, believ- 
 ing him doomed to death. Such was also his own convic- 
 tion. He set out in unfaltering obedience to the lot, but 
 with the feeling of a doomed man, leaving his blessing behind 
 him ; and so brought himself into contact with the freer air 
 again, and once more carried his Gospel, such as it had 
 warmed, and changed, and developed into, to the world. 
 
 His feelings on getting down to the field of action were 
 of a curious, complicated kind. " I could scarce reconcile 
 myself at first to this strange way," he says, " having been 
 
284 THE REFORMEE. 
 
 all my life, till very lately, so timorous of every point relat- 
 ing to decency and order, that I should have thought the 
 saving of souls almost a sin if it had not been done in a 
 church." His heart stirred in him more and more as he sat 
 by and saw the great assembly gather, and dauntless Whit- 
 field, not concerned about such punctilios, preach to them 
 with his usual fervour. The mind of Wesley goes on work- 
 ing through it all with that curious power of modification in 
 opinion, following the tenor of his wishes, which is common 
 to humanity. Next day he remarks to himself, having 
 evidently travelled a long way in the mean time, that our 
 Lord's Sermon on the Mount was " one pretty remarkable 
 precedent of field-preaching ; and I suppose there were 
 churches at that time also," he adds, meeting his own 
 scruples as they arise. On the third day he had mastered 
 the controversy and took the decisive step. '* I submitted 
 to be more vile," he says, " and proclaimed in the highways 
 the glad tidings of salvation." Such was the issue — a 
 result easily to be foreseen ; for it is amazing how texts and 
 doctrines and opinions, however apparently hostile, all fuse 
 and melt into arguments for the step which a man in his 
 secret heart all the time desires to take. 
 
 As soon as Wesley began to preach thus in Bristol and 
 its neighbourhood, a great outbreak of the strange phenomena 
 which generally attend the beginning of every great religious 
 movement took place. People were seized upon whilst 
 listening to his preaching by paroxysms of nervous emotion, 
 often reaching the length of positive convulsion fits. They 
 " cried out and shouted as in the agonies of death." They 
 fell on their faces on the ground ; they poured forth some- 
 times wild blasphemies, sometimes as wild confessions of 
 sin. They "roared for the disquietness of their heart," 
 says the preacher, describing the extraordinary scene which 
 daily took place around him. Such scenes have not yet 
 vanished from among us. The present writer witnessed 
 many years ago with the wonder, half-consternation, half- 
 belief of youth, a band of devout Methodists kneeling round 
 a groaning prostrate figure, adjuring God, by every kind of 
 wild argument, to save the sinner now. " Now, Lord ! " 
 shouted these grandchildren of the disciples of Wesley, with 
 an excitement of eagerness which no doubt was chiefly 
 
THE REFORMEH. 288 
 
 traditionary, an inheritance from the period when Wesley 
 and his brethren threw themselves on their knees around the 
 convulsionist just struck down in their midst, and " ceased 
 not calling upon God till He raised him up full of peace and 
 joy in the Holy Ghost/' Sou they is very hard upon his 
 hero for these singular manifestations. The poet takes it 
 for granted they were impositions, not reflecting how rare a 
 successful imposition is ; or attributes the strange effect to 
 fanaticism or enthusiasm, not perceiving that this throws no 
 light whatever on the mystery, but simply shifts its ground. 
 Since his day we have made at least the advance, if advance 
 it is, of looking upon even such exciting matters with unpre- 
 judiced eyes, not to condemn, but to see what is in them. 
 And though they are still unexplained, and like to remain 
 so, it is very clear that they were no impositions. From the 
 days of John the Baptist till now, such incidents have made 
 themselves visible, wherever a new voice like that of him in 
 the wilderness has come, rousing the world into a revival of 
 religious life. They were new in England, and no doubt 
 were perniciously fostered by the very principles of the 
 society, which encouraged, and indeed commanded, every 
 man to lay bare his personal experience. But how John 
 Wesley — himself (as he believed) converted in an instant 
 by a flash of light from heaven — could be expected to reject 
 the evidence of men to whom the same light came, only with 
 a more violent illumination, producing eff'ects more startling 
 in appearance, but not more momentous, it would be hard 
 to say. On the contrary, he was bound to believe them, and 
 he did believe. 
 
 His preachings were thus made the occasion of wild and 
 wonderful scenes, exhibitions of the strangest and most 
 indecorous emotion. We stand at our ease and blame him 
 for his ready belief and adoption of all these wonders ; but 
 for a man bred in that age, and holding the principles he 
 did, we do not see what else he could have done. His 
 brother Samuel, evidently a most well-meaning, sober- 
 minded man, but with no special call or mission to the world, 
 vexed the soul of the Eeformer at this period with long- 
 winded letters upon these phenomena. In the very midst of 
 his exciting and laborious life this correspondence comes in, 
 full of an anxious and not unkindly or unthoughtful 
 
286 THE REFORMER. 
 
 endeavour to make him believe that his work is foolishness, 
 and his followers impostors or madmen. We cannot but feel 
 that Wesley has the best of the controversy, however 
 impressed we may be by the good sense and moderation of 
 his brother. He says, with natural warmth, that these 
 effects were not outward only, or he would not believe in 
 them, but that they were followed by entire and undeniable 
 reformation of life, the strongest argument that could be 
 adduced in their favour. It was the same Samuel Wesley 
 who suggested that his mother should dig in the spot where 
 the Epworth ghost had seemed to pour money at her feet, 
 who made this opposition, a man consequently not in the 
 least sceptical as to supernatural interference in the affairs of 
 men ; and surely if such influence were possible, no motive 
 could be given for its exercise half so powerful as that of 
 saving a soul and reforming a life. The " manifestations " 
 — to borrow a modern cant expression — in which the good 
 man did believe, were altogether fantastic and meaningless : 
 the phenomena he assailed were connected with the greatest 
 of spiritual events. Surely it was the preacher who had the 
 best of the argument. 
 
 At Bristol another great step was made towards the 
 organisation of Methodism ; but, , again, in an unconscious 
 and almost accidental way. Their first meeting-house came 
 into being, not with any idea of making a church of it, but 
 solely for the convenience of the " bands " which could find 
 no rooms to meet in. For this building money, of course, 
 was required ; and while Wesley was considering and con- 
 sulting with his friends how to raise it, one of the members 
 of the society proposed that every person in it should con- 
 tribute a penny a-week till the whole was paid. When it 
 was objected that many of them were poor, the proposer of 
 the scheme continued, " Put eleven of the poorest with me, 
 and if they can give anything, well. I will call on them 
 weekly ; and if they can give nothing, I will give for them 
 as well as for myself." This scheme, by which a princely 
 income has since been secured, unfolded further capabilities as 
 it was put into practice. " The persons who had undertaken 
 for a class, as their divisions were called, discovered some 
 irregularities among those for whose contributions they were 
 responsible and reported it to Wesley." With the clear eye 
 
THE EEFORMEE. 287 
 
 of a born administrator he perceived at once the wonderful 
 instrument of power on which he had unwittingly laid his 
 hand ; and in a moment, it may be said, the discipline of 
 the community was established. The class-leaders became 
 not only the collectors but the inspectors of the rising com- 
 munity. They were " to see every person in their division 
 at least once a-week, in order to inquire how their souls 
 prospered ; to advise, reprove, comfort, and exhort as 
 occasion might require, and to receive what they were 
 willing to give towards the expenses of the society and the 
 relief of the poor. They were also to meet the minister and 
 the stewards of the society, that they might inform the 
 minister of any that were sick and any that were disorderly." 
 Each leader was, in short, a kind of authorised and solemn 
 Spy with a half-sacred character — commissioned to pry into 
 the souls, the characters, and the actions of the flock in 
 their most private moments. It is a most curious fact that 
 the yoke of such a system as this, perhaps the most fright- 
 ful kind of inquisition ever established, was voluntarily and 
 joyfully taken up by a mass of persons who, by the very act of 
 entering the society, had made a vow of obedience as com- 
 plete as ever bound a religious order ; and that Wesley, 
 himself a man not endowed with that overflowing human 
 sympathy which attaches all who come within its sphere — 
 a man, on the contrary, not over warm in his aff'ections, 
 imperious in character, full of natural arrogance and severity, 
 should have placed himself at the head of so extraordinary 
 a hierarchy, more absolute than any Pope, is more extraor- 
 dinary still. Had this rule of Methodism been enforced by 
 any Government, lay or ecclesiastical, it would have roused 
 the whole energy of human nature in a struggle against the 
 intolerable tyranny. Yet thousands of people submitted to 
 it joyfully at the mere will of "Wesley and his ecclesiastics ! 
 We do no know any more extraordinary fact in the history 
 of religion. 
 
 The only change made from this first beginning was, that 
 the classes soon began to meet weekly in some settled place 
 instead of the visitation from house to house — a considerable 
 relaxation of the system. And such at the present moment 
 continues to be the constitution and government of the 
 Methodist Society. 
 
288 THE REFOEMEIl. 
 
 The community thus brought into being grew, as every 
 created thing must grow, developing principles and details 
 unthought of by its founders ; for lan institution of any 
 popular kind is like Frankenstein's monster in the story, 
 and pledges its maker to many a mode of provision for its 
 gigantic wants, from which he would have shrunk at the 
 beginning. When he had surmounted his dislike to the 
 first steps, Wesley found that another and another remained 
 to take, all inevitable, and most of them distasteful Field- 
 preaching, lay-preaching, gradual separation from the Church 
 of which he still prided himself on being a priest and mem- 
 ber, came upon him unawares. He found himself committed 
 to one step after another before he perceived what he was 
 doing, and defended himself with curious sophistry as soon 
 as he had yielded to the claims of each separate crisis. 
 '' Being ordained as Fellow of a College, I was not limited 
 to any particular cure, but have an indeterminate commission 
 to preach the Word of God in any part of the Church of 
 England," he said to the Bishop of Bristol when requested 
 to leave that prelate's diocese. " Of all men living," he 
 said at a later period, " those clergymen ought not to com- 
 plain who believe I preach the Gospel. If they do not ask 
 me to preach in their churches, they are accountable for my 
 preaching in the fields." In the same strain he asked, when 
 circumstances drove him unwillingly into the acceptance of 
 lay-preaching, " What was to be done in a case of so ex- 
 treme necessity when so many souls were at stake ? " He 
 went on thus from step to step, battling nobly with the 
 necessities of his position, and artfully persuading himself 
 of their wisdom as soon as his decision was made and the 
 act beyond recall. Thus the elaborate financial and inquisi- 
 torial system of the new community arose out of the fact 
 that a humble barn had to be built to shelter them at their 
 prayers — and the system of itinerary and lay-preaching had 
 both their origin in the sudden extent and multiplication of 
 the members of the Society. Serious intention or purpose 
 there was none in these extraordinary innovations. They 
 were expedients demanded by the necessities of the moment 
 — expedients which, being once established, commended 
 themselves as full ot use and adaptation to the great want 
 which existed before they did. The work of Wesley in his 
 
THE EEFORMEE. 289 
 
 age and country was to create that want, and the very- 
 strangeness of the means he was obliged to take to supply 
 it, proved how entirely he had fulfilled his mission. 
 
 We need not pause, having already exceeded our space, 
 to follow him through his controversy and separation from 
 the Moravians, or breach with Whitfield. The latter disa- 
 greement was on the vexed point of predestination, \vhich 
 Whitfield held strongly, and Wesley from his youth had 
 abhorred. The controversy waxed very hot, and much pain 
 and confusion was wrought, as usual, by that " madness in 
 the brain " which comes upon men when they are wroth with 
 one they love. It is hard to tell who has the better in such 
 a disputation, for it is the luck of such disputations to bring 
 out the worst side of both arguments. We owe to Wesley, 
 however, an epigrammatic definition of his opponent's doc- 
 trine, which is worth remembering. By the dogma of elec- 
 tion, he says, the elect are saved, do what they will ; and 
 the rest of the world damned, do what they can. While 
 thus strong against the favourite doctrines of Calvinism, he 
 was firmly set upon the peculiarities belonging to himself. 
 He demanded of every Christian that he should possess an 
 assurance that his soul was saved ; and at the same time a 
 belief that the soul, even when thus enlightened, might still 
 fall away and be lost ; and he enforced upon his converts 
 the still more extraordinary dogma of perfectibility, requir- 
 ing them to believe that in their flesh they might become 
 entirely holy, perfect, free from evil deed or thought. 
 Without this, and especially the first, no one could, accord- 
 ing to the Eeformer, be a Christian at all. His mother at 
 seventy, in some moment of pious exaltation, had, while 
 receiving the communion, been touched by a thrill of higher 
 feeling than usual, and told it to her son, as, no doubt, a re- 
 velation from the Holy Spirit, giving the assurance he held 
 so necessary. When this good woman died, not long after 
 — the mother from whom nearly twenty years before he had 
 received such Christian guidance as few are qualified to give 
 — Wesley was so far warped by his opinions as to put this 
 incident on record on her tombstone as the chief feature in 
 her history, describing her virtuous and pious life as " a 
 legal night of seventy years." Nothing could be more char- 
 acteristic of the man. His certainty that he himself was 
 
 T 
 
290 THE EEFOEMEE. 
 
 and must be right, and that everybody else was naturally 
 prone to error, is as distinct a feature of his mind as is the 
 wonderful clear-sightedness and faculty of seeing what good 
 there was in any practical suggestion which gives to his 
 otherwise narrow personality a certain appearance of can- 
 dour and frankness. 
 
 As for those who differed with him in his own Society, he 
 made sharp work of them. One of these objectors, who 
 held by Whitfield, and had permitted somebody to speak 
 disrespectfully of Wesley at a class-meeting, found himself, 
 to his intense astonishment, solemnly excommunicated ere 
 he knew what was coming. Wesley brooked no rivals, no 
 jar of conflicting claims. He was the universal Court of 
 Appeal, the one man living whose judgment was final. 
 Even in later times, when the Methodists had set up their 
 Conference or Parliament, it was still " Mr Wesley and the 
 Conference," — as who should say. King, Lords, and Commons. 
 No committee full of talking and circumlocution disturbed 
 the unity and promptitude of his action. He saw a thing 
 was good and expedient to be done, and did it, without even 
 a pretence of taking constitutional counsel. True, his 
 people interfered with him, drew lots for him, poked them- 
 selves bodily into his affairs with a sense that he belonged to 
 them body and soul ; but this is the primitive price of popu- 
 larity, the natural lot of every benevolent despot. He soft- 
 ened much in his insistance upon special points of doctrine 
 towards the end of his life ; but he never ceased, within the 
 community he had created, to be Pope and King. 
 
 It is scarcely necessary to our purpose to trace the after 
 details of a life which was no life at all in the ordinary sense 
 of the word, but only a mere string of preachings, journeys, 
 meditations, narratives of interesting cases, and awakening 
 meetings. His journals bear a good deal of resemblance to 
 the note-books of a physician : wild records of agitation and 
 excitement subdued, if not by the laying on of his hands, at 
 least by the prayers poured forth over the writhing patient ; 
 sometimes broken by gleams of miracle — actual disease 
 healed and devils put to flight ; sermons preached in field 
 and churchyard, on his father's tomb by Ep worth Church, 
 where he was refused admittance to the communion — every- 
 where, where men could be got together to listen ; fill up 
 
THE REFORMER. 291 
 
 the curious, monotonous, wonderful narrative. He rode all 
 over the country — in the course of his life, it is said, " above 
 a hundred thousand miles " — for the most part leaving the 
 reins on his horse's neck, and reading whilst he rode, block- 
 ing out the too ready entrance of thought in a way which it 
 is perhaps good for a man to do when he has found his work 
 in the world, and has no more time left in which to assail 
 and defend his own purpose of being. " In seventy years I 
 never lost one night's sleep," he was able to say at the close 
 of his life. After the troublous morning, with all its delu- 
 sive storms and lights, a severe, much-occupied existence, 
 full of a great work, and of that power which was the pas- 
 sion of his soul, fell to his share. Outside, trouble sur- 
 rounded him by times ; more than once he was seized upon 
 by a mob, whom he confronted with the cool courage which 
 is always effectual in such an emergency, and which natur- 
 ally, after a short interval, changed his pursuers into his 
 champions and protectors. He had the care of the Church 
 upon his head, but no personal cares to speak of. He mar- 
 ried in middle age, for no particular reason, it would appear. 
 Charles Wesley had married, and Whitfield had married, 
 and the Eeformer seems to have thought it was inconsistent 
 with his dignity that he should appear incapable of forming 
 the same tie. His wife was a thorn in his flesh, persecuting 
 him with (of all things in the world) her jealousy of the 
 female correspondents, who are the almost invariable solace 
 of such a man. He had bargained with her that he was 
 not to preach a sermon or travel a mile the less for their 
 union ; and probably Mrs Wesley did not see much good of 
 a husband who was always abroad in the world, jogging all 
 over England, and even Scotland, no companion or help to her. 
 The foolish woman did what she could to make his life a 
 burden to him for twenty years, and then withdrew finally, 
 for no better reason than had dictated her former vagaries. 
 No doubt his placid life was ruffled by this disturbance, but 
 there is no appearance that any profound love existed in him 
 to give a sting to the irritation. He expresses himself well 
 rid of her (though the Latin is not so plump) in his journal ; 
 yet confesses to himself that perhaps he had better not have 
 written that letter which she had found and read — probably 
 a most pious, harmless epistle. 
 
292 THE EEFORMEE. 
 
 Thus, and thus only, was the thread fretted, which ran on 
 in a strength most unusual to man to a very advanced age. 
 At seventy-two he declared himself to possess " the same 
 strength as I did thirty years ago," while he attributes this 
 to " my con-stantly rising at four for about fifty years, my 
 generally preaching at five in the morning — one of the most 
 healthy exercises in the world — my never travelling less, by 
 land and sea, than four thousand five hundred miles in a 
 year. At seventy-eight he was still, by the blessing of 
 God, just the same as when twenty-eight. A life full of 
 active exercise, occupation of mind and body, uninterrupted 
 and often extensive, yet unembittered by pricks of care, 
 or those wounds to the heart and affections which waste the 
 energies of men more than work — preserved him thus to 
 extreme old age. He would seem to have had no passions 
 to wear him out: his deepest emotions could be brought 
 before the brethren to be taked over and settled. His 
 natural heat of temper softened down as soon as he came 
 to have things his own way, — a pleasant manner of subdu- 
 ing that weakness. His intolerance was only shown towards 
 those who troubled him with their differences of opinion. 
 ^' I have no more right to differ with a man for holding a 
 different opinion from me, than I have to differ with a man 
 because he wears a wig," he says ; " but if he takes his wig 
 off and begins to shake the powder about my eyes, I shall 
 consider it my duty to get rid of him as soon as possible." 
 This he did summarily, and without hesitation, preserving 
 the peace of the Society by quick execution of heretics. In 
 short, he was not a man of dogmatic genius, or commissioned 
 to impress new opinions on his race. His business was to 
 convince the country it had a soul, and to drive it, with 
 violence if necessary, by any means that man may use, to 
 save that soul alive. 
 
 He was trained for this work by the trouble he had about 
 his own, " making " it, as the Irish say, in the first half of 
 his existence, and with natural heat insisting that everybody 
 around him should join in the operation. His own spiritual 
 history is the chart by which he guided the great ship of 
 which he was made pilot. In the early part of his life he 
 insisted that every man should be an ascetic ; in the latter, 
 that every man should be converted by conscious movement 
 
THE EEFORMER. 293 
 
 of Heaven, illumination from the Holy Ghost. His deter- 
 mination and tenacity prevailed when a lighter purpose 
 would have come to nothing. To have brought together 
 and constituted such a community as that of the Methodists, 
 is almost as great a work, taken in a merely external politi- 
 cal point of view, as that of founding a kingdom ; and in 
 right royal guise he organised and legislated for his spiritual 
 empire. Not on constitutional principles, or with any weak 
 view of representing the people, but as a royal act of grace, 
 he created the Conference, describing it as composed of 
 "preachers and expounders of God's holy word, under the 
 care of and in connection with the said John Wesley." At 
 the time of his death, in 1791, 313 preachers and about 
 77,000 people in England, and at least two-thirds of the 
 number in America, owned his spiritual sway. And yet the 
 founding of this kingdom was not his greatest work. Silent, 
 good men then, as at all times, were sadly moving about the 
 world, keeping their little lamps alight, giving of their oil 
 to none. Wesley threw his, kindled and glowing, into the 
 wide country. He awoke the Church and the race — he made 
 religion a fact too visible to be denied, and changed the 
 spiritual complexion and tenor of his age. How much effect 
 his work may have had in arresting in England that horrible 
 course of national corruption which ended two generations 
 later on the other side of the Channel in the wildest national 
 explosion and conflagration which has ever startled mankind, 
 is an inquiry into which we have neither time nor call to 
 enter. His figure stands out from the confused background 
 of his time, not in any halo of tenderness or human attrac- 
 tion, not in any overwhelming light of genius, but fixed for 
 ever on the unalterable foundation of a great work. Never 
 has man laboured more hardly, more constantly, with greater 
 devotion or steadiness. With such a pioneer as Whitfield, 
 and such a henchman as his brother Charles, it is still John 
 Wesley who occupies this supreme place — not always wise, 
 often self-willed, immoderate, much exciting, but yet the 
 Prophet and Keformer of his age. 
 
 Had he been in the Church of Kome (and there can be no 
 doubt that there was his fittest sphere), Wesley would have 
 been splendidly utilised, would have taken his place with 
 Dominic and Francis, founder of a vast community. The 
 
294 THE EEFOEMEE. 
 
 Cliurcli of England, less wise, let the man and his followers 
 slip through her fingers, but, moved by the influence he had 
 thrown abroad into the air, roused herself, as Englishmen 
 use, when the hour was past, to make up as best she could 
 for that inadvertence. Wesley died as he had lived, no 
 schismatic, but a true son of the Church, which was too 
 sleepy even to eject him for his innovations. But her sleep 
 ended with the generation which laughed horse-laughs at 
 the Methodists, and shut their pulpits against their leader. 
 The work of Wesley lived after him, like every great work. 
 Long as his life was, it was not long enough to see the full 
 effect of his influence. And there can be no doubt that, had 
 he lived to see it, the awakening of the Church of England 
 would have been to him a more joyful event than even the 
 increase of the great Society which for nearly a hundred 
 years has borne his name. 
 
VIII. 
 
 THE SAILOR. 
 
 There are few things which give so clear an idea of the 
 multiplicity and 'diversity of life as the glimpses which his- 
 tory affords us of the different occupations carried on at the 
 'Same moment by men belonging to the same age and edu- 
 cated under the same circumstances. No doubt the contrast 
 continues through all periods, and becomes but greater as 
 civilisation progresses ; but yet the circumstances of life in 
 the backwoods or in the bush, wherever our boys may have 
 gone to carry on the conflict with external nature, are so 
 softened by perpetual tidings of them, and by all the aids 
 that science and knowledge can give, that it strikes the imagi- 
 nation less than in those days when the highest sophistica- 
 tions of artificial society at home were going on side by side 
 with the most appalling struggles of primitive man amid the 
 untamed winds and seas. In the eighteenth century science 
 had not penetrated everywhere, inquisitive yet beneficent, 
 with the lamp which is never so blessed as when it lights 
 up those blank wastes of land and water through which the 
 wanderer of old had to grope his darkling way. And no- 
 thing can be more startling and abrupt, for instance, than 
 the contrast between such an impersonation of his period as 
 Horace Walpole and the man whose brief story we are about 
 to tell. About the first we know almost everything that can 
 be known — his "long lean" form stands in the very front 
 of the stage, bepowdered, belaced, bescented, not unkind 
 or unattractive in its way, a thing of velvet and embroidery 
 and fiae arts and good taste, with his hands full of pleasant 
 
296 THE SAILOR. 
 
 dainty occupations, in which every dilettante (and we use 
 the word with no scornful meaning) must feel a certain ten- 
 derness of sympathy. Yet to think that while he was writ- 
 ing his letters and collecting his anecdotes about kings and 
 princes and ministers of state, and Patapan, his white dog — 
 while he was unpacking his curiosities and hanging his 
 pictures and building pasteboard Gothic at Strawberry, 
 Anson, for his part, was going round Cape Horn ! And 
 that the two men might have shaken hands at some anti- 
 quated street-corner, not many months before, and bidden 
 each other a cheerful good-bye, with no particular sense of 
 the difference between them ! What a strange chaos would 
 this world seem to any spectator, could we but come to 
 knowledge of such, who had the power to watch its simul- 
 taneous scenes at a glance from some starry tower of obser- 
 vation or low-placed bastion of heaven. 
 
 Few men have come to such note as he did in his gene- 
 ration of whom there is so little to tell as of Anson, apart 
 from the work which was his hour of revelation. About his 
 origin and the preliminaries of his career we know not much 
 more than we do about those of his ship — where she was 
 built or what became of her, matters of little importance in 
 comparison with what she, and what he, did in their moment 
 of splendid service and action before the world. One small 
 book, the scene of which is laid, not in the haunts of civi- 
 lised men, but on the high seas and uninhabited islands of 
 the Pacific, contains all our sailor's history, though it em- 
 braces only some three or four years of his life. Eleven big 
 volumes are not enough for Horace, out of whose various 
 editions, commentators, and critics, a whole library might 
 be made. But we will not attempt to carry on the compari- 
 son. Anson was a sea-captain, evidently known to his 
 superiors as a man worthy of trust, but not otherwise re- 
 markable, when he was chosen to head the squadron which 
 made him famous. He was " of a family at that time new 
 and obscure," says Lord Mahon, " nor had he the advantage 
 of distinguished talents. After his expedition it used to be 
 said of him that he had been round the world but never in 
 it ; he was dull and unready on land, slow in business and 
 sparing of speech." A silent unexpansive man, thinking 
 much and saying little, able to keep his own counsel, ma- 
 
THE SAILOR. 297 
 
 turing slowly in liis mind plana which no urgent need of 
 sympathy in his nature tempted him to reveal prematurely: 
 with a silent sense in him — disclosed not by words but by 
 accidental indications of fact — of the beauty and splendour 
 of nature, such as belonged to few men in his time : and 
 with a steady force of resolution and modest undemonstra- 
 tive valour which no difficulties could appal. 
 
 Such is the aspect in which he appears to us dimly to do 
 his work; not him but his work being the notable, ever- 
 memorable thing. It is on the standing-ground of this 
 achievement alone that Anson has any right to a place in 
 the chronicles of his country. But to be, beyond all rivalry 
 — in a nation like England, identified with naval adventure 
 and the supremacy of the seas — the sailor of the age, is no 
 small distinction. During the same period there is no Eng- 
 lish general whom we can identify as its soldier. Marl- 
 borough was over ; Wellington was not begun. A crowd of 
 incapable second or third rate commanders were doing what 
 they could — as they have done more or less in all ages — to 
 neutralise the steadfast valour of British soldiers. They 
 gained us a defeat at Fontenoy, glorious, it is true, but no 
 thanks to them ; they made the army contemptible in Scot- 
 land ; they did what they could to reduce its prestige every- 
 where. But in this unheroic age one man did vindicate for 
 the sister profession its old laurels, and leave a tradition 
 upon which the great seamen of another generation could 
 be formed. He stands between Drake and Nelson, uniting 
 in his sober person something of the romance of individual 
 adventure impersonated in the former, with something of 
 the legitimate warfare and national importance of the other. 
 On him fell the splendid mantle of the adventurers of Eliza- 
 beth's time, though his unobtrusive figure bears little resemb- 
 lance to theirs. While all the other public officers of Eng- 
 land were wasting the public money upon unsuccessful 
 expeditions and untrustworthy allies, Anson alone spoiled 
 the enemy. The Spanish galleon, golden romance of mer- 
 chandise, once familiar to the British imagination, rose again 
 under his sober touch into a wealthy reality before the 
 country's astonished eyes. The South Seas had but re- 
 cently shaken the whole fabric of society in this island, and 
 made the very kingdom totter. It was a sordid tragedy 
 
298 THE SAILOR. 
 
 when played in Change Alley ; but it took to itself a 
 noble human investiture when carried out in a second ex- 
 citing chapter amid the fairy islands and awful rocks of the 
 Southern Seas. 
 
 For, in fact, Anson's expedition was but the denouement 
 and climax of the strange national whirlwind which had rapt 
 England out of its senses, and all but destroyed its credit 
 and mercantile standing in • the world twenty years before. 
 The South Sea Company, as has been already described in 
 these sketches, had gained at this terrible price the privilege 
 of sending one ship a-year to the supposed golden coasts of 
 South America. Trade, which then as always was apt to 
 have confused ideas of truth and honour, did what it could 
 to exploiter to the best of its crafty powers this grudging 
 concession ; and as the best means of doing so, sent its one 
 ship, attended by a little fleet of smaller vessels, the office of 
 which was to throw in endless contributions of their own 
 cargo as the freight of the first became exhausted, convert- 
 ing the never-emptying hold of the privileged ship into a 
 kind of inexhaustible Widow's cruse. The Spaniards be- 
 came suspicious of this trick, as was natural. And when a 
 Spanish ship, bigger and stronger than she, encountered on 
 the high seas the seeming innocence of a little English 
 trader, it is not wonderful, perhaps, that questions should 
 be asked in an unamiable way and with disagreeable results. 
 
 Sea-captains, possessed or possessing themselves of an 
 amateur right of search, are not distinguished for a gentle 
 use of it, whatever their nation may be ; and Spanish sea- 
 captains, if tradition speaks truly — tradition which even in 
 very recent times has been awkwardly justified — were ex- 
 ceptionably arrogant and cruel. About half-way between 
 the explosion of the South Sea Company and the setting out 
 of Anson's expedition — the opening and concluding acts of 
 the drama — in the year 1731 a certain skipper, named 
 Jenkins, master of the Eebecca, was met at sea and over- 
 hauled by a Spanish guarda-costa. As he had nothing con- 
 traband on board which could be seized, the unfortunate 
 himself was laid hold upon by the spiteful visitors. They 
 nearly hanged him, frightened him to death, and at last tore 
 off his ear. " Carry that to your king and tell him of it," 
 cried the insolent tyrants, throwing it at him. Bleeding 
 
THE SAILOR. 299 
 
 and furious, the poor man made his way to England, and, 
 *' with his owners," hurried out to Hampton Court to lay the 
 facts before the Duke of Newcastle. But Walpole was at 
 the height of his pacific reign, and the Ministry had no 
 desire to be made acquainted with facts which might disturb 
 the peace of the nation. Poor Jenkins carried his ear away 
 with him and exhibited it in the clubs, and had it written 
 about in newspapers. The story became a historical matter, 
 and rankled slowly in the national mind. Eight years 
 after, when the country was tired of peace, and Walpole's 
 opponents were vigorous enough to take the field against 
 him, Jenkins's ear suddenly sprung into sight and worked 
 England up into fury. The events thus fall into each other 
 with a logic rarely to be found in matters of fact. The 
 South Sea Company dishonestly abused the privilege (such 
 as it was) of sending one ship a-year to South America. 
 The Spaniards, seizing the first small stray that came in 
 their way, avenged this big dishonesty on Jenkins, innocent 
 victim, who had nothing to do with the matter. And so it 
 came about that the English nation, feeling one of its Ber- 
 serkar impulses of battle coming on, blazed up into a sudden 
 explosion of long-smouldering wrath, and declared war with 
 Spain. The first, and, as it happened, last step taken in 
 the matter was the sending forth of two naval expeditions ; 
 one with much flourish of trumpets and immense para- 
 phernalia of war under Admiral Vernon, which came to 
 miserable failure and ruin. The other, small, badly manned, 
 neglected in all its preliminaries, which was to brighten to 
 its pristine glory the naval renown of England, and add, 
 perhaps, the only fresh and genuine laurel produced by the 
 generation, to the national crown. 
 
 "The Jenkins-ear question," says Carlyle, in one of those wonderful 
 vivid glances across the mists of history wliich give his works their 
 greatest charm, " which then looked so mad to everybody, how sane has 
 it now grown ! In abstruse ludicrous form there lay immense questions 
 involved in it which were curious enough, certain enough, though in- 
 visible to everybody. Half the world lay hidden in embryo under it. 
 Colonial Empire, whose is it to be ? Shall half tlie world be England's 
 for industrial purposes, which is innocent, laudable, conformable to the 
 multiplication-table at least and other plain laws ? or shall it be Spain's 
 for arrogant-torpid, sham-devotional purposes, contradictory to every 
 
300 THE SAILOR. 
 
 law ? The incalculable Yankee nation itself, biggest phenomenon (once 
 thought beautifulest) of these ages, this too, little as careless readers on 
 either side of the sea now know it, lay involved. Shall there be a 
 Yankee nation, shall there not be ? Shall the new world be of Spanish 
 type, shall it be of English ? Issues which we may call immense." 
 
 Of such issues Anson knew and thought nothing. His 
 own conception of his mission is set forth with much straight- 
 forward perspicuity and absence of pretence by Mr Walter, 
 his Chaplain, and the compiler of his narrative. " When it 
 was foreseen that a war with Spain was inevitable, it was 
 the opinion of some considerable persons then charged with 
 the administration of affairs that the most prudent step the 
 nation could take on the breaking out of the war was attack- 
 ing that Crown in her distant settlements, for by this means 
 it was supposed that we should cut off the principal re- 
 sources of the enemy, and should reduce them to the 
 necessity of sincerely desiring a peace, as they would there- 
 by be deprived of the returns of that treasure by which alone 
 they could be enabled to carry on a war." 
 
 Such was the cause and such the objects, conscious and 
 unconscious, of Anson's expedition. To molest the Spaniard, 
 steal his treasures, disperse his ships, acquire if possible a 
 standing-ground on those golden shores from whence future 
 expeditions might operate, and avenge the national honour 
 which had been outraged. He had other intentions in his 
 private mind besides; — a little science, beneficent sailor- 
 thoughts of tracking out the pathless waters on the other 
 side of the world, and leaving a clear road for those who 
 should come after him — and floating dreams, perhaps, of the 
 golden galleons which might make a man's fortune all in 
 the way of his duty ; but duty and obedience to orders first 
 of all — the usual complication of motives which are present 
 in every human enterprise, and link on every individual 
 work by its sides and corners to the general plan of life. 
 
 The squadron sailed eight months later than had been in- 
 tended, according to English use and wont, and in such an 
 imperfect state of preparation as proves the unity of the 
 official mind in all ages and circumstances. It had been in- 
 tended that the expedition should be strengthened by a 
 considerable body of effective soldiers — " Colonel Bland's 
 regiment, and three independent companies of one hundred 
 
THE SAILOR. 301 
 
 men eacli." But when the moment of embarkation came, 
 Anson found that this fine promise of land-forces had been 
 transmuted into " five hundred invalids to be collected from 
 the out-pensioners of Chelsea College." No wonder that ho 
 was "greatly chagrined at having such a decrepid detach- 
 ment allotted to him," all the more, no doubt — though of 
 this the historian tells us nothing — that Sir Chaloner Ogle's 
 expedition — "twenty-five big ships of the line, with three 
 half regiments on board ; fireships, bombketches in abun- 
 dance, and eighty transports, with six thousand drilled 
 marines," going out to Jamaica to Vernon, to perish and 
 come to nothing before Carthagena — was getting ready by 
 his side, and snatching all the good things in the way of 
 men from his very mouth. His vehement remonstrances, 
 even though backed by those of Sir Charles Wager, a lord 
 of the Admiralty, had no effect. The pensioners were " the 
 properest men that could be employed,"' was the judgment 
 of certain " persons who were supposed to be better judges 
 of soldiers " than either of the Admirals, writes the Chaplain, 
 with suppressed indignation. The invalids themselves, 
 however, were of Anson's mind. " All those who had limbs 
 and strength to w^alk out of Portsmouth deserted, leaving 
 behind them only such as were literally invalids, most of 
 them being sixty years of age, and some of them upwards of 
 seventy." Two hundred and fifty-nine of these unhappy 
 victims of officialism came sadly on board the ship, Anson 
 and his sailors no doubt standing by with disgust and pity. 
 "It is difficult," says the sympathetic Chaplain, " to con- 
 ceive a more moving scene than the embarkation of these 
 unhappy veterans ; they were themselves extremely averse 
 to the service they were engaged in, and fully apprised of 
 all the dangers they were afterwards exposed to ; the appre- 
 hensions of which were strongly marked by the concern 
 that appeared in their countenances, which was mixed with 
 no small degree of indignation to be thus hurried from their 
 repose into a fatiguing employ to which neither the strength 
 of their bodies nor the vigour of their minds were any ways 
 proportioned, and where, without seeing the face of an 
 enemy, or in the least promoting the success of the enter- 
 prise, they would in all probability uselessly perish by 
 lingering and painful diseases; and this too after they had 
 
302 THE SAILOK. 
 
 spent the activity and strength of their youth in their 
 country's service." 
 
 Nor was this all : his complement of sailors was deficient 
 by three hundred men, who were to be supplied to him at 
 Portsmouth ; but in place of these all he could muster, after 
 a weary waiting of five or six months, was a hundred and 
 seventy seamen, made up by some odd marines and other 
 accidental auxiliaries. Thus retarded and thwarted at every 
 point, he managed to sail at last, in September 1740 (his 
 instructions being dated January 31). His squadron con- 
 sisted of his own ship, the Centurion, of sixty guns ; the 
 Gloucester, of fifty ; the Severn, of fifty ; the Pearl, of forty 
 (these two were soon lost, and returned inglorious home) ; 
 the Wager (which has a separate story of its own), of 
 twenty-eight, and the little Trial sloop, of eight guns. This 
 little cluster of vessels, with their imperfect crews and 
 hollow-cheeked invalids, left Portsmouth, no doubt, with a 
 glare of not ungenerous envy and high indignant mettle, at 
 the " twenty-five big ships of the line," which were getting 
 ready to go to their work the easy way, with every appliance 
 for success, while this little devoted expedition went out to 
 make a path for itself across the wildest waters known to 
 man, at a bad season, and with everything against it. Not 
 a word says the mild historian of any such contrast ; had 
 his record been the only one, we should never have known 
 what a wealthy splendid squadron was preparing side by 
 side with the Centurion and the Gloucester. Yet the reader 
 may be permitted to imagine in such a case some sharper 
 thrill of resolution, as he cast a last glance on the busy 
 dockyards, darting through the Commodore's mind. To 
 come home no worse, were least said, than these same brave 
 gentlemen ! let storm or foe do their worst to bring back to 
 England some token of what a man can dare when least 
 supported by fortune and the great ! He is silent, and lets 
 fall never a word to tell us what was in his thoughts. But 
 still it would be no wonder if that high stimulant of indigna- 
 tion, which is so often mixed in the cup of England's public 
 servants, should have tingled through Anson's veins as he 
 '' tided " silently down the Channel, the wind already in his 
 face, and his troubles begun. Had he know what the 
 difierence of the coming home would be, it might not, 
 
THE SAILOR. 303 
 
 perhaps, have been so well for the discipline of his mind. 
 But at this moment, at least, Yernon, a popular hero, had it 
 all his own way. 
 
 And the very winds conspired with the Admiralty and its 
 officials against the brave little squadron. Having been 
 detained so long at home, their only hope of tolerable 
 weather in rounding Cape Horn was that they should be 
 able to make up for lost time by speed at sea. On the con- 
 trary, they were forty days in reaching Madeira, a distance 
 sometimes accomplished in ten or twelve, says the Chaplain, 
 who pauses in his simple vivid story to describe that island 
 and its excellent wines, " which seem to be designed by 
 Providence for the refreshment of the inhabitants of the 
 torrid zone," he says, with enthusiasm. Here they were 
 slightly excited by a report of some strange squadron which 
 had been seen at sea, and which was the Spanish fleet 
 looking for them, full information having come of all 
 their intentions. This fleet, however, never met the 
 expedition of which it was in search. It drifted off" into 
 the great sea, into the storms, and came to destruction 
 peaceably without any aid from Anson's guns. " The 
 Spanish sailors, being for the most part accustomed to a 
 fair-weather country, might be expected to be very averse 
 to so dangerous and fatiguing a navigation," our Chaplain 
 says, with insular complacency. His conviction, however, 
 that the opposition between England and Spain is no thing 
 of the moment, but an everlasting national feud, comes out 
 in the simplest amusing way, though the fact was not the 
 least amusing to him. It never seems to occur to him that 
 an English ship is likely to visit these coasts with other than 
 hostile intentions. And there is a certain Portuguese 
 governor, Don Jose Sylva de Paz, of whom he writes as a 
 * Times ' correspondent might write of an ill innkeeper, warn- 
 ing the British tourist against his house. This man not 
 only ruled a port which geographers had declared to be 
 healthy and convenient, but which the squadron found 
 neither the one nor the other — a very sufficient ground of 
 irritation — but secretly sent word to the Spaniard of the 
 whereabouts of the English fleet. " The same perfidy every 
 British cruiser may expect who touches at St Catherine's, 
 while it is under the government of Don Jose Sylva de Paz," 
 
304 THE SAILOE. 
 
 cries our Chaplain, with a vehemence which has something 
 strangely humorous and pathetic in it, as his voice comes 
 hushed across the dead century. How little the risk of 
 being betrayed to the Spaniard would alarm any British 
 cruiser nowadays ! Indeed, at this special juncture of affairs, 
 every reference to the yet unfallen, yet powerful, sea-going 
 empire, with its colonies and fabulous galleons, strikes one 
 as the most curious sarcasm. Spain and England rivals for 
 the dominion of half a world ! By what wonderful magic 
 of evil can that old noble heroic country have come to be 
 the insignificance it is ? 
 
 This port of St Catherine's on the coast of Brazil was the 
 second station at which the squadron paused, and already 
 its wants and imperfections were apparent. Sickness had 
 appeared in the crowded ships. The Centurion alone sent 
 eighty patients from its thronged and airless forecastle to 
 the big hospital-tent established on shore, — patients rather 
 increased than diminished in number by the moist heat of 
 the climate and other local disadvantages. Then some 
 deficiency was found in one of the ships, the little Trial, one 
 of the stanchest of the squadron, which had sprung her 
 masts and otherwise disabled herself. While the sick men 
 were carried on shore to gain what equivocal advantage 
 they could among the mosquitoes on the marshy coast, and 
 a busy scene of industry arose in all the ships — the 
 carpenter's hammer and the sailmaker's needle going from 
 morning to night — the Commodore in painful impatience 
 overlooked these necessary but ill-timed labours, counting 
 the days till he could set sail. It was " near a month " 
 before the Trial was ready — a month every day of which was 
 paid for by the lives of the men, since every day delayed the 
 passage of Cape Horn, the point to which all looked forward 
 with alarm but too well founded. They should have been 
 rounding that dangerous headland when they were leaving 
 St Catherine's, so far behind were they. And with hearts 
 full of anxiety, and such fear as brave men need not blush 
 to acknowledge, they set out at length, on the 18th of 
 January, from the but half-friendly port. Twenty-eight 
 graves at St Catherine's had been filled from the Centurion's 
 crew alone, and yet ninety-six sick were mournfully 
 re-embarked to take their chance upon the bitter seas. The 
 
THE SAILOR. 305 
 
 Commodore, however, was fully aware of tlie dangers he was 
 about to encounter, and prepared for them with characteristic 
 prudence. In case of misadventure happening to one, each 
 ship had its distinct instructions. There was a trysting- 
 place at St Julian ; another at the island of our Lady of 
 Succour — much-needed patroness ; another at Juan Fer- 
 nandez, an isle which romance had already made her own. 
 In the land-locked waters at St Catherine's the little council 
 of commanders calmly looked the facts in the face and braced 
 themselves to their work. Then they went forward with 
 their lives in their hands. 
 
 The story sounds more like that of a blind man groping 
 his precarious way through a district full of snares and pit- 
 falls, than of a daring British squadron traversing the subject 
 seas. They went on sounding at every step ; casting the 
 lead, sometimes into measureless depths of ocean, sometimes 
 in sixty, eighty, forty fathoms, the bottom varying as the 
 depth did. All along the coast of Patagonia they proceeded 
 in this cautious way, looking out with ever-growing anxiety 
 for the worst, which was not yet reached. This caution was 
 but half, if even so much as half, for themselves ; they were 
 groping for the good of England ; making such sketches as 
 their skill permitted, rectifying their charts, lighting up the 
 seas with divine lights of safety for those who might follow. 
 At St Julian, close to the scene of sternest danger, the Trial 
 is again in trouble with those unlucky masts, which are too 
 lofty for the latitude, and have to be cut and hacked 
 and mended, while the Commodore painfully restrains 
 his impatience, and the Chaplain has leisure to find out 
 about the wild horses and wild cattle, and the wonders 
 of the lasso, there first displayed to curious eyes. And then 
 once more the fated squadron is under way. Going softly 
 a tdtons, feeling its way, ship by ship steals forward with a 
 certain solemnity to that awful strait of Le Maire, which was 
 to carry them into the scene of their mission. Between the 
 bristling coast of Tierra del Fuego and the wild rocks of Sta- 
 ten Land lay this horrible ghostly passage. In those days men 
 had not learned to love nature in her grand and gloomy as- 
 pects ; and perhaps it would be hard at any time to expect 
 from the sailor any enthusiasm of admiration for two awful 
 lines of deadly cliff, and the gloomy channel between them. 
 
 U 
 
306 THE SAILOR. 
 
 Tierra del Fuego, the Chaplaia tells us, was " of a stupen- 
 dous height, covered everywhere with snow ;" and, on the 
 other hand, '' Staten Land far surpasses it in the vvildness 
 and horror of its appearance ; seeming to be entirely com- 
 posed of inaccessible rocks, without the least mixture of 
 earth or mould between them. These rocks terminate in a 
 vast number of ragged points which spire up to a prodigious 
 height, and are all of them covered with everlasting snow. 
 The points themselves are on every side surrounded with 
 frightful precipices, and often overhang in a most astonishing 
 manner ; and the hills which bear them are generally sepa- 
 rated from each other by narrow clefts, which appear as if 
 the country had been frequently rent by earthquakes ; for 
 these chasms are nearly perpendicular, and extend through 
 the substance of the main rocks almost to their very bottoms ; 
 so that nothing could be imagined more savage and gloomy 
 than the whole aspect of this coast." 
 
 Had this description been written to-day, no doubt the 
 voyager would have found a certain enthusiasm for this grand 
 by-way through the seas. He would have discovered lights 
 about it, and reflections unseen by the anxious practical eye of 
 the eighteenth century. But we doubt whether Art itself could 
 have made a more effective point than the contrast of this 
 sullen awful passage through which the silent ships sped 
 breathless, the little Trial leading the way — with the supposed 
 brightness beyond, to which the mariners looked forward, 
 seeing through those gloomy portals of rock only a silvery 
 Pacific Ocean and the end of their enterprise. They held 
 their breath, half, perhaps, from the shadow of death over- 
 hanging them in the pinnacles of those horrible rocks, but 
 at least as much from expectation, feeling at last — were but 
 this passage made — the grand difiSculty surmounted, and 
 their work within reach of their hand. '' We presumed we 
 had nothing before us from hence but an open sea," cries the 
 Chaplain, bursting forth out of the cliff-shadows into a short- 
 lived outbreak of the prevailing hope, " till we arrived on 
 those opulent coasts where all our hopes and wishes centred. 
 We could not help persuading ourselves that the greatest 
 difiSculty of our voyage was now at an end, and that our 
 most sanguine dreams were on the point of being realised ; 
 and hence we indulged our imaginations in those romantic 
 
THE SAILOR. 307 
 
 schemes which the fancied possession of the Chilian gold 
 and Peruvian silver might be conceived to inspire." The 
 morning was lovely, bright, and mild — the finest day they 
 had seen since they left England, — the sun, no doubt, blaz- 
 ing upon the snow — though that is not a point which the 
 Chaplain thinks worth mentioning. There was a brisk 
 breeze, which hurried them through the dreaded passage in 
 about two hours, though it was between seven and eight 
 leagues in length. And the hearts of the anxious Commo- 
 dore and his men rose within them. Surely here was fortune 
 smiling upon them at last. 
 
 Alas ! it was only now they were upon the dreaded Cape, 
 their terror throughout their voyage. Instead of proving, 
 as they hoped, a gateway into the soft Pacific, the wild 
 channel was but the avenue to destruction. ^' The day of 
 our passage was the last cheerful day that the greatest part 
 of us would ever live to enjoy," says the Chaplain, mourn- 
 fully ; and it is here that the tragic interest of his narrative 
 begins. Before they were well out of the shadow of the 
 rocks, the terrible truth burst upon them. The blue sky 
 darkened over, the wind changed, the tide turned — 
 " furiously," says the historian. A violent current (he can 
 use no milder words), aided by the " fierceness and con- 
 stancy of the westerly winds," drove them to eastward. 
 For forty days, almost without intermission, they were 
 driven and tossed, playthings of the waters, up and down in 
 miserable zigzags, about the awful Cape ; now menaced by 
 " mountainous waves," any one of which, had it broken fairly 
 over them, would have sent them to the bottom ; now dashed 
 almost to pieces by the rolling of the ship — their sails torn 
 off by the winds, split by the frost — their rigging covered 
 with ice, their bodies benumbed and disabled by the cold. 
 Sometimes a fog came on ; and the Commodore, himself 
 struggling for bare life, fired forlorn guns every half-hour, — 
 flashes of despair to keep the perishing ships together. Yet 
 all this time, in the height of their misery, there still lingered 
 a cheerful assurance of hope. According to all they knew, they 
 had been making their way steadily towards the Pacific. It 
 could not but be near at hand, and their toils near a close. 
 And with every day of storm the longing for that sea of 
 peace, for those isles and " opulent coasts," must have grown 
 
308 THE SAILOR. 
 
 on the weary crews, who, any hour, any moment — so they 
 thought — might suddenly glide into the rippling waters and 
 sunny calm. It maybe supposed, accordingly, what was the 
 consternation of the sailors, thus strained to the supreme 
 struggle, when they found that they had been betrayed by 
 an insidious current completely out of their course, and saw 
 once more the awful rocks of Tierra del Fuego frowning out 
 of the mists upon their lee. 
 
 Before this time scurvy, most dreaded of all the dangers 
 of a long sea-voyage, had made its fatal appearance among 
 them. With their feeble old pensioners and rapidly-made- 
 up crews, sickness had been rife in the ships from the very 
 beginning of the voyage ; and it is evident that Anson's good 
 sense and good feeling had forestalled sanitary science so 
 far as to do all that was possible for the ventilation and 
 cleanliness of his crowded vessel. So early as November the 
 sickly condition of the crews and the want of air between 
 the decks had been reported to him ; and by the time they 
 arrived at St Catherine's it was found necessary to give the 
 Centurion a "thorough cleansing, smoking it between the 
 decks, and after all, washing every part well with vinegar," 
 — a precaution made needful by the '^ noisome stench " and 
 vermin, which had become " intolerably offensive." This 
 being so when things went comparatively well, it may be 
 imagined what these decks must have got to be when every 
 comfort and almost every hope had abandoned the unhappy 
 mass of suffering men, drenched with salt water, frozen with 
 cold, worn with continual labour, who flung themselves upon 
 them to die. During their terrible beatings about Cape Horn, 
 the scurvy took stronger and stronger hold upon them. In 
 April they lost forty- three men from it on board the Cen- 
 turion alone ; in May double that number ; in June, before 
 they reached Juan Fernandez, " the disease extended itself 
 so prodigiously that, after the loss of about two hundred men, 
 we could not at last muster more than six foremast men in a 
 watch capable of duty." The officers themselves (and, still 
 more remarkably, the ofiScers' servants) seem to have escaped 
 the attacks of this disease, fortified either by the tremendous 
 burden of responsibility, or by that curious force of high 
 spirit and finer mettle which carries so many absolutely 
 weaker men through the perils which slay the strongest. 
 
THE SAILOR. 309 
 
 Our Chaplain records the characteristics of the disease with 
 that grave and calm simplicity which distinguishes his style, 
 revealing its full horrors, yet never dwelling unduly on them. 
 Some of its victims, he describes, lay in their hammocks 
 eating and drinking, in cheerful spirits, and with vigorous 
 voices ; yet in a moment, if but moved from one place to 
 another, still in their hammocks, died out of hand, all vital 
 energy being gone from them. Some who thought them- 
 selves still able for an attempt at duty would fall down and 
 die among their comrades on attempting a stronger pull or 
 more vigorous strain than usual. Every day, while winds and 
 waves, roaring and threateninground, held over the whole ship- 
 load another kind of death, must the dim-eyed mariners with 
 failing strength and sinking spirit have gathered to the funeral 
 of their dead. By this time their companion ships had all 
 disappeared, and the Centurion alone, with its sick and dying, 
 tossed about almost at the will of the waves upon that deso- 
 late sea. At last there came a moment when, destruction 
 being imminent, " the master and myself," our brave Chap- 
 lain, undertook the management of the helm, while every 
 available soul on board set to work to repair and set the sails 
 and secure the masts, to take advantage once more in des- 
 peration of a favourable change of wind. This was their last 
 storm; but not even then were the troubles of this terrible 
 voyage at an end. They missed Juan Fernandez by one of 
 those mistakes which come in with bewildering certainty at 
 such moments of desperation to enhance all sufferings. '' The 
 Commodore himself was strongly persuaded that he saw it,^' 
 but, overpowered by the scepticism of his officers, changed his 
 course in over-precaution. Then at last the high hearts of 
 the expedition gave way. The water was failing, to add to 
 all the rest; men were dying five and six every day. "A 
 general dejection prevailed among us," says the historian. 
 It was at this moment, when hope and heart were well-nigh 
 gone, that the island of their hopes, all smiling in the sullen 
 seas, with soft woods and grassy slopes and sweet streams 
 of running water, suddenly burst like a glimpse of paradise 
 upon their hungering eyes. 
 
 Nothing can be more touching than the sober, simple story, 
 as it describes this deliverance out of despair. The feeble 
 creatures, to whom water had become the first of luxuries, 
 
310 THE SAILOR. 
 
 hastened on deck as fast as their tottering limhs would 
 carry them, to gaze with eyes athirst at a great cascade of 
 living water flinging itself, with the wantonness of nature, 
 over a rock a hundred feet high into the sea. The first boat 
 sent on shore brought back heaps of grass^ having no time 
 to search for better vegetables. The spectre crew were four 
 hours at work, with the assistance of all the ghosts from 
 below who could keep their feeble legs, to raise the cable, 
 when it was necessary to change their anchorage, and could 
 not manage it with all their united strength. But yet the 
 haven was reached, the tempest over for the moment. The 
 ship had but settled to her moorings when a tiny sail bore 
 bravely np upon the newly arrived, and proved to be the 
 Trial, valorous little sloop, which had held its own against 
 all the dangers encountered by the Centurion, and now found 
 its way to the try sting-place, with only its captain, lieutenant, 
 and three men able to stand by the sails. A fortnight later, 
 some of the sailors gazing out from a height upon the sea, 
 saw, or fancied they saw, another sail faintly beating about 
 the horizon. In five days more it appeared again, making 
 feeble futile attempts to enter the safe shelter in which An- 
 son lay. The watchful Commodore sent out instant help, 
 risking his boats and refreshed convalescent men to save his 
 consort, and by this timely help kept them alive, until, after 
 three weeks or more of fruitless attempts, the Gloucester at 
 last got into the bay, having lost three-fourths of her crew. 
 Three weather-beaten hulks, with torn sails and broken 
 masts ; three groups of worn-out men escaped as from the 
 dead, looked each other in the face in this lull of fate. With 
 the whisper of the soft woods in their ears, and delicious 
 noise and tinkle of running water, instead of the roaring of 
 the winds and the sea, what salutations, from the edge of the 
 grave, must have been theirs I The brave Commodore set 
 to work, without the loss of an hour, to remove the sick to 
 shore : not a man among them laboured harder than he, the 
 leader, and his ofiScers followed his example, willingly or un- 
 willingly. From one vessel after another the helpless and 
 suffering were landed, to be healed and soothed out of their 
 miseries. Green things of better quality than grass, and 
 fresh fish, and flesh of goats, and new-made bread, consoled 
 the worn-out wretches, and rest stole into the souls of the 
 
THE SAILOR. 311 
 
 almost lost. Anson for his own part, with a touch of senti- 
 ment which speaks out of the utter silence in which he is 
 content to leave himself, with a power beyond that of words, 
 chose for himself an idyllic resting-place in this moment of 
 repose. 
 
 " I despair of conveying an adequate idea of its beauty," says our 
 Chaplain, — who, let us hope, shared it with his master. " The piece of 
 ground that he chose was a small lawn that lay on a little ascent, at the 
 distance of about half a mile from the sea. In the front of his tent there 
 was a large avenue cut through the woods to the seaside, which, sloping 
 to the water with a gentle descent, opened a prospect of the bay and the 
 ships at anchor. This lawn was screened behind by a tall wood of myrtle, 
 sweeping round it in the form of a theatre. . . . There were, besides, 
 two streams of crystal water which ran on the right and left of the tent, 
 within one hundred yards' [distance, and were shaded by the trees which 
 skirted the lawn on either side." 
 
 He thinks some faint idea of "the elegance of this situa- 
 tion " may be gleaned from a print which, unfortunately, is 
 not to be found in the edition before us. A certain sup- 
 pressed poetry of mind must have been in the man who, 
 after such desperate encounter with primitive dangers, 
 pitched his lonely tent between those running rills, with 
 the bay and his ships at anchor softly framed at his feet by 
 the sweet myrtle boughs. Does not the reader hear the 
 sudden hush in the stormy strain, — 
 
 ' ' A sound as of a hidden brook, 
 In the leafy month of June. " 
 
 With what a profound harmony does this momentary vision 
 of repose and tender quiet fall into the tale, all ajar with the 
 danger of warring winds and waves ! 
 
 While Anson was drawing this breath of tranquillity and 
 health, and taking up again, undismayed, the thread of his 
 plans against the enemy, the other admiral, Vernon, with 
 his splendid fleet and armament, had collapsed all into 
 nothing. Long before, indeed, in April, while dauntless 
 Anson, without a thought of turning back in his mind, was 
 going through his agony round Cape Horn, the struggle 
 was over for that rival who had outshone, outnumbered, 
 and swallowed up his poor little expedition. The big 
 fleet which sailed amid the cheers of England had beat 
 
312 THE SAILOE. 
 
 back, all broken, disgraced, and discomfited, to Jamaica — 
 driven miserably away from before the face of that old 
 Spanish foreshadowing of a grim Sebastopol, known as 
 Carthagena — ere our little squadron painfully got itself to- 
 gether in the bay at Juan Fernandez. Our Commodore, 
 of course, could know nothing of that disaster, and indeed 
 was still pondering in his mind how even yet, even now, 
 his ragged shipwrecked band might carry something home 
 to balance the conquests of those rustling gallants. Never 
 could a greater contrast have been ; and it was well for 
 England that the chief seaman of so critical an age was not 
 poor popular Vernon recriminating with his General at 
 Jamaica, but Anson, musing alone on the island lawn, just 
 out of the jaws of death, planning a thousand daring 
 adventures, with his eyes fixed on the deceitful quiet of 
 that Southern Sea. 
 
 And to carry out the other part of his character, it is 
 evident that the Chaplain-secretary — who must by this time 
 have grown to be a stout sailor, with clear eyes of his own 
 and a modest courageous soul — got little rest even in this 
 interval of repose. He has scarce drawn breath from his 
 tragic narrative, and still labours at his breast with a sup- 
 pressed passion, when he is abot^t again, setting down his 
 master's distinct seamanlike instructions, topographical 
 account of the island, and guide to mariners. As An- 
 son groped along the unknown coast, coming up to the 
 climax of tempest which drove soundings out of the level of 
 possibility, so now he surveys the rocks and inlets about 
 his island, indicating where the British cruiser may and 
 may not attempt to anchor, and settling once for all in sound 
 numbers where that isle of Safety is to be found. A mis- 
 take in respect to this had cost him seventy men — but never 
 English sea-captain should pay so dearly again for the 
 knowledge, if the Commodore and the Chaplain could pre- 
 vent it. Thus the two set to work for their country as 
 soon as they had got their sick on shore, and were at liberty 
 for a stroke of independent toil. How they found a goat 
 with its ears slit, one of Alexander Selkirk's flock, our Chap- 
 lain tells us by the way; and Crusoe with his umbrella 
 seems to come out of the woods as he speaks, and give a 
 friendly nod to the narrator. For it is not the first time we 
 
THE SAILOR. 313 
 
 have seen Juan Fernandez, or found it a shelter from the 
 tempest. The reader pauses over the halcyon moment, 
 almost longing to believe that it is a community of Crusoes 
 that have now got possession of the isle, and that there, on 
 the soft lawn between the brooks, the seaman will stay and 
 forget his toils. Vain fancy! there where he sits, intent 
 upon the distant bay and the ships at anchor, it is how to 
 get at his work again, how to resume those toils, how to 
 plunge once more into conflict with seas and Spaniards, rich 
 galleons and prying guarda-costas — that is all the burden of 
 his thoughts. 
 
