_ _^^ 
 
 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-
 
 3<D JOHN MILTON. 
 
 ism, were ever in the same room together, 
 or exchanged words with one another. 
 Milton's name does not occur in the great 
 history of Lord Clarendon. Whitelocke, 
 who was the leading member of the Com- 
 mittee which Milton served, only mentions 
 him once. Thurloe spoke of him as a blind 
 man who wrote Latin letters. Richard 
 Baxter, in his folio history of his Life and 
 Times, never mentions Milton at all.* He 
 was just a clerk in the service of the Com- 
 monwealth, of a scholarly bent, peculiar 
 habit of thought, and somewhat of an odd 
 temper. He was not the man to cultivate 
 great acquaintances, or to fritter away his 
 time waiting the convenience of other peo- 
 ple. When once asked to use his influence 
 to obtain for a friend an appointment, he 
 replied he had no influence, 'propter pau- 
 cissimas familiaritates meas cum gratio- 
 sis, qui domi fere, idque libenter, me conti- 
 neo' The busy great men of the day 
 would have been more than astonished, 
 they would have been disgusted, had they 
 been told that posterity would refer to most 
 of them compendiously, as having lived 
 
 * See note to Mitford's Milton, Vol. I., clii.
 
 JOHN MIL TON. 3 1 
 
 in the age of Milton. But this need not 
 trouble us. 
 
 On the Continent Milton enjoyed a wider 
 reputation, on account of his controversy 
 with the great European scholar, Salmasius, 
 on the sufficiently important and interest- 
 ing, and then novel, subject of the execu- 
 tion of Charles I. Was it justifiable ? Sal- 
 masius, a scholar and a Protestant, though 
 of an easy-going description, was employed, 
 or rather, as he had no wages (Milton's 
 hundred Jacobuses being fictitious), nomi- 
 nated by Charles, afterwards the Second, to 
 indict the regicides at the bar of European . 
 opinion, which accordingly he did in the 
 Latin language. The work reached this 
 country in the autumn of 1649, an d ft Qv ' l ~ 
 dently became the duty of somebody to an- 
 swer it. Two qualifications were necessary 
 the replier must be able to read Latin, 
 and to write it after a manner which should 
 escape the ridicule of the scholars of Ley- 
 den, Geneva, and Paris. Milton occurred 
 to somebody's mind, and the task was en- 
 trusted to him. It is not to be supposed 
 that Cromwell was ever at the pains to read 
 Salmasius for himself, but still it would not
 
 32 JOHN MILTON, 
 
 have done to have it said that the Defemio 
 Regia of so celebrated a scholar as Salma- 
 sius remained unanswered, and so the ap- 
 pointment was confirmed, and Milton, no 
 new hand at a pamphlet, set to work. In 
 March 1651 his first Defence of the English 
 People was in print. In this great pam- 
 phlet Milton asserts, as against the doctrine 
 of the divine right of kings, the undis- 
 puted sovereignty of the people ; and he 
 maintains the proposition that, as well by 
 the law of God, as by the law of nations, 
 and the law of England, a king of England 
 may be brought to trial and death, the 
 people being discharged from all obligations 
 of loyalty when a lawful prince becomes a 
 tyrant, or gives himself over to sloth and 
 voluptuousness. This noble argument, alike 
 worthy of the man and the occasion, is 
 doubtless overclouded and disfigured by 
 personal abuse of Salmasius, whose rela- 
 tions with his wife had surely as little to do 
 with the head of Charles I. as had poor 
 Mr. Dick's memorial. Salmasius, it appears, 
 was henpecked, and to allow yourself to be 
 henpecked was, in Milton's opinion, a high 
 crime and misdemeanour against humanity,
 
 JOHN MILTON. 33 
 
 and one which rendered a man infamous, 
 and disqualified him from taking part in 
 debate. 
 
 It has always been reported that Salma- 
 sius, who was getting on in years, and had 
 many things to trouble him besides his own 
 wife, perished in tfie effort of writing a re- 
 ply to Milton, in which he made use of lan- 
 guage quite as bad as any of his opponent's ; 
 but it now appears that this is not so. In- 
 deed, it is generally rash to attribute a 
 man's death to a pamphlet, or an article, 
 either of his own or anybody else's. 
 
 Salmasius, however, died, though from 
 natural causes, and his reply was not pub- 
 lished till after the Restoration, when the 
 question had become, what it has ever since 
 remained, academical. 
 
 Other pens were quicker, and to their 
 productions Milton, in 1654, replied with 
 his Second Defence of the English People, a 
 tract containing autobiographical details of 
 immense interest and charm. By this time 
 he was totally blind, though, with a touch 
 of that personal sensitiveness ever charac- 
 teristic of him, he is careful to tell Europe, 
 in the Second Defence, that externally his
 
 34 JOHN MILTON. 
 
 eyes were uninjured, and shone with an un- 
 clouded light. 
 
 Milton's Defences of the English People 
 are rendered provoking by his extraordi- 
 nary language concerning his opponents. 
 "Numskull," "beast," "fool," "puppy," 
 " knave," " ass," " mongrel-cur," are but 
 a few of the epithets that may be selected 
 for this descriptive catalogue. This is 
 doubtless mere matter of pleading, a rule 
 of the forum where controversies between 
 scholars are conducted ; but for that very 
 reason it makes the pamphlets as pro- 
 voking to an ordinary reader as an old 
 bill of complaint in Chancery must have 
 been to an impatient suitor who wanted 
 his money. The main issues, when cleared 
 of personalities, are important enough, and 
 are stated by Milton with great clearness. 
 ' Our king made not us, but we him. Na- 
 ture has given fathers to us all, but we 
 ourselves appointed our own king ; so that 
 the people is not for the king, but the king 
 for them.' It was made a matter of great 
 offence amongst monarchs and monarchi- 
 cal persons that Charles was subjected to 
 the indignity of a trial. With murders and
 
 JOHN MILTON. 35 
 
 poisonings kings were long familiar. These 
 were part of the perils of the voyage, for 
 which they were prepared, but, as Salma- 
 sius put it, ' for a king to be arraigned in 
 a court of judicature, to be put to plead 
 for his life, to have sentence of death pro- 
 nounced against him, and that sentence 
 executed,' oh! horrible impiety. To this 
 Milton replies : ' Tell me, thou superlative 
 fool, whether it be not more just, more 
 agreeable to the rules of humanity and 
 the laws of all human societies, to bring 
 a criminal, be his offence what it will, be- 
 fore a court of justice, to give him leave 
 to speak for himself, and if the law con- 
 demns him, then to put him to death as 
 he has deserved, so as he may have time 
 to repent or to recollect himself ; than 
 presently, as soon as ever he is taken, to 
 butcher him without more ado ? ' 
 
 But a king of any spirit would probably 
 answer that he preferred to have his des- 
 potism tempered by assassination than by 
 the mercy of a court of John Miltons. To 
 which answer Milton would have rejoined, 
 ' Despotism, I know you not, since we are 
 as free as any people under heaven.'
 
 36 JOHN MILTON. 
 
 The weakest part in Milton's case is his 
 having to admit that the Parliament was 
 overawed by the army, which he says was 
 wiser than the senators. 
 
 Milton's address to his countrymen, with 
 which he concludes the first defence, is 
 veritably in his 'grand style ' : 
 
 'He has gloriously delivered you, the 
 first of nations, from the two greatest mis- 
 chiefs of this life tyranny and super- 
 stition. He has endued you with great- 
 ness of mind to be First of Mankind, who 
 after having confined their own king and 
 having had him delivered into their hands, 
 have not scrupled to condemn him judi- 
 cially, and pursuant to that sentence of 
 condemnation to put him to death. After 
 performing so glorious an action as this, 
 you ought to do nothing that 's mean and 
 little ; you ought not to think of, much less 
 do, anything but what is great and sublime. 
 Which to attain to, this is your only way : 
 as you have subdued your enemies in the 
 field, so to make it appear that you of all 
 mankind are best able to subdue Ambition, 
 Avarice, the love of Riches, and can best 
 avoid the corruptions that prosperity is apt
 
 JOHN MILTON. 37 
 
 to introduce. These are the only argu- 
 ments by which you will be able to evince 
 that you are not such persons as this fellow 
 represents you, traitors, robbers, murderers, 
 parricides, madmen, that you did not put 
 your king to death out of any ambitious 
 design that it was not an act of fury or 
 madness, but that it was wholly out of love 
 to your liberty, your religion, to justice, 
 virtue, and your country, that you punished 
 a tyrant. But if it should fall out other- 
 wise (which God forbid), if, as you have 
 been valiant in war, you should grow de- 
 bauched in peace, and that you should not 
 have learnt, by so eminent, so remarkable 
 an example before your eyes, to fear God, 
 and work righteousness ; for my part I 
 shall easily grant and confess (for I cannot 
 deny it), whatever ill men may speak or 
 think of you, to be very true. And you 
 will find in time that God's displeasure 
 against you will be greater than it has 
 been against your adversaries greater 
 than His grace and favour have been to 
 yourselves, which you have had larger ex- 
 perience of than any other nation under 
 heaven.'
 
 38 JOHN MILTON. 
 
 This controversy naturally excited great- 
 er interest abroad, where Latin was famil- 
 iarly known, than ever it did here at home. 
 Though it cost Milton his sight, or at all 
 events accelerated the hour of his blind- 
 ness, he appears greatly to have enjoyed 
 conducting a high dispute in the face of 
 Europe. ' I am,' so he says, ' spreading 
 abroad amongst the cities, the kingdoms, 
 and nations, the restored culture of civil- 
 ity and freedom of life.' We certainly 
 managed in this affair of the execution of 
 Charles to get rid of that note of insularity 
 which renders our politics uninviting to 
 the stranger. 
 
 Milton, despite his blindness, remained 
 in the public service until after the death 
 of Cromwell ; in fact, he did not formally 
 resign until after the Restoration. He 
 played no part, having none to play, in the 
 performances that occurred between those 
 events. He poured forth pamphlets, tmt 
 there is no reason to believe that they were 
 read otherwise than carelessly and by few. 
 His ideas were his own, and never had a 
 chance of becoming fruitful. There seemed 
 to him to be a ready and an easy way to
 
 JOHN MILTON. 39 
 
 establish a free Commonwealth, but on 
 the whole it turned out that the easiest 
 thing to do was to invite Charles Stuart to 
 reascend the throne of his ancestors, which 
 he did, and Milton went into hiding. 
 
 It is terrible to think how risky the sit- 
 uation was. Milton was undoubtedly in 
 danger of his life, and Paradise Lost was 
 unwritten. He was for a time under ar- 
 rest. But after all he was not one of the 
 regicides he was only a scribe who had 
 defended regicide. Neither was he a man 
 well associated. He was a solitary, and, 
 for the most part, an unpopular thinker, 
 and blind withal. He was left alone for 
 the rest of his clays. He lived first in 
 Jewin Street, off Aldersgate Street, and 
 finally in Artillery Walk, Bunhill Fields. 
 He had married, four years after his first 
 wife's death, a lady who died within a 
 twelvemonth, though her memory is kept 
 ever fresh, generation after generation, by 
 her husband's sonnet beginning, 
 
 ' Methought I saw my late espoused saint.' 
 
 Dr. Johnson, it is really worth remember- 
 ing, called this a poor sonnet. In 1664
 
 4O JOHN MILTON. 
 
 Milton married a third and last wife, a lady 
 he had never seen, and who survived her 
 husband for no less a period than fifty- 
 three years, not dying till the year, 1727. 
 The poet's household, like his country, 
 never realised any of his ideals. His third 
 wife took decent care of him, and there 
 the matter ended. He did not belong to 
 the category of adored fathers. His daugh- 
 ters did not love him it seems even 
 probable they disliked him. Mr. Pattison 
 has pointed out that Milton never was on 
 terms even with the scholars of his age. 
 Political acquaintances he had none. He 
 was, in puritan language, ' unconnected 
 with any place of worship,' and had there- 
 fore no pastoral visits to receive, or ser- 
 mons to discuss. The few friends he had 
 were mostly young men who were attracted 
 to him, and were glad to give him their 
 company ; and it is well that he had this 
 pleasure, for he was ever in his wishes a 
 social man not intended to live alone, 
 and blindness must have made society lit- 
 tle short of a necessity for him. 
 
 Now it was, in the evening of his days, 
 with a Stuart once more upon the throne,
 
 JOHN MILTON. 41 
 
 and Episcopacy finally installed, that Mil- 
 ton, a defeated thinker, a baffled pamphlet- 
 eer for had not Salmasius triumphed? 
 with Horton and Italy far, far behind 
 him, set himself to keep the promise of his 
 glorious youth, and compose a poem the 
 world should not willingly let die. His 
 manner of life was this. In summer he 
 rose at four, in winter at five. He went to 
 bed at nine. He began the day with hav- 
 ing the Hebrew Scriptures read to him. 
 Then he contemplated. At seven his man 
 came to him again, and read and wrote till 
 an early dinner. For exercise he either 
 walked in the garden or swung in a ma- 
 chine. Besides conversation, his only other 
 recreation was music. He played the or- 
 gan and the bass viol. He would some- 
 times sing himself. After recreation of 
 this kind he would return to his study to 
 be read to till six. After six his friends 
 were admitted, and would sit with him till 
 eight. At eight he had his supper olives 
 or something light. He was very abstemi- 
 ous. After supper he smoked a pipe of 
 tobacco, drank a glass of water, and went 
 to bed. He found the night a favourable
 
 42 JOHN MILTON. 
 
 time for composition, and what he com- 
 posed at night he dictated in the day, sit- 
 ting obliquely in an elbow chair with his 
 leg thrown over the arm. 
 
 In 1664 Paradise Lost was finished, but 
 as in 1665 came the Great Plague, and 
 after the Great Plague the Great Fire, it 
 was long before the MS. found its way 
 into the hands of the licenser. It is inter- 
 esting to note that the first member of the 
 general' public who read Paradise Lost, I 
 hope all through, was a clergyman of the 
 name of Tomkyns, the deputy of the Arch- 
 bishop of Canterbury, Dr. Sheldon. The 
 Archbishop was the State Licenser for re- 
 ligious books, but of course did not do the 
 work himself. Tomkyns did the work, and 
 was for a good while puzzled what to make 
 of the old Republican's poem. At last, 
 and after some singularly futile criticisms, 
 Tomkyns consented to allow of the pub- 
 lication of Paradise Lost, which accord- 
 ingly appeared in 1667, admirably printed, 
 and at the price of $s. a copy. The au- 
 thor's agreement with the publisher is in 
 writing as Mr. Besant tells us all agree- 
 ments with publishers should be and
 
 JOHN MILTON. 43 
 
 may be seen in the British Museum. Its 
 terms are clear. The poet was to have 
 ^5 down ; another ^5 when the first edi- 
 tion, which was not to exceed 1,500 copies, 
 was sold ; a third ^5 when a second edi- 
 tion was sold ; and a fourth and last $ 
 when a third edition was sold. He got 
 his first ^5, also his second, and after his 
 death his widow sold all her rights for 8. 
 Consequently 18, which represents per- 
 haps $o of our present currency, was 
 Milton's share of all the money that has 
 been made by the sale of his great poem. 
 But the praise is still his. The sale was 
 very considerable. The ' general reader ' 
 no doubt preferred the poems of Cleave- 
 land and Flatman, but Milton found an 
 audience which was fit and not fewer than 
 ever is the case when noble poetry is first 
 produced. 
 
 Paradise Regained was begun upon the 
 completion of Paradise Lost, and appeared 
 with Samson Agonistes in 1671, and here 
 ended Milton's life as a producing poet. 
 He lived on till Sunday, 8th November, 
 1674, when the gout, or what was then 
 called gout, struck in and he died, and was
 
 44 JOHN MILTON. 
 
 buried beside his father in the Church of 
 St. Giles's, Cripplegate. He remained la- 
 borious to the last, and imposed upon him- 
 self all kinds of drudgery, compiling dic- 
 tionaries, histories of Britain and Russia. 
 He must have worked not so much from 
 love of his subjects as from dread of idle- 
 ness. But he had hours of relaxation, of 
 social intercourse, and of music ; and it is 
 pleasant to remember that one pipe of to- 
 bacco. It consecrates your own. 
 
 Against Milton's great poem it is some- 
 times alleged that it is not read ; and yet it 
 must, I think, be admitted that for one per- 
 son who has read Spenser's Fairy Queen, 
 ten thousand might easily be found who 
 have read Paradise Lost. Its popularity 
 has been widespread. Mr. Mark Pattison 
 and Mr. John Bright measure some ground 
 between them. No other poem can be 
 mentioned which has so coloured English 
 thought as Milton's, and yet, according to 
 the French senator whom Mr. Arnold has 
 introduced to the plain reader, ' Paradise 
 Lost is a false poem, a grotesque poem, a 
 tiresome poem.' It is not easy for those 
 who have a touch of Milton's temper though
 
 JOHN MILTON. 45 
 
 none of his genius to listen to this foreign 
 criticism quite coolly. Milton was very 
 angry with Salmasius for venturing to find 
 fault with the Long Parliament for having 
 repealed so many laws, and so far forgot 
 himself as to say, ' Nam nostra leges, Ole, 
 quid ad te ? ' But there is nothing muni- 
 cipal about Paradise Lost. All the world 
 has a right to be interested in it and to find 
 fault with it. But the fact that the people 
 for whom primarily it was written have 
 taken it to their hearts and have it on their 
 lips ought to have prevented it being called 
 tiresome by a senator of France. 
 
