_ _^^ OBITGR DICT SECOND SERIES LIBRARY University of California IRVINE OBITER DICTA. (Second Series.} Obiter )ttta. First Series. CONTENTS. CARLYLE. ON THE ALLEGED OBSCU- RITY OF MR. BROWN- ING'S POETRY. TRUTH HUNTING. ACTORS. A ROGUE'S MEMOIRS. TIIE VIA MEDIA. FALSTAFF. OBITER DICTA SECOND SERIES BY AUGUSTINE BIRRELL NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 1887 Authorized Edition mi The Riverside Press, Cambridge '. Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Co PREFACE. I AM sorry not to have been able to per- suade my old friend, George Radford, who wrote the paper on ' Falstaff ' in the former volume, to contribute anything to the sec- ond series of Obiter Dicta. In order to en- joy the pleasure of reading your own books over and over again, it is essential that they should be written either wholly or in part by somebody else. Critics will probably be found ready to assert that this little book has no right to exist, since it exhibits nothing worthy of the name of research, being written by one who has never been inside the reading-room of the British Museum. Neither does it expound any theory, save the unworthy one, that literature ought to please ; nor does it so much as introduce any new name or forgotten author to the attention of what is facetiously called 'the reading public.' VI PREFACE. But I shall be satisfied with a mere de facto existence for the book, if only it prove a little interesting to men and women who, called upon to pursue, somewhat too rigor- ously for their liking, their daily duties, are glad, every now and again, when their feet are on the fender, and they are surrounded by such small luxuries as their theories of life will allow them to enjoy, to be reminded of things they once knew more familiarly than now, of books they once had by heart, and of authors they must ever love. The first two papers are here printed for the first time ; the others have been so treated before, and now reappear, pulled about a little, with the kind permission of the proper parties. NEW SQUARE, LINCOLN'S INN, April, 1887. CONTENTS. PAGE I. MILTON . . . . . . .1 II. POPE 52 III. JOHNSON 109 IV. BURKE i 149 V. THE MUSE OF HISTORY .... 196 VI. CHARLES LAMB 224 VII. EMERSON 238 VIII. THE OFFICE OF LITERATURE . . 256 IX. WORN-OUT TYPES 265 X. CAMBRIDGE AND THE POETS . . 275 XI. BOOK-BUYING 284 JOHN MILTON. IT is now more than sixty years ago since Mr. Carlyle took occasion to observe, in his Life of Schiller, that, except the Newgate Calendar, there was no more sick- ening reading than the biographies of au- thors. Allowing for the vivacity of the compar- ison, and only remarking, with reference to the Newgate Calendar, that its com- pilers have usually been very inferior wits, in fact attorneys, it must be owned that great creative and inventive genius, the most brilliant gifts of bright fancy and happy expression, and a glorious imagina- tion, well-nigh seeming as if it must be inspired, have too often been found most unsuitably lodged in ill-living and scanda- lous mortals. Though few things, even in what is called Literature, are more disgust- ing than to hear small critics, who earn 2 JOHN MIL TON. their bite and sup by acting as the self-ap- pointed showmen of the works of their bet- ters, heaping terms of moral opprobrium upon those whose genius is, if not exactly a lamp unto our feet, at all events a joy to our hearts, still, not even genius can re- peal the Decalogue, or re-write the sen- tence of doom, ' He which is filthy, let him be filthy still.' It is therefore permissible to wish that some of our great authors had been better men. It is possible to dislike John Milton. Men have been found able to do so, and women too ; amongst these latter his daughters, or one of them at least, must even be included. But there is nothing sickening about his biography, for it is the life of one who early consecrated himself to the service of the highest Muses, who took labour and intent study as his por- tion, who aspired himself to be a noble poem, who, Republican though he became, is what Carlyle called him, the moral king of English literature. Milton was born in Bread Street, Cheap- side, on the gth of December, 1608. This is most satisfactory, though indeed what JOHN MILTON. 3 might have been expected. There is a notable disposition nowadays, amongst the meaner -minded provincials, to carp and gird at the claims of London to be consid- ered the mother city of the Anglo-Saxon race, to regret her pre-eminence, and sneer at her fame. In the matters of municipal government, gas, water, fog, and snow, much can be alleged and proved against the English capital, but in the domain of poetry, which I take to be a nation's best guaranteed stock, it may safely be said that there are but two shrines in England whither it is necessary for the literary pil- grim to carry his cockle hat and shoon London, the birthplace of Chaucer, Spen- ser-y Ben Jonson, Milton, Herrick, Pope, Gray, Blake, Keats, and Browning, and Stratford - upon - Avon, the birthplace of Shakspeare. Of English poets it may be said generally they are either born in Lon- don or remote country places. The large provincial towns know them not. Indeed, nothing is more pathetic than the way in which these dim, destitute places hug the memory of any puny whipster of a poet who may have been born within their stat- 4 JOHN MILTON. utory boundaries. This has its advantages, for it keeps alive in certain localities fames that would otherwise have utterly perished. Parnassus has forgotten all about poor Henry Kirke White, but the lace manufac- turers of Nottingham still name him with whatever degree of reverence they may respectively consider to be the due of let- ters. Manchester is yet mindful of Dr. John Byrom. Liverpool clings to Roscoe. Milton remained faithful to his birth-city, though, like many another Londoner, when he was persecuted in one house he fled into another. From Bread Street he moved to St. Bride's Churchyard, Fleet Street ; from Fleet Street to Aldersgate Street ; from Aldersgate Street to the Barbican ; from the Barbican to the south side of Holborn ; from the south side of Holborn to what is now called York Street, West- minster; from York Street, Westminster, to the north side of Holborn ; from the north side of Holborn to Jewin Street ; from Jewin Street to his last abode in Bun- hill Fields. These are not vain repetitions if they serve to remind a single reader how all the enchantments of association , JOHN MILTON. 5 lie about him. Englishwomen have been found searching about Florence for the street where George Eliot represents Ro- mola as having lived, who have admitted never having been to Jewin Street, where the author of Lycidas and Paradise Lost did in fact live. Milton's father was the right kind of father, amiable, accomplished, and well-to- do. He was by business what was then called a scrivener, a term which* has re- ceived judicial interpretation, and imported a person who arranged loans on mortgage, receiving a commission for so doing. The poet's mother, whose baptismal name was Sarah (his father was, like himself, John), was a lady of good extraction, and ap- proved excellence and virtue. We do not know very much about her, for the poet was one of those rare men of genius who are prepared to do justice to their fathers. Though Sarah Milton did not die till 1637, she only knew her son as the author of Comus, though it is surely a duty to believe that no son would have poems like L' Alle- gro and // Penseroso in his desk, and not at least once produce them and read them 6 JOHN MILTON. aloud to his mother. These poems, though not published till 1645, were certainly com- posed in his mother's life. She died before the troubles began, the strife and conten- tion in which her well-graced son, the poet, the dreamer of all things beautiful and cultured, the author of the glancing, trip- ping measure ' Haste thee, nymph, and bring with thee Jest and youthful jollity ' was destined to take a part, so eager and so fierce, and for which he was to sacrifice twenty years of a poet's life. The poet was sent to St. Paul's School, where he had excellent teaching of a hu- mane and expanding character, and he early became, what he remained until his sight left him, a strenuous reader and a late student. ' Or let my lamp at midnight hour Be seen on some high, lonely tower, Where I may oft outwatch the Bear.' Whether the maid who was told off by the elder Milton to sit up till twelve or one o'clock in the morning for this wonderful Pauline realised that she was a kind of JOHN MILTON. 7 doorkeeper in the house of genius, and blessed accordingly, is not known, and may be doubted. When sixteen years old Mil- ton proceeded to Christ's College, Cam- bridge, where his memory is still cherished ; and a mulberry tree, supposed in some way to be his, rather unkindly kept alive. Mil- ton was not a submissive pupil ; in fact, he was never a submissive anything, for there is point in Dr. Johnson's malicious remark, that man in Milton's opinion was born to be a rebel, and woman a slave. But in most cases, at all events, the rebel did well to be rebellious, and perhaps he was never so entirely in the right as when he protested against the slavish traditions, of Cambridge educational methods in 1625. Universities must, however, at all times prove disappointing places to the young and ingenuous soul, who goes up to them eager for literature, seeing in every don a devotee to intellectual beauty, and hoping that lectures will, by some occult process the genius loci initiate him into the mysteries of taste and the storehouses of culture. And then the improving conver- sation, the flashing wit, the friction of mind 8 JOHN MILTON. with mind, these are looked for, but hardly found ; and the young scholar groans in spirit, and perhaps 'does as Milton did quarrels with his tutor. But if he is wise he will, as Milton also did, make it up again, and get the most that he can from his stony-hearted stepmother before the time comes for him to bid her his Vale vale et aternum vale. Milton remained seven years at Cam- bridge from 1625 to 1632 from his six- teenth to his twenty-fourth year. Any in- tention or thought he ever may have had of taking orders he seems early to have rejected with a characteristic scorn. He considered a state of subscription to arti- cles a state of slavery, and Milton was al- ways determined, whatever else he was or might become, to be his own man. Though never in sympathy with the governing tone of the place, there is no reason to suppose that Milton (any more than others) found this lack seriously to interfere with a fair amount of good solid enjoyment from day to day. He had friends who courted his society, and pursuits both grave and gay to occupy his hours of study and relaxation. JOHN MILTON. 9 He was called the ' Lady ' of his college, on account of his personal beauty and the purity and daintiness of his life and con- versation. After leaving Cambridge Milton began his life, so attractive to one's thoughts, at Morton, in Buckinghamshire, where his father had a house in which his mother was living. Here, for five years, from his twenty-fourth to his twenty-ninth year a period often stormy in the lives of poets he continued his work of self-education. Some of his Cambridge friends appear to have grown a little anxious, on seeing one who had distinction stamped upon his brow, doing what the world calls nothing ; and Milton himself was watchful, and even sus- picious. His second sonnet records this state of feeling: ' How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth, Stolen on his wing my three-and-twentieth year ! My hasting days fly on with full career, But my late spring no bud or blossom shew'th.' And yet no poet had ever a more beautiful springtide, though it was restless, as spring should be, with the promise of greater things and 'high midsummer pomps.' These IO JOHN MILTON. latter it was that were postponed almost too long. Milton at Horton made up his mind to be a great poet neither more nor less ; and with that end in view he toiled unceas- ingly. A more solemn dedication of a man by himself to the poetical office cannot be imagined. Everything about him became as it were pontifical, almost sacramental. A poet's soul must contain the perfect shape of all things good, wise, and just. His body must be spotless and without blemish, his life pure, his thoughts high, his studies intense. There was no drink- ing at the 'Mermaid' for John Milton. His thoughts, like his pys, were not those that 1 are in widest commonalty spread.' When in his walks he met the Hodge of his period, he is more likely to have thought of a line in Virgil than of stopping to have a chat with the poor fellow. He became a student of the Italian language, and writes to a friend : ' I who certainly have not merely wetted the tip of my lips in the stream of these (the classical) languages, but in proportion to my years have swal- JOHN MILTON. II lowed the most copious draughts, can yet sometimes retire with avidity and delight to feast on Dante, Petrarch, and many others ; nor has Athens itself been able to confine me to the transparent waves of its Ilissus, nor ancient Rome to the banks of its Tiber, so as to prevent my visiting with delight the streams of the Arno and the hills of Faesolae.' Now it was that he, in his often-quoted words written to the young Deodati, doomed to an early death, was meditating ' an immortality of fame,' letting his wings grow and preparing to fly. But dreaming though he ever was of things to come, none the less, it was at Horton he com- posed Comus, Lycidas, L' Allegro, and // Penseroso, poems which enable us half sadly to realise how much went and how much was sacrificed to make the author of Paradise Lost. After five years' retirement Milton be- gan to feel the want of a little society, of the kind that is ' quiet, wise, and good,' and he meditated taking chambers in one of the Inns of Court, where he could have a pleasant and shady walk under ' imme- 12 JOHN MILTON. morial elms,' and also enjoy the advantages of a few choice associates at home and an elegant society abroad. The death of his mother in 1637 gave his thoughts another direction, and he obtained his father's per- mission to travel in Italy, ' that woman- country, wooed not wed,' which has been the mistress of so many poetical hearts, and was so of John Milton's. His friends and relatives saw but one difficulty in the way. John Milton the younger, though not at this time a Nonconformist, was a stern and unbending Protestant, and was as bitter an opponent of His Holiness the Pope as he certainly would have been, had his days been prolonged, of His Majesty the Pretender. There is something very characteristic in this almost inflamed hostility in the case of a man with such a love of beauty and passion for architecture and music as al- ways abided in Milton, and who could write ' But let my due feet never fail To walk the studious cloisters pale, And love the high embowed roof, With antique pillars massy-proof, JOHN MILTON. 13 And storied windows richly dight, Casting a dim, religious light. There let the pealing organ flow To the full-voiced quire below, In service high and anthems clear, As may with sweetness, through mine ear, Dissolve me into ecstacies, And bring all heaven before my eyes.' Here surely is proof of an aesthetic nature beyond most of our modern raptures ; but none the less, and at the very same time, Rome was for Milton the ' grim wolf ' who ' with privy paw, daily devours apace.' It is with a sigh of sad sincerity that Dr. Newman admits that Milton breathes through his pages a hatred of the Catholic Church, and consequently the Cardinal feels free to call him a proud and rebellious creature of God. That Milton was both proud and rebellious cannot be disputed. Nonconformists need not claim him for their own with much eagerness. What he thought of Presbyterians we know, and he was never a church member, or indeed a church-goer. Dr. Newman has admitted that the poet Pope was an unsatisfactory Catholic ; Milton was certainly an unsatis- factory Dissenter. Let us be candid in 14 JOHN MILTON. these matters. Milton was therefore bid- den by his friends, and by those with whom he took council, to hold his peace whilst in Rome about the ' privy wolf/ and he promised to do so, adding, however, the Miltonic proviso that this was on condition that the Papists did not attack his religion first. ' If anyone,' he wrote, ' in the very city of the Pope, attacked the orthodox re- ligion, I defended it most freely.' To call the Protestant religion, which had not yet attained to its second century, the orthodox religion under the shadow of the Vatican was to have the courage of his opinions. But Milton was not a man to be frightened of schism. That his religious opinions should be peculiar probably seemed to him to be almost inevitable, and not unbecom- ing. He would have agreed with Emer- son, who declares that would man be great he must be a Nonconformist. There is something very fascinating in the records we have of Milton's one visit to the Continent. A more impressive Englishman never left our shores. Sir Philip Sidney perhaps approaches him near- est. Beautiful beyond praise, and just suf- JOHN MILTON. 15 ficiently conscious of it to be careful never to appear at a disadvantage, dignified in manners, versed in foreign tongues, yet full of the ancient learning, a gentleman, a scholar, a poet, a musician, and a Chris- tian, he moved about in a leisurely man- ner from city to city, writing Latin verses for his hosts and Italian sonnets in their ladies' albums, buying books and music, and creating, one cannot doubt, an all too flattering impression of an English Protes- tant. To travel in Italy with Montaigne or Milton, or Evelyn or Gray, or Shelley, or, pathetic as it is, with the dying Sir Walter, is perhaps more instructive than to go there for yourself with a tourist's ticket. Old Montaigne, who was but forty- seven when he made his journey, and whom therefore I would not call old had not Pope done so before me, is the most delightful of travelling companions, and as easy as an old shoe. A humaner man than Milton, a wiser man than Evelyn with none of the constraint of Gray, or the strange though fascinating outlandishness of Shelley he perhaps was more akin to Scott than any of the other travellers ; but 1 6 JOHN MILTON. Scott went to Italy an overwhelmed man, whose only fear was he might die away from the heather and the murmur of Tweed. However, Milton is the most im- proving companion of them all, and amidst the impurities of Italy, ' in all the places where vice meets with so little discour- agement, and is protected with so little shame,' he remained the Milton of Cam- bridge and Horton, and did nothing to pollute the pure temple of a poet's mind. He visited Paris, Nice, Genoa, Pisa, and Florence, staying in the last city two months, and living on terms of great in- timacy with seven young Italians, whose musical names he duly records. These were the months of August and Septem- ber, not nowadays reckoned safe months for Englishmen to be in Florence mod- ern lives being raised in price. From Flor- ence he proceeded through Siena to Rome, where he also stayed two months. There he was present at a magnificent entertain- ment given by the Cardinal Francesco Barberini in his palace, and heard the singing of the celebrated Leonora Baroni. It is not for one moment to be supposed JOHN MILTON. 17 that he sought an interview with the Pope, as Montaigne had done, who was exhorted by his holiness ' to persevere in the devo- tion he had ever manifested in the cause of the Church ; ' and yet perhaps Mon- taigne by his Essays did more to sap the authority of Peter's Chair than Milton, however willing, was able to do. It has been remarked that Milton's chief enthusiasm in Italy was not art, but music, which falls in with Coleridge's dictum^ that Milton is not so much a picturesque as a musical poet, meaning thereby, I sup- pose, that the effects which he produces and the scenes which he portrays are rather sug- gested to us by the rhythm of his lines than by actual verbal descriptions. From Rome Milton went to Naples, from whence he had intended to go to Sicily and Greece, but the troubles beginning at home he fore- went this pleasure, and consequently never saw Athens, which was surely a great pity. He returned to Rome, where, troubles or no troubles, he stayed another two months. From Rome he went back to Florence, which he found too pleasant to leave under two more months. Then he went to Lucca, 1 8 JOHN MILTON. and so to Venice, where he was very stern with himself, and only lingered a month. From Venice he went to Milan, and then over the Alps to Geneva, where he had dear friends. He was back in London in August 1639, after an absence of fifteen months. The times were troubled enough. Poor Charles I., whose literary taste was so good that one must regret the mischance that placed a crown upon his comely head, was trying hard, at the bidding of a priest, to thrust Episcopacy down Scottish throats, who would not have it at any price. He was desperately in need of money, and the House of Commons (which had then a raison d'etre} was not prepared to give him any except on terms. Altogether it was an exciting time, but Milton was in no way specially concerned in it Milton looms so large in our imagination amongst the figures of the period that, despite Dr. John- son's sneers, we are apt to forget his polit- ical insignificance, and to fancy him cur- tailing his tour and returning home to take his place amongst the leaders of the Par- liament men. Return home he did, but it JOHN MILTON. 1 9 was, as another pedagogue has reminded us, to receive boys 'to be boarded and in- structed.' Dr. Johnson tells us that we ought not to allow our veneration for Mil- ton to rob us of a joke at the expense of a man ' who hastens home because his coun- trymen are contending for their liberty, and when he reaches the scene of action vapours away his patriotism in a private boarding-school ;' but that this observation was dictated by the good Doctor's spleen is made plain by his immediately proceed- ing to point out, with his accustomed good sense, that there is really nothing to laugh at, since it was desirable that Milton, whose father was alive and could only make him a small allowance, should do something, and there was no shame in his adopting an honest and useful employment. To be a Parliament man was no part of the ambition of one who still aspired to be a poet ; who was not yet blind to the heavenly vision ; who was still meditating what should be his theme, and who in the meantime chastised his sister's sons, un- ruly lads, who did him no -credit and bore him no great love. 2O JOHN MILTON. The Long Parliament met in November 1640, and began its work, brought Straf- ford to the scaffold, clapped Laud into the Tower, Archbishop though he was, and secured as best they could the permanency of parliamentary institutions. None of these things specially concerned John Mil- ton. But there also uprose the eternal Church question, ' What sort of Church are we to have ? ' The fierce controversy raged, and ' its fair enticing fruit,' spread round ' with liberal hand,' proved too much for the father of English epic. ' He scrupled not to eat Against his better knowledge.' In other words, he commenced pamphlet- eering, and between May 1641 and the fol- lowing March he had written five pamphlets against Episcopacy, and used an intolerable deal of bad language, which, however ex- cusable in a heated controversialist, ill became the author of Comus. The war broke out in 1642, but Milton kept house. The ' tented field ' had no attractions for him. In the summer of 1643 he took a sudden journey into the country, and returned JOHN MILTON. 