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DE QUINCEY'S WRITINGSc 
 
Se iliuucei)'6 Worfts. 
 
 AUTHOR'S LIBRARY EDITION. 
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAYS, 
 
 ESSAYS ON THE POETS. 
 
 THOMAS DE QUINCEY. 
 
 TWO VOLUMES IN ONE. 
 
 BOSTON : 
 JAMES R. OSGOOD AND COMPANY, 
 
 Late Ticknor & Fields, and Fields, Osgood, & Co. 
 1875- 
 

 Entered aciording to Act of Congress, in the year 1853, bjr 
 
 TiCKNOR Kill) Fields, 
 
 }r\ the Clerk's Office of the District Court of tlie District ol Massach' tetiS. 
 
 ■BEQUEST 
 
 JUNE 5, 1943 
 
^ FROM THE AUTHOR, TO THE AMERICAN EDITOR 
 
 \j3 OF HIS WORKS. 
 
 [Published by JAiiES R. Osgood & Co., successors toTiCKNOR and Fields.] 
 
 These papers I am anxious to put into the hands of your 
 house, and, so far as regards the U. S., of you?- house exclu- 
 sively ; not with any view to further emolument, but as an 
 acknowledgment of the services which you have already ren- 
 dered me ; namely, first, in having brought together so widely 
 scattered a collection, — a difficulty which in my own hands 
 by too painful an experience I had found from nervous de- 
 pression to be absolutely insurmountable ; secondly, in hav- 
 ing made me a participator in the pecuniary profits of the 
 American edition, without solicitation or the shadow of any 
 expectation on my part, without any legal claim that I could 
 plead, or equitable warrant in established usage, solely and 
 merely upon your own spontaneous motion. Some of these 
 new papers, I hope, will not be without their value in the 
 eyes of those who have taken an interest in the original 
 series. But at all events, good or bad, they are now ten- 
 dered to the appropriation of your individual house, the 
 Messrs. Ticknor and Fields, according to the amplest 
 extent of any power to make such a transfer that I may be 
 found to possess by law or custom in America. 
 
 I wish this transfer were likely to be of more value. But 
 the veriest trifle, interpreted by the spirit in which I offer it, 
 may express my sense of the liberality manifested throughout 
 this transaction by your honorable house. 
 Ever believe me, my dear sir, 
 
 Your faithful and obliged, 
 
 THOMAS DE QUINCEY. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 SnAliSPE.\RE, 9 
 
 P01>E, . .' 101 
 
 Charles Lamb, 167 
 
 Goethe, 227 
 
 Schiller .... 263 
 
BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 SHAKSPEARE.^ 
 
 WiiLiAM ShA-Kspeake, the protagonist on the great 
 arena of modern poetry, and the glory of the human 
 intellect, was born at Stratford-upon-Avon, in the 
 county of Warwick, in the year 1564, and upon some 
 day, not precisely ascertained, in the month of April. 
 It is certain that he was baptized on the 25th ; and 
 from that fact, combined with some shadow of a tradi- 
 tion, Malone has inferred that he Avas born on the 23d. 
 There is doubtless, on the one hand, no absolute neces- 
 sity deducible from law or custom, as either operated 
 in those times, which obliges us to adopt such a con- 
 clusion ; for children might be baptized, and were 
 baptized, at various distances from their birth : yet, on 
 the other hand, the 23d is as likely to have been the 
 day as any other ; and more likely than any earlier day, 
 upon two arguments. First, because there was proba- 
 bly a tradition floating in the seventeenth century, 
 that Shakspeare died upon his birthday : now it is 
 beyond a doubt that he died upon the 23d of April. 
 Secondly, because it is a reasonable presumption, that 
 no parents, living in a simple community, tenderly 
 alive to the pieties of household duty, and in an age 
 8till clinging reverentially to the ceremonial ordinances 
 of religion, would much delay the adoption of their 
 child into the great family of Christ. Considering the 
 
 [9] 
 
10 SHAKSPEAEE. 
 
 extreme frailty of an infant's life during its two earliest 
 years, to delay would often be to disinherit the child of 
 its Christian privileges ; privileges not the less eloquent 
 to the feelings from being profoundly mysterious, and, 
 in the English church, forced not only upon the atten- 
 tion, but even upon the eye of the most thoughtless. 
 According to the discipline of the English church, the 
 unbaiJtized are buried with ' maimed rites,' shorn of 
 their obsequies, and sternly denied that ' sweet and 
 solemn farewell,' by which otherwise the church ex- 
 presses her final charity with all men ; and not only 
 so, but they are even locally separated and seques- 
 trated. Ground the most hallowed, and populous with 
 Christian burials of households, 
 