 But what is the matter with our great 
 epic ? That nobody ever wished it longer 
 is no real accusation. Nobody ever did 
 wish an epic longer. The most popular 
 books in the world are generally accounted 
 too long, Don Quixote, the Pilgrims 
 Progress, Tom Jones. But, says Mr. Ar- 
 nold, the whole real interest of the poem 
 depends upon our being able to take it lit- 
 erally ; and again, ' Merely as matter of 
 poetry, the story of the Fall has no special 
 force or effectiveness its effectiveness 
 for us comes, and can only come, from our
 
 46 JOHN MILTON. 
 
 taking it all as the literal narrative of what 
 positively happened.' These bewildering 
 utterances make one rub one's eyes. Car- 
 lyle comes to our relief : ' All which prop- 
 ositions I for the present content myself 
 with modestly but peremptorily and irre- 
 vocably denying.' 
 
 Mr. Pattison surely speaks the language 
 of ordinary good sense when he writes, 
 ' For the world of Paradise Lost is an 
 ideal, conventional world quite as much as 
 the world of the Arabian Nights, or the 
 world of the chivalrous romance, or that of 
 the pastoral novel.' 
 
 Coleridge, in the twenty-second chapter 
 of the Biographia Literaria, points out 
 that the fable and characters of Paradise 
 Lost are not derived from Scripture, as in 
 the Messiah of Klopstock, but merely sug- 
 gested by it the illusion on which all 
 poetry is founded being thus never contra- 
 dicted. The poem proceeds upon a legend, 
 ancient and fascinating, and to call it a 
 commentary upon a few texts in Genesis 
 is a marvellous criticism. 
 
 The story of the Fall of Man, as re- 
 corded in the Semitic legend, is to me
 
 JOHN "MILTON. 47 
 
 more attractive as a story than the Tale of 
 Troy, and I find the rebellion of Satan and 
 his dire revenge more to my mind than the 
 circles of Dante. Eve is, I think, more in- 
 teresting than ' Heaven-born Helen, Spar- 
 ta's queen,' I mean in herself, and as a 
 woman to write poetry about. 
 
 The execution of the poem is another 
 matter. So far as style is concerned its 
 merits have not yet been questioned. As 
 a master of style and diction, Milton is as 
 safe as Virgil. The handling of the story 
 is more vulnerable. The long speeches 
 put in the mouth of the Almighty are 
 never pleasing, and seldom effective. The 
 weak point about argument is that it usu- 
 ally admits of being answered. For Mil- 
 ton to essay to justify the ways of God to 
 man was well and pious enough, but to 
 represent God Himself as doing so by ar- 
 gumentative process was not so well, and 
 was to expose the Almighty to possible re- 
 buff. The king is always present in his 
 own courts, but as judge, not as advocate ; 
 hence the royal dignity never suffers. 
 
 It is narrated of an eminent barrister, 
 who became a most polished judge, Mr.
 
 48 JOHN MILTON. 
 
 Knight Bruce, that once, when at the very 
 head of his profession, he was taken in be- 
 fgre a Master in Chancery, an office since 
 abolished, and found himself pitted against 
 a little snip of an attorney's clerk, scarce 
 higher than the table, who, nothing daunt- 
 ed, and by the aid of authorities he cited 
 from a bundle of books as big as himself, 
 succeeded in worsting Knight Bruce, whom 
 he persisted in calling over and over again 
 ' my learned friend.' Mr. Bruce treated 
 the imp with that courtesy which is always 
 an opponent's due, but he never went be- 
 fore the Masters any more. 
 
 The Archangel has not escaped the re- 
 proach often brought against affable per- 
 sons of being a bit of a bore, and though 
 this is to speak unbecomingly, it must be 
 owned that the reader is glad whenever 
 Adam plucks up heart of grace and gets 
 in a word edgeways. Mr. Bagehot has 
 complained of Milton's angels. He says 
 they are silly. But this is, I think, to in- 
 tellectualise too much. There are some 
 classes who are fairly exempted from all 
 obligation to be intelligent, and these airy 
 messengers are surely amongst that num-
 
 JOHN' MILTON. 49 
 
 ber. Tfye retinue of a prince or of a bride 
 justify their choice if they are well-looking 
 and group nicely. 
 
 But these objections do not touch the 
 main issue. Here is the story of the loss 
 of Eden, told enchantingly, musically, and 
 in the grand style. ' Who,' says M. Scherer, 
 in a passage quoted by Mr. Arnold, ' can 
 read the eleventh and twelfth books with- 
 out yawning ? ' People, of course, are free 
 to yawn when they please, provided they 
 put their hands to their mouths ; but in 
 answer to this insulting question, one is 
 glad to be able to remember how Cole- 
 ridge has singled out Adam's vision of 
 future events contained in these books as 
 especially deserving of attention. But to 
 read them is to repel the charge. 
 
 There was no need for Mr. Arnold, of 
 all men, to express dissatisfaction with 
 Milton 
 
 ' Words which no ear ever to hear in heaven 
 Expected ; least of all from thee, ingrate, 
 In place thyself so high above thy peers.' 
 
 The first thing for people to be taught 
 is to enjoy great things greatly. The spots 
 on the sun may be an interesting study,
 
 50 JOHN MILTON. 
 
 but anyhow the sun is not all spots. In- 
 deed, sometimes in the early year, when 
 he breaks forth afresh, 
 
 ' And winter, slumbering in the open air, 
 Wears on her smiling face a dream of spring,' 
 
 we are apt to forget that he has any spots 
 at all, and, as he shines, are perhaps re- 
 minded of the blind poet sitting in his 
 darkness, in this prosaic city of ours, swing- 
 ing his leg over the arm of his chair, and 
 dictating the lines 
 
 ' Seasons return, but not to me returns 
 Day, or the sweet approach of even or morn, 
 Or sight of vernal bloom or summer's rose, 
 Or flocks or herds, or human face divine. 
 But cloud instead, and ever-during dark 
 Surrounds me from the cheerful ways of men 
 Cut off ; and for the book of knowledge fair 
 Presented with a universal blank 
 Of nature's works, to me expunged and razed, 
 And wisdom at one entrance quite shut out. 
 So much the rather, Thou, Celestial Light, 
 Shine inwards, and the mind through all her powers 
 Irradiate there "plant eyes ; all mist from thence 
 Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell 
 Of things invisible to mortal sight.' 
 
 Coleridge added a note to his beautiful 
 poem ' The Nightingale,' lest he should be 
 supposed capable of speaking with levity
 
 JOHN MILTON. 51 
 
 of a single line in Milton. The note was 
 hardly necessary, but one loves the spirit 
 that prompted him to make it. Sainte- 
 Beuve remarks : ' Parler des poetes est 
 toujours une chose bien delicate, et sur- 
 tout quand on 1'a t6 un peu soi-meme.' 
 But though it does not matter what the 
 little poets do, , great ones should never 
 pass one another without a royal salute.
 
 POPE. 
 
 THE eighteenth century has been well 
 abused by the nineteenth. So far as I can 
 gather, it is the settled practice of every 
 century to speak evil of her immediate pre- 
 decessor, and I have small doubt that, had 
 we gone groping about in the tenth century, 
 we should yet have been found hinting that 
 the ninth was darker than she had any need 
 to be. 
 
 But our tone of speaking about the last 
 century has lately undergone an alteration. 
 The fact is, we are drawing near our own 
 latter end. The Head Master of Harrow 
 lately thrilled an audience by informing 
 them that he had, that very day, entered an 
 existing bond fide boy upon the school 
 books, whose education, however, would not 
 begin till the twentieth century. As a 
 parent was overheard to observe, ' an illus- 
 tration of that sort comes home to one.'
 
 POPE. 53 
 
 The older we grow the less confident we 
 become, the readier to believe that our 
 judgments are probably wrong, and liable, 
 and even likely, to be reversed ; the better 
 disposed to live and let live. The child, 
 as Mr. Browning has somewhere elaborated, 
 cries for the moon and beats its nurse, but 
 the old man sips his gruel , with avidity and 
 thanks Heaven if nobody beats him. And 
 so we have left off beating the eighteenth 
 century. It was not so, however, in our 
 lusty prime. Carlyle, historian though he 
 was of Frederick the Great and the French 
 Revolution, revenged himself for the 
 trouble it gave him by loading it with all 
 vile epithets. If it had been a cock or a 
 cook he could not. have called it harder 
 names. It was century spendthrift, fraud- 
 ulent bankrupt, a swindler century, which 
 did but one true action, " namely, to blow 
 its brains out in that grand universal sui- 
 cide named French Revolution." 
 
 The leaders of the neo-Catholic move- 
 ment very properly shuddered at a cen- 
 tury which whitewashed its churches and 
 thought even monthly communions affected. 
 The ardent Liberal could not but despise
 
 54 POPE. 
 
 a century which did without the franchise, 
 and, despite the most splendid materials, 
 had no Financial Reform Almanack. The 
 sentimental Tory found little to please him 
 in the House of Hanover and Whig domina- 
 tion. The lovers of poetry, with Shelley 
 in their ears and Wordsworth at their 
 hearts, made merry with the trim muses of 
 Queen Anne, with their sham pastorals, 
 their dilapidated classicism, and still more 
 with their town-bred descriptions of the 
 country, with its purling brooks, and nod- 
 ding groves, and, hanging over all, the 
 moon not Shelley's 'orbed maiden,' but 
 'the refulgent lamp of night.' And so, 
 on all hands, the poor century was weighed 
 in a hundred different balances and found 
 wanting. It lacked inspiration, unction, 
 and generally all those things for which it 
 was thought certain the twentieth century 
 would commend us. But we do not talk 
 like that now. The waters of the sullen 
 Lethe, rolling doom, are sounding too loud- 
 ly in our own ears. We would die at peace 
 with all centuries. Mr. Frederick Harri- 
 son writes a formal Defence of the Eight- 
 eenth Century. Mr. Matthew Arnold re-
 
 POPE. 55 
 
 prints half-a-dozen of Dr. Johnson's Lives 
 of the Poets. Mr. Leslie Stephen com- 
 poses a history of thought during this ob- 
 jurgated period, and also edits, in sump- 
 tuously inconvenient volumes, the works 
 of its two great novelists, Richardson and 
 Fielding ; and, finally, there now trembles 
 on the very verge of completion a splendid 
 and long-laboured edition of the poems and 
 letters of the great poet of the eighteenth 
 century, the abstract and brief chronicle of 
 his time, a man who had some of its vir- 
 tues and most of its vices, one whom it is 
 easy to hate, but still easier to quote 
 Alexander Pope. 
 
 Twenty years ago the chances were that 
 a lecture on Pope began by asking the, 
 perhaps not impertinent, question, ' Was he 
 a poet ? ' And the method had its merits, 
 for the question once asked it was easy 
 for the lecturer, like an incendiary who has 
 just fired a haystack, to steal away amidst 
 the cracklings of a familiar controversy. It 
 was not unfitting that so quarrelsome a man 
 as Pope should have been the occasion of 
 so much quarrelsomeness in others. For 
 long the battle waged as fiercely over
 
 56 POPE. 
 
 Pope's poetry as erst it did in his own 
 Homer over the body of the slain Patroclus. 
 Stout men took part in it, notably Lord 
 Byron, whose letters to Mr. Bowles on the 
 subject, though composed in his lordship's 
 most ruffianly vein, still make good read- 
 ing of a sort. But the battle is over, at 
 all events for the present. It is not now 
 our humour to inquire too curiously about 
 first causes or primal elements. As we are 
 not prepared with a definition of poetry, 
 we feel how impossible it would be for us 
 to deny the rank of a poet to one whose 
 lines not infrequently scan and almost al- 
 ways rhyme. For my part, I should as 
 soon think of asking whether a centipede 
 has legs or a wasp a sting as whether the 
 author of the Rape of tJie Lock and the 
 Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot was or was not a 
 poet. 
 
 Pope's life has been described as a suc- 
 cession of petty secrets and third-rate 
 problems, but there seems to be no doubt 
 that it began on May 2ist, 1688, in Lom- 
 bard Street, in the city of London. But 
 this event over, mystery steps in with the 
 question, What was his father ? The occu-
 
 POPE. 57 
 
 pation of the elder Pope occasioned nearly 
 as fierce a controversy as the poetical legit- 
 imacy of the younger. Malice has even 
 hinted that old Pope was a hatter. The 
 poet, of course, knew, but would n't tell, 
 being always more ready, as Johnson ob- 
 serves, to say what his father was not than 
 what he was. He denied the hatter, and 
 said his father was of the family of the 
 Earls of Downe ; but on this statement 
 being communicated to a relative of the 
 poet, the brutal fellow, who was probably 
 without a tincture of polite learning, said 
 he heard of the relationship for the first 
 time ! ' Hard as thy heart, and as thy 
 birth obscure,' sang one of Pope's too nu- 
 merous enemies in the easy numbers he 
 had taught his age. It is, however, now 
 taken as settled that the elder Pope, like 
 Izaak Walton and John Gilpin, and many 
 other good fellows, was a linen-draper. 
 He made money, and one would like to 
 know how he did it in the troublesome 
 times he lived in ; but his books have all 
 perished. He was a Roman Catholic, as 
 also was the poet's mother, who was her 
 husband's second wife, and came out of
 
 58 POPE. 
 
 Yorkshire. It used to be confidently as- 
 serted that the elder Pope, on retiring from 
 business, which he did early in the poet's 
 childhood, put his fortune in a box and 
 spent it as he needed it, a course of con- 
 duct the real merits of which are likely to 
 be hid from a lineal descendant. Old Pope, 
 however, did nothing of the kind, but in- 
 vested money in the French funds, his 
 conscience not allowing him to do so in 
 the English, and he also lent sums on bond 
 to fellow Catholics, one of whom used to 
 remit him his half-year's interest calcu- 
 lated at the rate of -4. per cent, per an- 
 num, whereas by the terms of the bond he 
 was to pay 4k P er cent, per annum. On 
 another occasion the same borrower de- 
 ducted from the interest accrued due a 
 pound he said he had lent the youthful 
 poet. These things annoyed the old gen- 
 tleman, as they would most old gentlemen 
 of my acquaintance. The poet was the 
 only child of his mother, and a queerly 
 constituted mortal he was. Dr. Johnson 
 has recorded the long list of his infirmities 
 with an almost chilling bluntness ; but 
 alas ! so malformed was Pope's character,
 
 POPE. 59 
 
 so tortuous and twisted were his ways, so 
 elaborately artificial and detestably petty 
 many of his devices, that it is not malice 
 but charity that bids us remember that, 
 during his whole maturity, he could neither 
 dress nor undress himself, go to bed or get 
 up without help, and that on rising he had 
 to be invested into a stiff canvas bodice 
 and tightly laced, and have put on him a 
 fur doublet and numerous stockings to keep 
 off the cold and fill out his shrunken form. 
 If ever there" was a man whose life was one 
 long provocation that man was the author 
 of the Dunciad. Pope had no means of 
 self-defence save his wit. Dr. Johnson was 
 a queer fellow enough, having inherited, as 
 he tells us, a vile melancholy from his fa- 
 ther, and he certainly was no Adonis to 
 look at, but those who laughed at him were 
 careful to do so behind his gigantic back. 
 When a rapacious bookseller insulted him 
 he knocked him down. When the carica- 
 turist Foote threatened to take him off 
 upon the stage, the most Christian of lexi- 
 cographers caused it to be intimated to 
 him that if he did the author of Rasselas 
 would thrash him in the public street, and
 
 60 POPE. 
 
 the buffoon desisted. ' Did not Foote/ 
 asked Boswell, 'think of exhibiting you, 
 sir ? ' and our great moralist replied, ' Sir, 
 fear restrained him, he knew I would have 
 broken his bones.' When he denounced 
 Macpherson for his Ossian frauds, and the 
 irate Celt said something about personal 
 chastisement, Johnson told him, in writing, 
 that he was not to be deterred from detect- 
 ing a cheat by the menaces of a ruffian, 
 and by way of a temporary provision for 
 his self-defence selected a most grievous 
 cudgel, six feet in height, and terminating 
 in a head (once the root) of the size of a 
 large orange. The possession of great 
 physical strength is no mean assistance to 
 a straightforward life. The late Professor 
 Fawcett, who, though blind, delighted, 
 arm-in-arm with a friend, to skate furiously 
 on the fens, never could be brought to 
 share the fears entertained on his behalf 
 by some of the less stalwart of his acquaint- 
 ances. 'Why,' he used 'to exclaim apolo- 
 getically, ' even if I do run up against any- 
 body, it is always the other fellow who gets 
 the worst of it.' But poor Pope, whom a 
 child could hustle, had no such resources.
 
 POPE. 6 1 
 
 We should always remember this, it is bru- 
 tal to forget it. 
 