21 home to his boys with a wife, the daughter of an Oxfordshire Cavalier. Poor Mary Powell was but seventeen, her poetic lord was thirty-five. From the country-house of a rollicking squire to Aldersgate Street was somewhat too violent a change. She had left ten brothers and sisters behind her, the eldest twenty-one, the youngest four. As one looks upon this picture and on that, there is no need to wonder that the poor girl was unhappy. The poet, though keenly alive to the subtle charm of a woman's personality, was unpractised in the arts of daily companionship. He expected to find much more than he brought of general good-fellowship. He had an ideal ever in his mind of both bodily and spiritual excellence, and he was almost greedy to realise both, but he knew not how. One of his complaints was that his wife was mute and insensate, and sat silent at his board. It must, no doubt, have been deadly dull, that house in Al- dersgate Street. Silence feigned, save when broken by the cries of the younger Phillips sustaining chastisement. Milton had none of that noble humanitarian spirit 22 JOHN MILTON. which had led Montaigne long years before him to protest against the cowardly tradi- tions of the schoolroom. After a month of Aldersgate Street, Mrs. Milton begged to go home. Her wish was granted, and she ran back to her ten brothers and sis- ters, and when her leave of absence was up refused to return. Her husband was furi- ously angry ; and in a time so short as al- most to enforce the belief that he began the work during the honeymoon, was ready with his celebrated pamphlet, The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce restored to the good of both sexes. He is even said, with his accustomed courage, to have paid atten- tions to a Miss Davis, who is described as a very handsome and witty gentlewoman, and therefore not one likely to sit silent at his board ; but she was a sensible girl as well, and had no notion of a married suitor. Of Milton's pamphlet it is everyone's duty to speak with profound respect. It is a noble and passionate cry for a high ideal of married life, which, so he argued, had by inflexible laws been changed into a droop- ing and disconsolate household captivity, without refuge or redemption. He shud- JOHN MILTON. 2$ dered at the thought of a man and woman being condemned, for a mistake of judg- ment, to be bound together to their unspeak- able wearisomeness and despair, for, he says, not to be beloved and yet retained is the greatest injury to a gentle spirit. Our present doctrine of divorce, which sets the household captive free on payment of a broken vow, but on no less ignoble terms, is not founded on the congruous, and is indeed already discredited if not disgraced. This pamphlet on divorce marks the be- ginning of Milton's mental isolation. No- body had a word to say for it. Episco- palian, Presbyterian, and Independent held his doctrine in as much abhorrence as did the Catholic, and all alike regarded its au- thor as either an impracticable dreamer or worse. It was written certainly in too great haste, for his errant wife, actuated by what motives cannot now be said, re- turned to her allegiance, was mindful of her plighted troth, and, suddenly entering his room, fell at his feet and begged to be forgiven. She was only nineteen, and she said it was all her mother's fault. Milton was not a sour man, and though perhaps 24 JOHN MILTON. too apt to insist upon repentance preced- ing forgiveness, yet when it did so he could forgive divinely. In a very short time the whole family of Powells, whom the war had reduced to low estate, were living un- der his roof in the Barbican, whither he moved on the Aldersgate House proving too small for his varied belongings. The poet's father also lived with his son. Mrs. Milton had four children, three of whom, all daughters, lived to grow up. The mother died in childbirth in 1652, being then twenty-six years of age. The Areopagitica, a Speech for Unli- censed Printing, followed the divorce pam- phlet, but it also fell upon deaf ears. Of all religious sects the Presbyterians, who were then dominant, are perhaps the least likely to forego the privilege of interfer- ence in the affairs of others. Instead of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London, instead of *a lordly Imprimatur, one from Lambeth House, another from the west end of Paul's,' there was appointed a commission of twenty Presbyterians to act as State Li- censers. Then was Milton's soul stirred JOHN MILTON. 25 within him to a noble rage. His was a threefold protest, as a citizen of a State he fondly hoped had been free, as an au- thor, and as a reader. As a citizen he protested against so unnecessary and im- proper an interference. It is not, he cried, ' the unfrocking of a priest, the unmitring of a bishop, that will make us a happy na- tion,' but the practice of virtue, and virtue means freedom to choose. Milton was a manly politician, and detested with his whole soul grandmotherly legislation. ' He who is not trusted with his own actions, his drift not being known to be evil, and standing to the hazard of law and penalty, has no great argument to think himself re- puted in the commonwealth wherein he was born, for other than a fool or a for- eigner.' ' They are not skilful considerers of human things who imagine to remove sin by removing the matter of sin.' 'And were I the chooser, a dram of well-doing should be preferred before many times as much the forcible hindrance of evil doing.' These are texts upon which sermons, not inapplicable to our own day, might be preached. Milton has made our first par- 26 JOHN MILTON. ent so peculiarly his own that any observa- tions of his about Adam are interesting. 4 Many there be that complain of Divine Providence for suffering Adam to trans- gress. Foolish tongues ! When God gave him reason He gave him freedom to choose, for reason is but choosing ; he had been else a mere artificial Adam. We ourselves esteem not of that obedience a love or gift which is of force. God therefore left him free, set before him a provoking object ever almost in his eyes ; herein consisted his merit, herein the right of his reward, the praise of his abstinence.' So that ac- cording to Milton even Eden was a state of trial. As an author, Milton's protest has great force. 'And what if the author shall be one so copious of fancy as to have many things well worth the adding come into his mind after licensing, while the book is yet under the press, which not seldom happens to the best and diligentest writers, and that perhaps a dozen times in one book. The printer dares not go be- yond his licensed copy. So often then must the author trudge to his leave-giver that those his new insertions may be JOHN MILTON. 2? viewed, and many a jaunt will be made ere that licenser for it must be the same man can either be found, or found at leisure ; meanwhile either the press must stand still, which is no small damage, or the author lose his accuratest thoughts, and send forth the book worse than he made it, which to a diligent writer is the greatest melancholy and vexation that can befall.' Milton would have had no licensers. Every book should bear the printer's name, and ' mischievous and libellous books ' were to be burnt by the common hangman, not as an effectual remedy, but as the * most effectual remedy man's pre- vention can use.' The noblest pamphlet in ' our English, the language of men ever famous and fore- most in the achievements of liberty,' ac- complished nothing, and its author must already have thought himself fallen on evil days. In the year 1645, the year of Naseby, as Mr. Pattison reminds us, appeared the first edition of Milton's Poems. Then, for the first time, were printed V Allegro and // 28 JOHN MILTON. Penseroso, the Ode on the Morning of Christ's Nativity, and various of the son- nets. The little volume also contained Comus and Lycidas, which had been pre- viously printed. With the exception of three sonnets and a few scraps of transla- tion, Milton had written nothing but pam- phlets since his return from Italy. At the beginning of the volume, which is a small octavo, was a portrait of the poet, most villainously executed. He was really thir- ty-seven, but flattered himself, as men of that age will, that he looked ten years younger ; he was therefore much chagrined to find himself represented as a grim-look- ing gentleman of at least fifty. The way he revenged himself upon the hapless artist is well known. The volume, with the por- trait, is now very scarce, almost rare. In 1647 Milton removed from the Bar- bican, both his father and his father-in-law being dead, to a smaller house in Holborn, backing upon Lincoln's Inn Fields, close to where the Inns of Court Hotel now stands, and not far from the spot which was destined to witness the terrible tragedy which was at once to darken and glorify JOHN MILTON. 29 the life of one of Milton's most fervent lovers, Charles Lamb. About this time he is supposed to have abandoned peda- gogy. The habit of pamphleteering stuck to him ; indeed, it is one seldom thrown off. It is much easier to throw off the pamphlets. In 1649 Milton became a public servant, receiving the appointment of Latin Secre- tary to the Council of Foreign Affairs. He knew some member of the Committee, who obtained his nomination. His duties were purely clerkly. It was his business to translate English despatches into Latin, and foreign despatches into English. He had nothing whatever to do with the shap- ing of the foreign policy of the Common- wealth. He was not even employed in translating the most important of the State papers. There is no reason for supposing that he even knew the leading politicians of his time. There is a print one sees about, representing Oliver Cromwell dic- tating a foreign despatch to John Milton ; but it is all imagination, nor is there any- thing to prove that Cromwell and Milton, the body and soul of English Republican- 3lain English, means that ' our good Edmund ' was an enormous devourer of poetry and novels, and so he remained to the end of his days. That he always preferred Fielding to Richardson is satisfactory, since it pairs him off nicely with Dr. Johnson, whose preference was the other way, and so helps to keep an in- teresting question wide open. His passion for the poetry of Virgil is significant. His early devotion to Edward Young, the grandiose author of the Night Thoughts, is not to be wondered at ; though the inspi- ration of the youthful Burke, either as poet or critic, may be questioned, when we find him rapturously scribbling in the margin of his copy : EDMUND BURKE. ' Jove claimed the verse old Homer sung, But God Himself inspired Dr. Young.' But a boy's enthusiasm for a favourite poet is a thing to rejoice over. The years that bring the philosophic mind will not bring they must find enthusiasm. In 1750, Burke (being then twenty-one) came for the first time to London, to do what so many of his lively young country- men are still doing though they are be- ginning to make a grievance even of that eat his dinners at the Middle Temple, and so qualify himself for the Bar. Cer- tainly that student was in luck who found himself in the same mess with Burke ; and yet so stupid are men so prone to rest with their full weight on the immaterial and slide over the essential that had that good fortune been ours we should proba- bly have been more taken up with Burke's brogue than with his brains. Burke came to London with a cultivated curiosity, and in no spirit of desperate determination to make his fortune. That the study of the law interested him cannot be doubted, for everything interested him, particularly the stage. Like the sensible Irishman he was, 158 EDMUND BURKE. he lost his heart to Peg Woffington on the first opportunity. He was fond of roaming about the country, during, it is to be hoped, vacation-time only, and is to be found writ- ing the most cheerful letters to his friends in Ireland (all of whom are persuaded that he is going some day to be somebody, though sorely puzzled to surmise what thing or when, so pleasantly does he take life), from all sorts of out-of-the-way coun- try places, where he lodges with quaint old landladies who wonder maternally why he never gets drunk, and generally mistake him for an author until he pays his bill. When in town he frequented debating so- cieties in Fleet Street and Covent Garden, and made his first speeches ; for which pur- pose he would, unlike some debaters, de- vote studious hours to getting up the sub- jects to be discussed. There is good reason to believe that it was in this manner his attention was first directed to India. He was at all times a great talker, and, Dr. Johnson's dictum notwithstanding, a good listener. He was endlessly interested in everything in the state of the crops, in the last play, in the details of all trades, EDMUND BURKE. 159 the rhythm of all poems, the plots of all novels, and indeed in the course of every manufacture. And so for six years he went -up and down, to and fro, gathering infor- mation, imparting knowledge, and prepar- ing himself, though he knew not for what. The attorney in Dublin grew anxious, and searched for precedents of a son behaving like his, and rising to ejninence. Had his son got the legal mind ? which, accord- ing to a keen observer, chiefly displays it- self by illustrating the obvious, explaining the evident, and expatiating on ttte com- monplace. Edmund's powers of illustra- tion, explanation, and expatiation could not indeed be questioned ; but then the subjects selected for the exhibition of those powers were very far indeed from being obvious, evident, or commonplace ; and the attorney's heart grew heavy within him. The paternal displeasure was signi- fied in the usual manner the supplies were cut off. Edmund Burke, however, was no ordinary prodigal, arid his reply to his father's expostulations took the unex- pected and unprecedented shape of a copy of a second and enlarged edition of his l6o EDAIUND BURKE. treatise on the Sublime and Beautiful, which he had published in 1756 at the price of three shillings. Burke's father promptly sent the author a bank-bill for ;ioo, conduct on his part which, con- sidering he had sent his son to London and maintained him there for six years to study law, was, in my judgment, both sub- lime and beautiful. In the same year Burke published another pamphlet a one-and- sixpenny affair written ironically, in the style of Lord Bolingbroke, and called A Vindication of Natural Society; or, a View of the Miseries and Evils arising to Man- kind from Every Species of Civil Society. Irony is a dangerous weapon for a public man to have ever employed, and in after- life Burke had frequently to explain that he was not serious. On these two pam- phlets' airy pinions Burke floated into the harbour of literary fame. No less a man than the great David Hume referred to him, in a letter to the hardly less great Adam Smith, as an Irish gentleman who had written a ' very pretty treatise on the Sublime.' After these efforts, Burke, as became an established wit, went to Bath EDMUND BURKE. l6l to recruit, and there, fitly enough, fell in love. The lady was Miss Jane Mary Nu- gent, the daughter of a celebrated Bath physician ; and it is pleasant to be able to say of the marriage that was shortly solemnised between the young couple, that it was a happy one, and then to go on our way, leaving them where man and wife ought to be left alone. Oddly enough, Burke's wife was also the offspring of a 'mixed marriage' only in her case it was the father who was the Catholic ; conse- quently both Mr. and Mrs. Edmund Burke were of the same way of thinking, but each had a parent of the other way. Although getting married is no part of the curricu- lum of a law student, Burke's father seems to have come to the conclusion that after all it was a greater distinction for an attor- ney in Dublin to have a son living amongst the wits in London, and discoursing famil- iarly on the ' Sublime and Beautiful,' than one prosecuting some poor countryman, with a brogue as rich as his own, for steal- ing a pair of breeches ; for we find him generously allowing the young couple ^200 a year, which no doubt went some way to- 1 62 EDMUND BURKE. wards maintaining them. Burke, who was now in his twenty-eighth year, seems to have given up all notion of the law. In 1758 he wrote for Dodsley the first volume of the Annual Register, a melancholy series which continues to this day. For doing this he got ^100. Burke was by this time a well-known figure in London literary so- ciety, and was busy making for himself a huge private reputation. The Christmas Day of 1758 witnessed a singular scene at the dinner table of David Garrick. Dr. Johnson, then in the full vigour of his mind, and with the all-dreaded weapons of his dialectics kept burnished by daily use, was flatly contradicted by a fellow-guest some twenty years his junior, and, what is more, submitted to it without a murmur. One of the diners, Arthur Murphy, was so struck by this occurrence, unique in his long experience of the Doctor, that on returning home he recorded the fact in his journal, but ventured no explanation of it. It can only be accounted for so at least I venture to think by the combined ef- fect of four wholly independent circum- stances : First, the day was Christmas EDMUND BURKE. 163 Day, a day of peace and goodwill, and our beloved Doctor was amongst the sincerest, though most argumentative of Christians, and a great observer of days. Second, the house was David Garrick's, and conse- quently we may be certain that the din- ner had been a superlatively good one ; and has not Boswell placed on record Johnson's opinion of the man who pro- fessed to be indifferent about his dinner? Third, the subject under discussion was India, about which Johnson knew he knew next to nothing. And four t/t, the offender was Edmund Burke, whom Johnson loved from the first day he set eyes upon him to their last sad parting by the waters of death. In 1761 that shrewd old gossip, Horace Walpole, met Burke for the first time at dinner, and remarks of him in a letter to George Montague: ' I dined at Hamilton's yesterday ; there were Garrick, and young Mr. Burke, who wrote a book in the style of Lord Boling- broke, that was much admired. He is a sensible man, but has not worn off his au- thorism yet, and thinks there is nothing 1 64 EDMUND BURKE. so charming as writers, and to be one. He will know better one of these days/ But great as were Burke's literary pow- ers, and passionate as was his fondness for letters and for literary society, he never seems to have felt that the main burden of his life lay in that direction. He looked to the public service, and this though he always believed that the pen of a great writer was a more powerful and glorious weapon than any to be found in the ar- moury of politics. This faith of his comes out sometimes queerly enough. For exam- ple, when Dr. Robertson in 1777 sent Burke his cheerful History rf America in quarto volumes, Burke, in the most perfect good faith, closes a long letter of thanks thus : 'You will smile when I send you a tri- fling temporary production made for the occasion of the day, and to perish with it, in return for your immortal work.' I have no desire, least of all in Edin- burgh, to say anything disrespectful of Principal Robertson ; but still, when we remember that the temporary production he got in exchange for his History of America was Burke's immortal letter to EDMUND BURKE. 165 the Sheriffs of Bristol on the American War, we must, I think, be forced to admit that, as so often happens when a Scotch- man and an Irishman do business together, the former got the better of the bargain. Burke's first public employment was of a humble character, and might well have been passed over in a sentence, had it not terminated in a most delightful quarrel, in which Burke conducted himself like an Irishman of genius. Some time in 1759 he became acquainted with William Gerard Hamilton, commonly called ' Single-speech Hamilton,' on account of the celebrity he gained from his first speech in Parliament, and the steady way in which his oratorical reputation went on waning ever after. In 1761 this gentleman went over to Ireland as Chief Secretary, and Burke accompanied him as the Secretary's secretary, or, in the unlicensed speech of Dublin, as Hamilton's jackal. This arrangement was eminently satisfactory to Hamilton, who found, as generations of men have found after him, Burke's brains very useful, and he deter- mined to borrow them for the period of their joint lives. Animated by this desire, 1 66 EDMUND BURKE. in itself praiseworthy, he busied himself in procuring for Burke a pension of ^300 a year on the Irish establishment, and then the simple 'Single -speech' thought the transaction closed. He had bought his poor man of genius, and paid for him on the nail with other people's money. Noth- ing remained but for Burke to draw his pension and devote the rest of his life to maintaining Hamilton's reputation. There is nothing at all unusual in this, and I have no doubt Burke would have stuck to his bargain, had not Hamilton conceived the fatal idea that Burke's brains were exclusively his (Hamilton's). Then the sit- uation became one of risk and apparent danger. Burke's imagination began playing round the subject : he saw himself a slave, blotted out of existence mere fuel for Hamilton's flame. In a week he was in a towering passion. Few men can afford to be angry. It is a run upon their intel- lectual resources they cannot meet. But Burke's treasury could well afford the lux- ury ; and his letters to Hamilton make de- lightful reading to those who, like myself, EDMUND BURKE. 