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[Illustration]

A LITTLE ENGLISH GALLERY

by

LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY

[Illustration]

New York

Harper and Brothers

MDCCCXCIV

Copyright, 1894, by Harper & Brothers.

All rights reserved.

TO

EDMUND GOSSE

THIS FRIENDLY TRESPASS ON HIS FIELDS

PREFATORY NOTE

THE studies in this book are chosen from a number written at irregular

intervals, and from sheer interest in their subjects, long ago.

Portions of them, or rough drafts of what has since been wholly

remodelled from fresher and fuller material at first hand, have

appeared within five years in _The Atlantic Monthly_, _Macmillan’s_,

_The Catholic World_, and _Poet-Lore_; and thanks are due the

magazines for permission to reprint them. Yet more cordial thanks,

for kind assistance on biographical points, belong to the Earl of

Powis; the Rev. R. H. Davies, Vicar of old St. Luke’s, Chelsea; the

Rev. T. Vere Bayne, of Christchurch, and H. E. D. Blakiston, Esq.,

of Trinity College, Oxford; T. W. Lyster, Esq., of the National

Library of Ireland; Aubrey de Vere Beauclerk, Esq.; Miss Langton,

of Langton-by-Spilsby; the Vicars of Dauntsey, Enfield Highway, and

Montgomery, and especially those of High Ercall and Speke; and the

many others in England through whose courtesy and patience the tracer

of these unimportant sketches has been able to make them approximately

life-like.

CONTENTS

CHAP. PAGE

I. LADY DANVERS (1561-1627) 1

II. HENRY VAUGHAN (1621-1695) 53

III. GEORGE FARQUHAR (1677-1707) 119

IV. TOPHAM BEAUCLERK (1739-1780)

AND

BENNET LANGTON (1741-1800) 171

V. WILLIAM HAZLITT (1778-1830) 229

I

LADY DANVERS

1561-1627

MR. MATTHEW ARNOLD somewhere devotes a grateful sentence to the women

who have left a fragrance in literary history, and whose loss of long

ago can yet inspire men of to-day with indescribable regret. Lady

Danvers is surely one of these. As John Donne’s dear friend, and George

Herbert’s mother, she has a double poetic claim, like her unforgotten

contemporary, Mary Sidney, for whom was made an everlasting epitaph.

If Dr. Donne’s fraternal fame have not quite the old lustre of the

incomparable Sir Philip’s, it is, at least, a greater honor to own

Herbert for son than to have perpetuated the race of Pembroke. Nor is

it an inharmonious thing to remember, in thus calling up, in order to

rival it, the sweet memory of “Sidney’s sister,” that Herbert and

Pembroke have long been, and are yet, married names.

Magdalen, the youngest child of Sir Richard Newport, and of Margaret

Bromley, his wife, herself daughter of that Bromley who was

Privy-Councillor, Lord Chief-Justice, and executor to Henry VIII., was

born in High Ercall, Salop; the loss or destruction of parish registers

leaves us but 1561-62 as the probable date. Of princely stock, with

three sisters and an only brother, and heir to virtue and affluence,

she could look with the right pride of unfallen blood upon “the many

fair coats the Newports bear” over their graves at Wroxeter. It was

the day of learned and thoughtful girls; and this girl seems to have

been at home with book and pen, with lute and viol. She married, in

the flower of her youth, Richard Herbert, Esquire, of Blache Hall,

Montgomery, black-haired and black-bearded, as were all his line; a man

of some intellectual training, and of noted courage, descended from

a distinguished brother of the yet more distinguished Sir Richard

Herbert of Edward IV.’s time, and from the most ancient rank of Wales

and England. At Eyton in Salop, in 1581, was born their eldest child,

Edward, afterwards Lord Herbert of Cherbury, a writer who is still the

puzzle and delight of Continental critics. He is said to have been a

beautiful boy, and not very robust; his first speculation with his

infant tongue was the piercing query: “How came I into this world?” But

his next brother, Richard, was of another stamp; and went his frank,

flashing, fighting way through Europe, “with scars of four-and-twenty

wounds upon him, to his grave” at Bergen-op-Zoom, with William, the

third son, following in his soldierly footsteps. Charles grew up

reserved and studious, and died, like his paternal uncle, a dutiful

Fellow of New College, Oxford. The fifth of these Herberts, “a soul

composed of harmonies,” as Cotton said of him, and destined to make the

name beloved among all readers of English, was George, the poet, the

saintly “parson of Fuggleston and Bemerton.” Henry, his junior, with

whom George had a sympathy peculiarly warm and long, became in his

manhood Master of the Revels, and held the office for over fifty years.

“You and I are alone left to brother it,” Lord Herbert of Cherbury once

wrote him, in a mood more tender than his wont, when all else of that

radiant family had gone into dust. The youngest of Magdalen Newport’s

sons was Thomas, “a posthumous,” traveller, sailor, and master of a

ship in the war against Algiers. Elizabeth, Margaret, and Frances

were the daughters, of whom Izaak Walton says, with satisfaction,

that they lived to be examples of virtue, and to do good to their

generation. None of them made an illustrious match. Margaret married

a Vaughan. Frances secured unto herself the patronymic Brown, and was

happily seconded by Elizabeth, George Herbert’s “dear sick sister,”

who became Mistress Jones. In the south chancel transept of Montgomery

Church, where Richard Herbert the elder had been buried three years

before, there was erected in 1600, at his wife’s cost, a large canopied

alabaster altar-tomb, with two portrait-figures recumbent. All around

it, in the quaint and affectionate boast of the age, are the small

images of these seven sons and three daughters; “Job’s number and Job’s

distribution,” as she once remarked, and as her biographers failed

not to repeat after her. But their kindred ashes are widely sundered,

and “as content with six foot as with the moles of Adrianus.” This at

Montgomery is the only known representation of the Lady Magdalen. Her

effigy lies at her husband’s left, the palms folded, the eyes open, the

full hair rolled back from a low brow, beneath a charming and simple

head-dress. Nothing can be nobler than the whole look of the face, like

her in her prime, and reminding one of her son’s loving epithet, “my

Juno.” The short-sighted inscription upon the slab yet includes her

name.

Never had an army of brilliant and requiring children a more excellent

mother. “_Severa parens_,” her gentle George called her in his

scholarly verses; and such she was, with the mingled sagacity and

joyousness which made up her character. If we are to believe their

own testimony, the leading members of her young family were of

excessively peppery Cymric temperaments, and worthy to call out that

“manlier part” of her which Dr. Donne, who had every opportunity of

observing it in play, was so quick to praise. There is a passage in

a letter of Sir Thomas Lacy, addressed to Edward Herbert, touching

upon “the knowledge I had how ill you can digest the least indignity.”

“Holy George Herbert” himself, in 1618, commended to his dear brother

Henry the gospel of self-honoring: “It is the part of a poor spirit to

undervalue himself and blush.” And physical courage went hand in hand

with this blameless haughtiness of the Herberts, a pretty collateral

proof of which may be adduced from a message of Sir Henry Jones to his

brother-in-law, the other Henry just mentioned, concerning a gift for

his little nephew. “If my cozen, William Herbert your sonne . . . be

ready for the rideing of a horse, I will provide him with a Welch nagg

that shall be as mettlesome as himself.” There is no doubt that all

this racial fire was fostered by one woman. “Thou my root, and my most

firm rock, O my mother!” George cried, long after in the _Parentalia_,

aware that he owed to her his high ideals, and the strength of

character which is born of self-discipline.

“God gave her,” says one of her two devoted annalists, who we wish

were not so brief and meagre of detail—“God gave her such a comeliness

as though she was not proud of it, yet she was so content with it as

not to go about to mend it by any art.” Her fortune was large, her

benevolence wide-spreading. All the countryside knew her for the living

representative of the ever-hospitable houses of Newport and Bromley.

“She gave not on some great days,” continues Dr. Donne, “or at solemn

goings abroad; but as God’s true almoners, the sun and moon, that pass

on in a continual doing of good; as she received her daily bread from

God, so daily she distributed it, and imparted it to others.” In these

years of her wifehood and widowhood at Montgomery Castle (the “romancy

place” dating from the eleventh century, and ruined, like the fine

old house at High Ercall, during the Civil Wars), and afterwards at

Oxford and London, she reared her happy crew of boys and girls in an

air of generosity and honor; training them to habits of hardiness and

simplicity, and to the equal relish of work and play. “Herself with

her whole family (as a church in that elect lady’s house, to whom John

wrote his second Epistle) did every Sabbath shut up the day at night

with a general, with a cheerful singing of psalms.” One may guess at

young Richard’s turmoil in-doors, and at the little Elizabeth’s soft,

patient ways, and think of George (on Sundays at any rate) as the child

of content, “the contesseration of elegances” worthy Archdeacon Oley

called him.

The fair and stately matron moving over them and among them was not

without her prejudices. “I was once,” Edward testifies, “in danger of

drowning, learning to swim. My mother, upon her blessing, charged me

never to learn swimming; telling me, further, that she had learned of

more drowned than saved by it.” Though the given reason failed to

impress him, he adds, the commandment did; so that the accomplished

Crichton of Cherbury, who understood alchemy, broke his way through

metaphysics, and rode the Great Horse; the ambassador, author, and

beau, to whom Ben Jonson sent his greeting:

“What man art thou that art so many men,

All-virtuous Herbert?”

even he lacked, on principle, the science of keeping himself alive

in an alien element, because it had been pronounced less risky to

die outright! It was a pretty paradox, and one which sets down our

high-minded Magdalen as quite feminine, quite human.

Her Edward was matriculated in 1595 at University College, Oxford,[1]

for which he seemed to retain no great partiality; he bequeathed his

books, like a loyal Welshman, to Jesus College, instead, and his

manuscripts to the Bodleian Library. In 1598, when he was little

more than seventeen, he was wedded to his cousin Mary Herbert, of

St. Gillian in Monmouthshire. Her age was one-and-twenty; she was an

heiress, enjoined by her father’s will to marry a Herbert or forfeit

her estates; she was also almost a philosopher. There was no wild

affection on either side, but the marriage promised rather well, both

persons having resources; and no real catastrophe befell either in

after-life. Much as she desired the match for worldly motives, the

chief promoter of it was too solicitous for her tall dreamer of a

son, who underwent the pleasing peril of having Queen Bess clap him

on the cheek, not to take the whole weight of conjugal direction on

her own shoulders. Without undue officiousness, but with the masterly

foresight of a shrewd saint, she moved to Oxford from Montgomery with

her younger children and their tutors, in order to handle Mistress

Herbert’s husband during his minority. “She continued there with him,”

says Walton, in his _Life of George Herbert_, “and still kept him in

a moderate awe of herself, and so much under her own eye as to see and

converse with him daily; but she managed this power over him without

any such rigid sourness as might make her company a torment to her

child, but with such a sweetness and compliance with the recreations

and pleasures of youth as did incline him willingly to spend much of

his time in the company of his dear and careful mother.”

It was during this stay that she contracted the chivalrous friendship

which has embalmed her tranquil memory. Dr. John Donne (not ordained

until 1614, and indeed not Dr. Donne then at all, but “Jack Donne,”

his profaner self) had been at Cadiz with Essex, and had wandered over

the face of Europe; and he came back, accidentally, to Oxford during

the most troubled year of his early prime. It was no strange place to

him,[2] who had been, at eleven, the Pico della Mirandola of Hart

Hall, and whose relatives seem to have resided always in the town.

There and then, however, he cast his bright eye upon Excellence, and in

his own phrase,

“—dared love that, and say so, too,

And forget the He and She.”

We can do no better than cite a celebrated and beautiful passage, once

more from Walton: “This amity, begun at this time and place, was not

an amity that polluted their souls, but an amity made up of a chain of

suitable inclinations and virtues; an amity like that of St. Chrysostom

to his dear and virtuous Olympias, whom, in his letters, he calls his

saint; or an amity, indeed, more like that of St. Hierom to his Paula,

whose affection to her was such that he turned poet in his old age, and

then made her epitaph, wishing all his body were turned into tongues

that he might declare her just praises to posterity.” How these words

remind one of the sweet historic mention which Condivi gives to the

relations between Vittoria Colonna and Michelangelo! The little English

idyl of friendship and the great Italian one run parallel in much.

Donne’s trenchant _Satires_, some of the earliest and very best in

the language, were already written, and he was not without the hint

of fame. Born in 1573, he was but eight years the senior of Edward

Herbert, and not more than a dozen years the junior of Edward Herbert’s

mother. To her two sons, also, who were to figure as men of letters,

he was sincerely attached from the first, and had a marked and lasting

influence on their minds. Donne had the superabundance of mental power

which Mr. Minto has pointed out as the paradoxical cause of his failure

to become a great poet. He was a three-storied soul, as the French say:

a spirit of many sides and moods, a life-long dreamer of good and bad

dreams. To his restless, incisive intelligence his contemporaries, with

Jonson and Carew at their head, bowed in hyperboles of acclaim. He had

a changeful conscience, often antagonized and often appeased. There

was a strain in him of strong joy, for he was descended through his

mother from pleasant John Heywood the dramatist, and from the father

of that great and merry-hearted gentleman, Sir Thomas More. If ever

man needed vitality to buoy him over sorrows heavy and vast, it was

Donne in his “yeasting youth.” Thrown, through no fault but his own,

from his old footholds of religion and occupation, and unable, despite

his versatile and alert genius, to grind a steady living from the hard

mills of the world, he was in the midst of a bitter plight when the

friends worthy of him found a heavenly opportunity which they did not

let go by, and made his acceptance of their favor a rich gift unto

themselves. Foremost among these, besides Lady Herbert, were Sir Robert

Drury of Drury Lane, and a kinsman, Sir Francis Woolly, of Pirford,

Surrey, fated to die in his youth, both of whom gave the Donnes, for

some nine consecutive years, the use of their princely houses. John

Donne had been in the service of the Chancellor, Lord Ellesmere,

and lost place and purse by the opposition to his marriage with his

“_lectissima dilectissimaque_,” Anne More, who was Lady Ellesmere’s

niece, the daughter of Sir George More of Loxly, Lieutenant of the

Tower, and probably a distant cousin of his own. No reverses, however,

could beat the pathetic cheer out of him. “Anne Donne,[3] undone,” was

one of his inveterate teary jests over the state of things at home. He

wrote once, with sickness, poverty, and despair at his elbow: “If God

should ease us with burials, I know not how to perform even that. But I

flatter myself that I am dying, too, for I cannot waste faster than by

such griefs.” Five of his twelve children passed before their father to

the grave, the good domestic daughter Constance upholding him always,

and keeping the house together. But just as hope dawned with his

appointment to the Lectureship of Lincoln’s Inn, heavenward suddenly,

with her youngest-born, in 1617, went his dear and faithful wife, whom

he laid to rest in St. Clement Danes.

About the time when the remorseful old queen died disdainfully on her

chamber-floor at Richmond, the necessities of this family called for

daily succors, and with a simple and noble delicacy they were supplied.

Nor did they cease. Magdalen Herbert was a “bountiful benefactor,”

Donne “as grateful an acknowledger.” His first letter to her from

Mitcham in Surrey, dated July 10, 1607, is made up of terse, tender

thanks, in his heart’s own odd language. He sends her an enclosure of

sonnets and hymns, “lost to us,” says Walton, movingly, “but doubtless

they were such as they two now sing in heaven.” Dr. Grosart, with a

great show of justice, claims that the sequence called _La Corona_, and

familiar to latter-day readers, are the identical sonnets passed from

one to the other. During this same month of July we know that, paying a

call in his “London, plaguey London,” and finding his friend abroad,[4]

Dr. Donne consoled himself by leaving a courtliest message: “Your

memory is a state-cloth and presence which I reverence, though you be

away;” and went back after to his “sallads and onions” at Mitcham, or

to his solitary lodgings near Whitehall.

The attachment, close and deferent on both sides, was continued without

a breach, and with the intention, at least, of “almost daily letters.”

Thoreau, quoting Chaucer, so saluted Mrs. Emerson: “You have helped

to keep my life on loft.” No meaner service than this was his dear

lady’s to John Donne, often heretofore astray in the slough of doubt

and dissipation; she fed more than his little children, clothed more

than his body, and fostered anew in him that faith in humanity which

is the well-spring of good works. He was not a poet of Leigh Hunt’s

innocent temperament, who could accept benefits gladly and gracefully

from any appreciator; his soul dwelt too remote and proud in her

accustomed citadels. But this loving help, thrust upon him, he took

with dignity, and after 1621, when he was able, in his own person, to

befriend others, he gave back gallantly to mankind the blessings he

once received from two or three. It was something for Magdalen Herbert

to have saved a master-name to English letters, and kept in his unique

place the poet, interesting beyond many, whose fantastic but real force

swayed generations of thinking and singing men; it was something, also,

to have won in return the words which were his gold coin of payment.

Nowhere is Donne’s sentiment more genuine, his workmanship more happy

and less complex, than in the verses dedicated to her blameless

name. They have a lucidity unsurpassed among the yet straightforward

lyrics of their day. Drayton’s self, who died in the same year with

Donne, might have addressed to the lady of Eyton so much of his noble

extravagance;

“Queens hereafter shall be glad to live

Upon the alms of thy superfluous praise.”

Yet in these eulogies, as in most of the graver contemporaneous poems

of the sort, there is little personality to be detected; the homage

has rather a floating outline, an unapproaching music, exquisite and

awed. Donne gives, sometimes, the large Elizabethan measure:

“Is there any good which is not she?”

In the so-called _Elegy, The Autumnal_, written on leaving Oxford, he

starts off with a well-known cherishable strophe:

“No spring nor summer beauty hath such grace

As I have seen in one autumnal face.”

The entire poem is a monody on the encroachments of years, and neatly

chronological:

“If we love things long-sought, age is a thing

Which we are fifty years in compassing;

If transitory things, which soon decay,

Age must be loveliest at the latest day.”

It strikes the modern ear as maladroit enough that a woman in her yet

sunshiny forties, and a most comely woman to boot, should have required

prosody’s ingenious excuses for wrinkles and kindred damages. Was life

so hard as that in “the spacious days”? Shakespeare, in agreement with

Horace, had already reminded his handsome “Will” of the pitiless and

too expeditious hour,

“When forty winters shall besiege thy brow,

And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field!”

which also seems, to a nice historical sense, somewhat staggering. The

close of Donne’s little homily is perfect, and full of the winning

melancholy which was part of his birthright in art, whenever he allowed

himself direct and homely expression:

“May still

My love descend! and journey down the hill,

Not panting after growing beauties; so

I shall ebb on with them who homeward go.”

Such was John Donne’s first known tribute to his friend. She must have

been early and thoroughly familiar with his manuscripts, which were

passed about freely, Dr. Grosart thinks, prior to 1613, and which

burned what Massinger would call “no adulterate incense” to herself.

Her bays are to be gleaned off many a tree, and she must have cast a

frequent influence on Donne’s work, which is not traceable now. He

seems to have had a Crashaw-like devotion to the Christian saint whose

inheritance

“Bethina was, and jointure Magdalo,”

not unconnected with the fact that some one else was Magdalen also;

never does he tire of dwelling on the coincidence and the difference.

In one of his quaintly moralizing songs, he goes seeking a “true-love”

primrose, where but on Montgomery Hill! for he is hers, by all

chivalrous tokens, as much as he may be. Again he cites, and almost

with humor:

“that perplexing eye

Which equally claims love and reverence.”

And his platonics make their honorable challenge at the end of some

fine lines:

“So much do I love her choice, that I

Would fain love him that shall be loved of her!”

There was prescience in that couplet. As early, at least, as 1607-8,

the widow’s long privacy ended, probably while she was at her “howse

at Charing Cross,” watching over the progress of her son George at

Westminster School; and he that was “loved of her” was the grandson of

the last Lord Latimer of the Nevilles, junior brother of a nobleman

who perished with Essex in 1602, and brother and heir of that Sir

Henry Danvers who was created Earl of Danby in 1625 for his services

in Ireland, and who literally left a green memory as the founder of

the pleasant Physic Gardens at Oxford. The name of Danvers, the kindly

step-father, is one of the noteworthy omissions of Lord Herbert of

Cherbury’s _Autobiography_. But George Herbert was devoted to him,

as his many letters show, and turned to him, never in vain, during

his restless years at Cambridge; and into his circle of relatives,

with romantic suddenness, he afterwards married. Sir John Danvers, of

Dauntsey, Wilts, was twenty years younger than his wife. It is worth

while to quote the very deft and courtly statement of the case made at

the last by Dr. Donne: “The natural endowments of her person were such

as had their part in drawing and fixing the affections of such a person

as by his birth and youth and interest in great favors at court, and

legal proximity to great possessions in the world, might justly have

promised him acceptance in what family soever, or upon what person

soever, he had directed. . . . He placed them here, neither diverted

thence, nor repented since. For as the well-tuning of an instrument

makes higher and lower strings of one sound, so the inequality of their

years was thus reduced to an evenness, that she had a cheerfulness

agreeable to his youth, and he had a sober staidness conformable to her

more advanced years. So that I would not consider her at so much more

than forty, nor him at so much less than thirty, at that time; but as

their persons were made one and their fortunes made one by marriage,

so I would put their years into one number, and finding a sixty

between them, think them thirty apiece; for as twins of one hour they

lived.”[5]

In the August of 1607, a masque by John Marston was given in the now

ruined castle of Ashby-de-la-Zouch, eighteen miles from Leicester, as

an entertainment devised by Lord Huntingdon and his young wife, the

Lady Elizabeth Stanley, to welcome her mother, Alice, Countess-Dowager

of Derby,[6] “the first night of her honor’s arrival at the house of

Ashby.” Fourteen noble ladies took part in the masque, and among them

was “Mris Da’vers.” The name may, perhaps, be recognized as that of the

subject of this sketch, for Sir John Danvers was not knighted until the

following year; and it has been so recognized by interested scholars

who have searched Nichols’s _Progresses of James I_. And yet we cannot

be too sure that we have her before us, in the wreaths and picturesque

draperies of the amateur stage; for there was another Mistress Da’vers

at court, whose purported letter, dated February 3, 1613, signed with

her confusing Christian names of “Mary Magdaline,” gave great trouble,

thirty years ago, to the experts of the Camden Society. Besides, a

letter of the good gossipy Chamberlain, dated March 3, 1608-9, mentions

as if it were then a piece of fresh news: “Young Davers is likewise

wedded to the widow Herbert, Sir Edward’s mother, of more than twice

his age.” This would seem to preclude the possibility of the fair

masquer being the same person.

The mother of many Herberts, the “more than forty” bride, was by

nature a home-keeping character. Among the correspondence relating

to Lord Herbert of Cherbury, privately printed in 1886 by the Earl

of Powis, are a few pages which give us invaluable glimpses of the

London household. Lady Danvers’s eldest son, who set off upon his

travels soon after her second marriage, and who applied himself

vigorously to the various diversions of body and mind catalogued

in the _Autobiography_, found himself often pinched for money. In

such a strait, not unfamiliar to other fine gentlemen of his day, he

invariably appealed to the services of the step-father who was his

junior, in England. The latter, writing how “wee are all some what

after the olde manner, and doe hartely wish you well,” seems to have

busied himself to some avail, in concert with his brother-in-law, Sir

Francis Newport (the first Lord Newport), in securing letters of credit

to Milan, Turin, the Netherlands, and elsewhere, and in explaining at

length, in his long involved sentences, how matters could be bettered.

Whether or not the absent Knight of the Bath had reason to suspect Sir

John’s disinterested action when it came to the handling of pounds

and pence, he does not seem, then or after, to have burdened him with

any great harvest of thanks. But Sir John’s faithful wife knew how to

defend him, in a script of May 12, 1615, which may be quoted precisely

as it stands in the Herbert papers.

“To my best beloved sonn, S’r Edward Herbert, Knight,

“My deare Sonn,

it is straunge to me to here you

to complayne of want of care of you in your absence

when my thoughts are seldom removed from you which

must assuredly set me aworkinge of any thinge may doe

you good, & for writinge the one of us yf not both

never let messenges pass without letter, your stay

abroad is so short in any one place & we so unhappy in

givinge you contentment as our letters com not to your

hands which we are sorry for. And to tel you further

of S’r John Da’vers Love which I dare sweare is to no

man more, he is & hath beene so careful to keep you

from lake of money now you are abroad as your Baylife

faylinge payment as they continually doe & pay no man,

he goeth to your Merchaunt, offers him self & all the

powers he can make to supply you as your occasions may

require, mistake him not, but beleeve me there was

never a tenderer hart or a lovinger minde in any man

then is in him towards you who have power to com’aund

him & all that is his. Now for your Baylifs I must

tell you they have not yet payed your brothers all

their Anuities due at Midsom’er past & but half due

at Christmas last and no news of the rest, this yf

advauntage were taken might be preiuditiall to you and

it is ill for your Brothers & very ill you have such

officers.

“I hope it will bringe you home & that is all the good

can com of this. your sister Johnes hath long beene

sicke & within this 8 dayes hath brought a boy she is

so weake as she is much feared by those aboute her. my

Lady Vachell lyes now adyeinge the bell hath twice gone

for her. your wife & sweet children are well & herein

I send you little Florence letter to see what comfort

you may have of your deare children, let them, my Dear

sonn, draw you home & affoorde them your care and me

your comfort that desire more to see you then I desire

any thinge ells in the world, and now I end with my

dayly prayer for your health and safe retorne to Your

ever lovinge mother,

Magd: Da’vers.

“I have received the Pattent of your Br: William, & S’r

John hath beene with the ambassatore who stayes for S’r

James Sandaline[7] his cominge.”

A sympathizing reader, aware of sequences, may wonder whence Sir John

drew “all the powers he can make”! The dignified letter, with its

undulating syntax and thrifty punctuation, harmonizes with all we

know of this delightful woman, who could so reproach what she deemed

a shortcoming, without a touch of temper. How affectionate is the

reference to the “little Florence” who died young, and to the other

children, sufficiently precious to all that household, except to the

wool-gathering chevalier their father, far away! Their innocent faces

peer again through a sweet postscript of their grand-uncle: (“Dick

is here, Ned and Bettye at Haughmond,”) written in the winter, from

Eyton, to the truant at the Hague.[8] This same genial Sir Francis

Newport, “imoderately desyring to see you,” confides to his nephew,

during what he complains of as “a verye drye and hott time”[9] for

Shropshire farmers, that “mye syster your mother is confident to take

a iourney into these pts this somer, the rather, I think, because yo’r

brother Vaugh’n is dead & if yo’ have a willing harte you maye come

tyme enough to acco’pany her heare, & would not then the companye bee

much the better?” But we fear the little excursion never came off.

Edward Herbert’s next visit to his home, presumably after a four-years’

absence, was in 1619; and in May of that year he accepted the office

of Ambassador to France, and spread his ready wing again to the

Continent. And the _Athenæ Oxoniensis_ will not let us forget that the

too spirited envoy had to be temporarily recalled in 1621, because he

had “irreverently treated” De Luynes, the powerful but good-for-nothing

Constable of France. It is not insignificant that this was the year in

which George Herbert wrote to his mother in one of his consoling moods,

bidding her be of good cheer, albeit her health and wealth were gone,

and the conduct of her children was not very satisfying!

We know that Lady Danvers had the “honor, love, obedience, troops of

friends” which became her, and that she lost none of her influence,

none of her serene charm. Her poet was much with her in his advancing

age. In July, 1625, while the plague was raging in London, Donne

reminded Sir Henry Wotton of the leisure he enjoyed, golden as

Cicero’s, by dating his letter “from S’r John Davor’s house at Chelsey,

of w’ich house & my Lord Carlil’s at Hanworth I make up my Tusculum.”

Many a peaceful evening must they have passed upon the terraces,

within sound of the solemn songs always dear to both. Visitors yet

more illustrious came there from the city; for the noble hostess

had once the privilege of reviving the great Lord Bacon,[10] who

had fainted in her garden. We learn, with sympathy, that “sickness,

in the declination of her years, had opened her to an overflowing

of melancholy; not that she ever lay under that water, but yet had,

sometimes, some high tides of it.” Death chose Dr. Donne’s ministering

angel before him, after thirty years of mutual fealty. Her restless son

Edward, now at home, was already eminent, and wearing his little Irish

title of Baron Castleisland; her thoughtful Charles was long dead; her

brother, also, was no more; her daughters were matrons, and dwelling in

prosperity. With but one unfulfilled wish, that of seeing her favorite

George married and in holy orders,[11] and after a life which left a

wake of sunshine behind it in the world, very patiently and hopefully

Magdalen Newport, Lady Danvers, entered upon eternity, in the early

June of 1627. On the eighth day of the month, in St. Luke’s, the parish

church of Chelsea, she was buried:

“Old age with snow-bright hair, and folded palm,”

the final earthly glimpse of her still traditionally beautiful. On the

first of July her faithful liegeman, now Dean of St. Paul’s and Vicar

of St. Dunstan-in-the-West, preached her funeral sermon there, before

a crowd of the great ones of London, the clergy, and the poor. Izaak

Walton’s kind face looked up from a near pew, whence he saw Dr. Donne’s

tears, and felt his breaking voice, the voice of one who did not belie

his friend, nigh the end of his own pilgrimage. In present grief and

among graver memories, he had the true perception not to forget how

joyous she had been. “She died,” he said, “without any change of

countenance or posture, without any struggling, any disorder, . . . and

expected that which she hath received: God’s physic and God’s music,

a Christianly death. . . . She was eyes to the blind, and feet to the

lame, . . . naturally cheerful and merry, and loving facetiousness and

sharpness of wit.” His own fund of mirth and strength was fast going;

and a haunting line of his youth,

“And all my pleasures are like yesterday,”

must have reverted to him many and many a time. Morbid and persistent

thoughts beset him from this hour, probably, more than ever, until

he had the effigy of himself, painted as he was, laid in his failing

sight;[12] morbid and persistent thoughts of the ruin which befalls the

bright bodies of humanity, sometimes surging up in his loneliness, and

crowding out the better vision which yet may “grace us in the disgrace

of death.” His inward eye was drawn strongly to his friend’s sepulchre,

sealed and sombre before him, and to what had been her, “going into

dust now almost a month of days, almost a lunar year . . . which, while

I speak, is mouldering and crumbling into less and less dust.” But he

ended in a wholesomer strain, subdued and calm: “This good soul being

thus laid down to sleep in His peace, ‘I charge you, O daughters of

Jerusalem, that ye wake her not!’”

The rare little duodecimo which contains Lady Danvers’s funeral sermon

was printed soon after, “together with other Commemorations of Her, by

her Sonne G. Herbert,” and offered to the public at the Golden Lion in

Paul’s Churchyard. The commemorations are in Greek and Latin. Strangely

enough, nowhere is the sweet and sage poet of _The Temple_ so set upon

his prosody, so given to awkward pagan conceits, so out of tune with

the ideals of classic diction. But he, who tenderly loved his mother,

has given to us, in the _Memoriæ Matris Sacrum_, several precious

personal fragments, and one more precious whole picture of daily habits

in the lines beginning _Corneliæ sanctæ_: her morning prayer, her bath,

and the plaiting of her glossy hair; her housewifely cares, her fit

replies, her writing to her friends, her passion for music, her gentle

helpfulness; the long felicity of a glad and stainless life,

“Quicquid habet tellus, quicquid et astra, fruens.”

Dr. Donne died in 1631, whatever was yet of earth in his spirit healed

and chastened by long pain. His last remembrance to some he loved

was his own seal of Christ on the Anchor, “engraven very small on

heliotropium stones, and set in gold, for rings.” Many of those to

whom his heart would have turned, the “autumnal beauty” scarce second

among them, had preceded him out of England. But in travelling towards

his Maker, he had that other sacred hope to “ebb on with them,” and

gloriously overtake them, as he traced the epitaph which covered

him in old St. Paul’s: “_Hic licet in occiduo cinere, aspicit eum

cujus nomen est Oriens_.” The tie between himself and her was not

unremembered in the next generation; for we find John Donne the younger

dedicating his father’s posthumous work to Francis, Lord Newport,

and when making his will, in 1662, bequeathing also to the same Lord

Newport “the picture of St. Anthony in a round frame.” And thus, in a

revived fragrance, the annals of true friendship close.