 The reckoning which. remained to be made, however, when 
 the sufferers came to life again, and the ghastly death-angel 
 departed from hovering over the ships, was enough to dis- 
 courage the stoutest heart. Two hundred and ninety-two 
 men had died out of the Centurion alone since the com- 
 mencement of the voyage ; the Gloucester, though a smaller 
 ship, had lost an equal number ; the Trial, about half of her 
 crew. Out of fifty pensioners and seventy-nine marines on 
 board the Centurion, only four of the one and eleven of the 
 other survived. Every pensioner on board the Gloucester 
 had perished ; and of forty-eight marines only two remained. 
 Thus the forebodings of the Commodore, and of the helpless 
 veterans themselves, and of reason, if the authorities had 
 cared anything about reason, were fully carried out. The 
 three ships had started from England with nine hundred 
 and sixty-one men on board — all that they could now muster 
 among them was three hundred and thirty-five ; " a number 
 greatly insufficient for manning the Centurion alone," says 
 the Chaplain, with dejection, " and barely capable of navig- 
 ating all the three with the utmost exertion of their strength 
 and vigour." A chill of bitter discouragement evidently 
 overwhelmed the steadfast heart of the Commodore as he 
 numbered his remnant. A Spanish squadron was out in 
 search of him, he knew ; and, " however contemptible the 
 ships and sailors of this part of the world may have been 
 generally esteemed," says the historian, with a quaint mix- 
 ture of national arrogance and self-pity, " it was scarcely 
 possible for anything bearing the name of a ship of force, to 
 be feebler and less considerable than ourselves." This was 
 one very gloomy side of the question ; but, on the other 
 
314 THE SAILOE. 
 
 hand, there was the galling thought of the Spanish crow of 
 triumph which should ring through all the seas should the 
 English allow themselves to be driven home without strik- 
 ing a blow. " This was a subject on which we had reason 
 to imagine the Spanish ostentation would remarkably exert 
 itself," our Chaplain adds, stung by the thought ; and yet, 
 what was to be done under the frightful complication of 
 circumstances ? To make a snatch at " what few prizes we 
 could pick up at sea," and get to Panama, where it would 
 be better to be beholden to Vernon, no doubt triumphant by 
 this time, for reinforcements, than to fail, — this would seem 
 to have been the plan which formed itself in the Commo- 
 dore's mind as he counted his men; — not altogether a 
 cheerful conclusion, and yet the only practicable thing to do. 
 The first part of this programme, at least, was carried out 
 at once. It was the middle of June when Anson arrived at 
 his island in the condition we have described. On the 8th 
 of September, the Centurion having just got herself cleaned 
 and mended, a sail appeared on the horizon, which, after 
 some doubt, the keen nautical eyes watching from their 
 point of observation decided to be a Spaniard. " We im- 
 mediately got all our hands on board, set up our rigging, 
 bent our sails," and by five in the afternoon got out, not- 
 withstanding want of wind, to sea ; resolute, in the very 
 fury of dejection, not to let an opportunity slip. The oppor- 
 tunity turned out to be a Spanish merchantman, laden with 
 a miscellaneous cargo, which yielded with trembling and 
 dismay, being totally unarmed and helpless, at the first 
 summons. Besides her sugar and cotton, — peaceful com- 
 modities, which were not important to our sailors, — they 
 found what they liked better — " seven trunks of wrought 
 plate, and twenty-three serons of dollars, each weighing 
 upwards of two hundred pounds avoirdupois." No con- 
 temptible prize. The Spaniards, with their heads full of 
 the awful tradition of the Buccaneers, awaited with horror 
 the will of their captors ; and when our noble first-lieuten- 
 ant went on board of them, with his lace tarnished by a 
 hundred storms, and the fine fleur of courtesy which no 
 storm can tarnish, the terrified crowd could but gasp and 
 gaze upon this nautical angel, not able to believe that such 
 beautiful politeness, such mercy and goodwill, could be true. 
 
THE SAILOR. 315 
 
 TLe letters found in the prize put an end, howe\er, to any 
 hope Anson might have formed of help from his brother 
 admiral — a hope which had already blossomed out into 
 various great projects, such as that of capturing Panama, 
 *' which would have given to the British nation the posses- 
 sion of the isthmus, whereby we should have been in effect 
 masters of all the treasures of Peru." The astounding news 
 that Vernon's expedition had failed, no doubt acted two ways 
 upon the valiant Commodore. It left him beyond hope of 
 any help, and at the same time it left him entirely free to 
 follow his own instincts, stung by the double necessity of 
 silencing the Spaniard. It was fortunate that with such 
 news came the wonderful stimulus of the prize to give 
 everybody courage. They ascertained, at the same time, 
 the destruction of the squadron sent out to look for them, 
 and that they were comparatively safe in the retreat of which 
 they had taken possession. With this consolation, towing 
 the big captive ship and her doubloons, the Centurion went 
 back to her expectant comrades in the bay to revive their 
 hearts. " And now the spirits of our people being greatly 
 raised, and their despondency dissipated by this earnest of 
 success, they forgot all their past distresses, resumed their 
 wonted alacrity, and laboured indefatigably in completing 
 our water, receiving our lumber, and in preparing to take 
 our farewell of the island." The Gloucester was sent out 
 " to cruise off the highland of Paita," and keep watch lest 
 another Spanish expedition might be despatched from Callao 
 to hunt the English. The Trial had already gone off "the 
 very next morning " after the Commodore's arrival, to look 
 out for further prizes ; and on the 19th of September, about 
 three months after her forlorn entrance into that island bay, 
 the Centurion spread out her cloudy wings once more, and 
 plunged forth, a wild yet lawful reiver — big, splendid, mag- 
 nanimous bird of prey — into these wealthy seas. 
 
 For some time after the story is but a record of prizes ; 
 eager seamen's eyes intent on the horizon for a sail ; flash 
 and swoop of the great half-manned ship upon the trembling 
 Spaniard; anxious investigation after doubloons; unexpected, 
 incredible mercy and kindness to the captives. Soon the 
 Trial had her spell of conquest too — "one of the largest 
 merchantmen employed in those seas," though unhappily 
 
316 THE SAILOK. 
 
 with but £5000 of silver on board. This seems, however, 
 to have cost the brave little ship her own life, which the 
 reader grieves to learn as if she had been a living creature. 
 Dismasted, leaking, crazy, parting at every timber, the little 
 conqueror of the seas had to be committed to them like so 
 many of her crew, her men watching by her in the prize they 
 had just secured, no doubt with heavy hearts and a certain 
 half-religious solemnity, till the dead ship went down in the 
 ocean she had breasted so long. But the Commodore had 
 no time to dally by the grave of either man or sloop. The 
 next prize had but £170 of money in her, which was a dis- 
 appointment ; and her goods, though valuable, were useless 
 to her captors; though, indeed, our Chaplain piously reflects, 
 — "though we could make no profit thereby ourselves, it 
 was some satisfaction to us to consider that it was so much 
 really lost to the enemy, and that the despoiling them was 
 no contemptible branch of that service in which we were 
 now employed by our country." 
 
 Soon, however, a larger enterprise dawned upon the little 
 fleet, for fleet it gradually became as prize after prize was 
 added to the Commodore's train. Lieutenant Brett, sent on 
 with the ship's barge and pinnace to seize a flying sail, 
 brought news of treasure at the little town of Paita close by, 
 where some escaped vessel had carried information that the 
 English were at hand, and set the whole coast a-tremble. 
 The governor was about to remove the treasure, and there was 
 no time to be lost. In every point of view the opportunity 
 was tempting ; the place was poorly defended and near at 
 hand ; the sailors were eager for conquest ; a swift-sailing 
 vessel, which the heavy old Centurion could never hope to cope 
 with a-foot, was about to leave the harbour with specie, and 
 must be caught, if at all, in port. And, to crown all, there 
 was here an opportunity of getting rid of the prisoners, an 
 inconvenient and unsafe cargo, numbering half as many as 
 their captors. Among them were three women — a mother, 
 with two beautiful daughters — whom Anson treated with the 
 most chivalrous respect, to the utter amazement of their fel- 
 low-captives,— but whom, no doubt, he was very glad to 
 get rid of at the earliest opportunity. That very night, the 
 Commodore being little fond of delay, the expedition bore 
 down upon Paita ; and Lieutenant Brett, once more in his 
 
THE SAILOR. 317 
 
 boats, set out by ten o'clock in the darkness to the work of 
 conquest. The boats' crews steered into the harbour of the 
 sleeping town with all that air of frolic which English 
 man-of-war's-men carry into the most desperate encounters. 
 ^' The shouts and clamour of threescore sailors who had been 
 confined so long on shipboard, and were now for the first 
 time on shore in an enemy's country, joyous as they always 
 are when they land, and animated besides, in the present 
 case, with the hopes of an immense pillage ; the huzzas, I 
 say," cries our Chaplain, himself a little excited, " of this 
 spirited detachment, joined with the noise of their drums, 
 and favoured by the night, had augmented their number in 
 the opinion of the enemy to at least three hundred." The 
 whole affair passed over almost as bloodlessly as any other 
 frolic. The terrified inhabitants fled in their nightgear, 
 leaving everything behind them. And thereupon arose such 
 a scene of grotesque good-natured schoolboy riot as perhaps 
 a conquered town never witnessed before. While the seri- 
 ous work of removing the treasure was going on, every man 
 in his disengaged moments foraged for himself They found 
 the laced coats and hats of the townsfolk in their deserted 
 houses, and with the wild humour of their class immediately 
 seized upon this opportunity of sport. In the confusion of 
 the night — there being, thank heaven, no worse outrage, it 
 would seem, to turn the farce into a tragedy — the rough 
 fellows fluttered about under the torchlight in the spoil they 
 had won, putting on "the glittering habits" over their own 
 dirty trousers and jackets, "not forgetting, at the same 
 time, the tye or bag wig and laced hat, which were generally 
 found with the clothes." Some, " not finding men's clothes 
 sufficient to equip themselves," the Chaplain thinks — or, 
 more probably, to enhance the effect of the boisterous mas- 
 querade — put on women's gowns and petticoats, " provided 
 there was finery enough." One can imagine the strange 
 scene, the grotesque forms, the horse-laughter and shouts of 
 rough merriment, making night hideous. But yet, so far as 
 appears, there is no blacker story to tell ; and a conqueror 
 who only plays such pranks before unoffended heaven is no 
 terrible sight. 
 
 The Spaniards generally, according to the account given 
 by our Chaplain, had fallen into a mild craze of wonder over 
 
318 THE SAILOE. 
 
 the innocence of their daring invaders. Lieutenant Brett 
 did not know his own people as they danced about fantastic 
 under his wondering eyes, but all the time kept a steady 
 watch over them, and saw to the swift and sure collection 
 of the treasure. Next morning the English flag made itself 
 visible on the flagstaff of the fort, and the Centurion anchored 
 in the bay, receiving boat-loads of silver, wealth to the full 
 extent of their hopes. By this time the fugitives from the 
 town, under their fugitive governor, had begun to assemble 
 on a hill behind, with much demonstration of force. They 
 had mustered a body of two hundred horse, fully equipped, 
 and of imposing appearance, who consoled themselves by 
 parading on the heights, and lending the strains of their 
 band to amuse the threescore begrimed and disguised seamen 
 labouring at their work of destruction below, but made no 
 attempt to recover the town, or stop the transport of goods 
 which was going on under their very eyes. The concluding 
 act in this wild extravaganza had a tragical air enough. 
 Having secured their prisoners in a church, safe and out of 
 the way, the boarding-party made a conflagration of Paita 
 and all her stores — a proceeding which, as Lord Mahon 
 says, " can scarcely be defended in civilised war," and has 
 " imprinted a deep blot on the glory of Lord Anson's expedi- 
 tion." A Spanish historian goes so far as to declare that it 
 was done without Anson's knowledge, and lui avail fort d4plu. 
 The courtesies of war, however, are a matter above all others 
 ruled by the character of the age in which that war is made; 
 and Anson's historian has already given his opinion on the 
 subject — which, no doubt, was that of his Commander — in 
 a passage we have quoted. It is perfectly clear that it 
 never occurred to them to consider the property of private 
 individuals. A bigger or smaller impersonation of Spain 
 was all the Commodore and his squadron saw in Paita, or in 
 the innocent merchant-ships they took. To molest Spain 
 was their special mission ; and to know that the goods thus 
 destroyed was so much lost to the enemy, was, no doubt, 
 once more a pious satisfaction to the authorities of the ex- 
 pedition, both secular and ecclesiastical. The Chaplain 
 neither regrets nor justifies the firing of the town ; to him 
 it is clearly a matter of course. He is proud to record the 
 wonder of the Spaniards over Anson's unparalleled clemency 
 
THE SAILOE. 319 
 
 to themselves ; and, in a lesser degree, it gives him sensible 
 pleasure to tell us that but one man of the invaders forgot 
 himself so far as to take " too large a dose of brandy " dur- 
 ing the bloodless sack of the place. But the vast bonfire 
 which destroyed so many houses and fortunes does not touch 
 him at all. It is so much loss to the enemy. He has no 
 other thought. 
 
 When the Commodore received his victorious detachment 
 back again with their spoils, leaving the unhappy townsfolk 
 free to return to the ashes of their dwellings, he was not 
 without his own troubles. Quarrels arose on the question 
 of the booty, the men who had remained on board and 
 missed the fun feeling it hard naturally to miss the profit as 
 well. This disturbance was quieted by an order from 
 Anson that all private plunder was to be produced and 
 divided, which was done accordingly ; and a curious Rag- 
 fair the decks of the old ship must have presented as every 
 man's hoard was displayed. When the division had been 
 made, the magnanimous Commodore presented the actual 
 victors with his own share, congratulating them on their 
 achievement ; and so peace was secured. 
 
 The Gloucester, which all this time had been ciiiising on 
 her station, making such prizes as she could find for her own 
 hand, without any share in the glory and amusement of this 
 exploit, was encountered shortly after, having laid hold of 
 two inconsiderable vessels only, though one of them had 
 £7000 on board. The other was a barge laden with cotton 
 in " jars " — a curious kind of package — the crew of which 
 professed to be of the poorest, yet were found, to the 
 bewilderment of their captors, eating pigeon-pie out of 
 silver dishes. When, however, the pretended cotton was 
 looked into — a matter which must have been settled at once, 
 one would think, the first time a jar was lifted — it was 
 discovered that the cotton was but a covering to a slivery 
 mass of doubloons, twelve thousand pounds' worth of them 
 — which must have gone far to reconcile the Gloucester to 
 her absence from Paita. Thus the English adventurers ac- 
 complished their mission merrily, wind and tide and fair 
 weather in their favour, and everything granted to them for 
 which the British sailor most sighed — plenty of prize-money, 
 plenty of work, a little fighting, and a little danger to 
 
320 THE SAILOR. 
 
 sweeten their wellbeing, and t"be consciousness of having 
 retrieved their fortune by their own endurance, patience, and 
 valour. Success, instead of satisfying, did but stimulate 
 the Commodore. No doubt, with the prick of his comrades' 
 defeat at Carthagena so fresh in his mind, the destruction of 
 Paita was sweet to him, an event over which no Spaniard 
 could glorify himself; and after such a feat, the squadron 
 could no longer content itself with dabbling in little prizes and 
 jars of hidden treasure. The galleon which had flitted across 
 their dreams since ever they left England was now near 
 enough and sure enough to quicken the beating of many a 
 heart. It was no longer a mere vision of romance — a 
 Cleopatra's, galley with Wealth sitting enthroned on her 
 gorgeous deck — but an ascertained certainty, an apple of 
 gold just ready to drop into the eager mouth. Blessed 
 Indians, creatures undeniably genuine, had actually seen, 
 and been on board of the glorious vision, and could answer 
 for its reality. Once a-year, from Manilla to Acapulco, this 
 ship of fortune made her way, and there was nothing in the 
 world to prevent the English sailor from standing in across 
 her bows and securing to himself her golden delights. On 
 this, accordingly, the Commodore fixed his eye. As soon as 
 the little squadron had come together again, and settled into 
 working trim by destroying a few prizes, and generally 
 shaking itself down, Anson directed his course towards the 
 north, steering for the port of Acapulco, where he hoped to 
 arrive in time to intercept this prize of prizes. By this time 
 the expedition numbered five sail, after the destruction of 
 the least satisfactory vessels. Thus they set out again on 
 the scarce-known way, sheathing the cutlass for the moment, 
 and taking to the lead and the pencil. Lieutenant Brett — 
 he of the boats, the conqueror of Paita — seems to have been 
 the artist of the expedition, as Mr Walter was its historian. 
 It is tantalising not to be able to refer to his plates of every 
 headland and bay and island that struck the Commodore's 
 eye. Full of hopes about the galleon, and speculations as 
 to her whereabouts, the ships bowled clumsily along the 
 wealthy shores of Peru, across the great gulf of Panama, 
 doing their duty by their country in a more peaceable way 
 than by the burning of Spanish towns and ships — sounding, 
 noting, making sure of everything — doing a solid spell of 
 
THE SAILOR. 321 
 
 work for posterity, which represented itself to the stout 
 seamen, chiefly, as has been remarked, under the shape of 
 the British cruiser doing perennial battle with imperial 
 Spain. 
 
 We pause, as our historian does, for one moment on the 
 way, for the sake of those chords of softest harmony which 
 nature has taught him to strike here and there in the midst 
 of the discords, to note the island of Quibo — paradisiacal 
 vision which burst upon the seaman's sight when once more 
 the monotony of the waves had begun to tell on him. Not 
 in search of the picturesque, but of wood and water, more 
 urgent necessities, had the squadron sought this second 
 Isle of Rest. *' Never was such a place for these needful 
 purposes," says our Chaplain. " The trees grow close to 
 the high- water mark, and a large rapid stream of fresh water 
 runs over the sandy beach into the sea ; " as if for once nature 
 had thrown aside her tricksy ways, and soberly provided 
 for her sailors' wants. Nor is the place without curiosities : 
 there are pearl oysters in heaps along the sea-margin, and 
 turtle in such quantities that the wanderers carried away a 
 month's supply, to their much comfort and benefit. But 
 these material blessings were not all. The Commodore, 
 while exploring the island, came upon something which 
 moved him, silent man, to us saying nothing about it, as 
 only a poetic soul can be moved. The Chaplain speaks as 
 if he had not been present at this exploration ; and if so, the 
 impression it made must have been vivid indeed to be thus 
 transmitted to us at second-hand. It was a waterfall they 
 saw ; and here is Mr Walter's picture of it, fresh as of 
 yesterday. No doubt the same water dashes over the same 
 rock unchanged at this moment, though the description has 
 become a thing of the old world : — 
 
 ** It was a river of transparent water, about forty yards wide, which 
 rolled down a declivity of near a hundred and fifty in length. The 
 channel it fell in was very irregular, for it was entirely composed of rock, 
 both its sides and bottom being made up of large detached blocks ; and 
 by these the course of the water was frequently interrupted, for in some 
 parts it ran sloping with a rapid but uniform motion, while in others it 
 tumbled over the ledges of the rocks with a perpendicular descent. All 
 the neighbourhood of this stream was a fine wood, and even the huge 
 masses of rock which overhung the water, and which, by their various 
 projections, formed the inequalities of the channel, were covered with 
 
 X 
 
322 THE SAILOR. 
 
 lofty forest-trees. "Whilst the Commodore and those accompanying him 
 were attentively viewing this place, and were remarking the different 
 blendings of the water, the rocks, and the wood, there came in sight (as 
 if still to heighten and animate the prospect) a prodigious flight of 
 mackaws, which, hovering over this spot, and often wheeling and playing 
 on the wing about it, afforded a most brilliant appearance by the glit- 
 tering of the sun on their variegated plumage, so that some of the 
 spectators cannot refrain from a kind of transport when they recount 
 the complicated beauties which occurred in this extraordinary waterfall. " 
 
 There is something in the circumstantial simplicity of 
 this picture — a certain sense of novelty in the idea of 
 describing such a thing as a waterfall at all, and in the sug- 
 gestion with which it is introduced — that (in the Com- 
 modore's opinion) " it surpassed . . . everything of this 
 kind which human art or industry had hitherto produced ! " 
 which is very quaint and characteristic. The science of 
 the picturesque was a novel science in those days ; and 
 perhaps even our Chaplain — though his eye is so clear, and 
 his imagination cannot refuse to be moved, even at second- 
 hand, by this grand ravine in the lonely isle, kept by God 
 for his own pleasure up to that moment — has still a lingering 
 belief that Kent or Brown, the landscape gardeners, might 
 yet produce a masterpiece to rpatch it. Such was the 
 fashion of his time. 
 
 The squadron then proceeded to Acapulco, about the 
 shores of which they lingered from January to May, fondly 
 imagining for a long time that they were in time to inter- 
 cept the galleon, or to snap her up on her return voyage. 
 But the galleon had arrived before Anson reached the coast, 
 and was stopped in her return by the governor of the place, 
 an uneasy consciousness of the English sea-lion prowling 
 about those lonely waters having crept over the Mexican 
 shore. When the Commodore had at last and reluctantly 
 admitted that hope was over, nothing was left for it but 
 to turn his back upon those " opulent coasts," and follow 
 his original plan, which was to make for the port of Macao 
 on the way to England and the civilised w^orld. It w^as not 
 a cheerful resolution, nor was the voyage a cheerful one. 
 The comparative calm which they had for so long enjoyed, 
 the constant neighbourhood of pleasant isles w^here wood 
 and water and rest might be had when needed, the excite- 
 
THE SAILOR. 323 
 
 ment of burning towns and taking prizes, had now to be 
 exchanged for a dreary voyage across the Pacific, in which 
 they had neither experience nor information to guide them, 
 but had once more to grope their way unsustained by any 
 exciting hope. The galleon faded like a dream from the 
 monotonous sky ; weary weeks of sea, unbroken by a sail, 
 or an islet, or an adventure, followed the excitement and 
 variety of their cruise, and with the natural effect. They 
 had calculated on making their passage to China, with the 
 help of the trade-wind, in about two months ; but this auxi- 
 liary failing them, they found themselves with scarcely a 
 fourth part of their voyage accomplished when seven weary 
 weeks had passed. Monotony, disappointment, and priva- 
 tion took heart and courage from the men ; and, as a natural 
 consequence, notwithstanding all their precautions, their 
 abundant supply of water, their stock of turtle, their anxious 
 attention to ventilation and cleanliness (on which the Chap- 
 lain specially insists — a man before his age), their deadliest 
 enemy, scurvy, again appeared among them. By this time 
 the prizes had all been sacrificed, the survivors of the crews 
 being inadequate even to the manning of the two English 
 ships. Now, in the midst of the dull Pacific, the Glouces- 
 ter's days were numbered. With sprung masts, starting 
 planks, seamen fainting at the pumps, and all round them a 
 hopeless horizon, waste of sky and sea, with no refuge hid- 
 den in it to encourage them to prolong the hopeless struggle 
 — ^no other end was possible. In August, when already the 
 two ships had been for more than three month-s labouring 
 along their weary course, the Gloucester, emptied of her 
 crew and such of her stores as could be got at, fired off her 
 guns solemnly one by one as the fire reached them, and 
 went down in sullen smoke and dull explosion into the sea, 
 the Centurion looking sadly on from a distance. Hence- 
 forward the Commodore was alone on the untracked waste, 
 vexed by contrary winds, and calms almost as contrary, with 
 a leak in his ship which could not be subdued, with eight 
 or ten or sometimes twelve burials a-day — his few sound 
 men failing, and nothing in the shape of land yet appearing 
 out of the obdurate blank. Over the dull level of the seas 
 brooded a dull ignorance more trying still. He thought 
 they must be driving to the leeward of the Ladrone Islands. 
 
324 THE SAILOE. 
 
 He feared that the eastern coast of Asia would prove the 
 nearest land — a coast upon which at that moment the mon- 
 soon was at its height, so that the strongest ship would find 
 it impracticable ; and the men kept dying, the water rush- 
 ing in. Black despair came upon the sickening crew — 
 when lo ! suddenly out of the mists uprose the joyful speck 
 of green, which meant safety and healing, and the tragic 
 strains once more drop into soft pastoral breathings of 
 tranquillity and rest. 
 
 The isle of consolation this time was Tinian, one of the 
 Ladrones, a paradise of fruit and plenty, where the sick 
 speedily came to, and the healthy took courage. The place 
 was so beautiful that our Chaplain here pauses to compli- 
 ment nature. It " did by no means resemble an uninha- 
 bited and uncultivated place," he says, " but had much more 
 the air of a magnificent plantation, where large lawns and 
 stately woods had been laid out together with great skill, 
 and where the whole had been so artfully combined, and so 
 judiciously adapted to the slopes of the hills and the inequali- 
 ties of the ground, as to produce a most striking effect, and 
 to do honour to the invention of the contriver " — a kind of 
 praise most quaintly characteristic of the eighteenth century. 
 Bread-fruit, cocoa-nuts, oranges, and vegetables of all kinds 
 — not to speak of herds of wild cattle, fowls, and pigs — made 
 the island celestial. But it is chiefly memorable as the 
 scene of a most moving and almost tragic accident, which 
 might have been the most serious of all they had yet en- 
 countered. A sudden storm came on one night while the 
 Centurion lay in the bay with less than half her crew on 
 board, her guns unsecured, her shrouds loose, her topmasts 
 unrigged, her Commodore and most of her ofScers on shore. 
 In the darkness of the sudden tropical storm the luckless 
 ship was driven out to sea, dragging her anchor ; and when 
 the morning broke, not a trace of her could the wistful 
 sailors see from Tinian as they strained their anxious eyes 
 over the desolate ocean. Nothing but a miserable little 
 Indian boat of fifteen tons burthen had they left ; and the 
 only alternative to the total loss of the Centurion with which 
 the deserted could console themselves was the idea that she 
 might still make her way to Macao and save herself if not 
 them. The Commodore, not more hopeful in reality than 
 
THE SAILOR. 325 
 
 Lis men, put at least a better face upon it. He liad been 
 ill with scurvy liimself, as was not wonderful, and had conse- 
 quently removed to a tent on shore, pitched, according to 
 the instinct for the beautiful which seems to have been in 
 the man, on " a most elegant spot." Here, after the first 
 silent chill of discouragement, his busy brain found out an 
 expedient of escape. Perhaps he believed in the possibility 
 of using it, perhaps he only felt that it was necessary at all 
 hazards to employ and keep a little hope in his five or six 
 score wretches abandoned in the lonely seas. His proposal 
 was to cut their little Indian ship in two, and lengthen her 
 to such a size as might make it possible for her to embark 
 the whole of them. After some hesitation on the part of 
 the despairing men he got them set to work. The smith's 
 forge was established on the shore ; one party, with the 
 Commodore himself working first among them (since their 
 work was the hardest), cut down trees and sawed them into 
 planks ; another party attended to the commissariat. They 
 made a little dock for their ship ; they made even the bel- 
 lows which were needful for the smith's part of the under- 
 taking. All at once the solitary tropical island grew into a 
 busy naval building-yard — the men working with not un- 
 cheerful readiness from daybreak till night, filling leafy 
 Tinian with sounds of axes and hammers, and stirring shouts 
 of industry. A few days after their labours began, an 
 incident occurred, insignificant to the crowd, but which to 
 the Commodore brought the bitterest pang he had yet 
 known. A sail was seen on the horizon, which the sailors 
 concluded with joy was their ship returning ; but as they 
 gazed, a second apparition came in sight behind the first, 
 confounding them in their speculations. Anson, silent as 
 ever, a man of few words, turned his glass upon them, and 
 discovered at once that there were two boats. A thrill of 
 despair went through his heart. He immediately concluded 
 that the Centurion had gone to the bottom, and that it was 
 the remnant of the survivors who were thus making their 
 painful way back to the island. The silent" man said not a 
 word to the eager and curious group around him, but turned 
 into his tent and faced this last stroke in solitude, with such 
 feelings as may be supposed. " There he passed some 
 bitter moments in the full belief that the ship was lost, and 
 
326 THE SATLOE. 
 
 that now all his views of further distressing the enemy, and 
 of still signalling his expedition by some important exploit, 
 were at an end." When, however, the Commodore, swallow- 
 ing the anguish of disappointment, which for the moment 
 had been too much for him, emerged again into the daylight, 
 he found the two boats which had so disturbed him to be 
 but Indian proas passing on some indifferent mission of their 
 own, and went back to work at his shipbuilding, no doubt 
 with a revulsion of feeling and new vigour in his courageous 
 heart. 
 
 Three weeks, however, had come and gone, and the work 
 was so far advanced that the day of embarkation in the enlarged 
 vessel had been fixed, when one of the men, casting a care- 
 less eye upon the sea in some pause of his work in the 
 sultry afternoon, suddenly saw the Centurion herself, and no 
 other, bearing down upon the island. " The ship ! the 
 ship ! " shouted the discoverer, setting off at full speed down 
 the hill, wild with sudden joy. One voice after another 
 echoed the cry. A nimble lieutenant of marines catching 
 up the shout, Aew with it breathless to the spot where Anson, 
 at the head of his people, was calmly labouring at his logs. 
 The Commodore threw down his axe : " for the first time," 
 says our Chaplain, "his joy broke, through the equable and 
 unvaried character which he had hitherto preserved." The 
 humbler workmen round following his example, flew helter- 
 skelter to the beach " in a kind of frenzy," scarce daring to 
 believe their eyes. The Centurion, meanwhile, had been 
 having her own troubles for these three weeks, but was 
 here safe and sound at last, making home, England, even 
 Manilla galleons, and distress of the enemy still practicable 
 to all. 
 
 After such an adventure, it is but natural to suppose that 
 nobody desired to linger in a spot where danger of so des- 
 perate a kind could never be completely guarded against. 
 They made all speed, accordingly, to get to sea ; and after a 
 voyage of nearly a month, comparatively without events, 
 got to the Chinese coast ; and with a satisfaction which it is 
 easy to realise after a two-years' cruise, interrupted by so 
 many moving incidents, found themselves in " an amicable 
 port and a civilised country" — the port, to wit, of Macao, 
 where they found letters and news from home for the first 
 
THE SAILOR. 327 
 
 time since the commencement of their voyage, as well as the 
 naval stores and other necessities of which they were desti- 
 tute. Did our space permit, the story of Anson's negotia- 
 tions with the authorities, Portuguese and Chinese ; his 
 humorous solemn assumption of state ; the most well-looking 
 of his crew dressed up in marine uniform to receive a Celes- 
 tial visitor, and all the punctilios of a representative of his 
 country set up at a moment's notice to impress the Chinamen 
 not only with the importance of the visitor, but with the super- 
 lative claims of his nation to instant attention and honour — 
 might amuse the reader. He had a great deal of trouble to 
 get the repairs he wanted, and various very solemn interviews 
 with the mandarins, to whom he gravely pointed out the impro- 
 bability of his men, however patient, starving in the midst of 
 plenty, while strong enough to take what they wanted ; and 
 *' to this the Commodore added, that if by delay of supplying 
 him with provisions, his men should, from the impulses of 
 hunger, be obliged to turn cannibals, and to prey upon their 
 own species, it was easy to be foreseen that, independent of 
 their friendship to their comrades, tliey would, in point of 
 luxury, prefer the plump well-fed Chinese to their own 
 emaciated shipmates ! " " The first mandarin acquiesced in 
 the justice of this reasoning," adds the Chaplain, with the 
 mild inward laugh which befits his position. 
 
 And here, alas ! our Chaplain leaves us, getting permission 
 from his Commander, along with two or tliree other travel- 
 worn officers, to return home by a ship which was just leav- 
 ing the port. The cruise and its dangers and excitements 
 were over, as everybody believed ; and the Centurion, too, 
 as soon as she had got herself put in sailing trim, was to 
 follow. So everybody thought, and so the silent Commodore 
 let them think, keeping a close eye upon his stores, his 
 repairs, everything necessary for the long voyage before him, 
 and meanwhile turning his own plans over in his deliberate 
 self-sufficing mind. It was only when he had left the port, 
 bound, as the world supposed, for Batavia and England, with 
 Dutch letters on board for the Dutch port, and not a doubt 
 of his destination on any mind either aboard or ashore, 
 that he called his people to him on the quarter-deck, and 
 opened his mind to them. That galleon I could they go 
 back to England without it, leaving the Spaniard to brag of 
 
32 S THE SAILOR. 
 
 their failure ? Were they to acknowledge themselves foiled, 
 and give in, English seamen not understanding the meaning 
 of such words ? It had well-nigh broken his heart to give 
 it up that time when he thought the Centurion lost ; and 
 nowBatavia and the Dutch letters must take their chance — the 
 galleon was the port to which he was bound. The sailors, 
 clustering round to listen, answered as sailors could not 
 choose but answer to such a proposition, "with three 
 strenuous cheers," and about went the ship, every soul in 
 her walking on air. Hopes, which had been abandoned by 
 everybody but the Commodore, sprang up again in full 
 luxuriance ; " they should yet be repaid the price of their 
 fatigues, and should at last return home enriched with the 
 spoils of the enemy." All the misfortunes of their former 
 voyages seem to have died out of the memories of the men 
 — not a doubt of their success occurred to them. When the 
 Commodore asked for mutton, his steward pathetically 
 begged leave of his honour to keep the two sheep which 
 were left for the entertainment of the general of the galleons. 
 This time the crew, as one man, felt convinced they could 
 not fail. 
 
 Nor did they. The doomed galleon approached from among 
 the islands serenely unconscious of the weather-beaten man- 
 o'-war that waited for her. Even when she perceived her 
 enemy advancing, with short-lived courage she advanced 
 upon him, trusting in her greater size and more numerous 
 guns and men. It is needless to repeat the particulars of 
 the usual story. In about two hours' time the big Spaniard 
 struck her flag. The Commodore reappeared, to the amaze- 
 ment of the Chinese, within three months of his leaving, in 
 the port of Macao, with a prize half as big again as his own 
 ship ; twice his own number of men kept fast, with such 
 mercifulness as was possible, in the Centurion's hold ; and 
 such masses of virgin silver and heaps of shining pieces-of- 
 eight as the imagination refuses to reckon, making a moon- 
 light splendour in the old Centurion's lockers. At last he 
 had done the piece of work he had set his heart on — so much 
 against Carthagena, so much to stop the Spaniard's brag- 
 ging mouth. And now our sailor had the heart to go home. 
 
 The total amount of treasure taken altogether by the 
 Centurion amounted to £400,000, " independent," adds the 
 
THE SAILOR. 329 
 
 historian, eager to make his hero's full merits clear, " of the 
 ships and merchandise which she either burnt or destroyed, 
 and which, by the most reasonable estimation, could not 
 amount to so little as £600,000 more ; so that the whole 
 damage done the enemy by our squadron did doubtless 
 exceed a million sterling. To which if there be added the 
 great expense of the Court of Spain in fitting out the Pizarro, 
 and in paying the additional charges in America incurred on 
 our account, together with the loss of one man-of-war, the 
 total of all these articles will be a most exorbitant sum, and 
 is the strongest conviction of the utility of this expedition, 
 which, with all its numerous disadvantages, did yet prove 
 so extremely prejudicial to the enemy." With this utterance 
 of calm exultation the Chaplain winds up the extraordinary 
 tale. And surely, though we may have changed our minds 
 a little about the Christian duty of being thus " prejudicial to 
 the enemy," there never was a story of wholesale plunder and 
 destruction more splendidly relieved by those qualities which 
 are among the highest possessed by human nature, and 
 which the one thing most fatal to humanity, war, has ever 
 had most share in calling out — dauntless courage, steadfast- 
 ness beyond compare, patience, devotion, loyalty, a dutiful 
 and unhesitating obedience in the face of every difficulty, a 
 noble, silent, magnanimous reign of one man over his 
 fellows. Be the object what it might, such a narrative could 
 not but move the hearts of men ; and the object, as Anson 
 saw it, was, by his lights, one of the purest principles of 
 patriotism — to magnify, glorify, and enrich his country — to 
 make the very name of her a terror and power — to make her 
 feared by the greatness of the pains she could inflict, yet 
 loved for the unparalleled mercy she could extend. Such 
 was his aim, inarticulate, and never put into words ; but 
 written in fire and flame, in panic-stricken and grateful hearts, 
 along all the shores of that Southern Sea. The galleon and 
 its ingots were necessities of the work — the garment of fact 
 and potential secondary impulse which are indispensable to 
 human action, but not its pervading motive, nor anything 
 but a big shadow upon its simple heroic soul. 
 
 The fine climax of the story — the sudden, silent swoop 
 into the Southern Seas, and stroke as of fate upon the long- 
 dreamed-of victim — is told with less picturesque effect than 
 
330 THE SAILOE. 
 
 the other part of the voyage. We miss our Chaplain s eye, 
 which was ever open to those details which make up a pic- 
 ture. Time does not permit us to follow him into his more 
 philosophical chapters — not even into the story of the gal- 
 leon itself, and all the precautions observed upon its yearly 
 voyag^; or his grave survey of the effects which might and 
 ought to have followed had the squadron but started a little 
 earlier. The only other quotation we shall make is one in- 
 teresting only as showing what a strange sarcasm a hundred 
 years can make out of words spoken in the most perfect 
 gravity and good faith. The writer is discussing the pro- 
 bable results of his Commodore's generous treatment of the 
 Spanish captives : — " Nor let it be imagined," he says, 
 " that the impressions which the Spaniards thus received to 
 our advantage is a matter of small import ; for, not to mention 
 several of our countrymen who have already felt the good 
 effects of these prepossessions, the Spaniards are a nation 
 whose good opinion of us is doubtless of more consequence than 
 that of all the world besides ! " Strange whirligig of time 
 which brings about so many revenges ! Whatever the future 
 may be which remains for this extraordinary nation, where is 
 there a people in the world whose good opinion is of so little 
 importa,nce now? 
 
 Anson had the gratification of bringing at once the news 
 and the results of his good fortune to England without being 
 forestalled by any flying rumour. In the very Channel he 
 escaped without knowing it, a danger as great as any of 
 those he had more painfully surmounted in the Pacific, hav- 
 ing sailed through the midst of a French fleet in a fog, which 
 concealed him from them, with all his dollars on board. 
 " Anson is returned with vast fortune," writes Horace Wal- 
 pole in June 1744. ''He has brought the Acapulco ship 
 into Portsmouth, and its treasure is computed at five hundred 
 thousand pounds." The latter circumstance, however, is a 
 mistake : Anson sold his galleon at Macao, and came home 
 in the Centurion, valiant old hulk, the only one which had 
 survived the cruise. 
 
 It is very strange, after the clear revelation of this man 
 which has come to us among the waves and seas, to find 
 him disappear the moment he touches English ground. If 
 it is the want of our Chaplain, whose office in nature it was 
 to elucidate his silent Commodore, or if it is that his work 
 
THE SAILOE. 331 
 
 was done, and humanity had henceforth no need of him, it 
 is hard to tell ; but the fact is very clear that he disappears 
 forthwith from all knowledge of man. True, he won a vic- 
 tery over the French three years after, notable enough in its 
 way, and was made a peer, and has left honourable Ansons 
 after him to the present generation. He was even promoted 
 to be a Lord of the Admiralty ten years later, in which 
 capacity Lord Waldegrave reports of him, that '' Lord An- 
 son, as usual, said little ; " though it is found " he had done 
 everything in his power that our fleet might be in the best 
 condition." He held this appointment for a very short time, 
 but seems to have been again called to office at a later 
 period. " He was in reality a good sea-officer," Lord Walde- 
 grave says, with a certain fine patronage, " and had gained 
 a considerable victory over the French in the last war" 
 (Cape Horn and Paita and the galleon evidently not con- 
 sidered worth speaking of!) "but nature had not endowed 
 him with those extraordinary abilities which had been so 
 liberally granted him by the whole nation." Thus the fine 
 stream of story sinks into the mud of contemporary gossip 
 and loses itself, gleaming out now and then, soiled with the 
 witty insinuations of that sweet-spoken age, in Horace Wal- 
 pole's letters. The narrative of the great sailor's voyage is 
 " very silly and contradictory," Horace thinks, jeering nas- 
 tily at our Commodore. Fortunately posterity, in that as in 
 some other things, has not been of Horace's opinion. " A 
 real poem in its kind, or romance all fact : one of the plea- 
 santest little books in the world's library at this date," says 
 Carlyle, A book all reality, full of a straightforward occu- 
 pation with its own business, which is one of the highest 
 evidences of truth. 
 
 Thus arose, without preface or exposition, one of the few 
 men of the eighteenth century who had an absolute and most 
 distinct piece of work to perform in the world. He did it, 
 " as usual, saying little ; " and, having done it, subsided into 
 that peaceable obscurity upon which even a peerage throws 
 little light. The modesty of his exit chimes in with our 
 favourite ideal of that British sailor whom England loves. 
 There were incompetent admirals enough, as there were in- 
 competent generals, in his time. Anson alone handed down 
 out of one century into another, to Nelson and all his cap- 
 tains, the old glorious English tradition of empire over the sea. 
 
IX. 
 THE PHILOSOPHEB. 
 
 There are few things in history more curious than the 
 position which philosophy has occupied in the world since 
 ever men began to think upon their thoughts. By general 
 consent the title of a great philosopher has been allowed to 
 represent the highest eminence to which the human mind 
 can attain. Something more stable and not less divine than 
 poetry, more lofty and comprehensive than mere science, 
 more searching than theology, more profound than ethics — 
 embracing and transcending common reason, common obser- 
 vation, all the best gifts of ordinary mortals — this noblest of 
 pursuits has everywhere taken the foremost rank in the 
 opinion of the world. It reveals itself out of the depths of 
 antiquity the oldest of all studies. Before physical science 
 had come into being, or when it existed but as a series of 
 distorted guesses at the wonders of external nature, philoso- 
 phy was. Though it has changed with every changing 
 generation, developed, waned, undergone countless revolu- 
 tions, there has been no break in the thread of its continuous 
 labour. How charming is divine philosophy ! There is no 
 intellectual occupation to which the common mind yields 
 such unvarying reverence. Poetry is to some but a light 
 art, a minstrel's song, half amusement, half waste of time. 
 Of science, even at the present day, and much more in for- 
 mer ag-es, men have asked, Cui bono ^ but it is a kind of in- 
 stinct in humanity (as appears) to respect philosophy. There 
 is no educated man of the present or of many preceding 
 generations, who would not take shame to himself if obliged 
 
THE PHILOSOPHER. 333 
 
 to confess that he knew nothing of, or had no sympathy with, 
 this science of the soul. We may scoff at the unpractical ten- 
 dency of abstract thought, at its exaggerations, its unreali- 
 ties, its want of a true hold upon the steady soil ; but yet 
 there is not one of us who is not more or less impressed by 
 the often misapplied title of " the greatest thinker of Ins age." 
 AVe may — nothing more probable — dislike the bearer of that 
 title, disapprove of him, feel that by very excess of logic he 
 makes himself futile ; yet we cannot contest the supremacy 
 it confers. 
 
 And thus, looking back along the line of ages, there 
 appears to us a line of great figures — figures almost more 
 notable in their calm than those of the greatest practical 
 agents the world has seen. Bacon, for example, in the rich 
 Elizabethan age. The greatest of English poets is on the 
 same scene, and with him a sovereign of personal note and 
 mark, great statesmen, and some of the most picturesque 
 and noble gentlemen — Sidney, Kaleigh, Essex — that ever 
 adorned England. Yet, even in presence of Shakespeare, it 
 is difficult to say that Bacon is not the most illustrious ; for 
 his deeds ? alas ! no — his deeds damn the man ; but because 
 of his transcendent eminence as a philosopher. It is thought, 
 and thought only, that gives him his supremacy. It is 
 needless to pursue through history the names of those who 
 have won on the same ground a long-enduring fame. Yet 
 the science which has conferred this fame has become in 
 modern times the most unsatisfactory, the least beneficial, 
 the most unpractical of all knowledges. Amid the busy 
 world, in which every man has his work to do and his bur- 
 den to bear, to walk over real thorns that tear his flesh, and 
 burning ploughshares that penetrate to the bone, the greatest 
 thinkers have but lived to prove that nought is everything 
 and everything is nought. Their researches have only led 
 them to the conclusion that nothing can be found out. It is 
 the labour of Sisyphus, never ending, still beginning, which 
 has cast over them the mist of splendour through which 
 posterity beholds them. Instead of expanding our horizon 
 and bringing new truths to our knowledge, the only practical 
 issue of their labours has been to reduce the number of our 
 beliefs and make us uncertain of all things. Each new 
 thinker who has risen in the world of modern philosophy has 
 
• 334 THE PHILOSOPHER. 
 
 taken something from us. Even the concession grudgingly- 
 made by one has been annulled by his successor. Let one 
 man afford us the cheering certainty that our consciousness 
 is a reality, and that we can know and be sure that we live ; 
 another comes after him to declare, no : that Something lives 
 of which we are a part ; Something which we cannot under- 
 stand, yet may believe ; and that this Something is the sole 
 reality in the universe. If one grants us the power of per- 
 cieving the image of things so truly as to be able to trust 
 in our conception of them, another contradicts him with the 
 assertion that the images alone exist, while of the things we 
 can have no assurance ; and a third follows with the still 
 more disheartening warning, that we must not trust even 
 those images, our minds being like a distorted mirror, full 
 of false reflections. A discouraging, humiliating, unadvan- 
 cing science, making progress, perhaps, in method and form, 
 but, so far as result goes, arriving only at the conclusion 
 that it is itself a delusion and impossibility. All other 
 knowledges have contributed something to the common stock 
 of human profit : philosophy alone has given us nothing. 
 She has bidden us believe that we live as shadows in an un- 
 real world — that nature and all her glories are but the phan- 
 tasmagoria of a dream — that the skies and the winds are but 
 so many notions of our own uneasy, restless brain. While 
 we, the ignorant, have been roaming, not uncheerily, about 
 a world full of sunshine and of moonlight, she has groped on 
 from one darkness to another, losing a faculty, a faith, a 
 scrap of feeble certainty, at every step. Such is the story 
 as traced even by her own votaries. Yet it is this con- 
 stantly-failing, constantly-dissatisfied science which has given 
 their chief title to immortality to some of the names most 
 known and famous in the ordinary world. 
 
 Let it be understood, to begin with, that the present 
 writer has no pretensions to touch the history of philosophy 
 as a philosopher should. It is with the eyes of the outside 
 spectator, or, as the subject of this sketch expresses it, the 
 vulgar^ that we regard its strange, long-continued, unproduc- 
 tive toil. We do not attempt to take up its phraseology, or to 
 explain its changes, so far as they come under our notice, from 
 within, but from without. Without overstepping that barrier 
 which separates the external sphere, in which everything is 
 
THE PHILOSOPHER. 335 
 
 real to our rational faculties, from the interior, in which all is 
 image and idea — some notion, we think, may be given of what 
 was going on at a certain period in the inner circle, and how 
 its movements affected, and were affected by, the outer shell 
 of practical existence. The eighteenth century was full of 
 philosophers and philosophisings, and yet it cannot in any 
 way be described as a philosophical age. It is an age of 
 rude contact, wild prejudices, petty motives, everything that 
 is most foreign to the principles of pure thought. If there 
 had been any practical tendency in the science to elevate 
 men's minds, and bring them to a better atmosphere, a more 
 fit opportunity for the exercise of its influence could not 
 have been. But this is an agency which no philosopher 
 claims. In utter disinterestedness, without hope of gain or 
 reward, the thinker goes on in his sphere within a sphere. 
 Earth and its doings are nothing to him — men and their 
 ways are beneath his notice. While the world beats the 
 air in its fierce fever, while it fights and struggles with all 
 the perversities of life, he stands, in the dim Camera Ob- 
 scura of his own consciousness, gazing at the reflections of 
 things turned topsy-turvy by the laws of nature. Is it a 
 real world that is outside ? No. It is but some phantasm, 
 probably quite unlike the moving current of images that 
 come and go. There are no things in his universe — there 
 are but thoughts ; or if anything exists besides thought, it 
 is that Something — be it God, be it devil, be it matter or 
 substance, or howsoever the word may change — a vast dark- 
 ness, which no man can fathom or define. The great sea 
 raging outside has little influence on the calm flux and 
 reflux of his tidal river : now it ebbs to some bare unity, 
 called, it may be. Idealism, it may be Sensationalism; now it 
 rises in a tide infinitesimally greater, to acknowledge a duality 
 of mental power. In endless succession come those fallings 
 and flowings. The spiritual conception rises with Descartes, 
 rises with Spinoza, ebbs with Hobbes, begins to mount again 
 with Locke, swells to a spring- tide in Berkeley, falls back to 
 the lowest water-mark in Hume and the philosophers of the 
 Eevolution. Yet how small a space is represented in this 
 coming and going I From Descartes, who is sure of himself, 
 to Hume, who was sure of nothing, the distance is scarce so 
 much as might be represented by the line of glistening peb- 
 
336 THE PHILOSOPHER. 
 
 bles or muddy bank between high and low water-mark. 
 And so far as the big universe was concerned, these great 
 thinkers might have been but so many children weaving 
 their endless bootless games upon the margin of the stream. 
 Man knew as much and as little of himself at the end as at the 
 beginning. He knew as little of the speechless forces 
 round him ; he was as ignorant of whence he came and 
 whither he was going. It may be said that true philosophy 
 proposes no end to itself, and is beyond all vulgar longings 
 after a result ; but we reply, that our estimate of its extra- 
 ordinary, brilliant, and bootless labour — a labour which has 
 confessedly occupied some of the finest intellects in the 
 world — is made from without, and not from within. No one 
 questions the strange interest of these inquiries to all who 
 get within the magic circle. But to what purpose is this 
 waste? asks the bewildered spectator; and neither from 
 within nor from without is there any reply. 
 
 The reigning philosophy of the time was that of Locke, 
 when George Berkeley came into the world ; one of those 
 serious moderate compromises between two systems of which 
 the English mind seems peculiarly capable. Eejecting as 
 untenable the philosophy which deduced everything from in- 
 dividual consciousness, and yet not material enough to deny 
 some power to the mind itself in conjunction with the senses, 
 Locke formed the conception of a double action always 
 going on in those dark recesses of the human intellect 
 v^hich have never yet given forth their secret to any in- 
 quirer. His decision was, that though sense supplied the 
 mind with all its materials, yet there was in the mind a cer- 
 tain power of reflection and rumination over the material 
 supplied which made every final conclusion a joint process 
 effected by two powers acting together — experience bring- 
 ing in the corn, but reflection grinding it in the mill. Ac- 
 cording to this theory, no innate principle, no intuitive 
 certainty, belonged to man. True, he might move about 
 among the phantasms of earth with a certain vulgar external 
 sense of their reality, but to know any one thing exactly as 
 it is, was for ever denied to him by laws immutable. His 
 own ideas of things were all his possession ; they might not 
 even resemble the things themselves, and probably did not — 
 but they were all to which he could attain. The ground on 
 
THE PHILOSOPHER. 337 
 
 which he walked presented to him certain appearances of 
 verdure, beauty, solidity, various and extended surface ; but 
 these were but impressions made on his senses, combined 
 and accumulated by his intellect, and not, so far as he knew, 
 affording even a fair representation of the earth in its own indi- 
 viduality. And yet the earth possessed an individuality, 
 and a something, a substance, whatever it was, really ex- 
 isted. With these impressions, Locke insisted, it was meet 
 that man should be satisfied. Satisfied or not, he had 
 reached the end of his tether. To go farther was impos- 
 sible — to gain anything like absolute knowledge was impos- 
 sible : the contentment thus enjoined might be to an eager 
 spirit only the forlorn and pathetic resignation of a being 
 blindly stumbling among the ghosts of things ; but to 
 Locke's calm and unexaggerated intelligence it was the 
 reasonable contentment of a creature born to no better en- 
 lightenment, able to derive pleasure and pain, though not 
 knowledge and certainty, from the shows of nature, and 
 bound to make a virtue of necessity, and put up with its in- 
 evitable deprivations. Most men do so without finding any 
 difficulty in the matter ; and it was fit and right that they 
 should do so, concluded the philosopher, with a calmness and 
 moderation which were indeed the characteristic sentiments 
 in his case of philosophical despair. He was resigning his 
 own science when he said it. "Locke gave up philosophy 
 as hopeless,'' says Mr Lewes. To this point had the silent 
 tide crept up when Berkeley came into the world. 
 
 And here the spectator who knows the age will brighten 
 with a thrill of warmer interest. The philosopher who was 
 about to awaken the discussions, the laughter, the ridicule 
 of the eighteenth century, is no abstract being shut up in a 
 fictitious world. In him life gives no contradiction to fame. 
 There is not a spot in his existence for which his warmest 
 admirer need fear the light of day. Bishop Berkeley was 
 not only a philosopher, he was a man. His being was not 
 starved upon the meagre fare of speculation, but nourished 
 by all the generous currents of existence. A life full of 
 active service to his kind, full of the warm impulses of a 
 spontaneous, frank, open-hearted Irish nature — a sensibility 
 so keen as to lead him even to Quixotisms and oddities of 
 kindness — give such a warm background to his philosophy 
 
 Y 
 
338 THE PHILOSOPHEE. 
 
 as no other great thinker within our recollection can equal. 
 A man who is ready, at an age when men are supposed to 
 consider their own comfort, to sacrifice himself in one of the 
 least comfortable of missions ; a man moved in later years 
 to pause in his philosophy in order to promulgate tar-w^ater 
 — grand specific for all the physical ills of humanity ; one 
 who feared neither poverty nor neglect nor derision for 
 what seemed to him at the moment the best he could do for 
 his fellow-creatures, — is such a man as is rarely met with in 
 the sphere of philosophy. No mental system has called 
 forth such contemptuous criticism, rude laughter, and foolish 
 condemnation — none has been denounced as so visionary and 
 unreal ; yet Berkeley is the one philosopher of modern times 
 who brings the race within the warmest circle of human 
 sympathies, and casts a certain interest and glow of light 
 from his own nature upon metaphysics themselves. 
 
 He was born in the county of Kilkenny, in March 1684, 
 of one of those families of English colonists who have so 
 curiously affected the history and character of Ireland. He 
 himself was of the second generation after the immigration 
 of the household, and presents himself to us with so many 
 of the best features of the traditional Irishman that it is 
 difiScult to refrain from identifying him with that busy, elo- 
 quent, restless Celtic genius which common opinion has 
 given to the country of his birth. There are no details but 
 the driest of his youth. He was educated, in the first place, 
 at Kilkenny School, then taught by a Dr Hinton, and at 
 fifteen was admitted a pensioner of Trinity College, Dublin. 
 Wealth there seems to have been none to make his family 
 conspicuous ; and their descent from the Berkeleys of Strat- 
 ton was apparently illegitimate, and did not count. His 
 extreme youth at the time of his entering the University 
 would seem a sign that his great powders had been early de- 
 veloped ; and it is apparent that his vivacious temperament, 
 and the ferment of universal rebellion against recognised 
 views and modes of thought so common to young men of 
 genius, soon drove him into utterance. His first publica- 
 tions were upon mathematical subjects, and one of them, at 
 least, was written before he was twenty. At twenty-three 
 he was admitted Fellow of his College, and two years after 
 published his 'Theory of Vision,' a work which we cannot here 
 
THE PHILOSOPHER. 339 
 
 discuss, but wbicli Mr Lewes tells us, in his 'History of Pliilo- 
 sopliy ' made " an epoch in science." Up to this moment no 
 light except the feeblest twinkle of history falls upon the 
 young man. How he lived, or what were his surroundings, 
 are matters entirely invisible to us. " He was much addicted 
 to reading" the "airy visions of romances," his biographer 
 tells us, not without an insinuation tliat these studies helped 
 " to give birth to his disbelief of the existence of matter." 
 The connection is one which we fear it would be difficult to 
 trace, though the suggestion is delicious. The romances 
 with which Berkeley ammsed his eager and manifold intelli- 
 gence must have been those splendid fictions of the school 
 of the ' Grand Cyrus ' which little Lady Mary Pierrepont a 
 few years before was reading in her nursery. 
 
 But the young philosopher, it is evident, did not confine 
 himself to fiction. " Disgust at the books of metaphysics 
 then received in the University, and that inquisitive atten- 
 tion to the operations of the mind which about this time was 
 excited by the writings of Mr Locke and Father Male- 
 branche," concurred with his novel-reading to incline him 
 towards a new system of thought. And it is evident that 
 there were in Berkeley other elements at work, differing 
 from the ordinary motives of the philosopher. Though there 
 is no want of candour in his reasoning, nor any disingenuous 
 attempt at the probation of any system distinct from that of 
 metaphysics, there is a foregone conclusion essentially unphi- 
 losophical in his mind from the outset. It is " in opposition 
 to sceptics and atheists" — it is "to promote" not only 
 " useful knowledge," but "religion," that he gives forth his 
 philosophy to the world. This motive gives warmth and 
 force to his words, and heightens every energy of thought 
 within him ; but it is not the passionless search for truth, 
 whatsoever that truth might happen to be, which is the ideal 
 temper of philosophy. One can imagine the young man's 
 nature rising into a glow of pious enthusiasm — high indig- 
 nation with the frivolous doubting world around him — a 
 passion of lofty eagerness to change the spirit and atmos- 
 phere which fills his country and debases his age. Under 
 all the measured composure of his demonstrations, this light 
 of meaning glows subdued, like the sunshine through the 
 golden-tinted marble which serves for windows, as many of 
 
340 THE PHILOSOPHEE. 
 
 our readers will remember, on that Florentine hill where San 
 Miniato watches the dead. He is betrayed not by any act 
 or even word, but by the intense still light of purpose and 
 meaning in all his speculations. Each step he takes con- 
 ducts him not into new and undiscovered lands, where each 
 inch of space may, for aught he knows, contain a discovery, 
 but, with a steady regularity and stateliness, to one great 
 point at which he has aimed from the beginning. He has 
 covered over the cross on his buckler, and fights for the 
 moment in armour which bears no cognisance ; but yet he is 
 as truly, according to his perceptions, the champion of reli- 
 gion, as if he wore the outward appearance of a Crusader. 
 It is curious enough, and looks like a kind of natural punish- 
 ment for this beautiful and touching disingenuousness, that 
 Berkeley's idealism holds the place of a stepping-stone to the 
 unmitigated scepticism of Hume. The strain was too great 
 for the common mind, and produced a reaction ; and the 
 assumption by the idealist of all power and perception to the 
 intellect alone, provoked an examination of that intellect on 
 the part of the sceptic such as nothing human can bear. 
 But, we repeat, there is no disingenuousness in Berkeley's 
 reasonings. They are even pronounced to be (philosophi- 
 cally) irrefutable — a fact which is no demonstration what- 
 ever, either of their truth or of the impracticability of other 
 attempts equally irrefutable (philosophically) to prove them at 
 once futile and foolish. So charming is divine philosophy ! 
 But the impression we derive of Berkeley as a man, in the 
 first outburst of his powers, is by just so much the more 
 attractive and lovable as this secret meaning within him is 
 unphilosophical. Such an ardent, impassioned, generous 
 young soul, as those which, some forty years ago, facing the 
 infidel world with all the fervour of youthful opposition made 
 beautiful by piety, began that peaceful revolution in France, 
 which has, alas ! developed into Ultramontanism, and many 
 things less lofty and lovely than Montalembert and Lacor- 
 daire ; such a young knight of Christianity as about the 
 same period the English Church gave birth to, among the 
 earlier followers of Newman — to develop (again alas !) into 
 Oratorists and Ritualists — was the Irish youth, fallen upon 
 evil days for religion, surrounded by scepticism and that 
 brutal free-thinking which belonged to the eighteenth cen- 
 
THE PHILOSOPHER. 341 
 
 tury, reading Locke and Malebranche and the 'Grand Cyrus' 
 in his rooms at Trinity, and feeling his heart burn within 
 him. Such a one, throbbing all over with spirit and soul 
 and genius — half scornful of, half indifferent to, the body 
 which was, as he felt to his finger-points, but the docile ser- 
 vant of his glowing, swelling, creating mind — such a one to 
 acknowledge that sense was all, or almost all, that man had 
 to guide him ! The fashion of the age did not run in the 
 way of great missionary exertions in our sense of the word ; 
 and Berkeley had actually embarked in the tortuous ways of 
 metaphysics. It is not difficult to imagine with what a 
 silent ardour, with what light in his young eyes, he turned 
 to elaborate his own system of thought. Philosophy is 
 always free to do what youth is always inclined to ; and 
 that is, to spurn all X)revious foundations, and begin from the 
 beginning for its own hand. Thus the field was open for 
 the Idealist ; no tradition of his science bound him to respect 
 the theories which had preceded his. An iconoclast is noth- 
 ing to a philosopher. Berkeley put his foot upon Locke 
 without a moment's hesitation, and strode on to the often- 
 contested and never-conquered field. 
 
 It was in the year 1710, when he was a young man of 
 six-and-twenty. Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin, working 
 with his pupils in the obscurity of an island much more dis- 
 tant in all practical ways from England than it is now, that 
 the ' Principles of Human Knowledge ' were published. He 
 does not seem in all his subsequent life to have gone beyond 
 or much developed this early work. But in order to enable 
 the ordinary reader, who is not a philosopher, to follow the 
 true sense of his argument, it must be permitted to us to 
 pause once more and make clear the difference between the 
 world of actual life and the world of philosophy. If the 
 arguments belonging to the one are received as applying to 
 the other, they are simple absurdities, such as no man other 
 than a fool or madman could hold or dwell upon. Dr John- 
 son's " peremptory refutation," as Mr Lewes called it, of 
 Berkeley's theory by the easy expedient of kicking a stone, 
 and Keid's similar argument about breaking his head against 
 a post or stepping into a dirty kennel, are simple sillinesses, 
 strange though it may be to give such a name to the sa^dngs 
 of two such authorities. They suggest a confusion of the 
 
342 THE PHILOSOPHER. 
 
 two worlds, quite excusable in the vulgar, but unpardonable 
 in the learned. Outside everything is real to us. In our 
 practical concerns we do not pause to discuss what images 
 are imprinted on the eje, or what sounds on the tympanum. 
 We hear and we see, which is quite enough for us. Neither do 
 we pause to consider how it is that an impression of some- 
 thing snowy white or blazing crimson is conveyed to us 
 when we look at a rose ; the rose does not seem, but is, red 
 or white. It is rich with perfume ; it has thorns that prick 
 and moss that clothes it. We walk on solid soil without for 
 an instant contradicting reason by the supposition that the 
 foot which strikes that steady surface, and the earth that re- 
 ceives it, are but phantasms of our senses. The most pro- 
 found and the most ideal of philosophers walks abroad like 
 other men, and accepts the ordinary accidents of nature with 
 that unhesitating natural conviction which he can no more 
 contest than he can — doubt he ever so much — doubt his own 
 existence. The stone and the post are as indubitable to 
 him as to ourselves. Few philosophers have lived so healtli- 
 ful and full a material life as the man who denied the exist- 
 tence of matter ; but then he never denied its existence in 
 the outer sphere of fact and everyday reality. " That what 
 I see, hear, and feel doth exist — i.e., is perceived by me — I 
 no more doubt than I do of my own being," says Berkeley. 
 '' I do not argue against the existence of any one thing that 
 we can apprehend either by sensation or reflection. That 
 the things I see with my eyes and touch with my hands do 
 exist, really exist, I make not the least question." Out of 
 doors, in common daylight, common air, in the life which he 
 enjoyed fully, with all his young faculties strung to its plea- 
 sures and its wonders, Berkeley was as other men. A more 
 than ordinarily keen observation of everything going on 
 around him is apparent in his letters. The " horrible rocks" 
 of the Alpine passes make his heart melt within him ; the 
 miseries he sees in France as he passes through it " spoil his 
 mirth." Wherever he goes it is with open eyes, full of 
 vivacity and human kindness. This is the world we live in, 
 the world familiar and homely, whose facts are incontestable, 
 whose delights console, whose horrors appal us. In respect 
 to its stones and its posts, its roses and its landscapes, 
 Berkeley is at one with aU mankind. 
 
