A STUDY OF 
 
 ENGLISH PROSE WRITERS 
 
 A LABORATORY METHOD 
 
 BY 
 
 J. SCOTT CLARK 
 
 AUTHOR OF "A PRACTICAL RHETORIC," ETC., AND PROFESSOR OF THE 
 ENGLISH LANGUAGE AT NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY 
 
 " Le Style c'est l'/iomie." BUFFON 
 
 " The whole art of criticism consists in learning to 
 know the human being who is partially revealed to us 
 in his written and spoken words." LESLIE STEPHEN 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 1898
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1898, BY 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 
 TROW DIRECTORY 
 
 PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY 
 NEW YORK
 
 STACK 
 ANNEX 
 
 To 
 
 A MAN AND A IV OMAN 
 WHO DENIED THEMSELVES A THOUSAND LUXURIES 
 
 AND MANY COMFORTS 
 
 THAT THEY MIGHT GIVE THEIR CHILDREN 
 A LIBERAL EDUCATION 
 
 THIS VOLUME 
 
 IS REVERENTLY INSCRIBED BY 
 ONE OF THE CHILDREN
 
 TABLE OF CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 FRANCIS BACON ....... i 
 
 JOHN MILTON ........ 20 
 
 JOHN BUNYAN ........ 50 
 
 JOSEPH ADDISON ..... .82 
 
 RICHARD STEELE . . . . . 117 
 
 DANIEL DEFOE ....... 143 
 
 JONATHAN SWIFT . . . . . . .168 
 
 OLIVER GOLDSMITH . . . . . . -199 
 
 SAMUEL JOHNSON ....... 236 
 
 EDMUND BURKE . . . . . . ' 282 
 
 CHARLES LAMB ....... 323 
 
 WALTER SCOTT ....... 353 
 
 THOMAS DE QUINCEV . . . . . . 391 
 
 THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY .... 420 
 
 WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY .... 455 
 
 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN ...... 492 
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD . . . . . . .507 
 
 THOMAS CARLYLE . . . . . . -524
 
 VI TABLE OF CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 GEORGE ELIOT . . . . . . -570 
 
 CHARLES DICKENS ....... 607 
 
 JOHN RUSKIN ...... . 648 
 
 WASHINGTON IRVING 693 
 
 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE . . . . . -725 
 
 RALPH WALDO EMERSON ...... 768 
 
 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL ...... 800 
 
 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 837
 
 PREFACE 
 
 IT is generally admitted by teachers of English that, aftei 
 one has learned to avoid the common violations of clearness, 
 force, precision, and the other requisites of good style, he may 
 best improve his own use of the mother-tongue by studying 
 the English classics. But how is one to study the English 
 classics so as to obtain positive and appreciable results? This 
 volume represents an attempt to answer that question. It cer- 
 tainly has not been answered satisfactorily either by the nu- 
 merous text-books on English Literature or by the countless 
 editions of English classics "with notes." To memorize bi- 
 ographical data or the mere generalities and negations of crit- 
 icism, or to trace out obscure allusions or doubtful meanings, 
 is certainly not to study a writer in any broad or fruitful way. 
 While the method here offered may not be ideal, it is not 
 merely theoretical. It has been rigidly and continuously 
 tested in the author's class-room during the last eleven years, 
 by means of extracts from a partially developed manuscript, 
 printed privately for the use of his pupils. The results thus 
 obtained seem to warrant him in presenting the method for 
 the use, or at least for the criticism, of his fellow -teachers. 
 
 In a word, the method consists in determining the partic- 
 ular and distinctive features of a writer's style (using the term 
 style in its wide sense), in sustaining that analysis by a very 
 wide consensus of critical opinion, in illustrating the particular 
 characteristics of each writer by voluminous and carefully 
 selected extracts from his works, and in then requiring the 
 pupil to find in the works of the writer parallel illustrations. 
 The method has grown out of dissatisfaction with results ob-
 
 Vlll PREFACE 
 
 tained under the old methods of teaching English and out of 
 the conviction that such a revolution as has taken place in the 
 study of all branches of natural science during the last quarter 
 century is both possible and necessary in the study of English. 
 Just as the pupil has come to study oxygen and electricity and 
 protoplasm and not merely what someone has said about 
 these, so he must learn to study the masterpieces of style them- 
 selves and not merely what someone has said about them. 
 Moreover, as the student of chemistry, physics, or biology, 
 must have a hand-book or a set of tables to show him how to 
 go to work, so the student of English classics must have a 
 hand-book to show him how to go to work. This volume is 
 offered as such a hand-book. 
 
 It is a plausible objection to the method here presented that 
 it is unscientific because it seems to apply the old scholastic 
 dictum : " First learn what is to be believed," and follows a 
 deductive rather than an inductive order. The reply is that 
 the pupil must have some guidance, and that "everyone 
 knows more than anyone." It is believed that the consensus 
 of criticism here offered is sufficiently wide to annul any 
 charge of mere individual preference. To ask an ordinary 
 undergraduate to study an English classic without giving him 
 some specific working directions, is as fruitless as to ask him 
 to fly. Moreover, it will be seen that the method is really 
 inductive and scientific ; for the pupil is urged to find in his 
 author any other distinctive characteristic for which he can 
 discover clear illustrations besides those named in the analysis. 
 After a class has had sufficient experience in following the 
 method here presented, it may be wise and feasible to ask them 
 to do independent critical work. But born critics are as rare 
 as born chemists. 
 
 Among the results obtained from the use of the method here 
 presented are an increase in the breadth, accuracy, and idio- 
 matic character of the pupil's vocabulary ; the development, 
 in the pupil's style, of such graces as chaste imagery, suspense,
 
 PREFACE IX 
 
 point, smoothness, rhythm, and a greater predominance of the 
 Anglo-Saxon element ; the development of an intelligent crit- 
 ical habit ; and last, but perhaps most important, the creation 
 of a real hunger for the best literature and the initiation of the 
 pupil into the real life and spirit of the great masters of style. 
 The central idea of the book is found in the quotation from 
 Leslie Stephen given on the title-page : " The whole art of 
 criticism consists in learning to know the human being who is 
 partially revealed to us in his written and spoken words." The 
 biographical outline prefixed to the discussion of each writer 
 is intended simply as a means of review, that the reader may 
 get the historical bearing, so to speak, before beginning his 
 critical work. Those who desire more minute biographies 
 will find them in the encyclopaedias. The biographies of 
 most of the earlier writers are based on Leslie Stephen's inval- 
 uable "Biographical Dictionary;" the later ones are based 
 on a careful review of the respective writer's published corre- 
 spondence. 
 
 The bibliographies also prefixed to the several discussions 
 are the result of some research. No subject needs the services 
 of the professional bibliographer more than criticism, yet 
 hitherto it has been strangely and almost entirely neglected. 
 In the nature of the case, the best criticism is not to be found 
 in complete volumes nor even in complete chapters or para- 
 graphs. It is scattered sparsely throughout a vast amount of 
 biography and general comment, and is generally found in 
 books whose titles give no hint of critical contents. It is 
 hoped that the bibliographies here given will be found both 
 helpful and somewhat exhaustive. Every book listed has been 
 conscientiously examined, besides a vast number of volumes 
 and periodical articles whose titles seemed to promise possible 
 criticism, but which were found to contain only biography or 
 the generalities and negations of criticism. Only those books 
 and articles are listed that contain positive and specific criti- 
 cism. In general, the arrangement of books is somewhat in
 
 X PREFACE 
 
 the order of their critical importance. In determining the con- 
 sensus of opinion as to the characteristics of any writer, the 
 attempt has been to quote the most eminent critics; but the 
 author has not hesitated to quote from comparatively obscure 
 commentators whenever the criticisms offered by such have 
 been found clear and happy in expression. Both the crit- 
 ical comments and the illustrations have been taken directly 
 from the original sources. 
 
 While this volume is not intended for use without constant 
 reference to the works of the writers respectively treated, and 
 while it is intended, primarily, as a text-book for advanced 
 pupils in English, it is believed that it will be found not de- 
 void of interest to the general reader, even if used without 
 reference to companion volumes of general literature. 
 
 In conclusion, the author desires to acknowledge his in- 
 debtedness to the late Dr. William F. Poole, of revered mem- 
 ory, and to his successor, Mr. John Vance Cheney, for cour- 
 tesies extended in the Newbury Library of Chicago ; to Mr. 
 Ernst Hild, Librarian of the Chicago Public Library, and to 
 his assistant, Miss Elliott, for similar courtesies ; to the Rev. 
 E. W. Mundy, Librarian of the Central Library of Syracuse, 
 New York ; to Miss Mary B. Lindsay, Librarian of the Evan- 
 ston, 111., Public Library; to Miss Lodilla Ambrose, Assist- 
 ant Librarian of Northwestern University ; to the members of 
 the English language "seminary" classes at Northwestern 
 during the last two years, who have given material aid in veri- 
 fying the bibliographies, and to his sister and faithful aman- 
 uensis, Mrs. Alice Clark Greene. 
 
 It can hardly be expected that the following pages are free 
 from errors. They have been prepared during the rare mo- 
 ments and hours snatched from years of almost slavish toil in 
 the most exacting of professions, while subject to constant in- 
 terruption and in the midst of unpropitious circumstances. If, 
 in spite of possible errors, the book shall serve in any degree 
 to arouse in other pupils the interest and the " noble hunger "
 
 PREFACE xi 
 
 that have been thus aroused in his own, the author's end will 
 be attained. If warranted by the reception given to the 
 present volume, the author purposes to supplement it, in the 
 near future, with two others ; one treating in a similar manner 
 the style of twenty-five English and American poets of the 
 first rank and the other devoted primarily to Shakespeare and 
 secondarily to a concise treatment of many poets and prose 
 writers of lower rank. Most of the material for these addi- 
 tional volumes is already in hand. 
 
 J. S. C. 
 
 NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY, 
 Evanston, 111., June, 1898.
 
 SUGGESTIONS TO TEACHERS 
 
 WHILE the author does not assume to teach the teachers 
 who may use this volume as a text-book, it is hoped that a 
 detailed statement of the method of use found most fruitful in 
 his own classes will not appear pedantic. In order to attain 
 the ends enumerated in the preface, it has been his custom to 
 assign beforehand to each member of a class a specific section 
 of some work of the particular writer to be studied at the time 
 and to give the following directions to pupils : 
 
 1. Read carefully the section assigned to you, and observe 
 critically every word, neither very long nor obsolete, that im- 
 presses you as not found in the vocabularies of ordinary writers 
 and speakers, especially such words as do not belong to your 
 own habitual vocabulary. Select the best ten such words and 
 write them after the figure i in your class report, which is to 
 be left on the instructor's desk at the opening of the class 
 session. 
 
 2. Observe carefully every case of especial accuracy or deli- 
 cacy in the use of words, and record the best five cases oppo- 
 site the figure 2 in your class report, giving enough of the 
 context in every case to make the accuracy or delicacy ap- 
 parent. 
 
 3. Observe every distinct idiom, and record, opposite the 
 figure 3, your best five cases. 
 
 4. Observe every rhetorical figure, and index opposite the 
 figure 4, the page and line where each of the best five figures 
 is to be found. 
 
 5. Index, opposite the figure 5, the best three cases of sus- 
 pense (rhetorical period) to be found in your section. 
 
 6. Index, opposite the figure 6, the best three cases of 
 point (epigram, antithesis, balance, etc.), if such be found. 
 
 7. Index, opposite the figure 7, the best three cases of 
 smooth connection found. Observe especially the connec- 
 tion between paragraphs.
 
 SUGGESTIONS TO TEACHERS xiii 
 
 8. Index, opposite the figure 8, the best three cases of sim- 
 plicity, if such be found. Define simplicity, for this purpose, 
 as the use of easy conversational words and constructions. 
 
 9. Index, opposite the figure 9, the best three cases of 
 rhythm, if such be found. Rhythm is "an element of pro- 
 portion in language" it is always an essential element of 
 eloquence. 
 
 10. Now determine, approximately, the percentage of An- 
 glo-Saxon words employed by the given writer, in the follow- 
 ing manner : Add the whole number of words on any full 
 page, taken at random, and use the sum for the denominator 
 of a fraction. Then add the words on that page that are not 
 apparently derived from Latin or Greek, and use the sum as 
 the numerator of your fraction ; now reduce the fraction to 
 decimal terms, and the result will be the approximate one 
 sought. Of course, the accuracy of the result thus obtained 
 will depend on the pupil's knowledge of foreign languages, 
 but the ordinary college student knows enough of Latin, at 
 least, to make the exercise practical and beneficial. 
 
 Now read carefully the analysis of the writer under consid- 
 eration, to be found in this volume, until you shall have 
 gained, from the comments and illustrations, a clear idea of 
 each of his peculiar characteristics. Then review the section 
 assigned you from the writer's works, find there the best illus- 
 trations you can of each of the characteristics, and index in 
 your class report the best illustrations found for each point, 
 numbering according to the numbers given in the text-book. 
 If your section does not afford illustrations of all the particu- 
 lar characteristics, obtain these from any of the writer's other 
 works available, so far as you have time. 
 
 Finally, copy at the end of your class report at least one 
 hundred words consisting of the finest, brightest expressions 
 and short passages to be found in what you have read. 
 
 If an average of forty i2mo pages from any writer be as- 
 signed to every pupil, the ordinary college upper-classman 
 will accomplish the work outlined above in about five hours 
 of faithful work. The work may be divided and considered 
 at two or more class sessions, or the complete reports may be 
 considered at one time and credit be given accordingly. 
 
 The recitation-hour is occupied in comparing the various 
 pupils' reports, listening to several illustrations of each of the 
 particular characteristics, emphasizing the best cases under the
 
 XIV SUGGESTIONS TO TEACHERS 
 
 ten general characteristics, and in answering many questions 
 incident to the discussion. The method in general has never 
 failed to stimulate interest. Selections are made at every 
 class session from the words reported under the first general 
 head (see directions to pupils on pages xiii and xiv), and an 
 attempt is made to fix these words in the vocabulary of every 
 member of the class by requiring written exercises involving 
 the accurate use of the selected words in sentences invented by 
 the pupils. 
 
 One difficulty confronts the teacher who would have his 
 pupils study the English classics by this or any other method"; 
 namely, the lack of proper material in duplicate. To use a 
 scientific, that is a laboratory method, one must have mate- 
 rial corresponding in variety and duplication to that provided 
 at each table in a chemical laboratory ; but few school-boards 
 are yet willing to give to the English teacher equal facilities 
 with his chemical or biological colleague. The use of the or- 
 dinary book of " selections " is a delusion and a snare. As 
 well get an idea of the Atlantic from examining a pint bottle 
 of its water. 
 
 Three methods of meeting the exigency have been em- 
 ployed by the author ; none fruitless, but of varying value. 
 First, one may have each pupil obtain a cheap edition of 
 some complete work of every writer to be studied during a 
 given term, and may then assign the same in sections, duplicat- 
 ing sections according to circumstances. The large list of 
 very cheap editions of detached works published within recent 
 years makes this plan feasible without unduly burdening the 
 pupil by the expense. Many years' use of this method has 
 proved its practicability. The only serious objection lies in 
 the fact that, often, no single work of a writer gives a suffi- 
 ciently broad view of his style. For example, characteristics 
 of Goldsmith to be found plentifully in his plays and essays 
 are not found in " The Vicar of Wakefield." Of course, the 
 ideal and the just way would be for the school to own the 
 works required, in sufficient duplicate, and then to charge, if 
 necessary, a small fee, as is done in the laboratories of science, 
 for the use and wear of the books. The second method is to 
 have each pupil own the complete works of some one writer 
 to be studied and then to rotate the same through the class. 
 This method secures the broad view lacking in the first, but it 
 is cumbrous, sometimes irritating, and it makes concentration
 
 SUGGESTIONS TO TEACHERS XV 
 
 in the class-room impossible ; since no two pupils may be 
 studying the same writer at the same time. The third and 
 by far the best method yet found involves more preliminary 
 work than may, perhaps, be expected of every teacher. A set 
 of books large enough to accommodate his present and prob- 
 able classes has been made by the author by taking the com- 
 plete works of each of the twenty-six writers here treated, in 
 sufficient duplications to make an average of about forty pages 
 for every pupil, separating these into sections, and reminding 
 them strongly. The result is a series of volumes, each differ- 
 ent from the rest, numbered consecutively, and all together 
 including the complete works of every writer to be studied. 
 These books are owned by the teacher or by the school, and 
 are leased to the pupil for a small fee, sufficient to keep the 
 books in repair. Thus the class have, as a whole, the widest 
 view of the writer's style, and the objections to the first two 
 methods are met. The first method suggested is practicable 
 and, on the whole, very satisfactory. The second is hardly 
 to be recommended ; the third is almost ideal.
 
 BACON, 1561-1626 
 
 Biographical Outline. FRANCIS BACON, born at York 
 House, London, January 22, 1561 ; father Lord Keeper of 
 the Great Seal ; mother a fine classical scholar and a sister of 
 the wife of William Cecil (Lord Treasurer Burghley). Bacon 
 enters Trinity College, Cambridge, in April, 1573 (aged 
 twelve), and leaves in March, 1575; is admitted to Gray's 
 Inn in the same year ; becomes connected with the English 
 embassy to France in 1576, and remains abroad till the death 
 of his father, in 1579 ; returns to London soon afterward, finds 
 his inheritance to be meagre, and seeks political preferment 
 through his uncle, Burghley ; continues his legal studies, and 
 is admitted as " utter barrister" in 1582 ; in November, 1584, 
 is elected member of parliament for Melcombe-Regis, through 
 Burghley's influence ; in 1584-85 Bacon writes his " Letter of 
 Advice to Queen Elizabeth," urging moderation in the treat- 
 ment of the Catholics ; in the parliament of 1586 sits for Taun- 
 ton, and becomes a bencher of Gray's Inn during the same 
 year; in 1589 sits for Liverpool, and writes "An Advertise- 
 ment Touching the Controversies of the Church of England ' ' 
 (not published till 1640), again advocating religious tolera- 
 tion ; forms a close friendship with the Earl of Essex in 1591 
 due to the Earl's warm admiration of Bacon, and to Bacon's 
 desire to "employ" the Earl; in 1592 writes "Certain Ob- 
 servations," etc., a defence of the queen's government; sits 
 for Middlesex in 1593. and leads the opposition against a 
 proposal of the Lords demanding joint discussion of certain 
 proposed subsidies to the queen, thus displeasing Burghley, 
 and so angering Elizabeth that she refuses to see Bacon 
 or to listen to his application for the attorney-generalship,
 
 2 BACON 
 
 though Essex warmly espoused his cause ; Bacon first appears 
 in a legal case in 1594, and wins distinction and the approval 
 of Burghley; seeks the solicitor-generalship in 1595, but de- 
 clines to apologize to Elizabeth for his parliamentary freedom 
 of speech, and so is refused the office ; in his quest for both these 
 offices Bacon deliberately sacrifices his personal advancement 
 to his conscientious convictions of right ; Essex, disappointed 
 by Bacon's failure to secure the office, forces on him a gift 
 of land in Twickenham Park, which Bacon afterward sold (or 
 1,800 ; in 1595 Bacon expresses, in a letter to Essex, a wish 
 to retire from the practice of law and to devote himself to phi- 
 losophy, but about that time is engaged by the queen as one 
 of her learned counsel ; in 1596 Bacon advises Essex (then just 
 returned from his Spanish victories) to convince the queen 
 that he (Essex) is not a dangerous person by shunning further 
 military enterprises and by refusing to cultivate popularity 
 with the people; publishes his " Essays" in 1595 ; seeks to 
 become Master of the Rolls in 1597, in order to improve his 
 desperate financial condition ; sits for Southampton in 1597 ; 
 attempts, unsuccessfully, to make a statesman of Essex ; is ar- 
 rested for debt in September, 1598; Essex loses the favor of 
 Elizabeth by his failure in the Irish campaign ; Bacon attempts 
 to mediate between Essex and the queen, and only offends 
 both ; at the informal trial of Essex, in 1600, Bacon makes a 
 show of severi ty toward Essex, hoping thus to secure the favor 
 of the queen and so, eventually, to help Essex ; Essex is for- 
 bidden to appear at court, and proceeds to concoct a wild 
 scheme of seizing the court and inaugurating a revolution ; in 
 February, 1601, the project fails, Essex is imprisoned, and 
 Bacon is appointed, with others, to investigate the revolt ; 
 Bacon aids in securing the conviction of Essex, who is exe- 
 cuted (Bacon's apologists attempt to justify his action on the 
 ground of Essex's open treason and Bacon's duty to the state) ; 
 during the parliaments of 1601 and 1602 Bacon advocates 
 restrictions on monopolies and both political and religious
 
 BACON 3 
 
 toleration toward the Irish ; is knighted by James in 1603; 
 during 1604 publishes his "Apology Concerning the Late 
 Earl of Essex," and addresses to James a paper on the Union 
 of Scotland and England and one on "The Pacification and 
 Edification of the Church of England," the latter again 
 urging religious toleration ; attempts conciliation between 
 James and the Commons in the parliament of 1604 ; is ap- 
 pointed one of the English commissioners to discuss the terms 
 of union with Scotland, and receives, in 1604, a royal pension 
 of 60 a year; in October, 1605, publishes his "Advance- 
 ment of Learning; " in May, 1606, marries Alice Barnham, 
 daughter of a former sheriff of London and step-daughter of Sir 
 John Packington ; in June, 1606, Bacon asks the king for the 
 solicitor-generalship; is promised that office in 1607, when the 
 then incumbent, Doderidge, should have been removed ; in the 
 parliament of 1606 Bacon champions the measures of the plan 
 of union with Scotland, advocating free commercial intercourse 
 and mutual citizenship in either country ; becomes solicitor- 
 general June 25, 1607, at a salary of ; i, ooo (equal to ^4,000 
 now) ; becomes a strong supporter of James, and preaches very 
 conservative doctrine ; in 1608 Bacon sets down his " Com- 
 mentariiis Solutus" being private memoranda of his great 
 projects in science and politics and of his plans for personal 
 advancement the most complete revelation of Bacon's true 
 character in existence; during 1608 writes also "In Felicem 
 ^^^^noriam Elizabeths" and "A Discourse on the Plantation 
 of Ireland," the latter addressed to James; during 1609 Bacon 
 works on his ' ' Instauratio MagnaJ ' and addresses to friends his 
 " Cogitata et Visa" and his " De Sapientia Veterum , " in 
 1612 publishes a new edition of his " Essays," adding " On 
 Deformity," a reflection on the character of Salisbury, Bacon's 
 long-time opponent, then recently deceased ; seeks vainly to 
 secure Salisbury's place as Master of the Wards; addresses 
 frequent state papers to the king, urging political and religious 
 toleration and proposing measures that would, doubtless, have
 
 4 BACON 
 
 avoided the Revolution ; Bacon becomes attorney-general in 
 1613, and is so respected by the Commons that they waive 
 their rule forbidding an attorney-general to sit in the house ; 
 Bacon sides with James in his quarrel with Coke over the pre- 
 rogative of the judges, appears as the chief prosecutor of Somer- 
 set, and warmly supports Villiers (Buckingham) ; becomes a 
 privy councillor in 1616 and Lord Keeper of the Seals in 1617 ; 
 writes his " New Atlantis " (never completed) between 1614 
 and 1617 ; imperils his position, in 1617, by protesting to 
 James against the marriage of Coke's daughter to Buckingham; 
 becomes Lord Chancellor January 17, 1618, and is raised to 
 the peerage July 12, 1618 ; exhibits great energy and judicial 
 fairness in his office of Chancellor ; in 1618, 1619, and 1620 
 Bacon engages in the prosecution of Sir Walter Raleigh, Suf- 
 folk, and Yelverton ; proposes, in the parliament of 1620, the 
 withdrawal of certain obnoxious patents ; publishes his " No- 
 vum Organum" October 12, 1620 ; on his sixtieth birth-day, 
 January 22, 1621, receives the homage of Ben Jonson, and 
 is made Viscount St. Albans six days later ; is attacked by 
 Coke, Cranfield, and others in the parliament of 1621 for his 
 support of unpopular monarchical measures, and is made a 
 scape-goat for James, Buckingham, and their supporters; is 
 charged in the Commons by one Aubrey and again by one 
 Egerton with accepting bribes while Chancellor, his accusers 
 being men against whom Bacon had decided ; the complaint 
 is brought before the Lords, supplemented with charges made 
 by Lady Wharton, who had paid money directly into Bacon's 
 hands, and had received a crushing sentence soon afterward 
 (Bacon's apologists explain his conduct on the ground that, 
 according to the custom of the day, presents might be received 
 from suitors ; but they admit that, by taking a gift while Lady 
 Wharton's case was pending, Bacon was indiscreet if not crim- 
 inally guilty) ; Bacon pleads guilty, and begs that his pun- 
 ishment may be limited to the loss of his office ; he is fined 
 ^40,000, is ordered imprisoned during the king's pleasure,
 
 BACON 5 
 
 is disabled from sitting in parliament, and is forbidden to 
 come near the court ; after t\vo weeks in the Tower, Bacon is 
 released, his fine is so adjusted as to relieve him from financial 
 embarrassment, and, eventually, he is allowed to come to court; 
 completes his " History of Henry VII." in October, 1621 ; 
 in 1623 publishes the Latin translation of his " Advancement 
 of Learning " under the title " De Augmentis Scientiarum /" 
 applies in vain for the provostship of Eton in 1623 and for a 
 full pardon in 1625 ; continues to work on his " Instauratio 
 Magna," though seriously interrupted by ill-health; dies 
 April 9, 1626, at the home of Lord Arundel, his illness being 
 occasioned by exposure while performing a scientific experi- 
 ment. 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY ON BACON'S STYLE. 
 
 Minto, \V., "English Prose Literature." Edinburgh, 1886, Macmillan, 
 
 244-255- 
 Hazlitt, W., " Dramatic Literature of the Reign of Elizabeth. " London, 
 
 1882, Bell, 174-181. 
 Church, R. W., " English Men of Letters" (Bacon). New York, 1884, 
 
 Harper, 198-214. 
 Macaulay, T. B., "Essays" (Miscellaneous Works). New York, 1880, 
 
 Harper, 2 : 330-458. 
 Hazlitt, \V., Miscellaneous Works." Philadelphia, 1869, Claxton, R. 
 
 & H., 174-181. 
 Nicoll, H. J., "Landmarks of English Literature." New York, 1883, 
 
 Appleton, 89-94. . 
 Taine, H., "History of English Literature." New York, 1875, Holt, I: 
 
 244-252. 
 Whipple, E. P., " Literature of the Age of Elizabeth." Boston, 1884, 
 
 Houghton, Mifflin, & Co., I: 278-340. 
 
 Collier, W. F. , " History of English Literature." London, 1892, Nel- 
 son, 155-161. 
 Lord, J., "Beacon Lights of History." London, Blackwoods, 1886, 3: 
 
 417-458. 
 Whipple, E. P., "Outlooks." Boston, 1888, Ticknor & Co., 300- 
 
 305-
 
 6 BACON 
 
 Saintsbury, G., "History of Elizabethan Literature." New York, 1887, 
 
 Macmillan, 207-214. 
 Disraeli, I., "Amenities of Literature." New York, 1874, W. J. Wid- 
 
 dleton, 2 : 322-324. 
 
 Fuller, Thomas, "Worthies." Boston, 1869, Fields, 2: 422. 
 Morris, G. S., "British Thought." Chicago, 1880, S. C. Griggs & Co., 
 
 114-140. 
 Stoughton, J., "Worthies of Science." London, n. d., Religious Tract 
 
 Society, 45-66. 
 Washburn, E. W., 'Studies in Early English Literature." New York, 
 
 1882, Putnams, 188-219. 
 
 Wotton, M. E., " Word Portraits." London, 1887, Bentley & Son, 10-12. 
 Spedding, J., "Francis Bacon and His Times." Boston, 1878, Hough- 
 ton, Osgood & Co., v. index. 
 
 Fischer, E. K. B., " Bacon." London, 1857, Longmans, 1-37. 
 Dixon, W. H., " Life of Bacon." London, 1862, John Murray. 
 Lucas, S., " Mornings of the Recess." London, 1864, Tinsley Bros., i: 
 
 179-223. 
 Abbott, E. A., "Life and Works of Bacon." London, 1885, Macmillan, 
 
 447-457- 
 Lovejoy, B. G., " Francis Bacon." Boston, 1883, Estes & Lauriat, v. 
 
 index. 
 
 Dixon, W. H., "Life of Bacon." London, 1862, John Murray. 
 Adams, W. H. D., " Records of Noble Lives." London, 1872, Nelson, 
 
 53-100. 
 Knight, C., "Gallery of Portraits." London, 1837, C. Knight & Co., 7: 
 
 177-184. 
 
 Hunt, T. W., " Representative English Prose." New York, 1887, Arm- 
 strong, 217-230. 
 Hallam, H., "Introduction to the Literature of Europe." New York, 
 
 1886, Armstrong, 217-230. 
 Philips, M. G., "A Manual of English Literature." New York, 1893, 
 
 Harper, 253-285. 
 Welsh, A. H., " Development of English Literature." Chicago, 1884, 
 
 Griggs, I : 456-472- 
 Stephen, L., " Dictionary of National Biography." New York, 1885, 
 
 Macmillan, 2: 328-361. 
 Mitford, Miss M. R., " Recollections of a Literary Life." New York, 
 
 1852, Harper, 547-548. 
 
 Lodge, E., "Portraits." London, 1850, Bohn, 3: 187-194. 
 Devey, J., "Bacon's Essays, with Introduction." London, 1890, Bell, 
 
 xxviii-xxiz.
 
 BACON 7 
 
 Nichol, John, " Francis Bacon, His Life and Philosophy." Edinburgh, 
 1889, Blackwood, 1-249. 
 
 Craik, G. L., "Bacon, His Writings and Philosophy." London, 
 1844. 
 
 North American Review, 61 : 351-374 (Brazer) ; 68: 402 (A. P. Pea- 
 body); 65: I77(W. B. Peabody); 74: 84 (W. S. Low); 93: 149 
 (H. Giles); 29: 76 (A. H. Everett); 41: 386 (Everett). 
 
 Edinburgh Revieiv, 113: 159-177; 27: 180; 36: 220-267 (Mackin- 
 tosh); 150:395; 106: 151; 168. 
 
 Contemporary Revie-ii>, 27: 653-821 (J. Spedding); 28: 141 (E. A. Ab- 
 bott) ; 28 : 169-190 and 365-562 (J. Spedding). 
 
 Atlantic Monthly, 51 : 507 (R. G. White); 43: 542-543; 22: 476- 
 
 573- 
 
 Quarterly Review, 99: 287-331 ; 6l : 462. 
 Blackwood' s Magazine, 93 : 480-499 ; 3 : 657. 
 Eclectic Review, IOO : 672-689 (J. Devey). 
 Bentley's Miscellany, 26 : 84-95 (Cheirurgus). 
 New Englander, 10 : 333-374 (D. A. Wasson). 
 The Dial (Chicago), 6 : 118-120 (M. B. Anderson). 
 
 PARTICULAR CHARACTERISTICS. 
 
 I. Extreme Conciseness. It is doubtful whether any 
 other English writer has equalled Bacon in the power of con- 
 densation. In the words of Alexander Smith, "His sen- 
 tences bend beneath the weight of his thought like a branch 
 beneath the weight of its fruit." Saintsbury attributes Ba- 
 con's "curt severity" to the influence of Montaigne. We 
 have received from Bacon a large number of sententious 
 phrases and apothegms, which have become common property. 
 " His sayings," says Hazlitt, " have the effect of axioms, and 
 are at once striking and self-evident." He has been called 
 "stimulating beyond the recorded power of any other man 
 except Socrates." 
 
 " The severe terseness of the style of the ' Essays,' in which 
 every sentence is packed with as much matter as it can pos- 
 sibly hold, makes their intelligent perusal at first a task of
 
 8 BACON 
 
 some difficulty ; but fresh perusals reveal their inexhaustible 
 wealth of matter. "Jf. J. Nicoll. 
 
 " His works combine the greatest brevity with the greatest 
 beauty of expression ; . . . each thought is so truly an 
 addition and not an expansion of the preceding." E. P. 
 Whipple. 
 
 ' ' These short papers say what they have to say without 
 preface and in literary undress, without a superfluous word, 
 without the joints and bands of structure ; they say it in brief, 
 rapid sentences, which come down, sentence after sentence, 
 like the strokes of a great hammer. No wonder that, in their 
 disdainful brevity, they seem rugged and abrupt. . . . 
 He had more than once expressed his preference for the form 
 of aphorism over the argumentative and didactive continuity 
 of a set discourse. . . . These aphorisms are meant to 
 strike, to awaken questions, to disturb prejudices, to let light 
 into a nest of unsuspected intellectual confusions and self- 
 misunderstandings, to be the mottoes and watchwords of 
 many a laborious and difficult inquiry." R. W. Church. 
 
 " Instead of explaining his idea, he transposes and trans- 
 lates it, translates it entire, to the smallest details, enclosing 
 all in the majesty of a grand period or in the brevity of a 
 striking sentence. Thence springs a style of admirable rich- 
 ness, gravity, and vigor ; now solemn and symmetrical, now 
 concise and piercing, always elaborate and full of color. 
 There is nothing in English prose superior to his diction. 
 . . . Shakespeare and the seers do not contain more vig- 
 orous or expressive condensations of thought, more resembling 
 inspiration, and in Bacon they are to be found everywhere. 
 On the whole, his process is that of the creators ; it is intu- 
 ition, not reasoning. When he has laid up his store of facts, 
 the greatest possible, on some vast subject, on some entire 
 province of the mind, on the whole anterior philosophy, on 
 the general condition of the sciences, on the power and 
 limits of human reason, he casts over all this a comprehensive
 
 BACON 9 
 
 view, as it were a great net, brings up a universal idea, con- 
 denses his idea into a maxim, and hands it to us with the 
 words, ' Verify and profit by it.' ' Taine. 
 
 "His phrases have the effect of axioms, and are at once 
 striking and self-evident. . . . His style is equally sharp and 
 sweet, flowing and pithy, condensed and expansive, express- 
 ing volumes in a sentence or amplifying a single thought 
 into pages of rich, glowing, and delightful eloquence." 
 Hazlitt. 
 
 " He had a wonderful talent for packing thought close and 
 rendering it portable." Macaulay. 
 
 " Of all the productions in the English language, Bacon's 
 Essays contain the most matter in the fewest words." 
 \VJiatdy. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " Certainly it is heaven upon earth to have a man's mind move 
 in charity, rest in providence, and turn upon the poles of truth." 
 
 Of Truth. 
 
 " Revenge triumphs over death ; love slights it ; honor aspireth 
 to it ; grief flieth to it ; fear preoccupateth it." Of Death. 
 
 " Children sweeten labors, but they make misfortunes more 
 bitter ; they increase the cares of life, but they mitigate the re- 
 membrance of death." Of Parents and Children. 
 
 " Nuptial love maketh mankind, friendly love perfecteth it, 
 but wanton love corrupteth and embaseth it." Of Love. 
 
 " Men of age object too much, consult too long, adventure too 
 little, repent too soon, and seldom drive business home to the full 
 period, but content themselves with a mediocrity of success." 
 
 Of Youth and Age. 
 
 " Men in great place are thrice servants servants of the sov- 
 ereign of state, servants of fame, and servants of business ; so as 
 they have no freedom, neither in their persons, nor in their ac- 
 tions, nor in their times. It is a strange desire to seek power and 
 lose liberty ; or to seek power over others and to lose power over 
 a man's self." Of Great Place.
 
 IO BACON 
 
 2. Clear Analysis and Arrangement. Bacon is 
 careful to define the terms of his subject and to make a clear 
 and logical arrangement of his theme. In comparing him 
 with Jeremy Taylor, Saintsbury speaks of Bacon's superior 
 sense of order and proportion. Hazlitt calls him "the sur- 
 veyor, not the builder of the fabric of science." 
 
 "As a rule, Bacon's paragraphs are very good ; he has a 
 sense of method and good arrangement. . . . In perspi- 
 cuity of arrangement he is much superior to any of the Eliza- 
 bethan writers. . . . The divisions are so clear and 
 proceed upon distinctions so familiar that, though the sub- 
 divisions be carried to the eighth degree, there is not the 
 least perplexity to any mind of ordinary education." Will- 
 iam Minto. 
 
 " The writings of Bacon are as clear as they are profound." 
 Whately. 
 
 "It is in the Essays alone that the mind of Bacon is 
 brought into contact with the mind of ordinary readers. 
 There he talks to plain men, in language that everybody 
 understands, about things in which everybody is interested." 
 Macaulay. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " I take goodness in this sense, the affecting of the weal of 
 men, which is what the Grecians call ' philanthropia '/ and the 
 word humanity (as it is used) is a little too light to express it."- 
 Of Goodness. 
 
 " We will speak of nobility first as a portion of an estate, 
 then as a condition of particular persons." Of Nobility. 
 
 " But leaving these curiosities (though not unworthy to be 
 thought on in fit place), we will handle what persons are apt to 
 envy others, what persons are most subject to be envied them- 
 selves, and what is the difference between public and private 
 envy. . . . This envy, being in the Latin word ' invidia? 
 goeth in the modern languages by the name of discontentment ; 
 of which we shall speak in handling sedition." Of Envy. 
 
 " So that in reason as well as in experience there fall out to be
 
 BACON II 
 
 three distempers (as I may term them) of learning : the first 
 fantastical learning ; the second contentious learning ; and the 
 last delicate learning ; vain imaginations, vain altercations, and 
 vain affectations ; and with the last I will begin." The Advance- 
 ment of Learning. 
 
 3. Rich Imagery Striking Illustration. Bacon 
 is remarkable not only for the aptness and the breadth of his 
 illustrations but for the wonderful variety in the sources 
 whence he draws them. All forms of human activity, all vo- 
 cations and professions, all departments of knowledge are 
 drawn upon in what Minto calls Bacon's " incontinent quick- 
 ness to discover analogy." Isaac Disraeli calls him "not 
 only the wittiest of writers in his remote allusions, but poet- 
 ical in his fanciful conceptions." He has an especial fond- 
 ness for homely similitudes and quaint analogies. 
 
 " Through all his writings are numerous homely and pointed 
 illustrations make his meaning abundantly luminous. 
 Bacon's pages are very thickly strewn with similitudes. 
 
 . . They are taken almost exclusively from familiar ob- 
 jects and operations in nature and human life. In his narra- 
 tive their number is more within bounds, and they are usually 
 very graphic ; in the ' Essays ' they are often superfluous." 
 William Minto. 
 
 " The ' Advancement of Learning ' is one of the landmarks 
 of what high thought and rich imagination have made of the 
 English language ; it is a book which we can never open 
 without coming on some felicitous and unthought of illustra- 
 tion, yet so natural as almost to be doomed to become a com- 
 monplace. ... An edition of Bacon with marginal 
 references and parallel passages would show a more persistent 
 recurrence of characteristic illustrations and sentences than 
 perhaps any other writer." R. W. Church. 
 
 " His conscience was weakened by that which gives such 
 splendor and attractiveness to his writings his imagination. 
 He was a philosopher, but a philosopher in whose character
 
 12 BACON 
 
 imagination was co-ordinated with reason. This imagination 
 was not merely a quality of his intellect but an element of his 
 nature, and through its instinctive workings he was not con- 
 tent to send out his thoughts stoically bare of adornment, but 
 clothed them in purple and gold, and made them move in 
 majestic cadences. . . . His beneficent spirit and rich 
 imagination lend sweetness and beauty to the homeliest prac- 
 tical wisdom." E. P. Whipple. 
 
 " The ' Essays,' or ' Counsels Civil and Moral,' were espe- 
 cially enriched with the brighter blossoms of their great 
 author's matured fancy. In this respect that his fancy was 
 more vivid in age than in youth the mind of Bacon formed 
 an exception to the common rule." W. F. Collier. 
 
 " A great and luminous intellect, one of the finest of this 
 poetic progeny, who, like his predecessors, was naturally dis- 
 posed to clothe his ideas in the most splendid dress : in this 
 age a thought did not seem complete till it had assumed form 
 and color. But what distinguishes him from the others is, 
 that with him an image only serves to concentrate meditation. 
 He reflected long, stamped on his mind all the parts and rela- 
 tions of his subject ; he is master of it, and then, instead of 
 exposing this complete idea in a graduated chain of reasoning, 
 he embodies it in a comparison so expressive, exact, lucid, that 
 behind the figure we perceive all the details of the idea, like 
 liquor in a fine crystal vase. . . . This is his mode of 
 thought, by symbols, not by analysis." Taine. 
 
 " His style is all over color and imagery ; so much so, in- 
 deed, that this sort of enrichment may be said frequently to 
 enter into its substance and to constitute his thoughts rather 
 than to clothe and decorate them." G. L. Craik. 
 
 " This philosophy is constantly enveloped in the most splen- 
 did imagery, which hangs around it like the drapery round 
 the limbs of an ancient statue, only giving higher ideas of the 
 strength and symmetry of the form, which it partially con- 
 ceals. ' ' Hallam .
 
 BACON 13 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " As if there were sought in knowledge a couch whereupon to 
 rest a searching and restless spirit ; or a terrace for a wandering 
 and variable mind to walk up and down with a fair prospect ; or 
 a tower of state for a proud mind to rest itself upon ; or a fort or 
 a commanding ground for strife and contention ; or a shop for 
 profit and sale ; and not a rich storehouse for the glory of the 
 Creator and the relief of man's estate." The Advancement of 
 Learning. 
 
 " For envy is a gadding passion and walketh the street and 
 does not keep at home." Of Envy. 
 
 " All rising to great place is -by a winding stair ; and if there 
 be factions, it is good to side a man's self [to take sides] whilst 
 he is in the rising and to balance himself when he is placed." 
 Of Great Place. 
 
 " If a man be gracious and courteous to strangers, it shows he 
 is a citizen of the world, and that his heart is no island cut off 
 from other lands but a continent that joins to them." Of Good- 
 ness. 
 
 " For as water will not ascend higher than the level of the first 
 spring-head from whence it descendeth, so knowledge derived 
 from Aristotle, and exempted from the liberty of examination, 
 will not rise again higher than the knowledge of Aristotle." The 
 Advancement of Learning. 
 
 4. Knowledge of Human Nature Sagacity. 
 
 Bacon's great natural powers of observation seem to have been 
 sharpened by his intimate relations with the courtiers of 
 Elizabeth and James. He analyzes human character as a 
 chemist does a natural compound. 
 
 "His 'Essays' are the counsels of a shrewd, politic man 
 of the world, who has looked with eager and penetrating eye 
 upon mankind as it appears in the senate-house, in courts of 
 law, in the commercial world ; of a man who is firmly con- 
 vinced that self-interest is the actuating principle of human- 
 ity." j/.
 
 14 BACON 
 
 "It was not in the knowledge of nature but in the knowl- 
 edge of human nature that Bacon pre-eminently excelled. 
 . His knowledge of human nature was the result of 
 the tranquil deposit, year after year, into his receptive and 
 capacious intellect of the facts of history and of his own wide 
 experience of various kinds of life. . . . The most val- 
 uable peculiarity of this wisdom is that it not merely points 
 out what should be done but it points out how it can be 
 done. . . . He regarded the machinery in motion ; the 
 human being as he thinks, feels, and lives ; men in their re- 
 lations with men ; and the phenomena presented in history 
 and life he aimed to investigate as he would investigate the 
 phenomena of the natural world." E. P. Whipple. 
 
 " He had made an exact and extensive survey of human 
 requirements ; he took the gauge and metre, the depths and 
 soundings of human capacity. He was master of the com- 
 parative anatomy of the mind of man, of the balance of power 
 among the different faculties. . . . Bacon has been 
 called one of the wisest of mankind. The word wisdom 
 characterizes him more than any other. . . . He had 
 great sagacity of observation, solidity of judgment, and scope 
 of fancy." Hazlitt. 
 
 "His sagacity and knowledge of state affairs proved so 
 true a guide that his views of the main actions have not been 
 set aside by more patient investigations." William Minto. 
 
 " There is not to be found in any human composition a 
 passage more eminently distinguished by profound and serene 
 wisdom than the description of ' The House of Solomon ' in 
 the ' New Atlantis.' " Macaulay. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " This kind of degenerate learning did chiefly reign amongst 
 the schoolmen, who, having sharp and strong wits and abundance 
 of leisure and small variety of reading ; but their wits being shut
 
 BACON 15 
 
 up in the cells of a few authors (chiefly Aristotle, their dictator) 
 as their persons were shut up in the cells of their monasteries 
 and colleges, and knowing little history, either of nature or time, 
 did out of no great quantity of matter and infinite agitation of 
 wit spin out unto us those laborious webs of learning which are 
 extant in their books." The Advancement of Learning. 
 
 " It was prettily devised of yEsop, the fly sat upon the axle- 
 tree of the chariot and said, ' What a dust do I raise ! ' So are 
 there some vain persons that, whatever goeth alone, or moveth 
 upon greater means, if they have never so little hand in it, they 
 think it is they that carry it. They that are glorious [boastful] 
 must needs be factious ; for all bravery [vaunting] stands upon 
 comparisons. They must needs be violent to make good their 
 own vaunts ; neither can they be secret and therefore not effect- 
 ual.''^ Vain Glory. 
 
 " A man that hath no virtue in himself ever envieth virtue in 
 others. For men's minds will either feed upon their own good 
 or upon others' evil, and who wanteth the one will prey upon the 
 other, and whoso is out of hope to attain to another's virtue, will 
 seek to come at even hand by depressing another's fortune. A 
 man that is busy and inquisitive is commonly envious ; for to 
 know much of other men's matters cannot be, because all that 
 ado may concern his own estate. Therefore it must needs be 
 that he taketh a kind of play pleasure in looking upon the fort- 
 unes of others. Neither can he that mindeth but his own busi- 
 ness find much matter for envy." On Envy. 
 
 5. Frequent Biblical and Classical Quotation 
 and Allusion. Bacon's knowledge of the ancient classics 
 seems to have been limited only by the writings themselves. 
 On almost every page some brilliant side-light is thrown from 
 this source, and often from a writer who is quite unknown to 
 the best of our modern classical scholars. The moral ob- 
 liquity of Bacon's later life certainly was not due to a lack of 
 familiarity with Bible truths and teachings. His acquaintance 
 with Holy Writ is almost equal to that of Shakespeare, and the 
 works of both unite with many modern masterpieces in testify- 
 ing to the value of the English Bible as a literary model.
 
 16 BACON 
 
 Bacon quotes very frequently from the Bible, and from the 
 Latin writers, especially Tacitus, Lucretius, and Cicero. 
 
 "In his 'Advancement of Learning,' addressed to King 
 James, he seems to humor the pedantry of the monarch, and 
 introduces not a few Latin quotations without translating 
 them. ' ' William Minto. 
 
 "That he felt any pride in, or even set just value on, his 
 unique mastery of the English language, there is scarcely any 
 indication. Of his Latin he was proud." E. A, Abbott. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 "The blessing of Judah and Issachar will never meet; that 
 the same people or nation should be both the lion's whelp and 
 the ass between burdens ; neither will it be that a people over- 
 laid with taxes should ever become valiant and martial." Of 
 Kingdoms and Estates. 
 
 " And it cometh many times to pass that ' materiam super- 
 abit opus," 1 that the work and coinage is worth more than the ma- 
 terial, and enricheth a state more." Of Kingdoms and Estates. 
 
 " This same ' multis utile bellum ' is an assured and infallible 
 sign of a state disposed to seditions and troubles." Of Seditions 
 and Troubles. 
 
 " And therefore it was well said, ' Invidia festos dies non agit? 
 for it is ever working upon some or other." Of Envy. 
 
 " Usury is one of the certainest means of gain, though one of 
 the worst ; as that whereby a man doth eat his bread in the sweat 
 of another's brow." Of Riches. 
 
 " By all means it is to be procured that the trunk of Nebuchad- 
 nezzar's tree of monarchy be great enough to bear the branches 
 and the boughs ; that is, that the natural subjects of the crown or 
 state bear a sufficient proportion to the stronger subjects that 
 they govern ; therefore all states that are liberal of naturalization 
 toward strangers are fit for empire." Of Kingdoms and Estates. 
 
 6. The Use of Obscure Latin Derivatives and 
 Obsolete Words. " Bacon uses a great many more obso- 
 lete words than either Hooker or Sidney. ... In his
 
 BACON 17 
 
 narrative and in his ' Essays,' as well as his scientific writings, 
 he shows a decided preference now and then for ' ink-horn 
 terms.' " William Minto. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " Preserve the right of thy place, but stir not questions of juris- 
 diction." Of Great Place. 
 
 " As for facility [ease of access] it is worse than bribery." Of 
 Great Place. 
 
 " The lighter sort of malignity turneth but to a coarseness or 
 forwardness or aptness to oppose, or difficileness, or the like ; 
 but the deeper sort to envy and mere mischief." Of Goodness. 
 
 " We see the Switzers last well notwithstanding their diversity 
 of religion and cantons ; for utility is their bond and not respects 
 [consideration of persons]." Of Nobility. 
 
 7. Eloquence. "Bacon was an orator, not a worker; 
 a Tyrtaeus, not a Miltiades." H. J. Nicoll. 
 
 " His power as an orator is attested by two eminent author- 
 ities. Sir Walter Raleigh says that 'he surpassed other men in 
 speaking as much as he did in writing ; and Ben Jonson 
 affirms : ' No man had their affections more in his power. ' 
 . . . From all that we know it seems unmistakable that 
 he addressed chiefly the self-interest and confirmed passions of 
 his audience. The main study of his life was how to ' work ' 
 men." William Minto. - 
 
 " He is the most eloquent of all discoursers on the phi- 
 losophy of science, and the general greatness of his mind is 
 evident even in the demonstrable errors of his system." 
 E. P. IVJiipple. 
 
 "His eloquence alone would have entitled him to a high 
 rank in literature." Macaulay. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " As for nobility in particular persons, it is a reverend thing to 
 see an ancient castle or building not in decay, or to see a fair
 
 18 BACON 
 
 timber-tree sound and perfect ; how much more to behold an an- 
 cient noble family, which hath stood against the waves and 
 weathers of time ! for new nobility is but the act of power, but 
 ancient nobility is the act of time." Of Nobility. 
 
 11 Your Majesty's eloquence is indeed royal, streaming, and 
 branching out in Nature's fashion as from a fountain, copious 
 and elegant, original and inimitable." Advancement of Learn- 
 ing. 
 
 "A man shall find in the traditions of astrology some pretty 
 and apt divisions of men's natures, according to the predom- 
 inances of the planets ; lovers of quiet, lovers of action, lovers 
 of victory, lovers of honour, lovers of pleasure, lovers of art, 
 lovers of change, and so forth. ... Of much like kind are 
 those impressions of nature which are imposed upon the mind by 
 the sex, by the age, by the region, by the health and sickness, 
 by beauty and deformity, and the like, which are inherent and 
 not extern ; and again, those which are caused by extern fortune ; 
 as sovereignty, nobility, obscure birth, riches, want, magistracy, 
 privateness, prosperity, adversity, constant fortune, variable 
 fortune, and the like." Advancement of Learning. 
 
 8. Intellectual Elevation. " In the tone of his mind 
 there is something imperial. When he writes on buildings, 
 he speaks of a palace, with spacious entrances and courts and 
 banqueting halls ; when he writes on gardens, he speaks of 
 alleys and mounts, waste places and fountains of a garden 
 ' which is indeed prince-like.' " Alexander Smith. 
 
 " All who read Bacon are impressed with a certain dignity, 
 majesty, and grandeur in his intelligence." E. P. Whipple. 
 
 " He views objects from the greatest height, and his re- 
 flections acquire a sublimity in proportion to their profundity, 
 as in deep wells of water we see the sparkling of the highest 
 fixed stars." Hazlitt. 
 
 " The quality of strength in his style is intellectual rather 
 than emotional. In his narrative there is very little expres- 
 sion of feeling ; the strength comes chiefly from conciseness, 
 secured by comprehensive statement, pregnant metaphor, and
 
 BACON 19 
 
 occasional strokes of epigrammatic condensation. . 
 To read the productions of Bacon's vigorous and subtile in- 
 tellect has a bracing influence." Minto. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " When the mind goes deeper and sees the dependence of the 
 causes and works of Providence, it will easily perceive, accord- 
 ing to the mythology of the poets, that the upper link of Nat- 
 ure's chain is fastened to Jupiter's throne." Advancement of 
 Learning. 
 
 "The first creature of God, in the works of days, was the light 
 of the sense, the last was the light of reason, and his Sabbath 
 work, ever since, is the illumination of the spirit. First he 
 breathed light upon the face of the matter, or chaos, then he 
 breathed light into the face of man ; and still he breatheth and 
 inspireth light into the face of his chosen." Of Truth. 
 
 " The understanding when left to itself in a man of a steady, 
 patient, and reflecting disposition, makes some attempt in the 
 right direction, but with little effect, since the understanding, un- 
 directed and unassisted, is unequal and unfit for the task of 
 vanquishing the obscurity of things. "Novum Organum.
 
 MILTON, 1608-1674. 
 
 Biographical Outline. JOHN MILTON, born December 
 9, 1608, in Bread Street, Cheapside, London ; father a scriv- 
 ener a man of scholarly and musical attainments ; Milton is 
 first taught by a private tutor, one Thomas Young ; enters St. 
 Paul's School not later than 1620 ; is passionately devoted to 
 study, reading till midnight regularly, while yet a child, and 
 thus early injuring his eyesight; he learns Latin, Greek, 
 French, Italian, and some Hebrew ; is a poet at ten, and is 
 devoted to Spenser's " Faery Queene ; ' ' writes two paraphrases 
 of the Psalms before he is fifteen ; enters Christ's College, 
 Cambridge, February 12, 1624-25, as a pensioner, and is 
 matriculated on the gth of the following April ; keeps every 
 term at Cambridge, taking A.B. in March, 1629, and A.M. 
 in July, 1632 ; is harshly treated (tradition says whipped) by 
 his tutor, one Chappel ; is highly respected at the university 
 for his scholarship ; corresponds in Latin with his friends 
 Diodati, Young, and Gill, while at Cambridge; writes sev- 
 eral Latin poems and ' ' Prolusione s Oratorice" (published in 
 1674) as college exercises ; writes his " Ode on the Nativity " 
 at Christmas, 1629, and his Sonnet to Shakespeare in 1630 ; ex- 
 presses scorn for the dramatic performances seen at Cambridge, 
 the narrow theological studies of his fellows, and their igno- 
 rance of philosophy; is nicknamed "the lady" at college 
 because of his long, flowing locks, his personal beauty, and 
 his sensitiveness ; becomes a good fencer, but holds himself 
 austerely aloof from most student society ; develops great 
 hostility to scholasticism ; even while at Cambridge Milton 
 already considered himself as dedicated to the utterance of 
 
 20
 
 MILTON 21 
 
 great thoughts and to the strictest chastity, on the ground that 
 "he who would write well hereafter in laudable things ought 
 himself to be a true poem ; " Milton is educated with a view 
 to taking holy orders, but, on leaving Cambridge, he decides 
 to postpone (but not to abandon) that course ; is alienated 
 from the Church by the intolerant policy of Laud ; soon de- 
 cides to devote himself exclusively to literature, and settles 
 with his father at Horton, in Buckinghamshire, twelve miles 
 from London, where he resides from 1632 to 1638; while at 
 Horton Milton visits London frequently, to obtain instruc- 
 tion in music and mathematics, and writes his "Allegro" 
 and ' ' Pen seroso ; " writes also his masque "Arcades," for 
 the Countess-dowager of Derby, and "Comus," for the Earl 
 of Bridge water (performed at Ludlow Castle in September, 
 1634, and published by Milton's musical collaborator, Henry 
 Lawes, without acknowledging Milton's authorship) ; Milton 
 writes " Lycidas " in November, 1637, on the death of his 
 friend Edward King; starts, in April, 1638, on a Continental 
 tour, taking a servant and being liberally supplied with money 
 by his father ; makes brief visits to Paris, Nice, Genoa, Leg- 
 horn, and Pisa, and spends two months in Florence and two 
 more in Rome ; thence to Naples, where he learns of the 
 threatened revolution, and determines to return- home, "lest I 
 should be travelling abroad while my countrymen were fight- 
 ing for liberty ; " stops two more months at Florence on his 
 way homeward, and returns by way of Ferrara, Bologna, Ven- 
 ice, Verona, Milan, and (probably) the Simplon ; spends some 
 time in Geneva, and reaches England via Paris in July, 1639; 
 while abroad he offends the Italians by his strict morality and 
 his outspoken attacks on popery, but is received and honored 
 by many eminent persons, including Grotius, the Academi- 
 cians of Florence, Galileo, and others ; during his tour he 
 writes five Italian sonnets and a canzone ; on his return, takes 
 lodgings in a tailor's house in St. Bride's Churchyard, Lon- 
 don, and receives there his sister's two sons (aged eight and
 
 22 MILTON 
 
 nine) as pupils ; soon afterward takes " a pretty garden-house " 
 in Aldersgate Street ; establishes for himself and his pupils a 
 regime of " hard study and spare diet," allowing himself but 
 one " gaudy day " a month, and carrying out, with his pupils, 
 the methods of education described in his tractate on that 
 subject; in 1643 takes more pupils, and writes his Latin 
 idyll ' ' Epitaphium Damonis ; ' ' sketches the plan of a poem 
 on Arthur, draws up a list of ninety-nine subjects for other 
 poems, and already contemplates a poem on " Paradise Lost " ; 
 enters political discussion by publishing, anonymously, in the 
 summer of 1641, three pamphlets "Of Reformation Touching 
 Church Discipline in England," "Prelatical Episcopacy," and 
 " Animadversions upon the Remonstrance Defence," all three 
 being vehement attacks on the episcopacy and scathing re- 
 plies to the pleas of its adherents; in February, 1641-42, Mil- 
 ton publishes, under his own name, " The Reason of Church 
 Government Urged Against Prelacy ; " in April, 1642, pub- 
 lishes his "Apology," defending himself against a slanderous 
 attack by Bishop Hall and replying most vehemently in kind; 
 declines to enter the army at the outbreak of the civil war in 
 1642, on the ground that his mind is stronger than his body, 
 and is therefore more useful to the cause of liberty ; on May 
 21, 1643, after a surprisingly short courtship, Milton marries 
 Mary Powell, aged seventeen, daughter of a Cavalier land- 
 holder, residing at Forest Hill, Oxfordshire, who had long 
 owed Milton a debt of ^312; soon afterward, Milton's 
 father, driven by the Royalists from his home at Reading, 
 comes to live with Milton ; Milton's wife soon becomes dis- 
 satisfied with the dulness of his home and the crying of his 
 oft-beaten pupils, and Milton finds his wife stupid ; so she re- 
 turns to her father after a month's trial of " a philosophical 
 life," promising to return at the ensuing Michaelmas; she 
 refuses to return ; Milton's messenger is uncivilly treated by 
 her family, and then (within three months of his marriage) 
 Milton writes his tractate on " The Doctrine and Discipline
 
 MILTON 23 
 
 of Divorce," in which he justifies divorce on the ground of 
 incompatibility or of mutual consent, especially if there be 
 no children, and proposes sweeping changes in the marriage- 
 laws ; the tractate makes him notorious, and he is bitterly at- 
 tacked, especially after his second and acknowledged edition 
 of the tractate in February, 1643-44; publishes a second 
 pamphlet on divorce in July, 1644 ; influenced by the demand 
 that his books be burned and by the threat of prosecution be- 
 cause he had not obtained a proper license from the Stationers' 
 Company, Milton writes his " Areopagitica" published No- 
 vember 24, 1644, and generally acknowledged to be the best 
 of his prose works ; publishes two more pamphlets on divorce 
 in 1644-45, an d proposes to apply his principles by marrying 
 the daughter of one Dr. Davis, a lady immortalized in Mil- 
 ton's Sonnet to " Lady Margaret " : meantime his wife's par- 
 ent's lose their property, and she begs his pardon and asks to 
 be received again ; Milton reluctantly consents, and they take 
 a house in the Barbican (a street near Aldersgate Street) large 
 enough to accommodate his increasing number of pupils; by 
 Mary Powell, Milton has four children : Anne, Mary, John (who 
 died in infancy), and Deborah; Mrs. Milton dies in 1652; 
 Milton publishes the first collected edition of his poems in 
 1645, placing the Latin and the English verseson separate pages; 
 his pupils increase in number, and include several sons of promi- 
 nent families; in the autumn of 1647 Milton removes to a house 
 in High Hoi born and gives up teaching ; it is supposed that he 
 inherited a competency from his father, who died in March, 
 1646-47 ; in his sonnet to Fairfax and in other writings he 
 expresses deep sympathy with the Puritan cause ; writes para- 
 phrases of seventeen of the Psalms and a ' ' History of Bri tain ; ' ' 
 immediately after the execution of Charles I., he publishes a 
 pamphlet on "The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates," and is 
 consequently invited to become Latin Secretary to the Council 
 of State ; he accepts, and takes office March 15, 1648-49, at a 
 salary of about ^730 a year; his duties are to translate the
 
 24 MILTON 
 
 foreign dispatches of the government into dignified Latin, to 
 examine papers found on suspected persons, and to act as a 
 licenser of books ; he is directed by the government to answer 
 the " Eikon Basilike" a book then popularly supposed to 
 have been written by Charles I., in defence of his character 
 and position, but really written by the Bishop of Exeter; 
 Milton publishes his answer October 6, 1649, under the title 
 " Eikonoklastes" of which a French translation is ordered 
 made by the Council of State ; Milton is ordered by the coun- x 
 cil, in January, 1650, to reply to Salmasius, a professor at 
 Leyden " a man of enormous reading and no judgment " 
 whom the Scottish Presbyterians had invited to write in de- 
 fence of their theological and political position, and who had 
 accordingly published, in 1649, the " Defensio Regio pro 
 Carolo I.; Milton's reply, ' 'Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio," 
 appears in March, 1650, and he refuses ,100 voted him by 
 the council as payment for the work ; completes the destruction 
 of his eyesight by overwork on his" Defence ; " in March, 1652, 
 he is attacked with gross personal abuse by one Peter du Mou- 
 lin in a book entitled " Rcgii Sanguinis Clamor ad Ca'/um," 
 dedicated to Alexander More, formerly professor of Greek 
 at Geneva, and attributed to More by Milton ; he is or- 
 dered by the council to reply to the" Clamor" and pub- 
 lishes his answer in May, 1654, under the title ''Defensio 
 Stcunda" a book full of savage abuse, but containing, also, 
 valuable autobiographical passages and an apostrophe to 
 Cromwell ; More replies, denying the authorship of the 
 " Clamor," and Milton writes a third book, " Pro Se Defen- 
 sio" in August, 1655 ; while Latin secretary he occupies for a 
 time chambers at Whitehall ; later removes to another "pretty 
 garden-house," afterward 19 York Street, subsequently oc- 
 cupied successively by Bentham, James Mill, and Hazlitt, and 
 demolished in 1877 ; he lives here till the Restoration ; is as- 
 sisted in his duties as secretary by Andrew Man ell and others; 
 in 1655, apparently because of his blindness, Milton's salary
 
 MILTON 25 
 
 is reduced to ^150 a year, which was to be paid during his 
 life, and was soon increased to ^200; on November 12, 
 1656, he marries Catherine Woodcock, by whom he has one 
 child, but mother and child die in February, 1658 ; Milton 
 is said to have had an allowance first from Parliament and 
 afterward from Cromwell for the maintenance of a " weekly 
 table" for the entertainment of eminent foreigners, who came 
 to England especially to see him; in 1659 he publishes two 
 pamphlets favoring a purely voluntary ecclesiastical system, 
 and in 1660 one proposing that Parliament make itself perpet- 
 ual; in April, 1660, writes " Brief Notes," attacking a royal- 
 ist sermon ; at the Restoration Milton conceals himself in a 
 friend's house in Bartholomew Close; on June 16, 1660, it is 
 ordered by the Commons that his " Pro Populo Anglicano De- 
 fensio ' ' be burned by the common hangman and that he be 
 indicted and taken into custody ; he is arrested during the sum- 
 mer, but is ordered released at the next session on the payment 
 of fees amounting to ^150 ; the Indemnity Act frees him from 
 all legal consequences of his actions ; the lenient treatment of 
 Milton was probably due to the efforts of his friends Marvell and 
 D'Avenant, for the latter of whom he had formerly entreated 
 when D'Avenant had been in danger of execution ; on regaining 
 his liberty, Milton takes a house in Holborn and soon after- 
 ward removes to Jewett Street; by the changes attendant 
 on the Restoration his income is reduced from ^500 to 
 about ^200 a year ; Mrs. Powell, mother of Milton's first 
 wife, attempts to obtain some of his property, and apparently 
 succeeds in part; on February 24, 1662-63, ne marr ies Eliza- 
 beth Minshull, and soon afterward removes to a small house 
 with a garden, in Artillery Walk, Bunhill Fields, where he re- 
 sides till death, if we except a reported short sojourn as a 
 lodger in the house of the bookseller Millington ; during the 
 plague of 1665 he retires to Chalfont St. Giles, where "a 
 pretty box " was taken for him by the Quaker, Thomas Ell- 
 wood ; Ellwood had previously formed a friendship with Mil-
 
 26 MILTON 
 
 ton, had read Latin books to him, received from him in the 
 " box " at Chalfont the manuscript of " Paradise Lost," and 
 suggested a poem on "Paradise Regained ; " the house at Chal- 
 font is still preserved (1898) as a public memorial of Milton ; 
 he begins " Paradise Lost " in 1658 and finishes it in 1663 ; 
 loses his house in Bread Street (inherited from his father) in 
 the great fire of 1666; on April 27, 1667, Milton sells the 
 copyright of " Paradise Lost " to Samuel Simmons, the terms 
 being that Milton is to receive ^5 down and ^5 additional 
 for each of the first three editions of not more than 1,500 copies 
 each; receives his second ^5 in April, 1669, and these 10 
 are all he ever received personally for " Paradise Lost; " in 
 1680 Milton's widow sells to Simmons a perpetual copyright of 
 the book for 8 ; 4,500 copies were sold by 1688 ; Dryden 
 first appreciated itsTalue, saying of Milton: " This man cuts 
 us all out, and the ancients, too; " with Milton's permission, 
 Dryden puts " Paradise Lost " into a drama in rhyme, under 
 the title " A Heroick Opera," published in 1674; Milton is 
 much visited, in his later years, by foreigners and men of 
 rank; "Paradise Lost" is translated into German and into 
 Latin in 1682 ; Milton publishes " Paradise Regained " and 
 "Samson Agonistes " together in 1671, and could never 
 bear to hear " Paradise Regained " pronounced inferior to his 
 first epic; in 1669 he publishes his Latin grammar and his 
 "History of Britain," written long before; in 1673 puts 
 forth a new edition of his early poems ; suffers during his last 
 years from the gout and from unpleasant domestic relations ; 
 dies at his house in Artillery Walk, Bunhill Fields, November 
 8, 1674, leaving ^100 each to his " undutiful children," 
 and ^600 to his widow.
 
 MILTON 27 
 
 . BIBLIOGRAPHY ON MILTON'S STYLE. 
 
 Scherer, E., "Essays on English Literature." New York, 1891, Scrib- 
 
 ner, 111-150. 
 Bayne, P., "The Puritan Revolution." London, 1878, James Clark & 
 
 Co., 297-347. 
 Channing, W. E., "Works." Boston, 1867, American Unit. Ass'n, 
 
 20: 30. 
 
 Coleridge, H., "Essays," etc. London, 1851, E. Moxon, 2: 18-28. 
 Lowell, J. R., " Latest Literary Essays." New York, 1892, Houghton, 
 
 Mifflin & Co. 
 Taine, H., " History of English Literature." New York, 1874, Holt, 
 
 I : 409-456. 
 Ward, T. H., "English Poets" (Pattison). New York, 1881, Macmil- 
 
 lan, 2 : 293-306. 
 
 Gilfillan, G., "Literary Portraits." Edinburgh, 1851, J. Hogg, 2: 1-27. 
 Arnold, M., " Mixed Essays." New York, 1879, Macmillan, 256-257. 
 Hazlitt, W., " Lectures on the English Poets." London, 1884, G. Bell & 
 
 Son, 75-90. 
 Hallam, H., "Works." New York, 1859, Harper, i: 131, and 2: 182, 
 
 and see index. 
 
 Hazlitt, W., "Table Talk." London, 1882, G. Bell & Sons, 240-249. 
 Newman, J. H., " Essays on Milton's Style." London, 1872, Longmans, 
 
 54-60. 
 Garnett, R., " John Milton " (Great Writers). London, 1890, W. Scott, 
 
 v, index. 
 Bagehot, W., " Works." Hartford, 1889, Travellers' Insurance Co., I: 
 
 303-352. 
 Pattison, M., "Milton" (English Men of Letters). New York, 1879, 
 
 Harper, 79. 
 Saintsbury, G., "A History of Elizabethan Literature." New York, 
 
 1887, Macmillan, 317-330. 
 Macaulay, T. B., "Essays" (Miscellaneous Works). New York, 1880, 
 
 Harper, I : 13-64, and v, index. 
 Lowell, J. R., "Among My Books." Boston, 1891, Houghton, Mifflin 
 
 & Co., 274-276. 
 Dowden, E., "Studies in Literature." London, 1878, Kegan Paul & 
 
 Co., 88-90. 
 Arnold, M., " Essays in Criticism" (Second Series). New York, 1888, 
 
 Macmillan, 56-69. 
 DeQuincey, T., "Works." Edinburgh, 1890, A. & C. Black, ill 
 
 453-473. and 4 : 86- i 18.
 
 28 MILTON 
 
 Johnson, S., "Works" (Lives of the Poets). New York, 1846, Harp- 
 er, 2 : 22-46. 
 
 Birrell, A., " Obiter Dicta." New York, 1887, Scribner, 2: 1-52. 
 
 Minto, Wm., " English Prose Literature." Edinburgh, 1876, Black, 311. 
 
 Masson, D., "Essays, Biographical and Critical." Cambridge, 1856, 
 Macmillan, 37-53- 
 
 Brooke, S., "John Milton." New York, 1879, Appleton, 112-125. 
 
 Nicoll, H. J., "Landmarks of English Literature." New York, 1883, 
 Appleton, 112-125. 
 
 Dawson, G., " Biographical Lectures." London, 1886, Kegan Paul, 
 Trench & Co., 82-88. 
 
 Rice, A. T., " Essays from North American Review " (Emerson). New 
 York, 1879, Appleton, 99-122. 
 
 Dowden, E., "Transcripts and Studies." London, 1888, Kegan Paul, 
 Trench & Co., 454-473. 
 
 Windsor, A. L., " Ethica." London, 1860, Smith, Elder &Co., 57-112. 
 
 Browning, E. B., "Essays on the Poets." New York, 1863, James 
 Miller, 192-199. 
 
 Collier, W. F., " History of English Literature." London, 1892, Nel- 
 son, 194-211. 
 
 Reed, H., " British Poets." Philadelphia, 1857, Parry & Macmillan, I : 
 
 199-233- 
 Hunt, L., " Selections from English Poets." Philadelphia, 1854, W. P. 
 
 Hazard, 172. 
 
 Masson, D., " Three Devils. " London, 1874, Macmillan, 125-150. 
 Philips, M. G., "A Manual of English Literature." New York, 1885, 
 
 Harper, I : 293-373. 
 
 Carlyle, T., "Essays." London, 1869, Chapman & Hall, 2: 64. 
 Welsh, A. H., "The Development of English Literature." Chicago, 
 
 1884, Griggs, I : 472-495- 
 Hunt, T. W., "English Prose, and Prose Writers." New York, 1887, 
 
 Armstrong, 246-264. 
 Dennis, J., " Heroes of Literature." London, 1883, Society for Promoting 
 
 Christian Knowledge, 114-147. 
 Rossetti, W. M., " Lives of Famous Poets." London, 1878, E. Moxon, 
 
 65-79. 
 Dobson, W. T., "The Classic Poets." London, 1879, Smith, Elder & 
 
 Co., 394-452- 
 Seeley, J. R. , " Lectures and Essays." London, 1870, Macmillan, 89- 
 
 154- 
 
 Yonge, C. D., "Three Centuries of English Literature." New York, 
 1889, Appleton, 185-210.
 
 MILTON 29 
 
 Hutton, L., "Literary Landmarks of London." New York, 1892, 
 Harper, 210-216. 
 
 Howitt, Wm., " Homes and Haunts of British Authors." London, 1847, 
 Bentley, i : 67-104. 
 
 Masson, D., "In the Footsteps of the Poets." New York, 1893, Whit- 
 taker, 13-105. 
 
 Sterling. John, "Essays and Tales." London, 1848, Parker, I : 73-87. 
 
 Contemporary Review, 19: 198-209 (Do wden) ; 22: 427-460 (P. Bayne). 
 
 Quarterly Review, 143: 186-204; 32: 442-457; 63: 29-61 (J. H. 
 Lord). 
 
 Edinburgh Rei'iew, 69 : 112-121 (Channing) ; 42: 304-346 (Macaulay). 
 
 Christian Examiner, 57: 323-339 (S. Osgood) ; 66: 401-431 (G. E. 
 Ellis) ; 3 : 29-77 ( w - E - Channing). 
 
 LittelTs Li-'hig Age, 44 : 497 (Lamartine). 
 
 British Quarterly, 29: 185-214; 10: 229-254. 
 
 International Review, 9: 125-135 (H. C. Lodge). 
 
 North British Review, 30: 281-309; 16: 295-335 (D. Masson). 
 
 Fortnightly Revie-a, 54: 510-519 (Pollock). 
 
 The Nation, 47: 310 (E. S.); 13: 91-92 (Allen); 17: 165-166 (Al- 
 len); 31: 15-16 (Allen); 26: 342-344 (Diman) ; 30: 30-32 (G. 
 Smith). 
 
 Century Magazine, 36: 53-55 (M. Arnold). 
 
 North American Review, 47 : 56-73 (Emerson) ; 82 : 388-404 (Whit- 
 ney); 22: 364-373; 31: 101-103 and 33 8 and 45 J -452; 3& : 
 243-246; 41: 375-382 (Channing); 46: 216-217 (Emerson); 
 126: 536-543 (D. Masson). 
 
 National Magazine, I: 9-13. 
 
 Methodist Quarterly Review, 17: 542-559(7. H. Newhall). 
 
 Foreign Quarterly Review, 10 : 508-513. 
 
 Eclectic Review, 25 : 288-291 ; 89 : 507-521 (J. A. St. John). 
 
 New Monthly Magazine, 40 : 39-50. 
 
 The At/i entfiim, 2(1884): 359-360. 
 
 Fortnightly Magazine, 54: 510-520 (Pollock). 
 
 Edinburgh Revim\ 69: 214-230 (J. M. Mason). 
 
 Bibliotheca Sacra, 4: 251-269 (T. W. Hunt). 
 
 Presbyterian Review, 4 : 681-709 (Van Dyke). 
 
 Presbyterian Quarterly, I : 382-395 (Gillette). 
 
 Unitarian Revie-M, 20 : 242-^250 (J. H. Allen). 
 
 De Bow's Commercial R t ~!'ieit>, 29 : 430-441 (G. Fitzhugh). 
 
 Fraser's Magazine, 17: 627-635 (W. E. Channing). 
 
 Congregational Magazine, 10 : 33-41 (J. H. Todd); 17: 217-225 (Rob- 
 ert Fletcher).
 
 30 MILTON 
 
 Colburn's NrM Monthly Magazine, 40 : 39-51. 
 
 Contemporary Review,. 19: 198-211 (E. Dowden) ; 22: 427-460 
 
 (Bayne). 
 Macmillan's Magazine, 31 : 554-556 (J. C. Shairp) and 380-387 (M. 
 
 Pattison). 
 
 PARTICULAR CHARACTERISTICS. 
 
 I. Majestic Eloquence Magnificence Sublim- 
 ity. " This is the quality," says Mark Pattison, " which the 
 poverty of our language tries to express by the words solem- 
 nity, gravity, majesty, nobility, loftiness, and which, name 
 it as we may, we all feel in reading ' Paradise Lost.' 
 The ' Areopagitica ' is a copious flood of majestic eloquence, 
 the outpouring of a noble soul with a divine scorn of narrow 
 dogma and paltry aims." Macaulay declares that Milton's 
 prose writings "abound with passages compared with which 
 the finest declamations of Burke sink into insignificance." 
 His pamphlets are "orations rather than treatises or disser- 
 tations." Many passages in his prose parallel " the solemn 
 music of his own best verse." 
 
 " There is something indescribably heroical and magnifi- 
 cent which overflows from Milton, even when he is engaged 
 in the most miserable discussions. . . . The language in 
 these pamphlets is instinct with fire there is no prose poetry 
 in the language comparable with it. The eloquence is now 
 sad, tender, and again wild and tempestuous as the hurricane 
 of heaven. . . . There are moments when, shaking the 
 dust of argument from him, the poet suddenly bursts forth 
 and carries us off on the torrent of an incomparable eloquence. 
 It is no rhetorical phrase-making, it is poetic enthusiasm, a 
 flood of images shed over the dull and arid theme, a wing- 
 stroke that sweeps us high above piddling controversies." 
 Edmond Scherer. 
 
 11 It [the ' Areopagitica '] is a pleading of the highest elo- 
 quence and courage, with interspersed passages of curious in-
 
 MILTON 31 
 
 formation, keen wit, and even a rich humor, such as we do 
 not commonly look for in Milton." David Masson. 
 
 " Milton's prose works are studded with words and phrases 
 of intense nobleness, which beacon the gloom of sordid ages 
 and send rays of star-like illumination into the dusk of com- 
 promise, conventionality, and hypocrisy. . . . These 
 writings [of Milton] are wonderful for the truth, learning, 
 subtilty, and pomp of language." Peter Bayne. 
 
 " It [the ' Areopagitica '] is the most literary of Milton's 
 prose, eloquent, to the point, and full of noble images, splen- 
 didly wrought and fitted to their places. ... At times 
 they rise into an eloquence which has nothing like it in Eng- 
 lish literature for grandeur, music, splendor." Stopford 
 Brooke. 
 
 " Among Milton's many great attributes, his mastery of 
 the sublime is the one which has probably received the most 
 frequent laudation." W. M. Rossetti. 
 
 " Milton's chief talent, and, indeed, his distinguishing ex- 
 cellence, lies in the sublimity of his thoughts." Addison. 
 
 " There are splendid passages in Milton's prose works, pas- 
 sages where we are carried away by torrents of gorgeous elo- 
 quence. ... In comparison with his organ tones the 
 voices of contemporary singers seem as penny whistles." 
 H. J. Nicoll. 
 
 Lowell calls the " Areopagitica " an " impassioned harangue 
 of a supremely eloquent man," and adds : " His more elab- 
 orate passages have the multitudinous roll of thunder." 
 
 " We have in Milton no trash, no effusion of pious senti- 
 mentalism, like certain herbs, too sweet to be wholesome; 
 but a strain that might have been sung by the angelic host on 
 the plains of Bethlehem and rehearsed by the shepherds in 
 the ears of the infant God." George Gilfillan. 
 
 Taine calls this quality "sacerdotal pomp and majesty," 
 and adds, "As of old, he went out of this lower world in 
 search of the sublime. ' '
 
 32 MILTON 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 "Thou, therefore, that sittest in light and glory unapproach- 
 able, parent of angels and men ! next thee I implore, Omnipotent 
 King, Redeemer of the lost remnant, whose nature thou didst 
 assume ; ineffable and everlasting Love ! and thou the third 
 subsistence of divine infinitude, illumining Spirit, the joy and 
 solace of created things ! one Tri-personal God-head ! look upon 
 this thy poor and almost spent and expiring church. . . . 
 Oh, let them not bring about their damned designs to reinvolve, 
 us in that pitchy cloud of infernal darkness, where \ve shall nev- 
 ermore see the sun of thy truth again, never hope for the cheerful 
 dawn, never more hear the bird of morning sing." Animadver- 
 sions, etc. 
 
 " Then, amidst the hymns and hallelujahs of saints, someone 
 may, perhaps, be heard offering at high strains in new and lofty 
 measures to sing and celebrate thy divine mercies and marvel- 
 lous judgments in this land throughout all ages, whereby this 
 great and warlike nation, instructed and inured to the fervent and 
 continual practice of truth and righteousness, and casting far 
 from her the rags of her old vices, may press on hard to that 
 high and happy emulation to be found the soberest, and wisest, 
 and most Christian people at that day when thou, the eternal, 
 and shortly expected King, shall open the clouds to judge the 
 several kingdoms of the world." Reformation in England. 
 
 " Ye are now in the glorious way to high virtue and matchless 
 deeds, trusted with a most inestimable trust, the asserting of our 
 just liberties. Ye have a nation that expects now, and from 
 mighty sufferings aspires to be the example of all Christendom 
 to a perfect reforming. Dare to be as great, as ample, and as 
 eminent in the fair progress of your noble designs as the full 
 and goodly stature of truth and excellence itself; as unlimited 
 by petty precedents and copies as your unquestionable calling 
 from Heaven gives you power to be." On Divorce. 
 
 2. Gorgeous, Often Excessive, Imagery." He 
 
 breaks forth into magnificent images, he displays in his style 
 the force which he perceives around him and in himself. Im- 
 agination carried Milton away and enchained him in met-
 
 MILTON 33 
 
 aphor. . . . Overloaded with ornaments, infinitely 
 prolonged, these periods are triumphant choruses of angelic 
 alleluias, sung by deep voices to the accompaniment of ten 
 thousand harps of gold." Taine. 
 
 " He was rich in the cumulative treasures of an exhaustless 
 imagination, sometimes lavished with the imprudence of a too 
 prodigal hand. . . . If, in a general summary of Milton's 
 characteristics, I should be asked to point out the predominat- 
 ing feature in his organism, I should unhesitatingly direct at- 
 tention to his imagination." A. C. Windsor. 
 
 Macaulay compares the gorgeous splendor of Milton's words 
 and imagery, his weighty aud ornate magnificence, to a per- 
 fect field of cloth-of-gold. " The style," he says, " is stiff 
 with gorgeous embroidery. It is, to borrow his own majestic 
 language, ' a sevenfold chorus of hallelujahs and harping sym- 
 phonies.' ' Many of his figures his "jewels five words 
 long " seem to be brought in for their own sake instead of 
 growing naturally out of the thought. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant nation, rous- 
 ing herself like a strong man after sleep and shaking her invin- 
 cible locks : methinks I see her as an eagle mewing her mighty 
 youth and kindling her undazzled eyes at the full mid-day beam ; 
 purging and unsealing her long-abused sight at the fountain itself 
 of heavenly radiance ; while the whole noise of timorous and 
 flocking birds, with those also that love the twilight, flutter about, 
 amazed at what she means, and in their envious gabble would 
 prognosticate a year of sects and schisms." Areopagitica. 
 
 '' Then was the priest set to con his motions and his postures, 
 his liturgies and his lisures [lessons], till the soul, by this means 
 of overbodying herself, given up justly to fleshly delights, bated 
 her wing apace downward, and rinding the ease she had from her 
 visible and sensuous colleague, the body, in performance of re- 
 ligious duties, her pinions now broken and flagging, shifted off 
 from herself the labor of high soaring any more." Reformation 
 in England.
 
 34 MILTON 
 
 " Then was the sacred Bible sought out of the dusty corners 
 where profane falsehood and neglect had thrown it, the schools 
 opened, divine and human learning raked out of the embers of 
 forgotten tongues, the princes and cities trooping apace to the 
 new-erected banner of salvation ; the martyrs, with the un- 
 resistible might of weakness, shaking the power of darkness and 
 scorning the fiery rage of the old red dragon." Reformation in 
 England, 
 
 3. Intense Energy Vituperation. This quality of 
 Milton's style appears especially in the boldness of his figures 
 and the fierceness of his invectives. His controversial writ- 
 ings abound in sharp rejoinder and vituperation, often de- 
 scending to unpardonable coarseness and insult. In the words 
 of Edmond Scherer, "Luther and Calvin, those virtuosos of in- 
 sult, had not gone farther. ' ' It was an age of fierce and coarse 
 controversy, and Milton felt called to defend himself and his 
 cause with the same weapons that his enemies used. 
 
 We have his own confession that he entered the contest un- 
 willingly, for he says : " Surely, to every good and peaceable 
 man, it must in nature needs be a hateful thing to be the dis- 
 pleaser and molester of thousands ; much better would it like 
 him, doubtless, to be the messenger of gladness and content- 
 ment, which is his chief intended business to all mankind, but 
 that they resist and oppose their own happiness. But when 
 God commands to take the trumpet and blow a dolorous or a 
 jarring blast, it lies not in man's will what he shall say or 
 what he shall conceal." 
 
 "In his earliest prose works we are aware of a gigantic 
 strength, a clash and clang of militant energy. In the prose 
 the torrent foams, leaps, rages, tosses rocks about. 
 The tempest hurtles through the air, driving the clouds before 
 it like the routed autumn leaves." Peter Bayne.
 
 MILTON 35 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " You scrape together whatever seems to make for your opinion 
 either out of ostentation or out of weakness ; you would leave out 
 nothing that you could find in a baker's or a barber's shop ; nay, 
 you would be glad of anything that looked like an argument from 
 the very hangman." Defence, 
 
 " That all this is true, whoso desires to know at large with least 
 pains and expects not here overlong rehearsals of that which is 
 by others already so judiciously gathered, let him hasten to be 
 acquainted with that noble volume written by our learned Selden, 
 ' Of the Law of Nature and of Nations,' a work more useful and 
 more worthy to be perused by whosoever studies to be a great 
 man in wisdom, equity, and justice than all those ' decretals and 
 sumless sums,' which the pontifical clerks have doted on, ever 
 since that unfortunate mother famously sinned thrice, and died 
 impenitent of her bringing into the world those two misbegotten 
 infants, and forever infants, Lombard and Gratian, him the com- 
 piler of canon iniquity, the other the Tubal Cain of scholastic 
 sophistry, whose overspreading barbarism hath not only infused 
 their own bastardy upon the fruitfullest part of human learning, 
 not only dissipated and dejected the clear light of nature in us, 
 and of nations, but hath tainted also the fountains of divine doc- 
 trine, and rendered the pure and solid law of God unbeneficial 
 to us by their calumnious dunceries." On Divorce. 
 
 " You who know so many tongues, who read so many books, 
 who write so much about them, you are yet but an ass. . . . 
 O most drivelling of asses, you come driven by a woman, with 
 the cured heads of bishops whom you had wounded, a little image 
 of the great beast of the Apocalypse." Reply to Salmasius. 
 
 4. Involution and Inversion. The difficulties in Mil- 
 ton's prose style would he sufficient to exclude a less energetic 
 author from the list of master -writers. His " page-long pe- 
 riods " are both obscure and wearisome. In the words of 
 Pattison, " he does not seem to have any notion of what a 
 period means. He leaves off, not when the sense closes, but 
 when he is out of breath." His controversial writings bear 
 the marks of reckless haste in construction. Hales calls him
 
 36 MILTON 
 
 " the last of the Titans the last great writer in the old pe- 
 riodic style," and adds, " he had more to say than he could 
 say. His thoughts rush upon him in a throng that he can at 
 times scarcely order and control. His utterance is almost 
 choked." The "stiff Latinity " that causes Shaw to call 
 Milton "the most Roman of English authors," is a blemish 
 that belongs to nearly all the Elizabethan prose. Harsh in- 
 versions and cumbrous construction everywhere abound. 
 
 Yet no less an authority than William Ellery Channing 
 excuses Milton's sins of arrangement as follows : 
 
 " It is objected to his prose-writings that his style is difficult 
 and obscure, abounding in involutions, transpositions, and 
 Latinisms; that his protracted sentences exhaust and weary the 
 mind and too often yield it no better recompense than con- 
 fused and indistinct perceptions. . . . We mean not to 
 deny that these charges have some grounds ; but they seem 
 to us much exaggerated ; and when we consider that the dif- 
 ficulties of Milton's style have almost sealed up his prose- 
 writings, we cannot but lament the fastidiousness and effem- 
 inacy of modern readers. We know that simplicity and 
 perspicuity are important qualities of style ; but there are 
 vastly nobler and more important ones, such as energy and 
 richness, and in these Milton is not surpassed. The best 
 style is not that which puts the reader most easily and in the 
 shortest time in possession of the writer's naked thoughts ; 
 but that which is the truest image of a great intellect, which 
 conveys fully and carries furthest into other souls the con- 
 ceptions and feelings of a profound and lofty spirit. To be 
 universally intelligible is not the highest merit. A great 
 mind cannot, without injurious restraint, shrink itself to the 
 grasp of common, passive readers. Its natural movement is 
 free, bold, and majestic ; and it ought not to be required to 
 part with these attributes that the multitude may keep pace 
 with it. A full mind will naturally overflow in long sentences ; 
 and in the moment of inspiration, when thick-coming thoughts
 
 MILTON 37 
 
 and images crowd on it, will often pour them forth in a splen- 
 did confusion, dazzling to common readers, but kindling to 
 congenial spirits. There are writings which are clear through 
 their shallowness. We must not expect in the ocean the trans- 
 parency of the calm inland stream. For ourselves, we love 
 what is called easy reading perhaps too well, especially in our 
 hours of relaxation ; but we love, too, to have our faculties 
 tasked by master-spirits. We delight in long sentences in 
 which a great truth, instead of being broken up into numer- 
 ous periods, is spread out in its full proportions, is irradiated 
 with variety of illustration and imagery, is set forth in a 
 splendid affluence of language, and flows, like a full stream, 
 with a majestic harmony which fills at once the ear and soul." 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " They who to states and governors of the commonwealth direct 
 their speech, High Court of Parliament, or, wanting such access 
 in a private condition, write that which they foresee may advance 
 the public good ; I suppose them as at the beginning of no mean 
 endeavor, not a little altered and moved inwardly in their minds : 
 some with doubt of what will be the success, others with fear of 
 what will be the censure ; some with hope, others with confi- 
 dence of what they have to speak." Areopagitica. 
 
 " Whose unerring guidance and conduct having followed as a 
 loadstar, witk all diligence and fidelity, in this question, I trust, 
 through the help of that illuminating Spirit which hath favored 
 me, to have done no every day's work, in asserting, after many 
 the words of Christ, with other scriptures of great concernment 
 from burdensome and remorseless obscurity, tangled with man- 
 ifold repugnancies, to their native lustre and consent between 
 each other ; hereby also dissolving tedious and Gordian difficul- 
 ties ; which have hitherto molested the church of God, and are 
 now decided, not with the sword of Alexander, but with the im- 
 maculate hands of charity, to the unspeakable good of Christen- 
 dom." On Divorce. 
 
 " And if others may chance to spend more time with you in 
 canvassing later antiquity, I suppose it is not for that they ground 
 themselves thereon ; but that they endeavor by showing the cor-
 
 38 MILTON 
 
 ruptions, uncertainties, and disagreements of those volumes, and 
 the easiness of erring, or overslipping in such a boundless and 
 vast search, if they may not convince those that are so strongly 
 persuaded thereof ; yet to free ingenious minds from an over- 
 awful esteem of those more ancient than trusty fathers, whom 
 custom and fond opinion, weak principles, and the neglect of 
 sounder and superior knowledge hath exalted so high as to have 
 gained them a blind reverence ; whose books in bigness and 
 number so endless and immeasurable, I cannot think that either 
 God or nature, either divine or human wisdom, did ever mean 
 should be a rule or reliance to us in the decision of any weighty 
 or positive doctrine." Animadversions. 
 
 5. Inequality Incongruity. "It is not uncom- 
 mon," says Channing, " to find, in the same sentence, his 
 affluent genius pouring forth magnificent images and expres- 
 sions and suddenly his deep scorn for his opponents suggest- 
 ing and throwing into the midst of this splendor sarcasms and 
 degrading comparisons altogether at variance with the gen- 
 eral strain." Concerning the same characteristic, Haliam re- 
 marks: "The majestic soul of Milton breathes such high 
 thoughts as had not been uttered before ; yet even here he 
 frequently sinks in a single instant, as is usual with our old 
 writers, from his highest flights to the ground." 
 
 " There are passages which for richness of texture, harmony 
 of tone, and artistic distribution of parts, can hardly be 
 matched in our language ; but that equable distinction which 
 is the constant note of his verse is wanting. ... A sen- 
 tence builded majestically with every help of art and imagi- 
 nation too often thrusts heavenward from a huddle of vulgar 
 pentices [sheds] such as used to cluster about mediaeval cathe- 
 drals. Never was such inequality. He is careless of euphony, 
 seeming to prefer words not only low but harsh, and such 
 superlatives as ' virtuousest,' ' viciousest,' ' sheepishest.' ' 
 Lowell. 
 
 " The prose works descend to brutalities of personal abuse
 
 MILTON 39 
 
 and recrimination often coarse, and are full of the miseries of 
 debate. We slip from passages full of stately thought and 
 splendid diction into passages which we are almost ashamed 
 to read." Stopford Brooke. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " Thus large I have purposely been, that if I have been justly 
 taxed with this crime, it may come upon me, after all this my 
 confession, with a tenfold shame ; but if I have hitherto de- 
 served no such opprobrious word or suspicion, I may hereby en- 
 gage myself now openly to the faithful observation of what I have 
 professed. I go on to show you the unbridled impudence of this 
 loose railer, who, having once begun his race, regards not how 
 far he flies out beyond all truth and shame ; who from the single 
 notice of the "Animadversions," as he protests, will undertake to 
 tell ye the very clothes I wear, though he be much mistaken in 
 my wardrobe ; and like a son of Belial, without the hire of Jeze- 
 bel, charges me ' of blaspheming God and the King,' as ordina- 
 rily as he imagines ' me to drink sack and swear,' merely because 
 this was a shred in his commonplace book, and seemed to come 
 off roundly, as if he were some empiric of false accusations, to 
 try his poisons upon me, whether they would work or not." 
 Apology for Smcctymnuus. 
 
 " Who can with patience hear this filthy, rascally fool speak so 
 irreverently of persons eminent both in greatness and piety ? Dare 
 you compare King David with King Charles ; a most religious 
 king and prophet with a superstitious prince, and who was but a 
 novice in the Christian religion ; a most prudent, wise prince 
 with a weak one ; a valiant prince with a cowardly one ; finally, 
 a most just prince with a most unjust one ? " Defence of the Peo- 
 ple, etc. 
 
 "But ever blessed be He, and ever glorified, that from his 
 high watch-tower in the heavens, discerning the crooked ways of 
 perverse and cruel men, hath hitherto maimed and infatuated all 
 their damnable inventions and deluded their great wizards with 
 a delusion fit for fools and children ; had God been so minded, 
 He could have sent a spirit of mutiny amongst us, as He did be- 
 tween Abimelech and the Shechemites, to have made our funerals, 
 and slain heaps more in number than the miserable surviving
 
 38 MILTON 
 
 ruptions, uncertainties, and disagreements of those volumes, and 
 the easiness of erring, or overslipping in such a boundless and 
 vast search, if they may not convince those that are so strongly 
 persuaded thereof ; yet to free ingenious minds from an over- 
 awful esteem of those more ancient than trusty fathers, whom 
 custom and fond opinion, weak principles, and the neglect of 
 sounder and superior knowledge hath exalted so high as to have 
 gained them a blind reverence ; whose books in bigness and 
 number so endless and immeasurable, I cannot think that either 
 God or nature, either divine or human wisdom, did ever mean 
 should be a rule or reliance to us in the decision of any weighty 
 or positive doctrine." Animadversions. 
 
 5. Inequality Incongruity. "It is not uncom- 
 mon," says Channing, " to find, in the same sentence, his 
 affluent genius pouring forth magnificent images and expres- 
 sions and suddenly his deep scorn for his opponents suggest- 
 ing and throwing into the midst of this splendor sarcasms and 
 degrading comparisons altogether at variance with the gen- 
 eral strain." Concerning the same characteristic, Hallam re- 
 marks : "The majestic soul of Milton breathes such high 
 thoughts as had not been uttered before ; yet even here he 
 frequently sinks in a single instant, as is usual with our old 
 writers, from his highest flights to the ground." 
 
 " There are passages which for richness of texture, harmony 
 of tone, and artistic distribution of parts, can hardly be 
 matched in our language ; but that equable distinction which 
 is the constant note of his verse is wanting. ... A sen- 
 tence builded majestically with every help of art and imagi- 
 nation too often thrusts heavenward from a huddle of vulgar 
 pentices [sheds] such as used to cluster about medieval cathe- 
 drals. Never was such inequality. He is careless of euphony, 
 seeming to prefer words not only low but harsh, and such 
 superlatives as ' virtuousest,' ' viciousest,' ' sheepishest.' ' 
 Lowell. 
 
 " The prose works descend to bruttJities of personal abuse
 
 MILTON 39 
 
 and recrimination often coarse, and are full of the miseries of 
 debate. We slip from passages full of stately thought and 
 splendid diction into passages which we are almost ashamed 
 to read." Stopford Brooke. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " Thus large I have purposely been, that if I have been justly- 
 taxed with this crime, it may come upon me, after all this my 
 confession, with a tenfold shame ; but if I have hitherto de- 
 served no such opprobrious word or suspicion, I may hereby en- 
 gage myself now openly to the faithful observation of what I have 
 professed. I go on to show you the unbridled impudence of this 
 loose railer, who, having once begun his race, regards not how 
 far he flies out beyond all truth and shame ; who from the single 
 notice of the "Animadversions," as he protests, will undertake to 
 tell ye the very clothes I wear, though he be much mistaken in 
 my wardrobe ; and like a son of Belial, without the hire of Jeze- 
 bel, charges me ' of blaspheming God and the King,' as ordina- 
 rily as he imagines ' me to drink sack and swear,' merely because 
 this was a shred in his commonplace book, and seemed to come 
 off roundly, as if he were some empiric of false accusations, to 
 try his poisons upon me, whether they would work or not. "- 
 Apology for Smectymnuus. 
 
 11 Who can with patience hear this filthy, rascally fool speak so 
 irreverently of persons eminent both in greatness and piety ? Dare 
 you compare King David with King Charles ; a most religious 
 king and prophet with a superstitious prince, and who was but a 
 novice in the Christian religion ; a most prudent, wise prince 
 with a weak one ; a valiant prince with a cowardly one ; finally, 
 a most just prince with a most unjust one ? " Defence of the Peo- 
 ple, etc. 
 
 "But ever blessed be He, and ever glorified, that from his 
 high watch-tower in the heavens, discerning the crooked ways of 
 perverse and cruel men, hath hitherto maimed and infatuated all 
 their damnable inventions and deluded their great wizards with 
 a delusion fit for fools and children ; had God been so minded, 
 He could have sent a spirit of mutiny amongst us, as He did be- 
 tween Abimelech and the Shechemites, to have made our funerals, 
 and slain heaps more in number than the miserable surviving
 
 42 MILTON 
 
 and the Learning of the best Ages of the World on its side." 
 Reply to Salmasius. 
 
 " In handling almost the greatest subject that ever was (with- 
 out being too tedious in it), I am in hopes of attaining two things, 
 which indeed I earnestly desire. The one not to be at all want- 
 ing, as far as in me lies, to this most Noble Cause and most 
 worthy to be recorded to all future ages ; the other, that I may 
 appear to have avoided myself that perilousness of matter, and 
 redundancy of words, which I blame in my antagonist." Reply 
 to Salmasius. 
 
 7. Independence Mental Isolation Intolerance. 
 
 While closely allied to the sixth quality of Milton's style, 
 just discussed, his mental isolation is not identical with his 
 conscious inspiration. The two qualities are frequently 
 found distinct. "Like Dante," says Lowell, "Milton was 
 forced to become a party by himself. He stands out in 
 marked and solitary individuality, apart from the great move- 
 ment of the Civil War, apart from the supine acquiescence of 
 the Restoration, a self-opinionated, unforgiving, unforgetting 
 man. . . . Gentle as Milton's earlier portraits would seem 
 to show him, he had in him by nature, or bred into him by 
 fate, something of the haughty and defiant self-assertion of 
 Dante and Michael Angelo. In no other author is the man 
 so large a part of his works. Milton's haughty conception of 
 himself enters into all he says and does. Always the neces- 
 sity of this one man became that of the whole human race 
 for the moment. There were no walls so sacred but must go 
 to the ground when he wanted elbow-room ; and he wanted a 
 great deal. . . . It results from the almost scornful with- 
 drawal of Milton into the fortress of his absolute personality 
 that no great poet is so uniformly self-conscious as he. . . . 
 He makes Deity a mouth-piece for his present theology. . . . 
 Now it is precisely this audacity of self-reliance, I suspect, 
 which goes far toward making him sublime. . . . The 
 grand loneliness of Milton in his latter years, while it makes
 
 MILTON 43 
 
 him the most impressive figure in our literary history, is 
 reflected also in his maturer poems by a sublime independence 
 of human sympathy, like that with which mountains fascinate 
 and rebuff us." 
 
 " Narrowness is his fault, but the intense individuality 
 which often accompanies narrowness is his great virtue 
 a virtue which no poet, which no writer, either in prose or 
 verse, has ever had in greater measure than he." SaiHfsfatry. 
 
 Speaking of Milton's university career, Birrell says: " Mil- 
 ton was not a submissive pupil; in fact, he was never a 
 submissive anything, for there is point in Dr. Johnson's mali- 
 cious remark, that, in Milton's opinion, man was born to be 
 a rebel and woman to be a slave. He considered a state 
 of subscription to articles a state of slavery. . . . That 
 Milton was both proud and rebellious cannot be disputed. 
 . . . The pamphlet on divorce marks the beginning of his 
 mental isolation. Nobody had a word to say for it." 
 
 " He was isolated in his generation by the very force of his 
 genius. Wordsworth expresses this quality of Milton's style 
 and of his character in the single line, ' His soul was like a 
 star and dwelt apart.' " Edmond Scherer. 
 
 " A want of humor, with its usual concomitant, a want of 
 power to do justice to men of different types from himself, 
 was Milton's great defect through life." H. J. Nicoll. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " For God, it seems, intended to prove me, whether I durst 
 alone take up a rightful cause against a world of disesteem, 
 and found I durst. My name I did not publish, as not willing it 
 should sway the reader either for me or against me. But when I 
 was told that the style, which what it ails to be so soon distin- 
 guishable I cannot tell, was known by most men, and that some 
 of the clergy began to inveigh and exclaim on what I was 
 credibly informed they had not read. I took it then for my 
 proper season, both to show them a name that could easily con- 
 temn such an indiscreet kind of censure, and to reinforce the
 
 44 MILTON 
 
 question with a more accurate diligence ; that if any of them 
 would be so good as to leave railing and to let us hear so much 
 of his learning and Christian wisdom as will be strictly demanded 
 of him in his answering to this problem, care was had he should 
 not spend his preparations against a nameless pamphlet." On 
 Divorce. 
 
 "When the liberty of speech was no longer subject to control, 
 all mouths began to be opened against the bishops. ... I 
 saw that a way was opening for the establishing of real liberty ; 
 that the foundation was laying for the deliverance of man from 
 the yoke of slavery and superstition ; . . . and as I had from 
 my youth studied the distinction between civil and religious 
 rights, ... I determined to relinquish the other pursuits in 
 which I was engaged, and to transfer the whole force of my tal- 
 ents and my industry to this one important object." Second 
 Defence. 
 
 " You cannot be truly free unless we are free too : for such is 
 the nature of things that he who entrenches on the liberty of 
 others is the first to lose his own and become a slave. But if you, 
 who have hitherto been the patron and tutelary genius of liberty ; 
 if you, who are exceeded by no one in justice, in piety, and good- 
 ness, should hereafter invade that liberty which you have de- 
 fended, your conduct must be fatally operative, not only against 
 the cause of liberty but the general interests of piety and vir- 
 tue. Your integrity and virtue will appear to have evaporated, 
 your faith in religion to have been small ; your character with 
 posterity will dwindle into insignificance, by which a most de- 
 structive blow will be levelled against the happiness of mankind." 
 Second Defence. 
 
 " For he who freely magnifies what hath been nobly done, and 
 fears not to declare as freely what might be done better, gives 
 ye [the Lords and Commons] the best covenant of his fidelity." 
 A reopagitica . 
 
 8. Moral Elevation Purity. Carlyle has called Mil- 
 ton "the moral king of English literature." In his second 
 Defence of the People of England, Milton declares, concern- 
 ing his experience on the Continent: " I again take God to 
 witness that, in all those places where so many things are con-
 
 MILTON 45 
 
 sidered lawful, I lived sound and untouched from all profligacy 
 and vice, having this thought perpetually before me, that 
 though I might escape the eyes of men, I certainly could not 
 the eyes of God." 
 
 " Milton consecrated his thoughts as well as his words. 
 . . . He praised everywhere chaste love, piety, gener- 
 osity, heroic force. . . . They [the masques] were 
 amusements for the castle ; he made out of them lectures on 
 magnanimity and constancy. . . . He was born with 
 the instinct of noble things." Taine. 
 
 Milton was sensuous, as he declared all poetry should be, but 
 he was never sensual. His conception of the dignity and 
 the moral possibilities of poetry is best expressed in his 
 own words : " These [poetic] abilities, wheresoever they be 
 found, are the inspired gift of God, rarely bestowed, but yet 
 to some (though most abuse) in every nation ; and are of 
 power beside the office of a pulpit, to imbreed and cherish in 
 a great people the seeds of virtue and public civility, to allay 
 the perturbations of the mind, and set the affections in right 
 tune ; to celebrate in glorious and lofty hymns the throne 
 and equipage of God's almightiness, and what he works, 
 and what he suffers to be wrought with high providence 
 in his church ; to sing the victorious agonies of martyrs 
 and saints, the deeds and triumphs of just and pious na- 
 tions, doing valiantly through faith against the enemies of 
 Christ." 
 
 " Look at the Lady in ' Comus! ' " exclaims Van Dyke ; she 
 is the sweet embodiment of Milton's youthful ideal of virtue, 
 clothed with the fairness of opening womanhood, armed with 
 the sun-clad power of chastity. Darkness and danger cannot 
 stir the constant mood of her calm thoughts ! Evil things 
 have no power upon her, but shrink abashed from her 
 presence. ' ' 
 
 " He had a gravity in his temper not melancholy ; not till 
 the later part of his life sour, morbid, or ill-tempered ; but a
 
 46 MILTON 
 
 certain serenity of mind a mind not condescending to little 
 things. ' ' Walter Bagehot. 
 
 " It was the glory of Milton to create for himself a universe 
 of his own ; and every line of his works shows us an instance 
 of the employment of ordinary materials in relation to a high 
 internal moral end." -John Sterling. 
 
 "The man was as great and pure as the author." Miss 
 Mitford. 
 
 "The almost passionate praise of purity, the scorn mani- 
 fested for those who indulge in sensual delights ! 
 Irritable, exacting, vindictive, he was totally free from any- 
 thing deserving the name of vice ; conscientious, high- 
 minded, dignified, and courageous." H. J. Nicoll. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 "After the performing so glorious an action as this, you ought 
 to do nothing that's mean and little, not so much as to think of, 
 much less to do, anything but what is great and sublime. . . . 
 Show as much justice, temperance, and moderation in the main- 
 taining your liberty as you have shown courage in freeing your- 
 selves from slavery." Reply to Salmasius. 
 
 " Nature and laws would be in an ill case, if Slavery should 
 find what to say for itself and Liberty be mute : and if tyrants 
 should find men to plead for them, and they that can master and 
 vanquish tyrants should not be able to find advocates." Reply 
 to Salmasius. 
 
 " I thought it base that I should be travelling abroad for pleasure 
 while my fellow-countrymen at home were fighting for liberty." 
 From a Letter. 
 
 9. Erudition Profound Learning. This endow- 
 ment appears continually both in Milton's prose and in his 
 poetry. In his early manhood he wrote to a friend: "I, 
 who certainly have not wetted the tip of my lips in the stream 
 of these the classical languages, but in proportion to my years 
 have swallowed the most copious draughts, can yet some-
 
 MILTON 47 
 
 times retire with avidity and delight to feast on Dante, 
 Petrarch, and many others." 
 
 " His literature was unquestionably great. He read all 
 the languages which are considered either learned or polite ; 
 Hebrew, with its two dialects ; Latin, Greek, Italian, French, 
 and Spanish. In Latin his skill was such as places him in the 
 first rank of writers and critics, and he appears to have culti- 
 vated Italian with uncommon diligence." Samuel Johnson. 
 
 "The author unfolds the treasures of his learning [in the 
 controversy with Salmasius], heaping up the testimony of 
 Scripture, passages from the fathers, and quotations from the 
 poets, laying sacred and profane antiquity alike under contri- 
 bution, and subtly discussing the sense of this and that 
 Greek or Hebrew term." Edmond Scherer. 
 
 " From the twelfth year of his life, Milton tells us he 
 rarely went to bed without studying until midnight. During 
 the five years at Horton, after leaving Cambridge, he says : 
 ' I was wholly intent, through a period of absolute leisure, on a 
 steady perusal of Greek and Latin writers. . . . Occa- 
 sionally I exchanged for life in the city, either for the purpose 
 of buying books or for that of learning anything new in 
 mathematics or music, in which I then took delight.' " 
 H. J. Nicoll. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 "Thus Mithridates exprest himself in a letter to Arfaces, 
 King of the Parthians : ' If you were to have been the trum- 
 peter, not so much as Homer's mice would have waged war 
 against the frogs. . . . You take care, and so you might 
 well, lest any should imagine that you were about to bereave 
 Cicero or Demosthenes ; . . . but like a second Crispin, or 
 that little Grecian Tzetyes, you do but write a great deal, take 
 no pains to write well. . . . You conclude very tragically, 
 like Ajax in his raving.' " Reply to Salmasius. 
 
 " To this purpose Josephus writes, a proper and able interpre- 
 tator of the laws of his own country, who was admirably well 
 versed in the Jewish policy, and infinitely preferable to a thou-
 
 48 MILTON 
 
 sand obscure, ignorant Rabbins. He has it thus in the fourth Book 
 of his Antiquities '\ptaroKparia ntv ovv ^paritrroi',' etc. Another 
 Jewish author, Philo Judaeus, who was Josephus's contemporary, 
 a very studious man in the Law of Moses, upon which he wrote 
 a large commentary." Reply to Salmasius. 
 
 " He told them the manner of their king, as before he told us 
 the manner of the priests, the sons of Eli ; for he uses the same 
 word in both places (which you in the thirty-third page of your 
 book, by an Hebrew solecism, too, call nisn). The 
 fathers have commented on this place too ; I'll instance in one, 
 that may stand for a great many ; and that's Sulpitius Severus, a 
 contemporary and intimate friend of St. Jerome, and, in St. 
 Augustine's opinion, a man of great wisdom and learning. . . . 
 But according to Sallust, that lawful power and authority that 
 kings were intrusted with, . . . and you might have learnt 
 from Lichardus, that most of the Rabbins too were of the same 
 mind." Reply to Salmasius. 
 
 10. Coarseness Vulgarity. " He used an intol- 
 erable deal of bad language, which, however excusable in a 
 heated controversialist, ill became the author of ' Connis.' 
 . This noble argument [' The Defence of the 
 English People '], alike worthy of the man and of the occa- 
 sion, is doubtless overclouded and disfigured by personal 
 abuse. His defences are rendered provoking by his extraor- 
 dinary language concerning his opponents; 'numskull,' 
 'beast,' 'fool,' 'puppy,' 'knave,' 'ass,' 'mongrel-cur,' are 
 but a few of the epithets that may be selected from this 
 descriptive catalogue." Augustine Birrell. 
 
 " He was not nice in the choice of his missiles, and too 
 
 often borrows a dirty lump from the dung-hill of Luther. 
 
 His sentences are often loutish and difficult ; in 
 
 controversy he is brutal, and at any, the most inopportune 
 
 moment, capable of an incredible coarseness." Lowell. 
 
 "It is a more serious objection that they [his prose writ- 
 ings] are disfigured by party spirit, coarse invective, and 
 controversial asperity. Milton's alleged virulence was man-
 
 MILTON 49 
 
 ifested toward both private and public foes." W. E. 
 Channing. 
 
 " Milton retorts, . . . seasoning the mess with coarse 
 epigrams and with vulgar terms of abuse. Luther and Calvin 
 themselves, experts as they were in insults, had never done it 
 better. " Edmond Scherer. 
 
 " The natural acerbity of his temper, quickened by the 
 insults of his assailants, often led him to indulge in the most 
 vulgar railing." George Dawson. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " 'And I wish,' you say, 'that the writer had been burned 
 as well.' Is this your disposition, slave ? But you have taken 
 good care that I should not indulge a similar wish toward you ; 
 for you have been long wasting in blacker flames. Your con- 
 science is scorched by the flames of adultery and rape and those 
 perjuries by the help of which you debauched an unsuspecting 
 girl, to whom you promised marriage and then abandoned to de- 
 spair. You are writhing under the flames of that mercenary 
 passion which impelled you, though covered with crimes, to lust 
 after the functions of the priesthood and to pollute the conse- 
 crated elements with your incestuous touch." Second Defence. 
 
 " As for the queen herself, she was made believe that by put- 
 ting down bishops her prerogative would be infringed, of which 
 shall be spoken anon as the course of method brings it in ; and 
 why the prelates labored it should be so thought, ask not them, 
 but ask their bellies. . . . But he that will mould a modern 
 bishop into a primitive, must yield him to be elected by the 
 popular voice, undiocesed, unrevenued, unlorded, and leave him 
 nothing but brotherly equality, matchless temperance, frequent 
 fasting, incessant prayer and preaching, continual watchings and 
 labors in his ministry ; which what a rich booty it would be, 
 what a plump endowment to the many-benefice-gaping-mouth of 
 a prelate, what a relish it would give to his canary-sucking and 
 swan-eating palate, let old Bishop Mountain judge for me." 
 Reformation in England.
 
 BUNYAN, 1628-1688 
 
 Biographical Outline. John Bunyan, born at Elstow, 
 near Bedford, in November, 1628 ; name spelled Buignon, 
 Buniun, Bonyan, Binyan, and in twenty-nine other ways ; 
 father a tinker and mother a "decent " woman of the lower 
 class ; the family had a forge and a workshop at Elstow, 
 where, from time immemorial, they had occupied a freehold ; 
 Bunyan learns to read and write " according to the rate of 
 other poor men's children," but is early called from school 
 to help his father, and soon forgets his learning, as he says, 
 " even almost utterly ; " the loss of his mother, in June, 1644, 
 and the prompt advent of a step-mother estrange him from 
 his home and induce him to enlist as a soldier in the Civil 
 War, probably (but not certainly) on the Parliamentary side ; 
 while in the army he is providentially preserved from death 
 by the sudden and voluntary substitution of another soldier 
 in his place in a file drawn to besiege a certain point, the 
 substitute being immediately killed ; at the close of the Civil 
 War Bunyan is supposed to have returned to Elstow and to 
 his trade as tinker or "brasier;" he is married about the 
 end of 1648 (he gives neither the date of his marriage nor the 
 name of his wife) to a woman of godly parents, but they have 
 " not so much as a spoon or a household dish between them ; ' ' 
 his wife's dowry consists of two pious books (' The Plain Man's 
 Pathway to Heaven ' and ' The Practice of Piety '), the reading 
 of which profoundly affects Bunyan and produces an external 
 change in his habits; he gives up dancing, bell-ringing, and 
 profanity, and becomes a diligent student of the narrative 
 parts of the Bible ; although " a brisk talker on religion," he 
 
 50
 
 BUNYAN 51 
 
 soon realizes that he is "a poor painted hypocrite " and that 
 he entirely lacks a personal knowledge of deep spiritual ex- 
 periences ; he enters upon the tremendous spiritual conflict 
 afterward so graphically described in his " Grace Abound- 
 ing; " after three years of this struggle he enters into pro- 
 found spiritual peace, and joins a non-conformist body meet 
 ing at Bedford under the ministrations of " holy Mr. Gifford," 
 who has much influence over Bunyan ; Bunyan still resides 
 at Elstow, where his blind daughter, Mary, and his second 
 daughter, Elizabeth, are born ; he removes to Bedford about 
 
 1655, where, after the death of his wife and his pastor, Bun- 
 yan, who had been a deacon, begins to exhort, at first pri- 
 vately and gradually " in a more publick way ; " he is for- 
 mally acknowledged and consecrated as a preacher in 1657 ; 
 his preaching draws great crowds, all the Midland counties 
 demanding to hear him ; he continues his trade as a ' ' brasier ; ' ' 
 while a few churches are opened to him, most of his ser- 
 mons are delivered " in woods, in barns, on village greens, 
 or in town chapels; " he meets great opposition from the 
 established clergy because of his effort " to mend souls as well 
 as kettles and pans ; " he is indicted for preaching in 1658 
 (with unknown result), is called " a witch, a Jesuit, a highway- 
 man," and is otherwise grossly slandered; publishes his first 
 book, " Some Gospel Truths Opened," at Newport Pagnel in 
 
 1656, protesting against the mysticism of the Quakers ; he is 
 answered by oneBurrough, and replies, in 1657, with "A Vin- 
 dication of Gospel Truths ; " both of Bunyan's books show a 
 great command of plain English and a thorough knowledge of 
 the Bible ; in 1658, just before Cromwell's death, Bunyan pub- 
 lishes " Sighs from Hell, or the Groans of a Damned Soul," 
 a discourse founded on the parable of the rich man and Laz- 
 arus ; ignoring the revival of the acts against non-conformists 
 at the Restoration, he continues to preach in barns, etc. ; he 
 is arrested while conducting a meeting near Bedford, Novem- 
 ber 12, 1660, disdaining to improve an opportunity given
 
 52 BUNYAN 
 
 him to escape ; he refuses to promise to forbear preaching, 
 and is committed .by Justice Wingate (who really wished to 
 release him) to the county jail (not the town gaol on the 
 Ouse Bridge, as has been commonly believed), where he re- 
 mains nearly all the time for the ensuing twelve years ; he is 
 tried, somewhat irregularly (no witnesses appear against him), 
 at Bedford in January, 1661; he confesses the indictment, 
 and declares his intention to repeat his offence at the first op- 
 portunity ; he is sentenced to three months' imprisonment, 
 with the addition of banishment if he persists in his contumacy, 
 and execution if, after banishment, he return to England 
 without royal license ; at the end of three months he is urged 
 to agree to some sort of a compromise, such as confining him- 
 self to private exhortation, but he refuses ; refuses also to take 
 advantage of the general pardon offered on the coronation of 
 Charles II. ; a year before his arrest he had married a second 
 wife, who afterward went to London and appealed to the House 
 of Lords in his behalf, but was referred to his judges ; in 
 the summer of 1661 she appeals three times to have Bunyan for- 
 mally tried and fully heard, but in vain ; another vain effort 
 is made in 1662; except for a slight interval in 1666, Bunyan 
 remains in jail till 1672 ; during the early years of his im- 
 prisonment he is allowed to leave the jail frequently and to 
 attend religious meetings at Bedford, and even as far away as 
 London, but the irregularity is discovered, the jailer nearly loses 
 his place in consequence, and Bunyan is forbidden henceforth 
 " even to look out at the door ; " he is liberated in 1666, 
 but is soon rearrested for repeating his former offence ; while 
 in jail he supports his family by making long-tagged laces ; 
 " nor was the Word of God bound," for he preached to his 
 fellow -prisoners, many being his co-religionists ; he studies 
 ardently the Bible and Fox's " Book of Martyrs," and writes, 
 while in prison, many pamphlets and tracts ; his first prison 
 book, called ''Profitable Meditations," is written in verse, 
 and has small literary merit j in 1663 he publishes " Praying
 
 BUNYAN 53 
 
 in the Spirit " and " Christian Behavior ; " between 1663 and 
 1665 appear "Four Last Things," " Ebal and Gerizim," 
 "Prison Meditations" (these three in verse), "The Holy 
 City," and " The Resurrection of the Dead ; " he publishes 
 his first immortal work, "Grace Abounding to the Chief of 
 Sinners," about the time of his brief release in 1666 ; dur- 
 ing the second period of his imprisonment he apparently does 
 little literary work ; in 1672 he publishes "A Defence of Jus- 
 tification by Faith," being an unjustifiably ferocious attack 
 on a work then popular by the Rev. Edward Fowler ; Bunyan 
 publishes also, in 1672, " The Confession of My Faith and 
 Reason of My Practice," a vindication of his course and an 
 appeal for liberty; although " Pilgrim r s Progress" is de- 
 clared by Bunyan to have been written in "the gaol," re- 
 cently discovered evidence tends to prove that it must have 
 been during a later and shorter imprisonment, about 1675, 
 from which he was released by the intervention of Thomas 
 Burton, then Bishop of Lincoln ; he is released from jail in 
 the spring of 1672, and receives, by royal authority, a license 
 to preach, on May Qth of that year and a formal pardon on 
 September 1 3th following ; his release is due to a general plan 
 of Charles II. for setting up the Roman Catholic worship in 
 England by first showing leniency to all non -conformists ; on 
 January 21, 1672, Bunyan is called to the pastorate of the 
 non-conformist congregation at Bedford, which worshipped in 
 a barn from the Restoration till 1701 ; he makes frequent 
 preaching tours through the surrounding country, and is play- 
 fully known as " Bishop Bunyan ; " publishes " The Strait 
 Gate " in 1676 and the first and second editions of " Pilgrim's 
 Progress" in 1678; in 1679 appears the third edition of 
 " Pilgrim's Progress," both the second and the third contain- 
 ing important additions to the first edition ; in 1678 he pub- 
 lishes also " Come and Welcome to Jesus Christ " and " A 
 Treatise on the Fear of God ; " in 1679 he also publishes his 
 third great book, "The Life and Death of Mr. Badman," unap-
 
 ^ 54 BUNYAN 
 
 preached save by the tales of Defoe as a picture of the rough 
 English country-town life under Charles II. ; in 1682 Bun- 
 yan publishes " The Holy War," and between 1682 and 1684 
 " The Barren Fig Tree " and " The Pharisee and ,the Pub- 
 lican ; " the second part of " Pilgrim's Progress " appears in 
 1684 ; with the renewed enforcement of the acts against non- 
 conformists in 1675, Bunyan's preaching tours again become 
 dangerous, but he abstains from political disputes, and is not 
 disturbed; he preaches frequently in London to large congre- 
 gations, but repeatedly refuses tempting offers to leave his' 
 Bedford flock for more attractive fields ; under James II. he 
 refuses a royal offer of a political office, made on condition 
 that he take a personal part in remodelling the corporation of 
 Bedford ; Bunyan is unofficial chaplain to the Lord-Mayor of 
 London at the time of his death, which occurs August 31, 
 1688, in London, at the house of a friend ; he is buried in 
 Bunhill Fields, and leaves a personal estate of less than one 
 hundred pounds. 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY ON BUNYAN'S STYLE. 
 
 Macaulay, T. B., "Essays" (Miscellaneous Works). New York, 1880, 
 
 Harper, i: 523-535; 2: 641; 4: 25-39. 
 
 Venables, E., "Life of John Bunyan." London, 1861, Murray, 168. 
 Minto, W., "English Prose Literature." Edinburgh, 1886, Blackwood, 
 
 301-330. 
 Taine, H. A., "History of English Literature." New York, 1874, 
 
 Holt, 2: 80-96. 
 Cheever, G. B., "Lectures on Pilgrim's Progress." London, 1799, 
 
 Religious Tract Society, 1-279. 
 
 Lang, A., "Essays in Little." New York, 1891, Scribner, 183-192. 
 Woodberry, G. E., "Studies in Letters." Boston, 1891, Houghton, 
 
 Mifflin & Co., 209-219. 
 Gilfillan, G., "Literary Portraits." Edinburgh, 1852, J. Hogg, i: 
 
 3H-330; 3: 336-348. 
 Hallam, H., "Literature of Europe." New York, 1847, Harper, 
 
 2: 417. 
 Masson, D.,. "British Novelists." Boston, 1892, W. Small, 80-85.
 
 BUNYAN 55 
 
 Gosse, E., " History of English Literature of the Eighteenth Century." 
 
 New York, 1889, Macmillan, 82-86. 
 Dawson, G., "Biographical Lectures." London, 1886, Kegan Paul, 
 
 Trench & Co., 106-125. 
 Hazlitt, W. C, "Offspring of Thought in Solitude." London, 1884, 
 
 Reeves & Turner, 213-220. 
 Tuckerman, B., "History of English Prose Fiction." New York, 
 
 1882, Putnam, 106-111. 
 Froude, J. A., " Bunyan " (English Men of Letters). New York, 
 
 1880, Harper, 152-165. 
 Punshon, W. M., "Exeter Hall Lectures." London, 1857, Nisbet, 12: 
 
 459-484. 
 
 Southey, R., "Cromwell and Bunyan." London, 1861, Murray, 168. 
 Whittier, J. G., "Prose Works." Boston, 1866, Ticknor & Co., 
 
 I : 218. 
 
 Collier, W. F., " History of English Literature." London, 1892, Nel- 
 son, 227-231. 
 Tulloch, J., "English Puritanism and Its Leaders." Edinburgh, 1861, 
 
 Blackwood, 393-488. 
 Philip, R., " Life and Times of Bunyan." London, 1839, George 
 
 Virtue. 
 Brown, J., " Life, Times, and Work of John Bunyan." Boston, 1885, 
 
 Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 
 Anderson, W., "Self-made Men." London, 1879, J. Snow & Co., 
 
 65-112. 
 Scott, Sir W., "Critical and Miscellaneous Essays." Philadelphia, 
 
 1841, Carey & Hart, I : 315-345. 
 Nicoll, H. J., " Landmarks of English Literature." New York, 1891, 
 
 Appleton, 101-106. 
 Welsh, A. H., " Development of English Literature." Chicago, 1884, 
 
 Griggs, 2 : 45-54. 
 Whittier, J. G., " Poetic Works." Boston, 1889, Houghton, Mifflin & 
 
 Co., 6(2); 9-37. 
 Stephen, L. (Venables), "Dictionary of National Biography." New 
 
 York, 1886, Macmillan, 7: 275-284. 
 Allibone, S. A., "Dictionary of Authors." Philadelphia, 1858, Childs 
 
 & Peters, i : 282-284. 
 Phillips, M. G., "A Manual of English Literature." New York, 1885, 
 
 Harper, I : 288-289. 
 Russell, W. C. , "The Book of Authors." London, n. d., Warne, 90- 
 
 92. 
 Harper's Magazine, 14 : 776-782 (Macaulay).
 
 5^ BUNYAN 
 
 MacmiHarfs Magazine, 30: 273-280 (A. P. Stanley); 39: 23-31 (Net- 
 
 tleship) ; 28 : 238-242. 
 Eclectic Review, 23 : 318-334 (Cheever) ; 70 : 468-480 (R. Philip) ; 95 : 
 
 263-281 (G. Opper); 83: 129-147 (Cheever). 
 North American Review, 36 : 449-472 (Cheever). 
 Catholic World, 6 : 536-544. 
 
 Dublin University Magazine, 37 : 435-453 (Cheever). 
 National Magazine, 6: 97-108 and 205-213. 
 American Church Review, 16 : 337-354 (J. Ferguson). 
 Christian Review, 4: 394-419 (R. Philip); 19: 243-258 (V. R. 
 
 Hotchkiss). 
 Methodist Quarterly Review, 9: 466-470 (Cheever); 18 : 209-227' 
 
 (L. A. H.). 
 
 Westminster Review, 17 : 103-118 (H. V. Knight). 
 Christian Observer, 32 : 805-813 ; 46 : 501-509 ; 32 : 596-620 and 
 
 668-689. 
 
 People 's Journal, 10 : 281-284^. Whitehead). 
 Princeton Review, 31 : 232-257 (S. D. Alexander). 
 Contemporary Review, 50 : 464-480 (Goldwin Smith). 
 Congregationalist, 15 : 785-792. 
 Dial, 6 : 298-299 (G. C. Noyes). 
 Athenaum, \ : 1886, 449-450. 
 
 Spectator, 59 : 49-50; 60 : 439-440; 63: 840-842. 
 Nation, 42 : 59-61 (Woodberry) ; 30 : 404-406 (A. V. Dicey). 
 Academy, 29 : 1-2 (E. Peacock). 
 Saturday Review, 62 : 63-65. 
 Good Words, 26 : 693-700 (J. A. Picton). 
 Book Lore, 4 : 144-145. 
 
 Catholic Presbyterian , 3 : 401-410 (D. Sime). 
 Presbyterian Quarterly Review, IO: 434-461. 
 Frazer's Magazine, 31 : 308-319. 
 
 PARTICULAR CHARACTERISTICS. 
 
 i. Vigor Terseness Freshness. Next to that 
 of the English Bible, Bunyan's language is the most terse 
 and idiomatic to be found in our literature. Ninety-three 
 per cent, of his vocabulary is Anglo-Saxon. In some of 
 his pages there is not a word of more than two syllables. 
 Punshon speaks of " his array of ' picked and packed ' words, 
 the clearness with which he enunciates, and the power with
 
 BUNYAN 57 
 
 which he applies the truth, his intense and burning ear- 
 nestness, the warm soul that is seen beating in benevolent 
 heart-throbs, through the transparent page. ' ' He has the rare 
 faculty of using no unnecessary words. " In Bunyan's pict- 
 ures, ' ' says Venables, ' ' there is never a superfluous detail. 
 Every stroke tells, and helps to the completeness of the por- 
 traiture. " His diction bears plainly the marks of the few 
 books that he knew, and knew so well. His constant compan- 
 ions were the Bible and Fox's " Book of Martyrs," and every 
 page shows the impress of one or the other of these books. 
 Southey calls Bunyan's diction " a pure stream of current Eng- 
 lish." Hallam calls him "powerful and picturesque from 
 concise simplicity." "Under his simplicity," says Taine, 
 " you will find power, and in his puerility, intuition." Ma- 
 caulay says, of the " Pilgrim's Progress : " 
 
 " There is no book in our literature on which we would so 
 readily stake the fame of the unpolluted English language, no 
 book which shows so well how rich that language is in its 
 own proper wealth and how little it has been improved by 
 all that it has borrowed. His knowledge of the Bible was 
 such that he might have been called a living concordance." 
 
 " Never was the inward life of any being depicted with 
 more vehement and burning language. It [' Grace Abound- 
 ing '] is an intensely vivid description of the workings of a 
 mind of the keenest sensibility and the most fervid imagina- 
 tion. . . . It is condensed, severe, and naked in its 
 style, beneath the pent fire of Bunyan's feelings and the 
 pressure of his conscience, forbidding him to seek for beauty." 
 G. B. Cheever. 
 
 " His characters come as fresh, as vivid, as if they were out 
 of Scott or Moliere ; the tinker is as great a master of charac- 
 ter and fiction as the greatest, almost." Andrew Lang. 
 
 " The pent-up fire glows in every line, and kindles the 
 hearts of his readers. Beautiful images, vivid expressions, 
 forcible arguments all aglow with passion, tender pleadings,
 
 58 BUNYAN 
 
 solemn warnings, make those who read him all eye, all ear, 
 all soul. . ... He did not set himself to compose theo- 
 logical treatises upon stated subjects, but after he had preached 
 with satisfaction to himself and acceptance to his audience, he 
 usually wrote out the substance of his discourse from memory, 
 with the enlargements and additions it might seem to require. 
 And thus his religious works have all the glow and fervor of 
 the unwritten utterances of a practised orator." E. Venables. 
 
 " The thing which gave Bunyan notoriety in the days of 
 his ungodliness was the energy which he put into all his do- 
 ings. . . . Though there is a great appearance of ampli- 
 tude about his compositions, few of his words could be want- 
 ed." -James Hamilton. 
 
 " Nothing, as a rule, is colder than the characters in an 
 allegory ; his are living" Tainc. 
 
 " More earnest words were never written [speaking of 
 ' Grace Abounding ']. It is the entire unveiling of a human 
 heart the tearing off of the fig-leaf covering of sin." }Vhit- 
 ticr. 
 
 " Read not Addison nor Johnson, read Bunyan, who em- 
 ployed direct and true English. . . . The man who 
 would speak good English should take for his company the 
 authorized version of the Bible and Bunyan's ' Pilgrim's Prog- 
 ress.' Bunyan's is chapel English, man's English, woman's 
 English, the English spoken anywhere by the native sons and 
 daughters of the soil." George Dawson. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " They then began to pick holes, as we say, in the coats of 
 some of the godly, and with that devilishness that they may have 
 a seeming colour to throw religion (for the sake of some infirmities 
 they have espied in them) behind their backs." Grace Abound- 
 ing. 
 
 " His house is as empty of religion as the white of an egg is of
 
 BUNYAN 59 
 
 savour. There is there neither prayer nor sign of repentance ; 
 yea, the brute in his kind serves God far better than he. He is 
 the very stain, reproach, and shame of religion, to all that know 
 him ; it can hardly have a good word in all that end of the town 
 where he dwells, through him. ' A saint abroad, and a devil at 
 home.' His poor family finds it so ; he is such a churl, such a 
 railer at and so unreasonable with his servants, that they neither 
 know how to do for or speak to him. Men that have any deal- 
 ings with him say it is better to deal with a Turk than with him, 
 for fairer dealing they shall have at their hands. This Talkative, 
 if it be possible, will go beyond them, defraud, beguile, and over- 
 reach them." Pilgrim's Progress. 
 
 " How many steps have I took in vain ! Thus it happened to 
 Israel, for their sin ; they were sent back again by way of the 
 Red Sea ; and I am made to tread those steps with sorrow which 
 I might have trod with delight, had it not been for this sinful 
 sleep. How far might I have been on my way by this time ! I 
 am made to tread those steps thrice over which I needed not to 
 have trod but once ; yea, now also I am like to be benighted, 
 for the day is almost spent. Oh, that I had not slept ! " Pil- 
 grim's Progress. 
 
 2. Imaginative Power Portraiture. W. M. Pun- 
 
 shon calls his imagination ' ' princely, almost beyond compare. ' ' 
 Every object, every character is brought before the reader 
 with wonderful vividness. " Abstract qualities of charac- 
 ter," says Froude, " were never clothed in more substantial 
 flesh and blood than Bunyan's jurymen." Bunyan pos- 
 sessed in a remarkable degree the power of graphic represen- 
 tation. Says Taine : ' ' He transforms arguments into para- 
 bles. . . . Giant Despair, a simple abstraction, becomes 
 as real in his hands as an English gaoler or farmer. 
 Powerful as that of an artist, but more vehement, this imag- 
 ination worked in the man without his co-operation, and be- 
 sieged him with visions which he had neither willed nor fore- 
 seen. . . . He has no trouble in calling up or forming 
 imaginary objects. They agree in all their details with all
 
 60 BUNYAN 
 
 the details of the precept which they represent, as a pliant 
 veil fits the body which it covers. He distinguishes and ar- 
 ranges all the parts of the landscape here the river, on the 
 right the castle, a flag on its left turret, the setting sun three 
 feet lower, an oval cloud in the front part of the sky with 
 the preciseness of a carpenter. ' ' 
 
 " He was a lad to whom nature had given a powerful 
 imagination and sensibility which amounted to a disease. 
 . . . Images came crowding on his mind faster than he 
 could put them into words ; quagmires and pits, steep hills', 
 dark and horrible glens, soft vales, and sunny pastures. . . . 
 To the last he loved to draw his illustrations of sacred things 
 from camps and fortresses, from guns, drums, trumpets, flags 
 of truce, and regiments arrayed, each under its own banner." 
 Macaulay. 
 
 " Bunyan's imagination was powerful enough, in connec- 
 tion with his belief in God's superintending Providence, to 
 array his inward trials with a sensible shape and external 
 events with a light reflected from his own experience ; hopes 
 and fears were friends and enemies ; acting in concert with 
 these, all things that he met with in the world were friends 
 and enemies likewise, according as they aided or opposed his 
 spiritual life." G. B. Cheever. 
 
 " He had to render into outward and visible forms the 
 subtle and strong passions of individual and internal life. 
 . . . He has taken the hidden things of the interior life 
 and put them into words as an artist puts them upon canvas ; 
 and there are no better pictures." George Dawson. 
 
 "Bunyan combined the power of expressing thoughts of 
 universal acceptability in a style of the most perfect clearness, 
 with a high degree of imaginative genius and a vivid descrip- 
 tive faculty ; his works are equally attractive to readers of all 
 ages and every variety of mental culture ; they are among 
 the first to be taken up in the nursery and among the last to 
 be laid down when life is closing in on us ; they have filled the
 
 BUNYAN 6l 
 
 memory with pictures and peopled it with the most unfor- 
 gettable reality. . . . Nor is there one [of his works] 
 which does not here and there exhibit specimens of Bunyan's 
 picturesque and imaginative power. In nothing is his vivid- 
 ness more displayed than in the reality of his impersonations. 
 The dramatis persona are not shadowy abstractions, moving 
 far above us in a mystical world or lay figures ticketed with 
 certain names, but solid men and women of our own flesh and 
 blood, living in our own every-day world, men of like passions 
 with ourselves. Many of them we know familiarly ; there is 
 hardly one we should be surprised to meet any day." E. 
 Venables. 
 
 " His imagination [after conversion] ceased its childish 
 fabling, and became visionary ; he saw mind-pictures, and 
 this the more readily because his uneducated mind was accus- 
 tomed to move through concrete ideas, and was characterized 
 by a high visualizing power." G. E. Woodberry. 
 
 "It [' Pilgrim's Progress '] is the matchless and inimitable 
 crystallization into imaginative art of the whole system of Puri- 
 tan Protestantism." Edmund Gosse. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " He took me, and had me where he showed me a stately pal- 
 ace, and how the people were clad in gold that were in it ; and 
 how there came a venturous man, and cut his way thro* the 
 armed men that stood in the door to keep him out ; and how he 
 was bid to come in and win eternal glory." Grace Abounding. 
 
 " Now there was, not far from the place where they lay, a 
 castle called Doubting Castle, the owner whereof was Giant 
 Despair ; and it was in his grounds they now were sleeping. 
 Wherefore he, getting up in the morning early and walking up 
 and down in his fields, caught Christian and Hopeful asleep in 
 his grounds. Then, with a grim and surly voice, he bid them 
 awake, and asked them whence they were and what they did on 
 his grounds. They told him they were pilgrims and that they 
 had lost their way. Then, said the giant, ' You have this night
 
 62 BUNYAN 
 
 trespassed on me, by trampling in and lying on my grounds ; and 
 therefore you must go along with me." So they were forced to 
 go, because he was stronger than they. They also had but 
 little to say, for they knew themselves in a fault. The Giant, 
 therefore, drove them before him and put them into his castle, in- 
 to a very dark dungeon, nasty and stinking to the spirits of these 
 two men. Here, then, they lay from Wednesday morning till 
 Saturday night, without one bit of bread or drop of drink or 
 light or any to ask how they did." Pilgrim's Progress. 
 
 " So he went on and Apollyon met him ; now the monster was 
 hideous to behold. He was clothed with scales like a fish (and 
 they are his pride), he had wings like a dragon, feet like a bear, 
 and out of his belly came fire and smoke, and his mouth was as 
 the mouth of a lion." Pilgrim's Progress. 
 
 ''Then went the jury out, whose names were Mr. Blindman, 
 Mr. No-good, Mr. Malice, Mr. Love-lust, Mr. Live-loose, Mr. 
 Heady, Mr. High-mind, Mr. Enmity, Mr. Liar, Mr. Cruelty, Mr. 
 Hate-light, and Mr. Implacable, who every one gave in his pri- 
 vate verdict against him among themselves, and afterward unan- 
 imously concluded to bring him in guilty before the Judge. And 
 first among themselves, Mr. Blindman, the foreman, said, ' I see 
 clearly that this man is a heretic.' Then said Mr. No-good, 
 'Away with such a fellow from the earth!' ' Ay,' said Mr. 
 Malice, 'for I hate the very look of him.' Then said Mr. Love- 
 lust, ' I could never endure him.' ' Nor I,' said Mr. Live-loose, 
 ' for he would always be condemning my way.' ' Hang him, 
 hang him!' said Mr. Heady. 'A sorry ,' said Mr. High- 
 mind. ' My heart riseth against him,' said Mr. Enmity. 'He 
 is a rogue,' said Mr. Liar. ' Hanging is too good for him,' said 
 Mr. Cruelty. ' Let us dispatch him out of the way,' said Mr. 
 Hatelight. Then said Mr. Implacable, ' Might I have all the 
 world given to me, I could not be reconciled to him ; there- 
 fore let us forthwith bring him in guilty of death.' " Pilgrim's 
 Progress. 
 
 3. Homeliness Naturalness. This means some- 
 thing more than simplicity. He abounds in homely collo- 
 quialisms. Minto declares that Bunyan's language " is 
 homely indeed, but it is not the every-day speech of hinds
 
 BUNYAN 63 
 
 and tinkers ; it is the language of the Church, of the Bible, 
 of Fox's ' Book of Martyrs,' and whatever other literature 
 Bunyan was in the habit of perusing." It is this plainness of 
 style that has caused " Pilgrim's Progress" to be translated 
 into more languages than any other English book ; while, for 
 two hundred years, the Bible excepted, it has been the most 
 widely read book in our literature. 
 
 " His English is plain but never vulgar, homely but never 
 coarse, and still less unclean ; full of imagery but never 
 obscure, always intelligible, always forcible, going straight to 
 the point in the fewest and simplest words. It may indeed 
 be affirmed that it was impossible for Bunyan to write badly. 
 His genius was a native genius. As soon as he began to 
 write at all he wrote well. Without any training, as he says, 
 in the school of Aristotle or Plato, or any study of the great 
 masters of literature, at one bound he leapt to a high level of 
 thought and composition. His earliest book, ' Some Gos- 
 pel Truths Opened,' 'thrown off,' writes Dr. Brown, 'at a 
 heat,' displays the same ease of style and directness of speech 
 and absence of stilted phraseology which he maintained to 
 the end. The great charm which pervades all Bunyan's 
 writings is their naturalness. You never feel that he is writ- 
 ing for effect, still less to perform an uncongenial piece of 
 task-work. He writes because he had something to say 
 which was worth saying, a message to deliver on which the 
 highest interests of others were at stake, which demanded 
 nothing more than a straightforward earnestness and plainness 
 of speech, such as, coming from the heart, might best reach 
 the hearts of others. He wrote as he spoke, because a neces- 
 sity was laid upon him which he dared not evade." Ven- 
 ables. 
 
 ' ' The vocabulary is the vocabulary of the common people. 
 There is not an expression, if we except a few technical terms 
 of theology, which would puzzle the rudest peasant. We 
 have observed several pages which do not contain a single
 
 64 BUNYAN 
 
 word of more than two syllables. Yet no writer has said 
 more exactly what he meant." Macaulay, 
 
 " Shorn of all ornament, simple and direct as the contrition 
 and prayer of childhood, . . . the style [of ' Grace 
 Abounding '] is that of a man dead to self-gratification and 
 only desirous to convey to others the lesson of his inward 
 trials, temptations, sins, weaknesses, and dangers."- Whittier. 
 
 "These repetitions, embarrassed phrases, familiar compari- 
 sons, this artless style, whose awkwardness recalls the child- 
 ish periods of Herodotus, and whose simplicity recalls tales 
 for children, prove that if his work is allegorical, it is so in 
 order that it may be intelligible, and that Bunyan is a poet 
 because he is a child." Taine. 
 
 " His is a homespun style, not a manufactured one. 
 If it is not a well of English undefiled to which the poet and 
 philologist must repair, . . . it is a clear stream of cur- 
 rent English, the vernacular speech of his age, sometimes, in- 
 deed, in its rusticity and coarseness, but always in its plain- 
 ness. . . . His language is everywhere level to the most 
 ignorant reader and to the meanest capacity ; there is a 
 homely reality about it ; a nursery tale is not more intelligi- 
 ble, in its manner of narration, to a child." Robert Sort they. 
 
 " It [' Pilgrim's Progress '] is composed in the lowest style 
 of English, without slang or false grammar. If you were to 
 polish it, you would at once destroy the reality of the vision." 
 Coleridge. 
 
 "This book [' Pilgrim's Progress '] is written so plainly, 
 simply, and true to nature, that a sentence means almost a 
 volume, and we find ourselves quoting from it constantly as 
 we do from Shakespeare. . . . They [his pictures] are 
 homely, you say. So much the better. And what realism 
 there is about them ! There are so many characters in the 
 book that those whom he addresses are pretty sure to find 
 themselves in it." George Dawson.
 
 BUNYAN 6$ 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 ' ' Then Apollyon straddled quite over the whole breadth of the 
 way, and said, ' I am void of fear in this matter ; prepare thyself 
 to die ; for I swear by my infernal den that thou shall go no fur- 
 ther ; here will I spill thy soul : ' and with that he threw a flaming 
 dart at his breast ; but Christian had a shield in his hand with 
 which he caught it, and so prevented the danger of that. Then 
 did Christian draw, for he saw it was time to bestir him ; and 
 Apollyon as fast made at him, throwing darts as thick as hail." 
 Pilgrim's Progress. 
 
 11 Why, they, after their headstrong manner, conclude that it 
 is a duty to rush on their journey all weathers ; and I am for 
 waiting for wind and tide. They are for hazarding all for God 
 at a clap ; and I am taking all advantages to secure my life and 
 estate." Pilgrim's Progress. 
 
 " Will a man give a penny to fill his belly with straw ? or can 
 you persuade the turtle-dove to live on carrion, like the crow ? 
 Though faithless ones care for carnal lusts, pawn or mortgage, or 
 sell what they have and themselves outright to boot." Grace 
 Abounding. 
 
 4. Quiet Humor Latent Satire. "We have 
 strokes of pleasantry which bring back the smile to our faces 
 and humorous thrusts about Hopeful's courage when the 
 thieves were at a distance, and at the way in which ' Peter 
 would swagger, aye, he would, but who so foiled and run 
 down by villains as he ? ' " John Brown. 
 
 "The open-heartedness, humor, and deep sensibility of 
 Christian's character make us love him. ... It is 
 amusing to see the manner in which, by turns, their [Bunyan's 
 personages] real character is expressed in Bunyan's honest, 
 rugged, plain-dealing, and humorous way." Sir Walter 
 Scott. 
 
 "The man must have been not a little waggish as well 
 as witty who invented such happy names for the judge and 
 jury that tried and burnt Faithful at Vanity Fair. . . .
 
 66 BUNYAN 
 
 Many of the characters of his ' Holy War ' also, as well as 
 the manoeuvres of it, are rich in masterly strokes of shrewd- 
 ness and piquancy. His coinage, like Fuller's or Donne's, 
 ' rings like good metal.' . . . The ' Holy War ' abounds 
 with sparkling wit as well as with profound metaphysics. It 
 is, altogether, ' a witty invention,' which verifies the proverb, 
 that ' Wisdom dwells with Prudence.' It is needless to say 
 that this wit is of the highest order ; and the more remark- 
 able, inasmuch as it is struck out from abstract qualities and 
 personified passions." Robert Philip. 
 
 " He can, by the quiet touch of sarcasm, wither up a pom- 
 pous pretender, tear off the mantle of a hypocrite, expose a 
 fool, and blast an impostor. ... He is at times dan- 
 gerous in the cool naivete of his satire." George Gilfillan. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " I like you wonderful well, for your sayings are full of convic- 
 tion ; and I will add, what thing is so pleasant and what so profita- 
 ble as to talk of the things of God ? What things so pleasant (that 
 is, if a man hath any delight in things that are wonderful) ? For 
 instance, if a man doth delight of the history or the mystery of 
 things ; or if a man doth delight to talk of miracles, wonders, or 
 signs, where shall he find things recorded so delightful and so 
 sweetly penned as in the Holy Scripture ? . . . What you 
 will : I will talk of things heavenly or things earthly ; things 
 sacred or things profane ; things past or things to come ; things 
 foreign or things at home ; things more essential or things 
 circumstantial ; provided that all will be done to our profit. "- 
 Pilgrim's Progress. 
 
 ff Yes, and my wife is a very virtuous woman ; the daughter of 
 a virtuous woman : she was my Lady Feigning's daughter, there- 
 fore she came of a very honorable family, and is arrived to such 
 a pitch of breeding that she knows how to carry it to all, even to 
 prince and peasant. It is true we somewhat differ in religion 
 from those of the stricter sort, yet but in two small points : we 
 never strive against wind or tide ; secondly, we are always most 
 zealous when religion goes in his silver slippers : we love to walk
 
 BUNYAN 67 
 
 with him in the streets if the sun shines and the people applaud 
 him." Pilgrim's Progress. 
 
 " But will it not be counted a trespass against the Lord of the 
 city whither we are bound, thus to violate his revealed will ? 
 They told him that, as for that, he needed not to trouble his head 
 thereabout ; for what they did they had custom for, and could 
 produce, if need were, testimony that would witness it for more 
 than a thousand years. ' But,' said Christian, 'will your practice 
 stand a trial at law ? ' They told him that, ' custom, it being of 
 so long a standing as above a thousand years, would doubtless 
 now be admitted as a thing legal by any impartial judge ; and 
 besides,' said they, 'so be we get into the way, what's matter 
 which way we get in ? If we are in, we are in.' " Pilgrim's 
 Progress. 
 
 5. Realism. "Bunyan always preached 'what he saw 
 and felt. "... How he preached when himself amidst 
 the terrors of his own ' Pilgrim ' in the Valley of the Shadow 
 of Death, may be gathered from his own mouth. 
 He acted always under one character, the Christian Soldier, 
 realizing in his own conflicts and conquests the Progress of 
 his own Pilgrim. Therefore his great work is not a book of 
 imaginations and shadows but of realities experienced. . . 
 It will be pleasing to the imagination just in proportion as 
 the mind of the reader has been accustomed to interpret the 
 things of this life by their connection with another and by 
 the light which comes from that world to this. A reader 
 without this habit, and never having felt that he is a stranger 
 and a pilgrim in a world of temptations and snares, can see but 
 half the beauty of such poetry as fills this work, because it 
 cannot make its appeal to his own experience. ... Of 
 the faithfulness with which Bunyan has depicted the inward 
 trials of the Christian conflict, of the depth and power of the 
 appeal which that book makes to the Christian's heart, of the 
 accuracy and beauty of the map therein drawn of the deal- 
 ings of God's spirit in leading the sinner from the City of
 
 68 BUNYAN 
 
 Destruction to Mount Zion, he knows and can conceive noth- 
 ing." G. B. Cheever. 
 
 " This is the highest miracle of genius that things which 
 are not should be as though they were ; that the imaginations 
 of one mind should become the personal recollections of 
 another. . . . Bunyan is almost the only writer that 
 ever gave to the abstract the interest of the concrete. 
 His imagination exercised despotic power over his body and 
 mind. . . . He felt his infernal enemy pulling at his 
 clothes behind him. He spurned with his feet and struck- 
 with his hands at the destroyer." Macau/ay. 
 
 "How close, how truthful to his surroundings, he was as 
 a literary workman, is brought home with great force by the 
 view which this biography [' Pilgrim's Progress '] gives of Bed- 
 ford things and people." G. E. Woodberry. 
 
 " The ' Pilgrim's Progress ' is a study, unsurpassed for faith- 
 fulness of detail and large suggestiveness, of one of the most 
 remarkable epochs in any land. It is no mere realistic sketch 
 of the Bedford of Puritan times ; it is a masterly and brilliant 
 picture of the people of Puritan England and of the moral 
 and ideal forces in the air. Christian, Faithful, and Mr. 
 Greatheart ; Pliable, Obstinate, and Talkative ; Mr. Saveall, 
 Mr. Moneylove, and Mr. Byends were, doubtless, but decent, 
 ' douce ' folks from Bedford ; . . . but they were immedi- 
 ately recognized in every parish in the country. . . . The 
 character, the spirit, and the tendencies of the time are all 
 here. . . . The earnestness of the times, the narrowness, 
 the piety, the superstitions, and the excesses religious and 
 irreligious are all here. The fragment is simply invaluable. 
 No ancient statue, no shield or stone weapon, and no fossil, 
 plant, fish, or foot-mark ever gave so real and so rich a glimpse 
 of its times as this fantastic dream. . . . It is more than 
 a mere likeness, and for this reason is of more than special in- 
 terest to the student of history. He sees in the little sketch 
 far more than mere villagers and pietists ; for he sees, in these
 
 BUNYAN 69 
 
 villagers and pietists, the impulse that made Puritanism great. 
 
 . . The characters are drawn with the firmest fidelity to 
 truth so much so that we may predicate with assurance what 
 they will think, feel, will, or even what they will do, under 
 given circumstances. ' ' David Simc. 
 
 " He places before his readers certain pictures which he 
 himself saw almost as clearly as if he had been Christian trudg- 
 ing upon a real highway, instead of Bunyan writing within 
 dark prison walls. And this he has done with such marvel- 
 lous skill that we, too, feel the green grass of the Delectable 
 Mountains beneath our feet and shudder as the awful darkness 
 of the Valley of the Shadow of Death closes around us." 
 W. F. Collier. 
 
 " The more we study the 'Pilgrim's Progress' and the 
 ' Holy War,' in connection with his own history and times, 
 the more shall we see reason to believe that his numerous 
 characters directly and broadly reflect both the outer and in- 
 ner characteristics of the religious world familiar to him. 
 . . There is also everywhere, in his allegories, the evi- 
 dence of a rare power of actual observation of sharp insight 
 into the living characteristics around him, and of great fulness 
 of artistic skill in drawing these from the life as he knew and 
 saw them. ... It is, above all, this realistic element 
 that gives to Bunyan's great allegory its special interest. It 
 is because he draws so much from outward fact that we find 
 his pages so living and linger over them, and return to them 
 and find them not only instructive, but entertaining. Spen- 
 ser in his great allegory is richer, . . . but he has nowhere 
 caught life and mirrored it as Bunyan has done. . . . Puri- 
 tanism lives in his pages spiritually and socially in forms 
 and in coloring which must ever command the sympathy and 
 enlist the love of all good Christians." John Tulloch. 
 
 " A man so sensitive to supernatural impressions could re- 
 alize them as completely as the actual experiences of his daily 
 life. . . . The same impression of reality pervades the
 
 7O BUNYAN 
 
 whole book [' Pilgrim's Progress '].... Every person- 
 age whom he meets on his journey and every place through 
 which he passes, appears to the mind of the reader with the 
 vividness of actual experience. The child or the laborer reads 
 the ' Pilgrim's Progress ' as a record of adventures undergone 
 by a living man ; the scholar forgets the art which has raised 
 the picture before his mind in a sense of contact with the sub- 
 ject portrayed. . . . Other allegorists have pleased the 
 fancy or gratified the understanding, but Bunyan occupies at 
 once the imagination, the reason, and the heart of his reader. 
 In ' Pilgrim's Progress ' strange and unreal places 
 become well-known places, and moral qualities become dis- 
 tinct human beings." Bayard Tuckerman. 
 
 ' ' He was one of those enthusiasts whom some call fanatics 
 and some madmen ; who hear suggestions, as they believe, 
 from visible, tangible forms about their beds, and to whom it 
 is in vain to say that they do not see them, for they verily 
 and firmly believe that they do. ... Such a process is 
 like catching a cloud and making it permanent, or like turn- 
 ing a thought into a thing. But John Bunyan has done it." 
 George Daw son. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " I have also another stratagem in my head : you knosv Man- 
 soul is a market-town, a town that delights in commerce ; what, 
 therefore, if some of our Diabolonians shall feign themselves far 
 countrymen, and shall go out and bring to the market of Man- 
 soul some of our wares, though it be but for half the worth ? 
 Now let those that thus trade in their market be those that are 
 true to us, and I will lay down my crown to pawn it will do. 
 There are two that are come to my thoughts already, that I think 
 will be arch at this work, and they are, Mr. Penny-wise-pound- 
 foolish and Mr. Get-i'-th'-hundred-and-lose-i-th'-shire ; nor is 
 this man with the long name at all inferior to the other." The 
 Holy War. 
 
 11 I saw then in my dream that they went on in this their soli-
 
 BUNYAN 71 
 
 tary ground, till they came to a place at which a man is apt to 
 lose his way. Now though when it was light their guide could 
 well enough tell how to miss those ways that led wrong, yet in 
 the dark he was put to a stand ; but he had in his pocket a map 
 of all ways leading to or from the Celestial City ; wherefore he 
 struck a light, for he never goes, also, without his tinder-box, 
 and takes a view of his book or map, which bids him be care- 
 ful, in that place, to turn to the right-hand way." Pilgrim's 
 Progress. 
 
 " It made me laugh to see how old Mr. Prejudice was kicked 
 and tumbled about in the dirt : for though a while since he was 
 made a captain of the Diabolonians, to the hurt and damage of the 
 town, yet now they had got him under their feet ; and I'll assure 
 you he had by some of my Lord Understanding's party his 
 crown cracked to boot. Mr. Anything also became a brisk man 
 in the broil ; but both sides were against him, because he was 
 true to none. Yet he had for his malpertness one of his legs 
 broken ; and he that did it wished it had been his neck. Much 
 harm more was done on both sides : but this must not be forgot- 
 ten. It was now a wonder to see my Lord Will-be-will so indif- 
 ferent as he was ; he did not seem to take one side more than 
 another, only it was perceived that he smiled to see how old 
 Prejudice was tumbled up and down in the dirt ; also when Cap- 
 tain Anything came halting up before him, he seemed to take but 
 little notice of him." The Holy War. 
 
 6. Catholicity Common Sense. "His common 
 sense ... is extraordinarily close-packed and hard, and 
 exhibits acute observation of the ways of human nature in 
 practical life. . . . In an age of sectaries, he was not a 
 narrow bigot, and did not stickle for meaningless things ; 
 and in the time of political strife growing out of religious 
 differences, and though himself a sufferer by twelve years' 
 experience in prison, he did not confuse heaven with any 
 fantastic monarchy or commonwealth of Christ, nor show any 
 rancor or revengeful spirit as a subject." G. E. Woodberry. 
 
 " You cannot say from a perusal of that work ['Pilgrim's 
 Progress '] whether its author was a Presbyterian
 
 72 BUNYAN 
 
 or a Lutheran, only that he did not mean, in drawing his own 
 portrait of a true Christian, that he should belong to any of 
 these parties exclusively. . . . The portraiture was a 
 compound of what was excellent in them all. . . . You 
 do not meet truth in fragments, or in parts, but for the whole. 
 You do not meet prejudices, bigotries, reproaches, nor any- 
 thing in the sweet fields through which he leads you that can 
 repel any the humblest, most forgotten Christian, or the 
 wisest, most exalted one from these lovely enclosures; 
 . . . conversing with you all the way so lovingly, so in- 
 structively, so frankly, that nothing can be more delightful. 
 You have in him more of the ubiquity, unity, and harmony 
 of divine truth, more of the pervading breath and stamp of 
 inspiration, than in almost any other uninspired writer. 
 . In him there was a remarkable translucence of the 
 general in the particular, and of the particular through the 
 general. . . . Bunyan's book has the likeness of this 
 universality, and Christians of every sect may take what they 
 please out of it, except their own sectarianism ; they cannot 
 find that. In this respect it bears remarkably the divine 
 stamp. . . . It is a work so full of native good sense 
 that no mind can read it without gaining in wisdom and 
 vigor of judgment. . . . It is the charm of common 
 sense and reality that constitutes in great measure the charm 
 of Bunyan's book." G. B. Cheever. 
 
 "The 'Pilgrim's Progress' is entirely catholic that is, 
 universal in its expression and in its thoughts. It may con- 
 tain sentiments distasteful to this or to that section of Chris- 
 tians may tinge of the Calvinist or of the Puritan ; but 
 what is remarkable is that this peculiar color is so slight." 
 A. P. Stanley. 
 
 "John Bunyan doubtless owed to John Gifford the 
 peculiar type of his Christianity, its comprehensiveness, its 
 sect-forgetting zeal for the things of Jesus Christ." James 
 Hamilton.
 
 BUNYAN 73 
 
 "John Bunyan dipped his pen in the Catholicism of Cath- 
 olicity. He had no sympathy with any ism, however novel 
 or specious or popular, which corrupted or darkened the sim- 
 plicity of the Gospel. With him charity was not a mere 
 clap-trap sentiment for the platform, but a deep conviction, a 
 strong principle, a fruit of the Holy Spirit." W. Anderson. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " I saw then in my dream so far as this valley reached there 
 was on the right hand a very deep ditch ; that ditch is it into 
 which the blind have led the blind in all ages, and have both 
 there miserably perished. Again, behold, on the left hand, there 
 was a very dangerous quag, into which, if even a good man falls, 
 he can find no bottom for his feet to stand on. Into that quag 
 King David once did fall, and had no doubt therein been smoth- 
 ered, had not He that is able plucked him out." Pilgrim's 
 Progress. 
 
 " Now I began to consider with myself that God hath a bigger 
 mouth to speak with than I had a heart to conceive with ; I 
 thought also with myself that He spoke not his words in haste or 
 in an unadvised heat, but with infinite wisdom and judgment and 
 in very truth and faithfulness." Grace Abounding. 
 
 " The Publican hath now new things, great things, and life-long 
 things to concern himself about : his sins, the curse, with death 
 and hell, began now to stare him in the face : wherefore it was 
 no time now to let his heart or his eyes or his cogitations wander, 
 but to be fixed, and to be vehemently applying himself as a sin- 
 ner to the God of Heaven for mercy." The Pharisee and the 
 Publican. 
 
 " My sons, you have heard, in the words of the truth of the 
 Gospel, that you must ' through many tribulations enter into the 
 kingdom of heaven ; ' and again, that ' in every city bonds and 
 afflictions await you ; ' and therefore you cannot expect that you 
 should go long on your pilgrimage without them in some sort or 
 other. You have found something of the truth of these testimo- 
 nies upon you already, and more will immediately follow ; for 
 now, as you see, you are almost out of this wilderness, and there- 
 fore you will soon come into a town that you will by and by see
 
 74 BUNYAN 
 
 before you ; and iu that town you will be hardly beset with ene- 
 mies, who will strain hard but they will kill you ; and be sure 
 that one or both of ypu must seal the testimony which you hold 
 with your blood ; but be you faithful unto death, and the King 
 will give you a crown of life. He that shall die there, although 
 his death will be unnatural, and his pain, perhaps, great, he will 
 yet have the better of his fellows ; not only because he will be 
 arrived at the Celestial City soonest, but because he will escape 
 many miseries that the other will meet with the rest of the jour- 
 ney. But when you are come to the town, and shall find ful- 
 filled what I have here related, then remember your friend, and 
 quit yourselves like men, and commit the keeping of your souls 
 to God in well-doing, as unto a faithful creator." Pilgrim's 
 Progress. 
 
 7. Biblical Coloring Spirituality. "His genius 
 pursued a path dictated by his piety, and one that no other 
 being in the world ever pursued before him. . . . The 
 very discipline of his intellect was a spiritual discipline ; the 
 conflicts that his soul sustained with the powers of darkness 
 were the very sources of his intellectual strength. 
 The light that first broke through his darkness was the light 
 from Heaven. . . . Bunyan has given a powerful rela- 
 tion of his own religious experience in a little work entitled, 
 ' Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners.' . . . Not 
 only was his heart made new by the spirit of the Bible, but 
 his whole intellectual being was penetrated and transfigured 
 by its influence. . . . The spirit of his work is Hebrew : 
 we may trace the mingled influence of David and of Isaiah in 
 the character of his genius ; and as to the images of the sacred 
 poets, he is lavish in the use of them in the most natural and 
 unconscious manner possible ; his mind was imbued with 
 them." G. B. Cheever. 
 
 "There is scarce a circumstance or metaphor in the Old 
 Testament which does not find a place, bodily and literally, in 
 the story of the ' Pilgrim's Progress ; ' and this peculiar arti-
 
 BUNYAN 75 
 
 fice has made his own imagination appear more creative than 
 it really is." Hallam. 
 
 " The ' Pilgrim's Progress ' is not only one of the first and 
 most beautiful English offsprings of the Scriptures, but it is so 
 like them in style, language, imagery, and sustained fervor 
 that it might be taken as an appendix to the Bible. The tale 
 so glows from beginning to end with Eastern imagery and fer- 
 vor of prophets and seers that it may be viewed as an English 
 flower grown upon Jewish soil. . . . It is so full of their 
 sublime images that it comes upon the reader as an apocalypse 
 of the Apocalypse. ... To the glad, pious ears of the 
 Pilgrim the very birds, when they sing sweetly, sing aloud 
 the Psalms of David." David Sime. 
 
 " It was only its relation to religion that made any aspect 
 of life interesting to him. . . . Bunyan knew no liter- 
 ature except that of the Bible ; his imagination fed itself upon 
 its grand forms of expression its wondrous scenes. His alle- 
 gories are found constructed upon such great outlines of im- 
 aginative incident and scenery as he had there learned to 
 admire. All critics have been struck with the simplicity and 
 faithfulness with which he reproduced scriptural circumstance 
 and idea. . . . Nature is beheld by him only in the light 
 of the sacred page and delineated by him only in the light of 
 its descriptive language." John Tulloch. 
 
 "It is the English of the Bible. His images are images 
 of prophet and evangelist. So completely had the Bible be- 
 come Bunyan's life that one feels its phrases as the natural ex- 
 pression of his thoughts. He lived in the Bible till its words 
 became his own. ' '/. R. Green. 
 
 " Bunyan had occasion to mention an entertainment. Every 
 dish which he placed on the table is in itself a scriptural 
 parable ; and the precise nature of the refreshment . . . 
 is found, on referring to the texts indicated, to have an ex- 
 plicit connection with some striking particular of the Holy 
 Wri t. " Sir Walter Scott.
 
 76 BUN VAN 
 
 " ' Pilgrim's Progress' seems to be a complete reflection of 
 scripture with none of the rubbish of the theologians mixed up 
 with it." Thomas Arnold. 
 
 " ' Pilgrim's Progress ' has been called ' the creed of Cal- 
 vin, illustrated by the genius of Shakespeare. ' ' 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " But at last I began to consider, that * that which is highly 
 esteemed among men, is had in abomination with God.' And I 
 thought again, this shame tells me what men are ; but he tells 
 me nothing what God or the Word of God is ; and I thought, 
 moreover, that at the day of doom we shall not be doomed to 
 death or life according to the hectoring spirits of the world, but 
 according to the wisdom and law of the Highest. Therefore, 
 thought I, what God says is best, indeed is best, though all the 
 men in the world are against it." Pilgrim's Progress. 
 
 " Then said my lord mayor, ' We have sinned indeed, but that 
 shall be no help to thee, for our Immanuel hath said it, and that 
 in great faithfulness, ' and him that cometh to me I will in no 
 wise cast out.' He hath also told us (O our enemy) that ' all 
 manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven to the sons 
 of men.' Therefore we dare not despair, but will look for and 
 wait for mercy." The Holy War. 
 
 " Look to the heavens, and behold and consider the stars, how 
 high are they ! Can you stop the sun from running his course, 
 and hinder the moon from giving her light ? Can you count the 
 number of the stars, or stop the bottles of heaven ? Can you 
 call for the waters of the sea, and cause them to cover the face 
 of the ground ? Can you behold everyone that is proud and 
 abase him and bend their faces in secret ? Yet these are some of 
 the works of our King, in whose name, this day, we come up un- 
 to you, that you may be brought under his authority. In his 
 name, therefore, I summon you again to yield up yourselves to 
 his captains." The Holy War. 
 
 8. Sympathy Tenderness. " Religion has scarcely 
 ever worn a form so calm and soothing as in his allegory. 
 The feeling which predominates throughout the book is a
 
 BUNYAN 77 
 
 feeling of tenderness for weak, timid, and harassed minds. 
 The character of Mr. Fearing, of Mr. Feeblemind, and Mr. 
 Despondency and his daughter Miss Muchafraid ; the account 
 of poor Littlefaith, who was robbed by three thieves of his spend- 
 ing money ; the description of Christian's terrorin thedungeon 
 of Giant Despair and in his passage through the river all 
 show how strong a sympathy Bunyan felt, after his own mind 
 had become clear and cheerful, for persons afflicted with 
 religious melancholy. ' ' Macaulay. 
 
 " He had in himself all these ingredients of full-formed 
 humanity. . . . How sorry he is for Mr. Badman ! 
 and how he makes you sympathize with Christian and Mr. 
 Ready-to-halt and Mr. Feeblemind ! . . . * In his ser- 
 mons how piteously he pleads with sinners for their own souls! 
 And how expressive is the undisguised vehemency of his 
 yearning affections ! " -James Hamilton. 
 
 "Throughout the 'Pilgrim's Progress' are evidences of 
 strong human sympathy and a kindly indulgence for the 
 weak and erring among his fellow-men. . . . Bunyan 
 himself was distinguished by a general sympathy with his 
 fellow-men which the narrowness of Puritanism had failed to 
 impair." Bayard Tuckerman. 
 
 " That man knew his Bible well, and he knew that other 
 book well the human heart." George Dawson. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " If, therefore, any of them should at any time be sick or weak, 
 and so not able to perform that office of love, which, with all 
 their hearts they are willing to do (and will do also when 
 well and in health), slight them not, nor despise them, but 
 rather strengthen them, and encourage them, though weak and 
 ready to die, for they are your fence and your guard, your wall, 
 your gate, your locks, and your bars. And although, when they 
 are weak, they can do but little, but rather need to be helped by 
 you than that you should then expect great things from them, 
 yet, when well, you know what exploits, what feats and warlike
 
 78 BUNYAN 
 
 achievements they are able to do and will perform for you." 
 The Holy War. 
 
 "Now, when he had heard me make my complaint, he 
 said, ' Peace be to thee.' He also wiped mine eyes with 
 his handkerchief, and clad me in silver and gold. He put a 
 chain about my neck, and ear-rings in mine ears, and a beauti- 
 ful crown upon my head. Then he took me by the hand, and 
 said, 'Mercy, come after me.' So he went up, and I followed, 
 till we came at a golden gate. Then he knocked ; and when they 
 within had opened, the man went in, and I followed him up to a 
 throne, upon which one sat, and he said to me, ' Welcome, 
 daughter." Pilgrim's Progress. , 
 
 " But alas ! who knows the many straits, and as I may say, 
 the stress of weather (I mean the cold blasts of hell) with which 
 the poor soul is assaulted betwixt its receiving of grace and its 
 sensible closing with Jesus Christ ? None, I dare say, but it and 
 its fellows. . . . Oh, what mists, what mountains, what 
 clouds, what darkness, what objections, what false apprehensions 
 of God, of Christ, of grace, of the Word, and of the soul's con- 
 dition, doth Satan now lay before it, and haunt it with ; whereby 
 he dejecteth, casteth down, daunteth, distresseth, and almost 
 driveth it into despair !" The Pharisee and the Publican. 
 
 9. Dramatic Instinct. "Its ['Pilgrim's Progress'] 
 dramatic power is wonderful. Every character is distinct 
 and real. Every person introduced is a man or a woman and 
 not a shadow, an abstraction to which names are given. 
 . . . His persons all have human hearts, and the red 
 blood of life flows through their veins, and they talk and feel 
 and slip and get on, even as the people we meet." Lang- 
 ford. 
 
 " In the works of many celebrated authors men are merely 
 personifications. . . . The mind of Bunyan, on the con- 
 trary, was so imaginative that personifications became men. 
 A dialogue between two qualities in his dream has more dra- 
 matic effect than a dialogue between two human beings in 
 most plays. ' ' Ma can lav.
 
 BUNYAN 79 
 
 " Its [' Pilgrim's Progress '] dramatic skill is of the highest 
 order. The characters are never confused, inconsistent, or 
 mechanical. On the contrary, they are vivid, life-like, and 
 always full of supreme interest. So intensely dramatic is the 
 work that probably only its religious character has prevented 
 it from long ago having been put upon the stage. But, in 
 point of fact, it requires no stage to bring out its dramatic 
 effects. Even the tiny boy with the book before him can 
 construct such a stage for himself. . . . For sheer, 
 strong, human interest, it stands only beside the very best 
 dramas and romances in our language." David Sime. 
 
 " The 'Pilgrim's Progress ' is marked by a dramatic unity 
 not always possessed by even greater books. . . . The 
 unity of the story is kept up from point to point. 
 The episodes by the way never draw us so far aside that we 
 forget the main story, but rather contribute to its effect. 
 Bunyan's characters never linger, never tire us. As 
 soon as they step on to the scene we feel their personality so 
 vividly that we are sure that we should know them again. 
 They proceed at once to instruct or amuse or interest, having 
 done which they disappear, leaving us regretful they have van- 
 ished so soon. ... By a few strokes only, sometimes by 
 the mere giving of a name, an abstraction rises up clothed in 
 flesh and blood." -John Brown. 
 
 " Honest John Bunyan is the first man I know of who has 
 mingled narrative and dialogue together ; a mode of writing 
 very engaging to the reader, who, in the most interesting 
 passages, finds himself admitted as it were to the company 
 and present at the conversation." Benjamin Franklin, 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " The captains, therefore, being fled into the castle, the 
 enemy, without much resistance, possess themselves of the rest 
 of the town, and spreading themselves as they went into every 
 corner, they cried out as they marched, according to the com-
 
 80 BUNYAN 
 
 mand of the tyrant, ' Hell-fire ! Hell-fire ! Hell-fire ! ' so that 
 nothing for a while throughout the town of Mansoul could be 
 heard but the direful noise of ' Hell-fire ! ' together with the roar- 
 ing of Diabolus's drum. And now did the clouds hang black over 
 Mansoul, nor to reason did anything but ruin seem to attend it." 
 The Holy War. 
 
 " One thing I would not let slip ; I took notice that now poor 
 Christian was so confounded that he did not know his own voice. 
 And thus I perceived it : just when he was come over against 
 the mouth of the burning pit, one of the wicked ones got behind 
 him, and slept up softly to him, and whisperingly suggested many 
 grievous blasphemies to him, which he verily thought had pro- 
 ceeded from his own mind." Pilgrim's Progress. 
 
 10. Conscious Inspiration Earnestness. "In 
 
 recommending his own religious experience to the readers 
 of his romance, Bunyan was impressed with a sense of the 
 sacred importance of the task for which he had lived through 
 poverty and captivity. . . . To gain the favor of 
 Charles and all his court he would not, we are confident, 
 have guided Christian one step off the straight and narrow 
 path. "Sir Walter Stott. 
 
 " Not more abandoned to the power of supernatural influ- 
 ence was Ezekiel . . . than was the tinker of Elstow 
 when following the footsteps of Christian in that immortal 
 pilgrimage, or when beleaguering Mansoul with those multitu- 
 dinous hosts of darkness." George Gilfillan. 
 
 " To attempt this [stepping into a higher style] would be, 
 to one of his intense earnestness, to degrade his calling. He 
 dared not do it. . . . God had not played with him, and 
 he dared not play with others. His errand was much too 
 serious, and their need and danger too urgent to waste time 
 in tricking out his words with human skill. . . . Every 
 sentence breathes the most tremendous earnestness. 
 It is just this, which, with all their rudeness, their occasional 
 bad grammar, and their homely colloquialisms, gives to 
 Bunyan's writings the power of riveting the attention and
 
 BUNYAN 8l 
 
 stirring the affections which few authors have attained to." 
 E. Venables. 
 
 "It [' Pilgrim's Progress '] has the one supreme quality of 
 all true inspiration, that it is not so much the man taking pos- 
 session, deliberately, of the subject, as it is the subject coming 
 down and bearing away the man." -John Brown. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " I dared not, when I came before the Lord, go off my knees 
 until I had entreated him for help and mercy against the tempta- 
 tions that are to come ; and I beseech thee, reader, that thou 
 learn to beware of my negligence by the afflictions that for this 
 thing I did for days and months and years with sorrow undergo." 
 Grace Abounding. 
 
 " Whoso believes and understands it cannot live without con- 
 fession of sin and a coming to him for mercy. . . . The 
 terror of the Lord, how will it appear, when his wrath shall burn 
 and flame out like an oven or a fiery furnace before him, while 
 the wicked stand in his sight ! . . Who can conceive this 
 
 terror ! much more unable are men to express it with tongue or 
 pen ; yet the truly penitent and sin-confessing publican hath ap- 
 prehension so far thereof by the word of the testimony that it 
 driveth him to God with a confession of sin for an interest 
 in God's mercy." The Pharisee and the Publican. 
 
 " That which made me fear was this : lest Christ should have 
 no liking to me, for he called whom he would. But oh ! the 
 glory that I saw in that condition did still so engage my heart 
 that I could seldom read of any that Christ did call but I pres- 
 ently wished, ' Would I had been in their clothes, would I had 
 been born Peter ; would I had been born John ; or, would I had 
 been by and had heard him when he called them, how would I 
 have cried, O Lord, call me also ! But oh ! I feared he would 
 not call me.' " Grace Abounding.
 
 ADDISON, 1672-1719 
 
 Biographical Outline. Joseph Addison, born May i. 
 1672, at Milston, near Amesbury, Wilts ; father a clergyman, 
 afterward Dean of Lichfield ; Addison attends school, succes- 
 sively, at Amesbury, Salisbury, Lichfield, and the Charter- 
 house; forms a life-friendship with Steele at the Charterhouse ; 
 in 1687 he enters Queen's College, Oxford, where his classical 
 attainments attract attention, and soon gain for him a demy- 
 ship (a half- fellowship) at Magdalen College; he takes A.M. 
 in 1693, gains a probationary fellowship in 1697 and in 1698 
 a regular fellowship, which he holds till 1711 ; takes sev- 
 eral pupils, and rapidly acquires a reputation for elegant 
 scholarship, especially in Latin poetry, in which he excels all 
 Englishmen except Milton and Buchanan ; among the sub- 
 jects of his Latin poems are the Peace of Ryswick, an altar- 
 piece of the Resurrection at Magdalen, a description of the 
 bowling green, a barometer, a puppet-show, addresses to Dr. 
 Hannes and Dr. Burnet, of the Charterhouse, and a mock- 
 heroic war between the cranes and the pygmies, in which 
 Swift's Lilliputians are foreshadowed ; Addison's literary 
 reputation reaches London, and he writes a congratulatory 
 poetical address to Dryden, which Dryden inserts in the third 
 part of his " Miscellany Poems," published in 1693 ; to the 
 fourth part of Dryden's " Miscellany," published in 1694, 
 Addison contributes a translation of parts of Virgil's Fourth 
 Georgic and a didactic account of "The Greatest English 
 Poets;" in 1697 he contributes an anonymous essay on the 
 Georgics to Dryden's translation of Virgil, and in a postscript 
 to his " ^Eneis " Dryden refers to him as " the ingenious Mr. 
 Addison, of Oxford ; " Addison at one time intended to take 
 
 82
 
 ADDISON 83 
 
 holy orders, but was deterred (Tickell says) by his diffidence ; 
 he engages to make a translation of Herodotus ; is introduced 
 to Charles Montague (later Earl of Halifax) by Congreve, of 
 whom Montague (then Chancellor of the Exchequer) was al- 
 ready a patron; in 1695 Addison publishes a poem to the 
 king, with a dedicatory address to Lord Somers, both ex- 
 pressing orthodox conservative political opinions; in 1697 he 
 publishes his Latin poem on the Peace of Ryswick, with a 
 dedication to Montague, who obtains for Addison, through 
 Somers, a pension of ^300 a year, and declares that he will 
 keep him out of the Church ; the alleged object of the pension 
 was to enable Addison to qualify himself for diplomatic em- 
 ployment ; he leaves England in the autumn of 1699, visits 
 Paris, and settles in Blois, where he lives for a year in great 
 seclusion, assiduously mastering the French language ; he re- 
 turns to Paris in 1700, and converses with Malebranche and 
 Boileau ; Boileau is impressed with Addison's Latin scholar- 
 ship and exerts a strong influence on him thereafter ; Addison 
 leaves France in December, 1700, for a tour through Italy; 
 he visits Genoa, Milan, Venice, San Marino, Rome, Naples, and 
 Capri ; spends the early autumn of 1701 in Rome, and reaches 
 Geneva in November, going via Florence and Mont Cenis ; 
 throughout his tour he studies the scenery of Italy as illus 
 trating the writings of Virgil, Juvenal, Ovid, Manlius, and 
 Seneca; in a "Letter from Italy" addressed to Halifax, he 
 expresses himself forcibly against fabled Christian antiquities, : 
 popery, and tyrannical political power; while at Geneva he-'- 
 learns of Halifax's expulsion from office, of the death of Will- 
 iam III., and of the consequent loss of his pension, which had 
 then been paid but one year, so that he is left with only his 
 Oxford fellowship for support ; he remains on the Continent 
 till September, 1703, spending the summer of 1702 in Vienna, 
 where he writes his dialogues on " Medals; " later he visits 
 Hamburg and Holland ; Swift's assertion that, while abroad, 
 Addison became " travelling tutor to a squire " is not corrob-
 
 84 ADDISON 
 
 orated, as he refused to become tutor to the son of the Duke 
 of Somerset because he considered a salary of one hundred 
 guineas a year, with expenses, insufficient pay ; returning to 
 London in the autumn of 1703, he remains for a year without 
 employment ; continues his intimacy with prominent Whigs, 
 and becomes a member of the famous Kitcat Club; after the 
 battle of Blenheim, in August, 1704, Godolphin seeks a poet 
 to commemorate the English victory ; Halifax suggests Add i- 
 son, who is found in poor lodgings and who is made Commis- 
 sioner of Appeals as a retainer for his services in writing the 
 poem ; he writes " The Campaign," and is rewarded by be- 
 ing made Under Secretary of State, in 1706, an office that he 
 retains, though under different superiors, till 1709, when he 
 becomes secretary to Wharton, then just made Lord-Lieutenant 
 of Ireland ; Addison is made also Keeper of the Records, at a 
 salary of ^400 a year ; while holding these political offices 
 he published (1705) "Remarks on Several Parts of Italy" 
 (which became very popular and was republished in 1718) 
 and "Fair Rosamond," an opera in three acts, published 
 anonymously (1707), which failed at first, but afterward suc- 
 ceeded when set to new music by Arne ; during this period 
 Addison also aided Steele in writing his play " The Tender 
 Husband," and formed a close friendship with Swift, whom he 
 calls, in 1705, " the most agreeable companion, the truest 
 friend, and the greatest genius of his age ; " Addison spends 
 much of his time at Will's and later at Button's Coffee House, 
 with Pope, Tickell, Davenant, Ambrose Phillips, and other 
 literary friends ; though not intemperate, according to the 
 standards of the time, he sometimes used wine to excess, gen- 
 erally taking it to overcome his natural diffidence and to 
 stimulate his conversational powers, which Swift, Steele, and 
 Lady Mary Montague declare to have been remarkable ; he 
 enters Parliament for Lostwithiel in 1708, is unseated in De- 
 cember, 1709, and through the influence of Wharton is at 
 once reflected for Malmesbury; he holds this office during life,
 
 ADDISON 85 
 
 but his modesty prevents him from speaking in Parliament ; he 
 defends the Whig ministry vigorously in the Whig Examiner 
 (five numbers) in the autumn of 1710; with the fall of the 
 Whigs, early in 1711, Addison loses his secretaryship (then 
 worth ^2,000 a year), and in the same year loses an estate in 
 India valued at ^14,000, left him by a brother ; but he soon 
 afterward buys an estate in Bilton, Warwickshire, paying 
 ;io,ooo ; other indications of his comfortable financial con- 
 dition are the resignation of his fellowship in 1711 and the 
 abandonment of half the profits of his play, " Cato " in 1713 ; 
 Steelehad started the Tatler on April 12, 1709, and Addison, 
 then in Ireland, contributed one or two papers, but his fre- 
 quent and important contributions do not begin till October 
 15, 1709 (No. 8 1 of the Tatler}; he contributes frequently 
 during 1710, and his papers have great influence in making 
 the periodical popular ; of the Tatler papers, forty-one are 
 attributed solely to Addison and thirty-four to Addison and 
 Steele in conjunction ; Addison's contributions are in the 
 form of essays rather than statements of news, and contain 
 some of the finest specimens of his humor ; the Tatler ceases 
 January 2, 1711; the Spectator begins March i, 1711, and 
 continues through 555 daily numbers, till December 6, 1712, 
 when it is killed by the new stamp duty ; its daily sales some- 
 times reached 20,000 copies ; of the 555 numbers, Addison 
 wrote 274, his contributions being signed by one of the let- 
 ters CLIO; his Spectator essays, especially the Roger de Cov- 
 erley papers, established his style as a model for the century 
 following ; in seventeen Spectator papers on " Paradise Lost, ' ' 
 he establishes the orthodox estimate of Milton's genius ; Ad- 
 dison's " divine poems " are also published in the Spectator 
 during the autumn of 1712 ; he finishes his play of " Cato " 
 (most of it written as early as 1703), and it is put on the 
 stage April 14, 1713, with great success, although its dra- 
 matic weakness and its excessive declamation are admitted ; 
 Pope wrote a prologue for the play, Swift overcame his recent
 
 86 ADDISON 
 
 hostility to Addison and attended a rehearsal, and both Whigs 
 and Tories vied with each other in patronizing both the au- 
 thor and the actors; eight editions of " Cato " were pub- 
 lished during 1713, and it was translated into French, Italian, 
 German, and Latin ; Voltaire called it " the first reason- 
 able English tragedy; " John Dennis made a severe attack 
 on Addison because of its awkward dramatic construction, 
 and was answered by Pope ; later, Pope became offended at 
 Addison, unjustly charging him with abetting Tickell in 
 Tickell's supposed attempt to rival Pope's " Homer," and so 
 Pope wrote his famous satire on "Atticus; " evidence since 
 discovered has proved Pope guilty of despicable conduct in his 
 treatment of the case, and has shown Addison to have been 
 entirely innocent of Pope's charges ; Addison contributes fifty- 
 one papers to the Guardian during 1713 and twenty-four 
 papers to a new Spectator (probably conducted by Budgell) in 
 1714 ; during the same year he furnishes two papers to Steele's 
 Lover, and writes a prose comedy, " The Drummer," which 
 is represented unsuccessfully in 1715, and is afterward pub- 
 lished by Steele ; on the death of Queen Anne (August i , 
 1714) Addison is made secretary to the Lords Justices, and 
 soon afterward becomes secretary to Sunderland, then newly 
 appointed Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland ; ten months later, on 
 Sutherland's retirement, Addison is made one of the Lords 
 Commissioners of Trade; from December 23, 1715, to June 
 9, 1716, he publishes the Freeholder fifty-five papers in 
 defence of Whig principles; on August 3, 1716, he mar- 
 ries the Countess of Warwick, his long-time friend and 
 neighbor ; gossip says that the alliance was an unhappy 
 one, but his marriage doubtless aided Addison's political ad- 
 vancement ; in the spring of 1717 he is made fellow Secre- 
 tary of State with Townshend ; he retires from office in March, 
 1718, with a pension of ^1,500 a year, and begins, but does 
 not complete, several literary undertakings ; meantime he has 
 become estranged from Steele because of Steele's failure tore-
 
 ADDISON 87 
 
 pay loans made him by Addison ; Addison's last writing con- 
 sists of two papers in the Old Whig, in March and April, 
 1719, severely replying to articles by Steele, published in the 
 Plebeian ; he dies peacefully at Holland House, June 17, 1719, 
 leaving his widow and one daughter, the latter said to have 
 been of feeble mind. 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY ON ADDISON'S STYLE. 
 
 Thackeray, W. M., "The English Humorists." New York, 1886, Har- 
 per, 173-191. 
 
 Johnson, S., "Works." New York, 1846, Harper, 288-309. 
 
 Macaulay, T. B., "Miscellaneous Works." New York, 1880, Harper, 
 3: 407-488. 
 
 Gosse, E., " History of the i8th Century Literature." New York, 1889, 
 Macmillan, 105-107 and v. , index. 
 
 Taine, H. A., "History of English Literature." New York, 1875, 
 Holt, 2: 3 1 9-35 1. 
 
 Courthope, W. J., "English Men of Letters." New York, 1884, Har- 
 per. 
 
 Hazlitt, W., " Lectures on the English Poets." London, 1884, G. Bell 
 & Son, 2: 127-133. 
 
 De Quincey, Thomas, " Works." Edinburgh, 1890, A. & C. Black, II : 
 19-29. 
 
 Nicoll, H. J., "Landmarks of English Literature." New York, 1883, 
 Appleton, 171-181. 
 
 Green, J. R., "Essays of Addison." New York, 1890, Macmillan, 
 
 5-25. 
 
 Hunt, T. W., " Representative English Prose." New York, 1887, Arm- 
 strong, 288-309. 
 
 Collier, W. F., " History of English Literature." London, 1892, Nel- 
 son, 260-265. 
 
 Aiken, J., "Essays." London, 1811, J. Johnson, 335-346. 
 
 Phillips, M. G., "A Manual of English Literature." New York, 1893, 
 Harper, i : 499~533- 
 
 Stephen, L., "Dictionary of National Biography." New York, 1888, 
 Macmillan, i: 122-134. 
 
 Ward, T. H., "The English Poets." New York, 1881, Macmillan, 3 : 
 1-6. 
 
 Pope, A., "Poems" ("Dunciad"), 2: verses 124-140. 
 
 L'Estrange, A. G., "History of English Humor." London, 1878, 
 Hurst & Blackett, 2 : 77-99.
 
 88 ADDISON 
 
 Howitt, William, "Homes and Haunts of British Poets." London, 
 
 1863, Routledge, I : 139. 
 Hurd, Bishop, " Works of Addison, with Notes." London, 1854, Bohn, 
 
 v. Preface to Vol. I. 
 Bascom, J., "The Philosophy of English Literature." New York, 1870, 
 
 Putnam, 178-181. 
 Minto, W., " English Prose Literature." Edinburgh, 1886, Blackwood, 
 
 377-392. 
 Backus, F. J., & Shaw, " History of English Literature." New York, 
 
 1879, Sheldon, 214-223. 
 Knight, Thomas, " Gallery of Portraits." London, 1836, C. Knight A: 
 
 Co., 6: 147-155. 
 Addison, J., "Works" (" Addisoniana "). London, 1883, G. Bell* & 
 
 Sons, 6: 673-752. 
 Russell, W. C., "The Book of Authors." London, n. d., F. Warne & 
 
 Co., 153-163. 
 
 Saturday Review, 8 : 394-396. 
 Eraser's Magazine, 28 : 304-320. 
 Gentleman's Magazine, 7 : 324-344 (C. C. Clarke). 
 London Quarterly, 4: 99-122 (Lyall). 
 Temple Bar, 41 : 319-337 ; 55 : 33~52- 
 Edinburgh Review, 78 : 193-260 (Macaulay). 
 Eclectic Review, 78: 193 and 264-290 (Aiken). 
 Western Magazine, 3: 232-244 (J. J. J.). 
 Century Magazine, 48 : 703-709 (Mrs. Oliphant). 
 Canadian Monthly, 15: 411-420 (Lyall). 
 Dial (Chicago), 4: 282-283 (M. B. Anderson). 
 North American Review, 64: 314-372 (W. B. Peabody); 79: 90-109 
 
 (H. T. Tucker man). 
 
 Southern Literary Messenger, 32: 450-455. 
 Century, 26: 703-709 (Mrs. Oliphant). 
 
 PARTICULAR CHARACTERISTICS. 
 
 I. Urbanity Elegance. To the familiar ease of Steele 
 Addison added a polish never surpassed and rarely equalled. 
 " He represents," says one critic, " the amenities and not the 
 heroism of literature. ' ' Bascom calls him ' ' a polished shaft in 
 the temple of letters. " For two hundred years the literary 
 world accepted Johnson's famous dictum : " Whoever wishes 
 to attain an English style familiar but not coarse and elegant
 
 ADDISON 89 
 
 but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the 
 volumes of Addison." He is " eminent for his humanity." 
 " Elegance," says Minto, " is the ruling quality of his style. 
 We might go the round of our great writers for such 
 another example of superficial smoothness. The wit and 
 polish are exquisite." " Were I left to myself," says Addi- 
 son, in one of his papers, " I should rather aim at instructing 
 than diverting, but if we will be useful to the world, we must 
 take it as we find it. ' ' And so he diverts by the elegance of 
 his diction as well as by the brightness of his wit. While, 
 in the opinion of some critics, Macaulay and Hawthorne have 
 supplanted Addison as models for the writers of the present 
 day, he must still be regarded as one of the greatest masters of 
 elegant yet idiomatic prose. Macaulay calls Addison's ' ' Cato ' ' 
 "a play the whole merit of which consists in its stately rhetoric, 
 a rhetoric sometimes not unworthy of Lucan." 
 
 " His writings are the pure source of classical style. Men 
 never spoke in England better. Ornaments abound, and 
 rhetoric has no part in them. There are happy expressions, 
 easily discovered, which give things a new and ingenious 
 turn ; harmonious periods in which the sounds flow into one 
 another with the diversity and sweetness of a quiet stream ; a 
 fertile vein of invention and images, through which runs the 
 most amiable irony. . . . His writings are conversa- 
 tions, masterpieces of English urbanity and reason ; nearly 
 all the details of his character and life have contributed to 
 nourish this urbanity and reasonableness." Taine. 
 
 "I have often reflected, after a night spent with him [Ad- 
 dison], apart from all the world, that I had the pleasure of 
 conversing with an intimate acquaintance of Terence and 
 Catullus, who had all their wit and nature heightened with 
 humor more exquisite and delightful than any other man ever 
 possessed . ' ' Steele. 
 
 " His conversation had something in it more charming 
 than I have found in any other man." Pope.
 
 go ADDISON 
 
 " Many of his moral essays are exquisitely beautiful and 
 happy. They are the perfection of elegant sermonizing." 
 Hazlitt. 
 
 " The great Boileau, upon perusal of Mr. Addison's ele- 
 gant hexameters, was first made aware that England was not 
 altogether a barbarous nation." Thackeray. 
 
 " The first English writer who composed a regular tragedy 
 and infused a spirit of elegance through every part of it was 
 the illustrious Mr. Addison. His ' Cato ' is a masterpiece 
 both with regard to the diction and the harmony and beauty 
 of the numbers." Voltaire. 
 
 " He wrote English with the simplicity, directness, and 
 grace which still render the Spectator a model of prose com- 
 position. . . . If we have remained true to the fountain 
 of ' English undefiled,' amid the glaring and spasmodic al- 
 lurements of later authors, the tranquil tone, the clear diction, 
 and the harmonized expression of Addison will affect us like 
 the permanent effulgence of a star when the flashing curve of 
 a rocket has gone out in darkness. . . . His censorship 
 was tempered with good-feeling, his expression untainted 
 with vulgarity ; he was familiar without losing refinement of 
 tone ; he used language as a crystal medium to enshrine 
 sense and not as a grotesque costume to hide the want of it ; 
 he was above the conceits of false wit and too much of a 
 Christian to profane his gifts ; in a word, he wrote like a 
 gentleman and a scholar, and yet without the fine airs of the 
 one or the pedantry of the other. . . . He lacked em- 
 phasis and fire ; but their absence is fully compensated by 
 grace, truth, and serenity. It is not only among the moun- 
 tains and by the sea-shore that Nature hoards her beauty but 
 also on meadow-slopes and around sequestered lakes ; and in 
 like manner human life and thought have their phases of tran- 
 quil attraction and genial repose as well as of sublime and 
 impassioned development." H. T. Tuckerman. 
 
 " His style, with its free, unaffected movement, its clear
 
 ADDISON 91 
 
 distinctness, its graceful transitions, its delicate harmonies, its 
 appropriateness of tone ; the temperance and moderation of 
 his treatment, the effortless self-mastery, the sense of quiet 
 power, the absence of exaggeration or extravagance, the per- 
 fect keeping with which he deals with his subjects ; or again 
 the exquisite reserve, the subtle tenderness, the geniality, the 
 pathos of his humor what are these but the reflection of 
 Addison himself, of that temper so pure and lofty yet so sym- 
 pathetic, so strong yet so lovable? " J. R. Green. 
 
 "As a writer he is urbane, cheerful, charming, and well- 
 mannered to a degree which has scarcely been surpassed in 
 the history of the world. His irony prepossesses a little circle 
 of the best and most cultivated listeners. . . . Addison 
 was excessively fastidious in choice of words, laboriously polish- 
 ing and balancing his phrases until they represented the finest 
 literary art at his disposal." Edmund Gosse. 
 
 " His elegance of language and variegation of prose and 
 verse gain upon the reader. . . . Before the profound 
 observers of the present race repose too securely on the con- 
 sciousness of their own superiority to Addison, let them con- 
 sider his remarks on Ovid, in which may be found criticisms 
 sufficiently subtle and refined ; let them peruse likewise his 
 essays on 'Wit ' and on the ' Pleasures of the Imagination,' 
 in which he founds art on the base of nature, and draws the 
 principles of invention from dispositions inherent in the mind 
 of man with skill and elegance such as his contemners will 
 not easily attain." Samuel Johnson. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " There is an infinite variety of motions to be made use of in 
 the flutter of a fan ; there is the angry flutter, the modest flut- 
 ter, the timorous flutter, the confused flutter, the merry flutter, 
 and the amorous flutter. Not to be tedious, there is scarce any 
 emotion in the mind which does not produce a suitable agitation 
 in the fan ; insomuch that, if I only see the fan of a disciplined
 
 92 ADDISON 
 
 lady, I know very well whether she laughs, frowns, or blushes." 
 The Spectator, 
 
 " The club of which I am a member is very luckily composed 
 of such persons as are engaged in different ways of life and de- 
 puted as it were out of the most conspicuous classes of mankind : 
 by this means I am furnished with the greatest variety of hints 
 and materials, and know everything that passes in the different 
 quarters and divisions not only of this great city but of the whole 
 kingdom." The Spectator, 
 
 " These obvious speculations made me at length conclude 
 that there is a sort of vegetable principle in the mind of every 
 man when he comes into the world. In infants the seeds lie 
 buried and undiscovered till after awhile they sprout forth in a 
 kind of rational leaves, which are words, and in due season the 
 flowers begin to appear in a variety of beautiful colors, and all 
 the gay pictures of youthful fancy and imagination." The Spec- 
 tator, 
 
 " A man of polite imagination is led into a great many pleas- 
 ures that the vulgar are not capable of receiving. He can con- 
 verse with a picture and find an agreeable companion in a statue. 
 He meets with a secret refreshment in a description, and often 
 feels a greater satisfaction in the prospects of fields and meadows 
 than another does in the possession. It gives him, indeed, a 
 kind of property in everything he sees, and makes the most rude 
 and uncultivated parts of nature administer to his pleasures : so 
 that he looks upon the world, as it were, in another light, and 
 discovers in it a multitude of charms that conceal themselves 
 from the generality of mankind." The Spectator, 
 
 2. Keen Satire. Until Addison's day English satire 
 had been comparatively gross. His satire is more polite than 
 that of Butler and Swift, but perhaps not quite so kindly as 
 that of Steele. Minto alone, of all his critics, sees an ele- 
 ment of malevolence in Addison's satire. He calls him " the 
 great English example of polite ridicule." and declares that 
 not a single paper of Addison's can be pointed out that does 
 not contain " a stroke of gay malevolence." On the other 
 hand, Thackeray calls him " the gentle satirist, who hit no un- 
 fair blow; the kind judge, who castigated only in smiling," and
 
 ADDISON 93 
 
 Macaulay declares that Addison revolutionized society without 
 writing one personal lampoon. His satire is usually pointed 
 at classes, but it is at classes under imaginary individual types. 
 In one of his earliest papers, Addison says: " I must entreat 
 every person who reads this paper [the Spectator] never to 
 think himself or any of his friends aimed at in what is said, 
 for I promise him never to draw a faulty character which 
 does not fit at least a thousand people or to publish a single 
 paper that is not written in the spirit of benevolence." 
 
 "As a moral satirist he stands unrivalled. . . . Ad- 
 dison's power of turning either an absurd book or an absurd 
 man into ridicule was unrivalled. . . . He was gifted 
 with incomparable powers of ridicule. . . . There are 
 certainly no satirical papers superior to those in which the 
 Tory fox-hunter is introduced. ... As a satirist, he 
 was, at his own weapons, more than Pope's match. 
 The great satirist, who, alone knew how to use ridicule with- 
 out abusing it." Macaulay. 
 
 " Perhaps the best way of describing Addison's peculiar 
 pleasantry is to compare it with the pleasantry of some other 
 great satirists. The three most eminent masters of the art of 
 ridicule during the eighteenth century were, we conceive, 
 Addison, Swift, and Voltaire. Which of the three had the 
 greatest power of moving laughter may be questioned. But 
 each of them, within his own domain, was supreme. Vol- 
 taire is the prince of buffoons. His merriment is without 
 disguise or restraint. He gambols; he grins; he shakes his 
 sides ; he points the finger ; he turns up the nose; he shoots 
 out the tongue. The manner of Swift is the very opposite of 
 this. He moves laughter, but never joins in it. He appears in 
 his works such as he appeared in society. All the company are 
 convulsed with merriment ; while the dean, the author of all the 
 mirth, preserves an invincible gravity, and even sourness of 
 aspect, and gives utterance to the most eccentric and ludicrous 
 fancies with the air of a man reading the commination service.
 
 94 ADDISON 
 
 The manner of Addison is as remote from that of Swift as 
 from that of Voltaire. He neither laughs out like the French 
 wit, nor, like the Irish wit, throws a double portion of severity 
 into his countenance while laughing inly ; but preserves a 
 look peculiarly his own a look of demure severity, disturbed 
 only by an arch sparkle of the eye, an almost imperceptible 
 elevation of the brow, an almost imperceptible curl of the lip. 
 We own that the humor of Addison is, in our opinion, of a 
 more delicious flavor than the humor of either Swift or Vol- 
 taire. Thus much, at least, is certain, that both Swift and 
 Voltaire have been successfully mimicked, and that no man 
 has yet been able to mimic Addison." Macaulay. 
 
 " His .delicate satire . . . gives his sketches a pre- 
 cision, a neatness, an epigrammatic point which are wanting 
 in Steele's more clumsy and more good-humored delinea- 
 tions."^./. Nicoll. 
 
 " Addison gave the first example of the proper use of wit. 
 It was his practice, when he found any man invincibly wrong, 
 to flatter his opinions by acquiescence and sink them yet 
 deeper into absurdity." Swift. 
 
 " The first paper sent by Addison to the Tatter was No. 
 1 8, wherein is displayed that inimitable art which makes 
 a man appear infinitely ridiculous by the ironical commen- 
 dation of his offences against right, reason, and good 
 taste. . . . His power of ridiculing keenly without 
 malignity is, of course, best shown in the character of Sir 
 Roger de Coverley, whose delightful simplicity of mind is 
 made the medium of much good-natured satire on the man- 
 ners of the Tory country gentleman of the period. 
 On other occasions he ridicules some fashion of taste by a 
 perfectly grave and simple description of its object. Per- 
 haps the most admirable specimen of the oblique manner of 
 his satire is that on the Italian Opera, in the number of the 
 Spectator describing the various lions who had fought on the 
 stage with Nicolini." W. J. Courthope.
 
 ADDISON 95 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " The next step to our refinement was the introducing of Ital- 
 ian actors into our opera ; who sang their parts in their own 
 language, at the same time that our country performed theirs in 
 our native tongue. At length the audience grew tired of under- 
 standing half the opera ; and to ease themselves entirely of the 
 fatigue of thinking, have so ordered it at present that the whole 
 opera is performed in an unknown tongue. I have heard the 
 word And pursued through the whole gamut, have been enter- 
 tained with many a melodious The, and have heard the most 
 beautiful graces, quavers, and divisions, bestowed upon Then, 
 For, and From ; to the eternal honor of our English particles." 
 The Spectator. 
 
 " A third kind of female orators may be comprehended under 
 the word Gossips. Mrs. Fiddle Faddle is perfectly accomplished 
 in this kind of eloquence ; she launches out into descriptions of 
 christenings, runs divisions upon an head-dress, knows every dish 
 of meat that is served up in her neighborhood, and entertains her 
 company a whole afternoon together with the wit of her little boy 
 before he is able to speak." The Spectator. 
 
 " He is therefore to teach them the art of finding flaws, loop- 
 holes, and evasions in the most solemn compacts, and particu- 
 larly a great rabbinical secret, revived of late years by the fra- 
 ternity of Jesuits, namely, that contradictory interpretations of 
 the same article may both of them be true and valid. ... In 
 short, this professor is to give the society their stiffening and in- 
 fuse into their manners that beautiful political starch, which may 
 qualify them for levees, conferences, visits, and make them shine 
 in what vulgar minds are apt to look upon as trifles." The 
 Spectator. 
 
 3. Moral Elevation High Purpose. Addison is 
 the great lay-preacher of our literature. He spoke to a peo- 
 ple still steeped in the vices that followed the Restoration a 
 people who would not have heeded for a moment the reproofs 
 of a regularly ordained clergyman and by his winsome skill 
 he even "made morality fashionable." Taine unjustly ridi- 
 cules " the sticky plaster of his morality," but he justly
 
 C/5 ADDISON 
 
 adds, " Formerly honest men were not polished and polished 
 men were not honest ; piety was fanatical and urbanity de- 
 praved." It was Addison's glory that, as he said, he 
 " brought philosophy out of closets and libraries, schools and 
 colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and in 
 coffee-houses." " We put as the supreme point in the man," 
 says Bascom, " the purity of his spirit, the generosity of his 
 temper, and rejoice that his excellent work stands fast by the 
 altar of worship." 
 
 " Is the glory of Heaven to be sung only by gentlemen in 
 black coats ? Must the truth be expounded only in gown and 
 surplice, and out of those two vestments can nobody preach 
 it ? Commend me to this dear preacher without orders this 
 parson in the tye-wig. . . . His sense of religion stirs 
 through his whole being." Thackeray. 
 
 " Of the services which his essays rendered to morality it 
 is difficult to speak too highly. . . . He taught the na- 
 tion that the faith and the morality of Hale and Tillotson 
 might be found in company with wit more sparkling than the 
 wit of Congreve, and with humor richer than the humor of 
 Vanbrugh. So effectually, indeed, did he retort on vice the 
 mockery which had recently been directed against virtue, that, 
 since his time, the open violation of decency has always been 
 considered among us as the mark of a fool. Macau/ay." 
 
 " No whiter page than Addison's remains ; 
 He from the taste obscene reclaims our youth, 
 And sets the passions on the side of truth ; 
 Forms the soft bosom with the gentlest art, 
 And pours each human virtue through the heart." Pope. 
 
 "The world became insensibly reconciled to wisdom and 
 goodness when they saw them recommended by him with at 
 least as much spirit and elegance as that with which they had 
 been ridiculed for half a century." Tickell. 
 
 "It is justly observed by Tickell, that he employed wit on
 
 ADDISON 97 
 
 the side of virtue and religion ; he not only made the proper 
 use of wit himself, but taught it to others ; and from his time 
 it has been generally subservient to the cause of reason and of 
 truth. He has dissipated the prejudice that has long con- 
 nected gayety and vice, and easiness of manner with laxity of 
 principles. He has restored virtue to its dignity, and taught 
 innocence not to be ashamed. This is an elevation of literary 
 character above all Greek, above all Roman fame. . . 
 If any judgment be made from his books of his moral 
 character, nothing will be found but purity and excellence. 
 As a teacher of wisdom he may be confidently fol- 
 lowed. His religion has nothing in it enthusiastic or super- 
 stitious ; he appears neither weakly credulous nor wantonly 
 sceptical ; his morality is neither dangerously lax nor im- 
 practicably rigid. All enchantment of fancy and all cogency 
 of argument are employed to recommend to the reader his 
 real interest, the care of pleasing the Author of his being. 
 Truth is shown sometimes as the phantom of a vision, some- 
 times appears half-veiled in an allegory, sometimes attracts 
 regard in the robes of fancy, and sometimes steps forth in the 
 confidence of reason. She wears a thousand dresses, and in 
 all is pleasing." Johnson. 
 
 " What has given its superior reputation to the Spectator 
 [over the Taf/er\ is the greater gravity of its pretensions, its 
 moral dissertations, and critical reasonings." Hazlitt. 
 
 " The work of Addison consisted in building up a public 
 opinion, which, in the way of durable solidity, seems, like the 
 great Gothic cathedrals, to absorb into itself the individuality 
 of the architect. A vigorous effort of thought is required to 
 perceive how strong this individuality must have been. We 
 have to reflect on the ease with which, even in these days 
 when the foundations of all authority are called in question, 
 we form judgments on questions of morals, breeding, and 
 taste, and then to dwell in imagination on the state of conflict 
 in all matters religious, moral, and artistic which prevailed 
 7
 
 98 ADDISON 
 
 in the period between the Restoration and the succession of the 
 house of Hanover. To whom do we owe the comparative har- 
 mony we enjoy? Undoubtedly to the authors of the Spectator, 
 and first of all these, by universal consent, to Addison. 
 The aim of the Spectator was to establish a natural standard 
 of conduct in morals, manners, art, and literature. 
 He showed the courtiers, in a form of light literature which 
 pleased their imagination, and with a grace and charm of 
 manner that they were well qualified to appreciate, that true 
 religion was not opposed to good-breeding. On the other 
 hand, he brought his raillery to bear on the super-solemnity' of 
 the trading and professional classes, in whom the spirit of 
 Puritanism was most prevalent. . . . His design was to 
 hold as 'twere the mirror up to nature, so that the conscience 
 of society might recognize in a dramatic form the nature of 
 its lapses from virtue and reason. . . . His moralizing 
 is natural, for the age required it ; but it is free from the 
 censoriousness of the preacher. " W. J. Courthope. 
 
 11 Addison corrects failings by showing their absurdity; he 
 does not smite the erring with a flail ; he takes them cordially 
 by the hand, puts them in the straight path of morals, and 
 sends them on their way with a compliment. . . . Ad- 
 dison has more pity for than wrath against great offenders. 
 He gleams out with playful summer lightning, and 
 while offenders admire, they yet look up. Their eye is not 
 yet on the earth, their gaze is on heaven ; and when the 
 moral philosopher has got them there, he leaves them to the 
 chance of finding a Christian missionary who may do what 
 he was unequal to lead them to something more profitable 
 than gazing. . . . He was better qualified perhaps than 
 most men for being the censor of abuses and the corrector of 
 manners. He could afford to be indulgent while he was 
 most severe ; he condones even while he condemns. His pen 
 is not dipt in gall. He has not the scowl of the cynic or the 
 grin of the satyr. He does not wield the lash of the execu-
 
 ADDISON 99 
 
 tioner nor the birch of the pedagogue. He looks with kindly 
 eye upon the very follies which he chastises, while his moral 
 instincts lead him to recoil from all that is base in purpose 
 and unworthy in conduct." W. Lyall. 
 
 "Addison gave to literature a respectability which it sel- 
 dom possessed before. He became the ideal of an author. 
 He helped to dig the channel which connects the stream of 
 private knowledge with the popular mind, across the isthmus 
 of an aristocracy of birth, of education, and of society." 
 H. T. Tuckerman. 
 
 " Without inflicting a wound he effected a great social 
 reform, and reconciled wit and virtue after a long and 
 disastrous separation, during which wit had been led astray 
 by profligacy and virtue by fanaticism. . . . That 
 which chiefly distinguished Addison from Swift, from Vol- 
 taire, from almost all the other great masters of ridicule, is 
 the grace, the nobleness, the moral purity, which we find 
 even in his merriment. . . . Nothing great, nothing 
 amiable, no moral duty, no doctrine of natural or revealed 
 religion has ever been associated by Addison with any degrad- 
 ing idea. His humanity is without a parallel in literary his- 
 tory. . . . No kind of power is more formidable than 
 the power of making men ridiculous ; and that power Addison 
 possessed in boundless measure. But of Addison it may be 
 confidently affirmed that he has blackened no man's character, 
 nay, that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to find, in all 
 the volumes that he has left us, a single taunt which can be 
 called ungenerous or unkind." Macaulay. 
 
 "And out of that [Sir Roger de Coverley's] laughter, and 
 out of that sweet weakness, and out of those harmless eccen- 
 tricities and follies, and out of that touched brain, and out of 
 that honest manhood and simplicity we get a result of hap- 
 piness, goodness, tenderness, pity, piety such as, if my audi- 
 ence will think their reading and hearing over, doctors and 
 divines but seldom have the fortune to inspire. . . .
 
 100 ADDISON 
 
 When this man looks from the world, whose weaknesses he 
 describes so benevolently, up to the heaven which shines over 
 us all, I can hardly fancy a human face lighting up with a 
 more serene rapture a human intellect thrilling with a purer 
 love and adoration than Joseph Addison's. . . . When 
 he turns to heaven a Sabbath comes over that man's mind ; 
 and his face lights up from it with a glory of thanks and 
 prayers. His sense of religion stirs through his whole being. 
 In the field, in the town ; looking at the birds in the trees, at 
 the children in the street ; in the morning or in the moon- 
 light ; over his books in his own room, in a happy party at 'a 
 country merry-making or a town assembly, good-will and 
 peace to God's creatures and love and awe of Him who made 
 them, fill his pure heart and shine from his kind face." 
 Thackeray. 
 
 " He acquired the art of rendering morality visible and 
 truth expressive. . . . Such a man might judge and 
 counsel his fellows ; his judgments were not amplifications 
 arranged by a process of the brain but observations controlled 
 by experience ; he might be listened to on moral subjects as 
 a natural philosopher was upon subjects of physics ; we feel 
 that he spoke with authority and that we are instructed. 
 . He employed all his talent and all his writings in 
 giving to us the notion of what we are worth and of what 
 we ought to be. ... [He once wrote] ' The great and 
 only end of these, my speculations, is to banish vice and 
 ignorance out of the territories of Great Britain.' And he 
 kept his word. . . . It is no small thing to make mo- 
 rality fashionable. Addison did it, and it has remained in 
 fashion. For the first time, Addison reconciled virtue with 
 elegance, taught duty in an accomplished style, and made 
 pleasure subservient to reason. . . . His papers are 
 wholly moral advice to families, reprimands to thoughtless 
 women, a portrait of an honest man, remedies for the pas- 
 sions, reflections on God, on the future life. . . . He
 
 ADDISON IOI 
 
 is full of epigrams written against flirtations, extravagant 
 toilets, useless visits. He writes a satirical journal of a man 
 who goes to his club, learns the news, yawns, studies the 
 barometer, and thinks his time well spent. He considers 
 that our time is a capital, our business a duty, and our life 
 a task." Taine. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " Were I conscious of anything in my writings that is not in- 
 nocent, at least, or that the greatest part of them were not sin- 
 cerely designed to discountenance vice and ignorance and sup- 
 port the interest of true wisdom and virtue, I should be more 
 severe upon myself than the public is disposed to be." The 
 Spectator. 
 
 "And now, who would not quit all the pleasures and trash 
 and trifles which are apt to captivate the heart of man, and 
 pursue the greatest rigors of piety and austerities of a good life, 
 to purchase to himself such a conscience, as at the hour of death, 
 when all the friendship in the world shall bid him adieu, and the 
 whole creation turn its back upon him, shall dismiss the soul, 
 and close his eyes with that blessed sentence, ' Well done, thou 
 good and faithful servant, enter thou into the joy of thy Lord.'" 
 The Spectator. 
 
 " There is another kind of virtue that may find employment 
 for those retired hours in which we are altogether left to our- 
 selves, and destitute of company and conversation ; I mean that 
 intercourse and communication which every reasonable being 
 ought to maintain with the great Author of his being. The man 
 who lives under a habitual sense of the divine presence keeps 
 up a perpetual cheerfulness of temper, and enjoys every mo- 
 ment the satisfaction of thinking himself in company with his 
 dearest and best of friends." The Spectator. 
 
 4. Delicate Humor. Addison appeared in an age of lit- 
 erary affectation, an age when scurrility and licentious literary 
 buffoonery had depraved the public taste. "It was," says 
 T. W. Hunt, " the golden age of the anagram, the acrostic, and 
 the far-fetched simile. ' ' Addison at first defined true humor
 
 102 ADDISON 
 
 and then continually exemplified it. Thackeray well calls him 
 " a wit that makes us laugh and leaves us good and happy," 
 and adds, " He came in that artificial age and began to speak 
 with his noble, natural voice." His papers fairly overflow 
 with good-humor. He abounds in what Hallam aptly calls 
 "some sly Horatian pleasantry on fashionable follies." 
 
 "In the constellation of men of genius which shed lustre 
 upon English literature during the early part of the eighteenth 
 century, the palm is given to Addison for that delicate kind 
 of humor which, for the purpose either of correction or amuse- 
 ment, attaches a gentle and good-natured ridicule to delinea- 
 tions of manners and customs. This award of criticism seems 
 never to have been disputed ; and if we include in the com- 
 petition all the attempts in this walk that have appeared from 
 his age to the present time, the claim of Addison to superi- 
 ority will probably still remain unshaken. His humor is most 
 effectual for correcting the follies and foibles of mankind, 
 which he seems to have had much at heart. . . . The 
 Tatlcr, in its later portions, is enriched with some exquisite 
 specimens of that delicate and graceful wit, that original vein 
 of humor, and that sportiveness of fancy, in the union of 
 which he had no predecessor or rival and has had no suc- 
 cessor." Aiken. 
 
 " The gentle graces of Mr. Addison never forsake him in a 
 paper of humor ; the bent of his genius lying so strongly that 
 way."/. R. Green. 
 
 "The brilliant Mary Montagu said that she had known 
 all the wits, and that Addison was the best company in the 
 world. Steele, an excellent judge of lively conversation, said 
 that the conversation of Addison was at once the most polite 
 and the most mirthful that could be imagined. If, as Jenyns 
 oddly imagined, if the happiness of Seraphim and just men 
 made perfect be derived from an exquisite perception of the 
 ludicrous, their mirth must surely be none other than the 
 mirth of Addison a mirth consistent with tender compassion
 
 ADDISON 103 
 
 for all that is frail, and with profound reverence for all that 
 is sublime. But what shall we say of Addison's humor of 
 his sense of the ludicrous, of his power of awakening that 
 sense in others, and of drawing mirth from incidents that 
 occur every day and from little peculiarities of temper and 
 manner such as may be found in every man ? We feel the 
 charm ; we give ourselves up to it ; but we strive in vain to 
 analyze it." Macau-lay. 
 
 Dr. Kippis summarily describes the character of Addison's 
 humorous productions in these words : " There are none of 
 his works in which his merit as a graceful writer more dis- 
 tinguishingly appears than in his humorous pieces. His hu- 
 mor is so natural, so easy, so unaffected, that we never grow 
 weary of it ; and we shall find upon a diligent examination 
 of the papers of this kind that it is prodigiously various and 
 extensive. He scarcely ever descends to personal satire, and 
 his ridicule of certain characters in life, while it is remark- 
 ably striking, is so gentle that persons who answer to the 
 characters must read him with pleasure. A wit that was so 
 copious and inexhaustible, without trespassing against good- 
 nature or offending against decency, is entitled to the highest 
 admiration and applause." 
 
 Gosse says, " His wit is as penetrating as a perfume," and 
 Thackeray declares that ' ' Addison wrote his papers as gayly as 
 though he were going out for a holiday." 
 
 "I have the good fortune to be intimate with a gentle- 
 man remarkable for this temper [bashfulness] who has an inex- 
 haustible source of wit to entertain the curious, the grave, 
 the hjamorous, and the frolicsome. . . . You discern the 
 brightness of his mind and the strength of his judgment ac- 
 companied with the most graceful mirth. In a word, by this 
 enlivening aid he is whatever is polite, instructive, and di- 
 verting. He was above all other men in that talent called 
 humor." Steele. 
 
 "The finest critic, the finest gentleman, the most ten-
 
 104 ADDISON 
 
 der humorist of his age. . . . He throws a delightful 
 gleam of love and laughter upon the eccentricities and charac- 
 teristic follies of individual nature." Mrs. Oliphant. 
 
 " The essence of Addison's humor is irony. . . . He 
 ridicules some fashion or taste by a perfectly grave and simple 
 description of its object. . . . Charles Lamb, again, has 
 passages which, for mere delicacy of humor, are equal to any- 
 thing in Addison's writings. But the superiority of Addison 
 consists in this, that he expresses the humor of the life about 
 him, while Lamb is driven to look at its oddities from out- 
 side." W. J. Courthope. 
 
 " His humor is so happily diffused as to give the grace of 
 novelty to domestic scenes and daily occurrences. He never 
 outsteps the modesty of nature, nor raises merriment or won- 
 der by the violation of truth. His figures neither divert by 
 distortion nor amuse by aggravation. ... In argument 
 he had many equals ; but his humor was singular and match- 
 less. Bigotry itself must be delighted with the Tory fox- 
 hunter. ' ' Johnson. 
 