These rapid, ragged strokes of a pen make the only possible biography

of Lady Danvers. When Walton wrote of her, he had the entire

correspondence with Dr. Donne before him.[13] “There were sacred

endearments betwixt these two excellent persons,” he assures us, but

disappointingly hurries on into the highway of his subject. It is

curious that it seems impossible now to trace these breathing relics,

or others from the same source; for George Herbert, in the second

elegy of the _Parentalia_, has much to say, and very sweetly, of the

industry of his mother’s “white right hand,” and of the “many and most

notable letters, flying over all the world.” Much detail is utterly

lost which men who agree with Prosper Mérimée that all Thucydides

would not be worth an authentic memoir of Aspasia, or even of one of

the slaves of Pericles, might be glad to remember. A copy of a song,

a reminiscence of the glow and stir of the days through which she

moved, a guess through a mist at the blond head,[14] the half-imperious

carriage, the open hand, as she went her ways, like Dante’s lovely

lady, _sentendosi laudare_,—these are all we have of the daughter of

England’s golden age. It would be easy, were it also just, to throw

a dash of color into her shadowy history. One would like to verify

the scene at Eyton, while the news of the coming Armada roused the

lion in Drake, and struck terror into the Devon towns; and to hear the

young wife, with three lisping Herberts at her knee, beguile them with

mellow contralto snatches of a Robin Hood ballad, or with the sweet

yesterday’s tale of Zutphen, where their country’s dearest gave his

cup of water to a dying comrade. A decade later, before their handsome

bluff father, her other healthful boys stood up to wrestle, and twang

their arrows at forty paces; or a rosy daughter stole to his side, and

asked him of mishaps in Ireland, or of the giant laughter bubbling

from the “oracle of Apollo” in a London street. It is to be believed

that one who watched events through the insurrection of Essex, through

Raleigh’s dramatic trial, reprieve, and execution, through the national

mourning for the Prince of Wales, through the fever for colonization,

the savage sea-fights, the great intrigues in behalf of the Queen of

Scots, the religious divisions, the muttering parliamentary thunders,

the stress and heat of the exciting dawn of the seventeenth century,

was not unmindful of all it meant to be alive, there and then. Magdalen

Newport’s girlhood fell on Lyly’s _Euphues_, fresh from the printers;

the _Arcadia_ made the talk of Oxford, in her prime; the dusky splendor

of Marlowe’s _Faustus_ was abroad before her second marriage. She was,

surely, aware of Shakespeare, and of the wonder-folio of 1623; of the

newest delighting madrigals and antiphons set forth by one Robert

Jones, when every soul in England had the gift of music; of rascal

Robert Greene’s lovable lyrics, of Wyatt’s, Campion’s, and Drayton’s.

She wrote no verses, indeed, but her familiars wrote them; her every

step jostled a Muse. We may assume that no growth nor loss in literary

circles escaped that tender “perplexing eye.” Perhaps it glistened from

a bench, in the pioneer British theatre, on the actors of _Volpone_,

and followed silently, behind the royal group, the first mincings

of the first dear Fool in _King Lear_, one day-after-Christmas at

Whitehall. Last of all, for whim’s sake, how any sociologist would

enjoy having the honest opinion of young Lady Herbert, or that of

little Mistress Donne, concerning the person they could but thank and

praise! _Utinam vivisset Pepys!_ It is a cheat of history that it

preserves no clearer tint or trace of this chosen passer-by. Such, in

truth, she was, and the quiet vanishing name clings to her: the woman

of durable gladness, happily born and taught, like the soul whereof Sir

Henry Wotton, who must have known her well, made his immortal song.

Of the gracious figure of Sir John Danvers we may be said to lose

sight; for he seems less gracious, as by a Hindoo trick, as soon as

it is written that his wife departed unto her reward. Comment on

his character is equal comment upon hers, and adds new force to the

classic episode of a lady philanthropist espousing a ne’er-do-weel and

a featherbrain. Aubrey, always happy over a little ultra-contemporary

gossip, calls it “a disagreeable match,” disappointing to the

bridegroom’s kindred; but adds that “he married her for love of her

wit.” Now, wit is an admirable magnet, but it is to be suspected that

there was also, and in the immediate vicinity, “metal more attractive,”

as Hamlet says. In the Chelsea parish-books is an entry, the first of

its kind, certifying that Sir John Danvers had settled his account with

“the poore,” a matter of thirty pounds’ loan (in which the vicar must

have connived), for the year ending in January of 1628. If the payment

were, by any hap, in advance, it may have fallen in Lady Danvers’s own

lifetime; and if so, it is quite as likely that she paid it, with an

admonition! Her “high tides of melancholy,” of whose true cause she

certainly would not have complained to Dr. Donne, had something to

do with this young spendthrift, who must have had his wheedling way,

sooner or later, with such of her ample revenues as were yet extant.

Perhaps Lord Herbert of Cherbury was both shrewd and charitable, in

suppressing mention of his new relative.[15] The longer one looks into

the matter, the less curious seems his unexplained silence concerning

this late graft of a family hitherto always respectable and always

loyal.

There are gleams of subsequent private history in the tell-tale records

at Chelsea. We are not incurably astonished to learn that as early as

May of 1629 was christened Elizabeth, daughter of Sir John Danvers

and Elizabeth his wife. This Lady Elizabeth, arriving providentially

with her Dauntsey wealth, having borne him four children, died, as

did his mother, in 1636; and left him even as she found him, none too

monogamous. In 1648 Sir John Danvers again appeared at the venerable

altars where his first saint never had a memorial, loving, honoring,

and cherishing a Mrs. Grace Hewes, Hawes, or Hewet, of Kemerton in

Gloucestershire, and, as it is to be surmised, leading her tame

fortune by a ribbon. His debts and difficulties, not of one but of all

time, sprout perennially in the registers. His indefatigable name,

oftener than any rival’s whatsoever, figures as borrowing and paying

interest on a forty-pound note, which, like a Hydra-head, was always

forthcoming so soon as it was demolished. This disgraceful business was

the man’s chief concern: for the older he grew the deeper and deeper

he sank into entanglements, particularly after the death of the King.

It was never doubted, in his day, but that this was a judgment on the

former Gentleman Usher who affixed hand and seal to the warrant of his

sovereign’s execution.[16] His own family, it is said, as well as the

royalist Herberts and Newports, dropped his acquaintance; and who knows

whether Mrs. Grace Hewet was faithful? At his favorite Chelsea, in the

April of 1655, and in about the seventy-fourth year of his age, Sir

John Danvers ended his career by more conventional agencies than the

rope and the knife, which might have befallen him in the Stuart triumph

of the morrow. His manor fell an immediate forfeit to the crown. In

1661, the dead republican was attainted, and all of his estate which

was unprotected was declared regal booty. The year before his own

burial at Dauntsey he laid there, “to the great grief of all good men,”

the body of his elder son Henry, who had just attained his majority.

The Earl of Danby had died, “full of honors, wounds, and days,” in

1643, while this Henry, his nephew, was still a hopeful child; and on

him alone he had taken pains to settle his possessions. But Henry, in

turn, was persuaded to bequeath the major part of them to his father’s

ever-gaping pocket, the remainder reverting to one of his two surviving

sisters. The third Lady Danvers, who lived until 1678, had also a son

Charles,[17] who petitioned the crown for his paternal rights, but

died in old age, with neither income nor issue.

Clarendon quietly indicts Sir John Danvers as a “proud, formal, weak

man,” such as Cromwell “employed and contemned at once.” George Bate

gives him a harder character, saying that he “proved his brother to be

a delinquent in the Rump Parliament, whereby he might overthrow his

will, and so compass the estate himself. He sided with the sectarian

party, was one of the King’s judges, and lived afterwards some years

in his sin, without repentance.” But the same accuser adds the saving

fact that Dr. Thomas Fuller, like Aubrey, was Sir John’s friend, and,

by his desire, preached many times at Chelsea, “where, I am sure, he

was instructed to repent of his misguided and wicked consultations in

having to do with the murther of that just man.” One half surmises

that had the preliminaries of the great struggle occurred in her time

Magdalen Herbert’s rather austere and advanced standards of right would

have stood it out, despite her traditions, for the Commons against

_Carolus Agnus_.[18] But that would have been a very different matter

from sharing the feelings of the crude advocates of revolution and

regicide. What a misconception of her spotless motives must she have

borne, had others found her in agreement with her vagabond lord, who

treated politics as he treated the sacrament of matrimony, purely as a

makeshift and a speculation!

He was no raw-head-and-bloody-bones, this Roderigo-like Briton who won

the approval of Lord Bacon, and whom George Wither thanks for “those

pleasurable refreshments often vouchsafed”; and whom very different

men, such as George Herbert and Walton[19] and peaceable Fuller loved.

He was a comely creature of some parts, a luckless worldling anxious

to feather his own nest, and driven by timidity and the desire of gain

into treacheries against himself. His short, thin, and “fayre bodie,”

common, as George Herbert would have us imply, to all who bore his

name, his elegance, his hospitality, and his devotedness to his elderly

wife, carried him off handsomely in the eyes of her jealous circle. His

house in Chelsea, commemorated now by Danvers Street, adjoined that

which had been Sir Thomas More’s, and was presumably a part of the same

estate. All around it, and due to its master’s genuine enthusiasm, lay

the first Italian garden planted in England; and there, rolling towards

the Thames, were the long glowing flower-beds and green orchard-alleys,

which were also the “_horti deliciæ dominæ_” recalled thrice in the

music of filial sorrow. This home of Magdalen Danvers was pulled down,

and built over, in 1716. Within its unfallen walls, where she spent

her serene married life, and where she died, she had time to think,

nevertheless, that she stood, towards evening, in the ways of folly,

and that hers was one of those little incipient domestic tragedies

which must always look amusing, even to a friend.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Walton confuses this Edward Herbert with a namesake entered at

Queen’s College; and he follows the erring dates of the _Autobiography

of Lord Herbert of Cherbury_. The boy’s age is correctly given as

fourteen in the college registers.

[2] Donne had been in residence at both Universities, but took no

degree at either, as he had scruples against accepting the conditions

imposed. He was at that time, and until about 1593, like his parents, a

Catholic. His father was of Welsh descent: a fact which may have borne

its share in attracting him towards the Herberts.

[3] Anne Donne, it may be remarked, was also the name of Cowper’s

mother.

[4] Sir Richard Baker’s _Chronicle_, 1684, mentions Dr. Donne as one

of his “heroic Grecians,” and adds, in the same breath, that he was “a

great visitor of ladies.”

[5] Dr. Donne’s conceit about the ages of his friends is better handled

in the young Cartwright’s

“Chloe, why wish you that your years,”

a little later. It is not impossible that Cartwright, an Oxonian and an

observer, may have drawn upon Donne’s report of this very wedding for

his charming and ingenious lyric.

[6] This august personage was one of the Spencers of Althorp. At

this time she had been for six years the wife of her second husband,

the Lord Keeper Egerton, although retaining the magnificent title of

her widowhood. At their estate of Harefield in Middlesex, Milton’s

_Arcades_ was afterwards given, and it will be remembered what fine

compliments to the then aged countess-dowager figure in its opening

verses. Spenser’s _Teares of the Muses_ had been dedicated to her, in

her prime, and she was the Amaryllis “highest in degree” of his _Colin

Clout’s Come Home Again_.

[7] Sir James Sandelyn, Sandalo, or Sandilands (who cuts his finest

figure as Jacobus Sandilandius in _The Muses’ Welcome_) was appointed

Maistre d’Hostel to the beloved and beautiful Princess Elizabeth on

her marriage to Frederic, Count Palatine of the Rhine, afterwards

King of Bohemia, in 1612. As Sir James’s name is down on the lists of

the Exchequer for a gift in 1615, and as his little son Richard was

baptized in Deptford Church two months after the date of Lady Danvers’s

letter, we may conclude that he came back to England just when the

“ambassatore” expected him.

[8] Edward Herbert served as a volunteer in the campaign of 1614-15

in the Netherlands, under the Prince of Orange. Richard Herbert, here

mentioned, was his eldest son, a future Cavalier and captain of a troop

of horse in the Civil Wars; Edward was the baby, and “Bettye” the child

Beatrice, destined, like her sister, to a short life.

[9] This 1614-15 was an eccentric and un-English year throughout. The

winter signalized itself by the Great Snow; “_frigus intensum_,” as

Camden says, “_et nix copiosissima_.”

[10] Lord Bacon dedicated to Edward Herbert, “the father of English

deists,” his very flat translation of the Psalms! George wrote three

Latin poems in his honor, one being upon the occasion of his death.

[11] He was, in July of 1626, ordained deacon, and prebendary of Layton

Ecclesia in Huntingdonshire. Readers of Walton will remember how his

dear mother invited him to commit simony on that occasion.

[12] The standing marble figure in a winding-sheet which Dr. King had

modelled upon this strange painting on wood, may yet be seen in the

south ambulatory of the choir of St. Paul’s; almost the only relic

saved from the old cathedral which perished in the Great Fire of 1666.

It is not only of unique interest, but of considerable artistic beauty,

and “seems to breathe faintly,” as Sir Henry Wotton said of it.

[13] Dr. Donne’s papers were bequeathed to Dr. Henry King, the

poet-Bishop of Chichester, then residentiary of St. Paul’s. The “find”

were a precious one, if they yet survive.

[14] The half-romantic reference, which occurs more than once in

Donne’s poems, to his own long-dead arm which still shall keep

“The bracelet of bright hair about the bone,”—

has it nothing to do with this blond head? _Honi soit qui mal y pense._

The internal evidences in _The Relic_, with its mention of St. Mary

Magdalen, and its boast of purest friendship, and the roguery of the

closing line in _The Funeral_, are somewhat strong, nevertheless.

[15] The famous _Autobiography_, indeed, boldly assures posterity

that Lady Herbert, after 1597, “continued unmarried,” and, in brief,

“was the woman Dr. Donne hath described her.” The acknowledgment of

the accuracy of that funeral sermon, containing, as it does, its very

specific Danvers passages, is in our fearless philosopher’s best style.

[16] There was afterwards, in France, a Gentleman of the Bedchamber who

had other notions. “Gratitude,” said Thierry to his executioner in the

court-yard of the Abbaye—“gratitude has no opinions. I am leal to my

master.”

[17] An elder Charles, son of the Lady Elizabeth Danvers, was baptized

in 1632, and must have died early.

[18] Edward Herbert sided eventually with the Parliament, which

indemnified him for the burning and sacking of Montgomery Castle.

[19] The six very innocent, cheerful, pious ten-syllable stanzas,

attributed in _The Complete Angler_ to “another angler, Jo. Davors,

Esq.,” are not, it is hardly necessary to add, from our scapegrace’s

pen. He ceased to be “Jo. Davors, Esq.,” when Walton was fourteen years

old.

II

HENRY VAUGHAN

1621-1695

IN his own person, Henry Vaughan left no trace in society. His life

seemed to slip by like the running water on which he was forever gazing

and moralizing, and his memory met early with the fate which he hardly

foresaw. Descended from the royal chiefs of southern Wales whom Tacitus

mentions, and whose abode, in the day of Roman domination, was in the

district called Siluria,[20] he called himself the Silurist upon his

title-pages; and he keeps the distinctive name in the humblest of

epitaphs, close by his home in the glorious valley of the Usk and the

little Honddu, under the shadow of Tretower, the ruined castle of his

race, and of Pen-y-Fan and his kindred peaks. What we know of him

is a sort of pastoral: how he was born, the son of a poor gentleman,

in 1621, at Newton St. Bridget, in the old house yet asleep on the

road between Brecon and Crickhowel; how he went up to Oxford, Laud’s

Oxford, with Thomas, his twin, as a boy of sixteen, to be entered at

Jesus College;[21] how he took his degree (just where and when no one

can discover), and came back, after a London revel, to be the village

physician, though he was meant for the law, in what had become his

brother’s parish of Llansantffraed; to write books full of sequestered

beauty, to watch the most tragic of wars, to look into the faces of

love and loss, and to spend his thoughtful age on the bowery banks of

the river he had always known, his _Isca parens florum_, to which

he consecrated many a sweet English line. And the ripple of the not

unthankful Usk was “distinctly audible over its pebbles,” as was the

Tweed to the failing sense of Sir Walter, in the room where Henry

Vaughan drew his last breath, on St. George’s day, April 23, 1695. He

died exactly seventy-nine years after Shakespeare, exactly one hundred

and fifty-five years before Wordsworth.

Circumstances had their way with him, as with most poets. He knew

the touch of disappointment and renunciation, not only in life, but

in his civic hopes and in his art. He broke his career in twain, and

began over, before he had passed thirty; and he showed great æsthetic

discretion, as well as disinterestedness, in replacing his graceful

early verses by the deep dedications of his prime. Religious faith and

meditation seem so much part of his innermost nature, it is a little

difficult to remember that Vaughan considered himself a brand snatched

from the burning, a lawless Cavalier brought by the best of chances

to the quiet life, and the feet of the moral Muse. He suffered most

of the time between 1643 and 1651 from a sorely protracted and nearly

fatal illness; and during its progress his wife and his dearest friends

were taken from him. Nor was the execution of the King a light event

to so sensitive a poet and so passionate a partisan. Meanwhile Vaughan

read George Herbert, and his theory of proportional values began to

change. It was a season of transition and silent crises, when men bared

their breasts to great issues, and when it was easy for a childlike

soul,

“Weary of her vain search below, above,

In the first Fair to find the immortal Love.”[22]

Vaughan, in his new fervor, did his best to suppress the numbers

written in his youth, thus clearing the field for what he afterwards

called his “hagiography”; and a critic may wonder what he found in his

first tiny volume of 1646, or in _Olor Iscanus_, to regret or cancel.

Every unbaptized song is “bright only in its own innocence, and

kindles nothing but a generous thought”; and one of them, at least,

has a manly postlude of love and resolve worthy of the free lyres of

Lovelace and Montrose. Vaughan, unlike other ardent spirits of his

class, had nothing very gross to be sorry for; if he was, indeed, one

of his own

“feverish souls,

Sick with a scarf or glove,”

he had none but noble ravings. Happily, his very last verses, _Thalia

Rediviva_, breaking as it were by accident a silence of twenty-three

years, indorse with cheerful gallantry the accents of his youth.

The turn in his life which brought him lasting peace, in a world

rocking between the cant of the Parliament and resurgent audacity

and riot, achieved for us a body of work which, small as it is, has

rare interest, and an out-of-door beauty, as of the natural dusk,

“breathless with adoration,” which is almost without parallel. Eternity

has been known to spoil a poet for time, but not in this instance.

Never did religion and art interchange a more fortunate service,

outside Italian studios. Once he had shaken off secular ambitions,

Vaughan’s voice grew at once freer and more forceful. In him a

marked intellectual gain sprang from an apparently slight spiritual

readjustment, even as it did, three centuries later, in one greater

than he, John Henry Newman.

Vaughan’s work is thickly sown with personalities, but they are so

delicate and involved that there is little profit in detaching them.

What record he made at the University is not apparent; nor is it at

all sure that so independent and speculative a mind applied itself

gracefully to the curriculum. He was, in the only liberal sense, a

learned man, full of life-long curiosity for the fruit of the Eden

Tree. His lines beginning

“Quite spent with thought I left my cell”

show the acutest thirst for hidden knowledge; he would “most gladly

die,” if death might buy him intellectual growth. He looks forward to

eternity as to the unsealing and disclosing of mysteries. He makes the

soul sing joyously to the body:

“I that here saw darkly, in a glass,

But mists and shadows pass,

And by their own weak shine did search the springs

And source of things,

Shall, with inlighted rays,

Pierce all their ways!”

With an imperious query, he encounters the host of midnight stars:

“Who circled in

Corruption with this glorious ring?”

What Vaughan does know is nothing to him; when he salutes the Bodleian

from his heart, he is thinking how little honey he has gathered from

that vast hive, and how little it contains, when measured with what

there is to learn from living and dying. He had small respect for the

sinister sciences among which the studies of his beloved brother,

a Neo-Platonist, lay. Though he was no pedant, he dearly loved to

get in a slap against the ignorant whom we have always with us. At

twenty-five, he printed a good adaptation of the Tenth of Juvenal, and

flourished his wit, in the preface, at the expense of some possible

gentle reader of the parliamentary persuasion who would “quarrel with

antiquitie.” “These, indeed, may think that they have slept out so many

centuries in this Satire, and are now awaked; which had it been still

Latin, perhaps their nap had been everlasting!”

He was an optimist, proven through much personal trial; he had

sympathy with the lower animals, and preserved a humorous deference

towards all things alive, even the leviathan of Holy Writ, which

he affectionately exalts into “the shipmen’s fear” and “the comely

spacious whale”! Vaughan adored his friends; he had a unique veneration

for childhood; his adjective for the admirable and beautiful, whether

material or immaterial, is “dear”; and his mind dwelt with habitual

fondness on what Sir Thomas Browne (a man after his own heart) calls

“incomprehensibles, and thoughts of things which thoughts do but

tenderly touch.”

His occupation as a resident physician must have fostered his fine

eye and ear for the green earth, and furnished him, day by day,

with musings in sylvan solitudes, and rides abroad over the fresh

hill-paths. The breath of the mountains is about his books. An early

riser, he uttered a constant invocation to whomever would listen, that

“Manna was not good

After sun-rising; far-day sullies flowers.”

He was hospitable on a limited income.[23] His verses of invitation

_To his Retired Friend_, which are not without their thrusts at

passing events, have a classic jollity fit to remind the reader of

Randolph’s ringing ode to Master Anthony Stafford. Again and again

Vaughan reiterates the Socratic and Horatian song of content: that he

has enough lands and money, that there are a thousand things he does

not want, that he is blessed in what he has. All this does not prevent

him from recording the phenomenal ebb-tides of his purse, and from

whimsically synthesizing on “the threadbare, goldless genealogie” of

bards! No sour zealot in anything, he enjoyed an evening now and then

at the Globe Tavern in London, where he consumed his sack with relish,

that he might be “possessor of more soul,” and “after full cups have

dreams poetical.” But he was no lover of the town. Country life was

his joy and pride; the only thing which seemed, in his own most vivid

phrase, to “fill his breast with home.”

“Here something still like Eden looks!

Honey in woods, juleps in brooks.”

A literary acquaintance, one unrecognized N. W., congratulates

Vaughan that he is able to “give his Muse the swing in an hereditary

shade.” He translated with great gusto _The Old Man of Verona_, out

of Claudian, and Guevara’s _Happiness of Country Life_; and he notes

with satisfaction that Abraham was of his rural mind, in “Mamre’s holy

grove.” Vaughan was an angler, need it be added? Nay, the autocrat of

anglers: he was a salmon-catcher.

With “the charity which thinketh no evil,” he loved almost everything,

except the Jesuits, and his ogres the Puritans. For Vaughan knew where

he stood, and his opinion of Puritanism never varied. He kept his

snarls and satires, for the most part, hedged within his prose, the

proper ground of the animosities. When he put on his singing-robes, he

tried to forget, not always with success, his spites and bigotries.

For his life, he could not help sidelong glances, stings, strictures

between his teeth, thistle-down hints cast abroad in the neatest of

generalities:

“Who saint themselves, they are no saints!”

The introduction to his _Mount of Olives_ (whose pages have a soft

billowy music like Jeremy Taylor’s) is nominally inscribed to “the

peaceful, humble, and pious reader.” That functionary must have found

it a trial to preserve his peaceful and pious abstraction, while the

peaceful and pious author proceeded to flout the existing government,

in a towering rage, and in very elegant caustic English. Vaughan was

none too godly to be a thorough hater. He was genially disposed to

the pretensions of every human creature; he refused to consider his

ancestry and nurture by themselves, as any guarantee of the justice

of his views or of his superior insight into affairs. Yet in spite of

his enforced Quaker attitude during the clash of arms, he nursed in

that gentle bosom the heartiest loathing of democracy, and shared the

tastes of a certain clerk of the Temple “who never could be brought to

write Oliver with a great O.” It is fortunate that he did not spoil

himself, as Wither did, upon the wheels of party, for politics were his

most vehement concern. Had he been richer, as he tells us in a playful

passage, nothing on earth would have kept him from meddling with

national issues.

The poets, save the greatest, Milton, his friend Andrew Marvell, and

Wither, rallied in a bright group under the royal standard. Those

among them who did not fight were commonly supposed, as was Drummond

of Hawthornden, to redeem their reputation by dying of grief at the

overthrow of the King. Yet Vaughan did not fight, and Vaughan did not

die of grief. It is so sure that he suffered some privation, and it

may be imprisonment, for his allegiance, that shrewd guessers, before

now, have equipped him and placed him in the ranks of the losing cause,

where he might have had choice company. His generous erratic brother (a

writer of some note, an alchemist, an Orientalist, a Rosicrucian, who

was ejected from his vicarage in 1654, and died either of the plague,

or of inhaling the fumes of a caldron, at Albury, in 1665, while the

court was at Oxford)[24] had been a recruit, and a brave one. But Henry

Vaughan explicitly tells us, in his _Ad Posteros_, and in a prayer in

the second part of _Silex Scintillans_, that he had no personal share

in the constitutional struggle, that he shed no blood. Again he cries,

in a third lyric,

“O accept

Of his vowed heart, whom Thou hast kept

From bloody men!”

This painstaking record of a fact by one so loyal as he goes far

to prove, to an inductive mind not thoroughly familiar with his

circumstances, that he considered war the worst of current evils, and

was willing, for this first principle of his philosophy, to lay himself

open to the charge, not indeed of cowardice (was he not a Vaughan?),

but of lack of appreciation for the one romantic opportunity of his

life. His withdrawal from the turmoil which so became his colleagues

may seem to harmonize with his known moral courage and right sentiment;

and fancy is ready to fasten on him the sad neutrality, and the

passionate “ingemination” for “peace, peace,” which “took his sleep

from him, and would shortly break his heart,” such as Clarendon tells

us of in his beautiful passage touching the young Lord Falkland. But

it is greatly to be feared that Vaughan, despite all the abstract

reasoning which arrays itself against so babyish and barbarous a thing

as a battle, would have swung himself into a saddle as readily as any,

had not “God’s finger touched him.” A comparison of dates will show

that he was bedridden, while his hot heart was afield with the shouting

gentlemen whom Mr. Browning heard in a vision:

“King Charles! and who’ll do him right, now?

King Charles! and who’s ripe for fight, now?

Give a rouse: here’s in Hell’s despite now,

King Charles!”

This is the secret of Vaughan’s blood-guiltlessness. Of course he

thanked Heaven, after, that he was kept clean of carnage; he would have

thanked Heaven for anything that happened to him. It was providential

that we of posterity lost a soldier in the Silurist, and gained a poet.

As the great confusion cleared, his spirit cleared too, and the Vaughan

we know,

“Delicious, lusty, amiable, fair,”

comes in, like a protesting angel, with the Commonwealth. Perhaps

he lived long enough to sum up the vanity of statecraft and the

instability of public choice, driven from tyranny to license, from

absolute monarchy to absolute anarchy; and to turn once more to his

“loud brook’s incessant fall” as an object much worthier of a rational

man’s regard. Born while James I. was vain-gloriously reigning, Henry

Vaughan survived the Civil War, the two Protectorates, the orgies of

the Restoration (which he did not fail to satirize), and the Revolution

of “Meenie the daughter,” as the old Scots song slyly calls her. He had

seen the Stuarts in and out, in and out again, and his seventy-four

years, on-lookers at a tragedy, were not forced to sit through the dull

Georgian farce which began almost as soon as his grave was green.

Moreover, he was thoroughly out of touch with his surroundings. While

all the world was either devil-may-care or Calvin-colored, he had for

his characteristic a rapt, inexhaustible joy, buoying him up and

sweeping him away. He might well have said, like Dr. Henry More, his

twin’s rival and challenger in metaphysics, that he was “most of his

time mad with pleasure.” While

“every burgess foots

The mortal pavement in eternal boots,”

Vaughan lay indolently along a bank, like a shepherd swain, pondering

upon the brood of “green-heads” who denied miracles to have been or to

be, and wishing the noisy passengers on the highways of life could be

taught the value of

“A sweet self-privacy in a right soul.”

His mind turned to paradoxes and inverted meanings, and the analysis

of his own tenacious dreams, in an England of pikes and bludgeons and

hock-carts and wassail-cakes. “A proud, humoursome person,” Anthony

à Wood called him. He was something of a fatalist, inasmuch as he

followed his lonely and straight path, away from crowds, and felt eager

for nothing but what fell into his open hands. He strove little, being

convinced that temporal advantage is too often an eternal handicap.

“Who breaks his glass to take more light,” he reminds us, “makes way

for storms unto his rest.” This passive quality belongs to happy men,

and Vaughan was a very happy man, thanks to the faith and will which

made him so, although he had known calamity, and had failed in much.

Throughout his pages one can trace the affecting struggle between

things desired and things forborne. It is only a brave philosopher who

can afford to pen a stanza intimate as this:

“O Thou who didst deny to me

The world’s adored felicity!

Keep still my weak eyes from the shine

Of those gay things which are not Thine.”

He had better possessions than glory under his hand in the health and

peace of his middle age and in his cheerful home. He was twice married,

and must have lost his first wife, nameless to us, but most tenderly

mourned, in his twenty-ninth or thirtieth year. She seems to have been

the mother of five of his six children. Vaughan was rich in friends. He

had known Davenant and Cartwright, but it is quite characteristic of

him that the two great authors to whom he was especially attached were

Jonson and John Fletcher, both only a memory at the time of his first

going to London. Of Randolph, Jonson’s strong “son,” who so beggared

English literature by dying young in 1634, Vaughan sweetly says

somewhere that he will hereafter

“Look for Randolph in those holy meads.”

Mention of his actual fellow-workers is very infrequent, nor does he

mention the Shakespeare who had “dwelt on earth unguessed at,” and who

is believed to have visited the estates of the Vaughans at Scethrog,

and to have picked up the name of his merry fellow Puck from goblin

traditions of the neighborhood. Vaughan followed his leisure and his

preference in translating divers works of meditation, biography, and

medicine, pleasing himself, like Queen Bess, with naturalizing bits of

Boethius, and much from Plutarch, Ausonius, Severinus, and Claudian.

He did some passages from Ovid, but he must have felt sharply the

violence done to the lyric essence in passing it ever so gently from

language to language, for he lingered over Adrian’s darling _Animula

vagula blandula_, only to leave it alone, and to write of it as the

saddest poetry that ever he met with.

Not the least of Henry Vaughan’s blessings was his warm friendship with

“the matchless Orinda.”[25] This delightful Catherine Fowler married,

in 1647, a stanch royalist, Mr. James Philips of Cardigan Priory, and

as his bride, became what, in the Welsh solitudes, was considered

“neighbor” to Vaughan, her home being distant from his just fifty miles

as the crow flies. She had been, in her infancy, a prodigy of Biblical

quotation, like Evelyn’s little Richard, and grew up to be such another

_précieuse_ as Madame la Comtesse de Lafayette, _née_ Lavergne; but

we know that she was the cleverest and comeliest of good women, and

Vaughan’s association with her must have been a perpetual sunshine

to him and his. She prefixed, after the fashion of the day, some

commendatory verses to his published work. They are not only pretty,

but they furnish a bit of adequate criticism. The secular Muse of the

Silurist is, according to Orinda,

“Truth clothed in wit, and Love in innocence,”

and has, for her birthright, seriousness and a “charming rigour.” The

last two words might stand for him in the fast-coming day when nobody

will have time to discuss old poets in anything but technical terms and

epigrams. Orinda, with her accurate judgment, should have had a chance

to talk to Mr. Thomas Campbell, who adorned his _Specimens_ with the

one official and truly prepositional phrase that “Vaughan was one of

the harshest of writers, even of the inferior order of the school of

conceit!”[26]

While Henry Vaughan was preparing for publication the first half of

_Silex Scintillans_ as the token of his arrested and uplifted youth,

Rev. Mr. Thomas Vaughan, backed by a few other sanguine Oxonians, and

disregardful of his twin’s exaggerated remorse for the fruits of his

profaner years, brought out the “formerly written and newly named”

_Olor Iscanus_, over the author’s head, in 1650, and gave to it a

motto from the Georgics. The preface is in Eugenius Philalethes’ own

gallant style, and offers a haughty commendation to “beauty from the

light retired.” Perhaps Vaughan’s earliest and most partial editor

felt, like Thoreau on a certain occasion, that it were well to make an

extreme statement, if only so he might make an emphatic one. He chose

to supplicate the public of the Protectorate in this wise: “It was

the glorious Maro that referred his legacies to the fire, and though

princes are seldom executors, yet there came a Cæsar to his testament,

as if the act of a poet could not be repealed but by a king. I am

not, reader, Augustus Vindex: here is no royal rescue, but here is a

Muse that deserves it. The author had long ago condemned these poems

to obscurity and the consumption of that further fate which attends

it. This censure gave them a gust of death, and they have partly known

that oblivion which our best labors must come to at last. I present

thee, then, not only with a book, but with a prey, and, in this kind,

the first recoveries from corruption. Here is a flame hath been some

time extinguished, thoughts that have been lost and forgot, but now

they break out again like the Platonic reminiscency. I have not the

author’s approbation to the fact, but I have law on my side, though

never a sword: I hold it no man’s prerogative to fire his own house.