 ' That died in peace with one another, 
 Father, sister, son, and brother,' 
 
 opens to receive the vilest malefactor ; by which the 
 church symbolically expresses her maternal willingness 
 to gather back into her fold those even of her flock 
 who have strayed from her by the most memorable 
 aberrations ; and yet, with all this indulgence, she 
 banishes to unhallowed ground the innocent bodies of 
 the unbaptized. To them and to suicides she turns a 
 face of wa-ath. With this gloomy fact offered to the 
 very external senses, it is difficult to suppose that any 
 parents v.'ould risk their own reproaches, by putting 
 the fulfilment of so grave a duty on the hazard of a 
 convulsion fit. The case of royal children is different ; 
 their baptisms, it is true, were often delayed for weeks, 
 but the household chaplains of the palace were always 
 at hand, night and day, to baptize them in the very 
 agonies of death. 2 We must presume, therefore, that 
 William Shakspeare was born on some day very little 
 
SHAKSrEAUE. 11 
 
 anterior to that of his baptism : and the more so 
 because the season of the year was lovely and genial, 
 the 23d of April in 1564, corresponding in fact with 
 what we now call the 3d of May, so that, whether the 
 child was to be carried abroad, or the clergyman to be 
 summoned, no hindrance would arise from the weather. 
 One only argument has sometimes struck us for sup- 
 posing that the 22d might be the day, and not the 23d ; 
 which is, that Shakspeare's sole grand-daughter. Lady 
 Barnard, was married on the 22d of April, 1626, ten 
 years exactly from the poet's death ; and the reason 
 for choosing this day might, have had a reference to 
 her illustrious grandfather's birthday, which, there is 
 good reason for thinking, would be celebrated as a 
 festival in the family for generations. Still this choice 
 may have been an accident, or governed merely by 
 reason of convenience. And, on the whole, it is as 
 \\<A\ perhaps to acquiesce in the old belief, that Shak- 
 speare was born and died on the 23d of April. We 
 cannot do wrong if we drink to his memory on both 
 22d and 23d. 
 
 On a first review of the circumstances, we have 
 rea*ion to feel no little perplexity in finding the mate- 
 rials for a life of this transcendent writer so meagre 
 and so few ; and amongst them the larger part of 
 doubtful authority. All the energy of curiosity di- 
 rected upon this subject, through a period of one 
 liundrcd and fifty years, (for so long it is since Better- 
 ton the actor began to make researches,) has availed 
 us little or nothing. Neither the local traditions of hia 
 provincial birthplace, though sharing wdth London 
 through half a century the honor of his familiar pres- 
 ence, nor the recollections of that brilliant literary 
 
12 SHAKSPEAEE. 
 
 circle witli whom he lived in the metropolis, have 
 /ielded much more than such an outline of his history, 
 as is oftentimes to be gathered from the penurious 
 records of a gravestone. That he lived, and that he 
 died, and that he was ' a little lower than the angels ; ' 
 — these make up pretty nearly the amount of our un- 
 disputed report. It may be doubted, indeed, whether 
 at this day we are as accurately acquainted with the 
 life of Shakspeare as with that of Chaucer, though 
 divided from each other by an interval of two centu- 
 ries, and (what should have been more effectual 
 towards oblivion) by the wars of the two roses. And 
 yet the traditional memory of a rural and a sylvan 
 region, such as Warwickshire at that time was, is 
 usually exact as well as tenacious ; and, with respect 
 to Shakspeare in particular, we may presume it to 
 have been full and circumstantial through the genera- 
 tion succeeding to his own, not only from the curiosity, 
 and perhaps something of a scandalous interest, which 
 would pursue the motions of one living so large a part 
 of his life at a distance from his wife, but also from 
 the final reverence and honor wliich would settle upon 
 the memory of a poet so jireeminently successful ; 
 of one who, in a space of five and twenty years, after 
 running a bright career in the capital city of his 
 native land, and challenging notice from the throne, 
 Lad retired with an ample fortune, created by his 
 personal efforts, and by labors purely intellectual. 
 