THE PHILOSOPHER. 343 
 
 But lift the curtain which hangs over the door of the 
 philosopher's study, and it is a different world which you 
 enter. He sits there in the silence, with his books round 
 him, with his desk before him, a musing and bewildered 
 creature, and asks himself what is real, and what is a vain 
 show. In that silence tliere is but one thing that makes 
 itself evident, so as no man can contradict it. He himself 
 is — that is the point from which he starts. It may not, 
 perhaps, be capable of elaborate demonstration, but yet it is, 
 even by a philosopher, indisputable. He is there, but what 
 are these visions around him ? All that he can understand 
 of the merest table or chair is, that it conveys a certain 
 notion to his mind. The tree that looks in at his window is, 
 he knows, not green in itself, but green by right of some 
 property in his eyes that makes it so. His hand touches 
 something on which he leans — what is it? But for the 
 hand that touches, the arm that leans on it, the thing would 
 have of itself no conscious being. What is it, then ? What 
 can we ever know about it ? Folly to laugh at to the echo 
 outside, but within actually the subject which has occupied 
 for ages the closest thoughts of the greatest thinkers. The 
 carpenter who made this bit of oak or mahogany into shape, 
 no doubt, with open mouth and eyes, and with inextinguish- 
 able laughter, would tell the philosopher all about it ; but 
 the philosopher, for his part, knows nothing about it. He 
 cannot tell how that dead thing can he. He looks at it on 
 every side, and can make nothing of it. Is it the shadow 
 of some mysterious unknown thing which exists unseen, un- 
 fathomable, in the wide wastes of earth ? or is it only so far 
 as it impresses its likeness upon a seeing eye that it exists 
 at all ? This is the question he makes to the blank silence, 
 which gives him no reply. The conclusion come to by the 
 philosophy of Locke was, that a vast phantom called Matter 
 did exist in the world — that houses and mountains, and 
 even tables and chairs, were^ in some shadowy way, because 
 of this vast substantial soul, if such an expression may be 
 used, which was behind them. As the soul lives, according 
 to the Christian faith, because God lives, so things were, 
 according to philosophy, because Matter was. What it was, 
 how it was, or what connection it had with all these 
 eccentric signs of its presence, nobody could tell, any more 
 
344 THE PHILOSOPHEE. 
 
 than anybody, unassisted by the light of revelation, can tell 
 what God is, or how He unites himself to His creatures. 
 The other was an Earth-God, a kind of heavy inanimate 
 soul to the inanimate universe. It brooded upon the depths 
 a visible darkness. It found an Avatar, like the Hindoo 
 Divinity, in every new development of solid shape and size. 
 Such was the idea current in the darkling world of philo- 
 sophy. We repeat, all this had no more to do with the 
 ordinary globe than a chemical knowledge of its constituent 
 parts has to do with the refreshing influence of a draught of 
 water. Outside, all was plain matter of fact, indisputable 
 reality, a world full of things and beings of many sorts and 
 varieties ; inside, there were but, as it were, the shadows 
 glimmering confused upon a mirror — sometimes growing 
 into dark shapes, sometimes dispersing into mere vapour. 
 To bring the processes, the reasonings of one world into 
 another, would be simply absurdity. In the one, liberal 
 nature takes everything for granted ; in the other, nothing 
 is believed, nothing allowed — everything put to severest 
 examination. Without fully acknowledging and perceiving 
 this distinction, and that with a candour and clearness 
 which is not displayed by either Johnson or Eeid, we can 
 neither understand Berkeley's system nor that of any other 
 great leader of (so called) thought. 
 
 After this preface, we may venture to give such an in- 
 dication as comes within the range of an ordinary observer 
 of the views contained in the ' Principles of Human Know- 
 ledge,' written when he was six-and-twenty, by the brilliant 
 young Irishman, which, Mr Lewes tells us, " made an epoch 
 in metaphysics." These principles are : That spirit, the 
 unseen being of God and of man, is the only real and know- 
 able existence in the world: that the Earth-God — the 
 inanimate abstraction Matter, in which external things were 
 supposed to live and have their being, as the soul lives and 
 has its being in the life of God — is a mere invention of 
 human fancy : and that we can form no conception of the 
 world around us except as perceived by us. Such are the 
 plain and simple foundations of Berkeley's system. From 
 this it will be seen that much laughter was expended by the 
 age, and many shafts of dull wit shot at the philosopher 
 which fell entirely wide of their mark. In these clear and 
 
THE PHILOSOPHER. 345 
 
 simple principles there is nothing about the non-existence 
 of stones or posts. 
 
 " The only thing, " he says, "whose existence I deny, is that which 
 philosophers call matter or corporeal substance. And in doing this," he 
 adds, with a touch of humour, " there is no damage done to the rest of 
 mankind, who, I daresay, will never miss it. . . . So long as we 
 attribute a real existence to unthinking things distinct from their being 
 perceived, it is not only impossible for us to know with evidence the 
 nature of any real unthinking being, but even that it exists. Hence it 
 is that we see philosophers distrust their senses, and doubt of the ex- 
 istence of heaven and earth — of everything they see and feel, even of 
 their own bodies. And after all their labour and struggle of thought, 
 they are forced to own we cannot attain to any self-evident or demon- 
 strative knowledge of the existence of sensible things. But all this 
 doubtfulness which so bewilders and confounds the mind, and makes 
 philosophy ridiculous in the eyes of the world, vanishes if we annex a 
 meaning to our words, and do not amuse ourselves with the terms abso- . 
 lute, external, exist, and suchlike, signifying we know what. I can as 
 well doubt of my own being, as of the being of those things which I 
 actually perceive by sense — it being a manifest contradiction that any 
 sensible object should be immediately perceived by sight or touch, and 
 at the same time have no existence in nature, since the very existence of 
 an unthinking being consists in being perceived." 
 
 This, then, is the mnch- talked -of, much-langhed-at 
 idealism of Berkeley. Like every other system of philo- 
 sophy, it involves the disciple in a thousand difficulties. 
 To say that the furniture of a room, that the landscape seen 
 from the window, exist only when the inhabitant of that 
 room beholds the one or the other, conveys (or would 
 convey, were we outside" in the ordinary world) a manifest 
 absurdity. But he is not without his answer to all such 
 objections. " The table I write on I say exists — that is, I 
 can see and feel it — and if I am out of my study, I should 
 say it existed, meaning thereby that if I were in my study I 
 might perceive it^ or that some other spirit actually does 
 perceive it. . . . But, say you, there is nothing easier," 
 he adds, " than to imagine trees, for instance, in a park, or 
 books existing in a closet, and nobody by to perceive them. 
 I answer, you may so, there is no difficulty in it. But what 
 is all this, I beseech you, more than framing in your mind 
 certain ideas which you call books and trees, and at the 
 same time omitting to frame the idea of any one that may 
 
346 THE PHILOSOPHER. 
 
 perceive tliem ? but do not you yourself perceive or think of 
 them all the while ? " Thus the idea widens, gathering to 
 itself all forces of imagination and memory. These outside 
 mysteries of nature live in your perception of them, live in 
 your thought of them. When darkness falls over the 
 w^oods you know, and makes them invisible, are they not 
 there alive, breathing, rustling under the night wind, in 
 your thoughts ? and if not even in your thoughts, how can 
 you tell what benighted creature, desolate of all comforts, 
 may haunt them, making the gloomy glades alive with the 
 consciousness of a human eye ? or what angel, leaning from 
 the heavens, may charm them into reality? Or, higher 
 still, does not God look and behold, giving them existence 
 with His glance ? '' Some truths," says the philosopher, his 
 gaze widening, his mind swelling with an exaltation worthy 
 his subject, " are so near and obvious to the mind that a 
 man need only to open his eyes to see them. Such I take 
 this important one to be — to wit, that all the choir of heaven 
 and furniture of earth — in a word, all those bodies which 
 compose the mighty frame of the world, have not any 
 existence without a mind, that their being (esse) is to be per- 
 ceived and known ; that, consequently, so long as they are 
 not actually perceived by men, or .do not exist in my mind, 
 or that of any other created spirit, they must either have no 
 existence at all, or else subsist in the mind of some eternal 
 spirit!' Where could there be found a theory more touching 
 or more sublime ? All the choir of heaven, and all the fur- 
 niture of earth — all the little stars unnamed and unknown in 
 their systems — all those unseen isles of paradise which lie 
 in undiscovered seas, — hanging, as in their proper atmo- 
 sphere, like the motes in the sunshine, in the light of the 
 eyes of God ! Never has a nobler conception filled the heart 
 of any poet. The mind in which it had its origin has such 
 a right to the name of Seer as falls to few of the most nobly 
 endowed among men. 
 
 It is not within our range or sphere to follow this new 
 system through the storm of argument, laughter, and dis- 
 cussion which it called forth. It is enough for us to state 
 what the theory was, which even at this present day brings 
 a smile to the lip of many an ignorant bystander at Bishop 
 Berkeley's name. The strain of subdued enthusiasm and 
 
THE PHILOSOPHER, 347 
 
 lofty poetry in tlie book attracted many minds ; and so did 
 the close and unbroken chain of reasoning, of which Hume 
 said, " that it admitted of no answer," although it produced 
 no conviction. If the pretensions of philosophy are ad- 
 mitted at all, Mr Lewes tells us that Berkeley is irrefut- 
 able. " He failed, as the greatest philosophers of all times 
 have failed, not because he was w^eak, but because philo- 
 sophy was impossible," says the historian of philosophy. 
 The book, a small octavo volume, never came to a second 
 edition so long as its author lived, but yet became at once 
 sufficiently known to win him some fame, and to puzzle the 
 brains of the philosophical world. " Mr Berkeley published, 
 A.D. 1710, at Dublin, the metaphysic notion that matter was 
 not a real thing," says Whiston in the ' Memoirs of Dr 
 Clarke ; ' " nay, that the common opinion of its reality was 
 groundless, if not ridiculous. He was pleased to send Dr 
 Clarke and myself, each of us, a book. After we had both 
 perused it, I went to Dr Clarke and discoursed with him 
 about it to this effect, that I, being not a metaphysician, 
 was not able to answer Mr Berkeley's subtle pr^emises, though 
 I did not at all believe his absurd conclusion. I therefore 
 desired that he, who was deep in such subtleties, but did 
 not appear to believe Mr Berkeley's conclusions, would 
 answer him ; which task he declined." Thus the young 
 Irishman splintered his lance upon the world without find- 
 ing any immediate champion to do battle with him. There 
 was a pause of consternation in that misty, doubtful, uncer- 
 tain sphere. The old philosophy " did not appear to be- 
 lieve," but 'declined the task" of replying. It was some 
 time before it found breath and courage enough even to ac- 
 knowledge the challenge. 
 
 For two years after this the young fellow of Trinity 
 remained in Dublin, no doubt doing his w^ork with the joy- 
 ful energy of his youth and enthusiastic temperament. Dur- 
 ing this time " the principles inculcated in Mr Locke's two 
 treatises on Government seem to have turned his attention 
 to the doctrine of passive obedience," says his biographer, 
 " iii support of which he printed the substance of three 
 Commonplaces delivered by him that year in the College 
 chapel." He himself explains this publication, by way of 
 preface, with a mixture of that lofy optimism which dis- 
 
348 THE PHILOSOPHER. 
 
 tinguishes all liis thoughts, and which so often carries men 
 of his stamp, in their very pursuit of the highest good, into 
 conjunction with the meanest tyrannies — and a frank 
 straightforward opposition to the great antagonist he had 
 chosen for himself, which is equally characteristic of the 
 man. The age was not favourable to the doctrine of passive 
 obedience ; all its political order, in short, was founded 
 upon a flat and practical contradiction of the theory. So far 
 from passively obeying, England had but lately expelled her 
 hereditary monarch, had set in succession two daughters of 
 the exiled king upon his throne, and was now plotting the 
 introduction of an altogether new family of rulers, leaving 
 the old in banishment, in the hope that her new lords would 
 do her will instead of demanding of her that she should do 
 theirs. Eight or wrong, such was the principle rooted 
 deeply by recent events in the heart of the nation. An 
 opposite opinion meant at that moment Jacobitism, revolu- 
 tionism, anything but devotion to the powers that be. In 
 short, the title of the powers then actually existing to the 
 obedience and devotion of the people was of so unreal a 
 character that such a treatise at such a time looked very 
 much like either rebellion or nonsense. Berkeley, however, 
 meant it as neither. This is how he explains his curious 
 exposition of duty : — 
 
 " That an absolute passive obedience ought not to be paid to any civil 
 power, but that submission to government should be measured and 
 limited by the public good of society ; and that, therefore, subjects may 
 lawfully resist the supreme authority in those cases where the public 
 good shall plainly seem to require it— nay, that it is their duty to do so, 
 inasmuch as they are all under an indispensable obligation to promote the 
 common interest : these and the like notions, which I cannot help think- 
 ing pernicious to mankind and repugnant to right reason, having of late 
 years been industriously cultivated and set in the most advantageous 
 lights by men of parts and learning, it seemed necessary to arm the 
 youth of our University against them, and take care they go into the 
 world well principled ; I do not mean obstinately prejudiced in favour of 
 a party, but, from an early acquaintance with their duty, and the clear 
 rational ground of it, determined to such practices as may speak them 
 good Christians and loyal subjects." 
 
 Perhaps nobody but an Irishman could have sent forth in 
 perfect good faith at such a crisis a work of such a kind. 
 Queen Anne was sinking towards her end. It was the 
 
THE PHILOSOPHER. 349 
 
 general meaning and expectation that the new family, with 
 no claims whatever upon the obedience of the nation, should 
 be set in her place ; and it is little wonder that this whim- 
 sical big bull should have been afterwards produced against 
 Berkeley, when he was recommended for promotion to the 
 new Majesties. In the long-run, happily, it did him no 
 harm ; nor is there the least trace that he had any intention 
 of turning the eyes of the young fervid English-Irish com- 
 munity towards the exiled Stuarts, who alone, sacred in 
 their divine right, could have any claim upon the passive 
 obedience of their hereditary subjects. His aim was honestly 
 to prove " that there is an absolute unlimited non-resistance 
 or passive obedience due to the supreme power, wherever 
 placed in any nation ; " and unappalled by the amazing con- 
 tradiction of circumstances around him, he worked out his 
 theory with a calm as perfect as if the social order of the 
 empire had never been disturbed. 
 
 A few months after this publication, he went to England 
 for the first time, and was received with enthusiasm. The 
 whole guild of literature seems to have opened its arms to 
 the young philosopher. Steele on the one side, and Swift 
 on the other, brought him into the heart of all the society of 
 the day. Addison, at this or a subsequent time, was so 
 much interested in him that he took the trouble of bringing 
 about a meeting at his own house between him and Dr 
 Clarke, in order to the discussion^ and reconciliation, if pos- 
 sible, of their differing views. Pope writes to him that "my 
 Lord Bishop Atterbury was very much concerned at missing 
 you yesterday," and entreats him to '' provide yourself of 
 linen and other necessaries sufficient for the week ; for as I 
 take you to be almiost the only friend I have that is above 
 the little vanities of the town, I expect you may be able to 
 renounce it for one week, and to make trial how you like my 
 Tusculum, because I assure you it is no less yours, and hope 
 you will use it as your own country-villa in the ensuing 
 season." Atterbury himself, a more congenial spirit, adds 
 his praise of the young adventurer in terms which seem 
 highflown to the sober ears of posterity. " So much learn- 
 ing, so much knowledge, so much innocence, and such 
 humility, I did not think had been the portion of any but 
 angels till I saw this gentleman," says the Bishop. Thus, 
 
350 THE PHILOSOPHER. 
 
 universally admired and adopted by the wits, the young 
 man's short career in " town " must have been a continued 
 triumph. 
 
 He published, while in London, the ' Three Dialogues 
 between Hylas and Philonous/ in which his new system of 
 philosophy was once more set forth and elucidated to the 
 world. The form of dialogue was one which pleased the 
 age ; but it has radical disadvantages at all times, and 
 especially when dealing with a subject so difficult. The 
 reader cannot but feel that the hapless interlocutor, set up 
 there to be driven into one corner after another, compelled 
 to make the most damaging admissions, and finally beaten 
 and triumphed over, is in every respect a man of straw, 
 rather enfeebling than strengthening, with his weak objec- 
 tions, the strain of the argument ; nor are the dialogues so 
 readable (although so evidently intended to be more read- 
 able) as the grave work which preceded them. "What with 
 this publication, and his warm reception by society, Berke- 
 ley's short stay in London must have been sufficiently full. 
 He is said to have written several papers for the ' Guardian,' 
 only one of which, however, can be identified as his. He 
 was introduced and recommended specially, it would seem, 
 by Swift, who was one of his many friends, to that strange 
 hero of romance the Earl of Peterborough, then about to 
 start upon a mission as Ambassador to the Court of Sicily 
 and other Italian States — and became his secretary and 
 chaplain. In the suite of this remarkable and eccentric per- 
 sonage Berkeley left philosophy and England, and went out, 
 wandering on an errant course which lasted for years, abroad 
 into the world. He was still but nine-and-twenty, and yet 
 this is something like the end of his purely philosophical 
 career. Hereafter the young man, afloat in the full tide of 
 life, finds other pieces of work to do, and matters thrown 
 into his hands of which he had not dreamed. His intellect 
 goes on in the activity inseparable from such a nature ; but 
 the silence and the leisure have gone from him. Hencefor- 
 ward he is in a busier scene, amid influences more urgent 
 and less subtle. And we do not suppose that any other 
 philosopher has proved himself capable of thus setting his 
 mark upon the most difficult of all sciences, and turning its 
 stream into a new channel, before he had even attained the 
 
THE PHILOSOPHER. 361 
 
 maturity of manhood. This Berkeley did while still under 
 thirty ; and thereafter went upon his way, not to forget or 
 abandon the speculations of his youth, but yet to play the 
 part of a man in a world too busy for philosophers, and to 
 demonstrate what force of healthful vitality, what stout 
 service and helpfulness, could exist in the prophet of Ideal- 
 ism, the destroyer of matter, the exponent of what, to so 
 many sober-minded critics, has seemed the most fantastic of 
 all creeds. 
 
 The young Irishman, thus setting out uj)on his travels with 
 a reputation already at a height which only one or two men 
 in a century ever gain — with manners and morals so high 
 that only among the angels had Bishop Atterbury hoped to 
 behold the like of him — with "every virtue under heaven" 
 attributed to him by the most satirical of poets, — was, in 
 addition to all this, endowed with that beauty of form and 
 face which does not always accompany beauty of character. 
 He was '' a handsome man, with a countenance full of mean- 
 ing and benignity, remarkable for great strength of limbs, 
 and of a very robust constitution." A natural, genial, joyous 
 young soul, the very best and highest type of the advent- 
 urer, going blithely out to face the world and seek his for- 
 tune ; and yet already the author of works, one of which 
 had "made an epoch in science," and the other an epoch in 
 metaphysics ! Such wonders happen but rarely in this 
 limited world. It is evident that he carried all that weight 
 of learning lightly as a flower, and went away with the 
 simplicity of genius, glad of opportunities of speaking 
 French, and writing such letters to his "dear Tom" as any 
 young Irish chaplain on his travels might have written. 
 He was a week on the road betw^een Calais and Paris in the 
 stage-coach, but having " good company," did not mind. 
 He was dazzled by the grandeur of everything he saw in 
 Paris, finding there " splendour and riches " to pass belief, 
 but " has some reasons to decline speaking of the country or 
 villages that I saw as I came along." These reasons, as he 
 afterwards permits us to divine, were "the poverty and 
 distress," which he sadly allows to be enough " to spoil the 
 mirth of any one who feels the sufferings of his fellow- 
 creatures ;" for we must not forget that it was the eighteenth 
 century, and those awful seeds of oppression and wretched- 
 
352 THE PHILOSOPHER. 
 
 iiess wliicli produced the Kevolution were already germina- 
 ting. " I cannot help observing," he says, "that the Jacob- 
 ites have little to hope, and others little to fear, from that 
 reduced nation. The king, indeed, looks as if he wanted 
 neither meat nor drink, and his palaces are in good repair, 
 but through the land there is a different face of things." 
 Evidently to the traveller matters appeared too serious to 
 be talked of; and yet some eighty years passed before the 
 awful explosion came ! 
 
 " I was present," he adds, " at a disputation in the Sor- 
 bonne, which, indeed, had much of the French fire in it ; " 
 and he goes on to say that he was about " to visit Father 
 Malebranche, and discourse him on certain points." Of this 
 meeting a curious story is told. The priest was in his cell 
 when the young clergyman, heretic in more than religious 
 faith, went to see him. He was discovered " cooking in a 
 small pipkin a medicine for a disorder with which he was then 
 troubled — an inflammation on the lungs. The conversation 
 naturally turned on our author's system, of which the other 
 had received some knowledge from a translation just pub- 
 lished. But the issue of his debate proved tragical to poor 
 Malebranche. In the heat of disputation he raised his voice 
 so high, and gave way so freely to the natural impetuosity 
 of a man of parts and a Frenchman,' that he brought on him- 
 self a violent increase of his disorder, which carried him off 
 a few days after." Thus Malebranche died of Berkeley in 
 the most curious, tragi-comic way ; and indeed few contrasts 
 could be more striking than that of the old French priest in 
 his cell, with his pipkin and his cough, shrill and worn, yet 
 impetuous still, and the strapping young Fellow of Trinity, 
 with the fresh winds blowing about him, and all his youth- 
 ful powers in full vigour. He was a month in Paris, and 
 made full use of his time ; and his power of conversing with 
 his fellow-travellers, and understanding disputations at the 
 Sorbonne, full of French fire, is not one of the least of his 
 acquirements. There are, alas ! many Fellows of colleges, 
 men full of philosophy and fine attainment, who even in 
 these travelling days might be found to hesitate at such a 
 test. 
 
 From Paris the travellers went on to Italy, daring the 
 dangers of the Mont Cenis pass on New- Year's Day — an 
 
THE PHILOSOPHER. 353 
 
 experience whicli Berkeley seems to have found appalling 
 enough. " I can gallop all day long, and sleep but three 
 or four hours at night," he writes, from the sunny side of 
 the Alps, to his dear Tom. The account of his travels con- 
 tains, of course, nothing new to the modern reader ; indeed 
 he acknowledges, even at that period, that " Italy is an 
 exhausted subject." Yet he does not hesitate to give a 
 sketch of Ischia to Pope, — one of those little, bare, yet not 
 unsuggestive, descriptions of the " delicious isle " in which 
 the age abounded. To Dr Arbuthnot, another of the friends 
 his reputation had made for him among the wits, he sends 
 his account of Vesuvius. Wherever he goes, it is with his 
 eyes open, his mind intent upon the sight and understanding 
 of all. This first expedition lasted not quite a year, but was 
 immediately followed by a second, taken in charge of a 
 pupil, a Mr Ashe, son of the Bishop of Clogher, who had 
 previously been Provost of Trinity College. Between these 
 two expeditions he had a fever, of which Arbuthnot writes 
 to Swift with friendly playfulness. ''Poor philosopher 
 Berkeley has now the idea of healthy which was very hard to 
 produce in him," he says, " for he had an idea of a strange 
 fever on him, so strong that it was very hard to destroy it by 
 introducing a contrary one." Thus his friends, with kindly 
 jeers, smiled at the Idealist ; as indeed it has been his fate 
 to be pursued with jeers, not kindly, from that time until now. 
 He was absent for four years on his second expedition, 
 and, it is apparent, made himself acquainted with the depths 
 of Italy as few men can, even at the present day. Nor was 
 he so much occupied with his travels as to abandon specula- 
 tion. On his way home, stopping at Lyons in one of the 
 many pauses of those slow journeys, he composed what his 
 biographer calls " a curious tract, ' De Motu,' which he sent 
 to the Koyal Academy of Sciences at Paris, the subject 
 being proposed by that assembly." This paper " Concern- 
 ing Motion " was afterwards published in London in the 
 year 1721, and is in perfect agreement with the characteristic 
 strain of Berkeley's philosophy, his theory being that all 
 motion centres in God, the one great Mover of the universe. 
 Even these abstruse reasonings, however, though carried on 
 in conjunction with the cares of a traveller, were not suffi- 
 cient to occupy his many-sided intelligence. In the same 
 
 Z 
 
354 THE PHILOSOPHER. 
 
 year, 1721, the period of the South Sea catastrophe, the 
 eager Irishman, full of interest and concern in everything 
 that affected his country, sent forth ' An Essay towards 
 Preventing the Kuin of Great Britain,' which falls, with a 
 mixture of quaint wisdom and simplicity, upon ears warped 
 from the modesty of nature by those suggestions of political 
 economy which were then unknown to the world. Berkeley's 
 cure for the evils of his country is that simplest, most 
 indubitable, and yet most impossible of cures — that men 
 should become better, wiser, and purer. "Whether the pro- 
 sperity that preceded or the calamities that succeeded the 
 South Sea project have most contributed to our undoing," 
 he says, " is not so clear a point as it is that we are actually 
 undone and lost to all sense of our true interest : nothing less 
 than this could render it pardonable to have recourse to 
 those old trite maxims concerning religion, industry, 
 frugality, and public spirit, which are now forgotten, but, if 
 revived and put in practice, may not only prevent our final 
 ruin, but also render us a more happy and flourishing people 
 than ever." The reader follows the argument with a certain 
 reverential amusement, if we may use such words. This 
 eighteenth century was the falsest and most artificial of ages, 
 and yet what a depth of simplicity must have lain in the 
 heart of a nation to which the philosopher could recommend, 
 as to a primitive people, this noblest primitive remedy ! 
 Let every man become religious, modest, industrious, says 
 the dreamer ; where is the difficulty ? — apart from any 
 national crisis, is not this every man's duty, every 
 man's highest interest? — and all will come right. The 
 succeeding practical suggestions are even more Utopian. 
 He thinks " if the poor- tax was fixed at a medium in every 
 parish, taken from a calculation of the last ten years, and 
 raised for seven years by Act of Parliament, that sum (if 
 the common estimate be not very wrong), frugally and 
 prudently laid out in workhouses, would for ever free the 
 nation from the care of providing for the poor, and at the 
 same time considerably improve our manufactures. We 
 might, by these means, rid our streets of beggars ; " he adds, 
 in his simplicity, '^ even the children, the maimed, and the 
 blind, might be put in the way of doing something for their 
 livelihood. As for the small number of those who by age 
 
THE PHILOSOPHEE. 355 
 
 or infirmities are utterly incapable of all employment, they 
 might be maintained by the labour of others ; and the public 
 would receive no small advantage from the industry of those 
 who are now so great a burden and expense to it." 
 
 Had the philosopher lived to see the dreaded and hated 
 workhouse of our own day, how strangely would he have 
 been surprised by the result of his suggestions ! He goes 
 on to imagine how the same tax, *' continued three years 
 longer," might set our roads in order and render our rivers 
 navigable ; " so that in the space of ten years the public 
 may be for ever freed from a heavy tax, industry encouraged, 
 commerce facilitated, and the whole country improved " I 
 Our genial reformer next proceeds to suggest " some reward 
 or privilege to those who have a certain number of children," 
 and that the public should " inherit half the unentailed 
 estates of all who die unmamed of either sex " I Taxes 
 upon '' dead bachelors " he holds, with a delightful scorn of 
 the creature, to be " in no sort grievous to the subject " ! 
 Nor does he let women altogether escape, though touching 
 that chapter with a light hand, like the gallant gentleman he 
 was. He would have sumptuary laws, restraining "the 
 luxury of dress which giveth a light behaviour to our women. 
 He would have order taken with public amusements, the 
 drama reformed, the masquerade abolished. He would have 
 " a pillar of infamy " to mark the memory of the swindler 
 with an odious immortality. He would have a *^ parliament 
 house, courts of justice, royal palace, and other public 
 edifices, built " suitable to the dignity of the nation, with 
 decorations of pictures and statues, in order " to transmit 
 memorable things and persons to posterity," to *' spirit up 
 new arts, employ many hands, and keep money circulating 
 at home ; " though this project, he fears, would " be laughed 
 at as a vain affair, of great expense and little use to the 
 public." Last of all, he would encourage public spirit by 
 " erecting an academy of ingenious men, whose employ- 
 ment it would be to compile the history of Great 
 Britain, to make discourses proper to inspire men with 
 a zeal for the public, and celebrate the memories of those 
 who have been ornaments to the nation, or done it eminent 
 service. Not to mention," he adds, with the quaint humour 
 which now and then breaks in upon his grave argument. 
 
35C THE PHILOSOPHER. 
 
 " tliat this would improve our language, and amuse certain 
 husy spirits of the age^ which, perhaps, would be no ill policy/' 
 
 This essay holds no such important place among 
 Berkeley's works as we give it here ; and yet we know 
 nothing which more illustrates the spirit of the man. Bits 
 of true wisdom are in it, with interminglings of that fantastic 
 theorising of which a " thinker," so called, seldom shakes 
 himself absolutely free when he takes to planning for the 
 good of the outside world ; yet how different, even in his 
 most fantastic moment, how modest and sober, is our 
 Idealist, in comparison with most intellectual dreamers ! 
 He was in London at the time the essay was written, seeing 
 around him on every side the consequences of the national 
 madness. And yet he was in very fine company, and made 
 much of in the brilliant world when he reappeared from time 
 to time bringing tidings with him, as it were, from the ends 
 of the earth. One of the places where he is most visible to 
 us at this distance is in the little philosophical parties which 
 gathered round the Princess of Wales in her opposition 
 Court in Leicester Fields. She gave the philosophers one 
 evening in the week, and found recreation in their learned 
 talk. " Of this company were Dr Clarke, Hoadly, Berkeley, 
 and Sherlock. Clarke and Berkeley were generally con- 
 sidered the principals in the debates that arose on these 
 occasions ; and Hoadly adhered to the former as Sherlock 
 did to the latter." Thus they discussed and rediscussed — 
 Caroline, with her bright eyes, looking on, with the ready 
 interest and keen wit which distinguished her. To such a 
 little oasis of brightness and social enjoyment our wandering 
 philosopher comes by times, gleaming out suddenly into the 
 midst of the wit and the embroidery. But it never seems 
 to have had the fascination for him that it had for Swift, 
 nor did his lingering advancement and the unproductive 
 character of royal friendship embitter the sweeter temper and 
 gayer heart of Berkeley. He went back to Ireland in 1721 
 as chaplain to the Lord-Lieutenant, without any apparent 
 reluctance to leave the society even of Leicester Fields, and 
 found there fortune and preferment awaiting him of which, 
 probably, he had never dreamed. 
 
 The fortune came in the most curious way from a woman 
 unhappily too well known to the world — the hapless and 
 
THE PHILOSOPHER. 357 
 
 foolish creature whom Swift's love and indifference drove to 
 distraction and death. Poor Vanessa, tragical, self-willed, 
 despairing woman, had seen young Berkeley with her ter- 
 rible hero in 1713, when she was at home and all was well 
 with her ; and in the rage and anguish of her deathbed, the 
 unfortunate soul bethought herself of the young man who 
 seems to have touched all the world with a feeling of his 
 goodness. She left her whole fortune — wildly indifferent to 
 her own kindred, wildly indignant with the man on whom 
 she would fain have bestowed it — to be divided between 
 Berkeley and another of her friends, though it was years 
 since she had met the philosopher, and there seems to have 
 been no special friendship between them. His share amounted 
 to about £4000 — no inconsiderable matter for a man without 
 fortune. This curious incident does not seem to have made 
 any breach in the friendship between himself and Swift, 
 which is remarkable enough. A year or two later the pre- 
 ferment came in the substantial shape of the deanery of 
 Derry, which was worth £1100 a-year. 
 
 By this time Berkeley was forty — not the most adventur- 
 ous of ages. After long waiting, he had at length attained 
 such a climax of his temporal hopes as justified him in mar- 
 rying and settling, as people say. Marry he did after a 
 while, but the idea of " settling" was far from having any 
 place in his mind. Not quite six months after his appoint- 
 ment to the deanery we find him once more setting out for 
 England with the strangest errand. Not philosophy this 
 time, which in most previous cases had been found quite 
 compatible with the strictest regard to a man's private in- 
 terest. On the contrary, it was Quixotism of the wildest 
 description, such as never philosopher had been known to 
 be guilty of before. An idea had seized upon his busy 
 brain more dangerous than any onslaught upon matter. It 
 had occurred to him some fine day, no one knows how — in 
 the learned babble of Leicester Fields perhaps, or on the 
 Italian hills, or amid the salt spray on the shores of his own 
 island — to think of certain ignorant savages far away over 
 the seas, where a new English empire seemed forming on 
 the shores of America. America itself was hidden in the 
 mists of the future, and no premonition warned Dean Berke- 
 ley of that immeasurable Yankee nation whicli was so soon 
 
358 THE PHILOSOPHEE. 
 
 to come into being. It was " a scheme for converting the 
 savage Americans to Christianity" that began to work in 
 his teeming brain. The unhappy Eed men, so dwindled, so 
 miserable and hopeless, bore an interest then which it seems 
 now strange to contemplate. Nobody knew how they were 
 to be swallowed up and pushed out of their places ; and 
 men had already dimly opened their eyes to the value of 
 that great continent as a place big enough and rich enough 
 to supply room for the overflowings of the mother country, 
 however vast these overflowings might be. And in this 
 case, how important was it to conciliate, and cultivate, and 
 Christianise the native race ! To be sure there were but 
 two things to do — that, or exterminate them ; and extermi- 
 nation had not dawned upon any mind as the preferable al- 
 ternative as yet. Accordingly, the new Dean is scarce warm 
 in his seat before this idea, howsoever conceived or sug- 
 gested, begins to work so strongly in him that he cannot 
 rest. Derry and £1100 a-year, and all the advantages of 
 place and position, become as nothing in comparison with 
 those savage Americans. Yet there is a certain statesman- 
 like calm even in his fervour. It is no wild solitary expe- 
 dition on which he longs to set out. His scheme is to carry 
 a staff with him — to go accompanied with his brotherhood, 
 a colony of evangelists. Their work was to be done by 
 means of " a college to be erected in the Summer Islands, 
 otherwise called the Isles of Bermuda." In 1725 he pub- 
 lished his plan for this expedition. He himself was to re- 
 sign his appointment and become head of the college on the 
 magnificent stipend of a hundred pounds a-year ; and his 
 eloquence and enthusiasm had so won upon his friends, that 
 no less than three young Fellows of his University declared 
 themselves willing to accompany him, abandoning all their 
 prospects. To gain an endowment for this college, Berkeley 
 set out in the end of '24, armed with all the recommenda- 
 tions his friends could give him, to men powerful in Church 
 and State. Here is one of these commendatory letters, 
 which not only throws the vivid light of personal revelation 
 upon Berkeley, but reveals out of the darkness, in one of 
 his softest moments, a tragical figure, still more remarkable 
 and universally known than himself. The letter is ad- 
 
THE PHILOSOPHER. 359 
 
 dressed to Lord Carteret, then Lieutenant of Ireland, and it 
 is Swift who writes : — 
 
 ** Zd of September 1724. — There is a gentleman of this kingdom just gone 
 for England — it is Dr George Berkeley, Dean of Derry, the best prefer- 
 ment among us, being worth about £1100 a-year. He takes the Bath in 
 his way to London, and will of course attend your Excellency, and be 
 presented, I suppose, by his friend, my Lord Burlington ; and because I 
 believe you will choose out some very idle minutes to read this letter, 
 perhaps you may not be ill entertained with some account of the man 
 and his errand. He was a fellow in the University here, and, going to 
 England very young, about thirteen years ago, he became the founder of 
 a sect there called the Immaterialists, by the force of a very curious book 
 on that subject. Dr Smalridge and many other eminent persons were his 
 proselytes. I sent him secretary and chaplain to Sicily with my Lord 
 Peterborough ; and upon his lordship's return, Dr Berkeley spent above 
 seven years in travelling over most parts of Europe, but chiefly through 
 every corner of Italy, Sicily, and other islands. When he came back to 
 England he found so many friends that he was effectually recommended 
 to the Duke of Grafton, by whom he was lately made Dean of Derry. 
 Your Excellency will be frightened when I tell you all this is but an 
 introduction, for I am now to mention his errand. He is an absolute 
 philosopher with regard to money, titles, and power, and for three years 
 past hath been struck with a notion of founding a university at Bermuda, 
 by a charter from the Crown. He has seduced several of the hopefullest 
 young clergymen and others here, many of them well provided for, and 
 all of them in the fairest way of preferment ; but in England his con- 
 quests are greater, and I doubt will spread very far this winter. He 
 showed me a little tract which he designs to publish, and there your 
 Excellency will see his whole scheme of a life academic-philosophic of 
 a college founded for Indian scholars and missionaries, where he most 
 exorbitantly proposeth a whole hundred pounds a-year for himself, forty 
 pounds for a fellow, and ten for a student. His heart will break if his 
 deanery be not taken from him and left at your Excellency's disposal. 
 I discourage him by the coldness of courts and ministers, who will in- 
 terpret all this as impossible and a vision, but nothing will do. And 
 therefore I do humbly entreat your Excellency either to use such per- 
 suasions as will keep one of the first men in this kingdom for learn- 
 ing and virtue quiet at home, or assist him by your credit to compass 
 his romantic design, which, however, is very noble and generous, and 
 directly proper for a great person of your excellent education to en- 
 courage." 
 
 Berkeley's pamphlet, which was published early in the 
 ensuing year, sets forth at length all the necessity and ad- 
 
360 THE PHILOSOPHER. 
 
 vantage of this wonderful scheme. He begins by lamenting 
 " that there is at this day little sense of religion, and a most 
 notorious corruption of manners in the English colonies 
 settled on the continent of America and the islands," and 
 that ^' the Gospel hath hitherto made but a very inconsi- 
 derable progress among the neighbouring Americans, who 
 still continue in much the same ignorance and barbarism in 
 which we found them above a hundred years ago." After 
 summing np the causes of this condition of affairs, one of 
 which he describes as the mean qualifications, both in learn- 
 ing and morals, of the clergy, who are in many cases " the 
 very dregs and refuse" of the Church, he propounds his plan 
 — a plan which has been adopted in recent days with at least 
 as much success, we believe, as has attended any other mis- 
 sionary scheme — of training young natives as missionaries 
 to their countrymen. Conjoined with this was the prospect 
 of being able to educate " the youth of our English planta- 
 tions" to fill the colonial churches ; but it was on the savages 
 evidently that Berkeley had set his heart. Eeligion is fail- 
 ing, he thinks, in the Old World. " In Europe the Protes- 
 tant religion hath of late years considerably lost ground, and 
 America seems the likeliest place wherein to make up for 
 what hath been lost in Europe." High dreams of a continent 
 evangelised and a new world brightening into Christianity rise 
 to his mind as he speaks. Nor is the scheme without its inter- 
 mixture of romance. It was in " the Summer Islands " the 
 college was to be planted — its principal with one hundred 
 a-year, its fellows with forty. " Several gentlemen," he says, 
 " in all respects very well qualified, and in possession of good 
 preferments and fair prospects at home," were ready to en- 
 gage in it — " to dedicate the remainder of their lives to in- 
 structing the youth of America and prosecuting their own 
 studies in a retirement so sweet and so secured' 
 
 Such was the philosopher's dream. Kock-encircled 
 islands, so defended by nature that foe or pirate could not 
 come near them, lavishly supplied with all that nature needs ; 
 tranquilly free from trade, yet with a little navy of sloops 
 coming and going between them and the world ; a vast sea 
 around, which cools the hot breezes and softens the northern 
 winds ; a climate *' like the latter end of a fine May ;" tall 
 cedars to shelter the orange-trees ; the calm of philosophy. 
 
THE PHILOSOPHER. 361 
 
 the light of love (for was not the missionary sage about to 
 be married ?), a splendid aim and a hundred pounds a-year ! 
 It was the most wonderful combination which ever presented 
 itself to a dreamer's eye ; a bower of bliss, an academic 
 grove, and at the same time humanity regenerated and a new 
 world won to God. No wonder the fervid Irishman haunted 
 St Jameses like a ghost, and struggled to get rid of the rich 
 prize of his deanery, its wealthy stipend and dignified 
 leisure. He got his will so far as words went : after a long 
 and tedious struggle he attained to a charter for his college 
 and a (promised) grant of £20,000. His heart was so moved 
 by his success, that, so far as we are informed, for the only 
 time in his life Berkeley burst into song. His " success 
 drew from our author," says his biographer, "a beautiful 
 copy of verses, in which another age will acknowledge the 
 old conjunction of the prophetic character with that of the 
 poet to have again taken place." How far Berkeley would 
 have consented to the realisation of his hopes as carried out 
 in the strangely-different fashion intended by Providence is 
 a different question ; but yet the verses have enough of that 
 strange mixture of blindness and insight which we call the 
 prophetic faculty, to merit a place in the record of his life : — 
 
 "Verses on the Prospect of Planting Arts and Letters 
 IN America. 
 
 " The Muse, disgusted at an age and clime 
 Barren of every glorious theme, 
 In distant lands now waits a better time. 
 Producing subjects worthy fame. 
 
 " In happy climes, where from the genial sun 
 And virgin earth, such scenes ensue. 
 And force of art by nature seems outdone, 
 And fancied beauties by the true : 
 
 " In happy chmes, the seat of innocence, 
 Where nature guides and virtue rules, 
 Where men shall not impose for truth or sense 
 The pedantry of courts and schools : 
 
 ' ' There shall be sung another golden age, 
 The rise of empire and of arts. 
 The good and great inspiring epic rage, 
 The wisest heads and noblest hearts. 
 
362 THE PHILOSOPIIEE. 
 
 ** Not such as Europe breeds in her decay ; 
 Such as she bred when fresh and young, 
 When heavenly flame did animate her clay, 
 By future poets shall be sung. 
 
 ** "Westward the course of empire takes its way ; 
 The four first acts already past, 
 A fifth shall close the drama with the day ; 
 Time's noblest offspring is its last. " 
 
 It is strange that these verses should never have been sug- 
 gested by any enterprising American as the national anthem 
 of the new empire — curiously falsified so far as Berkeley's 
 meaning went, yet taking, like so many other bits of uncon- 
 scious prophecy, a wonderful signification of their own. 
 
 On the 1st of August 1728, Berkeley was married to Anne 
 Forster, a daughter of the Speaker of the Irish House of 
 Commons — a lady, as he himself says in the quaint phrase- 
 ology of the time, " whose humour and turn of mind pleases 
 me beyond anything I know in the whole sex." On the 6th 
 of September the pair set sail from Gravesend upon their 
 amazing mission. Mr James and Mr Dalton, two young 
 men of fortune ; a Mr Smilert or Smibert, " an ingenious 
 painter ; " and a cousin of Mrs Berkeley's, " my Lady Han- 
 cock's daughter," made up the little party. Berkeley took 
 with him " a pretty large sum of money of his own property, 
 and a collection of books for the use of his intended library." 
 Thus the wild enterprise was actually carried out with such 
 defiance of prudence and such devotion to a purpose as 
 perhaps no mature man newly married, and with the respon- 
 sibilities of individual life upon him, ever manifested before. 
 He was now over forty, an unenthusiastic age, and the 
 position which he thus abandoned must have been, both in 
 income and rank, fully up to his highest hopes. Neverthe- 
 less the philosopher set sail, America shining before him in 
 a haze of coming splendour, the empire of the future, 
 "Time's noblest offspring." We fear America has proved 
 ungrateful as well in the present advanced state of her his- 
 tory as in the immediate result of Berkeley's mission, and 
 has not added, as she ought, the name of this early and 
 fervid believer in her destiny to her beadroll of saints and 
 heroes. 
 
 But the little mission never got to Bermuda. The party 
 
THE PHILOSOPHEE. SCS 
 
 went to Ehode Island, and took up its residence in Newport, 
 a town " containing about six thousand souls, the most 
 thriving, flourishing place in all America for its bigness." 
 In this small community Berkeley found "four sorts of 
 Anabaptists, besides Presbyterians, Quakers, Independents, 
 and many of no profession at all," but all living in tolerable 
 peace and quiet, and all agreed, or politely professing to be 
 so, that the Church of England was the second-best. Here 
 he purchased land and built a farmhouse, meaning to make 
 of his new property a stock farm to supply the future college 
 at Bermuda. But the months passed wearily on, and the 
 first flush of hope wavered, and the promised Government 
 grant, without which nothing could be done, was not forth- 
 coming. Anxious letters, full of increasing care, came from 
 the troubled missionary. Though he threw himself at once 
 into clerical work in his temporary abode, it was work with 
 no satisfaction in it. If this were to be all, he could not but 
 bethink himself that " upon all private accounts I should like 
 Derry better than New England." His friends, wearying too 
 of the quiet of Newport and the suspense, went off to Boston, 
 and upon various expeditions. There his first child was 
 born, and " a great joy" to him. '' Among all my delays and 
 disappointments, I thank God," he says, with quaint sobriety, 
 " I have two domestic comforts that are very agreeable, my 
 wife and my little son, both which exceed my expectations, 
 and fully answer all my wishes." But yet notwithstanding 
 these solaces, even Berkeley's stout heart began to fail. 
 His letters convey the idea to us of a man on a headland 
 straining his eyes out to sea for ships which will not come. 
 The winds blow him chance bits of news in an irregular, 
 half-reliable way. Now it is that one of the men whose co- 
 operation he had hoped for, has been made a bishop at 
 home, which calls from him an impatient sigh of congratu- 
 lation, *' since I doubt we are not likely to see him in this 
 part of the world." Now it is the heart-sickening tidings 
 that a ship has been cast away with letters on board, which 
 probably would have brought consolation. But consolation 
 in the shape of his £20,000, Berkeley was not destined 
 to receive. 
 
 His courage, however, did not fail. With his wife only 
 standing by him, and his baby to amuse him, and his ear 
 
364 THE PHILOSOPHER. 
 
 continually on the strain for such echoes from England as 
 might come across the sea, the indomitable soul set to work 
 again, and produced, by way of occupation to his anxious 
 leisure, the * Minute Philosopher,' a book intended for the 
 refutation of the freethinkers of his time. It was " written 
 in a series of dialogues on the model of Plato," and contained 
 — besides a long strain of close and powerful argument, 
 which of course, in the change which has come over scepti- 
 cism, as well as other modes of thought, is little better than 
 a fossil at this time — many pleasant quaint indications of 
 the manners of the day, the '' dishes of tea," in which even 
 freethinkers seemed to delight, and the little landscapes, 
 quaint compositions, like the pretty artificial background of 
 one of Stothard's engravings, where they meet the virtuous 
 rustic, and find all their skill and cleverness crumble to 
 nothing before him. Such was the fashion of the age ; and 
 nothing can more clearly manifest the difference between that 
 period and our own, than the contrast between the free- 
 thinker as set forth by Berkeley, who was himself a man of 
 the world, and knew what he was describing — professed 
 libertine and scoffer, setting pleasure high above virtue, and 
 almost professedly denying God in order to be free of the 
 restraints of His law — and the pious, even pietistic, doubter 
 of our own time, with his high morality and his tender con- 
 science, Berkeley knew of no such refined and wonderful 
 being. His Alciphron and Lysicles are fine gentlemen, 
 " bloods" of the fullest flavour. And yet this is how (being 
 on a visit in the country) they manage their meetings : "As 
 we sat round the tea-table, in a summer parlour which looks 
 into the garden, Alciphron, after the first dish, turned down 
 his cup, and, reclining back in his chair, proceeded as fol- 
 lows " ! How comical are the little changes of manner 
 
 and custom which a century makes ; and how much more 
 than comical, how amazing, the difference in sentiment and 
 thought ! 
 
 But in the mean time no news or bad news came from 
 England. The money from which the endowment of the 
 Bermuda College was to have come was otherwise appro- 
 priated ; and Sir Eobert Walpole, on being finally appealed 
 to, made answer, that of course the money would be paid as 
 soon as suited the public convenience ; but, as a friend, he coun- 
 
THE PHILOSOPHER. 365 
 
 selled Dean Berkeley to return home and not to await that 
 far-off contingency. Thus the whole chivalric scheme broke 
 down. Berkeley had wasted four j^ears in the blank exis- 
 tence of the little New England town, had " expended much 
 of his private property," and spent infinite exertions and 
 hopes in vain. A long period before his actual setting-out 
 had been swallowed up in negotiations to obtain this futile 
 charter and unpaid grant. He gave up, on the whole, some 
 seven years of the flower and prime of his life to the scheme 
 thus cruelly and treacherously rendered abortive. It is so 
 that England treats the generous movements and attempted 
 self-devotion of her sons. Had it been a factory or a plan- 
 tation, there might have been some hope for Berkeley ; but 
 a college with only ideal advantages, mere possibilities of 
 influence and evangelisation, — what was that to Walpole, or 
 to the slumbrous prosaic nation over which he ruled? A 
 generation later, indeed, that Utopia in the Summer Islands, 
 had it been planted, might have been of use to England ; 
 but there have been few statesmen in our island of more 
 generous temper than that of the Jewish king, who was satis- 
 fied that there should be peace in his time. Berkeley re- 
 turned in 1732 to England, his hopes over, so far as the New 
 World was concerned, his deanery gone in the Old World, 
 his money spent, and the cares of a growing family upon him. 
 Had he but contented himself with pleasant Derry and his 
 £1100 a-year, as any other philosopher would! But here 
 our Idealist stands alone among philosophers, and in a 
 very small minority even among men. One friend he had 
 who understood and appreciated the man. Queen Caroline, 
 herself advanced from Leicester Fields to the full glory of St 
 James's, lost no time in doing what a queen could do to 
 compensate him for his failure. But even queens in England 
 cannot do everything they will, and it was two years before 
 Berkeley was provided for. At the end of that time he be- 
 came Bishop of Cloyne, and returned for the remainder of 
 his active life to his native country, henceforward to employ 
 all the powers of his intellect for its advantage, and to spend, 
 in comparative obscurity and unceasing beneficent genial 
 work, the latter half of his days. 
 
 Nothing can be more curious, especially at the present 
 moment, than the incidental light thrown upon the Ireland 
 
3C6 THE PHILOSOPHEE. 
 
 of a century ago by the life of such a man. It would be 
 difficult to conceive anything more unlike the Ireland 
 which plays so large a part in the political world to-day. 
 At that time nobody had so much as begun to think of the 
 rights or wrongs of the nation, though it possessed that 
 highest of supposed advantages — an actual Parliament of 
 its own. We have already said that in Bishop Berkeley's 
 own character there is so much of the traditionary Irishman, 
 that it is difiScult to avoid identifying him with the country 
 in which he was born ; and yet everything in his biography, 
 as in all contemporary works, goes to prove how entirely dis- 
 tinct was the native race from the English colony which 
 ruled and represented it. The Irish are not much more to 
 Berkeley than were the Eed men whom he had so longed to 
 preach to. They occupied, it would seem, a position not dis- 
 similar. They were savages, to whom a benevolent pro- 
 tecting colonist was kind, teaching them the first principles 
 of social economy, and elementary rules of prudence and 
 self-interest ; — and whom a bad colonist was correspondingly 
 hard upon as upon an abject and inferior race. The schemes 
 that were current in the island for introducing manufactures 
 and industries of various descriptions — the great society 
 which distributed flax-seed and lent tools, and coaxed the 
 pitiful barbarian into helping himself — bear all the charac- 
 teristics which attend the bringing in of civilisation in the 
 savage corners of the earth. Paddy himself, our old witty 
 well-beloved friend, does not seem to have had any existence 
 when Bishop Berkeley wrote the ' Querist,' or when Chester- 
 field set up an anxious and shortlived Vice-Kegality at 
 Dublin, and Mr Prior, the " dear Tom " of Berkeley's letters, 
 established his society. At that day he was a wild abori- 
 ginal man, no gleam of his natural genius having yet shone 
 through his uncouth guise — as unlike the Paddy brought 
 into knowledge (we suppose) by Miss Edgeworth, as is the 
 factious and irrepressible Irishman of the moment. And 
 certainly, if it were wanted to prove the beneficial action 
 which a Protestant bishop might exercise in such a country, 
 no better example could be found than that of the Bishop of 
 Cloyne. When thus settled permanently in his own island, 
 Berkeley devoted himself to its interests with all the en- 
 thusiasm of his nature. Probably his episcopal work was 
 
THE PHILOSOPHER. 367 
 
 not very engrossing. The year after his installation in his 
 bishopric the ' Querist ' was published in Dublin. Its object 
 was a general exposition, not of the wrongs, but of the vices 
 of Ireland, with many practical suggestions for their remedy, 
 one of which was the establishment of a national bank. In- 
 dustry, cleanliness, content, and that honest work which is 
 in so many cases to the Celt as to the savage rather a curse 
 than a blessing, are what he recommends and urges with 
 perpetual iteration. 
 
 " Whether there ever was, is, or will be, an industrious native poor or 
 an idle rich ? " is the first question in the ' Querist ; ' and on this he rings 
 the changes with infinite variety and wealth of illustration. *' Whether 
 the bulk of our Irish natives are not kept from thriving by that cynical 
 content in dirt and beggary which they possess to a degree beyond any 
 other people in Christendom ? Whether the creating of wants be not the 
 likeliest way to produce industry in a people ? And whether, if our 
 peasantry were accustomed to eat beef and wear shoes, they would not be 
 more industrious? Whether Ireland alone might not raise hemp suflScient 
 for the British navy ? Whether the upper part of this people are not 
 truly English by blood, language, religion, manners, inclination, and in- 
 terest ? Whether we are not as much Englishmen as the children of old 
 Romans born in Britain were still Eomans ? . . . Whether, if drunk- 
 enness be a necessary evil, men may not as well drink the growth of their 
 country ? . . . Whether there be upon earth any Christian or civi- 
 lised people so beggarly, wretched, and destitute as the common Irish ? 
 . . . Whether there be any country in Christendom more capable of 
 improvement than Ireland ? Whether my countrymen are not readier at 
 finding excuses than remedies ? . . . Whether it be not a new spec- 
 tacle under the sun to behold in such a climate and such a soil, and under 
 such a gentle Government, so many roads untrodden, fields untilled, 
 houses desolate, and hands unemployed ? . . . Whose fault is it if 
 poor Ireland still continues poor ? " 
 
 This last pregnant question has been handed on to us like 
 so many of the others, and does not seem much nearer a 
 reply now than in Bishop Berkeley's day. But it is curious 
 to see this perennial question approached from the side of 
 national compunction and a desire to mend. To think that 
 neither a national bank, nor the distribution of flax and 
 hemp seed, nor the promotion of manufactures in general, 
 should have brought any cure to the distracted country, 
 would probably have much perplexed the ardent philosopher, 
 thus reasoning with his own people with all the heat and 
 
368 THE PHILOSOPHER. 
 
 vehemence of an anxiety bordering on despair. Some time 
 later lie treated the same subject in a still more remarkable 
 and individual way, addressing, under the title of 'A Word to the 
 Wise,' an eloquent remonstrance and exhortation to the Catholic 
 priests of Ireland. Among all the remarkable productions 
 of his genius there is none more remarkable than this. In- 
 deed, Berkeley's fame as a philosopher has but obscured th^ 
 singular exertions in the most practical of all fields of public 
 labour which would of themselves have distinguished any 
 other man. The way in which he addresses "your rever- 
 ences," with a dignified respect and full acknowledgment of 
 their influence, has been but too seldom emulated in Ireland. 
 We are told in his biography that the priests returned 
 "their sincere and hearty thanks to the worthy author" in 
 the 'Dublin Journal,' "assuring him that they were deter- 
 mined to comply with every particular recommended in his 
 address to the best of their power." The kind of advice 
 thus given by the Protestant bishop, in his acknowledged 
 eminence as at once a sage of the highest reputation and a 
 man experienced in the world, to the homely priests of a 
 country a thousand times poorer and more wretched then 
 than it is now, will be seen from the follovving extracts : — 
 
 " Be not startled, reverend sirs," he begins, "to find yourselves ad- 
 dressed by one of a different communion. We are indeed (to our shame 
 be it spoken) more inclined to hate for those articles wherein we differ, 
 than to love one another for those wherein we agree. But if we cannot 
 extinguish, let us at least suspend our animosities ; and, forgetting our 
 religious feuds, consider ourselves in the amiable light of countrymen 
 and neighbours. Why should disputes about faith interrupt the duties 
 of civil life ? or the different roads we take to heaven prevent our taking 
 the same steps on earth ? Do we not inhabit the same spot of ground, 
 breathe the same air, and live under the same government ? Why, then, 
 should we not conspire in one to promote the common good of our coun- 
 try ? We are all agreed about the usefulness of meat, drink, and clothes ; 
 and, without doubt, we all sincerely wish our poor neighbours were 
 better supplied with them. .Providence and nature have done their part : 
 no country is better qualified to furnish the necessaries of life, and j^et 
 no people are worse provided. . . . Whether it be from the heavi- 
 ness of the climate, or from the Spanish and Scythian blood that runs in 
 their veins, or whatever else may be the cause, there still remains in the 
 natives of this island a remarkable antipathy to labour. You, gentle- 
 men, can alone conquer this innate hereditary sloth. Do you then, as 
 you love your country, exert yourselves. 
 
THE PHILOSOPHEE. 369 
 
 " The house of an Irish peasant is the cave of poverty — within you see 
 a pot and a little straw ; Avithout, a heap of children tumbling on the 
 dunghill. Their fields and gardens are a lively counterpart of Solomon's 
 description in the Proverbs. ... In every road the ragged ensigns of 
 poverty are displayed. You often meet caravans of poor, whole families 
 in a drove, without clothes to cover or bread to feed them, both which 
 might be easily procured by moderate labour. They are encouraged in 
 this vagabond life by the miserable hospitality they meet with in eveiy 
 cottage, whose inhabitants expect the same kind reception in their turn 
 when they become beggars, begging being the last refuge of these impro- 
 vident creatures. . . . The Scythians were noted for wandering, and 
 the Spaniards for sloth and pride. Our Irish are behind neither of these 
 nations, from which they descend, in their respective characteristics. 
 * Better is he that laboureth and aboundeth in all things than he that 
 boasteth himself and wanteth bread/ saith the son of Sirach, but so saith 
 not the Irishman. In my own family, a kitchen-wench refused to carry 
 out cinders because she was descended from an old Irish stock. . . . 
 At the same time, these proud people are more destitute than savages, 
 and more abject than negroes. . . . Having long observed and be- 
 wailed this wretched state of my countrymen, and the insuflBciency of 
 several methods set on foot to reclaim them, I have recourse to your 
 reverences as the dernier resort. . . . Eaise your voices, reverend 
 sirs, exert your influence, show your authority over the multitude, by 
 urging them to the practice of an honest industry, a duty necessary to all 
 and required in all, whether Protestants or Eoman Catholics, whether 
 Christians, Jews, or Pagans. . . . When so many circumstances 
 provoke and animate your people to labour, when their private wants 
 and the necessities of the public, when the laws, the magistrates, and the 
 very country calls upon them, you cannot think it becomes you alone to 
 be silent or hindmost in every project for promoting the public good. 
 "Why should you, whose influence is greatest, be the least active ? Why 
 should you, whose words are most likely to prevail, say least in the 
 common cause ? 
 
 *' Perhaps it will be said, the discouragements attending those of your 
 communion are a bar against all endeavours for exciting them to a laud- 
 able industry. ... To this it may be answered that, admitting 
 these considerations do in some measure damp industry and ambition in 
 persons of a certain rank, yet they can be no let to the industry of poor 
 people, or supply an argument against endeavouring to procure meat, 
 drink, and clothes. ... It will be alleged in excuse for this idleness, 
 that the country-people want encouragement to labour, as not having a 
 property in the lands. There is small encouragement, say you, for them 
 to build or plant upon another's land, wherein they have only a tempor- 
 ary interest. To which I answer, that life itself is but temporary ; that 
 all tenures are not of the same kind ; that the case of our English and 
 the original Irish is equal in this respect ; and that the true aborigines 
 
 2 A 
 
370 THE PHILOSOPHEK. 
 
 or natural Irish are noted for want of industry in improving even on their 
 own lands, whereof they have both possession and property. ... A 
 tight house, warm apparel, and wholesome food, are sufficient motives to 
 labour. If all had them we should be a flourishing nation. . . . 
 
 " But admitting even, for the various reasons above alleged, that it is 
 impossible for our cottagers to be rich, yet it is certain they may be 
 clean. I^ow, bring them to be cleanly and your work is half done. A 
 little washing, scrubbing, and rubbing bestowed on their persons and 
 houses, would introduce a sort of industry, and industry in one kind is apt 
 to beget it in another. Indolence in dirt is a terrible symptom, which 
 shows itself in our lower Irish more perhaps than in any people on this 
 side the Cape of Good Hope. I will venture to add, that, look through- 
 out the kingdom, and you shall not find a clean house, inhabited by 
 cleanly people, and yet wanting necessaries. That same spirit of indus- 
 try that keeps folk clean being sufficient to keep them also in food and 
 raiment. . . . 
 