 Pope's parents found in their only son 
 the vocation of their later life. He might 
 be anything he liked. Did he lisp in num- 
 bers, the boyish rhymes were duly scanned 
 and criticised ; had he a turn for painting, 
 lessons were provided. He might be any- 
 thing he chose, and everything by turns. 
 Many of us have been lately reading chap- 
 ters from the life of another only son, and 
 though the comparison may not bear work- 
 ing out, still, that there were points of 
 strong similarity between the days of the 
 youthful poet at- Binfield and those of 
 Ruskin at Herne Hill may be suspected. 
 Pope's education was, of course, private, 
 for a double reason his proscribed faith 
 and his frail form. Mr. Leslie Stephen, 
 with a touching faith in public schools, has 
 the .hardihood to regret that it was ob- 
 viously impossible to send Pope to West- 
 minster. One shudders at the thought. 
 It could only have ended in an inquest. 
 As it was, the poor little cripple was 
 whipped at Twyford for lampooning his 
 master. Pope was extraordinarily sensi-
 
 62 POPE. 
 
 tive. Cruelty to animals he abhorred. 
 Every kind of sport, from spinning cock- 
 chafers to coursing hares, he held in loath- 
 ing, and one cannot but be thankful that 
 the childhood of this super-sensitive poet 
 was shielded from the ruffianism of the 
 nether world of boys as that brood then 
 existed. Westminster had not long to 
 wait for Cowper. Pope was taught his 
 rudiments by stray priests and at small 
 seminaries, where, at all events, he had his 
 bent, and escaped the contagious error 
 that Homer wrote in Greek in order that 
 English boys might be beaten. Of course 
 he did not become a scholar. Had he done 
 so he probably would not have translated 
 Homer, though he might have lectured on 
 how not to do it. Indeed, the only evi- 
 dence we have that Pope knew Greek at 
 all is that. he translated Homer, and was 
 accustomed to carry about with him a 
 small pocket edition of the bard in the 
 original. Latin he could probably read 
 with decent comfort, though it is notice- 
 able that if he had occasion to refer to a 
 Latin book, and there was a French trans- 
 lation, he preferred the latter version to
 
 POPE. 63 
 
 the original. Voltaire, who knew Pope, 
 asserts that he could not speak a word of 
 French, and could hardly read it ; but Vol- 
 taire was not a truthful man, and on one 
 occasion told lies in an affidavit. The fact 
 is, Pope's curiosity was too inordinate 
 his desire to know everything all at once 
 too strong to admit of the delay of learning 
 a foreign language ; and he was conse- 
 quently a reader of translations, and he 
 lived in an age of translations. He was, 
 as a boy, a simply ferocious reader, and 
 was early acquainted with the contents of 
 the great poets, both of antiquity and the 
 modern world. His studies, at once in- 
 tense, prolonged, and exciting, injured his 
 feeble health, and made him the lifelong 
 sufferer he was. It was a noble zeal, and 
 arose from the immense interest Pope ever 
 took in human things. 
 
 From 170x3 to 1715, that is, from his 
 fourteenth to his twenty-ninth year, he 
 lived with his father and mother at Bin- 
 field, on the borders of Windsor Forest, 
 which he made the subject of one of his 
 early poems, against which it was alleged, 
 with surely some force, that it has nothing
 
 64 POPE. 
 
 distinctive about it, and might as easily 
 have been written about any other forest ; 
 to which, however, Dr. Johnson character- 
 istically replied that the onus lay upon the 
 critic of first proving that there is anything 
 distinctive about Windsor Forest, which 
 personally he doubted, one green field in the 
 Doctor's opinion being just like another. 
 In 1715 Pope moved with his parents to 
 Chiswick, where in 1717, his father, aged 
 seventy-five, died. The following year the 
 poet again moved with his mother to the 
 celebrated villa at Twickenham, where in 
 1733 she died, in her ninety-third year. 
 Ten years later Pope's long disease, his 
 life, came to its appointed end. His poet- 
 ical dates may be briefly summarised thus : 
 his Pastorals, 1709 ; the Essay on Criticism t 
 1711 ; the first version of the Rape of the 
 Lock, 1712; the second, 1714; the Iliad, 
 begun in 1715, was finished 1720; Eloisa, 
 1717; the Elegy to the memory of an 
 Unfortunate Lady and the Dunciad, 1728; 
 the Essay on Man, 1732; and then the 
 Epistles and Satires. Of all Pope's biog- 
 raphers, Dr. Johnson is still, and will prob- 
 ably ever remain, the best. The life indeed,
 
 POPE. 65 
 
 like the rest of the Lives of the Poets, is a 
 lazy performance. It is not the strenuous 
 work of a young author eager for fame. 
 When Johnson sat down, at the instance 
 of the London booksellers, to write the 
 lives of those poets whose works his em- 
 ployers thought it well to publish, he had 
 long been an author at grass, and had no 
 mind whatever again to wear the collar. 
 He had great reading and an amazing 
 memory, and those were at the service of 
 the trade. The facts he knew, or which 
 were brought to his door, he recorded, but 
 research was not in his way. Was he not 
 already endowed with a pension, which, 
 with his customary indifference to attack, 
 he wished were twice as large, in order 
 that his enemies might make twice as 
 much fuss over it ? None the less nay, 
 perhaps all the more for being written 
 with so little effort, the Lives of the Poets 
 are delightful reading, and Pope's is one 
 of the very best of them.* None knew the 
 
 * Not Horace Walpole's opinion. ' Sir Joshua Rey- 
 nolds has lent me Dr. Johnson's Life of Pope, which Sir 
 Joshua holds to be a chef (Taeuvre. It is a most trumpery 
 performance, and stuffed with all his crabbed phrases
 
 66 POPE. 
 
 infirmities of ordinary human nature better 
 than Johnson. They neither angered him 
 nor amused him ; he neither storms, sneers, 
 nor chuckles, as he records man's vanity, 
 insincerity, jealousy, and pretence. It is 
 with a placid pen he pricks the bubble 
 fame, dishonours the overdrawn sentiment, 
 burlesques the sham philosophy of life ; 
 but for generosity, friendliness, affection, 
 he is always on the watch, whilst talent 
 and achievement never fail to win his ad- 
 miration ; he being ever eager to repay, 
 as best he could, the debt of gratitude 
 surely due to those who have taken pains 
 to please, and who have left behind them 
 in a world, which rarely treated them 
 kindly, works fitted to stir youth to emula- 
 tion, or solace the disappointments of age. 
 And over all man's manifold infirmities, 
 he throws benignantly the mantle of his 
 stately style. Pope's domestic virtues were 
 not likely to miss Johnson's approbation. 
 Of them he writes : 
 
 ' The filial piety of Pope was in the high- 
 est degree amiable and exemplary. His 
 parents had the happiness of living till he 
 
 and vulgarisms, and much trash as anecdotes.' Letters, 
 vol. viii., p. 26.
 
 POPE. % 67 
 
 was at the summit of poetical reputation 
 till he was at ease in his fortune, and 
 without a rival in his fame, and found no 
 diminution of his respect or tenderness. 
 Whatever was his pride, to them he was 
 obedient ; and whatever was his irritability, 
 to them he was gentle. Life has, amongst 
 its soothing and quiet comforts, few things 
 better to give than such a son.' 
 
 To attempt to state in other words a 
 paragraph like this would be indelicate, as 
 bad as defacing a tombstone, or rewriting 
 a collect. 
 
 Pope has had many editors, but the last 
 edition will probably long hold the field. It 
 is more than sixty years since the original 
 John Murray, of Albemarle Street, deter- 
 mined, with the approval of his most dis- 
 tinguished client Lord Byron, to bring out 
 a library edition of Pope. The task was 
 first entrusted to Croker, the man whom 
 Lord Macaulay hated more than he did 
 cold boiled veal, and whose edition, had it 
 seen the light in the great historian's life- 
 time, would have been, whatever its merits, 
 well basted in the Edinburgh Review. But 
 Croker seems to have made no real pro-
 
 68 POPE. 
 
 gress ; for though occasionally advertised 
 amongst Mr. Murray's list of forthcoming 
 works, the first volume did not make its 
 appearance until 1871, fourteen years after 
 Croker's death. The new editor was the 
 Rev. Whitwell Elwin, a clergyman, with 
 many qualifications for the task, patient, 
 sensible, not too fluent, but an intense 
 hater of Pope. 'To be wroth with one 
 you love,' sings Coleridge, ' doth work like 
 madness in the brain ; ' and to edit in nu- 
 merous volumes the works of a man you 
 cordially dislike and always mistrust has 
 something of the same effect, whilst it is 
 certainly hard measure on the poor fellow 
 edited. His lot if I may venture upon a 
 homely comparison founded upon a lively 
 reminiscence of childhood resembles that 
 of an unfortunate infant being dressed by 
 an angry nurse, in whose malicious hands 
 the simplest operations of the toilet, to say 
 nothing of the severer processes of the tub, 
 can easily be made the vehicles of no mean 
 torture. Good cause can be shown for 
 hating Pope if you are so minded, but it is 
 something of a shame to hate him and edit 
 him too. The Rev. Mr. Elwin unravels
 
 POPE. 69 
 
 the web of Pope's follies with too rough a 
 hand for my liking ; and he was, besides, 
 far too apt to believe his poet in the wrong 
 simply because somebody has said he was. 
 For example, he reprints without comment 
 De Quincey's absurd strictures on the cele- 
 brated lines 
 
 ' Who but must laugh if such a man there be ; 
 Who would not weep if Atticus were he ! ' 
 
 De Quincey found these lines unintelligi- 
 ble, and pulls them about in all directions 
 but the right one. The ordinary reader 
 never felt any difficulty. However, Mr. 
 Elwin kept it up till old age overtook 
 him, and now Mr. Courthope reigns in 
 his stead. Mr. Courthope, it is easy to 
 see, would have told a very different tale 
 had he been in command from the first, 
 for he keeps sticking in a good word for 
 the crafty little poet whenever he decently 
 can. And this is how it should be. Mr. 
 Courthope's Life, which will be the con- 
 cluding volume of Mr. Murray's edition, 
 is certain to be a fascinating book. 
 
 It is Pope's behaviour about his letters 
 that is now found peculiarly repellent. 
 Acts of diseased egotism sometimes ex-
 
 7O POPE. 
 
 cite an indignation which injurious crimes 
 fail to arouse. 
 
 The whole story is too long to be told, 
 and is by this time tolerably familiar. 
 Here, however, is part of it. In early 
 life Pope began writing letters, bits of 
 pompous insincerity, as indeed the letters 
 of clever boys generally are, to men old 
 enough to be his grandparents, who had 
 been struck by his precocity and antici- 
 pated his fame ; and being always master 
 .of his own time, and passionately fond of 
 composition, he kept up the habit so 
 formed, and wrote his letters as one might 
 fancy the celebrated Blair composing his 
 sermons, with much solemnity, very slowly, 
 and without emotion. A packet of these 
 addressed to a gentleman owning the once 
 I proud name of Cromwell, and who was cer- 
 I tainly ' guiltless of his country's blood,' - 
 for all that is now known of him is that he 
 used to go hunting in a tie-wig, that is, a 
 full-bottomed wig, tied up at the ends, 
 had been given by that gentlemen to a 
 lady with whom he had relations, who 
 being, as will sometimes happen, a little 
 pressed for money, sold them for ten gui-
 
 POPE. 71 
 
 neas to Edmund Curll, a bold pirate of a 
 bookseller and publisher, upon whose head 
 every kind of abuse has been heaped, not 
 only by the authors whom he actually pil- 
 laged, but by succeeding generations of 
 penmen who never took his wages, but 
 none the less revile his name. He was 
 a wily ruffian. In the year 1727 he was 
 condemned by His Majesty's judges to 
 stand in the pillory at Charing Cross for 
 publishing a libel, and thither doubtless, 
 at the appointed hour, many poor authors 
 flocked, with their pockets full of the bad 
 eggs that should have made their brealc- 
 fasts, eager to wreak vengeance upon their 
 employer ; but a printer in the pillory has 
 advantages over other traders, and Curll 
 had caused handbills to be struck off and 
 distributed amongst the crowd, stating, 
 with his usual effrontery, that he was put 
 in the pillory for vindicating the blessed 
 memory of Her late Majesty Queen Anne. 
 This either touched or tickled the mob 
 it does not matter which who protected 
 Curll whilst he stood on high from further 
 outrage, and when his penance was over 
 bore him on their shoulders to an adja-
 
 72 POPE. 
 
 cent tavern, where (it is alleged) he got 
 right royally drunk.* Ten years earlier, 
 those pleasant youths, the Westminster 
 scholars, had got hold of him, tossed him 
 in a blanket, and beat him. This was the 
 man who bought Pope's letters to Crom- 
 well for ten guineas, and published them. 
 Pope, oddly enough, though very angry, 
 does not seem on this occasion to have 
 moved the Court of Chancery, as he sub- 
 sequently did against the same publisher, 
 for an injunction to restrain the vending 
 of the volume. Indeed, until his suit in 
 1741, when he obtained an injunction 
 against Curll, restraining the sale of a 
 volume containing some of his letters to 
 Swift, the right of the writer of a letter 
 to forbid its publication had never been 
 established, and the view that a letter was 
 a gift to the receiver had received some 
 countenance. But Pope had so much of 
 the true temper of a litigant, and so loved 
 a nice point, that he might have been ex- 
 pected to raise the question on the first 
 opportunity. He, however, did not do so, 
 and the volume had a considerable sale, 
 
 * Howell's State Trials, vol. xvii., p. 159.
 
 POPE. 73 
 
 a fact not likely to be lost sight of by 
 so keen an author as Pope, to whom the 
 thought occurred, 'Could I only recover 
 all my letters, and get them published, 
 I should be as famous in prose as I am 
 in rhyme.' His communications with his 
 friends now begin to be full of the mis- 
 creant Curll, against whose machinations 
 and guineas no letters were proof. Have 
 them Curll would, and publish them he 
 would, to the sore injury of the writer's 
 feelings. The only way to avoid this out- 
 rage upon the privacy of true friendship 
 was for all the letters to be returned to 
 the writer, who had arranged for them to 
 be received by a great nobleman, against 
 whose strong boxes Curll might rage and 
 surge in vain. Pope's friends did not at 
 first quite catch his drift. ' You need give 
 yourself no trouble,' wrote Swift, though 
 at a later date than the transaction I am 
 now describing ; ' everyone of your letters 
 shall be burnt.' But that was not what 
 Pope wanted. The first letters he recov- 
 ered were chiefly those he had written to 
 Mr. Caryll, a Roman Catholic gentleman 
 of character. Mr. Caryll parted with his
 
 74 POPE. 
 
 letters with some reluctance, and even sus- 
 picion, and was at the extraordinary pains 
 of causing them all to be transcribed ; in 
 a word, he kept copies, and said nothing 
 about it. Now it is that Pope set about as 
 paltry a job as ever engaged the attention 
 of a man of genius. He proceeded to man- 
 ufacture a sham correspondence ; he gar- 
 bled and falsified to his heart's content. 
 He took a bit of one letter and tagged it 
 on to a bit of another letter, and out of 
 these two foreign parts made up an imagi- 
 nary letter, never really written to any- 
 body, and which he addressed to Mr. Ad- 
 dison, who was dead, or to whom else he 
 chose. He did this without much regard 
 to anything except the manufacture of 
 something which he thought would read 
 well, and exhibit himself in an amiable 
 light and in a sweet, unpremeditated 
 strain. This done, the little poet de- 
 stroyed the originals, and deposited one 
 copy, as he said he was going to do, in 
 the library of the Earl of Oxford, whose 
 permission so to do he sought with much 
 solemnity, the nobleman replying with 
 curtness that any parcel Mr. Pope chose
 
 POPE. 75 
 
 to send to his butler should be taken care 
 of. So far good. The next thing was to 
 get the letters published from the copy 
 he had retained for his own use. His 
 vanity and love of intrigue forbade him 
 doing so directly, and he bethought him- 
 self of his enemy, the piratical Curll, with 
 whom, there can now be no reasonable 
 doubt, he opened a sham correspondence 
 under the initials "P. T." "P. T." was 
 made to state that he had letters in his 
 possession of Mr. Pope's, who had done 
 him some disservice, which letters he was 
 willing to let Curll publish. Curll was as 
 wily as Pope, to whom he at once wrote, 
 and told him what " P. T." was offering 
 him. Pope replied by an advertisement 
 in a newspaper, denying the existence of 
 any such letters. "P. T.," however, still 
 kept it up, and a mysterious person was 
 introduced as a go-between, wearing a cler- 
 gyman's wig and lawyer's bands. Curll 
 at last advertised as forthcoming an edi- 
 tion of Mr. Pope's letters to, and, as the 
 advertisement certainly ran, from, divers 
 noblemen and gentlemen. Pope affected 
 the utmost fury, and set the House of
 
 76 POPE. 
 
 Lords upon the printer for threatening to 
 publish peers' letters without their leave. 
 Curll, however, had a tongue in his head, 
 and easily satisfied a committee of their 
 Lordships' House that this was a mistake, 
 and that no noblemen's letters were in- 
 cluded in the intended publication, the 
 unbound sheets of which he produced. 
 The House of Lords, somewhat mystified 
 and disgusted, gave the matter up, and 
 the letters came out in 1735. Pope raved, 
 but the judicious even then opined that 
 he protested somewhat too much. He 
 promptly got a bookseller to pirate Curll's 
 edition a proceeding on his part which 
 struck Curll as the unkindest cut of all, 
 and flagrantly dishonest. He took pro- 
 ceedings against Pope's publisher, but 
 what came of the litigation I cannot say. 
 
 The Caryll copy of the correspondence 
 as it actually existed, after long remaining 
 in manuscript, has been published, and we 
 have now the real letters and the sham 
 letters side by side. The effect is gro- 
 tesquely disgusting. For example, on Sep- 
 tember 2Oth, 1713, Pope undoubtedly wrote 
 to Caryll as follows :
 
 POPE. 77 
 
 ' I have been just taking a walk in St. 
 James's Park, full of the reflections of the 
 transitory nature of all human delights, 
 and giving my thoughts a loose into the 
 contemplation of those sensations of satis- 
 faction which probably we may taste in the 
 more exalted company of separate spirits, 
 when we range the starry walks above and 
 gaze on the world at a vast distance, as 
 now we do on those.' 
 