 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " As Sir Roger is landlord to the whole congregation, he keeps 
 them in very good order, and will allow nobody to sleep in it 
 [the church] besides himself ; for if by chance he has been sur- 
 prised into a short nap at sermon, upon recovery out of it he 
 stands up and looks about him, and if he sees anybody else nod- 
 ding, either wakes them himself or sends his servant to them."- 
 The Spectator. 
 
 " He [Sir Roger de Coverley] has, moreover, bequeathed to the 
 chaplain a very pretty tenement with good lands about it. It 
 being a very cold day when he made his will, he left for mourn- 
 ing to every man in the parish a great frieze-coat and to every 
 woman a black riding-hood." The Spectator. 
 
 " When Sir Roger saw Andromache's obstinate refusal to her 
 lover's importunities, he whispered me in the ear that he was sure 
 that she would never marry him ; to which he added, with a more
 
 ADDISON 105 
 
 than ordinary vehemence : ' You can't imagine, sir, what it is to 
 have to do with a widow. ' Upon Pyrrhus his threatening afterward 
 to leave her, the knight shook his head, and muttered to himself : 
 ' Ay, do if you can.' This part dwelt so much upon my friend's 
 imagination that, at the close of the third act, as I was thinking of 
 something else, he whispered in my ear : ' These widows, sir, are 
 the most perverse creatures in the world. But pray,' says he, 
 ' you that are a critic, is the play according to your dramatic 
 rules, as you call them ? Should your people in tragedy always 
 talk to be understood ? Why, there is not a single sentence in 
 this play that I do not know the meaning of.' "Sir Roger at the 
 Theatre. 
 
 " As I was walking with him last night, he asked me how I liked 
 the good man whom I have just mentioned ; and without staying 
 for my answer told me that he was afraid of being insulted with 
 Latin and Greek at his own table ; for which reason he desired a 
 particular friend of his at the University to find him a clergyman 
 rather of plain sense than much learning, of a good aspect, a 
 clear voice, a sociable temper, and, if possible, a man that un- 
 derstands a little of backgammon. . . . ' At his first settling 
 with me I made him a present of all the good sermons which 
 have been printed in English, and only begged of him that every 
 Sunday he would pronounce one of them in the pulpit. Accord- 
 ingly he has digested them into such a series that they follow one 
 another naturally, and make a continued system of practical di- 
 vinity.' " The Spectator. 
 
 5. Skill in Portraiture. In the ability to seize upon 
 "the fugitive traits of some popular habit, vice, or caprice, 
 and so to combine these in an imaginary personage that we 
 seem to be reading of an actual living being of like feelings 
 and passions with ourselves," Addison is surpassed only by 
 Shakespeare. "That delectable creation," Sir Roger de 
 Coverley, is compared by Walpole to Falstaff. Addison is 
 never weary, says J. R. Green, " of tracking out human 
 character into its shyest recesses." Sir Roger is aptly called 
 by one critic " the legitimate precursor of Squire Weston, 
 Parson Adams, the Man of Feeling, and Pickwick," and by
 
 106 ADDISON 
 
 another " a perfectly finished picture worthy of Cervantes or 
 Sir Walter Scott." In one line of portraiture, however, Ad- 
 dison failed ; his portrayal of female character is neither just 
 nor discriminating. Thackeray best tells the reason for this 
 lack : " He was a man's man, remember. The only woman 
 whom he did know he didn't write about. I take it there 
 would not have been much humor in that story." 
 
 " Addison has gained himself immortal honor by his man- 
 ner of filling up this last character [Sir Roger de Coverley]. 
 Who is there that can forget, or be insensible to, the inimitable 
 nameless traits of nature and of old English character in it? 
 to his unpretending virtues and amiable weaknesses ; to his 
 modesty, generosity, hospitality, and eccentric whims; to 
 his respect of his neighbors and the affection of his domes- 
 tics; to his wayward, hopeless, secret passion for his fair 
 enemy, the widow, in which there is more of real romance 
 and true delicacy than in a thousand tales of knight-errantry 
 (we perceive the hectic flush of his cheek, the faltering of his 
 tongue in speaking of her bewitching airs and ' the whiteness 
 of her hand ') ; to the havoc he makes among the game in 
 his neighborhood ; to his speech from the bench, to show the 
 Spectator what is thought of him in the country ; to his un- 
 willingness to be put up as a sign-post and his having his 
 own likeness turned into the Saracen's head ; to his gentle 
 reproof of the baggage of a gypsy that tells him he has a 
 widow in his line of life ; to his doubts as to the existence of 
 witchcraft and protection of a reputed witch ; to his ac- 
 count of the family pictures and his choice of a chaplain ; 
 to his falling asleep at church and his reproof of John Will- 
 iams, as soon as he recovered from his nap, for talking in ser- 
 mon-time? . . . The characters of Will Wimble and Will 
 Honeycomb are not a whit behind their friend Sir Roger de 
 Coverley in delicacy and felicity. The delightful simplicity 
 and good-humored officiousness in the one are set off by the 
 graceful affectation and courtly pretension in the other. How
 
 ADDISON . 107 
 
 long since I first became acquainted with these two characters 
 in the Spectator ! What old-fashioned friends they seem, and 
 yet I am not tired of them, like so many other friends, nor 
 they of me ! How airy these abstractions of the poet's pen 
 streaming over the dawn of our acquaintance with human 
 life ! How they glance their fairest colors on the prospect 
 before us ! How pure they remain in it to the last, like the 
 rainbow in the evening cloud, which the rude hand of time 
 can neither soil nor dissipate ! What a pity that we cannot 
 find the reality, and yet if we did, the dream would be over." 
 Hazlitt. 
 
 "The abundance of his own mind left him little in need 
 of adventitious sentiments ; his wit always could suggest what 
 the occasion demanded. He had read with critical eyes the 
 important volume of human life, and knew the heart of man, 
 from the depth of stratagem to the surface of affectation. As 
 a describer of life and manners, he must be allowed to stand 
 perhaps the first of the first rank. . . . His figures neither 
 divest by distortion nor amaze by aggravation. . . . He 
 copies life with so much fidelity that he can be hardly said to 
 invent. . . . His exhibitions have an air so much origi- 
 nal that it is difficult to suppose them not merely the product 
 of imagination. ' ' Johnson. 
 
 " What he observed he had the art of communicating in 
 two widely different ways. He could describe virtues, vices, 
 habits, whims as well as Clarendon. But he could do some- 
 thing better. He could call human beings into existence and 
 make them exhibit themselves. If we wish to find anything 
 more vivid than Addison's best portraits, we must go either 
 to Shakespeare or Cervantes. As an observer of life, of man- 
 ners, of all shades of human character, he stands in the first 
 class. ' ' Macaulay. 
 
 "The figure of Sir Roger de Coverley, though it belongs to 
 a by-gone stage of society, is as durable as human nature it- 
 self, and, while language lasts, the exquisite beauty of the
 
 108 ADDISON 
 
 colors in which it is preserved will excite the same kind of 
 pleasure. Scarcely below the portrait of the good knight 
 will be ranked the character of his friend and biographer, the 
 silent spectator of men. Addison rescued the lineaments of 
 the original English country gentleman and kept them bright 
 and genuine for the delight of posterity, ere their individu- 
 ality was lost in the uniformity of the locomotive age. It is 
 surprising that features so delicately pictured, incidents so 
 unromantic, and sentiments so free from extravagance should 
 thus survive intact. It is the nicety of the execution and the 
 humor of the character that preserves it. . . . Addisori's 
 delicate and true hand gave the character of Sir Roger color 
 and expression and therefore unity of effect." W. J. Court- 
 hope. 
 
 " Addison's greatest achievement is universally admitted 
 to be the character of Sir Roger de Coverley. Sir Roger is 
 the incarnation of Addison's kindly tenderness, showing 
 through a vein of delicate persiflage." Leslie Stephen. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " Will Wimble is younger brother to a baronet, and descended 
 of the ancient family of the Wimbles. He is now between forty 
 and fifty ; but being bred to no business and born to no estate, 
 he generally lives with his older brother as superintendent of his 
 game. He hunts a pack of dogs better than any man in the 
 country, and is very famous for finding out a hare. He is ex- 
 tremely well versed in all the little handicrafts of an idle man. 
 He makes a May-fly to a miracle, and furnishes the whole country 
 with angle rods. As he is a good-natured, officious fellow, and 
 very much esteemed on account of his family, he is a welcome 
 guest at every house, and keeps up a good correspondence among 
 all the gentlemen about him. He carries a tulip root in his 
 pocket from one to another, or exchanges a puppy between a 
 couple of friends that live in the opposite sides of the country. 
 Will is a particular favorite of all the young heirs, whom he 
 frequently obliges with a net that he has weaved or a setting dog
 
 ADDISON 109 
 
 that he has made [trained] himself. He now and then presents a 
 pair of garters of his own knitting to their mothers or sisters, and 
 raises a great deal of mirth among them by inquiring as often 
 as he meets them, ' how they wear ! ' These gentleman-like 
 manufactures and obliging little humors make Will the darling 
 of the country." The Spectator. 
 
 "My friend Will Honeycomb values himself very much upon 
 what he calls the knowledge of mankind, which has cost him 
 many disasters in his youth ; for Will reckons every misfortune 
 that he has met with among the women and every rencounter 
 among the men as parts of his education ; and fancies he should 
 never have been the man he is had not he broke windows, 
 knocked down constables, disturbed honest people with his mid- 
 night serenades, and beat up a lewd woman's quarters, when he 
 was a young fellow. The engaging in adventures of this nature 
 Will calls the studying of mankind, and terms his knowledge of 
 the town the knowledge of the world. Will ingenuously confesses 
 that for half his life his head ached every morning with reading 
 of men overnight ; and at present comforts himself under certain 
 pains which he endures from time to time, that without them he 
 could not have been acquainted with the gallantries of the age. 
 This Will looks upon as the learning of a gentleman, and regards 
 all other kinds of science as the accomplishments of one whom 
 he calls a scholar, a bookish man, or a philosopher." The Spec- 
 tator. 
 
 " I had, some years ago, an aunt of my own, by name, Mrs. 
 Martha Ironside, who would never marry beneath herself, and is 
 supposed to have died a maid in the fourscorth year of her age. 
 She was the chronicle of our family, and passed away the greater 
 part of the last forty years of her life in recounting the antiquity, 
 marriages, exploits, and alliances of the Ironsides. Mrs. Martha 
 conversed generally with a knot of old virgins, who were likewise 
 of good families. My aunt Martha used to chide me very fre- 
 quently for not sufficiently valuing myself. She would not eat a 
 bit all dinner-time, if, at an invitation, she found she had been 
 seated below herself ; and would frown upon me for an hour 
 together, if she saw me give place to any man under a bar- 
 onet. ... A little before her death she was reciting to me 
 the history of my forefathers ; but dwelling a little longer than 
 ordinary upon the actions of Sir Gilbert Ironsides, I gave an un-
 
 I TO ADDISON 
 
 fortunate pish, and asked, ' What was all that to me ? ' Upon 
 which she retired to her closet, and fell a-scribbling for three hours 
 together, in which time, as I afterward found, she struck me out 
 of her will." The Spectator. 
 
 6. Conventionality Formalism. "His morality, 
 thoroughly English, always crawls among commonplaces, 
 discovering no principles, making no deductions. The fine 
 and lofty aspects of the mind are wanting. He gives inim- 
 itable advice, a clear watchword, justified by what happened 
 yesterday, useful for to-morrow. . . . There is nothing 
 sublime or chimerical in the end which he sets before us ; all 
 is practical, that is, business-like and sensible : the question is, 
 ' How to be easy here and happy afterward." . . . The 
 continuous period is like the shears of the Quintinie, which 
 crop all the trees round, under the pretence of beautifying. 
 This is why there is a coldness and monotony in Addison's 
 style. He seems to be listening to himself. He is too meas- 
 ured and correct. . . . He has his rules in his pocket, 
 and brings them out for everything. . . . His Spectato r is 
 only an honest man's manual, and is often like ' The Complete 
 Lawyer.' It is practical, its aim being not to amuse but to 
 instruct us. ... He thinks of the future life, but does 
 not forget the present ; he rests virtue on interest rightly un- 
 derstood. He strains no principle to its limits; he accepts 
 them all, as they are to be met with everywhere. 
 What a store he has of resolutions and maxims ! All rapture, 
 instinct, inspiration, and caprice are abolished or disciplined. 
 No case surprises him or carries him away. He is always 
 ready and protected ; so much so that he is like an automaton. 
 Argument has frozen and inveiled him. . . . To put 
 calculation at every stage ; such is the morality of Addison 
 and of England. . . . Underneath his morality is a pair 
 of scales, which weighs quantities of happiness. He stirs him- 
 self by mathematical computations to prefer the future to the 
 present. Thus arises this religion, a product of melancholic
 
 ADDISON 1 1 1 
 
 temperament and acquired logic, in which man, a sort of cal- 
 culating Hamlet, aspires to the ideal by making a good busi- 
 ness of it, and maintains his poetical sentiments by financial 
 calculations. . . . There is an element of coarseness in 
 this fashion of treating divine things, and we like still less 
 the exactness with which he explains God, reducing him to 
 a mere magnified man. . . . The sincerity of his emo- 
 tions makes us respect even his catechetical prescriptions." 
 Taine. 
 
 " Steele seems to have gone into his closet chiefly to set 
 down what he observed out-of-doors. Addison seems to have 
 spent most of his time in his study, and to have spun out and 
 wire-drawn the hints which he borrowed from Steele, or took 
 from nature, to the utmost. . . . The humorous descrip- 
 tions of Steele resemble loose sketches or fragments of a 
 comedy ; those of Addison are rather comments or ingenious 
 paraphrases on the genuine text." Hazlitt. 
 
 " Addison shrank from every bold and every profound ex- 
 pression as from an offence against good-taste. . . . He 
 durst as soon have danced a hornpipe on the top of the 
 ' Monument ' as have talked of a ' rapturous emotion. ' What 
 would he have said ? Why, ' Sentiments that were of a na- 
 ture to prove agreeable after an unusual rate.' " De Quincey. 
 
 " The judicious Mr. Addison had the effeminate complais- 
 ance to soften the severity of his dramatic characters so as to 
 adapt it to the manners of the age ; and from an endeavor to 
 please, quite mined a masterpiece of its kind." Voltaire. 
 
 " Its [' Cato's '] pompous monotony was taken for dignity, 
 and its strict adherence to the critical rules then accepted was 
 preferred by Addison's contemporaries to the truth and nature 
 of Shakespeare. In it the dramatic unities unity of place, 
 unity of time, and unity of action are observed with a com- 
 pleteness that leads to some rather ridiculous results ; all the 
 characters go through their actions and their speeches with 
 the utmost conventional correctness." H. J. Nicoll.
 
 112 ADDISON 
 
 "In all those parts of the poem [' Cato '] where action 
 and not ornament is demanded, we seem to perceive the work 
 of a poet who was constantly thinking what his characters 
 ought to say in the situation rather than of one who was 
 actually living with them in the situation itself." W. J. 
 Courthope. 
 
 " Mr. Addison could not give out a common order in writ- 
 ing from his endeavoring always to word it too finely." 
 Pope. 
 
 "In 'Remarks on Italy' the comparative absence of 
 earnest poetical feeling is manifest throughout. At Venice 
 he was not haunted by ' the gentle lady wedded to the Moor,' 
 nor does the noble Portia rise to view." H. T. Tuckerman. 
 
 " We delight in his company so greatly that we do not pause 
 to reflect that the inventor of Sir Roger de Coverley and of 
 Will Honeycomb had not half of the real comic force of Far- 
 quhar or Van Brugh, nor so much as that of the flashing wit 
 of Congreve. Human nature, however, is superior to the 
 rules, and Addison stands higher than those more original 
 writers by merit of the reasonableness, the good sense, the 
 wholesome humanity, that animates his work. He is classic 
 while they are always a little way over on the barbaric side of 
 perfection. . . . The air of good breeding at which he 
 always aimed, . . . the excessive and meticulous civility 
 of Addison. ' ' Edmund Gosse. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " The story of Solomon's choice does not only instruct us in 
 that point of history, but furnishes out a fine moral to us, namely, 
 that he who applies his heart to wisdom does, at the same time, 
 take the most proper method for gaining long life, riches, and 
 reputation, which are very often not only the rewards but the ef- 
 fects of wisdom." The Guardian. 
 
 " It is the great art and secret of Christianity, if I may use 
 that phrase, to manage our actions to the best advantage and di- 
 rect them in such a manner that everything we do may turn to
 
 ADDISON 1 1 3 
 
 account at that great day when everything we have done will be 
 set before us." The Spectator. 
 
 "There is nothing of greater importance to us than thus dil- 
 igently to sift our thoughts and examine all those dark recesses 
 of the mind, if we would establish our souls in such a solid and 
 substantial virtue as will turn to account in that great day when 
 it must stand the test of infinite wisdom and justice." The Spec- 
 tator. 
 
 " I never could have a taste for old bricks and rubbish, nor 
 would trouble myself about the ruins of Augustus's Palace so long 
 as I could see the Vatican." Of Ancient Medals. 
 
 11 Upon laying together all particulars and examining all the 
 moles and marks by which the mother used to describe the child 
 when he was first missing, the boy proved to be the son of the mer- 
 chant, whose heart had so unaccountably melted at the sight of 
 him. The lad was very well pleased to find a father who was so 
 rich and likely to leave him a good estate ; the father, on the other 
 hand, was not a little delighted to see a son return to him whom 
 he had given up for lost, with such a strength of constitution, 
 sharpness of understanding, and skill in languages." Sir Roger 
 and the Gypsies. 
 
 7. Verbal Precision Fastidiousness. Addison 
 has been generally criticised for carrying this quality to ex- 
 cess for " confounding correctness with mechanism." Haz- 
 litt prefers " Steele's occasional selection of beautiful poetical 
 passages, without any affectation of analyzing their beauties, 
 to Addison's fine-spun theories." The one great lack in 
 Addison's style is the element of deep feeling. All is clear, 
 correct, and elegant, but there is an absence of that element, 
 so noticeable in Steele, that takes hold of the heart of the 
 reader. Addison addresses, almost without exception, the 
 purely intellectual side of our natures. He abounds, says 
 Taine, in "commercial common-sense and business-like reso- 
 lutions and maxims. He explains God and describes Heav- 
 en." He comes "with weights and figures into the thick 
 of human passions, to ticket them and classify them like bales ; 
 8
 
 1 14 ADDISON 
 
 to tell the public that the inventory is complete, and to lead 
 them by the mere virtue of statistics to honor and duty." 
 
 "The mere choice and arrangement of his words would 
 have sufficed to make his essays classical. For never, not 
 even by Dryden, not even by Temple, had the English lan- 
 guage been written with such sweetness, grace, and facility." 
 Macaulay. 
 
 " He had accepted the public as his judges j and he writes 
 as if some critical representative of the public were at his 
 elbow, putting to the test of reason every sentiment and every 
 expression. Wharton tells us, in his ' Essay on Pope,' that 
 Addison was so fastidious in composition that he would often 
 stop the press to alter a preposition or conjunction ; and this 
 evidence is corroborated in a very curious and interesting man- 
 ner by the MS. of some of Addison's essays, discovered by Mr. 
 Sykes Campbell in 1858. A sentence in one of the papers 
 on the ' Pleasures of the Imagination ' shows, by the vari- 
 ous stages through which it passed before its form seemed 
 satisfactory to the writer, what nice attention he gave to 
 the balance, rhythm, and lucidity of his periods." W. J. 
 Courthope. 
 
 " The select world refines language. It does not suffer the 
 risks and approximations of extempore and inexperienced 
 speaking. It requires a knowledge of style, like a knowledge 
 of external forms. It will have exact words to express the 
 fine shades of thought and measured words to preclude of- 
 fensive or extreme impressions. It wishes for developed 
 phrases, which, presenting the same idea under several aspects, 
 impress it easily upon the desultory mind. It demands 
 harmonious words, which, presenting a known idea in a smart 
 form, may introduce it in a lively manner to its desultory 
 imagination. Addison gives it all that it desires ; his writ- 
 ings are the pure source of classic style ; men never spoke 
 better in England. . . . Throughout we have precise 
 contrasts, which serve only for clearness, and are not too pro-
 
 ADDISON 115 
 
 longed . . . harmonious periods, in which the sounds 
 flow into one another with the diversity and sweetness of a 
 quiet stream." Taine. 
 
 " There is a studied absence of all such features of style as 
 redundance, inversion, and circumlocution. There is very 
 little verbal tinsel for the sake of effect and no desire to con- 
 ceal under a veil of words. It is in point here to note that 
 verbal precision was carried to an unhealthful extreme by 
 Addison and his school. He was as fastidious in prose as 
 Pope and Dryden were in poetry. . . . Verbal preci- 
 sion overreaches itself in Addison. ... It was indeed 
 the error of the age. ... He was careful to a fault." 
 T. IV. Hunt. 
 
 "Addison was excessively fastidious in his choice of words, 
 laboriously polishing and balancing his phrases until they rep- 
 resented the first literary art at his disposal, until the rhythm 
 was perfect, the sentence as light and bright as possible, and 
 the air of good breeding, at which he always aimed, success- 
 fully caught. He was probably the earliest English author of 
 prose, except, perhaps, Sir Thomas Browne, who aimed delib- 
 erately at beauty of execution and treated the pedestrian form 
 with as much respect as though it had been verse. 
 Addison's share in completing the development of our lan- 
 guage was very considerable he smoothed down English 
 phraseology to an almost perilous extent ; and Swift, who ad- 
 mitted that the Spectator was very pretty, thought that Ad- 
 dison's tendency was too feminine." Edmund Gosse. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " True happiness is of a retired nature and an enemy to pomp 
 and noise ; it arises in the first place from the enjoyment of one's 
 self and in the next from the friendship and conversation of a few 
 select companions ; it loves shade and solitude, and naturally 
 haunts groves and fountains, fields and meadows ; in short, it 
 feels everything it wants within itself, and receives no addi-
 
 Il6 ADDISON 
 
 tion from multitudes of witnesses and spectators." The Spec- 
 tator. 
 
 " A good intuition joined to a good action gives it its proper 
 force and efficacy ; joined to an evil action, extenuates its malig- 
 nity, and in some cases may take it wholly away ; and joined to 
 an indifferent action, turns it to a virtue, and makes it meritori- 
 ous as far as human actions can be so." The Spectator. 
 
 " Since I have just mentioned the word enemies, I must explain 
 myself so far as to acquaint my reader that I mean only the in- 
 significant party zealots on both sides ; men of such poor narrow 
 souls that they are not capable of thinking on anything but with 
 an eye to Whig or Tory. During the course of this paper I have 
 been accused by these despicable wretches of trimming, time- 
 serving, personal reflection, secret hate, and the like." The 
 Spectator.
 
 STEELE, 1675-1729 
 
 Biographical Outline. Richard Steele, born of Eng- 
 lish parents in Dublin, March 12, 1675 ; father secretary to 
 the Duke of Ormond, then Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland ; Steele 
 is placed in the Charterhouse School, London, through the 
 influence of Ormond ; he forms there a close friendship with 
 Addison; enters Merton College, Oxford, in 1692, and re- 
 mains three years ; becomes enamored of a military life, fails 
 to secure a commission, and enlists as a private in the Horse- 
 Guards ; is disinherited by a rich relative for this step ; is soon 
 promoted to a captaincy ; plunges into a life of fashionable dis- 
 sipation and extravagance; as " a check on his irregularities 
 a self-monitor " he writes " The Christian Hero," published 
 in 1701 ; turns his talent toward comedy, and produces, suc- 
 cessively, from 1701 to 1704, "The Funeral," " The Ten- 
 der Husband," "The Lying Lovers ;" is appointed Gazetteer 
 in 1705, through Addison's influence; obtains an estate in 
 Barbadoes at the death of his first wife, and adds to his fort- 
 une by marrying "Molly Scurlock ; " lives extravagantly, 
 and is always familiar with "duns and bailiffs, misery, folly, 
 and repentance;" establishes The Tatter, April 12, 1709; 
 is aided by Addison ; the Tatler is discontinued January 2, 
 1710-11, and the Spectator is established March i, 1710-11 ; 
 the Spectator is discontinued in December, 1712, and the 
 Guardian is established in March, 1713, and is continued 
 through 175 numbers; later Steele establishes the English- 
 man (57 numbers), the Lover, the Reader, the Plebeian, and 
 the Theatre ; of 271 Tatlers, Steele wrote 188; of 635 Spec- 
 tators, 240 ; of 175 Guardians, 82 ; he is assailed by Swift ; 
 enters Parliament, writes a pamphlet, "The Crisis," reflect- 
 
 117
 
 Il8 STEELE 
 
 ing on the Protestantism of the government, and is expelled 
 from Parliament therefor in 1714; he holds several minor 
 offices under George I., and is again elected to Parliament ; 
 in 1718 he publishes " The Fishpool," and in 1719 opposes 
 the Peerage Bill, and thus incurs the anger of Addison, who 
 dies before they become reconciled ; Steele opposes the 
 South-Sea scheme in 1720, publishes "The Conscious Lov- 
 ers" (a comedy) in 1722, and dies in Wales, September i, 
 1729. 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY ON STEELE'S STYLE. 
 
 Thackeray, W. M., " The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Cen- 
 tury." London, 1886, Smith, Elder & Co., 192-227. 
 
 Minto, W., " English Prose Literature." Edinburgh, 1886, Blackwood, 
 392-400. 
 
 Dobson, A., "English Writers" (Andrew Lang). New York, 1886, 
 Appleton, 225-233. 
 
 Aitken, G. A., "Life of Richard Steele." Boston, 1889, Houghton, 
 Mifflin & Co., 2 : 343-345. 
 
 Montgomery, R., " Memoirs of the Life of Steele," etc. Edinburgh, 
 1865, Nimmo, 2 : 295-309. 
 
 Hazlitt, W., "The Round Table." London, 1871, Bell & Daldy, 9-14. 
 
 Drake, N., "Essays." London, 1885, Sharpe, I : 185-291. 
 
 Hazlitt, W., " Lectures on the English Poets." London, 1884, G. Bell 
 & Daldy, 127-128. 
 
 Gosse, E., " History of the Eighteenth Century Literature." New 
 York, 1889, Macmillan, 186-192. 
 
 Nicoll, H. J., " Landmarks of English Literature." New York, 1883, 
 Appleton, 175-183. 
 
 Welsh, A. H., "The Development of English Literature." Chicago, 
 1884, Griggs, 2 : 76-80. 
 
 Dennis, J., " Studies in English Literature." London, 1876, Stanford, 
 148-191. 
 
 Courthope, W. J., "Joseph Addison." New York, 1884, Harper, 85- 
 109. 
 
 Chalmers, A., "British Essayists." Boston, 1856, Little & Co., Pref- 
 ace. 
 
 Friswell, J. H., "Essays." London, 1880, Love & Manta, 114 & 299- 
 300.
 
 STEELE 
 
 Bascom, J., " The Philosophy of English Literature." New York, 1874, 
 Putnam, 171-174. 
 
 Craik. G. L., " History of English Literature." New York, 1869, Scrib- 
 ner, 248-250. 
 
 Macaulay, T. B. , " Miscellaneous Works." New York, 1880, Harper, 
 3 : 85 and v. index. 
 
 Kingsley, H., " Fireside Studies." London, 1876, Chatto & Windus, 
 i : 1-128. 
 
 Collier, W. F., " History of English Literature." London, 1892, Nel- 
 son, 269-273. 
 
 Taine, H. A., " History of English Literature." New York, 1875, 
 Holt, v. , index. 
 
 Russell, W. C., " Book of Authors." London, n. d., Warne, 147-149 
 
 &I55- 
 L'Estrange, A. G., " History of English Humor." London, 1878, 
 
 Hurst & Blackett, 2 : 62-83. 
 Tuckerman, H. T., "Biographical Essays." Boston, 1857, Phillips, 
 
 Sampson & Co., 405-411. 
 
 Morley, H., Spectator. London, n. d., Routledge, Preface. 
 North American Review, 108 : 78-95 (Tuckerman) ; 46 : 341-372 (W. 
 
 E. Channing). 
 
 Quarterly Review, 96 : 509-568 (J. Forster). 
 Blackwood's Magazine, 99 : 726-746. 
 Atlantic Monthly, 59 : 127-129 (Austin Dobson). 
 New Monthly Magazine, 161 : 633-656 (Converse). 
 Cornhill Magazine, 34 : 408-426 (Dennis). 
 Gentleman's Magazine, 7 : 336-344 (C. C. Clarke). 
 Contemporary Review, 56 : 503-515 (Dobson). 
 Dial, 10 : 249-252 (Richards). 
 Colburrf s Magazine, 161 : 633-656. 
 
 Southern Literary Messenger, 15 : 651-656 (Tuckerman). 
 Spectator, 62 : 301-302. 
 
 PARTICULAR CHARACTERISTICS. 
 
 I. Colloquial Ease Companionship. "Mon- 
 taigne, whom I have proposed to consider as the father of this 
 kind of personal authorship among the moderns, in which the 
 reader is admitted behind the curtain, and sits down with the 
 writer in his gown and slippers, was a most magnanimous and 
 undisguised egotist ; but Isaac Bickerstaff, Esq. was the more
 
 120 STEELE 
 
 disinterested gossip of the two. The English journalist good 
 naturedly lets you into the secret both of his own affairs and 
 those of his neighbors. A young lady, on the other side oi 
 Temple Bar, cannot be seen at her glass for half a day to- 
 gether, but Mr. Bickerstaff takes due notice of it ; and he 
 has the first intelligence of the symptoms of the belle passion 
 appearing in any young gentleman at the west end of town. 
 Steele's papers in the Tatler are more like the re- 
 marks which occur in sensible conversation and less like a 
 lecture. . . . Steele seems to have gone into his closet 
 chiefly to set down what he observed out of doors. Addison 
 seems to have spent most of his time in his study." Hazlitt. 
 
 " The originator of the social element in English liter- 
 ature," says Montgomery, " was Richard Steele. The idea of 
 a colloquial critic and censor first found adequate illustration 
 in his pen." Another critic calls him "more human and less 
 bookish than any other writer of the eighteenth century," and 
 adds : . . . " His essays are more like the gossip of a friend 
 than formal literature. He is a man who puts us into good 
 humor with ourselves." Since Steele's day this element of 
 " personal authorship" has been a well-defined feature of the 
 style of nearly every famous English essayist. Steele, like 
 Montaigne, really, therefore, inaugurated a new method of 
 composition. 
 
 " The great charm of Steele's writing is its naturalness. He 
 wrote so quickly and carelessly that he was forced to make 
 the reader his confidant and had not time to deceive him. 
 He had a small share of book-learning but a vast acquaintance 
 with the world. He had known men and taverns. He had 
 lived with gownsmen, with troopers, with gentlemen Ushers 
 of the Court, with men and women of fashion, with authors 
 and wits, with the inmates of the sponging-houses, and with 
 the frequenters of all the clubs and coffee-houses in the town. 
 He was liked in all company because he liked it ; and you 
 liked to see his enjoyment as you like to see the glee of a box-
 
 STEELE 121 
 
 ful of children at the pantomime. He was not of those lonely 
 ones of the earth whose greatness obliged them to be solitary ; 
 on the contrary, he admired, I think, more than any other 
 man who ever wrote ; and, full of hearty applause and sym- 
 pathy, he wins upon you by calling you to share his delight 
 and good humor. His laugh rings through the whole house. 
 He must have been invaluable at a tragedy, and have cried as 
 much as the most tender young lady in the boxes." Thack- 
 eray. 
 
 " . . . If we have read Steele much, and turn to 
 him yet again, every new reading seems more like an act 
 of meditation or memory than receiving another's thoughts. 
 We do not say a word to ourselves about its merits. All 
 that we are conscious of is a succession of familiar, agree- 
 able images which we begin to value as part of ourselves 
 [He is] an early companion, who is so visible and 
 intelligible in every word that he is at our side and talking 
 with us. Happily, Steele never writes as if he had a lite- 
 rary character to support, or indeed any character but that of 
 the good old gentleman who has taken our morals into keep- 
 ing . . . an easy, natural humor which never quite 
 runs over and never loses its charm. . . . There is, how- 
 ever, something better than grace and polish to denote his 
 common manner ; we mean his familiar colloquial ease and 
 directness. . . . He has a method of stating things which 
 the reader would pronounce the same in which they would 
 occur to himself, and which at once makes him a party in the 
 matter, and puts the writer quite out of consideration for 
 the time." W. E. Channing. 
 
 " He was, indeed, far more of a companion than a scholar. 
 It was by virtue not so much of the finish as the free- 
 dom of his style that Steele won the town. . . . The 
 most felicitous of Steele's essays are colloquial without any 
 loss of dignity. Writing became more conversational and 
 talking more finished. ... Sir Richard's easy temper
 
 122 STEELE 
 
 and frank companionship lowered his class-Mentor from stilts, 
 and promoted his access to common readers." H. T. Tuck- 
 erman. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " At fifteen I was sent to the university and stayed there for 
 some time ; but a drum passing by, being a lover of music, I 
 listed myself for a soldier." The Tatler. 
 
 " After this my reader will not be .surprised to hear the account 
 which I am about to give of a club of my own contemporaries, 
 among whom I pass two or three hours every evening. This I 
 look upon as taking my first nap before I go to bed." The Tatler. 
 
 " But I must turn my present discourse to what is of yet greater 
 regard to me than the care of my writings ; that is to say, the 
 preservation of a lady's heart. Little did I think I should ever 
 have business of this kind on my hands more ; but, as little as 
 anyone who knows me would believe it, there is a lady at this 
 time who professes to love me." The Tatler. 
 
 " Nay, I have known a young fellow who was regularly bred 
 an attorney, and was a very expert one till he had an estate fallen 
 to him. The moment that happened, he who could before prove 
 the next land he cast his eye upon his own, and was so sharp 
 that a man at first sight would give him a small sum for a general 
 receipt whether he owed him anything or not ; such a one, I say, 
 have I seen, coming upon an estate, forget all his diffidence of 
 mankind and become the most manageable thing breathing." 
 The Tatler. 
 
 2. Minuteness Realism. "The social sketches of 
 the Tatler must always retain a certain interest. The whole 
 of the time is mirrored in its pages. We see the theatre with 
 Betterton and Bracegirdle on the stage ; we see the side-box 
 bowing from its inmost rows at the advent of the radiant 
 Cynthia of the minute ; we see the church, with its high 
 pews and its hour-glass by the pulpit ; we hear, above the rus- 
 tle of the fans and the coughing of open-breasted beaux, the 
 sonorous periods of Burnett or Atterbury ; we scent the fra- 
 grance of bergamot and lavender and Hungary-water. We
 
 STEELE 123 
 
 follow the gilded chariots moving slowly round the ring in 
 Hyde Park; we take the air in the Mall with the bucks and 
 pretty fellows ; we trudge after the fine lady bound in her 
 glass chair upon her interminable ' how-dees ; ' we listen to 
 the politicians at White's or the Cocoa- Tree ; ... we 
 call for the latest Tatler at Morphew's by Stationer's Hall. 
 It is not true that Queen Anne is dead ; we are living in her 
 very reign ; and the Victorian Era, with its steam and its 
 socialism, its electric lights and its local option, has floated 
 away from us like a dream. . . . Steele, with his eye on 
 the object, sketches what he sees among his fellows. He is 
 sensitive about his claim to scholarship ; but his range of read- 
 ing is restricted, and his real book is human nature." An- 
 drew Lang. 
 
 " In reading the pages of the Tatler, we seem as if sud- 
 denly transported to the age of Queen Anne, of toupees and 
 full-bottomed periwigs. . . . We distinguish the dappers, 
 the smarts, and the pretty fellows, as they pass by Mr. Lilly's 
 shop windows in the Strand ; we are introduced to Betterton 
 and Mrs. Oldfield behind the scenes ; are made familiar with 
 the persons and performances of Will Estcourt or Tom Durfey. 
 . We are surprised with the rustling of hoops and the 
 glittering of paste buckles. ' ' Hazlitt. 
 
 "As we read in these delightful volumes of the Tatler and 
 Spectator, the past age returns, the England of our ancestors 
 is revivified. The May-pole rises in the Strand again in 
 London ; the churches are thronged with daily worshippers ; 
 the beaux are gathering in the coflee-houses, the gentry are 
 going to the Drawing-room, the ladies are thronging to the 
 toy-shops, the chair-men are jostling in the streets, the foot- 
 men are running with links before the chariots or fighting 
 around the theatre doors. In the country, I see the young 
 Squire riding to Eton with his servants behind him, and 
 Will Wimble, the friend of the family, to see him safe." 
 Thackeray.
 
 124 STEELE 
 
 "There are many points of view in which these 'essays' 
 have an interest at the present day. . . . They are not 
 so properly a history as a set of pictures of the times. . . 
 They raise the veil of a hundred years and, by a kind of 
 magic, show us the whole of daily English city life at that 
 period ; the men and their costumes, the professions, the 
 theatres, the trades, the interior of private houses, the prevail- 
 ing notions respecting education and criticism. We have 
 every condition of life, every pursuit, and almost every kind 
 of an opinion, conversation, tastes, fashions, follies, vices. 
 Till we think a little of the subject, we shall have no concep- 
 tion of the minuteness and extent of information which these 
 papers give us. ... Here is illusion produced by realities, 
 and not an idea of reality created, as in fine romances, by 
 animating descriptions and actions, and where our warmed 
 imaginations are made to do half the work for the author. 
 Steele's characters are not sketches. They are genuine living 
 men and women. We know them and their manner of life. 
 We are prepared for all they have to say." IV. E. Channing. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " Upon the mantle-tree stood a pot of lambative electuary, 
 with a stick of liquorice, and near it a phial of rose-water and 
 powder of tutty. Upon the table lay a pipe filled with betony 
 and colt's-foot, a roll of wax-candle, a silver spitting-pot, and a 
 Seville orange." Two Old Ladies. 
 
 11 Whereas Bridget Howd'ye, late servant to the Lady Fardin- 
 gale, a short, thick, lively, hard-favoured wench of about twenty- 
 nine years of age, her eyes small and bleared, her nose very 
 broad at bottom and turning up at the end, her mouth wide and 
 lips of an unusual thickness, two teeth out before, the rest black 
 and uneven, the tip of her left ear being of a mouse-color, her 
 voice loud and shrill, quick of speech, and something of a Welsh 
 accent, withdrew herself on Wednesday last from her lady's 
 dwelling-house, and with the help of her consorts, carried off the 
 following goods of her said lady, viz : [here follow two pages of 
 the names of articles stolen]." The Tatler.
 
 STEELE 125 
 
 " When I was a middle-aged man, there were many societies 
 of ambitious young men in England, who, in their pursuits after 
 fame, were every night employed in roasting porters, smoking 
 cobblers, knocking down watchmen, overturning constables, 
 breaking windows, blackening sign-posts, and the like immortal 
 enterprises, that dispersed their reputation throughout the whole 
 kingdom." The Tatler. 
 
 3. Humanity Sympathy. " There may have been 
 wiser, stronger, greater men. But many a strong man would 
 have been stronger for a touch of Steele's indulgent sympathy ; 
 many a great man has wanted his genuine largeness of heart ; 
 many a wise man might learn something from his deep and 
 wide humanity. His virtues revealed his frailties. . . . 
 For words which the heart finds when the head is seeking ; 
 for phrases glowing with the white-heat of a generous emotion; 
 for sentences which throb and tingle with a manly pity or 
 courageous indignation, we must turn to the essays ofSteele." 
 Andrew Lang. 
 
 " It is obvious that the social tone of the Spectator is as 
 much owing to Steele as its grace and humor are to Addison. 
 If the one was a fine scholar, the other was a most agreeable 
 gentleman ; if the one was correct, the other was genial ; if 
 the one had reliable tastes, the other had noble impulses so 
 that between them there was a beautiful representative hu- 
 manity." H. T. Tuckerman. 
 
 ' ' When Addison was so delicately weighing and polishing 
 his sentences, Steele was pouring out what he saw or what he 
 felt. When he preaches, as he is very apt to do, we fall to 
 ' nodding in his face.' But we wake again when he returns to 
 the subject he knows best the shifting pictures of human 
 life, with its hopes and disappointments, its laughter and its 
 tears. . . . His style takes fire, ' the motion doth dilate 
 the flame,' and Steele becomes a great writer." Edmund 
 Gosse. 
 
 " Steele's papers are easily distinguished to this day by
 
 126 STEELE 
 
 their pure humanity, springing from the kindness and the 
 gentleness of his heart." Coleridge. 
 
 " It may be that he was a more negligent writer than Addi- 
 son ; but the genuineness of his feelings frequently carries him 
 farther." Austin. Dobson. 
 
 " He has a relish for beauty and goodness wherever he 
 meets it. He admired Shakespeare affectionately, and more 
 than any other man of his time, a^id, according to his gener- 
 ous, expansive nature, called upon all his company to like what 
 he liked himself. He did not damn with faint praise; he 
 was in the world and of it ; and his enjoyment of life presents 
 the strangest contrast to Swift's savage indignation and Ad- 
 dison's lonely serenity. . . . Dick set about almost all 
 the undertakings of his life with inadequate means ; and, as 
 he took and furnished a house with the most generous inten- 
 tions toward his friends, the most tender gallantry toward his 
 wife, and with this only drawback, that he had not where- 
 withal to pay the rent when quarter-day came so, in his life, 
 he proposed to himself the most magnificent schemes of virt- 
 ue, forbearance, public and private good, and the advance- 
 ment of his own and the national religion ; but when he had 
 to pay for these articles so difficult to purchase and so costly 
 to maintain poor Dick's money was not forthcoming ; and 
 when Virtue called with her little bill, Dick made a shuffling 
 excuse that he could not see her that morning, having a head- 
 ache from being tipsy overnight ; or when stern Duty rapped 
 at the door with his account, Dick was absent and not ready 
 to pay. He was shirking at the tavern ; or had some par- 
 ticular business (of somebody's else) at the ordinary ; or he 
 was in hiding, or worse than in hiding, at the lock-up house. 
 What a situation for a man ! for a philanthropist for a lover 
 of right and truth for a magnificent designer and schemer ! 
 not to dare to look in the face the Religion which he adored 
 and which he had offended ; to have to shirk down back lanes 
 and alleys, so as to avoid the friend whom he loved and who
 
 STEELE 127 
 
 had trusted him ; to have the house which he had intended for 
 his wife, whom he loved, and for her ladyship's company, 
 which he wished to entertain splendidly, in the possession 
 of a bailiff's man ; with a crowd of little creditors grocers, 
 butchers, and small-coal men lingering round the door with 
 their bills and jeering at him ! Alas for poor Dick Steele ! 
 For nobody else, of course. . . . There are no little sins, 
 shabby peccadilloes, importunate remembrances, or disappoint- 
 ed holders of our promises to reform, hovering at our steps or 
 knocking at our door. Of course not. We are living in the 
 nineteenth century ; and poor Dick Steele stumbled and got 
 up again, and got into jail and got out again, and sinned and 
 repented, and loved and suffered, and lived and died scores of 
 years ago. Peace be with him. Let us think gently of one 
 who was so gentle ; let us speak kindly of one whose own 
 breast exuberated with human kindness." Tfiackeray. 
 
 " His large heart seems to rush out in sympathy with any 
 tale of sorrow or exhibition of magnanimity." Courthope. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " A poor fellow at the end of the passage, with a rusty coat, a 
 melancholy air, and soft voice, desired them ' to look upon a 
 man not used to beg.' The latter received the charity of almost 
 everyone that went by. The strings of the heart, which are to 
 be touched to give us compassion, are not so played on but by 
 the finest hand." The Tatler. 
 
 " To enquire into men's faults and weaknesses has something 
 in it so unwelcome that I have often seen people in pain to act 
 before me, whose modesty only makes them think themselves 
 liable to censure. This and a thousand other nameless things 
 have made it an irksome task to me to personate Mr. Bickerstaff 
 any longer ; and I believe it does not often happen that the 
 reader is delighted where the author is displeased." The Tatler. 
 
 "If we could look into the secret anguish and affliction of 
 every man's heart, we should often find that more of it arises 
 from little imaginary distresses, such as checks, frowns, contra-
 
 128 STEELE 
 
 dictions, expressions of contempt, and (what Shakespeare reckons 
 among other evils under the sun) 
 
 ' The proud man's contumely, 
 The insolence of office, and the spurns 
 That patient merit of the unworthy takes ' 
 
 than from the more real pains and calamities of life. The only 
 method to remove these imaginary distresses as much as possible 
 out of human life would be the universal practice of such an 
 ingenuous complaisance as I have been here describing." The 
 Guardian. 
 
 4. Kindly Satire. Of all English writers who have 
 satirized human foibles and frailties, Steele is the kindliest. 
 Himself " ever sinning and repenting," he had the warmest 
 sympathy with his erring fellow-mortals. It is this quality 
 that makes him always more beloved, though less respected, 
 than his more pious and sometimes more malevolent friend, 
 Addison. " Steele exemplified," says Bascom, " the strong, 
 heedless, generous impulses of his Irish nationality." His 
 satire is certainly generous, and all his acts and expressions 
 were impulsive. 
 
 " He is a writer of genuinely amiable humor. . . . 
 Steele was a kindly observer of human frailties. Against 
 what he considered to be heartlessness and vice he was open- 
 ly indignant. Minor faults he ridiculed with good-humor, 
 with a certain fellow-feeling for the objects of his ridicule." 
 Minto. 
 
 " We can forgive his tippling in taverns in consideration 
 of the loving touch with which he handles the foibles of his 
 neighbors and the mirth without bitterness that flows from 
 his gentle pen." W. F. Collier. 
 
 "This native vein is the study of humanity, and upon this 
 he delights to exhaust the resources of his genial humor, his 
 art, his raillery, and his playfulness. The world about him, 
 not always a very reputable world, but one of considerable
 
 STEELE 
 
 129 
 
 extent and variety, this is what he shows us, this is what he 
 laughs with and at, this is what he strives to conquer by the 
 light artillery of ridicule." Andrew Lang. 
 
 " His humor is uniformly kindly, genial, indulgent, recog- 
 nizing always that to 'step aside is human.' An object is 
 never so ludicrous but he has somewhere a subordinate stroke 
 to show that, though he is laughing, there is nothing ma- 
 licious in his mirth. He often seems to be satirizing himself 
 
 more than others, and smiling a little ruefully perhaps at 
 
 his own weaknesses rather than theirs. ... He rallied 
 the follies of society with unfailing tact and good-humor ; 
 he rebuked its vices with admirable courage and dignity." 
 Austin Dobson. 
 
 " A universality of aim took away the special intent of his 
 hits at folly ; and self-love was not wounded by the judicious 
 advice of a kindly man of the world, anonymously tendered. 
 The satire had too much of pleasantry to embitter its object." 
 H. T. Tuckerman. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " Some men are born at twenty years of age, some at thirty, 
 some at three-score, and some not above an hour before they 
 die ; nay, we may observe multitudes that die without ever being 
 born, as well as many dead persons that fill up the bulk of man- 
 kind and make a better figure, in the eyes of the ignorant, than 
 those who are alive and in their proper and full state of health." 
 Dead Folk. 
 
 " But, being driven out of his little law and logic, he told me, 
 very pertly, that he looked upon such a perpendicular creature 
 as man to make a very imperfect figure without a cane in his 
 hand. ' It is well known,' says he, ' we ought, according to the 
 natural situation of our bodies, to walk upon our hands and feet ; 
 and that the wisdom of the ancients had described man to be 
 an animal of four legs in the morning, two at noon, and three at 
 night ; by which they intimated that a cane might very proper- 
 ly become part of us in some period of life.'" Bickerstaff, 
 Censor. 
 
 9
 
 130 STEELE 
 
 " But we must bear with this false modesty in our young nobil- 
 ity and gentry till they cease at Oxford and Cambridge to grow 
 dumb in the study of eloquence." Bickerstaff. 
 
 " There is a doctor in Mouse Alley, near Wapping, who sets up 
 for curing cataracts upon the credit of having, as his bill sets 
 forth, lost an eye in the emperor's service. His patients come in 
 upon this, and he shows his muster-roll, which confirms that he 
 was in his majesty's troops ; and he puts out their eyes with 
 great success." Quack Advertisements. 
 
 " It is very remarkable that these brothers of the blade began 
 to appear upon the first suspension of arms ; and that since the 
 conclusion of the peace the order is very much increased, both 
 as to the number of the men and the size of their weapons." 
 The Tatler. 
 
 5. Intense Pathos. Steele was a man of deep, emo- 
 tional nature. He has less polish than Addison, but he has 
 more human sympathy. He frequently portrays what Hazlitt 
 calls "the heart-rending pathos of private distress." His 
 pathos is too intense to be artistic. It is not a " sweet sor- 
 row," but rather a scene from which we turn away in pain. 
 " If he describes a death -bed scene, or tells a pathetic story," 
 says one critic, "it is not with the trickery of an author 
 striving for effect, but with the simple unconscious pathos of 
 a man who has witnessed the scene, and is still under its sad- 
 dening influences." Even Steele himself was often overcome 
 by the painfulness of his own creations, and he often sought 
 relief by indulgence in wine or by very abruptly changing the 
 current of his thought. He said of himself, " Pity is the 
 weakness of my heart." 
 
 "As might be expected from his emotional nature, his 
 pathetic side is especially strong ; but it is strong with all the 
 defects of that nature that is to say, it is rather poignant 
 and intense than fine or suggestive. He is not in the least 
 ashamed of his tears ; and when, with Master Stephen, he 
 mounts his stool to be melancholy, he is for no half-measures 
 in grief." Andrew Lang,
 
 STEELE 131 
 
 " Steele is one of the most touching of our writers. The 
 incidents that he recalled or imagined were of the most heart- 
 rending character. . . . Most of those [papers] that do 
 appeal to our tender sensibilities lay before us situations of 
 extreme anguish." Minto. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " O Death, thou hast right to the bold, to the ambitious, to the 
 high, and to the haughty ; but why this cruelty to the humble, to 
 the meek, to the undiscerning, to the thoughtless ? Nor age, nor 
 business, nor distress can erase the dear image from my imagi- 
 nation. In the same week I saw her dressed for a ball and in a 
 shroud. How ill did the habit of death become the pretty trifler ! 
 
 I still behold the smiling earth . A large train of disasters 
 
 were coming on to my memory, when my servant knocked at 
 my closet door, and interrupted me with a letter, attended with 
 a hamper of wine, of the same sort with that which is to be put 
 to sale on Thursday next at Garraway's coffee -house." Recol- 
 lections. 
 
 " Sir, I, who two hours ago told you truly I was the happiest 
 man alive, am now the most miserable. Your daughter lies dead 
 at my feet, killed by my hand, through a mistake of my man's 
 charging my pistols unknown to me. . . . Him I have mur- 
 dered for it. Such is my wedding-day. I will immediately fol- 
 low my wife to her grave ; but before I throw myself upon my 
 sword, I command my distraction so far as to explain my story 
 to you. I fear my heart will not keep together till I have stabbed 
 it. Poor, good old man ! Remember, he that killed your 
 daughter died for it. In the article of death, I give you my 
 thanks and pray for you, though I dare not for myself. If it be 
 possible, do not curse me." Love and Sorrow. 
 
 " My heart was torn to pieces, to see the husband on one side 
 suppressing and keeping down the swellings of his grief, for fear 
 of disturbing her in her last moments ; and the wife even at that 
 time concealing the pains she endured for fear of increasing his 
 affliction. She kept her eyes upon him for some moments after 
 she grew speechless, and soon after closed them forever. In the 
 moment of her departure, my friend, who had thus far com-
 
 132 STEELE 
 
 manded himself, gave a deep groan and fell into a swoon by her 
 bedside." The Wife Dead. 
 
 6. Good Sense Sound Judgment. Steele mani- 
 fested peculiar skill in his method of applying truths and 
 principles to the social problems with which he was dealing. 
 He had a clear perception of character and "a clear, strong, 
 practical distinction of what was true, useful, and becoming 
 in the matter before him." "The general purpose of the 
 whole," wrote Steele of the Spectator, "has been to recom- 
 mend truth, honor, and virtue as the chief ornaments of life ; 
 but I considered severity of manners was absolutely essential 
 to him who would censure others, and for that reason, and 
 that only, chose to wear a mask." In his expressions con- 
 cerning the manners, morals, and politics of the time, there 
 appear constantly statements that impress one with their 
 hard, practical common-sense. This can better be illustrated 
 than defined. 
 
 " The cardinal quality of these papers [Steele's ' Essays '] 
 is their good sense ; this never forsakes them. Their philos- 
 ophy presents it in a penetrative, their humor in a pungent, 
 form. This good sense was most effective in securing uni- 
 form success. Whatever the object of satire the pedantry 
 of learning, the conceit of rank, the foppishness of dress, 
 the frivolity of etiquette, the prejudice of partisanship the 
 same sober, sound opinion underlay and sustained the attack." 
 Bascom. 
 
 Steele says of himself: " It was my aim, in any intelligible 
 manner as I could, to rally all those singularities of human 
 life, through the different professions and characters in it, 
 which obstruct anything that is truly good and great." 
 
 Minto speaks of Steele's " mingling good sense and earnest- 
 ness with merriment and burlesque," and Drake says, "He 
 was uniformly the friend of virtue, propriety, and good 
 sense. ' '
 
 STEELE 133 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " Any doctrine on the subject of dying other than that of liv- 
 ing well is the most insignificant and most empty of all labors 
 of men." The Tatler. 
 
 " Learning does but improve in us what nature has endowed 
 us with, for not to have good sense with learning is only to have 
 more ways of exposing one's self." The Tatler. 
 
 " He who thinks no man his superior but for virtue and no 
 man his inferior but for vice, can never be obsequious or assum- 
 ing in a wrong place, but will be as ready frequently to emulate 
 men in rank below him as to avoid and pity those above." The 
 Tatler. 
 
 "It is a mistaken sense of superiority to believe a figure or 
 equipage gives men precedence to their neighbors. Nothing can 
 create respect from mankind but laying obligations upon them ; 
 and it may very reasonably be concluded that if it were put into a 
 due balance, according to the true state of the account, many 
 who believe themselves in possession of a large share of dignity 
 in the world must give place to their inferiors. The greatest of 
 all distinctions in civil life is that of debtor and creditor ; and 
 there needs no great progress in logic to know which, in that case, 
 is the advantageous side." Men Not Their Own Masters. 
 
 " Familiarity, among the truly well-bred, never gives authority 
 to trespass upon one another in the most minute circumstance ; 
 but it allows us to be kinder than we ought otherwise to presume 
 to be." The Tatler. 
 
 7. Reverence for Womanhood. " Steele's wife 
 preserved every scrap of his written communications to her. 
 . . It is remarkable what a key is thus furnished to the 
 knowledge of his heart and habits. Above all, these little 
 notes, in every phrase and tone, evidence Steele's warm, wise, 
 and chivalric appreciation of woman a sentiment rare in his 
 day. . . . For him it were needless to plead for woman's 
 rights ; he recognized them, not indeed as external civil priv- 
 ileges, but as social authorities, in her very nature. . . .
 
 134 STEELE 
 
 His recognition of woman's needs as a rational creature, and 
 his respect and tenderness for her, as evinced in his writings, 
 are confirmed by, or rather originated in, his private experi- 
 ence. . . . Women, especially, owe Steele no small ob- 
 ligation for advocating the mental capabilities, recognizing 
 the social mission, and exposing the baneful follies of their 
 sex." H. T. Tuckerman. 
 
 1 ' All women especially are bound to be grateful to Steele, 
 as he was the first of our writers who really seemed to admire 
 and respect them. ... It was Steele who first began to 
 pay a manly homage to their goodness and understanding 
 as well as to their tenderness and beauty. . . . Steele 
 admires women's virtue, acknowledges their sense, and adores 
 their purity and beauty with an ardor and strength which 
 should earn the good-will of all women to their hearty and 
 respectful champion. He paid the finest compliment to a 
 woman that perhaps ever was offered. He said, ' To have 
 loved her was a liberal education.' . . . His breast 
 seems to warm and his eyes to kindle when he meets a good 
 and beautiful woman, and it is with his heart as well as with 
 his hat that he salutes her. ... A gallant tenderness 
 for the sex [female] shines through good-natured Dick's 
 mock-heroic humor. Addison politely holds the sex up to 
 ridicule ; Steele sympathizes with their little artifices, 
 and even insinuates a piece of genuine good advice as 
 to the best means of success. . . . Steele's ' Sir Roger ' 
 is quite a different person from Addison's 'Sir Roger.' 
 All that is amiable in the conception belongs to Steele." 
 Thackeray. 
 
 " He wrote of women and children as, in his day, no 
 writer had hitherto dared to do. As the first painter of do- 
 mesticity the modern novel owes him much. . . . Of 
 women Steele wrote with an insight, an admiration, an hon- 
 esty, and a chivalry which should forever entitle him to the 
 gratitude of the sex." Austin Dobson.
 
 STEELE 135 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " You see in no place of conversation the perfection of speech 
 so much as in an accomplished woman, whether it be that there 
 is a partiality irresistible when we judge of that sex, or whatever 
 it is, you may observe a wonderful freedom in their utterance 
 and an easy flow of words, without being distracted, as we often 
 are who read much, in the choice of dictions and phrases." The 
 Tatler. 
 
 " You will therefore forgive me that I strive to conceal every 
 wrong step made by any who have the honor to wear petticoats, 
 and shall at all times do what is in my power to make all mankind 
 as much their slaves as myself." The Tatler. 
 
 " In short, I must tell my female readers, and they may take 
 an old man's word for it, that there is nothing in woman so grace- 
 ful and becoming as modesty. It adds charms to their beauty, 
 and gives a new softness to their sex." The Tatler. 
 
 8. Power of Portraiture. " The lesson is generally 
 instilled unostentatiously by a vivid sketch of some individual, 
 so full of life that a very few words suffice to make the char- 
 acter remain fixed in our memories. In the number and 
 variety of such portraits Steele is unrivalled." Aitken. 
 
 " The Portraits of Bickerstafif and Cynthio in the Tatler, of 
 Sir Roger de Coverley in the Spectator, and of Nestor Iron- 
 sides in the Guardian, are drawn and finished in a manner 
 which not only indicates a perfect insight into the passions 
 and feelings of the human frame, but demonstrates likewise the 
 possession of that creative energy which, from the numerous 
 shades and gradations of manner, can select and associate such 
 features as shall designate a character altogether original, 
 though founded on the usual acknowledged motives and ac- 
 tions of mankind." N. Drake. 
 
 " By what other power is it that Steele assembles his little 
 groups at the coffee-houses, or in private families, or in his 
 own apartment, and sets people before us in such a manner
 
 136 STEELE 
 
 that we at once become acquainted with them, as if they had 
 fallen in our way, and makes them talk, not as in books, 
 but as if every word had been taken down from real conver- 
 sation? . . . This familiar every-day acquaintance with 
 characters of every variety and without number, is not and 
 could not be obtained from mere delineation. They are not 
 sketches ; they are genuine living men and women. We 
 know them and their manner of life. We are prepared for 
 all they have to say. We can account for their motives, an- 
 ticipate their doubts, answer their objections, advise them 
 what to do, and predict their destiny." W. E. Channing. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " That animal whom we call a pretty fellow ; who, being just 
 able to find out that what makes Sophronius acceptable is a nat- 
 ural behavior, in order to the same reputation, makes his own an 
 artificial one. Sophronius just now passed into the inner room 
 directly forward ; Jack comes as fast after as he can for the right 
 and left looking-glass, in which he had but just approved himself 
 by a nod at each, and marched on. He will meditate within for 
 half an hour, until he thinks he is not careless enough in his air, 
 and come back to the mirror to recollect his forgetfulness." 
 The Tatler. 
 
 " I had hardly been accommodated with a seat, before there 
 entered into the aisle a young lady in the very bloom of youth 
 and beauty, and dressed in the most elegant manner imaginable. 
 Her form was such that it engaged the eyes of the whole congre- 
 gation in an instant, and mine among the rest. Though we were 
 all thus fixed upon her, she was not in the least out of counte- 
 nance or under the least disorder. However, she had not in the 
 least a confident aspect, but moved on with the most graceful 
 modesty. The deputy of the ward sat in that pew, and she stood 
 opposite to him ; and at a glance into the seat, though she did not 
 appear the least acquainted with the gentleman, was let in with a 
 confusion that spoke much admiration at the novelty of the thing. 
 The service immediately began, and she composed herself for it
 
 STEELE 137 
 
 with an air of so much goodness and sweetness that the confes- 
 sion, which she uttered so as to be heard where I sat, appeared 
 an act of humiliation more than she had occasion for. The truth 
 is, her beauty had something so innocent and yet so sublime that 
 we all gazed upon her like a phantom. None of the pictures 
 which we behold of the best Italian painters have anything like 
 the spirit which appeared in her countenance at the different sen- 
 timents expressed in the several parts of the divine service. That 
 gratitude and joy at a thanksgiving, that lowliness and sorrow at 
 the prayers for the sick and distressed, that triumph at the pas- 
 sages which gave instances of the divine mercy." The Spectator. 
 "But the next heir that possessed it was this soft gentleman, 
 whom you see there. Observe the small buttons, the little boots, 
 the laces, the slashes about his clothes, and above all the post- 
 ure he is drawn in (which to be sure was his own choosing) ; you 
 see he sits with one hand on a desk, writing and looking as it were 
 another way, .like an easy writer or a sonneteer. He was one of 
 those that had too much wit to know how to live in the world ; 
 he was a man of no justice, but great good manners ; he ruined 
 everybody that had anything to do with him, but never said a 
 rude thing in his life ; the most indolent person in the world, he 
 would sign a deed that passed away half his estate with his gloves 
 on, but would not put on his hat before a lady if it were to save 
 his country." Sir Roger de Coverley Papers. 
 
 9. Spontaneity Vivacity. "Addison, with all his 
 amazing genius, could not get on without Steele. There 
 was an amount of nerve and, if we may be allowed a vulgar- 
 ity, 'go' about Steele which Addison never had." Charles 
 Kingsley. 
 
 " His humor, in short, has the prevailing characteristic of 
 his genius it is spontaneous and genuine, but often loose 
 and ill-considered in expression. Still, it is so cheerful and 
 good-natured, so frank and manly, that one is often tempted 
 to echo the declaration of Leigh Hunt ' I prefer open- 
 hearted Steele with all his faults to Addison with all his es- 
 says.' " Andrew Lang. 
 
 " The first sprightly runnings are there [in the Tatler\
 
 138 STEELE 
 
 it has more of the original spirit, more of the freshness and 
 stamp of nature."- Hazlitt. 
 
 " While Mr. Addison was abroad, and after he came home, 
 in rather a dismal way, to wait upon Providence in his shabby 
 lodging in the Haymarket, young Captain Steele was cutting 
 a much smarter figure than that of his classical friend of 
 Charterhouse Cloister and Maudlin Walk. Could not some 
 painter give an interview between the gallant captain of Lu- 
 cas's, with his hat cocked, and hfs lace, and his face too, a 
 trifle tarnished with drink, and that poet, that philosopher, 
 pale, proud, and poor, his friend and monitor of school-days, 
 of all days ? How Dick must have bragged about his chances 
 and his hopes, and the fine company he kept, and the charms 
 of the reigning toasts and popular actresses, and the number 
 of bottles that he and my lord and some other pretty fellows 
 had cracked overnight at the ' Devil ' or the ' Garter ! ' Can- 
 not one fancy Joseph Addison's calm smile and cold gray 
 eyes following Dick for an instant as he struts down the Mall 
 to dine with the Guard at St. James, before he turns, with his 
 sober pace and threadbare suit, to walk back to his lodgings 
 up the two pair of stairs ? " Thackeray. 
 
 " We have already called Steele' s wit fresh and natural. 
 It came with no stinted flow. He wrote as he lived, freely 
 and carelessly, scattering the coinage of his brain, as he did 
 his guineas, with an unsparing hand. All who read his pa- 
 pers or his letters to Prue cannot help seeing the good heart 
 of the rattle-brain shining out in every line." W. F. Collier. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " Two sisters in Essex Street are eternally gaping out of the 
 window, as if they knew not the value of time. . . . Upon 
 which I writ the following line : ' Dear Creatures, on the receipt 
 of this, shut your casement.' But I went by yesterday, and 
 found them still at the window. What can a man do in this 
 case but go on and wrap himself up in his own integrity ? "- 
 The Tatler.
 
 STEELE 139 
 
 " Since this body must be earth, I shall commit it to the dust 
 in a manner suitable to my character. Therefore, as there are 
 those who dispute whether there is any such real person as Isaac 
 Bickerstaff or not, I shall excuse all persons who appear what 
 they really are from coming to my funeral. But all those who 
 are, in their way of life, personce, as the Latins have it, persons 
 assumed, and who appear what they really are not, are hereby 
 invited to that solemnity." The Tatler. 
 
 " The last letter I shall insert is as follows : This is written 
 by a very inquisitive lady ; and I think such interrogative gentle- 
 women are to be answered no other way than by interrogation. 
 Her billet is this : 
 
 ' Dear Mr. Bickerstaff : 
 
 ' Are you quite as good as you seem to be ? 
 
 ' CHLOE.' 
 To which I can only answer : 
 
 ' Dear Chloe : 
 
 ' Are you quite as ignorant as you seem to be ? 
 
 'I. B.'" The Tatler. 
 
 10. High Moral Aim. "In his ever-lovable writings 
 he always kept before him the highest aims, endeavoring to 
 reform manners and help m raising mankind to a higher level ; 
 whatever the method, the aim was always the same, and in no 
 field were his efforts without success." Aitken. 
 
 " It was no part of Steele's object or habits to make brilliant 
 sentences on any subject. He was deliberately occupied with 
 making men better. . . . The utmost sweetness and love 
 breathe through his moral speculations. How tender his re- 
 membrance of affecting scenes in his childhood ! How lively 
 his sense of the beauty of a sound, honest heart ; of the dig- 
 nity and benign power of women ; of the claims, confidence, 
 and reward of friendship ; of the deference we owe to others 
 in the smallest things ! We are drawn near to him, and 
 breathe the air of benevolence and courtesy, and love him 
 the more that he is not perfect, if only for sympathy ; . . . 
 Though in the great variety of his topics he says many 
 things frivolous and exceptionable, yet the inculcation of re-
 
 140 STEELE 
 
 ligious truth, motives, and obligations is, in his lateres says 
 at least, steadily, perseveringly pursued. It is postponed for 
 nothing else. It is introduced at any moment and in any 
 connection where it can be with prudence and decency ; and 
 for the most part in a strictly practical manner." W. E. 
 Channing. 
 
 " He brought his daily observations of life, his gleanings in 
 society, his early studies, his critical estimate of authors and 
 actors, and his reflections on the destiny and duty of his fel- 
 lows to bear on his essays, . . . now entering a satirical 
 protest, advocating amelioration in manners, suggesting im- 
 proved standards, winning to more wise pastimes and more 
 gracious intercourse." H. T. Tuckerman. 
 
 " His utterances on Charity, Benevolence, Praise, Flattery, 
 Distinction, and the like, are admirable lay-sermons, full of a 
 noble and earnest sincerity." Andrew Lang. 
 
 "Without any fear of scoffing and deistical critics before 
 their eyes, they [Addison and Steele] tried to uphold common 
 sense, decency, order, virtue, and religion, and on the other 
 hand to show the folly of vice and to laugh at the senseless prof- 
 ligacy of the rake, the fop, and the fool." J. H. Friswell. 
 
 " The papers which originated with Steele . . . were 
 a social evangel. . . . They aimed at what they did 
 much to accomplish, a social regeneration." /. Bascom. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " As for my part. I ever esteemed a drunkard of all vicious 
 persons the most vicious. ... If a man consider that he 
 cannot, under the oppression of drink, be a friend, a gentleman, 
 a master, or a subject ; that he has so long banished himself from 
 all that is dear, and given up all that is sacred to him ; he would 
 even then think of a debauch with horror." The Tatler. 
 
 " The world will never be in any manner of order or tranquillity 
 till men are firmly convinced that conscience, honor, and credit 
 are all in one interest ; and that without the concurrence of the
 
 STEELE HI 
 
 former, the latter are but impositions upon ourselves and others." 
 The Taller. 
 
 " Now the bubble courts the impostor, and pretends at the 
 utmost to be but his equal. To clear up the reasons and causes 
 in such revolutions and the different conduct between fools and 
 cheats, shall be one of our labors for the good of this kingdom." 
 The Taller. 
 
 " Of all the evils under the sun, that of making vice commend- 
 able is the greatest ; for it seems to be the basis of society that 
 applause and contempt should be always given to proper objects. 
 But in this age we behold things for which we ought to have an 
 abhorrence not only received without disdain but even valued as 
 motives of emulation. This is naturally the destruction of sim- 
 plicity of manner, openness of heart, and generosity of temper. 
 When one gives one's self the liberty to range and run over in 
 one's thoughts the different geniuses of men which one meets in 
 the world, one cannot but observe that most of the indirection 
 and artifice which is used among men does not proceed so much 
 from a degeneracy in nature as [from] an affectation of appear- 
 ing men of consequence by such practices." The Toiler. 
 
 ii. Grave Intentional Exaggeration. This has 
 always been a common form of humor, but few writers have 
 equalled the founder of the Tatler in the profound gravity 
 and deliberation with which he sets down the most astound- 
 ing hyperbole. 
 
 " He knows very well how to exaggerate in a quiet, grave 
 style, which looks like truth, and throws the whole force of 
 the manner upon the point he aims at." W. E. Channing. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " Being informed that several dead men in and about this city 
 do keep out of the way and abscond, for fear of being buried ; 
 and being willing to respite their interment, in consideration of 
 their families and in hopes of their amendment, I shall allow 
 them certain privileged places, where they may appear to one 
 another, without causing any let or molestation to the living, or
 
 142 STEELE 
 
 receiving any, in their own persons, from the company of Up- 
 holders . " Bicker sta/. 
 
 ' ' The stratagem had so good an effect upon him that he grew 
 immediately a new man, and is learning to speak without an 
 oath ; which makes him extremely short in his phrases ; for, as I 
 observed before, a common swearer has a brain without any idea 
 on the swearing side ; therefore my ward has yet mighty little to 
 say, and is forced to substitute some other vehicle of nonsense to 
 supply the defect of his unusual expletives." Pacolet. 
 
 " Whereas, a commission of interment has been awarded 
 against Doctor John Partridge, philomath, professor of physic 
 and astrology, and whereas the said Partridge hath not sur- 
 rendered himself, nor shown cause to the contrary : These are 
 to certify that the Company of Upholders will proceed to bury 
 him from Cordwainer's Hall, on Tuesday the twenty-ninth in- 
 stant, where any six of his surviving friends, who still believe 
 him to be alive, are desired to come prepared to hold up the 
 pall." Pacolet. 
 
 " I shall here publish to the world the life of a person who 
 was neither man nor woman ; . . . who, as the town very well 
 knows, was a woman that practised physic in a man's clothes, 
 and, after having had two wives and several children, died about 
 a month since." The Tatler.
 
 DEFOE, 1661 (?)-i73i 
 
 Biographical Outline. Daniel Defoe, born in 1660 
 or 1 66 1 in the parish of St. Giles, Cripplegate, London ; 
 father a well-to-do nonconformist butcher named Foe ; Defoe 
 changes his name to Defoe about 1703, for reasons variously 
 assigned ; he enters the academy at Newington Green at the 
 age of fourteen ; he afterward declared that he " understood " 
 Latin, Spanish, and Italian, that he " could read " Greek, 
 and that he spoke French "fluently;" he also obtained 
 some knowledge of mathematics, a wide acquaintance with 
 geography, modern history, and the existing commercial con- 
 ditions of his day, and took the theological and philosophical 
 courses necessary to fit him for the dissenting ministry ; he 
 goes into business as a hose factor about 1685 ; participates 
 in the "No-popery" riots of 1685; joins William's army on 
 its approach to London, in 1688; in 1701 he publishes a 
 pamphlet on the succession, proposing to investigate the 
 claims of Monmouth ; he engages in foreign trade, visiting 
 France, Germany, and Spain, and becomes bankrupt about 
 1692; by 1705 he has reduced his debts from ^17,000 to 
 ,5,000, discharging in full obligations for which composi- 
 tion had been accepted ; he philosophizes on his financial 
 experience in an "Essay on Projects," published in 1698 ; in 
 this essay he shows himself to be a most intelligent observer, 
 and foreshadows several commercial institutions that were not 
 developed till a century later ; in 1694 he refuses the offer of 
 a commercial agency in Spain, in order to give his services 
 toward solving the financial problems of the government ; in 
 1695 he is made accountant to the Commissioners of the Glass 
 
 143
 
 144 DEFOE 
 
 Duty, an office that he held till the commission was suppressed 
 in 1699 ; he is also secretary and a partner in a company en- 
 gaged in making pantiles [curved roof-tiles] at Tilbury 
 a business that proves remunerative ; in the later years of 
 William's reign Defoe becomes prominent as a pamphleteer in 
 support of the king's character and policy ; he argues in 
 favor of a standing army in 1697; in 1700 he publishes 
 The Two Great Questions, a pamphlet vigorously defending 
 the expected war, of which a French translation, with a reply, 
 appeared in 1701; in 1701 he also writes "The True-Born 
 Englishman, a Satyr," being a reply to a poem by one Tut- 
 chin, in which William had been called a Dutchman ; by 
 1705 nine genuine and twelve pirated editions of this poem 
 had been printed, and 80,000 copies sold in the streets ; Defoe 
 is presented to William, who treats him with confidence; in 
 1701 he writes Six Distinguishing Characters of a Parliament 
 Man, denouncing stock-jobbers and calling attention to the 
 serious political questions of the day ; in the same year, on the 
 imprisonment of the Whig presenters of the " Kentish Peti- 
 tion," he publishes the "Legion Memorial," and presents it 
 to the Speaker of the House of Commons, with the result of 
 liberating the petitioners; in December, 1701, he publishes 
 " The Original Power of the Collective Body of the English 
 People," his most noteworthy discussion of political theories; 
 in his " Reasons against a War with France " (1701) he urges 
 that England should secure the colonial empire of Spain ; on 
 William's death, March 8, 1702, he publishes a poem, " Mock 
 Mourners," ridiculing the official lamentations, and a pam- 
 phlet, New Test of the Church of England's Loyalty, at- 
 tacking the high church party ; in 1702 he joins in the con- 
 troversy over the bill suppressing "occasional nonconformity," 
 though he admits the necessity of the Established Church as a 
 barrier against popery and infidelity, and does not object to 
 limited tests ; in his Dissenters' Answer to High Chunk 
 Challenge he asserts that the dissenters would conform if ob-
 
 DEFOE 145 
 
 noxious ceremonies were not insisted on, and argues that it is 
 an injustice to require military and naval service from dis- 
 senters while excluding them from preferment ; he is charged 
 with desertion by the more narrow dissenters, and, in self- 
 defence, publishes The Shortest Way with Dissenters, a 
 satirical pamphlet ostensibly written by a high churchman, in 
 which it is proposed to extirpate the dissenters as the French 
 king had extirpated the Protestants ; the more vehement 
 Tories approve the pamphlet in earnest, and one clergyman 
 places it next to the Bible in his estimation ; but the reaction 
 soon comes, and Defoe is prosecuted for libelling the Church 
 by misrepresenting its principles; the House of Commons 
 orders the pamphlet to be burned, and a reward is offered for 
 Defoe's apprehension ; he is indicted February 24, 1703, is 
 tried in the following July, acknowledges the authorship, and 
 is sentenced to pay a fine of two hundred marks, to stand three 
 times in the pillory, to be imprisoned during the Queen's 
 pleasure, and to give security for his good behavior during the 
 succeeding seven years ; he publishes several other pamphlets 
 on the subject of conformity, all advocating toleration ; he 
 stands in the pillory July 29, 30, and 31, 1703 ; the popu- 
 lace form a guard, cover the pillory with flowers, and drink 
 to his health ; Defoe publishes his " Hymn to the Pillory," 
 which sells in great numbers ; afterward he is imprisoned in 
 Newgate, and is thus compelled to abandon his business at 
 Tilbury, thereby losing ,3,500 ; he obtains a precarious 
 support for his wife and six children by writing pamphlets on 
 the questions of the day, besides A Layman 's Sermon on the 
 great storm (November 27, 1703) ; his notoriety leads to a 
 spurious publication of his writings, and, in 1703, he pub- 
 lishes the first volume of a "true collection," followed, in 
 1705, by a second volume; during his imprisonment he be- 
 gins his Review, at first a weekly paper and afterward issued 
 r\vo and three times a week, of which the full title was "A 
 Review of the Affairs of France and of All Europe, as Influ- 
 xo
 
 146 DEFOE 
 
 enced by the Nation; " an imaginary "Scandal Club" con- 
 tributes to its pages, and fills five monthly supplements in 
 1704 with its "Advices; " during half of 1705 the "Ad- 
 vices" appear twice a week as a separate publication called 
 The Little Review ; in July, 1712, the Review ceases in its 
 old form, but a new series, called simply The Review, is is- 
 sued twice a week till June, 1713 ; during the ten years of 
 the publication Defoe writes all its contents, never missing a 
 number ; during the same period he also publishes eighty 
 other books equalling the Review in bulk ; the Review marks 
 the beginning of English periodical literature, and suggested, 
 later, the Tatler and the Spectator ; the expulsion of Notting- 
 ham, Defoe's special enemy, and the admission of Harley to 
 the ministry in the spring of 1704, result in the relief of De- 
 foe's family by a sum sent from the treasury, and, four months 
 later, in his release from prison ; his bond for good behavior 
 is still in force, and some conditions are imposed on his lib- 
 eration ; he retires for a time to St. Edmund's Bury, returns 
 to London in October, 1 704, and in November publishes a 
 pamphlet entitled Giving Alms no Charity ; during 1705 
 he publishes The Consolidate, or "Memoirs of Sundry 
 Transactions from the World in the Moon," and enters into 
 a correspondence with Lord Halifax, which shows that Defoe 
 was then receiving, through one of the Whig junto, financial 
 aid from some "unknown benefactor; " he is employed by 
 Harley, then Secretary of State, "in several honorable 
 though secret services ; " takes part in the political campaign 
 of 1705, writing a satire The Dyet of Poland, attacking 
 the high church party; in 1706 he publishes "The True 
 Relation of the Apparition of One Mrs. Veal " and a polit- 
 ical satire in twelve books of verse, entitled "Jure Divino ; " 
 the common story that " Mrs. Veal " was written to help ad- 
 vertise Drelincourt's book on the ' Fear of Death ' has been 
 proved false; in the autumn of 1706 Defoe is sent by the 
 ministry as a secret agent to Scotland to aid in negotiations
 
 DEFOE 147 
 
 looking to the Union, and kisses the Queen's hand on his ap- 
 pointment ; he publishes six essays ' ' Toward Removing 
 National Prejudices " against the measure in both countries; 
 he remains in Scotland through 1707, is consulted on ques- 
 tions of trade, is once threatened by a mob, and defends him- 
 self against the charge of dependence on the ministry with 
 some equivocation ; he is still persecuted by his creditors, 
 though he had surrendered to the commissioners appointed for 
 the relief of debtors ; upon Harley's ejection from the minis- 
 try, Defoe offers his services to Godolphin, Harley's bitter 
 enemy, is accepted, and again is sent to Scotland in 1708 ; 
 for a time he prints the Review in both Edinburgh and Lon- 
 don, and makes a pretence of intending to settle in Scotland ; 
 he supports Godolphin through the Review in the elections 
 of 1708, and attacks Sacheverell so vehemently that Defoe is 
 threatened with assassination ; on Godolphin's dismissal Defoe 
 is "providentially cast back upon his original benefactor" 
 (Harley), as he puts it ; the Review suddenly changes its spirit 
 to correspond with Defoe's partial political somersault ; in 
 October, 1710, he publishes two essays, " Public Credit " and 
 "Loans," both so clearly in Harley's interest that they are 
 attributed to Harley ; Defoe now so strongly urges acqui- 
 escence in the peace (condemned by the Whigs) that Mesna- 
 ger,the French agent, translates one of Defoe's pamphlets into 
 French and sends him one hundred pistoles ; the Review is in- 
 jured by the new tax, imposed in 1712, but Defoe continues 
 its publication through one more volume, eloquently asserting 
 his independence and his suffering in the cause of truth, and 
 then discontinues the Review, to become the principal contribu- 
 tor to the Mercator, issued in Harley's (then Lord Oxford's) 
 interest; he is again sent to Scotland in the latter part of 1712, 
 where he writes several anti -Jacobite pamphlets under osten- 
 sibly Jacobite titles, such as Reasons against the Succession 
 of the House of Hanover, What if the Pretender Should 
 Come, etc. ; these pamphlets offend the Whigs, who now
 
 148 DEFOE 
 
 regard Defoe as a hireling renegade ; he is prosecuted for li- 
 bel, the pamphlets are declared treasonable, and he is impris- 
 oned, April 22, 1713., but immediately secures a pardon under 
 the great seal ; he continues to write pamphlets and to con- 
 tribute to the Mercator in Oxford's interest ; in a " Letter 
 to the Dissenters" (December, 1713) he exhorts them to 
 neutrality; in April, 1714, he replies in "The Public Spirit 
 of the Whigs," to Swift's attack on the Scots, and defends 
 Oxford in a tract ; Defoe is engaged by one Hunt, a book- 
 seller, to issue a periodical called The Flying Sheet, in oppo- 
 sition to one already published under that title ; in its pages 
 Defoe attacks Lord Annesley, and is again prosecuted for 
 libel ; while his trial is pending he writes (September, 1714) 
 his "Appeal to Honour and Justice," his "Advice to the 
 People of Great Britain," and "A Secret History of One 
 Year " (the first year of William's reign) ; he is severely ill 
 early in 1715, but in March he publishes his "Family In- 
 structor," a book of 450 pages, presumably written earlier ; 
 in July, 1715, he publishes "A History of the Wars of His 
 Present Majesty, Charles XII., King of Sweden," and in the 
 same month is convicted of libel on Lord Annesley ; A 
 Hymn to the Mob and other pamphlets appear soon after- 
 ward ; in November, 1715, when his fellow-convicts are im- 
 prisoned, Defoe escapes punishment by proposing, through 
 Judge Parker, to enter the employ of the government under 
 Townshend, then Secretary of State ; his proposal is accepted, 
 and from May, 1716, till September, 1720, he publishes a 
 monthly paper called Mercurius Politicus, at the same time 
 contributing to the News Letter, a high church journal, cir- 
 culated only in manuscript, of which Defoe owned a part ; 
 he also aids, during the same period, in managing Mist's 
 Journal, a Jacobite organ, started in 1716 ; Defoe appears in 
 Mist 's Journal as a translator of foreign news, but his au- 
 thorship is suspected because of " his art in forging a story 
 and imposing it on the world for truth ; " he also starts the
 
 DEFOE 149 
 
 WJiitehall Evening Post, a tri-weekly journal, in 1718, and 
 writes for it till June, 1720; in October, 1719, he starts the 
 Daily Post, for which he writes till 1725 ; he contributes 
 also to Applebee 1 s Journal from 1720 to 1726; all these 
 contributions and pamphlets, after 1709, were anonymous, 
 as Defoe was regarded as a renegade ; he practically allowed 
 himself to pass for a traitor or, more properly, a spy ; he dis- 
 played wonderful versatility, writing on the widest variety of 
 topics, but generally avoiding political themes during the 
 later years of his journalism ; he publishes the first volume of 
 " Robinson Crusoe " April 25, 1719, and sells it to one Tay- 
 lor, who sells four editions in five months ; Defoe publishes 
 the second volume August 8, 1719 ; in 1720 he publishes 
 " Serious Reflections during the Life of Robinson Crusoe ; " 
 "Robinson Crusoe" becomes marvellously popular, is ten 
 times pirated and imitated, is translated into many languages, 
 and is " bought by every old woman and left to her family as 
 a legacy with ' Pilgrim's Progress ; ' " between the first and 
 second editions of " Robinson Crusoe " Defoe publishes " The 
 Anatomy of Exchange Alley," an attack on stock-jobbers, 
 and " The Chimera," an attack on John Law's financial 
 schemes ; he writes several short fictitious stories of criminals 
 in 1719, and, in 1720, publishes " The Adventures of Captain 
 Singleton ' ' and ' ' Memoirs of a Cavalier ; " " Moll Flan- 
 ders," " Colonel Jacque," and " The Journal of the Plague" 
 all appear in 1722, "Roxana" in 1724, and "A New Voy- 
 age Round the World" in 1725; in his own view, Defoe 
 was, in his stories of harlots and vagabonds, a sincere and 
 zealous moralist ; in 1725 and 1727 he published two volumes 
 of " The Complete English Tradesman " and " The Use and 
 Abuse of the Marriage Bed; " during 1726 appeared " The 
 Political History of the Devil," "A System of Logic," "An 
 Essay on the Reality of Apparitions," and several other 
 books ; after 1725 Defoe wrote under the pseudonym of " An- 
 drew Moreton ;" he appears at this period to have been fairly
 
 150 DEFOE 
 
 prosperous, for he had "a very handsome house" at Stoke 
 Newington, and he invested a thousand pounds for an estate 
 for his daughter Hannah in 1722 ; he appears to have been 
 commercially engaged in 1726; during 1729 some catastro- 
 phe of unknown character befell Defoe, compelling him to 
 make over all his property to his son, to go into hiding, and 
 to fear violence; it is surmised that his " wicked, perjured, 
 and contemptible enemy" was Mist, the editor of Mist's 
 Journal, who had discovered Defoe's former duplicity, had 
 escaped from imprisonment to France, and had, perhaps, in- 
 formed the English Government of Defoe's double-dealing ; 
 Defoe's last writing was "An Effectual Scheme for the Im- 
 mediate Preventing of Street Robberies," published in 1731 ; 
 he died " of a lethargy " in Ropemaker's Alley, Moorfields, 
 London, April 26, 1731, and was buried in Bunhill Fields, 
 where an obelisk was erected to his memory in 1870; he is 
 known to have written at least 254 books, besides countless 
 pamphlets and contributions to journals. 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY ON DEFOE'S STYLE. 
 
 Masson, D., " British Novelists." Boston, 1892, W. Small, 87-106. 
 Chalmers, G., " Life of Defoe. " Oxford, 1841, Talboys, i: 1-118. 
 Scott, Sir W., "Prose Works." Edinburgh, 1870, Black, 4: 228-296. 
 Wilson, W., " Memoirs of Defoe." London, 1830, Hurst & Co., v., 
 
 index. 
 Dawson, G., "Biographical Lectures." London, 1886, Kegan Paul, 
 
 Trench & Co., 125-141. 
 Minto, W., "English Prose Literature." Edinburgh, 1886, Blackwood, 
 
 349-361. 
 Stephen, L., " Hours in a Library." New York, 1894, Putnam, i : i- 
 
 47- 
 Taine, H. A., "History of English Literature." New York, 1874, 
 
 Holt, 2 : 393-400 and v., index. 
 Dennis, J., " Studies in English Literature." London, 1876, Stanford, 
 
 77-88. 
 Foster, J., "Critical Essays." London, 1875, Bell & Sons.
 
 DEFOE 151 
 
 Jeaffreson, J. C., "Novels and Novelists." London, 1858, Hurst & 
 
 Blackett, i : 65-85. 
 Mitchell, D. G., "Old Story Tellers." New York, 1878, Scribner, 
 
 198-218. 
 Tuckerman, H. T., "Essays." Boston, 1857, Phillips, Sampson & Co., 
 
 285-303. 
 
 \Votton, M. E., "Word Portraits." London, 1887, Bentley, 83-86. 
 Chadwick, W., " Life and Times of Defoe." London, 1859, J. R. Smith. 
 Wright, Thos., " Life of Defoe." New York, 1894, Randolph. 
 Knight, Charles, "Gallery of Portraits." London, 1837, C. Knight & 
 
 Co., 7: 1 12-120. 
 Craik, G. L., "History of English Literature." New York, 1869, 
 
 Scribner, 270-273. 
 Macaulay, T. B., " Miscellaneous Works." New York, 1880, Harper, 
 
 i: 116. 
 Gosse, E., " History of the Eighteenth Century Literature." New York, 
 
 1889, Macmillan, 176-185. 
 Nicoll, H. J., "Landmarks of English Literature." New York, 1883, 
 
 Appleton, 203-208. 
 
 Russell, W. C., " The Book of Authors. " London, n. d., Warne, 91-133. 
 Stephen, L., "Dictionary of National Biography." New York, 1888, 
 
 Macmillan, 14 : 280-292. 
 Encyclopaedia Britannica. Boston, 1877, Little, Brown & Co., 7 : 27- 
 
 30 (G. S. A.). 
 L'Estrange, A. G., "History of English Humor." London, 1878, 
 
 Hurst & Blackett, 2 : 22-44. 
 
 North American Rwiew, 78: 277-279 (H. T. Tuckerman). 
 Blackwoofs Magazine, 106: 457-487. 
 Edinburgh Rei'ieui, 82, 480-533; 50: 397-425. 
 British Quarterly Review, 27: 85-105; 50: 483-519 (W. Lee). 
 Christian Examiner, 71 : 340353- 
 Every Saturday, 5 : 453-464. 
 
 Congregational Magazine, 13 : 1-7 and 57-64 (Walter Wilson). 
 Westminster Review, 13: 69-85 (Walter Wilson). 
 Dublin University Magazine, 48: 57-71. 
 Retrospective Review', 3 : 354-379 ; 6 : 1-20. 
 Southern Re^'^eu', 7: 68-101 (Walter Wilson). 
 Eclectic Magazine, 74 : 366-371. 
 Corn hill Magazine, 23 : 310-320. 
 
 LitteWs Living Age, 29: 49-64 (Chambers) ; 50: 513-526. 
 Spectator, 74: 210. 
 London Quarterly Review, 57 : 345-370.
 
 I $2 DEFOE 
 
 PARTICULAR CHARACTERISTICS. 
 
 I. Minuteness. Defoe is the master-narrator. In his 
 most purely fictitious productions he notes so minutely 
 every circumstance that it has all the preciseness of history. 
 Leslie Stephen calls his novels " simple history minus the 
 facts." His "Memoirs of a Cavalier," the pretended jour- 
 nal of a soldier in the English Revolution, deceived so acute 
 a critic as Lord Chatham, while his " Journal of the Plague " 
 and certain of his ironical writings were taken for earnest by 
 some of the ablest men of the day. He is really the inventor 
 of the realistic novel. He throws such an air of reality over 
 the creations of his fancy that the reader is involuntarily sur- 
 prised into a persuasion of their truth. He has a rare power 
 of putting himself thoroughly in the place of the fictitious 
 persons whom he invents. Concerning his " unflinching 
 realism," Minto declares that "none of our writers, not 
 even Shakespeare, shows half such a knowledge of the cir- 
 cumstances of life among different ranks and conditions of 
 men : none of them has realized with fidelity how so many 
 different persons lived and moved." 
 
 " His labor has been expended on making his narrative 
 minutely circumstantial his reflection of life a picture 
 of unparalleled fidelity and detail. He is incomparably 
 graphic and impressive. He produces his effects not by 
 ponderous epithets or impressive reflections, but by the ac- 
 cumulation of striking details in homely language." Minto. 
 
 " If Swift, in his fictions, is the satirist of the age, De- 
 foe, in most of his, is its chronicler or newspaper reporter. 
 Minuteness of imagined circumstance and filling up 
 the power of fiction in fac -simile of nature is Defoe's unfailing 
 characteristic. ' ' Masson. 
 
 " Defoe had the kind of mind suitable to such a hard ser- 
 vice, solid, exact, entirely destitute of refinement, enthusiasm,
 
 DEFOE 153 
 
 agreeableness. . . . Even in fiction his information is 
 as precise as in history. He gives dates, year, month, and 
 day ; notes the wind, northeast, southwest, northwest ; he 
 writes a log-book, an invoice, attorney's and shopkeeper's 
 bills, the number of moidores, interest, specie payments, 
 payments in kind, cost and sale prices, the share of the 
 king, of religious houses, partners, brokers, net totals, statis- 
 tics. ... It seems as if our author had performed 
 all Crusoe's labors, so exactly does he describe them, with 
 numbers, quantities,^dimensions, like a carpenter, potter, or 
 an old tar. The geography and hydrography of the island 
 are so given ' that the reader is tempted to take an atlas 
 and draw for himself a map of the place, to enter into all 
 the details of the history, and to see the objects as clearly and 
 fully as the author.' " Taine. 
 
 "There is all the minute detail of a log-book in it 
 [' Crusoe ']. . . . It is like reading evidence in a court of 
 justice." Lamb. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " My brother's house had a little court before it and a brick 
 wall and a gate in it, and within that several warehouses, where 
 his goods of several sorts lay. It happened that in one of these 
 warehouses were several packs of women's high-crowned hats, 
 which came out of the country, and were, as I suppose, for ex- 
 portation, whither I know not." Journal of the Plague. 
 
 11 While I was at Chester we had some small skirmishes with 
 Sir William Brereton. One morning in particular Sir William 
 drew up and faced us ; and one of our colonels of horse ob- 
 serving the enemy to be not, as he thought, above two hundred, 
 desired leave of Prince Rupert to attack them with a like num- 
 ber, and accordingly he sallied out with two hundred horse. I 
 stood drawn up without the city with eight hundred more, ready 
 to bring him off if he should be put to the worst, which happened 
 accordingly." Memoirs of a Cavalier.
 
 1 54 DEFOE 
 
 " Before I set up my tent, I drew a half-circle before the hol- 
 low place, which took in about ten yards in its semi-diameter 
 from the rock and twenty yards in its diameter from its begin- 
 ning and ending. ... In this half-circle I pitched two rows 
 of strong stakes, driving them into the ground till they stood very 
 firm like pikes, the biggest end being out of the ground above 
 five feet and a half and sharpened on the top. The two rows 
 did not stand above six inches from one another." Robinson 
 Crusoe. 
 
 2. Homeliness. By this we mean something more than 
 simplicity. Defoe continually uses old-fashioned phrases and 
 the homely idioms of the street. He writes like a man of 
 business rather than an artist. Tuckerman well calls him a 
 man of the people, a writer of plain, vigorous, unembellished 
 English." His independence of artistic rules appears also in 
 the whimsical coinages found here and there. 
 
 " The use of homely language is one of the most remarkable 
 features of Defoe's style. It is one of the secrets of the con- 
 tinued popularity of ' Robinson Crusoe. ' . . . His humor 
 consists in the application of very homely language to affairs 
 usually treated with stiff dignity. ... As suited to 
 the vigorous popular style, his preference was for the homely 
 and even the coarse. His allusions are sometimes learned, 
 but always easily understood from the homeliness of the 
 expression. . . . Defoe describes his own style as his 
 ' natural infirmity of homely plain writing.' " Minto. 
 
 " Defoe's one great aim in all his works is to destroy the 
 illusion of romance and to write as though he were telling 
 in homely language a narrative of ordinary life. 
 There have been greater novelists, but not one who has 
 shown more skill in the management of his materials or 
 produced so fine an effect from the accumulation of prosaic 
 details." Dennis. 
 
 " The style of Defoe is plain and homely, but expressive, di-
 
 DEFOE 155 
 
 reel, and manly. It may be described as thoroughly English. 
 It reflected the character of his mind, and bespoke the man 
 of firm resolve and unshaken integrity. . . . His lan- 
 guage is always that of the plain, unlettered person he pro- 
 fesses himself: homely in phraseology, in expression rude and 
 artificial, yet forcible, happy, and strongly descriptive. . . . 
 Even Defoe's deficiencies in style, his homeliness of language, 
 his rusticity of thought, expressive of what is called the Crassa 
 Minerva, seem to claim credit for him as one who speaks the 
 truth." Sir Walter Scoff. 
 
 " In his works of imagination his almost constant charac- 
 teristic is a simplicity and plainness, which, if there be any 
 affectation about it at all, is chargeable only with that of a 
 homeliness sometimes approaching to that of rusticity." G. 
 L. Craik. 
 
 " He drew upon his knowledge of low English life, framing 
 imaginary histories of thieves, courtesans, buccaneers, and 
 the like of the kind to suit a coarse popular taste." David 
 Mas son. 
 
 " His imagination was that of a man of business, not 
 of an artist, crammed and, as it were, jammed down with 
 facts. He tells them as they come to him, without arrange- 
 ment or style, like a conversation, without dreaming of pro- 
 ducing an effect or composing a phrase, employing technical 
 terms and vulgar forms, repeating himself at need, using the 
 same thing two or three times, not seeming to suspect that 
 there are methods of amusing, touching, engrossing, or pleas- 
 ing, with no desire but to pour out on paper the fulness of 
 the information with which he is charged." Taine. 
 
 " His style is everywhere beautiful, but plain and homely. 
 ' Robinson Crusoe ' is delightful to all ranks and classes ; but 
 it is easy to see that it is written in a phraseology peculiarly 
 adapted to the lower conditions of readers." Lamb.
 
 1 56 DEFOE 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " We have been huffed and bullied with your Act of Tolera- 
 tion ; you have told us that you are the Church established by 
 law, as well as others ; have set up your canting synagogues at 
 our church doors, and the church and members have been loaded 
 with reproaches, with oaths, associations, abjurations, and what 
 not." The Shortest Way with Dissenters. 
 
 " The girl has scarce been a week, nay, a day in her service, 
 but a committee of servant-wenches are appointed to examine 
 her, who advise her to raise her wages or give warning ; to en- 
 courage to which the herb-woman or chandler-woman or some 
 other old intelligencer provides her a place of four or five pounds 
 a year ; this sets Madam cock-a-hoop, and she thinks of nothing 
 now but veils and high wages, and so gives warning from place 
 to place till she had got her wages up to the tip-top." Every- 
 body's Business. 
 
 " But the greatest abuse of all is. that these creatures are be- 
 come their own law-givers ; nay, I think they are ours too, though 
 nobody would imagine that such a set of slatterns should bam- 
 boozle a whole nation." Everybody's fiusiness. 
 
 3. Realism Verisimilitude. " He was, perhaps, the 
 greatest liar that ever lived. . . . He has absolute com- 
 mand over the scaffolding and carpentry of realism. . . . 
 The realism, the unvarnished attention to minute fact, is just 
 what preserves their [his novels'] interest." Edmund Gosse. 
 
 11 To Defoe was given a tongue to which no one could listen 
 without believing every word he uttered. His unrivalled 
 skill in mystification has made it difficult to distinguish the 
 purely fictitious from the authentic part of his admitted nar- 
 ratives, and in some places to separate genuine histories from 
 stories composed by him. . . . He had the most marvel- 
 lous power ever known "of giving verisimilitude to fiction. In 
 other words, he had the most amazing talent on record for 
 telling lies." Leslie Stephen. 
 
 "The subject [of ' Robinson Crusoe'] was one admirably
 
 DEFOE 157 
 
 adapted for Defoe's genius. The patient ingenuity with 
 which he piles detail on detail, his thorough identification of 
 himself with his hero, even the wearisome and commonplace 
 religious meditations interspersed through the book, combine 
 to give it such a reality that in reading it the insight and 
 genius necessary to produce such a result fall out of view, and 
 we imagine ourselves attending to the wonderful adventures of 
 a veritable English sailor, and possessing more than the 
 average proportion of the ordinary English faculty of adapt- 
 ing himself with as good a grace as possible to any situation. 
 . His ' Journal of the Plague ' is so minute, so cir- 
 cumstantial, so exactly like reality, that it was believed by 
 Dr. Mead to be the work of a medical man." H. J. Nicoll. 
 
 " On the whole, however, it was his own robust sense of 
 reality that led him to his style. ... In his representa- 
 tions of English ragamuffin life there is nothing of allegory, 
 poetry, or even of didactic purpose ; all is hard, prosaic, and 
 matter-of-fact, as in newspaper paragraphs. . . . It is in 
 the true spirit of a realist, also, that Defoe, though he is usually 
 plain and prosaic, yet, when the facts to be reported are strik- 
 ing or horrible, rises easily to their level. . . . It is evi- 
 dent that no man ever possessed a stronger imagination of that 
 kind which, a situation being once conceived, teems with cir- 
 cumstances in exact keeping with it. ... Defoe's match- 
 less power of inventing circumstantial incidents made him 
 more a master even of its poetic capabilities than the rarest 
 poet then living could have been." David Mas son. 
 
 " Never was such a sense of the real, before or since. Our 
 realists of to-day, painters, anatomists, who enter deliberately 
 on their business, are very far from this naturalness ; art and 
 calculation crop out amidst their too minute descriptions. 
 Defoe creates illusion ; for it is not the eye which deceives 
 us but the mind, and that literally. His account of the great 
 plague has more than once passed for true ; and Lord Chatham 
 mistook his ' Memoirs of a Cavalier ' for an authentic nar-
 
 1 58 DEFOE 
 
 rative. This was his aim. In the preface to the old edition 
 of ' Robinson Crusoe ' it is said : ' The story is told, . . . 
 to the instruction of others by this example, and to justify 
 and honor the wisdom of Providence. The editor believes 
 the thing to be a just history of facts; neither is there any 
 appearance of fiction in it.' All his talents lie in this, and 
 thus even his imperfections aid him ; his lack of art becomes 
 a profound art ; his negligence, repetition, prolixity, con- 
 tribute to the illusion ; we cannot imagine that such and such 
 a detail, so minute, so dull, is invented ; an inventor would 
 have suppressed it ; it is too tedious to have been put in on 
 purpose ; art, therefore, cannot have piled up this heap of dull 
 and vulgar accidents; it is the truth." Tainc. 
 
 " No writer of fictitious narrative has ever excelled him in 
 at least one prime excellence the air of reality which he 
 throws over the creations of his fancy ; an effect proceeding 
 from the strength of conception with which he enters into the 
 scenes, adventures, and characters he undertakes to describe." 
 G. L. Craik. 
 
 " Defoe has a power of circumstantial invention, an un- 
 rivalled genius for dyeing like truth. . . . He has often 
 been quoted as a first - hand authority in matters of his- 
 tory. . . . He was a great, a truly great liar, perhaps 
 the greatest liar that ever lived." Minto. 
 
 " The general charm attached to the romance of Defoe is 
 chiefly to be ascribed to the unequalled dexterity with which 
 he has given an appearance of reality to the incidents which 
 he narrates." Sir Walter Scott. 
 
 "Verisimilitude is the great merit of Defoe as a novelist. 
 The seeming authenticity of his stories is also greatly enhanced 
 by the autobiographic form in which they are cast. He is 
 a model narrator ; passages of his fiction read like testimony 
 elicited in a court of justice ; and incidental and apparently 
 trifling circumstances are so naturally interwoven as to give a 
 singular air of truth to the whole. " H. T. Tuckerman.
 
 DEFOE 159 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " I could dwell a great while on the calamities of this dreadful 
 time, and go on to describe the objects that appeared among us 
 every day, the dreadful extravagances which the distraction of 
 sick people drove them into ; how the streets began now to be 
 fuller of frightful objects and families to be made even a terror 
 to themselves ; but after I have told you, as I have above, that 
 one man being tied in his bed and finding no other way to deliver 
 himself, set the bed on fire with his candle, which unhappily 
 stood within his reach, and burnt himself in bed ; and how an- 
 other, by the insufferable torment he bore, danced and sung 
 naked in the streets, not knowing one ecstasy from another ; I 
 say, after I have mentioned these things, what can be added 
 more ? " The Plague in London. 
 
 " We had but little time to consult ; but being in one of the prin- 
 cipal inns of the town, we presently ordered the gates of the inn 
 to be shut, and sent to all the inns where our men were quartered 
 to do the like, with orders if they had any back-doors or ways to 
 get out, to come to us. By this means, however, we got so much 
 time as to get on horseback, and so many of our men came to us 
 by back-ways that we had near three hundred horse in the yards 
 and places behind the house ; and now we began to think of break- 
 ing out by a lane which led from the back part of the' inn ; but 
 a new accident determined us another though a worse way." 
 Memoirs of a Cavalier. 
 
 " I cannot here omit one very remarkable instance of the Cath- 
 olic zeal of that Prince, which I was soon after an eye-wit- 
 ness of. I was at that time in the fruit-market, when the King 
 passing by in his coach, the host, whether by accident or con- 
 trivance, I cannot say, was brought at that very juncture out of 
 the great church, in order, as I after understood, to a poor 
 sick woman's receiving the sacrament. On sight of the host, the 
 king came out of his coach, kneeled down in the street, which at 
 that time proved to be very dirty, till the host passed by ; then 
 rose up, and taking the lighted flambeau from him who bore it, 
 he followed the priest up a straight nasty alley, and then up a 
 dark ordinary pair of stairs, where the poor sick woman lay. 
 There he stayed till the whole ceremony was over, when, return-
 
 l6o DEFOE 
 
 ing to the door of the church, he very faithfully returned the 
 lighted flambeau to the fellow he had taken it from, the people 
 all the while crying out, ' Viva, Viva!' an acclamation, we may 
 imagine, intended to his zeal as well as his person." Memoirs of 
 Captain Carleton. 
 
 4. Undisguised Sarcasm. " No one can doubt for a 
 moment that Defoe was a decided master of ridicule, and 
 that, however his adversaries might affect to despise, they 
 were as little able to endure his wit as to cope with his argu- 
 ments. . . . He possessed a large share of that dry, 
 caustic wit which gave a peculiar force to his language and 
 told more significantly than whole pages of sentiment. . . . 
 When his opponents argue fairly, he reasons with acuteness, 
 vigor, and judgment ; but when they lose their temper, he 
 laughs at their weakness, and answers their railings by sarcasm. 
 . This satire [' Speculum Cr ape -G aw no mm '] gave an 
 earnest of those sarcastic powers that were unfolded by Defoe 
 in his subsequent writings. . . . The keen-ness of our 
 author's satire brought upon him a host of enemies." Wal- 
 ter Wilson. 
 
 " He is a great master of the language of sarcasm and 
 abuse. He deals in the same kind of undisguised banter as 
 Macaulay ; only he is more exuberant, stands less upon his 
 dignity, hits fearlessly at greater antagonists, and altogether 
 has a more magnanimous air. . . . He is more openly 
 derisive and less bitter than Addison, having no mastery of 
 the polite sneer ; he is not a loving humorist like Steele, but 
 sarcastically and derisively humorous ; and he is more mag- 
 nanimous and less personal than Swift, dealing with public 
 not with private conduct, and carrying into the warfare a 
 spirit less savagely ferocious." Minto. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " And then it comes out, with a great many grieving aggrava- 
 tions to a parent, to find himself tricked and defeated in the
 
 DEFOE l6l 
 
 expectations of his son's marrying handsomely and to his advan- 
 tage, instead of which he is obliged, perhaps, to receive a dish- 
 clout for a daughter-in-law, and see his name and family propa- 
 gated by the descendants of a race of beggars." The Complete 
 English Tradesman. 
 
 " Now they find that they are in danger of the Church of Eng- 
 land's just resentments ; now they cry out peace, union, forbear- 
 ance, and charity, as if the Church had not too long harboured 
 her enemies under her wing, and nourished the viperous brood, 
 till they hiss and fly in the face of the mother that cherished 
 them." The Shortest Way with Dissenters. 
 
 " But once set the Pretender upon the throne, and let the 
 funds be but happily stopped and paid into his hands, that he 
 may be in no more need of a Parliament, and all these dis- 
 tempers will be cured as effectually as a fever is cured by cutting 
 off the head, or the halter cures a bleeding at the nose." What 
 If the Pretender Should Come? 
 
 5. Didacticism Moral Aim. "Defoe professes to 
 write always with a moral and even with a religious pur- 
 pose." Dennis. 
 
 " It must be admitted that Defoe tacks some kind of moral 
 to stories which show no great delicacy of moral feeling." 
 Leslie Stephen. 
 
 " However we regard his life, we see only prolonged efforts 
 and persecutions. Joy seems to be wanting ; the idea of the 
 beautiful never enters. When he comes to fiction, it is like a 
 Presbyterian and a plebeian, with low subjects and moral aims, 
 to treat of the adventures and reform the conduct of thieves 
 and prostitutes, workmen and sailors. His whole delight was 
 to think that he had a service to perform and that he was per- 
 forming it." Taine. 
 
 " Another universal feature of his fiction is the pure and 
 pleasing morality constantly exhibited in the incident and 
 reinforced by the reflections of the author. " Walter Wilson. 
 ii
 
 162 DEFOE 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " By this we may see what share fortune has in the greatest 
 events. In all probability the Earl of Peterborrow had never 
 engaged in such a dangerous affair, in cold blood and unprovoked ; 
 and if such an enterprise had been resolved on in a regular way, 
 it is very likely he might have given the command to some of the 
 general officers : since it is not usual nor hardly allowable for one 
 that commands in chief to go in person on such kind of services." 
 Memoirs of Captain Carleton, 
 
 " As I knew nothing, that night, of the supply I was to receive 
 by the providential driving of the ship nearer the land by the 
 storms and tide, by which I have since been so long nourished 
 and supported, so these three poor desolate men knew nothing 
 how certain of deliverance and supply they were, how near it was 
 to them, and how effectually and really they were in a condition 
 of safety, at the same time that they thought themselves lost and 
 their case desperate. So little do we see before us in the world, 
 and so much reason have we to depend cheerfully upon the great 
 Maker of the world that He does not leave His creatures so abso- 
 lutely destitute but that, in the worst circumstances, they have 
 always something to be thankful for and sometimes are nearer 
 deliverance than they imagine ; nay, are even brought to their 
 deliverance by the means by which they seem to be brought to 
 their destruction." Robinson Crusoe. 
 
 " I must testify, from my experience, that a temper of peace, 
 thankfulness, love, and affection, is much the more proper frame 
 for prayer than that of terror and discomposure ; and that under 
 the dread of mischief impending a man is no more fit for a com- 
 forting performance of the duty of praying to God than he is for 
 a repentance on a sick bed ; for these discomposures affect the 
 mind, as the others do the body : and the discomposure of the 
 mind must necessarily be as great a disability as that of the body, 
 and much greater ; praying to God being properly an act of the 
 mind, not of the body." Robinson Crusoe.
 
 DEFOE 163 
 
 6. Worldly Wisdom Sagacity. " Sound common 
 sense and shrewd observation dressed in a lively and a fascinat- 
 ing style are the characteristics of his work." British Quar- 
 terly. 
 
 " This ['A Serious Inquiry into the Question of Conformity 
 of Dissenters'] evinces much good sense, couched in forcible 
 yet becoming language. As a piece of serious argument it is 
 irresistible ; and the adroitness with which he manages it 
 shows that he was a master of human nature no less than of his 
 subject. . . . His sentiments upon most subjects are dis- 
 tinguished by good sense and a profound acquaintance with 
 human nature." Walter Wilson. 
 
 " He displays especial subtlety in tracing the gradual growth 
 of an opinion, or a purpose, from its first suggestion to its full 
 development. This power meets us in all his work." Minto. 
 
 " In all his books we find a knowledge of different types of 
 society, especially among the lower classes, such as has, perhaps, 
 never been attained by any [other] writer." H. J. Nicott. 
 
 " His intense love for facts and his very accurate and com- 
 prehensive knowledge and wide experience of the world of 
 men, made him of all writers the one most able to give a true 
 picture. " National Review. 
 
 " The great peculiarity of the work [' Robinson Crusoe '] 
 is its immense display of worldly wisdom, and its wide and 
 varied representation of the interests, motives, rewards, and 
 considerations whereby men are actuated to their welfare or 
 their sorrow." Chambers's Papers for the People. See Lit- 
 tcir s Living Age. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " Here we may observe, and I hope it will not be amiss to 
 take notice of it, that a near view of death would soon reconcile 
 men of good principles one to another, and that it is chiefly ow- 
 ing to our easy situation in life and our putting these things far 
 from us that our breaches are fomented, ill blood continued,
 
 I 64 DEFOE 
 
 prejudices, breach of charity, and of Christian union so much 
 kept and so far carried on among us as it is : another plague 
 year would reconcile all these differences ; a close conversing with 
 death, or with diseases that threaten death, would scum off the 
 gaul from our tempers, remove the animosities among us, and 
 bring us to see with differing eyes than those which we looked 
 on things with before." The Plague in London. 
 
 " Nay, so eager was the prince for fighting that when, from 
 the top of Edgehill, the enemy's army was descried in the bottom 
 between them and the village of Keynton, and that the enemy 
 had bid us defiance by discharging three cannons, we accepted 
 the challenge, and answering with two shots from our army, we 
 must needs forsake the advantage of the hills, which they must 
 have mounted under the command of our cannon, and march 
 down to them into the plain. I confess I thought here was a 
 great deal more gallantry than discretion ; for it was plain tak- 
 ing an advantage out of our hands and putting it into the hands 
 of the enemy. An enemy that must fight may always be fought 
 with to advantage. My old hero, the glorious Gustavus Adol- 
 phus, was as forward to fight as any man of true valour, mixt 
 with any policy, need to be or ought to be ; but he used to say 
 an enemy reduced to a necessity of fighting is half beaten." 
 Memoirs of a Cavalier, 
 
 "A tradesman behind his counter must have no flesh and 
 blood about him, no passions, no resentment ; he must never 
 be angry no, not so much as seem to be so, if a customer 
 troubles him five hundred pounds' worth of goods, and scarce 
 bids money for anything ; nay, though they really come to his shop 
 with no intent to buy, as many do, only to see what is to be sold, 
 and though he knows they cannot be better pleased than they 
 are at some other shop where they intend to buy, 'tis all one ; 
 the tradesman must take it, he must place it to the account of 
 his calling that 'tis his business to be ill used and resent noth- 
 ing ; and so must answer as obligingly to those who give him an 
 hour or two's trouble and buy nothing as he does to those who, 
 in half the time, lay out ten or twenty pounds. The case is 
 plain ; and if some do give him trouble, and do not buy, others 
 make amends, and do buy ; and as for the trouble, 'tis the busi- 
 ness of the shop." The Complete English Tradesman.
 
 DEFOE 165 
 
 7. Sincerity Independence. " There were few 
 braver men in England ; and hardly any were less in bond- 
 age to the opinions of their neighbors, for he passed a life of 
 danger and hardship solely in consequence of his determina- 
 tion to think and act for himself on every possible occasion ; 
 nor has any writer thought for himself with more persistency 
 or stamped his own character more vigorously on every one 
 of his own productions." Chambers's Papers for the People. 
 See Litteir s Living Age. 
 
 " All of them [his works] bear the traces of a sincere, 
 earnest, manly character and of an understanding unusually 
 active, penetrating, and well-informed." G. L. Craik. 
 
 " There is evidence from his writings that he early dis- 
 covered that spirit of independence which terminated in an 
 unconquerable love of liberty. His was a soul of iron in a 
 casement of adamant. His principles were of the sternest 
 character, and the mind which formed them was not to be 
 deterred from avowing them by suffering or reproach." 
 Walter Wilson. 
 
 ''A spirit of integrity and candor, a desire to see fair 
 play and to do justice to all parties in a word, the spirit of 
 common sense and common honesty runs through all Defoe's 
 w r i t i ngs . " Hazlitt. 
 
 " He was a brave, active man, who saw things as they were 
 and said what he thought ; a man battling for liberty, who 
 fought with a wrong-doer, whether friend or foe ; the Ishmael 
 of political writing." George Dawson. 
 
 " He worked for causes of which he really approved ; he 
 never sacrificed the opinion to which he was most deeply at- 
 tached." L eslie Stcph en . 
 
 "The great charm of his fiction is its truth. His convic- 
 tions were grave, his observation minute, and his experience 
 of life painful, but conscience and intelligence were pro- 
 foundly active. . . . He was too independent and too 
 much in advance of his time not to be essentially apart from
 
 1 66 DEFOE 
 
 those who were ostensibly near and around him. He was 
 driven into the entrenchments of conscience. Like all bold 
 and individual thinkers, he was often alone." H. T. Tuck- 
 erman. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " The story of those three men, if the reader will be content 
 to have me give it in their own persons, without taking upon me 
 to either vouch the particulars or answer for any mistakes, I 
 shall give as distinctly as I can ; believing the history will be a 
 very good pattern for any poor man to follow, in case the like 
 public desolation should happen here ; and if there may be no 
 such occasion, which God in his infinite mercy grant us, still the 
 story may have its uses so many ways as that it will, I hope, 
 never be said that the relating has been unprofitable." The 
 Plague in London. 
 
 " The prodigious stupid bigotry of the people also was irksome 
 to me ; I thought there was something in it very sordid. The en- 
 tire empire the priests have over both the souls and bodies of 
 the people gave me a specimen of that meanness of spirit which 
 is nowhere else to be seen in Italy, especially in the city of 
 Rome. ... It must forever be against them as a brand of 
 infamy and as a reproach on their whole nation, that, purchased 
 by the Parliament's money, they sold their honesty, and rebelled 
 against their king for hire ; and it was not many years before, as 
 I have said already, they were fully paid the wages of their un- 
 righteousness and chastised for their treachery by the very same 
 people whom they thus basely assisted ; then they would have 
 retrieved it, if it had not been too late." Memoirs of a Cavalier. 
 
 8. Graphic Description. Defoe excels in single de- 
 scriptive touches. This quality includes something more than 
 that of minuteness, already discussed. It involves a concep- 
 tion of relations as well as of details ; a feeling for the pict- 
 uresque. Defoe carefully observes the cardinal principles of 
 description as since formulated by Bain ; that is, he pre- 
 sents, at the outset, a comprehensive view of the whole scene ; 
 he conveys definite ideas of size, shape, etc., by comparison
 
 DEFOE 167 
 
 with well-known objects, and he often uses " the panoramic 
 view " with great skill. 
 
 ''It is worthy of remark that he observes the cardinal rule 
 of description, the inaugural presentation of a comprehensive 
 view. He fills in the picture by degrees, but he begins by 
 drawing a comprehensive outline. . . . As is testified 
 by every page of his writings, Defoe excelled in the graphic 
 presentation both of concrete things and states of mind." 
 Minto. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " You ascend the great staircase at the upper end of the hall, 
 which is very large ; at the foot of the staircase you have a Bac- 
 chus as large as life, done in Peloponnesian marble, carrying a 
 young Bacchus on his arm, the young one eating grapes and let- 
 ting you see by his countenance that he is pleased with the taste 
 of them." From London to Land's End. 
 
 " He was a comely, handsome fellow, perfectly well made, 
 with straight strong limbs, not too large ; tall and well-shaped, 
 and, as I reckon, about twenty-six years of age. He had a very 
 good countenance, not a fierce and surly aspect, but seemed to 
 have something very manly in his face, and yet he had all the 
 sweetness and softness of an European in his countenance too, 
 especially when he smiled. His hair was long and black, not 
 curled like wool ; his forehead very high and large, and a great 
 vivacity and sparkling sharpness in his eyes." Robinson Crusoe. 
 
 "On Friday, the 26th of November, in the afternoon, about 
 four of the clock, a country fellow came running to me in a great 
 fright, and very earnestly entreated me to go and see a pillar, as 
 he called it, in the air, in a field hard by. I went with the fel- 
 low : and when I came, found it to be a spout marching directly 
 with the wind : and I can think of nothing I can compare it to 
 better than the trunk of an elephant, which it resembled, only 
 much bigger. It was extended to a great length, and swept the 
 ground as it went, leaving a mark behind. It crossed a field ; 
 and what was very strange (and which I should scarce have been 
 induced to believe had I not myself seen it, besides several 
 country-men who were astonished at it) meeting with an oak 
 that stood towards the middle of the field, snapped the body of 
 it asunder." The Storm.
 
 SWIFT, 1667-1745 
 
 Biographical Outline. Jonathan Swift, born No- 
 vember 30, 1667, at Dublin; his father, who died before 
 Swift's birth, was steward of the King's Inns, and was de- 
 scended from an old loyalist family ; mother distantly related 
 to Dryden ; when one year old Swift was kidnapped by his 
 nurse, out of affection, and was carried to her home at White 
 Haven, England, where his mother allowed him to remain 
 for three years ; by his third year he could read any chapter 
 in the Bible ; soon after the child was brought back to Dub- 
 lin, his mother removed to Leicester and left him in the hands 
 of an uncle, who sent him, in his sixth year, to Kilkenny 
 School, then called " the Eton of Ireland ; " here Swift finds 
 Congreve as a school-fellow ; Swift enters Trinity College, 
 Dublin, April 24, 1682 ; he manifests an aversion to the 
 scholastic metaphysics, neglects the regular studies of the cur- 
 riculum for history and poetry, and, though living regularly 
 and obeying the university statutes, is refused a degree at the 
 expiration of his regular four years' course ; he seems to have 
 obtained a fair knowledge of the classics ; he continues in 
 residence at the university for some time, and eventually re- 
 ceives his degree of A.B., but grows somewhat reckless and 
 dissipated after the degree is first refused ; he is frequently 
 censured by the college authorities for neglecting to attend 
 chapel services and for haunting the town ; on November 20, 
 1688, he is suspended for inciting dissension and for insulting 
 the dean ; while at Trinity he receives much-needed financial 
 aid from his brother, Willoughby Swift, and from his uncle, 
 William Swift ; he is deeply affected by his poverty and his 
 sense of dependence, and this is doubtless one of the causes 
 
 1 68
 
 SWIFT 169 
 
 of his life-long bitterness ; on the accession of King William 
 in 1688, Swift flees from Ireland with other Jacobites and 
 finds refuge in his mother's home at Leicester, where she was 
 ''rich and happy on twenty pounds a year ; " in spite of her 
 neglect during his infancy, he was deeply devoted to his 
 mother; after seeking a means of livelihood for some time 
 vainly, he is received into the family of Sir William Tem- 
 ple at Moor Park, near Farnham, in Surrey, whither Temple 
 had retired after his brilliant diplomatic career ; Temple had 
 been a friend of Swift's grandfather, and was distantly related 
 to Swift by marriage; after acting for a year as Temple's 
 amanuensis, during which time Swift is said to have been 
 treated somewhat as a menial, he returns to Ireland for a 
 short time, on the advice of a physician, "who weakly im- 
 agined that his native air might be of some use to recover his 
 health ; " he bears a letter from Temple to the Secretary of 
 State for Ireland, in Dublin, recommending Swift for a clerk- 
 ship or a fellowship in Trinity College ; he soon returns to 
 Moor Park, where Temple discovers his real ability and com- 
 mends him to King William; Swift visits Oxford in 1692, 
 and receives A.M. ad eundem ; in 1693 he is employed by 
 Temple to explain to William's ministers Temple's views on 
 the Triennial Bill ; about 1693 he begins his earlier poems, 
 which are marked by great satirical vigor ; he predicts his 
 future in the couplet : 
 
 " My hate, whose lash just Heaven has long decreed 
 Shall on a day make sin and folly bleed ; " 
 
 in May, 1694, Swift declines an offer of ^120 a year to act 
 as a clerk in the office of the Master of the Rolls in Ireland, 
 and quarrels with Temple ; after swallowing his pride suffi- 
 ciently to ask from Temple a needful letter of recommenda- 
 tion, he is ordained a deacon, October 28, 1694, and a priest, 
 January 15, 1695 ; he at once receives the small prebend of 
 Kilroot, worth ^100 a year, but he soon tires of the obscure
 
 1 70 SWIFT 
 
 life, returns to Moor Park in May, 1696, and resigns his pre- 
 bend to a friend in March, 1698 ; before leaving Kilroot 
 Swift declares love passionately to one Miss Waring (" Va- 
 rina "), an Irish lady, sister of an old college chum, but his 
 suit is not encouraged ; he remains at Moor Park, acting as 
 Temple's clerk, till Temple's death in 1699; he becomes a 
 great walker, sometimes doing thirty-eight miles in a day and 
 lodging at way -side inns, where, according to Orrery, Swift 
 imbibed much of his coarseness of language from the discourse 
 of the wagoners ; while at Moor Park he reads diligently in 
 the Latin classics, history, and philosophy ; he also acts as 
 tutor to Esther Johnson, a dependent of Temple's, unjustly 
 suspected at the time of being Temple's natural daughter ; 
 on Temple's death he leaves to Swift ^100, the privilege of 
 editing Temple's posthumous works (worth perhaps ^200), 
 and a recommendation of preferment to King William ; the 
 recommendation proves of little value ; Swift began his liter- 
 ary career by writing certain " Pindaric Odes," the last dated 
 1691, one of which caused Dryden to say to him, " You will 
 never be a poet ; " Swift also writes poetical epistles to Con- 
 greve and Temple ; in 1696 he writes " The Tale of a Tub " 
 and in 1697 "The Battle of the Books," but both remain 
 unpublished till 1704 ; in 1708, to prove that in his " Tale 
 of a Tub" he had not intended to express sympathy with 
 the current infidelity, he publishes " An Argument in Favor 
 of Abolishing Christianity in England," intensely satirical; 
 in a similar strain was his " Mr. Collins's Discourse of Free- 
 thinking," published in 1713; in 1698, failing to secure 
 preferment from King William (perhaps because the courtier 
 to whom Swift entrusted his petition failed to deliver it), he 
 becomes chaplain and secretary to the Earl of Berkeley, then 
 just made one of the Lords Justices of Ireland ; on reaching 
 Dublin the earl dismisses Swift in favor of another man ; he 
 applies for the vacant deanery of Derry, but is refused by the 
 secretary except on the presentation of a bribe
 
 SWIFT i;i 
 
 the amount that had been offered by another candidate ; 
 Swift is either unable or unwilling to pay the bribe ; in Feb- 
 ruary, 1700, he receives the living of Laracor, a village near 
 Trim, twenty miles from Dublin ; this, with two other small 
 livings and a prebend in the Cathedral of St. Patrick, give 
 him an income of about ^230 a year ; at this time " Varina ' ' 
 (Miss Waring), whom Swift had frequently importuned to 
 marry him, expresses a wish to have the marriage take place ; 
 he refuses in a letter remarkable for its insulting brutality, in 
 which he offers to marry the lady on conditions that her self- 
 respect compel her to refuse; on Temple's death in 1699, 
 leaving Esther Johnson (then become an attractive girl of 
 twenty) homeless and with an inheritance of an Irish farm, 
 Swift suggests to her that, with her friend Mrs. Dingley, she 
 settle in Ireland, where she could live more cheaply; the 
 ladies comply with the suggestion and settle in Dublin, in 
 lodgings near those of Swift, sometimes occupying his apart- 
 ments during his absence ; twice they accompany him on 
 visits to London ; their relationship to him gives rise to nu- 
 merous scandals, but there is good evidence that he never 
 saw Miss Johnson except in the presence of a third person ; 
 Swift's duties at Laracor were light, consisting of the reading 
 of prayers twice a week to an audience averaging not over 
 fifteen persons ; he becomes attached to Laracor, and greatly 
 improves the living ; he is on friendly social terms with the 
 successive Lord-Lieutenants Berkeley, Ormond, and Pem- 
 broke, conducting a long correspondence with Lady Berkeley 
 and acting as chaplain to Ormond and Pembroke ; between 
 1700 and 1710 he seems to have passed at least four years in 
 London, sometimes acting as agent for the Church of Ireland 
 and meeting many great people through his acquaintance 
 with the Irish viceroys and with Congreve ; in 1705 he be- 
 comes intimate with Addison, who greatly admires and pub- 
 licly praises him; Swift manifests a strange indifference to 
 literary fame ; while in London, early in 1708, he writes the
 
 172 SWIFT 
 
 famous Bickerstaff papers, ridiculing one Partridge, who had 
 set up as an astrologer, and thus suggesting to Steele, who was 
 just starting the Tatler, his pseudonym ; though intimate 
 with the great wits and great statesmen of the day, Swift gets 
 " nothing but the good words and good wishes of a decayed 
 ministry ; " in 1701 he publishes his first political pamphlet, 
 being a defence of Somers and other Whig ministers, recently 
 impeached, under the title A Discourse on the Dissensions 
 in Athens and Rome ; the pamphlet becomes very popular, 
 and secures for Swift the friendship of Halifax, Somers, Sun- 
 derland, and the other leading Whigs ; in November, 1707, 
 he goes to London and attempts to secure for the Irish 
 Church a restoration of the " first fruits and tenths," taken 
 from the whole Church by Henry VIII., and already returned 
 to the English Church by Queen Anne ; he remains in Lon- 
 don till March, 1709 ; during 1708 Somers tries in vain to 
 secure for Swift the vacant bishopric of Waterford ; in Oc- 
 tober, 1708, Somers becomes President of the Council, and 
 Wharton, a licentious infidel, is made Lord-Lieutenant of Ire- 
 land ; about this time Swift shows his attachment to the 
 Church by publishing his pamphlets, A Project for the Ad- 
 vancement of Religion and The Sentiments of a Church of 
 England Man ; in December, 1708, he publishes a pamphlet 
 defending the Test Act ; all these pamphlets displeased the 
 Whigs, then in power, who were inclined to favor the dissent- 
 ers ; Swift is at last promised the "first fruits" that he 
 sought for the Irish Church, but the promise is not fulfilled ; 
 in the spring of 1709, after visiting his mother at Leicester, 
 he retires to Laracor, sick in mind and body ; he remains for 
 eighteen months in seclusion at Laracor, nourishing his indig- 
 nation against the Whigs, and especially against Wharton ; on 
 the overthrow of the Whigs in September, 1709, he starts 
 again for London to urge his " first fruits " appeal ; he be- 
 gins his famous "Journal to Stella" (letters written to Esther 
 Johnson and Mrs. Dingley) in September, 1710, and con-
 
 SWIFT 1/3 
 
 tinues it till April, 1713; it was evidently written with no 
 thought of publication ; he is received in London by the 
 defeated Whig leaders with marked attentions, but he responds 
 coldly; on October 10, 1710, he is introduced to Harley, 
 one of the new Tory leaders, and is cordially received ; with- 
 in a week Harley promises to get the " first fruits " business 
 settled at once, and all the Tory leaders express delight at 
 securing Swift's support ; the " first fruits" are granted No- 
 vember 14, 1710; Swift becomes intimate with Harley and 
 St. John, and is consulted on the most important official af- 
 fairs ; he indignantly rejects an offer of money-payment for 
 his services ; from November 2, 1710, to June 14, 1711, he 
 writes weekly articles for St. John's Tory paper, the Exam- 
 iner ; these papers contain some of his fiercest satire, and 
 their influence is tremendous ; during the election of 1711 he 
 wages a fierce pamphlet war with the Whig pamphleteers ; in 
 November, 1711, he publishes The Conduct of the Allies, of 
 which n,ooo copies are sold within two months ; the Tories 
 are victorious in December, 1711, and Swift reaches the 
 height of his political power, but his health is seriously af- 
 fected by his old complaint of dizziness ; he secures many 
 appointments for friends and other applicants, but refuses to 
 ask for preferment for himself; at last he declares that he 
 will write nothing more till something is done for him, and 
 on April 23, 1713, he is appointed dean of St. Patrick's 
 Cathedral at Dublin ; he leaves London for Dublin in June, 
 1713, is ordained, and remains at his post till October, when, 
 on the appeal of his Tory friends, he returns to London ; he 
 endeavors to save the Tory cause by reconciling the growing 
 differences between the leaders Harley and St. John ; late in 
 1713 he publishes a scathing pamphlet, attacking Bishop Bur- 
 net, and also his Public Spirit of the Whigs ; in the latter he 
 attacks Steele, who had entered Parliament and had opposed 
 Swift's party in a pamphlet called the Crisis; meanwhile 
 Swift had quarrelled with Addison because, after Steele had
 
 1/4 SWIFT 
 
 lost his place as Gazetteer and after Swift had obtained a 
 promise of reinstatement on condition of an apology by Steele 
 to Harley for certain things in the Crisis, Addison advised 
 Steele not to apologize ; good feeling was afterward restored 
 between Swift and Addison, but Swift never became recon- 
 ciled to Steele; in 1714 Steele was expelled from the House 
 for his authorship of the Crisis ; in May, 1714, having failed 
 to reconcile Harley and St. John, Swift retires to a parsonage 
 at Upper Letcombe, in Berkshire ; he refuses all appeals to 
 return to London, but writes, without publishing, his pam- 
 phlet entitled Free Thoughts upon the Present State of Af- 
 fairs ; although Oxford had not treated Swift well, Swift 
 thrice writes to him, urging a course that would have saved 
 Oxford ; on the death of Queen Anne and the expulsion of 
 Oxford, in August, 1714, Swift returns to Dublin and shuts 
 himself up with his chagrin and political despair ; in a letter 
 to Oxford he offers to join him in the Tower ; he continues 
 to affect brutality, especially toward women, issuing regular 
 edicts, commanding all ladies who seek his acquaintance to 
 make the first advances ; before the time of the ' ' Journal to 
 Stella" she had refused as a suitor one Tisdall, a Dublin 
 clergyman, whom Swift did not regard with favor ; certain 
 passages in Swift's letters indicate that he was somewhat jeal- 
 ous of Tisdall 's attentions to "Stella; " in 1708 he meets, 
 in London, Mrs. Van Homrigh, a well-to-do widow, and her 
 daughter Hester, then aged seventeen; in 1710 he takes 
 lodgings with the Van Homrighs and becomes a member of 
 the family ; about the time of obtaining his deanery he be- 
 gins to call Hester Van Homrigh " Vanessa " and to make a 
 confidante of her; in his autobiographical poem " Cadenus 
 (Decanus, or the Dean) and Vanessa " he asserts that he re- 
 garded her simply with fatherly affection, but she soon de- 
 clared to him that he had won her heart ; he replied that his 
 age, etc., put love out of the question, but offered her unlim- 
 ited friendship ; on the death of Miss Van Homrigh's mother,
 
 SWIFT 175 
 
 soon after thp final retirement of Swift to Ireland, the young 
 lady also retires to Ireland, with her sister, and eventually 
 settles at Celbridge, near Dublin ; Swift shuns the company of 
 " Vanessa," who adores him passionately, and he begs her to 
 leave him forever ; it is believed by some of his biographers 
 that his dilemma was due to the fact that he had been secretly 
 married to " Stella" in 1716, but this remains neither proved 
 nor disproved at least, he was most anxious to prevent a 
 meeting between " his two slaves ; " in 1723 " Vanessa " is 
 said to have written to " Stella," asking if she were Swift's 
 wife, and " Stella" is said to have replied in the affirmative 
 and to have shown "Vanessa's" letter to Swift; he rides 
 to Celbridge, confronts "Vanessa" with the letter, and she 
 dies soon afterward, first revoking her will, in which she had 
 made him sole legatee, and after requesting her executors to 
 publish both Swift's letters and his autobiographical poem 
 " Cadenus and Vanessa ; " he visits England in the summer 
 of 1726, but is made w r retched by the reports of " Stella's " 
 declining health ; he spends the winter in Dublin, and re- 
 turns to London during the summer of 1727 ; " Stella " dies 
 at Dublin January 28, 1728 ; the story, widely circulated, 
 that on her death-bed she refused Swift's offer to make their 
 marriage public, is not sustained, neither is the equally prev- 
 alent story that he discovered her to be his natural sister ; 
 Swift's apologists explain his refusal to marry on the ground of 
 his natural coldness of temper, his extreme economy, practised 
 with a view to becoming independent, his chronic malady 
 of vertigo, and his frequent forebodings of insanity ; after 
 withdrawing from politics for ten years he publishes, in 1724, 
 his " Drapier's Letters," combating a scheme of Walpole's for 
 giving to one Wood a monopoly of copper coinage in Ire- 
 land ; the effect of the " Letters " is tremendous, and the Privy 
 Council modifies the terms of the monopoly ; ^300 are offered 
 as a reward for the arrest of the author, and the printer is 
 prosecuted ; the monopoly soon fails entirely, and Swift be-
 
 1/6 SWIFT 
 
 comes a popular idol; on his return from England, in 1726, 
 he is greeted with public honors such as are generally re- 
 served for princes; about 1727 he makes a long visit to Pope, 
 meets Bolingbroke and Wai pole, and receives some assurances 
 of court favor, which are not fulfilled ; he now speaks of re- 
 maining in Dublin as " dying like a poisoned rat in a hole ; " 
 he warmly defends the Church, and writes his fiercest satire, 
 " The Legion Club," when Parliament proposes to invade 
 Church privileges; while writing this he is seized with a fit, 
 and is soon incapable of extended mental effort ; in 1729 he 
 writes A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor 
 People in Ireland from Becoming a Burden to their Parents 
 or the Country ; as early as 1713-14 he had formed, with 
 Pope, Gay, and Arbuthnot, the Scriblerus Club, whose ob- 
 ject was the production of a joint stock satire ; this seems to 
 have been the origin of the idea of "Gulliver's Travels; " 
 Swift wrote a part of the "Travels" as early as 1722, com- 
 pleted it in 1726, and published it anonymously in 1727 ; 
 its success was overwhelming ; after its publication he returns 
 to his "wretched dirty dog-hole of a prison," becomes the 
 centre of a little intellectual circle, practises the most gener- 
 ous charity, grows daily more sour and apparently avaricious, 
 befriends Sheridan, and, by 1741, becomes so violently insane 
 as to require restraint ; during his later years he amused him- 
 self with writing acrostics, riddles, etc. ; his last writings worth 
 noting are " Polite Conversation," " Directions to Servants " 
 (the latter published after Swift became imbecile), and three 
 poems: "Verses on Dr. Swift's Death," "A Rhapsody on 
 Poetry," and "Verses to a Lady;" in 1735 he declared 
 that he never had received a farthing for anything he wrote 
 except that, through Pope's prudent management, he got 
 ^200 for "Gulliver;" he gave the profits of his other 
 writings to the publishers; he died at Dublin, October 19, 
 1745, and left ^12,000 to found St. Patrick's Hospital, 
 which was opened in 1757 with fifty beds.
 
 SWIFT 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY ON SWIFT'S STYLE. 
 
 Gosse, E. , " History of English Literature." New York, 1868, Mac- 
 millan, 140-167. 
 
 Jeffrey, J., " Jonathan Swift. " London, 1853, Longmans, Green & Co., 
 v., index. 
 
 Craik, H., "Life of Jonathafc Swift." London, 1882, Macmillan, v., 
 index. 
 
 Philips, M. G., " Manual of English Literature." New York, 1893, 
 Harper, I : 533~5 6 3- 
 
 Thackeray, W. M., "The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Cen- 
 tury." London, 1886, Smith, Elder & Co. , 119-155. 
 
 Johnson, S., " The Lives of the Poets (Works)." New York, 1846, 
 Harper, I : 211-223; 3 : 1-25. 
 
 Minto, W., " English Prose Literature. " Edinburgh, 1886, Blackwood, 
 
 36I-377- 
 Taine, H. A., "History of English Literature." New York, 1875, 
 
 Holt, 2 : 352-392, and v. index. 
 Morley, H. (Stephen), "English Men of Letters (Swift)." New York, 
 
 1879, Harper. 
 Hazlitt, W., "Lectures on the English Poets." London, 1884, G. Bell 
 
 & Sons, 145-152. 
 Collier, W. F., " History of English Literature." London, 1892, Nelson, 
 
 282-288. 
 Hannay, J., "Satire and Satirists." New York, 1855, Redfield, 130- 
 
 I5i- 
 
 Masson, D., "British Novelists." Boston, 1892, W. Small, 87-106. 
 Forster, T., " Life of Jonathan Swift. " New York, 1876, Harper. 
 Nicoll, H. J., " Landmarks of English Literature." New York, 1883, 
 
 Appleton, 162-170. 
 
 Masson, D., " Three Devils, " etc. London, 1874, Macmillan, 235-301. 
 Hunt, T. W., "Representative English Prose." New York, 1887, 
 
 Armstrong, 265-287. 
 
 Hallam, H., "Literature of Europe." New York, 1847, Harper, 419. 
 Craik, G. L., "History of English Literature." New York, 1869, 
 
 Scribner, 208-239. 
 De Quincey, T., "Works." Edinburgh, 1890, C. & A. Black, II. 
 
 12-19. 
 
 Eagle, J., "Essays." Edinburgh, 1857, Blackwood, 213-264. 
 Coan, T. M., " Topics of the Times. " New York, 1883, Putnam, 2: 
 
 12
 
 178 SWIFT 
 
 Dilke. C. W., "Papers of a Critic." London, 1875, Murray, I: 
 
 361-382. 
 Bascom, J., "The Philosophy of English Literature." New York, 
 
 1877, Putnam, 178. 
 Knight, Charles, "Gallery of Portraits." London, 1835, C. Knight, 
 
 5= 45-52- 
 Wilson, J., " Studies of Modern Mind and Character." London, 1881, 
 
 Longmans, Green & Co., 69-116. 
 Ward, T. H. (Nichol), " English Poets." New York, 1881, Macmillan, 
 
 3= 34-39- 
 Dawson, G., "Biographical Lectures.", London, 1887, Kegan Paul, 
 
 Trench & Co., 141-159. 
 
 Russell, W. C., "Book of Authors." London, n. d., Warne, v., index. 
 Timbs, J., "Wits and Humourists." London, 1872, R. Bentley, 2: 
 
 1-121. 
 
 L'Estrange, A. G., "History of English Humour." London, 1878, 
 
 Hurst & Blackett, 2 : 44-62. 
 Howitt, William, " Homes and Haunts of British Authors. " New York, 
 
 1863, Routledge, 116-140. 
 Wilde, Lady, " Notes on Men," etc. London, 1891, Ward & Downey, 
 
 85-112. 
 Hay, Jos., "Jonathan Swift the Mystery of his Life and Love." 
 
 London, 1891, Chapman & Hall. 
 The Nation, 22 : 248-250 and 265-267 (Lowell). 
 British Quarterly Review, 20: 528-560 (Masson). 
 Gentleman's Magazine, 17: 436-456 (C. C. Clark). 
 The Athenaum, 1886 (i): 96-97 (S. L. Poole). 
 Dublin University Magazine, 33: 374-381 (W. R. Wilde); 15: 634- 
 
 661. 
 
 I'nitarian Revino, II: 233-247 (N. P. Gilman). 
 Edinburgh Re^'iew, 28: 1-58 (Jeffrey). 
 
 Southern Literary Messenger, 15 : 141-147 (H. T. Tuckerman). 
 North American Review, 106: 68-128 (A. S. Hill). 
 Comhill Magazine, 33 : 172-183. 
 Eclectic Afagazine, 28 : 83-91. 
 North British Review, 1 1 : 337-368.
 
 SWIFT 179 
 
 PARTICULAR CHARACTERISTICS. 
 
 I. Caustic Satire Impatience of Absurdity 
 Ferocious Sarcasm. Sarcasm is Swift's favorite weapon, 
 and in its use he is without a peer. T. W. Hunt calls him " the 
 lord of irony; " Minto declares that "nobody can pretend 
 to dispute his title of the prince of English satirists ; his 
 mastery of language for the purposes of ridicule is universally 
 allowed to be unsurpassed. His similitudes never elevate a 
 subject except in irony. He exempts from his ridicule no 
 profession, no foible, hardly any institution, hardly any 
 character." Dr. Johnson calls his " Argument against Abol- 
 ishing Christianity " "a. very happy and judicious irony." 
 This is too mild a term to apply to most of Swift's 
 works, but it must be said, in fairness, that his biting satire is 
 generally without malice. He scourges with a whip of scor- 
 pions, but he generally scourges with a good end in view. He 
 sometimes hated men, but he hated dishonesty and meanness 
 and injustice more. 
 
 " He is the fiercest and, take him all in all, the greatest of 
 all the satirists. . . . He is the greatest of the English 
 satirists, I think, in all ways. . . . His satire goes very 
 deep ; it is not only a bitter satire against individuals, it is 
 philosophical satire, which goes to the root of things." J. 
 Hannay. 
 
 " The ludicrous in Swift arises out of his keen sense of 
 impropriety, his soreness and impatience of the least ab- 
 surdity. . . . He sets a mark of reprobation on that 
 which offends good sense and good manners, which cannot 
 be mistaken and which holds it up to our ridicule and con- 
 tempt ever after." Hazlitt. 
 
 "'The Battle of the Books' strikes an entirely different 
 chord. Its object is satire, not criticism. . . . Like
 
 180 SWIFT 
 
 all the satire that Swift ever wrote, it goes directly to the 
 point by its personal reference. . . . No weapon of 
 sarcasm is neglected [in the ' Tale of a Tub '] and, after the 
 ground has been mapped out and the general positions assigned, 
 each new illustration, each subordinate metaphor, seems to 
 give some new point to the ridicule. . . . Satire such as 
 this reaches far beyond the accidents of ecclesiastical con- 
 troversies, beyond the realm even of literary cliques ; it pur- 
 sues human nature, and routs it put from all its subterfuges 
 and disguises. ... In ' Brobdingnag ' the satire never 
 allows itself to be forgotten long. . . . His sarcasm was 
 too fierce to allow him to become a theoretical reformer. 
 What strikes us most in the political tracts is the deliberate 
 incisiveness of their irony, the despairing bitterness that gives 
 them finish and completeness." G. L. Craik. 
 
 " He moves laughter but never joins it. He appears in 
 his works as he appears in society. All the company are con- 
 vulsed with merriment, while the Dean, the author of all the 
 mirth, preserves an invincible gravity and even sourness of 
 aspect, and gives utterance to the most eccentric and ludicrous 
 fancies with the air of a man reading the Commination Ser- 
 vice.' ' Macaulay. 
 
 " Each of these treatises [' The Battle of the Books ' and 
 the ' Mechanical Operation of the Spirit '] shows a great free- 
 dom from prejudice, a boundless impatience of humbug and 
 pretension, and a savage touch which is all the more brutal 
 because of the delicacy, keenness, and power of sympathy of 
 which the author shows himself inherently capable upon every 
 page. . . . Dean Swift could write finely on a broom- 
 stick, and not finely merely, but with the most caustic and 
 fatal pungency." Edmund Gosse. 
 
 " Swift, in his fictions, as in the rest of his writings, is the 
 British satirist of his age. ... In all that he said and 
 did there was a vein of ferocious irony. ... In the 
 ' Battle of the Books ' we have a satire directed partly against
 
 SWIFT l8l 
 
 individuals and partly against a prevailing tone of opinion and 
 criticism. In the ' Tale of a Tub ' he appears as a satirist of 
 the existing Christian churches. . . . The author of these 
 books could not but be acknowledged as the first prose satirist 
 of the age." David Masson. 
 
 "He was, without exception, the greatest and most effi- 
 cient libeller that ever exercised the trade, and possessed 
 in an eminent degree all the qualifications which it requires 
 a clear head, a cold heart, a vindictive temper, no ad- 
 miration of noble qualities, no sympathy with suffering, 
 not much conscience, not much consistency, a ready wit, a 
 sarcastic humor, a thorough knowledge of the baser parts of 
 human nature, and a complete familiarity with everything 
 that is low, homely, and familiar in language. These were his 
 gifts, and he soon felt for what ends they were given. Almost 
 all his works are libels generally upon individuals, sometimes 
 upon sects and parties, sometimes upon human nature. What- 
 ever be his end, however, personal abuse direct, vehement, 
 unsparing invective is his means. It is his sword and his 
 shield, his panoply and his chariot of war. In all his writings, 
 accordingly, there is nothing to raise or exalt our notions 
 of human nature, but everything to vilify and degrade." 
 Jeffrey. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " What they do in Heaven we are ignorant of; what they do 
 not, we are told expressly, that they neither marry nor are given 
 in marriage." Thoughts on Various Subjects. 
 
 " It may be neither safe nor prudent to argue against the abol- 
 ishing of Christianity at a juncture when all parties appear so 
 unanimously determined upon the point, as we cannot but allow 
 from their actions, their discourses, and their writings." The 
 Abolishment of Christianity. 
 
 "Physicians ought not to give their judgment of religion for 
 the same reason that butchers are not admitted to be jurors upon 
 life and death." Thoughts on Various Subjects.
 
 1 82 SWIFT 
 
 " I have been sometimes thinking, if a man had the art of the 
 second sight for seeing lies, as they have in Scotland for see- 
 ing spirits, how admirably he might entertain himself in this 
 town by observing the different shapes, sizes, and colours 
 of those swarms of lies which buzz about the heads of some 
 people like flies about a horse's ears in summer." The Ex- 
 aminer. 
 
 11 1 have been assured by a very knowing American of my ac- 
 quaintance in London that a young healthy child, well nursed, 
 is, at a year old, a most delicious,' nourishing, and wholesome 
 food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled ; and I make no 
 doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout. . . . 
 I grant this food will be somewhat dear and therefore very proper 
 for [Irish] landlords, who, as they have already devoured most 
 of the parents, seem to have the best title to the children." A 
 Modest Proposal, etc. 
 
 2. Directness Sincerity Terseness. Like Mil- 
 ton, Swift seldom, if ever, wrote merely for the purpose of 
 making literature. He was intensely in earnest. Most of 
 his prose is aggressive, and he attacks boldly and directly ; he 
 makes no feints and no pretences. ' ' He does not address 
 men in general," says Taine, " but certain men ; he does not 
 care to teach a truth but to make an impression." 
 
 " The merits of his prose are condensation, pith, always 
 with the effect, generally the reality, of sincere purpose and, 
 with few exceptions, simplicity and directness." F. Nichol. 
 
 "In these poems [written for the Tatler\ Swift is splen- 
 didly direct, vivid, and vigorous; his lines fall like well- 
 directed blows of the flail. . . . He is a writer of the 
 first order because he moulded language to be the vehicle of a 
 sincerity that has never been surpassed. . . . The po- 
 lemical and humorous parts [of ' The Tale of a Tub '] are 
 direct and terse beyond anything that preceded them in Eng- 
 lish." Edmund Gossc.
 
 SWIFT 183 
 
 " He separates with a severe and caustic air truth from false- 
 hood, folly from wisdom, ' shows vice her o\vn image, scorn 
 her own feature; ' and it is the force, the precision, and the 
 honest abruptness with which the separation is made that ex- 
 cites our surprise and our admiration." Hazlitt. 
 
 "It is not only by its flashes of wit, by its bursts of elo- 
 quence, by the steady and relentless heat of its satire, that it 
 [Swift's style] is redeemed : but still more by the marvellous 
 strength and grasp with which the whole of human nature is 
 seized, bound to the dissecting-table, and made to yield to 
 his pitiless scalpel the tale of its subterfuges and pretences and 
 tricks. Other satires have their special application. Who 
 is it that can limit the range of the satire in ' The Tale of a 
 Tub?'" G. L. Craik. 
 
 " They [' The Tale of a Tub ' and Gulliver '] are written 
 with great plainness, force, and intrepidity advance at once to 
 the matter in dispute give battle to the strength of the enemy, 
 and never seek any kind of advantage from darkness or ob- 
 scurity. . . . There is a force and terror about it [' The 
 Legion Club'] which redeems it from ridicule and makes us 
 shudder at the sort of demoniacal inspiration with which the 
 malison is vented. . . . On the subjects to which he 
 confines himself he is unquestionably a strong, masculine, and 
 perspicuous writer. He is never finical, fantastic, or absurd 
 takes advantage of no equivocations in argument and puts on 
 no tawdriness for ornaments. . . . Though a great polemic, 
 he makes no use of general principles, nor ever enlarges his 
 views to a wide or comprehensive conclusion. Everything is 
 particular with him and, for the most part, strictly personal. 
 To make amends, however, we do think him quite without a 
 competitor in personalities. With a quick and sagacious 
 spirit and a bold and popular manner, he joins an exact 
 knowledge of all the strong and the weak parts of every cause 
 he has to manage." -Jeffrey.
 
 1 84 SWIFT 
 
 " No English is so pointed and so direct as Swift's. Every 
 sentence is a keen knife that cuts straight to the core ; there 
 is no hesitation or swerving; there is never a word wasted." 
 Stanley Lane-Poole. 
 
 "Swift wrote with a tact, a force, and a clearness that al- 
 most ensured a satisfactory issue. He selected the best weapon 
 and used it with rare judgment. . . . For perspicuity, 
 directness, and freedom from involution or bombast, his style 
 is a model." H. T. Tuckerman\ 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " For my own part, who am but a man of obscure condition, I 
 do solemnly declare, in the presence of Almighty God, that I will 
 suffer the most ignominious and torturing death rather than to 
 submit to receive this accursed coin, or any other that shall be 
 liable to these objections, until they be forced upon me by a law 
 of my own country; and if that shall ever happen, I will trans- 
 port myself into some foreign land and eat the bread of poverty 
 among a free people." The Drapier's Letters. 
 
 "Let them [the allies] therefore lay aside all clumsy pretence 
 to address ; tell us no more of former sieges, battles, and glories ? 
 nor make love to us in prose, and extol our beauty, our fortune, 
 and their own passion for us up to the stars ; but let them come 
 roundly to the business, and in plain terms give us to understand 
 that they will not recognize any other government in Great Brit- 
 ain but Whiggarchy only." The Conduct of the Allies. 
 
 " I have never known this great town without one or more 
 dunces of figure who had credit enough to give rise to some new 
 word and propagate it in most conversation, though it had neither 
 humor nor significance." The Examiner. 
 
 " If a rebellion should prove so successful as to fix the Pre- 
 tender on the throne of England, I would venture to transgress 
 that statute so far as to lose every drop of my blood to hinder him 
 from being king of Ireland." The Drapier's Letters. 
 
 3. Intensity. If qualities of style are to be measured by 
 the results accomplished through their agency, then Swift must 
 be considered one of the most forcible writers that ever held a
 
 SWIFT 185 
 
 pen. By his pamphlets he became almost the political dicta- 
 tor of his day. His " Drapier's Letters" revolutionized the 
 financial policy of the government. His " Conduct of the 
 Allies" really caused the cessation of the Spanish War. Dr. 
 Smith calls it the most successful pamphlet ever issued. Eleven 
 thousand copies were sold within two months. Taine de- 
 clares that his. Examiner " in one year transformed the opin- 
 ion of three kingdoms. ' ' These marvellous results must be at- 
 tributed largely to Swift's forcible way of putting things. His 
 arguments and his invective were unanswerable, and his lan- 
 guage was as forcible as his thought. Swift had nothing but 
 contempt for the false refinements and meretricious ornaments 
 of language from which his age was not free. On the other 
 hand, the force of his style often degenerated into coarseness, 
 even indecency. 
 
 " If a single word were to be employed in describing it 
 ['The Battle of the Books'], applicable alike to its wit and 
 to its extravagance, intensity should be chosen." -John 
 Forster. 
 
 "The two qualities whose union marks Swift's genius are 
 intensity and lucidity. . . . The anger [in ' A Proposal 
 for the Universal Use of Irish Manufactures '] comes out in 
 short pithy, telling sentences, which are abruptly closed, and 
 leave a sense of power in reserve. . . . It is rigidly char- 
 acteristic in its simple force, wasting no word by redundancy, 
 marring the effect by no overwrought effort." G. L.Craik. 
 
 " In vigor and poignancy of satire, in grave irony, in mas- 
 culine force and intensity, ' The Tale of a Tub ' has never 
 been surpassed." H. J. Nicoll. 
 
 " In certain fine and deep qualities Addison and Steele, 
 and perhaps Farquhar, excelled, . . . but in natural 
 brawn and strength, in original energy, force, and imperious- 
 ness of brain, he excelled them all." David Masson. 
 
 " The power of Swift's prose was the terror of his own and 
 remains the wonder of after-times. " F. Nichol.
 
 1 86 SWIFT 
 
 " He is careful to make his words fit close to his ideas, and 
 often brings out his meaning sharply by contrasting it with 
 what he does not mean. . . . His action is emphatic and 
 copious, and the intense force of his satire is unsurpassed." 
 Minto. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " I know your Lordship means those long-since exploded doc- 
 trines of obedience and submission to princes, which were only 
 calculated to make a free and happy people slaves and miserable. 
 Who but asses and pack-horses and beasts of burden can enter- 
 tain such servile notions ? " A Pretended Letter, etc. 
 
 " Cromwell was dead ; his son Richard, a weak ignorant wretch, 
 who gave up his monarchy much in the same manner with the 
 two usurping kings of Brentford [in the ' Rehearsal']." The Plea 
 of Merit. 
 
 " I hope your husband will interpose his authority to limit you 
 in the trade of visiting ; half a dozen fools are, in all conscience, 
 as many as you should require ; and it will be sufficient for you 
 to see them twice a year ; for I think the fashion does not exact 
 that visits should be paid to friends." Letter to a Young Lady 
 on her Marriage. 
 
 " It will no doubt be a mighty comfort to our grandchildren, 
 when they see a few rags hung up in Westminster Hall, which 
 cost a hundred millions, whereof they are paying the arrears, to 
 boast as beggars do that their grandfathers were rich and great." 
 The Conduct of the Allies. 
 
 4. Plainness Simplicity Homeliness Bald- 
 ness. This means something more than mere simplicity of 
 style. Swift laid down and followed the principle that " the 
 divine should have nothing to say to the wisest of men that 
 the most uneducated could not understand." " In respect to 
 plainness," says Hunt, " he has no superior in English prose. 
 He called things by their right names. He had no faith in 
 Talleyrand's theory ' that language is the art of concealing
 
 SWIFT 187 
 
 thought. ' His style has a downright practical bluntness that 
 marked it as superior, and makes it still representative." 
 Craik calls Swift's style "so idiomatic, so English, so true 
 and appropriate in all its varieties." "Every sentence," 
 says Shaw, " is homely and rugged and strong." He seems 
 to have hated foreign words as he hated men. Sometimes 
 Swift carries this quality of plainness to such an extreme that, 
 as Taine declares, " he has the style of a surgeon and a judge 
 cold, grave, solid, unadorned. He imports into literature 
 the positive spirit of men of business, degrading everything to 
 the level of vulgar events." 
 
 " Dean Swift may be placed at the head of those who have 
 employed a plain style. Few writers have discovered more 
 capacity. He treats every subject which he handles, whether 
 serious or ludicrous, in a masterly manner. He knew, almost 
 beyond any man, the purity, the extent, the precision of the 
 English language." Blair. 
 
 " He always understands himself, and his readers always 
 understand him. The peruser of Swift wants little previous 
 knowledge, and it is sufficient that he is acquainted with com- 
 mon words and common things. He is neither required to 
 mount elevations nor to explore profundities. His passage is 
 always on a level or on solid ground, without asperities, with- 
 out obstruction. ... He studied purity, . . . and 
 whoever depends upon his authority may generally conclude 
 himself safe. His sentences are never too much dilated or 
 contracted, and it would not be easy to find any embarrass- 
 ment in the complication of his clauses, any inconsequence in 
 his connections or abruptness in his transitions. . . . They 
 [his works] are written with great plainness, force, and in- 
 trepidity advance at once to the matter in dispute give 
 battle to the strength of the enemy, and never seek any kind 
 of advantage from darkness or obscurity. . . . Its [' The 
 Tale of a Tub's '] great merit seems to consist in the author's 
 familiarity with all sorts of common and idiomatic expres-
 
 1 88 SWIFT 
 
 sions. ... To deliver absurd notions or incredible tales 
 in the most authentic, honest, and direct terms, . . . and 
 to luxuriate in all the variations of that grave, plain, and per- 
 spicuous phraseology which dull men use to express their 
 homely opinions, seems to be the great art of this extraordinary 
 humorist. . . . His is radically a low and homely style 
 without grace and without affectation and chiefly remark- 
 able for a great choice and profusion of common words and 
 expressions. ' ' Samuel Johnson. 
 
 ' ' The brevity, the homeliness, the minuteness, the un- 
 broken seriousness of the narrative [' Gulliver '], all give a 
 character of truth and simplicity to the work. . . . His 
 style is chiefly remarkable for a great choice and profusion 
 of common words and expressions. . . . Other writers 
 who have used a plain and direct style have been for 
 the most part jejeune and limited in their diction, and 
 generally give us an impression of the poverty as well as 
 of the tameness of their language. Swift, without ever tres- 
 passing into figures or poetical expressions, or ever em- 
 ploying a word that can be called fine or pedantic, has a 
 prodigious variety of good set phrases always at his command, 
 and displays a sort of homely richness, like the plenty of an 
 old English dinner or the wardrobe of a wealthy burgess." 
 Jeffrey. 
 
 "Swift's prose is never ungainly; it is simple and clear 
 and direct, absolutely free from affectation or 'curious care," 
 never seeking mere rhetorical effects ; but it is not the less 
 polished to a smooth and brilliant surface not the polish of 
 elaboration, but the fine chiselled surface of a mind that 
 thought clearly and exactly." Stanley Lane-Poole. 
 
 " His writings exhibit no tendency to exaggeration or 
 bombast ; no fallacious images or far-fetched analogies ; no 
 timid phrases in which the expression hangs loosely and in- 
 accurately around the meaning. . . . His arguments are 
 so plain that the weakest mind can grasp them, yet so logical
 
 SWIFT 189 
 
 that it is seldom possible to evade their force. . . . His 
 style is always clear, keen, nervous, and exact. He delights in 
 the most homely Saxon, in the simplest and most unadorned 
 sentences. ' ' Lecky. 
 
 " Nothing shows Swift's genius in these Irish tracts more 
 conclusively than the marvellously simple materials with 
 which he maintains their force. ... So vivid is the im- 
 aginative power [in 'The Legion Club '] of his descriptions, 
 that, as we read, we seem to see the gibbering of the madmen, 
 twisting their straws, tugging at their chains, and making 
 the place hideous with their foul and loathsome bestialities. 
 His style is free from all tricks and peculiarities ; it 
 holds to its purpose with absolute directness and lucidity. 
 It has no balanced periods, no ornaments ; even grammatical 
 regularity is sometimes wanting. But with dramatic nicety it 
 suits the character in which he speaks, and he bends it to his 
 purpose with the unconscious skill with which a well-trained 
 fencer turns his foil. . . . His power was to be shown by 
 the lucidity and the skill of expression. . . . He sought 
 to make himself, above all, simple, clear, and logical in his 
 method. . . . The strength of Swift's prose lies in its 
 clearness and in its flexibility rather than in its technical cor- 
 rectness." G. L. Craik. 
 
 " He says what he means in the homeliest native English that 
 can be conceived. . . . His sentences are self-sufficient, 
 and fit the occasion as a glove the hand." T. H. Ward. 
 
 " He is explicit in referring to what has been said, what is 
 to come, and what is the connection of one theory with an- 
 other. . . . When he writes seriously, his language is 
 simple, unadorned, and designed above everything to con- 
 vey his meaning directly." Minto. 
 
 " At a time when elegance was thought to be all in all in 
 writing, he showed what power lay in a simple, virile style, and 
 what plain, homely words could do when managed by a mas- 
 ter's hand." Lowell.
 
 190 SWIFT 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " I have been frequently assured by great ministers that poli- 
 tics were nothing but common sense ; which, as it was the only 
 true thing they spoke, so it was the only thing they could have 
 wished I should not believe." Some Free Thoughts, etc. 
 
 " It is great fault among you that when a person writes with no 
 other intention than to do you goo4, you will not be at the pains 
 to read his advices. One copy of this paper may serve a dozen 
 of you, which will be less than a farthing apiece." The Drapier's 
 Letters. 
 
 "A great minister puts you a case and asks your opinion, but 
 conceals an essential circumstance, upon which the whole weight 
 of the matter turns ; then he despises your understanding for 
 councilling him no better, and concludes he ought to trust en- 
 tirely to his own wisdom." Some Free Thoughts, etc. 
 
 " And I defy the greatest divine to produce any law, either of 
 God or man, which obliges me to comprehend the meaning of 
 omniscience, omnipresence, ubiquity, attribute, beatific vision, with 
 a thousand others so frequent in pulpits, any more than that of 
 eccentric, idiosyncrasy, entity, and the like." Letter to a Young 
 Clergyman. 
 
 5. Vehement Invective Insolence. While satire 
 is Swift's favorite weapon, he frequently descends to use a 
 bludgeon where Addison would wield a stiletto. Says Taine, 
 " He knows life as a banker knows accounts ; and, his total 
 once made up, he scorns or knocks the babblers who dispute 
 it in his presence." He is given to the use of such terms as 
 bully, sharper, rake, and the like. In the words of Thackeray : 
 "It is Samson with a bone in his hand, rushing on his ene- 
 mies and felling them." 
 
 " Their [' Tale of a Tub ' and ' Gulliver '] distinguishing 
 feature, however, is the force and vehemence of the invective 
 in which they abound the copiousness, the steadiness, the 
 perseverance, and the dexterity with which abuse and ridicule
 
 SWIFT 191 
 
 are showered upon the adversary. This, we think, was be- 
 yond all doubt Swift's great talent and the weapon by which 
 he made himself formidable. . . . Almost all his works 
 are libels; generally upon individuals, sometimes upon sects 
 and parties, sometimes upon human nature. Whatever be his 
 end, however, personal abuse, direct, vehement, unsparing in- 
 vective, is his means. . . . There is no spirit, indeed, of 
 love or of honor in any part of them, -but an unvaried and harass- 
 ing display of insolence and animosity in the writer and vil- 
 lany and folly in those of whom he is writing. . . . He 
 seems always to think the most effectual blows the most advis- 
 able and no advantage unlawful that is likely to be successful 
 for the moment. Disregarding all the laws of polished hos- 
 tility, he uses at one and the same moment his sword and his 
 poisoned dagger, his hands and his teeth and his envenomed 
 breath. . . . The invective of Swift appears in this [' The 
 Legion Club ' ] and some other pieces like the infernal fire of 
 Milton's rebel angels, which 
 
 ' Scorch'd and blasted and o'erthrew ' 
 
 and was launched even against the righteous with such impet- 
 uous fury, 
 
 ' That whom it hit none on their feet might stand, 
 Though standing else as rocks but down they tell 
 By thousands, angel on archangel rolled.' 
 
 It is scarcely necessary to remark, however, that there is never 
 the least approach to dignity or nobleness in the style of these 
 terrible invectives. . . . They are honest, coarse, and vio- 
 lent effusions of furious rage and rancorous hatred." -Jeffrey. 
 "Its ['A Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manu- 
 factures '] power lies in its variety. Indignant earnestness is 
 subtly varied by sarcasm, straight blows of invective by deli- 
 cate irony. The most withering of all his poetic
 
 192 SWIFT 
 
 satires is ' The Legion Club. ' His fury bursts all bounds in 
 the storm of abuse and ridicule and utter scorn that he pours 
 upon the august assembly." G. L. Craik. 
 
 "He delighted in a strain of ribald abuse. . . . He 
 possessed powers of satire perhaps as terrible as have ever been 
 granted to a human being." Lecky. 
 
 " They [' The Drapier's Letters '] are masterpieces of dread- 
 ful humor and invective. . . . The assault is wonderful 
 for its terrible rage." Thackeray. 
 
 " The personal satire of Swift is often not only merciless 
 but wholly unjustifiable." H. T. Tuckerman. 
 
 " His ordinary style is grave irony. . . . Swift has 
 the genius of insult ; he is the inventor of irony, as Shake- 
 speare of poetry, and, as beseems an extreme force, he goes to 
 extremes in his thought and art." Taine. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " He humbly gave the modern generals to understand that he 
 conceived, with great submission, they were all a pack of rogues 
 
 and fools and d d cowards and confounded loggerheads and 
 
 illiterate whelps and nonsensical scoundrels." The Battle of the 
 Books. 
 
 " ' Not to disparage myself,' said he, 'by the comparison with 
 such a rascal, what art thou but a vagabond without house or 
 home, without stock or inheritance, born to no possession of 
 your own but a pair of wings and a drone-pipe ? Your liveli- 
 hood is a universal plunder upon nature ; a freebooter over 
 fields and gardens ; and for the sake of stealing, will rob a nettle 
 as easily as a violet.' "The Battle of the Books. 
 
 " When I reflect on this I cannot conceive you to be human 
 creatures, but a sort of species hardly a degree above a monkey ; 
 who has more diverting tricks than any of you, is an animal less 
 mischievous and expensive, might in time be a tolerable critic in 
 velvet and brocade, and, for aught I know, would equally become 
 them." Letter to a Young Lady on her Marriage. 
 
 " I can discover no political evil in suffering bullies, sharpers,
 
 SWIFT IQ3 
 
 and rakes to rid the world of each other by a method of their 
 own, where the law has not been able to find an expedient." On 
 Good Manners. 
 
 6. Wit Power of Ludicrous Combination. "His 
 most grave themes were blended with ironical pleasantry ; 
 and, in those of a lighter nature, deep and bitter satire is 
 often concealed under the most trifling levity." Sir Walter 
 Scott. 
 
 "In his various works we find one quality almost always 
 predominant an imperturbable humor ; and from this lam- 
 bent spirit of pleasantry nothing human or divine was safe. 
 The magnificence of Swift's anger, scintillating with 
 wit, glowing with passion, throws its cometary splendor right 
 across the Augustan heavens." Edmund Gosse. 
 
 " As all know, it is in his character as a humorist, an in- 
 ventor of the preposterous, as a medium for the reflective, and 
 above all as a master of irony, that he takes his place as one 
 of the chiefs of English literature." David Masson. 
 
 " He never attempted any species of composition in which 
 either the sublime or the pathetic was required of him ; but 
 in every department of poetry where wit is necessary he dis- 
 played, as the subject chanced to require, either the blasting 
 lightning of satire or the lambent, meteor-like coruscations of 
 frolicsome humor." Leslie Stephen. 
 
 " For the qualities of sheer wit and humor Swift had no 
 superior, ancient or modern ; ... his wit was perfect, 
 as such a sheer meeting of the extremes of difference and 
 likeness. ' ' Leigh Hunt. 
 
 " In ' Lilliput ' the humor is on the surface : the satire is 
 only occasional. ... By nothing did he affect men 
 more than by his marvellous combination of the grimmest 
 earnestness with the most mocking humor. In its latter and 
 more matured form, his wit itself became earnest and passion- 
 ate, and has a severity, a fierceness, a saera indignatio, that 
 13
 
 194 SWIFT 
 
 are all his own, and that have never been blended in any 
 other writer with so keen a perception of the ludicrous and 
 so much general comic power. The breadth of his rich, pun- 
 gent, original jocularity is at the same time cutting as a 
 sword and consuming as fire." G. L. Craik. 
 
 11 His wit was perfectly unbridled. His unrivalled power 
 of ludicrous combination seldom failed to get the better of his 
 prudence ; and he found it impossible to resist a jest. . . . 
 His wit is a species of argument." Lecky. 
 
 " He had more humor in him than Pope, who had it not 
 in him to produce a downright side-shaking bit of rollicking 
 fun. There is more laughter altogether about Swift's satire. 
 . . . The Dean had a real humorous side." -J. Hannay. 
 
 "His humor, though sufficiently marked and peculiar, is 
 not to be easily defined. The nearest description we can 
 give of it would make it consist in expressing sentiments the 
 most absurd and ridiculous, the most shocking and atrocious, 
 or sometimes the most energetic and original, in a sort of 
 composed, calm, and unconscious way, as if they were plain, 
 undeniable, commonplace truths, which no person could dis- 
 pute or gain credit by announcing, and in maintaining them 
 always in the gravest and most familiar language, with a con- 
 sistency which somewhat palliates their extravagance, and a 
 kind of perverted ingenuity which seems to give pledge for 
 their sincerity. The secret, in short, seems to consist in em- 
 ploying the language of humble good sense and simple, un- 
 doubting conviction to express in their honest nakedness 
 sentiments which it is usually thought necessary to disguise 
 under a thousand pretences, or truths which are usually in- 
 troduced with a thousand apologies." Jeffrey. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " These papers are delivered to a set of artists, very dextrous 
 in finding out the mysterious meanings of words, syllables, and 
 letters ; for instance, they can discover a flock of geese to signify 
 a senate ; a lame dog, an invader ; the plague, a standing army ;
 
 SWIFT 195 
 
 a buzzard, a prime minister ; the gout, a high priest ; a gibbet, a 
 secretary of state ; a sieve, a court lady ; a broom, a revolution ; a 
 mousetrap, an employment; a bottomless pit, a treasury; a sink, 
 a court ; a cap and bells, a favorite ; a broken reed, a court of jus- 
 tice ; an empty tun, a general." Gulliver's Travels. 
 
 "They bury their dead with their heads directly downward, 
 because they hold an opinion that in eleven thousand moons they 
 are all to rise again ; in which period the earth (which they con- 
 ceive to be flat) will turn upside down, and by this means they 
 shall, at their resurrection, be found ready standing on their 
 feet. " Gulliver's Travels. 
 
 " What is man himself but a microcoat, or rather a complete 
 suit of clothes with all its trimmings ? As to his body there can 
 be no dispute ; but examine even the acquirements of his mind, 
 you will find them all contribute in their order towards furnish- 
 ing an exact dress ; to instance no more, is not religion a cloak, 
 honesty a pair of shoes worn out in the dirt, self-love a surtout, 
 vanity a shirt, and conscience a pair of breeches? " Tale of a 
 Tub. 
 
 7. Coarseness. " His intensity of loathing leads him 
 to besmear his antagonists with filth. He becomes disgusting 
 in the effort to express disgust. . . . He tears aside the 
 veil of decency to show the bestial elements of human nat- 
 ure." L eslie Steph en . 
 
 " [He is] a monster gibbering shrieks [in the fourth part 
 of ' Gulliver's Travels '] and gnashing imprecations against 
 mankind tearing down all shreds of modesty, past all sense 
 of manliness and shame ; filthy in word, filthy in thought, 
 furious, raging, obscene! " Thackeray. 
 
 " He seems to delight in low metaphors and gross allu- 
 sions. His coarseness is gratuitous and his smut deliberate. 
 Indeed, the vulgarity of Swift is sometimes unendurable." 
 H. T. Tuckerman. 
 
 "Persons of delicate and refined taste have been hurt by 
 its [' Gulliver's Travels '] grossness, and those of more severe 
 and religious feelings have marked it with that moral dis-
 
 196 SWIFT 
 
 approbation which rejects a work so wide in its temper and 
 feeling from the spirit of Christianity." John Mitford. 
 
 " All his jests have the same character and insolence and 
 coarseness. He does not even scruple, upon occasion, to imi- 
 tate his own Yahoos, by discharging upon his unhappy victims 
 a shower of filth, from which neither courage nor dexterity can 
 afford any protection. . . . The greater part of the wis- 
 dom and satire [of 'Gulliver's Travels '] appears to us to be 
 extremely vulgar and commonplace. . . . If he can make 
 his victim writhe . . . he is contented, provided he can 
 make him sufficiently disgusting, that a good share of the filth 
 that he throws should stick to his own fingers. ... In 
 humor and in irony, and in the talent for debasing and defil- 
 ing what he hated, we join with all the world in thinking 
 the Dean of Saint Patrick's without a rival." -Jeffrey. 
 
 " In the process of ' debasing and defiling ' he sometimes 
 condescends to use the language of the brothel. . . . His 
 allusions are often extremely gross." Minto. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. ^ 
 
 " This honest, civil, ingenious gentleman knows in his con- 
 science that there are not ten clergymen in England except non- 
 jurors who do not abhor the thought of the Pretender reigning 
 over us much more than himself. Yet this is the spittle of the 
 bishop of Sarum, which our author licks up and swallows, and 
 then coughs out again with an addition of his own phlegm." 
 The Public Spirit of the Whigs. 
 
 " Erect your schemes with as much method and skill as you 
 please ; yet, if the materials be nothing but dirt, spun out of your 
 own entrails, the edifice will conclude at last in a cobweb ; the 
 duration of which, like that of other spiders' webs, may be im- 
 puted to their being forgotten or neglected or hid in a corner. 
 For anything else of genuine that the moderns may pretend to I 
 cannot recollect ; unless it be a large vein of wrangling and sa- 
 tire, much of a nature and substance with the spider's poison, 
 which, however they pretend to spit wholly out of themselves, is
 
 SWIFT 197 
 
 improved by the same arts, by feeding upon the insects and ver- 
 min of the age." The Battle of the Books. 
 
 In "The Battle of the Books" and in Swift's "Direc- 
 tions to Servants" will be found abundant illustrations of 
 this characteristic some of them so extreme as not to bear 
 repetition here. 
 
 8. Misanthropy.- "Among the ' Houyhnhnms ' proba- 
 bility is ruthlessly sacrificed to the wild pleasure the author 
 takes in trampling human pride in the mire of his sarcasm." 
 Edmund Gosse. 
 
 " In ' Gulliver ' we have a satire on the various classes of 
 men and their occupations . . . and satires on human 
 nature and human society down to their very foundations." 
 David Mas son. 
 
 " In parts of his work there is a sort of heartiness of abuse 
 and contempt of mankind which produces a greater sympathy 
 and animation in the reader than the most elaborate sarcasms 
 that have since come into fashion. . . ." Jeffrey. 
 
 "The satires proceeding from his later, most disappointed 
 years are almost fiendish in the calm malignity of their expos- 
 ure of the weakness and follies of mankind. . . . 'Gulli- 
 ver's Travels' ... is the most ferocious satire on entire 
 humanity ever written. It is a mockery of the spectacle of 
 life such as has never proceeded from any other unbelieving 
 and misbelieving soul. Its author rejoices to degrade what- 
 ever in us is worthy and to set on high all the foulness and sin 
 of which human nature is capable." N. P. Giltnan. 
 
 " Of all the creations of his fancy it [' The Voyage to the 
 Land of the Houyhnhnms'] is the most improbable; it is 
 filled with such a fierce indignation against the frailties and 
 vices to which our nature is so prone ; ... it indulges in 
 such a fiendish mockery of the degraded species, and holds up 
 such hideous representations of the loathsome depravity of our 
 sins, while it renders its satire more effective by drawing
 
 198 SWIFT 
 
 through it the richest vein of ridicule and the most pointed 
 wit." -John Mitford. 
 
 " Swift exempts from his ridicule no profession, no faith, 
 hardly any institution, hardly any character. . . . All 
 come in for a cut of his stinging lash." Minto. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " The daughters of great and rich families, computed after the 
 same manner, will hardly amount to half the number of the male ; 
 because the care of their education is either entirely left to their 
 mothers or they are sent to boarding schools or put into the hands 
 of English or French governesses, and generally the worst that can 
 be gotten for the money. So that, after the reduction I was com- 
 pelled to, from two thousand to one, half the number of well-edu- 
 cated nobility and gentry must either continue in a single life, or 
 be forced to couple themselves with women for whom they can 
 possibly have no esteem ; I mean fools, prudes, coquettes, game- 
 sters, saunterers, endless talkers of nonsense, splenetic idlers, 
 intriguers, given to scandal and censure." On the Education of 
 Ladies. 
 
 " I have ever hated all societies, professions, and communities ; 
 and all my love is toward individuals. . . . But principally I 
 hate and detest that animal called man although I heartily 
 love John, Peter, Thomas, and so on." Letter to Mr. Pope. 
 
 " But instead of proposals for conquering that magnanimous 
 nation, I rather wish they were in a capacity or disposition to send 
 a sufficient number of their inhabitants for civilizing Europe by- 
 teaching us the first principles of honour, justice, truth, temper- 
 ance, public spirit, fortitude, chastity, friendship, benevolence, 
 and fidelity." A Voyage to the Houyhnhnms. 
 
 " And pray, what is man but a topsy-turvy creature, his animal 
 faculties perpetually mounted on his rational, his head where his 
 heels should be grovelling on the earth ! and yet, with all his 
 faults, he sets up to be a universal reformer and corrector of 
 abuses, a remover of grievances ; rakes into every slut's corner of 
 nature, bringing hidden corruptions to light, and raises a mighty 
 dust where there was none before, sharing deeply all the while in 
 the very same pollutions he pretends to sweep away." The Tale 
 of a Tub.
 
 GOLDSMITH, 1728-1744 
 
 Biographical Outline. Oliver Goldsmith, born at 
 Pallas, near Ballymahon, Ireland, November 10, 1728 ; father 
 then a curate and small farmer, mother the daughter of a 
 clergyman ; Goldsmith's father becomes rector of Kilkenny 
 West in 1 730, and the family settle at Lissoy ; Goldsmith learns 
 his letters from a Mrs. Delap, who thought him " impenetrably 
 stupid ; " later he attends the village school of Lissoy, kept by 
 an old soldier named Thomas Byrne ; Goldsmith is a dull 
 pupil, but reads chap-books, learns ballads, and makes juve- 
 nile rhymes; his school-life is interrupted by a severe attack of 
 small-pox, which leaves his face badly marked ; later he stud- 
 ies under a Mr. Griffin at Elphin School ; between 1739 and 
 1741 he is in a school at Athlone, and goes thence to a school 
 at Edgeworthstown, where his cleverness attracts attention ; on 
 June n, 1744, he enters Trinity College, Dublin, as a sizar, 
 being forced to take that menial position because of the econ- 
 omy necessary that his father may provide Goldsmith's sister 
 with an extravagant marriage-portion ; his tutor at Trinity, 
 one Wilder, is harsh and brutal ; Goldsmith is humiliated by 
 his position as sizar, and rebels against the mathematics and 
 logic that he is compelled to study ; he receives some aid 
 from an uncle by marriage, but often has to pawn his books 
 and to earn his living by writing street-ballads, which he sells 
 for five shillings each; in May, 1747, he narrowly escapes ex- 
 pulsion for conspiring with other students to duck certain bail- 
 iffs in the college cistern ; in the following June he tries in 
 vain to secure a scholarship given- on examination, but wins 
 an "exhibition" worth thirty shillings a year; he gives a 
 supper and a dance- to celebrate his good fortune, is inter - 
 
 199
 
 200 GOLDSMITH 
 
 rupted by his tutor, is " chastised," and straightway sells his 
 books and runs away to Cork; a reconciliation with the tutor 
 is effected by Goldsmith's brother, who had been a pensioner 
 at Trinity, and who held a scholarship there ; Goldsmith's 
 father dies early in 1747; Goldsmith takes A. B. at Dublin in 
 February, 1749; after leaving the university he occasionally 
 assists in his brother's school at Pallas, loafs about the town 
 of Ballymahon (where his mother lived in poverty), declines 
 to take holy orders, plays the flute,, and throws the hammer ; 
 through his uncle he obtains a tutorship with one Mr. Flinn, 
 but soon resigns, obtains a good horse and thirty pounds, and 
 starts for Cork, intending to sail thence for America ; he 
 misses his ship, and soon returns to Ballymahon with a poor 
 horse and no money ; he then borrows ,50 from his 
 Uncle Contarine, starts for London to study law, and soon 
 returns to Ballymahon, after losing the money in gambling 
 at Dublin ; he is again aided by his uncle, his brother, and 
 his sister, and goes to Edinburgh in the autumn of 1752 to 
 study medicine; joins a students' club called "The Medical 
 Society," tells stories, sings songs, and is generally popular ; 
 he makes a tour of the Highlands early in 1753; he deter- 
 mines to finish his medical studies abroad, pays his debts by 
 means of a loan from two college friends, sails for Bordeaux, 
 is driven into Newcastle by rough weather, and, with other 
 passengers, is imprisoned for two weeks on the false charge of 
 having enlisted in the French service in Scotland ; on his re- 
 lease he sails for Rotterdam and goes thence to Leyden, 
 where a fellow-countryman lends him money, which he forth- 
 with expends in bulbs for his Uncle Contarine; early in 1755 
 he starts on his famous pilgrimage, " with one clean shirt and 
 next to no money; " his exact itinerary is unknown, but he 
 probably visited Louvain, Paris, Strasburg, several points in 
 Germany and Switzerland, Venice, Padua (where he is sup- 
 posed to have studied six months), Carinthia, and thence back 
 through France to Dover, landing February i, 1756 ; he trav-
 
 GOLDSMITH 2OI 
 
 elled principally on foot, and supported himself by playing on 
 his flute, except in Italy, where he engaged in disputations at 
 the universities and convents ; he is said to have taken a medi- 
 cal degree at Louvain, but all the alleged details of his tour are 
 doubtful ; he reaches London in great destitution, probably 
 tries acting and school-teaching, soon becomes assistant to a 
 chemist on Fish Street Hill, and later, through the aid of his 
 friend Dr. Sleigh, sets up as a physician in.Bankside, South- 
 wark; he is unsuccessful as a physician, writes tragedy (?), 
 proposes to travel to Sinai to decipher " the written moun- 
 tains," reads proof, and, late in 1756, becomes an usher in a 
 school at Peckham kept by Dr. Milner, a dissenting minister, 
 whose son Goldsmith had known at Edinburgh ; at Milner's 
 house he meets Griffiths, proprietor of the Monthly Review, 
 and agrees to write for the Review, receiving in return his 
 lodging and "an adequate salary;" he is engaged on the 
 Review from April till September, 1757; he writes also for 
 other periodicals, and translates "Memoirs of Jean Marteilhe," 
 published in 1758 ; he leaves Griffiths's employ because he is 
 disgusted with the way in which his manuscript is "edited " 
 by that worthy and his wife ; he returns for a while to Dr. 
 Milner, and then " makes shift to live by a very little practice 
 as a physician ; " during 1758 he publishes an essay on " The 
 Present State of Taste and Literature in Europe," and solicits 
 subscribers for the same; he obtains, through Milner, an 
 appointment as physician to a factory on the coast of Coro- 
 mandel promising an income of ^1,100; tries the requisite 
 preliminary examination December i, 1758, and fails ; he bor- 
 rowed from Griffiths the suit of clothes in which he appeared 
 at the examination, and wrote four articles for the Monthly 
 Review in payment; during 1759 he writes for Griffiths a 
 superficial life of Voltaire, and receives twenty pounds for his 
 work; the "Life" is published in the Lady's Magazine 
 (then published by Griffiths), in 1761 ; about 1759 Gold- 
 smith takes a lodging at 1 2 Green Arbour Court, near the Old
 
 2O2 GOLDSMITH 
 
 Bailey, and begins to acquire some reputation and social 
 standing; his essay on "Polite Learning " attracts Thomas 
 (afterward Bishop) Percy, who was then collecting materials 
 for his " Reliques," and Percy calls on Goldsmith, whom he 
 finds living in squalor ; Goldsmith also meets Smollett, then 
 editor of the Critical Review, to which Goldsmith contrib- 
 utes during 1757-59; during 1759-60 he also writes for the 
 British Magazine (started by Smollett), The Lady's Maga- 
 zine, the Bee, and the Busybody ; in 1760 he enters into 
 an agreement with John Newbery, a "philanthropic book- 
 seller" of St. Paul's Churchyard, by which Goldsmith is 
 to contribute two papers a week to the Public Ledger 
 (started by Newbery, January 12, 1760) and is to receive 
 therefor the stated sum of ^100 a year; here appeared his 
 "Chinese Letters," ninety-eight papers in all, which were 
 reprinted in book form in 1762 under the title "A Citi- 
 zen of the World ; "the " Letters" add to his reputation and 
 his social standing, and in 1760 he removes to better lodg- 
 ings at 6 Wine Office Court, Fleet Street ; here he is visited 
 by Johnson (whom Goldsmith had previously complimented 
 in the Bee} on May 31, 1761, and thus begins a friendship 
 that serves greatly to aid Goldsmith ; about this time he ap- 
 plies in vain to Garrick for aid in securing the secretaryship 
 of the Society of Arts, then vacant; during 1762 Goldsmith 
 does hack-work for Newbery, writing some seven volumes, 
 including the paper on " The Cock Lane Ghost," his " His- 
 tory of Mecklenburgh," "A Compendium of Biography," 
 etc. ; Prior estimates Goldsmith's income during 1762 at be- 
 low ^120; he removes to Islington late in 1762, and con- 
 tinues to do hack-work for Newbery, from whom he borrows 
 money in 1763; he probably writes " A History of England 
 in a Series of Letters from a Nobleman to His Son," pub- 
 lished in 1764; about this time, in company with Johnson, 
 Burke, Reynolds, Garrick, and others, he aids in form- 
 ing the famous Turk's Head Club; he is still considered
 
 GOLDSMITH 203 
 
 "a mere literary drudge," though Johnson calls him "one of 
 the first men we now have as an author;" on the publica- 
 tion of "The Traveller," Dec. 19, 1764, Johnson's opinion 
 is suddenly and generally adopted; " The Traveller" passed 
 through four editions in 1765, and reached a ninth edition 
 by 1774; Goldsmith received twenty guineas for the manu- 
 script of the poem and probably twenty more on its success ; 
 his new fame brings him to the notice of Robert Nugent 
 (afterward Viscount Clare) and through Nugent to that of the 
 Karl of Northumberland, then Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland ; 
 the Earl offers to aid Goldsmith, but he unwisely declines and 
 recommends his brother Henry instead; later he writes his 
 ballad "Edwin and Angelina" for the amusement of the 
 Countess of Northumberland ; a collection of his essays is 
 published in 1765, and he again tries in vain to set up as a 
 physician ; on March 26, 1766, he publishes " The Vicar of 
 Wakefield," written before " The Traveller " was published ; 
 through Johnson's agency he obtains 60 for the manu- 
 script of "The Vicar of Wakefield," and thus secures re- 
 lease from his landlady, who had just arrested him for non- 
 payment of rent ; " The Vicar of Wakefield ' ' establishes Gold- 
 smith's reputation ; he removes to Temple Court and resides 
 there, at 2 Bench Court, till his death, except for frequent short 
 sojourns in the country; during 1771-74 he writes "She 
 Stoops to Conquer," and works on his "Animated Nature" 
 at a farm near Hyde ; he is devoted to society, masquerading, 
 and gaming, but continues to do hack-work for booksellers ; 
 in December, 1766, he publishes " Poems for Young Ladies," 
 for which he receives ten guineas, and in April, 1767, " The 
 Beauties of English Poesy," for which he receives probably 
 fifty guineas; in 1769 Dennis pays him two hundred and 
 fifty guineas for the manuscript of " A History of Rome; " 
 in 1770 appeared his lives of Parnell and Bolingbroke, in 
 1771 his "English History," for which he was to receive 
 five hundred guineas, and in 1773 his "Greek History,"
 
 2O4 GOLDSMITH 
 
 for which Dennis paid him ^250 ; his " Animated Nature," 
 which he had agreed in 1769 to write for Griffin eight 
 volumes at one .hundred guineas a volume was not pub- 
 lished till after Goldsmith's death, though he received full pay- 
 ment ; early in 1767 he offers his " Good-Natured Man " to 
 Garrick, who refuses it, probably because of some personal re- 
 sentment against Goldsmith ; it is soon afterward accepted by 
 Colman, but is not played till January 28, 1768 ; at first the 
 play is not very successful, and the scene at the bailiffs is 
 hissed ; but after this scene is omitted the play succeeds, and 
 eventually brings to Goldsmith ,500; on May 26, 1770, he 
 publishes "The Deserted Village," begun two years before; 
 it passes at once through five editions; " She Stoops to Con- 
 quer" is received with hesitation by Colman in 1772, but he 
 is finally induced by Johnson to stage it, and on March 15, 
 1773, it scores a great success, running twelve nights and 
 bringing to Goldsmith 500 ; he is widely known and es- 
 teemed in his later years ; in 1770 he visits Paris in company 
 with Mrs. Horneck and her daughters, one of whom was " the 
 Jessamy bride; " in 1771 Goldsmith's old enemy, Kenrick, 
 wrote a letter to the London Packet, insinuating that Gold- 
 smith's relations with the Hornecks were not proper ; Gold- 
 smith gave him a caning, and escaped prosecution for the 
 deed by promising ^50 to a Welsh charity ; he visits 
 Lord Clare at Bath in the winter of 1770-71, and writes 
 "A Haunch of Venison" in the lord's honor; in 1773 he 
 projects "A Dictionary of the Arts and Sciences," and is 
 promised articles by Johnson, Burke, Reynolds, and others ; 
 one article is written by Burney, but the plan falls through ; 
 Goldsmith writes his last poem, "Retaliation," probably 
 in February, 1774, but it was not published till after his 
 death, which occurred at his lodgings at 2 Bench Court, Lon- 
 don, April 4, 1774; according to Reynolds he died owing 
 ^2,000.
 
 GOLDSMITH 2O$ 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY ON GOLDSMITH'S STYLE. 
 
 Black, W., "English Men of Letters." New York, 1879, Harper, 
 
 81-87, etc. 
 Phillips, M. G., "A Manual of English Literature." New York, 1893, 
 
 Harper, 2 : 55-84. 
 Giles, H., " Lectures and Essays." Boston, 1850, Ticknor, Reed & 
 
 Fields, 218-258. 
 De Quincey, T., " Works." Edinburgh, 1890, A. & C. Black, 4: 288- 
 
 323- 
 Goldsmith, O. , "Miscellaneous Works " (D. Masson). Philadelphia, 
 
 1872, Claxton. 
 Duyckinck, E. A., " Portrait Gallery." New York, 1875, Johnson, 
 
 Wilson & Co., I : 28-43. 
 Nicoll, H. J., "Landmarks of English Literature." New York, 1883, 
 
 Appleton, 249-256. 
 Welsh, A. H., "Development of English Literature." Chicago, 1884, 
 
 Griggs, 203-221. 
 Taine, H. A., "History of English Literature." New York, 1875, 
 
 Holt, 2 : 430-434 and index. 
 Ward, T. H. (Dowden), "The English Poets." New York, 1881, 
 
 Macmillan, 3 : 368-373. 
 Cary, H. F., "Lives of the English Poets." London, 1846, Bohn, 
 
 222-246. 
 Dawson, G., "Biographical Lectures." London, 1886, Kegan Paul, 
 
 Trench & Co., 172-190. 
 Tuckerman, H. T. , "Thoughts on the Poets." New York, 1846, 
 
 Francis. 
 Scott. Sir W., "Lives of the Novelists." New York, 1872, Denham, 
 
 210-234. 
 Thackeray, W. M., "English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century. " 
 
 London, n. d. , Smith, Elder & Co. 
 
 Irving, W., " Life of Goldsmith. " New York, 1864, Putnam. 
 Minto, W., "English Prose Literature. " Edinburgh, 1886, Blackwood, 
 
 461-473. 
 
 Collier, W. F. , "History of English Literature." London, 1892, Nel- 
 son, 324-342. 
 Jeaffreson, J. C., "Novels and Novelists." London, 1858, Hurst & 
 
 Blackett, I : 223-258. 
 Macaulay, T. B. , "Miscellaneous Works." New York, 1880, Harper, 
 
 I : 581-628 and 4: 40-55.
 
 206 GOLDSMITH 
 
 Chalmers, A., "English Poets." London, 1810, C. Wittingham, 16: 
 
 479-487- 
 
 Bulwer-Lytton, E., " Miscellaneous Prose." London, 1868, R. Bent- 
 ley, I : 49-94- 
 Rossetti, W. M., " Lives of Famous Poets." London, 1878, Moson, 
 
 161-175. 
 Gosse, E., " History of Eighteenth Century Literature." New York, 
 
 1889, Macmillan, 316 -332 and 344-450. 
 Stephen, L., "Dictionary of National Biography." New York, 1890, 
 
 Macmillan, 22 : 86-95. 
 Brydges, Sir S. E., " Centura Literaria." London, 1815, Longman & 
 
 Co., 7 : 334-356. 
 
 Forster, J. , " Life, etc. , of Oliver Goldsmith. " Leipsic, 1873, Tauchnitz. 
 Howitt, W., "Homes and Haunts of British Poets." London, 1858, 
 
 Bentley, I : 286-336. 
 
 Hunt, Leigh, "Classic Tales," London, 1806, Reynell & Hunt, 41-80. 
 L'Estrange, A. G., "History of the English Humourists." London, 
 
 1878, Hurst & Blackett, 2 : 131-140. 
 Tuckerman, B., " History of English Prose Fiction." New York, 1891, 
 
 Putnam, 237-240 and 273. 
 Yonge, C. D., " Three Centuries of English Literature." New York, 
 
 1889, Appleton, 59-68. 
 Prior, Jos., "Life of Oliver Goldsmith." London, 1838, J. Murray, 2 
 
 vols. 
 Allibone, S. A., "Dictionary of Authors." Philadelphia, 1858, Childs 
 
 & Peters, I : 687-696. 
 
 Southern Literary Messenger, 6, 267-274 (Tuckerman). 
 Quarterly Review, 95 : 394-448. 
 
 Blackwood's Magazine, 67: 296-308 and 137-153 and 297-309 (W. Ir- 
 ving). 
 North American Review, 70: 265-289 (C. M. Kirkman) ; 45: 91-116 
 
 (Channing). 
 
 Edinburgh Review, 65 : 108-129 (W. Empson). 
 American Whig Review , 10: 498-513 (J. D. W.). 
 American Quarterly Review, 21 : 460-515. 
 Museum, 6 : 1-13 (Sir Walter Scott). 
 Dublin University Magazine, 7: 30-54; 83: 438-446 (Fitzpatrick) ; 88: 
 
 352-368 (R. B. Knowles). 
 Bentley 1 s Miscellany, 24: 193-199. 
 Chambers' s Journal, 9 : 343-347. 
 Monthly Review, 142: 163-170. 
 Biographical Magazine, 2: 99-120.
 
 GOLDSMITH 2O/ 
 
 British Quarterly Review, 8: 1-25 (John Forster). 
 
 LittelTs Living Age (from Sharpens Magazine}, 24 : 337-346 (Frederick 
 
 Lawrence). 
 
 Eclectic Review, 66 : 27-40 (James Prior). 
 Appleton's Journal, n : 459-462 (S. M. Towle). 
 Art Journal, 16: 305-308 and 326-328. 
 Christian Quarterly Spectator, 10: 18-37 (J. Prior). 
 Portfolio, 6 : 210-225. 
 
 PARTICULAR CHARACTERISTICS. 
 
 I. Graceful Ease. Goldsmith is remarkable for the 
 way in which he has photographed his own traits and his life- 
 history in all his scenes and characters. In turning his pages 
 one feels, almost, that he is conversing with a friend. " Not 
 one of us, however busy or hard," says Thackeray, "but 
 once or twice in our lives has passed an evening with him, 
 and undergone the charm of his delightful music. His song 
 is fresh and beautiful as when first he charmed with it." 
 Goethe, on listening to a German translation of " The Vicar 
 of Wakefield," pronounced it " a prose idyl." Speaking of 
 the characters in this immortal story, William Black says, 
 "All is done with such a light, homely touch that one gets 
 familiarly to know these people without being aware of it. " 
 De Quincey speaks of Goldsmith's ' ' happy graces of style, 
 plastic as the air or the surface of a lake to the pure impulses 
 of nature." Forsyth calls " The Vicar of Wakefield " "as 
 sweet a picture as was ever drawn of family life; " another 
 critic considers " the sustained sweetness of Goldsmith's char- 
 acter almost miraculous," while another exclaims, "How 
 many a familiar truth has he clothed in clear and graceful 
 diction ! " This quality of graceful ease is more easily felt 
 than defined. As one critic says, "There is a charm, an 
 effect, and that we all feel ; and we might almost as well try 
 to produce as to express it." It is a matter of universal 
 wonder among the critics that, although many of Goldsmith's 
 tastes are known to have been low,, and though he had a life-
 
 208 GOLDSMITH 
 
 long fondness for vulgar associations, both his language and 
 his sentiments are marvellously pure. " His simplicity," 
 says Minto, "is an elegant simplicity. He is not homely 
 like Paley nor coarse like Swift. The remarkable thing is his 
 combination of purity with copiousness. He is never affect- 
 edly easy, never condescends to polite slang. The light and 
 graceful structure of his sentences cannot be too much ad- 
 mired. The strong points of his intellect centred in his 
 power of easy and graceful literary composition." In short, 
 the literary world has approved the justice of Johnson's esti- 
 mate in the famous Latin sentence which the "Dictator" 
 wrote upon his friend's cenotaph in Westminster Abbey : 
 "There is hardly any form of literature that he did not 
 touch; and whatever he touched he adorned." That his ease 
 and grace were both conscious and cultivated appears from 
 one of Goldsmith's remarks. He once wrote, "To be dull 
 and dronish is an encroachment on the prerogative of a 
 folio." 
 
 " Even when he is wrong as to his facts or his sweeping 
 generalizations, one is inclined to forgive him on account 
 of the quaint gracefulness and point of his style. 
 Goldsmith put an anxious finish into all his better work ; per- 
 haps that is the secret of the gracefulness that is apparent in 
 every line. . . . Goldsmith was particularly happy in 
 writing bright and airy verses ; the grace and lightness of his 
 touch has rarely been approached." William Black. 
 
 " His style was always pure and easy. . . . About 
 everything that he wrote, serious or sportive, there was a 
 certain natural grace and decorum hardly to be expected from 
 a man a great part of whose life had been passed among 
 thieves and beggars, street-walkers and merry-andrews." 
 Macaulay. 
 
 "The exquisite grace, the delicate choice of words, the 
 amiability of sentiment, so peculiarly his own and so well 
 suited to express the simple beauty of his thoughts, gave a
 
 GOLDSMITH 209 
 
 charm to the work which familiarity can only endear. . . . 
 As an essayist, he has contributed some of the most pure and 
 graceful specimens of English prose discoverable in the whole 
 range of literature. . . . The fascinating ease of its flow 
 is the result of long study and careful revision." Bayard 
 Tuckerman. 
 
 " While I am prepared to condemn him by my moral 
 sense, and while obliged to say that he was not at all respect- 
 able, yet he had those graceful graciousnesses and gracious 
 gracefulnesses which, in spite of a sense of condemnation, 
 make him, after all, one of the darlings of the human race." 
 George Daw son. 
 
 " Goldsmith, both in verse and prose, was one of the most 
 delightful writers in the language. His verse flowed like a 
 limpid stream. His ease is quite unconscious. Everything 
 in him is spontaneous, unstudied, unaffected." Hazlitt. 
 
 " The admirable ease and grace of the narrative, as well as 
 the pleasing truth with which the principal characters are de- 
 signed, make ' The Vicar of Wakefield ' one of the most 
 delicious morsels of fictitious composition on which the hu- 
 man mind was ever employed." Sir Walter Scott. 
 
 " One of the most graceful, gentle-minded, and pure writ- 
 ers our literature can boast of. ... His manners were 
 without the refinement and good-breeding which the exquisite 
 polish of his language would lead us to expect." H.J. Nicoll. 
 
 " Where is there now a man who can pen an essay with 
 such ease and elegance as Goldsmith? " Samuel Johnson. 
 
 " He writes as if he were at full leisure to make everything 
 perfect, and as serenely as if he were indifferent to fame or 
 already secure in the possession of it." Channing. 
 
 " He may be likened to his own writings, which, with all 
 their incomparable grace, lightness, elegance, ingenuousness, 
 and lambent fire, have nothing deep or grand : they charm ; 
 they do not instruct, they do not inspire they are graceful, 
 not wise. ' 'John Forster.
 
 210 GOLDSMITH 
 
 In the preface to the first edition of his " Citizen of the 
 World" Goldsmith wrote : "In the intimacy between my 
 author and me he has usually given me a lift of his eastern 
 sublimity and I have sometimes given him return of my col- 
 loquial ease. ' ' 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " I love everything that's old : old friends, old times, old man- 
 ners, old books, old wine ; and, I believe, Dorothy [taking her 
 hand], you'll own I have been pretty fond of an old wife.'' She 
 Stoops to Conquer. 
 
 " The place of our retreat was in a little neighborhood consist- 
 ing of farmers, who tilled their own grounds, and were equal 
 strangers to opulence and poverty. As they had almost all the 
 conveniences of life within themselves, they seldom visited towns 
 or cities in search of superfluity. Remote from the polite, they 
 still retained the primeval simplicity of manners ; and frugal by 
 habit, they scarcely knew that temperance was a virtue." Vicar 
 of Wakefield. 
 
 " I could not avoid showing my argument to my old friend Mr. 
 Wilmot in the hopes of receiving his approbation ; but I discov- 
 ered that he was most violently attached to the contrary opinion, 
 and with good reason ; for he was at that time actually courting 
 a fourth wife." Vicar of Wakefield. 
 
 " I published some tracts on the subject myself, which, as they 
 never sold, I have the consolation of thinking were read only by 
 the happy few." Vicar of Wakefield. 
 
 2. Simplicity Naturalness Homeliness. " His 
 
 writings partake strongly of his character. Candid simplicity, 
 unaffected plainness, are symptomatic of both. In comparing 
 Goldsmith with his fellow-novelists, his unreserved and un- 
 sophisticated simplicity strikes us at once. . . . There 
 is nothing but the simplest language conveying the simplest 
 moral, evolved by the simplest agency." Macaulay. 
 
 "The characteristic of our author's poetry is a prevailing 
 simplicity, which conceals all the artifices of versification ; but 
 it is not confined to his expression alone, for it pervades
 
 GOLDSMITH 211 
 
 every feature of the poem ['The Deserted Village']. His 
 delineation of rural scenery, his village portraits, his moral, 
 political, and classical allusions, while marked by singular 
 fidelity, chasteness, and elegance, are all chiefly distinguished 
 by their pleasing and natural character. "-- H'ijshingfon Iri'ing. 
 
 " Goldsmith is among the simplest of our writers. . . . 
 He resembles Addison ; his simplicity is an elegant simplic- 
 ity." Minto. 
 
 "In prose style, as in poetic, it is noticeable that Gold- 
 smith has little in common with his great contemporaries, with 
 their splendid bursts of rhetoric and Latin pomp of speech 
 but that he goes back to the perfect plainness and simple 
 grace of the Queen Anne men : colloquial ease of 
 
 expression, an apparent absence of all effort or calculation." 
 Edmund Gosse. 
 
 "His 'Vicar of Wakefield ' is a prose idyl, somewhat 
 spoilt by phrases too rhetorical, but at bottom as homely as a 
 Flemish picture. Observe in Terburg's or Mieri's paintings 
 a woman at market or a burgomaster emptying his long glass 
 of beer ; their faces are vulgar, the ingenuousness is comical, 
 the cookery occupies the place of honor ; yet these good folks 
 are so peaceful, so contented with their small ordinary happi- 
 ness, that we envy them. The impression left by Goldsmith's 
 book is pretty much the same." Taine. 
 
 "It is not for the plot that people now read ' The Vicar of 
 Wakefield.' . . . Surely human nature must be very 
 much the same when this simple description of a quiet Eng- 
 lish home went straight to the heart of nations in both hemi- 
 spheres. And the wonder is that Goldsmith, of all men, 
 should have produced such a perfect picture of domestic life. 
 Herder, again and again, throughout his life, reverted to the 
 charm and delight with which he had made the acquaint- 
 ance of the English ' prose idyl,' and took it for granted that 
 it was a real picture of English life. . . ." William 
 Black.
 
 212 GOLDSMITH 
 
 " 'And now, my dear mother, having struggled so hard to 
 get back to see you, I wonder you are not more rejoiced to 
 see me.' This is one of his immortal sentences, which is 
 worth embalming, it is so deliciously simple. Goldsmith 
 was a big baby, a baby to the end of his life ; but, remember, 
 he was only half-baked ; the reasonable side of his nature was 
 never developed ; he died before he had a chance of cutting 
 his wisdom-teeth; he never did cut them, and he would have 
 had to live to the age of Methuselah before he cut them. 
 [The picture of the party at Vauxhall in the third of 
 ' the Beau Tibbs' series] is as fresh in its fidelity to human nat- 
 ure and as externally effective in its artistic oppositions as any 
 of the best efforts of the great masters of fiction. . . 
 He was in reality of so open and unguarded a disposition and 
 so wholly incapable of any conventional concealment of his 
 thoughts and affections, that in collecting anecdotes to illus- 
 trate his characters it is of the first importance to ascertain 
 whether the narrator is a friend or an enemy." George Daw- 
 son. 
 
 " He gives us pictures of home and rural life which denote 
 an exquisite sense of their charms and an exact knowledge of 
 their petty troubles. . . . Our minds are exercised, but 
 without the least effort ; we get at the full meaning without 
 seeking for it." W. E. Channing. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " You may be as neat as you please and I shall love you the 
 better for it ; but all this is not neatness but frippery. These 
 rufflings and pinkings and patchings will only make us hated by 
 all the wives of our neighbors." Vicar of Wakefield. 
 
 " Every man who has seen the world and has had his ups and 
 downs in life, as the expression is, must have frequently expe- 
 rienced the truth of this doctrine ; and must know that to have 
 much or to seem to have it is the only way to have more." 
 Essays.
 
 GOLDSMITH 213 
 
 " My house consisted of but one story, and was covered with 
 thatch, which gave it an air of great snugness ; the walls on the 
 inside were nicely whitewashed, and my daughters undertook 
 to adorn them with pictures of their own designing. Though 
 the same room served us for a parlor and kitchen, that only 
 made it the warmer. Besides, as it was kept in the utmost neat- 
 ness, the dishes, plates, and coppers being well scoured and 
 all disposed in bright rows on the shelves, the eye was agree- 
 ably relieved, and did not want rich furniture. "Vicar of 
 Wakefield. 
 
 3. Broad Sympathy Love of Humanity. It is 
 
 this quality, above all others, that makes Goldsmith, as 
 Thackeray justly calls him, " the most beloved of English 
 writers." He is essentially a sympathetic writer. De Qnin- 
 cey finely calls this trait in Goldsmith's style " that exquisite 
 truth of household pathos " which causes the genial Irishman 
 to be " remembered among men by tears of tenderness." Of 
 that delicate pathos which lies half-way between smiles and 
 tears Goldsmith was a consummate master. Thackeray at- 
 tributes the charm of his style to " his sweet regrets, his del- 
 icate compassion, his soft smile, his tremulous sympathy, the 
 weakness which he owns," and adds: " Think of him, reck- 
 less, thriftless, vain if you like, but merciful, gentle, generous, 
 full of love and pity. Wander he must ; but he carries a 
 home-relic with him, and dies with it on his breast." Per- 
 haps the most characteristic adjective to be applied to Gold- 
 smith is good-natured. Giles calls this good-nature " a copi- 
 ous fountain of kindness, refreshing the life around him with 
 streams of gayety, of fondness, and of pity. There was a be- 
 nignity in him which gave his heart an interest in the hum- 
 blest creature." As compared with the pathos of Sterne, 
 Minto nicely observes that Goldsmith's "benevolence was 
 more active than sentimental, just as Sterne's was more senti- 
 mental than active." A critic in the North American Re- 
 view is right when he declares that "it is to this wealth
 
 214 GOLDSMITH 
 
 of sympathy that Goldsmith's writings owe their immor- 
 tality." 
 
 1 ' It is not to be described the effect which Goldsmith's 
 ' Vicar of Wakefield ' had upon me just at the critical mo- 
 ment of my mental development. That lofty and benevolent 
 irony, that fair and indulgent view of all infirmities and faults, 
 that meekness under all calamities, that equanimity under all 
 changes and chances, . . . proved my best education." 
 Goethe. 
 
 " Not a little of the peculiar charm of Goldsmith is attrib- 
 utable to the excellence of his heart. Mere talent would 
 scarcely have sufficed to interpret and display so enchantingly 
 the humble characters and scenes to which his most brilliant 
 efforts were devoted. It was his sincere and ready sympathy 
 with man, his sensibility to suffering in every form, his strong 
 social sentiment, and his amiable interest in all around him 
 which brightened to his mind's eye what to the less suscep- 
 tible is unheeded and obscure." Bayard Tuckerman. 
 
 11 He learned to regard ' the human face divine' with af- 
 fection and esteem. . . . He was ready to do anything 
 Jack-of-all-trades, master of none until, by-and-by, he 
 became master of the human heart and writer of two or three 
 of the deepest, truest, sweetest things men ever have written. 
 . . . In all literature I know of no such touch of that 
 heavenly charity which Christians praise so much and know so 
 little as where Dr. Primrose, on finding that his daughter has 
 been seduced, curses the seducer, and Moses with loving sim- 
 plicity rebukes his father. The old man replies, ' Did I curse 
 him, child? then may heaven forgive me and him.' . . . 
 High animal spirits, careless nature, readiness to give and re- 
 ceive, gushing tenderness these were his virtues, and they are 
 always popular. . . . I for one am glad that God sent 
 Oliver Goldsmith into the world to teach, as he has done by 
 his life and writings, that mercy, charity, and slowness to 
 anger which, through all his sad, mean, and miserable life he
 
 GOLDSMITH 21 5 
 
 never failed to show. ... If Goldsmith's precepts leave 
 us languid, his charming topography and his graceful mem- 
 ories, his tender retrospect and his genial sympathy with hu- 
 manity still invite and detain us. ... Its [' The Vicar 
 of Wakefield's '] sweet humanity, its wisdom and its common 
 sense, its happy mingling of character and Christianity, will 
 keep it sweet long after more ambitious and in many respects 
 abler works are forgotten." George Dawson. 
 
 ' His benevolent spirit seems still to smile on us : to suc- 
 cor with sweet charity; to soothe, caress, and forgive; to 
 plead with the fortunate for the unhappy and the poor." 
 Thackeray. 
 
 " But the children of flesh, whose pulses beat too sympa- 
 thetically, cannot sequester themselves in that way [as Milton 
 did]. They walk in no such altitudes, but at elevations eas- 
 ily reached by the ground-winds of humble calamity. And 
 from that cup of sorrow which upon all lips is pressed in 
 some proportion, they must submit, by the very terms on 
 which they hold their gifts, to drink, if not more profoundly 
 than others, yet more perilously as regards the fulfilment of 
 their intellectual mission. Among this household of chil- 
 dren, too sympathetically linked to the trembling impulses 
 of earth, stands forward conspicuously Oliver Goldsmith." 
 De Quincey. 
 
 "We read 'The Vicar of Wakefield ' in youth and in 
 age we return to it again and again, and bless the memory 
 of an author who contrives to reconcile us to human nature." 
 Sir Walter Scott. 
 
 " The secret of its ['The Vicar of Wakefield's '] endur- 
 ing popularity is undoubtedly its truth to nature, but to nat- 
 ure of the most amiable kind, to nature as Goldsmith saw 
 it." Washington Irving. 
 
 " His charity seems to have been pushed beyond the lim- 
 its of prudence, and all who knew him testify to the singular 
 kindliness of his nature." Leslie Stephen.
 
 2l6 GOLDSMITH 
 
 " He was so generous that he quite forgot to be just." 
 Macaulay. 
 
 " He was kind and benevolent whenever he had it in his 
 power ; and although frequently duped by artful men, his 
 heart was never hardened against the application of the un- 
 happy. ' ' Dr. Chalmers. 
 
 " He had in himself an original to draw from, with pre- 
 cisely those qualities which win general affection. Lovable 
 himself, in spite of all his grave faults, he makes lovable the 
 various copies that he takes from the master-portrait. He is 
 precisely what Johnson calls him, the ' affectum lenis domina- 
 tor' potens because lenis. He is never above the height of 
 the humblest understanding ; and, by touching the human 
 heart, he raises himself to a level with the loftiest." Bulwer- 
 Lytton. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " While the slightest inconveniences of the great are magnified 
 into calamities ; while tragedy mouths out their sufferings in all 
 the strains of eloquence, the miseries of the poor are entirely dis- 
 regarded ; and yet some of the lower ranks of people undergo 
 more real hardships in one day than those of a more exalted sta- 
 tion suffer in their whole lives. It is inconceivable what diffi- 
 culties the meanest of our common sailors and soldiers endure 
 without murmuring or regret ; without passionately declaiming 
 against Providence or calling their fellows to be gazers on their 
 intrepidity. Every day to them is a day of misery, and yet they 
 entertain their hard fate without repining." Essays. 
 
 " ' Excuse me ! ' returned I ; ' these people, however fallen, 
 are still men, and that is a very good title to my affections. . . . 
 If these wretches, my children, were princes, there would be 
 thousands ready to offer their ministry ; but, in my opinion, the 
 heart that is buried in a dungeon is as precious as that seated 
 upon a throne.' " Vicar of Wakefield. 
 
 " Were I to be angry at men for being fools, I could find am- 
 ple room for declamation, but alas ! I have been a fool myself; 
 and why should I be angry with them for being something
 
 GOLDSMITH 217 
 
 so natural to every child of humanity ?" Description of Va- 
 rious Clubs. 
 
 4. Pleasantry Mild Irony. Goldsmith is a master 
 of humor as well as of wit. His pleasantry generally takes 
 the form of playful, sympathetic irony, though we have fre- 
 quent illustrations of pure humor of the slyest kind. He 
 revels in what De Quincey calls " happy laughter untainted 
 with malice." A writer in the North American Review de- 
 fines this characteristic as " the same unobtrusive, ever-vary- 
 ing humor, seen equally in deeds, words, characters, and 
 situations, calling for no sagacity in us to catch it, and pro- 
 ducing no surprise." Another critic calls it " sweetened wis- 
 dom, sympathetic satire, unvenomed humor."' "Whom," 
 asks Thackeray, "did the vagrant harper ever hurt? he car- 
 ries no weapon save the harp on which he plays to you." 
 
 "Goldsmith is the most amiable of our satirists. He was 
 full of the milk of human kindness, and the range of his sym- 
 pathies was wide. His ridicule is always on the side of good 
 sense and good feeling, and he handles even his embodiments 
 of folly and weakness ' tenderly, as if he loved them ; ' as if, 
 at least, he had a lurking toleration for them and secretly 
 recognized their claims to exist in their own way as varieties 
 of multiform humanity. " Minto. 
 
 " The vices and follies of the day are touched with the 
 most playful and diverting satire. . . . He softens caus- 
 tic satire with a pleasant humor. . . . He drew human 
 nature as he found it, with the freedom of a satirist, but never 
 with the coldness of a cynic. . . . No one ever excelled 
 so much as he in depicting amiable follies and endearing 
 weaknesses. His satire makes us at once smile and love all 
 that he so tenderly ridicules." Talfourd. 
 
 "The whimsical yet amiable views of human life and hu- 
 man nature ; the mellow, unforced humor blended so happily 
 with good feeling and good sense throughout his writings win
 
 2l8 GOLDSMITH 
 
 their way irresistibly to the affections and carry the author 
 with them. What a bland, gentle, loving humor it is which 
 occasionally steals over the picture of ' The Deserted Vil- 
 lage, 1 giving here and there charming touches of gay sunshine 
 breaking out upon the several points 'of a shaded landscape, 
 yet never disturbing the sweet serenity and sadness of the 
 whole ! Never did humor wear so gentle an aspect. . . . 
 That which constitutes the greatest charm [of ' The Citizen of 
 the World'] is the subdued and chastened satire one occa- 
 sionally meets with. Not a rude and boisterous, a cutting and 
 malicious satire, but such as requires to be read with some 
 attention before the full force of its sly innuendoes is fully per- 
 ceived. " Washington Irving. 
 
 "Look ye now, for one moment, at the deep and delicate 
 humor of Goldsmith. How at his touch the venial infirmities 
 and vanity of this good Vicar of Wakefield live lovingly be- 
 fore the mind's eye ! How we sympathize with poor Moses 
 in that deep trade of his for the green spectacles ! How all 
 our good wishes for aspiring rusticity thrill for the showman 
 who would let his bear dance only to the genteelest tunes ! " 
 E. P. Whipple. 
 
 11 The charm of the strictures of ' The Citizen of the World ' 
 lies wholly in their delicate satire. ... At the same 
 time it must be allowed that the utterance of these strictures 
 through the mouth of a Chinese admits of a certain naivete 
 which, on occasion, heightens the sarcasm. . . . The 
 fine ladies and gentlemen who lived in that atmosphere of 
 scandal and intrigue and gambling are also from time to time 
 treated to a little decorous and respectful raillery." William 
 Black. 
 
 " With his comic sagacity and his genial perception of the 
 ludicrous, no writer can give more amusing pictures than he 
 does of sordid follies. . . . He drew human nature as he 
 found it, with the freedom of a satirist, bat never with the 
 coldness of a cynic." H. Giles.
 
 GOLDSMITH 219 
 
 "Such of his juvenile letters as have been preserved show 
 that he possessed at an early age that charm of style and fe- 
 licity of humorous description that afterward delighted the 
 world. . . . His criticisms on the reigning modes of 
 the time show wonderful powers of humor and gentle satire." 
 H. J. Nicoll. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " I had scarcely taken orders a year before I began to think 
 seriously of matrimony, and chose my wife as she did her wed- 
 ding-gown, not for a fine glossy surface, but for such qualities as 
 would wear well. To do her justice, she was a good-natured, 
 notable woman ; and as for breeding, there were few country 
 ladies who could show more. She could read any English book 
 without much spelling ; but for pickling, preserving, and cook- 
 ery, none could excel her." Vicar of Wakefield. 
 
 "I even went a step beyond Whiston in displaying my prin- 
 ciples : as he had engraven on his wife's tomb that she was the 
 only wife of William Whiston, so I wrote a similar epitaph for 
 my wife, though still living, in which I extolled her prudence, 
 economy, and obedience till death ; and having got it copied 
 fair, with an elegant frame, it was placed over the chimney-piece, 
 where it answered several useful purposes. It admonished my 
 wife of her duty to me and my fidelity to her ; it inspired her 
 with a passion for fame, and constantly put her in mind of her 
 end." Vicar of Wakffield. 
 