Thou seest how saucy I am grown, and if thou dost expect I should

commend what is published, I must tell thee I cry no Seville oranges;

I will not say ‘Here is fine,’ or ‘cheap’: that were an injury to

the verse itself, and to the effect it can produce. Read on; and

thou wilt find thy spirit engaged, not by the deserts of what we call

tolerable, but by the commands of a pen that is above it.” All this is

uncritical, but useful and proper on the part of the clerical brother,

who writes very much as Lord Edward Herbert might be supposed to write

for George under like conditions; for he knew, according to an ancient

adage, that there is great folly in pointing out the shortcomings of

a work of art to eyes uneducated to its beauties. It was just as well

to insist disproportionately upon the principle at stake, that Henry

Vaughan’s least book was unique and precious. He was not, like the

majority of the happy lyrists of his time, a writer by accident; he

was strictly a man of letters, and his sign-manual is large and plain

upon everything which bears his name. He indites like a Roman, with

evenness and without a superfluous syllable. One cannot italicize

him; every word is a congested force, packed to bursting with meaning

and insistence; the utterance of a man who has been thinking all his

life upon his own chosen subjects, and who unerringly despatches

a language about its business, as if he had just created it. Like

Andrew Marvell’s excellent father, “he never broached what he had

never brewed.” It follows that his work, to which second editions were

wellnigh unknown, shows scarcely any variation from itself. It carries

with it a testimony that, such as it stands, it is the very best its

author can do. Its faults are not slips; they are quite as radical and

congenital as its virtues. Vaughan (to transfer a fine phrase of Mr.

W. T. Arnold) is “enamoured of perfection,” but he is fully so before

he makes up his mind to write, and from the first every stroke of his

pen is fatal. It transfixes a noun or a verb, pins it to the page, and

challenges a reformer to move or replace it. His modest Muse is as

sure as Shakespeare, as nice as Pope; she is incapable of scruples and

apprehensions, once she has spoken. What Vaughan says of Cartwright may

well be applied to his own deliberate grace of diction:

“Thou thy thoughts hast drest in such a strain

As doth not only speak, but rule and reign.”

His verses have the tone of a Vandyck portrait, with all its firm

pensive elegance and lack of shadow.

Vaughan has very little quaintness, as we now understand that word, and

none of the cloudiness and incorrigible grotesqueness which dominated

his Alexandrian day. He has great temperance; he keeps his eye upon

the end, and scarcely falls at all into “the fond adulteries of art,”

inversions, unscholarly compound words, or hard-driven metaphors. If

he be difficult to follow, it is only because he lives, as it were, in

highly oxygenated air; he is remote and peculiar, but not eccentric.

His conceits are not monstrous; the worst of them proclaims:

“Some love a rose

In hand, some in the skin;

But, cross to those,

I would have mine within”;

which will bear a comparison with Carew’s hatched cherubim, or with

that very provincialism of Herbert’s which describes a rainbow as the

lace of Peace’s coat! Those of Vaughan’s figures not drawn from the

open air, where he was happiest, are, indeed, too bold and too many,

and they come from strange corners: from finance, medicine, mills, the

nursery, and the mechanism of watches and clocks. In no one instance,

however, does he start wrong, like the great influencer, Donne, in

_The Valediction_, and finish by turning such impediments as “stiff

twin-compasses” into images of memorable beauty. The _Encyclopædia

Britannica_, like Campbell, finds Vaughan “untunable,” and so he is

very often. But poets may not always succeed in metaphysics and in

music too. The lute which has the clearest and most enticing twang

under the laurel boughs is Herrick’s, and not Donne’s; Mr. Swinburne’s,

and not Mr. Browning’s. It is to be observed that when Vaughan lets go

of his regrets, his advice, and his growls over the bad times, he falls

into instant melody, as if in that, and not in a rough impressiveness,

were his real strength. His blessing for the river Usk flows sweetly as

the tide it hangs upon:

“Garlands, and songs, and roundelays,

And dewy nights, and sunshine days,

The turtle’s voice, joy without fear,

Dwell on thy bosom all the year!

To thee the wind from far shall bring

The odors of the scattered spring,

And, loaden with the rich arrear,

Spend it in spicy whispers here.”

Vaughan played habitually with his pauses, and unconsciously threw the

metrical stress on syllables and words least able to bear it; but no

sensitive ear can be otherwise than pleased at the broken sequence of

such lines as

“these birds of light make a land glad

Chirping their solemn matins on a tree,”

and the hesitant symbolism of

“As if his liquid loose retinue stayed

Lingering, and were of this steep place afraid.”

The word “perspective,” with the accent upon the first syllable, was

a favorite with him; and Wordsworth approved of that usage enough to

employ it in the majestic opening of the sonnet on King’s College

Chapel.[27] In short, if Vaughan be “untunable,” it is because he

never learned to distil vowels at the expense or peril of the message

which he believed himself bound to deliver, even where hearers were

next to none, and which he tried only to make compact and clear. His

speech has a deep and free harmony of its own, to those whom abruptness

does not repel; and even critics who turn from him to the masters of

verbal sound may do him the parting honor of acknowledging the nature

of his limitation.

“A noble error, and but seldom made,

When poets are by too much force betrayed!”

Vaughan was a born observer, and in his poetry may be found the pioneer

expression of the nineteenth-century feeling for landscape. His canvas

is not often large; he had an indifference towards the exquisite

presence of autumn, and an inland ignorance of the sea. But he could

portray depth and distance at a stroke, as in the buoyant lines:

“It was high spring, and all the way

Primrosed, and hung with shade,”

which etches for you the whole winding lane, roofed and floored with

beauty; he carries a reader over half a continent in his

“Paths that are hidden from the vulture’s eyes,”

and suspends him above man’s planet altogether with his audacious

eagle, to whom “whole seas are narrow spectacles,” and who

“in the clear height and upmost air

Doth face the sun, and his dispersèd hair!”

Besides this large vision, Vaughan had uncommon knowledge how to employ

detail, during the prolonged literary interval when it was wholly out

of fashion. It has been the lot of the little rhymesters of all periods

to deal with the open air in a general way, and to embellish their

pages with birds and boughs; but it takes a true modern poet, under the

influence of the Romantic revival, to sum up perfectly the ravages of

wind and frost:

“Where is the pride of summer, the green prime,

The many, many leaves all twinkling?—Three

On the mossed elm; three on the naked lime

Trembling; and one upon the old oak tree”;

and it takes another to give the only faithful and ideal report of a

warbling which every schoolboy of the race had heard before him:

“That’s the wise thrush: he sings each song twice over,

Lest you should think he never could recapture

The first fine careless rapture.”

That Vaughan’s pages should furnish this patient specification is

remarkable in a man whose mind was set upon things invisible. His gaze

is upon the inaccessible ether, but he seems to detect everything

between himself and heaven. He sighs over the inattentive rustic, whom,

perhaps, he catches scowling by the pasture-bars of the wild Welsh

downs:

“O that he would hear

The world read to him!”

Whatever is in that pleasant world he himself hears and sees; and his

interrupted chronicle is always terse, graphic, straight from life. He

has the inevitable phrase for every phenomenon, a little low-comedy

phrase, sometimes, such as Shakespeare and Carew had used before him:

“Deep snow

Candies our country’s woody brow.”

It seems never to have entered the primitive mind of Vaughan to love,

or serve, art and nature for themselves. His cue was to walk abroad

circumspectly and with incessant reverence, because in all things

he found God. He marks, at every few rods in the thickets, “those

low violets of Thine,” and the “breathing sacrifice” of earth-odors

which the “parched and thirsty isle” gratefully sends back after a

shower.[28] His prayer is that he may not forget that physical beauty

is a great symbol, but only a symbol; a “hid ascent” through “masks and

shadows” to the divine; or, as Mr. Lowell said in one of his last poems,

“a tent

Pitched for an Inmate far more excellent.”

A humanist of the school of Assisi, Vaughan was full of out-of-door

meeknesses and pieties, nowhere sweeter in their expression than in

this all-embracing valedictory:

“O knowing, glorious Spirit! when

Thou shalt restore trees, beasts, and men,

* * * * *

Give him among Thy works a place

Who in them loved and sought Thy face.”

He muses in the garden, at evenfall:

“Man is such a marigold

As shuts, and hangs the head.”

Clouds, seasons, and the eternal stars are his playfellows; he

apostrophizes our sister the rainbow, and reminds her of yesterday, when

“Terah, Nahor, Haran, Abram, Lot,

The youthful world’s grey fathers, in one knot,”

lifted anxious looks to her new splendor. He is familiar with the

depression which comes from boding weather, when

“a pilgrim’s eye,

Far from relief,

Measures the melancholy sky.”

He has an artist’s feeling, also, for the wrath of the elements, which

inevitably hurry him on to the consummation

“When Thou shalt spend Thy sacred store

Of thunders in that heat,

And low as e’er they lay before

Thy six-days buildings beat!”

“I saw,” he says, suddenly—

“I saw Eternity the other night”;

and he is perpetually seeing things almost as startling and as bright:

the “edges and the bordering light” of lost infancy; the processional

grandeur of old books, which he fearlessly calls

“The track of fled souls, and their Milky Way”;

and visions of the Judgment, when

“from the right

The white sheep pass into a whiter light.”

Here the figure beautifully forecasts a famous one of Rossetti’s.

Light, indeed, is Vaughan’s distinctive word, and the favorite source

of his similes and illustrations.

If Vaughan’s had not been so profoundly moral a nature, he would

have lacked his picturesque sense of the general, the continuous.

That shibboleth, “a primrose by the river’s brim,” is to him all the

generations of all the yellow primroses smiling there since the Druids’

day, and its mild moonlike ray reflects the hope and fear and pathos

of the mortal pilgrimage that has seen and saluted it, age after age.

Whatever he meets upon his walk is drowned and dimmed in a wide halo

of association and sympathy. His unmistakable accent marks the opening

of a little sermon called _The Timber_; a sigh of pity, tender as a

child’s, over the fallen and unlovely logs:

“Sure, thou didst flourish once! and many springs

Many bright mornings, much dew, many showers,

Passed o’er thy head; many light hearts and wings,

Which now are dead, lodged in thy living towers.”[29]

Leigh Hunt once challenged England and America[30] to produce anything

approaching, for music and feeling, the beauty of

“boughs that shake against the cold,

Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.”

He forgot the closes of these artless lines of a minor poet; or he did

not know them.

Vaughan’s meek reputation began to renew itself about 1828, when four

critics eminently fitted to appraise his worth were in their prime;

but, curiously enough, none of these, not even the best of them, the

same Charles Lamb who said a just and generous word for Wither, had the

satisfaction of rescuing his sunken name. Lamb’s friend, the good soul

Bernard Barton, seems, however, to have known and admired his Vaughan.

Eight little books, if we count the two parts of _Silex Scintillans_

as one,[31] enclose all of the Silurist’s original work. He began to

publish in 1646, and he practically ceased in 1655, reappearing but

in 1678 with _Thalia Rediviva_, which was not issued under his own

supervision. It is commonly supposed that his verses were forgotten

up to the date (1847) of the faulty but timely Aldine edition of the

Rev. H. F. Lyte, thrice reprinted and revised since then, and until the

appearance of Dr. Grosart’s four inestimable quartos; but Mr. Carew

Hazlitt has been fortunate enough to discover the advertisement of an

eighteenth-century reprint of Vaughan. As the results of Dr. Grosart’s

patient service to our elder writers are necessarily semi-private,

it may be said with truth that the real Vaughan is still debarred

from the general reader, who is, indeed, the identical person least

concerned about that state of affairs. His name is not irrecoverable

nor unfamiliar to scholars.[32] His mind, on the whole, might pass

for the product of yesterday; and he, who needs no glossary, may

handsomely cede the honors of one to Mr. William Morris. It is at least

certain that had Vaughan lately lifted up his sylvan voice out of

Brecknockshire, he would not so readily be accused of having modelled

himself unduly upon George Herbert.[33] He has gone into eclipse behind

that gracious name.

Henry Vaughan was a child of thirteen when Herbert, a stranger to

him, died at Bemerton, and he read him first in the sick-chamber to

which the five years’ distresses of his early manhood confined him.

The reading could not have been prior to 1647, for _Olor Iscanus_,

Vaughan’s second volume, was lying ready for the press that year, as

we know from the date of its dedication to Lord Kildare Digby. As no

novice poet, therefore, he fell under the spell of a sweet and elect

soul, who was also a lover of vanquished royalty, a convert who had

looked upon the vanities of the court and the city, a Welshman born,

and not unconnected with Vaughan’s own ancient and patrician house.

These were slight coincidences, but they served to strengthen a forming

tie. The Silurist somewhere thanks Herbert’s “holy ever-living lines”

for checking his blood; and it was, perhaps, the only service rendered

of which he was conscious. But his endless iambics and his vague

allegorical titles are cast thoroughly in the manner of Herbert, and

he takes from the same source the heaped categorical epithets, the

didactic tone, and the introspectiveness which are his most obvious

failings. Vaughan’s intellectual debt to Herbert resolves itself into

somewhat less than nothing; for in following him with zeal to the

Missionary College of the Muses, he lost rather than gained, and he

is altogether delightful and persuasive only where he is altogether

himself. Nevertheless, a certain spirit of conformity and filial

piety towards Herbert has betrayed Vaughan into frequent and flagrant

imitations. It seems as if these must have been voluntary, and rooted

in an intention to enforce the same truths in all but the same

words; for the moment Vaughan breaks into invective, or comes upon

his distinctive topics, such as childhood, natural beauty (for which

Herbert had an imperfect sense), friendship, early death, spiritual

expectation, he is off and away, free of any predecessor, thrilling and

unforgettable. Comparisons will not be out of place here, for Vaughan

can bear, and even invoke them. Dryden said in Jonson’s praise that he

was “a learned plagiary,” and nobody doubts nowadays that Shakespeare

and Milton were the bandit kings of their time. There was, indeed,

in English letters, up to Queen Anne’s reign, an open communism of

ideas and idioms astonishing to look upon; there is less confiscation

at present, because, outside the pale of the sciences, there is less

thinking. If any one thing can be closer to another, for instance, than

even Drummond’s sonnet on _Sleep_ is to Sidney’s, it is the dress of

Vaughan’s morality to that of George Herbert’s. Mr. Simcox is the only

critic who has taken the trouble to contrast them, and he does so in

so random a fashion as to suggest that his scrutiny, in some cases,

has been confined to the rival titles. It is certain that no other

mind, however bent upon identifications, can find a likeness between

_The Quip_ and _The Queer_, or between _The Tempest_ and _Providence_.

Vaughan’s _Mutiny_, like _The Collar_, ends in a use of the word

“child,” after a scene of strife; and if ever it were meant to match

Herbert’s poem, distinctly falls behind it, and deals, besides, with

a much weaker rebelliousness. _Rules and Lessons_ is so unmistakably

modelled upon _The Church Porch_ that it scarcely calls for comment.

Herbert’s admonitions, however, are continued, but nowhere repeated;

and Vaughan’s succeed in being poetic, which the others are not. Beyond

these replicas, Vaughan’s structural genius is in no wise beholden to

Herbert’s. But numerous phrases and turns of thought descend from the

master to the disciple, undergoing such subtle and peculiar changes,

and given back, as Coleridge would say, with such “usurious interest,”

that it may well be submitted whether, in this casual list, every

borrowing, save two, be not a bettering.

HERBERT.

“A throbbing conscience, spurrèd by remorse,

Hath a strange force.”

“My thoughts are all a case of knives,

Wounding my heart

With scattered smart.”

“And trust

Half that we have

Unto an honest faithful grave.”

“Teach me Thy love to know,

That this new light which now I see

May both the work and workman show:

Then by a sunbeam I will climb to Thee!”

“I will go searching, till I find a sun

Shall stay till we have done,

A willing shiner, that will shine as gladly

As frost-nipt suns look sadly.

Then we will sing and shine all our own day,

And one another pay;

His beams shall cheer my breast, and both so twine

Till even his beams sing, and my music shine.”

(_Of prayer._)

“Heaven in ordinary, man well-drest,

The Milky Way, the bird of Paradise.”

“Then went I to a garden, and did spy

A gallant flower,

The crown-imperial: Sure, said I,

Peace at the root must dwell.”

VAUGHAN.

“A darting conscience, full of stabs and fears.”

“And wrap us in imaginary flights

Wide of a faithful grave.”

“That in these masks and shadows I may see

Thy sacred way,

And by these hid ascents climb to that day

Which breaks from Thee

Who art in all things, though invisibly!”

“O would I were a bird or star

Fluttering in woods, or lifted far

Above this inn

And road of sin!

Then either star or bird would be

Shining or singing still to Thee!”

(_Of books._)

“The track of fled souls, and their Milky Way.”

“I walked the other day to spend my hour

Into a field,

Where I sometime had seen the soil to yield

A gallant flower.”

HERBERT.

“But groans are quick and full of wings,

And all their motions upward be,

And ever as they mount, like larks they sing:

The note is sad, yet music for a king.”

“Joys oft are there, and griefs as oft as joys,

But griefs without a noise;

Yet speak they louder than distempered fears:

What is so shrill as silent tears?”

“At first Thou gavest me milk and sweetnesses,

I had my wish and way;

My days were strewed with flowers and happiness;

There was no month but May.”

“Only a scarf or glove

Doth warm our hands, and make them write of Love.”

“I got me flowers to strew Thy way,

I got me boughs off many a tree;

But Thou wast up by break of day,

And brought Thy sweets along with Thee.”

“O come! for Thou dost know the way:

Or if to me Thou wilt not move,

Remove me where I need not say,

‘Drop from above.’”

“Sure Thou wilt joy by gaining me

To fly home like a laden bee.”

VAUGHAN.

“A silent tear can pierce Thy throne

When loud joys want a wing;

And sweeter airs stream from a groan

Than any artèd string.”

“Follow the cry no more! There is

An ancient way,

All strewed with flowers and happiness,

And fresh as May!”

“feverish souls

Sick with a scarf or glove.”

“I’ll get me up before the sun,

I’ll cull me boughs off many a tree;

And all alone full early run

To gather flowers and welcome Thee.”

“Either disperse these mists, which blot and fill

My perspective still as they pass;

Or else remove me hence unto that hill

Where I shall need no glass!”

“Thy grave, to which my thoughts shall move

Like bees in storms unto their hive.”

To arraign Vaughan is to vindicate him. In the too liberal assizes of

literature, an idea becomes the property of him who best expresses

it. Herbert’s odd and fresh metaphors, his homing bees and pricks of

conscience and silent tears, the adoring star and the comrade bird,

even his famous female scarf, go over bodily to the spoiler. In many an

instance something involved and difficult still characterizes Herbert’s

diction; and it is diverting to watch how the interfering hand sorts

and settles it at one touch, and sends it, in Mr. Matthew Arnold’s

word, to the “centre.” Vaughan’s mind, despite its mysticism, was full

of despatch and impetuosity. Like Herbert, he alludes to himself, more

than once, as “fierce”; and the adjective undoubtedly belongs to him.

There is in Vaughan, at his height, an imaginative rush and fire which

Herbert never knew, a greater clarity and conciseness, a far greater

restraint, a keener sense both of color and form, and so much more

deference for what Mr. Ruskin calls “the peerage of words,” that the

younger man could never have been content to send forth a line which

might mean its opposite, such as occurs in the fine stanza about glory

in the beautiful _Quip_. It is only on middle ground that the better

poet and the better saint collide. Vaughan never could have written

“O that I once past changing were

Fast in Thy Paradise, where no flower can wither!”

or the tranquil confession of faith:

“Whether I fly with angels, fall with dust,

Thy hands made both, and I am there:

Thy power and love, my love and trust

Make one place everywhere!”

For his best is not Herbert’s best, nor his worst Herbert’s worst. It

is not Vaughan who reminds us that “filth” lies under a fair face. He

does the “fiercer” thing: he goes to the Pit’s mouth in a trance, and

“hears them yell.” Herbert’s noblest and most winning art still has its

stand upon the altar steps of _The Temple_; but Vaughan is always on

the roof, under the stars, like a somnambulist, or actually above and

out of sight, “pinnacled dim in the intense inane”; absorbed in larger

and wilder things, and stretching the spirits of all who try to follow

him. Herbert has had his reward in the world’s lasting appreciation;

and though Vaughan had a favorable opinion of his own staying powers,

nothing would have grieved him less than to step aside, if the choice

had lain between him and his exemplar. Or re-risen, he would cry

loyally to him, as to that other Herbert, the rector of Llangattock and

his old tutor: “_Pars vertat patri, vita posthuma tibi_.”

Vaughan, then, owed something to Herbert, although it was by no means

the best which Herbert could give; but he himself is, what Herbert is

not, an ancestor. He leans forward to touch Cowper and Keble; and Mr.

Churton Collins has taken the pains to trace him in Tennyson.

The angels who

“familiarly confer

Beneath the oak and juniper,”

invoke an instant thought of the Milton of the _Allegro_; and the

fragrant winds which linger by Usk, “loaden with the rich arrear,”

appear to be Milton’s, too. His austere music first sounded in the

public ear in 1645, one year before Vaughan, much his junior, began

to print. It would seem very unlikely that a Welsh physician should

be beholden long after to the manuscripts of the Puritan stripling,

close-kept at Cambridge and Horton; but it is interesting to find the

prototype of Vaughan’s charming lines about Rachel,

“the sheep-keeping Syrian maid,”

in the _Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester_, dating from

1631.[34] Vaughan’s dramatic Fleet Street,

“Where the loud whip and coach scolds all the way,”

might as well be Swift’s, or Crabbe’s; and his salutation to the lark,

“And now, as fresh and cheerful as the light,

Thy little heart in early hymns doth sing,”

is like a quotation from some tender sonnet of Bowles, or from his

admirer, the young Coleridge who instantly outstepped him. _Olor_,

_Silex_, and _Thalia_ establish unexpected relationships with genius

the most remote from them and from each other. The animated melody of

poor Rochester’s best songs seems deflected from

“If I were dead, and in my place,”

addressed to Amoret,[35] in the _Poems_ of 1646. The delicate simile,

“As some blind dial, when the day is done,

Can tell us at midnight there was a sun,”

and

“But I am sadly loose and stray,

A giddy blast each way.

O let me not thus range:

Thou canst not change!”

(a verse of a poem headed by an extract, in the Vulgate, from the

eighth chapter to the Romans), come home with a smile to the lover of

Clough. Vaughan was that dangerous person, an original thinker; and the

consequence is that he compromises a great many authors who may never

have heard of him. It is admitted now that we owe to his prophetic lyre

one of the boasts of modern literature. Dr. Grosart has handled so well

the obvious debt of Wordsworth in _The Intimations of Immortality_, and

has proven so conclusively that Vaughan figured in the library at Rydal

Mount, that little need be said here on that theme. In _Corruption_,

_Childhood_, _Looking Back_, and _The Retreat_, most markedly in the

first, lie the whole point and pathos of

“Trailing clouds of glory do we come

From Heaven, which is our home.”

Few studies are more fascinating than that of the liquidation, so

to speak, of Vaughan’s brief, tense, impassioned monodies into “the

mighty waters rolling evermore” of the great _Ode_. It is Holinshed’s

accidental honor that he is lost in Shakespeare, and incorporated

with him. So with Vaughan: if shorn of his dues, he still remains

illustrious by virtue of one signal service to Wordsworth, whom, in the

main, he distinctly foreshadows. Yet it is no unpardonable heresy to be

jealous that the “first sprightly runnings” of a classic should not be

better known, and to prefer their touching simplicity to the grandly

adult and theory-burdened lines which everybody quotes. In the broad

range of English letters we find two persons whose normal mental habits

seem altogether of a piece with Vaughan’s: a woman of the eighteenth

century, and a philosopher of the nineteenth. The lovely _Petition for

an Absolute Retreat_, by Anne, Countess of Winchelsea (whose genius

was the charming _trouvaille_ of Mr. Edmund Gosse), might pass for

Vaughan’s, in Vaughan’s best manner; and so might

“Their near camp my spirit knows

By signs gracious as rainbows,”

as indeed the whole of Emerson’s ever-memorable _Forerunners_, itself a

mate for _The Retreat_; or rather, had these been anonymous lyrics of

Vaughan’s own day, it would have been impossible to persuade a Caroline

critic that he could not name their common author.

Our poet had a curious fashion of coining verbs and adjectives out of

nouns, and carried it to such a degree as to challenge pre-eminence

with Keats.

“O how it bloods

And spirits all my earth!”

is part and parcel of the young cries of Endymion. When Vaughan has

discovered something to produce a fresh effect, he is not the man who

will hesitate to use it; and this mannerism occurs frequently: “our

grass straight russets,” “angel’d from that sphere,” “the mountained

wave,” “He heavened their walks, and with his eyes made those wild

shades a Paradise.” A little informality of this sort sometimes

justifies itself, as in the couplet ending the grim and powerful

_Charnel-House_:

“But should wild blood swell to a lawless strain,

One check from thee shall channel it again!”

And Henry Vaughan shares also with Keats, writing three hundred

years later, a defect which he had inherited, together with many

graces, directly from Ben Jonson:[36] the fashion of crowding the

sense of his text and the pauseless voice of his reader from the

natural breathing-place at the end of a line into the beginning or

the middle of the next line. More than any other, except Keats in his

first period, he roughens, without always strengthening, his rich

decasyllabics, by using what Mr. Gosse has happily classified as the

“overflow.”

Though the Silurist had in him the possibilities of a great elegiac

poet, and his laments for his dead are many and memorable, there is not

one sustained masterpiece among them; nothing to equal or approach,

for example, Cowley’s _Ode on the Death of Mr. William Hervey_, in

the qualities which abide, and are visited with the honors of the

class-book and the library shelf. Yet Vaughan’s elegies are exquisite

and endearing; they haunt one with the conviction that they stop short

of immortality, not because their author had too little skill, but

because, between his repressed speech and his extreme emotions, no art

could make out to live. He had a deep heart, such as deep hearts will

always recognize and reverence:

“And thy two wings were grief and love.”

In the face of eternity he seems so to accord with the event which

all but destroys him, that sorrow inexpressible becomes suddenly

unexpressed, and his funeral music ends in a high enthusiasm and

serenity open to no misconception. Distance, and the lapse of time,

and his own utter reconciliation to the play of events make small

difference in his utterance upon the old topic. The thought of his

friend, forty years after, is the same mystical rapture:

“O could I track them! but souls must

Track one the other;

And now the spirit, not the dust,

Must be thy brother:

Yet I have one pearl by whose light

All things I see,

And in the heart of death and night,

Find Heaven and thee.”

_Daphnis_, the eclogue to the memory of Thomas Vaughan, is the only

one of these elegies which, possessing a surplus of beautiful lines,

is not even in the least satisfying. “R. Hall,” “no woolsack soldier,”

who was slain at the siege of Pontefract, won from Henry Vaughan a

passionate requiem, which opens with a gush of agony, “I knew it would

be thus!” as affecting as anything in the early ballads; and the battle

of Rowton Heath took from him “R. W.,” the comrade of his youth. But

it was in one who bore his sovereign’s name (hitherto unidentified,

although he is said to have been the subject of a “public sorrow”) that

Vaughan lost the friend upon whom his whole nature seemed to lean. The

soldier-heart in himself spoke out firmly in the cry he consecrated

_To the Pious Memory of C. W._ Its masculine dignity; the pride and

soft triumph which it gathers about it, advancing; the plain heroic

ending which sweeps away all images of remoteness and gloom, in

“Good-morrow to dear Charles! for it is day,”

can be compared to nothing but an _agitato_ of Schubert’s mounting

strings, slowing to their major chord with a courage and cheer that

bring tears to the eyes. Vaughan’s tender threnodies would make a small

but precious volume. _To the Pious Memory_, with _Thou that Knowest for

Whom I Mourn_, _Silence and Stealth of Days_, _Joy of my Life while

Left me Here_, _I Walked the other Day to spend my Hour_, _The Morning

Watch_, and _Beyond the Veil_, are alone enough to give him rank

forever as a genius and a good man.

“C. W.’s” death was one of the things which turned him forever from

temporal pursuits and pleasures. Of his first wife we can find none but

conjectural traces in his books, for he was shy of using the beloved

name. The sense of those departed is never far from him. The air of

melancholy recollection, not morbid, which hangs over his maturer

lyrics, is directly referable to the close-following calamities which

estranged him from the presence of “the blessèd few,” and sent him, as

he nobly hoped,

“Home from their dust to empty his own glass.”

His thoughts centred, henceforward, in their full intensity, on the

supernatural world; nay, if he were irremediably depressed, not only

on the persistence of resolved matter, by means of which buried men

come forth again in the color of flowers and the fragrance of the wind,

but even on the physical damp and dark which confine our mortality. It

is the poet of dawn and of crisp mountain air who can pack horror on

horror into his nervous quatrains about Death:

“A nest of nights; a gloomy sphere

Where shadows thicken, and the cloud

Sits on the sun’s brow all the year,

And nothing moves without a shroud.”

This is masterly; but here, again, there is reserve, the curbing hand

of a man who holds, with Plato, a wilful indulgence in the “realism” of

sadness to be an actual crime. Vaughan’s dead dwell, indeed, as his own

mind does, in “the world of light.” As his corporeal sight is always

upon the zenith or the horizon, so his fancy is far away, with his

radiant ideals, and with the virtue and beauty he has walked with in

the flesh. He takes his harp to the topmost hill, and sits watching

“till the white-winged reapers come.”

He thinks of his obscured self, the child he was, and of “the narrow

way” (an ever-recurrent Scriptural phrase in his poetry) by which he

shall “travel back.” To leave the body is merely to start anew and

recover strength, and, with it, the inspiring companionship of which he

is inscrutably deprived.

Chambers’ _Cyclopædia_ made an epic blunder, long ago, when it ascribed

to this gentlest of Anglicans a “gloomy sectarianism.” He, of all

religious poets, makes the most charming secular reading, and may well

be a favorite with the heathen for whom Herbert is too decorative,

Crashaw too hectic and intense, Cowper too fearful, and Faber too

fluent; _Lyra Apostolica_ a treatise, though a glorious one, on Things

which Must be Revived, and _Hymns Ancient and Modern_ an exceeding

weariness to the spirit. It is a saw of Dr. Johnson’s that it is

impossible for theology to clothe itself in attractive numbers; but

then Dr. Johnson was ignorant of Vaughan. It is not in human nature to

refuse to cherish the “holy, happy, healthy Heaven” which he has left

us (in a graded alliteration which smacks of the physician rather than

of the “gloomy sectarian”), his very social “angels talking to a man,”

and his bright saints, hovering and smiling nigh, who

“are indeed our pillar-fires

Seen as we go;

They are the city’s shining spires

We travel to.”

Who can resist the earnestness and candor with which, in a few

sessions, he wrote down the white passion of the last fifty years

of his life? No English poet, unless it be Spenser, has a piety so

simple and manly, so colored with mild thought, so free from emotional

consciousness. The elect given over to continual polemics do not count

Henry Vaughan as one of themselves. His double purpose is to make life

pleasant to others and to praise God; and he considers that he is

accomplishing it when he pens a compliment to the valley grass, or,

like Coleridge, caresses in some affectionate strophes the much-abused

little ass. All this liberal sweetness and charity heighten Vaughan’s

poetic quality, as they deepen the impression of his practical

Christianity. The nimbus is about his laic songs. When he talks of

moss and rocks, it is as if they were incorporated into the ritual. He

has the genius of prayer, and may be recognized by “those graces which

walk in a veil and a silence.” He is full of distinction, and of a sort

of golden idiosyncrasy. Vaughan’s true “note” is—Vaughan. To read him

is like coming alone to a village church-yard with trees, where the

west is dying, in hues of lilac and rose, behind the low ivied Norman

tower. The south windows are open, the young choir are within, and the

organist, with many a hushed unconventional interlude of his own, is

rehearsing with them the psalm of “pleasures for evermore.”