167 dearly love a dispute when conducted ac- cording to the rules of the game by men of great intellectual wealth. Hamilton de- molished and reduced to stony silence, Burke sat down again and wrote long let- ters to all his friends, telling them the whole story from beginning to end. I must be allowed a quotation from one of these letters, for this really is not so friv- olous a matter as I am afraid I have made it appear a quotation of which this much may be said, that nothing more delightfully Burkean is to be found anywhere : ' MY DEAR MASON, ' I am hardly able to tell you how much satisfaction I had in your letter. Your approbation of my conduct makes me believe much the better of you and my- self ; and I assure you that that approba- tion came to me very seasonably. Such proofs of a warm, sincere, and disinter- ested friendship were not wholly unneces- sary to my support at a time when I ef- perienced such bitter effects of the perfidy and ingratitude of much longer and much closer connections. The way in which you 1 68 EDMUND BURKE. take up my affairs binds me to you in a manner I cannot express ; for to tell you the truth, I never can (knowing as I do the principles upon which I always endeavour to act) submit to any sort of compromise of my character ; and I shall never, there- fore, look upon those who, after hearing the whole story, do not think me perfectly in the right, and do not consider Hamilton an infamous scoundrel, to be in the small- est degree my friends, or even to be per- sons for whom I am bound to have the slightest esteem, as fair and just estima- tors of the characters and conduct of men. Situated as I am, and feeling as I do, I should be just as well pleased that they totally condemned me, as that they should say there were faults on both sides, or that it was a disputable case, as I hear is (I cannot forbear saying) the affected lan- guage of some persons. . . . You cannot avoid remarking, my dear Mason, and I hope not without some indignation, the unparalleled singularity of my situation. Was ever a man before me expected to enter into formal, direct, and undisguised slavery ? Did ever man before him confess EDMUND BURKE. 169 an attempt to decoy a man into such an alleged contract, not to say anything of the impudence of regularly pleading it ? If such an attempt be wicked and unlawful (and I am sure no one ever doubted it), I have only to confess his charge, and to ad- mit myself his dupe, to make him pass, on his own showing, for the most consummate villain that ever lived. The only differ- ence between us is, not whether he is not a rogue for he not only admits but pleads the facts that demonstrate him to be so ; but only whether I was such a fool as to sell myself absolutely for a consideration which, so far from being adequate, if any such could be adequate, is not even so much as certain. Not to value myself as a gentleman, a free man, a man of education, and one pretending to literature ; is there any situation in life so low, or even so criminal, that can subject a man to the pos- sibility of such an engagement ? Would you dare attempt to bind your footman to such terms ? Will the law surfer a felon sent to the plantations to bind himself for his life, and to renounce all possibility either of elevation or quiet ? And am I to I/O EDMUND BURKE. defend myself for not doing what no man is suffered to do, and what it would be criminal in any man to submit to ? You will excuse me for this heat.' I not only excuse Burke for his heat, but love him for letting me warm my hands at it after a lapse of a hundred and twenty years. Burke was more fortunate in his second master, for in 1765, being then thirty-six years of age, he became private secretary to the new Prime Minister, the Marquis of Rockingham ; was by the interest of Lord Verney returned to Parliament for Wen- dover, in Bucks ; and on January 2/th, 1766, his voice, was first heard in the House of Commons. The Rockingham Ministry deserves well of the historian, and on the whole has re- ceived its deserts. Lord Rockingham, the Duke of Richmond, Lord John Cavendish, Mr. Dowdeswell, and the rest of them, were good men and true, judged by an ordinary standard ; and when contrasted with most of their political competitors, they almost approach the ranks of saints and angels. However, after a year and EDMUND BURKE. 17 1 twenty days, his Majesty King George the Third managed to get rid of them, and to keep them at bay for fifteen years. But their first term of office, though short, lasted long enough to establish a friend- ship of no ordinary powers of endurance between the chief members of the party and the Prime Minister's private secretary, who was at first, so ran the report, sup- posed to be a wild Irishman, whose real name was O'Bourke, and whose brogue seemed to require the allegation that its owner was a popish emissary. It is satis- factory to notice how from the very first Burke's intellectual pre-eminence, charac- ter, and aims were clearly admitted and most cheerfully recognised by his political and social superiors ; and in the long cor- respondence in which he engaged with most of them, there is not a trace to be found, on one side or the other, of anything approaching to either patronage or ser- vility. Burke advises them, exhorts them, expostulates with them, condemns their aristocratic languor, fans their feeble flames, drafts their motions, dictates their protests, visits their houses, and generally supplies 1/2 EDMUND BURKE. them with facts, figures, poetry, and ro- mance. To all this they submit with much humility. The Duke of Richmond once indeed ventured to hint to Burke, with ex- ceeding delicacy, that he (the Duke) had a small private estate to attend to as well as public affairs ; but the validity of the excuse was not admitted. The part Burke played for the next fifteen years with relation to the Rockingham party re- minds me of the functions I have observed performed in lazy families by a soberly clad and eminently respectable person who pays them domiciliary visits, and, having admission everywhere, goes about mysteri- ously from room to room, winding up all the clocks. This is what Burke did for the Rockingham party he kept it going. But fortunately for us, Burke was not content with private adjuration, or even public speech. His literary instincts, his dominating desire to persuade everybody that he, Edmund Burke, was absolutely in the right, and every one of his opponents hopelessly wrong, made him turn to the pamphlet as a propaganda, and in his hands EDMUND BURKE. 173 'The thing became a trumpet, whence he blew Soul-animating strains.' So accustomed are we to regard Burke's pamphlets as specimens of our noblest lit- erature, and to see them printed in com- fortable volumes, that we are apt to forget that in their origin they were but the chil- dren of the pavement, the publications of the hour. If, however, you ever visit any old public library, and grope about a little, you are likely enough to find a shelf holding some twenty-five or thirty musty, ugly lit- tle books, usually lettered ' Burke,' and on opening any of them you will come across one of Burke's pamphlets as originally is- sued, bound up with the replies and counter- pamphlets it occasioned. I have frequent- ly tried, but always in vain, to read these replies, which are pretentious enough usually the works of deans, members of Parliament, and other dignitaries of the class Carlyle used compendiously to de- scribe as ' shovel-hatted ' and each of whom was as much entitled to publish pamphlets as Burke himself. There are some things it is very easy to do, and to write a pamphlet is one of them ; but to 174 EDMUND BURKE. write such a pamphlet as future genera- tions will read with delight is perhaps the most difficult feat in literature. Milton, Swift, Burke, and Sydney Smith are, I think, our only great pamphleteers. I have now rather more than kept my word so far as Burke's pre-parliamentary life is concerned, and will proceed to men- tion some of the circumstances that may serve to account for the fact, that when the Rockingham party came into power for the second time in 1782, Burke, who was their life and soul, was only rewarded with a minor office. First, then, it must be recorded sorrowfully of Burke that he was always desperately in debt, and in this country no politician under the rank of a baronet can ever safely be in debt. Burke's finances are, and always have been, marvels and mysteries ; but one thing must be said of them that the malignity of his enemies, both Tory ene- mies and Radical enemies, has never suc- ceeded in formulating any charge of dis- honesty against him that has not been at once completely pulverised, and shown on EDMUND BURKE. 175 the facts to be impossible.* Burke's pur- chase of the estate at Beaconsfield in 1768, only two years after he entered Par- liament, consisting as it did of a good house and 1,600 acres of land, has puzzled a great many good men much more than it ever did Edmund Burke. But how did he get the money ? After an Irish fashion by not getting it at all. Two- thirds of the purchase-money remained on mortgage, and the balance he borrowed ; or, as he puts it, ' With all I could collect of my own, and by the aid of my friends, I have established a root in the country.' That is how Burke bought Beaconsfield, where he lived till his end came ; whither he always hastened when his sensitive mind was tortured by the thought of how badly men governed the world ; where he * All the difficulties connected with this subject will be found collected, and somewhat unkindly considered, in Mr. Dilke's Papers of a Critic, vol. ii. The equity draftsman will be indisposed to attach importance to statements made in a Bill of Complaint filed in Chan- cery by Lord Verney against Burke fourteen years after the transaction to which it had reference, in a suit which was abandoned after answer put in. Yet Mr. Dilke thought it worth while to reprint this ancient Bill. 176 EDMUND BURKE. entertained all sorts and conditions of men Quakers, Brahmins (for whose ancient rites he provided suitable accommodation in a greenhouse), nobles and abbes flying from revolutionary France, poets, painters, and peers ; no one of whom ever long re- mained a stranger to his charm. Burke flung himself into farming with all the en- thusiasm of his nature. His letters to Arthur Young on the subject of carrots still tremble with emotion. You all know Burke's Thoughts on the Present Discon- tents. You remember it is hard to for- get his speech on Conciliation with America, particularly the magnificent pas- sage beginning, ' Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom, and a great empire and little minds go ill to- gether.' You have echoed back the words in which, in his letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol on the hateful American War, he protests that it was not instantly he could be brought to rejoice when he heard of the slaughter and captivity of long lists of those whose names had been familiar in his ears from his infancy, and you wfuld all join with me in subscribing to a fund EDMUND BURKE. 177 which should have for its object the print- ing and hanging up over every editor's desk in town and country a subsequent passage from the same letter : ' A conscientious man would be cautious how he dealt in blood. He would feel some apprehension at being called to a tremen- dous account for engaging in so deep a play without any knowledge of the game. It is no excuse for presumptuous ignorance that it is directed by insolent passion. The poorest being that crawls on earth, contending to save itself from injustice and oppression, is an object respectable in the eyes of God and man. But I cannot con- ceive any existence under heaven (which in the depths of its wisdom tolerates all sorts of things) that is more truly odious and disgusting than an impotent, helpless creature, without civil wisdom or military skill, bloated with pride and arrogance, call- ing for battles which he is not to fight, and contending for a violent dominion which he can never exercise. . . . ' If you and I find our talents not of the grea\ and ruling kind, our conduct at least is conformable to our faculties. No man's 178 EDMUND BURKE. life pays the forfeit of our rashness. No desolate widow weeps tears of blood over our ignorance. Scrupulous and sober in a well-grounded distrust of ourselves, we would keep in the port of peace and se- curity ; and perhaps in recommending to others something of the same diffidence, we should show ourselves more charitable to their welfare than injurious to their abilities.' You have laughed over Burke' s account of how all Lord Talbot's schemes for the reform of the king's household were dashed to pieces, because the turnspit of the king's kitchen was a Member of Parlia- ment. You have often pondered over that miraculous passage in his speech on the Nabob of Arcot's debts, describing the de- vastation of the Carnatic by Hyder Ali a passage which Mr. John Morley says fills the young orator with the same emotions of enthusiasm, emulation, and despair that (according to the same authority) invariably torment the artist who first gazes on 'The Madonna' at Dresden, or the figures of 'Night' and 'Dawn' at Florence. All these things you know, else are you mighty EDMUND BURKE. 1/9 self-denying of your pleasures. But it is just possible you may have forgotten the following extract from one of Burke's farming letters to Arthur Young : ' One of the grand points in controversy (a controversy indeed chiefly carried on be- tween practice and speculation) is that of deep ploughing. In your last volume you seem, on the whole, rather against that practice, and have given several reasons for your judgment which deserve to be very well considered. In order to know how we ought to plough, we ought to know what end it is we propose to ourselves in that operation. The first and instrumental end is to divide the soil ; the last and ultimate end, so far as regards the plants, is to facilitate the pushing of the blade upwards, and the shooting of the roots in all the in- ferior directions. There is further pro- posed a more ready admission of external influences the rain, the sun, the air, charged with all those heterogeneous con- tents, some, possibly all, of which are nec- essary for the nourishment of the plants. By ploughing deep you answer these ends in a greater mass of the soil. This would ISO EDMUND BURKE. seem in favour of deep ploughing as noth- ing else than accomplishing, in a more perfect manner, those very ends for which you are induced to plough at all. But doubts here arise, only to be solved by ex- periment. First, is it quite certain that it is good for the ear and grain of farinaceous plants that their roots should spread and descend into the ground to the greatest possible distances and depths ? Is there not some limit in this ? We know that in timber, what makes one part flourish does not equally conduce to the benefit of all ; and that which may be beneficial to the wood, does not equally contribute to the quantity and goodness of the fruit ; and, vice versa, that what increases the fruit largely is often far from serviceable to the tree. Secondly, is that looseness to great depths, supposing it is useful to one of the species of plants, equally useful to all ? Thirdly, though the external influences the rain, the sun, the air act undoubt- edly a part, and a large part, in vegetation, does it follow that they are equally salutary in any quantities, at any depths ? Or that, though it may be useful to diffuse one of EDMUND BURKE. l8l these agents as extensively as may be in the earth, that therefore it will be equally useful to render the earth in the same de- gree pervious to all ? It is a dangerous way of reasoning in physics, as well as morals, to conclude, because a given pro- portion of anything is advantageous, that the double will be quite as good, or that it will be good at all. Neither in the one nor the other is it always true that two and two make four.' This is magnificent, but it is not farm- ing, and you will easily believe that Burke's attempts to till the soil were more costly than productive. Farming, if it is to pay, is a pursuit of small economies ; and Burke was far too Asiatic, tropical, and splendid to have anything to do with small econo- mies. His expenditure, like his rhetoric, was in the ' grand style.' He belongs to Charles Lamb's great race, ' the men who borrow.' But indeed it was not so much that Burke borrowed as that men lent. Right-feeling men did not wait to be asked. Dr. Brocklesby, that good physi- cian, whose name breathes like a benedic- tion through the pages of the biographies 1 82 EDMUND BURKE. of the best men of his time, who soothed Dr. Johnson's last melancholy hours, and for whose supposed heterodoxy the dying man displayed so tender a solicitude, wrote to Burke, in the strain of a timid suitor proposing for the hand of a proud heiress, to know whether Burke would be so good as to accept 1,000 at once, instead of waiting for the writer's death. Burke felt no hesitation in obliging so old a friend. Garrick, who, though fond of money, was as generous - hearted a fellow as ever brought down a house, lent Burke 1,000. Sir Joshua Reynolds, who has been reck- oned stingy, by his will left Burke ,2,000, and forgave him another .2,000 which he had lent him. The Marquis of Rocking- ham by his will directed all Burke's bonds held by him to be cancelled. They amounted to 30,000. Burke's patrimo- nial estate was sold by him for 4,000 ; and I have seen it stated that he had received altogether from family sources as much as 20,000. And yet he was always poor, and was glad at the last to accept pensions from the Crown in order that he might not leave his wife a beggar. This good lady EDMUND BURKE. 183 survived her illustrious husband twelve years, and seemed as his widow to have some success in paying his bills, for at her death all remaining demands were found to be discharged. For receiving this pen- sion Burke was assailed by the Duke of Bedford, a most pleasing act of ducal fatuity, since it enabled the pensioner, not bankrupt of his wit, to write a pamphlet, now of course a cherished classic, and in- troduce into it a few paragraphs about the House of Russell and the cognate subject of grants from the Crown. But enough of Burke's debts and difficulties, which I only mention because all through his life they were cast up against him. Had Burke been a moralist of the calibre of Charles James Fox, he might have amassed a for- tune large enough to keep up half-a-dozen Beacon sfields, by simply doing what all his predecessors in the office he held, includ- ing Fox's own father, the truly infamous first Lord Holland, had done namely, by retaining for his own use the interest on all balances of the public money from time to time in his hands as Paymaster of the Forces. But Burke carried his passion 184 EDMUND BURKE. for good government into actual practice, and, cutting down the emoluments of his office to a salary (a high one, no doubt), effected a saving to the country of some ^25,000 a year, every farthing of which might have gone without remark into his own pocket. Burke had no vices, save of style and temper ; nor was any of his expenditure a profligate squandering of money. It all went in giving employment or disseminat- ing kindness. He sent the painter Barry to study art in Italy. He saved the poet Crabbe from starvation and despair, and thus secured to the country one who owns the unrivalled distinction of having been the favourite poet of the three greatest intellectual factors of the age (scientific men excepted), Lord Byron, Sir Walter Scott, and Cardinal Newman. Yet so dis- torted are men's views that the odious and anti-social excesses of Fox at the gambling- table are visited with a blame usually wreathed in smiles, whilst the financial irregularities of a noble and pure-minded man are thought fit matter for the fiercest censure or the most lordly contempt. EDMUND BURKE. 185 Next to Burke's debts, some of his com- panions and intimates did him harm and injured his consequence. His brother Richard, whose brogue we are given to understand was simply appalling, was a good-for-nothing, with a dilapidated repu- tation. Then there was another Mr. Burke, who was no relation, but none the less was always about, and to whom it was not safe to lend money. Burke's son, too, whose death he mourned so pathetically, seems to have been a failure, and is described by a candid friend as a nauseating person. To have a decent following is important in politics. A third reason must be given : Burke's judgment of men and things was often both wrong and violent. The story of Powell and Bembridge, two knaves in Burke's own office, whose cause he es- poused, and whom he insisted, on reinstat- ing in the public service after they had been dismissed, and maintaining them there, in spite of all protests, till the one had the grace to cut his throat and the other was sentenced by the Queen's Bench to a term of imprisonment and a heavy 1 86 EDMUND BURKE. fine, is too long to be told, though it makes interesting reading in the twenty-second volume of Ho well's State Trials, where at the end of the report is to be found the following note : ' The proceedings against Messrs. Powell and Bembridge occasioned much animated discussion in the House of Commons, in which Mr. Burke warmly supported the accused. The compassion which on these and all other occasions was manifested by Mr. Burke for the sufferings of those pub- lic delinquents, the zeal with which he advocated their cause, and the eagerness with which he endeavoured to extenuate their criminality, have received severe rep- rehension, and in particular when con- trasted with his subsequent conduct in the prosecution of Mr. Hastings.' The real reason for Burke's belief in Bembridge is, I think, to be found in the evidence Burke gave on his behalf at the trial before Lord Mansfield. Bembridge had rendered Burke invaluable assistance in carrying out his reforms at the Pay- master's Office, and Burke was constitu- tionally unable to believe that a rogue EDMUND BURKE. l8/ could be on his side ; but, indeed, Burke was too apt to defend bad causes with a scream of passion, and a politician who screams is never likely to occupy a com- manding place in the House of Commons. A last reason for Burke's exclusion from high office is to be found in his aversion to any measure of Parliamentary Reform. An ardent reformer like the Duke of Rich- mond the then Duke of Richmond who was in favour of annual parliaments, universal suffrage, and payment of mem- bers, was not likely to wish to associate himself too closely with a politician who wept with emotion at the bare thought of depriving Old Sarum of parliamentary representation. These reasons account for Burke's ex- clusion, and jealous as we naturally and properly are of genius being snubbed by mediocrity, my reading at all events does not justify me in blaming any one but the Fates for the circumstance that Burke was never a Secretary of State. And after all, does it matter much what he was ? Burke no doubt occasionally felt his exclusion a little hard ; but he is the victor who re- 1 88 EDMUND BURKE. mains in possession of the field ; and Burke is now, for us and for all coming after us, in such possession. It now only remains for me, drawing upon my stock of assurance, to essay the analysis of the essential elements of Burke's mental character, and I therefore at once proceed to say that it was Burke's pecul- iarity and his glory to apply the imagina- tion of a poet of the first order to the facts and the business of life. Arnold says of Sophocles ' He saw life steadily, and saw it whole.' Substitute for the word 'life' the words 'organised society,' and you get a peep into Burke's mind. There was a catholic- ity about his gaze. He knew how the whole world lived. E r ""'thing contributed to this : his vast desultory re. ding ; his education, neither wholly academical nor entirely professional ; his long years of apprenticeship in the service of knowledge ; his wanderings up and down the country ; his vast conversational powers ; his enor- mous correspondence with all sorts of peo- ple ; his unfailing interest in all pursuits, EDMUND BURKE. 