 " If you have any regard (as is not to be doubted) either for the souls 
 or bodies of your people, or even for your own interest or credit, you can- 
 not fail to inveigh against this crying sin of your country. . . . Were 
 this but done heartily — would you but * be instant in season and out of sea- 
 son, reprove, rebuke, exhort,' such is the ascendant you have gained overthe 
 people, that we might soon expect to see the good fruits thereof. . . . 
 It stands upon you to act with vigour in this cause, and shake off the shackles 
 of sloth from your countrymen, the rather because there be some who 
 surmise that yourselves have put them on. Eight or wrong, men will be 
 apt to judge of your doctrines by their fruits. It will reflect small 
 honour on their teachers if, instead of honesty and industry, those of 
 your communion are peculiarly distinguished by the contrar}' qualities, 
 or if the nation converted by the great and glorious St Patrick should, 
 above all other nations, be stigmatised and marked out as good for 
 nothing. . . . Many suspect your religion to be the cause of that 
 notorious idleness which prevails so generally among the natives of this 
 island, as if the Roman Catholic faith was inconsistent with an honest 
 diligence in a man's calling. But whoever considers the great spirit of 
 industry that reigns in Flanders and France, and even beyond the Alps, 
 must acknowledge this to be a groundless suspicion. In Piedmont and 
 Genoa, in the Milanese and the Venetian States, and indeed throughout 
 all Lombardy, how well is the soil cultivated, and what manufactories of 
 silk, velvet, paper, and other commodities flourish ! ... To which 
 I might add, that the person whose authority will be of the greatest 
 weight with you, even the Pope himself, is at this day endeavouring to 
 put ncAV life into the trade and manufactures of his country. Though I 
 am in no secret of the Court of Rome, yet I will venture to affirm, that 
 neither Pope nor Cardinals will be pleased to hear that those of their 
 communion are distinguished above all others by sloth, dirt, and beggary ; 
 
THE PHILOSOPHER. 371 
 
 or be displeased at your endeavouring to rescue them from the reproach 
 of such an infamous distinction." 
 
 It is unnecessary to apologise for quoting so largely from 
 this extraordinary appeal at a moment when Ireland and its 
 affairs are again in the ascendant, and when so graphic a 
 picture of its condition a hundred years ago, and the rela- 
 tions then existing between the priesthood and people is 
 thus presented before us. The Bishop dwells upon these 
 relations with the most unhesitating distinctness. He has 
 no doubt of the power of "your reverences" to effect what 
 reformation they please in the race so dutifully subject to 
 them. Perhaps so strange an address was never written by 
 a dignified ecclesiastic in one Church to the priesthood of 
 another. Its candour and honesty and generous meaning 
 seem, if we may trust the biographer of Berkeley, to have 
 been understood and appreciated by the body to whom it 
 was addressed. They are said to have acknowledged in the 
 ' Dublin Journal' before mentioned that "in everypage it con- 
 tained a proof of the author's extensive charity ; his views 
 are only towards the public good ; the means he provideth 
 are easily complied with ; and his manner of treating per- 
 sons in their circumstances so very singular, that they 
 plainly show the good man, the polite gentleman, and the 
 true patriot." How far these sentiments came from the 
 heart it is of course impossible to tell, or whether there 
 might not be some among their reverences who found the 
 heretic Bishop's advice impertinent and uncalled for; but 
 nevertheless there it is, as curious a memorial of the age 
 and the man as could well be found. 
 
 Notwithstanding Berkeley's philosophical understanding, 
 his liberal mind and friendly ways of thinking, and experi- 
 ence of the world, it is evident that he looked upon the penal 
 laws respecting Koman Catholics as a matter of course, un- 
 alterable, and founded on everlasting justice ; just as he 
 speaks with imperturbable calm, and not the slightest appear- 
 ance even of a doubt as to the righteousness of the arrange- 
 ment, about the slaves in the plantations. These simplest 
 rules of natural justice did not, it is evident, in the smallest 
 degree affect a mind so open, so generous, so full of regard 
 for his fellow-creatures. This is one of the mysteries of 
 humanity which it is the most hard to elucidate. We are 
 
372 THE PHILOSOPHER. 
 
 far from taking up the extreme side of those great questions, 
 or of going wild, for instance, with rapture over that most 
 doubtful and insoluble problem of negro emancipation, the 
 practical difficulties of which are immense. As a question 
 of expediency or even possibility, it is perhaps as far from 
 solution as ever it was ; but in theory there no longer re- 
 mains a doubt on the subject. This, however, it is clear, 
 had never entered Berkeley's mind. A hundred years is no 
 such great matter in the world's history ; but all the material 
 changes that have been effected since then reckon small 
 enough in comparison with the revolution which has been 
 wrought in all our estimates of things and modes of thought. 
 Berkeley takes slavery for granted with the utmost calm, 
 just as he takes it for granted that it is in the natural order 
 of things that a priesthood, to whose influence he appeals as 
 supreme over a whole nation, should be " obnoxious to the 
 laws," and the communion in general lie under the "dis- 
 couragements " to which he alludes so placidly. And yet 
 he could not take for granted the existence of a stool or a 
 table 1 What are our vulgar novelties of gas and penny- 
 post, and the rest of our modern stock-in-trade, in comparison 
 with the extraordinary revolution of ideas which has placed, 
 in this respect at least, by mere dint of time, the mass of 
 men who never think at all, on a height unattainable by one 
 of the greatest thinkers and best men of his age ! 
 
 The last great public undertaking of Bishop Berkeley's 
 life has a whimsical aspect, which in fact it derives (accord^ 
 ing to the strictest rules of his own philosophy) from our 
 eyes alone, being in its nature and effect upon the time a 
 very serious matter of the gravest importance to the world. 
 This was the discovery and promulgation of tar-water — 
 grand sovereign panacea for every evil under heaven. The 
 curious enthusiasm of the man's nature, and scorn of all 
 secondary restraints — such as the fear of ridicule, or the 
 blame which attends interference with the business of others 
 — comes out most distinctly in the fervour and persistence 
 with which he thrusts his nauseous draught down the world's 
 throat. It cured himself, he tells us, of " a nervous cholic " 
 which " rendered his life a burden to him ;" upon which he 
 began, with his natural energy and hopefulness, to try it 
 upon his neighbours j and having worked a variety of cures 
 
THE PHILOSOPHER. 373 
 
 in Cloyne, immediately judged it Lis duty to make known 
 the marvel to his country and mankind in general. He 
 addressed himself to this subject characteristically in a work 
 entitled ' Siris : A Chain of Philosophical Reflections and In- 
 quiries concerning the Virtues of Tar-water.' " We are now 
 mad about tar-water," says Horace Walpole, " on the publi- 
 cation of a book written by Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne. The 
 book contains every subject from tar-water to the Trinity ; 
 however, all the world read it, and understand no more than 
 they would if it were intelligible." The description has a 
 sneer in it, but yet is not far from the truth. ' Siris ' begins 
 with the most plain and practical directions for the making 
 of the panacea, and as many details of cures as Morison or 
 Mr Hollo way could desire ; from a colic to an inflammation 
 — gout, ague, pleurisy, asthma, everything from which man 
 suffers, had been cured by this wonderful agent ; and from 
 this very solid beginning our philosopher goes off', not fan- 
 tastically, but by slow degrees, by means of the structure of 
 plants, their anatomy and constituent elements, up to the 
 deepest speculations of the ancient philosophy, and the na- 
 ture of the Godhead itself. " It is indeed a chain," says his 
 admiring biographer, " which, like that of the poet, reaches 
 from earth to heaven, conducting the reader by an almost 
 imperceptible gradation from the phenomena of tar-water, 
 through the depths of the ancient philosophy, to the sub- 
 limest mystery of the Christian religion." This curious 
 work is one of Berkeley's longest productions, and contains 
 a very quaint mixture of the practical with the most ethereal 
 ideal qualities. It came speedily to a second edition, a 
 happiness which does not seem to have befallen any of his 
 former works, and must have produced an overwhelming 
 sensation throughout the country. The philosophical system 
 of Idealism did not do half so much to make the Bishop of 
 Cloyne famous as this treatise, and the invention which gave 
 it birth. 
 
 " A man came into an apothecary's shop the other day," 
 says Horace Walpole in the year 1744. " ' Do you sell tar- 
 water?' * Tar- water!' replied the apothecary, 'why, I sell 
 nothing else !'" So swift and so universal was the popu- 
 larity of the new remedy. If it derived anything of its 
 reputation from the quaint and elaborate argument by which 
 
374 THE PHILOSOPHER. 
 
 the author traced its beneficial stream through the veins of 
 the odorous pines, from their subtle connection with the vital 
 flame which gives existence to the entire world, it would be 
 creditable to the genius of the age ; probably, however, as 
 Horace says, the world understood it as little as if it had 
 been intelligible ; but the public understood and appreciated 
 the cases, of which its reverend inventor gave the fullest 
 supply. Two other shorter works on the same subject — 
 pamphlets once more addressed to "dear Tom" — followed 
 up the impression. Ireland, not to say Great Britain, going 
 mildly out of their senses, did nothing but swallow the hate- 
 ful draught. So long indeed had the idea lasted, that the 
 writer has heard from an old lady, still living and enjoying 
 life, an awful tale of the miseries of a houseful of Irish chil- 
 dren who were condemned to begin life daily with a cupful of 
 tar- water, as late as the beginning of the present century. 
 
 This was Berkeley's last work. He was by this time 
 growing old, and beginning, as the springs of life failed 
 him, to grow weary of his retirement in the utter seclusion 
 of Cloyne, which he had only left once since his appointment. 
 Nothing can be more pleasant than the glimpses we have in 
 his letters of the tranquil life he led in his episcopal hermit- 
 age. The palace, or, as his biographer modestly calls it, the 
 " manse-house " of the little diocese, seems to have been a 
 home of all the arts. Three boys, of whom the parents could 
 not at first decide " which was prettiest," and one daughter, 
 grew up round him in that peaceful place. The village, for 
 it was nothing better, had few resources, but these were culti- 
 vated with a steady adherence to principle, such as few theo- 
 rists attempt. The Bishop ''chose to wear ill clothes and 
 worse wigs, rather than suffer the poor of the town to remain 
 unemployed " — a piece of self-denial which no doubt was felt 
 by the handsome ecclesiastic even when age took from him 
 something of his characteristic vivacity. Offers of better 
 preferment were made to him more than once, which he de- 
 clined. He " did not see," he says, " all things considered, 
 the glory of wearing the name of Primate in these days, or 
 of getting so much money, a thing every tradesman in Lon- 
 don may get if he pleases." Visitors went and came to the 
 manse-house, but not in such numbers as would have satis- 
 
THE PHILOSOPHER. 375 
 
 fied the Bishop's genial hospitality. He writes letters to his 
 friends who had accompanied him to America with a friendly 
 warmth, bidding them to visit him, describing the myrtles 
 in his garden, and the advantages of his neighbourhood. 
 " Agreeably to the warmth of his temper, he had conceived 
 so high an idea of the beauties of Cloyne," his biographer 
 tells us, " that Mr Pope had once almost determined to make 
 a visit to Ireland on purpose to see the place, which his friend 
 had painted to him with such brilliancy of colouring, and 
 which yet to common eyes presents nothing that is very 
 worthy of attention." 
 
 Within, the manse-house must have been a pleasant home. 
 The Bishop declined to buy the 'Causes Celebres' because he 
 apprehended " there might be some among them of too deli- 
 cate a nature to be read by boys and girls, to whom my 
 library, and particularly all French books, are open." At one 
 time painting is the favourite art, in which he thinks his wife 
 " shows a most uncommon genius ; though," he adds, " others 
 may be supposed to judge more impartially than I." At 
 another time it is music that is in the ascendant, and Berke- 
 ley's letters are full of bass-viols and Italian psalms. " My 
 wife, I am told, is this day inferior to no singer in the king- 
 dom," he says with that kindly exaltation of his own which 
 is characteristic of such a genial and buoyant nature. It is 
 evident that to make the first break in the family was a thing 
 which the kind father, now growing old, regarded with alarm. 
 When his second boy was old enough for the university, a 
 plan which the parents had been cherishing for some time, 
 and which Berkeley preferred to the glories of the primacy, 
 was put into execution. He removed with his wife and family 
 to Oxford. " He had taken a fixed resolution," says his bio- 
 grapher, "to spend the remainder of his days in that city, 
 with a view of indulging the passion for a learned retirement 
 which had ever strongly possessed his mind." But young 
 George no doubt had as much to do with it, for Cloyne, after 
 all, was more of a retirement than Oxford. With his usual 
 high-minded sense of justice, he requested leave to resign 
 his bishopric on making this change. *' So uncommon a 
 petition excited his Majesty's curiosity to inquire who was 
 the extraordinary man who made it ; being told it was his 
 
376 THE PHILOSOPHER. 
 
 old acquaintance Dr Berkeley, lie declared that he should die 
 a bishop in spite of himself, but gave him full liberty to re- 
 side where he pleased." It would seem that his actual pas- 
 toral work was not the thing which Berkeley himself felt most 
 indispensable to his diocese. He appropriated two hundred 
 a-year to the poor of his neighbourhood, as a substitute for 
 his presence among them until he returned ; and so went his 
 way, contented to spend in ease and learned intercourse the 
 evening of his days. 
 
 But that evening was destined to be a very short one. Six 
 months after his arrival in Oxford, the family were together 
 on a peaceful Sunday night. The father lay on a sofa in the 
 repose of his old age ; the mother, who had been to him more 
 than he expected and all he desired, and whose accomplish- 
 ments he admired with so much tender simplicity, was read- 
 ing aloud to the little household party a sermon of Dr Sher- 
 lock's. Calmest domestic scene, the soft and silent happi- 
 ness of sober English imaginations, upon which it must have 
 looked so unlikely that any sudden terror could fall. His 
 young daughter going to him with " a dish of tea " was the 
 first to see what had happened. He had left them while the 
 reading went on, while the tea sent up its fragrant fumes — 
 and was gone unalterably beyond all sound or call. 
 
 So ended a life which has few equals either in the ranks 
 of philosophers or ecclesiastics; a more generous, a more 
 frank and brave and candid spirit never stepped on English 
 soil. His story has dropped from common knowledge, and 
 only his philosophy remains — a philosophy in which the ordi- 
 nary mind must always see a touch of absurdity. Yet (philo- 
 sophically), as we have seen, there was nothing absurd in it, 
 and the theory was irrefutable ; while no one who has re- 
 garded the grand conception of a world so living in God, will 
 refuse to allow to the system the credit of the highest beauty. 
 It agrees with everything in his own harmonious nature, and 
 with all the principles that swayed his life. Never philoso- 
 pher before him in modern story had been more than inoffen- 
 sive to his fellow-creatures. Berkeley breathed out of him 
 help, kindness, counsel, and aid to everything round him. 
 Honesty that reached the magnanimous point, and that gen- 
 erous sympathy with his race which brings a man within 
 
THE PHILOSOPHER. 377 
 
 reach of the glorious stigma of Quixotism, were the charac- 
 teristics of the Idealist. Philosophy may or may not be the 
 hopeless science which it is represented by one of its ablest 
 historians ; but such a man as Berkeley gives vital force to 
 a generation. Knowledge may fail though it is everlasting; 
 Man, the creature of a day, is the only thing in earth which 
 lives for ever. 
 
X. 
 
 THE NOVELIST. 
 
 Of all the many branches in which literature flourishes, 
 there is none which has been so widely and universally deve- 
 loped in our own generation as that of fiction. We are 
 informed on all sides that we have made immense progress 
 in positive knowledge of every description ; but we can see 
 for ourselves the astounding progress which has been made 
 in that special track of art, which demands, some people 
 think, the minimum of knowledge, cultivation, or training. 
 It has come to be a common doctrine that everybody can 
 write a novel, just as it used to be that everybody, or rather 
 anybody, might keep a school ; and in point of fact, nowa- 
 days most people do write novels, with a result which can 
 scarcely be called satisfactory. The art is as old as human 
 nature ; and yet it is not so old in its present shape but that 
 we can identify the fountain from which so many springs 
 have flowed. The similitude is one too energetic, too violent, 
 however, for the subject. The modern English novel, which 
 is in everybody's hands nowadays ; which gives employment 
 to crowds of workpeople, almost qualifying itself to rank 
 among the great industries of the day ; which keeps paper- 
 mills going, and printing-machines, and has its own army of 
 dependants and retainers, as if it were cotton or capita], — 
 the English novel, we say, arose, not with any gush, as from 
 a fountain, but in a certain serene pellucid pool, where a 
 group of pretty smiling eighteenth- century faces, with ela- 
 borate "heads," and powder and patches, were wont to 
 
THE NOVELIST. 379 
 
 mirror themselves in the middle of George II.'s reign ; while 
 Pope was singing his melodious couplets, and Chester- 
 field writing his wonderful letters, and Anson fighting with 
 the winds and seas, and Prince Charlie planning the '45. 
 From all the confused events of which the world was full — 
 bewildering destruction of the old, still more bewildering 
 formation of the new — the spectator turns aside into the 
 quaintest homely quiet, the most domestic, least emotional, 
 of all household scenes : and there finds Samuel Eichardson, 
 a good printer, a comfortable, affectionate, fatherly trades- 
 man, kind to everybody about him, and very much ap- 
 plauded by his admiring friends, but with no special marks 
 of genius that any one can see. Other men of far greater 
 personal note breathed the same air with this active, potter- 
 ing, and virtuous bourgeois ; men with good blood in their 
 veins, and gold lace on their coats, and Greek and Latin at 
 their fingers' end, not to speak of youth, and vivacity, and 
 high spirits, and knowledge of the world. There was Henry 
 Fielding, for instance, writing bad plays, and painfully cast- 
 ing about what to do with his genius. What was he to do 
 with it? having at the same time an ailing wife and little 
 children, burdens which Pegasus can take lightly en croupe, 
 when he is aware what he is about, and has his course clear 
 before him, but terrible drawbacks to the stumbling steed 
 which is seeking a path for itself across the untrodden ways. 
 It is impossible to give any sketch of one of the two 
 great novelists of the age without introducing the other. 
 Fielding has a thousand advantages to start with over our 
 homely forefather. He is so genial, so jovial, such a fine 
 gentleman ; so high an impulse of life and current of spirit 
 run through his books. His wickednesses are not wicked, 
 but mere accidents — warmth of blood and rapidity of move- 
 ment carrying him away. And then his knowledge of the 
 world ! Eichardson's knowledge was only of good sort of 
 people, and secondary litterateurs, and — women, who are not 
 the world, as everybody knows. This curious distinction of 
 what is life and what is not, which has prevailed so widely 
 since then, probably originated in the eighteenth century. 
 Observers of the present day might be tempted, in the spirit 
 of an age which inquires into everything, to ask why Covent 
 Garden should teach knowledge of the world more effectually 
 
3S0 THE NOVELIST. 
 
 than Salisbury Court, and whether players and debauchees 
 throw more light upon the workings of human nature than 
 honest and reasonable souls — but this is so entirely taken for 
 granted by critics, that it would be vain to make any stand 
 against so all-prevailing a theory ; though the question is 
 one which will suggest itself now and then to the unpre- 
 judiced. But, notwithstanding the superior knowledge of 
 the world, which gave Fielding an advantage over Kich- 
 ardson — notwithstanding his better acquaintance with 
 polite society, and immensely greater spring and impulse 
 of genius — it was the old printer, and not the young 
 man of the world, who found out the mode of employing 
 his gift. The path once opened was soon filled with many 
 passengers ; but to Eichardson must be given the credit 
 of having directed the stream towards it and opened the 
 way. 
 
 Eichardson's personal history is of a kind unique in litera- 
 ture. He had lived half a century in the commonplace 
 world before any one suspected him of the possession of 
 genius. Ordinary duties, commonplace labour, had filled up 
 his fifty years. He had gone through what it was natural 
 to suppose would be the hardest affliction of a man conscious 
 of an original gift of his own, the printing and publication of 
 much rubbish of other people's, with the greatest patience, 
 and had, to all appearance, occupied himself with his own 
 life without any thought of reproducing its mysteries for the 
 edification of others. He had been respectable and helpful 
 and friendly from his cradle. One of Fielding's biographers 
 declares contemptuously that Eichardson " had never known 
 the want of a guinea, or committed an act which the most 
 rigid moralist could censure." It seems the worst accusa- 
 tion that could be brought against him. Neither man nor 
 maid could lay their scath to him. He was a little fussy, a 
 little particular, more than a little vain, but only with that 
 simple vanity which is fed by domestic incense. None of 
 those irregularities which are supposed to belong to genius, 
 existed in this homely man. He was diligent in business, 
 plodding even, to all appearance, with a quick eye for his 
 interest, and a soul capable of the most tradesmanlike punc- 
 tuality and industry. He paid his way, built houses and 
 barns, wrote and spoke a great deal of good-humoured 
 
THE NOVELIST. 381 
 
 twaddle, and had not one spark of the light which so often 
 leads astray in his commonplace countenance. And yet, 
 strangely enough, when the late blossom came, it was not a 
 humble specimen of a class already known, but something 
 entirely new and original. Had the world been aware that 
 a new development of art was about to come into being, and 
 that it lay between Kichardson and Fielding to produce it, 
 who could have for a moment hesitated as to which should be 
 the founder of the new school ? The one had every possible 
 stimulus to spur him on ; the other no inducement at all, 
 except the promptings of that half-vain, half-benevolent, 
 impulse to benefit others which has indeed produced much 
 print but little literature. The triumph of the old fogey 
 over the splendid young adventurer is complete in every 
 particular. It may be said that Kichardson did not mean it, 
 but that in no way detracts from the glory of his originality. 
 Shakespeare probably did not mean it either. While the 
 young man, torn with a thousand cares, tried ineffectual hack- 
 neyed ways of working, such as every needy wit resorted to 
 — poor comedies in the taste of the day, inferior even to the 
 previously exciting rubbish, and utterly unworthy of his 
 own powers — the humdrum old printer glided calmly into 
 the undiscovered path which was to bring fame to both of 
 them. Very seldom is it in this world that the old fogey 
 triumphs. Youth gets the better of him at every turn. 
 Even when he is a hero, with a fine past behind him, he is 
 thrust into a corner to leave room for his grandson, while 
 yet the springs of life are undiminished. We all allow, with 
 a certain fond adoration, that nothing is too good for youth, 
 and enjoy it over again in our children, or cling to it 
 frantically in our own persons, as circumstances or tempera- 
 ment ordain, with the strangest pathetic superstition. It 
 has the cream of everything — health and favour, and suc- 
 cess and congratulation. But once in a way, when fifty 
 beats five-and-twenty, may not the rest of us be allowed the 
 unusual luxury of a cheer ? 
 
 Kichardson was born in 1689, in Derbyshire. " My 
 father," he says, " was a very honest man, descended of a 
 family of middling note. My mother was also a good 
 woman, of a family not ungenteel." These mild pro- 
 testations of gentility, however, do not seem to have moved 
 
382 THE NOVELIST. 
 
 the good man farther. He makes no attempt to envelop his 
 progenitors in fictitious dignity as Pope did, but acknowledges 
 the tradesman ship of his immediate connections. It was 
 intended that he should be brought up to the Church — a 
 phrase which bore a very different meaning in those days 
 and in our own. Had the intention been carried out, Kich- 
 ardson probably would have become one of the poor curates 
 who are revealed to us in his own, and more distinctly in 
 Fielding's, works — good men, who took a horn of ale in the 
 kitchen, whose chief means of communicating with the 
 squire or his lady was through " the waiting gentlewoman," 
 herself a curate's daughter. That he had "only common 
 school learning," and at fifteen chose a business, was no 
 doubt a great deal better for Samuel, as well as for his 
 future readers. He describes himself as being " not fond of 
 play," and of being called Serious and Gravity by the other 
 boys, who, however, sought his society as a teller of stories, 
 some of which were from his memory, but others, " of which 
 they would be most fond, and often were affected by them," 
 of his own invention. " All my stories carried with them, I 
 am bold to say, a useful moral," says the virtuous romancer. 
 And we may be sure they did ; for whatever may be the 
 objection of the precocious modern child to an over- 
 demonstrative moral, there can be no doubt that stern 
 poetic justice, and the most rigid awards of morality, are 
 always most congenial to the primitive intelligence. It was 
 not only schoolboys, however, who benefited by his moral- 
 ities. The following incident shows the lad in a more 
 curious light : — 
 
 "From my earliest youth I had a love of letter- writing. I was not 
 eleven years old when I Avrote, spontaneously, a letter to a widow of near 
 fifty, who, pretending to a zeal for religion, and being a constant fre- 
 quenter of church ordinances, was continually fomenting quarrels and 
 disturbances, by back-biting and scandal, among all her acquaintance. 
 I collected from the Scripture texts that made against her. Assuming 
 the style and address of a person in years, I exhorted her, I expostulated 
 with her. But my handwriting was known. I was challenged with it, 
 and owned the boldness ; for she complained of it to my mother with 
 tears. My mother chid me for the freedom taken by such a boy with a 
 woman of her years ; but knowing that her son was not of a pert or for- 
 ward nature, but, on the contrary, shy and bashful, she commended my 
 principles, though she censured the liberty taken. " 
 
THE NOVELIST. 383 
 
 A certain delicious air of self-satisfaction in this narrative 
 shows plainly enough that the mature moralist, in the height 
 of his fame, approved, and was on the whole somewhat 
 proud, of these doings of the baby prig. The little monster, 
 we believe, might even now be matched in here and there a 
 virtuous Low-Church household. The reader will recollect 
 a set of American novels, much repandu some fifteen or 
 twenty years ago, in which the creature flourishes, and is 
 not " chid '' but adored for its pious impudence. Pleasanter 
 incidents, however, are in the life of this droll little pre- 
 cocious adviser and sage. It is clear that he was born with 
 an old head upon his young shoulders, and his success was 
 great among women — a " success " of a character curiously 
 out of tune with the manners of the time, and at which 
 critics, bom conservators of the sneers of all the ages, 
 continue to jeer, notwithstanding that the cycle has run 
 round again, and a Platonic counsellor of womankind has 
 once more become a favourite character in life and fiction. 
 Here is a companion picture of a much more agreeable 
 kind : — 
 
 " As a bashful and not forward boy, I was an early favourite with all 
 the young women of taste and reading in the neighbourhood. Half-a- 
 dozen of them, when met to work with their needles, used, when they got 
 a book they liked, and thought I should, to borrow me to read to them, 
 their mothers sometimes with them, and both mothers and daughters 
 used to be pleased with the observations they put me upon making. 
 
 " I was not more than thirteen, w^hen three of these young w^omen, un- 
 known to each other, having an high opinion of my taciturnity, revealed 
 to me their love-secrets, in order to induce me to give them copies 
 to write after, or correct, for answers to their lovers' letters ; nor did 
 any one of them ever know that I was the secretary to the others. I 
 have been directed to chide, and even repulse, when an offence was either 
 taken or given, at the very time that the heart of the chider or repulser 
 was open before me, overflowing with esteem and affection, and the fair 
 repulser, dreading to be taken at her word, directing this word, or that 
 expression, to be softened or changed. One, highly gratified with her 
 lover's fervour and vows of everlasting love, has said, when I have asked 
 her direction, ' I cannot tell you what to write ; but ' (her heart on her 
 lips) ' you cannot write too kindly ; * all her fear was only that she should 
 incur slight for her kindness." 
 
 Never was a more distinct foreshadowing of the life to 
 come. The quaint urchin, in his little coat and breeches, a 
 
384 THE NOVELIST. 
 
 wise little undergrown old man, making his comments with 
 the infinite complacency of precocious childhood, keeping 
 the young women's secrets, knitting his soft brows over the 
 composition of their love-letters, ready, no doubt, to go to 
 the stake rather than betray one of his confiding friends, is 
 a picture full of humour and a pleasant sentiment. If it 
 were not that it is the fashion to sneer at Eichardson, one 
 would say, indeed, that there could scarcely be a prettier 
 picture. It is not, of course, the ordinary ideal of a boy of 
 tliirteen ; but yet it is indisputable that there is a kind of man 
 for whom, from his childhood, the society and confidence of 
 women has an irresistible charm, and that such a man is by 
 no means of necessity a milksop, as society in general is 
 good enough to suppose. This character, it is evident, 
 showed itself in the future novelist at the earliest possible 
 period, and as his life developed it made itself more and 
 more apparent. There are many causes which strengthen 
 such a tendency when it exists in the mind of a man in 
 Kichardson's position. He was without education, and yet 
 striving for the best results of education, if we may venture 
 on such an expression. Books, and discussions about books, 
 and that heavenly art of conversation which every intelligent 
 inexperienced being expects to find in society, were to this 
 lowly lad the greatest things on earth. And where was he 
 to attain any semblance of these delightful discussions — 
 that feast of reason and flow of soul of which he dreamt — 
 except among women? Women are very badly educated, 
 everybody says, and everybody has said it from the remotest 
 antiquity, — and it is very wrong indeed that such a state of 
 affairs should continue to go on as it has gone for several 
 thousand years ; and therefore it is most right and just to 
 institute ladies' colleges, and courses of lectures, and uni- 
 versity examinations. But yet the fact is that, so far as 
 talk is concerned, the sisters of the boy upon whom we are 
 spending heaps of money at Eton and Oxford, are not only 
 much pleasanter to talk to, but very much more ready and 
 better qualified in many instances to take a part in those 
 mild intellectual encounters, those little incursions over the 
 borders of metaphysics, discussions of motives, sentiments, 
 cases of conscience, points of social honour, which are the 
 most prolific subjects of conversation, than — not only their 
 
THE NOVELIST. 385 
 
 brother, but tlieir brother's tutor, and all the learned com- 
 munity to which he belongs. Mr Helps, in his * Friends in 
 Council,' and all the remote descendants of that popular 
 work, reduces his feminine interlocutors to a very small 
 share in the talk ; but had the talk been real, the chances 
 are it would have been they, and not Ellesmere or Milverton, 
 who had the lion's share. Among themselves, women con- 
 tinually discuss such subjects. And so long as there remains 
 a prejudice in favour of Shakespeare and the musical glasses 
 as subjects of refined conversation, men in Kichardson's 
 position, painfully climbing the social ladder, will always 
 find their best aids in the help and guidance of women. 
 Had the young novelist attempted to read or elicit any 
 sympathy about his books from the boors in the village ale- 
 house, what a downfall would his have been ! But their 
 sisters in the mantuamaker's parlour responded by nature to 
 any fine sentiment or case of delicate distress. It v^as no 
 doubt of as much importance to Richardson that he thus 
 came in contact with the young women and their love-letters, 
 instead of the village wits in the ale-house, as it is of im- 
 portance to a freshman at Oxford to begin his course under 
 the auspices of a good or a bad '' set." 
 
 In the year 1706, Richardson began his active life as 
 apprentice to a printer. " He thought it would gratify his 
 thirst for reading," says Mrs Barbauld ; an interpretation of 
 the motives of a "devil" which ought to make authors in 
 general benevolent towards the imp. But the young printer 
 did not find the facilities he had hoped for. His master 
 naturally wanted him to work and not to read ; and he had 
 to steal from sleep and amusement the time which he felt 
 himself bound to devote to the improvement of his mind. 
 He " engaged in a correspondence with a gentleman greatly 
 my superior in degree, and of ample fortune, who, had he 
 lived, intended high things for me,'' he informs us. Who 
 this mythical personage was, or how the 'prentice lad became 
 acquainted with him, no information is given. But "multi- 
 tudes of letters," says Richardson, "passed between tliis 
 gentleman and me. He wrote well — was a master of the 
 epistolary style. Our subjects were various ; but his letters 
 were mostly narrative, giving me an account of his proceed- 
 ings and what befell him in the different nations through 
 
 2 B 
 
386 THE NOVELIST. 
 
 wliicli lie travelled." This romantic episode of his youth, 
 which looks very much as if it might belong to the fabulous 
 era which occurs in most men's history, was terminated by 
 the early death of "the gentleman," and henceforward no- 
 thing but sober prose occurs in the narrative. Eichardson 
 served out his apprenticeship, worked five or six years as 
 a compositor, and finally set up for himself in a court in 
 Fleet Street. He must have been a man of about thirty 
 when he thus ventured to try his individual fortune. 
 Everything had evidently gone with him in the soberest, 
 most methodical way. No exaggerated good -luck nor 
 superlative energy had been his. A few years later he 
 became the publisher of the ' True Briton,' one of the fac- 
 tious newspapers of the time ; and subsequently two or 
 three other papers passed through his hands. Like a true 
 London 'prentice, he married his master's daughter — a step 
 which no doubt promoted his modest fortunes ; and on her 
 death, married again the daughter of a bookseller at Bath — 
 keeping his affections strictly within the trade. An acquaint- 
 ance with the Speaker of the House of Commons, Mr Onslow, 
 procured him the printing of the Journals of the House, in 
 twenty-six folio volumes : a work in which there was appa- 
 rently more honour than profit, since he complains to one of 
 his correspondents that he had never yet had payment, " no, 
 not to the value of a shilling, though the debt is upwards of 
 three thousand pounds." But it is clear that the man who 
 could be the nation's creditor to the extent of three thousand 
 pounds must have thriven in his affairs. He had a large 
 family of sons and daughters, most of whom he lost in in- 
 fancy — a house in the country near Hammersmith — and all 
 the comforts of a well-to-do and thriving citizen. In this 
 pleasant unexciting routine of busy life, working hard early 
 and late, yet taking his leisure and seeing his friends, fifty 
 years of Eichardson' s life were spent. He had his trials and 
 his joys like the rest of us ; but nothing occurred to distin- 
 guish him from any other printer in the trade, except, per- 
 haps, a knack he had of compiling indices, writing prefaces, 
 and doing other humble necessary accidental jobs in the 
 launching of a book into the world. This knack, towards 
 the year 1740, suggested to some enterprising publishers the 
 idea of a homely little work, such as might be "useful" to 
 
THE NOVELIST. 387 
 
 the ignorant. The account of this suggestion, however, 
 had better be given in Kichardson's own words : — 
 
 "Two booksellers, my particular friends, entreated me to write for 
 them a little volume of letters, in a common st3de, on such subjects as 
 might be of use to those country readers who were unable to indite for 
 themselves. 'Will it be any harm,' said I, *in a piece you want to be 
 written so low, if we should instruct them how they should think and 
 act in common cases, as well as indite ? ' They were the more urgent 
 with me to begin the little volume from this hint. I set about it, and 
 in the progress of it, writing two or three letters to instruct handsome 
 girls who were obliged to go out to service, as we phrase it, how to avoid 
 the snares that might be laid against their virtue, the above story (one 
 of structure somewhat similar to that of ' Pamela ' ) recurred to my 
 thoughts." 
 
 From this slight origin sprang a whole world of literary 
 efforts, and some of the most notable books in the English 
 language. Nothing can be more characteristic of the man 
 who no more suspected himself of possessing that strange 
 light of genius within his humdrum individuality than the 
 world did. What the fatherly good soul meant was to assume 
 in print the role which he had evidently come to by nature in 
 the ordinary intercourse of life. He had daughters of his 
 own, and preferred — " I do not blush," he says, " to confess 
 it" — the society of women ; and what more just than that, 
 when the pen was thus put into his hand, he should employ 
 it in warning young women against those snares of which 
 the world was full ? In the simplest good faith the bonhomme 
 began his homely labours. There is no touch of inspiration, 
 no thrill of poetic frenzy, about the matter. A little plea- 
 sant natural complacency, something of that unctuous amia- 
 bility which characterises the giver of good advice, a little 
 fuss, excitement, and flutter of interest in the dutiful feminine 
 household. Thus ' Pamela ' came into the world. Richardson 
 was over fifty by this time. He had all the settled habits 
 of a punctual tradesman, and of a man early married and 
 long habituated to the calm yoke of domestic life. His first 
 critics were his wife and a young lady visitor, who " used 
 to come to my little closet every night with, 'Have you 
 any more of ' Pamela,' Mr R.? — we are come to have a little 
 more of ' Pamela.' This encouraged me to prosecute it," 
 says the unconscious novelist. But so little was he aware 
 
3S8 THE NOVELIST. 
 
 of any special merit in his work, that '' I had not the cour- 
 age/' he tells his friend Aaron Hill, "to send the two vol- 
 nmes to your ladies, until I found the books well received 
 by the public." "I had no leisure," he adds, to another 
 correspondent, " nor knew I that I had so much invention, 
 till I almost accidentally slid into the writing of ' Pamela.' 
 And besides, little did I imagine that anything I could write 
 would be so kindly received as my writings have been by 
 the world." 
 
 The story is sufficiently well known to want little descrip- 
 tion ; and at the same time it is so completely contrary to 
 the taste of the present age, that it is with difficulty that we 
 can comprehend the wild plaudits with which it seems to 
 have been received. That young women should be taught 
 to guard their " virtue," and yet that the brutal squire who 
 permitted himself all kinds of attempts upon it was, after 
 all, not such an offender but that he might be pardoned 
 when his "intentions'' became "honourable," and married 
 and made very happy ever after, is the astounding senti- 
 ment of the eighteenth century as expressed in ' Pamela.' 
 Those letters which the virtuous papa, in all the domestic 
 purity of his slippers and his closet, read to his " worthy- 
 hearted wife " and her young lady friend, and which were 
 written with the intention of turning "young people into a 
 course of reading . . . which might tend to promote 
 the cause of religion and virtue," abound in nauseous details 
 as explicit as the frankest of French novels. To be sure, 
 Pamela is spotless, and there is no dangerous seduction of 
 sentiment to confound the reader's sense of right and wrong; 
 but it does not seem to occur to the author that his heroine's 
 delicacy of mind is in the slightest degree impaired by the 
 assaults made upon her, or that the coarse contest is any- 
 thing but a sublime trial and victory of feminine purity. 
 Such, there is no doubt, was to a great extent the sentiment 
 of the age. " Why is old Lady So-and-So's staff like ' Pam- 
 ela'?" said a pretty wit, in her patches and powder. " Be- 
 cause it is the prop of virtue ! " Perhaps we are not so 
 much better in reality as we think ourselves — for is not the 
 sensation novel a resurrection of nastiness? — but yet we 
 have advanced a little in our ideal of virtue and its props. No 
 doubts on the subject, however, seem to have troubled the 
 
THE NOVELIST. 389 
 
 satisfaction of ' Pamela's ' original audience. The book was 
 published anonymously in the year 1740. *'It was received," 
 says Mrs Barbauld, " with a burst of applause from all ranks 
 of people." Its tendency was considered so excellent that 
 popular divines recommended it from the pulpit. Ladies at 
 Eanelagh, in the height of gaiety and fashion, held up the 
 slim volumes to each other *' to show they had got the book 
 that every one was talking of." "Mr Pope says it will do 
 more good than many volumes of sermons. I have heard 
 them (Pope and Allen) very high in its praises, and they 
 will not have any faults to be mentioned in the story. I 
 believe they have read it twice apiece at least," says Eich- 
 ardson's brother-in-law. " Mr Chetwynd says," adds the 
 same authority, " that if all other books were to be burned, 
 this book, next to the Bible, ought to be preserved." Other 
 enthusiastic contemporaries declare it to be " the best book 
 ever published." 
 
 " I opened this powerful little piece," says Aaron Hill, while still 
 unaware, or affecting to be unaware, of its authorship, "with more ex- 
 pectation than from common designs of like promise, because it came 
 from your hands for my daughters ; yet who could have dreamed he would 
 find, under the modest disguise of a novel, all the soul of religion, good- 
 breeding, discretion, good-nature, wit, fancy, fine thoughts, and morality ? 
 . . . It will live on through posterity with such unbounded extent 
 of good consequences that twenty ages to come may be the better and 
 wiser for its influence." 
 
 Such was the reception afforded to a book which nowadays 
 we should consider of very doubtful tendency, and upon which 
 the most enthusiastic admirer would certainly never think of 
 bringing up his son to virtue, as one of Richardson's ad- 
 mirers proposes. A still greater compliment was in reserve 
 for it. Fielding, with a curious mixture of contempt and 
 imitation, wrote his ' Joseph Andrews ' avowedly as a parody 
 upon, and trenchant satire of, the Waiting Gentlewoman, 
 who had carried her purity to so good a market. The state 
 of feeling which could permit such a proceeding is happily 
 incomprehensible to ourselves. It is said the two men had 
 been on good terms before, though there never could have 
 been much friendship, one would imagine, between the 
 struggling playwright afloat amid all the dissipations of 
 town, the ruined squire, with the best of blood in his veins 
 
390 THE NOVELIST. 
 
 but not a shilling in his pocket — and the orderly sober citizen, 
 warm and well to do, whose virtues and failings were alike 
 respectable. Nobody except Kichardson himself, who felt 
 it deeply, seems to have considered that there was anything 
 derogatory to the dignity of genius in this curious parody and 
 adaptation. The spiteful meaning has all evaporated by pro- 
 cess of time ; and perhaps the highest claim of ' Pamela ' to 
 consideration now is, that it was the occasion of producing 
 another work of quality much less mortal than itself. Field- 
 ing pays the kain or toll to the devil — which seems to have 
 been exacted from that age, as it was from the medieval 
 artificers, who built bridges and founded cities by the help 
 of the Evil One — with a certain jovial readiness. But dis- 
 gusting as are his preliminary chapters, we are not sure that 
 they are really worse than Pamela's elaborate defence and 
 detailed account of her various dangers ; and Kichardson 
 has nothing which can compare with the conception of Par- 
 son Adams. That wonderful, simple, patriarchal, wise, and 
 innocent and foolish priest — with his learning and his ab- 
 sence of mind, his tender heart, his spotless character, his 
 sympathy and severity — is one of the first and finest figures 
 in that gallery of worthies which has since expanded so 
 widely. He stands between Sir Eoger de Coverley and 
 Uncle Toby, one of those matchless pictures, made with a 
 smile on the lip and a tear in the eye, which enrich English 
 literature. And there are few greater marvels in literary 
 history than the fact that such a conception was brought 
 into the world, in the first place, by a rival's spiteful impa- 
 tience of public approbation as shown to the author of the 
 pioneer story — the novel which had sounded the waters, and 
 made the chart, and opened the dangerous yet triumphant 
 way. Thanks to that alchemy of genius which works the 
 base alloy out of the gold unawares, and defeats even its 
 own evil motives when once its splendid activity is fully 
 got to work, Fielding's book, which began in malice and 
 filthiness, rapidly cleared into a real masterpiece of art. A 
 greater compliment could not have been paid to Pamela. 
 It is the grand distinction of that pretty, voluminous, simple, 
 and prudent maiden. 
 
 The story was translated almost immediately into French 
 and Dutch — that language, now so unknown, being then the 
 
THE NOVELIST. 391 
 
 familiar tongue of our closest^ allies. And it produced for 
 Kichardson a crowd of correspondents, and fame which was 
 entirely beyond his expectations. A spurious continuation, 
 called ' Pamela in High Life,' was published shortly after, 
 and led the author to give forth two additional volumes, 
 which, however, have fallen into utter oblivion. Warburton 
 advised him, in his own name and that of Pope, to *' make it 
 a vehicle for satire upon the fashions and follies of the Great 
 World, by representing the light in which they would appear 
 to the rustic Pamela when she was introduced to them." 
 But satire was not Kichardson's /or^e; and the continuation 
 of Pamela is as dead as any of the other secondary novels of 
 the day. 
 
 After this curious blaze of sudden excitement and suc- 
 cess, quiet fell once more upon the printing-office, with the 
 printer's house over it, in Salisbury Court, and over the 
 pleasanter home at Hammersmith. The good tradesman 
 went back to his business ; he opened his house hospitably 
 to his intimates ; he wrote his little letters, full of a soft purr 
 of satisfaction and content. He was pleased with himself, 
 pleased with his friends, and perhaps felt that the world 
 itself could scarcely be so wicked, since 'Pamela' had so lively 
 a reception in it. The kindly simple heart of the man is 
 very well expressed in his letters, notwithstanding this 
 purring of complacency. When he hears that one of his 
 friends has an unwholesome residence, and is subject to per- 
 petual illness in it, he puts his own country house immedi- 
 ately at that friend's disposal. He sends the young ladies 
 copies of ' Pamela,' and toy-books for the children. With a 
 softer instinct still he consoles a dissatisfied poet over the 
 apparent failure of his works. " Your writings require 
 thought to read and to take in their whole force, and the 
 world has no thought to bestow. I do not think," he adds, 
 as so many benevolent critics have said with the same 
 object, "that were Milton's ' Paradise Lost ' to be now pub- 
 lished as a new work, it would be well received. Shake- 
 speare, with all his beauties, would, as a modern writer, be 
 hissed off the stage." Everything he says is full of the 
 same good-nature and bland patriarchal kindness. Success 
 evidently had nothing but a softening effect upon him. The 
 only touch of bitterness in all the six, not over-lively, volumes 
 
392 THE NOVELIST. 
 
 of his correspondence is directed against Fielding, of whom 
 he speaks with a certain acrid offence which is quite com- 
 prehensible, to say the least. 
 
 In this quietness, his biographer tells us, eight years were 
 passed without any further appeal to popular sympathy and 
 admiration. But the interval was not one of idleness. 
 Within a year or two of his first publication the plan of 
 * Clarissa ' seems to have so far ripened in his mind that his 
 correspondents were informed of it. In 1744 he informs Dr 
 Young (of the * Night Thoughts ') that '' I have not gone so 
 far as I thought to have done by this time ; and then the 
 unexpected success which attended the other thing," he 
 adds, " instead of encouraging me, has made me more diffi- 
 dent. And I have run to such an egregious length, and am 
 such a sorry pruner, though greatly luxuriant, that I am apt 
 to add three pages for one I take away ! Altogether I am 
 frequently out of conceit with it." But still the work went 
 on. It gave all his friends a subject to write about, and 
 added a zest to his homely Hfe. During those tranquil 
 passing years, which seem to go like so many days (the 
 time of the '45, when Scotland was being rent in sunder, and 
 Charles Edward going through his martyrdom, and the 
 Scots lords being beheaded and quartered almost under the 
 eyes of our placid novelist !) Kichardson, in his snug closet, 
 after his day's work, went on slowly elaborating his story. 
 Some parts of it appear to have been sent, before publication, 
 for the criticism of his friends at a distance ; and it was 
 regularly read and submitted to the judgment of his home 
 circle, which included a varying number of young ladies who 
 seem to have been in the habit of paying long visits at his 
 hospitable house, and whom he called his daughters, and 
 corresponded with in the most voluminous and sprightly 
 manner. 
 
 "He used to write in a little summer-house or grotto, as it was 
 called, within his garden, before the family was up ; and when they 
 met at breakfast he communicated the progress of his story, which by 
 that means had every day a fresh and lively interest. Then began the 
 criticisms, the pleadings for Harriet Byron or Clementina ; every turn 
 and every incident was eagerly canvassed, and the author enjoyed the 
 benefit of knowing beforehand how his situations would strike. " 
 
 One of the members of this little conclave thus describes 
 
THE NOVELIST. 393 
 
 the scene: "The grot, the garden, " she exclaims, "rush 
 upon my view " — 
 
 ** And then a choir of Hstening nymphs appears 
 Oppressed with wonder, or dissolved in tears, 
 But on her tender fears while Harriet dwells, 
 And love's soft symptoms innocently tells, 
 They all with conscious smiles these symptoms view, 
 And by those conscious smiles confess them tme." 
 
 The patriarch himself gives, however, a description of 
 this pretty domestic life from a point of view less reverential 
 and more consistent with the light-mindedness which is com- 
 mon, we fear, to young womankind. 
 
 " I never knew one of you girls," he complains playfully, ** put out of 
 your course for the pleasure of the poor man, whom, neverthleless, you 
 profess to honour. His leisure time is generally in a morning. Did ever any 
 one of you rise an hour sooner in favour to him ? You were never visible 
 till the breakfast table had been spread half an hour. A little arm-in- 
 arm turn in the garden after that was necessary to relate your dreams 
 and give account of your night's rest ; change of dress came next ; then 
 dinner-time approached ; then retired to write (till the dinner-bell sum- 
 moned you), one to one absent favourite, one to another, as love or duty, 
 or both, induced. After dinner a conversation that could not but be agree- 
 able ; but dinner-time conversations are seldom other than occasional 
 prattlings on vague subjects : attendance of servants will not permit them 
 to be more. Some charming opportunities talked of by-and-by for read- 
 ing and conversing. The day we will suppose fine. Your Highmore 
 cannot bear to be confined within the house or garden walls. She throws 
 out her temptations for a walk where she can see and be seen. All the 
 girls accompany her. Nobody must read or be read to till the walkers 
 return. The man of the house is invited to dangle after them ; not for 
 an escort — they fear nothing. He, aware of his little consequence to 
 them in their walk, stays frequently at home ; gives directions to his 
 gardener ; and is but just got up-stairs to his writing (I should noio rather 
 say reading) desk, when the gypsies' return is signified to him by the call of 
 the tea-bell. Down he must go ; for why ? They are at leisure to expect 
 him. Down goes the passive. . . . Fresh promises to themselves of 
 reading-time. The honest man, who is to be taken up and laid down as 
 they please, is asked if he will not read to them by-and-by. He passively 
 bows : the rather signifies compliance, as the opportunity for the book 
 and his employment is yet at a distance. At last, however (the tea 
 offices all over), they assemble at one large table ; one goes to ruffle- 
 making ; one to border-making ; one to muslin-flowering ; one to draw- 
 ing ; and then the passive man is called to his lesson. He is often 
 
394 THE NOVELIST. 
 
 interrupted by supper preparations. At last the cloth is laid, all the 
 important works are bagged up ; each lady looks pleased and satisfied 
 with her part so well performed of the duties of the day.'' 
 
 But whether listened to with breathless and weeping inte- 
 rest at breakfast, or interjected as an accompaniment to the 
 ruffle -making and muslin-flowering between tea and supper, 
 the gregarious good soul, in his simple vanity, read his book 
 to the girls, collected their impetuous youthful opinions, and 
 himself learned to believe in his own characters, as they 
 grew into actual personages in the lively discussions of the 
 house. And thus was produced the history of ' Clarissa,' a 
 book which, after lying buried for years in "gentlemen's 
 libraries," has lately been republished, and reintroduced to 
 popular notice. A more remarkable book has never been 
 written ; and when the character of the author and his age, 
 and all the circumstances that have just been described, are 
 taken into consideration, the reader cannot but feel that the 
 production is unique in literature. The story of a pretty 
 and good girl involved in the mazes of a long courtship, full 
 of sweet sentiments and tender morality — with very black 
 shadows kept respectfully away from her, and never allowed 
 to cloud the white light in which she stands — with a 
 womanish perfection of a lover, and a gradual ascension out of 
 difficulty into the height of blessedness — is the kind of nar- 
 rative which was to have been expected. Indeed, the suc- 
 ceeding history of ' Sir Charles Grandison ' fulfils almost all 
 the requirements of the situation, and feels something like 
 the natural production of the humble optimist and his little 
 court. But ' Clarissa ' is nothing of all this. The book is 
 long-winded, sometimes tedious, overlaid with moralisings, 
 and full of improbabilities ; and yet it is one of the finest 
 tragic efforts of genius — a book which by times touches 
 upon the borders of the sublime. 
 
 We are under the disadvantage, at the present moment, of 
 coming in, as it were, at the end of a tolerably lively discus- 
 sion raised by Mr Dallas's late republication of this remark- 
 able book. No work, perhaps, has ever called forth a greater 
 diversity of opinion. To some critics the story is at once 
 disgusting and improbable, tedious to the last degree, forced 
 and unnatural in its effects, and of the most artificial con- 
 struction. To these objections Eichardson's warmest admirer 
 
THE NOVELIST. 395 
 
 cannot answer with a decided negative. The story in its 
 chief point is revolting, and the book is prolix beyond all 
 modern conception of the word ; and yet it seems difficult to 
 believe that any reader, once fairly entered upon it — " in- 
 fected," to use Macaulay's forcible but disagreeable expres- 
 sion — could give it up again until he came to the end, or 
 could accompany the heroine through her extraordinary 
 humiliation and triumph without tears. The story turns 
 upon a crime so brutal and cowardly that it is quite beyond 
 any possible gloss of sentiment. Once more, it is Female 
 virtue that is assailed — the theme, apparently, of all others 
 most familiar to the age — but nothing can be more unlike 
 the rustic resistance and servile gratitude of Pamela than 
 this strange duel to the death between the man and the 
 woman, in which a hundred typical strifes might be em- 
 bodied. Clarissa herself is such a type of character as could 
 have been set forth only by a man habituated to the society 
 of women, and to look upon things very much from their 
 point of view. She is a delicate creature, whose heart has 
 but begun faintly to awaken to any conception of love or 
 individual inclination at all, when she is suddenly frozen 
 back into herself, into the chill unopened bud of her life, by 
 such a horror as is sufficient to congeal the young blood in 
 its very fountain. Her soft insensibility to any contagion of 
 passion — the shrinking, faint, easily relinquished preference 
 which is all she is ever made to feel for her destroyer — is 
 sometimes brought as an accusation against the perfection 
 of her womanhood. But the critics who do so have not taken 
 the trouble to think that it was a woman in the bud whom 
 Kichardson intended to draw — a creature forced into extra- 
 ordinary development, it is true, but warped by the very 
 influences which urged her life into pathetic blossom, out of 
 that warm and tender sweetness which comes by the natural 
 agency of bright sunshine and common rain. Her heart had 
 begun, as we have said, softly, unawares, to turn towards 
 the man who pretended to love her, with that shy, sweet, 
 gradual impulsion which is one of the most beautiful things 
 in nature. Her eyes and her heart were being drawn to him 
 modestly and maidenly, in a tenderness half acknowledged, 
 half denied, even to herself; when Fate seized upon the 
 innocent creature, wrapt her in its fatal web, arrested in the 
 
396 THE NOVELIST. 
 
 first place the rising fancy, cliilled and withered it by doubts 
 and fears ; and then, by a sudden violent revulsion, closed 
 up the opening bud, with all its fairy colours, and forced 
 forward the pale splendour of despair, chill maiden flower, 
 stealing every hue of colour and perfume of life out of its ex- 
 quisite climax of sorrow and decay. No man less acquainted 
 with all the secret unseen sweetness of a girl's heart — its 
 brooding over itself, its soft reluctance, its delight in the 
 hesitations and tender delays which irritate passion into 
 frenzy — could have drawn the early Clarissa, so passionless 
 and dutiful, exacting nothing but the right to reject a 
 repugnant suitor, and ready to make a sacrifice of the soft 
 beginnings of liking in her heart, if her parents would have 
 but accepted that pure yet painful off'ering. Then, when 
 this morning light fades — when the helpless creature is 
 caught into the vortex which is to swallow her up — the 
 reader can see the chill that comes upon the opening flower, 
 can see the soft virginal husks closing up over the arrested 
 bud ; and then the drooping and the fading, and sudden 
 bursting forth by its side of the other development, which is 
 so different, so consistent and inconsistent with the first pro- 
 mise af the outraged life. 
 
 This conception stands by itself amid all the conceptions 
 of genius. No Greek, no Italian, no English poet has 
 painted such a figure in the great picture-gallery which is 
 common to the world. Neither ancient nor modern woman 
 has ever stood before us thus pale and splendid in the shame 
 which is not hers, sweet soul, though it kills her. Almost 
 every other victim shrinks and burns with the stain of her 
 own fault ; and even Lucretia herself, if more awful, is less 
 womanly, less tender, less sweet, than the maiden creature 
 in whom nature and religion reassert their rights after the 
 first moment of frenzy ; who calls for no vengeance, and can 
 accept no expiation, and dies smiling, of no external wound, 
 but only by the deadly puncture of the shame itself, making 
 all other daggers unnecessary. How it came about that a 
 homely soul like that of Richardson, amid the flutter of his 
 pretty fresh companions — the girls that frequented his gar- 
 den like so many doves — could have fallen upon this tragic 
 ideal, is a very different matter. His earlier and later works 
 are both quite comprehensible, and in harmony with the cir- 
 
THE NOVELIST. 397 
 
 cumstances ; but what unthought-of inspiration made the 
 good man capable of Clarissa, is a question which we do not 
 attempt to answer. In the quaint prosaic garments with 
 which his prolix style has invested her — in the artificial yet 
 not ungraceful costume of the age, the "pale primrose- 
 coloured paduasoy," the Brussels lace cap, the apron of 
 flowered lawn, all set forth with the liveliest realism — it is a 
 virgin-martyr, a poetic visionary being, one of the few ori- 
 ginal types of art, which we have here before us. Not Des- 
 demona, not Imogen, is of herself a more tender creation. 
 They are so much the more fortunate that it is immortal 
 verse that clothes them. Clarissa, for her part, has but a 
 garrulous and pottering expositor, but in her own person she 
 is divine. 
 
 We repeat, and with all the strength of conviction, that 
 the highest poetic creation of the age is this one matchless 
 figure. It was inherently a prosaic age, and Richardson 
 was prose itself. If spiritual science had so far advanced in 
 these days as to make it possible that the shade of Shake- 
 speare could have breathed this conception into him, leaving 
 the sexagenarian with stammering lips and tedious tongue 
 to evolve the tender mystery, it would be a feasible sort of 
 explanation. The jewel is clumsily cut, and set in his own 
 way in the heaviest old-fashioned setting, but it is a diamond 
 of the purest water, — and where did he find it ? The aston- 
 ished spectator, looking at him and his surroundings, and at 
 the wonderful work just issued out of his commonplace 
 hands, can but echo the question. Sophia Western is a 
 pretty creature, a sweet sketch of the surface and outside of 
 a woman ; but she can no more stand within the charmed 
 niche that encloses Clarissa, than can Harriet Byron or any 
 other conventional heroine. Such a creature exists by her 
 own right, and is not the fruit of observation, or study, or 
 knowledge of the world. She lives, as Miranda does in the 
 island, owing nothing to earth and all to heaven. Not a 
 woman of her generation is half so true to nature ; and now 
 that most of the women of her generation are dead and 
 buried, Clarissa lives, still surprising the warm tears of youth 
 out of world-worn eyes. 
 
 The first half of this wonderful book was published some 
 time before the concluding volumes ; and nothing can be 
 
398 THE NOVELIST. 
 
 more amusing than the storm of entreaty, remonstrance, 
 even threats, with which the author was overwhelmed if he 
 should venture to pursue his inexorable purpose. On second 
 thoughts, Clarissa, strange as it appears, must have been 
 Eichardson's lawful offspring, and not a heavenly changeling 
 brought to him by Shakespeare's shade. The steadiness 
 with which he resists all persuasion, his obstinate mainten- 
 ance of his own ideal in the face of a hundred angry critics, 
 is as clear a proof of his paternity as was Solomon's test. 
 He will not have his child mangled by any profane touch, 
 nor desecrate her by vulgar makings-up or impossible re- 
 covery, such as were quite in keeping with the character of 
 a Pamela. The urgency and seriousness of the appeals 
 made to him show the extraordinary impression made on his 
 contemporaries, and would be ludicrous in their fervour to 
 any one who had not fallen under the enchantment of the 
 story. Lady Bradshaigh, who was unknown to him at the 
 time, though afterwards one of his closest correspondents, 
 writes to him as follows, with the earnestness of a petitioner 
 for life : — 
 
 " I am pressed, sir, by a multitude of your admirers, to plead in behalf 
 of your amiable Clarissa. Having too much reason, from hints given in 
 your four volumes, from a certain advertisement, and from your forbear- 
 ing to write, after promising all endeavours should be used towards 
 satisfying the discontented — from all these, I say, I have but too much 
 reason to apprehend a fatal catastrophe. I have heard that some of your 
 advisers who delight in horror (detestable wretches !) insisted upon rapes, 
 ruin, and destruction ; others, who feel for the virtuous in distress, 
 (blessings for ever attend them !) pleaded for the contrary. Could you be 
 deaf to these and comply with those ? ... It is not murder or any 
 other horrid act, but the preceding distresses which touch and raise the 
 passions of those at least whom an author would wish to please, suppos- 
 ing him to be such a one as I take you to be. Therefore, sir, after you 
 have brought the divine Clarissa to the very brink of destruction, let me 
 entreat (may I say insist upon) a turn that will make your almost de- 
 spairing readers half mad with joy. I know you cannot help doing it to 
 give yourself satisfaction, for I pretend to know your heart so well that 
 you must think it a crime never to be forgiven, to leave vice triumphant 
 and virtue depressed. ... If you disappoint me, attend to my curse 
 — May the hatred of all the young, beautiful, and virtuous for ever be 
 your portion ! and may your eyes never behold anything but age and de- 
 formity ! May you meet with applause only from envious old maids, 
 surly bachelors, and tyrannical parents ! May you be doomed to the 
 
THE NOVELIST. 399 
 
 company of such ! and, after death, may their ugly souls haunt you ! 
 Now, make Lovelace and Clarissa unhappy if you dare ! " 
 
 The same lady, continmiig her remonstrances (which she 
 does at a length and with a fluency which makes the pro- 
 digious correspondence of Kichardson's heroines a trifle less 
 incredible), makes use of stronger and stronger arguments. 
 '* Sure you wall think it worth your while to save his soul, 
 sir," she cries, pleading for the reformation of Lovelace. " It 
 is too shocking and barbarous a story for publication !" she 
 exclaims, when another volume has made her acquainted 
 with the worst that can happen. " My hand trembles, for I 
 can scarce hold the pen. I am as mad as the poor injured 
 Clarissa." Another anonymous correspondent declares : 
 " Since I have heard that you design the end shall be un- 
 happy, I am determined to read no more. I should read the 
 account of her death with as much anguish of mind as I 
 should feel at the loss of my dearest friend." Gibber, in 
 theatrical fervour, on being informed that Eichardson in- 
 tended his heroine to die, shouts — " D — n him if she 
 should!" and asks whether he is to be expected to stand a 
 patient observer of her ruin ? In the face of all this hubbub 
 of remonstrance, the author persevered with a steady firm- 
 ness, quite unlike his ordinary complaisant amiability. He 
 gives his reasons for so doing at length in his letters to Lady 
 Bradshaigh, with as much gravity and seriousness as distin- 
 guishes the appeal to him. If it had concerned the life of 
 some one condemned to die, the matter could not have been 
 more solemnly discussed. It is evident that he considers it 
 as a matter of course that all the world should be serious 
 over such a question. He replies to his correspondent's ap- 
 peal in the following serious strain : — 
 
 *' "What, madam, is the temporary happiness we are so fond of ? What 
 the long life we are so apt to covet ? The more irksome these reflections 
 are to the young, the gay, and the wealthy, the more necessary are they 
 to be inculcated. 
 
 ♦ A verse may find him who a sermon flies. 
 And turn delight into a sacrifice.' 
 