 " My wife and daughters happening to return a visit to neigh- 
 bors, found that the family had lately got their pictures drawn by 
 a limner, who travelled the country, and took likenesses for fif- 
 teen shillings the head. As this family and ours had long a sort 
 of rivalry in point of taste, our spirit took the alarm at this stolen 
 march upon us, and notwithstanding all I could say, and I said 
 much, it was resolved we should have our pictures done too. 
 Having, therefore, engaged the limner (for what could I do?) our 
 next deliberation was, to show the superiority of our tastes in the 
 attitudes. As for our neighbor's family, there were seven of 
 them, and they were drawn with seven oranges, a thing quite out 
 of taste, no variety in life, no composition in the world. We de- 
 sired to have something in a brighter style, and after many de-
 
 22O GOLDSMITH 
 
 bates, at length came to an unanimous resolution of being drawn 
 together in one large historical family piece. This would be 
 cheaper, since one frame should serve for all, and it would be in- 
 finitely more genteel ; for all families of any taste were drawn in 
 the same manner. As we did not immediately recollect an his- 
 torical subject to hit us, we were contented each with being 
 drawn as independent historical figures. My wife desired to be 
 represented as Venus, and the painter was desired not to be too 
 frugal of his diamonds in her stomacher and hair. Her two little 
 ones were to be as Cupids by her side, while I, in my gown and 
 band, was to present her with my books on the Whistonian con- 
 troversy. Olivia would be drawn as an Amazon sitting upon a 
 bank of flowers, dressed in a green Joseph, richly laced with gold, 
 and a whip in her hand. Sophia was to be a shepherdess, with 
 as many sheep as the painter could put in for nothing ; and Moses 
 was to be dressed out with a hat and white feather." Vicar of 
 Wakefield. 
 
 5. Power of Portraiture Fidelity. "They [the 
 ' Chinese Letters '] contain many descriptions of character, 
 which, if surpassed by himself, were surpassed by no other 
 writer of the time." Leslie Stephen. 
 
 " There is as much human nature in the character of the 
 Vicar alone as would have furnished any fifty of the novels of 
 that day or of this. Who has not been charmed by his sly 
 and quaint humor, by his moral dignity and simple vanities, 
 even by the little secrets he reveals to us of his paternal rule? 
 It is of little consequence whether we say that Au- 
 burn is an English village or insist that it is only Lissoy ideal- 
 ized, as long as the thing is true in itself. And we know that 
 this is true : it is not that one sees the place as a picture, but 
 that one seems to be breathing its very atmosphere and listen- 
 ing to the various cries that thrill the ' hollow silence.' . . . 
 Again and again there are recurrent strokes of such vividness 
 and naturalness that we yield altogether to the necromancer. 
 Look at this perfect picture of human emotion and outside 
 nature put in a,. few sentences. The old clergyman, after be-
 
 GOLDSMITH 221 
 
 ing in search of his daughter, has found her, and is now hav- 
 ing left her in an inn returning to his family and his home. 
 ' As I walked but slowly, the night waned apace. The labor- 
 ers of the day were all retired to rest ; the lights were out in 
 every cottage ; no sounds were heard but of the shrilling cock 
 and the deep-mouthed watch-dog at hollow distance. ' What 
 more perfect description of the stillness of night was ever 
 given ? "William Black. 
 
 " Within a small compass he drew with a singularly easy 
 and vigorous pencil the characters of nine or ten of his inti- 
 mate associates." Macaulay. 
 
 " His talent for fresh and vivid delineation is ever most 
 prominently displayed when he is describing what he actually 
 witnessed." Bayard Tuckerman. 
 
 " Few works exhibit a nicer perception or more delicate 
 delineation of life and manners [than ' The Citizen of the 
 World '], . . . and English characteristics in endless 
 variety are hit off with the pencil of a master. . . . Fic- 
 tion, in poetry, is not the reverse of truth, but her soft and 
 enchanted resemblance ; and this ideal beauty of nature has 
 been seldom united with so much sober fidelity as in the 
 groups and scenery of ' The Deserted Village.' " Thomas 
 Campbell. 
 
 " The elements of the Vicar's character are certainly very 
 common. We recognize an old acquaintance, and no study 
 or ingenuity can make him anything else than what he ap- 
 pears to plain men at the first reading. It is needless to add 
 that, in spite of this, or in consequence of it, it is known all 
 over the world as a master-work of genius. . . . He 
 shows the irksomeness of the company of fools in his sketches 
 of that matchless compound of superficiality, pretension, 
 tawdriness, and self-content, the little second-rate beau, Mr. 
 Tibbs." W. E. Channing. 
 
 " There is a strong personal resemblance in all his charac- 
 ters ; they are portraits of himself drawn with the features
 
 222 GOLDSMITH 
 
 widened into broad humor or elongated into saturnine wisdom. 
 His Beau Tibbs seems to have been created by looking at 
 and magnifying some of his own foibles ; his Dr. Primrose by 
 drawing forth those grave and kindly feelings which, not- 
 withstanding those foibles, lay, he knew, at the bottom of his 
 heart. ' ' Washington Irving. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 "At a small distance from the house my predecessor had made 
 a seat, overshadowed by a hedge of hawthorne and honeysuckle. 
 There, when the weather was fine and our labor soon finished, 
 we usually sat together, to enjoy an extensive landscape in the 
 calm of the evening. There too we drank tea, which was now 
 become an occasional banquet, and as we had it but seldom it 
 diffused a new joy, the preparations for it being made with no 
 small share of bustle and ceremony. On these occasions our two 
 little ones always read to us, and they were regularly served after 
 we were done. Sometimes to give variety to our amusements 
 the girls sang to the guitar, and while they thus formed a little 
 concert, my wife and I would stroll down the sloping field, that 
 was embellished with blue-bells and century, talk of our children 
 with rapture, and enjoy the breeze that wafted both health and 
 harmony." Vicar of Wakefield. 
 
 "During the reply I had the opportunity of observing the 
 appearance of our new companion ; his hat was pinched up with 
 peculiar smartness ; his looks were pale, thin and sharp ; round 
 his neck he wore a broad black ribbon and in his bosom a buckle 
 studded with glass ; his coat was trimmed with tarnished twist ; 
 he wore by his side a sword with a black hilt ; and his stockings 
 of silk, though newly washed, were grown yellow with long ser- 
 vice." A Citizen of the World. 
 
 " Our little habitation was situated at the foot of a sloping hill, 
 sheltered with a beautiful underwood behind and a prattling riv- 
 er before ; on one side a meadow, on the other a green. My 
 farm consisted of about twenty acres of excellent land, I having 
 given a hundred pounds for my predecessor's good-will. Noth- 
 ing could exceed the neatness of my little enclosures ; the elms 
 and hedge-rows appearing with inexpressible beauty. There 
 were three other apartments, one for my wife and me, another
 
 GOLDSMITH 223 
 
 for our two daughters, within our own, and the third, with two 
 oeds, for the rest of the children." Vicar of Wakefield. 
 
 6. Delicate Pathos. " Goldsmith is a master of pathos, 
 exquisite of its kind. It is the pathos intimately allied to hu- 
 mor and touching upon the tears that lie nearest to our smiles. 
 The humor that draws tears, and the pathos that provokes smiles, 
 will be popular to the end of the world." Bulwer-Lytton. 
 
 "The very first line of the poem [' The Traveller'] strikes a 
 key-note there is in it a pathetic thrill of distance and re- 
 gret and longing. . . . The genuine and tender pathos 
 [of his works] never at any time verges on the affected or 
 theatrical. ' ' William Black. 
 
 " He can be commended for the elegance of his imagery, 
 the depth of his pathos, and the flow of his numbers. He is 
 uniformly tender and impressive, but rarely sublime. Of the 
 entire poem [' The Deserted Village '] it may be deliberately 
 said that it has more tenderness and pathos, gives more of 
 picture to the eye and of feeling to the heart, than any other 
 in the language which is written in the same verse or metre." 
 Washington Irving. 
 
 " There is true pathos in that tender lament [' The Deserted 
 Village '] over the superseded sports and ruined haunts of rus- 
 tic enjoyment, which never fails to find a response in every 
 feeling breast. It is an elaborate and touching epitaph, writ- 
 ten in the cemetery of the world over what is dear to all hu- 
 manity. " Bayard Tuckerman. 
 
 " His poems and his novel contain some of the very finest 
 touches of pathos. ' ' Minto. 
 
 "That unfeigned compassion for the miseries of his kind 
 with which he walked the London streets." Austin Dobson. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " The old man's passion for confinement is similar to that we 
 all have for life. V r e are habituated to the prison, we look
 
 224 GOLDSMITH 
 
 round with discontent, are displeased with the abode, and yet 
 the length of our captivity only increases our fondness for the 
 cell. The trees we have planted, the houses we have built, or 
 the posterity we have begotten, all serve to bind us closer to 
 earth, and embitter our parting." A Citizen of the World. 
 
 "Then let us take comfort now, for we shall soon be at our 
 journey's end ; we shall soon lay down the heavy burthen laid by 
 Heaven upon us ; and though death, the only friend of the 
 wretched, for a little while mocks the weary traveller with the 
 view, and like the horizon still flies before him, yet the time will 
 certainly and shortly come when we shall cease from our toil ; 
 when the luxuriant great ones of the world shal) no more tread 
 us to the earth." Vicar of Wakefield. 
 
 " But who are these who make the streets their couch, and 
 find a short repose from wretchedness at the doors of the opu- 
 lent ? These are strangers, wanderers, and orphans, whose cir- 
 cumstances are too humble to expect redress, and whose dis- 
 tresses are too great even for pity. Their wretchedness excites 
 rather horror than pity. Some are without the covering even of 
 rags and others emaciated with disease : the world has disclaimed 
 them ; society turns its back upon their distress, and has given 
 them up to nakedness and hunger." A City Night Piece, 
 
 " Life at the greatest and best is but a forward child, that must 
 be humoured and coaxed a little till it falls asleep, and then all 
 the care is over." The Good-Natured Man. 
 
 7. Cheerfulness Optimism. "He had a constitu- 
 tional gayety of heart, an elastic hilarity and, as he himself 
 expresses it, ' a knack of hoping ' which knack could not be 
 bought with Ormus and with Ind nor lured for a day with the 
 peacock-throne of Delhi." De Quinccy. 
 
 " The cheerfulness which shines like sunlight through Gold- 
 smith's writings did not altogether desert him even in the 
 most trying hours of his wayward and troubled career. He 
 had, with all his sensitiveness, a fine, happy-go-lucky disposi- 
 tion ; was ready for a frolic when he had a guinea and when 
 he had none, and could turn a sentence on the humorous side 
 of starvation. ' ' William Black.
 
 GOLDSMITH 22 
 
 " His constant cheerfulness under all circumstances was the 
 wonderful thing about him. . . . He lived in the sun- 
 shine." George Dawson. 
 
 " Not in those graces of style nor in that homely, cherished 
 gallery of familiar faces can the secret of its [Goldsmith's 
 style's] extraordinary fascination be said to consist. It lies 
 nearer the heart a something which has found its way there ; 
 which, while it amused, has made us happier; which, gently 
 interweaving itself with our habits of thought, has increased 
 our good humor and charity ; which, insensibly it may be, has 
 corrected wilful impatiences of temper and made the world's 
 daily accidents easier and kinder to us all ; somewhat thus 
 should be expressed, I think, the charm of ' The Vicar of 
 Wakefield.' "John Forster. 
 
 " The artless benevolence that beams throughout his works ; 
 the whimsical yet amiable views of human life and human 
 nature ; the enforced humor, blending so happily with good 
 feeling and good sense, and singularly dashed at times with a 
 pleasing melancholy ; even the very nature of his mellow and 
 flowing and softly tinted style all seem to bespeak his moral 
 as well as his intellectual qualities, and make us love the man 
 at the same time that we admire the author. . . . [His 
 writings] put us in good humor with ourselves and with the 
 world, and in so doing they make us happier and better men." 
 Washington Irving. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " All that the wisdom of the proud can teach is to be stubborn 
 or sullen under misfortunes. The Cardinal's example will in- 
 struct us to be merry in circumstances of the highest affliction. 
 It matters not whether our good humour be construed by others 
 into insensibility or even idiotism ; it is happiness to ourselves, 
 and none but a fool would measure his satisfaction by what the 
 world thinks of it ; for my own part, I never pass by one of our 
 prisons for debt that I do not envy that felicity which is still go-
 
 226 GOLDSMITH 
 
 ing forward among those people who forget the cares of the 
 world by being shut out from its ambition." Essays. 
 
 " As for my misfortunes, master, I can't pretend to have gone 
 through any more than other folks ; for, except the loss of my 
 limb and my being obliged to beg, I don't know any reason, 
 thank heaven, that I have to complain. There is Bill Thibbs, of 
 our regiment, he has lost both his legs, and an eye to boot, but, 
 thank heaven, it is not so bad with me yet." Essays. 
 
 " ' There again you are wrong, my dear,' cried I, 'for though 
 they be copper, we will keep them b,y us, for copper spectacles, 
 you know, are better than nothing. . . . But let us have one 
 bottle more, Deborah, my life, and Moses, give us a good song. 
 What thanks do we not owe to heaven for thus bestowing tran- 
 quillity, health, and competence ! I think myself happier now 
 than the greatest monarch upon earth. He has no such fireside, 
 no such pleasant faces about it. Yes, Deborah, we are now 
 growing old ; but the evening of our life is likely to be happy. 
 We are descended from ancestors that know no stain, and we 
 shall leave a good and virtuous race of children behind. While 
 we live they will be our support and our pleasure here, and when 
 we die they will transmit our honour untainted to posterity. Come, 
 my son, we wait for a song, let us have a chorus.' " Vicar of 
 Wakefield. 
 
 8. Wit Comical Extravagance. " Goldsmith sur- 
 passes all our humorists in the combination of delicate wit 
 with extravagant fun. His fancy was of the lightest and 
 airiest order, and his volatile spirit was easily warmed to the 
 boiling-point of comical extravagance." Minto. 
 
 " Fashions in dramatic literature may come and go ; but 
 the wholesome, good-natured fun of ' She Stoops to Conquer ' 
 is as capable of producing a hearty laugh now as when it first 
 saw the light in Covent Garden. . . . Whenever the 
 entertainer [Goldsmith] thin-ks he is becoming dull [in his 
 essays] he suddenly tells a quaint little story, and walks off 
 amid the laughter he knows he has produced." William 
 Black. 
 
 "His comic writing is of the class which is perhaps as
 
 GOLDSMITH 22J 
 
 much preferred to that of a staider sort by people in general 
 as it is by the writer of these pages comedy, running wit, 
 farce. . . . It is that of the prince of comic writers, 
 M ol i ere. " Leigh Hunt. 
 
 " There is altogether ... an exuberant heartiness 
 and breadth of genial humor in the comedy [' She Stoops to 
 Conquer '] which seems of right to overflow into Tony Lump- 
 kin. He may be farcical, as such lumpish, roaring, un- 
 couth animal spirits have a right to be ; but who would abate 
 a bit of Cousin Tony, stupid and cunning as he is ; impu- 
 dent yet sheepish, with his loutish love of low company and 
 his young squire sense of his ' fortin ? ' There is never any 
 misgiving about Goldsmith's fun and enjoyment. It is not 
 obtained at the expense of any better thing. . . . Whether 
 it be enjoyment or mischief going on in one of Goldsmith's 
 comedies, the predominant impression is hearty, jovial, and 
 sincere." -John Forster. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " Ah, there was merit neglected for you ! and so true a friend ! 
 We loved each other for thirty years, and yet he never asked me 
 to lend him a single farthing." The Good- Natured Man. 
 
 " Mixing with the crowd, I was now conducted to the hall 
 where the magistrates are chosen ; but what tongue can describe 
 this scene of confusion ! the whole crowd seemed equally in- 
 spired with anger, jealousy, politics, patriotism, and punch." 
 A Citizen of the World. 
 
 " It is a proverb in China, that a European suffers not even 
 his spittle to be lost ; the maxim, however, is not sufficiently 
 strong, since they sell even their lies to great advantage. Every 
 nation drives a considerable trade in this commodity with their 
 neighbours." A Citizen of the World. 
 
 " ' Nay, don't talk ill of my master, madam. I won't bear to 
 hear anybody talk ill of him but myself." The Good-Natured 
 Man. 
 
 "You must know, then, that I am very well descended ; my 
 ancestors have made some noise in the world ; for my mother
 
 228 GOLDSMITH 
 
 cried oysters and my father beat a drum : I am told we have 
 even had some trumpeters in our family. Many a nobleman 
 cannot show so respectable a genealogy." Adventures of a 
 Strolling Piper. 
 
 9. Concise Diction Nice Choice of Words. 
 
 " His artless words were, each one, delicately chosen ; his 
 simple constructions were studiously sought. ' ' Edward 
 Dowden. 
 
 " Any young writer who may imagine that the power of 
 clear and concise literary expression comes by nature, cannot 
 do better than study, in Mr. Cunningham's big collection of 
 Goldsmith's writings, the continual and minute alterations 
 which the author considered necessary even after the first edi- 
 tion sometimes when the second and third editions had 
 been published. Many of these, especially in the poetical 
 works, were merely improvements in sound, as suggested by 
 a singularly sensitive ear. . . . But the majority of the 
 omissions and corrections were prompted by a careful taste, 
 which abhorred everything redundant or slovenly. 
 The English people are very fond of good English ; and thus 
 it is that couplets from ' The Traveller ' and ' The Deserted 
 Village ' have come into the common stock of our language, 
 and that sometimes not so much on account of the ideas they 
 convey as through their singular precision of epithet and 
 musical sound." William Black. 
 
 " He was a great, perhaps an unequalled master, of the 
 arts of selection and condensation. ... In general, 
 nothing is less attractive than an epitome ; but the epitomes 
 of Goldsmith, even when not concise, are always amusing." 
 -Macaulay. 
 
 " A man who had the art of being minute without tedious- 
 ness and general without confusion ; whose language was co- 
 pious without exuberance, exact without constraint, and easy 
 without weakness. " Samuel Johnson.
 
 GOLDSMITH 229 
 
 " What he aimed to do, and what he succeeded in doing, 
 was to give a clear, concise, and readable account of his sub- 
 ject."^./. Nicoll. 
 
 " They ['The Traveller ' and ' The Deserted Village '] are 
 cabinets of exquisite workmanship, which will outlast hundreds 
 of oracular shrines of oak ill put together." Leigh Hunt. 
 
 " The language of his prose works in general is admitted 
 to be a model of perfection." Washington Irring. 
 
 " ' The style is the man,' " says a French authority; at all 
 events, the style is the writer. But where, in this irregular 
 course of study where, in his college associations or his vil- 
 lage festivities did this man, with his rustic manners and 
 Irish brogue, pick up a style so pure, so delicate ? " Bulwer- 
 Lyttcn. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " Let me no longer waste the night over the page of antiquity 
 or the sallies of contemporary genius, but pursue the solitary 
 walk, where vanity, ever changing, but a few hours past walked 
 before me ; where she kept up the pageant, and now, like a 
 froward child, seems hushed with her own importunities." A 
 Citizen of the World. 
 
 " But times are altered ; trade's unfeeling train 
 Usurp the land, and dispossess the swain ; 
 Along the lawn, where scattered hamlets rose, 
 Unwieldy wealth and cumbrous pomp repose ; 
 And every want to luxury allied, 
 And every pang that folly pays to pride." 
 
 The Deserted Village. 
 
 ' ' They please, are pleased, they give to get esteem, 
 Till, seeming blest, they grow to what they seem," 
 
 The Traveller. 
 
 10. High Moral Tone." It ['The Vicar of Wakefield'] 
 has the advantage that it is quite moral nay, in a pure sense 
 Christian represents the reward of good will and persever-
 
 230 GOLDSMITH 
 
 ance in the right, strengthens an unconditional confidence in 
 God, and attests the final triumph of good over evil ; and all 
 this without a trace of cant or pedantry. . . . And in 
 the end these are the thoughts and feelings which have re- 
 claimed us from all the errors of life." Goethe. 
 
 " He is a friend ofvirtue, and in his most playful pages 
 never forgets what is due to it. A gentleness, delicacy, and 
 purity of feeling distinguishes whatever he wrote, and bears a 
 correspondence to the generosity of a disposition which knew 
 no bounds but his last guinea. . . . He wrote to exalt 
 virtue and expose vice ; and he accomplished his task in a 
 manner which raises him to the highest rank among British 
 authors." Sir Walter Scott. 
 
 " His ' Vicar of Wakefield ' and his pictures of the village 
 pastor present religion under its most endearing forms, and 
 with a feeling that could only flow from the deep convictions 
 of the heart. . . . Few productions of the kind afford 
 greater amusement in the perusal [than does ' The Vicar of 
 Wakefield '], and still fewer inculcate more impressive lessons 
 of morality. Though wit and humor abound in every page, 
 yet in the whole volume there is not one thought injurious in 
 its tendency nor one sentiment that can offend the chastest 
 ear. Its language is what ' angels might have heard and vir- 
 gins told.' ' Washington Irving. 
 
 "Its [' Vicar of Wakefield's '] sweet humanity, its simplic- 
 ity, its wisdom and its common sense its happy mingling of 
 character and Christianity, will keep it sweet long after more 
 ambitious and in many respects abler works have found their 
 level with the great democracy of the forgotten." Austin 
 Dobson. 
 
 " Protestant and English virtue has not a more approved 
 and amiable exemplar. Religious, affectionate, rational, the 
 Vicar unites predilections which seemed irreconcilable." 
 Taine. 
 
 "He had the happy art of being virtuous in his books,
 
 GOLDSMITH 231 
 
 though not altogether virtuous out of them. He had two 
 sides: the under side, his life; the upper side the golden, 
 glorious, beautiful side his works. He gave good advice in 
 consequence of never having taken it. ... By his faults, 
 his follies, his genius, his fooleries, his blunders, his mistakes, 
 and his nonsenses, he learned, even as a preacher would learn, 
 to preach well on virtue because of his acquaintance with vice. 
 Goldsmith was a prince of moralists, a king of max- 
 ims, a master of apothegms, lord of proverbs. . . . He 
 had a disinclination for the clerical profession [for which he 
 had been educated] he said he was not good enough for it. 
 Deep down below all his nonsense there was a heart 
 of goodness which made him shrink back in this case." 
 George Daw son. 
 
 " Its [' Vicar of Wakefield's '] perfect purity of tone afforded 
 a pleasing contrast to most of the works of fiction that had 
 preceded it." H. J. Nicoll. 
 
 " Good predominant over evil is briefly the purpose and 
 moral of the little story [' Vicar of Wakefield ']. It is designed 
 to show us that patience in suffering, that persevering reliance 
 on the providence of God, that quiet labor, cheerful endeavor, 
 and an indulgent forgiveness of the faults and infirmities of 
 others, are the easy and certain means of pleasure in this world 
 and of turning pain to noble uses. It is designed to show us 
 that the heroism and self-denial needed for the duties of life 
 are not of the superhuman sort ; that they may coexist with 
 many follies, with some simple weaknesses, with many harm- 
 less vanities ; and that, in the improvement of mankind, near 
 and remote, in its progress through worldly content to final 
 happiness, the humblest of men have their places assigned 
 them and their parts allotted them to play." John Forster. 
 
 " His talents were sacredly devoted to the cause of virtue 
 and humanity. No malignant satire ever came from his pen." 
 Bayard Tuckerman. 
 
 "His chaste pathos makes him an insinuating moralist.
 
 232 GOLDSMITH 
 
 His quiet enthusiasm leads the affections to humble 
 things without a vulgar association." Thomas Campbell. 
 
 " He is so remarkably free from the coarseness and ribaldry 
 which were more than tolerated in some of the ablest writers 
 of his time that it seems as if he could not have lived in the 
 midst of licentiousness and known how much the public taste 
 would endure. . . . When we come to think over the 
 matter and find scenes, reflections, feelings, whole passages and 
 simple sayings, not merely remembered but so wrought into 
 the mind that they are a part of itself rather than its furniture, 
 and that our tempers have been softened by them, our char- 
 acters and sentiments moulded, and our happiness increased, 
 we own that some power, deep as any philosophy, has been 
 operating without our knowledge to produce effects like these, 
 and that, while reading, we little thought of the mild, tender, 
 yet clear light which made the images at once distinct and 
 lovely." W. E. Channing. 
 
 " How comes it that in all the miry paths of life that he had 
 trod no speck ever sullied the robe of his modest and graceful 
 muse ? How, amidst all that love for inferior company, which 
 never to the last forsook him, did he keep his genius so free 
 from every touch of vulgarity ? What style in the English 
 language is more thoroughly elegant and high-bred more 
 impressed with the stamp of a gentleman its ease so polished, 
 its dignity so sweet ? " Bulwer-Lytton, 
 
 " In an age when drunkenness was fashionable, he was not a 
 drinker; in an age which appears to me strangely coarse in 
 language and corrupt in morals the only immorality of which 
 Goldsmith was guilty was gambling, which, in the estimation 
 of his contemporaries, was no immorality at all ; and in his 
 poems there is a striking freedom from the moral blemishes of 
 Sterne and Swift, of Fielding and Smollett. . . . Had 
 he lived to old age it is not likely that he would have pro- 
 duced a nobler poem than ' The Deserted Village.' ' S. M. 
 Towle.
 
 GOLDSMITH 233 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " O my children, if you could but learn to commune with your 
 own hearts and know what noble company you can make them, 
 you would little regard the elegance and splendor of the worth- 
 less." Vicar of Wakefield. 
 
 " Heaven, we are assured, is much more pleased to view a 
 repentant sinner than ninety-nine persons who have supported 
 a course of undeviating rectitude : and this is right ; for that 
 single effort, by which we stop short in the down-hill path to per- 
 dition, is of itself a greater exertion of virtue than a hundred acts 
 of justice.": Vicar of Wakefield. 
 
 " ' Both wit and understanding,' cried I, ' are trifles without 
 integrity ; it is that which gives value to every character. The 
 ignorant peasant, without fault, is greater than the philosopher 
 with many ; for what is genius and courage without a heart ? 
 " An honest man is the noblest work of God ! " . . . Men 
 should be prized not for their exemption from fault, but for the 
 size of the virtues they are possessed of.' " Vicar of Wakefield. 
 
 II. Mock-heroic Declamation. "Goldsmith some- 
 times assumes a declamatory style, with oratorical interro- 
 gation and answer and paragraphs in the form of a climax. 
 In these declamations there is usually a tincture of mock hero- 
 ism." Minto. 
 
 "Among the minor writings of Goldsmith there is none 
 more delightful than this [' The Life of Richard Nash '] : the 
 mock-heroic gravity, the half-familiar, contemptuous good 
 nature with which he composes this Funeral March of the 
 Marionette, are extremely whimsical and amusing." William 
 Black. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " Does this look like security ? Does this look like confidence ? 
 No, madam ; every moment that shows me your merit only serves 
 to increase my diffidence and confusion." She Stoops to Conquer.
 
 234 GOLDSMITH 
 
 " This, too, is one of my nephew's tjopeful associates. O van- 
 ity, thou constant deceiver, how do all thy efforts to exalt serve 
 but to sink us ! Thy false colourings, like those employed to 
 heighten beauty, only seem to mend that bloom which they con- 
 tribute to destroy." The Good-Naturcd Man. 
 
 "Doubt my sincerity, madam? By your dear self I swear; 
 ask the brave if they desire glory ? ask cowards if they court 
 safety ? ask the sick if they long for health ? ask misers if they 
 love money ? " The Good-Natured Man. 
 
 " Hail, O ye simple, honest Brahmins of the East ! Ye inof- 
 fensive friends of all that were born to happiness as well as you ! 
 You never sought a short-lived pleasure from the miseries of 
 others ! " A Citizen of the World. 
 
 12. Unexpected Turn Epigram Antithesis. In 
 
 his plays and his essays Goldsmith is fond of surprising his 
 reader by giving to the sentence an unexpected turn just at the 
 end. This is of the nature of epigram, and comes perhaps logi- 
 cally under the head of wit, already discussed ; it is so marked 
 a trait, however, that we venture to consider it distinctly. 
 This sudden trip at the close of an otherwise sober sentence 
 " peculiarly suited Goldsmith's gay volatility." 
 
 " One is kept continually on the alert by the epigrammati- 
 cal turn of his sentences." Knowles. 
 
 "He was taken with the charm of rhetorical antithesis, 
 and labored to deliver his sayings in an antithetical form."- 
 Minto. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 "After I had resided at college for seven years my father died 
 and left me his blessing." The Man in Black. 
 
 " O friendship ! thou fond soother of the human breast, to thee 
 we fly in every calamity ; to thee the wretched seek for succor ; 
 on thee the care-tired son of misery fondly relies ; from thy kind 
 assistance the unfortunate always hopes for relief, and may be 
 ever sure of disappointment." The Man in Black. 
 
 " I have seen a lady dressed from top to toe in her own manu-
 
 GOLDSMITH 235 
 
 factures formerly. But nowadays, there's not a thing of their 
 own manufacture about them except their faces." The Good- 
 Matured Man. 
 
 " Olivia wished for many lovers, Sophia to secure one. Oliv- 
 ia was often affected with too great a desire to please, Sophia 
 even repressed excellence from her fears to offend. The one en- 
 tertained me with her vivacity when I was gay, the other with her 
 sense when I was serious." The Vicar of Wakefield.
 
 SAMUEL JOHNSON, 1709-1784 
 
 Biographical Outline. Samuel Johnson, born at Lich- 
 field, September 18, 1709; father a bookseller and a man 
 of some standing in church and, political circles; Johnson 
 inherits from his father " a powerful frame and a vile melan- 
 choly ; " he is remarkably precocious ; suffers as a child from 
 scrofula, which disfigures his face and affects the sight of one 
 eye ; is " touched " by Queen Anne; after learning his let- 
 ters at a dame school he enters Lichfield School, where the 
 influence of the brutal head-master, one Hunter, permanently 
 affects Johnson's educational theories ; in the autumn of 1725 
 he visits an uncle, Cornelius Ford, a clergyman of convivial 
 tastes, who recognizes Johnson's ability, and causes him to 
 be transferred to a school at Stourbridge kept by one Went- 
 worth, whom Johnson is said to have assisted in teaching ; 
 after remaining a year at Stourbridge he returns to his father's 
 house in Lichfield and spends two years in " lounging," 
 but is " immoderately fond " of reading old romances; he 
 reads also widely in other lines, and writes a few verses ; Oc- 
 tober 31, 1728, he enters Pembroke College, Oxford, being 
 at first supported by one Andrew Corbet, " a neighboring 
 gentleman," as a companion to Corbet's son, then at Pem- 
 broke ; a disagreement with Corbet causes Johnson's supplies 
 to be stopped after a time ; he remains at Oxford steadily till 
 December 12, 1729, and is there at intervals till October 8, 
 1731 ; he despises his tutor's lectures, surprises the college by 
 the extent of his reading, and translates Pope's "Messiah" 
 into Latin verse, which is published in 1731 in an " Oxford 
 Miscellany ; " while at Oxford Johnson is " miserably poor," 
 suffers from hypochondria, and is sometimes proudly insubor- 
 
 236
 
 SAMUEL JOHNSON 237 
 
 dinate ; he reads Greek and metaphysics in a desultory way, 
 disdains financial aid, and leaves Oxford late in 1729 be- 
 cause of his poverty ; his father, practically bankrupt, dies 
 in December, 1731, leaving Johnson but ,20; after a 
 long search for employment he becomes an usher in Market- 
 Bosworth School, probably early in 1732 ; he is harshly treat- 
 ed by Sir Wolstan Dixie, patron of the school (to whom 
 Johnson acted as chaplain), and leaves the school after a ser- 
 vice of a few months ; he goes to Birmingham and takes 
 lodgings with a Mr. Warren, chief bookseller of Birmingham 
 and publisher of the Birmingham Journal, to which Johnson 
 becomes a contributor ; he translates for the Journal Labo's 
 "Voyage to Abyssinia," and receives five guineas for the 
 work; Johnson returns to Lichfield about 1734 and endeav- 
 ors to obtain subscribers for an edition of Politian's Latin 
 poems, which he proposes to publish ; in July, 1735, ^ e mar " 
 ries a Mrs. Porter, the widow of a Birmingham mercer, a 
 woman two years Johnson's senior and having a daughter 
 (Lucy) by her first husband ; she brings to Johnson about 
 ;8oo and they take a house at Edial, near Lichfield, where, 
 as an advertisement in the Gentleman' 's Magazine announces, 
 " young gentlemen are boarded and taught the Greek and 
 Latin languages by Samuel Johnson;" among his pupils, 
 who never exceeded eight in number, were Garrick and his 
 brother ; Johnson's peculiarities of temper and appearance 
 cause him to fail in two attempts, made about this time, to 
 secure positions in public schools; March 3, 1737, he starts 
 with Garrick for London to seek his fortune, leaving his family 
 in lodgings at Lichfield ; while at Edial Johnson had written 
 three acts of his drama " Irene ; " he finds a patron in Henry 
 Hervey, third son of the Earl of Bristol ; he spends the 
 summer of 1737 at Lichfield and there completes " Irene ; " 
 returns to London with his wife in the autumn, taking lodg- 
 ings for himself and wife in Woodstock Street, Hanover 
 Square, and leaving Lucy Porter with his mother at Lich-
 
 238 SAMUEL JOHNSON 
 
 field; "Irene" is successively refused by the two principal 
 theatrical managers of the day ; Johnson contributes to the 
 Gentleman's Magazine for March, 1738, a Latin ode en- 
 titled Sylvanus Urban, and soon becomes a regular con- 
 tributor ; he also begins, about 1738, to edit the parliamen- 
 tary debates, first reported by William Guthrie and published 
 by Johnson fictitiously under the title " Doings of the Senate 
 ,of Lilliput ; " Johnson himself writes the debates from July, 
 1741, to March, 1744, some of them being derived second- 
 hand from actual hearers and others being simply the product 
 of his own imagination ; he afterward told Boswell that he 
 ceased writing the debates because he " would not be acces- 
 sory to the propagation of a falsehood; " in 1738 he pub- 
 lishes his satire "London," imitating Juvenal's Third Sa- 
 tire, and receives ten guineas for the copyright ; it appears 
 on the same day as Pope's " Epilogue," and reaches a second 
 edition within a week ; in 1739 Johnson applies for the prin- 
 cipalship of a school at Appleby, and Pope tries to secure for 
 him the degree of A.M. from Dublin University, the posses- 
 sion of the degree being a necessary condition of appointment 
 at Appleby ; both attempts fail, as does an effort made by 
 Johnson soon afterward to secure permission to practise as an 
 advocate at Doctor's Commons ; he then engages with Cave, 
 the publisher, to make a translation of Father Paul's " His- 
 tory," and receives ^49 is. for work done upon it, but the 
 translation is never completed ; Johnson continues to write 
 for the Gentleman's Magazine; in 1742 he is employed to 
 catalogue the library of Harley, second Earl of Osborne ; the 
 earl treats Johnson insolently, and is promptly knocked down 
 by the impecunious librarian ; little is known of Johnson's 
 life about this time till February, 1744, when he publishes 
 his "Life of Savage," in which he rehearses the hardships 
 and the extreme poverty that he and Savage had suffered to- 
 gether; in 1745 he publishes in pamphlet form certain crit- 
 icisms of Hanmer's edition of Shakespeare, with proposals for
 
 SAMUEL JOHNSON 239 
 
 a new edition by himself; in 1747 he publishes the plan of 
 his " Dictionary," inscribing the work to Lord Chesterfield ; 
 by his contract with the booksellers, Johnson was to receive 
 ^1,575 for the work ; he employs six amanuenses, and him- 
 self reads and marks all the books used as sources of illustra- 
 tive quotations; while preparing the " Dictionary " he writes 
 "The Vanity of Human Wishes" (published in January, 
 1749), and receives fifteen guineas for the copyright; in 
 1749 Garrick, having become manager of the Drury Lane 
 Theatre, brings out Johnson's drama "Irene;" it runs for 
 nine nights, and brings to Johnson ^195 i-js. as royalty, 
 which is supplemented with 100 received for the copyright, 
 but the play is really a failure, and Johnson does not again 
 try dramatic writing ; he publishes the first number of the 
 Rambler, March 20, 1750, and issues it twice a week there- 
 after till March 14, 1752, himself writing practically all the 
 contents; Johnson receives two guineas a paper; the sales 
 rarely exceeded five hundred copies, but the collected edition 
 of one hundred and fifty numbers was popular, and was re- 
 printed ten times during Johnson's life; the Rambler estab- 
 lishes his reputation as a moralist; in 1750 he writes a pro- 
 logue for Milton's " Comus," then performed at Drury Lane 
 for the benefit of Milton's granddaughter ; he loses his wife 
 in 1752, and writes a sermon to be preached at her funeral, 
 which was not preached but was published after Johnson's 
 death ; he contributes to the Adventurer, established by his 
 friend and imitator, Hawkesworth, during 175354; early 
 in 1755, when the "Dictionary" was nearing completion, 
 Johnson writes his famous letter to Lord Chesterfield, reject- 
 ing that nobleman's tardy offer of assistance with the mem- 
 orable words, " I am indifferent and cannot enjoy it, I am 
 lonely and cannot impart it. I am known and do not need 
 it;" late in 1 754 he visits Warton at Oxford and receives 
 (February 20, 1755) the honorary degree of M.A. ; the 
 "Dictionary" appears April 15, 1755, and is at once ac-
 
 240 SAMUEL JOHNSON 
 
 cepted as a standard authority; from 1749 onward Johnson 
 was connected with various tavern clubs, and formed friend- 
 ships with Langton, Beauclerk, Burney, Goldsmith, Rey- 
 nolds, Burke, and many other prominent men of the time ; 
 between 1752 and 1759 he takes into his home a blind Welsh 
 lady in reduced circumstances named Williams, an impov- 
 erished French waiter named Levett, Mrs. Desmouslins, the 
 daughter of his godfather, a Miss Carmichael, and one Bark- 
 er, a colored servant, educated by Johnson ; all these de- 
 pendents are cared for by Johnson till their deaths; although 
 he had received 100 more than was promised for the " Dic- 
 tionary," Johnson was so poor in 1752 as to be sued for a 
 debt of ^51 3-y. , which was paid by a loan from Richardson ; 
 he publishes the first number of the Idler, April 15, 1758, and 
 issues it weekly thereafter till April 5, 1760; his profits on 
 the collected edition, which appeared in October, 1761, were 
 about ^84; on the death of his mother in January, 1759, 
 in order to raise money for her funeral and other expenses, 
 Johnson wrote " Rasselas," "in the evenings of one week," 
 and received ^1,251 from the first two editions; about this 
 time he gives up his house in Gough Square and takes lodgings 
 at i Inner Temple Lane, where he lives " in indolent pov- 
 erty ; " in 1760-61 he does little except to work on his edi- 
 tion of Shakespeare ; in July, 1762, through the intercession 
 of friends, he receives from George III. a pension of ^300 a 
 year ; he is requested by the ministers to write pamphlets, 
 and is supplied with materials for the same ; among these 
 pamphlets are The False Alarm (1770) and Taxation no 
 Tyranny (1775) ; the pension relieves Johnson from pecun- 
 iary cares, but nearly palsies his pen ; he lies in bed till 
 noon, and declares, " No man but a blockhead ever wrote 
 except for money ; " meets Boswell in May, 1763, " and thus 
 became visible to posterity; " during the winter of 1763-64 
 he unites with Reynolds, Burke, and Goldsmith in forming 
 the famous Turk's Head Club, which had weekly suppers till
 
 SAMUEL JOHNSON 241 
 
 1772 and then fortnightly suppers till 1783, the membership 
 gradually increasing to thirty members; in 1764 Johnson 
 meets and becomes intimate with the Thrales (Thrale was a 
 wealthy brewer of Streatham), who have great influence on 
 his life thereafter ; for the next twenty years he is practically 
 a member of the Thrale family ; he is recognized as a literary 
 dictator, and receives wide homage ; his conversations are 
 recorded by Boswell, Mrs. Thrale (afterward Mrs. Piozzi), 
 and Madame d'Arblay; in October, 1765, heat last brings 
 out his " Shakespeare," and receives ^475 for the first two 
 editions; in May, 1777, he engages to write prefaces fora 
 proposed collection of the English poets, and names his own 
 price ; the first four volumes of the collection appeared in 
 1779 and the last four in 1781 ; Johnson received, altogether, 
 four hundred guineas for the work, though the publishers 
 would have given a thousand or fifteen hundred if he had so 
 demanded ; he makes frequent excursions to Lichfield and 
 Oxford and, in the autumn of 1771, visits the Hebrides in 
 company with Boswell; in 1775 Johnson publishes an ac- 
 count of the latter journey ; in company with the Thrales he 
 visits Wales in 1774 and Paris in 1775 ; in 1781, on the 
 death of Thrale, Johnson becomes his executor and receives 
 from him a legacy of 200 ; he suffers much from asthma 
 and gout, and loses his home with Mrs. Thrale on the depart- 
 ure of that lady for an Italian trip under the guidance of the 
 musician Piozzi, whom she afterward married ; Johnson re- 
 turns to his house in Fleet Street; he visits Oxford again, with 
 Boswell, in 1784; he dies at his home December 13, 1784, 
 and is buried in Westminster Abbey ; his property at his 
 death amounted to ^2,300. 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY ON JOHNSON'S STYLE. 
 Stephen, L. , "Hours in a Library." New York, 1894, Putnam, 2: 
 
 1-33- 
 
 Minto, W., "English Prose Literature." Edinburgh, 1886, Blackwood, 
 417-428. 
 16
 
 242 SAMUEL JOHNSON 
 
 Stephen, L., "English Men of Letters." New York, 1879, Harper, 
 
 166-195. 
 Hazlitt, W., " Lectures on the English Poets." London, 1884, G. Bell 
 
 & Sons, 2: 133-141. 
 Waller, J. F., "Johnson and Boswell." London, j88i, Cassell & Co., 
 
 1-185. 
 Masson, E. T., "Johnson, his Words and Ways." New York, 18/9, 
 
 Harper, 1-306. 
 Brougham, Lord Henry, "Works." London, 1846, Chas. Kingsley & 
 
 Co., 1 : 304-378. 
 Welsh, A. H., "The Development of English Literature." Chicago, 
 
 1884, Griggs, 2: 172-178. 
 Murphy, A., "An Essay on the Life and Genius of Samuel Johnson" 
 
 (Johnson's Works). New York, 1846, Harper, I : 1-33. 
 Payne, J., "Johnson's Life and Writings." New York, 1855, Harper, 
 
 1 : 13-100. 
 Macaulay, T. B., "Essays" (Miscellaneous Works). New York, 1880, 
 
 Harper, I : 58 1-628 and index. 
 
 Hunt, T. W., " Representative English Prose." New York, 1887, Arm- 
 strong, 310-333. 
 Craik, G. L., " History of English Literature. " New York, 1869, Scrib- 
 
 ner, 323-328. 
 
 Collier, W. F., "History of English Literature." London, 1892, Nel- 
 son, 343-35- 
 Duyckinck, E. A., " Portrait Gallery." New York, 1875, Johnson, 
 
 Wilson & Co., 2: 5-27. 
 Gosse, E., "History of Eighteenth Century Literature." New York, 
 
 1889. Macmillan, 282-295. 
 Stephen, L., "Dictionary of National Biography." New York, 1888, 
 
 Macmillan, 30: 30-47. 
 Hazlitt, W. C., "Offspring of Thought," etc. London, 1884, Reeves 
 
 & Co., 47-56. 
 Carlyle, T., " Critical and Miscellaneous Essays. " London, 1847, Chap^ 
 
 man & Hall, 3 : 18-90. 
 Carlyle, T., "Heroes and Hero Worship." Philadelphia, 1894, Alte- 
 
 mus, 222-246. 
 Grant, Lieut. -Col. F., "Samuel Johnson." London, 1887, W. Scott, 
 
 150-170. 
 Scott, Sir W., "Lives of the Novelists." New York, 1872, Denham, 
 
 234-245. 
 Hawthorne, N., "Tales, Sketches," etc. Boston, 1870, Fields, Osgood 
 
 & Co., 294-306.
 
 SAMUEL JOHNSON 243 
 
 Birrell, A., " Obiter Dicra." New York, 1887, Scribner, I : III, etc. ; 
 
 2: 109-144. 
 
 Towers, J., "Dr. Samuel Johnson," etc. London, 1886, Dilly, 1-124. 
 Russell, A. P., "Characteristics." Boston, 1893, Houghton, Mifflin & 
 
 Co., 52-74. 
 
 Masson, D., "British Novelists." Boston, 1892, W. Small, 156-157. 
 Nicoll, H. J., "Landmarks of English Literature." New York, 1883, 
 
 Appleton, 238-251. 
 Taine, H. A., "History of English Literature." New York, 1875, 
 
 Holt, 2 : 434-443 and v. index. 
 Allibone, A., "Dictionary of Authors." Philadelphia, 1858, Childs & 
 
 Co., I : 971-983. 
 Bascom, J., " Philosophy of English Literature." New York, 1874, 
 
 Putnam, 186-208. 
 Buckland, A., "The Story of English Literature." London, 1882, Cas- 
 
 sell & Co., 442-457. 
 Dawson, G., "Biographical Lectures." London, 1886, Kegan Paul, 
 
 Trench & Co., 159-171. 
 Gilfillan, G., "Gallery of Literary Portraits." Edinburgh, 1857, 2: 
 
 217-226. 
 Perry, T. S., "English Literature in the Eighteenth Century." New 
 
 York, 1883, Harper, 403-415. 
 L'Estrange, A. G., " History of English Humor." London, 1878, 
 
 Hurst & Blackett, 110-113. 
 Page, \V. P., "Johnson's Life and Writings." New York, 1885, Harper, 
 
 1 : 13-100. 
 Phillips, M. G., "A Manual of English Literature." New York, 1893, 
 
 Harper, 2: 23-55. 
 
 Macaulay, T. B., " Encyclopaedia Britannica." New York, 1881, Scrib- 
 ner, 13: 719-730. 
 
 Cornhill Magazine, 29 : 280-297 (L. Stephen). 
 Macmillaii'f Magazine, 38: 153-160 (M. Arnold); 57: 190-194(0. B. 
 
 Hill); 38: 153-160 (M. Arnold). 
 New Monthly Magazine, 103 : 18-27 (Sir Nathaniel). 
 Monthly Review, 6l : I-IO (Bathurst) ; 81-92; 186-191. 
 Linen's Living Age, 144: 259-273^. Dennis); 52: 742-750 (G. D.); 
 
 176: 288-292 (G. B. Hill); 45: 221-227 (J- Murray); 138: 86-93 
 (Matthew Arnold). 
 
 Harper's Magazine, 82 : 927-932 (Walter Besant). 
 National Magazine, I: 393-402; 2: 206-213 (Courthope). 
 Democratic Review, II : 165-171 (M. Darnlay). 
 Contemporary Review, 55 : 88-99 (G. B. Hill) ; 32 : 707-728 (W. Cyples).
 
 244 SAMUEL JOHNSON 
 
 Quarterly Review, 46: 1-46. 
 
 North American Review, 34: 91-119 (Peabody). 
 
 The Nation, 45 : 296-299 (Lounsbury). 
 
 Eclectic Magazine, 40 ; 424-427 (Macaulay) ; 34 : 492-500. 
 
 British Quarterly Review, 70 : 347-372 (J. Dennis). 
 
 Eclectic Magazine, 34 : 492-500. 
 
 PARTICULAR CHARACTERISTICS. 
 
 I. Latinized Diction. Johnson's diction abounds in 
 sonorous Latin derivatives. He once said of himself that he 
 had used, in a certain work of his, " too big words and too 
 many of them." This quality of his style has been so gener- 
 ally noticed as to give us the permanent adjective Johnsonian 
 or Johnsonese. Carlyle calls it "a wondrous buckram style, 
 . a measured grandiloquence, stepping or rather stalk- 
 ing along in a very solemn way, but a phraseology that al- 
 ways has something in it." Goldsmith once said to Johnson, 
 " Doctor, if you were to write a fable about little fishes, you 
 would make them talk like whales." It is but fair to say, 
 however, that this trait is not found in Johnson's memorable 
 table-talk nor prominently in his later writings. 
 
 "Johnson's memory for words, and consequent command 
 of language, was amazing. In this respect he stands in the 
 very first rank. One might suppose, from what is usually said 
 concerning the great preponderance of Latin words in his dic- 
 tion, that he failed in command of homelier language ; but this 
 is a mistake. His Rambler is highly Latinized ; but in his 
 Preface to Shakespeare, 1768, we trace the beginning of a 
 homelier style. In his ' Lives of the Poets ' the style is not so 
 Latinized as the average style of the present day. The pro- 
 portion of Latin words is not above half as great as in a leader 
 of the Times. He is often studiously homely, and shows a 
 perfect command of homely diction. . . . Perhaps the 
 most common objection to Johnson's style is that it contains 
 too many heavy words of Latin origin. The objection is just, 
 but there are one or two things which the objectors com-
 
 SAMUEL JOHNSON 245 
 
 monly overlook. One is that his earlier style is much more 
 Latinized than his later : ... his ' Lives of the Poets ' 
 contains more of the Saxon element than the average style 
 of the present day. Another thing is that his Latin deriv- 
 atives are not of his own coining. . . . Finally, he is 
 much less Latinized than several writers of note both before 
 and after him. . . . Johnson had not the qualifications 
 of a popular expositor. His diction was too Latinized, and 
 he did not sufficiently relieve the dryness of general statements 
 by examples and illustrations." Minto. 
 
 "It is well known that he made less use than any other 
 eminent writer of those strong plain words, Anglo-Saxon or 
 Norman-French, of which the roots lie in the inmost depths 
 of our language, and that he felt a vicious partiality for terms 
 which, long after our own speech had been fixed, were bor- 
 rowed from the Greek and Latin, and which, therefore, even 
 when lawfully naturalized, must be considered as born aliens, 
 not entitled to rank with the king's English. . . . His 
 conversation appears to have been quite equal to his writings in 
 matter, and far superior to them in manner. When he talked 
 he clothed his wit and his sense in forcible and natural expres- 
 sions. As soon as he took his pen in his hand to write for 
 the public, his style became systematically vicious. All his 
 books are written in a learned language in a language 
 which nobody hears from his mother or his nurse ; in a lan- 
 guage in which nobody ever quarrels or drives bargains or 
 makes love in a language in which nobody ever thinks. 
 It is clear that Johnson himself did not think in the 
 dialect in which he wrote. The expressions which came first 
 to his tongue were simple, energetic, and picturesque. When he 
 wrote for publication, he did his sentences out of English into 
 Johnsonese. His letters from the Hebrides to Mrs. Thrale are 
 the original of that work of which the ' Journey to the Heb- 
 rides ' is the translation, and it is amusing to compare the two 
 versions. 'When we were taken upstairs,' says he in one of
 
 246 SAMUEL JOHNSON 
 
 his letters, ' a dirty fellow bounced out of the bed on which 
 one of us was to lie. 1 This incident is recorded in the ' Jour- 
 ney ' as follows : '-Out of one of the beds on which we were 
 to repose, started up, at our entrance, a man black as a Cy- 
 clops from the forge.' Sometimes Johnson translated aloud. 
 ' The Rehearsal,' he said, very unjustly, ' has not enough 
 wit to keep it sweet; ' then, after a pause, ' it has not vital- 
 ity enough to preserve it from putrefaction.' ' Mtiiciti/tiy. 
 
 " What he himself called his habit of using too big words 
 and too many of them was not affectation, but as much the 
 result of special idiosyncrasy as his queer gruntings and 
 twitchings. ... In his letters . . . we see that he 
 could be pithy enough when he chose to descend from his 
 Latinized abstractions to good concrete English, but that is 
 only when he becomes excited." Leslie Stephen. 
 
 " In childish memories he is too constrained to be associ- 
 ated with dust and dictionaries and those provoking obstacles 
 to boys' reading long words." Augustine Birrell. 
 
 "This [Johnson's Anglo-Latin element] is one of the first 
 features that impresses the reader as he studies the prose struct- 
 ure and diction, and it becomes more manifest as the perusal 
 goes on. . . . There is a wide-spread antipathy by way 
 of presumption against the Johnsonian style in this regard, so 
 that many even among the educated must confess to an utter 
 ignorance of the pages that they pronounce Latinized. . . . 
 His diction is beyond question a mixed one. The foreign 
 element is prominent enough to call attention to it as foreign 
 and thus to detract from its native simplicity as seen in Swift 
 and Addison. . . . The diction of the Rambler is a dis- 
 tinctively classical diction. It is English in Latin dress. In 
 his antipathy to the French, he favored the Latin unduly. 
 He abhorred all Gallicisms, but in deference to the 
 influence of such authors as Sir Thomas Browne and by reason 
 of his personal classical attainments, he gave undue weight to 
 the idioms of Rome. It is thus that we have such terms as
 
 SAMUEL JOHNSON 247 
 
 obstreperous, ratiocination and adumbrate in great profu- 
 sion. . . . This Latinic element is not offensively pres- 
 ent in all of his writings. Most of the extreme criticisms 
 offered have been based upon a study of the Rambler. Up to 
 this point, the criticism is just. These essays contain as much 
 of this foreign caste as all his other works combined. The 
 author's style simplified somewhat as he went on. . . . 
 In ' Rasselas ' much of the crude and the burly style of the 
 earlier writings gives place to a genuine pathos, while in the 
 ' Lives of the Poets ' there is a quality of diction and an order 
 of structure that may well be compared to that of any pre- 
 ceding writer. . . . His diction was Latinic, though less 
 and less [so] as his style advanced." T. W. Hunt, 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 *' That affluence and power, advantages extrinsic and adventi- 
 tious and therefore easily separable from those by whom they are 
 possessed, should very often flatter the mind with expectations of 
 felicity which they cannot give, raises no astonishment." Life of 
 Savage. 
 
 "'Dear Princess,' said Rasselas, 'you fall into the common 
 errors of exaggeratory declamation, by producing, in a familiar 
 disquisition, examples of national calamities and scenes of exten- 
 sive misery, which are found in books rather than in the world.' " 
 Rasselas. 
 
 " I sit down, in pursuance of my late engagement, to recount 
 the remaining part of the adventures that befel me in my long 
 quest of conjugal felicity, which, though I have not yet been so 
 happy as to obtain it, I have at least endeavored to deserve by 
 unwearied diligence, without suffering from repeated disappoint- 
 ments any abatement of my hope or repression of my activity." 
 The Rambler. 
 
 2. Antithesis Balance Point. " His composition 
 is full of antithesis ; he carefully balances the thought, limits 
 it on this side and on that, and exhibits it in various rela- 
 tions. An exact poise of ideas and correspondence of con-
 
 248 SAMUEL JOHNSON 
 
 siderations accompany him in his composition, whether it be 
 grave or humorous." John Bascom. 
 
 " Dr. Johnson is . . . . a complete balance-master in 
 the topics of morality. He never encourages hope, but he 
 counteracts it by fear ; he never elicits a truth, but he sug- 
 gests some objection in answer to it. ... The structure 
 of his sentences, which was his own invention, and which 
 has been generally imitated since his time, is a species of 
 rhyming in prose, where one clause answers to another 
 in measure and quantity, like the tagging of syllables at 
 the end of a verse ; the close of the period follows as 
 mechanically as the oscillation of a pendulum ; the sense is 
 balanced with the sound ; each sentence, revolving around its 
 centre of gravity, is contained within itself like a couplet, and 
 each paragraph forms itself into a stanza." Hazlitt. 
 
 " The structure of the sentences is compact, though they 
 are too elaborately balanced and stuffed with superfluous an- 
 tithesis." Leslie Stephen. 
 
 " None has more generally mutilated the flowing liberty of 
 conversation and life by antithesis and technical words. . . . 
 His phraseology rolls ever in solemn and majestic peri- 
 ods, in which every substantive marches ceremoniously, ac- 
 companied by its epithet ; grand, pompous words peal forth 
 like an organ ; every proposition is set forth by another prop- 
 osition of equal length ; thought is developed with the com- 
 passed regularity and official splendor of a procession."- Taine. 
 
 "The often -remarked mannerism of Johnson's sentences 
 . . . consists in the frequent use of the balanced struct- 
 ure. He employs liberally all the arts of balance both in 
 sound and in sense. In ' The Lives of the Poets ' he is much 
 less elaborate and sonorous in his balances than in the Ram- 
 bler. ... In this work [' The Lives of the Poets '] bal- 
 ances are numerous, but, on the whole, it may be said that 
 in these the cadence is more varied, and that we have a 
 greater proportion of curt, short sentences and balances.
 
 SAMUE-L JOHNSON 
 
 Such balances as the following are very common 
 ' If his jests are coarse, his arguments are strong.' 
 From his earliest compositions to his last, Johnson shows a 
 liking for strong antithesis. It is frequently combined with 
 balance. . . . He is particularly fond of antithesis in 
 his succinct expositions of character and style." Minto. 
 
 "His balanced pomp of antithetic clauses soon had for 
 others, as it had for him, an irresistible charm, and caused a 
 complete revolution, for a time, in English style." A. H. 
 Welsh. 
 
 "A fondness for balanced periods was its [his diction's] 
 special characteristic. . . . The measured pace, the 
 constant balance of the style becomes quite intolerable." 
 Brougham. 
 
 "His constant practice of padding out a sentence with 
 useless epithets till it became as stiff as the bust of an exqui- 
 site ; his antithetical forms of expression, constantly employed 
 even where there is no opposition in the ideas expressed ; his 
 big words wasted on little things ; his harsh inversions, so 
 widely different from those graceful and easy inversions which 
 give variety, spirit, and sweetness to the expression of our 
 great old writers all these peculiarities have been imitated 
 by his admirers and parodied by his assailants, till the public 
 has become sick of the subject. . . . Many readers pro- 
 nounced the writer a pompous pedant, who would never use 
 a word of two syllables where it was possible to use a word 
 of six, and who could not make a waiting-woman relate her 
 adventures without balancing a noun with another noun and 
 every epithet with another epithet." Macaulay. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " That this general desire may not be frustrated, our schools 
 seem yet to want some book, which may excite curiosity by its 
 variety, encourage diligence by its facility, and reward applica- 
 tion by its usefulness." Preface to the Preceptor.
 
 SAMUEL JOHNSON 
 
 " We are still so much unacquainted with our own state and so 
 unskilful in the pursuit of happiness, that we shudder without 
 danger, complain without grievances, and suffer our quiet to be 
 disturbed and our commerce to be interrupted by an opposition 
 to the government, raised only by interest and supported only 
 by clamour, which yet has so far prevailed upon ignorance and 
 timidity that many favour it as reasonable and many dread it as 
 powerful." The False Alarm. 
 
 " If the two versions are compared, perhaps the result would 
 be that Dryden leads his reader forward by his general vigor 
 and sprightliness, and Pitt often stops him to contemplate the 
 excellence of a single couplet ; that Dryden's faults are forgotten 
 in the hurry of delight, and that Pitt's beauties are neglected in 
 the languor of a cold and listless perusal ; that Pitt pleases the 
 critics and Dryden the people ; that Pitt is quoted and Dryden 
 read." Lives of the Poets. 
 
 3. Fondness for Philosophizing Didacticism 
 Triteness. "Johnson was extremely fond of reducing 
 everything to general principles. Few writers have given us 
 so many moral and literary maxims. Instead of giving ex- 
 pression to the feelings naturally aroused by a sublime or pa- 
 thetic object, he is ' paralyzed by his tendency to moralize. ' 
 Johnson, it must be confessed, rather abuses the moralist's 
 privilege of being commonplace. He descants not unfre- 
 quently upon propositions so trite that even the most earnest 
 enforcement can give them little interest. With all draw- 
 backs, however, the moralizing is the best part of the Ram- 
 bler. . . . What an amazing turn it [the Rambler'} shows 
 for commonplaces ! That life is short, that marriage for mer- 
 cenary motives produces unhappiness, that different men are 
 virtuous in different degrees, that advice is generally ineffect- 
 ual, that adversity has its uses, that fame is liable to suffer 
 from detraction these and a host of other such maxims are 
 of the kind upon which no genius and no depth of feeling 
 can confer a momentary interest. . . . Johnson, it must 
 be said, like most of his contemporaries, considered poetry al-
 
 SAMUEL JOHNSON 2$ I 
 
 most exclusively from the didactic and logical point of view. 
 He always inquires what is the moral of a work of art. John- 
 son, it must be confessed, rather abuses the moralist's privilege 
 of being commonplace. He descants not unfrequently upon 
 propositions so trite that even the most earnest enforcement 
 can give them little interest. With all drawbacks, however, the 
 moralizing is the best part of the Rambler." Leslie Stephen. 
 
 "On themes of sorrow, as on themes of sublimity, his 
 power to move is paralyzed by his constant tendency to rea- 
 son and moralize. Instead of sympathizing with distress, he 
 seems to ask himself, ' Is distress in these circumstances rea- 
 sonable?' . . . Such is his propensity to moralize that 
 the events in his biographies seem reduced to the importance 
 of so many texts. . . . What he keeps principally in 
 view is the beneficial effect of religious belief on human con- 
 duct, laying down the law in sonorous dogmas. In the 
 presence of objects that raise emotions of sublimity in other 
 men, he was on the watch to lay hold of general rules. In- 
 stead of giving way to the aesthetic influences of the situation, 
 he pondered on the causes or the moral value of them, and 
 meditated dictatorial, high-sounding, general propositions. 
 . . . His ' Rasselas ' is virtually a sermon on the impos- 
 sibility of finding perfect happiness in the world ; one of its 
 professed objects is the benevolent achievement of damping 
 the ardor of youth. . . . Though called the Great Mor- 
 alist, he expounded nothing that could be called an ethical 
 system. He simply applied strong good sense to the common 
 situations of life. His first principles were understood, not 
 stated. Minto. 
 
 " His truths are too true ; we already know his precepts by 
 heart. We learn from him that life is short and we ought to 
 improve the few moments granted to us ; that a mother ought 
 not to bring up her son as a fop ; that a man ought to repent 
 of his faults, and yet avoid superstition ; that in everything we 
 ought to be active and not hurried." Taine.
 
 252 SAMUEL JOHNSON 
 
 ' ' Johnson was a prophet to his people ; preached a gospel 
 to them as all like him always do. The highest gospel 
 he preached we may describe as a kind of moral prudence : 
 4 in a world where much is to be done, and little is to be 
 known,' see how you will doit\ . . . Such gospel Johnson 
 preached and taught coupled, theoretically and practically, 
 with this other great gospel : ' Clear your mind of cant ! ' " 
 Carlyle. 
 
 " The Rambler is a collection 'of moral essays, or scholas- 
 tic theses, written on set subjects, and of which the individ- 
 ual characters and incidents are merely artificial illustrations, 
 brought in to give a pretended relief to the dryness of didactic 
 discussion. The Rambler is a splendid and imposing com- 
 mon-place book of general topics and rhetorical declamation 
 on the conduct and business of human life. " Hazlitt. 
 
 11 ' Rasselas ' is less a novel or a tale than a series of John- 
 sonian reflections strung on a thread of fictitious narrative." 
 David Mas son. 
 
 " The heik and burnoose of the Eastern prince and philos- 
 opher cannot conceal the old brown coat and worsted stock- 
 ings of the pompous English moralist." Collier. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " Contempt is a kind of gangrene, which, if it seizes one part 
 of a character, corrupts all the rest by degrees. Blackmore, 
 being despised as a poet, was in time neglected as a physician ; 
 his practice, which was once invidiously great, forsook him in the 
 latter part of his life." Life of Blackmore. 
 
 " The life that passes in penury must necessarily pass in ob- 
 scurity. It is impossible to trace Fenton from year to year or to 
 discover what means he used for his support." Life of Fenton. 
 
 " Truth, such as is necessary to the regulation of life, is always 
 found where it is honestly sought. Change of place is no natural 
 cause of the increase of piety, for it inevitably produces dissipa- 
 tion of mind." Rasselas.
 
 SAMUEL JOHNSON 253 
 
 4. Independence Sincerity Piety. While these 
 terms express somewhat different ideas, they may be combined 
 to describe one of Johnson's most prominent characteristics. 
 He was a self-appointed literary dictator. He worshipped 
 at no man's shrine, and belonged to no school but his own. 
 He is the most individual writer of his age. To the last, he 
 persisted in speaking his own thoughts in his own way. By 
 his independent force of character, as well as by his abilities, 
 he literally compelled the homage of such men as Goldsmith, 
 Burke, and Reynolds. Carlyle, a kindred spirit, calls him 
 "a mass of genuine manhood, . . . a hard-struggling, 
 weary-hearted man, having in him the element of heart-sin- 
 cerity, and preaching his great gospel, 'Clear your mind of 
 cant ! ' Figure him there with his scrofulous diseases, with his 
 great greedy heart, and unspeakable chaos of thoughts ; stalk- 
 ing mournful as a stranger in this earth, . . . the 
 largest soul that was in all England ; and provision made for 
 it of fourpence-halfpenny a day. ... So much left un- 
 developed in him to the last : in a kindlier element what 
 might he not have been ! " His famous act of scornfully 
 throwing from the window the shoes offered him in charity, 
 while he stood with feet half-frozen in the frosty Oxford hall, 
 gives the key-note to his whole character and career. To quote 
 Carlyle again, this act portrayed " an original man not a sec- 
 ond-hand, borrowing, or begging man. . . . In no wise a 
 clothes-horse or patent digester, but a genuine man." Every- 
 where Johnson manifests his " rooted contempt for whining." 
 His independence appears especially in his literary criticisms. 
 Sometimes, as in his strictures upon Milton's " Lycidas," his 
 judgments are considered outrageously unjust; but, as Stephen 
 says : " If Johnson's blunder in this case implied sheer stupid- 
 ity, one can only say that honest stupidity is a much better 
 thing than clever insincerity or fluent repetition of second- 
 hand dogmas." Whatever other faults Samuel Johnson may 
 have had, he is certainly free from literary servility.
 
 254 SAMUEL JOHNSON 
 
 " He was so majestic in intellect, so honest in purpose, so 
 kind and pure in heart, so full of humour and reasonable sweet- 
 ness, and yet so trenchant, and at need so grim, that he never 
 sank to the figure-head of a clique, nor ever lost the balance 
 of sympathy with readers of every rank and age. 
 The charm of the book [' Rasselas '] is its humanity, the 
 sweetness and wholesomeness of the long melancholy episodes, 
 the wisdom of the moral reflections and disquisitions." Ed- 
 mund Gosse. , 
 
 "A noble, heroic nature was that of Samuel Johnson, be- 
 yond all controversy ; not only did his failings lean to virtue's 
 side his very intellectual weakness and prejudices had some- 
 thing in them of strength and greatness ; they were the exu- 
 berance and excess of a rich mind, not the stinted growth of a 
 poor one. There was no touch of meanness in him : rude and 
 awkward enough he was in many points of mere demeanor, 
 but he had the soul of a prince in real generosity, refinement, 
 and elevation. . . . The spirit of his philosophy is never 
 other than manly and high-toned as well as moral." G. L. 
 Craik. 
 
 " His honesty of heart, his courageous temper, the value he 
 set on things outward and material, might have made him a 
 king among kings. . . . Once for all, [he] could not 
 and would not believe, much less speak and act, a falsehood : 
 the form of sound words, which he held fast, must have a 
 meaning in it. Here lay the difficulty: to behold a preten- 
 tious mixture of truth and falsehood, and feel that he must 
 fight them ; yet to love and defend only the true. ... It 
 does not appear that at any time Johnson was what we call 
 irreligious : but in sorrows and isolation, when hope died 
 away, and only a long vista of suffering and toil lay before him 
 to the end, then first did religion shine forth in its meek, ever- 
 lasting clearness ; even as the stars do in black night, which in 
 the daytime and dusk were hidden in inferior lights. 
 How Samuel Johnson, in the ear of Voltaire, can purify and
 
 SAMUEL JOHNSON 255 
 
 fortify his soul, and have real communion with the highest, 
 . . . this too stands all unfolded in his biography, and is 
 among the most touching and memorable things there. . . . 
 Johnson's religion was the light of life to him ; without it his 
 heart was all sick, dark, and had no guidance left. . . 
 Such was Johnson's life : the victorious battle of a free, true 
 man. ... In spite of all practical shortcomings, no one 
 that sees into the significance of Johnson will say that his 
 prime object was not truth. ... In his writings them- 
 selves are errors enough, crabbed prepossessions enough ; yet 
 these also of a quite extraneous and accidental nature, no- 
 where a wilful shutting of the eyes to truth. . . . Quite 
 spotless ... is Johnson's love of truth, if we look at 
 it as expressed in practice, as what we have named honesty of 
 action. . . . The life of this man has been, as it were, 
 turned inside out and examined with microscope by friend 
 and foe; yet was there no lie found in him. His doings and 
 writings are not shows but performances ; you may weigh them 
 in the balance, and they will stand weight. Not a line, not 
 a sentence is dishonestly done, is other than it pretends to be. 
 . Motive for writing he had none, as he often said, but 
 money ; and yet he wrote so. ... Mark, too, how little 
 Johnson boasts of his sincerity. He has no suspicion of his 
 being particularly sincere of his being particularly any- 
 thing ! He does not engrave truth on his watch- 
 seal; no, but he stands by truth, speaks by it, works and 
 lives by it. ... He has a basis of sincerity; unrecog- 
 nized, because never questioned or capable of question. 
 . . . He is under the noble necessity of being true. John- 
 son's way of thinking about this world is not mine any more 
 than Mahomet's was; but I recognize the everlasting element 
 of heart-sincerity in both ; and see with pleasure how neither 
 of them remains ineffectual. ... I find in Johnson's 
 books the indisputablest traces of a great intellect and great 
 heart ever welcome, under what obstructions and perver-
 
 256 SAMUEL JOHNSON 
 
 sions soever. They are sincere words, those of his ; he means 
 things by them." Carlyle. 
 
 ' ' The love which we feel for Johnson is due to the fact 
 that the pivots upon which his life turned are invariably noble 
 motives, and not mere obedience to customs. . . . How 
 manly the self-respect with which he guarded his dignity, 
 through all the temptations of Grub Street ! . . . John- 
 son speaks with the sincerity of a man drawing upon his own 
 experience. . . . He was no man to be put off with mere 
 phrases in place of opinions or to accept doctrines which were 
 not capable of expressing genuine emotions. . . . He had 
 the rare courage ... to say what he thought as forcibly 
 as he could say it. " Leslie Stephen. 
 
 "Amidst prejudices and ridicule he has a deep convic- 
 tion, an active faith, a severe moral piety. He is a Christian 
 from his heart and conscience, reason and practice. The 
 thought of God, the fear of the last judgment, engross and re- 
 form him. He said one day to Garrick : ' I'll come no more 
 behind your scenes, David, for the silk stockings and white 
 bosoms of your actresses excite my amorous propensities.' 
 He reproaches himself with his indolence, implores God's 
 pardon, is humble, has scruples." Taine. 
 
 " If, indeed, he had become what he afterward described 
 as one of the lowest of all human beings, a scribbler for a 
 party, he might possibly have obtained a remunerative occu- 
 pation ; but Johnson was too high-spirited to turn his pen to 
 such vile uses." H. J. Nicoll. 
 
 " His sound critical power and elevated feeling are well ex- 
 emplified in the prologue spoken at the opening of Drury 
 Lane Theatre ; and there is true greatness of spirit in his pro- 
 logue to ' Comus. ' . . . His admirable independence of 
 character is perhaps even better seen in the prologue to ' A 
 Word to the Wise.' . . . Nothing can be better than 
 the dignity with which Johnson, in this address, indirectly 
 reproves them [the audience] for their previous disregard of
 
 SAMUEL JOHNSON 257 
 
 the laws of humanity, by which all their verdicts ought to be 
 determined . " IV. J. Courthope. 
 
 "He represents that vast army of electors whom neither 
 canvasser nor caucus has ever yet cajoled or bullied into a 
 polling-booth." Augustine Birrell. 
 
 " He was full of gentle kindness and humanity, sweet - 
 heartedness, good sense, bounti fulness, and hatred of what was 
 mean and contemptible ; his prejudices and his rudeness must 
 all be overlooked when one but simply glances at the struggles, 
 the greatness, and the goodness of the man." George Daw- 
 son. 
 
 " He was a type, standing by himself, with wonderful 
 characteristics. . . . It is his works which have been 
 made immortal by him. They live because he lives. His 
 fame is independent of them." Hazlitt. 
 
 " Human dignity he maintained, ... we all know 
 how well, through the whole long and arduous struggle of his 
 life. ' ' Matthew Arnold. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " He has, however, so much kindness for me that he advises 
 me to consult my safety when I talk of corporations. I know not 
 what the most important corporation can do, becoming manhood, 
 by which my safety is endangered. My reputation is safe, for I 
 can prove the fact ; my quiet is safe, for I meant well ; and for 
 any other safety, I am not to be very solicitous." The Writ- 
 ings and Genius of Pope. 
 
 " To walk with circumspection and steadiness in the right 
 path, at an equal distance between the extremes of error, ought 
 to be the constant endeavour of every reasonable being ; nor can 
 I think those teachers of moral wisdom much to be honoured as 
 benefactors to mankind, who are always enlarging upon the diffi- 
 culties of our duties and providing rather excuses for vice than 
 incentives to virtue." The Rambler. 
 
 " But I have no design to gratify pride by submission or malice 
 by lamentation ; nor think it reasonable to complain of neglect 
 ' '7
 
 2$8 SAMUEL JOHNSON 
 
 from those whose regard I never solicited. If I have not been 
 distinguished by the distributors of literary honors, I have seldom 
 descended to the arts by which favor is obtained. I have seen 
 the meteors of fashion rise and fall without any attempt to add a 
 moment to their duration. ... In my papers, no man could 
 look for censures of his enemies or praises of himself." The 
 Rambler. 
 
 5. Gravity Pomp Heaviness. In the closing num- 
 ber of the Rambler, Johnson says, '" I have allotted few papers 
 to the idle sports of the imagination." While Addison wrote 
 of fops and fans, Johnson wrote of self-denial, prudence, and 
 the like. His friend, Garrick, called him " a tremendous 
 companion. ' ' This tendency to be " heavy ' ' appears especially 
 when he attempts to express pathos and the other gentler emo- 
 tions. " When he ventures upon such topics," says Stephen, 
 "he flounders dreadfully, and rather reminds us of an artist 
 who should attempt to paint miniatures with a mop." " What 
 most distinguishes Dr. Johnson from other writers," says 
 Hazlitt, " is the pomp and uniformity of his style. All his 
 periods are cast in the same mould, are of the same size and 
 shape. . . . He condescends to the familiar till we are 
 ashamed of our interest in it ; he expands the little till it looks 
 big." Taine calls him "the respectable, the tiresome Dr. 
 Samuel Johnson." 
 
 "Here and there, the pompous utterance invests them 
 [Johnson's writings] with an unlucky air of absurdity. . 
 To appreciate fairly the strangely cumbrous form of his written 
 speech, we must penetrate more deeply than may at first sight 
 seem necessary beneath the outer rind of this literary Behemoth. 
 . No critic could have divined his power from the 
 clumsy gambols in which he occasionally recreates himself. 
 Nor, indeed, does his pomposity sink to mere 
 verbiage so often as might be supposed. It is by no means 
 easy to translate his ponderous phrases into simple words with- 
 out losing some of their meaning. . . . His written
 
 SAMUEL JOHNSON 259 
 
 style, however faulty in other respects, is neither slipshod 
 nor ambiguous. . .' . The language might be simpler, but 
 it is not a mere sham aggregation of words. . . . Omit- 
 ting its [the Rambler* s\ clumsy attempts at occasional levity, 
 it maybe granted that in its ponderous sentences lies buried a 
 great mass of strong sense and an impressive and characteris- 
 tic view of life. . . . With all its faults the style has the 
 merit of masculine directness. The inversions are not such 
 as to complicate the construction. As Boswell remarks, he 
 never uses a parenthesis ; and his style, though ponderous and 
 wearisome, is as transparent as the master snipsnap of Macau- 
 lay. . . . His style acquired something of the old elab- 
 oration, though the attempt to conform to the canons of a 
 later age renders the structure disagreeably monotonous. 
 His tendency to pomposity is not relieved by the naivete of 
 spontaneity. . . . We seem to see a man, heavy-eyed, 
 ponderous in his gestures, like some huge mechanism which 
 grinds out a ponderous tissue of verbiage as heavy as it is 
 certainly solid. . . . He is often ponderous and ver- 
 bose, and one feels that the mode of expression is not that 
 which is most congenial; and yet the vigor of thought makes 
 itself felt through rather clumsy modes of utterance. 
 The Rambler had probably a more lasting success than any 
 other imitation of the Spectator, though its rare modern 
 readers will generally consider it as a proof of the amazing 
 appetite of Johnson's public for solid sermonizing. . . . 
 From this time Johnson became accepted as an imposing 
 moralist." Leslie Stephen. 
 
 " In writing ... his style becomes artificial and 
 ponderous ; the whole process of his intellectual exertion loses 
 much of its elasticity and life. . . . Even [the essays in] 
 his Rambler, which we hold to be the most indigestible of 
 his productions, are none of them mere leather or prunello. 
 The pomposity and inflation of Johnson's compo- 
 sition abated considerably in his own later writing, and, as
 
 26O SAMUEL JOHNSON 
 
 the cumbering flesh fell off, the nerve and spirit increased ; 
 the most happily executed parts of 4 The Lives of the Poets ' 
 offer almost a contrast to the oppressive rotundity of the 
 Rambler, produced thirty years before." G. L. Craik. 
 
 4 ' Both the Rambler and the Idler are now found to be 
 very heavy reading, and it would be idle to deny that a 
 considerable portion of them is little better than sonorous 
 commonplace. . . . It is interesting to compare John- 
 son's ponderous but not uninteresting work [' Journey to the 
 Hebrides '] with the volume in which Boswell . 
 gave such a na'ive and amusing account of the adventures and 
 conversations of himself and his great companion. 
 Johnson has not the lightness of hand and the dexterity of 
 touch which enabled Addison to treat trivial topics gracefully 
 and appropriately, and when he aspires to do so he generally 
 fails lamentably." ff.J. Nicoll. 
 
 44 Whatever the work be, tragedy or dictionary, biography 
 or essay, he always writes in the same style. . . . Clas- 
 sical prose attains its perfection in him, as classical poetry in 
 Pope. Art cannot be more finished, or nature more forced. 
 No one has confined ideas in more strait compartments ; none 
 has given stronger relief to dissertation and proof; none has 
 imposed more despotically on story and dialogue the forms of 
 argumentation and violent declamation. ... It is the 
 completion and the excess, the triumph and the tyranny of 
 oratorical style." Taine. 
 
 " It would be easy to select from Johnson's writings nu- 
 merous 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 from 
 this charge. The characteristics of Johnson's prose style are 
 colossal good sense, though with a strong sceptical bias, good 
 humour, vigorous language, and a movement from point to 
 point which can only be compared to the measured tread of 
 a well-drilled company of soldiers. " Augustine Birrell.
 
 SAMUEL JOHNSON 261 
 
 "The Rambler is 'too wordy,' as the author confessed; 
 he tried to be a little lighter in manner in the twenty-nine 
 papers he contributed in 1752 and 1753 to Hawkesworth's 
 Adventurer. ... In these two short compositions [' In- 
 troduction to Dictionary' and ' Letter to Lord Chesterfield '], 
 in each of which the author is singularly moved, his Eng- 
 lish, though always stately and formal, is lifted out of the 
 sesquipedalian affectation of magnificence which has amused 
 the world so much, and which was beyond question a serious 
 fault of Johnson's style. Here, and especially in the ' Letter 
 to Chesterfield,' he is simple, terse, and thrilling, and, as the 
 occasion was a private one, we may take it that in the ex- 
 traordinary fire and pungency of the sentences we have some- 
 thing like a specimen of the marvellous power of conversation 
 which made Johnson the wonder of his age." Edmund 
 Gosse. 
 
 "In his 'Lives of the Poets' he tried hard to work him- 
 self out of the sonorous grandiloquence of the Rambler. 
 Perhaps the less pompous diction of his later pro- 
 ductions is partly a result of his great practice in conversation. 
 As we have just said, he was conscious of the blemish in his 
 Rambler and endeavored to amend. . . . The Rambler 
 certainly is a very ponderous composition. Reviewing it 
 himself later in life, he shook his head and exclaimed that it 
 was ' too wordy.' The heaviness of Johnson's style does not 
 arise from any abstruseness in the subject-matter. The Ram- 
 bler took up mainly subjects suitable for light reading. The 
 explanation seems to be that his ear was enamoured of a meas- 
 ured, ponderous movement, of a lofty departure from the 
 simple pace of common speech, and that he was not versa- 
 tile enough to adopt any other, even when this was flagrantly 
 unsuitable to the occasion. . . . Johnson's style is sel- 
 dom or never impassioned. He delivers himself with severe 
 majestical dignity and vigorous authoritative brevity. . . . 
 The magisterial air of the Rambler probably awed many into
 
 262 SAMUEL JOHNSON 
 
 reading him with respect and trying to profit by his doctrine, 
 but the dry, abstract character of the exposition must have 
 made perusal anything but a labor of love." Minto. 
 
 " When he talked he clothed his wit and his sense in for- 
 cible and natural expressions. As soon as he took his pen in 
 his hand to write for the public, his style became systemati- 
 cally vicious. Macaulay. 
 
 " His ' Letters from Correspondents,' in particular, are 
 more pompous and unwieldy than 1 what he writes in his own 
 person. . . . The fault of Dr. Johnson's style is that it 
 reduces all things to the same artificial and unmeaning level. 
 In his contributions to the Adventurer, the Doctor 
 uses his stilts less; he walks more perhaps occasionally runs. 
 Yet majestic diction was as natural to a man who thought in 
 rounded periods as was a disjointed chaos of the parts of 
 speech to many of his critics." Hazlitt. 
 
 "A wondrous buckram style the best he could get to 
 then ; a measured grandiloquence stepping, or rather stalking, 
 along in a very solemn way, grown obsolete now; sometimes 
 a tumid size of phraseology not in proportion to the contents 
 of it all all this you must put up with." Carlyle. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " As the last Idler is published in that solemn week which the 
 Christian world has always set apart for the examination of the 
 conscience, the review of life, the extinction of earthly desires, 
 and the renovation of holy purposes, I hope that my readers are 
 already disposed to view every incident with seriousness and im- 
 prove it by meditation." The Idler. 
 
 " Behold, Flirtilla, at thy feet, a man grown gray in the study 
 of those noble arts by which right and wrong may be confounded, 
 and caprice and appetite instated in uncontrolled command and 
 boundless dominion ! Sjich a casuist may surely engage, with 
 certainty of success, in vindication of an entertainment which in 
 an instant gives confidence to the timorous and kindles ardor in
 
 SAMUEL JOHNSON 263 
 
 the cold ; an entertainment where the vigilance of jealousy has so 
 often been eluded and the virgin is set free from the necessity of 
 languishing in silence." The Rambler. 
 
 "It is scarcely possible, in the regularity and composure of 
 the present time, to imagine the tumult of absurdity and clamor 
 of contradiction which perplexed doctrine, disordered practice, 
 and disturbed both public and private quiet in that age where 
 subordination was broken and awe was hissed away ; when any 
 unsettled innovator, who could hatch a half-formed nation, pro- 
 duced it to the public ; when every man might become a preach- 
 er, and almost every preacher could collect a congregation." 
 Life of Butler. 
 
 " The spirit, volatile and fiery, is the Pope's emblem of vivac- 
 ity and wit ; the acidity of the lemon will very aptly figure pun- 
 gency of raillery and acrimony of censure ; sugar is the natural 
 representative of luscious adulation and gentle complaisance ; 
 and water is the proper hieroglyphic of easy prattle, innocent and 
 tasteless." The Rambler. 
 
 6. Melancholy Despondency. All Johnson's writ- 
 ings are tinged with a hue of melancholy. In his best known 
 poem, " The Vanity of Human Wishes," he sounds the key- 
 note of all his works. To him this earth is ever a place 
 
 " Where wavering man, betrayed by venturous pride 
 To tread the dreary paths without a guide, 
 As treacherous phantoms in the mist delude, 
 Shuns fancied ills or chases airy good." 
 
 " He had to go about," says Carlyle, "girt with continual 
 hypochondria, physical and spiritual pain like a Hercules 
 with the burning Nessus-shirt on him." The melancholy cast 
 of Johnson's mind appears especially in " Rasselas," com- 
 posed, as it was, in solitude and sorrow. 
 
 "The melancholy which colors it [the Rambler\ is the 
 melancholy of a noble nature. . . . His melancholy is 
 distinguished from that of feebler men by the strength of 
 the conviction that ' it will do no good to whine.' 
 The evils of life were too deeply seated to be caused or cured
 
 264 SAMUEL JOHNSON 
 
 by kings or demagogues. . . . His melancholy is not 
 so heavy-eyed and depressing in his talk, for we catch him at 
 moments of excitement ; but it is there, and sometimes breaks 
 out emphatically and unexpectedly. The prospect of death 
 often clouds his mind, and he bursts into tears when he 
 thinks of his past sufferings. . . . Johnson has some- 
 thing in common with the fashionable pessimism of modern 
 times. No sentimentalist of to-day could be more convinced 
 that life is in the main miserable. ,It was his favorite theory, 
 according to Mrs. Thrale, that all human action was prompted 
 by the vacuity of life. Men act solely in the hope of escaping 
 themselves. Evil ... is the positive, and good merely 
 the negative of evil. All desire is at bottom an attempt 
 to escape from pain. . . . He differs from most modern 
 sentimentalists in having the most hearty contempt for useless 
 whining. If he dwells upon human misery, it is because he 
 feels that it is as futile to join with the optimist in ignoring as 
 with the pessimist in howling over the evil. We are in a sad 
 world, full of pain, but we have to make the best of it. Stub- 
 born patience and hard work are the sole remedies, or rather 
 the sole means of temporary escape. Much of the Rambler is 
 occupied with variations upon this theme, and expresses the 
 kind of dogged resolution with which he would have us plod 
 through this weary world. . . . Johnson is impressed by 
 a deep sense of the evils under which humanity suffers, and 
 forcibly rejects the superficial optimism of the day. Men, he 
 tells us over and over, are wretched, and there is no use in de- 
 nying it. ... We are almost appalled by the gloomy 
 strength which sees so forcibly the misery of the world and 
 rejects so unequivocally all the palliatives of sentiment and 
 philosophy." Leslie Stephen. 
 
 " There is a pathetic air of gloomy melancholy about 1m 
 sonorous reflections on the vanity of human wishes. . f . 
 But though he is said to ' bewail his miseries with eloquence,' 
 his lamentations are not very touching." Minto.
 
 SAMUEL JOHNSON 265 
 
 " This element [didacticism] was undoubtedly deepened 
 by his natural seriousness of mind, often tinged with melan 
 choly. Had it not been for this inherited despondency, his 
 large nature might have been healthfully tender and his style 
 impassioned. . . . His extreme poverty and strong 
 tendencies to melancholy made it impossible for him to attain 
 to anything like a spacious and healthful view of life." 
 T. W. Hunt. 
 
 ' ' And so the story [ ' Rasselas ' ] rolls, pathetic and 
 gloomy, like a bit of the Black Sea." David Masson. 
 
 " Then followed ' The Vanity of Human Wishes,' contain- 
 ing, in dignified and impressive verse, a declaration of John- 
 son's profound and life-long conviction that, upon the whole, 
 the amount of misery in the world is greatly in excess of the 
 amount of happiness. . . . It [ ' Rasselas ' ] is a dis- 
 course on his old theme, ' The Vanity of Human Wishes,' 
 eloquently and powerfully written and bearing everywhere 
 the marks of that gloom approaching to despair with which he 
 habitually contemplated life." H. J. Nicoll. 
 
 " There appears before us a man with a gloomy and un- 
 polished air, . . . suffering from morbid melancholy 
 since his birth, and moreover a hypochondriac." Taine. 
 
 " Fits of morbid melancholy often seized him, which, as he 
 says, ' kept him mad half his life.' Penniless, . . . and 
 touched with terrible insanity, the youth stood looking out 
 upon a world that seemed all cold and bare and friendless to 
 his gaze." W. F. Collier. 
 
 " We see in it [' The Vanity of Human Wishes '] the mel- 
 ancholy that darkened all his view of human existence." 
 W. J. Coiirthope. 
 
 " He was melancholy almost to madness, ' radically wretch- 
 ed,' indolent, blinded, diseased." Augustine Birrell. 
 
 " He had king's evil, he was purblind, he inherited the 
 germs of many diseases, and was of a most melancholy tem- 
 perament." George Dawson.
 
 266 SAMUEL JOHNSON 
 
 "His ' Rasselas ' is the most melancholy and debilitating 
 moral speculation that ever was put forth." Hazlitt. 
 
 " A deep melancholy took possession of him, and gave a 
 dark tinge to all his views of human nature and of human 
 destiny. " Macaulay. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " When we take the most distant prospect of life, what does it 
 present to us but a chaos of unhappiness, a confused and tumult- 
 uous scene of labor and contest, disappointment and defeat ? If 
 we view past ages in the reflection of history, what do they offer 
 to our meditation but crimes and calamities ? One year is dis- 
 tinguished by a famine, another by an earthquake : kingdoms 
 are made desolate, sometimes by war and sometimes by pesti- 
 lence ; the peace of the world is interrupted at one time by the 
 caprices of a tyrant, at another by the rage of the conqueror. 
 The memory is stored only with vicissitudes of evil ; and the 
 happiness, such as it is, of one part of mankind, is found to 
 arise commonly from sanguinary success, from victories which 
 confer upon them the power not so much of improving life 
 by any new enjoyment as of inflicting misery on others and 
 gratifying their own pride by comparative greatness." The 
 Adventurer. 
 
 " But as we advance forward into the crowds of life, innumer- 
 able delights solicit our inclinations, and innumerable cares 
 distract our attention ; the time of youth is passed in noisy frol- 
 ics ; manhood is led on from hope to hope and from project to 
 project ; the dissoluteness of pleasure, the inebriation of success, 
 the ardour of expectation, and the vehemence of competition chain 
 down the mind alike to the present scene, nor is it remembered 
 how soon this mist of trifles must be scattered and the bubbles 
 that float upon the rivulet of life be lost forever in the gulf of 
 eternity." The Idler. 
 
 " 'The Europeans,' answered Imlac, ' are less unhappy than 
 we ; but they are not happy. Human life is everywhere a state 
 in which much is to be endured and little to be enjoyed.' " 
 Rasselas.
 
 SAMUEL JOHNSON 267 
 
 7. Sturdy Conservatism Intolerance Preju- 
 dice. " For him," says Hazlitt, "' out of the pale of estab- 
 lished authority and received dogmas, all is sceptical, loose, 
 and desultory." 
 
 His pamphlet Taxation no Tyranny expresses the very 
 essence of British prejudice against the principles involved in 
 the Declaration of Independence. Minto observes that he 
 "could not repress his political leanings even in writing the 
 definitions for his Dictionary," and adds that, " when writ- 
 ing the Parliamentary debates for the Gentleman' s Magazine, 
 he took care that ' the Whig dogs should not have the best of 
 it.' ' He hated dissenters as " honestly " as he hated 
 Whigs, infidels, Frenchmen, and Scotchmen. He once re- 
 marked that, for all he could see, all foreigners were fools. 
 
 " Conservative in politics and religion, he was called the 
 Hercules of Toryism, and declared that the first Whig was the 
 Devil. He thought Rousseau to be the prince of felons, and 
 could hardly settle the proportion of iniquity between him 
 and Voltaire. . . . He was never able to divest himself 
 entirely of prejudice, and the definitions [in his Dictionary] 
 which betray his personal feelings and peculiarities are amus- 
 ing."^. H. Welsh. 
 
 " That Johnson, in spite of all drawbacks, adopted the con- 
 servative side ; stationed himself as the unyielding opponent 
 of innovation, resolute to hold fast the form of sound words, 
 could not but increase, in no small measure, the difficulties he 
 had to strive with. ... To resist innovation is easy 
 enough on one condition : that you resist inquiry. This is, 
 and was, the common expedient of your common Conserva- 
 tive ; but this would not do for Johnson. . . . The last 
 in many things, Johnson was the last genuine Tory ; the last 
 of Englishmen who, with strong voice and wholly believing 
 heart, preached the doctrine of standing still ; who, without 
 selfishness or slavishness, reverenced the existing powers ; 
 who had heart-devoutness with heart-hatred of cant
 
 268 SAMUEL JOHNSON 
 
 was orthodox-religious with his eyes open. . . . John- 
 son's aim was in itself an impossible one: this of stemming 
 the eternal flood of time; of clutching all things and an- 
 choring them down and saying, ' Move not ! ' how could or 
 should it ever have success ? . The essence of origi- 
 
 nality is not that it be new ; Johnson believed altogether in 
 the old ; he found the old opinions credible for him, fit for 
 him ; and in a right heroic manner lived under them. . 
 He stood by the old formulas ; the happier was it for him that 
 he could so stand ; but in all formulas that he could stand by 
 there needed to be a most genuine substance. . . . From 
 Johnson's strength of affection we deduce many of his pecu- 
 liarities, especially that threatening array of perversions known 
 under the name of 'Johnson's Prejudices.' . . . Those 
 evil-formed prejudices ot his, that Jacobitism, Church-of-Eng- 
 landism, hatred of the Scotch, belief in witches, and such like 
 what were they but ordinary beliefs of well-doing, well-meaning 
 provincial Englishmen of that day? . . . Admire here 
 this other contradiction in the life of Johnson; that, though the 
 most ungovernable and in practice the most independent of 
 men, he must be a Jacobite and worshipper of the Divine 
 Right. . . . Touch his religion, glance at the Church of 
 England, or the Divine Right, and he was upon you ! These 
 things were his symbols of all that was good and precious for 
 men ; his very Ark of the Covenant ; whoso laid hand on them 
 -tore asunder his heart of hearts. Not out of hatred to the 
 opponent but of love to the things opposed did Johnson grow 
 cruel, fiercely contradictory." Carlyle. 
 
 " His conservatism may be at times obtuse, but it is never 
 of the cynical variety. ... He holds his own belief 
 with so vigorous a grasp that all argumentative devices for 
 loosening it seem to be thrown away. . . . His tenacious 
 conservatism caused him to cling to decaying materials, for 
 the want of anything better, and he has suffered the natural 
 penalty. . . . Nothing, indeed, can be truer than that
 
 SAMUEL JOHNSON 269 
 
 Johnson cared very little for the new gospel of the rights of 
 man. . . . [To him] the natural equality of man was 
 mere moonshine. So far is this from being true, he says, that 
 not two people can be together for half an hour without one 
 acquiring an evident superiority over the other. Subordina- 
 tion is an essential element to human happiness. . . . His 
 hatred of the Americans was complicated by his hatred of 
 slave-owners. . . . The attack upon the Americans is 
 arrogant and offensive. Although Mr. Hill truly points out 
 that Johnson's dislike to America was associated with his 
 righteous hatred of slavery and consequent prejudice against 
 the planters, it is equally true that he states the English 
 claims in the most illiberal and irritating fashion. . . . 
 His massive and keenly logical, but narrow and rigid intel- 
 lect was the servant of strong passions, of prejudices imbibed 
 through early associations, and of the constitutional melan- 
 choly which made him a determined pessimist. . . . His 
 Toryism and high-churchmanship had become part of his nat- 
 ure. . . . Whiggism is vile, according to the Doctor's 
 phrase, because Whiggism is ' a negation of all principle ; ' it 
 is, in his view, not so much the preference of one form to an- 
 other, as an attack upon the vital condition of all government. 
 He called Burke ' a bottomless Whig,' in this sense, implying 
 that Whiggism meant anarchy. . . . This dogged con- 
 servatism has both its value and its grotesque side. 
 Loving authority, and holding one authority to be as good as 
 another, he defended with uncompromising zeal the most pre- 
 posterous and tyrannical measures. The pamphlets against 
 the Wilkesite agitators and the American rebels are little more 
 than a huge rhinoceros snort of contempt against all who are 
 fools enough or wicked enough to promote war and disturb- 
 ance in order to change one form of authority for another." 
 Leslie Stephen. 
 
 " He was, as a politician, half ice and half fire. On the 
 side of his intellect he was far too apathetic about public
 
 2/O SAMUEL JOHNSON 
 
 affairs, far too sceptical as to the good or evil tendency of any 
 form of polity. His passions, on the contrary, were violent, 
 even to slaying, against all who leaned to Whiggish prin- 
 ciples. ... In Scotland he thought it his duty to pass 
 months without joining in public worship, solely because the 
 ministers of the kirk had not been ordained by bishops." 
 Macaulay. 
 
 ' Johnson was a grand conservative; nature and inclina- 
 tion made him so. He was born'a worshipper of govern- 
 ments. . . . Johnson leaned strongly to conservatism, 
 perhaps too strongly ; but it was ever visible in all his actions 
 that he disliked despotism. . . . They [people] imagine 
 that Johnson was entirely composed of wisdom, and that he 
 was nothing but a dictionary of aphorisms. He was no such 
 thing. He was a great hungry man, with hot blood, strong 
 passions, odd ways, queer likings and dislikes, and mountain- 
 ous prejudices. . . . Yet this man a man of gigantic 
 prejudices and strong dislikes, who, if he did not like a man, 
 found it difficult to do him justice took the very work in 
 hand [' Lives of the Poets '] and did it as no other man could 
 have done it." George Dawson. 
 
 " 'If,' said he, '-I saw a Whig and a Tory drowning, I 
 would first save the Tory : and when I saw he was safe, not 
 till then. I would go and help the Whig ; but the dog should 
 duck first, the dog should duck,' laughing with pleasure at 
 the thought of the Whig's ducking." Cary. 
 
 " He was a high Tory and a high churchman in all con- 
 troversies respecting the state. The Established Church, the 
 established government, the established order of things in 
 general, found in him an unflinching supporter." Brougham. 
 
 " He was a strong force of conservation and concentra- 
 tion, in an epoch which by its natural tendencies seemed 
 moving toward expansion and freedom." Matthew Arnold. 
 
 " I hold Johnson to be the great supporter of the British 
 monarchy and Church during the last age better than whole
 
 SAMUEL JOHNSON 2/1 
 
 benches of bishops, better than Pitts, Norths, and the great 
 Burke himself. Johnson had the ear of the nation; his im- 
 mense authority reconciled it to loyalty and shamed it out of 
 irreligion. ' ' Thackeray. 
 
 " All these pamphlets [in The False Alarm] show 
 Johnson's unusual vigor of style, his unbending Toryism, 
 and his utter incapacity to take a candid and impartial 
 view of a political controversy. ' Taxation No Tyranny ' 
 is a very characteristic production. Even George III. could 
 have desired no more strenuous and unreasoning support 
 of the right of Great Britain to tax American colonies." 
 H. J. Nicoll. 
 
 " His naturally powerful reason was a good deal clouded 
 by various prejudices. He would believe no good either of 
 republican or of infidel. He did injustice to Milton ; he 
 abused Bolingbroke without reading him ; and Boswell men- 
 tions his having uttered about Hume a remark too gross to be 
 committed to paper. He hated and ridiculed the French and 
 the Scotch, and refused to be persuaded that anybody could 
 live happily out of London. In these things, as in many 
 others, he showed gross egotism and want of sympathy. . . . 
 He was the last man in the world to coriciliate opposition, 
 and his strong powers of argument were warped by prejudice. 
 His 'Taxation no Tyranny ' . . . is at once overbearing 
 and sophistical. It might inflame and embitter partisans, 
 but it was too abusive and too unreasonable to make con- 
 verts." Minto. 
 
 " He had his prejudices and his intolerant feelings ; but he 
 suffered enough in the conflict of his own mind with them. 
 His were not time-serving, heartless, hypercritical 
 prejudices, but deep, inwoven, not to be rooted out but 
 with life and hope prejudices which he found from old habit 
 necessary to his own peace of mind, and thought so to the 
 peace of mankind. . . . They were between himself and 
 his conscience." Hazlitt.
 
 272 SAMUEL JOHNSON 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " It were a curious but an idle speculation to inquire what ef- 
 fect these dictators of sedition expect from the dispersion of their 
 Letter among us. If they believe their own complaints of hard- 
 ship, and really dread the danger which they describe, they will 
 naturally hope to communicate the same perceptions of their fel- 
 low-subjects. But probably in America, as in other places, the 
 chiefs are incendiaries, that hope to fob in the tumults of a con- 
 flagration and toss brands among a rabble passively combustible. 
 Those who wrote the Address, though they have shown no great 
 extent of profundity of mind, are yet probably wiser than to be- 
 lieve it : but they have been taught by some master of mischief 
 how to put in motion the engine of political electricity ; to attract 
 by the sounds of Liberty and Property, to repel by those of 
 Popery and Slavery, and to give the great stroke by the name of 
 Boston." Taxation no Tyranny. 
 
 "A few weeks will show whether the government can be 
 shaken by empty noise, and whether the faction which depends 
 upon its influence has not deceived alike the public and itself. 
 That it should have continued until now, is sufficiently shameful. 
 None can indeed wonder that it has been supported by the sec- 
 taries, the natural fomenters of sedition and confederates of the 
 rabble, of whose religion little now remains but hatred of estab- 
 lishments, and who are angry to find separation now only toler- 
 ated which was once rewarded : but every honest man must la- 
 ment that it has been regarded with frigid neutrality by the 
 Tories, who, being long accustomed to signalize their principles 
 by opposition to the court, do not yet consider that they have at 
 last a king [George III.] who knows not the name of party, and 
 who wishes to be the common father of all his people." The 
 False Alarm. 
 
 " We have found by experience that though ... a bor- 
 ough has been compelled to see its dearest interest in the hands 
 of him whom it did not trust, yet the general state of the nation 
 has continued the same. The sun has risen and the corn has 
 grown and whatever talk has been of the danger of property, yet 
 he that ploughed the field commonly reaped it, and he that built 
 a house was master of the door : the vexation excited by injus-
 
 SAMUEL JOHNSON 273 
 
 tice suffered, or supposed to be suffered, by any pri%'ate man or 
 single community, was local and temporary ; it neither spread 
 far nor lasted long." The False Alarm. 
 
 8. Brusqueness Harshness. Johnson's thirty years' 
 struggle with want combined with his naturally splenetic 
 temper to make him, at times, very harsh and unqualified in 
 his criticisms. " One of his favorite methods of argument," 
 says Grant, " was a flat denial of his opponent's statements, 
 and he considered that treating an adversary with respect was 
 giving him an advantage to which he was not entitled." 
 His own strength mental, moral, and spiritual made him 
 very unsympathetic toward what he considered the weaknesses 
 of his associates. Taine, with characteristic French dislike of 
 such a character, calls Johnson " a bear with the manners of a 
 beadle and the inclinations of a constable." In his humor, 
 as in his satire, he is broad and personal. As Stephen puts 
 it, " He judges by his intuitive aversions." Boswell said of 
 him: " He is through your body in an instant, without any 
 preliminary parade ; he gives a deadly lunge, but cares little 
 for skill of fence." Shaw fairly accounts for this trait in 
 Johnson, saying, "When, weary and lame, he reached the 
 top of the ladder by which he had climbed from poverty and 
 obscurity to competence and fame, he had brought with him 
 the begrimed and offensive manners of his underground life." 
 
 " We know that he puffed and grunted, and contradicted 
 everybody, reviling as fools and blockheads and barren ras- 
 cals all who dared to differ from his literary highness." 
 W. F. Collier. 
 
 11 This element [gravity] at times showed itself in the ex- 
 treme form of rudeness bordering on severity. Mrs. Boswell 
 spoke of him to her husband as a ' bear ' in his manners. 
 Now and then his style had this bearish quality. There is a 
 brusque and harsh tone about it that grates upon the ear. 
 The sage of Lichfield had a good deal of the animal in his 
 18
 
 2/4 SAMUEL JOHNSON 
 
 nature, and it often ruled the other elements. When thus 
 exercised he would indulge in the most cruel invective and 
 spare no feelings whatsoever." T. W. Hunt. 
 
 " He treated those whose opinions had an opposite inclina- 
 tion with little tolerance and no courtesy." Brougham. 
 
 " There is no arguing with Johnson, for if his pistol misses 
 fire, he knocks you down with the butt end of it." Gold- 
 smith. 
 
 "If he did not always think what he felt, he always said 
 what he thought." Hazlitt. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " Authoresses are seldom famous for clean linen, therefore 
 they cannot make laundresses ; they are rarely skilful at their 
 needle, and cannot mend a soldier's shirt ; they will make bad 
 sutlers, being not much accustomed to eat. I must therefore 
 propose that they shall form a regiment of themselves and garri- 
 son the town which is supposed to be in most danger of a French 
 invasion. They will probably have no enemies to encounter ; 
 but, if they are once shut up together, they will soon disencum- 
 ber the public by tearing out the eyes of one another.'' Employ- 
 ment of Authors. 
 
 " In this poem there is no nature, for there is no truth ; there 
 is no art, for there is nothing new. Its form is that of a pasto- 
 ral ; easy, vulgar, and therefore disgusting ; whatever images it 
 can supply are long ago exhausted ; and its inherent improbabil- 
 ity always forces dissatisfaction on the mind. . . . It is not 
 to be considered as the effusion of real passion ; for passion runs 
 not after remote allusions and obscure opinions. Passion plucks 
 no berries from the myrtle and ivy, nor calls upon Arethuse and 
 Mincius, nor tells of rough satyrs and ' fauns with cloven heel.' 
 Where there is leisure for fiction there is little grief." Criticism 
 on Milton's Lycidas. 
 
 "There are so many competitors for the fame of cleanliness 
 that it is not hard to gain information of those that fail from 
 those that desire to excel : I quickly found that Nitella passed
 
 SAMUEL JOHNSON 2/5 
 
 her time between finery and dirt, and was always in a wrapper, 
 night-cap, and slippers, when she was not decorated for immedi- 
 ate show." The Rambler. 
 
 9. Kindness Sympathy. " Johnson, to be sure, has 
 a roughness in his manner ; but no man alive has a more ten. 
 der heart. He has nothing of the bear but his skin." Gold- 
 smith. 
 
 ' ' He was a humane, warm-hearted man, at least toward 
 cases of distress brought on by no fault of the sufferer ; he 
 opened his house as a retreat for several ' infirm and decayed ' 
 persons. ' ' Minto. 
 
 " His nature was too tender and too manly to incline to 
 Swift's misanthropy. Men might be wretched, but he would 
 not therefore revile them as filthy Yahoos. . . . This 
 depth of tender feeling was, in fact, the foundation of John- 
 son's character. . . . His emotions were as deep and 
 tender as they were genuine. How sacred was his love for 
 his old and ugly wife ! how warm his sympathy wherever it 
 could be effective ! . . . In his deep capacity for sym- 
 pathy and reverence we recognize some of the elements that 
 go to the making of a poet." Leslie Stephen. 
 
 " Few men on record have had a more merciful, tenderly 
 affectionate nature than old Samuel. He was called a bear ; 
 . yet within that shaggy exterior of his there beat a 
 heart as warm as a mother's, soft as a little child's. . . . 
 But observe also with what humanity, what openness of love, 
 he can attach himself to all things to a blind old woman, to 
 a Doctor Levett, to a cat ' Hodge.' . . . Where in all 
 England could there have been found another soul so full of 
 pity, a hand so heavenlike bounteous as his? " Carlyle. 
 
 " It was natural that, though his heart was undoubtedly 
 generous and humane, his demeanor in society should be 
 harsh and despotic. For severe distress he had sympathy, 
 and not only sympathy but munificent relief. . . . He
 
 2/6 SAMUEL JOHNSON 
 
 would carry home on his shoulders a sick and starving girl 
 from the streets. He turned his house into a place of refuge 
 for a crowd of wretched old creatures who could find no other 
 asylum; nor could all their peevishness and ingratitude weary 
 out his benevolence. But the pangs of wounded vanity 
 seemed to him ridiculous ; and he scarcely felt sufficient com- 
 passion even for the pangs of wounded affection." Macaulay. 
 
 "Cumberland saw the tender-hearted old man standing 
 beside his friend Garrick's grave, at the foot of Shakespeare's 
 monument, bathed in tears." G. L. Craik. 
 
 " In his best hours he was not devoid of susceptibility nor 
 incapable of feeling. His profound sympathy for the poor, 
 his affection for his chosen friends, and his indignation against 
 what he felt to be wrong, reveal a sensitive nature." T. W. 
 Hunt. 
 
 "Johnson had the tenderest heart and the strongest temper 
 the bitterest sarcasm and the gentlest spirit of considera- 
 tion ; the most utter hatred of sin and the most 
 tender mercy toward sinners. . . . But what I chiefly 
 like him for, except his tender-heartedness and his unusual 
 kindness, is his robust nature. . . . Nothing in history 
 is more touching than this man's tenderness." George Daw- 
 son. 
 
 "Love and sympathy were as necessary to this rough and 
 rugged man as to any sentimental girl. But he gave far more 
 than he received." Walter Besant. 
 
 " His beautiful lines on Levett's death are still more beauti- 
 ful and touching because they recall a whole history of John- 
 son's goodness, tenderness, and charity." Matthew Arnold. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " Dear, Honored Mother. Your weakness afflicts me beyond 
 what I am willing to communicate to you. I do not think you 
 unfit to face death, but I know not how to bear the thought of los-
 
 SAMUEL JOHNSON 2/7 
 
 ing you. ... I pray often for you ; do you pray for me. 
 . . . I am, dear, dear mother, your dutiful son, Sam John- 
 son." Letters. 
 
 " One reason why I delayed to write was, my uncertainty how 
 to answer your letter. I like the thought of giving away the 
 money very well ; but when I consider that Tom Johnson is my 
 nearest relative, and that he is now old and in great want ; that 
 he was my playfellow in childhood, and has never done anything 
 to offend me ; I am in doubt whether I ought not rather give it 
 him than any other." Letters. 
 
 " Chambers, you find, has gone far, and poor Goldsmith is 
 gone much farther. He died of a fever, exasperated, as I be- 
 lieve, by the fear of distress. He had raised money and squan- 
 dered it by every artifice of acquisition and folly of expense. 
 But let not his frailties be remembered : he was a very great 
 man." Letters. 
 
 10. Religious Superstition. " That Johnson's relig- 
 ious opinions sometimes took the form of a rather grotesque 
 superstition, may be true; and it is easy enough to ridicule 
 some of its manifestations. He took the creed of his day with- 
 out much examination of the evidence upon which its dogmas 
 rested ; but the writer must be thoughtless indeed who should 
 be more inclined to laugh at his superficial oddities than to 
 admire the reverent spirit and the brave self-respect with 
 which he struggled through a painful life. . . . He 
 looked leniently upon superstitions, such as ghosts and second- 
 sight, which appeared to fall in with his religious beliefs, 
 while his strong sense often made him absurdly sceptical in 
 ordinary matters." Leslie Stephen. 
 
 " He went himself on a ghost-hunt to Cock Lane, and was 
 angry with John Wesley for not following up another scent of 
 the same kind with proper spirit and perseverance. 
 He has gravely noted down in his diary that he once com- 
 mitted the sin of drinking coffee on Good Friday. . . . 
 But a man who took off his hat when he passed a church 
 episcopally consecrated must be a good man, a pious man, a
 
 278 SAMUEL JOHNSON 
 
 man of good principles. Johnson could easily see that those 
 persons who looked on a dance or a laced waistcoat as sinful, 
 deemed most ignobly of the attributes of God and the ends of 
 creation. But with what a storm of invective he would have 
 overwhelmed any man who had blamed him for celebrating 
 the redemption of mankind with sugarless tea and butterless 
 buns! " Macaulay. 
 
 " We can conceive that Johnson, had he lived when augury 
 by tokens was in vogue, would have been a steadfast believer 
 in the flight of crows ; and that, if his lot had been cast in an 
 astrological age, he would have consulted his horoscope before 
 going on a journey or embarking in an enterprise." Hazlitt. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " ' That the dead are seen no more,' said Imlac, ' I will not 
 undertake to maintain, against the concurrent and unvaried testi- 
 mony of all ages and of all nations. There is no people, rude or 
 learned, among whom apparitions of the dead are not related 
 and believed. . . . That it is doubted by single cavillers can 
 very little weaken the general evidence ; and some who deny it 
 with their tongues confess it by their fears.' " Rasselas. 
 
 " Methought I was in the midst of a very entertaining set of 
 company, and extremely delighted in attending to a lively con- 
 versation, when on a sudden I perceived one of the most shock- 
 ing figures imagination can frame advancing toward me. She 
 was dressed in black, her skin was contracted into a thousand 
 wrinkles, her eyes deep sunk in her head, and her complexion 
 pale and livid as the countenance of death. Her looks were filled 
 with terror and unrelenting severity, and her hands armed with 
 whips and scorpions. As soon as she came near, with a horrid 
 frown, and a voice that chilled my very blood, she bid me follow 
 her. I obeyed, and she led me through rugged paths, beset with 
 briars and thorns, into a deep, solitary valley. Wherever she 
 passed the fading verdure withered beneath her steps ; her pesti- 
 lential breath infected the air with malignant vapours, obscured 
 the lustre of the sun, and involved the fair face of heaven in uni- 
 versal gloom. Dismal bowlings resounded through the forest,
 
 SAMUEL JOHNSON 279 
 
 from every baleful tree, the night raven uttered his dreadful note, 
 and the prospect was filled with desolation and horror." The 
 Rambler. 
 
 " As I sat thus, forming alternatively excuses for delay and 
 resolutions to go forward, an irresistible heaviness suddenly sur- 
 prised me ; I laid my head upon the bank and resigned myself to 
 sleep, when methought I heard the sound as of the flight of eagles 
 and a being of more than human dignity stood before me. While 
 I was deliberating how to address him, he took me by the hand 
 with an air of kindness, and asked me solemnly, but without 
 severity: ' Theodore, whither art thou going ? ' ' I am climbing,' 
 answered I, ' to the top of the mountain, to enjoy a more exten- 
 sive prospect of the works of nature.' ' Attend first,' said he, ' to 
 the prospect which this place affords, and what thou dost not 
 understand I will explain. I am one of the benevolent beings 
 who watch over the children of dust, to preserve them from those 
 evils which will not ultimately terminate in good, and which 
 they do not, by their own faults, bring upon themselves. Look 
 around, therefore, without fear : observe, contemplate, and be 
 instructed.' " The Vision of Theodore. 
 
 II. Humor. " By way of strange contrast to this quality 
 [gravity] his style is not infrequently marked by the most 
 playful humor. Bos well's biography is full of these outbursts 
 of pleasantry, when, by way of reaction from the inherent 
 gravity of his nature, he would indulge in sallies of wit and 
 repartee. There is just enough of this in his prose to give it 
 flavor and attractiveness. In ' The Lives of the Poets ' this 
 order of style is well presented." T. W. Hunt. 
 
 " When he is in a pleasant mood his humour is broad and 
 arrogant. The most pleasing form of his humour is when he is 
 humourous at his own expense. . . . Many of the Ram- 
 blers are full of genuine humour, broad and hearty, and of 
 happy strokes of wit." Minto. 
 
 " When he threw aside his pen, which he regarded as an 
 encumbrance, he became not only learned and thoughtful, but 
 acute, witty, humourous, natural, honest." Hazlitt.
 
 28O SAMUEL JOHNSOlST 
 
 " His little circle of friends called forth his humour as the 
 House of Commons excited Chatham's eloquence. 
 His queer prejudices take a humourous form, and give a delight- 
 ful zest to his conversation." Leslie Stephen. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " Last Saturday I came to Ashbourne Ashbourne in the Peak. 
 Let not the barren name of the Peak terrify you ; I have never 
 wanted strawberries and cream. The great bull has no disease 
 but age. I hope in time to be like the great bull ; and hope you 
 will be like him too a hundred years hence." Dr. Johnson to 
 Mrs, Thrale. 
 
 " Dear Sir, ... I will not send compliments to my friends 
 by name, because I would be loath to leave any out in the 
 enumeration. Tell them, as you see them, how well I speak of 
 Scotch politeness, and Scotch hospitality, and Scotch beauty, 
 and of everything Scotch, but Scotch oat-cakes and Scotch prej- 
 udices." To James Boswell, Esq. 
 
 Johnson. " Nay, sir, it was not the wine that made your head 
 ache, but the sense 1 put into it." 
 
 Bos well. " What, sir ; will sense make the head ache ? " 
 
 Johnson. " Yes, sir, when it is not used to it." Bosivelts 
 Life of Johnson . 
 
 12. Personification of Abstract Nouns. This is a 
 
 peculiarly Johnsonian characteristic. He continually uses 
 the abstract noun as if it were a person, making it the sub- 
 ject of an active verb, and thus gaining brevity. 
 
 "To make up what is called ' the Johnsonian manner,' or 
 ' Johnsonese,' we must take not only these striking peculiarities 
 of sentence-structure but certain other peculiarities, especially 
 a peculiar, use of the abstract noun." Minto. 
 
 " It was not, however, the mere bigness of the words that 
 distinguished his style but a peculiar love of putting the ab- 
 stract for the concrete." Leslie Stephen.
 
 SAMUEL JOHNSON 28 I 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " Luxury, avarice, injustice, violence, and ambition take up 
 their ordinary residence in populous cities ; while the hard and 
 laborious life of the husbandman will not admit of these vices." 
 Thoughts on Agriculture. 
 
 " I shall therefore lay my case before you, and hope by your 
 decision to be set free from unreasonable restraints and enabled 
 to justify myself against the accusations which spite and peevish- 
 ness produce against me." The Rambler. 
 
 " To oppose the devastations of Famine, who scattered the 
 ground everywhere with carcasses, Labour came down upon earth. 
 Labour was the son of Necessity, the nurseling of Hope, and the 
 pupil of Art ; he had the strength of his mother, the spirit of his 
 nurse, and the dexterity of his governess." The Rambler. 
 
 11 My name is Religion. I am the offspring of Truth and Love 
 and the parent of Benevolence, Hope, and Joy. The monster 
 from whose power I have freed you is called Superstition. She 
 is the child of Discontent and her followers are Fear and Sor- 
 row." The Rambler.
 
 BURKE, 1729-1797 
 
 Biographical Outline. Edmund Burke, born at Dub- 
 lin about January 12, 1729; father a Protestant attorney, 
 mother a Roman Catholic ; Burke, is reared as a Protestant, 
 but so many of his friends were Catholics that he early learned 
 toleration; in 1741 he enters a school at Ballitore, County 
 Kildare, kept by one Shackleton, a Quaker, with whose son, 
 Richard, he forms and maintains a life-long friendship ; he 
 enters Trinity College, Dublin, in 1743, and remains there till 
 1748, studying diligently, but not following any systematic 
 course ; he becomes especially familiar with the works of 
 Cicero, whom he takes as " the model on which he labored 
 to form his own character, in eloquence, in policy, in ethics, 
 and in philosophy; " he acquires some knowledge of Greek, 
 and wins a scholarship on examination in 1746 ; he is entered 
 at the Middle Temple, London, in 1747, takes A.B. at 
 Dublin in the spring of 1748, and goes to London to study 
 law in 1750; owing to weak health he does not study se- 
 verely, but spends much time travelling about the Midland 
 counties of England ; little is known of his life between 
 1752 and 1757 ; he appears to have visited France, to have 
 frequented theatres and debating clubs, and to have met some 
 eminent men, including Garrick, who became his life-long 
 friend ; Burke refuses to enter upon the practice of law, 
 which so angers his father that, in 1755, his paternal allow- 
 ance of ;ioo a year is wholly or partly withdrawn, and 
 he is forced to depend on literature for a livelihood ; he had 
 probably written before that time " Hints for an Essay on the 
 Drama," unpublished till after his death; in 1756 he pub- 
 lishes " A Vindication of Natural Society " and " A Philo- 
 
 282
 
 BURKE 283 
 
 sophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas on the Sublime 
 and the Beautiful," the latter having been begun in 1748; 
 these two books at once give to Burke a high literary reputa- 
 tion, and so please his father that he sends him a present of 
 ^100 ; he takes lodgings (probably first at Bath) with his 
 physician, Dr. Nugent, whose daughter Jane (reared as a Ro- 
 man Catholic) he marries in the winter of 1756-57 ; his wife 
 conforms to his religion, and the marriage proves happy ; in 
 1757 he publishes " An Account of the European Settlements 
 in America," originally written by his cousin, William Burke, 
 but revised and much modified by Burke ; he writes also, 
 in 1757, his "Abridgment of the History of England;" 
 in 1758 he begins to edit the Annual Register, receiving 
 from the publisher, Dodsley, ^100 a year for his services; 
 he contributes to the Register the "Survey of Events" 
 for several years thereafter ; he resides in Wimpole Street, 
 with his father-in-law, is in straitened financial circum- 
 stances, and seeks in vain from Pitt the office of consul at 
 Madrid; in 1759 he becomes private secretary to W. G. 
 Hamilton ; this position brings Burke to the notice of many 
 men in power, and, in 1761, he becomes secretary to the 
 Earl of Halifax, whom Burke accompanies to Ireland ; while 
 in Ireland he writes reflections on the penal code and also an 
 address to the king in behalf of oppressed Irish Catholics, both 
 papers being published after his death ; he returns to London 
 after a year in Dublin and obtains, through Hamilton, in the 
 spring of 1763, a pension of ^300 a year; he accepts the 
 pension on condition that Hamilton allow him some time for 
 literary work; in May, 1674, on Hamilton's expulsion, 
 Burke returns to live with his father-in-law in Queen Anne 
 Street; in 1762 he joins the Turk's Head Club, where he 
 shines as a conversationalist with Johnson, Garrick, Reynolds, 
 Goldsmith, and others ; he becomes warmly attached to John- 
 son, Garrick, and Reynolds ; Burke refuses to give his whole 
 time to Hamilton's service, and Hamilton breaks off his con-
 
 284 BURKE 
 
 nection with him, so that Burke loses his pension; he is in 
 poverty for awhile, but seems to have reached a better finan- 
 cial condition by .1765, probably through the speculations of 
 his brother and his cousin ; in July, 1765, he becomes secretary 
 to Lord Rockingham, First Lord of the Treasury ; Burke's en- 
 emies try, unsuccessfully, to deprive him of his position by 
 accusing him of being a Papist, a Jesuit, an Irish adventur- 
 er, etc. ; Rockingham refuses to believe the slanders, becomes 
 Burke's warm friend, and aids him financially, but the false 
 charge of being a Papist was subsequently and frequently made 
 against Burke; he is elected member of Parliament for Wend- 
 over, December 23, 1765, and makes his first speech in Jan- 
 uary, 1766, arguing in favor of receiving the petition from the 
 American Congress ; he soon becomes a leading member of 
 the House, and, according to Johnson, makes " two speeches 
 on the repeal of the Stamp Act which were publicly com- 
 mended by Mr. Pitt and have filled the town with wonder ; " 
 he is greatly admired at first for his commanding eloquence, 
 but he soon loses his power over the House, whose members 
 could not follow his profound thoughts; the conservatives 
 among the Whigs are determined to exclude him from high 
 office, and this tends to sour his naturally high temper and to 
 make him vehement and often undignified ; on the resignation 
 of the Duke of Grafton as one of the Secretaries of State Burke 
 endeavors in vain to secure the vacant office, and declines a 
 proffered seat at the Board of Trade ; on Rockingham's dis- 
 placement in June, 1766, he defends Rockingham's career in 
 a pamphlet called A Short History of a Short Administra- 
 tion ; he visits his relatives in Ireland in the summer of 
 1766, and on his return refuses overtures made by Chatham 
 with a view to attaching Burke to the administration ; he op- 
 poses Townshend's plan for taxing the American colonies in 
 1767 ; in the spring of 1768 he buys an estate of six hundred 
 acres in Buckinghamshire, near Beaconsfield, twenty-four miles 
 from London, paying ^6,000 down and borrowing the balance
 
 BURKE 285 
 
 of ;i 4,000 by mortgaging the estate ; he is supposed to have 
 been aided by his brother, his cousin, and Lord Verney, who 
 were engaged in somewhat reckless speculation at the time ; he 
 borrows a part of the ^6,000 from Garrick, lives extravagant- 
 ly, and is ever afterward in pecuniary straits, especially after 
 the financial crash of 1769, which ruined his cousin and his 
 brother; in 1769 he defends Wilkes, and in 1770 publishes 
 his " Thoughts on the Present Discontents," which serves to 
 regenerate the Whigs by demanding publicity of Parliamen- 
 tary proceedings and an increase in the power of the people ; 
 he also speaks, during the session of 1770, in favor of free 
 speech, a free press, free trade, and freedom from church 
 tithes ; he is virulently attacked by the pamphleteers, and is 
 charged with the authorship of the " Letters of Junius ; " in 
 the autumn of 1771 he is appointed agent for the province of 
 New York at a salary of ^500, and, in the following year, he 
 refuses to act as an agent of the East India Company with a 
 higher salary ; he speaks in favor of religious toleration, in the 
 session of 1773, but is intolerant toward infidels because of a 
 view of French morals and philosophy obtained during a visit 
 to Paris in February, 1773 ; he becomes an ally of Fox in 
 1774, and for the next eight years they vehemently oppose 
 Lord North's administration ; Burke makes his great speech 
 on American taxation in the spring of 1774, and opposes the 
 bill for closing the port of Boston ; he is elected for Bristol in 
 the succeeding autumn ; in March, 1775, ne protests against 
 restraining the trade of the American colonies, and proposes 
 his famous thirteen resolutions for conciliation, which are 
 defeated; in November, 1776, he makes a final effort for the 
 revision of all the acts aggrieving the colonies, and, after fail- 
 ing, withdraws from Parliament during the discussion of all 
 questions concerning America; he defends his action in "A 
 Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol ; " during the sessions of 
 1778 and 1779 he labors to abolish wrecking, the use of the 
 pillory, and the employment of Indians in the American war;
 
 286 BURKE 
 
 he tries in vain to secure the reform of domestic political 
 abuses in the session of 1780, secures some modification of the 
 acts against Irish trade, and advocates the relief of the Scotch 
 Catholics ; he defies the mob in the " no-popery " riots of 
 1780, but is unharmed ; his efforts toward religious toleration 
 and his defence of Ireland cause the loss of his political influ- 
 ence in Bristol, but he secures a seat for Mai ton, through 
 Rockingham ; in 1781 he again proposes a bill for economical 
 reform, and is supported by William Pitt the Younger ; with 
 the aid of Fox, Burke forces Lord North to resign in the 
 spring of 1782 ; on the accession of the Rockingham Whigs 
 in 1782 Burke is again excluded from the cabinet seat to which 
 he was richly entitled, and is again put off with the paltry office 
 of paymaster of the forces ; he again labors for self-govern- 
 ment in Ireland, and at last carries a large part of his scheme 
 for economical reform ; he receives a salary of ^4,000 as 
 paymaster, and is promised by the government "something 
 considerable for his wife and son ; " by the death of Rock- 
 ingham he loses both his office and the promised "some- 
 thing ; " he endeavors in vain to secure a political sinecure 
 clerkship for his son ; he becomes paymaster again in 1783, 
 and devotes himself to reforms in the government of India ; 
 he meets and greatly admires Frances Burney (Madame 
 d'Arblay), and is elected Lord Rector of Glasgow Univer- 
 sity in 1784 ; his political enemies make his life miserable 
 with slander and obloquy, and he is treated with great dis- 
 respect in the House, though he recovers 100 damages, 
 with costs, in a libel suit against the printer of the Public 
 Advertiser ; he continues his efforts against the maladmin- 
 istration of Hastings in India, and, on February 18, 1785, 
 makes his famous speech on the Nabob of Arcot's debts ; he 
 is re-elected Lord Rector of Glasgow in 1785, and makes a 
 tour of Scotland, astonishing the northern scholars with the 
 universality of his knowledge; in 1786 he is aided by Fox, 
 Francis, Sheridan, and others in his attack on Hastings, and,
 
 BURKE 287 
 
 on May 10, 1787, he impeaches Hastings at the bar of the 
 House of Lords ; he begins his great speech against Hastings 
 February 15, 1787, and continues speaking during four days, 
 except for a brief interruption due to illness ; he is in finan- 
 cial straits again in 1787, and is aided by a gift of ^1,000 
 from his friend Dr. Brocklesby ; in November, 1788, when Fox 
 comes into power, he [Fox] declines to aid in securing for 
 Burke the cabinet position that Burke deserved, and arranges 
 to give him, instead, his old office of paymaster, besides a 
 pension of ^2,000, half to go to Burke's son and half to his 
 wife ; Burke's disappointment increases his vehemence and 
 bitterness during 1789, and his enemies renew their false 
 charges of Jesuitism, etc. ; on May 4, 1789, he receives 
 from the House a vote of censure for using violent expressions 
 toward a fellow-member, and many regard him as '' an in- 
 genious madman ; " he aids Wilberforce in 1788-89 in Wil- 
 berforce's efforts to abolish the slave-trade an object for 
 which Burke had begun to work as early as 1780; in the 
 autumn of 1789 he writes his " Reflections on the Revolution 
 in France" as a warning to his more radical countrymen, 
 and publishes it November i, 1790; early in 1790 he be- 
 comes estranged from Fox and Sheridan, who oppose Burke's 
 position on the French Revolution; the " Reflections " pass 
 through eleven editions in their first year, and Burke receives 
 LL.D. from Dublin, after narrowly failing to receive D.C.L. 
 from Oxford; the "Reflections" create a reaction against 
 the French Revolution in England, and divide the country 
 into two parties on the subject, thus doing much to weaken 
 the Whigs ; Burke receives the compliments of foreign sov- 
 ereigns ; he sits for Malton again in 1790, and renews his 
 activity against Hastings ; he publishes " A Letter to a Mem- 
 ber of the National Assembly" early in 1791, and soon af- 
 terward breaks finally with Fox and with the Whig party on 
 the debate over the Quebec Bill; he retires to Margate late 
 in 1791 and publishes his " Appeal from the New to the Old
 
 288 BURKE 
 
 Whigs " and his " Thoughts on French Affairs; " in January, 
 1792, he writes his letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe, discuss- 
 ing religious toleration in Ireland; in February, 1792, on 
 the death of his friend Reynolds, Burke receives from Rey- 
 nolds a legacy of ^2,000 ; during the session of 1792 he op- 
 poses a motion for Parliamentary reform and one for the re- 
 peal of certain penal statutes as to religious opinions, thus 
 giving color to the charge that he had discarded his life-long 
 views of religious and civil liberty ; though without a party, 
 Burke now becomes " a sort of power of Europe ; " he cor- 
 responds with " Monsieur " (Louis XVIII.), and is regarded 
 as the representative of the French refugees in England ; late 
 in 1792 he advocates war with France, and takes sides with 
 the Conservative ministry; his popularity returns with the 
 declaration of war ; he mourns the loss of Fox's friendship, 
 but declines to make overtures toward a reconciliation ; from 
 May 28 to June 16, 1793, he makes a nine days' speech de- 
 fending his impeachment of Hastings, and on the i9th he 
 receives the thanks of the House ; he retires finally from 
 Parliament in July, 1793: the loss of his son on the 2d 
 of the following August nearly breaks Burke' s heart ; on Au- 
 gust 3oth he is granted a pension of ^1,200 a year ; this was 
 soon increased, and a second pension of ^2,500 was added, 
 which Burke promptly sold to pay his debts ; he lives in re- 
 tirement at Beaconsfield during 1795, but writes his "Re- 
 marks on the Apparent Circumstances of the War" (pub- 
 lished after his death) and " A Letter to a Noble Lord," the 
 latter being a reply to an attack on Burke's pension made by 
 the Duke of Bedford; in 1796 he founds at Penn, near Bea- 
 consfield, a school for ihe sons of French emigrants; he 
 writes and publishes his first two "Letters on a Regicide 
 Peace " during the summer of 1796 ; he is severely ill late in 
 the summer, and Windham, then Secretary of War, writes : 
 "Your life is at this moment of more consequence than that 
 of any [other] man living; " Burke is visited by Wilberforce
 
 BURKE 289 
 
 and many other eminent men ; he dies at Beaconsfield, July 
 9, 1797 ; Fox proposes in the House that he be buried at 
 public expense in Westminster Abbey, but, in accordance 
 with Burke's expressed wish, he is buried at Beaconsfield. 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY ON BURKE'S STYLE. 
 
 Prior, J., "Life of Edmund Burke." London, 1878, G. Bell & Sons, 
 512-519, etc. 
 
 Brougham, H., " Statesmen of George III." Edinburgh, 1872, Black, 
 3: 231-261. 
 
 Lecky, W. E. H., "England in the Eighteenth Century." New York, 
 1888, Appleton, 3 : 198-399. 
 
 McKnight, T. , "The Life and Times of Burke." London, 1860, Chap- 
 man & Hall, 3 : 1-752. 
 
 Minto, W., "English Prose Literature." Edinburgh, 1886, Blackwood, 
 440-461. 
 
 Goodrich, C. A., "British Eloquence." New York, 1853, Harper, 206- 
 240. 
 
 De Quincey, T., " Literary Criticism." Boston, 1882, Houghton, Mif- 
 flin & Co., 348-352. 
 
 Rogers, S., " Recollections." London, 1859, Longmans & Co., 81-89. 
 
 Craik, G. L., "History of English Literature." New York, 1869, 
 Scribner, 328-353. 
 
 Hazlitt, W., "Sketches and Essays." London, 1878, G. Bell & Son, 
 408-426. 
 
 Morley, J., "English Men of Letters" (Burke). New York, 1879, 
 Harper, 210-229. 
 
 Knight, C., "Gallery of Portraits." London, 1837, C. Knight, 3: 33- 
 40. 
 
 Croly, Geo., "The Political Life of Burke." London, 1840, Black- 
 wood, v. index. 
 
 Wilberforce, Bishop, "Life of Wilberforce." London, 1860, Black- 
 wood, 57-68. 
 
 May, Sir T. E., "Constitutional History." London, 1876, Macmillan, 
 I : 492-493- 
 
 Taine, H. A., "History of English Literature." New York, 1875, 
 Holt, 2 : 309-318 and v. index in 3. 
 
 Fox, C. J., "Parliamentary History." London, 1815, Reuter Agency, 
 28 : 363. 
 19
 
 290 BURKE 
 
 Stephen, L , "English Thought of the Eighteenth Century." London, 
 1881, Smith, Elder & Co., 219-252. 
 
 Macaulay, T. B, "Miscellaneous Works." New York, 1880, Harper, 
 4: 1 20 and v. index. 
 
 Buckle, H. T., '"' History of Civilization in England." New York, 1859, 
 Appleton, 326-330. 
 
 Hunt, T. W., "Representative English Prose." New York, 1887, 
 Armstrong, 334-362. 
 
 Mclntosh, Sir J., "Miscellaneous. Works. " New York, 1871, Apple- 
 ton, 40-45. 
 
 Ferris, G. F., "Great Leaders." New York, 1889, Appleton, 369- 
 
 378- 
 
 Payne, E. J., Introduction to "Burke: Select Works." Oxford, 1883, 
 Clarendon Press, XXX.-XLIX. 
 
 Froude, J. A., "Short Studies." New York, 1877, Scribner, Armstrong 
 &Co. 
 
 Birrell, A., " Obiter Dicta." New York, 1887, Scribner, 2: 149-196. 
 
 Gosse, E., "History of the Eighteenth Century Literature." New 
 York, 1889, Macmillan, 365-374. 
 
 Collier, W. F., " History of English Literature." London, 1892, Nel- 
 son, 375-378. 
 
 Robertson, J. B., " Lectures on the Life of Burke." Dublin, 1875. 
 
 Dilke, C. W., "Papers of a Critic." London, 1875, J. Murray, 2: 
 309-330. 
 
 Adams, W. H. D., "English Party Leaders." London, 1878, Tinsley 
 Bros., 1 : 261-341. 
 
 Dulcken, H. W., "Worthies of the World." New York, 1882, Put- 
 nam, 33-58. 
 
 Nicoll, H. J., "Landmarks of English Literature." New York, 1883, 
 Appleton, 256-261. 
 
 Stephen, L., "Dictionary of National Biography." New York, 1890, 
 Macmillan, 7 : 345-365. 
 
 Hazlitt, W., "Political Essays." New York, 1889, \Varne & Co., 269, 
 276, and 361-377. 
 
 Phillips, M. G., "A Manual of English Literature." New York, 1893, 
 Harper, 2: 9-11, etc. 
 
 Hunt, T. W., "Studies in Literature and Style." New York, 1890, 
 Armstrong, 35-39. 
 
 McCormick, Charles, " Memoirs of the Rt. Hon. Edmund Burke." Lon- 
 don, 1897, McCormick. 
 
 Edgar, J. G., "Footprints of Famous Men." New York, 1854, Har- 
 per, 46-67.
 
 BURKE 291 
 
 Miles, W. A., " Letter on Burke's ' Letter to a Noble Lord.' " London, 
 
 1796, J. Debrett, 101. 
 
 , "The Georgian Era." London, 1832, Bronston & Co., 
 
 1 : 318-329. 
 Wotton, Mabel E., "Word Portraits." London, 1887, Bentley, 39- 
 
 42. 
 
 Fortnightly Review, 7: 129-303 and 420 (J. Morley). 
 Xorth American Review, 88 : 61-113 (C. C. Smith). 
 Bibliotheca Sacra, 31: 507-525 (G. Shepard). 
 Quarterly Review, 34: 457-487 (J. Prior). 
 Edinburgh Review, 46 : 269-303. 
 Contemporary Review, 50: 27-47 (Birrell). 
 Methodist Quarterly Review, 1 8 : IOI-IIO (Fry). 
 National Magazine, 3 : 432-438. 
 The Nation, 22 : 48-49 (A. V. Dicey). 
 Eclectic Magazine, 30: 201-210 (Gilfillan). 
 Edinburgh Review, 46: 277 (Adams). 
 
 PARTICULAR CHARACTERISTICS. 
 
 i. Impassioned Eloquence Miltonic Grandeur. 
 
 It is this quality, perhaps, more than any other that has 
 caused such critics as De Quincey, Craik, and others to call 
 Burke " the supreme writer of his century." T. W. Hunt de- 
 clares that Burke's style "marks the highest point as yet attained 
 in England in forensic prose. His eloquence is supreme and 
 rises to the level of the sublime. It is oratorical passion in 
 the essence." Macaulay says that Burke is "in amplitude 
 of comprehension and richness of imagination superior to ev- 
 ery orator, ancient or modern." Of Burke's "Address to the 
 King," John Morley says, "Each sentence falls on the ear 
 with the accent of some golden-tongued oracle of the wise 
 gods." Another critic calls him " an orator in all his thoughts 
 and a sage in all his eloquence." Brougham speaks of his 
 "fierce, nervous, overwhelming declamation, the heavy artillery 
 of powerful declamation." Goodrich says that " the variety 
 and extent of his powers in debate was greater than that of
 
 292 BURKE 
 
 any other orator in ancient or modern times." Minto con- 
 siders his declamatory energy largely due to the concreteness 
 of his terms and images. Chambers exclaims, " Who can 
 withstand the fascination and magic of his eloquence ! " and 
 Payne combines all these estimates when he says, " His writ- 
 ings have ever since been the model of all who wish to say 
 anything forcibly, naturally, freely, and in a comparatively 
 small space." 
 
 " I steadily affirm that of all th&men who are, or who ever 
 have been, eminent for energy or splendor of eloquence, 
 
 . . there is not one who surpasses Burke." Dr. Parr. 
 
 " His descriptions were more vivid, more harrowing, more 
 horrible than human utterance on either fact or fancy ever 
 formed before. ... At one time he dropped his head 
 upon his hands and was unable to proceed, while the bosoms 
 of his auditors became convulsed with passion." Madame 
 a' Arblay [describing the speech against Hastings]. 
 
 "For half an hour I looked upon the orator in a revery of 
 wonder, and actually felt myself to be the most culpable man 
 on earth." Warren Hastings. 
 
 " Burke had . . . the grandeur proper to a man 
 dealing with imperial themes ; the freedom of nations, the 
 justice of rulers, the fortunes of great societies, the sacredness 
 of law. . . . He had the amplitude, the weightiness, 
 the inspiration, the high flight of Milton, but there can hardly 
 have been any conscious attempt at imitation. . . . He 
 imprints himself upon us with a magnificence and elevation of 
 expression that places him among the highest masters of lit- 
 erature." -John Morley. 
 
 " Burke has been compared to Cicero I do not know for 
 what reason. Their excellences are as different, and indeed 
 as opposite, as they can well be. Burke had not the polished 
 elegance, the glassy neatness, the artful regularity, the exqui- 
 site modulation, of Cicero. He had a thousand times more 
 richness and originality of mind, more strength and pomp
 
 BURKE 293 
 
 of diction. . . . If it [grandeur] is not to be found in 
 Burke, it is to be found nowhere. Burke's eloquence was that 
 of the poet ; of the man of high and unbounded fancy : his 
 wisdom was profound and contemplative. . . . Burke's 
 eloquence was calculated to make them [men] think." 
 Hazlitt. 
 
 "The rapid, vehement, impetuous torrent of his eloquence, 
 kindling as it flowed, and the nervous motions of his counte- 
 nance reflected the ungovernable excitement under which he 
 labored. . . . [There was] great magnetism in his elo- 
 quence. He made the whole House pass in an instant from 
 the tenderest emotions of feeling to bursts of laughter ; never 
 was the electric power of eloquence more imperiously felt." 
 W. E. H. Lecky. 
 
 " The vast amount of his works rolls impetuously in a cur- 
 rent of eloquence. . . . It is either the expose of a 
 ministry or the whole history of British India or the complete 
 theory of revolutions and the political conditions, which comes 
 down like a vast overflowing stream, to dash with its ceaseless 
 effort and accumulated mass against some crime that men 
 would overlook or some injustice which they would sanction." 
 Taine. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " Therefore it is with confidence that, ordered by the Commons 
 of Great Britain, I impeach Warren Hastings of high crimes and 
 misdemeanors. I impeach him in the name of the Commons of 
 Great Britain, whose parliamentary trust he has abused ; I im- 
 peach him in the name of the Commons of Great Britain, whose 
 national character he has dishonoured ; I impeach him in the 
 name of the people of India, whose laws, rights, and liberties he 
 has subverted ; I impeach him in the name of the people of India, 
 whose property he has destroyed, whose country he has laid waste 
 and desolate ; I impeach him in the name of human nature itself, 
 which he has cruelly outraged, injured, and oppressed in both 
 sexes ; and I impeach him in the name and by virtue of those 
 eternal laws of justice which ought equally to pervade every age,
 
 294 BURKE 
 
 condition, rank, and situation in the world." Impeachment of 
 Hastings. 
 
 " Such is the republic to which we are going to give a place in 
 civilized fellowship ;. the republic which, with joint consent, we 
 are going to establish in the centre of Europe, in a port that over- 
 looks and commands every other state and which eminently con- 
 fronts and menaces this kingdom. You may call this faction 
 which has eradicated the monarchy expelled the proprietary, 
 persecuted religion, trampled upon law you may call this France 
 if you please : but of the ancient France nothing remains but the 
 central geography; its iron frontier'; its spirit of ambition ; its 
 audacity of enterprise ; its perplexing intrigue. These and these 
 alone remain. All the former correctives, whether of virtue or 
 of weakness, which existed in the old monarchy are gone. No 
 single corrective is to be found in the whole body of the new re- 
 public a republic not of simple husbandmen or fishermen, but 
 of intriguers and of warriors a republic of a character the most 
 restless, the most enterprising, the most impious, the most fierce 
 and bloody, the most hypocritical and perfidious, the most bold 
 and daring that ever has been seen or indeed that can be con- 
 ceived to exist." Thoughts on a Regicide Peace. 
 
 " I call it atheism by establishment when any state shall not ac- 
 knowledge the existence of God as a moral governor of the world ; 
 when it shall offer to him no religious or moral worship ; when it 
 shall abolish the Christian religion by decree ; when it shall perse- 
 cute with a cold, unrelenting, steady cruelty, by every mode of 
 confiscation and imprisonment, exile, and death, all its minis- 
 ters ; when it shall generally shut up or pull down the churches ; 
 when, in the place of that religion of social benevolence and in- 
 dividual self-denial, in mockery of all religion, it shall institute 
 impious, blasphemous, indecent rites, in honour of their vitiated, 
 perverted reason, and erect altars to the personification of their 
 own corrupted and bloody republic ; when schools and semi- 
 naries are founded at the public expense to poison mankind from 
 generation to generation with the horrible maxims of this im- 
 piety ; when, wearied out with incessant martyrdom and the 
 cries of a people hungering and thirsting for religion, they permit 
 it only as a tolerated evil I call this atheism by establishment." 
 Thoughts on a Regicide Peace.
 
 BURKE 295 
 
 2. Profuse, Sometimes Excessive, Imagery. - 
 
 He had, as Brougham says, "an imagination marvellously quick 
 to descry unthought-of resemblances." Yet he rarely if ever 
 uses a trope merely for the purpose of ornament. De Quincey 
 grows impatient with " the long-eared race of Burke's critics," 
 who have understood him, " not as thinking in and by his fig- 
 ures, but as deliberately laying them on by way of enamel or 
 after-ornament," and declares that Burke " was a man of fancy 
 in no other sense than as Lord Bacon was so, and Jeremy Taylor, 
 and as all large and discursive thinkers must be." It is this rare 
 power of figurative illumination that accounts for the fact, stated 
 by Craik, that " the writings of Burke are, indeed, the only 
 English political writings of a past age that continue to be read 
 in the present." This "creative richness of imagination " 
 appears in every one of his writings. " He had," says Ma- 
 caulay, "in the highest degree that noble faculty whereby 
 man is able to live in the past and in the future, in the distant 
 and the unreal." C. A. Goodrich joins De Quincey in de- 
 fending Burke against Fox's charge of floridity, and says that 
 "a large part of his imagery is not liable to any censure of 
 this kind ; many of his figures are so finely wrought into the 
 texture of his style that we hardly think of them as figures at 
 all." T. W. Hunt accounts for this trait, in part, by Burke's 
 age and nationality : "In proneness to satire and fondness for 
 imagery and romance he was a true Celt. . . . The age 
 was agitative. All was aglow and ablaze." The sources 
 from which Burke drew his figures are marvellously wide. 
 History, art, science, literature, every profession, every trade 
 is made to bear ready and continual tribute to the wonderful 
 treasure-house of his fancy. 
 
 ' ' The great element of power in Burke, over and above what 
 he has in common with Macaulay, is his extravagant splendor 
 of imagery. . . . Like Carlyle, he makes abundant use 
 both of tropes and explicit figures. He is especially rich in 
 metaphor. He has been called ' the greatest master of met-
 
 296 BURKE 
 
 aphor the world has ever known,' and if we except Carlyle, 
 we may allow that he is the most metaphorical of our prose 
 writers. . . . His extravagant imagery rises to the wild- 
 est pitch in his ungovernable moments." Minto. 
 
 " Burke' s profusion of figurative language has been the 
 theme of endless admiration. His mind was a repertory of 
 things generally known concerning history, sciences, profes- 
 sions, manufactures, handicrafts ; and he drew illustrations 
 from all classes of subjects in his multifarious knowledge. 
 The framework of what Burke had to say was too 
 thickly overlaid with Asiatic ornament. His natural ardor 
 always impelled him to clothe his conclusions and to express 
 them in glowing and exaggerated phrases : . . . The 
 great offender and burden was that imagination, . . . 
 bringing in all conceivable wealth of imagery, accumulating 
 figures, and extending illustrations till they become a dazzling 
 and bewildering veil of light, hiding the process, progress, 
 and the very gist of the argument." -John Morley. 
 
 " It is true, however, that, in some rare cases, Burke did in- 
 dulge himself in a pure rhetorician's use of fancy, consciously 
 and profusely lavishing his ornaments for mere purposes of 
 effect. There are many such cases." De Quincey. 
 
 " In debate, images and illustrations rose to his lips with 
 a spontaneous redundance that astonished his hearers." 
 W.E.H. Lecky. 
 
 " The wheels of his imagination did not catch fire from the 
 rottenness of the materials, but from the rapidity of their mo- 
 tion. He most frequently produced an effect by the remote- 
 ness and novelty of his combinations, by force of contrast, 
 by the striking manner in which the most opposite and un- 
 promising materials were harmoniously blended together ; not 
 by laying his hands on all the fine things he could think of, 
 but by bringing together those things which he knew would 
 blaze out into glorious light by their collision. The florid style 
 is a mixture of affectation and commonplace. Burke's was a
 
 BURKE 297 
 
 union of untamable vigor and originality. . . . He was 
 completely carried away by his subject. He had no other 
 object but to produce the strongest impression on his reader, 
 by giving the truest, the most characteristic, the fullest, and 
 the most forcible description of things, trusting to the power of 
 his own mind to mould them into grace and beauty. He did 
 not produce a splendid effect by setting fire to the light vapors 
 that float in the regions of fancy. . . . His gold was not 
 the less valuable for being wrought into elegant shapes and 
 richly embossed with curious figures ; the solidity 
 
 of a building is not destroyed by adding to it beauty and or- 
 nament, . . . and the strength of a man's understanding 
 is not always to be estimated in exact proportion to his power 
 of imagination. . . . Burke was so far from being a 
 gaudy or flowery writer, that he was one of the severest writers 
 we have. . . . He unites every extreme and every va- 
 riety of composition ; the lowest and meanest words with the 
 highest. He excels in the display of power, in showing the 
 extent, the force, and the intensity of his ideas ; he is led on 
 by the mere impulse and vehemence of his fancy, not by the 
 affectation of dazzling his readers by gaudy conceits or pom- 
 pous images. . . . The ' Letter to the Duke of Bedford ' 
 is the most delightful exhibition of wild and brilliant fancy 
 that is to be found in English prose, but it is too much like 
 a beautiful picture painted upon gauze ; it wants something 
 to support it. ' The Regicide Peace ' is without ornament, 
 but it has all the solidarity, the might, the gravity of a 
 judicial record. It seems to have been written with a cer- 
 tain constraint upon himself and to show those who said he 
 could not reason that his arguments might be stripped of 
 their ornaments without losing anything of their force." 
 Hazlitt. 
 
 " A robe of brocaded damask is splendid, sumptuous, and 
 appropriate to noble public occasions, but it is scarcely flexi- 
 ble. ' ' Edmund Gosse.
 
 298 BURKE 
 
 "He rarely employs simile, but delights in metaphor. 
 He is rich, and even lavish, in the use of imagery ; 
 but this is never introduced for the sake of ostentatious dis- 
 play, but in order to enforce or illustrate an argument. "- 
 J. B. Robertson. 
 
 " There is a foam on its [the stream of his eloquence] ed- 
 dies, mud in its bed ; thousands of strange creatures sport 
 wildly on its surface ; he does not select, he lavishes ; he casts 
 forth by myriads his multiplied ' fancies, emphases, harsh 
 words, declamation, and apostrophes, jests and execrations, 
 the whole grotesque or horrible assemblage of the distant 
 regions and populous cities which his unwearied learning or 
 fancy has traversed." Taine. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " Astronomers have supposed that if a certain comet, whose 
 path intercepted the ecliptic, had met the earth in some (I forget 
 which) sign, it would have whirled us along with it in its eccen- 
 tric course into God knows what regions of heat and cold. Had 
 the portentous comet of the Rights of Man, which from its horrid 
 hair shakes pestilence and war, and with fear of change per- 
 plexes monarchs had that comet crossed upon us in that inter- 
 nal state of England, nothing human could have prevented our 
 being hurried out of the highway of heaven into all the vices, 
 crimes, and miseries of the French Revolution." Reflections on 
 the Revolution in France. 
 
 "So long as the well-compacted structure of our Church and 
 State, the sanctuary, the holy of holies, of that ancient law, de- 
 fended by reverence, defended by power a fortress at once and 
 a temple shall stand unviolate on the brow of the British Lion ; 
 as long as the British monarchy, not more limited than fenced by 
 the orders of the state, shall, like the proud keep of Windsor, 
 rising in majesty of proportion and girt with a double belt of its 
 kindred and coeval towers as long as this awful structure shall 
 oversee and guard this subjected land, so long the mounds and 
 dykes of the low, flat Bedford level will have nothing to fear from
 
 BURKE 299 
 
 all the pickaxes of all the levellers in France." Reflections on the 
 Revolution in France. 
 
 "The grants to the House of Russell were so enormous as not 
 only to outrage economy but even to stagger credibility. The 
 Duke of Bedford is the leviathan among all the creatures of the 
 crown. . . . He plays and frolics in the ocean of the royal 
 bounty. Huge as he is, and while he lies ' floating many a 
 rood,' he is still a creature. His ribs, his fins, his whalebone, his 
 blubber, the very spiracles through which he spouts a torrent of 
 brine against his origin and covers me all over with the spray 
 everything of him and about him is from the throne." Letter to 
 a Noble Lord. 
 
 3. Invective Coarseness Ridicule. Burke's mind 
 was eminently satirical. In his earlier writings this quality 
 took the form of dignified irony ; but the stings and insults to 
 which he was subjected in later years caused him to retort in 
 the fiercest invective, often unpardonably coarse. Taine speaks 
 of " the trumpet-blast of his curses," and declares that Burke 
 had no taste. Like Swift, he is too intensely in earnest to make 
 elegance an end in his writing. He is a striking illustration 
 of the truth, that in literature, as in architecture, grace and 
 force sometimes vary inversely with each other. "If," says 
 John Morley, " anyone has imbued himself with that exact- 
 ing love of delicacy, measure, and taste in expression, which 
 was, until our own day, a sacred tradition of the French, then 
 he will not like Burke. . . . The thought of wrong or 
 misery moved him less to pity for the victim than to anger 
 against the cause. He has some gratuitous and unredeemed 
 vulgarity; some images whose barbarity makes us shudder. " 
 Even Macaulay admits that his debates on the Regency were 
 marked by "asperity and indecency." Minto observes that 
 " whenever Burke wishes to cover anything with ridicule, his 
 words are taken from every-day speech and his figures from 
 the commonest objects." But even the righteous ends that 
 Burke had in view fail to excuse the outrageous coarseness of
 
 3OO BURKE 
 
 some of his invective. He calls Hastings "a wallowing 
 sow," " the keeper of a pig-sty, wallowing in filth and cor- 
 ruption ; " and the like. 
 
 "If by wit be meant any of its forms compatible with 
 fierce invective, his speeches abound with innumerable speci- 
 mens of the highest merit. . . . He does not scruple to 
 make the most grossly offensive comparisons in the plainest 
 terms. . . . He made abundant use of the weapon of 
 ridicule. . . . We cannot suppose that he ever indulged 
 in it [abuse or ridicule] without to some extent bullying his 
 artistic as well as his prudential conscience." Minto. 
 
 " He indulges in bitter invective mingled with poignant 
 wit, but descending often to abuse and even scurrility ; he is 
 apt, moreover, to carry an attack too far, to slay the slain, 
 or to mingle and dilute the reader's contempt with pity." 
 Brougham. 
 
 "There appeared more of study than of truth, more of 
 invective than of justice, and, in short, so little proof to so 
 great passion that in a very short time, I, who had been 
 overpowered by his eloquence, began to lift up my head ; 
 . and before I was myself aware of the declension of 
 Mr. Burke's powers over my feelings, I found myself looking 
 all around with my opera-glass in hand." Miss Bitrney 
 [describing the speech against Hastings]. 
 
 " It is no use for him to study Cicero and to confine his 
 dashing force in the orderly channels of Latin rhetoric ; he 
 continues half a barbarian. . . . We give way to him, 
 and see in his outbursts only the outpourings of a great heart 
 and a deep mind, too open and too full ; and we wonder 
 with a sort of strange veneration at this extraordinary outflow, 
 impetuous as a torrent, broad as a sea, in which the inex- 
 haustible variety of color and form undulates beneath the sun 
 of a splendid imagination, which lends to this muddy surge 
 all the brilliancy of its rays." Tame. 
 
 " Though a most skilful and penetrating critic, and though
 
 BURKE 301 
 
 his English style is one of the very finest in the language, his 
 taste was not pure ; even his best writings are sometimes dis- 
 figured by strangely coarse and repulsive images ; and gross 
 violations of taste seem to have been frequent in his speeches." 
 W. E. H. Lecky. 
 
 "It is distressing to see this master of the English lan- 
 guage descending to scurrilities unworthy of a fish-wife and 
 relinquishing all remnants of judgment, decorum, reason, and 
 good sense in ravings about the tyrannies of a regicide Jaco- 
 binism. " Edimmd Gosse. 
 
 " He was terrible as well as offensive in the coarseness of 
 his epithets ; would come down upon his adversary and stab 
 him through with a rough, rusty blade, which he picked up 
 for the purpose out of the filth of the gutter." -John Morley. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " Benfield, a criminal, who long since ought to have fattened 
 the region kites with his offal, is by his Majesty's ministers en- 
 throned in the government of a great kingdom." Nabob of Ar- 
 cofs Debts. 
 
 " I find no man who has remained in that more than stoical 
 apathy but the Prince de Conti. This mean, stupid, selfish, 
 swinish, and cowardly animal, universally known and despised 
 as such, has been perfectly neutral, except in one abortive at- 
 tempt to elope." Policy of the Allies. 
 
 " What was the event ? A strange uncouth thing [Napoleon], 
 a theatrical figure of the opera, his head shaded with three-col- 
 oured plumes, strutted from the back scenes, and, after a short 
 speech, in the mock-heroic falsetto of stupid tragedy, delivered 
 the gentleman fan English messenger] into the custody of a 
 guard, . . . and ordered him to be sent from Paris in two 
 hours." Letters on a Regicide Peace. 
 
 " That debt forms the foul putrid mucus in which are engen- 
 dered the whole brood of ascarides, all the endless involutions, 
 the eternal knot added to knot of those inexpugnable tape-worms 
 which devour the nutriment and eat up the bowels of India." 
 Nabob of Arcofs Debts.
 
 302 BURKE 
 
 "With six great chopping bastards, each as lusty as an infant 
 Hercules, this delicate creature [Hon. Henry Dundas] blushes 
 at the sight of his new bridegroom and assumes a virgin deli- 
 cacy ; or, to use a more fit as well as a more poetic comparison, 
 the person so squeamish, so timid, so trembling lest the winds 
 of heaven should visit too roughly, is expanded to broad sun- 
 shine, exposed like the sow of imperial augury, lying in the mud 
 with all the prodigies of her fertility about her, as evidence of 
 her delicate amours." Nabob of Arcofs Debts. 
 
 4. Mental and Moral Elevation. In all his political 
 conceptions Burke was lofty and majestic. He was an intel- 
 lectual Titan. He had no taste for discussing what was puerile 
 or trifling, and when compelled to do so, as Croly says, " He 
 winged his tempest 'gainst a turnpike bill." Johnson de- 
 clares that one could not meet Burke casually for five minutes 
 in the street without becoming aware that he was a remark- 
 able man, while Maurice says, " To read him makes us ac- 
 knowledge that we are small men." Here, especially, " the 
 style is the man." In an age when English political corrup- 
 tion reached its climax, Edmund Burke remained " a pure, 
 conscientious, upright man." Taine tells us that " he based 
 human society on maxims of morality, insisted on a high and 
 pure tone of feeling in the conduct of public business, and 
 seemed to have undertaken to raise and authorize the generos- 
 ity of the human heart. He fought nobly for noble causes ; 
 against the crimes of power in England, the crimes of the 
 people in France, the crimes of monopolists in India." John 
 Morley says that Burke's style is " noble, earnest, deep-flow- 
 ing, because his sentiment was lofty and fervid." T. W. 
 Hunt compares Burke to Milton and Homer, and adds: " He 
 was specially fond of discussing high themes his brow was 
 massive and so was his soul. There is something about 
 Burke's prose that is majestic and magisterial a kind of judi- 
 cial gravity everywhere apparent, that makes it impossible for 
 a man to be any other than in sober earnest as he peruses it
 
 BURKE 303 
 
 the embodiment of nobility and unselfishness in human 
 nature." 
 
 "He made himself everywhere the champion of principle 
 and the persecutor of vice; and men saw him bring to the 
 attack all the forces of his wonderful knowledge, his lofty rea- 
 son, his splendid style, with the unwearying and untempered 
 ardor of a "moralist and a knight." Taine. 
 
 "There is no public man whose character was in all re- 
 spects more transparently pure. Weak health and deep and 
 fervent religious principles saved him from the temptations of 
 youth ; and amid all the vicissitudes and corruption of poli- 
 tics his heart never lost its warmth or his conscience its sensi- 
 tiveness. ... In the higher moral qualities of public as 
 of private life he has not often been surpassed. That loyal af- 
 fection with which he clung through his whole life to the 
 friends of his early youth ; that genuine kindness which made 
 him when still a poor man the munificent patron of Barry and 
 Crabbe; . . . that stainless purity and retiring modesty 
 of nature which made his domestic life so different from 
 that of some of the greatest of his contemporaries ; that depth 
 of feeling which made the loss of his only son the death-knell 
 of the whole happiness of his life, may be traced in every 
 stage of his public career. Fidelity to his engagements, a 
 disinterested pursuit of what he believed to be right, in spite 
 of all the allurements of interest and popularity ; a deep and 
 ardent hatred of oppression and cruelty in every form ; a 
 readiness at all times to sacrifice personal pretensions to party 
 interests ; a capacity of devoting long years of thankless labor 
 to the service of those he had never seen, and who could nev- 
 er reward him, were the characteristics of his life." W. E. 
 H. Lecky. 
 
 " One great feature in his statesmanship was his consistent 
 endeavor to introduce into the conduct of affairs, between 
 nation and nation, higher principles of morality." Minio. 
 
 " The greatness of Burke as a thinker cannot be adequately
 
 304 BURKE 
 
 appreciated without noticing the nobility of his moral char- 
 acter. ... A noble unselfishness stamps all his efforts." 
 Leslie Stephen. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 "The worst event of this day, though it may deject, shall not 
 break or subdue me. The call upon us is authoritative. Let who 
 will shrink back, I shall be found at my post. Baffled, discoun- 
 tenanced, subdued, discredited, as the cause of justice and hu- 
 manity is, it will only be the dearer to me. Whoever, therefore, 
 shall at any time bring before you anything towards the relief of 
 our distressed fellow-citizens in India and towards a subversion 
 of the present most corrupt and oppressive system for its govern- 
 ment, in me shall find a weak (I am afraid) but a steady, ear- 
 nest, and faithful assistant." The Nabob of Arcofs Debts. 
 
 " The people are right. The calculation of money profit in all 
 wars is false. On balancing the account of such wars, ten thou- 
 sand hogsheads of sugar are purchased at ten thousand times their 
 price. The blood of man should never be shed but to redeem 
 the blood of man. It is well shed for our family, for our friends, 
 for our country, for our God, for our kind : the rest is vanity ; 
 the rest is crime." Letters on a Regicide Peace. 
 
 " I have little to recommend my opinions but long observa- 
 tion and much impartiality. They come from one who has been 
 no tool of power, no flatterer of greatness ; and who, in his last 
 act, does not wish to belie the tenor of his life." Reflections on 
 the Revolution in France. 
 
 "No man lives too long who lives to do with spirit, and suffer 
 with resignation what Providence pleases to command, or in- 
 flict ; but indeed they are sharp incommodities which beset old 
 age." Letter to a Noble Lord. 
 
 5. Erudition Vast Knowledge. " No man of sense 
 could meet Burke under a gateway, to avoid a shower, with- 
 out being convinced that he was the first man in England. 
 His stream of talk is perpetual ; and he does not talk from any 
 desire of distinction, but because his mind is full. 
 Take up whatever topic you please, he is ready to meet you." 
 -Johnson.
 
 BURKE 305 
 
 "Dr. Smith, of Oxford, after spending several years upon 
 a theory in chemistry, came up to London only to find that 
 Burke, the politician, had anticipated him by some years." 
 Buckle. 
 
 ' ' Possessed of most extensive knowledge, and that of the 
 most various description, acquainted alike with what different 
 classes of men knew, each in his own province, and with 
 much that one hardly ever thought of learning, he could either 
 bring his masses of information to bear directly upon the sub- 
 jects to which they severally belonged, or he could avail him- 
 self of them generally to strengthen his faculties or enlarge 
 his views, or he could turn any portion of them to account 
 for the purpose of enlarging his theme or enriching his dic- 
 tion. . . . When Burke is handling any one matter we 
 perceive that we are conversing with a reasoner or a teacher, 
 to whom almost every other branch of knowledge is familiar." 
 Brougham. 
 
 " There are few men whose depth and versatility have been 
 so fully recognized by their contemporaries. Adam Smith 
 declared that he had found no other man who, without com- 
 munication, had thought out the same conclusions on political 
 economy as himself. Winstanley, the Camden Professor of 
 Ancient History, bore witness to his knowledge of philosophy, 
 history, filiation of languages, and the principles of etymo- 
 logical deduction. ... No other politician or writer 
 has thrown the light of so penetrating a genius on the nature 
 and workings of the British Constitution, has impressed his 
 principles so deeply upon both the great parties in the state, 
 and has left behind him a richer treasure of political wisdom 
 applicable to all countries and to all times. . . . Take 
 up what you please, he is ready to meet you. His intellect- 
 ual energy was fully commensurate with his knowledge, and 
 he had rare powers of bringing illustrations and methods 
 of reasoning derived from many spheres to bear on any sub- 
 ject he touched, and of combining an extraordinary natural fa-
 
 306 BURKE 
 
 cility with most untiring and fastidious labor." II'. E. H. 
 Lecky. 
 
 " He brought his subject along with him ; he drew his 
 material from himself. The only limits which circumscribed 
 his variety were the stores of his own mind. His stock of 
 ideas did not consist of a few meagre facts meagrely stated, 
 of half a dozen commonplaces tortured into a thousand dif- 
 ferent ways ; but his mine of wealth was a profound under- 
 standing, inexhaustible as the human heart and various as the 
 sources of human nature. He therefore encircled every sub- 
 ject to which he applied himself, and new subjects were only 
 the occasions of calling forth fresh powers of mind which had 
 not been before exerted." Hazlitt. 
 
 " He was well versed in Greek and Latin literature, was 
 familiar with the great masters of his own language, and had 
 read the best models of the French. Ancient and modern 
 history he had deeply studied ; he was an admirable connois- 
 seur in art; and he was not unfamiliar with some of the 
 natural sciences. To theology and philosophy he paid con- 
 siderable attention. His acquaintance with English law as- 
 tonished professional men themselves, while from the Roman 
 jurisprudence he not unfrequently drew happy illustrations ; 
 and, as is said of Shakespeare, he loved to converse with 
 laborers and mechanics about their trades. He was a skilful, 
 practical agriculturist ; in matters of commerce and finance 
 he was exceedingly well versed, and in the whole science of 
 economics he was far beyond his age." J. B. Robertson. 
 
 11 His speeches abounded in imagery, philanthropy, wis- 
 dom, all the noblest characteristics of his genius. 
 His mind was a repertory of things generally known concern- 
 ing history, professions, manufactures, handicrafts ; and he 
 drew illustrations from all classes of subjects in his multi- 
 farious knowledge." Minto. 
 
 " He knew how the whole world lived. Everything con- 
 tributed to this : his vast desultory reading ; his education,
 
 BURKE 307 
 
 neither wholly a- ademical nor entirely professional ; his long 
 years of apprenticeship in the service of knowledge ; his wan- 
 derings up and down the country ; his vast conversational 
 powers ; his enormous correspondence with all sorts of people ; 
 his unfailing interest in all pursuits. . . . His writings 
 are a storehouse of wisdom, the noble, animating wisdom of 
 one who has the poet's heart as well as the statesman's brain." 
 Augustine Birrell. 
 
 "He entered Parliament, . . . having had time to 
 train himself thoroughly in all matters; acquainted with law, 
 history, philosophy, literature master of such a universal eru- 
 dition that he has been compared to Bacon." Taine. 
 
 " His learning is so various and extensive that we might 
 praise it for its range and compass were it not still more praise- 
 worthy for its solidity and depth." Thomas Campbell. 
 
 " Considered simply as a master of English prose, Burke has 
 not, in my judgment, been surpassed in any period of our 
 literature. His speeches, literally speaking, are the only English 
 speeches which may still be read with profit when the hearer 
 and speaker have long been turned to dust. . . . Burke 
 stands alone in his generation for the combination of width 
 of view with deepness of sympathy. Thinking of the mass, 
 he never forgets the individual. . . . Incomparably the 
 greatest intellectual power of all English politicians, the life 
 and soul of his party for some years." Leslie Stephen. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " In Russia it is not held respectful to call the priests papas, 
 their true and ancient appellation, but those who wish to address 
 them with civility always call them hieromonachi." Penal Laws. 
 
 "We know little of Sesostris but that he led an army of 900,- 
 ooo men out of Egypt and overran the Mediterranean coast as far 
 as Colchis. . . . The next personage who figures in the 
 tragedy of the ancients is Semiramis, for we have no particulars 
 of Ninus. . . . Like the fleets of Xerxes or the armies of 
 Pergamus and Syria in their wars against the Scythians, . . .
 
 3O8 BURKE 
 
 they all overlook us like the malevolent being of the poet." The 
 Sublime and the Beautiful. 
 
 " Milk is the first support of our childhood. The component 
 parts of this are water, oil, and a sort of very sweet salt called 
 the sugar of milk. All these, when blended, have a great smooth- 
 ness to the taste and a relaxing quality to the skin. We must 
 observe that, as smooth things are, as such, agreeable to the taste 
 and are found of a relaxing quality, so, on the other hand, things 
 which are found by experience to be of a strengthening quality 
 and fit to brace the fibres, are almost universally rough and pun- 
 gent to the taste, and in many cases even rough to the skin."- 
 The Sublime and the Beautiful. 
 
 6. Use of Apothegm Didacticism. "Burke will 
 always be read with delight and edification, because, in the 
 midst of discussions, ... he scatters apothegms that 
 take us into the region of lasting wisdom. In the midst of 
 the torrent of his most strenuous and passionate deliverances, 
 he suddenly rises aloof from his immediate subject and reminds 
 us of some permanent relation of things, some enduring truth 
 of human life or society. . . . He added much to the 
 permanent consideration of wise political thought by his 
 maxims. "John Morley. 
 
 11 His oratorical impressiveness was strongly connected with 
 the weight of those maxims which he had formed from a long 
 and profound study of the heart of man. And it is the force 
 and abundance of those fine reflections which give an immortal 
 value to his works on topics of the most temporary nature." 
 George Croly. 
 
 " He had a peculiar gift of introducing into transient party 
 conflicts observations drawn from the most profound knowl- 
 edge of human nature, of the first principles of government 
 and legislation. . . . There is perhaps no English writer 
 since Bacon whose works are so thickly starred with thought. 
 The time may come when they will be no longer read ; the 
 time will never come in which men would not grow wiser by 
 reading them." W. E. H. Lecky.
 
 BURKE 309 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " The taking away of a vote is the taking away of the shield 
 which the subject has, not only against the oppression of power 
 but that worst of all oppressions, the persecution of private so- 
 ciety. . . . When we are to provide for the education of any 
 body of men we ought anxiously to consider the particular func- 
 tion they are to perform in life." On the Penal Laws. 
 
 " A victory over real corruptions enables us to baffle spurious 
 and pretended reformations. . . . Some persons, by hating 
 vice too much, come to love men too little. . . . In all bodies, 
 those who will lead must also in a considerable sense follow. 
 . . . Nothing turns out to be so oppressive and unjust as a 
 feeble government. . . . Never did nature say one thing and 
 wisdom another. ... To innovate is not to reform. . . . 
 Rage and frenzy will pull down more in half an hour than pru- 
 dence, deliberation, and foresight can build up in a hundred 
 years. . . . The church is the place where one day's truce 
 surely ought to be allowed to the dissensions and animosities of 
 mankind." Reflections on the Revolution in France. 
 
 " But men may be sorely touched and deeply grieved in their 
 privileges as well as in their purses. Men may lose little in prop- 
 erty by the act which takes away all their freedom. When a man 
 is robbed of a trifle on the highway, it is not the two-pence lost 
 that constitutes the capital outrage. This is not confined to 
 privileges. Even ancient indulgences withdrawn, without offence 
 on the part of those who enjoyed such favors, operate as griev- 
 ances." On Conciliation with America. 
 
 7. Conservatism Veneration for Ancient In- 
 stitutions. "An abhorrence for abstract politics, a pre- 
 dilection for aristocracy, and a dread of innovation were 
 ever the most sacred articles of his political creed. He would 
 not abandon to the invasion of audacious novelties opinions 
 which he had received in his youth and had maintained so 
 long which had been fortified by the applause of the great 
 and the assent of the wise, and which he had supported against 
 so many distinguished opponents." Sir James Mackintosh. 
 
 " Burke had a constitutional love for old things; anything
 
 310 BURKE 
 
 that mankind had ever worshipped or venerated or obeyed 
 was dear to him. . . . With all his passion for good 
 government, he dearly loved a little rust." De Quincey. 
 
 "He trembled for the fair fame 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 
 fundamental questions about the origin of society. 
 Burke was all his life through a passionate maintainer of 
 the established order of things and, a ferocious hater of ab- 
 stractions and metaphysical politics. Burke had a consti- 
 tutional love for old things simply because they were old. 
 Burke may be called the High Priest of Order, 
 a lover of settled ways, of justice, peace, and se- 
 curity." Augustine Birr ell. 
 
 " It was peculiar to him that, possessed of a fancy and im- 
 agination singularly brilliant united with stores of knowl- 
 edge of a liberal and philosophical turn of mind, added 
 to having passed much time among books all the elements 
 which unite to compose a beautiful system and make an im- 
 posing theorist, produced in him a distinctly opposite effect. 
 He would admit no innovating speculations into the busi- 
 ness of government. He professed to build . . . upon 
 the basis of history and experience. . . . He entertained 
 for ancient institutions that respect and admiration which 
 all sober minds feel as long (but no longer) as they have 
 been productive of good. . . . His aim was to preserve 
 all our institutions in the main as they stood ; for the simple 
 reason that under them the nation had become good and 
 prosperous and happy. He would rather not innovate at all, 
 for innovation was not reformation : tooverturn nothing which 
 had the sanction of time and many happy days in its favor, to 
 correct and perfect superstition, but to leave all foundations, the 
 antiquity of which formed a guarantee of their usefulness and 
 stability in general opinion, sacred and unharmed, this was his 
 aim." -J. Prior.
 
 BURKE 311 
 
 " In discussing questions of domestic politics, he constantly 
 refused to travel beyond the landmarks of the constitution as 
 he found it established. ... A constitution was with 
 him a thing of life." G. L. Craik. 
 
 " To his eye the constitution was no makeshift scaffolding, 
 destined to speedy decay, but a venerable edifice of super!) 
 architecture resembling ' the proud keep of Windsor, rising in 
 the majesty of proportion and girt with the double belt of its 
 kindred and coeval towns.' " Leslie Stephen. 
 
 " He held the principles of conservatism with the zeal of a 
 Leveller, and tempered lofty ideas of improvement with the 
 scrupulousness of official routine. There is no part of Burke's 
 career at which we may not find evidence of his instructive 
 and undying repugnance to the critical or revolutionary spirit 
 and all its works." -John Morley. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 I reckon myself among the most forward in my zeal for main- 
 taining our constitution and its principles in their utmost purity 
 and vigour. Those who are attached to the constitution of this 
 kingdom will take good care how they are involved with persons 
 who, under a pretext of zeal toward the Revolution and constitu- 
 tion, too frequently wander from their true principles, and are 
 ever ready to depart from the firm but courteous and deliberate 
 spirit which produced the one and presides in the other. . . . 
 It is far from true that the right of the king depends on the will 
 of the governed, or that we acquired a right by the Revolution to 
 elect our own kings." Reflections on the Revolution in France. 
 
 " With us the king and the lords are several and joint securi- 
 ties for the equalities of each district, each province, each city. 
 When did you hear in Great Britain of any province suffering 
 from the inequality of its representation ; what district from having 
 no representation at all ? Not only our monarchy and our peer- 
 age secure the equality on which our unity depends, but it is the 
 spirit of the House of Commons itself The very inequality of 
 representation, which is so foolishly complained of, is perhaps 
 the very thing which prevents us from thinking or acting as mem-
 
 312 BURKE 
 
 bers for districts. Cornwall elects as many members as all Scot- 
 land. But is Cornwall better taken care of than Scotland ? Few 
 trouble their heads about any of your bases, out of some giddy 
 clubs. Most of those who wish for any change, upon any plausi- 
 ble grounds, desire it on different ideas." Reflections on tke 
 Revolution in France. 
 
 " We must recall their erring fancies to the acts of the Revolu- 
 tion which we revere, for the discovery of its true principles. If 
 the principles of the Revolution of 1688 are anywhere to be found, 
 it is in the statute called the Declaration of Rights. In that most 
 wise, sober, and considerate declaration, drawn up by great law- 
 yers and great statesmen, and not by warm and inexperienced en- 
 thusiasts, not one word is said nor one suggestion made of a general 
 right to chose our own governors, to cashier them for miscon- 
 duct, and to form a government for ourselves." Reflections on 
 the Revolution in France. 
 
 8. Catholicity Tolerance. "What distinguished 
 him from all other men was a wide, comprehensive intellect, 
 which . . . seized the general aspect of things and, be- 
 yond text, constitution, and figures, perceived the invisible 
 tendency of events and the inner spirit." Taine. 
 
 "[In his argument] he moves on with composed air, the 
 even, dignified pace of the historian ; and unfolds his facts in a 
 narrative so easy and yet so correct, that you plainly perceive 
 that he wanted only the dismissal of other pursuits to have 
 rivalled Livy or Hume." Brougham. 
 
 " His great and peculiar distinction was that he viewed all 
 objects of the understanding under more relations than other 
 men, and under more complex relations." De Quincey. 
 
 "There was a catholicity about his gaze. . . . He 
 saw all sides of a subject." Augustine Birrell. 
 
 " In all things, while he deeply reverenced principles, he 
 chose to deal with the concrete more than with abstractions; 
 he studied men rather than man. . . . The principles 
 of toleration ever found in him a powerful advocate, and he 
 was ever zealous to remove imperfections and correct abuses
 
 BURKE 313 
 
 in the establishment, as the best means of securing its per- 
 manent existence. . . . The mere fact that toward the 
 close of a tolerably long career he should still have kept his 
 mind sufficiently open to perceive and his honesty sufficiently 
 vigorous to cleave to the new and barely suspected deductions 
 from his principles which the French Revolution forced upon 
 him, is worth taking into account when we hear that Burke 
 had too much of the unflinching party-man about him to be 
 a true thinker." -John Morley. 
 
 " He believed that the interests of men in society should 
 be consulted and their several stations and employments as- 
 signed, with a view to their nature, not as physical but as 
 moral beings, so as to nourish their hopes, to lift their imagi- 
 nation, to enliven their fancy, to rouse their activity, to 
 strengthen their virtue, and to furnish the greatest number of 
 objects of present and future means of enjoyment to beings 
 constituted as man is, consistently with the order and stability 
 of the whole." Hazlitt. 
 
 " Edmund Burke possessed and had sedulously sharpened 
 that eye which sees all things, actions, and events in relation 
 to the laws that determine their existence and circumscribe 
 their possibility." Coleridge. 
 
 " He belonged to all ages, and his mind was as catholic as 
 it was clear and vast. . . . He had philosophic intellect; 
 
 he had genius; ... he had heart, 
 he had withal a most comprehensive view." George Gil- 
 fillan. 
 
 " He was endlessly interested in everything, in the state of 
 the crops, in the last play, in the details of all trades, the rhythm 
 of all poems, the plots of all novels, and indeed in the course 
 of every manufacture. ... He bought Beaconsfield, 
 where he entertained all sorts and conditions of men. . . . 
 Burke was far too Asiatic, tropical, and splendid to have any- 
 thing to do with small economics." Augustine Birrell.
 
 314 BURKE 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " My resolutions therefore mean to establish the equity and 
 justice of a taxation of America by grant and not by imposition ; 
 to mark the legal competency of the colony Assemblies for the 
 support of their government in peace and for public aids in time 
 of war ; to acknowledge that this legal competency has had a 
 dutiful and beneficial exercise ; and that experience has shown 
 the benefit of their grants and the futility of parliamentary tax- 
 ation as a method of supply." On Conciliation with America. 
 
 " If there be one fact in the world perfectly clear it is this : 
 ' That the disposition of the people of America is wholly averse 
 to any other than a free government ; ' and this is indication 
 enough to any honest statesman how he ought to adapt whatever 
 power he finds in his hands to their case. If any ask me what a 
 free government is, I answer that, for any practical purpose, it 
 is what the people think so ; and that they and not I are the nat- 
 ural, lawful, and competent judges of this matter." Letter to the 
 Sheriffs of Bristol. 
 
 " It was long before the spirit of true piety and true wisdom, 
 involved in the principles of the Reformation could be depurated 
 from the dregs and feculence of the contention with which it was 
 carried through. However, until this be done, the Reformation 
 is not complete ; and those who think themselves good Protes- 
 tants, from their animosity to others, are in that respect no 
 Protestants at all. It was at first thought necessary, perhaps, to 
 oppose to Popery another Popery, to get the better of it. What- 
 ever was the cause, laws were made in many countries, and in 
 this kingdom in particular, against Papists, which are as bloody 
 as any of those which had been enacted by the Popish princes 
 and states ; and where those laws were not bloody, in my opin- 
 ion they were worse ; as they were slow, cruel outrages on our 
 nature, and kept men alive only to insult in their persons every 
 one of the rights and feelings of humanity." Speech at Bristol, 
 Previous to the Election. 
 
 9. Fondness for Qualification. "In Burke some 
 collateral adjunct of the main proposition, some temperament 
 or restraint, some oblique glance at its remote affinities, will
 
 BURKE 315 
 
 invariably be found to attend the progress of his sentences. 
 Burke looks forward, advancing and changing his own station 
 concurrently with the advance of his sentences." De Quin- 
 cey. 
 
 " The admirable combination of the generalizing faculty, 
 with a respect for concrete facts, was a marked peculiarity of 
 Burke's mind. His theorizing is always checked and verified 
 by the text of specific instances, and yet in every special case 
 he always sees a general principle." Brougham. 
 
 " For the immediate effect of his eloquence, it might have 
 been better if his mind had not been so Argus-eyed to all the 
 various conflicting points of every case which he discussed. 
 . . . He was too careful and too deep for his hearers. He 
 
 ' . . . still went on refining, 
 
 And thought of convincing, while they thought of dining. ' . 
 
 . . Thus he was continually looking before and after 
 and on all sides of him, and stopping, whenever two or more 
 apparently opposite considerations came in his way, to balance 
 or reconcile them." G. L. Craik. 
 
 " His mind was at once sublime and minute ; ... he 
 is eager to embrace the whole of a subject ; to place the mat- 
 ter in every variety of light and to apply every possible illus- 
 tration. . . . He sometimes gives the first hint of a dif- 
 ficulty in order to show his skill in overcoming it. ... 
 His mind possessed a peculiar discursive quality." -J. Prior. 
 
 " The subtlety of his mind was undoubtedly what rendered 
 Burke a less popular writer than he otherwise would have 
 been. . . . [To Burke] the most important truths must 
 be the most refined and subtle, and for that very reason they 
 must comprehend a great number of particulars, and instead 
 of referring to any distinct or positive facts, must point out 
 the combined effect of an extensive chain of causes, operating 
 gradually, remotely, and collectively, and therefore imper- 
 ceptibly. " Hazlitt.
 
 316 BURKE 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " From hence they thought themselves obliged to dispose their 
 citizens into such classes, and to place them into such situations 
 in the state, as their peculiar habits might qualify them to fill 
 and to allot to them such appropriated privileges as might secure 
 to them what their specific occasions required, and which might 
 furnish to each description such force as might protect it in the 
 conflict caused by the diversity of interests, that must exist, and 
 must contend, in all complex society : for the legislator would 
 have been ashamed that the coarse husbandman should well 
 know how to assort and to use his sheep, horses, and oxen, and 
 should have enough of common sense not to abstract and equal- 
 ize them all into animals, without providing for each kind an 
 appropriate food, care, and employment ; whilst he, the econo- 
 mist, disposer, and shepherd of his own kindred, subliming him- 
 self into an airy metaphysician, was resolved to know nothing of 
 his flocks but as men in general." Reflections on the Revolution 
 in France. 
 
 " Accordingly, that they might not relax the nerves of their 
 monarchy, and that they might preserve a close conformity to 
 the practice of their ancestors, as it appeared in the declaratory 
 statutes of Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth, in the next clause 
 they vest, by recognition, in their majesties, all the legal prerog- 
 atives of the crown, declaring, ' that in them they are most fully, 
 rightfully, and entirely invested, incorporated, united, and an- 
 nexed.' In the clause which follows for preventing questions by 
 reason of any pretended titles to the crown, they declare (observ- 
 ing also in this the traditionary language, along with the tra- 
 ditionary policy of the nation, and repeating as from a rubric the 
 language of the preceding acts of Elizabeth and James), that on 
 the preserving ' a certainty in the succession thereof, the unity, 
 peace, and tranquillity of this nation doth, under God, wholly 
 depend.' " Reflections on the Revolution in France. 
 
 " But I cannot think that any educated man, any man who 
 looks with an enlightened eye on the interest of Ireland, can be- 
 lieve that it is not highly for the advantage of Ireland that this 
 Parliament, which, whether right or wrong, whether we will or 
 not, will make some laws to bind Ireland, should always have in
 
 BURKE 317 
 
 it some persons, who by connection, by property, or by early 
 possessions and affections, are attached to the welfare of that 
 country. I am so clear upon this point, not only from the clear 
 reason of the thing, but from the constant course of my observa- 
 tion by now having sat eight sessions in Parliament, that I de- 
 clare it to you as my sincere opinion, that (if you must do either 
 the one or the other) it would be wiser by far, and far better for 
 Ireland, that some new privileges should attend the estates of 
 Irishmen, members of the two Houses here, than that their char- 
 acter should be stained by penal impositions, and their properties 
 loaded by unequal and unheard-of modes of taxation." Letter 
 to Sir Charles ing ham. 
 
 10. Stern Pathos. " Burke excels in pathos. 
 It was inconsistent with his purpose as an orator to draw a 
 soothing picture of distress. In the Warren Hastings trial 
 he is said ' to have made an affecting appeal to the feelings of 
 their lordships,' but his object was to horrify and inflame 
 them, not to fill them with luxurious feelings of compassion 
 and melancholy. . . . The well-known allusion to Marie 
 Antoinette is very touching, but the emotion cannot long 
 sustain itself in the melting mood, but passes into fiery indig- 
 nation." Minto. 
 
 11 [His descriptions of the desolation wrought by the wick- 
 ed policy of Hastings] are full of genuine pathos, and, while 
 arousing righteous indignation against the oppressed, awaken 
 sympathy for the suffering." T. W. Hunt. 
 
 "In his 'Reflections on the French Revolution,' we find 
 philosophy the most subtle, invective the most sublime, spec- 
 ulation the most far-stretching, . . . piercing pathos 
 . and eloquence the most dazzling that ever com- 
 bined depth with splendor." George Gilfillan. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " What a heart must I have to contemplate without emotion 
 that elevation and that fall ! Little did I dream when she [Marie
 
 318 BURKE 
 
 Antoinette] added the duties of veneration to those of distant, 
 enthusiastic, respectful love, that she would ever be obliged to 
 carry the sharp antidote against dishonour concealed in that 
 bosom. Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such 
 disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation 
 of honour and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must 
 have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that 
 threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone. 
 That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded ; 
 and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. Never, never 
 more shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that 
 proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination 
 of the heart, which kept alive the spirit of exalted freedom." 
 Reflections on the Revolution in France. 
 
 " Then ensued a scene of woe the like of which no eye had 
 seen, no heart conceived, no tongue can adequately tell. All the 
 horrors of war before khown or heard of were mercy to that new 
 havoc. A storm of universal fire blasted every field, consumed 
 every house, destroyed every temple. The miserable inhabitants, 
 flying from their flaming villages, in part were slaughtered ; 
 others, without regard to sex, to age, to the respect of rank or 
 sacredness of function, fathers torn from children, husbands 
 from wives, enveloped in a whirlwind of cavalry and amidst the 
 goading spears of drivers and the trampling of pursuing horses 
 were swept into captivity in an unknown and hostile land. Those 
 who were able to evade -this tempest fled to the walled cities. 
 But, escaping from fire, sword, and exile, they fell into the jaws 
 of famine." The Nabob of Arcofs Debts. 
 
 " I was entirely out of the way of serving or of hurting any 
 statesman or any party when the ministers so generously and so 
 nobly carried into effect the spontaneous bounty of the crown. 
 Both descriptions have acted as became them. When I could 
 no longer serve them, the ministers have considered my sit- 
 uation. When I could no longer hurt them, the revolutionists 
 have trampled on my infirmity. My gratitude, I trust, is equal 
 to the manner in which the benefit was conferred. It came 
 to me, indeed, at a time of life and in a state of mind and body 
 in which no circumstance of fortune could afford me any real 
 pleasure. But this was no fault in the royal donor or in his
 
 BURKE 319 
 
 ministers, who were pleased, in acknowledging the merits of an 
 invalid servant of the public, to assuage the sorrows of a desolate 
 old man." Letter to a Noble Lord. 
 
 II. Vivid Imagination. " He had, in the highest 
 degree, that faculty by which a man is enabled to live in the 
 past and in the future, in the distance and in the unreal. In- 
 dia and its inhabitants were not to him, as to most Englishmen, 
 mere names and abstractions, but a real country and a real 
 people. The burning sun, the strange vegetation of the palm 
 and the cocoa tree, the rice-field, the tank, and the huge 
 trees, older than the Mogul Empire, under which the village 
 crowds assemble ; the thatched roof of the peasant hut ; the 
 rich tracery of the mosque, where the imaun prays with his 
 face toward Mecca, the drums, the banners, and the gaudy 
 idol, the devotee swinging in the air, the graceful maiden 
 with the pitcher on her head, descending the steps to the 
 river-side, the black faces, the long beards, the turbans and 
 the flowing robes, the spears and the silver maces, the ele- 
 phants with their canopies of state, the gorgeous palanquin of 
 the prince and the close litter of the noble lady all those 
 things were to him as the objects amidst which his own 
 life had been passed, as the objects which lay on the road be- 
 tween Beaconsfield and St. James's Street. . . . He had 
 just as lively an idea of the insurrection at Benares as of Lord 
 George Gordon's riots, and of the execution of Nuncomar as 
 of the execution of Dr. Dodd. Oppression in Bengal was to 
 him the same thing as oppression in the streets of London." 
 Mac ait lay. 
 
 11 Burke's imagination grew with his intellect, by which it 
 was nourished with his ever-extending realm of thought. 
 . . . Oppression in Massachusetts was the same as oppres- 
 sion in Middlesex." G. L. Craik. 
 
 " He had one of those fertile and precise imaginations 
 which believe that finished knowledge is an inner view, which
 
 320 BURKE 
 
 never quit a subject without having clothed it in its colors 
 and forms, and which, passing beyond statistics and the rub- 
 bish of dry documents, recompose and reconstruct before the 
 reader's eyes a distant country and a foreign nation, with its 
 monuments, dresses, landscapes, and all the shifting detail of 
 its aspects and manners. . . . His fire is so sustained, his 
 convictions so strong, his emotion so warm and abundant, 
 that we suffer him to goon, forget our repugnance, see in his 
 inequalities and his trespasses only 'the outpouring of a great 
 heart and a deep mind, too open and too full ; and we wonder 
 with a sort of strange veneration at this extraordinary over- 
 flow, impetuous as a torrent, broad as a sea, in which the inex- 
 haustible variety of colors and forms modulates beneath the 
 sun of a splendid imagination, which lends to this muddy 
 surge all the brilliancy of its rays." Taine. 
 
 " Burke's imagination led him to look out all over the 
 whole land : the legislator devising new laws, the judge ex- 
 pounding and enforcing old ones, the merchant despatching 
 his goods and extending his credit, . . . Burke saw 
 all this with the fancy of a poet and dwelt on it with the eye 
 of a lover. ... It was Burke's peculiarity and his glory 
 to apply the imagination of a poet of the first order to the facts 
 and business of life." Augustine Birrcll. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " Abbe Sieves has whole nests of pigeon-holes full of constitu- 
 tions ready made, ticketed, sorted, and numbered ; suited to 
 every season and every fancy ; some with the top of the pattern 
 at the bottom and some with the bottom at the top ; some plain, 
 some flowered : some distinguished for their simplicity, others for 
 their complexity ; some of blood-colour ; some of bone de Paris ; 
 some with directories, others without a direction ; some with 
 councils of elders and councils of youngsters ; some without any 
 council at all. Some where the electors choose the representa- 
 tives ; others, where the representatives choose the electors. 
 Some in long coats and some in short cloaks ; some with panta-
 
 BURKE 321 
 
 loons; some without breeches. Some with five-shilling qualifica- 
 tions ; some totally unqualified. So that no constitution-fancier 
 may go unsuited from his shop, provided he loves a pattern of 
 pillage, oppression, arbitrary imprisonment, confiscation, exile, 
 revolutionary judgment, and legalized premeditated murder, in 
 any shapes into which they can be put." Letter to a Noble 
 Lord. 
 
 "Several English were the stupefied and indignant spectators 
 of that triumph. It was (unless we have been strangely deceived) 
 a spectacle more resembling a procession of American savages 
 entering into Onondaga after some of their murders called vic- 
 tories and leading into hovels hung round with scalps their cap- 
 tives, overpowered with the scoffs and buffets of women as 
 ferocious as themselves, much more than it resembled the tri- 
 umphal pomp of a civilized martial nation." Reflections on the 
 Revolution in France. 
 
 " On that day, it was thought, he [The Archduke Charles of 
 Austria] would have assumed the port of Mars ; that he would 
 bid to be brought forth from their hideous kennel (where his 
 scrupulous tenderness had too long immured them) those impa- 
 tient dogs of war, whose fierce regards affright even the minister 
 of vengeance that feeds them ; that he would let them loose, in 
 famine, fever, plagues, and death, upon a guilty race, to whose 
 frame, and to all whose habit order, peace, religion, and virtue 
 are alien and abhorrent." On a Regicide Peace. 
 
 12. Rapidity. While few of his critics refer specifi- 
 cally to this quality of Burke's style, it is certainly one of his 
 most prominent characteristics, just as it is one of Macaulay's. 
 
 "In many of his vehement passages the sentences move 
 with an abruptness and rapidity resembling the habitual man- 
 nerism of Macaulay." Minto. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " That government is at once dreaded and contemned ; that 
 
 the laws are despoiled of all their respected and salutary terrors ; 
 
 that their inaction is a subject of ridicule and their exertion of 
 
 abhorrence ; that rank and office and title and all the solemn 
 
 21
 
 322 BURKE 
 
 plausibilities of the world have lost their reverence and effect ; 
 that our foreign politics are as much deranged as our domestic 
 economy ; that our dependencies are slackened in their affection 
 and loosened from . their obedience ; that we know neither how 
 to yield nor how to enforce ; that hardly anything above or below, 
 abroad or at home, is sound and entire ; but that disconnection 
 and confusion, in offices, in parties, in families, in Parliament, 
 in the nation, prevail beyond the disorders of any former time ; 
 these are facts universally admitted and lamented." On the 
 Present Discontents. 
 
 " What softening of character is to be had, what review of the 
 social situations and duties is to be taught, by these examples to 
 kings, to nobles, to men of property, to women, and to infants ? 
 The royal family perished because it was royal. The nobles 
 perished because they were noble. The men, women, and chil- 
 dren who had property, because they had property to be robbed 
 of. The priests were punished after they had been robbed of 
 their all, not for their vices, but for their virtues and for their 
 piety, which made them an honour to their sacred profession and 
 to that nature of which we ought to be proud, since they belong 
 to it." On a Regicide Peace. 
 
 " Well ! but will a lessening of prodigal expenses and the 
 economy which has been introduced by the virtuous and sapient 
 Assembly, make amends for the losses sustained in the receipt 
 of revenue ? In this at least they have fulfilled the duty of a 
 financier. Have those who say so, looked at the expenses of the 
 National Assembly itself? of the municipalities? of the city of 
 Paris ? of the increased pay of the two armies ? of the new 
 police ? of the new judicatures ? Have they even carefully com- 
 pared the present pension list with the former ? These politi- 
 cians have been cruel, not economical." Reflections on the 
 Revolution in France,
 
 LAMB, 1775-1834 
 
 Biographical Outline. Charles Lamb, born February 
 10, 1775, in Crown Office Row, the Temple, London; 
 father originally a domestic servant to a bencher of the Inner 
 Temple ; Lamb begins his school-life under one William Bird 
 in a day-school leading out of Fetter Lane, which his sister 
 Mary also attends; in 1782 he obtains a nomination to 
 Christ's Hospital (the " Blue Coat School "), where he re- 
 mains for seven years, and where he forms a lasting friendship 
 with his fellow-pupil, Coleridge ; Lamb is a fair student, ac- 
 quiring a considerable knowledge of Latin and obtaining the 
 rank of "deputy Grecian" next to the highest rank; a 
 serious impediment in his speech prevents his obtaining an 
 "exhibition" to the university, a favor extended only to 
 those qualified to enter the Church ; he leaves Christ's Hos- 
 pital in 1789, while Coleridge remains three years longer, and 
 goes thence to Cambridge ; Lamb at first secures a humble 
 clerkship in the South Sea House, where his older brother, 
 John, was employed, but, early in 1792, he is appointed to a 
 clerkship in the East India House, a place that he held for 
 the next thirty years ; his family leave the Temple on the 
 death of Samuel Salt (Lamb's father's employer) in 1792, 
 and their place of residence till 1796 is unknown ; in 1796 
 they lodge in Little Queen Street, suffering from poverty and 
 barely supported by the salary of Charles and the earnings of 
 Mary as a seamstress; the elder brother, "John Lamb, 
 Gentleman," lives comfortably elsewhere, and does not aid 
 in the family support ; Lamb's mother was an invalid, with 
 an inclination to insanity; on September 22, 1796, Mary 
 
 323
 
 324 LAMB 
 
 Lamb becomes suddenly insane, attempts to stab a little 
 'prentice maid, and fatally stabs her mother, who had inter- 
 fered ; at an inquest Mary is pronounced temporarily insane, 
 and she would have been consigned to a public lunatic asylum 
 if Charles had not given bonds to become her guardian and 
 to restrain her from doing further harm a most trying bur- 
 den, which he bore heroically till the day of his death ; al- 
 though in love with a girl living in a cottage near Blakesware 
 House, Hertfordshire, he gives up all thought of matrimony, 
 at his mother's death, and removes, with his now imbecile 
 father and a maiden aunt, to 45 Chapel Street, Pen ton vi lie, 
 temporarily placing Mary in a private sanitarium at Hackney ; 
 the old aunt dies in 1797 and the father in 1799 ; Lamb be- 
 gins a life-long correspondence with Coleridge in May, 1796, 
 and in one of his letters he records the fact that he himself 
 had been in an asylum for six weeks during the winter of 
 1795-96 because of some mental derangement ; there is no 
 evidence that he ever afterward suffered in that way ; his 
 mental malady has been attributed to his disappointment in 
 love affairs, but there is little evidence to support this theory ; 
 in the spring of 1796 Coleridge publishes, through Cottle of 
 Bristol, his first small volume of poems, and it includes four 
 sonnets by Lamb, this being his first appearance in print ; in 
 1797 the second edition of Coleridge's poems includes 
 "poems by Charles Lamb and Charles Lloyd;" in the 
 summer of 1797 Lamb visits Coleridge at Nether Stowey, 
 where he meets Wordsworth and others ; in 1798 appears a 
 small volume of verse by Lamb and Lloyd and Lamb's prose 
 romance, " A Tale of Rosamund Gray and Old Blind Mar- 
 garet; " our earliest portrait of Lamb is made, through Cottle's 
 agency, in 1798 ; late in that year he begins his correspond- 
 ence with Southey, in which he first manifests his peculiar 
 humor and quaintness ; on the death of Lamb's father, in the 
 spring of 1799, Mary returns to live with her brother at 
 Pentonville, but rumors of her insane violence soon compel
 
 LAMB 325 
 
 them to give up their lodgings ; during the next nine months 
 they lodge at Southampton Buildings, Holborn, but are again 
 driven out because of the rumors of Mary's insanity ; they 
 then take lodgings in King's Bench Walk, in the Temple, 
 where they remain for nine years, removing thence to lodg- 
 ings in Inner Temple Lane for another nine years ; late in 
 1799 Lamb begins his correspondence with Thomas Man- 
 ning, a Cambridge mathematician and orientalist, whom 
 Lamb had met while visiting Lloyd at Cambridge; about 
 this time Lamb also begins to write for the newspapers ; dur- 
 ing the next three years he, contributes paragraphs and epi- 
 grams to the Morning Post, the Morning Chronicle, and the 
 Albion; in 1802 he publishes "John Woodvil," a play in 
 blank verse, showing throughout the influence of the early 
 Elizabethan dramatists, whom Lamb dearly loved and studied, 
 and whose style he purposely imitated in his play ; the play 
 is ignorantly and unfavorably reviewed in the Edinburgh 
 Review for April, 1803 ; meantime Lamb and his sister are, 
 as she writes, " very poor ; " late in 1805 he writes his farce 
 Mr. H. ; " it is produced at Drury Lane Theatre, Decem- 
 ber 10, 1805, and is, as he says, " incontinently damned; " 
 during 1805 he meets Hazlitt and, through him, Godwin, who 
 was then publishing books for children ; for Godwin Charles 
 and Mary write "Tales from Shakespeare," which is pub- 
 lished in 1807 and reaches a second edition in the following 
 year ; the " Tales " first brought Lamb into notice as a writer; 
 in 1808 he publishes a child's version of the adventures of 
 Ulysses, based on Chapman's " Odyssey; " in 1808 he also 
 publishes, through the Longmans, selections from the early 
 English dramatists, under the title "Poets Contemporary 
 with Shakespeare;" he is at once recognized by literary 
 men as a critic of the highest order and a great prose writer ; 
 in 1811 he publishes in Leigh Hunt's Reflector his essay on 
 Hogarth and that on the tragedies of Shakespeare; in 1813 
 he publishes "Recollections of Christ's Hospital" in the
 
 326 LAMB 
 
 Gentleman's Magazine and, in 1814, his "Confessions of a 
 Drunkard " in his friend Montagu's book, " Some Enquiries 
 into the Effects of Fermented Liquors; " between 1808 and 
 1818 Lamb forms friendships with Procter, Talfourd, Crabbe, 
 Haydon, and others, and is frequently embarrassed by the ex- 
 penditures incident to the entertainment of numerous visitors ; 
 in the autumn of 1817 the Lambs remove to lodgings in 
 Great Russell Street, Covent Garden ; in 1818 Charles pub- 
 lishes a collection of his miscellaneous writings, both prose 
 and verse, including "John Woodvil " and "Rosamund 
 Gray," dedicating the two volumes to Coleridge; early in 
 1820 he is presented by Hazlitt to the editor of the newly 
 established London Magazine, and agrees to contribute occa- 
 sional essays; in August, 1820, he contributes " Recollections 
 of the South Sea House," to which he first appends his pseu- 
 donyme " Elia " (at first spelled Ellia), appropriating the 
 name of a long-forgotten old clerk in the South Sea House ; 
 between August, 1820, and December, 1822, he contributes 
 to the London Magazine twenty-five essays signed "Elia;" 
 these were reprinted in a single volume in 1823 ; after the 
 death of his brother in 1821, Lamb writes " Dream Chil- 
 dren ; " in 1822 the Lambs make a brief tour in France, vis- 
 iting Charles's friend, James Kenney, a dramatist, at Versailles; 
 while abroad Mary suffers from one of her then more fre- 
 quently recurring fits of insanity ; early in 1823 Southey 
 publishes a severe criticism of Lamb's " Essays of Elia," de- 
 claring that the essays, as a whole, lack sound religious feel- 
 ing ; Lamb, deeply hurt, replies in "A Letter of Elia to 
 Robert Southey, Esq.," published in the London Magazine 
 for October, 1823 ; Southey replies in a generous letter of 
 explanation, and their friendship is renewed ; while visiting 
 at Cambridge, in 1823, the Lambs meet Ernma Isola, daugh- 
 ter of one of the esquire bedells of the university ; Emma 
 afterward often visits them in London, and is eventually 
 adopted by them ; she becomes a great comfort to both
 
 LAMB 327 
 
 Charles and Mary, by whom she is educated, and remains 
 with them till her marriage to Moxon,the publisher, in 1833 ; 
 in August, 1823, the Lambs remove from Great Russell Street 
 to a cottage in Colebrooke Row, Islington, where the New 
 River runs at the foot of the garden ; about this time Lamb 
 becomes attached to Bernard Barton, the Quaker Poet, to 
 whom many of his best letters are addressed ; after a severe 
 illness in the winter of 1824-25, by the advice of his phy- 
 sicians he applies to the directors of the East India House 
 for retirement with a pension ; his request is granted in 
 March, 1825, his pension amounting to three-fourths of his 
 salary at the time, less a slight deduction, to insure an allow- 
 ance to Mary in case she should survive her brother ; the 
 amount available for Lamb was ^441 a year; the Lambs 
 make frequent visits to Hertfordshire, where they eventually 
 take the little house known as "The Chace," at Enfield; 
 Lamb seeks relief from the tedium of having nothing to do 
 in long walks about the country; in 1826 he contributes to 
 the Monthly Magazine his papers on ' ' Popular Fallacies ; ' ' 
 in 1828 he writes his verses "On An Infant Dying as Soon 
 as Born " (the child of his friend Thomas Hood), and makes 
 extracts from the Garrick plays in the British Museum for 
 the " Table Book" of his friend Hone; in 1830 he makes a 
 collection of his acrostics, album-verses, etc., and publishes 
 them through his friend Moxon under the title " Album 
 Verses; " in 1829 Mary's increasing fits of insanity compel 
 them to give up housekeeping, and they take lodgings in En- 
 field, near " The Chace," with a family named Westwood ; 
 Mary improves, but Charles grows restless to return to town 
 life ; in 1833 they remove to Edmonton, the parish adjoining 
 Enfield, where they take lodgings at Bay Cottage with the 
 Waldens, who had cared for Mary during her previous at- 
 tacks ; here the Lambs pass the last two years of their united 
 lives; in 1833 Moxon marries Emma Isola, and publishes 
 " The Last Essays of Elia," drawn mainly from the London
 
 328 LAMB 
 
 Magazine ; Lamb is greatly depressed by Coleridge's death in 
 July, 1834 ; he dies at Edmonton December 27, 1834, and 
 is buried there ; he leaves to his sister his accumulated sav- 
 ings of 2,000; she survives him till May 20, 1847; at 
 times he sought refuge from his great sorrow, and from the 
 embarrassment due to his stammering, in the use of wine ; 
 owing to his predisposition to insanity a very little alcohol 
 affected him, but those who knew him best declare that he 
 was never thus incapacitated for the performance of either his 
 official or his domestic duties. 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY ON LAMB'S STYLE. 
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 333-343- 
 
 Pater, W., "Appreciations." New York, 1890, Macmillan, 107-126. 
 Gilfillan, G., "Literary Portraits." Edinburgh, 1851, J. Hogg, i: 
 
 230-234. 
 Oliphant, Mrs., "Literary History of England." New York, 1889, 
 
 Macmillan, 2 : 1-18. 
 De Quincey, T., "Works." Edinburgh, 1890, A. & C. Black, 5 : 215- 
 
 259- 
 Reed, H., "British Poets." Philadelphia, 1857, Parry & McWilliams, 
 
 2: 127-132. 
 Bulwer-Lytton, E., "Miscellaneous Prose Works." New York, 1868, 
 
 Harper, 1 : 89-122. 
 Stoddard, R. H., "Personal Recollections." New York, 1875, Scrib- 
 
 ner, 1-47. 
 
 Procter, B. W., "Charles Lamb." London, 1869, E. Moxon. 
 Ainger, A., "English Men of Letters." New York, 1882, Harper, 
 
 100-121, etc. 
 
 Birrell, A., " Res Judicatce. " New York, 1892, Scribner, 232-252. 
 Pebody, C., " Authors at Work. " London, 1872, Allen & Co., 114-146. 
 Welsh, A. H., " Development of English Literature." Chicago, 1884, 
 
 Griggs, 2 : 298-299. 
 Dawson, G., "Biographical Lectures." London, 1887, Kegan Paul, 
 
 Trench &Co., 235-251. 
 Allibone, S. A., " Dictionary of Authors. " Philadelphia, 1870, Lippin- 
 
 cott, 2 : 1048. 
 Ainger, A., "Essays of Elia." New York, International Book Co., I : 
 
 1-16.
 
 LAMB 329 
 
 Ireland, Alex., "William Hazlitt." New York, 1889, Warne, 300-306 
 
 and 471-474. 
 Shaw, T. B., " A Manual of English Literature." New York, 1881, 
 
 Sheldon, 347~348- 
 Minto, \V., "English Prose Literature." Edinburgh, 1886, Blackstone, 
 
 537-539- 
 Robertson, J. M., "An Essay Toward a Critical Method. " London, 
 
 1889, Unwin, v. index. 
 Ward, T. H., "English Poets" (Dowden). New York, Macmillan, 4: 
 
 326-333- 
 
 Russell, W. C., "Book of Authors." London, n. d., Warne, 399-402. 
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 Appleton, 365-368. 
 
 Hall, S. C., " Book of Memoirs." London, 1871, Virtue, 51-61. 
 Hall, S. C., " Retrospect of a Long Life." New York, 1883, Appleton, 
 
 316-317- 
 Ainger, A., "Letters of Charles Lamb." London, 1888, Macmillan, 
 
 two volumes, v, index. 
 
 Moir, D. M., " Sketches of Poetical Literature." London, 1872, Black- 
 wood, 89-90. 
 
 Phillips, M. G., "A Manual of English Literature." New York, 1893, 
 Harper, 2 : 243 and v. index. 
 
 Morley and Tyler, " A Manual of English Literature." New York, 
 1882, Sheldon, 636. 
 
 Hazlitt, William, "Table Talk." London, 1882, G. Bell & Sons, v. 
 index. 
 
 Craik, G. L., " History of English Literature." New York, 1864, Scrib- 
 ner, 2 : 483-484. 
 
 Swinburne, A. C., "William Blake " London, 1868, C. Holten, 8. 
 
 Taine, H. A., " History of English Literature." New York, 1875, Holt, 
 3: 68-71. 
 
 Talfourd, T. N., "Final Memorials of Charles Lamb." New York, 
 1849, Appleton, v. index. 
 
 Talfourd, T. N.," Life and Letters of Charles Lamb. " London, 1886, Bell. 
 
 Talfourd, T. N., "Memoirs of Charles Lamb." Philadelphia, 1892, 
 Lippincott. 
 
 Hood, Thomas, "Works." New York, 1864, Putnam, 6: 396. 
 
 Fitzgerald, P., " Memoir of Charles Lamb." London, 1866, R. Bent- 
 ley, v. index. 
 
 Martin, B. E , " In the Footprints of Charles Lamb." New York, 1890, 
 Scribner, 1-146. 
 
 Lamb, C., " Letters." New York, 1888, Armstrong.
 
 33O LAMB 
 
 Stephen, L., "Dictionary of National Biography." New York, 1890, 
 
 Macmillan, 31 : 423-429. 
 
 Wotton, M. E., "Word Portraits." London, 1887, Bentley, 168-171. 
 Paul, C. K., "William Godwin." London, 1876, King & Co., I : 362 
 
 and 2 : 3. 
 Hutton, L. , " Literary Landmarks of London." New York, 1892, 
 
 Harper, 182-192. 
 Pym, H. N., "Memoirs of Old Friends." London, 1882, Smith, 
 
 Elder & Co., I : 23. 
 Froude, J. A., " Life of Carlyle." London, 1882, Longmans, Green & 
 
 Co., l: 222 and 2 : 209-210. , 
 
 Quarterly Review, 122: 17-20; 54: 58-77. 
 
 Blackwood's Magazine, 66: 133-150; 3: 598-610; 108: 285-301. 
 North American Review, 104 : 418-428 (A. S. Hill) ; 46 : 55-71 (C. C. 
 
 Felton). 
 
 Eclectic Magazine, 23: 491-496; 31: 399-405; 15: 67-77. 
 Methodist Quarterly Review, 18 : 566-577 (W. H. Barnes); 47: 382- 
 
 397 (Wise). 
 
 The Dial (Chicago), 9: 38-39 (E. G. Johnson); 4: no. 
 Harpers' Magazine, 20: 88-97 (G. W. Curtis); 54: 916-917 (G. W. 
 
 Curtis) ; 55 : 464-465 (G. W. Curtis) ; I : 272-274 (L. Hunt). 
 Edinburgh Review, 124: 133-140 (Procter); 66: 1-20 (Talfourd) ; 2: 
 
 90-96. 
 
 British Quarterly, 45 : 335-356 ; 8 : 381-395. 
 Christian Examiner, 69: 415-434 (T. B. Fox). 
 Fortnightly Review, 30 : 466-474 (W. H. Pater). 
 Nineteenth Century, 17: 66-91 (Swinburne). 
 Westminster Review, 126: 16-28 (Talfourd). 
 Xorth British Review, 10 : 179-214 (Talfourd). 
 
 Atlantic Monthly, n : 529-5450. E. Babson) ; 12: 401-417 (Bab- 
 son); 14: 478-491 (Babson); 14: 552-563 (Babson) ; 27: 745- 
 
 757 (Babson). 
 
 The Academy, 21 : 168 (R. C. Brown); 33: 265-266 (R. C. Brown). 
 Temple Bar, 85: 33-51; 86: 237-257 (Roose). 
 Gentleman's Magazine (New Series), 41 : 55-63 (Summers) ; 6 : 285- 
 
 298 (Pebody) ; 19: 113-122 (Shepherd). 
 Dublin University Magazine, 79: 149-168. 
 American Quarterly Review, 19 : 185-206 (Tuckerman) ; 22 : 473-483 
 
 (Talfourd). 
 
 Historical Magazine, 9 : 45-49. 
 The Athemnim, 1886 (2): 468 (Ainger) ; 1835 (l): 70-73 and 107-110 
 
 (Procter).
 
 LAMB 331 
 
 The New Englander, 44: 605 (\V. W. \Yells). 
 
 Frascrs Magazine, 105: 607-617 (J. Dennis). 
 
 Chambers' 's Journal, 43 : 763-766. 
 
 Macmillan's Magazine, 15: 473-483; 55 : 161-173 (Ainger) ; 54: 276- 
 
 279 (Birrell). 
 
 London Society, 42: 182-194. 
 Christian Remembrancer, 16 : 424-458. 
 Contemporary Kez'iew, 45 : 642-665 (R. H. Hutton). 
 Spectator, 65 : 205-207. 
 
 PARTICULAR CHARACTERISTICS. 
 
 I. Quaintness Fondness for the Antique. Lamb 
 has been justly called "an old writer, who lived a century or 
 two after his time." He was a constant reader and a great 
 admirer of the old English writers, such as Browne, Fuller, 
 Taylor, and the like, and he succeeded in reviving the spirit 
 of these authors in his own works. Taine says that " he re- 
 stored the sixteenth century." He introduced the reading 
 public of his day to the merits and beauties of the Elizabethan 
 dramatists, and it is said that his tragedy "John Woodvil " 
 bears all the marks of having been written two hundred years 
 before. His biographer, Talfourd, calls this quality " that 
 quaint sweetness, that peculiar union of kindness and whim." 
 When Lamb was but twenty-one he wrote to Coleridge: " I 
 wish you would try and do something to bring our elder bards 
 into more general fame. I writhe with indignation when, in 
 books of criticism, I find no mention of such men as Mas- 
 singer or Beaumont and Fletcher, men with whom succeeding 
 dramatic writers can bear no manner of comparison ; " and 
 again, "I hate all that do read, for they read nothing but 
 reviews and new books. I gather myself up into the old 
 things." This trait in Lamb's style and character seems in 
 part due to the influence of " the old and awful cloisters " of 
 the school where he spent his most impressionable years. 
 Barry Cornwall calls him " the last true lover of antiquity." 
 He has a distaste for new faces, new books, new buildings,
 
 332 LAMB 
 
 and new customs. He says of himself that he loves " out-of- 
 the-way humors and opinions heads with some diverting 
 twist in them." He tells us also that he and his sister were 
 tumbled early, by accident or design, into a spacious closet of 
 good Old English reading, without much objection or pro- 
 hibition, and browsed at will upon that fair and wholesome 
 pasturage. The result of all this appears in the "picturesque 
 quaintness " of his words, constructions, and themes. " He 
 diverges into green lanes and sunshiny glades, and not seldom 
 into the darker and more holy places of undiscovered solitude. ' ' 
 " Crude they are, I grant you," says Lamb of his own writ- 
 ings; " a sort of unlicked, incondite things, villainously planked 
 out in an affected array of antique modes and phrases. ' ' 
 
 "Mr. Lamb has raked among the dust and cobwebs of a 
 remote period ; has exhibited specimens of curious relics, and 
 poured over moth-eaten, decayed manuscripts for the benefit 
 of the more inquisitive and discerning part of the public. 
 . He prefers by-ways to highways. . . . The 
 film of the past hovers forever before him. He evades the 
 present, he mocks the future. ... His style is often 
 conveyed through old-fashioned conduit-pipes ; but, never- 
 theless, runs pure and clear." Hazlitt. 
 
 " He was the quaintest of humourists. . . . In his search 
 of matter for genius, he went into the oddest and most out-of- 
 the-way corners. . . .His style is so antique yet racy, 
 imitative yet original. . . - His letters are all so deli- 
 ciously fresh and rich, so peppered with old world condiments, 
 so brimful of the sparkling ' wine of life,' so tartly singular in 
 their spirit and style." George Gilfillan. 
 
 " From the olden time of authorship 
 Thy patent should be dated, 
 And thou with Marvell, Browne, 
 And Burton mated." 
 
 Bernard Barton.
 
 LAMB 333 
 
 " Even in what he says casually, there comes an aroma of 
 old English. . . . He continually overawes one with 
 touches of a strange utterance from worlds afar." Walter 
 
 Pater. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " Above all thy rarities, old Oxenford, what do mostarride and 
 solace me are thy repositories of mouldering learning. . . . 
 What a place to be in is an old library ! It seems as though all 
 the souls of all the writers that have bequeathed their labours to 
 these Bodleians were reposing here, as in some dormitory or 
 middle state. I do not want to handle, to profane the leaves, 
 their winding-sheets. I could as soon dislodge a shade. I seem 
 to inhale learning, walking amid their foliage ; and the odor of 
 their old moth-scented coverings is fragrant as the first bloom of 
 those sciential apples which grew amid the happy orchard." 
 Oxford in Vacation. 
 
 " Situated as thou art, in the very heart of living and stirring 
 commerce amid the fret and fever of speculation with the Bank 
 and the ' Change ' and the India-house about thee, in the hey- 
 day of present prosperity, with their important faces, as it were, 
 insulting thee, their poor neighbour out of business to the idle 
 and merely contemplative to such as me, old house, there is a 
 charm in thy quiet a cessation a coolness from business an in- 
 dolence almost cloistral which is delightful ! With what rever- 
 ence have I paced thy great bare rooms and courts at even-tide ! 
 They spoke of the past the shade of some dead accountant, with 
 visionary pen in ear, would flit by me, stiff as in life. Living ac- 
 counts and accountants puzzle me. I have no skill in figuring. 
 But thy great dead tomes, which scarce three degenerate clerks 
 of the present day could lift from their enshrining shelves with 
 their old fantastic flourishes and decorative rubric interlacings 
 their sums in triple columniations, set down with formal super- 
 fluity of ciphers with pious sentences at the beginning, without 
 which our religious ancestors never ventured to open a book of 
 business or bill of lading the costly vellum covers of some of 
 them almost persuading us that we are got into some better 
 library are very agreeable and edifying spectacles." The 
 South-Sea House. 
 