189 trades, manufactures, all helped to keep before him, like motes dancing in a sun- beam, the huge organism of modern soci- ety, which requires for its existence and for its development the maintenance of credit and of order. Burke's imagination led him to look out over the whole land : the legislator devising new laws, the judge expounding and enforcing old ones, the merchant despatching his goods and ex- tending his credit, the banker advancing the money of his customers upon the credit of the merchant, the frugal man slowly accumulating the store which is to support him in old age, the ancient institutions of Church and University with their seemly provisions for sound learning and true reli- gion, the parson in his pulpit, the poet pondering his rhymes, the farmer eyeing his crops, the painter covering his can- vases, the player educating the feelings. Burke saw all this with the fancy of a poet, and dwelt on it with the eye of a lover. But love is the parent of fear, and none knew better than Burke how thin is the lava layer between the costly fabric of so- ciety and the volcanic heats and destroy- 190 EDMUND BURKE. ing flames of anarchy. He trembled for the fair frame of all established things, and to his horror saw men, instead of covering the thin surface with the concrete, digging in it for abstractions, and asking funda- mental questions about the origin of soci- ety, and why one man should be born rich and another poor. Burke was no prating optimist : it was his very knowledge how much could be said against society that quickened his fears for it. There is no shallower criticism than that which accuses Burke in his later years of apostasy from so-called Liberal opinions. Burke was all his life through a passionate maintainer of the established order of things, and a fero- cious hater of abstractions and metaphys- ical politics. The same ideas that explode like bombs through his diatribes against the French Revolution are to be found shining with a mild effulgence in the com- parative calm of his earlier writings. I have often been struck with a resemblance, which I hope is not wholly fanciful, be- tween the attitude of Burke's mind towards government and that of Cardinal Newman towards religion. Both these great men EDMUND BURKE. 1 9! belong, by virtue of their imaginations, to the poetic order, and they both are to be found dwelling with amazing eloquence, detail, and wealth of illustration on the varied elements of society. Both seem as they write to have one hand on the pulse of the world, and to be for ever alive to the throb of its action ; and Burke, as he re- garded humanity swarming like bees into and out of their hives of industry, is ever asking himself, How are these men to be saved from anarchy ? whilst Newman puts to himself the question, How are these men to be saved from Atheism ? Both saw the perils of free inquiry divorced from practical affairs. ' Civil freedom,' says Burke, ' is not, as many have endeavoured to persuade you, a thing that lies hid in the depth of abstruse science. It is a blessing and a benefit, not an abstract speculation ; and all the just reasoning that can be upon it is of so coarse a texture as perfectly to suit the ordinary capacities of those who are to en- joy and of those who are to defend it.' ' Tell men,' says Cardinal Newman, ' to gain notions of a Creator from His works, 1 92 EDMUND BURKE. and if they were to set about it (which nobody does), they would be jaded and wearied by the labyrinth they were tra- cing ; their minds would be gorged and surfeited by the logical operation. To most men argument makes the point in hand more doubtful and considerably less impressive. After all, man is not a reason- ing animal, he is a seeing, feeling, contem- plating, acting animal.' Burke is fond of telling us that he is no lawyer, no antiquarian, but a plain, prac- tical man ; and the Cardinal, in like man- ner, is ever insisting that he is no theolo- gian he leaves everything of that sort to the Schools, whatever they may be, and simply deals with religion on its practical side as a benefit to mankind. If either of these great men has been guilty of intellectual excesses, those of Burke may be attributed to his dread of anarchy, those of Newman to his dread of atheism. Neither of them was prepared to rest content with a scientific frontier, an imaginary line. So much did they dread their enemy, so alive were they to the terrible strength of some of his posi- EDMUND BURKE. 193 tions, that they could not agree to dispense with the protection afforded by the huge mountains of prejudice and the ancient rivers of custom. The sincerity of either man can only be doubted by the bigot and the fool. But Burke, apart from his fears, had a constitutional love for old things, simply because they were old. Anything man- kind had ever worshipped, or venerated, or obeyed, was dear to him. I have already referred to his providing his Brahmins with a greenhouse for the purpose of their rites, which he watched from outside with great interest. One cannot fancy Cardinal Newman peeping through a window to see men worshipping false though ancient gods. Warren Hastings's high-handed dealings with the temples and time-honoured if scandalous customs of the Hindoos filled Burke with horror. So, too, he respected Quakers, Presbyterians, Independents, Bap- tists, and all those whom he called Con- stitutional Dissenters. He has a fine pas- sage somewhere about Rust, for with all his passion for good government he dearly loved a little rust. In this phase of char- 194 EDMUND BURKE. acter he reminds one not a little of another great writer whose death literature has still reason to deplore George Eliot ; who, in her love for old hedge-rows and barns and crumbling moss-grown walls, was a writer after Burke' s own heart, whose novels he would have sat up all night to devour ; for did he not deny with warmth Gibbon's statement that he had read all five volumes of Evelina in a day ? 'The thing is impossible,' cried Burke; 'they took me three days, doing nothing else.' Now, Evelina is a good novel, but Silas Marner is a better. Wordsworth has been called the High Priest of Nature. Burke may be called the High Priest of Order a lover of set- tled ways, of justice, peace, and security. His writings are a storehouse of wisdom, not the cheap shrewdness of the mere man of the world, but the noble, animating wis- dom of one who has the poet's heart as well as the statesman's brain. Nobody is fit to govern this country who has not drunk deep at the springs of Burke. ' Have you read your Burke ? ' is at least as sen- sible a question to put to a parliamentary EDMUND BURKE. 195 candidate, as to ask him whether he is a total abstainer or a desperate drunkard. Something there may be about Burke to .regret, and more to dispute ; but that he loved justice and hated iniquity is certain, as also it is that for the most part he dwelt in the paths of purity, humanity, and good sense. May we be found adhering to them! THE MUSE OF HISTORY. Two distinguished men of letters, each an admirable representative of his Univer- sity, Mr. John Morley and Professor See- ley have lately published opinions on the subject of history, which, though very likely to prove right, deserve to be care- fully considered before assent is bestowed upon them. Mr. Morley, when President of the Mid- land Institute, and speaking in the Town Hall of Birmingham, said : ' I do not in the least want to know what happened in the past, except as it enables me to see my way more clearly through what is happen- ing to-day,' and this same indifference is professed, though certainly nowhere dis- played, in other parts of Mr. Morley's writings.* Professor Seeley never makes his point * Critical Miscellanies, vol. in., p. 9. THE MUSE OF HISTORY. 197 quite so sharp as this, and probably would hesitate to do so, but in the Expansion of England he expounds a theory of history largely based upon an indifference like that which Mr. Morley professed at Birming- ham. His book opens thus : ' It is a fa- vourite maxim of mine that history, while it should be scientific in its method, should pursue a practical object that is, it should not merely gratify the reader's curiosity about the past, but modify his view of the present and his forecast of the future. Now, if this maxim be sound, the history of England ought to end with something that might be called a moral.' This, it must be admitted, is a large order. The task of the historian, as here explained, is not merely to tell us the story of the past, and thus gratify our curiosity, but, pursuing a practical object, to seek to modify our views of the present and help us in our forecasts of the future ; and this the historian is to do, not unconsciously and incidentally, but deliberately and of set purpose. One can well understand how history, so written, will usually begin with a maxim, and invariably end with a moral. 198 THE MUSE OF HISTORY. What we are afterwards told in the same book follows in logical sequence upon our first quotation namely, that ' history fades into mere literature, (the italics are ours) when it loses sight of its relation to practical politics.' In this grim sentence we read the dethronement of Clio. The poor thing must forswear her father's house, her tuneful sisters, the invocation of the poet, the worship of the dramatist, and keep her terms at the University, where, if she is really studious and steady, and avoids literary companions (which ought not to be difficult), she may hope some day to be received into the Royal Society as a second-rate science. The people who do not usually go to the Royal Society will miss their old playmate from her accus- tpmed slopes, but, even were they to suc- ceed in tracing her to her new home, ac- cess would be denied them ; for Professor Seeley, that stern custodian, has his answer ready for all such seekers. ' If you want recreation, you must find it in Poetry, par- ticularly Lyrical Poetry. Try Shelley. We can no longer allow you to disport your- selves in the Fields of History as if they were a mere playground. Clio is enclosed.' THE MUSE OF HISTORY. 199 At present, however, this is not quite the case ; for the old literary traditions are still alive, and prove somewhat irritating to Professor Seeley, who, though one of the most even-tempered of writers, is to be found on p. 173 almost angry with Thackeray, a charming person, who, as we all know, had,, after his lazy literary fashion, made an especial study of Queen Anne's time, and who cherished the pleasant fancy that a man might lie in the heather with a pipe in his mouth, and yet, if he had only an odd volume of the Spectator or the Tat- ler in his hand, be learning history all the time. ' As we read in these delightful pages,' says the author of Esmond, ' the past age returns ; the England of our an- cestors is revivified ; the Maypole rises in the Strand ; the beaux are gathering in the coffee houses ; ' and so on, in the style we all know and love so well, and none better, we may rest assured, than Professor See- ley himself, if only he were not tortured by the thought that people were taking this to be a specimen of the science of which he is a Regius Professor. His com- ment on this passage of Thackeray's is al- 20O THE MUSE OF HISTORY. most a groan. ' What is this but the old literary groove, leading to no trustworthy knowledge ? ' and certainly no one of us, from letting his fancy gaze on the May- pole in the Strand, could ever have fore- told the Griffin. On the same page he cries : ' Break the drowsy spell of narra- tive. Ask yourself questions, set yourself problems ; your mind will at once take up a new attitude. Now modern English his- tory breaks up into two grand problems the problem of the Colonies and the problem of India.' The Cambridge School of History with a vengeance. In a paper read at the South Kensing- ton Museum in 1884, Professor Seeley observes : ' The essential point is this, that we should recognise that to study history is to study not merely a narrative, but at the same time certain theoretical studies.' He then proceeds to name them : Politi- cal philosophy, the comparative study of legal institutions, political economy, and international law. These passages are, I think, adequate to give a fair view of Professor Seeley 's posi- tion. History is a science, to be written THE MUSE OF HISTORY. 2OI scientifically and to be studied scientifi- cally in conjunction with other studies. It should pursue a practical object and be read with direct reference to practical poli- tics using the latter word, no doubt, in an enlightened sense. History is not a narrative of all sorts of facts biographi- cal, moral, political, but of such facts as a scientific diagnosis has ascertained to be historically interesting. In fine, history, if her study is to be profitable and not a mere pastime, less exhausting than skittles and cheaper than horse exercise, must be dominated by some theory capable of verifi- cation by reference to certain ascertained facts belonging to a particular class. Is this the right way of looking upon history ? The dictionaries tell us that his- tory and story are the same word, and are derived from a Greek source, signifying information obtained by inquiry. The natural definition of history, therefore, surely is the story of man upon earth, and the historian is he who tells us any chap- ter or fragment of that story. All things that on earth do dwell have, no doubt, their history as well as man ; but when a mem- 202 THE MUSE OF HISTORY. her, however humble, of the human race speaks of history without any explanatory context, he may be presumed to be allud- ing to his own family records, to the story of humanity during its passage across the earth's surface. ' A talent for history ' I am quoting from an author whose style, let those mock at it who may, will reveal him ' may be said to be born with us as our chief inher- itance. History has been written with quipo-threads, with feather pictures, with wampum belts, still oftener with earth- mounds and monumental stone -heaps, whether as pyramid or cairn ; for the Celt and the Copt, the red man as well as the white, lives between two eternities, and warring against oblivion, he would fain unite himself in clear, conscious relation, as in dim unconscious relation he is al- ready united, with the whole future and the whole past.' To keep the past alive for us is the pious function of the historian. Our curi- osity is endless, his the task of gratifying it. We want to know what happened long ago. Performance of this task is only THE MUSE OF HISTORY. 2O3 proximately possible ; but none the less it must be attempted, for the demand for it is born afresh with every infant's cry. History is a pageant and not a philosophy. Poets, no less than professors, occasion- ally say good things even in prose, and the following oracular utterance of Shelley is not pure nonsense : ' History is the cyc- lic poem written by Time upon the mem- ories of men. The past, like an inspired rhapsodist, fills the theatre of everlasting generations with her harmony.'' If this be thought a little too fanciful, let me adorn this page with a passage from one of the great masters of English prose Walter Savage Landor. Would that the pious labour of transcription could confer the tiniest measure of the gift ! In that bundle of imaginary letters Landor called Pericles and Aspasia, we find Aspasia writing to her friend Cleone as follows : ' To-day there came to visit us a writer who is not yet an author : his name is Thucydides. We understand that he has been these several years engaged in prep- aration for a history. Pericles invited him to meet Herodotus, when that wonderful 2O4 THE MUSE OF HISTORY. man had returned to our country, and was about to sail from Athens. Until then it was believed by the intimate friends of Thucydides that he would devote his life to poetry, and, such is his vigour both of thought and expression, that he would have been the rival of Pindar. Even now he is fonder of talking on poetry than any other subject, and blushed when history was mentioned. By degrees, however, he warmed, and listened with deep interest to the discourse of Pericles on the duties of a historian. ' " May our first Athenian historian not be the greatest," said he, " as the first of our dramatists has been, in the opinion of many. We are growing too loquacious, both on the stage and off. We make dis- quisitions which render us only more and more dim-sighted, and excursions that only consume our stores. If some among us who have acquired celebrity by their com- positions, calm, candid, contemplative men, were to undertake the history of Athens from the invasion of Xerxes, I should ex- pect a fair and full criticism on the ora- tions of Antiphon, and experience no dis- THE MUSE OF HISTORY. 205 appointment at their forgetting the battle of Salamis. History, when she has lost her Muse, will lose her dignity, her occu- pation, her character, her name. She will wander about the Agora ; she will start, she will stop, she will look wild, she will look stupid, she will take languidly to her bosom doubts, queries, essays, disserta- tions, some of which ought to go before her, some to follow, and all to stand apart. The field of history should not merely be well tilled, but well peopled. None is de- lightful to me or interesting in which I find not as many illustrious names as have a right to enter it. We might as well in a drama place the actors behind the scenes, and listen to the dialogue there, as in a history push valiant men back and pro- trude ourselves with husky disputations. Show me rather how great projects were executed, great advantages gained, and great calamities averted. Show me the generals and the statesmen who stood fore- most, that I may bend to them in rever- ence ; tell me their names, that I may re- peat them to my children. Teach me whence laws were introduced, upon what 2O6 THE MUSE OF HISTORY. foundation laid, by what custody guarded, in what inner keep preserved. Let the books of the treasury lie closed as reli- giously as the Sibyl's ; leave weights and measures in the market-place, Commerce in the harbour, the Arts in the light they love, Philosophy in the shade ; place His- tory on her rightful throne, and at the sides of her Eloquence and War." ' This is, doubtless, a somewhat full-dress view of history. Landor was not one of our modern dressing-gown-and-slippers kind of authors. He always took pains to be splen- did, and preferred stately magnificence to chatty familiarity. But, after allowing for this, is not the passage I have quoted in- fused with a great deal of the true spirit which should animate the historian, and does it not seem to take us by the hand, and lead us very far away from Professor Seeley's maxims and morals, his theoretical studies, his political philosophy, his political economy, and his desire to break the drowsy spell of narrative, and to set us all problems ? I ask this question in no spirit of enmity towards these theoretical studies, nor do I doubt for one moment that the student of THE MUSE OF HISTORY. 2O/ history proper, who has a turn in their directions, will find his pursuit made only the more fascinating the more he studies them just as a little botany is said to add to the charm of a country walk ; but and surely the assertion is not neces- sarily paradoxical these studies ought not to be allowed to disfigure the free- flowing outline of the historical Muse, or to thicken her clear utterance, which in her higher moods chants an epic, and in her ordinary moods recites a narrative which need not be drowsy. As for maxims, we all of us have our ' little hoard of maxims ' wherewith to preach down our hearts and justify any- thing shabby we may have done ; but the less we import their cheap wisdom into history the better. The author of the Ex- pansion of England will probably agree with Burke in thinking that ' a great em- pire and little minds go ill together,' and so, surely, a fortiori, must a mighty uni- verse and any possible maxim. There have been plenty of brave historical maxims be- fore Professor Seeley's, though only Lord Bolingbroke's has had the good luck to be 208 THE MUSE OF HISTORY. come itself historical.* And as for theories, Professor Flint, a very learned writer, has been at the pains to enumerate fourteen French and thirteen German philosophies of history current (though some, I expect, never ran either fast or far) since the re- vival of learning. We are (are we not ?) in these days in no little danger of being philosophy-ridden, and of losing our love for facts simply as facts. So long as Carlyle lived, the con- crete had a representative, the strength of whose epithets sufficed, if not to keep the philosophers in awe, at least to supply their opponents with stones. But now it is different. Carlyle is no more a model historian than is Shakspeare a model dram- atist. The merest tyro can count the faults of either on his clumsy fingers. That born critic, the late Sir George Lewis, had barely completed his tenth year before he was able, in a letter to his mother, to point out to her the essentially faulty structure * ' I will answer you by quoting what I have read some- where or other, in Dionysius Halicarnassensis I think, that history is philosophy teaching by examples.' See Lord Bolingbroke's Second Letter on the Study and Use of History. THE MUSE OF HISTORY. 2OQ of Hamlet, and many a duller wit, a dec- ade or two later in his existence, has come to the conclusion that Frederick the Great is far too long. But whatever were Carlyle's faults, his historical method was superbly naturalistic. Have we a historian left us so honestly possessed as he was with the genuine historical instinct, the true enthusiasm to know what happened ; or one half so fond of a story for its own sake, or so in love with things, not for what thsy were, but simply because they were ? ' What wonderful things are events,' wrote Lord Beaconsfield in Coningsby ; 'the least are of greater importance than the most sublime and comprehensive specula- tions.' To say this is to go perhaps too far ; certainly it is to go farther than Car- lyle, who none the less was in sympathy with the remark; for he also worshipped events, believing as he did that but for the breath of God's mouth they never would have been events at all. We thus find him always treating even comparatively insig- nificant facts with a measure of reverence, and handling them lovingly, as does a book-hunter the shabbiest pamphlet in his 2IO THE MUSE OF HISTORY. collection. We have only to think of Car- lyle's essay on the Diamond Necklace to fill our minds with his qualifications for the proud office of the historian. Were that inimitable piece of workmanship to be sub- mitted to the criticisms of the new scien- tific school, we doubt whether it would be so much as classed, whilst the celebrated description of the night before the battle of Dunbar in Cromwell, or any hundred scenes from the French Revolution, would, we expect, be catalogued as good examples of that degrading process whereby history fades into mere literature. This is not a question, be it observed, of style. What is called a picturesque style is generally a great trial. Who was it who called Professor Masson's style Carlyle on wooden legs ? What can be drearier than when a plain matter-of-fact writer attempts to be animated, and tries to make his characters live by the easy but futile expedient of writing about them in the present tense ? What is wanted is a passion for facts ; the style may be left to take care of itself. Let me name a his- torian who detested fine writing, and who THE MUSE OF HISTORY. 