FOOTNOTES:

[20] Siluria comprised the shires of Monmouth, Hereford, Glamorgan,

Radnor, and Brecon.

[21] The Reverend H. F. Lyte, Vaughan’s enthusiastic editor, best known

as the author of _Abide with Me_, reminds us that there was another

Henry Vaughan of the same college and the same neighborhood at home—a

pleasant theological person not to be confounded with the poet. It was

probably he, and not the Silurist, who devoted some verses to Charles

the First in the book called _Eucharistica Oxoniensis_, 1641.

[22] These deep Augustinian lines are Carew’s, gay Carew’s; and they

mark the highest religious expression of their time.

[23] Vaughan apparently enjoyed that privilege of genius, acquaintance

with a London garret, if we may take autobiographically the fine brag

worthy of the tribe of Henri Mürger:

“I scorn your land, So far it lies below me; here I see How all the

sacred stars do circle me.”

[24] The King lodged at Christchurch, the Queen and my Lady Castlemaine

(together, alas!) at Merton, amid endless hawking, tennis, boating,

basset, and general revelry.

[25] Orinda’s own verses, scattered in manuscript among her friends,

were collected and printed without her knowledge, and much against her

desire, in 1663: a piece of treachery which threw her into a severe

indisposition. She could therefore condole more than enough with Henry

Vaughan. Friends were officious creatures in those days.

[26] This, to say the least, was not “pretty” of Campbell, who thought

so well of the “world’s grey fathers” congregated to gaze at Vaughan’s

_Rainbow_ that he conveyed them bodily into the foreground of his own.

[27] Per´-spective was, of course, the general pronunciation from

Shakespeare to Dr. Johnson, and is used with great beauty in Dryden’s

_Ode to the Memory of Mrs. Anne Killigrew_. But it is a characteristic

word with Vaughan, and it was from Vaughan that Wordsworth took it.

[28] Vaughan had a relish for damp weather, the thing which makes the

loveliness of the British isles, and which the ungrateful islanders

are prone to revile. He never passes a sheet of water without looking

upward for the forming cloud:

“That drowsy lake From her faint bosom breathed thee!”

[29] Sometimes erroneously printed “bowers.”

[30] It was kind of the ever-kind Hunt to include America in his

enumeration, at a time when the United States were supposed by his

fellow-countrymen to have no literature at all of their own. The

circumstance that his challenge appeared in the preface to _The Book

of the Sonnet_, which was edited by Hunt in conjunction with an

American, and published at Boston in 1868, may help to account for the

mannerliness of the reference.

[31] In the _Letters and Memorials of Archbishop Trench_, vol. ii.,

p. 57, there is a letter bearing upon this point from Mr. Frank

Millson, dated 1868, which deserves serious consideration from

Vaughan’s forthcoming editors. “I think,” he writes the Dean, “that

your supposition that the 1655 edition is the same book as the one

of 1650, with a new title-page and additions, can hardly be correct,

though I know that Lyte, the editor of Pickering’s reprint, thinks as

you do. The preface to the 1655 edition is dated September 30, 1654,

and contains this passage” (not given in the _Memorials_) “which seems

to me to refer to the fact of a new edition. A comparison of my two

copies shows that the 1650 edition consists of half a sheet, title

and dedication, and 110 pages. The second edition has title, preface,

dedication, motto, the 110 pages of the first edition, with 84 pages

of new matter, and a table of first lines. A noticeable thing in the

arrangement is that the sheets do not begin with new printer’s marks,

as they might be expected to do if the second part were simply new

matter added to the first volume, but begin with A, the last sheet of

the former volume having ended with G. I am sorry to trouble you with

these trifling details; but as Vaughan has long been a favorite author

of mine, they have an interest for me, and if they help to show that he

was not neglected by readers of his own time, I shall be glad.”

[32] Anthologies and cyclopædias nowadays, especially since Dr. John

Brown and Principal Shairp drew attention to the Silurist in their

pages, are more than likely to admit him. It was not so always.

Winstanley, sharp as was his eye, let Vaughan escape him in his

_Lives of the Poets_, published in 1687. He is not in the _Theatrum

Poetarum_, nor in Johnson’s _Lives_. He is in neither of Southey’s

collections. Mr. Palgrave allows him, in _The Golden Treasury_, but

a song and a half; Ellis’s sheaf of excellent _Specimens_ of 1811

furnishes eighteen lines of a wedding blessing on the _Best and Most

Accomplished Couple_ apologizing for “their too much quaintness and

conceit”; and in Willmott’s _Sacred Poets_ Vaughan occupies four

pages, as against Crashaw’s thirty-five, Herbert’s thirty-seven, and

Wither’s one hundred and thirty-two. But Vaughan fares well in Dr.

George Macdonald’s _England’s Antiphon_, and in Archbishop Trench’s

_Household Book_. Ward’s _English Poets_, in the second volume, has a

conventional selection from him, as has, at greater length, Fields’ and

Whipple’s _Family Library of British Poetry_. There is a goodly list

entered under Vaughan’s name in Gilfillan’s _Less-Known British Poets_,

all chosen from his devotional work. Thirty-seven religious lyrics

again adorn the splendid _Treasury of Sacred Song_. Vaughan’s secular

numbers yet await their proper bays, although a limited edition of most

of them, containing a bibliography, was printed in 1893 by J. R. Tutin

of Hull. Mr. Saintsbury, in his _Seventeenth Century Lyrics_, has a

small and very choice group of Vaughan’s songs, and Professor Palgrave,

having to do with him for the third time, gives him large and cordial

honor in the eleventh volume of _Y Cymmrodor_. In Emerson’s Parnassus

he appears but once. He had his most graceful and grateful American

tribute when Mr. Lowell, long ago, named him in passing as “dear Henry

Vaughan,” in _A Certain Condescension in Foreigners_.

[33] In one of his prefaces, Vaughan hits neatly at the crowd of

Herbertists: “These aim more at verse than at perfection.” Where there

are noble resemblances, it is well to remember that two sides have the

right to be heard. Mrs. Thoreau used to say: “Mr. Emerson imitates

Henry!” And she was at least as accurate as the critics who annoyed her

old age by the reversed statement.

[34] Mr. R. H. Stoddard owns a copy of the first edition of

_Nieremberg’s Meditations_, translated by Vaughan in 1654, and

published the following year, which has upon the title-page an

autographic “J. M.” supposed, by every evidence, to be Milton’s. If it

be so, the busy Latin Secretary, meditating his grand work, must have

been, on his part, a reader and a lover of the man who was almost his

equal at golden phrases.

[35] Congreve and Waller employ the same rather too obvious love-name

for their serenaded divinities.

[36] Vaughan openly wears jewels which belong to Jonson.

“Go seek thy peace in war: Who falls for love of God shall rise a star!”

wrote brave Father Ben; and no Englishman of spirit, between 1642 and

the Restoration, was likely to forget it. The passage certainly clung

to Vaughan’s mind, for he assimilated it later in a sweet line all for

peace:

“Do thou the works of day, and rise a star.”

III

GEORGE FARQUHAR

1677-1707

THERE is a narrow dark Essex Street West in the city of Dublin, running

between Fishamble Street and Essex Gate, at the rear of the Lower

Blind Quay. The older people still bluntly call it what it was called

before 1830: Smock Alley. On its north side stands the sufficiently

ugly church of SS. Michael and John. The arched passage still in use,

parallel with the nave of this church, was the entrance to a theatre

on the same site; what is now the burial vault was once the pit, full

of ruddy and uproarious faces. The theatre, erected about 1660, which

had a long, stormy and eventful history, was rebuilt in 1735, and

having been turned into a warehouse, fell into decay, to be replaced

by a building of another clay. But while it was still itself, it was

great and popular, and the lane between Trinity College and the old

arched passage was choked every night with the press of jolly youths,

who, as Archbishop King pathetically complained, appeared to love the

play better than study! Among those who hung about Smock Alley like a

barnacle in the years 1694 and 1695, was a certain George Farquhar,

son of William,[37] a poor Londonderry clergyman of the Establishment;

a long-faced peculiar lad of mild mien but high spirits. He had come

from the north, under episcopal patronage, to wear a queer dress among

his social betters, to sweep and scour and carry tankards of ale to

the Fellows in hall; and incidentally, to imbibe, on his own part, the

lore of all the ages. The major event in his history is that, instead

of sitting up nights over _Isocrates de Pace_, he slipped off to see

Robert Wilkes and the stock company, and to decide that acting, or,

as he afterwards sarcastically defined it, “tearing his Lungs for a

Livelihood,” was also the thing for him. Wherefore, at eighteen, either

because his benefactor, Bishop Wiseman of Dromore, had died, or else,

as is not very credibly reported, because he was cashiered from his

class, Master Farquhar, cut loose from his old moorings, applied to

Manager Ashbury of the Dublin Theatre, and to such avail that he was

able presently to make his own appearance there as no less a personage

than Othello. He had a weak voice and a shy presence; but the public

encouraged him. One of his first parts was that of Guyomar, Montezuma’s

younger brother, in Dryden’s tragedy of _The Indian Emperor_. In the

fifth act, as soon as he had declaimed to Vasquez in sounding sing-song:

“Friendship with him whose hand did Odmar kill?

Base as he was, he was my brother still!

But since his blood has washed away his guilt,

Nature asks thine for that which thou hast spilt,”

he made, according to stage directions, a fierce lunge at his too

conciliatory foe. Guyomar had armed himself, inadvertently, with

a genuine sword, and Vasquez came near enough to being killed in

the flesh. The man eventually recovered; but it shows of what

impressionable stuff Farquhar was made, that his mental horror

and pain, during that moment while he believed he had slain a

fellow-creature, should have turned the course of his life. He left the

stage; nor would he return to it. Some eight years after, indeed, he

visited Dublin again, and on the old boards played Sir Harry Wildair

for his own benefit; but this was at a time when he forced himself to

undertake all honorable chances of money-making, out of his consuming

anxiety for his family.

Wilkes and his wife returned to London, and the lad Farquhar went with

them. He obtained a commission in the army from the Earl of Orrery;

he was in Holland on duty during a part of the year 1700, and came

back to England with one of her earliest military red coats on his

back, in the train of his much-approved sovereign, William III. He

had already written, thanks to Wilkes and his incessant urging, his

first two plays, and had seen them successful at Drury Lane;[38] he

had also overheard with enthusiasm, at the Mitre Tavern in St. James’s

Market, Mistress Nance Oldfield, an orphan of sixteen, niece of the

proprietress, reading _The Scornful Lady_ behind the bar. Captain

Vanbrugh was duly told of Farquhar’s delight and admiration, and on

the strength of them introduced the girl to Rich, who did few things

so good in his lifetime as when he put her upon the stage at fifteen

shillings a week. It was not long before this distinguished actress

and generous woman, destined to lend her gayety and beautiful bearing

to the interpretation of Farquhar’s women, enlivened the town as the

glorious Sylvia of _The Recruiting Officer_, who can “gallop all the

morning after a hunting-horn, and all the evening after a fiddle.”

“We hear of Farquhar at one time,” says Leigh Hunt, in a pretty

summary, “in Essex, hare-hunting (not in the style of a proficient);

at another, at Richmond, sick; and at a third, in Shropshire on a

recruiting party, where he was treated with great hospitality, and

found material for one of the best of his plays.”

_Love and a Bottle_ inaugurated the vogue of the Farquhar comedy; and

Wilkes, whose name in London carried favor and precedence, was the

Roebuck of the cast. Its successors, _The Constant Couple_ (with a

framework transferred and adapted from its author’s earlier _Adventures

of Covent Garden_), and its sequel, _Sir Harry Wildair_, again

championed by the “friendly and indefatigable” Wilkes, who impersonated

the engaging rakish heroes, had long runs, and firmly established

their author’s fame. In 1702 Farquhar produced _The Inconstant_ (which

he had perverted from Fletcher’s _Wild Goose Chase_, as if a fit

setting were sought for the wonderfully effective last act of his own

devising); and after _The Inconstant_, _The Twin Rivals_. _The Stage

Coach_, a one-act farce in which he had a collaborator,[39] dates from

1704, and _The Recruiting Officer_ from 1706; _The Beaux’ Stratagem_

was written in the spring of 1707. This is a working record of barely

nine years; it represents a secure and continuous artistic advance; and

it should have brought its patient originator something better than the

privilege of dying young, “broken-hearted,” as he confessed to Wilkes,

“and without a shilling.”

Farquhar had but the trifling income of an officer’s pay on which to

support his wife and his two little daughters. He seems to have sought

no political preferment, nor did his numerous patrons put themselves

out to advance him, although these were the very days when men of

letters were crowded into the public service. Ever and anon he received

fifteen guineas, then a very handsome sum, for a play. Perhaps,

like his rash gallants, he had “a head to get money, and a heart to

spend it.” He greatly wished success, for the sake of those never

absent from his thought; and he complained bitterly when the French

acrobats and rope-dancers took from _The Twin Rivals_ the attention of

pleasure-seeking Londoners, much as poor Haydon complained afterwards

of the crowds who surged down Piccadilly, to behold not his “Christ’s

Entry into Jerusalem” at all, but General Tom Thumb, holding court

under the same roof.

When Farquhar’s health was breaking, and debts began to involve him at

last, it appears that the Earl of Ormonde, his general, prompted him

to sell his commission in order to liquidate them, and agreed to give

him a captaincy. Or, as is yet more probable, in view of the fact that

Farquhar was already known by the title of captain, he was urged to

sell out of the army, on a given pledge that preferment of another sort

awaited him. His other industrious devices to secure support for four

having missed fire, he gladly performed his part of the transaction,

only to experience a fatal delay on the part of my Lord Ormonde,

whose mind had strayed to larger matters. In fine, the unkept promise

hurt the subaltern to the heart; he sank, literally from that hour,

of grief and disquietude. Lintott the stationer, and his old friend

Wilkes stood manfully by him, one with liberal payment in advance,

and one with affectionate furtherance and gifts; but Farquhar did not

rally. It was to Wilkes, as everybody knows, that he penned this most

touching testament: “Dear Bob, I have not anything to leave thee to

perpetuate my memory but two helpless girls. Look upon them sometimes!

and think of him who was, to the last moment of his life, thine.” The

end came on or about April 29, 1707, George Farquhar being just thirty

years of age. While he lay dying in Soho, his last and best comedy

was in progress at the new magnificent Haymarket, and his audiences,

with a barren benevolence not uncharacteristic of the unthinking human

species, are said to have wept for him. He was buried in the parish

church-yard of St. Martin-in-the-Fields,[40] where Nell Gwynne’s

contrite ashes lay, and where her legacied bells tolled for his passing.

Farquhar’s name is always coupled with those of Congreve, Wycherley,

and Vanbrugh, although in spirit and also in point of time he was

removed from the influences which formed them. Many critics, notably

Hazlitt, Macaulay, and Thackeray, have allowed him least mention of the

four, but he is, in reality, the best playwright among them; and it is

greatly to the credit of a discreditable period if he be taken as its

representative. He had Vanbrugh’s exuberant vivacity, Congreve’s grace,

Wycherley’s knack of climax. Wycherley, retiring into private life when

Farquhar was born, lived to see his exit; Etherege was then at his

zenith; Dryden’s _All for Love_ was in the printer’s case, and Otway,

almost on the point of his two great works, was coming home ragged

from Flanders: Otway, whose boyish ventures on the stage, and whose

subsequent soldiering, Farquhar was so closely to follow.

Pope, and a gentler observer, Steele, found Farquhar’s dialogue “low,”

and so it must have sounded between the brave surviving extravagances

of the Jacobean buskin and the modulated utterances of _Cato_ and _The

Revenge_. A practical talent like Farquhar’s was bound to provoke hard

little words from the Popes who shrank from his spontaneous style,

and the Steeles who could not approve of the gross themes he had

inherited. For sheer good-breeding, some scenes in _The Way of the

World_ can never be surpassed; they prove that one cannot hold the

stage by talk alone. It is fortunate for Farquhar that he could not

emulate the exquisitely civilized depravities of Congreve’s urban Muse.

But his dialogue is not “low” to modern tastes; it has, in general, a

simple, natural zest, infinitely preferable to the Persian apparatus

of the early eighteenth century. Even he, however, can rant and

deviate into rhetoric, as soon as his lovers drop upon one knee. More

plainly in Farquhar’s work than in that of any contemporary, we mark

the glamour of the Caroline literature fading, and the breath of life

blowing in. An essentially Protestant nationalism began to settle down

upon England for good and all with William and Mary, and it brought

subtle changes to bear upon the arts, the trades, the sports, and

the manners of the people. In Farquhar’s comedies we have the reflex

of a dulling and strengthening age; the fantasticalities of the last

three reigns are all but gone; the Vandyck dresses gleam and swish

no longer. Speech becomes more pert and serviceable, in a vocabulary

of lesser range; lives are vulgarizing, that is, humanizing, and

getting closer to common unromantic concerns; no such delicately unreal

creature as Millamant, all fire and dew and perfumery,—Millamant who

could not suffer to have her hair done up in papers written in prose,

and who, quite by herself, is a vindication of what Mr. Allibone is

pleased to call “Lamb’s sophistical and mischievous essay,”—walks the

world of Farquhar. With him, notwithstanding that the sorry business

to be despatched is the same old amorous intrigue, come in at once

less license, less affectation, less Gallicism. He reports from the

beginning what he himself apprehends; his plays are shorthand notes,

albeit timid in character, upon the transitional and prosaic time. His

company is made up of individuals he had seen in a thousand lights at

the Spread Eagle and the Rummer; in the Inner Temple and in St. James’s

Park; in barracks domestic and foreign; and in his native place, where

adventurers, eloquent in purest Londonderry,[41] stumbled along

full of whiskey and ideas. He anticipates certain phases of Private

Ortheris’s thorough-going love of London, and figures his exiled Dicky

as “just dead of a consumption, till the sweet smoke of Cheapside

and the dear perfume of Fleet-ditch” made him a man again. In this

laughing affectionate apprehension of the local and the temporal

lies Farquhar’s whole strength or weakness. From the poets of the

Restoration there escapes, most incongruously, now and then, something

which betokens a sense of natural beauty, or even a recognition of the

divine law; but Farquhar is not a poet, and this spray from the deeps

is not in him. He perceives nothing that is not, and opens no crack or

chink where the fancy can air itself for a moment and

—“step grandly out into the infinite.”

Such a lack would not be worth remarking in the debased and insincere

writers who but just preceded him. But from the very date of his

first dealings with London managers, idealism was abroad, and a man

with affinities for “the things that are more excellent” need have

feared no longer to divulge them, since the court and the people, if

not the dominant town gentry, were with him. Farquhar had neither the

full moral illumination nor the will, though he had the capacity,

to lend a hand to the blessed work waiting for the opportunist. He

was young, he was of provincial nurture; he was carried away by the

theatrical tradition. Yet his mind was a Medea’s kettle, out of which

everything issued cleaner and more wholesome. Despite the prodigious

animal spirits of his characters, they conduct their mad concerns with

sense and moderation; they manage tacitly to proclaim themselves as

temporarily “on a tear,” as going forth to angle in angling weather,

and as likely to lead sober citizen lives from to-morrow on. Under bad

old maintained conditions they develop traits approximately worthy of

the _Christian Hero_. They “look before and after.” They are to be

classed as neutrals and nondescripts, for they have all the swagger

of their lax progenitors, and none of their deviltry. They belong

professionally to one family, while they bear a tantalizing resemblance

to another. Farquhar himself, perhaps unaware that partisanship is

better than compromise, made his bold toss for bays both spiritual

and temporal. Imitating, as novices will ever do, the art back of

him, he adopted the claim to approbation which that art never dreamed

of. In the very good preface to _The Twin Rivals_ (which has always

been approved of critics rather than of audiences), he sets up for a

castigator of vice and folly, and he offers to appease “the ladies and

the clergy,” as, in some measure apparent to the more metaphysical

among them, he may have done. His friend, Mr. John Hopkins, the

author of _Amasia_, invited, on behalf of _The Constant Couple_, the

commendation of Collier. That open-minded censor may have seen with

satisfaction, in the general trend of Farquhar’s composition, the less

and less dubious day-beams of Augustan decency. Though Farquhar did not

live, like Vanbrugh and the magnanimous Dryden, to admit the abuse of a

gift, and to deplore it, he alone, of the minor dramatists, seems all

along to have had a negative sort of conscience better than none. His

instincts continually get the better not only of his environment, but

of his practice. Some uneasiness, some misgiving, are at the bottom of

his homely materialism. He thinks it best, on the whole, to forswear

the temptation to be sublime, and to keep to his cakes and ale; and

for cakes and ale he had an eminent and inborn talent. What was ably

said of Hogarth, the great exemplar, will cover all practicians of his

school: “He had an intense feeling for and command over the impressions

of senses and habit, of character and passion, the serious and the

comic; in a word, of nature as it fell in with his own observation, or

came into the sphere of his actual experience. But he had little power

beyond that sphere, or sympathy for that which existed only in idea. He

was ‘conformed to this world, not transformed.’” Or, as Leigh Hunt, in

his beautiful memoir, adds, with acuteness, of Farquhar himself: “He

could turn what he had experienced in common life to the best account,

but he required in all cases the support of ordinary associations, and

could not project his spirit beyond them.” In short, Farquhar lacked

imagination. He had insight, however, of another order, which is

his praise, and which distinguishes him from all his fellows: he had

sympathy and charity.

The major blot on the literature of the English stage of the period is

not its libertinism, but rather its concomitant utter heartlessness.

“Arrogance” (so, according to Erasmus, that ascetic scholar Dean Colet

used to remind his clergy) “is worse than a hundred concubines.” The

slight sporadic touches of tenderness, of pity, of disinterested

generosity, to be found by patient search in Congreve, come in boldly

with Farquhar, and boldly overrun his prompter’s books. Vanbrugh’s

scenes stand on nothing but their biting and extravagant sarcasm. As

Congreve’s characters are indiscriminately witty, so Vanbrugh’s are

universally and wearisomely cynical, and at the expense of themselves

and all society. His women in high life have no individuality; they

wear stings of one pattern. The genial conception of the shrewd,

material Mrs. Amlet, however, in _The Confederacy_, is worthy of

Farquhar, and certainly Congreve himself could not have bettered

her in the execution. Etherege’s typical Man of Mode is a tissue

of untruth, hardness, and scorn, all in impeccable attire; a most

mournful spectacle. Thinking of such dainty monsters, Macaulay let fly

his famous invective against their creators: “Foreheads of bronze,

hearts like the nether millstone, and tongues set on fire of hell!”

George Farquhar may be exempted altogether from this too-deserved

compliment. There is honest mirth in his world of fiction, there is

dutifulness, there is true love, there are good women; there is genuine

friendship between Roebuck and Lovewell, between Trueman and Hermes

Wouldbe, between Aimwell and Archer, and between the green Tummas of

_The Recruiting Officer_ and his Costar, whom he cannot leave behind.

Sylvia, Angelica, Constance, Leanthe, Oriana, Dorinda, free-spoken

as they are, how they shine, and with what morning freshness, among

the tiger-lilies of that evil garden of the Restoration drama! These

heroines are an innovation, for they are maids, not wedded wives.

As to the immortal periwigged young bloods their suitors, they are

“real gentlemen,” as Hazlitt, who loved Farquhar, called them, “and

only pretended impostors;” or, to quote Farquhar’s latest editor, Mr.

A. C. Ewald, they are “always men and never yahoos.” Their author

had no interest in “preferring vice, and rendering virtue dull and

despicable.” Their praise may be negative, but it establishes a wide

wall of difference between them and the fops and cads with whom they

have been confounded. In their conversations, glistening with epigram

and irony, malevolence has no part; they sneer at no virtue, they

tamper with none; and at every turn of a selfish campaign they find

opportunity for honorable behavior. From the mouths of these worldlings

comes satire, hot and piping, against worldliness; for Farquhar is

as moralizing, if not as moral, as he dares be. Some of the least

attractive of them, the most greedy and contriving, have moments of

sweetly whimsical and optimistic speech. Thus Benjamin Wouldbe, the

plotter against his elder brother in _The Twin Rivals_, makes his

adieu after the fashion of a true gallant: “I scorn your beggarly

benevolence! Had my designs succeeded, I would not have allowed you the

weight of a wafer, and therefore will accept none.” The same person

soars again into a fine Aurelian speculation: “Show me that proud stoic

that can bear success and champagne! Philosophy can support us in hard

fortune, but who can have patience in prosperity?” Over his men and

women in middle life Farquhar lingers with complacence entirely foreign

to his colleagues, to whom mothers, guardians, husbands, and other

apple-guarding dragons were uniformly ridiculous and odious. Justice

Balance is as attractive as a hearth-fire on a December night; so is

Lady Bountiful. Over Fairbank, the good goldsmith, Farquhar gets fairly

sentimental, and permits him to drop unaware into decasyllabics, like

the pastoral author of _Lorna Doone_. His rogues are merely roguish,

in the softened sense of the word; in his panorama, though black

villains come and go, it is only for an instant, and to further some

one dramatic effect. He has eulogy for his heroes when they deserve it,

and when they do not you may trust him to find a compassionate excuse;

as when poor Leanthe feelingly says of her lover that “his follies are

weakly founded upon the principles of honor, where the very foundation

helps to undermine the structure.” Even Squire Sullen, for his

lumpishness, is divorced without derision, and in a peal of harmless

laughter. Farquhar, indeed, is all gentleness, all kindness. He had the

pensive attitude of the true humorist towards the world he laughed at;

his characters let slip words too deep for their living auditors. It

is curious that to a Restoration dramatist, “a nether millstone,” we

should owe a perfect brief description of ideal married life. In the

scene of the fourth act of _Sir Harry Wildair_, where Lady Lurewell,

with her “petrifying affectation,” is trying to tease Sir Harry out

of all endurance on the subject of his wife (whom he believes to be

lost or dead), and the degree of affection he had for her, he makes

reply: “My own heart whispered me her desires, ’cause she herself was

there; no contention ever rose but the dear strife of who should most

oblige—no noise about authority, for neither would stoop to command,

where both thought it glory to obey.” This is meant to be spoken

rapidly, and not without its tantalizing lack of emphasis; but what a

pearl it is, set there in the superlatively caustic dialogue! English

chivalry and English literature have no such other golden passage in

their rubrics, unless it be the famous tribute to the Lady Elizabeth

Hastings that “to love her was a liberal education,” or Lovelace’s

unforgettable song:

“I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honour more!”

The passage takes on a very great accidental beauty when we remember

that it required courage, in its time and place, to have written it.

It is characteristic also of Farquhar that it should be introduced,

as it is, on the top wave of a vivacious and stormy conversation,

which immediately sweeps it under, as if in proof that he understood

both his art and his audience. The conjugal tie, among the leaders

of fashion, was still something to laugh at and to toy with. Captain

Vanbrugh, from whom nobody need expect much edification, had put in the

mouth of his Constant, in a play which was a favorite with Garrick,

a bit of sense and sincerity quoted, as it deserved to be, by Hunt:

“Though marriage be a lottery in which there are a wondrous many

blanks, yet there is one inestimable lot in which the only heaven on

earth is written.” And again: “To be capable of loving one is better

than to possess a thousand.” This was in 1698, and Farquhar therefore

was not first, nor alone, in daring to speak for the derided idea of

wedlock. Steele was soon to arise as the very champion of domestic

life; and English wit, since he wrote, has never subsisted by its

mockery of the conditions which create

“home-keeping days and household reverences.”

But it was Farquhar who spoke in behalf of these the most memorable

word of his generation. After that lofty evidence of what he must be

suspected to have been, it is well to see, as best we may, what manner

of man George Farquhar was. And first let us take some extracts from

his own account of himself, “candid and modest,” as Hunt named it.

He gives us to understand that he had an ardent temperament, held in

check by an introspective turn of thought, by natural bashfulness, and

by habits of consideration for others. The portrait is drawn from a

letter in the _Miscellanies_, of “a mind and person generally dressed

in black,” and might have come bodily, and with charming grace, from

_The Spectator_. “I have very little estate but what lies under the

circumference of my hat . . . and should I by misfortune come to lose

my head, I should not be worth a groat.” “I am seldom troubled by what

the world calls airs and caprices, and I think it an idiot’s excuse

for a foolish action to say: ‘’Twas my humor.’” “I cannot cheerfully

fix to any study which bears not a pleasure in the application.”

“Long expectation makes the blessing always less to me; I lose the

great transport of surprise.” “I am a very great epicure; for which

reason I hate all pleasure that’s purchased by excess of pain. I can’t

relish the jest that vexes another. In short, if ever I do a wilful

injury, it must be a very great one.” “I have many acquaintances, very

few intimates, but no friend; I mean, in the old romantic way.” “I

have no secret so weighty but that I can bear it in my own breast.”

“I would have my passion, if not led, at least waited on by my

reason.” This last text, repeated elsewhere by Farquhar, which is the

counterpart of one in Sir Philip Sidney’s _Arcadia_, has interest from

the lips of a child of the “dancing, drinking, and unthinking time.”

Farquhar’s face, in the old prints, is wonderfully of a piece with

these amiable reports: a handsome, humane, careworn, melancholy young

face, the negation of the contemporary idea of the man about town. His

constitution, at its best, was but frail. “You are as dear to me,” he

says, pathetically, to his Penelope, “as my hopes of waking in health

to-morrow morning.”

A tradition has been received without question by his many critics and

biographers, that his chief characters, all cast in the same animated

mould, are but incognitos of himself. Highly-colored projections of

himself, with latent traits exaggerated, and formed mental restraints

removed, they may indeed be. The public, which loves identifications,

insisted on finding him revealed in his Archers and Sir Harrys. Whether

or not the dramatists of the day had universally the Rembrandtesque

whim of painting themselves into their own foregrounds, they were

obstinately supposed to do so, with Etherege in Young Bellair, with

Otway in Jaffier. But the real Farquhar

—“courteous, facile, sweet,

Hating that solemn vice of greatness, pride,”

with his reserve, his simple dress, his thin, agreeable voice,

his early reputation at college for uncongeniality, acting in

every emergency whither we can fairly trace him with deliberate

high-mindedness, is far enough from the temper of his restless and

jocund creations. He wished to remove the impression that he could have

been his own model; for he took pains to inscribe _The Inconstant_ to

his classmate, Richard Tighe, and to compliment him upon his kinship

with Mirabel, “a gay, splendid, easy, generous, fine young gentleman”;

the applauded type, in short, of all that Farquhar’s heroes set out to

be. Again, lest he should pass for a realist as rabid as Mademoiselle

de Scudéry, who pinioned three hundred and seventy of her acquaintances

between the covers of _Clélie_, Farquhar adds this warning to his

enthusiastic dedication of _The Recruiting Officer_ “to all friends

round the Wrekin”: “Some little turns of humor that I met with almost

within the shade of that famous hill gave the rise to this comedy;

and people were apprehensive that, by the example of some others, I

would make the town merry at the expense of the country gentleman. But

they forgot that I was to write a comedy, not a libel.” He disclaims

everywhere, with the same playful decisiveness, the interpretations put

upon his designs and actions by the world of overgrown infants which he

entertained. Endowed with courage and much personal charm, he had small

chance of distinguishing himself upon the field, and for the most part

shone at a garrison mess; but he had led a not inadventurous life, in

which were incidents of the most pronounced melodrama, with a touch of

mystery to enhance their value for the curious. Farquhar had travelled,

and with an open, not an insular mind; he had, by his own confession,

too deep an acquaintance with wine, and with the nightingales of Spring

Gardens, outsinging “the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow”; he had

been, in short, though with “melancholy as his every-day apparel,”

alive and abroad as a private Whig of the Revolution, shy of ladies’

notice till it came, and proud of it ever after. When he printed, in

his twenty-first year, _The Adventures of Covent Garden_, he added to

it a boy’s bragging motto: _Et quorum pars magna fui_. The inference

seems to have clung closer to him than he found comfortable. He

complains, not without significance, in his prose essay upon the

drama, that the public think any rôle compounded of “practical rake

and speculative gentleman is, ten to one, the author’s own character.”