 "Antiquity! thou wondrous charm, what art thou that, being
 
 334 LAMB 
 
 nothing, art everything ! When thou wert thou wert not antiquity 
 then thou wert nothing, but hadst a remoter antiquity, as thou 
 calledst it, to look back to with blind veneration ; thou thyself 
 being to thyself flat, jejeune, modern ; what mystery lurks in this 
 retroversion ? or what half Januses are we, that cannot look for- 
 ward with the same idolatry with which we forever revert ! The 
 mighty future is as nothing, being everything ! the past is every- 
 thing, being nothing ! What were thy dark ages ? Surely the 
 sun rose as brightly then as now ! " Oxford in Vacation. 
 
 2. Tenderness Sympathy with Humanity. In 
 
 one of his letters, Lamb says : " I myself prefer the affections 
 to the sciences." The expression is most characteristic of the 
 man and of his style. With Goldsmith (possibly) excepted, he 
 is the most gentle and lovable of our great essayists. Patmore, 
 his intimate friend, says that it was impossible for Lamb to 
 hate a human being. De Quincey, another friend, says that 
 Lamb's temper was "angelically benign, but also, in a mor- 
 bid degree, melancholy." In his writings, as in his life, he 
 displayed the most delicate regard for the feelings of others, 
 no matter how humble or how debased. It is said that he 
 would give the right of way to a beggar on the street. The 
 husband of a poor woman of Lamb's acquaintance is ar- 
 rested for sheep-stealing, and Lamb urges his sister to call at 
 once on the unfortunate woman, lest she may think their 
 coldness due to the disgrace of her husband. " I have a ten- 
 derness for a sheep-stealer," is Lamb's quizzical explanation 
 to a correspondent. Talfourd justly says, that of all modern 
 writers, Lamb's works " are most immediately directed to 
 give us heart's-ease and make us happy." Says Hazlitt : "He 
 yearns after and covets that which soothes the frailty of human 
 nature." T. W. Hunt puts the case finely when he says that 
 Lamb " has a large element of the Melanchthon in his style, 
 and little of the Luther." "Thoroughly to understand and en- 
 joy Lamb," says Ainger, " one must have come to entertain a 
 feeling toward him almost like personal affection." Lamb's
 
 LAMB 335 
 
 tenderness often takes the form of the finest pathos "smil- 
 ing pathos," De Quincey calls it. " His heart," says Cole- 
 ridge, " is as whole as his head." 
 
 "And I thought how natural it was for Charles Lamb to 
 give a kiss to an old folio, as I once saw him do to Chap- 
 man's ' Homer.' " Leigh Hunt. 
 
 " He could not, or would not, see ugliness anywhere ex- 
 cept as a sort of beauty-spot upon the face of beauty ; but 
 beauty he could see everywhere, and nowhere shining so 
 brightly as when in connection with what others call ugli- 
 ness. . . . He loved those best whom everyone else 
 hated." R. H. Stoddard. 
 
 "He reasoned with his heart with his heart he loved ; in 
 his heart he lived, moved, and had his being. And what a 
 strange, wild, hot, large heart Lamb's was ! It was only less 
 than that which lies in Dumfries kirk-yard, belonging to the 
 man of whom it was said that if you touched his hand it would 
 have burnt yours. This heart taught Lamb to love the out- 
 casts of society, to associate with the excommunicates, to cry 
 halves to every pelt of calumny which assailed their devoted 
 heads. ' ' George Gilfillan. 
 
 "His simple mother-pity to those who suffer by accident 
 or by unkindness of nature has something primitive in its 
 largeness. . . . Little arts of happiness he is ready to 
 teach to others." Walter Pater. 
 
 " His heart opened wide to real distress. . . . The 
 large-minded human being . . . Charles Lamb ! who 
 sympathized with all classes and conditions of men as readily 
 with the sufferings of the tattered beggar and the poor chim- 
 ney-sweeper's boy as with the starry contemplations of Ham- 
 let ' The Dane,' or the eagle- flighted madness of Lear. 
 . . The fact that distinguished Charles Lamb from other 
 men was his entire devotion to one grand and tender purpose. 
 He pitied all objects which had been neglected or 
 despised."^. W. Procter,
 
 336 LAMB 
 
 " There was nothing too great for him to grasp, nothing 
 too little for him to love." George Dawson. 
 
 " With what a noble, independent, manly mind did he 
 love his friends ! His masculine nature and absolute freedom 
 from that curse of literature, coterieship, stand revealed on 
 every page of the history of Lamb's friendships." Augustine 
 Birrell. 
 
 " No face can frown, no brow be overcast, when Elia the 
 gentle, the tender, the humorous and ever-smiling, notwith- 
 standing the deep dew of anguish which was never quite dried 
 in his eyes makes his appearance upon the scene. 
 Elia, the whimsical, the tender, whose every tear suggests a 
 smile, and every smile a tear." Mrs. Oliphant. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " Shut not thy purse-strings always against painted distress. 
 Act a charity sometimes. When a poor creature (outwardly and 
 visibly such) comes before thee, do not stay to inquire whether 
 the seven small children, in whose name he implores thy assist- 
 ance, have a veritable existence. Rake not into the bowels of 
 unwelcome truth to save a half-penny. It is good to believe 
 him. If he be not all that he pretendeth, give, and under 
 a personate father of a family, think (if thou pleasest) that 
 thou hast relieved an indigent bachelor. When they come 
 with their counterfeit looks and mumping tones, think them 
 players. You pay your money to see a comedian feign these 
 things, which, concerning these poor people, thou canst not 
 certainly tell whether they are feigned or not." The Decay of 
 Beggars. 
 
 " I like to meet a sweep understand me not a grown sweep- 
 er but one of those tender novices such as come forth with the 
 dawn, or somewhat earlier, with their little professional notes 
 sounding like the peep peep of a young sparrow. . . . I have 
 a kindly yearning toward these dim specks poor blots inno- 
 cent blacknesses. . . . Reader, if thou meetest one of these 
 small gentry in thy early rambles, it is good to give him a penny.
 
 LAMB 337 
 
 It is better to give him two-pence. If it be starving weather, and 
 to the proper troubles of his hard occupation a pair of kibed 
 heels be added, the demand on thy humanity will surely rise to a 
 tester." The Praise of Chimney Sweepers. 
 
 3. Graceful Ease Companionability. In a purely 
 literary sense, the most prominent feature of Lamb's style is 
 what Shaw calls " an unimaginable happiness of expression." 
 Says Ainger, " There is an epithet commonly applied to 
 Lamb so hackneyed that one shrinks from using it once more 
 the epithet delightful. No other word certainly seems 
 more appropriate, and it is perhaps because (in defiance of 
 etymology) the sound of it suggests that double virtue of il- 
 luminating and making happy. It is in vain to attempt to 
 convey an idea of the impression left by Lamb's style. It 
 evades analysis. One might as well seek to account for the 
 perfume of lavender or the flavour of quince. . . . If he 
 had by nature the delicate grace of Marvell and the quaint 
 fancy of Quarles, he had also the chivalry of Sidney." De 
 Quincey calls him " the exquisite Elia," abounding in " shy 
 graces lurking half unseen, like violets in the shade ; a bril- 
 liant star forever fixed in the firmament of English literature," 
 and pronounces the essays of Elia " as exquisite a gem amongst 
 the jewelry of literature as any nation can show. " There is 
 a racy, colloquial, home-like quality about Lamb's prose that 
 gives it a lasting charm. He is "sympathetic rather than 
 scholastic." He purposely wrote in a conversational style. 
 " He labored," says Taine, " to destroy the grand aristocrat - 
 ical and oratorical style and to replace studied phrases and a 
 lofty vocabulary by natural tones and plebeian words." As 
 Hood expresses it, " Lamb, whilst he willingly lent a crutch 
 to halting Humility, took delight in tripping up the stilts of 
 Pretension." In a word, as a critic puts it in the Quarterly 
 Review, " Lamb is one of those favorites of the Graces on 
 whom the gift of charm is bestowed." 
 
 22
 
 338 LAMB 
 
 " Never was there more delightful playing with life and all 
 its mysteries and depths, more soft and laughing banter, more 
 tender thoughtfulness. . . . When he rises into the fun 
 of the roast pig, or expatiates with humorous tenderness upon 
 the 'innocent blacknesses,' the poor little sweeps for whose 
 hard lot no alleviation of machinery in the shape of long- 
 jointed brushes had yet been thought of, or falls into the 
 vein of delicate sentiment in which he discourses with his 
 'dream children,' there is no more delightful companion. 
 No true reader, wherever found, can fail to ac- 
 knowledge the power of Elia. He is, in the best sense of the 
 word, one who writes for writing's sake, not because he has 
 much to tell us, but because it is a pleasure to him to make 
 friends with us, to jest and sigh and trifle, to play some whim- 
 sical trick upon us, to transport us in a moment, all unwit- 
 tingly, from laughter into weeping, to play upon all the 
 strings of our hearts. Writing of this description is apt to be 
 considered by the ignorant the easiest of all manner of literary 
 composi tion . ' ' Mrs. Oliphant. 
 
 " The most beloved of English writers may be Goldsmith 
 or may be Scott : the best beloved will always be Charles 
 Lamb. His charm is incomparable with any other man's. 
 It is impossible merely to like him : you must, as Wordsworth 
 bade the redbreast whom he saw chasing the butterfly, ' love 
 him, or leave him alone.' . . ' . There is in his work a 
 sweetness like no other fragrance, a magic like no second 
 spell in all the world of letters. " Sivinburne. 
 
 " His Essays are carefully elaborated ; yet never were 
 works written in a higher defiance to the conventional pomp 
 of style ; a sly hit, a happy pun, a humorous combination lets 
 the light into the intricacies of the subject, and supplies the 
 place of ponderous sentences. Seeking his materials for the 
 most part in the common paths of life often in the humblest 
 he gives an importance to everything and sheds a grace 
 over all." Talfourd.
 
 LAMB 339 
 
 "With what a gusto Mr. Lamb describes the Inns and 
 Courts of law, the Temple and Gray's Inn, as if he had been 
 a student there for the last two hundred years, and had been 
 as well acquainted with the person of Sir Francis Bacon as he 
 is with his portrait or writings. . . . There was no fuss 
 or cant about him ; nor were his sweets or sours ever diluted 
 with one particle of affectation. " Hazlitt. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " No rascally comparative insults a beggar, or thinks of weigh- 
 ing purses with him. He is not in the scale of comparison. He 
 is not under the measure of property. He confessedly hath none 
 any more than a dog or a sheep. No one twitteth him with os- 
 tentation above his means. No one accuses him of pride, or up- 
 braideth him with mock-humility. None jostle with him for the 
 wall, or pick quarrels for precedency. No wealthy neighbor 
 seeketh to eject him from his tenement. No man sues him. No 
 man goes to law with him. If I were not the independent gen- 
 tleman that I am, rather than I would be a retainer to the great, 
 a led captain, or a poor relation, I would choose, out of the del- 
 icacy and true greatness of my mind, to be a beggar." The De- 
 cay of Beggars. 
 
 " ' A clear fire, a clean hearth, and the rigor of the game.' 
 This was the celebrated wish of old Sarah Battle (now with God), 
 who, next to her devotions, loved a good game of whist. She 
 was none of your lukewarm gamesters, your half-and-half play- 
 ers, who have no objection to take a hand, if you want one to 
 make up a rubber ; who affirm that they have no pleasure in 
 winning ; that they like to win one game and lose another ; that 
 they can while away an hour very agreeably at a card-table, but 
 are indifferent whether they play or no ; and will desire an ad- 
 versary who has skipped a wrong card to take it up and play an- 
 other. These insufferable triflers are the curse of a table. One 
 of these flies will spoil a whole pot. Of such it may be said that 
 they do not play at cards, but only play at playing at them." 
 Mrs. Battle's Opinions on Whist. 
 
 " I love a fool as naturally as if I was of kith and kin to 
 him. When a child, with childlike apprehensions that dived
 
 34O LAMB 
 
 down below the surface of the matter, I read those Parables 
 not guessing at the involved wisdom. I had more yearnings tow- 
 ard that simple architect that built his home upon the sand than 
 I entertained for his more cautious neighbors. I grudged at the 
 hard censure pronounced upon the quiet soul that kept his tal- 
 ent ; and, prizing their simplicity beyond the more provident, 
 and, to my apprehensions, somewhat unfeminine wariness of their 
 competitors I felt a kindliness that almost amounted to a tcn- 
 dre for those five thoughtless virgins." All FooVs Day. 
 
 4. Amiable Humor. The qualities of Lamb's style al- 
 ready discussed are continually found in combination with the 
 most genial humor. This sometimes takes the form of familiar 
 juggling with high themes, sometimes that of playful apos- 
 trophe, such as we see in Carlyle and Burns, sometimes that 
 of the gravest and most absurd exaggeration. His humor is 
 especially noteworthy for its freedom from sarcasm. His 
 "malice "is always playful. He laughs with men, not at 
 them. De Quincey calls him "a Diogenes with the heart of a 
 St. John." Charles Lamb lived all his life in the shadow of 
 a terrible misfortune; yet he has brightened the world with 
 the kindly pleasantry manifest on almost every page of his 
 essays. "Among all the leading English essayists," says T. W. 
 Hunt, " there is none in whom humor is so much an essential 
 part of the man and his style. His face is always promising 
 good things." " With what well-disguised humor," exclaims 
 Hazlitt, " he introduces us to his relations, and how freely he 
 serves up his friends ! " The Quarterly, again, sums up this 
 quality by saying, " The humour of Charles Lamb is at once 
 pure and genial ; it has no malice in its smile. His keenest 
 sarcasm is but his archest pleasantry." Gerald Massey and 
 others have called Lamb the first English humorist. Com- 
 paring him with the "crowd of jesters," a writer in Black- 
 wood's says: "We quit their uproarious laughter for his 
 more quiet and pensive humor with somewhat of the same 
 feeling that we leave the noisy though amusing highway for
 
 LAMB 341 
 
 the cool landscape and the soft greensward. We reflect as we 
 smile ; the malice of our nature is rather laid to rest than 
 called forth ; a kindly and forgiving temper is excited. We 
 rise from his works, if not with any general truth more 
 vividly impressed, yet prepared by gentle and almost imper- 
 ceptible touches to be more social in our companionships 
 and warmer in our friendships." 
 
 "A combination of humor and pathos a sweet stream of 
 thought, bubbling and sparkling with witty fancies. 
 It was colored by a hundred gentle feelings. It bore the 
 rose as well as the thorn. His heart warmed the jests and 
 conceits with which his brain was busy, and turned them into 
 flowers." B. W. Procter. 
 
 " Who, I wonder, ever managed to squeeze into a cor- 
 respondence of forty years truer humour, madder nonsense, 
 sounder sense, or more tender sympathy ! These letters do 
 not indeed prate about first principles, but they contain many 
 things conducive to a good life here below." Augustine 
 Birrell. 
 
 " His sensibility to strong contrast was the foundation of 
 his humour, which was that of a wit at once melancholy and 
 willing to be pleased." Leigh Hunt. 
 
 "He succeeds 'glimpse-wise' in catching and recording 
 more frequently than others the gayest, happiest attitude of 
 things." Walter Pater. 
 
 " One of the gentlest, tenderest, rarest, and most delicate of 
 English humourists. . . . Lamb's humour was marvellous- 
 ly combined with pathos ; his fun was the sparkle and ripple 
 and foam of a richly running river of humanity, pity, and ten- 
 derness. ' ' George Dawson. 
 
 "There is, indeed, scarcely a note a notelet (as he used 
 to call his very little letters) Lamb ever wrote which has not 
 something of that quaint sweetness, some hint of that peculiar 
 union of kindness and whim which distinguished him from all 
 other poets and humourists." Talfourd.
 
 342 LAMB 
 
 "What a keen, laughing, hair-brained vein of homefelt 
 truth! " Hazlitt. 
 
 " What arch, limpid humor, humor in its very essence, un- 
 forced, honey-sweet, like the drops exuded from the grapes by 
 their own pressure ! " G. W. Curtis. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " What a careless, even deportment hath your borrower ! What 
 rosy gills ! What a beautiful reliance on Providence doth he mani- 
 fest taking no more thought than lilies ! What contempt for 
 money accounting it (yours and mine especially) no better than 
 dross. . . . He is the true taxer who calleth all the world up 
 to be taxed. . . . His exactions, too, have such a cheerful, 
 voluntary air ! So far removed from your sour parochial or state- 
 gatherers those ink-horn varlets, who carry their want of wel- 
 come in their faces ! He cometh to you with a smile, and troubleth 
 you with no receipt ; confining himself to no set season. Every 
 day is his Candlemas or his Feast of Holy Michael." The Two 
 Races of Men. 
 
 " The compliments of the season to my worthy masters, and a 
 merry first of April to us all ! Many happy returns of this day to 
 you and you and you, Sir nay, never frown, man, nor put a 
 long face upon the matter. Do we not know one another ? what 
 need of ceremony among friends ? we have all a touch of that 
 same you understand me a speck of the motley. Beshrew the 
 man who, on such a day as this, \hzgeneral festival, should affect 
 to stand aloof. I am none of those sneakers. I am free of the 
 corporation, and care not who knows it. He that meets me in 
 the forest to-day shall meet with no wise-acre, I can tell him. 
 Stultus sum. Translate me that, and take the meaning of it to 
 yourself for your pains. What, man, we have four quarters of the 
 globe on our side at the least computation." All FooVs Day. 
 
 " All my intention was but to make a little sport with such 
 public and fair game as Mr. Pitt, Mr. Wilberforce, Mrs. Fitzher- 
 bert, the Devil, &c. gentry dipped in Styx all over, whom no 
 paper javelin-lings can touch. To have made free with these 
 cattle where was the harm ? 'twould have been but giving a polish 
 to lampblack, not nigrifying a negro primarily." Letter to Man- 
 ning.
 
 LAMB 343 
 
 5. Wit Epigram Paronomasia. Lamb is a wit as 
 well as a humorist. He frequently gives us what De Quincey 
 calls "minute scintillations of genius." He has "a talent 
 for saying keen pointed things, sudden flashes or revelations 
 of hidden truths, in a short, condensed form of words." His 
 wit appears most brilliantly in his letters and in his recorded 
 conversations. "Sometimes his wit appears in the form of 
 epigram, sometimes in a brilliant pun, a fantastic coinage, a 
 dash of irony." 
 
 " His jests scald like tears, and he probes a question with 
 a play upon words. . . . He is as little of a proser 
 as possible ; but he blurts out the finest wit and sense in 
 the world. ... No one ever stammered out such fine, 
 piquant, deep, eloquent things in a half-dozen half-sentences 
 as Lamb did." Hazlitt. 
 
 " Lamb every now and then irradiates, and the beam, 
 though single and fine as a hair, is yet rich with colors, and I 
 both see and feel it." Coleridge. 
 
 " Here is a rich vein of quaint surprises, good to recall as to 
 encounter, their after-gust as pleasant (if not so pungent) as 
 their first shock." R. C. Brown. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 Speaking of Cowper in one of his letters, Lamb writes : " But 
 the poor gentleman has just recovered from his lunacies, and that 
 begets pity, and pity love, and love admiration, and then it goes 
 hard with the people but they lie." We append other detached 
 specimens : " When Southey becomes as modest as his prede- 
 cessor, Milton, and publishes his epics in duodecimo, I will read 
 "em." " George Dyer hath prepared two volumes full of poetry 
 and criticism. They impend over the town, and are threatened 
 to fall in the winter." " Your woodcock, snipe, teal, widgeon, 
 and other lesser daughters of the ark." " Clarkson tells me 
 you are in a smoky house. Have you cured it ? It is hard to 
 cure anything of smoking." " Dear Wordsworth : Thanks for 
 the books you have given me and for all the books you mean to
 
 344 LAMB 
 
 give me." " Opinion is a species of property that I am always 
 desirous of sharing with my friends." " Godwin is five hundred 
 pounds ideal money qut of pocket by the failure of his tragedy." 
 " Braham, the singer, is a mixture of the Jew, the gentleman, and 
 the angel." " Martin [to his friend, Martin BurneyJ, if dirt were 
 trumps, what a hand you would hold!" " Very well, my dear 
 boy [to Procter], Ben Jonson has said worse things than that 
 and better." "Charles," said Coleridge to Lamb, "have you 
 ever heard me preach ? " "I n-n-ever heard you do anything 
 else," replied Lamb. " T. W. is severity years old ; he has some- 
 thing under a competence ; he has one joke and forty pounds a 
 year, upon which he retires in a green old age." "If I had a 
 little son, I would name him 'Nothing to do.' " " But I am your 
 factotum, and that, save in this instance, which is a single case 
 (and I can't get at you), shall be next to a fac-nihil at most, a 
 fac-simile." " Hang the Age ! I will write for Antiquity ! " 
 
 "Above all, those insufferable concertos and pieces of music, 
 as they are called, do plague and embitter my apprehension. 
 Words are something ; but to be exposed to an endless battery 
 of mere sounds ; to be long a-dying, to be stretched upon a rack 
 of roses ; to keep up languor by unintermitted effort ; to pile 
 honey upon sugar and sugar upon honey to an interminable 
 tedious sweetness ; to fill up sound with feeling and strain ideas 
 to keep pace with it ; to gaze on empty frames, and be forced to 
 make the pictures for yourself; to read a book, all stops, and be 
 obliged to supply the verbal matter ; to invent extempore trage- 
 dies to answer to the vague gesture of an inexplicable rambling 
 mime these are faint shadows of what I have undergone from a 
 series of the ablest-executed pieces of this empty instrumental 
 music." A Chapter on Ears. 
 
 " Dear old friend and absentee : This is Christmas day, 1815. 
 What the time be with you, I do not know. The I2th of June 
 next year, perhaps. And if it should be the consecrated season 
 with you, I don't see how you can keep it; you have no turkeys ; 
 you would not desecrate the festival by offering up a withered 
 Chinese bantam instead of the savory Norfolcian holocaust that 
 smokes all around my nostrils at this moment from a thousand 
 firesides. Then, what puddings have you ? Where will you get 
 holly to stick into your churches, or churches to stick (that must 
 be the substitute) ? What memorials you can have of the holy
 
 LAMB 345 
 
 time, I see not. A missionary or two may keep up the idea of 
 the wilderness. But what standing evidence have you of the 
 nativity ? It is our rosy-cheeked, home-stalled divines whose 
 faces shine to the tune of ' Unto us a child is born.' '' Letter to 
 Manning in China. 
 
 " Hang work ! 1 wish that all the year were a holiday. I am 
 sure that indolence, indefeasible indolence, is the true state of 
 man, and business the invention of old Teazer, whose interfer- 
 ence doomed Adam to an apron and set him hoeing." Letter to 
 Wordsworth. 
 
 " What do you think of smoking ? I want your sober, average 
 opinion ; I generally am eating my dinner about the time I 
 should determine it. Morning is a girl, and could not smoke ; 
 she is no evidence one way or the other ; and night is so bought 
 over that he cannot be a very upright judge. Maybe the truth 
 is, that one pipe is wholesome, two pipes toothsome, three pipes 
 noisome, four pipes fulsome, five pipes quarrelsome, and that is 
 the sum of it. But this is abstaining rather upon rhyme than 
 upon reason, for after all our instincts may be best.' 1 Letter to 
 Coleridge. 
 
 "Two special things are worth seeing at Cambridge : the por- 
 trait of Cromwell and a better one of Dr. Harvey, who found out 
 that blood was red." Letter to Mrs. Wordsworth. 
 
 6. Self -Reflection Unselfish Egoism. Lamb 
 stamped upon all he wrote a vivid impression of his own rare 
 individuality. " Instead of undertaking to compose a liter- 
 ary work out of such materials as he possessed," says A. S. 
 Hill, " Lamb put himself, with whatever belonged to him, 
 on paper. .A reader is less interested in the essays than in 
 the essayist." Almost every paragraph is liberally sprinkled 
 with the first personal pronoun, and yet the reader never 
 feels that Lamb is egotistical in the ordinary offensive sense 
 of that term ; and the details of his life, as found in his 
 correspondence, prove him to have been as shy and modest 
 as he was generous. Says the Quarterly Review : ' ' Lamb 
 calls up, completes, and leaves to the admiration of all time 
 a character which, as a personification of humour, is a higher
 
 346 LAMB 
 
 being than even Scott has imagined, viz., that of Charles 
 Lamb himself." T. W. Hunt compares Lamb to Burns in 
 that he " gave vent to his inner self" in his writings. At 
 the age of twenty-five, Lamb wrote to Coleridge : ' ' For God's 
 sake, don't make me ridiculous any more by terming me gen- 
 tle-hearted in print, or do it in better verses. It did well 
 enough five years ago, when I was moral coxcomb enough to 
 feed upon such epithets. My sentiment is long since van- 
 ished. My virtues have done sucking. Such praise is fit only 
 for a greensick sonneteer." 
 
 "It is the man Charles Lamb that constitutes the enduring 
 charm of his written works. . . . He is an egotist but 
 an egotist without a touch of vanity or self-assertion an 
 egotist without a grain of envy or ill-nature. It is this 
 humanity that gives to his intellect its flexibility and its deep 
 vision, that is the feeder at once of his pathos and of his 
 humour." Alfred Ainger. 
 
 " His essays are delightfully personal, and when he speaks 
 of himself, you cannot hear too much." Bryan Wallet- 
 Procter. 
 
 " Especially when he spoke of himself, and his own re- 
 strained and subdued life, was Lamb exquisite ; the ' sort of 
 double singleness ' in which he and his sister lived, their har- 
 mony, their little differences, their diversified tastes, their 
 mutual recollections nothing could be more delicately set 
 do w n . " Mrs. Oliphant. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " I love Quaker ways and Quaker worship. I venerate the 
 Quaker principles. It does me good for the rest of the day when 
 I meet any of their people in my path. When I am ruffled or dis- 
 turbed by any occurrence, the sight or quiet voice of a Quaker 
 acts upon me as a ventilator, lightening the air and taking off a 
 load from the bosom. But I cannot like the Quakers (as Des- 
 demona would say) to live with them. I am all over sophisticated
 
 LAMB 347 
 
 with humors, fancies, craving hourly sympathy. I must have 
 books, pictures, theatres, chit-chat, scandal, jokes, ambiguities, 
 and a thousand whim-whams, which their simpler taste can do 
 without. I should starve at their primitive banquet." Imperfect 
 Sympathies. 
 
 ' ' My reading has been lamentably desultory and unmethodical. 
 Old, out-of-the-way English plays and treatises have supplied me 
 with most of my notions and ways of feeling. In everything that 
 relates to science I am a whole encyclopaedia behind the rest of 
 the world. I should have scarcely cut a figure among the frank- 
 lins or country gentlemen of King John's days. I know less 
 geography than a schoolboy of six weeks' standing. To me a map 
 of old Ortelius is as authentic as Arrowsmith. I do not knosv 
 whereabout Africa merges into Asia; whether Ethiopia lies in one 
 or the other of those great divisions, nor can I form the remotest 
 conjecture of the position of New South Wales or Van Dieman's 
 Land. Yet do I hold a correspondence with a very dear friend 
 in the first named of these two terra incognita." The Old and 
 the New Schoolmaster. 
 
 " I even think that sentimentally I am disposed to harmony. 
 But organically I am incapable of a tune. I have been prac- 
 tising 'God Save the Queen' all my life, whistling and hum- 
 ming of it over to myself in solitary corners, and am not yet 
 arrived, they tell me, within many quavers of it. Yet hath the 
 loyalty of Elia never been impeached. I am not without sus- 
 picion that I have an undeveloped faculty of music within me." 
 A Chapter on Ears. 
 
 7. Delicate Fancy. Lamb was endowed in a rare de- 
 gree with that power that enables one to create a world for 
 himself and people it at will. In the words of C. C. Felton : 
 " He possessed the power of returning at will to the heaven 
 that lies about us in our infancy ; or, rather, he never, except 
 during the period of adolescence, travelled far away from 
 it. ... He does not philosophize about childhood with 
 Wordsworth, nor exhibit infant phenomenons with Dickens, 
 but is a child, looks at the world through a child's eyes, has 
 his night-fears, his day-dreams, his attachments, his repul-
 
 348 LAMB 
 
 sions, his awe of the unknown, and his shrinking from the un- 
 familiar. " " The streets of London," says Hazlitt, " are his 
 fairy land, teeming with wonder, with life and interest to his 
 retrospective glance as it did to the eager eye of childhood ; 
 he has contrived to weave his tritest traditions into a bright 
 and endless romance." 
 
 "The ' Essays of Elia' traverse a peculiar field of ob- 
 servation, sequestered from general interest, and they are 
 composed in a spirit too delicate and unobtrusive to catch 
 the ear of the noisy crowd clamoring for strong sensations. ' ' 
 De Quincey. 
 
 "It is vain to attempt to convey an idea of the impression 
 left by Lamb's style. It evades analysis. One might as well 
 seek to account for the perfume of lavender or the flavor of 
 quince. It is, in truth, an essence, prepared from flowers and 
 herbs gathered in fields where the ordinary reader does not 
 often range. . . . His style becomes aromatic, like the 
 perfume of faded rose-leaves in a china jar." Alfred Ain- 
 
 g*r-" 
 
 " His work is small in quantity, but how rare and delicate 
 is it in quality ! " H. J. Nicoll. 
 
 " He knows the secret of fine, significant touches." Wal- 
 ter Pater. 
 
 "The most exquisite of essayists and the rarest of souls, 
 profoundly original as a stylist and as a critic." -J. M. Rob- 
 ertson. 
 
 " His book has not only the delicate aroma which suits the 
 most cultivated, but a something of native fragrance which 
 appeals to the multitude as well. . . . There are many 
 impatient readers who are not capable of this kind of litera- 
 ture at all; who, indeed, are not to be called readers at all, 
 but, on the one side, workmen in mines, out of which they 
 mean to draw substantial advantage ; or, on the other, like 
 the easy audience of the Eastern story-teller romance-de- 
 vourers, seekers after excitement, if not in act and deed, in
 
 LAMB 349 
 
 narrative and history, in something that thrills and tingles 
 the blood with the keen vicissitudes of a rapid tale." Mrs. 
 Oliphant. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 "Sun-threads, filmy beams, ran through the celestial napery 
 of what seemed its princely cradle. All the winged orders hov- 
 ered round, watching when the new-born should open its yet 
 closed eyes ; . . . then were celestial harpings heard, not 
 in full sympathy as those by which the spheres are tutored, but 
 as loudest instruments on earth speak oftentimes muffled so 
 as to accommodate their sound better to the weak ears of the im- 
 perfect-born. And with the noise of those subdued soundings 
 the Angelet sprang forth, fluttering its rudiments of pinions, but 
 forthwith flagged and was recovered into the arms of those full- 
 winged angels. And a wonder it was to see how, as the years 
 went round in heaven a year in dreams is as a day continually 
 its white shoulders put forth buds of wings, but wanting the per- 
 fect angelic nutriment, anon was shorn of its aspiring, and fell 
 fluttering still caught by angel hands forever to put forth 
 shoots and to fall fluttering, because its birth was not of the un- 
 mixed vigor of heaven." The Child Angel, 
 
 "Specially can I forget thee, thou happy medium, thou shade 
 of refuge between us and them [the crew], conciliating interpreter 
 of their skill to our simplicity, comfortable ambassador between 
 sea and land ! whose sailor-trousers did not more convincingly 
 assure thee to be an adopted denizen of the former than thy 
 white cap and whiter apron over them, with thy neat-fingered 
 practice in thy culinary vocation, bespoke thee to have been of 
 inland nurture heretofore a master cook of Eastcheap ? How 
 busily didst thou ply thy multifarious occupation, cook, mariner, 
 attendant, chamberlain : here, there, like another Ariel, flam- 
 ing at once about all parts of the deck, yet with kindlier minis- 
 trations ; not to assist the tempest, but, as if touched with a 
 kindred sense of our infirmities, to soothe the qualms which that 
 untried motion might haply raise in our crude land-fancies." 
 The Old Margate Hoy. 
 
 " Hope is a charming, lively, blue-eyed wench, and I am al- 
 ways glad of her company, but could dispense with the visitor 
 she brings with her her younger sister, Fear a white-livered,
 
 350 LAMB 
 
 lily-cheeked, bashful, palpitating, awkward hussy, that hangs 
 like a green girl at her sister's apron-strings, and will go with her 
 whithersoever she goes." Letters, 
 
 8. Melancholy. "The sad event of Lamb's life im- 
 parted a melancholy to his writings, even where they seem 
 to abound in good-humor." T. B. Shaw. 
 
 " Lamb's deeper and sadder heart lay for the most part in 
 quiet concealment. ' ' Edward Dowden. 
 
 Bulwer speaks of that "subdued and serene melancholy 
 which rarely saddens, but often sweetens, the music of Lamb's 
 gentle laugh." 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " These pleasant and some mournful passages, with the first 
 sight of the sea, co-operating with youth and a sense of holidays 
 and out-of-door adventure, to me, that had been pent up in popu- 
 lous cities for many months before, have left upon my mind the 
 fragrance as of summer days gone by, bequeathing nothing but 
 their remembrance for cold and wintry hours to chew upon."- 
 The Old Margate Hoy. 
 
 " Alas ! the great and good go together in separate herds and 
 leave such as I to lag far, far behind in all intellectual, and far 
 more grievous to say in all moral accomplishments. Wesley 
 has said : ' Religion is not a solitary thing.' Alas ! it necessarily 
 is so with me, or next to solitary." Letters 
 
 " I pity you for overwork, but, I assure you, no work is worse. 
 The mind preys on itself, the most unwholesome food. I bragged 
 formerly that I could not have too much time. I have now a sur- 
 feit. With few years to come, the days are wearisome." Letters. 
 
 9. Critical Acumen. "There is a quaint vigor of lan- 
 guage, a fanciful acuteness of observation, and such true hu- 
 manities and noble sensibilities sparkling everywhere as rank 
 him among the most original critics of the age. " Allan Cun- 
 ningham. 
 
 " His critical notices are extremely valuable and above any 
 praise of mine. ... If his strength as a critic was and
 
 LAMB 351 
 
 remains for us as the 'strength of ten,' it was because his 
 heart was pure. . . . As a critic he had no master it 
 might almost be said no predecessor. He was the inventor of 
 his own art. . . . Lamb's criticism as often takes the 
 form of a study of human life as of the dramatic art. 
 Lamb is our best and wholesomest example of that rare ability 
 to value and enjoy one great literary school without at the 
 same time disparaging its opposites." Alfred Ainger. 
 
 " Lamb's essay on ' Shakespeare's Tragedies ' is one of the 
 great documents of critical literature.";/. M. Robertson. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " But the true poet dreams being awake. He is not possessed 
 by his subject, but has dominion over it. In the groves of Eden 
 he walks familiar as in his native paths. He ascends the empy- 
 rean heaven, and is not intoxicated. He treads the burning 
 marl without dismay ; he wins his flight without self-loss through 
 realms of chaos ' and old night.' Or if, abandoning himself to 
 that severer chaos of a ' human mind untuned,' he is content 
 awhile to be mad with Lear or to hate mankind (a sort of mad- 
 ness) with Timon, neither is that madness nor this misanthropy 
 so unchecked but that, never letting the reins of reason wholly 
 go, while most he seems to do so, he has his better genius still 
 whispering at his ear, with the good servant Kent suggesting 
 saner councils or with the honest steward Flavius recommend- 
 ing kindlier resolutions. Where he seems most to recede from 
 humanity he will be found the truest to it." The Sanity of True 
 Genius. 
 
 " It is an ordinary criticism, that my Lord Shaftesbury and Sir 
 William Temple are models of the genteel style in writing. We 
 should prefer saying of the lordly and the gentlemanly. Noth- 
 ing can be more unlike than the inflated, finical rhapsodies of 
 Shaftesbury and the plain , natural chit-chat of Temple. The man 
 of rank is discernible in both writers ; but in the one it is only 
 insinuated gracefully, in the other it stands out offensively. The 
 peer seems to have written with his coronet on and his earl's 
 mantle before him ; the commoner in his elbow-chair and un- 
 dress. What can be more pleasant than the way in which the
 
 352 LAMB 
 
 retired statesman peeps out in his essays, penned by the latter in 
 his delightful retreat at Sheen ? They scent of Nimeguen and 
 the Hague. Scarce an authority is quoted under an ambassa- 
 dor." The Genteel Style in Writing, 
 
 10. Discursiveness. It is one mark of Lamb's col- 
 loquial vein, already referred to, that he allows himself to 
 wander at will from his theme and to ramble whithersoever 
 his lively fancy may lead him. In a writer who addressed 
 himself mainly to the intellect this discursiveness would be 
 regarded as a serious blemish; but in him who "prefers the 
 affections to the sciences " we follow the ramblings with no 
 feelings but those of quiet enjoyment. This quality cannot 
 well be illustrated without quoting an entire essay, but the ob- 
 servant reader will notice the frequent divergencies from the 
 subject in almost any of Lamb's productions.
 
 SCOTT, 1771-1832 
 
 Biographical Outline. Walter Scott, born in Edin- 
 burgh, August 15, 1771, the ninth of twelve children, six of 
 whom died in infancy ; father a solicitor, descended from " a 
 great riding, sporting, fighting clan " ; mother, daughter of a 
 physician, and better educated than most Scotch women of 
 her day ; she gave to her son much of the information and in- 
 spiration for his romances ; during Scott's second year a teeth- 
 ing fever results in making him lame for life ; for the sake of 
 his health, he is sent out of the city to reside with his grand- 
 father at the farm of Sandy-Knowe, southeast of Edinburgh ; 
 he spends the sunny days with the shepherds among the sheep ; 
 shows an early fondness for manly sports and heroic literature ; 
 at six reads poems aloud to his mother, and is pronounced " a 
 most astounding genius "; his childhood at Sandy-Knowe is 
 pictured in the third canto of" Mar mi on " ; as a child he 
 manifests remarkable spirit, gentleness, and self-command ; at 
 school " he glanced like a meteor from one end of the class to 
 the other," and " received more praise for his interpretation 
 of the spirit of his authors than for his knowledge of their lan- 
 guage " ; out of school he extemporizes innumerable stories 
 for his comrades, and becomes a daring leader in all athletic 
 sports and ventures ; masters Latin fairly, but refuses to study 
 Greek ; studies first at the High School at Edinburgh and then 
 at a school in Kelso, where the master becomes a friend and 
 an inspiration ; from boyhood, Scott is " a worshipper of the 
 past " and an in tense conservative; he enters the University of 
 Edinburgh in 1783, remains three years, and obtains, in ad- 
 dition to his Latin, some knowledge of French and German ; 
 23 353
 
 354 SCOTT 
 
 displays a phenomenal memory, great power of physical en- 
 durance, and great fondness for romance ; begins to study law, 
 first as an apprentice to his father and afterward at the Uni- 
 versity ; is admitted to the bar in 1796 ; in 1787 he suffers 
 from a hemorrhage, and, during the absolute silence imposed 
 as an essential of recovery, begins "his study of the scenic 
 side of history"; reads voraciously in the line of military 
 exploit, romance, and mediaeval legend ; learns Italian and 
 Spanish, and reads Cervantes, whose novels, he says, " first 
 inspired me to excel in fiction" ; he tramps about the coun- 
 try so much in search of natural beauty and historic associa- 
 tions that his father pronounces him " better fitted for a ped- 
 dler than a lawyer ' ' ; often walks thirty miles a day, though 
 still very ame, and has many adventures and some carousals ; 
 he studies the law carefully, however, and succeeds respect- 
 ably, though he is a poor debater ; practises law more or less 
 for fourteen years, never earning over ^230 a year ; he 
 serves as Clerk of Session for several years without a sal- 
 ary ; in 1790 he falls violently in love with the daughter 
 of Sir John Belcher, but the lady marries another in 1796 ; 
 Scott's success as a lawyer is marred by his " dabblings 
 in poetry" and by his reputation for "wild and unpro- 
 fessional adventurousness " ; he visits London and becomes 
 widely known for his ballads of love, etc.; in 1797 he mar- 
 ries Miss Charpentier (Carpenter), daughter of a French Roy- 
 alist of Lyons " a bird of paradise mating with an eagle" ; 
 his first serious literary attempt is a translation of Burger's 
 " Lenore," made in 1795 and published in 1796; in 1798 
 he publishes a translation of Goethe's " Gottz von Berliching- 
 en," and in 1799 the ballads " Glenfinlas," "The Eve of 
 St. John," and "The Grey Brother" ; in January, 1802, 
 publishes the first two volumes of " Minstrelsy of the Scottish 
 Border" (including several ballads from his own pen); 
 the first edition (eight hundred copies) is sold within one 
 year, and Scott becomes famous ; he publishes the third vol-
 
 SCOTT 355 
 
 ume of the " Minstrelsy " in 1803 ; in 1805 publishes " The 
 Lay of the Last Minstrel " (begun in 1802), of which 44,000 
 copies were sold regularly during the following twenty-five 
 years, bringing Scott ^769; he publishes, " Marmion " 
 (largely composed in the saddle) in 1808, and receives one 
 thousand guineas for the copyright before publication ; during 
 1808 he also edits elaborate editions of Dryden and Swift, 
 adding critical notes and a biography to each; from 1798 to 
 1804 he resides at Lasswade, six miles from Edinburgh ; he 
 then removes to Ashestiel, in Selkirkshire, a few miles up the 
 Tweed from Abbotsford, where he resides till 1812 ; while 
 at Ashestiel he writes and publishes "The Lay of the Last 
 Minstrel," " The Lady of the Lake " (for which he receives 
 ^2,000 at its publication), "The Bridal of Triermain," a 
 part of " Rokeby," and a vast amount of other material ; in 
 1 799 he is made Sheriff of Selkirkshire, with a salary of ^300 
 a year, an office that he holds till shortly before his death ; he 
 becomes an officer in the Edinburgh volunteer cavalry, and 
 gives much attention to military affairs; in 1812, having 
 come into the salary of the Clerkship of Session, Scott buys 
 " a mountain farm " of one hundred acres, five miles down 
 the Tweed from Ashestiel, paying ^4,000, half of which he 
 borrows from his brother on the security of a poem (" Roke- 
 by ") not then written ; he takes to Abbotsford much of the 
 material forming the present " armory " there, and resides at 
 Abbotsford till his death, repeatedly enlarging the estate by 
 buying up adjacent lands until his estate reaches 1,000 
 acres, and costs, for the land alone, ^29 ooo ; he surrounds 
 himself at Abbotsford with numerous pet dogs and other 
 animals, devotes much time to tree-planting, and entertains 
 there many noted people; in 1802 he sends ^500 to James 
 Ballantyne, a former school-fellow at Kelso, who had printed 
 Scott's first work, and induces him to remove to Edinburgh ; 
 in 1805 Scott becomes a silent partner with Ballantyne in the 
 printing business, and in 1809 the admission of John, brother
 
 356 SCOTT 
 
 to James Ballantyne, results in the firm of John Ballantyne & 
 Co., booksellers and publishers; in 1812-14 the concern is 
 saved from bankruptcy only by the receipts from " Waverley " 
 (begun in 1805 and published in 1814) ; " Waverley " is pub- 
 lished anonymously, and meets with astounding success, over 
 60,000 copies being sold up to 1825 ; during 1811-14 Scott 
 corresponds with Byron, Southey, and his friend Sir Hum- 
 phry Davy; publishes " Rokeby " in 1812 and the "Bri- 
 dal of Triermain " in 1813; 10,000 copies of "Rokeby" 
 are sold within three months after publication ; Scott declines 
 the offer of the laureateship in 1813; visits the Shetland 
 Isles in 1814; in January, 1815, publishes "The Lord of 
 the Isles," and in February, " Guy Mannering," in two vol- 
 umes ; he receives ^2,000 for " Guy Mannering ," of which 
 2,000 copies were sold the day after its publication and 50,000 
 up to 1838, in Great Britain alone; he publishes, also, "Paul's 
 Letters to His Kinsfolk" early in 1815 ; visits London in 
 March, 1815, remaining two months, and meeting Byron and 
 the Prince Regent, who gives a dinner in Scott's honor; visits 
 Brussels and the field of Waterloo soon after the battle, in 
 August, 1815, and returns to Abbotsford in September, after 
 spending some time in Paris ; publishes his poem " The Field 
 of Waterloo " in October, 1815, and "The Antiquary" in 
 May, 1816 ; 6,000 copies of the latter were sold within six 
 days after publication ; in December, 1816, still preserving 
 his incognito, Scott publishes, through Murray, the first 
 series of "Tales of My Grandfather," containing "The Black 
 Dwarf" and "Old Mortality"; 4,000 copies were sold with- 
 in six weeks; in January, 1817, he publishes "Harold the 
 Dauntless," begun several years before, and makes a fruitless 
 effort to secure an appointment as Baron of the Exchequer ; 
 he is severely ill during the winter of 1817, and later in that 
 year entertains, at Abbotsford, Lady Byron and Washington 
 Irving; in December he completes and publishes "Rob Roy," 
 of which 40,000 copies were sold in Great Britain up to
 
 SCOTT 357 
 
 1838 ; publishes " The Heart of Midlothian " in June, 1818; 
 at this time the annual profits on his novels were about ^10,- 
 ooo ; for several years prior to 1818 Scott edits the " Edin- 
 burgh Annual Register," a history of the world for each pre- 
 ceding year, making an annual volume of about four hundred 
 pages ; while in Edinburgh he lives in Castle Street ; declares 
 in 1818 that his annual expenditure for postage alone reaches 
 ^150; in November, 1818, he accepts the offer of a baro- 
 netcy ; in December, 1818, sells all his existing copyrights to 
 Constable & Co. for ^12,000, they agreeing not to reveal 
 the author's name under a forfeit of ^2,000 ; Scott suffers a 
 return of his stomach malady in the spring of 1819, and dic- 
 tates " The Bride of Lammermoor," " The Legend of Mont- 
 rose " (both published in 1819), and the greater part of 
 "Ivanhoe" while suffering intense physical pain ; he enter- 
 tains Prince Leopold of Saxe-Cobourg and Miss Edgeworth 
 in the summer of 1819, and publishes " Ivanhoe " during the 
 following autumn ; it is received " with clamorous delight " ; 
 during the winter of 1819-20 he publishes the essays entitled 
 " The Visionary," giving his views " on certain popular doc- 
 trines and delusions" ; entertains Prince Gustavus Vasa at 
 Edinburgh in the winter of 1820, and publishes " The Mon- 
 astery " in the following March ; proceeds to London to re- 
 ceive his baronetcy, and, at the request of George IV., sits for 
 his portrait, to be hung in the royal gallery at Windsor ; sits 
 also for the bust that now best represents him ; becomes " Sir 
 Walter Scott " March 30, 1820, King George conferring the 
 honor in person ; in May, 1820, Scott receives tenders of the 
 degree of D.C.L. from both Oxford and Cambridge ; in Sep- 
 tember, 1820, he publishes "The Abbot," a continuation of 
 " The Monastery," but the novel is not a success ; in Novem- 
 ber is elected president of the Royal Society of Edinburgh ; 
 publishes " Kenilworth " in January, 1821, and begins to 
 edit Ballantyne's " Novelist's Library " ; in November, 1821, 
 sells to Constable the copyrights of " Ivanhoe," " The Mon-
 
 358 SCOTT 
 
 astery," "The Abbot," and " Kenilworth " for five thou- 
 sand guineas, repeating the forfeit clause of ^2,000 to insure 
 his incognito; Scott had already received ^10,000 profits 
 from these four novels ; signs a contract, also, for " four works 
 of fiction yet to be written "; publishes "The Pirate" in 
 December, 1821, "The Fortunes of Nigel" in May, 1822, 
 and " Halidon Hill" in June, 1822 ; superintends repairs to 
 the ruin of Melrose Abbey and manages the popular recep- 
 tion to George IV. at Edinburgh in the summer of 1822 ; 
 publishes " Peveril of the Peak " in January, 1823, " Quen- 
 tin Durward " in June, and " St. Ronan's Well " in Decem- 
 ber; the comparatively cold reception given to the last two 
 novels alarms both Scott and Constable, his publisher ; lie 
 publishes " Redgauntlet" in June, 1824, and completes his 
 mansion at Abbotsford in November; publishes "Tales of 
 the Crusaders," including "The Talisman" and "Be- 
 trothed," in June, 1825 ; visits Ireland in July, and is pub- 
 licly honored at Dublin ; entertains Moore at Abbotsford 
 in the autumn ; is alarmed by rumors of the failure of Consta- 
 ble, with whom Scott and the Ballantynes had been long and 
 intricately involved in business, but " the storm blows over" ; 
 Scott gives up hunting and begins his diary in November, 
 1825, registering his purpose "to practise economics "; on 
 January 17, 1826, both Constable and the Ballantyne firm be- 
 come bankrupt, and Scott is left, in his own words, " a beg- 
 gar " ; January 2ist he writes in his diary : " Naked we en- 
 tered this world, and naked we leave it blessed be the name 
 of the Lord " ; on the next day, spurring himself for his he- 
 roic undertaking (which was nothing less than to earn over 
 half a million dollars by his pen and so to pay up the debts of 
 the firm), he writes : " Well ! Exertion exertion exertion ! 
 O invention, rouse thyself! may man be kind ! may God be 
 propitious ! The worst is, I never quite know when I am 
 right or wrong " ; he disdains to take advantage of the bankrupt 
 act, and begins " Woodstock," averaging thirty pages a day;
 
 SCOTT 359 
 
 is greatly depressed by the illness of Lady Scott, who dies 
 May 15, 1826; publishes "Woodstock" in April, 1826, 
 and receives ^8,228 in cash for the copyright; leaves A b- 
 botsford for London in October, and proceeds thence to 
 Paris in search of material for his " Life of Napoleon " ; is 
 received with great public honors in both cities, and returns 
 to Abbotsford late in November ; first acknowledges the au- 
 thorship of the Waverley novels in February, 1827; publishes 
 " Chronicles of the Canongate " and the second series of 
 " Tales of a Grandfather" in December, 1828 ; during the 
 same month, after being unconsciously rescued from the 
 clutches of a firm of London Jewish brokers by friends, 
 Scott sells his remaining copyrights, including the " Chron- 
 icles," for ^8,500, and pays the Ballantyne creditors six 
 shillings in the pound ; that is, he had earned, during the 
 previous two years, about ^40,000; during 1828 he begins a 
 new edition of his poems, with biographical prefaces, and a 
 new edition of the novels, with elaborate notes ; publishes 
 "The Fair Maid of Perth" in March, 1828, and the third 
 series of "Tales of a Grandfather" in December; during 
 1829, though in continual ill-health, he publishes "Anne of 
 Geierstein," the fourth series of "Tales of a Grandfather," 
 and the first volume of " Scottish History " (in Lardner's Cy- 
 clopaedia) ; during 1830 he publishes the second volume of the 
 " Scottish History " and the new edition of his poems ; suf- 
 fers a stroke of paralysis in February and another soon after- 
 ward ; declines a royal pension and the rank of Privy Coun- 
 cillor in the summer of 1830 ; publishes " Demonology " and 
 " The History of France " during the same summer, and by 
 September has paid over one-half of the vast debt ; in De- 
 cember, 1830, he pays his creditors another three shillings 
 in the pound, and they release to him his Abbotsford furni- 
 ture, linens, plate, paintings, library, and curiosities of every 
 description, on which they had held a claim (the estate of 
 Abbotsford had previously been entailed to Scott's oldest son) ;
 
 360 SCOTT 
 
 Scott has another attack of apoplexy in August, 1831, but 
 rallies, and, against the advice of all his physicians and the 
 entreaties of friends, completes and publishes " Count Robert 
 of Paris " and " Castle Dangerous " ; during the summer he 
 entertains at Abbotsford the artist Turner, who comes to 
 make drawings for illustrating Scott's poems, and also Words- 
 worth, who comes to bid Scott farewell before the latter's 
 tour to Italy in search of health ; Wordsworth afterward com- 
 memorates the visit in his " Yarrow Revisited " ; Scott leaves 
 Abbotsford September 23, 1831, spends a month in London, 
 meeting again Moore, Irving, and many other old friends, 
 and sails from Portsmouth October 2gih in the Barhant, a 
 royal frigate placed at his disposal by the king ; he is accom- 
 panied by his eldest son, Major Walter Scott, then connected 
 with the British embassy at Rome ; reaches Malta November 
 25th; thence to Naples, where his younger son, Charles, 
 awaits him and where Scott receives royal attentions ; in spite 
 of remonstrances, he begins and nearly finishes ' ' The Siege 
 of Malta" and "Bizzano," neither of which he publishes; 
 leaves Naples April 16, 1832, accompanied by his son Charles, 
 and starts homeward by way of the Tyrol and the Rhine; 
 spends several weeks in Rome, leaving there May nth; 
 hastens through Florence, Bologna, Venice, Innspruck, Mu- 
 nich, Heidelberg, and Frankfort, travelling night and day in 
 the hope of reaching Abbotsford before his death, which he 
 knew to be near ; thence down the Rhine to Cologne ; suffers 
 another severe stroke of apoplexy when near Minguen, June 
 9th, which renders him helpless; by steamer from Rotterdam, 
 reaching London June i3th, where he remains till early in 
 July, unconscious most of the time ; thence, accompanied by 
 his two daughters and by Lockhart, by steamer to Edinburgh 
 and thence to Abbotsford, which he reaches July i2th; 
 Lockhart writes : "At the sight of his own towers he sprang 
 up with a cry of delight"; his health improves during the 
 first weeks after reaching Abbotsford, but then steadily de-
 
 SCOTT 361 
 
 clines till his death there, September 21, 1832 ; his unmarried 
 daughter, Anne, receives from the privy purse of William IV. 
 a pension of ^200 till her death, in 1833 ; his eldest son 
 succeeds him in the baronetcy, and his daughter, the wife of 
 Lockhart, is buried by the side of Sir Walter, at Dryburgh, in 
 1837; his obligations to his creditors, amounting to ^54,000 
 at his death, are settled by means of ^22,000 of life insur- 
 ance, the balance being assumed by Cadell, the publisher, on 
 the security of unexpired copyrights. 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY ON SCOTT'S STYLE. 
 
 Devey, J., "A Comparative Estimate, etc." London, 1873, E. Moxon, 
 212-225. 
 
 Whipple, E. P., "Essays and Reviews." Boston, 1867, Ticknor, I: 
 318-329. 
 
 Shairp, J. C., "Aspects of Poetry." Boston, 1882, Houghton, Mifflin & 
 Co., 323-349- 
 
 Stephen, L., "Hours in a Library." New York, 1894, Putnam, I: 
 137-169. 
 
 Hutton, R. H., " Sir Walter Scott." New York, 1878, Harper. 
 
 Yonge, C. D., "Life of Sir Walter Scott." London, 1888, Walter 
 Scott. 
 
 Canning, A. S. G., " Philosophy of the Waverley Novels." London, 
 1879, Smith, Elder & Co. 
 
 Bagehot, W., "Literary Studies" (Works). Hartford, 1889, Travel- 
 lers' Insurance Co., 2: 197239. 
 
 Jeffrey, F., " Modern British Essayists." Philadelphia, 1852, A. Hart, 
 6 : 359-3 8 . etc. 
 
 Carlyle, T., " Critical and Miscellaneous Essays. " London, 1847, Chap- 
 man & Hall, 4 : 99-165. 
 
 Masson, D., " Sir Walter Scott. " New York, 1893, Whittaker. 
 
 Sainte-Beuve, C. A., "Essays." London, 1893, W. Scott, 164-167. 
 
 Watt, J. C., "Great Novelists." Edinburgh, 1880, Macniven & Wal- 
 lace, 1-96. 
 
 Oliphant, Mrs., "Literary History of England." New York, 1889, 
 Macmillan, 2: 80-152. 
 
 Landon, L. E., "Life and Literary Remains of L. E. L." London, 
 1841, Colburn, 2: 81-194. 
 
 Hazlitt, W., "Lectures on the English Poets." London, 1884, G. Bell 
 & Sons, 205-207.
 
 362 SCOTT 
 
 Hazlitt, W., "Spirit of the Age." London, 1886, G. Bell & Sons, 97- 
 
 117. 
 Lang, A., "Letters to Dead Authors." New York, 1892, Longmans, 
 
 Green & Co., 127-136. 
 Macaulay, T. B., "Miscellaneous Works." New York, 1880, Harper, 
 
 1 : 200, etc., v. index. 
 
 Masson, D., " British Novelists." Boston, 1892, W. Small, 161-214. 
 Nicoll, H. J., "Landmarks of English Literature." New York, 1883, 
 
 Appleton, 323-340. 
 Taine, H. A., "History of English Literature." New York, 1875, 
 
 Holt, 2 : 73-80 and v. index. 
 Ward, T. H. (Goldwin Smith), "The English Poets." New York, 
 
 1881, Macmillan, 4: 186-194. 
 
 Gilfillan, G., "Life of Sir Walter 'Scott." Edinburgh, 1871, W. Oli- 
 
 phant & Co. 
 Rossetti, W. M., "Lives of Famous Poets." London, 1885, E. Moxon, 
 
 219-234. 
 Tuckerman, B., "A History of English Prose Fiction." New York, 
 
 1882, Putnam, 278-284. 
 
 Veitch, J., "The History and Poetry of the Scottish Border." Edin- 
 burgh, 1898, Blackwood, 496-578. 
 
 Welsh, A. H., "The Development of English Literature." Chicago, 
 1884, Griggs, 2 : 321-330. 
 
 Lang, A., " Essays in Little." New York, 1891, Scribner, 171-182. 
 
 Collier, W. F., "History of English Literature." London, 1892, 
 Nelson, 399-413. 
 
 Rice, A. T., " Essays from North American Review (W. H. Prescott)." 
 New York, 1879, Appleton, 3-63. 
 
 Talfourd, T. N., "Critical and Miscellaneous Essays." Boston, 1854, 
 Phillips, Sampson & Co., 11-15. 
 
 Duyckinck, E. A., " Portrait Gallery." New York, 1875, Johnson, Wil- 
 son & Co., i: 476-488. 
 
 Knight, C., " Gallery of Portraits." London, 1837, C. Knight & Co., 
 7 : 185-197. 
 
 Mason, E. T., " Personal Traits of British Authors." New York, 1885, 
 Scribner, 3 : 1-7. 
 
 Pebody, C., "Authors at Work." London, 1872, W. H. Allen & Co., 
 36-85. 
 
 Reed, H., " British Poets." Philadelphia, 1857, Parry & McMillan, 2: 
 60-89. 
 
 Jeaffreson, J. C. , "Novels and Novelists." London, 1858, Hurst & 
 Blackett, 2 : 31-84.
 
 SCOTT 363 
 
 Allibone, S. A., "A Critical Dictionary of Authors." Philadelphia, 
 
 1891, Lippincott, 2 : 1964-1979. 
 Bryant, W. C. , " Orations and Addresses." New York, 1873, Putnam, 
 
 387-393. 
 Chorley, H. F., "The Authors of England." London, 1838, C. Tilt, 
 
 7-13- 
 Courthope, W. J., "The Liberal Movement in English Literature." 
 
 London, 1885, Murray, 111-156. 
 Dennis, J., "Heroes of Literature." New York, 1883, E. & J. B. 
 
 Young, 300-321. 
 Dickson, N., "The Bible in Waverley." Edinburgh, 1884, A. & C. 
 
 Black. 
 Graham, W., " Lectures, Sketches, etc." Edinburgh, 1873, Seaton & 
 
 Mackenzie, 153-163. 
 Howitt, W., " Homes and Haunts of British Poets." London, 1863, 
 
 Routledge, 446-486. 
 Irving, W., " Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey." New York, 1852, 
 
 Putnam, 201-379. 
 Jerrold, B., " The Best of All Good Company." London, 1871, W. T. 
 
 Gill, 85-160. 
 Lennox, Lord W. P., "Celebrities I have Known." London, 1877, 
 
 Hurst & Blackett, 2 : 21-33. 
 Lockhart, J. G., "Memoirs of Walter Scott." Boston, 1881, 
 
 Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 
 Mackay, C., " Forty Years' Recollections." London, 1877, Chapman & 
 
 Hall, I : 175-206. 
 Martineau, H., " Miscellanies." Boston, 1836, Hilliard, Gray & Co., 
 
 I : 1-12 and 27-56. 
 Senior, W. W., " Essays on Fiction." London, 1864, Longmans & 
 
 Green, 1-185. 
 Prescott, W. H., " Biographical and Critical Miscellanies." Philadelphia, 
 
 1869, Lippincott. 
 Dawson, W. J., " The Makers of Modern English." New York, 1890, 
 
 Whittaker, 61-71. 
 Mitford, M. R., "Recollections of a Literary Life." New York, 1851, 
 
 Harper, 424-442. 
 Minto, W., " Literature of the Georgian Era." New York, 1895, 
 
 Harper, 235-253 and 286-289. 
 Gibson, John, " Reminiscences of Sir Walter Scott." Edinburgh, 1871, 
 
 A. & C. Black. 
 
 Doyle, Sir F. H., " Lectures on Poetry." London, 1869, Macmillan, 
 182-183, 78-127.
 
 364 SCOTT 
 
 " Encyclopaedia Britannica," gth edition (W. Minto). Edinburgh, 1871, 
 Bell, 21 : 544-551. 
 
 Everett, E., "The Mount Vernon Papers." New York, 1860, Apple- 
 ton, 115-123 and 135-144. 
 
 Moir, D., " Sketches of Poetical Literature." Cambridge, 1856, Black- 
 wood, 116-127. 
 
 Yonge, C. D., "Three Centuries of English Literature." New York, 
 1889, Appleton, 294-332. 
 
 Masson, D., "In the Footsteps of the Poets" (J. Dennis). New 
 York, 1893, Whittaker, 235-279. 
 
 Phillips, M. G., " A Manual of English Literature." New York, 1893, 
 Harper, I : 265-330 and v. index. 
 
 Quarterly Review, 27 : 337-364 ; 26 : 110-130 (A. W. Senior). 
 
 Atlantic Monthly, 46 : 313-320 (T. S. Perry) ; 69: 139-142. 
 
 Edinburgh Review, 28 : 193-259 (Jeffrey) ; 29 : 403-432 (Jeffrey) ; 55 : 
 61-69; 6: 1-20 (Jeffrey) ; 16 : 263-293 ; 24 : 208-242 (Jeffrey). 
 
 North American Review, 99 .- 5^3~S^7 (Senior) ; 46 : 445-474 (Lock- 
 hart) ; 36: 289-315 (Cunningham); 32: 386-421 (Pebody) ; 35: 
 1 72-1 73 and 187-189 (W. H. Prescott). 
 
 The Forum, 14 : 503-513 (Mallock). 
 
 The Nation, 13: 103-104 (J. R. Dennett). 
 
 Harper's Magazine, 43: 5 1 1-5 14 (Mrs. Z. B. Buddington). 
 
 Macmillan's Magazine, 26 : 168 (Frere). 
 
 Fraser's Magazine, 5 : 207-217; 36: 345-351. 
 
 Monthly Review, 2 : 569-581. 
 
 Nineteenth Century Magazine, 7 : 941-962 (Ruskin). 
 
 BlackwoooTs Magazine, 19: 152-160; no: 229-256. 
 
 New Monthly Magazine, 46 : 79-85 (Scott). 
 
 Contemporary Review, 23 : 514-539 (J. Wedgewood). 
 
 Good Words, 16 : 500-508 (J. C. Shairp). 
 
 National Review, 6 : 444-472. 
 
 Saturday Review, 14: 746-748. 
 
 PARTICULAR CHARACTERISTICS. 
 
 I. Vivid Personal Portraiture. Sainte Beuve, who is 
 perhaps the greatest critic whom the nineteenth century has 
 produced, calls Sir Walter Scott " an immortal painter of hu- 
 manity." Richard Henry Hutton says: " Indeed, whether 
 Scott draws truly or falsely, he draws with such genius that 
 his pictures of Richard and Saladin, of Louis XI. and Charles
 
 SCOTT 365 
 
 the Bold, of Margaret of Anjou and Rene of Provence, of 
 Mary Stuart and Elizabeth Tudor, of Sussex and Leicester, 
 of James and Charles and Buckingham, of the two Dukes of 
 Argyle the Argyle of the time of the Revolution and the 
 Argyle of George II. of Queen Caroline, of Claverhouse and 
 Monmouth and Rob Roy, will live in English literature be- 
 side Shakespeare's pictures probably less faithful if more 
 imaginative of John and Richard and the later Henries 
 and all the great figures by whom they are surrounded. No 
 historical portrait that we possess will take precedence 
 as a mere portrait of Scott's brilliant study of James I. in 
 ' The Fortunes of Nigel. 1 ' 
 
 "You find everywhere in Walter Scott a remarkable se- 
 curity and thoroughness in his delineations, which proceed 
 from his comprehensive knowledge of the real world, obtained 
 by lifelong studies and observations and a daily discussion 
 of the most important relations. He is equal to his subject 
 in every direction in which it takes him ; the king, the royal 
 brother, the prince, the head of the clergy, the nobles, the 
 magistracy, the citizens and mechanics, the Highlanders, are 
 all drawn with the same sure hand and hit off with equal 
 truth." Goethe. 
 
 "It seemed as if the author had transferred into his page 
 the strong delineations of the Homeric pencil, the rude but 
 generous gallantry of a primitive period, softened by the more 
 airy and magical inventions of Italian romance." W. H. 
 Prescott. 
 
 "The characters, whether historical or fictitious, are as 
 lifelike and natural as if drawn from personal acquaintance. 
 He chiefly delights and excels in describing pecul- 
 iar people, like Baillie Jarvie, Dominie Sampson, Meg Mer- 
 rilies, David Deans, etc., and also in delineating historical 
 characters with astonishing force and accuracy. 
 Even when placing these historical characters in imaginary 
 situations, he adheres so carefully to all that is known of
 
 366 SCOTT 
 
 them that the most practical reader will own that they would, 
 in all consistency, have acted in those situations precisely as 
 the novelist has made them." A. S. G. Canning. 
 
 "We cannot say, of course, that figures in Scott's pages 
 talked as he makes them talk, but the reader feels sure that if 
 they did not they ought to have done so." -J. Dennis. 
 
 11 When he comes to the character of his heroes, he seizes 
 at once upon the master-passion, and, by two or three leading 
 strokes, stamps the man's history on his face in hues which 
 impart a meaning to the least of his actions. ... By- 
 bringing the new in contact with the old, men were enabled 
 to trace the same bounding hopes and fears, the same hatreds 
 and loves, the same rivalries and aspirations, arrayed in dif- 
 ferent attire, developed under conflicting institutions, which 
 now actuate them and animating a social structure they had 
 hitherto vainly striven to piece together from the dry inves- 
 tigations of the lawyer or the tedious narrative of the histo- 
 rian." -J. Devey. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " He [Mr. Holdenough] was a tall, thin man, with an adust 
 complexion, and the vivacity of his eye indicated some irasci- 
 bility of temperament. His dress was brown, not black, and 
 over his other vestments he wore, in honor of Calvin, a Geneva 
 cloak of a blue color, which fell backward from his shoulders. 
 His grizzled hair was cut as short as shears could perform the 
 feat and covered with a black silk skull-cap, which stuck so 
 close to the head that the two ears expanded from under it as if 
 they had been intended as handles by which to lift the whole 
 person. Moreover, the worthy divine wore spectacles and a 
 long, grizzled, peaked beard, and he carried in his hand a small 
 pocket Bible with silver clasps." Woodstock. 
 
 " Grahame of Claverhouse was in the prime of life, rather low 
 of stature, and slightly, though elegantly, formed ; his gesture, 
 language, and manners were those of one whose life had been 
 spent among the noble and the gay. His features exhibited even 
 feminine regularity. An oval face, a straight and well-formed
 
 SCOTT 367 
 
 nose, dark hazel eyes, a complexion just sufficiently tinted with 
 brown to save it from the charge of effeminacy, a short upper 
 lip, curved upward like that of a Grecian statue and slightly 
 shaded by small mustachios of light brown, joined to a profusion 
 of long curled locks of the same color, which fell down on each 
 side of his face, contributed to form such a countenance as 
 limners love to paint and ladies to look upon." Old Mortality. 
 
 " Formed in the best proportions of her sex, Rowena was tall in 
 stature, yet not so much so as to attract observation on account 
 of her superior height. Her complexion was exquisitely fair, but 
 the noble cast of her head and features prevented the insipidity 
 which sometimes attaches to fair beauties. Her clear blue eye, 
 which sat enshrined beneath a graceful eyebrow of brown, suf- 
 ficiently marked to give expression to the forehead, seemed 
 capable to kindle as well as melt, to command as well as to be- 
 seech. If mildness were the more natural expression of such a 
 combination of features, it was plain that in the present instance 
 the exercise of habitual superiority and the reception of general 
 homage had given to the Saxon lady a loftier character, which 
 mingled with and qualified that bestowed by nature." Ivanhoe. 
 
 2. Realistic Description Imaginative Power. 
 
 This quality is in part the same as the first except that it is 
 applied to things rather than persons. Scott himself was fully 
 conscious of his descriptive power; for, early in life, he writes 
 of his boyish powers to a friend : " But show me an old castle 
 or field of battle, and I was at home at once, filled it with its 
 combatants in their proper costume, and overwhelmed my 
 hearers by the enthusiasm of my description." 
 
 " Everything appears before us in its true colors, with its 
 true light and shade and true proportion and peopled with 
 figures so varied, so life-like and individual that, after read- 
 ing the novel, we cannot divest ourselves of a firm conviction 
 of the reality of persons, places, and events. So much so, 
 indeed, is this the case with nearly all Scott's historical novels 
 that, when we afterward find in authentic history any proofs 
 of occasional incorrectness or even anachronisms in these fie-
 
 368 SCOTT 
 
 tions, we deny the evidence of our reason, and cannot be in- 
 duced to think that the manners, the characters, or the events 
 could have been otherwise than as the artist has represented 
 them." T. B. Shaw. 
 
 " All that portion of the history of his country that he has 
 touched upon (wide as the scope is) the manners, the person- 
 ages, the events, the scenery lives over again in his volumes. 
 Nothing is wanting the illusion is complete. There is a 
 hurtling in the air, a trampling of feet upon the ground, as 
 these perfect representations of human character or fanciful 
 belief come thronging back upon our imagination. " Hazlitt. 
 
 " Nature, history, tradition, life, everything and every 
 place, were shown by this new and vigorous spirit to be full 
 to overflowing with what had been, in the dim eyes of former 
 soi-disant geniuses, only dry bones, but which, at the touch of 
 this bold necromancer, sprung up living forms of the most 
 fascinating grace. . . . The whole land seemed astir 
 with armies, insurrections, pageantries of love, and passages of 
 sorrow, that for twenty years kept the enraptured public in a 
 trance, as it were, of one accumulating marvel of joy. There 
 seemed no bounds to his powers or to the field of his opera- 
 tions." William Howitt. 
 
 " Whatever age he chooses for his story lives before us : we 
 become contemporaries of all his persons and sharers in all 
 their fortunes. ... In the vivid description of natural 
 scenery, our author is wholly without a rival. . . . Every 
 gentle swelling of the ground, every gleam of the water, 
 every curve and rock of the shore, all varieties of the earth, 
 from the vastest crag to the soft grass of the woodland walk, 
 and all changes of the heavens from ' morn to morn, from noon 
 to latest eve ' are placed before us in his works with a dis- 
 tinctness beyond that which the painter's art can attain, while 
 we seem to breathe the mountain air, to drink in the freshness 
 of the valleys. " T. N. Talfourd. 
 
 " He can describe a battle with a vividness unequalled by
 
 SCOTT 369 
 
 any poet since Homer. . . . The homelier characters 
 are as much alive as if they were flesh. . . . He is a 
 master of description of commonplace affairs and people." 
 J. Dennis. 
 
 " The manners, customs, language, ideas, together with the 
 armor, dresses, and furniture of the period are described with 
 a force and accuracy never surpassed, and perhaps never 
 equalled, by any other author in prose fiction." A. S. G. 
 Canning. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " One end of this long and dusky apartment was entirely oc- 
 cupied by a gallery, which had in ancient times served to accom- 
 modate the musicians and minstrels. There was a clumsy stair- 
 case at either side of it, composed of entire logs of a foot square ; 
 and in each angle of the ascent was placed, by way of sentinel, 
 the figure of a Norman foot-soldier, having an open casque on his 
 head, which displayed features as stern as the painter's genius 
 could devise. Their arms were buff-jackets, or shirts of mail, 
 round bucklers, with spikes in the centre, and buskins which 
 adorned and defended the feet and ankles but left the knees bare. 
 These wooden warders held great swords or maces in their hands, 
 like military guards on duty." Woodstock. 
 
 " The floor was composed of earth mixed with lime, trodden 
 into a hard substance, such as is often employed in flooring our 
 modern barns. For about one-quarter of the length of the apart- 
 ment the floor was raised by a step, and this space, which was 
 called the dais, was occupied only by the principal members of 
 the family and visitors of distinction. For this purpose, a table 
 richly covered with scarlet cloth was placed transversely across 
 the platform, from the middle of which ran the longer and lower 
 board, at which the domestics and inferior persons fed, down 
 toward the bottom of the hall. The whole resembled the form of 
 the letter T or some of those ancient dinner-tables which, ar- 
 ranged on the same principles, may be still seen in the antique 
 colleges of Oxford or Cambridge. Massive chairs and settles of 
 carved oak were placed upon the dais, and over these seats and 
 the more elevated table was fastened a canopy of cloth, which 
 served in some degree to protect the dignitaries who occupied 
 34
 
 370 SCOTT 
 
 that distinguished station from the weather, and especially from 
 the rain, which, in some places, found its way through the ill-con- 
 structed roof." Ivanhoe. 
 
 " The scene was singularly romantic. On the verge of a wood, 
 which approached to within a mile of the town of Ashby, was an 
 extensive meadow of the finest and most beautiful green turf, sur- 
 rounded on one side by the forest and fringed on the other by 
 straggling oak-trees, some of which had grown to immense size. 
 The ground, as if fashioned on purpose for the martial display 
 which was intended, sloped gradually down on all sides to a level 
 bottom, which was enclosed for the lists with strong palisades, 
 forming a space of a quarter of a mile in length and about half as 
 broad. The form of the enclosure was an oblong square, save 
 that the corners were considerably rounded-off, in order to afford 
 more convenience for the spectators. The openings for the entry 
 of the combatants were at the northern and southern extremities 
 of the lists, accessible by strong wooden gates, each wide enough 
 to admit two horsemen riding abreast. At each of these portals 
 were stationed two heralds, attended by six trumpets, as many 
 pursuivants, and a strong body of men-at-arms for maintaining 
 order and ascertaining the quality of the knights who proposed to 
 engage in this martial game." Ivanhoe. 
 
 3. Picturesqueness Scenic Effect. While this 
 quality is often found in combination with the second, they 
 are by no means identical. There may be picturesqueness 
 without vividness and vividness without picturesqueness. As 
 Prescott says: "Scott was, in truth, master of the pictur- 
 esque. He understood better than any historian since the 
 time of Livy how to dispose his lights and shades so as to 
 produce the most striking results. . . . If he wants the 
 passion and fire of Moore and Campbell, his pictures are 
 more true to nature than those of either. It [' The Lady of 
 the Lake '] seemed like the breathings of his native pibroch, 
 stealing over glen and mountain, and calling up all the de- 
 licious associations of rural solitude." 
 
 " A love of picturesque, of beautiful, vigorous, and grace-
 
 SCOTT 371 
 
 
 
 ful things, a genuine love . . . this is the highest qual- 
 ity to be discovered in him." Carlyle. 
 
 " Nothing could be more picturesque and animated than 
 the panorama of brilliant and highly colored mediaeval life 
 thus made to pass before us." Mrs. Oliphant. 
 
 " Scott was eminently a painter of words. The pictur- 
 esque was his forte. Witness the magnificent descriptions of 
 natural scenery sunsets, stormy seas, deep woodland glades 
 with which many of his chapters open." W. F. Collier. 
 
 " He is in history as he is at Abbotsford, bent on ar- 
 ranging points of view and Gothic halls. The moon will 
 come well there between the towers ; here is a nicely placed 
 breastplate ; the ray of light which it throws back is pleasant 
 to see on these old hangings ; suppose we took out the feudal 
 garments from the wardrobe and invited these guests to a 
 masquerade ? The entertainment would be a fine one, in 
 accordance with their reminiscences and their aristocratic 
 principles. . . . Moreover, there are ladies and young 
 girls, and we must arrange the show so as not to shock their 
 severe morality and their delicate feelings make them weep 
 becomingly. . . As he has the greatest supply of rich 
 
 costumes, and the most inexhaustible talent for scenic effect, 
 he makes all his people get on very pleasantly, and composes 
 tales which, in truth, have only the merit of fashion, though 
 that fashion may last a hundred years yet." Taine. 
 
 "What picturesqueness ! from the castle to the cottage, 
 from the religious zealot and the soldier of fortune to the 
 very hounds snuffing the odor of supper in ' Redgauntlet ' ! 
 If he seldom or never penetrates into the innermost regions 
 of men, how fresh are all his outside sketches ! " B. IV. 
 Procter. 
 
 Ruskin has testified how true was Scott's sense of color 
 and with what fidelity he describes the scenery which was 
 familiar to him. Pitt said of " The Lay of the Last Min- 
 strel " that it was the sort of thing he might have expect-
 
 372 SCOTT 
 
 ed in painting, but could never have fancied capable of being 
 given in poetry. Mrs. Landon calls Scott " the founder of 
 a new school the picturesque," and adds: " All his char- 
 acters give the idea of portraits rather than inventions." 
 
 "It is in the embellishment of his plots by graphic inci- 
 dents as well as in his matchless delineations of character that 
 Scott's powers as a poet are most conspicuous. He knew 
 how to crowd his canvas with those lights and shades which 
 have the effect of conveying the poej's creations with all their 
 freshness and reality into the reader's heart. The picture of 
 delicate beauty comforting giant strength, of the quiet repose 
 of nature disturbed by the shaggy panoply of arms, of the 
 silence and darkness of midnight broken by the war-whoop of 
 the trooper or the torch of the incendiary these and other 
 kindred points of contrast the poet brings out with a minute 
 ness of touch which sets up the entire scene in all its gor- 
 geous coloring before our eyes, while the faintest reverber- 
 ation of the sounds echoes in the ear. . . . Men saw 
 revived as in a glass all the artistic features of the Middle 
 Ages, just as the last vestige of them had sunk beneath the 
 tide of modern innovation." J. Devey. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " As she passed for the third time the kneeling crusader, a 
 part of a little and well-proportioned hand, so beautifully formed 
 as to give the highest proportions of the form to which it be- 
 longed, stole through the folds of the gauze, like a moonbeam 
 through the fleecy cloud of a summer night, and again a rosebud 
 lay at the feet of the Knight of the Leopard." The Talisman. 
 
 " At the upper and eastern end of the chapel stood the altar, 
 behind which a very rich curtain of Persian silk, embroidered 
 deeply with gold, covered a recess containing, unquestionably, 
 some image or relic of no ordinary sanctity, in honor of whom 
 this singular place of worship had been erected. Under the im- 
 pression that this must be the case, the knight advanced to the 
 shrine and, kneeling down before it, repeated his devotions with
 
 SCOTT 373 
 
 fervency, during which his attention was disturbed by the curtain 
 being suddenly raised, or, rather, pulled aside, how or by whom 
 he saw not ; but in the niche which was thus disclosed he beheld 
 a cabinet of silver and ebony, with a double folding-door, the 
 whole formed into a miniature resembling a Gothic church." 
 The Talisman. 
 
 " The glorious beams of the rising sun, which poured from a 
 tabernacle of purple and golden clouds, were darted full on such 
 a scene of natural romance and beauty as had never before 
 greeted my eyes. To the left lay the valley, down which the 
 Forth wandered on its easterly course, surrounding the beautiful 
 detached hill, with all its garland of woods. On the right, amid 
 a profusion of thickets, knolls and crags, lay the head of a broad 
 mountain lake, lightly curled into tiny waves by the breath of 
 the morning breeze, each glittering into its course under the in- 
 fluence of the sunbeams. High hills, rocks, and banks waving 
 with natural forests of birch and oak formed the borders of this 
 enchanting sheet of water ; and, as their leaves rustled to the 
 wind and twinkled in the sun, gave to the depth of solitude a 
 sort of life and vivacity." Rob Roy. 
 
 4. Vivacity Animation Sustained Vigor. This 
 quality, while kindred to the three already considered, is dis- 
 tinct. It is found mainly in Scott's narration, while they are 
 found mainly in his description. Leslie Stephen says : "The 
 vivacity of the description the delight with which Scott 
 throws himself into the pursuit of his knick-knacks and an- 
 tiquarian rubbish has something contagious about it." 
 Dulcken declares that " when one has said that Scott is ex- 
 ceedingly spirited, one has expressed the most salient and the 
 finest of his excellencies. ' ' 
 
 " His store of images is so copious that he never dwells 
 upon one long enough to produce weariness in the reader; 
 and, even when he deals in borrowed or in tawdry wares, the 
 rapidity of his transition and the transient glance with which 
 he is satisfied as to each, leave the critic no time to be 
 offended, and hurry him forward along with the multitude,
 
 374 SCOTT 
 
 enchanted with the brilliancy of the exhibition. 
 His narrative, in this way, is kept constantly full of life, 
 variety, and color, and is so interspersed with glowing de- 
 scriptions and lively illusions and flying traits of sagacity and 
 pathos as not only to keep our attention continually awake 
 but to afford a pleasing exercise to most of our other facul- 
 ties. "Jeffrey. 
 
 " The poet could only supply his want of abstract grandeur, 
 of mental introspection, of profound pathos, by thrilling in- 
 cident, by startling contrasts of situation, by grand scenic 
 effects, by powerful delineation of character. . . . It is 
 owing to his success in breathing into the martial relics of 
 chivalry the spirit of human life that Scott is entitled to a 
 high place in narrative poetry. . . . His heroes stride 
 before us with an earnestness rather than with the sentimen- 
 tality which speaks the atmosphere of romance." J. Drvey. 
 
 " He had no philosophic meditativeness, but he knew how 
 to tell a story. . . . There is a confident ease in his 
 way of telling a story which no other writer of English fiction 
 has ever possessed in anything like the same degree. He has 
 made history live." R. L. Stevenson. 
 
 " Scott's poetry abounds in vigorous, rushing lines, which 
 no one familiar with them in youth is likely to forget in after 
 years. . . . His genius was fed less on meditation than 
 on action, and there is a strength and swiftness of movement 
 in his verse which carries the reader with it. The author of 
 ' Marmion ' never fails for want of vigor, and never loiters by 
 the way when the plot requires that he should move over the 
 ground swiftly. ' ' -J. Dennis. 
 
 "The first quality of his character, or, rather, that which 
 forms the basis of it, is his energy." W. H. Prescott.
 
 SCOTT 375 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " ' He blenches not ! He blenches not ! ' said Rebecca. ' I see 
 him now ; he heads a body of men close under the outer barrier of 
 the barbican. They pull down the piles and palisades ; they 
 hew down the barriers with axes. His high black plume floats 
 abroad over the throng like a raven over the fields of the slain. 
 They have made a breach in the barriers they rush in they are 
 thrust back! Front-de-Bceuf heads the defenders; I see his 
 gigantic form above the press. They throng again to the breech, 
 and the pass is disputed hand to hand and man to man. God of 
 Jacob ! it is the meeting of two fierce tides the conflict of two 
 oceans moved by adverse winds.'" Ivanhoe. 
 
 " ' I assure you, Colonel,' said Waverley, ' that you judge too 
 harshly of the Highlanders.' 
 
 " ' Not a whit, not a whit ; I cannot spare them a jot I cannot 
 bate them an ace. Let them stay in their own barren mountains, 
 and puff and swell, and hang their bonnets on the horns of the 
 moon, if they have a mind ; but what business have they to 
 come where people wear breeches and speak an intelligible 
 language ? ' . . . 
 
 " 'A fine character you'll give of Scotland upon your return, 
 Colonel Talbot.' 
 
 " ' Oh Justice Shallow,' said the Colonel, 'will save me the 
 trouble" Barren, barren beggars all, beggars all. Marry, 
 good air " and that only when you are fairly out of Edin- 
 burgh, and not yet come to Leith, as is our case at present.'" 
 Waverley. 
 
 " ' Nay, I cannot tell what to make of you,' answered the chief 
 of Maclvor ; 'you are blown about with every wind of doctrine. 
 Here have we gained a victory and your behavior is praised by 
 every living mortal to the skies and the prince is eager to thank 
 you in person and all our beauties of the White Rose are pulling 
 caps for you and/0w, the preux chevalier of the day, are stoop- 
 ing on your horse's neck like a butter-woman riding to market 
 and looking as black as a funeral.' 
 
 " ' I am sorry for our poor Colonel Gardiner's death ; he was 
 once very kind to me.' 
 
 " ' Why, then, be sorry for five minutes, and then be glad again; 
 his chance to-day may be ours to-morrow. And what does it
 
 376 SCOTT 
 
 signify ? the next best thing to victory is honorable death ; but 
 it is a pis-aller, and one would rather a foe had it than one's 
 self.' " \Vaverley. 
 
 5. Quiet, Kindly Humor Toleration Sympathy. 
 "Walter Scott is never bitter; he loves men from the 
 bottom of his heart, excuses or tolerates them ; does not 
 chastise vices, but unmasks them, and that not rudely. His 
 greatest pleasure is to pursue at length^ not, indeed, a vice, but 
 a hobby ; the mania for odds and ends in an antiquary, the 
 archaeological vanity of the Baron of Bradwardine, the aris- 
 tocratic drivel of the Dowager Lady Bellenden that is, the 
 amusing exaggeration of an allowable taste ; and this without 
 anger, because, on the whole, these ridiculous people are es- 
 timable and even generous. Even in rogues like Dirk Hat- 
 teraick, in cut-throats like Bothwell, he allows some goodness. 
 In this critical refinement and in this philosophy he resembles 
 Addison. ... A continuous archness throws its smile 
 over these interior and genre pictures, so local and minute. 
 . . . Most of these good folk are comic. Our author 
 makes fun of them, brings out their little deceits, parsimony, 
 fooleries, vulgarity, and the hundred thousand ridiculous 
 habits people always contract in a narrow sphere of life. 
 . . . By this fundamental honesty and broad humanity, 
 he was the Homer of modern-citizen life." Taine. 
 
 "It is this beneficent spirit which* gives such an air of 
 bonhomie to Scott's humor throughout his works. He played 
 with the foibles of his fellow-beings, and presented them in 
 a thousand characteristic and whimsical lights ; but the kind- 
 ness and generosity of his nature would not allow him to be a 
 satirist." Washington Irving. 
 
 " There is no keen or cold-blooded satire, no bitterness of 
 heart or fierceness of resentment in any part of his writings. 
 His love of ridicule is little else than a love of mirth, and sav- 
 ours throughout of the joyous temperament in which it ap-
 
 SCOTT 377 
 
 pears to have its origin ; while the buoyancy of a raised and 
 poetical imagination lifts him continually above the region of 
 mere jollity and good-humour, to which a taste by no means 
 nice or fastidious might otherwise be in danger of sinking 
 him." -Jeffrey. 
 
 " In dry humour, and in that higher humour which skilfully 
 blends the ludicrous and the pathetic so that it is hardly pos- 
 sible to separate between smiles and tears, Scott is a master. 
 [He produces] creations that make one laugh in- 
 wardly as one reads." R. If. Hutton. 
 
 "And no man has ever seen with more genial vision that 
 mingling of noble qualities with abundant weaknesses which 
 humorists love, . . . with a luminous perception of every 
 man 'ganging his ain gait,' and all the wonderful curves and 
 diversities of path through which he does so, and an amused, 
 affectionate sense of the special foibles, broken bits of folly 
 and wisdom, obstinacies, prejudices, absurdities, which en- 
 velop here and there the best heart and nature." Mrs. Oli- 
 phant. 
 
 " His heart was an unfailing fountain, which not merely 
 the distresses but the joys of his fellow -creatures made flow 
 like water. . . . Rarely, indeed, is this precious quality 
 found united with the most exalted intellect. . . . He 
 had a ready sympathy, a word of contagious kindness or can- 
 did greeting for all. . . . He did not deal in sneers. 
 * Sir Walter,' said one of his old retainers, 'speaks 
 to every man as if he were his blood-relation.' His heart 
 overflowed with that charity which is the life-spring of our 
 religion." W. H. Prescott. 
 
 " There is a genial and, withal, sober manliness about him 
 which is very noticeable. Since his day we have had many 
 varieties of novels, but in this quality of genial humanity 
 Scott still stands unrivalled. . . . His genial healthful- 
 ness preserves in him a cordial and sympathetic view of life. 
 Scott has dealt with every form of human trag-
 
 378 SCOTT 
 
 edy, but he has done so with the large and tolerant spirit 
 of a great master. . . . Above all, he is a great humor- 
 ist. He is quick to see the fun of a situation, and his laugh- 
 ter is Homeric. It is this element of health in which Scott 
 stands supreme, and it is precisely this quality which we most 
 need to-day in our contemporary fiction and poetry. "- 
 W. J. Dawson. 
 
 What a fine, easy, natural, out-of-door air his scenes 
 possess ! What great geniality he has ! . . Scott seems 
 to have had no vanity. He never thrusts himself into the 
 narrative. . . . His books are an evidence of an able, 
 well-balanced mind." B. W. Procter. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " ' Truly,' said Wamba, without stirring from the spot, ' I have 
 consulted my legs upon this matter, and they are altogether of 
 opinion that to carry my gay garments through these sloughs 
 would be an act of unfriendship to my sovereign person and 
 royal wardrobe ; wherefore, Gurth, I advise thee to call off 
 Fangs and leave the herd to their destiny, which, whether they 
 meet with bands of travelling soldiers, or of outlaws, or of wan- 
 dering pilgrims, can be little else than to be converted into Nor- 
 mans before morning, to thy no small ease and comfort.' " 
 Ivanhoe. 
 
 " I must do Balmawhapple, however, the justice to say that 
 he not only kept the rear of his troops, and labored to maintain 
 some order among them, but, in the height of his gallantry, an- 
 swered the fire of the castle by discharging one of his horse-pis- 
 tols at the battlements ; although, the distance being nearly half 
 a mile, I could never learn that this measure of retaliation svas 
 attended with any particular effect." Waverley. 
 
 " Inglewood was, according to her description, a whitewashed 
 Jacobite ; that is, one who, having been long a non-juror, like 
 most of the other gentlemen of the country, had lately qualified 
 himself to act as justice by taking the oaths to Government and 
 this inactivity does not by any means arise from actual stupidity. 
 On the contrary, for one whose principal delight is in eating and 
 drinking, he is an alert, joyous, and lively old soul, which makes
 
 SCOTT 379 
 
 his assumed dulness the more diverting. So you may see Jobson 
 on such occasions like a bit of broken-down bloodlet, con- 
 demned to drag an overloaded cart, puffing, strutting, and splut- 
 tering, to get the Justice put in motion, though while the wheels 
 groan, creak, and revolve slowly, the great and preponderating 
 weight of the vehicle fairly frustrates the efforts of the willing 
 quadruped, and prevents its being brought into a state of actual 
 progression." Rob Roy. 
 
 6. Excessive Detail Diffuseness. "He is elabor- 
 ately minute in the specification of the dress and equipage of 
 his heroes ; he will suspend his narrative until he has settled 
 the martlets on their shields and told us whether the field of 
 their escutcheons is argent ord'or. . . . Scott's pains- 
 taking description of articles of attire, which occasionally has 
 the air of an inventory, though frequently censured, was to 
 some extent necessary, in order to impart an appearance of 
 reality to those few touches on which he relied for breathing 
 animation into figures decorated with so much skill. 
 The truth is, Scott wrote about no subject in which his heart 
 was not profoundly interested, or with the details of which he 
 was not perfectly familiar. This is the real secret of his suc- 
 cess. . . . And this was done with a brilliancy of effect, 
 with a splendor of coloring, with a fidelity to nature, down to 
 the most minute detail, which has never been surpassed ; with 
 a truthful accuracy which simulated life in every degree of 
 rank, and which may be said to have generalized history." 
 J. Devey. 
 
 ' ' The antique relics, the curious works of art, the hangings 
 and furniture, even, with which his halls are decorated, were 
 specially contrived and selected by him ; and to read his let- 
 ters at this time [when he was writing his novels] to his friend 
 Terry, one might fancy himself perusing the correspondence 
 of an upholsterer, so exact and technical is he in his instruc- 
 tions." W. H. Prescott. 
 
 "Scott bestows an apparently disproportionate amount of
 
 380 SCOTT 
 
 imagination upon the mere scene-painting, the external trap- 
 pings, the clothes or dwelling-places of his performers. A 
 traveller into a strange country naturally gives us the ex- 
 ternal peculiarities which strike him. Scott has to tell us 
 what completed the costume of his Highland chiefs or medi- 
 aeval barons. . . . He fairly carried away the hearts of 
 his contemporaries by a lavish display of mediaeval uphol- 
 stery." Leslie Stephen. 
 
 1 ' His faults may be summed up thus : frequent carelessness 
 of language ; occasional quaintness of thought ; a trick of in- 
 troducing learned terms into conversation, and, as with Baron 
 Bradwardine and Jonathan Oldbuck, pursuing the humors of 
 an odd character to a wearisome length ; . . . occasional 
 repetition of himself, and an overloading of his page with an- 
 tiquarian details." George Gilfillan. 
 
 " He is terribly long and diffuse; his conversations are in- 
 terminable ; he is determined, at all events, to fill three vol- 
 umes." Taine. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " The recesses within them were raised a step or two from the 
 wall In one was placed a walnut-tree reading-desk and a huge 
 stuffed arm-chair, covered with Spanish leather. A little cabinet 
 stood beside, with some of its shuttles and drawers open, display- 
 ing hawk's-bills, dog-whistles, instruments for trimming falcons' 
 feathers, bridle-bits of various construction, and other trifles 
 connected with sylvan sport." Woodstock. 
 
 "The human figures which completed this landscape were, in 
 number,two, partaking, in their dress and appearance, of that wild 
 and rustic character which belonged to the woodlands of the West 
 Riding of Yorkshire at that early period. The eldest of these 
 men had a stern, savage, and wild aspect. His garments were of 
 the simplest form imaginable, being a close jacket with sleeves, 
 composed of the tanned skin of some animal, on which the hair 
 had been originally left, but which had been worn off in so many 
 places that it would have been difficult to distinguish, from the 
 patches that remained, to what creature the fur had belonged. 
 This primeval vestment reached from the throat to the knees, and
 
 SCOTT 38! 
 
 served at once all the usual purposes of body-clothing. There 
 was no wider opening at the collar than was necessary to admit 
 the passage of the head, from which it may be inferred that it was 
 put on by slipping it on over the head and shoulders, in the man- 
 ner of a modern shirt or ancient hauberk. Sandals, bound with 
 thongs made of boar's-hide, protected the feet, and a roll of thin 
 leather was twined artificially around the legs, and, ascending 
 above the calf, left the knees bare, like those of a Scottish High- 
 lander. To make the jacket sit yet more close to the body, it was 
 gathered at the middle by a broad leathern belt secured by a 
 brass buckle, to one side of which was attached a sort of scrip, 
 and to the other a ram's horn, accoutred with a mouth-piece, for 
 the purpose of blowing, etc." Ivanhoe. 
 
 " The livery cupboards were loaded with plate of the richest 
 description and the most varied ; some articles tasteful, some 
 perhaps grotesque in the invention and decoration, but all gorge- 
 ously magnificent, both from the richness of the work and value 
 of the materials. Thus, the chief table was adorned by a salt 
 ship-fashion made of mother-of-pearl, garnished with silver and 
 divers warlike ensigns and other ornaments, anchors, sails, and 
 sixteen pieces of ordnance. It bore a figure of Fortune, placed 
 on a globe, with a flag in her hand. Another salt was fashioned 
 of silver, in form of a swan in full sail. That chivalry might not 
 be outwitted amid this splendor, a silver Saint George was pre- 
 sented, mounted, and equipped in the usual fashion in which he 
 bestrides the dragon. The figures were moulded to be in some 
 sort useful. The horse's tail was managed to hold a case of 
 knives, while the breast of the dragon presented a similar accom- 
 modation for oyster-knives." Kenilworth. 
 
 7. False Antiquarianism Anachronism. "Scott 
 knew the Middle Ages perhaps better than any other man of 
 his time; but he did not know them as they are known 
 now ; and an antiquary would pick many holes in his cos- 
 tume. His baronial mansion at Abbotsford was bastard 
 Gothic, and so are many details of his poems." Goldwin 
 Smith. 
 
 " From Walter Scott we learned history ; and yet is this
 
 382 SCOTT 
 
 history ? All these pictures of a distant age are false. Cos- 
 tumes, scenery, externals alone are exact ; actions, speech, 
 sentiments, all the rest is civilized, embellished, arranged in 
 modern guise. We might suspect it when looking at the 
 character and modern life of the author ; for what does he 
 desire ? And what do the guests eager to hear him demand ? 
 Is he a lover of truth as it is, foul and fierce ? An inquisitive 
 explorer, indifferent to contemporary applause, bent alone on 
 defining the transformations of living nature ? By no means. 
 He is in history as he is at Abbotsford, bent on arranging 
 points of view and Gothic halls. . . . Walter Scott 
 pauses on the threshold of the soul and in the vestibule of 
 history, selects in the Renaissance and the Middle Ages only 
 the fit and agreeable, blots out plain-spoken words, licentious 
 sensuality, bestial ferocity. After all, his characters, to what- 
 ever age he transports them, are his neighbors ' cannie ' 
 farmers, vain lairds, gloved gentlemen, marriageable ladies, 
 all more or less commonplace, that is, steady ; by their edu- 
 cation and character at a great distance from the voluptuous 
 fools of the Restoration or the heroic brutes and fierce beasts 
 of the Middle Ages." Taine. 
 
 " What did Scott care for a few anachronisms that would 
 be the ruin of one of our contemporaries? He thought noth- 
 ing of confusing all the dates about Shakespeare in his 'Wood- 
 stock ' and the list of his sins in this respect might be made 
 a long one." 7! 6". Perry. 
 
 " Many inaccuracies of fact might be pointed out in them 
 [Scott's historical novels]. His study of the character of 
 James I. in ' The Fortunes of Nigel ' is in several respects en- 
 tirely mistaken. His description of a euphuist in ' The Mon- 
 astery ' bears no resemblance whatever to the followers of 
 John Lyly." Bayard Tuckerman. 
 
 " The murder of Amy Robsart is placed in the same year 
 with Leicester's magnificent revel at Kenihvorth in Elizabeth's 
 honor. It was, in fact, long before. . . . Scott connects
 
 SCOTT 383 
 
 Lady Derby with the Papist plot, though she had been dead 
 many years, and was no Roman Catholic, but a member of 
 one of the most distinguished Huguenot families of France." 
 C. D. Yonge. 
 
 "The sfudy of antiquarian lore became a necessity of 
 Scott's being. He read up old churches, devoured legendary 
 tales, tracked to its source every heraldic distinction, and 
 studied feudal customs until chivalry became to him the only 
 real thing in the world which had any meaning. 
 He could sing only of ancient feuds, of magical enchantments, 
 of mailed knights bent upon feats of war or gallantry, of gen- 
 tle dames and cowled priests crossing each other's paths in 
 the intrigues of love and statecraft, of errant damsels in 
 moated castles perplexed by the claims of rival chieftains. 
 In intermingling weird superstitions with his narrative, Scott 
 was true to the character of the times he was endeavoring to 
 depict ; but in confounding these with the whole machinery 
 of the supernatural then existing, the poet committed an error, 
 which should not be overlooked in any fair estimate of his 
 powers. . . . When he sacrifices that broad spirit of 
 Christianity permeating all the institutions of chivalry to a 
 few wild legends, he dwarfs the leading element of the age 
 and substitutes an excrescence. . . . Of the abysmal 
 depths of religious feeling, and of the deeper mysteries of the 
 human heart, he knew very little and discoursed less. In not 
 diving beneath the surface, in giving us a mere travesty of the 
 external embodiment in which this intensity of religious feeling 
 had enwrapped itself, Scott so far was untrue to the spirit of 
 the age he would represent. . . . The individual scenes 
 are so artistically finished, the minor incidents are so elab- 
 orated, that we lose sight of the incongruities marring the 
 framework of the design in the lavish shower of beauties flung 
 with reckless profusion at our feet." -J. Devey. 
 
 Sufficient indications of this characteristic have been given 
 in the critical quotations.
 
 384 SCOTT 
 
 8. Romanticism. "Wordsworth turned from the Ti- 
 tanic confusion of the French Revolution to the study of 
 nature; Scott to the study of the romantic past. ... It 
 was the splendor of the past rather than the thrilling strug- 
 gles of the present which fascinated his imagination. . . . 
 From childhood, his memory had been stored with fantastic 
 relics of a legendary past. Old snatches of ballad poetry, 
 curious stories of second-sight, all the odds and ends which 
 the literary antiquary loves and cherishes, were the natural 
 heritage of Scott. The grotesque, the heroic, the romantic, 
 were the diet on which his imagination had been fed. . . . 
 He rekindled the love of chivalry, the old admiration of the 
 troubadour, in the English heart." W. J. Dawson. 
 
 " He obeyed an easy and fertile inspiration, independent 
 of passing questions, a stranger to the struggles of the time, 
 loving past ages, whose ruins he frequented and whose spirits 
 he invoked, searching out every tradition to revive and re- 
 juvenate it." Sainte-Beuve. 
 
 " Diving into the human heart, Scott discovered the secret 
 of gratifying taste by the mysterious. . . . His love for 
 the mysterious led him early to haunt ruined castles and to 
 repeople them with the phantoms of their past existence. 
 That the poet has raised the ghost of chivalry from the tomb 
 in such a manner as to interest the public in its lineaments, is 
 sufficiently evident from the popularity which his works still 
 command." J. Devey. 
 
 " A feeling of superstition seemed to hover about Scott's 
 mind like some strange, mysterious dream, giving a roman- 
 tic coloring to his conversation and his writings." W. H. 
 Prescott. 
 
 " With Scott, the romantic movement, the movement of an 
 extended curiosity and enfranchised imagination, has begun." 
 R. L. Stevenson.
 
 SCOTT 385 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " Attended by this gallant equipage, himself well mounted and 
 splendidly dressed in crimson and gold, bearing upon his hand 
 a falcon, and having his head covered by a rich fur bonnet 
 adorned with a circle of precious stones, from which his long, 
 curled hair escaped and overspread his shoulders, Prince John, 
 upon a gray and high-mettled palfrey, caracoled within the lists 
 at the head of his jovial party, laughing loud with his train, and 
 eying with all the boldness of royal criticism the beauties who 
 adorned the lofty galleries." Ivanhoe. 
 
 " Gradually the galleries became filled with knights and nobles 
 in their robes of peace, whose long and rich-tinted mantles were 
 contrasted with the gayer and more splendid habits of the ladies, 
 who, in a greater proportion than even the men themselves, 
 thronged to witness a sport which one would have thought too 
 bloody and dangerous to afford their sex much pleasure. The 
 lower and interior space was soon filled by substantial yeomen 
 and burghers, and such of lesser gentry as, from modesty, pov- 
 erty, or dubious title, durst not assume any higher place." 
 Ivanhoe. 
 
 " A spectre may, indeed, here and there still be seen of an old, 
 gray-headed and gray-bearded Highlander with war-worn feat- 
 ures, but bent double by age, dressed in an old-fashioned cocked- 
 hat, bound with white tape instead of silver lace ; and in coat, 
 waistcoat, and breeches of a muddy-colored red, bearing in his 
 withered hand an ancient weapon called a Lochaber axe such 
 a phantom of former days still creeps, I am informed, about the 
 statue of Charles the Second." Heart of Midlothian. 
 
 9. Patriotism. Scott, even more than Burns, has made 
 almost every district of Scotland classic ground. His spirit 
 and his memory pervade every scene. The number of visitors 
 to Scotland from foreign lands is an annual testimony to the 
 literary as well as religious truth, "The things which are 
 unseen are eternal." This quality did not appear in his 
 earlier writings so clearly and fairly as in his novels, for 
 Jeffrey wrote, when " Marmion " first appeared : "There is 
 25
 
 386 SCOTT 
 
 scarcely one trait of true Scottish nationality or patriotism 
 introduced into the whole poem." But the following years 
 abundantly reversed this verdict on Scott's work as a whole. 
 John Dennis says : " No man of letters ever did so much for 
 his country. . . . He removed the antagonism that had 
 always existed between the Lowlander and the Highlander. 
 Indeed, the Scotland we know may almost be called his 
 creation. . . . The love of country animated all Scott's 
 life and inspired all his best work." v 
 
 " He idolized the wild scenery of his native country, and 
 has described it in imperishable language." -J. Devey. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " No, Cleveland ; my own rude country has charms for me, 
 even desolate as you think it, and depressed as it surely is, which 
 no other land on earth can present to me. I endeavor in vain to 
 represent to myself those visions of trees and of groves which my 
 eye never saw, but my imagination can conceive no sight in nat- 
 ure more sublime than those waves when agitated by a storm, or 
 more beautiful than when they come, as they do now, rolling in a 
 calm tranquillity to the shore. Not the fairest scene in a foreign 
 land, not the brightest sunbeam that ever shone upon the rich- 
 est landscape, would win my thoughts for a moment from that 
 lofty rock, misty hill, and wide-rolling ocean. Hialtland is the 
 land of my deceased ancestors and of my living father ; and in 
 Hialtland will I live and die." The Pirate. 
 
 " ' Let us have his company, by all means,' answered my com- 
 panion. ' I respect the Scotch, sir ; I love and honor the nation 
 for their sense of morality. Men talk of their filth and poverty ; 
 but commend me to sterling honesty, though clad in rags, as the 
 poet saith. I have been credibly assured, sir, by men on whom 
 I can depend, that there was never known such a thing in Scot- 
 land as highway robbery.' " Rob Roy. 
 
 " ' You do not know the genius of that man's country, sir,' 
 answered Rashleigh ; ' discretion, prudence, and foresight are 
 their leading qualities ; these are only modified by a narrow- 
 spirited but yet ardent patriotism, which forms, as it were, the out- 
 most of the concentric bulwarks with which a Scotchman fortifies
 
 SCOTT 387 
 
 himself against all the attacks of a generous philanthropical prin- 
 ciple. Surmount this mound, you find an inner and still dearer 
 barrier the love of his province, his village, or most probably his 
 clan ; storm this second obstacle, you have a third his attach- 
 ment to his own family his father, mother, sons, daughters, 
 uncles, aunts, and cousins, to the ninth generation.' " Rob Roy. 
 
 10. High Moral Tone Reverence. Dean Stanley 
 speaks justly of " the profound reverence, the lofty sense of 
 Christian honor, purity, and justice that breathe through 
 every volume of the romances of Walter Scott." 
 
 " True virtue and religion are always reverently treated by 
 him ; and if he laughs at the eccentricities and quaint expres- 
 sions of a Puritan or a Covenanter, he never despises a man." 
 -J. Dennis. 
 
 " There is no man that we now recall, of historical celeb- 
 rity, who combined in so eminent a degree the highest 
 qualities of the moral, the intellectual, and the physical." 
 W. H. Prescott. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " Go to the king himself ; speak, speak to him, as the servants of 
 God have a right to speak even to earthly sovereigns. Point out 
 to him the folly and the wickedness of the course he is about to 
 pursue ; urge upon him that he fear the sword, since wrath 
 bringeth the punishment of the sword. Tell him that the friends 
 that died for him in the fields of Worcester, on the scaffolds and 
 on the gibbets, since that bloody day that the remnant, who are 
 in prison, scattered, fled, and ruined on his account deserve 
 better of him and of his father's race than that he should throw 
 away his life in an idle brawl ; tell him that it is dishonest to 
 venture that which is not his own, dishonorable to betray the 
 trust which brave men have reposed in his virtue and in his 
 courage." Woodstock. 
 
 "The sincere and earnest approach of the Christian to the 
 throne of the Almighty teaches the best lesson of patience under 
 affliction. Since wherefore should we mock the Creator with sup-
 
 388 SCOTT 
 
 plications, when we insult Him by murmuring under His de- 
 crees? " The Talisman. 
 
 " The clergyman had reminded them that the next congrega- 
 tion they must join would be that of the just or the unjust ; that 
 the psalms they now heard must be exchanged, in the space of 
 two brief days, for eternal hallelujahs or eternal lamentations ; 
 and that this fearful alternative must depend upon the state to 
 which they might be able to bring their minds before the moment 
 of awful preparation ; that they should not despair on account of 
 the suddenness of the summons, but rather feel this comfort in 
 their misery, that, though all who now lifted their voices or bent 
 the knee in, conjunction with them lay under the same sentence 
 of certain death, they only had the advantage of knowing the 
 precise moment at which it would be executed upon them. 
 ' Therefore,' urged the good man, his voice trembling with emo- 
 tion, ' redeem the time, my unhappy brethren, which is yet left, 
 and remember that, with the grace of Him to whom space and 
 time are but as nothing, salvation may yet be assured, even in 
 the pittance of delay which the laws of your country afford yon.'" 
 Heart of Midlothian. 
 
 II. Dramatic Power. "He is superior to any of his 
 rivals in the creation of incidents, in the manipulation of 
 events, and in the grouping of his characters with a view to 
 secure that dramatic interest so necessary to the dramatic suc- 
 cess of a narrative poem." -J. Devey. 
 
 ' ' Almost every appearance of Meg Merrilies is a stage effect 
 as dramatic in situation as it is in language. . . . Pley- 
 dell is a comedy in himself." L. E. Landon. 
 
 " I see in no other author such a combination of truth and 
 ease and dramatic power." B. W.Procter. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " ' Repeat your defiance when I have counted thrice,' said 
 Everard, ' and take the punishment of your insolence. Once 
 I have cocked my pistol. Twice I never missed my aim. By 
 all that is sacred, I fire if you do not withdraw. When I pro- 
 nounce the next number, I will shoot you dead where you stand.
 
 SCOTT 389 
 
 I am yet unwilling to shed blood I give you another chance of 
 flight. Once twice Thrice! ' 
 
 " Everard aimed at the bosom, and discharged the pistol. The 
 figure waved its arm in an attitude of scorn, and a loud laugh 
 arose, during which the light, as gradually growing weaker, glanced 
 and glimmered upon the apparition of the aged knight, and then 
 disappeared. Everard's life-blood ran cold to his heart. ' Had 
 he been of human mould,' he thought, ' the bullet must have 
 pierced him ; but I have neither will nor power to fight with 
 supernatural beings.' " Woodstock. 
 
 " As, at the blast of that last trumpet, the guilty shall call upon 
 the mountains to cover them, Leicester's inward thoughts invoked 
 the stately arch which he had built in his pride to burst its strong 
 conjunction and overwhelm him in its ruins. But the cemented 
 stones stood fast, and it was the proud master himself who, as if 
 some actual pressure had bent him to the earth, kneeled down 
 before Elizabeth, and prostrated his brow to the marble flag- 
 stones on which she stood. 
 
 "' Leicester,' said Elizabeth, in a voice which trembled with 
 passion, ' could I think thou hast practised on me on me, thy 
 sovereign on me, thy confiding, thy too-partial mistress the 
 base and ungrateful deception which thy present confusion 
 surmises by all that is holy, false lord, that head of thine were 
 in as great peril as ever was thy father's.'" Kenilworth . 
 
 " ' I agree to it, sir ; I agree to it, perfectly,' said Morris, shrink- 
 ing back as Campbell moved his chair toward him to fortify 
 his appeal; 'and I incline, sir, ' he added, 'to retract my in- 
 formation as to Mr. Osbaldistone ; and I request, sir, you will 
 permit him, sir, to go about his business and me to go about 
 mine, also ; your worship may have business to settle with Mr. 
 Campbell, and I am rather in haste to be gone.' ' Then, there 
 go the declarations,' said the Justice, throwing them into the fire; 
 ' and now you are at perfect liberty, Mr. Osbaldistone. And 
 you, Mr. Morris, are set quite at ease.' 
 
 " 'Ay,' said Campbell, eying Morris as he assented with a 
 rueful grin to the Justice's observations, much like the ease of a 
 toad under a pair of harrows. ' But fear nothing, Mr. Morris ; 
 you and I maun leave the house together.' With such a linger- 
 ing look of terror as the condemned criminal throws when he is
 
 390 SCOTT 
 
 informed that the cart awaits him, Morris arose ; but, when on his 
 legs, appeared to hesitate. ' I tell thee, man, fear nothing,' re- 
 iterated Campbell ; ' I will keep my word with you. Bid the 
 Justice farewell, man, and show your Southern breeding.' 
 
 " Morris, thus exhorted and encouraged, took his leave, under 
 the escort of Mr. Campbell ; but apparently new scruples and ter- 
 rors struck him before they left the house, for I heard Campbell 
 reiterating assurances of safety and protection as they left the 
 ante-room." Rob Roy. 
 
 " On the lower step of this throne,vthe champion was made to 
 kneel down. And it was observed that he tottered as they guided 
 him the second time across the lists. Rowena, descending with 
 a graceful and dignified step, was about to place the chaplet 
 which she held in her hand upon the helmet of the champion, 
 when the marshals exclaimed, with one voice, ' It must not be 
 thus his head must be bare ! ' " Ivanhoe.
 
 DE QUINCEY, 1785-1859. 
 
 Biographical Outline. Thomas De Quincey, born at 
 Greenheys, Manchester, August 15, 1785; father a merchant 
 of some literary reputation and culture, a contributor to the 
 Gentleman's Magazine; De Quincey's father dies in 1792, 
 leaving an income of ^1,600 a year to De Quincey and his 
 five brothers and sisters ; the death of three sisters, before he 
 was six years old, had made a profound impression on him, 
 which is recorded in his " Autobiographic Sketches" ; he is 
 first taught by his guardian, the Rev. Samuel Hall, at Salford, 
 and rejoices at the absence of his brother William at a board- 
 ing-school, leaving the sensitive Thomas to be surround- 
 ed by his sisters and not by "horrid, pugilistic brothers" ; 
 De Quincey is precocious ; he enters the school of Dr. Mor- 
 gan, at Bath, in 1796, accompanied by his brother Richard 
 (" Pink ") ; at Bath he attracts attention by his skill in Latin 
 and Greek, writing the latter language easily when thirteen, 
 and conversing in it fluently when fifteen ; he is removed 
 from Bath because of illness, due to a blow on the head by an 
 usher; after a period of seclusion with his mother (" to sub- 
 due his intellectual vanity"), he enters a school at Winkfield, 
 Wiltshire, more religious than thorough ; while at Wiltshire 
 he aids in publishing a school-paper called The Observer ; he 
 visits his friend Lord Westport at Eton and also Lord West- 
 port's family in Ireland ; visits, also, the family of Lord Car- 
 berry, in Northamptonshire, where Lady Carberry has much 
 influence over him ; he enters the Manchester Grammar - 
 School in 1801, hoping to remain three years and thus to 
 gain an " exhibition " of forty guineas, which, with his allow-
 
 392 DE QUINCEY 
 
 ance of ^150 a year, would carry him through Oxford; at 
 Manchester, DeQuincey's liver becomes torpid through lack of 
 exercise and unwise drugging; he becomes wretched and begs 
 his guardians to remove him, but they refuse ; he borrows ten 
 guineas from Lady Carberry (then visiting at Manchester) and 
 runs away in July, 1802 ; he walks to Chester, meets an uncle, 
 and is permitted to proceed to Wales, with an allowance of a 
 guinea a week ; he wanders among the Welsh mountains, 
 learns German, and partly makes his living by writing letters 
 for the peasantry ; feeling the need of books and educated 
 companions, he goes to London, and tries in vain to secure a 
 loan of 200 with which to support himself till attaining his 
 majority ; he is put off by money-lenders, is reduced almost 
 to starvation, sleeps in a deserted house in Soho with a neg- 
 lected child for his companion, and wanders about London 
 during the day ; at one time he is saved from a fainting-fit by 
 the generosity of an outcast woman, immortalized in his auto- 
 biography under the name of "Ann" ; eventually he be- 
 comes reconciled with his friends, and enters Worcester Col- 
 lege, Oxford, with an allowance of ^100 a year ; he is quiet 
 and studious at Oxford, and distinguishes himself in Latin, 
 but he never takes a degree, partly because he despised the 
 examination -system and partly out of diffidence as to oral tests 
 (he insisted on answering questions about Greek in Greek) ; 
 while at Oxford he suffers from a violent toothache, and, at 
 the advice of student friends, takes laudanum for relief, thus 
 beginning his use of opium ; in 1803 he had begun a corre- 
 spondence with Wordsworth, whom he greatly admired ; he 
 meets Coleridge at Nether Stowey in 1807, accompanies Cole- 
 ridge's family to Grasmere, where he meets Wordsworth and 
 Southey, and, on returning, aids Coleridge by lending him, 
 anonymously, through Cottle, the bookseller, ^300 ; De 
 Quincey is again at Oxford early in 1808 ; he goes thence to 
 London, where he meets Davy, Lamb, and others, and studies 
 law in a desultory way at the Middle Temple ; he visits
 
 DE QUINCEY 393 
 
 Wordsworth at Grasmere early in 1809, and, after returning 
 to London and doing some proof-reading, etc., for Words- 
 worth, settles at Townend, Westmoreland, in November, 1809, 
 in a cottage previously occupied by Wordsworth, which he 
 proceeds to " fill with books " ; he forms an intimate friend- 
 ship with Professor Wilson ("Christopher North"), takes 
 long nocturnal rambles with him, and visits him at Edinburgh 
 during the winters of 1814-15 and 1815-16; De Quincey 
 continues to read German metaphysics, and seeks relief in 
 laudanum for an irritation of the stomach; by 1813 he is 
 taking three hundred and forty grains of opium daily ; he 
 becomes attached to Margaret Simpson (daughter of a " states- 
 man " of Westmoreland), reduces his opium allowance to 
 forty grains a day, improves in health, and is married ; the 
 opium-habit soon masters him again, he gives up a projected 
 philosophical work to be called " De Evicndatione Humani 
 Intellciftts," and becomes incapable of mental work ; he reads 
 Ricardo in 1819, and proceeds to draw up " Prolegomena of 
 all Future Systems of Political Economy," which he does not 
 complete; his indulgence in opium causes him to be haunted 
 by monstrous dreams; by the failure of a bank, he loses most 
 of his fortune, and is compelled to do something for support ; 
 he contributes to Blackwood 1 s Magazine (edited by his friend 
 Wilson) and to the Quarterly Review, and, in the summer of 
 1819, becomes editor of the Westmoreland Gazette ; he is 
 recklessly liberal in his financial affairs; in 1821 he again at- 
 tempts to give up opium, goes to London, and is befriended 
 by the Lambs ; he meets Hood, Talfourd. and Hazlitt, and 
 settles for a time at 4 York Street, Covent Garden, where he 
 writes " The Confessions of an English Opium-Eater," which 
 he publishes in the London Magazine for October and Novem- 
 ber, 1821 ; the "Confessions" attract much attention, and 
 are reprinted in 1822 and again in 1823, with an appendix 
 giving a tabulated statement of his daily doses of opium ; he 
 continues his contributions to the London Magazine, including
 
 394 DE QUINCEV 
 
 " Letters to a Young Man Whose Education Has Been Neg- 
 lected " (1823), "The Dialogue of the Three Templars" 
 (1824), and others;, in 1825 he translates, modifies, and ridi- 
 cules the German novel IValladmoor, falsely attributed to Scott, 
 and contributes to Knight 1 s Quarterly, sometimes lodging with 
 Knight, and manifesting amusing simplicity in practical busi- 
 ness affairs ; he becomes recognized as a writer, and is men- 
 tioned by Wilson in the " Noctes Ambrosiana ;" he publishes 
 in BfackwooeTs Magazine a translation of Lessing's " Laoco- 
 6n " (1826) and "Murder as One of the Fine Arts" (Febru- 
 ary, 1827) ; his relations with Blackwood' 's cause him to settle 
 in Edinburgh, where he lodges in Wilson's rooms, late in 1828; 
 he contributes to the Edinburgh Literary Gazette during 
 1828-30 ; is joined by his family at Edinburgh in 1830, and 
 does not return to Westmoreland ; in 1832 he publishes 
 " Klosterheim," which, though never popular, was success- 
 fully dramatized in London; after 1834 he contributes to 
 Tait 's Magazine many autobiographical reminiscences of Cole- 
 ridge, Wordsworth, and other literary friends, in which cer- 
 tain indiscreet revelations caused De Quincey trouble afterward, 
 though he was hardly in a responsible mental condition when 
 the reminiscences were written ; between 1833 and 1837 he 
 loses his wife and two sons ; he lodges for a time at 42 Lothian 
 Street, Edinburgh, apart from his children ; in 1840 he takes 
 a cottage at Mavis Bush, Lasswade, where his daughters settle 
 permanently, and where he stays in the intervals between his 
 sojourns in various places ; he returns to his opium excesses 
 after his wife's death ; in 1844, after much suffering, he makes 
 a final effort, and reduces his daily dose to six grains, which 
 (his daughter says) he never again exceeded ; he hands over 
 his business affairs in full to his daughter, and is not afterward 
 troubled about finances, except as he is embarrassed by his per- 
 sistent extravagance and "wanton charity"; he develops a 
 mania for accumulating papers, and leaves six rooms full at dif- 
 ferent places at the time of his death ; from March, 1841, to
 
 DE QUINCEY 395 
 
 June, 1843, he is at Glasgow as the guest of Professor Lushing- 
 ton and Professor Nichol ; he lodges at Glasgow much of the 
 time from 1843 to 1847 ; he contributes to Blackivood' 1 s from 
 1837 to 1841, and writes biographies of Shakespeare, Pope, 
 and others for the "Encyclopaedia Britannica"; publishes 
 " The Logic of Political Economy " in 1844, and contributes 
 to Taif s Magazine during 1846 and 1847; he meets James 
 Hogg, who projects a collected edition of De Quincey's works ; 
 he is visited, in 1851-52, by James T. Fields, of Boston, 
 who gives him a share of the profits arising from the sale in 
 America of De Quincey's seven volumes of collected writings; 
 he afterward revises his collected writings, which are published 
 during 1853-60; he contributes, also, to Hogg's Instructor; 
 he lodges again at 42 Lothian Street, Edinburgh, and, at 
 seventy, is able to walk fourteen miles daily for exercise ; he 
 attracts much attention by his marvellous powers of conversa- 
 tion ; dies December 8, 1859. 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY ON DE QUINCEY'S STYLE. 
 
 Bayne, P., " Essays in Biography and Criticism." Boston, 1857, Gould 
 
 & Lincoln, I : 15-50. 
 Gilfillan, G., " Literary Portraits." Edinburgh, 1852, J. Hogg, I : 104- 
 
 no; 2 : 294-364. 
 Hodgson, S. H.. " Outcast Essays." London, 1881, Longmans, Green 
 
 & Co., 1-67. 
 Davey, S., "Darwin, Carlyle, and Dickens." London, 1879, Bumpus, 
 
 159-185. 
 Saintsbury, G., "Essays in English Literature." London, 1890, Per- 
 
 cival, 304-339. 
 Masson, D., "English Men of Letters." New York, 1882, Harper. 
 
 134-158. 
 Stephen, L., "Hours in a Library." New York, 1894, Putnam, i: 
 
 237-269. 
 Hunt, T. W., "Representative English Prose." New York, 1887, 
 
 Armstrong, 417-443. 
 Minto, W., " English Prose Literature. " Edinburgh, 1886, Blackwood, 
 
 49-76.
 
 DE QUINCEY 
 
 Mathews, W., " Hours with Men and Books." Chicago, 1882, Griggs, 
 
 9-58. 
 De Quincey, T., "Works " (Autobiography). Edinburgh, 1889, A. & C. 
 
 Black, i : 17-400; 2: 1-81. 
 Oliphant, Mrs., "Literary History of England." New York, 1889, 
 
 Macmillan, 2 : 18-30. 
 Page, H. A., " De Quincey, His Life and Writings." New York, 1877, 
 
 Scribner, v. index. 
 Mason, E. T., " Personal Traits of British Authors." New York, 1885, 
 
 Scribner, 3: 223-275. 
 Nicoll, H. J., " Landmarks of English Literature." New York, 1883, 
 
 Appleton, 360-365. 
 Stephen, L., "Dictionary of National Biography." New York, 1890, 
 
 Macmillan, 14: 385-391. 
 Masson, D., "Essays Biographical and Critical." Cambridge, 1856, 
 
 Macmillan, 447-475. 
 Oliphant, Mrs., "Victorian Age of English Literature." New York, 
 
 1882, Macmillan, 2 : 18-29. 
 
 Giles, H., "Illustrations of Genius." Boston, 1854, Fields, 300-365. 
 Christian Examiner, 74: 77-95 (Cheever); 54: 428-436 (H. T. Tucker- 
 man). 
 
 British Quarterly, 66: 415-433 (A. A. Page); 38: 1-29. 
 Continental Monthly, 5: 650-662 (L. W. Spring). 
 Saturday Review, 66 : 329-330. 
 New Monthly Magazine, 98 : 389-399 (Sir Nathaniel) ; 96 : 142-147 
 
 (Sir Nathaniel). 
 The Spectator, 64: 730-731. 
 North American Review, 74: 425-445 (S. G. Brown); 88: 113-132 
 
 (Phillips). 
 
 Harper's Magazine, I: 141-150. 
 Atlantic Monthly, 12: 345-368 (Alden). 
 Dublin University Magazine, 43 : 409-425 ; 44: 331-345 
 Fortnightly Review, 15: 310-329 (L. Stephen). 
 Quarterly Review, no: 1-35. 
 Christian Remembrancer, 29: 155-191. 
 
 Eraser's Magazine, 62 : 781-792 (H. W. F.) ; 63 : 51-69 (H. W. F.). 
 Westminster Review , 61 : 275-284. 
 Gentleman's Magazine, 37: 117-135 (A. H. Japp). 
 LitteWs Living Age, 66: 151-154 (The Press); 60: 387-398 (The 
 
 Instructor) ; 35 : 442-445 (The Examiner).
 
 DE QUINCEY 397 
 
 PARTICULAR CHARACTERISTICS. 
 
 i. Excessive Qualification and Suspense. A trait 
 of De Quincey closely allied to his habit of digression, and 
 one which the general reader must always regard as a defect, 
 is his tendency to overload his sentences with irrelevant 
 particulars. He appends relative clause to relative clause in 
 several degrees of subordination, and often adds to such a 
 combination a parenthesis within a parenthesis. Obviously, 
 this excessive qualification is generally due to De Quincey's 
 sometimes finical desire for exactness. Another cause of his 
 " long evolutions " is to be found in his continued study of 
 German authors. Many of his constructions are essentially 
 Gothic. " Specially inclined to the elaborate, periodic order 
 of sentence," says T. W. Hunt, " he found himself, at times, 
 so involved midway in the structure as to make clearness 
 impossible." 
 
 "His sentences are stately, elaborate, crowded with quali- 
 fying clauses and parenthetical allusions, to a degree un- 
 paralleled among modern writers. If we try De Quincey by 
 his own rule of 'unwieldy comprehensiveness,' we must con- 
 vict him of many violations." Minto. 
 
 " He is, from the very principles on which his style is con- 
 structed, the most diffuse of writers. . . . His commend- 
 able desire for lucidity of expression makes him nervously 
 anxious to avoid any complexity of thought. . . . He 
 abounds in diffuse discussions of irrelevant topics. . . . 
 Why, on the very first page, having occasion to mention 
 Christendom in the fifteenth century, should he provide against 
 some eccentric misconception by telling us that it did not, at 
 that time, include any part of America ? " Leslie Stephen. 
 
 " He generally knows his conclusion from the first, and 
 sometimes announces it dogmatically at the outset ; but, 
 whether for inquiry toward his conclusion or for proof of it
 
 398 DE QUINCEY 
 
 after it has been announced, his habit is to choose a point of 
 entry and thence, by subtle and intricate windings, to reach 
 the centre, where the concurrent trains will meet, and all will 
 become clear." Mdsson. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " Caesar, the Dictator, at his last dinner party, on the very even- 
 ing before his assassination, when the minutes of his earthly 
 career were numbered, being asked what death, in his judgment, 
 might be pronounced the most eligible, replied, ' That which 
 should be most sudden.' " On Ccesar. 
 
 " Whatever we may swear with our false, feigning lips, in our 
 faithful hearts ; we still believe, and must forever believe, in fields 
 of air traversing the total gulf between earth and the central 
 heavens. Still, in the confidence of children that tread without 
 fear every chamber in their father's house, and to whom no door 
 is closed, we, in that Sabbatic vision, which sometimes is re- 
 vealed for an hour upon nights like this, ascend with easy steps 
 from the sorrow-stricken fields of earth upward to the sandals of 
 God." An English Mail-Coach. 
 
 " At this stage of advance, and when a true European feeling 
 has been created, a ' sensus communist or community of feeling, 
 on the main classification of wars, it will become possible to erect 
 an operative tribunal, or central Amphictyonic Council for all 
 Christendom, not with any commission to suppress wars a policy 
 which would react as a fresh cause of war, since high-spirited na- 
 tions would arm for the purpose of resisting such arrogant de- 
 crees but with the purpose and effect of oftentimes healing local 
 or momentary animosities, and also (by publishing the opinion of 
 Europe assembled in Council) with the effect of taking away the 
 shadow of dishonor from the act of making concessions." On 
 War. 
 
 " I was then fifteen years old and a trifle more, and, as it had 
 come to the knowledge of Mr. G., a banker in Lincolnshire (whom 
 hitherto I have omitted to notice among my guardians, as one 
 too generally prevented from interfering by his remoteness from 
 the spot, but whom otherwise I should have recorded with honor 
 as by much the ablest among them), that some pecuniary advan- 
 tages were attached to a residence at the Manchester Grammar-
 
 DE QUIXCEY 399 
 
 School, while in other respects that school seemed as eligible as 
 any other, he had counselled my mother to send me hither." 
 Confessions of an Opium-Eater. 
 
 2. Inveterate Digression. In one respect De Quincey 
 is far from a model writer, and that is in his ungovernable 
 habit of digressing from his given theme. He not only 
 digresses from his main theme, but he digresses from his first 
 digression, and sometimes even from his third. Says Masson : 
 " His windings have often the appearance of wilful digres- 
 sions. . . . His digressions, however, to use his own 
 phrase, ' have a wonderful knack of revolving to the point 
 whence they set out,' and generally with a fresh freight of 
 meaning to be incorporated at that point. . . . But 
 there are cases, his greatest admirers must admit, in which the 
 subsidiary swallows up the primary, and the captain's lug- 
 gage all but sinks the ship and cargo." "At times," says 
 another critic, " his mind seems to move vaguely round in vast, 
 unreturning circles. The thoughts catch hold of nothing, but 
 are heaved and tossed like masses of cloud by the wind." 
 Minto also finds palliation for this offence in De Quincey's 
 consciousness that he is digressing and his care in inform- 
 ing the reader when he leaves the main theme and when he 
 returns. To use a homely figure, the railway-track of De 
 Quincey's thought is notable for the abundance of switches, 
 and switches from switches ; but the point where he leaves 
 the main track and the point where he returns are generally 
 marked by very distinct signals. 
 
 " You can as soon calculate on the motions of a stream of 
 the aurora as on those of his mind. From the title of any 
 one of his papers, you can never infer whether he is to treat 
 the one announced or a hundred others, or into how many 
 foot-notes he is to draw away, as if into subterranean pipes, 
 its pith and substance. ... At every possible angle of 
 his road he contrives to break off." Gilfillan.
 
 400 DE QUINCEY 
 
 
 
 " De Quincey often offends beyond the possibility of justifi- 
 cation, overloading his sentences, in a gossiping kind of way, 
 with particulars that have no relevance whatever to the main 
 statement. ' ' Minto. 
 
 " The goal, indeed, is always kept in view ; however circuit- 
 ous the wandering may be, there is always a return to the 
 subject." Peter Bayne. 
 
 " Like Bishop Berkeley, who commenced one of his treatises 
 on the virtues of tar-water and ended it on the immortality of 
 the soul, when he [De Quincey] begins a subject, no one can 
 tell what it will include." S. Davey. 
 
 " It is absolutely impossible for him to keep his subject, or 
 any subject. It is as impossible for him to pull himself up 
 briefly in any digression from that subject. In his finest pas- 
 sages, as in his most trivial, he is at the mercy of the will-o'- 
 the-wisp of divagation." Saintsbury. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " I have used my privilege of discursiveness to step aside from 
 Demosthenes to another subject, not otherwise connected with 
 the Attic orator than, first, by the common reference of both sub- 
 jects to rhetoric ; but, secondly, by the accident of having been 
 jointly discussed by Lord Brougham in a paper which (though 
 now forgotten) obtained at the moment most undue celebrity." 
 On Demosthenes. 
 
 " Looking back to the foot-note on the oriental idea of the 
 hakim, as a mask politically assumed by Christ and the evangel- 
 ists, under the conviction of its indispensableness to the free 
 propagation of Christian philosophy, I am, indeed, inclined for the 
 sake of detaining the reader's eye a little longer upon a matter 
 so important in the history of Christianity, if only it may be re- 
 garded as true, to subjoin an extract from a little paper written 
 by myself heretofore, but not published. I may add these two 
 remarks, viz.," etc. On Judas Iscariot. 
 
 " Out of this digression, for the purpose of showing how inex- 
 tricably my feelings and images of death were entangled with 
 those of summer, as connected with Palestine and Jerusalem, let
 
 DE QUINCEY 4OI 
 
 me come back to the bed-chamber of my sister." Autobiog- 
 raphy. 
 
 " I beg the reader's pardon for this disproportioned digression, 
 into which I was hurried by my love for our great national litera- 
 ture, my anxiety to see it among educational resources invested 
 with a ministerial agency of far ampler character, but, at all events, 
 to lodge a protest against that wholesale neglect of our supreme 
 authors which leaves us open to the stinging reproach of ' tread- 
 ing daily with our clouted shoon ' (to borrow the words of Comus) 
 upon that which high-minded foreigners regard as the one para- 
 mount jewel in our national diadem. 
 
 " This incident I have digressed to mention because this Malay 
 (partly from the picturesque exhibition he assisted to frame, 
 partly from the anxiety I connected with his image for some days) 
 fastened afterward upon my fancy, and through that upon my 
 dreams, bringing with him other Malays worse than himself, that 
 ran ' amuck ' at me and led me into a world of nocturnal trou- 
 bles. " Opium- Eater. 
 
 3. Scrupulous Precision Subtlety. De Qtiincey is 
 one of the most accurate of our writers in his use of language. 
 If the highest attainment in style is always to use the right word 
 in the right place, then the estimate placed upon De Quincey 
 by Masson, William Mathews, and others must be accepted 
 as correct. Mathews calls him " by universal acknowledg- 
 ment the most powerful and versatile master of the English 
 tongue in our time." He is certainly the most scholarly, the 
 most subtle and analytic of the great essayists. De Quincey 
 once said of himself: ''From my birth I was made an in- 
 tellectual creature. . . . My proper vocation, as I well 
 knew, was the exercise of the analytic understanding." Mas- 
 son declares that " De Quincey's sixteen volumes of magazine 
 articles are full of brain from beginning to end." It is, in 
 part, at least, the marvellous range of De Quincey's scholarship 
 that gives him "his wonderful power of alighting on the 
 exact word that is fittest." As Wilson puts it: "The best 
 word always comes up." De Quincey has what Masson calls 
 26
 
 402 DE QUINCEY 
 
 " the metaphysical mood." Says another critic: "We are 
 struck at once by the exquisite refinement of mind, the sub- 
 tleness of association, and the extreme tenuity of the threads 
 of thought." " Nothing can be more exquisite," says Minto, 
 " than De Quincey's subtlety in distinguishing wherein things 
 agree and wherein they differ. . . . The strong point in 
 his diction is his acquaintance with the language of the 
 thoughts and feelings, with the subjective side of the English 
 vocabulary. . . . None of our .writers in general litera- 
 ture have shown themselves so scrupulously precise." De 
 Quincey sometimes carries this quality to an extreme by need- 
 lessly cumbering his sentences with definitions of the terms 
 used and with too minute explicitness of statement. He de- 
 lights in subtle speculations, in the analysis of motives, in con- 
 jecture as to the possible results of an action. He has what he 
 himself calls " an inner eye and power of intuition for the un- 
 seen." He " revels in nice distinctions and scrupulous qual- 
 ifications." 
 
 " So far as one might acquiesce in the description of some 
 of De Quincey's mental products as ' wire-drawn,' it is in 
 cases where one might agree with Carlyle, that the kind of 
 matter dealt with was not worth so much manipulation, and 
 that simple assumption or asseveration or decision by a toss-up, 
 would have saved time and answered all practical purposes. 
 Very rarely, however, will one of De Quincey's subt- 
 lest ingenuities be voted useless by any reader who does come 
 qualified with the due amount of preliminary interest in the 
 kind of matter discussed so much pleasure is there in ob- 
 serving the ingenuity itself, and so certain it is, as has been 
 already said, that some germ of future thought will be left if 
 the immediate result has been disappointing. Then, with 
 what a passion for scientific exactness does De Quincey treat 
 everything, and in what a state of finished clearness at the end 
 he leaves every speculation of his, so far as it may have been 
 carried ! His numerical divisions and subdivisions, so un-
 
 DE QUINCEY 403 
 
 usual in literary papers, are themselves signs of the practised 
 thinker refusing to part with any of the habits or devices of 
 scientific analysts wherever they will help him. In short, very 
 seldom has there been such a combination of the purely log- 
 ical intellect with so much of scholarly erudition." Masson. 
 
 " He has all the characteristics of a scholar of the best and 
 rarest kind the scholar who is exact as to language without 
 failing to comprehend literature and competent in literature 
 without being slipshod as to language." Saintsbury. 
 
 " Each step of his argument, each shade of meaning, and 
 each fact in his narrative, must have its own separate embodi- 
 ment ; and each joint and connecting link must be carefully 
 and accurately defined." Leslie Stephen. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " In that great social organ which, collectively, we call litera- 
 ture there may be distinguished two separate offices that may 
 blend, and often do so, but capable, severally, of a severe insu- 
 lation, and naturally fitted for reciprocal repulsion. The function 
 of the first is to teach ; the function of the second is to move. 
 The first is a rudder ; the second, an oar or a sail." Essays. 
 
 " Wine unsettles and clouds the judgment, and gives a preter- 
 natural brightness and a vivid exaltation to the contempts and 
 admirations, to the loves and the hatreds, of the drinker ; opium, 
 on the contrary, communicates serenity and equipoise to all the 
 faculties, active and passive ; and, with respect to the temper and 
 moral feelings in general, it gives simply that sort of vital warmth 
 which is approved by the judgment, and which would probably 
 always accompany a bodily constitution of primeval or antedi- 
 luvian health." Confessions of an Opium-Eater . 
 
 " What, then, is religion ? Decomposed into its elements, as 
 they are found in Christianity, how many powers for acting on the 
 heart of man does, by possibility, this great agency include ? 
 According to my own view, four. I will state them and number 
 them. Firstly, a form of worship, a cultus. Secondly, an idea 
 of God. . . . Thirdly, an idea of the relation which man oc- 
 cupies to God. . . . Fourthly, a doctrinal part, . . . and
 
 4O4 DE QUINCEY 
 
 this [doctrinal part] divides into two great sections." Christian- 
 ity an Organ of Political Movement. 
 
 " In general, whenever a paramount interest of human nature 
 is at stake, a suicide which maintains that interest is self-homi- 
 cide ; but, for a personal interest, it becomes self-murder." 
 Murder as a Fine Art. 
 
 4. Stately Rhythm. De Quincey ranks with Hooker 
 and Milton as a master of stately, melodious cadence. Says 
 Leslie Stephen : " De Quincey stands absolutely alone as the 
 inventor and sole performer on a new musical instrument 
 for such an instrument is the English language in his hands. 
 The sentences are so delicately balanced and so skil- 
 fully constructed that his finer passages fix themselves in the 
 memory without the aid of metre. . . . His most ex- 
 quisite passages are intended to be musical compositions in 
 which words have to play the part of notes. . . . If De 
 Quincey obtains, without the aid of metre, graces which few 
 other writers have won by the same means, it is all the more 
 creditable to De Quincey. One may fancy that, if De Quin- 
 cey's language were emptied of all meaning whatever, the 
 mere sound of the words would move us, as the lovely word 
 Mesopotamia moved Whitefield's hearers." The Opium- 
 Eater gloried in this power of his ; he delights in what he 
 calls "bravura," "melodious ascents." "His prose," says 
 T. W. Hunt, " possesses what Beethoven calls ' pronunciabili- 
 ty,' and what Masson calls 'musical beauty.' . . . Intellect- 
 ual as his style was, it was conspicuously artistic, and this 
 pictorial and artistic quality rises at times to magnificence." 
 Mathews calls De Quincey's prose " the most passionately 
 eloquent, the most thoroughly poetical prose our language has 
 produced, the organ-like variety and grandeur of its cadence 
 affecting the mind as only perfect verse affects it." Masson 
 calls it " the style of sustained splendor, of prolonged wheel- 
 ing and soaring, as distinct from the style of crackle and brief 
 glitter, of chirp and short flight." One critic says of certain
 
 DE QUINCEY 405 
 
 passages in De Quincey's " Suspt'ria," " The mind is swept 
 away by them into some shadowy region, where one vision of 
 innocence, or beauty, or fear, or sorrow chases another till 
 all at last ' fade into the light of common day. ' ' In one of 
 his essays, De Quincey interrupts himself to explain that he 
 might have ended the sentence more briefly by substituting 
 for the last nine words the single term master-builder, but 
 adds that his ear could not endure "a. sentence ending with 
 two consecutive trochees, and each of these trochees ending 
 with the same syllable er. " "Ah, reader," he exclaims, 
 " I would the gods had made thee rhythmical, that thou 
 mightest comprehend the thousandth part of my labors in 
 the evasion of cacophony ! " 
 
 " The acutest and, at the same time, the most gorgeous 
 and eloquent writer of English prose in the nineteenth cen- 
 tury, combining the rarely harmonizing elements of severe 
 logic and exuberant fancy." William Mathews. 
 
 " Many passages might be quoted from De Quincey of which 
 the melody is so striking as irresistibly to attract attention 
 and make us linger lovingly over them, apart altogether from 
 the matter they contain." H. G. Nicoll. 
 
 " De Quincey is rich in the language of elaborate stateliness. 
 
 He takes rank with Milton as one of the masters of 
 
 stately cadence as well as of sublime composition. . . . 
 
 He finds the happiest exercise of his powers in sustained 
 
 flights through the region of the sublime." Minto, 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " From the silence and deep peace of this summer night from 
 the pathetic blending of this sweet moonlight, dawnlight, dream- 
 light from the manly tenderness of this flattering, whispering, 
 murmuring love suddenly, as from the woods and fields sud- 
 denly, as from the chambers of the air opening in revelation 
 suddenly, as from the ground yawning at her feet, leaped upon 
 her, with the flashing of cataracts, Death, the crowned phantom,
 
 406 DE QUINCEY 
 
 with all the equipage of his terrors and the tiger-roar of his 
 voice." The Stage- Coach. 
 
 " O just, subtile, and mighty opium ! that to the hearts of 
 poor and rich alike, for the wounds that will never heal and for 
 1 the pangs that tempt the spirit to rebel,' bringest an assuaging 
 balm ; eloquent opium ! that with thy potent rhetoric stealest 
 away the purposes of wrath, and, to the guilty man, for one night 
 givest back the hopes of youth and hands washed pure from 
 blood . " Confessions of an Opium- Eater. 
 
 " Then, like a chorus, the passion deepened. Some greater 
 interest was at stake, some mightier cause than ever yet the 
 world had pleaded or trumpet had proclaimed. Then came sud- 
 den alarms ; hurryings to and fro ; trepidations of innumerable 
 fugitives ; darkness and light ; tempests and human faces ; and 
 at last, with the sense that all was lost, female forms and the 
 features that were worth all the world to me ; and, but a moment 
 allowed and clasped hands, with heart-breaking partings, and 
 then everlasting farewells ! and, with such a sigh as the caves 
 of hell sighed when the incestuous mother uttered the abhorred 
 name of Death, the sound was reverberated everlasting fare- 
 wells ! and again, and yet again reverberated everlasting fare- 
 wells ! " Confessions of an Opium- Eater. 
 
 5. Sense of the Mysterious. A profound sense of 
 awe in the presence of the phenomena of nature characterizes 
 De Quincey's mind and style. Says Leslie Stephen: "He 
 appeals to our terror of the infinite, to the shrinking of the 
 human mind before astronomical distances and geological 
 periods of time. He paints vast perspectives, opening in long 
 succession, till we grow dizzy in the contemplation. . . 
 Melancholy and an awe-stricken sense of the vast and vague 
 are the emotions which he communicates with the greatest 
 power." Minto observes that De Quincey's tendency was to 
 " discover and develop lurking objects of admiration and as- 
 tonishment." He seems constantly to be under the impres- 
 sion that certain mysterious and occult agencies, not conceived
 
 DE QUINCEY 4O/ 
 
 by ordinary men, are interfering with human affairs. Masson 
 suggests that "the best name for this variety of the affection 
 for the mysterious in De Quincey's mind is Druidism, or the 
 Druidic element. He was wrapt in religious wonder ; he 
 went through the world, one may say, in a fit of metaphysical 
 musing. . . . The thunder and the lightning, the sun 
 in the heavens, the nocturnal sky, the quiet vastness of a 
 mountain range, the roar of the unresting ocean, the carnage 
 of a great battle-field, the stealthy ravage of a pestilence such 
 were the physical grandeurs, and such the facts and moments 
 of historic majesty, with which De Quincey's mind delighted 
 to commune. It was a saying of his own that he could not 
 live without mystery. No man that is worth much can." 
 
 " He is to some extent an intellectual mystic meaning a 
 certain affinity for the mysterious a strange idiosyncrasy, in 
 which associations of terror, of gladness, or of gloom link 
 themselves with certain seasons and places." Peter Bayne. 
 
 " None, we think, have so dipped their pens in the varied 
 lines of sunshine and gloom, or been able to fix that which is 
 fleeting and transient. De Quincey lived in a 
 
 dream-world until dreams became, as it were, the substantial 
 realities of his existence." S. Davey. 
 
 " He is much of a thinker on the metaphysics of things, 
 and he feels the mystery of being; he is much of an inquirer 
 into the constitution of things, and he feels the mystery of 
 creation ; he is much of a muser on this full world, this vital 
 world, throbbing in every speck of it with a quickening pulse, 
 and he feels the mystery of life." H. Giles. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " The sun of midsummer, at mid-day, was showering down tor- 
 rents of splendor. The weather was dry, the sky was cloudless, 
 the blue depths seemed the express types of infinity ; and it was 
 not possible for the eye to behold or for the heart to conceive any 
 symbols more pathetic of life and the glory of life. ... A
 
 408 DE QU1XCEY 
 
 solemn wind began to blow the saddest that ear ever heard. It 
 was a wind that might have swept the fields of mortality for a 
 thousand centuries ; whose hollow, sad, Memnonian but saintly 
 swell was the one great audible symbol of eternity. Then a 
 trance fell upon me. A vault seemed to open in the zenith of 
 the far, blue sky, a shaft which ran up forever. Frost gathering 
 frost, some Sarsar wind of death seemed to repel me ; some 
 mighty relation between God and death dimly struggled to evolve 
 itself from the dreadful antagonism between them." Autobiog- 
 raphy. 
 
 " The awful stillness oftentimes of summer noons, when no 
 winds were abroad, the appealing silence of gray or misty after- 
 noons these were fascinations as of witchcraft. Into the woods, 
 into the desert air 1 gazed, as if some comfort lay hid in them. 
 Obstinately I tormented the blue depths with my scrutiny, sweep- 
 ing them forever with my eyes and searching them for one angelic 
 face that might perhaps have permission to reveal itself for a 
 moment." A utobiography. 
 
 " Great is the mystery of Space, greater is the mystery of Time. 
 Either mystery grows upon man as man himself grows ; and 
 either seems to be a function of the godlike which is in man. He 
 trembles at the abyss into which his bodily eyes look down." 
 Autobiography. 
 
 6. Erudition Extensive Range. "One may mark 
 the indications of a gigantic receptive faculty seizing hundred- 
 handed, and gathering into one store-house, from all lands and 
 centuries, what intellectual treasures it chooses to make its 
 own. " Peter Bayne. 
 
 " One of the first things that strikes us is the multifarious- 
 ness of his knowledge. A systematic student in none of the 
 sciences, nevertheless he had gleaned technical terms from 
 every science." Minto. 
 
 " An obvious characteristic of De Quincey's writings is their 
 extreme multifariousness. They range over an extraordinary 
 extent of ground, the subjects of which they treat being them- 
 selves the most diverse kinds, while their illustrative references 
 and allusions shoot through a perfect wilderness of miscellane-
 
 DE QUINCEY 4O9 
 
 ous scholarship. . . . There are few courses of reading 
 from which a young man of good natural intelligence would 
 come away more instructed, charmed, and stimulated, or, to 
 express the matter as definitely as possible, with his mind more 
 stretched. Good natural intelligence, a certain fineness of 
 fibre, and some amount of scholarly education, have to be 
 presupposed, indeed, in all readers of De Quincey. But, even 
 for the fittest readers, a month's continuous course of De Quin- 
 cey would be too much. Better have him on the shelf, and 
 take down a volume at intervals for one or two of the articles 
 to which there may be an immediate attraction. An evening 
 with De Quincey in this manner will always be profitable. 
 Not only was it De Quincey's laudable habit to put brain 
 into all his articles, but it so chanced that the brain he had at 
 his disposal was a brain of no common order. Let us get rid, 
 however, of the disagreeable word brain, and ask, in more 
 manly and less physiological fashion, what were the chief char- 
 acteristics of De Quincey's peculiar mind and genius. At the 
 basis of all, as we have seen, was his wealth of miscellaneous 
 and accurate knowledge." Masson. 
 
 " Few English writers have touched so large a number of 
 subjects with such competence, both in information and in 
 handling. ' ' Saintsbury. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 "Such is man, though a Deucalion elect; such is woman, 
 though a decent Pyrrha. . . . Against thugs, I had Juvenal's 
 license to be careless in the emptiness of my pockets (cantabit 
 I'acuus coram latione viator}. . . . The first, to borrow a 
 technical distinction from medicine, is a case of acute, the second 
 of chronic pleasure. ... I was, indeed, like a person who, 
 according to the old pagan legend, had entered the cave of Tro- 
 phonius. . . . Being an oracle, it is my wish to behave my- 
 self like an oracle and not to evade any decent man's questions 
 in the way that Apollo too often did at Delphi." Confessions of 
 an Opium- Eater.
 
 4IO DE QUINCEY 
 
 " Lord Bacon it is who notices the subtle policy which may lurk 
 in the mere external figure of a table. A square table, having an 
 undeviable head and foot, two polar extremities of what is highest 
 and lowest, a perihelion and an aphelion, together with equatorial 
 sides, opens at a glance a large career to ambition ; while a cir- 
 cular table sternly represses all such aspiring dreams, and so does 
 a triangular table. Yet if the triangle should be right-angled, 
 then the Lucifer seated at the right angle might argue that he 
 subtended all the tenants of the hypothenuse ; being, therefore, 
 as much nobler than they as Atlas wasjiobler than the globe which 
 he carried." Confessions of an Opium-Eater . 
 
 7. Affected Familiarity Forced Homeliness 
 
 Slang. De Quincey seems to have realized that the diffuse- 
 ness and stateliness of his style would prevent him from be- 
 coming a popular writer, for we frequently find evidences of 
 a deliberate and forced attempt to be popular in his diction. 
 Like all forced attempts in writing, these are melancholy fail- 
 ures. The result, in De Quincey's case, comes nearer vulgarity 
 than anything else, and can but be regarded as a blemish on 
 a style possessed of many rare beauties. Says Stephen : " He 
 is conscious that, as a great master of language, he can play 
 what tricks he pleases, without danger of remonstrance. And 
 therefore he every now and then plunges into slang, not ir- 
 reverently, as a vulgar writer might do, but of malice pre- 
 pense. The shock is almost as great as if an organist perform- 
 ing a solemn tune should suddenly introduce the imitation of 
 the mewing of a cat." Another critic calls De Quincey's 
 slangy apostrophes " exquisite foolery." 
 
 " By a kind of reaction from his other extreme of stateli- 
 ness, he is apt to be too familiar and colloquial and to help 
 himself to slang and kitchen-rhetoric." Masson. 
 
 " He has a singular facility of fusing his most learned spec- 
 ulations into the idiom of English thinking, even into the 
 idiom of its drollery and its slang." H. Giles.
 
 DE QUINCEY 41 1 
 
 " He does not disdain to use the slang of all classes, from 
 Cockney to Oxonian." Minto. 
 
 " He is a complete master of the English language even of 
 its slang." 6". Davey. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " Wicked Joseph, listen to me : You've been telling us a fairy- 
 tale ; and, for my part, I've no objection to a fairy-tale in any 
 situation, because, if one can make no use of it oneself, always 
 one knows that a child will be thankful for it. But this tale, Mr. 
 Joseph, happens also to be a lie ; secondly, a fraudulent lie ; 
 thirdly, a malicious lie." The Essencs. 
 
 '"I (said Augustus Caesar) found Rome built of brick, but I 
 left it built of marble.' Well, my man, we reply, for a wondrous- 
 ly little chap, you did what in Westmoreland they call a good 
 darroch (day's work) ; and if navvies had been wanted in 
 those days, you should have had our vote to a certainty." 
 Essay on Casar. 
 
 " If, quitting the one great blazing jewel, the Urim and Thum- 
 mim of the Iliad [Achilles], you descend to individual passages 
 of poetic effect, and if among these a fancy should seize you of 
 asking for a specimen of the sublime in particular, what is it that 
 you are offered by the critics ? Nothing that we remember be- 
 yond one single passage, in which the god Neptune is described 
 in a steeplechase and making play at a terrific pace. And cer- 
 tainly, enough is exhibited of the old boy's hoofs and their spank- 
 ing qualities to warrant our backing him against a railroad for a 
 rump and dozen ; but after all, there is nothing to grow frisky 
 about, as Longinus does, who gets up the steam of a blue- 
 stocking enthusiasm, and boils us a regular gallop of routing." 
 A Brief Appraisal of Greek Literature. 
 
 "Joanna never was in service; and my opinion is that her 
 father should have mended his own stockings, since probably he 
 was the party to make the holes in them, as many a better man 
 than D'Arc does, meaning by that not myself, because, though 
 probably a better man than D'Arc, I protest against doing any- 
 thing of the kind. . . . The better men that I meant were 
 the sailors in the British Navy, every man of whom mends his
 
 412 DE QUINCEY 
 
 own stockings. Who else is to do it ? Do you suppose that the 
 junior lords of the admiralty are under articles to darn for the 
 navy ? "Joan of Arc. 
 
 8. Grotesque, Playful Humor. De Quincey's humor 
 has little of the genial quality which marks that of Lamb and 
 Goldsmith. In many cases it consists of treating horrible 
 themes in a cool, deliberate way, as if he were talking of the 
 most innocent actions of every-day life or the data of some 
 science. Minto calls it " the humour of bringing the ideas 
 of fine art and ordinary business into ludicrous collision 
 with solemn or horrible transactions." In the opinion of 
 another critic, " the first paper on Murder as One of the Fine 
 Arts, with its various and out-of-the-way lore, with its mixture 
 of subtile discrimination and satire and rollicking humor, is 
 worthy "of Professor Wilson or Charles Lamb. ' ' 
 
 " He shows us grotesque and fanciful shapes, with beautiful 
 devices ; faces of cherubims and archangels, side by side with 
 goblin-like forms and unearthly shapes of monstrous divini- 
 ties." S. Davey. 
 
 " De Quincey's humor is odd, unique, as original as his 
 genius. Always playful and stingless, it takes at one time the 
 form of a banter, at another that of mock dignity. At one 
 hour it greets us in the grave robe of the critic, and pokes fun 
 at the learned ; at another, in the scarlet dress of the satirist, 
 and blasts hypocrisy with its ridicule." William Mathews. 
 
 " The delicate wit and irony of the essay upon ' Murder as 
 a Fine Art ' has moved many a reader to such a laugh, tem- 
 pered with a thrill of visionary excitement and horror, as is 
 rare among the laughters of literature." Mrs. Oliphant. 
 
 " A sense of fun follows him into his most serious disqui- 
 sitions, and reveals itself in freaks of playfulness and jets of 
 comic fancy. ... In its display on a smaller scale, it is 
 generally good-natured and kindly. . . . It cannot be said 
 that his humour is of the largest-hearted kind, so dependent is
 
 DE QUINCEY 413 
 
 it on deliberate irony, a Petronian jostling of the ghastly with 
 the familiar or the express simulation of lunacy." Masson. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " If once a man indulge in murder, he comes very soon to 
 think little of robbing ; from robbing he comes to drinking and 
 Sabbath- breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastina- 
 tion. Many a man has dated his ruin from some murder or 
 other that perhaps he thought little of at the time." Murder as 
 a Fine Art. 
 
 " Gentlemen I have had the honor to be appointed by your 
 committee to the trying task of reading the Williams' Lecture on 
 Murder considered as one of the Fine Arts a task which might 
 be easy enough three or four centuries ago, when the art was 
 little understood and few great models had been exhibited ; but 
 in this age, when masterpieces of excellence have been exe- 
 cuted by professional men, it must be evident that, in the style 
 of criticism applied to them, the public will look for something 
 of a corresponding improvement. Practice and theory must ad- 
 vance pari passu. People begin to see that something more 
 goes to the composition of a fine murder than two blockheads 
 to kill and to be killed a knife a' purse and a dark lane. 
 Design, gentlemen, grouping, light and shade, poetry, sentiment, 
 are now deemed indispensable to attempts of this nature." 
 Murder as a Fine Art. 
 
 " It has been repeatedly affirmed by the learned that opium is 
 a tawny brown in color and this, take notice, I grant ; second- 
 ly, that it is rather dear which also I grant ; and thirdly, if 
 you eat a good deal of it, most probably you must do what is 
 disagreeable to any man of regular habits, viz., die." Confes- 
 sions of an Opium- Eater. 
 
 " Hobbes but why, or on what principle, I never could un- 
 derstand was not murdered. This was a capital oversight of 
 the professional men of the seventeenth century ; because in 
 every light he was a fine subject for murder, except, indeed, that 
 he was lean and skinny ; for I can prove that he had money, and 
 (what is very funny) he had no right to make the least resistance ; 
 since, according to himself, irresistible power creates the very 
 highest species of right, so that it is rebellion of the blackest dye
 
 414 DE QUINCEY 
 
 to refuse to be murdered when a competent force appears to 
 murder you." Murder as a Fine Art. 
 
 9. Perception of Resemblances. De Quincey has 
 what he himself calls " the higher faculty of an electric apti- 
 tude for seizing analogies . . . the logical instinct for 
 feelin-g in a moment the secret parallelisms that connect 
 things apparently remote" what T. W. Hunt calls "the 
 detection of those hidden analogies that escape most men." 
 He is a model of exact comparison. 
 
 " Another rare endowment, which he has to a wonderful 
 degree, is the power of detecting resemblances." Mathews. 
 
 "It is a logical intellect, acute in the discovery of agree- 
 ment and difference, fertile in methods of comparison, and 
 decisive in rectitude of inference. " H. Giles. 
 
 " To point out with deliberate some would say with tedi- 
 ous scrupulosity the resembling circumstances in the things 
 compared, peculiarly suits his subtilizing turn of mind. He 
 never seems to be in a hurry, and does not aspire to hit off a 
 similitude in a few pregnant words ; his characteristic is 
 punctilious accuracy, regardless of expense in the matter of 
 words. Nothing can be more exquisite than his subtlety in 
 distinguishing wherein things agree and wherein they dis- 
 agree." Minto. 
 
 " In the act of thinking anything, metonymies, meta- 
 phors, anecdotes, illustrations, historical or fantastic, start up 
 in his mind, become incorporate with his primary thought, 
 and are, in fact, its language." Masson. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 "But strange, indeed, where everything seems strange, is the 
 arrangement of the Ceylonese territory and people. Take a 
 peach ; what you call the flesh of the peach, the substance which 
 you eat, is massed orbicularly round a central stone often as 
 large as a pretty large strawberry. Now, in Ceylon the central 
 district, answering to this peach-stone, constitutes a fierce little
 
 DE QUINCEY 415 
 
 Lilliputian kingdom, quite independent, through many centuries, 
 of the lazy belt, the peach-flesh, which swathes and enfolds it, 
 and perfectly distinct by the character and origin of its popu- 
 lation. The peach-stone is called Kandy and the people Kan- 
 dyans." Essays. 
 
 " To take an image from the language of eclipses, the corre- 
 spondence between the disk of the original nord and its trans- 
 lated representative is, in thousands of instances, not annular ; 
 the centres do not coincide ; the nords overlap." An English 
 Mail Coach. 
 
 "The town of L represented the earth, with its sorrows 
 
 and its graves left behind, yet not out of sight, nor wholly forgot- 
 ten. The ocean in everlasting but gentle agitation, and brooded 
 over by dove-like calm, might not unfitly typify the mind and 
 the mood which then swayed it." Autobiography. 
 
 " In the twinkling of an eye, at a sudden summons, as it were 
 from the sounding of a trumpet, or the oriental call by the 
 clapping of hands, gates are thrown open, which have an effect 
 corresponding in grandeur to the effect that would arise from 
 the opening of a ship-canal across the Isthmu^ of Darien, viz., 
 the introduction to each other face to face of two separate in- 
 finities. Such a canal would suddenly lay open to each other 
 the two great oceans of our planet, the Atlantic and the Pacific ; 
 while the act of translating into Greek and/ram Hebrew, that is, 
 transferring out of a mysterious cipher as little accessible as 
 Sanscrit, and which never -would be more accessible through any 
 worldly attractions of alliance with power and civic grandeur of 
 commerce, out of this darkness into the golden light of a lan- 
 guage the most beautiful, etc." On the Supposed Scriptural 
 Expression for Eternity. 
 
 10. Profound Religious Faith Reverence. 
 
 " De Quincey is a Christian on epicurean principles. He 
 dislikes an infidel because his repose is disturbed by the 
 arguments of free-thinkers. " Leslie Stephen. 
 
 " De Quincey is distinctly and avowedly a Christian." 
 H. Giles. 
 
 " We find a profound and sincere religious feeling. . . .
 
 4l6 DE QUINCEY 
 
 As a moralist, De Quincey takes his stand upon Christianity, 
 and his whole system of belief is built upon it. He is a sin- 
 cere Christian believer, without compromise or reserve. He 
 everywhere extols the Christian religion, and is jealous for its 
 character and sanctity. " C. C. Smith. 
 
 11 With all his errors, De Quincey has not ceased to believe 
 in Christianity." Harper 1 s Magazine. 
 
 " De Quincey ever shows himself a believer in revealed 
 religion and a firm adherent of the Established Church." 
 Christian Examiner. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " The great principles of Christian morality are now so inter- 
 woven with our habits of thinking that we appeal to them no 
 longer as Scriptural authorities but as the natural suggestions 
 of a sound judgment. For instance, in the case of any wrong 
 offered to the Hindoo races, now so entirely dependent upon our 
 wisdom and justice, we British immediately, by our solemnity of 
 investigation, testify our sense of the deep responsibility to India 
 with which our Indian supremacy has invested us. We make no 
 mention of the Christian oracles. Yet where, then, have we 
 learned this doctrine of far-stretching responsibility ? In all 
 Pagan systems of morality there is not the vaguest and slightest 
 appreciation of such relations as connect us with our colonies. 
 But from the profound philosophy of Scripture we have learned 
 that no relations whatever, not even those of property, can con- 
 nect us with even a brute animal but that we contract concurrent 
 obligations of justice and mercy." Essay on Christianity. 
 
 " All false religions have perished by their own hollowness and 
 by internal decay, under the searching trials applied by life and 
 the changes of life, by social mechanism and the changes of social 
 mechanism, which wait in ambush upon every mode of religion. 
 False modes of religion could not respond to the demands ex- 
 acted from them or the questions emerging. One after one they 
 have collapsed, as if by palsy, and have sunk away under new 
 aspects of society and new necessities of man which they were not 
 able to face. Commencing in one condition of society, in one 
 set of feelings, and in one system of ideas, they sank instinc-
 
 DE QUINCEY 417 
 
 lively under any great change in these elements, to which they 
 had no natural power of plastic self-accommqdation. A false 
 religion furnished always a key to one subordinate lock ; but a 
 religion that is true will prove a master-key for all locks alike. 
 This transcendental principle, through which Christianity trans- 
 ers herself so readily from climate to climate, from land to land, 
 from century to century, from the simplicity of shepherds to the 
 utmost refinement of philosophers, carries with it a correspond- 
 ing necessity (corresponding, I mean, to such infinite flexibility) 
 of an infinite development." Essay on Protestantism. 
 
 " How grand a triumph, if, even then, amidst the raving of all 
 around him and the frenzy of the danger, the man is able to con- 
 front his situation is able to retire for a moment into solitude 
 with God and to seek his counsel from Him." The English 
 Mail Coach. 
 
 II. Originality Independence. "The originality, 
 the independence of his exposition is in every case the most 
 remarkable part of it. You have the subject treated at first 
 hand." S. H. Hodgson. 
 
 " He had the independence of a true critic. ... He 
 brings to light and to being that which is his own. He fol- 
 lows here the guidance of no master." T. W. Hunt. 
 
 11 Few, if any, have the indefinable quality of freshness in so 
 large a measure." Saintsbury. 
 
 "Of his multifarious writings all are strongly marked by 
 the individuality of the author." S. Davey. 
 
 " It is rare to find an author whose works seem to bear more 
 truly and clearly the stamp of his own mind, and whose judg- 
 ments moral, political, and literary are set down with less 
 apparent reference to the opinions of contemporaries." 
 G. G. Brown. 
 
 "No one can better develop the utmost possibility of a 
 musty adage, a threadbare proverb, a flavorless bit of slang, 
 or a joke that has seen better days." Littell 's Living Age, 
 from the Press. 
 
 " He was as original a thinker as most men are who take 
 27
 
 418 DE QUINCEY 
 
 comparatively little for granted and who inquire before they 
 conclude." B: A. Page. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 "War stands, or seems to stand, upon the double basis of 
 necessity ; a primary necessity that belongs to our human degra- 
 dations, a secondary one that towers by means of its moral rela- 
 tions into the region of our impassioned grandeurs. The two 
 propositions on which I take my stand are these : first, that 
 there are nowhere latent in society any powers by which it can 
 effectually operate a war for its extermination. The machinery is 
 not there. The game is not within the compass of the cards. 
 Secondly, that this defect of power is not a curse, but on the 
 whole a blessing from century to century, if it is an inconvenience 
 from year to year. The Abolition Committees, it is to be feared, 
 will be angry at both propositions. Yet, gentlemen, hear me 
 strike, but hear me. That's a sort of plagiarism from The- 
 mistocles. But never mind. I have as good a right to the words, 
 until translated back into Greek, as that most classical of yellow 
 admirals. I protest that I should have used these words even 
 if Themistocles had absconded into Scythia in his boyhood." 
 Essay on War. 
 
 "My own impressions incline me to represent the earth as a 
 fine, noble young woman, full of the pride which is so becoming 
 to her sex, and well able to take her own part, in case that, at 
 any solitary part of the heavens, she should come across one of 
 those vulgar, fussy comets disposed to be rude and take improper 
 liberties. But others there are, a class whom I perfectly abom- 
 inate, that place our earth in the category of decaying, nay, of 
 decayed women. Hair like arctic snows, failure of vital heat, 
 palsy that shakes the head as in the porcelain toys on our mantel- 
 pieces, asthma that shakes the whole fabric these they abso- 
 lutely fancy themselves to see; they absolutely hear the tellurian 
 lungs wheezing, panting, crying, ' Bellows to mend ! ' periodi- 
 cally as the earth approaches her aphelion.'' Essay on System 
 of the Heavens. 
 
 12. Insight into Character. "He had an extraor- 
 dinary insight into practical human life ; not merely in the
 
 DE QUINCEY 419 
 
 abstract, but in the concrete ; not merely as a philosopher of 
 human nature, but as one who saw into those who passed him 
 in the walk of life with the kind of intuition attributed to ex- 
 pert detectives." Burton. 
 
 " While it was a peculiarity of his intellect to be exquisitely 
 introspective, he was yet marvellously swift in his appreciation 
 of men and things." William Mathews. 
 
 " He had that mental acumen which found such fitting ex- 
 ercise in the study of men." T. W. Hunt. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 "Knowing that she would reap nothing from answering her 
 persecutors, why did she not retire by silence from the superflu- 
 ous contest ? It was because her quick and eager loyalty to truth 
 would not suffer her to see it darkened by frauds which she could 
 expose. ... It was through that imperishable grandeur of 
 soul which taught her to submit meekly and without a struggle to 
 her punishment, but taught her not to submit no, not for a mo- 
 ment to qalumny as to facts or to misconstruction as to mo- 
 tives." Joan of Arc. 
 
 " It is unintelligibly but mesmerically potent, this secret fasci- 
 nation attached to features oftentimes that are absolutely plain ; 
 and as one of many cases within my own range of positive experi- 
 ence, I remember, in confirmation, at this moment, that in a 
 clergyman's family, counting three daughters, all on a visit to my 
 
 mother, the youngest Miss F P , who was strikingly and 
 
 memorably plain, never walked out on the Clifton Downs unat- 
 tended but she was followed home by a crowd of admiring men, 
 anxious to learn her rank and abode ; whilst the middle sister, 
 eminently handsome, levied no such visible tribute on the public ; 
 I mention this fact one of a thousand similar facts simply by 
 way of reminding the reader of what he must himself have often 
 witnessed, viz., that no woman is condemned by nature to any 
 ignoble necessity of repining against the power of other women ; 
 her own may be far more confined, but within its own circle may 
 possibly, measured against that of the haughtiest beauty, be the 
 profounder." Autobiography,
 
 MACAULAY, 1800-1859 
 
 Biographical Outline. Thomas Babington Macaulay, 
 born at Rothby Temple, Leicestershire, October 25, 1800; 
 father a merchant and publicist, who was active in abolishing 
 the slave-trade ; removes to Birchin Lane and, in Thomas's 
 third year, to Clapham ; Macaulay begins reading at three, 
 and exhibits marvellous powers of memory at four ; is petted 
 by Hannah More; at seven he begins a compendium of uni- 
 versal history, and at eight writes a theological discourse : 
 memorizes Scott's poems and begins writing poems and hymns ; 
 first attends a private school in Clapham, then (in 1812) to 
 the school of one Preston, at Little Shelford, near Cambridge; 
 reads with astonishing voracity and rapidity ; enters Trinity 
 College, Cambridge, in October, 1818; exchanges Tory for 
 Whig political views ; wins college prizes in Latin. declama- 
 tion and in English poetry ; is refused college honors because 
 of his dislike for mathematics ; is made a fellow of Trinity in 
 October, 1824; takes private pupils in 1823, because of his 
 father's business reverses ; his family remove to London in 
 1821 ; Macaulay lives with his parents till 1829 ; is called to 
 the bar in 1826; does not practise, but frequents the House 
 of Commons, makes political speeches, and writes for the mag- 
 azines; first contributes to Knighf s Quarterly Magazine an 
 article on " Ivry and the Armada;" in August, 1825, pub- 
 lishes in the Edinburgh Review his essay on Milton, which 
 is highly praised by Jeffrey ; is offered the editorship of the 
 Edinburgh Review on Jeffrey's retirement, but declines; his 
 other essays, twenty-six in number, appear in the Edinburgh 
 Review from 1825 to 1844 ; is made a Commissioner in Bank- 
 ruptcy in 1828, by Lord Lyndhurst, a political opponent; 
 
 420
 
 MACAULAY 421 
 
 this, with his fellowship and his receipts from the Review, 
 give him an income of ^900 ; he is elected a member of 
 Parliament for Calne in 1830; wins great fame by a speech 
 on the second reading of the Reform Bill in 1831 ; is courted 
 by Sydney Smith, Hallam, and other literary celebrities ; by 
 the abolition of his commissionership and the expiration of his 
 fellowship Macaulay is reduced to selling his university gold 
 medals ; he engages in controversy with J. W. Croker ; is 
 made a Commissioner of the Board of Control [of Indian 
 affairs] in 1832, and soon afterward becomes secretary of the 
 board; continues in Parliament, representing Leeds; although 
 needing the income as commissioner to help pay his father's 
 debts, Macaulay resigns his office so as to be free to oppose a 
 government bill for apprenticing liberated slaves ; his resigna- 
 tion is not accepted ; he is offered a seat in the Supreme Coun- 
 cil of India, at ^10,000 a year for five years ; he accepts only 
 on condition that his sister Hannah shall accompany him to 
 India ; sails for India in February, 1834 ; resides at Calcutta 
 till December, 1838, when he returns to England; is made 
 president of a committee which founds the educational system 
 of India ; prepares, also, a criminal code for India, which was 
 published in December, 1837 ; his penal code became law in 
 1860 ; meantime Macaulay reads a vast amount of classical 
 literature, and learns German on his homeward voyage ; on 
 arriving he is challenged to a duel by one Wallace, whose life 
 of Mclntosh Macaulay had condemned in the Edinburgh Re- 
 view ; Macaulay accepts the challenge, but friends arrange a 
 bloodless settlement ; he makes a tour of Italy in the autumn 
 of 1838, and receives impressions for his "Lays of Ancient 
 Rome;" returns to London, and begins his "History of 
 England " in March, 1839 ; is elected to Parliament for 
 Edinburgh in 1839, and becomes Secretary of War in Sep- 
 tember of that year ; till 1841 he lives in London with Sir 
 George Trevelyan, who had married Macaulay's sister Han- 
 nah ; he is reluctantly forced to publish his essays in 1843, as
 
 422 MACAULAY 
 
 Americans had already published them ; the annual sales of the 
 essays reach 6,000 by 1864; publishes his " Lays of Ancient 
 Rome " in 1842 ; 18,000 copies are sold during the first ten 
 years ; in 184142 Macaulay advocates and secures important 
 changes in the law of copyright ; he advocates the repeal of the 
 corn-laws; is made Paymaster-General in 1846, and is re- 
 elected for Edinburgh ; is defeated at the Edinburgh election of 
 1847 because of his approval of the Established Church and his 
 independent views in general ; he declines further participation 
 in politics and devotes himself to literature ; the first two vol- 
 umes of his " History " appear in November, 1848 ; 13,000 
 copies are sold the first four months ; he is ordained Lord Rec- 
 tor of the University of Glasgow in March, 1849; declines 
 the professorship of Modern History at Cambridge ; declines 
 a Cabinet position in 1852 ; his health suddenly and seriously 
 fails ; makes his last speech in the House of Commons in July, 
 1853 ; prepares civil-service rules and examinations for India 
 in 1854; publishes the third volume of his "History" in 
 December, 1855 ; 26,500 copies are sold during the first ten 
 weeks; the "History" is at once translated into twelve 
 languages, and in March, 1856, Macaulay receives from his 
 publishers royalties amounting to ^20,000 ; he buys and set- 
 tles at Holly Lodge, Kensington, in 1856 ; accepts a peerage in 
 1857 ; is made high steward of the borough of Cambridge in 
 1857 ; continues work upon his "History," and contributes 
 several articles to the "Encyclopaedia Britannica ; " dies at 
 Holly Lodge, December 28, 1859, and is buried in Westmin- 
 ster Abbey; the fifth volume of the "History," edited by 
 Lady Trevelyan, appeared in 1861. 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY ON MACAULAY'S STYLE. 
 
 Saintsbury, G., "Impressions." New York, 1895, Dodd, Mead & Co., 
 
 79-98. 
 Oliphant, Mrs., "Victorian Age of English Literature." New York, 
 
 1892, Tail, H9-I97-
 
 MACAULAY 423 
 
 Minto, W., "English Prose." Edinburgh, 1886, Blackwood, 87-130. 
 Stirling, J. H., "Jerrold, Tennyson, and Macaulay." Edinburgh, 1868, 
 
 Edmonston & Douglas, 112-172. 
 Pebody, C, "Authors at Work." London, 1872, W. H. Allen, 208- 
 
 246. 
 Jones, C. H., "Macaulay, His Life and Writings." New York, 1880, 
 
 Appleton, 229-247. 
 
 Lancaster, H. H., "Essays and Reviews." Edinburgh, 1876, Edmon- 
 ston & Douglas, 178-229. 
 Mason, E. T., " Personal Traits of British Authors." New York, 1885, 
 
 Scribner, 4: 33-81. 
 Stevens, A., "Character Sketches." New York, 1882, Phillips & Hunt, 
 
 53-107. 
 Russell, A. P., "Characteristics." Boston, 1893, Houghton, Mirflin & 
 
 Co., 74-105. 
 Russell, W. C., "The Book of Authors." London, 1879, Warne & 
 
 Co., 469-472. 
 Skelton, J., "Essays in History and Biography." Edinburgh, 1883, 
 
 Blackwood, 279-283. 
 Stephen, L., "Hours in a Library." New York, 1894, Putnam, 3: 
 
 343-376. 
 
 Collier, W. F., " History of English Literature." London, 1892, Nel- 
 son, 461-467. 
 Nicoll, H. J., "Landmarks of English Literature." New York, 1893, 
 
 Appleton, 412-420. 
 Welsh, A. H., "Development of English Literature." Chicago, 1884, 
 
 Griggs, 2: 301-309. 
 Taine, H. A., "History of English Literature." New York, 1875, 
 
 Holt, 3 : 256-294. 
 Stephen, L., "Dictionary of National Biography." New York, 1890, 
 
 Macmillan, 34 : 410-418. 
 Henley, W. E., "Views and Reviews." New York, 1890, Scribner, 
 
 1 6. 
 
 Home, R. H., "A New Spirit of the Age." New York, 1844, Har- 
 per, 2 1 1-22 1. 
 
 Grimm, H., " Literature." Boston, 1886, Cupples & Co., 130-168. 
 Bayne, P., "Essays in Biography and Criticism." Boston, 1858, 
 
 Gould & Lincoln, 2 : 52-85. 
 Gilfillan, G., "Literary Portraits." Edinburgh, 1851, J. Hogg, i: 262- 
 
 271; 2: 81-100; 3: 278-313. 
 Whipple, E. P., "Essays and Reviews." Boston, 1861, Ticknor, i: 
 
 9-31-
 
 424 MACAULAY 
 
 Bagehot, W., "Literary Studies." Hartford, 1856, Travellers' Insur- 
 ance Company, 2 : 58-99. 
 Martineau, H., "Biographical Sketches." New York, 1876, Leopold 
 
 & Holt, 102-113. 
 
 Freeman, E. A., "Atlas Essays." New York, 1877, Banks, 2: 1-14. 
 Morley, J., "English Men of Letters" (Morrison). New York, 1882, 
 
 Harper, 38-65. 
 Spedding, J., " Evenings with a Reviewer." Boston, 1882, Houghton, 
 
 Mifflin & Co., v. index., 2 vols. 
 Trevelyan, G. O., "Life and Letters of Macaulay. " New York, 1876, 
 
 Longmans, Green & Co., 1 : 1-465 ; ~2 : 1-480. 
 Punshon, W. M., " Life of Macaulay" (Exeter Hall Lectures). Boston, 
 
 1873, Estes & Lauriat, 39-97. 
 Anton, P., "Masters in History." Edinburgh, 1880, Macmillan, 121- 
 
 194. 
 Gladstone, W. E., " Gleanings, " etc. New York, 1879, Scribner, 2: 
 
 265-341. 
 Kebbel, T. E., "Essays upon History and Politics." London, 1864, 
 
 Chapman & Hall, 30. 
 Morley, J., "Critical Miscellanies." New York, 1893, Macmillan, i: 
 
 253-293- 
 
 Fortnightly Review, 25 ; 494-514 (J. Morley). 
 
 Quarterly Review, 142: 1-50 (Trevelyan); 124: 1-50 and 287-333 
 (Trevelyan); 71: 453-47- 
 
 Harper's Magazine, 53; 85-97 and 238-244 (R. H. Stoddard). 
 
 Princeton Review, 12: 431-451 (J. M. Alexander). 
 
 Belgravia, 29 : 397-410 (T. H. S. Escott). 
 
 Debow's Magazine, 28 : 667-679 (G. Fitzhugh). 
 
 Macmillan 's Magazine, I: 241-247 (F. D. Maurice) ; 34: 85-97 (Mor- 
 rison) ; i: 287-298 (H. Moore). 
 
 Methodist Quarterly, 37 : 197-225 (A. Stevens). 
 
 Saturday Review, 9 : 9-10. 
 
 Littelfs Living Age, 64: 506-509 (Saturday Review}; 37: 323-340 
 {Chambers' s Repository). 
 
 Eclectic Magazine, \<$: 505-509 (Hannah More); 51: 145-161 (J. A. 
 Froude) ; 13 : 35-46 (G. Gilfillan). 
 
 Eraser's Magazine, 62 : 438-446 (J. Skelton) ; 33 : 77-85 ; 62 : 438-446 
 (Shirley) ; 103 : 187-196 (E. Myers) ; 33 : 77-84. 
 
 Spectator, 66: 337-338. 
 
 Edinburgh Review, 100: 252-275. 
 
 Blacfcivood's Magazine, 86 : 162-174. 
 
 Eclectic Review, 3 : 273-276.
 
 MACAULAY 425 
 
 Cornhill Magazine, i: 129-134. 
 
 Forum, 18 : 80-94 (F. Harrison). 
 
 Motion, 56: 16-17 (W. C. Sydney); 22: 337~33 8 and 35 2 -353 (A. V. 
 
 Dicey). 
 
 North American AVrvVa 1 , 93: 418-456 (C. C. Smith). 
 North British Review, 25: 41-58; 33: 229-247 (H. H. Lancaster). 
 
 I. Fondness for Contrast Balance Point 
 
 Epigram. "Macaulay delights to leave us face to face 
 with contrasts. He likes to represent a man as a bundle of 
 contradictions, because it enables him to obtain startling 
 results." Leslie Stephen. 
 
 1 ' He makes considerable use of the conventional balanced 
 phrases for amplifying the roll of a sentence. . . . His 
 pages are illuminated not only by little sparks of antithe- 
 sis but by broad flashes. Not only is word set off against 
 word, clause against clause, and sentence against sentence ; 
 one group of sentences answers another, and paragraphs are 
 balanced against paragraphs. ... A favorite and char- 
 acteristic way of getting up an antithesis is, before narrating 
 an event, to recount all the circumstances that concurred to 
 make it different from what it ultimately proved to be. 
 Another favorite device is in the course of his narrative to 
 speculate what might have happened had circumstances been 
 different. ... A large portion of his sentences contain 
 words and clauses in formal balance. . . . Passages 
 show balance combined with antithesis. . . . The strik- 
 ing characteristic of abruptness in Macaulay's style is caused 
 chiefly by his way of transition and connection. We are 
 constantly being jerked from the immediate subject and back 
 again with a 'but.' . . . Very often all the sentences 
 up to the last are a preparation for the shock of astonishment 
 administered at the close. He likes to occupy the first sen- 
 tences of the paragraph with circumstances leading us to 
 expect the opposite of what is really the main statement. 
 . . . A preference is given to flash and startling facts to
 
 426 MACAULAY 
 
 material that is good for pictures and for dazzling paradoxes. 
 The scintillations of antithesis are almost incessant." Minto. 
 
 " As nimble and concise in wit as Sydney Smith, . . 
 the wonderful clearness, point, and vigor of his style send his 
 thoughts right into every brain. . . . His spice is of 
 so keen a flavor that it tickles the coarsest palate. 
 Common historical events he narrates with all the brilliancy 
 of epigram. ' ' Walter Bagehot. 
 
 " He delights to cram tomes of diluted facts into one short, 
 sharp antithetical sentence and to condense general principles 
 into epigrams. . . . His words overflow with anti- 
 thetical forms of expression and thoughts condensed into 
 sparkling epigrams. His page is brightened by them, gleam- 
 ing over the discussion of a question of taste like incessant 
 flashes of heat-lightning thrown off like glittering sparks in 
 the rush of his declamatory logic." E. P. Whipple. 
 
 11 Macaulay's style was like Pope's . . . artificial by 
 nature; deficient in flexibility and compass, as inferior to 
 Burke as Pope was to Dryden ; below Johnson in elegance 
 and below Hume in combination of strength, polish, and 
 simplicity, he had something which all three wanted, and 
 has in consequence had a thousand readers for every one of 
 theirs. . . . No one of these writers ever leaves us at a 
 loss for his meaning, but they do not pointedly call attention 
 to it. ... We cannot read a page of his work without 
 finding ourselves continually laying stress upon particular 
 words, whether we will or no. To such perfection has he 
 carried this practice that he seldom or never stands in need 
 of italics, and his argument remains impressed upon the mind 
 like a clearly marked tune upon the memory. So much in- 
 deed is this the case that in his later writings his style not un- 
 frequently degenerates into a mere jig." 7! . Kebbel.
 
 MACAULAY 427 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " We charge him with having broken his coronation oath ; and 
 we are told that he kept his marriage vow ! We accuse him of hav- 
 ing given up his people to the merciless inflictions of the most hot- 
 headed and hard-hearted of prelates, and the defense is, that he 
 took his little son on his knee and kissed him." Essay on Milton. 
 
 " Among statesmen of the age Halifax was, in genius, the first. 
 His intellect was fertile, subtle, capacious. His polished, lumi- 
 nous, and animated eloquence set off by the silver tones of his 
 voice was the delight of the House of Lords. His conversation 
 overflowed with thought, fancy, and wit. Yet he was less suc- 
 cessful in politics than many who enjoyed smaller advantages." 
 Essay on Bacon. 
 
 " He applied to the government ; and it seems strange that he 
 should have applied in vain. His wishes were moderate. He- 
 reditary claims on the administration were great. He had him- 
 self been favorably noticed by the Queen. His uncle was Prime 
 Minister. His own talents were such as any minister might have 
 been eager to enlist in the public service. But his solicitations 
 were unsuccessful. The truth is that the Cecils disliked him and 
 did all that they could decently do to keep him down." Essay 
 on Bacon. 
 
 " This great commander [Lord Galway] conducted the cam- 
 paign of 1707 in the most scientific manner. On the plain of 
 Almanza he encountered the army of the Bourbons. He drew up 
 his troops according to the methods prescribed by the best 
 writers, and in a few hours lost eighteen thousand men, a hun- 
 dred and twenty standards, all his baggage, and all his artillery." 
 War of the Succession in Spain. 
 
 " Melville was not a great statesman : he was not a great ora- 
 tor : he did not look or move like the representative of royalty : 
 his character was not of more than standard purity : and the 
 standard of purity among Scottish senators was not high : but he 
 was by no means deficient in prudence and temper : and he suc- 
 ceeded, on the whole, better than a man of much higher qualities 
 might have done." History of England. 
 
 2. Profuse Repetition. " It seems as if he were mak- 
 ing a wager with his reader and said to him : ' Be as absent
 
 428 MACAULAY 
 
 in mind as you will, as stupid, as ignorant ; in vain you will 
 be ignorant, you shall learn ; I will repeat the same idea in 
 so many forms.' ' Taine. 
 
 " [He has] a profuse way of repeating a thought in several 
 different sentences. . . . His ideal is evidently to turn a 
 subject over on every side, to place it in all lights." Minto. 
 
 " He remembers that he has not only to exhibit his proofs, 
 but to hammer them into the heads of his audience by incessant 
 repetition. . . . He goes on ^blacking the chimney with 
 a persistency which somehow amuses us because he puts so 
 much heart into his work." Leslie Stephen. 
 
 " The style of Macaulay is a diorama of political pictures. 
 You seem to begin with a brilliant picture its colors are dis- 
 tinct, its lines are firm ; on a sudden it changes, at first gradu- 
 ally, you can scarcely see how or in what, but truly and un- 
 mistakably a slightly different picture is before you ; then the 
 second vision seems to change it too is another and yet the 
 same ; then the third shines forth and fades : and so without 
 end. The unity of this delineation is the identity the ap- 
 parent identity of the picture in no two moments does it seem 
 quite different, in no two is it identically the same." Walter 
 Bagehot. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " That these practices were common we admit. But they were 
 common just as all wickedness to which there is a strong tempta- 
 tion always was and always will be common. They were common 
 just as theft, cheating, perjury, adultery have always been com- 
 mon. They were common, not because people did not know 
 what was right, but because people liked to do what was wrong. 
 They were common though prohibited by law. They were com- 
 mon though condemned by public opinion. They were common 
 because in that age law and public opinion had not sufficient force 
 to restrain the greediness of powerful and unprincipled magis- 
 trates. They were common as every crime will be common 
 when the gain to which it leads is great and the chance of punish- 
 ment small." History of England.
 
 MACAULAY 429 
 
 " Thus was it with that famous assembly. They formed a 
 force which they could neither govern nor resist. They made it 
 powerful. They made it fanatical. As if military insolence were 
 not of itself sufficiently dangerous, they heightened it with spirit- 
 ual pride ; they encouraged the soldiers to rave from the tops of 
 tubs against the men of Belial till every trooper thought himself 
 a prophet. They taught them to abuse popery till every drum- 
 mer fancied that he was as infallible as a pope." Essay on Milton. 
 
 " Pitt was emphatically the man of parliamentary government, 
 the type of his class, the minion, the child, the spoiled child, of 
 the House of Commons. For the House of Commons he had a 
 hereditary, an infantine love. Through his whole boyhood, the 
 House of Commons was never out of his thoughts or out of the 
 thoughts of his instructors ; ... he was constantly in train- 
 ing for the conflicts of the House of Commons. He was a dis- 
 tinguished member of the House of Commons at twenty-one. 
 The ability which he displayed in the House of Commons made 
 him the most powerful subject in Europe before he was twenty- 
 five, etc." Essay on William Pitt. 
 
 3. Rapidity Profusion Erudition. " This abun- 
 dance of thought and style, this multitude of explanations, 
 ideas and facts, this vast aggregate of historical knowledge, 
 goes rolling on, urged forward by an internal passion, sweep- 
 ing away objections in its course, and adding to the dash of 
 eloquence the irresistible force of its mass and weight." 
 Taine. 
 
 " Take at hazard any three pages, and you see 
 one, two, three, a half dozen, a score of allusions to other his- 
 toric facts, characters, literature, and poetry with which you 
 are acquainted. . . . He reads twenty books to write 
 a sentence ; he travels a hundred miles to make a line of de- 
 scription.' ' Thackeray. 
 
 "There is a fulness and a rapid continuance of utterance 
 
 that hurry us triumphantly along the stream of expression. 
 
 . The swiftness of its speed is as the rush of the eager 
 
 victor through the broken wreck of the terrified foe that
 
 430 MACAULAY 
 
 flees. ... [It is] transparent but flushed rapidity." 
 /. H. Stirling. 
 
 "Knowledge and important principles generalized from 
 knowledge are scattered with careless ease and prodigality, as 
 though they would hardly be missed in the fulness of mind from 
 which they proceed. . . . The most gorgeous trappings 
 of his rhetoric are radiant with thought." Walter Bagehot. 
 
 " He has gathered only those flowers that grow far out of 
 the common path, in the by-ways of history and poetry and 
 these he scatters over his pages with what might be called an 
 elaborate carelessness and profusion. . . . His pictures 
 float past the reader like the cumulus clouds of a summer's 
 day, clear, swiftly flying, and touched with the loveliest hues." 
 Peter Bayne, 
 
 "Hastings' trial is a picture . . . which in its thick 
 and crowded magnificence reminds you of the descriptions of 
 Tacitus, or (singular connection !) of the paintings of Ho- 
 garth. As in Hogarth, the variety of figures and circum- 
 stance each and all bear upon the main object, to which they 
 point like fingers. . . . His papers are thickly studded 
 with facts." George Gilfillan. 
 
 " The author has weighted himself with a load of minute 
 detail such as no historian ever uplifted before." -J. C. Mor- 
 rison. 
 
 " Quotations from obscure writers or from obscure works of 
 great writers ; multitudinous allusions to ancient classics or to 
 modern authors whom his mention has gone far to make 
 classics; references to some less-studied book of Scripture ; 
 names which have driven us to the Atlas to make sure of our 
 geography, or to the Biographical Gallery to remind us that 
 they lived they crowd upon us so thickly that we are bewil- 
 dered in the profusion, and there is danger to our physical 
 symmetry from the enlargement of our bump of wonder." 
 Morley Punshon. 
 
 "There is a certain music, but it is the music of a man
 
 MACAULAY 43 1 
 
 everlastingly playing for us rapid solos on a silver trumpet, 
 never the swelling diapason of the organ, never the deep 
 ecstatics of the four magic strings. . . . He revels in 
 bold assertion, gratuitous assumption, ingenious illustration, 
 brilliant rhetoric, and eloquent declamation. With these he 
 confuses, confounds, captivates, overpowers, and carries along 
 his readers. He so excites their admiration as to disqualify 
 them for cool and deliberate reflection. He dethrones their 
 judgment and enthrones their passions and prejudices. He is 
 irresistible on first reading. His splendid paradoxes, his bold- 
 ness, his audacity, his very outrageousness, hurry us along and 
 leave no time for thought or criticism. ... A large 
 portion of the wide historic realm is traversed in that ample 
 flight of reference, allusion, and illustration ; and what unspar- 
 ing copiousness of knowledge gives substance, meaning, and 
 attraction to that blaze and glare of rhetoric ! . . . Fig- 
 ures from history, ancient and modern, sacred and secular ; 
 characters from plays and novels, from Plautus down to Walter 
 Scott and Jane Austen ; images and similes from poets of 
 every age and every nation ; shrewd thrusts from satirists, wise 
 saws from sages, pleasantries, caustic and pathetic, from 
 humourists ; all through, Macaulay's pages are alive with the 
 bustle and variety and animation of some glittering masque 
 and cosmoramic revel of great books and heroical men. 
 . . . Macaulay's knowledge was not only very wide ; it 
 was both thoroughly accurate and instantly ready. For this 
 stream of apt illustrations he was indebted to his extraordi- 
 nary memory and his rapid eye for contrasts and analogies. 
 They come to the end of his pen as he writes ; they are not 
 laboriously hunted out in indexes and then added by way of 
 after-thought and extraneous interpolation. Hence quotations 
 and references . . . find their place in a page of Ma- 
 caulay as if by a delightful process of complete assimilation 
 and spontaneous fusion." -John Morley. 
 
 " His style was like a full-blooded steed on the race-course,
 
 432 MACAULAY 
 
 fleet, direct, and of simple but splendid proportions. . . . 
 Nearly every one of his essays is a good example of his versa- 
 tility, an ample resume of the best student's knowledge not 
 only of the character or subject treated, but of its epoch, sum- 
 marized with a marvellous tact and colored by an artist's 
 hand." Leslie Stephen. 
 
 " His history is like a cavalry charge. Down go horse and 
 man before his rapid and reckless onset. His ' rush ' is irre- 
 sistible save by the coolest judgment and the most cultivated 
 intellects. Ranks are broken, guns are spiked, and away 
 sweeps the bold dragoon to arrive at a fresh square." 
 T. E. KebbeL 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " Twice, within the memory of men yet living, the natives had 
 attempted to throw off the alien yoke; twice the intruders had 
 been in imminent danger of extirpation ; twice England had come 
 to the rescue, and had put down the Celtic population under the 
 feet of her own progeny. Millions of English money had been 
 expended in the struggle. English blood had flowed at Boyne 
 and at Athlone, at Aghrim and at Limerick. The graves of thou- 
 sands of English soldiers had been dug in the pestilential morass 
 of Dundalk. It was owing to the exertions and sacrifices of the 
 English people that, from the basaltic pillars of Ulster to the 
 lakes of Kerry, the Saxon settlers were trampling on the children 
 of the soil." History of England. 
 
 " India and its inhabitants were not to him, as to most English- 
 men, mere names and abstractions, but a real country and a real 
 people. The burning sun, the strange vegetation of the palm 
 and the cocoa-tree, the rice-field, the tank, the huge trees, older 
 than the Mogul empire, under which the village crowds assemble ; 
 the thatched roof of the peasant's hut ; the rich tracery of the 
 mosque where the imaum prays with his face to Mecca, the drums 
 and banners and gaudy idols, the devotee swinging in the air, 
 the graceful maiden, with the pitcher on her head, descending the 
 steps to the riverside, the black faces, the long beards, the yellow 
 streaks of sect, tiie turbans and the flowing robes, the spears and 
 the silver maces, the elephants with their canopies of state, the 
 gorgeous palanquin of the prince, all these things were to him as
 
 MACAULAY 433 
 
 the objects amidst which his own life had been passed."- Essay 
 on Warren Hastings. 
 
 " Such a prince as our Henry the Fifth would have been the 
 idol of the North. The follies of his youth, the selfish ambition 
 of his manhood, the Lollards roasted at slow fires, the prisoners 
 massacred on the field of battle, the expiring lease of priest-craft 
 renewed for another century. The dreadful legacy of a causeless 
 and a hopeless war bequeathed to a people who had no interest in 
 its event, everything is forgotten but the victory of Agincourt." 
 Essay on Machiavelli. 
 
 4. Harsh Invective Open Derision. " In propor- 
 tion as his praise is eloquent and hearty for what is noble and 
 good in character, his scorn is severe for what is little and 
 mean. . . . He carries his austerity beyond the bounds 
 of humanity. His harshness to the captive of his criticism 
 is a transgression of the law against cruelty to animals. 
 . . He is both judge and executioner ; condemns the 
 prisoner puts on the black cap with a stinging sneer 
 hangs, quarters, and scatters his limbs to the four winds 
 without any appearance of pity or remorse. 
 He breathes upon them the hot breath of scorn ; he crushes 
 and grinds them in the whirling mill of his logic. Over 
 the burning marl of his critical pandemonium he makes 
 them walk with unsandaled feet, and views their ludicrous 
 agonies with mocking glee. . . . His denunciation is 
 frequently awful in its depth, earnestness, and crushing force. 
 All cant about the rights of man, all whining and whimpering 
 about the clashing interests of body and soul, are treated with 
 haughty scorn and made the butt of contemptuous ridicule." 
 E. P. Whipple. 
 
 " Macaulay has a rough touch ; when he strikes he knocks 
 down." Taine. 
 
 " For a combination of sarcasm and crushing invective we 
 hardly know where the sketch of Barere can find a parallel. ' ' 
 H. H. Lancaster. 
 28
 
 434 MACAULAY 
 
 " We hold our breath while Nemesis descends to crucify 
 the miscreant Barere. . . . That he was a good hater, 
 there can be no question. . . . Dr. Johnson would have 
 hugged him for the heartiness with which he lays on his dark 
 shades of color." Morley Punshon. 
 
 "In his contemptuous and derisive moods, he uses a studied 
 meanness of expression that reminds us of the coarse famil- 
 iarity of Swift. ' ' Minto. 
 
 " Macaulay's wit is always sarcasm sarcasm embittered by 
 indignation, and yet performing its minute dissections with 
 judicial gravity. ... He first flays, then kills, then 
 tramples, and then hangs his victim in chains. . . . Nor 
 will his sarcastic vein, once awakened against Croker, sleep 
 till it has scorched poor Bozzy to ashes and even singed the 
 awful wig of Johnson." George Gilfillan. 
 
 " His fury expressed itself in a studied affectation of scorn 
 and in that rueful laugh which is described in unclassical 
 English as proceeding from the wrong side of the mouth. 
 There is an unfading charm in the swing and vigor of the 
 lines [of the ' Lays '] which brings to our ears the very 
 songs of the battle, the clash of steel, and the rushing of the 
 horses, the noise of the captains and the shouting ' a cut- 
 and-thrust style,' Wilson calls it, without any flourish. . . . 
 Though not malevolent, or even naturally an uncharitable 
 man, Macaulay was too ready to form an unkindly judgment 
 of his political adversaries. . . . He spoke his hatred 
 out, as was his nature, and he refused to see any redeeming 
 points in the character of his adversary ; we may say indeed 
 that he was incapable of seeing them." Mrs. Oliphant. 
 
 " In his review of James Mill's ' Essay on Government, 1 
 he treated the author with such contemptuous vehemence of 
 vituperation that he felt compelled to withdraw the article 
 from publication and even to volunteer an apology for his 
 language. . . . Nor is Macaulay's castigation, superflu- 
 ously insulting and needlessly personal as that castigation was,
 
 MACAULAY 435 
 
 of Wallis, the editor of Macintosh's 'James II.' altogether 
 creditable. It was a melancholy acknowledgment to make 
 that he had ' attacked Mr. Wallis with an asperity which 
 neither literary defects nor speculative difference can justify, 
 and which ought to be reserved for offenders against the laws 
 of morality and honor.' ' T.H. S. Escott. 
 
 " When he hates a man he calls him knave or fool with 
 unflinching frankness." Leslie Stephen. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " The suit, happily for Bacon, was unsuccessful. The lady, 
 indeed, was kind to him in more ways than one. She rejected 
 him ; and she accepted his enemy. She married that narrow- 
 minded, bad-hearted pedant, Sir Edward Coke, and did her best 
 to make him as miserable as he deserved to be." Essay on 
 Bacon. 
 
 " The faults of James, both as a man and as a prince, were 
 numerous ; but insensibility to the claims of genius and learn- 
 ing was not among them. He was indeed made up of two men ; 
 a witty, well-read scholar, who wrote, disputed, and harangued, 
 and a nervous, drivelling idiot, who acted." History of Eng- 
 land. 
 
 " A wise man might talk folly like this by his own fireside ; 
 but that any human being, after having made such a joke, should 
 write it down, and copy it out, and transmit it to the printer, 
 and correct the proof-sheets, and send it forth into the world, is 
 enough to make us ashamed of our species." Essay on Southey's 
 Colloquies on Society. 
 
 " Honor and shame were scarcely more to him than light and 
 darkness to the blind. His contempt of flattery has been highly 
 commended, but it is possible to be below flattery as well as 
 above it. One who trusts nobody will not trust sycophants. 
 One who does not value real glory will not value its counterfeit." 
 History of England. 
 
 5. Sacrifice of Fact to Form and Effect " The 
 
 real and weighty objection to his inaccuracy is his habit of 
 making broad, sweeping statements. . . . He is con-
 
 436 MACAULAY 
 
 stantly misleading by innuendo suggestive of the false, by 
 epithets, by generalizations, by rhetorical extensions of the 
 actual fact or text." Saintsbury. 
 
 " Exact balance cannot long be kept up without a sacrifice 
 to strict truth. . . . Both sides are extremely exagger- 
 ated to make the antithesis more telling. . . . It is not 
 denied that Macaulay had a tendency to make slight sacrifices 
 of truth to antithesis. . . . He has been accused of col- 
 oring his facts to suit his prejudice in favor of modern cul- 
 tivation and to gratify his favorite passion for antithesis." 
 Minto. 
 
 " Herein lies his essential defect as an historian. In his 
 judgment men are all black or all white. He applies the log- 
 ical doctrine of the excluded middle to the domain of ethics. 
 The characters whom he draws deserve immortal glory or 
 eternal infamy. ... If Macaulay's account of the sev- 
 eral periods which he describes were true, no honest man 
 could have been a Royalist in the reign of Charles, and no 
 patriot could have been a Tory in the time of William III." 
 T. H. S. Escott. 
 
 " His aptitude for forcing things into a firm outline and 
 giving them a sharply defined edge these and other singular 
 talents all lend themselves to his intrepid and indefatigable 
 pursuit of effect. . . . Macaulay's hardy and habitual 
 recourse to strenuous superlatives is fundamentally unscien- 
 tific and untrue." -John Morley. 
 
 "That his love for pointed diction leads him into many 
 errors, cannot be denied." E. P. IVJiipple. 
 
 "In seeking for paradoxes, Macaulay often stumbles on, 
 but more frequently stumbles over, truth." George Gil- 
 fillan. 
 
 " The desire for effect at any cost makes some of his char- 
 acters, such as Bacon, mere heaps of contradictory qualities." 
 Leslie Stephen. 
 
 " We will not deny that in the heat of his animosity he
 
 MACAULAY 437 
 
 may have distorted facts ; for every student of history knows 
 with what readiness those elastic trifles will assume all va- 
 rieties of shape according to the glasses through which they 
 are observed. But these at the worst are in a few extreme 
 instances, for which we at least are ready to forgive the only 
 historian who has been able to make his readers live in the 
 period of which he writes. Colored his narrative may be, 
 yet it is history, and history of the most profitable kind." 
 Mrs. Oliphant. 
 
 ' ' The love of form may be cultivated to an unhealthy ex- 
 tent, engendering a comparative indifference to the matter 
 which it clothes. ... If history is made amusing, who 
 will take the trouble to investigate its truth ? and who will 
 care if it be true? . . . The deliberate rejection of all 
 minor points which would mar the clearness of a statement, a 
 refusal to come within the circle of some sweeping general- 
 ization, must have created wrong impressions. . . . He 
 had so much confidence in the truth of his general views that 
 he doubtless considered himself justified in risking something 
 to promote their popularity. Of these four volumes of bold 
 and brilliant declaration we may say that they are beautiful, 
 they are magnificent, but they are not history." T. E. 
 KetbcL 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " For the public mind was possessed of the belief that the more 
 conscientious a Papist was, the more likely he must be to plot 
 against a Protestant government." Essay on Bacon. 
 
 "The difference between the soaring angel and the creeping 
 snake was but a type of the difference between Bacon the Philos- 
 opher and Bacon the Attorney-General, Bacon seeking for truth 
 and Bacon seeking for the seals." Essay on Bacon. 
 
 " His occasional remarks on the affairs of ancient Rome and 
 of modern Europe are full of errors ; but he writes of times with 
 respect to which almost every other writer has been in the wrong ; 
 and therefore, by resolutely deviating from his predecessors, he
 
 438 MACAULAY 
 
 is often in the right. . . . His style would never have 
 been elegant, but it might at least have been manly and per- 
 spicuous ; and nothing but the most elaborate case could possibly 
 have made it so bad as it is." Essay on Mitford's History of 
 Greece. 
 
 " The King cringed to his rival that he might trample on his 
 people, sank into a viceroy of France, and pocketed with com- 
 placent infamy her degrading insults and her more degrading 
 gold. The caresses of harlots and the jests of buffoons regulated 
 the policy of the state. The government had just ability enough 
 to deceive and just religion enough to persecute. The principles 
 of liberty were the scoff of every grinning courtier and the 
 Anathema Maranatha of every fawning dean. In every high 
 place worship was paid to Charles and James, Belial and Moloch ; 
 and England propitiated those obscene and cruel idols with the 
 blood of her best and bravest children. Crime succeeded to 
 crime, and disgrace to disgrace, till the race accursed of God and 
 man was a second time driven forth, to wander on the face of 
 the earth and to be a byword and a shaking of the head to the 
 nations." Essay on Milton. 
 
 6. Narrative Power Panoramic View. "The first 
 and most obvious secret of Macaulay's place on popular book 
 shelves is that he has a true genius for narration, and narration 
 will always, in the eyes of many all over the world, stand first 
 among literary gifts. . . . His firmness and directness of 
 statement, his spiritedness, his art of selecting salient and 
 highly colored detail, and all his other merits as a narrator 
 keep the listener's attention, and make him the easiest of writ- 
 ers to follow." -John Morley. 
 
 11 Narrative was his peculiar forte." H. J. Nicoll. 
 
 " The clearest and most fascinating of narrators. " E. A. 
 Freeman. 
 
 " That a man like Macaulay is always fascinating, that his 
 account of the Seven Years' War and the Silesian campaigns 
 attests a descriptive power of the very highest kind, I need not 
 tell those who have read his essay. . . . Nothing could
 
 MACAULAY 439 
 
 be more brilliant than his manner of depicting the conquest of 
 India by Lord Clive." Grimm. 
 
 "There is no lack of pictorial matter in Macaulay. He 
 had no bent for the description of still life. It was vigorous 
 and stirring movement ' the rush and the roar of practical 
 life ' that was of interest to him. . . . The character 
 of our author's style consists more in pictorial touches brought 
 in by a side wind than in the direct description of objects." 
 Minto. 
 
 " The ease and charm of the narrative in such favorite es- 
 says as those on Clive and Warren Hastings cannot but be felt 
 even by those who are most inclined to differ from his esti- 
 mate of his subjects. . . . His history is one of the 
 greatest efforts in narrative that have ever been made. From 
 beginning to end we have a vast history in the original sense 
 of the word, which is usually denoted by lopping the first syl- 
 lable flowing on in a perfectly unbroken stream in a thousand 
 little rivulets that converge into the main flood, neither neg- 
 lected nor magnified into undue importance, but firmly and 
 skilfully guided into their proper places as the component 
 parts of a great whole. Nothing is more striking in Macaulay's 
 style than this absolute continuity of story. . . . When 
 we read Macaulay ... we feel like a spectator of a great 
 natural drama unrolling itself before our eyes. We are not 
 even hearing the story told by one of the actors but actually 
 looking on at what is taking place. This is, to our mind, the 
 great superiority of Macaulay's writings over those of more ex- 
 act historians. ... In Macaulay's pictures of the past, 
 the reader can see at a glance more of the real life of the world 
 as it then was than the most toilsome examination of historical 
 evidence can afford him." Mrs. Oliphant. 
 
 7. Eloquence Oratorical Climax. " Certain pas- 
 sages of Macaulay's prose rise higher than the finest raptures
 
 440 MACAULAY 
 
 of his poetry, and the term Eloquence will measure the loftiest 
 reaches of either." George Gilfillan. 
 
 " Occasionally he uses the long oratorical, climactic period, 
 consisting of a number of clauses in the same construction in- 
 creasing gradually in strength so as to form a climax. 
 The compact finish [is] produced by the frequent occurrence 
 of the periodic arrangement. . . . Very often his elo- 
 quence is lofty and inspiring. ... In every paragraph 
 we are conscious of being led on to a. crowning demonstration. 
 His arts of contrast have the effect of making a climax. He 
 seems to pause in the course of his narrative or his argument 
 and go back for a race that will carry him sweepingly over 
 the next obstacle. He is careful to reserve the most telling 
 for the end, and artfully prepares the way for a final resolu- 
 tion." Minto. 
 
 " Rarely has eloquence been more captivating than Macau- 
 lay's. . . . He has the oratorical afflatus. ... Of 
 whatever subject he treats, he is impassioned for his sub- 
 ject." Taine. 
 
 " He was one of the most eloquent speakers in Parliament." 
 Leslie Stephen. 
 
 " He displays much of the imperious scorn, passionate 
 strength, and swelling diction of Brougham." Walter Bage- 
 hot. 
 
 " Of climax, the coping-stone of the emphatic style, he is 
 a master, and this it is which gives to his rapid antitheses a 
 strength and cogency of their own. After he has accumulated 
 his evidence and brought out point after point in his own 
 favor ... he never fails at the right moment to give 
 the final blow which drives his conclusion home and leaves it 
 embedded in our own minds to the exclusion of all subordi- 
 nate ideas which might weaken our perception of its force." 
 T. E. Kebbel.
 
 MACAULAY 441 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " Such a mark of national respect was due to the unsullied 
 statesman, to the accomplished scholar, to the master of pure 
 English eloquence, to the consummate painter of life and manners. 
 It was due, above all, to the great satirist, who alone knew how to 
 use ridicule without abusing it; who, without inflicting a wound, 
 effected a great social reform ; and who reconciled wit and virtue 
 after a long and disastrous separation, during which wit had been 
 led astray by profligacy and virtue by fanaticism." Essay on 
 Addis on. 
 
 " Then came those days, never to be recalled without a blush, 
 the days of servitude without loyalty and sensuality without love, 
 of dwarfish talents and gigantic vices. The paradise of cold 
 hearts and narrow minds, the golden age of the coward, the bigot, 
 and the knave." Essay on Milton. 
 
 " The time was approaching when our island, while struggling 
 to keep down the United States of America, and pressed with a 
 still nearer danger by the too just discontents of Ireland, was to 
 be assailed by France, Spain, and Holland and to be threatened 
 by the armed neutrality of the Baltic ; when even our maritime 
 supremacy was to be in jeopardy ; when hostile fleets were to 
 command the straits of Calpe and the Mexican sea ; when the 
 British flag was to be scarcely able to protect the British Chan- 
 nel." Essay on Hastings. 
 
 8. Clearness. " Nobody can have any excuse for not 
 knowing exactly what it is that Macaulay means. This is a 
 prodigious merit when we reflect with what fatal alacrity hu- 
 man language lends itself, in the hands of so many performers 
 upon the pliant instrument, to all sorts of obscurity, ambiguity, 
 disguise, and pretentious mystification. . . . Macaulay 
 never wrote an obscure sentence in his life." -John Morley. 
 
 " Clearness is the first of the cardinal virtues of his style ; 
 and nobody ever wrote more clearly than Macaulay." Les- 
 lie Stephen. 
 
 " One can trace in his writing a constant effort to make 
 himself intelligible to the meanest capacity. Macaulay's
 
 442 MACAULAY 
 
 composition is as far from being abstruse as printed matter 
 well can be. . . . For his perspicuity he certainly de- 
 serves all praise." Minto. 
 
 " At the close of the last of a series of meetings in which a 
 gentleman read the ' History ' aloud to his poorer neighbors 
 one of the audience rose, and moved in North-Country fash- 
 ion a vote of thanks to Mr. Macaulay ' for having written a 
 history which working men can understand.' " G. O. Tre- 
 velyan. 
 
 " Many a reader of Macaulay is deceived by his perfect 
 clearness, and will not admit that what appears so plain, vis- 
 ible, and obvious is in the least recondite or remote. A little 
 haze would quadruple the distance, and a good Teutonic fog 
 would have made him pass for one of the most profound 
 thinkers of the age. . . . This lofty perspicuity, this 
 power of sustaining himself at a height above a wide and 
 complex subject, is as visible in the Essays as in the History." 
 -J. C. Morrison. 
 
 " Macaulay's writings have one very peculiar and very 
 popular quality. They are eminently clear. They can by 
 no possibility, at any time, be nebulous. You can read them 
 as you run." George Gilfillan. 
 
 " He thought little of recasting a whole paragraph in order 
 to obtain a more lucid arrangement." A. P. Russell. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " Where there was a good path he seldom failed to choose it. 
 But now he had only a choice among paths every one of which 
 seemed likely to lead to destruction. From one faction he could 
 hope for no cordial support. The cordial support of the other 
 faction he could retain only by becoming the most factious man in 
 his kingdom, a Shaftesbury on the throne. If he persecuted the 
 Tories their sulkiness would infallibly be turned into fury. If he 
 showed favor to the Tories, it was by no means certain that he 
 would retain their good-will ; and it was but too probable that
 
 MACAULAY 443 
 
 he might lose his hold on the hearts of the Whigs. Something, 
 however, he must do : something he must risk : a Privy Coun- 
 cil must be sworn in : all the great offices, political and judicial, 
 must be filled. It was impossible to make an arrangement that 
 would please everybody and difficult to make an arrangement 
 that would please anybody : but an arrangement must be made." 
 History of England, 
 
 " To sum up the whole : we should say that the aim of the 
 Platonic philosophy was to exalt man into a god. The aim of 
 the Baconian philosophy was to provide man with what he re- 
 quires while he continues to be a man. The aim of the Platonic 
 philosophy was to raise us far above vulgar wants. The aim of 
 the Baconian philosophy was to supply our vulgar wants. The 
 former aim was noble; but the latter was attainable. Plato 
 drew a good bow, ... he aimed at the stars ; his arrows 
 struck nothing. . . . Bacon fixed his eye on a mark which 
 was placed on earth. . . . and hit it in the white." Essay 
 on Bacon. 
 
 " The heroic couplet was then the favorite measure. The art 
 of arranging words in that measure, so that the lines may flow 
 smoothly, that the accents may fall correctly, that the rhymes 
 may strike the ear strongly, and that there may be a pause at the 
 end of every distich, is an art as mechanical as that of mending 
 a kettle or shoeing a horse, and may be learned by any human 
 being who has sense enough to learn anything. But, like other 
 mechanical arts, it was gradually improved by means of many 
 experiments and many failures. It was reserved for Pope to 
 discover the trick." Essay on Addison. 
 
 9. Ornamentation Splendor of Imagery. "What- 
 ever his subject, he contrives to pour into it with singular dex- 
 terity a stream of rich, graphic, and telling illustrations from 
 widely diversified sources. . . . He has a rapid eye for 
 contrasts and analogies." John Morley. 
 
 " Macaulay was all fire and brilliancy. Every sentence 
 was a rhetorical flourish, and he naturally seemed to speak in 
 a dialect that can only be described as poetic." T, H. S. 
 Escott.
 
 444 MACAULAY 
 
 " From another pen such masses of ornament would be 
 tawdry : with him they are only rich. . . . He embel- 
 lishes the barrenest subject. " IV. E. Gladstone. 
 
 " Our path glitters with ' barbaric pearl and gold.' 
 If we are wearied, it is from excess of splendor. . . . We 
 are in a gorgeous saloon, from whose walls flash out upon us a 
 long array of pictures. He ransacks for precedents and illus- 
 trations the histories of almost every age and clime." Mor- 
 ley Pitnshon. 
 
 "His similitudes are often brilliantly ingenious and ex- 
 pressed with his usual richness and felicity of language, but 
 they are too artificial and gaudy finery to be worthy of serious 
 imitation. . . . Instance is piled upon instance and com- 
 parison upon comparison, where a full statement would be 
 enough to make the meaning clear to the smallest capacity. 
 The fluent abundance of examples and comparisons is often 
 greater than the subject demands. . . . His prodigious 
 knowledge of particulars betrays him into a superfluity of illus- 
 tration. . . . He has an incomparable command of ex- 
 amples and illustrations." Minto. 
 
 " His powers of brilliant illustration have never been 
 denied, and it would not be easy to name their equal." -J. 
 C. Morrison. 
 
 " He has unbounded command of illustration. . . . 
 Macaulay's most memorable things are chiefly happy illustra- 
 tions, verbal antitheses, and clever alliterations. . . . 
 Frequent, cool, and refreshing literary illustrations, blowing 
 like breezes across the otherwise arid and blood-dried pages." 
 George Gilfillan. 
 
 " The grave and rich ornamentation which Macaulay 
 throws over his narrative, a sort of potent vegetation, flowers 
 of brilliant purple like those which spread over every page of 
 ' Paradise Lost ' and < Childe Harold.' "Tatne. 
 
 " His early writings are overlaid with gaudy ornament." 
 H. H. Lancaster.
 
 MACAULAY 445 
 
 " He gives us the most vivid and effective figures. . . . 
 It [his style] is bright, glittering, brilliant. . . . It is 
 dyed in a thousand colors ; it glitters with a thousand points." 
 /. H. Stirling. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " The person who on this occasion came forward as the 
 champion of the Colonists, the forerunner of Swift and of Grattan, 
 was William Molyneux. He would have rejected the name of 
 Irishman as indignantly as a citizen of Marseilles or Cyrene, 
 proud of his pure Greek blood and fully qualified to send a 
 chariot to the Olympic race-course, would have rejected the 
 name of Gaul or Libyian." History of England. 
 
 " The people of India, when we subdued them, were ten times 
 as numerous as the Americans whom the Spaniards vanquished, 
 and were, at the same time, quite as highly civilized as the vic- 
 torious Spaniards. They had reared cities larger and fairer than 
 Saragossa or Toledo and buildings more beautiful and costly 
 than the cathedral of Seville. They could show bankers richer 
 than the richest firms of Barcelona or Cadiz, vice-roys whose 
 splendor far surpassed that of Ferdinand the Catholic, myriads 
 of cavalry and long trains of artillery which would have aston- 
 ished the Great Captain." Essay on Lord Clive. 
 
 " This is as absurd as it would be in a Haytian negro of our 
 time to dwell with national pride on the greatness of Louis the 
 Fourteenth and to speak of Blenheim and Ramillies with patriotic 
 regret and shame. . . . One of the ablest among them, in- 
 deed, attempted to win the hearts of his English subjects by 
 espousing an English princess. But by many of his barons this 
 marriage was regarded as a marriage between a white planter and 
 a quadroon girl would now be regarded in Virginia." History of 
 England . 
 
 " Scotsmen, whose dwellings and whose food were as wretched 
 as those of the Icelanders of our time, wrote Latin verse with 
 more than the delicacy of Vida, and made discoveries in science 
 which would have added to the renown of Galileo." History of 
 England.
 
 446 MACAULAY 
 
 10. Power of Personal Portraiture Delineation 
 of Character. " He had a keen eye for the slightest hint 
 that could be turned to account in sketching the portrait of a 
 man. . . . All his portraits are drawn from life and stand 
 out upon his canvas like Holbein's portrait of Wentworth 
 you know the man in an instant." C. Pebody. 
 