211 never said to himself, ' Go to, I will make a description,' and who yet was dominated by a love for facts, whose one desire al- ways was to know what happened, to dis- pel illusion, and establish the true account Dr. S. R. Maitland, of the Lambeth Li- brary, whose volumes entitled The Dark Ages and The Reformation are to history what Milton's Lycidas is said to be to poetry : if they do not interest you, your tastes are not historical. The difference, we repeat, is not of style, but of aim. Is history a pageant or a phi- losophy ? That eminent historian, Lord Macaulay, whose passion for letters and for ' mere literature ' ennobled his whole life, has expressed himself in some places, I need scarcely add in a most forcible man- ner, in the same sense as Mr. Morley. In his well-known essay on history, contrib- uted to the Edinburgh Review in 1828, we find him writing as follows: 'Facts are the mere dross of history. It is from the abstract truth which interpenetrates them, and lies latent amongst them like gold in the ore, that the mass derives its whole value.' And again: 'No past event has 212 THE MUSE OF HISTORY. any intrinsic importance. The knowledge of it is valuable only as it leads us to form just calculations with respect to the future.' These are strong passages ; but Lord Ma- caulay was a royal eclectic, and was quite out of sympathy with the majority of that brotherhood who are content to tone down their contradictories to the dull level of in- eptitudes. Macaulay never toned down his contradictories, but, heightening everything all round, went on his sublime way, rejoi- cing like a strong man to run a race, and well knowing that he could give anybody five yards in fifty and win easily. It is, therefore, no surprise to find him, in the very essay in which he speaks so contempt- uously of facts, laying on with his vigorous brush a celebrated purple patch I would gladly transfer to my own dull page were it not too long and too well known. A line or two taken at random will give its purport : ' A truly great historian would reclaim those materials the novelist has appropri- ated. We should not then have to look for the wars and votes of the Puritans in Clarendon and for their phraseology in Old THE MUSE OF HISTORY. Mortality, for one half of King James in Hume and for the other half in the For- tunes of Nigel. . . . Society would be shown from the highest to the lowest, from the royal cloth of state to the den of the out- law, from the throne of the legate to the chimney-corner where the begging friar regaled himself. Palmers, minstrels, cru- saders, the stately monastery with the good cheer in its refectory, and the tourna- ment with the heralds and ladies, the trumpets and the cloth of gold, would give truth and life to the representation.' It is difficult to see what abstract truth inter- penetrates the cheer of the refectory, or what just calculations with respect to the future even an upholsterer could draw from a cloth, either of state or of gold ; whilst most people will admit that, when the brilliant essayist a few years later set him- self to compose his own magnificent his- tory, so far as he interpenetrated it with the abstract truths of Whiggism, and cal- culated that the future would be satisfied with the first Reform Bill, he did ill and guessed wrong. To reconcile Macaulay's utterances on 214 THE MUSE OF HISTORY. this subject is beyond my powers, but of two things I am satisfied : the first is that, were he to come to life again, a good many of us would be more careful than we are how we write about him ; and the second is that, on the happening of the same event, he would be found protesting against the threatened domination of all things by scientific theory. A Western American, who was once compelled to spend some days in Boston, was accustomed in after- life to describe that seat of polite learning to his horrified companions in California as a city in whose streets Respectability stalked unchecked. This is just what philosophical theories are doing amongst us, and a decent person can hardly venture abroad without one, though it does not much matter which one. Everybody is expected to have ' a system of philosophy with principles coherent, interdependent, subordinate, and derivative,' and to be able to account for everything, even for things it used not to be thought sensible to be- lieve in, like ghosts and haunted houses. Keats remarks in one of his letters with great admiration upon what he christens THE MUSE OF HISTORY. 215 Shakspeare's 'negative capability,' mean- ing thereby Shakspeare's habit of com- plaisant observation from outside of theory, and his keen enjoyment of the unexplained facts of life. He did not pour himself out in every strife. We have but little of this negative capability. The ruddy qualities of delightfulness, of pleasantness, are all ' sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought.' The varied elements of life the ' Murmur of living, Stir of existence, Soul of the world ! ' seem to be fading from literature. Pure literary enthusiasm sheds but few rays. To be lively is to be flippant, and epigram is dubbed paradox. That many people appear to like a drab- coloured world hung round with dusky shreds of philosophy is sufficiently ob- vious. These persons find any relaxation they may require from a too severe course of theories, religious, political, social, or now, alas ! historical, in the novels of Mr. W. D. Howells, an American gentle- man who has not been allowed to forget that he once asserted of fiction what Pro- 2l6 THE MUSE OF HISTORY. fessor Seeley would be glad to be able to assert of history, that the drowsy spell of narrative has been broken. We are to look for no more Sir Walters, no more Thackerays, no more Dickens. The stories have all been told. Plots are exploded. Incident is over. In moods of dejection these dark sayings seemed only too true. Shakspeare's saddest of sad lines rose to one's lips ' My grief lies onward and my joy behind.' Behind us are Ivanhce and Guy Mannering, Pendennis and The Virginians, Pecksniff and Micawber. In front of us stretch a never-ending series, a dreary vista of Fore- gone Conclusions, Counterfeit Presentments, and Undiscovered Countries. But the dark- est watch of the night is the one before the dawn, and relief is often nearest us when we least expect it. All this gloomy nonsense was suddenly dispelled, and the fact that really and truly, and behind this philosophical arras, we were all inwardly ravening for stories was most satisfactorily established by the incontinent manner in which we flung ourselves into the arms of THE MUSE OF HISTORY. 21 7 Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson, to whom we could almost have raised a statue in the market-place for having written Treasure Island. But to return to history. The interests of our poor human life, which seems to be- come duller every day, require that the fields of history should be kept for ever unenclosed, and be a free breathing-place for a pallid population well-nigh stifled with the fumes of philosophy. Were we, imaginatively, to propel our- selves forward to the middle of the next century, and to fancy a well-equipped his- torian armed with the digested learning of Gibbon, endowed with the eye of Carlyle, and say one-fifteenth of his humour (even then a dangerous allotment in a dull world), the moral gravity of Dr. Arnold, the crit- ical sympathy of Ste-Beuve, and the style of Dr. Newman, approaching the period through which we have lived, should we desire this talented mortal to encumber himself with a theory into which to thrust all our doings as we toss clothes into a portmanteau ; to see himself to extract the essence of some new political philosophy, 2l8 THE MUSE OF HISTORY. capable of being applied to the practical politics of his own day, or to busy himself with problems or economics ? To us per- sonally, of course, it is a matter of indiffer- ence how the historians of the twentieth century conduct themselves, but ought not our altruism to bear the strain of a hope that at least one of the band may avoid all these things, and, leaving political philos- ophy to the political philosopher and polit- ical economy to the political economist, re- member that the first, if not the last, duty of the historian is to narrate, to supply the text not the comment, the subject not the sermon, and proceed to tell our grandchil- dren and remoter issue the story of our lives ? The clash of arms will resound through his pages as musically as ever it does through those of the elder historians as he tells of the encounter between the Northern and Southern States of America, in which Right and Might, those great twin-brethren, fought side by side ; but Romance, that ancient parasite, clung af- fectionately with her tendril-hands to the mouldering walls of an ancient wrong, thus enabling the historian, whilst awarding the THE MUSE OF HISTORY. 2IQ victor's palm to General Grant, .to write kindly of the lost cause, dear to the heart of a nobler and more chivalrous man, ^ Gen- eral Lee, of the Virginian army. And again, is it not almost possible to envy the historian to whom will belong the task of writing with full information, and all the advantage of the true historic distance, the history of that series of struggles and hero- isms, of plots and counter-plots, of crimes and counter-crimes, resulting in the free- dom of Italy, and of telling to a world, eager to listen, the life - story of Joseph Mazzini ? ' Of God nor man was ever this thing said, That he could give Life back to her who gave him, whence his dead Mother might live. But this man found his mother dead and slain, With fast sealed eyes, And bade the dead rise up and live again, And she did rise.' Nor will our imaginary historian be un- mindful of Cavour, or fail to thrill his read- ers by telling them how, when the great Italian statesman, with many sins upon his conscience, lay in the very grasp of death, he interrupted the priests, busy at their 22'0 THE MUSE OF HISTORY. work of intercession, almost roughly, with the exclamation, 'Pray not for me. Pray for Italy ! ' whilst if he be one who has a turn for that ironical pastime, the dissection of a king, the curious character, and mud- dle of motives, calling itself Carlo Alberto will afford him material for at least two paragraphs of subtle interest. Lastly, if our historian is ambitious of a larger canvas and of deeper colours, what is there to pre- vent him, bracing himself to the task, ' As when some mighty painter dips His pencil in the hues of earthquake and eclipse,' from writing the epitaph of the Napoleonic legend ? - But all this time I hear Professor Seeley whispering in my ear, ' What is this but the old literary groove leading to no trustworthy knowledge ? ' If by trustworthy knowledge is meant demonstrable conclusions, capable of being expressed in terms at once exact and final, trustworthy knowledge is not to be gained from the witness of history, whose testimony none the less must be re- ceived, weighed, and taken into account. Truly observes Carlyle : ' If history is philosophy teaching by examples, the writer THE MUSE OF HISTORY. 221 fitted to compose history is hitherto an un- known man. Better were it that mere earthly historians should lower such preten- sions, and, aiming only at some picture of the thing acted, which picture itself will be but a poor approximation, leave the inscru- table purport of them an acknowledged secret.' ' Some picture of the thing acted.' Here we behold the task of the historian ; nor is it an idle, fruitless task. Science is not the only, or the chief source of knowl- edge. The Iliad, Shakspeare's plays, have taught the world more than the Politics of Aristotle or the Novum Organum of Bacon. Facts are not the dross of history, but the true metal, and the historian is a worker in that metal. He has nothing to do with abstract truth, or with practical 'politics, or with forecasts of the future. A worker in metal* he is, and has certainly plenty of what .Lord Bacon used to call 'stuff ' to work upon ; but if he is to be a great historian, and not a mere chronicler, he must be an artist as well as an artisan, and have something of the spirit which an- imated such a man as Francesco Francia 222 THE MUSE OF HISTORY. of Bologna, now only famous as a painter, but in his own day equally celebrated as a worker in gold, and whose practice it was to sign his pictures with the word Gold- smith after his name, whilst he engraved Painter on his golden crucifixes. The true historian, therefore, seeking to compose a true picture of the thing acted, must collect facts, select facts, and com- bine facts. Methods will differ, styles will differ. Nobody ever does anything exactly like anybody else ; but the end in view is generally the same, and the historian's end is truthful narration. Maxims he will have, if he is wise, never a one ; and as for a moral, if he tell his story well, it will need none ; if he tell it ill, it will deserve none. The stream of narrative flowing swiftly, as it does, over the jagged rocks of human destiny must often be turbulent and tossed ; it is, therefore, all the more the duty of every good citizen to keep it as undefiled as possible, and to do what in him lies to prevent peripatetic philosophers on the banks from throwing their theories into it, either dead ones to decay, or living ones to drown. Let the philosophers ventilate THE MUSE OF HISTORY. 22$ their theories, construct their blow-holes, extract their essences, discuss their max- ims, and point their morals as much as they will ; but let them do so apart. His- tory must not lose her Muse, or ' take to her bosom doubts, queries, essays, disser- tations, some of which ought to go before her, some to follow, and all to stand apart.' Let us at all events secure our narrative first sermons and philosophy the day after. CHARLES LAMB.* MR. WALTER BAGEHOT preferred Hazlitt to Lamb, reckoning the former much the greater writer. The preferences of such a man as Bagehot are not to be lightly dis- regarded, least of all when their sincerity is vouched for, as in the present case, by half a hundred quotations from the favoured author. Certainly no writer repays a liter- ary man's devotion better than Hazlitt, of whose twenty seldom read volumes hardly a page but glitters with quotable matter ; the true ore, to be had for the cost of cart- age. You may live like a gentleman for a twelvemonth on Hazlitt's ideas. Opinions, no doubt, differ as to how many quotations a writer is entitled to, but, for my part, I like to see an author leap-frog into his subject over the back of a brother. * The Works of Charles Lamb. Edited, with notes and introduction, by the Rev. Alfred Ainger. Three volumes. London: 1883-5. CHARLES LAMB. 22$ I do not remember whether Bagehot has anywhere given his reasons for his pref- erence the open avowal whereof drove Crabb Robinson well-nigh distracted ; and it is always rash to find reasons for a faith you do not share ; but probably they par- took of the nature of a complaint that Elia's treatment of men and things (mean- ing by things, books) is often fantastical, unreal, even a shade insincere ; whilst Haz- litt always at least aims at the centre, whether he hits it or not. Lamb dances round a subject ; Hazlitt grapples with it. So far as Hazlitt is concerned, doubtless this is so ; his literary method seems to realise the agreeable aspiration of Mr. Browning's Italian in England: ' I would grasp Metternich until I felt his wet red throat distil In blood thro' these two hands.' Hazlitt is always grasping some Metternich. He said himself that Lamb's talk was like snap-dragon, and his own 'not very much unlike a game of nine-pins.' Lamb, writ- ing to him on one occasion about his son, wishes the little fellow a ' smoother head of hair and somewhat of a better temper 226 CHARLES LAMB. than his father ; ' and the pleasant words seem to call back from the past the stormy figure of the man who loved art, literature, and the drama with a consuming passion, who has described books and plays, au- thors and actors, with a fiery enthusiasm and reality quite unsurpassable, and who yet, neither living nor dead, has received his due meed of praise. Men still continue to hold aloof from Hazlitt, his shaggy head and fierce scowling temper still seem to terrorise, and his very books, telling us though they do about all things most de- lightful poems, pictures, and the cheerful playhouse frown upon us from their up- per shelf. From this it appears that would a genius ensure for himself immortality, he must brush his hair and keep his tem- per ; but alas ! how seldom can he be per- suaded to do either. Charles Lamb did both ; and the years as they roll do but swell the rich revenues of his praise. Lamb's popularity shows no sign of waning. Even that most extraordinary compound, the rising generation of read- ers, whose taste in literature is as erratic as it is pronounced ; who have never heard CHARLES LAMB. 22/ of James Thomson who sang The Seasons (including the pleasant episode of Musidora bathing), but understand by any reference to that name only the striking author of The City of Dreadful Night ; even these wayward folk the dogs of whose criti- cism, not yet full grown, will, when let loose, as some day they must be, cry 'havoc' amongst established reputations read their Lamb, letters as well as es- says, with laughter and with love. If it be really seriously urged against Lamb as an author that he is fantastical and artistically artificial, it must be owned he is so. His humour, exquisite as it is, is modish. It may not be for all markets. How it affected the Scottish Thersites we know only too well, that dour spirit re- quired more potent draughts to make him forget his misery and laugh. It took Swift or Smollett to move his mirth, which was always, three parts of it, derision. Lamb's elaborateness, what he himself calls his af- fected array of antique modes and phrases, is sometimes overlooked in these strange days, when it is thought better to read about an author than to read him. To read aloud 228 CHARLES LAMB. the Praise of Chimney Sweepers without stumbling, or halting, not to say mispro-. nouncing, and to set in motion every one of its carefully-swung sentences, is a very pretty feat in elocution, for there is not what can be called a natural sentence in it from beginning to end. Many people have not patience for this sort of thing ; they like to laugh and move on. Other people again like an essay to be about something really important, and to con- duct them to conclusions they deem worth carrying away. Lamb's views about in- discriminate almsgiving, so far as these can be extracted from his paper On the Decay of Beggars in the Metropolis, are unsound, whilst there are at least three ladies still living (in Brighton) quite re- spectably on their means, who consider the essay entitled A Bachelor s Complaint of the Behaviour of Married People im- proper. But, as a rule, Lamb's essays are neither unsound nor improper ; none the less they are, in the judgment of some, things of naught not only lacking, as Southey complained they did, ' sound re- ligious feeling,' but everything else really worthy of attention. CHARLES LAMB. To discuss such congenital differences of taste is idle ; but it is not idle to observe that when Lamb is read, as he surely de- serves to be, as a whole letters and po- ems no less than essays these notes of fantasy and artificiality no longer domi- nate. The man Charles Lamb was far more real, far more serious despite his jesting, more self-contained and self-re- strained than Hazlitt, who wasted his life in the pursuit of the veriest will-o'-the- wisps that ever danced over the most mi- asmatic of swamps, who was never his own man, and who died, like Brian de Bois Gil- bert, ' the victim of contending passions.' It should never be forgotten that Lamb's vocation was his life. Literature was but his by-play, his avocation in the true sense of that much-abused word. He was not a fisherman but an angler in the lake of letters ; an author by chance and on the sly. He had a right to disport himself on paper, to play the frolic with his own fan- cies, to give the decalogue the slip, whose life was made up of the sternest stuff, of self-sacrifice, devotion, honesty, and good sense. 