 How are we to account, then, for that deluge, as if 
 from Lethe which has swept away so entirely the tra- 
 ditional memorials of one so illustrious ? Such is the 
 fatality of error which overclouds every question con- 
 aocted with Shakspeare, that two of his principal 
 
SHAKSPEAEE. 13 
 
 critics, Steevens and Malone, have endeavored to solve 
 the difficulty by cutting it Avith a falsehood. They 
 deny in effect that he tvas illustrious in the century 
 succeeding to his own, however much he has since 
 become so. We shall first produce their statements 
 in theu- own words, and we shall then briefly review 
 them. 
 
 Steevens delivers his opinion in the following terms ; 
 ' How little Shakspeare was once read, may be under- 
 stood from Tate, who in his dedication to the altered 
 play of King Lear, speaks of the original as an ob- 
 scm-e piece, recommended to his notice by a friend : 
 and the author of the Tatler, having occasion to quote 
 a few lines out of Macbeth, was content to receive them 
 from Davenant's alteration of that celebrated drama, 
 in which almost every original beauty is either awk- 
 wardly disguised or arbitrarily omitted.' Another 
 critic, Avho cites this passage from Steevens, pursues 
 the hypothesis as follows : ' In fifty years after his 
 death, Dryden mentions that he was then become a 
 little obsolete. In the beginning of the last century, 
 Lord Shaftesbury complains of his rude unpolished 
 style, and his antiquated phrase and wit. It is certain 
 that, for nearly a hundred years after his death, partly 
 owin'T to the immediate revolution and rebellion, and 
 partly to the licentious taste encouraged in Charles 
 II. 's time, and perhaps partly to the incorrect state of 
 his works, he was almost entirely neglected.' 
 This critic then goes on to quote with approbation the 
 opinion of Malone, — ' that if he had been read, ad- 
 mired, studied, and imitated, in the same degree as he 
 is now, the enthusiasm of some one or other of hia 
 admirers in the last age would have induced him to 
 
14 SHAKSPEARE. 
 
 make some inquiries concerning the history of his 
 theatrical career, and the anecdotes of his private 
 life.' After which this enlightened writer re-affirms 
 and clenches the judgment he has quoted, by saying, 
 — ' His admirers, however, if he had admirers in that 
 age, possessed no portion of such enthusiasm.' 
 
 It may, perhaps, be an instructive lesson to young 
 readers, if we now show them, by a short sifting of 
 these confident dogmatists, how easy it is for a careless 
 or a half-read man to circulate the most absolute false- 
 hoods under the semblance of truth ; falsehoods which 
 impose upon himself as much as they do upon others. 
 We believe that not one word or illustration is uttered 
 in the sentences cited from these three critics, which is 
 not virtually in the very teeth of the truth. 
 
 To begin with Mr. Nahum Tate. This poor grub 
 of literature, if he did really speak of Lear as ' an 
 obscure piece, recommended to his notice by a friend,' 
 of which we must be allowed to doubt, was then utter- 
 ing a conscious falsehood. It happens that Lear was 
 one of the few Shakspearian dramas which had kept 
 the stage unaltered. But it is easy to see a mercenary 
 motive in such an artifice as this. Mr. Nahum Tate is 
 not of a class of whom it can be safe to say that they 
 are ' well known : ' they and their desperate tricks are 
 essentially obscure, and good reason he has to exult in 
 the felicity of such obscurity ; for else this same vilest 
 of travesties, Mr. Nahum's Lear, would consecrate his 
 name to everlasting scorn. For himself, he belonged 
 to the age of Dryden rather than of Pope : he ' flour- 
 ished,' if we can use such a phrase of one who was 
 always withering, about the era of thr Revolution ; 
 and his Lear, we believe, was arranged in the yeai 
 
SHAKSPEARE. 15 
 
 1682. But the family to which he belongs is abun- 
 dantly recorded in the Dunciad, and his own name will 
 be found amongst its catalogues of heroes. 
 