 " We thank him for the vividness of delineation by which 
 we can see statesmen like Somers and Nottingham, etc." 
 Morley Punshon. 
 
 11 [He paints] elaborate portraitures of the greatest English 
 statesmen." H. H. Lancaster. 
 
 " [He had] a delight in gathering and a power of painting 
 personal peculiarities. [He was] a great master of portrait 
 painting."/. H. Stirling. 
 
 "To us there is an even greater attraction in the light yet 
 elaborate studies of character such as are contained in the 
 papers on Sir William Temple and Addison. . . . There 
 is no point in which his genius is more amply displayed than 
 in the masterly, if occasionally prejudiced, sketches of character 
 with which the ' History' is interspersed. . . . Thus we 
 get those exquisite little portraits in miniature which Macaulay 
 threw in with such wondrous skill when he had to present new 
 characters upon the scene." Mrs. Oliphant. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " He [William of Orange] was now in his thirty-seventh year. 
 But both in body and mind he was older than other men of the 
 same age. . . . His external appearance is almost as well 
 known to us as to his own captains and counsellors. . . . His 
 features were such as no artist could fail to seize. His name at 
 once calls up before us a slender and feeble frame, a lofty and 
 ample forehead, a nose curved like the beak of an eagle, an eye 
 rivalling that of an eagle in brightness and keenness, a thoughtful 
 and somewhat sullen brow, a firm and somewhat peevish mouth, 
 a cheek pale, thin, and deeply furrowed by sickness and by care. 
 That pensive, severe, and solemn aspect could scarcely have be-
 
 MACAULAY 447 
 
 longed to a happy or a good-natured man. But it indicates in a 
 manner not to be mistaken capacity equal to the most arduous 
 enterprises and fortitude not to be shaken by reverses or dan- 
 gers." History of England. 
 
 " In the foreground is that strange figure which is as familiar 
 to us as the figures of those among whom we have been brought 
 up the gigantic body, the huge massy face, seamed with the 
 scars of disease ; the brown coat, the black worsted stockings, 
 the gray wig with a scorched foretop ; the dirty hands, the nails 
 bitten and pared to the quick. We see the eyes and mouth mov- 
 ing with convulsive twitches ; we see the heavy form rolling ; we 
 hear it puffing ; and then comes the ' Why, sir ! ' and the ' What 
 then, sir ? ' and the ' No, sir ! ' and the ' You don't see your way 
 through the question, sir ! ' " Essay on BosweWs Life of Johnson. 
 
 " Steele had left college, been disinherited, led a vagrant life, 
 served in the army, and had written comedies. He was one of 
 those people whom it is impossible either to hate or to respect. 
 His temper was sweet, his affections warm, his spirits lively, his 
 passions strong, and his principles weak. His life was spent in 
 sinning and repenting. He was, however, so good-natured that 
 it was impossible to be seriously angry with him." Essay on 
 Addison. 
 
 II. Commonplace. " More than once his explications 
 are commonplace. He proves what all allow." Taine. 
 
 " He abounds in the stock metaphor, the stock transition, 
 the stock equipoise, the stock rhetoric, the stock expedients 
 generally of Addison, Robertson, Goldsmith, etc." -J. H. 
 Stirling. 
 
 " His work abounds in what is substantially commonplace. 
 We may be sure that no author could have achieved Macau - 
 lay's boundless popularity among his contemporaries unless 
 his works had abounded in what is substantially common- 
 place. . . . It is one of the first things to be said about 
 Macaulay that he was in exact accord with the common 
 average sentiment of his day on every subject on which he 
 spoke. His superiority was not of that highest kind which 
 leads a man to march in thought on the outside margin of
 
 448 MACAULAY 
 
 the crowd, watching them, sympathizing with them, hoping 
 for them, but apart. Macaulay was one of the middle-class 
 crowd in his heart, and only rose above it by extraordinary 
 gifts of expression." -John Morley. 
 
 " He states the grounds of his judgments in a manner so 
 intelligible to all of us ; he appears to examine every ac- 
 tion by a strict moral rule and yet by one which is not too 
 high for us, which we can all recognize ; which, in fact, is 
 deduced for the most part from habits and practices where- 
 with respectable people in our century are in general con- 
 formity." F. D. Maurice. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " It is better that mankind should be governed by wise laws 
 well administered, and by an enlightened public opinion, than 
 by priestcraft : but it is better that men should be governed by 
 priestcraft than by brute violence, by such a prelate as Dunstan 
 than by such a warrior as Penda. A society sunk in ignorance 
 and ruled by mere physical force has great reason to rejoice 
 when a class, the influence of which is intellectual and moral, 
 rises to ascendancy. Such a class will doubtless abuse its power, 
 but mental power even when abused is still a nobler and better 
 power than that which consists merely in corporeal strength." 
 History of England. 
 
 " Of course, we do not mean to defend all their measures. 
 Far from it. There never was a perfect man ; it would, there- 
 fore, be the height of absurdity to expect a perfect party or a 
 perfect assembly. For large bodies are far more likely to err 
 than individuals. The passions are inflamed by sympathy ; 
 the fear of punishment and the sense of shame are diminished 
 by partition. Every day we see men do for their faction what 
 they would die rather than do for themselves." Essay on Hal- 
 lam 1 s Constitutional History. 
 
 " These things produced great excitement among the pop- 
 ulace, which is always more moved by what impresses the 
 senses than by what is addressed to the reason." History of 
 England.
 
 MACAULAY 449 
 
 12. Patriotism. " The commonplaces of patriotism and 
 freedom would never have been so powerful in Macaulay's 
 hands if they had not been inspired by a sincere and hearty 
 faith in them in the soul of the writer." John Morley. 
 
 " His love of liberty is expressed in passages as full of fire 
 as the poets." J. Skelton. 
 
 " His country was England. In this little spot he concen- 
 trated a force of admiration and of worship which might 
 have covered all the world. . . . They [his works] are 
 pervaded by a generous love of liberty." W. E. Gladstone. 
 
 ' ' With Macaulay the love of country was a passion. How 
 he kindles at each stirring or plaintive memory in the annals 
 he was so glad to record !" Morley Punshon. 
 
 " The noble love of liberty animates his entire work." 
 Trevelyan. 
 
 " He had a stout and noble patriotism." Saintsbury. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " I shall relate how, from the auspicious union of order and 
 freedom, sprang a prosperity of which the annals of human af- 
 fairs had furnished no example ; how our country from a state 
 of ignominious vassalage rapidly rose to the place of umpire 
 among European powers ; how her opulence and her martial 
 glory grew together ; how a gigantic commerce gave birth to a 
 maritime power compared with which every other maritime 
 power, ancient or modern, sinks into insignificance, etc." His- 
 tory of England. 
 
 " I hope that it will be in my power to inspire at least some 
 of my countrymen with love and reverence for those free and 
 noble institutions to which Britain owes her greatness and from 
 which, I trust, she is not destined soon to descend." Speech on 
 Retiring from Political Life. 
 
 "The history of England is emphatically one of progress. 
 . . . In the course of seven centuries this wretched and de- 
 graded race have become the greatest and most highly civilized 
 people that ever the world saw, have spread their dominion over 
 29
 
 450 MACAULAY 
 
 every quarter of the globe, have scattered the seeds of mighty em- 
 pires and republics over vast continents of which no dim intima- 
 tion had ever reached Ptolemy or Strabo have created a mar- 
 itime power which would annihilate in a quarter of an hour the 
 natives of Tyre, Athens, Carthage, Venice, and Genoa together, 
 etc." Essay on Mackintosh's History. 
 
 13. Prejudice Partiality Bias. " He reserved his 
 pugnacity for quarrels undertaken on public grounds and 
 fought out with the world looking on as umpire. 
 Independent, frank, and proud, almost to a fault, he detested 
 the whole race of robbers and time-servers, parasites and 
 scandal-mongers, led-captains, led-authors and some of his 
 antipathies have stamped themselves indelibly on literary his- 
 tory." G. O. Trevelyan. 
 
 " He is a terribly partial historian." Saintsbury. 
 
 "An incomparable advocate, he pleads an infinite number 
 of causes. ' ' Taine. 
 
 "He is a brilliant advocate for or against a person." 
 Grimm. 
 
 "He sometimes allows his Whig propensities to get the 
 better of strict justice. ' ' H. J. Nicoll. 
 
 " Partiality for some characters amounting to favoritism ; 
 a hatred for others amounting to fury." George Gilfillan. 
 
 "His prejudices were sometimes strong and extreme but 
 they were honest." Alexander H. Stephens. 
 
 " Lord Macaulay was a great man, but he was a great 
 Whig man."/. H. Shirley. 
 
 " Not only were his critical faculties of nearly the same 
 calibre as Johnson's, they were invested with at least an equal 
 amount of prejudice. . . . His history, in fact, flowed 
 from his politics and not his politics from his history. . . . 
 The party under whom he was to serve was ready to his 
 hand, . . . and having once given his allegiance, he 
 continued their faithful and successful soldier to his life's end. 
 What sort of history would be written by such a man as this,
 
 MACAULAY 45 1 
 
 it is superfluous to inquire. . . . When he got to a 
 Whig stratum of fact he wisely stopped digging, preconceived 
 of the worthlessness of everything that lay beneath. His 
 mind was already made up, and he only read for arguments 
 to help out a foregone conclusion. . . . He did not 
 consider that it was his business to discover truth. That, in 
 his eyes, had been discovered already. He had to narrate 
 the facts in which that truth lay embedded ; and those he 
 was at liberty to narrate in any way that he thought likely to 
 prove most attractive or that was most agreeable to his own 
 genius. ... At the age of three or four and twenty he 
 became mixed up with a great party struggle ; he remained in 
 their [Whig] ranks till the battle was won ; and, like the battle of 
 the Nile, it was not a victory, but a conquest. . . . His 
 first experience of public life was brief and brilliant, and had 
 stamped a character upon his mind which was never after- 
 ward changed. His political creed remained stationary from 
 that moment, growing in intensity but closed to impressions 
 from without. . . . Not only does he seem to have 
 been indifferent to truth as an abstract object, he seems not 
 to have been acquainted with the deeper principles at stake in 
 the religious and philosophic controversies which he under- 
 took to discuss. . . . This defect is, of course, most 
 conspicuous in his essay on Bacon. . . . Macaulay, of 
 course, had a perfect right to consider metaphysics unworthy 
 the attention of a man of sense. . . . But he had no 
 right to assume it. ... His criticism [though sensible 
 and clear] ... is not what, in these days, we should 
 call philosophical criticism. . . . Though he was doubt- 
 less a vivacious reader, it is not equally clear that he was a 
 conscientious student. He found himself possessed of a fac- 
 ulty which raised him above the necessity of research. With 
 that he could command the homage of the people at will." 
 T. E. Kebbel.
 
 452 MACAULAY 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 "There is, we have said, no consistency in Mr. Souther's 
 political system. But if there be in his political system any 
 leading principle, any one error which diverges more widely and 
 variously than any other, it is that of which his theory about 
 national works is a ramification. He conceives that the business 
 of the magistrate is, not merely to see that the persons and prop- 
 erty of the people are secure from attack, but that he ought to 
 be a jack-of-all-trades, architect, engineer, school-master, mer- 
 chant, theologian, a Lady Bountiful in every parish, a Paul Pry 
 in every house, spying, eaves-dropping, relieving, admonishing, 
 spending our money for us and choosing our opinions for us." 
 Essay on Southey's Colloquies. 
 
 " Meanwhile the unquiet brain of Monmouth was teeming with 
 strange designs. He had now reached a time of life at which 
 youth could no longer be pleaded as an excuse for his faults ; but 
 he was more wayward and eccentric than ever. Both in his 
 intellectual and in his moral character there was an abundance 
 of those fine qualities which may be called luxuries and a 
 lamentable deficiency of those solid qualities which are of the 
 first necessity. He had brilliant wit and ready invention without 
 common sense and chivalrous generosity and delicacy without 
 common honesty." History of England. 
 
 " It is, indeed, most extraordinary that a mind like Mr. 
 Southey's, a mind richly endowed in many respects by nature 
 and highly cultivated by study, a mind which has exercised con- 
 siderable influence on the most enlightened generation of the 
 most enlightened people that ever existed, should be utterly des- 
 titute of the power of discerning truth from falsehood. Yet such 
 is the fact. Government is to Mr. Southey one of the fine arts. 
 He judges of a theory, of a public measure, of a religion or a 
 political party, of a peace or a war, as men judge of a picture or 
 a statue, by the effect produced on his imagination. A chain of 
 associations is to him what a chain of reasoning is to other men ; 
 and what he calls his opinions are in fact merely his tastes." 
 Essay on Southey's Colloquies.
 
 MACAULAY 453 
 
 14. Assurance Self-Confidence Egotism. 
 
 " Macaulay's manner of writing gives the impression that he 
 is wholly infallible." Grimm. 
 
 ' What at first sight wore the air of dignity and elevation 
 in truth rather disagreeably resembles the narrow assurance of 
 a man who knows that he has the battalions of public opin- 
 ion with him. . . . It is oVerweeningness and self-con- 
 fident will that are the chief notes of Macaulay's style." 
 John Morlev. 
 
 " His essays are pronounced in a tone of perfect assurance. 
 His writings have all the stimulus of oracular de- 
 cision . " George Gilfillan. 
 
 When we find that he ignores all persons, however famous, 
 with whom he was not intimately associated ; that he alludes 
 only twice to Dickens ; that he merely mentions Bulwer to 
 say that he has met him ; that on the rank and file of his con- 
 temporaries in literature, society, and politics, he is almost 
 entirely silent, and yet that he writes so voluminously and so 
 minutely about himself, his feelings, and his intentions how 
 is it possible to avoid feeling that an egotist in the ordinary 
 sense of the word is exactly what Macaulay was? " T. H. S. 
 Escott. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " We think that the theory of Mr. Mill rests altogether on 
 false principles, and that even on those false principles he does 
 not reason logically. Nevertheless we do not think it strange 
 that his speculations should have filled the Utilitarians with ad- 
 miration. We have been for some time past inclined to suspect 
 that these people, whom some regard as the lights of the world 
 and others as incarnate demons, are in general ordinary men 
 with narrow understandings and little information. The con- 
 tempt which they express for elegant literature is evidently the 
 contempt of ignorance." Essay on Milt's Essay on Government. 
 
 " We have for some time past been convinced that this was 
 really the case ; and that, whenever their philosophy should be
 
 454 MACAULAY 
 
 boldly and unsparingly scrutinized, the world would see that it 
 had been under a mistake respecting them [the Utilitarians]. 
 We have made the experiment ; and it has succeeded beyond 
 our most sanguine expectations. A chosen champion of the 
 school has come forth against us. A specimen of his logical 
 abilities now lies before us ; and we pledge ourselves to show 
 that no prebendary at an anti-Catholic meeting, no true-blue 
 baronet after the third bottle at a Pitt Club, ever displayed such 
 utter incapacity of comprehending or answering an argument as 
 appears in the speculations of this Utilitarian apostle." Essay 
 on the Utilitarian Theot y of Government.
 
 THACKERAY, 1811-1863 
 
 Biographical Outline. William Makepeace Thackeray, 
 born at Calcutta, India, July 18, 1811 ; father, in the em- 
 ploy of the East India Company, dies when Thackeray is five 
 years old, and leaves him a fortune of ^20,000; in 1816 
 Thackeray is sent to England, and is placed in the famous 
 Charter House School, where he remains till 1828 ; enters 
 Trinity College, Cambridge, in February, 1829 ; while in 
 Cambridge he helps to edit a periodical called The Snob; 
 leaves Cambridge in 1830, visits Paris, Rome, Dresden, and 
 Weimar, and meets Goethe ; reads law for a year or more in 
 the Temple ; is ambitious to become an artist, travels over 
 Europe, and studies art at Paris and Rome ; loses his fort- 
 une within two years, partly .through the failure of an Indian 
 bank, and mainly in an unsuccessful newspaper venture ; 
 during 1833-34 he helps to edit and partly owns a paper 
 called the National Standard ; resides in Paris, 1835-36, and 
 publishes an illustrated folio called "Flore et Zephyr ; " he is 
 forced to take up literature as a means of support, and be- 
 comes a regular and frequent contributor to Eraser's Maga- 
 zine ; contributes also to the Times, the New Monthly Review, 
 and the Westminster Review; under the pseudonym of 
 "Michael Angelo Titmarsh" he contributes to Eraser's 
 "The Great Hoggarty Diamond" and "Barry Lyndon," 
 the latter in 1837-38 ; in 1837 he marries Isabella Shawe, 
 who becomes insane a few years later, and spends the remain- 
 der of her life in retirement, away from her family ; under the 
 pseudonym of "Titmarsh" Thackeray also publishes "The 
 Parish Sketch-Book," in 1840, "The Second Funeral of 
 
 455
 
 456 THACKERAY 
 
 Napoleon," in 1841, "The Chronicle of the Drum," in 
 1841, and " The Irish Sketch-Book," in 1843; he becomes 
 connected with Punch, in 1840; in Punch appear first the 
 " Snob Papers " then " Jeames's Diary;" he then publishes 
 "Vanity Fair" as a serial in twenty-four monthly parts, 
 beginning in January, 1847 ; Thackeray's reputation is estab- 
 lished by " Vanity Fair; " he is made widely known in Octo- 
 ber, 1847, by Charlotte Bronte, who dedicated to Thackeray 
 the second edition of (Jane Eyre) ; " in 1851 he delivers in 
 America his lectures on "The English Humorists of the 
 Eighteenth Century;" " Pendennis " is also published in 
 monthly numbers, beginning in November, 1848; his principal 
 connection with Punch ceases in 1850 ; he begins lecturing 
 in London, May 22, 1851, on George III. and on the Eng- 
 lish Humorists of the Eighteenth Century, and has among 
 his hearers Carlyle, Dickens, Hallam, Macaulay, Charlotte 
 Bronte, and Harriet Marti neau ; during 1851 Thackeray 
 repeats the lectures in Manchester, Oxford, Cambridge, and 
 Edinburgh; publishes "Henry Esmond" in 1852, and re- 
 ceives ^"1,000 for the manuscript ; he sails for America, Oc- 
 tober 30, 1852, having Lowell and Clough as fellow-passen- 
 gers ; delivers his lectures on the Humorists in Boston, New 
 York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, and Richmond ; 
 returns to London early in 1853 ; visits Paris and Baden, 
 where he begins "The Newcomes," which he publishes in 
 monthly numbers from October, 1853, to August, 1855 ; re- 
 ceives ^4,000 for the novel ; sails for America again, Octo- 
 ber 13, 1855, and lectures on "The Four Georges," from 
 Boston to Savannah ; both American lecture-tours are very 
 successful financially ; Thackeray returns to London in April, 
 1856; he repeats the lectures on "The Four Georges" 
 throughout England and Scotland during 1856, and receives 
 fifty guineas a night ; he stands for Parliament for Oxford in 
 July, 1857, but is defeated by a slight majority; publishes 
 "The Virginians " in monthly parts from November, 1857,
 
 THACKERAY 457 
 
 to October, 1859 ; becomes a friend and correspondent of 
 Motley ; Thackeray is attacked unjustifiably in June, 1858, 
 by Edmund Yates in Tou>n Talk; Thackeray demands and 
 secures Yates's dismissal from the Garrick Club; the result is 
 an estrangement between Thackeray and Dickens, who had 
 tried to protect Yates an estrangement that ceased only a 
 week before Thackeray's death ; Thackeray becomes the first 
 editor of the Cornhill Magazine in 1859, and begins in its 
 columns the publication of " Lovel the Widower " in Janu- 
 ary, 1860, together with the first of his "Roundabout Pa- 
 pers; " he publishes "The Adventures of Philip" in the 
 Cornhill from January, 1861, to August, 1862 ; this is the 
 first of his novels not originally illustrated by himself; he be- 
 comes didactic and somewhat despondent in his later work; 
 he resigns the editorship of Cornhill in March, 1862, and re- 
 moves to a fine new home at Palace Green ; dies there sud- 
 denly and alone on Christmas eve, 1863 ; is buried in Ken- 
 sal Green Cemetery. 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY ON THACKERAY'S STYLE. 
 
 Whipple, E. P., "Character and Characteristic Men." Boston, 1884, 
 
 Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 197-218. 
 
 Godwin, P., "Out of the Past." New York, 1870, Putnam, 226-240. 
 Bayne, P., "Essays in Biography and Criticism." Boston, 1857, Gould 
 
 & Lincoln, I : 389-392. 
 Stoddard, R. H., "Anecdote Biography of Thackeray." New York, 
 
 1874, Scribner, Armstrong & Co., 1-196. 
 Lancaster, H. H., "Essays and Reviews." Edinburgh, 1876, Edmon- 
 
 ston & Douglass, 399-479. 
 
 Brimley, G., "Essays." London, 1882, Macmillan, 258-269. 
 Watt, J. C., "Great Novelists." Edinburgh, 1880, Macniven & Wal- 
 lace, 97-161. 
 
 Masson, D., " British Novelists. " Boston, 1892, W. Small, 235-259. 
 Taine, H. A., "History of English Literature." New York, 1875, 
 
 Holt, 3 : 80, 95, and 213-255. 
 Xicoll, H. J., "Landmarks of English Literature." New York, 1883, 
 
 Appleton, 385-390.
 
 458 THACKERAY 
 
 Henley, \V. E., " Views and Reviews." New York, 1890, Scribner, 9-20. 
 Lang, A., " Essays in Little." New York, 1891, Scribner, 103-117. 
 Lang, A., "Letters to Dead Authors." London, 1892, Longmans & 
 
 Green, 1-9. 
 
 Taylor, B., "Essays and Notes." New York, 1880, Putnam, 134-155. 
 Collier, W. F., "History of English Literature." London, 1892, Nel- 
 son, 487-493. 
 Fields, J. T., "Yesterdays with Authors." Boston, 1893, Houghton, 
 
 Mifflin & Co., 11-39. 
 
 Bagehot, W., "Works." Hartford, 1889, Travellers' Insurance Com- 
 pany, 2: 154-197- 
 Walsh, W. S. (Shepherd), "Pen Pictures of Modern Authors." New 
 
 York, 1886, Putnam, 294-320. 
 Bungay, G. W., " Off -Hand Takings." New York, 1854, DeWitt, 
 
 224-229. 
 Trollope, A. (Thackeray), "English Men of Letters." New York, 
 
 1879, Harper, 1-210. 
 
 Eagles, J., "Essays." Edinburgh, 1857, Blackwood, 213-264. 
 Merivale, H. and Marzials, "Life of W. M. Thackeray." London, 
 
 1891, W. Scott, 1-248. 
 Jeaffreson, J. C., "Novels and Novelists." London, 1858, Hurst & 
 
 Blackett, 2 : 262-282. 
 Gilfillan, G., "Literary Portraits." Edinburgh, 1854, J. Hogg, 3: 
 
 261-278. 
 Berdmore, S., "Scratch Team of Essays." London, 1883, W H. 
 
 Allen & Co., 97-122. 
 Hannay, J., " Characters and Criticisms." London, 1865, David Bogue, 
 
 42-59- 
 Senior, W. W., "Essays on Fiction." London, 1864, Longmans & 
 
 Green, 321-394. 
 Dawson, G., "Biographical Lectures." London, 1886, Kegan Paul, 
 
 Trench & Co., 438-450. 
 Hutton, L., " Literary Landmarks of London." New York, 1892, 
 
 Harper, 302-307. 
 Jerrold, B., "The Best of All Good Company." Boston, 1878, Sill & 
 
 Co., 163-238. 
 L'Estrange, A. G., "History of English Humour." London, 1878, 
 
 Hurst & Blackett, 2 : 216-225. 
 Parton, J., "Some Noted Princes," &c. New York, 1886, Crowell, 
 
 52-56. 
 Phillips, S., "Essays from the Times." London, 1851-1854, Murray, 
 
 2: 320-338.
 
 THACKERAY 459 
 
 Skelton, J., "Essays in History and Biography." Edinburgh, 1883, 
 
 Blackwood, 293-295. 
 Smith, G. B., "Poets and Novelists." New York, 1876, Appleton, 
 
 i-56. 
 Vaughan, R. A., " Essays and Remains." London, 1858, J. W. Parker, 
 
 2: 311-320. 
 Duyckinck, E. A., " Portrait Gallery." New York, 1875, Johnson, 
 
 Wilson & Co., 5: 189-198. 
 Oliphant, Mrs., "The Victorian Age of English Literature." New 
 
 York, 1892, Tait, 261-281. 
 Welsh, A. H., "Development of English Literature." Chicago, 1884, 
 
 Griggs, 2: 415-418. 
 
 Harper's Magazine, 49 : 533-549 (R. H. Stoddard). 
 North American Review, 98 : 624-627 (J. R. Lowell) ; 67 : 368-370 
 
 (E. P. Whipple) ; 82 : 284 (Pebody) ; 100: 626 (C. S. Norton) ; 91 : 
 
 580-582 (Felton). 
 Atlantic Monthly, 15 : 639-641 (Whipple) ; 25 : 247-249 (Howells) ; 51 ; 
 
 243 (M. S. Henry). 
 
 Edinburgh Review, 87: 46-67; 137: 95-121. 
 Christian Examiner, 60: 102-121 (H. T. Tuckerman). 
 The Forum, 18: 326-338 (F. Harrison). 
 
 Westminster Review, 74: 500-523; 82: 172-185; 59: 363-368. 
 Scribner 3 ! Monthly, 21 : 535-543 (E. S. Nadal). 
 Quarterly Review, 84: 153-185. 
 The Nineteenth Century, 5 : 35-43 (A. Trollope). 
 Putnam's Magazine, 6 : 623-627. 
 Temple Bar, 61 : 469-475. 
 
 Eclectic Magazine, 34 : 96-100 ; 6 : 562-593 ; 2 : 1-6. 
 Longman'' s Magazine, 17: 673-682 (A. Lang). 
 Cornhill Magazine, 9: 129-132 (Dickens). 
 
 North British Re^<iew, 40: 210-265 (H. H. Lancaster); 15: 57-89. 
 'Saturday Review, 17: 9-10. 
 Dublin University Magazine, 64 : 620-627. 
 Littelfs Living Age, 80: 285-287, 325-328, 413-415, and 476-477 
 
 (Dickens in the Spectator) ; 18 : 412-426 (Spectator) ; 36 : 277-280 
 
 (London Times).
 
 460 THACKERAY 
 
 PARTICULAR CHARACTERISTICS. 
 
 I. Keen, Merciless Satire Hatred of Shams 
 Hypercriticism. " The satire of Thackeray is the recoil of 
 an exquisite sensibility from the harsh touch of life. . . . 
 He had not merely a smiling contempt but a deadly hatred of 
 all manner of shams, an equally intense love for every kind of 
 manliness and for gentlemanliness as_its highest type. He had 
 an eye for pretension as fatally detective as an acid for an 
 alkali ; and wherever it fell, so clear and seemingly harmless, 
 the weak spot was sure to betray itself." Lowell. 
 
 " Thackeray appears at first to have considered that his 
 business was to find fault ; to carry into literature the functions 
 of the detective police ; to pry into the haunts and arrest the 
 persons of scoundrels who evaded the ordinary operations of 
 the law. The most fashionable clubs and drawing-rooms were 
 invaded to catch scamps whom a common policeman would 
 have sought in low alleys and hells. . . . The latent 
 weaknesses, foibles, follies, vices of the intelligent and good 
 became the objects of his search, somewhat to the exclusion 
 of their nobler and predominant qualities, and the result 
 was, in many instances, wofully partial estimates and ex- 
 hibitions of men and women. The truth was truth only 
 from the satirist's point of view." E. P. }V7iipph\ 
 
 " Thackeray had power to expose every kind of lie and 
 humbug. . . . He was a man who had strong moral as 
 well as intellectual qualities and that strong sense of justice 
 without which no author ever became famous. . . . To 
 those who read the ' Snob Papers ' it was permitted to leaven 
 the inherent pride and snobbishness of their nature by the ab- 
 sorption of those antidotes to pride and selfishness which 
 Thackeray provided. He had an uncompromising hatred of 
 wrong." Peter Bayne. 
 
 " In ' The Newcomes ' he deliberately states his intention of
 
 THACKERAY 461 
 
 leaving the bad alone, poor fellows, and solely attacking the 
 so-called good, . . . the ' worldly holy,' as Laurence 
 Oliphant afterward called them. . . . The crusade 
 against this kind of hypocrisy was what Thackeray really 
 enjoyed. To satirize vice was not half so attractive to him. 
 . . . His detestation of humbug was so intense that he 
 seems to forget that there is some of it which we could 
 scarcely do without." Mrs. Oliphant. 
 
 "He saw something that was distasteful, and a man in- 
 stantly became a snob in his estimation. . . . The little 
 courtesies of the world and the little discourtesies became 
 snobbish to him. A man could not wear his hat or carry his 
 umbrella or mount his horse without falling into some error 
 ofsnobbism before his hypercritical eyes." Anthony Trol- 
 lope. 
 
 " His great service to the world has been in his exposure 
 of the prevailing faults of his time. . . . ' The Book of 
 Snobs' should be read carefully at least once a year." H. 
 H. Lancaster. 
 
 " His pen alternately, at his own variable whim and pleas- 
 ure, dropped honey and vitriol. . . . There were blent 
 together in the nature of this one writer the sweetness of 
 Goldsmith and the withering, pitiless scorn of Swift. . 
 Sometimes the careless strokes dealt around him by the comic 
 censor blight as visibly as a flare of lightning. . . . For 
 long he was regarded as one whose inspiration was entirely of 
 the brain without any promptings of the heart. He was ac- 
 cused of being a cold-blooded cynic, who could sneer at hu- 
 man sympathies, but whose passionless nature was incapable of 
 arousing them. . . . His hatred of swindlers of gigan- 
 tic arch-scoundrels burst out in 'The Hoggarty Diamond,' 
 and proclaimed itself in his works between that and ' The 
 Newcomes.' The satirist was no respecter of persons; the 
 tyranny and infamy of a nobleman were described as truth- 
 fully as the vulgar ignorance of a waiting- man or lodging-
 
 462 THACKERAY 
 
 house keeper. It was Thackeray who tore from social de- 
 pravity her two-fold robe, one side of rags and one of spangled 
 purple, and displayed her hateful proportions.";/. C. Jeaf- 
 freson. 
 
 " A new delineator of life was at work in society, and one 
 whose pen was as keen as the dissecting knife of the surgeon. 
 An author had sprung up who dared to shame society by a 
 strong and manly scorn. . . . Thackeray manages to 
 find the one vulnerable point in our" armor; he introduces the 
 rapier of his sarcasm, and we are slain. . . . Surely, the 
 world should be the better for the fearless work which this 
 man has accomplished. . . . His wit does not preclude 
 him from being fair and just. . . . With all his keen 
 sense of the ridiculous, and his scathing powers of invective, 
 there is no one instance where, for the sake of the brilliancy 
 of his satire, he ever cast a slur upon truly philanthropic labor. 
 When he laughs we know he will do it fairly." G. B. Smith. 
 
 " He was very fond of looking into the tricks of genius. 
 He liked to be by when the preacher arranged his last curl 
 before mounting the pulpit and when the beadle was arrang- 
 ing his surplice so that it might fall in the best folds. . . . 
 A man of the world, great and full of gracefulness, full of fun ; 
 cri ticising bishops, millionnaires, and tailors . . . a man 
 who walked through life carrying the lamp of an upright char- 
 acter, a pure spirit, and a truth-telling tongue. . . . He 
 had a fine eye for a snob, from the top to the bottom of soci- 
 ety. He read it all, and knew where to find the particular 
 bone the snob bone. . . . Without exaggeration or fuss 
 he painted us such a picture of life and gave us such lessons in 
 morals that it is almost impossible to read them without get- 
 ting wiser." George Dawson. 
 
 " His men, if not absurd, are tyrants or rogues ; his women, 
 if not fools, are intriguers or flirts ; he paints those who pur- 
 sue nothing but wealth and those who pursue nothing but 
 pleasure. . . . He paints the former as vain, greedy,
 
 THACKERAY 463 
 
 purse-proud, oppressive and overbearing in prosperity, grovel- 
 ling and base in adversity, and envious and suspicious at all 
 times. He describes the latter as frivolous, heartless, and 
 false, with as much selfishness and vanity and malignity as 
 their Russell Square neighbors, though concealed under a 
 smoother exterior. . . . He has penetrated into the 
 lowest cells of pride, vanity, and selfishness, and has laid open 
 some of the secrets of the human prison-house which never 
 were revealed before. . . . His favorite amusement is 
 unmasking hypocrisy. He delights to show the selfishness of 
 kindness, the pride of humility, the consciousness of sim- 
 plicity." W. W. Senior. 
 
 11 The weak and wicked phases of human development were 
 brought too much into the light, while the better phases were 
 kept in shadow. . . . But he took no satyr's delight in 
 the offensive scenes and graceless characters ; he was even 
 sadder than the reader could be at the horrible prospects before 
 him; . . . he chastised in no ill-natured or malicious vein, 
 but in love; he cauterized only to cure." Parke Godwin. 
 
 One critic calls him " usefully and delightfully cynical," 
 while Hannay says : " He combined Addison's love of virtue 
 with Johnson's hatred of cant Horace Walpole's lynx-like 
 eye for the mean and ridiculous with the gentleness and wide 
 charity of Goldsmith for mankind as a whole." But, like 
 most writers, Thackeray knew himself better than did any of 
 his critics, and he best expresses the general average of the 
 criticisms already given. In the introduction to " Vanity 
 Fair" he says: "One is bound to speak the truth as one 
 knows it, whether one mounts cap and bells or a shovel hat ; 
 and a deal of disagreeable matter must come out in the course 
 of such an undertaking. " And in 1854 Thackeray wrote to 
 a friend : "I suppose we all begin by being too savage. / 
 know one who did. ... I hate Juvenal. I mean I 
 think him a truculent brute ; and I love Horace better than 
 you do. ... I admire Swift's power, but I don't ad-
 
 464 THACKERAY 
 
 mire that kind of power so much as I did fifteen years ago. 
 . . . Love is a higher intellectual exercise than hatred." 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " He seldom drank too much, and never was late to business 
 or huddled over his toilet, however brief had been his sleep or 
 severe his headache. In a word, he was as scrupulously whited 
 as any sepulchre in the whole bills of mortality." The New- 
 comes. 
 
 " No, no ; my master was a man of forty now, and behayved 
 himself as sich. . . . He swoar more and lowder than any- 
 one there ; he abyoused the waiters, the wittles, the wines. With 
 his glass in his i, he staired at everybody. ... He talked 
 about ' my carridge,' ' my currier,' ' my servant ; ' and he did 
 wright. I've always found through life that if you wish to be 
 respected by English people, you must be insalent to them, 
 especially if you are a sprig of nobiliaty. We like being insulted 
 by noblemen it shows they're familiar with us. Law bless us ! 
 . . . While my master was hectoring in the parlor at Balong, 
 pretious airs I gave myself in the kitching ; and the consequints 
 was that we were better served and moar liked than many pip- 
 pie with twice our merit." Memoirs of C. J. Yellowplush. 
 
 " If ever our cousins, the Smigsmags, asked me to meet Lord 
 Longears, I should like to take an opportunity after dinner and 
 say, in the most good-natured way in the world : ' Sir, Fortune 
 makes you a present of a number of thousand pounds every year. 
 The ineffable wisdom of our ancestors has placed you as a chief 
 and hereditary legislator over me. Our admirable Constitution 
 (the pride of Britons and envy of surrounding nations) obliges 
 me to receive you as my senator, superior and guardian. Your 
 eldest son, Fitz-Heehaw, is sure of a place in Parliament; your 
 younger sons, the DeBrays, . . . will represent us in for- 
 eign courts. These prizes our admirable Constitution (the pride 
 and envy of, etc.) pronounces to be your due ; without count of 
 your dulness, your vices, your selfishness, or your entire in- 
 capacity and folly.' " Concluding Observations on Snobs.
 
 THACKERAY 465 
 
 2. Exact Portraiture Natural Characterization. 
 
 " Thackeray, in his more elaborate works, always paints 
 character, and Dickens single peculiarities. Thackeray's 
 personages are all men, those of Dickens personified oddi- 
 ties. The one is an artist, the other a caricaturist. . 
 Thackeray's round of character is very limited, but his char- 
 acters are masterpieces, always governed by those average 
 motives and acted upon by those average sentiments which 
 all men have in common. They never act like heroes and 
 heroines but like men and women." Lowell. 
 
 " It would be difficult to name a writer of fiction of equal 
 excellence who had so little of the inventive or imaginative 
 faculty. Keenness of observation and a nice appreciation of 
 character supplied him with all the materials of his creations. 
 He wrote from the experience of life. The key to his works 
 is to be found in his life. . . . The features of the old 
 soldier [Colonel Newcorae] appear before us as faithfully and 
 as naturally as though limned by the hand of Sir Joshua 
 Reynolds. . . . The faculty is very rare of being able 
 to transfer the lineaments of commonplace people in such a 
 manner as that others will care to study them. Yet this is 
 the result that Thackeray achieves, and that without labor. 
 Nothing transcendental or that which is beyond human nat- 
 ure is thrown in as a means of bribing the reader into a 
 closer relationship. As men passed Thackeray he observed 
 them; but in doing so he felt that to add to the original 
 would destroy the identity, and the consequence of his con- 
 summate art is that throughout the whole of his varied picture- 
 gallery there is no portrait which bears the impress of falsity 
 or distortion." G. B. Smith. 
 
 "It is Thackeray's aim to represent life as it is actually 
 and historically men and women as they are, in those sit- 
 uations in which they are usually placed, with that mixture 
 of good and evil, strength and foible, which is to be found 
 in their characters, and liable only to those incidents which 
 30
 
 466 THACKERAY 
 
 are of ordinary occurrence. He will have no faultless char- 
 acters, no demi-gods nothing but men and brethren. "- 
 David Masson. 
 
 " He has, in a very singular manner, the power of seizing 
 humors or peculiarities. . . . Never before, we think, in 
 fiction, did characters so uniformly speak exactly like the men 
 and women in real life [as in 'Esmond']." H. H. Lan- 
 caster. 
 
 " If he sets himself to draw a blackguard, he is too true an 
 artist to omit the redeeming points that are to be found in 
 almost every case. . . . Thackeray desired to represent 
 an unvarnished picture of man as he really is." Mrs. Oli- 
 phant. 
 
 "In 'Esmond 1 Thackeray reproduces for us the style in 
 which men wrote and talked in the days of Queen Anne. To 
 reproduce the forgotten phraseology, to remember always, not 
 how his age would express an idea, but how Steele or Swift or 
 Addison would have expressed it, might have been pro- 
 nounced impossible of accomplishment. Yet in ' Esmond ' 
 Thackeray did accomplish it, and with perfect success." H. 
 /. Nicoll. 
 
 " I know of no author save Balzac, whom he resembles in 
 other points, whose characterizations of men and of incidents 
 are so sharply defined, so nicely and finely cut, so chiselled as 
 if from the block, like a piece of statuary, and yet so free and 
 flowing and full of animation, the most unlike statuary of any- 
 thing in the world." Parke Godwin. 
 
 " George Osborne, Dobbin, and Amelia are characters 
 almost literally true to nature. . . . His page swarms 
 with personages whom we recognize at once as genuine." 
 E. P. IVhipple. 
 
 " Whoever it is that speaks in his pages, does it not seem 
 that such a person would certainly have used such words on 
 such an occasion ? Whether it be a great duke, such as he 
 who was to have married Beatrix, or a mean chaplain, such as
 
 THACKERAY 467 
 
 Tusher or Captain Steele, the humorist, they talk not as 
 they would have talked, probably, of which I am no judge 
 but as we feel that they might have talked." Anthony Trol- 
 lope. 
 
 Perhaps Henley unconsciously testifies to Thackeray's fidel- 
 ity of portraiture when he says : "Esmond apart, there is 
 scarcely a man or woman in Thackeray whom it is possible to 
 love unreservedly or thoroughly respect. ' ' A more favorable 
 critic, writing anonymously, says of Thackeray's portraits : 
 " In variety, truth, and consistency they are unrivalled. They 
 are not caricatures, they are not men of humors ; they are the 
 men and women whom we daily meet ; they are, in the fullest 
 sense of the word, representative ; and yet they are drawn 
 so sharply and finely that we never could mistake or con- 
 found them." As in considering his satire, so here, we find 
 the best summary in Thackeray's own words. In " Catherine" 
 he writes: "The only way in which poor authors can act 
 honestly for the public and themselves is to paint thieves as 
 they are ; not dandy, poetical, rose-water thieves, but real, 
 downright scoundrels, leading scoundrelly lives, drunken, 
 profligate, dissolute, low, as scoundrels will be." And again 
 he writes : ' ' My rascals are no milk-and-water rascals, I 
 promise you." 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " ' Where is Sir Pitt Crawley ? ' said Miss Sharp, majestically. 
 
 " ' He, he ! I'm Sir Pitt Crawley. Reklect you owe me a pint 
 for bringing down your luggage. He, he ! Ask Tinker if I 
 aynt. Mrs. Tinker, Miss Sharp ; Miss Governess, Mrs. Char- 
 woman. Ho, ho ! ' 
 
 " The lady addressed as Mrs. Tinker at this moment made her 
 appearance with a pipe and a paper of tobacco, for which she 
 had been dispatched. 
 
 ' ' ' Where's the farden ? ' said he. ' I gave you three-half-pence. 
 Where's the change, old Tinker ? ' 
 
 " ' There ! ' replied Mrs. Tinker, flinging down the coin ; ' it's
 
 468 THACKERAY 
 
 only baronets as cares about farthings. ... He never gave 
 away a farthing in his life,' growled Mrs. Tinker. 
 
 " ' Never, and never will ; it's against my principle.' " Vanity 
 Fair. 
 
 " Mr. Foker's behavior was quite different. He inquired for 
 Rummer and the cold in his nose, told Mrs. Rummer a riddle, 
 asked Miss Rummer when she would be ready to marry him, and 
 paid his compliments to Miss Brett, the other young lady in the 
 bar, all in a minute of time, and with a liveliness and facetious- 
 ness which set all these ladies in a giggle ; and he gave a cluck 
 expressive of great satisfaction as he tossed off his mixture, which 
 Miss Rummer prepared and handed to him." Pendennis. 
 
 " As she is not a heroine there is no need to describe her 
 person. Indeed, I am afraid that her nose was rather short than 
 otherwise and her cheeks a great deal too round and red for a 
 heroine, but her face blushed with rosy health and her lips with 
 the freshness of smiles, and she had a pair of eyes which sparkled 
 with the brightest and honestest good-humor, except indeed 
 when they filled with tears, and that was a great deal too often, 
 for the silly thing would cry over a dead canary bird or over a 
 mouse." Vanity Fair. 
 
 3. Artistic Ease Grace Finish. "His manner is 
 the perfection of conversational writing ; graceful, yet vigor- 
 ous; adorably artificial, yet incomparably sound, 
 easily and happily rhythmical, yet full of color ; ... in- 
 stinct with urbanity and instinct with charm, it is a type of 
 high-bred English, a climax of literary art. ... He was 
 a rare artist in words. . . . Setting aside Cardinal New- 
 man's, the style he wrote is certainly less open to criticism 
 than that of any other modern Englishman. . . . He 
 was neither super-eloquent, like Mr. Ruskin, nor a German- 
 ized Jeremy, like Carlyle. . . . He neither dallied with 
 antitheses, like Macaulay, nor rioted in verbal vulgarisms with 
 Dickens ; he abstained from technology as carefully as George 
 Eliot indulged in it. ... He wrote as a very prince among 
 talkers, and he interfused and impenetrated English with the
 
 THACKERAY 469 
 
 elegant and cultured fashion of Queen Anne." W. E. Hen- 
 ley. 
 
 " Surely that style, so fresh, so rich, so full of surprises 
 that style which stamps as classical even his fragments of slang, 
 and perpetually astonishes and delights would alone give 
 immortality to an author even had he little to say." An- 
 drew Lang. 
 
 " The grace, flexibility, and easy elegance of the style are 
 especially notable. It is utterly without pretension, and par- 
 takes of the absolute sincerity of the writer ; it is talk in 
 print, seemingly as simple as the most familiar private chat, 
 yet as delicate in its felicities as the most elaborate composi- 
 tion. . . . It [' The Newcomes '] seems written with a 
 pen diamond-pointed, so glittering and incisive is its slight- 
 est touch." E. P. Whipple. 
 
 " There is a certain Saxon flavor and colloquial ease in Mr. 
 Thackeray's best writing which forms his chief literary attrac- 
 tion, and is the combined result of a familiarity with good 
 English literature and an absence of that conventional erudi- 
 tion which is so apt to give a pedantic twinge to style." 
 H. T. Tucker man. 
 
 " Thackeray's style is beyond praise so easy, so limpid, 
 showing everywhere by unobtrusive allusions how rich he was 
 in modern culture ; it has the highest charm of gentlemanly 
 conversation. And it was natural to him, his early works 
 being as perfect, as low in tone, as the latest. He was in all 
 respects the most finished example we have of what is called 
 ' a man of the world.' " Lowell. 
 
 " Addison's style suggests it, but Addison's was more 
 artificial ; Goethe's had much of the same clearness, but 
 Goethe's was more staid and stately ; Fielding's had the same 
 naturalness, but was at times too careless and hurried, and, in 
 fact, we can only speak of it as Thackeray's own original, 
 vigorous, natural, limpid, idiomatic, and flexible a perfect 
 vehicle for the man's peculiar spirit." Parke Godwin.
 
 470 THACKERAY 
 
 " Nobody in our day wrote, I should say, with such perfec- 
 tion of style." Carlyle. 
 
 " There is something in the exquisite finish and harmony of 
 'Esmond ' which one can only express by the epithet artistic ; 
 it is a pure combination of perfect taste and perfect workman- 
 ship.''^. Oliphant. 
 
 ' ' Confessedly, at the last, he was the greatest master of pure 
 English in our day. His style is never ornate, ... is 
 never forced or loaded, only entirely appropriate and entirely 
 beautiful." H. H. Lancaster. 
 
 Another declares that " there may have been men of 
 greater genius than Thackeray ; there may have been more 
 forcible writers than he ; but no one has approached him in 
 the command of polished, idiomatic English in all its varie- 
 ties." A contributor to the Athentzum calls Thackeray's dic- 
 tion "agreeable, manly, colloquial, English the English of 
 cultivated men, but still with as little bookishness about it as 
 possible such is the clear atmosphere we breathe in reading 
 him. Very sparing in imagery, perfectly free from conceits." 
 Skelton calls him "the most finished literary artist of his 
 age ; " and as early as 1839 Dr. McKenziesaid : " He writes 
 the best and purest English of any author now living." Of 
 his own profession Thackeray once wrote : " We are but 
 tradesmen, working for bread and not for righteousness' sake. 
 Let's try and work honestly ; but don't let us be prating 
 pompously about our ' sacred calling. ' ' 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " The sun shines to-day as he did when he first began shining ; 
 and the birds in the tree overhead, while I am writing, sing very 
 much the same notes they have sung ever since they were finches. 
 . . . There may be nothing new under and including the sun ; 
 but it looks fresh every morning, and we rise with it to toil, hope, 
 scheme, laugh, struggle, love, suffer, until the night comes and 
 quiet. And then will wake Morrow and the eyes that look on it ; 
 and so da capo" The Newcomes.
 
 THACKERAY 471 
 
 " I fancy poor Congreve's theatre is a temple of Pagan delights 
 and mysteries not permitted except among heathens ; . . . 
 when the libertine hero carries off the beauty in the play, and the 
 dotard is laughed to scorn for having the young wife ; . . . 
 when Mr. Punch, that godless old rebel, breaks every law and 
 laughs at it with odious triumph, outwits his lawyer, bullies the 
 beadle, knocks his wife about the head, and hangs the hangman 
 don't you see . . . the Pagan protest ?" English Humorists. 
 
 " But where is the road and its merry incidents of life ? Is 
 there no Chelsea or Greenwich for the old honest pimple-nosed 
 coachmen ? I wonder where they are, those good fellows ? Is old 
 Weller alive or dead ? and the waiters, yea, and the inns at which 
 they waited and the cold rounds of beef inside and the stunted 
 ostler, with his blue nose and clinking pail, where is he, and 
 where is his generation ? To those great geniuses now in petti- 
 coats who shall write novels for the beloved reader's children, 
 these men and things will be as much legend and history as Mi- 
 nerva or Coeur de Lion or Jack Sheppard. . . . Alas ! we shall 
 never hear the horn sing at midnight or see the pike-gates fly 
 open any more." Vanity Fair, 
 
 4. Familiar Comment. Self-Suggestion. Unlike 
 other great masters of dramatic art, Thackeray frequently 
 allows himself to comment upon his own characters. In 
 the preface to " Pendennis " he says, "It is a kind of 
 confidential talk between writer and reader. ... In 
 the course of his volubility the writer must of necessity lay 
 bare his own weaknesses, vanities, peculiarities." His critics 
 have generally condemned this trait as a blemish in an other- 
 wise almost perfect style. Anthony Trollope says : " Thack- 
 eray, too, has a strong flavor of Thackeray. I am inclined to 
 think that his most besetting sin in style the little ear-mark 
 by which he is most conspicuous is a certain affected famil- 
 iarity. He indulges too frequently in little confidences with 
 individual readers, in which pretended allusions to himself are 
 numerous. ... In the short contributions to periodicals 
 on which he tried his 'prentice hand, such addresses were 
 natural and efficacious ; but in a larger work of fiction they
 
 4/2 THACKERAY 
 
 cause an absence of that dignity to which even a novel may 
 aspire." Whipple, who is so warm an admirer of Thackeray, 
 observes that " the continual presence of the writer himself, 
 making himself the companion of the reader gossiping, hint- 
 ing, sneering, laughing, crying, as the narrative proceeds 
 combine to produce an effect which nobody, to say the least, 
 ever found dull." A writer in the Edinburgh Review is 
 more positive in condemning this trait. He says : "Mr. 
 Thackeray indulges in the bad practice of commenting on his 
 dramatis persona. He is perpetually pointing out to us the 
 generosity of Dobbin, the brutality of the Osbornes, the vanity 
 of Joseph Sedley, and so on, instead of leaving us to find out 
 their qualities from their actions." 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " What man could be otherwise than happy to be allowed a 
 momentary embrace of two such precious fingers ? When a gen- 
 tleman so favors me, I always ask, mentally, why he has taken 
 the trouble at all, and regret that I have not had the presence of 
 mind to poke one finger against his two. If I were worth ten 
 thousand a year, ... I cannot help thinking he would have 
 favored me with the whole palm." The Newcomes. 
 
 " No, we are not monsters of crime or angels walking the 
 earth at least I know one of us who isn't, as can be shown any 
 day at home if the knife won't cut or the mutton comes up raw. 
 . . . At the time when this story begins, I say, Lovel had his 
 faults which of us has not ? He had buried his wife, having 
 notoriously been henpecked by her. How many men and breth- 
 ren are like him ! He had a good fortune I wish I had as much 
 though I dare say many people are ten times as rich. He was 
 a good-looking fellow enough ; though that depends, ladies, upon 
 whether you like a fair man or a dark one." Lovel the Widower. 
 
 " And, as we bring our characters forward, I will ask leave, as 
 a man and a brother, not only to introduce them, but occasional- 
 ly to step down from the platform and talk about them ; if they 
 are good and kindly, to love them and shake them by the hand : 
 if they are silly, to laugh at them confidentially in the reader's
 
 THACKERAY 473 
 
 sleeve ; if they are wicked and heartless, to abuse them in the 
 strongest terms which politeness admits of." Vanity Fair. 
 
 5. Sympathy Sincerity Manliness. In the early 
 days of his authorship Thackeray was frequently called cyn- 
 ical. But any critic who should make that charge to-day 
 would convict himself of almost total ignorance of Thack- 
 eray's best work. 
 
 " We question much if society will ever be ministered to 
 by a physician who will so sincerely compassionate the sores 
 it was his duty to probe. . . . [We are impressed with] 
 the open candor and gentlemanliness and the indulging gen- 
 tleness and truth of his character. . . . Kindliness marked 
 his relations with the meanest of his class. ... It pained 
 him beyond measure to refuse the manuscripts of his corre- 
 spondents [when he was editor of the Cornhill~\, especially the 
 poorer class of them a tenderness that he expresses in his 
 paper ' Thorns in the Cushion.' . . . It is said that he 
 frequently sent the money out of his own pocket to needy con- 
 tributors and their contributions to the waste-basket. . . . 
 He fulminated his anathemas, not because he had tried any- 
 thing or found anything wanting, but because the human race 
 were going after Solomon's gods and pampering the same ap- 
 petites and, unlike him, appearing to be immensely satisfied. 
 The effect of his writings must surely be to make honest men 
 hate all manner of cant." -J. C. Watt. 
 
 "The special text from which Thackeray preached was not 
 past or future ideal but present and living goodness and 
 beauty. . . . He levelled the keenest satire and most 
 biting irony equally against ostentation of soul, speciosity of 
 life, and falseness of heart. ... A gentleman in heart 
 and speech, he had no sympathy with swagger of any kind. 
 It has been often urged against him that he does not 
 make us think better of our fellow-men. No, truly. But he 
 does what is far greater than this he makes us think worse of
 
 474 THACKERAY 
 
 ourselves. . . . The whole tendency of his writings has 
 invariably been to inspire reverence for manliness and purity 
 and truth." H. H. Lancaster. 
 
 "Although from his experience of life he was completely 
 desilhisione, the well of natural tenderness was never dried in 
 his heart. He rejoiced, with a fresh, boyish delight, in every 
 evidence of an unspoiled nature in others in every utterance 
 which denoted what may have seemed to him overfaith in 
 the good. The more he was saddened by his knowledge of 
 human weakness and folly, the more gratefully he welcomed 
 strength, virtue, sincerity. His eyes never unlearned the 
 habit of that quick moisture which honors the true word and 
 noble deed." Bayard Taylor. 
 
 " His humanity was the crown and glory of his work. 
 He was one of those men who are naturally full of 
 sensibility to a degree. . . . Selfishness was as foreign to 
 him as insincerity. . . . To veil at times this side of his 
 character was essential, in order to give play to that satire 
 which kills. . . . Men who understood him best knew 
 that it cost him an effort to subdue that part of his nature 
 which hastened to sympathize with others. . . . What- 
 soever was good, honest, and true found in him a defender ; 
 whatsoever was base, unmanly, or false shrank abashed from 
 his presence. A man with less pretence, less assumption, less 
 sham never existed. . . . He is a man of feeling in the 
 fullest sense of that word ; for he loves all living with the heart 
 of a brother ; his soul rushes forth in sympathy with sadness 
 and sorrow, with goodness or grandeur, over all creation." 
 G. B. Smith. 
 
 " [He is] the first social regenerator of the day, . . . the 
 very master of that working corps who would restore to recti- 
 tude the warped state of things. . . . He resembles Field- 
 ing as an eagle does a vulture." Charlotte Bronte. 
 
 Skelton, Thackeray's correspondent and intimate friend, 
 speaks of him as "that noble, simple gentleman, ... a
 
 THACKERAY 475 
 
 pure, healthy, honest, boyishly noble and chivalrous soul, . . . 
 tender, gentle, upright, true in thought and deed." At 
 Thackeray's death Punch, to which he had been so long a 
 contributor, called him "a brave, true, honest gentleman, 
 whom no pen but his own could depict as those who knew 
 him best could desire," and contained a poem on Thackeray 
 by Shirley Brooks, from which we quote one stanza : 
 
 " He was a cynic ! No ! By his life, all wrought 
 
 Of generous acts, mild words, and gentle ways ; 
 His heart wide open to all kindly thought, 
 
 His hand so quick to give, his tongue to praise." 
 
 In 1859, four years before Thackeray's death, we find a 
 writer in the Edinburgh Review thus expressing the best sen- 
 timent of his time in regard to the great novelist : " England 
 may regard it as some proof of her moral soundness that her 
 greatest novelist is, in all his sentiment and sympathies, the 
 deadly enemy of hypocrisy but the constant friend of virtue. " 
 Another anonymous critic writes : " It is this constant quiver- 
 ing of a note of tenderness amidst all the despicable and shame- 
 ful things which he attributes to his worst characters that 
 really raises Thackeray's satire so high above the level of all 
 preceding satire. . . . Thackeray is always trembling 
 with sensitiveness as well as flashing with rage. He trains our 
 nerves to a finer and more delicate sense of tune before he 
 dashes his hand with a fierce jar over the strings. He teaches 
 us to recognize every sweet note, even when it is all but lost 
 in the discordant scream of passion. He relieves the mind 
 by long intervals of genial insight before he rends it with his 
 imaginative fury at the lurking baseness or at the imbecility of 
 innocence." 
 
 In his "English Humorists" Thackeray discusses this very 
 quality, and justly says : " The humourous writer, besides ap- 
 pealing to your sense of ridicule, professes to awaken and di- 
 rect your love, your pity, your kindness your scorn for un-
 
 47C THACKERAY 
 
 truth, pretension, imposture your tenderness for the weak, 
 the poor, the oppressed, the unhappy. ... He takes 
 upon him to be the week-day preacher, so to speak." Late 
 in life he makes his " faithful old gold pen " say : 
 
 " Stranger, I never writ a flattery, 
 Nor signed the page that registered a lie." 
 
 And again he writes as an editor to his readers : ' ' Dearly be- 
 loved, neither in nor out of this pulpit do I profess to be 
 bigger or cleverer or wiser than any of you. ' ' 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " Many persons will call this description low ; I do not envy 
 them their gentility, and have always observed through life (as to 
 be sure every other gentleman has observed as well as myself) 
 that it is your parvenu who stickles most for what he calls the 
 genteel, and has the most squeamish abhorrence for what is frank 
 and natural." The Newcomes. 
 
 "There is scarce any parent, however friendly or tender with 
 his children, but must feel sometimes that they have thoughts 
 which are not his or hers, and wishes and secrets quite beyond 
 the parental control ; and as people are vain long after they 
 are fathers, ay, or grandfathers, and not seldom fancy that mere 
 personal desire of domination is overweening anxiety and love for 
 their family, no doubt that common outcry against thankless chil- 
 dren might often be shown to prove, not that the son is disobe- 
 dient, but the father too exacting." The Newcomes. 
 
 "There was a crowd of idlers round the door as I passed out 
 of it, and had I been alone I should have been ashamed of seeing 
 them ; but as it was, I was only thinking of my dear, dear wife, 
 who was leaning trustfully on my arm and smiling like heaven 
 into my face ay, and took heaven too into the Fleet Prison 
 with me or an angel out of heaven. Ah ! I had loved her before, 
 and happy it is to love when one is hopeful and young in the 
 midst of smiles and sunshine ; but be //happy, and then see what 
 it is to be loved by a good woman. I declare before heaven that 
 of all the joys and happy moments it has given me, that was the 
 crowning one that little ride with my wife's cheek on my shoul-
 
 THACKERAY 477 
 
 der down Holborn to the prison." The Great Hoggarty Dia- 
 mond. 
 
 6. Intense Realism Minute Observation. 
 
 Thackeray was fond of saying, " I have no brain above the 
 eyes; I describe what I see." We have already considered 
 one phase of this quality that which concerns his portrayal 
 of personal character. We now come to his minute observa- 
 tion of things. 
 
 " Thackeray looked at everything at nature, at life, at art 
 from a sensitive aspect. . . . The visible scene of 
 life the streets, the servants, the clubs, the gossip, the West 
 End fastened on his brain. These were to him reality ; 
 they burned in upon his brain ; they pained his nerves ; their 
 influence reached him through many avenues which ordinary 
 men do not feel much or to which they are altogether imper- 
 vious. . . . He could not help seeing everything, and 
 what he saw made so near and keen an impression upon him 
 that he could not again exclude it from his understanding; it 
 stayed there and disturbed his thoughts." Walter Bagehot. 
 
 " His scenes never seem to be invented. They come to 
 pass. The author lifts the curtain, and the play goes on. 
 . . Everybody, on reading his works, is quite convinced 
 that the author has seen what he sets forth. . . ' He 
 
 simply puts down the reports of his eyes,' says Mr. Keen, ' as 
 any well-informed gentleman might do.' But then, my friend, 
 what eyes they are ! How they take in every minute particu- 
 lar of the visible appearance ; and having got that, have 
 strangely pierced the entire significance of it ! 
 There is something so sharp, so penetrating, so luminous in 
 his look, that when he sees the thing he sees the whole of it 
 inside as well as out and that not only with his eyes but 
 with his brain and heart." Parke Godwin. 
 
 " The realism of Thackeray represents the extreme point of 
 reaction against the false idealism of the Minerva press. . . .
 
 4/8 THACKERAY 
 
 He is as little of an idealizer as it is possible to be. ... He 
 depends for success, not on the power of his personages to evoke 
 sympathy, negative or positive, but on their strict correspond- 
 ence with fact. . . . His popularity is the most powerful 
 evidence to which we could easily point of the capacity re- 
 siding in the exhibition of bare, or even repulsive, fact to in- 
 terest mankind. . . . [He gives] the uncompromising 
 recital of nature's facts." Peter Bayne. 
 
 "Truthfulness to fact, eager and uncompromising, was his 
 main characteristic. . . . He strove always to paint and 
 show things as they really are." H. H. Lancaster. 
 
 " ' Vanity Fair ' is a moving panorama of life, with a hun- 
 dred side-scenes and episodes of interest and with a reality 
 and fulness of humanity which have never been surpassed." 
 Mrs. Oliphant. 
 
 " As a work of art ' Esmond ' is Thackeray's masterpiece ; 
 as the reproduction of a past age as a historical novel it is 
 unrivalled. . . . The way in which Thackeray enters 
 into the spirit as well as the letter of the times he describes is 
 wonderful." J?. H. Stoddard. 
 
 "Thackeray takes us below the surface; we travel through 
 the dark scenes of the human drama with him ; he makes his 
 notes and comments without flattery and with astounding 
 realism. . . . He is true to the results of life as we see 
 them daily. For example, he makes Newcome die before the 
 family fortunes are restored. See, again, the fate of Beatrix 
 Esmond. We are sorry, but it is natural. . . . There 
 are but few occurrences in the whole series [of his works] that 
 were not drawn either from his own individual history or the 
 history of some one of his friends or acquaintances. 
 He is Fielding purified." . B. Smith. 
 
 " When Thackeray began to be known as a writer there was 
 a small but select circle of intelligent readers who longed for 
 something more truthful in fiction. . . . They wanted a 
 stern painter of nature to arise who should not aim at touching
 
 THACKERAY 479 
 
 their sensibilities by the tricks and slights of authorship but 
 who, seeing Nature and knowing Her intimately, should resolve 
 to interest men in an exact and complete portrayal of separate 
 human characters such as constitute this society in which 
 we pass our days, loving and hating, sinning and repenting. 
 They exclaimed, ' Let us have less art and more 
 truth ! ' To satisfy this craving was Thackeray's appointed 
 work. From first to last simplicity and accuracy, without 
 reserve, have been his characteristics as an author. 
 It was Thackeray's mission to renew the realistic spirit of 
 Fielding."/! C. Jeaffreson. 
 
 " How thoroughly he understands the feelings of them that 
 go down into the West in broughams ! Men weary 
 
 of the cupboard drama, the tea-cup tragedies and check-book 
 and band-box comedies which he regards as the stuff of human 
 action and the web of human life. His intelligence is largely 
 one of trifles. He is wise over trivial and trumpery things." 
 W.E. Henley. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " How changed the house is, though ! The front is patched 
 over with bills, setting forth the particulars of the furniture in 
 staring capitals. They have hung a shred of carpet out of an 
 upstairs window a half-dozen porters are lounging on the dirty 
 steps the hall swarms with dingy guests of oriental countenance, 
 who thrust printed cards into your hand and offer to bid. Old 
 women and amateurs have invaded the upper apartments, 
 pinching the bed-curtains, poking into the feathers, shampoo- 
 ing the mattresses, and clapping the wardrobe drawers to and 
 fro. Enterprising young housekeepers are measuring the look- 
 ing-glasses and hangings to see if they will suit the new menage 
 (Snob will brag for years that he has purchased this or that at 
 Dives's sale), and Mr. Hammerdown is sitting on the great 
 mahogany dining-table, in the dining-room below, waving the 
 ivory hammer and employing all the artifices of eloquence, en- 
 thusiasm, entreaty, reason, despair ; shouting to his people ; 
 satirizing Mr. Davids for his sluggishness ; inspiring Mrs. Moss
 
 480 THACKERAY 
 
 into action ; imploring, commanding, bellowing, until down 
 comes the hammer like fate, and we pass to the next lot." Van- 
 ity Fair. 
 
 " We chat with our pretty neighbor or survey the young ones 
 sporting ; we make love and are jealous ; we dance or obse- 
 quiously turn over the leaves of Cecilia's music-book ; we play 
 whist or go to sleep in the arm-chair, according to our ages and 
 conditions. Snooze gently in thy arm-chair, thou bald-head ! 
 play your whist or read your novel or talk scandal over your 
 work, ye worthy dowagers and fogies! Meanwhile the young 
 ones frisk about or dance or sing, or laugh ; or whisper behind 
 curtains in moonlit windows ; or slink away into the garden, and 
 come back smelling of cigars, nature having made them to do 
 so." The Newcomes. 
 
 " On entering the dining-room, by the orders of the individual 
 in gaiters, Rebecca found that apartment not more cheerful than 
 such rooms usually are, when genteel families are out of town. 
 The faithful chambers seem, as it were, to mourn the absence of 
 their masters. The turkey carpet has rolled itself up and retired 
 sulkily under the sideboard ; the pictures have hidden their faces 
 behind old sheets of brown paper ; the ceiling lamp is muffled 
 up in a dismal sack of brown holland ; the window curtains have 
 disappeared under all sorts of shabby envelopes ; the marble 
 bust of Sir Walpole Crawley is looking from its black corner at 
 the bare boards and the oiled fire-irons and the empty card- 
 racks over the mantel-piece ; the cellaret has lurked away behind 
 the carpet ; the chairs are turned up heads and tails along the 
 walls; and in the dark corner opposite the statue is an old- 
 fashioned crabbed knife-box, locked and sitting on a dumb- 
 waiter." Vanity Fair. 
 
 7. Didacticism Fondness for Moralizing. "I 
 
 open at random his three great works ' Pendennis,' ' Van- 
 ity Fair,' 'The Newcomes. ' Every scene sets in relief a 
 moral truth ; the author desires that at every stage we should 
 form a judgment on vice and virtue ; he has blamed or ap- 
 proved beforehand, and the dialogues or portraits are to him 
 only means by which he adds our approbation to his appro- 
 bation, our blame to his blame. He is giving us lessons ;
 
 THACKERAY 481 
 
 and beneath the sentiments which he describes, as beneath 
 the events which he relates, we continually discover rules for 
 the conduct and the intentions of a reformer." Taitic. 
 
 " His was not the hortatory method. He had no notion 
 
 that much good could be done by telling people to be good. 
 
 Yet he did not altogether neglect positive teaching. 
 
 Many passages might be taken from his works which inculcate 
 
 the beauty of goodness." H. H. Lancaster. 
 
 " Our real sense of right is never led astray, our feelings of 
 obedience toward the laws of God are not one whit dimin- 
 ished after we have penised his writings." Peter Bayne. 
 
 " Thackeray's works are full of moral instruction of a kind, 
 but it is of a kind which scarcely applies except to the higher 
 orders. . . . His numerous asides to his readers are full 
 of that sad wisdom which experience brings." H. J. Nicoll. 
 
 " Thackeray's morality is that of a highly respectable Brit- 
 ish cynic." W. E. Henley. 
 
 Thackeray was himself well aware of this quality of his 
 work, for he writes : " Perhaps of all novel-spinners now ex- 
 tant the present writer is the most addicted to preaching. 
 Does he not stop perpetually in this story and begin to preach 
 to you?" 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " Have we not all such closets, my jolly friend, as well as the 
 noble Marquis of Carabas ? At night, when all the house is 
 asleep but you, don't you get up and peep into yours ? When 
 you in your turn are slumbering, up gets Mrs. Brown from your 
 side, steals down stairs like Amina to her ghoul, clicks open the 
 secret door, and looks into her dark depository. Psha ! who 
 knows anyone save himself alone ? Who, in showing his house 
 to the closest and dearest, doesn't keep back the key of a closet 
 or two ? " The Neivcomes. 
 
 " The wicked are wicked, no doubt, and they go astray and 
 they fall, and they come by their deserts ; but who can tell the 
 mischief which the very virtuous do ? " The Newcomes. 
 
 " If the best men do not draw the best prizes in life, we know
 
 482 THACKERAY 
 
 that it has been so ordained by the Ordainer of the lottery ; we 
 own, and see daily, how the false and worthless live and prosper, 
 while the good are called away, and the dear and young perish 
 untimely. We perceive in every man's life maimed happiness, 
 the frequent falling, the bootless endeavor ; . . . we see 
 flowers of good blooming in foul places, as in the most lofty and 
 splendid fortunes, flaws of vice and meanness and stains of evil, 
 and, knowing how mean the best of us is, let us give a hand of 
 charity to Arthur Pendennis, with all his faults and shortcom- 
 ings, who does not claim to be a hero but only a man and a 
 brother." Pendennis. 
 
 8. Kindly Humor. " First and foremost is his wonderful 
 humor a quality in which he is not inferior to Swift, Field- 
 ing, Dickens, or any other among the illustrious English 
 humorists and which in some form or other steeps and satu- 
 rates every page of his writings. " Parke Godwin. 
 
 " The first characteristic which strikes the reader of Thack- 
 eray is unquestionably his humor. It does not gleam forth as 
 flashes of lightning, rare and vivid, but is more like the ever- 
 bubbling fountain, the perennial spring. It is a kind of per- 
 meating force throughout all his works, now lashed into sarcasm 
 and now dissolved into pathos. . . . He is one of the best 
 of English humorists simply because his nature is sensitive at 
 all points. . . . His eye wanders round all ; and neither 
 friend nor foe, if vulnerable, can keep out the arrows of his 
 wit. . . . The pure humorist is the rarest of literary 
 characters. His nature is not content with detecting foibles 
 nor his pen with pointing them out for derision ; his purpose is 
 infinitely higher and nobler. The humorist must have emo- 
 tions, nerves, sensibilities, and that nameless sympathy with 
 human nature which enables him to change places at will with 
 other members of his species. Humor does not produce the 
 sneer of Voltaire, it rather smiles through the tear of Mon- 
 taigne. . . . It is not contempt, its essence is love ; it 
 issues not in laughter but in still smiles, which lie far deeper.
 
 THACKERAY 483 
 
 . . . When to the faculty of originating ridicule is added 
 the power of concentrating pity or pathos upon the subject, 
 this may be styled humor. But the irony must be subjugated 
 to the feeling. The heart must love while the countenance 
 may smile." G. B. Smith. 
 
 " Mr. Thackeray's humor does not mainly consist in the 
 creation of oddities of manner, habit, or feeling, but in so 
 representing actual men and women as to excite a feeling of 
 incongruity in the reader's mind a feeling that the follies and 
 vices described are deviations from an ideal of humanity. 
 . . . No one could be simply amused with Mr. Thackeray's 
 descriptions or his dialogues. . . . The moral antithesis 
 of the actual and the ideal is the root from which springs the 
 peculiar charm of his writings. . . . He could not have 
 painted 'Vanity Fair' as he has unless Eden had been shining 
 brightly in his inner eyes." G. Brimley. 
 
 " He ridiculed the ugly and the absurd in truth and pure- 
 ness. . . . Even when the necessities of his story compel 
 him to draw bad characters, he gives them as much good as 
 he can. ... If reproof is the main burden of his dis- 
 course, we must remember that to reprove, not to praise, is the 
 business of the preacher." H. H. Lancaster. 
 
 " With the doubtful characters those which hover on the 
 boundaries of good and bad how admirably Thackeray can 
 turn their good qualities toward us ! . . . For all those 
 whom moralists would sweep aside as worthless Thackeray had 
 the truly catholic sympathy of a man who has seen enough to 
 find good in everything. . . . Taken merely as a piece 
 of humorous writing, the ' Book of Snobs ' approaches the 
 sublime." Mrs. Oliphant. 
 
 J. C. Watt speaks finely of "the abundant and abiding 
 pleasantness of Thackeray's wit." That he felt the injustice 
 of those who regarded him as a mere cynic or satirist, ap- 
 pears from a letter which Thackeray wrote to Edinburgh 
 friends in 1848. He there describes himself as "a writer who
 
 484 THACKERAY 
 
 has had some difficulty in making people understand 
 that under the mask satirical there walks about a sentimental 
 person who means. not unkindly to any mortal." And, in 
 discussing abstractly the quality of humor, he says: "The 
 first quality of an artist is to have a large heart. 
 Tears are the alms of gentle spirits. ... I know of no 
 such provocative as humour; it is an irresistible sympathizer; 
 it surprises you into compassion. . . . Humour is mis- 
 tress of tears. ' ' 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " When she had to stretch across the table to make a stroke, 
 that youth caught glimpses of a little ankle, a little clocked stock- 
 ing, and a little black satin slipper with a little red heel, which 
 filled him with unutterable rapture, and made him swear that 
 there never was such a foot, ankle, clocked stocking, satin slip- 
 pers in the world. And yet, O you foolish Harry ! your mother's 
 foot was ever so much more slender, and half an inch shorter, 
 than Lady Maria's. But somehow boys do not look at their 
 mamma's slippers and ankles with rapture." The Virginians. 
 
 " Andrea was here then in the loneliness that he loved, a 
 fantastic youth, who lived but for his art ; to whom the world 
 was like the Coburg Theatre, and he in a magnificent costume 
 acting a principal part. His art and his beard and whiskers 
 were the darlings of his heart. His long, pale hair fell over a 
 high polished brow, which looked wonderfully thoughtful ; and 
 yet no man was more guiltless of thinking. He was always put- 
 ting himself into attitudes ; he never spoke the truth ; and was 
 so entirely affected and absurd as to be quite honest at last ; for 
 it is my belief that the man did not know truth from falsehood 
 any longer, and was when alone, when in company, nay, when 
 unconscious and sound asleep snoring in bed, one complete lump 
 of affectation. . . . To do him justice, he hated ' Don Juan,' 
 and a woman was in his eyes an angel ; a Mangel, alas ! he would 
 call her, for nature and the circumstances of his family had 
 taken sad Cockney advantages over Andrea's pronunciation." 
 A Shabby Genteel Story. 
 
 " Dr. Firmin's horror seemed to be because his noble friends
 
 THACKERAY 485 
 
 were horrified by Phil's radical doctrine. At that time of my 
 life, being young and very green, I had a little mischievous 
 pleasure in infuriating Square-toes and causing him to pronounce 
 that I was ' a dangerous man.' Now I am ready to say that Nero 
 was a monarch with many elegant accomplishments and consider- 
 able natural amiability of disposition. I praise and admire suc- 
 cess wherever I meet it. I make allowances for faults and short- 
 comings, especially in my superiors ; and feel that, did we know 
 all, we should judge them very differently. People don't believe 
 me, perhaps, quite so much as formerly ; but I don't offend 
 I trust I don't offend. Have I said anything painful ? Plague 
 on my blunders ! I recall the expression. I regret it. I con- 
 tradict it flat." Adventures of Philip. 
 
 9. Simple Pathos Tenderness. This is a quality 
 closely verging on Thackeray's sympathy and his humor, 
 already considered. He once told Dickens that he "never 
 could see a boy without wanting instantly to give him a 
 sovereign." Anthony Trollope says: " I regard him as one 
 of the most tender-hearted human beings I ever knew ; one 
 who, with an exaggerated contempt for the foibles of the 
 world at large, would entertain an almost equal sympathy 
 with the joys and troubles of those around him. . . . 
 Nothing sadder than the story of Beatrix can be imagined." 
 
 " ' Esmond ' gives instructive exhibitions of the pathology 
 of the heart the pathos of secret home sorrow." R. A. 
 Vaughan. 
 
 " There was always the sad vein in whatever came from his 
 pen. Nothing was without its vanity any more than without 
 its comic element or urbanity."/. C. Watt. 
 
 " A knowledge that his sorrows were great is necessary to 
 the perfect appreciation of much of his deepest pathos." H. 
 H. Lancaster. 
 
 " There was to the last in him the sensibility of a child's 
 genuine heart. . . . He did in his writings what thou- 
 sands of men do in their lives shrouded an over-tenderness
 
 486 THACKERAY 
 
 in a transparent veil of cynicism. . . . The eye was a 
 dull one that could not look through this muslin work into a 
 mind that, so to speak, was always keeping Christmas. " H. 
 T. Tuckerman. 
 
 Some of the best comments on Thackeray's pathos are from 
 the pens of anonymous contributors to the reviews. We ap- 
 pend one : 
 
 " The pathos of Thackeray is not sentimentality carefully 
 elaborated, nor is it an outgushing of emotion that moves us 
 to tears and as quickly restores our smiles. It comes, like 
 many scenes in life, unexpectedly before our eyes, and moves 
 us to the heart with mute appeal. This pathos is saddening 
 rather than affecting. It comes from a tender heart bleeding 
 with sorrow for others in distress and gloom. It is the grief 
 which comes when the most precious objects of love are taken 
 away, and when there seems to be no comfort, no hope, no 
 consolation. While it leaves the eye unmoistened, it too 
 often makes the heart sad to the core and leaves it so. ... 
 Thackeray's sentiment, rarely indulged in, is never otherwise 
 than genuine; his pathos goes to the roots of the heart." 
 Westminster Review. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " Half an hour after the father left the boy, and in his grief 
 and loneliness was rowing back to shore, Clive was at play with a 
 dozen other children on the sunny deck of the ship. . . . 
 What a sad repast their parents had that day ! How their hearts 
 followed the careless young ones home across the great ocean ! 
 Mothers' prayers go with them. Strong men, alone on their 
 knees, with streaming eyes and broken accents, implore Heaven 
 for those little ones who were prattling at their sides but a few 
 hours since. Long after they are gone, careless and happy, rec- 
 ollections of the sweet past rise up and smite those who remain : 
 the flowers they had planted in their little gardens, the toys they 
 played with, the little vacant cribs they slept in as father's eyes 
 looked blessings down upon them." The Newcomes.
 
 THACKERAY 487 
 
 "It is only in later days, perhaps, when the treasures of love 
 are spent and the kind hand cold which ministered them, that we 
 remember how tender it was ; how soft to soothe ; how eager to 
 shield ; how ready to support and caress. The ears may no 
 longer hear which would have received our words of thanks so 
 delightedly. Let us hope those fruits of love, though tardy, are 
 yet not all too late." The Newcomes. 
 
 11 Esmond came to this spot in one sunny evening of spring, 
 and saw amidst a thousand black crosses, casting their shadows 
 across the grassy mounds, that particular one which marked his 
 mother's resting-place. . . . He fancied her, in tears and 
 darkness, kneeling at the foot of her cross, under which her cares 
 were buried. Surely, he knelt down and said his own prayer 
 there, not in sorrow as much as in awe (for even his memory had 
 no recollections of her) and in pity for the pangs which the gentle 
 soul in life had been made to suffer. . . . Might she sleep 
 in peace might she sleep in peace ; and we too when our strug- 
 gles and pains are over. ... I took a little flower off the 
 hillock and kissed it, and went my way like the bird that had 
 just lighted on the cross by me, back into the world again." 
 Henry Esmond. 
 
 10. Skill in Burlesque and Farce. " In parody of 
 every kind, from the most admiring imitation down to the 
 most boisterous burlesque, Thackeray stands at the head of all 
 other imitators. . . . ' Codlingsby,' the parody of Dis- 
 raeli's ' Coningsby,' may be taken as the most effective par- 
 ody in our language. . . . Those ten pages of irrepressi- 
 ble fooling are enough to destroy Disraeli's reputation as a 
 serious romancer. . . . It is only the very greatest mas- 
 ters who can produce extravaganzas, puerile tomfooleries, 
 drolleries to delight children, and catchpenny songs of such a 
 kind that mature and cultivated students can laugh over them 
 for the fiftieth time and read them till they are household 
 words." Frederic Harrison. 
 
 " In the burlesque, as it is commonly called, or the ludi- 
 crous, Thackeray is quite as much at home as in the realistic
 
 488 THACKERAY 
 
 division of pure fiction ; though, the vehicle being less power- 
 ful, he has achieved smaller results by it. ... No writer 
 ever had a stronger proclivity toward parody than Thack- 
 eray. ' ' A nthony Trollope. 
 
 " In the riot of his burlesques . . . he is not seen at 
 his best ; but his second-rate is much better than the first- 
 rate of any one else in the same way." W. D. Howells. 
 
 "The love of fun in him was something quite peculiar. 
 Some writers have been more witty ; a few have had more 
 delicate humor ; but none, we think, have had more of that 
 genial quality which is described by that homely word fun." 
 H. H. Lancaster. 
 
 " Thackeray has distinctively exhibited the trivial aspect of 
 life. . . . The characters he draws are neither the best 
 men nor the worst, but the atmosphere of triviality which 
 envelops them was never before so plainly perceivable. He 
 paints the world as a great Vanity Fair, and none has done 
 that so well." Peter Bayne. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " I wonder did she hear the bump-bumping of my heart ? O 
 heart ! O wounded heart ! did I ever think thou wouldst bump- 
 bump again? ' Egl Egl izabeth,' I say, choking with emotion, 
 ' do do do you te tell me you don't lo love that apoth- 
 ecary ? ' 
 
 " She shrugs her shoulder her charming shoulder. 
 
 " ' And if,' I hotly continued, ' if a gentleman if a man of ma- 
 ture age certainly, but who has a kind heart and four hundred a 
 year of his own were to say to you, ' Elizabeth ! will you bid the 
 flowers of a blighted life to bloom again ? Elizabeth, will you 
 soothe a wounded heart ? ' 
 
 "'O, Mr. Batchelor!' she sighed, and then added, quickly, 
 ' Please don't take my hand ! Here's Pop ! '" Lovel the 
 Widower. 
 
 " Away through light and darkness, storm and sunshine ; away 
 by tower and town, highroad and hamlet. . . . Brave horse !
 
 THACKERAY 489 
 
 gallant steed ! snorting child of Araby ! On went the horse, 
 over mountains, rivers, turnpikes, apple-women ; and never 
 stopped until he reached a livery stable in Cologne, where his 
 master was accustomed to put him up." Rebecca and Rowena. 
 
 " I have seen, I say, the Hereditary Princess of Potztausend- 
 Donnerwetter (that serenely beautiful woman) use her knife in lieu 
 of a fork or spoon ; I have seen her almost swallow it, by Jove ! like 
 Ramo Samee, the Indian juggler. And did I blench ? Did my 
 estimation for the princess diminish ? No, lovely Amelia ! One 
 of the truest passions that ever was inspired by woman was raised 
 in this bosom by that lady. Beautiful one ! long, long may the 
 knife carry food to those lips ! the reddest and loveliest in the 
 world." The Snob Playfully Dealt With. 
 
 II. Significant Appellations. The fondness of 
 Thackeray for caricaturing people by single appellations is 
 rather a phase of the quality last considered than a new qual- 
 ity. But the feature is sufficiently prominent to warrant spe- 
 cific treatment. In speaking of " Jeames's Diary," Jeaffre- 
 son says : " Nothing could be more laughter-moving than the 
 mere orthography of these wondrous autobiographical mem- 
 oranda of the great archetype and representative man of 
 Flunkeydom." 
 
 " Many of the remote personages and minor characters 
 whom other writers would refer to in general terms Thack- 
 eray introduces to us by name, and we know them by the ear- 
 mark he has pointed out. Do we not know who Doctor 
 Straightwaist is, although he never appeared on the stage or 
 spoke a word? Was contempt for the asinine M. P. ever 
 better expressed than by calling him Lord Longears and ask- 
 ing after the health of his sons, Fitz-Heehaw and the De 
 Brays ? Or how could impoverished and snobbish nobility 
 be more pungently satirized than by introducing Sir Pitt 
 Crawley, residing on Great Gaunt Street in Crawleycum, 
 Snailby parish ? This is caricature in a word and with a 
 single stroke of the pen, but its images we carry in our mem- 
 ory long after more elaborate portraits have faded. Other ex-
 
 490 THACKERAY 
 
 amples . . . are Grimby, the tomfool jester ; Bawler, of 
 the House of Commons ; Sir Huddleston Fuddleston, the 
 lord; Jawkins, the. club gossip ; Drencher, the doctor; Cap- 
 tain Blacksheep, the inebriate ; Miss Prior, the ancient 
 maiden ; Yellowplush, the footman ; Cuff, the boarding- 
 school bully; Hammerdown, the auctioneer, who does his 
 best to inspire Mrs. Moss to a purchase ; Lords Castlemouldy 
 and Bareacres of the poverty-stricken nobility ; Colonel 
 Swallowtail, the military dandy in- the box at the play." 
 Frank McElwain. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " ' General Gulpin,' continued Rosa, ' eats a great deal and is 
 very stupid, but he looks well at table with his star and ribbon. 
 Let us put him down ! ' and she noted down ' Sir Thomas and 
 Lady Gulpin 2, Lord Castlemouldy, i.' . . . Mrs. Fitzroy 
 insisted that the party should be of her very best company. 
 Funnyman, the great wit, was asked because of his jokes and 
 Mrs. Butt, on whom he practices." A Little Dinner at Tim- 
 mins's. 
 
 " Herewith slang takes the lead of the conversation, and I 
 could not help remarking how like the comedy was to life ; . . . 
 how Lady Grace Gadabout, when she calls upon Rose Ringdove 
 to pay a morning visit, appears in a low satin dress, with jewels 
 in her hair ; how Saucebox, her attendant, wears diamond 
 brooches and rings on all her ringers : while Mrs. Tallyho, on 
 the other hand, transacts all the business of life in a riding-habit, 
 and always points her jokes by a cut of the whip." Sketches and 
 Travels in London. 
 
 " She listened with indefatigable complacency to his stories of 
 the stable and the mess ; felt the greatest interest in Jack Spat- 
 terdash, whose cab-horse had come down, and Bob Martingale, 
 who had been taken up in a gambling-house, and Tom Cinq- 
 bars, who was going to ride the steeplechase." Vanity Fair. 
 
 12. Alleged Injustice to Womanhood. Thack- 
 eray has been frequently and severely criticised for presenting 
 a low and unfair ideal of womanhood ; and the charge, while
 
 THACKERAY 49! 
 
 not very strikingly sustained, is admitted by some critics who 
 are otherwise most favorable in their comments. Senior calls 
 " Vanity Fair " " a rich collection of deformities," and pro- 
 ceeds : " Having with great skill put together a creature of 
 which the principal elements are undiscriminating affection, 
 ill-requited devotion, ignorant partiality, a weak will, and a 
 narrow intellect, he calls on us to worship his poor idol as 
 the type of female excellence." On the other hand, those 
 who say Thackeray is unjust to women should read " Mr. 
 Brown's Letters to His Nephew," which Lancaster calls 
 " next to the ' Snob Papers ' and Sydney Smith's Lectures, 
 the best modern work on moral philosophy." In the same 
 vein Lowell declares : " We have yet to recall a single word 
 of his calculated to bring a really womanly woman into con- 
 tempt. ' ' 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " No, I am a woman scorner, and don't care to own it. I hate 
 young ladies ! Have I not been in love with several, and has 
 any one of them ever treated me decently ? I hate married 
 women ! Do they not hate me ? and, simply because I smoke, 
 try to draw their husbands away from my society ? I hate dow- 
 agers ! Have I not cause ? Does not every dowager in London 
 point to George Fitz-Boodle as to a dissolute wretch whom young 
 and old should avoid ? " Fitz-Boodle's Confessions. 
 
 " O me ! what a confession it is, in the very outset of life and 
 blushing brightness of youth's morning, to own that the aim with 
 which a young girl sets out, and the object of her existence, is to 
 marry a rich man ; that she was endowed with beauty so that 
 she might buy wealth, and a title with it ; that as sure as she has 
 a soul to save her business here on earth is to try and get a rich 
 husband." The Neivcomes. 
 
 11 Add tears, scorn, frequent innuendo, long estrangement, bit- 
 ter outbreak, passionate appeals to Heaven and the like, and we 
 may fancy the widow's state of mind. Are there not beloved 
 beings of the gentler sex who argue in the same way nowadays ? 
 The book of female logic is blotted all over with tears, and Jus- 
 tice in their courts is forever in a passion." The Virginians.
 
 NEWMAN, 1801-1890 
 
 Biographical Outline. John Henry Newman, born in 
 London, February 21, 1801; father a banker, mother of Hugue- 
 not descent; in 1808 he enters a private school at Baling; 
 shows an early love of literature; dates his "conversion" 
 (of which he afterward wrote, " I am still more certain of it 
 than that I have hands or feet") in the autumn of 1816 ; as 
 a boy, reads widely in theology and church history ; enters 
 Trinity College, Oxford, December 14, 1816; gains a valu- 
 able Trinity scholarship in 1818; father suffers financial dis- 
 aster in 1818, and Newman enters Lincoln's Inn, where he 
 keeps a few terms, his father intending him for the law ; he 
 breaks down (through overreading) in his final University 
 examination in 1820, and barely secures his B.A. degree; 
 remains in Oxford as a private tutor; studies Latin, logic, 
 and physics in competition for a fellowship in Oriel College, 
 which he wins, April 12, 1822 "the turning point of his 
 life ; " becomes an intimate friend of Pusey, then also a fel- 
 low of Oriel ; is ordained deacon, June 13, 1824, and becomes 
 curate of St. Clement's Church, Oxford ; does much hard 
 parish work, and preaches for the following nineteen years as 
 an Anglican clergyman ; comes closely under the influence of 
 Whately, then principal of Alban Hall, who makes Newman 
 vice-principal; assists in composing Whately 's "Logic;" 
 resigns at St. Alban 's and becomes a tutor in Oriel in 1826 ; 
 contributes to the "Encyclopaedia Metropolitana " an article 
 on Cicero in 1824 and an essay on Miracles in 1826 ; in 1827 
 he is appointed one of the preachers at Whitehall Palace, 
 London ; becomes vicar of St. Mary's, the University church, 
 
 493
 
 NEWMAN 493 
 
 Oxford, in 1828 ; serves as pro-proctor in 1830, and begins his 
 break with the evangelical church party by writing a pamphlet 
 criticising the Church Missionary Society at Oxford; begins a 
 systematic study of the church fathers ; is made one of the 
 select University preachers in 1831-32; disagrees with the 
 provost over the duties of his tutorship, and is forced to resign 
 in 1832 ; visits Italy in December, 1832, and meets Dr. 
 (after Cardinal) Wiseman ; finds the religion of Rome at that 
 time "polytheistic, degrading, and idolatrous;" while in 
 Rome, collaborating with his companion, Hurrell Froude, he 
 begins the poems known as the "Lyra Apostolica ; " visits 
 Sicily in April, 1833; is dangerously ill, but repeatedly ex- 
 claims, " I shall not die, I have a work to do;" in June, 
 1833, while becalmed on an orange-boat sailing from Palermo 
 to Marseilles, Newman writes "Lead, Kindly Light;" he 
 reaches London, July 9, 1833, five days before Keble starts 
 "The Oxford Movement" by his Oxford assize sermon on 
 national apostasy ; Newman begins his "Tracts for the Times" 
 in September, 1833, and advances " The Oxford Movement " 
 by his sermons at St. Mary's; publishes his volume on the 
 Arians at the close of 1833 ; publishes " The Prophetical Office 
 of the Church " and " Justification " in 1837, and " Disqui- 
 sition on the Canon " and the " Tractate on Antichrist" in 
 1838 ; becomes editor of the British Critic, the organ of the 
 tractarian movement; publishes "Tract Ninety" in 1841, 
 which, by its attitude toward Catholicism, excites great in- 
 dignation ; Newman consequently resigns his editorship of the 
 Critic in 1841 ; he withdraws from Oxford and forms, with 
 several disciples, the " Littlemore Monastery," where he re- 
 mains three years in suspense ; in February, 1843, he publishes 
 in the Consen'ati 've Journal a retraction of his charges against 
 the Church of Rome, and in September resigns his living at 
 St. Mary's ; he formally joins the Church of Rome, October 
 9, 1845 ; leaves Oxford in February, 1846, soon visits Rome, 
 and is there ordained priest in October ; he returns to Eng-
 
 494 NEWMAN 
 
 land in 1847, and resides at Birmingham and other places; in 
 1849 he publishes his " Discourses to Mixed Congregations " 
 considered his greatest sermons; in 1850 he establishes the 
 London Oratory, and publishes his "Twelve Lectures; "in 
 1851 he publishes his "Lectures on the Present Position of 
 Catholics;" makes charges against an apostate Romish 
 priest, Dr. Achelli ; is sued for libel and is fined ^100 
 in January, 1853; in 1854 Newman becomes rector of the 
 new Catholic University then just established at Dublin ; he 
 publishes "The Idea of a University; " returns to Birming- 
 ham in 1858, the Dublin institution having proved a failure ; 
 in 1859 he establishes a school at Edgbarton for Catholics 
 of the upper class ; is drawn into a controversy with Charles 
 Kingsley in 1864, which leads to the publication of Newman's 
 " Apologia pro Vita Sua," which revolutionized popular 
 opinion in his favor ; his works in thirty-six volumes are pub- 
 lished in 1868; in 1874, replying to Gladstone's "Vatican 
 Decrees," he publishes his " Letter to the Duke of Norfolk ; " 
 is elected an honorary member of Trinity College, Oxford, in 
 1877 ; is created Cardinal in 1879; resided at Edgbarton till 
 his death, August u, 1890. 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY ON NEWMAN'S STYLE. 
 
 Hutton, R. H., " Modern Guides to Religious Thought." London, 1891, 
 
 Macmillan, 47-101. 
 Shairp, J. S. C, "Aspects of Poetry." Boston, 1882, Houghton, Mifflin 
 
 &Co., 377-401. 
 
 Froude, J. A., " Short Studies." New York, 1884, Scribner, 2 : 86-121. 
 Nicoll, H. J., "Landmarks of English Literature." New York, 1883, 
 
 Appleton, 441-455. 
 O'Hagan, Lord, "Occasional Papers." London, 1884, Kegan Paul, 
 
 Trench & Co. , 243-245. 
 Martineau, J., "Essays." London,: 1866, Longmans, Green & Co., 
 
 219-281. 
 Oliphant, Mrs., " The Victorian Age of English Literature." New York, 
 
 1892, Tait, 2 : 313-322. 
 Scribner 1 s Magazine, 3: 735-743 (Birrell).
 
 NEWMAN 495 
 
 The Nation, 5 1 : 127-129. 
 
 Contemporary Review, 58: 313-332 (Meynell) ; 45: 642-665 (R. H. 
 
 Hutton). 
 
 Andover Review, 4 : 97-113 (F. B. Hornebrooke) ; 14: 262-298. 
 Nineteenth Century Magazine, 28: 563-574 (Ward). 
 Dublin Review, 107: 424-436 (Hayman). 
 The Catholic World, 51 : 712-724 (Hewit). 
 London Quarterly Review, 75 : 205-232. 
 American Catholic Quarterly, 15: 609-629 (A. F. Marshall). 
 
 PARTICULAR CHARACTERISTICS. 
 
 I. Finish Urbanity. " The finish and urbanity of 
 Cardinal Newman's prose have been universally commended, 
 even by those who are most strenuously opposed to his opin- 
 ions." H. J. Nicoll. 
 
 " How tender is the style in the only sense in which we can 
 properly attribute tenderness to style, its avoidance of every 
 harsh word, its shrinking aside from anything like overstate- 
 ment." R. H. Hutton. 
 
 " Carlyle's style is like the full untutored swing of the 
 giant's arm ; Cardinal Newman's is the assured self-possession, 
 the quiet gracefulness, of the finished athlete." Principal 
 Shairp. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 "Man is a being of genius, passion, intellect, conscience, 
 power. He exercises these various gifts in various ways, in great 
 deeds, in great thoughts, in heroic acts, in hateful crimes. He 
 founds states, he fights battles, he builds cities, he ploughs the 
 forests, he subdues the elements, he rules his kind. He creates 
 vast ideas, and influences many generations. . . . He pours 
 out his fervid soul in poetry ; he sways to and fro, he soars, he 
 dives in his restless speculations ; his lips drop eloquence ; he 
 touches the canvas, and it glows with beauty ; he sweeps the 
 strings, and they thrill with an ecstatic meaning." Literature 
 and Life. 
 
 " Where are they who were so active, so sanguine, so gener- 
 ous ? the amiable, the modest, and the kind ? We were told that 
 they were dead ; they suddenly disappeared ; that is all we know
 
 496 NEWMAN 
 
 about it. They were silently taken from us ; they are not met in 
 the seat of the elders, nor in the assemblies of the people ; in the 
 mixed concourse of men, nor in the domestic retirement which 
 they prized. As Scripture describes it, ' The wind has passed 
 over them, and they are gone, and their place shall know them no 
 more.' And they have burst the many ties which bound them ; 
 they were parents, brothers, sisters, children, and friends ; but 
 the bond of kindred is broken, and the silver cord of love is 
 loosed." The Lapse of Time. 
 
 " Blessed portion indeed, thus to be tutored in the sweetest, 
 softest strains of gospel truth and to range over the face of the 
 earth pilgrims and sojourners, with winning voices singing, as far 
 as in the flesh it is possible to sing, the song of Moses the ser- 
 vant of God and the song of the Lamb." Affliction, A School of 
 Comfort. 
 
 2. Self-Revelation. " There is one quality which will 
 give Newman's sermons perpetual interest. It is not the style, 
 finished as that is ; it is not the thought, deep and true, as all 
 must acknowledge ; but it is the fact that these sermons are 
 the revelation of his inner experience." F.B. Hornebrooke. 
 
 "Inferior styles express the purpose but conceal the man ; 
 Newman's expresses the purpose by revealing the man." 
 R. H. ttttton. 
 
 "There are touching passages of another kind, which are 
 characteristic of Dr. Newman's writings and give them a 
 peculiar charm. They are those which yield momentary 
 glimpses of a very tender heart that has a burden of its own, 
 unrevealed to man. . . . It is, as I have heard it de- 
 scribed, as though he suddenly opened a book and gave you 
 a glimpse for a moment of wonderful secrets, and then as 
 quickly closed it." Principal Shairp. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 ' ' If I looked into a mirror and did not see my face, I should have 
 that sort of feeling which actually comes upon me when I look into 
 this busy world and see no reflection of the Creator. . . . 
 Were it not for this voice speaking so clearly in my conscience
 
 NEWMAN 497 
 
 and my heart, I should be an Atheist or a Pantheist or a Polythe- 
 ist when I looked into the world." Apologia. 
 
 ' ' I have never for an instant had even the temptation of re- 
 penting my leaving Oxford. The feeling of repentance has not 
 even come into my mind. How could it ? How could I remain 
 at St. Mary's a hypocrite ? how could I be answerable for souls 
 (and life so uncertain) with the convictions, or at least persua- 
 sions, which I had upon me ? It is indeed a responsibility to act 
 as I am doing ; and I feel His hand heavy upon me without inter- 
 mission, who is all Wisdom and Love, so that my heart and mind 
 are tired out, just as the limbs might be from a load on one's back. 
 That sort of dull, aching pain is mine; but my responsibility 
 really is nothing to what it would be to be answerable for souls, 
 for confiding, living souls, in the English Church with my convic- 
 tions. " Apologia. 
 
 " How soothing will then be the remembrance of His past gifts ! 
 We shall remember how we got up early in the morning, and how 
 all things, light or darkness, sun or air, cold or freshness, breathed 
 of Him of Him the Lord of glory, who stood over us, and came 
 down upon us, and gave himself to us, and poured forth milk and 
 honey for our sustenance, though we saw Him not." Present 
 Blessings. 
 
 3. Penetration Insight into Human Life. " He 
 
 was intimately acquainted with his own heart, and he so read 
 the hearts of his fellow-men that he seemed to know their in- 
 most secrets. In his own words, he could tell them what they 
 knew about themselves, and what they did not know, till they 
 were startled by the truth of his revelations. His knowledge 
 of human nature, underived from books and philosophy, was 
 intuitive, first hand, and practical." Principal Shairp. 
 
 " I know no writings which combine, as Cardinal New- 
 man's do, so penetrating an insight into the realities of the 
 human world around us in all its details, with so unwaver- 
 ing an inwardness of standard in estimating and judging of 
 that world ; so steady a knowledge of the true vanity of 
 human life, with so steady a love for that which is not van- 
 ity or vexation of spirit, but which appeases the hunger and 
 32
 
 498 NEWMAN 
 
 slakes the thirst which Vanity Fair only stimulates." 
 R. H. Hutton. 
 
 " His object is to convince and to convince by gaining 
 your attention, exciting your interest, enlivening your fancy. 
 It is not his general practice to address the pure reason. He 
 knows (he well may) how little reason has to do with men's 
 convictions." Augustine Birrell. 
 
 "Often as he carries us away by his close dialectic, his 
 wonderful readings of the human heart, his tender or indignant 
 fervor, there remains a small dark speck of misgiving which 
 we can never wipe out." -James Martineau. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " Who can know ever so little of himself without suspecting 
 all kinds of imperfect and wrong motives in every thing he at- 
 tempts ? " Private Judgment. 
 
 " The heart is commonly reached, not through the reason, but 
 through the imagination by means of direct impressions, by the 
 testimony of facts and events, by history and by description. 
 Persons influence us, voices melt us, books subdue us, and deeds 
 inflame us." Sermons. 
 
 " We grow up from boyhood ; our minds open ; we go into the 
 world ; we hear what men say, or read what they put in print ; 
 and thus a profusion of all kinds is discharged upon us. ... 
 Young people, especially, because they are young, color the as- 
 semblage of persons and things, which they encounter with the 
 freshness and grace of their own spring-tide, look for all good 
 from their reflection of their own hopefulness, and worship what 
 they have created. Men of ambition, again, look upon the world 
 as a theatre for fame and glory. . . . Poets, too, after their 
 wont, put their ideal interpretation upon all things, material as 
 well as moral, and substitute the noble for the true." Discipline 
 of Mind. 
 
 4. Subtlety. " You feel that you are in the hands of a 
 thinker of the very highest powers ; yet they are powers rather 
 of an intellectual conjurer than of a teacher who commands
 
 NEWMAN 499 
 
 your confidence. You are astonished at the skill which is 
 displayed, and unable to explain away the results ; but you 
 are conscious all the time that you are being played with ; 
 you are perplexed, but you are not attracted. . . . Every 
 line, every word, tells, from the opening sentence to the 
 last. . . . Dr. Newman has watched and analyzed the 
 process of the mind with as much care and minuteness as 
 Ehrenberg the organization of animalculae. The knotted 
 and tangled skein is disengaged and combed out until every 
 fibre of it can be taken up separately and examined at leisure." 
 -J. A. Froude. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " Conscience is no longer recognized as an independent arbiter 
 of actions, its authority is explained away ; partly it is super- 
 seded in the minds of men by the so-called moral sense, which is 
 regarded merely as the love of the beautiful ; partly by the rule 
 of expediency, which is forthwith substituted for it in the details 
 of conduct. Now conscience is a stern, gloomy principle ; it 
 tells us of guilt and prospective punishment. Accordingly, when 
 its terrors disappear, then disappear also in the creed of the day 
 those fearful images of divine wrath with which the Scripture 
 abounds." Parochial Sermons. 
 
 " And besides, a mean system is often nothing better than an 
 assemblage of words ; and always looks such before it is proved 
 to be something more. For instance, if we knew only of the 
 colors white and black, and heard a description of brown or grey, 
 and were told that those were neither white nor black, but some- 
 thing like botk, yet between them, we should be tempted to con- 
 ceive our informant to use words either self-contradictory or 
 altogether unmeaning ; as if it were plain that what was not 
 white must be black and what was not black must be white." 
 The Use of Private Judgment. 
 
 " Many a man supposes that his investigation ought to be at- 
 tended with a consciousness of his making it ; as if it were scarce- 
 ly pleasing to God unless he all along reflects upon it, boasts 
 of it as a right, and sanctifies it as a principle. He says to him- 
 self and others, ' I am examining, I am scrutinizing, I am judg- 
 ing, I am free to choose or reject, I am exercising the right of
 
 5OO NEWMAN 
 
 Private Judgment.' What a strange satisfaction ! Does it in- 
 crease the worth of our affections to reflect upon them as we feel 
 them ? Would our mourning for a friend become more valuable 
 by our saying, ' I am weeping ; I am overcome and agonized for 
 the second or third time ; I am resolved to weep ?" The Use of 
 Private Judgment. 
 
 5. Erudition. "Newman's mind was world-wide. He 
 was interested in everything which was going on in science, 
 in politics, in literature. Nothing, was too large for him, 
 nothing too trivial, if it threw light upon the central ques- 
 tion, what man really was and what was his destiny." -J. A. 
 Froude. 
 
 " You have triumphed in every field of mental effort as 
 a philosopher, an historian, a theologian, an orator, and a 
 poet. You have wielded the most varied powers with equal 
 mastery." C? Hagan to Newman. 
 
 " One thing I will mention which has always especially 
 attracted my attention ; the wonderful art of marshalling facts 
 from all directions and sources as illustrations of his theme 
 and casting new and strange side-lights upon it." Hewit. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " In neither the GEdipus Coloneus nor the Plutoctetes, the 
 two most beautiful plays of Sophocles, is the plot striking ; but 
 how excellent is the delineation of the characters of Antigone 
 and CEdipus in the former tragedy, particularly in their inter- 
 view with Polyneses, and the various descriptions of the scene 
 itself which the Chorus furnishes ! '' Poetry with Reference to 
 Aristotle's Poetics. 
 
 " Thus Optics has for its subject the whole visible creation, so 
 far forth as it is simply visible ; Mental Philosophy has a nar- 
 rower province but a richer one. Astronomy, plane and physi- 
 cal, each has the same subject-matter, but views it or treats it 
 differently. Lastly, Theology and Comparative Anatomy have 
 subject-matters partly the same, partly distinct." Sermons. 
 
 " The Council was opened by St. Cyril on June 22 of the cur- 
 rent year, without waiting for the Bishops representing the great
 
 NEWMAN 501 
 
 Syrian patriarchate, who were a few days' journey from Ephesus, 
 in spite of the protest on that account of sixty-eight Bishops al- 
 ready there. . . . The first session, in which Nestorius was 
 condemned and a definition or exposition of faith made, was 
 concluded before night. ... At the end of the Acts of the 
 first session the signatures of about two hundred Bishops are 
 found, and writers of the day confirm this number, though there 
 is nothing to show that the additional forty or fifty were added 
 on the day on which the definition was passed, June 22, and it is 
 more probable that they were added afterwards." Letter to the 
 Duke of Norfolk. 
 
 6. Viyid Imagination. " His satire could not be as 
 powerful as it is without his imaginative power of isolating 
 what he wants to emphasize and contrasting it with its oppo- 
 site. But it is when he exerts his flexible and vivid imagi- 
 nation in depicting the deepest religious passion that we are 
 the most carried away by him and feel his great genius most 
 truly. . . . Dr. Newman's style is far from magnificent, 
 for it is delicately vivid." R. H. Hutton. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " She thought she was no longer in Africa, but in her own 
 Greece ; more sunny and bright than before ; but the inhabitants 
 were gone. Its majestic mountains, its rich plains, its expanse 
 of waters, all silent ; no one to converse with ; no one to sym- 
 pathize with. And, as she wandered on and wondered, suddenly 
 its face changed, and its colors were illuminated tenfold by a 
 heavenly glory, and each hue upon the scene was of a beauty she 
 had never known, and seemed strangely to affect all her senses 
 at once, being fragrance and music as well as light. And there 
 came out of the grottoes and glens and woods and out of the 
 seas myriads of bright images, whose forms she could not dis- 
 cern ; and these came all around her, and became a sort of 
 scene or landscape, which she could not have described in words, 
 as if 'it were a world of spirits not of matter." Callista's Vi- 
 sion. 
 
 "For twelve miles they extended from front to rear, and the
 
 502 NEWMAN 
 
 whizzing and hissing could be heard for twelve miles on every 
 side of them. The bright sun, though hidden by them, illu- 
 mined their bodies and was reflected from their quivering wings, 
 and as they heavily fell earthward they seemed like the innumer- 
 able flakes of a yellow-colored snow, and like snow did they de- 
 scend, a living carpet, or rather pall, upon fields, crops, gardens, 
 copses, groves, orchards, vineyards, olive-woods, orangeries, 
 palm-plantations, and the deep forests, sparing nothing within 
 their reach." Our Locust Plagues of North Africa. 
 
 7. Quiet Humor. " Humour he possesses in a marked 
 degree. A quiet humour, of course, as berus his sober profes- 
 sion and the gravity of the subjects on which he loves to dis- 
 course. It is not the humour that is founded on a lively sense 
 of the incongruous. ... It always takes us unawares." 
 Augustine Birrell. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 "Men speak as if the 'Apostolical Order' were (to use a 
 homely illustration) like the roof of a house or the top of a box, 
 shutting in and making fast and tight ' Evangelical Truth ; ' or 
 like ' politeness,' the charge for which, in some dames' schools, 
 used to be an extra two pence." The Anglo-American Church. 
 
 " It is said that a man may go on sipping first white wine and 
 then port till he loses all perception which is which ; and it is very 
 great good fortune in this day if we manage to escape a parallel 
 misery in theology." The Anglo-American Church. 
 
 " Oxford is like the almshouse for clergymen's widows. Self- 
 importance, jealousy, tittle-tattle, are the order of the day. It 
 has always been so in my time. The two great ladies, Mrs. 
 Vice-Chancellor and Mrs. Divinity-Professor, can't agree, and 
 have followings respectively ; or Vice-Chancellor himself, being a 
 new broom, sweeps all the young masters clear out of Convoca- 
 tion House, to their great indignation : or Mr. Slavery Dean of 
 St. Peter's does not scruple to say in a stage-coach that Mr. 
 Wood is no scholar ; on which the said Wood calls him, in return, 
 ' Slanderous Slavery.' " Loss and Gain.
 
 NEWMAN 503 
 
 8. Intense Idealism. " In his mode of thought the 
 first characteristic I would notice is his innate and intense 
 idealism. . . . It is a thought of his, always deeply felt 
 and many times repeated, that this visible world is but the 
 outward shell of an invisible kingdom, a screen which hides 
 from our view things far greater and more wonderful than any 
 which we see, and that the unseen world is close to us and ever 
 ready, as it were, to break through the shell and manifest 
 itself. " Principal Shairp. 
 
 "In his " Grammar of Assent ' ' he pursues his course in a 
 serene atmosphere as though hardly conscious of the agnosti- 
 cism or the materialism which were troubling the waters of 
 thought with dirty bubbles. He wrote on principles which 
 were above such human accidents, as much as to say, clear 
 your minds of their distempers, and look down from the 
 eternal principles of truth and right on to the shifting delusions 
 of this folly or that sin." A. F. Marshall. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 "Can it be that these mysterious stirrings of the heart and. 
 keen emotions and strange yearnings after we know not what, 
 and awful impressions from we know not whence, should be 
 wrought in us by what is unsubstantial, and comes and goes, and 
 begins and ends in itself? No, they have escaped from some 
 higher sphere ; they are the outpourings of eternal harmony in 
 the medium of created sound : they are echoes from our home ; 
 they are the voice of angels or the Magnificat of saints or the 
 living laws of divine governance or the divine attributes ; some- 
 thing are they besides themselves which we cannot compass, 
 which we cannot utter ; though mortal man, and he, perhaps, not 
 otherwise distinguished above his fellows, has the gift of eliciting 
 them." University Sermons. 
 
 " Whenever we look abroad, we are reminded of those most 
 gracious and holy beings, the servants of the Holiest, who deign to 
 minister to the heirs of salvation. Every breath of air and ray of 
 light and heat, every beautiful prospect, is, as it were, the skirts
 
 504 NEWMAN 
 
 of their garments, the waving of the robes of those whose faces 
 see God in heaven." Parochial Sermons. 
 
 " And yet, in spite of this universal world which we see, there 
 is another world, quite as far-spreading, quite as close to us, and 
 more wonderful ; another world, all around us, though we see it 
 not, and more wonderful than the world we see, for this reason, 
 if for no other, that we do not see it. All around us are num- 
 berless objects, coming and going, watching, working or wait- 
 ing, which we see not ; this is that other world, which the eyes 
 reach not unto, but faith only." The Invisible World. 
 
 9. Sense of the Mysterious. " The sense of the mys- 
 teriousness of our being that we even now belong to two 
 worlds, and that that part of ourselves which we cannot see is 
 far more important than the part which we do see. 
 One way in which he shows this sense of mystery is the feeling 
 of wonder with which he looks upon the brute creation." 
 Principal Shairp. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " It is, indeed, a very overpowering thought, when we get to 
 fix our minds on it, that we familiarly use, I may say hold inter- 
 course with, creatures who are as much strangers to us, as mys- 
 terious, as if they were fabulous, unearthly beings, more powerful 
 than man, and yet his slaves, which Eastern superstitions have 
 invented. They have apparently passions, habits, and a certain 
 accountableness, but all is mystery about them. ... Is it 
 not plain to our senses that there is a world inferior to us in the 
 scale of being, with which we are connected without understand- 
 ing what it is ? " Parochial Sermons. 
 
 " And to those who do thus receive the blessed doctrine under 
 consideration, it will be found to produce special and singular 
 practical effects on them on the very ground of its mysterious- 
 ness. There is nothing, according as we are given to see and 
 judge of things, which will make a greater difference in the temper, 
 character, and habits of an individual than the circumstances of 
 his holding or not holding the Gospel to be mysterious." The 
 Mysteriousness of Our Present Being.
 
 NEWMAN 505 
 
 " We must not search curiously what is His present office, what 
 is meant by His pleading, His sacrifice, and by His perpetual 
 intercession for us. And, since we do not know, we will studiously 
 keep to the figure given us in Scripture ; we will not attempt to 
 interpret it or change the wording of it, being wise above what is 
 written. We will not neglect it because we do not understand it. 
 We will hold it as a mystery." Mysteries in Religion. 
 
 10. Keen Irony Satire. " His sentences stab his 
 invective destroys." Augustine Birrell. 
 
 " Newman's irony is directed against what he regarded as 
 the real self-deception which went on in the minds of some of 
 his own most intimate associates and friends of former days. 
 Keen as his irony is, there is a certain passion in it, 
 too. . . . Let anyone who doubts Dr. Newman's power 
 of satire read the closing chapters of ' Loss and Gain. ' There 
 are passages in these chapters containing comedy as effective 
 as anything written in our time." R. H. Hutton. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " All things now are to be learned at once ; not first one thing, 
 then another ; not one well, but many badly. Learning is to be 
 without exertion, without attention, without toil, without ground- 
 ing, without advance, without finishing. There is to be nothing 
 individual in it ; and this, forsooth, is the wonder of the age. 
 What the steam engine does with matter the printing-press is to 
 do with mind ; it is to act mechanically, and the population is to 
 be passively, almost unconsciously, enlightened by the mere 
 multiplication and dissemination of volumes." Idea of a Uni- 
 versity. 
 
 " Not by an act of volition but by a sort of mechanical impulse 
 bishop and dean, archdeacon and canon, rector and curate, one 
 after another, each in his high tower, off they set, swinging and 
 booming, tolling and chiming, with nervous intenseness and thick- 
 ening emotion and deepening volume, the old ding-dong which has 
 scared country and town this weary time ; tolling and chiming 
 away, jingling and clamoring and ringing the changes on these 
 poor half dozen notes all about ' the popish aggression,' ' insolent
 
 506 NEWMAN 
 
 and insidious,' ' insidious and insolent,' ' insolent and atrocious,' 
 'atrocious and insolent,' ' atrocious, insolent, and ungrateful,' 
 ' ungrateful, insolent, and atrocious,' ' foul and oppressive,' 
 ' pestilent and horrid,' ' subtle and unholy,' ' audacious and re- 
 volting,' ' contemptuous and shameless,' ' malignant,' ' frightful," 
 ' mad,' ' meretricious,' bobs (I think the singers call them), bobs 
 and bobs-royal and triple bob-majors and grandsires, to the ex- 
 tent of their compass and the full ring of their metal, in honor of 
 Queen Bess and to the confusion of the Pope and the princes of 
 the church." Catholicism in Englan'd.
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD, 1822-1888 
 
 Biographical Outline. Matthew Arnold, born at 
 Laleham, near Staines, England, December 24, 1822; father 
 Dr. Thomas Arnold, afterward head - master of Rugby ; 
 Matthew first attends a private school, then spends a year at 
 Winchester College ; enters Rugby in 1837, and wins a 
 scholarship at Balliol College, Oxford, in 1840 ; while at 
 Oxford, wins a Latin prize and the Newdigate prize, but 
 graduates second class ; is elected a fellow of Oriel College 
 in 1845 ; forms an intimate friendship with Arthur Hugh 
 Clough; becomes secretary to Lord Lansdowne, leader of 
 the Whigs, in 1847 ; publishes "A Strayed Reveller, and Other 
 Poems " in 1848 ; teaches at Rugby as assistant master for a 
 time ; in 1851 marries a daughter of Justice Weightman, and 
 is appointed lay-inspector of non-conformist schools ; does 
 much to elevate elementary education ; in 1853 publishes 
 ' ' Empedocles on Etna and Other Poems ; " is called to the 
 chair of poetry at Oxford in 1857; in 1858 publishes " Me- 
 rope, a Tragedy," containing as a preface an essay on the 
 principles of criticism ; in 1865 publishes " Essays in Criti- 
 cism ; " in 1859 he is sent as foreign assistant commissioner to 
 study the Continental systems of primary education ; in 1865 
 is sent to examine into the state of secondary education on the 
 Continent; in 1867 publishes " Schools and Universities on 
 the Continent;" in 1867 appear "New Poems " and "A 
 Study of Celtic Literature ; " is re-elected at Oxford in 1862, 
 and draws much attention to his chair ; is compelled by stat- 
 ute to retire in 1867 ; publishes " Culture and Anarchy " in 
 1869 ; refuses later to stand for the Oxford position again, as 
 
 507
 
 508 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 his liberal religious views had made strong opposition prob- 
 able; publishes "St. Paul and Protestantism" in 1870, 
 "Friendship's Garland," a satire, in 1871, "High Schools 
 and Universities in Germany" in 1875; publishes "Liter- 
 ature and Dogma," " God and the Bible," and " Last Es- 
 says on Church and Religion," the latter in 1877 ; " Mixed 
 Essays " in 1879; visits the United States in 1883 and again 
 in 1886, lecturing in the principal, cities during both visits; 
 publishes " American Lectures " in 1887 ; his last paper was 
 "Civilization in the United States;" dies at Liverpool, 
 England, April 15, 1888. 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY ON MATTHEW ARNOLD'S STYLE. 
 
 Mutton, R. H., " Literary Essays." New York, 1888, Macmillan, 
 
 310-360. 
 Burroughs, J., "Indoor Studies." Boston, 1893, Houghton, Mifflin & 
 
 Co., 79-127. 
 Henley, W. E. f "Views and Reviews." New York, 1890, Scribner, 
 
 83-92. 
 
 Gallon, A., "Urbana Scripta." London, 1885, E. Steck, 77-107. 
 Stedman, E. C., "Victorian Poets." Boston, 1887, Houghton, Mifflin 
 
 & Co., I : 90-100. 
 Whipple, E. P., "Recollections of Eminent Men." Boston, 1887, 
 
 Ticknor, 280-304. 
 Nicoll, H. J., "Landmarks of English Literature." New York, 1883, 
 
 Appleton, 436-439. 
 Dawson, W. J., " The Makers of Modern English." New York, 1890, 
 
 Whittaker, 328-341. 
 Hunt, T. W., "Studies in Literature and Style." New York, 1890, 
 
 Armstrong, 217-243. 
 Oliphant, Mrs., "The Victorian Age of English Literature." New 
 
 York, 1892, Tail, 430-435 and 570-575. 
 Saintsbury, G., "Corrected Impressions." New York, 1895, Dodd, 
 
 Mead & Co., 138-157. 
 Watson, R. A., " Gospels of Yesterday." London, 1888, Nisbet, 181- 
 
 217. 
 Cheney, J. V., "The Golden Guess." Boston, 1892, Lee & Shepard, 
 
 77-119.
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD 509 
 
 Jacobs, J., "George Eliot, Matthew Arnold, etc." London, 1891, 
 
 Nutt, 77-94. 
 Vaughan, R. A., "Essays and Reviews." London, 1858, Parker, 2: 
 
 332. 
 Howitt, Wm., " Homes and Haunts of British Poets." London, 1863, 
 
 Routledge. 
 Armstrong, R. A., "Latter-Day Teachers." London, 1881, Kegan 
 
 Paul, Trench &Co., 27-53. 
 
 Birrell, A., " J?es Judicata. " New York, 1892, Scribner, 181-223. 
 Hutton, R. H., "Modern Guides to Religious Thought." London, 
 
 1891, Macmillan, 103-149. 
 
 Thorne, H. H., " Modern Idols." Philadelphia, 1887, Lippincott, 7-20. 
 Robertson, J. M., "Essays Toward a Critical Method." London, 
 
 1889, Nimmo, v. index. 
 Swinburne, A. C., "Essays and Studies." London, 1875, Chatto & 
 
 Windus, 123-124 and 123-184. 
 
 The Nation, 29 : 276-277 (W. C. Brownell); 274-275 ; 46 : 315-316. 
 North American Review', 138: 429-444 (Whipple) ; 146: 657-662 
 
 (Stoddard) ; 147: 473-474 (F. Lockwood) ; 146: 515-519 (Fry). 
 Century Magazine, 14: 185-195 (Burroughs). 
 Andover Review, lo : 232-249 (Scudder). 
 
 Contemporary Review, 24 : 539-567 (Hewlett) ; 49 : 327-354 (Hutton). 
 Scribner 1 s Magazine, 18: 281-289(0. S. Merriam). 
 
 PARTICULAR CHARACTERISTICS. 
 
 I. Literary Insight Critical Acumen. "The 
 moment we meet him as a critic we are in the presence of a 
 master. . . . He is the keenest, the wisest critic so far 
 adorning English literature ; . . . he is a great critic 
 because he brings to bear on a variety of great subjects ex- 
 tensive knowledge, superior power of perception, and clear, 
 pure, adequate utterance, . . . lifting pure criticism as 
 near perhaps as it may rise to the plane of creative art." 
 John Vance Cheney. 
 
 " Arnold was pre-eminently a critical force, a force of clear 
 reason and of steady discernment. He is an author whom we 
 read ... for his unfailing intelligence and critical acu- 
 men and because, to borrow a sentence of Goethe, he helps us
 
 510 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 to ' attain certainty and security in the appreciation of things 
 exactly as they are.' . . . It is undoubtedly as a critic 
 of literature that Arnold is destined to leave his deepest mark. 
 In this field the classic purity and simplicity of his mind, its 
 extraordinary clearness, steadiness, and vitality, are the quali- 
 ties most prized. His power as a critic is undoubtedly his 
 power of definition and classification. . . . His genius 
 for definition and analysis finds full scope in his work on 
 ' Celtic Literature,' wherein are combined the strictness of 
 scientific analysis with the finest literary charm." -John 
 Burroughs. 
 
 " His power of poetic expression is founded on a delicate 
 simplicity of taste. . . . [He] shows the finest insight 
 into Greek poetry, and has a highly cultivated appreciation 
 both for the specific aroma of words and for the poetical at- 
 mosphere of thought." Jt. H. Hutton. 
 
 " Mr. Arnold spares no pains to make critics feel that their 
 duty is ' to see things as they are," to shun insular prejudice 
 and self-complacency, to avoid all eccentricity and exaggera- 
 tion, never to praise with blind enthusiasm or to condemn 
 with equally blind indignation, and to keep themselves pure 
 from the contagion of personal or political or national bias." 
 H. J. Nicoll. 
 
 "It is in Arnold . . . that we begin to find the ef- 
 fectual expression of the habit of analysis and reasoning in 
 matters of comparative literature.";/. M. Robertson. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " The grand power of poetry is its interpretative power. . . . 
 To ascertain the master current in the literature of an epoch is 
 one of the critic's highest functions. . . . The thing to know 
 of a writer is, where he is all himself and his best self ; where he 
 gives us what no other man gives us. ... For poetry is sim- 
 ply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of 
 saying things, and hence its importance." Essays in Criticism.
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD $11 
 
 " The critical power is of lower rank than the creative. True ; 
 but in assenting to this proposition, one or two things are to be 
 kept in mind. It is undeniable that the exercise of a creative 
 power, that a free creative activity is the highest function of man. 
 . . . Now, in literature, I will limit myself to literature, for 
 it is about literature that the question arises the elements with 
 which the creative power works are ideas ; the best ideas on 
 every matter which literature touches, current at the time. 
 . . . The grand work of literary genius is a work of synthesis 
 and exposition, not of analysis and discovery ; its gift lies in the 
 faculty of being happily inspired by a certain intellectual and 
 spiritual atmosphere, by a certain order of ideas, when it finds 
 itself in them; of dealing divinely with these ideas, presenting 
 them in the most effective and attractive combinations making 
 beautiful works with them, in short." Essays in Criticism. 
 
 " [Mr. Kinglake's] style has not the warm glow, blithe move- 
 ment, and soft pliancy of life such as the Attic style has. . 
 It has glitter without warmth, rapidity without ease, effectiveness 
 without charm. Its characteristic is, that it has no soul; all it 
 exists for is to get its ends, to make its points, to damage its 
 adversaries, to be admired, to triumph. A style so bent on effect 
 at the expense of soul, simplicity, and delicacy ; a style so little 
 studious of the charm of the great models ; so far from classic 
 truth and grace, must surely be said to have the note of pro- 
 vincialism." Literary Influence of Academies. 
 
 2. Suggestiveness Intellectuality. " He sowed the 
 minds of men with thoughts which have had a wide influence 
 on the times. . . . His poetry is the poetry of ideas. 
 Matthew Arnold never dreamed. He lived a stren- 
 uous intellectual life, and his poetry is the outcome of his 
 thinking. ' ' George Dawson. 
 
 " He is the apostle of culture and clear intelligence. . . . 
 Everywhere in his books we are brought under the influence of 
 a mind which clears our vision, which sets going a process of 
 crystallization in our thoughts, and brings our knowledge, on a 
 certain range of subjects, to a higher state of clearness and 
 purity. . . . Matthew Arnold was probably the most deeply
 
 512 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 imbued with the spirit of Greek culture of any man of letters 
 of our time." -John Burroughs. 
 
 "He generally gives us something which has cost him 
 thought, and which is fitted thereby to awaken thought in us. 
 There is in the style a kind of Gothic robustness 
 through the influence of which it impresses itself upon the 
 reader and infuses into his being something of this same Teu- 
 tonic spirit. His style throughout has this educational and 
 educating quality. ... In the words of Montesquieu, 
 it seeks ' to render an intelligent being still more intelligent.' 
 The style is instructive andincitive; . -. it 
 
 serves to quicken within the reader a genuine literary impulse. 
 . . . No one can read the prose of Arnold with carefulness 
 and sympathetic attention without becoming a wiser man and 
 without having a desire awakened in him to become even 
 wiser still. . . . It is this intellectual element of his style 
 which, after all, is its distinctive element." T. W. Hunt. 
 
 " He is the poet of the inner intellectual life. ... In 
 all his writings there is a strange inwardness : they never pall 
 or weary because, beyond the beauty of expression, is always 
 a beauty and a depth of thought." A. Galton. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " To walk staunchly by the best light one has, to be strict and 
 sincere with one's self, not to be of the number of those who say 
 and do not, to be in earnest, this is the discipline by which alone 
 man is enabled to rescue his life from thralldom to the passing 
 moment and to his bodily senses, to ennoble it and to make it 
 eternal." Culture and Anarchy. 
 
 " Socrates is poisoned and dead ; but in his own breast does 
 not every man carry about with him a possible Socrates in that 
 power of a disinterested play of consciousness upon his stock 
 notions and habits, of which this wise and admirable man gave 
 all through his lifetime the great example, and which was the 
 secret of his incomparable influence ? And he who leads men to 
 call forth and exercise in themselves this power, and who busily
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD 513 
 
 calls it forth and exercises it in himself, is at the present moment, 
 perhaps, as Socrates was in his time, more in concert with the 
 vital work-ing of men's minds, and more effectually significant, 
 than any House of Commons' orator or practical operator in poli- 
 tics." Culture and Anarchy. 
 
 " In thus making sweetness and light to be characters of per- 
 fection, culture is of like spirit with poetry follows one law with 
 poetry. Far more than our freedom, our population, and our in- 
 dustrialism, many among us rely upon our religious organizations 
 to save us. I have called religion a yet more important manifes- 
 tation of human nature than poetry, because it has worked on a 
 broader scale for perfection and with greater masses of men. 
 But the idea of beauty and of a human nature perfect on all its 
 sides, which is the dominant idea of poetry, is a true and invalu- 
 able idea. . . It is destined, adding to itself the religious 
 idea of a devout energy, to transform and govern the other." 
 Culture and Anarchy. 
 
 3. Repetition Stock Phrases. "When a thought 
 is to be exactly repeated the exact word first used must be 
 used again. . . . Arnold's oft-rung phrases, instead of 
 affectations, are formulated truths with catch-words which, 
 once caught, cling like burrs." John Vance Cheney. 
 
 "A view being taken, a phrase more or less felicitous is 
 selected to express the view, and henceforth the changes are 
 rung upon the phrase. . . . The trick of iteration, exas- 
 perating as it was, effected its purpose; and the formulae 
 ' sweetness and light ' and so forth . . . have bitten the 
 more deeply into the contemporary consciousness because they 
 were formulae and could be easily recalled." J.Jacobs. 
 
 " When he has polished to the last degree of artistic finish 
 a definition or a phrase, it is no part of his purpose to leave it 
 in modest retirement till the discernment of the reader dis- 
 covers it. He has so little faith in the discernment of the 
 public that he emphatically points out what a perfect phrase he 
 has invented ; and, lest it be forgotten, makes it a pivot upon 
 which paragraph after paragraph revolves." Anonymous. 
 33
 
 514 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 " Mr. Arnold treated the middle classes as a common jury, 
 and hammered away at them remorselessly and with the most 
 unblushing iteration." Augustine Birrell. 
 
 T. W. Hunt speaks of " the injudicious recurrence of such 
 phrases as 'sweetness and light,' 'the sense in us for conduct,' 
 'the sense in us for beauty,' etc.," and Leslie Stephen notes 
 Arnold's "curious delight in discoursing catch- words and re- 
 peating them sometimes to weariness," 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness 
 and light. He who works for sweetness and light works to make 
 the reason and will of God to prevail. . . . Culture looks 
 beyond machinery ; culture hates hatred ; culture has one great 
 passion, the passion for sweetness and light. . . . It knows 
 that the sweetness and light of the few must be imperfect until the 
 raw and unkindled masses of humanity are touched with sweet- 
 ness and light. If I have not shrunk from saying that we must 
 work for sweetness and light, so neither have I shrunk from say- 
 ing that it must have a broad basis must have sweetness and 
 light." On Sweetness and Light. 
 
 " Charlatanism is for confusing or obliterating the distinctions 
 between excellent and inferior, sound and unsound or only half 
 sound, true and untrue or only half true. It is charlatanism, con- 
 scious or unconscious, whenever we confuse or obliterate these. 
 And in poetry, more than anywhere else, it is unpermissible to 
 confuse and obliterate them. For in poetry the distinction be- 
 tween excellent and inferior, sound and unsound or only half 
 sound, true and untrue or only half true, is of paramount impor- 
 tance. . . . And the criticism of life will be of power in pro- 
 portion as the poetry conveying it is excellent rather than inferior, 
 sound rather than unsound, true rather than untrue or only half 
 true." Essays in Criticism. 
 
 " I have been trying to show that culture is, or ought to be, the 
 study and pursuit of happiness ; and that of perfection, as pur- 
 sued by culture, beauty, and intelligence or, in other words, 
 sweetness and light are the main characters. But hitherto I 
 have been insisting chiefly on beauty or sweetness as a character
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD 515 
 
 of perfection. To complete rightly my design, it evidently re- 
 mains to speak of intelligence or light as a character of perfec- 
 tion." Doing as One Likes. 
 
 4. Doubt Lack of Deep Moral Sympathy. 
 
 " He lacks the broad, paternal, sympathetic element that the 
 first order of men possess. ... All his sympathies are 
 with the influences which make for correctness, for discipline, 
 for taste, for perfection, rather than those that favor power, 
 freedom, originality, individuality and the more heroic and 
 primary qualities. . . . One never doubts Arnold's abil- 
 ity to estimate a purely literary and artistic force ; but one 
 sees that it is by no means certain that he will fully appreciate 
 a force of character, a force of patriotism, of conscience, of 
 religion. . . . His works, as models of urbanity and 
 lucidity, will endure ; still, they do not contain the leaven 
 which leavens and modifies races and times." -John Bur- 
 roughs. 
 
 " Intellectual doubt has found its voice in Matthew Arnold's 
 most sincere utterances, and doubt can never touch a wide 
 circle. . . . He is a spirit loosed upon the sunless sea 
 of doubt and ever wearily scanning the gray horizon for the 
 desired but undiscovered haven. . . . Less than any 
 other who has felt the force of religious truth has he gained 
 the secret of serenity, the mind that knows, the calm of cer- 
 titude, the heart that rests in the light of faith." George 
 Dawson. 
 
 " No one has expressed more powerfully and poetically the 
 spiritual weaknesses [of this generation], its craving for a pas- 
 sion it cannot feel, ... its desire for a creed it cannot 
 accept, its aspiration for a peace it does not know. But Mr. 
 Arnold does this from the intellectual side sincerely and 
 delicately, but from the surface and never from the centre. 
 . . . His criticisms . . . are always too much lim- 
 ited to the thin superficial layer of the moral nature of their
 
 5l6 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 subjects, and take little comparative interest in the deeper 
 individuality beneath. . . . It is always the style and 
 superficial doctrine of their poetry, not the individual charac- 
 ter and unique genius, which occupy him." fi. H. Button. 
 "The general characteristic of Mr. Arnold's poetry is 
 moral and intellectual skepticism and despondency." E, 
 P. Whipple. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " Wandering between two worlds, one dead, 
 
 The other powerless to be born, 
 With nowhere yet to rest my head, 
 
 Like these on earth I wait forlorn. 
 Their faith, my tears, the world deride : 
 I come to shed them at their side." 
 
 The Grande Chartreuse. 
 
 11 At the stage of experience where men are now arrived, it is 
 evident to whoever looks at things fairly that the miraculous data 
 of the Bible have not this unique character of trustworthiness ; 
 that they, like other such data, proceed from a medium of im- 
 perfect observation and boundless credulity. The story of the 
 magical birth and resuscitation of Jesus was bred in such a me- 
 dium ; and not to see this, to build confidently on the story, is 
 hardly more serious than to admit the story of the magical birth 
 and resuscitation of the Virgin because it is as beautiful. Never 
 let us deny to this story power and pathos or treat with hostility 
 ideas which have entered so deep into the life of Christendom. 
 But the story is not true ; it never really happened. The per- 
 sonages never did meet together and speak and act in the manner 
 related. The personages of the Christian Heaven and their con- 
 versations are no more matter of fact than the personages of the 
 Greek Olympus and their conversations. . . . There is no 
 doubt, therefore, about an Eternal not ourselves that makes for 
 righteousness, and to which men have transferred that ancient 
 high name, God, the Brilliant or Shining, by which they once 
 adored a mighty object outside themselves, the sun, which from 
 the first took their notice as powerful for their weal or woe. So 
 that God is admitted ; but people maintain, besides, that he is 
 personal and thinks and loves." God and the Bible.
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 4. " The Gods laugh in their sleeves 
 To watch man doubt and fear, 
 Who knows not what to believe 
 
 Since he sees nothing clear, 
 And dares stamp nothing false 
 When he finds nothing sure." 
 
 Empedodes on Etna. 
 
 5. Despondency Melancholy. Mr. Arnold says of 
 himself: %; In the sincere endeavor to learn and practise, 
 amid the bewildering confusion of our times, what is sound 
 and true in poetical art, I seemed to myself to find the only 
 sure guidance, the only solid footing among the ancients. 
 They, at any rate, knew what they wanted in art and we do 
 not." 
 
 " Moral uneasiness and spiritual darkness often verging on 
 despair, . . [a] tone of sad yearning and bitter dis- 
 
 satisfaction . . . with modified intensity runs through all 
 the poems of Mr. Arnold's middle period. . . . [There 
 is a] neutral transitionary attitude between allegiance to au- 
 thority that has ceased to control him and acceptance of 
 a system that does not command his reverence." R. H. 
 Hutton. 
 
 "An undertone of sadness runs like a sombre current be- 
 low the visible level of his verse. . . . Seriousness is too 
 often seen to give place to sadness and to a sadness that is 
 nothing less than Byronic and oppressive." T. ]V. Hunt. 
 
 " He is full of an incommunicable grief, and in the effort 
 to express what he suffers, he reaches to an intensity of utter- 
 ance which we find nowhere else in his poetry. . . . He 
 cannot conceal from us that there is no peace in culture. A 
 pervading sadness and despair are its most memorable features. 
 There breathes throughout the sadness of failure, the distress 
 of faithlessness. . . . [He strikes] the iron chord of a 
 militant yet despairing pessimism." George Dawson. 
 
 " In the melancholy with which the sick King of Bokhara
 
 518 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 broods, ... in the gloomy resentment of Mycerinus, 
 . . . in the despair of Empedocles on Etna in his fail- 
 ure to solve the riddle of the painful earth, ... in those 
 fine lines written by a death-bed, ... in the melodious 
 sadness of the personal retrospects in 'Resignation,' . . . 
 in the consciously hopeless cravings of ' The Scholar Gipsy ' 
 and ' Thyrsis,' ... he delineates the intellectual weak- 
 ness and dejection of the age, and feebly though poetically 
 shadows forth his own hopeless hope of a remedy." R. H. 
 Button. 
 
 " Didacticism and Pessimism constitute the main objection 
 to the body of his poetry too naked teaching, too free use of 
 ' the fearful gift,' the 'glance of melancholy,' too much mal- 
 ady and too little melody, too little ease and spontaneity, too 
 little of the bubbling music of joy. ... Of a truth, 
 Arnold is a man of sorrows." -John Vance Cheney. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " O born in days when wits were fresh and clear, 
 And life ran gaily as the sparkling Thames ; 
 Before this strange disease of modern life, 
 
 With its sick hurry, its divided aims, 
 Its heads o'ertaxed, its palsied hearts, was rife 
 Fly hence, our contact fear! 
 
 But fly our paths, our feverish contact fly ! 
 For strong the infection of our mental strife, 
 Which, though it gives no bliss, yet spoils for rest ; 
 And we should win thee from thy own fair life, 
 Like us distracted and like us unblest." 
 
 The Scholar-Gipsy. 
 
 " The brave, impetuous heart yields everywhere 
 To the subtle, contriving head ; 
 Great qualities are trodden down, 
 And littleness united 
 Is become invincible." Empedocles on Etna.
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD $19 
 
 " Wise men everywhere know that we must keep up our cour- 
 age and hope. . . . But the very word duty points to an 
 effort and a struggle to maintain our hope unbroken." Dis- 
 courses in America. 
 
 6. Intellectual and Moral Superciliousness. 
 
 " He took a sort of perverse delight in intellectual isolation, 
 and lectured his antagonists with the serene positiveness of 
 one who was perfectly convinced that he knew everything 
 better than anybody else knew anything. . . . There is 
 a touch of literary dandyism in all Arnold's prose. He al- 
 ways figures, as someone has well said, as ' a superior person ' 
 talking down to the intellectual incapacities of his inferiors." 
 George Dawson. 
 
 " Mr. Arnold has always impressed on his poems that air 
 of aristocratic selectness and conscious exclusiveness which 
 Goethe, even after being the popular poet of Germany, claimed 
 for his own writings. . . . Mr. Arnold's poems draw 
 their life entirely from the proud self-conscious zone of mod- 
 ern experience, and have scarcely given forth one single note 
 of popular grief and joy." E. C. Stedman. 
 
 " Matthew Arnold is the poet of the universities of the 
 intellectual classes. . . . He has not in him the mixt- 
 ure of common life and feeling which can conciliate that 
 inner circle with the wider one of the general world, or the 
 warm inspiration of passion and emotional nature which goes 
 to the common heart." Mrs. Oliphant. 
 
 11 His critical style has this fundamental fault, a dogmatic 
 spirit. . . . This dogmatism is apparent in all his prose. 
 No man has opposed the dogmatic tone more than he, yet he 
 is here among the chief of sinners. . . . The critic is 
 thoroughly satisfied with himself. . . . This aristocratic 
 manner was more and more apparent in Mr. Arnold and 
 never .more pronounced than in his later utterances. . 
 He preferred to appear as the apostle of classical restraint.
 
 52O MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 The one most repellant feature of this distinguished writer is 
 this imperial pompousness, this air of self-assertion, which 
 amounts at times to nothing short of a literary strut. . . 
 In his American addresses we note most conspicuous examples 
 of this parade of parts this literary hauteur." T. W. Hunt. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " The mere nomenclature of the country [the United States] 
 sets upon a cultivated person like the incessant pricking of pins. 
 What people in whom the sense of beauty and fitness was quick 
 could have invented or could tolerate the hideous names ending 
 in ' ville ' the Briggsvilles, Higginsvilles, Jacksonvilles rife 
 from Maine to Florida, the jumble of unnatural and inappropri- 
 ate names everywhere ? " Last Words on America. 
 
 " Wragg ! If we are to talk of ideal perfection, of the best in 
 the whole world, has any one reflected what a touch of grossness 
 in our race, when an original shortcoming in the more delicate 
 spiritual perceptions is shown by the natural growth amongst us 
 of such hideous names Higginbottom, Stiggins, Bugg ! In 
 Ionia and Attica they were luckier in this respect than ' the best 
 race in the world ;' by the Ilissus there was no Wragg, poor 
 thing ! " Essays in Criticism. 
 
 " It may be very well for born Hebraisers, like Mr. Spurgeon, 
 to Hebraise ; but for liberal statesmen to Hebraise is surely un- 
 safe, and to see poor old liberal hacks Hebraising, whose real 
 self belongs to a kind of negative Hellenism a state of moral 
 indifference without intellectual ardor is even painful. And 
 when, by our Hebraising, we neither do what the better mind of 
 statesmen prompted them to do nor win the affections of the 
 people we want to conciliate nor yet reduce the opposition of 
 our adversaries but rather brighten it, surely it may not be un- 
 reasonable to Hellenize a little." Culture and Anarchy. 
 
 7. Cool, Stinging Satire. " He is a master of ironi- 
 cal reasoning. . . . He never uses a literary bludgeon ; 
 he delights rather in the sharp rapier-thrust, the swift retort, 
 the quiet ironical smile that is so much harder to bear than
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD 521 
 
 the loud derisive laughter of a Johnson or a Carlyle." 
 George Dawson. 
 
 " His best friends might wish to see him they would cer- 
 tainly be curious to see him lose his temper for once in a 
 way over some subject that deserves to rouse his ire." J. 
 Jacobs. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " In the following essay it will be seen how our society dis- 
 tributes itself into Barbarians, Philistines, and Populace ; and 
 America is just ourselves, with the Barbarians quite left out, and 
 the Populace nearly." Culture and Anarchy. 
 
 "Why, one has heard people, fresh from reading certain arti- 
 cles of the Times on the Registrar-General's returns of marriages 
 and births in this country, who would talk of our large English 
 families in quite a solemn strain, as if they had something in itself 
 beautiful, elevating, and meritorious in them ; as if the British 
 Philistine would have only to present himself before the Great 
 Judge with his twelve children in order to be received among the 
 sheep as a matter of right ! " Culture and Anarchy. 
 
 " The reader may judge of my astonishment, therefore, at find- 
 ing, from Mr. Wright's pamphlet, that I had ' declared with 
 much solemnity that there is not any proper reason for his ex- 
 isting.' That I never said ; but, on looking back at my lectures 
 on translating Homer, I find that I did say, not that Mr. Wright 
 but that Mr. Wright's version of the Iliad, repeating in the main 
 the merits and defects of Cowper's version, as Mr. Sotheby's re- 
 peated those of Pope's version, had, if I might be pardoned for 
 saying so, no proper reason for existing. Elsewhere I expressly 
 spoke of the merit of his version ; but I confess that the phrase, 
 qualified as I have shown, about its want of a proper reason for 
 existing, I used. Well, the phrase had, perhaps, too much vivac- 
 ity ; we have all of us a right to exist, we and our works ; an un- 
 popular author should be the last person to call in question this 
 right. So I gladly withdraw the offending phrase, and I am sorry 
 for having used it." Essays in Criticism,
 
 522 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 8. Classic Finish Clearness Purity. "Arnold 
 is probably the purest classic writer that English literature, as 
 yet, has to show; classic not merely in the repose and purity 
 of his style, but in the unity and simplicity of his mind. 
 The man of all others among recent English writers 
 who had in a pre-eminent degree the gift of style . 
 was Matthew Arnold." -John Burroughs. 
 
 " That natural light of mind, that power of reception and 
 reflection of things or thoughts, whrch I most admire in so 
 much of Mr. Arnold's work. I mean by it much more than 
 mere facility or transparency ; more than brilliance, more 
 than ease or excellence of style. . . . No poem in any 
 language can be more perfect as a model of style [than ' Thyr- 
 sis '].... No countryman of ours since Keats died 
 has made or has found words fall into such faultless folds and 
 forms of harmonious line. . . . No one has in like meas- 
 ure that tender and final quality of touch which tempers the 
 excessive light and suffuses the refluent shade. . . . No 
 poet has ever come so near the perfect Greek." Swinburne. 
 
 " Mr. Arnold belongs to the classical school of poetry, 
 regarding the Greeks, with their strength and simplicity of 
 phrase and their perfect sense of form, as his masters. To 
 the imaginative power of a true poet he adds a delicacy and 
 refinement of taste and a purity and severity of phrase which 
 uncultured readers often mistake for boldness. Nowhere in 
 his poems do we find those hackneyed commonplaces, decked 
 out with gaudy and ungraceful ornament, which pass for 
 poetry with many people. . . . There are few poems 
 which show such a refined sense of beauty, such dignity and 
 self-restraint, such admirable adaptation of the form to the 
 subject as, for example, ' Tristam and Iseult,' ' Sohrab and 
 Rustum,' and the ' Forsaken Merman.' ' H. J. Nicoll. 
 
 " He has originality, ... a style of the utmost 
 lucidity and of frequent force. . . . He is never obscure ; 
 he says what he has to say with admirable definiteness and
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD 523 
 
 precision of phrase. . . . [He has an] admirable terse- 
 ness and distinctness of expression." George Dawson. 
 
 " The chief note of his style is an exquisite and classical 
 quality of touch. . . . The verse of Arnold is bathed in 
 lucid and tranquil light." Horace Scudder. 
 
 " Arnold's prose is luminous like a steel mirror." R. H. 
 Hutton. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 "A few years afterwards the great English middle-class, the 
 kernel of the nation, the class whose intelligent sympathy had up- 
 held a Shakespeare, entered the prison of Puritanism, and had 
 the key turned on its spirit there for two hundred years." Es- 
 say on HeinricJi Heine. 
 
 " One man in many millions, a Heine, may console himself 
 and keep himself erect in suffering by a colossal irony of this 
 sort, by covering himself and the Universe with the red fire of 
 this sinister mockery, but the many millions cannot, cannot if 
 they would." Essay on Pagan and Medieval Religious Senti- 
 ment. 
 
 " What Lady is this, whose silk attire 
 
 Gleams so rich in the light of the fire ? 
 
 The ringlets on her shoulders lying 
 
 In their flitting lustre vying 
 
 With the clasp of burnished gold 
 
 Which her heavy robe doth hold ? 
 
 What place is this, and who are they ? 
 Who is that kneeling lady fair ? 
 And on his pillows that pale knight 
 Who seems of marble on a tomb ? 
 How comes it here, this chamber bright 
 Through whose mullioned windows clear 
 The castle court all wet with rain, 
 The drawbridge and the moat appear 
 
 and far away 
 The unquiet bright Alantic plain ? " 
 
 Tristam and Iseult.
 
 CARLYLE, 1795-1881 
 
 Biographical Outline. Thomas Carlyle, born Decem- 
 ber 4, 1795, at Ecclefechan, Dumfries, Scotland ; father a 
 stone-mason; Thomas studies at the village-school and after- 
 ward at Annan Grammar School, which he enters in 1804; 
 in November, 1809, he enters Edinburgh University, walking 
 the eighty miles thence from his home ; his parents wish him 
 to study for the ministry ; he leaves the University in the 
 summer of 1814, and becomes mathematical tutor in An- 
 nandale Academy at a salary of ^70 per year ; he makes a 
 profound study of Newton's " Principia ;" in the autumn of 
 1816 becomes master of a school in Kilcardy, where he forms 
 an intimate friendship with Edward Irving, and reads his- 
 tory voraciously in Irving's library ; is unpopular as a teacher, 
 and resigns in October, 1818; goes to Edinburgh without a 
 definite aim ; takes up mineralogy and, incidentally, German ; 
 earns a meagre support by tutoring and translating scienti- 
 fic pamphlets from the French ; is tortured by dyspepsia ; 
 spends the summer of 1819 on his father's farm at Mainhill, 
 Annandale, wandering distracted about the moors, "eating 
 my own heart, . . . through mazes of doubt, perpetual 
 questionings unanswered;" returns to Edinburgh in Novem- 
 ber, 1819, and resumes private teaching and attendance on 
 law lectures; becomes disgusted with the law by March, 1820, 
 and visits Irving at Glasgow ; studies German literature at 
 Mainhill during the summer of 1821, and writes articles for 
 " Brewster's Cyclopaedia;" in September, 1820, returns to 
 Edinburgh, " determined to find out something stationary " 
 and "sick of this drivelling state of painful idleness; " con- 
 tinues private teaching and hack writing, earning a plain 
 
 524
 
 CARLYLE 525 
 
 living but still subject to mental " temptations in the wilder- 
 ness ;" London booksellers refuse his proposal to make a com- 
 plete translation of Schiller's works; in June, 1821, he 
 achieves what he calls in "Sartor Resartus " his "new- 
 birth," when he " authentically took the devil by the nose; " 
 in May, 1821, he visits Haddington, with Irving, and meets 
 Jane Baillie Welsh, with whom Irving was then in love ; 
 Carlyle becomes her tutor in German ; through Irving's aid 
 he becomes tutor at Edinburgh in the family of Mr. Buller, a 
 retired East India merchant, at a salary of 200 ; he trans- 
 lates Legendre's "Geometry" successfully, and contem- 
 plates various ambitious literary works ; is made a familiar 
 member of the Buller family, where he has many social ad- 
 vantages ; in 1823 begins writing his " Life of Schiller " for 
 the London Magazine ; removes with the Bullers to Kin- 
 naird House, near Dunkeld ; continues his correspondence 
 with Jane Welsh, who frowns upon his matrimonial advances ; 
 translates Goethe's " Wilhelm Meister " in 1824, and re- 
 ceives good pay for it ; in 1824 he first visits London, where 
 he continues to act as tutor to Charles and Arthur Buller, 
 and rene\vs his intimacy with Irving, then at the height of 
 his London fame (meanwhile Irving, though devoted to Jane 
 Welsh, had reluctantly kept a youthful obligation by marry- 
 ing a lady to whom he had become engaged years before) ; 
 Carlyle meets Procter, Cunningham, Campbell, and Cole- 
 ridge ; resides briefly at Ke\v, and gives up the Buller tutor- 
 ship in July, 1824 ; spends two months in Birmingham as the 
 guest of one Badams, a physician and a friend of Irving, who 
 tries to cure Carlyle's dyspepsia; takes lodgings with the 
 Irvings at Dover in October, 1824 ; spends twelve days in 
 Paris, where he meets Legendre, hears Cuvier lecture, and 
 sees Laplace and others ; returns to Dover and takes lodgings 
 in London in the autumn of 1824 ; remains in London till 
 midwinter, putting his "Life of Schiller" into final book 
 form ; becomes engaged to Jane Welsh (conditionally) in the
 
 526 CARLYLE 
 
 spring of 1825 ; returns to his father's home at Mainhill in 
 March, 1825, having engaged to make further translations 
 from the German, and takes a farm at Hoddam Hill ; Miss 
 Welsh visits him and his family ; gives up Hoddam Hill in 
 1826 and removes, with his father's family, to Scotsbrig, near 
 Ecclefechan ; marries Jane Welsh at Templand, October 17, 
 1826, and takes a house at Comely Bank, Edinburgh; enter- 
 tains De Quincey, Hamilton, Wilson, and others ; completes 
 his " Specimens of German Romance " late in 1826 ; finds no 
 remunerative occupation, and so decides to remove to his 
 wife's moorland farm at Craigenputtock; in June, 1827, he 
 meets Jeffrey, and engages to write for the Edinburgh Review 
 the essays now known as the "Miscellanies;" is greatly en- 
 couraged by presents and an appreciative letter from Goethe 
 in July, 1827 ; Jeffrey makes an unsuccessful effort to obtain 
 for Carlyle, through Brougham, a chair in the new London 
 University ; an effort of Irving and others to secure for him a 
 chair in the University of St. Andrews also fails ; he leaves 
 Edinburgh for Craigenputtock May 26, 1827; continues his 
 contributions to the Edinburgh Review, and publishes his 
 essay on Voltaire in the Foreign Review in April, 1829; 
 joins the staff of the new Eraser's Magazine in May, 1830; 
 writes "Sartor Resartus " in 1831, but fails to find a pub- 
 lisher; spends the autumn of 1831 in London, where he meets 
 John Stuart Mill, Leigh Hunt, and others ; returns to Craig- 
 enputtock in April, 1832 ; corresponds with Mill ; publishes 
 his essay on Goethe in the Foreign Quarterly in July, 1832 ; 
 writes his essay on Diderot, and spends the winter of 1832-33 
 in Edinburgh ; returns in the spring to Craigenputtock (where 
 he is visited by Emerson) and writes the "Diamond Neck- 
 lace;" after receiving Thiers's History from Mill, Carlyle 
 decides to undertake a history of the French Revolution ; 
 begins publishing "Sartor Resartus" in Eraser's in Novem- 
 ber, 1833; settles, June 10, 1834, with his wife at 5 Cheyne 
 Row, Chelsea, London, where he resides till his death;
 
 CARLYLE 527 
 
 "Sartor Resartus " excites "universal disapprobation;" 
 Carlyle completes the manuscript of the first volume of the 
 "French Revolution," which is loaned to Mill and is acci- 
 dentally burned; he refuses a position on the staff of the 
 London Times ; completes the second manuscript of the first 
 volume of the " French Revolution " September 22, 1835 ; 
 toils at the second volume during 1836, "mind weary, body 
 very sick ; " is comforted by Sterling and Leigh Hunt; pub- 
 lishes his essay on Mirabeau and the "Diamond Necklace" 
 in 1836 ; " Sartor Resartus " is published in America through 
 Emerson's influence, in 1836; Carlyle completes the second 
 volume of the "French Revolution " January 12, 1837, and 
 publishes both volumes soon afterward ; begins his first course 
 of public lectures (on German Literature) in London, May i, 
 1837 ; the lectures are financially successful and are followed 
 by three more courses in three successive years, one on the 
 History of Literature and Periods of European Culture, one 
 on Revolutions in Modern Europe, and one on Hero Worship 
 all lost or imperfectly reported except the last ; Carlyle 
 becomes recognized as a social "lion," but repulses many 
 would-be influential friends; in 1838-39 he receives, through 
 Emerson, ^150 as the profits of the American edition of 
 "Sartor Resartus;" reviews Lockhart's "Life of Scott" 
 in January, 1838 (in 1839 Emerson publishes in America 
 Carlyle's "Miscellaneous Essays"); "Chartism," written 
 in 1839 and refused by the Quarterly, is published in pam- 
 phlet form in 1840 ; Carlyle publishes " Heroes and Hero- 
 Worship" early in 1841, and retires to Yorkshire " to ripen 
 or rot for awhile;" writes the preface to Emerson's Essays 
 and little else during 1841 ; the death of Mrs. Carlyle's moth- 
 er, in February, 1842, brings Mrs. Carlyle into a property 
 of ^200 a year ; Carlyle visits Belgium briefly with the 
 Bullers in 1842, and in 1843 visits Charles Redwood in 
 Wales; he publishes " Past and Present " in April, 1843, and 
 " The Life and Letters of Oliver Cromwell " in December,
 
 528 CARLYLE 
 
 1845 ; a new edition is demanded by May, 1846 ; he is again 
 visited by Emerson in the autumn of 1847 ; makes a tour of 
 Ireland in the summer of 1849, and makes notes not intended 
 for publication (published in 1882) ; publishes his " Discourse 
 on the Nigger Question " in Eraser's, December, 1849, an( ^ 
 begins his " Latter-Day Pamphlets ;" publishes the " Life of 
 John Sterling" in 1851; begins work on his " Friedrich 
 II." in 1852, of which he publishes the first two volumes 
 in 1858 and the sixth and last in -1865; visits Germany in 
 1852 ; is elected Lord Rector of Edinburgh University in 
 November, 1865; delivers his inaugural address in March, 
 1866 ; leaves Edinburgh to visit his brother James at Scots- 
 brig, and while there learns of his wife's sudden death while 
 she is driving in the Park ; writes two volumes of the " Rem- 
 iniscences" in 1866 (much of it never intended for publica- 
 tion), including his recollections of Irving and Jeffrey ; pub- 
 lishes his pamphlet " Shooting Niagara " in 1867 ; publishes 
 " The Early Kings of Norway "in 1875 ; refuses many royal 
 honors and decorations and the offer of a pension ; dies in 
 London February 5, 1881. 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY ON CARLYLE'S STYLE. 
 
 Arnold, A. S., "Thomas Carlyle." London, 1888, Ward & Downey. 
 Lowell, J. R., "Literary Works Essays." Boston, 1891, Houghton, 
 
 Mifflin & Co., 2: 77-120. 
 Robertson, J. M., "Modern Humanists." London, 1891, Swan, 
 
 Sonnenschein & Co., 1-61. 
 Burroughs, J., "Indoor Studies." Boston, 1893, Houghton, Mifflin & 
 
 Co., 128-162. 
 Caird, E., "Essays on Literature." New York, 1892, Macmillan, 
 
 230-267. 
 Masson, D., "Carlyle Personally and In His Writings." London, 
 
 1885, Macmillan. 
 Home, R. H., "A New Spirit of the Age." New York, 1844, 
 
 Harper, 333-348- 
 Lancaster, H. H., "Essays and Reviews." Edinburgh, 1876, Edmond- 
 
 ston & Douglass, 229-296.
 
 CARLYLE 529 
 
 Hutton, R. H., "Modern Guides of English Thought." New York, 
 
 1891, Macmillan, 1-46. 
 Whipple, E. P., "Essays and Reviews." Boston, 1861, Ticknor, 2: 
 
 387-392. 
 Stephen, L., "Hours in a Library." New York, 1894, Putnam, 3: 
 
 271-306. 
 Gilfillan, G., "Literary Portraits." Edinburgh, 1851, J. Hogg, I: 
 
 84-104 and 3: 313-328. 
 Morley, J., "Critical Miscellanies." New York, 1893, Macmillan, I: 
 
 135-203. 
 Dawson, G., "Biographical Lectures." London, 1886, Kegan Paul, 
 
 Trench & Co., 358-437. 
 Emerson, R. W., " English Traits." Boston, 1886, Phillips, Sampson, 
 
 & Co., 21-24 a d 249. 
 Norton, C. E., "Correspondence of Carlyle and Emerson." Boston, 
 
 1886, Ticknor & Co., 2 vols. 
 
 Nichol, J., "Carlyle." Edinburgh, 1881, McNiven & Wallace. 
 Whipple, E. P., "American Literature and Other Papers." Boston, 
 
 1863, Ticknor, Reid & Fields, 246 and 387-392. 
 Scherer, E., "Essays on English Literature." New York, 1891, 
 
 Scribner, 226-236. 
 
 Birrell, A., " Obiter Dicta." New York, 1881, Scribner, I: 1-55. 
 Giles, H., "Lectures and Essays." Boston, 1861, Ticknor, Reid & 
 
 Fields, 2 : 286-299. 
 
 Brimley, G., "Essays." London, 1860, Macmillan, 239-251. 
 Lowell, J. R., "My Study Windows." Boston, 1871, J. R. Osgood, 
 
 115-149. 
 Dowden, E., "Studies in Literature." London, 1878, C. K. Paul, 
 
 72-78. 
 Bayne, P., "Lessons From My Masters." New York, 1879, Harper, 
 
 3-192. 
 Shairp, J. S. C., "Aspects of Poetry." Boston, 1882, Houghton, 
 
 Mifflin & Co., 407-437. 
 Arnold, M., "Discourses in America." London, 1885, Macmillan, 
 
 138-207. 
 Minto, W., "English Prose Literature." Edinburgh, 1886, Blackwood, 
 
 I30-I77- 
 Morley, H., "English Literature in the Reign of Victoria. " Leipzig, 
 
 1881, Tauchnitz, 294-316. 
 Nicoll, H. J., " Landmarks of English Literature." New York, 1883, 
 
 Appleton, 420-428. 
 
 34
 
 530 CARLYLE 
 
 Smith, J. C., "Writings by the Way." Edinburgh, 1885, Blackwood, 
 
 1-62. 
 Sterling, John, "Essays and Tales." London, 1848, J. W. Parker, I : 
 
 252-381. 
 Russell, W. C, "The Book of Authors." London, n. d., Warne, 
 
 462-465. 
 Saintsbury, G., "Corrected Impressions." New York, 1895, Dodd, 
 
 Mead & Co., 41-60. 
 Oliphant, Mrs., "The Victorian Age of English Literature." New 
 
 York, 1892, Tait, 101-121. 
 Davey, S., "Dickens, Carlyle, Darwin," etc. London, 1879, E. 
 
 Bumpus, 45-98. 
 Friswell, J. H., " Modern Men of Letters." London, 1870, Hodder 
 
 & Stoughton, 273-282. 
 Kebbell, T. E., "Essays upon History and Politics." London, 1864, 
 
 Chapman & Hall, 72-97. 
 McCie, G., "The Religion of Our Literature." London, 1875, Hodder 
 
 & Stoughton, 1-68. 
 
 Harnley, E. B., " Essay on Carlyle." Edinburgh, 1881, Blackwood. 
 Larkin, H., " Carlyle, the Open Secret," etc. London, 1886, Kegan 
 
 Paul, Trench & Co., 128-162. 
 Froude, J. A., " First Forty Years of Carlyle's Life." New York, 1882, 
 
 Scribner. 
 Dowden, E., "Transcripts and Studies." London, 1888, Kegan Paul, 
 
 Trench & Co. 1-40. 
 Garnett, R., "Life of Thomas Carlyle" (Great Writers). London, 
 
 1887, W. Scott. 
 Froude, J. A., "Life of Thomas Carlyle in London." New York, 
 
 1884, Scribner. 
 Wylie, W. H., " Carlyle, the Man and His Books." London, 1881, 
 
 Marshall & Co. 
 Mazzini, J., "Life and Writings of Mazzini." London, 1887, W. 
 
 Scott, 109-176. 
 
 Tyndall, J., "New Fragments." New York, 1881, Appleton, 347-392. 
 Hood, E. P., " Thomas Carlyle as a Philosophical Thinker." London, 
 
 1875, J. Clark & Co. 
 Greg, W. R., "Literary and Social Judgments." Boston, 1873, 
 
 Osgood, 115-145. 
 Hutton, L., " Literary Landmarks of London." New York, 1892, 
 
 Harper, 38-40. 
 Martineau, J., "Essays Philosophical and Theological." New York, 
 
 1866, Holt, 329-405.
 
 CARLYLE 531 
 
 Martineau, H., "Autobiography." London, 1877, Smith, Elder & Co., 
 
 i: 380-387. 
 
 Collier, W. F. , " History of English Literature." London, 1892, Nel- 
 son, 494-499. 
 Walsh, W. S., "Pen Pictures of Modern Authors." New York, 1886, 
 
 Putnam, 1-41. 
 Carlyle, T., "Reminiscences" (Norton). Froude, New York, 1881, 
 
 Scribner. 
 
 Conway, M. D., "Carlyle." New York, 1881, Harper. 
 Parton, J., "Some Noted Princes," etc. New York, 1883, Crowell, 
 
 I73-J87. 
 Robertson, J. M., "Essays Toward a Critical Method." London, 1889, 
 
 v. index. ^ 
 
 Thoreau, H. D., "A Yankee in Canada." Boston, 1866, Osgood, 211- 
 
 247. 
 Welsh, A. H., "The Development of English Literature." Chicago, 
 
 1884, Griggs, 455-470. 
 Taine, H. A., "History of English Literature." New York, 1875, 
 
 Holt, 3 : 295-343. 
 Henley, W. E., "Views and Reviews." New York, 1890, Scribner, 
 
 16. 
 Russell, A. P., "Characteristics." Boston, 1893, Houghton, Mifflin & 
 
 Co., 270-275. 
 Jenks, E., "Thomas Carlyle and J. S. Mill." London, 1888, G. Allen, 
 
 1-104. 
 Sheppard, N., "Essays of George Eliot." New York, n. d., Funk & 
 
 Wagnalls, 25-30. 
 Procter, B. W., "An Autobiographical Fragment." London, 1877, 
 
 Bell, 163-167. 
 Phillips, M. G., "A Manual of English Literature." New York, 1893, 
 
 Harper, 2: 30-31 and 53-54 and 101-102, etc. 
 Gibbins, H. de B., "English Social Reformers." London, 1892, Me- 
 
 thuen, 184-204. 
 
 Dulcken, H. W., "Worthies of the World." New York, 1882, Put- 
 nam, 321-336. 
 
 Shepard, R. H., " Bibliography of Carlyle. " London, 1 88 1, Eliot Stock. 
 The Critic, 2 : 277 (Burroughs). 
 The Independent, 32: 109-110. 
 The Nation, 32: 291-292 (E. L. Godkin) ; 32: 201-202 (J. Bryce) ; 
 
 32: 109-110 (A. G. Sedgwick). 
 North American Review, 41 : 454-482 (A. H. Everett) ; 140: 9-21 (F. 
 
 Harrison).
 
 532 CARLYLE 
 
 Dublin Rez'ievv, 5 : 349-376. 
 
 The New Englandfr, 8 : 46-66 (Field). 
 
 Westminster Review, 57: 247-251 (George Eliot). 
 
 National Review, 3: 483-4940. Martineau) ; 16: 77-83 (P. W. Roose); 
 
 4: 330-341 (A. Austin). 
 Atlantic Monthly, I : 185-196 (Phillips) ; 12 : 497-504 (D. A. Masson) ; 
 
 51: 560-564; 51: 320-330 (Burroughs); 51: 837-840; 55: 421- 
 
 423- 
 
 Prater's Magazine, 72 : 778-810 ; 103 : 515-528 (A. Lang). 
 
 Contemporary Review, 39 : 584-609 (E. Simcox) ; 60: 520-528 (Lecky) ; 
 49 : 772-793 (Max Miiller). 
 
 Harper's Magazine, 48 : 726-729 (J. G. Wilson). 
 
 Scribner's Magazine, 22 : 89-92 (Emerson) ; 22 : 92-106 (Saints- 
 bury). 
 
 North British Review, 40 : 1-40 (Masson). 
 
 New Review, 6 : 408-429 and 593-608. 
 
 LittelFs Living Age, 163 : 629-635 (A. Austin in Xational Review) ; 
 148: 692-703 (J. Macdowell in London Times). 
 
 Gentlemen's Magazine, 30 : 530-533 (H. R. F. Bourne). 
 
 Scottish Review, I : 72-100. 
 
 Fortnightly Review, 39 : 622-642 (Venables) ; 53 : 5-32 (J. Tyndall). 
 
 Athenaum, 2 ('84) : 524-526; I ('95): 149-251 (J. N. Hoarr). 
 
 Chambers 's Journal, 57 : 663-666. 
 
 Eclectic Magazine, 199-206 (P. Frank); 118: 326-398 (C. G. Duffey). 
 
 Quarterly Review, 132 : 335-366. 
 
 Good Words, 22 : 477-480 (D. Macleod). 
 
 Nineteenth Century, 10: 1-4 (J. A. Froude) ; 9 : 856-879 (E. Dowden) ; 
 9 : 1009-1025 (H. Taylor) ; 32 : 470-486 (J. Strachey). 
 
 Macmillan's Magazine, 43 : 482-496 (Mrs. Oliphant) ; 47: 2OO-2I2 (J. 
 C. Morrison). 
 
 Corn hill Magazine, 44: 664-683 (Leslie Stephen). 
 
 Blackwood's Magazine, 159: 31-38. 
 
 PARTICULAR CHARACTERISTICS. 
 
 i. Free Coinage Verbal Eccentricities. "His 
 felicity and power of expression surpass even his special merit 
 as historian and critic. Therein his experience has not failed 
 him, but furnished him with such a store of winged, ay, and 
 legged words, as only a London life perchance could give
 
 CARLYLE 533 
 
 account of. We had not understood the wealth of the lan- 
 guage before. Nature is ransacked, and all the resorts and 
 purlieus of humanity are taxed to furnish the fittest symbol 
 for his thought. He does not go to the dictionary, the word- 
 book, but to the word-manufactory itself, and has made end- 
 less work for the lexicographers." H. D. Thoreau. 
 
 " One peculiarity of Carlyle's style deserves notice his 
 revival of many of the old Saxon words, for none of the semi- 
 French and semi-Latin words imported of late so strike upon 
 an Englishman's heart and feelings as the good old Saxon : 
 they sound home-like, not like the frippered follies of modern 
 times, but like the earnest, hearty days of our fathers under 
 the best development. ... In one respect I think Car- 
 lyle has improved the English language, and that is in the 
 use he makes of words banded and coupled together as epi- 
 thets. . . . Compound words are too few in the old 
 language of England ; the old Saxon tongue did not rejoice 
 in long words, but stood rather in awe of them ; but we now 
 need compound words in order to avoid that diluted style 
 which the writings of the last half-century have supplied 
 something by which our thoughts may be more compressed, 
 masculine, and energetic and this Carlyle has done in some 
 of the singularly beautiful epithets which he has strung to- 
 gether in these compound words, in which the Greeks and 
 Germans were thought to have the pre-eminence, but which 
 he has demonstrated the English language is quite as capable 
 of showing, and being rightly used under, as either of those 
 tongues." George Dawson. 
 
 11 In point of fact, however, Carlyle takes no liberty with 
 the English language for which he cannot plead the example 
 of Shakespeare. When he wants to express a shade of mean- 
 ing for which there is no word in the dictionary, he makes a 
 term by tacking one or two words together. He speaks [in 
 4 Sartor Resartus '] of a ' snow - and - rose - bloom maiden ' 
 . . . Carlyle makes these words as Turner mixed colors,
 
 534 CARLYLE 
 
 to suit his own pictorial wants. Shakespeare did the same." 
 Peter Bayne. 
 
 " He is most liberal in the coinage of new words and even 
 new forms of syntax. ... To give an adequate view of 
 his verbal eccentricities would be no small labor. He ex- 
 tends the admitted licenses of the language in every direction, 
 using one part of speech for another, verbs for nouns, nouns 
 for verbs, adverbs and adjectives for nouns. His coinages 
 often take the form of new derivatives' benthamee,' ' amusee. ' 
 He abuses the license of giving plurals to abstract nouns." 
 Minto. 
 
 " Both [Carlyle and Jean Paul Richter] constantly use 
 words sanctioned by no custom, or even precedent, and, of 
 course, though often expressive, sometimes not compensating 
 for their oddness by any special felicity." John Sterling. 
 
 " Hardly any writer at any time has seen during his own 
 life so many new forms of speech, invented by himself, pass 
 into the general dictionary of phrase." Saintsbury. 
 
 " Carlyle's vocabulary is made up of long compounds in 
 the German style, of unusual forms, of comparatives and 
 superlatives of his own invention." Edmond Scherer. 
 
 " If he wants to convey a shade of meaning for which only 
 an approximate word exists, and he is not satisfied with a 
 paraphrase, he must alter the old word or invent a new one." 
 W. E. Henley. 
 
 " That new grandiose yet rugged voice which broke every 
 law of composition and triumphed over them all, which 
 shocked and bewildered all critics and authorities, yet ex- 
 cited and stirred the whole slumbrous world of literature and 
 rang into the air like a trumpet." Mrs. Oliphant. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " All was done for me that human waiterage, in the circum- 
 stances, could do. ... A very unbeautiful, old, boiled-look 
 ing, foreign dignitary, married to somebody's sister, . . .
 
 CARLYLfi 535 
 
 half-pay-sergeant-looking figure is talking insipidities about the 
 news from the papers." Irish Journey. 
 
 " No penny-a-week Committee Lady, no manager of Soup- 
 Kitchens, dancer at Charity Balls, was this rugged, stern-visaged 
 man ; but where in all England could there have been found 
 another soul so full of pity, a hand so heavenlike-bounteous as 
 his ? " Boswelts Life of Johnson. 
 
 " Accordingly, the impotent, insolent Do-nothingism in Prac- 
 tice and say-nothingism in Speech, which we have to witness on 
 that side of our affairs, is altogether amazing." Gospel of Dilet- 
 tanteism. 
 
 2. Profuse Imagery. " First, revelling in his immense 
 force of comparison and assimilation, he shows a prodigious 
 luxuriance of the figures of similarity nicknaming personages, 
 applying old terms to new situations, and such like. He often 
 substitutes metaphorical for the real names when the real are 
 quite sufficient and perhaps more suitable for the occasion. 
 Now this habit, not to speak of its lowering the value and 
 freshness of his genius by overdoing and overaffecting orig- 
 inality of phrase, often makes it appear as if he did not know 
 the literal and customary names of things, and were driven to 
 make shift with these allusive names. . . . The simili- 
 tudes, forcibly hunted out from every region of his knowledge 
 of nature and of books, are not merely fanciful embellishments 
 most of them go to the making of his vivid powers of de- 
 scription. The character or the personal appearance or action 
 of an individual ; the character of a nation, a state of society, 
 a political situation ; the relative position of two belligerents 
 everything, in short, that needs describing he brings vividly 
 before us in its leading features by some significant simile or 
 metaphor. ' ' Minto. 
 
 ''He cannot be contented with a single expression; he 
 employs figures at every step ; he embodies all his ideas ; he 
 must touch forms. We see that he is besieged and haunted by 
 brilliant or gloomy visions ; every thought with him is a shock ;
 
 556 CARLYLE 
 
 a stream of misty passion comes bubbling into his overflowing 
 brain, and the torrent of images breaks forth and rolls on 
 amidst every kind of mud and magnificence." Taine. 
 
 " In his graphic description of Richter's style, Carlyle de- 
 scribes his own pretty nearly ; and no doubt he first got his 
 tongue loosened at that fountain and was inspired by it to 
 equal freedom and originality. ' The language,' as he says of 
 'Richter, ' groans with indescribable metaphors and allusions 
 to all things human and divine, flowing onward, not like a 
 river, but like an inundation ; circling in complete eddies ; 
 chafing and gurgling, now this way, now that ; ' but in Car- 
 lyle ' the proper current ' never ' sinks out of sight amid the 
 boundless roar. ' ' ' H. D. Thoreau. 
 
 " In reading Jean Paul it is impossible, I think, not to think 
 that the color is sometimes more important than the meaning, 
 the embroidery more precious than the stuff ; but the intel- 
 lectual power of Carlyle is great enough to cause his most 
 glowing similitudes to thrill with life. In describing the lan- 
 guage of those books you are forced to fall back upon the 
 author's resource of metaphor and to say that it is now like 
 the gleaming of swords, now like the rustle and glance of 
 jewelled garments, now terrible as lightning, now tender as 
 the dew, now firm, close, rapid as the tread of armed men, 
 now wildly and grandly vague as the voice of forests or the 
 moaning of the sea." Peter Bayne. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " That waste chaos of authorship by trade ; that waste chaos 
 of skepticism in religion and politics, in life theory and life prac- 
 tice ; in his poverty, in his dust and dimness, with the sick body 
 and the rusty coat ; he made it do for him, like a brave man. 
 Not wholly without a loadstar as the brave all need to have ; with 
 his eye set on that, he would change his course for nothing in 
 these confused vortices of the lower sea of time." Heroes and 
 Hero Worship.
 
 CARLYLE 537 
 
 " Virtue once promised to be her own reward; but because 
 she does not pay him in the current coin of worldly enjoyment, 
 he reckons her, too, a delusion ; and, like Brutus, reproaches as 
 a shadow what he once worshipped as a substance. Whither 
 shall he now tend ? For his loadstars have gone out one by one ; 
 and as the darkness fell, the strong steady wind has changed into 
 a fierce and aimless tornado." Essay on Goethe. 
 
 " Dreariest continent of shot-rubbish the eye ever saw. Con- 
 fusion piled on confusion to your utmost horizon's edge ; obscure 
 in illusive twilight as of the shadow of death ; trackless, without 
 index, without finger-post or mark of any human fore-goer ; 
 where your human footstep, if you are still human, echoes bode- 
 ful through the gaunt solitude, peopled only by somnambulent 
 Pedants, Dilettants, and doleful creatures, by Phantasms, errors, 
 inconceivabilities, by nightmares, pasteboard novroys, griffins, 
 wiverns, and chimeras dire. There, all vanquished, overwhelmed 
 under such waste lumber-mountains, the wreck and dead ashes 
 of some six unbelieving generations, does the age of Cromwell 
 and his Puritans lie hidden from us." Essay on Cromwell. 
 
 " These fringes of lamplight, struggling up through smoke and 
 thousand-fold exhalation, some fathoms into the ancient reign of 
 Night, what thinks Bootes of them, as he leads his Hunting-Dogs 
 over the Zenith in their leash of sidereal fire ? That stifled hum 
 of Mid-night, when Traffic has lain down to rest ; and the chariot- 
 wheels of Vanity, still rolling here and there through distant 
 streets, and bearing her to Halls roofed in and lighted to the due 
 pitch for her ; and only Vice and Misery to prowl or to moan 
 like night-birds are abroad : that hum, I say, like the ster- 
 torous, unquiet slumber of sick Life, is heard in Heaven." 
 Essay on Burns. 
 
 3. Excessive Ridicule Broad Sarcasm. "No 
 
 man ever poured out such withering scorn upon his contem- 
 poraries. Many of his political tracts are as blasting as the 
 ' Satires ' of Juvenal. The opinions and practices of his times 
 in politics, religion, and literature were as a stubbly, brambly 
 field, to which he would fain apply the match and clean the 
 ground for a nobler crop. . . . He was probably the
 
 538 CAfcLYLE 
 
 most savage and contemptuous man in the world in his time, 
 who had anything like his enormous fund of tenderness and 
 magnanimity. ' 'John Burroughs. 
 
 " ' The Latter- Day Pamphlets ' assailed with the most gall- 
 ing invective and contemptuous ridicule the leading poli- 
 ticians and institutions of the country. The hollowness of 
 great men and the servility of small are lashed with a furious, 
 stinging whip, whose thongs, steeped in the salt of grim, fan- 
 tastic wit, cut and smart to the very bone. Yet many blows 
 are too fierce, too sweeping, and many fall harmless upon 
 sound and honest things." IV. F, Collier. 
 
 ' ' This firm, victorious, scoffing vituperation strikes them 
 with chill and hesitation. His talks often remind you of 
 what was said of Johnson : ' If his pistol missed fire, he would 
 knock you down with the butt-end.' " Emerson. 
 
 " Never was there a more striking example of that ingenium 
 fervidum long ago said to be a characteristic of his country- 
 men. His is one of the natures, rare for these latter centuries, 
 capable of rising to a white heat; but once fairly kindled, he 
 is like a three-decker on fire, and his shotted guns go off, as 
 the glow reaches them, alike dangerous to friend and foe." 
 Lowell. 
 
 " There is, then, a true and most pregnant, nay, a humane 
 meaning in the constant flayings and extirpations to which the 
 merely logical man is subjected by Mr. Carlyle. But his 
 treatment is so hard that any bowels of compassion not un- 
 naturally and dangerously indurated must yearn toward the 
 sufferer thus dissected alive. While the operator, moreover, 
 grins during the process with a disdainful glee harder to be 
 borne than much anatomy." -John Sterling. 
 
 " Nothing restrains him ; not even the so-called proprieties 
 of history. He may, after his boisterous fashion, pour scorn 
 upon you for looking grave as you read in his vivid pages of 
 the reckless manner in which too many of his heroes drove 
 coaches-and-six through the Ten Commandments. As likely
 
 CARLYLE 539 
 
 as not he will call you a blockhead and tell you to close your 
 wide mouth and cease shrieking." Augustine Birrell. 
 
 "It is to Goethe, too much revered by Mr. Carlyle, that 
 we owe this tinge of irony which in this book [' The French 
 Revolution '] often supervenes . . . . those traits of 
 mockery . . . . above all, that disposition to crush 
 man by contrasting him with the Infinite." Mazzini. 
 
 " But it [the humor in ' The French Revolution '] is dif- 
 ficult to describe in fact, it is indescribable to anyone who 
 has not become acquainted with it in the book itself. To 
 some it may seem altogether offensive to associate any kind 
 of mirth with such a subject ; but I confess that the mood of 
 scornful pity, of half-sneering sympathy, of admiration dashed 
 with derision and gravity varied with peals of laughter in 
 which the fearful tale is told, has sometimes struck me as scarce- 
 ly human." Peter Bayne. 
 
 " The deep scorn which he poured upon the whole machin- 
 ery of modern politics, the loathing with which he looked 
 upon the great national Palaver, the contempt which he felt 
 for the modern conception of liberty as a barricade against 
 most needful and necessary government all prevented him 
 from offering any but the wildest and most impracticable sug- 
 gestions to practical statesmen." R. H. Hutton. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " Strip your Louis Quatorze of his king-gear, and there is left 
 nothing but a poor forked radish with a head fantastically 
 carved." Heroes and Hero Worship. 
 
 " And now observe to what bewildering obscurations and im- 
 pediments all this as yet stands entangled, and is yet intelligible 
 to no man. How, with our gross Atheism, we hear it not to be 
 the voice of God to us, but regard it merely as a voice of earthly 
 Profit-and-Loss. And have a Hell in England the Hell of 
 making money. And coldly see the all-conquering Sons of Toil 
 sit enchanted by the million, in their Poor-Law Bastile, as if this 
 were nature's law ; mumbling to ourselves some vague jangle-
 
 540 CARLYLE 
 
 ment of Laissez-faire, Supply-and-Demand, Cash-payment the 
 one nexus of man to man ; Free-trade, Competition, and Devil 
 take the hind-most, our latest Gospel yet preached ! " Past and 
 Present. 
 
 " Nay, our very Biographies, how stiff-starched, foisonless, hol- 
 low ! They stand there respectable ; and what more ? Dumb 
 idols ; with a skin of delusively painted wax-work ; inwardly 
 empty, or full of rags and bran. In our England especially, 
 which in these days is become the chosen land of respectability, 
 Life-writing has dwindled to the sorrowfullest condition ; it re- 
 quires a man to be some disrespectable, ridiculous Boswell,etc." 
 The Diamond Necklace. 
 
 " They [the Americans] have begotten, with a rapidity beyond 
 recorded example, Eighteen Millions of the greatest bores ever 
 seen in this world." Past and Present. 
 
 4. Contemptuous Familiarity Nicknames. 
 
 " Carlyle had a narrow escape from being the most formi- 
 dable blackguard the world has ever seen ; was, indeed, in 
 certain moods, a kind of divine blackguard a purged and 
 pious Rabelais, who could bespatter the devil with more tell- 
 ing epithets than any other man who ever lived. What a 
 tongue ! What a vocabulary ! He fairly oxidizes, bums up 
 the object of his opprobrium in the stream of caustic epithets 
 he turns upon it." -John Burrmighs. 
 
 "But he is wilfully and pertinaciously unjust ; even scur- 
 rilous, impolite, ungentlemanly ; calls us 'imbeciles,' 'dilet- 
 tantes,' ' Philistines,' implying sometimes what would not 
 sound well expressed." H. D. Thoreau. 
 
 " I am quite sure that your fine taste will be repelled by the 
 horrible coarseness of some of his nicknames in the Cromwell 
 book." Mary Russell Mitford. 
 
 " He rejoices in odd phrases, in recurring epithets, in nick- 
 names, in catchwords." Edmond Scherer. 
 
 "As for King Thomas, the last of the monological succes- 
 sion, he made such a piece of work with his prophecies and
 
 CARLYLE 541 
 
 sarcasms about our little trouble with some of the Southern 
 States that we came rather to pity him for his whim and 
 crochets than to get angry with him for calling us bores and 
 other unamiable names." O. W. Holmes. 
 
 " He writes biography like a showman. He stands in front 
 of his heroes, as it were, with a long stick, pointing out their 
 peculiarities with a grin and describing them in the well- 
 known language of the van. His mere diction outweighs in 
 impertinence whatever it may win in power." T. E. Kebbel. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " One word, in spite of our haste, must be granted to poor 
 Bozzy. He passes for a mean, inflated, gluttonous creature ; and 
 was so in many senses. Yet the fact of his reverence for Johnson 
 will ever remain noteworthy." Heroes and Hero Worship. 
 
 " O Heavyside ! my solid friend, this is the sorrow of sorrows : 
 what on earth can become of us till this accursed enchantment, 
 the general summary and consecration of delusions, be cast forth 
 from the heart and life of one and all ? " The Present Time. 
 
 " Rowland of Roncesvalles, too, we see well in thinking of it, 
 found rainy weather as well as sunny ; knew what it was to have 
 hose need darning ; got tough beef to chew, or even went dinner- 
 less ; was saddle-sick, calumniated ; . . . and oftenest felt, 
 I doubt not, that this was a very Devil's world, and he, Rowland 
 himself, one of the sorriest caitiffs there." The Diamond Neck- 
 lace. 
 
 " Plutus, the blustering giant, collapses at Virgil's rebuke ; it is 
 as the sails sink, the mast being suddenly broken, or that poor 
 Sordello, with the cotto aspetto face baked parched brown and 
 lean." Heroes and Hero Worship. 
 
 5. Minute Characterization Individualization. 
 
 " He sees history, as it were, by flashes of lightning. A single 
 scene, whether a landscape or an interior, a single figure in a 
 wild mob of men, whatever may be snatched by the eye in that 
 instant of intense illumination, is minutely photographed upon 
 the memory. Every tree and stone, almost every blade of
 
 542 CARLYLE 
 
 grass, every article of furniture in a room, the attitude or ex- 
 pression, nay, the very buttons and shoe-strings of a principal 
 figure, the gestures of momentary passion in a wild throng 
 everything leaps into vision under that glare with a painful 
 distinctness that leaves the retina quivering. The intervals 
 are absolute darkness. Mr. Carlyle makes us acquainted with 
 the isolated spot where we happen to be when the flash comes, 
 as if by actual eyesight, but there is no possibility of a com- 
 prehensive view. No other writer compares with him for 
 vividness. He is himself a witness, and makes us witnesses 
 of whatever he describes." Lowell. 
 
 " Thomas Carlyle had a wonderful power of sketching, in a 
 few words, physical and mental portraits of the men he met. 
 . . . Every peculiarity of face, feature, shape of the head, 
 color of the hair, movement of the body, or any other merely 
 physical characteristic, was made significant of mental or 
 moral qualities in the person delineated." E. P. }Vhipple. 
 
 " Carlyle created nothing ; but with a real subject before 
 him he was the greatest of historical painters. He took all the 
 pains first to obtain an authentic account of the facts. Then, 
 with a few sharp lines, he could describe face, figure, charac- 
 ter, action, with a complete insight never rivalled except by 
 Tacitus and with a certain sympathy, a perennial flashing of 
 humour, of which Tacitus has none. He produces a gallery 
 of human portraits each so distinctly drawn that, whenever 
 studied, it could never be forgotten." -J. A. Froude. 
 
 " But when he got hold of ' a man ' in history, it seems to 
 me that it was absolutely impossible for him to miss hitting 
 off that man to the life. And he could in the same way seize 
 a period, a movement, a set of incidents, with a grasp of which 
 I am sure it is enough and I do not think it is too much to 
 say that the result was Gibbon's without his obstinate super- 
 ficiality and Thucydides's without his disappointing asceticism 
 in rhetoric and eloquence." Saintsbury. 
 
 "I think you see as pictures every street, church, parlia-
 
 CARLYLE 543 
 
 ment house, barrack, baker's shop, mutton-stall, forge, wharf, 
 and ship, and whatever stands, creeps, rolls, or swims there- 
 about, and.make all your own. Hence your encyclopediacal 
 allusions to all knowables and the virtues and vices of your 
 panoramic pages. Well, it is your own, and it is English ; 
 and every word stands for somewhat ; and it cheers and forti- 
 fies me." Emerson to Carlyle. 
 
 "No one at all acquainted with his writings can fail to 
 remember his almost excessive love of detail; his lively taste 
 for facts simply as facts. Imaginary sorrows may extort from 
 him nothing but grunts and snorts ; but let him only worry 
 out for himself, from that great dust-heap called 'history,' 
 some undoubted fact of human and tender interest, and, how- 
 ever small it may be, relating possibly to someone hardly 
 known, and playing but a small part in the events he is re- 
 cording, and he will wax amazingly sentimental and perhaps 
 shed as many real tears as Sterne or Dickens do sham ones 
 over their figments. This realism of Carlyle's gives a great 
 charm to his histories and biographies. The amount he tells 
 you is something astonishing no platitudes, no rigmarole, 
 no common form (articles which are the staple of most biog- 
 raphies), but, instead of them, all the facts and features of the 
 case pedigree, birth, father and mother, brothers and sisters, 
 education, physiognomy, personal habits, dress, mode of 
 speech ; nothing escapes him." Augustine Birrell. 
 
 " In the chapter [in ' The French Revolution '] in which 
 the States-general defile before the eyes of the reader, the per- 
 sonal appearance and the most prominent characteristics of 
 the leading men are presented with a graphic force with which 
 there is nothing in Gibbon, in Clarendon, or in Macaulay 
 that can be compared." Peter Bayne. 
 
 " In Carlyle's power of description lies one of his most in- 
 disputable claims to high literary rank. . . . As a rule, 
 he is satisfied with a few suggestive strokes; but occasionally 
 he fills in a picture. When he does so, he gives the general
 
 544 CARLYLE 
 
 view first, and then tells of particular after particular, delib- 
 erately, and with some similitude or collateral circumstance to 
 fix each particular distinctly in the mind." Minto. 
 
 " Everything of a nature to strike vividly on the senses has 
 been seized by him, and he has handed down the image to 
 his readers." Mazzini. 
 
 " He is a masterly clerk, scribe, reporter, writer. He can 
 reduce to writing most things gestures, winks, nods, signifi- 
 cant looks, patois, brogue, accent, pantomime; and how much, 
 passed for silence before, does he represent by written words." 
 H. D. Thorcau. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " Sitting in his stall ; working on tanned hides, amid pincers, 
 paste, horns, rosin, swine-bristles, and a nameless flood of rub- 
 bish, this youth [George Fox] had nevertheless a Living Spirit be- 
 longing to him ; also an antique Inspired Volume, through which, 
 as through a window, it could look upwards and discern its celes- 
 tial Home. The task of a daily pair of shoes, coupled even with 
 some prospect of victuals and an honorable Mastership in Cord- 
 wainery, and perhaps the post of Thirdborough in his hundred, 
 as the crown of long, faithful sewing was no-wise satisfaction 
 enough to such a mind." Sartor Resartus. 
 
 " The very boys deftly wrench the matches out of fallen bombs : 
 a man clutches a rolling ball with his hat, which takes fire ; 
 when cool, they crown it with a ' bonnet rouge? Memorable, also, 
 be that nimble Barber, who, when the bomb burst beside him, 
 snatched up a shred of it, introduced soap and lather into it, cry- 
 ing : ' Voila monplath barbe ! My new shaving dish ! ' and shaved 
 ' fourteen people' on the spot." The French Revolution. 
 
 " And so now bursts forth that effulgence of Parisian enthusi- 
 asm, good-heartedness, and brotherly love ; such, if Chroniclers 
 are trustworthy, as was not witnessed since the Age of Gold. 
 Paris, male and female, precipitates itself towards its South- 
 west extremity, spade on shoulder. Streams of men, without 
 order, or in order, as ranked fellow-craftsmen, as natural or 
 accidental reunions, march towards the Field of Mars. Three- 
 deep these march ; to the sound of stringed music ; preceded by
 
 CARLYLE 545 
 
 young girls with green boughs and tri-color streamers ; they have 
 shouldered, soldier-wise, their shovels and picks, and with one 
 throat are singing faird. Yes, ' pardieu, fa ira,' cry the passen- 
 gers on the streets. All corporate Guilds and public and private 
 Bodies of Citizens, from the highest to the lowest, march ; the 
 very Hawkers, one finds, have ceased bawling for one day. The 
 neighboring Villages turn out ; their able men come marching, 
 to village fiddle or tambourine and triangle, under their Mayor 
 or Mayor and Curate, who also walk bespaded and in tricolor 
 sash." The French Revolution. 
 
 6. Extravagant Humor Absurd Incongruity. 
 
 " In Carlyle's wit and humour there are many peculiar charac- 
 teristics. His wit is a heavy, thumping kind, like the batter- 
 ing ram of old, hammering away with ' thunderlike percussion ' 
 at some old abuse or timeworn institution. He reminds us of 
 the heathen tradition of one of the gods, who is described as 
 'all hands, all eyes, all feet,' to speak out, overtake, and 
 punish falsehood and wrongs. His humour is often of such a 
 kind as makes us laugh through tears, and laughs itself in its 
 most savage words. It has in it a wild, grim fancy, with 
 something of the fierce, grotesque, and fiery earnestness of 
 Hogarth, with the free, daring caricature of Cruikshank. A 
 rough, rugged, vehement spirit is in him, as well as a hearty 
 humour, which ever and anon breaks out, sporting with the 
 foibles, fancies, and manners of the age." 6 1 . Davey. 
 
 " Humorous eccentricity and exaggeration is enjoyed, and 
 the happy turns of phrase are caught up and remembered; the 
 vivid pictures of actual events enrich the gallery of memory. ' ' 
 Saintsbury. 
 
 " Nowhere, surely, in the whole field of English literature, 
 Shakespeare excepted, do you come upon a more abundant 
 vein of humour than Carlyle's, though I admit that the quality 
 of the ore is not of the finest. His every production is bathed 
 in humour. This must never be, though it often has been, 
 forgotten. He is not to be taken literally. He is always a 
 35
 
 CARLYLE 
 
 humorist, not unfrequently a writer of burlesque, and occa- 
 sionally a buffoon. . . . Although the spectacle of Mr. 
 Swinburne taking Carlyle to task, as he recently did, for in- 
 delicacy, has an oddity all its own, so far as I am concerned 
 I cannot but concur with this critic in thinking that Carlyle 
 has laid himself open, particularly in his 'Frederick, the 
 Great,' to the charge one usually associates with the great and 
 terrible name of Dean Swift ; but it js the Dean with a differ- 
 ence, and the difference is all in Carlyle' s favor. The former 
 deliberately pelts you with dirt, as did in the olden days gen- 
 tlemen electors their Parliamentary candidates ; the latter only 
 occasionally splashes you, as does a public vehicle pursuing on 
 a wet day its uproarious course." Augustine Burn/I. 
 
 " There is nothing deeper in his constitution than his 
 humor than the condescending good -nature with which he 
 looks at every object in existence as a man might look at a 
 mouse." Emerson. 
 
 " In Mr. Carlyle's writings humor of every sort abounds; 
 he is a great idealist and a great humorist ; the spectacle of 
 startling contradictions, the grotesque exaggerations, are pre- 
 sented side by side in too grim a form for laughter, and yet 
 there is a dreadful Rabelaisian merriment." E. P. Hood. 
 
 " In the works in which he appeared as a humorist and a 
 satirist as distinguished from his loftiest moods, in which he 
 appeared as a thinker and a seer his wit and humor rushed 
 by instinct into forms truly Rabelaisian. In particular, he 
 cannot help letting his mind run riot in picturing individuals." 
 E. P. Whipple. 
 
 " We should omit a main attraction in these books if we 
 said nothing of their humor. . . . The very punctuation, 
 the italics, the quotation marks, the blank spaces and dashes, 
 and the capitals, each and all are pressed into its service." 
 H. D. Thoreau.
 
 CARLYLE 547 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 ' ' For what end were their tithes levied and eaten ; for what 
 were their shovel-hats scooped out and their surplices and cas- 
 sock-aprons girt-on ; and such a church-repairing and chaffering 
 and organing and other racketing held over that spot of God's 
 Earth if Man were but a Patent Digester and the Belly with its 
 adjuncts the grand Reality ? " Sartor Resartus. 
 
 " The old Pope of Rome, finding it laborious to kneel so long 
 while they cart him through the streets to bless the people on 
 Corpus-Christi Day, complains of rheumatism: whereupon his 
 Cardinals consult ; construct him, after some study, a stuffed 
 cloaked figure, of iron and wood, with wool or baked hair ; and 
 place it in a kneeling posture. Stuffed figure, or rump of a 
 figure ; to this stuffed rump he, sitting at his ease on a lower 
 level, joins, by the aid of cloaks and drapery, his living head and 
 outspread hands ; the rump with its cloaks kneels, the Pope looks, 
 and holds his hands spread ; and so the two in concert bless the 
 Roman population on Corpus-Christi Day, as well as they can." 
 Past and Present. 
 
 " Nay, if you grant, what seems to me admissible, that the 
 Dandy has a Thinking-principle in him, and some notions of 
 Time and Space, is there not in this Life-devotedness to Cloth, 
 in this so willing sacrifice of the Immortal to the Perishable, 
 something (though in reverse order) of that blending and iden- 
 tification of Eternity with Time, which, as we have seen, con- 
 stitutes the Prophetic character ? " Sartor Resartus. 
 
 7. Rugged Sincerity Earnestness. " His soul is 
 
 full of earnestness, and nearly every line of his writings bears 
 the strong impress of his spirit and the stamp of ' I believe ' 
 upon it. A reverence and faith in that which is true, a deep 
 hatred of that which is false, a belief in the eternal and immu- 
 table laws of God in the world, in the sovereign right of 
 duty, in the dignity and solemnity of human life these are 
 the articles of his faith, which he ever proclaims with new and 
 impressive earnestness. . . . [He speaks] in words which,
 
 548 CARLYLE 
 
 like Luther's, are 'half- battles,' that fly off sometimes with fiery 
 sentences, like sparks from his fierce, glowing soul, as he 
 utters his indignant protest against human wrong and misery, 
 against cant and falsehood and the vices and crimes which 
 dishonor human nature, or again utters his prophetic warnings 
 and denunciations after the manner of the old Hebrew seers. ' ' 
 S. Davey. 
 
 1 ' He was a preacher of righteousness to his generation and 
 a rebuker of its shams and irreverences, and as such he cut 
 deep, cut to the bone and to the marrow of the bone. That 
 piercing, agonized, prophetic, yet withal melodious and win- 
 some voice, how it rises through and above the multitudinous 
 hum and clatter of contemporary voices in England, and alone 
 falls upon the ear as from out the primal depths of moral con- 
 viction and power ! Carlyle always takes us to the 
 source of intense personal and original conviction. The 
 spring may be a hot spring, or a sulphur spring, or a spouting 
 spring a geyser, as Froude says, shooting up volumes of 
 steam and stone, or the most refreshing and delicious of foun- 
 tains (and he sterns to have been these things alternately); 
 but in any case it was an original source and came from out 
 the depths at times from out the Plutonic depths. 
 His stress and heat of conviction was such as only the great 
 world reformers have been possessed of." -John Burroughs. 
 
 " Above all, I would note the sincerity of the writer. What 
 he writes he not only thinks but feels. He may deceive him- 
 self he cannot deceive us ; for what he says, even when it is 
 not the truth, is yet true ; his individuality, his errors, his in- 
 complete views of things realities the truth, limited, I might 
 say, for error springing from sincerity in a high intellect is 
 no other than such. . . . He writes a book as he would 
 do a good action. Yet more, not only does he feel all he 
 writes, but he writes nearly all he feels." -J. Mazzini. 
 
 " He was, indeed, himself a literary Cromwell, waging 
 sternest war with all the force of an earnest soul against mod-
 
 CARLYLE 549 
 
 ern humbug, untruth, and noisy pretension. No wonder that 
 this soldier of the pen, among the stanchest of our century, 
 looking back across two hundred years of history, should have 
 recognized natural royalty in the crazy brow, solid frame, 
 and iron soul of a Huntingdon farmer, who could lead armies to 
 a certain triumph and dissolve a senate with the stamping of 
 his foot. An electric sympathy linked the two ; true man- 
 hood sharpened Cromwell's sword and true manhood guided 
 Carlyle's pen." IV. F. Collier. 
 
 " His guiding genius is his moral sense, his perception of 
 the sole importance of truth and justice. . . . It is not so 
 much that Carlyle cares for this or that dogma as that he likes 
 genuineness (the source of all strength) in his companions. 
 Combined with this warfare on respectability, and 
 indeed pointing all his satire, is the severity of his moral senti- 
 ment. In proportion to the peals of laughter amid which he 
 strips the plumes of a pretender and shows the lean hypocrisy 
 to every advantage of ridicule, does he worship whatever en- 
 thusiasm, fortitude, love, or other sign of a good nature is in a 
 man . ' ' Emerson. 
 
 " Further, it must be said that, true as is his devotion to 
 the truth, so flaming and cordial is his hatred of the false, in 
 whatever shapes and names delusions may show themselves. 
 Affectations, quackeries, tricks, frauds, swindlings, commer- 
 cial or literary, baseless speculations, loud, ear-catching rhet- 
 oric, melodramatic sentiment, moral drawlings and hyper- 
 boles, religious cant, clever political shifts, and conscious or 
 half-conscious fallacies, all in his view come under the same 
 hangman's rubric proceed from the same offal heart." 
 -John Sterling. 
 
 " Carlyle preaches the dignity of labor, the necessity of 
 righteousness, the love of veracity, the hatred of shams Mat- 
 thew Arnold. What he despised, and would teach others to 
 despise, was earth's treasures, pleasures, fashions, forms, man- 
 ners, shams, cant, and all oppression and wrong. What
 
 550 CARLYLE 
 
 he loved was God above all and his fellow-man, pity for dis- 
 tress, industry in work, sacrifice of self, honesty of purpose, 
 truth in word and. deed, purity of heart, good works any- 
 where and everywhere." A. S. Arnold. 
 
 " As a negative teacher he has few equals. ' Don't funk ;' 
 'don't cant;' 'don't gush]' 'don't whine; ' ' don't chatter' 
 these and some others like them were his commandments, 
 and I do not know where to look for a better set of this 
 ki nd . " George Saints bury. 
 
 " He is singularly serious and untrivial. We are every- 
 where impressed by the rugged, unwearied, and rich sincerity 
 of the man. ... He has the earnestness of a prophet. 
 In an age of pedantry and dilettanteism, he has no grain of 
 these in his composition." H. D.Thoreau. 
 
 " He possessed, besides, another quality, the rarest of all 
 and the most precious, an inflexible love of truth. It was 
 first a moral principle with him, but he had also an intellectual 
 curiosity to know everything exactly as it was." Froude. 
 
 "He was [in his student days] without influence, friends, 
 or any desire to make them a rugged, somewhat repellant, 
 defiant young man, fearing as the very devil himself any at- 
 tempt at patronage. ... In his uncompromising indi- 
 viduality, conciliating nobody, he became the acknowledged 
 head and most prominent figure in English literature. He 
 considered the prejudices of no one, and freely gave forth his 
 own with all the force of his great character and impassioned 
 utterance. . , . That the world was a place for a man to 
 make his way in, to make his fortune, to attain comfort and 
 reputation by steady climbing, catching at every twig to help 
 himself up, was the famous gospel of respectability which Car- 
 lyle felt himself bound to trample under foot. ... In 
 all his scorn of the things that be, in all his wild expositions 
 of ' that stuff that dreams are made of,' and in all his indig- 
 nant denunciations of sham and false appearances, he held fast 
 to the great central idea of God and Providence a being be-
 
 CARLYLE 551 
 
 fore whom every man should answer for his deeds. . . 
 Sometimes, when excited by the sight of what he considered 
 sham religion, he was wildly and contemptuously profane ; 
 often when moved by real piety and devotion, tenderly rev- 
 erent and respectful. ... He proved to many the pos- 
 session of a heart full of kindness and generosity." Mrs. 
 Oliphant. 
 
 ' ' He hates falsehood and laziness and puffery ; and he has 
 little or no respect for merely rich and titled people. . 
 He does not utter hymns in favor of prosperity ; his advocacy 
 is reserved for the humble, the slighted, and the deceived, for 
 the poor who have no friends." T. E. Kebbel. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " Nature's laws, I must repeat, are eternal : her still small 
 voice, speaking from the inmost heart of us, shall not, under ter- 
 rible penalties, be disregarded. No one man can depart from 
 the truth without damage to himself ; no one million of men ; no 
 twenty-seven millions of men. Show me a nation fallen every- 
 where into this course, so that each expects it, permits it to others 
 and himself, I will show you a nation travelling with one assent 
 on the broad way." Past and Present. 
 
 " Wholly a blessed time : when jargon might abate, and here 
 and there some genuine speech begin. When to the noble 
 opened heart, as to such heart they alone do, all noble things be- 
 gan to grow visible ; and the difference between just and unjust, 
 between true and false, between work and sham work, between 
 speech and jargon, was once more what to our happier fathers it 
 used to be, infinite as between a heavenly thing and an infernal: 
 the one a thing which you were not to do, which you were wise 
 not to attempt doing ; which it were better for you to have a mill- 
 stone tied around your neck and be cast into the sea than con- 
 cern yourself with doing ! Brothers, it will not be a Morrison's 
 pill or remedial measure that will bring all this about for us ! " 
 Past and Present. 
 
 " Thou there, the thing for thee to do is, if possible, to cease 
 to be a hollow sounding shell of hearsays, egoisms, purblind dil-
 
 552 CARLYLE 
 
 ettanteism : and become, were it on the infinite small scale, a 
 faithful discerning soul. Thou shalt descend into thy inner man 
 and see if there be any traces of a soul there ; till then there can 
 be nothing done ! O brother, we must if possible resuscitate 
 some soul and conscience in us ; exchange our dilettanteism for 
 sincerities, our dead hearts of stone for living hearts of flesh." 
 Past and Present. 
 
 8. Chaotic Sentence Structure. " He set at naught 
 what are usually called the models of English composition 
 he laid under contribution the most diverse and outlandish 
 sources of speech, borrowing now something from his native 
 Annandale idiom and vocabulary, largely from German sources 
 (Jean Paul Richter is especially named), importing not only 
 words and phrases, but whole turns of language hitherto 
 unheard in English." Principal Shairp. 
 
 " He often flings together a bundle of words which, upon 
 cool analysis, we find a mass of disjointed notes drives at full 
 swing through all school notions of logical and grammatical 
 arrangement, scattering right and left into ignominious exile 
 nominatives and verbs, articles and pronouns. " W. F. Collier. 
 
 " His phraseology is broken and hammered out; it has 
 been said to resemble repousse metal- work. He makes it, of 
 set purpose, unmusical, unbalanced, with sharp turns, with 
 weak endings and mere lapses." Edmond Scherer. 
 
 "His books are not easy reading; they are a kind of 
 wrestling to most persons. His style is like a road made of 
 rocks ; when it is good, there is nothing like it ; and when it 
 is bad, there is nothing like it." John Burroughs. 
 
 " He leaps in unimpeded jerks from one end of the field of 
 ideas to the other ; he confounds all styles, jumbles all forms, 
 heaps together Pagan allusions, Bible reminiscences, German 
 abstractions, technical terms, poetry, slang, mathematics, 
 physiology, archaic words, neologisms. There is nothing he 
 does not tread down and ravage. The symmetrical construe-
 
 CARLYLE 553 
 
 tions of human art and thought, dispersed and unset, are piled 
 under his hands into a vast mass of shapeless ruins, from the 
 tops of which he gesticulates and fights like a conquering 
 savage. ' ' Taine. 
 
 . " What had been a slight fault in the earlier books, caught 
 from half imitation of Jean Paul and other German writers by 
 a secluded man of genius who wished to speak out his own 
 depths in his own way, became in his later books a vice of 
 style. ' ' Henry Morley. 
 
 11 The style which troubled others, and troubled himself 
 when he thought about it, was perhaps the best possible to 
 convey thoughts which were often like the spurting of vol- 
 canic fire; but it was inharmonious, rough-hewn, and savage." 
 J, A. Fronde. 
 
 ' ' And so thoroughly had he studied the works of Germans 
 ' he wrestled,' says one, 'so long with Jean Paul to master 
 his spirit that, like Jacob of old, his thigh has been put out, 
 and he has halted in his English ever since.' " George Daw- 
 son. 
 
 " But has literature any parallel to the oddity of the vehi- 
 cle chosen to convey this treasure ? I delight in the contents; 
 the form, which my defective apprehension for a joke makes 
 me not appreciate, I leave to your merry discretion. And 
 yet did ever wise and philanthropic author use as defying a 
 diction ? As if society were not sufficiently shy of truth with- 
 out providing beforehand with an objection to the form." 
 Emerson. 
 
 " Mr. Carlyle's resolution to convey his meaning at all haz- 
 ards makes him sieze the most effectual and sudden words, in 
 spite of usage and fashionable taste ; and therefore, when he 
 can get a brighter tint, a more expressive form, by means of 
 some strange we must call it Carlylism ; English, Scotch, 
 German, Greek, Latin, French, technical slang, American or 
 lunar, or altogether superlunar, transcendental, and drawn 
 from the eternal Nowhere, he uses it with a courage which
 
 554 CARLYLE 
 
 might blast an academy of lexicographers into a Hades void 
 even of vocables." -John Sterling. 
 
 " With a coriceptive imagination vigorous beyond any in 
 his generation, with a mastery of language equalled only by 
 the greatest poets, he wants altogether that plastic imagination, 
 the shaping faculty which would have made him a poet in the 
 highest sense. He is a preacher and a prophet anything 
 you will but an artist he is not and never can be. It is 
 always the knots and gnarls of the oaks that he admires, never 
 the perfect and balanced tree." Lowell. 
 
 "Before his style had acquired those thunderous qualities, 
 the vast-flowing Solway flood of the style by which 
 he was distinguished in after life. . . . His strange tu- 
 multuous volcanic style with its extraordinary stamp of a 
 burning earnestness and meaning, which were incomprehen- 
 sible to the multitude, and stupefy instead of exciting them. 
 The rhapsody and whirlwind of ' Sartor Resartus ' 
 was incomprehensible." Mrs. Oliphant. 
 
 ' ' The vague popular notion that this style consists merely 
 of Germanizing, and especially of Richterizing, of English 
 may be dismissed at once. For, in the first place, the first 
 evil characteristic of a purely German style, as it appears to 
 the impartial considerer of German literature in the original, 
 from Wai pain von Eschenbach to Heine, is absent. That 
 characteristic is clumsiness, consequent upon length. The 
 style of Carlyle is never clumsy and it is rarely long. 
 Pepys, Voltaire, Richter suggest themselves turn by turn, as 
 the antitypes of the singular hybrid language in which he got 
 his thoughts dressed and ready for the inspection of man- 
 kind. ' ' Saintsbury. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " For neither would Teufelsdrockh's mad daydream, here as 
 we presume covertly intended, of levelling society (levelling it 
 indeed with a vengeance, into one huge drowned marsh ! ) and
 
 CARLYLE 555 
 
 so attaining the political effects of nudity without its figorific or 
 other consequences be thereby realized." Sartor Resartus. 
 
 " In vain did the winds howl forests sounding and creaking, 
 deep calling unto deep and the storms heap themselves togeth- 
 er into one huge Arctic whirlpool : thou flewest through the mid- 
 dle thereof, striking fire from the highway ; wild music hummed 
 in thy ears, thou too wert as a ' sailor in the air ; ' the wreck of 
 matter and the crash of worlds was thy element and propitiously 
 wafting tide." Sartor Resartus. 
 
 " In which circumstances, it occurred to the mind of Ana- 
 charsis Clootz that while so much was embodying itself into Club 
 or Committee and perorating applauded, there yet remained a 
 greater and greatest ; of which, if it also took body and pero- 
 rated, what might not the effect be : Humankind namely, le 
 Genre Humain itself ! In what rapt creative moment the 
 thought rose in Anacharsis's soul ; all his throes, while he went 
 about giving shape and birth to it ; how he was sneered at by 
 cold worldlings, but did sneer again, being a man of polished 
 sarcasm ; and moved to and fro persuasive in coffee-house and 
 soiree, and dived down assiduous-obscure in the great deep of 
 Paris, making his thought a fact : of all this the spiritual biog- 
 raphies of that period say nothing." The French Revolution. 
 
 9. Lamentation Gloominess Despair. " With 
 so keen a sense of the ludicrous contrast between what men 
 might be, nay, wish to be, and what they are, and with a 
 vehement nature that demands the instant realization of his 
 vision of a world altogether heroic, it is no wonder that Mr. 
 Carlyle, always hoping for a thing and always disappointed, 
 should become bitter. Perhaps if he expected less he would 
 find more. Saul seeking his father's asses found himself 
 turned suddenly into a king ; but Mr. Carlyle, on the look- 
 out for a king, always seems to find the other sort of animal. 
 He sees nothing on any side of him but a procession of the 
 Lord of Misrule; in gloomier moments, a Dance of Death, 
 where everything is either a parody of what is noble or an 
 aimless jig that stumbles finally into the annihilation of the
 
 556 CARLYLE 
 
 grave, and so passes from one nothing to another. 
 No doubt Adam depreciated the apple that the little Cain on 
 his knee was crunching by comparison with those he himself 
 had tasted in Eden. ... By degrees the humorous ele- 
 ment in his nature gains ground, till it overmasters all the 
 rest. Becoming always more boisterous and obtrusive, it 
 ends at last, as such humor must, in cynicism. In ' Sartor 
 Resartus ' it is still kindly, still infused with sentiment ; and 
 the book, with its mixture of indignation and farce, strikes 
 one as might the prophecies of Jeremiah, if the marginal 
 comments of the Reverend Mr. Sterne in his wildest mood 
 had by some accident been incorporated with the text. 
 Unhappily the bit of mother from Mr. Swift's vinegar barrel 
 has had strength enough to sour all the rest." Lowell. 
 
 " The idea with which Mr. Carlyle's earthly habitation im- 
 presses him is a very melancholy one everywhere dust, rags, 
 shabbiness, mildew, and cobwebs inhabited by monstrous 
 spiders. The most cheerful nature once fully possessed with 
 this imagination and habituated to look on this scene of moral 
 desolation, must inevitably catch a sympathetically mournful 
 if not dreary hue ; the brightest lake overhung by such a sky 
 must be dark and dismal. Hence the picture conveyed to 
 the reader, with more or less of a kind of a forcible vagueness 
 in all his works, is that of This Planet in Tatters and Mr. 
 Carlyle weeping over it. Such a doctrine, ' Woe to thee, O 
 Planet ! ' can, if conveyed in a prophetic tone, appear only 
 as a Jeremiad." W. E. Henley. 
 
 "An awful shadow accompanies the brilliant sky of your 
 genius. That dark humor of yours, that woful demon from 
 whose companionship, by the law of your existence, you 
 cannot be free, tolls funeral-bells and chants the dirges of 
 death in your ears forever. What your faith does not 
 take with warmth to your bosom, it must spurn violently 
 away ; where you cannot hope strongly, you must vehemently 
 despair ; what your genius does not illumine to your heart
 
 CARLYLE 557 
 
 ft must bury as in shadows of eternal night. " - Masson to 
 Carlyle. 
 
 "He bewails his gloom and loneliness and the isolation of 
 his soul in the paths in which he was called to walk. 
 Carlyle does not communicate the gloom he feels ; ' tis the 
 most tonic despair to be found in literature. There is a kind 
 of felicity in it. For one thing, it sprang from no personal 
 disappointment or selfishness. It always has the heroic 
 tinge. . . . Carlyle was a man of sorrow, and sorrow 
 springs from sympathy and love. A sorrowing man is a living 
 man. His is the Old World sorrow, the inheritance of ages, 
 the grief of justice and retribution over the accumulated 
 wrongs and sufferings of centuries. ... It was his own 
 glory that he never flinched ; that his despair only nerved him 
 to work the harder ; the thicker the gloom, the more his light 
 shone." -John Burroughs. 
 
 " All his qualities have a certain virulence, coupled though 
 it be, in his case, with the utmost impatience of Christendom 
 and Jewdom and all existing presentiments of the good old 
 story. He talks like a very unhappy man, profoundly soli- 
 tary, displeased, and hindered by all men and things about 
 him, biding his time, meditating how to undermine and 
 explode the whole world of nonsense that torments." 
 Emerson. 
 
 " Carlyle belonged to a family group who were 'always 
 dubious of other people, never certain of the good meaning of 
 those outside of their circle, though very confident of their 
 own.' . . . His struggles with his health, with his temper, 
 with the exclusive and high-strung nature which was the great 
 drawback of his genius, were sometimes tragical, often whim- 
 sical, sometimes laughable. . . . His mission was to 
 show to the world the cloud- wrappings, the strange delusive 
 vapors, the deep abysses of mystery in which our little tangi- 
 ble life floats, surrounded on every side by bewildering dark- 
 ness and wonders which no man can clear up. To those who
 
 558 CARLYLE 
 
 saw in it a clear, comfortable solid universe enough, the best 
 of all possible worlds, in which man's chief end was to attain 
 comfort and respectability, he was a great destructive, pull- 
 ing down every foundation and leaving the unhappy soul 
 weltering in the mists and marshes of the unknowable." 
 Mrs. Oliphant. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " Then, in that strange Dream, how we clutch at shadows as 
 if they were substances ; and sleep deepest while fancying our- 
 selves most awake ! Which of your Philosophical Systems is 
 other than a dream-theorem ; a net quotient, confidently given 
 out, where divisor and dividend are both unknown ? What are 
 all your national Wars, with their Moscow Retreats and sangui- 
 nary hate-filled Revolutions but the Somnambulism of uneasy 
 Sleepers ? This dreaming, this Somnambulism, is what we on 
 Earth call Life ; wherein the most indeed undoubtingly wander, 
 as if they knew right hand from left ; yet they only are wise who 
 know that they know nothing." Sartor Resartus. 
 
 " In our and old Johnson's dialect, man has lost the soul out of 
 him ; and now, after the due period, begins to find the want of 
 it ! This is verily the plague-spot ; centre of the universal S^- 
 cial Gangrene threatening all modern things with frightful death. 
 To him that will consider it, here is the stem, with its roots and 
 taproot, with its world-wide upas-boughs and accursed poison- 
 exudations, under which the world lies writhing in atrophy and 
 agony. You touch the focal-centre of all our disease, of our 
 frightful nosology of diseases, when you lay your hand on this. 
 There is no religion ; there is no God ; man has lost his soul, and 
 vainly seeks antiseptic salt. Vainly : in killing Kings, in passing 
 Reform Bills, in French Revolutions, Manchester Insurrections, 
 is found no remedy. The foul elephantine leprosy, alleviated 
 for an hour, reappears in new force and desperateness next 
 hour." Past and Present. 
 
 " To me this all-deafening blast of Puffery, of poor Falsehood 
 grown necessitous, of poor Heart-Atheism fallen now into En- 
 chanted Workhouses, sounds too surely like a Doom's-blast ! I 
 have to say to myself in old dialect : ' God's blessing is not writ-
 
 CARLYLE 559 
 
 ten on all this ; His curse is written on all this ! ' Unless per- 
 haps the Universe be a chimera ; some old totally deranged 
 eight-day clock, dead as brass ; which the Maker, if there ever 
 was any Maker, has long ceased to meddle with." Past and 
 Present. 
 
 10. Exaltation of the Individual Hero Wor- 
 ship. " Mr. Carlyle comprehends only the individual: the 
 true sense of the unity of the human race escapes him. He 
 sympathizes with all men, but it is with the separate life of 
 each and not with their collective life. . . . He seeks 
 among his equals in intelligence, not the Englishman, the 
 Italian, the German, but the man ; he adores, not the god of 
 one sect, of one period, or of one people, but God." 
 J. Mazzini. 
 