 Poor stuff enough, one would have 
 thought. On re-reading this letter Pope 
 was so pleased with his moonshine that he 
 transferred the whole passage to an imag- 
 inary letter, to which he gave the, of course 
 fictitious, date of February roth, 1715, and 
 addressed to Mr. Blount ; so that, as the 
 correspondence now stands, you first get 
 theCaryll letter of 1713, 'I have been just 
 taking a solitary walk by moonshine,' and 
 so on about the starry walks ; and then 
 you get the Blount letter of 1715, 'I have 
 been just taking a solitary walk by moon- 
 shine ; ' and go on to find Pope refilled 
 with his reflections as before. Mr. Elwin 
 does not, you may be sure, fail to note how 
 unlucky Pope was in his second date,
 
 78 POPE. 
 
 February loth, 1715 ; that being a famous 
 year, when the Thames was frozen over, 
 and as the thaw set in on the Qth, and the 
 streets were impassable even for strong 
 men, a tender morsel like Pope was hardly 
 likely to be out after dark. But, of course, 
 when Pope concocted the Blount letter in 
 1735, and gave it any date he chose, he 
 could not be expected to carry in his head 
 what sort of night it was on any particular 
 day in February twenty-two years before. 
 It is ever dangerous to tamper with writ- 
 ten documents which have been out of 
 your sole and exclusive possession even for 
 a few minutes. 
 
 A letter Pope published as having been 
 addressed to Addison is made up of frag- 
 ments of three letters actually written to 
 Caryll. Another imaginary letter to Ad- 
 dison contains the following not inapt pas- 
 sage from a letter to Caryll : 
 
 4 Good God ! what an incongruous ani- 
 mal is man ! how unsettled in his best part, 
 his soul, and how changing and variable in 
 his frame of body. What is man altogether 
 but one mighty inconsistency ? ' 
 
 What, indeed ! The method subse-
 
 POPE. 79 
 
 quently employed by Pope to recover his 
 letters from Swift, and to get them pub- 
 lished in such a way as to create the im- 
 pression that Pope himself had no hand in 
 it, cannot be here narrated. It is a story 
 no one can take pleasure in. ' Of such an 
 organised hypocrisy as this correspondence 
 it is no man's duty to speak seriously. 
 Here and there an amusing letter occurs, 
 but as a whole it is neither interesting, 
 elevating, nor amusing. When in 1741 
 Curll moved to dissolve the injunction 
 Pope had obtained in connection with the 
 Swift correspondence, his counsel argued 
 that letters on familiar subjects and con- 
 taining, inquiries after the health of friends 
 were not learned works, and consequently 
 were not within the copyright statute of 
 Queen Anne, which was entitled, 'An act 
 for the Encouragement of Learning ' ; 
 but Lord Hardwicke, with his accustomed 
 good sense, would" have none of this ob- 
 jection, and observed (and these remarks, 
 being necessary for the judgment, are not 
 mere obiter dicta, but conclusive) : 
 
 ' It is certain that no works have done 
 more service to mankind than those which
 
 8o POPE. 
 
 have appeared in this shape upon familiar 
 subjects, and which, perhaps, were never 
 intended to be published ; and it is this 
 which makes them so valuable, for I must 
 confess, for my own part, that letters which 
 are very elaborately written, and originally 
 intended for the press, are generally the 
 most insignificant, and very little worth 
 any person's reading' (2 Atkyns, p. 357). 
 
 I am encouraged by this authority to ex- 
 press the unorthodox opinion that Pope's 
 letters, with scarcely half-a-dozen excep- 
 tions, and only one notable exception, are 
 very little worth any person's reading. 
 
 Pope's epistolary pranks have, perhaps, 
 done him some injustice. It has always 
 been the fashion to admire the letter which, 
 first appearing in 1737, in Pope's corre- 
 spondence, and there attributed to Gay, 
 describes the death by lightning of the 
 rustic lovers John Hewet and Sarah Drew. 
 An identical description occurring in a let- 
 ter written by Pope to Lady Mary Wortley 
 Montague, and subsequently published by 
 Warton from the original, naturally caused 
 the poet to be accused of pilfering another 
 man's letter, and sending it off as his own.
 
 POPE. 8 1 
 
 Mr. Thackeray so puts it in his world- 
 famous Lectures, and few literary anec- 
 dotes are wider known ; but the better 
 opinion undoubtedly is that the letter was 
 Pope's from the beginning, and attributed 
 by him to Gay because he did not want to 
 have it appear that on the date in question 
 he was corresponding with Lady Mary. 
 After all, there is a great deal to be said in 
 favour of honesty. 
 
 When we turn from the man to .the poet 
 we have at once to change our key. A 
 cleverer fellow than Pope never commenced 
 author. He was in his own mundane way 
 as determined to be a poet, and the best 
 going, as John Milton himself. He took 
 pains to be splendid he polished and 
 pruned. His first draft never reached the 
 printer though he sometimes said it did. 
 This ought, I think, to endear him to us in 
 these hasty days, when authors high and 
 low think nothing of emptying the slops of 
 their minds over their readers, without so 
 much as a cry of ' Heads below.' 
 
 Pope's translation of the 7/zWwas his 
 first great undertaking, and he worked at 
 it like a Trojan. It was published by sub-
 
 82 POPE. 
 
 scription for two guineas ; that is, the first 
 part was. His friends were set to work to 
 collect subscribers. Caryll alone got thirty- 
 eight. Pope fully entered into this. He 
 was always alive to the value of his wares, 
 and despised the foppery of those of his 
 literary friends who would not make money 
 o^it of their books, but would do so out of 
 their country. He writes to Caryll : 
 
 ' But I am in good earnest of late, too 
 much a man of business to mind metaphors 
 and similes. I find subscribing much su- 
 perior to writing, and there is a sort of 
 little epigram I more especially delight in, 
 after the manner of rondeaus, which begin 
 and end all in the same words, namely 
 " Received " and "A. Pope." These epi- 
 grams end smartly, and each of them are 
 tagged with two guineas. Of these, as I 
 have learnt, you have composed several 
 ready for me to set my name to.' 
 
 This is certainly much better than that 
 trumpery walk in the moonshine. Pope had 
 not at this time joined the Tories, and 
 both parties subscribed. He cleared over 
 ^5,000 by the Iliad. Over the Odyssey he 
 slackened, and employed two inferior wits
 
 POPE. 83 
 
 to do half the books ; but even after paying 
 his journeymen he made nearly ,4,000 
 over the Odyssey. Well might he write in 
 later life 
 
 ' Since, thanks to Homer, I do live and thrive.' 
 
 Pope was amongst the first of prosperous 
 authors, and heads the clan of cunning 
 fellows who have turned their lyrical cry 
 into consols, and their odes into acres. 
 
 Of the merits of this great work it is not 
 necessary to speak at length. Mr. Ed- 
 mund Yates tells a pleasant story of how 
 one day when an old school Homer lay on 
 his table, Shirley Brooks sauntered in, and 
 taking the book up laid it down again, 
 dryly observing, 'Ah ! I see you have 
 Homers Iliad! Well, I believe, it is the 
 best.' And so it is. Homer's Iliad is the 
 best, and Pope's Homer s Iliad is the sec- 
 ond best. Whose is the third best is con- 
 troversy. 
 
 Pope knew next to no Greek, but then 
 he did not work upon the Greek text. He 
 had Chapman's translation ever at his el- 
 bow, also the version of John Ogilby, which 
 had appeared in 1660 a splendid folio,
 
 84 POPE. 
 
 with illustrations by the celebrated Hollar. 
 Dryden had not got farther than the first 
 book of the Iliad, and a fragment of the 
 sixth book. A faithful rendering of the 
 exact sense of Homer is not, of course, to 
 be looked for. In the first book Pope de- 
 scribes the captive maid Briseis as looking 
 back. In Homer she does not look back, 
 but in Dryden she does ; and Pope fol- 
 lowed Dryden, and did not look, at all 
 events, any farther back. 
 
 But what really is odd is that in Cow- 
 per's translation Briseis looks back too. 
 Now, Cowper had been to a public school, 
 and consequently knew Greek, and made 
 it his special boast that, though dull, he 
 was faithful. It is easy to make fun of 
 Pope's version, but true scholars have sel- 
 dom done so. Listen to Professor Coning- 
 ton * : 
 
 'It has been, and I hope still is, the de- 
 light of every intelligent schoolboy. They 
 read of kings, and heroes, and mighty 
 deeds in language which, in its calm majes- 
 tic flow, unhasting, unresting, carries them 
 on as irresistibly as Homer's own could do 
 
 * In Oxford Essays for 1858.
 
 POPE. 85 
 
 were they born readers of Greek, and their 
 minds are filled with a conception of the 
 heroic age, not indeed strictly true, but 
 almost as near the truth as that which, was 
 entertained by Virgil himself.' 
 
 Mr. D. G. Rossetti, himself both an ad- 
 mirable translator and a distinguished poet, 
 has in effect laid down the first law of 
 rhythmical translation thus : 'Thou shalt 
 not turn a good poem into a bad one.' 
 Pope kept this law. 
 
 Pope was a great adept at working upon 
 other men's stuff. There is hardly any- 
 thing in which men differ more enormously 
 than in the degree in which they possess 
 this faculty of utilisation. Pope's Essay on 
 Criticism, which brought him great fame, 
 and was thought a miracle of wit, was the 
 result of much hasty reading, undertaken 
 with the intention of appropriation. Apart 
 from the limcz labor, which was enormous, 
 and was never grudged by Pope, there was 
 not an hour's really hard work in it. Dry- 
 den had begun the work of English criti- 
 cism with his Essay on Dramatic Poesy, 
 and other well-known pieces. He had also 
 translated Boileau's Art of Poetry. Then
 
 86 POPE. 
 
 there were the works of those noble lords, 
 Lord Sheffield, Lord Roscommon, Lord 
 Granville, and the Duke of Buckingham. 
 Pope, who loved a brief, read all these 
 books greedily, and with an amazing quick 
 eye for points. His orderly brain and bril- 
 liant wit re-arranged and rendered resplen- 
 dent the ill-placed and ill-set thoughts of 
 other men. 
 
 The same thing is noticeable in the most 
 laboured production of his later life, the 
 celebrated Essay on Man. For this he was 
 coached by Lord Bolingbroke. 
 
 Pope was accustomed to talk with much 
 solemnity of his ethical system, of which 
 the Essay on Man is but a fragment, but 
 we need not trouble ourselves about it. 
 Dr. Johnson said about Clarissa Harlowe 
 that the man who read it for the story 
 might hang himself ; so we may say about 
 the poetry of Pope : the man who reads it 
 for its critical or ethical philosophy may 
 hang himself. We read Pope for pleasure, 
 but a bit of his philosophy may be given 
 
 1 Presumptuous man ! the reason wouldst thou find. 
 Why formed so weak, so little, and so blind ? 
 First, if thou canst, the harder reason guess
 
 POPE. 87 
 
 Why formed no weaker, blinder, and no less ? 
 Ask of thy mother Earth why oaks are made 
 Taller and stronger than the weeds they shade ! 
 Or ask of yonder argent fields above 
 Why Jove's satellites are less than Jove ! ' 
 
 To this latter interrogatory presumptuous 
 science, speaking through the mouth of 
 Voltaire, was ready with an answer. If 
 Jupiter were less than his satellites they 
 would n't go round him. Pope can make 
 no claim to be a philosopher, and had he 
 been one, Verse would have been a most 
 improper vehicle to convey his specula- 
 tions. No one willingly rights in hand- 
 cuffs or wrestles to music. For a man 
 with novel truths to promulgate, or grave 
 moral laws to expound, to postpone doing 
 so until he had hitched them into rhyme 
 would be to insult his mission. Pope's gifts 
 were his wit, his swift-working mind, added 
 to all the cunning of the craft and mystery 
 of composition. He could say things bet- 
 ter than other men, and hence it comes 
 that, be he a great poet or a small one, he 
 is a great writer, an English classic. What 
 is it that constitutes a great writer? A 
 bold question, certainly, but whenever any- 
 one asks himself a question in public you
 
 88 POPE. 
 
 may be certain he has provided himself 
 with an answer. I find mine in the writ- 
 ings of a distinguished neighbour of yours, 
 himself, though living, an English classic 
 Cardinal Newman. He says : * 
 
 * I do not claim for a great author, as 
 such, any great depth of thought, or 
 breadth of view, or philosophy, or sagac- 
 ity, or knowledge of human nature, or ex- 
 perience of human life though these 
 additional gifts he may have, and the more 
 he has of them the greater he is, but I 
 ascribe to him, as his characteristic gift, in 
 a large sense, the faculty of expression. 
 He is master of the two-fold X6yo<s, the 
 thought and the word, distinct but insepa- 
 rable from each other. ... He always has 
 the right word for the right idea, and never 
 a word too much. If he is brief it is be- 
 cause few words suffice ; if he is lavish of 
 them, still each word has its mark, and 
 aids, not embarrasses, the vigorous march 
 of his elocution. He expresses what all 
 feel, but all cannot say, and his 'sayings 
 pass into proverbs amongst his people, and 
 
 * Lectures and Essays on University Subjects : Lecture 
 on Literature.
 
 POPE. 89 
 
 his phrases become household words and 
 idioms of their daily speech, which is tesse- 
 lated with the rich fragments of his lan- 
 guage, as we see in foreign lands the 
 marbles of Roman grandeur worked into 
 the walls and pavements of modern pal- 
 aces.' Pope satisfies this definition. He 
 has been dead one hundred and forty-two 
 years ; yet, next to Shakspeare, who has 
 been dead two hundred and seventy years, 
 and who was nearer to Pope than Pope is 
 to us, he is the most quoted of English 
 poets, the one who has most enriched our 
 common speech. Horace used, but has 
 long ceased to be, the poet of Parliament ; 
 for the late Prime Minister, who, more 
 than any other, has kept alive in Parlia- 
 ment the scholarly traditions of the past, 
 has never been very Horatian, preferring, 
 whenever the dignity of the occasion 
 seemed to demand Latin, the long roll of 
 the hexameter, something out of Virgil or 
 Lucretius. The new generation of hon- 
 ourable members might not unprofitably 
 turn their attention to Pope. Think how, 
 at all events, the labour members would 
 applaud, not with a ' sad civility,' but with
 
 9O POPE. 
 
 downright cheers, a quotation they actually 
 understood. 
 
 Pope is seen at his best in his satires 
 and epistles, and in the mock-heroic. To 
 say that the Rape of the Lock is the best 
 mock-heroic poem in the language is to 
 say nothing ; to say that it is the best in 
 the world is to say more than my reading 
 warrants ; but to say that it and Paradise 
 Regained are the only two faultless poems, 
 of any length, in English is to say enough. 
 
 The satires are savage perhaps satires 
 should' be ; but Pope's satires are some- 
 times what satires should never be shrill. 
 Dr. Johnson is more to my mind as a sheer 
 satirist than Pope, for in satire character 
 tells more than in any other form of verse. 
 We want a personality behind a strong, 
 gloomy, brooding personality ; soured and 
 savage if you will nay, as soured and 
 savage as you like, but spiteful never. 
 
 Pope became rather by the backing of 
 his friends than from any other cause a 
 party man. Party feeling ran high during 
 the first Georges, and embraced things 
 now outside its ambit the theatre, for 
 example, and the opera. You remember
 
 POPE. 91 
 
 how excited politicians got over Addison's 
 Cato, which, as the work of a Whig, and 
 appearing at a critical time, was thought 
 to be full of a wicked wit and a subtle in- 
 nuendo future ages have failed to discover, 
 amidst its obvious dulness. Pope, who 
 was not then connected with either party, 
 wrote the prologue, and in one of the best 
 letters ever written to nobody tells the 
 story of the first night. 
 
 ' The numerous and violent claps of the 
 Whig party, on the one side the theatre, 
 were echoed back by the Tories on the 
 other, while the author sweated behind the 
 scenes with concern to find their applause 
 proceeded more from the hand than the 
 head. This was the case too of the pro- 
 logue-writer, who was clapped into a 
 stanch Whig, sore against his will, at al- 
 most every two lines. I believe that you 
 have heard that, after all the applause of 
 the opposite faction, my Lord Bolingbroke 
 sent for Booth, who played Cato, into the 
 box between one of the acts, and presented 
 him with fifty guineas, in acknowledgment, 
 as he expressed it, for his defending the 
 cause of liberty so well against a perpetual
 
 92 POPE. 
 
 dictator. The Whigs are unwilling to be 
 distanced this way, as it is said, and, there- 
 fore, design a present to the said Cato very 
 speedily. In the meantime they are getting 
 ready as good a sentence as the former on 
 their side. So, betwixt them, it is proba- 
 ble that Cato, as Dr. Garth expressed it, 
 may have something to live upon after he 
 dies.' 
 
 Later on music was dragged into the 
 fray. The Court was all for Handel and 
 the Germans ; the Prince of Wales and the 
 Tory nobility affected the Italian opera. 
 The Whigs went to the Haymarket ; the 
 Tories to the Opera House in Lincoln's 
 Inn Field. In this latter strife Pope took 
 no part ; for, notwithstanding his Ode on 
 St. Cecilia's Day, he hated music with an 
 entire sincerity. He also affected to hate 
 the drama ; but some have thought this ac- 
 counted for by the fact that, early in his 
 career, he was damned for the farce of 
 Three Hours After Marriage, which, after 
 the fashion of our own days, he concocted 
 with another, the co-author in this case be- 
 ing a wit of no less calibre than Gay, the 
 author of The Beggars' Opera. The aston-
 
 POPE. 93 
 
 ished audience bore it as best they might 
 till the last act, when the two lovers, hav- 
 ing first inserted themselves respectively 
 into the skins of a mummy and a crocodile, 
 talk at one another across the boards ; then 
 they rose in their rage, and made an end 
 of that farce. Their yells were doubtless 
 still in Pope's ears when, years afterwards, 
 he wrote the fine lines 
 
 ' While all its throats the gallery extends, 
 And all the thunder of the pit ascends, 
 Loud as the wolves on Orca's stormy deep 
 Howl to the roarings of the northern deep.' 
 