 ** Of this nature is my design. Eeligion never was at so low an ebb as 
 at present. And if my work must be supposed of the moral kind, I was 
 willing to try if a religious novel would do good. And did you not per- 
 
400 THE NOVELIST. 
 
 ceive that, in the very first letter of Lovelace, all those seeds of wicked- 
 ness were thick-sown which sprouted up into action afterwards in his 
 character— pride, revenge, a love of intrigue, plot, contrivance. And 
 who is it that asks, Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles ? 
 . . And as to reforming and marrying Lovelace, and the example to 
 be given by it, what but this that follows would it have been, instead of 
 the amiable one your good-nature and humanity point out. ' Here,' says 
 another Lovelace, *may I pass the flower and prime of my youth in form- 
 ing and pursuing the most insidious enterprises. ... I may at last 
 meet with and attempt a Clarissa, a lady of priceless virtue. I may try 
 her, vex her, plague and torment her worthy heart. I may fit up all 
 my batteries against her virtue ; and if I find her proof against all my 
 machinations, and myself tired with rambling, I may then reward that 
 virtue ; I may graciously extend my hand ; she may give me hers, and 
 rejoice and thank heaven for my condescension in her favour. The Al- 
 mighty I may suppose at the same time to be as ready with His mercy, 
 foregoing His justice on my past crimes, as if my nuptials with this meri- 
 torious fair one were to atone for the numerous distresses and ruins I have 
 occasioned in other families ; and all the good-natured, the worthy, the 
 humane part of the world forgiving me too, because I am a handsome and 
 a humorous fellow, will clap their hands with joy and cry out — 
 
 ' Happy, happy, happy pair, 
 None but the brave deserve the fair.' 
 
 " Indeed, my dear madam," he adds in a following letter, with increas- 
 ing solemnity, " I could not think of leaving my heroine short of heaven. 
 . . . A writer who follows nature and pretends to keep the Christian 
 system in his eye, cannot make a heaven in this world for his favourites, 
 or represent this life otherwise than as a state of probation. Clarissa, I 
 once more aver, could not be rewarded in this world. To have given her 
 her reward here, as in a happy marriage, Avould have been as if a poet had 
 placed his catastrophe in the third act of his play, when his audience were 
 obliged to expect two more. What greater moral proof can be given of 
 a world after this for the rewarding of suffering virtue and for the punish- 
 ing of oppressive vice, than the inequalities in the distribution of rewards 
 and punishments here below ? " 
 
 With such solemnity was the question of the ending of a 
 story treated by author and readers ! It could not have been 
 more profoundly serious had it concerned the saving of a 
 life. And the very fact that Richardson had thus a manifest 
 motive in his tale, independent of the rules of art, makes it 
 still more apparent with what an intuitive perception of the 
 best principles of art he kept by his original idea. Clarissa 
 made happy would have been a commonplace being, another 
 Pamela, a less serene Miss Byron ; while Clarissa outraged, 
 
THE NOVELIST. 401 
 
 putting aside with a sweet mournful pride the atonement 
 which is impossible, carrying her involuntary pollution to 
 heaven, is the rarest conception. A man who writes a story 
 with a moral purpose is in most cases doubly hampered ; but 
 here, fortunately, the interests of morality concurred with 
 the highest necessities of art. 
 
 Lovelace, the only other character worth considering in 
 the book, bears tokens of having also been conceived by a 
 man used to contemplate the world from a woman's point of 
 view. He is not in the smallest degree a milksop, nor does 
 he approach the perfections of Sir Charles Grandison by any 
 indications of the nascent prig. He is full of vivacity and 
 spirit and humour even at his worst ; but his wickedness is 
 as different from the frank animalism of Tom Jones as it is 
 possible to conceive. Vice has to him all the attraction of 
 intrigue, all the charm of sentiment and emotion, and that 
 irresistible temptation of universal conquest which is so 
 strong in women. Lovelace, like a true woman's hero, will 
 not allow himself to be beat. He will conquer by fair means, 
 if possible — but if not, by any means. He is bent upon mak- 
 ing himself the object of everybody's attention, admiration, 
 wonder, or horror, as the case may be. Though he is not 
 without a certain subtle undercurrent of contempt for the very 
 admirers whom he dazzles and beguiles, it is a necessity of 
 his nature to beguile and dazzle everywhere. And so he 
 does. The reader perceives that the effect he produces is a 
 real effect. It is no assertion of the author, but a visible re- 
 sult worked out by very apparent means. His friend loathes, 
 abjures, and denounces his horrible project, but cannot detach 
 himself from the charm of his personality. Society gazes 
 and averts its eyes with a flutter of horror, yet is continually 
 dazzled by the courageous front he bears, and flattered and 
 melted by the pains he takes to recommend himself to it. 
 Tom Jones's sensuality is a mere matter of disposition — a 
 peccadillo, of which neither he nor his author is ashamed, 
 involving nothing but the temptation and downfall of the 
 moment, not much more important than the robbing of an 
 orchard or the shooting of an unlawful pheasant. He is 
 infinitely nastier and infinitely more innocent than the subtle 
 seducer, whose name has come to represent a class, happily 
 more rife in fiction than in life. The hero of Fielding 
 
 2 C 
 
402 THE NOVELIST. 
 
 would have been harmless as a girl to Clarissa. He would 
 have kissed the hem of her garment notwithstanding his 
 fundamental easy-minded uncleanness. In power and 
 subtlety of conception the hero of Kichardson is as far 
 superior to him as he is inferior in execution. Perhaps the 
 very inferiority of execution, indeed — the long-windedness, 
 the wearisome prolixity, as contrasted with the incisive 
 brilliant brevity and clearness of the rival novelist — does 
 but bring out the more, the extraordinary advantage, in 
 point of elevation and depth, which the one has over the 
 other. The genius of Kichardson thus unawares took up 
 and profited by what was essentially a feminine ideal. To 
 women, vice of the Tom Jones development is abhorrent 
 and incomprehensible ; while vice like that of Lovelace, 
 which sets all the powers to work — which is full of plot and 
 contrivance, of insatiable love of approbation and necessity 
 for conquest, of emotion and mental excitement, and remorse 
 and passion — is something which they can understand and 
 realise. It would be too deep and too curious a question to 
 ask why this feminine conception should have been worked 
 out by a man as it has never been by any female artist, even 
 in a field like this, where women have won many triumphs — 
 and might lead us into speculations which have little to do with 
 Kichardson ; but yet the fact seems to us very clear. Love- 
 lace is the detestable, while Clarissa is the attractive, part 
 of the book ; and yet he too is full of attraction. His un- 
 daunted spirit, his impudent vivacity and readiness, which 
 is never at a loss ; the way in which he fights every inch of 
 the ground, taking the blame upon himself, yet never sink- 
 ing under it, is as fine a picture as any in art ; and there is 
 something in his distracted letter, on receiving the intelli- 
 gence of her death, which reaches the highest tragic height. 
 When all is said that can be said of the imperfections of the 
 workmanship, and the tedious exuberance of detail with 
 which these two wonderful figures are enveloped and over- 
 laid, it is still undeniable that the Man and the Woman 
 stand forth in this book in their mortal struggle with such 
 tragical and solemn force as has seldom been given to any 
 creations of the imagination. The conception is perfect ; it 
 is the execution alone which is to blame. 
 
 Perhaps no novel has ever been received with such 
 
THE NOVELIST. 403 
 
 universal enthusiasm. All kinds of people wept and ap- 
 plauded. It flew over the Channel with a swiftness which is 
 seldom equalled even in these days of increased communica- 
 tion, and was translated by the Abbe Prevost, himself a 
 congenial writer, who *' softened it/-' the biographer quaintly 
 tells us, in order to adapt it to — save the mark ! — " the 
 more delicate taste of the French." Letters poured upon 
 the author full of a fever of admiration, sometimes most 
 amusingly expressed. One lady, for example, says : " I am 
 more and more charmed with your Clarissa ; it is indeed a 
 noble character, but I fear nowhere to be met with except in 
 your Letters. What a pity it is you are not a woman, and 
 blest with means of shining as she did ! for a person 
 capable of drawing such a character would certainly be able 
 to act in the same manner if in a like situation." Dr Johnson, 
 in repeated letters, asks characteristically that an index 
 should be made to the book ; for it is not, he says, " a per- 
 formance to be read with eagerness, and laid aside for ever, 
 but will be occasionally consulted by the busy, the aged, 
 and the studious ; and therefore I beg that this edition, by 
 which I suppose posterity is to abide, may want nothing 
 that can facilitate its use." There are portions of this cor- 
 respondence, especially the letters of Mrs Klopstock, the 
 wife of the poet — who, in all the effusiveness of ardent 
 youth, gives Kichardson a sketch of her own love-story and 
 happiness — which are touching and charming as any 
 romance. '' Oh the heavenly book ! " cries this enthusiastic 
 creature. " You will know all what concerns me," she adds, 
 in her pretty German-English. "Love, dear sir, is all what 
 me concerns ; and love shall be all what I will tell you in this 
 letter." After a few charming letters, this little episode of 
 real life finds its conclusion in a brief obituary notice — a 
 piece of plain and sad prose — more pathetic than anything 
 in fiction. Richardson's fatherly heart was always open to 
 such confidences. Had he been a woman, as his other cor- 
 respondent suggests, he could scarcely have been more 
 tenderly ready to open his sympathies and affections to all who 
 sought them. He is himself, however, moved to complain of 
 the flood of additional occupation thus brought upon him : — 
 
 ** I am drawn into acquaintance and into correspondences upon it so 
 numerous, and that with and from people of condition, that what time 
 
404 THE NOVELIST. 
 
 I have to spare from my troublesome and necessary business is wholly 
 taken up. I am teazed," he adds, " by a dozen ladies of note and virtue 
 to give them a good man, as they say I have been partial to their sex and 
 unkind to my own. But, sir, my nervous infirmities you know— time 
 mends them not — and * Clarissa ' has almost killed me. You know how 
 my business engages me. You know by what snatches of time I write 
 that I may not neglect that, and that I may preserve that independency 
 which is the comfort of my life. I never sought out of myself for 
 patrons. My own industry and God's providence have been my whole 
 reliance. The great are not great to me unless they are good. And it 
 is a glorious privilege that a middling man enjoys who has preserved his 
 independency, and can occasionally (though not stoically) tell the world 
 what he thinks of that world, in hopes to contribute, though but by his 
 mite, to mend it." 
 
 The publication of ' Clarissa ' thus placed the respectable 
 old printer upon the highest pinnacle of contemporary fame. 
 There is a most amusing semi-romantic episode in his cor- 
 respondence, touching the beginning of liis personal 
 acquaintance with his correspondent Lady Bradshaigh, 
 which is too characteristic to be omitted. The lady (the 
 same who interceded for the reformation of Lovelace and the 
 happiness of Clarissa) had for some time corresponded with 
 him under a fictitious name, and a great deal of coquetting 
 had ensued touching a personal interview. Eichardson, 
 having in vain invited her to his house, and suggested other 
 modes of meeting, at last humours her fancy for stealing a 
 preliminary peep at him in the Park, by such a description 
 of himself as sets the good soul before us in all the homely 
 prose of his daily appearance. Never was a more innocent 
 little intrigue. Lady Bradshaigh herself was, as she informs 
 us, " turned forty," and of the full and rosy development not 
 uncommon at that age. Her " dear man/' a certain passive 
 rustic Sir Koger, who makes no appearance in his own 
 person, shared her enthusiasm and amused himself with her 
 letters. Yet she hesitates, like a mischievous girl, over the 
 innocent meeting, and teazes her unknown friend with ap- 
 pearances and disappearances, keeping him promenading 
 about the Mall, while she passes in her chair, and conducting 
 herself with all the malicious freaks of a young flirt. Here 
 is the sketch of his own respectable person, with which 
 Eichardson furnishes his troublesome correspondent : — 
 
THE NOVELIST. 405 
 
 " I go through the Park once or twice a-week to my little retirement, 
 but I will for a week together be in it every day three or four hours, at 
 your command, till you tell me you have seen a person who answers to 
 this description, namely : Short, rather plump than emaciated, notwith- 
 standing his complaints ; about live foot five inches ; fair wig ; lightish 
 cloth coat, all black besides ; one hand generally in his bosom, the other 
 a cane in it, which he leans upon under the skirts of his coat usually, 
 that it may imperceptibly serve him as a support, when attacked by sud- 
 den tremors or startings, and dizziness, which too frequently attack him, 
 but, thank God, not so often as formerly ; looking directly foreright, as 
 passers-by would imagine, but observing all that stirs on either hand of 
 him without moving his short neck ; hardly ever turning back ; of a 
 light-brown complexion ; teeth not yet failing him ; smoothish faced and 
 ruddy cheeked ; at some times looking to be about sixty-five, at other 
 times much younger ; a regular even pace, stealing aAvay ground rather 
 than seeming to rid it : a grey eye, too often overclouded by mistiness 
 from the head ; by chance lively — very lively it will be, if he have hope 
 of seeing a lady whom he loves and honours : his eye always on the ladies; 
 if they have very large hoops, he looks down and supercilious, and as 
 if he would be thought wise, but perhaps the sillier for that ; as he ap- 
 proaches a lady, his eye is never fixed first upon her face, but upon her 
 feet, and thence he raises it up, pretty quickly for a dull eye ; and one 
 would think (if we thought him at all worthy of observation) that from 
 her air and (the last beheld) her face, he sets her down in his mind as 
 so or so, and then passes on to the next object he meets — only then 
 looking back, if he greatly likes or dislikes, as if he would see if the lady 
 appear to be all of a piece in the one light or in the other. Are these 
 marks distinct enough, if you are resolved to keep all the advantages you 
 set out with ? And from this odd, this grotesque figure, think you, 
 madam, that you have anything to apprehend ? anything that will not 
 rather promote than check your mirth ? I dare be bold to say (and 
 allow it too) that you would rather see this figure than any other you 
 ever saw, whenever you should find yourself graver than you wish to be. " 
 
 Kichardson was at this time about sixty, perhaps the first 
 gallant of his age thus pursued and tantalised. The little 
 contest ended in a cordial meeting and long-enduring 
 friendship. 
 
 ' Clarissa ' was scarcely well out of his hands when we find 
 his friends beginning to assail him about the Good Man, 
 whom it now remained to him to draw. " As to the fine 
 manj' he writes in 1750, when "the divine 'Clarissa' " was 
 but newly published, '* what shall be done if such ladies as 
 
406 THE NOVELIST. 
 
 Miss Sutton, who can so well tell what she does not like, will 
 not do us the honour to tell us what she does ? Will she or 
 will you, madara, be so good as to acquaint me what he is to 
 do, and what he is not to do, in order to acquire and main- 
 tain an exemplary character ? " 
 
 The answer to this letter affords us a strange glimpse 
 into the social virtue, or rather want of virtue, of the time. 
 
 *' I believe," his correspondent replies, "the yonng ladies hardly know 
 themselves, for want of patterns, what an agreeable man with religion 
 and sense is, which makes me wish yon would show them one. They are 
 so used to see those they think genteel and polite without morals and 
 religion, that they imagine them almost if not quite incompatible, and 
 are afraid, if they insist too much on the last, they must give up the 
 first." 
 
 The correspondence goes on at much length, entering into 
 all the details of the subject. In August 1750, Kichardson 
 had begun the required piece of work, but complained of his 
 incapability of carrying it out. "My business has great 
 calls upon me," he says, "my very relaxations are business; 
 altogether, time of life too advanced — I fear, I shall not 
 be able to think of a new work. And then the title is 
 a very audacious one. To draw a man that good men would 
 approve, and that young ladies in such an age as this will 
 think amiable — tell me, madam, is not that an audacious 
 task?" But the subject was too tempting an occasion of 
 letter-writing to be let slip. Mrs Donaldson, who is the 
 leader of the assault, continues with unabating energy ; — 
 
 "To think of a man with religion, sense, and agreeableness is easy, 
 and to say he shall have this or that good quality ; but to work these up 
 into a story — to produce these in action— I know nobody who is capable 
 of doing it but Mr Eichardson ; and if he declines it, how shall I pretend 
 to encourage him ? And yet I wish he would try. ... If our hero 
 must fight, let it be before we are acquainted with him ; and when once 
 a man has shown his courage it will keep him from insult. Suppose the 
 woman he likes engaged in her affections, before she knew him, to one 
 of a more modern cast, could we not make our hero show virtue and 
 honour, and at last, to the credit of my sex, triumph over the man of 
 mode ? . . . Some faults, you observe, our virtuous man must have 
 — some sallies of passion ; the best mans character will bear it, though 
 a Clarissa's would not. I will not arrogate any merit to our sex from it, 
 but suppose it arises from custom, education, or what you will, 'tis 
 certain our man must not be an angel. Clarissa's goodness seems, if 
 
THE NOVELIST. 407 
 
 I may use the expression, intuitive. Our man, to make him natural, 
 must have some failings from passion, but must be soon recovered by- 
 reason and religion. . . . Our man must have so much of the Christ- 
 tian and philosopher that reflection must always set him right." 
 
 The counsellors became more exacting as time went 
 on : — 
 
 "This morning the doctor received a letter from Mr Skelton," writes 
 Mrs Delany. "He says he wishes you were to exhibit a bad woman as 
 well as a good man. I don't know but I wish so too ; but not as a 
 principal figure, only in your background, and by way of shade, to set 
 off some of your brightest figures." "My dear agi'eeable friend," the 
 same lady adds, on an after occasion, "has communicated to me the 
 sketch you have sent her of your truly fine gentleman. I have no fears 
 about him ; I am sure he will be as complete as human fancy and judg- 
 ment can make him. . . . She has told me your dispute about 
 Harriet's owning her passion so freely. If she has mere liking only, she 
 may tell her mind without reserve ; but if she is downright in love, it is 
 impossible she should, if as delicate as I am sure you would have her 
 be. . . . But this restraint goes no further than till the favoured 
 person has made his passion known. Then I think Harriet may (nay, 
 should) frankly and generously avow her inclination. In the mean time 
 I should only allow of some involuntary approbations which may flatter 
 Sir Charles, but for which, if Harriet recollects them, she should condemn 
 herself." 
 
 Eichardson, on liis part, coquets a little, giving his friends 
 to understand that he is much guided by their counsels ; 
 but yet, as we have seen, steadfastly taking his own way. 
 He is even pathetic when occasion serves. 
 
 "What can I mean, you are pleased to ask," he says, "by seeming 
 uncertain whether I shall publish my new work ? Have I not, madam, 
 already obtruded upon the world many volumes? and have I not reason 
 to apprehend that the world will be tired of me if I do ? When will 
 this scribbler stop, will it not be asked ? But when no more can be 
 written or published by the same hand, then indulgence will possibly for 
 that very reason be exerted in favour of the new piece. And a defunct 
 author will probably meet with better quarter than a living one ; espe- 
 cially as he is known to be a man in business — an obscure man, and 
 one who is guilty of very great presumption in daring to write at all, or 
 do anything but print the works of others." 
 
 This humility is, perhaps, a little overstained, considering 
 the triumph of Clarissa over all rivals. 
 
 In the letter last quoted he begs the assistance of Mrs 
 
408 THE NOVELIST. 
 
 Delany and her friends " in describing a scene or two in 
 upper life ; " and it is evident that, deluded by this extreme 
 amiability, his corres|)ondents were now and then so rash 
 as to write not only counsels but letters (for insertion in his 
 books) for him, and " remarks " upon various subjects, for 
 which the novelist is properly grateful, but — puts them in 
 his waste-basket and takes his own way. In short, there 
 can be little doubt that Kichardson, while occasionally tak- 
 ing a hint, with that supreme power of natural selection 
 which belongs to genius, did but amuse himself with the 
 deliberations of his little parliament. He permitted them 
 to persuade themselves that they were useful to him, and 
 that their suggestions and criticisms guided his work ; but 
 whenever their judgment went contrary to his own, his 
 decision is remorseless, though always full of thanks and 
 acknowledgments. In this matter it is evident he displayed 
 that smiling bland consistent resolution which makes by- 
 standers imagine the man moves by their influence, who is 
 all the time calmly, and without a moment's hesitation, 
 taking his own way. 
 
 In less than five years from the publication of ' Clarissa,' 
 ' Sir Charles Grandison ' was given to the world. Its pur- 
 pose has been so clearly expounded in the letters we have 
 quoted, that it seems unnecessary to add to this description 
 of its leading motif. It is the history of the fine man, so 
 often referred to — " our man,'' who was to embody in him- 
 self every perfection. This intention was but too rigidly 
 carried out. The fine, the splendid, the courteous Sir 
 Charles — politest of lovers, most speckless and charming of 
 men — is a composition too sweet for the common palate. It 
 would be foolish to say that there is not in this book much 
 of the same charm that we find in ' Clarissa ;' but a man 
 could not, as one of Richardson's correspondents regretfully 
 remarks, be brought into such a " delicate distress " as a 
 woman ; neither do the same rules answer with the coarser 
 male creatures which do very well for his sisters. Sir 
 Charles is the pink of every perfection known to the age ; 
 but he is so universally appreciated, so flattered and beloved, 
 everything prospers so beautifully in his hands, that all the 
 admiration the reader can give is forestalled, and he feels 
 himself limping a world behind the enthusiastic audience in 
 
THE NOVELIST. 409 
 
 the book itself. It is a book as true to the circumstances 
 and antecedents of its author as 'Clarissa" is above them. 
 There are all the complications of the love-story — all those 
 delicate expedients for staving off an- inevitable denouement^ 
 which the art of fiction has since elaborated ; there is the 
 excitement of an abduction, so managed as that any possible 
 stigma upon the heroine, or suggestion of impropriety, 
 should be avoided; there are a succession of promising 
 duels, all successfully eluded by the skill and grace and 
 irresistible courage of the matchless hero ; and, finally, 
 there is the double love, with all its delicacies, which seemed 
 at one time to secure for the author the happy ending all 
 his friends demanded, and the unhappy ending which he 
 himself approved. But Kichardson was older, and perhaps 
 more persuadable, and Clementina had no grievance to make 
 life impossible, as Clarissa had ; and accordingly, all ends, 
 as the ladies would have it, in rose-water and confectionery 
 and wedding-cakes, actual and prospective. 
 
 Perhaps it is beyond the powers of ordinary human nature 
 to strike the highest chords of mortal music more than once ; 
 Eichardson was no Shakespeare, but a very commonplace man, 
 preferred, one can scarcely tell how, to the privilege of one 
 creation. But his wings lasted him only till that commis- 
 sion was accomplished. Into his little natural round, which 
 he had paced in * Pamela,' he falls back again in 'Sir Charles 
 Grandison.' He had been snatched out of it into higher 
 regions for one moment of full inspiration, but now the good 
 old soul dropped back. His garland and his singing-robes 
 fell from him. His fine gentleman is virtue incarnate in a 
 laced coat and the daintiest of ruffles. He wears gold lace 
 and point upon his very soul. Silk and velvet and embroid- 
 ery are moral qualities in him. He has no existence out 
 of those fine, too fine clothes ; his principles and his manners 
 are carefully cut to harmonise with that lovely exterior. 
 The ideal is still feminine, but it has shifted its ground and 
 become a kind of housemaid's ideal, the perfection of every- 
 thing that is fine. In 'Clarissa,' as we have said, the author 
 had seized, with a perfection which as yet no woman has 
 equalled, the higher tone of feminine feeling. In ' Sir Charles 
 Grandison ' he has caught, with a reality equally unrivalled, 
 the lower and less exalted tone. Nothing could be more 
 
410 THE NOVELIST. 
 
 exact than the flutter of womanish correspondences, the uni- 
 versal worship given by all the circle to the idol in the 
 midst ; the mixture of envy and fondness with which his 
 chosen wife is surrounded ; the girlish murmurs of applause, 
 the frank adoration of the sisters, the beatific avowals of the 
 bride. Such a chanting of litanies and burning of incense 
 is, unfortunately for the objects of it, still a frequent evi- 
 dence of womanish enthusiasm. Its effect, generally, is to 
 make the man who is the central figure look extremely 
 foolish to the outside world. But here the instincts of the 
 author come in to save that last degradation. Sir Charles is 
 not made to look foolish. How he is saved from it, it is 
 difficult to tell — but he is saved. He is invested with all 
 the preternatural solemnity and grandeur of the as yet un- 
 developed being familiarly known to this too familiar age as 
 a prig ; but he is not made to look like a fool — which, in 
 the circumstances, is about the highest praise that could be 
 given. 
 
 ' Sir Charles Grandison' was published in 1753, the author 
 being sixty-four, still involved in the toils of business, and 
 suffering from nervous complaints, which often made him 
 unable to write. Its reception by the world was no less 
 flattering than had been that of the others. His friend, Dr 
 Young, who had feared that the new work might diminish 
 the reputation gained by ' Clarissa,' retracted his opinion at 
 once. He writes : — 
 
 " I now applaud what I presumed to blame ; 
 After Clarissa you shall rise in fame. " 
 
 " I look upon you as an instrument of providence adjusted to the pecu- 
 liar exigencies of the times," says the same admiring friend, "in which 
 all would be fine gentlemen, and only are at a loss to know what that 
 means. While they read, perhaps, from pure vanity, they do not read 
 in vain, and are betrayed into benefit whilst mere amusement is their 
 pursuit. . . . And as I look upon you as an instrument of provi- 
 dence, 1 likewise look on you as a sure heir of a double immortalitj''. 
 "When our language fails one indeed may cease ; but the failure of the 
 heavens and the earth will put no period to the other." 
 
 This letter begins with an outburst of *' Joy to you, dear 
 sir, and joy to the world ; you have done great things for 
 it ; and I will venture to affirm that no one shall read you 
 without benefit or^ — guilt." In such strains did his friends 
 
THE NOVELIST. 411 
 
 sound forth the praises of the successful author. And in- 
 deed it was for this high reward he consciously strove — not 
 for the guerdon of art, or such praise as might be shared by 
 a profane boisterous Fielding or wicked Tristram Shandy. 
 He liimself informs us that his novels appear in the humble 
 guise of novels, " only by way of accommodation to the 
 manners and tastes of an age overwhelmed with luxury, and 
 abandoned to sound and sensitiveness ; " and, complaining of 
 some excisions made by his French translator, the Abbe 
 Prevost, adds: *' He treats the story" ('Clarissa') *'asatrue 
 one; and says, in one place, that the English editor has often 
 sacrificed his story to moral instructions, warnings, &c. 
 The very motive with me," adds Kichardson, "of the story's 
 being written at all." 
 
 These words are amusingly suggestive of the differences 
 of national conception in point of art. Yet it is curious to 
 find that the success of Eichardson's works, and especially 
 of ' Clarissa,' in France, was immediate ; and there can be no 
 doubt that they are still better known and more appreciated 
 among our neighbours than by ourselves — a fact, perhaps, 
 not so extraordinary as it looks upon the surface, since the 
 classical productions of any language are always first pre- 
 sented to foreign students. Mrs Barbauld tells us of a 
 Frenchman who, in her own time and knowledge, "paid a 
 visit to Hampstead for the sole purpose of finding out the 
 house in the flask walk, where Clarissa lodged, and was sur- 
 prised at the ignorance or indifference of the inhabitants on 
 that subject." 
 
 ' Grandison ' was the last of Eichardson's works. In it he 
 had completed the cycle of labour which commended itself to 
 his mind. He had drawn (accidentally) the simple girl re- 
 sisting vice, and making a very good thing of her virtue. 
 Startled by his own success, he had then roused all his 
 faculties to the creation of a paragon maiden ; and the only 
 thing that remained for him to do was then the paragon 
 man. That task fulfilled, his office as a moralist was over. 
 In vain his friends tempted him to other exertions. The 
 bad woman of Mr Skelton, the widow of Lady Bradshaigh, 
 had no attractions for him. His work was done ; and it is 
 no small testimony to the simple kindly nature of the man 
 to find him back at his printing, writing the invaluable 
 
412 THE NOVELIST. 
 
 judicious letters of an experienced publisher to the authors 
 whose works passed through his hands. Thus, all the 
 blaze of his own literary fame still surrounding him, we find 
 him giving modest counsel to Dr Young about the preface 
 to the 'Night Thoughts.' "I humbly think this part cannot 
 be too delicately mentioned," he says. "Might not, sir, the 
 manner of introducing what relates to the army be less 
 violent, if I may so express myself, and the connection be 
 made more easy?" "A thousand thanks, my best friend, 
 for restoring me to myself," cries Young, in reply ; "I shall 
 follow your advice in the dedication."" This is not the only 
 instance of his careful regard for the fame and success of 
 his friends. He had but a few years more to live, but his 
 activity was as yet undiminished. To the last he continued 
 to write letters, discussing all sorts of subjects, social ethics 
 of every description, and the semi-metaphysical questions 
 which are dear to women, with his dear girls, who call him 
 " my papa," and communicate with each other to his praise 
 and glory: "Miss Hecky," writing to "her 8ukey" or "her 
 Prissy," in strains of adoration, mingled with the liveliest 
 sprightly sketches of their odd old-fashioned life. He 
 pulled down his old printing-offices, and built new and much 
 enlarged ones, while all this pleasant chatter went on ; and 
 how the old man, superintending his work and his buildings, 
 could find time for letters of a dozen pages, is a mystery 
 which the reader will find it difficult to fathom. He was 
 worried, too, by an Irish piracy of his books, which gave 
 him no small trouble, and by many bodily infirmities. It is 
 taking an ungenerous advantage of the kind soul to post- 
 pone to this twilight period of his days the quotation of his 
 sentiments about his great rivals ; and yet these are too 
 characteristic to be left out. We have already said that he 
 never forgave Fielding for the spiteful travesty attempted 
 in the ' Joseph Andrews ' — a feeling which is very compre- 
 hensible, and even excusable, and no doubt coloured his 
 judgment in respect to his competitor's future works. But 
 it is very doubtful whether, under any circumstances, two 
 minds so dissimilar could have appreciated each other. It 
 is thus Richardson speaks of the unquestionably shabby 
 meaning, so soon and so splendidly swallowed up in one real 
 creation, of Fielding's first work : — 
 
THE NOVELIST. 413 
 
 " So long as tlie world will receive, Mr Fielding will write. Have you 
 ever seen a list of his performances ? Nothing but a shorter life than I 
 can wish him can hinder him from writing himself out of date. The 
 * Pamela ' which he abused in his ' Shamela ' taught him how to write to 
 please, though his manners are so different. Before his ' Joseph Andrews ' 
 (hints and names taken from that story with a lewd and ungenerous en- 
 graftment), the poor man wrote without being read, except when his * Pas- 
 quins,' &c., roused party attention and the legislature at the same time. 
 According to that of Juvenal, which may be thus translated, — 
 
 ' "Wouldst thou be read, or wouldst thou bread insure, ■' 
 
 Dare something worthy Newgate or the Tower.' 
 
 In the former of which (removed from inns and alehouses) will some of 
 his worst scenes be laid, and perhaps not unusefully. I hope not." 
 
 At a later period Eichardson announces that " Fielding 
 has over-written or rather W7zc?er- written himself " in 'Amelia.' 
 " The piece," he says, " is as dead as if it had been published 
 forty years ago as to sale. . . . His brawls, his jeers, 
 his gaols, his sponging-houses, are all drawn from what he 
 has seen or known. As I said, he has little or no invention." 
 The good man, however, reaches the climax of hallucination, 
 when he thus addresses Miss Fielding, the sister of the 
 moralist, and herself the author of some forgotten books. 
 He tells her he has just reperused a collection of letters pub- 
 lished by her. " What knowledge of the human heart ! " he 
 exclaims ; " well might a critical judge of writing say, as he 
 did to me, that your late brother's knowledge of it was not 
 (fine writer as he was) comparable to yours. His was but as 
 the knowledge of the outside of a clock-work machine, while 
 yours was that of all the fine springs and movements of the 
 inside " ! 
 
 Nor is he more lenient to Sterne. " Who is this Yorick ? 
 you are pleased to ask me," he writes to the Bishop of Sodor 
 and Man. " You cannot, I imagine, have looked into his 
 books ; execrable, I cannot but call them." A lady, whom 
 he quotes, a friend of his daughter's in the country, gives a 
 less severe but not less decided judgment. '' There is sub- 
 ject for mirth, and some affecting strokes," she says. " Yor- 
 ick, Uncle Toby, and Trim are admirably characterised, and 
 very interesting; . . . but let not * Tristram Shandy ' be 
 ranked among the well-chosen authors in your library." " I 
 am told that the third and fourth volumes are worse, if pos- 
 
414 THE NOVELIST. 
 
 sible, than the two first," adds Eichardson, " which only I 
 have had the patience to rim through." Thus it will be 
 seen that, open-hearted as the good man was, there was 
 a limit to his amiability ; and that his rivals or betters in his 
 special department were less dear to him than the rest of 
 mankind. " Mark my prophecy that, by another season, this 
 performance " (' Tristram Shandy ') " will be as much decried 
 as it is now extolled," says the correspondent wdiom he quotes; 
 "for it has not intrinsic merit sufficient to prevent it sinking 
 when no longer upheld by the short-lived breath of fashion." 
 Let us forgive him, if he takes pleasure in the thought. It 
 is the only meanness of which the good soul seems capable ; 
 and when we consider the ridicule that had been poured 
 upon himself by all the wits, their scorn of his humble degree 
 and respectable virtuous life, and the solemn sense he had of 
 the responsibilities attending the literary faculty, and the 
 heavy guilt of every man who used it in indifference to the 
 interests of morality, some excuse may be found for the old 
 man. No doubt he thought it was the evil tendencies of 
 these works that moved him to so much indignation ; and it 
 is equally without doubt that in an author, himself so suc- 
 cessful, jealousy could not be the only motive, but that a 
 real and unaffected horror of sin and nastiness must have 
 counted for much in his ill-nature. If any of the present 
 living brotherhood of poets were to employ similar language 
 in respect to Mr Swinburne, would anybody say it was envy? 
 The last few years of Richardson's life were spent in com- 
 parative ease and leisure. He had made his business great 
 and flourishing, and, with a natural regret, lamented that he 
 had no son to leave it to. He had been long subject to in- 
 firmities which are vaguely described as nervous disorders, 
 one of which was a shaking hand, which made him unable 
 to write. These weaknesses increased with age ; and in 
 the year 1761, when he had attained the age of seventy-two, 
 a stroke of apoplexy put an end to his blameless homely life. 
 He left four daughters behind him, all that remained of his 
 family, and a reputation quite unique in history. It seems 
 needless to repeat the description of an anomaly so w^ell 
 known and fully acknowledged. He was a respectable trades- 
 man, distinguished by no aspirations (so far as is apparent) 
 beyond his peers ; a good printer, entering with all his heart 
 
THE NOVELIST. 415 
 
 into his business ; a comfortable soul, fond of his fireside and 
 his slippers, and his garden and all homely pleasures ; never 
 owing a guinea nor transgressing a rule of morality, accord- 
 ing to the dreadful accusation we have elsewhere quoted ; 
 and yet so much a poet that he has added at least one char- 
 acter to the inheritance of the world, of which Shakespeare 
 need not have been ashamed — the most celestial thing, the 
 highest imaginative effort of his generation. Nothing can 
 be more unlike Richardson than Clarissa, and yet without 
 Richardson Clarissa had not been. 
 
XL 
 
 THE SCEPTIC. 
 
 There is no title wliicli has been more differently applied, or 
 called forth more diverse sentiments, than that by which we 
 have distinguished the subject of the present sketch. To 
 many, perhaps most, readers it is a name of reproach, imply- 
 ing at once intellectual blindness and some degree of moral 
 obliquity. It presents before them the image of a man per- 
 sistently, and perhaps wilfully, denying the truth, closing 
 his eyes to it, preferring not to see ; a man whose evil life 
 moves him to reject the unvarying morality of revelation, or 
 whose self-conceit prompts him to place his own opinion 
 above all authority ; a being from whom good deeds and vir- 
 tuous dispositions are not to be looked for— who is without 
 principle, and therefore not to be depended on in this life, 
 and whom, with a certain satisfaction, the most charitable 
 may set down as likely to wake up very uncomfortably in 
 the life beyond. On the other hand, there are many, in an 
 age which has taken "honest doubt"' under its patronage 
 and protection, to whom a sceptic is an interesting being, 
 almost crazed by his efforts to believe in Christianity, sadly 
 acknowledging all its beauties, but bound by hard fate to see 
 more clearly, to sift evidence more closely, to judge more 
 conscientiously, than his fellows. The real character, as we 
 are about to attempt its portraiture, has little in common with 
 either conception. The word sceptic, like the corresponding 
 word enthusiast, describes a certain class of minds rather 
 than a peculiar set of opinions. In this sense there are 
 some who are good Christians and yet sceptics undeniable, 
 
THE SCEPTIC. 417 
 
 just as there are enthusiasts whose minds are untouched by 
 religion. The character is not attractive, nor does it appeal 
 to those higher human sympathies which are called forth by 
 manifestations of such qualities as faith, loyalty, and selt- 
 devotion ; but yet it is a real personality, and not unworthy 
 of attention among the many different types of intellectual 
 life. 
 
 The character of the true sceptic was never more clearly 
 exhibited than by David Hume, the philosopher and historian, 
 whose name is so well known and firmly established among 
 the greatest of his century, and whose works and influence 
 have produced as much effect upon men's minds and beliefs 
 as it is possible for a perpetual negative to produce. He is 
 not only a born representative of the class, but even to a great 
 extent of his time, which was an unbelieving age, full of pro- 
 fanities, great and small, and an immense and astonishing 
 indifference to everything spiritual and unseen. He was one 
 of the most clear-sighted men of his day — keen in pursuit of 
 truth, not moved by any throes of mental anguish because of 
 his inability to believe one dogma or another, but still far 
 from setting himself up as an authority above other autho- 
 rities, or arrogating a superior judgment. He was no pro- 
 fligate, eager to cover his sins by the abrogation of moral 
 laws — no revolutionary, bent upon satisfying his own am- 
 bition by the overturn of all things. Neither was his spirit 
 affected by the gloomy nothingness of the system he believed. 
 He was an honest, cheerful, comfortable, unexcited soul, full 
 of a steady power of labour, much patience and good-humour, 
 and a certain sober light-heartedness, whatever was his for- 
 tune. The devoutest believer, with all the succours of re- 
 ligion, could not have behaved with more composure and dig- 
 nity in the presence of death ; nor is the sober quiet of his 
 life less remarkable. He was good to his friends, not un- 
 generous to his opponents. He took success quietly and 
 misfortune undauntedly. Pope Innocent's musings, in Mr 
 Browning's poem, over the strange and woeful fact that "the 
 Christians in their panoply " do no greater deeds than those 
 performed by '*the instincts of the natural man" — could not 
 have had a more remarkable proof than is furnished by this 
 unbeliever. He was in his way a good man, as good as any- 
 body round him. He was a cheerful human creature, quite 
 
 2 D 
 
418 THE SCEPTIC. 
 
 undaunted by the darkness in which his being was shrouded ; 
 accepting life with all its inevitable penalties just as bravely, 
 good-humouredly, and patiently as if the rewards of heaven 
 awaited him at the end, yet believing in no rewards of 
 heaven. The problem is one which it is right to consider on 
 its own merits, and with as little prejudice as we may. 
 
 David Hume was born in the year 1711, of a good Ber- 
 wickshire family, well thought of in the country-side, though 
 without any apparent distinction but that of rural gentility. 
 His mother, to whose sole charge he was left at a very early 
 age, was " a woman," as he tells us, " of singular merit, who, 
 though young and handsome, devoted herself entirely to the 
 rearing and education of her children/' He '' passed through 
 the ordinaiy course of education with success " — though his 
 name, we are informed by Mr Hill Burton, his biographer, 
 from whose full and able narrative we chiefly quote, does not 
 occur in any list of graduates of his university. 
 
 His earliest letters are full of a clumsy precocious philo- 
 sophy, quaintly mingled with familiar gossip. " Greatness 
 and elevation of soul," he writes, " are to be found only in 
 study and contemplation ; this can alone teach us to look down 
 on human assailants ; " and then he proceeds to inform his 
 correspondent that " John has bought a horse ; he thinks it 
 neither cheap nor dear. It has no fault, but boggles a little." 
 This junction of the lowly and the sublime belongs to the 
 year 1727, when he was sixteen. By that time he had gone 
 through his university career, according to the curious habit 
 of Scotland, and had returned to Ninewells, his ancestral 
 home, there to reflect upon himself and his thoughts, and 
 make unconscious soundings in the yet shallow waters on 
 which his boyish boat was launched. Even at this early 
 period the character of the man had already formed itself; 
 a ponderous thoughtfulness, moved by no special sympathy 
 for his kind, nor high-placed ideal, fond of fact and certainty, 
 uninfluenced even by that superficial imagination which be- 
 longs to youth, shows itself in him. One of the most re- 
 markable indications of his curiously unexcitable fancy is a 
 " Historical Essay upon Chivalry and Modem Honour," which 
 was found among his early papers. " It is written with great 
 precision and neatness," we are informed, and is " no despic- 
 able specimen of caligraphy ; " which is a pleasant reminder 
 
THE SCEPTIC. 419 
 
 that the boy-philosopher was still a boy, fond of his young 
 productions, and almost as much interested in the fineness 
 of his up-strokes as in the solidity of his conclusions. But 
 even this subject, generally so dazzling to the unsophisticated 
 mind, has no effect on the imagination of our young sceptic. 
 The theory he forms in respect to it is about as disparaging 
 to chivalry as anything which could have entered the hlas^ 
 brain of a prosaic old man of the world. He tells us that the 
 whole system was but a barbarous attempt to imitate the 
 graces of the ancient civilisation — the device of a savage to 
 replace the majestic and beautiful models of antiquity by 
 heaping together a mass of fantastic ornaments. A similar 
 impulse, he says, carried into the regions of art, produced 
 *' that heap of confusion and irregularity " known as Gothic 
 architecture ! A.b the latter was a barbarous effort to copy 
 the beauty of ancient buildings, so the former was a frenzied 
 attempt to imitate the classic splendour of manners and mo- 
 rals. Seventeen years or so old, with the blood of knights 
 in his veins, living in a historic country full of tales and 
 tokens of wild feudal devotion and heroism, the boy could 
 find no better nor profounder explanation of a system so 
 strangely powerful that (in theory at least) it made the least 
 worldly of all codes dominant for centuries over a self-seeking 
 world. Even his youth, which might have been of some use 
 in such an emergency, gave him no better aid than his matu- 
 rity did in after times ; and thus it will be seen that from 
 the very beginning of his career, his want of imagination 
 baffled the very clearness of his insight, and made him mor- 
 ally incapable, as the sceptical intelligence always must be, 
 of penetrating into the deepest secrets of that human nature 
 which he professed to plumb and fathom with impartial severe 
 logic to its most intimate depths. 
 
 This essay, which was never published, belongs to the 
 prefatory period of his life which he spent at home — a period 
 of about seven years between the conclusion of his formal 
 education and his first start in life. This was a long time 
 to be wasted by a Scotch lad of thrifty enterprising race, as 
 well as of unusual mental powers ; but probably the develop- 
 ment of his genius was not of a kind to impress the little audi- 
 ence surrounding him. " Our Davie's a fine good-humoured 
 crater," his mother is reported to have said of him, " but un- 
 
420 THE SCEPTIC. 
 
 common wake-minded ; " and altliougli he sliowed no lack of 
 energy and resolution in later life, it is evident that to all 
 outward appearance he was passive in his opening chapter; 
 brooding much on himself and his capabilities, and bent on 
 his own way, yet offering no demonstration of active will, or 
 strong inclination, to those who supposed it lay in their hands 
 to decide the tenor of his life. His family, which, like so 
 many families of Scotch gentlefolks, was largely connected 
 with lawyers, destined him for that profession — for he was a 
 younger brother scantily provided for. " My studious dispo- 
 sition, my sobriety, and my industry, gave my family a notion 
 that the law was a proper profession for me," he says ; "but 
 I formed an insurmountable aversion to everything but the 
 pursuits of philosophy and general learning." His mother 
 and brother, sagacious, homely observers, thinking of nothing 
 beyond the ordinary course of existence, and such occupation 
 as might become the son of a good house, made their plans 
 for him as they would have done for any other younger son. 
 It was no evil lot to which they devoted him. He might 
 have become Baron Hume, like his nephew. He might have 
 risen to the bench, and added a Lord Ninewells to the list of 
 the family honours. The career was honourable and familiar, 
 and scarcely even precarious — not to be mentioned in the 
 same breath with its only alternatives — the position of a tra- 
 velling tutor or " governor," or the doubtful success of trade. 
 The Scottish reader will easily call up before him the picture 
 of the country house, half mansion, half farm, the acute leddy, 
 with her undisguised Scotch and practical views, and John 
 the laird, who thought of no other love so long as his mother 
 ruled the frugal house, and kept the old family bonds intact. 
 But while they discussed and rediscussed "■ our Davie's " 
 fortunes, he himself was occupied with the matter in a very 
 different way. Such a crisis as forms the turning-point in 
 the lives of so many notable men, had come upon the lad in 
 the strangest unfamiliar shape. The form it took was not 
 of that struggle between the great moral and spiritual forces 
 which we understand so little, out of which he might have 
 come converted^ to use the ordinary phraseology, and con- 
 scious of new motives and a changed life. It was not a 
 supreme crisis of the heart, rent asunder by human passion. 
 But yet something had come upon him which he could not 
 
THE SCEPTIC. 421 
 
 explain, which brought him to a dead stop in his career, and 
 was beyond his control ; and the strange boy perceived by 
 instinct the gravity of the crisis. Inspecting himself with 
 critical eyes, he saw that the moment was one which must 
 determine his future existence. His heart and his soul had 
 come to a pause, and he had to explain the reason to himself. 
 He does this in a letter to a physician, which, long as it is, 
 is too characteristic to be passed by. In this curious com- 
 position he sets down every detail of his case with calm in- 
 terest and composure : it does not occur to him to attribute 
 it to any influence from heaven or hell. That God should 
 be likely to take any trouble in the matter is not within his 
 conception of possibilities ; neither is there any terrestrial 
 creature who has been instrumental in producing the strange 
 tumult and prostration which he feels within him. Passion 
 has nothing to do with it ; his affections have received no 
 check, his hopes no disappointment. Having maturely con- 
 sidered all things, he concludes naturally that it must, after 
 all, be his body that is to blame. He must be ill, though he 
 does not know it. Thus, in an age which had not begun to 
 form any dogmas about the influence of the digestion upon 
 the mind, that modern theory is anticipated by a lad of twenty, 
 in whom one would naturally suppose a thousand fantastic 
 reasons for these mental disturbances would present them- 
 selves, sooner than that simple stomachical explanation which 
 saves so much trouble. The strongest evidence of a mind 
 already full of energy and activity, in the truest and liveliest 
 action, and of heart, soul, and imagination totally una wakened, 
 is to be found in this letter, which was written apparently 
 not later than his twentieth year : — 
 
 ** Sir, — Not being acquainted with this handwriting, you will pro- 
 bably look to the bottom to find the subscription, and not finding any 
 will certainly wonder at this strange method of addressing you. I must 
 here, in the beginning, beg you to excuse it, and to persuade you to read 
 what follows with some attention, must tell you that this gives you an 
 opportunity to do a very good-natured action, which I believe is the most 
 powerful argument I can use. I need not tell you that I am your coun- 
 tryman, a Scotsman ; for without any such tie, I dare rely upon your 
 humanity even to a perfect stranger, such as I am. The favour I beg of 
 you is your advice, and the reason why I address myself in particular to 
 you need not be told, as one must be a skilful physician, a man of letters, 
 
422 THE SCEPTIC. 
 
 of wit, of good sense, and of great humanity, to give me a satisfying 
 answer. . . . Trusting, however, to your candour and generosity, I 
 shall, without further preface, proceed to open up to you the present con- 
 dition of my health, and to do that the more effectually shall give you a 
 kind of history of my life, after which you will easily learn why I keep 
 my name a secret. 
 
 " You must know, then, that from my earliest infancy I found always 
 a strong inclination to books and letters. As our college education in 
 Scotland, extending little further than the languages, ends commonly 
 when we are about fourteen or fifteen years of age, I was after that left to 
 my own choice in my reading, and found it incline me almost equally to 
 books of reasoning and philosophy, and to poetry and the polite authors. 
 Every one who is acquainted either with the philosophers or critics knows 
 that there is nothing yet established in either of these two sciences, and 
 that they contain little more than endless disputes, even in the most fun- 
 damental articles. Upon examination of these, I found a certain boldness 
 of temper growing in me which was not inclined to submit to any authority 
 in these subjects, but led me to seek out some new medium by which 
 truth might be established. After much study and reflection on this, at 
 last, when I was about eighteen years of age, there seemed to be opened 
 up to me a new scene of thought which transported me beyond measure, 
 and made me, with an ardour natural to young men, throw up every 
 other pleasure or business to apply entirely to it. The law, which was 
 the business I designed to follow, appeared nauseous to me, and I could 
 think of no other way of pushing my fortune in the world but that of a 
 scholar and philosopher. I was infinitely happy in this course of life for 
 some months, till at last, about the beginning of September 1729, all my 
 ardour seemed in a moment to be extinguished, and I could no longer 
 raise my mind to that pitch which formerly gave me such excessive 
 pleasure. I felt no uneasiness or want of spirits when I laid aside my 
 book, and therefore never imagined there was any bodily distemper in the 
 case, but that my coldness proceeded from a laziness of temper which 
 must be overcome by redoubling my application. In this condition I 
 remained for nine months, very uneasy to myself, as you may well 
 imagine, but without growing any worse, which was a miracle. There 
 was another particular which contributed more than anything to waste 
 my spirits and bring on me this distemper, which was, that having read 
 many books of morality, such as Cicero, Seneca, and Plutarch, and being 
 smit with their beautiful representations of virtue and philosophy, I 
 undertook the improvement of my temper and will along with my 
 reason and understanding. I was continually fortifying myself with re- 
 flections against death, and poverty, and shame, and pain, and all the 
 other calamities of life. These, no doubt, are exceeding useful when 
 joined with an active life, because the occasion being presented along with 
 the reflection works it into the soul, and makes it take a deep impression ; 
 but in solitude they serve to little other purpose than to waste the spirits, 
 
THE SCEPTIC. 423 
 
 the force of the mind meeting with no resistance, but wasting itself in the 
 air, like our arm when it misses its aim. This, however, I did not learn 
 but by experience, and till I had already ruined my health, though I was 
 not sensible of it. . . . Thus I have given you a full account of the 
 condition of my body ; and without staying to ask pardon, as I ought to 
 do, for so tedious a story, shall explain to you how my mind stood all 
 this time, which on every occasion, especially in this distemper, have a 
 very near connection together. Having now time and leisure to cool my 
 inflamed imagination, I began to consider seriously how I should proceed 
 in my philosophical inquiries. I found that the moral philosophy trans- 
 mitted to us by antiquity laboured under the same inconvenience that 
 has been found in their natural philosophy, of being entirely hypothetical, 
 and depending more upon invention than experience : eveiy one con- 
 sulted his fancy in erecting schemes of virtue and of happiness without 
 regarding human nature, upon which every moral conclusion must de- 
 pend. This, therefore, I resolved to make my principal study, and the 
 source from which I would derive every truth in criticism as well as 
 morality. I believe it is a certain fact, that most of the philosophers 
 who have gone before us have been overthrown by the greatness of their 
 genius, and that little more is required to make a man succeed in this 
 study than to throw off all prejudices either for his own opinions or for 
 those of others. At least this is all I have to depend on for the truth of 
 my reasonings, which I have multiplied to such a degree, that within 
 these three years I find I have scribbled many a quire of paper, in which 
 there is nothing contained but my own inventions. This, with the 
 reading most of the celebrated books in Latin, French, and English, and 
 acquiring the Italian, you may think a sufficient business for one in 
 perfect health, and so it would had it been done to any purpose ; but my 
 disease was a cruel encumbrance on me. I found that I was not able to 
 follow out any train of thought by one continued stretch of view, but by 
 repeated interruptions, and by refreshing my eye from time to time upon 
 other objects. Yet with this inconvenience I have collected the rude 
 materials for many volumes ; but in reducing these to words, when one 
 must bring the idea he comprehended in gross, nearer to him, so as to 
 contemplate its minutest parts, and keep it steadily in his eye, so as to 
 copy these parts in order, — this I found impracticable to me, nor were 
 my spirits equal to so severe an employment. Here lay my greatest 
 calamity. I had no hopes of delivering my opinions with such elegance 
 and neatness as to draw to me the attention of the world, and I would 
 rather live and die in obscurity than produce them maimed and im- 
 perfect. 
 
 "Such a miserable disappointment I scarce ever remember to have 
 heard of. The small distance betwixt me and perfect health makes me 
 the more uneasy in my present situation. It is a weakness rather than a 
 lowness of spirits which troubles me, and there seems to be as great a 
 difference betwixt my distemper and common vapours, as betwixt 
 
424 THE SCEPTIC. 
 
 vapours and madness. I have noticed in the writings of the French 
 mystics, and in those of our fanatics here, that when they give a history 
 of the situation of their souls, they mention a coldness and desertion of 
 the spirit which frequently returns ; and some of them, at the beginning, 
 have been tormented with it many years, As this kind of devotion 
 depends entirely on the force of passion, and consequently of the animal 
 spirits, I have often thought that their case and mine were pretty 
 parallel, and that their rapturous admirations might discompose the 
 fabric of the nerves and brain as much as profound reflections, and that 
 warmth or enthusiasm which is inseparable from them." 
 
 That the subject of this curious piece of analysis should 
 himself perceive the resemblance between his own condition 
 and that of the " French mystics " and " fanatics " at home, 
 is one of the strangest features in the strange narrative. 
 And that it should never occur to him to attribute it to a 
 mental or spiritual cause, is more remarkable still. The 
 idea of any conflict for him between the powers of light and 
 darkness — of any rising up of nature within him, to resolve 
 once for all the inevitable problem on which side his life was 
 to be ranged, would have simply amused the young man. 
 He was too good-tempered and genial by nature to have 
 treated the supposition with a sneer ; but the unheroic boy 
 would have laughed at the notion with unintentional humility. 
 The letter we have just quoted was, it appears probable, 
 never sent to the eminent physician for whom it was destined ; 
 but remained among his papers, to throw its homely reve- 
 lation upon a youth unlike the youth of other men : an 
 early morning without dew or mist, or signs of the recent 
 aurora — calm in colour as a leaden sky, sober as a day in 
 autumn, quiet as the silence of the fields ; yet so divorced 
 from all natural metaphors, that there is no sense of infini- 
 tude, no mystery of space or distance about it, but all toned 
 down into a universal calm. 
 
 " I would not quit my pretensions to learning but with 
 my last breath," he adds, while discussing the chances of 
 " a more active life " which were before him ; but something 
 had to be done to break the spell which no doubt the quiet 
 existence of Ninewells rather strengthened than interrupted. 
 In the brief and succinct biography which he entitles " My 
 own Life," the story is told in half-a-dozen words. " My 
 very slender fortune," he says, ''being unsuitable to this 
 
THE SCEPTIC. 425 
 
 plan of life (that of a student and philosopher), and my 
 health being a little broken by my ardent application, I was 
 tempted, or rather forced, to make a very feeble trial for 
 entering into a more active scene of life. In 1734 I went to 
 Bristol with some recommendations to eminent merchants, 
 but in a few months found that scene totally unsuitable to 
 me." This was all that came of the attempt to throw his 
 life into a new channel. In the same year he seems to have 
 finally made up his mind to yield to his inclinations, and let 
 fortune and the world go by. Such a man was qualified, as 
 few men are, for the austere effort of frugality which enables 
 a poor scholar to live on a pittance out of love for his books. 
 Imagination, it is evident, would never lead him astray; 
 and though he was always kind and friendly, and ready to 
 share with his intimates, yet his range of sympathies was too 
 limited to move him towards any of the foolish generosities 
 which we pardon to youth. Then he had the training of his 
 careful Berwickshire home to fortify him in his new career. 
 The amount of the income upon which he ventured to em- 
 brace a life of philosophical research is not mentioned ; but 
 as he afterwards assures us that he has acquired a compet- 
 ence when he manages to scrape together £1000, and at a 
 much later period of his life thinks £150 a-year a sufficient 
 provision for life in London, it must have been scanty in- 
 deed. His first start in life was attended by an entire 
 separation from home and all its associations. *' I went over 
 to France," he says, " with a view of prosecuting my studies 
 in a country retreat ; and I then laid that plan of life which 
 I have steadily and successfully pursued. I resolved to 
 make a very rigid frugality supply my deficiency of fortune, 
 to maintain unimpaired my independency, and to regard 
 every object as contemptible, except the improvement of my 
 talents in literature." 
 
 It would be against all the traditions of literature not to 
 respect and glorify this determination — which was, there is 
 no doubt, in its way a noble one. But yet there is some- 
 thing in the picture of the young Scotchman retiring to the 
 dismal quiet of a French provincial town — of all solitudes 
 the most restricted, and of all conventional places the most 
 conventional — separating himself without any profounder 
 cause from his ancient associations, which chills out the 
 
426 THE SCEPTIC. 
 
 sympathy from the mind of the beholder. It is another 
 proof of that strange good-humoured indifference to all the 
 deeper wants of humanity, which was always one of his lead- 
 ing characteristics. He paused for some time in Paris — a 
 more natural shelter for all the busy thoughts that were 
 germinating in his mind — and went about in that new 
 strange world attracted by matters very little likely, one 
 would have thought, to secure the attention of a youDg man 
 setting out in the world. Instead of affording us a glimpse 
 of the picturesque old capital which now exists no longer, 
 he tells us of the miracles performed at the tomb of the 
 Abbe Paris ; recording with curious significance and secret 
 irony the " incontestable " proof of miraculous cures wrought 
 by that holy personage. His mind, it is evident, was more 
 occupied with the different trains of thought gradually 
 growing to completion within himself, than by the external 
 novelty around him, notwithstanding the favourable impres- 
 sion which French life, manners, and dispositions had made 
 upon him. He proceeded to Klieims on leaving Paris, and 
 there established himself. It "is to be the place of my abode 
 for some considerable time," he writes, '^ and where I hope both 
 to spend my time happily for the present, and lay up a stock 
 for the future." This curious choice of an obscure French 
 country town, possessing, no doubt, a university, but not of 
 any special distinction, is one of the least comprehensible 
 things in the history of the time : in which we constantly find 
 travellers of note, and young noblemen with their governors, 
 established in the French provinces, in towns now fallen into 
 complete obscurity, and at no time more remarkable, except, 
 perhaps, for the beauty of their churches, than an English 
 county town of corresponding size. And that one attraction, 
 the glorious Grothic cathedrals of France, was little appreci- 
 ated by the eighteenth century. 
 
 The first piece of contemporary observation which Hume 
 offers us is marked, like everything else, by his peculiar 
 modes of thought. The difference of manners in France and 
 England struck him as it does every stranger ; not, how- 
 ever, with unreasoning enthusiasm, but with a more charac- 
 teristic impulse to examine the matter : and the result of his 
 careful analysis was the conclusion that the French were in- 
 deed more polite and obliging at heart, but that the English 
 
THE SCEPTIC. 427 
 
 had a better method of expressing it — an opinion totally 
 opposed to the ordinary theory. 
 
 "By the expressions of politeness," he says, "I mean those outward 
 deferences and ceremonies which custom has invented to supply the defect 
 of real politeness or kindness that is unavoidable towards strangers or 
 indifferent persons even in some of the best dispositions in the world. 
 These ceremonies ought to be so contrived as that, though they do not 
 deceive or pass for sincere, yet still they please by their appearance, and 
 lead the mind, by its own consent and knowledge, into an agreeable 
 delusion. One maj'^ err by running into either of the two extremes — that 
 of making them too like truth or too remote from it — though we may 
 observe that the first is scarce possible, because whenever any expression 
 or action becomes customary it can deceive nobody. Thus, when the 
 Quakers say 'your friend,' they are as easily understood as another 
 that says * your humble servant. ' The French err in the contrary ex- 
 treme — that of making their civilities too remote from truth — which is a 
 fault. . . . Another fault I find in the French manners is that, like 
 their clothes and furniture, they are too glaring. An English fine gentle- 
 man distinguishes himself from the rest of the world by the whole tenor 
 of his conversation more than by any particular part of it ; so that, 
 though you are sensible he excels, you are at a loss to tell in what, and 
 have no remarkable civilities or compliments to pitch on as a proof of his 
 politeness. These he so smooths over that they pass for the common 
 actions of life, and never put you to the trouble of returning thanks for 
 them. The English politeness is always greatest when it appears least. " 
 
 This would seem a sufficiently trivial subject to occupy 
 the thoughts of the young philosopher, but it displays the 
 penetrating acuteness and analytical power of his mind as 
 well as if it had been more intrinsically important. Indeed, 
 the very slightness of the occasion shows more completely 
 his mental habit of sounding to the depths and tracing every 
 superficial indication back to its origin in the unseen re- 
 cesses of human nature : a habit quite compatible with his 
 incapacity for comprehending that nature's holier secrets. 
 He seems to have remained about a year at Kheims, and 
 from thence went on to La Fleche, where, with a curious 
 delight in the society of the ecclesiastical caste of which he 
 was the professed enemy, he hung about the Jesuits' Col- 
 lege, picking up odd bits of information, and engaging in 
 many a strange discussion, full on the one side as on the 
 other of mental reservation and half-conscious sophistry. 
 *' I was walking in the cloisters of the Jesuits' College," he 
 
428 THE SCEPTIC. 
 
 relates on one sucli occasion, " engaged in a conversation 
 with a Jesuit of some parts and learning, who was relating 
 to me and urging some nonsensical miracle lately performed 
 in their convent, when I was tempted to dispute against 
 him ; and as my head was full of the topics of my Treatise 
 of Human Nature, which I was at that time composing, this 
 argument" (his afterwards celebrated argument against 
 miracles) " immediately occurred to me, and I thought it 
 much gravelled my companion ; but at last he observed to 
 me that it was impossible for that argument to have any 
 solidity, because it operated equally against the Gospel as 
 the Catholic miracles, which observation I thought proper to 
 admit as a suflScient answer. I believe you will allow that 
 the freedom, at least, of this reasoning makes it somewhat 
 extraordinary to have been the produce of a convent of 
 Jesuits, though perhaps you may think the sophistry of it 
 savours plainly of the place of its birth." 
 