 " Great is his reverence for realities for all such traits as 
 spring from the intrinsic nature of the actor. He humors this 
 into an idolatry of strength. A strong nature has a charm 
 for him previous, it would seem, to all inquiry whether the 
 force be divine or diabolic." Emerson. 
 
 " And more especially, though not exclusively, does he 
 revere and study those living nearest to our own time and cir- 
 cumstances, in whom he may find monumental examples of 
 the mode in which our difficulties are to be conquered. These 
 men he rejoices in and eminently succeeds in delineating, in 
 enabling us to see what is essential and physiognomical in 
 each, and how the facts of nature and society favored and 
 opposed the formation of his life into a large completeness. 
 The hindrances such a man had to overcome, the energies by 
 which he vanquished them, and the work, whatever it might 
 have been, which he thus accomplished for mankind, appear 
 in these pictures with lucid clearness marked with a force 
 and decision of hand and style worthy of the greatest mas- 
 ters." John Sterling. 
 
 " Carlyle was, as everyone knows, a hero worshipper. . . . 
 He is never himself until he has discovered or invented a hero;
 
 560 CARLYLE 
 
 and when he has got him, he tosses him and dandles him as a 
 mother her babe." Augustine Birrell. 
 
 " Mr. Carlyle .has invented the Hero-cure, and all who 
 recommend any other method, or see any hope of healing else- 
 where, are either quacks and charlatans or their victims. . . . 
 At first he made out very well with remarkable men ; then, 
 lessening the water and increasing the spirit, he took to He- 
 roes ; and now he must have downright inhumanity, or the 
 draught has no savor ; so he gets (5n at last to kings, types of 
 remorseless Force, who maintain the political views of Ber- 
 sekers by the legal principles of Lynch." Lowell. 
 
 "All dreams of democracy, republicanism, or equality, 
 which will teach men that there is to come the day when there 
 will be no heroes or no governors, Thomas Carlyle has essayed 
 to disprove. . . . With respect to these heroes and the 
 worship Carlyle says ought to be paid to them, they seem to 
 serve like the rounds of Jacob's ladder, to lead men gradually 
 up from the earth to the great Lord of the earth. In such sense 
 they had their uses ; and there is small fear that men, in giv- 
 ing worship to the heroes of the world, will neglect to give 
 due reverence to the Maker of heroes. . . . One of his 
 greatest, and, as I think, his sublimest attempts, is to revive 
 each man's faith in himself and in his individuality. . . . 
 This is a diseased want of manhood, of self-reliance and self- 
 trust ; and to overthrow this Carlyle has done much. He has 
 pointed to single men, to what they have done single-handed, 
 and has shown that the whole world lies before the single 
 man, and has tried to get you to look inward into the soul. ' ' 
 George Dawson. 
 
 " It seems to me to have become an imperative requisition 
 of your mind that nine-tenths of mankind should be fools. 
 They must be so ; else you have no place for them in your 
 system, and know not what to do with them. As fools, you 
 have full arrangements made for their accommodation. Some 
 hero, some born ruler of men is to come forth (out of your
 
 CARLYLE 56 r 
 
 books) and reduce them to obedience and lord it over them 
 in a most useful manner. But if they will not be fools, if 
 they contumaciously refuse to be fools, they disturb the nec- 
 essary relation of kingship, and, of course, deserve much 
 reputation." Masson to Carlyle. 
 
 " How he loves all the battling, struggling, heroic souls ! 
 Whenever he comes upon one such in his histories, no matter 
 how obscure, he turns aside to lay a wreath upon his tomb. 
 . . . Carlyle wants an actual flesh-and-blood hero, and 
 what is more, wants him immersed head and ears in the actual 
 affairs of this world." -John Burroughs. 
 
 "Devotion to the heroic does not prevent the assumption of 
 a tone toward the great mass of the unheroic which implies that 
 they are no more than two-legged mill horses, ever treading a 
 fixed and unalterable round." Henry Morley. 
 
 " Carlyle's worship of strength and force, his love for the 
 bold, the daring, for uncompromising action and the tenacity 
 that never loses hold of its object." Mrs. Oliphant. 
 
 "Loving the glory and knowing the utility of the snows 
 and hurricanes of winter, he looks with contempt on the noise- 
 less operations of nature which succeed ; on the loosening of 
 the moist, rich soil and the unseen but universal quickening 
 of vegetation. . . . We feel annoyed that Carlyle should 
 have lent even the semblance of his support to that silly small 
 fry who fancy they are forcible when they affect to worship 
 force. . . . All the king's [Frederick's] weaknesses, vices, 
 and brutalities are gulped down alike. Nothing comes amiss 
 to him. And whether it is the murder of a gigantic carpen- 
 ter, the bullying of a diminutive professor, or personal vio- 
 lence to his own son or daughter, it is all the same. They 
 are all smoothed down somehow by Carlyle's peculiar phrase- 
 ology and somehow masticated into virtues. . . . He 
 has a giant's strength ; it is only to be regretted that he too 
 frequently uses it with the wild energy of a giant." T. . 
 Kebbd. 
 
 36
 
 562 CARLYLE 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " What had this man [Cromwell] gained ; what had he gained ? 
 He had a life of sore strife and toil, to his last day. Fame, am- 
 bition, place in history ? His dead body was hung in chains ; 
 his ' place in history ' place in history, forsooth! has been a 
 place of ignominy, accusation, blackness and disgrace ; and 
 here, this day, who knows if it is not rash in me to be among the 
 first that ever ventured to pronounce him not a knave and liar 
 but a genuinely honest man ! Peace to him. Did he not, in 
 spite of all, accomplish much for us ? We walk smoothly over 
 his great rough heroic life ; step over his body sunk in the ditch 
 there. We need not spurn it as we step on it ! Let the hero 
 rest. It was not to men's judgment that he appealed : nor have 
 men judged him very well." Lectures on Heroes. 
 
 " What this Odin saw into and taught with his runes and his 
 rhymes, the whole Teutonic people laid to heart and carried for- 
 ward. His way of thought became their way of thought such, 
 under new conditions, is the history of every great thinker still. 
 In gigantic confused lineaments, like some enormous camera- 
 obscura shadow thrown upward from the dead deeps of the past 
 and covering the whole northern heaven, is not that Scandinavian 
 mythology in some sort of portraiture of this man Odin ? The 
 gigantic image of his natural face, legible or not legible there, 
 expanded and confused in that manner ! Ah, thought, I say, is 
 always thought. No great man lives in vain. The history of the 
 world is but the biography of great men." Heroes and Hero 
 Worship. 
 
 ' ' There was an eye to see in this man [Napoleon] , a soul to 
 dare and do. He rose naturally to be the king. All men saw 
 that he was such. The common soldiers used to say on the march : 
 ' These babbling avocats up at Paris ; all talk and no work ! 
 What wonder it runs all wrong ? We shall have to go and put our 
 petit caporal there.' They went, and put him there ; they and 
 France at large. Chief-consulship, emperorship, victory over Eu- 
 rope ; till the poor lieutenant of La Fere, not unnaturally, might 
 seem to himself the greatest of all men that had been in the world 
 for some ages." Heroes and Hero Worship.
 
 CARLYLE 563 
 
 II. Skill in Portraiture Vividness Dramatic 
 Power. "Such living conceptions of character we find 
 nowhere else in prose. The figures of most historians seem 
 like dolls stuffed with bran, whose whole substance runs out 
 through any hole that criticism may tear in them ; but Car- 
 lyle's are so real in comparison that if you prick them they 
 bleed. ' ' Lowell. 
 
 " And this was Carlyle's special gift to bring dead things 
 and dead people actually to life ; to make the past once more 
 the present and to show us men and women playing their 
 parts on the mortal stage as real flesh-and-blood human creat- 
 ures, with every feature which he ascribes to them authen- 
 ticated ; not the most trifling incident invented, and yet 
 as a result figures as completely alive as Shakespeare's own. 
 Very few writers have possessed this double gift of accuracy and 
 representative power. I could mention only two, Thucydides 
 and Tacitus ; and Carlyle's power as an artist is greater than 
 either of theirs. Lockhart said when he read ' Past and Pres- 
 ent,' that, except Scott, in this particular function no one 
 equalled Carlyle. .1 would go farther, and say no writer in any 
 age equalled him. Dramatists, novelists, have drawn character 
 with similar vividness, but it is the inimitable distinction of 
 Carlyle to have painted actual persons with as much life in 
 them as novelists have given to their own inventions, to which 
 they might ascribe what traits they pleased." J. A. Froude. 
 
 " Gifted with that objectivity of which Goethe has in re- 
 cent times given us the highest model, he so identifies him- 
 self with the things, events, or men which he exhibits that in 
 his portraits and his descriptions he attains a rare lucidness of 
 outline, force of coloring, and graphic precision ; they are 
 not imitations but reproductions. And yet he never loses in 
 the detail the 'characteristic,' the unity of the object, being, 
 or idea which he wishes to exhibit." Mazzini. 
 
 " What he generally attempts, and achieves with supreme 
 success, is imaginatively to realize the events and characters
 
 564 CARLYLE 
 
 with which he has to deal and to present them to us in such 
 startling life-like colors that we almost seem to see the place 
 and know in person the men of the story. Nor does he 
 achieve this result by any of the deceptive scene-painting 
 tricks of ordinary picturesque writing but by a kind of dra- 
 matic reproduction, based on the most careful and accurate 
 study of facts, which lets us see the inmost spirit of the dram- 
 atis persona through, and along with, the outward fashion 
 of their lives." E. Caird. 
 
 "This book on hero worship, in common with Carlyle's 
 historic works, has the singular beauty of making all these 
 heroes live and move before us. We are not presented with 
 a set of fleshless abstractions, but have the very men living 
 again before our eyes. All this is done by the ability to 
 supply the whole man from a knowledge of some of his 
 deeds, thoughts, and words. . . . He does not strive to 
 give us a finished picture, losing its power by its very finish, 
 leaving nothing for the imagination to do because so elabo- 
 rated ; but, like the sketch of a great master, teaching as much 
 by what it leaves out as by what it supplies for it is a prin- 
 ciple true here, that where imagination has naught to do 
 mental impression will be comparatively weakened." George 
 Dawson. 
 
 " His Rembrandt-like imagination lighted up special points 
 and scenes in the world's history with marvellous force." 
 R. H. Hutton. 
 
 " Carlyle's ' French Revolution ' is no mere record but a 
 great drama passing before our eyes. We are made spectators 
 rather than readers of the terrible developments, one after an- 
 other, of each successive act. He made all France shimmer 
 and burn before our eyes." Mrs. Oliphant.
 
 CARLYLE 565 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " Sleek Pache, the Swiss Schoolmaster, he that sat frugal in his 
 Alley, the wonder of neighbors, has got lately whither thinks 
 the reader ? To be Minister of War ! Madame Roland, struck 
 with his sleek ways, recommended him to her husband as Clerk ; 
 the sleek Clerk had no need of salary, being of true Patriotic 
 temper. He would come with a bit of bread in his pocket, to 
 save dinner and time ; and, munching incidentally, do three 
 men's work in a day ; punctual, silent, frugal the sleek Tartuffe 
 that he was." The French Revolution. 
 
 " And Dumouriez is swept back on this wing and swept back 
 on that, and is like to be swept back utterly ; when he rushes up 
 in person, the prompt Polymetis ; speaks a prompt word or two ; 
 and then, with clear tenor-pipe, ' uplifts the Hymn of the Marseil- 
 lese, entonna la Marseillaise? ten thousand tenor or bass pipes 
 joining ; or say some forty thousand in all ; for every heart leaps 
 at the sound : and so, with rhythmic march-melody, waxing ever 
 quicker, to double and to treble quick, they rally, they advance, 
 they rush, death- defy ing, man-devouring ; carry batteries, re- 
 doubts, whatsoever is to be carried ; and, like the fire whirlwind, 
 sweep all manner of Austrians from the scene of action. Thus, 
 through the hands of Dumouriez, may Rouget de Lille, in figura- 
 tive speech, be said to have gained, miraculously, like another 
 Orpheus, by his Marseillese fiddle - strings (fidibus canoris], a 
 Victory of Jemappes and conquered the Low Countries." The 
 French Revolution. 
 
 " Moses withdrew ; but Nature and her vigorous veracities did 
 not withdraw. The men of the Dead Sea, when we next went to 
 visit them, were all ' changed into Apes ' ; sitting on the trees 
 there, grinning now in the most unaffected manner ; gibbering 
 and chattering very genuine nonsense ; finding the whole Universe 
 now a most indisputable Humbug ! The Universe has become 
 a Humbug to these Apes who thought it one. There they sit 
 and chatter, to this hour ; only, I believe, every Sabbath there re- 
 turns to them a bewildered half-consciousness, half-reminiscence ; 
 and they sit, with their wizzened, smoke-dried visages and such 
 an air of supreme tragicality as Apes may ; looking out through 
 those blinking smoke-bleared eyes of theirs into the wonderful-
 
 566 CARLYLE 
 
 est universal smoky Twilight and undecipherable disordered Dusk 
 of Things." Past and Present. 
 
 12. Fondness for Apostrophe, Exclamation, and 
 Interrogation. " Much of his peculiar manner is made 
 up of the special figures of Interrogation, Exclamation, and 
 Apostrophe. . . . Interrogation is a large element in his 
 mannerism. It is not merely an occasional means of special 
 emphasis; it is a habitual mode of transition, used by Carlyle 
 almost universally for the vivid introduction of new agents 
 and new events. . . . Exclamation occurs in every 
 mood. Sometimes in wonder and elation ; sometimes in de- 
 rision and contempt ; sometimes in pity ; sometimes in fun ; 
 sometimes in real admiration and affection. . . . The 
 apostrophizing habit is perhaps the greatest notability of his 
 mannerism. His make of mind compels him to adopt this 
 art of style, apart from his consciousness of the power it gives 
 him as a literary artist. It provides one outlet among others 
 for his deep-seated dramatic tendency. Farther, it suits his 
 active turn of mind and favorite mode of the enjoyment of 
 power ; it gives scope for his daring familiarity with person- 
 ages, whether for admiration or for humour, and meets with 
 no check from any regard for offended conventionalities." 
 Minto. 
 
 " Add to this exclamations, interrogations, apostrophes to 
 the characters, to the reader, to hearer, to earth, to things in 
 general. It is impossible to conceive an idea of the way in 
 which our author abuses the words God, Infinity, Eternity, 
 Profundity. It is true that he freshens them up by putting 
 them in the plural, and saying ' the Immensities,' ' the Si- 
 lences," ' the Eternal Veracities.' " Edmond Scherer. 
 
 "We urge that he is inflicting a permanent injury upon 
 
 English literature by adhering to his present [1864] style. 
 
 . In the young writers of the day the debasing effect 
 
 of this example is constantly perceptible. . . . Perhaps
 
 CARLYLE 567 
 
 the commonest of all the faults that we are called upon to 
 criticise is the use of those authorial ' asides ' and apostro- 
 phes which deform the pages of almost every other biographi- 
 cal or historical work that issues from the press." T. . 
 Kebbel. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " Foolish world, what went ye out to see ? A tankard scoured 
 bright: and do there not lie, of the self same pewter, whole 
 barrowfuls of tankards, though by worse fortune all still in the 
 dim State ? " Essay on Scott. 
 
 " Courage, reader ! Never can the historical inquirer want 
 pabulum, better or worse ; are there not forty-eight longitudinal 
 feet' of small-printed history in thy daily newspapers ? " Essay 
 on History. 
 
 " But the unhappy Dragoman has already been chastised, per- 
 haps too sharply. If, warring with the reefs and breakers and 
 cross -eddies of Life, he still hover on this side the shadow of 
 night, and any word of ours might reach him, we would rather 
 say: Courage, brother! grow honest, and times will mend." 
 Essay on Goethe. 
 
 " Weep ye by the stream of Babel, decent clean English-Irish ; 
 weep, for there is cause, till you can do something better than 
 weep ; but expect no Babylonian or any other mortal to concern 
 himself with that affair of yours ! And, on the whole, I would 
 recommend you rather to give up ' weeping ' take to working 
 out your meaning rather than weeping it." Irish Journey. 
 
 " O brother ! is that what thou callest prosaic ; of small inter- 
 est ? Awake, poor troubled sleeper : shake off thy torpid night- 
 mare dream ; look, see, behold it." The Diamond Necklace. 
 
 " Away, you! begone swiftly, ye regiments of the line ! in the 
 name of God and of his poor struggling servants, sore put to it 
 to live these bad days, I mean to rid myself of you with some de- 
 gree of brevity." The French Revolution. 
 
 13. Rare but Effective Pathos." Carlyle's writings 
 are not without gleams of pathos all the more touching from 
 the surrounding ruggedness." Minto. 
 
 " Carlyle, rugged and gnarled though he was, none the less
 
 568 CARLYLE 
 
 was a great artist, not of the mellifluous, but of the strong and 
 vehement order, delighting in the Titanic, yet intermingling 
 it, ever and anon, with soft bursts of pathos ; as you see some 
 rough granite mountain with here and there well-springs of 
 clearest water and streaks of greenest verdure." Principal 
 Shairp. 
 
 "Mingled, too, with this unseemly fury, and denouncing 
 through all their unmeasured and lacerating language, there 
 is discernible in both men [Kingsley and Carlyle] a rich vein 
 of beautiful and pathetic tenderness. This is most marked 
 in Mr. Carlyle, as might be expected from his far deeper 
 nature." W. R. Greg. 
 
 " Anon, he has broken away from your side, and is croon- 
 ing up into the azure depths a lament that would wring tears 
 from the very stones, if they would only try to understand 
 it."S. Davey. 
 
 " From the sublime to the ignoble, from the pathetic to the 
 grotesque, is but a step with Mr. Carlyle." Taine. 
 
 Procter calls him "a great master of pathos." 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " One is sorry for Cromwell in his old days. His complaint is 
 incessant of the heavy burden Providence has laid on him ; heavy, 
 which he must bear till death. Old Colonel Hutchinson, as his 
 wife relates it, Hutchinson, his old battle-mate, coming to see 
 him on some indispensable business, much against his will 
 Cromwell ' follows him to the door' in a most fraternal, domestic, 
 conciliatory style ; begs that he would be reconciled to him, his 
 old brother-in-arms ; says how much it grieves him to be mis- 
 understood, deserted by true fellow-soldiers, dear to him from 
 of old ; the rigid Hutchinson, cased in his Republican formula, 
 sullenly goes away. And the man's head now white ; his strong 
 arm growing weary with his long work ! I think always too of 
 his poor Mother, now very old, living in that palace of his ; a 
 right brave woman ; as indeed they lived all an honest God- 
 fearing household there : if she heard a shot go off she thought it
 
 CARLYLE 569 
 
 was her own son killed. He had to come to her at least once a 
 day, that she might see with her own eyes that he was yet living. 
 Heroes and Hero Worship. 
 
 " Edward Irving's warfare has closed ; if not in victory, yet in 
 invincibility and faithful endurance to the end. . . . The 
 terge heart, with its large bounty, where wretchedness found 
 solacement and they that were wandering in darkness the light 
 as of a home, has paused. The strong man can no more : beaten 
 on from without, undermined from within, he must sink over- 
 wearied, as at nightfall, when it was yet but the mid-season of 
 day. Irving was forty-two years and some months old ; Scot- 
 land sent him forth a Herculean man ; our mad Babylon wore 
 and wasted him with all her engines ; and it took her twelve 
 years. He sleeps with his fathers in that loved birth-land : 
 Babylon, with its deafening inanity, rages on ; but to him hence- 
 forth innocuous, unheeded forever." On the Death of Edward 
 Irving.
 
 GEORGE ELIOT, 1819-1880 
 
 Biographical Outline. Marian Evans, born November 
 22, 1819, at Asbury Farm, parish of Chilvers Colon, War- 
 wickshire, England ; her father, partly portrayed in " Adam 
 Bede, ' ' was agent for the estates of Francis Newdigate ; the 
 family reside at Griff on the Asbury estate ; in 1824 Marian 
 is sent to a boarding-school at Attleborough, Warwickshire, 
 and four years later to a larger one at Meneaton ; she forms 
 an intimacy here with Miss Lewis, the principal governess ; 
 before her tenth year Marian devours the Waverley novels, the 
 " Essays of Elia," " Pilgrim's Progress," and " Rasselas ; " 
 in 1832 she enters Miss Franklin's school at Coventry, where 
 she manifests rare musical gifts ; leaves school in 1835, loses 
 her mother in 1836, and becomes manager of her father's 
 household ; after leaving school she learns Italian, German, 
 Greek, and Latin from private tutors ; is brought to observe 
 the Methodists through her Aunt Elizabeth, a Methodist 
 preacher, who is partially portrayed as Dinah Morris in 
 " Adam Bede; " publishes a religious poem in the Christian 
 Observer in January, 1840 ; reads voraciously ; removes with 
 her father to Coventry in 1841 ; forms an intimacy with Mr. 
 and Mrs. Charles Bray of Coventry, the latter a prosperous 
 ribbon manufacturer, who was writing books of liberal relig- 
 ious tendency ; their influence and the reading of a book by 
 Charles Hennell (brother of Mrs. Bray) on the origins of 
 Christianity aid in changing Miss Evans's religious views ; she 
 refuses to go to church, and her father demands a separation ; 
 after three weeks' separation she reconsiders, returns to her 
 father, and goes to church ; in 1844 she is induced to take up 
 
 570
 
 GEORGE ELIOT 5/1 
 
 the translation of Strauss' s " Life of Jesus," begun by Dr. 
 Brabant, father of Charles Hennell's wife ; she labors under 
 ill-health and other great discouragements, but completes a 
 conscientious translation, which appears in 1846 ; she devotes 
 the next three years to her invalid father, who dies in 1849, 
 leaving her a small income ; she visits the Continent with the 
 Brays, and in October, 1849, takes rooms in the house of the 
 painter, M. d'Albert, at Geneva ; she returns to England in 
 March, 1850, and takes up her residence with the Brays; in 
 September, 1851, becomes assistant editor of the Westminster 
 fieview and settles in London; gives up editorial work in 
 October, 1853; meantime translates Feuerbach's "Essence 
 of Christianity," which appears in July, 1854; forms an ac- 
 quaintance and a friendship with Herbert Spencer, and 
 through him meets George Henry Lewes, then editor of the 
 Leader ; in July, 1854, she enters with Lewes into domestic 
 relations regarded by herself as a marriage, though not sanc- 
 tioned by law ; social isolation results ; she spends the next six 
 months on the Continent with Lewes; they return to London 
 in March, 1856; being strongly urged to try fiction by 
 Lewes, who was a very devoted companion, she begins 
 "Amos Barton" in September, 1856 ; the first part of "Amos 
 Barton " appears in Blackwood 1 s Magazine in January, 1857, 
 when she first took the pseudonym "George Eliot," under 
 which all her later writings appeared ; she completes "Janet's 
 Repentance " in October, 1857; publishes, early in 1858, the 
 collected " Scenes from Clerical Life," which are warmly 
 praised by Dickens, who divines the author's sex ; she com- 
 pletes " Adam Bede " in November, 1857, and receives from 
 Blackwood ^800 for four years' copyright; in 1859 she 
 settles, with Lewes, at Holly Lodge, Wandsworth ; "Adam 
 Bede ' ' appears during the same year ; sixteen thousand cop- 
 ies are sold within twelve months, and Blackwood volun- 
 teers an additional ^800 ; "The Mill on the Floss" ap- 
 pears in April, 1860, and six thousand copies are sold within
 
 5/2 GEORGE ELIOT 
 
 two months afterward ; she visits Italy in 1860, and while 
 in Florence projects an historical novel of the time of 
 Savonarola; publishes " Silas Marner," which ends her first 
 literary period, in 1861 ; revisits Florence to study for 
 " Romola " in May, 1861 ; in February, 1862, she refuses 
 ^10,000 for the copyright of " Romola," and prefers to 
 publish it serially in the Cornhill Magazine for ,7,000; it 
 so appeared from July, 1862, to August, 1863; in December, 
 1860, she removes, with Lewes, to Blandford Square, Lon- 
 don, and in November, 1863, to 21 North Bank, Regent's 
 Park; she completes "Felix Holt" in May, 1866; early in 
 1867 she visits Spain to gain impressions for her " Spanish 
 Gypsy," a poem already begun, which was published in April, 
 1868; she publishes " Middlemarch " in December, 1872, 
 and twenty thousand copies are sold within the next two years ; 
 she receives ^1,200 for " Middlemarch " from America; 
 in 1874 she publishes a volume of poems, including the 
 ' ' Legend of Jubal ; " " Daniel Deronda ' ' is published serially 
 in 1876, and the sales exceed even those of "Middlemarch; " 
 in 1876 the Leweses buy a house at Withey, near God aim ing; 
 during 1878 George Eliot writes " The Impressions of Theo- 
 phrastus Such;" Lewes dies in November, 1878; George 
 Eliot edits his unfinished writings, and founds in his honor 
 a studentship in physiological investigation worth ^200 a 
 year ; " Theophrastus Such" does not appear till May, 1879; 
 in April, 1880, George Eliot formally marries J. W. Cross, 
 who had been an intimate friend since 1869; they revisit the 
 Continent, and, returning, settle at 4 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, 
 London, where George Eliot dies, December 22, 1880. 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY ON GEORGE ELIOT'S STYLE. 
 
 Cooke, G. W., "A Critical Study." Boston, 1883, Osgood, 104-128. 
 
 Browning, O., "Great Writers " (George Eliot). London, 1890, Scott 
 & Co., 136-180. 
 
 Lord, J., "Beacon Lights of History." New York, 1885, Fords, How- 
 ard & Hurlburt, 5 : 467-512.
 
 GEORGE ELIOT 573 
 
 Hazeltine, M. W., " Chats about Books. " New York, 1883, Scribner, 
 
 I-I3- 
 
 Blind, M., " George Eliot. " Boston, 1883, Roberts, 136-150. 
 McCarthy, J., " Modern Leaders." New York, 1872, Sheldon, 136-144. 
 Robertson, E. S., "English Poetesses." London, 1883, Cassell, 327- 
 
 334- 
 Taylor, B., "Critical Essays," etc. New York, 1880, Putnam, 339- 
 
 347- 
 Oliphant, Mrs., "Victorian Age of English Literature." New York, 
 
 1892, Tail, 2: 460-471. 
 Saintsbury, G., "Corrected Impressions." New York, 1895, Dodd, 
 
 Mead & Co., 162-1/2. 
 Harrison, F., "Early Victorian Literature." London, 1895, Arnold, 
 
 338-347- 
 Scherer, E., " Essays in English Literature." New York, 1891, Scribner, 
 
 1-130 and 251-309. 
 Whipple, E. P., "Recollections," etc. Boston, 1887, Ticknor, 344- 
 
 397- 
 Shepard, W. S. ( "Pen Pictures of Modern Authors. " New York, 1886, 
 
 Putnam, 41-58. 
 Hutton, R. H., " Modern Guides of Religious Thought." New York, 
 
 1891, Macmillan, 151-268. 
 Dowden, E., "Studies in Literature." London, 1878, Kegan Paul, 
 
 Trench & Co., 250-256. 
 Stephen, L., "Hours in a Library." New York, 1894, Putnam, 2: 
 
 207-237. 
 Magnus, Lady K., "Jewish Portraits." Boston, 1889, Cupples & Up- 
 
 ham, 1 : 83-98. 
 Cross, Mrs. M. A. E. C., "Essays," etc. ' New York, 1884, Scribner. 
 
 86 etc. 
 Brown, J. C., "The Ethics of George Eliot's Works." Edinburgh. 
 
 1879, Blackwood. 
 
 Kaufmann, D., " George Eliot and Judaism. " Edinburgh, 1877, Black- 
 wood, 89-96. 
 Cross, J. W., "George Eliot's Life in Her Letters," etc. New York, 
 
 1885, Harper, 4 volumes. 
 Johnston, R. M., "Studies." Indianapolis, 1891, Bowen, Merrill & 
 
 Co., 1-106. 
 Cleveland, R. E., "George Eliot's Poetry," etc. New York, 1885, 
 
 Funk & Wagnalls, 7-25. 
 Harnley, Sir E., "Shakespeare's Funeral," etc. Edinburgh, 1889, 
 
 Blackwood, 215-270.
 
 574 GEORGE ELIOT 
 
 Lancaster, H. H., " Essays and Reviews." Edinburgh, 1876, Edmon- 
 
 ston & Douglass, 1 : 351-361. 
 Seguin, L. E., "Scenes and Characters from the Works of George 
 
 Eliot." London, 1888, A. Strahan, 1-19. 
 Main, A., "Selected Sayings" (from George Eliot). Edinburgh, 1873, 
 
 Blackwood. 
 Anonymous, "Wit and Wisdom of George Eliot." Boston, 1873, 
 
 Roberts Bros. 
 Adams, W. H., "Celebrated Englishwomen." London, 1884, White 
 
 & Co., 222-291. 
 Cone, H. G., and Gilder, J. S., "Pen Portraits." New York, 1887, 
 
 Cassell, 2 : 245-292. 
 Dawson, W. F., "Quest and Vision." London, 1892, Hodder & 
 
 Stoughton, 128-157. 
 Henley, W. E., "Views and Reviews." New York, 1890, Scribner, 
 
 I30-I33- 
 
 James, H., " Partial Portraits. " London, 1888, Macmillan, 37-52 and 
 
 65-93- 
 McCrie, G., " Religion of Our Literature." London, 1875, Hodder & 
 
 Stoughton, 286. 
 Myers, F. W. H., "Essays Modern." London, 1883, Macmillan, 
 
 251-276. 
 Paul, C. K., "Biographical Sketches." London, 1883, Kegan Paul, 
 
 Trench & Co., 141-170. 
 Thome, W. H., " Modern Idols." Philadelphia, 1887, Lippincott, 
 
 136-167. 
 Wilde, Lady J. F. S., "Notes on Men," etc. London, 1891, Ward & 
 
 Damon, 171-179. 
 Nicoll, H. J., "Landmarks of English Literature." New York, 1883, 
 
 Appleton, 396-398. 
 Axon, W. E. A., "Stray Chapters in Literature." Manchester, 1888, 
 
 161-168. 
 Griswold, H. F., "Home Life of British Authors." Chicago, 1887, 
 
 351-362. 
 Harrison, F., "The Choice of Books," etc. London, 1886, Macmillan, 
 
 203-230. 
 Hutton, R. H., " Essays on Theology and Literature." London, 1877, 
 
 Macmillan, 2 : 294-367. 
 Parton, J., " Some Noted Princes," etc. New York, 1886, Crowell, 
 
 62-65. 
 
 Stephen, L., " Dictionary of National Biography." London, 1888, Mac- 
 millan, 13 : 216-222.
 
 GEORGE ELIOT 575 
 
 Welsh, A. H., "Development of English Literature." Chicago, 1882, 
 
 Griggs, 2 : 470-487- 
 Lanier, S., "Development of the English Novel." New York, 1892, 
 
 Scribner, 151 etc. 
 Fortnightly Magazine, 43: 538-553 (O. Browning); 26: 601-616 (S. 
 
 Calvin). 
 ll'estnrinstfr Reviau,6\: 65-81; 160: 73-83; Il6: 154-198; 124: 
 
 160-208 (J. W. Cross); 117: 65-81. 
 Dublin Review, 5 : 371-394. 
 
 International Review, 10 : 447-458 (W. F. Roe). 
 Scribner s Monthly, 8: 685-703 (W. C. Wilkinson). 
 Corn/till Magazine, 43 : 8-23 (L. Stephen). 
 The Nation, 40 : 283-284 and 325 (A. V. Dicey). 
 Atlantic Monthly, 51: 243-246 (M. L. Henry); 38: 684-694 (H. 
 
 James). 
 
 Harper's Magazine, 62: 912-922 (C. K. Paul). 
 Nineteenth Century, 9 : 778-780 (Edith Simcox). 
 The Dial (Ch.), 1 : 181-183 (M. S. Sullivan). 
 St. Paul's Magazine, 12: 592-625 (G. B. Smith). 
 London Quarterly Revie-M, 108: 469-478 (Lady Eastlake). 
 Blacfavood's Magazine, 150: 867-877 (Gaetano Negri). 
 Tins ley's Magazine, 3: 565-578. 
 London Quarterly, 64: 197-210 (J. W. Cross). 
 The Congregationalist, 14: 273-284 (J. W. Cross). 
 North British Rti'iew, 45 : 197-228. 
 Macmillan's Magazine, 14: 273-279(7. Morley). 
 North American Review, 124: 50-57 (E. P. Whipple). 
 International Review, 7: 30-32 (Francis McGuire). 
 Contemporary Revinv, 47: 372-391 (R. H. Hutton). 
 British Quarterly, 45 : 141-178. 
 Quarterly Review, 134: 336-350. 
 
 PARTICULAR CHARACTERISTICS. 
 
 i. Psychological Analysis of Character. " It 
 
 was not with her ethics that George Eliot wrote her novels, it 
 was with her psychology ; and in this lies the secret of her 
 power. . . . Accustomed as she was to read her own 
 heart and gifted with the faculty of observation, which helps 
 one to read the hearts of others, nothing astonished her. 
 . . . George Eliot possesses the clairvoyance which
 
 576 GEORGE ELIOT 
 
 divines the interior play of passion, the experience which 
 knows that the human being is capable of all contradictions, 
 the indulgence which tolerates because it understands, and, 
 lastly, the gift of measure and the taste for truth which prevent 
 an author from rushing into extremes, from idealizing either 
 the beautiful or the ugly, from making figures which are 
 heroes or monsters in black. So, if we add to psycho- 
 logical divination the faculty of creating living characters, we 
 shall have George Eliot's novel." JEJmone/ Scherer. 
 
 " George Eliot's manner is to describe, to minutely por- 
 tray, and to dissect to the last muscle and nerve the person- 
 ages of her great dramas. . . . She seeks to penetrate 
 into the motives of life and to reveal the hidden springs of ac- 
 tion, to show how people affect each other ; how ideas mould 
 the destinies of the individual. . . . She devotes more 
 space to the inner life and character of her personalities than 
 to her narratives and conversations. . . . None of her 
 leading characters are in the end what they were in the begin- 
 ning. . . . Characters play a part in her books . 
 for the sake of manifesting the soul, in order that the unfolding 
 of psychological analysis may go on. She has a purpose larger 
 than that of telling a story or describing the loves of a few 
 men and women. Psychological analysis seems out of place 
 in a novel, but with George Eliot it is a chief purpose of her 
 writing. She lays bare the soul, opens its inmost secrets, and 
 its anatomy is minutely studied. She traces some of her 
 characters through a long process of development, and shows 
 how they are affected by the experiences of life. 
 Novelists usually carry their characters through their pages on 
 the same level of mind and life. George Eliot not only does 
 this with her uncultured characters, but she shows the soul in 
 the process of unfolding or expanding." G. W. Cooke. 
 
 " We meet the complaint that she is too analytic ; that she 
 is the confessor rather than the artist ; and is more anxious to 
 probe the conditions of her heroines' souls, to give an accurate
 
 GEORGE ELIOT 577 
 
 diagnosis of their spiritual complaints and an account of 
 their moral evolution than to show us the character in action. 
 This is in part true. ' ' Leslie Stephen. 
 
 " Her great characteristic is her knowledge of human nat- 
 ure and the grasp of thought with which she seizes and brings 
 before us its most hidden secrets. Scott said of Richardson 
 that ' in his survey of the human heart he left neither head, 
 bay, nor inlet until he had traced its soundings and laid it 
 down in his chart with all its minute sinuosities, its depths, 
 and its shallows. ' More than this may be said with truth of 
 George Eliot. She has sounded with no less accuracy than 
 did Richardson the depths and the shallows of every little bay ; 
 and she has ventured boldly on distant seas of which the 
 storms and the treacherous calms were alike to him unknown. 
 . . Psychological analysis is her strength. She creates 
 character, she devises incident and situation chiefly that she 
 may have her occasion of indulging that almost superhuman 
 faculty which is hers of laying bare to its ultimate microscopic 
 secret the anatomy of the living human consciousness at 
 play." W. C. Wilkinson. 
 
 " She placed herself, by imagination and sympathy, at the 
 inmost core of the natures of her characters, and delineated 
 them from within, not approached them from without. She 
 did not merely look at them, but she looked into them, and 
 also looked through them to the spiritual laws they obeyed or 
 violated. She kept a sort of relentless watch on all the subtle 
 interior movements of their minds and hearts ; and they could 
 not pass into a dreaming sleep without being still subject to 
 this piercing glance into the fantasies and wild incidents of 
 their dreams. " E. P. Whipple. 
 
 " As regards the passion of love, she does not portray it, 
 as in the old-fashioned novels, leading to fortunate marriages 
 with squires and baronets ; but she generally dissects it, un- 
 ravels it, and attempts to penetrate its mysteries a work de- 
 cidedly more psychological than romantic or sentimental and 
 37
 
 578 GEORGE ELIOT 
 
 hence more interesting to scholars and thinkers than to ordi- 
 nary readers, who delight in thrilling adventures and exciting 
 narrations. . . . For minute analysis of character and 
 psychological insight she has never been surpassed." -John 
 Lord. 
 
 " The world was, first and foremost, for George Eliot, the 
 moral, the intellectual world ; the personal spectacle came 
 after ; and, lovingly, humanly as she regarded it, we con- 
 stantly feel that she cares for the things she finds in it only so 
 far as they are types. The philosophic door is always open on 
 her stage, and we are aware that the somewhat cooling draught 
 of ethical purpose draws across it. ... Nothing is finer, 
 in her genius, than the combination of her love of general 
 truth and love of the special case; without this, indeed, we 
 should not have heard of her as a novelist, for the passion of 
 the special case is surely the basis of the story-teller's art." 
 Henry James. 
 
 "There is too much exhaustive analysis of all the petty 
 people of the petty town of Middlemarch." Lady Wilde. 
 
 "This wonderful transcript of humanity [' Adam Bede,'] 
 containing so much that is usually undiscovered in life, the 
 movement of the heart and mind in the workings of motive, 
 . . . abounded in spiritual analysis and philosophy which 
 would have suited neither Scott's mind nor his time, and was 
 more broad than the work of either Dickens or Thackeray." 
 Mrs. Oliphant. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " Under every guilty secret there is hidden a brood of guilty 
 wishes, whose unwholesome, infecting life is cherished by the 
 darkness. The contaminating effect of deeds often lives less in 
 the commission than in the consequent adjustment of our de- 
 sires the enlistment of our self-interest on the side of falsity ; 
 as, on the other hand, the purifying influence of public confession 
 springs from the fact that by it the hope in lies is forever swept
 
 GEORGE ELIOT 579 
 
 away, and the soul recovers the noble attitude of simplicity." 
 Romola. 
 
 " Oh, the delight of taking out that little box and looking at 
 the ear-rings ! Do not reason about it, my philosophical reader, 
 and say that Hetty, being very pretty, must have known that it 
 did not signify whether she had any ornaments or not ; and that, 
 moreover, to look at ear-rings which she could not possibly wear 
 out of her bed-room could hardly be a satisfaction, the essence 
 of vanity being a reference to the impressions produced on others ; 
 you will never understand women's natures if you are so exces- 
 sively rational. Try to divest yourself of all your rational preju- 
 dices as much as if you were studying the psychology of a canary- 
 bird, and only watch the movements of this pretty round creat- 
 ure as she turns her head on one side with an unconscious smile 
 at the ear-rings nestled in the little box. Ah ! you think, it is 
 for the sake of the person who has given them to her, and her 
 thoughts are gone back now to the moment when they were put 
 into her hands. No; else why should she have cared to have 
 ear-rings rather than anything else ? And I know that she had 
 longed for ear-rings from among all the ornaments she could 
 imagine." Adam Bede. 
 
 "Men and women make sad mistakes about their own symp- 
 toms, taking their vague uneasy longings, sometimes for genius, 
 sometimes for religion, and oftener for a mighty love." Middle- 
 march. 
 
 2. Preference for Homely Types. "The sphere 
 which she has made specially her own is that quiet English 
 country life which she knew in early youth. It has been de- 
 scribed with more or less vivacity and sympathy by many ob- 
 servers. Nobody has approached George Eliot in the power 
 of seizing its essential characteristics and exhibiting its real 
 charm. She has done for it what Scott did for the Scotch 
 peasantry, or Fielding for the eighteenth-century Englishman, 
 or Thackeray for the higher social stratum of his time. "- 
 Leslie Stephen. 
 
 "The Midland home, the plain village life, the humble 
 toiling country folk, shaped for her the scenes and characters
 
 580 GEORGE ELIOT 
 
 about which she was to write. She was raised in a country 
 of historic memories, but it was not these, however, which 
 attracted her so much as the pleasant country, the quiet vil- 
 lages. With observant eyes she saw the world about her as it 
 was, and she entered into the heart of its life, and has painted 
 it for us in a most sympathetic, appreciative spirit. The sim- 
 ple, homely, unromantic life of middle England she has made 
 immortal with her wit, her satire, her fine description, and 
 her keen love of all that is human." G. W. Cooke. 
 
 " George Eliot early showed a tendency to choose her 
 heroes and heroines from among common people, living 
 homely lives and contending with the sordid troubles of an 
 insignificant existence. She laid an eloquent stress upon the 
 tragedy and passion which dwell in what we are pleased to 
 call 'common life.' " George Dawson. 
 
 "She fastened upon the English middle classes and the 
 ordinary English poor, and turned social studies of them into 
 novels which it is an education to read." E. S. Robertson. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " And now the half- weaned calves that have been sheltering 
 themselves in a gorse-built hovel against the left-hand wall, 
 come out and set up a silly answer to that terrible bark, doubtless 
 supposing that it has reference to a bucket of milk." Adam 
 Bede. 
 
 " It is for this rare, precious quality of truthfulness that I de- 
 light in many Dutch paintings, which lofty-minded people despise. 
 I find a source of delicious sympathy in these faithful pictures of 
 a monotonous, homely existence, which has been the fate of so 
 many more among my fellow mortals than a life of pomp or of 
 absolute indigence, of tragic suffering or of world-stirring actions. 
 I turn, without shrinking, from cloud-borne angels, from proph- 
 ets, sybils, and heroic warriors, to an old woman bending over 
 her flower-pot or eating her solitary dinner, while the noonday 
 light, softened perhaps by a screen of leaves, falls on her mob- 
 cap and just touches the rim of her spinning-wheel and her stone
 
 GEORGE ELIOT 581 
 
 jug and all those common cheap things which are the precious 
 necessaries of life to her : or I turn to that village wedding, kept 
 between four brown walls, where an awkward bridegroom opens 
 the dance with a high-shouldered, broad-faced bride, while elder- 
 ly and middle-aged friends look on, with very irregular noses and 
 lips, and probably with quart-pots in their hands, but with an ex- 
 pression of unmistakable contentment and good will. ' Foh ! ' 
 says my idealistic friend, ' what vulgar details ! What good is 
 there in taking all these pains to give an exact likeness of old 
 women and clowns? What a losv phase of life ! What clumsy, 
 ugly people ! ' But, bless us, things may be lovable that are not 
 altogether handsome, I hope." Adam Bede. 
 
 " ' Well ! I'll not stick at giving myself trouble to put down such 
 hypocritical cant,' said Mr. Tomlinson, the rich miller. ' I know 
 well enough what your Sunday evening lectures are good for for 
 wenches to meet their sweethearts and brew mischief. There's 
 work enough with the servant-maids as it is such as I never 
 heard the like of in my mother's time, and it's all along o' your 
 schooling and new-fangled plans. Give me a servant as can 
 nayther read or write, I say, and doesn't know the year o' the 
 Lord as she was born in. I should like to know what good those 
 Sunday-schools have done, now. Why, the boys used to go 
 birds'-nesting on a Sunday morning ; and a capital thing too 
 ask any farmer ; and a very pretty thing it was to see the strings 
 o' heggs hanging up in poor people's houses. You'll not see 'em 
 nowhere now." Janet's Repentance. 
 
 3. Broad Sympathy Tolerance. " In largeness of 
 Christian charity, in breadth of human sympathy, in tenderness 
 toward all human frailty that is not vitally base and self-seek- 
 ing, in subtle power of finding ' a soul of goodness ' in things 
 apparently evil, she has not many equals, certainly no supe- 
 rior, in the writers of the day. . . . Self-sacrifice as the 
 divine law of life and its only fulfilment ; self-sacrifice, not 
 in some ideal sphere sought out for ourselves in the vain spirit 
 of self-pleasing, but wherever God has placed us, amid homely, 
 petty anxieties, loves, and sorrows ; the aiming at the highest 
 attainable good in our own place, irrespective of all results of
 
 582 GEORGE ELIOT 
 
 joy or sorrow, of apparent success or failure such is the 
 lesson that begins to be conveyed to us in George Eliot's 
 ' Clerical Scenes.' The lesson comes to us in the quiet, unself- 
 ish love, the sweet hourly self-devotion of the Milly ' of 
 ' Amos Barton,' so touchingly pure and full that it never rec- 
 ognizes itself as self-devotion at all." J. C. Brown. 
 
 " George Eliot has wide-ranging sympathies as well as large 
 discourse of reason ; ... all her faculties and qualities 
 are but the varying expression of one large, noble, and opulent 
 nature." j. P. Whipple. 
 
 " Her sympathy with all classes was wide, and proceeded 
 from the general source of all such sympathy thorough in- 
 sight into their modes of thought and life. . . . Herself 
 an unbeliever, George Eliot could do justice to those of in- 
 tense religious convictions, analyzing and describing them in 
 a way which showed that she thoroughly understood them." 
 H. J. Nicoll. 
 
 " All writers but the greatest a Shakespeare, a Goethe, 
 a Scott, a George Eliot take interest in their own class, 
 their own co-religionists alone. The others of whom they 
 speak come in as supernumeraries on the stage to fill up the 
 background of the picture ; but those who bring them seem 
 not to consider whether they are men and women with human 
 hearts or mere marionettes. But the great writer shows that 
 even that the humblest 'if you prick them will bleed,' and 
 discovers the touch of goodness in the most unpromising 
 characters in poor little Hetty, in sensuous, pleasure-loving 
 Arthur Donnithorne as well as in Dinah and Mr. Irwine. 
 We find in her the most marvellous power of putting 
 herself in the position of the holders of all creeds, so deep 
 was her sympathy with every form in which the religious in- 
 stincts have expressed themselves. The simple faith, half 
 pagan but altogether reverent, of Dolly Winthrop; the sen- 
 sible matter-of-fact and honorable morality of Mr. Irwine ; 
 the aspirations of a modern St. Theresa ; the passionate fer-
 
 GEORGE ELIOT 583 
 
 vor of Dinah, supplying by sympathy all that was lacking in 
 external culture were understood and reverenced by her. 
 The painful bliss of asceticism, the rapture of Cath- 
 olic devotion, the satisfaction that comes of self-abnegation, 
 were realized by her as though she had been a fervid Catholic, 
 although the ground -tone of her thought was essentially and 
 intensely Protestant." C. K. Paul. 
 
 "Among artists who, with Shakespeare, unite breadth of 
 sympathy with power of interpreting the rarer and more in- 
 tense experiences of the souls of men, George Eliot must be 
 placed. . . . Her sympathy spreads with a powerful and 
 even flow in every direction. Hetty, with her little butter- 
 fly soul, pleasure-loving, not passionate, luxurious, vain, hard 
 of heart, is viewed with the sincerest, most intelligent sym- 
 pathy. Tito is condemned, decreed to death, but he is un- 
 derstood far too truly to be an object of hatred. Tessa, the 
 pretty pigeon, Hinda, who has little more soul than a squir- 
 rel, are lovable after their kind ; and up from these characters 
 through the hierarchy of human characters to Romola and 
 Fedalma, to Zarca and Savonarola, there is not one grade too 
 low, not one too high for love to reach." Edward Dowden. 
 
 " She does not aspire to paint irreproachable characters 
 but characters in which good and evil are mixed, for which 
 we feel attachment even while we condemn them." Edmond 
 Scherer. 
 
 "There is a character in 'As You Like It' who is de- 
 scribed as being able to find 
 
 ' tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, 
 Sermons in stones, and good in everything.' 
 
 Such a person we should imagine George Eliot to be ; . . . 
 it is impossible to take up any of her works without being 
 struck, perhaps primarily, with this thought how truly this 
 writer has lived and felt ! The histories she has written are 
 no soulless records ; they breathe with real, warm life ; how
 
 584 GEORGE ELIOT 
 
 could they be otherwise when, if we may be thus expressed, 
 their author is so proficient with the stethoscope of the human 
 heart ? Romola, Tito, Adam Bede, Silas Marner, Maggie 
 Tulliver are not mere names ; they are existences as positive 
 and as palpable as our own. We have had their souls laid 
 bare before us. In very few writers has this marvellous fac- 
 ulty of penetration been so powerful. And it is the product 
 of the intensely sympathetic nature which the author pos- 
 sesses."^. B. Smith. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " It is with men as with trees : if you lop off their finest 
 branches, into which they are pouring their young life juice, the 
 wounds will be healed over with some rough boss, some old excres- 
 cence ; and what might have been a grand tree, expanding into 
 liberal shade, is but a whimsical, misshapen trunk. Many an irri- 
 tating fault, many an unlovely oddity, has come of hard sorrow, 
 which has crushed or maimed the nature just when it was expand- 
 ing into plenteous beauty ; and the trivial erring life which we 
 visit with our harsh blame may be but as the unsteady motion of 
 a man whose best limb is withered." Mr. Gil/it's Love-Story. 
 
 " I rarely see a bent old man or a wizened old woman without 
 seeing the past of which they are the shrunken remnant ; and 
 the unfinished romance of rosy cheeks and bright eyes seems 
 sometimes of feeble interest and significance compared with that 
 drama of hope and love which has reached its catastrophe long 
 ago and left the poor soul, like a dim and dusty stage, with all 
 its sweet garden scenes and fair perspectives overturned and 
 thrust out of sight." Amos Barton. 
 
 " But, my good friend, what will you do with your fellow-par- 
 ishioner who opposes your husband in the vestry ? with your 
 newly-appointed vicar, whose style of preaching you find pain- 
 fully below that of his regretted predecessor ? with the honest 
 servant who worries your soul with her one failing ? with your 
 neighbor, Mrs. Green, who was really kind to you in your last 
 illness, but has said several ill-natured things about you since 
 your convalescence ? nay, with your excellent husband himself, 
 who has other irritating habits besides that of not wiping his
 
 GEORGE ELIOT $85 
 
 shoes ? These fellow-mortals, every one, must be accepted as 
 they are : you can neither straighten their noses nor brighten 
 their wit nor rectify their dispositions ; and it is these people 
 amongst whom your life is passed that it is needful you should 
 tolerate, pity, and love ; it is these more or less ugly, stupid, 
 inconsistent people whose movements of goodness you should be 
 able to admire for whom you should cherish all possible hopes, 
 all possible patience." Adam Bede. 
 
 4. Power of Portraiture Range. " In depicting 
 human life her power of characterization stoops to the humblest 
 and rises to the loftiest types of human character. It ranges 
 from Mrs. Poyser to Dorothea Brooke ; from the frivolous 
 Hetty to the superb Gwendolen ; from the mentally impris- 
 oned rustic worthies who gather at the ale-house in Raveloe 
 to the crowd of emancipated mechanics who fearlessly debate 
 all questions in their London tavern club ; from representa- 
 tives of religious prudence, provident even in their hesitating 
 trust in Providence, all the way up to such embodiments 
 of the fervors and exaltations of religious genius as Dinah in 
 ' Adam Bede ' and the Rev. Mr. Lyon in ' Felix Holt ' and 
 Mordecai in ' Daniel Deronda.'" E. P. \VJiipple. 
 
 " George Eliot succeeded remarkably in some male por- 
 traits, yet her men are often simply women in disguise. The 
 piquancy, for example, of the famous character of Tito is 
 greatly due to the fact that he is the voluptuous but sensitive 
 character, not unfamiliar in the fiction which deals with so- 
 cial intrigues, but generally presented to us in feminine cos- 
 tume. We are told of Daniel Deronda that he combined a 
 feminine affectionateness with masculine inflexibility. To 
 our perceptions, the feminine vein becomes decidedly the 
 most prominent, and this equally true of such characters as 
 Philip Wakem and Mr. Lyon." Leslie Stephen. 
 
 " If she did not absolutely excel all her contemporaries in 
 the revelation of the human mind and the creation of new 
 human beings, at least she was second to none in those dis-
 
 586 GEORGE ELIOT 
 
 tinguishing characteristics of genius. . . . The pictures 
 of the village, etc., in ' Amos Barton ' are as perfect a work 
 of genius as was ever given to the world. . . . The 
 author had conceived that shining figure [the clergyman in 
 ' Janet's Repentance '] coldly as a mere specimen and not 
 with any sympathy in his fate. . . . Nothing can ex- 
 ceed in real power the picture of the attractive villain Tito, 
 so thoroughly base of nature, so tortuous, so lovable and 
 beautiful on the outside, so amiable and so remorseless at once, 
 which is drawn by the author with a concentrated passion as 
 of some actual person whom she hated and pursued through 
 every trick and wile, never leaving till the last pang of dis- 
 honored and miserable death, to which she drives him with a 
 fierce joy in his last agonies." Mrs. Oliphant. 
 
 " George Eliot can make her dullest people interesting and 
 dramatically effective. She can paint two dull people with 
 quite different ways of dulness; . . . and you are aston- 
 ished to find how utterly distinct the two kinds of stupidity 
 are and how intensely amusing both can be made." Justin 
 McCarthy. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " It is of little use for me to tell you that Hetty's cheek was 
 like a rose petal, that dimples played about her pouting lips, that 
 her large dark eyes hid a soft roguishness under their long lashes, 
 and that her curly hair, though all gathered back under her round 
 cap while she was at work, stole back in dark delicate rings on 
 her forehead and about her white, shell-like ears ; it is of little use 
 for me to say how lovely was the contour of her pink and white 
 neckerchief tucked into her low, plum-colored stuff bodice, or 
 how the linen butter-making apron, with its bib, seemed a thing 
 to be imitated in silk by duchesses, since it fell in such charming 
 lines, or how her brown stockings and thick-soled, buckled shoes 
 lost all that clumsiness which they must certainly have had when 
 empty of her foot and ankle ; of little use unless you have seen 
 a woman who affected you as Hetty affected her beholders ; for 
 otherwise, though you might conjure up the image of a lovely
 
 GEORGE ELIOT 587 
 
 woman, she would not in the least resemble that distracting, kit- 
 ten-like maiden." Adam Bede. 
 
 " She was a lovely woman Mrs. Amos Barton ; a large, fair, 
 gentle Madonna, with thick close chestnut curls beside her well- 
 rounded cheeks and with large, tender, short-sighted eyes. The 
 flowing lines of her tall figure made the simplest dress look grace- 
 ful. . . . Among strangers she was shy and tremulous as a 
 girl of fifteen ; she blushed crimson if any one appealed to her 
 opinion ; yet that tall graceful substantial presence was so im- 
 posing in its mildness that men spoke to her with an agreeable 
 sensation of timidity." A mas Barton. 
 
 "She [Mrs. Transome] worked lightly, for her figure was thin 
 and finely formed, though she was between fifty and sixty. She 
 was a tall, proud-looking woman, with abundant gray hair, dark 
 eyes and eyebrows, and a somewhat eagle-like yet not unfeminine 
 face. Her tight-fitting black dress was much worn ; the fine lace 
 of her cuffs and collar and of the small veil which fell backward 
 over her high comb, was visibly mended ; but rare jewels flashed 
 on her hands, which lay on her folded black-clad arms like finely 
 cut onyx cameos." Felix Holt. 
 
 " Cecco was a wild-looking figure ; a very ragged tunic, made 
 shaggy and variegated by cloth-dust and clinging fragments of 
 wool, gave relief to a pair of long arms and a long and sinewy 
 neck ; his square jaw shaded by a bristly black beard, his bridge- 
 less nose and low forehead, made his face look as if it had been 
 crushed down for the purpose of packing, and a narrow piece of 
 red rag tied over his ears seemed to assist in the compression." 
 Romola. 
 
 5. Wide Erudition Occasional Pedantry Sci- 
 entific Imagery. " In sobriety, breadth, and massiveness 
 of understanding, in familiar acquaintance with the latest de- 
 monstrated truths of physical, historical, economic, and meta- 
 physical science, and in the capacity to use these truths as 
 materials for a philosophy of nature and human nature, this 
 woman is the acknowledged peer of such men as John Stuart 
 Mill and Herbert Spencer. . . . This general largeness 
 of mind, this tranquil grasp of the outlying problems of hu-
 
 588 GEORGE ELIOT * 
 
 man life and human destiny, distinguished her from all the 
 other novelists of the age ; for she not only looks at things 
 and into things, but she looks through things to the laws of 
 life they illustrate and by which they are governed." E. P. 
 Whipple. 
 
 "Her books have a strong tendency toward erudition. She 
 amassed knowledge throughout her whole life. She knew 
 all: she read all with a marvellous discrimination. . . . 
 Replete with learning, weighted wjth knowledge in every 
 page, the finish is so rare that the joints between erudition 
 and imagination cannot be discerned." Oscar Browning. 
 
 " Rarely has the novelist come to his task with such far- 
 reaching culture as George Eliot. We have seen her girlhood 
 occupied with an extraordinary variety of studies ; we have 
 seen her plunged in abstruse metaphysical speculations ; we 
 have seen her translating some of the most laborious philo- 
 sophical investigations of German thinkers ; we have seen her 
 again translating from the Latin the ' Ethics ' of Spinoza ; 
 and finally we have seen her attracting and attracted by some 
 of the leaders in science, philosophy, and literature. 
 Occasionally she moves somewhat heavily under the vast 
 weight of erudition. . . . Now and then [her writings] 
 are not without a trace of cumbrousness and pedantry." 
 M. Blind. 
 
 "To carry ethical purpose and erudition into art is indeed 
 a perilous undertaking, wherein but one or two of the greatest 
 have succeeded. . . . That George Eliot's success is far 
 from complete, is far too obvious." Frederick Harrison. 
 
 " Romola is a magnificent piece of ' cram.' The terrible 
 masses of information have put out the fire. If we fail to per- 
 ceive this in the more serious passages, it is painfully evident 
 in those meant to be humourous or playful." Leslie Stephen. 
 
 "The habit of using phrases and illustrations borrowed 
 from science grew on George Eliot, and did not always tend 
 to lucidity : thus, in the first sentence of ' Deronda,' we find
 
 GEORGE ELIOT 589 
 
 a glance mentioned as of a dynamic quality an expression of 
 which we (though not destitute of some tincture of dynamical 
 instruction) have failed to this day to see the applicability." 
 H. E. Henley. 
 
 " She makes frequent use of her large learning and culture 
 in her novels. In the earlier ones a Greek quotation is to be 
 found here and there, while in the later ones German seems to 
 have the preference. ... In the ' Mill on the Floss ' she 
 describes Bob Jakin's thumb as ' a singularly broad specimen 
 of that difference between the man and the monkey. 1 Such 
 references to recent scientific speculations are not infrequent. 
 If they serve to show the tendencies of her mind toward 
 knowledge and large thought, they also indicate a too ready 
 willingness to imbibe, and to use in a popular manner, what 
 is not thoroughly assimilated truth." G. W. Cooke. 
 
 "The scientific phraseology to which he himself [Mr. Lewes] 
 was more or less sincerely devoted invaded his companion's 
 writing with a positive contagion. . . . ' Felix Holt' and 
 ' Middlemarch ' are studies of immense effort and erudition, 
 not unenlightened by humour, but, on the whole, dead." 
 Saints bury. 
 
 " Mrs. Lewes has mastered many sciences as well as litera- 
 tures. Probably no other novel writer since novel writing 
 became a business ever possessed one tithe of her scientific 
 knowledge. . . . She is all genius and culture. Had 
 she never written a page of fiction, nay, had she never written 
 a line of poetry or prose, she must have been regarded with 
 wonder and admiration by all who knew her as a woman of 
 vast and varied knowledge. . . . Mrs. Lewes has made 
 people read novels who perhaps never read fiction from any 
 other pen. . . . She has made the novel the companion 
 and friend and study of scholars and thinkers and statesmen. 
 Her books are discussed by the gravest critics as productions 
 of the highest school of art. . . . Her books compel, 
 they extort the admiration of men who would disparage all
 
 59 GEORGE ELIOT 
 
 novels, if they could, as frivolous and worthless, but who are 
 forced even by their own canons and principles to recognize 
 the clear deep thought, the noble culture, the penetrating 
 analytic power which are evident in almost every chapter. 
 . . . The deep philosophic thought of George Eliot's 
 novels enthuses and illumines them everywhere. . . . You 
 feel that you are under the control of one who is not merely 
 a great story-teller, but who is also a deep thinker." Justin 
 McCarthy. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " In Heine's hands, German prose, usually so heavy, so clumsy, 
 so dull, becomes, like clay in the hands of the chemist, compact, 
 metallic, brilliant ; it is German in an allotropic condition." 
 Essay in the Westminster Review. 
 
 " When the fully developed insect is parasitic, we believe, the 
 larva is usually parasitic also ; and we shall probably not be far 
 wrong in supposing that Young at Oxford, as elsewhere, spent a 
 good deal of time in hanging about possible and actual patrons." 
 IVorldliness and Other- Worldliness. 
 
 11 He [Dr. Doran] has ascertained that the internal emotions 
 of prebendaries have a sacerdotal quality, and that the very 
 chyme and chyle of a rector are conscious of the gown and band. 
 . . . The woman of large capacities can seldom rise beyond 
 the absorption of ideas ; her physical conditions refuse to support 
 the energy required for spontaneous activity ; the voltaic pile is 
 not strong enough to produce crystallization." WorldRness and 
 Other- Worldliness. 
 
 6. Quiet, Contemplative Humor. " She has a rich 
 and racy humor, sensitive and sober, refined and delicate. 
 She does not caricature folly with Dickens, nor laugh at 
 weakness with Thackeray ; but she shows us the limitations 
 of life in such a manner as to produce the finest humor. She 
 is never grotesque or vulgar ; but wise, laughter-loving, and 
 sympathetic. Her humor is pure and homely as it is delicate 
 and exquisite ; and it is invariably human and noble. She 
 has an intense and a wonderful appreciation of the ludicrous,
 
 GEORGE ELIOT 591 
 
 sees whatever is incongruous in life, and makes her laughter 
 genial and joyous. Her humor is the very quintessence of 
 human experience strikes deadly blows at what is unjust and 
 untrue. She laughs at all, but sneers at no one for she has 
 sympathy with all." G. W. Cooke. 
 
 "George Eliot possessed a vein of humour ... in- 
 comparably superior in depth if not in delicacy to that of any 
 other feminine writer. It is the humour of a calm, contem- 
 plative mind, familiar with wide fields of knowledge and 
 capable of observing the little dramas of rustic life from a 
 higher stand-point. . . . She is awake to those quaint 
 aspects of the little world before her which only show their 
 quaintness to the cultivated intellect." Leslie Stephen. 
 
 " Her power of description is far excelled by a more extra- 
 ordinary endowment still viz., her humor. While its qual- 
 ity is scarcely definable, it is all her own, as in the case of 
 every great master. . . . It is like a silver stream mean- 
 dering through the lovely meadows of her thought bright, 
 pleasant, and beautifying. If it is not deep, scathing, or 
 searching, it is very seldom coarse. . . . We laugh 
 without malice at the foibles of her creations and at their per- 
 sonal idiosyncrasies. Mrs. Poyser is, in her way, equal to 
 any humorous conception in the language. She is truer than 
 Mrs. Gamp and quite as original. Her sayings alone suffice 
 to make ' Adam Bede ' one of the most mirth-suggestive books 
 in the language. . . . The mirthfulness does not consist 
 of jokes but rather of the reproduction of the quaintness of 
 human nature, and the appearance is so perfect, so true, that 
 we cannot help but smile. Mellower than that of almost any 
 other author, the humor is also as tender as it is rich." 
 G. B. Smith. 
 
 " The grotesque in human character is reclaimed from the 
 province of the humorous by her affections, when that is pos- 
 sible, and is shown to be a pathetic form of beauty. Her 
 humour usually belongs to her entire conception of character,
 
 592 GEORGE ELIOT 
 
 and cannot be separated from it. . . . Her humorous 
 effects are secured by letting her mind drop sympathetically 
 into a level of lower intelligence, or duller moral perception, 
 and by the conscious presence at the same time of the higher 
 self. The humorous perception exists only in the qualified 
 organs of perception which remain at the higher, the normal 
 point of view. . . . George Eliot's humour allies itself 
 with her intellect on the one hand and with her sympathies 
 and moral perceptions on the other. ' Edward Dowden. 
 
 " Two great faculties [she had] which seem mutually ex- 
 clusive and which in her writings are at once combined and 
 carried to an extraordinary pitch of power the pathos which 
 draws tears from the driest eyes and the most abundant, the 
 most amusing, the most original comedy." Edmond Scherer. 
 
 " George Eliot's inspiration came from the country, where 
 the conventionalities, which are even more rigid than in the 
 most artificial society, are so patent to the seeing eye that the 
 satirist need be no sharper than the humorist and may almost 
 fulfil his office lovingly. . . . Even that gift of humour 
 in which it had been so often confidently asserted that the 
 whole female sex was deficient, was seen to shine out in this 
 individual with the warmest suffusion of light and insight." 
 Mrs. Oliphant. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " I have known Mr. Pilgrim discover the most unexpected virt- 
 ues in a patient seized with a promising illness. A good inflam- 
 mation fired his enthusiasm, and a lingering dropsy dissolved 
 him into charity. Gradually, however, as his patients became 
 convalescent, his view of their character became more dispas- 
 sionate. When they could relish mutton-chops he began to 
 admit that they had foibles, and by the time they had swal- 
 lowed their last dose of tonic, he was alive to their most inexcus- 
 able faults." Janet's Repentance. 
 
 "' Good day, Mrs. Poyser,' said the old Squire, peering out 
 at her with his short-sighted eyes a mode of looking at her
 
 GEORGE ELIOT 593 
 
 which, as Mrs. Poyser observed, 'allays aggravated her; it was 
 as if you was a insect, and he was a goin' to dab his finger-nail 
 on you.' However, she said, 'Your servant, sir,' and curtseyed 
 with an air of perfect deference as she advanced toward him : 
 she was not the woman to misbehave towards her betters and 
 fly in the face of the catechism without severe provocation." 
 Adam Bede. 
 
 " Time out of mind the Raveloe doctor had been a Kimble ; 
 Kimble was inherently a doctor's name; and it was difficult to 
 contemplate firmly the melancholy fact that the actual Kimble 
 had no son, so that his practice might one day be handed over to 
 a successor with the incongruous name of Taylor or Johnson." 
 Silas Marncr. 
 
 7. Pessimism Despair Melancholy. "The cen- 
 tral point of George Eliot's philosophy is that there is a 
 continuity in action which cannot be broken, and that noth- 
 ing but an inflexible regard for duty and a perpetual will- 
 ingness to sacrifice our own happiness to supreme moral 
 purpose or to the happiness of others can save the individual 
 life from shipwreck or mutilation. She never shows us good 
 springing out of evil ; mere optimistic folk may teach that 
 comforting doctrine ; but she walks in the light of common 
 day and in the presence of the unvarnished realities of life, 
 and prefers to enforce the more terrible truth that evil springs 
 out of evil and can produce nothing but evil. There are no 
 arresting angels in the path ; healing and comforting angels 
 there may be, but the bitter consequences of wrong-doing 
 must lie paid to the uttermost farthing notwithstanding." 
 George Dawson. 
 
 " There is wanting in George Eliot's books that freshness 
 of spirit, that faith in the future, and that peaceful poise of 
 soul which is to be found in the writings of Tennyson, Rus- 
 kin, and Browning. Even with all his constitutional cynicism 
 and despair, the teachings of Carlyle are much more hopeful 
 than hers. An air of world-weariness and fatigue is about all 
 38
 
 594 GEORGE ELIOT 
 
 her work, even when it is most stimulating with its altru- 
 ism. Though in theory not a pessimist, yet a sense of pain 
 and sorrow grows out of the touch of each of her books. 
 . . . She was art agnostic ; life had no wide horizon for 
 her. The world was bounded to her vision, rounded into the 
 little capacity possessed by man. Where others would have 
 cast a glow of hope and sunset brilliance, promise of a brighter 
 day yet to dawn over the closing scenes of her novels, she 
 could see nothing beyond but the feeble effect of an earthly 
 transmitted good. . . . George Eliot leaves us with a 
 feeling that we know nothing and can hope for but little." 
 G. W. Cooke. 
 
 "When Tom and Maggie sink in the hurrying Floss there 
 is left an aching sense of abrupt incompleteness, of imperious 
 suspension, of intolerable arrest ; and with this a sense of the 
 utter helplessness of our extremest longings. The musician's 
 hand has broken the movement in the midst, and it can never 
 be taken up again. This is cruel to all our tender desires for 
 joy. But there is something more dreadful. When the 
 heavens break up over the head of Silas Marner, when the 
 lots declare him, the innocent man, guilty in the midst of the 
 Lantern Yard ; when he goes out with despair in his soul, 
 with shaken trust in God and man, to live for weary years a 
 life of unsocial and godless isolation, accumulating his hoard 
 of yellow pieces, the tragedy is deeper. When the beautiful 
 Greek awakes from his swoon beside the Arno to find no soli- 
 tary lair, but the vindictive eyes of Baldassare looking down at 
 him and the eager knuckles at his throat, the real piteousness 
 and terror is not that a young man is about to die, but that now 
 the visible seal of finality is to be set upon that death of the 
 soul which had already taken place." Edward Dowden. 
 
 " If I insist on the kind of pitifulness with which George 
 Eliot considers our earthly state, it is because this disposition 
 is what in reality constitutes the main principle of her art. 
 All great wit draws inspiration from some philosophy or other,
 
 GEORGE ELIOT 595 
 
 and the philosophy of George Eliot is a gently sad one. 
 There reigns in it what Wordsworth, in a beautiful line, calls 
 
 'The still, sad music of humanity,' 
 
 the melancholy note which human destiny gives out. 
 The sadness which creeps over us in view of human imperfec- 
 tions is nothing to that darkness which enters the soul when 
 the peculiar philosophical opinions of this gifted woman are 
 insidiously but powerfully introduced. . . . She was 
 steeped in the doctrines of modern pessimistic agnosticism. 
 . . . Future life is no certainty ; hope in redemption is 
 buried in a sepulchre ; life in most cases is a futile struggle. 
 . . . Thus she discourses like a Pagan. " Edmond Scherer. 
 "Undoubtedly one of the prominent abiding impressions 
 left upon us is her sadness. She is touched with a profound 
 sorrow for the whole human race ; she individualizes human- 
 ity, and declares it to be miserable and unhappy. Her books 
 are almost overweighted with sadness. . . . Do what 
 she will, the burden is ever present to her, and even in the 
 most humorous passages in her novels . . . the wit is 
 now and again tinged with bitterness, and more frequently 
 still with melancholy. . . . And yet this sadness, from 
 whose power over her genius the author is not able to get 
 clear, is very beautiful. It is only the good or the great who 
 know how to be sad. The sadness of a philanthropist or a 
 philosopher is a very deep feeling one of the strongest of all 
 emotions. George Eliot is a mixture of the two. She per- 
 ceives the weight of human misery, and her powerlessness to 
 lift it from the mind affects her greatly. . . . The de- 
 spair surrounding the characters of George Eliot is the result 
 of hopelessness. The miserable whining tone is absent; the 
 tragedy here is not simulated but real. The principal suf- 
 ferers are those who have heroically striven, and who bear 
 about them the evidences of the struggle. . . . It is in-
 
 596 GEORGE ELIOT 
 
 teresting to notice how this sadness of George Eliot . 
 seems to have deepened with the years. Each book, as it 
 was issued, . . . has shown a gradual growth of the 
 feeling till it appears to have culminated in ' Middlemarch.' 
 Now there is no hope. At first, through the sadness there 
 gleamed the bright star of faith. But it would almost seem at 
 length to be quenched in midnight. . . . It is such 
 looking for the light and not apprehending it which has be- 
 gotten in all readers such a sublime pity for her." G. B. 
 Smith. 
 
 11 To me George Eliot's whole career seems to be all of a 
 piece she conceded everything to doubt. She conceded too 
 much to temptation, perhaps rather from a strong sense of the 
 hopelessness of holding high ground than of any inability of 
 holding it after she had taken it. ... She struggled on 
 in gloom, sometimes in despair, to convince mankind that 
 their own clear duty is to be more pitiful to each other's 
 faults. . . . The inexpressible sadness of the works of 
 George Eliot is one characteristic which has deeply impressed 
 us. ... The stern mournfulness of these books gives us 
 the idea of one who does not know or who has forgotten that 
 the stone was rolled from the heart of the world on the morn- 
 ing when Christ came." R. H. Hutton. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 "What a glad world this looks like, as one drives or rides along 
 the valleys or over the hills ! . . . [One] would not know 
 that, hidden behind the apple-blossoms or among the golden corn 
 or under the shrouding boughs of the wood there might be a human 
 heart beating heavily with anguish perhaps a young blooming 
 girl, not knowing where to turn for refuge from swift-advancing 
 shame ; understanding no more of this life of ours than a foolish 
 lost lamb ; wandering farther and farther in the nightfall on the 
 lonely heath, yet tasting the bitterest of life's bitterness. Such 
 things are sometimes hidden among the sunny fields and behind 
 the blossoming orchards ; and the sound of the gurgling brook, if
 
 GEORGE ELIOT 597 
 
 you came close to one spot, behind a small bush, would be mingled 
 with a despairing sob. No wonder man's religion has much sor- 
 row in it; no wonder he needs a suffering God." Adam Bede, 
 
 " There are so many things wrong and difficult in the world 
 that no man can be great he can hardly keep himself from 
 wickedness unless he gives up thi-nking much about pleasures 
 or rewards and gets strength to endure what is hard and painful. 
 If you mean to act nobly and to seek to know the best 
 things God has put within reach of man, you must learn to fix 
 your mind on that end and not on what will happen to you be- 
 cause of it. And remember, if you were to choose something 
 lower and make it the rule of your life to seek your own pleasure 
 and to escape from what is disagreeable, calamity might come 
 just the same ; and it would be calamity falling on a base mind, 
 which is one form of sorrow that has no balm in it and that may 
 well make a man say, ' It would have been better for me if I had 
 never been born.'" Romola. 
 
 " We are impressed with the broad sameness of the human lot, 
 which never alters in the main headings of its history hunger 
 and labor, seed-time and harvest, love and death." Romola. 
 
 8. Deep Religious Feeling Moral Purpose. 
 
 " George Eliot never sinned against the natural piety which 
 should bind our days together. The tender regard which she 
 had for all the surroundings of her youth did not fail toward 
 those whose teaching had once roused her reverence and 
 who could never become the objects of indiscriminate antip- 
 athy. ' ' Leslie Stephen. 
 
 " That the mind of her who penned these novels was pro- 
 foundly religious, no reader can doubt. . . . When we 
 attempt, however, to define the religion in which George 
 Eliot rested our task becomes difficult. We find in her the 
 most marvellous power of putting herself in the position of 
 the holders of all creeds, so wide was her sympathy ; but she 
 seldom revealed her own religious views in her novels." 
 C. K. Paul. 
 
 " She was distinctively a moral teacher in her books. The
 
 598 GEORGE ELIOT 
 
 novel was never to her a work of art alone. She believed that 
 man can find happiness and true culture only in a moral life. 
 . . . She was one of the most ardent preachers of the 
 moral life ; her books are crowded with teaching of the most 
 positive character." G. W. Cooke. 
 
 " At the root of George Eliot's genius lay an extraordinarily 
 deep and ever-present sense of the significance of human ex- 
 istence. Her relations with the world in which she found 
 herself, both with its past and its present, pressed so incessantly 
 and so forcibly on the springs of interest and curiosity that 
 there seems to have been hardly a moment when she was not 
 observing, speculating, or analyzing and recording the re- 
 sults. The world within and the world without never ceased 
 to be, for her, wonderlands." E. W. Henley. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " With that cry of self-despair, Maggie fell on her knees against 
 the table and buried her sorrow-stricken face. Her faith went 
 out to the Unseen Pity that would be with her to the end. Surely, 
 there was something being taught her by this experience of great 
 need, and she must be learning a secret of human tenderness and 
 long-suffering that the less erring could hardly know." Mill on 
 the Floss. 
 
 " It is only a poor sort of happiness that could ever come by 
 caring about our own narrow pleasures. We can only have the 
 highest happiness, such as goes along with being a great man, 
 by having wide thoughts and much feeling for the rest of the 
 world as well as ourse-lves ; and this sort of happiness often brings 
 so much pain with it that we can only tell it from pain by its 
 being what we would choose before everything else because our 
 souls see it is good." Romola. 
 
 " Whatever might be the weaknesses of the ladies who pruned 
 the luxuriances of their lace and ribbons, cut out garments for 
 the poor, distributed tracts, quoted Scripture, and defined the 
 true Gospel, they had learned this that there was a divine work 
 to be done in life, a rule of goodness higher than the opinion of 
 their neighbors ; and if the notion of a heaven in reserve for
 
 GEORGE ELIOT 599 
 
 themselves was a little too prominent, yet the theory of fitness 
 for that heaven consisted in purity of heart, in Christ-like com- 
 passion, in the subduing of selfish desires. They might give the 
 name of piety to much that was only puritanic egoism ; they 
 might call many things sin that were not sin ; but they had at 
 least the feeling that sin was to be avoided and resisted ; and 
 color-blindness, which may mistake drab for scarlet, is better 
 than total blindness." Scenes of Clerical Life. 
 
 9. Picturesque Description of Rural Life and 
 Scenery. "This characteristic may include but is not iden- 
 tical with her preference for homely types. So vivid is her 
 description of rural life that the tale is really an historical 
 painting, . . . to be valued as an accurate delineation 
 rather than an imaginary scene." -John Lord. 
 
 " An English landscape in the manner of Constable, rich 
 with rough soft color and infallible in local truth, is first pre- 
 sented. The life of the whole neighborhood grows up before 
 us; and from this the principal characters never altogether 
 detach themselves." Edward Dowden. 
 
 " So graphically are the various scenes and persons of ' Mid- 
 dlemarch ' brought before our eyes that we seem to know the 
 borough town thoroughly. We are familiar with its people, 
 and could walk in and out amongst them and through the 
 streets without any doubt or difficulty. . . . Easy and 
 natural, she can describe a farm-house with as minute and 
 faithful a pencil as she can draw character. Nothing escapes 
 her, and her power is equally great over the aggregate and 
 the single. The scenery of the Midlands does not afford scope 
 for sublime descriptions ; the massive is almost entirely absent, 
 but the beautiful is everywhere, and of this George Eliot is 
 cognizant. . . . Take the sketches of Raveloe, Milby, 
 Shepparton, and others where can there be found more ac- 
 curate painting? The author has been the connecting link 
 between us and that village life which we can never forget. 
 There are scenes and places hit off by only just a
 
 6OO GEORGE ELIOT 
 
 few words, such as the ride to Stone Court, where a Midland 
 landscape, in all its quiet beauty, is put upon the canvas ; 
 everything speaks to a mind like the author's. The language 
 of the fields, the rivers, and the woods is no sealed one to her. 
 And as she herself says of those aspects of scenery, ' These are 
 the things which make the gamut of joy to midland-bred souls 
 the things they toddled among, or perhaps learned by 
 heart standing between their father's knees while he drove 
 leisurely.' . . . The art of depicting scenery is rarely 
 found in a very eminent degree, and certainly seldom in those 
 who have other pronounced qualifications for the novelist. 
 George Eliot is one of the few who possess this rare gift." 
 G. B. Smith. 
 
 " How perfect is that vignette of Raveloe ' a village 
 where many of the old echoes lingered, undrowned by new 
 voices ! ' The entire picture of the village and its village life 
 a hundred years ago is finished with the musical and reserved 
 note of poetry, such as we are taught to love in Wordsworth 
 and Tennyson. . . . Modern English has few pieces of de- 
 scription more gem-like in its crystalline facets than the open- 
 ing chapter that tells of the pale, uncanny weaver of Raveloe 
 in his stone cottage by the deserted pit. Some of us can re- 
 member such house- weavers in such lonesome cottages on the 
 Northern moors, and have heard the unfamiliar rattle of the 
 loom in a half-ruinous homestead." Frederic Harrison. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " The afternoon sun was warm on the five workmen there busy 
 upon doors and window- frames and wainscotings. A scent of 
 pine wood from a tent-like pile of planks outside mingled itself 
 with the scent of the elder bushes, which were spreading their 
 summer snow close to the window opposite ; the slanting sun- 
 beam shone through the transparent shavings that flew before 
 the steady plane, and lit up the fine grain of the oak panelling 
 which stood propped against the wall. On a heap of those soft 
 shavings a rough grey shepherd dog had made himself a pleasant
 
 GEORGE ELIOT 6oi 
 
 bed, and was lying with his nose between his fore-paws, occasion- 
 ally winking his brows to cast a glance at the tallest of the five 
 workingmen, who was carving a shield in the center of a wooden 
 mantel-piece." Adam Bede. 
 
 " A charming picture Cheverel Manor would have made that 
 evening, if some English Watteau had been there to paint it; the 
 castellated house of grey tinted stone, with the flecking sunbeams 
 sending flashes of golden light across the many-shaped panes in 
 the mullioned windows, and a great beech leaning athwart one of 
 the flanking towers, and breaking with its flattened boughs the 
 too formal symmetry of the front ; the broad gravel walk wind- 
 ing on the right by a row of tall pines alongside the pool on the 
 left branching out among swelling grassy mounds." Scenes from 
 Clerical Life, 
 
 " As the morning silvered the meadows with their long lines of 
 bushy willows marking the water-courses, or burnished the golden 
 corn-ricks clustered near the long roofs of some midland home- 
 stead, he saw the full-uddered cows driven from their pasture to 
 their early milking. Perhaps it was the shepherd, head servant 
 of the farm, who drove them, his sheep-dog following with a heed- 
 less, unofficial air, as of a beadle in undress. The shepherd with 
 a slow and slouching walk, timed by the walk of grazing beasts, 
 moved aside, as if unwillingly throwing out a monosyllabic hint to 
 his cattle." Felix Holt. 
 
 10. The Artistic Use of Dialect." Much of the life 
 and vigor of her dialogue depends upon the dialect in which 
 it is spoken. Her phrases never appear studied, but are 
 brought before us as in real life, with all their imperfections 
 of dialect, and they reach their mark straight as an arrow. A 
 great part, perhaps the finest part of George Eliot's work could 
 only be translated into a dialect. . . . When I hear 
 Adam Bede's mother speak her Staffordshire dialect, so rough, 
 so full of Saxon archaisms, I feel myself face to face with the 
 truth. ' ' Gaetano Negri. 
 
 " The sense of local coloring is greatly heightened by the 
 dialogues, which speak the language of the people portrayed. 
 When Luke describes his rabbits as < nesh ' things, and when
 
 602 GEORGE ELIOT 
 
 Mrs. Jerome says ' Little gells should be seen and not heered? 
 and Tommy Transom mentions his readiness to pick up a 
 ' clauch ' penny, we are brought closer to the homely life of 
 these people. She has so well succeeded in portraying ' what 
 they call the dialeck hereabout ' that the reader is enabled to 
 realize, as he could not do so well by any other method, the 
 homeliness and rusticity of the life presented." G. W. Cooke. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " I'm not this countryman, you may tell by my tongue, sir ; 
 they're cu'rous talkers i' this country, sir ; the gentry 's hard work 
 to hunderstand 'em. I was brought hup among the gentry, sir, 
 an' got the turn of their tongue when I was a bye. Why, what 
 do you think the folks here says for ' hev'nt you ' ? the gentry, 
 you know, says ' hev'nt you ' ; well, the people about here says, 
 ' hanna yey.' It's what they call the dialeck as is spoke here- 
 about, sir. That's what I've heard Squire Donnithorne say many 
 a time ; ' it's the dialeck ', says he." Adam Bede. 
 
 " 'No, no,' said Tommy, wagging his head from side to side, 
 ' I thought you'd come into that. I thought you'd know bet- 
 ter than to say contrairy. But I'll shake hands \vi' you ; I don't 
 want to knock any man's head off. I'm a good chap a sound 
 crock an old family kep' out o' my rights. I shall go to heaven, 
 for all Old Nick.' "Felix Holt. 
 
 " ' Well, Mrs. Fitchett, how are your fowls laying now ? ' . . . 
 ' Pretty well for laying, madame, but they've ta'en to eating their 
 eggs ; I've no peace of mind with 'em at all.' 
 
 " ' What will you sell them a couple ?'...' Well, ma- 
 dame, half-a-crown ; I couldn't let 'em go, not under.' 
 
 '"Take a pair of tumbler pigeons for them little beauties.' 
 . . . ' Well, madame, Master Fitchett shall go and see 'em 
 after work. He's very hot on new sorts ; to oblige you.' " Mid- 
 dlemarch. 
 
 II. Labored Satire Sarcasm. "George Eliot is 
 not so good a satirist as she is a humorist. Her humor is 
 nearly always as fresh and delightful as a morning in May,
 
 GEORGE ELIOT 603 
 
 but her satire is labored. . . . The foibles of the world 
 she cannot treat in the vein of a satirist. . . . Her satire 
 is heavy, and lacks the light touch with the tender undertone 
 of compassion." G. IV. Cooke. 
 
 " There is an acerbity about her satire, with a flippancy 
 about her diction, when she chooses to misrepresent amiable 
 weaknesses and even religious faith, which will have startled 
 and shocked many a candid mind, and which is altogether 
 indefensible in a writer of fiction, who makes personages in 
 order to malign them, and has the whole domain of thought 
 and language to ransack for characters and for expressions." 
 Quarterly Review. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " When a man is happy enough to win the affections of a sweet 
 girl, who can soothe his cares with crochet and respond to all his 
 most cherished ideas with bead urn-rugs and chair -covers in 
 German wool, he has, at least, a guarantee of domestic comfort, 
 whatever trials may await him out of doors. What a resource it 
 is, under fatigue and irritation, to have your drawing-room well 
 supplied with small mats." //'.? Repentance. 
 
 " It is a pathetic sight and a striking example of the complex- 
 ity introduced into the emotions of a high state of civilization 
 the sight of a fashionably dressed female in grief. From the sor- 
 row of a Hottentot to that of a woman in large buckram sleeves, 
 with several bracelets on each arm, an architectural bonnet, and 
 delicate ribbon strings what a long series of gradations ! " 
 Janet's Repentance. 
 
 " Mrs. Bulstrode's naive way of conciliating piety and worldli- 
 ness the nothingness of this life and the desirability of cut glass, 
 the consciousness at once of filthy rags and best damask, was not 
 a sufficient relief from the weight of her husband's seriousness." 
 Middlema rch . 
 
 " He was an industrious gleaner of personal details, and could 
 probably tell everything about a great philosopher or physicist 
 except his theories or discoveries." Daniel Deronda.
 
 604 GEORGE ELIOT 
 
 12. Delicate Pathos. "The exquisite truth and deli- 
 cacy of the pathos in these stories [' Adam Bede ' and 
 ' Amos Barton '] I have never seen equalled ; and they have 
 impressed me in a manner that I should find it very difficult 
 to describe ... if I had the impertinence to try." 
 Dickens. 
 
 "The prevailing pathos of her books affects one with a 
 tender personal sympathy for the author, as well as the larger 
 impersonal which it is evident she wishes to inculcate on 
 behalf of the whole pitiable world of mankind." W. C. 
 Wilkinson. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " The snow lay thick upon the graves, and the day was cold 
 and dreary ; but there was many a sad eye watching that black 
 procession as it passed from the vicarage to the church and from 
 the church to the open grave. There were men and women who 
 had bandied vulgar jests about their pastor and who had lightly 
 charged him with sin ; but now, when they saw him following 
 the coffin, pale and haggard, he was consecrated anew by his 
 great sorrow, and they looked at him with respectful pity." 
 Amos Barton. 
 
 " But the Pitying Mother had not yet entered within the walls, 
 and the morning arose on unchanged misery and despondency. 
 Pestilence was hovering in the track of famine. Not only the 
 hospitals were full, but the courtyards of private houses had been 
 turned into refuges and infirmaries ; and still there was unshel- 
 tered want. And early this morning, as usual, members of the 
 various fraternities who made it part of their duty to bury the 
 unfriended dead, were bearing away the corpses that had sunk 
 by the wayside." Rontola. 
 
 " It was a cloudy day, and nearing dusk. Arno ran dark and 
 shivering ; the hills were mournful, and Florence with its girdling 
 stone towers had that silent, tomb-like look, which unbroken 
 shadow gives to a city seen from above. Santa Cruce, where her 
 father lay, was dark amid that darkness, and slowly vanishing up 
 the narrow street was the white load, like a cruel, deliberate 
 Fate carrying away her father's life -long hope to bury it in an
 
 GEORGE ELIOT 605 
 
 unmarked grave. Romola felt less that she was seeing this her- 
 self than that her father was consciou of it as he lay helpless 
 under the imprisoning stones, where her hand could not reach 
 his to tell him that he was not alone." Romola. 
 
 13. Depreciation ol Individualism. "She dispels 
 that pleasant illusion, fondled by most writers of fiction, 
 that the individual is dominant in human affairs, and gets 
 what he wants if he has the energy to struggle for it. The 
 pitiless laws of existence, which are independent of human 
 wish or will, and which crush all who oppose their action, 
 she perceives with a sad certainty of insight. To the egotist 
 and sentimentalist, raging or moaning at the constitution of 
 things, Nature seems cruel and Providence seems cruel ; but 
 she, looking at individuals in relation to the mighty external 
 forces they obey or resist, sees that unselfishness is the con- 
 dition both of usefulness and happiness and that Providence 
 has no pets." E. P. IVhipple. 
 
 "So far as George Eliot's life was concerned, she was 
 eager in her self-development and as eager in her sympathies. 
 But it was a different matter in the main drift of her work. 
 . . . She lowered the power of individualism. . . . 
 Few have individualized their characters more than she did, 
 and of these characters we have many distinct types. But 
 she individualized them with, I may say, almost the set pur- 
 pose of showing that their individualism was to be sacrificed 
 to the general welfare of the race. The more her characters 
 cling to their individuality, the more they fail in reaching 
 happiness or peace. . . . The whole of her books is a 
 suppressed attack on individualism and an exaltation of self- 
 renunciation as the only force of progress, as the only ground 
 of morality.' ' Stopford Brooke. 
 
 " George Eliot evidently desired to destroy individualism 
 as a social force. The individual, according to her teaching, 
 is to renounce himself for the sake of the race. He is to live,
 
 (5CX5 GEORGE ELIOT 
 
 not as a personal being but as a member of the social organ- 
 ization ; to develop his altruistic nature, not to perfect his 
 personal character." G. W. Cooke. 
 
 Although this characteristic cannot well be illustrated in 
 detached paragraphs, it finds abundant illustration in the 
 general spirit of such works as " Felix Holt " and " Daniel 
 Deronda."
 
 DICKENS, 1812-1870 
 
 Biographical Outline. Charles Dickens, born at 
 Landport, a suburb of Portsea, February 7, 1812, the eldest 
 son and second of eight children ; father a clerk in the dock- 
 yard at Portsmouth, afterward a Parliamentary reporter; family 
 removed to London in 1814 and thence to Chatham in 1818 ; 
 Dickens is taught first by his mother and then by one Wm. 
 Giles, who kept a day-school in Chatham ; the family re- 
 move in 1821 to London, where the father becomes financially 
 embarrassed and is imprisoned ; Dickens obtains employment 
 at pasting labels in a blacking warehouse, partly owned by a 
 cousin, but soon leaves on account of a quarrel between the 
 father and the cousin ; by chance he becomes enabled to 
 attend school (about 1824) at Wellington House Academy, 
 where he remains for nearly two years; writes stories for his 
 boy friends while at school ; finds employment as clerk in a 
 law office, and conceives the idea of becoming a reporter; he 
 reads much in the British Museum with that end in view ; 
 displays from early boyhood a fondness for the stage ; be- 
 comes intimately acquainted with Macready and Fechter, then 
 in their glory, and is prevented from becoming an actor only 
 by an accident ; he begins reporting for the True Sun, and, 
 in 1835, obtains a regular position on the staff of the Morn- 
 ing Chronicle; the first of his "Sketches by Boz " is pub- 
 lished in the Monthly Magazine in 1833, but not paid for; 
 other "Sketches" follow in the Evening Chronicle; 
 "Sketches by Boz " are published in book form in 1836; 
 Dickens ceases reporting in 1836 ; he begins the " Pickwick 
 
 607
 
 6o8 DICKENS 
 
 Papers" merely as the letter-press to accompany comic 
 sketches by one Seymour, then popular as a comic draughts- 
 man ; he publishes " Pickwick Papers" in 1836-37 ; both his 
 first books are extremely successful, commercially ; he earns 
 five guineas a week as a reporter, and gets ^150 for the 
 copyrights of " Pickwick Papers " and " Sketches by Boz ;" 
 in 1836 he marries Catherine, daughter of George Hogarth, 
 a friend of Scott and conductor of the Evening Chronicle ; 
 Dickens repurchases the copyright of "Sketches by Boz," 
 paying thirteen times what he had received for it ; he pub- 
 lishes "Oliver Twist" in 1837-39 and "Nicholas Nickle- 
 by " in 1838-39, beginning the latter before finishing the 
 former; during 1838-39 he is editor of Bentley 's Miscel- 
 lany, in which "Oliver Twist" appears as a serial; he 
 receives a handsome income from the sale of " Pickwick 
 Papers;" he writes several unsuccessful dramas during 
 1836-38 ; in 1839 takes up his residence in Devonshire Ter- 
 race, Regent's Park; in 1840 he establishes an illustrated 
 weekly publication called Master Humphrey* s Clock, in which 
 appear the story of that name (afterward called "The Old 
 Curiosity Shop " ) and " Barnaby Rudge ;" in 1841 he visits 
 Edinburgh by invitation, and receives great public honors ; 
 sails for America in January, 1842, and returns in July; he 
 publishes " American Notes" in 1842 and " Martin Chuz- 
 zlewit " in 1843 ; publishes the " Christmas Carol " in De- 
 cember, 1843 ; settles with his family in Genoa, Italy, in July, 
 1844; visits London at Christmas time, and reads the proofs 
 of " The Chimes " to Macready and other friends ; publishes 
 " The Chimes " in December, 1844 ; visits Rome and Naples 
 in the spring of 1845, and returns in June to London; pub- 
 lishes the "Cricket on the Hearth" in December, 1845; 
 becomes editor of the Daily News for a few weeks early in 
 1846 ; spends the summer of 1846 at Lausanne, and removes 
 to Paris in the autumn ; completes " Dombey and Son " while 
 in Paris, and returns to London early in 1847 ; during 1847
 
 DICKENS 609 
 
 and 1848 he interests himself in amateur drama as manager 
 and actor, giving Jonson's ' Every Man in His Humour" 
 and Shakespeare's " Merry Wives of Windsor " in Liverpool, 
 Manchester, and London, the proceeds being given mainly 
 to John Poole, the author of " Paul Pry," and to Sheridan 
 Knowles; in 1850 he publishes "David Copperfield," and 
 also establishes the weekly Household Words, in which 
 " Bleak House " appears serially during 1852-53 ; he spends 
 the summers of 1853, 1854, and 1856 at his residence in 
 Boulogne ; makes a tour of Switzerland and Italy in the au- 
 tumn of 1853 ; returns in December, and reads the " Carol " 
 and the " Cricket on the Hearth " to large audiences in Bir- 
 mingham ; publishes "Hard Times" as a serial in 1854; 
 joins Wilkie Collins in private theatricals in 1855-56 ; pub- 
 lishes " Little Dorrit " as a serial during 1855-57 ; begins 
 formal public reading in 1858, and purchases Gad's Hill 
 Place during the same year ; separates from his wife by 
 mutual agreement in May, 1858 ; reads with great pop- 
 ularity and financial success during 1858-59 in England, 
 Scotland, and Ireland; in the spring of 1859 merges House- 
 hold Words into All the Year Round, and publishes "A 
 Tale of Two Cities " as a serial ; "Great Expectations " ap- 
 pears in 1860; by 1861 Dickens is giving most of his time 
 and strength to public reading ; during 1864-65 he pub- 
 lishes " Our Mutual Friend ; " eighty readings given during 
 one-half of 1866 bring Dickens ^1 5,000 ; he sails for Boston 
 November 9, 1866 ; reads in America till April 20, 1867 ; 
 returns to England in May, and begins, in October, 1867, his 
 " farewell " series of readings ; gives his last public reading 
 March 16, 1870, and begins "Edwin Drood " during this 
 year ; dies at Gad's Hill June 8, 1870. 
 
 39
 
 6lO DICKENS 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY ON DICKENS'S STYLE. 
 
 Ward, A. W., "English Men of Letters" (Dickens). New York, 1882, 
 
 Harper, 192-222. 
 Saintsbury, G., "Corrected Impressions." New York, 1895, Dodd, 
 
 Mead & Co., 117-138. 
 Oliphant, Mrs., "The Victorian Age of English Literature." New 
 
 York, 1892, Tait, 248-261. 
 Timbs, J., "Later Wits and Humorists." London, 1874, Bentley, 2: 
 
 222-254. 
 
 Whipple, E. P., "Outlooks." Boston, 1888, Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 
 Whipple, E. P., "Lectures." Boston, 1850, Ticknor, Reed & Co., 42- 
 
 84. 
 
 Lang, A., " Essays in Little." New York, 1891, Scribner, 118-131. 
 Poe, E. A., "Works." New York, 1855, Redfield, 3: 464-483. 
 Collier, W. F., "History of English Literature." London, 1892, Nel- 
 son, 480-486. 
 Whipple, E. P., " Literature and Life." Boston, 1888, Houghton, 
 
 Mifflin & Co., 42-84. 
 Fields, J. T., "Yesterdays with Authors." Boston, 1893, Houghton, 
 
 Mifflin & Co , 125-251. 
 Bayne, P., " Essays in Biography and Criticism." Boston, 1857, Gould 
 
 & Lincoln, 1 : 362-392. 
 Shepard, W. S., "Pen Pictures." New York, 1886, Putnam, 236- 
 
 293- 
 Spedding, J., " Reviews and Discussions." London, 1879, Kegan, Paul 
 
 & Co., 240-276. 
 Clark, C. and M. C., "Recollections of Writers." New York, 1878, 
 
 . Scribner, 295-341. 
 Pemberton, T. C., " Dickens and the Stage." London, 1888, Redway, 
 
 1-254- 
 
 Dickens, C., " Letters of," etc. New York, 1879, Scribner, 2 vols. 
 
 Hanaford, P. and C., "Life and Writings of Dickens." Boston, 1882, 
 D. Lothrop & Co. 
 
 Forster, J., "Life of Dickens." Philadelphia, 1874, Lippincott, 3: 
 326-386. 
 
 Canning, A. S. G., "Philosophy of Charles Dickens. " London, 1880, 
 Smith, Elder & Co. 
 
 Dulcken, H. W., "Worthies of the World." London, 1881, 3: 513- 
 528. 
 
 Duyckinck, E. A., " Portrait Gallery. " New York, 1875, Johnson, Wil- 
 son & Co., 2: 383-398.
 
 DICKENS 6fl 
 
 Friswell, J. H., " Modern Men of Letters," etc. London, 1870, Hod- 
 
 der & Stoughton, 1-45. 
 Henley, W. E., "Views and Reviews." New York, 1890, Scribner, 
 
 I : 9-16. 
 Mas-on, E. T., "Personal Traits of British Authors." New York, 
 
 1885, Scribner, 4: 171-233. 
 Jeaffreson. J. (_'.. "Novels and Novelists." London, 1858, Hurst & 
 
 Blacken. 2: 303-334. 
 Nicoll, H. J., " Landmarks of English Literature." New York, 1883, 
 
 Appleton, 377-385- 
 Taine, "History of English Literature." New York, 1875, Holt, 3 : 
 
 178-212. 
 Lang, A., "Letters to Dead Authors." New York, 1892, Longmans, 
 
 Green & Co., 9-19. 
 
 Brimley, G., "Essays." London, 1882, Macmillan, 281-294. 
 Chambers, R., " Cyclopaedia of English Literature. " Edinburgh, 1876, 
 
 Chambers, 2: 515-521. 
 Cleveland, C. D., " English Literature of the Nineteenth Century." 
 
 Philadelphia, 1873, 718-730. 
 
 Davey, S., "Darwin, Carlyle and Dickens." London, 1876, E. Bum- 
 pus, 121-156. 
 Drake, S. A., " Our Great Benefactors. " Boston, 1884, Roberts Bros., 
 
 I02-III. 
 Field, R., "Pen Portraits of Charles Dickens's Readings. " Boston, 
 
 1872, J. R. Osgood. 
 
 Masson, D., "British Novelists." Boston, 1892, W. Small, 239-258. 
 Stephen, L. , "Dictionary of National Biography." New York, Mac- 
 millan, 1896, 15: 20-32. 
 Bagehot, W., "Works." Hartford, 1889, Travellers' Insurance Co., 2: 
 
 239-278. 
 
 Fitzgerald, P., " Recreations of a Literary Man." London, 1882, 48-171. 
 Home, R. H., "A New Spirit of the Age." New York, 1844, Harper, 
 
 1-52. 
 Jerrold, W. B., " The Best of all Good Company." Boston, 1878, W. 
 
 F. Gill & Co., 1-80. 
 L'Estrange, A. G., "A History of English Humour." London, 1878, 
 
 Hurst & Blackett, 2 : 226-241. 
 Mackenzie, R. S., "Life of Charles Dickens." Philadelphia, 1870, T. 
 
 B. Peterson & Bros. 
 Stoddard, R. H., "Anecdote Biographies," etc. New York, 1875, 
 
 (Bric-a-Brac Series, Vol. 2), Scribner, Armstrong & Co. 2 : 197- 
 
 299.
 
 6l2 DICKENS 
 
 Watt, J. C, " Great Novelists." Edinburgh, 1880, Macmillan, 163-218. 
 Welsh, A. H., "Development of English Literature." Chicago, 1884, 
 
 Hall, S. C., "A Book of Memories." London, 1871, Virtue & Co., 
 
 449-4S 2 - 
 Russell, W. C., "The Book of Authors." London, n. d., Warne, 
 
 490-492. 
 Allibone, "Dictionary of Authors." Philadelphia, 1858, Childs & Pe- 
 
 ters, i : 500-501. 
 Atlantic Monthly, 10: 546-554 (Whipple) ; 7: 639(Ruskin); 40: 327- 
 
 333 (Whipple). 
 
 Fortnightly Review, \T. 141-154 (Lewes) ; 17: 117-120 (Stack). 
 North American Review, 106: 671-672 (C. E. Norton); 114: 413-419 
 
 F. Sheldon). 
 
 Quarterly Review, 59: 484-518(7. W. Croker). 
 Scribner's Monthly, 20: 641-656. 
 Harper's Magazine, 25: 376-379 (L. G. Clark); 41: 610-616 (M. D. 
 
 Conway) ; 12: 380-386. 
 The Forum, 18: 543-553 (F. Harrison). 
 The Galaxy, 10 : 253-263 (R. G. White). 
 Temple Bar, 83 : 188-200 (H. Merivale) ; 27: 225-234. 
 Prater's Magazine, 21: 381-400:29: 167-169 (Thackeray); 82: 130-134. 
 Old and New, 3 : 480-483. 
 
 Putnam's Magazine, 5 : 263-272 (G. F. Talbot). 
 Knickerbocker Magazine, 39: 421-431 (F. W. Shelton). 
 Macmillan's Magazine, 22 : 236-240 (A. H.). 
 Westminster Review, 82 : 414-441. 
 Nineteenth Century, 5 : 24-43 (A- Trollope). 
 Belgravia, 20: 267-276, and 393-402 (W. F. Peacock). 
 Contemporary Revinv, 10 : 203-225 (George Stole). 
 North British Revinv , 3 : 65-87; 15: 57-89. 
 St. Paul's Magazine, 6 : 370-375 (A. Trollope). 
 Blackwood's Magazine, 109: 673-695; 60: 590. 
 London Review, 35 : 265-286. 
 English Review, 10 : 257-263. 
 Litteh's Living Age, 102 : 346-348 (Spectator); 106 : 118-122 (Spec- 
 
 tator). 
 
 Saturday Review, 5 : 636. 
 
 Edinburgh Review, 76: 258-272; 8l : 95-99; 68: 41-53. 
 Chambers 's Journal, 47: 502-505; 54: 710-712; 51: 177-180; 50: 
 
 74-79- 
 Every Saturday, 9 : 450-452.
 
 DICKENS 613 
 
 PARTICULAR CHARACTERISTICS. 
 
 I. Fondness for Caricature Exaggeration 
 Grotesqueness. "In regard to his humorous characters, 
 the intensity with which he conceives them, and the over- 
 flowing abundance of joy and merriment which springs in- 
 stinctively up from the very fountains of his being at the 
 slightest hint of the ludicrous, sometimes leads him to the 
 very verge of caricature. . . . They [his characters] are 
 caricatured more in appearance than in reality, and if grotesque 
 in form, are true and natural at heart. . . . Such carica- 
 ture as this is to character what epigram is to fact a mode of 
 conveying truth more distinctly by suggesting it through a 
 brilliant exaggeration. . . . The mind of the reader uncon- 
 sciously limits the extravagance into which Dickens sometimes 
 runs, and indeed discovers the actual features and lineaments 
 of the character shining the more clearly through it. ... 
 It is not that caricature which has no foundation but in ' the ex- 
 travagancy and crazy ribaldry of fancy,' but caricature based 
 on the most piercing insight into actual life ; so keen indeed 
 that the mind finds relief in playing with its own conceptions. 
 A caricaturist rarely presents anything but a man's peculiarity, 
 but Dickens ever presents the man. . . . Mr. Richard 
 Swiveller is a fine example of the felicity with which Dickens 
 can tread the dizziest edges of characterization without sinking 
 into mere caricature. He seems to be taken by surprise as 
 his glad and genial fancies glide into his brain and to laugh 
 and exult with the beings he has called into existence in the 
 spirit of a man observing, not creating. Squeers and Peck- 
 sniff, Tony Weller and old John Willett, although painted 
 with such distinctness that we seem to see them with the 
 bodily eye, we still feel to be somewhat overcharged in the 
 description. In fact, his characters are all more or less over- 
 charged, as if the author were a little intoxicated with his own 
 humorous conceptions, and could not keep himself in any
 
 614 DICKENS 
 
 measure. . . . His genius in characterization tends to 
 the grotesque and extravagant ; his personages in their names, 
 as in their qualities, produce on us the effect of strangeness." 
 -. P. Whipple. 
 
 " Few great humorists have so persistently sought to efface 
 the line which separates the barely possible from the morally 
 probable. . . . It is to his sense of the grotesque rather 
 than to any deep-seated satirical intention, and certainly not 
 to any want of reverence or piety, that I would likewise 
 ascribe the exaggeration and unfairness of which he is guilty 
 against Little Bethel and all its works. The vigor of Dickens 
 a mental and moral vigor, supported by a splendid physical 
 organism was the parent of his tendency to exaggeration. 
 But without this vigor he could not have been as creative as 
 he was." A. W. Ward. 
 
 11 The tendency of Dickens, in all his painting, is toward 
 caricature. The fault is an outgrowth of his very power. 
 Seeing in an instant, with intense abstraction, the odd feature 
 or whimsical bent in any man or woman, he creates a char- 
 acter from that single quality, making his creation stand out 
 in bright relief as the type of a whole class." W. F. Collier. 
 
 " His vivid perception of external oddities passes into 
 something like hallucination. . . . His books are there- 
 fore inimitable caricatures of contemporary ' humors ' rather 
 than the masterpieces of a great observer of human nature. ' ' 
 Leslie Stephen. 
 
 " He was apt to be a caricaturist where he should have 
 been a painter ; he was often mawkish and often extravagant ; 
 he was sometimes more inept than a great writer has ever 
 been." W. E. Henley. 
 
 " There are no caricatures in the portraits of Hogarth, nor 
 are there any in the pages of Dickens ; the most striking 
 thing in both is their inexhaustible variety and truth of char- 
 acter. ... If the people examined their own minds, 
 they would be very likely to find that this opinion [that
 
 DICKENS 615 
 
 Dickens often caricatures] chiefly originated and was support- 
 ed by certain undoubted caricatures among the illustrations. 
 Cruikshank [Dickens's early illustrator] appears 
 sometimes to have made his sketches without due reference, 
 if any, to the original. . . . When he deals with a dirty 
 young thief he refers to him as ' the first-named young gentle- 
 man;' while the old Jew, Fagin a horrible compound of all 
 sorts of villainy the author designates as ' the merry old 
 gentleman." . . . Everybody is struck with a sense of 
 the ludicrous at the preposterousness of the compliment. In 
 this way the author avoids disgust, loses no point of his true 
 meaning, and gains in the humour of his scene." R. H. 
 Home, 
 
 11 He seems to have been more destitute of the faculty of 
 self-criticism than any person of whom I can think who pos- 
 sessed anything like his powers of creation. . . . For 
 once that he will content himself with this [a quiet style], he 
 will indulge a score of times in a kind of trumpery, strained, 
 melodramatic rant. . . . He will spoil the admirable 
 vigor of his descriptive faculty at crises by plastering and 
 daubing this rant over the scenes, and will change a shudder 
 to a yawn by simply overdoing it. I cannot think that to 
 close observers Dickens can ever have seemed a realist. He 
 was too glaringly fantastic, phantasmagoric, theatrical for 
 that. " Saints bury. 
 
 1 ' Mr. Dickens's personages are mostly extravagant carica- 
 tures ; often, too, not the caricature of a whole man but of 
 one trait, or even trick, of a man, as all caricatures are apt to 
 be. Most of them, nearly all of them, are such creatures as 
 never did exist, and could by no possibility exist. Dickens 
 was mainly a caricaturist, and his caricatures are far more ex- 
 travagant and exaggerated than any that John Leech or even 
 Richard Doyle drew for Punch's pages." Richard Grant 
 White. 
 
 " Dickens had for his subject only the twirls and oddities
 
 6l6 DICKENS 
 
 of nature, and had, in general, a highly conventionalized and 
 unreal sphere, made, however, all the more mechanical by 
 the incongruities of absolute fact with the wild vagaries of 
 freakish wit and fancy." Mrs. Oliphant. 
 
 11 Thackeray's personages are all men, those of Dickens are 
 personified oddities. The one is an artist, the other a carica- 
 turist. . . . Thackeray looks at life from the club-house 
 window, Dickens from the reporter's box in the police court. 
 Dickens is certainly one of the greatest comic writers that 
 ever lived, and he has perhaps created more types of oddity 
 than any other." Lowell. 
 
 It has been asserted that Dickens never drew a clergy- 
 man except to caricature him. On the other hand, the 
 Spectator, at the time of Dickens's death, declared: "His 
 delight in the grotesque has done more than ever Mr. J. S. 
 Mill, by any philosophical defence of liberty, could do to 
 make us tolerant toward individual eccentricity of almost 
 every shade." Dickens himself sums up the whole matter 
 in a letter, replying to a kindly criticism by Lord Lytton. 
 He says: " I have such an inexpressible enjoyment in what 
 I see in a droll light that I dare say I pet it as if it were a 
 spoiled child." 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " [Quilp] ate hard eggs, shell and all, devoured gigantic prawns 
 with the heads and tails on, chewed tobacco and water cresses at 
 the same time, drank boiling tea without winking, bit his fork 
 and spoon till they bent again . . . [till] the women were 
 nearly frightened out of their wits and began to doubt if he were 
 really a human creature." Old Curiosity Shop. 
 
 " He had eyes . . . with no depth in the color or form 
 and much too near together as if they were afraid of being found 
 out in something, singly, if they kept too far apart. They had a 
 sinister expression, under an old cocked hat like a three-cornered 
 spittoon. . . . Except on the crown, which was raggedly 
 bald, he had stiff, black hair standing jaggedly all over it and
 
 DICKENS 617 
 
 growing down hill almost to his broad, blunt nose. It was so like 
 smith's work, so much more like the top of a strongly spiked 
 wall than a head of hair, that the best of players at leap-frog might 
 have declined him as the most dangerous man in the world to go 
 over." A 7\ile of Two Cities. 
 
 " Her name was Paragon. Her nature was represented to us, 
 when we engaged her, as being feebly expressed in her name. 
 She had a written character as large as a proclamation, and ac- 
 cording to that document could do everything of a domestic nat- 
 ure that ever I heard of, and a great many things that I never 
 did hear of. She was a woman in the prime of life ; of a severe 
 countenance, and subject (particularly in the arms) to a sort of a 
 perpetual measles. She had a cousin in the Life Guards, with 
 such long legs that he looked like the afternoon shadow of some- 
 body else." David Copperfield. 
 
 2. Genial Humor. It would be a most unjust and 
 unwarranted assumption to say that the manifestation of Dick- 
 ens's fun-loving faculty was confined to burlesque or carica- 
 ture. Lord Jeffrey, who has not been noted for his partiality 
 toward writers in general, asserts that Dickens "has given 
 more delight, and has suggested better feelings to a larger 
 class of readers than any other author except Shakespeare." 
 Bulwer calls him " our hearth's wise cheerer." Lydia Ma- 
 ria Child calls the "Christmas Carol" "one of the sunniest 
 bubbles that ever floated on the stream of light literature." 
 And Thackeray, who must be admitted to be an intelligent 
 judge of true humor, wrote as follows in his " Box of Christ- 
 mas Books : " "There is but one book left in the box, the 
 smallest one ; but oh, how much the best of all ! It is the 
 work of the master of all English humorists now alive the 
 young man who came and took his place calmly at the head of 
 the whole tribe, and who has kept it. ... Think of the 
 harmless laughter, the genial wit, the frank, manly love he 
 has taught us all to feel ! " And of the " Christmas Carol " 
 Thackeray says: "It seems to me a national benefit, and
 
 6l8 DICKENS 
 
 to every man and woman who reads it a personal kind- 
 ness." 
 
 "Of all our own great writers since Scott, Dickens is 
 probably the man to whom the world owes most gratitude. 
 No other has caused so many sad hearts to be lifted up in 
 laughter ; no other has added so much mirth to the toilsome 
 and perplexed life of men, of poor and rich, of learned and 
 unlearned. ' A vast hope has passed across the world,' says 
 Alfred de Musset. We may say that with Dickens a happy 
 smile, a joyous laugh, went round trie earth." Andrew Lang. 
 
 " Charles Dickens was, before all things, a great humorist 
 doubtless, the greatest of this century ; for though we may 
 find in Scott a more truly Shakespearian humour of the highest 
 order, the humour of Dickens is so varied, so paramount, so 
 inexhaustible, that he stands forth in our memory as the 
 humorist of the age. ... In this fine and most rare gift 
 he abounds to overflowing ; and this humour pours in perfect 
 cataracts of ' grotesque imagery ' over every phase of life, 
 the poor and the lower classes of his time in London and in 
 a few of its great suburbs and its neighboring parts." 
 Frederic Harrison. 
 
 " Dickens's works furnish a constant commentary on the 
 distinction between wit and humour; for, of sheer wit, either 
 in remark or repartee, there is scarcely an instance in any of 
 his volumes, while of humour there is a fulness and gusto in 
 every page. . . . He continually exhibits the most trifling 
 and commonplace things in a new and amusing light." 
 . H. Home. 
 
 ' ' I have seen him praised for wit ; but I should say that 
 when he is really funny he is always humorous, but never 
 funny when he attempts wit. It is apt to land him in the 
 Circumlocution Office and other dry places, wherein an over- 
 strained satire prowls and barks. But in his own region of 
 partly observed, partly invented humour of the fantastic kind 
 his felicity is astonishing." Saintsbury.
 
 DICKENS 619 
 
 " ' Pickwick Papers ' is an almost perfect specimen of the 
 strictly English quality of fun, . . . which differs as 
 greatly from the humour of Scotland or Ireland as from 
 French wit or American extravagance." Mrs. Oliphant. 
 
 1 ' In the first pages of the ' Pickwick Papers ' he showed a 
 humor richer, subtler than that of any writer who was then 
 living or who has since come before the public. . . 
 Humor was Mr. Dickens's great distinctive trait ; and for 
 humor, pure and simple, he produced in all his life nothing 
 quite equal to ; Pickwick,' nothing so sustained, so varied, 
 so unrestrained." Richard Grant White. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " Richard Swiveller took a greasy memorandum-book from his 
 pocket and made an entry therein. 
 
 " ' Is that a reminder in case you should forget to call ? ' said 
 Trent, with a sneer. 
 
 " ' Not exactly, Fred," replied the imperturbable Richard, con- 
 tinuing to write with a business-like air. ' I enter in this little 
 book the names of the streets that I can't go down while the shops 
 are open. This dinner to-day closes Long Acre. I bought a pair 
 of boots in Great Queen Street last week, and made that no thor- 
 oughfare, too. There's only one avenue in the Strand left open 
 now, and I shall have to stop up that to-night with a pair of 
 gloves.' " Old Curiosity Shop. 
 
 " These audiences were of a very superior description, includ- 
 ing a great many young ladies' boarding-schools, whose favor 
 Mrs. Jarley had been at great pains to conciliate by altering the 
 face and costume of Mr. Grimaldi as clown to represent Mr. 
 Lindley Murray as he appeared when engaged in the composition 
 of his English Grammar and turning a murderess into Mrs. Han- 
 nah More, both of which likenesses were admitted by Miss Mon- 
 flathers, who was at the head of the head Boarding and Day es- 
 tablishment in the town, . . . to be quite startling from their 
 extreme correctness." Old Curiosity Shop. 
 
 " If, by the sacrifice of all my property, I could get transmi-
 
 620 DICKENS 
 
 grated into a dog I I really think I should never leave off wag- 
 ging my tail." Edwin Drood. 
 
 " It may further be remarked, that Miss Knag still aimed at 
 youth, although she had shot beyond it years ago." Nicholas 
 Nickleby. 
 
 3. Incarnation of Characteristics Single 
 Strokes. " He has a very peculiar power of taking hold of 
 some particular traits and making a character out of them. 
 He is especially apt to incarnate particular professions in this 
 way ; many of his people never speak without some allusion 
 to their occupation. You cannot separate them from it, nor 
 does the writer ever separate them : ... he sees people 
 in the street doing certain things, talking in a certain way, 
 and his fancy petrifies them in the act : he goes on fancying 
 hundreds of reduplications of that act : he frames an exist- 
 ence in which there is nothing else but that aspect which 
 attracted his attention." Walter Bagehot. 
 
 "The tendency of Dickens's genius, both in the actual 
 and the imaginary, is to personify, to individualize. This 
 makes his pages all alive with character. Not only does he 
 never treat of man in the abstract, but he gives personality to 
 the rudest shows of nature. . . . The whole originality 
 and power of Dickens lies in the instinctive insight into in- 
 dividual character. . . . He has gleaned all his facts 
 from observation and sympathy, in a diligent scrutiny of 
 actual life, and no contemporary author is less indebted to 
 books. . . . All that he observes is taken up and trans- 
 formed by his imagination becomes Dickensized, in fact, so 
 that, whether he describes a landscape or a boot-jack or a 
 building or a man, we see the object not as it is in itself but 
 as it is deliciously bewitched by his method of looking at it. 
 . . . The result is that we do not have in him an exact 
 transcript of life but an individualized idea of life from his 
 point of view. He has, in short, discovered and colonized
 
 DICKENS 621 
 
 one of the waste districts of Imagination, which we may call 
 Dickensland ; . . . from his own brain he has peopled it 
 with some fourteen hundred persons ; and it agrees with the 
 settlements made there by Shakespeare and Scott in being 
 better known than such geographical countries as Canada and 
 Australia. . . . It is distinguished from all other colonies 
 in Brainland by the ineffaceable peculiarities of its colonizer. 
 . . . He has created an ideal population which is more 
 interesting to human beings than the great body of their 
 actual friends and neighbors. . . . His method of assail- 
 ing social and political abuses is to make them ridiculous or 
 hateful ; and he makes them ridiculous or hateful by imper- 
 sonating them in men and women." E. P. Whipple. 
 
 " There is an individuality even about the buildings [in 
 Dickensland]. . . . There are houses sly-looking, houses 
 wicked - looking, houses pompous - looking. . . . You 
 know all the people as you know your own brothers and sis- 
 ters." Alexander Smith. 
 
 " A man, woman, or child cannot buy a morsel of pickled 
 salmon, look at his shoe, or bring a mug of ale ; a solitary 
 object cannot pass on the other side of the way ; a boy can- 
 not take a bite at a turnip or hold a horse ; a bystander can- 
 not answer the simplest question ; a dog cannot fall into a 
 doze ; a bird cannot whet his bill ; a pony cannot have a pe- 
 culiar nose or a pig one ear, but out peeps the first germ of 
 a character. . . . There is also what Lamb calls ' the 
 dumb rhetoric of the scenery.' . . . He not only ani- 
 mates furniture and stocks and stones or even the wind with 
 human powers, but often gives them an individual rather than 
 a merely generalized character. . . . Old, deserted, 
 broken-windowed houses grow crazed with staring each other 
 out of countenance ; and crook-backed chimney-pots and 
 cowls turn slowly round with witch -like mutter and sad whis- 
 pering moan, to cast a hollow spell upon the scene." R. H. 
 Home.
 
 622 DICKENS 
 
 " Most of Dickens's characters represent a class. . 
 He never develops a character from within but begins by 
 showing how the nature of the individual has been developed 
 externally by his whole life in the world. To this effect he 
 first paints his portrait at full length ; sometimes his dress 
 before his face, and most commonly his dress and demeanor. 
 When he has done this to his satisfaction hefee/s in the man, 
 and the first words that he utters are the key-note of his char- 
 acter. . . . His characters are for the most part fac- 
 simile creations, built up with materials from the life as re- 
 tained by a most tenacious memory. They are not mere 
 realities but the type and essence of real classes. 
 The men and things he deals with he means actually as he 
 calls them ; the only exception to their reality is that they 
 represent classes ; the best of them are never mechanical, 
 matter-of-fact portraits." R. H. Horne. 
 
 11 These personages light up the scenes with unfailing light 
 and mirth. In them we seek, not the excitement of story 
 nor that later fashion of excitement, the analysis of character. 
 Dickens was, fortunately for us, no analyst. He 
 neither anatomizes nor explains the amusing and, it must be 
 allowed, extraordinary persons whom he puts before us. 
 . They live, not because their author shows us their 
 machinery, but because we are personally acquainted with 
 themselves. . . . It is almost exclusively in his comic 
 characters that the genius of Dickens is really displayed. The 
 few exceptions are chiefly to be found in the criminal class ; 
 Bill Sikes, for instance, is a criminal to be proud of, and there 
 is a good deal of truth in the repulsive figure of Jonas Chuz- 
 zle wi t . " Mrs. Oliphant. 
 
 Dickens once told Lewes that every word spoken by his 
 characters was distinctly heard by him. To the same effect an 
 anonymous critic says: " He is something like Balzac, who 
 said that he could not describe a landscape until he had 
 turned himself for the time into trees, grass, and flowers
 
 DICKENS 623 
 
 . . . so that he became, as it were, a part of them and they 
 a part of him. . . . The winds, streams, and woods are 
 haunted with spirits." 
 
 "In ' Pickwick Papers ' was seen the art which can com- 
 bine traits vividly true to particular men or women with pro- 
 pensities common to all mankind. . . . He exposed 
 himself to the charge of now and then putting human nature 
 itself in the place of the individual, who should be only a small 
 section of it." John Forster. 
 
 " Having caught a hint from actual fact, he generalizes it, 
 runs away with this generalization into a corner, and devel- 
 ops it there into a character to match ; which character he then 
 transports along with others similarly suggested into a world 
 of semi-fantastic conditions, where the laws need not be those 
 of ordinary probability. He has characters of ideal perfection 
 and beauty as well as ideal ugliness and brutality characters 
 of a human kind verging on the supernatural as well as char- 
 acters actually belonging to the supernatural. Even his situ- 
 ations and scenery often lie in a region beyond the margin of 
 every-day life." David Masson. 
 
 Lewes calls Dickens's personages " not characters, but per- 
 sonified characteristics," and a writer in Blackwood's Maga- 
 zine, sums up the case as follows: "This can be nothing 
 but genius, that vivifying and creating principle which not 
 only makes something out of nothing, but which communicates 
 qualities to a bit of dull clay, of which, in itself, it is utterly 
 unconscious genius which we are laboring to define without 
 growing much the wiser, but which we can no more refuse 
 to be influenced by than we can deny the evidence of our 
 senses." 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " A fleet of barges were coming lazily on, some sideways, some 
 head-first, some stern first ; all in a wrong headed, dogged, ob- 
 stinate way, bumping up against the larger craft, running under 
 the bows of steamboats, getting into every kind of noolc and
 
 624 DICKENS 
 
 corner where they had no business, and being crunched on all 
 sides like so many walnut shells." Old Curiosity Shop. 
 
 " Nothing seemed to be going on but the clocks, and they had 
 such drowsy faces, such lazy, heavy hands, and such cracked voices 
 that they surely must have been too slow. The very dogs were 
 all asleep, and the flies, drunk with moist sugar in the grocer's 
 shop, forgot their wings and briskness, and baked to death in 
 dusty corners of the window.'' Old Curiosity Shop. 
 
 "Besides, the kettle was aggravating and obstinate. It 
 wouldn't allo\v itself to be adjusted on the top bar ; it wouldn't 
 hear of accommodating itself kindly to the knobs of coal ; it 
 would lean forward with a drunken air and dribble, a very idiot 
 of a kettle on the hearth. It was quarrelsome, and hissed and 
 spluttered morosely at the fire. To sum up all, the lid, resisting 
 Mrs. Peerybingle's fingers, first of all turned topsy-turvy and 
 then, with an ingenious pertinacity deserving of a better cause, 
 dived sideways in down to the very bottom of the kettle. And 
 the hull of the Royal George has never made half the monstrous 
 resistance to coming out of the water which the lid of that kettle 
 employed against Mrs. Peerybingle before she got it up again." 
 The Cricket on the Hearth. 
 
 4. Descriptive Power Minuteness of Observa- 
 tion Vividness. Dickens is a master of description. 
 Hardly since Defoe has he been equalled in his power of 
 minute observation. When he was first becoming known, 
 Chambers observed that Dickens was the first writer since 
 Smollett who had taken notice of " the prodigious fund of 
 character for description to be found in the streets of London. 
 This inexhaustible fund had lain untouched. The most odd- 
 looking and odd -speaking beings were suffered to vegetate 
 unheeded, unchronicled." A writer in the Edinburgh Review 
 calls him " the truest and most spirited delineator of English 
 life amongst the middle and lower classes since the days of 
 Smollett and Fielding." 
 
 " His eye is worth all his other senses. ... He pos- 
 sesses the power of seeing much more in a given space and
 
 DICKENS 625 
 
 time than people usually do. . . . His works contain a 
 larger number of faithful pictures of the middle and lower 
 classes of England of the present period than can be found in 
 any other modern work. . . . This closeness to reality, 
 so that what he describes has the same effect upon the internal 
 sense as thinking of reality, renders Dickens very like Defoe." 
 R. H. Home. 
 
 11 The first of these [the characteristics of Dickens] is his 
 power of observation in detail. We have heard we do not 
 know whether correctly or incorrectly that he can go down 
 a crowded street and tell you all that is in it what each shop 
 was, what the grocer's name was, how many scraps of orange- 
 peel there were on the pavement. His works give you ex- 
 actly the same idea : the amount of detail which there is in 
 them is something amazing to an ordinary writer something 
 incredible. ... He has, too, the peculiar alertness of 
 observation that is observable in those who live by it : he de- 
 scribes London like a special correspondent for posterity." 
 Walter Bagehot. 
 
 " The commonest objects, the most ordinary interiors, any 
 old house, a parlor, a boat, fifty things that in the ordinary 
 tale-teller would pass unmarked, are made vividly present and 
 intelligi ble ; are brought out with a strength of relief, pre- 
 cision, and force unapproached in any other writer of prose 
 fiction." -John Forster. 
 
 " Dickens understood the greatness of trifles ; he knew and 
 showed his science in small things. ... He took ad- 
 vantage of the most petty personal traits of a man or woman 
 to make up the total of oddity or ugliness or turpitude or 
 saintliness he desired to present." y. C. Watt. 
 
 11 In ' Oliver Twist ' the lowest and vilest forms of London 
 life are painted with a startling truthfulness that rivals the 
 pencil of Defoe. "rF. F. Collier. 
 
 " The source of all Dickens's descriptions is pure imagina- 
 tion. . . . An imagination so lucid and energetic cannot 
 40
 
 626 DICKENS 
 
 but animate inanimate objects without an effort. 
 His imagination is so active that it carries everything with it 
 in the path which it chooses. . . . Dickens is a poet ; he 
 is as much at home in the imaginative as in the actual. . . . 
 Objects, with Dickens, take their hue from the thoughts of his 
 characters. ' ' Taine. 
 
 " To the way in which his imagination enabled him to iden- 
 tify himself with the figments of his own imagination, he 
 frequently testified. Dante is not rnore certain in his celestial 
 and infernal topography than was Dickens as to every stair in 
 the little midshipman's house and as to ' every young gentle- 
 man's bedstead ' in Dr. Blimber's establishment. . . . 
 The gift of suddenly finding out what a man, a thing, a com- 
 bination of man and thing is like this too comes by nature, 
 and there is something electrifying in its sudden exercise. 
 . . . He was always observing. Half his life he was 
 afoot. ... A complete natural history of the country 
 actor, the London landlady, and the British waiter might be 
 compiled from his pages. This form of observation and de- 
 scription extended from human life to that of animals. . . . 
 Dickens has been called ' The Landseer of Fiction.' . . . 
 In everything, whether animate or inanimate, he found out at 
 once the characteristic feature, and reproduced it in words 
 of faultless precision. This is the secret of his descriptive 
 power." A. W. Ward. 
 
 " How true to nature, even in the most trivial details, al- 
 most every character and every incident in the works of the 
 great novelist really were, is best known to those whose tastes 
 or duties led them to frequent the paths of life from which 
 Dickens delighted to draw." R. H. Stoddard.
 
 DICKENS 627 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " There was not much to look at. A rickety table, with spare 
 bundles of papers, yellow and ragged from long carriage in the 
 pocket, ostentatiously displayed upon its top ; a couple of stools 
 set face to face on opposite sides of this crazy piece of furniture ; 
 a treacherous old chair by the fire-place ; . . . two or three 
 common books of practice ; ajar of ink, a pounce box, a stinted 
 hearth broom, . . . these, with the yellow wainscot of the 
 walls, the smoke-discolored ceiling, the dust and cobwebs, were 
 among the most prominent decorations of the office of Mr. Samp- 
 son Brass." The Old Curiosity Shop, 
 
 " The poulterers' shops were still half open, and the fruiterers' 
 were radiant in their glory. There were great, round, pot-bellied 
 baskets of chestnuts, shaped like the waistcoat of jolly old gentle- 
 men, lolling at the doors and tumbling out into the street in their 
 apoplectic opulence. There were ruddy, brown-faced, broad- 
 girthed Spanish onions, shining in the fatness of their growth like 
 Spanish friars and winking from their shelves in wanton slyness 
 at the girls as they went by and glanced demurely at the hung-up 
 mistletoe. There were pears and apples, clustered pyramids ; 
 there were bunches of grapes, made, in the shop-keeper's be- 
 nevolence, to dangle from conspicuous hooks, that people's mouths 
 might water gratis as they passed ; there were piles of filberts, 
 mossy and brown, recalling, in their fragrance, ancient walks 
 among the woods and pleasant shufflings ankle deep through with- 
 ered leaves ; there were Norfolk biffins, squab and swarthy, set- 
 ting off the yellow of the oranges and lemons, and, in the great 
 compactness of their juicy persons, urgently and beseechingly 
 entreating to be carried home in paper bags and eaten after din- 
 ner." A Christmas Carol. 
 
 " They left the high-road by a well-remembered lane, and soon 
 approached a mansion of dull-red brick, with a little weather- 
 cock-surmounted cupola on the roof and a bell hanging in it. It 
 was a large house, but one of broken fortunes ; for the spacious 
 offices were little used ; their walls were damp and mossy, their 
 windows broken, and their gates decayed. Fowls clucked and 
 strutted in the stables, and the coach-houses and sheds were 
 overrun with grass. Nor was it more retentive of its ancient state
 
 628 DICKENS 
 
 within ; for, entering the dreary hall and glancing through the 
 open doors of many rooms, they found them poorly furnished, 
 cold, and vast. There was an earthy savor in the air, a chilly 
 bareness in the place, which associated itself somehow with too 
 much getting up by candle-light and not too much to eat."- 
 A Christmas Carol. 
 
 5. Tender, Sometimes Mawkish, Pathos. On no 
 
 characteristic of Dickens is there-such a sharp difference of 
 opinion as on his pathos. Writers like Saintsbury, Andrew 
 Lang, and Mrs. Oliphant score him mercilessly for his 
 " mawkish, melodramatic sentimentality," while Whipple and 
 the stern Jeffrey have lauded him for his tenderness and his 
 "purified conception of moral beauty." There is warrant 
 for both extremes of criticism, and both kinds of pathos may 
 be abundantly illustrated from Dickens's works. The truth 
 must be determined by a general average of the two criticisms, 
 bearing in mind that Dickens aimed to touch the hearts, not 
 of critics but of the common people the class of whom he 
 mainly wrote and whom he best knew. That he has suc- 
 ceeded remarkably in this aim, no one will deny. 
 
 "It is this inability to know where to stop which has 
 brought discredit on his pathos. He really had 
 pathos, but he could not be content with a moderate dose of 
 it, and must needs froth and whip and bedevil it till it becomes 
 half insipid, half fulsome. . . . He abounds in washy 
 pathetics and windy politics, in leather-and -prunella peers and 
 good-young-person heroines. ... In Dickens we always 
 feel the constant presence of the theatre of the boards and 
 the lamps, the property-man and the prompter. . . . Our 
 fathers thought Little Nell and Little Paul almost excruci- 
 atingly pathetic, while the whole of my own generation has 
 chiefly yawned over them. I am told that the weeping time 
 is coming again soon; but this I take leave to doubt." 
 Saintsbury.
 
 DICKENS 629 
 
 " One source of his pathos is the intense and purified con- 
 ception he has of moral beauty, of that beauty which comes 
 from a thoughtful brooding over the most solemn and affecting 
 realities of life. . . . He makes everybody cry, even his 
 hostile critics ; but his critics object that they are made to 
 cry against the rules ; that it is sentimentality they cry over 
 and not pure sentiment ; that it is exceedingly unnatural to 
 have their natures so deeply stirred. Dickens took their tears 
 as the most cogent of all answers to their maxims, 
 disregarding the snarling protest they made against the magi- 
 cian who extorted from them such irrepressible drops of un- 
 critical emotion. . . . It is certain that his genius can 
 as readily draw tears as provoke laughter. Sorrow, want, 
 poverty, pain, and death ; the affections which cling to earth 
 and those which rise above it ; he represents always with 
 power and often with marvellous skill." E. P. Whipple. 
 
 11 The pathos of ' Oliver Twist ' is mawkish, as it usually is 
 in Dickens's works, and the absurdly melodramatic story of 
 Oliver's birth, with the machinations of the impossible villain 
 Monks, is little worthy of the author, though he has sinned 
 repeatedly in the same way, and does not seem to have known 
 better. . . . We are free to admit that we have no ad- 
 miration at all for Dickens's sentimental or pathetic passages ; 
 we are moved only to weariness by ' that Smike's unceasing 
 drivellings or those everlasting Nells.' We feel no interest 
 in little Paul Dombey, and the maunderings of Jo leave our 
 withers un wrung." Mrs. Oliphant. 
 
 ' ' His pathos is not less true than various, for the gradations 
 are marked between the stern tragic pathos of ' Hard Times,' 
 the melting pathos of 'Old Curiosity Shop,' ' Dombey and 
 Son, 1 and ' David Copperfield,' and the pathos of helplessness 
 which appeals to us in Smike and Jo." T. H. Ward. 
 
 " His perception of moral beauty was as refined as his con- 
 ceptions were, in their finer traits, tender and natural. 
 Two or three of his scenes and numerous incidental touches
 
 630 DICKENS 
 
 have never been surpassed, if the heart-felt tears of tens of 
 thousands of readers are any test of natural pathos. . . . 
 The only tragedy of Hogarth and Dickens is the constant 
 tragedy of private life especially with the poorer classes." 
 R. H. Home, 
 
 " There is no writer who knows better how to touch and 
 melt; he makes us weep absolutely shed tears : before read- 
 ing him we did not know there was so much pity in the heart. 
 The grief of a child who wishes to be loved by his father and 
 whom his father does not love, the despairing love and slow 
 death of a poor half-imbecile young man ; all these pictures 
 of secret grief leave an ineffaceable impression." Taine. 
 
 " He has naturally great powers of pathos; his imagina- 
 tion is familiar with the common sort of human suffering, 
 and his marvellous conversancy with the detail of existence 
 enables him to describe sick-beds and death-beds with an 
 excellence very rarely seen in literature a nature far more 
 sympathetic than that of most authors has familiarized him 
 with such subjects." Walter Bagehot. 
 
 " Like his humor, Mr. Dickens's pathos was in general not 
 of the highest type. It was very touching, and there are 
 many passages in his books that must melt all but the stoniest 
 natures. As his humor always provokes laughter, so his pa- 
 thos generally moves to tears. But laughter is not the best 
 witness to the high quality of humor nor tears to that of pa- 
 thos." Richard Grant \Vhite. 
 
 Jeffrey wrote to Dickens concerning the Death of Paul 
 Dombey : "I have so cried and sobbed over it, and felt my 
 heart purified by those tears, and blessed and loved you for 
 making me shed them." Landor said that Little Nell was 
 equal to any character in fiction, and Jeffrey said, " Noth- 
 ing so good since Cordelia. ' '
 
 DICKENS 631 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " She was dead. No sleep so beautiful and calm, so free from 
 trace of pain, so fair to look upon. . . . Her couch was 
 dressed here and there with some winter berries and green leaves 
 gathered in a spot she had been used to favor. ' When I die, 
 put me near something that has loved the light and had the 
 sky above it always.' Those were her words. She was dead. 
 Dear, gentle, patient, noble Nell was dead. Her little bird a 
 poor slight thing the pressure of a finger would have crushed, was 
 stirring nimbly in its cage ; and the strong heart of its child mis- 
 tress was mute and motionless forever." Old Curiosity Shop. 
 
 " ' Mr. Snagsby,' says Jo, ' I went and give a illness to the lady 
 as wos and yit as warn't the t'other lady, and none of 'em never 
 says nothink to me for having done it, on accounts of their being 
 ser good and my having been s'unfortnet. The lady come herself 
 and see me yesday, and she ses, "Ah, Jo ! " she ses, " We thought 
 we'd lost you, Jo ! " she ses. And she sits down a smilin' so quiet, 
 and don't pass a word nor yit a look upon me for having done it, 
 she don't, and 1 turns agin the wall, I doos, Mr. Snagsby. And 
 Mr. Jarnders, I see him forced to turn away his own self. And 
 Mr. Woodcot, he come fur to giv me somethink for to ease me, 
 wot he's allus a doin' on day and night, and wen he comes a 
 bendin' over me and a speakin" up so bold, I see his tears a 
 fallin', Mr. Snagsby.'" Bleak House. 
 
 " Bob was very cheerful with them, and spoke pleasantly to all 
 the family. He looked at the work upon the table and praised 
 the industry and speed of Mrs. Cratchit and the girls. They 
 would be done long before Sunday. 
 
 " ' Sunday ! You went to-day, then, Robert ? ' said his wife. 
 
 " ' Yes, my dear,' returned Bob. ' I wish you could have gone. 
 It would have done you good to see how green a place it is. But 
 you'll see it often. I promised him that I would walk there on 
 a Sunday. My little, little child ! ' cried Bob, ' my little child ! ' " 
 Christmas Carol. 
 
 6. Gayety Animal Spirits Good-Fellowship. 
 
 Dickens was always and everywhere the prince of " good fel- 
 lows." His joviality bubbles up continually in his writings-
 
 632 DICKENS 
 
 James T. Fields, who perhaps knew Dickens personally better 
 than any other American, calls him " an incarnation of gen- 
 erous and abounding gayety, a type of beneficent earnestness, a 
 great expression of intellectual vigor and emotional vivacity," 
 and adds : " He liked to dilate in imagination over the brew- 
 ing of a bowl of punch, but I always noticed that, when the 
 punch was ready, he drank less of it than anyone who might 
 be present." And Mr. Dolby, who was Dickens's business 
 manager during his memorable reading tours in England and 
 America a man who lived and dined with the novelist daily 
 for months together says : " Although he so frequently both 
 wrote and talked about eating and drinking, I have seldom 
 met a man who partook less freely of the kindly fare placed 
 before him." These direct and positive testimonies from 
 Dickens's intimate friends and associates should set at rest the 
 consciences of those good people who have been troubled by 
 what appeared to be the novelist's excessive conviviality. 
 
 " He has an exuberance of animal spirits a surplus vitality 
 like that which makes him, after signing his name to a 
 letter or note, give such a whirl of flourishing. 
 Sometimes his humour not only takes the show of mere animal 
 spirits, but may be said to depend solely on them. 
 His boisterous fun and good-humour are like Smollett's, with 
 this advantage, that to find his best things we have not to go 
 to a dunghill and scratch them out." S. Davey. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 "In came a fiddler with a music book, and went up to the 
 lofty desk, and made an orchestra of it. In came Mrs. Fezziwig, 
 one vast substantial smile. In came the three Misses Fezziwig, 
 beaming and lovable. In came the six young followers whose 
 hearts they broke. In came all the young men and women em- 
 ployed in the business. In came the house-maid, with her cousin, 
 the baker. In came the cook, with her brother's particular 
 friend, the milkman. In they all came, one after another ; some
 
 DICKENS 633 
 
 shyly, some boldly, some gracefully, some awkwardly, some 
 pushing, some pulling ; in they all came anyhow and everyhow. 
 Away they all went, twenty couples at once ; hands half round 
 and back again the other way ; down the middle and up again ; 
 round and round in various stages of affectionate grouping ; old 
 top couple always turning up in the wrong place ; new top cou- 
 ple starting off again as soon as they got there ; all top couples 
 at last, and not a bottom one to help them ! When this result 
 was brought about, old Fezziwig, clapping his hands to stop the 
 dance, cried out : ' Well done ! ' and the fiddler plunged his hot 
 face into a pot of porter, especially provided for that purpose." 
 A Christmas Carol. 
 
 11 Then up rose Mrs. Cratchit, Cratchit's wife, dressed out but 
 poorly in a twice-turned gown, but brave in ribbons, which are 
 cheap and make a goodly show for sixpence ; and she laid the 
 cloth, assisted by Belinda Cratchit, second of her daughters, also 
 brave in ribbons, while Master Peter Cratchit plunged a fork 
 into the saucepan of potatoes, and getting the corners of his 
 monstrous shirt-collar (Bob's private property, conferred upon 
 his son and heir in honor of the day) into his mouth, rejoiced to 
 find himself so gallantly attired, and yearned to show his linen 
 in the fashionable parks. And now two smaller Cratchits, boy 
 and girl, came tearing in, screaming that outside the baker's 
 they had smelt the goose, and known it for their own ; and bask- 
 ing in luxurious thoughts of sage and onion, these young Cratch- 
 its danced about the table and exalted Master Peter Cratchit 
 to the skies, while he (not proud, although his collar nearly 
 choked him) blew the fire, until the slow potatoes, bubbling up, 
 knocked loudly at the sauce-pan lid to be let out and peeled." 
 A Christmas Carol. 
 
 " It was a perfect embodiment of the still small voice, free 
 from all cold, hoarseness, huskiness, or unhealthiness of any kind. 
 Foot-passengers slackened their pace, and were disposed to lin- 
 ger near it ; neighbors who had got up splenetic that morning 
 felt good-humor stealing on them as they heard it, and by de- 
 grees became quite sprightly ; mothers danced their babies to 
 its ringing ; still the same magical tink, link, tink, came gaily 
 from the work-shop of the Golden Key. Who but the locksmith 
 could have made such music ? A gleam of sun shining through 
 the unsashed window and checkering the dark workshop with a
 
 634 DICKENS 
 
 broad patch of light, fell full upon him, as though attracted by 
 his sunny heart. There he stood working at his anvil, his face 
 radiant with exercise and gladness, his sleeves turned up, his 
 wig pushed off his shining forehead the easiest, freest, happiest 
 man in all the world." Bartiaby Rudge. 
 
 7. Sincerity Manliness Earnestness. Thomas 
 Carlyle, who has never been noted as a flatterer, called his 
 vivacious contemporary "a most cordial, sincere, clear-sighted, 
 quietly decisive, just and loving man. ... A quiet, 
 shrewd-looking little fellow, who seems to guess pretty well 
 what he is and what others are." Forster, Dickens's match- 
 less biographer, observes that in " Our Mutual Friend" the 
 novelist " pictures rare veracity of soul amid the lowest forms 
 of social degradation, placed beside others of sheer falsehood 
 and pretence amid unimpeachable social correctness," and 
 adds, "Whatever Dickens was, he was thoroughly." Dick- 
 ens's most hostile critics have never found reason to sug- 
 gest that there is anything in his writings that suggests or 
 fosters impurity in thought. 
 
 " The author was not a mere jester and story-teller, but a 
 true philanthropist and reformer. . . . He has generally 
 a moral purpose in view. He never panders to popular preju- 
 dices, but boldly rebukes vice in whatever rank he finds it. 
 Dickens abhorred a sham with his whole soul. 
 . He was the soul of truth and manliness as well as 
 kindness." R. H. Stoddard. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 "And it is pleasant to write that they reared a family; be- 
 cause any propagation of goodness and benevolence is no small 
 addition to the aristocracy of nature and no small subject of re- 
 joicing for mankind at large." Old Curiosity Shop. 
 
 " For the Bachelor was one of those whose goodness shuns the 
 light, and who have more pleasure in discovering and extolling
 
 DICKENS 635 
 
 the good deeds of others than -a trumpeting their own. . . . 
 Thank God that the innocent joys of others can strongly move 
 us, and that we, even in our fallen nature, have one source of 
 pure emotion which must be prized in Heaven." Old Curiosity 
 Shop. 
 
 " ' Oh, Miss Dombey,' he said, ' is it possible that while I have 
 been suffering so much in striving with my sense of what is due 
 to you, and must be rendered to you, I have made you suffer 
 what your words disclose to me ? Never, never before Heaven, 
 have I thought of you but as the single, bright, pure, blessed 
 recollection of my boyhood and my youth. Never have I from 
 the first, and never shall I till the last regard your part in my 
 life but as something sacred, never to be lightly thought of, never 
 to be esteemed enough, never, until death, to be forgotten ! ' " 
 Dombey and Son, 
 
 8. Broad Sympathy Plain, Practical Humanity. 
 
 If the most prominent surface characteristic of Dickens is 
 his humor, especially his fondness for caricature, his crown- 
 ing glory is his sympathy. 
 
 " In painting character, he is troubled by no uneasy sense 
 of himself. . . . His mind, by the readiness with which 
 it generally assimilates other minds, . . . grows with 
 every exercise of its powers. . . . Had he been an ego- 
 tist, devoured with a ravenous vanity for personal display, 
 his talents would hardly have made him known 
 beyond the street in which he lived. . . . His fellow- 
 feeling with the race is his genius. The humanity, . . . 
 the recognition of the virtues which obtain among the poor 
 and humble, so observable in the works of Dickens, is charac- 
 teristic of the age. . . . Dickens commonly surveys 
 human nature from the position of charity and love. 
 He makes us love our kind not only in its exhibitions of moral 
 beauty but also when frailties mingle with its excellence. . . . 
 He continues to effect that reconciliation of charity and mo- 
 rality by which our sympathy with weakness and toleration
 
 636 DICKENS 
 
 of error never run into a morbid sentimentality. . . . 
 He evolves beautiful and heroic qualities from heroic souls. 
 He makes the fact that happiness and virtue are not 
 confined to any one class a reality to the mind. . . . The 
 materials for numberless characters are within the reach of all 
 novelists, but most of them are ridden by some nightmare of 
 dignity or gentility which compels them to pass by the hero 
 in the alley for some piece of etiquette or broadcloth in the 
 drawing-room. . . . The one test of merit in Dickens- 
 land is goodness of heart ; and it contains a considerable 
 number of highly esteemed persons in whom this quality is 
 connected with confusion of head. Alone among his con- 
 temporaries Charles Dickens seems to possess that instinctive 
 sympathy with whatever is human and humane, which is the 
 fundamental condition of genial and varied characterization. 
 In impersonated abstractions of humanity which satisfy our 
 human nature he may be excelled ; in individualities which 
 make us in love with our kind he is unapproached." E. P. 
 Whipple. 
 
 " He was the best beloved of modern writers almost from 
 the outset of his career. ... He loved his fellow-men, 
 and did more to make them happy and amiable than any other 
 writer of his time." W. E. Henley, 
 
 "The philosophy of Dickens certainly is the professed 
 philosophy of kindliness, of a genial interest in all things great 
 and small, of a light English joyousness and a sunny universal 
 benevolence. . . . Whatever practice, institution, or 
 mode of thinking is adverse, in Mr. Dickens's view, to natural 
 enjoyment and festivity, against that he makes war. . . . 
 His philosophy may be denned as anti-Puritanism." David 
 Masson. 
 
 1 ' It was his mission to make people happy. Words of good 
 cheer were native to his lips ; and he was always doing what 
 he could to lighten the lot of all who came into his beautiful 
 presence. . . . We content ourselves with what he was
 
 DICKENS 637 
 
 a lover of his kind, a friend of the friendless, a champion of 
 the poor, the degraded, the outcast, the forlorn. His career 
 was a prolonged beneficence to his fellow -beings. It may 
 be said of his books that they made a circumnavigation of 
 charity." J. T. Fields. 
 
 " I may quarrel with Mr. Dickens's art a thousand and a 
 thousand times ; I delight and wonder at his genius. I rec- 
 ognize it I speak with awe and reverence as a commission 
 from that Divine Beneficence whose blessed task we know it 
 will one day be to wipe every tear from every eye." 
 Thackeray. 
 
 " He helped to blot out the hard line which too often 
 severs class from class, and made Englishmen feel more as one 
 family than they had ever felt before. . . . He has taught 
 his countrymen the eternal value of generosity, purity, kind- 
 ness, and unselfishness. . . . The distress of the poor of 
 England, he used to say, pierced through his happiness, and 
 haunted him day and night. . . . By him that veil was 
 rent asunder which parts the various classes of society. 
 Through his genius the rich man, faring sumptuously every 
 day, was made to feel the presence of Lazarus at his gate. 
 The unhappy inmates of the work-house, the neglected chil- 
 dren of the dens and caves of our great cities, the starved and 
 ill-used boys in remote schools, far from the observation of 
 men, felt that a new ray of sunshine was poured on their dark 
 existence." Dean Stanley. 
 
 " First among his natural gifts must be placed what may 
 in a word be called his sensibility that quality of which 
 humour, in the more limited sense of the word, and pathos are 
 the twin products. . . . To him the voiceless cause of 
 the suffering and the oppressed was at all times dearer than 
 any literary success. . . . His sympathy with the afflictions 
 of the hearth and the home knew almost no bounds. . . . 
 He was tender with the tenderness of Cowper, playful with 
 the playfulness of Goldsmjdh, natural with the naturalness of
 
 638 DICKENS 
 
 Fielding. . . . He conscientiously addressed himself, as 
 to the task of his life, to the endeavour to knit humanity to- 
 gether."^. IV. Ward. 
 
 "He set in motion the secret springs of sympathy by 
 touching the domestic affections. . . . He spoke in the 
 mother- tongue of the heart, and was always sure of listen- 
 ers." G. H. Lewes. 
 
 "He had a deep pity, a deep sympathy (and no idle or 
 barren one) for the poor and especially the hard-working 
 poor. He could indicate and emphasize the absurdities of 
 their manner and speech, their awkward gestures, bad gram- 
 mar, inelegant pronunciation, without one touch to feed the 
 contempt of the most cynical or the most ill-natured hearer; 
 and he inculcated at every moment, directly or indirectly, 
 the lesson of brotherly kindness." Anthony Trollope. 
 
 After reading the " Christmas Carol" [published in 1843] 
 Jeffrey wrote to Dickens : "Be sure you have done more 
 good and not only fostered more kindly feeling, but prompted 
 more positive acts of benevolence by this little publication 
 than can be traced to all the pulpits and confessionals since 
 1842." In his second and greatest series of readings in Eng- 
 land [1866] Dickens expressly stipulated that shilling seat- 
 holders should have as good accommodation as those who 
 were willing to pay higher sums for their evening's enjoyment. 
 He said, " I have been the champion and friend of the work- 
 ing man all through my career, and it would be inconsistent, 
 if not unjust, to put any difficulty in the way of his attending 
 my readings." After first seeing Venice, Dickens wrote: 
 " When I saw those palaces, how I thought that to leave one's 
 hand upon the time, lastingly upon the time, with one tender 
 touch for the mass of toiling people that nothing could oblit- 
 erate, would be to lift one's self above the dust of all Doges in 
 their graves." And again, "I wish we were all in Eden 
 again, for the sake of these toiling creatures." Daniel Web- 
 ster hardly exaggerated when he said: "Dickens has done
 
 DICKENS 639 
 
 more to ameliorate the condition of the English poor than all 
 the statesmen Great Britain has sent to Parliament." 
 
 " The stabs of his satire are never of a morbid, misanthrop- 
 ical kind. . . . They will almost invariably be found 
 directed against social wrongs, ' the insolence of office,' 
 against false notions of honor, against mere external respect- 
 ability." R. H. Home. 
 
 "Dickens wrote as a philanthropist. His purpose was 
 a lovely and a noble one to teach us charity. He did not 
 labor in vain. The world is better, purer, gentler, more lov- 
 ing and forgiving for the thirty years of Charles Dickens's la- 
 borious life ; and he goes to his rest followed by the blessings 
 due to a benefactor of mankind." Richard Grant ]Vhite. 
 
 "The deep, rich, cheery voice; the brave and noble 
 countenance ; the hand that had the fire of friendship in its 
 grip all played their part in comforting in a moment the creat- 
 ure who had come to Charles Dickens for advice, for help, 
 for sympathy." R. H. Stoddard. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 ' ' The light is come upon the dark benighted way. Dead ! 
 Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, 
 Right Reverends and Wrong Reverends of every order. Dead, 
 men and women, born with heavenly compassion in your hearts. 
 And dying thus around us every day ! " Bleak House. 
 
 "If those who rule the destinies of nations would remember 
 this if they would but turn aside from the wide thoroughfares 
 and the great houses and strive to improve the wretched 
 dwellings in by-ways where only poverty may walk many low 
 roofs would point more truly to the sky than the loftiest steeple 
 that now rears proudly up from the midst of guilt and crime 
 and horrible disease to mock them by its contrast." Old Curi- 
 osity Shop. 
 
 " Again the Ghost sped on, above the black and heaving sea 
 on, on until, being far away, as he told Scrooge, from any 
 shore, they lighted on a ship. They stood beside the helmsman
 
 640 DICKENS 
 
 at the wheel, the lookout in the bow, the officers who had the 
 watch ; dark, ghostly figures in their several stations ; but every 
 man among them hummed a Christmas tune, or had a Christmas 
 thought, or spoke below his breath to his companion of some by- 
 gone Christinas day, with homeward hopes belonging to it. And 
 every man on board, waking or sleeping, good or bad, had had 
 a kinder word for one another on that day than on any day in the 
 year ; and had shared to some extent in its festivities ; and had 
 remembered those he cared for at a distance, and had known 
 that they delighted to remember him." A Christmas Carol. 
 
 9. Dramatic Power. If any argument were needed to 
 prove Dickens a born dramatist, it might be found in the his- 
 tory of his own marvellous readings from his works and in that 
 of the dramatizations of his plays. It has been well said, " If 
 he had not been a great writer, he would have been a great 
 actor. ' ' 
 
 "He has great tragic power. It would be useless, in our 
 limits, to attempt to give illustrations of his closeness to nat- 
 ure in delineating the deeper passions, his profound observa- 
 tion of the workings of the soul when stained with crime and 
 looking forward to death; his skill in gifting remorse, fear, 
 avarice, hatred, and revenge with their appropriate language, 
 and his subtle appreciation of the influence exercised by differ- 
 ent moods of the mind in modifying the appearances of exter- 
 nal objects." E. P. Whipple. 
 
 " Who has so depicted the dismayed and conscience- 
 stricken murderer, his soul haunted and lashed by the aveng- 
 ing furies, the eternal wakefulness of his fevered brain, the 
 torment of unceasing restlessness, the thousand dreadful eyes 
 that leer at him, and the thousand voices that hoot at him 
 from morn till night?" S. Davey. 
 
 " His imaginative power and dramatic instinct combined 
 to produce an endless succession of effective scenes and situa- 
 tions. . . . In no direction was nature a more powerful 
 aid to art with him than in this. From his very boyhood he
 
 DICKENS 641 
 
 seems to have possessed . . . the faculty of converting 
 into a scene putting as it were into a frame personages that 
 came under his notice and the background on which he saw 
 them. . . . His genius exercises a particularly strong 
 spell in those scenes that precede a catastrophe, which are 
 charged like thunder-clouds with the coming storm. And 
 here the constructive art is at work ; for it is the same arrange- 
 ment of incidents, past and to come, combined by anticipa- 
 tion in the mind of the reader, which gives their extraordi- 
 nary force to such scenes." A. W. Ward. 
 
 " He has no developed tragic character and no pathetic, 
 but he often places his personages in tragic and pathetic situa- 
 tions, and makes a strong impression mainly by his own con- 
 viction and earnestness and his thorough working out of his 
 intention." Anthony Trollope. 
 
 '"Nicholas Nickleby' established beyond dispute Dickens's 
 mastery of dialogue, or that power of making characters real 
 existences, not by describing them but by letting them de- 
 scribe themselves, which belongs only to story-tellers of the 
 first rank." -John Forster. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " There was a^un hanging on the wall. He took it down and 
 moved a pace or two toward the door of the perfidious stranger's 
 room. He knew the gun was loaded. Some shadowy idea that 
 it was just to shoot this man like a wild beast seized him, and di- 
 lated in his mind until it grew into a monstrous demon in com- 
 plete possession of him, casting out all milder thoughts and set- 
 ting up its undivided empire. That phrase is wrong. Not 
 casting out his milder thoughts but artfully transforming them. 
 Changing them into scourges to drive him on. Turning water 
 into blood, love into hate, gentleness into blind ferocity. Her 
 image, sorrowing, humbled, but still pleading to his tenderness 
 and mercy with resistless power, never left his mind ; but staying 
 there, it urged him to, the door ; raised the weapon to his shoul- 
 der ; fitted and nerved his finger to the trigger ; and cried ' Kill
 
 642 DICKENS 
 
 him ! In his bed ! ' He reversed the gun to beat the stock upon 
 the door ; already held it lifted in the air ; some indistinct de- 
 sign was in his thoughts of calling out to him to fly, for God's 
 sake, by the window When, suddenly, the struggling fire il- 
 lumined the whole chimney with a glow of light ; and the Cricket 
 on the Hearth began to chirp ! " The Cricket on the Hearth. 
 
 " Down and up and headforemost on the steps of the building ; 
 now on his knees ; now on his feet ; now on his back ; dragged 
 and struck at and stifled with the bunches of grass and straw that 
 were thrust into his face by hundreds of hands ; torn, bruised, 
 panting, bleeding, yet always entre'ating and beseeching for 
 mercy, ... he was hauled to the nearest street corner, 
 where one of the fatal lamps swung. . . . Once he went aloft 
 and the rope broke, and they caught him shrieking ; twice he 
 went aloft and the rope broke, and they caught him shrieking ; 
 then the rope was merciful and held him, and his head was soon 
 on a pike." A Tale of Two Cities. 
 
 " Squeers had caught the boy firmly in his grip ; one desperate 
 cut had fallen on his body ; it was raised again, and again about 
 to fall when Nicholas Nickleby suddenly started up and cried, 
 
 " ' Stop ! ' in a voice that made the rafters ring. 
 
 " ' Who cried stop ? ' cried Squeers in a shriek 
 
 " ' I,' said Nicholas, stepping forward. ' This must not go 
 on.' 
 
 " ' Must not go on ? ' 
 
 " ' No ! ' thundered Nicholas. . . . ' You have disregarded 
 all my quiet interference in this miserable lad's behalf; you have 
 returned no answer to the letter in which I begged forgiveness for 
 him and offered to be responsible that he would remain quietly 
 here. Don't blame me for this public interference. You have 
 brought it upon yourself ; not I. 1 
 
 " ' Sit down, beggar ! ' screamed Squeers, almost beside him- 
 self with rage, and seizing Smike as he spoke. 
 
 " ' Wretch ! ' rejoined Nicholas, fiercely, ' touch him at your 
 peril ! I will not stand by and see it done. My blood is up, and 
 I have the strength of ten such men as you. Look to yourself, 
 for, by Heaven ! I will not spare you, if you drive me on.' " 
 Nicholas Nickleby.
 
 DICKENS 643 
 
 10. Vulgarity Artificiality. Much as one of his ad- 
 mirers would like so to do, it would be unjust to the readers 
 of this volume if the author should fail to mention a char- 
 acteristic that is noted by nearly all the critics of Dickens, 
 friendly as well as hostile. 
 
 " It is only when he approaches the delineation of gentility, 
 or attempts the attitude of philosophic satire, that he exhibits 
 traces of the one unpardonable thing ; and his vulgarest book, 
 his one book tainted with incurable, hopeless vulgarity, is his 
 ' Child's History of England.' . . . As a terrorist and a 
 manufacturer of villains with a capital V, Dickens has, I be- 
 lieve, from the first been exposed to the doubts and sneers of 
 callous heretics. ... [I am surprised] by the astonishingly 
 vague and unpractical character of the optimism which in- 
 spired such alternatives as the novelist suggested or seemed to 
 suggest [for the evils of the social system], . . . Except 
 among those readers who had no more knowledge of the sub- 
 ject than tkeir author, it was impossible that many, even 
 from the first, should not be struck with the almost incon- 
 ceivable ignorance [of Dickens] of all of the upper class and 
 a large part of the middle class which his books displayed. 
 His soldier-officers, his clergymen, his scholars, his 
 miscellaneous gentlemen, much more his baronets and his 
 peers, were like nothing that lives and moves on any part of 
 the earth except the boards of the stage. Rose Maylie and 
 Kate Nickleby are not live girls but wax dolls." Saintsbury. 
 
 " I demur to the common assertion that Dickens could not 
 draw a gentleman. All that can be said is that it very rarely 
 suited his purpose to do so, supposing the term to include 
 manners as well as feelings." A. W. Ward. 
 
 " Ladies and gentlemen were out of Dickens's sphere alto- 
 gether ; and though the greater part of his life as a successful 
 and famous man was spent in their society, he never learned 
 to draw them. . . . Such totally unreal personages as 
 Ralph Nickleby, Sir Mulberry Hawk, Steerforth, Quilp, Mr.
 
 644 DICKENS 
 
 Dombey, and Sir Leicester Dedlock may, perhaps, have their 
 counterparts in the waters under the earth, but certainly in 
 the other localities mentioned in the second Commandment 
 their like has not been seen. . . . The pure and blame- 
 less heroines such as Agnes, . . . when they are not utterly 
 insignificant, are still more completely without interest. One 
 page of the Marchioness is worth all the Kates and Ruths 
 put together. It is an amiable fault to paint virtues in the 
 finest colors, but it is unfortunate when they are mere streaks 
 of pure white such as fatigue the eye to rest upon." Mrs. 
 Oliphant. 
 
 " Nor had he the gift of drawing any noble gentlewomen 
 his women are at the best but dolls nor any fine, true-hearted 
 gentleman. . . . One of Thackeray's men or Charles 
 Reade's women is worth a cart-load of Dickens's middle- 
 class dolls." -J. H. Friswell. 
 
 In reply to such criticisms as the three last quoted, Richard 
 Hengist Home exclaims, concerning the description of the 
 pauper funeral in " Oliver Twist : " " O ye scions of a refined 
 age readers of the scrupulous taste, who, here and there, in 
 apprehensive circles, exclaim upon Dickens as a low writer 
 and lover of low scenes look at this passage find out how 
 low it is and rise up from the contemplation chastened, puri- 
 fied wiser because sorrow-softened and better men through 
 the enlargement of your sympathies! . . . Perhaps the 
 reason why Dickens never successfully paints the upper classes 
 is because there is little, if any, humour or genuine wit in the 
 upper classes, where all gusto of that kind is polished away." 
 
 "He rioted in verbal vulgarisms. ... He sinned re- 
 peatedly against taste. . . . He could be both noisy and 
 vulgar." W. E. Henley. 
 
 " The vulgarity of his attempt at aristocracy his lords and 
 baronets is woful. . . . We are inclined to predict of 
 works of this style that an ephemeral popularity will be fol- 
 lowed by an early oblivion." -J, W. Croker.
 
 DICKENS 645 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " ' Mr. Jarndyce,' said Sir Leicester in reply, as he bowed and 
 seated himself, ' I do myself the honor of calling here ' 
 
 " ' You do me the honor, Sir Leicester.' 
 
 " 'Thank you of calling here on my road from Lincolnshire 
 to express my regret that any cause of complaint, however strong, 
 that I may have against a gentleman who who is known to you 
 and has been your host, and to whom therefore I will make no 
 further reference, should have prevented you, still more ladies 
 under your escort, from seeing whatever there may be to gratify 
 a polite and refined taste at my house, Chesney Wold. 
 It is possible, Mr. Jarndyce, that the gentleman to whom, for 
 the reasons I have mentioned, I refrain from making further al- 
 lusion it is possible, Mr. Jarndyce, that that gentleman may 
 have done me the honor so far to misapprehend my character as 
 to induce you to believe that you would not have been received 
 by my local establishment in Lincolnshire with that urbanity, 
 that courtesy, which its members are instructed to show to all 
 ladies and gentlemen who present themselves at that house. I 
 merely beg to observe, sir, that the fact is the reverse.' " Bleak 
 House. 
 
 " ' I am afraid you have been giving her some of your wicked 
 looks, my lord,' said the intended. 
 
 " ' No, no, no,' replied the old lord, ' no, no, I'm going to be 
 married and lead a new life. Ha, ha, ha ! a new life, a new life ! 
 ha, ha, ha ! ' . . 
 
 " ' I hope you don't think good looks a disqualification for the 
 business, my lord,' said Madame Mantalini, simpering. 
 
 <: 'Not by any means,' replied the old lord, 'or you would 
 have left it long ago.' 
 
 ' ' You naughty creature,' said the lively lady, poking the peer 
 with her parasol ; ' I won't have you talk so. How dare you ? 
 Nay, you bad man, you positively shall go first ; I 
 wouldn't leave you behind with that pretty girl, not for half a 
 second. I know you too well. Jane, my dear, let him go first, 
 and we shall be quite sure of him.' 
 
 " The old lord, evidently much flattered by this suspicion, be- 
 stowed a grotesque leer upon Kate as he passed ; and, receiving
 
 646 DICKENS 
 
 another tap of the parasol for his wickedness, tottered down 
 stairs to the door, where his sprightly body was hoisted into the 
 carriage by two stout footmen." Nicholas Nickleby. 
 
 " ' An unexpected playsure, Nickleby,' said Lord Frederick 
 Verisopht, taking his glass out of his right eye, where it had, un- 
 til now, done duty on Kate, and fixing it in his left, to bring it to 
 bear on Ralph. 
 
 " ' Designed to surprise you, Lord Frederick,' said Mr. Pluck. 
 
 " 'Not a bad idea,' said his lordship, ' and one that would al- 
 most warrant the addition of an extra two and a half per cent.' 
 
 " ' Nickleby,' said Sir Mulberry Hawk, in a thick, coarse voice, 
 ' take the hint and tack it on to the other five-and-twenty, or 
 whatever it is, and give me half for the advice.' 
 
 "Sir Mulberry garnished this speech with a hoarse laugh, 
 and terminated it with a pleasant oath regarding Mr. Nickle- 
 by's limbs, whereat Messrs. Pike and Pluck laughed consumedly. 
 . . . Verisopht, who was to lead Kate down stairs, drew her 
 arm through his up to the elbow. 
 
 " ' No, damn it, Verisopht,' said Sir Mulberry, ' fair play's a 
 jewel, and Miss Nickleby and I settled the matter with our eyes, 
 ten minutes ago. ' " Nicholas Nickleby, 
 
 II. Diffuseness. " Dickens's diffuseness may arise in a 
 great measure from his writing his novels in periodical num- 
 bers, so that he had often to write against time. . . . He 
 becomes tedious also in depicting high life, as if out of his 
 element. His lords are merely stuffed figures." 6". Davey. 
 
 Saintsbury calls this habit of diffuseness, " the dreary 
 mannerism which appears in ' Bleak House,' which simply 
 floods ' Little Dorrit ' and ' Hard Times,' and which seldom 
 retires for long in any of the later books. ' ' 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " Tossing to and fro upon his hot, uneasy bed ; tormented by 
 a fierce thirst which nothing could appease ; unable to find in 
 any change of posture a moment's peace or ease, and rambling 
 ever through deserts of thought where there was no resting- 
 place ; no sight or sound suggestive of rest or repose, nothing
 
 DICKENS 647 
 
 but a dull, eternal weariness, with no change but the restless 
 shiftings of his miserable body and the weary wandering of 
 his mind, constant, still to one ever-present anxiety to a sense 
 of something left undone, of some fearful obstacle to be sur- 
 mounted, of some carking care that would not be driven away, 
 and which haunted the distempered brain, now in this form, now 
 in that, always shadowy and dim, but recognizable for the same 
 phantom in every shape it took ; darkening every vision like an 
 evil conscience, and making slumber horrible." Old Curiosity 
 Shop. 
 
 " To record of Mr. Dombey that he was not in his way 
 affected by this intelligence would be to do him an injustice. He 
 was not a man of whom it could properly be said that he was 
 ever startled or shocked ; but he certainly had a sense within 
 him that if his wife should sicken and decay he would be very 
 sorry, and that he would find a something gone from among his 
 plate and furniture and other household possessions, which was 
 well worth the having, and could not be lost without sincere re- 
 gret. Though it would be a cool, business-like, gentlemanly, 
 self-possessed regret, no doubt." Dombey and Son. 
 
 " Mr. Bounderby's first disquietude on hearing of his happi- 
 ness was occasioned by the necessity of imparting it to Mrs. 
 Sparsit. He could not make up his mind how to do that or 
 what the consequences of the act might be. Whether she 
 would instantly depart, bag and baggage, to Lady Scadgers, 
 or would positively refuse to budge from the premises ; whether 
 she would be plaintive or abusive, tearful or tearing ; whether she 
 would break her heart or break the looking-glase. However, as it 
 must be done, he had no choice but to do it; so, afte-r attempt- 
 ing several letters and failing in them all, he resolved to do it 
 by word of mouth." Hard Tim&s.
 
 RUSKIN, 1819 
 
 Biographical Outline. John Ruskin, born in London, 
 February 8, 1819 ; father a wine merchant of Scotch descent, 
 a man of some literary and aesthetic culture and, eventually, 
 of considerable wealth ; Ruskin passes much of his childhood 
 and youth at Herne Hill, near Dulwich, where he writes his 
 earlier works ; during almost every summer, up to his twen- 
 tieth year, he makes a wide tour through various parts of 
 England and Scotland with his parents, in their private car- 
 riage; he visits Paris and Brussels in 1825; at four teaches 
 himself to read and write after an original method, and makes 
 rhymes before he can write them ; is a book-worm at five ; 
 between 1826 and 1829 prints with a pen a " work " of three 
 volumes, imitating the style of Miss Edgeworth ; studies 
 Latin grammar with his mother, and becomes greatly inter- 
 ested in natural science ; writes numerous poems and dramas 
 from his seventh to his tenth year ; has his first tutor (in 
 Latin) in 1829, and begins sketching in 1831 ; in 1830 he 
 visits the Lake District and the mountains of Cumberland, 
 and becomes a "mountain-worshipper;" sees Southey and 
 Wordsworth at church at Windermere ; begins Greek in 1830, 
 and is soon versifying Anacreon ; tries to copy Cruikshank's 
 illustrations of Grimm's fairy tales; in 1831 has his first 
 drawing-master, and takes up French and geometry; writes 
 imitations of the Waverley novels, " Childe Harold," " Don 
 Juan," and various other works ; in 1832 receives inspiration 
 from Turner's vignettes in Rogers's " Italy; " during the sum- 
 mer of 1832 he posts leisurely through northern France, Bel- 
 gium, southern Germany, and Italy to Como, Milan, and 
 
 648
 
 RUSKIN 649 
 
 Genoa, and returns via Chamouni and Paris, making descrip- 
 tive verses, prose sketches, and drawings of all objects of in- 
 terest (first sees the falls of Schaffhausen on this tour) ; in 1833 
 he enters the day school of the Rev. Thomas Dale at Peck- 
 ham, to fit for Oxford ; Ruskin's father proposes to make him 
 a clergyman ; he is greatly interested in mineralogy, and at- 
 tempts a " Dictionary of Minerals ;" publishes an essay on 
 mountain structure in Loudon's Magazine of Natural History 
 in March, 1834; goes abroad in 1835, determined to make 
 original investigations in mineralogy, meteorology, etc. ; in- 
 vents a cyanometer, and begins his annual journal of travel in 
 verse ; spends much of the summer in the Bernese Oberland, 
 Venice, Verona, and the Tyrol ; during this tour he sees on 
 the Rigi the storm scene so wonderfully described in " Modern 
 Painters;" publishes in Friendship's Offering, December, 
 1835, poems entitled " Andernach," " St. Goar," and "Salz- 
 burg ; " early in 1836 he falls passionately in love with Adele 
 Domecq, a convent-bred Catholic, daughter of his father's 
 Paris partner (Ruskin had been bred an English churchman 
 by his very pious mother) ; writes for his love a romance 
 entitled " Leoni, a Legend of Italy," which is published in 
 Friendship' 's Offering in 1837 ; during 1836 he writes love 
 poems, a romantic novel, and a play, " Marcolini," of some 
 merit ; his love affair is terminated by Adele's marriage, in 
 1839, to a French nobleman ; in 1835 Ruskin makes many 
 outline drawings touched with color in imitation of Front's 
 lithographs ; he takes six lessons from Copley Fielding, then 
 President of the Water Color Society, and receives inspiration 
 from Turner's pictures in the Exhibition of 1836; writes for 
 BlackwootTs Magazine a reply to an adverse criticism on 
 Turner that had appeared in its pages, and submits the article 
 to Turner, who suppresses it; is matriculated as a "gentle- 
 man commoner" at Christ Church, Oxford, late in 1836, 
 and goes into residence there in January, 1837 ; writes " The 
 Gipsies" in competition for the Newdigate prize in poetry,
 
 650 RUSKIN 
 
 but is defeated by Arthur (afterward Dean) Stanley ; makes 
 many fine drawings, mainly architectural, and, during the 
 summer of 1837, contributes to London's Architectural Maga- 
 zine an article on "The Poetry of Architecture," and under 
 the pseudonym " Kata Pushin " (according to nature), five 
 articles on "The Convergence of Perpendiculars ; " in 1838 
 he writes " The Comparative Advantages of the Studies of 
 Music and Painting," and is quoted under his pseudonym, 
 as an authority on architecture ; studies geology at Oxford 
 under Buckland and Acland; competes for the Newdigate 
 prize again in 1838, -writing "The Exile of St. Helena," 
 and is again defeated; wins the Newdigate in 1839 with his 
 poem " Salsette and Elephanta;" in 1840, on coming of 
 age, he receives from his father an allowance of ^200 a year 
 for pocket money, and promptly spends it all for one of 
 Turner's pictures ; meets Turner for the first time soon after- 
 ward ; in the spring of 1840 his health is so affected by the 
 outcome of his love affair that he leaves the University, 
 abandons his plans for the church, and for two years seeks 
 health in travel and varied medical treatment ; visits Nor- 
 mandy, the Riviera, Rome, Naples, Venice, Basle, and re- 
 turns to England in June, 1841 ; spends the autumn in Wales 
 and at Leamington, undergoing medical treatment ; at Leam- 
 ington he meets his future wife, and, at her challenge, writes a 
 fairy tale, " The King of the Golden River," which was pub- 
 lished in 1843 ; takes up his university work again in November, 
 1841, under his tutor Gordon ; is deficient in Latin and Greek, 
 but excels in French, biblical knowledge, and mineralogy; 
 passes his final examination and receives A.B. from Oxford in 
 May, 1842 ; continues drawing lessons under J. D. Harding, 
 and, on his return to England in June, 1842, determines on art 
 criticism as his life work ; writes and publishes the first vol- 
 ume of " Modern Painters ' during the winter of 1842-43 ; 
 in August, 1843, removes with his parents from Herne Hill 
 to Denmark Hill, nearer the centre of London, and becomes
 
 RUSKIN 651 
 
 a social " lion ; " takes M.A. from Oxford in October ; tours 
 through Switzerland again in 1844, stopping to study the old 
 masters at Paris; in 1845 makes his first Continental tour 
 alone, stopping to study Christian art at Lucca, Verona, and 
 Venice ; is tortured with doubts concerning religious truth ; 
 writes and publishes " Modern Painters," Volume II., during 
 the winter of 1845-46 ; makes another tour through Switzerland 
 and Italy in 1846 ; to Ambleside for rest in 1847, suffering 
 still from pectoral weakness and from a spinal weakness which, 
 eventually, causes a slight deformity ; from Ambleside to 
 Leamington for treatment and thence to Perth, where he 
 becomes engaged to Miss Charlotte Withers, the " fair maid 
 of Perth," whom he had met in 1838; is married to Miss 
 Withers at Perth April 10, 1848 ; makes a tour of Normandy 
 with his wife in the summer of 1848, returning to London in 
 October, and settling at 31 Park Street, where Ruskin writes 
 "The Seven Lamps of Architecture" during the winter of 
 1848-49, himself making the plates for illustrating the book 
 in soft-ground etching ; he makes another Continental tour 
 in 1849 ; settles in Venice to study architecture, and re- 
 turns in February, 1850, to London, where he writes " The 
 Stones of Venice," illustrating the book with engravings in 
 mezzotint and line made by his own hand; in 1850 Rus- 
 kin' s father collects and publishes his son's poems; during 
 1851 are published " The King of the Golden River," Vol- 
 ume I. of " The Stones of Venice," and the theological pam- 
 phlet " Notes on the Construction of Sheepfolds." " The 
 Stones" is severely criticised by "the Philistines," but is 
 highly praised by Carlyle in a personal letter, which begins a 
 voluminous correspondence between Ruskin and his "mas- 
 ter," continued during Carlyle's life; during 1851 Ruskin 
 also revises Volumes I. and II. of " Modern Painters," and 
 publishes " Pre-Raphaelitism ; " from August, 1851, to June, 
 1852, he is at Venice studying architecture; he returns in 
 July, 1852, to Herne Hill, where he writes Volumes II. and
 
 652 RUSKIN 
 
 III. of " The Stones of Venice," published in 1853 ; he lect- 
 ures at Edinburgh on Architecture and Painting during the 
 summer of 1853 (lectures published in 1854) ; makes another 
 Swiss tour in 1854, returning to London and helping to 
 found the Working Men's College in October ; with D. G. 
 Rossetti, Ruskin teaches classes in painting, weekly, at the 
 college a service that he performs faithfully for many ensu- 
 ing winters; in the autumn of 1854 his wife, whose tastes 
 had proved totally incompatible with his own, leaves him 
 permanently the entire facts relating to the separation have 
 never been published ; during 1855 Ruskin meets the Brown- 
 ings (who become warm friends and regular correspondents), 
 studies shipping at Deal, and writes and publishes Volumes 
 III. and IV. of " Modern Painters; " makes another Swiss 
 tour with his parents in 1856, returning to London in the 
 winter, where he writes and publishes " The Elements of 
 Drawing," long used as a text-book; during 1857 he lectures 
 frequently in London on art-topics and at Manchester in July 
 on " The Political Economy of Art; " makes another tour of 
 Scotland in 1857, and spends the winter of 1857-58 at the 
 National Gallery arranging and restoring Turner's sketches, 
 which had been left to mildew and destruction; he rescues 
 and mounts between glass some four hundred out of 19,000 ; 
 during 1858 he gives several lectures and makes another 
 Swiss tour ; during 1859 visits, with his parents, Berlin, 
 Dresden, Nuremberg, Munich, etc., and returns to London 
 to write Volume V. of " Modern Painters" in the winter; 
 about this time art becomes subordinated, in Ruskin's mind, 
 to ethical considerations; during the summer of 1860 he forms 
 friendships with Charles Eliot Norton, Mrs. Stowe, and Walt 
 Whitman, all of whom he meets at Genoa ; he gradually re- 
 jects "orthodox religion, orthodox morals and politics, ortho- 
 dox art, and orthodox science ; " writes " Unto This Last" 
 while at Chamouni, in the summer of 1860 ; spends the fol- 
 lowing winter at Denmark Hill ; continues lecturing in 1861,
 
 RUSKIN 653 
 
 and in the autumn visits Savoy, where he writes " Munera 
 Pulveris" which is published at first serially, and appears in 
 book form in 1872 ; he spends the summer of 1862 in Switz- 
 erland ; returns to lecture at the Working Men's College in 
 December, and goes back to Mornex, Switzerland, till June, 
 1863, where he studies the geology of the Alps; lectures at 
 London on "Stratified Alps" in June, and becomes more 
 intimate with Carlyle ; during 1864 he lectures at London, 
 Bradford, and Manchester on economic subjects, and dis- 
 continues his teaching at the Working Men's College ; his 
 father dies in March, 1864, leaving Ruskin a legacy of 
 ^120,000 ; his cousin, Miss Agnew (afterward Mrs. Severn), 
 becomes a member of Ruskin's family in April, 1864, and is 
 thenceforward the guardian of his health and comfort ; in 1864 
 he publishes ' ' Queen's Gardens ' ' obscurely as a pamphlet ; he 
 is in England during 1865 lecturing and publishing "Ses- 
 ame and Lilies," which passed through fourteen editions up 
 to 1892 ; he also studies educational methods, and devises 
 the system portrayed in his " Ethics of the Dust," pub- 
 lished in 1866 (Carlyle calls it " a most shining perform- 
 ance ") ; the " Ethics " was unpopular at first, but was repub- 
 lished in 1877, and eight thousand copies were soon sold ; 
 Ruskin spends the summer of 1866 in Switzerland, starting 
 with the Trevelyans as companions ; he is at home during 
 1867, lecturing and publishing " Time and Tide ; " receives 
 LL.D. from Oxford in May ; spends most of 1868 in mineral 
 researches, lecturing at Dublin and at London and making a 
 tour through Belgium; in 1869 he lectures, travels through 
 Switzerland and Italy again, is elected Slade Professor of Fine 
 Art at Oxford in August, and publishes " The Queen of the 
 Air; " he delivers his first course of Oxford lectures in Febru- 
 ary, 1870 ; then to Italy and back to Oxford for his second 
 course in December ; during 1871 he publishes "Fors Clavi- 
 gera" No. I, gives his third course at Oxford, is severely ill, 
 and, after partial recovery, buys his present [1897] home,
 
 654 RUSKIN 
 
 Brantwood, in the Lake District ; he endows a mastership in 
 drawing at Oxford with ^5,000, and gives ^7,000 to the 
 St. George's Society, which he had then recently helped to 
 found ; he is elected Lord Rector of St. Andrew's University, 
 but is disqualified from serving because of his relations to 
 Oxford ; his mother dies in 1871, aged ninety ; during 1872 
 Ruskin delivers his fourth and fifth courses at Oxford, making 
 his customary Italian tour between the two, and takes up his 
 residence at Brantwood ; during this year he becomes deeply 
 interested in the problem of better housing for the poor and 
 in the matter of street-cleaning; publishes "The Eagle's 
 Nest," and withdraws most of his early books from circulation 
 for the time; during 1873 ne ^ s re-elected Slade Professor, 
 gives several general lectures and his sixth course at Oxford, 
 and publishes "Ariadne Florentina ; " from 1872 to 1875 
 he becomes devotedly attached to a former lady pupil, and 
 proposes marriage, but is refused because he *vill not declare 
 that he loves God more than her; she dies broken-hearted 
 soon afterward; during 1874 he travels through Italy and 
 Sicily, is severely ill at Assisi, and returns to deliver his 
 seventh and eighth courses at Oxford, where he has Prince 
 Leopold as an interested pupil; during 1875 he makes a car- 
 riage tour of northern England, establishes a museum at Shef- 
 field, and gives his ninth course at Oxford, having as a pupil 
 W. H. Mallock, whom Ruskin pronounces to be the only man 
 who ever really understood him ; during 1876 he is re-elected 
 Slade Professor, and, after several general lectures, goes to 
 Paris and then to Venice, where he remains till June, 1877 ; 
 he experiences a reawakening of his old religious feelings, 
 and retracts his sceptical judgments ; forms the Guild of St. 
 George, a semi-socialistic society, from 1873 to 1877 ; gives 
 his tenth course at Oxford in 1877 ; publishes " Fors Clavi- 
 gera" in ninety-six parts from 1871 to 1884 afterward col- 
 lected and published in eight volumes; publishes "Pro- 
 serpina " in ten parts from 1875 to 188-6, and " Deucalion "
 
 RUSKIN 655 
 
 in eight parts from 1875 to 1883 ; during 1877 he visits 
 Prince Leopold at Windsor and also Gladstone, whom Ruskin 
 had misunderstood and attacked ; he becomes reconciled with 
 Gladstone, and promptly publishes an admission of his error 
 in the current number of Fors ; he is severely ill with in- 
 flammation of the brain at Brantwood in March, 1878 ; later 
 he publishes in Fors a criticism on the artist Whistler, 
 who sues Ruskin for libel, wins, and gets one farthing dam- 
 ages ; Ruskin 's costs are paid by voluntary public subscrip- 
 tion ; early in 1879 he resigns the Slade Professorship, and 
 has a bitter contest with Tyndall over the theory of glacial 
 action ; he is at Brantwood in feeble health during most of 
 1879, 1880, and 1881, where he is cared for by his cousin, 
 Mrs. Severn ; during 1880 he visits France, lectures at Eton, 
 and publishes "The Lord's Prayer and the Church; " in 
 1882 he removes with the Severns to Herne Hill, revisits 
 France and Italy, and goes back to Brantwood early in 1883 ; 
 he resumes lecturing at Oxford ; is at Herne Hill during 
 1885, where he forms and lectures to the " Society of the 
 Friends of Living Creatures; " publishes, in 1885, a reprint 
 of all his magazine articles under the title " The Old Road," 
 and begins his autobiography, " Praterita" of which twenty- 
 four of the twenty-eight parts have since been published in two 
 volumes ; he is severely ill again at Brantwood in 1886, and 
 when not entirely recovered mails his famous letter to the 
 Richmond rector; visits southern England again in 1887 and 
 the Continent in 1888; in the summer of 1889 he attempts 
 to continue " Prceterita " at Seascale, on the Cumberland 
 Coast, but is compelled by the failure of his powers to 
 give up the task ; devotes his remaining strength to writing 
 "Joanna's Care," a tribute to his cousin, Mrs. Severn; he 
 refuses to attempt any further literary effort after 1890, and 
 has since lived quietly at Brantwood. From his fifteenth to 
 his sixty-ninth year Ruskin published at least seventy-two 
 volumes and one hundred magazine articles, made several
 
 656 RUSKIN 
 
 hundred drawings and engravings, delivered scores, perhaps 
 hundreds, of lectures, and made at least nineteen Continental 
 tours, besides travelling much about Great Britain. 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY ON RUSKIN'S STYLE. 
 
 McCarthy, J., " Modern Leaders." New York, 1872, Sheldon, 183- 
 
 191. 
 Mather, J. M., " The Life and Teachings of Ruskin. " New York, 1890, 
 
 Warne. 
 Waldstein, C., "The Work of Ruskin.'" New York, 1893, Harper, 
 
 1-200. 
 Lancaster, H. H., "Essays and Reviews." Edinburgh, 1876, Edmon- 
 
 ston & Douglass, 297-351. 
 Cooke, G. W., "Poets and Problems." Boston, 1886, Ticknor, 175- 
 
 267. 
 Bayne, P., "Essays in Biography and Criticism." Boston, 1857, Gould 
 
 & Lincoln, I : 281-324. 
 Saintsbury, G., " Corrected Impressions. " New York, 1895, Houghton, 
 
 Mifflin & Co., 198-218. 
 Oliphant, Mrs., "The Victorian Age of English Literature." New 
 
 York, 1892, Tail, 501-529. 
 Bayne, P., "Lessons from my Masters." New York, 1879, Harper, 
 
 367-449. 
 
 Cook, E. T., "Studies in Ruskin." London, 1890, G. Allen, v. index. 
 Robertson, J. M., "Modern Humanists." London, 1891, Swan, Son- 
 
 nenschein & Co., 184-212. 
 
 Godwin, P., "Out of the Past." New York, 1870, Putnam, 367-394. 
 Shepard, W. S.," Pen Pictures of Modern Authors." New York, 1886, 
 
 Putnam, 56-68. 
 Collingwood, W. G., "The Art Teaching of Ruskin." New York, 
 
 1891, Putnam. 
 Friswell, J. H., "Modern Men of Letters." London, 1870, Hodder & 
 
 Stoughton, 91-119. 
 Ritchie, A. T., " Records of John Ruskin." New York, 1892, Harper, 
 
 63-125- 
 Nicoll, H. J., " Landmarks of English Literature." New York, 1883, 
 
 Appleton, 432-436. 
 Welsh, A. H., "Deyelopment of English Literature." Chicago, 1884, 
 
 Griggs, 2 : 488-505. 
 Mitford, M. R. , " Recollections of a Literary Life." New York, 1851, 
 
 Harper, 547, etc.
 
 RUSKIN 657 
 
 Henley, W. E., "Views and Reviews." New York, 1890, Scribner, 16. 
 Phillips, M. G., "A Manual of English Literature." New York, 1893, 
 
 Harper, 2 : 419-420. 
 Cook, D. , "Art of England." London, 1869, Sampson, Lowe & Co., 
 
 3I6-359- 
 Hutton, R. H., "Criticisms on Contemporary Thought." London, 
 
 1894, Macmillan, 2 : 106-120. 
 Atlantic Monthly, 42: 39-51 (H. E. Scudder). 
 Nineteenth Century, 3: 136-145; 4: 925-931. 
 North American Review, 66: 110-145 (F. Dexter); 72: 294-316(8. G. 
 
 Brown); 102 : 306-312 (R. Sturgis). 
 The .\ 'ation, 33: 220-221 (A. G. Sedgwick); 12: 221 (W. J. Stillman) ; 
 
 29: 411-412 (R. Sturgis); 46: 263-264; 54: 16-17 (W. J- Still- 
 man) ; 57 : 159-160 (W. J. Stillman). 
 Edinburgh Review, 103: 273-284; 167: 198-234. 
 Foreign Quarterly Review, 37 : 380-416. 
 Quarterly Review, 98 : 384-433. 
 New Englander, 29: 659-677 (H. M. Day). 
 
 British Quarterly Rei'iew, 32: 412-439; 13: 476-496; 18: 460-483. 
 Methodist Quarterly Review, 20: 533-544 (G. Haven); 49: 697-710 
 
 (W. N. McElroy). 
 
 The Chicago Dial, i : 228-229 (W. F. Allen). 
 Lutheran Quarterly, 10: 1-23 (C. A. Stork). 
 Eclectic Magazine, 31 : 65-78 (Hogg). 
 Christian Observer, 62 : 658-678. 
 Appleton's Journal, 20: 58-65 (T. M. Coan). 
 Century Magazine, 13 : 357-366 (W. J. Stillman). 
 Harper's Magazine, 18: 382-418 (Chas. Waldstein). 
 Blackwood^s Magazine, 75 : 740-756 ; 70 : 326-348. 
 Macmillan 's Magazine, 22 : 423-434 (S. Brooke). 
 Eclectic Review, 112: 478-488; 103: 545-563. 
 Prospective Review, 10 : 19-51. 
 The American, 51: 265-266 (E. McCall). 
 Unitarian Review, 23 : 241-257 (D. M. Wilson). 
 North British Review, 36 : 1-20 (H. H. Lancaster). 
 Tinsley's Magazine, 43 : 686-691 (Julia Firth). 
 Once a Week, 26 : 475-479. 
 The Galaxy, 13: 164-172 (J. McCarthy). 
 The Critic, 19 : 286-287 (Daily News). 
 The Practical Magazine, 7: 161-165 (W. S. C). 
 Good Words, 35: 538-540 (Mrs. E. T. Cook); 34: 477-481 (Mrs. E 
 
 T. Cook). 
 42
 
 658 RUSKIN 
 
 The Art Journal, 45 : 336. 
 
 Poet Lore, 5 : 1-7 (W. G. Kingsland). 
 
 Fraser's Magazine, 9: 688-701 (L. Stephen); 89: 688-701 (L. 
 
 Stephen) ; 49 : 127-138. 
 National Review, 5 : 403-412 (E. S. P). 
 
 Temple Bar, 83 : 49-55. 
 
 Scottish Review, 24: 21-44 (Kaufmann). 
 
 Spectator, 50: 435-436; 50: 467-468 and 1174-1175. 
 
 PARTICULAR CHARACTERISTICS. 
 
 I: Descriptive Power. " There are many to whom the 
 heavens declared no glory and the earth unfolded no form 
 until Ruskin's writings opened their eyes to see and their 
 hearts to feel ; many who never saw the beauty of cloud form, 
 nor knew the majesty of the hills, nor felt the sweetness of the 
 meadows until taught by him in ' Modern Painters.' Here 
 lies much of his power : he can bring back to us the wonder 
 of childhood; he is, in this sense, the restorer of paradise." 
 /. M. Mather. 
 
 " With equal truth he gives us the clouds sweeping in 
 stormy grandeur ; calmly floating like angels' wings in the far 
 distance of the higher heaven ; clustering in gorgeous pomp 
 around the sunset ; lying dark against the fading orange of 
 the evening sky. And in all this there is a quietness and 
 freedom from exaggeration which does not always pervade 
 Mr. Ruskin's writings." H. H. Lancaster. 
 
 " Listen to Ruskin's description of the sea, and you think 
 he must have spent his days and years in watching the beauty 
 of its garlanded summer waves and the tortured writhing of 
 its wintry billows. Follow his eye as it ranges over the broad 
 fields of the sky, and you are impressed with the idea that it 
 could never have been turned from observing the processions 
 of the clouds across the blue or tracing the faint streaks of 
 the cirri, lying like soft maiden's hair along heaven's azure, 
 or watching the sun as he touches the whole sky with gold and 
 scarlet and vermilion, to be for him a regal tent at eventide.
 
 RUSKIN 659 
 
 Go with him into the forest, and you believe that he has 
 studied nothing else but the forms of stem and branch, the 
 arrangement of light and shade in the hollows of the foliage. 
 Enter with him the cathedral of the mountains, mark atten- 
 tively as he points out ' their gates of rock, pavements of 
 cloud, choirs of stream and stone, altars of snow, and vaults 
 of purple traversed by the continual stars,' and you conclude 
 that there he must always have worshipped. . . . What- 
 ever he may call himself, it is as a painter of nature with words 
 that Ruskin is named with enthusiasm wherever men speak the 
 English tongue. It has been through his books, not through 
 his pictures, that he has mainly influenced his generation. 
 . You are apt, when you read his account of one 
 series of natural appearances, to conclude that he must have 
 devoted all his time and all his attention to that particular 
 scries. To show the flickering dance of sunbeams on forest 
 leaves, to set before us the very spring and prancing of the 
 waves, to word-paint the wreathing of the mist and every 
 caprice and humor of the sky, required rather an abundant 
 supply of words ; but the supply at Ruskin's command was a 
 small matter to his power of laying them on, to the exquisite 
 precision with which he applied every vocable. . . . We 
 do not, for our part, recall a single instance in which he has 
 deliberately set himself to place a scene before our eyes, with- 
 out enabling us, after a sufficiently close and steady look, to 
 see it in its grand, consistent features. ... In the ele- 
 ments of descriptive power, which underlie the garb, either of 
 prose or verse, we have no hesitation in declaring that, with 
 the exception of one or two of Byron's highest efforts, such as 
 his description of the storm in the Alps, the boasted and mag- 
 nificent descriptions of that poet are decidedly inferior to those 
 of Ruskin. Such a series of descriptions, indeed, as Ruskin's 
 does not, in prose or verse, exist in the English language, or, 
 we are assured, in any other." Peter Bayne. 
 
 " I feel confident that whoever has read the works of Rus-
 
 660 RUSKIN 
 
 kin will thereafter approach nature with a new faculty of ap- 
 preciation, will have his attention directed to what he before 
 passed by with indifference, and will discover what before was 
 hidden. . . . And this will not be only with regard to the 
 beauties of the Alps or the stormy sea, but they will be able 
 to extract elevating pleasure out of each flower that blooms 
 before their window in the summer, and even out of the deli- 
 cate tracery-work of the bare branches of the trees, deadened 
 by the cold winter, that stands at the back of their house or 
 in the city square. . . . Ruskin, in his best description 
 of nature, does also use movement as the central energy of his 
 descriptive motive. Clouds are not merely square or round 
 or multiform, but they move, swing, sweep, or hang to or in 
 their various shapes; their colors are growing or fading in 
 their intensity or asserting some relation to one another ; nay, 
 even the shape of each rock and stone and leaf and twig is 
 described in the varied motion of its lines. It is one of the 
 most astonishing and admirable qualities of his best passages 
 that, with all their alliteration and the harmony of sound 
 which pervades his ordered array, the description is most mi- 
 nute and accurate; and no better words, no words encir- 
 cling and penetrating the meanings of things more fully and 
 promptly, could have been chosen." Charles Waldstcin. 
 
 " 'The Stones of Venice ' is the book of descriptive prose 
 in English, and all others toil after it in vain." Saintsbury. 
 
 " Many passages from the ' Modern Painters ' and those 
 books that immediately followed it, such as that of the writer's 
 first view of Venice, are quoted as one should frame a picture 
 rather than as mere descriptions in words are usually treated. 
 These delectable passages are indeed pictures as noble as any in 
 Turner, and are constantly removed from the original page to 
 be hung, as it were, in the picture-galleries of the imagination, 
 where they shine with a perfection of color and tone which is 
 often denied to the finest pigments. . . . Notwithstand- 
 ing all the eccentric accompaniments of his genius, nothing
 
 RUSKIN 66 1 
 
 can touch Ruskin's high place in literature as one of the most 
 perfect masters of style and language which this century, or 
 indeed any other, has known." Mrs. Oliphant. 
 
 " What is clear is that his faculty mainly reposes on an ex- 
 traordinary power of observation. . . . If we carefully 
 consider his work from first to last, we shall see that he is, 
 above all things, a perceiver, a seer in the strict sense ; one 
 who in art detects intentions and significances where other 
 eyes miss them." -J. M. Robertson. 
 
 " He says he never knew a child more incapable than him- 
 self of telling a tale, but when he chooses to describe a man or 
 a woman, there stands the figure before us ; when he tells a 
 story we live it. His is rather the descriptive than the con- 
 structive faculty ; his mastery is over detail and quality rather 
 than form." Anne Thackeray Ritchie. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " How different must the thoughts about nature have been, of 
 the noble who lived among the bright marble porticoes of the 
 Greek groups of temple or palace, in the midst of a plain cov- 
 ered with corn and olives, and by the shore of a sparkling and 
 freighted sea, from those of the master of some mountain prom- 
 ontory in the green recesses of Northern Europe, watching night 
 by night, from amongst his heaps of storm-broken stone, rounded 
 into towers, the lightnings of the lonely sea flash round the sands 
 of Harlech or the mists changing their shapes forever among 
 the changeless pines that fringe the crests of Jura." Modern 
 Painters. 
 
 " Cressed brook and ever eddying river, lifted even in flood 
 scarcely over its stepping-stones, but through all sweet summer 
 keeping tremulous music with harp-strings of dark water among 
 the silver fingering of the pebbles. . . . With quiet depth of 
 clear water furrowing among the grass blades and looking only 
 like their shadow, but presently emerging again in little startled 
 gushes and laughing hurries, as if they had remembered suddenly 
 that the day was too short for them to get down the hill." Mod- 
 ern Painters.
 
 662 RUSKIN 
 
 " Go out, in the spring time, among the meadows that slope 
 from the shores of the Swiss lakes. There, mingled with the 
 taller gentians and the white narcissus, the grass grows deep and 
 free ; and as you follow the winding mountain paths, beneath 
 arching boughs all veiled and dim with blossoms, paths that for- 
 ever droop and rise over the green banks and mounds sweeping 
 down in scented undulation, steep to the blue water, studded here 
 and there with new-mown heaps, look up towards the higher hills, 
 where the waves of everlasting green roll silently into their long 
 inlets among the shadows of the pines." Modern Painters. 
 
 2. Magnificence Splendor of Diction. " In his 
 
 early days of enthusiasm he was often magnificent no lesser 
 word will suffice. . . . For more than forty years artists 
 in flamboyant prose have been writing after and after the 
 famous description of the falls of Schaffhausen. ... I 
 have never been a Ruskinite, though I have always thought 
 that nobody in our time has touched Ruskin at his very best 
 as an artist in the flamboyant variety of English prose. . . . 
 If these curious volumes are taken with a due amount of 
 rational salt, they cannot fail to enlarge and exercise the tastes 
 and powers of the reader. . . . They will be found to 
 contain the very finest prose (without exception and beyond 
 comparison) which has been written in English during the 
 last half of the nineteenth century. The great merit of his 
 prose is that it is never, as most of the ornate prose styles of 
 a more recent day are, affected and unnatural. . . . Mr. 
 Ruskin's purple patches despite a rather too great tendency 
 to run not merely into definitely rhythmical, but into defi- 
 nitely metrical forms are never labored ; they never suggest 
 effort, strain, or trick." Saintsbury. 
 
 " At his bidding we awake to a new consciousness of the 
 beauty and grandeur of the world. . . . Summer has for 
 us a new opulence and pride ; autumn, which is summer meet- 
 ing death with a smile, a new solemnity and a more noble 
 sadness. Even to winter we learn to look for his part in
 
 RUSKIX 663 
 
 nature's pageantry, in nature's orchestral beauty ; we find new 
 music in his storms, a new majesty in his cataracts, a more 
 exquisite pencilling in his frost-work." Peter Bayne. 
 
 " His style is stately in form, the diction is rich with beauty 
 and magnificence, and the purpose is always lofty and pure. 
 He writes as one who gives his whole heart to what he says, 
 who pours his words forth in a flood, with majestic intensity 
 and the splendor of power. He has the gift of graceful utter- 
 ance, so that every sentence is rounded and complete, happy 
 in form and instinct with charm." G. W. Cooke. 
 
 " Of this first volume [of ' Modern Painters'] what most im- 
 pressed the public was not the soundness of his views of art 
 or his knowledge of nature . . . but his elo- 
 quence, his magnificent diction." W. J. Stillman. 
 
 " Many passages of 'Modern Painters' are really poems in 
 their tenderness, their sentiment, and their grandeur." Mary 
 Russell Mitford. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " And then wait yet for one hour, while the east again becomes 
 purple, and the heaving mountains, rolling against it in darkness 
 like waves of a wild sea, are drowned one by one in the glory of 
 its burning ; watch the white glaciers blaze in their winding paths 
 about the mountains, like mighty serpents with scales of fire ; 
 watch the columnar peaks of solitary snow, kindling downward, 
 chasm by chasm, each in itself a new morning ; their long ava- 
 lanches cast down in keen streams brighter than the lightning, 
 sending each her tribute of driven snow, like altar-smoke up to 
 the heavens ; the rose-light of their silent domes flushing that 
 heaven about them and above them, piercing with purer light 
 through its purple lines of lifted cloud, casting a new glory 
 on every wreath as it passes by, until the whole heaven, one 
 scarlet canopy, is interwoven with a roof of waving flame and 
 tossing, vault beyond vault, as with the drifted winds of many 
 companies of angels ; and then, when you can look no more for 
 gladness, and when you are bowed down with fear and love for 
 the Maker and Doer of this, tell me who has delivered his mes- 
 sage unto men." Modern Painters.
 
 664 RUSKIN 
 
 " The fields ! All spring and summer is in them, the walks 
 by silent scented paths, the rests in noonday heat, the joy of 
 herds and flocks, the power of all shepherd life and meditation, 
 the life of sun-light upon the world, falling in emerald streaks 
 and falling in soft blue shadows, where else it would have struck 
 upon the dark mould or scorching dust, pastures beside the 
 pacing brooks, soft banks and knolls of lowly hills, crispy leaves 
 all dim with early dew, or smooth in evening warmth of barred 
 sunshine, dinted by happy feet, and softening in their full the 
 sound of loving voices ; all these are ^summed in those simple 
 words." Modern Painters. 
 
 " It had been wild weather when I left Rome, and all across 
 the Campagna the clouds were sweeping in sulphurous blue, 
 with a clap of thunder or two, and breaking gleams of sun along 
 the Claudian aqueduct, lighting up the infinity of its arches like 
 the bridge of chaos. But as I climbed the long slope of the 
 Alban mount, the storm swept finally to the north, and the noble 
 outlines of the dome of Albano and graceful darkness of its ilex 
 groves rose against pure streaks of alternate blue and amber ; 
 the upper sky gradually flashing through the last fragments of 
 rain-cloud in deep palpitating azure, half ether and half-dew." 
 Modern Painters. 
 
 3. Impetuous Eloquence. " [He is] one of the most 
 eloquent prose writers of any age or literature, a man whose 
 feeling for art is not a taste but a kind of passion. 
 He has written with a fire and an earnestness that were quite 
 new in critical literature. . . . He has an almost unpar- 
 alleled command of language, and in that he has carried both 
 art and energy to unsurpassed lengths. . . . It [ ' Mod- 
 ern Painters' ] is certainly, for eloquence and energy, one of 
 the most remarkable books ever produced by a youth in his 
 twenties. . . . -His prose, which from the first had a 
 boundless wealth of power and color, has in later years grown 
 more and more direct and electric without losing any of its 
 eloquence, seeming to be burned ever purer in the fire of his 
 passion. . . . The worst of it is that the man has his 
 eloquence and his dazzling flashes of insight on condition of
 
 RUSKIN 665 
 
 a prophetic fury which will not stay to reconsider. 
 His value lies in his stimulant energy, his power of disturb- 
 ing vulgar human complacency and confronting human sel- 
 fishness with higher motives and urgent menaces." -J. M. 
 Robertson. 
 
 " His mind is too discursive for poetry, too impetuous and 
 unrestrained. He rushes eagerly on when he has a thought 
 to utter, with little order and system, careless of logical 
 sequence if he can but give his ideas and his emotions full 
 expression. ... No English author is more eloquent 
 than he or more capable of sustained flights of impassioned, 
 magnetic, and powerful writing." G. W. Cooke. 
 
 "If the spirit of beauty received only the second homage 
 of his heart, ... his was an intense and energetic vas- 
 salage for all of that ; and whenever the spirit of modern im- 
 provement, real or so-called, the spirit of modern invention, 
 of industry, of material progress, blasted with the furnace breath 
 of its engine the fields, the woods, which were in his eyes 
 sacred to the spirit of beauty, he cried out against it with the 
 bitterness of a Hebrew prophet seeing the abominations of 
 desolation carried into the holy place. . . . He sees 
 clearly and feels earnestly, and what he sees and feels he de- 
 scribes with impetuous eloquence. There are whole pages of 
 rhetoric in his books which possess all the magnificence of 
 Milton or Taylor. But he is not always equal in his style 
 nor always just in his opinions." Peter Bayne. 
 
 "Mr. Rusk in is always striking, always eloquent, always 
 true to his own convictions and his own noble nature." 
 Mary Russell Mitford.
 
 666 RUSK1X 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " You knock a man into the ditch, and then you tell him to re- 
 main in the position in which Providence has placed him. That's 
 modern Christianity. You say ' we did not knock him into the 
 ditch.' How do you know what you have done or what you are 
 doing? That's just what we have all got to know, and what we 
 shall never know until the question with us, every morning, is, not 
 how to do the gainful thing, but how to do the just thing ; nor until 
 we are at least so far on the way to "being Christian as to have 
 understood that maxim of the poor half-way Mohammedan, 'One 
 hour in the execution of justice is worth seventy years of prayer.' " 
 Christian Justice. 
 
 " Do you know, if you read this, that you cannot read that 
 that what you lose to-day you cannot gain to-morrow ? Will you go 
 and gossip with your housemaid or your stable boy, when you may 
 talk with queens and kings, or flatter yourselves that it is with 
 any worthy consciousness of your own claims to respect that you 
 jostle with the hungry and common crowd for entree here and au- 
 dience there, when all the while this eternal court is open to you, 
 with its society, wide as the world, multitudinous as its days, the 
 chosen and the mighty of every place and time ? Into that you 
 may enter always ; in that you may take fellowship and rank ac- 
 cording to your wish ; from that, once entered into it, you can 
 never be outcast but by your own fault." Sesame and Lilies. 
 
 '' Are you sure there is a heaven ? Sure there is a hell ? Sure 
 that men are dropping before your faces through the pavements 
 of the street into eternal fires or sure that they are not ? Sure 
 that at your own death you are going to be delivered from all 
 sorrow, to be endowed with all virtue, to be gifted with all felic- 
 ity and raised into perpetual companionship with a king, com- 
 pared to whom the kings of the earth are as grasshoppers and the 
 nations as dust at His feet ? are you sure of this ? Or if not, do 
 any of us so much as care to make it sure ? and, if not, how can 
 anything that we do be right how can anything we think be 
 wise ; what honor can there be in the arts that amuse us or what 
 profit in the possessions that please ? " The Mystery of Life.
 
 RUSKIN 667 
 
 4. Biting Satire Fierce Invective. " The torrents 
 of scorn and the unsparing impeachment with which Ruskin 
 has swept down upon what he deems the purblind selfishness of 
 the moneyed classes, are among the finest passages of invective 
 in the English language ; while savage and desperate blows 
 aimed in return are proof that those attacked are not slow in 
 standing on their own defence nor in fighting for what they 
 suppose to be the national weal." -J. M. Mather. 
 
 " Just as he transcends Carlyle in word-magic, so does he 
 transcend him in the blazing force of his criticism of modern 
 English life, where he sees true and aims straight. 
 At times he resorts to the most amazing scurrility. Of Adam 
 Smith he writes: 'It is true that the half-bred and half- 
 witted Scotchman had not wit enough in him to carve so 
 much as his own call's head on a whinstone with his own 
 hand.' " /. M. Robertson. 
 
 " He is of the Boanerges order, an apostle of love, and full 
 of the most amiable qualities, yet always ready to call down 
 fire from heaven to consume those who follow another stand- 
 ard or go by different rules from his. . . . It is inevi- 
 table with every reformer that he should feel himself as sent to 
 a world lying in wickedness and from which every good 
 principle and power of perception has gone. And this was 
 the attitude taken emphatically by Mr. Ruskin in the begin- 
 ning of his career. . . . His strictures on those whose 
 theories or practice were averse to his rules have always been 
 severe to the point of virulence." Mrs. Oliphant. 
 
 " He has always, and bitterly, sneered at the Crystal Palace, 
 regardless of what I may be allowed to call the appealing 
 smile of not very elevated but certainly genuine satisfaction 
 on the faces of millions of men, women, boys, girls, and little 
 children, whom it has made for a few hours, at least, ex- 
 tremely happy. He has inveighed with blistering scorn 
 against the long line of suburban London streets and ' villas ' 
 inhabited by the lower middle classes of the metropolis without
 
 668 RUSKIN 
 
 its ever seeming to occur to him that in those not very bright 
 or variegated abodes thousands of honest fellows, 
 busy all day in city offices, snatch a little fresh air in the 
 mornings and evenings, toss their babies, kiss their wives, and 
 lead a perhaps not very refined but honest, healthy, manly, 
 enjoyable existence." Peter Bayne, 
 
 " There is nothing going on among us as notable to me 
 as those fierce lightning bolts Ruskin is copiously and desper- 
 ately pouring into the black world of anarchy all around him. 
 No other man in England that I meet has in him the divine 
 rage against iniquity, falsity, and baseness that Ruskin has 
 and that every man ought to have." Carlylc to Emerson, 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " In the carriage with me were two American girls with their 
 fathers and mothers, perhaps of the class which has lately made 
 so much money suddenly and does not know what to do with it. 
 . . . And they are travelling through a district which, if any in 
 the world, should touch the hearts and delight the eyes of young 
 girls. Between Venice and Verona ! Portia's villa perhaps in sight 
 upon the Brenta. Juliet's tomb to be visited in the evening, 
 blue against the southern sky the hills of Petrarch's home. . . . 
 But the two American girls were neither princesses nor peers 
 nor dreamers. By infinite self-indulgence, they had reduced 
 themselves to two pieces of white putty that could feel pain. The 
 flies and dust stuck to them as to clay, and they perceived, be- 
 tween Venice and Verona nothing but the flies and the dust." 
 Fors Clavigera. 
 
 " The Alps themselves, which your own poets used to love so 
 reverently, you look upon as soaped poles in a bear garden, which 
 you set yourselves to climb and slide down again with ' shrieks 
 of delight.' When you are past shrieking, having no human 
 articulate voice to say you are glad with, you fill the quietude of 
 their valleys with gunpowder blasts, and rush home red with cu- 
 taneous eruption of conceit and voluble with convulsive hic- 
 cough of self-satisfaction." Sesame and Lilies. 
 
 " Writers like the present critic of BlackwoocT s Magazine 
 [Christopher North] deserve the respect due to honest, hopeless,
 
 RUSKIN 669 
 
 helpless imbecility. There is something exalted in the innocence 
 of their feeblemindedness ; one cannot suspect them of partiality, 
 for it implies feeling ; nor of prejudice, for it implies some pre- 
 vious acquaintance with their subject. We are not insulted with 
 opinions on music from persons ignorant of its notes ; nor with 
 treatises on philology by persons unacquainted with the alphabet ; 
 but here is page after page of criticism, which one may read from 
 end to end, looking for something which the author knows and 
 finding nothing." Scotch Reviewers. 
 
 5. Extravagance Lack of Sanity. "His career is 
 fantastic and lacks sanity. . . . He is undoubtedly 
 compact of whim, and it would not need the courage of a 
 Euclid to define him as a body with one side only. A crotch- 
 eteer with a tongue of gold ; an enthusiastic lover of art who 
 systematically ignores some of the first laws of the artist ; a 
 political economist who would bankrupt Eldorado and unsettle 
 Sparta ; a moralist who does not know the meaning of fair- 
 ness ; a critic who does not know the meaning of balance 
 such is Mr. Ruskin. . . . His despised, and I must say I 
 think rather despicable, Political Economy wins the ground 
 that his aesthetics had lost ; and all or half of our socialists or 
 semi-socialists nowadays talk 'Unto this Last' without its mys- 
 ticism and with twice its unreason. . . . He is probably 
 more prone than any man of equal talents who has lived in 
 this century to logical fallacies and illicit processes of every 
 kind. . . . For happier expressions of crotchety fancy 
 where shall we look than in the rather numerous passages 
 where Mr. Ruskin sets forth his favorite craze that bright 
 colors are virtuous and dark and neutral tints wicked ? The 
 thing is false ; it is almost silly ; but it is so charmingly put 
 that you chuckle at once with keen pleasure and mild scorn. 
 Although he is scarcely ever wrong in admiration, 
 his dislikes are so capricious and so unreasonable that one is 
 almost safe in saying that when Mr. Ruskin passes from praise 
 to blame he may as well be neglected." Saintsbury.
 
 6/O RUSKIN 
 
 " His splendid enthusiasm, which was so real and living of 
 its kind, carried him from the beginning into the hot injustice 
 of the partisan. ... He endeavored to persuade the 
 world into a pre-scientific, as he had persuaded the painters 
 into a pre-Raphaelite, system. . . . His 'Unto this Last ' 
 . . . filled the vulgar mind with ridicule and made sober 
 men pause and wonder and often smile at what is called the 
 utterly unpractical nature of these suggestions. . . . He 
 has portrayed a workingman such as never was on sea or 
 shore. ' ' Mrs. Oliphant. 
 
 " His mastering eloquence and startling insight are flavored 
 by a passion for the irrational and the irrelevant, which leaves 
 the dispassionate judge in doubt whether his unreason does not 
 balance, as it certainly discredits, his wisdom. . . . He 
 wrote of things Protestant and Catholic entirely in the spirit 
 of his mother's Evangelicism, bringing to the inflated and rhe- 
 torical fanaticism of that day ... his own wealth of lan- 
 guage and volume of sound, but no thinking worth speaking 
 of. ... He estimates the results of machinery by fantastic 
 absolute standards and false comparative standards. 
 IfonlyRuskin could always or in general have written with 
 science or with logic could have given a work of con- 
 nected economic thought without the irrelevances and irra- 
 tionalities, which are not science but mere personal perversity 
 and caprice the recasting of economics might have gone 
 on a great deal faster! . . . He is chronically at the 
 mercy of verbal allurements, leading him into those etymo- 
 logical mysticisms over which Arnold shrugged his shoulders. 
 . . . Where sensory impressions cannot sting him into 
 clear vision, his religion remains as arbitrary and irrational 
 as when it was instilled into him by his mother, his scriptural- 
 ism as mediaeval, his philosophy as childish." J. M. Rob- 
 ertson. 
 
 " He is not always equal in his style, nor always just in his 
 opinions. He has a fondness for extravagance, as well of
 
 RUSKIN 6/1 
 
 thought as of expression, and perpetually indulges his mere 
 conceits." Parke Godwin. 
 
 " He rushes eagerly on when he has a thought to utter, 
 with little order and system, careless of logical sequence if 
 he can but give his ideas and his emotions full expression. His 
 is the prose of emotion and imagination more than of logic 
 and reason. There is no continuity, no system, no orderly 
 unfolding of a distinct purpose, in his ' Modern Painters ; ' 
 and the same is true in a large measure of all his writings. ' ' 
 G.W. Cooke. 
 
 " Mr. Ruskin's writings afford three or four instances of slips 
 in reasoning so manifest and so avoidable that they seem in- 
 tentionally thrown in the way of those critics who will always 
 insist upon forming the estimate of a field of wheat from its 
 half-dozen bad ears." Peter Bayne. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " You have put a railroad bridge over the fall of Schaffhausen. 
 You have tunnelled the cliffs of Lucerne by TelPs chapel ; you 
 have destroyed the Clarens shore of the Lake of Geneva ; there 
 is not a quiet valley in England that you haven't filled with bel- 
 lowing fire ; there is not a particle left of English land which you 
 have not trampled coal ashes into, nor any foreign city in which 
 the spread of your presence is not marked among its fair old 
 streets and happy gardens by a consuming white leprosy of new 
 hotels and perfumers shops." Sesame and Lilies. 
 
 " This gas-lighted and gas-inspired Christianity we are triumph- 
 ant in, and draw back the hem of our robes from the touch of the 
 heretics who dispute it. . . . You might sooner get lightning 
 out of incense smoke than true action or passion out of your 
 modern English religion. You had better get rid of the smoke 
 and the organ pipes, both. Leave them and the gothic windows 
 and the painted glass to the property man ; give up your carbu- 
 retted hydrogen ghost in one healthy expiration, and look after 
 Lazarus at the doorstep." Sesame and Lilies. 
 
 " You care for pictures, absolutely, no more than you do for 
 the bills pasted on your dead walls. There is always room
 
 672 RUSKIN 
 
 on the walls for the bills to be read, never for the pictures to be 
 seen. You do not know what pictures you have (by repute) in 
 the country, nor whether they are false or true, nor whether they 
 are taken care of or not ; in foreign countries, you calmly see the 
 noblest existing pictures in the world rotting in abandoned wreck 
 (in Venice you saw the Austrian guns deliberately pointed at 
 the palaces containing them), and if you heard that all the fine 
 pictures in Europe were made into sand-bags to-morrow on the 
 Austrian forts, it would not trouble you so much as the chance 
 of a brace or two of game less in your own bags in a day's 
 shooting. That is your national love of Art." Sesame and 
 Lilies. 
 