 Pope, as we have said, became a parti- 
 san, and so had his hands full of ready-made 
 quarrels ; but his period was certainly one 
 that demanded a satirist. Perhaps most 
 periods do ; but I am content to repeat, his 
 did. Satire like Pope's is essentially mo- 
 dish, and requires a restricted range. Were 
 anyone desirous of satirising humanity at 
 large I should advise him to check his 
 noble rage, and, at all events, to begin with 
 his next-door neighbour, who is almost 
 certain to resent it, which humanity will 
 not do. This was Pope's method. It was 
 a corrupt set amongst whom he moved.
 
 94 POPE. 
 
 The gambling in the South Sea stock had 
 been prodigious, and high and low, married 
 and single, town and country, Protestant 
 and Catholic, Whig and Tory, took part in 
 it. One could gamble in that stock. The 
 mania began in February 1720, and by the 
 end of May the price of ;ioo stock was 
 up to .^340. In July and August it was 
 ^950, and even touched ;i,ooo. In the 
 middle of September it was down to ^590, 
 and before the end of the year it had 
 dropped to ^125. Pope himself bought 
 stock when it stood so low as ^104, but he 
 had never the courage to sell, and con- 
 sequently lost, according to his own ac- 
 count, half his worldly possessions. The 
 Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole, also 
 bought stock, but he sold as did his Most 
 Gracious Majesty the King at ^1,000. 
 The age was also a scandalous, ill-living 
 age, and Pope, who was a most confirmed 
 gossip and tale-bearer, picked up all that 
 was going. The details of every lawsuit 
 of a personal character were at his finger- 
 ends. Whoever starved a sister, or forged 
 a will, or saved his candle-ends, made a 
 fortune dishonestly, or lost one disgrace-
 
 POPE. 95 
 
 fully, or was reported to do so, be he citizen 
 or courtier, noble duke or plump alderman, 
 Mr. Pope was sure to know all about it, 
 and as likely as not to put it into his next 
 satire. Living, as the poet did, within easy 
 distance of London, he always turned up 
 in a crisis as regularly as a porpoise in a 
 storm, so at least writes a noble friend. 
 This sort of thing naturally led to quarrels, 
 and the shocking incompleteness of this 
 lecture stands demonstrated by the fact 
 that, though I have almost done, I have as 
 yet said nothing about Pope's quarrels, 
 which is nearly as bad as writing about 
 St. Paul and leaving out his journeys. 
 Pope's quarrels are celebrated. His quar- 
 rel with Mr. Addison, culminating in the 
 celebrated description, almost every line 
 of which is now part and parcel' of the 
 English language ; his quarrel with Lady 
 Mary Wortley Montague, whom he satir- 
 ised in the most brutal lines ever written 
 by man of woman ; his quarrel with Lord 
 Hervey ; his quarrel with the celebrated 
 Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, ought not 
 to be dismissed so lightly, but what can I 
 do ? From the Duchess of Marlborough
 
 96 . POPE. 
 
 Pope is said to have received a sum of 
 money, sometimes stated at ;i,ooo and 
 sometimes at ,3,000, for consenting to 
 suppress his description of her as Atossa, 
 which, none the less, he published. I do 
 not believe the story ; money passed be- 
 tween the parties and went to Miss Martha 
 Blount, but it must have been for some 
 other consideration. Sarah Jennings was 
 no fool, and loved money far too well to 
 give it away without security, and how pos- 
 sibly could she hope by a cash payment to 
 erase from the tablets of a poet's memory 
 lines dictated by his hate, or bind by the 
 law of honour a man capable of extorting 
 blackmail ? Then Pope quarrelled most 
 terribly with the elder Miss Blount, who, 
 he said, used to beat her mother ; then he 
 quarrelled with the mother because she 
 persisted in living with the daughter and 
 pretending to be fond of her. As for his 
 quarrels with the whole tribe of poor au- 
 thors, are they not writ large in the four 
 books of the Dunciad? Mr. Swinburne is 
 indeed able 'to find in some, at all events, 
 of these quarrels a species of holy war, 
 waged, as he says, in language which is, at
 
 POPE. 97 
 
 all events, strong, ' against all the banded 
 bestialities of all dunces and all dastards, 
 all blackguardly blockheads and all block- 
 headed blackguards.' 
 
 I am sorry to be unable to allow myself 
 to be wound up in Mr. Swinburne's bucket 
 to the height of his argument. There are 
 two kinds of quarrels, the noble and the 
 ignoble. When John Milton, weary and 
 depressed for a moment in the battle he 
 was fighting in the cause of an enlight- 
 ened liberty and an instructed freedom, 
 exclaims, with the sad prophet Jeremy, 
 'Woe is me, my mother, that thou hast 
 borne me, a man of strife and contention,' 
 we feel the sublimity of the quotation, 
 which would not be quite the case were 
 the words uttered by an Irishman return- 
 ing home with a broken head from Donny- 
 brook Fair. The Dunciad was quite un- 
 called for. Even supposing that we admit 
 that Pope was not the agressor, 
 
 ' The noblest answer unto such 
 Is kindly silence when they brawl.' 
 
 But it is, to say the least of it, doubtful 
 whether Pope did not begin brawling first. 
 Swift, whose misanthropy was genuine,
 
 98 POPE. 
 
 and who begged Pope whenever he thought 
 of the world to give it another lash on his 
 (the Dean's) account, saw clearly the 
 danger of Pope's method, and wrote to 
 him : ' Take care the bad poets do not out- 
 wit you as they have done the good ones in 
 every age ; whom they have provoked to 
 transmit their names to posterity. Maevius 
 is as well known as Virgil, and Gildon will 
 be as well known as you if his name gets 
 into your verses ; and as for the difference 
 between good and bad fame, it is a mere 
 trifle.' The advice was far too good to be 
 taken. But what has happened ? The 
 petty would-be Popes but for the real Pope 
 would have been entirely forgotten. As it 
 is, only their names survive in the index to 
 the Dunciad ; their indecencies and das- 
 tardly blockheadisms are as dead as Queen 
 Anne ; and if the historian or the moralist 
 seeks an illustration of the coarseness and 
 brutality of their style, he finds it only too 
 easily, not in the works of the dead dunces, 
 but in the pages of their persecutor. Pope 
 had none of the grave purpose which 
 makes us, at all events, partially sympa- 
 thise with Ben Jonson in his quarrels with
 
 POPE, 99 
 
 the poetasters of his day. It is a mere 
 toss-up whose name you may find in the 
 Dunciad a miserable scribbler's or a re- 
 splendent scholar's ; a tasteless critic's or 
 an immortal wit's. A satirist who places 
 Richard Bentley and Daniel Defoe amongst 
 the dunces must be content to abate his 
 pretensions to be regarded as a social 
 purge. 
 
 Men and women, we can well believe, 
 went in terror of little Mr. Pope. Well 
 they might, for he made small concealment 
 of their names, and even such as had the 
 luck to escape obvious recognition have 
 been hoisted into infamy by the untiring 
 labours of subsequent commentators. It 
 may, perhaps, be still open to doubt, who 
 was the Florid Youth referred to in the 
 Epilogue to the Satires, 
 
 ' And how did, pray, the Florid Youth offend 
 Whose speech you took and gave it to a friend ?' 
 
 Bowles said it was Lord Hervey, and that 
 the adjective is due to his lordship's well- 
 known practice of painting himself ; but 
 Mr. Croker, who knew everything, and was 
 in the habit of contradicting the Duke of 
 Wellington about the battle of Waterloo,
 
 IOO POPE. 
 
 says, 'Certainly not. The Florid Youth 
 was young Henry Fox.' 
 
 Sometimes, indeed, in our hours of lan- 
 guor and dejection, when 
 
 ' The heart is sick, 
 And all the wheels of being slow,' 
 
 the question forces itself upon us, What 
 can it matter who the Florid Youth was, 
 and who cares how he offended ? But this 
 questioning spirit must be checked. ' The 
 proper study of mankind is man/ and that 
 title cannot be denied even to a florid 
 youth. Still, as I was saying, people did 
 not like it at the time, and the then Duke 
 of Argyll said, in his place in the House 
 of Lords, that if anybody so much as 
 named him in an invective, he would first 
 run him through the body, and then throw 
 himself not out of the window, as one 
 was charitably hoping but on a much 
 softer place the consideration of their 
 Lordships' House. Some persons of qual- 
 ity, of less truculent aspect than McCallum 
 More, thought to enlist the poet's services, 
 and the Duchess of Buckingham got him 
 to write an epitaph on her deceased son 
 a feeble lad, to which transaction the
 
 POPE. IOI 
 
 poet is thought to allude in the pleasing 
 lines, 
 
 ' But random praise the task can ne'er be done, 
 Each mother asks it for her booby son.' 
 
 Mr. Alderman Barber asked it for him- 
 self, and was willing so at least it was 
 reported to pay for it at the Handsome 
 figure of ,4,000 for a single couplet. Pope, 
 however, who was not mercenary, declined 
 to gratify the alderman, who by his will 
 left the poet a legacy of ;ioo, possibly 
 hoping by this benefaction, if he could not 
 be praised in his lifetime, at all events to 
 escape posthumous abuse. If this were 
 his wish it was gratified, and the alderman 
 sleeps unsung. 
 
 Pope greatly enjoyed the fear he excited. 
 
 With something of exultation he sings : 
 
 ' Yes, I am proud, I must be proud to see 
 Men, not afraid of God, afraid of me ; 
 Safe frdm the bar, the pulpit, and the throne, 
 Yet touched and shamed by ridicule alone. 
 Oh sacred weapon ! left for Truth's defence, 
 Sole dread of folly, vice, and insolence ! 
 To all but heaven-directed hands denied, 
 The Muse may give thee, but the gods must guide : 
 Reverent I touch thee, but with honest zeal, 
 To rouse the watchmen of the public weal, 
 To Virtue's work provoke the tardy Hall,
 
 IO2 POPE. 
 
 And goad the prelate slumb'ring in his stall. 
 Ye tinsel insects ! whom a court maintains, 
 That counts your beauties only by your stains, 
 Spin all your cobwebs o'er the eye of day 
 The Muse's wing shall brush you all away, 
 All his grace preaches, all his lordship sings, 
 All that makes saints of queens, and gods of kings 
 All, all but truth drops dead-born from the press, 
 Like the last gazette, or the last address.' 
 
 The poet himself was very far from be- 
 ing invulnerable, and he writhed at every 
 sarcasm. There was one of his contempo- 
 raries of whom he stood in mortal dread, 
 and yet whose name he was too frightened 
 even to mention. It is easy to guess who 
 this was. It was Hogarth, who in one of his 
 caricatures had depicted Pope as a hunch- 
 back, whitewashing Burlington House. 
 Pope deemed this the most grievous insult 
 of his life, but he said nothing about it ; 
 the spiteful pencil proving more than mas- 
 ter of the poisoned pen. 
 
 Pope died on May soth, 1744, bravely 
 and cheerfully enough. His doctor was 
 offering him one day the usual encourage- 
 ments, telling him his breath was easier, 
 and so on, when a friend entered, to whom 
 the poet exclaimed, ' Here I am, dying of
 
 POPE. 103 
 
 a hundred good symptoms.' In Spence's 
 Anecdotes there is another story, pitched in 
 a higher key: 'Shortly before his death,- 
 he said to me, " What 's that ? " pointing 
 into the air with a very steady regard, and 
 then looked down on me and said, with a 
 smile of great pleasure, and with the great- 
 est softness, "'Twasa vision." It may 
 have been so. At the very last he con- 
 sented to allow a priest to be sent for, who 
 attended and administered to the dying 
 man the last sacraments of the Church. 
 The spirit in which he received them can- 
 not be pronounced religious. As Cardinal 
 Newman has observed, Pope was an unsat- 
 isfactory Catholic. 
 
 Pope died in his enemies' day. 
 
 Dr. Arbuthnot, who was acknowledged 
 by all his friends to have been the best 
 man who ever lived, be the second-best 
 who he might, had predeceased the poet ; 
 and it should be remembered, before we 
 take upon ourselves the task of judging a 
 man we never saw, that Dr. Arbuthnot, 
 who was as shrewd as he was good, had 
 for Pope that warm personal affection we 
 too rarely notice nowadays between men
 
 IO4 POPE. 
 
 of mature years. Swift said of Arbuthnot, 
 ' Oh ! if the world had but a dozen Arbuth- 
 nots in it I would burn my Travels! This 
 may be doubted without damage to the 
 friendly testimony. The terrible Dean 
 himself, whose azure eyes saw through 
 most pretences, loved Pope ; but Swift was 
 now worse than dead he was mad, dying 
 a-top, like the shivered tree he once gazed 
 upon with horror and gloomy forebodings 
 of impending doom. 
 
 Many men must have been glad when 
 they read in their scanty journals that Mr. 
 Pope lay dead at his villa in Twickenham. 
 They breathed the easier for the news. 
 Personal satire may be a legitimate, but it 
 is an ugly weapon. The Muse often gives 
 what the gods do not guide ; and though 
 we may be willing that our faults should 
 be scourged, we naturally like to be sure 
 that we owe our sore backs to the black- 
 ness of our guilt, and not merely to the fact 
 that we have the proper number of syllables 
 to our names, or because we occasionally 
 dine with an enemy of our scourger. 
 
 But living as we do at a convenient dis- 
 tance from Mr. Pope, we may safely wish
 
 FOPE. 105 
 
 his days had been prolonged, not necessa- 
 rily to those of his mother, but to the 
 Psalmist's span, so that he might have 
 witnessed the dawn of a brighter day. 
 1744 was the nadir of the eighteenth cen- 
 tury. With Macbeth the dying Pope might 
 have exclaimed, 
 
 ' Renown and grace is dead, 
 The wine of life is drawn, and the mere lees 
 Is left in the vault to brag of.' 
 
 The feats of arms that have made the 
 first ministry of the elder Pitt for ever 
 glorious would have appealed to Pope's 
 better nature, and made him forget the 
 scandals of the court and the follies of the 
 town. Who knows but they might have 
 stirred him, for he was not wholly without 
 the true poet's prophetic gift, which dreams 
 of things to come, to foretell, in that ani- 
 mated and animating style of his, which 
 has no rival save glorious John Dryden's, 
 the expansion of England, and how, in far- 
 off summers he should never see, English 
 maidens, living under the Southern Cross, 
 should solace their fluttering hearts before 
 laying themselves down to sleep with some 
 favourite bit from his own Eloisa to Abe-
 
 IO6 POPE. 
 
 lard ? Whether, in fact, maidens in those 
 latitudes do read Eloisa before blowing out 
 their candles I cannot say ; but Pope, I 
 warrant, would have thought they would. 
 And they might do worse and better. 
 
 Both as a poet and a man Pope had 
 many negations. 
 
 ' Of love, that sways the sun and all the stars,' 
 
 he knew absolutely nothing. Even of the 
 lesser light, 
 
 ' The eternal moon of love, 
 Under whose motions life's dull billows move,' 
 
 he knew but little. 
 
 His Eloisa, splendid as is its diction, and 
 vigorous though be the portrayal of the 
 miserable creature to whom the poem re- 
 lates, most certainly lacks ' a gracious some- 
 what,' whilst no less certainly is it marred 
 by a most unfeeling coarseness. A poem 
 about love it may be a love-poem it is 
 not. Of the ' wild benefit of nature,' 
 
 ' The silence that is in the starry sky, 
 The sleep that is among the lonely hills,' 
 
 Pope had small notion, though there is just 
 a whiff of Wordsworth in an observation 
 he once hazarded, that a tree is a more po-
 
 POPE. IO7 
 
 etical object than a prince in his coronation 
 robes. His taste in landscape gardening 
 was honoured with the approbation of Hor- 
 ace Walpole, and he spent ;i,ooo upon a 
 grotto, which incurred the ridicule of John- 
 son. Of that indescribable something, that 
 'greatness* which causes Dryden to uplift 
 a lofty head from the deep pit of his cor- 
 ruption, neither Pope's character nor his 
 style bears any trace. But still, both as 
 a poet and a man we must give place, and 
 even high place, to Pope. About the poetry 
 there can be no question. A man with his 
 wit, and faculty of expression, and infinite 
 painstaking, is not to be evicted from his 
 ancient homestead in the affections and 
 memories of his people by a rabble of crit- 
 ics, or even a posse of poets. As for the 
 man, he was ever eager and interested in 
 life. Beneath all his faults for which 
 he had more excuse than a whole congre- 
 gation of the righteous need ever hope to 
 muster for their own shortcomings we 
 recognise humanity, and we forgive much 
 to humanity, knowing how much need 
 there is for humanity to forgive us. In- 
 difference, known by its hard heart and its
 
 IO8 POPE., 
 
 callous temper, is the only unpardonable 
 sin. Pope never committed it. He had 
 much to put up with. We have much to 
 put up with in him. He has given enor- 
 mous pleasure to generations of men, and 
 will continue so to do. We can never give 
 him any pleasure. The least we can do is 
 to smile pleasantly as we replace him upon 
 his shelf, and say, as we truthfully may, 
 ' There was a great deal of human nature 
 in Alexander Pope.'
 
 DR. JOHNSON. 
 
 IF we should ever take occasion to say 
 of Dr. Johnson's Preface to Shakspeare 
 what he himself said of a similar produc- 
 tion of the poet Rowe, ' that it does not 
 discover much profundity or penetration,' 
 we ought in common fairness always to 
 add that nobody else has ever written 
 about Shakspeare one-half so entertain- 
 ingly. If this statement be questioned, 
 let the doubter, before reviling me, re-read 
 the Preface, and if, after he has done so, 
 he still demurs, we shall be content to 
 withdraw the observation, which, indeed, 
 has only been made for the purpose of in- 
 troducing a quotation from the Preface 
 itself. 
 