 With respect to the author of the TaiJer, a very 
 different explanation is requisite. Steevens means the 
 reader to understand Addison ; but it does not follow 
 that the particular paper in question was from his pen. 
 Nothing, however, could be more natural than to 
 quote from the common form of the play as then in 
 possession of the stage. It was there, beyond a doubt, 
 that a fine gentleman living upon town, and not pro- 
 fessing any deep scholastic knowledge of literature, 
 (a light in which we are always to regard the writers 
 of the Spectator, Guardian, &c.,) would be likely to 
 have learned anything he quoted from Macbeth. 
 This we say generally of the writers in those peri- 
 odical papers ; but, with reference to Addison in par- 
 ticular, it is time to correct the popular notion of his 
 literary character, or at least to mark it by severer 
 lines of distinction. It is already pretty well known, 
 that Addison had no very intimate acquaintance with 
 the literature of his own country. It is known, also, 
 that he did not think such an acquaintance any ways 
 essential to the character of an elegant scholar and 
 litterateur. Quite enough he found it, and more than 
 enough for the time he had to spare, if he could main- 
 tain a tolerable familiarity with the foremost Latin 
 poets, and a very slender one indeed with the Grecian. 
 How slender, we can see in his ' Travels.' Of modern 
 authors, none as yet had been published with notes, 
 commentaries, or critical collations of the text ; and, 
 accordingly, Addison looked upon all of them, except 
 those few who professed themselves followers in the 
 
16 SHAKSPEAKE. 
 
 retinue and equipage of the ancients, as creatures of a 
 lower race. Boileau, as a mere imitator and propa- 
 gator of Horace, he read, and probably little else 
 amongst the French classics. Hence it arose that he 
 took upon himself to speak sneeringly of Tasso. To 
 this, which was a bold act for his timid mind, he was 
 emboldened by the countenance of Boileau. Of the 
 elder Italian authors, such as Ariosto, and, a fortiori, 
 Dante, he knew absolutely nothing. Passing to our 
 own literature, it is certain that Addison was pro- 
 foundly ignorant of Chaucer and Spenser. Milton 
 only, — and why ? simply because he was a brilliant 
 scholar, and stands like a bridge between the Christian 
 literature and the Pagan, — Addison had read and 
 esteemed. There was also in the very constitution 
 of Milton's mind, in the majestic regularity and 
 planetary solemnity of its epic movements, something 
 which he could understand and appreciate. As to the 
 meteoric and incalculable eccentricities of the dramatic 
 mind, as it displayed itself in the heroic age of our 
 drama, amongst the Titans of 1590- 1630, they con- 
 founded and overwhelmed him. 
 
 In particular with regard to Shakspeare, we shall 
 now proclaim a discovery which we made some twenty 
 years ago. We, like others, from seeing frequent 
 references to Shakspeare in the Spectator, had acqui- 
 esced in the common belief, that although Addison was 
 no. doubt profoundly unlearned in Shakspeare's lan- 
 guage, and thoroughly unable to do him justice, (and 
 this we might well assume, since his great rival. Pope, 
 who had expressly studied Shakspeare, -was, after all, 
 flo memorably deficient in the appropriate knowledge,) 
 — yet, that of course he had a vague popular kno ,vl- 
 
BHAKSPEAEE. 
 
 17 
 
 edge of the mighty poet's cardinal drarras. Accident 
 only led us into a discovery of our mistake. T\\ice 
 or thrice Ave had observed, that if Shakspeare were 
 quoted, that paper turned out not to be Addison's ; and 
 at length, by express examination, we ascertained the 
 curious fact, that Addison has never in one instance 
 (quoted or made any reference to Shakspeare. But 
 Avas this, as Steevens most disingenuously pretends, to 
 be taken as an exponent of the public feeling towards 
 Shakspeare? Was Addison's neglect representative of 
 a general neglect ? If so, whence came Rowe's edi- 
 tion. Pope's, Theobald's, Sir Thomas Haiamer's, Bishop 
 Warburton's, all upon the heels of one another ? With 
 such facts staring him in the face, how shameless must 
 be that critic who could, in support of such a thesis, 
 refer to ' the author of the Taller; contemporary with 
 all these editors. The truth is, Addison was well 
 aware of Shakspeare's hold on the popular mind ; too 
 well aware of it. The feeble constitution of the poetic 
 faculty, as existing in himself, forbade his sympathizing 
 with Shakspeare ; the proportions were too colossal for 
 his delicate vision ; and yet, as one who sought popu- 
 larity himself, he durst not shock what perhaps he 
 viewed as a national prejudice. Those who have hap- 
 pened, like ourselves, to see the effect of passionate 
 music and ' deep-inwoven harmonics ' upon the feeling 
 of an idiot,3 may conceive what we mean. Such music 
 does not utterly revolt the idiot ; on the contrary, u 
 has a strange but a horrid fascination for him ; it 
 alarms, irritates, disturbs, makes him profoundly un- 
 happy ; and chiefly by unlocking imperfect glimpses 
 of thoughts and slumbering instincts, which it is for 
 his peace to have entii-ely obscured, because for hira 
 2 
 