 " To think how many of your dull Sunday mornings have been 
 spent, for propriety's sake, looking chiefly at those carved angels 
 blowing trumpets above your family vaults ; and never one of 
 you has had Christianity enough in him to think that he might as 
 easily have his moors full of angels as of grouse. And now, if 
 ever you did see a real angel before the day of judgment, your 
 first thought would be to shoot it. And for your ' family ' 
 vaults, what will be the use of them to you ? Does not Mr. 
 Darwin show you that you can't wash the slugs out of a lettuce 
 without disrespect to your ancestors ? Nay, the ancestors of the 
 modern political economist cannot have been so pure ; they 
 were not he tells you himself vegetation slugs, but carnivorous 
 ones those, to wit, that you see also carved on your tombstones 
 going in and out at the eyes of skulls. And, truly, I don't know 
 what else the holes in the heads of modern political economists 
 were made for." Conduct of Life. 
 
 6. Dogmatism Arrogance Conceit. "With ami- 
 able egotism and a high yet not unjustifiable sense of his own 
 worthiness to form an opinion, . . . he sets forth without 
 disguise, not only praising what he loves but denouncing 
 what he hates with the force of infallibility. ... A gen- 
 tle strain of self-satisfaction and self- belief runs through all his 
 work and the conviction that the principles that produced 
 such a man as himself are the best that could be followed. 
 . . . In his later years this beautiful conviction has become
 
 RUSKIN 673 
 
 so hot and strong as to lead to the formation of much dogma 
 and other sort of conscious infallibility." Mrs. Oliphant. 
 
 " He was gifted by nature with what is the most fortunate 
 gift for a man of genius, the most unfortunate for another, an 
 entire freedom from the malady of self-criticism. ... It 
 is extremely difficult to criticise Mr. Ruskin, for the simple rea- 
 son that he has never condescended to criticise himself. He 
 once characteristically boasted that he had never withdrawn a 
 sentence written since 1860 as erroneous in principle. . . 
 Ruskin's standards are often mere will-worship, ideas which 
 he has casually picked up in a state of hypothesis from other 
 men, and which he erects into eternal truths. . . . Dis- 
 cipline is what Ruskin has always lacked ; as well in methods 
 as in the serene self-confidence which has enabled him to de- 
 liver himself on any and every subject without any suspicion 
 that he is talking ill-informed nonsense. . . . He erected 
 a sort of private pulpit, and in ' Fors Clavigera ' and other 
 things made almost a religion of his own idiosyncrasy. . . . 
 He has an inevitable and all-pervading tendency to general- 
 ize to bring things under what, at any rate, seems a law 
 to erect schemes and deduce and connect. . . . His 
 mania for generalizing blinds him to the absurd on one side, 
 as we constantly find it doing in Continental thinking." 
 Saintsbury. 
 
 " Like Carlyle and Arnold, he himself has put it on record 
 that he has failed to influence his generation. . . . But 
 wkether the explanation of baffled and embittered egotism 
 will serve to explain the defeatedness of Ruskin, we must not 
 attempt to say till we have investigated His case. 
 Headlong dogmatism on matters on which his thoughts had 
 never gone further or deeper than his first vivid prejudice, is 
 to the last as much a characteristic of his works as the sudden 
 and penetrating analysis of social and other phenomena, of 
 which his first burning glance has pierced his heart. . . . 
 To himself Ruskin probably seems a revealer of the divine 
 43
 
 674 RUSKIN 
 
 law and purpose in things. . . . Just as his mother would 
 see in a public calamity or in national error the punishing 
 or blinding hand of a vengeful deity, so to the last he falls 
 into the mediseval'attitude whenever he is weary of exhorta- 
 tion or hopeless of obedience. . . . Arrogance is always 
 driving him to contemn even before he has comprehended. 
 . . . It lies on the face of all his work that in him an in- 
 tense egotism is the condition of his eloquence and energy. 
 At times certainly it seems to disappear, in homage to some 
 one of his masters, Carlyle or another ; but even then he iden- 
 tifies his prejudice with theirs, and never does he long abide 
 in the attitude of impersonal concern for simple truth. . . . 
 In all his polemic, even at its best and justest, is visible his 
 normal inability to conceive or even suspect how any. life or 
 opinion can be right and good which clashes with his tastes 
 and convictions. He lays down binding principles for the 
 regulation of all life in terms of his sentiments for the time 
 being. . . . One result of his temper is that his criticisms 
 of individuals are often extravagantly unjust. . . . It is a 
 gross presumption on the part of any man, nay, on the part of 
 any woman, to lay down what is forever to be done and what 
 not to be done by all women. . . . Had I read his at- 
 tack on Buckle without knowing it was made by a mouth-piece 
 of passionate caprice, I should have been disposed to call it 
 the most nearly ungenerous impeachment I ever saw in secular 
 literature. . . . [Ruskin is] a man whose notions of his 
 ' relation to the universe ' have reached heights of extravagance 
 seldom obtained in black-on-white. . . . [He has] the 
 prophetic temper of overweening self-confidence and the self- 
 worship which poses as Theism." -J. M. Robertson. 
 
 "His own personal history and opinions, his manner of 
 life, the inmost soul of the man, are revealed to the attentive 
 reader of his books, as is the case with almost no other 
 author. He is sympathetic and confidential, touched with 
 egotism, and always open and responsive to whatever influ-
 
 RUSKIN 675 
 
 ence life may bring to him. . . . He is too much of 
 a dogmatist to be overcome by any of that distrust which 
 besets less positive natures, and which causes them to ask if 
 their neighbor's creed may not be as good as theirs. If he 
 has grown more tolerant with advancing years, he has not 
 grown less positive." G. W. Cooke. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " I suppose, that when people see my name down for a hundred 
 pounds to the Cruikshank Memorial and for another to the 
 Eyre Fund, they think only that I have more money than I 
 know what to do with. Well, the giving of these subscriptions 
 simply decides the question whether or no I shall be able to 
 afford a journey to Switzerland in the negative. . . . And I 
 believe this delay (though I say it) will be really something of a 
 loss to the travelling public, for the little essay was intended to 
 explain to them, in a familiar way, the real wonderfulness of 
 their favorite mountain, the Righi." Time and Tide. 
 
 " But I speak to you under another disadvantage, by which I 
 am checked in frankness of utterance not only here but every- 
 where ; namely, that 1 am never fully aware how far my audi- 
 ences are disposed to give me credit for real knowledge of my 
 subject, or how far they grant me attention only because I have 
 been sometimes thought an ingenious or pleasant essayist 
 upon it. For I have had, what, in many respects, I boldly call 
 a misfortune, to set my words sometimes prettily together." 
 The Mystery of Life. 
 
 " I must repeat, once more, and with greater insistence re- 
 specting Sculpture than Painting, that I do not in the least set 
 myself up for a critic of authenticity, but only of absolute 
 goodness. My readers may trust me to tell them what is well 
 done or ill." Modern Painters. 
 
 7. Keen Sensibility Interpretation. " Next 
 among Mr. Ruskin's qualifications for his task must be men- 
 tioned his wonderfully minute observation of nature. He has 
 watched her in every aspect ; he is familiar with every detail
 
 676 RUSKIN 
 
 of her working. And yet, with his careful noting of par- 
 ticulars, he has never lost sight of the poetry of nature as a 
 whole. His is not the spirit of the botanist who pulls to 
 pieces a weed in a ditch, blind to the expanse of beauty which 
 lies spread out before him. ... As a general rule, no 
 writing is less effective than what is called word-painting. 
 It is for the most part unsatisfactory failing altogether to 
 convey any adequate conception of the original. But it is not 
 so in the hands of Mr. Ruskin. His fervid imagination en- 
 ables him to realize, his abounding style enables him to ex- 
 press the whole meaning of the painter." H. H. Lancaster. 
 " Ruskin had a passionate love of nature in his boyhood, 
 which his father gave him the opportunity of gratifying, but 
 which he could not have created. His power of comprehend- 
 ing nature was as instinctive as Mozart's capacity for music, 
 which made him a composer at the age of four and the despair 
 of his masters only a few years later. As he walked by the crags 
 on the Derwentwater and looked through the dark roots 
 into the waters of the lake, he was filled with ' intense joy, 
 mingled with awe.' . . . It [' Modern Painters '] gave to 
 beauty an importance in the whole range of life it will retain 
 hereafter, gave to nature an interpretation of the highest and 
 richest kind, and brought sentiment to as fine an expression 
 in literature as it has ever known. . . . [He has] 
 Wordsworth's capacity for seeing nature instinct with the 
 Divine Life and for beholding in it a spiritual beauty and 
 power sublime and wonderful. It has made him one of the 
 greatest of the describers of the natural world. New beauties 
 and new meanings have been revealed to him as existing in all 
 forms and expressions. His minute observation, his powerful 
 imagination, his intuition of beauty and harmony, and his 
 ability to make others feel that what he describes really exists, 
 have made him a wonderful interpreter of nature. 
 He penetrates through the facts of nature to their meanings 
 for the artist and the lover of beauty, seeing what others pass
 
 RUSKIN 677 
 
 by without waiting to behold. ... As the interpreter 
 of nature, Ruskin is the equal of Rousseau as the interpreter of 
 human sentiment, and he has produced a similar change in 
 the common opinions of men. . . . He is the lover of 
 nature in all her aspects of repose and sublimity ; alike in her 
 quiet beauty and her amazing splendor. " G. W. Cooke. 
 
 " For myself, I doubt whether Mr. Ruskin has any great 
 qualities but his eloquence and his true, honest love of nature. 
 As a man to stand up before a society of which one part was 
 fashionably languid and the other only too busy and greedy 
 and preach to it of Nature's immortal beauty and the true way 
 to do her reverence, I think Mr. Ruskin had, and has, a place 
 almost worthy the dignity of a prophet. I think, too, that he 
 has the capacity to fill the place, to fulfil its every duty. 
 No man since Wordsworth's brightest days did half 
 so much to teach his countrymen and those who speak his 
 language ho\v to appreciate that silent nature ' which never did 
 betray the heart that loved her.' " Justin McCarthy. 
 
 " With an explicitness which was a duty and with that 
 scientific calmness with which any man may recall and state 
 the impressions of boyhood, Mr. Ruskin has informed us of 
 the emotions with which, in his earliest years, he looked upon 
 nature. He says, ' In such journeyings, whenever they 
 brought me near hills, and in all mountain ground and scen- 
 ery, I had a pleasure . . . comparable for intensity only 
 to the joy of a lover in being near a noble and kind mistress. 
 . . Although there was no definite religious sentiment 
 mingled with it, there was a continual perception of sanctity 
 in the whole of nature, from the slightest thing to the vastest ; 
 I could only feel this perfectly when alone, and then it would 
 often make me shiver from head to foot with the joy and fear 
 of it when, after being some time away from hills, I first got 
 to the shore of a mountain river, where the brown water 
 circled among the pebbles.' It is of the emotions experienced 
 amid mountain scenery that Ruskin here more expressively
 
 678 RUSKIN 
 
 speaks. . . . Endowed with the keenest sensibility to 
 the influences of nature, he has observed them with accuracy 
 and at the same time with strong poetic feeling. Few men 
 are more alive to the beauties of art, and none have studied 
 its actual manifestations with more diligence. Applying his 
 knowledge of nature to works of art, he is able to judge their 
 comparative merits with a rare taste and profound sympathy. 
 Ruskin stands among a select and honored few who 
 have interpreted nature's meaning -and conveyed her bounty 
 to mankind. He has spoken with a voice of power of those 
 pictures which ever change yet are ever new, which are old yet 
 are not dim or defaced, of the beauty of which all art is an ac- 
 knowledgment, of the admiration of which all art is the result, 
 but which, having hung in our view since childhood, we are 
 apt to pass lightly by. ... At his bidding, we awake 
 to a new consciousness of the beauty and grandeur of the 
 world. We have more distinct ideas as to what it is ; we 
 know better how to look for it." Peter Bayne. 
 
 " He sees the glorious world as we have never known it 
 or have perhaps forgotten to look upon it. He takes the first 
 example to hand ; the stones which he makes into bread ; 
 the dust and scraps and dry sticks and moss which are lying 
 to his hand ; he is so penetrated with the glory and beauty 
 of it all, of the harmony into which we are set, that it sig- 
 nifies little to him upon what subject he preaches and by 
 what examples he illustrates his meaning." A, T. Ritchie. 
 
 " He has read the book of nature with unwearied diligence 
 and conscientious observation. He cannot only see rightly, 
 but he can express with passion which is sufficiently tempered 
 to be intense and with copiousness sufficiently charged with 
 fact to be interesting that which he has seen in the natural 
 world. It is not too much to say that for many of us whose 
 deepest pleasure is in the beauty of the world, he has tripled 
 our power of pleasure. And it has been done, not as the 
 poet does it, by developing intensity of feeling but by ap-
 
 RUSKIN 679 
 
 pealing to feelings through the revelation of fact and by the 
 exquisite-delight which we feel he takes in the discovery and 
 beauty of the fact and by the charm of the vehicle through 
 which he tells the story. ' ' Stopford Brooke. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " Few of us, perhaps, have thought, in watching its career 
 across our own mossy hills or listening to the murmur of the 
 springs amidst the mountain quietness, that the chief masters of 
 the human imagination owed, and confessed that they owed, the 
 force of their noblest thoughts, not to the flowers of the valley 
 nor the majesty of the hill, but to the flying cloud. Yet they 
 never saw it fly, as we may in our own England. So far, at least, 
 as I know the clouds of the south, they are often more terrible 
 than ours, but the English Pegasus is swifter. On the Yorkshire 
 and Derbyshire hills, when the rain-cloud is low and much bro- 
 ken and the steady west-wind fills all space with its strength, the 
 sungleams fly like golden vultures : they are flashings rather 
 than shinings ; the dark spaces and the dazzling race and skim 
 along the acclivities and dart and dip from crag to dell, swallow- 
 like ; no Graiae these gray and withered : grey-hounds rather, 
 following the Cerinthian stag with the golden antlers." The An- 
 gel of the Sea. 
 
 " Most people think of waves as rising and falling. But if 
 they look at the sea carefully, they will perceive that the waves 
 do not rise and fall. They change. Change both place and 
 form, but they do not fall ; one wave goes on, and on, and still 
 on ; now lower, now higher, now tossing its mane like a horse, 
 now building itself together like a wall, now shaking, now steady, 
 but still the same wave, till at last it seems struck by something 
 and changes, one knows not how becomes another wave." Of 
 the Pathetic Fallacy. 
 
 " And therefore we see at once that the stem of Caspar Pous- 
 sin's tall tree, on the right of the La Riccia, in the National Gal- 
 lery, is a painting of a carrot or a parsnip, not the trunk of a 
 tree. For, being so near that every individual leaf is visible, we 
 should not have seen, in nature, one branch or stem actually 
 tapering. We should have received an impression of graceful
 
 680 RUSKIN 
 
 diminution ; but we should have been able, on examination, to 
 trace it joint by joint, fork by fork, into the thousand minor sup- 
 ports of the leaves. Caspar Poussin's stem, on the contrary, 
 only sends off four or five branches altogether, and both it and 
 they taper violently and without showing why or wherefore 
 without parting with a single twig without showing one vestige 
 of roughness or excrescence and leaving, therefore, their un- 
 fortunate leaves to hold on as best they may. The latter, how- 
 ever, are clever leaves, and support themselves as swarming bees 
 do, hanging on by each other." Of Truth of Vegetation. 
 
 8. Inconsistency Self-Contradiction. " It has 
 
 never, during Mr. Ruskin's long career, troubled him to bethink 
 himself whether he knew what he was talking about, whether 
 he was or was not talking nonsense, whether he was or was 
 not contradicting something that he had said before. . . . 
 In his inequalities of style Mr. Ruskin is very much at one 
 with all practitioners of prose during this century. . . . 
 But where he is almost unique is in his inequalities of thought 
 and matter. ... At times his thought has really mar- 
 vellous vigor, felicity, and truth. At others, and just as 
 often, it borders on sheer nonsense. . . . [This charac- 
 teristic is illustrated in] that marvellous compound of 
 ingenuity and folly, 'The Queen of the Air,' [and in] 
 that astonishing mixture of namby-pamby guess- 
 work and suggestive thought, 'The Ethics of the Dust.' ' 
 Saintsbury. 
 
 " Ruskin is, so far as my reading goes, the most self-con- 
 tradictory writer who ever lived. ... In his art criti- 
 cism he has a first principle for every day in the year and 
 every hour of the day ; pictures and practices are forever 
 being praised or blamed under general laws set up for that oc- 
 casion only. At one time he will denounce as unworthy all 
 writing for money ; at another he will present as model lives 
 those of Shakespeare and Scott, who systematically wrote to
 
 RUSKIN 68 1 
 
 make money. . . . He contradicts himself in the same 
 book, sometimes in the same chapter, sometimes in the same 
 page. . . . The frequent discovery that he sees things alto- 
 gether differently at different times, seems never to have im- 
 paired his habitual, his constitutional, confidence in the right- 
 ness of his impressions." -J, M. Robertson. 
 
 "No man has ever contradicted himself so often, so reck- 
 lessly, so complacently as Mr. Ruskin has done. It is absurd 
 to call him a great critic, even in art ; for he seldom expresses 
 an opinion one day without flatly contradicting it the next. 
 He is a great writer, audacious, . . . eloquent, writing 
 out of the fulness of the present mood and heedless how far 
 the impulse of to-day may contravene that of yesterday." 
 Justin McCarthy. 
 
 " Ruskin has phases of impression, but his noble instinct 
 is for the truth, although the example he gives at times seems so 
 changeable and his system of instruction almost hopeless for 
 students who have to live during their short lives, to pay their 
 way and their long bills as well as to study their art." Anne 
 Thackeray Ritchie. 
 
 " We feel the pleasure of meeting, in the middle of a num- 
 ber of writers cut out after the same pattern, with one who 
 cuts out his own pattern and alters it year by year. 
 We should be dismayed to lose the most original man in Eng- 
 land. . . . It is quite an infinite refreshment to come 
 across a person who can gravely propose to banish from Eng- 
 land all manufactures which require the use of fire, who has 
 the quiet audacity to contradict himself in the face of all the 
 reviewers, and who spins his net of fancies and thoughts with- 
 out caring a straw what the world thinks of them. . . . 
 The good which a man of so marked an originality does to us 
 all is great if it is provoking ; and we would rather possess him 
 with his errors than a hundred steady-going writers who can 
 give solemn reasons for all they say." Stopford Urookc.
 
 682 RUSKIN 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " Therefore, the first necessity of social life is the clearness of 
 national conscience in enforcing the law, that he should keep 
 who has justly earned." The Crown of Wild Olive. [Compare 
 this with the second illustration.] 
 
 " Has not the man who has worked for the money a right to 
 use it as best he can ? No, in this respect, money is now exactly 
 what mountain promontories over public roads were in olden 
 times. The barons fought for them fairly : the strongest and 
 cunningest got them ; then fortified them and made every one 
 who passed below pay toll. Well, capital now is exactly what 
 crags were then. Men fight fairly for their money ; but once 
 having got it, the fortified millionaire can make everybody who 
 passes below pay toll to his million and build another tower of 
 his money castle." The Crown of Wild Olive. [Compare this 
 with his general economical doctrines.] 
 
 This characteristic finds clearest illustration, not in detached 
 paragraphs, but in the general tenor of a volume. 
 
 Q. Moral Aim Didacticism. "He had a strong but 
 capricious moral sense. . . . His insatiable appetite for 
 moral applications and his firm belief in his moral mission 
 blind him, as we find these things do often the Britons. 
 . . . He is a man with an ardent sense of duty combined 
 with an ardent desire to do good ; eager to throw everything 
 into the form of a general law, but eager also to give that gen- 
 eral law, directly or indirectly, mystically or simply, an ethical 
 bearing and interpretation." Saintsbury. 
 
 " The importance of individual character, the value of work 
 in forming it, the supremacy of duty in directing it, these are 
 some of the leading moral lessons that Mr. Ruskin, like Car- 
 lyle, has had to teach, but to which he has given a new turn 
 by adding the sanction of art. ... In life the only 
 liberty worth having is founded on personal discipline. This 
 is why Mr. Ruskin lays so much stress upon the dignity and 
 usefulness of manual labor. " G. IV: Cooke.
 
 RUSKIN 683 
 
 " Nobody makes a more thrilling appeal to the individual 
 conscience or a more direct demand for individual action." 
 -J. M. Robertson. 
 
 "It is as a moralist and a reformer and in his passionate 
 love for humanity that we must recognize him. His place is 
 in the pulpit, speaking largely and in the unsectarian sense. 
 . Ruskin could never, any more than Savonarola, 
 escape the condition of being in every fibre of his nature a 
 moralist and not an artist, and as he advanced in life the 
 ethical side of his nature more and more asserted its mastery, 
 though less and less in theological terms." W. J. Stillman. 
 
 " Mr. Ruskin's lectures upon art are apt to pass into moral 
 or religious discourses." Leslie Stephen. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " Love and trust are the only mother-milk of any man's soul. 
 So far as he is hated and mistrusted, his powers are destroyed. 
 Do not think that with impunity you can follow the eyeless fool 
 and shout with the shouting charlatan, and that the men you thrust 
 aside with gibe and blow are thus sneered and crushed into the 
 best service they can do you. I have told you they will not serve 
 you for pay. They cannot serve you for scorn." Peace. 
 
 " The importance of the results thus obtained by the slightest 
 change of direction of the infant streamlets, furnishes an interest- 
 ing type of the formation of human characters by habit. Every 
 one of those notable ravines and crags is the expression, not of 
 any sudden violence done to the mountain, but of its little habits 
 persisted in continually. It was created with one ruling instinct ; 
 but its destiny depended nevertheless, for effective result, on the 
 direction of the small and all but invisible tricklings of water, 
 in which the first shower of rain found its way down its sides. 
 The feeblest, most insensible oozings of the drops of dew among 
 its dust were in reality arbiters of its eternal form ; commissioned, 
 with a touch more tender than that of a child's finger, as silent 
 and slight as the fall of a half-checked tear on a maiden's cheek, 
 to fix forever the forms of peak and precipice and hew those 
 leagues of lifted granite into the shapes that were to divide the 
 earth and its kingdoms." Crests.
 
 684 RUSKIN 
 
 " It was a beautiful thought, yet an erring one, as all thoughts 
 are which oppose the Law to the Gospel. When people read, 
 ' the law came by Moses, but grace and truth by Christ,' do they 
 suppose that the law was ungracious and untrue ? The law was 
 given for a foundation ; the grace (or mercy) and truth for fulfil- 
 ment ; the whole forming one glorious Trinity of judgment, 
 mercy, and truth. And if people would but read the text of their 
 Bibles with heartier purpose of understanding it, instead of su- 
 perstitiously, they would see that throughout the parts which they 
 are intended to make most personally their own (the Psalms) it 
 is always the Law which is spoken of with chief joy." The Angel 
 of the Sea. 
 
 10. Spirituality Biblical Coloring. " His writings 
 are . . . characterized by a spirituality of tone. Their 
 tendency is to purify and ennoble, to enthrone duty, reveal 
 goodness, and encourage admiration, hope, and love. He 
 seeks to rescue man from the engrossing spirit of greed and 
 woman from the life of frivolity and fashion. He has a pro- 
 found reverence for the God of his fathers, and firmly holds a 
 belief in the unseen. Righteousness with him is no slowly 
 evolved quality but a Divine principle, eternal and unchange- 
 able. . . . Many of the poems reveal a depth of devo- 
 tion and a spirituality of tone which show his youth to have 
 been lived beneath the dominance of intense religious feeling. 
 . . . [He cannot] separate the principles of biblical teaching 
 from the duties of every-day life. . . . They [his writings] 
 are free from the materializing influences common to so much 
 of the teaching of the present age. ... If there be a 
 supreme truth flowing out of Ruskin's writings, it is the enno- 
 bling and spiritualizing truth that reminds us that we are born 
 in the Divine image for Divine ends. . . . His power to 
 make a verse of Scripture interpret a phenomenon of nature, 
 his apt method of reducing prophetic and apostolic principles 
 to every-day life, and his unrivalled skill in interweaving 
 sacred phraseology with his own, rnake his writings sugges-
 
 RUSKIN 685 
 
 tlve and interpretive of the greatest of all books."/". M. 
 Mather. 
 
 "A notable characteristic of all these writings of Ruskin 
 . . . is the earnestness and biblical simplicity of their re- 
 ligion. His father and mother, especially the latter, were fer- 
 vently devout persons of the evangelical school, which in 
 Ruskin's early days had not lost its intellectual prestige. With 
 the ingenuous passion of an affectionate, trustful, dutiful boy, 
 whose home had been for him a temple, he accepted loyally, 
 as beyond all dispute, the creed he learned at his mother's 
 knee. ' ' Peter Bayne. 
 
 " We must recur to a leading characteristic of Mr. Ruskin's 
 writings which gives to them their purest beauty and the deep- 
 est truth ; we mean the profound religious feeling which per- 
 vades them all. . . . He cannot look on the flaming 
 wings of the angels of Angelice without rising in thought to 
 the heavenly hosts above." H. H. Lancaster. 
 
 11 High above all else he puts the development of the soul 
 through the world-experiences of man ; and underneath he 
 ranges the other functions down to the lowest, on which all 
 the others rest. He has devised no system and made no table 
 of human duties ; but he ever keeps before himself the fact 
 that human nature is a whole, that in a full and faithful life 
 every faculty shares, and that we are not to live for what is 
 sensual and subordinate. ... If his love of nature and 
 beauty was great in its earliest manifestations, not the less em- 
 phatically was he drawn toward that inward realm where the 
 higher nature discloses other attractions as fascinating and as 
 real. His love for the unreal and spiritual was a master pas- 
 sion as ardent as that which guided him to art and to beauty 
 of nature, so that he could never look upon the one without 
 being confident the other was interwoven with whatever it is 
 or can become. . . . But the currents of his faith run too 
 deep and broad for any real lapse of it or for any real pessi- 
 mism that sees the world abandoned of God. . . . His is
 
 686 RUSKIN 
 
 the religion of the spirit, of one who sincerely loves worship 
 and praise, and whose soul is entranced by visions of the eter- 
 nal. "_ G. W. Cooke. 
 
 " I have next with deeper gratitude to chronicle what I 
 owed to my mother for the resolutely consistent lessons which 
 so exercised me in the Scriptures as to make every word of 
 them familiar to my ear as habitual music. ... In this 
 way she began with the first verse of Genesis and went 
 straight through to the last verse of the Apocalypse ; hard 
 names, numbers, Levitical law and all ; and began with 
 Genesis again the next day. . . . After our chapters 
 . . I had to learn a few verses by heart or repeat some- 
 thing I had already learned. ... I had to learn the 
 whole body of the fine old Scottish paraphrases . 
 and to these, together with the Bible itself, I owe the first 
 cultivation of my ear in sound." Ruskin. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " She [England] has not yet read often enough that old story of 
 the Samaritan's mercy. He whom he saved was going down from 
 Jerusalem to Jericho to the accursed city (so the old church used 
 to understand it). He should nol have left Jerusalem ; it was 
 his own fault that he went out into the desert, and fell among the 
 thieves, and was left for dead. Every one of these English children, 
 in their day, took the desert bypath, as he did, and fell among 
 friends took to making bread out of stones at their bidding, and 
 then died, torn and famished ; careful England, in her pure, 
 priestly dress, passing by on the other side. So far as we are con- 
 cerned, that is the account ive have to give of them." Peace. 
 
 " For these are the robes of love of the Angel of the Sea. To 
 these that name is chiefly given, the ' spreadings of the clouds,' 
 from their extent, their gentleness, their fullness of rain. Note 
 how they are spoken of in Job xxxvi. 29-31. ' By them judgeth 
 he the people ; He giveth meat in abundance. With clouds he 
 covereth the light. He hath hidden the light in his hands, and 
 commanded that it should return. He speaks of it to his friend ; 
 that it is his possession and that he may ascend thereto.' That,
 
 RUSKIN 687 
 
 then, is the Sea-Angel's message to God's friend ; that, the mean- 
 ing of those strange golden lights and purple flushes before the 
 morning rain. The rain is sent to judge and feed us; but the 
 light is the possession of God, and they may ascend thereto 
 where the tabernacle veil will cross and part its rays no more." 
 The Angel of the Sea. 
 
 " You can scarcely, at present, having been all your lives, hith- 
 erto, struggling for security of mere existence, imagine the peace 
 of heart which follows the casting out of the element of selfish- 
 ness as the root of action ; but it is peace, observe, only, that is 
 promised to you, not at all necessarily, or at least primarily, joy. 
 You shall find rest unto your souls when first you take on you the 
 yoke of Christ ; but joy only when you have borne it as long as 
 He wills and are called to enter the joy of your Lord." Fors 
 Clavigera. 
 
 ii. Philanthropy Desire for Social Reform. 
 
 " Compassion for the poor is the last word of Mr. Ruskin's 
 books on art as well as of those on morals. He said that 
 neither sound art, policy, nor religion can exist in England 
 until, neglecting, if must be, your own pleasure -gar dens and 
 pleasure-chambers, you resolve that the streets which are the 
 habitations of the poor . . . shall be again restored to 
 the rule of the spirits. Ruskin is possessed of ardent feeling 
 and intense sympathies. His heart is warm and glowing and 
 his affections strong. To help others is to him a delight, and 
 it is one of the noblest objects life offers him. He feels with 
 the poor, takes their sorrows and burdens to his own heart, 
 and has for them whatever of sympathy man can give to 
 man. . . . No one has shown such powerful imagination 
 as he in lifting the veil which hides the grim realities of pov- 
 erty from the gay dreams of wealth or such fearless satire 
 in mocking the churches for dining with the rich and preach- 
 ing to the poor." G. W. Cooke. 
 
 " The moral influence of Ruskin is also felt in the direc- 
 tion of social reforms. Organizations for the improvement of 
 the people have not only been suggested and elaborated in
 
 688 RUSKIN 
 
 his writings, but, in some cases, started and sustained largely 
 by their motive power. . . . And there are not a few men 
 and women engaged in philanthropic labor in the present day 
 who acknowledge his teaching as the force first rousing their 
 efforts and since guiding and encouraging them in their self- 
 appointed duties among the poor." -J. H. Friswell. 
 
 "'Sesame and Lilies' is, and most deservedly so, a 
 favorite book with the public. Who can ever forget the 
 closing passages, in which the poet, looking round about, 
 seeing the need of the children even greater than that of their 
 elders, bids women go forth into the garden and tend to the 
 flowerets lying broken with their fresh leaves torn, set them 
 in order in their little beds, fence them from the fierce wind. 
 ' Flowers with eyes like yours and thoughts like yours.' ' 
 Anne Thackeray Ritchie. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " Well, the poor seem to have a prejudice against the work- 
 house which the rich have not ; for, of course, every-one who takes 
 a pension from the government goes into the workhouse on a grand 
 scale ; only the workhouses for the rich do not involve the idea 
 of work and should be called play-houses. But the poor like to 
 die independently, it appears ; perhaps if we made the play-houses 
 for them pretty or pleasant enough, or gave them their pensions 
 at home, and allowed them a little introductory speculation with 
 the public money, their minds might be reconciled to the condi- 
 tion. . . . We make our relief either so insulting to them or 
 so painful that they rather die than take it at our hands." Sesame 
 and Lilies, 
 
 11 Suppose the captain of a frigate saw it right, or were by any 
 chance obliged to place his own son in the position of a common 
 sailor ; as he would then treat his son, he is bound always to treat 
 every one of the men under him. So, also, supposing the master 
 of a manufactory saw it right, or were by any chance obliged to 
 place his own son in the position of an ordinary workman ; as he 
 would then treat his son, he is always bound to treat every one of 
 his men." The Roots of Honour.
 
 RUSKIN 689 
 
 "The ant and the moth have cells for each of their young, but 
 our little ones lie in festering heaps, in homes that consume them 
 like graves ; and night by night from the corners of our streets 
 rises up the cry of the homeless ' I was a stranger and ye took 
 me not in.' . . . The mistake of the best men through gen- 
 eration after generation has been that great one of thinking to 
 help the poor by almsgiving and by preaching of patience or of 
 hope and by every other means, emollient or consolatory, except 
 the one thing which God orders for them, justice." Poverty. 
 
 12. Critical Acumen. " No Englishman that we know 
 is comparable to him ... for the vividness and value of 
 his critique. Lord Lindsay, who made the history of art a 
 specialty, is not more minutely acquainted with it than Rus- 
 kin is ; nor is Mrs. Jameson, though a woman, more suscep- 
 tible to all its finer poetical feelings; nor is Eastlake, though 
 President of the Royal Academy, a nicer judge of its technical 
 excellence. In fact, we might roll a great many critical 
 ' single gentlemen ' into one, without forming a compound 
 equal to Ruskin. . . . The appearance of ' Modern 
 Painters," by an ' Oxford Graduate,' protesting so vehemently 
 against the shallow pedantries of the magazine writers, and 
 throwing down the gauntlet of critical combat to the entire 
 circle of on-lookers with such lusty disdain, was an era in the 
 history of British criticism. . . . He is the critic rather 
 than the philosopher of art. ... As a judge he is posi- 
 tive and severe but also enthusiastic. His praise and his 
 blame alike come from the heart." Parke Godwin. 
 
 " He has spent half a lifetime of strenuous if fitful labor 
 on the study and analysis of artistic phenomena, of which he 
 has written with a fire and an earnestness that were quite new 
 in critical literature. ... He has made himself one of 
 the most stringent and stirring of modern critics of life, at- 
 taining in that function to an intensity if not a breadth of 
 impressiveness and of influence reached by none of his con- 
 temporaries." -J. M. Robertson. 
 44
 
 6QO RUSKIN 
 
 " Ruskin is a critic in the largest and best sense that can 
 be given to that word, defining him as one who points out 
 the limitations of life and shows the way to what is higher 
 and better. ... In this sense Ruskin is a critic, and 
 one of the most noteworthy which this century has produced 
 in England. In aim he has been noble, in theory right, in 
 methods sound. That which is capable of keeping the critic 
 sound in judgment and sweet in temper Ruskin has : a pas- 
 sionate love of nature and man. ... . A high aim and a 
 consistent adherence to it are all that can be asked of the 
 critic. In neither direction has Ruskin missed the highest mark 
 of his calling. . . . Ruskin thoroughly understands the 
 mission of the true critic. He has had a high and just stand- 
 ard of criticism, a distinct and worthy conception of life itself 
 and the purpose to teach men a lofty ideal. . . . There 
 are times when the critic is more needed than the poet, and 
 Ruskin has done more for art than any artist the time has 
 produced. ... A new mission and a new spirit have 
 come to criticism as Ruskin has dealt with it, for it has ceased 
 to be literary and fastidious and come to be one with life and 
 its genuine interests. . . . Ruskin's chief work has been 
 done as a critic of art." G. W. Cooke. 
 
 " Such a school of criticism as his must, in the very nature 
 of things, perpetuate itself and correct and regulate the art 
 criticism of the future.";/. M. Mather. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " I regret that I have not been able, as yet, to examine with 
 care the powers of mind involved in modern caricature. They 
 are, however, always partial and imperfect ; for the very habit of 
 looking for the leading lines by the smallest possible number of 
 which the expression may be attained, warps the power of general 
 attention, and blunts the perception of the delicacies of the en- 
 tire form and color. Not that caricature, or exaggeration of 
 points of character, may not be occasionally indulged in by the 
 greatest men as constantly by Leonardo ; but then it will be
 
 KUSKIN 691 
 
 found that the caricature consists, not in imperfect or nolent 
 drawing, but in delicate and perfect drawing of strange and ex- 
 aggerated forms quaintly combined : and even thus, I believe, 
 the habit of looking for such conditions will be found injurious ; 
 I strongly suspect its operation on Leonardo to have been the in- 
 verse of his non-natural tendencies in his higher works." Mod- 
 ern Painters. 
 
 " On the whole, the first master of the lower picturesque among 
 our living artists is Clarkson Stanfield ; his range of art being, 
 indeed, limited by his pursuit of this character. I take 
 therefore a windmill, forming the principal subject in his 
 drawing of Brittany, near Dol, and beside it I place a windmill, 
 which forms also the principal subject in Turner's study of the 
 Lock, in the " Liber Studiorum" At first sight, I dare say, the 
 reader may like Stanfield's best ; and there is, indeed, a great 
 deal more in it to attract liking. Its roof is nearly as interesting 
 in its ruggedness as a piece of the stony peak of a mountain, with 
 a chalet built on its side ; and it is exquisitely varied in swell 
 and curve. Turner's roof, on the contrary, is a plain, ugly gable, 
 a windmill roof, and nothing more. Stanfield's sails are twisted 
 into most effective wrecks, as beautiful as pine bridges over Al- 
 pine streams ; only they do not look as if they had ever been ser- 
 viceable windmill sails ; they are bent about in cross and awkward 
 ways, as if they were warped or cramped ; and their timbers 
 look heavier than necessary. Turner's sails have no beauty 
 about them like that of Alpine bridges ; but they have the exact 
 switchy sway of the sail that is always straining against the wind ; 
 and the timbers form clearly the lightest possible framework for 
 the canvas, thus showing the essence of windmill sail. Then 
 the clay wall of Stanfield's mill is as beautiful as a piece of chalk 
 cliff, all worn into furrows by the rain, coated with mosses, and 
 rooted to the ground by a heap of crumbled stone, embroidered 
 by grass and creeping plants. But this is not a serviceable state 
 for a windmill to be in. The essence of a windmill, as distin- 
 guished from all other mills, is that it should turn round and be 
 a spinning thing, ready always to face the wind ; as light, there- 
 fore, as possible and as vibratory ; so that it is in no wise good 
 for it to approximate itself to the nature of chalk cliffs." Mod- 
 ern Painters. 
 
 11 Now, observe, that passage is noble primarily because it
 
 692 RUSKIN 
 
 contains the utmost number that will come together into the 
 space of absolutely just, wise, and kind thoughts. But it is 
 more than noble, it is perfect, because the quantity it holds is not 
 artificially or intricately concentrated, but with the serene swift- 
 ness of a smith's hammer-strokes on hot iron ; and with choice 
 of terms which, each in its place, will convey far more than they 
 mean in the dictionary. Thus, ' however ' is used instead of 
 ' yet,' because it stands for ' howsoever,' or, in full, for ' yet what- 
 ever they did.' ' Thick ' of society, because it means, not merely 
 the crowd, but the fog of it ; ' ten hundred thousand ' instead 
 of ' a million ' or ' a thousand thousand,' to take the sublimity 
 out of the number, and make us feel that it is a number of 
 nobodies. " Prceterita.
 
 IRVING, 1783-1859 
 
 Biographical Outline. Washington Irving, born in 
 New York City, April 3, 1783, the youngest of eleven chil- 
 dren ; father a Scotchman, who began life as a sailor and 
 afterward became a New York merchant ; mother the grand- 
 daughter of an English curate ; they emigrate to New York 
 in 1763 ; Irving is presented, as a child, to General Wash- 
 ington, then in New York, after whom he was named ; he 
 is reared as a strict Scotch Presbyterian by his father, who 
 was a deacon in that church, but the severity produces a re- 
 action, and, early in his boyhood, Irving is confirmed as an 
 Episcopalian at Trinity Church ; he develops an early love 
 for the drama ; in his fourth year he enters the school of Mrs. 
 Kilmaster in Ann Street, where he spends two years in learn- 
 ing the alphabet ; thence, in 1789, to a school for both sexes, 
 kept by Benjamin Romaine, where Irving remains till his 
 fourteenth year ; he is an omnivorous reader from his tenth 
 year, devouring especially books of travel, fiction, and poetry ; 
 writes verses as a child ; enters a law-office at sixteen, appar- 
 ently declining the opportunity of a course at Columbia Col- 
 lege, such as had been given to his brothers ; reads more 
 literature than law, and begins to explore the lower Hudson 
 district, which he was to make classic ; makes his first trip 
 up the Hudson and into the Mohawk Valley in 1802 ; in the 
 same year he enters the law- office of Josiah Hoffman, whose 
 family had great influence on Irving's future life ; because of 
 threatened pulmonary weakness, he spends most of the next 
 few years travelling in the Hudson and Mohawk Valleys, pene- 
 trating as far north as Ogdensburg and Montreal, and stopping 
 
 693
 
 694 IRVING 
 
 to enjoy the social pleasures offered at Albany, Saratoga, Ball- 
 ston, etc. ; his first literary publication is a series of letters in 
 his brother Peter's paper, the Morning Chronicle, consisting 
 of satires on the current local drama, etc. , in the style of the 
 Spectator and Tatler ; these papers foreshadow his ultimate 
 humor, sensibility, and tenderness; by 1804 he has become 
 so consumptive in appearance that he is sent abroad by his 
 brothers ; reaches Bordeaux in June, and goes thence, after a 
 stay of six weeks, by diligence to the Mediterranean ; visits 
 Avignon, Marseilles, and Nice, reaching Genoa in October, 
 where he remains till late in December; in Genoa he meets 
 Lady Shaftesbury, who gives him valuable letters of introduc- 
 tion ; sets out for Sicily in December, the packet being 
 seized and searched by pirates en route; spends two months 
 in Sicily, thence goes to Naples, and reaches Rome in March, 
 1805, where he begins his life-long friendship with the artist 
 Washington Allston ; makes some effort to become a landscape- 
 painter, but abandons the attempt ; meets Baron von Hum- 
 bold t, Madame de Stael, and other notabilities ; reaches Paris 
 in May, 1805, where he spends four months studying French 
 and the theatre; reaches London via the Netherlands in 
 October, and remains there till January, 1806 ; hears Kemble, 
 Cooke, and Mrs. Siddons, who afterward acknowledges the 
 power of Irving's pathos ; returning, reaches America in 
 February, 1806, with restored health but with no taste for 
 continuing legal pursuits; devotes himself mainly to society ; 
 with his brother William and John Paulding he issues Sal- 
 magundi, a semi-monthly duodecimo periodical, modelled after 
 the Spectator, which runs through twenty numbers; he be- 
 comes slightly interested in local politics in 1806, and fails in 
 an attempt to secure a clerical appointment at Albany : begins 
 the "Knickerbocker History" in collaboration with his 
 brother Peter, at first intending it simply as a bit of local 
 satire on " The Picture of New York," a somewhat pedantic 
 book then just issued ; Peter is called to Europe, and Irving
 
 IRVING 695 
 
 condenses their joint work into the first six chapters, com- 
 pletes the work on a new plan, and publishes the complete 
 "History" in 1809; meantime his fiancee, Miss Matilda 
 Hoffman, second daughter of Irving's law preceptor, between 
 whom and himself there existed a most ardent attachment, 
 dies suddenly in her eighteenth year ; of the loss Irving wrote 
 years afterward, " It threw some clouds into my disposition 
 which have ever since hung about it ; " the " Knickerbocker 
 History " becomes immediately popular, and is highly praised 
 by Sir Walter Scott; Irving now admits having "a fatal 
 propensity to belles If tires," but continues to be a society 
 man ; he makes frequent visits to Washington, stopping for 
 the social gayeties of Philadelphia and Baltimore and making 
 many friends, especially " Dolly," wife of President Madi- 
 son; during 1812 he edits a periodical, called at first Select 
 Reviews and afterward the Analectic Magazine, some articles 
 from which went, eventually, into the "Sketch Book;" 
 during 181 2 he writes also a brief biography of the poet Camp- 
 bell as an introduction to an American edition of " Gertrude 
 of Wyoming;" becomes gradually tired of "the tedious 
 commonplace of fashionable society; " in March, 1812, sells a 
 second edition of the " Knickerbocker History" (1,500 copies) 
 for $1,200; in the autumn of 1814 he enlists and becomes 
 aid and secretary to Governor Tompkins of New York, serv- 
 ing till the close of the war, four months later; in May, 1815, 
 he embarks for a short visit to his brother Peter, then in Eu- 
 rope, but remains abroad seventeen years; travels through mid- 
 dle England and Wales, and spends most of the two following 
 years at Liverpool, trying vainly to bolster up the declining 
 hardware importing business of his brothers, one of whom 
 (Peter) was then an invalid; passes most of the year in ill- 
 health and depression, but plans the " Sketch Book; " meets 
 Byron, Disraeli, and other notabilities, and is entertained at 
 Abbotsford by Sir Walter Scott ; his brothers become bankrupt 
 early in 1818, and Irving determines on literature as a profes-
 
 696 IRVING 
 
 sion ; he refuses a proffered clerkship at Washington, declines 
 the editorship of an anti-Jacobin periodical at Edinburgh, 
 proffered by Scott, and refuses a salary of a thousand guineas 
 offered him by Murray to become editor of a projected new 
 London magazine ; refuses also to contribute to the Quarterly 
 at the rate of one hundred guineas an article " because it has 
 always been so hostile to my country ; ' ' the first number of the 
 "Sketch Book" is published in America in May, 1819, and 
 the last number in September, 1820 ; it wins immediate popu- 
 larity in both America and England; Irving feels " almost 
 appalled by such success," and declares, " I have attempted 
 no lofty theme. ... I have preferred addressing my- 
 self to the feelings and fancy of the reader rather than to 
 his judgment;" piracy compels the republication of the 
 "Sketch Book" in England; Murray at first refuses it, 
 and Irving publishes it on his own responsibility ; Murray 
 afterward buys the copyright for 200 ; Irving becomes 
 a social "lion" in London, and enters into cordial rela- 
 tions with Southey, Campbell, Hallam, Gifford, Rogers, 
 Scott, and other notabilities; visits Paris in 1820, where he 
 forms a lasting friendship with Moore; the " Sketch Book " 
 (published over the pseudonym of Geoffrey Crayon) is highly 
 praised by the Scotch reviews, by Byron, and others, and 
 is attributed to Scott; Irving returns to England in 1821, 
 visits various watering-places, seeking relief from an eruptive 
 malady in his ankles, and publishes " Bracebridge Hall ; " in 
 1822 he visits Germany, spending some time in Dresden, 
 where all, including royalty, unite to do him honor ; he re- 
 turns to Paris in July, 1853 ; writes only at rare intervals, but 
 then with great rapidity and facility; publishes "Tales of a 
 Traveller" in 1824; in February, 1824, settles at Madrid, 
 and begins work on his "Life of Columbus;" publishes 
 "The Life of Columbus" in February, 1828, receiving from 
 Murray ,3,150 for the copyright; publishes "The Chroni- 
 cle of the Conquest of Granada ' ' soon afterward, receiving
 
 IRVING 697 
 
 ^2,000 for the manuscript ; in 1829 he is unexpectedly ap- 
 pointed Secretary of Legation at London, and returns thither 
 in April, 1830; in 1831 he receives a gold medal from the 
 Royal Society of Literature and the degree of D.C.L. from 
 Oxford; resigns his secretaryship in September, 1831, and 
 returns to New York in May, 1832, where he is received with 
 great popular ovations ; is called upon to support his two 
 brothers and several nieces ; invests his savings in Western 
 "paper towns," an investment "as permanent as it was un- 
 remunerative ; " visits the far West and South, passing up the 
 Arkansas River, and publishes " A Tour on the Prairies; " in 
 1832 he purchases a small farm on the Hudson, near Tarry- 
 town, improves the old Dutch stone cottage, names it " Sun- 
 nyside," and settles there in 1832 ; in 1838 he is living 
 there "with Ebenezer's five girls, sister Catherine and her 
 daughter," and other dependent relatives ; he entertains 
 Louis Napoleon, then an obscure French nobleman, at Sun- 
 nyside in 1837 ; declines a seat in Van Buren's Cabinet as 
 Secretary of the Navy ; becomes editor of the Knickerbocker 
 Magazine in 1839 at a salary of $2,000 ; attempts to se- 
 cure an act of Congress establishing international copyright; 
 published "Recollections of Abbotsford " and " Newstead 
 Abbey " in 1835, " The Legends of the Conquest of Spain " 
 in 1835, "Astoria" (largely the work of his nephew, Pierre 
 Irving) in 1837, the "Life of Goldsmith" in 1846, and 
 " Mahomet and his Successors " in 1849 ; he collects his essays 
 in the Knickerbocker Magazine, and publishes them under the 
 title " Wolfert's Roost " in 1855; publishes "The Life of 
 Washington" also in 1855-59; abandons, in favor of W. 
 H. Prescott, his life-long project of writing a history of the 
 conquest of Mexico (without Prescott's knowledge, though 
 Irving had already collected much more material than had 
 Prescott) ; is appointed Minister to Spain in 1842, at the 
 suggestion of Daniel Webster, and is confirmed by acclama- 
 tion ; he fulfils the duties of minister satisfactorily in a time
 
 698 IRVING 
 
 of great civil disturbance in Spain ; he visits Paris and 
 London briefly, assists in settling the Oregon boundary dis- 
 pute, and is recalled from Madrid in 1846; reaches Sunnyside 
 in September, 1846, and continues to labor assiduously at his 
 " Life of Washington ; " his works are " out of print " from 
 1842 to 1848 ; they are reissued in 1848 by George Putnam, 
 and from 1848 to 1859 Irving receives 88,000 for his copy- 
 rights ; he dies at Sunnyside, November 28, 1859. 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY ON IRVING'S STYLE. 
 
 Warren, C. D. , "The Works of Washington Irving." New York, 
 
 1894, Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 190-304. 
 Wallace, H. B., "Literary Criticism." Philadelphia, 1856, Parry & 
 
 Macmillan, 67-91. 
 Everett, E., " Orations and Speeches. " Boston, 1872, Little, Brown & 
 
 Co., 248-262. 
 Haweis, H. R., "American Humorists." London, 1883, Chatto & Win- 
 
 dus, 3-36. 
 Bungay, G. W, " Off -Hand Takings." New York, 1854, DeWitt & 
 
 Co., 141-147. 
 Richardson, C. F., "American Literature." New York, 1893, Putnam, 
 
 i: 258-281. 
 Whipple, E. P., "American Literature." Boston, 1887, Ticknor, 
 
 36-39 
 Lowell, J. R., " Fable for Critics " (Poetical Works). New York, 1891, 
 
 Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 2: 78-79. 
 Hill, D. J., " Life of Irving." New York, 1849, Sheldon & Co., 203- 
 
 228. 
 Warner, C. D., " American Men of Letters." Boston, 1881, Houghton, 
 
 Mifflin & Co., 190-304. 
 Putnam, G. P., "Personal Reminiscences." New York, 1880, Putnam, 
 
 128-170. 
 Warner, Bryant, Etc., " Irving, his Life, Character, and Genius." New 
 
 York, 1880, Putnam, 77-128. 
 Tuckerman, H. T., "Mental Portraits." London, 1853, Bentley, 339- 
 
 362. 
 
 Dowden, E., "Studies in Literature." London, 1878, Kegan Paul & 
 
 Co., 470. 
 Jeffrey, F., "Modern British Essayists." Philadelphia, 1852, A. Hart, 
 
 6: 637-643.
 
 IRVING 699 
 
 Welsh, A. H., "Development of English Literature." Chicago, 1884, 
 
 Griggs, 2: 303-307. 
 Willis, N. P., " Hurrygraphs." Auburn, New York, 1853, Alden & 
 
 Co., 256-257. 
 Dana, R. H., "Poems and Prose Writings. " New York, 1850, Scrib- 
 
 ner, 3-16. 
 Tuckerman, H. T., "America and Her Commentators." New York, 
 
 1864, Scribner, 422-424. 
 Russell, W. C., "The Book of Authors. " London, n. d., Warne, 281, 
 
 313, 425, and 466. 
 Shaw, T. B., "A Manual of English Literature." New York, 1881, 
 
 Sheldon, 497-501. 
 Underwood, F. H., " Hand Book of English Literature." Boston, 
 
 1873, Lee & Shepard, 92-94. 
 Irving, P. M., "Life and Letters of Washington Irving." New York, 
 
 n. d., Putnam, three volumes, v. index. 
 Hazlitt, William, " The Spirit of the Age. " New York, 1894, Putnam, 
 
 333-340- 
 Cleveland, C. D., "Compendium of English Literature." New York, 
 
 n. d., Barnes, 274-275. 
 Beers, H. A., "Initial Studies in American Letters." New York, 1891, 
 
 Chautauqua Publishing Co. 
 Nicoll, J., "American Literature." Edinburgh, 1885, Adam & Charles 
 
 Black, 170-175. 
 Hawthorne and Lemon, " American Literature. " Boston, 1891, Heath, 
 
 38-46. 
 
 " Irvingiana. " New York, 1860, C. D. Richardson, 1-63. 
 Harper's Magazine, 20: 542-545 (Thackeray); 24: 349-356 (J. 
 
 Wynne); 52: 412-413 (Whipple); 66: 790-791 (G. W. Curtis). 
 Atlantic Monthly, 13: 694-701 (D. G. Mitchell). 
 Scribner's Monthly, ii: 799-808 (G. P. Lathrop). 
 T/ie Xation, 36: 291-292 (A. G. Sedgwick). 
 
 North American Review, 9 : 322-356 (R. H. Dana) ; 41 : 1-28 (E. Ev- 
 erett) ; 86 : 330-358 (G. W. Green) ; 69 : 175-196 (E. Bryant) ; 15 : 
 
 204-224; 29: 293-314 (Editor) ; 28: 103-134 (A. H. Everett). 
 Christian Examiner, 73: 602-616 (J. B. C.) ; 43: 271-283 (Pierre M. 
 
 Irving). 
 
 Methodist Quarterly, 16 : 537-549 (R. Allyn). 
 Democratic Review, 9: 593-597 ; 21: 488-494. 
 Eclectic Magazine, 29 : 155-162; 64: 497-501; 34: 546-573. 
 Quarterly Review, 25: 50-67 (Irving); 114: 151-179 (P. M. Irving); 
 
 31 : 473-487-
 
 700 IRVING 
 
 National Magazine, I : 444-445 (Philarete Chasles). 
 Blackwood's Alagazine, 6: 556-561; 7: 360-369. 
 The Century Magazine, 12: 53-58 (C. Cook). 
 Fraser's Magazine, ^: 435; 12: 409-415. 
 Edinburgh Review, 37 : 337~35 (F- Jeffrey). 
 Colbuni's Magazine, 118: 213-221 (C. Redding). 
 Bentleys Miscellany, 19: 622-623. 
 
 7mA Quarterly Review, 8 : 915-926 (H. T. Tuckerman). 
 LittelVs Living Age, 74: 579-581 (Spectator). 
 
 PARTICULAR CHARACTERISTICS. 
 
 I. Serenity Mildness Dreaminess. " If I want 
 at any moment to transport myself into a calm and restful 
 time, I can do it by taking up Irving. . . . Irving's 
 books are quite free from the unrest of these times, and there 
 is a total absence in them of the intellectual strain which has 
 characterized nearly all the writings of the past thirty years. 
 He never caught the restlessness of this century. 
 . . . His placid, retrospective, optimistic strain pleased 
 a public that were excited and harrowed by the mocking and 
 lamenting of Byron. . . . There is no visible straining 
 to attract attention. . . . He seems always writing from 
 an internal calm, which is the necessary condition of his pro- 
 duction. ... To the last he basked in the sun and 
 radiated cheerfulness all about him. . . . His writings 
 induce to reflection, to quiet musing, to tenderness for tradi- 
 tion ; they amuse, they entertain, they call a check to the 
 feverishness of modern life ; but they are rarely stimulating 
 or suggestive." Charles Dudley Warner. 
 
 " By temperament and cast of mind he was ordained to 
 be a gentle minister at the altar of literature. . . . Since 
 his advent as a writer an intense style has come into vogue ; 
 glowing rhetoric, bold verbal tactics, and a more powerful 
 exercise of thought characterize many popular authors of 
 the day. . . . But . . . -as we look forth on the
 
 IRVING 701 
 
 calm and picturesque landscape which environs him, we are 
 content that no fierce polemic, visionary philanthropist, or 
 rabid sentimentalist has thus linked his name with the tran- 
 quil beauties of the scene. ... He infuses . . . 
 the sportiveness of fancy into his creations, and thus yields 
 genuine refreshment and a needed lesson to the fevered minds 
 of his countrymen. No contrast, indeed, can be more entire 
 than that between the Dutch passivity he loves to delineate, 
 the indolent humor which gives such zest to his sketches, and 
 the Yankee enterprise which overlays the scene of his inven- 
 tions." H. T. Tuckerman. 
 
 " The earth seems to be reeling under our feet, and we turn 
 to those who write like Irving for some assurance that we are 
 still in the same world into which we were born ; we read and 
 are quieted and consoled." G. P. Putnam. 
 
 " He easily surpassed Charles Lamb in evenness of execu- 
 tion. Behind all that he did appeared his own serene, happy, 
 and well-balanced character." C. F. Richardson. 
 
 " We come from reading ' Rural Life in England ' as much 
 restored and as cheerful as if we had been passing an hour or two 
 in the very fields and woods themselves. Mr. Irving's scenery 
 is so perfectly true so full of little beautiful particulars, so 
 varied, yet so connected in character that the distant is brought 
 nigh to us, and the whole is seen and felt like a delightful 
 reality. It is all gentleness and sunshine. The bright and 
 lively influences of nature fall on us, and our disturbed and 
 lowering spirit is made clear and tranquil turned all to 
 beauty, like clouds shone on by the sun." J?. H. Dana. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " It is a pleasing sight, of a Sunday morning, when the bell 
 is sending its sober melody across the quiet fields, to behold 
 peasantry in their best finery, with ruddy faces and mod- 
 est cheerfulness, thronging tranquilly along the green lanes to 
 church ; but it is still more pleasing to see them in the evenings
 
 7O2 IRVING 
 
 gathering about their cottage doors and appearing to exult in the 
 humble comforts and embellishments which their own hands 
 have spread around them. It is this sweet home-feeling, this 
 settled repose of affection in the domestic scene, that is, after 
 all, the parent of the steadiest virtues and purest enjoyments." 
 Rural Life in England. 
 
 " Though there may be something whimsical in all this, yet 
 I confess that I cannot look upon John's [John Bull] situation 
 without strong feelings of interest. With all his odd humours 
 and obstinate prejudices, he is a stetling-hearted old blade. He 
 may not be so wonderfully fine a fellow as he thinks himself, but 
 he is, at least, twice as good as his neighbors represent him." 
 Sketch Book. 
 
 '* I would place implicit confidence in an Englishman's de- 
 scription of the regions beyond the cataracts of the Nile; of un- 
 known islands in the Yellow Sea ; of the interior of India ; or of 
 any other tract which other travellers might be apt to picture out 
 with the illusions of their fancies. But I would cautiously receive 
 his account of his immediate neighbors and of those nations with 
 which he is in habits of most frequent intercourse. However I 
 might be disposed to trust his probity, I dare not trust his prej- 
 udices." English Writers on America. 
 
 2. Ease Quiet Grace. Irving has been called the 
 American Addison. In one quality he more closely resem- 
 bles Steele, and that is the quiet, colloquial ease everywhere 
 apparent. Irving was in no sense a partisan. He disliked 
 conflict, and his sensitive soul shrank from the aggressive 
 forms of composition in which men like Carlyle delight. 
 
 "This easy-going gentleman, with his winning mildness 
 and quiet deliberation as if he never could and never did 
 and never would knuckle down to hard task-work. . . . 
 He had the manner of a lazy observer of life ... his 
 apparent lazy and really acute observations of life. 
 He had neither the power nor the disposition to cut his way 
 transversely across popular opinion and prejudice that Ruskin 
 has." Charles Dudley Warner.
 
 IRVING 703 
 
 "Grace is an electric light evolved by the action of suc- 
 cessive parts of the subject on the mind. It is the source of 
 that fresh and delightful fragrance which always exhales from 
 Irving's writings. . . . The pleasantness which he dif- 
 fuses over subjects the most barren . . . arises chiefly 
 from the instinctive quietness with which he seizes everything. 
 The art of this system consists in the gentleness and 
 fineness of the rays. . . . Looking only at the style and 
 manner of his works, we find a grace as inherent as that of 
 childhood ; a gentle gayety as variable yet as unfailing and as 
 unfatiguing as the breezes of June ; an indestructible presence 
 of good taste, simplicity, and ease. . . . What renders 
 the merit more singular in Irving is that, successful and in- 
 imitable as the charm is, it is obviously not spontaneous or 
 unconscious." H. B. Wallace. 
 
 " It [the name of Irving] is the synonym of a sweet liter- 
 ary grace and a harmless gayety of humor which retain their 
 charm in the midst of new tastes and among powerful rivals." 
 George William Curtis. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " What was I to do to pass away the long-lived day ? I was 
 sadly nervous and lonely ; and everything about an inn seemed 
 calculated to make a dull day ten times duller. Old newspapers, 
 smelling of beer and tobacco smoke, and which I had already 
 read half a dozen times good-for-nothing books, that were 
 worse than rainy weather. I bored myself to death with an old 
 volume of the Lady's Magazine. I read all the commonplace 
 names of ambitious travellers scrawled on the panes of glass ; the 
 eternal families of the Smiths and the Browns and the Jacksons 
 and the Johnsons and all the other sons ; and I deciphered several 
 scraps of inn-window poetry which I have met with in all parts of 
 the world." The Stout Gentleman. 
 
 " As I am too civil not to agree with the ladies on all occasions, 
 I have committed myself most horribly with both parties by abus- 
 ing their opponents. I might manage to reconcile this to my 
 conscience, which is a truly accommodating one, but I cannot
 
 704 IRVING 
 
 to my apprehensions if the Lambs and Trotters ever come to a 
 reconciliation and compare notes, I am ruined ; T have deter- 
 mined, therefore, to beat a retreat in time, and am actually look- 
 ing out for some other nest in this great city, where old English 
 manners are still kept up ; where French is neither eaten, drank, 
 danced, nor spoken. This found, I will, like a veteran rat, hast- 
 en away before I have an old house about my ears and leave the 
 Lambs and the Trotters to divide the distracted empire of Little 
 Britain." Little Britain, 
 
 " To a homeless man, who has no spot on this wide world which 
 he can truly call his own, there is a momentary feeling of some- 
 thing like independence and territorial consequence when, after 
 a weary day's travel, he kicks off his boots, thrusts his feet into 
 his slippers, and stretches himself before an inn fire. Let the 
 world go as it may ; let kingdoms rise or fall ; so long as he has 
 the wherewithal to pay his bill, he is, for the time being, the very 
 monarch of all he surveys. The arm-chair is his throne, the 
 poker his sceptre, and the little parlour, of some twelve feet 
 square, his undisputed empire. It is a morsel of certainty 
 snatched from the midst of the uncertainties of life, it is a sunny 
 moment gleaming out of a cloudy day. Shall I not take mine ease 
 in mine inn ? thought I, as I gave the fire a stir, lolled back in 
 my elbow-chair, and cast a complacent look about the little par- 
 lour of the Red Horse at Stratford-on-Avon." Sketch Book. 
 
 "There was a gentle tap at the door, and a pretty chamber- 
 maid, putting in her smiling face, inquired with a hesitating air 
 whether I had rung. I understood it as a modest hint that it was 
 time to retire. My dream of absolute dominion was at an end ; 
 so, abdicating my throne, like a prudent potentate, to avoid being 
 deposed, and putting the Stratford guide-book under my arm, as 
 a pillow companion, I went to bed, and dreamt all night of Shake- 
 speare, the jubilee, and David Garrick." Stratford-on-Avon. 
 
 3. Spontaneous Humor. Irving is the prince of 
 American humorists ; his humor is unlike that of any other 
 writer. In reading the works of other humorists, you are fre- 
 quently conscious of a strained effect ; the author seems to be 
 making an effort to be funny. In Irving this rarely, if ever, 
 appears. He seems to make us laugh because he cannot help
 
 IRVING 705 
 
 it ; and, consequently, one may read his lighter works again 
 and again without any perception of weakness or staleness. 
 
 " Irving's gift was humor ; and allied to this was senti- 
 ment. He acquired other powers which he himself may have 
 valued more highly and which brought him more substantial 
 honors ; but the historical compositions which he and his 
 contemporaries regarded as a solid basis of fame could be 
 spared without serious loss, while the works of humor, the 
 first fruits of his genius, are possessions in English literature 
 the loss of which would be irreparable. . . . The 
 [Knickerbocker] History was hailed with delight as the most 
 witty and original production from any American pen. The 
 first foreign critic was Scott, who read it aloud in his family 
 till their sides were sore with laughing. Of its humor one is 
 tempted to use the words grotesque and gigantic. . . . 
 I take it that no one would care to undertake to mend it or 
 to disturb in any way the richest piece of native humor that 
 the country has produced." Charles Dudley Warner. 
 
 "It is the genial coloring of his humorous conceptions, 
 not their mechanism that wins our interest. He often makes 
 us smile, but seldom elicits a broad guffaw for his concep- 
 tions are charged with a feeling softened by culture and tem- 
 pered by geniality." D. J. Hill. 
 
 " When I compare it [' History of New York '] with other 
 works of wit and humor of a similar length, I find that, unlike 
 most of them, it carries forward the reader to the conclusion 
 without weariness or satiety, so unsought, spontaneous, self- 
 suggested are the wit and humor. The author makes us 
 laugh because he can no more help it than we can help laugh- 
 ing. . . . His humor not only tinged his writings, but 
 overflowed in his delightful conversation. Its [' Salma- 
 gundi's '] gayety is its own ; its style of humor is not that of 
 Addison nor of Goldsmith, though it has all the genial spirit 
 of theirs. . . . It is far more frolicsome and joyous, yet 
 tempered by a mature gracefulness. " Bryant. 
 45
 
 706 IRVING 
 
 " In the class of compositions to which it [' Knickerbocker 
 History '] belongs, I know of nothing happier than this work 
 in our language. It at once placed Mr. Irving at the head of 
 American humorists." Edward Everett. 
 
 " He had the singular fortune to write before all the good 
 jokes had been made. ... In him indeed are the germs 
 of an American humor since run to seed in buffoonery, but 
 he is never outrageous always within delicate bounds. "- 
 H. R. Haweis. 
 
 " Scarce ever a page anywhere but on a sudden some shim- 
 mer of buoyant humor breaks through all the crevices of a 
 sentence a humor not born of rhetoric or measurable by 
 critic's rules, but coming as the winds come, and playing up 
 and down with a frolicsome, mischievous blaze that warms 
 and piques and delights us." Donald G. Mitchell. 
 
 " We smile habitually, and with the same zest, at the idea 
 of the Trumpeter's rubicund proboscis . . . and the fig- 
 ure which the pedagogue cuts on the dorsal ridge of old Gun- 
 powder." H. T. Tuckerman. 
 
 " living's ' History of New York ' is, perhaps, the most 
 unique, perfectly rounded, and elaborately sustained bur- 
 lesque in our literature. It has enough of sober history to 
 ballast it, and its ludicrous incidents and studies of the whim- 
 sical traits of Dutch character are painted with a grave air of 
 verity that keeps the reader in a perpetual but never tiresome 
 chuckle. . . . The vivacity of his youth never wholly 
 deserted him ; although he ceased writing humorous works, it 
 served to animate his graver histories and to give them a 
 charm which the mere annalist could not attain." F. H. 
 Underwood. 
 
 " He produced at the age of twenty-six the most deliciously 
 audacious work of humor in our literature." E. P. Whipple. 
 
 " His range was wide, covering essay, fiction, history, etc. 
 . ; now he was tenderly pathetic, now broadly humor- 
 ous. The Hudson stories in the ' Sketch Book '
 
 IRVING /O/ 
 
 combine nearly every merit that can be found or wished in a 
 tale of humor. " C. F. Richardson. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " The rival oracle of Little Britain is a substantial cheesemon- 
 ger, who lives in a fragment of one of the old family mansions, 
 and is as magnificently lodged as a round-bellied mite in the 
 midst of one of his own Cheshires. Indeed, he is a man of 
 no little standing and importance ; and his renown extends 
 through Huggin Lane and Lad Lane and even unto Alderman- 
 bury. His opinion is very much taken in affairs of state, having 
 read the Sunday papers for the last half century, together with 
 the Gcntltmaris Magazine, Rapin's 'History of England,' 
 and the ' Naval Chronicle.' His head is stored with invaluable 
 maxims which have borne the test of time and use for centuries. 
 It is his firm opinion that ' it is a moral impossible,' so long as 
 England is true to herself, that anything can shake her ; and he 
 has much to say on the subject of the national debt ; which, 
 somehow or other, he proves to be a great national bulwark and 
 blessing." Little Britain. 
 
 " He likewise prohibited the seamen from wearing more than 
 five jackets and six pair of breeches under pretence of rendering 
 them more alert. . . . The parties broke up without noise 
 and without confusion. They were carried by their own carriages, 
 that is to say, by the vehicles nature had provided them, except- 
 ing such of the wealthy as could afford to keep a wagon. The 
 gentlemen gallantly attended their fair ones to their respective 
 abodes, and took leave of them with a hearty smack at the door ; 
 which, as it was an established piece of etiquette, done in per- 
 fect simplicity and honesty of heart, occasioned no scandal at 
 that time, nor should it at the present if our great-grand- 
 fathers approved of the custom, it would argue a great want of 
 reverence in their descendants to say a word against it." His- 
 tory of New York. 
 
 11 ' Now had the Dutchmen snatched a huge repast,' and find- 
 ing themselves wonderfully encouraged and animated thereby, 
 prepared to take the field. Expectation, says the writer of the 
 Stuyvesant manuscript expectation now stood on stilts. The 
 world forgot to turn round, or rather stood still, that it might
 
 708 IRVING 
 
 witness the affray ; like a fat round-bellied alderman, watching 
 the combat of two chivalric flies upon his jerkin. The eyes of 
 all mankind, as usual in such cases, were turned upon Fort 
 Christina. The sun, like a little man in a crowd at a puppet 
 show, scampered about the heavens, popping his head here and 
 there and endeavoring to get a peep between the unmannerly 
 clouds that obtruded themselves in his way. The historians 
 filled their ink-horns the poets went without their dinners, 
 either that they might buy paper and goose-quills or because 
 they could not get anything to eat antiquity scowled sulkily out 
 of his grave to see itself outdone while even posterity stood 
 mute, gazing in gaping ecstasy of retrospection on the eventful 
 field." History of New York. 
 
 4. Tenderness Sympathy Deep Pathos. "Irv- 
 ing's method is the sympathetic rather than the precise or the 
 philosophic. The ' Sketch Book,' especially, abounds in seri- 
 ous, tender, meditative passages. And in all his works you 
 are made to feel, with Bryant, that ' the author loved good 
 women and little children and a pure life ; ' he had faith in his 
 fellow-men, a kindly sympathy with the lowest, without any 
 subservience to the highest. His heart caught and reflected 
 every phase of humanity. . . . He shed over all the 
 merry atmosphere of a kindly heart." Lowell. 
 
 " If Irving could enjoy wit and humor, . . . no other 
 writer of books had a heart more tenderly sensitive than his 
 to the ills and sufferings which flesh is heir to." G. P. Put- 
 nam. 
 
 " Concerning his ' Tour on the Prairies," he tells us, 
 indeed, with commendable honesty of his new appetite for de- 
 struction which the game of the prairies excited ; but we can- 
 not fear for the tenderness of a heart that sympathizes so 
 readily with suffering and yields so gracefully to kindly im- 
 pulses." -/f. T. Tuckerman.
 
 IRVING 709 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " She had made an effort to put on something like mourning 
 for her son ; and nothing could be more touching than this strug- 
 gle between pious affection and utter poverty ; a riband or so 
 a faded black handkerchief and one or two more such humble 
 attempts to express by outward signs that grief which passes 
 show. When I looked round upon the storied monuments, the 
 stately hatchments, the cold marble pomp, with which grandeur 
 mourned magnificently over departed pride, and turned to this 
 poor widow, bowed down with age and sorrow at the altar of 
 her God, and offering up the prayers and praises of a pious 
 though a broken heart, I felt that this living monument of real 
 grief was worth them all." The Widow and Her Son. 
 
 " If thou art a child and hast ever added a sorrow to the soul 
 or a furrow to the silvered brow of an affectionate parent ; if thou 
 art a husband, and hast ever caused the fond bosom that vent- 
 ured its whole happiness in thy arms to doubt one moment of 
 thy kindness or thy truth ; if thou art a friend, and hast ever 
 wronged, in thought, or word, or deed, the spirit that generously 
 confided in thee ; if thou art a lover, and hast ever given one un- 
 merited pang to that true heart that now lies cold and still beneath 
 thy feet ; then be sure that every unkind look, every ungracious 
 word, every ungentle action, will come thronging back upon thy 
 memory and knocking dolefully at thy soul. Then be sure that 
 thou wilt lie down sorrosving and repentant on the grave, and 
 utter the unheard groan and pour the unavailing tear more 
 deep, more bitter because unheard and unavailing." Rural 
 Funerals. 
 
 " I sank upon the grave and buried my face in the tall grass 
 and wept like a child. Yes, I wept in manhood upon the grave, 
 as I had in infancy upon the bosom of my mother. Alas, how 
 little do we appreciate a mother's tenderness while living ! how 
 heedless are we in youth of all her anxieties and kindness ! But 
 when she is dead and gone ; when the cares and coldness of the 
 world come withering to our hearts ; when we find how hard it is 
 to find true sympathy, how few love us for ourselves, how few will 
 befriend us in our misfortunes ; then it is we think of the mother 
 we have lost. . . . ' Oh, my mother !' exclaimed I, burying 
 my face again in the grass of the grave ; ' oh, that I were once
 
 7 10 IRVING 
 
 more by your side, sleeping, never to wake again on the cares 
 and troubles of the world ! ' " Tales of a Traveller. 
 
 5. Kindly Satire. If Horace was the most amiable sat- 
 tirist among the ancients, Irving holds that rank among the 
 moderns. He abounds in playful jest, but his jests leave no 
 sting. 
 
 " The boy mischief . . . lingered in him for a good 
 while, . . . and lent not a little point to some of the 
 keener pictures of the ' Knickerbocker History of New York ; ' 
 and if I do not mistake, there was now and then a quiet 
 chuckle, as he told me of the foolish indignation with which 
 some descendants . . . had seen their ancestors put to 
 a tender broil over the playful blaze of his humor. 
 Can you recall a sneer that has hate in it anywhere in his 
 books ? Can you tell me of a thrust of either words or silence 
 which has malignity in it ? . . . Not that he is without 
 a quiet power and exercise of satire not that follies which 
 strike his attention do not get a thrust from his fine rapier, 
 but they are such follies, for the most part, as everybody con- 
 demns." Dona Id G. Mitchell. 
 
 11 We have a satire keen and biting, sparing no puffed-up 
 dignity in state or in letter but withal so good-natured and 
 forgiving that every reader is made more charitable instead of 
 more censorious. . . . However satirical he is, there is 
 never the sneer of the cynic. . . . However much he 
 .ridicules folly, he never attempts to taunt and deride it." 
 G. P. Putnam. 
 
 " If there are touches of satire in his writings, he is the 
 best natured and most amiable of satirists, amiable beyond 
 Horace ! and in his irony for there is a vein of playful irony 
 running through many of his works there is no tinge of bit- 
 terness. . . . ' Salmagundi ' satirizes the follies and ridi- 
 cules the humors of the times with great prodigality of wit 
 and no less exuberance of good nature." Bryant.
 
 IRVING 711 
 
 "The delicate flavor of Charles Lamb without, however, 
 the sly but severe bite of Lamb's satire. . . . Knicker- 
 bocker's comic history is a feat of playful and sustained satire 
 as far as I know without a parallel." H. R. Haweis. 
 
 " The sympathetic spirit seen in the author enabled John 
 Bull to accept fair criticism without offence." Charles Dud- 
 ley Warner. 
 
 " Irving was the earliest of American satirists, but there is no 
 sting in the laughter that he moves." George William Curtis. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " I should not forget to mention that these popular meetings 
 were held at a noted tavern, for houses of that description have 
 always been found the most fostering nurseries of politics, 
 abounding with those genial streams which give strength and 
 sustenance to faction. We are told that the ancient Germans 
 had an admirable mode of treating any question of importance ; 
 they first deliberated upon it when drunk and afterwards recon- 
 sidered it when sober. The shrewder mobs of America, who 
 dislike having two minds upon a subject, both determine and act 
 upon it drunk, by which means a world of cold and tedious 
 speculation is dispensed with ; and, as it is universally allowed 
 that when a man is drunk he sees double, it follows most 
 conclusively that he sees twice as well as his sober neighbors.'' 
 History of New York. 
 
 " But the most important branch of civilization, and which has 
 been most strenuously extolled by the zealous and pious fathers 
 of the Romish church, is the introduction of the Christian faith. 
 It was truly a sight that might well inspire horror, to behold 
 these savages stumbling among the dark mountains of paganism 
 and guilty of the most horrible ignorance of religion. It is true 
 they neither stole nor defrauded ; they were sober, frugal, con- 
 tinent, and faithful to their word ; but, though they acted right 
 habitually, it was all in vain unless they acted so from precept. 
 The newcomers, therefore, used every method to induce them to 
 embrace and practice the true religion except that of setting 
 them the example." History of New York. 
 
 " The grand requisite for climbing the rugged hill of popu-
 
 712 IRVING 
 
 larity the summit of which is the seat of power is to be useful. 
 I must explain what we understand by usefulness. The horse, 
 in his native state, is wild, swift, impetuous, full of majesty, and 
 of a most generous spirit. It is then the animal is noble, exalted, 
 useless. But entrap him, manacle him, cudgel him, break down 
 his lofty spirit, put the curb into his mouth, the load upon his 
 back, and reduce him into servile obedience to the bridle and 
 the lash, and it is then he becomes useful. Your jackass is one 
 of the most useful animals in existence." Salmagundi. 
 
 6. Mild Melancholy Contemplation. "It was the 
 
 instinct of Irving's mind," says Bryant, " to attach itself to 
 the contemplation of the good and the beautiful." And 
 mingled with this vein is one of melancholy or mild regret. 
 " His face was set toward the past, never toward the future." 
 This characteristic may be due, at least in part, to the touch- 
 ing romance of Irving's earlier years. The thought of her 
 who was so faithfully loved, so early lost, seems to have tinged 
 his whole life. 
 
 " This country would seem at first to be quite barren of food 
 for the imagination of such a writer as Irving, who was always 
 a backward-looking man, whose mind dwelt more willingly 
 in traditions than in the present. . . . That his early 
 bereavement cast a cloud over his otherwise gay disposition 
 and gave an abiding tinge of melancholy to his life, 
 is evident in his literature here and there and in certain half- 
 tones of tenderness. " Charles Dudley Warner. 
 
 " He became attached to a young lady whom he was to have 
 married. She died unwedded in the flower of her age. . . . 
 Those who are fond of seeking, in the biographies of eminent 
 men, for the circumstances which determined the bent of their 
 genius, find in this sad event and the cloud it cast over the 
 hopeful and cheerful period of early manhood an explanation 
 of the transition from the unbounded playfulness of the 
 ' Knickerbocker History of New York ' to the serious, tender, 
 and meditative vein of the ' Sketch Book.' ' Bryant.
 
 IRVING 713 
 
 " Irving was gay and full of humor, even in spite of occa- 
 sional fits of melancholy, which he was, however, seldom sub- 
 ject to when with those he liked." Margaret Fuller. 
 
 " His point of view was retrospective and tranquil, and was 
 particularly grateful to a people who had just emerged from the 
 grim realities of the Revolution." -Julian Hawthorne. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " How much, thought I, has each of these volumes, now 
 thrust aside with such indifference, cost some aching head how 
 many weary days ! how many sleepless nights ! How have their 
 authors buried themselves in the solitude of cells and cloisters ; 
 shut themselves up from the face of man and the still more 
 blessed face of nature, and devoted themselves to painful re- 
 search and intense reflection ! And all for what ? to occupy an 
 inch of dusty shelf to have the titles of their works read now and 
 then in a future age by some drowsy churchman or casual strag- 
 gler like myself ; and in another age to be lost even to remem- 
 brance. Such is the amount of this boasted immortality. A 
 mere temporary rumor, a local sound ; like the tone of that bell 
 that has just tolled among these towers, filling the ear for a mo- 
 ment lingering transiently in echo and then passing away like 
 a thing that was not." The Mutability of Literature. 
 
 11 I remained some little time, musing over these casual relics 
 of antiquity, thus left like wrecks upon this distant shore of time, 
 telling no tale but that such beings had been and had perished. 
 A little longer, and even these faint records will be obliterated, 
 and the monument will cease to be a memorial. Whilst I was yet 
 looking down upon these gravestones, I was roused by the sound 
 of the abbey clock, reverberating from buttress to buttress and 
 echoing among the cloisters. It is almost startling to hear this 
 warning of departed time sounding among the tombs and telling 
 the lapse of the hour, which, like a billow, has rolled us onward 
 towards the grave." Westminster Abbey. 
 
 " To a mind thus temperately harmonized, thus matured and 
 mellowed by a long lapse of years, there is something truly con- 
 genial in the quiet enjoyment of our early autumn amid the
 
 7 14 IRVING 
 
 tranquillities of the country. There is a sobered and chastened 
 air of gaiety diffused over the face of nature, peculiarly inter- 
 esting to an old man ; and when he views the surrounding land- 
 scape withering under his eye, it seems as if he and nature were 
 taking a last farewell of each other and parting with a melan- 
 choly smile, like a couple of old friends who, having sported 
 away the spring and summer of life together, part at the approach 
 of winter with a kind of prophetic fear that they are never to 
 meet again." Salmagundi. 
 
 7. Picturesqueness. "In all his wanderings," says 
 H. T. Tuckerman, " his eye was busy with the scenes of nature 
 and cognizant of their every feature. . . . With the feel- 
 ings of a poet and the habitudes of an artist, he wandered over 
 the rural districts of merry England, the melancholy hills of 
 romantic Spain, and the exuberant wilderness of his native 
 land, gathering up their most picturesque aspects and transfer- 
 ring them with the pure and vivid colors of his genial expres- 
 sion into permanent memorials. . . . The true basis of 
 his genius is artistic." 
 
 " The perusal of Mr. living's writings is like walking in 
 some familiar lawn or ordinary scene of nature on a fine soft 
 morning in spring. A lustrous atmosphere brings out each 
 object truly, yet under such strong aerial perspective as renders 
 everything picture-like. . . . We meet few examples of 
 incidents or scenes in nature rendered with simple accuracy, 
 as by historical portraiture of a real occurrence. Yet such 
 may be found which challenge comparison with anything in 
 literature. . . . The picture, in ' Bracebridge Hall,' of 
 the eagle expelled from his resting-place is unrivalled. . . . 
 The description of Henry VIII. 's chapel, in the 'Sketch 
 Book,' is equally remarkable in a very different style. It is a 
 true Diisseldorf picture, minute in detail, dazzling in coloring, 
 with a delightful bewilderment thrown over its actuality by 
 cross-lights managed with consummate skill. . . . As a 
 picturesque painter of material life he shines without an equal.
 
 IRVING 715 
 
 . . . He paints an ideal picture of inanimate nature, of 
 animals, trees, and landscapes. Mr. Irving's microscopic 
 fidelity accomplishes some remarkable effects. . . . The 
 attractiveness of his tales depends upon the illustrative talent 
 of the narrator, upon the innumerable occasional decorations 
 that delight us into a forgetfulness of the plot, and upon the 
 pleasant sketches of costume, scenery, and manners which are 
 hung along the conduct of his piece in such profusion that it 
 resembles at length a brilliant gallery of pictures. . . . 
 He is in description what Backhuysen is in painting. So 
 prominent is the perspective that you seem to have the thing 
 itself rather than a representation of it." H. B. Wallace. 
 
 " He not only seizes upon every presentation of form and 
 color in objects, but paints them as if he enjoyed it. What he 
 perceives is not coldly reflected as from a plate of burnished 
 metal, but enters into his life and, enriched by contact with 
 his heart's blood, comes forth vitalized. His pictures seem 
 almost to pulsate with life. . . . He deals in pictures, 
 not in arguments. His symbol in nature is neither the vol- 
 cano, flaming with unexpected outbursts, nor the meteor 
 flashing across the solemn gloom of the midnight sky. It is 
 the iridescent arch of the rainbow, unsurpassed in beauty, but 
 a form rather than a force." D. J. Hill. 
 
 ft In our lighter literature he is without a rival as an artist. 
 He is equally happy in delineations of scenery and character. 
 . . . His style is unrivalled in picturesque effect." 
 F. H. Underwood. 
 
 " There is in his writings also the gayety and airiness of a 
 light, pure spirit a fanciful playing with common things 
 and here and there beautiful touches till the ludicrous be- 
 comes half picturesque. . . . Mr. Irving's scenery is so 
 true, so full of little beautiful particulars, that . . . the 
 distant is brought nigh to us and the whole is seen and felt 
 like a delightful reality. It is all gentleness and sunshine; the 
 bright influences fall on us, and our disturbed and lowering
 
 7l6 IRVING 
 
 spirits are made clear and tranquil turned all to beauty like 
 clouds shone upon by the moon." jK. H. Dana. 
 
 ' ' The ' Sketch Book ' was like the portfolio of an artist a 
 series of careful and authentic studies from life and nature, 
 embodying the natural tastes and traits of the man as elicited 
 by the scenes witnessed and the moods expressed by a genial 
 and contemplative wanderer." G. P. Putnam. 
 
 " The scenes and characters [in ' Rip Van Winkle' ] are so 
 harmonized that they have the effect of a picture, in which all 
 the parts combine to produce one charming whole." E. P. 
 Whipple. 
 
 " The boy had the artistic temperament the love of the 
 picturesque in books." Charles Dudley Warner. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " It was on the morning after the events recorded in the pre- 
 ceding chapter that a magnificent and powerful train issued 
 forth from the Christian camp. The advanced guard was com- 
 posed of legions of cavalry, heavily armed, and looked like mov- 
 ing masses of polished steel. Then came the king and queen, 
 with the prince and princess and the ladies of the court, sur- 
 rounded by the body-guard, sumptuously arrayed, composed of 
 the sons of the most illustrious houses of Spain ; after these was 
 the rear-guard, composed of a powerful force of horse and foot ; 
 for the flower of the army sallied forth that day. The Moors 
 gazed with fearful admiration at this glorious pageant, wherein 
 the pomp of the court was mingled with the terrors of the camp. 
 It moved along in a radiant line, across the Vega, to the melo- 
 dious thunders of martial music ; while banner and plume and 
 silken scarf and rich brocade gave a gay and gorgeous relief to 
 the grim visage of iron war that lurked beneath." Conquest of 
 Granada. 
 
 " The sun was pouring down a yellow autumnal ray into the 
 square of the cloisters, beaming upon a scanty plot of grass in 
 the centre and lighting up an angle of the vaulted passage with 
 a kind of dusty splendor. From between the arcades, the eye 
 glanced up to a bit of blue sky or a passing cloud, and beheld
 
 IRVING 
 
 the sungilt pinnacles of the abbey towering into the azure heav- 
 ens." Westminster Abbey. 
 
 " We at length arrived upon the highest point of the promon- 
 tory above Granada, called the mountain of the sun. The even- 
 ing was approaching : the setting sun had just gilded the loftiest 
 heights. Here and there a solitary shepherd might be descried 
 driving his flock down the declivities to be folded for the night 
 or a muleteer and his lagging animals threading some mountain 
 path, to arrive at the city gates before night-fall." Salmagundi. 
 
 8. Smoothness Elegance Finish. It is the qual- 
 ity so easily felt, but only partly expressed by these terms, that 
 causes Irving to be called the American Addison. He was 
 pre-eminently a literary man. 
 
 " No writer of his time had a better sense of literary form 
 and proportion ; he seems to have been born with this as with 
 his style. ... It does not weary, and it combines many 
 of the qualities that make what we call charm in lighter 
 literature. . . . Surrender yourself to the flowing cur- 
 rent of his transparent style, and you are conscious of a be- 
 guilement which is the crowning excellence of all lighter 
 literature, for which we have no word but charm. . . . 
 That his style was influenced by the purest English models 
 was apparent. But there remains a large margin for won- 
 der how, with his want of training, he could have elabo- 
 rated a style which is distinctively his own, and is as copious, 
 felicitous in the choice of words, flowing, spontaneous, flexi- 
 ble, engaging, clear, and as little wearisome when read con- 
 tinuously in quantity as any in the English tongue. . . 
 [' Bracebridge Hall' is] the perfection of ease and finish. 
 . . . He felt his subject, and he expressed his conception 
 not so much by direct statement or description as by almost 
 imperceptible touches of shading here and there, by a dif- 
 fused tone and color, with very little show of analysis." 
 Charles Dudley Warner. 
 
 " It is not only the genial philosophy, the humane spirit,
 
 718 IRVING 
 
 the humor and pathos of Irving, which endear his writings 
 and secure them an habitual interest, but it is the refreshment 
 afforded in a recurrence of the unalloyed, unaffected, clear 
 and flowing style with which he invariably expresses himself." 
 H. T. Tuckerman. 
 
 " He unites the various qualities of a perfect manner of 
 writing. ... It is, above the style of all other writers of 
 the day, marked with expressive elegance." E. P. Whipple. 
 
 " His style is transparent as the light ; sweetly modulated, 
 unaffected, the mature expression of a fertile fancy, a benig- 
 nant temper, a mind which, delighting in the noble and the 
 beautiful, turned involuntarily away from their opposites. " 
 Bryant. 
 
 " His works have all an admirable proportion ; nothing 
 necessary is omitted and needless details are avoided. He 
 never fatigues us by learned antitheses nor by the parallelisms 
 of proverbial philosophers in short, we can say that his style 
 is absolutely unrivalled in its fluency, grace, and picturesque 
 effect." F. H. Underwood. 
 
 " To all readers of refined taste he commended himself by 
 the remarkable chastity of his English style and the uncom- 
 mon delicacy of his moral sense, which, even in the tempting 
 characters of the early Dutch settlers of New York, did not 
 allow him to be betrayed into the coarse and vulgar. . . . 
 If we were to characterize a manner, which owes much of its 
 merit to the absence of any glaring characteristic, we should 
 perhaps say that it is, above the style of all other writers of 
 the day, marked with expressive elegance." Edward Ever- 
 ett. 
 
 " The great charm and peculiarity of his work consists in 
 the singular sweetness of the composition and the mildness of 
 the sentiments. . . . We happen to be very intense and 
 sensitive admirers of those soft harmonies of studied speech in 
 which the author is so apt to indulge himself: and we have 
 caught ourselves neglecting his excellent matter, to lap our-
 
 IRVING 719 
 
 selves in the liquid music of his periods and letting ourselves 
 float passively down the mellow falls and windings of his soft- 
 flowing sentences, with a delight not inferior to that which 
 we derive from fine versification." -Jeffrey. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " Mrs. Toole has for some time reigned unrivalled in the fash- 
 ionable world and had the supreme direction of caps, bonnets, 
 feathers, flowers and tinsel. She has dressed and undressed our 
 ladies just as she pleased; now loading them with velvet and 
 wadding, now turning them adrift upon the world to run shiver- 
 ing through the streets with scarce a covering to their backs ; 
 and now obliging them to drag a long train at their heels, like the 
 tail of a paper kite. Her despotic sway, however, threatens to 
 be limited. A dangerous rival has sprung up in the person of 
 Madame Bouchard, an intrepid little woman, fresh from the 
 headquarters of fashion and folly, and who has burst, like a sec- 
 ond Bonaparte, upon the fashionable world Mrs. Toole, not- 
 withstanding, seems determined to dispute her ground bravely 
 for the honor of old England. The ladies have begun to arrange 
 themselves under the banner of one or other of these heroines 
 of the needle, and everything portends open war. Madame 
 Bouchard marches gallantly to the field, flourishing a flaming red 
 robe for a standard, ' flouting the skies ; ' and Mrs. Toole, no 
 ways dismayed, sallies out under cover of a forest of artificial 
 flowers, like Malcolm's host. Both parties possess great merit, 
 and both deserve the victory." Salmagundi. 
 
 " From Poet's Corner I continued my stroll towards that part 
 of the abbey which contains the sepulchres of the kings. I 
 wandered among what once were chapels, but which are now 
 occupied by the tombs and monuments of the great. At every 
 turn I met with some illustrious name or the cognizance of some 
 powerful house renowned in history. As the eye darts into these 
 dusky chambers of death, it catches glimpses of quaint effigies ; 
 some kneeling in niches, as if in devotion, others stretched upon 
 the tombs, with hands piously pressed together ; warriors in 
 armor, as if reposing after battle ; prelates with crosiers and 
 mitres and nobles in robes and coronets, lying, as it were, in 
 State. In glancing over this scene, so strangely populous, yet
 
 720 IRVING 
 
 where every form is so still and silent, it seems almost as if we 
 were treading a mansion of that fabled city where every being 
 had been suddenly transmuted into stone." Westminster Abbey. 
 
 " During my residence in the country, I used frequently to at- 
 tend at the old village church. Its shadowy aisles, its mouldering 
 monuments, its dark oaken panelling, all reverend with the 
 gloom of departed years, seemed to fit it for the gloom of solemn 
 meditation. A Sunday, too, in the country is so holy in its re- 
 pose such a pensive quiet reigns over the face of nature that 
 every restless passion is charmed down, and we feel all the nat- 
 ural religion of the soul gently springing up within us." The 
 Widow and Her Son. 
 
 " Following the current of the brook for a mile or two, we re- 
 traced many of our old haunts, and told a hundred adventures 
 which had befallen us at different times. It was like snatching 
 the hour-glass of time, inverting it, and rolling back the sands 
 that had marked the lapse of years. At length the shadows be- 
 gan to lengthen, the south wind gradually settled into a perfect 
 calm, the sun threw his rays through the trees on the hill-tops in 
 golden lustre, and a kind of Sabbath stillness pervaded the whole 
 valley, indicating that the hour was fast approaching which was 
 to relieve for a while the farmer from the rural labor, the ox from 
 his toil, the school-urchin from his primer, and bring the loving 
 plowman home to the feet of his blooming dairy-maid." Sal- 
 magundi. 
 
 9. Fondness for Tradition Romanticism. "He 
 is not only an artist of the beautiful but one whose pencil is 
 dipped in the mellow tints of legendary lore." H. T. Tucker- 
 man. 
 
 " He dearly loved to wander about in the silent woods, by 
 the sparkling streams, in the solitude of the hills, under the 
 open sky, and in the recesses where nature whispered to him 
 her secrets, and to dream the dreams of youth and romance. 
 . . . The boy was a dreamer and a saunterer ; he him- 
 self says that he used to wander about the pier-heads in 
 fine weather, watching the ships departing on long voyages, 
 and dream of going to the ends of the earth. . . . With
 
 IRVING 72 1 
 
 the romantic period of Spanish history Irving was in ardent 
 sympathy. The story of the Saracens entranced his mind. 
 His imagination disclosed his Oriental qualities while he pored 
 over the romance and the ruin of that land of fierce contrasts, 
 of arid wastes beaten by the burning sun, valleys blooming 
 with intoxicating beauty, cities of architectural splendor and 
 picturesque squalor. It is a matter of regret that he, who 
 seemed to need the Southern sun to ripen his genius, never 
 made a pilgrimage into the East and gave to the world pict- 
 ures of the lands that he would have touched with the charm 
 of their o\vn color and the witchery of their own romance. 
 . The charm of ' The Alhambra ' is largely in the leis- 
 urely, loitering, dreamy spirit in which the temporary Ameri- 
 can resident of the ancient palace-fortress entered into its wan- 
 dering beauties and romantic associations and in the artistic 
 skill with which he wove the commonplace daily life of his 
 attendants there into the more brilliant woof of the past. 
 . . . There is no question of our national indebtedness 
 to him for investing a crude and new land with the enduring 
 charms of romance and tradition. . . . The Knicker- 
 bocker Legend and the romance with which Irving has in- 
 vested the Hudson are a priceless legacy ; and this would re- 
 main an imperishable possession in popular tradition if the 
 literature creating it were destroyed. ... In fact, it 
 [The Legend of Sleepy Hollow '] is old. And yet the orig- 
 inal setting, the exquisite adaptation of the legend to its locality, 
 make it a new creation. It has the same dignity of antiquity 
 as ' The Legend of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus. ' . . . 
 Legends these were which Irving heard, . . . but it was 
 genius that gave the folk-tales form and added them to the 
 romance of the world. . . . This sort of creation is un- 
 equalled in modern times. His mind dwelled more willingly 
 in traditions than in the present. . . . It [' History of 
 Columbus '] is in fact a composition of that borderland be- 
 tween legend and history." Charles Dudley Warner. 
 46
 
 722 IRVING 
 
 "The charming stories comprised in the Alhambra vol- 
 ume, not less than the Hudson legends, show his fertility of 
 thought, his originality of invention, his romantic tendency. 
 . [The] old-fashioned flavor [which his works bore], 
 as though they had been taken from the drawers of an ancient 
 secretary scented with faded rose-leaves, gives them an added 
 charm." C. F. Richardson. 
 
 "He manifested a tender, satisfied repose in the venerable 
 by his quiet delight in the implicit tradition of 
 English civility, the scarcely felt yet everywhere influential 
 presence of a beautiful and grave past." Edward Dowiicn. 
 
 " The consequence of this style of dainty selection and ex- 
 quisite indistinctness is that we cannot determine whether we 
 are reading a professed fiction or an intended history. 
 In the history of the siege of Granada this puzzle between 
 truth and fiction becomes absolutely offending." H. B. 
 Wallace. 
 
 " In all his wanderings his eye, ... his memory, 
 brooded over the traditions of the past, and his heart caught 
 and reflected every phase of humanity. . . . The lights 
 and shadows of English life, the legendary romance of Spain, 
 the novelty of a tour on the prairies of the West and of ad- 
 ventures in the Rocky Mountains, the poetic beauty of the 
 Alhambra, the memories of Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey, 
 the quaint and comfortable philosophy of the Dutch colonists, 
 and the scenery of the Hudson, are themes upon which he 
 expatiates with the grace and zest of a master." H. T. Tuck- 
 erman. 
 
 " To pass the vague and venerable traditions of the austere 
 and heroic founders of the city through the alembic of a 
 youth's hilarious creative humor and turn them out in forms 
 resistlessly grotesque but with their identity unimpaired, was 
 a stroke as daring as it was successful. The audacious Goth 
 of the legend who plucked the Roman senator by the beard 
 was not a more ruthless iconoclast than this son of New Am-
 
 IRVING 723 
 
 sterdam, who drew his civil ancestors from venerable obscur- 
 ity by flooding them with the cheerful light of a blameless 
 fun." George William Curtis. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " It was the recollection of this romantic tale of former times 
 and of the golden little poem which had its birth-place in this 
 tower, that made me visit the old pile with more than common 
 interest. The suit of armor hanging up in the hall, richly gilt 
 and embellished, as if to figure in the tourney, brought the image 
 of the gallant and romantic prince vividly before my imagination. 
 I paced the deserted chambers where he had composed his 
 poem ; I leaned upon the window and endeavored to persuade 
 myself it was the very one where he had been visited by his 
 vision ; I looked out upon the spot where he had first seen Lady 
 Jane." The Sketch Book. 
 
 " As he was one evening, about twilight, passing through the 
 Court of Lions, he heard footsteps in the Hall of the Abencerrages. 
 Supposing some loungers to be lingering there, he advanced to 
 attend upon them, when, to his astonishment, he beheld four 
 Moors richly dressed, with gilded cuirasses and cimeters and 
 poniards glittering with precious stones. They were walking to 
 and fro with solemn pace, but paused and beckoned to him. 
 The old soldier, however, took to flight, and could never after- 
 ward be prevailed upon to enter the Alhambra. Thus it is that 
 men sometimes turn their backs upon fortune ; for it is the firm 
 opinion of Mateo that the Moors intended to reveal the place 
 where their treasures lay buried. A successor to the invalid 
 soldier was more knowing ; he came to the Alhambra poor, but 
 at the end of a year he went off to Malaga, bought horses, set up 
 a carriage, and still lives there, one of the richest as well as the 
 oldest men of the place, all which, Mateo sagely surmises, was 
 in consequence of his finding out the golden secret of these 
 phantom Moors." The Alhambra. 
 
 11 Day after day he watched for the return of the messenger of 
 love ; but he watched in vain. He began to accuse him of 
 forgetfulness, when toward sunset one evening the faithful bird 
 fluttered into his apartment, and, falling at his feet, expired. 
 The arrow of some wanton archer had pierced his breast, yet he
 
 724 IRVING 
 
 had struggled with the lingerings of life to execute his mission. 
 As the prince bent with grief over this gentle martyr to fidelity, 
 he beheld a chain of pearls round his neck, attached to which, 
 beneath his wing, was a small enameled picture. It represented 
 a lovely princess in the very flower of her years. It was doubtless 
 the unknown beauty of the garden. But who and where was she ? 
 How had she received his letter and was this picture sent as a 
 token of approval of his passion ? Unfortunately, the death of 
 the faithful dove left everything in mystery and doubt." The 
 Alhambra.
 
 HAWTHORNE, 1804-1864 
 
 Biographical Outline. Nathaniel Hawthorne, born at 
 Salem, Mass., July 4, 1804 ; ancestors (who spelled their name 
 Hathorne) were prominent in the public affairs of New Eng- 
 land ; his father and grandfather were shipmasters ; father 
 dies in Nathaniel's fourth year; Hawthorne shows no pre- 
 cocious traits; in 1853 he wrote of his childhood: "One 
 of the peculiarities of my boyhood was a grievous disinclina- 
 tion to go to school, and (Providence favoring me in this 
 natural repugnance) I never did go half as much as other 
 boys, partly owing to delicate health (which I made the most 
 of for the purpose) and partly because, much of the time, there 
 were no schools within reach; " he reads " Pilgrim's Prog- 
 ress " and " The Faerie Queene " as a boy ; is lame for a 
 time, and has for a tutor Dr. Worcester, of Dictionary fame ; 
 in 1818 his mother removes to Raymond, Me., near Lake 
 Sebago, where the family had lands and where, says Haw- 
 thorne, " I first got my cursed habits of solitude ; " he roams 
 the woods alone, and skates alone till midnight on the lake ; 
 begins to make experiments in verse, printing some of them in 
 Boston papers; returns alone to Salem in 1819, and enters 
 school there; begins preparation for college in 1820 under a 
 private tutor; writes to his mother, "You are in danger of 
 having one learned man in your family. ... I get my 
 lessons at home and recite them to him [the lawyer-tutor] at 
 seven in the morning. . . . Shall you want me to be a 
 minister, doctor, or lawyer? A minister I will not be ; " he 
 enters Bowdoin College in 1821 ; writes to his mother, " I am 
 quite reconciled to going to college if I am to spend the vaca- 
 
 725
 
 726 HAWTHORNE 
 
 tions with you [in Maine]. Yet four years of the best of my 
 life is a great deal to throw away; " among his fellow-students 
 at Bowdoin are Longfellow, Franklin (afterward President), 
 Pierce, and Horatio Bridge, with the two latter of whom 
 Hawthorne forms a close and lifelong friendship ; in the pref- 
 ace to " The Snow Image " he says to Bridge, " If anybody 
 is responsible at this day for my being an author, it is your- 
 self; " in 1821 Hawthorne writes to his mother: " What do 
 you think of my becoming an author and relying for support 
 upon my pen? Indeed, I think the "illegibility of my hand- 
 writing very author-like. How proud you would be to see 
 my works praised by the reviewers as equal to the proudest 
 productions of the scribbling sons of John Bull ; " he is only 
 a fair student at Bowdoin, " doing a hundred things the Fac- 
 ulty never heard of, or else it had been worse for us ; " at one 
 time he is fined fifty cents by the Faculty for playing cards 
 for money; is graduated in 1825, and returns to Salem, 
 whither his mother had meantime returned ; of this period 
 Hawthorne says: " It was my fortune or misfortune, just as 
 you please, to have some slender means of supporting myself, 
 and so, ... instead of immediately studying a profes- 
 sion, I sat myself down to consider what pursuit in life I was 
 best fit for. ... I had always a natural tendency tow- 
 ard seclusion. ... I had very few acquaintances in 
 Salem, and during the nine or ten years that I spent there in 
 this solitary way I doubt whether so much as twenty people 
 of the town were aware of my existence. ... I had read 
 endlessly all sorts of good and good-for-nothing books, and, 
 in the dearth of other employment, had early begun to scrib- 
 ble sketches and stories, most of which I burned ; " he con- 
 tributes a few sketches to the Token, a Boston annual, and 
 publishes a romance entitled " Fanshawe " anonymously at 
 his own expense in 1828 ; soon afterward he collects and 
 annihilates the entire edition ; makes a critical study of many 
 novels ; begins contributing to the Knickerbocker Magazine
 
 HAWTHORNE 727 
 
 in 1836, and during the same year goes to Boston to become 
 editor of The American Magazine of Useful and Entertain- 
 ing Knowledge, at a salary of $500 ; the periodical has a 
 short life and is a financial failure, Hawthorne getting 
 but $20 for his four months' service as editor; meantime 
 he helps to prepare an " Universal History," which becomes 
 a popular text-book and for his share in which Hawthorne 
 receives $100; he returns to Salem and publishes "Twice- 
 Told Tales" in the spring of 1837; about this time he 
 is duped by an adventuress, and is induced to challenge 
 an old friend to a duel ; explanations are made, and the 
 friendship is renewed, but Hawthorne's faith in human nat- 
 ure is sorely shaken, especially as his promptness in sending 
 the challenge influences his old college friend (then Congress- 
 man) Cilley to accept a challenge from a Southerner (Wise), 
 which results fatally to Cilley ; some of the first series of 
 "Twice-Told Tales" reflect Hawthorne's remorse and his 
 views of moral guilt at this period; from 1832 to 1838 he had 
 printed in the Token, the New England Magazine, the Amer- 
 ican Magazine, the Knickerbocker Magazine, and the Demo- 
 cratic Review some forty-four articles, many of them reprinted 
 in " Twice-Told Tales ; " meantime " he had little commun- 
 ication even with the members of his own family ; frequently 
 his meals were brought and left at his locked door. 
 He seldom chose to walk in town except at night ' ' [see the 
 "Night Sketches" in " Twice-Told Tales"]; in 1837 he 
 meets Sophia Peabody, an invalid artist, the daughter of a 
 Salem bookseller and related to Elizabeth Peabody ; Julian 
 Hawthorne calls her " Hawthorne's true guardian and recreat- 
 ing angel; " each falls rapturously, but silently, in love with 
 the other; they become engaged early in 1839, but conceal 
 their relation for three years, owing to Miss Peabody's ill- 
 health, to the opposition to the match by Hawthorne's sister 
 Elizabeth, and to the abnormal nervousness of his mother; 
 early in 1839 he is appointed weigher and gauger in the Bos-
 
 728 HAWTHORNE 
 
 ton Custom House at a salary of $1,200, a position which he 
 called " a very grievous thraldom" and from which he was 
 removed in 1841 through political changes ; in April, 1841, 
 he goes to reside with the socialistic community at Brook 
 Farm, but as a visitor rather than a member; " does his share 
 of the farm-work like a man," and does not shrink from milk- 
 ing cows and shovelling manure ; while at Brook Farm he 
 gathers the material for his " Blithedale Romance;" Miss 
 Peabody recovers from her illness in 1842, and is married to 
 Hawthorne, July gth, after an ideal courtship " a love-story 
 such as the angels might delight to hear," and "the lovers 
 were justified in believing that Love himself was the physi- 
 cian ; " they settle in " The Old Manse " at Concord, where 
 "Mr. Emerson passes by with a sunbeam in his face; " 
 Hawthorne becomes intimate with Emerson, who " talks to 
 him all the time, while Hawthorne looks answers;" Una, 
 Hawthorne's first child, is born at Concord ; they return to 
 Salem in the autumn of 1845, in financial straits, because of the 
 failure of Hawthorne's debtors to pay him for literary work ; 
 in the spring of 1843 he writes : " I have written with pretty 
 commendable diligence, averaging twelve to fourteen hours 
 a day, and the result is seen in various magazines. . . . 
 Meantime the magazine people [the Democratic Revieiv\ do 
 not pay their debts, so that we taste some of the inconven- 
 iences of poverty ; " March 23, 1846, Hawthorne is appointed 
 by President Polk Surveyor of the Custom House at Salem 
 at a salary of $1,200 ; he spends the summer of 1846 in Bos- 
 ton, where his second child, Julian, is born; in September, 
 1847, on moving into the Salem house, where " The Scarlet 
 Letter " was written, Mrs. Hawthorne writes : "He has now 
 lived in the nursery a year without a chance of one hour's un- 
 interrupted musing and without his desk being once opened ; " 
 he loses his place in the Salem Custom House in the summer 
 of 1849 through political chicanery ; begins " The Scarlet 
 Letter," which he completes in six months, though harassed
 
 HAWTHORNE 729 
 
 meantime by his "official decapitation," by the illness and 
 death of his mother (who was at that time a member of Haw- 
 thorne's family), and at times by severe physical pain ; the 
 first edition of " The Scarlet Letter " (5,000 copies) is ex- 
 hausted within ten days, and Hawthorne finds himself famous ; 
 the book is highly praised by English periodicals ; in the sum- 
 mer of 1850 he removes to Lenox, Mass., in the Berkshire 
 Hills, where he settles "in a small red house . . . 
 far from a comfortable residence, but he had no means of ob- 
 taining a better one ; " writes "The House of the Seven Ga- 
 bles " at Lenox, and publishes it in March, 1851 ; it is warm- 
 ly praised in reviews by Longfellow and Lowell ; Hawthorne's 
 second daughter, Rose, is born at Lenox in May, 1851 ; in 
 the June following he begins " The Wonder Book," " the 
 only book he ever published which has not a gloomy page in 
 it," finishes it in six weeks, and publishes it in July, 1851 ; he 
 removes, in November, 1851, to West Newton, Mass., where 
 he writes "The Blithedale Romance; " during the winter of 
 1851-52, he buys from Bronson Alcott the old home of the 
 latter at Concord, and settles there in June, 1852; Haw- 
 thorne names the place, with its twenty acres of land, " The 
 Wayside;" it is two miles from " The Old Manse," with 
 which it has often been confounded; meantime "The House 
 of the Seven Gables" becomes most popular in England and 
 is twice translated into German ; Hawthorne publishes " The 
 Blithedale Romance " in the summer of 1851 ; he is deeply 
 affected by the drowning of his sister Louisa from a burning 
 steamboat on the Hudson in July, 1852; finishes " Tangle- 
 wood Tales " in March, 1853, and publishes it in the fol- 
 lowing autumn ; in August and September, 1853, he writes 
 the biography of his old friend Franklin Pierce, as a campaign 
 document "such a testimony to the character of a presi- 
 dential candidate as was never before thrown upon the fierce 
 arena of political warfare ; " he visits the Isles of Shoals with 
 Pierce later in the autumn ; at first he refuses President Pierce' s
 
 73O HAWTHORNE 
 
 urgent offers of official appointment, but finally accepts the 
 consulship at Liverpool, for which he is confirmed March 26, 
 18^53 ; sails for Liverpool late in the following June ; the three 
 American novels (" The Scarlet Letter," " The House of the 
 Seven Gables," and " The Blithedale Romance ") are reprint- 
 ed in England ; the first two are pirated, but for " The Blithe- 
 dale Romance" Hawthorne receives ^200 from Chapman & 
 Hall ; during the following six years he writes only the manu- 
 script volumes of his English, French, and Italian journals ; at 
 Liverpool he begins a correspondence with De Quincey, and 
 forms a close friendship with Henry Bright, who had visited 
 Concord the year before ; Hawthorne finds the consulship less 
 remunerative than he had" expected ; spends a part of the 
 summer of 1855 at Leamington and in the Lake District, re- 
 turning to "this black and miserable hole" (Liverpool) 
 more miserable because of an unexpected reduction in his pay 
 just then ; visits London in September, 1855, escorting Mrs. 
 Hawthorne on her way to Lisbon, where she spends the fol- 
 lowing winter in search of health ; he revisits London in the 
 spring of 1856, and receives attention from several literary 
 lights, including Howitt and Charles Reade; visits Abbots- 
 ford and York in 1856, and meets Alexander Ireland, Emer- 
 son's friend ; spends the summer of 1856 near Southampton, 
 and thence to Bennoch's home near London, where Haw- 
 thorne meets the Brownings, Florence Nightingale, Macaulay, 
 and others ; he then resides for ten months at Southport, near 
 Liverpool; resigns his consulship in September, 1857, and 
 settles temporarily in London ; on the i3th of January, 1856, 
 starts for Italy by way of Paris, leaving with Henry Bright 
 his English journals, " not to be opened till 1900 ; " " shiv- 
 ers through some of the palaces and churches of Genoa," and 
 soon afterward reaches Rome, where he forms a close friend- 
 ship with Story, the sculptor, and meets Bryant, Miss Bremer, 
 and other literary people ; leaves Rome for Florence in May, 
 1858; resides first at the villa Mcptauto, a mile outside the
 
 HAWTHORNE 731 
 
 city, near Mrs. Browning's Casa Guidi, where Hawthorne 
 writes the first sketch of "The Marble Faun," afterward re- 
 written at Redcar in England ; he returns to Rome by way 
 of Sienna in October, and resides there at 28 Piazza. Poli till 
 May, 1859, but writes nothing because of the almost fatal ill- 
 ness of his daughter Una ; he leaves Rome May 26, 1859, and 
 returns to London, stopping briefly at Genoa, Marseilles, Avig- 
 non, Geneva, Villeneuve, and Paris; meets Thomas Hughes, 
 Monckton Milnes,and Chorley ; retires to Red car, near Whitby, 
 in July in order to prepare " The Marble Faun " for publica- 
 tion ; thence to Leamington in October, where he remains till 
 March, 1860, and where he finishes the romance ; " The Mar- 
 ble Faun " is published in London by Smith, Elder & Co. in 
 February, 1860, under the title "Transformation," and is 
 favorably received ; Hawthorne goes to London in May, 1860, 
 where he meets Motley and Layard, and thence to America in 
 June ; he remodels ' ' The Wayside ' ' and settles there ; is so op- 
 pressed by the political conditions that he writes nothing dur- 
 ing 1860 ; in 1 86 1 begins his romance " Septimius," the first 
 and longest sketch of which has never been published ; during 
 1 86 1 Hawthorne contributes to the Atlantic the articles based 
 on his English Note-Books, which were afterward gathered 
 into a volume entitled " Our Old Home," published in 1863 ; 
 he receives $200 for each article in the Atlantic ; in the spring 
 of 1862 he visits Washington and the seat of war, and contrib- 
 utes to the Atlantic an article entitled ' ' Chiefly about War Mat- 
 ters," appending ironical notes expressing "the horror-stricken 
 comments of the editor upon the writer's want of patriotism," 
 which deceived many readers; spends the summer of 1862 
 seeking for health on the Maine coast, near Mount Desert; be- 
 gins the second sketch of ' The Dolliver Romance ' ' (Septimius) 
 in the winter of 1862-63, an( ^> contrary to his custom, allows 
 the first part to be published serially before the manuscript is 
 completed ; afterward withdraws the introductory chapter, 
 and writes to the editor of the Atlantic : " There are two or
 
 732 HAWTHORNE 
 
 three chapters ready to be written, but I am not robust enough 
 to begin ; " his health continues to decline during 1863 ; he is 
 visited by his old friend ex-President Pierce early in 1864; 
 in March, 1864, he starts southward in search of health, ac- 
 companied by W. D. Ticknor; Ticknor's sudden death while 
 they are together in Philadelphia, in April, greatly shocks 
 Hawthorne and aggravates his malady (which no one seemed 
 to understand); he returns to Boston with Ticknor's remains, 
 and on May i5th starts with P'ierce for a tour of Northern 
 New England ; dies suddenly at Plymouth, N. H., May 18, 
 1864 ; after his death his journals of England, Italy, etc., are 
 transcribed and published by Mrs. Hawthorne ; afterward his 
 daughter Una and Robert Browning decipher the second 
 manuscript of " Septimius Felton," and it is published in the 
 Atlantic ; " Grimshawe " has also been published since Haw- 
 thorne's death. 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY ON HAWTHORNE'S STYLE. 
 
 Hutton, R. H., "Literary Essays." New York, 1888, Macmillan, 
 
 437-490. 
 Rice, A. T. (G. W. Curtis), " Essays from the North American Review." 
 
 New York, 1879, Appleton, 334-358. 
 James, H., "English Men of Letters." New York, 1880, Harper, v. 
 
 index. 
 Whipple, E. P., "Character and Characteristic Men." Boston, 1866, 
 
 Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 218-242. 
 Richardson, C. F., "American Literature." New York, 1893, Putnam, 
 
 2: 330-390. 
 Page, H. A., "A Memoir of Nathaniel Hawthorne." London, 1872, 
 
 King& Co., 1-113. 
 Underwood, F. H., "A Handbook of English Literature." Boston, 
 
 1873, Lee & Shepard, 241-242. 
 Fields, J. T., "Nathaniel Hawthorne." Boston, 1876, Osgood & Co., 
 
 128, etc. 
 Lathrop, G. P., " A Study of Hawthorne." Boston, 1876, Osgood & Co., 
 
 v. index. 
 Higginson, T. W., " Short Studies. " Boston, 1888, Lee & Shepard,
 
 HAWTHORNE 733 
 
 Tuckerman, H. T. , "Mental Portraits.'' London, 1853, R. Bentley, 
 
 250-270. 
 Stedman, E. C., "Hawthorne and Other Poems." Boston, 1877, Os- 
 
 good & Co., 11-25. 
 
 Nichol, J., "American Literature." Edinburgh, 1882, Black, 322-352. 
 Poe, E. A., "The Literati." New York, 1855, Redneld, 188-202. 
 Smith, G. B., "Poets and Novelists." New York, 1876, Appleton, 
 
 151-206. 
 Whipple, E. P., "Outlooks." Boston, 1888, Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 
 
 3I7-3I8. 
 Symonds, J. A., "Hawthorne, an Oration." Portland, 1878, Bowdoin 
 
 Alumni. 
 Conway, M. D., "Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne." (Great Writers), 
 
 New York, 1890, Lovell, 13-215. 
 Bridge, H., " Personal Recollections of Nathaniel Hawthorne." New 
 
 York, 1893, Harper, 1-200. 
 Hutton, R. H., "Essays, Theological and Critical." London, 1877, 
 
 Dolly & Co., 2: 370-416. 
 Drake, S. A., "Our Great Benefactors." Boston, 1884, Roberts, 116- 
 
 124. 
 Fields, J. T., " Yesterdays with Authors." Boston, 1893, Houghton, 
 
 Mifflin & Co., 39-124. 
 Walsh, W. Shepard, "The Literary Life." New York, 1882, Putnam, 
 
 150-160. 
 Stephen, L., "Hours in a Library." New York, 1894, Putnam, i: 
 
 169-199. 
 Taylor, B., " Critical Essays and Notes. " New York, 1880, Putnam, 
 
 354-357- 
 Mitford, M. R., " Recollections of a Literary Life." New York, 1851, 
 
 Harper, 5*5-532- 
 Phillips, M. G., "A Manual of English Literature." New York, 1893, 
 
 Harper, 2 : 437~439- 
 Xorth American Review, 99: 539-557 (G. W. Curtis); 45: 59- 73 
 
 (Longfellow); 76: 227-248 (Peabody) ; 129: 203-222 (A. Trol- 
 
 lope); 71: 135-148 (A. W. Abbott) ; 99: 539-554 (G. W. Curtis). 
 North British Review, 49 : 93-113; 49: 173-208. 
 Scribner's Monthly, u : 799-808(6. P. Lathrop). 
 Atlantic Monthly, 14: 98-101 (Holmes); 5: 509-510 (Editor) ; 22: 
 
 359-374 (Peabody) ; 5 : 614-622 (Whipple) ; 26 : 257-272 (Hfl- 
 
 lard) ; 51-363-375 (Lathrop) ; 26: 257-272 (Hillard). 
 Harper's Magazine, 45 : 683-697 (Stoddard). 
 Christian Examiner, 25 : 182-190 (Peabody).
 
 734 HAWTHORNE 
 
 The Nation, 14: 172-173 (H. James); n : 59-61 (J. R. Dennett). 
 
 Westminster Review, 142 : 203-214 (Bradfield) ; 58 : 592-598 ; 73 : 
 338-340. 
 
 Andover Review, 18 : 139-147(0. W. Curtis); 7: 31-46 (C. L. Star- 
 buck). 
 
 Methodist Quarterly Review, 48 : 409-433 (R. G. Houghton). 
 
 Century Afagazine, 10: 83-93 (J- Hawthorne); 28: 3-17 (J. Haw- 
 thorne). 
 
 The New Englander, 5 : 56-69 (S. W. S. Button). 
 
 Eclectic Magazine, 77: 174-186 (M. Browne). 
 
 American Whig Review, 4: 296-316 (C.^W. Weber). 
 
 Belgravia, 19 : 72-79 (Kenningale Cook). 
 
 Catholic World, 32 : 231-237 (J. V. O'Connor). 
 
 Blackwood's Magazine, 94 : 610-623. 
 
 New Monthly Magazine, w. 202-212 (Sir Nathaniel) ; 98: 202-207. 
 
 Cornhill Magazine, 23: 321-336, 444-456, and 566-575. 
 
 Every Saturday, 13: 179-180. 
 
 Overland Magazine, 2: 138-143 (D. Libby). 
 
 The Galaxy, 6 : 742-748 (E. Benson). 
 
 The Catholic Presbyterian, 6 : 33-42 (A. C. Roe). 
 
 St. Paul's Magazine, 9: 311-313 (G. P. Lathrop.) 
 
 London Quarterly Review, 37 : 48-78. 
 
 Universalist Quarterly, 8 : 272-293 (A. D. Mayo). 
 
 The Critic, 3 : 65-66 (J. H. Morse). 
 
 Taifs Magazine, 23 : 756-757 ; 22 : 33-41. 
 
 Lippincott's Magazine, 43 : 250 (R. H. Stoddard). 
 
 Democratic Review, 16 : 376-384. 
 
 National Review, n : 453-481. 
 
 PARTICULAR CHARACTERISTICS. 
 
 I. Mysticism Weirdness. " The old witch-hanging 
 city [Salem] had no weirder product than this dark-haired 
 son. . . . The mind of Justice Hawthorne's descendant 
 was bewitched by the fascination of a certain devilish subtlety 
 under the comeliest aspect of human affairs. ... In the 
 preface to the 'Twice-Told Tales,' Hawthorne says: 'Even 
 in what purport to be pictures of actual life, we have alle- 
 gory, not always so warmly dressed, in its habiliments of flesh
 
 HAWTHORNE 735 
 
 and blood as to be taken into the reader's mind without a 
 shiver.' . . . The spell of mysterious horror which kin- 
 dled Hawthorne's imagination was a test of the character of 
 his genius. The mind of this child of witch-haunted Salem 
 loved to hover between the natural and the supernatural, and 
 sought to tread the almost imperceptible and doubtful line of 
 contact. He instinctively sketched the phantoms that have the 
 figures of men but are not human. . . . His genius broods 
 entranced over the evanescent phantasmagoria of the vague 
 delectable land in which the realities of experience blend with 
 ghostly doubts and wonders. . . . Thus it was because the 
 early New England life made so much larger account of the 
 supernatural element than any other modern civilized society 
 that the man whose blood had run in its veins instinctively 
 turned to it. Human life and character, whether in New 
 England, two hundred years ago, or Italy to-day, interested 
 him only as they were touched with this glamour of sombre 
 spiritual mystery. . . . His own times and their people 
 and their affairs were just as shadowy to him as those of any 
 of his stories. He wrote like a disembodied intelligence of 
 events with which his neighbors' hearts were quivering." 
 George William Curtis. 
 
 "A kindred element in his genius is his affinity with the 
 weird, the mysterious, the supernatural. His page is dappled 
 with lights and shadows derived from other suns than ours. 
 No foot moved with firmer tread than his over that dim twi- 
 light region which lies between the seen and the unseen. The 
 skill with which he weaves his threads of mystery into the 
 web of common life, the firm hand with which he controls 
 the shadowy shapes which he evokes, the art with which he 
 leaves his problems half unsolved and the reader's mind in 
 doubt as to how much he himself believed of the wonders 
 he suggested or revealed these are among the most strik- 
 ing characteristics of his peculiar and original genius."- 
 G. S. Hillard.
 
 736 HAWTHORNE 
 
 " He was really the ghost of New England I do not mean 
 the ' spirit ' nor the ' phantom,' but the ghost in the older sense 
 in which that term is used the thin, rarefied essence which 
 is supposed to be found somewhere behind the physical organ- 
 ization ; . endowed with a certain painful sense of the 
 gulf between his nature and its organization, always recogniz- 
 ing the gulf, always trying the bridge over it, and always more 
 or less unsuccessful in the attempt. . . . There is nothing 
 more ghostly in his writings than his account of the consul- 
 ship at Liverpool. . . . Hawthorne, who was a delicate 
 critic of himself, was well aware of the shadowy character of 
 his own genius, though hardly aware that precisely here lay its 
 curious and thrilling power. . . . Hawthorne's peculiar 
 genius lies in the power he possesses to be haunted and, in 
 his turn, to haunt the reader with his conceptions far more 
 than in their intrinsic force." JR. H. Hutton. 
 
 " But he whose quickened eye 
 Saw through New England's life her inmost spirit 
 
 Her heart and all the stays on which it leant 
 
 Returns not since he laid the pencil by 
 Whose mystic touch none other shall inherit. 
 
 What sybil to him bore 
 
 The secret oracles that move and haunt ? 
 
 At night's dread noon he scanned the enchanted glass, 
 Ay, and himself the warlock's mantle wore, 
 
 Nor to the thronging phantoms said Avaunt, 
 
 But waved his wand and bade them rise and pass." 
 
 E. C. Stedman. 
 
 " The strange mysteries in which the world and our natures 
 are shrouded are always present to his imagination; he 
 catches dim glimpses of the laws which bring out strange har- 
 monies but on the whole tend rather to deepen than to clear
 
 HAWTHORNE 737 
 
 the mysteries. He loves the marvellous, not in the vulgar 
 sense of the word, but as a symbol of perplexity which en- 
 counters every thoughtful man in his journey through life." 
 Leslie Stephen. 
 
 " This air, on the author's part, of being a confirmed 
 habitue of a region of mysteries and subtleties, constitutes the 
 originality of his tales." Henry James. 
 
 " His fondness for the out-of-the-way, the grotesque, and 
 the abnormal is appeased a little by the introduction of the 
 mesmerist element into composition." G. B. Smith. 
 
 " Nothing could be more remote from the ordinary pict- 
 ures of life and manners as shown in the modern novel than 
 the romances of Hawthorne. Boston, as he paints it, is as 
 far away as old Troy. There are striking and life-like figures 
 which we see involved in the magical web of his story, but 
 the art of the romancer throws upon them a film of distance, 
 so that we seem contemplating phantasms. An air of mystery 
 broods over every scene, whether it is in a many-gabled house 
 or in the depths of an original forest. The reader feels a tin- 
 gling in the silence of his room as in the days when his boy- 
 ish terrors were roused by stories of ghosts. He feels that he 
 is entering a realm over which shines ' a light that never was 
 on sea or land,' where the flowers are like their semblance in 
 wax, where the sounds of laughter have ceased to echo, and 
 where the grave people, each burdened with his sin or his sor- 
 row, walk about like the unresting throng in the halls of 
 Eblis, each holding his hand over his ever-burning heart." 
 F. If. Underwood. 
 
 " He always takes us below the surface and beyond the 
 material. . . . He makes us breathe the air of contem- 
 plation and turns our eyes inward. . . . It is as if we 
 went forth in a dream into the stillness of an autumn wood or 
 stood in a vast gallery of old pictures. . . . The appeal is 
 to the retrospective, the introspective, to what is thoughtful 
 and profoundly conscious in our nature and whereby it com- 
 47
 
 738 HAWTHORNE 
 
 munes with the mysteries of life and the occult intimations of 
 nature. . . . It is around the boundary of the possible 
 that he most freely expatiates ; the realities and the mysteries 
 of life, to his vision, are scarcely apart ; they act and react 
 so as to yield dramatic hints or vistas of sentiment." H. T. 
 Tuckerman. 
 
 " The element of poetry is air ; we know the poet by his 
 atmospheric effects, by the blue of his distance, by the soften- 
 ing of every hard outline he touches, by the silvery mist in 
 which he veils deformity and clothes what is common so that 
 it changes to awe-inspiring mystery, by the clouds of gold and 
 purple which are the drapery of his dreams. And surely we 
 have had but one prose-writer who could be compared with 
 him in aerial perspective, if we may use the painter's term. If 
 Irving is the Claude of our unrhymed poetry, Hawthorne is its 
 Poussin." O. W. Holmes. 
 
 In concluding " The Marble Faun," Hawthorne says of his 
 own work : " The idea of the modern Faun loses all the 
 poetry and beauty which the author fancied in it, and be- 
 comes nothing better than a grotesque absurdity, if one bring 
 it into the light of day." 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " Her singing was as the murmur of a soul bewildered amid 
 the sinful gloom of earth and retaining only enough memory of 
 a better state to make sad music of the wail, which would else 
 have been a despairing shriek. . . . Her studio was one of 
 those delightful spots that hardly seem to belong to the actual 
 world but rather to be the outward type of a poet's haunted 
 imagination, where there are glimpses, sketches, and half-de- 
 veloped hints of beings and objects grander and more beauti- 
 ful than we can anywhere find in reality." The Marble Faun. 
 
 "Without absolutely expressing a doubt whether the stalwart 
 Puritan had acted as a man of conscience and integrity through- 
 out the proceedings which might have been sketched, they, 
 nevertheless hinted that he was abont to build his house over
 
 HAWTHORNE 739 
 
 an unquiet grave. His home would include the home of the 
 dead and buried wizard, and would thus afford the ghost of 
 the latter a kind of privilege to haunt its new apartments and 
 the chambers into which future bridegrooms would lead their 
 brides. . . . The terror and ugliness of Maule's crime and the 
 wretchedness of his punishment would darken the freshly plas- 
 tered walls and infect them early with the scent of an old and 
 melancholy house." The House of the Seven Gables. 
 
 " In the midst of this wild scene, where unbound passions 
 jostled each other in a drunken career, there was one solemn 
 voice of a man, and a manly and melodious voice it might once 
 have been. He went to and fro continually, and his feet 
 sounded upon the floor. In each member of that frenzied com- 
 pany, whose own burning thoughts had become their exclusive 
 world, he sought an auditor for the story of his own individual 
 wrong, and interrupted their laughter and tears as his reward of 
 scorn or pity. He spoke of woman's perfidy, of a wife who had 
 broken her holiest vows, of a home and heart made desolate. 
 Even as he went on, the shout, the laugh, the shriek, the sob, 
 rose in unison, till they changed into the hollow, fitful, and un- 
 even sound of the wind, as it fought among the pine trees on 
 those three lonely hills. The lady looked up, and there was the 
 withered woman smiling in her face." Twice-Told Tales. 
 
 2. Profound Moral Insight. "The common theme 
 of all Hawthorne's stories is the deeper psychology. They 
 deal, one and all, with what homely folk are disposed to call 
 the mysteries of man's soul and conscience." Hazeltine. 
 
 "The subtle analysis of spiritual moods, which made him 
 at home in the darkest recesses of the human heart, long re- 
 flection upon the motives and moods and processes in minds 
 conscious of crimes, sure intuition of the laws that govern 
 them, a profound, perhaps melancholy, thoughtfulness upon the 
 problems of good and evil, guilt and sorrow, life and death 
 these are but new growths in later times of those dark- veined 
 leaves that grew of old upon the Puritan stalk. ... In 
 psychological insight he is unrivalled among the men of our 
 time." J. A. Symonds.
 
 740 HAWTHORNE 
 
 " His fondness for the analysis of the moral and mental 
 framework of humanity is evidently absorbing. . . . 
 What the scientific use of lenses the telescope and the micro- 
 scope does for us in relation to the external universe, the 
 psychological writer achieves in regard to our own nature. 
 He reveals its wonder and beauty, unfolds its complex laws, 
 and makes us suddenly aware of the mysteries within and 
 around individual life. In the guise of attractive fiction, and 
 sometimes of the most airy sketches, Hawthorne thus deals 
 with his reader. . . . If we were obliged to desig- 
 nate that [mood] of Hawthorne in a single word, we should 
 call it metaphysical or perhaps soulful. He always takes us 
 below the surface and beyond the material. . . . Per- 
 haps the union of the philosophic tendency with the poetic 
 instinct is the great charm of his genius. . . . He opens 
 vistas into that beautiful and unexplored world of thought that 
 exists in every human being, though overshadowed by material 
 circumstance and technical duty." H. T. Tuckerman. 
 
 " The problems that Hawthorne started were usually con- 
 nected with the deepest mysteries of the human mind and 
 conscience. . . . He carried this preference for delineat- 
 ing states of mind and obscurely suggesting the class of facts 
 which may have given rise to them to the farthest point in 
 his last novel, ' Transformation.' " J?. H. Hutton. 
 
 " The great question over which, in one form or other, 
 Hawthorne perpetually broods is the nature of Evil, the effect 
 on the soul of error and misery and remorse and their mys- 
 terious relations to the highest forms of human heroism and to 
 human progress." -J. Nichol. 
 
 " A man of morbid shyness, the path of whose genius di- 
 verged always out of the sun into the darkest shade and to 
 whom human beings were merely psychological phenomena. 
 He treated his companions [in the Custom-house] 
 as he treated himself and all the personages in history and 
 experience with whom he dealt merely as phenomena to be
 
 HAWTHORNE 741 
 
 analyzed and described. ... It was not beauty itself 
 nor deformity not virtue nor vice which engaged the author's 
 deepest sympathy. It was the occult relation between the 
 two. ... In his simplest passages he still seems to be 
 studying and curiously observing rather than sympathizing. 
 His first romance (then acknowledged, and now 
 forgotten) was marked by that startling self-possession of style 
 and cold analysis of passion, rather than sympathy with it, 
 which showed no imitation but remarkable original power. 
 The same lurid gloom overhangs it that shadows all his works. 
 It is uncanny ; the figures of the romance are not persons, 
 they are passions, emotions, spiritual speculations." George 
 William Curtis. 
 
 " But none save he in our own time so laid 
 His summons on man's spirit ; none but he, 
 Whether the light thereof were clear or clouded, 
 Thus on his canvas fixed the human soul, 
 The thought of mystery, 
 
 In deep hearts by this moral guise enshrouded, 
 Wild hearts that like the church-bells ring and toll." 
 
 E. C. Stedman. 
 
 " In the ' Prophetic Pictures,' ' Fancy's Show-Box,' ' The 
 Great Carbuncle,' 'The Haunted Mind,' and 'Edward 
 Fane's Rose-bud ' there are flashes of moral insight which 
 light up, for the moment, the darkest recesses of the individual 
 mind. ... In this two-fold power of insight into souls 
 and of the spiritual laws which regulate both the natural ac- 
 tion and morbid aberrations of souls, Hawthorne is so incom- 
 parably great that in comparison with him all the other 
 romancers of the century, whether German, French, English, 
 or American, seem to be superficial. . . . Scott once 
 said that there were depths in human nature which it was un- 
 healthy to attempt to sound ; and it is in attempting to sound
 
 742 HAWTHORNE 
 
 these that Hawthorne has exhibited his most marvellous gifts 
 of insight and characterization. In the subtlety and accuracy, 
 the penetration and sureness of his glance into the morbid 
 phenomena of the human soul ; in exhibiting the operation 
 of the most delicate laws of attraction and repulsion which 
 human natures can experience ; in the capacity to terrify his 
 readers with the consciousness of their latent possibilities for 
 evil, so that they shrink from his exposures like guilty things 
 surprised; he. makes novelists like Thackeray and Dickens 
 appear relatively superficial. . . . With his insight of 
 individual souls he combines a far deeper insight of the spir- 
 itual laws which govern the strangest aberrations of individual 
 souls." E. P. \Vhipple. 
 
 " His intellectual and moral insight is so like one laying 
 bare, under the greatest stress of circumstances, the inmost 
 secrets of his own heart that we cannot forbear investing him 
 with the intelligence and something, too, of the dread which 
 we are apt to associate with clairvoyants. . . . Haw- 
 thorne has insight in the profoundest sense a consciousness 
 of visible and invisible life and of sound and unsound charac- 
 ter, a gift of real analysis. ... In his subtle and strong 
 moral insight he surely represented his Puritan ancestors in 
 the most worthy and obviously sympathetic way. 
 He is in the position of the father-confessor of whom he at one 
 time thinks, . . . as he looks around his congregation, 
 all whose secret sins are known to him." G. P. Lathrop. 
 
 "The charm the great charm is that they [Hawthorne's 
 works] are glimpses of a great field, of the whole deep mys- 
 tery of man's soul and conscience." Henry James. 
 
 " He calls your attention to the profound ethics involved 
 in the tale, and yet does it so gently that you never think of 
 the moral as being obtrusive." T. IV. Higginson. 
 
 " Shakespeare, Scott, and Dickens create characters and 
 place them before us clothed in their proper figures and using 
 their proper and characteristic speech. Hawthorne reverses
 
 HAWTHORNE 743 
 
 the process, and, taking the ideal person for granted, shows 
 him as upon a dissecting table, and lays bare every throbbing 
 nerve and every secret fibre of his soul." F. H. Undem>ood. 
 " This ' inward sphere,' the human heart, was Hawthorne's 
 field of study and portrayal. He saw and described its in- 
 nocence, its purity, its loveliness, its noble hopes, its truest 
 triumphs, its temptations, its sinful tendency, its desperate 
 struggles, its downward motions, its malignity, its total de- 
 pravity, at least in appearance, its final putrefaction and self- 
 destruction the only destruction of which, in the divine 
 plan, it is capable. . . . Hawthorne goes to the depths 
 of the soul in his search for the basal principle of human ac- 
 tion." C. F. Richardson. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " What is Guilt ? A stain upon the soul. And it is a point of 
 vast interest whether the soul may contract such stains, in all 
 their depth and flagrancy, from deeds which have been plotted and 
 resolved upon, but which, physically, have never had existence. 
 Must the fleshly hand and the visible frame of man set its seal to 
 the evil designs of the soul, in order to give them their entire 
 validity against the sinner ? Or, while none but crimes per- 
 petrated are cognizable before an earthly tribunal, will guilty 
 thoughts of which guilty deeds are no more than shadows will 
 these draw down the full weight of a condemning sentence in the 
 supreme court of eternity ? In the solitude of a midnight 
 chamber, or in a desert afar from men, or in a church, while the 
 body is kneeling, the soul may pollute itself even with those 
 crimes which we are accustomed to deem altogether carnal. If 
 this be true, it is a fearful truth." Fancy 1 s Show- B ox . 
 
 "The man with the dagger thrust back the weapon into his 
 bosom and drew forth a pocket pistol, but not of that kind which 
 kills by a single discharge. It was a flask of liquor with a 
 block-tin tumbler screwed upon its mouth. Each drank a com- 
 fortable draw, and left the spot with so many jests and such 
 laughter at their unaccomplished wickedness that they might be 
 said to have gone on their way rejoicing. In a few hours they
 
 744 HAWTHORNE 
 
 had forgotten the whole affair, nor once imagined that the 
 recording angel had written down the crime of murder against 
 their souls in letters as durable as eternity." David Swan. 
 
 " We have called the Evil ; now let us call the Good. 
 Does none answer to the call ? Not one ; for the just, the pure, 
 the true, and all who might most worthily obey it, shrink sadly 
 back as most conscious of error and imperfection. Then let the 
 summons be to those whose pervading principle is love. This 
 classification will embrace all the truly good and none in whose 
 souls there exists not something that may expand itself into a 
 heaven both of well-doing and felicity." Mosses from an Old 
 Manse. 
 
 3. Imaginative Power. " Hawthorne was imagination 
 in the flesh. Imagination and fancy load his most fragile 
 theme ; and to strip them away would be to leave a skeleton 
 one would hardly deem it possible to so build on and vivify 
 as to make it a thing of beauty. Here is Hawthorne's skill 
 and charm ; and, conscious of it, he was perpetually adding 
 to the number of meagre hard-outlined notes of natural ap- 
 pearance, ... by cunning use of which he held warp 
 and weft of gossamer to the ground. Had Hawthorne em- 
 ployed fancy only, he would have left an enviable reputation ; 
 as it is, the employment of it seems to have been frequently the 
 indulgence of a native bent as a means of rest from the ex- 
 hausting exercise of pure imagination." -John Vance Cheney. 
 
 " In a peculiar and restricted domain of imagination . . . 
 Hawthorne has fairly outmatched all his English brethren. 
 He is the Jonathan Edwards of the imaginative representation 
 of life as Thackeray is its Hume." E. P. Whipple. 
 
 " In no [other] American writer is to be found the same 
 predominance of weird imagination as in Hawthorne." 
 Anthony Trollope. 
 
 " That delicate and penetrating imagination which was 
 always at play, always entertaining itself, always engaged in 
 a game of hide-and-seek in the region in which it seemed to
 
 HAWTHORNE 745 
 
 him that the game could best be played among the snadows 
 and substructions, the dark-based pillars and supports of our 
 moral nature this is the real charm of Hawthorne's writing, 
 this purity and spontaneity and naturalness of fancy." 
 Henry James. 
 
 "These effusions ['Twice-Told Tales'] of Mr. Hawthorne 
 are the product of a truly imaginative intellect, restrained and 
 in some measure repressed by fastidiousness of taste. . . . 
 Mr. Hawthorne's distinctive trait is invention, creation, im- 
 agination, originality." Edgar Allan Poe. 
 
 " In our view the most remarkable trait in his writings is 
 this harmonious blending of the common and familiar in the 
 outward world with the mellow and vivid tints of his own 
 imagination. . . . They [his tales] almost invariably 
 possess the reality of tone which perpetuates imaginative lit- 
 erature, . . . buoyant with a fantasy as aerial as Shel- 
 ley's conceptions." H. T. Tuckerman. 
 
 " The secret of his power lies in the great art with which 
 he reflects and re-reflects the main idea of the tale from the 
 countless faces of his ghostly imagination until the reader's 
 mind is absolutely haunted by it." R. H. Hutton. 
 
 " The scenes of Hawthorne's novels are not accessible by 
 earthly travel. His books, being works of art and of imag- 
 ination, can be efficiently explained and illuminated only by 
 study of their inner aim and significance, to which the pict- 
 ures of nature and human nature which they contain are 
 strictly auxiliary."; Julian Hawthorne. 
 
 "How masterly is the touch of the artist's crayon in this 
 imaginative creation ['The House of the Seven Gables'] 
 based upon the mental and moral anatomy of actual beings. 
 . . . How lightly his spirit hovers over the streams of 
 actual life, scarcely touching it before springing up again, 
 like a seabird on the crest of a wave ! Nothing could be 
 more accurate and polished than his descriptions and his 
 presentations of the actual facts; but his fancy rises resilient
 
 746 HAWTHORNE 
 
 from these to some dreamy, far-seeing perception or gentle 
 moral inference. The visible human pageant is only of value 
 to him as it suggests the viewless host of heavenly shapes 
 that hang above it like an idealizing mirage. . . . Haw- 
 thorne, . . . the calm, ardent, healthy master of im- 
 agination." G. P. Lathrop. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " He [the faun] drank in the natural influence of the scene, 
 and was intoxicated as by an exhilarating wine. He ran races 
 with himself along the gleam and shadow of the wood- paths. 
 He leapt up to catch the overhanging bough of an ilex, and 
 swinging himself by it alighted far onward, as if he had flown 
 thither through the air. In a sudden rapture he embraced the 
 trunk of a sturdy tree, and seemed to imagine it a creature 
 worthy of affection and capable of a tender response ; he clasped 
 it closely in his arms, as a Faun might have clasped the warm 
 feminine grace of the nymph, whom antiquity supposed to dwell 
 within that rough, encircling rind. Then, in order to bring him- 
 self closer to the genial earth with which his kindred instincts 
 linked him so strongly, he threw himself at full length on the 
 turf, and pressed down his lips, kissing the violets and daisies, 
 which kissed him back again, though shyly, in their maiden 
 fashion." The Marble Faun. 
 
 " One of these rooms was filled with moonlight, which did not 
 enter through the window, but was the aggregate of all the 
 moonshine that is scattered around the earth on a summer night 
 while no eyes are awake to enjoy its beauty. Airy spirits had 
 gathered it up, wherever they found it gleaming on the broad 
 bosom of a lake, or silvering the meanders of a stream or 
 glimmering among the wind stirred boughs of a wood, and had 
 garnered it in this one spacious hall." Mosses from an Old 
 Manse. 
 
 " In these lengthened vigils, his [Dimmesdale's] brain often 
 reeled, and visions seemed to flit before him ; perhaps seen 
 doubtfully and by a faint light of their own in the remote 
 dimness of the chamber or more vividly and close beside him 
 within the looking glass. Now it was a -herd of diabolical shapes,
 
 HAWTHORNE 747 
 
 that grinned and mocked at the pale minister and beckoned him 
 away with them ; now a group of shining angels, who flew up- 
 ward heavily, as sorrow-laden, but grew more ethereal as they 
 rose. Now came the dead friends of his youth and his white- 
 bearded father with a saint-like frown and his mother turning 
 her face away as she passed by." The Scarlet Letter. 
 
 4. Semi-Fatalism Quietism. " He was, in political 
 and social conviction, a democratic quietist ; one might 
 almost say a fatalist. . . . His deeply rooted conviction 
 that, as far as any real and deep .reform is accomplished, it 
 may, in a certain sense, be said to accomplish itself." R. H. 
 Hutton. 
 
 " There is one other source of the extreme fascination of 
 this man's writings. A plain word for it would be concen- 
 tration or pertinacity ; but in the lurid haze under which his 
 genius so often works, it becomes something for which we 
 really want a name. Perhaps we might call it a fatality of 
 method which carries an almost awfully impersonal look with 
 it. When Judge Pyncheon sits dead in his chair in the dark 
 room all night, and the genius of the author, through all 
 that most terrible time, walks round and round him in the 
 gloom, gradually closing in on the solemn fact that you 
 well know all the while, you feel with a shudder that this bad 
 man is not only dead, he is dead dead fatally dead, so to 
 speak. Now, the movement of Hawthorne as a narrator is 
 always of this kind. He gradually closes in upon his idea ; 
 but as you feel his imagination is doing this spontaneously, 
 the effect is like that of some preternatural fatality." 
 M. Browne. 
 
 " His relentless fancy seemed to seek a sin that was hope- 
 less, a cruel despair that no faith could throw off." George 
 William Curtis. 
 
 " Instead of the old Puritan speculations about predestina- 
 tion and free-will, he dwells upon the transmission by natural 
 laws of an hereditary curse and upon the strange blending of
 
 748 HAWTHORNE 
 
 good and evil which may cause sin to be an awakening im- 
 pulse in a human soul." Leslie Stephen. 
 ' " The bracing influence of quietude, so essential to his well- 
 being, fascinates him, and he cannot shake off its influence so 
 far as to enter actively and for personal interests into any of 
 the common, pursuits, even of the man who makes a business 
 of literature. ... He retires in profound sorrow, ac- 
 knowledging that earth holds nothing perfect, that his dream 
 of the ideal beings leading an ideal life, which, in spite of 
 the knowledge of evil, he has been cherishing for so many 
 years, is a dream to be fulfilled in the hereafter alone." 
 H. T. Tuckerman. 
 
 " Was it not well that one 
 
 One if no more should meditate alool, 
 Though not for naught the time's heroic quarrel 
 For what men rush to do, and what is done ? ' ' 
 
 E. C. Stedman. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " Thus ever does the gross fatality of earth exult in its invari- 
 able triumph over the immortal essence which, in this dim sphere 
 of half development, demands the completeness of a higher 
 state." Mosses from an Old Manse. 
 
 " How strange, indeed ! Man had marked this woman's sin 
 with a scarlet letter, which had such potent and disastrous effi- 
 cacy that no human sympathy could reach her save it were sinful 
 like herself. ... By the first step awry thou didst plant the 
 germ of evil ; but since that moment all has been a dark ne- 
 cessity." The Scarlet Letter. 
 
 "The perception of an infinite shivering solitude, amid which 
 we cannot come close enough to human beings to be warmed 
 by them, and where they turn to cold, chilly shapes of mist, is 
 one of the most forlorn results of any accident, misfortune, crime, 
 or peculiarity of character that puts an individual ajar with the 
 world." Italian Notes. 
 
 " ' I perceive,' said the Man of Intelligence, examining it more
 
 HAWTHORNE 749 
 
 closely, ' that this is the Pearl of Great Price.' . . . ' Pardon 
 me,' rejoined the Intelligencer, calmly, ' you ask what is beyond 
 my duty. This pearl, as you well know, is held on a peculiar 
 tenure, and having once let it escape from your keeping, you 
 have no greater claim to it nay, not so great as any other per- 
 son. I cannot give it back.' " The Intelligence Office. 
 
 " Hence, too, might be drawn a weighty lesson from the little 
 regarded truth, that the act of the passing generation is the germ 
 which may and must produce good or evil fruit in a far distant 
 time ; that, together with the seed of the merely temporary crop, 
 which mortals term expediency, they inevitably sow the acorns 
 of a more enduring growth, which may darkly overshadow their 
 posterity." House of the Seven Gables. 
 
 " Would that I had a folio to write instead of an article of a 
 dozen pages. Then might I exemplify how an influence, beyond 
 our control, lays its strong hand on every deed which we do, and 
 weaves its consequences into an iron tissue of necessity." 
 Twice-Told Tales. 
 
 5. Sly Humor. "Observe, now, the vital office of humor 
 in Hawthorne's thought. It gleams out upon us from behind 
 many of the gravest of his conceptions, like the silver side of 
 a dark leaf turning in the wind. Wherever the concretion of 
 guilt is most adamantine, there he lets his fine slender jet of 
 humor play like a lambent fire, until the dark mass crum- 
 bles, and the choragos of the tragedy begins his mournful 
 yet hopeful chant among the ruins." G. P. Lathrop. 
 
 "Through all this intensity of suffering [in 'The Scarlet 
 Letter'], through this blackness of narrative, there is ever run- 
 ning a vein of drollery. As Hawthorne himself says, a lively 
 sense of the humorous again stole in among the solemn phan- 
 toms of her [Hester's] thought. He is always laughing at 
 something with his weird mocking spirit. . . . Through 
 it all there is a touch of burlesque not as to the suffering of 
 the sufferers but as to the great question whether it signifies 
 much in what way we suffer, whether by crushing sorrows or 
 little things." Anthony Trollope.
 
 750 HAWTHORNE 
 
 " He had humor, and sometimes humor of a delicious 
 kind ; but this sunshine of the soul was but sunshine breaking 
 through, or lighting up, a sombre and ominous cloud." -. 
 P. Whipple. 
 
 " Hawthorne's humour is partly of the same root as his 
 melancholy, springing from slow, close, inquisitive scrutiny of 
 the paradoxes of life, the humour which is quite as much true 
 criticism as true humour." R. If. Hutton. 
 
 " Hawthorne was able to tread in that magic circle only 
 by an exquisite refinement of taste and by a delicate sense 
 of humour, which is the best preservative against all extrava- 
 gance." Leslie Stephen. 
 
 " Hawthorne with all his pensiveness and gravity is said to 
 have been of a cheerful mood. . . . His essays contain 
 a vein of the richest humor." -J. A. Symonds. 
 
 1 ' [His humor in the Custom - house is] like the war- 
 bling of bobolinks before a thunder -storm. ... A lam- 
 bent light of delicate humor played over all Hawthorne said 
 in the confidence of familiarity." George William Curtis. 
 
 " He had humor ; not facetiousness or buffoonery a forced 
 or imported brilliance but innate humor, that plays about 
 the subject like the lambent flames of incandescent coal."- 
 Julian Hawthorne. 
 
 "Occasional touches of humor, introduced with exquisite 
 tact, relieve the grave undertone of the narrative, and form 
 vivacious and quaint images which might readily be trans- 
 ferred to canvas so effectively are they drawn in words. 
 When intent upon the quaint or characteristic in 
 life he has a humor as zestful as Lamb." H. T. Tuckennan. 
 
 " He is to a considerable degree ironical this is a part of 
 his charm part even, one may say, of his brightness ; but he 
 is neither bitter nor cynical. . . . On the whole, Haw- 
 thorne's observation has a smile in it oftener than may at first 
 appear. " Henry James.
 
 HAWTHORNE 75 1 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " How can we elevate our history of retribution for sin of long 
 ago when, as one of our most prominent figures, we are com- 
 pelled to introduce, not a young and lovely woman, nor even the 
 stately remains of beauty storm-shattered by affliction, but a 
 gaunt, sallow, rusty-jointed maiden in a long-waisted silk gown, 
 and with a strange horror of a turban on her head ? " The House 
 of the Seven Gables. 
 
 " On this particular forenoon, so excessive was the warmth of 
 Judge Pyncheon's kindly aspect, that (such, at least, was the 
 rumor about town) an extra passage of the water-carts was found 
 essential, in order to lay the dust occasioned by so much extra 
 sunshine ! " Hoiise of the Seven Gables. 
 
 " The hens were now scarcely larger than pigeons, and had a 
 queer, rusty, withered aspect and a gouty kind of movement and 
 a sleepy and melancholy tone throughout all the variations of 
 their clucking and cackling. It was evident that the race had 
 degenerated, like many a noble race besides, in consequence of 
 too strict a watchfulness to keep it pure. These feathered people 
 had existed too long in their distinct variety, a fact of which the 
 present representatives, judging by their lugubrious deportment, 
 seemed to be aware. They kept themselves alive, unquestion- 
 ably, and laid now and then an egg and hatched a chicken, not 
 for any pleasure of their own, but that the world might not 
 absolutely lose what had once been so admirable a breed of 
 fowls." The House of the Seven Gables. 
 
 6. Morbidness Melancholy." The sort of morbid- 
 ness that, so to speak, is not individual in its causes nor strict- 
 ly personal in its expression ; the sort of morbidness which is 
 the accumulation of generations and which makes a nature 
 unhealthy by reason of the peculiar form which its ancestors' 
 perhaps healthy activity has impressed upon it ; this, it seems 
 plain, is a morbidness that Hawthorne had. His gifts and 
 graces of imagination and fancy appear as if dominated by 
 some spell compelling them to face always the sinfulness of 
 sin. to busy themselves with the spiritual depths, not of man,
 
 752 HAWTHORNE 
 
 but of man under the curse of total depravity and fore-or- 
 dained to wrath with the depths of human nature in corrup- 
 tion. It becomes impossible, then, to dissociate his mor- 
 bidness from his genius and to avoid saying that his morbid- 
 ness constitutes his genius, and that, in his case, in no other, 
 ' genius is a disease.' ' J. R. Dennett. 
 
 " This [a quotation from his journal] seems to me to ex- 
 press very well the weak side of Hawthorne's work his con- 
 stant mistrust and suspicion of the society that surrounded 
 him, his exaggerated, painful, morbid national consciousness. 
 The same tendency of imagination, in perhaps quite 
 as characteristic form [as in Rappacini's daughter] is shown 
 in the tale called ' The Birth-mark,' which turns on the mor- 
 bid horrors inspired by a slight birth-mark on the cheek of a 
 beautiful woman in the mind of her husband. . . . But 
 it is in the more elaborate tales that Hawthorne has most scope 
 at once for the relieving elements which these morbid in- 
 terests . . . especially require and for the fuller develop- 
 ment and justification, so to say, of emotions so subtle and un- 
 healthy. ... It may be well that Hawthorne believed no 
 more of the so-called science of mesmeric and spiritual phe- 
 nomena than the most acute and incredulous men of his so- 
 ciety. But that he was especially fascinated by these morbid 
 phenomena, as by all morbid phenomena of human nature, 
 is proved by a vast number of passages in his various note- 
 books as well as by the subjects of his novels. ... It 
 would be very unjust to Hawthorne to represent him as in any 
 degree addicted, like Edgar Poe, to the invention of mon- 
 strosities and horrors. I only mean that his genius naturally 
 leads him to the analysis and representation of certain outlying 
 moral anomalies, which are not the anomalies of ordinary evil 
 and sin, but have a certain chilling unnaturalness of their own. 
 . . . And when he delineates what is revolting, one of the 
 main elements that makes it so revolting is the Manichean in- 
 carnation of some noble and half-angelic affection in a malig-
 
 HAWTHORNE 753 
 
 nant body of evil, from which it vainly seeks to be divorced. 
 . . . Both the novels and the note-books testify to their 
 author's melancholy, though hardly melancholy of a deep 
 order. It is the melancholy of a man with a rather slow flow 
 of blood in his veins and almost a horror of action rather 
 than any deep melancholy which speaks in him." R. H. 
 Hutton. 
 
 "He creates a melancholy which amounts to remorse in 
 the minds of his readers. There falls upon them a conviction 
 of some unutterable woe, which is not altogether dispelled till 
 other books and other incidents have had their effects." 
 Anthony Trollope, 
 
 " He had spiritual insight, but it did not penetrate to the 
 sources of spiritual joy ; and his deepest glimpses of truth 
 were calculated rather to sadden than to inspire." E. P. 
 Whipple. 
 
 "It is impossible, we should think, to read him without 
 becoming sadder if not wiser in spite of an assumed air of 
 gaillardise and a cheery moral tacked now and then to a sor- 
 rowful parable, he is essentially sad-hearted, and confirms any 
 similar tendency in his readers. . . . With special abil- 
 ity to depict exceptional modes of human nature is conjoined 
 special temptation to linger amid what is morbid and to 
 court intimacy with whatever deviates from the dull standard 
 of conventionalism and gives to distortion and oddity the 
 preference over harmonic unity." H. T. Tuckerman. 
 
 " This world, it seemed, had naught for such as he 
 For one who, in his heart's deep wilderness 
 Shrunk darkling, and, whatever wind might blow, 
 Found no quick use for potent hands and fain, 
 No chance that might express 
 To human-kind the thoughts that moved him so. 
 Oh, deem deem not those long years were quite in vain." 
 
 R. C. Stedman. 
 48
 
 754 HAWTHORNE 
 
 " The sensitive youth was a recluse, upon whose imagina- 
 tion had fallen the gloomy mystery of Puritan life and char- 
 acter. . . . Devoted all day to lonely reverie and mus- 
 ing upon the obscurer passages of the life whose monuments 
 he constantly encountered, that musing became inevitably 
 morbid. ... He beholds and describes the generous 
 impulses of humanity with sceptical courtesy rather than with 
 hopeful cordiality. . . . The tranquil and pervasive sad- 
 ness of all his writings, the kind of heart-ache that they leave 
 behind, seems to spring from the fact that his nature was re- 
 lated to the moral world as his own Donatello was to the 
 human. . . . There are many gleams upon the pages [of 
 'Twice-Told Tales'], but a strange, melancholy chill per- 
 vades the book." George William Curtis. 
 
 Hawthorne once wrote to his friend Field, " I wish God 
 had given me the faculty of writing a sunshiny book." 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " It was that heartsickness which, it is to be hoped, we may all 
 of us have been pure enough to feel once in our lives, but the 
 capacity for which is usually exhausted early, and perhaps with a 
 single agony. . . . The character of our individual beloved 
 one having invested itself with all the attributes of right that 
 one friend being to us the symbol and representative of whatever 
 is good and true when he falls the effect is almost as if the sky 
 fell with him, bringing down in chaotic ruin the columns that 
 upheld our faith." The Marble Faun. 
 
 " A happy person is such an unaccustomed and holy creature 
 in this sad world ! . . . With only an inconsiderable change, 
 the gladdest objects and existences become the saddest ; hope 
 fading into disappointment ; joy darkening into grief, and festal 
 splendor into funereal darkness and all evolving as their moral 
 a grim identity between gay things and sorrowful ! Only give 
 them a little time, and they turn out to be just alike." The 
 Marble Faun. 
 
 " Even as he spoke the door was gerrtly and slowly thrust ajar,
 
 HAWTHORNE 755 
 
 affording a glimpse of the slender figure of a young girl, who, as 
 she timidly entered, seemed to bring the light and cheerfulness 
 of the outer atmosphere into the somewhat gloomy apartment. 
 We know not her errand there, nor can we reveal whether the 
 young man gave up his heart into her custody. If so, the 
 arrangement was neither better nor worse than ninety-nine cases 
 out of a hundred, where the parallel sensibilities of a similar age, 
 importunate affections, and the easy satisfaction of characters 
 not deeply conscious of themselves, supply the place of any 
 profounder sympathy." The Intelligence Office. 
 
 " How early in the summer, too, the prophecy of autumn 
 comes ! Earlier in some years than in others ; sometimes even 
 in the first weeks of July. There is no other feeling like what is 
 caused by this faint, doubtful, yet real perception if it be not a 
 foreboding, rather of the year's decay, so blessedly sweet and 
 sad in the same breath. . . . Did I say that there was no 
 feeling like it ? Ah, but there is a half acknowledged melancholy 
 like to this when we stand in the perfected vigor of our life and 
 feel that Time has now given us all his flowers, and that the next 
 work of his never idle fingers must be to steal them one by one 
 away." Mosses from an Old Manse. 
 
 7. Delicate Sensibility. George William Curtis, who 
 knew Hawthorne well, says: " He was so sensitive that his 
 look and manner can be suggested by the word 'glimmering.' " 
 
 " And his the gift which sees 
 A revelation and a tropic sign 
 In the lone passion-flower, and can discover 
 The likeness of the far Antipodes, 
 Though but a leaf is stranded from the brine ; 
 His the fine spirit which is so true a lover 
 Of sovran Art that all the becks of life 
 Allure it not until the work be wrought." 
 
 E. C. Stedman. 
 
 " Nothing could be more accurate and sensitive than the 
 brief description of nature in his works. ... He shad-
 
 756 HAWTHORNE 
 
 ows forth hints, makes signs, whispers, muses aloud, gives the 
 key-note of a melody, puts us on a track ; in a word, ad- 
 dresses us as nature does that is, unostentatiously and with 
 a significance not to be realized without reverent silence and 
 gentle feeling ; a sequestration from bustle and material care 
 and somewhat of the meditative insight and latent sensibility 
 in which his themes are conceived and wrought out." H. 
 T. Tuckerman. 
 
 11 There is perhaps no more delicate comment on the ex- 
 quisite sensibility of Hawthorne than this, that he should be 
 so open to climatic influence in his writing." G. P. Lathrop. 
 
 " Hawthorne's pure and delightful fancies, though at times 
 they may have led us too far from the healthy contact of 
 every-day interests, never leave a stain upon the imagination, 
 and generally succeed in throwing a harmonious coloring 
 upon some objects in which we had previously failed to rec- 
 ognize the beautiful." Leslie Stephen, 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " Poor Old Earth ! What I should chiefly regret in her de- 
 struction would be that very earthliness which no other sphere or 
 state of existence can renew or compensate. The fragrance of 
 flowers and of new-mown hay ; the genial warmth of sunshine and 
 the beauty of a sunset among the clouds ; . . . the delicious- 
 ness of fruits and of all good cheer ; the magnificence of moun- 
 tains and seas and cataracts and the softer charm of rural scen- 
 ery ; even the fast-falling snow and the gray atmosphere through 
 which it descends all these and innumerable other enjoyable 
 things of the earth must perish with her. . . . And then our 
 mute four-footed friends and winged songsters of our woods! 
 Might not it be lawful to regret them, even in the hallowed 
 groves of Paradise ? " Hall of Fantasy. 
 
 " I doubt if anybody ever does really see a mountain who 
 goes for the set and sole purpose of seeing it. Nature will not 
 let herself be seen in such cases. You must patiently bide her 
 time ; and by and by, at some unforeseen moment, she will 
 quietly and suddenly unveil herself, and for a brief space allow
 
 HAWTHORNE 757 
 
 you to look right into the heart of her mystery." English Note- 
 Book. 
 
 " What a sweet reverence is that, when a young man dreams 
 his mistress a little more than mortal, and almost chides himself 
 for longing to bring her close to his heart ! " Marble Faun. 
 
 " It must be a spirit much unlike my own which can keep it- 
 self in health and vigor without sometimes stealing from the 
 sultry sunshine of the world, to plunge into the cool bath of soli- 
 tude. At intervals, and not infrequent ones, the forest and the 
 ocean summon me one with the roar of its waves, the other with 
 the murmur of its boughs forth from the haunts of men." 
 Twice-Told Tales. 
 
 8. Vivid Description Picturesqueness Fidel- 
 ity. " Sometimes they [Hawthorne's sketches] are purely 
 descriptive bits of Flemish painting, so exact and arrayed in 
 such mellow colors that we unconsciously take them in as ob- 
 jects of sensitive rather than imaginative observation. . . 
 In truth to costume, local manners, and scenic features ' The 
 Scarlet Letter ' is as reliable as the best of Scott's novels. 
 So life-like in the minutiae and so picturesque in 
 general effect are these sketches of still life that they are 
 daguerreotyped in the reader's mind, and form a distinct and 
 changeless background, the light and shade of which give ad- 
 mirable effect to the action of a story. . . . Were a New 
 England Sunday breakfast, an old mansion, an easterly town, 
 or the morning after it clears ever so well described ? 
 The early history of New England has found no such genial 
 and vivid illustrations as his pages afford. . . . We seem 
 to breathe the air as we read and to be surrounded by the 
 familiar objects of a New England town. The interior of the 
 house [of the Seven Gables], each article described within it, 
 from the quaint table to the miniature by Mai bone ; every 
 product of the old garden, the street scenes that beguile the eyes 
 of poor Clifford as he looks out of the arched window, the noble 
 elm and the ginger-bread figures at the little shop window all
 
 758 HAWTHORNE 
 
 have the significance that belongs to reality when seized upon 
 by art. In these details we have the truth, simplicity, and ex- 
 act imitation of the Flemish painters. The Old Manse and the 
 Custom - house . . . are memorable instances of this 
 fidelity in the details of local and personal portraiture and 
 that chaste yet deep tone of coloring which secures an har- 
 monious whole. . . . Nor is Hawthorne less successful 
 in those pictures that are drawn exclusively for the mind's eye 
 and are obvious to sensation rather than to actual vision." 
 H. T. Tuckerman. 
 
 " To read his historical sketches is like wandering through 
 old portrait galleries or walking streets that have long disap- 
 peared, with quaint old houses about us and figures in the an- 
 tique garb of a past generation." -J. A. Symonds. 
 
 " He studied minutely and portrayed with delicate faith- 
 fulness the smallest flower beneath his feet, the faintest bird in 
 the distant sky, the trivial remark or the seemingly unimpor- 
 tant act of the person described." C. F. Richardson. 
 
 " He virtually offers the most vivid reflection of New Eng- 
 land life that has found its way into literature." Henry 
 James. 
 
 " The most obvious excellence of the work [' The Marble 
 Faun'] is the vivid truthfulness of its descriptions of Italian 
 life, manners, and scenery. . . . Hawthorne is one of 
 those true observers who concentrate in observation every 
 power of their minds. He has accurate sight and piercing 
 insight. . . . We might quote from the descriptive por- 
 tions of the work a hundred pages at least which would de- 
 monstrate how closely accurate observation is connected with 
 the highest powers of the intellect and the imagination." 
 E. P. Whipple. 
 
 " In the whole literature of our civil strife there is no more 
 vivid description than this [in 'Septimius Felton '] of the way 
 the sounds of a skirmish pass away in the distance." T. W. 
 Higginson.
 
 HAWTHORNE 759 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " On every side the seven gables pointed sharply toward the 
 sky, and presented the aspect of a whole sisterhood of edifices 
 breathing through the spiracles of one chimney. . . . It would 
 be an omission, trifling indeed but unpardonable, were we to for- 
 get the green moss that had long since gathered on the projec- 
 tions of the windows ; nor must we fail to direct the reader's eye 
 to a crop, not of weeds but flower-shrubs, which were growing 
 aloft in the air, not a great way from the chimney, in the nook 
 between two of the gables. They were called Alice's posies. 1 ' 
 House of the Seven Gables. 
 
 " The early sunbeams hovered cheerfully upon the tree tops, 
 beneath which two weary and wounded men had stretched their 
 limbs the night before. Their bed of withered oak leaves was 
 strewn upon the small level of one of the gentle swells by which 
 the face of the country is diversified. The mass of granite, 
 rearing its smooth, flat surface fifteen or twenty feet above their 
 heads, was not unlike a gigantic gravestone, upon which the 
 veins seemed to form an inscription in forgotten characters." 
 The Intelligence Office. 
 
 "Above the draw there was a broad and deep pool, one side 
 of which was bordered by a precipitous wall of rocks, as smooth 
 as if hewn out and squared and piled one upon another, above 
 which rose the forest. On the other side there was still a gently 
 shelving bank, and the shore was covered with tall trees, among 
 which I particularly remarked a stately pine, wholly devoid of 
 bark, rising white in aged and majestic ruin, thrusting out its 
 barkless arms. It must have stood there in death many years, 
 its own ghost. Above the dam the brook flowed through the 
 forest, a glistening and babbling water-path, illuminated by the 
 sun, which sent its rays almost straight along its course." The 
 American Note Book. 
 
 9. Natural Simplicity Clearness. " Hawthorne not 
 only writes English, but the sweetest, simplest, and clearest 
 English that ever has been made the vehicle of equal depth, 
 variety, and subtlety of thought and emotion. . . . He 
 contrives to embody in his simple style qualities which would
 
 760 HAWTHORNE 
 
 almost excuse the verbal extravagance of Carlyle." E. P. 
 Whipple. 
 
 " His utterance is singularly clear and simple. His style 
 only rises above the colloquial in the sustained order of its 
 flow ; the terms are natural and fitly chosen. Indeed, a care- 
 less reader is liable continually to lose sight of his meaning 
 and beauty from the entire absence of pretension in his style. 
 The style of Hawthorne is wholly unevasive; he re- 
 sorts to no tricks of rhetoric or verbal ingenuity ; language is 
 to him a crystal medium through which to let us see the play 
 of his humor, the glow of his sympathy, and the truth of his 
 observation." H. T. Tuckerman. 
 
 ""Another characteristic of this writer is the exceeding 
 beauty of his style. It is as clear as running waters are. In- 
 deed, he uses words as mere stepping-stones, upon which, with 
 a free and youthful bound, his spirit crosses and recrosses the 
 bright and rushing stream of thought." Longfellow. 
 
 " That limpid flow of expression, never laboring, never 
 shallow, but moving on with tranquil force, clear to the 
 depths of its profoundest thought, shows itself with all its 
 consummate perfections." O. W. Holmes. 
 
 "There is no attempt at effect. All is quiet, thoughtful, 
 subdued. Yet this repose may exist simultaneously with high 
 originality of thought ; and Mr. Hawthorne has demonstrated 
 the fact." Poe. 
 
 " There was no conception so daring that he shrank from 
 attempting it, and none that he could not so master as to state 
 it, if he pleased, in terms of monosyllables." T. W. -Ffiggin- 
 son. 
 
 " Hawthorne had in his composition, contemplator and 
 dreamer as he was, an element of simplicity and rigidity, a 
 something plain, masculine, and sensible. . . . The main 
 impression produced by his observations is that of simplicity. 
 They spring not only from an unsophisticated but from an ex- 
 ceedingly natural mind. Never, surely, was a man of literary
 
 HAWTHORNE 761 
 
 genius less a man of letters. He looks at things as little as 
 possible in that composite historic light which forms the at- 
 mosphere of many imaginations." Henry James. 
 
 "In Hawthorne's college themes and in his renderings from 
 the ancient classics there was even then the promise of that 
 matchless simplicity and brilliancy of style in which his later 
 works were written ; a style so pure that it seems a new ele- 
 ment, in which the airiest creatures of the imagination may 
 play at will." -John Addington Symonds. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " The children dwelt in a city, and had no wider play-place 
 than a little garden before the house, divided by a white fence 
 from the street, and with a pear-tree and two or three plum-trees 
 overshadowing it and some rose-bushes just in front of the parlor 
 windows. The trees and shrubs, however, were now leafless, and 
 their twigs were enveloped in the light snow, which thus made a 
 kind of wintry foliage, with here and there a pendant icicle for 
 the fruit." The Snow Image. 
 
 " The study had three windows, set with little old-fashioned 
 panes of glass, each with a crack across it. The two on the 
 western side looked, or rather peeped, between the willow 
 branches, down into the orchard, with glimpses of the river 
 through the trees. The third, facing northward, commanded a 
 broader view of the river, at a spot where its hitherto obscure 
 waters gleam forth into the light of history." Mosses from an 
 Old Manse. 
 
 " And now we are seated by the brisk fireside of an old farm- 
 house the same fire that glimmers so faintly among my rem- 
 iniscences at the beginning of this chapter. There we sat with 
 the snow melting out of our hair and beards and our faces all 
 ablaze with the past inclemency and present warmth. It was, 
 indeed, a right good fire that we found waiting us, built up of 
 great rough logs and knotty limbs and splintered fragments of an 
 oak-tree such as farmers are wont to keep for their own hearths." 
 The Blithedale Romance. 
 
 " For often as he sat waiting for her by the margin of the 
 spring, she would suddenly fall down around him a shower of
 
 762 HAWTHORNE 
 
 sunny raindrops, with a rainbow glancing through them, and 
 forthwith gather herself up into the likeness of a beautiful girl, 
 laughing or was it the warble of the rill over the pebbles to 
 see the youth's amazement." The Marble Faun. 
 
 10. Idealism Romanticism. Hawthorne has been 
 well called "a born lover of romance." In his method he 
 was an idealist ; he idealized the real. 
 
 "I may, perhaps, accept a phrase of which Hawthorne 
 himself was fond ' the moonlight oT romance ' and compel 
 it to explain something of the secret of his characteristic gen- 
 ius. If the objects illuminated were not real and familiar, 
 the light would not seem so mysterious ; it is the pale uniform 
 tint, the loss of color and retail, and yet the vivid outline 
 and the strong shadow which produce what Hawthorne calls 
 ' the moonlight of romance.' " R. H. Hutton. 
 
 " Was it not a thing to weep over that a man so keenly 
 alive to every picturesque influence, so anxious to invest his 
 work with the enchanted haze of romantic association, should 
 be confined to middle age amongst the bleak granite rocks 
 and the half-baked civilization of New England?" Leslie 
 Stephen. 
 
 " The imagination is a wayward faculty, and writers largely 
 endowed with it have acknowledged that they could expatiate 
 with confidence only upon themes hallowed by distance. 
 . . . But to clothe a familiar scene with ideal interest 
 and to exalt things to which our senses are daily accustomed 
 into the region of imaginative beauty and genuine sentiment, 
 requires an extraordinary power of abstraction and concentra- 
 tive thought. . . . Yet with a calm gaze, a serenity and 
 fixedness of musing that no outward bustle can disturb and 
 no power of custom render hackneyed, Hawthorne takes his 
 stand and loses all consciousness of himself and the present in 
 transferring its features and atmosphere to canvas. 
 The imaginative grace lends itself .quite as aptly to redeem
 
 HAWTHORNE 763 
 
 and glorify homely fact in the plastic hands of the author. 
 A rare and most attractive quality of Hawthorne is this artis- 
 tic use of familiar materials. ... In our view the most 
 remarkable trait in his writings is this harmonious blending 
 of the common and familiar in the outward world with the 
 mellow and vivid tints of his own imagination. . . . 
 The scenery, tone, and personages of ' The House of the Seven 
 Gables ' are imbued with a local authenticity which is not for 
 an instant impaired by the imaginative charm of romance." 
 H. T. Tuckerman. 
 
 ' ' In Hawthorne the whole class of little descriptive effu- 
 sions directed upon common things . . . have a greater 
 charm than there is any warrant for in their substance. The 
 charm is made up of the spontaneity, the personal quality of 
 the fancy that plays through them, its mingled simplicity and 
 subtlety, its purity and its bonhomie." Henry James. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " The good lady could look all over the garden and see every- 
 thing and everybody in it. And what do you think she saw 
 there ? Violet and Peony, of course, her own darling children. 
 Ah, but whom or what did she besides ? Why, if you will be- 
 lieve me, there was a small figure of a girl, dressed all in white, 
 with rose-tinged cheeks and ringlets of golden hue, playing 
 about the garden with the children ! " The Snow Image. 
 
 " As we threaded the streets, I remember how the buildings 
 on either side seemed to press too closely upon us, insomuch that 
 our mighty hearts found barely room enough to throb between 
 them. The snow-fall, too, looked inexpressibly dreary (I had 
 almost called it dingy), coming down through an atmosphere of 
 city smoke and alighting on the sidewalk only to be moulded 
 into the impress of somebody's patched boot or overshoe." 
 The Blithedale Romance. 
 
 " Houses of any antiquity in New England are so invariably 
 possessed with spirits that the matter seems hardly worth allud- 
 ing to. Our ghost used to heave deep sighs in a particular cor-
 
 764 HAWTHORNE 
 
 ner of the parlor, and sometimes rustled paper, as if he were 
 turning over a sermon in the long entry where, nevertheless, he 
 was invisible, in spite of the bright moonshine that fell through 
 the eastern window." Mosses from an Old Manse. 
 
 "He descended among the foliage, waiting for her to come 
 close to the trunk, and then suddenly dropped from an im- 
 pending bough, and alighted at her side more as if the sway- 
 ing of the branches had let a ray of sunlight through. The 
 same ray likewise glimmered among the gloomy meditations 
 that encompassed Miriam, and lit up the pale, dark beauty of 
 her face, while it responded pleasantly to Donatello's glance." 
 The Marble Faun, 
 
 II. Self-Reflection. "His mind is reflected in his 
 style as a face is reflected in a mirror, and the latter does not 
 give back its image with less appearance of effort than the 
 former."^. P. Whipple. 
 
 " There never was a man more shrinkingly retiring, yet 
 surely was an author never more naively frank. He is willing 
 that you should know all that a man may fairly reveal of him- 
 self. The great interior story he does not tell, of course, but 
 the introduction to the 'Mosses from an Old Manse,' [etc.] 
 are as intimate and explicit chapters of autobiography as can 
 be found." George William Curtis. 
 
 " There is probably no writer whose personality seems to 
 us so largely mingled with his productions as Hawthorne. 
 In truth, the man and his work are inseparable in our minds. 
 From this we conclude that few writers have had 
 such power of self-absorption in their own creations as Haw- 
 thorne had, and that it is for this reason his strong individ- 
 uality is so indelibly stamped upon his characters." S. A. 
 Drake. 
 
 " His stories are, in the truest sense of the word, autobio- 
 graphical ; and with repeated opportunities for cultivating his 
 acquaintance by direct intercourse, we have learned from his 
 books immeasurably more of his mental history, tastes, ten-
 
 HAWTHORNE 765 
 
 dencies, sympathies, and opinions than we should have known 
 had we enjoyed his daily concourse for a lifetime. Diffident 
 and reserved as to the habitudes of the outer man, yet singu- 
 larly communicative in disposition and desire, he takes his 
 public for his confidant, and betrays to thousands of eyes likes 
 and dislikes, whims and reveries, veins of mirthful and serious 
 reflection, modes of feeling both healthful and morbid, which 
 it would be beyond his power to disclose through the ear, even 
 to the most intimate of friends or the dearest of kindred." 
 A. P. Peabody. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " The greatest obstacle to being heroic is the doubt whether 
 one may not be going to prove one's-self a fool ; the truest hero- 
 ism is to resist the doubt and the profoundest wisdom, to know 
 when it ought to be resisted and when to be obeyed." The Blithe- 
 dale Romance, 
 
 " There is a piercing, thrilling, delicious kind of regret in the 
 idea of so much beauty thrown away, or only enjoyable at its 
 half- development, in winter and early spring and never to be 
 dwelt amongst as the home scenery of any human being." The 
 Marble Faun. 
 
 " Happy the man that has such a friend beside him when he 
 comes to die ! How many men, I wonder, does one meet with, 
 in a lifetime, whom he would choose for his death-bed com- 
 panions ! " The Blithedale Romance. 
 
 " Truth often finds its way to the mind close muffled in robes 
 of sleep, and then speaks with uncompromising directness of 
 matters in regard to which we practice an unconscious self- 
 deception during our waking moments." Mosses from an Old 
 Manse. 
 
 12. High Moral Tone. " In all of Hawthorne's works 
 the remarkable and characteristic thing is the incessant action 
 of the moral faculty, exquisitely toned by the moral senti- 
 ment." E. Benson. 
 
 " The moral ideal which Hawthorne keeps before himself
 
 766 HAWTHORNE 
 
 and his readers throughout all his works is, on the whole, not 
 only pure but noble." J?. H. Hutton. 
 
 " Referring again to the morbidly intricate and repellent in 
 his works, we must not forget that accompanying these there 
 is generally a touch of light which leads the mind to some 
 higher consideration beyond the tangled and gloomy web. 
 Masked under the modest reserve of a story-teller the noblest 
 spirit is at work, and a beautiful and impressive lesson is found 
 enclosed within the fancy. . . . In his search for the 
 beautiful he found more truth than philosophers in seeking the 
 true." T. Bradfield. 
 
 " Hawthorne, when you have studied him, will be very 
 precious to you. . . . He will have enabled you to feel 
 yourself an inch taller during the process. Something of the 
 sublimity of the transcendent, something of the mystery of 
 the unfathomable, something of the brightness of the celestial, 
 will have attached itself to you, and you will all but think that 
 you might live to be sublime and revel in mingled light and 
 mystery." Anthony Trollope. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 "It is the very same black mud out of which the yellow lily 
 makes its obscene and noisome odor. Thus we see too, in the 
 world, that some persons assimilate only what is ugly and evil 
 from the same moral circumstances which supply good and 
 beautiful results the fragrance of celestial flowers to the daily 
 life of others." Mosses from an Old Manse. 
 
 " We do ourselves wrong, and too meanly estimate the Holi- 
 ness above us, when we deem that any act or enjoyment, good in 
 itself, is not good to do religiously." The Marble Faun. 
 
 " It behooves men, and especially men of benevolence, to 
 consider well what they are about, and, before acting on their 
 philanthropic purpose, to be quite sure that they comprehend 
 the nature and all the relations of the business in hand." The 
 Snow Image.
 
 HAWTHORNE 767 
 
 " If for any cause I were bent upon sacrificing every earthly 
 hope as a peace-offering towards heaven, I would make the wide 
 world my cell and good deeds to mankind my prayer. Many 
 penitent men have done this and found peace in it. 
 Has there been an unutterable evil in your young life ? Then 
 crowd it out with good, or it will lie corrupting there forever, and 
 cause your capacity for better things to partake of the noisome 
 corruption." The Marble Faun.
 
 EMERSON, 1803-1882 
 
 Biographical Outline. Ralph Waldo Emerson, born 
 in Boston, Mass., May 25, 1803, the second of five sons; 
 father pastor of the "First Church" (Congregational) of 
 Boston; Emerson enters the public grammar-school in 1811 
 and the Boston Latin School soon afterward ; at the age of 
 eleven (1814) he is translating Virgil into English verse ; is 
 fond, also, of Greek, history, and poetry ; composes verses, 
 and thinks highly of " the idle books under the bench at the 
 Latin School;" enters Harvard College in 1818 and is 
 graduated in 1821 ; receives second prize for English com- 
 position in his Senior year, but gives little evidence of re- 
 markable ability while in college ; joins his brother Will- 
 iam in conducting a private school at Boston, and later 
 serves as principal of an "Academy" at Chelmsford, now 
 a part of Lowell ; later he has a private school at Cam- 
 bridge ; in 1823 he begins studying for the ministry un- 
 der Dr. Channing, afterward taking a course of lectures 
 at the Harvard Divinity School ; owing to trouble with 
 his eyes, he takes no notes at the Divinity School, and is 
 excused from the examinations; Emerson wrote later, "If 
 they had examined me, they probably would not have let 
 me preach at all ; " in 1826 he is "approbated to preach " 
 by the Middlesex Association of Ministers ; visits South Caro- 
 lina and Florida during the winter of 1827-28, and preaches 
 several times at Charleston and other places ; returning, 
 preaches temporarily in several New England towns; in March, 
 1829, he is ordained colleague of Dr. Ware in the "Second 
 Church " of Boston ; in September, 1829, he marries Ellen 
 
 768
 
 EMERSON 769 
 
 Louisa Tucker, who dies of consumption in February, 1832 ; 
 in September, 1832, he preaches his famous sermon on the 
 Lord's Supper, expressing his scruples against administering 
 the same, and announcing his intention, therefore, to resign 
 his office; he visits Europe in 1833, making a tour of Sicily, 
 Italy, France, and England, and meeting Coleridge, Words- 
 worth, Landor, De Quincey, and Carlyle; he becomes a res- 
 ident of Concord in the summer of 1834, first occupying the 
 " Old Manse" of Hawthorne's novel; begins lecturing in 
 the winter of 1833-34, giving three lectures treating of his 
 European experiences and two, respectively, on "Water" 
 and " The Relation of Man to the Globe; " during 1834 he 
 lectures on Michael Angelo, Milton, Luther, George Fox, and 
 Burke ; the first two of these lectures were published in the 
 North American Review for 1837-38; Emerson begins, in 
 May, 1834, his correspondence with Carlyle, which lasts till 
 1872 ; in September, 1835, he marries Lydia Jackson, of 
 Plymouth, Mass. ; during 1835 he gives ten lectures in Bos- 
 ton on "English Literature;" in 1836, twelve lectures on 
 "The Philosophy of History:" in 1837, ten lectures on 
 "Human Culture;" in April, 1836, he writes his great 
 "Concord Hymn;" till 1838 he preaches frequently as a 
 "supply" at East Lexington, Mass.; lectures on "War" 
 in 1837 ; publishes anonymously in 1836 his small book 
 entitled "Nature," which Holmes calls "a reflective prose 
 poem ; " in August, 1837, delivers his Phi Beta Kappa ora- 
 tion at Cambridge, entitled " The American Scholar ; " July 
 15, 1838, delivers at Cambridge his Divinity School Address, 
 which excites severe criticism by theologians and raises Em- 
 erson " to the importance of a heretic ; " in 1838-39 he gives 
 ten lectures on "Human Life," of which these titles Love, 
 Demonology, and The Comic remain in his published works ; 
 he contributes, during 1838 and 1839, the poems entitled 
 " The Humble Bee " and " To the Rhodora " to the Western 
 Messenger (both poems written about 1823); in July, 1838, 
 49
 
 7/0 EMERSON 
 
 he lectures on ' ' Literary Ethics ' ' at Dartmouth College ; in De- 
 cember, 1838, Emerson writes to Carlyle that he has 22,000 
 drawing six per cent, interest, besides his house, his two-acre 
 lot, and an income of $800 from his lectures; in August, 1841, 
 he lectures at Waterville, Me., on " The Method of Nature; " 
 writing to Carlyle about this time, Emerson calls himself 
 "an incorrigible spouting Yankee; " from 1840 to 1844 he 
 contributes more than thirty articles, including some of his 
 best poems, to the Dial, first edited by Margaret Fuller and 
 later (1842-44) by Emerson himself; during 1841 he de- 
 livers, also, his lectures on ' ' Man the Reformer, " " The 
 Times," "The Transcendentalist," and "The Conserva- 
 tive ; " he publishes, during 1841, his first volume of collected 
 essays, including those OH History, Self-Reliance, Compen- 
 sation, Spiritual Laws, Love, Friendship, Prudence, Heroism, 
 the Over-Soul, Circles, and Art; in February, 1842, he loses 
 his only son, then five years old, whom he mourns to Carlyle 
 as " a piece of love and sunshine well worth my watching 
 from morning to night ; " writes " A Threnody " in memory 
 of his lost child; delivers his address on' "The Young 
 American " in February, 1844, and publishes, during the 
 same year, the second volume of his essays ; lectures also on 
 " New England Reformers " during 1844; publishes the first 
 volume of his poems in 1846 ; sails a second time for Europe 
 October 5, 1847 ; after spending a week with Carlyle, Emer- 
 son begins a lecture tour, arranged for him by the Rev. Alex- 
 ander Ireland ; while lecturing in Edinburgh he meets Leigh 
 Hunt, De Quincey, and many other notabilities ; visits Paris 
 before returning to America ; in 1850 publishes selections from 
 his English lectures under the title " Representative Men ; " 
 during 1855 he delivers anti-slavery addresses in New York 
 and Boston, favoring the purchase of the slaves by the Gov- 
 ernment, and also favors female suffrage in an address before 
 the Woman's Rights Convention ; in 1856 he publishes 
 "English Traits; " in 1857 he begins to contribute to the
 
 EMERSON 771 
 
 Atlantic Monthly, then just established, and continues till his 
 twenty-eighth article ; he helps to found the famous " Satur- 
 day Club," which includes Hawthorne, Motley, Dana, Lowell, 
 Whipple, Agassiz, Holmes, Longfellow, and others; during 
 1858 he publishes his Essay on Persian Poetry ; in 1859 
 makes his greatest public speech at the Burns Festival in 
 Boston ; in 1860 he publishes the " Conduct of Life ; " in 
 1862 delivers his funeral address over Thoreau and his 
 Address on the Emancipation Proclamation; during 1863 
 publishes " The Boston Hymn," " Voluntaries," and many 
 other poems; during 1866 writes "Terminus," one of his 
 noblest poems; during 1868, 1869, and 1870 lectures at Har- 
 vard University on " The Natural History of the Intellect ;" 
 in 1870 publishes "Society and Solitude;" during 1871 
 visits California in company with Prof. J. B. Thayer, who 
 afterward publishes an account of the journey ; Emerson loses 
 a part of his house and many valuable papers by fire in July, 
 1872 ; he sails the third time for Europe in October, 1872, 
 in company with his daughter Ellen, going as far as Egypt ; 
 during his absence friends subscribe $11,620 for the rebuild- 
 ing of his house ; he returns to Concord in May, 1873, 
 and is greeted with a popular ovation ; in 1874 he publishes 
 "Parnassus," a collection of poems from British and American 
 authors ; during the same year he is nominated Lord Rector 
 of the University of Glasgow, and receives five hundred votes 
 against seven hundred for Disraeli, which he calls " quijte the 
 fairest laurel that has ever fallen on me; " in April, 1875, 
 he delivers an address at Concord on the one hundredth anni- 
 versary of " the fight at the bridge; " before the shock of the 
 fire in 1872 his mental powers, especially his memory, began 
 to show signs of failure; in March, 1878, he lectures in the 
 Old South Church at Boston on " Fortune of the Republic; " 
 in May, 1879, he lectures at Harvard University on "The 
 Preacher;'" in 1881 reads before the Massachusetts Historical 
 Society a paper on Carlyle; in February, 1882, publishes in
 
 772 EMERSON 
 
 the Century an article on "Superlatives;" dies at Concord 
 April 27, 1882. 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY ON EMERSON'S STYLE. 
 
 Whipple, E. P., " American Literature." Boston, 1887, Ticknor, 59-68 
 
 and 234-259. 
 Stedman, E. C, "Poets of America." Boston, 1885, Houghton, Mifflin 
 
 & Co., 77, etc. 
 Sanborn, F. B., "The Genius and Character of Emerson." Boston, 
 
 1885, Osgood, 1-425. 
 
 Whipple, E. P., "Recollections." Boston, 1878, Ticknor, 119-154. 
 Lowell, J. R., "Works." Boston, 1891, Houghton, Mifflin & Co., I : 
 
 349-361. 
 Arnold, M., "Discourses in America." London, 1885, Macmillan, 
 
 138-207. 
 Morley, J., "Critical Miscellanies." New York, 1893, Macmillan, I: 
 
 293-346. 
 Powell, T., "The Living Authors of America." New York, 1850, 
 
 Stringer, 49~77- 
 Welsh, A. H., " Development of English Literature." Chicago, 1882, 
 
 Griggs, 2: 523-542. 
 Richardson, C. F., "American Literature." New York, 1893, Putnam, 
 
 l : 33 -37i and 2: 137-172. 
 
 Birrell, A., " Obiter Dicta. " New York, 1887, Scribner, 2: 238-256. 
 Gilfillan, G., "Literary Portraits." Edinburgh, 1851-52,7. Hogg, i: 
 
 195-208; 2: 120-135; 3 : 328-336. 
 Grimm, H., "Literature." Boston, 1886, Cupples, Upham & Co., 
 
 1-44. 
 Burroughs, J., "Indoor Studies." Boston, 1893, Houghton, Mifflin & 
 
 Co., 128-162. 
 
 Conway, M. D., "Emerson at Home and Abroad.'' Boston, 1882, Os- 
 good, 1-383. 
 Alcott, A. B., " Ralph Waldo Emerson," etc. Boston, 1882, Cupples, 
 
 Upham & Co., 1-56. 
 Woodbury, C. J., "Talks with Emerson." New York, 1890, Baker & 
 
 Taylor, 1-177. 
 
 James, H., "Partial Portraits." New York, 1888, Macmillan, 1-34. 
 Guernsey, A. H., "Ralph Waldo Emerson, Philosopher and Poet." 
 
 New York, 1881, Appleton, 1-327. 
 Hawthorne,}., " Confessions and Criticisms." Boston, 1887, Ticknor, 
 
 186-217.
 
 EMERSON 773 
 
 Walsh, W. S. (Shepard), "Pen Pictures of Modern Authors." New 
 
 York, 1886, Putnam, 86-98. 
 Dana, W. F. , "The Optimism of Emerson." Boston, 1886, Cupples, 
 
 Upham A; Co., 1-64. 
 Bungay, G. W., " Off- Hand Takings." New York, 1854, Dewitt, 
 
 119-127. 
 
 Nichol, J., "American Literature." Edinburgh, 1882, Black, 254-321. 
 Parton, J., "Some Noted Princes," etc. New York, 1885, Crowell, 
 
 284-288. 
 Garnet, R. (Robertson), " Great Writers " (Emerson). New York, 1888, 
 
 Whi taker. 
 Friswell, J. H., "Modern Men of Letters." London, 1870, H odder & 
 
 Stoughton, 333-342. 
 Frothingham, O. B., "Transcendentalism in New England." New 
 
 York, 1876, Putnam, 218-249. 
 Hunt, T. W., "Studies in Literature and Style." New York, 1890, 
 
 Armstrong, 246-279- 
 Willis, N. P., " Hurrygraphs. '' Rochester, New York, 1853, Alden 
 
 Beardsly Co., 169-179. 
 Scudder, H. E., " Men and Letters. " Boston, 1889, Houghton, Mifflin 
 
 & Co., 147-171. 
 Robertson, J. M., "Modern Humanists." London, 1891, Swan, Son- 
 
 iienschein & Co., 112-137. 
 North British Review, 47: 166-187. 
 Christian Examiner, 30 : 253-262 (C. C. Felton) ; 38: 87-106 (F. H. 
 
 Hedge) ; 48 : 314-318 (C. A. Bartol). 
 North American Review, 136: 431-446 (E. P. Whipple) ; 130: 479-499 
 
 (F. H. Underwood) ; 70 : 520-524 (C. E. Norton) ; 70 : 520-525 
 
 (C. E. Norton); 140: 129-144(660. Bancroft). 
 
 The Century Magazine, 25: 875-886 (Stedman); 27: 925-932 (Bur- 
 roughs). 
 
 The Chautauquan, 17: 687-692 (J. V. Cheney). 
 Fortnightly Review, 44: 319-331 (W. L. Courtney). 
 The Nation, 34: 375-377 (T. W. Higginson) ; 40: 99-101 (T. W. Hig- 
 
 ginson). 
 
 The Arena, lo: 736-745 (W. H. Savage). 
 Harper's Magazine, 52: 4 1 7-420 (E. P. Whipple); 68: 457-468 (Annie 
 
 Fields) ; 65 : 278-281 (J. Hawthorne) ; 65 : 576-587 (E. P. Whip- 
 pie). 
 
 Gentleman's Magazine, 35 : 472-480 (Kernahan). 
 Christian Review, 26 : 640-653 (J. Caldwell). 
 Scribner's Monthly, 17: 496-512 (F. B. Sanbora).
 
 774 EMERSON 
 
 Literary World, II : 175-176 (T. W. Higginson) and 174-185, obse- 
 quies (several authors). 
 
 Methodist Quarterly Re-view, 34: 357~374 (Geo. Prentice). 
 British Quarterly Review, n: 281-315 (J. Chapman). 
 Quarterly Review, 166 : 130-159. 
 
 Black-wood's Magazine, 62 : 643-657 ; 155 : 480-490. 
 Tail's Magazine, 15 : I7~ 2 3 (G. Gilfillan). 
 Lit fell's Living Age, 23 : 344-350 (English Review) 
 
 PARTICULAR CHARACTERISTICS. 
 
 I. Terseness Epigram Aphorism. "So many 
 precious sayings enrich his more sustained poems as to make 
 us include him at times with the complete artists. . . . 
 Bacon's elementary essays excepted, there are none in English 
 of which it can be more truly averred that there is nothing 
 superfluous in them. . . . Each sentence is an idea, 
 an epigram, an image, or a flash of spiritual light. . . . 
 Terseness is the distinctive feature of his style. . . . No 
 one has compressed more sternly the pith of his discourse. 
 . . . His generalizations pertain to the unseen world ; 
 viewing the actual, he puts its strength and fineness alike into 
 a line or an epithet. He was born with an unrivalled faculty 
 of selection. . . . Emerson treats of the principles be- 
 hind all history, and his laconic phrases are the very honey- 
 cells of thought." E. C. Stedman. 
 
 " His short sentences scintillate and snap like sparks from 
 an electrical conductor, and each gives a separate tingle to the 
 nerves." Edward Dowden. 
 
 " In choice and pith of diction he hits the mark with a 
 felicity that is almost his own in this generation. He is terse, 
 concentrated, and free from the blunder of mistaking intel- 
 lectual dawdling for meditation." -John Morley. 
 
 " It would be impossible to condense any of his essays ; 
 they are the last results of condensation ; we can only cut 
 them up and abridge them." -John Burroughs. 
 
 " You are dazzled on every page by. his superabundance of
 
 EMERSON 775 
 
 compactly expressed reflection and his marvellous command of 
 all the resources of imaginative illustration. Every paragraph 
 is literally ' rammed with life.' A fortnight's meditation is 
 sometimes condensed into a sentence of a couple of lines. 
 Almost every word bears the mark of deliberate thought in 
 its selection. . . . That wonderful compactness and con- 
 densation of statement which surprise and charm the reader of 
 his books were due to the fact that he exerted every faculty of 
 his mind in the act of verbal expression. A prodigal in re- 
 spect to thoughts, he was still the most austere economist in 
 the use of words. . . . The fire in him, which would in- 
 stantly have dissipated ice into vapor, made the iron in him 
 run molten and white-hot into the mould of his thought when 
 he was stirred by a great sentiment or an inspiring insight. It 
 is admitted that he is worthy to rank among the great masters 
 of expression ; yet he was the least fluent of educated beings. 
 In a company of swift talkers he seemed utterly helpless, until 
 he fixed upon the right word or phrase to embody his mean- 
 ing, and then the word or phrase was like a gold coin, fresh 
 and bright from the mint and recognized as worth ten times 
 as much as the small change of conversation which had been 
 circulating so rapidly around the table while he was mute or 
 stammering." E. P. Wkipple. 
 
 "What he says of both [Shakespeare and Goethe] is de- 
 duced from the very essence of their characters, and is at 
 once so terse and so profound that in many places almost 
 every word seems to need a commentary." Grimm. 
 
 " To know how universally the thought and the portable 
 epigram of Emerson have been diffused, it is only necessary 
 for the reader, familiar with recent literature, to open some 
 of the early essays, such as ' Nature ' or ' English Traits ' and 
 to renew the acquaintance begun twenty-five years ago. On 
 every page there will be seen scintillating lines that have 
 since become the common property of mankind, quoted by 
 everybody, like ' Hamlet ' or ' Lycidas,' and generally with-
 
 776 EMERSON 
 
 out a thought of the source whence they came." F. H. 
 Underwood. 
 
 "For choice and pith of language he belongs to a better 
 age than ours. . . . His eye for a fine telling phrase 
 that will carry true is like that of a backwoodsman for a rifle ; 
 and he will dredge up a choice word from the mud of Cotton 
 Mather himself. A diction at once so rich and homely as 
 his I know not where to match in these days of writing by the 
 page; it is like homespun cloth of gold." Lowell. 
 
 ' ' It may be fearlessly said that, within the limits of the 
 English sentence, no man who ever wrote the English tongue 
 has put more meaning into words than Emerson. . . . 
 Neither Greek precision nor Roman vigor could produce a 
 phrase that Emerson could not match. . . . Look 
 through all Emerson's writings, and then consider whether in 
 all literature you can find a man who has better fulfilled that 
 aspiration stated in such condensed words by Joubert, ' to 
 put a whole book into a page, a whole page into a phrase, 
 and that phrase into a word.' After all, it is phrases and 
 words won like this which give immortality." T. W. Hig- 
 ginson. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " There is always a best way to do everything, if it be to boil 
 an egg. . . . The nobility cannot, in any country, be dis- 
 guised. . . . Your manners are always under examination, 
 and by committees little suspected. . . . Men are like 
 Geneva watches with crystal faces which expose the whole 
 movement. . . . Fine manners need the support of fine 
 manners in others. . . . The basis of good manners is self- 
 reliance. . : . The things of a man for which we visit him 
 were done in the dark and the cold. A little integrity is better 
 than any career." Essay on Behavior. 
 
 " Fashion, though in a strange way, represents all manly virtue. 
 It is a virtue gone to seed : it is a kind of posthumous honor. 
 It does not often caress the great but the children of the great :
 
 EMERSON 777 
 
 it is a hall of the past. It usually sets its face against the great 
 of this hour. Great men are not commonly in its halls : they are 
 absent in the field ; they are working, not triumphing." Essay 
 on Manners. 
 
 11 Prudence is the virtue of the senses. It is the science of 
 appearances. It is the outmost action of the inward life. It is 
 God taking thought for oxen. It moves matter after the laws of 
 matter. It is content to seek health of body by complying with 
 physical conditions and health of mind by the laws of the intel- 
 lect." Essay on Prudence. 
 
 2. Lack of Logical Sequence. " The weak place 
 in him as a literary artist is probably his want of continuity 
 and the tie of association a want which, as he grew old, 
 became a disease, and led to a break in his mind like that of 
 a bridge with one of its piers gone, and his power of com- 
 munication was nearly or quite lost. There is no artistic con- 
 ception that runs the length and breadth of any of his works ; 
 no unity of scheme or plan, like that of an architect or of a 
 composer, that makes an inevitable whole of any of his books 
 or essays ; seldom a central and leading idea, of which the 
 rest are but radiations and unfoldings. His essays are frag- 
 mentary successions of brilliant and startling affirmations or 
 vaticinations with little or no logical sequence." -John 
 JBurroughs. 
 
 " He sacrifices unity to richness of detail. . . . The 
 ideas his sentences involve are on the scale of a continent; in 
 form they are adapted for a cabinet of curiosities. They are 
 sweeping generalizations given in essences. Short and pene- 
 trating, though irregularly arranged, they are like gold nails 
 struck into a temple wall apparently at random ; the pattern is 
 an enigma to the uninitiated. . . . His style, all armed 
 with points and antitheses, like the bristles of a hedgehog, 
 lacks repose. . . . His essays are bundles of loose ideas 
 tacked together only by a common title ; handfuls of scraps
 
 7/8 EMERSON 
 
 laid by singly, taken out in a mass, and tossed down before 
 his audience like the miscellaneous contents of a conjurer's 
 hat."/. Nichol. 
 
 " There is a certain impression left on the minds of Emer- 
 son's readers which may be described as fragmentary. . . . 
 Philosophers and prophets do not feel bound to produce epics 
 in twelve books or dramas in five acts, or even blank-verse 
 poems fifty pages long. When Emerson had said his say in 
 verse he stopped. . . . Emerson as a writer has been 
 compared to that minister who gradually filled a barrel with 
 separately written pages and picked out enough for a sermon 
 when Sunday came. Again, it has been said that Emerson's 
 essays would read as well backward as forward, sentence by 
 sentence. ... In poetry, as in prose, Emerson prepared 
 his bits of material when he would and afterward elaborated 
 them into symmetrical wholes at leisure or fit occasion." 
 C. F. Richardson. 
 
 "Emerson cannot, I think, with justice be called a great 
 philosophical writer. He cannot build ; his arrangement of 
 philosophical ideas has no progress in it, no evolution ; he 
 does not construct a philosophy. . . . Emerson himself 
 formulates perfectly the defect of his own philosophical pro- 
 ductions when he speaks of his ' formidable tendency to the 
 lapidary style.' ' I build my house of bowlders,' he says 
 again, ' with very little system, and, as regards composition, 
 with most fragmentary result ; paragraphs incompressible, 
 each sentence an infinitely repellant particle.' Nothing can 
 be truer. ' ' Matthew Arnold. 
 
 " It [a certain lecture] was as if, after vainly trying to get 
 his paragraphs into sequence and order, he had tried at last 
 the desperate expedient of shuffling them. It was chaos come 
 again, but it was a chaos full of shooting stars, a jumble of 
 creating forces." Lowell. 
 
 " We are told of his mode of preparing an essay of the 
 slow-going medley of thoughts on a topic at last brought out
 
 EMERSON 7/9 
 
 and strung at random, like a child's variegated beads." E. 
 C. Stcdman. 
 
 " Everything is thrown in just as it comes, and sometimes 
 the pell-mell is enough to persuade us that Pope did not exag- 
 gerate when he said that no one qualification is so likely to 
 make a good writer as the power of rejecting his own thoughts. 
 . . . ' Can you tell me,' asked one of his neighbors, 
 while Emerson was lecturing, ' what connection there is be- 
 tween that last sentence and the one that went before, and what 
 connection it all has with Plato ? ' ' None, my friend, save 
 in God,' was the reply. . . . As he says of Landor, his 
 sentences are cubes which will stand firm, place them how or 
 where you will. . . . One of the traces that every critic 
 notes in Emerson's writing is that it is so abrupt, so sudden 
 in its transitions, so discontinuous, so inconsecutive." John 
 Morley. 
 
 There are, in many of his essays, separate statements pre- 
 senting no logical continuity. . . . He might, for har- 
 mony's sake, have arranged the blossoms he had plucked ac- 
 cording to their hue and fragrance ; but it was not his affair 
 to go further in their classification. . . . His writings 
 have coherence by virtue of their single-hearted motive." 
 Julian Hawthorne. 
 
 "There is not a trace of system, of progressive advance- 
 ment in thought, of consistent intuition, in all his writings. 
 . . . Contradictory intuitions, as he would call them, 
 abound in almost every page. . . . As a writer his man- 
 nerism lies in the exceeding unexpectedness of his transitions ; 
 in his strange, swift, and sudden yokings of the most distant 
 and unrelated ideas." George Gilfillan. 
 
 11 His compositions affect us, not as logic linked in syllo- 
 gisms, but as voluntaries rather, or preludes, in which one is 
 not tied to any design of air, but may vary his key or note at 
 pleasure, as if improvised without any particular scope of ar- 
 gument ; each period, each paragraph being a perfect note in
 
 780 EMERSON 
 
 itself, however it may chance to chime with its accompani 
 ments in the piece." Bronson Alcott. 
 
 " He was only a philosopher in that ancient sense of which 
 his friend Alcott still offers a faint adumbration ; his mission 
 was to sit, like Socrates beneath the plane tree, and offer pro- 
 found and beautiful aphorisms, without the vague thread of the 
 Socratic method to tie them together." T. U\ Higginson. 
 
 " Indifferent to logic, he suppressed all the processes of his 
 thinking, and announced its results in affirmations. 
 The collection of these separate insights into nature and hu- 
 man life he ironically calls an essay ; and much criticism has 
 been wasted in showing that the aphoristic and axiomatic sen- 
 tences are often connected by mere juxtaposition on the page 
 and not by logical relation with each other, and that at the 
 end we have no perception of a series of thoughts leading up 
 to a clear idea of the general theme. . . . Emerson's so- 
 called essays sparkle with sentences which might be made the 
 texts for numerous ordinary essays ; and his general title, it 
 may be added, is apt to be misleading. He is fragmentary 
 in composition because he is a fanatic for compactness ; and 
 every paragraph, sometimes every sentence, is a record of an 
 insight. Hence comes the impression that his sentences are 
 huddled together rather than artistically disposed." E. P, 
 Whipple. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 "A man is a whole encyclopedia of facts. The creation of a 
 thousand forests is in one acorn, and Egypt, Greece, Rome, 
 Gaul, Britain, America, lie folded already in the first man. Epoch 
 after epoch, camp, kingdom, empire, republic, democracy, are 
 merely the application of his manifold spirit to the manifold 
 world. This human mind wrote history and this must read it. 
 The Sphinx must solve her own riddle. If the whole of history is 
 in one man, it is all to be explained from individual experience. 
 There is a relation between the hours of our life and the centuries 
 of time." Essay on History.
 
 EMERSON 781 
 
 " The only money of God is God. He pays never with any- 
 thing less or anything else. The only reward of virtue is virtue : 
 the only way to have a friend is to be one. Vain to hope to come 
 nearer a man by getting into his house. If unlike, his soul only 
 flees the faster from you, and you shall catch never a true glance 
 of his eye. We see the noble afar off, and they repel us; why 
 should we intrude ? " Essay on Friendship. 
 
 " Character is higher than intellect. Thinking is the function. 
 Living is the functionary. The stream retreats to its source. A 
 great soul will be strong to live as well as strong to think. Does 
 he lack organ or medium to impart his truths ? He can still fall 
 back on this elemental force of living them. This is a total act. 
 Thinking is a partial act. Let the grandeur of justice shine in 
 his affairs. Let the beauty of affection cheer his lowly roof. 
 Those ' far from fame,' who dwell and act with him, will feel the 
 force of his constitution in the doings and passages of the day 
 better than it can be measured by any public and designed dis- 
 play. Time shall teach him that the scholar loses no hour which 
 the man lives. Herein he unfolds the sacred germ of his instinct, 
 screened from influence. What is lost in seemliness is gained in 
 strength." Man Thinking. 
 
 3. Mysticism Introspection Subjectiveness. 
 
 " It must be taken for granted that Wordsworth's experience 
 was the result and record of genuine insight and that it can- 
 not be curtly dismissed as ' crazy, mystical metaphysics' be- 
 fore Emerson can even obtain a hearing; for he undoubtedly 
 was more crazy and mystical than Wordsworth cared to be, 
 while independently following in the path which Wordsworth 
 had marked out. . . . He was a man who had earned the 
 right to utter these noble truths by patient meditation and 
 clear insight. . . . It is this depth of spiritual experience 
 and subtility of spiritual insight which distinguishes Emerson 
 from all other American authors and makes him an elementary 
 power as well as an elementary thinker." E. P. Whipple. 
 
 " There is much in Emerson's works that will not stand 
 rigid literary tests ; much that is too fanciful and ethereal,
 
 782 EMERSON 
 
 too curious and paradoxical not real or true, but only seem- 
 ingly so, or so by a kind of violence or disruption." -John 
 Burroughs. . 
 
 " He feels that every enigma runs into the great enigma 
 what is man ? and that, if he could but unlock his own heart, 
 the key of the universe were found. ... He persists in 
 believing that the creation is a vast symbol of man ; that 
 every tree and blade of grass is somehow cognate with his 
 nature and significant of his destiny ; and that the remotest 
 stars are only the distant perspective of that picture of which 
 he is the central figure. . . . You feel somewhat like the 
 unlearned reader of Howe and Baxter when he comes upon 
 their Latin and Greek quotations : you skip or bolt his bits 
 of mysticism, and pass on with greater gusto to the clear and 
 the open. . . . His utterances are becoming vaguer and 
 more elaborately oracular. He is dealing with deliberate 
 puzzles through the breaks in the dark forest of his page you 
 see his mind in full retreat toward some remoter Cimmerian 
 gloom. . . . He has been living in a world of his own. 
 He has been more conversant with principles than with facts 
 and more with dreams than with either. . . . It is the 
 bird that speaks our soul alone can furnish the interpretation. 
 So with many of Emerson's poems. They mean absolutely 
 nothing they are nonsense verse, except to those who have 
 learned their cipher and whose heart instinctively dances to 
 their tune. It is often a wordless music a wild, wailing 
 rhythm as a sound inexplicable but not absurd or meaning- 
 less. . . . Emerson's verses float us away listening and 
 lost on their stream of sound and of dim suggestive meaning. 
 Led himself, as he repeatedly says, ' as far as the incommuni- 
 cable,' he leads us into the same mystic regions." George 
 Gilfillan. 
 
 " Few have had Emerson's inward eye, but it is well that 
 some have not been restricted . to it. ... His voice 
 comes ' like a falling star ' from a" skyey dome of pure ab-
 
 EMERSON 783 
 
 straction. . . . If a theist, with his intuition of an all- 
 pervading life, he no doubt felt himself a portion of that life, 
 and the sense of omnipresence was so clearly the dominant 
 sense of its attributes that to call him a theist rather than a 
 pantheist is simply a dispute about terms. . . . One may 
 say that his philosophical method bears to the inductive or 
 empirical a relation similar to that between the poetry of 
 self-expression and the poetry of aesthetic creation, a relation 
 of the subjective to the objective. . . . If he sought 
 first principles, he looked within himself for them." E. C. 
 Stedman. 
 
 " His mysticism gives us a counterpoise to our super-prac- 
 ticality. ' ' Lowell. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " The wise man not only leaves out of his thought the many, 
 but leaves out the few. Fountains, fountains ; the self-moved, 
 the absorbed, the commander because he is commanded, the 
 assured, the primary they are good, for these announce the 
 present pressure of supreme power. Our action should rest 
 mathematically on our own substance. In nature there are no 
 false valuations. A pound of water in the ocean tempest has no 
 more gravity than in a mid-summer pond. All things work 
 exactly according to their quality and according to their 
 quantity; attempt what they can do, except man only." Es- 
 say on Character. 
 
 " And the first condition is, that we must leave a too close and 
 lingering adherence to the actual, to facts, and study the senti- 
 ment as it appeared in hope and not in history ; for each man 
 sees his own life defaced and disfigured, as the life of man is not, 
 to his imagination. Each man sees over his own experience a 
 certain slime of error, while that of other men looks fair and 
 ideal. Let any man go back to those delicious relations which 
 make the beauty of his life, which have given him sincerest 
 instruction and nourishment, he will shrink and shrink. Alas ! 
 I know not why, but infinite compunctions embitter in mature 
 life all the remembrances of budding sentiment and cover every 
 beloved name. Everything is beautiful, seen from the point of
 
 784 EMERSON 
 
 the intellect or as truth. But all is sour if seen as experience." 
 Essay on Love. 
 
 " A man who stands united with his thought conceives mag- 
 nificently of himself. He is conscious of a universal success, 
 even though bought by uniform particular failures. No advan- 
 tages, no powers, no gold or force can be any match for him. I 
 cannot choose but rely on my own poverty rather than on your 
 wealth. I cannot make your consciousness tantamount to mine. 
 Only the star dazzles ; the planet has a faint, moon-like ray. I 
 hear what you say of the admirable parts and tried temper of the 
 party you praise, but I see welJ that, for all his purple cloaks, I 
 shall not like him, unless he is at least a poor Greek like me. I 
 cannot deny it, O friend, that the vast shadow of the Phenomenal 
 includes thee also in its pied and painted immensity." Es- 
 say on Friendship. 
 
 4. Originality Independence Individuality. 
 " It was impossible for Emerson to part with his own individ- 
 uality, even in celebrating the achievements of the inspired 
 saints, bards, and artists who had seemingly parted with theirs. 
 He did not desire to ' disindividualize ' himself while in- 
 tensely appreciating other individualities. . . . He rep- 
 resents Thought in any adjustment of our poetic group, and 
 furthermore his thought being independent and emancipa- 
 tory the American conflict with superstition, with servility 
 to inherited usage and opinion. . . . We know his dis- 
 taste for convention, his mistrust of' tinkle ' and ' efficacious 
 rhymes.' But his gift lifted him above his will; and while 
 throwing out his grapnel, clinging to prose as the firm ground 
 of his work, he rose involuntary and with music. 
 The force of Emerson lay in the depth and clearness of his 
 intentions. He gave us the revelation and prophecy of a man 
 among millions. . . . He has taught his countrymen the 
 worth of virtue, wisdom, courage above all, to fashion life 
 upon a self-reliant pattern, obeying the dictates of their own 
 souls. . . . Emerson never felt the strength of propor- 
 tion that compels the races to whom art is a religion and a
 
 EMERSON 785 
 
 law. . . . His instinct of personality, not without a 
 pride of its own, made him a nonconformist." E. C. Sted- 
 man. 
 
 " Emerson had a pronounced, almost a haughty individu- 
 ality. Throughout his life he guarded it with a jealous care. 
 He could never endure the thought of being the organ of any. 
 . . . In reading him we feel that we are in communion 
 with an original person as well as with an original poet. . . . 
 Nothing that can be said against him touches his essential 
 quality of manliness. . . . How superb and animating is 
 his lofty intellectual courage ! ' The soul,' he says, ' is in her 
 native realm, and it is wider than space, older than time, wide 
 as hope, rich as love.' . . . The poet's character was on 
 a level with his lofty thinking." E. P. IVfiipple. 
 
 " Both in poetry and in prose his influence is as spontane- 
 ous as that in nature; he announces and lets others plead." 
 C. F. Richardson. 
 
 "Instead of cultivating the tormenting and enfeebling 
 spirit of scruple, instead of multiplying precepts, he bade men 
 not to crush out their souls under the burden of duty ; they 
 are to remember that a wise life is not wholly filled up by 
 commandments to do and to abstain from doing. Hence we 
 have in Emerson the teaching of a vigorous morality without 
 the formality and the deadly tedium of didacticism." -John 
 Morley. 
 
 " No one has had so steady and constant and above all so 
 natural a vision of what we require and what we are capable of 
 in the way of aspiration and independence." Henry James. 
 
 " The intellectual life of Emerson for nearly half a century 
 has affected educated men with an influence that is immeasur- 
 able; he is ' the Columbus of modern thought.' Since Lord 
 Bacon there has not been another writer whose resources were 
 so wholly in himself. He belongs with the three or four 
 philosophic minds of the first order born of the Anglo-Saxon 
 race." F H. Underwood. 
 50
 
 786 EMERSON 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " The characteristic of a genuine heroism is its persistency. 
 All men have wandering impulses, fits and starts of generosity. 
 But when you have resolved to be great, abide by yourself, and 
 do not weakly try to reconcile yourself with the world. The 
 heroic cannot be common nor the common the heroic. Yet we 
 have the weakness to expect the sympathy of people in those 
 actions whose excellence is that they outrun sympathy and ap- 
 peal to a tardy justice. If you would -serve your brother because 
 it is fit for you to serve him, do not take back your words when 
 you find that prudent people do not commend you. Be true to 
 your own act, and congratulate yourself if you have done some- 
 thing strange and extravagant and broken the monotony of a 
 decorous age." Essay on Heroism. 
 
 " Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. He who 
 would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name 
 of goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of our 
 own minds. Absolve you to yourself and you shall have the 
 suffrage of the world. I remember an answer, which, when quite 
 young, I was prompted to make to a valued adviser, who was wont 
 to importune me with the dear old doctrines of the church. On 
 my saying, ' What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, 
 if I live wholly from within ? ' my friend suggested ' But these 
 impulses may be from below, not from above.' I replied, ' They 
 do not seem to me to be such ; but if I am the devil's child, I 
 will live then from the devil.' " Essay on Self -Reliance. 
 
 5. Sense of Beauty Poetic Imagery. "The sense 
 of beauty is his supreme faculty. In this respect only one 
 modern author, Ruskin, bears a comparison with him."- 
 F. H. Underwood. 
 
 " The perception of beauty in nature or in human nature, 
 whether it be the beauty of a flower or of a soul, makes Emer- 
 son joyous and glad ; he exults in celebrating it, and he com- 
 municates to his readers his own ecstatic mood. . . . The 
 singular attractiveness of his writings comes from his intense 
 perception of beauty, both in its abstract quality as the ' aw-
 
 EMERSON 787 
 
 ful loveliness ' which such poets as Shelley have celebrated 
 and in the more concrete expression by which it fascinates 
 ordinary minds. . . . His ' Ode to Beauty ' indicates 
 that the sense of beauty penetrated to the inmost centre of his 
 being, and was an indissoluble element in his character. 
 . . . The sense of beauty, indeed, was so vital an ele- 
 ment in the constitution of his being that it decorated every- 
 thing it touched. . . . His imaginative faculty, both in 
 the conception and creation of beauty, is uncorrupted by any 
 morbid sentiment. His vision reaches to the very source of 
 beauty the beauty that cheers." E. P. If hippie. 
 