 In that document, Dr. Johnson, with his 
 unrivalled stateliness, writes as follows : 
 ' The poet of whose works I have under- 
 taken the revision may now begin to
 
 HO DR. JOHNSON. 
 
 assume the dignity of an ancient, and 
 claim the privilege of established fame and 
 prescriptive veneration. He has long out- 
 lived his century, the term commonly fixed 
 as the test of literary merit.' 
 
 The whirligig of time has brought in his 
 revenges. The Doctor himself has been 
 dead his century. He died on the I3th of 
 December, 1784. Come, let us criticise him. 
 
 Our qualifications for this high office 
 need not be investigated curiously. 
 
 ' Criticism,' writes Johnson in the 6oth 
 Idler, ' is a study by which men grow 
 important and formidable at a very small 
 expense. The power of invention has 
 been conferred by nature upon few, and 
 the labour of learning those sciences which 
 may by mere labour be obtained, is too 
 great to be willingly endured ; but every 
 man can exert such judgment as he has 
 upon the works of others ; and he whom 
 nature has made weak, and idleness keeps 
 ignorant, may yet support his vanity by 
 the name of a critick.' 
 
 To proceed with our task by the method 
 of comparison is to pursue a course open 
 to grave objection, yet it is forced upon us
 
 DR. JOHNSON. I I I 
 
 when we find, as we lately did, a writer in 
 the Times newspaper, in the course of a 
 not very discriminating review of Mr. 
 Froude's recent volumes, casually remark- 
 ing, as if it admitted of no more doubt 
 than the day's price of consols, that Car- 
 lyle was a greater man than Johnson. It 
 is a good thing to be positive. To be pos- 
 itive in your opinions and selfish in your 
 habits is the best recipe, if not for happi- 
 ness, at all events for that far more attain- 
 able commodity, comfort, with which we 
 are acquainted. 'A noisy man,' sang poor 
 Cowper, who could not bear anything 
 louder than the hissing of a tea-urn, ' a 
 noisy man is always in the right,' and a 
 positive man can seldom be proved wrong. 
 Still, in literature it is very desirable to 
 preserve a moderate measure of independ- 
 ence, and we, therefore, make bold to ask 
 whether it is as plain as the 'old hill of 
 Howth,' that Carlyle was a greater man 
 than Johnson ? Is not the precise contrary 
 the truth? No abuse of Carlyle need be 
 looked for here or from me. When a man 
 of genius and of letters happens to have 
 any striking virtues, such as purity, tern-
 
 112 DR. JOHNSON. 
 
 perance, honesty, the novel task of dwell- 
 ing on them has such attraction for us, 
 that we are content to leave the elucida- 
 tion of his faults to his personal friends, 
 and to stern, unbending moralists like Mr. 
 Edmund Yates and the World newspaper.* 
 To love Carlyle is, thanks to Mr. Froude's 
 superhuman ideal of friendship, a task of 
 much heroism, almost meriting a pension ; 
 still it is quite possible for the candid 
 and truth loving soul. But a greater than 
 Johnson he most certainly was not. 
 
 There is a story in Boswell of an ancient 
 beggar-woman who, whilst asking an alms 
 of the Doctor, described herself to him, in 
 a lucky moment for her pocket, as ' an old 
 straggler.' Johnson, his biographer tells 
 us, was visibly affected. The phrase stuck 
 to his memory, and was frequently applied 
 to himself. ' I too,' so he would say, ' am 
 an old straggler.' So too, in all conscience, 
 was Carlyle. The struggles of Johnson 
 have long been historical ; those of Carlyle 
 have just become so. We are interested 
 in both. To be indifferent would be in- 
 
 * "The late Mr. Carlyle was a brute and a boor." 
 The World, October 2Qth, 1884.
 
 DR. JOHNSON. 113 
 
 human. Both men had great endowments, 
 tempestuous natures, hard lots. They 
 were not amongst Dame Fortune's favor- 
 ites. They had to fight their way. What 
 they took they took by storm. But and 
 here is a difference indeed, Johnson 
 came off victorious, Carlyle did not. 
 
 Boswell's book is an arch of triumph, 
 through which, as we read, we see his hero 
 passing into eternal fame, to take up his 
 place with those 
 
 ' Dead but sceptred sovereigns who still rule 
 Our spirits from their urns.' 
 
 Froude's book is a tomb over which the 
 lovers of Carlyle's genius will never cease 
 to shed tender but regretful tears. 
 
 We doubt whether there is in English 
 literature a more triumphant book than 
 Boswell's. What materials for tragedy are 
 wanting ? Johnson was a man of strong 
 passions, unbending spirit, violent temper, 
 as poor as a church-mouse, and as proud as 
 the proudest of Church dignitaries ; en- 
 dowed with the strength of a coal-heaver, 
 the courage of a lion, and the tongue of 
 Dean Swift, he could knock down booksel- 
 lers and silence bargees ; he was melan-
 
 114 ' DR ' JOHNSON. 
 
 choly almost to madness, ' radically wretch- 
 ed,' indolent, blinded, diseased. Poverty 
 was long his portion ; not that genteel pov- 
 erty that is sometimes behindhand with its 
 rent, but that hungry poverty that does not 
 know where to look for its dinner. Against 
 all these things had this ' old struggler ' to 
 contend ; over all these things did this ' old 
 struggler ' prevail. Over even the fear of 
 death, the giving up of this 'intellectual 
 being,' which had haunted his gloomy fancy 
 for a lifetime, he seems finally to have pre- 
 vailed, and to have met his end as a brave 
 man should. 
 
 Carlyle, writing to his wife, says, and 
 truthfully enough, ' The more the devil 
 worries me the more I wring him by the 
 nose ;' but then if the devil's was the only 
 nose that was wrung in the transaction, 
 why need Carlyle cry out so loud ? After 
 buffeting one's way through the storm- 
 tossed pages of Fronde's Carlyle in which 
 the universe is stretched upon the rack be- 
 cause food disagrees with man and cocks 
 crow with what thankfulness and rever- 
 ence do we read once again the letter in 
 which Johnson tells Mrs. Thrale how he
 
 DR. JOHNSON: 115 
 
 has been called to endure, not dyspepsia or 
 sleeplessness, but paralysis itself : 
 
 ' On Monday I sat for my picture, and 
 walked a considerable way with little in- 
 convenience. In the afternoon and even- 
 ing I felt myself light and easy, and began 
 to plan schemes of life. Thus I went to 
 bed, and, in a short time, waked and sat up, 
 as has long been my custom ; when I felt 
 a confusion in my head which lasted, I sup- 
 pose, about half a minute ; I was alarmed, 
 and prayed God that however much He 
 might afflict my body He would spare my 
 understanding. . . . Soon after I perceived 
 that I had suffered a paralytic stroke, and 
 that my speech was taken from me. I had 
 no pain, and so little dejection, in this dread- 
 ful state, that I wondered at my own apa- 
 thy, and considered that perhaps death it- 
 self, when it should come, would excite less 
 horror than seems now to attend it. In 
 order to rouse the vocal organs I took two 
 drams. ... I then went to bed, and, strange 
 as it may seem, I think, slept. When I 
 saw light it was time I should contrive 
 what I should do. Though God stopped 
 my speech, He left me my hand. I en-
 
 Il6 DR. JOHNSON. 
 
 joyed a mercy which was not granted to 
 my dear friend Lawrence, who now per- 
 haps overlooks me, as I am writing, and 
 rejoices that I have what he wanted. My 
 first note was necessarily to my servant, 
 who came in talking, and could not imme- 
 diately comprehend why he should read 
 what I put into his hands. . . . How this 
 will be received by you I know not I 
 hope you will sympathise with me ; but 
 perhaps 
 
 ' " My mistress, gracious, mild, and good, 
 
 Cries Is he dumb ? 'T is time he shou'd." 
 
 ' I suppose you may wish to know how 
 my disease is treated by the physicians. 
 They put a blister upon my back, and two 
 from my ear to my throat, one on a side. 
 The blister on the back has done little, 
 and those on the throat have not risen. I 
 bullied and bounced (it sticks to our last 
 sand), and compelled the apothecary to 
 make his salve according to the Edinburgh 
 dispensatory, that it might adhere better. 
 I have now two on my own prescription. 
 They likewise give me salt of hartshorn, 
 which I take with no great confidence ; but 
 I am satisfied that what can be done is done
 
 DR. JOHNSON. 117 
 
 for me. I am almost ashamed of this quer- 
 ulous letter, but now it is written let it go.' 
 
 This is indeed tonic and bark for the 
 mind. 
 
 If, irritated by a comparison that ought 
 never to have been thrust upon us, we ask 
 why it is that the reader of Boswell finds 
 it as hard to help loving Johnson as the 
 reader of Froude finds it hard to avoid dis- 
 liking Carlyle, the answer must be that 
 whilst the elder man of letters was full to 
 overflowing with the milk of human kind- 
 ness, the younger one was full to overflow- 
 ing with something not nearly so nice ; and 
 that whilst Johnson was pre-eminently a 
 reasonable man, reasonable in all his de- 
 mands and expectations, Carlyle was the 
 most unreasonable mortal that ever ex- 
 hausted the patience of nurse, mother, or 
 wife. 
 
 Of Dr. Johnson's affectionate nature no- 
 body has written with nobler appreciation 
 than Carlyle himself. ' Perhaps it is this 
 Divine feeling of affection, throughout 
 manifested, that principally attracts us to 
 Johnson. A true brother of men is he, 
 and filial lover of the earth.'
 
 Il8 DR. JOHNSON. 
 
 The day will come when it will be rec- 
 ognised that Carlyle, as a critic, is to be 
 judged by what he himself corrected for 
 the press, and not by splenetic entries in 
 diaries, or whimsical extravagances in pri- 
 vate conversation. 
 
 Of Johnson's reasonableness nothing 
 need be said, except that it is patent 
 everywhere. His wife's judgment was a 
 sound one ' He is the most sensible man 
 I ever met.' 
 
 As for his brutality, of which at one time 
 we used to hear a great deal, we cannot 
 say of it what Hookham Frere said of Lan- 
 dor's immorality, that it was 
 
 ' Mere imaginary classicality 
 Wholly devoid of criminal reality.' 
 
 It was nothing of the sort. Dialectically 
 the great Doctor was a great brute. The 
 fact is he had so accustomed himself to 
 wordy warfare, that he lost all sense of 
 moral responsibility, and cared as little for 
 men's feelings as a Napoleon did for their 
 lives. When the battle was over, the Doc- 
 tor frequently did what no soldier ever did 
 that I have heard tell of, apologised to his 
 victims and drank wine or lemonade with
 
 DR. JOHNSON. 119 
 
 them. It must also be remembered that 
 for the most part his victims sought him 
 out. They came to be tossed and gored. 
 And after all, are they so much to be pitied ? 
 They have our sympathy, and the Doctor 
 has our applause. I am not prepared to 
 say, with the simpering fello\y with weak 
 legs whom David Copperfield met at Mr. 
 Waterbrook's dinner table, that I would 
 sooner be knocked down by a man with 
 blood than picked up by a man without 
 any ; but, argumentatively speaking, I 
 think it would be better for a man's repu- 
 tation to be knocked down by Dr. Johnson 
 than picked up by Mr. Froude. 
 
 Johnson's claim to be the best of ouf 
 talkers cannot, on our present materials, 
 be contested. For the most part we have 
 only talk about other talkers. Johnson's 
 is matter of record. Carlyle no doubt was 
 a great talker no man talked against 
 talk or broke silence to praise it more elo- 
 quently than he, but unfortunately none of 
 it is in evidence. All that is given us is a 
 sort of Commination Service writ large. 
 We soon weary of it. Man does not live 
 by curses alone.
 
 I2O DR. JOHNSON. 
 
 An unhappier prediction of a boy's fu- 
 ture was surely never made than that of 
 Johnson's by his cousin, Mr. Cornelius 
 Ford, who said to the infant Samuel, 'You 
 will make your way the more easily in the 
 world as you are content to dispute no 
 man's claim to conversation excellence, 
 and they will, therefore, more willingly al- 
 low your pretensions as a writer.' Unfor- 
 tunate Mr. Ford ! The man never breathed 
 whose claim to conversation excellence Dr. 
 Johnson did not dispute on every possible 
 occasion, whilst, just because he was ad- 
 mittedly so good a talker, his pretensions 
 as a writer have been occasionally slighted. 
 
 Johnson's personal character has gener- 
 ally been allowed to stand high. It, how- 
 ever, has not been submitted to recent 
 tests. To be the first to 'smell a fault' 
 is the pride of the modern biographer. 
 Boswell's artless pages afford useful hints 
 not lightly to be disregarded. During some 
 portion of Johnson's married life he had 
 lodgings, first at Greenwich, afterwards at 
 Hampstead. But he did not always go 
 home o' nights ; sometimes preferring to 
 roam the streets with that vulgar ruffian
 
 DR. JOHNSON. 121 
 
 Savage, who was certainly no fit company 
 for him. He once actually quarrelled with 
 ' Tetty,' who, despite her ridiculous name, 
 was a very sensible woman with a very 
 sharp tongue, and for a season, like stars, 
 they dwelt apart. Of the real merits of 
 this dispute we must resign ourselves to ig- 
 norance. The materials for its discussion 
 do not exist ; even Croker could not find 
 them. Neither was our great moralist as 
 sound as one would have liked to see him 
 in the matter of the payment of small 
 debts. When he came to die, he remem- 
 bered several of these outstanding ac- 
 counts ; but what assurance have we that 
 he remembered them all ? One sum of 
 ;io he sent across to the honest fellow 
 from whom he had borrowed it, with an 
 apology for his delay ; which, since it had 
 extended over a period of twenty years, 
 was not superfluous. I wonder whether 
 he ever repaid Mr. Dilly the guinea he 
 once borrowed of him to give to a very 
 small boy who had just been apprenticed 
 to a printer. If he did not, it was a great 
 shame. That he was indebted to Sir Joshua 
 in a small loan is apparent from the fact
 
 122 DR. JOHNSON. 
 
 that it was one of his three dying requests 
 to that great man that he should release 
 him from it, as, of course, the most ami- 
 able of painters did. The other two re- 
 quests, it will be remembered, were to read 
 his Bible, and not to use his brush on Sun- 
 days. The good Sir Joshua gave the de- 
 sired promises with a full heart, for these 
 two great men loved one another ; but 
 subsequently discovered the Sabbatical re- 
 striction not a little irksome, and after a 
 while resumed his former practice, arguing 
 with himself that the Doctor really had no 
 business to extract any such promise. The 
 point is a nice one, and perhaps ere this 
 the two friends have met and discussed it 
 in the Elysian fields. If so, I hope the 
 Doctor, grown 'angelical,' kept his temper 
 with the mild shade of Reynolds better 
 than on the historical occasion when he 
 discussed with him the question of 'strong 
 drinks.' 
 
 Against Garrick, Johnson undoubtedly 
 cherished a smouldering grudge, which, 
 however, he never allowed anyone but 
 himself to fan into flame. His pique was 
 natural. Garrick had been his pupil at
 
 DR. JOHNSON. 123 
 
 Edial, near Lichfield ; they had come up 
 to town together with an easy united for- 
 tune of fourpence ' current coin o' the 
 realm.' Garrick soon had the world at his 
 feet and garnered golden grain. Johnson 
 became famous too, but remained poor and 
 dingy. Garrick surrounded himself with 
 what only money can buy, good pictures 
 and rare books. Johnson cared nothing 
 for pictures how should he ? he could 
 not see them ; but he did care a great 
 deal about books, and the pernickety little 
 player was chary about lending his splen- 
 didly bound rarities to his quondam pre- 
 ceptor. Our sympathies in this matter are 
 entirely with Garrick ; Johnson was one of 
 the best men that ever lived, but not to 
 lend books to. Like Lady Slattern, he 
 had a 'most observant thumb.' But Gar- 
 rick had no real cause for complaint. John- 
 son may have soiled his folios and sneered 
 at his trade, but in life Johnson loved Gar- 
 rick, and in death embalmed his memory 
 in a sentence which can only die with the 
 English language : ' I am disappointed by 
 that stroke of death which has eclipsed 
 the gaiety of nations, and impoverished 
 the public stock of harmless pleasure.'
 
 124 DR. JOHNSON. 
 
 Will it be believed that puny critics have 
 been found to quarrel with this colossal 
 compliment on the poor pretext of its 
 falsehood ? Garrick's death, urge these 
 dullards, could not possibly have eclipsed 
 the gaiety of nations, since he had retired 
 from the stage months previous to his de- 
 mise. When will mankind learn that lit- 
 erature is one thing, and sworn testimony 
 another ? 
 
 Johnson's relations with Burke were of 
 a more crucial character. The author of 
 Rasselas and The English Dictionary can 
 never have been really jealous of Garrick, 
 or in the very least desirous of ' bringing 
 down the house ; ' but Burke had done 
 nobler things than that. He had made 
 politics philosophical, and had at least 
 tried to cleanse them from the dust and 
 cobwebs of party. Johnson, though he 
 had never sat in the House of Commons, 
 had yet, in his capacity of an unauthorised 
 reporter, put into the mouths of honoura- 
 ble members much better speeches than 
 ever came out of them, and it is no secret 
 that he would have liked to make a speech 
 or two on his own account. Burke had
 
 DR. JOHNSON. 12$ 
 
 made many. Harder still to bear, there 
 were not wanting good judges to say that, 
 in their opinion, Burke was a better talker 
 than the great Samuel himself. To cap it 
 all, was not Burke a ' vile Whig ' ? The 
 ordeal was an unusually trying one. John- 
 son emerges triumphant. 
 