With the incident which furnished its thrilling closing scenes to _The

Inconstant_, Farquhar had probably no connection; he takes pains to

state that the hero of it was the Chevalier de Chastillon, quite as if

he feared another confusion of himself, as fearless and quick-witted

a man, with the “golden swashbucklers” of his imagination. The rumor

which confounded them with him has next to nothing to support it.

Fortune, fashion, foolhardiness, impudence, were not the stars which

shone upon Farquhar’s nativity. Such exotic and epic virtues as may

flourish under these, such as do adorn the delightful dandies he

depicted, surely belonged to him in person; and his quiet habit of

living apart and letting the town talk, fixed to perpetuity the belief

that he had exploited himself vicariously, for good and all, upon the

stage. Certain qualities of his, certain brave truces established with

adverse conditions, force one to consider him with more attention and

respect than even his brilliant pen invites. It is something to find

him diffident and studious in a bacchanalian society, and with such

scrupulous sensitiveness that a mere inadvertence in boyhood forbade

him ever to fence again;[42] but his outstanding characteristic, the

thing which sets him apart from his brocaded _dramatis personæ_, is his

known lasting devotion to the welfare of his family, and his admirable

behavior in relation to his early and extraordinary marriage.

In 1702, Farquhar issued a charming and little-known miscellany,

called _Love and Business_, “a collection of occasionary verse and

epistolary prose.” The poetic exercises are of small importance;

but the other data (which survive as a hindrance, rather than as a

help, to biographers) come near being of very definite value. All

manner of futile guesses have been expended upon the identification

of his Penelope. It is given to no mouser to name her with certainty;

but, despite the gossip of the greenroom, now as ever too ready to

weave romances about the name of George Farquhar, internal evidence

is strongly against her having been Anne Oldfield. Yet this is the

supposition of most of his editors. Commenting upon one passage

touching some villanous stratagem from which Farquhar says he was

able to rescue a friend in the Low Countries, a friend with whom he

afterwards condoles upon a robbery she had undergone, Leigh Hunt adds

that this may have been the woman whom Farquhar subsequently made his

wife. A widow, whose Christian name was Margaret, but of whom we know

so little else that we cannot say whether she was English, or whether

her age considerably exceeded his, conceived a passionate attachment

for him, and managed to have it represented to him from several

quarters not only that she was kindly disposed towards him, but that

it would be well for his opening career if he should seek her hand,

as she had estates and revenues. Eventually, after we know not what

hesitations natural to a fastidious temperament, he proposed to her

and was accepted, and it soon transpired that the bride was quite as

penniless as himself. Hunt does not follow out his own hint in the

matter of the robbery, though the question, when carefully considered,

has a vital import. If the victim were indeed the lady whom Farquhar

married later, and if she were indeed robbed, it should signify that

she must then have been possessed of some wealth, so that the report

given to Farquhar could not have been, up to that time at least, a

lie. On the other hand, casuists must decide whether, again in the

event of the victim having been correctly identified by Hunt, the

robbery itself may not have been an invention meant, after Farquhar had

declared his allegiance, to quicken his sympathy, and to soften the

coming revelation that the robbery could never have resulted, owing to

a defect in the premises! There is very much else about the _Letters_

which is confusing and inconsistent. They are so disconnected, and

they vary so in tone and manner, as to suggest a doubt whether, if not

altogether imaginary, they could have been meant for any one person. A

lady is announced as having returned them for publication; she dresses

in mourning, and resides now on the Continent, now in London or in the

country; her suitor very explicitly states that he had long solicited

in vain the honor of her hand; and, in the end, with farewells and an

abrupt and unexplained severing, he gives up the quest, with his own

admission that he has lost her and that her heart “had no room for

him.” Now that the recipient of this correspondence, Anne Oldfield

or another, should have returned it for commercial purposes, not

having been won by the very real passion exhibited in parts of it,

seems somewhat peculiar; but to accept as fact that Farquhar himself

actually asked these letters back from her, and printed them as they

stood, is, under the conditions, absurd, and irreconcilable with

our knowledge of his character from other and prior sources. Hunt

further suggests that the _Miscellany_ was gathered together in some

press of pecuniary trouble; and its title, indeed, may hint at a

whimsical expectation that Love, being harnessed and sent abroad to

arouse curiosity among readers, may return in the way of Business to

headquarters. But Farquhar, in his bachelor days, had a fair income,

and would not have been so likely to hear the wolf at the door as he

was later, when that sound would awake in him a dread not ominous to

himself alone. It is possible that the undiscovered register of his

marriage bears the date of 1702 or even of 1701; if it were so, that

might explain the issue of his only book not in dramatic dress, and the

emergency which called it forth. It is difficult indeed to suppose,

although modern delicacy in these matters was just then a somewhat

unknown quantity, that we have between its covers genuine love-letters

hot from the pen. Steele, of an August morning nine years later,

inserted in _The Spectator_ as the communication of a third person, six

of his own notes to his comely and noble _fiancée_, Mary Scurlock. But

Farquhar had not Steele’s earnestness and love of circumstantial truth,

nor his zest for pointing a moral. Or was this publication the sort of

thing he would be likely, for a not unworthy purpose, to do? Was he,

in reality, a shade more obtuse and misguided than Miss Fanny Brawne?

Rather let us believe the _Letters_ a work of fiction, and only founded

largely upon various bygone moods and incidents of the foregoing two

years, which for one reason or another might interest buyers. Such is

the description to “dear Sam” of Dryden’s erratic funeral, which is

almost too keenly rhetorical a summing-up to have been written the next

day, or the thoughtful and sensible surveys of the Dutch. The amatory

epistles, with their leaven of reality, are presumably edited out of

all recognition. They make no defined impression; they do not move

forward; they veil impenetrably the traits of the person addressed, who

is made to appear as a vanishing unrelenting goddess, deaf and blind to

George Farquhar pleading his best. Whatever were the facts, the report

of them is chivalrous. Assume for a moment that his wife stands behind

the whole of this correspondence, or even behind the latter part of

it, and what seemed to constitute a little betrayal in the very worst

taste turns out to be an innocent joke. Of course the “lady” (or one of

the ladies) lent the manuscripts to the printers; of course Farquhar

originated, in order to give color to Mistress Farquhar’s known

pretence of riches, and their joint subsequent poverty, the magnificent

thieving practised upon the never-thieved and the unthievable! One can

fancy them both, in their hard chairs in the bare room, laughing well

and long, between tears of anxious hope that the more personal element

in the _Miscellany_ might fetch them from the Covent Garden book-stalls

a parcel of fagots and a dinner.

Aside from all theorizing, it is pleasant to know that their life

together was a happy one. The consensus of all witnesses, in the

significant absence of any contrary voice, affirms that Farquhar,

having been trapped, bore himself like the gentleman he was. Two

children were born to him, to brighten, but also to sadden, his brief

and diligent life. Under his added anxieties he did his royal best; he

addressed to their mother, from first to last, no word of reproach for

her fraud.

“The secret pleasure of the generous act

Is the great mind’s great bribe.”

In its fragrance of faith and patience and self-sacrificing tenderness,

their domestic story can almost rank next after that sacred one of

Charles and Mary Lamb.

Farquhar’s widow, who had loved him, appears to have loved his

memory.[43] She did not survive her husband many years; for there is

reason to suppose she died before 1719, and in penury. Poor Farquhar

used to declare that the dread that his family might suffer want was

far more bitter to him than death. Wilkes gave at his theatre, in the

May of 1708, a benefit for Margaret Farquhar, and twelve years later

he was acting as trustee for the young girls Mary and Anne Margaret,

whose pension is said by the _Encyclopædia Britannica_ to have amounted

to thirty pounds; it was obtained through the exertions of Edmund

Challoner, to whom their father had dedicated his _Miscellanies_.

Wilkes seems to have again aided both the orphans when they came of

age. One of them married an humble tradesman, and died early; the

other was living in 1764, wholly uneducated, and, as it is said on

small authority, as a maid-servant. Farquhar’s elder biographers

and editors, Ware, Genest, Chetwood, and the rest, writing in this

daughter’s lifetime, were apparently unconscious of her existence; but

the thought of her father’s child, old, neglected, and in a menial

position, served to anger Leigh Hunt as late as 1842.

Fear and forecast of what is only too likely to befall the helpless,

depressed Farquhar in the April long ago, when he lay dying of

consumption, and when, with a fortitude which sustained him under

his bitter disappointment, for six weeks, he wrote and finished his

masterly comedy _The Beaux’ Stratagem_. As he drew near the end of the

second act he was told to give up hope; but the second act closes with

the famous rattling catechism between Cherry and Archer, and the best

bit of verse its author ever made; and the third starts in with the

hearty sweet laugh—Anne Oldfield’s laugh—of that “exquisite creature,

Mrs. Sullen.” On a fund of grief, Farquhar enriched his London with a

legacy of perpetual merriment. The unflagging impetus of his dramas,

above and beyond their very real intrinsic merit, accounts for their

great and yet unforfeited popularity. They descend to us associated

with the intellectual triumphs of the most dear and dazzling names

upon the English stage; they move upon the wings of intelligence

and good-nature; they “give delight, and hurt not.” They swarm with

soldiers, welcome figures long tacitly prohibited from the boards, as

too painful a reminder of the Civil Wars. They begin with the clatter

of spurs, the bang of doors, the hubbub of bantering voices in “a

broadside of damme’s.” Sergeant Kite appears, followed by a mob on

whom he lavishes his wheedling, inspiriting gibble-gabble; Roebuck

enters in fantastic colloquy with a beggar; Sir Harry crosses the road,

singing, with footmen after him, and Vizard meanwhile indicating him

to Standard as “the joy of the playhouse and the life of the park,

Sir Harry Wildair, newly come from Paris”; _The Twin Rivals_ opens

in a volley of epigrams; the rise of the curtain in _The Beaux’

Stratagem_ discloses sly old Boniface and the ingenious Cherry calling

and running, running and calling, in a fluster pregnant of farce and

revel. Farquhar’s pages are not for the closet; they have little

passive charm; to quote from them, full as they are of familiar saws

almost all his own, is hardly fair. His mother-wit arises from the

ludicrous and unforeseen predicament, not from vanity and conscious

power; it is integral, not mere repartee; and it never calls a halt to

the action. As was well said by Charles Cowden Clarke, “there are no

traps for jests” in Farquhar; “no trains laid to fire _équivoque_.” The

clear fun, spurting unannounced in dialogue after dialogue, in incident

after incident; the incessant Molière-like masquerades; the thousand

little issues depending upon by-play and transient inspiration; the

narrowing scope and deepening sentiment of the plot, like a secret

given to the players, to be told fully only to the audience most in

touch with them—these commend Farquhar’s vivacious rôles to actors, and

make them both difficult and desirable. With what unction, from an

actor’s lips, falls his manifold and glowing praise of theatres! What

a pretty picture, a broad wash of rose-purple and white, he can make

of the interior seen from the wings! “There’s such a hurry of pleasure

to transport us; the bustle, noise, gallantry, equipage, garters,

feathers, wigs, bows, smiles, ogles, love, music, and applause!” And

again, in another mood: “The playhouse is the element of poetry,

because the region of beauty; the ladies, methinks, have a more

inspiring, triumphant air in the boxes than anywhere else. They sit

commanding on their thrones, with all their subject slaves about them;

their best clothes, best looks; shining jewels, sparkling eyes; the

treasures of the world in a ring.” And Mirabel, who is speaking, ends

with an ecstatic sigh: “I could wish that my whole life long were the

first night of a new play!”

This is a drop, or a rise, from Congreve and his aristocratic

abstractions. Farquhar, in his youth, had modelled himself chiefly

upon the comedy of Congreve, and may be said to have perfected the

mechanism which the genius of Congreve had brought into vogue. He never

attained, nor could attain, Congreve’s scholarly elegance of proportion

and his consummate diction. But he had the happiness of being no purely

literary dramatist; he had technical knowledge and skill. He brought

the existing heroes with their conniving valets, the buxom equivocal

maids, the laughing, masking, conscienceless fine ladies, out of their

disreputable moonlight into healthful comic air; and added to them, in

the transfer, a leaven of homely lovableness which will forever keep

his masterpieces upon the stage.

Farquhar’s original intellect has a value only relative; he may be

considered as Goldsmith’s tutor rather than as Congreve’s disciple.

Goldsmith had no small knowledge of Farquhar, his forerunner by sixty

years as a sizar student of Trinity; and, like him, he is reported

to have been dropped from his class for a buffoonery. What friends

(_Arcades ambo_, in both Virgilian and blameless Byronese) might

these two parsons’ sons have been! Scrub, Squire Sullen’s servant,

in _The Beaux’ Stratagem_, who “on Saturday draws warrants, and on

Sunday draws beer,” was a part Goldy once greatly desired to act. He,

too, when he came to write plays, cast about for conventional types

to handle and improve. Tony and his incomparable mother would hardly

have been, without their first imperfect apparition in Wycherley’s

powerful (and stolen) _Plain Dealer_; and Young Marlow and Hastings

are frank reproductions of Archer and Aimwell, in a much finer

situation. Miss Hardcastle hopes that in her cap and apron she may

resemble Cherry. And no one seems to have traced a celebrated passage

in _The Vicar of Wakefield_ either to my Lady Howdye’s message to my

Lady Allnight repeated by Archer (who in this same scene introduces

the “topical song” upon the modern boards), or else to the example

of the manœuvring Bisarre in Act II., Scene I., of _The Inconstant_.

Surely, “forms which proceed from simple enumeration and are exposed to

validity from a contradictory instance” supplies the unique original

of the nonsense-rhetoric which so confounded poor Moses.[44] The talk

of Clincher Junior and Tim, of Kite, Bullock, Scrub, Lyric, and the

unbaptized wench Parly, of the constable showing the big bed to Hermes

Wouldbe, the talk, that is, of Farquhar’s common people, shows humor

altogether of what we may call the Goldsmith order: genial, odd,

grotesque paradox, springing from Irish inconsequence and love of human

kind.

In the sixth year of Queen Anne, when Farquhar died, Steele was married

to his “Prue,” and having seen the last of his three reformatory

dramas “damned for its piety,” sought Joseph Addison’s approval and

collaboration, and fell to designing _The Tatler_. Fielding was

newborn, Johnson just out of the cradle, Pope was trying a cunning

young hand at his first _Pastorals_; Defoe, an alumnus of Newgate, was

beating his way outward and upward; Swift, yet a Whig, was known but

for his _Tale of a Tub_. The fresh waters were rising on all sides to

vivify the sick lowlands of the decadence. The kingdoms had a forgotten

lesson, and long in the learning, set before them: to regain, as a

basis for legitimate results, their mental independence and simplicity;

to serve art for art’s sake, and to achieve, through the reactionary

formalism of the nascent eighteenth century, freedom and a broad ethic

outlook. It was as if Comedy, in her winning meretricious perfections,

had to die, that English prose might live. It is enough for an immature

genius of the third order, born under Charles the Second, to have

vaguely foreshadowed a just and imperative change. Farquhar certainly

does foreshadow it, albeit with what theologians might call absence of

the necessary intention.

He wrote excellent prefaces and prologues. His _Discourse upon Comedy_,

in the _Miscellanies_, did pioneer work for his theory, since

expounded by more authoritative critics, and received by the English

world, that the observance or non-observance of the dramatic unities

is at the will of the wise, and that for guidance in all such matters

playwrights should look to Shakespeare rather than to Aristotle. The

_Discourse_, in Farquhar’s clear, sunny, homespun, forceful style,

does him honor, and should be reprinted. His best charm is that he

cannot be didactic. His suasion is of the strongest, but he has the

self-consciousness of all sensitive and analytic minds, which keeps

him free here as elsewhere from the slightest assumption of despotism.

It is very refreshing, in the face of that incessant belaboring of

the reader which Lesage was setting as a contemporaneous fashion, to

come across Farquhar’s gentle good-humored salutatory: “If you like

the author’s book, you have all the sense he thought you had; if you

dislike it, you have more sense than he was aware of!” Had he lived

longer, or a little later, we should have found him as well, with his

turn for skirmishing psychology, among the essayists and the novelists.

There were in him a mellowness and an unction which have their fullest

play in professedly subjective writing. Farquhar, after all, did not

fulfil himself, for he followed an ill outgoing fashion in æsthetics

rather than further a right incoming one. No one can help begrudging

him to the period he adorned. He deserved to flourish on the manlier

morrow, and to hold a historic position with the regenerators of public

taste in England. “Ah, go hang thyself up, my brave Crillon, for at

Arques we had a fight, and thou wert NOT in it!” One can fancy Sir

Richard Steele forever quoting that at Captain George Farquhar, in some

roomy club-window in Paradise.

FOOTNOTES:

[37] Incipit Annus Academicus Die Julii 9^a 1694.

------+---------+----------+-----+-----------+------------+----------+

Die |Georgius | filius | | Natus | ibidem | Eu. Lloyd 17a |Farquhare|

Gulielmi |Annos|Londonderry|educatus sub|(college Julii | Sizator

| Farqhare | 17 | | magistro | tutor) | | Clerici | | | Walker |

------+---------+----------+-----+-----------+------------+----------+

This matriculation entry from the register of Trinity does away

with our sizar’s presumed father, Rev. John Farquhar, prebendary of

Raphoe. We hear nothing more, ever after, of the Farquhar family, who

henceforth leave young George to his own profane devices; nor can any

certainty be attached to additional information, sometimes proffered,

that the father had seven children in all, and held a living of only

one hundred and fifty pounds a year. One other point is fixed by the

entry, to wit: if George Farquhar was seventeen in the July of 1694, he

cannot have been born in 1678.

[38] This was the theatre built by Sir Christopher Wren in 1672.

[39] Peter Anthony Motteux, the wild and clever linguist and dramatist,

who made the best English translation of _Don Quixote_. _The Stage

Coach_, itself an adaptation, has little merit beyond its liveliness.

[40] The register of burial is dated a month later than the received

date of his death. It reads simply: “23 May, George Falkwere, M.” The

initial is the sapient sexton’s indication that this was neither a W

(woman) nor a C (child). The spelling of the name betokens its usual

and original pronunciation. The present famous porticoed church was not

built for nineteen years after Farquhar died.

[41] The not altogether foolish censure has been cast upon the rogue

Teague in _The Twin Rivals_ that he speaks an impossible brogue, which

might as well be Welsh. Farquhar did not succeed in transferring to

paper the weird and unlovely Ulster dialect with which he was familiar

in boyhood, and which had figured already in the third act of _Henry

the Fifth_, in Jonson’s Irish masque, in Shadwell’s _Lancashire

Witches_; which was simultaneously being used in his farce _The

Committee_, by Dryden’s friend Howard, and which was afterwards to have

good corroboration in Aytoun’s _Massacre of the MacPherson_. Farquhar

employs it twice elsewhere, passably well in the case of Torlough

Macahone of the parish of Curroughabegley (the personage who built a

mansion-house for himself and his predecessors after him), and with

lamentable flatness in that of Dugard in his last comedy. Dugard is a

rival of the nursery-maid dear to almanac humorists, who is wont to

exclaim: “Can’t ye tell boi me accint that ’tis Frinch Oi am!” It was

one of Farquhar’s inartistic mistakes that he made no loving study of

this or of anything touching nearly his own people. His Irishmen, with

the exception of Roebuck, are either rascals or characterless nobodies.

The name Teague, or Teig, which Howard had also employed, is old and

pure North Irish; and no less pleasant an authority than George Borrow

reminds us in the _Romano Lavo-Lil_ that it is Danish in origin.

[42] Dear Dick Steele, in 1701, while Captain of Fusileers, had a

duel thrust upon him; and in parrying, his sword pierced his man. To

his remorse may be ascribed his hatred of the custom of duelling,

expressed afterwards on every occasion. Steele owed his start in life

to James Butler, Duke of Ormonde, who entered him among the boys on

the Charterhouse foundation. This peer was grandfather to the man who

failed George Farquhar.

[43] Mrs. Farquhar published in 1711 an octavo volume of the _Plays,

Letters, and Verses_. Among the verses figures a poem of six cantos

dedicated to the victorious Earl of Peterborough, entitled _Barcelona_.

“It was found among my dear deceased husband’s writings,” says the

widow, in her prefatory note. He was not at the siege, and it is

possible that the six cantos were a manuscript copy of the effusion of

some former comrade. Farquhar was the author of several songs, one, of

highly didactic complexion, having emanated from him at the reputed age

of ten. Of these, only two are of fair lyrical quality: the page’s song

in _Love and a Bottle_, and “Tell me, Aurelia, tell me, pray,” which

Robert Southey included in his collection.

[44] _The Vicar of Wakefield_ dates from 1766. Almost twenty years

before that, the immortal Partridge had remarked to Tom Jones, quoting

his schoolmaster: “Polly matete cry town is my daskalon.” Noble

nonsense hath her pedigree. Goldsmith, however, is not so likely to

have taken his cue from Fielding.

IV

TOPHAM BEAUCLERK

1739-1780

AND

BENNET LANGTON

1741-1800

IN Samuel Johnson’s famous circle nearly every man stands for himself,

full of definite purpose and power. But two young men are there who

did nothing of moment, whose names chime often down the pages of all

his biographies, and to whom the world must pay honor, if only for

the friendship they took and gave. As Apollo should be set about with

his Graces “tripping neatly,” so the portentous old apparition of

Johnson seems never so complete and endearing as when attended by these

two above all things else Johnsonians. When the Turk’s Head is ajar

in Gerrard Street, in shadow-London; when the “unclubable” Hawkins

strides over the threshold, and Hogarth goes by the window with his

large nod and smile; when Chamier is there reading, Goldsmith posing

in purple silk small-clothes, Sir Joshua fingering his trumpet, Burke

and little brisk Garrick stirring “bishop”[45] in their glasses, and

the king of the hour, distinguished by his lack of ruffles, is rolling

about in his chair of state, saying something prodigiously humorous

and wise, it is still Bennet Langton and Topham Beauclerk who most

give the scene its human genial lustre, standing with laughter behind

him, arm in arm. They were his favorites, and it is the most adorable

thing about them both that they made out to like James Boswell, who

was jealous of them. (Perhaps they had apprehended thoroughly Newman’s

fine aphorism concerning a bore: “You may yield, or you may flee: you

cannot conquer!”) The rare glimpses we have of their brotherly lives is

through the door which opens or shuts for Johnson. Between him and them

was deep and enduring affection, and what little is known of them has

a right to be more, for his sake.

Bennet Langton, born in 1741 in the very neighborhood famous now as the

birthplace of Tennyson, was the elder son of the odd and long-descended

George Langton of Langton, and of Diana his wife, daughter of Edmund

Turnor, Esquire, of Stoke Rochford, Lincolnshire. While a lad in the

fen-country, he read _The Rambler_, and conceived the purest enthusiasm

for its author. He came to London, indeed, on the ideal errand of

seeking him out, and, thanks to the kind apothecary Levett, found the

idol of his imagination at home at No. 17 Gough Square, Fleet Street.

Despite the somewhat staggering circumstances of Johnson’s attire,—for

the serious boy had rashly presupposed a stately, fastidious, and

well-mannered figure,—he paid his vows, and commended himself to

his new friend for once and all. Langton entered Trinity College,

Oxford, in 1757, at the age of sixteen.[46] The Doctor, who had

known him about three years, followed his career at the university

with interest, writing to Langton’s tutor, then “dear Tom Warton,”

just appointed to the professorship of poetry held by his father, and

afterwards poet-laureate: “I see your pupil: his mind is as exalted

as his stature,” and to Langton’s self the sweet generality: “I love,

dear sir, to think of you.” He even paid his Freshman a visit, and

swam sportively across a dangerous pool in the Isis, in the teeth of

his warning; and here also, in the Oxford which was long ago his own

“tent of a night,” he fell across a part of his destiny in the shape

of that strange bird, Mr. Topham Beauclerk, then a taking scapegrace

of eighteen. The Doctor must have shaken his head at first, and

wondered at the juxtaposition of this arrant Lord of Misrule and the

“evangelical goodness” of his admirable Langton, until mollified by

the knowledge that a species of cult for himself, and ardent perusal

of his writings, had first brought them together. It was a pleasant

thought to him, that of the two young ribboned heads high in the

quadrangle, bending for the ninth time over _The Reasons Why Advice is

Generally Ineffectual_, _The Mischief of Unbounded Raillery_, and the

jolly satire on _Screech-Owls_; or smiling over the shy Verecundulus

and the too-celebrated Misellus who were part of the author’s machinery

for adding “Christian ardor to virtue, and Christian confidence to

truth.”

Beauclerk, like Langton, was a critic and a student; he was well-bred,

urbane, and of excellent natural parts; moreover, he was a wit, one

of the very foremost of his day, when wits grew in every garden. An

only child, he was born in London in the December of 1739, and named

after that benevolent Topham of Windsor who left the manors of Clewer

Brocas and Didworth and a collection of paintings and drawings to his

father, the handsome wild Lord Sydney Beauclerk, fifth son of the

first Duke of St. Albans, and also, in his time, a gentleman commoner

of Trinity. Lord Sydney died early, in the autumn of 1744, and was

buried in Westminster Abbey with his hero-brother Aubrey, whose

epitaph, still to be read there, Thomson seems to have written. All

the pretty toys and curios passed to Topham the little boy, under the

guardianship of Lady Beauclerk, his excellent but literal mother, once

Mary Norris of Speke in Lancashire. His tutor was named Parker, and

must have been a much-enduring man. Young Beauclerk grew up, bearing

a resemblance in many ways to Charles II.; and so it befell that with

his aggravating flippancy, his sharp sense, his quiver full of gibes,

his time-wasting, money-wasting moods, foreign as Satan and his pomps

to those of his sweet-natured college companion, he was able to strike

Dr. Johnson in his own political weak spot. A flash of the liquid

Stuart eye was enough to disarm Johnson at the very moment when he was

calling up his most austere frown; it was enough to turn the vinegar

of his wrath to the honey of kindness. _Il ne nous reste qu’une chose

à faire: embrassons-nous!_ as the wheedling Prince, at a crisis,

says to Henry Esmond. Johnson, as everybody knows, was a Jacobite.

No sincerer testimony could he have given to his inexplicable liking

for a royal rogue than that he allowed Nell Gwynn’s great-grandson to

tease him and tyrannize over him during an entire lifetime. A choice

spectacle this: Mr. Topham Beauclerk, on his introduction, literally

bewitching Dr. Samuel Johnson! The stolid moralist was enraptured

with his Jack-o’-lantern antics; he rejoiced in his manners, his

taste and literary learning; admired him indiscreetly, rich clothes,

equipage, and all; followed his whims meekly, expostulated with him

almost against his traitorous impulses, and clung to him to the end in

unbroken fondness and faith.

Beauclerk had immense gayety and grace, and the full force given by

high spirits. His accurate, ever-widening knowledge of books and men,

his consummate culture, and his fearlessness, sat handsomely on one

who was regarded by contemporary old ladies as a mere “macaroni.” It

was a matter of course that he tried for no degree at college. The

mistress of Streatham Park, who was by no means his adorer, and who

remembered his chief wickedness in remembering that “he wished to be

accounted wicked,” informs us in a private jotting since published

that he was “a man of very strict veracity.” A philosopher and a

truth-teller, whatever his worldly weaknesses, was sure to be a

character within the range of Johnson’s affections. It was he who most

troubled the good Doctor, he for whom he suffered in silence, with whom

he wrangled; he whose insuperable taunting promise, never reaching any

special development, vexed and disheartened him; yet, perhaps because

of these very things, though Bennet Langton was infinitely more to his

mind, it was Absalom, once again, whom the old fatherly heart loved

best. Nor was he unrepaid. None loved him better, in return, than his

“Beau,” the very mirror of the name, who was wont to pick his way up

the grimy Fleet Street courts “with veneration,” as Boswell records.

Bennet Langton, as Mr. Forster expresses it in his noble _Life of

Goldsmith_, was “an eminent example of the high and humane class who

are content to ‘ring the bell’ to their friends.” He was a mild young

visionary, scrupulous, tolerant, and generous in the extreme; modest,

contemplative, averse to dissipation; a perfect talker and reader,

and a perfect listener; with a face sweet as a child’s, fading but

now, among his kindred, on the canvas of Sir Joshua Reynolds. He left

a gracious memory behind at Oxford, where his musing bust adorns the

old monastic library of Trinity. He was six feet six inches tall,

slenderly built, and slightly stooping. “The ladies got about him in

drawing-rooms,” said Edmund Burke, “like maids about the Maypole!”

Miss Hawkins, in her _Memoirs_, names him as the person with whom

Johnson was certainly seen to the fairest advantage. His deferent

suave manner was the best foil possible to the Doctor’s extraordinary

explosions. He had supreme self-command; no one ever saw him angry;

and in most matters of life, as a genuine contrast to his beloved

friend Beauclerk, he was apt to take things a shade too seriously. We

learn from Mr. Henry Best, author of some good _Personal and Literary

Memorials_, that the advance rumors of the French Revolution found

Langton, in the fullest sense, an aristocrat; but it was not long

before he became, from conviction, a thorough Liberal, and so remained,

although he suffered a great unpopularity, owing to this change, in

his native county. He wrote, in 1760, a little book of essays entitled

_Rustics_, which never got beyond the passivity of manuscript. The

year before, under the date of July 28th, Langton contributed to the

pages of _The Idler_ the paper numbered 67 and entitled _A Scholar’s

Journal_. It is a pleasant study of procrastination and of shifting

plans, a gentle bit of humor to be ranked as autobiographic. There is

an indorsement of Montrose in its heroic advice to “risk the certainty

of little for the chance of much.” But Langton’s graceful academic

pen was not destined to a public career. Perseverance of any sort was

not native to him. He fulfilled beautifully, adds the vivacious Miss

Hawkins, “the pious injunction of Sir Thomas Browne, ‘to sit quietly

in the soft showers of Providence,’ and might, without injustice,

be characterized as utterly unfit for every species of activity.”

Yet at the call of duty, so well was the natural man dominated by

his unclouded will, he girded himself to any exertion. Wine-drinking

was habitual with him, and he felt its need to sharpen and rouse

his intellect; “but the idea of Bennet Langton being what is called

‘overtaken,’” wrote the same associate whom we have been quoting, “is

too preposterous to be dwelt on.” She furnishes one illustration of

Langton’s Greek serenity. Talking to a company, of a chilly forenoon,

in his own house, he paused to remark that if the fire lacked attention

it might go out: a brief, casual, murmurous interruption. He resumed

his discourse, breaking off presently, and pleading abstractedly with

eye in air: “Pray ring for coals!” All sat looking at the fire, and

so little solicitous about the impending catastrophe that presently

Langton was off again on the stream of his softened eloquence. In a few

minutes came another lull. “Did anybody answer that bell?” A general

negative. “Did anybody ring that bell?” A sly shaking of heads. And

once more the inspired monody soared among the clouds, at last dropping

meditatively to the hearthstone: “Dear, dear, the fire is out!”

Langton was the centre of a group, wherever he happened to be, talking

delightfully, and twirling the oblong gold-mounted snuff-box, which

promptly appeared as sociabilities began: a conspicuous figure, with

his height, his courteous smile, his mild beauty, and his habit of

crossing his arms over his breast, or locking his hands together on

his knee. He was a great rider, and could run like a hound. He had a

queerness of constitution which seemed to leave him at his lowest ebb

every afternoon about two of the clock, forgetful, weary, confused,

and without an idea in his head; but after a little food, he was

himself again. At dinner-parties he usually rose fasting, “such was the

perpetual flow of his conversation, and such the incessant claim made

upon him.” A morning call from Mr. Langton was a thing to suggest the

eternal years; yet we are told that satiety dwelt not where he was;

like Cowley, “he never oppressed any man’s parts, or put any man out

of countenance.” He had much the same sense of humor as Beauclerk had,

and his speech was quite as full of good sense and direct observation,

if not as cutting. He indicted a fault of Edmund Burke’s in one extreme

stroke: “Burke whisks the end of his tail in the face of an arguer!”