 " Words which are pictures sounds which are songs jubi- 
 lant raptures in praise of nature, reminding you afar off of 
 those old Hebrew hymns, which, paired to the timbrel or the 
 clash of cymbals, rose like the cries of some great victory to 
 Heaven are given to Emerson at his pleasure. . . . Ex- 
 quisite as many of his poems are, his other writings are a truer 
 and richer voice, their short and mellow sentences moving to 
 the breath of his spirit as musically as the pine cones to the 
 breeze. . . . He is the greatest of American poets. We 
 refer not to his verse, which is, in general, woven mist, involv- 
 ing little but to the beautiful and abrupt utterances about 
 nature in his prose. No finer things about the outward 
 features and the transient meanings of creation have been said 
 since the Hebrews than are to be found in some of his books." 
 George Gilfillan. 
 
 " The poetic element at times takes the form of the graphic ' 
 or picturesque, the pictorial or imaginative expression of ideas. 
 . . . It gave to his prose that poetic flavor that so much 
 of it possesses. . . . Hence the frequent recurrence, es- 
 pecially in his literary essays, of passages of marked poetic 
 beauty. . . . There is the presence of taste, beauty, im- 
 agination, poetic appreciation, and culture in theme, discus- 
 sion, and motive." T. W. Hunt. 
 
 " Emerson's prose is full of poetry, and his poems are light
 
 788 EMERSON 
 
 and air. His modes of expression, like his epithets, are imag- 
 inative." E. C. Stedman. 
 
 "There is more poetry in his prose than in his poems." 
 Matthew Arnold. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 ' ' There are days which occur in this climate, at almost any 
 season of the year, wherein the world .reaches its perfection ; when 
 the air, the heavenly bodies, and the earth make a harmony, as 
 if nature would indulge her offspring ; when, in these bleak up- 
 per sides of the planet, nothing is to desire that we have heard 
 of the happiest latitudes, and we bask in the shining hours of 
 Florida and Cuba ; when everything that has life gives sign of 
 satisfaction, and the cattle that lie on the ground seem to have 
 great and tranquil thoughts. These halcyons may be looked for 
 with a little more assurance in that pure October weather which 
 we distinguish by the name of Indian Summer. The day, im- 
 measurably long, sleeps over the broad hills and warm wide 
 fields. To have lived through all its sunny hours seems longevity 
 enough." Essay on Nature. 
 
 "For it is a fire that, kindling its first embers in the narrow 
 nook of a private bosom, caught from a wandering spark out of 
 another private heart, grows and enlarges until it warms and 
 beams upon multitudes of men and women, upon the universal 
 heart of all, and so lights up the whole world and all nature with 
 its generous flames." Essay on Love. 
 
 ' ' I have seen the softness and beauty of the summer clouds 
 floating feathery overhead, enjoying, as it seemed, their height 
 and privilege of motion, while yet they appeared not so much 
 the drapery of this place and hour as forelooking to some pa- 
 vilions and gardens of festivity beyond. It is an odd jealousy : 
 but the poet finds himself not near enough to his object. The 
 pine tree, the river, the bank of flowers before him does not seem 
 to be nature. Nature is still elsewhere. This other is but out- 
 skirt and far-off reflection, an echo of the triumph that has passed 
 by, and is now at its glancing splendor and heyday, perchance 
 in the neighboring fields, or if you stand in the fields, then in the 
 adjacent woods." Essay on Nature.
 
 EMERSON 789 
 
 6. Suggestiveness. Emerson himself well defines this 
 characteristic of his own style, when he says : " The most in- 
 teresting writing is that which does not quite satisfy the reader. 
 Try and leave a little thinking for him ; that will be better for 
 you both. The trouble with most writers is they spread too 
 thin. The reader is as quick as they ; has got there before 
 them, and is ready and waiting. A little guessing does him 
 no harm, so I would assist him with no connection. If you 
 can see how the harness fits, he can. But make sure that you 
 see it." 
 
 "Emerson's so-called essay sparkles with sentences which 
 might be made the texts for numerous ordinary essays. . . . 
 He has the immense advantage of suggesting something new 
 to the diligent reader after he has read him for the fiftieth 
 time. . . . His sentences have furnished texts for ser- 
 mons ; his paragraphs have been expanded into volumes, and 
 open minds, representing every variety of creed, have gladly 
 appropriated and worked out, after their own fashion, hints 
 and impulses derived from the creedless seer and thinker." 
 E. P. Whipple. 
 
 " We look upon him as one of the few men of genius whom 
 our age has produced, and there needs no better proof of it 
 than his masculine faculty of fecundating other minds." 
 Lowell. 
 
 " From that time I have never ceased to read Emerson's 
 works ; and whenever I take up a volume it seems to me as 
 if I were reading it for the first time. ... He sometimes 
 made wonderfully simple observations which yet disentangled 
 the most intricate trains of thought." Grimm. 
 
 " Probably the best test of good prose is this : it is always 
 creative ; it begets in the mind of the reader a deep and per- 
 vading sense of life and reality. Now that Emerson is 
 gone, how many are there in America? . . . He was 
 to scatter the seed-germs of nobler thinking and living, not 
 to rear a temple to the muses. -John Burroughs.
 
 79O EMERSON 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " The weakness of the will begins when the individual would 
 be something of himself. All reform aims in some one particu- 
 lar to let the great soul have its way through us ; in other words, 
 to engage us to obey. Of this pure nature every man is at some 
 time sensible. Language cannot paint it with colors. It is too 
 subtle. It is undefinable, immeasurable ; but we know that it 
 pervades and contains us. We know that all spiritual being is 
 in man. A wise old proverb says, ' God comes to see us with- 
 out bell : ' that is, as there is no screen or ceiling between our 
 heads and the infinite heavens, so is there no bar or wall in the 
 soul, where man, the effect, ceases, and God, the cause, begins. 
 The walls are taken away." Essay on the Over-Soul. 
 
 " Our admiration of the antique is not admiration of the old but 
 of the natural. The Greeks are not reflective but perfect in their 
 senses, perfect in their health, with the finest physical organiza- 
 tion in the world. Adults acted with the simplicity and grace of 
 boys. They made vases, tragedies, and statues such as healthy 
 senses should that is, in good taste. Such things have con- 
 tinued to be made in all ages, and are now, wherever a healthy 
 physique exists, but, as a class, from their superior organization, 
 they have surpassed all. They combine the energy of manhood 
 with the engaging unconsciousness of childhood. Our reverence 
 for them is our reverence for childhood. Nobody can reflect 
 upon an unconscious act with regret or contempt." Essay on 
 History. 
 
 " There is a class of men, individuals of which appear at long 
 intervals, so eminently endowed with insight and virtue that they 
 have been unanimously saluted as divine, and who seem to be 
 an accumulation of that power we consider. Divine persons are 
 character-born, or, to borrow a phrase from Napoleon, they are 
 victory-organized. They are usually received with ill-will be- 
 cause they are new, and because they set abound to the exagger- 
 ation that has been made of the personality of the last divine 
 person." Essay on Character. 
 
 7. Sincerity. " There are living organisms so transparent 
 that we can see their hearts beating and their blood flowing 
 so transparent was the life of Emerson. . . . When a
 
 EMERSON 791 
 
 man speaks the truth in the spirit of truth his eye is as clear 
 as the heavens." O. W. Holmes. 
 
 " On every page there is set the strong stamp of sincerity 
 and the attraction of a certain artlessness ; the most awkward 
 sentence rings true ; and there is often a pure and simple note 
 that touches more than if it were the perfection of elaborated 
 melody." John Morley. 
 
 " Emerson preached sincerity as among the first virtues. 
 He never hesitated to tell the poets, prose writers, reformers, 
 fanatics, who were his friends and acquaintances exactly what 
 he thought of them ; and there was never a doubt of his 
 mental and moral nonesty in their reception of his criticisms." 
 E. P. Whipple. 
 
 " In an era of excessive reticencyand hypocrisy, he has no 
 concealments. We never suspect him of withholding half of 
 what he knows or of formularizing for our satisfaction a be- 
 lief which he does not sincerely hold. He is transparently 
 honest and honorable." -_/. Nichol. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " That which we are, we shall teach, not voluntarily but in- 
 voluntarily. Thoughts come into our minds through avenues 
 which we never voluntarily opened. Character teaches over our 
 head. The infallible index of true progress is found in the tone 
 the man takes." Essay on the Over-Soul. 
 
 "Our culture, therefore, must not admit the arming of the 
 man. Let him hear in season that he is born into the state of 
 war . . . and neither defying nor dreading the thunder, let 
 him take both reputation and life in his hand, and with perfect 
 urbanity dare the gibbet and the mob by the absolute truth of 
 his speech and the rectitude of his behavior." Essay on Heroism. 
 
 " We know each other very well, which of us has been just to 
 himself and whether that which we teach or behold is only an 
 aspiration or is our honest effort also." Essay on the Over-Soul. 
 
 8. Optimism. " His persistent optimism is the root of 
 his greatness and the source of his charm. . . . Strong
 
 792 EMERSON 
 
 as was Emerson's optimism, and unconquerable as was his be- 
 lief in a good result to emerge from all which he saw going 
 on around him, no misanthropical satirist ever saw shortcom- 
 ings and absurdities more clearly than he did, or exposed 
 them more courageously. . . . Truly, his insight is ad- 
 mirable ; his truth is precious. Yet the secret of his effect is 
 not ever in these ; it is in his temper. It is in the hopeful, 
 serene, beautiful temper wherewith these, in Emerson, are in- 
 dissolubly joined; in which they work, and have their being. 
 Never had man such a sense of the inexhaustibleness of 
 nature and such hope. It was the ground of his being ; it 
 never failed him. . . . Happiness in labor, righteousness, 
 and veracity ; in all the life of spirit ; happiness and eternal 
 hope that was Emerson's gospel. There is no man living to 
 whom, as a writer, so many of us feel and thankfully acknowl- 
 edge so great an indebtedness for ennobling impulses." 
 Matthew Arnold. 
 
 " Emerson's lines are an emancipation proclamation set to 
 music, a resurrection to that immortality and ideality he told 
 his friend Sanborn he held to. He has not written a verse 
 that does not refresh and exhilarate. He never for an instant 
 panders to despondency and to despair." C. A. Bartol. 
 
 11 To him no individual was ever so low as to have lost his 
 capacity for manhood or to have lost the opportunity of be- 
 coming a receptacle of descending truth." G. W. Cooke. 
 
 "Emerson declared that truth is mighty and will prevail ; 
 he looked serenely at the ugly aspect of contemporary life be- 
 cause, as an optimist, he was a herald of the future. 
 Carlyle, as a pessimist, denounced the present, and threw all 
 the energy of his vivid dramatic genius into vitalizing the 
 past. He [Emerson] declared, even when current events ap- 
 peared ugliest to the philanthropist, that ' the highest thought 
 and the deepest love is born with Victory on its head.' ' 
 E. P. \Vhipple. 
 
 " He looked upon nature as pregnant with soul ; for him
 
 EMERSON 793 
 
 the spirit always moved upon the face of the waters. The in- 
 comprehensible plan was perfect : whatever is, is right. Thus 
 far he knew, and was an optimist of reverent intent." E. C. 
 Stedman. 
 
 " In all he is the optimist rather than the pessimist, the 
 philosopher, not the mere by-stander. Idealism appears to 
 him a lovely thing and of eternal truth. . . . He was an 
 optimist, a serene presence, unexcited because confident of 
 the ultimate result. Though bitterly attacked, he seldom re- 
 torted and seldom swerved from his self-confident course." 
 C. F. Richardson. 
 
 " He is the champion of the republic ; he is our future liv- 
 ing in our present and showing the world, by anticipation, 
 what sort of excellence we are capable of." -Julian Haw- 
 thorne. 
 
 " He fought with the bright battalions. And their allies 
 of the graver faiths have proclaimed that his serenity of op- 
 timism invalidated his authority as a practical moral expo- 
 nent. "C.f. Woodbury. 
 
 " The greatness of his work consists in the measure of pure 
 genius and of inspiration to noble and heroic conduct which 
 it holds. As a writer he had but one aim, namely, to inspire, 
 to wake up his reader or hearer to the noblest and the high- 
 est that there was in him. ... As a prose writer there 
 is one note in Emerson which we get with the same em- 
 phasis and clearness in no other writer. I mean the heroic 
 note, the noble note of manhood rising above the accidents 
 of fortune and the tyranny of circumstances, the inspira- 
 tion of courage and self-reliance. ... In Emerson 
 more than in any other there are words that are like banners 
 leading to victory, symbolical, inspiring, rallying, seconding 
 and pointing the way to our best endeavor." -John Bur- 
 roughs.
 
 794 EMERSON 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " Never mind the ridicule, never mind the defeat : up again, 
 old heart ! . . . there is victory yet for all justice ; and the 
 true romance which the world exists to realize will be the trans- 
 formation of genius into practical power." Essay on Experience. 
 
 " Yet when we have said all our fine things about the arts, we 
 must end with a frank confession that the arts, as we know them, 
 are but initial. . . . He has conceived meanly of the re- 
 sources of man who believes that the- best age of production is 
 past." Essay on Art. 
 
 " The intellect, with blazing eye, looking through history, from 
 the beginning onward, gazes on this blot [slavery], and it disap- 
 pears. The sentiment of Right, once very low and indistinct 
 but ever more articulate because it is the voice of the universe, 
 pronounces Freedom. The power that built this fabric of things 
 affirms it in the heart ; and in the history of the First of August 
 has made a sign to the ages of his will." Emancipation Address- 
 
 Q. Idealism. " Emerson was the champion of the Ideal; 
 Carlyle asserted the absolute dominion of fact." E. P. 
 Whipple. 
 
 " He began where many poets end, seeking at once the 
 upper air, the region of pure thought and ideality. . . . 
 Emerson was the freest and most ideal of them all, and what 
 came to him by inheritance or prophetic forecast he gave like 
 a victor." E. C. Stedman. 
 
 ' ' The consistent idealist, yet realist none the less, he has 
 illustrated the learning and thought of former times on the 
 noblest themes, and has come nearest of any to emancipating 
 the mind of his own time from the dreams of past ages." 
 A. Bronson Alcott. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " The things we now esteem fixed shall, one by one, detach 
 themselves like fruit from our experience and fall. . . . The 
 soul looketh steadily forward, creating a world always before
 
 EMERSON 795 
 
 her, leaving worlds always behind her. She has no dates nor 
 rites nor persons nor specialties nor men. The soul knows only 
 the soul; all else is idle weeds for her wearing." Essay on the 
 Over- Soul. 
 
 " My house stands in low land, with limited outlook, and on 
 the skirt of the village. But I go with my friend to the shore of 
 our little river ; and with one stroke of the paddle, I leave the 
 village politics and personalities, yes, and the world of villages 
 and personalities behind, and pass into a delicate realm of sun- 
 set and moonlight, too bright almost for spotted man to enter 
 without novitiate and probation. We penetrate bodily this in- 
 credible beauty : we dip our hands in this painted element : our 
 eyes are bathed in these lights and forms." Essay on Nature. 
 
 10. Dignity Gravity Courtliness. "That which 
 struck me most, as distinguishing him from most other human 
 beings, is nobility. He is a born nobleman." Frederika 
 Bremer. 
 
 ' ' There was a majesty about him beyond all other men I 
 have known, and he dwelt, habitually, in that ampler and 
 diviner air to which most of us, if ever, rise but occasionally." 
 Lowell. 
 
 " In a time full of personal pretension, his poise of modest 
 dignity rebuked the fantastic and shamed the grovelling. No- 
 bility was in his walk, his word, his every gesture." -Julia 
 Ward Howe. 
 
 " Emerson had an unpretentious dignity of demeanor, and 
 I felt as if I had always known him." Grimm. 
 
 " There are stanzas in Emerson's poems which read like ora- 
 cles. . . . He announces them with the confident tones 
 of the seer and the prophet. They rank with the loftiest utter- 
 ances that have ever proceeded from the awakened heart and 
 consciousness and intellect of man." E. P. Whipple. 
 
 " Nor does his abruptness ever impede a true urbanity. 
 The accent is homely and the apparel plain, but his bearing 
 lias a friendliness, a courtesy, a hospitable humanity, which
 
 796 EMERSON 
 
 goes nearer to our hearts than either literary decoration or 
 rhetorical unction." -John Morley. 
 
 " The epithet ' sun-accustomed ' is applied to Emerson's 
 piercing eye by one, a woman and a poet, who marked the 
 effect of his noble profile. I, too, remember him in this wise 
 and as the most serene of men : one whose repose, whose 
 tranquillity, was not the contentment of an idler housed in 
 worldly comforts, but the token of spiritual adjustment to all 
 the correspondences of life as the bravest and most deferen- 
 tial, the proudest in self-respect, yet recognizing in deep hu- 
 mility the supremacy of universal law." E. C. SteJmati. 
 
 " The cast of his character was majestic. The order of his 
 mind was majestic. It was morally impossible for him to de- 
 scend from the high plane of his thought and life to any lower 
 levels ; so that when he came to the act of written expression 
 he must present ' high thinking' in high forms and illustrate 
 in every line and page that elevation of spirit and sentiment 
 on which Longinus so insists. ... If dignity of style 
 is essentially literary, 'Emerson furnished it beyond meas- 
 ure. . . . His demeanor was marked by a kind of clas- 
 sical decorum by that lofty ' urbanity ' of presence and bear- 
 ing which subdued all that was unrefined and gave a courtly 
 character to the place and hour." T. W. Hunt. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " What is so excellent as strict relations of amity when they 
 spring from this deep root ? The sufficient reply to the skeptic, 
 who doubts the power and the furniture of man, is in that possi- 
 bility of joyful intercourse with persons which makes the faith 
 and practice of all reasonable men. I know nothing which life 
 has to offer so satisfactory as the profound good understanding 
 which can subsist, after much exchange of good offices, between 
 two virtuous men, each of whom is sure of himself and sure of 
 his friend. It is a happiness which postpones all other gratifica- 
 tions, and makes politics and commerce and churches cheap. 
 For when men shall meet as they ought, each a benefactor, a
 
 EMERSON 797 
 
 shower of stars clothed with thoughts, with deeds, with accom- 
 plishments, it should be the festival of nature which all things 
 announce." Essay on Character. 
 
 "The entire end of friendship is a commerce the most strict 
 and homely that can be joined ; more strict than any of which 
 we have experience. It is for aid and comfort through all the 
 relations and passages of life and death. It is fit for serene days 
 and graceful gifts and country rambles, but also for rough roads 
 and hard fare, shipwreck, poverty, and persecution. It keeps 
 company with the sallies of wit and the trances of religion. 
 We are to dignify to each other the daily needs and offices of 
 man's life and embellish it by courage, wisdom, and unity. It 
 should never fall into something usual and settled, but should be 
 alert and inventive and add rhyme and reason to what was 
 drudgery." Essay on Friendship. 
 
 " The farmer's office is precise and important, but you must 
 not try to paint him in rose-color ; you cannot make pretty com- 
 pliments to fate and gravitation, whose minister he is. He rep- 
 resents the necessities. It is the beauty of the great economy 
 of the world that makes his comeliness. He bends to the order 
 of the seasons, the weather, the soils and crops, as the sails of a 
 ship bend to the wind. He represents continuous hard labor, 
 year in, year out, and small gains. He is a slow person, timed 
 to nature and not to city watches. He takes the pace of seasons, 
 plants, and chemistry. Nature never hurries : atom by atom, 
 little by little, she achieves her work." Essay on Farming. 
 
 II. Dignified Irony. "He has subtle and kindly 
 irony. . . . No satirist ever saw shortcomings and ab- 
 surdities more clearly than he did or exposed them more 
 courageously. When he sees 'the meanness,' as he calls it, 
 of American politics, he congratulates Washington on being 
 'long already happily dead,' on being 'wrapped in his 
 shroud and forever safe. ' With what subtle though 
 
 kind irony he follows the gradual withdrawal in New Eng- 
 land, in the last half century, of tender consciences from the 
 social organizations the bent for experiments such as that of 
 Brook Farm and the like, follows it in all its ' dissidence
 
 798 EMERSON 
 
 of dissent and Protestantism of the Protestant religion ! ' He 
 loves even to rally the New Englander on his philanthropic 
 activity and to find his beneficence and its institution a 
 bore." Matthew Arnold. 
 
 " Even when provocation was great, his satire was so gerrtle 
 and genial that it warmed even its object." C. J. Wood- 
 bury. 
 
 "In judging of works of immensely less importance [than 
 Goethe's ' Faust'], which only excited his ridicule, his irony 
 was often delicious." E. P. Whipple. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 "Senators and presidents have climbed so high with pain 
 enough, not because they think the place specially agreeable, but 
 as an apology for real worth and to vindicate their manhood in 
 our eyes. This conspicuous chair is their compensation to them- 
 selves for being of a poor, cold, hard nature. They must do what 
 they can." Essay on Politics. 
 
 "What did the preacher mean by saying that the good are 
 miserable in the present life ? Was it that houses and lands, 
 offices, wine, horses, dress, luxury, are had by unprincipled men, 
 whilst the saints are poor and despised ; and that a compensation 
 is to be made to these last hereafter by giving them the like 
 gratifications another day, bank-stock and doubloons, venison 
 and champagne ? This must be the compensation intended ; 
 for what else ? Is it that they are to have leave to pray and 
 praise ? to love and serve men ? Why, that they can do now. 
 The legitimate inference the disciple would draw was, ' We are 
 to have such a good time as the sinners have now ; ' or, to push 
 it to its extreme import, ' You sin now, we shall sin by-and-by ; 
 we would sin now, if we could ; not being successful, we expect 
 our revenge to-morrow.' " Essay on Compensation. 
 
 "When we see a soul whose 'acts are all regal, graceful, and 
 pleasant as roses, we must thank God that such things can be 
 and are, and not turn sourly on the angel and say, ' Crump is a 
 better man with his grunting resistance to all his native devils.' " 
 Essay on Spiritual Laws.
 
 EMERSON 799 
 
 " The world is filled with the proverbs and acts and winkings 
 of a base prudence, which is a devotion to matter ; as if we pos- 
 sessed no other faculties than the palate, the nose, the touch, the 
 eye and ear ; a prudence which adores the Rule of Three, which 
 never subscribes, which gives never, which lends seldom, and 
 asks but one question of any project Will it bake bread ? This 
 is a disease like a thickening of the skin until the vital organs are 
 destroyed. But culture, revealing the high origin of the appar- 
 ent world and aiming at the perfection of the man as the end, 
 degrades everything else, as health and bodily life, into means." 
 Essay on Prudence.
 
 LOWELL, 1819-1881 
 
 Biographical Outline. James Russell Lowell, born at 
 Cambridge, Mass., February 22, 1819 ; father a Congrega- 
 tional minister, and both parents of English descent ; in 1827 
 Lowell enters the school of William Wells, near " Elmwood," 
 as Lowell's home was called ; he enters Harvard College as 
 a Freshman in 1834; forms there an intimate friendship with 
 George B. Loring ; is only a fair student, but evinces an 
 early love for literature, especially poetry ; becomes secretary 
 of the ' ' Hasty Pudding Club, ' ' whose records were then kept 
 in verse ; is suspended for several months during his Senior 
 year for neglect of studies; passes the interval studying under 
 a tutor at Concord, where he meets Emerson and Thoreau ; 
 writes the poem for Class Day in 1838 (a satire on the Aboli- 
 tionists and the Concord Transcendentalists), but is not allowed 
 to read it because of his suspension, then in effect ; it is printed 
 in pamphlet form for the class ; Lowell passes his final exam- 
 inations and takes A. B. with his classmates in June, 1838; 
 first thinks seriously of entering the ministry and then takes 
 up the law ; by October, 1838, he is reading Blackstone 
 " with as good a grace and as few wry faces as I may ; " he 
 plans a dramatic poem on Cromwell, and regrets "being com- 
 pelled to say farewell to the muses ; " in 1839 he writes, " I 
 am schooling myself and shaping my theory of poetry ; " dur- 
 ing 1839 he writes verses ("pottery ") for the Boston Post 
 and for the Advertiser; in December, 1839, meets Miss Maria 
 White, who " knows more poetry than anyone I am acquainted 
 with ; " receives LL.B. from the Harvard Law School in the 
 summer of 1840 ; takes up the law more seriously because of 
 
 800
 
 LOWELL 801 
 
 his father's heavy financial losses at that time and because of 
 his engagement to Miss White in the autumn of 1840 ; during 
 1839-40 he contributes verses to the Knickerbocker Magazine 
 and to the Southern Literary Messenger under his own name 
 and under the pseudonym of " Hugh Percival ; " publishes, 
 early in 1841, a collection of his own poems entitled " A 
 Year's Life," which wins some recognition ; spends the 
 winter of 184243 in New York, undergoing treatment by an 
 oculist, and makes valuable acquaintances, including Page, the 
 artist, and Briggs, the " Henry Franca" of the " Fable for 
 Critics;" during 1841-42 he begins his life-long effort to 
 secure international copyright, and contributes poetry to the 
 Boston Miscellany, Graham' s Magazine, and the Democratic 
 Review, receiving from ten to thirty dollars for each poem ; 
 in June, 1843, writes to Loring: "I am more and more 
 assured every day that I shall yet do something that will keep 
 my name (and perhaps my body) alive. My wings were 
 never so strong as now. So hurrah for a niche and a laurel ! " 
 publishes his second volume of poems in December, 1843, 
 and resolves to devote himself to literature rather than law ; 
 during 1844 he publishes " Conversations on Some of the 
 Older Poets" (not since republished) , and marries Maria 
 White, another poet, in December of that year ; they spend 
 the winter in Philadelphia, where Lowell, doubtless influenced 
 by his wife's strong abolitionist sentiments, becomes a con- 
 tributor to the Freeman, an anti-slavery paper ; he returns to 
 Cambridge in June, 1845 ; in 1846 becomes a regular con- 
 tributor to the Anti-Slavery Standard at a salary of $500 per 
 annum for a weekly contribution in prose or verse ; continues 
 this connection till the spring of 1850, contributing many of 
 " The Biglow Papers" and his poems on "Garrison," "Free- 
 dom," " Eurydice," " The Parting of the Ways," " Beaver 
 Brook," and " The First Snowfall," the latter in memory of 
 his first child, Blanche, who died in March, 1847, aged fifteen 
 months ; during 1848 he collects and publishes the first series
 
 802 LOWELL 
 
 of "The Biglow Papers," publishes "A Fable for Critics" 
 (anonymously), and contributes " Sir Launfal " to the North 
 American Review ; the entire first edition of " The Biglow Pa- 
 pers" is sold within a week after publication ; during the winter 
 of 1849-50 he publishes a collective edition of his poems, enter- 
 tains Frederika Bremer, and loses his second child, Rose, then 
 three years old, concerning whom he writes "After the Burial " 
 (first published in 1869) ; sails for Italy in July, 1851, hoping 
 thus to improve his wife's failing health, and selling a part of 
 his patrimony for the expenses of the journey ; he severs his 
 connection with the Anti-Slavery Standard in April, 1850, 
 saying : "It has never been a matter of dollars and cents be- 
 tween us, for I might have earned much more in other ways. 
 For every poem which has been printed in the 
 Standard I could have got four times the money paid me by 
 the committee" [controlling the Standard\\ loses his only 
 son, then in his second year, at Rome in the spring of 1852, 
 and returns to America in the following autumn ; writes little 
 during his first foreign tour, saying, "I have been observ- 
 ing; " contributes, in September, 1853, his " Moosehead 
 Journal" to Putnam' s Magazine, in which are also published 
 about that time several of Mrs. Lowell's poems ; his wife dies 
 in October, 1853, leaving him one child, a daughter ; Lowell 
 writes, "I understand now what is meant by 'the waters 
 have gone over me; 1 " he spends the summer of 185431 
 Beverly, Mass. ; prepares a series of lectures on the English 
 poets during the autumn, and delivers the same at the Lowell 
 Institute, in Boston, during the following winter, thus winning 
 his spurs as a critic; contributes " Cambridge Twenty Years 
 Ago " to Putnam' s Magazine in January, 1854, and " Pictures 
 from Appledore " to the Crayon for December, 1854; in 
 January, 1855, he is offered the chair of French and Spanish 
 Literature at Harvard ("at a salary that will make me inde- 
 pendent"), thus succeeding Ticknor and Longfellow; ac- 
 cepts the Harvard chair on condition' of being allowed a year
 
 LOWELL 803 
 
 in Europe for preparation ; lectures in Wisconsin and other 
 central Western States early in the spring of 1855, "going 
 home with $600 in my pocket; " publishes " Invita Minerva" 
 in the Crayon for May, 1855, and sails for Paris in June ; meets 
 Leigh Hunt and Lowell's friend Story, the sculptor, in Lon- 
 don, where Thackeray gives a dinner in Lowell's honor at the 
 Garrick Club ; to Germany early in the autumn of 1855, stop- 
 ping at Bruges, Antwerp, and The Hague, and settling at Dres- 
 den to study the German language and literature ; remains at 
 Dresden, " working like a dog no, a pig," passing a wretch- 
 ed winter, "out of health and out of spirits; " in March, 1856, 
 he starts for Italy ; visits Bologna, Parma, Verona, Modena, 
 Florence, Naples ; recovers his health and returns to Dresden 
 in June, 1856; to Paris in July, and back to America early in 
 the autumn, to take up the duties of his professorship, which 
 he held for seventeen years thereafter ; gives up his home at 
 Elmwood temporarily and goes to reside with his brother-in- 
 law, Dr. Howe, in Cambridge ; gives two courses of lectures 
 each year at Harvard; in the summer of 1857 marries Miss 
 Frances Dunlap, and in the following autumn becomes editor of 
 the then newly established Atlantic Monthly ; lectures in New 
 York City in February, 1857 ; during 1858 writes that he is 
 " working often fifteen hours a day; " in 1859 begins a cor- 
 respondence with Thomas Hughes ; returns to Elmwood in 
 the spring of 1861 ; during the same year writes "The Wash- 
 ers of the Shroud," begins the second series of " The Biglow 
 Papers," and resigns the editorship of the Atlantic in May, 
 1861 ; gives up " The Biglow Papers " in June, 1862, saying, 
 " It's no use . . . my brain must lie fallow a while ;" 
 early in 1864 becomes joint editor of the North American 
 Review with Professor C. E. Norton ; edits a volume of " Old 
 Dramatists " in August, 1864 ; in July, 1865, writes and reads 
 at the Harvard memorial exercises his " Commemoration 
 Ode" "so rapt with the fervor of conception as I have not 
 been these ten years ;" but, a little later, is " ashamed at hav-
 
 804 LOWELL 
 
 ing been again tempted into thinking that I could write poetry, 
 a delusion from which I have been tolerably free these dozen 
 years;" continues. his studies in German literature in 1865, 
 but chafes at the drudgery of his professorship, saying, " If I 
 can sell some of my land and slip my neck out of this collar 
 again, I shall be a man. . . . My professorship is wearing 
 me out ;" concerning his financial receipts from his magazine 
 articles, he writes in December, 1865, " For some years I have 
 had twice fifty dollars for whatever I write and three or four 
 times fifty for a long poem;" becomes a contributor to The 
 Nation in 1866, and begins a correspondence with Leslie 
 Stephen; prints his last "Biglow Paper" in the Atlantic 
 for May, 1866, and publishes during that year a complete 
 series of "The Biglow Papers" with a long introduction 
 on " Yankeeisms " ("getting $820 for my last six weeks' 
 work"); writes " The Nightingale in the Study " in 1867, 
 and continues his "annual dissatisfaction" of lecturing at 
 Harvard ; in October, 1868, publishes a new volume of old 
 poems entitled " Under the Willows ;" during the summer of 
 1869 writes his long poem "The Cathedral" (published in 
 the Atlantic for January, 1870) ; in the winter of 1870 visits 
 Washington, stopping to lecture at Baltimore; during the 
 summer of 1870 he studies old French metrical romances, 
 averaging twelve hours a day, and writes, " I long to give 
 myself to poetry again before I get so old that I have only 
 strength and no music left;" entertains Thomas Hughes at 
 Elmwood in the autumn ; in July, 1871, sells " my birthright 
 [part of the land at Elmwood] for a mess of pottage, "and 
 writes to Leslie Stephen, " It will give me about $5,000 a 
 year, and Mabel [his daughter] about $400 more;" he re- 
 tains the Elmwood house with two acres ; publishes " Among 
 My Books" in 1870 and "My Study Windows" in 1871 ; 
 resigns the Harvard professorship in 1872, writing to Miss 
 Norton, " It takes a good while to slough off the effect of sev- 
 enteen years of pedagogy ; ' ' publishes his essay on Dante, and
 
 LOWELL 805 
 
 sails for Europe the third time in 1872 ; lands at Queenstown, 
 and visits Dublin and Chester en route to London ; thence to 
 Paris (" picking up books here and there "), where he meets 
 Emerson; in June, 1873, receives D.C.L. from Oxford and 
 leaves Paris, making a tour of Belgium, Holland, and Ger- 
 many and reaching Venice in October ; thence to Flor- 
 ence ; at Rome in January and February, 1874, and to 
 Naples in March ; while at Rome writes his ' ' Elysian Argosy ' ' 
 (published in the Atlantic for May, 1874) ; back to Paris in 
 May, 1874, and to America in July; during 1875 publishes 
 in the Atlantic his essay on Spenser and his Centennial Ode, 
 " Under the Old Elm," and in book form the second series of 
 " Among My Books," containing the essays on Dante, Spen- 
 ser, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats ; lectures again at Har- 
 vard, and writes for The Nation two poems entitled "The 
 World's Fair, 1876," and " Tempora Mutantur" both of 
 which excite some popular condemnation ; he becomes active- 
 ly interested in political reform in April, 1876, and is made, 
 successively, a delegate to the State and national conventions 
 the latter at Cincinnati, where Hayes was nominated ; writes 
 his " Ode for the Fourth of July, 1876," read at the Philadel- 
 phia Centennial Celebration ; declines repeated popular invi- 
 tations to run for Congress, is made a Presidential elector, and 
 continues lecturing at Harvard in the autumn of 1876 ; visits 
 Washington in February, 1877, stopping at Baltimore to give 
 a course of lectures at Johns Hopkins University ; is offered 
 by President Hayes the embassy to Austria and afterward that 
 to Germany, but declines both ; in June, 1877, is appointed 
 Minister to Spain and sails thither in July, visiting Paris and 
 London en route and reaching Madrid in August; finds his 
 ministerial duties unexpectedly heavy, and suffers from the 
 gout (as he had suffered for years) ; visits Seville, Cordova, 
 and Granada during the winter of 1877-78 ; in the spring of 
 1878 makes a two months' tour through Southern France, 
 Italy, and Greece, returning to Madrid in July ; entertains
 
 8o5 LOWELL 
 
 General Grant there in October; on January 19, 1870, 
 receives his appointment as Minister to England, and ac- 
 cepts on condition of a two months' interim ; in the autumn 
 of 1 88 1 he makes another tour through Germany and Italy, 
 as far as Rome, returning to London in January, 1882 ; 
 during 1884 he is elected Lord Rector of St. Andrew's, and 
 receives a doctor's degree from the University of Edinburgh 
 and LL.D. from Harvard; delivers his address on "De- 
 mocracy" at Birmingham in October, 1884, and makes 
 several other public addresses in England, about this time, 
 winning great popularity there; he incurs the hostility of 
 Irish-American politicians by certain official action during 
 1884 ; during 1885 he loses his second wife in London, and is 
 recalled by President Cleveland, reaching America in June ; 
 unable to bear the associations at Elmwood, he settles at 
 Southborough, Mass., with his daughter and her family ; pub- 
 lishes "Democracy and other Addresses " in 1886, and re- 
 visits London during the summer ; receives great public, hon- 
 ors, visits Gladstone, and returns in the autumn ; in Novem- 
 ber, 1886, delivers an address on the 25oth anniversary of the 
 founding of Harvard; in 1887 is receiving $2,000 a year 
 from his general copyrights ; spends the summer of 1887 in 
 England ; during 1888 re-edits and publishes his poems, at- 
 tends the anniversary of the University of Bologna as Har- 
 vard's representative, and spends the summer in England, at 
 Whitby; is at Whitby again in 1889, returning to America 
 in October and settling with his daughter at his old Elmwood 
 home; is severely ill during the spring of 1890; dies at Elm- 
 wood August 12, 1891. 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY ON LOWELL'S STYLE. 
 
 Stedman, E. C., "Poets of America." Boston, 1885, Houghton, Mifflin 
 
 & Co., 304-348. 
 Curtis, G. W., "Orations and Addresses." New York, 1894, Harper, 
 
 3 : 367-398.
 
 LOWELL 807 
 
 Haweis, H. R., "American Humorists." London, 1883, Chatto & 
 
 Windus, 73-134- 
 Underwood, F. H., "James Russell Lowell, the Poet and the Man." 
 
 Boston, 1893, Lee & Shepard. 
 Richardson, C. F., "American Literature." New York, 1893, Putnam, 
 
 2 : 186-204. 
 Whipple, E. P., "Essays and Reviews." Boston, 1861, Ticknor & 
 
 Fields, 68-71. 
 
 Whipple, E. P., "Outlooks on Society." Boston, 1888, Ticknor, 306-314. 
 Whipple, E. P., "American Literature." Boston, 1887, Ticknor, 78-79. 
 Bungay, G. W., "Off-Hand Sketches." New York, 1854, Dewitt & 
 
 Douglass, 394-400. 
 Underwood, F. H., "James Russell Lowell, a Biographical Sketch." 
 
 Boston, 1882, Osgood & Co. 
 James, G. P. R., "Essays in London," etc. New York, 1893, Harper, 
 
 44-80. 
 Stead, W., " Character Sketches. " London, 1892, Hodder & Stoughton, 
 
 120-134. 
 
 Taylor, B., "Critical Essays." New York, 1880, Putnam, 298-301. 
 Nichol, J., "American Literature." Edinburgh, 1855, Black, 220-412. 
 Wilkinson, W. C., "Free Lance." New York, 1874, Mason, 50. 
 Poe, E. A., "Works." New York, 1855, Redfield, 3: 275-282. 
 Lowell, J. R., "Fable for Critics" (Lowell's Works). Cambridge, 
 
 1892, Houghton, Mifnin & Co., 3 : 1-95. 
 
 " Lowell, J. R., Letters of " (C. E. Norton). New York, 1894, Harper. 
 Brown, E. E., " Life of J. R. Lowell." Boston, 1887, Ticknor. 
 Welsh, A. H., "Development of English Literature." Chicago, 1882, 
 
 Griggs, 2 : 39O-393- 
 
 Curtis, G. W., "Homes of American Authors." New York, 1853, Put- 
 nam, 349-366. 
 Underwood, F. H., " Builders of American Literature." Boston, 1893, 
 
 Lee & Shepard. 
 North American Review, 52 : 452-466 (G. S. Hillard) ; 58 : 283-299 (C. C. 
 
 Felton); 66: 458-482 (F. Bowen); 153: 460-467 (R. H. Stoddard). 
 Putnam's Magazine, I : 547-558 (W. S. Thayer). 
 North British Review, 46 : 472-482. 
 
 Scribner's Monthly, 4: 75-86 and 227-237 and 339-345 (W. C. Wil- 
 kinson). 
 
 Harper's Magazine, 62 : 252-273 (F. H. Underwood). 
 Century Magazine, 2: 97-112 (Stedman) ; 21 : 113-118 (Woodberry). 
 The Literary World, 16 : 217-225 (C. D. Warner); 22 : 290-291 (J. W. 
 
 Parsons).
 
 808 LOWELL 
 
 Fortnightly Review, 38: 78-89 (H. D. Traill); 50: 310-324 (Sidney 
 
 Low). 
 
 The Nineteenth Century, 17: 988-1008(0. B. Smith). 
 The Spectator, 58 : 744-745 (H. D. Traill) ; 66 : 693-694. 
 The Nation, 53 : 116-118 (T. W. Higginson). 
 The Critic, 9: 75-76 (Editor); 8: 151-160 (G. E. Woodberry) ; 16 : 
 
 82-83 and 291-292 (Editor); 16 : 92-99 (C. Wingate). 
 Chicago Dial, 7 : '241-243 (M. B. Anderson); 12: 133-135 (O. F. 
 
 Emerson); 15 : 291-293 (E. G. J.). 
 Andover Review, 16 : 294-300 (Editor). 
 The New Englander, 29: 125-136; 7: 63-72 (D. March); 29: 477- 
 
 512 (D. H. Chamberlain). 
 The Arena, 14 : 504-529 (H. Garland). 
 The Athentzum, 2 ('91) : 257-259 (T. Watts). 
 
 Blackwood's Magazine, 150: 454-460 and 589-590 (W. W. Story). 
 Contemporary Review, 60 : 477-498 (F. H. Underwood). 
 New England Magazine, 5 : 183-192 (E. E. Hale) and 398-401 (Key- 
 
 ser). 
 
 Unitarian Review, 36 : 436-455 (J. W. Chadwick). 
 Good Words, 28: 521-527 (F. H. Underwood). 
 Review of Reviews, 4 : 287-291 (J. F. Jamieson) and 291-294 (C. F. 
 
 Winchester) and 294-296 (R. D. Jones) and 296-310 (W. T. Stead). 
 The Writer, 5 : 183-193 (J. H. Holmes). 
 Gentleman's Magazine, 15: 464-487 (Haweis). 
 
 PARTICULAR CHARACTERISTICS. 
 
 I. Culture Allusiveness. If Spenser is "the poet's 
 poet," Lowell is certainly the poet of the man of culture. 
 While he is generally intelligible to the ordinary reader, his 
 pages abound in allusions and evidences of erudition that de- 
 light the more cultivated classes. The pleasure felt on recog- 
 nizing the force of some allusion, perhaps hidden from the 
 ordinary mind, is doubtless akin to that felt at guessing a 
 conundrum or at being recognized in company by some emi- 
 nent personage. 
 
 " He was a scholar in the best sense of the word, possessing 
 a thorough knowledge of English literature and critically con-
 
 LOWELL 809 
 
 versant with other literature as well the classics of Greece 
 and Rome and the classics of Spain and Italy, France and 
 Germany. A scholar, not a pedant, he mastered his learning, 
 and it profited him in the large horizons which it disclosed to 
 his spiritual vision and in the felicity and dignity which it 
 imparted to his style. Gentleman and scholar in all that he 
 wrote, there is that in his writing which declares a greater 
 intellect than it reveals." R. H. Stoddard. 
 
 "The best things in all tongues naturally gravitated to 
 him ; and it was difficult for any but the most curiously learned 
 to say whether he seemed more at home with the philosophic 
 authors of Germany, the great poet of Italy, the immortal ro- 
 mancer of Spain, the brilliant wit and classic finish of the 
 French, or with the long line of poets, chroniclers, and think- 
 ers of our old home. . . . There is nothing in Lowell's 
 odes obscure to a well-trained mind ; but, unfortunately, all 
 minds are not so trained as to dissolve his thought from out 
 the richly incrusted diction. So it remains that the stronger 
 poems of Lowell are beyond the comprehension of all but 
 cultivated readers. . . . Lowell's prose is like cloth of 
 gold too splendid and too cumbrous for every-day wear." 
 F. H. Underwood. 
 
 " He is not a writer for dullards, and to read him enjoyably 
 is a point in evidence of a liberal education. ... A 
 pedant quotes for the sake of a display of his learning ; Lowell, 
 because he has mastered every thing connected with his theme. 
 He is not only a man of letters but a fine exemplar 
 of culture, and of culture so generous as to be thought supra- 
 American by those observers who, while pronouncing him a 
 citizen of the world, are careful to exclude this country from 
 his range. . . . The fine thing about Lowell was his 
 plentiful and original genius. This was so rich ihat he never 
 was compelled, like many writers, to hoard his thoughts or be 
 miserly with his bright sayings. When warmed by compan- 
 ionship and in talk he gave full play to this spontaneity, and
 
 8 10 LOWELL 
 
 said enough witty and epigrammatic and poetic things to set 
 up a dozen small talkers or writers." . C. Stedman. 
 
 " It was a pleasure to feel that he was accomplished up to 
 the hilt. Those who didn't like him pronounced him too 
 accomplished, too omniscient." Henry James. 
 
 " One whom studious search through varied lore has taught 
 The streams, the rills, the fountain-heads of thought." 
 
 O. W. Holmes. 
 
 "Lowell's poetry has simply gone on perfecting itself in 
 form and finish till now he is as complete a specimen of ' a 
 literary man's poet ' of the consummate artist in expression 
 as it would be easy to find in a summer day's hunt through 
 a well-filled library." "Around the stormy topics of war, 
 slavery, and politics plays an incessant summer lightning of 
 literary, antiquarian, and instructive social and domestic 
 twitter." H. R. Haweis. 
 
 "He was not merely a professional literary man, but one 
 to whom self-improvement was a sacred calling and who as- 
 signed to culture that same unique place in humanity's achieve- 
 ments as did that engaging mediaeval blue-stocking, Roswit 
 of Gandersheim, when she declared, ' Homo animal capax 
 discipline? I would give Lowell his high rank in American 
 culture perhaps for no other reason more than because he was 
 both learned and liberal in scholarship. He held the firm 
 middle ground between the unbalanced aesthete and the sta- 
 tistical grammarian, who dwells among the very dry bones of 
 dead literature." -James I. Hatfield. 
 
 At the time of Lowell's death a writer in the London Times 
 declared : " With him there passes away one of the very few 
 Americans who were the equals of any son of the Old World 
 of any Frenchman or any Englishman in that indefinable 
 mixture of qualities which we sum up, for want of a better 
 word, under the name of culture. ... . Whenever official
 
 LOWELL 8ll 
 
 business was not too heavy, he invariably read for a minimum 
 of four hours a day. This did not include the time that he 
 gave to ephemeral literature ; it was the time that he spent in 
 the serious reading of books, generally old books." 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " As he shrank away after the last thaw, he built for himself 
 the most exquisite caverns of ice to run through, if not ' measure- 
 less toman ' like those of Alph, the sacred river, yet perhaps more 
 pleasing for their narrowness than for their grandeur. What a 
 cunning silver-smith is frost ! The rarest workmanship of Delhi 
 or Genoa copies him but clumsily, as if the fingers of all other 
 artists were thumbs. Fernwork and lacework and filagree in 
 endless variety, and under it all the water tinkles like a distant 
 guitar, or drums like a tambourine, or gurgles like the Tokay of 
 an anchorite's dream. Beyond doubt there is a fairy procession 
 marching along those frail arcades and translucent corridors." 
 A Good Word for Winter. 
 
 " Credulity, as a mental and moral phenomenon, manifests 
 itself in widely different ways, according as it chances to be the 
 daughter of fancy or terror. The one lies warm about the heart 
 as Folk-lore, fills moonlight dells with dancing fairies, sets out a 
 meal for the Brownie, hears the tinkle of airy bridle-bells as 
 Tamlane rides away with the Queen of Dreams, changes Pluto 
 and Proserpine into Oberon and Titania, and makes friends with 
 unseen powers as Good Folk." Essay on Witchcraft. 
 
 " I had seen many lakes, ranging from that of Virgil's Cumean 
 to that of Scott's Caledonian Lady; but Moosehead, within two 
 days of me, had never enjoyed the profit of being mirrored in my 
 retina. At the sound of the name, no reminiscential atoms (ac- 
 cording to Kenelm Digby's Theory of Association as good as 
 any) stirred and marshalled themselves in my brain.'' Moose- 
 head Journal. 
 
 " I say nothing of such matters as the montagna bruna on 
 which Ulysses was wrecked. . . . Faustus, Don Juan and 
 Tannhauserare the last ghosts of Legend that linger almost until 
 the Gallic cockcrow of universal enlightenment and disillusion.'' 
 Leaves from My Journal.
 
 8l2 LOWELL 
 
 2. Independence Manliness Vigor. From the 
 beginning to the end of his career, Lowell exemplified by 
 contrast the force of his own stirring lines, 
 
 ' ' They are slaves who dare not be 
 In the right with two or three." 
 
 " He never feared and never shirked the obligation to be 
 positive. . . . When he felt at all he felt altogether was 
 always on the same side as his likings and loyalties. He had 
 no experimental sympathies, and no part of him was traitor 
 to the rest. . . . If he was an admirable man of letters, 
 there should be no want of emphasis on the first term of the 
 title. He was indeed in literature a man essentially mascu- 
 line, upright, downright." Henry James. 
 
 " The singer who was willing to sacrifice so much for the 
 sake of an ti -slavery and unpopular religious movements and to 
 write a whole series of poems, with his utmost force, against 
 a popular war, is certainly not amenable to the charge of 
 weakness." C. F. Richardson. 
 
 " In Lowell's verse there was something of Wordsworth's 
 simplicity, something of Tennyson's sweetness and musical 
 flow, and something more of the manly earnestness of the 
 Elizabethan poets." F. H. Underwood. 
 
 11 A poet, he was more than a poet ; a critic, he was more 
 than a critic; a thinker, he was more than a thinker ; from 
 beginning to end he was a man a man in every fibre and 
 every feeling, right-minded, clear-minded, strong-minded, 
 honest, honorable, courageous, and resolute." R. H. Stod- 
 dard. 
 
 " If there is a clew that may be used, it is to be sought in 
 his individuality, in the fact that his ten talents have some- 
 how been melted and fused into one and that the greatest 
 the talent of being a man first and everything else afterward." 
 G. E. Woodberry. 
 
 "As he allowed no church or sect to dictate his religious
 
 LOWELL 813 
 
 views or control his daily conduct, so he permitted no party 
 to direct his political action. He was a Whig, an abolition- 
 ist, a Republican, a Democrat, according to his conception 
 of the public exigency." George William Curtis. 
 
 " Lowell was himself alone, wearing his academic garb, yet 
 hasting to throw aside his crook at the sound of the trumpet." 
 E. C. Stedman. 
 
 "His taste for experiment and imitation did not for a 
 moment lead him to intellectual servility. If he sometimes 
 played on other men's instruments, he played his own tune. 
 It was the tune which he had heard in the Atlantic breezes as 
 they swept through the trees round the old home at Elmwood. 
 . His whole life shows that he had, and had in over- 
 flowing abundance, what most Americans lack moral cour- 
 age, the high-bred courage to defy that voice of the people 
 which is not yet the voice of God. ... In courage, in 
 truthfulness, in everything, he was the type of the Puritan 
 idea in its most bracing expression. . . . His courage, 
 his honesty, his proud, uncompromising independence were 
 all his own, but Puritanism fostered them." Sidney Low. 
 
 "No one of our poets shows a richer or wider range of 
 thought than Mr. Lowell ; no one a greater variety of ex- 
 pression in verse. But whatever form his Muse may select, 
 it is the individuality of an intellect rather than that of a lit- 
 erary artist which she represents." Bayard Taylor. 
 
 " Lowell is indeed one of the most exquisite prose writers 
 of the century, the master of a style which, while it is flex- 
 ible to all the demands of statement, description, reflection, 
 epigram, and narrative, is strongly individualized and sug- 
 gests no model on which it is formed." E. P. Whipple.
 
 8 14 LOWELL 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " I am not, I think, specially thin-skinned as to other people's 
 opinions of myself, having, as I conceive, later and fuller intel- 
 ligence on that point than anybody else can give me. . . . 
 Whoever at fifty does not rate himself quite as low as most of his 
 acquaintance would be likely to put him, must be either a fool or 
 a great man, and I humbly disclaim being either." On a Certain 
 Condescension in Foreigners. 
 
 " It may be coarse, earthy, but in reading it [' Gammer Gur- 
 ton's Needle '] one feels that he is at least a man among men 
 and not a humbug among humbugs." Essay on Spenser, 
 
 " Is it not the highest art of a Republic to make men of flesh 
 and blood and not the marble ideals of such ? It may be fairly 
 doubted whether we have produced this higher type of man yet. 
 Perhaps it is the collective, not the individual, humanity that is 
 to have a chance of nobler development among us. ... In 
 some places, we have arrived at a point at which civil society is 
 no longer possible, and already another reaction has begun, not 
 backwards to the old system, but toward fitness either from nat- 
 ural aptitude or special training." On a Certain Condescension 
 in Foreigners. 
 
 3. Sectionalism Nationalism. Quite as much as 
 Whittier, though in another way, Lowell proclaims himself a 
 son of New England and of America. He gloried in being an 
 American. It has been justly said of him that " he did more 
 than any other man to command respect for our institutions " 
 in the minds of all Europeans. During his later years Low- 
 ell was charged by that class of pseudo-statesmen against 
 whom he had directed some of his keenest darts with being 
 un-American. Never was a more baseless slander uttered. In a 
 recently published letter addressed to his friend, Joel Ben- 
 ton, and bearing date of January, 1876, Lowell indignantly 
 exclaims: "These fellows have no notion of what love of 
 country means. It is in my very blood and bones. If I am 
 not an American, who ever was ? m l am no pessimist, nor
 
 LOWELL 815 
 
 ever was. . . . What fills me with doubt and dismay 
 is the degradation of the moral tone. Is it, or is it not, a 
 result of Democracy? Is ours a government of the people, 
 by the people, for the people, or a Kakistocracy rather, for the 
 benefit of knaves at the cost of fools ? Democracy is, after 
 all, nothing more than an experiment, like another ; and I 
 know only one way of judging it by its results. Democracy 
 in itself is no more sacred than monarchy. It is man 
 who is sacred. . . . It is honor, justice, culture that 
 make liberty invaluable. . . . Forgive me for this long 
 letter of justification, which I am willing to write for your 
 friendly eye, though I should scorn to make any pub- 
 lic defence. Let the tenor of my life and writings defend 
 me." 
 
 "Lowell was an intense New Englander. There is no 
 finer figure of the higher Puritan type. The New England 
 soil, from which he sprang, was precious to him. The New 
 England legend, the New England language, New England 
 character and achievement, were all his delight and familiar 
 study. . . . Burns did not give to the Scottish tongue a 
 nobler immortality than Lowell gave to the dialect of New 
 England. . . . Literature was his pursuit, but patriot- 
 ism was his passion. His love of country was that of a lover 
 for his mistress." George William Curtis. 
 
 " His America was a country Avorth hearing about, a mag- 
 nificent conception, an admirably consistent and lovable 
 object of allegiance. If the sign that in Europe one knew 
 him best by was his intense national consciousness, one felt 
 that this consciousness could not sit lightly on a man in 
 whom it was the strongest form of piety. . . . Above all, 
 it was a particular allegiance to New England. . . . New 
 England was heroic, for he felt in his pulses the whole history 
 of her origines." Henry James. 
 
 " Lowell will chiefly be remembered as poet because of 
 his New England heart and voice his idyls of the Junes and
 
 8l6 LOWELL 
 
 Decembers of Massachusetts and his verse of anti-slavery and 
 patriotism." C. F. Richardson. 
 
 " He is an American of the Americans, alive to the idea 
 and movement of the whole country, singularly independent 
 in his tests of its men and products from whatever section or 
 in however unpromising a form they chance to appear. . . . 
 He seems to represent New England more variously than 
 either of his comrades. We find in his work, as in theirs, her 
 loyalty and moral purpose. She Jias been at cost for his 
 training, and he in turn has read her heart, honoring her as a 
 mother before the world and seeing beauty in her common 
 garb and speech. . . . To him the Eastern States are 
 what the fathers, as he has said, desired to found no new 
 Jerusalem but a New England and, if it might be, a better 
 one. His poetry has the strength, the tenderness, and the 
 defects of the down-East temper." E. C. Stedmam. 
 
 "The elementary fact about Lowell, which stands at the 
 threshold of every discussion of his works, is that he was born 
 and bred a New Englander. It is a fact which he himself 
 does not permit his readers to forget. In his prose and in his 
 verse he goes back to it again and again. Literature will 
 know him longest, not as the critic nor as the writer of ele- 
 gies, lyrics, and odes, but as the poet who gave literary form 
 and value to the indigenous humour, rhetoric, and satire of the 
 farmers of New England." Sidney Low. 
 
 " If there was one quality more than another that summed 
 up Lowell's characteristics, it was his Americanism. 
 Longfellow and Bryant are essentially English, modified 
 slightly by their American environment." G. E. Woodberry. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " Above all, we beg them to remember that America is not to 
 us, as to them, a mere object of external interest to be discussed 
 and analyzed, but in us, part of our very marrow. ... I know 
 one person who is singular enough to'think Cambridge the very
 
 LOWELL 817 
 
 best spot on the habitable globe. Doubtless God could have 
 made a better, but doubtless he never did." On a Certain Con 
 descension in Foreigners. 
 
 " America he informed me, was without arts, science, litera- 
 ture, culture, or any native hope of supplying them. We were 
 a people wholly given to money-getting and who, having got it, 
 knew no better use for it than to hold it fast. I am fain to con- 
 fess that I felt a sensible itching of the biceps, and that my fin- 
 gers closed with such a grip as he had just informed me was one 
 of the effects of our unhappy climate. . . . That young man 
 will never know how near he came to being assaulted by a re- 
 spectable gentleman of middle age at the corner of Church Street. 
 . . . Till after our Civil War it never seemed to enter the 
 head of any foreigner, especially of any Englishman, that an 
 American had what could be called a country, except as a place 
 to eat, sleep, and trade in. Then it seemed to strike them sud- 
 denly. By jove, you know, fellows don't fight like that for a shop- 
 till ! No, I rather think not. To Americans, America is some- 
 thing more than a promise and an expectation. . . . There 
 was never a colony save this that went forth, not to seek Gold but 
 God. Is it not as well to have sprung from such as these as from 
 some burly beggar who came over with Wilhelmus Conquestor? " 
 On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners. 
 
 4. Appreciation of Nature." The charm of Lowell's 
 out-door verse lies in its spontaneity ; he loves nature with a 
 child-like joy, her boon companion, finding even in her illu- 
 sions welcome and relief just as one gives himself up to a 
 story or a play, and will not be a doubter. Here he never 
 ages, and he beguiles you and me to share his joy. It does 
 me good to see a poet who knows a bird or a flower as one 
 friend knows another, yet loves it for itself alone. . . . 
 He has the pioneer heart, to whom a homestead farm is dear 
 and familiar, and native woods and waters are an intoxication. 
 . There is little of the ocean in his verse ; the sea- 
 breeze brings fewer messages to him than to Longfellow and 
 Whittier. His sense of inland nature is all the more alert 
 53
 
 8l8 LOWELL 
 
 for him the sweet security of meadow paths and orchard closes. 
 What Lowell loves most in nature are the trees and their 
 winged inhabitants and the flowers that grow untended." 
 E. C. Stedman. 
 
 " He is the poet who can stoop to read 
 The secret hidden in a wayside weed ; 
 Whom June's warm breath with child-like rapture fills, 
 Whose spirit ' dances with the daffodils. ' ' ' 
 
 O. W. Holmes. 
 
 " How Nature mourns thee in the still retreat 
 
 Where passed in peace thy love-enchanted hours ! 
 Where shall she find an eye like thine to greet 
 
 Spring's earliest foot-prints on her opening flowers? 
 Have the pale wayside weeds no fond regret 
 For him who read the secrets they enfold ? 
 Shall the proud spangles of the field forget 
 
 The verse that lent new glory to their gold ? " 
 
 O. W. Holmes. 
 
 "In a considerable portion of his nature- verse he accepts 
 the Wordsworthian doctrine, and goes to the fields as an 
 escape from books, lays thought down like a burden, and plays 
 'tis holiday with him ; and in coming back to the study, 
 seems to make an unwelcome return to himself. ... In 
 the poem in which he describes his day under the willows. 
 Mr. Lowell reveals in most phases the feeling habitual to his 
 mind of the sense of nature as a refuge, of the strength of 
 associations with a familiar landscape, and, in a word, shows 
 the attribute of the poet who is also a man of thought toward 
 nature and human nature met face to face." G. E. Wood- 
 berry. 
 
 ' ' When out for a walk nothing escaped him not the 
 plumage of a bird, the leafage of a tree, the color of a blossom, 
 nor a trait upon a human countenance. He knew almost
 
 LOWELL 819 
 
 every bird by its note, its color, and its flight. He knew 
 where flowers grew and when they should appear. All this 
 knowledge might have been possessed by a person with little 
 sentiment ; but it was with the eyes of love that Lowell looked 
 upon the world." F. H. Underwood. 
 
 " There is something of seasonable nature in every verse 
 the freshness of the spirit sociable with earth and sky and 
 stream. . . . What could be more strangely sweet than 
 the little poem ' Phoebe ' in ' Heartsease and Rue ' a remin- 
 iscence of the saddest of all bird-notes caught in the dimmest 
 of wakeful dawns ? " Henry James. 
 
 " I regret that I cannot dwell at greater length upon the 
 lighter tones of sweet feeling that come streaming in from his 
 ' Garden Acquaintance ' like the song of birds in spring. 
 The bobolink and the oriole, the song-sparrow and the cat- 
 bird, besides the many birds with which we are familiar in 
 England are all his friends, and he is their protector." 
 H. R. Haweis. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " If they [the birds] will not come near enough to me (as most 
 of them will), I bring them close with an opera glass, a much 
 better weapon than a gun. I would not, if I could, convert them 
 from their pretty pagan ways. The only one I sometimes have 
 savage doubts about is the red squirrel. . . . He steals the 
 corn from under the noses of my poultry. But what would you 
 have ? He will come down upon the limb of a tree I am lying 
 under till he is within a yard of me. He and his mate will. scurry 
 up and down the great black walnut for my diversion, chattering 
 like monkeys. Can I sign his death warrant who has tolerated 
 me about his grounds so long? Not I. Let them steal, and 
 welcome. I am sure I should, had I the same bringing up and 
 the same temptation. As for the birds, I do not believe there is 
 one of them but does more good than harm ; and of how many 
 featherless bipeds can this be said ? " My Garden Acquaint- 
 ance.
 
 820 LOWELL 
 
 " So far as he himself can shape his course, it [Walton's brook] 
 leads us under the shadow of honey-suckle hedges, or along the 
 rushy banks of silence-loving streams, or through the cloistral 
 hush of cathedral 1 closes, or where the shadow of the village 
 church-tower creeps round its dial of green graves below, or to 
 the company of godly and thoughtful men." Essay on Walton. 
 
 "The Pewee is the first bird to pipe up in the morning; he 
 saddens with the season, and as summer declines, he changes 
 his note to che pewee ! as if in lamentation. He is so familiar as 
 often to pursue a fly through the open window into my library. 
 There is something inexpressibly dear to me in these old friend- 
 ships of a lifetime. There is scarce a tree of mine but has had, 
 at some time or other, a happy homestead among its boughs." 
 My Garden Acquaintance. 
 
 5. High Moral Purpose Religious Instinct 
 
 Although Lowell often ridiculed and always rebelled against 
 the narrow " orthodoxy " in the midst of which he was reared, 
 his poems prove him to be possessed of a profound religious 
 instinct. Says one critic: "Hope and faith are his heart's 
 pillars hope for man, faith in truth, love, right. A loving 
 spirit flows from his soul into his poetry. The woes and 
 wonderings of humanity are touched with exquisite tender- 
 ness. ' ' 
 
 " Lowell's voice was ever for independence, human rights, 
 the dignity of labor." E. C. Stedman. 
 
 " That justice and law and righteousness are things for 
 which any man with an immortal soul in him would willingly 
 die these formed the stock of axioms with which the son of 
 the Massachusetts minister started in life. . . . There 
 is hardly anything which Lowell wrote that is not calculated 
 and intended to awaken worthy ambition, generous effort, 
 and an earnest appreciation of purity, nobility and truth, 
 whether in literature or life. . . . It is pleasant in his 
 last poems to note how the generous enthusiasm for progress, 
 the faith in an ideal, which were 'the legacies of his early
 
 LOWELL 821 
 
 training, remained, through all the bitterness of controversy 
 and after the militant scorn for the mean and unworthy had 
 died down into a placid tolerance." Sidney Low. 
 
 " He is the poet of pluck and action and purpose, of the 
 gayety and liberty of virtue. . . . His poetical per- 
 formance might sometimes, no doubt, be more intensely 
 lyrical, but it is hard to see how it could be more intensely 
 moral I mean, of course, in the widest sense of the term. 
 His play is as good as a game in the open air ; but when he 
 is serious, he is as serious as Wordsworth and much more 
 compact. " Henry James. 
 
 " Mr. Lowell was a Puritan by heredity, and the moral 
 fervor of the men of the Mayflower was wrought into the 
 inmost fibre of his being. But his Puritanism was a living 
 force applied to the living issues of the day. . . . Mr. 
 Lowell has been, and long will be, the most potent preacher 
 of the living Christ that this century has produced. 
 The real abiding power which dwelt in him when he was 
 ' greatly and suddenly inspired ' lies in those poems where he 
 reveals the Christ still wandering among men, seeking to help 
 and to save." W. T. Stead. 
 
 " Never did a man trust himself more unreservedly to the 
 guidance of a blazing principle never did ' principle ' bring 
 a man through more triumphantly. . . . The deep re- 
 ligious instinct, emancipated from all forms, but vibrating 
 with the fitful uncertainty of an aeolian harp to 'the wind 
 which bloweth where it listeth,' this is the first thing in 
 Lowell's mind, as it is the second in Longfellow's and the 
 third in Bryant's." H. R. Haweis. 
 
 "At the root of this personality lay a deep moral earnest- 
 ness. Mr. Lowell was of Puritan descent ; and though the 
 training of three generations had refined all Puritan acerbity 
 and narrowness out of him, yet the aggressive moral temper 
 of the Puritan was still in his blood. . . . His own ideals 
 were rather moral than merely literary ; and all his best writ-
 
 822 LOWELL 
 
 ing, in poetry, at all events, has a distinct ethical motive." 
 C. T. Winchester. 
 
 " The obvious characteristic of the poems is their high re- 
 ligious spirit. It is not a mild and passive morality that we 
 perceive, but the aggressive force of primitive Christianity. 
 . Though the physical aspect of evolution had en- 
 gaged his attention, as it has that of all intellectual men, and 
 had commanded perhaps a startled and dubious assent, yet his 
 strong spiritual nature recoiled in horror from the materialistic 
 application of the doctrine to the origin of things. Force 
 could never be to him the equivalent of spirit, nor law the 
 substitute of God. In conversation once upon the ' promise 
 and potency ' phrases of Tyndall, he exclaimed with energy, 
 ' Let whoever will believe that the idea of Hamlet or Lear 
 was developed from a clod ; I will not.' " F. H. Underwood. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 "Traditions? Granting that we did not have any, all that is 
 worth having in them is the common property of the soul an 
 estate in gavel-kind for all the sons of Adam and, moreover, if 
 a man cannot stand on his two feet, were it not better for him to 
 be honest about it at once and go down on all-fours ? " On a Cer- 
 tain Condescension in Foreigners, 
 
 " During the great storm of two winters ago, the most robus- 
 tious periwig-pated fellow of late years, I waded and floundered 
 a couple of miles through the whispering night, and brought home 
 that feeling of expansion we have after being in good company. 
 1 Great things doeth He which we cannot comprehend : for He 
 saith to the snow, Be thou on the earth.' . . . There is 
 nothing in the original of that fair snow's tender flakes, but 
 neither Pope nor Cowper could get out of their heads the Psalm- 
 ist's tender phrase : ' He giveth his snow like wool ! ' " A Good 
 Word for Winter. 
 
 " I am something of a protestant in matters of government 
 also, and am willing to get rid of vestments and ceremonies and 
 to come down to bare benches if only faith in God take the place 
 of a general agreement to profess confidence in ritual and sham.
 
 LOWELL 823 
 
 / 
 
 Every mortal man of us holds stock in the only public debt that 
 is absolutely sure of payment, and that is the debt of the Maker 
 of this universe to the universe He has made. I have no notion 
 of selling out my shares in a panic." On a Certain Condescen- 
 sion in Foreigners. 
 
 6. Humor. Brilliant Satire. "Here [in < The Biglow 
 Papers '] was now seen that maturity of genius, of which 
 Humor is a flower, revealing the sound, kind man within the 
 poet. . . . The jesting is far removed from that clownish 
 gabble which, if it still increases, will shortly add another to 
 the list of offences that make killing no murder." E. C. 
 Stedman. 
 
 " No speech, no plea, no appeal was comparable in popular 
 and permanent effect with this pitiless tempest of fire and 
 hail [' The Biglow Papers '], in the form of wit, argument, 
 satire, knowledge, insight, learning, common-sense, and pa- 
 triotism. It was humor of the purest strain, but humor in 
 deadly earnest. In its course, as in that of a cyclone, it 
 swept all before it the press, the Church, criticism, scholar- 
 ship and it bore resistlessly down upon the Mexican War, 
 the pleas for slavery, the Congressional debates." George 
 William Curtis. 
 
 " While it is just open to argument whether Mr. Lowell is 
 an actual or an adopted son of the Muses, he is unquestion- 
 ably a born humorist. He possesses a humour of thought 
 which is at once broad and subtle ; his humour of expression 
 is his American birthright." H. D. Traill. 
 
 ' ' We have before referred to the peculiar dualism of Low- 
 ell's mind ; a strong current of reason running parallel with 
 a creative imagination. We might think one of his ink-stands 
 filled by the spirit of Fun while the other was under the care 
 of the sedatest of the Muses." F. H. Underwood.
 
 821 LOWELL 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " There is something touching in the constancy with which 
 men attend free lectures and in the honest patience with which 
 they listen to them. He who pays may yawn or shift testily in 
 his seat, or even go out with an awful reverberation of criticism, 
 for he has bought the right to do any or all of these and paid 
 for it. But gratuitous hearers are anaesthetized to suffering by a 
 sense of virtue." A Good Word for Winter. 
 
 "Just so many misdirected letters" every year and no more! 
 Would it were as easy to reckon up the number of men on 
 whose backs fate has written the wrong address, so that they 
 arrive by mistake in congress and other places where they do not 
 belong ! May not these wanderers of whom I speak have been 
 sent into the world without any proper address at all ? Where 
 is our dead-letter office for such ? And if wiser social arrange- 
 ments should furnish us with something of the sort, fancy (hor- 
 rible thought !) how many a workingman's friend (a kind of in- 
 dustry in which the labor is light and the wages heavy) would be 
 sent thither because not called for in the office where at present 
 he lies." On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners. 
 
 "Even poor old Dennis himself had arrived at a kind of 
 muddled notion that artifice was not precisely art, that there 
 were depths in human nature which the most perfectly manu- 
 factured line of five feet could not sound." Essay on Pope. 
 
 " The air, after all, is only an infinitely thinner kind of water, 
 such as I suppose we shall have to drink when the state does her 
 whole duty as a moral reformer." A Good Word for Winter. 
 
 7. Wit. " Wit was as natural to him as breathing, and 
 when the mood was on he could no more avoid seeing and 
 signalling puns than an inebriate could help seeing double. 
 But the wit and the puns were not the end and aim of his 
 talk. . . . Viewing Lowell as a poet, his mind seems to 
 have two independent functions : in serious verse he might 
 be weighty, incisive, imaginative, or tender ; but when he is 
 Hosea he revels in ludicrous images, droll conceits, and quaint
 
 LOWELL 825 
 
 terms of expression. In his serious moments a poetical image, 
 as in Wordsworth's line: 
 
 ' Floats double, swan and shadow ; ' 
 
 while in the humorous half of his existence the vision of the 
 stately swan above is attended by the shadow of a mirth-pro- 
 voking gander below. The reflection is a jocose similitude 
 not a disenchanting parody of sentiment, but a comic twist of 
 it giving the lively shock of the unexpected, which is wit. 
 . It must be repeated by way of emphasis, that from 
 the first fly-leaf to the colophon, this ['The Biglow Papers'] is 
 the only complete and perfect piece of grotesque comedy in 
 existence. . . . It ['A Fable for Critics'] is the wittiest 
 of literary satires and the most faithful of caricatures. . . . 
 It is the gay humor of a youth in the freedom of an anony- 
 mous pasquinade revelling in puns, clashing unexpected and 
 all but impossible rhymes like cymbals, tossing off grotesque 
 epithets and comparisons, and going at a break-neck canter, 
 like a race-horse let loose. . . . No other poem of the 
 kind equals it in the two aspects of vivid genius and riotous 
 fun. . . . It is as full of puns as a pudding of plums. 
 The good ones are the best of their kind, strung together like 
 beads, and the bad ones are so ' atrocious ' as to be quite as 
 amusing." F. H. Underwood, 
 
 " There is no historic circle of wits and scholars to which 
 Lowell's abundance would not have contributed a golden drop 
 and his wit a glittering repartee. . . . It is so finely 
 compact of illustration, of thought and learning, of wit and 
 fancy and permeating humor, that his prose page sparkles and 
 sways like a phosphorescent sea." George William Curtis. 
 
 " James Russell Lowell is a wit and a genius ; wit sparkles 
 through whole essays and long poems, and in the best part of 
 ' A Fable for Critics ' or ' The Biglow Papers ' it fairly proves 
 that it is genius." C. F. Richardson.
 
 826 LOWELL 
 
 " Mr. Lowell's wit is as omnipresent and as tireless as elec- 
 tricity itself. He himself says of Carlyle that he saw history 
 by flashes of lightning. It would be equally true to say of 
 Mr. Lowell that he reads literature by flashes of wit. The 
 effect is quite indescribable. A quivering phosphorescent 
 sheen plays everywhere over the pages and sets them in a 
 tremulous illumination that never permits the attention of the 
 reader to sleep. . . . No other equal amount of literature 
 can be produced that will yield to a competent assay a larger 
 net result of pure wit. " W. C. Wilkinson. 
 
 " Nature to the poet's power bestowed, 
 A genial humor and a trenchant wit, 
 That now like mild heat-lightning gleamed and glowed, 
 Now with a sudden flash life's centre hit." 
 
 W. W. Story. 
 
 "Fortunately for him and for his friends he was one of 
 the most whimsical, one of the wittiest of human beings." 
 Henry James. 
 
 " He paints at one time with a dab of color, at another he 
 etches elaborately but always with the same firmness and 
 certainty of touch and always equally deliberate there is 
 nothing of the greased lightning about his wit : it never plays 
 about his subject, it always riddles it through and through." 
 H. R. Haweis. 
 
 " Not halting statesmen and not dons outdone, 
 Taught us to love this lord of sense and fun ; 
 Nor did it come to us as a surprise 
 To find a Yankee virtuous as wise. 
 
 No, Holmes, sweet Holmes ! Our pride it nothing shames 
 To own us conquered by your truthful James, 
 His ' sword and spear ' in truth were cause of it, 
 The sword of eloquence, the spear of wit. ' ' 
 
 E. E. Br0wn in London Punch.
 
 LOWELL 827 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " Everybody had a mission (with a capital M) to attend to 
 everybody else's business. . . . Not a few impecunious zeal- 
 ots abjured the use of money (unless earned by other people), 
 professing to live on the internal revenues of the spirit. Some 
 had assurance of instant millennium so soon as hooks and eyes 
 should be substituted for buttons. Communities were estab- 
 lished where everything was to be common but common-sense. 
 . . . All stood ready at a moment's notice to reform every- 
 thing but themselves." Essay on Thoreau. 
 
 "The finback whale recorded above has much the look of a 
 brown paper parcel the whitish stripes that run across him 
 answering for the pack-thread. He has a kind of accidental 
 hole in the top of his head, through which he pooh-poohs the rest 
 of creation, and which looks as if it had been made by the chance 
 thrust of a chestnut rail." Leaves from My Journal. 
 
 11 We have the documents in fac-simile, signed and sealed by 
 Lucifer, Beelzebub, Satan, Elimi, Leviathan, and Astaroth, duly 
 witnessed by Baalberith, Sec'y of the Grand Council of Demons. 
 Fancy the competition such a state paper would arouse at a sale 
 of autographs. Commonly no security seems to have been given 
 by the other party to these arrangements but the bare word of 
 the Devil, which was considered, no doubt, every whit as good 
 as his bond.' 1 Essay on Witchcraft. 
 
 11 Well do I recall the sorrows of my youth, when I was shipped 
 in search of knowledge on the long Johnsonian swell of the last 
 century, favorable to anything but the calm digestion of historic 
 truth. I had even then an uneasy suspicion, which was ripened 
 into certainty, that thoughts were never draped in long skirts 
 like babies if they were strong enough to go alone." Essay on 
 Milton. 
 
 8. Didacticism. In his " Fable for Critics," Lowell 
 says justly of himself: 
 
 "There's Lowell, who's striving Parnassus to climb 
 With a whole bale of isms tied together with rhyme ;
 
 828 LOWELL 
 
 The top of the hill he will ne'er come nigh reaching 
 
 Till he learns the distinction 'twixt singing and preaching ." 
 
 " The primary quality of Lowell's intellect, so far as one is 
 able to understand it from an examination of his literary 
 work as a whole, was not so much that of the poet or the 
 critic or the essayist as the preacher. This was his voca- 
 tion the task for which he had a ' call ; ' and he felt it so 
 himself, and knew, as men do in such cases, that it was at 
 once the source of his weakness and his strength. . . . 
 It is perfectly true that Lowell's ascent of the Parnassian 
 steep was somewhat seriously impeded by the Republicanism, 
 Neo-Calvinism, Old Liberalism, Humanitarianism, Melior- 
 ism, and the rest of the formidable spiritual baggage which 
 he had to haul behind him. . . . The preacher in him, 
 during at least the earlier and more characteristic period of 
 his work, was more than the scholar, more than the critic or 
 the poet. . . . Much of Lowell's teaching is like Car- 
 lyle's, a discourse on the text ' Work while you have the 
 light.' " Sidney L(nv. 
 
 " The work of public instruction is not so manifest nor so 
 much needed in Lowell's critical writings, but the result is 
 still that sought by the literary teacher, and Lowell's methods 
 are consciously didactic, though not always apparently so." 
 C. F. Richardson. 
 
 " Lowell's ' progressive' verse often was fuller of opinion 
 than beauty, of eloquence than passion. . . . When 
 called upon, as he supposed, to make a choice between Taste 
 and his conception of Duty, Taste sometimes went to the 
 wall. . . . The thought, the purpose these are the main 
 ends with Lowell, though prose or metre suffer for it. ... 
 His doctrines and reflections, in the midst of an ethereal dis- 
 tillation, at times act like the single drop of prose which, as 
 he reports a saying of Landor to Wordsworth, precipitates the 
 whole. ... If Whittier and Lowell, like the Lake
 
 LOWELL 829 
 
 Poets before them, became didactic through moral earnest- 
 ness, it none the less aided to inspire them. Their verse ad- 
 vanced a great cause and, as the years went by, grew in qual- 
 ity perhaps as surely as that of poets who, in youth, reject 
 all but artistic considerations." E. C. Stedman. 
 
 "Song, satire, and parable more and more as he lives 
 and ponders and pours forth are all so many pulpit illustra- 
 tions or platform pleas." H. R. Haweis. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 "There are certain defects of taste which correct themselves 
 by their own extravagance. Language, I suspect, is more apt to 
 be reformed by the charm of some master of it, like Milton, than 
 by any amount of precept. The influence of second-rate writers 
 for evil is at best ephemeral ; for true style, the joint result of 
 culture and natural aptitude, is always in fashion, as fine manners 
 always are, in whatever clothes." Essay on Pope, 
 
 11 But a classic is properly a book which maintains itself by virt- 
 ue of that happy coalescence of matter and style, that innate and 
 exquisite sympathy between the thought that gives life and the 
 form that consents to every mood of grace and dignity, which can 
 be simple without being vulgar, elevated without being distant, 
 and which is something neither ancient nor modern, always new, 
 and incapable of growing old." Essay on Spenser. 
 
 " The poet with a real eye in his head does not give us every- 
 thing but only the best ot everything. He selects, he combines, 
 or else gives what is characteristic only ; while the false style of 
 which I have been speaking seems to be as glad to get a pack of 
 impertinences on its shoulders as Christian in the ' Pilgrim's 
 Progress ' was to be rid of his. One strong verse that can hold 
 itself upright with the bare help of the substantive and verb is 
 worth acres of this dead cord -wood piled stick on stick, a bound- 
 less continuity of dryness." Essay on Spenser. 
 
 9. Philanthropy Faith in Human Nature. 
 
 " With all the faith he had in his own people of the past, he 
 looked forward to the new race which is yet forming in our
 
 830 LOWELL 
 
 womb, and nowhere in our literature is there more direct 
 expression of the national faith in mere manhood than in a few 
 great lines of these patriotic poems, or, more soberly and ex- 
 plicitly, in the essay upon Democracy." G. E. Woodberry. 
 
 " There was another phase of Lowell's teaching which was 
 not less helpful, and that was his inexhaustible faith in the in- 
 extinguishable ' spark of God ' in the human heart. . . 
 He ever sees 
 
 ' Beneath the foulest faces lurking 
 One God-built shrine of reverence and love.' " 
 
 W. T. Stead. 
 
 " Man is the great object of Lowell's song, because the 
 world must be advanced to attain the full stature of greatness. 
 . . His ethical code is healthful and refreshing; he 
 analyses human nature with all the magical power, if also 
 with the tenderness, of the skilfullest of soul-physicians. 
 He is the best of metaphysicians, because his 
 conclusions are based, not upon theory, but upon the heart- 
 throbs of that humanity whose soul he endeavors to pierce." 
 G. B. Smith. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " At first sight nothing seemed more drolly trivial than the 
 lives of those whose single achievement is to record the wind and 
 the temperature three times a day. Yet such men are doubt- 
 less sent into the world for this special end, and perhaps there 
 is no kind of accurate observation, whatever its object, that 
 has not its final use and value for some one or other. 
 I protect my game as jealously as an English squire. If anybody 
 had oologized a certain cuckoo's nest I know of (I have a pair in 
 my garden every year) it would have left me a sore place in my 
 mind for weeks. I love to bring these aborigines back to the 
 mansuetude they showed to the early voyagers and before they 
 had grown accustomed to man and knew his savage ways." My 
 Garden Acquaintance. 
 
 " Dryden, like Lessing, was a hack-writer, and was proud, as
 
 LOWELL 831 
 
 an honest man has a right to be, of being able to get his bread 
 by his brains. He lived in Gent Street all his life and never 
 dreamed that where a man of genius lived was not the best part 
 of town." Essay on Dry den. 
 
 10. Rare but Deep Pathos. " While this quality 
 appears most frequently in Lowell's poetry, the sombre patches 
 in his prose are as fine as they are rare. The deep pathos in 
 some of Mr. Lowell's poems is as striking as any of his other 
 qualities. ... It may be a bold thing to say s but it seems 
 to us that the pathetic and unadorned simplicity of this poem 
 [' The Changeling '] has never been surpassed by any English 
 writer." . B. Smith. 
 
 " If the test of poetry be in its power over hearts, the truth 
 is this series [' The Biglow Papers'] must be placed in the 
 highest rank. The beginning is quaint, simple, and even hu- 
 morous, but with a subdued tone; there is no intimation of 
 the coming pathos ; nor are we conscious of the slow steps 
 by which we are led, stanza by stanza, to the heights where 
 thought and feeling become one. . . . Lowell had lost 
 three nephews and other near relatives in the war, and his ref- 
 erences to them can hardly be read without tears. There is a 
 cry of pain in every line. . . . They are palpitant like 
 naked nerves, and every word is like the leaf plucked by 
 Dante, which trickled blood." F. H. Underwood. 
 
 " There were qualities in this second book [of his poetry] 
 which revealed an active and fertile mind, a quick sympathy 
 with and a clear comprehension of sorrow and suffering." 
 J?. H. Stoddard. 
 
 " To our mind, some of the simpler verses are the heart- 
 poetry of Lowell's home are the most pathetic, and conse- 
 quently the most poetical." W. W. Story.
 
 832 LOWELL 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " How well I remember the indomitable good-humor under fire 
 of him who fell in the front of Ball's Bluff, the silent pertinacity 
 of the gentle scholar who got his last hurt at Fair Oaks, the ardor 
 in the gallant charge of the gentleman who, with the death-wound 
 in his side, headed his brigade at Cedar Creek ! How it comes 
 back, and they never come ! " A Good Word for Winter. 
 
 " The war was ended. I might walk townward without that 
 aching dread of bulletins that had darkened the July sunshine 
 and twice made the scarlet leaves of October seem stained with 
 blood. I remembered with a pang, half proud, half painful, how, 
 so many years ago, I had walked over the same path and felt 
 round my finger the soft pressure of a little hand that was one 
 day to harden with faithful grip of sabre. On how many paths, 
 leading to how many homes where proud memory does all she 
 can to fill up the fireside gaps with shining shapes, must not men 
 be walking in just such pensive mood as I ? Ah, young heroes, 
 safe in immortal youth as those of Homer, you, at least, carried 
 your ideal hence untarnished ! It is locked for you beyond moth 
 or rust in the treasure-chamber of death." On a Certain Con- 
 descension in Foreigners. 
 
 " I love old ways, and the path I was walking felt kindly to the 
 feet it had known for almost fifty years. How many fleeting im- 
 pressions it had shared with me ! How many times I had lingered 
 to study the shadows of the leaves mezzotinted upon the turf that 
 edged it by the moon, of the bare boughs etched with a touch 
 beyond Rembrandt by the same unconscious artist on the smooth 
 page of snow." On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners. 
 
 xi. Exuberant Imagery. "Even in his poems of the 
 heart, Lowell's poetic fancy made him too lavish in illustra- 
 tion and epithet. A discreeter bard would have restricted his 
 figurative language and won greater fame." C. F. Richard- 
 son. 
 
 " In a single page, Lowell compares Chaucer's style to a 
 river and a precious vintage, and contrasts it with the froth 
 of champagne and the folly of Miie. In relation to Shake-
 
 LOWELL 833 
 
 speare's birth, we have astrology, vinous processes, and alembic 
 projection, following upon one another as illustrations of the 
 coming nativity. . . . Nor have we any writer whose 
 imagery is oftener strong and exquisite : as in the description 
 of a snowy winter landscape." E. C. Stedman. 
 
 " Lowell's prose writings are as remarkable as his poetry. 
 The copiousness of his illustrations, the richness of his ima- 
 gery, the easy flow of his sentences, the keenness of his wit, 
 give to his reviews and essays a fascinating charm that would 
 place him in the front rank of our prose writers, if he did 
 not occupy a similar position among our poets." George 
 William Curtis. 
 
 "Nothing in his first volume, 'A Year's Life,' suggests 
 the throng of subtle thoughts and images which almost con- 
 fuse us by their multiplicity in 'The Cathedral.' " E. P. 
 Whipple. 
 
 " His ideality and plastic faculty gave to the train of 
 weighty thought the graces of image and simile ; and at length 
 the sonorous sentences seemed moving to the sound of music, 
 like a well-ordered army, glittering in sunlight." F. H. 
 Underwood. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " Night has no silence like this of busy day. All the batteries 
 of noise are spiked. We see the movement of life as a deaf man 
 sees it, a mere wraith of the clamorous existence that inflicts it- 
 self on our ears when the ground is bare. The earth is clothed 
 in innocence as a garment. Every wound of the landscape is 
 healed ; whatever was stiff has been sweetly rounded as the 
 breasts of Aphrodite ; what was unsightly has been covered 
 gently with a soft splendor, as if, Cowley would have said, nature 
 had cleverly let fall her handkerchief to hide it." A Good 
 Word for Winter. 
 
 '' The most beautiful thing I have seen at sea, all the more so 
 
 that I had never heard of it, is the trail of a shoal of fish through 
 
 the phosphorescent water. It is like a flight of silver rockets or 
 
 the streaming of northern lights through that silent nether heaven. 
 
 53
 
 834 LOWELL 
 
 I thought nothing could go beyond that rustling star-foam which 
 was churned up by our ship's bows or those eddies and disks of 
 dreamy flame that rose and wandered out of sight behind us." 
 Leaves from My Journal at Sea, 
 
 " Dryden, by his powerful example, by the charm of his verse, 
 which combines vigor and fluency in a measure perhaps never 
 reached by any other of our poets, and above all because it is 
 never long before the sunshine of his cheerful good sense breaks 
 through the clouds of rhetoric and gilds the clipped hedges over 
 which his thought clambers like an unpruned vine, did more 
 than all others combined to bring about the triumphs of French 
 standards in taste and French principles in criticism." Essay 
 on Pope. 
 
 12. Colloquial Rase. " Biglow, like Burns, makes 
 the dialect he employs flexible to every mood of thought and 
 passion, from good sense as solid as granite to the most be- 
 witching descriptions of nature and the loftiest affirmations of 
 conscience." E. P. Whipple. 
 
 " He carried style absolutely into conversation, where in- 
 deed it freely disguised itself as intensely colloquial wit." 
 Henry James. 
 
 " It is with some apprehension that the present writer vent- 
 ures to quote a stanza in the native dialect ; though full of 
 delicate feeling, expressed with the inimitable art of a great 
 poet, the unlettered style suggests only what is ridiculous ' to 
 the general,' who can see nothing touching in the sentiment 
 of a rustic, and are not softened by tears unless shed into a 
 broidered handkerchief." F. H. Underwood. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " Suppose we grant that winter is the sleep of the year what 
 then ? I take it upon me to say that his dreams are finer than 
 the best reality of his waking rivals. . . . For my own part, 
 I think winter a pretty wide-awake old boy, and his bluff 
 sincerity and hearty ways are more congenial to my mood and
 
 LOWELL 835 
 
 more wholesome for me than any charms of which his rivals are 
 capable." A Good Word for Winter. 
 
 " We cannot have fine buildings till we are less in a hurry. 
 We snatch our education like a meal at a railway station, just 
 in time to make us dyspeptic. The whistle shrieks, and we must 
 rush or lose our places in the great train of life. . . . Our 
 very villages seem in motion, following westward the bewitching 
 music of some Pied Piper of Hamelin. We still feel the great 
 push toward sundown given to the peoples somewhere in the 
 gray dawn of history. The cliff-swallow alone of all animate 
 nature emigrates eastward." A Moose head Journal. 
 
 " Were you ever alone with the sun ? You think it a very 
 simple question ; but I never was, in the full sense of the word, 
 till I was held up to him one cloudless day on the broad buckler 
 of the ocean. I suppose one might have the same feeling in the 
 desert. I remember getting something like it years ago when I 
 climbed alone to the top of a mountain, and lay face up on the 
 hot gray moss, striving to get a notion of how an Arab might 
 feel." At Sea. 
 
 " I confess that I come to the treatment of Pope with diffi- 
 dence. I was brought up in the old superstition that he was the 
 greatest poet that ever lived, and when I came to find out that I 
 had instincts of my own and my mind was brought in contact 
 with the apostles of a more esoteric doctrine of poetry, I felt an 
 ardent desire for smashing the idols I had been brought up to 
 worship." Essay on Pope. 
 
 13. Homeliness. "It [' The Vision of Sir Launfal '] 
 was woven of the homeliest, the most ungainly material. "- 
 E. C. Stedman. 
 
 " Even his lectures on subjects comparatively dry and dull 
 were brightened by the ceaseless flow of humor, 
 which was often homely but never coarse. Indeed, no man 
 drew more careful distinctions between what was homely and 
 what was vulgar than the praised and abused author of ' The 
 Biglow Papers.' . . . The homeliness, or vulgarity, 
 which the writer ingeniously defends, gave them [' The Big-
 
 836 LOWELL 
 
 low Papers '] half their charm with the half-educated masses." 
 W. IV. Story. 
 
 " They [the speakers in 'The Biglow Papers'] expressed 
 their opinions upon topics in which they could not but be inter- 
 ested and in words which were habitual with them in their 
 simple, honest, homely, down right, every - dayspeech." 
 R. H. Stoddard. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 
 
 " It has a good chance of being pretty ; but, like most Amer- 
 ican towns, it is in a hobble-de-hoy age, growing yet ; one can- 
 not tell what may happen. A child of great promise of beauty 
 is often spoiled by its second teeth. . . . There is something 
 pokerish about a deserted dwelling even in daylight." A Moose- 
 head Journal. 
 
 ' ' The only event of the journey hither was a boy hawking ex- 
 hilaratingly the last great railroad smash. . . . Other details 
 of my dreadful ride I will spare you. Suffice it to say that I ar- 
 rived here in safety, in complexion like an Ethiopian serenader 
 half got-up, and so broiled and peppered that I was more like a 
 devilled kidney than anything else I can think of. " A Moosehead 
 Journal. 
 
 " Who has never felt an almost irresistible temptation, and 
 seemingly not self-originated, to let himself go ? to let his mind 
 gallop and kick and cavort and roll like a horse turned loose ? 
 in short, as we Yankees say, ' to speak out in meeting ? ' Who 
 never had it suggested to him by the fiend to break in at a fu- 
 neral with the real character of the deceased instead of that 
 Mrs. Grundyfied view of him which the clergyman is so pain- 
 fully elaborating in his prayer ? " Essay on Witchcraft.
 
 HOLMES, 1809-1894. 
 
 Biographical Outline. Oliver Wendell Holmes, born 
 at Cambridge, Mass., August 29, 1809; father an orthodox 
 Congregational clergyman, mother descended from Evart Jan- 
 sen Wendell, who came from Friesland in 1640; ancestors 
 well-to-do ; at fifteen Holmes enters Phillips Academy, An- 
 dover, where he remains one year; at sixteen he enters Har- 
 vard (1825) and is graduated in 1829; while at Andover he 
 makes a spirited translation of a passage in Virgil ; studies 
 law one year ; begins the study of medicine ; goes to Europe 
 in 1833, and spends nearly three years in the medical schools 
 and hospitals of London and Paris; returns in 1836, and 
 takes his M.D. at Harvard at the same commencement when 
 he reads his " Metrical Essay " before Phi Beta Kappa; pub- 
 lishes his first volume of poems in 1836, including " Old 
 Ironsides," which dates back to 1830; in 1837-39 aids in 
 establishing the Tremont Medical School ; is Professor of 
 Anatomy and Physiology at Dartmouth College, 183940 ; re- 
 turns to Boston in 1840, and practises medicine till 1847, when 
 he accepts the Harvard professorship of Anatomy, which he 
 holds actively till 1882 and as emeritus till his death; mar- 
 ries Amelia Lee Jackson in 1840; publishes "Homoeopathy 
 and its Kindred Delusions" in 1842 and successive volumes 
 of poems in 1846, 1849, and 1850; in 1843 his " Boylston 
 Prize Essays" gain him a great medical reputation; in 1849 
 he builds his summer home in Pittsfield, Mass. ; in 1857, 
 with the founding of the Atlantic Monthly, he begins his 
 " Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table," which appeared as a vol- 
 ume in 1858; in 1860 he publishes "The Professor at the 
 
 837
 
 838 HOLMES 
 
 Breakfast-Table" and in 1872 "The Poet at the Breakfast- 
 Table; " dates of publication of other works are as follows: 
 "Currents and Counter-Currents in Medical Science," 1861 ; 
 "Elsie Venner," 1861 ; "Songs in Many Keys," 1861 ; 
 " Soundings from the Atlantic," 1863 ; " Humorous Poems," 
 1865; "The Guardian Angel," 1867; "Mechanism in 
 Thought and Morals," 1861 ; "Songs of Many Seasons," 
 1874; "A Memoir of Motley," 1878; " The Iron Gate," 
 1880; " Pages from an Old Volume of Life," 1883 ; "Medi- 
 cal Essays," 1883; "Ralph Waldo Emerson," 1884; "A 
 Moral Antipathy," 1885 ; " Our Hundred Days in Europe," 
 1887; "Before the Curfew," 1888; and "Over the Tea- 
 Cups," 1890; Holmes visits Europe in 1886; dies in Bos- 
 ton October 7, 1894. 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY ON HOLMES'S STYLE. 
 
 Whittier, J. G., "Literary Recreations." Boston, 1872, Osgood, 128- 
 
 137- 
 Stedman, E. C., " Poets of America." Boston, 1885, Houghton, Mifflin 
 
 & ( 0-. 273-304. 
 
 Whipple, E. P., "American Literature." Boston, 1887, Ticknor, 76-77. 
 \Vhipple, E. P., "Essays and Reviews." Boston, 1861, Ticknor, i: 
 
 66-68. 
 
 Taylor, B., " Essays and Notes." New York, 1880, Putnam, 301-302. 
 Richardson, C. F., "American Literature." New York, 1893, Putnam, 
 
 2 : 204-219. 
 
 Kennedy, W. S., "O. W. Holmes." Boston, 1883, Cassino & Co. 
 Nichol, J., "American Literature." Edinburgh, 1882, Black, 357-363 
 
 and 407-411. 
 Ilaweis, H. R., "American Humorists." London, 1883, Chatto & 
 
 Windus, 37-73. 
 Lowell, J. R., "Poetical Works." Boston, 1892, Houghton, Mifflin & 
 
 Co., 3 : 84-85. 
 
 Walsh, W. S., "Pen Pictures." New York, 1886, Putnam, 144-150. 
 Whittier, J. G., " Poetical Works." Boston, 1888, Houghton, Mifflin 
 
 & Co., 4 : 142-143. 
 Griswold, R. W., "Poets of America." Philadelphia, 1846, Carey & 
 
 Hart, 341-347-
 
 HOLMES 839 
 
 Mitford, Miss M. R., "Recollections of a Literary Life." New York, 
 
 1851. 
 
 Blue kwood's Magazine, 152 : 194-207. 
 Harper's Magazine, 83: 277-385 (G. W. Curtis). 
 Atlantic Monthly, 27 : 653 (Howells) ; 46 : 704-705 (G. P. Lathrop) ; 
 
 70: 401-402 (Whittier). 
 
 Scribner's Magazine, 18 : n 7-127 (F. II. Underwood); 16 : 791. 
 Forum, 18 : 271-287 (J. W. Chadwick). 
 Literary World, 25 : 350; 17: 23; 16: 429-431. 
 Review of Reviews, 10 : 495-501 (E. E. Hale). 
 Critic, 22: 242-257 and 259; 3: 191 (J. H. Morse); 8 : 46 (H. R. 
 
 Haweis) ; 6: I and 13 (A. W. Rollins); 4: 109 (O. W. Holmes) 
 
 and 133; 5: 97. 
 
 Dial (Ch.), 17: 215-217; 12: 209-219 (E. G. Johnson). 
 North American Review, 64 : 208-216 (Palfrey); 68 : 201-203 (F. 
 
 Bowen) ; 159 : 669-677 (H. C. Lodge). 
 North British Revievv, 61 : 476-480. 
 Macmillan''s Magazine, 4 : 305-309 (J. M. Ludlow). 
 International Revie^M, 8 : 501-514 (R. O. Palmer). 
 Author, i : 167-171 (G. P. Lovejoy). 
 Arena, 4: 129-142 (G. Stewart). 
 Good Words, 28 : 298-305 (F. H. Underwood). 
 Spectator, 61 : 855-858 (T. T. Palgrave). 
 Every Saturday, 14 : 466-470. 
 Appleton's Journal, 12 : 545-548. 
 Eclectic Magazine, 80 : 632-638 (W. H. Bidwell). 
 Saturday Review, 57: 65 1-654 (E. E. Brown). 
 Irish Quarterly Review, 5 : 193-221. 
 Academy, 29 : 37-39 (Walter Lewin). 
 Fortnightly Revie^v, 46 : 235-246 (De Lille). 
 Athenaum, 1884 (2), 274 (E. W. Gosse) ; 1888 (i), 787. 
 National Magazine, 3 : 502-508. 
 British Quarterly Rnnew, 52 : 324-351. 
 Belgravia, 20: 222-233 (K. Cook). 
 Dublin University Magazine, 159: 401-405 ; 64: 208-210; 84: 376- 
 
 383 (H. F. G.).
 
 840 HOLMES 
 
 PARTICULAR CHARACTERISTICS. 
 
 Introductory Note. What most impresses the reader, 
 after a careful review of the writings of Holmes, is his won- 
 derful versatility. We know not where he most excels, 
 whether as poet, essayist, novelist, monologuist, critic, or close 
 scientific writer. In the words of an English critic: " To 
 borrow a vulgar phrase, we never know where to have him, 
 and his pages are protean in their, ever-changing aspects. 
 Pathology, divinity, physiology, the world, the 
 flesh, and the devil, the trotting-track, the prize-ring, society 
 and the musical glasses all are jumbled up together, and yet 
 with a perceptible intellectual sequence, in which imagina- 
 tion, with some kind of plausibility, can follow the connecting 
 threads. . . . He might belong to half a dozen schools 
 of philosophy to the cynical, to the lachrymose, and, above 
 all, to the optimistic, with a strong dash of the epicurean." 
 It is obviously impossible to illustrate this quality by any short 
 series of detached paragraphs. An idea of Holmes's versatil- 
 ity must be gained from a study of his works as a whole. We 
 therefore begin our systematic analysis with a quality that 
 lends itself to more concise definition and illustration. 
 
 x. Buoyancy Youthfulness Optimism. No qual- 
 ity of Holmes's style and character impresses the reader more 
 constantly than his perennial youthfulness his habit of look- 
 ing at the things of earth and time through the eyes of an in- 
 genuous boy. 
 
 " [His longevity] is not, however, without a certain aspect 
 of propriety. If not the youngest in years, he was the young- 
 est of them all in heart. . . . He never left the cheerful 
 little ghost of his boyhood behind him." Literary World. 
 
 " Before his day the sons of the Puritans were hardly ripe 
 for the doctrine that there is a time to laugh, that humor is
 
 HOLMES 841 
 
 quite as helpful a constituent of life as gravity or gloom." 
 E. C. Stedman. 
 
 " The cheerful raj's of faith which, like the notes of birds 
 wafted to one from summer woodlands, suggest only tranquil 
 happiness and peace." Ray Palmer. 
 
 "[In his eightieth year] still the youngest man alive." 
 Lowell. 
 
 " [The Poem on Contentment^ is a most frank confession of 
 his liking for life's fair and pleasant things. . . . He was 
 neither stoic nor ascetic; neither indifferent to life's sweet and 
 pleasant things nor, while hankering for their possession, did 
 he repress his noble rage and freeze the genial currents of his 
 soul. His was an undisguised enjoyment of earthly comforts; 
 a happy confidence in the excellence and glory of our present 
 life; a persuasion, as one has said, 'that if God made us, 
 then he also meant us ; ' and he held to these things so earn- 
 estly, so pleasantly, so cheerfully, that he could not help com- 
 municating them to everything he wrote. . . . He wrote 
 in such a jocund way, with such animal spirits and pure ab- 
 surdity." -John Chadwick. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " Wherever the trotting horse goes, he carries in his train 
 brisk omnibuses, lively baker's carts, and therefore hot rolls, 
 the jolly butcher's wagon, the cheerful gig, the wholesome after- 
 noon drive with wife and child, all the forms of moral excel- 
 lence, except truth, which does not agree with any kind of horse 
 flesh." The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. 
 
 " I don't know whether our literary professional people are 
 more amiable than they are in other places, but certainly quar- 
 relling is out of fashion among them. This could never be if 
 they were in the habit of secret anonymous puffing of each other. 
 That is the kind of underground machinery which manufactures 
 false reputations and genuine hatreds. On the other hand, I 
 should like to know if we are not at liberty to have a good time 
 together and say the pleasantest things we can think of to each
 
 842 HOLMES 
 
 other, when any of us reaches his thirtieth or fortieth or fiftieth 
 or eightieth birthday." The Professor at the Breakfast- Table. 
 
 "The Professor has been to see me. Came in, glorious, at about 
 twelve o'clock last night. Said he had been with ' the boys.' 
 On inquiry, found out that ' the boys ' were certain baklish and 
 grayish gentlemen that one sees or hears of in various important 
 stations of society. The Professor is one of the same set, but he 
 always talks as if he had been out of college about ten years. 
 He calls them sometimes ' the boys,' and sometimes ' the old 
 fellows.' Call them by the latter title, and see how he likes it. 
 Well, he came in last night glorious, as I was saying. . . 
 But the Professor says he always gets tipsy in old memories. 
 He was, I forget how many years old when he went to the meet- 
 ing ; just turned of twenty now, he said. He made various 
 youthful proposals to me, including a duet under the landlady's 
 daughter's window. He had just learned a trick, he said, of one 
 of the boys of getting a splendid bass out of a door panel by rub- 
 bing it with the palm of the hand. Offered to sing ' The Sky is 
 Bright,' accompanying himself on the front door, if I would go 
 down a'nd help in the chorus. . . . All at once he jumped 
 up and said, Don't you want to hear what I read to the boys ? 
 The Professor then read 
 
 ' Flash out a stream of blood-red wine ! 
 
 For I would drink to other days ; 
 And brighter shall their memory shine, 
 
 Seen flaming through its crimson blaze. 
 The roses die, the summers fade ; 
 
 But every ghost of boyhood's dream 
 By nature's magic power is laid 
 
 To sleep beneath this blood-red stream [etc.].' " 
 
 The Autocrat of the Breakfast- Table. 
 
 2. Colloquial Habit Familiarity Self-Revela- 
 tion. Closely allied with his buoyancy and often united 
 with it in expression is the colloquial element in Holmes. 
 He talks not at you but with you. 
 
 " The colloquial habit of the Autocrat is ... so 
 marked generally in Holmes's writings as to be called distinc- 
 tive. . . . Without the private personal touch of the
 
 HOLMES 843 
 
 essayist in his stories they would not be his. His colloquial 
 habit is very winning when governed by a natural delicacy and 
 an exquisite literary instinct. It is the quality of all the au- 
 thors who are distinctly loved as persons by their readers, and 
 it is to this class that Holmes especially belongs." George 
 William Curtis. 
 
 " There is something akin to affection which connects such 
 poets with their readers, when poet and reader are at their 
 best. They cannot be Shelleys, but they win by warmth, 
 though they dazzle not by splendor. . . . Manliness 
 finds in Holmes a friend and culture a companion." C. F. 
 Richardson. 
 
 " He was and is one of the few writers who are present 
 at the reading of their own works a conversationalist in type, 
 on paper a dear friend living between the covers of a printed 
 book." Edii'ard R. Hale. 
 
 " This Bostonian who was his own Boswell. ... It 
 needed the nineteenth century to produce an Autocrat with so 
 much more of intellectual hospitality than the brave old Doc- 
 tor who dogmatised over Mrs. Thrale's teacups ; a spectator, 
 whose vision went so much deeper than that of the smiling 
 Addison." Helen M. Cone. 
 
 " [It is] the Autocrat in his best moods those moments 
 when, all barriers of invention and situation broken down, the 
 author talks face to face, or rather soul to soul, consciousness 
 to consciousness, with the reader." W. D. Howells. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " Do not think, because I talk to you of many subjects briefly, 
 that I should not find it much lazier work to take each one of 
 them and dilute it down to an essay. Borrow some of my old 
 college themes and water my remarks to suit yourselves." The 
 Autocrat of t lie Breakfast- Table. 
 
 "I don't believe any man ever talked like that in this world. 
 I don't believe 7 talked just so ; but the fact is, in reporting one's
 
 844 HOLMES 
 
 conversation, one cannot help It/air-ing it up more or less, iron- 
 ing out crumpled paragraphs, starching limp ones, and crimping 
 and plaiting a little sometimes ; it is as natural as prinking at 
 the looking-glass." The Autocrat of the Breakfast- Table. 
 
 "Apropos of Horses. Do you know how important good 
 jockeying is to authors ? Judicious management ; letting the 
 public see your animal just enough, not too much; holding him 
 up hard when the market is too full of him ; letting him out at 
 just the right buying intervals; always gently feeling his mouth ; 
 never slacking and never jerking the rein ; this is what I mean 
 by jockeying." The Autocrat of the Breakfast- Table. 
 
 " A lyric conception my friend, the Poet said hits me like a 
 bullet in the forehead. I have often had the blood drop from my 
 cheeks when it struck, and felt that I turned white as death. 
 Then comes a creeping as of centipedes running down the spine, 
 then a gasp and a great jump of the heart, then a sudden flush 
 and a beating in the vessels of the head, then a long sigh, and 
 the poem is written." The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. 
 
 3. Unconventionality. Simple Treatment of 
 Weighty Themes. This is another closely allied trait of 
 Holmes, mingled, as it so often is, with his buoyant and 
 colloquial manner. While the genial Doctor has not the awe- 
 lessness of Shelley and Byron, he does not hesitate to discuss 
 the most serious questions of life and death in a tone almost 
 playful in its serene fearlessness. 
 
 " The researches of most scientific men, especially in ab- 
 struse subjects, like the relations of body and mind, are pre- 
 served in works which the public cannot understand if they 
 should try. What Tyndall has done in the interpretation of 
 the laws of nature is done even more brilliantly by Holmes ; 
 and this is not due to any letting down of the subject ; it is 
 rather furnishing the means for the ordinary mind to ascend 
 to the higher level of thought. . . . [Of the Autocrat's 
 first appearance] The truth was the prosaic folk had no way 
 to estimate Holmes. They wrote only stately sentences, while 
 he was free when he chose to ut>e the simplest language of
 
 HOLMES 845 
 
 every-day life. The ideas they would formally promulgate 
 in methodical order he lashed upon the reader with a daz- 
 zling wit." F. H. Underwood. 
 
 " [He has] the common-sense of the Franklin quality." 
 C. F. Richardson. 
 
 " There is no straining for effect; simple, natural thoughts 
 are expressed in simple and perfectly transparent language." 
 
 Whittier. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind over-taxed. 
 Good mental machinery ought to break its own wheels and 
 levers, if anything is thrust among them suddenly which tends to 
 stop them or reverse their motion. A weak mind does not ac- 
 cumulate force enough to hurt itself ; stupidity often saves a man 
 from going mad. We frequently see persons in insane hospitals, 
 sent there in consequence of what are called religious mental dis- 
 turbances. I confess that I think better of them than of many 
 who hold the same notions, and keep their wits and appear to 
 enjoy life very well, outside of the asylums. Any decent person 
 ought to go mad, if he really holds such and such opinions. It is 
 very much to his discredit in every point of view if he does not." 
 
 The Autocrat of the Breakfast- Table. 
 
 "But I'll tell you what the Professor said to the Poet the other 
 day. ' My boy,' said he, ' I can work a great deal cheaper than 
 you, because I keep all my goods in the lower story. You have 
 to hoist yours into the upper stories of the brain and let them 
 down again to your customers. I take mine in at the level of the 
 ground, and send them off at my door-step almost without lifting. 
 I tell you, the higher a man has to carry the raw material of thought 
 before he works it up, the more it costs him in blood, nerve, and 
 muscle.' Coleridge knew all this very well when he advised every 
 literary man to have a profession. 1 ' The Autocrat of the Break- 
 fast- Table. 
 
 " The more we study the body and the mind, the more we find 
 both to be governed, not by but according to laws, such as we 
 observe in the larger universe. You think you know all about 
 walking don't you, now? Well, how do you suppose your 
 lower limbs are held to your body ? They are sucked up by two
 
 846 HOLMES 
 
 cupping vessels, (' cotoloid ' cup-likecavities) and held there 
 as long as you live, and longer. At any rate, you think you 
 move them backward and forward at such a rate as your will de- 
 termines, don't you? On the contrary, they swing just as any 
 other pendulums swing, at a fixed rate, determined by their 
 length. You can alter this by muscular power, just as you can 
 take hold of the pendulum of a clock and make it move faster or 
 slower ; but your ordinary gait is timed by the same mechanism 
 as the movements of the solar system." The Autocrat of the 
 Breakfast- Table. 
 
 " There are three wicks, you know, to the lamp of a man's life ; 
 brain, blood, and breath. Press the brain a little, its light goes 
 out, followed by both the others. Stop the heart a min-ute, and 
 out go all three of the wicks. Choke the air out of lungs, and 
 presently the fluid ceases to supply the other centers of flame, 
 and all is soon stagnation, cold, and darkness. The ' tripod of 
 life ' a French physiologist called these three organs. It is all 
 clear enough which leg of the tripod is going to break down here. 
 I could tell you exactly what the difficulty is ; which would be 
 as intelligible and amusing as a watchmaker's description of a 
 diseased timekeeper to a ploughman." The Professor at the 
 Breakfast- Table. 
 
 4. Piquant Satire Graceful Badinage. Holmes's 
 satire is unlike that of any other of our great humorists, 
 though it has much of the tone of Lamb and of Hood. 
 
 " His metrical satires are of the amiable sort that debars 
 him from kinsmanship with the Juvenals of old or the Popes 
 and Churchills of more recent time. . . . Yet he is a 
 keen observer of the follies and chances which satire makes 
 its food. As his humor had relaxed the grimness of a Puritan 
 constituency, so his prose satire did much to liberalize their 
 clerical system." E. C. Stedman. 
 
 " He deals with the vanities, the foibles, the faults of man- 
 kind, good-naturedly and almost sympathizingly suggesting 
 excuses for the folly which he tosses about on the horns of his 
 ridicule. ' ' Whittier. 
 
 " He looks at folly and pretension from the highest pin-
 
 HOLMES 847 
 
 nacle of scorn. They never provoke his indignation, for to 
 him they are too mean to justify anger, and are hardly worth 
 petulance." E. P. Whiffle. 
 
 ' All his trenchant bits of criticism and pretended dogma- 
 tism have attached to them, like a corollary, a little hint that 
 the cure for it all is charity the understanding other men 
 better. . . . Do you remember ' Urania, a Rhymed Les- 
 son,' away back in his younger days with what skilful 
 good humor it picked out all the little solecisms of dress, 
 manners, and talk, and yet left the perpetrators, while en- 
 tirely cured, feeling as though they were laughed with and 
 not at ?" tf. W. Gilder. 
 
 " Holmes's pen has the point of a French rapier, and draws 
 blood whenever he chooses to use it with that intent." Ray 
 Palmer. 
 
 " Holmes is distinctively and purely a satirist, and for a 
 lifetime has been lashing others with the most stinging and 
 excoriating satire (tempered with humor and good-nature). 
 . . . When at his best, his humor has the genial, kindly 
 character which marks that of all great humorists ; but too 
 often it is only an ironical smirk, a sardonical grin, a laughing 
 at others instead of with them." W. S. Kennedy. 
 
 " The two bete noires of Holmes are homoeopathy and end- 
 less punishment, and he never lets an opportunity pass of 
 giving a thrust at either." F. H. Underwood. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " I took more of it [the pie] than was good for me, as much 
 as eighty-five per cent., I should think, and had an indigestion 
 in consequence. While I was suffering from it, I wrote some 
 sadly desponding poems and a theological essay which took a 
 very melancholy view of creation. When I got better I labelled 
 them all pie-crust, and laid them by as scarecrows and solemn 
 warnings. I have a number of books on my shelves that I should 
 like to label with some such title ; but, as they have great names
 
 848 HOLMES 
 
 on their title-pages, Doctors of Divinity, some of them, it 
 wouldn't do." 7 he Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. 
 
 " There are not a few who, even in this life, seem to be pre- 
 paring themselves for that smileless eternity to which they look 
 forward by banishing all gayety from their hearts and all joyous- 
 ness from their countenances. I meet one such in the street not 
 unfrequently, a person of intelligence and education, but who 
 gives me (and all that he passes) such a rayless and chilling look 
 of recognition, something as if he were one of Heaven's assess- 
 ors come down to ' doom ' every acquaintance he met, that I 
 have sometimes begun to sneeze on the spot, and gone home 
 with a violent cold, dating from that instant. I don't doubt he 
 would cut his kitten's tail off if he caught her playing with it. 
 Please tell me who taught her to play with it?" The Autocrat 
 of the Breakfast-Table. 
 
 " Every person's feelings have a front-door and a side-door by 
 which they may be entered. . . . You can keep the world 
 out from your front-door, or receive visitors only when you are 
 ready for them ; but those of your own flesh and blood, or of 
 certain degrees of intimacy, can come in at the side-door, if they 
 will, at any hour and in any mood. Some of them have a scale 
 of your whole nervous system, and can play all the gamut of 
 your sensibilities in semitones, touching the naked nerve-pulps 
 as a pianist strikes the keys of his instrument. . . . Married 
 life is the school in which the most accomplished artists in 
 this department are found. A delicate woman is the best in- 
 strument ; she has such a magnificent compass of sensibilities ! 
 From the deep inward moan which follows pressure on the great 
 nerves of right to the sharp cry as the filaments of taste are 
 struck with a crashing sweep, is a range which no other instru- 
 ment possesses. A few exercises on it daily at home fit a man 
 wonderfully for his habitual labors, and refresh him immensely 
 when he returns from them. No stranger can get a great many 
 notes of torture out of a human soul ; it takes one that knows 
 it well, parent, child, brother, sister, intimate. Be very careful 
 to whom you give a side-door key ; too many have them al- 
 ready.i' The Autocrat of the Breakfast- Table.
 
 HOLMES 849 
 
 5. Exuberant, Dazzling Wit. All his critics unite 
 in ascribing to Holmes a wit equalled only by that of Hood 
 and Lowell. 
 
 " The movement of his wit is so swift that its presence is 
 known only when it strikes. He will sometimes, as it were, 
 blind the eyes of his victims with diamond dust, then pelt 
 them pitilessly with scoffing compliments. He passes from 
 the sharp and stinging gibe to the most grotesque exaggera- 
 tions of drollery with a most bewildering rapidity." E. P. 
 \Vhipple. 
 
 "There's Holmes, who is matchless among you for wit ; 
 A Leyden-jar always full-charged, from which flit 
 The electrical tingles of hit after hit." Lowell. 
 
 "Dr. Holmes has proved his title to be a wit in the earlier 
 and higher sense of the word, when it meant a man of genius, 
 a player upon thoughts rather than upon words." Lowell. 
 
 " A. restless wit that sees the different sides, the contradic- 
 tions, and cannot forbear to flash upon the eye all the various 
 angles of truth, while never ceasing to take the view of the 
 poet." G. P. Lathrop. 
 
 " If any of our readers need amusement and the wholesome 
 alternative of a hearty laugh, we commend them, not to Dr. 
 Holmes the physician, but to Dr. Holmes the scholar, the wit, 
 and the humorist. . . . He was born for the ' laughter 
 cure,' as certainly Priessnitz was for the ' water-cure,' and has 
 been quite as successful in his way." H'hittier. 
 
 " keen analysis 
 
 Of men and moods, electric wit, 
 Free play of mirth, and tenderness 
 To heal the slightest wound from it." Whittier. 
 
 54
 
 850 HOLMES 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " I have just been to hear some music-pounding. It was a 
 young woman, with as many white muslin flounces round her 
 as the planet has rings, that did it. She gave the music-stool a 
 twirl or two and fluffed down on it like a whirl of soap-suds in 
 a hand-basin. Then she pushed up her cuffs as if she were 
 going to fight for the champion's belt. Then she worked her 
 wrists and her hands, to limber 'em, I suppose, and spread out 
 her fingers till they looked as though" they would pretty much 
 cover the key-board, from the growling end to the little squeaky 
 one. Then those two hands of hers made a jump at the keys as 
 if they were a couple of tigers coming down on a flock of black 
 and white sheep, and the piano gave a great howl, as if its tail 
 had been trod on." The Poet at the Breakfast-Table. 
 
 " So never mind what your cousins, brothers, sisters, uncles, 
 aunts, and the rest, say about that fine poem you have written, 
 but send it (postage paid) to the editors, if there are any, of the 
 Atlantic which, by the way, is not so called because it is a 
 notion, as some dull wits wish they had said, but are too late." 
 
 The Autocrat of the Breakfast- Table. 
 
 " My acquaintance with the French language is very imperfect, 
 I having never studied it anywhere but in Paris, which is awk- 
 ward, as B. F. devotes himself to it with the peculiar advantage of 
 an Alsatian teacher." The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. 
 
 " Neither will I pretend that I am so unused to the more per- 
 ishable smoking contrivance that a few whiffs would make me 
 feel as if I Jay in aground-swell on the Bay of Biscay. I am not 
 unacquainted with that fusiform, spiral-wound bundle of chopped 
 stems and, miscellaneous incombustibles, the cigar, so called, of 
 the shops which to ' draw ' asks the suction-power of a nursling 
 infant Hercules and to relish, the leathery palate of old Silenus." 
 
 The Autocrat of the Breakfast- Table. 
 
 6. Fanciful Humor. " To write good comic verse is a 
 different thing from writing good comic poetry. A jest or a 
 sharp saying may easily be made to rhyme ; but to blend ludi- 
 crous ideas with fancy and imagination and display in their
 
 HOLMES 851 
 
 conception and expression the same poetic qualities usually 
 exercised in serious composition, is a rare distinction. Among 
 American poets we know of no one who excels Holmes in this 
 difficult branch of art." E. P. IVhipple. 
 
 " [Holmes's humor is] fun shading down to seriousness and 
 seriousness shading up to fun." Lowell. 
 
 " Hood is great both in smiles and tears, but his prevailing 
 mood is all absorbing, and he is either all smiles or all tears 
 at any one time. Holmes is as funny in his different way, 
 though by no means so deeply pathetic and startling as the 
 other. In recompense he often produces a delightful ming- 
 ling of the sad and gay, scarcely found in Hood, and has a 
 marvellous gift, moreover, of sliding from the real to the ideal 
 beginning with jest and ending with poetry." Literary 
 World. 
 
 " You with the classic few belong 
 Who tempered wisdom with a smile." 
 
 Lowell. 
 
 "It does not appear that anyone else did so much as Dr. 
 Holmes to change the social temper of New England, to make 
 it less harsh and joyless, and to make easier for his fellow- 
 countrymen the transition from old things to new." John 
 W. Chadwick. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " I never thought he would come to good, when I heard him 
 attempting to sneer at an unoffending city so respectable as Bos- 
 ton. After a man begins to attack the State-House, when he gets 
 bitter about the Frog-Pond, you may be sure there is not much 
 left of him. Poor Edgar Poe died in the hospital soon after he 
 got into this way of talking ; and so sure as you find an unfortu- 
 nate fellow reduced to this pass, you had better begin praying for 
 him and stop lending him money, for he is on his last legs." 
 The Professor at the Breakfast- Table,
 
 852 HOLMES 
 
 " Certain things are good for nothing until they have been kept 
 for a long while ; and some are good for nothing until they have 
 been long kept and used. ... Of those which must be kept 
 and used I will name three meerschaum pipes, violins, and 
 poems. The meerschaum is but a poor affair until it has burned 
 a thousand offerings to the cloud-compelling deities. . . . 
 Gradually the juices which the broad leaves of the Great Vegeta- 
 ble had sucked up from an acre and curdled into a drachm are 
 diffused through its thirsting pores. First a discoloration, then a 
 stain, and at last a rich, glowing umber tint spreading over the 
 whole surface. Nature true to her old brown autumnal hue, you 
 see as true in the fire of the meerschaum as in the sunshine of 
 October ! And then the cumulative wealth of its fragrant remi- 
 niscences ! He who inhales its vapors takes a thousand whiffs in 
 a single breath ; and one cannot touch it without awakening the 
 old joys that hang round it as the smell of the flowers clings to 
 the dresses of the daughters of the house of Farina." The 
 Autocrat of the Breakfast- Table. 
 
 " ' I suppose that now they have levelled everything they are 
 quiet and contented. Have they any of those uneasy people called 
 reformers ? ' " 
 
 ' ' ' Indeed they have,' said my attendant. ' There are the Ortho- 
 brachians, who declaim against the shameful abuse of the left arm 
 and hand, and insist on restoring their perfect equality with the 
 right. Then there are Isopodic societies, which insist upon bring- 
 ing back the original equality of the upper and lower limbs. If 
 you can believe it, they actually practise going on all fours 
 generally in a private way, a few of them together, but hoping to 
 bring the world round to them in the near future.' " Over the 
 Tea -Cups. 
 
 7. Pathos. The pathos of Holmes, while not so deep 
 as that of Hood and Steele, which it resembles, is invariably 
 natural and genuine. There is no mawkish sentimentality in 
 his pages such as is found in some scenes by Dickens. 
 
 " The poet of 'The Last Leaf was among the first to teach 
 his countrymen that pathos is an equal part of true humor ; that 
 sorrow is lightened by jest and jest redeemed from coarseness
 
 HOLMES 853 
 
 by emotion, under most conditions of this our evanescent 
 human life." E. C. Stedman. 
 
 "After some comic picture, grotesque phrase, or quick 
 thrust, the reader comes suddenly upon a stanza of perfect 
 beauty of form, with the gentlest touch of natural feeling." 
 F. H. Underwood. 
 
 " Still in thy human tenderness they feel 
 The honest voice and beating heart of Steele. " 
 
 Edmund Gosse. 
 
 "His finest humor borders close upon pathos." W. S. 
 Kennedy. 
 
 " The author is capable of moving the heart as well as of 
 tickling the fancy." Whittier. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " There is one very sad thing in old friendships, to every mind 
 that is really moving onward. It is this : that one cannot help 
 using his early friends as the seaman uses the log, to mark his 
 progress. Every now and then we throw an old schoolmate over 
 the stern with a string of thought tied to him, and look I am 
 afraid with a kind of luxurious and sanctimonious compassion 
 to see the rate at which the string reels off, while he lies there 
 bobbing up and down, poor fellow ! and we are dashing along 
 with the white foam and bright sparkle at our bows ; the ruffled 
 bosom of prosperity and progress, with a sprig of diamonds stuck 
 in it ! " Ike Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. 
 
 " I never laughed at my landlady after she had told me her 
 story, but I often cried not those pattering tears that run off the 
 eaves upon our neighbor's yards, the stillicidium of self-conscious 
 sentiment, but those which steal noiselessly through their con- 
 duits until they reach the cisterns lying round about the heart ; 
 those tears that we weep inwardly with unchanging features ; 
 such did I shed for her often when the imps of the boarding-house 
 Inferno tugged at her soul with their red-hot pincers." The 
 Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. 
 
 " ' My life is the dying pang of a worn-out race, and I shall go
 
 854 HOLMES 
 
 down alone into the dust, out of this world of men and women, 
 without ever knowing the fellowship of the one or the love of the 
 other. I will not die with a lie rattling in my throat. If another 
 state of being has anything worse in store for me, I have had 
 a. long apprenticeship to give me strength that I may bear it. 
 I don't believe it, Sir ! I have too much faith for that. God has 
 not left me wholly without comfort, even here. I love this old 
 place where I was born ; the heart of the world beats under the 
 three hills of Boston, Sir ! I love this great land with so many 
 tall men in it and so many good, noble women.' His eyes turned 
 to the silent figure by his pillow. l l have learned to accept 
 meekly what has been allotted me, but I cannot honestly say that 
 I think my sin has been greater than my suffering. I bear the 
 ignorance and evil-doing of whole generations in my single per- 
 son. I never drew a breath of air nor took a step that was not a 
 punishment for another's fault. I may have had many wrong 
 thoughts, but I cannot have done many wrong deeds, for my 
 cage has been a narrow one, and I have paced it alone.'" The 
 Professor at the Breakfast- Table. 
 
 8. Point Epigram Whimsical Paradox. "The 
 most obvious characteristic of Holmes's poetry is its combined 
 terseness and finish. The lines are often poetical proverbs 
 or epigrams, with vigor and point in every phrase. . . . 
 And as much is true of the Autocrat's prose. He flashes upon 
 you an ingenious suggestion or a whimsical paradox clothed 
 in fantastic guise, and without giving you time to pause upon 
 the truth it contains or to reflect even whether what seems 
 so plausible is true, presents you with another and another in 
 endless sequence." F. H. Underwood. 
 
 " In Holmes's professional and literary addresses there 
 is a compactness and polished vigor in his sentences, an ef- 
 fectiveness and point, which remind one of the pungency of 
 Junius." Ray Palmer. 
 
 "You may open any of the three [prose] volumes upon 
 which Holmes's fame really rests, and find on every page 
 aphorisms and epigrams which deserve to be framed, put
 
 HOLMES 855 
 
 down in your private note-book, or carried in your heart." 
 H. R. Jfaweis. 
 
 " A proverb maker, some of whose words are not without 
 wings. . . . His pertinent maxims are so frequent that 
 it seems as if he had jotted them down from time to time and 
 here first brought them to application ; they are apothegms 
 of common life and action, often of mental experience, strung 
 together by a device so original as to make the work quite a 
 novelty in literature." E. C. Stt-Jman. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " I can't help remembering that the world's great men have not 
 commonly been great scholars, nor its great scholars great men." 
 
 " Put not your trust in money, but put your money in trust." 
 
 " Controversy equalizes fools and wise men in the same way 
 and the fools know it." 
 
 " Good feeling helps society to make liars of most of us not 
 absolute liars, but such careless handlers of truth that its sharp 
 corners get terribly rounded." 
 
 " The axis of the earth sticks out visibly through the centre of 
 each and every town or city." 
 
 " Knowledge and timber shouldn't be much used till they are 
 seasoned." The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. 
 
 " Humility is the first of the virtues for other people." The 
 Professor at the Breakfast- Table. 
 
 9. Sportive Fancy. " Like his wit, humor, and pathos, 
 this frolicsome fancy marks everything that Holmes has writ- 
 ten. In the contributions [to the New England magazines] 
 of the young graduate, the high spirits of a frolicsome fancy 
 effervesce and sparkle." George William Curtis. 
 
 " That song has flecked with rosy gold 
 The sails that fade o'er fancy's sea." 
 
 William Winter. 
 
 " It riots in his measures . . . fancy which he tenders 
 in lieu of imagination and power. The consecutive poems of
 
 856 HOLMES 
 
 one whose fancy plays about life as he saw it may be a feast 
 complete and epicurean, having solid dishes and fantastic, 
 all justly savored, cooked with discretion, flanked with hon- 
 est wine, and whose cates and dainties, even, are not designed 
 to cloy a fancy whose glint, if not imagination, is like that 
 of the sparks struck off from it. ... To this day [1885] 
 there is no telling whither a fancy, once caught and mounted, 
 will bear this lively rider." E. C. Stedman. 
 
 " [His] sense of the ludicrous is not keener than his sense 
 of the beautiful ; his wit and humor^are but the sportive exer- 
 cise of a fancy and imagination which he has abundantly ex- 
 ercised on serious topics." E. P. \Vhipple. 
 
 " [I am] struck anew by the presence of that prolific fancy 
 which avoids monotony." Bayard Taylor. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " Let us get up and see what is going on. Oh, oh, oh ! do 
 you know what has got hold of you ? It is the great red dragon 
 that is born of the little red eggs we call sparks, with his hundred 
 blowing red manes, and his thousand lashing red tails, and his 
 multitudinous red eyes glaring at every crack and key-hole, 
 and his countless red tongues lapping the beams he is going to 
 crunch presently, and his hot breath warping the panels and 
 cracking the glass and making old timber sweat that had forgotten 
 it was ever alive with sap. Run for your life ! leap ! or you will 
 be a cinder in five minutes, that nothing but a coroner would 
 take for the wreck of a human being." The Professor at the 
 Breakfast- Table. 
 
 " Next year you will find the grass growing tall and green 
 where the stone lay ; the ground-bird builds her nest where the 
 beetle had his hole ; the dandelion and the buttercup are growing 
 there, and the broad fans of insect angels open and shut over 
 their golden disks, as the rhythmic waves of blissful conscious- 
 ness pulsate through their glorified being." The Autocrat of the 
 Breakfast- Table. 
 
 " The island is where ? No matter. It is the most splendid 
 domain that any man looks upon in _these latitudes. Blue sea
 
 HOLMES 857 
 
 around it and running up into its heart, so that the little boat 
 slumbers like a baby in lap, while the tall ships are stripping 
 naked to fight the hurricane outside, and storm stay-sails bang- 
 ing and flying in ribbons. Trees, in stretches of miles ; beeches, 
 oaks, most numerous ; many of them hung with moss, looking 
 like bearded Druids ; some coiled in the grasp of huge, dark- 
 stemmed grape-vines. Open patches where the sun gets in and 
 goes to sleep, and the winds come so finely sifted that they are as 
 soft as swan's down." The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. 
 
 10. Sincerity Honesty Manliness. Although 
 many of his victims, theological and medical, have writhed 
 under the poet's castigations, all admit his honesty of purpose 
 and his entire freedom from that morbidness and sentimental- 
 ity that sometimes mar the work of otherwise great writers. 
 From the critic of Holmes's first volume, who declares that 
 " there is not a particle of humbug in him," to that reviewer, 
 writing after the poet's death, who wishes for a list of "the 
 men now in middle age whose mental tone has been, con- 
 sciously or unconsciously, considerably influenced by the 
 kindly castigation, until they seem intolerable of shams and 
 half-baked pretences that otherwise they might have gone on 
 tolerating," through all those fifty years the Autocrat ever 
 spoke in what Bayard Taylor fitly calls "that freshness 
 and heartiness of tone which springs from a fountain lower 
 than the brain." 
 
 " He is fresh and manly even when he securely treads the 
 scarcely marked line which separates sentiment from senti- 
 mentality. . . . He valorously invites and courts the 
 malicious sharpness of the most unfriendly criticism. By thus 
 daring, provoking, and defying opposition both to his pro- 
 fessional and literary reputation, he seems to us to indicate a 
 real if somewhat impatient love of truth. . . . Nobody 
 can justly appreciate Holmes who does not perceive an im- 
 personal earnestness and insight beneath the play of his pro- 
 voking personal wit. . . . Even his petulances of sar-
 
 858 HOLMES 
 
 casm are but eccentric utterances of a love of truth which 
 has its source in the deepest and gravest sentiments of his 
 nature." ,. P. Wtiipple. 
 
 " [His] metrical dedications offered to his brothers of the 
 medical craft . . . [are] bristling with scorn of quackery 
 and challenge to opposing systems." E. C. Stedman. 
 
 " He prefers a brown-stone mansion to a cabin in the 
 woods. . . . He is a hater of vulgarity and pretension 
 and of quacks, literary and other. . . . The characters 
 he develops are not all separated " into heroes and villains, 
 but are painted as they are, with some strain of good in the 
 worst, some blemish of weakness, or perhaps a stain of guilt, 
 in the best. . . . He has no ' sentiment ' but that which 
 is in harmony with intellectual health and cheerful temper." 
 F. H. Underwood. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " When one of us who has been led by native vanity or sense- 
 less flattery to think himself or herself possessed of talent arrives 
 at the full and final conclusion that he or she is really dull, it is 
 one of the most tranquillizing and blessed convictions that can 
 enter a mortal mind. . . . How sweetly and honestly one 
 said to me the other day, ' I hate books ! ' A gentleman, singu- 
 larly free from affectations, not learned, of course, but of per- 
 fect breeding, which is often so much better than learning. 
 . . . I did not recognize in him inferiority of literary taste 
 half so distinctly as I did simplicity of character and fearless 
 acknowledgment of his inaptitude for scholarship. In fact, I 
 think there are a great many gentlemen and others, who read 
 with a mark to keep their place, that really ' hate books,' but 
 never had the wit to find it out.'' The Autocrat of the Breakfast- 
 Table. 
 
 " Unfortunately there has been a very great tendency to make 
 capital of various kinds out of dying men's speeches. The lies 
 that have been put into their mouths for this purpose are endless. 
 The prime minister, whose last breath was spent in scolding his 
 nurse, dies with a magnificent apothegm upon his lips, manu-
 
 HOLMES 859 
 
 factured by a reporter. Addison gets up a tableau and utters 
 an admirable sentiment, or somebody makes the posthumous 
 dying epigram for him. The incoherent babble of green fields 
 is translated into the language of stately sentiment. One would 
 think all that dying men had to do was to say the prettiest thing 
 they could, to make their rhetorical point, and then bow 
 themselves politely out of the world." The Professor at the 
 Breakfast- Table. 
 
 " ' I wish I were half as good as many heathens have been,' I 
 said, ' Dying for a principle seems to me a higher degree of 
 virtue than scolding for it ; and the history of heathen races is 
 full of instances where men have laid down their lives for the 
 love of their kind, of their country, of truth, nay, even for simple 
 manhood's sake or to show their obedience or fidelity." What 
 would not such beings have done for the souls of men, for the 
 Christian commonwealth, for the King of Kings, if they had 
 lived in days of larger light ? Which seems to you nearest 
 heaven, Socrates drinking his hemlock, Regulus going back to 
 the enemy's camp, or that old New England divine sitting com- 
 fortably in his study and chuckling over his conceit of certain 
 poor women, who had been burned to death in his own town, 
 going ' roaring out of one fire into another ? ' " The Professor at 
 the Breakfast-Table. 
 
 ii. Earnestness Serious Purpose. Those who 
 estimate Oliver Wendell Holmes merely as a wit come far 
 short of a true conception of the man and of his genius. He 
 was by no means unaware of the risk he ran of being miscon- 
 strued by that very large and highly respectable race of 
 critics and readers who mistake dull sobriety for wisdom, and 
 confound wit with buffoonery. In one of his anniversary 
 poems, written at the very beginning of his literary career, he 
 says to the friends who have urged him to lend his song to 
 their merriment : 
 
 " Besides, my prospects don't you know that people won't employ 
 A man that wrongs his manliness by laughing like a boy, 
 And suspect the azure blossom that unfolds upon a shoot, 
 As if wisdom's old potato could not flourish at its .root ? "
 
 860 HOLMES 
 
 "Beneath the brilliant fancy and sparkle which play on 
 the surface of his nature there runs a deep, strong current of 
 serious and earnest thought and feeling, which moves him, at 
 fit times, to strike the graver and richer chords which pro- 
 foundly move the soul in its higher moods." Ray Palmer. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " I have a creed, I replied, none better and none shorter. 
 It is told in two words, the two first of the Paternoster. And 
 when I say these works I mean them." The Autocrat of the 
 Breakfast- Table. 
 
 " Well, I can't be savage with you for wanting to laugh, and 
 I like to make you laugh, well enough, when I can. But then 
 observe this : if the sense of the ridiculous is one side of an im- 
 pressible nature, it is very well ; but if that is all there is in a 
 man, he had better have been an ape at once, and so have stood 
 at the head of his profession." The Autocrat of the Breakfast- 
 Table. 
 
 " I do not advise you, young man, even if my illustration strike 
 your fancy, to consecrate the flower of your life to painting the 
 bowl of a pipe ; for, let me assure you, the stain of a reverie- 
 breeding narcotic may strike deeper than you think for. I have 
 seen the green leaf of early promise grow brown before its time 
 under such Nicotian regimen, and thought the umbered meer- 
 schaum was dearly bought at the cost of a brain enfeebled and a 
 will enslaved." The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. 
 
 12. Localism Sectionalism. Few writers have been 
 so devotedly attached to a locality, and few volumes are so 
 tinged with localisms as are those of Holmes. 
 
 " [He has] an intense and perpetual localism. ... In 
 their [his novels] freshness, alertness, and brilliancy of delinea- 
 tion, [they] are thoroughly of New England ; they could not 
 have been written in another land." C. F. Richardson. 
 
 " [He is] an essential part of Boston, like the crier who 
 becomes so identified with a court that it seems as if Justice 
 must change her quarters when he is gone." E. C. Stedman.
 
 HOLMES 86l 
 
 "Fairly Boston's laureate. ... He believed in Eos- 
 ton as Johnson did in London." F, H. Underwood. 
 
 " When it was known that he was dead, men felt, despite 
 his age, as if there, where he was best known, his going made 
 a gap in nature, and took from them something which was as 
 much a part of their being as the air they breathed. Dr. 
 Holmes had one personal quality which ought not to be 
 passed over without mention anywhere or at any time. He 
 was a thorough American and always a patriot, always national 
 and independent, and never colonial or subservient to foreign 
 opinion. In the war of the rebellion none was a stronger up- 
 holder of the national cause than he. In his earliest verse we 
 catch constantly the flutter of the flag, and in his war poems 
 we feel the rush and life of the great uprising which saved the 
 nation. He was in the best sense a citizen of the world, of 
 broad and catholic sympathies. But he was first and before 
 that an American citizen of the United States, and this fact 
 is at once proof and reason that he was able to do work 
 which has carried delight to many people of many tongues, 
 and which has won him a high and lasting place in the great 
 literature of the English-speaking people." Henry Cabot 
 Lodge. 
 
 " The streets of London were not more loved by Johnson 
 and Lamb than those of Boston have been by Holmes. . . . 
 He has made only short swallow-flights beyond the limits of 
 his own beloved city. If he goes to Paris, he carries Boston 
 with him. ... A barnacle is not more closely identified 
 with its rock or a pearl with its oyster than, Holmes with 
 St. Botolph's town. All his books might be labelled, ' Talks 
 with my neighbors.' He is indigenous ; throws up New 
 England subsoil as he ploughs ; his homespun characters speak 
 the native patois, and the whole tone of his writings is unaf- 
 fectedly Yankee." W. S. Kennedy.
 
 862 HOLMES 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " Boston is just like other places of its size ; only perhaps, 
 considering its excellent fish-market, paid fire department, 
 superior monthly publications, and correct habit of spelling the 
 English language, it has some right to look down on the mob of 
 cities. I'll tell you, though, if you want to know it, what is the 
 real offense of Boston. It drains a large water-shed of its intellect, 
 and will not of itself be drained. . . . There can never be a 
 real metropolis in this country until the biggest centre can drain 
 the lesser ones of their talent and wealth.'' The Autocrat of the 
 Breakfast- Table. 
 
 " Full of crooked little streets; but I tell you Boston has 
 opened, and kept open, more turnpikes that lead to free thought 
 and free speech and free deeds than any other city of live men or 
 dead men, I don't care how broad their streets are, nor how high 
 their steeples ! " The Professor at the Breakfast- Table. [See also 
 the first illustration under Humor and the fourth under Pathos.] 
 
 13. Graceful Philosophy Ingenious Speculation. 
 " Dr. Holmes's whole work, in reality, has been to present 
 in a graceful, able, and amusing way philosophy not tran- 
 scending the bounds of the ordinarily intelligent mind, psy- 
 chology which, however just and acute, is never especially 
 profound, and objective observation wonderfully vivid and 
 gay, but on the whole somewhat slight." An English Critic. 
 
 " [Dr. Holmes has been fond of exploring] that weird 
 borderland between science and speculation where psychology 
 and physiology exercise mixed jurisdiction." Lowell. 
 
 "A kind of attenuated Franklin, who views things and 
 folks with the less robustness but keener distinction and in- 
 sight. . . . Somewhat distrustful of the 'inner light,' 
 he stands squarely upon observation, experience, induction ; 
 yet at times is so volatile a theorist that one asks how much of 
 his raging is conviction and how much mirth and whim." 
 E. C. Stedntan. 
 
 " His two novels are not so much "novels of plot as they are
 
 HOLMES 863 
 
 stories written to illustrate a psychological theory of hered- 
 ity. The strength of 'Elsie Venner' and the 'Guardian Angel' 
 lies in their shrewd psychological analysis of character and 
 in the wealth of practical philosophy." W. S. Kennedy. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 " There may be a physical reason for the strange connection 
 between the sense of smell and the mind. The olfactory nerve 
 so my friend the professor tells me is the only one directly 
 connected with the hemispheres of the brain, the parts in which, 
 as we have every reason to believe, the intellectual processes 
 are performed. . . . Contrast the sense of taste, as a source 
 of suggestive impressions, with that of smell." The Autocrat of 
 the Breakfast- Table. 
 
 " Some persons seem to think that absolute truth, in the form 
 of rigidly stated propositions, is all that conversation admits. 
 This is precisely as if a musician should insist on having nothing 
 but perfect chords and simple melodies, no diminished fifths, 
 no flat sevenths, no flourishes on any account. Now it is fair to 
 say that, just as music must have all these, so conversation must 
 have its partial truths, its embellished truths, its exaggerated 
 truths. It is in its higher forms an artistic product, and admits 
 the ideal element as much as pictures or statues. One man who 
 is a little too literal can spoil the talk of a whole tableful of men 
 of esprit" The Autocrat of the Breakfast- Table. 
 
 " Scientific knowledge, even in the most modest persons, has 
 mingled with it a something which partakes of insolence. Abso- 
 lute, preemptory facts are bullies, and those who keep company 
 with them are apt to get a bullying habit of mind, not of man- 
 ners, perhaps. . . . Take the man, for instance, who deals in 
 the mathematical sciences. There is no elasticity in a mathemat- 
 ical fact ; everything must go to pieces that comes in collision 
 with it. ... Every probability and most of our common, 
 working beliefs are probabilities is provided with buffers at 
 both ends which break the force of opposite opinions clashing 
 against it, but scientific certainty has no spring in it, no courtesy, 
 no possibility of yielding. All this must react on the minds which 
 handle these forms of truth." The Autocrat of the Breakfast- 
 Table.
 
 INDEX 
 
 ABBOT, E. A., quoted, 16 
 
 " Abolishment of Christianity, The," 
 quoted, 182 
 
 "A Christmas Carol," quoted, 627, 
 628, 631, 633, 640 
 
 '' Adam Bede," quoted, 579, 580, 581, 
 585, 587- 593, 597. 601, 602 
 
 Addison, biographical outline of, 82- 
 87 ; bibliography on, 87-88 ; con- 
 ventionality of, no; delicate liu- 
 mor of, 102 ; elegance of, 88 ; ele- 
 vation of, 95 ; fastidiousness of, 
 113; formalism of, no; high pur- 
 pose of, 95 ; humor of, 102 ; keen 
 satire of, 92 
 
 Addison, Macaulay's Essay on, 
 quoted; 441, 443, 447 ; moral eleva- 
 tion of, 95 ; portraiture, his skill 
 in, 105; precision, his verbal, 113; 
 quoted as critic, 31, 93 ; urbanity 
 of, 88 ; verbal precision of, 1 13 
 
 "Advancement of Learning, The," 
 quoted, 10, 13, 15, 18, 19 
 
 Ad-'tnture, The, quoted, 267 
 
 " Adventures of Philip," quoted, 485 
 
 '' Adventures of a Strolling Piper," 
 quoted, 228 
 
 11 Affliction," Newman's Sermon on, 
 quoted, 496 
 
 " Age," Bacon's Essay on, quoted, 9 
 
 " A Good Word for Winter," quoted, 
 8n, 822, 824, 832, 833, 835 
 
 "Agriculture, Thoughts on," quoted, 
 281 
 
 Aiken, J., quoted, 102 
 
 Ainger,~A., quoted, 334, 337, 346, 348, 
 
 351 
 
 Aitken, G. A. , quoted, 135, 139 
 Alcott, B. , quoted, 780. 794 
 "Alhambra, The," quoted, 723, 724 
 "All Fools' Day," quoted, 340, 342 
 "American Note-Book," Haw- 
 thorne's, quoted, 759 
 "A Modest Proposal," etc., Swift, 
 
 quoted, 182 
 
 "Amos Barton, "quoted, 584, 587, 604 
 "Ancient Medals," Addison on, 
 quoted, 113 
 
 Anderson, W. , quoted, 73 
 
 "Anglo-American Church, The," 
 Newman on, quoted, 502 
 
 " Animadversions," etc., Milton's, 
 quoted, 32, 38 
 
 " Apologia," Newman's, quoted, 
 497 
 
 "Apology for Smectymnuus," Mil- 
 ton's, quoted, 39 
 
 '' A Pretended Letter," Swift's, quot- 
 ed, 186 
 
 " Areopagitica," quoted, 33, 37, 44 
 
 Arnold, acumen, his critical, 509 ; 
 bibliography on, 508-509 ; biogra- 
 phy of 507-508 ; classic finish of, 
 522 ; clearness of, 522 ; cool, sting- 
 ing satire of, 520 ; critical acumen 
 of, 509 ; deep moral sympathy, his 
 lack of, 515 ; despondency of, 517 ; 
 doubt of, 515 ; finish, his classic, 
 522 ; insight, his literary, 509 ; in- 
 tellectuality of, 511 ; intellectual 
 superciliousness of, 519; literary 
 insight of, 509 ; lack of deep moral 
 sympathy, his, 515 ; melancholy of, 
 517; moral superciliousness of, 519; 
 moral sympathy, his lack of. 515 ; 
 phrases, his stock, 513 ; purity of, 
 522 ; quoted as critic, 40, 257, 271, 
 277, 5.17. 549, 778, 789. 792, 798 I 
 repetition of, 513 ; satire, his cool, 
 520 ; stinging satire of, 520 ; stock 
 phrases of, 513 ; suggestiveness of, 
 511 ; superciliousness of, 519 ; 
 sympathy, his lack of, 515 
 
 Arnold, A. S. , quoted, 550 
 
 Arnold, Thomas, quoted, 76 
 
 "Art," Emerson on, 794 
 
 " A Tale of Two Cities," quoted, 
 617, 642 
 
 Athenteum^ quoted, 470 
 
 "At Sea," quoted, 835 
 
 "Autobiography,'' De Quincey's, 
 quoted, 401, 408, 415, 419 
 
 "Autocrat at the Breakfast Table, 
 The," quoted, 841. 842, 843, 844, 
 845, 846, 848, 850, 852, 853, 855, 
 856, 857, 858, 860, 862, 863 
 
 865
 
 866 
 
 INDEX 
 
 BACON, analysis by, 10 ; biographi- 
 cal outline of, 1-5 ; bibliography 
 on, 5 ; characteristics of, 7-19 ; 
 biblical quotation by, 15 ; classical 
 quotation by, 15 ; conciseness of, 
 7 ; elevation (intellectual) of, 18 ; 
 eloquence of, 17 ; imagery of, n ; 
 knowledge of human nature of, 13 ; 
 Latin derivatives used by, 16 ; ob- 
 solete words of, 16 ; sagacity of, 
 
 13 
 " Bacon," Macaulay's Essay on, 
 
 quoted, 427, 435, 437, 443 
 Bagehot, W., quoted, 46, 477, 620, 
 
 625, 630 
 
 ' Barnaby Rudge," quoted, 654 
 Bartol, C. A., quoted, 792 
 Barton, B., quoted, 332 
 Bascom, J., quoted, 88, 96, 128, 132, 
 
 140, 248 
 " Battle of the Books, The," quoted, 
 
 192, 197 
 Bayne, Peter, quoted, 34, 400, 407, 
 
 408, 460, 478, 481, 488, 534, 536. 
 
 539. 543, 6 59- 663. 665, 668, 671, 
 
 678, 685 
 
 " Behavior," Emerson on, 776 
 Benson, E., quoted, 765 
 Besant, Walter, quoted, 277 
 " Bickerstaff," Steele on, quoted, 
 
 130, 142 
 Birrell, A., quoted, 41, 43, 48, 246, 
 
 257, 261, 266, 336, 341, 498, 502, 
 
 5>5, 514, 539. 543- 546, 560 
 Black, William, quoted, 208, 212, 
 
 218, 221, 223, 224, 226, 228, 233 
 Blackwood's Magazine, quoted, 623 
 Blair quoted, 187 
 "Bleak House," quoted, 631, 639, 
 
 645 
 
 Blind, M., quoted, 588 
 " Blithedale Romance.The," quoted, 
 
 761, 763, 765 
 Bos well, quoted, 273 
 Boswell's " Life of Johnson," quoted, 
 
 280 
 Boswell's "Life of Johnson," Car- 
 
 lyle on, quoted, 535 
 Boswell's "Life of Johnson," Ma- 
 
 caulay on, quoted, 447 
 Bradfield, F., quoted, 766 
 Bremer, F., quoted, 795 
 Brimley, G., quoted, 483 
 Bristol, Burke's speech at, quoted, 
 
 3H 
 
 Bronte, C. , quoted, 474 
 Brooke, Stopford. quoted, 31, 39, 
 
 475. 605. 679. 68 1 
 Brougham, quoted, 248, 249, 271, 
 
 274 
 
 Brown, E E., quoted, 826 
 
 Brown, John, quoted, 65, 79, 81 
 
 Brown, J. C. , quoted, 582 
 
 Brown, R. C. , quoted, 343 
 
 Brown, S. G., quoted, 417 
 
 Browne, M., quoted, 747 
 
 Browning, O., quoted, 588 
 
 Bryant, quoted, 705, 710, 712, 718 
 
 Bulwer-Lytton, quoted, 210, 223, 
 229, 232, 350 
 
 Bunyan, biographical outline of, 50- 
 54 ; bibliography on style of, 54- 
 56 ; biblical coloring of, 74 ; char- 
 acteristics of, 56-81 ; catholicity of, 
 71 ; common-sense of, 71 ; con- 
 SCJQUS inspiration, 80 ; dramatic 
 instinct of, 78 ; earnestness of, 80 ; 
 freshness of, 56 ; homeliness of, 
 68 ; humor of, 65 ; imaginative 
 power of, 59 ; inspiration (con- 
 scious) of, 80 ; latent satire of, 65 ; 
 naturalness of, 62 ; quiet humor of, 
 66 ; portraiture of, 59 ; realism of, 
 67 ; satire of, 65 ; spirituality of, 
 74 ; sympathy of, 76 ; tenderness 
 of, 76 ; terseness of, 56 ; vigor of, 
 56 
 
 Burke, ancient institutions, his ven- 
 eration for, 309 ; apothegm of, 368 ; 
 biographical outline of, 282-289 ; 
 bibliography on style of, 289-291 ; 
 catholicity of, 312 ; coarseness of, 
 299 ; conservatism of, 309 ; didac- 
 ticism of, 308 ; elevation, mental 
 and moral of, 302 ; eloquence of, 
 291 ; erudition of, 304 ; excessive 
 imagery of, 295 ; fondness for 
 qualification, his, 314 ; grandeur, 
 his Miltonic, 291 ; imagery, his 
 excessive, 293 ; imagination, his 
 vivid, 319 ; impassioned eloquence 
 of. 291 ; invective of, 299 ; institu- 
 tions, his fondness for ancient, 309 ; 
 knowledge, vast, of, 304 ; mental 
 and moral elevation of, 302 ; Mil- 
 tonic grandeur of, 291 ; pathos, his 
 stern, 317 ; profuse imagery of, 
 295 ; qualification, his fondness for, 
 314 ; rapidity of, 321 ; ridicule of, 
 299 ; stern pathos of, 317 ; tolera- 
 tion of, 312 ; use of apothegm, his, 
 368 ; veneration, his, for ancient 
 institutions, 308 ; vivid imagina- 
 tion of, 319 
 
 Burns, Carlyle's Essay on, quoted, 
 537 
 
 Burroughs, J., quoted, 510, 512, 515, 
 522, 538, 540, 548, 552, 557, 561, 
 774, 777. 782, 785, 789, 793 
 
 Burton, quoted, 419
 
 INDEX 
 
 867 
 
 , De Quincey's Essay on, 
 quoted, 398, 411 
 
 Caird, E. , quoted, 563 
 
 " Callista's Vision," quoted, 501 
 
 Campbell, Thomas, quoted, 221, 232 
 
 "Captain Carleton, Memoirs of," 
 quoted, 160, 162 
 
 Canning, A. S. G. , quoted, 366, 369 
 
 Carlyle, absurd incongruity, his por- 
 trayal of, 545 ; apostrophe of, 566 ; 
 bibliography on style of, 528-532 ; 
 biographical outline of, 524-528 ; 
 broad sarcasm of, 537 ; chaotic 
 sentence, structure of, 552 ; charac- 
 terization, his minute, 541 ; coin- 
 age, free of, 532 ; contemptuous 
 familiarity of, 540 ; despair of, 555 ; 
 dramatic power of, 563 ; earnest- 
 ness of, 547 ; eccentricities, his 
 verbal, 532 ; effective pathos of, 
 567 ; exaltation of the individual, 
 his, 559 ; excessive ridicule of, 537 ; 
 exclamation, his fondness for, 566 ; 
 extravagant humor of, 545 ; fa- 
 miliarity of, 540; free coinage of, 
 532 ; gloominess of, 555 ; hero- 
 worship of, 559 ; humor, his extrav 
 agant, 555 ; imagery, his profuse, 
 535 ; incongruity, his portrayal of, 
 545 ; individualization of, 541 ; in- 
 dividual, his exaltation of the, 559 ; 
 interrogation, his fondness for, 566 ; 
 lamentation of, 555 ; minute char- 
 acterization of, 541 ; nicknames, 
 his use of, 540 ; portraiture, his 
 skill in, 563 ; power, his dramatic, 
 563 ; profuse imagery of, 535 ; 
 quoted, as critic, 44, 244, 252, 253, 
 256, 263, 264, 269, 276, 371, 402, 
 470, 634, 668 ; rare but effective 
 pathos of, 567 ; ridicule, his ex- 
 cessive, 537 ; rugged sincerity of, 
 547 ; sarcasm, his broad, 537 ; sen- 
 tence structure, his chaotic, 552 ; 
 sincerity, his rugged, 547 ; struct- 
 ure, chaotic, of his sentences, 552 ; 
 skill, his, in portraiture, 563; verbal 
 eccentricities of, 532 ; vividness of, 
 563 ; worship, his, of heroes, 559 
 
 Gary, quoted, 271 
 
 "Catholicism in England," New- 
 man on, quoted, 506 
 
 Chadwick, J. W., quoted, 841, 851 
 
 Chalmers, Dr., quoted, 216 
 
 Chambers, quoted, 624 
 
 Channing, W. E. , quoted, 36, 49, 
 I2i, 124, 136, 141, 209, 212, 221, 
 232 
 
 " Character," Emerson on, 783, 790, 
 797 
 
 Cheever, G. B., quoted, 57, 60, 68, 
 
 72. 74 
 Cheney, ]. V., quoted, 509,513,518, 
 
 744 
 
 Child, L. M., quoted, 617 
 " Child Angel, The," quoted, 349 
 "Children," Bacon's Essay on, 
 
 quoted, 9 
 " Chimney Sweepers, The Praise of," 
 
 quoted, 337 
 " Christianity," De Quincey's Essay 
 
 on, quoted, 404, 416 
 Christian Examiner, quoted, 416 
 " Christian Justice," quoted, 666 
 Church, R. W., quoted, 8, n 
 " Citizen of the World, A," quoted, 
 
 222, 224, 227, 229 
 Clive, Lord, Macaulay on, quoted, 
 
 445 
 Coleridge, Lamb's Letter to, quoted, 
 
 345 
 
 Coleridge, quoted, 64, 126, 343 
 Collier, W. F., quoted, 12, 69, 128, 
 
 138, 252, 266, 371, 538, 549, 552, 
 
 614, 625 
 
 11 Compensation," Emerson on, 798 
 " Conciliation with America*'' Burke 
 
 on, quoted, 309, 314 
 " Conduct of the Allies, The," 
 
 quoted, 184, 186 
 
 ' Conduct of Life," quoted, 672 
 Cone, H. M., quoted, 843 
 "Confessions of an Opium Eater," 
 
 quoted. 399, 401, 403, 406, 407, 410, 
 
 413 
 
 " Conquest of Granada," quoted, 
 716 
 
 Cooke, G. W., quoted, 576, 580, 589, 
 591, 594. 598, 602, 603. 606, 663, 
 665, 671, 675, 677, 682, 686, 687, 
 690, 792 
 
 Courthope, W. J., quoted, 94, 98, 
 104, 108, 112, 114, 127, 257, 266 
 
 Craik, G. L., 12, 155, 158, 165, 180, 
 183, 185, 187, 189, 192, 194,254, 260, 
 276 
 
 " Crests," Ruskin on, quoted, 683 
 
 Croker, J. M., quoted, 644 
 
 Cromwell, Carlyle's Essay on, quot- 
 ed, 537, 569 
 
 "Culture and Anarchy, quoted, 
 512, 513, 520. 521 
 
 Cunningham, A., quoted, 350 
 
 Curtis, G. W., quoted, 342, 703, 711, 
 723, 735, 74i- 747, 750, 754, 755, 
 764, 813, 815, 823, 825, 833, 843, 
 
 855 
 
 DANA, R. H., quoted, 701, 716 
 " Daniel Deronda," quoted, 603
 
 868 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Davey, S., quoted, 400, 407, 411, 412, 
 
 417, 545. 548, 568, 632, 640, 646 
 " David Copperfield," quoted, 617 
 " David Swan," quoted, 744 
 Dawson, G., quoted, 41, 49, 58, 60, 
 64, 70, 77, 165, 209, 212, 215, 225, 
 231, 257, 266, 271, 277, 336, 341, 
 462, 511, 515, 517, 521, 523, 533, 
 
 553. 56o. 564, 593 
 
 Dawson, W. J., quoted, 378, 384 
 
 " Dead Folk. ' Steele on, quoted, 
 129 
 
 " Decay of Beggars, The," quoted, 
 336. 339 
 
 11 Defense of the English People," 
 quoted, 35, 39, 44, 49 
 
 Defoe, biography of, 143-150 ; bibli- 
 ography on, 150-152 ; description, 
 his graphic, 166 ; didacticism of, 
 161 ; graphic description of, 166 ; 
 homeliness of, 154 ; independence 
 of, 165 ; minuteness of, 152 ; moral 
 aim of, 161 ; realism of, 156 ; sa- 
 gacity of, 163 ; sarcasm of, 160 ; 
 sincerity of, 165 ; undisguised sar- 
 casm of, 160 ; verisimilitude of, 
 156 ; worldly wisdom of, 163. 
 
 Demosthenes, De Quincey's Essay 
 on, quoted, 400 
 
 Dennett, J. R., quoted, 752 
 
 Dennis, J., quoted, 155, 161, 366, 
 369, 374, 386. 387 
 
 De Quincey, affected familiarity of, 
 410 ; biographical outline of, 353- 
 361 ; bibliography on the style of, 
 361-364 ; character, his insight 
 into, 418 ; digression, his inveter- 
 ate, 399 ; excessive qualification of, 
 397 ; erudition of, 408 ; extensive 
 range of, 408 ; faith, his profound 
 religious, 415; familiarity of, 410; 
 forced homeliness of, 410 ; gro- 
 tesque humor of, 412 ; inveterate 
 digression of, 399 ; homeliness of, 
 410 ; humor, his grotesque, 412 ; 
 independence of, 417 ; insight, his, 
 into character, 418 ; mysterious, his 
 sense of the, 406; originality of, 417; 
 perception, his, of resemblances, 
 414 ; precision, his scrupulous, 
 401 ; playful humor of, 412 ; pro- 
 found religious faith of, 415 ; qual- 
 ification, his excessive, 397 ; quoted 
 as critic, in, 207, 213, 215, 217, 
 224. 337. 340, 343. 348, 400, 402, 
 405, 414, 519; range, his exten- 
 sive, 408 ; religious faith of, 415 ; 
 resemblances, his perception of, 
 414 ; reverence of, 415 ; rhythm, 
 his stately, 404 ; scrupulous pre- 
 
 cision of, 401 ; sense, his, of the 
 mysterious, 406 ; slang of, 410 ; 
 stately rhythm of, 404 ; subtlety 
 of, 397; suspense, his excessive, 
 
 397 
 
 " Deserted Village, The," quoted, 
 229 
 
 Devey, J., quoted, 366, 372, 374, 379, 
 383, 384. 386, 388 
 
 " Diamond Necklace, The,' 1 quoted, 
 540, 541, 567 
 
 Dickens, animal spirits of, 631 ; arti- 
 ficiality of, 643 ; bibliography on 
 his style, 609 ; biographical outline 
 of, 607 ; broad sympathy of, 635 ; 
 caricature, his fondness for, 613 ; 
 characteristics, his incarnation of, 
 620 ; descriptive power of, 624 ; 
 diffuseness of, 646 ; dramatic pow- 
 er of, 640 ; earnestness of, 634 ; 
 exaggeration of, 613 ; fellowship, 
 his good, 631 ; fondness, his, for 
 caricature, 613 ; gayety of, 631 ; 
 genial humor of, 617 ; good-fellow- 
 ship of, 631 ; grotesqueness of, 613; 
 humanity, his practical, 635 ; hu- 
 mor, his genial, 617 ; incarnation 
 of characteristics by, 620 ; manli- 
 ness of, 634 ; mawkish pathos of, 
 628 ; minuteness of, 624 ; observa- 
 tion, his power of, 624 ; pathos of, 
 628 ; power, his descriptive, 624 ; 
 power, his dramatic, 640 ; practical 
 humanity of, 635 ; quoted as critic, 
 604, 616, 638 ; sincerity of, 634 ; 
 single strokes of, 620 ; spirits, his 
 animal, 631 ; strokes, his single, 
 620 ; sympathy, his broad, 635 ; 
 tender pathos of, 628 ; vividness 
 of. 624 ; vulgarity, his alleged, 643 
 
 ''Discipline," Newman on, quoted, 
 498 
 
 " Discourses in America," Arnold's, 
 quoted, 519 
 
 Disraeli, I., quoted, n 
 
 " Divorce,'' Milton on, quoted, 32, 
 
 35, 37. 44 
 Dobson, A., quoted, 126, 129, 134, 
 
 223, 231 
 " Doing as One Likes," Arnold on, 
 
 quoted, 515 
 Dolby, quoted, 632 
 " Dombey and Son,'' quoted, 635, 
 
 647 
 Dowden, E. , quoted, 228, 350, 583, 
 
 592,594- 599. 722, 774 
 Drake. N. , quoted, 133, 135 
 Drake, S. A., quoted, 764 
 ' Drapier's Letters, The," quoted, 
 
 1 84,- 1 90
 
 INDEX 
 
 869 
 
 " Dryden, 1 ' Lowell on, 831 
 Dulcken, quoted, 373 
 
 " EARS, A Chapter on," quoted, 344, 
 
 347 
 
 Edinburgh Review, quoted, 472, 475, 
 624 
 
 11 Education of Ladies," Swift on, 
 quoted, 198 
 
 "Edwin Drood, 1 ' quoted, 620 
 
 Eliot, George, analysis of character, 
 her psychological, 575 ; artistic use 
 of dialect, her, 601 ; bibliography 
 on the style of, 572-575 ; biograph- 
 ical outline of, 570-572 ; broad 
 sympathy of, 581 ; character, her 
 psychological analysis of, 575 ; 
 contemplative humor of, 590 ; deep 
 religious feeling of, 597 ; delicate 
 pathos of, 674 ; depreciation of in- 
 dividualism by, 605 ; despair of, 
 593 ; description of rural life by, 
 599 ; dialect, her artistic use of, 
 601 ; erudition, her wide, 587 ; 
 feeling, her deep religious, 597 ; 
 homely types, her preference for, 
 579 ; humor, her quiet, 590 ; im- 
 agery, her scientific, 587 ; individ- 
 ualism, her depreciation of, 605 ; 
 labored satire of, 602 ; melancholy 
 of, 593; moral purpose of, 597; 
 occasional pedantry of, 587 ; pa- 
 thos, her delicate, 604 ; pedantry, 
 her occasional, 587 ; pessimism of, 
 593 ; picturesque description by, 
 599; portraiture, her power of, 585; 
 power of portraiture of, 585 ; pref- 
 erence for homely types by, 579 ; 
 psychological analysis by, 575 ; 
 purpose, her deep moral, 597 ; 
 quiet humor of, 590; range of, 
 585 ; religious feeling of, 597 ; ru- 
 ral life, her description of, 599 ; 
 sarcasm of, 602 ; satire, her la- 
 bored, 602 ; scenery, her descrip- 
 tion of rural, 599 ; scientific imag- 
 ery of, 587 ; sympathy, her broad, 
 581 ; tolerance of, 581 ; types, her 
 preference for homely, 579 ; useoi 
 dialect by, 601 ; wide erudition of, 
 
 587 
 
 " Emancipation Address," Emer- 
 son's, quoted, 794 
 
 Emerson, aphorism of, 774 ; beauty, 
 his sense of, 786 ; bibliography on 
 style of, 772-774 ; biographical out- 
 line of, 768-772 ; courtliness of, 795; 
 dignity of, 795 ; dignified irony of, 
 795; epigram of, 774; gravity of, 
 795 ; idealism of, 794 ; imagery, 
 
 his poetic, 786 ; independence of, 
 784 ; individuality of, 784 ; intro- 
 spection of, 787 ; irony, his digni- 
 fied, 797 ; logical sequence, his 
 lack of, 777 ; lack of logical se- 
 quence, his, 777 ; mysticism of, 
 781 ; optimism of, 791 ; originality 
 of, 784 ; poetic imagery of, 786 ; 
 quoted as critic, 538, 543, 546, 549, 
 553- 557. 559, 7 8 9 ; sequence, his 
 lack of, 777 ; sense ot beauty of, 
 786 ; sincerity of, 7^,0 ; subjective- 
 ness of, 781 ; suggestiveness of, 
 789 ; terseness of, 774 
 
 " Empedocles on .-Etna, 1 ' quoted, 
 517. Si8 
 
 "Employment of Authors," quoted, 
 275 
 
 " English Humorists, The," quoted, 
 471 
 
 '' English Note-Book," Hawthorne's, 
 quoted, 756 
 
 "English Writers on America," 
 quoted, 702 
 
 " Envy," Bacon's Essay on, quoted, 
 10, 13, 15, 16 
 
 Escott, T. H. S., quoted, 453 
 
 Essays, Goldsmith's, quoted, 213, 
 216, 224, 226 
 
 Essays, De Quincey's, quoted, 403, 
 
 415 
 " Essays in Criticism," Arnold's, 
 
 quoted, 510, 511, 514, 520, 521 
 Essenes, De Quincey's Essay on the, 
 
 quoted, 411 
 Eternity, De Quincey on, quoted, 
 
 415 
 "Everybody's Business," quoted, 
 
 156 ' 
 Everett, E., quoted, 706, 718 
 
 " FALLACY, OF THE PATHETIC," 
 
 quoted, 679 
 
 " Fancy's Show-Box," quoted, 743 
 " Farming." Emerson on, 797 
 " Felix Holt," quoted, 587, 601, 602 
 Felton, C. C. , quoted, 347 
 Fields, J. S. , quoted, 632, 637 
 11 Fitzboodle's Confessions," quoted, 
 
 491 
 
 " Fors Clavigera," 1 quoted, 668, 687 
 Forster, J. , quoted, 185, 209, 225, 
 
 227, 232, 623. 625, 641 
 Franklin, quoted, 79 
 "French Revolution," Carlyle's, 
 
 quoted. 544. 545, 555, 558, 565', 567 
 " Friendship," Emerson on, 781, 784, 
 
 797 
 Friswell, J. H. , quoted, 140, 644, 
 
 688
 
 8;o 
 
 INDEX 
 
 " From London to Land's End," 
 
 quoted, 167 
 Froude, J. A., quoted, 59, 499, 500, 
 
 542, 550, 553. 563 
 Fuller, M., quoted, 713 
 
 GALTON, A., quoted. 512 
 
 Gilder. R. W. , quoted, 847 
 
 Giles, H., quoted, 213, 218,407, 410, 
 
 414. 415 
 
 Gilfillan, George, quoted, 31, 66, 
 80. 332. 335- 380. 399, 453. 779, 782. 
 787 
 
 Gilman, N. P., quoted, 197 
 
 "God and the Bible," Arnold on, 
 quoted, 516 
 
 Godwin, P., quoted, 463, 466, 469, 
 477, 482. 665, 671, 678, 689 
 
 Goethe, Carlyle's Essay on, quoted, 
 537 
 
 Goethe, quoted, 207, 214, 230, 365 
 
 Goldsmith, antithesis of, 234 ; bib- 
 liography on the style of, 205-207 ; 
 biographical outline of, 199-204 ; 
 broad sympathy of, 213 ; cheerful- 
 ness of, 224 ; choice of words, his 
 nice. 228 ; comical extravagance 
 of, 226 ; concise diction of, 228 ; 
 delicate pathos of, 223 ; declama- 
 tion, his mock heroic, 233 ; dic- 
 tion, his concise, 228 ; ease, his 
 graceful, 207 ; epigram of, 224 ; 
 extravagance of, 226 ; fidelity of, 
 220 ; graceful ease of, 207 ; homeli- 
 ness of, 210 ; humanity, his love of, 
 213 ; irony, his mild, 217 ; love of 
 humanity, his, 213 ; mild irony of, 
 217 ; mock-heroic declamation of, 
 233 ; moral tone, his high, 229 ; 
 naturalness of, 210 ; nice choice of 
 words, his, 228 ; optimism of, 224 ; 
 portraiture, his power of, 220 ; 
 pleasantry of, 217 ; quoted, as 
 critic, 210, 244, 274, 275 ; sim- 
 plicity of, 210 ; sympathy, his 
 broad, 213 ; tone, his high moral, 
 229 ; turn, his unexpected, 234 ; un- 
 expected turn of, 234 ; wit of, 226 
 
 " Good Manners," Swift's Essay on, 
 quoted, 193 
 
 " Good-Natured Man, The," quot- 
 ed, 224, 227, 235 
 
 "Goodness," Bacon's Essay on, 
 quoted. 9. 13 
 
 " Gospel of Dilettantism," Carlyle 
 on the, quoted, 535 
 
 Gosse, E., quoted, 61, 91, 103, 112, 
 116, 126, 156, 180, 183, 193, 197, 
 211, 254, 261, 853 
 
 " Grace Abounding," quoted, 58, 61, 
 65. 73, 81 
 
 " Grande Chartreuse, The," quoted, 
 
 5i6 
 
 Grant, C. F., quoted, 273 
 "Great Place," Bacon's Essay on, 
 
 quoted, 9, 13, 17 
 Greek Literature, De Quincey on, 
 
 quoted, 411 
 
 Green, J, R., quoted, 75, 91, 102, 106 
 Greg, W. R., quoted, 568 
 Grimm, quoted, 453, 775, 789, 795 
 Guardian, The, quoted, 113, 128 
 "Gulliver's Travels," quoted, 195 
 
 HALE, E. E., quoted, 843 
 Hallam, quoted, 12, 38, 57, 75, 102 
 Hallam's " Constitutional History," 
 
 Macaulay on, quoted, 448 
 " Hall of Fantasy, The," quoted, 756 
 Hamilton, James, quoted, 58, 72, 77 
 Hannay, J., quoted, 179, 194 
 " Hard Times," quoted, 647 
 Harper's Magazine, quoted, 416 
 Harrison, Frederic, quoted, 487, 588, 
 
 600, 618 
 Hastings, Macaulay 's Essay on, 
 
 quoted, 441, 483 
 Hatfield, J. T., quoted, 810 
 Haweis, H. R., quoted, 706, 711, 
 
 810. 819, 821, 826, 829, 855 
 Hawthorne, J. , quoted, 713, 745, 750, 
 
 779. 793 
 
 Hawthorne, N., bibliography on style 
 of, 732-734 ; biographical outline 
 of, 725-732 ; clearness of, 759 ; deli- 
 cate sensibility of, 755 ; descrip- 
 tion, his vivid, 757 ; fatalism of, 
 747 ; fidelity of, 757 ; high moral 
 tone of, 765 ; humor, his sly, 749 ; 
 idealism of, 762 ; imaginative pow- 
 er of, 744 ; insight, his profound 
 moral,- 739 ; melancholy of, 751 ; 
 moral tone, his high, 765 ; moral 
 insight of, 739 ; morbidness of, 
 751 ; mysticism of, 734 ; natural 
 simplicity of, 759 ; picturesqueness 
 f. 757 1 profound moral insight 
 f, 739 I quietism of, 747; quoted, 
 as critic, 738,754; romanticism of, 
 762 ; self-reflection of, 764 ; sen- 
 sibility of, 755 ; simplicity of, 759; 
 sly humor of, 749 ; semi-fatalism 
 ' 747 1 tone, his high moral, 
 76; ; vivid description of, 757 ; 
 weirdness of, 734 
 
 Hazeltine, quoted, 739 
 
 Hazlitt, William, quoted, 7, 9, 10. 14, 
 18,90, C7, 106, in, 113, 120, 123, 
 130, 138, 165, 178, 183, 209, 248, 
 252, 257, 258, 262, 266, 267, 272, 
 274, -278, 280, 332, 334, 336, 339, 
 342, 343
 
 INDEX 
 
 8 7 I 
 
 " Heart of Midlothian.The," quoted, 
 
 385, 388 
 Heine, Arnold's Essay on, quoted, 
 
 523 
 
 Henley, W. E. , quoted, 467, 469, 
 479, 481, 534, 556, 589, 598, 614, 
 636, 644 
 
 "Henry Esmond," quoted, 487 
 
 "Heroes and Hero-worship," 
 quoted, 536. 539, 541, 562 
 
 " Heroism,'' Emerson on, 786, 791 
 
 Higginson, T. W., quoted, 742, 758, 
 760, 776 
 
 Hill, D. J., quoted, 705, 715 
 
 Hillard, G. S., quoted, 735 
 
 History, Carlyle's Essay on, quoted, 
 567 
 
 '' History." Emerson on, 780, 790 
 
 " History of England," Macaulay's, 
 quoted, 427, 428, 432, 435, 443, 
 445, 447. 448, 449, 452 
 
 Hodgson, S. H., quoted, 417 
 
 " Hoggarty Diamond, The Great," 
 quoted, 477 
 
 Holmes, badinage, his graceful, 846 ; 
 bibliography on the style of, 838 ; 
 biographical outline of, 837 ; buoy- 
 ancy of, 840 ; colloquial habit of, 
 842 ; earnestness of, 859 ; epigram 
 of, 854 ; exuberant wit of, 849 ; 
 familiarity of, 842 ; fanciful humor 
 of, 850; fancy, his sportive, 855; 
 graceful badinage of, 846 ; grace- 
 ful philosophy of, 862 ; habit, his 
 colloquial, 842 ; honesty of, 857 ; 
 humor, his fanciful, 850 ; ingenious 
 speculation of, 862 ; localism of, 
 860 ; manliness of, 857 ; optimism 
 of, 840 ; pathos of, 852 ; philoso- 
 phy, his graceful, 862 ; piquant 
 satire of, 846 ; point of, 854 ; pur- 
 pose, his serious, 859 ; paradox, 
 his whimsical, 854 ; quoted as 
 critic, 541, 760, 791, 738, 810. 818, 
 859 ; revelation of himself, 842 ; 
 satire, his piquant, 846 ; sectional- 
 ism of, 860 ; self-revelation of, 842 ; 
 serious purpose of, 859 ; simple 
 treatment of weighty themes, 844 ; 
 sincerity of, 847 ; speculation, his 
 ingenious, 862 ; sportive fancy of, 
 855 ; unconventionality of, 844 ; 
 weighty themes, his treatment of, 
 844 ; whimsical paradox of, 854 ; 
 youthfulness of. 840 
 
 ''Holy War," the, quoted, 70, 71, 
 76, 78, 80 
 
 Hood, E. P. , quoted, 546 
 
 Hood, T., quoted, 337 
 
 Home, J. XV., quoted, 795 
 
 Home, R. H., quoted, 615, 618,621, 
 
 622, 625, 630, 639 
 Hornebrooke, F. B. , quoted, 496 
 " House of the Seven Gables, 
 
 The," quoted, 739, 749, 751, 759 
 H owells. W. D. . quoted, 488, 843 
 Howitt, W., quoted, 368 
 Hunt, Leigh, quoted, 227, 229, 247, 
 
 265,335, 34L 419 
 
 Hunt, T. W. , quoted, 102, 115, 179, 
 186, 193, 274, 276, 280, 334, 340, 
 
 346, 397. 404. 414, 417, 5 12 - 514, 
 517, 520, 787, 796 
 
 Hutton, R. H., quoted. 364, 377, 
 495, 496, 498, 501, 505, 510, 516, 
 517, 518, 523, 539, 564, 596, 762, 
 766, 736. 740, 745, 747, 750, 753 
 
 " IDEA of a University, The," New- 
 man on, quoted, 505 
 
 Idler, The, quoted, 263, 267 
 
 "Impeachment of Hastings," 
 Burke's, quoted, 294 
 
 " Imperfect Sympathies," Lamb on, 
 quoted, 347 
 
 " Intelligence Office, The," quoted, 
 
 749, 755, 759 
 " Invisible World, The," Newman 
 
 on, quoted, 504 
 " Irish Journey," Carlyle's, quoted, 
 
 535. 567 
 
 Irving, Edward, Carlyle on his 
 death, quoted, 569 
 
 Irving, W. , bibliography on his 
 style, 698; biographical outline of, 
 693 ; contemplation of, 712 ; deep 
 pathos of, 708 ; dreaminess of, 700 ; 
 ease of, 702 ; elegance of, 717 ; fin- 
 ish of, 717 ; fondness for tradition, 
 his, 720 ; grace of, 702 ; humor, his 
 spontaneous, 704 ; kindly satire of, 
 710 ; melancholy, his mild, 712 ; 
 mild melancholy of, 712 ; mildness 
 of, 700 ; pathos, his deep, 708 ; pic- 
 turesqueness of, 714 ; quiet grace 
 of, 702 ; quoted as critic, 211. 215, 
 218, 222, 223, 225, 229, 230. 376 ; 
 romanticism of, 720 ; satire, his 
 kindly, 710; serenity of, 700; 
 smoothness of, 717 ; spontaneous 
 humor of, 704 ; sympathy of, 708 ; 
 tenderness of, 708 ; tradition, his 
 fondness for, 720 
 
 " Italian Notes," Hawthorne's, 
 quoted, 748 
 
 " Ivanhoe," quoted, 367, 370, 375, 
 378, 381, 385, 388, 390 
 
 JACOBS, J., quoted, 513, 521 
 James, H., quoted, 737, 742, 745,
 
 8/2 
 
 INDEX 
 
 750, 758. 761. 763, 778, 785, 810. 
 812, 815, 819, 821. 826, 834 
 
 "Janet's Repentance,'' quoted, 581, 
 592, ooj 
 
 Jeaffreson, J. C. , quoted, 462, 479, 
 489 
 
 Jeffrey, F., quoted, 181, 184, 188, 
 191. 194, 196, 374. 377, 385, 617, 
 630, 638, 719 
 
 "Joan of Arc," De Quincey on, 
 quoted, 412, 419 
 
 Johnson, abstract nouns, his per- 
 sonification of, 281 ; antithesis of, 
 247 ; balance of, 247 ; biographical 
 outline of, 236-241 ; bibliography 
 on style of, 241-244 ; brusque- 
 ness of, 273 ; conservatism of, 267 ; 
 despondency of, 263 ; diction, his 
 Latinized, 244; didacticism of, 249; 
 gravity of, 258 ; harshness of, 273 ; 
 heaviness of, 258 ; humor of. 279 ; 
 independence of, 253 ; intolerance 
 of, 267 ; kindness of, 275 ; Latin- 
 ized diction of, 274 ; melancholy 
 of, 263 ; nouns, his personification 
 of abstract, 281 ; personification, 
 his, of abstract nouns, 281 ; philos- 
 ophizing, his fondness for, 249 ; 
 piety of, 253 ; point of, 247 ; pomp 
 of, 258 ; prejudice of, 267 ; quoted, 
 as critic, 43, 47, 91, 97, 100, 104, 
 106, 179, 188, 208, 209, 228, 244, 
 258, 264 ; religious superstition of, 
 277 ; sincerity of, 253 ; sturdy con- 
 servatism of, 267 ; sympathy of, 
 275 ; triteness of, 279 
 
 Journal, Lowell's, quoted, 8n, 827, 
 834 
 
 " Journal of the Plague," quoted, 
 !53. 159. 164, 166 
 
 Judas Iscariot, De Quincey's Essay 
 on, quoted, 400 
 
 KEBBBL, T. E., quoted, 452. 541, 
 
 S5i, 561, 567 
 
 " Kenilworth, 1 ' quoted, 381, 389 
 Kennedy, W. S., quoted, 847, 853, 
 
 861, 863 
 " Kingdoms and Estates," Bacon's 
 
 Essay on, quoted, 16 
 Kingsley, Charles, quoted, 137 
 " Knickerbocker History of New 
 
 York," quoted, 707, 708, 711 
 Knowles, S. , quoted, 234 
 
 LAMB, acumen (critical) of, 350 ; 
 antique, his fondness for the, 331 ; 
 amiable humor of, 340 ; biograph- 
 ical outline of, 323-328 ; bibliog- 
 raphy of, 328-331 ; companion- 
 
 ability of, 337 ; critical acumen of, 
 350 ; delicate fancy of, 347 ; 
 discursiveness of, 352 ; ease, 
 his graceful, 337; egoism, his un- 
 selfish, 345 ; epigram of, 343 ; 
 fancy, his delicate, 347 ; fondness 
 for the antique, his, 331 ; graceful 
 ease of, 337 ; humanity, his sym- 
 pathy with, 334 ; humor, his ami- 
 able, 340 ; melancholy of, 350 ; 
 paronomasia of, 343 ; quaintness 
 of, 331 ; quoted as critic, 153, 155, 
 33 1 , 33 2 . 334, 346; sympathy of. 
 with humanity, 334; tenderness of, 
 334 ; unselfish egoism of, 345 ; wit 
 of, 343 
 
 Lancaster, H. H. , quoted, 461, 466, 
 470. 474, 478, 481, 483, 485, 488, 
 491, 658, 676, 685 
 Landon, L. E. , quoted, 372, 388 
 Landor, W. S., quoted, 630 
 '' Lane," Bacon's Essay on, quoted, 
 Lane-Poole, S., quoted, 184, 188 
 Lang, A., quoted, 57, 123, 125, 129, 
 
 i3 l . J 37, 140, 469, 618 
 Langford, P., quoted, 78 
 " Lapse of Time, The," quoted, 496 
 " Last Words on America," Arn- 
 old's, quoted, 520 
 Lathrop, G. P., quoted, 742, 746, 749, 
 
 756, 849 
 
 Lecky, quoted, 189, 192, 194 
 Letter of Milton, quoted, 46 
 " Letter to the Duke of Norfolk,'' 
 
 Newman's, quoted, 501 
 "Letter to a Young Lady," etc., 
 
 Swift's, quoted, 186, 192 
 " Letter to a Young Clergyman," 
 
 Swift's, quoted, 180 
 " Letter to Mr. Pope," Swift's, quot- 
 ed, 198 
 11 Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol," 
 
 Burke's, quoted, 314 
 " Letter to a Noble Lord," Burke's, 
 
 quoted, 299, 304, 319, 321 
 " Letter to Sir Charles Bingham," 
 
 Burke's, quoted, 317 
 Letters of Johnson, quoted, 277, 280 
 Letters, Lamb's, quoted, 350 
 Lewes, G. H. , quoted, 630, 638 
 " Life of Butler,' 1 Johnson's, quoted, 
 
 263 
 " Life of Pope," Johnson's, quoted, 
 
 257 
 
 '' Life of Savage," Johnson's, quot- 
 ed, 247 
 
 "Life of Dryden," Johnson's, quot- 
 ed, 250 
 
 " Life of Blackmore,' 1 Johnson's, 
 quoted., 252
 
 INDEX 
 
 8/3 
 
 " Life of Fenton, Johnson's, quoted, 
 
 253 
 
 " Literary Influence of Academies," 
 Arnold on, quoted, 511 
 
 Literary World, quoted, 840 
 
 " Literature and Life," quoted, 491 
 
 ''Literature and Life, 1 ' Newman on, 
 quoted, 495 
 
 '' Little Britain," quoted, 704, 707 
 
 " Locust Plagues," Newman on, 
 quoted, 502 
 
 Lodge, H. C., quoted, 861 
 
 Longfellow, quoted. 760 
 
 Lord. J., quoted, 578, 599 
 
 "Loss and Gain," Newman on, 
 quoted, 502 
 
 " Love," Emerson on, 784, 788 
 
 " Love and Sorrow," Steele on, 
 quoted, 131 
 
 11 Lovel, the Widower," quoted, 472, 
 488 
 
 Low, Sidney, quoted, 813, Pi6, 821, 
 828 
 
 Lowell, allusiveness of, 808 ; appre- 
 ciation of nature by, 817; bibliog- 
 raphy on the style of, 806 ; bio- 
 graphical outline of, 800; brilliant 
 satire of, 823 ; colloquial ease of, 
 834 ; culture of, 808 ; deep pathos 
 of, 831 ; didacticism of, 827 ; ease, 
 his colloquial, 834; exuberant im- 
 agery of, 832 ; faith in human nat- 
 ure, his, 829 ; high moral purpose 
 of, 820 ; homeliness of, 835 ; hu- 
 man nature, his faith in, 829; hu- 
 mor of, 823 ; imagery, his exuber- 
 ant, 832; independence of, 812; 
 manliness of, 812 ; moral purpose, 
 his high, 820 ; nationalism of, 814 ; 
 nature, his appreciation of, 817 ; 
 pathos, his deep, 831 ; philanthro- 
 py of, 829 ; purpose, his high mor- 
 al, 820; quoted as critic, 31, 38, 
 40, 42, 48, 190, 460, 465, 469, 538, 
 542, 554. 556, 560. 563- fi i6, 708, 
 776, 778, 783. 789. 795- 812, 814, 
 841, 849, 851, 862 ; rare pathos of, 
 831 ; religious instinct of, 820 ; sa- 
 tire, his brilliant, 823 ; sectionalism 
 of, 814 ; vigor of, 812 ; wit of, 821 
 
 Lyall, W., quoted, 99 
 
 "Lycidas," Johnson's Criticism on, 
 275 
 
 MACAULAY, assurance of, 453 ; bal- 
 ance of, 425 ; bias of, 450 ; bib- 
 liography on style of, 422-425; 
 biographical outline of, 420-422 ; 
 character, his delineation of, 446 ; 
 clearness of, 441 ; climax, his 
 
 oratorical, 439 ; commonplace of, 
 447 ; contrast, his fondness for, 
 425 ; delineation of character, his, 
 446 ; derision, his open, 443 ; 
 egotism 01, 453 ; eloquence of, 
 439 ; epigram, his fondness for, 
 425 ; erudition of, 429 ; effect, his 
 sacrifice of fact to, 435 ; fact, his 
 sacrifice of, to effect, 435 ; fond- 
 ness of, for contrast, 425 ; form, 
 his sacrifice ol fact to, 435 ; harsh 
 invective of, 433 ; imagery, his 
 splendor of, 443 ; invective, his 
 harsh, 433 ; narrative, power of, 
 438 ; open derision, his, 433 ; ora- 
 torical climax, his, 439; ornamenta- 
 tion, his, 443 ; panoramic view, his, 
 438 ; partiality of, 450 ; patriotism 
 of, 439 ; personal portraiture, hi? 
 power of, 446 ; point, his, 425 ; 
 power of personal portraiture, his, 
 446 ; prejudice of, 450 ; profuse 
 repetition of, 427; profusion of, 429; 
 quoted, as critic, 9, 10, 14, 17, 19, 30, 
 33, 60, 64, 68, 77, 78, 89, 93, 94, 96, 
 98,99, 103, 107, 114, 180, 208, 210, 
 
 213, 221, 228, 246, 249, 262, 266, 276, 
 
 278 ; rapidity of, 429 ; repetition 
 
 of, 427 ; sacrifice, his, ot fact to 
 
 effect, 435 ; self-confidence of, 453 ; 
 
 splendor of imagery, his, 443 ; 
 
 view, his panoramic, 438 
 Machiavelli, Macaulay's essay on, 
 
 quoted, 433 
 Mackintosh's "History,'' Macaulay 
 
 on, quoted, 450 
 " Mail-Coach, The English," quoted, 
 
 398, 406, 415, 417 
 " Man in Black, The," quoted, 234, 
 
 235 
 
 " Man Thinking," Emerson on, 781 
 " Manners," Emerson on, 777 
 Manning, Lamb's Letter to, quoted, 
 
 342, 345 
 "Marble Faun, The," quoted, 738, 
 
 746, 754, 757, 762, 764, 765, 766, 767 
 Marshall, A. F., quoted, 503 
 Martineau, J., quoted, 498 
 Massey, G., quoted, 341 
 Masson, D., quoted, 31, 153, 155, 
 
 157, 181, 185, 193, 197, 252, 265, 
 
 398, 399, 401, 403, 404, 406, 409, 
 
 410, 413, 414, 466. 557, 561, 623, 636 
 Mather, J. M., quoted, 658, 667, 685, 
 
 690 
 Mathews, W., quoted, 401, 405, 412, 
 
 414, 419 
 
 Mazzini, quoted, 539, 548, 559, 563 
 McCarthy, J., quoted, 586, 590, 677, 
 
 681
 
 874 
 
 INDEX 
 
 McElwain, F., quoted, 490 
 
 " Memoirs of a Cavalier," quoted, 
 154, 159, 164, 166 
 
 "Men Not their Own Masters," 
 Steele on, 133 
 
 " Middlemarch," quoted, 579, 602, 
 603 
 
 "Mill on the Floss, The," quoted, 
 598 
 
 Mill's Essay on "Liberty," Macaulay 
 on, quoted, 453 
 
 Milton, biographical outline of, 20- 
 26 ; bibliography on style of, 27- 
 30 ; characteristics of, 30 - 49 ; 
 coarseness of, 48 ; conscious in- 
 spiration of, 40 ; egoism of, 40 ; 
 elevation (moral) of, 44 ; elo- 
 quence of, 30 ; erudition of, 46 ; 
 excessive imagery of, 32 ; gorge- 
 ous imagery of, 32 ; imagery of, 
 32 ; incongruity of, 34 ; independ- 
 ence of, 42 ; inequality of, 38 ; in- 
 tense energy of, 34 ; intolerance 
 of, 42 ; inspiration of, 40 ; isolation 
 (mental) of, 42 ; inversion of, 35 ; 
 involution of, 35 ; learning of, 46 ; 
 magnificence of, 30 ; majestic elo- 
 quence of, 30 ; mental isolation of, 
 42 ; moral elevation of, 44 ; pro- 
 found learning of, 46 ; purity of, 
 44 ; quoted, as critic, 34, 40, 44, 
 45, 46 ; self-respect of, 40 ; sub- 
 limity of, 30 ; vituperation of, 
 34 ; vulgarity of, 48 
 
 " Milton," Macaulay 's Essay on, 
 quoted, 427, 429, 438, 441 
 
 " Milton," Lowell on, 827 
 
 Minto, quoted, 10, u, 14, 16. 17, 62, 
 89, 92, 128, 131, 132, 152, 154, 158, 
 160, 163, 167, 179, 186, 189, 196, 
 198, 208, 217, 223, 226, 233, 234, 
 245, 248, 249, 251, 262, 25, 267, 
 272, 275, 280, 281, 397, 399, 400, 
 402, 405, 406, 408, 411, 412, 414, 
 534, 535. 544, 566 
 
 Mitchell, D. G. , quoted. 706, 710 
 
 Mitford, J., quoted, 196, 198 
 
 Mitford, Mary Russell, quoted, 46, 
 540, 663, 665 
 
 Mitford's " History of Greece," Ma- 
 caulay on, quoted, 438 
 
 '' Modern Painters," quoted, 661, 
 662, 664, 675, 691 
 
 Montgomery, quoted, 120 
 
 " Moosehead Journal, 1 ' Lowell's, 
 quoted, 811, 835, 836. 
 
 Morley, Henry, quoted, 553, 561 
 
 Morley, John, quoted, 453, 774, 779, 
 785. 791, 796 
 
 ' Mosses from an Old Manse," 
 
 quoted, 744, 746, 748, 755, 761, 764, 
 765, 766 
 '' Mr. GilfiTs Love Story, 1 ' quoted, 
 
 5M 
 
 " Murder as a Fine Art," quoted, 
 404, 413, 414 
 
 *' My Garden Acquaintance," quot- 
 ed, 819, 820, 830 
 
 " Mysteries in Religion," Newman 
 on, quoted, 504, 505 
 
 ''Mystery of Life," quoted, 666, 
 675 
 
 'NABOB of Arcot's Debts, The," 
 
 quoted, 301, 302, 304, 318 
 " Nature," Emerson on, 788, 795 
 Negri, G. , quoted, 601 
 " Newcomes, The," quoted, 464, 470, 
 
 472, 476, 480, 481, 486, 487, 491 
 Newman, bibliography on the style 
 
 of, 494-495 ; biography of, 492- 
 
 494 ; erudition of, 500 ; finish of, 
 
 495 ; human life, his insight into, 
 497 ; humor, his quiet, 502 ; ideal- 
 ism, his intense, 503 ; imagination, 
 his vivid, 501 ; insight into human 
 life, his, 497 ; intense idealism of, 
 503 ; keen irony of, 505 ; life, his 
 insight into, 497 ; mysterious, his 
 sense of the, 504 ; penetration of, 
 497 ; quiet humor of, 502 ; satire 
 of, 505 ; self-revelation of, 496 ; 
 sense of the mysterious, his, 504 ; 
 subtlety of, 498 ; urbanity of, 495 ; 
 vivid imagination of, 501. 
 
 Nichol, J., quoted, 740, 778, 791 
 
 "Nicholas Nickleby," quoted, 620, 
 642, 646 
 
 Nicoll, H. J., quoted, 8, 13, 17, 31, 
 43, 46, 47, 94, 157, 163, 182, 185, 
 209, 219, 229, 231, 256, 260, 266, 
 271, 348, 405, 466, 481, 495, 510, 
 522. 582 
 
 " Nobility," Bacon's Essay on, 
 quoted, 10, 17, 18 
 
 "Novum Organum," quoted, 19 
 
 "OLD Curiosity Shop.The," quoted, 
 616, 619, 624, 627, 631, 634, 635, 
 
 639, 647 
 " Old Margate Hoy, The, quoted, 
 
 349. 350 
 
 " Old Mortality," quoted, 367 
 
 Oliphant, Mrs., quoted, 107, 336, 
 
 338, 346, 349, 371, 377, 412, 461, 
 
 466, 478, 483, 519, 534, 55i, 554, 
 
 558, 561, 564. 578, 586, 592, 616, 
 
 619, 622, 629, 644, 661, 667, 670, 
 
 673 
 O'Hagan, Lord, quoted, 500
 
 INDEX 
 
 875 
 
 " On a Certain Condescension in 
 Foreigners," quoted, 814, 817, 
 822, 823, 824, 832 
 
 " Over the Teacups," quoted, 852 
 "Oversoul, The," Emerson on, 790, 
 
 791, 795 
 "Oxford in Vacation," quoted, 333, 
 
 334 
 
 " PACOLET," Steele on, 142 
 
 Pagan Religious Sentiment, Arnold 
 
 on, quoted, 523 
 Page, B. A., quoted, 418 
 Palmer, R., quoted. 841, 847, 855, 860 
 " Parents," Bacon's Essay on, 
 
 quoted, 9 
 "Parochial Sermons," Newman's, 
 
 quoted, 499 
 " Past and Present," quoted, 540, 
 
 547, 5SL 552, 559, 566 
 Pater, W., quoted, 333, 335, 341, 
 
 348 
 
 Patmore, C. x quoted, 334 
 Pattison, Mark, quoted, 30, 35 
 Paul, C. K. , quoted, 583, 597 
 Peabody, A. P., quoted, 765 
 " Peace, Ruskin on,' 1 quoted, 683, 
 
 686 
 "Penal Laws," Burke on the, quoted, 
 
 39 
 
 " Pendennis," quoted, 468, 482 
 Perry, T. S., quoted, 382 
 " Pharisee and the Publican, The," 
 
 quoted. 73, 78, Si 
 Philip, Robert, quoted, 66 
 "Pilgrim's Progress," quoted, 59, 62, 
 
 65, 66, 67, 71, 73, 74, 76, 78, 80 
 " Pirate, The." quoted, 385 
 Pitt, W., quoted, 371 
 Pitt, Macaulay's Essay on, quoted, 
 
 429 
 
 " Plea of Merit," the, quoted, 186 
 Poe, quoted, 745, 760 
 " Poet at the Breakfast Table, The," 
 
 quoted, 850 
 
 " Poetry," Newman on, quoted, 500 
 " Policy of the Allies, The," quoted, 
 
 301 
 
 " Politics," Emerson on, 798 
 " Pope," Lowell on, 829, 834, 835 
 Pope, quoted, 89, 96, 112 
 " Poverty," Ruskin on, quoted, 689, 
 " Prasterita," quoted, 692 
 Preceptor, The, quoted, 249 
 Prescott, W. H., quoted, 365, 370, 
 
 374, 377, 379, 3 8 4, 3 8 7 
 " Present Blessings,'' Newman on, 
 
 quoted, 497 
 " Present Discontents, Thoughts on 
 
 the," quoted, 322 
 
 " Present Time, The," Carlyle on, 
 
 quoted, 541 
 " Private Judgment," Newman on, 
 
 quoted, 498, 499, 500 
 Procter, B. W., quoted, 331, 335, 
 
 341, 346, 371, 378, 388, 568 
 " Professor at the Breakfast Table, 
 
 The," quoted, 842, 846, 851, 854, 
 
 8 55, 8 5 6 , 8 57. 859, 862 
 Protestantism, De Quincey on, quot- 
 ed, 417 
 
 "Prudence," Emerson on, 777, 799 
 "Public Spirit of the Whigs, The," 
 
 quoted, 196 
 
 Punch, quoted, 475, 826 
 Punshon, M., quoted, 56. 59 
 Putnam, G. P., quoted, 701, 708, 
 
 710, 716 
 
 " QUACK ADVERTISEMENTS," 
 
 Steele on, quoted, 130 
 Quarterly Review, quoted, 603 
 
 " RACKS of Men, The Five," quoted, 
 
 342 
 
 Raleigh, Sir Walter, quoted, 17 
 Kumbler, The, quoted, 247, 258, 263, 
 
 275, 279, 281 
 " Rasselas," quoted, 247, 253, 267, 
 
 278 
 " Rebecca and Rowena,'' quoted, 
 
 489 
 " Recollections," Steele on, quoted, 
 
 131 
 
 "Reflections on the Revolution in 
 France," quoted, 298, 299, 304, 309, 
 311, 312, 316, 318, 321, 322 
 
 '' Reformation in England," quoted, 
 
 32. 33- 34, 4. 49 
 ''Regicide Peace, Letters on a," 
 
 quoted, 294, 301, 304, 321, 322 
 ''Reply to Salmasius, 1 ' Milton's, 
 
 quoted, 35, 41, 42, 46, 47, 48 
 Retiring, Macaulay's Speech on. 
 
 quoted, 449 
 Richardson, C. F., quoted, 701, 707, 
 
 722. 743, 758, 778, 785. 793. 812, 
 
 816, 825, 828, 832, 843, 845, 860 
 Ritchie, A. R. , quoted, 661, 678, 681, 
 
 688 
 
 Robertson, E. S., quoted, 580 
 Robertson, J. M. .quoted, 348, 351, 
 
 510, 661, 665, 667, 670, 674, t>8i, 
 
 683, 689 
 '' Robinson Crusoe," quoted, 154, 
 
 162 
 11 Rob Roy, 1 ' quoted, 373, 379, 386, 
 
 387. 390 
 " Romola," quoted, 579, 587, 597, 
 
 598, 604, 605
 
 8;6 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Rossetti, W. M., quoted, 31 
 
 " Rural Funerals." quoted, 709 
 
 " Rural Life in England," quoted, 
 
 702 
 
 Ruskin, acumen, his critical, 689 ; 
 aim, his moral, 682 ; arrogance of, 
 672 ; biblical coloring of, 684 ; bib- 
 liography on style of, 656 ; bio- 
 graphical outline of, 6-j8 ; biting 
 satire of, 667 ; coloring, his bibli- 
 cal, 684; conceit of, 672; contradic- 
 tion, self-, of, 680; critical acumen 
 of, 684 ; descriptive power of, 658 ; 
 desire for social reform, his, 687 ; 
 diction, his splendor of, 662 ; di- 
 dacticism of, 682; dogmatism of, 
 672 ; eloquence of, 664 ; extrava- 
 gance of, 669 ; fierce invective of, 
 667 ; impetuous eloquent e of, 664 ; 
 inconsistency of, 680; interpreta- 
 tion, his power of, 675 ; invective, 
 his fierce, 667 ; keen sensibility of, 
 675 ; lack of sanity of, 669 ; mag- 
 nificence of, 662 ; moral aim of, 
 682 ; philanthropy of, 687 ; power, 
 his descriptive, 658 ; quoted as 
 critic, 6c6 ; reform, his desire for 
 social. 687 ; sanity, his lack of, 669 ; 
 satire, biting, of, 667 ; self-contra- 
 diction of, 680 ; sensibility, his 
 keen, 675 ; social reform, his de- 
 sire for, 687 ; spirituality of, 684 ; 
 splendor of diction of, 662 
 
 SAINTE-BBUVB, quoted, 364, 384 
 Saintsbury, quoted, 7, 10, 43, 400, 
 
 403, 409, 417, 542, 545, 550, 554, 
 
 589, 618, 628, 643, 646, 660, 662, 
 
 669. 673, 680, 682 
 ''Salmagundi.'' quoted, 712, 714, 
 
 717, 719, 720 
 " Sanity of True Genius," quoted, 
 
 351 
 "Sartor Resartus" quoted, 544, 
 
 547, 555. 558 
 " Scarlet Letter, The," quoted, 747, 
 
 748 
 ' Scenes of Clerical Life," quoted, 
 
 599.6oi 
 
 Scherer, E., quoted, 30, 34, 43, 47, 
 534. 54, 552, 566. 576, 583, 592, 
 595 
 
 "Scholar Gipsy, The," quoted, 
 Si8 
 
 "Scotch Reviewers,' 1 quoted, 669 
 
 Scott, anachronism of, 381 ; anima- 
 tion of, 373 ; antiquarianism, his 
 false, 381 ; biography of. 353-361 ; 
 bibliography on style of, 361-364 ; 
 description, his realistic, 367 ; de- 
 
 tail, his excessive, 379 ; difFuseness 
 f> 379 I dramatic power of, 388 ; 
 effect, his scenic, 370 ; excessive 
 detail of, 379 ; false antiquarianism 
 of, 381 ; high moral tone of, 387 ; 
 humor, his kindly, 376 ; imagina- 
 tive power of, 367 ; kindly humor. 
 376 ; moral tone, his high, 387 ; 
 patriotism of, 365 ; personal por- 
 traiture of, 364 ; picturesqueness 
 of, 370 ; quiet humor of, 376 ; 
 quoted as critic, 65, 75, 80, 155, 
 158, 193, 209, 215, 230, 367 ; real- 
 istic description of, 367 ; reverence 
 of, 387 ; scenic effect of, 370 ; sus- 
 tained vigor of, 373 ; sympathy of, 
 376 ; toleration of, 376 ; vivacity 
 of, 373 ; vividness of, 364 
 
 " Scott," Carlyle's Essay on, quoted, 
 567 
 
 Scudder, H. E.. quoted, 523 
 
 "Seditions and Troubles," Bacon's 
 essay on, quoted, 16 
 
 " J*elf-Reliance," Emerson on, 786 
 
 Senior, \V. W. , quoted, 462, 491 
 
 " Sermons," Newman's, quoted, 498, 
 500, 503, 504 
 
 " Sesame and Lilies," quoted, 666, 
 668, 671, 672, 688 
 
 " Shabby-Genteel Story, A," quot- 
 ed, 484 
 
 Shairp, Principal, quoted, 495, 496, 
 497. 503. 504, 552, 568 
 
 Shaw, T. B., quoted, 36, 187, 274, 
 337, 350, 368 
 
 " She Stoops to Conquer, " quoted, 
 210 
 
 " Shortest Way with Dissenters," 
 The, quoted, 156, 161 
 
 '' Silas Marner," quoted, 593 
 
 Sime, David, quoted, 69, 75, 79 
 
 "Sir Roger and the Gypsies," quot- 
 ed, 113 
 
 11 Sir Roger at the Theatre," quoted, 
 105 
 
 " Sir Roger de Coverley Papers," 
 quoted, 137 
 
 Skelton, ]., quoted, 475 
 
 "Sketch Book," quoted, 702, 704, 
 
 723 
 
 "Sketches, Thackeray's, in Lon- 
 don," quoted. 490 
 
 Smith, Alexander, quoted, 7, 18, 621 
 Smith, C. C., quoted, 416 
 Smith. Goldwin, quoted, 381 
 Smith, G. B., quoted, 462, 465, 474, 
 478, 483, 584, 59', 596, 600, 736, 
 830, 831 
 
 " Snobs, Observations on," quoted, 
 464, 469
 
 INDEX 
 
 877 
 
 "Snow Image, The," quoted, 761, 
 
 763, 766 
 "Some Free Thoughts,' 1 Swift's, 
 
 quoted, 190 
 " South Sea House, The, 1 ' quoted, 
 
 Southey's Colloquies, Macaulay on, 
 
 quoted, 435, 452 
 Southey, quoted, 57, 64 
 Spectator^ the, quoted, 92, 95, 101, 
 
 104, 105, 109, no, 113, 116, 137, 616 
 " Spenser,'' Lowell on, quoted, 814, 
 
 829 
 
 "Spiritual Laws," Emerson on, 798 
 Stanley, Dean, A. P., quoted, 72, 
 
 387. 637 
 
 Stead, W. T., quoted, 822, 830 
 Stedman, E. C., quoted, 519, 739, 
 
 74i, 748, 753, 755, 774, 779, 783. 
 788, 793, 794, 796, 810, 813, 816, 
 818, 820, 823, 829, 833, 835, 841, 
 846, 851, 853. 855, 856, 858, 860, 
 862 
 
 Steele, aim, his high moral, 139 ; 
 biography of, 117-118 ; bibliog- 
 raphy on, 118-119 : colloquial 
 ease of, 119 ; companionability of. 
 119; ease, his colloquial, 119; 
 exaggeration, his grave, 141 ; good 
 sense of, 132 ; high moral aim of, 
 139 ; humanity of, 125 ; intense 
 pathos, 130 ; intentional exaggera- 
 tion of, 141 ; judgment, his sound, 
 132 ; kindly satire of, 128 ; minute- 
 ness of, 122 ; moral aim, 139 ; 
 pathos, his intense, 130 ; portrait- 
 ure, his power of, 135 ; quoted as 
 critic, 89, 103, 130, 132 ; realism of, 
 122 ; reverence, his, for woman- 
 hood, 133 ; satire, his kindly, 128 ; 
 sense, his good, 132 ; spontaneity, 
 his, 137; sound judgment of, 132; 
 sympathy, his, 125 ; vivacity of, 
 137 ; womanhood, his reverence 
 for, 133 
 
 Stephen, Leslie, quoted, 108, 152, 
 156, 161, 165, 193, 196, 216, 220, 246, 
 248, 250, 251, 254, 256, 258, 259, 
 265, 270, 273, 276, 278, 280, 281, 
 373. 3 80 , 397, 403, 404. 406, 410, 
 415, 577. 579, 585: 588, 591, 597, 
 614, 615, 683, 762, 737, 748, 750, 
 756 
 
 Sterling, John, quoted, 41, 46, 534, 
 538, 549, 554, 559 
 
 Stevenson, R. L., quoted, 374, 384 
 
 Stillman, W. J., quoted, 663, 683 
 
 Stoddard, R. H., quoted, 478, 626, 
 634, 639, 809, 831, 836 
 
 "Storm, The, "by Defoe, quoted, 167 
 
 Story, W. W., quoted, 826, 831, 836 
 ''Stout Gentleman, The," quoted, 
 
 703 
 
 " Stratford-on-Avon," quoted, 704 
 
 "Sublime and Beautiful. The," 
 Burke, quoted on, 308 
 
 " Sweetness and Light," Arnold on, 
 quoted, 514 
 
 Swift, biographical outline of, 168- 
 176 ; bibliography on, 177-178 ; 
 boldness of, 186 ; caustic satire of. 
 179 ; coarseness of, 195 ; directness 
 of, 182 ; ferocious sarcasm of, 179 ; 
 homeliness of, 186 ; quoted as crit- 
 ic, 94, 186 ; impatience, his, of ab- 
 surdity, 179 ; insolence of, 190 ; 
 intensity of, 185 ; invective, his 
 vehement, 190 ; ludicrous combi- 
 nation, his power of, 193 ; misan- 
 thropy of, 197 ; plainness of, 186 ; 
 sarcasm of, 179 ; simplicity of, 186 ; 
 sincerity of, 182 ; terseness of, 182 ; 
 vehement invective of, 190; wit 
 
 of, 193 
 
 Swinburne, A. C. , quoted, 338, 522 
 Symonds, J. A., quoted, 739, 750, 
 
 758, 761 
 System of the Heavens, De Quincey 
 
 on, quoted, 418 
 
 TAINK, quoted, 9, 12, 31, 33, 45, 57, 
 58, 59, 64, 89, 95, 97, 101, in, 115, 
 J 53> I 55> I 58, 161, 182, 185, 187, 
 190, 192, 211, 231, 248, 252, 256, 
 258, 260, 266, 273, 331, 337, 371, 
 376, 380, 382, 481, 536, 553, 568, 
 626 
 
 "Tale of a Tub, The," quoted, 195, 
 198 
 
 " Tales of a Traveller," quoted, 710 
 
 Talfourd, T. N., quoted, 217, 331, 
 334, 338, 341, 368 
 
 " Talisman, The," quoted, 372, 373, 
 388 
 
 Talleyrand, quoted, 186 
 
 Tatler, The, quoted, 122, 125, 127, 
 128, 130, 133, 135, 136, 138, 139, 
 140, 141, 142 
 
 "Taxation No Tyranny," quoted, 
 272 
 
 Taylor, B., quoted, 474, 813, 856 
 
 Thackeray, quoted, 207, 213, 215, 
 217, 271, 463, 467, 470, 471, 475, 
 476, 477* 481, 484, 617 
 
 Thackeray, alleged injustice of, to 
 womanhood, 490 ; appellations, 
 significant of, 489 ; artistic ease of, 
 468 ; burlesque, his skill in, 487 ; 
 characterization, his natural, 465 ; 
 comment, his familiar, 471 ; didac-
 
 8;8 
 
 INDEX 
 
 ticism of, 480 ; ease, artistic, of, 
 468 ; exact portraiture of, 465 ; 
 force, his skill in, 487 ; familiar 
 comment of, 471 ; finish of, 468 ; 
 fondness, his, for moralizing, 480; 
 grace of, 468 ; hatred of shams, 
 his, 460 ; humor, his kindly, 482 ; 
 quoted, 90, 92, ico, 121, 124, 126, 
 134, 138, 190, 192, 195 ; hypercriti- 
 cism of, 460 ; injustice to woman- 
 hood, his alleged, 490 ; intense 
 realism of, 477; keen, merciless 
 satire of, 460 ; kindly humor of, 
 482 ; manliness of, 473 ; merciless 
 satire of, 460 ; minute observation 
 f, 477 I moralizing, his fondness 
 for, 480 ; natural characterization 
 of, 465 ; observation, his minute, 
 477 ; pathos, simple, of, 465 ; por- 
 traiture, exact, of, 465 ; ^realism, 
 his intense, 477 ; satire, his merci- 
 less, 460 ; self-suggestion of, 471 ; 
 shams, his hatred of, 460 ; signifi- 
 cant appellations of, 489 ; simple 
 pathos of, 485 ; sincerity of, 473 ; 
 skill in burlesque, his, 487 ; sym- 
 pathy of, 473 ; tenderness of, 485 ; 
 womanhood, his alleged injustice 
 to, 490 
 "The Angel of the Sea," quoted, 
 
 679, 684, 687 
 
 " The Complete English Trades- 
 man," quoted, 161, 164 
 " The Cricket on the Hearth, " quot- 
 ed, 624, 642 
 
 " The Crown of Wild Olive," quot- 
 ed, 682 
 
 The Examiner, quoted, 182, 184 
 The False Alarm, quoted, 249, 273 
 "The Mutability of Literature," 
 
 quoted, 713 
 "The Genteel Style in Writing," 
 
 quoted, 352 
 
 "The Roots of Honor," quoted, 688 
 Thoreau, H. D., quoted, 533, 536, 
 540, 544, 546. 550 
 Thoreau," Lowell on, 827 
 '' Thoughts on Various Subjects," 
 
 Swift's, quoted, 181 
 Tickell, quoted, 96 
 "Time and Tide," quoted, 675 
 Times, The London, quoted, 810 
 ' Timmins's, A Little Dinner at,' 1 
 
 quoted, 490 
 
 Traill, H. D., quoted, 823 
 11 Traveler, The," quoted, 229 
 "Tristom and Iseult,' 1 quoted, 523 
 Trollope, A., quoted, 461, 467, 471, 
 485, 488, 638, 641, 766, 744, 749, 
 753 
 
 '"Truth," ftacon's Essay on, quoted, 
 
 9, 19 
 Tuckerman, Bayard, quoted, 70, 77, 
 
 209, 214, 221, 223, 232, 382 
 Tuckerman, H. T., quoted, 90, 96, 
 
 99, 122, 125, 129, 134, 140, 154, 
 158, 166, 184, 192, 195, 469, 486, 
 701, 706, 708, 714, 760, 763, 718, 
 720, 722, 738, 740, 745, 748, 750, 
 753, 756, 758 
 
 Tulloch, John, quoted, 69, 75, 461 
 "Twice-Told Tales," quoted, 739, 
 
 749. 757 
 
 "Two Old Ladies,' 1 Steele on, quot- 
 ed, 124 
 
 UNDERWOOD, F. H., quoted, 706, 
 715, 7i8, 737, 776, 785, 786, 812, 
 819, 822, 823, 825, 831, 833, 834, 
 845, 847, 853, 854, 858, 861 
 
 Utilitarian Theory, The, Macaulay, 
 on, quoted, 454 
 
 " VAIN GLORY," Bacon's Essay on, 
 
 quoted, 15 
 "Vanity Fair," quoted, 468, 471, 
 
 473, 480, 490 
 
 Van Dyke, H., quoted, 45, 61, 63 
 Vaughan, R. A., quoted, 485 
 "Vegetation, Of Truth of," quoted. 
 
 680 
 
 Venables, E., quoted, 57, 58, 81 
 " Vicar of Wakefield, The," quoted, 
 
 210, 212, 213, 2l6, 219, 22O, 222, 
 
 224, 226, 233, 235 
 
 "Virginians, The," quoted, 484, 491 
 " Vision of Theodore, The," quoted, 
 
 279 
 "Voyage to the Houyhnhmns, A," 
 
 quoted, 198 
 Voltaire, quoted, 90, 112 
 
 WALDSTKIN, CHARLES, quoted, 660 
 
 Wallace, H. B., quoted, 703, 715, 
 722 
 
 " Walton, 1 ' Lowell on, 820 
 
 War, De Quincey's Essay on, quot- 
 ed, 398, 418 
 
 War of Succession, Macaulay on, 
 quoted, 427 
 
 Ward, A. W., quoted, 614, 626, 629, 
 638, 641, 643 
 
 Ward, T. H., quoted, 189 
 
 Warner, C. D., quoted, 700, 702, 
 705, 711, 712, 716, 717, 721 
 
 Watt, J. C., quoted, 473, 483, 485, 
 625 
 
 " Waverley." quoted, 375, 376, 378 
 
 Welsh, A. H., quoted, 248, 249, 268
 
 INDEX 
 
 879 
 
 " Westminster Abbey," Irving on, 
 quoted, 713, 717, 720 
 
 Westminster Review, quoted, 486 
 
 Westminster Review, George Eliot 
 in, quoted, 590 
 
 Whately, quoted, 9 
 
 "What if the Pretender Should 
 Come,'' quoted, 161 
 
 Whipple, E. P., quoted, 8, 12, 14, 17, 
 18, 218. 460, 466, 469, 472, 516, 542, 
 546, 577, 582, 585, 588, 605, 614, 
 621, 629, 636, 640, 706, 718, 742, 
 744. 75, 753. 758, 760, 764, 775, 
 780, 781, 785, 787, 789, 791, 792, 
 794. 795. 798, 813, 833, 834, 847. 
 849, 851, 856, 858 
 
 '' Whist, Mrs. Battle's Opinions on," 
 quoted, 339 
 
 White, R. G., quoted, 615, 619, 630, 
 
 639 
 Whittier, quoted, 58, 845, 846, 849, 
 
 853 
 
 " Widow and Her Son, The," quot- 
 ed, 709 
 
 " Wife, Dead, The," Steele, quoted, 
 132 
 
 Wilde, Lady, quoted, 578 
 Wilkinson, W. C., quoted, 577, 604, 
 
 826 
 Wilson, Walter, quoted, 160, 161, 
 
 163, 165 
 
 Winchester, C. T., quoted, 822 
 Windsor, A. C., quoted, 33 
 Winter, W., quoted, 855 
 ''Witchcraft," Lowell on, 811, 827, 
 
 836 
 Woodberry, G. E., quoted, 61, 68, 71, 
 
 812, 816, 818 
 Woodbury, C. R., quoted, 793, 
 
 798 
 " Woodstock," quoted, 366, 369, 380, 
 
 387, 389 
 "Wordsworth, Lamb's Letter to," 
 
 quoted, 345 
 " Worldliness and Other-Worldli- 
 
 ness," quoted, 590 
 
 " YELLOWPLUSH, Memoirs of," 
 
 464 
 
 Yonge, C. D., quoted, 383 
 " Youth," Bacon's Essay on, quoted, 
 
 9
 
 A 000 161 680 4
 
 Hi;l III 
 
 i p 
 i 
 
 I HI I I