18 shakspeahe. 
 
 tliey can be revealed only partially, and with tlie sad 
 effect of throwing a baleful gleam upon his blighted 
 condition. Do Ave mean, then, to compare Addison 
 with an idiot ? Not generally, by any means. No- 
 body can more sincerely admire him where he was a 
 man of real genius, viz., in his delineations of character 
 and manners, or in the exquisite delicacies of his hu- 
 mor. But assuredly Addison, as a poet, was amongs* 
 the sons of the feeble ; and between the authors of 
 Cato and of King Lear there was a gulf never to be 
 bridged over.'* 
 
 But Dryden, we are told, pronounced Shakspeare 
 already in his day ' a little obsolete.' Here now we 
 have wilful, deliberate falsehood. Obsolete, in Dry- 
 den's meaning, does not imply that he was so with 
 regard to his popularity, (the question then at issue,) 
 but with regard to his diction and choice of words. 
 To cite Dryden as a witness for any purpose against 
 Shakspeare, — Dryden, who of all men had the most 
 ransacked wit and exhausted language in celebrating 
 the supremacy of Shakspeare's genius, does indeed re- 
 quire as much shamelessness in feeling as mendacity 
 in principle. 
 
 But then Lord Shaftesbury, who may be taken as 
 half way between Dryden and Pope, (Dryden died in 
 1700, Pope was then twelve years old, and Lord S. 
 Avrote chiefly, we believe, between 1700 and 1710,) 
 ' complains,' it seems, ' of his rude unpolished style, 
 and his antiquated phrase and wit.' What if he does r 
 Let the whole truth be told, and then we shall see hoAA 
 much stress is to be laid upon such a judgment. Thf 
 second Lord Shaftesbury, the author of the Character 
 istics, was the grandson of that famous political agitator, 
 
SHAKSPEAKE. 19 
 
 the Chancellor Shaftesbury, who passed his whole lifa 
 in storms of his own creation. The second Lord 
 Shaftesbury was a man of crazy constitution, querulous 
 from ill health, and had received an eccentric educa- 
 tion from his eccentric grandfather. He was practised 
 daily in talking Latin, to which afterwards he added a 
 competent study of the Greek ; and finally he became 
 unusually learned for his rank, but the most absolute 
 and undistinguished pedant that perhaps literature has 
 to show. He sneers continually at the regular built 
 academic pedant ; but he himself, though no academic, 
 was essentially the very impersonation of pedantry. 
 No thought however beautiful, no image however mag 
 nificent, could conciliate his praise as long as it was 
 clothed in English ; but present him with the most 
 trivial commonplaces in Greek, and he unaffectedly 
 fancied them divine ; mistaking the pleasurable sense 
 of his own power in a difficult and rare accomplish- 
 ment for some peculiar force or beauty in the passage. 
 Such was the outline of his literary taste. And was 
 it upon Shakspeare only, or upon him chiefly, that he 
 lavished his pedantry? Far from it. He attacked 
 Milton with no less fervor ; he attacked Dryden mth a 
 thousand times more. Jeremy Taylor he quoted only 
 to ridicule ; and even Locke, the confidential friend of 
 his grandfather, he never alludes to without a sneer. 
 As to Shakspeare, so far from Lord Shaftesbury's 
 censures arguing his deficient reputation, the very fact 
 of his noticing him at all proves his enormous popu- 
 larity ; for upon system he noticed those only who 
 luled the public taste. The insipidity of his objections 
 to Shakspeare may be judged from this, that he com- 
 ments in a spirit of absolute puerility upon the name 
 