 Though by no means disposed to hear 
 men made much of, he always listened 'to 
 praise of Burke with a boyish delight. He 
 never wearied of it. When any new proof 
 of Burke's intellectual prowess was brought 
 to his notice, he would exclaim exultingly, 
 'Did we not always say he was a great 
 man ? ' And yet how admirably did this 
 ' poor scholar ' preserve his independence 
 and equanimity of mind ! It was not easy 
 to dazzle the Doctor. What a satisfactory 
 story that is of Burke showing Johnson 
 over his fine estate at Beaconsfield, and 
 expatiating in his exuberant style on its 
 'liberties, privileges, easements, rights, and 
 advantages,' and of the old Doctor, the 
 tenant of ' a two-pair back ' somewhere off 
 Fleet Street, peering cautiously about, crit- 
 icising everything, and observing with 
 much coolness,
 
 126 DR. JOHNSON. 
 
 ' Non equidem invideo, miror magis.' 
 
 A friendship like this could be disturbed 
 but by death, and accordingly we read : 
 
 ' Mr. Langton one day during Johnson's 
 last illness found Mr. Burke and four or 
 five more friends sitting with Johnson. 
 Mr. Burke said to him, " I am afraid, sir, 
 such a number of us may be oppressive to 
 you." " No, sir," said Johnson, " it is not 
 so ; and I must be in a wretched state in- 
 deed when your company would not be a 
 delight to me." Mr. Burke, in a tremulous 
 voice, expressive of being very tenderly af- 
 fected, replied, " My dear sir, you have al- 
 ways been too good to me." Immediately 
 afterwards he went away. This was the 
 last circumstance in the acquaintance of 
 these two eminent men.' 
 
 But this is a well-worn theme, though, 
 like some other well-worn themes, still 
 profitable for edification or rebuke. A 
 hundred years can make no difference to a 
 character like Johnson's, or to a biography 
 like Boswell's. We are not to be robbed 
 of our conviction that this man, at all 
 events, was both great and good. 
 
 Johnson the author is not. always fairly
 
 DR. JOHNSON. 127 
 
 treated. Phrases are convenient things to 
 hand about, and it is as little the custom 
 to inquire into their truth as itistoxead 
 the letterpress on banknotes. We are con- 
 tent to count banknotes, and to repeat 
 phrases. One of these phrases is, that 
 whilst everybody reads Boswell, nobody 
 reads Johnson. The facts are otherwise. 
 Everybody does not read Boswell, and a 
 great many people do read Johnson. If 
 it be asked, What do the general public 
 know of Johnson's nine volumes octavo ? 
 I reply, Beshrew the general public ! What 
 in the name of the Bodleian has the gen- 
 eral public got to do with literature ? The 
 general public subscribes to Mudie, and 
 has its intellectual, like its lacteal suste- 
 nance, sent round to it in carts. On Sat- 
 urdays these carts, laden with 'recent 
 works in circulation,' traverse the Ux- 
 bridge Road ; on Wednesdays they toil up 
 Highgate Hill, and if we may believe the 
 reports of travellers, are occasionally seen 
 rushing through the wilds of Camberwell 
 and bumping over Blackheath. It is not a 
 question of the general public, but of the 
 lover of letters. Do Mr. Browning, Mr.
 
 128 DR. JOHNSON. 
 
 Arnold, Mr. Lowell, Mr. Trevelyan, Mr. 
 Stephen, Mr. Morley. know their Johnson ? 
 ' To doubt would be disloyalty.' And 
 what these big men know in their big way 
 hundreds of little men know in their little 
 way. We have no writer with a more gen- 
 uine literary flavour about him than the 
 great Cham of literature. No man of let- 
 ters loved letters better than he. He knew 
 literature in all its branches he had read 
 books, he had written books, he had sold 
 books, he had bought books, and he had 
 borrowed them. Sluggish and inert in all 
 other directions, he pranced through li- 
 braries. He loved a catalogue ; he de- 
 lighted in an index. He was, to employ 
 a happy phrase of Dr. Holmes, at home 
 amongst books, as a stable-boy is amongst 
 horses. He cared intensely about the fu- 
 ture of literature and the fate of literary 
 men. 'I respect Millar,' he once ex- 
 claimed ; ' he has raised the price of litera- 
 ture.' Now Millar was a Scotchman. 
 Even Home Tooke was not to stand in the 
 pillory : * No, no, the dog has too much lit- 
 erature for that.' The only time the au- 
 thor of Rasselas met the author of the
 
 DK. JOHNSON. 129 
 
 Wealth of Nations witnessed a painful 
 scene. The English moralist gave the 
 Scotch one the lie direct, and the Scotch 
 moralist applied to the English one a 
 phrase which would have done discredit to 
 the lips of a costermonger ; * but this not- 
 withstanding, when Boswell reported that 
 Adam Smith preferred rhyme to blank 
 verse, Johnson hailed the news as enthusi- 
 astically as did Cedric the Saxon the Eng- 
 lish origin of the bravest knights in the 
 retinue of the Norman king. ' Did Adam 
 say that ? ' he shouted : ' I love him for it. 
 I could hug him ! ' Johnson no doubt hon- 
 estly believed he held George III. in rev- 
 erence, but really he did not care a pin's 
 fee for all the crowned heads of Europe. 
 All his reverence was reserved for ' poor 
 scholars.' When a small boy in a wherry, 
 on whom had devolved the arduous task of 
 rowing Johnson and his biographer across 
 the Thames, said he would give all he had 
 to know about the Argonauts, the Doctor 
 was much pleased, and gave him, or got 
 
 * Anyone who does not wish this story to be true, 
 will find good reasons for disbelieving it stated in Mr. 
 Napier's edition of Boswell, vol. iv., p. 385.
 
 130 DR. JOHNSON. 
 
 Boswell to give him, a double fare. He 
 was ever an advocate of the spread of 
 knowledge amongst all classes and both 
 sexes. His devotion to letters has re- 
 ceived its fitting reward, the love and re- 
 spect of all ' lettered hearts.' 
 
 Considering him a little more in detail, 
 we find it plain that he was a poet of no 
 mean order. His resonant lines, informed 
 as they often are with the force of their 
 author's character his strong sense, his 
 fortitude, his gloom take possession of 
 the memory, and suffuse themselves through 
 one's entire system of thought. A poet 
 spouting his own verses is usually a figure 
 to be avoided ; but one could be content 
 to be a hundred and thirty next birthday 
 to have heard Johnson recite, in his full 
 sonorous voice, and with his stately elocu- 
 tion, The Vanity of Human Wishes. When 
 he came to the following lines, he usually 
 broke down, and who can wonder ? 
 
 ' Proceed, illustrious youth, 
 And virtue guard thee to the throne of truth ! 
 Yet should thy soul indulge the gen'rous heat 
 Till captive science yields her last retreat ; 
 Should reason guide thee with her brightest ray, 
 And pour on misty doubt resistless day ;
 
 DR. JOHNSON. 131 
 
 Should no false kindness lure to loose delight, 
 Nor praise relax, nor difficulty fright ; 
 Should tempting novelty thy cell refrain, 
 And sloth effuse her opiate fumes in vain ; 
 Should beauty blunt on fops her fatal dart, 
 Nor claim the triumph of a lettered heart ; 
 Should no disease thy torpid veins invade, 
 Nor melancholy's phantoms haunt thy shade ; 
 Yet hope not life from grief or danger free, 
 Nor think the doom of man revers'd for thee. 
 Deign on the passing world to turn thine eyes, 
 And pause a while from letters to be wise ; 
 There mark what ills the scholar's life assail, 
 Toil, envy, want, the patron and the gaol 
 See nations, slowly wise and meanly just, 
 To buried merit raise the tardy bust. 
 If dreams yet flatter, once again attend, 
 Hear Lydiat's life, and Galileo's end.' 
 
 If this be not poetry, may the name 
 perish ! 
 
 In another style, the stanzas on the 
 young heir's majority have such great 
 merit as to tempt one to say that the 
 author of The Jolly Beggars, Robert Burns, 
 himself, might have written them. Here 
 are four of them : 
 
 1 Loosen'd from the minor's tether, 
 
 Free to mortgage or to sell ; 
 Wild as wind and light as feather, 
 Bid the sons of thrift farewell.
 
 132 DR. JOHNSON. 
 
 ' Call the Betseys, Kates, and Jennies, 
 
 All the names that banish care. 
 Lavish of your grandsire's guineas, 
 Show the spirit of an he'ir. 
 
 ' Wealth, my lad, was made to wander, 
 
 Let it wander as it will ; 
 Call the jockey, call the pander, 
 Bid them come and take their fill. 
 
 ' When the bonny blade carouses, 
 Pockets full and spirits high 
 What are acres ? what are houses ? 
 Only dirt or wet or dry.' 
 
 Johnson's prologues, and his lines on 
 the death of Robert Levet, are well 
 known. Indeed, it is only fair to say that 
 our respected friend, the General Public, 
 frequently has Johnsonian tags on its 
 tongue : 
 
 ' Slow rises worth by poverty depressed.' 
 
 ' The unconquered lord of pleasure and of pain.' 
 
 ' He left the name at which the world grew pale 
 To point a moral or adorn a tale.' 
 
 ' Death, kind nature's signal of retreat.' 
 ' Panting time toiled after him in vain.' 
 
 All these are Johnson's, who, though he 
 is not, like Gray, whom he hated so, all
 
 DR. JOHNSON. 133 
 
 quotations, is yet oftener in men's mouths 
 than they perhaps wot of. 
 
 Johnson's tragedy, Irene, need not de- 
 tain us. It is unreadable ; and to quote 
 his own sensible words, ' It is useless to 
 criticise what nobody reads.' It was in- 
 deed the expressed opinion of a contem- 
 porary, called Pot, that Irene was the finest 
 tragedy of modern times ; but on this judg- 
 ment of Pot's being made known to John- 
 son, he was only heard to mutter, ' If Pot 
 says so, Pot lies,' as no doubt he did. 
 
 Johnson's Latin Verses have not escaped 
 the condemnation of scholars. Whose have ? 
 The true mode of critical approach to copies 
 of Latin verse is by the question How 
 bad are they ? Croker took the opinion of 
 the Marquess Wellesley as to the degree 
 of badness of Johnson's Latin Exercises. 
 Lord Wellesley, as became so distinguished 
 an Etonian, felt the solemnity of the occa- 
 sion, and, after bargaining for secrecy, gave 
 it as his opinion that they were all very 
 bad, but that some perhaps were worse than 
 others. To this judgment I have nothing 
 to add. 
 
 As a writer of English prose, Johnson
 
 134 DR - JOHNSON. 
 
 has always enjoyed a great, albeit a some- 
 what awful reputation. In childish memo- 
 ries he is constrained to- be associated with 
 dust and dictionaries, and those provoking 
 obstacles to a boy's reading 'long words.' 
 It would be easy to select from Johnson's 
 writings numerous passages written in that 
 essentially vicious style to which the name 
 Johnsonese has been cruelly given ; but 
 the searcher could not fail to find many 
 passages guiltless of this charge. The char- 
 acteristics of Johnson's prose style are co- 
 lossal good sense, though with a strong 
 sceptical bias, good humour, vigorous lan- 
 guage, and movement from point to point, 
 which can only be compared to the meas- 
 ured tread of a well-drilled company of sol- 
 diers. Here is a passage from the Preface 
 to Shakspeare : ' Notes are often neces- 
 sary, but they are necessary evils. Let 
 him that is yet unacquainted with the pow- 
 ers of Shakspeare, and who desires to feel 
 the highest pleasure that the drama can 
 give, read every play from the first scene 
 to the last, with utter negligence of all his 
 commentators. When his fancy is once 
 on the wing, let it not stoop at correction
 
 DR. JOHNSOtf, 135 
 
 or explanation. When his attention is 
 strongly engaged, let it disdain alike to 
 turn aside to the name of Theobald and of 
 Pope. Let him read on, through bright- 
 ness and obscurity, through integrity and 
 corruption ; let him preserve his compre- 
 hension of the dialogue and his interest in 
 the fable. And when the pleasures of nov- 
 elty have ceased, let him attempt exactness 
 and read the commentators.' 
 
 Where are we to find better sense, or 
 much better English ? 
 
 In the pleasant art of chaffing an author 
 Johnson has hardly an equal. De Quincey 
 too often overdoes it. Macaulay seldom 
 fails to excite sympathy with his victim. In 
 playfulness Mr. Arnold perhaps surpasses 
 the Doctor, but then the latter's playfulness 
 is always leonine, whilst Mr. Arnold's is 
 surely, sometimes, just a trifle kittenish. 
 An example, no doubt a very good one, of 
 Johnson's humour must be allowed me. 
 Soame Jenyns, in his book on the Origin 
 of Evil, had imagined that, as we have not 
 only animals for food, but choose some for 
 our diversion, the same privilege may be 
 allowed to beings above us, ' who may de-
 
 136 DR. JOHNSON. 
 
 ceive, torment, or destroy us for the ends 
 only of their own pleasure.' 
 
 On this hint writes our merry -Doctor as 
 follows : 
 
 ' I cannot resist the temptation of con- 
 templating this analogy, which I think he 
 might have carried farther, very much to 
 the advantage of his argument. He might 
 have shown that these "hunters, whose 
 game is man," have many sports, analo- 
 gous to our own. As we drown whelps or 
 kittens they amuse themselves now and 
 then with sinking a ship, and stand round 
 the fields of Blenheim, or the walls of 
 Prague, as we encircle a cockpit. As we 
 shoot a bird flying, they take a man in the 
 midst of his business or pleasure, and knock 
 him down with an apoplexy. Some of them 
 perhaps are virtuosi, and delight in the 
 operations of an asthma, as a human phi- 
 losopher in the effects of the air-pump. 
 Many a merry bout have these frolick 
 beings at the vicissitudes of an ague, and 
 good sport it is to see a man tumble with 
 an epilepsy, and revive, and tumble again, 
 and all this he knows not why. The 
 paroxysms of the gout and stone must un-
 
 DR. JOHNSON. 137 
 
 doubteclly make "high mirth, especially if 
 the play be a little diversified with the 
 blunders and puzzles of the blind and deaf. 
 . . . One sport the merry malice of these 
 beings has found means of enjoying, to 
 which we have nothing equal or similar. 
 They now and then catch a mortal, proud 
 of his parts, and flattered either .by the 
 submission of those who court his kindness, 
 or the notice of those who suffer him to 
 court theirs. A head thus prepared for the 
 reception of false opinions, and the projec- 
 tion of vain designs, they easily fill with 
 idle notions, till, in time, they make their 
 plaything an author ; their first diversion 
 commonly begins with an ode or an epistle, 
 then rises perhaps to a political irony, and 
 is at last brought to its height by a treatise 
 of philosophy. Then begins the poor ani- 
 mal to entangle himself in sophisms and to 
 flounder in absurdity.' 
 
 The author of the philosophical treatise 
 A Free Inquiry into the Nature and Origin 
 of Evil did not at all enjoy this ' merry 
 bout ' of the ' frolick ' Johnson. 
 
 The concluding paragraphs of Johnson's 
 Preface to his Dictionary are historical
 
 138 DR. JOHNSON. 
 
 prose ; and if we are anxious to find pas- 
 sages fit to compare with them in the mel- 
 ancholy roll of their cadences and in their 
 grave sincerity and manly emotion, we 
 must, I think, take a flying jump from Dr. 
 Johnson to Dr. Newman. 
 
 For sensible men the world offers no 
 better reading than the Lives of the Poets. 
 They afford an admirable example of the 
 manner of man Johnson was. The subject 
 was suggested to him by the booksellers, 
 whom as a body he never abused. Himself 
 the son of a bookseller, he respected their 
 calling. If they treated him with civility, 
 he responded suitably. If they were rude 
 to him, he knocked them down. These 
 worthies chose their own poets. Johnson 
 remained indifferent. He knew every body's 
 poetry, and was always ready to write any- 
 body's Life. If he knew the facts of a 
 poet's life and his knowledge was enor- 
 mous on such subjects he found room 
 for them ; if he did not, he supplied their 
 place with his own shrewd reflections and 
 sombre philosophy of life. It thus comes 
 about that Johnson is every bit as interest- 
 ing when he is writing about Sprat, or
 
 DR. JOHNSON. 139 
 
 Smith, or Fenton, as he is when he has got 
 Milton or Gray in hand. He is also much 
 less provoking. My own favourite Life is 
 that of Sir Richard Blackmore. 
 
 The poorer the poet the kindlier is the 
 treatment he receives. Johnson kept all 
 his rough words for Shakspeare, Milton, 
 and Gray. 
 
 In this trait, surely an amiable one, he 
 was much resembled by that eminent man 
 the late Sir George Jessel, whose civility 
 to a barrister was always in inverse ratio 
 to the barrister's practice ; and whose 
 friendly zeal in helping young and nervous 
 practitioners over the stiles of legal diffi- 
 culty was only equalled by the fiery enthu- 
 siasm with which he thrust back the At- 
 torney and Solicitor-General and people of 
 that sort. 
 
 As a political thinker Johnson has not 
 had justice. He has been lightly dismissed 
 as the last of the old-world Tories. He 
 was nothing of the sort. His cast of po- 
 litical thought is shared by thousands to 
 this day. He represents that vast army of 
 electors whom neither canvasser nor cau- 
 cus has ever yet cajoled or bullied into a
 
 140 DR. JOHNSON. 
 
 polling - booth. Newspapers may scold, 
 platforms may shake ; whatever circulars 
 can do may be done, all that placards can 
 tell may be told ; but the fact remains tha't 
 one - third ot every constituency in the 
 realm shares Dr. Johnson's 'narcotic in- 
 difference,' and stays away. 
 