 The last suggestion comes oddly enough from the young 
 philosopher who has just owned that he thought proper to 
 admit as a sufficient answer an argument which in reality 
 had no weight whatever with him, as his correspondent was 
 aware. Greek had met Greek in this fine encounter ; and 
 notwithstanding the proverbial subtlety of the Jesuit, one 
 doubts if the priest under his convent cloisters was a whit 
 surpassed in frankness or undermatched in finesse by the 
 burly young foreigner in his laced clothes who paced about 
 those courts of learning by his side, breathing the same air 
 as once Descartes breathed, and looking on with acute, un- 
 sympathetic, yet good-humoured eyes at the curious pieces 
 of human mechanism around him, on whom he could try the 
 success of an argument or point the edge of a theory. In 
 the profound retirement of La Fleche, cut off from every- 
 thing but books and Jesuits, Hume composed his ' Treatise 
 of Human Nature,' the first of his works. It would be un- 
 necessary to enter at length into the scope and meaning of 
 this book, which made a new step in the ever-turning tread- 
 mill of philosophy, and wound another confusing coil of 
 thought round the philosophical observer. In a recent 
 sketch of this series we did our best with unskilful hand to 
 trace for the unscientific reader the progress of mental science 
 (so called) up to the period of Berkeley. Locke had recog- 
 
THE SCEPTIC. 429 
 
 nised tlie existence of mind and matter, two grand and uni- 
 versal abstractions, in the world, the one being to us the 
 interpreter of the other. Berkeley, coming after him, boldly 
 denied the abstract existence of matter at all, and affirmed 
 mind, spirit, ideas, to be the only real existences. Hume, 
 taking up the discussion at this point, at once developed 
 and annihilated Berkeley. To him mind itself, the final 
 principle of existence, was, like everything else, a doubt 
 and uncertainty ; as incapable of proof as matter, its prim-' 
 eval antagonist. It had been apparent to Descartes that he 
 lived because he thought ; but even this consciousness gave 
 to Hume no philosophical conviction of his own existence. 
 He is careful, as we would also be, to discriminate clearly 
 between this philosophical doubt and the instinctive trust 
 of the common man in common circumstances, his sense, 
 beyond all power of reason to shake, that he himself is, and 
 is surrounded by conditions which must be observed and 
 heeded. It is only in philosophy that he ventures to assert 
 the strange doctrine that mind itself is an existence as im- 
 probable as matter. Neither the mighty spectre of a world 
 which seemed to surround him, nor the imagination called 
 mind with which he seemed to comprehend it, could prove 
 themselves. Shreds of fact floating in the air, and here and 
 there caught and secured — incomprehensible sequences and 
 necessities which could not be disputed, yet could not be 
 explained — were all his keen intellect acknowledged in the 
 universe. " Locke," says Mr Lewes, in his ' History of 
 Philosophy,' ''had shown that all our knowledge was de- 
 pendent upon experience. Berkeley had shown that we 
 had no experience of an external world independent of per- 
 ception, nor could we have any such experience. He pro- 
 nounced matter, therefore, to be a figment. Hume took up 
 the line where Berkeley had cast it, and flung it once more 
 into the deep sea, endeavouring to fathom the mysteries of 
 being. Probing deeper in the direction Berkeley had taken, 
 he found that not only was matter a figment, but mind was 
 no less so. If the occult substratum which men had inferred 
 to explain material phenomena could be denied because not 
 founded on experience, so also, said Hume, must we deny 
 the occult substratum, mind, which men had inferred to ex- 
 plain mental phenomena. All that we have any experience 
 
430 THE SCEPTIC. 
 
 of is of impressions and ideas. The substance of which 
 these are supposed to be impressions is occult, is a mere 
 inference ; the substance in which these impressions are 
 supposed to be is equally occult, is a mere inference. Matter 
 is but a collection of impressions ; mind is but a succession 
 of impressions and ideas. Thus was Berkeley's dogmatic 
 idealism converted into scepticism." 
 
 The system of Hume, if that can be called a system which is 
 the pulling down of all systems, and even of the very founda- 
 tion upon which scientific methods of thought maybe built, is 
 still more clearly set forth as follows in his own words : — 
 
 ** Men," he says, ** are carried by a natural instinct or prepossession 
 to repose faith in their senses. When they follow this blind and power- 
 ful instinct of nature, they always suppose the very images presented to 
 the senses to he the external objects, and never entertain any suspicion 
 that the one are nothing hut representations of the other. But this univer- 
 sal and primary opinion of all men is soon destroyed by the slightest 
 philosophy, which teaches us that nothing can ever be present to the 
 mind but an image or perception. So far, then, we are necessitated by 
 reasoning to contradict the primary instincts of nature, and to embrace a 
 new system with regard to the evidence of our senses. But here philo- 
 sophy finds herself extremely embarrassed, when she would obviate 
 the cavils and objections of the sceptics. She can no longer plead the 
 infallible and irresistible instinct of nature, for that led us to quite a 
 different system, which is acknowledged fallible, and even erroneous ; 
 and to justify this pretended philosophical system by a chain of clear 
 and convincing argument, or even any appearance of argument, exceeds 
 the power of all human capacity. 
 
 **Do you follow the instinct and propensities of nature in assenting 
 to the veracity of the senses ? But these lead you to believe that the 
 very perception or sensible image is the external object" — (Idealism). 
 
 "Do you disclaim this principle in order to embrace a more rational 
 opinion, that the perceptions are only representations of something ex- 
 ternal? You here depart from your natural propensities and more 
 obvious sentiments ; and yet are not able to satisfy your reason, which 
 can never find any convincing argument from experience to prove that 
 the perceptions are connected with external objects " — (Scepticism). 
 
 *' The answer to the question, ' What knowledge have we 
 of an external world ? ' " says Mr Hill Burton, in his account 
 of the same work, " resolved itself into this : that there were 
 certain impressions and ideas which we supposed to relate 
 to it — further we knew not. When we turn, according to 
 this theory, from the external world, and, looking into our- 
 
THE SCEPTIC. 431 
 
 selves, ask what certainty we have of separate self-existence, 
 we find but a string of impressions and ideas, and we have 
 no means of linking these together into any notion of a con- 
 tinuous existence. Such is that boasted thing, the human 
 intellect, when its elements are searched out by a rigid 
 application of the sceptical philosophy of Hume." And 
 such, we add, were the conclusions of the young man in 
 blooming Anjou, among the quiet of the convent gardens, 
 and under those very cloisters where Descartes, doubting 
 and pondering too, had taken a joyful leap into certain ex- 
 istence from his identification of the process going on in his 
 mind as thought. " I think, therefore I am," the French 
 father of modern philosophy had exclaimed to earth and 
 heaven in a burst of human satisfaction a century before. 
 And now when the hundred years with all its revolutions 
 was accomplished, the musing Scot paces the same pave- 
 ment, revolving the same diflSculties, and ends in a conclu- 
 sion as different as heaven is from earth. He, too, thought, 
 devoting his life to that occupation ; and in addition pos- 
 sessed as rude a personality as falls to the lot of most men ; 
 yet he takes himself to pieces in the silence as if he had 
 been a puzzle, and shakes his head over the many-cornered 
 morsels which he knows he can fit together if he tries. But 
 can all his fitting, all his trying, make one thing of them — 
 an existence, a unity, complete and real? The spectator, 
 even at this distance, cannot look on at the spectacle but 
 with a certain strain and unconscious thrill of sympathy. 
 To be driven to so blank an ending, how dismal must it 
 have been ! And all the more that the discovery was made 
 by a young man scarcely six-and-twenty, in the absolute 
 stillness of the silent foreign place, with grass growing in 
 its streets, and its time measured out by the unfamiliar tinkle 
 of the convent bell. He had given up home and youth, and 
 all the profits and attractions of practical life, in order to 
 have time and leisure to complete his theory. And this 
 was the best he could make of it! But the reader may 
 spare his sympathy, and assure himself that David never 
 ate an ounce the less, or felt his personal happiness in the 
 smallest degree diminished by the negation of all things to 
 which his thoughts had brought him. Not his was the 
 nature which admires and envies and longs after a faith it 
 
432 THE SCEPTIC. 
 
 cannot share. He was no amateur or dilettante in liis ways 
 of thinking, but a born sceptic, clad in impenetrable panoply 
 of spiritual indifference and personal satisfaction, and forti- 
 fied by good-humour and good digestion against all the 
 fanciful troubles known to man. 
 
 The utter solitude in which this work was accomplished 
 is another curious mark of the man's personal identity. He 
 did his work alone, without aid of counsel or sympathy. 
 " While he was framing his metaphysical theory," says Mr 
 Burton, " Hume appears to have permitted no confidential 
 advisers to have access to the workings of his inventive 
 genius ; and as little did he take for granted any of the 
 reasonings or opinions of the illustrious dead. Nowhere is 
 there a work of genius more completely authenticated as the 
 produce of the solitary labour of one mind." He tried the 
 edge of his argument, smiling in his sleeve the wliile, upon 
 his Jesuit companion, and he communicated the ' Keasonings 
 on Miracles ' to his namesake Henry Home ; but the latter 
 is the only instance in which he seems to have sought any- 
 thing resembling sympathy in his work. And yet he was a 
 social being, fond of the convivialities of the time, not in 
 the least averse to society or shy of ordinary intercourse. 
 Wherever he went he made friends, and kept them, and was 
 warm in all superficial charities. But the soul of the man 
 dwelt apart, not loftily so much as indiff'erently, having no 
 need of close communion or fellowship with any other soul. 
 A certain unexpressed good-humoured contempt for his kind, 
 mixed, as such a sentiment often is, with much benevolence 
 and amiable feeling towards them, was no doubt at the bot- 
 tom of this indiff'erence ; but its real origin was in the self- 
 sufiicing nature of the man, which demanded no support of 
 human fellowship, but could keep its standing without love, 
 without faith, without sense of dependence, requiring no 
 earthly paradise, hoping for no heaven. 
 
 And yet there is a struggle to be recorded, though it is 
 not of any very passionate description. The human nature 
 of the young man sometimes stirs within him notwithstand- 
 ing all his constitutional calm. Now and then there bursts 
 from him a cry of half-stifled pain. In one of his moments 
 of weakness he gives vent to the following reflections, com- 
 bating them all the while with his own pitiless common- 
 
THE SCEPTIC. 433 
 
 sense and practical sobriety. His theory itself is not half 
 so curious as the amazing power with which consciously he 
 employs his external existence and senses to smother and 
 make an end of such faint outcries and protestations as may 
 arise in his imperfectly-developed heart. 
 
 " The intense view of these manifold contradictions and imperfections 
 in human reason has so wrought upon me," he says, *'and heated my 
 brain, that I am ready to reject all belief and reasoning, and can look 
 upon no opinion even as more probable and likely than another. Where 
 am I, or what ? From what cause do I derive my existence, and to 
 what condition shall I return ? Whose favour shall I court, and whose 
 anger must I dread ? What beings surround me ? and on whom have I 
 any influence, or who have any influence on me? I am confounded 
 with all these questions, and begin to fancy myself in the most deplor- 
 able condition imaginable, environed with the deepest darkness, and 
 utterly deprived of the use of every member and faculty. 
 
 " Most fortimately it happens that since Reason is incapable of dis- 
 pelling these clouds, nature herself suffices to that purpose, and cures 
 me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium either by relaxing this 
 bent of mind, or by some avocation and lively impression of my senses 
 which obliterate all these chimeras. I dine, I play a game at back- 
 gammon, I converse and am merry with my friends : and when, after 
 three or four hours' amusement, I would return to these speculations, 
 they appear so cold and strained and ridiculous, that I cannot find in 
 my heart to enter into them any further. Here, then, I find myself 
 absolutely and necessarily determined to live and talk and act like 
 other people in the common affairs of life. ... I may, nay, I must 
 yield to the current of nature in submitting to my senses and under- 
 standing ; and in this blind submission I show most perfectly my scep- 
 tical disposition and principles ; but does it follow that I must strive 
 against the current of nature which leads me to indolence and pleasure ? 
 . . . No ; if I must be a fool, as all those who reason or believe any- 
 thing certainly are, ray follies shall at least be natural and agreeable. 
 . . . These are the sentiments of my spleen and indolence ; and, 
 indeed, I must confess that philosophy has nothing to oppose to them, 
 and expects a victory more from the return of a serious good-humoured 
 disposition than from the force of reason and conviction. In all the 
 incidents of life we ought still to preserve our scepticism. If we believe 
 that fire burns or water refreshes, 'tis only because it costs us too much 
 pains to think otherwise ; nay, if we are philosophers it ought only to 
 be upon sceptical principles, and from an inclination which we feel to 
 employing ourselves after that manner. When reason is lively and 
 mixes itself with some propensity, it ought to be assented to ; where it 
 does not, it never can have any title to operate upon us. At the time, 
 
 2 E 
 
434 THE SCEPTIC. 
 
 therefore, that I 'am tired with amusement or company, and have in- 
 dulged a reverie in my chamber or in a solitary walk by the river-side, 
 I feel my mind all collected within itself, and am naturally inclined to 
 carry my view into all these subjects about which I have met with so 
 many disputes in the course of my reading and conversation." 
 
 Surely so strange a piece of personal revelation was never 
 made. The philosopher takes his own intelligence in hand 
 and tunes it like an instrument. When a human sentiment 
 of dismay at the nothingness and desolation with which he 
 has surrounded himself creeps into his mind, he seeks out 
 his friends, is merry, plays his game of backgammon, and 
 lets himself go upon the current of nature which leads to 
 indolence and pleasure, sagaciously calculating upon the 
 period of revulsion which is sure to ^ come. Then, after the 
 desire for pleasure and ease has been satisfied, he indulges 
 in a reverie, or takes a solitary walk, and thus getting back 
 his inclination towards his work, follows it "on sceptical 
 principles " with an inconceivable philosophical calm. And 
 he was but six-and twenty when he thus regulated the stops of 
 his own being, regarding it, one cannot but feel, with some- 
 thing of the same partial contempt with which he regards 
 the rest of humankind — not disdainfully nor harshly, but good- 
 humouredly, as at best a poor creature capable of little, which 
 it is best not to drive or coerce, but humanely leave to pursue 
 its own way. We know no other writer who has thus, conde- 
 scendingly, apologetically, patronised and humoured himself. 
 
 The ' Treatise of Human Nature ' was published in 1738, 
 on terms not disadvantageous for such a work, and probably 
 more favourable than a young unknown aspirant in the same 
 strain would find possible now. He had fifty pounds " and 
 twelve bound copies of the book " for one edition of a thou- 
 sand copies. Its success was not of an encouragiiig kind. 
 " Never literary attempt was more unfortunate," he says, in 
 his autobiography. " It fell dead-born from the press, with- 
 out reaching such distinction as even to excite a murmur 
 among the zealots." This, however, seems too strong a 
 statement of the case, though it shows how intensely he had 
 felt the disappointment. His anxiety about its reception 
 was evidently great ; he was anxious to leave town, thinking 
 it would " contribute very much to my tranquillity, and 
 might spare mo many mortifications to be in the country 
 
THE SCEPTIC. 435 
 
 while the success of the work was doubtful. ... If you 
 know anybody that is a judge, you would do me a sensible 
 pleasure in engaging him to a serious perusal of the book," 
 he adds, feeling, as so many have done, that to be but known 
 was all he wanted. " The success of my philosophy is but 
 indifferent, if I may judge by the sale of the book, and if I 
 may believe my bookseller," he writes afterwards from Nine- 
 wells, where he had taken shelter. " I am now out of 
 humour with myself, but doubt not," he continues, with the 
 doleful playfulness of the disappointed, " in a little time to 
 be only out of humour with the world." Better luck, how- 
 ever, awaited him. In the three or four years following, 
 two other volumes — viz., the third part of the ' Treatise of 
 Human Nature,' and the first volume of * Essays, Moral and 
 Political ' — were given to the world ; the latter with anxious 
 anonymity. " The work was favourably received," he says, 
 " and soon made me entirely forget my former disappoint- 
 ment." " The Essays are all sold in London," he writes to 
 his friend Henry Home, with natural satisfaction, in the sum- 
 mer of 1742. It was some compensation to him for the mortifi- 
 cation of his beginning. He had by this time returned home, to 
 his mother, brother, and sister, who still kept house together 
 at Ninewells, an undivided family ; and for six or seven years 
 thereafter remained in this retirement, renewing, he tells us, his 
 acquaintance with Greek, making new friends, and beginning 
 various correspondences which went on during his whole life. 
 This period of quiet was not, however, one of repose or 
 satisfaction with his position. On his return from France he 
 had confessed to his friend Home " a certain shamefacedness 
 I have to appear among you at my years, without having yet 
 a settlement, or so much as attempted any," — a sentiment 
 which is in the highest degree characteristic of his race and 
 country, and in which every Scotsman will at once concur. 
 To come back without having made any mark in the world, 
 without having even planted his foot on steady ground, and, 
 in short, no better than he went, must have been a humilia- 
 tion even to a philosopher. " No alteration has happened to 
 my fortune, nor have I taken the least step towards it," he 
 writes to another friend. The success of his Essays no doubt 
 was consolatory ; but even that was no " settlement," and 
 his practical eyes were fully open to the necessity of making 
 
436 THE SCEPTIC. 
 
 a career for himself. He made an attempt to get a profes- 
 sorship in Edinburgh University, but failed ; and with some 
 reluctance seems to have adopted the idea of becoming " tra- 
 velling governor " to a young man of fashion and wealth, 
 could such be found. The appointment which he at length 
 obtained was perhaps the most strange ever conferred upon 
 a philosopher. It was that of companion to the Marquess of 
 Annandale — a young lunatic, full of literary and other frenzies 
 — in whose strange household he found, as might have been 
 expected, a most uncongenial home. His squabbles with the 
 official guardian, and his persistent claim for a sum of money 
 to which he considered himself entitled when at last dismissed 
 from this uncomfortable situation, are of no importance to our 
 story. The mistake seems to have been his acceptance of 
 the position at all ; and it certainly affords the observer a 
 very poor idea of the condition of the age, as respects litera- 
 ture and science, to find a man already distinguished in both, 
 and, at the same time, a gentleman of family as good as that 
 of his " patron," consenting to become the butt of a young 
 madman, and the companion of his tedious noisy days. ''What 
 a scene is this for a man nourished in philosophy and polite 
 letters to enter into all of a sudden and unprepared ! " Hume 
 himself exclaims. " But I ever laugh, whatever happens," 
 he adds, with rueful pleasantry. " I lived with him a twelve- 
 month," is the brief record in the autobiography. " My ap- 
 pointments during that time made a considerable accession 
 to my small fortune." Let us hope these " appointments " 
 somewhat eased the smart inflicted upon his dignity and 
 amour propre^ though his tenacious grasp upon the last scrap 
 of salary to which he had a right, is not a lofty ending to a 
 very uncomfortable episode in his career. 
 
 A more honourable, though at first sight scarcely more 
 suitable, office for a philosopher awaited him. These were 
 the days in which literary men received and expected pen- 
 sions and honours ; and yet it is but too apparent that, ex- 
 cept in the rare case of one who could be made Secretary of 
 State, or gentleman usher, there was in reality nothing in the 
 busy world for a man of letters to do. The second employ- 
 ment which fell in his way was that of Secretary to General 
 St Clair, then about setting out on " an expedition, which 
 was at first meant for Canada, but ended in an incursion on 
 
THE SCEPTIC. 437 
 
 the coast of France." " The office is very genteel," he says 
 in a letter ; " ten shillings a-day, perquisites, and no ex- 
 penses. . . . As to myself/' he adds to a second corres- 
 pondent, " my way of life is agreeable ; and though it may 
 not be so profitable as I am told, yet so large an army as will 
 be under the General's command in America must certainly 
 render my perquisites very considerable. I have been asked 
 whether I would incline to enter into the service ? My an- 
 swer was, that at my years I could not decently accept of a 
 lower commission than a company. The only prospect of 
 working this point would be to procure at first a company in 
 an American regiment by the choice of the colonies. But 
 this I build not on, nor indeed am I very fond of it." 
 
 The idea of David Hume in a soldier's coat has a curious 
 incongruity, which will make the reader smile. He was by 
 this time thirty-five, and had already begun to acquire the 
 bulk which afterwards distinguished him. The fat philoso- 
 pher, with his round chubby cheeks and succession of double 
 chins, smooth as a woman's, must have been a curious spec- 
 tacle in the rakish uniform of the time ; and though he was 
 never a soldier, he afterwards wore uniform, and at one time 
 held the rank of aide-de-camp. The expedition was one of 
 those purposeless schoolboy raids which distinguished the 
 time. It landed on the coast of Brittany, fluttered the dove- 
 cots in a few helpless seaside villages, and pretended to be 
 about to take the town of L'Orient, " the seat of the East 
 India trade." However, after a siege of six days and much 
 ineffectual artillery, the expedition thought better of it, and 
 turned back again, having "lost only ten men," as it fortu- 
 nately happened, " by the enemy." In Hume's personal 
 experience, the period was identified by the suicide, in his 
 own quarters, of a Major Forbes, one of his friends — a scene 
 sufficient to make a vivid impression on any mind, but which 
 is noted in Hume's history only by one matter-of-fact record 
 of the occurrence. The account he gives of the entire expe- 
 dition is curiously and unintentionally ironical. It was "de- 
 tained in the Channel until it was too late to go to America,'* 
 and was then sent "to seek adventures on the coast of France." 
 The general and admiral were both totally unacquainted with 
 the coast — without pilots, guides, or intelligence of any kind, 
 and even without the common maps of the country. They 
 
438 THE SCEPTIC. 
 
 were " entirely ignorant, except from such hearsay informa- 
 tion as they had casually picked up at Plymouth," of the 
 strength of the town and garrison they attacked. " There 
 never was on any occasion such an assemblage of ignorant 
 blockheads " as the engineers of the little army. Under such 
 circumstances there was nothing for it but to turn back again: 
 and though Hume says their discomfiture was " without any 
 loss or dishonour," it is a curious example of those deficiencies 
 which have always hampered the British army, and which 
 came to their climax in that uncomfortable age. 
 
 The short duration of this employment left the philosopher 
 once more in a state of uncertainty as to his future life. An 
 interval of " idleness and a gay pleasurable life " rewarded 
 him for the brief labours of his campaign. And he thus dis- 
 cusses his prospects in a letter to one of his friends, giving 
 us an incidental glimpse into the new projects which had 
 begun to awaken in his mind : — 
 
 ** I have an invitation to go over to Flanders with the general, and an 
 offer of table, tent, horses, &c. I must own I have a great curiosity to 
 see a real campaign, but I am deterred by a view of the expense, and am 
 afraid that, living in a camp, without any character, and without anything 
 to do, would appear ridiculous. Had I any fortune which would give me 
 a prospect of leisure and opportunity to prosecute my historical projects, 
 nothing could be more useful to me, and I should pick up more literary 
 knowledge in one campaign, by living in the general's family, and being 
 introduced frequently to the duke's, than most officers could do after many 
 years' service. But to what can all this serve ? I am a philosopher, and 
 so, I suppose, must continue. 
 
 *'I am very uncertain of getting half-pay, from several strange and 
 unexpected accidents, which it would be too tedious to mention ; and if 
 I get it not, shall neither be gainer nor loser by the expedition. I believe 
 if I would have begun the world again, I might have returned an officer 
 gratis, and am certain might have been made chaplain to a" regiment 
 gratis ; but ... I need say no more. I shall stay a little time in Lon- 
 don, to see if anything new will present itself. If not, I shall return very 
 cheerfully to books, leisure, and solitude in the country. An elegant table 
 has not spoiled my relish for sobriety, nor society for study ; and frequent 
 disappointments have taught me that nothing .need be despaired of, as 
 well as that nothing can be depended on." 
 
 Two years later, when the proposed campaign had 
 changed- into a peaceful embassage, Hume once more left 
 England in the train of General St Clair ; and the interval 
 
THE SCEPTIC. 439 
 
 of retirement, which seems to have been spent at Ninewells, 
 in country quiet and seclusion, had evidently impressed on 
 his mind the conception of his after- work. 
 
 " I got an invitation," he repeats, "from General St Clair to attend 
 him in his new employment at the Court of Turin, which I hope will 
 prove an agreeable if not a profitable jaunt for me. I shall have an 
 opportunity of seeing courts and camps ; and if I can afterwards be so 
 happy as to attain leisure and other opportunities, this knowledge may 
 even turn to account to me as a man of letters, which, I confess, has 
 always been the sole object of my ambition. I have long had an in- 
 tention, in my riper years, of composing some history; and I question 
 not but some greater experience in the operations of the field and the 
 intrigues of the Cabinet will be requisite, in order to enable me to 
 speak with judgment upon these subjects. But, notwithstanding of 
 these flattering ideas of futurity, as well as the present charms of 
 variety, I must confess that I left home with infinite regret, where I 
 had treasured up stores of study and plans of thinking for many years. 
 I am sure I shall not be so happy as I should have been had I prosecuted 
 these. But, in certain situations, a man dares not foUow his own judg- 
 ment, or refuse such offers as these." 
 
 His position in this mission was again that of secretary. 
 *' I wore the uniform of an officer, and was introduced to 
 these courts as aide-de-camp to the general," he says. We 
 have no space to follow the narrative of his journey, which 
 he sent home to the little domestic party at Ninewells, still 
 united, though the children were growing grey, in that close 
 union which sometimes exists with special force in the 
 family of a widow. There is nothing very remarkable in 
 the narrative, except an ingenuous surprise on the part of 
 the writer to find Germany a habitable country, with some 
 appearance of comfort and wellbeing among its people. 
 *' 'Tis of this country," he says, " Mr Addison speaks when 
 he calls the people 
 
 ' Nations of slaves by tyranny debased, 
 Their Maker's image more than haK defaced.' " 
 
 ** Be assured," he adds, with some warmth, " there is not a 
 finer country in the world, nor are there any signs of poverty 
 among the people. But John Bull's prejudices are ridicu- 
 lous as his insolence is intolerable." This last utterance, 
 however, so often repeated since then, arose from no supe- 
 riority on Hume's part to the prejudices of his race, but from 
 
440 THE SCEPTIC. 
 
 the much more vivacious sentiment of national indignation 
 and disgust at the same John Bull, who was then falling 
 into a frenzy fit of prejudice against everything Scotch, as 
 it was Hume's lot to ascertain by experience. There is 
 also in the account of his tour a sober appreciation of 
 natural beauties not common to the age. The Khine, the 
 Maine, the broad fertile country, the picturesque villages 
 and palaces (as he curiously entitles the feudal castles of 
 that wonderful district), are all commented on. It is true 
 he finds the houses in quaint Nuremberg to be " old- 
 fashioned and of a grotesque figure," though he allows they 
 are " solid, well built, complete, and cleanly ; " but that was 
 the fashion of the time. " I confess I had entertained no 
 such advantageous idea of Germany/' he says, with benevo- 
 lent satisfaction ; " and it gives a man of humanity pleasure 
 to see that so considerable a part of mankind as the Ger- 
 mans are in so tolerable a condition." This was written not 
 much more than a hundred years ago, and of a region now 
 as familiar as Bond Street to crowds of people whom Hume 
 would scarcely have admitted within the lowest circle of in- 
 telligence. Such strange changes does time alone, without 
 the help of any more startling agent, work upon the external 
 world. 
 
 "While Hume was at Turin he was seen by Lord Charle- 
 mont, who has left us the following unfavourable, but, we 
 fear, true description of his aspect and appearance : — 
 
 "Nature, I believe, never formed any man more unlike his real 
 character than David Hume. The powers of physiognomy were baffled 
 by his countenance ; neither could the most skilful in that science pre- 
 tend to discover the smallest trace of the faculties of his mind in the 
 unmeaning features of his visage. His face was broad aud fat, his 
 mouth wide, and without any other expression than that of imbecility. 
 His eyes vacant and spiritless, and the corpulence of his whole person 
 was far better fitted to communicate the idea of a turtle-eating alder- 
 man than of a refined philosopher. His speech in English was rendered 
 ridiculous by the broadest Scotch accent ; and his French was, if pos- 
 sible, still more laughable; so that wisdom most certainly never dis- 
 guised herself before in so uncouth a garb. Though now near fifty 
 years old he was healthy and strong ; but his health and strength, far 
 from being advantageous to his figure, instead of manly comeliness, 
 had only the appearance of rusticity. His wearing an uniform added 
 greatly to his natural awkwardness, for he wore it like a grocer of the 
 
THE SCEPTIC. 441 
 
 trained-bands. Sinclair was a lieutenant-general, and was sent to the 
 Courts of Vienna and Turin as a military envoy, to see that their quota 
 of troops was furnished by the Austrians and Piedmontese. It was 
 therefore thought necessary that his secretary should appear to be an 
 officer, and Hume was accordingly disguised in scarlet." 
 
 While Hume was absent on this mission, his ' Inquiry- 
 concerning Human Understanding ' was published in Lon- 
 don. He explains its nature and intention with his usual 
 brevity in his autobiography. ''I had always entertained a 
 notion," he says, "that my want of success in publishing 
 the ' Treatise of Human Nature' had proceeded more from 
 the manner than the matter, and that I had been guilty of a 
 very usual indiscretion in going to press too early. I there- 
 fore cast the first part of the work anew in the ' Inquiry- 
 concerning Human Understanding.' " " His desire was that 
 the * Treatise of Human Nature ' should now be treated as 
 a work blotted out of literature, and that the Inquiry should 
 be substituted in its place," Mr Burton tells us ; but this 
 was, of course, an impossible hope. In the new form his 
 principles were not altered, but their expression was soft- 
 ened; and, naturally, his opponents were little likely to 
 accept the less pungent and forcible statement. Such new 
 views, or developments of his principle, as he insisted upon 
 more fully in the new volume, did but carry out the con- 
 ceptions of the other. The doctrine of necessity, as opposed 
 to that of free-will in human action ; of the uniformity and 
 sameness of human impulses; and those opinions on miracles 
 which had first occurred to him at La Fleche — all branches 
 of a thoroughly sceptical philosophy — were prominent in 
 the book, — in which, indeed, the theory in respect to miracles 
 was first given to the world. Of these, each, it will be seen, 
 is, if possible, more destructive of any innate dignity in 
 human nature than the other: That men, like atoms of 
 matter, are moved by periodical waves of impulse to do the 
 same thing in a certain severe arithmetical sequence, of 
 which they understand nothing ; that the races of humanity 
 bear the same monotonous resemblance to each other as do 
 the stones in a river-bed, dragged up or down by the greater 
 or lesser force of the current ; that human testimony, how- 
 ever enthusiastic or however multiplied, is never to be 
 allowed even a hearing, when it contradicts the regularity 
 
442 THE SCEPTIC. 
 
 of natural laws ; — these are the developments of his doc- 
 trine, which Hume now gave to the world. A^ every step as 
 he advanced the great negation grew. The man who, under 
 his teaching, no longer could call his mind his own, or put 
 any faith in its existence, had now to give up his will as 
 well, and recognise himself as a creature 
 
 " Dragged round in earth's diurnal course 
 With stocks, and stones, and trees." 
 
 Individual character, great aspirations, generous senti- 
 ments, were alike denied him. He did but what he could 
 not help doing, thought but as certain vague natural in- 
 fluences moved him, was not to be believed at his highest 
 strain of feeling, or credited with any independent senti- 
 ment. 
 
 Such was the theory of the philosopher. It did not de- 
 press his own mind, so far as there is any evidence on the 
 matter ; but he was depressed by what would seem on the 
 surface of much less immediate importance. " This piece 
 was at first little more successful than the ' Treatise of 
 Human Nature,'" he says — a practical disappointment 
 much less easy to bear than any theory. " On my return 
 from Italy I had the mortification to find all England in a 
 ferment on account of Dr Middleton's ' Free Inquiry,' while 
 my performance was entirely overlooked and rejected. Such 
 is the force of natural temper, that these disappointments 
 made little or no impression upon me," he adds, with, no doubt, 
 partial truth. His mother's death, which happened at the 
 same period, and which he heard of on his return from Italy, 
 probably took the edge off the less severe misfortune. He 
 was found " in the deepest affliction and in a flood of tears," 
 we are told, when the melancholy news was communicated 
 to him ; and a good-natured friend improved the occasion 
 with exemplary faithfulness. "My friend, you owe this 
 uncommon grief to having thrown off the principles of 
 religion," said the comforter; "for if you had not, you 
 would have been consoled by the firm belief that this good 
 lady, who was not only the best of mothers but the most 
 pious of Christians, was completely happy in the realms of 
 the just." To which, as the story goes, David replied, 
 " Though I throw out my speculations to entertain the 
 
THE SCEPTIC. 443 
 
 learned and metaphysical world, yet in other things I do not 
 think so differently from the rest of the world as you 
 imagine." 
 
 This anecdote, it is evident, however, must be received 
 with caution, for there is no appearance of any such scientific 
 hypocrisy in his life. He was never a virulent, but what is 
 much worse, an indifferent unbeliever. Eeligion was no ne- 
 cessity to him ; he could live without it, and be as virtuous 
 as his neighbours ; and he could die without it. In short, 
 it was not, nor did he ever pretend it to be, a want of his 
 soul. Such beings are ; and it would be vain to imagine 
 that the unbelief of such a man was necessarily accompanied 
 either by remorse or despair. 
 
 In the mean time Hume returned to Ninewells, to his 
 brother and sister, with whom he remained until the marriage 
 of the former in 1751, composing his political and other 
 essays. During this interval of quiet, success came upon 
 him all at once. What his philosophy could not do, his 
 heresy and anti-Christianity did, by rousing the attention 
 of controversialists, who then abounded in the world. " My 
 bookseller informed me that my former publications were 
 beginning to be the subject of conversation, that the sale of 
 them was gradually increasing, and that new editions were 
 demanded. Answers by reverends and right reverends came 
 out two or three in a year ; and I found by Dr Warburton's 
 railing that the books were beginning to be esteemed in 
 good society." It was with this comfortable assurance that 
 at last he had made his mark in life, and attained his object, 
 that Hume removed into Edinburgh. His modest preten- 
 sions and contented temper, as well, alas ! as a state of 
 affairs much different from the present, are indicated in the 
 following account of his means and desires : — 
 
 "While interest remains as at present," he writes from Ninewells in 
 the summer of 1751, **I have fifty pounds a-)^ear, a hundred pounds' 
 worth of books, great store of linens and fine clothes, and near a hundred 
 pounds in my pocket, along with order, frugality, a strong spirit of 
 independency, good health, a contented humour, and an unabating love 
 for study. ... As my sister can join thirty pounds a-year to my 
 stock, and brings an equal love of order and frugality, we doubt not to 
 make our revenues answer." 
 
 • Thus the little celibate household set itself up in a " flat " 
 
444 THE SCEPTIC. 
 
 suspended between heaven and Edinburgh, high up in one 
 of the stately houses which still overlook the Earthen Mound, 
 upon an income not exceeding £80 a-year. They had an 
 unrivalled landscape before them ; but probably neither the 
 brother nor sister made much account of that ; and were 
 surrounded by the cheerful, social, familiar circle of Edin- 
 burgh, in which was mingled an unusually large proportion 
 of clergymen. This interval of leisure and work seems to 
 have been one of the happiest periods in Hume's life. He 
 even became frisky in the quiet, and amused himself lab- 
 oriously with the heaviest of ponderous jokes, about which 
 he writes long anxious letters, more concerned for its success 
 than he ever shows himself about one of his serious works. 
 While at Edinburgh he published the ' Political Discourses,' 
 "the only work of mine," he says, "that was successful on 
 the first publication. It was well received abroad and at 
 home. In the same year was published at London my 
 ' Inquiry concerning the Principles of Morals,' which, in my 
 own opinion (who ought not to judge on that subject), is of 
 all my writings — historical, philosophical, or literary — in- 
 comparably the best. It came unnoticed and unobserved 
 into the world." 
 
 Thus, with a certain mild irony, he records his successes 
 and failures, feeling, as many a writer has done before and 
 since, that curious mixture of disdain and satisfaction with 
 which it is but natural to observe the indiscriminating pre- 
 ferences of the crowd. They let his best drop listlessly 
 from their hands, and conferred a triumph on the secondary 
 production, of which he himself thought so much less 
 highly. The philosopher shrugs his shoulders as he sits at 
 his lofty windows looking over " the gallant Forth," with 
 Miss Katie by his side, and all his kindly friends and corres- 
 pondents making a little luminous homely circle round him. 
 There were Adam Smith and Ferguson at Glasgow ; Blair 
 and Pobertson in Edinburgh at his doors ; John Home, his 
 namesake, coming in by times from Athelstaneford, with the 
 MS. of his first tragedy in his pocket, which the philosopher 
 thinks may probably not deserve success, since the dramatist 
 admires Shakespeare and has never read Eacine ! and close 
 by him such an afflicted soul as poor Blacklock the poet, 
 penniless, learned, sensitive, and blind. When Hume, after 
 
THE SCEPTIC. 445 
 
 another iinsTiccessful attempt upon a vacant chair in the 
 University of Glasgow, accepted the appointment of Libra- 
 rian to the Advocates' Library, it is said to have been to 
 Blacklock that he devoted the proceeds of his office. It was 
 but £40 a-year, but that was no small addition to the 
 means of a man who was possessed of but £50 pour tout 
 potage. ^' In 1752," he says, "the Faculty of Advocates 
 chose me their librarian, an office from which I received 
 little or no emolument, but which gave me the command of 
 a large library. I then formed the plan of writing the 
 ' History of England.' " This great work, as has been seen, 
 had already vaguely visited his dreams for years before ; 
 and when at length he found himself at the very fountain- 
 head of information, with an admirable collection of books 
 at his disposal, and undisturbed quiet to plan and execute 
 as he pleased, he began his undertaking with such care and 
 pains as sometimes even provoke a smile. For it is not a 
 historian's scrupulous exactness as to fact which appears 
 foremost in the history of his work, so much as a curious 
 anxiety — sometimes growing quite painful in its intensity 
 — about the " correctness " of his English, and the careful 
 elimination of every Scotticism from its pages. He writes 
 letter on letter on this subject, and, it is evident, worked 
 with a diligence scarcely comprehensible in these slipshod 
 days, eliminating every doubtful expression from his work. 
 Scotland was then, as his biographer reminds us, a kind 
 of 5'w«s?-foreign country, with a dialect full, not only of 
 changed words, but of different idioms from those of pure 
 English. All this trouble seemed, according to his own 
 account, to have received but a poor recompense at first. 
 He narrates his renewed disappointment as follows : — 
 
 *'I commenced with the accession of tlie house of Stuart, an epoch 
 when, I thought, the misrepresentations of faction began chiefly to take 
 place. I was, I own, sanguine in my expectations of the success of this 
 work. I thought that I was the only historian that had at once neg- 
 lected present power, interest, and authority, and the cry of popular 
 prejudices ; and as the subject was suited to every capacity, I expected 
 proportional applause. But miserable was my disappointment ; I was 
 assailed by one cry of reproach, disapprobation, and even detestation ; 
 English, Scotch, and Irish, Whig and Tory, Churchman and sectary, 
 freethinker and religionist, patriot and courtier, united in their rage 
 against the man who had presumed to shed a generous tear for the fate 
 
446 THE SCEPTIC. 
 
 of Charles I. and the Earl of Strafford : and after the first ebullitions of 
 their fury were over, what was still more mortifying, the book seemed to 
 sink into oblivion. Mr Millar told me that in a twelvemonth he sold 
 only forty-five copies of it. I scarcely, indeed, heard of one man in the 
 three kingdoms, considerable for rank or letters, that could endure the 
 book. I must only except the Primate of England, Dr Herring, and the 
 Primate of Ireland, Dr Stone, which seem two odd exceptions. These 
 dignified prelates separately sent me messages not to be discouraged. 
 
 ** I was, however, I confess, discouraged ; and had not the war been at 
 that time breaking out between France and England, I had certainly 
 retired to some provincial town of the former kingdom, have changed 
 my name, and never more have returned to my native country. But 
 as this scheme was not now practicable, and the subsequent volume 
 was considerably advanced, I resolved to pick up courage and to per- 
 severe." 
 
 Two years later the second volume of the History was 
 published, and " was better received." In another interval 
 of three years the history of the house of Tudor followed, 
 and the work was concluded in 1761. It had thus been 
 about nine years in the composition. And notwithstanding 
 the discouraging character of its beginning, Hume, by the 
 time it was completed, had become one of the most famous 
 and popular authors in Europe. His renown, as will shortly 
 be seen, rapidly crossed the Channel, and was almost greater 
 in France than at home ; and profit and honour flowed upon 
 the philosopher. '* Notwithstanding,"" he owns, "this variety 
 of winds and seasons to which my writings bad been ex- 
 posed, they had still been making such advances that the 
 copy-money given me by the booksellers much exceeded 
 anything formerly known in England: I was become not 
 only independent, but opulent. I retired to my native 
 country of Scotland determined never more to set my foot 
 out of it ; and retaining the satisfaction of never having pre- 
 ferred a request to one great man, or even making advances 
 of friendship to any of them. As I was now turned of fifty, 
 I thought of passing all my life in this philosophical 
 manner." 
 
 This expectation, however, was not realised. His life, so 
 far as the excitement of popular adoration and applause went, 
 and all the show and outward apparel of greatness, was in- 
 deed only about to begin. 
 
 But before lie shoots away a new star into the firmament 
 
THE SCEPTIC. 447 
 
 of French fashion, there is a certain pleasure in watching 
 the bulky, ponderous philosopher, with his clumsy jokes and 
 friendly moderate enthusiasms. A certain rustic minister, 
 called Wilkie, had composed a poem professing to be a 
 translation of a supposed early production of Homer, and 
 called the Epigoniad, which Hume, with outbursts of praise, 
 declares to be the second epic poem in our language. Of 
 Homer's * Douglas ' he writes that " I am persuaded it will 
 be esteemed the best, and b,y French critics the only, 
 tragedy of our language ! " His interest in Robertson's 
 History, which he might even have been excused for think- 
 ing a rival of his own, is lively and honest, and he seems to 
 have omitted no opportunity of helping the writer forward. 
 Adam Smith's first work, the ' Theory of Moral Sentiments,' 
 a book also to some extent a rival of his own, he hails with 
 the same anxious plaudits, spreading its fame wherever he 
 goes. And no man ever took up more contentedly the role 
 of comfortable obscurity. When anticipating a change of 
 residence to London, he wrote to his friend Dr Clephane of 
 his desire to secure " a room in a decent, sober family, who 
 would not be averse to receive a sober, discreet, virtuous, 
 regular, quiet, good-natured man of a bad character ; " and 
 informed the doctor that " I shall then be able to spend 
 £150 a-year.'^ Never was a more friendly, unaffected, 
 good-humoured, self-denying, self-indulgent soul. He is so 
 kindly and so friendly that one scarcely likes to note how 
 characteristic of a nature never moved to any supreme 
 passion or effort, or deeply acted upon by anything outside 
 himself, is all this homely amiable submission to the sub- 
 dued colours and humdrum routine of declining life. He 
 accepts, nay, even forestalls it, liking nothing better than 
 the loose-robed comfort of the chimney-corner, the elephantine 
 pointless jokes, the subdued pleasurable sentiments of a life 
 from which avowedly all the disturbing vigour and restless- 
 ness of youth has departed. Comfort was sweet to him, and 
 he had it. What could such a man desire more ? 
 
 The change from this quiet scene to the brilliant Court of 
 France, with all its fine ladies and fine gentlemen, its princes 
 and wits and savans, precipitating themselves at the feet of 
 the good-humoured but surprised philosopher, is the strangest 
 that can be conceived. It was in the year 1763, when 
 
448 THE SCEPTIC. 
 
 Hume was fifty-two, and perfectly disposed to give himself 
 over to the quietude of age, that this extraordinary revo- 
 lution occurred in his life. The Marquess of Hertford had 
 been appointed ambassador to France, and by some strange 
 impulse of public spirit, or other unlikely motive, fixed upon 
 Hume, with whom he was not even acquainted, to be his 
 secretary. The invitation was so startling that the philoso- 
 pher hesitated ; but finally moved by the thought that he 
 had resolved to ^' give up his future life to amusements," and 
 attracted by the charms of French society, which he had 
 always admired, at length decided upon accepting it. " The 
 decorum and piety of Lord Hertford occasioned men to 
 wonder," says Horace Walpole, " when, in the room of Bun- 
 bury, he chose for his secretary the celebrated freethinker 
 David Hume, totally unknown to him ; but this was the 
 effect of recommendations from other Scots who had much 
 weight with Lord and Lady Hertford." Hume himself, 
 however, informs us that " the idea first came into my 
 patron's head without the suggestion of any one mortal." 
 The effect of the patronage of so orthodox a man seems to 
 have had the immediate effect of rehabilitating the unbeliev- 
 ing philosopher. " I was now a person clean and white as 
 the driven snow ; and were I to be proposed for the see of 
 Lambeth, no objection could henceforth be made to me," he 
 says, with a chuckle of amusement and humorous satisfaction. 
 Yet his anticipations were not always of a pleasurable 
 character. " I repine at my loss of ease, and leisure, and 
 retirement, and independence," he says ; " and it is not 
 without a sigh I look backwards, nor without reluctance that 
 I cast my eye forwards." These melancholy thoughts, how- 
 ever, disappeared when he found himself in the gayer 
 atmosphere of France, and suddenly discovered that he was 
 the fashion, and found all the world at his feet. He had 
 been prepared for the fact of his own popularity to some 
 mild extent. " No author ever yet attained to that degree 
 of reputation in his own lifetime that you are now in pos- 
 session of at Paris," Lord Elibank had written, to him in the 
 spring before his arrival there. " When you have occasion 
 to see our friend David Hume," writes another of his ac- 
 quaintances, " tell him that he is so much worshipped 
 here that he must be void of all passion if he does not imme- 
 
THE SCEPTIC. 449 
 
 diately take post for Paris." Helvetius also conveys to him 
 the same flattering announcement ; and so, in still softer 
 strains, does Madame de Boufflers, whose correspondence 
 with him had commenced two years before. He had scarcely 
 arrived when he was overwhelmed by evidences of this un- 
 bounded popularity. Ten days after he reached France, he 
 wrote to Adam Smith : ''I have been three days at Paris 
 and two at Fontainebleau, and have everywhere met with 
 the most extraordinary honours which the most exorbitant 
 vanity could wish or desire. The compliments of dukes and 
 marshals of France, and foreign ambassadors, go for nothing 
 with me at present. I retain a relish for no kind of flattery 
 but that which comes from the ladies." " During the two 
 last days, in particular," he adds, " I have suffered (the ex- 
 pression is not improper) as much flattery as almost any 
 man has ever done in the same time." He protests that " it 
 makes no difference to hinf^;" but it is evident that Hume 
 was far from displeased by these demonstrations of regard. 
 It is true that by times he gives vent to an exclamation of 
 weariness. '' I wish, twice or thrice a-day, for my easy- 
 chair and my retreat in James's Court!" but yet the 
 manner in which he dwells upon all the compliments made 
 to him, is not that of a man dissatisfied or annoyed by the 
 sweetnesses of his life. Here is a little sketch, made by his 
 own hand, from which it may be perceived how easily a man 
 can habituate himself to any amount of worship : — 
 
 " Do you ask me about my course of life ? I can only say that I eat 
 nothing but ambrosia, drink nothing but nectar, breathe nothing but 
 incense, and tread on nothing but flowers ! Every man I meet, and 
 stin more every lady, would think they were wanting in the most indis- 
 pensable duty if they did not make a long harangue in my praise. 
 What happened last week when I had the honour of being presented to 
 the Dauphin's children at Versailles is one of the most curious scenes I 
 ever passed through. The Due de B. , the eldest — a boy of ten years 
 old — stepped forth and told me how many friends and admirers I had 
 in this country, and that he reckoned himself among the number, from 
 the pleasure he had received in reading many passages in my works. 
 When he had finished, his brother, the Count de P., who is two years 
 younger, began his discourse, and informed me that I had been long 
 and impatiently expected in France, and that he himself soon ex- 
 pected to have great satisfaction from the reading of my fine history. 
 But what is more curious, I was carried then to the Count d'A., who is 
 
 2 P 
 
450 THE SCEPTIC. 
 
 but four years of age. I heard him mumble something, which, though 
 he had forgot in the way, I conjectured, from some scattered words, to 
 have been also a panegyric dictated to him. . . . 
 
 "All this attention and panegyric was at first offensive to me ; but 
 now it sits more easy. I have recovered in some measure the use of the 
 language, and am falling into friendships that are very agreeable — much 
 more so than silly distant admiration. They now begin to banter me, 
 and tell droll stories of me which they have either observed themselves 
 or heard from others ; so that you see I am beginning to be at home. 
 It is probable that this place will long be my home. I feel little incli- 
 nation to the factious barbarians of London ; and have ever desired to 
 remain in the place where I am i)lanted. How much more so when it 
 is the best place in the world ? I could here live in great abundance on 
 the half of my income ; for there is no place where money is so little 
 requisite to a man who is distinguished either by his birth or personal 
 qualities. . . . However, I cannot help observing on what a dif- 
 ferent footing learning and the learned are here from what they are 
 among the factious barbarians above mentioned." 
 
 Contemporary French writers are not wanting to confirm 
 these wonderful tales, with touches at the same of gentle 
 pleasantry at the ^^ gros philosophe Ecossais,^' ^^ grand et gros 
 historiographe d'AngleterreJ" 
 
 " C'est un excellent homme que David Hume," says Grimm ; " il est 
 naturellement serein, il entend finement, et quelquefois avec sel, quoi- 
 qu'il parle peu ; mais il est lourd, il n'a ni chaleur ni grace, ni agrement 
 dans I'esprit, ni rien qui soit propre h, s'allier au ramage de ces char- 
 mantes petites machines qu'on appelle jolies femmes." Another amus- 
 ing glimpse shows him playing elephantine pranks for the amusement 
 of the same ravishing but difficult audience in one of the dramatic 
 amusements of the time, in which *'on lui avait destine le role d'un 
 sultan assis entre deux esclaves employant toute son eloquence pour 
 s'en faire aimer ; les trouvant inexorables il devait chercher le sujet de 
 leur peines et de leur resistance : on le place sur un sopha entre les deux 
 plus jolies femmes de Paris, il les regarde attentivement, il se frappe le 
 ventre et les genoux a plusieurs reprises et ne trouve jamais autre chose 
 ^ les dire que, ' Eh bien—mes demoiselles — eh hien—vous voild done — eh 
 Men, vous voila — vous voila ici ? ' Cette phrase dura un quart d'heure 
 sans qu'il pdt en sortir. Une d'elles se leva d'impatience. ' Ah,' dit- 
 elle, ' je m'en §tais bien doutee — cet homme n'est bon qu'a manger du 
 veau ! ' Depuis ce temps il est rel6gug au role de spectateur, et n'en est 
 pas moins fdt6 et cajole." 
 
 It was nearly two years after his arrival in Paris and dis- 
 charge of all the duties of the secretaryship before Hume 
 
THE SCEPTIC. 461 
 
 really obtained the situation and its emoluments. " The 
 matter is concluded and the king has given his consent," he 
 writes in June 1765, after many exhortations to his friends 
 to aid him, and vicissitudes of fear and hope ; " so that, in 
 spite of Atheism and Deism, of Whiggism and Toryism, of 
 Scotticism and Philosophy, I am now possessed of an office 
 of credit, and of £1200 a-year." However, this was but a 
 momentary gleam of prosperity. A month had scarcely 
 passed before the home administration changed. Lord Hert- 
 ford was recalled, and Hume's good fortune became a thing 
 of the past. For several months he remained Charge 
 d' Affaires in Paris until the new ambassador arrived, and 
 finally left France in the beginning of 1766, not much more 
 certain of any future provision than he had been at his out- 
 set. A pension of £400 a-year was, however, eventually 
 settled upon him, and thus his diplomatic career came to a 
 close. 
 
 The curious episode of his connection with Kousseau need 
 not be here entered upon in detail. After making the Con- 
 tinent too hot to hold him, the great sentimentalist made 
 what he was pleased to call a flight from the secret yet 
 enthusiastic worship of Paris, under the protection of Hume 
 when he returned to England. Everything that our philo- 
 sopher could do to promote the comfort of his guest and find 
 a suitable refuge for him was, it is evident, done with zeal 
 and almost devotion, and called forth Kousseau's intensest 
 gratitude, which was often displayed in a way which the 
 sober Scotsman must have found somewhat embarrassing. 
 On one occasion when they had partially quarrelled over a 
 very small matter, Hume records : " After passing near an 
 hour in this ill-humour, he rose up and took a turn about the 
 room. But judge of my surprise when he sat down suddenly 
 on my knee, threw his hands about my neck, kissed me with 
 the greatest warmth, and bedewing all my face with tears, 
 exclaimed — ' Is it possible you can ever forgive me, my dear 
 friend ?'...! hope you have not so bad an opinion of 
 me as to think I was not melted on this occasion. I assure 
 you I kissed him and embraced him twenty times with a 
 plentiful effusion of tears. I think no scene in my life was 
 ever more affecting." We fear the reader will be more dis- 
 posed to smile than to weep at the grotesque picture of the 
 
452 THE SCEPTIC. 
 
 little bearded Swiss on the fat knees of le gros philosophe 
 EcossaiSj and of the mutual embracing which followed. This 
 sweet accord, , however, was far from permanent. After 
 Hume had procured him a pension, and given himself end- 
 less trouble in establishing him according to his incHnations, 
 Kousseau suddenly turned upon him with the most causeless 
 and meaningless insults. The quarrel, with the letters it 
 drew forth on both sides, was made into a pamphlet, and 
 published in France under the advice of Hume's friends 
 there. Cette sotte bete appelee le public was thus called in to 
 judge the matter ; and so far Hume's wrongs may be said to 
 have been fully avenged. 
 
 While this quarrel was going on, Hume received his last 
 public appointment as Under - Secretary of State under 
 General Conway, the brother of Lord Hertford. Once more 
 he speaks as if he grudged a little the employment which 
 kept him from retiring to his beloved leisure. He had 
 plenty of money ; and with his usual curious contemptuous 
 regard for himself " was desirous," he says, " of trying what 
 superfluity could produce, as I had formerly made an experi- 
 ment of a competency." This experiment, however, was 
 postponed for a year or two, and in the mean time his life is 
 thus described : — 
 
 '* My way of life here is very uniform, and by no means disagreeable. 
 I pass all the forenoon in the secretary's house, from ten till three, 
 when there arrive, from time to time, messengers that bring me all the 
 secrets of the kingdom, and, indeed, of Europe, Asia, Africa, and 
 America. I am seldom hurried ; but have leisure at intervals to take 
 up a book, or write a private letter, or converse with any friend that 
 may call for me ; and from dinner to bedtime is all my own. ... I 
 only shall not regret when my duty is over ; because, to me, the situa- 
 tion can lead to nothing, at least in all probability ; and reading, and 
 sauntering, and lounging, and dosing — which I call thinking — is my 
 supreme happiness, — I mean my full contentment." 
 
 Thus the man's identity and his philosophy go together 
 through every change in his existence. He does not pretend 
 to feel any satisfaction in the thought of doing his duty by 
 his country, though no doubt he did it according to his 
 lights. The same curious limit which nature seems to have 
 built around him, betrays itself in matters which might have 
 been supposed of the strongest personal interest. Even in 
 
THE SCEPTIC. 453 
 
 respect to correcting the imperfections of his History, he 
 asks, " Were it not an amusement, to what purpose would it 
 serve, since I shall certainly never live to see a new edi- 
 tion ?" It would appear that he felt no need even of that ter- 
 restrial immortality which tempts the most humble of mortal 
 creatures. He held ofiSce not more than three years, and 
 thus describes his retirement from public life, and entrance 
 into the full ease and luxury of which he wanted to make 
 experiment, for the rest of his existence : — 
 
 "I returned to Edinburgh in 1769, very opulent (for I possessed a 
 revenue of £1000 a-year), healthy, and though somewhat stricken in 
 years, with the prospect of enjoying long my ease, and of seeing the 
 increase of ''my reputation." 
 
 " I had taken one of Allan Eamsay's houses," he adds, — 
 and everybody who has ever seen Edinburgh, and remembers 
 the glorious position of Eamsay Gardens, on a line with the 
 Castle, and commanding all the country round ; the Forth, 
 and distant Fife lying blue, with its Laws and Lomonds, on 
 the horizon, will approve of his selection. But the situation 
 was thought too cold, and he retired eventually to his old 
 habitation in James's Court, which commanded the same fine 
 prospect ; though, perhaps, its size and pretensions, which 
 had suited the homely philosopher setting up an establish- 
 ment on £80 a-year, might scarcely answer all the require- 
 ments of the pensioned diplomatist and statesman with 
 £1100 a-year to spend. "I am glad to have come within 
 sight of you, and to have a view of Kirkcaldy from my win- 
 dows," he writes to Adam Smith, surely with some fresh 
 sense of pleasure in the familiar landscape thus restored to 
 him after all his wanderings. " I have been settled here two 
 months," he writes a little later, " and am here body and soul, 
 without casting the least thought of regret to London, or 
 even to Paris. I live still, and must for a twelvemonth, in 
 my old house in James's Court, which is very cheerful, and 
 even elegant, but too small to display my great talent for 
 cookery, the science to which I intend to addict the remain- 
 ing years of my life. I have just now lying on the table 
 before me a receipt for making soupe a la reine, copied with 
 my own hand : for beef and cabbage — a charming dish — and 
 old mutton, and cold lamb, nobody excels me. I make, also 
 
454 THE SCEPTIC. 
 
 sheep-head broth in a manner that Mr Keith speaks of it for 
 eight days after, and the Due de Nivernois would bind him- 
 self apprentice to my lass to learn it." In conjunction with 
 his cookery he took to building, and made himself a house, 
 like so many men, to die in. It was the commencement of 
 the street leading southwards from St Andrew Square to 
 Princes Street, and certainly was far from an improvement, 
 in point of position, upon the mount of vision he had left. 
 Before the new street had received any name, *' a witty young 
 lady chalked on the wall the words >Si^ David's Street^ 
 Hume's lass^ judging that it was not meant in honour or 
 reverence, ran into the house much excited to tell her master 
 how he was made game of, — " Never mind, lassie,'' he said, 
 ^' many a better man has been made a saint of before." Per- 
 haps there are few people, even among those who traverse 
 the locality daily, w^ho are aware that St David Street, still 
 existing in Edinburgh, thus commemorates, not Bruce's 
 royal successor, but the unsaintly David, the gros drole, who 
 won fame without caring for it, and desired no grace of re- 
 membrance even among his townsmen. The many-trodden 
 stony street, careless as his own soul of the thousand inte- 
 rests, sorrows, and loves that move about it, is the sceptic's 
 fitting shrine. 
 
 And yet one cannot look at the calm of his declining years 
 without a certain sympathy. He is so cheerful, so easy, so 
 contented with himself and everything about him ; so ready 
 to interest himself in other people — to advise, and applaud, 
 and good-humouredly criticise ; so free from all personal 
 anxiety about his own health or future prospects. There 
 are, no doubt, many who will think that these last were more 
 terrible than consolatory. But we have succeeded very poorly 
 in placing Hume before them if they do not perceive that 
 such was his nature, and that solicitude about the future 
 existence was a matter entirely impossible to him. He had 
 enjoyed almost everything that life could give to such a man. 
 He had never in his life loved enough or sorrowed enough 
 to feel any want of that compensating hereafter to which the 
 most of us poor mortals turn longing eyes. His nature was 
 complete without that postscript in which we put so pathetic 
 a trust. He had nobody whom his heart refused to part 
 with either waiting for him on the other side or retaining 
 
THE SCEPTIC. 455 
 
 liim on this. There would seem to be, let us say it with 
 reverence, no sufficient reason why such a soul should not 
 be gently extinguished on its exit from a world in which it 
 had found all it desired — not puffed out like a half-burned 
 candle, leaving chill suggestions of a might-have-been, but 
 allowed to die down in its socket, and consume itself away 
 and be no longer. Such an end would have had no terrors 
 for Hume — would, indeed, have been a characteristic conclu- 
 sion. All along it had been in his nature. It is the heart, 
 and not the intellect, which insists upon living, and it was 
 intellect which was Hume's chief possession. So far as the 
 other part of him went, the body, which had attained such 
 unwieldy proportions, he had made that very comfortable in 
 his day. He had given it all it desired — food, and wine, and 
 employment, and exercise, and rest — and his accounts were 
 very well balanced so far as that went. And as for his mind, 
 it surveyed all things, and measured the pain and pleasure, 
 the good and evil chances, the long succession of mortal 
 existence in which it found so little spontaneous impulse, 
 so much monotonous pendulum work of necessity, one race 
 following another through the world ; and doubtless, having 
 thus fathomed the secrets of existence, felt no need of further 
 experience, or of a new sphere to enter upon. The ordinary 
 observer looks on with amaze at a spectacle which contra- 
 dicts so many theories. The quiet death-bed, the cheerful 
 spirit, the courageous steadfast composure with which the 
 sceptic went through those last lingering days, are a mys- 
 tery to us. But such problems, like most other mysteries 
 in heaven and earth, must find solution elsewhere than here. 
 There are one or two points, however, which we may 
 pause to note, in which the Sceptic's nature and philosophy 
 baffle, as we have already said, even the keenness of his intel- 
 lect, and deprive him of a power of perception which men, pro- 
 bably less gifted than himself, possess by intuition. Such an 
 example shows us how genius itself may strike against the 
 limits of nature, and be stopped short by them. For instance, 
 in all his much intercourse with France, and the love he had 
 for it, it never seems to have been apparent to Hume, as it 
 was to Chesterfield, a much inferior thinker, that everything 
 around was darkening towards some great catastrophe. 
 Neither, though he lived in his youth in the very he^rt of the 
 
456 THE SCEPTIC. 
 
 country, and must have seen many such scenes of peasant 
 oppression and distress as those which took the very power 
 of speech from Berkeley, does he ever seem to have been im- 
 pressed by, or even to have noticed them ; which is a curious 
 evidence of that supreme want of sympathy with his race 
 which distinguished his mind, though in external particulars 
 it was constantly concealed by a certain natural amiability 
 and inclination to be friendly and helpful. This deficiency 
 neutralised at once his sagacious mind, his political know- 
 ledge, and his genius. He knew human nature so little, 
 even while knowing it so much, that the signs of the times 
 were a sealed book to him. There is another very notable 
 instance in which the same want of sympathy leads him to 
 advise a transgression of one of the first principles of honour, 
 an accusation which no doubt would have much surprised him. 
 A young clergyman, whose mind seems to have been un- 
 settled by Hume's works, applied to him, through his friend 
 Colonel Edmonstone, for advice as to what he should do ; 
 that is, whether or not he should remain in the Church. The 
 philosopher answers, without apparently a moment's doubt 
 or hesitation. " It is putting too great a respect on the vul- 
 gar," he says, " and on their superstitions, to pique one's self 
 on sincerity with regard to them. Did ever one make it a 
 point to speak truth to children or madmen ? If the thing 
 was worthy of being treated gravely, I should tell him that 
 the Pythian oracle, with the approbation of Xenophon, ad- 
 vised every one to worship the gods, i/o/^w rnXzug. I wish it 
 were still in my power to be a hypocrite in this particular. 
 The common duties of society usually require it, and the 
 ecclesiastical profession only adds a little more to an inno- 
 cent dissimulation, or rather simulation, without which it is 
 impossible to pass through the world." Thus his incapacity 
 to understand the heights and depths of the soul, his indiffer- 
 ence to his race, and the contempt for it which is involved 
 in all his philosophy, leads a man, otherwise honest and 
 straightforward, to a sophistry worse than anything fabled of 
 a Jesuit, and to direct encouragement of the worst and most 
 debasing of all falsehoods. 
 