230 CHARLES LAMB. Lamb's letters from first to last are full of the philosophy of life ; he was as sen- sible a man as Dr. Johnson. One grows sick of the expressions, ' poor Charles Lamb,' 'gentle Charles Lamb,' as if he were one of those grown-up children of the Leigh Hunt type, who are perpetually begging and borrowing through the round of every man's acquaintance. Charles Lamb earned his own living, paid his own way, was the helper, not the helped ; a man who was beholden to no one, who always came with gifts in his hand, a shrewd man capable of advice, strong in council. Poor Lamb in- deed ! Poor Coleridge, robbed of his will ; poor Wordsworth, devoured by his own ego ; poor Southey, writing his tomes and deem- ing himself a classic ; poor Carlyle, with his nine volumes of memoirs, where he 1 Lies like a hedgehog rolled up the wrong way, Tormenting himself with his prickles ' call these men poor, if you feel it decent to do so, but not Lamb, who was rich in all that makes life valuable or memory sweet. But he used to get drunk. This explains all. Be untruthful, unfaithful, unkind ; darken the lives of all who have to live under your CHARLES LAMB. shadow, rob youth of joy, take peace from age, live unsought for, die unmourned, and remaining sober you will escape the curse of men's pity, and be spoken of as a worthy person. But if ever, amidst what Burns called ' social noise,' you so far forget yourself as to get drunk, think not to plead 2 spotless life spent with those for whom you have laboured and saved ; talk not of the love of friends or of help given to the needy ; least of all make reference to a noble self-sacrifice passing the love of wo- men, for all will avail you nothing. You. get drunk, and the heartless and the selfish and the lewd crave the privilege of pitying you, and receiving your name with an odious smile. It is really too bad. The completion of Mr. Ainger's edition of Lamb's works deserves a word of com- memoration. In our judgment it is all an edition of Lamb's works should be. Upon the vexed question, nowadays so much agi- tated, whether an editor is to be allowed any discretion in the exclusion from his edition of the rinsings of his author's desk, we side with Mr. Ainger, and think more nobly of the editor than to deny him such 232 CHARLES LAMB. a discretion. An editor is not a sweep, and, by the love he bears the author whose fame he seeks to spread abroad, it is his duty to exclude what he believes does not bear the due impress of the author's mind. No doubt as a rule editors have no discre- tion to be trusted ; but happily Mr. Ainger has plenty, and most sincerely do we thank him for withholding from us A Vision of Horns and The Pawnbroker s Daughter. Boldly to assert, as some are found to do, that the editor of a master of style has no choice but to reprint the scraps or notelets that a misdirected energy may succeed in disinterring from the grave the writer had dug for them, is to fail to grasp the dis- tinction between a collector of curios and a lover of books. But this policy of exclu- sion is no doubt a perilous one. Like the Irish members, or Mark Antony's wife the 'shrill-toned Fulvia' the missing es- says are 'good, being gone.' Surely, so we are inclined to grumble, the taste was severe that led Mr. Ainger to dismiss Juke Judkins. We are not, indeed, prepared to say that Judkins has been wrongfully dis- missed, or that he has any right of action CHARLES LA AID. 233 against Mr. Ainger, but we could have put up better with his presence than his ab- sence. Mr. Ainger's introduction to the Essays of Elia is admirable ; here is a bit of it: ' Another feature of Lamb's style is its allusiveness. He is rich in quotations, and in my notes I have succeeded in tracing most of them to their source, a matter of some difficulty in Lamb's case, for his in- accuracy is all but perverse. But besides those avowedly introduced as such, his style is full of quotations held, if the ex- pression may be allowed, in solution. One feels, rather than recognises, that a phrase or idiom or turn of expression is an echo of something that one has heard or read before. Yet such is the use made of the material, that a charm is added by the very fact that we are thus continually renewing our experience of an older day. This style becomes aromatic, like the perfume of faded rose-leaves in a china jar. With such allusiveness as this I need not say that I have not meddled in my notes ; its whole charm lies in recognising it for our- 234 ' CHARLES LAMB. selves. The "prosperity" of an allusion, as of a jest, "lies in the ear of him that hears it," and it were doing a poor service to Lamb or his readers to draw out and ar- range in order the threads he has wrought into the very fabric of his English.' Then Mr. Ainger's notes are not med- dlesome notes, but truly explanatory ones, genuine aids to enjoyment. Lamb needs notes, and yet the task of adding them to a structure so fine and of such nicely studied proportions is a difficult one ; it is like building a tool-house against La Sainte Chapelle. Deftly has Mr. Ainger inserted his notes, and capital reading do they make ; they tell us all we ought to want to know. He is no true lover of Elia who does not care to know who the " Distant Correspondent " was. And Barbara S . ' It was not much that Barbara had to claim.' No, dear child ! it was not ' a bare half-guinea ; ' but you are surely also entitled to be known to us by your real name. When Lamb tells us Barbara's maiden name was Street, and that she was three times married first to a Mr. Dan- cer, then to a Mr. Barry, and finally to a CHARLES LAMB. 2$$ Mr. Crawford, whose widow she was when he first knew her he is telling us things that were not, for the true Barbara died a spinster, and was born a Kelly. Mr. Ainger, as was to be expected, has a full, instructive note anent the Old Benchers of the Inner Temple. Some hasty editors, with a sorrowfully large ex- perience of Lamb's unblushing fictions and Defoe-like falsehoods, and who, perhaps, have wasted good hours trying to find out all about Miss Barbara's third husband, have sometimes assumed that at all events most of the names mentioned by Lamb in his immortal essay on the Benchers are fictitious. Mr. Ainger, however, assures us that the fact is otherwise. Jekyl, Cov- entry, Pierson, Parton, Read, Wharry, Jackson, and Mingay, no less than * un- ruffled Samuel Salt,' were all real persons, and were called to the Bench of the Hon- ourable Society by those very names. One mistake, indeed, Lamb makes he writes of Mr. Twopenny as if he had been a Bencher. Now there never yet was a Bencher of the name of Twopenny ; though the mistake is easily accounted for. There 236 CHARLES LAMB. was a Mr. Twopenny, a very thin man too, just as Lamb described him, who lived in the Temple ; but he was not a Bencher, he was not even a barrister ; he was a much better thing, namely, stockbroker to the Bank of England. The holding of this office, which Mr. Ainger rightly calls im- portant, doubtless accounts for Twopenny's constant good-humour and felicitous jest- ing about his own person. A man who has a snug berth other people want feels free to crack such jokes. Of the contents of these three volumes we can say deliberately what Dr. Johnson said, surely in his haste, of Baxter's three hundred works, ' Read them all, they are all good.' Do not be content with the essays alone. It is shabby treatment of an author who has given you pleasure to leave him half unread ; it is nearly as bad as keeping a friend waiting. Anyhow, read Mrs. Leicester's School ; it is nearly all Mary Lamb's, but the more you like it on that account the better pleased her brother would have been. We are especially glad to notice that Mr. Ainger holds us out hopes of an CHARLES LAMB. edition, uniform with the works, of the letters of Charles Lamb. Until he has given us these, also with notes, his pious labours are incomplete. Lamb's letters are not only the best text of his life, but the best comment upon it. They reveal all the heroism of the man and all the cun- ning of the author; they do the reader good by stealth. Let us have them speed- ily, so that honest men may have in their houses a complete edition of at least one author of whom they can truthfully say, that they never know whether they most admire the writer or love the man. EMERSON. THERE are men whose charm is in their entirety. Their words occasionally utter what their looks invariably express. We read their thoughts by the light of their smiles. Not to see and hear these men is not to know them, and criticism without personal knowledge is in their case mutila- tion. Those who did know them listen in despair to the half-hearted praise and clumsy disparagement of critical strangers, and are apt to exclaim, as did the younger Pitt, when some extraneous person was ex- pressing wonder at the enormous reputa- tion of Fox, * Ah ! you have never been under the wand of the magician.' Of such was Ralph Waldo Emerson. When we find so cool-brained a critic as Mr. Lowell writing and quoting thus of Emerson : 'Those who heard him while their na- EMERSON. 239 Hv-c^-j tures were yet plastic, and then mental nerves trembled under the slightest breath of divine air, will never cease to feel and say: " Was never eye did see that face, Was never ear did hear that tongue, Was never mind did mind his grace That ever thought the travail long ; But eyes, and ears, and every thought Were with his sweet perfections caught;" ' we recognise at once that the sooner we take off our shoes the better, for that the ground upon which we are standing is holy. How can we sufficiently honour the men who, in this secular, work-a-day world, ha- bitually breathe ' An ampler ether, a diviner air,' than ours ! But testimony of this kind, conclusive as it is upon the question of Emerson's per- sonal influence, will not always be admissi- ble in support of his claims as an author. In the long run an author's only witnesses are his own books. In Dr. Holmes's estimate of Emerson's books every one must wish to concur.* * See Life of Emerson, by O. W. Holmes. 24O EMERSON. These are not the days, nor is this dry and thirsty land of ours the place, when or where we can afford to pass by any well of spiritual influence. It is matter, therefore, for rejoicing that, in the opinion of so many good judges, Emerson's well can never be choked up. His essays, so at least we are told by no less a critic than Mr. Arnold, are the most valuable prose contributions to English literature of the century ; his letters to Mr. Carlyle carried into all our homes the charm of a most delightful per- sonality ; the quaint melody of his poems abides in many ears. He would, indeed, be a churl who grudged Emerson his fame. But when we are considering a writer so full of intelligence as Emerson one so remote and detached from the world's blus- ter and brag it is especially incumbent upon us to charge our own language with intelligence, and to make sure that what we say is at least truth for us. Were we at liberty to agree with Dr. Holmes, in his unmeasured praise did we, in short, find Emerson full of inspira- tion our task would be as easy as* it would be pleasant ; but not entirely agree- EMERSON. 241 ing with Dr. Holmes, and somehow miss- ing the inspiration, the difficulty we began by mentioning presses heavily upon us. Pleasant reading as the introductory thirty-five pages of Dr. Holmes's book make, we doubt the wisdom of so very sketchy an account of Emerson's lineage and intellectual environment. Attracted towards Emerson everybody must be; but there are many who have never been able to get quit of an uneasy fear as to his 'staying power.' He has seemed to some of us a little thin and vague. A really great author dissipates all such fears. Read a page and they are gone. To in- quire after the intellectual health of such a one would be an impertinence. Emer- son hardly succeeds in inspiring this con- fidence, but is more like a clever invalid who says, and is encouraged by his friends to say, brilliant things, but of whom it would be cruel to expect prolonged men- tal exertion. A man, he himself has said, ' should give us a sense of mass.' He per- haps does not do so. This gloomy and possibly distorted view is fostered rather than discouraged by Dr. Holmes's intro- 242 EMERSON. ductory pages about Boston life and intel- lect. It does not seem to have been a very strong place. We lack performance. It is of small avail to write, as Dr. Holmes does, about 'brilliant circles,' and 'literary luminaries,' and then to pass on, and leave the circles circulating and the luminaries shining in vacua. We want to know how they were .brilliant, and what they illu- minated. If you wish me to believe that you are witty I must really trouble you to make a joke. Dr. Holmes's own wit, for example, is as certain as the law of grav- itation, but over all these pages of his hangs vagueness, and we scan them in vain for reassuring details. 'Mild orthodoxy, ripened in Unitarian sunshine,' does not sound very appetising, though we are assured by Dr. Holmes that it is 'a very agreeable aspect of Chris- tianity.' Emerson himself does not seem to have found it very lively, for in 1832, after three years' experience of the min- istry of the ' Second Church ' of Boston, he retires from it, not tumultuously or with any deep feeling, but with something very like a yawn. He concludes his fare- well sermon to his people as follows : EMERSON. 243 ' Having said this I have said all. I have no hostility to this institution. I am only stating my want of sympathy with it.' Dr. Holmes makes short work of Emer- son's childhood. He was born in Boston on the 2 5th May, 1803, and used to sit upon a wall and drive his mother's cow to pasture. In fact, Dr. Holmes adds noth- ing to what we already knew of the quiet and blameless life that came to its ap- pointed end on the 2/th April, 1882. On the completion of his college education, Emerson became a student of theology, and after a turn at teaching, was ordained, in March 1829, minister of the 'Second Church ' in Boston. In September of the same year he married ; and the death of his young wife, in February 1832, perhaps quickened the doubts and disinclinations which severed his connection with his ' In- stitution' on the Qth September, 1832. The following year he visited Europe for the first time, and made his celebrated call upon Carlyle at Craigenputtock, and laid the keel of a famous friendship. In the summer of 1834 he settled at Concord. He married again, visited England again, 244 EMERSON. wrote essays, delivered lectures, made ora- tions, published poems, carried on a long and most remarkable correspondence with Carlyle, enjoyed after the most temperate and serene of fashions many things and much happiness. And then he died. ' Can you emit sparks ? ' said the cat to the ugly duckling in the fairy tale, and the poor abashed creature had to admit that it could not. Emerson could emit sparks with the most electrical of cats. He is all sparks and shocks. If one were required to name the most non-sequacious author one had ever read, I do not see how we could help nominating Emerson. But, say some of his warmest admirers, 'What then?' 'It does not matter!' It appears to me to matter a great deal. A wise author never allows his reader's mind to be at large, but casts about from the very first how to secure it all for him- self. He takes you (seemingly) into his confidence, perhaps pretends to consult you as to the best route, but at all events points out to you the road, lying far ahead, which you are to travel in his company. How carefully does a really great writer, like EMERSON. 245 Dr. Newman or M. Renan, explain to you what he is going to do and how he is going to do it ! His humour, wit, and fancy, however abundant they may be, spring up like wayside flowers, and do but adorn and render more attractive the path along which it is his object to conduct you. The read- er's mind, interested from the beginning, and desirous of ascertaining whether the author keeps his word, and adheres to his plan, feels the glow of healthy exercise, and pays a real though unconscious atten- tion. But Emerson makes no terms with his readers he gives them neither thread nor clue, and thus robs them of one of the keenest pleasures of reading, the being beforehand with your author, and going shares with him in his own thoughts. If it be said that it is manifestly unfair to compare a mystical writer like Emerson with a polemical or historical one, I am not concerned to answer the objection, for let the comparison be made with whom you will, the unparalleled non-sequaciousness of Emerson is as certain as the Correggi- osity of Correggio. You never know what he will be at. His sentences fall over 246 EMERSON. you in glittering cascades, beautiful and bright, and for the moment refreshing, but after a very brief while the mind, having nothing to do on its own account but to remain wide open, and see what Emerson sends it, grows first restive and then tor- pid. Admiration gives way to astonish- ment, astonishment to bewilderment, and bewilderment to stupefaction. * Napoleon is not a man, but a system,' once said, in her most impressive tones, Madame de Stael to Sir James Mackintosh, across a dinner-table. ' Magnificent ! ' mur- mured Sir James. 'But what does she mean ? ' whispered one of those helplessly commonplace creatures who, like the pres- ent writer, go about spoiling everything. ' Mass ! I cannot tell ! ' was the frank ac- knowledgment and apt Shakspearian quo- tation of Mackintosh. Emerson's meaning, owing to his non-sequacious style, is often very difficult to apprehend. Hear him for a moment on ' Experience ' : ' I gossip for my hour concerning the eternal politic. I have seen many fair pic- tures, not in vain. A wonderful time I have lived in. I am not the novice I was EMERSON. 247 fourteen, nor yet seven years ago. Let who will ask, Where is the fruit? I find a private fruit sufficient. This is a fruit, that I should not ask for a rash effect from meditations, counsels, and the hiving of truths.' This surely is an odd way of hiving truths. It follows from it that Emerson is more striking than suggestive. He likes things on a large scale he is fond of ethnical remarks and typical persons. Notwithstanding his habit of introducing the names of common things into his dis- courses and poetry (' Hay, corn, roots, hemp, flax, apples, wool, and wood,' is a line from one of his poems), his familiarity therewith is evidently not great. ' Take care, papa,' cried his little son, seeing him at work with his spade, ' you will dig your leg.' His essay on Friendship will not be found satisfactory. Here is a subject on which surely we are entitled to 'body.' The Over Soul was different, there it was easy to agree with Carlyle, who, writing to Emerson, says : ' Those voices of yours which I likened to unembodied souls and censure sometimes for having no body, 248 EMERSON. how can they have a body ? They are light rays darting upwards in the east ! ' But friendship is a word the very sight of which in print makes the heart warm. One remembers Elia : ' Oh ! it is pleasant as it is rare to find the same arm linked in yours at forty which at thirteen helped it to turn over the Cicero De Amicitid, or some other tale of antique friendship which the young heart even then was burning to anticipate.' With this in your ear it is rather chilling to read, ' I do, then, with my friends as I do with my books. I would have them where I can find them, but I seldom use them. We must have society on our own terms, and admit or exclude it on the slightest cause. I can- not afford to speak much with my friend.' These are not genial terms. For authors and books his affection, real as it was, was singularly impersonal. In his treatment of literary subjects, we miss the purely human touch, the grip of affec- tion, the accent of scorn, that so pleasantly characterise the writings of Mr. Lowell. Emerson, it is to be feared, regarded a company of books but as a congeries of EMERSON. 249 ideas. For one idea he is indebted to Plato, for another to Dr. Channing. Sartor Resartus, so Emerson writes, is a noble philosophical poem, but 'have you read Sampson Read's Growth of the Mind?' We read somewhere of ' Pindar, Raphael, Angelo, Dryden, and De Stael.' Emer- son's notions of literary perspective are certainly 'very early.' Dr. Holmes him- self is every bit as bad. In this very book of his, speaking about the dangerous lib- erty some poets Emerson amongst the number take of crowding a redundant syllable into a line, he reminds us 'that Shakspeare and Milton knew how to use it effectively ; Shelley employed it freely ; Bryant indulged in it ; Willis was fond of it.' One has heard of the Republic of Let- ters, but this surely does not mean that one author is as good as another. 'Willis was fond of it.' I daresay he was, but we are not fond of Willis, and cannot help regarding the citation of his poetical ex- ample as an outrage. None the less, if we will have but a little patience, and bid our occasional wonder- ment be still, and read Emerson at the 25O EMERSON. right times and in small quantities, we shall not remain strangers to his charm. He bathes the universe in his thoughts. Nothing less than the Whole ever con- tented Emerson. His was no parochial spirit. He cries out ' From air and ocean bring me foods, From all zones and altitudes.' How beautiful, too, are some of his sen- tences. Here is a bit from his essay on Shakspeare in Representative Men : ' It is the essence of poetry to spring like the rainbow daughter of Wonder from the invisible, to abolish the past, and refuse all history. Malone, Warburton, Dyce, and Collier have wasted their life. The famed theatres have vainly assisted. Betterton, Garrick, Kemble, Kean, and Macready dedicate their lives to his genius him they crown, elucidate, obey, and express, the genius knows them not. The recita- tion begins, one golden word leaps out immortal from all this painful pedantry, and sweetly torments us with invitations to his own inaccessible homes.' The words we have ventured to italicise seem to us to be of surpassing beauty, and EMERSON. 251 to express what many a play-goer of late years must often have dimly felt. Patience should indeed be the motto for any Emerson reader who is not by nature 'author's kin.' For example, in the essay on Character, after reading, ' Everything in nature is bipolar, or has a positive and negative pole. There is a male and a fe- male, a spirit and a fact, a north and a south. Spirit is the positive, the event is the negative ; will is the north, action the south pole. Character may be ranked as having its natural place in the north/ how easy to lay the book down and read no more that day ; but a moment's -patience is amply rewarded, for but sixteen lines farther on we may read as follows : ' We boast our emancipation from many super- stitions, but if we have broken any idols it is through a transfer of the idolatry. What have I gained that I no longer immolate a bull to Jove or to Neptune, or a mouse to Hecate ; that I do not tremble before the Eumenides or the Catholic Purgatory, or the Calvinistic Judgment Day, if I quake at opinion, the public opinion as we call it, or the threat of assault or contumely, or 2$ 2 EMERSON. bad neighbours, or poverty, or mutilation, or at the rumour of revolution or of won- der ! If I quake, what matters it what I quake at ? ' Well and truly did Carlyle write to Emerson, ' You are a new era, my man, in your huge country.' Emerson's poetry has at least one of the qualities of true poetry it always pleases and occasionally delights. Great poetry it may not be, but it has the happy knack of slipping in between our fancies, and of clinging like ivy to the masonry of the thought-structure beneath which each one of us has his dwelling. I must be allowed room for two quotations, one from the stanzas called Give all to Love, the other from Wood Notes. ' Cling with life to the maid ; But when the surprise, First shadow of surmise, Flits across her bosom young Of a joy apart from thee, Free be she, fancy-free, Nor thou detain her vesture's hem, Nor the palest rose she flung From her summer's diadem. Though thou loved her as thyself, As a self of purer clay, Tho* her parting dims the day, EMERSON. 253 Stealing grace from all alive ; Heartily know When half-gods go, The gods arrive.' The lines from Wood Notes run as fol- lows : ' Come learn with me the fatal song Which knits the world in music strong, Whereto every bosom dances, Kindled with courageous fancies ; Come lift thine eyes to lofty rhymes Of things with things, of times with times, Primal chimes of sun and shade, Of sound and echo, man and maid ; The land reflected in the flood ; Body with shadow still pursued. For nature beats in perfect tune And rounds with rhyme her every rune ; Whether she work in land or sea Or hide underground her alchemy, Thou canst not wave thy staff in air, Or dip thy paddle in the lake, But it carves the bow of beauty there, And the ripples in rhymes the oar forsake. Not unrelated, unaffied, But to each thought and thing allied, Is perfect nature's every part, Rooted in the mighty heart.' What place Emerson is to occupy in American literature is for America to de- termine. Some authoritative remarks on this subject are to be found in Mr. Low- 254 EMERSON. ell's essay on ' Thoreau,' in My Study Windows ; but here at home, where we are sorely pressed for room, it is certain he must be content with a smalj allotment, where, however, he may for ever sit be- neath his own vine and fig-tree, none dar- ing to make him afraid. Emerson will always be the favourite author of some- body ; and to be always read by somebody is better than to be read first by everybody and then by nobody. Indeed, it is hard to fancy a pleasanter destiny than to join the company of lesser authors. All their read- ers are sworn friends. They are spared the harsh discords of ill-judged praise and feigned rapture. Once or twice in a cen- tury some enthusiastic and expansive ad- mirer insists upon dragging them from thetr shy retreats, and trumpeting their fame in the market-place, asserting, possi- bly with loud asseverations (after the fash- ion of Mr. Swinburne), that they are pre- cisely as much above Otway and Collins an'd George Eliot as they are below Shaks- peare and Hugo and Emily Bronte. The great world looks on good-humouredly for a moment or two, and then proceeds as EMERSON. 