20 SHAKSPEARE. 
 
 Desdemona, as thougli intentionally formed from the 
 Greek word for superstition. In fact, he had evidently 
 read little beyond the list of names in Shakspeare ; yet 
 there is proof enough that the u-resistible beauty of 
 what little he had read was too much for all his pedan- 
 try, and startled him exceedingly ; for ever afterwards 
 he speaks of Shakspeare as one who, with a little aid 
 from Grecian sources, really had something great and 
 promising about him. As to modern authors, neither 
 this Lord Shaftesbury nor Addison read any thing for 
 the latter years of their lives but Bayle's Dictionary. 
 And most of the little scintillations of erudition, which 
 may be found in the notes to the Characteristics, and 
 in the Essays of Addison, are derived, almost without 
 exception, and uniformly without acknowledgment, 
 from Bayle.^ 
 
 Finally, Avith regard to the sweeping assertion, that 
 ' for nearly a hundred years after his death Shakspeare 
 was almost entirely neglected,' we shall meet this scan- 
 dalous falsehood, by a rapid view of his fortunes during 
 the century in question. The tradition has always 
 been, that Shakspeare was honored by the especial 
 notice of Queen Elizabeth, as well as by that of James 
 I. At one time we were disposed to questidn the truth 
 of this tradition ; but that was for want of having read 
 attentively the lines of Ben Jonson to the memory of 
 Shakspeare, those generous lines which have so ab- 
 surdly been taxed with faint praise. Jonson could 
 make no mistake on this point; he, as one of Shak- 
 epeare's familiar companions, must have witnessed at 
 the very time, and accompanied with friendly sym- 
 pathy, every motion of royal favor towards Shakspeare. 
 Now he, in words which leave no loom for doubt, 
 nxclaims, 
 
SHAKSPEARE. 21 
 
 * Sweet swan of Avon, what a sight it were 
 To see thee in our waters yet appear ; 
 And make those flights upon the banks of Thames, 
 Jliat so did take Eliza and our James,' 
 
 These princes, then, were taken, were fascinated, 
 with some of Shakspeare's dramas. In Elizabeth the 
 approbation would probably be sincere. In James we 
 can readily suppose it to have been assumed ; for he 
 was a pedant in a different sense from Lord Shaftes- 
 bury ; not from undervaluing modern poetry, but from 
 caring little or nothing for any poetry, although he 
 wrote about its mechanic rules. Still the royal impri- 
 matur would be influential and serviceable no less 
 when offered hypocritically than in full sincerity. Next 
 let us consider at the very moment of Shakspeare's 
 death, who were the leaders of the British youth, the 
 principes jiiventutis, in the two fields, equally impor- 
 tant to a great poet's fame, of rank and of genius. 
 The Prince of Wales and John Milton ; the first being 
 then about sixteen years old, the other about eight. 
 Now these two great powers, as we may call them, 
 these presiding stars over all that was English in 
 thought and action, were both impassioned admirers of 
 Shakspeare. Each of them counts for many thou- 
 sands. The Prince of Wales ^ had learned to appre- 
 ciate Shakspeare, not originally from reading him, but 
 from witnessing the court representations of his plays 
 at Whitehall. Afterwards we know that he made 
 Shakspeare his closet companion, for he was re- 
 proached with doing so by Milton. And we know 
 also, from the just criticism pronounced upon the char- 
 acter and diction of Caliban by one of Charles's con- 
 fidential counsellors, Lord Falkland, that the king's 
 
22 SHAKSPIIARE. 
 
 admiration of Shakspeare had impressed a determina- 
 tion upon the court reading. As to Milton, by double 
 prejudices, puritanical and classical, his mind had been 
 preoccupied against the full impressions of Shakspeare. 
 And we know that there is such a thing as keeping the 
 sympathies of love and admiration in a dormant state, 
 or state of abeyance ; an eflFort of self-conquest realized 
 in more cases than one by the ancient fathers, both 
 Greek and Latin, with regard to the profane classics. 
 Intellectually they admired, and would not belie their 
 admiration ; but they did not give their hearts cor- 
 dially, they did not abandon themselves to their natural 
 impulses. They averted their eyes and weaned their 
 attention from the dazzling object. Such, probably, 
 was Milton's state of feeling towards Shakspeare after 
 1642, when the theatres were suppressed, and the 
 fanatical fervor in its noontide heat. Yet everf then 
 he did not belie his reverence intellectually for Shak- 
 speare : and in his younger days we know that he had 
 spoken more enthusiastically of Shakspeare, than he 
 ever did again of any uninspired author. Not only 
 did he address a sonnet to his memory, in which he 
 declares that kings would wish to die, if by dying they 
 could obtain such a monument in the hearts of men ; 
 but he also speaks of him in his 11 Penseroso, as the 
 tutelary genius of the English stage. In this trans- 
 mission of the torch {XafinaSofpoQia) Dryden succeeds to 
 Milton ; he was born nearly thirty years later ; about 
 thirty years they were contemporaries ; and by thirty 
 years, or nearly, Dryden survived his great leader. 
 Dryden, in fact, lived out the seventeenth century. 
 And we have now arrived within nine years of the era, 
 when the critical editions started in hot succession to 
 