 But when we return to the old man dying placidly in his 
 new Edinburgh house, we forget how superficial are his 
 affections, and how mortal his soul. Here is one of the last 
 
THE SCEPTIC. 457 
 
 letters he ever wrote, than which it would be impossible to 
 produce anything more quietly dignified or affecting. There 
 is a certain Socratic calm of anticipation in it which moves 
 the spectator to uncover and stand aside as in the presence 
 of a great being, be its nature what it may : — 
 
 **Deaii Brother, — Dr Black tells me plainly, like a man of sense, 
 that I shall die soon, which was no disagreeable news to me. He says 
 I shall die of weakness and inanition, and perhaps give little or no warn- 
 ing. But though I be growing sensibly weaker every day, this period 
 seems not to be approaching ; and I shall have time enough to improve 
 you and to desire your company, which will be very agreeable to me. 
 But at this time your presence is necessary at Ninewells to settle Josey 
 and comfort his mother. Davie will be also very useful to you. I am 
 much pleased with his tenderness and friendship. I beg therefore that 
 neither he nor you may set out ; and as the communication between us 
 is open and frequent, I promise to give you timely information. " 
 
 Never Christian fronted death more bravely, nor with a 
 more peaceful calm. 
 
 He died on the 25th August 1776, a fortnight after writ- 
 ing the above letter, at the age of sixty-five, leaving behind 
 him the highest philosophical reputation, a host of kind and 
 friendly recollections, and abundance of vulgar condemnation. 
 Perhaps it is one of the weaknesses of this age that it is un- 
 able to condemn with the frank and hearty vigour of its fore- 
 fathers. We cannot blame Hume for his iitter indifference 
 to the spiritual consolations, hopes, and blessings of which 
 his limited spiritual nature could form little conception and 
 felt no need. Nor can we even feel that imperfection in his 
 existence which strikes us in almost all the lives which have 
 been brought prominently before the world. There seems 
 nothing left to be made up to him, no injustice to set right, 
 no disappointment to soothe, no lost to restore. He had his 
 immortality, his consolations, his happiness, such as it was, 
 within the limits of this world. The imagination declines to 
 follow him into any other. Such a man with such a life may 
 be permitted — so far as our judgment of him is concerned — 
 in a certain solemn heathen calm and stillness of atmos- 
 phere, hushed but not discouraged by the thought, to end 
 and die. 
 
XII. 
 
 THE PAINTEE. 
 
 There are few more curious eflfects in history than that 
 which is produced by the transference of the work and in- 
 fluence properly belonging to one man into the hands of 
 another. The very fact that such a transfer is possible, in- 
 dicates a certain confusion and tumult in the elements of 
 life. Now and then there has come a moment when some 
 simple citizen, without training for government, has been 
 driven by failure of legitimate rulers and stress of necessity 
 and genius to the head of affairs ; and such a wonderful 
 reversal of ordinary law has been the last evidence — at once 
 result and cause — of those convulsions which transform a 
 world. The emergency which converts a calm civilian into 
 a great general may be less momentous, but its character is 
 the same ; it marks the moment when public danger is so 
 great that whosoever can must snatch at the reins and hold 
 them, standing upon no punctilio. To instance such pro- 
 digies as Cromwell or Buonaparte, or even Clive, in illustra- 
 tion of the singular office of the Painter Moralist, would be, 
 no doubt, magniloquent and overstrained ; and yet there is 
 something in the one phenomenon which recalls the other. 
 William Hogarth was born in an age which wanted moral 
 teaching above all other needs. The century was ill at 
 ease, as most centuries are. No doubt it would have been the 
 better for rulers of firmer grasp and generals of higher skill 
 and courage ; but yet political conflict was not its most 
 marked peculiarity, which is a bold statement to make, con- 
 sidering all tlie political struggles of the time. What ailed 
 
THE PAINTEE. 459 
 
 it most, however, was Vice, a perennial human disease which 
 now and then comes, like all other diseases, to a climax, at 
 which something must he done to kill or cure. Wickedness 
 had got to be rampant in those days; the very thoughts of 
 the virtuous were tinctured in spite of themselves by the 
 phraseology and images of pollution. Innocence itself spoke 
 words and was cognisant of facts which even the unabashed 
 hide under decent veils nowadays. To stay this tide of 
 corruption, violent and strange and unnatural means had to 
 be resorted to. The humdrum domestic goodness of the 
 time had neither elevation nor impulse of its own to move 
 the crowd. It might be the salt of the world preserving, 
 but it was not the leaven transforming that mass of evil. 
 There were teachers enough to instruct the race in the legiti- 
 mate way, but that calm method was not enough for the 
 emergency. And even Wesley, great apostle and reformer 
 of the age, the messenger of the Unseen to a nation which 
 had almost forgotten it possessed a soul, did not answer all 
 the exigencies of the moment. There is at all times a solid 
 block of humanity which resists all spiritual agency, and is 
 only to be worked upon by matter-of-fact arguments and 
 reasoning which is carnal and of the earth. When the 
 heavenly message was proclaimed to its full, there was still 
 room for another message, less elevated, less noble, but yet 
 efficacious in its way. Had a statesman delivered it in 
 power, or a philosopher out of the depths of his study and 
 cogitation, there would have been a natural fitness in the 
 office. Or had it fallen into the hands of a great writer, 
 there would have been no wonder, but only an instantane- 
 ous sense of suitability. But what had Art to do with so 
 grave a public necessity ? Of all regions from which help 
 could come this was the most hopeless. In every other oc- 
 cupation demanding genius the English mind has showed 
 itself able to compete with all comers. Poetry, philosophy, 
 the eloquence of the orator and of the author, have reached 
 in this island heights as splendid as have been possible to 
 any race or language ; but in England Art has never been 
 heroic. At the period we refer to it scarcely existed save 
 as an exotic ; but, even down to our own days, how much 
 have false sentiment, mock grandeur, bathos in every shape, 
 prevailed in its hands over all higher motives I Those 
 
460 THE PAINTER. 
 
 familiarities of art which now delight the British public had 
 not then come into being : where we have the domestic onr 
 grandfathers had the mythological ; and notwithstanding 
 that Sir Joshua Eeynolds was already born, and that a really 
 national school of painting was about to come into being, 
 by which we have profited for a hundred years, we have 
 never got much further — to our sorrow be it said. A certain 
 nobility and sweetness in the art of portrait-painting, most 
 conspicuous in him, its first great professor — a certain sym- 
 pathy for nature in the form of landscape, and now and then 
 by rare intervals an elevating step out of the namby-pamby 
 of domestic sentimentalism into the universally true of human 
 emotion, have been possible to English art ; but thoughts 
 that breathe and lines that burn have never been given to it. 
 And amid the Thornhills and Kents and Highmores of its 
 first beginning, how was it to be expected that a man should 
 rise with a message in him to the world, then rolling so fast 
 on its downward way ? 
 
 But this unlikely thing was what really happened. A 
 prophet after his fashion, with a commission to deliver — 
 urgent, violent, discourteous, sometimes terrible — rose all at 
 once from among the painters of ceilings and manufacturers 
 of goddesses. That vice was hideous, abominable, impos- 
 sible — abominable and hideous by the way, but of all things 
 impossible — ^not to be — the great embodied curse and 
 scourge and destroyer — was the burden of this prophetic 
 deliverance, as indeed it has been the burden of most prophets 
 from the earliest record. It is as difficult to answer the 
 question why Hogarth should have been selected to say this, 
 as it is to determine why the first Napoleon, and not another, 
 had the work of the conqueror thrust into his hands. 
 Hogarth's mission was not spiritual ; rather it is in its awful 
 prose, in its dread matter of fact and historical precision, 
 that its power rests. Heaven had little enough to do with 
 the matter. The prophet in this instance was a man of 
 earth, with no special celestial meaning in him ; quick- 
 sighted, shrewd, and practical ; not so much shocked by the 
 evil round him as practically convinced of the necessity of 
 putting a stop to it in the interests of the w^orld. The 
 nauseous details on which he dwells without reluctance — 
 almost, indeed, with a kind of pleasure — show that it was no 
 
THE PAINTER. 461 
 
 ideal of purity which moved him. He was used to life's 
 most crowded ways, and was not squeamish about what he 
 met there. He was so calm and impartial, and free of any 
 fantastic delicacy, that now and then the grim fun of a 
 situation struck him, and moved him to momentary laughter. 
 But his sense above and througli all was, that this could not 
 be. It must not be. Nature and life and every law of 
 earth pronounced against it. That vice is progressive, like 
 every other agency which acts on human nature ; that it 
 goes from worse to worse with an infallible certainty ; that 
 suffering accompanies it as an equally infallible consequence ; 
 that it carries with it misery, squalor, sickness, death, and 
 destruction ; that the end is involved in the beginning as 
 in a mathematical diagram, and that none escape, — this 
 is what Hogarth had to teach to his world. To say that his 
 world often misunderstood him, and took his tragedy for 
 farce, and his awful warning for an amusing fable, is no 
 lessening of his work. Neither is it anything against the 
 reality of his commission that he was moved by hosts of 
 secondary motives, bulking in his own eyes more largely 
 perhaps than the grander inspiration which he obeyed with- 
 out quite knowing that he did so. So Ezekiel, did one but 
 know it, might have had private and personal reasons 
 known to his contemporaries, and certain special personages 
 in his mind's eye, when he fulminated forth his passionate 
 charges against his nation and his age. The painter, we 
 may say, saw a new opening for his powers, which were 
 not trained to the height of the nymphs and goddesses ; and 
 the vulgar admiration of the public was caught by an ideal 
 wretch whom it identified with one of the well-known Molls 
 or Kates of the time. The meaner truth is not inconsistent 
 with the greater. By a process curiously possible to our 
 complicated human faculties, it was Moll or Kate whom 
 Hogarth painted ; and yet at the same time it was Vice 
 treading the miserable tragic way to destruction. The public 
 grinned, lewd, sympathetic, admiring ; and yet, in the very 
 midst of its brutal amusement caught the arrow in its heart. 
 The man to whom this curious office belonged — the only 
 prophet-painter ever produced, so far as we are aware, either 
 in England or elsewhere — was not a man whose character 
 would have made such an office probable. Hogarth was 
 
462 THE PAINTEll. 
 
 born in London in November 1697, of an honest, obscure 
 family. His father appears to have had some pretensions to 
 literature. " My father's pen," he says, " like that of many 
 other authors, did not enable him to do more than put me 
 in the way of shifting for myself." But this claim seems to 
 have had but slender foundation, as the elder Hogarth is 
 described as a corrector of the press and schoolmaster. The 
 painter describes himself as showing an early inclination 
 towards the art in which he was afterwards so famous. 
 " An early access to a neighbouring painter drew my atten- 
 tion," he says, " from play ; and I was at every possible 
 opportunity employed in making drawings. . . . My 
 exercises when at school were more remarkable for the 
 ornaments that adorned them than for the exercise itself. 
 In the former I soon found that blockheads with better 
 memories could much surpass me, but for the latter I was 
 particularly distinguished." This curious little indication 
 of youthful self-opinion and shrewd insight into the possi- 
 bilities of the future, though perhaps somewhat grandly 
 expressed, is clear enough as to the homely beginning of the 
 ladder by which he ascended. The painter referred to was, 
 no doubt, a house painter ; and it must have been the scrolls 
 and ingenious borders, the festooned ribbons and groups of 
 lutes and viols and music-books, which captivated the boy's 
 imagination. " I soon learned to draw the alphabet with 
 great correctness," he adds, evidently with a reminiscence 
 of sign-posts. These studies very naturally led to a 
 similar but more refined trade. Hogarth was apprenticed 
 to a silver-plate engraver, and spent the rest of his young 
 life in designing coats-of-arras and other ornamentation for 
 the silver tankards and heavy table-furniture of the age. 
 
 Natural as this transition would seem to have been, our 
 artist, with a curious little attempt at the elevation of his 
 surroundings, represents himself as having chosen so homely 
 a career, because " I had before my eyes the precarious 
 situation of men of classical education. ... It was 
 therefore very conformable to my own wishes," he adds, 
 " that I was taken from school and served a long apprentice- 
 ship." But the engraving of silver plate did not long satisfy 
 the ambitious boy. He "found it in every respect too limited; " 
 and at twenty his " utmost ambition " was to engrave on 
 
THE PAINTER. 463 
 
 copper. English art was at this period in its dawn ; and for 
 the first time an EngUsh painter had taken brush in hand to 
 emulate and continue the achievements of Verrio and La 
 Guerre. As it happened, it was Sir James Thornhill, the 
 future father-in-law of Hogarth, who thus made himself 
 visible upon the walls and roofs, in nymphs as well 
 developed and a heaven as blue as that which had made the 
 foreigner magnificent ; and no doubt a new impulse was 
 given to all English lads with a taste for the pencil by this 
 first leap into eminence of ^' native talent." " The paintings 
 of St Paul's Cathedral and Greenwich Hospital, which were 
 at that time going on, ran in my head," saj^s Hogarth. In 
 St Paul's it was not nymphs but apostles which were the 
 subjects ; and in accordance with the change of sentiment, 
 the brilliant azure which suited mythology sank into a truly 
 national drab ; but the pictures, sacred and profane, were of 
 about the same calibre. They were paid for by a munificent 
 British nation at the cost of forty shillings a square yard. 
 But all the same, they stimulated young Hogarth as he sat 
 engraving heraldic monsters upon silver, and pondering what 
 he should do to make himself famous. Even at this moment 
 of exuberant hope it does not seem to have occurred to him 
 that he too might paint nymphs. Very sensible, and at the 
 same time very daring and original, were the cogitations 
 which passed through the young man's mind as he laboured 
 at his grifSns. From the beginning the stamp of the 
 practical was on all his imaginations ; no dreams of study, 
 such as would seem to come naturally to a young artist, 
 moved his sober mind. He worked and he pondered, 
 rejecting everything that was impossible, confining himself 
 within the bounds of probability with the most curious 
 sobriety and reasonableness. Perhaps only the exercise of 
 an actual handicraft round which all his ponderings were 
 strung could have kept the balance so straight between the 
 imaginative and the practical ; but no doubt the mental 
 constitution of the young thinker is the first thing to be 
 taken into consideration. Even in the heat of his musings 
 he never forgets that he himself is no self-denying 
 enthusiast, but " one who loved his pleasure ; " and makes 
 his plans accordingly, laying out for himself no sketch of 
 impossible devotion to art or pursuit of abstract excellence, 
 
464 THE PAINTEIi. 
 
 but sucli a sober compromise between ambition and possi- 
 bility as the reasonable lad could feel was within his powers 
 of execution. A shrewd practical mind working under such 
 conditions, with fire enough to carry it on to its aim, and 
 yet not enthusiasm enough to blind it to its inevitable 
 deficiencies, is the natural inventor of new methods of study 
 and short cuts to learning, Hogarth, over his work, feeling 
 himself capable of better things, eager for fame and success 
 and all their practical accompaniments, and wisely reflecting 
 " that the time necessary to learn in the usual mode would 
 leave no room to spare for the common enjoyments of life " 
 — a sacrifice which he does not feel inclined to make — finds 
 nothing left for it but to consider " whether a shorter road 
 than that usually travelled was not to be found." The 
 progress of his thoughts on this point he records as 
 follows : — 
 
 *' The early part of my life had been employed in a business rather 
 detrimental than advantageous to those branches of the art which I 
 wished to pursne and have since professed. I had learned by practice 
 to copy with tolerable exactness in the usual way ; but it occurred to 
 me that there were many disadvantages attending this method of study 
 — as having faulty originals, &c. ; and even when the pictures or prints 
 to be imitated were from the best masters, it was little more than pour- 
 ing water out of one vessel into another. Drawing in an academy, 
 though it should be after the life, will not make a student an artist; for 
 as the eye is often taken from the original to draw a bit at a time, it is 
 possible he may know no more of what he has been copying, when his 
 work is finished, than he did before it was begun. ... A dull 
 transcriber who, in copying Milton's ' Paradise Lost,' hath not omitted 
 a line, has almost as much right to be compared to Milton as an exact 
 copier of a fine picture by Rubens hath to be compared to Rubens. . 
 , . What is written may be line for line the same with the original ; but 
 it is not probable that this will often be the case with the copied figure — 
 frequently far from it. Yet the performer will be much more likely to 
 retain a recollection of his own imperfect work than of the original 
 from which he took it. More reasons not necessary to enumerate struck 
 me as strong objections to this practice, and led me to wish that I could 
 find the shorter path — fix forms and characters in my mind, and instead 
 of copying the lines, try to read the language, and if possible find the 
 grammar of the art, by bringing into one focus the various observations 
 I had made, and then trying by my power on the canvas how far my 
 plan enabled me to combine and apply them to practice. For this pur- 
 pose I considered what various ways and to what diflerent purposes the 
 
THE PAINTER. 465 
 
 memory might be applied, and fell upon one which I found most suit- 
 able to my situation and idle disposition — laying it down first as an 
 axiom that he who could by any means acquire and retain in his 
 memory perfect ideas of the subjects he meant to draw, would have as 
 clear a knowledge of the figure as a man who can write freely hath of 
 the twenty-four letters of the alphabet and their infinite combinations 
 (each of these being composed of lines), and would consequently be an 
 accurate designer. This I thought my only chance for eminence. . . . 
 I therefore endeavoured to habitutate myself to the exercise of a sort of 
 technical memory, and by repeating in my own mind the parts of which 
 objects were composed, I could by degrees combine and put them down 
 with my pencil. Thus, with all the drawbacks which resulted from 
 the circumstances I have mentioned, I had one material advantage over 
 my competitors — viz. , the early habit I had thus acquired of retaining 
 in my mind's eye, without coldly copying it on the spot, whatever I in- 
 tended to imitate. . . . My pleasures and my studies thus going 
 hand in hand, the most striking objects that presented themselves, 
 either comic or tragic, made the strongest impression on my mind. 
 . . Instead of burdening the memory with musty rules, or tiring the 
 eyes with copying dry and damaged pictures, I have ever found study- 
 ing from nature the shortest and safest way of attaining knowledge in 
 my art. " 
 
 The kind of study of nature which Hogarth thus adopted 
 was not, however, the study promoted or recommended by 
 schools of art. " Sometimes, but too seldom, I took the life," 
 he says, " for correcting the parts I had not perfectly enough 
 remembered." "The life" as represented by an academic 
 model was almost as little in his way as copying " dry or 
 damaged pictures." It was nature as it abounded in the 
 streets, in the alehouses, wherever the jovial, obstinate, self- 
 opinionated young fellow passed, that he pursued, his 
 pleasures and studies going hand in hand. So early as 
 during his apprenticeship it is recorded of him how, walking 
 on a hot Sunday to Highgate with some companions — bro- 
 ther 'prentices, most likely, out of the Leicester Square pur- 
 lieus — they entered a public-house to rest, and there found 
 a quarrel going on, in which " the quart-pots, being the only 
 missiles at hand, were soon flying about the room in glorious 
 confusion." The scene took the fancy of the budding 
 satirist. " He drew out his pencil and produced on the spot 
 one of the most ludicrous pieces that ever was seen." Thus, 
 even while almost totally uninstructed, his faculty showed it- 
 self. He went about everywhere with open eyes, in which lay 
 
 2 G 
 
466 ' THE PAINTEE. 
 
 the gift not of that poetic insight which penetrates through 
 outward aspects to the heart, but of seeing the outside com- 
 binations, the facts of ordinary life, the strange faces and 
 gestures, the accidents and catastrophes, of prose and every- 
 day existence. This manner of studying nature without the 
 accompaniment of " the life " is a thing which few painters 
 would be likely to recommend to pupils of genius ; and 
 Hogarth's theory, which is avowedly based upon an inclina- 
 tion and habit of mind totally different from that which 
 " scorns delights and lives laborious days," is one very little 
 applicable to general cases. That a man should want no 
 other instruction, no work or study, beyond that which 
 could be got by " acquiring and retaining in his memory 
 perfect ideas of the subjects he meant to draw," and should 
 by that means only acquire as " clear a knowledge of the 
 figure as a man who can write freely hath of the twenty-four 
 letters of the alphabet," is for the ordinary mind a very 
 astounding notion. The letters of the alphabet, fortunately, 
 do not change the position of their legs and arms, as the 
 human subject has a painful inclination to do ; and the 
 clearest idea of a scene — nay, the power to represent it 
 vividly in words — does not, unhappily, convey to a writer 
 any power over the other art. AVhen the painter first pro- 
 pounded his notions, which would seem to have been during 
 his fitful occasional attendance at the first '^ life " school 
 established in England, one of his comrades drew from it the 
 not unnatural conclusion, that the only way to draw well was 
 not to draw at all ! a commentary which Hogarth accepts 
 with sufficient good-humour from an " arch brother of the 
 pencil," who " supposed," he adds, " that if I wrote an essay 
 on the art of swimming, I should prohibit my pupil from 
 going into the water until he had learned.^' The suggestion, 
 however, is quite consistent with the daring and somewhat 
 arrogant sense of power which genius is apt to give to a 
 mind so energetic, self-esteeming, and unimaginative. His 
 aim was to express the abounding ideas of his active brain 
 rather than to produce any " thing of beauty," and he was 
 content with just so much mastery over the technicalities of 
 his art as enabled him to do this. In short, he pursued art 
 as if it had been literature, with the most curious absence of 
 that craving after absolute excellence which distinguishes 
 
THE PAINTER. 467 
 
 the painter — and was from the first less concerned about his 
 mode of expressing himself than about what he had to say. 
 
 Having thus framed for himself his own scheme of life 
 and work, the young man, once free of the trammels of his 
 apprenticeship, seems to have attempted no further exercise 
 of the trade which he had just finished learning. ^' The in- 
 stant I became master of my own time I determined to 
 qualify myself for engraving on copper," he says ; and we 
 are told by one of his biographers that " he supported him- 
 self at this period of his life by engraving arms and shop- 
 bills.'* His own statement, however, is, that his first work 
 was in the shape of frontispieces and illustrations to books, 
 many of which — his illustrations of ' Hudibras,' 'Don Quixote/ 
 &c. — are still preserved, though of merit marvellously in- 
 ferior to what was to come. This early preface to life was 
 not without its struggles. He went not too often to " the 
 academy in St Martin's Lane." He went about the world 
 with bright eyes, noting everything, taking in a crowd of 
 objects familiar as daily bread, yet wonderful and strange as 
 truth ever is, into his teeming, working, throbbing brain, 
 which had no fantastical susceptibilty about it, nor tendency 
 to be readily excited — and fasted and feasted with the joy- 
 ous characteristic improvidence of his age and his craft. "I 
 remember the time," he says, ''when I have gone moping 
 into the city with scarce a shilling ; but as soon as I have 
 received ten guineas there for a plate, I have returned home, 
 put on my sword, and sallied out again with all the confi- 
 dence of a man who had thousands in his pockets." The 
 sword seems the only doubtful particular in this little sketch 
 — everything else is, no doubt, as true to the life as may 
 well be ; but the homely, independent young bourgeois^ proud 
 of himself and his powers, and half scornfully, half good- 
 humouredly indifferent to the opinion of others, seems 
 scarcely likely to have troubled himself with such an ap- 
 pendage. Thus, however, he worked through the difficulties 
 of his beginning — studying very little in the ordinary sense 
 of the word; yet wherever he was, "while my eyes were 
 open,*' as he says, " I was at my studies, and acquiring some- 
 thing useful to my profession. I could do little more than 
 maintain myself until I was near thirty," he adds, " but 
 even then I was a punctual paymaster." The picture he 
 
468 * THE PAINTEK. 
 
 thus gives of himself is as clear as any he ever made. An 
 honest fellow, not over-careful either of his money or his 
 time or his words ; not self-denying, yet conscientious ac- 
 cording to his fashion ; determined to have his own way 
 even in art ; very confident of his own powers ; dauntless in 
 his undertakings ; undiscouraged by failure — a jovial, care- 
 less, stubborn, prejudiced, yet righteous soul, without delicacy 
 of perception or fineness of feeling, but with an eye like the 
 light that saw and could not help seeing, and a mind 
 strongly prepossessed with that vulgar powerful sense of 
 morality in which there is nothing really religious, nothing 
 spiritual nor elevating, but yet a vigour and force of influ- 
 ence upon the crowd which it is difficult to over-estimate. 
 Such a man — troubled by no delicate scruples, endowed 
 with such coarse, vigorous, moral sentiments, and set free 
 to work as he listed in an age so full of social corruption — 
 might be trusted to find work worth the doing. And Hog- 
 arth found his and did it, gaining strength as he went on. 
 
 The first print he published separately was one called the 
 "Taste of the Town," now known as ''Burlington Gate," 
 which is simple satire, and shows little more than an impa- 
 tient disgust with fashionable follies. The spectator does 
 not feel quite sure, indeed, whether, had Cuzzoni and the 
 others been English instead of Italian, they would have 
 called forth so strongly the painter's wrath, since it is less 
 their craft than their country that seems to annoy him. 
 These were the days of rampant nationality, when an Eng- 
 lishman was equal to three Frenchmen, and when even so 
 impartial a mind as that of Hume recognised with surprise 
 and benevolent satisfaction that Germany was a habitable 
 country. The London citizen, homely and arrogant, cannot 
 throw sufficient scorn upon the Italian singer, of whom every 
 contemptuous hypothesis is taken for granted, and whose 
 puny head mounted on a big body, or loose-lipped, imbecile 
 countenance, shows in the most primitive way the low place 
 he is supposed to occupy in creation. While crowds are 
 pouring to masquerade and opera in this print, a waste-paper 
 dealer wheels across the foreground a wheel -barrow full of 
 the neglected works of English dramatists, in which, how- 
 ever, Shakespeare ranks no higher than Congreve. The 
 state of art is symbolised behind by a statue of Kent, the 
 
THE PAINTER. 469 
 
 architect-painter, landscape-gardener, and general art-referee 
 of the moment, who stands erect on the summit of Burling- 
 ton Gate, supported by reclining figures of Michael Angelo 
 and Raphael ! This was the satirist's first essay in the 
 branch of art he was afterwards to carry to so great a height. 
 And there is not much meaning in it beyond the satisfaction 
 of a half-trained man in his first savage stroke of ridicule. 
 It took the fancy of the public, however, and become so 
 popular that it was pirated, and Hogarth lost his just gains. 
 It is supposed by vaiious commentators that the prominent 
 position of Kent in this and later prints was intended not 
 only to express Hogarth's own fierce contempt of the char- 
 latan in his own art, but to conciliate the favour of Sir James 
 Thornhill, whose academy the young artist was attending 
 fitfully, with more cultivation of his argumentative powers 
 than of any other, so far as can be made out, and whose 
 young daughter was an attraction still more powerful. Ex- 
 cept the bare facts, however, not a gleam of light is there to 
 reveal the progress of the romance. Sir James's academy 
 was held "in a room he had built at the back of his own 
 house, now next the playhouse," says Hogarth ; and here, 
 perhaps, the struggling artist caught glimpses of the city 
 maiden, no inapt representation of the legendary master's 
 daughter of all London romances. It would be easy to 
 imagine the stolen progress of the courtship, the visions of 
 the young princess of the wealthy reputable house, only 
 daughter and heart's delight, furtively gleaming upon the 
 bold rebel who kept her father's studio in commotion, and 
 fought like Ishmael against all theories and traditions. He 
 was no longer a boy, but over thirty, working hard, with a 
 pugnacious, unquenchable determination to pay his way and 
 make his way, and earn wealth and fame ; and she in the 
 simplicity of twenty, with perhaps — most likely — a little 
 womanly enthusiasm for art, and faith in it — not to say 
 faith in the bold-eyed daring man, neither boy nor milksop, 
 who was so sure of his own powers. Romance and Covent 
 Garden seem little in keeping ; and yet, no doubt, such a 
 thing exists even now, when there are no quaint eighteenth- 
 century interiors, no old-fashioned passages down which a 
 pretty, demure figure, in snowy cap and hanging ruffles, 
 might be seen gliding by as in a Dutch picture. And tho 
 
470 THE PAINTEE. 
 
 issue was tliat Jane Thornliill ran away with the painter, 
 though how and in what fashion we have no record. 
 
 It was, no doubt, a most imprudent match. He was 
 thirty-three, and yet had done nothing to justify his own 
 self-confidence. Not that indolence was a vice which could 
 be charged against him. For thirteen years he had been 
 hard at work, doing illustrations, frontispieces, every kind 
 of drudgery that booksellers would supply him with. He 
 had even made a beginning in painting, and attempted to 
 conciliate legitimate art by what he calls " conversation 
 pieces ; " but was still a struggling poor artist, not having 
 yet struck the key-note of fame. Not very long before, 
 indeed, he had been pronounced in court to be no painter at 
 all, in the most humiliating and discouraging way. A more 
 curious episode in the story of a man just trembling on the 
 brink of fame could scarcely be. A Mr Morris, an uphol- 
 sterer, engaged him to make a design for tapestry, " a 
 representation of the Element Earth,"' whatever that may 
 have been. Immediately afterwards, the alarmed tradesman 
 found out that the artist he had intrusted with such an im- 
 portant commission was no painter, but only an engraver I 
 Upon this " I became uneasy," says the patron of art, *' and 
 sent one of my servants to him, w^ho stated my apprehen- 
 sions ; to which Mr Hogarth replied that it was certainly a 
 bold and unusual kind of undertaking ; and if Mr Morris did 
 not like it when finished, he should not be asked to pay for 
 it. The work was completed and sent home ; but my 
 tapestry-workers, who are mostly foreigners, and some of 
 tliem the finest hands in Europe, and perfect judges of per- 
 formances of that nature, were all of opinion that it was not 
 finished in a workmanlike manner, and that it was impos- 
 sible to execute tapestry by it." The verdict was in the 
 upholsterer's favour, and Hogarth had to swallow the affront 
 as best he might. Nor was the patronage he met with 
 always of a more dignified nature. He is reported to have 
 sold his plates to the landlord of the Black Horse in Corn- 
 hill by the weight of the copper. "I am only certain that 
 this occurrence happened in a single instance," says Nicholls, 
 his biographer, *' when the elder Bowles offered, over a 
 bottle, half-a-crown a pound weight for a plate just then 
 completed." Probably the incident was not so humbling to 
 
THE PAINTER. 471 
 
 Hogarth as it looks at this date, when painters are not in 
 the habit of discussing their works " over a bottle " with 
 publicans. But yet these indications are sufficient to show 
 that the path of the young artist was no primrose path, and 
 that he had his full share of those difficulties and mortifica- 
 tions which fall peculiarly to the lot of the self-trained and 
 self-opinionated son of genius in all arts. 
 
 His Bohemian life, however, ceased with his marriage, 
 and the sobering touch of household necessities and fully- 
 developed existence speedily showed its effects upon his 
 work. He took a house in Leicester Fields, and entered the 
 world of legitimate art formally as a portrait-painter. Wha 
 his domestic circumstances were there is no record, but he 
 seems to have claimed ineffectually from his father-in-law 
 the portion which Thornhill probably thought his daughter 
 had forfeited by her clandestine marriage ; and it was hard 
 times with the new household. His portraits did not suc- 
 ceed. " I could not bring myself to act like some of my 
 brethren, and make it a sort of manufactory, to be carried on 
 by the help of background and drapery painters," he himself 
 says. " I was unwilling to sink into a portrait manufac- 
 turer,^' he adds, in another place, and proceeds with scornful 
 force to describe the process : — 
 
 " A man of very moderate talents may have great success in it 
 as the artifice and address of a mercer is infinitely more useful than the 
 abilities of a painter. By the manner in which the present race of pro- 
 fessors in England conduct it, that also becomes still life as much as 
 any of the preceding. Admitting that the artist has no further view 
 than merely copying the figure, this must be admitted to its full extent ; 
 for the sitter ought to be still as a statue — and no one will dispute a 
 statue being as much still life as fruit, flowers, a gallipot, or a broken 
 earthen i)an. It must, indeed, be acknowledged they do not seem 
 ashamed of the title, for their figures are frequently so executed as to be 
 as still as a post. Posture and drapery, as it is called, is usually sup- 
 plied by a journeyman, who puts a coat, &c., on a wooden figure like a 
 a jointed doll, which they call a layman, and copies it in every fold as 
 it chances to come ; and all this is done at so easy a rate as enables the 
 principal to get more money in a week than a man of the first profes- 
 sional talents can get in three months. If they have a sufficient quan- 
 tity of silks, satins, and velvets to dress their laymen, they may thus 
 carry on a very profitable manufactory without a ray of genius." 
 
 All this, no doubt, had truth in it ; but, at the same time, 
 
472 THE PAINTER. 
 
 it would be wrong to forget that the man who thus writes 
 was very partially trained, with little real knowledge of the 
 science of painting, and almost no acquaintance with its 
 greatest works. He professed himself ready to compete 
 with Vandyke with a curious vanity wdiich seems peculiar 
 to the British painter, and confesses, not without pride, that 
 "I could not help uttering blasphemous expressions against 
 the divinity even of Raphael Urbino, Correggio, and Michael 
 Angelo." Hogarth's biographers unite in attributing his 
 failure in this branch of art to his uncourtly tendency to 
 paint men as they were — a reason which he himself also 
 adduces. "I found, by mortifying experience," he says, 
 " that whoever would succeed must adopt the mode recom- 
 mended in one of Gay's fables, and make divinities of all who 
 sit to him." This too, however, must be taken cum grano. 
 Every one is aware how doubtful is the success in portrait- 
 ure of historical or genre painters, who are in the habit of 
 "taking the life," to use Hogarth's phrase, as a general guide, 
 without filling their pictures with portraits of their models. 
 A painter of character naturally lies under a still greater 
 difficulty. Each artist instinctively seizes upon that phase 
 of physiognomy which attracts his special genius. The 
 idealist may fail more agreeably than the humourist, but it 
 is still a failure ; his sitter is a model to him, not an indi- 
 vidual ; whereas to Hogarth his sitter was a character whose 
 trenchant points he could not help seizing, and to whom he 
 assigned a place involuntarily in the wild grotesque life- 
 drama which he always felt to be going on around him. 
 His portrait of himself, of Captain Coram, and one or two 
 others, are full of homely force and reality ; but beauty was 
 not in his way. At the same time, there is no doubt that 
 his arrogant spirit and fiery temper must have had much to 
 do with his failure. " For the portrait of Mr Garrick in 
 * Richard III.' I was paid two hundred pounds, which was 
 more than any English artist ever received for a single por- 
 trait," he says ; yet when Mrs Garrick complained of another 
 portrait of her husband, that it looked " less noble " than 
 the original, " Hogarth drew his pencil across David's 
 mouth, and never touched the piece again." A still more 
 savage instance of resentment is recorded of him by the 
 moral Dr Trusler, in the first instance, and afterwards by all 
 
THE PAINTEE. 473 
 
 liis biographers. A man of unusual ugliness, and even de- 
 formity, was so ill advised as to sit to him for his portrait, 
 which Hogarth painted " with singularly rigid fidelity." 
 The unfortunate sitter was in no hurry to claim the per- 
 formance when finished, and after making repeated applica- 
 tions to him for the removal of his portrait and for its pay- 
 ment, Hogarth took the following unpardonable means of 
 getting himself paid. " He sent him," says Dr Trusler, 
 '' the following card : ' Mr Hogarth's dutiful respects to 
 
 Lord . Finding that he does not mean to have the 
 
 picture which was drawn for him, is informed again of Mr 
 Hogarth's pressing necessities for the money. If, therefore, 
 his lordship does not send for it in three days, it will be dis- 
 posed of, with the addition of a tail and some other append- 
 ages, to Mr Hare, the famous wild-beast man ; Mr H. having 
 given that gentleman a conditional promise on his lordship's 
 refusal/ This intimation," adds the Doctor with a chuckle, 
 " had its desired effect — the picture was paid for, and com- 
 mitted to the flames." 
 
 Now it cannot be supposed that it is an agreeable thing 
 to pay for a picture only for the purpose of committing it to 
 the flames, nor could the polite world be expected to subject 
 itself to assaults of savage insolence like the above ; and the 
 wonder rather is that Hogarth had any sitters at all, than 
 that his sitters were few. We find, however, in his journal 
 a list of unfinished pictures during the first year of his mar- 
 riage, which shows he was not without patronage. It 
 includes " a family piece of four figures for Mr Kich ; an 
 assembly of twenty-five figures for Lord Castlemain ; family 
 of four figues for Mr Wood ; a conversation of six figures 
 for Mr Cook ; a family of five figures for Mr Jones ; the 
 Committee of the House of Commons for Sir Archibald 
 Grant ; . . . a family of nine for Mr Vernon ; . . . 
 another of five for the Duke of Montague, &c. &c." These 
 were no doubt " small conversation pieces, from twelve to 
 fifteen inches high," which, as he himself says, " having 
 novelty, succeeded for a few years." These pictures are for 
 the most part lost in private collections, and unknown to 
 the public. At the same time, while still casting about for 
 his fit work, with dim suggestions of it floating in his brain, 
 but no certain inspiration to guide him, a more ambitious 
 
474 THE PAINTER. 
 
 project crossed Lis mind. He was, it is evident, so totally 
 uninstructed in art as to be able to conceive it possible that 
 he, with his imperfect training, might make a sudden hit in 
 the highest branch of his profession, having little more than 
 natural genius of a totally different bent to help him up to 
 the elevation of Kaphael and Buonarotti. Thus poor Hay- 
 don, with wild and melancholy arrogance, pitted himself 
 against the time-tried honours of Sebastian ; and Turner, 
 with better reason, though no more lofty meaning, has elected 
 to go down to posterity in an endless duel with calm Claude, 
 all unconscious of the quarrel fixed upon him. We are not 
 aware that any but English artists have ever conceived so 
 strange a struggle possible. It is thus that Hogarth de- 
 scribes his first attempt at high art, and the intention with 
 which it was made : — 
 
 " I entertained some hopes," he says, "of succeeding in what puffers 
 in books call the great style of History -painting, so that, without having 
 had a stroke of this grand business before, I quitted small portraits and 
 familiar conversations, and, with a smile at my own temerity, com- 
 menced history-painter, and on a great staircase at St Bartholomew's 
 Hospital painted two Scripture stories, the ' Pool of Bethseda, ' and the 
 'Good Samaritan,' with figures seven feet high. These I presented to 
 the charity, and thought they might serve as a specimen to show that, 
 were there an inclination in England for encouraging historical pictures, 
 such a first essay might prove the painting them more easily attainable 
 than is generally imagined." 
 
 The result, as was to be looked for, by no means fulfilled 
 the hopes with which it was made. These vast compositions 
 *' served as a specimen " to show, not what English art could 
 do if properly encouraged, but that sacred art was not in 
 Hogarth's way, and that he had nothing to do with the 
 grand and heroic. Probably he had himself made the dis- 
 covery before he had finished the pictures. The same 
 eventful crisis just after his marriage — when his conversa- 
 tion pieces began to fail, and when it became more and 
 more evident that, the heroic also failing, or promising to 
 fail, some new attempt must be made to strike out an incli- 
 vidual path — roused in him renewed ponderings over his own 
 powers, and what he was to do with them. He could not 
 depend continuously upon miserable book-illustrations or 
 uncertain painting of faces. He felt himself thrill with 
 
THE PAINTER. 475 
 
 power and the capacity for doing something, thongli he did 
 not yet see what ; and in this moment of doubt his musings 
 took the following form : — 
 
 **I thought hoth writers and painters had, in the historical style, 
 totally overlooked that intermediate species of subjects which may be 
 placed between the sublime and grotesque. I therefore wished to com- 
 pose pictures on canvas similar to representations on the stage ; and 
 further, hope that they will be tried by the same tests, and criticised by 
 the same criterion. Let it be observed that I mean to speak only of 
 those scenes where the human species are actors, and these, I think, 
 have not often been delineated in a way of which they are worthy and 
 capable. 
 
 " In these compositions those subjects that will both entertain and 
 improve the mind bid fair to be of the greatest public utility, and must 
 therefore be entitled to rank in the highest class. If the execution is 
 difficult (though that is but a secondary merit), the author has claim to 
 a higher degree of praise. If this be admitted, comedy, in painting as 
 well as writing, ought to be allotted the first place, as most capable of 
 all these perfections, though the sublime, as it is called, has been opposed 
 to it. Ocular demonstration will carry more conviction to the mind of 
 a sensible man than all he would find in a thousand volumes ; and this 
 has been attempted in the prints I have composed. Let the decision be 
 left to every unprejudiced eye; let the figures in either pictures or 
 prints be considered as players dressed either for the sublime, for gen- 
 teel comedy or farce, for high or low life. I have endeavoured to treat 
 my subjects as a dramatic writer ; my picture is my stage, and men and 
 women my players, who by means of certain actions and gestures are to 
 exhibit a dumb show." 
 
 " I therefore turned my thoughts to a still more novel 
 mode," he proceeds — " viz., painting and engraving modern 
 moral subjects, a field not broken up in any country or age." 
 This resolution produced " The Harlot's Progress," " The 
 Rake's Progress," and " The Marriage ^-la-Mode," works 
 more individual and remarkable than have ever, either before 
 or since, distinguished British art. We do not say more 
 beautiful, for that is a totally diiferent question. Other Eng- 
 lish painters since his time liave added many a sweet con- 
 ception and fair fancy to the world's store of wealth ; but 
 Hogarth is alone in the remarkable effort by which he found 
 his true work. He had spent his youth in unceasing at- 
 tempts to make it out, and it was only in his mature man- 
 hood at thirty-five that he stumbled at last upon the true 
 vein which he had been bom to explore. 
 
476 THE PAINTER. 
 
 The whole process is so curious, that it is worth almost 
 as much study as the works themselves in which it at last 
 found its issue. By rebellion against every tradition of his 
 art — by attempts in a hundred different ways to express the 
 yet inexpressible — by lawless studies, and equally lawless 
 contradictions of other men's studies — by self-confidence 
 which reaches the point of arrogance — the bull-headed, clear- 
 sighted j)ainter at last found out in his groping those tools 
 which are always to be found somehow by those who can nse 
 them. He was one of the men who are born dissenters and 
 protesters against the course of the ordinaiy world. That he 
 should have been in arms against the false taste which cul- 
 tivated a meaningless mythology was nothing — his nature 
 required that he should wield his weapons also against the 
 true taste, confusedly brightening through many shadows 
 upon dilettanti circles, which were too fine and too pretentious 
 to win any sympathy from the prejudiced Englishman. Ea- 
 phael was an Italian, and consequently of some kindred to 
 the opera-singer, whose pockets were overflowing with Eng- 
 lish gold, while English genius could scarce find bread to 
 eat; and therefore the divinest of painters excited in the 
 mind of the stubborn islander a covert envious contempt, 
 which he was half ashamed, half proud to express. But the 
 pugnacity which was so strong in his own profession, took 
 a different character when the Ishmael of art turned his keen 
 gaze upon the world which he had frequented from his child- 
 hood, and which was professedly his school and studio. 
 Among those crowds which attracted and absorbed him, in 
 which his vivid eye traced the perpetual clash of human in- 
 terests, and equally perpetual thread of human identity, what 
 wild mischief was working ! There was innocence, a white, 
 helpless, feeble thing, fluttering for a moment on the verge 
 of the abyss, with no inward power of resistance, or external 
 force to protect it ; there was Vice, boisterous and triumph- 
 ant, filling the foreground of the national picture, always the 
 loudest, the gayest, the most prominent object ; and there 
 was Destruction, stalking quietly in hideous universal domi- 
 nion, quenching the mirth, stripping off the gaudy robes, 
 visiting upon everything its awful sentence. Such were the 
 figures, dramatic and memorable, which Hogarth saw ap- 
 pearing and reappearing through the careless tragic crowd. 
 
THE PAINTER. 477 
 
 He traced them now through one group, now through another 
 — always the same uncertain beginning, the same flutter of 
 short-lived pleasure, the same dismal annihilation. Nothing 
 higher, nothing more subtle, in the complications of this ter- 
 rible existence, was apparent to him ; nor indeed was any 
 other view possible either to the constitution of his mind or 
 the nature of his art, which required the positive in all things, 
 and had no words in which to express those gradations and 
 shades of good and evil which form the favourite study of 
 the nineteenth century. In the eighteenth, vice and virtue 
 were sharply discriminated. The age, with all its artificial- 
 ity, had that primitive character which belongs to a second- 
 rate age. It believed in poetic justice, in swift rewards and 
 punishments, in an edifying reality of recompense, such as 
 the age of Shakespeare could no more have believed in than 
 does our own. It was a sham century, full of false pretences 
 in everything ; and yet it was childishly realistic in its moral 
 theories, and took it for granted that the industrious appren- 
 tice must come to be Lord Mayor, and the idle one be hanged 
 at Tyburn, with a mingled belief in, and indifference to, the 
 moral which is wonderful to behold. Such a strange satis- 
 faction and confidence in the vindictive sovereignty of Jus- 
 tice is characteristic of a licentious age — perhaps because 
 human instinct makes it apparent that without that last re- 
 straint the world must fall into utter and unmanageable cor- 
 ruption. It is only when higher canons of morality prevail, 
 when decency has become the rule and not the exception, 
 and when evil things hide themselves from the daylight, that 
 humanity dares admit in words how often it is the good who 
 suffer, and how generally the bad escape. Such an idea at 
 least had never dawned on our painter. The other lesson 
 was the lesson for his time ; and with all his characteristic 
 daring, with the vehemence of a man who has at last found 
 utterance, and feels the power in his own hands, he proceeded 
 to pour it forth upon the astonished world. 
 
 The story of " The Harlot's Progress " is already suffi- 
 ciently indicated by its name. It is a hideous and miserable 
 tragedy, without pathos or tenderness, but with a certain 
 elevating touch of terror, the gloom of an inevitable catas- 
 trophe. Even in the first scene the horror already creeps in 
 shadow over the doomed creature, with whom, however, the 
 
478 THE PAINTEK. 
 
 spectator is never called upon to have any sympathy. The 
 tale is as pitiless as it is desperate. The young country girl, 
 fresh and modest, with the rose in her bosom, and the inno- 
 cence of ignorance in her face, does not, even in that one 
 glimpse of her unfallen estate, appeal to the heart of the be- 
 holder. She is an easy, not unwilling, victim. The idea of 
 any struggle on her part to stand against the hideous peril 
 that approaches her has evidently never entered into her 
 creator's mind. She is innocent because she knows no bet- 
 ter, ready to be dazzled by the first gleam of temptation, the 
 aptest pupil in the horrible school. And the vice into which 
 she falls is unsoftened by the slightest veil of sentiment. In 
 the second design it is full-blown and rampant, corrupted to 
 the very core, with treachery added to depravity. It is evi- 
 dent that she has fallen without a struggle, and adopted her 
 horrible trade without any compunctions. The third picture 
 shows her reduced from luxury to squalor, but still as calm 
 in her wickedness, as destitute of any relenting or movement 
 of heart or conscience, as if she were a woman cut out of 
 stone. She has added robbery by this time to her accom- 
 plishments, and plays with the watch she has stolen with a 
 certain childish complacency in her acquisition. In the fol- 
 lowing scene, which shows her in Bridewell, there is a cer- 
 tain pitiful half- whimpering wonder in her face, which for 
 the first time introduces human feeling into the awful tale — 
 a sudden " blank misgiving of a creature moving about in 
 worlds not realised " has come over the fair, foolish, unawak- 
 ened countenance. Is it possible that it can be required of 
 her to labour and keep silence, she who has had but idleness 
 and noise and mad merrymaking since her career began ? 
 This look of childish complaint and wonder is the only trace 
 of humanity in the wretched being who is thus pursued with- 
 out sympathy to her miserable end. Her death, like her out- 
 set, makes no claim upon our pity. It is bare tragedy — 
 dreadful, not pathetic. We gaze and are silent, but no tears 
 come to our eyes. Such a passionless narrative, horribly 
 calm and immovable, would be, we believe, impossible 
 nowadays. But it adds in the most wonderful way to the 
 moral effect of the story. Vice has never been without its 
 sympathisers and bewailers. It has been clothed in senti- 
 mental colours, associated with love and generosity, and 
 
THE PAINTER. 479 
 
 many of the highest qualities of the heart. False lights of 
 every description have been thrown upon it — lights of genius, 
 of wit, of splendour and luxury — everything that can most 
 dazzle and confuse the mind. And though the highest por- 
 traiture of all would no doubt breathe an infinite pity for the 
 lost and hopeless, yet there is in this rigid unsympathetic 
 history a force which feeling cannot command. His heroine 
 was no horror to Hogarth any more than she was a divinity. 
 He could smile at her tricks, and enter into her tastes, and 
 realise her fully as a conceivable being ; but he has no pity 
 for her, and he asks none from the public. There she stands, 
 the curse and bane of whomsoever crosses her path — mean, 
 heartless, loveless, miserable — doomed from the beginning, 
 yet taking no grandeur even from her doom. 
 
 This awful story Hogarth wrote up before the eyes of the 
 world which knew her, and knew how true it was ; and this 
 was his moral — that vice was impossible; that it was ruin; 
 that its doom was pronounced the moment the first step was 
 taken ; and that none escaped. It is hard to tell whether 
 the painter meant or was aware of the frightful satire con- 
 tained in his postscript, the funeral scene round which so 
 many horrors crowd. He has been labouring to teach a 
 terrible lesson, and yet, in the very moment of completing 
 it, he is compelled to admit the fruitlessness of any lesson. 
 Dr Trusler, who expounds the prints, does his best to throw 
 a shade of ridicule upon the whole by the solemn suggestion 
 that " the appearance and employment of almost every one 
 present at this mockery of woe is such as must raise disgust 
 in the breast of any female who has the least tincture of 
 delicacy, and excite a wish that such an exhibition may not 
 be displayed at her own funeral!" The meaning of the 
 picture, however, whether intentional or not, is infinitely 
 more profound than this smug bit of eighteenth -century 
 morality. It is, as we have said, at the end of the most 
 trenchant and terrible warning, an exhibition of the fact still 
 more terrible, that human nature is unteachable ; that its 
 levity is not sobered, nor its evil instincts subdued, even by 
 the severest lesson ; that proof itself fails to convince, or 
 death to solemnise it ; and that the preacher, be he ever so 
 earnest, must acknowledge that he preaches in vain. 
 
 These wonderful pictures made an immediate revolution 
 
480 THE PAINTEK. 
 
 in the circumstances and prospects of the painter. Bj the 
 anxious wiles of his young wife and her mother, who were 
 eagerly seeking means of reconciliation between his father- 
 in-law and himself, the series was placed clandestinely in 
 Thornhill's drawing-room. The bit of family history in- 
 volved in his observations on them is amusing and char- 
 acteristic. The old painter was moved to instant admiration. 
 He was himself a classicist, but had evidently sufficient 
 candour of mind to perceive the originality and vigour of 
 this new attempt in art. He asked eagerly who was the 
 artist ; but when he was informed a humorous change en- 
 sued. " Oh, very well ; very well indeed," said Jane Thorn- 
 hill's father. " The man who can paint such pictures as 
 these can maintain a wife without a portion ! " It is almost 
 the only occasion upon which the veil of absolute obscurity 
 is lifted from Hogarth's domestic life. The quarrel, we are 
 told, was afterwards entirely made up, as such quarrels 
 generally are in the long-run, and the portion thus contended 
 for would seem to have been eventually granted. " He 
 afterwards considered the union of his daughter with a man 
 of such abilities an honour to his family, was reconciled, 
 and generous," says Dr Trusler — another proof of the oft- 
 proved principle that there is nothing so successful as suc- 
 cess. The outer world was equally favourable. " When 
 the publication was advertised, such was the expectation of 
 the town that above twelve hundred names were entered in 
 the subscription book. ... At a time when England 
 was coldly inattentive to everything which related to the 
 arts, so desirous were all ranks of people of seeing how this 
 little domestic story (!) was delineated, that there were eight 
 piratical imitations, besides two copies in a smaller size than 
 the original, published by permission of the autlior. To 
 show still further the taste of the time, it is added that 
 " the whole series were copied on fan-mounts representing 
 the six plates — three on one side and three on the other." 
 These fans were no doubt presented, in the interests of 
 morality, to young and innocent women, whose ears we 
 would now think polluted by the very name. Thus, as time 
 changes, the reformations of one age become the wonder 
 and scandal of another. 
 
 There were, however, other circumstances besides their 
 
THE PAINTER. 481 
 
 originality and merit which attracted the public attention to 
 these remarkable prints. The debauchee in the first of the 
 series was identified as the Colonel Charteris already dis- 
 tinguished by Pope. The magistrate in the third attracted 
 the instant admiration of society as a portrait of Mr Justice 
 Gonson, a judge famous for his pursuit of the vicious. Other 
 likenesses were discovered or imagined as the series went 
 on ; and thus the crowd solaced itself with a piece of 
 gigantic gossip, which satisfied those who were incapable 
 of any graver impression. Other prints, too, had prepared 
 the way for the first epic series — " The Man of Taste " — a 
 reproduction of the gate of Burlington House, with Kent 
 planted on the apex, but with the addition of a figure of 
 Pope whitewashing the wall and bespattering the passers- 
 by, in allusion to his unjustifiable onslaught on the Duke 
 of Chandos ; '' Southwark Fair," " The Examination of Bam- 
 bridge before the House of Commons," &c. These had 
 been gradually preparing the way for his grand success, and 
 at last the eye and interest of the public were finally won. 
 
 His second series appeared not much more than a year 
 later. It is the fatal career of a man instead of a woman which 
 the painter treats in the second place, with a corresponding 
 change of rank from the lowest to a higher class. The Pake 
 is introduced to us as the heir of a miser, whose fortune 
 would seem to have fallen suddenly and even unexpectedly 
 into his hands. He has the aspect of a gentleman-rustic, 
 the young squire of the age, with a fair meaningless young 
 face, and a story of premature wickedness to mark that he is 
 already a man of spirit. This story is intertwined through 
 the whole course of the more sombre drama, with an attempt, 
 the only one Hogarth ever made, to exhibit suffeiing, truth, 
 and goodness in contrast with depravity. The attempt can- 
 not, however, be said to be successful. Virtue, in her con- 
 ventional guise, is no match for vice in all the force of reality 
 and nature ; and the ministering angel who hovers over her 
 seducer, delivering him from want and attending him in his 
 misery, is the only unreal thing in the tragedy. In the first 
 scene the elated heir is refusing to acknowledge the claims 
 made upon him by the weeping victim and her mother, to 
 whom he offers money with the insouciance of the conven- 
 tional betrayer of innocence. Not so dazzling as Lovelace, 
 
 2 H 
 
482 THE PAINTEE. 
 
 he is the Squire Thornhill of the time, evidently the fa- 
 vourite and most familiar hero of popular fiction ; and there 
 is nothing elevated in the country lass, with her apron to 
 her eyes, and a ring held between her fingers, of whom the 
 young good-for-nothing is calmly disembarrassing himself. 
 The second scene is pure comedy, revealing the hero as a 
 full-blown man of fashion, holding that levee of dependants 
 and flatterers with which the world by this time is so famil- 
 iar. Then comes a horrible orgy in a tavern, where the 
 hero, his expression changing from the imbecility of com- 
 placent patronage to the deeper imbecility of intoxication, 
 is still the centre of the revolting group. The fourth print, 
 the least successful of the series, reveals the first check in his 
 career. He is going to court in all his finery when his chair 
 is stopped, and the bailiff's interrupt his progress ; but are 
 in their turn interrupted by the forgiving and faithful woman, 
 the victim of the first scene, who, we are to suppose, has so 
 far prospered in the mean time as to be able to deliver him 
 by means of the purse which she holds up with indignant 
 pity. The next scene is the hero's marriage to a simpering 
 and substantial old maid, who stands in forcible contrast to 
 the pretty young girl arranging her dress behind, by the 
 side of the dismayed prodigal, who submits to his fate with 
 averted eyes and stolid face. Dr Trusler is very hard upon 
 this unhappy bride. "An observer," he says, "being 
 asked. How dreadful must he this creature! s hatred? would 
 naturally reply. How hateful must be her love ? " — a discussion 
 which, however, seems quite beyond the question. The 
 Kake's funds being thus recruited, we find him next the 
 tragic centre of a gambling scene. He has thrown himself 
 on one knee in a despair which is too theatrical for reality, 
 having first plucked off" from his shaven head the wig which 
 lies on the floor beside him. This histrionic anguish, how- 
 ever, is powerfully contrasted by the dumb despair of the 
 seated figure beside him, who is evidently too much ab- 
 sorbed by his own losses and failure to have either eye or 
 ear for anything else. In the seventh print the oft-averted 
 ruin has at length and finally come. The hero is in prison, 
 in a crowded room in the Fleet, in which an extraordinary 
 group are collected around him. By his side stands his old 
 wife, dishevelled and furious, pouring forth her rage upon 
 
THE PAINTER. 483 
 
 him. In the foreground the woman whom he forsook and 
 deceived falls fainting, overcome, it is supposed, by the 
 sight of his sufferings. The hero himself, curiously matured 
 and changed, sits with staring eyes and shrugged-up shoul- 
 ders, listening, as if he heard them not, to his wife s re- 
 proaches and the demands of the jailer and potboy, who 
 appeal to him on the other side. Of all the series this is 
 perhaps the most powerful figure, though a curiously foreign 
 element has been introduced, for which the spectator is 
 quite unprepared. On the edge of ruin the young de- 
 bauchee has turned author. On the table beside him lies a 
 roll of paper and an open letter intimating that his play 
 " will not do :" and it is evidently the failure of this last hope 
 which fills his worn face with such a vacancy of despair. 
 
 No doubt Hogarth intended the incident as the fiercest 
 satire upon the play-writers of the time ; and in this picture 
 of the ruined prodigal — with no other inspiration than that 
 hideous knowledge of the vilest phases of humanity which it 
 is common to call knowledge of the world, making a last 
 attempt to retrieve his fortunes by means of the art of 
 Shakespeare — was aiming a crushing blow at many a 
 fashionable dramatist. But the Eake's despairing effort has 
 been too bad to be floated into life even by his notoriety ; 
 his wig is pushed back from his forehead, one open hand 
 raised in expostulation, a bewildered hopelessness in his 
 face. The faint of his old love before his eyes affects him 
 not so much as the demand of the potboy ; his mind has no 
 room for such emotions. And the spectator looking on 
 would like to clear off the ministering angel as an encum- 
 brance, and feels neither sympathy for her nor interest in 
 her. She is thrust artificially into the story, an interpolation 
 interfering with its completeness. The last scene of all 
 leaves the hero in a madhouse, supported and tended by his 
 faithful and virtuous victim. Thus, while death concludes 
 the misery of the woman-criminal, insanity obliterates the 
 fuller life of the man who has turned every good gift be- 
 stowed upon him into bitterness. The story is less simple, 
 and so is the moral, but the lesson is not less forcibly urged. 
 In the first pictorial narrative everything was clear and 
 concise, written with a pen of iron upon tablets of stone — 
 impurity, which is the supremest rebellion against all the 
 
484 THE PAINTER. 
 
 laws of life, followed by swift destruction, death, and the 
 end. But in the other story the lines are less distinct ; con- 
 fusion has crept over heaven and earth ; a perpetual jar 
 runs through everything. There is the bewildering change 
 from obscurity to wealth ; the rapture of possession ; the 
 sudden fall and rising, and reprecipitation into the abyss, all 
 following each other with a rapidity which takes away the 
 breath. It is all confusion and chaos, beginning in folly, 
 ending in madness ; no longer passive ignorance falling 
 prone and at once, but a thousand gifts misused, oppor- 
 tunities wasted, good turned into evil, love and truth and 
 nature all twisted in to overthrow, and Bedlam at the end. 
 