Johnson, the arch-whisker of tails, was not to be brought to book; but

Burke’s greatness was of a texture to bear and enjoy the thrust. It is

curious that Langton was markedly fond of _Hudibras_; such a relish

indicates, perhaps, the turn his own wit might have taken, had it not

been held in by too much second thought.

Johnson was wont to announce that he valued Langton for his piety,

his ancient descent, his amiable behavior, and his mastery of Greek.

“Who in this town knows anything of Clenardus, sir, but you and I?”

he would say. In the midst of his talk Langton would fall into the

“vowelled undertone” of the tongue he loved, correcting himself with a

little wave of the hands, and the apologetic phrase: “And so it goes

on.” “Steeped to the lips in Greek” he was indeed, bursting out with

a joyous salute to the moon of Hellas, upon a friend’s doorstep, or

making grotesque Hellene puns, for his own delight,[47] upon the blank

leaves of a pocket-book. Every one familiar with Johnsoniana will

recall the charming and spirited retort written by Dr. Barnard, then

Dean of Derry, later, Bishop of Killaloe, which closes:

“If I have thoughts and can’t express ’em,

Gibbon shall teach me how to dress ’em

In terms select and terse;

Jones teach me modesty and Greek;

Smith, how to think; Burke, how to speak;

And Beauclerk, to converse!”

In all deference to the illustrious Sir William Jones, it may be

claimed that “modesty and Greek” were the very arts in which Langton

was a past-master. But he was an amateur, and a private scholar, and

his name was a dissyllable; else the Dean might have tossed at his feet

as pretty a compliment as that given in the last line to his colleague.

It must have gratified Johnson that Langton refused, at Reynolds’s

dinner-table, “like a sturdy scholar,” to sign the famous Round Robin

(not signed, either, by Beauclerk) which besought him to “disgrace the

walls of Westminster with an English inscription.” And as if to keep

Langton firmly of his own mind on the subject, it was to him the Doctor

confided the Greek quatrain, sad and proud, which he had dedicated to

Goldsmith’s[48] memory.

For Bennet Langton Johnson had no criticism but praise. He presented

him with pride to Young and to Richardson, described him handsomely to

Hannah More, and proceeded to draw his character for Miss Reynolds, ere

she had met him, with such “energy and fond delight” as she avowed she

never could forget. What fine ringing metal was Johnson’s commendation!

“He is one of those to whom Nature has not spread her volumes,

nor uttered her voices, in vain.” “Earth does not bear a worthier

gentleman.” “I know not who will go to Heaven if Langton does not.” And

in the sweetest and completest approval ever put by one mortal upon

another: “_Sit anima mea cum Langtono!_” Yet even with this “angel of a

man” the Doctor had one serious and ludicrous quarrel.

It was the fatal outcome of his uneven moods that he must needs be

disenchanted at times even with his best beadsmen: there came days

when he would deny Beauclerk’s good-humor to be anything but “acid,”

Langton’s anything but “muddy.” He considered it the sole grave

fault of the latter that he was too ready to introduce a religious

discussion into a mixed assembly, where he knew scarcely any two of

the company would be of the same mind. On Boswell’s suggestion that

this may have been done for the sake of instructing himself, Johnson

replied angrily that a man had no more right to take that means of

gaining information than he had to pit two persons against each other

in a duel for the sake of learning the art of self-defence. Some

indiscretion of this sort on Langton’s part seems to have alienated

the friends for the first and last time. It was during their transient

bitterness that the Doctor made the historic apology, across the table,

to Oliver Goldsmith; an incident which, however beautiful in itself,

was a hard back-handed hit at Langton, standing by. Croker’s conjecture

may be true that the business which threatened to break a fealty of

some sixteen years’ standing arose rather from Langton’s settling his

estate by will upon his sisters, whose tutor he had been. On hearing

of it, the Great Cham grumbled and fumed, politely applying to the

Misses Langton the title of “three dowdies!”[49] and shouting, in a

feudal warmth, that “an ancient estate, sir! an ancient estate should

always go to males.” In fact, the Doctor behaved very badly, very

sardonically, and was pleased to lay hold of a post by Temple Bar one

night, and roar aloud over a piece of possible folly up in Lincolnshire

which concerned him not in the least. But in due time the breach,

whatever its cause, was healed. The Doctor, in writing of it, uses

one of his balancing sentences: “Langton is a worthy fellow, without

malice, though not without resentment.” The two could not keep apart

very long, despite all the unreason in the world. “Johnson’s quarrels,”

Mr. Forster tells us, “were lovers’ quarrels.” Another memorable

passage-at-arms, rich in comedy, happened in the course of one of

Johnson’s sicknesses, when, in the cloistral silence of his chamber,

he solemnly implored Bennet Langton, always the companion who comforted

his sunless hours, to tell him wherein his life had been faulty. His

shy and sagacious monitor wrote down, as accusation enough, various

Scriptural texts recommending tolerance, humility, long-suffering,

and other meek ingredients which were not predominant in the sinner’s

social composition. The penitent earnestly thanked Langton on taking

the paper from his hand, but presently turned his short-sighted eyes

upon him from the pillow, and emerging from what his own verbology

would call a “frigorific torpor,” he exclaimed in a loud, wrathful,

suspicious tone: “What’s your drift, sir?” “And when I questioned him,”

so Johnson afterwards told his blustering tale—“when I questioned him

as to what occasion I had given him for such animadversion, all that

he could say amounted to this: that I sometimes contradicted people in

conversation! Now, what harm does it do any man to be contradicted?” To

this same paternal young Langton the rebel submitted his Latin verses;

the _Poemata_, in the shape in which we possess them, were rigorously

edited by him. And Johnson leaned upon him in more intimate ways, as he

could never lean upon Beauclerk. To the scrupulous nature instinctively

right he made comfortable confidences: “Men of harder minds than ours

will do many things from which you and I would shrink; yet, sir, they

will, perhaps, do more good in life than we.”

As to the Honorable Topham Beauclerk, more volatile than Langton, he

had as steady a “sunshine of cheerfulness” for his heritage. We find

him complaining to a friend in the July of 1773: “Every hour adds to

my misanthropy; and I have had a pretty considerable share of it for

some years past.” This incursion of low spirits was not normal with

him. Johnson, bewailing his own morbid habits of mind, once said: “Some

men, and very thinking men, too, have not these vexing thoughts. Sir

Joshua Reynolds is the same all the year round; Beauclerk, when not ill

and in pain, is the same.” Boswell attests that Beauclerk took more

liberties with Johnson than durst any man alive, and that Johnson was

more disposed to envy Beauclerk’s talents than those of any one he had

ever known. Born into the freedom of London, Beauclerk was familiar

with Fox, Selwyn, and Walpole, and with the St. James men who did not

ache to consort with Johnson; and he was quite their match in ease and

astuteness. He walked the modish world, where Langton could not and

would not follow; he alternated the Ship Tavern and the gaming-table

with the court levees; Davies’s shop with the golden insipidities of

the drawing-room; _la comédie_, _la danse_, _l’amour même_, with the

intellectual tie-wigs of Soho. It shows something of his spirit that

whereas no member of the Club save himself was a frequenter of White’s

and Betty’s,[50] or a chosen guest at Strawberry Hill, yet there was no

person of fashion whom he was not proud to make known to Doctor Johnson

whenever he judged the candidate for so genuine an honor worthy of it.

Some of these encounters must have been queer and memorable!

Beauclerk’s unresting sarcasm often flattened out Boswell and irritated

the Doctor, though Bennet Langton, in his abandonments of enthusiastic

optimism, was never more than grazed. It is not to be denied that this

spoiled child of the Club liked to worry Goldsmith, the maladroit great

man who might have quoted often on such occasions the sad gibe of

Hamlet:

“I’ll be your foil, Laertes: in mine ignorance

Your skill shall, like a star in the darkest night,

Stick fiery off indeed.”

What a pity that Goldsmith’s _Retaliation_ was never finished, so as

to include his portrait of Beau! He was “a pestilent wit,” as Anthony

à Wood calls Marvell. Johnson, shy creature! deplored Beauclerk’s

“predominance over his company.” The tyranny, however, was gracefully

and decorously exercised, if we are to believe the unique eulogy that

“no man was ever freer, when he was about to say a good thing, from a

look which expressed that it was coming; nor, when he had said it, from

a look which expressed that it had come.” Few human beings have had

a finer sense of fun than Topham Beauclerk. He had an infallible eye

for the values of blunders, and an incongruity came home to him like

a blessing from above. Life with him was a night-watch for diverting

objects and ideas. When he was not studying, he was disporting himself,

like the wits of the Restoration; and he was equal to all emergencies,

as they succeeded one another. Every specimen preserved of his talk

is perfect of its kind, and makes us long for a full index. Pointed

his speech was, always, and reminds one indeed of a foil, but without

the button; a dangerous little weapon, somewhat unfair, but carried

with such consummate flourish that those whom it pricks could almost

cheer it. “O Lord! how I did hate that horrid Beauclerk!” Mrs. Piozzi

scribbled once on the margin of Wraxall’s _Memoirs_, in an exquisite

feminine vindication of poor Beau’s accomplished tongue.

He was no disguiser of his own likes and dislikes. Politics he avoided

as much as possible; but he affected less concern in public matters

than he really felt. “Consecrate that time to your friends,” he writes

with mock severity to the ideal Irishman, Lord Charlemont, “which

you spend in endeavoring to promote the interests of a half-million

of scoundrels.” For his private business he had least zeal of all;

and cites “my own confounded affairs” as the cause of his going into

Lancashire. Beauclerk had great tact, boldness, and independence; his

natural scorn of an oppressor was his modern and democratic quality.

His idleness (for he was as idle by habit as Langton was by nature) he

recognized, and lightly deprecated. Fastidious in everything, he made

“one hour of conversation at Elmsley’s”[51] his standard of enjoyment,

and his imagined extreme of annoyance was “to be clapped on the back

by Tom Davies.” What he chose to call his leisure (again the ancestral

Stuart trait!) he dedicated to the natural sciences in his beloved

laboratory. “I see Mr. Beauclerk often, both in town and country,”

wrote Goldsmith to Bennet Langton; “he is now going directly forward

to become a second Boyle, deep in chemistry and physics.” When there

was some fanciful talk of setting up the Club as a college, “to draw

a wonderful concourse of students,” Beauclerk, by unanimous vote, was

elected to the professorship of Natural Philosophy.

Johnson’s influence on him, potent though it was, seems to have been

negative enough. It kept him from a few questionable things, and

preserved in him an outward decorum towards customs and established

institutions; but it failed to incite him to make of his manifold

talents the “illustrious figure” which Langton’s eyes discerned in a

vain anticipation. Beauclerk and the great High Churchman went about

much together, and had amusing experiences. On such occasions, as in

all their familiar intercourse, the disciple had the true salt of the

Doctor’s talk, which, as Hazlitt remarks, was often something quite

unlike “the cumbrous cargo of words” he kept for professional use. In

the late winter of 1765 the two visited Cambridge, Beauclerk having a

mind to call upon a friend at Trinity.

These, as we know, had their many differences, “like a Spanish great

galleon, and an English man-o’-war”; the one smooth, sharp, and civil,

the other indignantly dealing with the butt-end of personality. Boswell

gives a long account of a charming dispute concerning the murderer

of Miss Reay, and the evidence of his having carried two pistols.

Beauclerk was right; but Johnson, with quite as solid a sense of

virtue, was angry; and he was soothed at the end only by an adroit

and affectionate reply. “Sir,” the Doctor began, sternly, at another

time, after listening to some mischievous waggery, “you never open your

mouth but with the intention to give pain, and you often give me pain,

not from the power of what you say, but from seeing your intention.”

And again, he said to him whom he had compared to Alexander, marching

in triumph into Babylon: “You have, sir! a love of folly, and a scorn

of fools; everything you do attests the one, and everything you say

the other.”[52] Beauclerk could also lecture his mentor. It was his

steadfast counsel that the Doctor should devote himself to poetry, and

draw in his horns of dogma and didactics.

He had, ever ready, some quaint simile or odd application from the

classics; in the habit of “talking from books,” as the Doctor called

it, he was, however, distanced by Langton. Referring to that friend’s

habit of sitting or standing against the fireplace, with one long leg

twisted about the other, “as if fearing to occupy too much space,”

Beauclerk likened him, for all the world, to the stork in Raphael’s

cartoon of The Miraculous Draught.[53] One of Beauclerk’s happiest

hits, and certainly his boldest, was made while Johnson was being

congratulated upon his pension. “How much now it was to be hoped,”

whispered the young blood, in reference to Falstaff’s celebrated vow,

“that he would purge and live cleanly, as a gentleman should do!”

Johnson seems to have taken the hint in good-humor, and actually to

have profited by it.

Very soon after leaving Oxford, Beauclerk became engaged to a Miss

Draycott, whose family were well known to that affable blue-stocking,

Mrs. Montagu; but some coldness on his part, some sensitiveness on

hers, broke off the match. His fortune-hunting parent is said to have

been disappointed, as the lady owned several lead-mines in her own

right. That same year, with Bennet Langton for companion part of the

way, Beauclerk, whose health, never robust, now began to give him

anxiety, set out on a Continental tour. Baretti, whom he had met at

home, received him most kindly at Milan, thanks to Johnson’s urgent

and friendly letter. By his subsequent knowledge of Italian popular

customs, he was able to testify in Baretti’s favor, when the latter

was under arrest for killing his man in the Haymarket, and in concert

with Burke, Garrick, Goldsmith, and Johnson, to help him, in a very

interesting case, towards his acquittal. It was reported to Selwyn

that the handsome gambling Inglese was robbed at Venice of £10,000!

an incident which, perhaps, shortened his peregrinations. If the

report were accurate, it would prove that he could have been in no

immediate need of pecuniary rescue from his leaden sweetheart. It was

Dr. Johnson’s opinion, coinciding with the opinion of Roger Ascham on

the same general subject, that travel adds very little to one’s mental

forces, and that Beauclerk might have learned more in the Academe of

“Fleet Street, sir!”

Topham Beauclerk married Lady Diana Spencer, the eldest daughter of

the second Duke of Marlborough, as soon as she obtained a divorce from

her first husband. This was Frederick, Lord Bolingbroke, nephew and

heir of the great owner of that title; a very trying gentleman, who

was the restless “Bully” of Selwyn’s correspondence; he survived until

1787. The ceremony took place March 12, 1768, in St. George’s, Hanover

Square, “by license of the Archbishop of Canterbury,” both conspirators

being then residents of the parish. Lady Diana Spencer was born in

the spring of 1734, and was therefore in her thirty-fifth year, while

Beauclerk was but twenty-nine.[54] Johnson was disturbed, and felt

offended at first with the whole affair; but he never withdrew from the

agreeable society of Beauclerk’s wife. It is nothing wonderful that the

courtship and honey-moon was signalized by the forfeit of Beauclerk’s

place in the exacting Club, “for continued inattendance,” and not

regained for a considerable period. “They are in town, at Topham’s

house, and give dinners,” one of George Selwyn’s gossiping friends

wrote, after the wedding. “Lord Ancram dined there yesterday, and

called her nothing but Lady Bolingbroke the whole time!” Let us hope

that “Milady Bully” triumphed over her awkward guest, and looked, as

Earl March once described her under other difficulties, “handsomer than

ever I saw her, and not the least abashed;” or as deliberately easy as

when she entertained with her gay talk the nervous Boswell who awaited

the news of his election or rejection from the Club. She was a blond

goddess, exceedingly fair to see. In her middle age she fell under the

observant glance of delightful Fanny Burney, who did not fail to allow

her “pleasing remains of beauty.”

The _divorcée_ was fond of and faithful to her new lord, and no

drawback upon his æsthetic pride, inasmuch as she was an artist of no

mean merit. Horace Walpole built a room for the reception of some of

her drawings, which he called his Beauclerk Closet, “not to be shown

to all the profane that come to see the house,” and he always praised

them extravagantly. It is surer critical testimony in her favor that

her name figures yet in encyclopædias, and that Sir Joshua, the honest

and unbought judge, much admired her work, which Bartolozzi was kept

busy engraving. It was her series of illustrations to Bürger’s wild

ballad of _Leonora_ (with the dolly knight, the wooden monks, the

genteel heroine, and the vigorous spectres) which, long after, helped

to fire the young imagination of Shelley. It is to be feared that her

invaluable portrait of Samuel Johnson is not, or never was, extant.

“Johnson was confined for some days in the Isle of Skye,” writes her

rogue of a spouse, “and we hear that he was obliged to swim over to

the mainland, taking hold of a cow’s tail. . . . Lady Di has promised

to make a drawing of it.” Sir Joshua’s pretty “Una” is the little

Elizabeth, afterwards Countess of Pembroke, elder daughter of Lady Di

and Topham Beauclerk, painted the year her father died.

The family lived in princely style, both at their “summer quarters” at

Muswell Hill, and on Great Russell Street, where the library, set in a

great garden, reached, as Walpole mischievously gauged it, “half-way to

Highgate.” Lady Di, an admirable hostess, proved herself one of those

odd and rare women who take to their husbands’ old friends. Selwyn

she cordially liked, and her warmest welcome attended Langton, whom

she would rally for his remissness, when he failed to come to them at

Richmond. He could reach them so easily! she said; all he need do was

to lay himself at length, his feet in London and his head with them,

_eodem die_. This Richmond home remained her residence during her

widowhood. Walpole mentions a Thames boat-race in 1791, when he sat in

a tent “just before Lady Di’s windows,” and gazed upon “a scene that

only Richmond, on earth, can exhibit.” In the church of the same leafy

town her body rests.

Beauclerk died at his Great Russell Street house on March 11, 1780. He

had been failing steadily under visitations of his old trouble since

1777, when he lay sick unto death at Bath, and when his wife nursed

him tenderly into what seemed to Walpole a miraculous recovery. He was

but forty-one years old, and, for all his genius, left no more trace

behind than that Persian prince who suddenly disappeared in the shape

of a butterfly, and whom old Burton calls a “light phantastick fellow.”

His air of boyish promise, quite unconsciously worn, hoodwinked his

friends into prophecies of his fame. He did not give events a chance to

put immortality on his “bright, unbowed, insubmissive head.” Yet he was

bitterly mourned. “I would walk to the extent of the diameter of the

earth to save him,” cried Johnson, who had loved him for over twenty

years; and again, to Lord Althorp: “This is a loss, sir, that perhaps

the whole nation could not repair.” Boswell mentions the Doctor’s April

stroll, at this time, while he was writing his _Lives of the Poets_;

and tells us how, returning from a call on the widow of the companion

of his youth, David Garrick, he leaned over the rails of the Adelphi

Terrace, watching the dark river, and thinking of “two such friends

as cannot be supplied.” “Poor dear Beauclerk!” Johnson wrote, when his

violent grief had somewhat subsided, “_nec, ut soles, dabis joca!_ His

wit and his folly, his acuteness and his maliciousness, his merriment

and his reasoning, are alike over. Such another will not often be found

among mankind.” Beyond this well-known and characteristic summing-up,

the Doctor made no discoverable mention, in his correspondence, of his

bereavement, certainly not to the highly-prejudiced Mrs. Thrale, to

whom he wrote often and gayly in the year of Beauclerk’s death. Nor

shall we know how the catastrophe affected Bennet Langton; for all the

most interesting papers relating to him were destroyed when the old

Hall at Langton-by-Spilsby was burned in 1855. On this subject, as on

others as intimate, he stands, perforce, silent.

Readers may recall a passage in Miss Burney’s _Diary_ which gives

countenance to an accusation not borne out by any other testimony,

that Beauclerk and his wife had not lived happily together. Dining

at Sir Joshua’s at Richmond, in 1782, Edmund Burke, sitting next the

author of _Evelina_, took occasion, on catching sight of Lady Di’s

“pretty white house” through the trees, to rejoice in the fact that

she was well-housed, moneyed, and a widow. He added that he had never

enjoyed the good-fortune of another so keenly as in this blessed

instance. Then, turning to his new acquaintance, as the least likely

to be informed of the matter, he spoke in his own “strong and marked

expressions” of the singular ill-treatment Beauclerk had shown his

wife, and the “necessary relief” it must have been to her when he was

called away. The statement does not seem to have been gainsaid by any

of the company; nor was Burke liable to a slanderous error. So severe a

comment on Beauclerk, resting, even as it does, wholly on Miss Burney’s

veracity, ought, in fairness, to be incorporated into any sketch of the

man. On the other side, it is pleasant to discover that Beauclerk, in

his will, made five days before the end, bequeathed all he possessed to

his wife, and reverted to her the estates of his children, should they

die under age. There was but one bequest beyond these, and that was to

Thomas Clarke, the faithful valet. The executors named were Lady Di

and her brother, Lord Charles Spencer, who had also been groomsman at

the marriage, which, despite Burke and its own evil beginnings, it is

hard to think of as ill-starred. The joint guardians of Charles George

Beauclerk, the only son, were to be Bennet Langton and a Mr. Loyrester,

whom Dr. Johnson speaks of as “Leicester, Beauclerk’s relation, and a

man of good character;” but the guardianship, provisional in case of

Lady Di’s decease, never came into force, as she survived, in fullest

harmony with her three children, up to August 1, 1808, having entered

her seventy-fifth year. Various private legacies came to Langton, by

his old comrade’s dying wish, the most precious among them, perhaps,

being the fine Reynolds portrait of Johnson, which had been painted at

Beauclerk’s cost. Under it was inscribed:

“_Ingenium ingens

Inculto latet hoc sub corpore._”

Langton thoughtfully effaced the lines. “It was kind of you to take

it off,” said the burly Doctor, with a sigh; and then (for how could

he but recall the contrast of temperament in the two, as well as the

affectionate context of Horace?), “not unkind in him to have put it

on.” The collection of thirty thousand glorious books “_pernobilis

Angli T. Beauclerk_” was sold at auction. The advertisement alone is

royal reading. There is much amiable witness to the circumstance that

Beauclerk was not only an admirer but a buyer of his friends’ works.

From some kind busybody who attended the twenty-ninth day of the sale,

and pencilled his observations upon the margins of the catalogue now in

the British Museum, we learn that Goldsmith’s _History of the Earth and

Animated Nature_ (nothing less!), which was issued, with cuts, in the

year he died, was knocked down to the vulgar for two and threepence.

The shelves, naturally, were stocked with Johnsons. Things dear to

the bibliophile were there: innumerable first editions, black-letter,

mediæval manuscript, Elzevirs, priceless English and Italian classics,

gathered with real feeling and pride; but the most vivid personal

interest belonged to the unpretending Lot 3444, otherwise known to fame

as _The Rambler_, printed at Edinburgh in 1751; for that was the young

Beauclerk’s own copy, carried with him to Oxford, and with a fragrance,

as of a last century garden, of the first hearty friendship of boys.

One cannot help wishing that a sentimental fate left it in Langton’s

own hands.

Lady Beauclerk, Topham’s mother, had died in 1766; and he asked to be

buried beside her, or at her feet, in the old chapel of Garston, near

Liverpool: “an instance of tenderness,” said Johnson, “which I should

hardly have expected.” There, in the place of his choice, he rests,

without an epitaph.

After this the Doctor consoled himself more than ever with Bennet

Langton, and with the atmosphere of love and reverence which surrounded

him in Langton’s house. He had been of old the most desired of all

guests at the family seat in Lincolnshire. “Langton, sir!” as he

liked to announce, “had a grant of warren from Henry II.; and Cardinal

Stephen Langton, of King John’s reign, was of this family.” Peregrine

Langton, Bennet’s uncle, was a man of simple and benevolent habits, who

brought economy to a science, without niggardliness, and whom Johnson

declared to be one of those he clung to at once, both by instinct and

reason; Bennet’s father, learned, good, and unaffected, the prototype

of his learned, good, and unaffected son, was, however, a more

diverting character. He had sincerest esteem for Johnson, but looked

askance on him for his liberal views, and suspected him, indeed, of

being a Papist in secret! He once offered the Doctor a living of some

value in the neighborhood, with the suggestion that he should qualify

himself for Orders: a chance gravely refused. Of this exemplary but

rather archaic squire, Johnson, a dissector of everything he loved,

said: “Sir! he is so exuberant a talker in public meetings that the

gentlemen of his county are afraid of him. No business can be done

for his declamation.” In his behalf, too, Johnson produced one of his

most astounding words; for having understood that both Mr. and Mrs.

Langton were averse to having their portraits taken, he observed aloud

that “a superstitious reluctance to sit for one’s picture is among the

anfractuosities of the human mind.”

Bennet Langton married, on the 24th of May, 1770, Mary Lloyd, daughter

of the Countess of Haddington, and widow of John, the eighth Earl of

Rothes, the stern soldier in laced waistcoat and breastplate beneath,

painted by Sir Joshua. It was a common saying at the time that

everybody was welcome to a Countess Dowager of Rothes; for it did so

happen that three ladies bearing that title were all remarried within

a few years. Lady Rothes, although a native of Suffolk, had acquired

from long residence in Scotland the accent of that country, which Dr.

Johnson bore with magnanimously, on the consideration that it was not

indigenous. She had a handsome presence, full of easy dignity, and a

naturalness marked enough in the heyday of Georgian affectation. With

a vivacity very different from Lady Di Beauclerk’s, she kept herself

the spring and centre of Langton’s tranquil domestic circle: a more

womanly woman historiographers cannot find. His own charm of character,

after his marriage, slipped more and more into the underground channels

of home-life, and so coursed on beneficently in silence. Their children

were no fewer than nine,[55] “not a plain face nor faulty person

among them:” the goddess daughters six feet in height, and the three

sons so like their Maypole father that they were able once to amuse

the Parisians by raising their arms to let a crowd pass. Langton was

wont to repeat with some glee certain jests about his height, and Dr.

Johnson’s nickname of “Lanky” he took ever with excellent grace; and

when Garrick had leaped upon a chair to shake hands with him, in old

days, he had knelt, at parting, to shake hands with Garrick. But the

King’s awkward digs at his “long legs” he found terribly distasteful,

nor was he thereby disposed to agree with the Doctor’s enthusiastic

proclamation, after the famous interview of 1767, that George III. was

“as fine a gentleman as Charles II.”

It was his cherished plan to educate his boys and girls at home, and

to give them a thorough acquaintance with the learned languages. No

social engagements were to stand in the way of this prime exigency. He

was in great haste to turn his young brood into Masters and Mistresses

of Arts. Johnson complained to Miss Burney, as they were both taking

tea at Mrs. Thrale’s, that nothing would serve Langton but to stand

them up before company, and get them to repeat a fable or the Hebrew

alphabet, supplying every other word himself, and blushing with pride

at the vicarious learning of his infants. But another of the tedious

royal jokes, “How does Education go on?” actually lessened his devotion

to his self-set task, and worried him like the water-drop in the

story, which fell forever on a criminal’s head until it had drilled

his brain. Again, both he and his wife, even after they had moved into

the retirement of Great George Street, Westminster, in pursuance of

their design, were far too agreeable and too accessible to be spared

the incursions of society. In a word, Minerva found her seat shaken,

and her altar-fires not very well tended, and therefore withdrew.

Langton impressed one axiom on his young scholars which they never

forgot: “Next best to knowing is to be sensible that you do not know.”

An entirely superfluous waif of a baby was once left at the doors of

this same many-childrened house, to be fed, clothed, and petted by Mr.

Bennet Langton and Lady Rothes, without protest. Dr. Johnson, who made

friends with all children, was especially attached to their third girl,

his god-daughter, whom he called “pretty Mrs. Jane,” and “my own little

Jenny.” The very last year of his life her “most humble servant” sent

her a loving letter, extant yet, and written purposely in a large round

hand as clear as print.

“Langton’s children are very pretty,” Johnson wrote to Boswell in

1777, “and his lady loses her Scotch.” But again, during the same

year, condescendingly: “I dined lately with poor dear Langton. I do

not think he goes on well. His table is rather coarse, and he has his

children too much about him.” Boswell takes occasion, in reproducing

this censure, to reprehend the custom of introducing the children after

dinner: a parental indulgence to which he, at least, was not addicted.

The Doctor gave him a mild nudge on the subject in remarking later:

“I left Langton in London. He has been down with the militia, and is

again quiet at home, talking to his little people, as I suppose you

do sometimes.” While Langton was in camp on Warley Common, in command

of the Lincolnshire troops, Johnson spent with him five delightful

days, admiring his tall captain’s blossoming energies, and poking

about curiously among the tents. Langton had fallen, little by little,

into a confirmed extravagance, so that the moral of Uncle Peregrine’s

sagacious living bade fair to be lost upon him. Boswell had a quarrel

with Johnson on the subject of Langton’s expenditure, during the course

of which, according to his own report, the Laird of Auchinleck suffered

a “horrible shock” by being told that the best way to drive Langton out

of his costly house would be to put him (Boswell) into it. The Doctor

was truly concerned, nevertheless, about his engaging spendthrift; up

to the very end, he would implore him to keep account-books, even if

he had to omit his Aristophanes. “He complains of the ill effects of

habit,” grumbled the great moralizer, “and he rests content upon a

confessed indolence. He told his father himself that he had ‘no turn

for economy!’ but a thief might as well plead that he had no turn for

honesty.” Such were the hard hits sacred to those Dr. Johnson most

esteemed. It transpires from his will that, by way of discouragement,

he had lent Langton £750.[56]

In the winter of 1785, Langton came from the country, and took lodgings

in Fleet Street, in order to sit beside Johnson as he lay dying, and

hold his hand. Nor was he alone in his pious offices: the Hooles, Mr.

Sestre, and several others were there, to keep constant vigil. Miss

Burney met Langton in the passage December 11th, two days before the

end: “He could not,” she wrote in her journal, “look at me, nor I at

him.” But through the foggy and restless nights when Johnson tried

to cheer himself, like More and Master William Lilly, by translating

into Latin some epigrams from the _Anthologia_, the true Grecian

beside him must have been his chief comfort. One can picture the old

eyes turning to him for sympathy, perhaps with that same murmured

“Lanky!” on awaking, which Boswell laughed to hear from him one merry

Hebridean morning, twelve years before. The last summons did not come

in Langton’s presence. Hurrying over to Bolt Court at eight of the

fatal evening, he was told that all was over three-quarters of an hour

ago. That large soul had gone away, as Leigh Hunt so beautifully said

of Coleridge, “to an infinitude hardly wider than his thoughts.” Then

Langton, who was wont to shape his words with grace and ease, went

up-stairs, and tried to pen a letter to Boswell, which is more touching

than tears: “I am now sitting in the room where his venerable remains

exhibit a spectacle, the interesting solemnity of which, difficult as

it would be in any sort to find terms to express, so to you, my dear

sir, whose sensations will paint it so strongly, it would be of all men

the most superfluous to”—and there, hopelessly choked and confused, it

broke off.

Langton bore Johnson’s pall; and he succeeded him as Professor of

Ancient Literature in the Royal Academy, as Gibbon had replaced

Goldsmith in the chair of Ancient History. He survived many years,

the delight of his company to the last. He, like others, was given

in his later years to detailing anecdotes of his great friend, with

an approximation to that friend’s manner. One lady critic, at least,

thought that these explosive imitations did not become “his own serious

and respectable character.” On December 18, 1801, in Anspach Place,

Southampton, a venerable nook “between the walls and the sea,” when

Wordsworth, Scott, and Coleridge were yet in their unheralded prime,

when Charles Lamb was twenty-six, Byron a dreaming boy on the Cotswold

hills, and Keats and Shelley little fair-eyed children, gentle Bennet

Langton, known to none of these, and somewhat forgotten as a loiterer

from the march of a glorious yesterday, slipped out of life. “I am

persuaded,” wrote one who knew him well, “that all his inactivity, all

the repugnance he showed to putting on the harness of this world’s

toil, arose from the spirituality of his frame of mind . . . I believe

his mind was in Heaven, wheresoever he corporeally existed.” He was

laid under the chancel of ancient St. Michael’s at Southampton, with

Johnson’s fond benison, “Be my soul with Langton’s!” inscribed on the

marble tablet above him.[57] The Rev. John Wooll of Midhurst, Joseph

Warton’s editor, was one of the few present at the funeral ceremony,

and he leaves us to infer that it had a rather neglectful privacy,

not, indeed, out of keeping with the “godly, righteous, and sober

life” it closed. Langton’s will, drawn up in the June of 1800, and

preserved in Somerset House, devised to the sole executrix, his “dear

wife,” who outlived him by nearly twenty years, his real and personal

estate, his books, his wines, his prints, his horses, and, as a gift

particularly pretty, his right of navigation in the river Wey. George

Langton was separately provided for, but there were some £8000 for the

eight younger children. The document is crowded with technical details,

and very long; and the manifest inference, on the whole, is that the

dear squire’s affairs were in a prodigious tangle. There is no wish

expressed concerning his burial, and, what is more curious, there

are no Christian formulas for the committal of the _animula vagula

blandula_: a lack perhaps not to be wondered at in Beauclerk’s concise

testament, but somewhat notable in the case of a person who certainly

had a soul.