255 before, and the disconcerted author is left free to scuttle back to his corner, where he is all the happier, sharing the raptures of the lonely student, for his brief experience of publicity. Let us bid farewell to Emerson, who has bidden farewell to the world, in the words of his own Good-bye. 1 Good-bye to flattery's fawning face, To grandeur with his wise grimace, To upstart wealth's averted eye, To supple office low and high, To crowded halls, to court and street, To frozen hearts and hasting feet, To those who go and those who come, Good-bye, proud world, I 'm going home, I am going to my own hearth-stone Bosomed in yon green hills, alone, A secret nook in a pleasant land, Whose groves the frolic fairies planned ; Where arches green the livelong day Echo the blackbird's roundelay, And vulgar feet have never trod, A spot that is sacred to thought and God.' THE OFFICE OF LITERATURE. DR. JOHN BROWN'S pleasant story has become well known, of the countryman who, being asked to account for the grav- ity of his dog, replied, ' Oh, sir ! life is full of sairiousness to him he can just never get eneugh o' fechtinY Something of the spirit of this saddened dog seems lately to have entered into the very people who ought to be freest from it our men of letters. They are all very serious and very quarrelsome. To some of them it is dan- gerous even to allude. Many are wedded to a theory or period, and are the most uxorious of husbands ever ready to re- sent an affront to their lady. This devo- tion makes them very grave, and possibly very happy after a pedantic fashion. One remembers what Hazlitt, who was neither happy nor pedantic, has said about pedan- try:- THE OFFICE OF LITERATURE. ' The power of attaching an interest to the most trifling or painful pursuits is one of the greatest happinesses of our nature. The common soldier mounts the breach with joy, the miser deliberately starves himself to death, the mathematician sets about extracting the cube-root with a feel- ing of enthusiasm, and the lawyer sheds tears of delight over Coke upon Lyttleton. He who is not in some measure a pedant, though he may be a wise cannot be a very happy man.' Possibly not ; but then we are surely not content that our authors should be pedants in order that they may be happy and devoted. As one of the great class for whose sole use and behalf literature ex- ists the class of readers I protest that it is to me a matter of indifference whether an author is happy or not. I want him to make me happy. That is his office. Let him discharge it. I recognise in this connection the corre- sponding truth of what Sydney Smith makes his Peter Plymley say about the pri- vate virtues of Mr. Perceval, the Prime Minister: 258 THE OFFICE OF LITERATURE. 'You spend a great deal of ink about the character of the present Prime Minis- ter. Grant all that you write I say, I fear that he will ruin Ireland, and pursue a line of policy destructive to the true in- terests of his country ; and then you tell me that he is faithful to Mrs. Perceval, and kind to the Master Percevals. I should prefer that he whipped his boys and saved his country.' We should never confuse functions or apply wrong tests. What can books do for us ? Dr. Johnson, the least pedantic of men, put the whole matter into a nut- shell (a cocoa - nut shell, if you will Heaven forbid that I should seek to com- press the great Doctor within any nar- rower limits than my metaphor requires !), when he wrote that a book should teach us either to enjoy life or 'endure it. ' Give us enjoyment!' 'Teach us endurance!' Hearken to the ceaseless demand and the perpetual prayer of an ever unsatisfied and always suffering humanity ! How is a book to answer the ceaseless demand ? Self-forgetfulness is of the essence of THE OFFICE OF LITERATURE. 259 enjoyment, and the author who would con- fer pleasure must possess the art, or know the trick, of destroying for the time the reader's own personality. Undoubtedly the easiest way of doing this is by the cre- ation of a host of rival personalities hence the number and the popularity of novels. Whenever a novelist fails his book is said to flag ; that is, the reader sud- denly (as in skating) comes bump down upon his own personality, and curses the unskilful author. No lack of characters and continual motion is the easiest recipe for a novel, which, like a beggar, should always be kept ' moving on.' Nobody knew this better than Fielding, whose nov- els, like most good ones, are full of inns. When those who are addicted to what is called 'improving reading' inquire of you petulantly why you cannot find change of company and scene in books of travel, you should answer cautiously that when books of travel are full of inns, atmosphere, and motion, they are as good as any novel ; nor is there any reason in the nature of things why they should not always be so, though experience proves the contrary. 260 THE OFFICE OF LITERATURE. The truth or falsehood of a book is im- material. George Borrow's Bible in Spain is, I suppose, true ; though now that I come to think of it, in what is to me a new light, one remembers that it contains some odd things. But was not Borrow the accred- ited agent of the British and Foreign Bible Society ? Did he not travel (and he had a free hand) at their charges ? Was he not befriended by our minister at Ma- drid, Mr. Villiers, subsequently Earl of Clarendon in the peerage of England? It must be true ; and yet at this moment I would as lief read a chapter of the Bible in Spain as I would Gil Bias ; nay, I posi- tively would give the preference to Senor Giorgio. Nobody can sit down to read Borrow's books without as completely forgetting himself as if he were a boy in the forest with Gurth and Wamba. Borrow is provoking and has his full share of faults, and, though the owner of a style, is capable of excruciating offences. His habitual use of the odious word 'indi- vidual' as a noun-substantive (seven times in three pages of The Romany Rye) elicits THE OFFICE OF LITERATURE. 26 1 the frequent groan, and he is certainly once guilty of calling fish the 'finny tribe.' He believed himself to be animated by an in- tense hatred of the Church of Rome, and disfigures many of his pages by Lawrence- Boythorn-like tirades against that institu- tion ; but no Catholic of sense need on this account deny himself the pleasure of read- ing Borrow, whose one dominating passion was camaraderie, and who hob-a-nobbed in the friendliest spirit with priest and gipsy in a fashion as far beyond praise as it is beyond description by any pen other than his own. Hail to thee, George Borrow ! Cervantes himself, Gil Bias, do not more effectually carry their readers into the land of the Cid than does this miraculous agent of the Bible Society, by favour of whose pleasantness we can, any hour of the week, enter Villafranca by night, or ride into Galicia on an Andalusian stallion (which proved to be a foolish thing to do), without costing anybody a peseta, and at no risk whatever to our necks be they long or short. Cooks, warriors, and authors must be judged by the effects they produce : tooth- 262 THE OFFICE OF LITERATURE. some dishes, glorious victories, pleasant books these are our demands. We have nothing to do with ingredients, tactics, or methods. We have no desire to be ad- mitted into the kitchen, the council, or the study. The cook may clean her saucepans how she pleases the warrior place his men as he likes the author handle his material or weave his plot as best he can when the dish is served we only ask, Is it good? when the battle has been fought, Who won ? when the book comes out, Does it read ? Authors ought not to be above being re- minded that it is their first duty to write agreeably some very disagreeable men have succeeded in doing so, and there is therefore no need for anyone to despair. Every author, be he grave or gay, should try to make his book as ingratiating as possible. Reading is not a duty, and has consequently no business to be made dis- agreeable. Nobody is under any obligation to read any other man's book. Literature exists to please, to lighten the burden of men's lives; to make them for a short while forget their sorrows and THE OFFICE OF LITERATURE. 263 their sins, their silenced hearths, their dis- appointed hopes, their grim futures and those men of letters are the best loved who have best performed literature's truest of- fice. Their name is happily legion, and I will conclude these disjointed remarks by quoting from one of them, as honest a par- son as ever took tithe or voted for the Tory candidate, the Rev. George Crabbe. Hear him in The Frank Courtship: ' " I must be loved ; " said Sybil ; " I must see The man in terrors, who aspires to me : At my forbidding frown his heart must ache, His tongue must falter, and his frame must shake ; And if I grant him at my feet to kneel, What trembling fearful pleasure must he feel : Nay, such the rapture that my smiles inspire That reason's self must for a time retire." " Alas ! for good Josiah," said the dame, " These wicked thoughts would fill his soul with shame ; He kneel and tremble at a thing of dust ! He cannot, child : " the child replied, " He must." ' Were an office to be opened for the in- surance of literary reputations, no critic at all Hkely to be in the society's service would refuse the life of a poet who could write like Crabbe. Cardinal Newman, Mr. Les- lie Stephen, Mr. Swinburne, are not always of the same way of thinking, but all three hold the one true faith about Crabbe. 264 THE OFFICE OF LITERATURE. But even were Crabbe now left unread, which is very far from being the case, his would be an enviable fame for was he not one of the favourite poets of Walter Scott, and whenever the closing scene of the great magician's life is read in the pages of Lockhart, must not Crabbe's name be brought upon the reader's quivering lip? To soothe the sorrow of the soothers of sorrow, to bring tears to the eyes and smiles to the cheeks of the lords of human smiles and tears, is no mean ministry, and it is Crabbe's. WORN-OUT TYPES. IT is now a complaint of quite respect- able antiquity that the types in which hu- manity was originally set up by a humour- loving Providence are worn out and require recasting. The surface of society has be- come smooth. It ought to be a bas-relief it is a plane. Even a Chaucer (so it is said) could make nothing of us as we wend our way to Brighton. We have tempers, it is true bad ones for the most part ; but no humours to be in or out of. We are all far too much alike ; we do not group well ; we only mix. All this, and more, is alleged against us. A cheerfully disposed person might perhaps think that, assuming the prevailing type to be a good, plain, readable one, this uniformity need not necessarily be a bad thing ; but had he the courage to give expression to this opin- ion he would most certainly be at once told, 266 WORN-OUT TYPES. with that mixture of asperity and contempt so properly reserved for those who take cheerful views" of anything, that without well-defined types of character there can be neither national comedy nor whimsical novel ; and as it is impossible to imagine any person sufficiently cheerful to carry the argument further by inquiring ingen- uously, ' And how would that matter ? ' the position of things becomes serious, and de- mands a few minutes' investigation. As we said at the beginning, the com- plaint is an old one most complaints are. When Montaigne was in Rome in 1580 he complained bitterly that he was always knocking up against his own coun- trymen, and might as well have been in Paris. And yet some people would have you believe that this curse of the Conti- nent is quite new. More than seventy years ago that most quotable of English authors, Hazlitt, wrote as follows : ' It is, indeed, the evident tendency of all literature to generalise and dissipate character by giving men the same artificial education and the same common stock of ideas ; so that we see all objects from the WORN-OUT TYPES. 267 same point of view, and through the same reflected medium ; we learn to exist not in ourselves, but in books ; all men become alike, mere readers spectators, not actors, in the scene, and lose all proper personal identity. The templar, the wit, the man of pleasure and the man of fashion, the courtier and the citizen, the knight and the squire, the lover and the miser Love- lace, Lothario, Will Honeycomb and Sir Roger de Coverley, Sparkish and Lord Foppington, Western and Tom Jones, my Father and my Uncle Toby, Millamant and Sir Sampson Legend, Don Quixote and Sancho, Gil Bias and Guzman d'Alfa- rache, Count Fathom and Joseph Surface, have all met and exchanged common- places on the barren plains of the haute lit- ttrature> toil slowly on to the Temple of Science, seen a long way off upon a level, and end in one dull compound of politics, criticism, chemistry, and metaphysics.' Very pretty writing, certainly ; * nor can * Yet in his essay On Londoners and Country People we find Hazlitt writing, ' London is the only place in which the child grows completely up into the man. I have known characters of this kind, which, in the way of 268 WORN-OUT TYPES. it be disputed that uniformity of surround- ings puts a tax upon originality. To make bricks and find your own straw are terms of bondage. Modern characters, like mod- ern houses, are possibly built too much on the same lines. Dickens's description of Coketown is not easily forgotten : 'All the public inscriptions' in the town were painted alike, in severe characters of black and white. The jail might have been the infirmary, the infirmary might have been the jail, the town hall might have been either, or both, or anything else, for anything that appeared to the contrary in the graces of their construction.' And the inhabitants of Coketown are exposed to the same objection as their buildings. Every one sinks all traces of what he vulgarly calls ' the shop ' (that is, his lawful calling), and busily pretends to be nothing. Distinctions of dress are found irksome. A barrister of feeling hates to be seen in his robes save when actually engaged in a case. An officer wears his childish ignorance and self-pleasing delusion, exceeded anything to be met with in Shakspeare or Ben Jonson, or the Old Comedy.' WORN-OUT TYPES. 269 uniform only when obliged. Doctors have long since shed all outward signs of their healing art. Court dress excites a smile. A countess in her jewels is reckoned indecent by the British workman, who, all unem- ployed, puffs his tobacco smoke against the window-pane of the carriage that is conveying her ladyship to a drawing-room ; and a West-end clergyman is with difficulty restrained from telling his congregation what he had been told the British workman said on that occasion. Had he but had the courage to repeat those stirring words, his hearers (so he said) could hardly have failed to have felt their force so unusual in such a place ; but he had not the cour- age, and that sermon of the pavement re- mains unpreached. The toe of the peasant is indeed kibing the heel of the courtier. The passion for equality in externals can- not be denied. We are all woven strangely in the same piece, and so it comes about that, though our modern society has in- vented new callings, those callings have not created new types. Stockbrokers, di- rectors, official liquidators, philanthropists, secretaries, not of State, but of compa- 2/O WORN-OUT TYPES. nies, speculative builders, are a new kind of people known to many, indeed playing a great part among us, but who, for all that, have not enriched the stage with a single character. Were they to disappear to-morrow, to be blown dancing away like the leaves before Shelley's west wind, where in reading or play-going would pos- terity encounter them ? Alone amongst the children of men, the pale student of the law, burning the midnight oil in some one of the ' high lonely towers ' recently built by the Benchers of the Middle Temple (in the Italian taste), would, whilst losing his youth over that interminable series, The Law Reports, every now and again strike across the old track, once so noisy with the bayings of the well-paid hounds of jus- tice, and, pushing his way along it, trace the history of the bogus company, from the acclamations attendant upon its illegit- imate birth to the hour of disgrace when it dies by strangulation at the hands of the professional wrecker. The pale student will not be a wholly unsympathetic reader. Great swindles have ere now made great reputations, and lawyers may surely be WORN-OUT TYPES. 2? I permitted to take a pensive interest in such matters. ' Not one except the Attorney was amused He, like Achilles, faithful to the tomb, So there were quarrels, cared not for the cause, Knowing they must be settled by the laws.' But our elder dramatists would not have let any of these characters swim out of their ken. A glance over Ben Jonson, Massinger, Beaumont and Fletcher, is enough to reveal their frank and easy method. Their characters, like an apothe- cary's drugs, wear labels round their necks. Mr. Justice Clement and Mr. Justice Greedy ; Master Matthew, the town gull ; Sir Giles Overreach, Sir Epicure Mammon, Mr. Plenty, Sir John Frugal, need no ex- planatory context. Are our dramatists to blame for withholding from us the heroes of our modern society ? Ought we to have ' Sir Moses, Sir Aaron, Sir Jamramagee, Two stock-jobbing Jews, and a shuffling Parsee ' ? Baron Contango, the Hon. Mr. Guinea-Pig, poor Miss Impulsia Allottee, Mr. Jeremiah Builder Rare Old Ben, who was fond of the city, would have given us them all and 2/2 WORN-OUT TYPES. many more ; but though we may well wish he were here to do it, we ought, I think, to confess, that the humour of these typical persons who so swell the dramatis persona of an Elizabethan is, to say the least of it, far to seek. There is a certain warm- hearted tradition about their very names which makes disrespect painful. It seems a churl's part not to laugh, as did our fathers before us, at the humours of the conventional parasite or impossible ser- ving-man ; but we laugh because we will, and not because we must. Genuine comedy the true tickling scene, exquisite absurdity, soul-rejoicing incongruity has really nothing to do with types, prevailing fashions, and such like vulgarities. Sir Andrew Aguecheek is not a typical fool ; he is a fool, seised in fee simple of his folly. Humour lies not in generalisations, but in the individual ; not in his hat nor in his hose, even though the latter be ' cross- gartered ' ; but in the deep heart of him, in his high-flying vanities, his low-lying oddities what we call his ' ways ' nay, in the very motions of his back as he WORN-OUT TYPES. 273 crosses the road. These stir our laughter whilst he lives and our tears when he dies, for in mourning over him we know full well we are taking part in our own obse- quies. ' But indeed,' wrote Charles Lamb, ' we die many deaths before we die, and I am almost sick when I think that such a hold as I had of you is gone.' Literature is but the reflex of life, and the humour of it lies in the portrayal of the individual not the type; and though the young man in Locksley Hall no doubt ob- serves that the 'individual withers,' we have but to take down George Meredith's novels to find the fact is otherwise, and that we have still one amongst us who takes notes, and against the battery of whose quick wits even the costly raiment of Poole is no protection. We are forced as we read to exclaim with Petruchio, ' Thou hast hit it ; come sit on me.' No doubt the task of the modern humorist is not so easy as it was. The surface ore has been mostly picked up. In order to win the precious metal you must now work with in-stroke and out-stroke after the most approved methods. Sometimes one would 274 WORN-OUT TYPES. enjoy it a little more if we did not hear quite so distinctly the snorting of the en- gine, and the groaning and the creaking" of the gear as it painfully winds up its prize : but what would you ? Methods, no less than men, must have the defects of their qualities. If, therefore, it be the fact that our national comedy is in a decline, we must look for some other reasons for it than those suggested by Hazlitt in 1817. When Mr. Chadband inquired, ' Why can we not fly, my friends ? ' Mr. Snagsby ventured to observe, ' in a cheerful and rather know- ing tone, " No wings ! " ' but he was imme- diately frowned down by Mrs. Snagsby. We lack courage to suggest that the some- what heavy-footed movements of our recent dramatists are in any way due to their not being provided with those twin adjuncts indispensable for the genius who would soar. CAMBRIDGE AND THE POETS. WHY all the English poets, with a barely decent number of exceptions, have been Cambridge men, has always struck me, as did the abstinence of the Greeks from malt Mr. Calverley, 'as extremely curious.' But in this age of detail, one must, however reluctantly, submit to prove one's facts, and I, therefore, propose to institute a 'Modest Inquiry' into this subject. Im- aginatively, I shall don proctorial robes, and, armed with a duster, saunter up and down the library, putting to each poet as I meet him the once dreaded question, ' Sir, are you a member of this University ? ' But whilst I am arranging myself for this function, let me utilise the time by making two preliminary observations the first one being that, as to-day is Sunday, only such free libraries are open as may happen to be attached to public-houses, and 2/6 CAMBRIDGE AND THE POETS. I am consequently confined to my own poor shelves, and must be forgiven even though I make some palpable omissions. The second is that I exclude from my survey living authors. I must do so ; their very names would excite controversy about a subject which, when wisely handled, admits of none. I now pursue my inquiry. That Chau- cer was a Cambridge man cannot be proved. It is the better opinion that he was (how else should he have known anything about the Trumpington Road ?), but it is only an opinion, and as no one has ever been found reckless enough to assert that he was an Oxford man, he must be content to ' sit out ' this inquiry along with Shakspeare, Webster, Ford, Pope, Cowper, Burns, and Keats, no one of whom ever kept his terms at either University. Spenser is, of course, the glory of the Cambridge Pembroke, though were the fellowships of that college made to depend upon passing a yearly ex- amination in the Faerie Queene, to be con- ducted by Dean Church, there would be wailing and lamentation within her rubi- cund walls^ Sir Thomas Wyatt was at St. CAMBRIDGE AND THE POETS. John's, Fulke Greville Lord Brooke at Je- sus, Giles and Phineas Fletcher were at King's, Herrick was first a/ St. John's, but migrated to the Hall, where he is still reck- oned very pretty reading, even by boating men. Cowley, most precocious of poets, and Suckling were at Trinity, Waller at King's, Francis Quarles was of Christ's. The Herbert family were divided, some going to Oxford and some to Cambridge, George, of course, falling to the lot of Cam- bridge. John Milton's name alone would deify the University where he pursued his almost sacred studies. Andrew Marvell, a pleasant 'poet and savage satirist, was of Trinity. The author of Hudibras is fre- quently attributed to Cambridge, but, on being interrogated, he declined to name his college always a suspicious circum- stance. I must not forget Richard Crashaw, of Peterhouse. Willingly would I relieve the intolerable tedium of this dry inquiry by transcribing the few lines of his now be- neath my eye. But I forbear, and ' steer right on.' Of dramatists we find Marlowe (un- 278 CAMBRIDGE AND THE POETS. timelier death than his was never, any) at Corpus ; Greene (I do not lay much stress on Greene) was both at St. John's and Clare. Ben Jonson was at St. John's, so was Nash. John Fletcher (whose claims to be considered the senior partner in his well-known firm are simply paramount) was at Corpus. James Shirley, the author of The Maids' Revenge and of the beauti- ful lyric beginning 'The glories of our birth and state/ in the innocence of his heart first went to St. John's College, Ox- ford, from whence he was speedily sent down, for reasons which the delightful au- thor of Athena Oxonienses must really be allowed to state for himself. 