 " The Rake's Progress " was not quite so successful as 
 the preceding series — partly, no doubt, because it was the 
 second, and partly from the greater elaboration of the story. . 
 But still we are told that its success " must have been great ; 
 for it was satisfactory to the artist himself." The figures 
 were again in many cases portraits ; but the chances are 
 that this particular, so totally unimportant nowadays, at so 
 great a distance of time, had but little to do even with con- 
 temporary popularity. For such characters as " the fencing- 
 master Dubois," " the miser Old Manners," " the maniac 
 William Ellis," could not be sufficiently well known to the 
 multitude to move its interest. By this time wealth had 
 begun to flow upon the ever-energetic painter. He became 
 able to add to his town-house "summer lodgings in Lambeth 
 Terrace," then no doubt a healthy rural neighbourhood, 
 where " the house which he occupied is still shown, and a 
 vine pointed out which he planted. While residing there he 
 became intimate with the proprietors of Vauxhall Gardens, 
 and embellished them with designs." The " Four Parts of 
 the Day " were composed for this use, and a host of other 
 works testify to the untiring vigour of the artist, who at last 
 found himself appreciated, and evidently laboured with a 
 sense of enjoyment under the pleasant stimulus of applause. 
 In the ten years which elapsed between the publication 
 of " The Rake's Progress " and that of " Marriage a- la-Mode " 
 he had produced " The Modern Midnight Conversation," a 
 wonderful group of revellers, most of them in the last stage 
 of intoxication ; " The Sleeping Congregation ;" " The Dis- 
 tressed Poet ; " a group of Doctors in consultation, known 
 
THE PAINTER. 485 
 
 as " TPie Undertakers' Arms;" an equally grotesque group 
 of students at a lecture; "The Four Parts of the Day;" 
 "Strolling Actresses Dressing in a Barn;" a curious em- 
 blematical drawing called " The Foundlings," as bad and 
 flat in its high virtue and benevolence as the others are 
 spirited and graphic, which was intended for the use of the 
 newly-founded hospital ; " The Enraged Musician," " Taste 
 in High Life," &c., besides a crowd of other less remarkable 
 works. At the same time, in this period of satisfied and 
 prosperous, but always pugnacious activity, he painted 
 several portraits with the avowed intention of rivalling the 
 old painters whom his dilettanti friends worshipped. In one 
 of his perpetual argumentations at the academy in St 
 Martin s Lane, Hogarth, " provoked," as he tells us, " by 
 their perpetual glorification of the past, put the following 
 question : ' Supposing,' " says the sturdy rebel, " ' that any 
 man at this time were to paint a portrait as well as Vandyke, 
 would it be seen or acknowledged, and could the artist enjoy 
 the benefit or acquire the reputation due to his performance ?' 
 They asked me, in reply," he proceeds, " ' if I would paint 
 one as well ? ' and I frankly answered, ' I believe I could." " 
 Thus it will be seen that not even success calmed down the 
 fighting nature of the self-dependent painter. The portrait 
 of Captain Coram, to which he refers as " the one which I 
 painted with most pleasure, and in which I particularly 
 wished to excel," is an admirable serious portrait of the 
 homely philanthropist, whose work had evidently interested 
 and stirred Hogarth's kindly pugnacious heart ; but neither 
 in that nor in the fat complacent features of Bishop Hoadley, 
 whom he painted about the same time, is anything to be 
 found which could affect the pre-eminence of Vandyke. It 
 seemed necessary to the vigorous arrogant soul, incapable 
 of any doubt of its own powers, to make a strain at the im- 
 possible now and then as life went on ; and it is curious to 
 find him doing it quite as eagerly now, at the height of his 
 fame, as when working unfriended and eager, with his heart 
 burning within him, and a sense of unexercised power swell- 
 ing in all his veins. 
 
 A more legitimate use of his natural combativeness was 
 made in 1735, when, justly disgusted and alarmed by the 
 losses he sustained from spurious copies and imitations of 
 
486 THE PAINTER. 
 
 his prints, he sought and obtained, in concert with various 
 other artists and printsellers, the law of copyright in draw- 
 ings and engravings, which secured to him the benefit of 
 his own genius. He was so much satisfied by the prompti- 
 tude of the Legislature, that he engraved a print to com- 
 memorate the event, with an inscription which is more 
 characteristic than modest — "In humble and grateful 
 acknowledgment," he says, "of the grace and goodness of 
 the Legislature, manifested in the Act of Parliament for the 
 encouraging of the arts of designing, engraving, &c., ob- 
 tained by the endeavours, and almost at the sole expense, of 
 the designer of this print, in 1735/' It was, however, a 
 very natural subject of self-gratulation, since it was his 
 prints and not his pictures which gave him the modest 
 wealth he had now attained. " He was rich enough to keep 
 his carriage," says Allan Cunningham ; "and though brother 
 artists conceded to him the name of painter with whimsical 
 reluctance, he was everywhere received with the respect and 
 honour due to a man of high talents and uncommon attain- 
 ments." So little seems to be authentically known of his 
 private life, that it is vain to make any attempt to discover 
 its fashion. "He loved state in his dress" — the same 
 authority adds, somewhat vaguely, " and good order in his 
 household ; and the success of his works enabled him to 
 indulge in the luxuries of a good table and pleasant guests." 
 The plain English of this, apparently, is, that the painter 
 was somewhat lavish and open-handed, living up to his 
 means, and taking little thought for the morrow. Barry 
 describes him as " a little man in a sky-blue coat," whom he 
 saw once standing at the corner of a street encouraging two 
 boys to fight. Probably he painted them afterwards, with 
 that lively pictorial sense of what it must all come to, which 
 did not interfere with his natural English delight in the 
 moment's sport. He was a friend of Fielding and of Garrick, 
 but does not appear to have made his way into fashionable 
 society, though he painted pictures for Horace Walpole, and 
 had patrons of title like other men. Probably he was him- 
 self too brusque^ too opinionated, too little considerate of the 
 feelings of others, for such a promotion. 
 
 Just before the publication of his last, and in some re- 
 spects greatest, series of engravings, Hogarth sold the pic- 
 
THE PAINTER. 487 
 
 tures from which his former prints were taken in a whimsical 
 and eccentric way by auction. They had all, it appears, up 
 to this time, remained in his hands. In was in the January 
 of '45, when so many things were going on, when Prince 
 Charlie was preparing to cross the Channel, and the king- 
 dom, in the eyes of many, was on the very edge of a great 
 convulsion ; and it gives us a curious glimpse into the indi- 
 vidual calm and leisure of that inner world of London, where 
 Kichardson sat working at his ' Clarissa,' and every man 
 went after his ordinary affairs, to find Hogarth concocting a 
 scheme which looks like a practical joke, and in which there 
 probably was a certain suppressed irony, for the disposal of 
 his pictures. " On the 25th of January ... he offered 
 for sale the six pictures of " The Harlot's Progress," the 
 eight paintings of " The Rake's Progress," " The Four 
 Times of the Day," and " The Strolling Actresses," on the 
 following conditions : — 
 
 **1, Every bidder shall have an entire leaf numbered in the book of 
 sale, on the top of which will be inscribed his name and place of abode, 
 the sum paid by him, the time when, and for which picture. 
 
 *' 2, That on the day of sale, a clock, striking every five minutes, shall 
 be placed in the room; and when it hath struck five minutes after 
 twelve, the first pictiu-e mentioned in the sale-book shall be deemed as 
 sold ; the second picture when the clock hath struck the next five 
 minutes after twelve, and so on in succession till the whole nineteen 
 pictures are sold. 
 
 ** 3. That none advance less than gold at each bidding. 
 
 **4. No person to bid on the last day, except those whose names 
 were before entered in the book. As Mr Hogarth's room is but small, 
 he begs the favour that no persons, except those whose names are entered 
 in the book, will come to view his paintings on the last day of sale." 
 
 Notwithstanding the natural disinclination of " the town " 
 to take all this trouble, we learn incidentally that Hogarth's 
 study " was full of noble and great personages" when the 
 day of sale arrived. He had still further revealed his opposi- 
 tion to all canons of art by another warlike manifesto in the 
 shape of an admission ticket to his auction, in which a num- 
 ber of well-known pictures by the old masters are seen in 
 personal conflict with Hogarth's own productions, the juxta- 
 position being often comical enough, though strained and un- 
 comfortable, as are all angry attempts at wit. The sale it- 
 
488 THE PAINTER. 
 
 self, wliich was attended by preliminaries so remarkable, was 
 commercially a failure. For the nineteen pictures thus put 
 up to auction he received only £427. Thus, for a sum 
 which would be but a modest price for one cabinet picture of 
 a well-known painter nowadays, Hogarth, the founder of a 
 school, a painter as widely known and largely popular as if 
 his narratives had been written with the pen instead of the 
 pencil, gave a large number of the best efforts of his genius. 
 " It must have stung his proud spirit," suggests Allan Cun- 
 ningham ; and it is apparent in every line of his personal 
 narrative that the effect of this and the other slights shown 
 to himself and to native art generally, embittered the whole 
 current of Hogarth's thoughts. Even before this humiliating 
 instance of the indifference of the picture-buying classes, he 
 had expressed his opinions on the subject in a letter in de- 
 fence of Sir James Thornhill's pictures, published in the St 
 James's 'Evening Post' of June 7th, 1737 — in which he 
 launched fiery arrows of indignation at " the picture-jobbers 
 from abroad," who set their face against all progress in art. 
 It is thus he describes their operations and the effect pro- 
 duced : — 
 
 *' It is their interest to depreciate every English work as hurtful to 
 their trade of continually importing shiploads of Dead Christs, Holy 
 Families, Madonas, and other dismal, dark subjects, neither entertain- 
 ing nor ornamental, on which they scrawl the terrible cramp names of 
 some Italian masters, and fix on us poor Englishmen the character of 
 universal dupes. If a man, naturally a judge of painting, not bigoted 
 to those empyrics, should cast his eye on one of their sham-virtuoso 
 pieces, he would be very apt to say, ' Mr Bubbleman, that grand Venus, 
 as you are pleased to call it, has not beauty enough for the character of 
 an English cookmaid.' Upon which the quack answers, with a confi- 
 dent air, ' Sir, I find that you are no connoisseur. The picture, I assure 
 you, is in Alesso Baldminetto's second and best manner, boldly painted 
 and truly sublime, the contour gracious, the air of the head in the high 
 Greek taste ; and a most divine idea it is.' Then, spitting in an obscure 
 place, and rubbing it with a dirty handkerchief, takes a skip to t'other 
 end of the room, and screams out in raptures, ' There's an amazing 
 touch ! A man should have this picture a twelvemonth in his collection 
 before he can discover half its beauties ! ' The gentleman (though 
 naturally a judge of what is beautiful, yet ashamed to be out of the 
 fashion by judging for himself) with this cant is struck dumb, gives a 
 vast sum for the picture, very modestly confesses he is indeed quite 
 ignorant of painting, and bestows a frame worth fifty pounds on a 
 
THE PAINTER. 489 
 
 frightful thing, which, without the hard name, is not worth so many- 
 farthings. Such impudence as is now continually practised in the pic- 
 ture-trade must meet with its proper treatment would gentlemen but ven- 
 ture to see with their own eyes. Let but the comparison of pictures with 
 nature be their only guide, and let them judge as freely of painting as 
 they do of poetry, they would then take it for granted that when a 
 piece gives pleasure to none but these connoisseurs or their adherents, 
 if the purchase be a thousand pounds, 'tis nine hundred and ninty-nine 
 too dear ; and were all our grand collections stripped of such sort of 
 trumpery, then, and not till then, it would be worth an Englishman's 
 while to try the strength of his genius to supply their place, which now 
 it were next to madness to attempt, since there is nothing that has not 
 travelled a thousand miles, or has not been done a hundred years, but 
 is looked upon as mean and ungenteel furniture." 
 
 " Marriage a-la-Mode," as we have already said, was pub- 
 lished in the year '45. The circumstance that the originals 
 still exist, and are now the property of the nation, makes this 
 series perhaps the most generally knoMm of all. The story 
 cannot be said to be less painful, but there are fewer visible 
 horrors in the delineation. The first scene shows us the 
 signing of the contract by which the splendid son of a long- 
 descended nobleman condescends to unite himself to a city 
 maiden, the daughter of a wealthy old alderman. Never 
 was contrast more complete than between the respective 
 fathers on either side ; and the whole tragedy shadows forth 
 before us in the group on the sofa. The bridegroom, pow- 
 dered and periwigged, sits turned away fi-om his bride, tak- 
 ing snufF out of the box which he holds gracefully in his 
 hand, and gazing with the profoundest satisfaction at his own 
 image in a great mirror. The lady sits by him listlessly lean- 
 ing forward, her face full of a dreamy wonder and dissatis- 
 faction, playing with her wedding-ring upon a handkerchief 
 — a wistful creature, half listening to the remark of the bar- 
 rister in gown and wig, who has turned away from the table 
 on pretence of mending his pen, and bends over her whisper- 
 ing something. She listens with eyes cast down, with the 
 blank look of a being standing on the threshold of an un- 
 known world. Councillor Silvertongue is nothing to her at 
 that strange moment. She is musing, wondering, standing 
 still to gaze at the undecipherable existence — a little sad and 
 disturbed, not knowing what to make of it, hearing and see- 
 ing as in a dream. A touch of poetic imagination, unlike his 
 
490 THE PAINTER. 
 
 ordinary tragic prose and intense reality, is in this listless, 
 bending, dreamy figure. It interests the spectator, and 
 moves him to a certain pity, as Hogarth's pictures so seldom 
 do. For one moment, intentionally or -unintentionally, we 
 are placed in sympathy with this doomed bride. The second 
 scene is still more powerful. It is morning, and the married 
 pair have met at something which is called breakfast. There 
 has been a late party evidently the night before, and the 
 candles still burn, and a yawning servant rouses himself hur- 
 riedly from a nap in the room behind. In the foreground a 
 bewildered steward, who has supposed himself certain of 
 a hearing at such an hour, withdraws with his book and 
 bills, holding up his hands and eyes in consternation. The 
 centre of the interest, however, is in the marvellous figure 
 of the husband, listlessly seated by the fire, a picture of 
 weariness, satiety, and disgust, such as perhaps was never 
 painted before. He seems to have but newly returned from 
 revels still more protracted than those of his household. 
 His hat is on his head, his dress in such disorder as a man's 
 must naturally be who has been up all night. But the way 
 in which he is thrown into his chair, the listless stretch of 
 all his limbs, the dull gaze of his wearied eyes, the sated 
 emptiness of his countenance, form altogether a picture 
 tragic in its force. Nothing but pleasure, so called — mad 
 pursuit of excitement and unlimited self-indulgence — could 
 have produced a dissatisfaction so entire, yet so dull, such a 
 sickening at everything in heaven or earth. It is the very 
 epic of miserable exhaustion — dull, heavy, hopeless, impa- 
 tient. He has not a word to throw even at the dog who is 
 snifiSng at the contents of his pocket. The listless limbs 
 have not vigour enough left to kick it away. What is the 
 good? is written on every line of the wonderful figure. 
 Such a sermon upon vice was never preached before. Once 
 more there is a dawning of pity in the mind of the looker-on. 
 The poor wretch, capable of such dead disgust with himself 
 and all the miserable delights into which he has been plung- 
 ing, might surely have been capable of better things. This 
 time it is the man who thus moves us ; the wife, with her 
 table thrust almost into the fire with the chilliness of luxury, 
 yawns and gazes at him under her half-closed eyelids with 
 a half-wondering contempt. Probably there has been a 
 
THE PAINTER. 491 
 
 quarrel about something, for she holds in her hand what 
 looks like a jewel-case ; but she as yet has sounded no 
 depths, and does not understand the tragedy which envelops 
 him. The one figure is that of frivolity playing with the 
 approaches of wickedness, utterly unaware of the depths 
 which lie below and the consequences involved in them, 
 lightly wondering and contemptuous, yawning out of simple 
 laziness and want of sleep; the other is the embodied failure, 
 the self-acknowledged futility and dissatisfaction of vicious 
 pleasure. Of all Hogarth's impersonations, this has, per- 
 haps, the highest meaning. It is scarcely surpassed by any- 
 thing in art. 
 
 The next scene once more abandons the higher walk of 
 genuine tragedy to plunge into hideous obscenities, into 
 which we cannot follow the hero ; nor is the meaning of the 
 scene clear enough to reward investigation. The chiefly 
 notable thing in it is the strange stolid impassible figure of 
 the child- woman, the heroine of the horrible tale, an unhappy 
 little puppet tricked out with every kind of finery, and with 
 the blood chilled in its very veins. The creature stands erect, 
 but in such a stupor of suffering, or misery, or terror, that 
 one feel she would fall prostrate at the merest touch, or 
 crumble into nothing, a gliost of helpless unintentional vice, 
 far more truly piteous and lamentable than the Harlot of 
 the first series. But, except for this, the suggestions of the 
 scene are simply disgusting, and the spectator is glad to 
 hurry on to the comedy of the Toilet-scene, full of character 
 and satire as it is. It ought to be tragi-comedy — for here it 
 is that the wife and her lover are supposed to be making the 
 fatal appointment, which ends in murder and death. But 
 we are obliged to say that we can find nothing tragical, 
 nothing passionate, no struggle of love or conscience in the 
 unmoved countenance of the fine lady who is being curled 
 and powdered, nor in the reclining figure of her lover, who 
 might be giving her a description of the perfectly lawful 
 and decorous seductions of a china monster, for anything 
 that appears in his face. He is holding out to her a 
 masquerade ticket, says the official explanation ; and we 
 are to suppose that up to this moment she has been but 
 frivolous, and that now passion is about to carry everything 
 before it, and the woman is on the verge of destruction. But 
 
492 THE PAINTER. 
 
 we are bound to add, that without the oEScial explanation it 
 would be very hard to find this out. Their conversation 
 has not the least appearance of being confidential. The 
 grinning hairdresser over her shoulder hears every word of 
 it, and the action of the picture flows quite away from the 
 hero and heroine to the wonderfully expressive group 
 behind her. The lady's levee is evidently well attended. 
 There is an assemblage of gentlemen of various classes, one 
 with his hair in curl-papers — and one lady in walking-dress, 
 who has evidently been attracted not by regard for her 
 friend, but by the music, to which the heroine herself pays 
 not the slightest attention. In the foreground, with his 
 mouth wide open, in the act of singing, sits the favourite 
 idol and abhorrence of the age, '' that contemptible shadow 
 of man, an Italian singer," as Dr Trusler describes him. A 
 flute-player, with his whole soul in his music, stands behind, 
 accompanying the song. No doubt the wide loose lips, and 
 pug-nose, and imbecile expression given to the singer, were 
 meant by Hogarth to express unmitigated contempt for the 
 frivolous being who was rewarded with so much English 
 gold. But the group surrounding him are not more digni- 
 fied than the Italian. The lady is leaning forward in her 
 chair, in an attitude uncomfortably suspended between 
 sitting and standing, oblivious of the chocolate which a 
 grinning black is pressing upon her ; and the faces of the 
 three men — one asleep, one idiotically ecstatic, the third 
 musing over his coffee, and not without a glance at the con- 
 versation of the lovers — are curiously real and original. 
 One has a fan suspended to his wrist, another has come 
 abroad with his hair carefully disposed in curl-papers ; so 
 fearless of ridicule were the Maccaroni of the age. And thus 
 uttermost vanity and frivolity accompany to the very edge of 
 ruin the doomed souls who have elected their own pleasure 
 as the highest rule of existence. The costumes are out of 
 date, but not the lesson, although let us hope our worst 
 scandals of the present time are not so shameless. 
 
 In the next picture of the series the tragedy has come to 
 a climax. It is the well-worn scene of discovery. The 
 lover leaping out of the open window, the wife on her 
 knees, in that miserable penitence which attends the fact of 
 being found out, but with the tragic circumstance that the 
 
THE PAINTER. 493 
 
 husband has been stabbed, and is dying. Perhaps the most 
 powerful point in this picture is, that both are carried 
 beyond the reach of emotion expressible in looks ; the man 
 sinks (in an impossible attitude, critics say — but that by 
 the way) with the stupor of death upon him, beyond either 
 rage or grief; the woman has fallen at his feet in a blank of 
 horror and consternation which equally takes all feeling out 
 of her face. Is it possible? — can it be? — the hapless 
 wretch is crying dumbly in her hideous awakening. Sin so 
 common, all the attendant circumstances so ordinary and 
 usual, so many reasons why it should remain undiscovered 
 for ever, why it should be excused, why the world should 
 go on all the same with masqueraders and Italian singers, 
 and one's patches and curls becomingly arranged ; and lo, 
 in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, it has come to 
 this ! She has shrieked out in her sudden horror, and 
 kneels before him, not penitent, too much shocked and 
 startled for any feeling, gazing up at him as he falls, to see 
 if it is true. The guilty lover turns round to give one look 
 as he escapes ; the burly watch bursts in at the door. Such 
 is the tragedy ; three hapless souls, but an hour since in the 
 heyday of youth and self-indulgence, swept suddenly up in 
 the fatal net of fate. 
 
 The concluding scene has that postscriptal character 
 which is common to Hogarth's works. The men have both 
 perished off the face of the earth — the husband murdered, 
 the lover executed ; and the unhappy creature who has 
 stood between them, finding life intolerable, has just 
 poisoned herself. We are done with them all, and we are 
 glad of it. Their sorry tragedy is cleared away from the 
 universe, and at the end comes in that strange conscious- 
 ness of the unbreaking perpetual stream of life which makes 
 every tragedy bearable. The miserable wife has returned 
 to her father's house in the City, where all this time exist- 
 ence has been running on in its old channel. Heaven and 
 earth have passed away in the mean time ; earthquakes, 
 convulsions, whatever is most fit to represent the climaxes 
 and catastrophes through which his child has passed, have 
 happened, and come to an end ; but there stands the old 
 father of the contract unchanged, in the same coat and wig, 
 and with the same soul, drawing her ring off her dead finger, 
 
494 THE PAINTEE. 
 
 lest it slioiild be stolen ; and there is the child, the little 
 seed which has sprung into being amid all these storms, 
 stretching out, unconscious, to kiss her dead face. The 
 play is over, but the old existence lasts and the new begins. 
 
 Such is the last and most remarkable series of Hogarth's, 
 works. The spectator has a doubt, when all is over, 
 whether he has read the story, or seen it acted, or only 
 looked at it on the walls of the National Gallery or within the 
 boards of a book — except, indeed, for the fact, most curious 
 of all, that he has no sympathy with any of the characters 
 in it — no desire to avert their fate, or yearning of pity 
 over them. They fill him with wonder, or horror, or dis- 
 gust, but with no fellow-feeling, or sense that they are 
 creatures like himself. The highest aims of tragedy have 
 been reached, and yet have been missed, with the strangest 
 mixture of weakness and power. He closes the volume 
 with perhaps a long-drawn breath of interest, but no sigh of 
 human emotion. It is that story of guilty love which has 
 gone deep to the heart, how often! notwithstanding all 
 remonstrances of morality. It is the same story which 
 Francesca, weeping, told to Dante in the dim country 
 of despair; and yet we look on grimly with horror or 
 interest, but without a tear or a thrill of feeling. How is 
 it ? We have not space enough to answer the question 
 fully here. 
 
 This is, however, the prevailing defect of these wonder- 
 ful works, and one which for ever bars their entrance into 
 the highest rank. They are pitiless, emotionless, unim- 
 passioned as the barest history ; and yet passion, so called, 
 is their prevailing topic. They are cold as the scenes of 
 a spectacle, and yet it is life in its most tumultuous shapes 
 which they represent. The cause is either a certain unbe- 
 lief in emotion, such as may be excused to a man familiar 
 with the sight of cold-blooded vice ; or it is because he 
 who puts this stern lesson on record stands in the place of 
 the Pharisee who gloats upon the sight, and is curious as 
 to all its details, even while he holds in his hand the savage 
 stone which is to crush the offender — and not in that of the 
 divine Spectator, who turns his sad countenance aside, over- 
 whelmed by the wonder, the pity, the misery of this lament- 
 able life. It was given to Hogarth to proclaim hoarsely, 
 
THE PAINTER. 495 
 
 yet unmoved, that the wages of sin is death, the primitive 
 lesson ; but not to quicken the heart or stir the weeping 
 blood of humanity with any tenderness for the hapless crea- 
 tures, with a lost heaven above, and hell and purgatory 
 within them, who thus sinned and died. 
 
 The intimation in the newspapers of the approaching 
 publication of this new series contained one of Hogarth's 
 savage covert sneers at the world which ventured to criti- 
 cise and wonder at him. " Particular care is taken," he 
 says, "that the whole shall not be liable to any exception 
 on account of indecency or inelegancy ; and that none of the 
 characters represented shall be personal." Still more 
 trenchant is the advertisement of the sale of the pictures, 
 in which he conceals his rage against his ungracious audi- 
 ence by a snarl of pretended deference to their opinion. He 
 was still smarting under the sense of contempt and neglect 
 which the sale of his former pictures had naturally produced ; 
 but it was no skilful way of conciliating the public to address 
 them as follows : — 
 
 "As, according to the standard so righteously and so laudably 
 established by picture-dealers, picture-cleaners, picture -framemakers, 
 and other connoisseurs, the works of a painter are to be esteemed more 
 or less valuable as they are more or less scarce, and as the living pain- 
 ter is most of all affected by the inferences resulting from this and 
 other considerations equally candid and edifying, Mr Hogarth, by way 
 of precaution, not puff, begs leave to urge that probably this will be 
 the last sale of pictures he may ever exhibit, because of the difficulty 
 of vending such a number at once to any tolerable advantage; and 
 that the whole number he has already exhibited, of the historical or 
 humorous kind, does not exceed fifty— of which the three sets called 
 * The Harlot's Progress,' * The Rake's Progress,' and that now to be sold, 
 make twenty ; so that whoever has a taste of his own to rely on, and 
 is not too squeamish, and has courage enough to own it by daring to 
 give them a place in a collection till Time, the supposed finisher, but 
 real destroyer, of paintings, has rendered them fit for those more sacred 
 repositories where schools, names, heads, masters, &c., attain their last 
 stage of preferment, may from hence be convinced that multiplicity at 
 least of his, Mr Hogarth's, pieces, will be no diminution of their 
 value. 
 
 The result was much what might have been anticipated 
 from a preliminary struggle which had thus become per- 
 sonal between the painter and the world. The following 
 
496 THE PAINTER. 
 
 narrative, however, throws a curious light upon the sraall- 
 ness of the circle to which picture-buying can have been 
 possible in those days. We can scarcely imagine that any 
 amount of petulance in words would have the effect of 
 emptying Christie's saleroom, for instance, were the works 
 of a well-known painter of the present time about to be 
 offered to the public. When the reader considers that 
 Hogarth was in the full blaze of his fame, and that his 
 prints were as good as an estate to him — prints taken from 
 the very pictures in question ; and that these pictures are 
 now among our national treasures, chief gems of our English 
 collection ; that they were the only remarkable productions 
 then existing from the hand of an Enghsh painter, and are 
 still unrivalled at the end of more than a century, — the fol- 
 lowing narrative of their sale, given by Mr Lane, the pur- 
 chaser, will be scarcely credible : — 
 
 " The sale was to take place by a kind of auction, where every bidder 
 was to write on a ticket the price he was disposed to give, with his 
 name subscribed to it. These papers were to be received by Mr Hogarth 
 for the space of one month, and the highest bidder, at twelve o'clock on 
 the last day of the month, was to be the purchaser. This strange mode 
 of proceeding probably disobliged the public, and there seemed at that 
 time to be a combination against Hogarth, who, perhaps, from the fre- 
 quent and extraordinary approbation of his works, might have imbibed 
 some degree of vanity, which the town in general, friends and foes, 
 seemed resolved to mortify. If this was the case — and to me it was 
 fully apparent— they fully effected their design ; for on the 6th of June 
 1750, which was to decide the fate of this capital work, when I arrived 
 at the Golden Head, expecting, as was the case at the sale of 'The 
 Harlot's Progress, ' to find his study full of noble and great personages, 
 I only found Hogarth and his friend Dr Parsons, Secretary to the Royal 
 Society. I had bid £110. No one arrived; and, ten minutes before 
 twelve, I told the artist I would make the pounds guineas. The clock 
 struck, and Mr Hogarth wished me joy of my purchase, hoping it was 
 an agreeable one ; I said, ' Perfectly so.' Dr Parsons was very much 
 disturbed, and Hogarth very much disappointed, and truly with great 
 reason. The former told me the painter had hurt himself by naming so 
 early an hour for the sale ; and Hogarth, who overheard him, said, in a 
 marked tone and manner, ' Perhaps it may be so.' I concurred in the 
 same opinion, said he was poorly rewarded for his labour, and, if he 
 chose, he might have till three o'clock to find a better bidder. Hogarth 
 warmly accepted the offer, and Dr Parsons proposed to make it public. 
 I thought this unfair, and forbade it. At one o'clock Hogarth said, ' I 
 shall trespass no longer on your generosity ; you are the proprietor, and 
 
THE PAINTEK. 497 
 
 if you are pleased with the purchase, I am abundantly so with the pur- 
 chaser. ' He then desired me to promise that I would not dispose of 
 the paintings without informing him, nor permit any person to meddle 
 with them under pretence of cleaning them, as he always desired to do 
 that himself. " 
 
 And all the time the world was showering wealth on Fari- 
 nelli, as in our own day it went to see Tom Thumb, driving 
 poor Haydon frantic. In the latter case it is perhaps, let 
 us say it with a sigh, comprehensible ; but Hogarth's dis- 
 appointment is a proof that, though an artist may quarrel 
 with the big world in general, he must not quarrel with a 
 limited class in it, or that he must take the consequences. 
 To-day, when the last new millionaire is ready to bid over 
 my lord's head to any amount, the consequences would no 
 doubt be much less serious. 
 
 Hogarth's next work was the series of " Industry and 
 Idleness," as exemplified in the History of Goodchild and 
 Idle, two London 'prentices — a drama quite according to the 
 taste of the time, in which the good lad has so perpetually 
 the best of it, that the wonder is how the wicked one could 
 show a disinterestedness and self-devotion so much above 
 the well-rewarded respectability of his comrade. " The 
 thrifty citizens of London welcomed these works warmly, 
 and hung them in public and private places as guides and 
 examples to their children and dependants," says Cunning- 
 ham. About the same time Hogarth produced a portrait oi 
 old Simon Fraser of Lovat, which, we are told, " was so popu 
 lar " that it was impossible to supply impressions sufficiently 
 fast to satisfy the eager demands of the public. Nothing 
 can be more curious than the character of this portrait, the 
 pawky, shrewd, humorous old face, which is the last that 
 could possibly be imagined to belong to an arch-rebel lying 
 under sentence of death for his country. It is comprehen- 
 sible how the fancy of the public must have been caught by 
 the frightful contrast between those homely cunning features 
 and the tragic place they held on Temple Bar in all the sub- 
 limity of death and patriotism and high treason. 
 
 It is painful, however, to have stories to tell of our painter 
 which are not pleasant stories. He went to France after the 
 peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, and no sooner had he crossed the 
 Channel than the vulgar instincts of the irrepressible Eng- 
 
 2 I 
 
498 THE PAINTEE. 
 
 lisLmaii seem to have burst fortii in him without restraint. 
 The fact is part of his character, — and yet it is always 
 strange to discover under the hearty, joyous, cordial exterior 
 which is traditionary to John Bull, that curious, cold, hard, 
 emotionless kernel which is so often associated with it — a 
 heart entirely devoid of genial human sympathy, and incap- 
 able of entering into, or even realising, the feelings of 
 others. The same nature which made our painter calmly 
 indifferent to the sufferings and calamities of his own heroes 
 and heroines, made him loudly contemptuous of all external 
 circumstances to which he was unaccustomed. " He was 
 displeased from the first with the people, the country, the 
 houses, and the fare. All he looked upon he declared to be 
 in bad taste. The houses, he said, were either gilt or be- 
 fouled. He laughed when he saw a ragged boy ; and at the 
 sight of silk stockings with holes in them he burst out into 
 very imprudent language." The result was, that he was 
 summarily sent back, two guards accompanying him on 
 board the English packet, who, " having insolently twirled 
 him round and round on the deck, told him he might pro- 
 ceed on his voyage without molestation;" a process which 
 many a French guard and many an English traveller would 
 have been but too glad to repeat since Hogarth's day. He 
 revenged himself by a design called " The Koast Beef of 
 Old England," and at a later period by two pictures called 
 respectively " England " and " France," and supposed to 
 represent the eve of an invasion, in which frogs and soupe 
 maigre on the one side, and riotous living on the other, are 
 the chief features — quite conventional, and not perhaps such 
 telling arguments to the present age as they were to Ho- 
 garth's. It would be diflScult to go over in detail all his 
 remaining works. The only late series with a moral mean- 
 ing is the one entitled *' The Four Stages of Cruelty,'" a sub- 
 ject too revolting to be discussed ; and the two prints, called 
 " Beer Street " and " Gin Lane," in the last of which occur 
 two figures unsurpassed for ghastly tragedy, one of which, a 
 half-naked woman, from whose helpless arms her child is 
 falling, sits unconscious, leering at the spectator with 
 drunken imbecility ; while the other, half man, half skeleton, 
 in a stupor which is partly drink and partly death, sits on 
 the stair below her, with glazed eyes and falling jaw, unable 
 
THE PAINTER. 499 
 
 to raise the glass to his ghastly open mouth — figures which 
 haunt the beholder like the visions of a nightmare. Among 
 his other pictures there is a burlesque of Paul before Felix, 
 *' designed in the Dutch style," of which Cunningham tells 
 us that " nothing can surpass it for broad humour," though 
 disgust is the only feeling with which we find ourselves 
 capable of regarding it. He afterwards — as, we suppose, a 
 kind of amende honorable — painted a serious version of the 
 same subject, which is as heavy and turgid as heart could 
 devise. After this, however, our painter recovered himself. 
 He produced "The March to Finchley," full of fun and 
 movement ; and the varied scenes of the Election, from 
 which we have the clearest and most graphic notion of what 
 politics were in those days, and how the business was 
 managed which authority is only now trying seriously to 
 bring within due control. Things have changed mightily 
 in the mean time ; and yet it is curious to note how little 
 some things have changed. 
 
 In the year 1753, when he had reached the mature age of 
 fifty-six, Hogarth made his d4but in literature. "What?" 
 he says, himself — 
 
 * ' What ? a book, and by Hogarth ! then twenty to ten 
 All he's gained by his pencil he'll lose by his pen. 
 Perhaps it may be so— howe'er, miss or hit, 
 
 He will publish — here goes ; it is double or quit." 
 
 The work was the 'Analysis of Beauty,' a book full of trench- 
 ant criticisms upon everybody who differed with himself, 
 and in which he set forth a theory which he had indicated 
 some time before by a waving line draw upo.n a palette in 
 the foreground of his own portrait; on this line was en- 
 graven the words. Line of heauty. " No Egyptian hierogly- 
 phic ever amused more than it did for a time," he says. 
 " Painters and sculptors came to me to know the meaning of 
 it, being as much puzzled with it as other people." We have 
 no space left to enter into either the book or its theory, but 
 it had upon Hogarth the almost fatal effect which pen and 
 ink seem to have upon those to whom pigments and pencils 
 are the natural weapons — it drove him into public argu- 
 mentation, abuse, and defence. Unfortunately, as was the 
 fashion of the time, personal questions of all kinds got mixed 
 
500 THE PAINTER. 
 
 up in the discussion of principles. Passion grew warmer 
 and warmer as it was expressed ; and the Englishman's 
 theoretical contempt for the old masters, who were continu- 
 ally thrown in his teeth, grew to such a heat that it drove 
 him to the most unequal and unlikely contest. A picture, 
 by some supposed to be by Correggio, had been a short 
 time before sold for £400 at a sale of pictures, and Hogarth, 
 with insane rivalry, offered to take up the same subject for 
 the same price, thus putting himself directly in competition 
 with his predecessor — a proceeding both foolish and un- 
 dignified ; especially foolish, considering the subject, since 
 he must have known that pathos was not his forte. It was 
 " Sigismunda weeping over the Heart of her Husband '' that 
 he undertook to paint, with the Correggio standing by to in- 
 vite comparison. Failure must have been involved from the 
 first in such a wager of battle. The painter was now sixty- 
 two, and gave signs, as he well might, of having failed a 
 little from his height of force. The subject was utterly out of 
 his way. His motive could be little more than one of those 
 stings of rivalship and emulation which are naturally short- 
 lived in an old man. He had attained most things that men 
 desire. He was well off, famous, the founder of a national 
 school of art; he acknowledges even the "partiality" with 
 which the world had received his works. He was Sergeant- 
 Painter to the King, the highest mark of official favour. 
 But all these good things did not defend him from that sting 
 of vanity. The picture was a commission from Sir Eichard 
 (afterwards Lord) Grosvenor, who, " falling into the clutches 
 of the dealers in old pictures," as Hogarth expresses it, be- 
 came after a while less enthusiastic about it than could have 
 been desired. The proud painter immediately rose in arms, 
 and wrote a hasty letter, haughtily exonerating his patron 
 from his bargain if he thought the price too great, and 
 throwing in an allusion to " Mr Hoare, the banker," as a 
 threat at the end. Lord Grosvenor immediately replied 
 with pardonable resentment, setting (on his side) the painter 
 free to make " Sigismunda" over to Mr Hoare, if he liked it. 
 " I really think the performance so striking and inimitable," 
 he adds, ironically, " that the constantly having it before 
 one's eyes would be too often occasioning melancholy ideas 
 to arise in one's mind." Another surly note from Hogarth 
 
THE PAINTER. 501 
 
 closed the correspondence, but the picture was never with- 
 drawn from the painter's studio. In his pride and resent- 
 ment he forbade his widow, by his will, to sell it for less 
 than £500, and we do not find that she was ever tempted to 
 do so. It was sold only after her death, when no guardian 
 of Hogarth's fame was left in the world. 
 
 The critics, who had fallen upon his ' Analysis of Beauty ' 
 as one man, now threw themselves wdth equal or increased 
 vigour on the unfortunate picture thus left upon his hands. 
 "A set of miscreants," he says, "the expounders of the 
 mysteries of old pictures," heaped every kind of abuse on 
 his " Sigismunda." And dauntless and virulent as was the 
 old man himself, he was old and worn with much labour, and 
 his health was affected by his mortification. "However 
 mean the vendor of poisons may be, the mineral is destruc- 
 tive," he goes on. " To me its operation was troublesome 
 enough. Ill-nature spread so fast, that now was the time 
 for every little dog in the profession to bark and revive the 
 old spleen which appeared at the time of the 'Analysis.' 
 The anxiety that attends endeavouring to recollect ideas 
 long dormant, and the misfortunes which clung to this trans- 
 action, coming on at a time when nature demands quiet, and 
 something besides exercise to cheer it, added to my long 
 sedentary life, brought on an illness which continued twelve 
 months." When he recovered from his illness, it was at a 
 time when " war abroad and contention at home engrossed 
 every one's mind. Prints were thrown into the background, 
 and the stagnation rendered it necessary that I should do 
 some timed thing to recover my lost time and stop a gap in 
 my income." Whether this picture of pecuniary need was 
 true or not it is hard to say ; but it is curious to see the old 
 painter, who had always so strenuously set himself against 
 the tide, whatever that tide might be, thus taking up the 
 side of power and authority for once in his life. " This 
 drew forth my print of ' The Times,' a subject which 
 tended to the restoration of peace and unanimity," he pro- 
 ceeds. But it did anything but promote these objects in 
 Hogarth's own experience. It roused against him the un- 
 restrained tongue of Wilkes, who had been his friend. In 
 all our painter's pugilistic experience, he had never yet met 
 such an antagonist. Whether he had shared Wilkes's poli- 
 
502 THE PAINTER. 
 
 tical opinions before this encounter, we are not told — indeed, 
 it is to be supposed that he was no politician, difficult though 
 it must have been for such a man to keep out of the excite- 
 ment of the prevailing contests. ^' Hogarth sacrificed 
 private friendship at the altar of party madness, and lent 
 his aid to the government/' we are told ; and immediately 
 the ' North Briton ' brought out a furious article on " The 
 King's Sergeant-Painter, William Hogarth." Hogarth re- 
 taliated with a concentrated force still more crushing : 
 nature and his craft had provided him with the necessary 
 weapons, and his reply was a portait of Wilkes, so savagely 
 like, so full of the fierce satire of truth, that the town was 
 electrified. " My friends advised me,'' says Hogarth, " to 
 laugh at the nonsense of party- wit — who would mind it ? 
 but ... I wished to return the compliment, and turn 
 it to some advantaged The blow struck deeply, and called 
 up Churchill, Wilkes's henchman, in defence of his princi- 
 pal. Hogarth struck again, but this time more feebly. *' I 
 had an old plate by me, with some parts ready sunk as the 
 background, and a dog, . . . and so patched up a print 
 of Master Churchill in the character of a bear. The pleasure 
 and pecuniary advantage derived from these two engrav- 
 ings," says the uncompromising old warrior with fine satis- 
 faction, "together with occasionally riding on horseback, 
 restored me to as much health as can be expected at my 
 time of life." 
 
 But amid these storms life was beginning to wane. 
 Though he had quarrelled and struggled all his life, we 
 hear of no such direct personal exchange of hostilities ; and 
 he was old, and the jar ran through him, body and soul. 
 He produced but one notable work after these events — a 
 work which we would gladly leave out of the record were it 
 not too remarkable to be omitted. It is the print known 
 by the name of " Credulity, Superstition, and Fanaticism," 
 and is evidently an attempt to throw all the brilliant search- 
 ing light of art upon the extraordinary success which 
 attended the preaching of Wesley and Whitfield. Hogarth 
 was not conscious of his own curious connection with the 
 reformers of his age. He did not know what a hoarse, vigorous, 
 unwilling pioneer his genius had been to their more spiri- 
 tual labours. And with his usual sharp eye for the absurd, 
 
THE PAINTEK. 503 
 
 and intolerance of exaggeration, and want of sympathy with 
 the feelings of others, he places before ns a combination of 
 religions madnesses which it is painful to look upon, and 
 which it is still more painful to quote as the last work of his 
 life. Clear-sighted as he was, he had no more comprehension 
 of the mission he himself had exercised than if he had been 
 blind ; nor is it probable that Wesley would have owned or 
 acknowledged the prophet's work of Hogarth. The world 
 had need enough of both ; but until the generation was over 
 and past, and God had written on its grave that moral which 
 only posterity can read, who could tell that between these 
 two warning voices there was any sympathy or parallel ? 
 Hogarth impales the so-called fanatics upon the end of his 
 spear without mercy. Probably there was even some truth 
 of fact in his picture ; but there is nothing of that higher 
 truth which is beyond and above all mere reality. 
 
 But even while he recorded, with vehemence so bitter, his 
 strong unalterable prejudices, and gave forth his hasty, 
 ignorant, popular judgment with the promptitude and energy 
 which had always distinguished him, the life of the old 
 painter was waning. He was old, though he had scarcely 
 begun to feel it ; and the unkind assaults of his friends — for 
 such both Wilkes and Churchill seem to have been — had 
 jarred him through and through. He did as men do when 
 they are sinking out of life's common capabilities. He took 
 a house in retired Chiswick, among the trees and gardens ; 
 he left oif work, " amusing himself with making slight 
 sketches and retouching his plates." He went up and 
 down to town now and then, and now recovered, now 
 lost strength, as that piteous process of dying demanded ; 
 but " complained that he was no longer able to think with 
 the readiness, and work with the elasticity of spirit " which 
 had been habitual to him. It was apparently in this waning 
 time that he made the notes, so full of vigour and passion and 
 characteristic pugnacity, from which we have quoted so 
 much. And yet, by moments, the self-disclosure fell into 
 other strains. Sometimes he murmurs feebly, with the com- 
 plaining of a child — of " one, till now rather my friend and 
 flatterer, attacking me in so infamous and malign a style." 
 Sometimes he rises into the formal yet half- deprecating self- 
 assertion which was considered in that age to be the fit tone 
 
504 THE PAINTER. 
 
 for a deathbed. " I can safely assert that I have invariably 
 endeavoured to make those about me tolerably happy," he 
 says with tremulous dignity, and a strange eighteenth- 
 century satisfaction in the contemplation of his own good- 
 ness. " My greatest enemy cannot say I ever did an inten- 
 tional injury ; though, without ostentation, I could produce 
 many instances of men that have been essentially benefited 
 by me. What may follow, God knows." When October 
 came with warnings of approaching winter, he went back to 
 Leicester Fields to spend the darker season in town ; but 
 spent only one day there, his career being over. He died 
 quite suddenly, overtaken all at once by the shadow which 
 had been coming on so slowly and so long. He was sixty- 
 seven, full of years and honours ; and yet died worried and 
 wearied and vexed with the contradictions of life. 
 
 There is little to be said of him beyond what has been 
 said. He was childless, and had no personal life to throw 
 gleams of more human interest upon the story of his career. 
 No man before or since has painted a story like him, or set 
 forth a parable with such authentic force and boldness. 
 Without any absolute horror of or indignation against vice, 
 he traced its course with a hand that never flinched from 
 any detail, or hesitated at any catastrophe, making it so plain 
 to an age which needed teaching that he who ran might 
 read. He was genial, vehement, and warm in manners and 
 temper ; but his intellect was cold, and did its work without 
 much assistance from the heart. Before his pictures the 
 vulgar laugh, and the serious spectator holds his peace, 
 gazing often with eyes awestricken at the wonderful un- 
 impassioned tragedy. But never a tear comes at Hogarth's 
 call. It is his sentence of everlasting expulsion from the 
 highest heaven of art. 
 
 THE END. 
 
 PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, EDINBURGH. 
 
MESSES BLACKWOOD MD SOUS' 
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 for enlightened, scientific, and sober teaching on the general art of war. No aspirant for military 
 fame needs henceforth ask, ' How are we to begin to study military history ? ' "—Times, Nov. 1. 
 
 A Revised and Enlarged Edition. 
 
 Lord St Leonards' Handy-Book of Property Law. 
 
 Eighth Edition, 5s. 
 
 The " Ever- Victorious Army." 
 
 A History of the Chinese Campaion under Lieut. >Col. C. G. Gordon, 
 
 AND OF THE SUPPRESSION OF THE TaI-PINQ REBELLION. By ANDREW 
 
 WILSON, F.A.S.L., Author of 'England's Policy in China;' and for- 
 merly Editor of the * China Mail. * In 8vo, with Maps, 15s. 
 
 " In addition to a good deal of information respecting China and its recent history, this volume 
 contains an interesting account of a brilliant passage in the military career of an English officer 
 of remarkable promise, and of the important results of his skill and heroism. . . . It brings out 
 clearly the eminent qualities of Colonel Gordon, his intrepidity and resources a^ a military leader, 
 his rare aptitude for a diffirult command, his dauntless courage, calmness, and prudence, hii lofty 
 character and unsullied hoaour."— Times, May 20. 
 
MESSRS BLACKWOOD &- SOJVS 
 
 The Book of the Landed Estate. 
 
 By ROBERT E. BROWN, Factor and Estate Agent, Wass, Yorkshire. 
 In 1 volume royal Svo, unitonii with tlie 'Book of the Farm,' by Mr 
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 " It is impossible even to glance at a tithe of the useful information and advice contained in this 
 Yolume, which will be certain to be the landlord and the agent's vade mecum."— Saturday Review. 
 
 "Mr Brown's book offers minute and ample answers to every possible inquiry which the land- 
 owner's ingenuity can suggest."— PuW Mall Gazette. 
 
 " A worlT admirably calculated to produce a better state of things, not only by pointing out to 
 landowners the advantages that must inevitably accrue to them from their estates being properly 
 cultivated, but by showing how that object may be attained."— i'e/i's Weikti/ Messenger. 
 
 " Mr Brown is plain and practical in his remarks; he is evidently a cautious and sensible land 
 agent, and his valuable work testifies to his having made good use of his opportunities, his obsei"- 
 vation, and his experience."— iVort/i British, A gricuUurist. 
 
 Handy Book of the Flower-Garden : 
 
 Being Plain, Practical Directions for the Propagation, Culturk, 
 AND Arrangement of Plants in Fi.ower-Gardens all the Year 
 Round ; embracing all classes of Gardens, from the largest to the 
 smalle.st ; with Engraved Plans, illustrative of the various systems of 
 Grouping in Beds and Borders. By 1)\VID THOMSON, formerly of 
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 of Buccleuch, K.G., at Drumlanrig. In crown Svo, 73. 6d. 
 
 "This is essentially a book for amateurs, and every amateur who is fortunate enough to be its 
 possessor, or who may merely skim over its pages, will, we are assured, agree with us in regarding its 
 author as being entitled to great praise for the simple and clear maimer in which he has explained 
 the cultural directions, which, if carefully complied with, will enable the non-professional floricul- 
 turist to grow plants as well as any gardener.'" -Gurtfc^era' Chronicle. 
 
 " Nowadays the flower garden is such a very important and interesting subject to many, that 
 almost any book on the subject is sure to find readers ; but as this is written by one of the be.st 
 
 gardeners in the country, and one, moreover, thoroughly master of the modern system of decora- 
 
 "_""'■ ed t ■ ' 
 
 pr ' 
 
 and can therefore pronounce the book the best on the subject yet written, or likely to be written 
 
 tion. it deserves more attention than any book published on this or allied subjects of recent years, 
 odi 
 
 . We are acquainted with the results produced by the able author, as well as with his book, 
 
 san therefore pronounce the book the best on thi 
 
 for a long time to come."— I'/te Field, March 21, 1868. 
 
 Handy Book of Meteorology. 
 
 By ALEXANDER BUCHAN. M.A., Secretary of the Scottish Meteoro- 
 logical So(!iety. A New and Enlarged Edition. Crown Svo, with 8 
 coloured Charts and other Engravings, 8s. 6d. 
 
 "In all other branches of meteorology Mr Buchan's book not only retains its previously high 
 position, but in several respects materially surpasses it. The chapter on, and charts of, barometric 
 pressure all over the world are perhaps the most important contributiotis to the science since the 
 
 fiublication of the kindred work by Dov6 ' On the Iiistributinn of Heat.' &c. ; and though not so 
 kely to be popular, we shall not be surprised if Buchan's ' Isobai-s ' are not really more important 
 than Dove's ' Isotherms.' "—Meteorological Magazine. 
 
 A History of Ornamental-Foliaged Pelargoniums; 
 
 WITH Practical Hints for their Production, Propagation, and 
 Cultivation, By PETER GRIEVE, Culford, Bury St Edmunds. 
 Second Edition, enlarged, including description of Best Varieties intro- 
 duced up to the present time, and Engravings, 43. 
 
 Geology for General Readers. 
 
 A SERIES OF POPULAR SKETCHES IN GEOLOGY AND PALE- 
 ONTOLOGY. By DAVID PAGE; I,L.D. F.R.S.E. F.G.S. Second 
 Edition, containing several New Chapters. 6s. 
 
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 never oi)press the reader with a pedantic display of learning, nor overwhelm him with a pompous 
 and superfiuons terminology; and they have the happy art of taking him straightway to the 
 face of nature herself, in-tcad of leading him by the tortuous and bewildering paths of technical 
 system and artificial classification."— Saturrfoi/ lierivv:. 
 
 " This is one of the best of Mr Page's many good books. It is written in a flowing popular style. 
 Without illustration or any extraneous aid, the narrative must prove attractive to any intelligent 
 ruader."— Geological Magazine, 
 
RECENT PUB Lie A TIONS. 
 
 The Handy Royal Atlas. 
 
 By ALEX. KEITH JOHNSTON, LL.D., .fee, Author of the 'Royal 
 
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 fully coloured, with General Index. Imperial 4to, price £2, 12s. 6d., 
 half-bound morocco. 
 
 " Is probably the best work of the kind now published."— TV'm?*, 
 
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 latest discoveries in Central Asia, in Africa, and America have bcei\ delineated with laborious 
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 The Origin of the Seasons, 
 
 Considered from a Gkological Point of View : showing the remark- 
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 By JOHN HILL BURTON. Vols. I. to IV., demy Svo, price 56s. 
 
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 The Fatherhood of God, 
 
 Considered in its General and Special Aspects, and particularlt 
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 The Eesurrection of tha Dead : 
 
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 Euchologion; or, Book of Prayers : 
 
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 FROM AGRICOLA'S INVASION TO THE REVOLUTION OF 1688. 
 
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 Journal of the Waterloo Campaign. 
 
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CATALOGUE 
 
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 MESSES BLACKWOOD AND SONS' 
 
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 HISTORY OF EUROPE, 
 
 From the Commencement of the French Revolution in 1789 to the Battle of 
 Waterloo. By Sir ARCHIBALD ALISON, Bart., D.C.L. 
 A New Library Edition (being the Tenth), in 14 vols, demy 8vo, with 
 
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 Another Edition, in crown 8vo, 20 vols., £6. 
 
 A People's Edition, 12 vols., closely printed in double columns, £2, 8s., 
 and Index Volume, 3s. 
 
 "An extraordinary work, which has eamed'for itself a lasting place in the literature of the country, 
 and within a few years found innumerable readers in every part of the globe. There is no book extant 
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 exhibits great knowledge, patient research, indefatigable industry, and vast power."— ri/ree*, Sept. 7, 1860. 
 
 CONTINUATION OF ALISONS HISTORY OF EUROPE, 
 
 From the Fall of Napoleon to the Accession of Louis Napoleon. By Sir 
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 ATLAS TO ALISON'S HISTORY OF EUROPE; 
 
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 LIVES OF LORD CASTLEREAGH AND SIR CHARLES 
 
 STEWART, Second and Third Marquesses of Londonderry. From the 
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 took part in the wars they have described."— 27ie Press. 
 
 THE INVASION OF THE CRIMEA: 
 
 Its Origin, and Account of its Progress down to the Death of Lord Raglan. 
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 HISTORY OF GREECE UNDER FOREIGN DOMINATION. 
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 HISTORY OF SCOTLAND FROM THE REVOLUTION 
 
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 Life of John Knox. Containing Illustrations of the History of the 
 
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 THE BOSCOBEL TRACTS; 
 
 Relating to the Escape of Charles the Second after the Battle of Worcester, 
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WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS. 7 
 
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 HOMER AND HIS TRANSLATORS, 
 
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 our own language."— QiwirterJj 
 
 THE GENIUS OF HANDEL, 
 
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8 BOOKS PUBLISHED BY 
 
 LAYS OF THE SCOTTISH CAVALIERS, 
 
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 BOTH WELL: A POEM. 
 
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 FIRM ILIA N; OR, THE STUDENT OF B ADA JOS. 
 
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 TEE ODYSSEY AND ILIAD OF HOMER. 
 
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WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS. 9 
 
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10 BOOKS PUBLISHED BY 
 
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WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS. H 
 
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 NOMENCLATURE OF COLOURS, 
 
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 A FAMILY TOUR ROUND THE COASTS OF SPAIN AND 
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12 BOOKS PUBLISHED BY 
 
 TRE ROYAL ATLAS OF MODERN GEOGRAPHY. 
 
 In a Series of entirely Original and Authentic Maps. By A. KEITH 
 JOHNSTON, F.RS.E., F.R.G.S., Author of the ' Physical Atlas,' <fec. With 
 a com]Dlete Index of easy reference to each Map, comprising nearly 150,000 
 Places contained in this Atlas. Imperial folio, half-bound in russia or mo- 
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 " Beyond doubt the greatest geographical work of our time."— Mtiseum. 
 
 INDEX GEOGRAPHICVS: 
 
 Being an Index to nearly One Hundred and Fifty Thousand Names op 
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 Johnston's ' Royal Atlas ; ' together with the Countries and Subdivi- 
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 A NEW MAP OF EUROPE. 
 
 By A. KEITH JOHNSTON, F.R.S.E. Size, 4 feet 2 inches by 3 feet 5 
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 ATLAS OF SCOTLAND. 
 
 31 Maps of the Counties of Scotland, coloured. Bound in roan, price lOs. 6d. 
 Each County may be had separately, in Cloth Case, Is. 
 
 KEITH JOHNSTON'S SCHOOL ATLASES:— 
 
 General and Descriptive Geography, exhibiting the Actual and Com- 
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 Physical Geography, illustrating, in a Series of Original Designs, the 
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 Classical Geography, comprising, in Twenty-three Plates, Maps and Plans 
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 Astronomy. Edited by J. R. Hind, Esq., F.R.A.S., &c. Notes and 
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 Elementary School Atlas of General and Descriptive Geography 
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 A MANUAL OF MODERN GEOGRAPHY: 
 
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 With Index. 7s. 6d., bound in leather. 
 
WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS. 13 
 
 THE BOOK OF THE FARM. 
 
 Detailing the Labours of the Farmer, Farm-Steward, Ploughman, Shepherd, 
 Hedger, Cattle-man, Field-worker, and Dairymaid, and forming a safe Monitor 
 for Students in Practical Agriculture. By HENRY STEPHENS, F.R.S.E. 
 2 vols, royal 8vo, £3, handsomely bound in cloth, with upwards of 600 
 Illustrations. 
 
 "The best book I have ever met with."— Pro/cMor Johnston. 
 
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 contents would occupy a larger space than we can conveniently devote to their discussion ; we therefore, 
 in general terms, commend them to the careful study of every young man who wishes to become a good 
 practical farmer."— ?'i»4e*. 
 
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 THE BOOK OF FARM IMPLEMENTS AND MACHINES. 
 By JAMES SLIGHT and R. SCOTT BURN. Edited by Henry Stephens, 
 F.R.S.E. Illustrated with 876 Engravings. Royal 8vo, uniform with the 
 ' Book of the Fanu,' half-bound, £2, 2s. 
 
 THE BOOK OF FARM BUILDINGS: 
 
 Their Arrangement and Construction, By HENRY STEPHENS, F.R.S.E., 
 and R. SCOTT BURN. Royal 8vo, with 1045 Illustrations. Uniform with 
 the ' Book of the Farm.' Half-bound, £1, lis. 6d. 
 
 THE BOOK OF THE GARDEN. 
 
 By CHARLES M'INTOSH. In 2 large vols, royal Svo, embellished with 
 1353 Engravings. 
 
 Each Volume may he had separately — viz. : 
 I. Architectural and Ornamental.— On the Formation of Gardens — 
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 Illustrated by 1073 Engravings, pp. 766. £2, 10s. 
 
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 —Gardenera' Chronicle. 
 
 PRACTICAL SYSTEM OF FARM BOOK-KEEPING: 
 
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 THE Estate, 2s, 6d. 
 
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 AINSLIE'S TREATISE ON LAND- SURVEYING. 
 
 A New and Enlarged Edition. Edited by William Galbraith, M.A., 
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 THE FORESTER: 
 
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14 BOOKS PUBLISHED BY 
 
 HANDBOOK OF THE MECHANICAL ARTS, 
 
 Concerned in the Construction and Arrangement of Dwellings and other 
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 PROFESSOR JOHNSTON'S WORKS.— 
 
 Experimental Agriculture. Being the Results of Past, and Suggestions 
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 Elements of Agricultural Chemistry and Geology. Eighth Edition, 
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 THE RELATIVE VALUE OF ROUND AND SA WN TIMBER, 
 
 Shown by means of Tables and Diagrams. By JAMES RAIT, Land-Steward 
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 THE YEAR-BOOK OF AGRICULTURAL FACTS. 
 
 1859 and 1860. Edited by R. Scott Burn. Feap. 8vo, 5s. each. 1861 and 
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 ELKING TON'S SYSTEM OF DRAINING: 
 
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 New Series, 1843 to 1851, 8 vols. ... 220 
 
 THE RURAL ECONOMY OF ENGLAND, SCOTLAND, AND 
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 DAIRY MANAGEMENT AND FEEDING OF MILCH COWS: 
 
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 ITALIAN IRRIGATION: 
 
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 THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE FARM: 
 
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 THE Y ESTER DEEP LAND-CULTURE: 
 
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 By HENRY STEPHENS, Esq., F.R.S.E., Author of the ' Book of the Farm.' 
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WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS. 15 
 
 A MANUAL OF PRACTICAL DRAINING. 
 
 By HENRY STEPHENS, F.R.S.E., Author of the 'Book of the Fann. 
 Third Edition, 8vo, 5s. 
 
 A CATECHISM OF PRACTICAL AGRICULTURE. 
 
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 HANDY BOOK ON PROPERTY LAW. 
 
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 million,— a book which the author tenders to the profanum vulyua as even capable of ' beguiling a few 
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 THE PLANTERS GUIDE, 
 
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 STABLE ECONOMY: 
 
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 ADVICE TO PURCHASERS OF HORSES. 
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 A PRACTICAL TREATISE ON THE CULTIVATION OF THE 
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 THE CHEMISTRY OF VEGETABLE AND ANIMAL PHYSI- 
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 of Utrecht. With an Introduction and Notes by Professor Johnston. 22 
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 THE MOOR AND THE LOCH. 
 
 Containing Minute Instructions in all Highland Sports, with Wanderings 
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 SALMON-CASTS AND STRAY SHOTS : 
 
 Being Fly-Leaves from the Note-Book of JOHN COLQUHOUN, Esq., 
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 COQUET-DALE FISHING SONGS. 
 
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 THE ANGLERS COMPANION TO THE RIVERS AND LOCHS 
 
 OF SCOTLAND. By T. T. STODDART. With Map of the Fishing Streams 
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16 BOOKS PUBLISHED BY 
 
 RELIGION IN COMMON LIFE: 
 
 A Sermon preached in Cratliie Church, October 14, 1855, before Her Majesty 
 the Queen and Prince Albert. By the Rev. JOHN CAIRD, D.D. Published 
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 SERMONS. 
 
 By the Rev. JOHN CAIRD, D.D., Professor of Divinity in the University of 
 Glasgow, and one of Her Majesty's Chaplains for Scotland. In crown Svo, 5s. 
 This Edition includes the Sermon on ' Religion in Common Life,' preached 
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 THE BOOK OF JOB. 
 
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 LECTURES IN DIVINITY. 
 
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 THE MOTHERS LEGACIE TO HER UNBORNE CIIILDE. 
 
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 Lee. 32mo, 4s. 6d. 
 
 "This beautiful and touching legacie."— ..KTi^ncBMm. 
 
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 ANALYSIS AND CRITICAL INTERPRETATION OF THE 
 
 HEBREW TEXT OF THE BOOK OF GENESIS. Preceded by a Hebrew 
 Grammar, and Dissertations on the Genuineness of the Pentateuch, and on 
 the Structure of the Hebrew Language. By the Rev. WILLIAM PAUL, 
 A.M. Svo, 18s. 
 
 PRAYERS FOR SOCIAL AND FAMILY WORSHIP. 
 
 Prepared by a Committee op the General Assembly of the Church of 
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 PRAYERS FOR SOCIAL AND FAMILY WORSHIP. 
 
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 In its Origin, Progress, and Perfection- By the Very Rev. E. B. RAMSAY, 
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 THEISM: THE WITNESS OF REASON AND NATURE TO 
 
 AN ALL-WISE AND BENEFICENT CREATOR. By the Rev. JOHN 
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 Andrews ; and one of Her Majesty's Chaplains in Ordinary in Scotland. In 
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 ON THE ORIGIN AND CONNECTION OF THE GOSPELS 
 
 OF MATTHEW, MARK, AND LUKE; With Synopsis of Parallel Passages, 
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 of the ' Voyage and Shipwreck of St Paul.' Medium Svo, 16s. 
 
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