 It is, of course, impossible to reconcile 
 all Johnson's recorded utterances with any 
 one view of anything. When crossed in 
 conversation or goaded by folly he was, 
 like the prophet Habakkuk (according to 
 Voltaire), capable du tout. But his domi- 
 nant tone about politics was something of 
 this sort. Provided a man lived in a state 
 which guaranteed him private liberty and 
 secured him public order, he was very much 
 of a knave or altogether a fool if he troubled 
 himself further. To go to bed when you 
 wish, to get up when you like, to eat and 
 drink and read what you choose, to say 
 across your port or your tea whatever oc- 
 curs to you at the moment, and to earn 
 your living as best you may this is what 
 Dr. Johnson meant by private liberty. 
 Fleet Street open day and night this is 
 what he meant by public order. Give a
 
 DR. JOHNSON. 141 
 
 sensible man these, and take all the rest 
 the world goes round. Tyranny was a 
 bugbear. Either the tyranny was beara- 
 ble, or it was not. If it was bearable, it 
 did not matter ; and as soon as it became 
 unbearable the mob cut off the tyrant's 
 head, and wise men went home to their 
 dinner. To views of this sort he gave em- 
 phatic utterance on the well-known occa- 
 sion when he gave Sir Adam Ferguson a 
 bit of his mind. Sir Adam had innocently 
 enough observed that the Crown had too 
 much power. Thereupon Johnson : 
 
 ' Sir, I perceive you are a vile Whig. 
 Why all this childish jealousy of the power 
 of the Crown ? The Crown has not power 
 enough. When I say that all governments 
 are alike, I consider that in no government 
 power can be abused long ; mankind will 
 not bear it. If a sovereign oppresses his 
 people, they will rise and cut off his head. 
 There is a remedy in human nature against 
 tyranny that will keep us safe under every 
 form of government.' 
 
 This is not and never was the language 
 of Toryism. It is a much more intellectual 
 ' ism.' It is indifferentism. So, too, in
 
 142 DR. JOHNSON. 
 
 his able pamphlet, The False Alarm, which 
 had reference to Wilkes and the Middlesex 
 election, though he no doubt attempts to 
 deal with the constitutional aspect of the 
 question, the real strength of his case is to 
 be found in passages like the following : 
 ' The grievance which has produced all 
 this tempest of outrage, the oppression in 
 which all other oppressions are included, 
 the invasion which has left us no property, 
 the alarm that surfers no patriot to sleep 
 in quiet, is comprised in a vote of the 
 House of Commons, by which the free- 
 holders of Middlesex are deprived of a 
 Briton's birthright representation in Par- 
 liament. They have, indeed, received the 
 usual writ of election ; but that writ, alas ! 
 wak malicious mockery ; they were insulted 
 with the form, but denied the reality, for 
 there was one man excepted from their 
 choice. The character of 4^e man, thus 
 fatally excepted, I have no purpose to de- 
 lineate. Lampoon itself would disdain to 
 speak ill of him of whom no man speaks 
 well. Every lover of liberty stands doubt- 
 ful of the fate of posterity, because the 
 chief county in England cannot take its 
 representative from a gaol.'
 
 DR. JOHNSON. 143 
 
 Temperament was of course at the bot- 
 tom of this indifference. Johnson was of 
 melancholy humour and profoundly scepti- 
 cal. Cynical he was not he loved his 
 fellow-men ; his days were full of 
 
 ' Little, nameless, unremembered acts 
 Of kindness and of love.' 
 
 But he was as difficult to rouse to enthusi- 
 asm about humanity as is Mr. Justice Ste- 
 phen. He pitied the poor devils, but he 
 did not believe in them. They were neither 
 happy nor wise, and he saw no reason to 
 believe they would ever become either. 
 * Leave me alone,' he cried to the sultry 
 mob, bawling ' Wilkes and Liberty.' ' I at 
 least am not ashamed to own that I care 
 for neither the one nor the other.' 
 
 No man, however, resented more fiercely 
 than Johnson any unnecessary interference 
 with men who were simply going their own 
 way. The Highlanders only knew Gaelic, 
 yet political wiseacres were to be found 
 objecting to their having the Bible in their 
 own tongue. Johnson flew to arms : he 
 wrote one of his monumental letters ; the 
 opposition was quelled, and the Gael got 
 his Bible. So too the wicked interference
 
 144 &R- JOHNSON. 
 
 with Irish enterprise, so much in vogue 
 during the last century, infuriated him. 
 ' Sir,' he said to Sir Thomas Robinson, 
 ' you talk the language of a savage. What, 
 sir! would you prevent any people from 
 feeding themselves, if by any honest means 
 they can do so ? ' 
 
 Were Johnson to come to life again, total 
 abstainer as he often was, he would, I ex- 
 pect, denounce the principle involved in 
 ' Local Option.' I am not at all sure he 
 would not borrow a guinea from a bystander 
 and become a subscriber to the ' Property 
 Defence League ; ' and though it is notori- 
 ous that he never read any book all through, 
 and never could be got to believe that any- 
 body else ever did, he would, I think, read 
 a larger fraction of Mr. Spencer's pamphlet, 
 ' Man versus the State,' than of any other 
 'recent work in circulation.' The state of 
 the Strand, when two vestries are at work 
 upon it, would, I am sure, drive him into 
 open rebellion. 
 
 As a letter-writer Johnson has great 
 merits. Let no man despise the epistolary 
 art. It is said to be extinct. I doubt it. 
 Good letters were always scarce. It does
 
 DR. JOHNSON. 145 
 
 not follow that, because our grandmothers 
 wrote long letters, they all wrote good 
 ones^or that nobody nowadays writes good 
 letters because most people write bad ones. 
 Johnson wrote letters in two styles. One 
 was monumental more suggestive of the 
 chisel than the pen. In the other there 
 are traces of the same style, but, like the 
 old Gothic architecture, it has grown do- 
 mesticated, and become the fit vehicle of 
 plain tidings of joy and sorrow of affec- 
 tion, wit, and fancy. The letter to Lord 
 Chesterfield is the most celebrated exam- 
 ple of the monumental style. From the 
 letters to Mrs. Thrale many good examples 
 of the domesticated style might be selected. 
 One must suffice : 
 
 ' Queeney has been a good girl, and wrote 
 me a letter. If Burney said she would 
 write, she told you a fib. She writes noth- 
 ing to me. She can write home fast enough. 
 I have a good mind not to tell her that Dr. 
 Bernard, to whom I had recommended her 
 novel, speaks of it with great commenda- 
 tion, and that the copy which she lent me 
 has been read by Dr. Lawrence three times 
 over. And yet what a gipsy it is. She no
 
 146 DR. JOHNSON. 
 
 more minds me than if I were a Branghton. 
 Pray, speak to Queeney to write again. . . . 
 Now you think yourself the first writer in 
 the world for a letter about nothing. Can 
 you write such a letter as this ? So mis- 
 cellaneous, with such noble disdain of reg- 
 ularity, like Shakspeare's works ; such 
 graceful negligence of transition, like the 
 ancient enthusiasts. The pure voice of Na- 
 ture and of Friendship. Now, of whom 
 shall I proceed to speak ? of whom but 
 Mrs. Montague ? Having mentioned Shak- 
 speare and Nature, does not the name of 
 Montague force itself upon me ? Such 
 were the transitions of the ancients, which 
 now seem abrupt, because the intermediate 
 idea is lost to modern understandings.' 
 
 But the extract had better end, for there 
 are (I fear) ' modern understandings ' who 
 will not perceive the ' intermediate idea ' 
 between Shakspeare and Mrs. Montague, 
 and to whom even the name of Branghton 
 will suggest no meaning. 
 
 Johnson's literary fame is, in our judg- 
 ment, as secure as his character. Like the 
 stone which he placed over his father's 
 grave at Lichfielcl, and which, it is shame-
 
 DR. JOHNSON. 147 
 
 ful to think, has been removed, it is 'too 
 massy and strong ' to be ever much affected 
 by the wind and weather of our literary 
 atmosphere. ' Never,' so he wrote to Mrs. 
 Thrale, 'let criticisms operate upon your 
 face or your mind ; it is very rarely that an 
 author is hurt by his critics. The blaze of 
 reputation cannot be blown out ; but it 
 often dies in the socket. From the author 
 of Fitzosbornes Letters I cannot think my- 
 self in much danger. I met him only once, 
 about thirty years ago, and in some small 
 dispute soon reduced him to whistle.' Dr. 
 Johnson is in no danger from anybody. 
 None but Gargantua could blow him out, 
 and he still burns brightly in his socket. 
 
 How long this may continue who can 
 say ? It is a far cry to 1985. Science 
 may by that time have squeezed out liter- 
 ature, and the author of the Lives of the 
 Poets may be dimly remembered as an odd 
 fellow who lived in the Dark Ages, and 
 had a very creditable fancy for making 
 chemical experiments. On the other hand, 
 the Spiritualists may be in possession, in 
 which case the Cock Lane Ghost will 
 occupy more of public attention than
 
 148 DR. JOHNSON. 
 
 Boswell's hero, who will, perhaps, be rep- 
 robated as the profane utterer of these 
 idle words : ' Suppose I know a man to be 
 so lame that he is absolutely incapable to 
 move himself, and I find him in a different 
 room from that in which I left him, shall I 
 puzzle myself with idle conjectures, that 
 perhaps his nerves have by some unknown 
 change all at once become effective ? No, 
 sir, it is clear how he got into a different 
 room he was carried? 
 
 We here part company with Johnson, 
 bidding him a most affectionate farewell, 
 and leaving him in undisturbed possession 
 of both place and power. His character 
 will bear investigation and some of his 
 books perusal. The latter, indeed, may be 
 submitted to his own test, and there is no 
 truer one. A book, he wrote, should help 
 us either to enjoy life or to endure it. His 
 frequently do both.
 
 EDMUND BURKE. 
 
 A Lecture delivered before the Edinburgh Phil- 
 osophical Society. 
 
 MR. JOHN MORLEY, who amongst other 
 things has written two admirable books 
 about Edmund Burke, is to be found in the 
 Preface to the second of them apologising 
 for having introduced into the body of the 
 work extracts from his former volume 
 conduct which he seeks to justify by quot- 
 ing from the Greek (always a desirable 
 thing to do when in a difficulty), to prove 
 that, though you may say what you have 
 to say well once, you cannot so say it 
 twice. 
 
 A difficulty somewhat of the same kind 
 cannot fail to be felt by every one who 
 takes upon himself to write on Burke ; for 
 however innocent a man's own past life 
 may be of any public references to the
 
 I5O EDMUND BURKE. 
 
 subject, the very many good things other 
 men have said about it must seriously in- 
 terfere with true liberty of treatment. 
 
 Hardly any man, and certainly no politi- 
 cian, has been so bepraised as Burke, 
 whose very name, suggesting, as it does, 
 splendour of diction, has tempted those who 
 would praise him to do so in a highly dec- 
 orated style, and it would have been easy 
 work to have brought together a sufficient 
 number of animated passages from the 
 works of well-known writers all dedicated 
 to the greater glory of Edmund Burke, and 
 then to have tagged on half-a-dozen speci- 
 mens of his own resplendent rhetoric, and 
 so to have come to an apparently natu- 
 ral and long desired conclusion without ex- 
 citing any more than the usual post lectorial 
 grumble. 
 
 This course, however, not recommend- 
 ing itself, some other method had to be 
 discovered. Happily, it is out of the ques- 
 tion within present limits to give any proper 
 summary of Burke's public life. This great 
 man was not, like some modern politicians, 
 a specialist, confining his activities within 
 the prospectus of an association ; nor was
 
 EDMUND BURKE. 151 
 
 he, like some others, a thing of shreds and 
 patches, busily employed to-day picking up 
 the facts with which he will overwhelm his 
 opponents on the morrow ; but was. one 
 ever ready to engage with all comers on all 
 subjects from out the stores of his accumu- 
 lated knowledge. Even were we to con- 
 fine ourselves to those questions only which 
 engaged Burke's most powerful attention, 
 enlisted his most active sympathy, elicited 
 his most bewitching rhetoric, we should 
 still find ourselves called upon to grapple 
 with problems as vast and varied as Eco- 
 nomic Reform, the Status of our Colo- 
 nies, our Empire in India, our relations 
 with Ireland both in respect to her trade 
 and her prevalent religion ; and then, 
 blurring the picture, as some may think 
 certainly rendering it Titanesque and 
 gloomy we have the spectacle of Burke 
 in his old age, like another Laocoon, writh- 
 ing and wrestling with the French Revolu- 
 tion ; and it may serve to give us some 
 dim notion of how great a man Burke 
 was, of how affluent a mind, of how po- 
 tent an imagination, of how resistless an 
 energy, that even when his sole unassisted
 
 I$2 EDMUND BURKE. 
 
 name is pitted against the outcome of cen- 
 turies, and we say Burke and , the French 
 Revolution, we are not overwhelmed by any 
 sense of obvious absurdity or incongruity. 
 
 What I propose to do is merely to con- 
 sider a little Burke's life prior to his ob- 
 taining a seat in Parliament, and then to 
 refer to any circumstances which may help 
 us to account for the fact that this truly 
 extraordinary man, whose intellectual re- 
 sources beggar the imagination, and who 
 devoted himself to politics with all the 
 forces of his nature, never so much as at- 
 tained to a seat in the Cabinet a feat one 
 has known to be accomplished by persons 
 of no proved intellectual agility. Having 
 done this, I shall then, bearing in mind the 
 aphorism of Lord Beaconsfield, that it is 
 always better to be impudent than servile, 
 essay an analysis of the essential elements 
 of Burke's character. 
 
 The first great fact to remember is, that 
 the Edmund Burke we are all agreed in re- 
 garding as one of the proudest memories 
 of the House of Commons was an Irish- 
 man. When we are in our next fit of po- 
 litical depression about that island, and are
 
 EDMUND BURKE. 153 
 
 about piously to wish, as the poet Spenser 
 tells us men were wishing even in his time, 
 that it were not adjacent, let us do a little 
 national stocktaking, and calculate profits 
 as well as losses. Burke was not only an 
 Irishman, but a typical one of the very 
 kind many Englishmen, and even possibly 
 some Scotchmen, make a point of dislik- 
 ing. I do not say he was an aboriginal 
 Irishman, but his ancestors are said to 
 have settled in the county of Galway, un- 
 der Strongbow, in King Henry the Sec- 
 ond's time, when Ireland was first con- 
 quered and our troubles began. This, at 
 all events, is a better Irish pedigree than 
 Mr. Parnell's. 
 
 Skipping six centuries, we find Burke's 
 father an attorney in Dublin which 
 somehow sounds a very Irish thing to be 
 who in 1725 married a Miss Nagle, and 
 had fifteen children. The marriage of 
 Burke's parents was of the kind called 
 mixed a term which doubtless admits of 
 wide application, but when employed tech- 
 nically signifies that the religious faith of 
 the spouses was different ; one, the father, 
 being a Protestant, and the lady an adher-
 
 154 EDMUND BURKE. 
 
 ent to what used to be pleasantly called 
 the ' old religion.' The severer spirit now 
 dominating Catholic councils has con- 
 demned these marriages, on the score of 
 their bad theology and their lax morality ; 
 but the practical politician, who is not 
 usually much of a theologian though 
 Lord Melbourne and Mr. Gladstone are 
 distinguished exceptions and whose 
 moral conscience is apt to be robust (and 
 here I believe there are no exceptions), 
 cannot but regret that so good an oppor- 
 tunity of lubricating religious differences 
 with the sweet oil of the domestic affec- 
 tions should be lost to us in these days 
 of bitterness and dissension. Burke was 
 brought up in the Protestant faith of his 
 father, and was never in any real danger of 
 deviating from it ; but I cannot doubt that 
 his regard for his Catholic fellow-subjects, 
 his fierce repudiation of the infamies of the 
 Penal Code whose horrors he did some- 
 thing to mitigate his respect for an- 
 tiquity, and his historic sense, were all 
 quickened by the fact that a tenderly 
 loved and loving mother belonged through 
 life and in death to an ancient and an out- 
 raged faith.
 
 EDMUND BURKE. 155 
 
 The great majority of Burke's brothers 
 and sisters, like those of Laurence Sterne, 
 were ' not made to live ; ' and out of the 
 fifteen but three, beside himself, attained 
 maturity. These were his eldest brother, 
 Garrett, on whose death Edmund suc- 
 ceeded to the patrimonial Irish estate, 
 which he sold ; his younger brother, Rich- 
 ard, a highly speculative gentleman, who 
 always lost ; and his sister, Juliana, who 
 married a Mr. French, and was, as became 
 her mother's daughter, a rigid Roman 
 Catholic who, so we read, was accus- 
 tomed every Christmas Day to invite to 
 the Hall the maimed, the aged, and dis- 
 tressed of her vicinity to a plentiful repast, 
 during which she waited upon them as a 
 servant. A sister like this never did any 
 man any serious harm. 
 
 Edmund Burke was born in 1729, in 
 Dublin, and was taught his rudiments in 
 the country first by a Mr. O'Halloran, 
 and afterwards by a Mr. FitzGerald, village 
 pedagogues both, who at all events suc- 
 ceeded in giving their charge a brogue 
 which death alone could silence. Burke 
 passed from their hands to an academy at
 
 156 EDMUND BURKE. 
 
 Ballitore, kept by a Quaker, from whence 
 he proceeded to Trinity College, Dublin. 
 He was thus not only Irish born, but Irish 
 bred. His intellectual habit of mind ex- 
 hibited itself early. He belonged to the 
 happy family of omnivorous readers, and, 
 in the language of his latest schoolmaster, 
 he went to college with a larger miscella- 
 neous stock of reading than was usual with 
 one of his years ; which, being interpreted 
 out of pedagogic into^>lain 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 
 
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