So went Beauclerk first of the three, Langton last, with the good ghost

still between them, as he in his homespun, they in their flowered

velvet, had walked many a year together on this earth. The old

companionship had undergone some sorry changes ere it fell utterly to

dust and ashes. Its happy prime had been in the Oxford “Longs,” when

the Doctor humored his lads, and tented under their roofs, plucking

flowers at one house, and romping with dogs at the other; or in 1764,

at the starting of the immortal Club, when the two of its founders, who

had no valid or pretended claim to celebrity, perched on the sills like

useful genii, with a mission to overrule sluggish melancholy, and renew

the sparkle in abstracted eyes. How supereminently they did what they

chose to do, and what vagaries they roused out of Johnson’s profound

hypochondria! Did not Topham Beauclerk’s mother once have to reprove

that august author for a suggestion to seize some pleasure-grounds

which they were passing in a carriage? “Putting such things into young

people’s heads!” said she. Where could the innocent Beauclerk’s elbow

have been at that moment, contrary to the canons of polite society,

but in the innocent Langton’s ribs? The gray reprobate, so censured,

explained to Boswell: “Lady Beauclerk has no notion of a joke, sir! She

came late into life, and has a mighty unpliable understanding.” Who

can forget the Doctor’s visit to Beauclerk at Windsor, when, falling

into the clutches of that gamesome and ungodly youth, he was beguiled

from church-going of a fine Sunday morning, and strolled about outside,

talking and laughing during sermon-time, and finally spread himself at

length on a mossy tomb, only to be told, with a giggle and a pleased

rub of the hands, that he was as bad as Hogarth’s Idle Apprentice?

Or the other visit in the north, when, after ceremoniously relieving

his pockets of keys, knife, pencil, and purse, Samuel Johnson, LL.D.,

deliberately rolled down a hill, and landed, betumbled out of all

recognition, at the bottom? Langton had tried to dissuade him, for the

incline was very steep, and the candidate scarcely of the requisite

suppleness. “Oh, but I haven’t had a roll for such a long time!”

pleaded his unanswerable big guest.

Best of all, we have the history of that memorable morning when

Beauclerk and Langton, having supped together at a city tavern, roused

Johnson at three o’clock at his Inner Temple Lane Chambers, and brought

him to the door, fearful but aggressive, in his shirt and his little

dark wig, and his slippers down at the heels, armed with a poker.

“What! and is it YOU? Faith, I’ll have a frisk with you, ye young

dogs!” We have visions of the Covent Garden inn, and the great brimming

bowl, with Lord Lansdowne’s drinking-song for grace; the hucksters and

fruiterers staring at the strange central figure, always sure to gather

a mob, even during the moment he would stand by a lady’s coach-door

in Fleet Street; the merry boat going its way by oar to Billingsgate,

its mad crew bantering the watermen on the river; and two of the

roisterers (equally wild, despite a little chronological disparity

of thirty years or so) scolding the other for hastening off, on an

afternoon appointment, “to dine with wretched unidea’d girls!” What

golden vagabondism! “I heard of your frolic t’other night; you’ll be in

_The Chronicle_! . . . I shall have my old friend to bail out of the

round-house!” said Garrick. “As for Garrick, sirs,” tittered the pious

Johnson aside to his accomplices, “he dare not do such a thing. His

wife would not let him!” All this mirth and whim sweetened the Doctor’s

heavy life. He had other intimates, other disciples. But these were Gay

Heart and Gentle Heart, who drove his own blue-devils away with their

idolatrous devotion, and whose bearing towards him stands ever as the

best possible corroboration of his great and warm nature. With him

and for him, they so fill the air of the time that to whomsoever has

but thought of them that hour, London must seem lonely without their

idyllic figures.

—“Our day is gone:

Clouds, dews, and dangers come; our deeds are done.”

There are gods as good for the after-years; but Odin is down, and his

pair of unreturning birds have flown west and east.

FOOTNOTES:

[45] A popular eighteenth-century beverage, composed of wine, orange,

and sugar.

[46] Although Langton is recorded on his college books as having given

the usual £10 for plate, and also as having paid his caution money

in 1757, his name is not down upon the matriculation lists, possibly

because he failed to appear at the moment the entries were being made.

In what must have been his destined space upon one of the pages, Dr.

Ingram made this note: “Q. Num Bennet Langton hic inserendus?”

[47] A boyish fashion of self-entertainment afterwards in great favor

with Shelley.

[48] It is a pleasant thing to remember that it was Langton, always an

appreciator of Goldsmith’s lovable genius, who suggested “Auburn” as

the name for his _Deserted Village_. There is a hamlet called Auborne

in Lincolnshire.

[49] Langton’s sisters are generally spoken of as three in number. But

Burke’s _History of the Landed Gentry_ mentions but two, Diana and

Juliet. There was a younger brother, Ferne, who died in boyhood, and

the floral name, not unlike a girl’s, may have been responsible for the

confusion.

[50] The fruiterer.

[51] The bookseller’s.

[52] Rochester, in his immortal epigram, had said the same of King

Charles II.

[53] This neat descriptive stroke has been attributed also to Richard

Paget.

[54] The register of St. George’s betrays a little eager blunder of

Lady Di’s which is amusing. When the officiating curate asked her to

sign, she wrote “Diana Beauclerk,” and was obliged to cross out the

signature—one knows with what a smile and a flush!—and substitute the

“Diana Spencer” which stands beside it.

[55] Miss Hawkins says “ten,” and may have had the extra adopted child

in mind.

[56] It is a pity he did not live to read the jolly _American Ballad

of Bon Gaultier_, which seems to have a sort of muddled clairvoyant

knowledge of this transaction:

“Every day the huge Cawana Lifted up its monstrous jaws; And it

swallowed Langton Bennet,(!) And digested Rufus Dawes.

“Riled, I ween, was Philip Slingsby Their untimely deaths to hear; For

one author owed him money,(!) And the other loved him dear.”

[57] The church has since been “restored,” and the fine epitaph is now

(1890) “skyed” on the south wall of the nave.

V

WILLIAM HAZLITT

1778-1830

THE titles of William Hazlitt’s first books bear witness to the ethic

spirit in which he began life. From his beloved father, an Irish

dissenting minister, he inherited his unworldliness, his obstinacy, his

love of inexpedient truth, and his interest in the emancipation and

well-being of his fellow-creatures. Bred in an air of seriousness and

integrity, the child of twelve announced by post that he had spent “a

very agreeable day” reading one hundred and sixty pages of Priestley,

and hearing two good sermons. A year later he appeared, under a Greek

signature, in _The Shrewsbury Chronicle_, protesting against sectarian

injustice; an infant herald in the great modern movement towards fair

play. The roll of the portentous periods must have made his father

weep for pride and diversion. William’s young head was full of moral

philosophy and jurisprudence, and he had what is the top of luxury

for one of his temperament: perfect license of mental growth. Alone

with his parents (one of whom was always a student and a recluse),

and for the most part without the school-fellows who are likely to

adjust the perilous effects of books, he became choked with theories,

and thought more of the needful repeal of the Test Act than of his

breakfast. He found his way at fourteen into the Unitarian College at

Hackney, but eventually broke from his traces, saving his fatherland

from the spectacle of a unique theologian. During the year 1795 he

saw the pictures at Burleigh House, and began to live. Desultory but

deep study, at home and near home, took up the time before his first

leisurely choice of a profession. His lonely broodings, his early

love for Miss Railton, his four enthusiastic months at the Louvre,

his silent friendship with Wordsworth and with Coleridge; the country

walks, the pages and prints, the glad tears of his youth,—these were

the fantastic tutors which formed him; nor had he ever much respect for

any other kind of training. The lesson he prized most was the lesson

straight from life and nature. He comments, tartly enough, on the

sophism that observation in idleness, or the growth of bodily skill and

social address, or the search for the secret of honorable power over

people, is not in any wise to be accounted as learning. Montaigne, who

was in Hazlitt’s ancestral line, was of this mind: “_Ce qu’on sçait

droictement, on en dispose sans regarder au patron, sans tourner les

yeulx vers son livre._” Hazlitt insists, too, that learned men are

but “the cisterns, not the fountain-heads, of knowledge.” He hated

the schoolmaster, and has said as witty things of him as Mr. Oscar

Wilde. Yet his little portrait-study of the mere book-worm, in _The

Conversation of Authors_, has a never-to-be-forgotten sweetness. His

mental nurture was serviceable; it was of his own choosing; it fitted

him for the work he had to do. Like Marcus Aurelius, he congratulated

himself that he did not squander his youth “chopping logic and scouring

the heavens.” Hazlitt once entered upon an _Inquiry whether the Fine

Arts are promoted by Academies_; the answer, from him, is readily

anticipated.

“If arts and schools reply,”

he might have added,—and it is a wonder that he did not,

“Give arts and schools the lie!”

Mr. Matthew Arnold made a famous essay on the same topic, and some

readers recollect distinctly that his verdict, for England, would be

in the affirmative, whereas it was no such matter. Now, no man can

conceive of Hazlitt presenting both sides of a case so impartially as

to be misunderstood, especially upon so vital a subject. He pastured,

he was not trained; and therefore he would have you and your children’s

children scoff at universities. Indeed, though the boy’s lack of

discipline told on him all through life, his reader regrets nothing

else which a university could have given him, except, perhaps, milder

manners. Hazlitt was perfectly aware that he had too little general

knowledge; but general knowledge he did not consider so good a tool for

his self-set task in life as a persistent, passionate study of one or

two subjects. Again, he is pleased to conjecture, with bluntness, that

if he had learned more he would have thought less. (Perhaps he was the

friend cited by Elia, who gave up reading to improve his originality!

He was certainly useful to Elia in delicate and curious ways: a whole

vein of rich eccentricity ready for that sweet philosopher’s working.)

Hear him pronouncing upon himself at the very end: “I have, then, given

proof of some talent and more honesty; if there is haste and want of

method, there is no common-place, nor a line that licks the dust. If

I do not appear to more advantage, I at least appear such as I am.”

Divorce that remark and the truth of it from Hazlitt, and there is

no Hazlitt left. He stood for individualism. He wrote from what was,

in the highest degree for his purpose, a full mind, and with that

blameless conscious superiority which a full mind must needs feel in

this empty world. His whole intellectual stand is taken on the positive

and concrete side of things. He has a fine barbaric cocksureness; he

dwells not with althoughs and neverthelesses, like Mr. Symonds and Mr.

Saintsbury. “I am not one of those,” he says, concerning Edmund Kean’s

first appearance in London, “who, when they see the sun breaking from

behind a cloud, stop to inquire whether it is the moon.” And he takes

enormous interest in his own promulgation, because it is inevitably

not only what he thinks, but what he has long thought. He delivers an

opinion with the air proper to a host who is master of a vineyard, and

can furnish name and date to every flagon he unseals.

None of Hazlitt’s energies went to waste: he earned his soul early, and

how proud he was of the possession! Retrospection became his forward

horizon. He was all aglow at the thought of that beatific yesterday;

in his every mood “the years that are fled knock at the door, and

enter.” He struggled no more thereafter, having fixed his beliefs and

found his voice. He saw no occasion to change. “As to myself,” he wrote

at fifty, referring to Lamb’s well-known “surfeits of admiration”

concerning some objects once adored, “as to myself, any one knows

where to have me!” He adds: “In matters of taste and feeling, one

proof that my conclusions have not been quite shallow or hasty is the

circumstance of their having been lasting. . . . This continuity of

impression is the only thing on which I pride myself.” A fine saying in

the _Boswell Redivivus_, attributed to Opie, is as clearly expressed

elsewhere by Hazlitt’s self: that a man in his lifetime can do but

one thing; that there is but one effort and one victory, and all the

rest is as machinery in motion. “What I write costs me nothing, but it

cost me a great deal twenty years ago. I have added little to my stock

since then, and taken little from it.” His sensations, latterly, were

“July shoots,” graftings on the old sap. It is his boast in almost his

final essay that his tenacious brain holds fast while the planets are

turning. He can look at a child’s kite in heaven, to the last, with the

eyes of a child: “It pulls at my heart.”

His conservative habit, however, seemed to teach him everything by

inference. In 1821, familiar with none of the elder dramatists save

Shakespeare, he borrowed their folios, and shut himself up for six

weeks at Winterslow Hut on Salisbury Plain. He returned to town steeped

in his theme, and with the beautiful and authoritative _Lectures_

written. Appreciation of the great Elizabethans is common enough now;

seventy years ago, propagated by Lamb’s _Specimens_, 1808, it was the

business only of adventurers and pioneers. Here is a critic indeed who,

without a suspicion of audacity, can arise as a stranger to arraign

the _Arcadia_, and “shake hands with Signor Orlando Friscobaldo as the

oldest acquaintance” he has! The thing, exceptional as it was, proves

that William Hazlitt knew his resources. His devoted friend Patmore

attributes his “unpremeditated art,” terse, profound, original, and

always moving at full speed, to two facts: “first, that he never, by

choice, wrote on any topic or question in which he did not, for some

reason or other, feel a deep personal interest; and, secondly, because

on all questions on which he did so feel, he had thought, meditated,

and pondered, in the silence and solitude of his own heart, for years

and years before he ever contemplated doing more than thinking of

them.” Unlike a distinguished historian, who, according to Horace

Walpole, “never understood anything until he had written of it,”

Hazlitt brought to his every task a mind violently made up, and a

vocation for special pleading which nothing could withstand.

Sure as he is, he means to be nobody’s hired guide: a resolve for

which the general reader cannot be too grateful. In wilful and mellow

study of what chance threw in his way his strength grew, and his

limitations with it. It is small wonder that he hated schoolmasters,

and the public which expected of him schoolmaster platitudes. He had

a pride of intellect not unlike Rousseau’s, and he seems to have had

ever in mind Rousseau’s cardinal declaration that if he were no better

than other men, he was at least different from them. Hazlitt defined

his own functions with proper haughtiness, in the amusing apology of

_Capacity and Genius_. “I was once applied to, in a delicate emergency,

to write an article on a difficult subject for an encyclopædia; and was

advised to take time, and give it a systematic and scientific form;

to avail myself of all the knowledge that was to be obtained upon the

subject, and arrange it with clearness and method. I made answer that,

as to the first, I _had_ taken time to do all that I ever pretended

to do, as I had thought incessantly on different matters for twenty

years of my life; that I had no particular knowledge of the subject

in question, and no head for arrangement; that the utmost I could do,

in such a case, would be, when a systematic and scientific article

was prepared, to write marginal notes upon it, to insert a remark or

illustration of my own (not to be found in former encyclopædias!) or to

suggest a better definition than had been offered in the text.”[58]

Such independence nobly became him, and none the less because it kept

him poor. But in the course of time, he had to work, and keep on

working, under wretched disadvantages. He had spurts of revolt, after

long experience of compulsory composition; his darling wish in 1822

(confided to his wife, of all persons) being that he “could marry some

woman with a good fortune, that he might not be under the necessity of

writing another line!”

There was in him absolutely nothing of the antiquary and the

scholar, as the modern world understands those most serviceable

gentlemen. He was a “surveyor,” as he said, erroneously, of Bacon.

He was continuously drawn into the byway, and ever in search of the

accidental, the occult; he lusted, like Sir Thomas Browne, to find the

great meanings of minor things. The “pompous big-wigs” of his day, as

Thackeray called them, hated his informality, his boldly novel methods,

his vivacity and enthusiasm. He had, within proscribed bounds, an

exquisite and affectionate curiosity, like that of the Renaissance.

“The invention of a fable is to me the most enviable exertion of human

genius: it is the discovery of a truth to which there is no clew, and

which, when once found out, can never be forgotten.” “If the world were

good for nothing else, it would be a fine subject for speculation.” It

is his deliberate dictum that it were “worth a life” to sit down by an

Italian wayside, and work out the reason why the Italian supremacy in

art has always been along the line of color, not along the line of form.

He depended so entirely upon his memory that those who knew him best

say that he never took notes, neither in gallery, library, nor theatre;

yet his inaccuracies are few and slight,[59] and he must have secured

by this habit a prodigious freedom and luxury in the act of writing.

He would rather stumble than walk according to rule; and he was so

pleasantly beguiled with some of his own images (that, for instance,

of immortality the bride of the youthful spirit, and of the procession

of camels seen across the distance of three thousand years) that he

reiterates them upon every fit occasion. He cites, twice and thrice,

the same passages from the Elizabethans. He is a masterly quoter, and

lingers like a suitor upon the borders of old poesy. His infallibility,

like the Pope’s, is of narrow scope and nicely defined. When he steps

beyond his accustomed tracks, which is seldom, his vagaries are

entertaining. You may account for his declaration that Thomas Warton’s

sonnets rank as the very best in the language, by reflecting that he

dealt not in sonnets and knew nothing of them; if he prefer _Hercules

Raging_ to any other Greek tragedy, it is collateral proof that he was

no wide-travelled Grecian, nor even Euripideian; when he gives his

distinguished preference to Shakespeare’s Helena, there is small need

of adding that Mr. Hazlitt, albeit with an affectionate friendship for

Mary Lamb, with a mother, a sister, a dynasty of sweethearts, and two

wives, was notoriously unlearned in women.[60]

The events of his life count for so little that they are hardly worth

recording. He was born into a high-principled and intelligent family,

at Mitre Lane, Maidstone, Kent, on the 10th of April, in the year 1778.

His infancy was passed there and in Ireland, his boyhood in New England

and in Shropshire. Prior to a long visit to Paris, where he made some

noble copies of Titian, he came in 1802 to Bloomsbury, where his

elder brother John, an advanced Liberal in politics and an excellent

miniature-painter, had a studio; and here he worked at art for several

joyous years, finally abandoning it for literature. The portraits he

painted, utterly lacking in grace, are fraught with power and meaning;

few of these are extant, thanks to the fading and cracking pigments

of the modern schools. The old Manchester woman in shadow, done in

1803, and the head of his father, dating from a twelvemonth later (two

things to which Hazlitt makes memorable reference in his essays),

are no longer distinguishable, save to a very patient eye, upon the

blackened canvases in his grandson’s possession. The picture of the

child Hartley Coleridge, begun at the Lakes in 1802, has perished

from the damp; that of Charles Lamb in the Venetian doublet survives

since 1804, in its serious and primitive browns,[61] as the best-known

example of an English artist not in the catalogues. Its historic value,

however, is not superior to that of two portraits of Hazlitt himself:

one a study in strong light and shade, with a wreath upon the head,

now very much time-eaten; and another representing him at about the

age of twenty-five, with a three-quarters front face looking over the

right shoulder, which appeals to the spectator like spoken truth. It

is all but void of the beauty characterizing the striking Bewick head

(especially as retouched and reproduced in Mr. Alexander Ireland’s

valuable book of 1889, which is a sort of Hazlitt anthology), and

characterizing, no less, John Hazlitt’s charming miniatures of William

at five and at thirteen; therefore it can deal in no self-flattery.

Fortunately, we have from the hand which knew him best the lank, odd,

reserved youth in whom great possibilities were brewing; thought and

will predominate in this portrait, and it expresses the sincere soul.

It would be idle to criticise the technique of a work disowned by its

author. Hazlitt had, as we know from much testimony, a most interesting

and perplexing face, with the magnificent brow almost belied by

shifting eyes, and the petulance and distrust of the mouth and chin;

but a face prepossessing on the whole from the clear marble of his

complexion,[62] remarkable in a land of ruddy cheeks. His lonely and

peculiar life lent him its own hue; the eager look of one indeed a

sufferer, but with the light full upon him of visions and of dreams:

“_Chi pallido si fece sotto l’ombra

Sì di Parnaso, o bevve in sua cisterna?_”

In 1798 Hazlitt had his immortal meeting at Wem with Samuel Taylor

Coleridge. He described himself at this period as “dumb, inarticulate,

helpless, like a worm by the wayside,” striving in vain to put on paper

the thoughts which oppressed him, shedding tears of vexation at his

inability, and feeling happy if in eight years he could write as many

pages. The abiding influence of his First Poet he has acknowledged

in an imperishable chapter. For a long while he still kept in “the

o’erdarkened ways” of Malthus and Tucker, or in the shadow, dear to

him, of Hobbes; but in 1817 the floodgates broke, the pure current

gushed out; and in the _Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays_ we have the

primal pledge of Hazlitt as we know him, “such as had never been before

him, such as will never be again.” From a “dumbness” and diffidence

extreme, he developed into the readiest of writers; his sudden pages,

year after year, transcribed in his slant large hand, went to the

printers rapidly and at first draft. The longer he used his dedicated

pen, the freer, the brighter, the serener it grew. In the fourteen or

fifteen of his books which deal with genius and the conduct of life,

there is, throughout, an indescribable unaffected zest, a self-same

and unwavering certitude of handling. Once he learned his trade, he

gave himself a large field and an easy rein. He never warmed towards

a subject chosen for him. His conversation was non-professional. He

considered a discussion as to the likelihood of the weather’s holding

up for to-morrow as “the end and privilege of a life of study.”

In London, as soon as he had abandoned painting, he became a

parliamentary reporter, and began to lecture on the English

philosophers and metaphysicians. He furnished his famous dramatic

criticisms to _The Morning Chronicle_, _The Champion_, _The Examiner_,

and _The Times_, and he acted later as home editor of _The Liberal_.

He married, on May-day of 1808, Miss Sarah Stoddart, who owned the

property near Salisbury where he afterwards spent melancholy years

alone. He fulfilled one human duty perfectly, for he loved and reared

his son. A most singular infatuation for the unlovely daughter of his

landlady; a second inauspicious marriage in 1824 with a Mrs. Isabella

Bridgwater; a prolonged journey on the Continent; the failure of

the publishers of his _Life of Napoleon_, which thus in his needful

days brought him no competence; a long illness heroically borne, and

a burial in the parish churchyard of St. Anne’s, under a headstone

raised, in a romantic remorse after an estrangement, by Charles Wells,

the author of _Joseph and his Brethren_,—these round out the meagre

details of Hazlitt’s life. He died in the arms of his son and of his

old friend Charles Lamb,[63] on the 18th of September, 1830, at 6 Frith

Street, Soho.

His domestic experiences, indeed, had been nearly as extraordinary as

Shelley’s. Sarah Walker, of No. 9 Southampton Buildings, is a sort of

burlesque counterpart of that other “spouse, sister, angel,” Emilia

Viviani. Nothing in literary history is much funnier than Mr. Hazlitt’s

kind assistance to Mrs. Hazlitt in securing her divorce, going to visit

her at Edinburgh, and supplying funds and advice over the teacups,

while the process was pending, unless it be Shelley’s ingenuous

invitation to his deserted young wife to come and dwell forever with

himself and Mary! The silent dramatic withdrawal of the second Mrs.

Hazlitt, the well-to-do relict of a colonel, who is henceforth

swallowed up in complete oblivion, is a feature whose like is missing

in Shelley’s romance. Events in Hazlitt’s path were not many, and his

inner calamities seem somehow subordinated to exterior workings. It is

not too much to say that to the French Revolution and the white heat of

hope it diffused over Europe he owed the renewal of the very impetus

within him: his moral probity, his mental vigor, and his physical

cheer. His measure of men and things was fixed by its standard. Other

enthusiasts wavered and went back to the flesh-pots of Egypt, but not

he. _Et cuncta terrarum subacta præter atrocem animum Catonis._ Towards

the grandest inconsistency this world has seen, he bore himself with a

consistency nothing less than touching. Everywhere, always, as a friend

who understood him well reminds a later generation, “Hazlitt was the

only man of letters in England who dared openly to stand by the French

Revolution, through good and evil report, and who had the magnanimity

never to turn his back upon its child and champion.” The ruin of

Napoleon, and the final news that “the hunter of greatness and of glory

was himself a shade,” meant more to him than the relinquishment of

his early and cherished art, or the fading of the long dream that his

heart “should find a heart to speak to.” On his last autumn afternoon,

he said what no one else would have dared to say for him: “I have had

a happy life.” Such it was, if we are to compute happiness by souls,

and not by the incidents which befall them. What were the things

which atoned to this reformer for the curse of a mind too sentient,

a heart never far from breaking? Over and above all amended and

amending abuses, the memory of the Rembrandts on the walls of Burleigh

House; the waving crest of the Tuderley woods; the sky, the turf, “a

winding road, and a three-hours’ march to dinner”; the impersonator of

Richard III. most to his mind, who lighted the stage, “and fought as

if drunk with wounds”; and the figure (how pastoral and tender!) of

the shepherd-boy bringing a nest for his young mistress’s sky-lark,

“not doomed to dip his wings in the dappled dawn.” What heresy to

the ancients would be this creed of poetic compensation! Montesquieu

adhered to it; but hardly from baffled and impassioned Hazlitt, dying

in his prime, would the avowal have been expected. Yet he had written

almost always, as Jeffrey saw, in “a happy intoxication.” Like the

sundial, in one of the most charming among his miscellaneous essays, he

kept count only of the hours of joy.

Hazlitt’s erratic levees among coffee-house wits and politicians, his

slack dress, his rich and fitful talk, his beautiful fierce head, go to

make up any accurate impression of the man. Mr. P. G. Patmore has drawn

him for us; a strange portrait from a steady hand: in certain moods

“an effigy of silence,” pale, anxious, emaciated, with an awful look

ever and anon, like the thunder-cloud in a clear heaven, sweeping over

his features with still fury.[64] He was so much at the mercy of an

excitable and extra-sensitive organization that an accidental failure

to return his salute upon the street, or, above all, the gaze of a

servant as he entered a house, plunged him into an excess of wrath and

misery. Full, at other times, of scrupulous good faith and generosity,

he would, under the stress of a fancied hurt, say and write malicious

things about those he most honored. He must have been a general thorn

in the flesh, for he had no tact whatever. “I love Henry,” said one

of Thoreau’s friends, “but I cannot like him.” Shy, splenetic, with

Dryden’s “down look,” readier to give than to exchange, Hazlitt was

a riddle to strangers’ eyes. His deep voice seemed at variance with

his gliding step and his glance, bright but sullen; his hand felt

as if it were the limp, cold fin of a fish, and was an unlooked-for

accompaniment to the fiery soul warring everywhere with darkness, and

drenched in altruism. His habit of excessive tea-drinking, like Dr.

Johnson’s, was to keep down sad thoughts. For sixteen years before he

died, from the day on which he formed his resolution, Hazlitt never

touched spirits of any kind. Profuse of money when he had it, he lacked

heart, says Mr. Patmore, to live well. Wherever he dwelt there was

what Carlyle, in Hunt’s case, called “tinkerdom”; his marriage, and

his residence under the august roof which had been Milton’s,[65] did

not mend matters for him. He covered the walls and mantel-pieces of

London landladies, after the fashion of the French bohemian painters,

with samples of his noblest style; and the savor of yesterday’s potions

of strong tea exhaled into their curtains. Never was there, despite

his confessional attitude, so non-communicative a soul. He never

corresponded with anybody; he never would walk arm in arm with anybody;

he never, perhaps from horror of the “patron” bogie, dedicated a book

to anybody. De Quincey knew a man warmly disposed towards Hazlitt

who learned to shudder and dread daggers when poor Hazlitt, with a

gesture habitual to him, thrust his right hand between the buttons

of his waistcoat! And he once cheerfully requested of a cheerful

colleague: “Write a character of me for the next number. I want to

know why everybody has such a dislike to me.” As a social factor he

was something atrocious.[66] The most humane of men, his suspicions

and shyings cut him off completely from humanity. The base war waged

upon him by the great Tory magazines could not have affected him so

deeply that it changed his demeanor towards his fellows; for he had the

mettle of a paladin, which no invective could break. But, alas! he had

“the canker at the heart,” which is no fosterer of “the rose upon the

cheek.”

With all this fever and heaviness in Hazlitt’s blood, he had a hearty

laugh, musical to hear. Haydon, in his exaggerated manner, reports an

uncharitable conversation held with him once on the subject of Leigh

Hunt in Italy, during which the two misconstruing critics, in their

great glee, “made more noise than all the coaches, wagons, and carts

outside in Piccadilly.” His smile was singularly grave and sweet.

Mrs. Shelley wrote, on coming back to England, in her widowhood, and

finding him much changed: “His smile brought tears to my eyes; it

was like melancholy sunlight on a ruin.” A man who sincerely laughs

and smiles is somewhat less than half a cynic. If there be any alive

at this late hour who questions the genuineness of Hazlitt’s high

spirits, he may be referred to the essay _On Going a Journey_, with

the pæan about “the gentleman in the parlor,” in the finest emulation

of Cowley; but chiefly and constantly to _The Fight_, with its

lingering De-Foe-like details, sprinkled, not in the least ironically,

with gold-dust of Chaucer and the later poets: the rich-ringing,

unique _Fight_,[67] predecessor of Borrow’s famous burst about the

“all tremendous bruisers” of _Lavengro_; and not to be matched in our

peaceful literature save with the eulogy and epitaph of Jack Cavanagh,

by the same hand. Divers hints have been circulated, within sixty-odd

years, that Mr. Hazlitt was a timid person, also that he had no turn

for jokes. These ingenious calumnies may be trusted to meet the fate of

the Irish pagan fairies, small enough at the start, whose punishment

it is to dwindle ever and ever away, and point a moral to succeeding

generations. Hazlitt’s paradoxes are not of malice prepense, but are

the ebullitions both of pure fun and of the truest philosophy. “The

only way to be reconciled with old friends is to part with them for

good.” “Goldsmith had the satisfaction of good-naturedly relieving

the necessities of others, and of being harassed to death with his

own.” “Captain Burney had you at an advantage by never understanding

you.” Scattered mention of “people who live on their own estates and

on other people’s ideas”; of Jeremy Bentham, who had been translated

into French, “when it was the greatest pity in the world that he

had not been translated into English”; of the Coleridge of prose,

one of whose prefaces is “a masterpiece of its kind, having neither

beginning, middle, nor end”; and even of the “singular animal,”

John Bull himself, since “being the beast he is has made a man of

him”:—these are no ill shots at the sarcastic. Congreve, with all his

quicksilver wit, could not outgo Hazlitt on Thieves, _videlicet_: “Even

a highwayman, in the way of trade, may blow out your brains; but if he

uses foul language at the same time, I should say he was no gentleman!”

Hazlitt’s sense of humor has quality, if not quantity. How was it this

same sense of humor, this fine-grained reticence, which wrote, nay,

printed, in 1823, the piteous and ludicrous canticle of the goddess

Sarah?

Hazlitt was a great pedestrian from his boyhood on, and, like

Goldsmith, a fair hand at the game of fives, which he played by the

day. Wherever he was, his pocket bulged with a book. It gave him keen

pleasure to set down the hour, the place, the mood, and the weather

of various ecstatic first readings. He became acquainted with _Love

for Love_ in a low wainscoted tavern parlor between Farnham and Alton,

looking out upon a garden of larkspur, with a portrait of Charles

II. crowning the chimney-piece; in his father’s house he fell across

_Tom Jones_, “a child’s Tom Jones, an innocent creature”; he bought

Milton and Burke at Shrewsbury, on the march; he looked up from Mrs.

Inchbald’s _Simple Story_, when its pathos grew too poignant, to

find “a summer shower dropping manna” on his head, and “an old crazy

hand-organ playing _Robin Adair_.” And on April 10, 1798, his twentieth

birthday, he sat down to a volume of the _New Eloïse_, a book which

kept its hold upon him, “at the inn of Llangollen, over a bottle of

sherry and a cold chicken!” The frank epicurean catalogue, as of equal

spiritual and corporeal delight, is worth notice. Do we not know that

Mr. Hazlitt had wood-partridges for supper, in his middle age, at

the Golden Cross, in Rastadt, near Mayence? Yet he failed to record

what book lay by his plate, and distracted his attention from her

who had been a widow, and who was already planning her respectable

exit from his society. Evidence that he was an eater of taste is to

be accumulated eagerly by his partisans, for eating is one of many

engaging human characteristics which establish him as lovable—that is,

posthumously lovable. Barry Cornwall was so jealously tender of his

memory that he would have forbidden any one to write of Hazlitt who

had not known him. As he did not warm miscellaneously to everybody,

it followed that his friends were few. We do not forget which one

of these, during their only difference, thought “to go to his grave

without finding, or expecting to find, such another companion.”[68]

Hazlitt would have set himself down, by choice, as a metaphysician.