'At the same time (1612) Dr. William Laud presiding at that house, he had a very great affection for Shirley, especially for the pregnant parts that were visible in him, but then having a broad or large mole upon his left cheek, which some esteemed a deformity, that worthy doctor would often tell him that he was an unfit person to take the sacred function upon him, and should never have his consent to do so.' Thus treated, Shirley left Oxford, that ' home of CAMBRIDGE AND THE POETS. 279 lost causes,' but not apparently of large moles, and came to Cambridge, and en- tered at St. Catharine's Hall, where, either because the authorities were -not amongst those who esteemed a broad or large mole upon the left cheek to be a deformity, or because a mole, more or less, made no sort of difference in the personal appearance of the college, or for other good and suffi- cient reasons, poor Shirley was allowed, without, I trust, being often told of his mole, to proceed to his degree and to Holy Orders. Starting off again, we find John Dryden, whose very name is a tower of strength (were he to come to life again he would, like Mr. Brown of Calaveras, ' clean out half the town '), at Trinity. In this poet's later life he said he liked Oxford better. His lines on this subject are well-known : ' Oxford to him a dearer name shall be Than his own Mother-University. Thebes did his rude, unknowing youth engage, He chooses Athens in his riper age.' But idle preferences of this sort are beyond the scope of my present inquiry. After Dryden we find Garth at Peterhouse and 280 CAMBRIDGE AND THE POETS. charming Matthew Prior at John's. Then comes the great name of Gray. Perhaps I ought not to mention poor Christopher Smart, who was a Fellow of Pembroke, and yet the author of David, under happier circumstances, might have conferred addi- tional poetic lustre, even upon the college of Spenser.* In the present century, we find Bryon and his bear at Trinity, Coleridge at Jesus, and Wordsworth at St. John's. The last named poet was fully alive to the honour of belonging to the same University as Milton. In language not unworthy of Mr. Trumbull, the well-known auctioneer in Middlemarch, he has recorded as follows : ' Among the band of my compeers was one Whom chance had stationed in the very room Honoured by Milton's name. O temperate Bard ! Be it confest that for the first time seated Within thy innocent lodge and oratory, One of a festive circle, I poured out Libations, to thy memory drank, till pride And gratitude grew dizzy in a brain Never excited by the fumes of wine Before that hour or since.' t * This passage was written before Mr. Browning's ' Parleyings ' had appeared. Christopher is now a ' per- son of importance,' and needs no apology. t The Prelude, p. 55. CAMBRIDGE AND THE POETS. 28 1 I know of no more amiable trait in the character of Cambridge men than their willingness to admit having been drunk once. After the great name of Wordsworth any other must seem small, but I must, before concluding, place on record Praed, Macaulay, Kingsley, and Calverley. A glorious Roll-call indeed ! ' Earth shows to Heaven the names by thousands told That crown her fame.' I So may Cambridge. Oxford leads off with one I could find it in my heart to grudge her, beautiful as she is Sir Philip Sidney. Why, I wonder, did he not accompany his friend and fu- ture biographer, Fulke Greville, to Cam- bridge ? As Dr. Johnson once said to Boswell, ' Sir, you may wonder ! ' Sidney most indisputably was at Christchurch. Old George Chapman, who I suppose was young once, was (I believe) at Oxford, though I have known Cambridge to claim him. Lodge and Peele were at Oxford, so were Francis Beaumont and his brother Sir John. Philip Massinger, Shakerley Mar- mion, and John Marston are of Oxford, also 282 CAMBRIDGE AND THE POETS. Watson and Warner. Henry Vaughan the Silurist, Sir John Davies, George Sandys, Samuel Daniel, Dr. Donne, Lovelace, and Wither belong to the sister University, so did Dr. Brady but Oxford must not claim all the merit of the metrical version of the Psalms, for Brady's colleague, Dr. Nahum Tate, was a Dublin man. Otway and Collins, Young, Johnson, Charles Wes- ley, Southey, Landor, Hartley Coleridge, B.eddoes, Keble, Isaac Williams, Faber, and Clough are names of which their Uni- versity may well be proud. But surely, when compared with the Cambridge list, a falling-off must be admitted. A poet indeed once came into residence at University College, whose single name for after all poets must be weighed and not counted would have gone far to right the balance, but is Oxford bold enough to claim Shelley as her own ? She sent him down, not for riotous living, for no purer soul than his ever haunted her courts, but for wanting to discuss with those whose business it was to teach him questions of high philosophy. Had Shelley only gone to Trinity in 1810 I feel sure wise and CAMBRIDGE AND THE POETS. 283 witty old Dr. Mansel would never have sent him down. Spenser, Milton, and Shelley ! What a triad of immortal fames they would have made. As it is, we ex- pect Oxford with her accustomed com- posure will insist upon adding Shelley to her score but even when she has been allowed to do so, she must own herself beaten both in men and metal. But this being so why was it so ? It is now my turn to own myself defeated. I cannot for the life of me tell how it hap- pened. BOOK-BUYING. THE most distinguished of living Eng- lishmen, who, great as he is in many direc- tions, is perhaps inherently more a man of letters than anything else, has been over- heard mournfully to declare that there were more booksellers' shops in his na- tive town sixty years ago when he was a boy in it than are to-day to be found within its boundaries. And yet the place ' all un- abashed ' now boasts its bookless self a city ! Mr. Gladstone was, of course, referring to second-hand bookshops. Neither he nor any other sensible man puts himself out about new books. When a new book is published, read an old one, was the ad- vice of a sound though surly critic. It is one of the boasts of letters to have glori- fied the term ' second-hand,' which other crafts have ' soiled to all ignoble use.' But BOOK-BUYING. 285 why it has been able to do this is obvious. All the best books are necessarily second- hand. The writers of to-day need not grumble. Let them ' bide a wee.' If their books are worth anything they too one day will be second-hand. If their books are not worth anything there are ancient trades still in full operation amongst us the pastrycooks and the trunk-makers who must have paper. But is there any substance in the plaint that nobody now buys books, meaning thereby second-hand books ? The late Mark Pattison, who had 16,000 volumes, and whose lightest word has therefore weight, once stated that he had been in- formed, and verily believed, that there were men of his own University of Ox- ford who, being in uncontrolled posses- sion of annual incomes of not less than jC$oo, thought they were doing the thing handsomely if they expended .50 a year upon their libraries. But we are not bound to believe this unless we like. There was a touch of morosity about the late Rector of Lincoln which led him to take gloomy views of men, particularly Oxford men. 286 BOOK-BUYING. No doubt arguments a priori may read- ily be found to support the contention that the habit of book-buying is on the decline. I confess to knowing one or two men, not Oxford men either, but Cambridge men (and the passion of Cambridge for litera- ture is a by-word), who, on the plea of being pressed with business, or because, they were going to a funeral, have passed a bookshop in a strange town without so much as stepping inside * just to see whether the fellow had anything.' But painful as facts of this sort necessarily are, any damaging inference we might feel dis- posed to draw from them is dispelled by a comparison of price-lists. Compare a bookseller's catalogue of 1862 with one of the present year, and your pessimism is washed away by the tears which unre- strainedly flow as you see what bonnes fortunes you have lost. A young book- buyer might well turn out upon Primrose Hill and bemoan his youth, after compar- ing old catalogues with new. Nothing but American competition, grumble some old stagers. Well ! why not ? This new battle for BOOK-BUYING. 287 the books is a free fight, not a private one, and Columbia has 'joined in.' Lower prices are not to be looked for. The book- buyer of 1900 will be glad to buy at to- day's prices. I take pleasure in thinking he will not be able to do so. Good finds grow scarcer and scarcer. True it is that but a few short weeks ago I picked up (such is the happy phrase, most apt to de- scribe what was indeed a ' street casualty') a copy of the original edition of Endymion (Keats's poem O subscriber to Mudie's ! not Lord Beaconsfield's novel) for the easy equivalent of half-a-crown but then that was one of my lucky days. The enor- mous increase of booksellers' catalogues and their wide circulation amongst the trade has already produced a hateful uni- formity of prices. Go where you will it is all the same to the odd sixpence. Time was when you could map out the coun- try for yourself with some hopefulness of plunder. There were districts where the Elizabethan dramatists were but slenderly protected. A raid into the ' bonnie North Countrie ' sent you home again cheered with chap-books and weighted with old 288 BOOK-BUYING. pamphlets of curious interest ; whilst the West of England seldom failed to yield a crop of novels. I remember getting a complete set 6f the Bronte books in the original issues at Torquay, I may say, for nothing. Those days are over. Your country bookseller is, in fact, more likely, such tales does he hear of London auc- tions, and such catalogues does he receive by every post, to exaggerate the value of his wares than to part with them pleas- antly, and as a country bookseller should, 'just to clear my shelves, you know, and give me a bit of room.' The only com- pensation for this is the catalogues them- selves. You get them, at least, for nothing, and it cannot be denied that they make mighty pretty reading. These high prices tell their own tale, and force upon us the conviction that there never were so many private libraries in course of growth as there are to-day. Libraries are not made ; they grow. Your first two thousand volumes present no difficulty, and cost astonishingly little money. Given ^400 and five years, and an ordinary man can in the ordinary BOOK-BUYING. 289 course, without any undue haste or put- ting any pressure upon his taste, surround himself with this number of books, all in his own language, and thenceforward have at least one place in the world in which it is possible to be happy. But pride is still out of the question. To be proud of hav- ing two thousand books would be absurd. You might as well be proud of having two top-coats. After your first two thousand difficulty begins, but until you have ten thousand volumes the less you say about your library the better. Then you may begin to speak. It is no doubt a pleasant thing to have a library left you. The present writer will disclaim no such legacy, but hereby under- takes to accept it, however dusty. But, good as it is to inherit a library, it is better to collect one. Each volume then, how- ever lightly a stranger's eye may roam from shelf to shelf, has its own individu- ality, a history of its own. You remember where you got it, and how much you gave for it ; and your word may safely be taken for the first of these facts, but not for the r second. 2QO BOOK-BUYING. The man who has a library of his own collection is able to contemplate himself objectively, and is justified in believing in his own existence. No other man but he would have made precisely such a combi- nation as his. Had he been in any single respect different from what he is, his li- brary, as it exists, never would have existed. Therefore, surely he may exclaim, as in the gloaming he contemplates the backs of his loved ones, 'They are mine, and I am theirs.' But the eternal note of sadness will find its way even through the keyhole of a li- brary. You turn some familiar page, of Shakspeare it may be, and his ' infinite va- riety/ his ' multitudinous mind,' suggests some new thought, and as you are wonder- ing over it, you think of Lycidas, your friend, and promise yourself the pleasure of having his opinion of your discovery the very next time when by the fire you two ' help waste a sullen day.' Or it is, per- haps, some quainter, tenderer fancy that engages your solitary attention, something in Sir Philip Sidney or Henry Vaughan, and then you turn to look for Phyllis, ever BOOK-BUYING. 2C)l the best interpreter of love, human or divine. Alas ! the printed page grows hazy beneath a filmy eye as you suddenly remember that Lycidas is dead ' dead ere his prime,' and that the pale cheek of Phyllis will never again be relumined by the white light of her pure enthusiasm. And then you fall to thinking of the inev- itable, and perhaps, in your present mood, not unwelcome hour, when the 'ancient peace ' of your old friends will be dis- turbed, when rude hands will dislodge them from their accustomed nooks and break up their goodly company. ' Death bursts amongst them like a shell, And trews them over half the town.' They will form new combinations, lighten other men's toil, and soothe another's sor- row. Fool that I was to call anything mine ! Uniform ivifb Obiter Dicta. ETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS. BY ANDREW LANG. / Vol., Elzevir i6mo, Gilt Top, $1.00. IT is a happy fancy of Mr. Lang's to unbosom himself of some of the brightest, wit- tiest and most thoughtful criti- cisms of recent years by writing it directly to the great dead themselves always with thor- ough reverence and apprecia- tion, and the most charming regard for their ways of thought, but with perfect >frankness. The public thus gains at second hand one of the brightest collec- tions of literary estimates which any contemporary writer not even excepting the author ot " Obiter Dicta " could have given them. The little Elzevir volume, with its page and print, would of itself have appealed to many of the dead authors, as it will to modern readers. CONTENTS. To W. M. Thackeray. To Charles Dickens. To Pierre de Ronzard. To Herodotus. Epistle to Mr. Alexander Pope, To Lucien of Samosata. To Maitre Francoys Rabelais. To Jane Austen. To Master Isaak Walton. To M. Chapelain. To Sir John Manndeville, Kt. To Alexandre Dumas. To Theocritus. To Edgar Allan Poe. To Sir Walter Scott, Bart. To Eusebius of Caesarea. To Percy Bysshe Shelley. To Monsieur de Moliere. To Robert Burns. To Omar Khayyam. To Q. Horatius Flaccus. " The book is one of the luxuries of the literary taste. It is meant for the exquisite palate, and is prepared by one of the knowing ' kind. It is an aston- ishing little volume." A^. Y. Evening Past. " Mr. Andrew Lang is decidedly a clever and dexterous literary workman, and we doubt if he has ever done any- thing neater or more finkhe-1 th n these 'Letters to Dead Authors.' " Tht Christian Union. QBITER DICTA. (FIRST SERIES.) AUGUSTINE BIRRELL. / Vol., Elzevir i6mo, Gilt Top, $1.00. CONTENTS. Carlyle. On the Alleged Obscurity of Mr. Browning's Poetry. Truth-Hunting. Actors. A Rogue's Memoirs. The Via Media. Falstaff. " A very dainty little book daintily written, daintily printed, and daintily bound. The author has a fine turn of style, a very pretty wit, a solid and manly vein of reflection. . . . An eminently pleasant and companionable book. Open it where we may, we find something to entertain and stimulate, to invite meditation, and provoke re- flection." Times. "Some admirably written essays. . . . Amusing and brilliant. . . . The book is the book of highly cultivated man, with a real gift of expression, a good deal of humor, a happy fancy, an im- aginative respect for religion, and a rather skeptical bias." Spectator. "This brilliant and thought-compel- ling little book. . . . Apart from their intellectual grip, which we think really notable, the great charm of these essays lies in the fine urbanity of their satirical humor," Academy. " Each essay is a gem of thought not of heavy, ponderous, didacti: thought, but of thought light, fanciful, and play- ful, yet conveying much wisdom," Standard. "The author is evidently a man of considerable reading, with opinions of his own, which he can express with vigor and humor. . . . The book is very readable and suggestive." St. James's Gazette. " A book to be enjoyed precisely be- cause of the irresponsibility which its clever author successfully affects. . . . We trust this is only the first of many such books, for the author of Obiter Dicta has it in him to delight his gen- eration for long years to come with writjng as little commonplace and as abounding in point and wit as any that has been seen in a bookseller's shop since his favorite Charles Lamb ceased to button-hole and fascinate English mankind." Liverpool Daily Post, " Such work as this needs no name to carry it ; its qualifications appear on the surface, and not only solicit, but command attention and hearing. It is a book which will interest and delight all lovers of good writing, and especial- ly all those who enjoy contact with a fresh, suggestive, incisive thinker," The Christian Union. "A collection of papers of which, per- haps, the most obvious quality is its lit- erary quality. The book is neat, ap- posite, clever, full of quaint allusions, happy thoughts, and apt unfamiliar quo- tations." Boston Advertiser. " The essays are all cleverly written. There is an air of ease and restfulness about them that is quite refreshing." Brooklyn Times. *' The book is pervaded by freshness, manliness, fine feeling, and intellectual integrity." New York Times. 'Charmingly written, and always eminently readable." Philadelphia. Record. "The little volume Is a delightful one, and its essays are written with great charm of style and winning frankness. The book is full of pleasant and refined reading tor all people of cultivated tastes. r ' Boston Saturday Evening: Gazette. "The tone and spirit of the essays are admirable ; there is no attempt at ped- antry, no painful display of contorted wit: the essays resemble the careful conversation of a cultured gentleman, and they are thoroughly fresh and en- tertaining." Buffalo Times, "The book is remarkable fora light- ness of touch and vivacity worthy of the best French writers, as well as fora fundamental tone of good sense that is all-English." The Examiner. " The writer of this volume represents the best criticism of the day. He would apply his principles to every art of ex- pression, and to every habit of thinking. He would have all mental processes brought before the reason for its judg- ment. Everywhere is evinced a strong artistic sense. Consistency and sym- metry are insisted upon in the develop- ment and employment of thought. The book is wisely written, and it deserves to be wisely read." Boston Transcript. " Wit, tenderness, delivery, and dis- cerning criticism are combined in an un- usual degree, and the letters, taken as a croup, constitute one of the freshest and most pleasing series of literary essays printed for many a day." Boston Journal. "The topics of these letters Indicate a scholarly study, and are handled with a vivacity which, extending from the grave to the gay, makes the volume an instructive and charming literary com- panion." Chicago Interior. QB1TER DICTA. (SECOND SERIES.) BY AUGUSTINE BIRRELL. / Vol., Elzevir i6mo. Gilt Top, $1.00. CONTENTS. Milton. Pope. Johnson. Burke. The Muse of History. Charles Lamb. Emerson. The Office of Literature. Worn-out Types. Cambridge and the Poets. Book-buying. The remarkable reception which was accorded to the first series of this work, and tlie large sale which it met with in all parts of the country, almost immediately on publication, -juarranls the belief that a still larger demand will arise for the second series. The subjects treated of in the second series of OBITER DICTA have a permanent interest ; and are such as will draw special attention in consequence of many of them having been under recent discussion. Two CHARMING VOLUMES OF POETRY. AirsfromArcady and Elsewhere By H. C. BUNNER. 1 Vol., 13mo, Grilt Top, $1.35. "It is not often that we have in our hands a volume of sweeter or more finished verses. ... In choosing Love for a conductor, who alone may open the way to Arcady, the poet indicates the theme on which he sings best, and which reflects at some angle, or repeats in some strain the inspiration of the great poetic and dramatic passion of life. His poems are thrown together in a delicately concealed order, which is j ^st perceptible enough to give an impression of progress and movement." The Independent. Ballades and Verses Vain. By ANDREW LANG. 1 "Vol., 13nao, Grilt Top, $1.5O. "The book is a little treasury of refined thought, graceful verse, world-philosophy, quiet humor, and sometimes a gentle cynicism. The versification is always polished, the sentiment delicate, and the diction vigorous and varied. It is a wholly charming production." Boston Saturday Evening Gazette. *** For sale by all booksellers, or sent, post-paid, upon receipt of price, by CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS, Publishers, 743 AND 745 BROADWAY, NEW YORK. DATE DUE GAYLORD PRINTED IN U.S.* U SOUTHERN REGIONAL UBRARY FACILITY A 000792716 3