Up to the time when his _Life of Napoleon_ was well in hand, he used

to affirm that the anonymous _Principles of Human Action_, which he

completed at twenty, in the literary style of the azoic age, was his

best work. He was rather proud, too, of the _Characteristics in the

Manner of Rochefoucauld’s Maxims_, his one dreary book, which contains

a couple of inductions worthy of Pascal, some sophistries and hollow

cynicisms not native to Hazlitt’s brain, and a vast number of the very

professorisms which he scouted. Maxims, indeed, are sown broadcast

over his pages, which Alison the historian classified as better to

quote than to read; but they gain by being incidental, and embedded in

the body of his fancies. His vein of original thought comes nowhere

so perfectly into play as in its application to affairs. His pen is

anything but abstruse,

“Housed in a dream, at distance from the kind.”

He did not recognize that to display his highest power he needed deeds

and men, and their tangible outcome to be criticised. His preferences

were altogether wed to the past. In his essay on _Envy_ he excuses,

with a wise reflection, his comparative indifference to living writers:

“We try to stifle the sense we have of their merit, not because they

are new or modern, but because we are not sure they will ever be old.”

Or, as Professor Wilson said of him, with tardy but winning kindness:

“In short, if you want Hazlitt’s praise, you must die for it . . .

and it is almost worth dying for.”[69] Yet what an eye he has for the

idiosyncrasy at his elbow, be it in the individual or in the race!

Every contemporary of his, every painter, author, actor, and statesman

of whom he cared to write at all, stands forth under his touch in

delicate and aggressive outlines from which a wind seems to blow

back the mortal draperies, like a figure in a triumphal procession

of Mantegna’s. His manner is essentially pictorial. His sketches of

Cobbett and of Northcote, in _The Spirit of Obligations_; of Johnson,

in _The Periodical Essayists_; of Sir Thomas Browne and Bishop Taylor;

and of Coleridge and Lamb, drawn more than once, with great power,

from the life, will never be excelled. His philippic on _The Spirit

of Monarchy_, or that on _The Regal Character_, is a pure vitriol

flame, to scorch the necks of princes. His comments upon English

and Continental types, if gathered from the necessarily promiscuous

_Notes of a Journey_, would make a most diverting and illuminating

duodecimo; the indictment of the French is especially masterly. _The

Spirit of the Age_, _The Plain Speaker_, the Northcote book, _The

English Comic Writers_, and the noble and little-read _Political

Essays_ are packed with vital personalities. So is _The Characters

of Shakespeare’s Plays_, full of beautiful metaphysical analysis, as

well as of vivifying criticism. This lavish accumulation of material,

never put to use according to modern methods, must appear to some as a

collection of interest awaiting the broom and the hanging committee;

but until the end of time it will be a place of delight for the scholar

and the lover of virtue. Hazlitt’s genius for assortment and sense of

relative values were not developed; he was in no wise a constructive

critic. Mr. R. H. Hutton complained once of Mr. Matthew Arnold that he

ranked his men, but did not portray them. Now Hazlitt, whose search is

all for character, irrespective of the historic position, falls into

the opposite extreme: he portrays his men, but does not rank them. An

attempt to break up into single file the merit which, with him, marches

abreast, he would look upon as a bit of arrogance and rank impiety.

He has nothing to say of the quality which stamps Bavius as the best

elegiac poet between Gray and Tennyson, or of the irony of Mævius,

which would place his dramas, were it not for their loose construction,

next to Molière’s. He does not care a fig for comparisons; or, rather,

he wishes them left to the gods, and to his perceiving reader.

Meanwhile, one face after another shines clear upon the wall, and

breathes enchantment on a passer-by.

It is very difficult to be severe with William Hazlitt, who was

towards himself so outspokenly severe. Every stricture upon him, as

well as every defence to be urged for it, may be taken out of his own

mouth. Even the _Liber Amoris_, as must always have been discerned,

demonstrates not only his weakness, but his essential uprightness

and innocence. His vindication is written large in _Depth and

Superficiality_, in _The Pleasures of Hating_, in _The Disadvantage of

Intellectual Superiority_. His “true Hamlet” is as faithful a sketch

of the author as is Newman’s celebrated definition of a gentleman.

Hazlitt says a tender word for Dr. Johnson’s prejudices which covers

and explains many of his own. Who can call him irritable, recalling

the splendid exposition of merely selfish content, in the opening

paragraphs of the essay on _Good Nature_? Yet, with all his lofty and

endearing qualities, he had a warped and soured mind, a constitutional

disability to find pleasure in persons or in conditions which were

quiescent. He would have every one as mettlesome and gloomily

vigilant as he was himself. His perfectly proper apostrophe to the

lazy Coleridge at Highgate to “start up in his promised likeness,

and shake the pillared rottenness of the world,” is somewhat comic.

Hazlitt’s nerves never lost their tension; to the last hour of his

last sickness he was ready for a bout. Much of his personal grief

arose from his refusal to respect facts as facts, or to recognize in

existing evil, including the calamitous perfumed figure of Turveydrop

gloriously reigning, what Vernon Lee calls “part of the mechanism

for producing good.” He bit at the quietist in a hundred ways, and

with choice venom. “There are persons who are never very far from the

truth, because the slowness of their faculties will not suffer them to

make much progress in error. These are ‘persons of great judgment.’

The scales of the mind are pretty sure to remain even when there is

nothing in them.” He was a natural snarler at sunshiny people with full

pockets and feudal ideas, like Sir Walter, who got along with the ogre

What Is, and even asked him to dine. In fact, William Hazlitt hated

a great many things with the utmost enthusiasm, and he was impolite

enough to say so, in and out of season. The Established Church and all

its tenets and traditions were only less monstrous in his eyes than

legendry, mediævalism, and “the shoal of friars.” He knew, from actual

experience, the loyalty and purity of the early Unitarians, and he

praised these with all his heart and tongue. As far as one can make

out, he had not the remotest conception of the breadth and texture

of Christianity as a whole. His theory, for he practised no creed

except the cheap one of universal dissent, was a faint-colored local

Puritanism; and that, as the Merry Monarch (an excellent judge of what

was not what!) reminds us, is “no religion for a gentleman.” But more

than this, Hazlitt had no apprehension of the supernatural in anything;

he was very unspiritual. It is curious to see how he sidles away from

the finer English creatures whom he had to handle. Sidney almost repels

him, and he dismisses Shelley, on one occasion, with an inadequate but

apt allusion to the “hectic flutter” of his verse. Living in a level

country with no outlook upon eternity, and no deep insight into the

human past, nor fully understanding those who had wider vision and more

instructed utterance than his own, it follows that beside such men as

those just named, then as now, Hazlitt has a crude villageous mien. He

had his refined sophistications; chief among them was a surpassing love

of natural beauty. But he relished, on the whole, the beef and beer of

life. The normal was what he wrote of with “gusto”; a word he never

tired of using, and which one must use in speaking of himself. While he

is an admirable arbiter of what is or is not truly intellectual, he is

all at sea when he has to discuss, for instance, emotional poetry, or,

what is yet more difficult to him, poetry purely poetic; its inevitable

touch of the fantastic, the mystical, puts his wits completely to rout.

The stern, lopsided, and magnificent article on Shelley’s _Posthumous

Poems_ in the _Edinburgh Review_ for July, 1824, and his impatience

with Coleridge at his best, perfectly exemplify this limitation.

Despite his partiality for Rousseau and certain of the early Italian

painters, most of the men whose genius he seizes upon and exalts with

unerring success are the men who display, along with enormous acumen

and power, nothing which betokens the morbid and exquisite thing we

have learned to call modern culture. Hazlitt, fortunately for us,

was not over-civilized, had no cinque-cento instincts, and would

have groaned aloud over such hedonism as Mr. Pater’s. Homespun and

manly as he is, who can help feeling that his was but an imperfect

development? that, as Mr. Arnold said so paternally of Byron, “he

did not know enough”? He lacked both mental discipline and moral

governance. He has the wayward and appealing Celtic utterance; the

manner made of largeness and simpleness, all shot and interwoven with

the hues of romanticism. Prodigal that he is, he cannot stoop to build

up his golden piecemeal, or to clinch his generalizations, thrown down

loosely, side by side. Esoteric thrift is not in him, nor the spirit of

co-operation, nor the sweetest of artistic anxieties, that of marching

in line. He has a knight-errant pen; his glad and chivalrous services

to literature resemble those of an outlaw to the commonwealth. Despite

his personal value, he stands detached; he is episodic, and represents

nothing.

“The earth hath bubbles as the water hath,

And this is of them.”

He misses the white station of a classic; for the classics have

equipoise, and inter-relationship. But it is great cause for

thankfulness that William Hazlitt cannot be made other than he is. Time

can not take away his height and his red-gold garments, bestow on him

the “smoother head of hair” which Lamb prayed for, and shrivel him into

one of several very wise and weary _précieux_. No: he stalks apart in

state, the splendid Pasha of English letters.

Hazlitt boasts, and permissibly, of genuine disinterestedness: “If you

wish to see me perfectly calm,” he remarks somewhere, “cheat me in a

bargain, or tread on my toes.”[70] But he cannot promise the same

behavior for a sophism repeated in his presence, or a truth repelled.

In his sixth year he had been taken, with his brother and sister, to

America, and he says that he never afterwards got out of his mouth the

delicious tang of a frost-bitten New England barberry. It is tolerably

sure that the blowy and sunny atmosphere of the young republic of

1783-7 got into him also. Liberalism was his birthright. He flourishes

his fighting colors; he trembles with eagerness to break a lance with

the arch-enemies; he is a champion, from his cradle, against class

privilege, of slaves who know not what they are, nor how to wish for

liberty. But he cannot do all this in the laughing Horatian way; he

cannot keep cool; he cannot mind his object. If he could, he would be

the white devil of debate. There are times when he speaks, as does

Dr. Johnson, out of all reason, because aware of the obstinacy and the

bad faith of his hearers. Morals are too much in his mind, and, after

their wont, they spoil his manners. Like the Caroline Platonist, Henry

More, he “has to cut his way through a crowd of thoughts as through a

wood.” His temper breaks like a rocket, in little lurid smoking stars,

over every ninth page; he lays about him at random; he raises a dust of

side-issues. Hazlitt sometimes reminds one of Burke himself gone off

at half-cock. He will not step circumspectly from light to light, from

security to security. Some of his very best essays, as has been noted,

have either no particular subject, or fail to follow the one they have.

Nor is he any the less attractive if he be heated, if he be swearing

“By the blood so basely shed

Of the pride of Norfolk’s line,”

or scornfully settling accounts of his own with the asinine public.

When he is not driven about by his moods, Hazlitt is set upon his fact

alone; which he thinks is the sole concern of a prose-writer. Grace and

force are collateral affairs. “In seeking for truth,” he says proudly,

in words fit to be the epitome of his career, “I sometimes found

beauty.”

_The Edinburgh Review_, in an article written while Hazlitt was in the

full of his activity, summed up his shortcomings. “There are no great

leading principles of taste to give singleness to his aims, nor any

central points in his mind around which his feelings may revolve and

his imaginations cluster. There is no sufficient distinction between

his intellectual and his imaginative faculties. He confounds the truths

of imagination with those of fact, the processes of argument with

those of feeling, the immunities of intellect with those of virtue.”

Here is an admirable arraignment, which goes to the heart of the

matter. Hazlitt himself corroborates it in a confession of gallant

directness: “I say what I think; I think what I feel.” It is this fatal

confusion which makes his course now rapid and clear, anon clogged with

vagaries, as if his rudder had run into a mesh of sea-weed; it is

this which deflects his judgments, and leads him, in the shrewd phrase

of a modern critic, to praise the right things for the wrong reasons.

Hazlitt’s prejudices are very instructive, even while he bewails

Landor’s or Cobbett’s, and tells you, as it were, with a tear in his

eye, when he has done berating the French, that, after all, they are

Catholics; and as for manners, “Catholics must be allowed to carry it,

all over the world!” His exquisite treatment of Northcote, a winning

old sharper for whom he cared nothing, is all due to his looking like

a Titian portrait. So with the great Duke: Hazlitt hated the sight

of him, “as much for his pasteboard visor of a face as for anything

else.” One of his justifications for adoring Napoleon was, that at a

levee a young English officer named Lovelace drew from him an endearing

recognition: “I perceive, sir, that you bear the name of the hero of

Richardson’s romance.” If you look like a Titian portrait, if you read

and remember Richardson, you may trust a certain author, who knows a

distinction when he sees it, to set you up for the idol of posterity.

Hazlitt thought Mr. Wordsworth’s long and immobile countenance

resembled that of a horse; and it is not impossible that this

conviction, twin-born with that other that Mr. Wordsworth was a mighty

poet, is responsible for various gibes at the august contemporary whose

memory owes so much to his pen in other moods.

He is the most ingenuous and agreeable egoist we have had since the

seventeenth-century men. It must be remembered how little he was in

touch outwardly with social and civic affairs; how he was content to

be the always young looker-on. There was nothing for him to do but

fall back, under given conditions, upon his own capacious entity. The

automaton called William Hazlitt is to him a toy made to his hand,

to be reached without effort; the digest of all his study and the

applicable test of all his assumptions. He knew himself; he could, and

did, with decorum, approve or chastise himself in open court. “His

life was of humanity the sphere.” His “I” has a strong constituency

in the other twenty-five initials. In this sense, and in our current

cant, Hazlitt is nothing if not subjective, super-personal. His sort of

sentimentalism is an anomaly in Northern literature, even in the age

when nearly every literary Englishman of note was variously engaged

in baring his breast. Whether he would carp or sigh, he will still

hold you by the button, as he held host and guest, master and valet,

to pour into their adjacent ears the mad extravagances of the _Liber

Amoris_. He gets a little tired at his desk, after battling for hours

with the slow and stupid in behalf of the beauty ever-living; he wants

fresh air and a reverie; he must digress or die. And from abstractions

bardic as Carlyle’s, he runs gladly to his own approved self. This very

circumstance, which lends Hazlitt’s pages their curious blur and stain,

is the same which stamps his individuality, and gives those who are

drawn towards him at all an unspeakably hearty relish for his company.

What shall we call it?—the habit, not maudlin in him, of speaking out,

of draining his well of emotion for the benefit of the elect; nay, even

of delicate lyric whimperings, beside which

“Poore Petrarch’s long-deceasèd woes”

take on a tinsel glamour. As the dancing-girl carries her jewels,

every one in sight as she moves, so our “Faustus, that was wont to

make the schools ring with _Sic probo_,” steps into the forum jingling

and twinkling with personalia. He is quite aware of the figure he

may cut: he does not stumble into an intimacy with you because he is

absent-minded, or because he is liable to an attack of affectation. He

is as conscious as Poussin’s giants, whom he once described as “seated

on the tops of craggy mountains, playing idly on their Pan’s pipes, and

knowing the beginning and the end of their own story.” Many sentences

of his, from their structure, might be attributed to Coleridge, the

single person from whom Hazlitt admits to have learned anything;[71]

but there is no mistaking his _note émue_: that is as obvious as the

syncopations in a Scotch tune, or the long eyes of Orcagna’s saints.

He wishes you to know, at every breathing-space, “how ill’s all here

about my heart; but ’tis no matter.” Laying by or taking up an old

print or folio, he loosens some fond confidence to that surprised

novice, the common reader. Like Shelley here, as in a few other

affectionate absurdities, the prince of prose, turning from his proper

affairs, assures you that he, too, is human, hoping, unhappy; he also

has lived in Arcadia. It is in such irrelevancies that he is fully

himself, Hazlitt freed, Hazlitt autobiographic, “his chariot-wheels

hot by driving fast.”[72] Who can forget the parentheses in his advices

to his little son, about the scholar having neither mate nor fellow,

and the god of love clapping his wings upon the river-bank to mock him

as he passes by? Or the noble and moving passage in _The Pleasures of

Painting_, beginning with “My father was willing to sit as long as I

pleased,” and ending with the longing for the revolution of the great

Platonic year, that those times might come over again! He freshens with

his own childhood the garden of larkspur and mignonette at Walworth,

and “the rich notes of the thrush that startle the ear of winter . . .

dear in themselves, and dearer for the sake of what is departed.” You

care not so much for the placid stream by Peterborough as for his own

wistful pilgrimage to the nigh farmhouse gate, where the ten-year-old

Grace Loftus (his much-beloved mother, who survived him) used to gaze

upon the setting sun. And in a choric outburst of praise for Mrs.

Siddons, the splendor seems to culminate less in “her majestic form

rising up against misfortune, an antagonist power to it” (what a truly

Shakespearean breadth is in that description!); less in the sight of

her name on the play-bill, “drawing after it a long trail of Eastern

glory, a joy and felicity unutterable,” than in the widening dream of

the happy lad in the pit, in his sovereign vision “of waning time, of

Persian thrones and them that sat on them”; in the human life which

appeared to him, of a sudden, “far from indifferent,” and in his

“overwhelming and drowning flood of tears.” He can beautify the evening

star itself, this innovator, who records that after a tranced and

busy day at the easel, the day of Austerlitz, he watched it set over

a poor man’s cottage with other thoughts and feelings than he shall

ever have again. There is nothing of _le moi haïssable_ in all this. It

is deliberate naturalism; the rebellion against didactics and “tall

talk,” the milestone of a return, parallel with that of Wordsworth,

to the fearless contemplation of plain and near things. But in a

professing logician, is it not somewhat peculiar? When has even a poet

so centred the universe in his own heart, without offence?

Hazlitt threw away his brush, as a heroic measure, because he foresaw

but a middling success. Many canvases he cut into shreds, in a fury

of dissatisfaction with himself. Northcote, however, thought his lack

of patience had spoiled a great painter. He was too full of worship

of the masters to make an attentive artisan. The sacrifice, like all

his sacrifices, great or small, left nothing behind but sweetness,

the unclouded love of excellence, and the capacity of rejoicing at

another’s attaining whatever he had missed. But the sense of disparity

between supreme intellectual achievement and that which is only

partial and relative, albeit of equal purity, followed him like a

frenzy. Comparison is yet more difficult in literature than in art,

and Hazlitt could take some satisfaction in the results of his second

ardor. He felt his power most, perhaps, as a critic of the theatre.

English actors owe him an incalculable debt, and their best spirits

are not unmindful of it. He was reasonably assured of the duration and

increase of his fame. Has he not, in one of his headstrong digressions,

called the thoughts in his _Table-Talk_ “founded as rock, free as

air, the tone like an Italian picture?” Even there, however, the

faint-heartedness natural to every true artist troubled him. He went

home in despair from the spectacle of the Indian juggler, “in his

white dress and tightened turban,” tossing the four brass balls. “To

make them revolve round him at certain intervals, like the planets in

their spheres, to make them chase one another like sparkles of fire, or

shoot up like flowers or meteors, to throw them behind his back, and

twine them round his neck like ribbons or like serpents; to do what

appears an impossibility, and to do it with all the ease, the grace,

the carelessness imaginable; to laugh at, to play with the glittering

mockeries, to follow them with his eye as if he could fascinate them

with its lambent fire, or as if he had only to see that they kept time

to the music on the stage—there is something in all this which he who

does not admire may be quite sure he never really admired anything in

the whole course of his life. It is skill surmounting difficulty, and

beauty triumphing over skill. . . . It makes me ashamed of myself. I

ask what there is that I can do as well as this? Nothing.” A third

person must give another answer. The whole passage offers a very

exquisite parallel; for in just such a daring, varied, and magical

way can William Hazlitt write. The astounding result, “which costs

nothing,” is founded, in each case, upon the toil of a lifetime.

Hazlitt’s style is an incredible thing. It is not, like Lamb’s, of one

warp and woof. It soars to the rhetorical sublime, and drops to hard

Saxon slang. It is for all the world, and not only for specialists. Its

range and change incorporate the utmost of many men. The trenchant

sweep, the simplicity and point of Newman at his best, are matched

by the pages on _Cobbett_, on _Fox_, and _On the Regal Character_;

and there is, to choose but one opposite instance, in the paper _On

the Unconsciousness of Genius_, touching Correggio, a fragment of

pure eloquence of a very ornate sort, whose onward bound, glow, and

volley can give Mr. Swinburne’s _Essays and Studies_ a look as of

sails waiting for the wind. The same hand which fills a brief with

epic cadences and invocations overwrought, throws down, often without

an adjective, sentence after sentence of ringing steel: “Fashion is

gentility running away from vulgarity, and afraid of being overtaken

by it.” “It is not the omission of individual circumstance, but the

omission of general truth, which constitutes the little, the deformed,

and the short-lived in art.” The man’s large voice in these aphorisms

is Hazlitt’s unmistakably. If it be not as novel to this generation as

if he were but just entering the lists of authorship, it is because his

fecundating mind has been long enriching at second-hand the libraries

of the English world. He comes forth, like another outrider, Rossetti,

so far behind his heralds and disciples, that his mannered utterance

seems familiar, and an echo of theirs. For it may be said at last,

thanks to the numerous reprints of the last seven years, and thanks

to a few competent critics, whom Mr. Stevenson leads, that Hazlitt’s

robust work is in a fair way to be known and appraised, by a public

which is a little less unworthy of him than his own. His method is

entirely unscientific, and therefore archaic. If we can profit no

longer by him, we can get out of him cheer and delight: and these

profit unto immortality. Meanwhile, what mere “maker of beautiful

English” shall be pitted against him there where he sits, the despair

of a generation of experts, continually tossing the four brass balls?

It has been said often by shallow reviewers, and is said sometimes

still, that Hazlitt’s style aims at effect; as if an effect must not

be won, without aiming, by a “born man of letters,” as Mr. Saintsbury

described him, “who could not help turning into literature everything

he touched.”[73] The “effect,” under given conditions, is manifest,

unavoidable. Once let Hazlitt speak, as he speaks ever, in the warmth

of conviction, and what an intoxicating music begins!—wild as that of

the gypsies, and with the same magnet-touch on the sober senses: enough

to subvert all “criticism and idle distinction,” and to bring back

those Theban times when the force of a sound, rather than masons and

surveyors, sent the very walls waltzing into their places.

In the face of diction so joyously clear as his, so sumptuous and

splendid, it is well to endorse Mr. Ruskin, that “no right style

was ever founded save out of a sincere heart.” It can never be

said of William Hazlitt, as Dean Trench well said of those other

“great stylists,” Landor and De Quincey, that he had a lack of moral

earnestness. What he was determined to impress upon his reader, during

the quarter-century while he held a pen, was not that he was knowing,

not that he was worthy of the renown and fortune which passed him by,

but only that he had rectitude and a consuming passion for good. He

declares aloud that his escutcheon has no bar-sinister: he has not

sold himself; he has spoken truth in and out of season; he has honored

the excellent at his own risk and cost; he has fought for a principle

and been slain for it, from his youth up. His sole boast is proven.

In a far deeper sense than Leigh Hunt, for whom he forged the lovely

compliment, he was “the visionary in humanity, the fool of virtue,” and

the captain of those who stood fast, in a hostile day, for ignored and

eternal ideals. The best thing to be said of him, the thing for which,

in Haydon’s phrase, “everybody must love him,” is that he himself loved

justice and hated iniquity. He shared the groaning of the spirit

after mortal welfare with Swift and Fielding, with Shelley and Matthew

Arnold, with Carlyle and Ruskin; he was corroded with cares and desires

not his own. Beside this intense devotedness, what personal flaw will

ultimately show? The host who figure in the Roman martyrology hang all

their claim upon the fact of martyrdom, and, according to canon law,

need not have been saints in their lifetime at all. So with such souls

as his: in the teeth of a thousand acknowledged imperfections in life

or in art, they remain our exemplars. Let them do what they will, at

some one stroke they dignify this earth. It is not Hazlitt, “the born

man of letters” alone, but Hazlitt the born humanist, who bequeaths us,

from his England of coarse misconception and abuse, a memory like a

loadstar, and a name which is a toast to be drunk standing.

THE END

FOOTNOTES:

[58] The article on _The Fine Arts_ in the _Encyclopædia Britannica_ is

signed “W. H.”

[59] Mrs. Hazlitt the first, it would appear, undertook to verify

her husband’s quotations for him. His favorite metaphor, “Like the

tide which flows on to the Propontic, and knows no ebb,” must have

passed many times under her eye. Any reference to Othello himself, in

the great scene of Act III., would have shown four lines for William

Hazlitt’s explicit one.

[60] Some of Hazlitt’s comments on women are full of unconscious humor.

In _Great and Little Things_ he admits being snubbed by the fair, and

adds with grandiloquence: “I took a pride in my disgrace, and concluded

that I had elsewhere my inheritance!”

[61] In the National Portrait Gallery, London.

[62] _Blackwood’s_, in the charming fashion of the time, repeatedly

refers to Hazlitt’s “pimples”; and Byron credited and supplemented the

allegation. Hazlitt himself says somewhere “that to lay a thing to

a person’s charge from which he is perfectly free, shows spirit and

invention!” The calumny is not worth mention, except as a fair specimen

of the journalistic methods against which literary men had to contend

some eighty years ago.

[63] Lamb had been his groomsman twenty-two years before, at the Church

of St. Andrew, Holborn, “and like to have been turned out several times

during the ceremony; anything awful makes me laugh!” as he confessed in

a letter to Southey in 1815.

[64] Orrery had seen this same bitter indignation overwhelm Swift at

times, “so that it is scarcely possible for human features to carry in

them more terror and austerity.”

[65] At 19 York Street, Westminster. The house, with its tablet “To the

Prince of Poets” set by Hazlitt himself, was destroyed in 1877.

[66] A snappy unpublished letter to Hunt, sold among the Hazlitt

papers at Sotheby, Wilkinson and Hodge’s, in the late autumn of 1893,

complains bitterly of kind Basil Montagu, who had once put off a

proffered visit from Hazlitt, on the ground that a party of other

guests was expected. The deterred one was naturally wroth. “Yet after

this, I am not to look at him a little _in abstracto_! This is what has

soured me and made me sick of friendship and acquaintanceship.” Hazlitt

confounded cause and effect. He was unwelcome in general gatherings

where his genius was unappreciated; and we may be sure Montagu

was sorry for it when, in the interests of concord, he held up so

deprecating and inhospitable a hand. But among those who nursed Hazlitt

in his last illness, Basil Montagu was not the least loyal.

[67] _The Fight_ appeared in the _New Monthly Magazine_ in 1822. It

was itself antedated by _The Fancy_ of John Hamilton Reynolds, Keats’s

friend and Hood’s brother-in-law, which was printed in 1820. The jolly

iambics are as inspired as the essay. “P. C.” is, of course, Pugilistic

Club.

“Oh, it is life! to see a proud And dauntless man step, full of hopes,

Up to the P. C. stakes and ropes, Throw in his hat, and with a spring

Get gallantly within the ring; Eye the wide crown, and walk awhile

Taking all cheerings with a smile; To see him strip; his well-trained

form, White, glowing, muscular, and warm, All beautiful in conscious

power, Relaxed and quiet, till the hour; His glossy and transparent

frame, In radiant plight to strive for fame! To look upon the clean

shap’d limb In silk and flannel clothèd trim; While round the waist

the kerchief tied Makes the flesh glow in richer pride. ’Tis more than

life to watch him hold His hand forth, tremulous yet bold, Over his

second’s, and to clasp His rival’s in a quiet grasp; To watch the noble

attitude He takes, the crowd in breathless mood; And then to see, with

adamant start, The muscles set, and the great heart Hurl a courageous

splendid light Into the eye, and then—the FIGHT!”

But this is general: Hazlitt is specific. His particular Fight was the

great one between Neate of Bristol and Tom Hickman the Gasman, Neate

being the victor. On May 20, 1823, Neate met Spring of Hertfordshire

(so translated out of his natural patronymic of Winter), in a contest

for the championship, and Neate himself went under. This latter battle

was mock-heroically celebrated by Maginn in _Blackwood’s_, and Hood’s

casual meteorological simile heaped up honors on the winner:

“The Spring! I shrink and shudder at her name. For why? I find her

breath a bitter blighter, And suffer from her blows as if they came

From Spring the fighter!”

So that literature may be said to have set close to the ropes in those

days, from first to last.

[68] Lamb, in “_A Letter to R. Southey, Esq._”

[69] The man of Martial’s epigram had other “views.” The capital

translation is Dr. Goldwin Smith’s:

“Vacerra lauds no living poet’s lays, But for departed genius keeps his

praise. I, alas, live; nor deem it worth my while To die, that I may

win Vacerra’s smile.”

[70] This was the spirit of Henry Fielding on his last voyage, hoisted

aboard among the watermen at Redcliffe, and hearing his emaciated body

made the subject of jeers and laughter. “No man who knew me,” he writes

in his journal, “will think I conceived any personal resentment at this

behavior; but it was a lively picture of that cruelty and inhumanity

in the nature of man which I have often contemplated with concern, and

which leads the mind into a train of very uncomfortable and melancholy

thoughts.” It is a fine passage, and a strong heart, not given to

boasting, penned it. Poor Hazlitt could not bear even an unintentional

slight without imputing diabolical malice to the offender. Yet it was

certainly true that, in his saner hours, he could suffer personal

discomfort in public without flinching, and deplore the habit which

imposed it, rather than the act.

[71] If Hazlitt conveyed some of his best mannerisms from Coleridge,

not always transmuting them, surely the balance may be said to be

even when one discovers later in Hartley Coleridge such an easy

inherited use of Hazlitt’s “flail of gold” as is exemplified in this

summary of Roger Ascham’s career. “There was a primitive honesty, a

kindly innocence about this good old scholar, which gave a personal

interest to the homeliest details of his life. He had the rare

felicity of passing through the worst of times without persecution and

without dishonor. He lived with princes and princesses, prelates and

diplomatists, without offence as without ambition. Though he enjoyed

the smiles of royalty, his heart was none the worse, and his fortunes

little the better.”

[72] The quotation is from Coleridge, and it was applied by him to

Dryden. Hazlitt himself unconsciously expanded and spoiled it in his

essay on _Burke_. “The wheels of his imagination did not catch fire

from the rottenness of the material, but from the rapidity of their

motion.”

[73] The Rev. H. R. Haweis has another characterization of these

breathing and burning pages: “long and tiresome essays by Hazlitt.”

So they are, sure enough, if only you be endowed to think so! Hazlitt

himself gives the diverting fact for what it is worth, that “three

chimney-sweeps meeting three Chinese in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, they

laughed at one another till they were ready to drop down.”

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Miss Guiney writes with a love for her subject which makes her fine

discrimination all the finer, and shows an insight into history

all the more admirable for the research which it has compelled.

This tiny volume gives evidence of as thorough study as would

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Miss Guiney has written La Rochejaquelein’s life on a small scale,

but with spirit and enthusiasm, and her little book is very

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A spirited, vivid, and felicitously phrased account of that dramatic

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CURTIS.

FROM THE EASY CHAIR. _Third Series._ By GEORGE WILLIAM

CURTIS.

CRITICISM AND FICTION. By WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS.

FROM THE BOOKS OF LAURENCE HUTTON.

CONCERNING ALL OF US. By THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON.

THE WORK OF JOHN RUSKIN. By CHARLES WALDSTEIN.

PICTURE AND TEXT. By HENRY JAMES. With Illustrations.

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price._

BY GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS.

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PUBLISHED BY HARPER & BROTHERS, NEW YORK.

[Illustration] _For sale by all booksellers, or will be sent by the

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or Mexico, on receipt of the Price._

* * * * *

Transcriber’s note:

Obvious punctuation errors were corrected.

Repeated headings were removed.

Page 56, “Llansaintfraed” changed to “Llansantffraed” (brother’s parish

of Llansantffraed)

Page 171, Footnote 37, “Farquhare” and “Farqhare” retained as printed

from the matriculation entry.