SHAKSPEAEE. 23 
 
 one anotter. The names we have mentioned were the 
 great influential names of the century. But of inferior 
 homage there was no end. How came Betterton the 
 actor, how came Davenant, how came Kowe, or Pope, 
 by their intense (if not always sound) admiration for 
 Shakspeare, unless they had found it fuming upwards 
 like incense to the pagan deities in ancient times, from 
 altars erected at every turning upon all the paths of 
 men? 
 
 But it is objected that inferior dramatists were some- 
 times preferred to Shakspeare ; and again that vile 
 travesties of Shakspeare were preferred to the authen- 
 tic dramas. As to the first argument, let it be remem- 
 bered, that if the saints in the chapel are always in the 
 same honor, because there men are simply discharging 
 a duty, which once due will be due forever ; the saints 
 of the theatre, on the other hand, must bend to the 
 local genius, and to the very reasons for having a 
 theatre at all. Men go thither for amusement. This 
 is the paramount purpose, and even acknowledged merit 
 or absolute superiority must give way to it. Does a 
 man at Paris expect to see Moliere reproduced in pro- 
 portion to his admitted precedency in the French 
 drama ? On the contrary, that very precedency argues 
 such a familiarization with his works, that those who 
 are in quest of relation M'ill reasonably prefer any 
 recent drama to that which, having lost all its novelty, 
 has lost much of its excitement. We speak of ordi- 
 nary minds ; but in cases of public entertainments, 
 deriving part of their power from scenery and stage 
 pomp, novelty is for all minds an essential condition 
 of attraction. Moreover, in some departments of the 
 comic, Beaumont and Fletcher, when writing in com- 
 
24 SHAKSPEAKE. 
 
 bination, really had a freedom and breadth, of manner 
 which excels the comedy of Shakspeare. As to the 
 altered Shakspeare as taking precedency of the genu- 
 ine Shakspeare, no argument can be so frivolous. The 
 public were never allowed a choice ; the great majority 
 of an audience eve'n now cannot be expected to carry 
 the real Shakspeare in their mind, so as to pursue a 
 comparison between that and the alteration. Their 
 comparisons must be exclusively amongst what thoy 
 have opportunities of seeing; that is, between the 
 various pieces presented to them by the managers of 
 theatres. Further than this, it is impossible for them 
 to extend their office of judging and collating ; and the 
 degenerate taste Avhich substituted the caprices of 
 Davenant, the rants of Dry den, or the filth of Tate, for 
 the jewelry of Shakspeare, cannot with any justice be 
 charged upon the public, not one in a thousand of 
 whom was furnished with any means of comparing, but 
 exclusively upon those (viz., theatrical managers,) who 
 had the very amplest. Yet even in excuse for them 
 much may be said. The very length of some plays 
 compelled them to make alterations. The best of 
 Shakspeare's dramas. King Lear, is the least fitted for 
 representation ; and even for the vilest alteration, it 
 ought in candor to be considered that possession is nine 
 points of the law. He who would not have intro- 
 duced, was often obliged to retain. 
 
 Finally, it is urged that the small number of editions 
 through which Shakspeare passed in the seventeenth 
 century, furnishes a separate argument, and a conclu- 
 sive one against his popularity. We answer, that, 
 considering the bulk of his plays collectively, the 
 editions were not few. Compared Avith any known 
 
SHAKSPEAHE. 26 
 
 case, the copies sold of Shakspeare were quite as many 
 as could be expected under the circumstances. Ton 
 or fifteen times as much consideration went to the 
 purchase of one great folio like Shakspeare, as would 
 attend the purchase of a little volume like Waller or 
 Donne. "Without reviews, or newspapers, or adver- 
 tisements, to diffuse the knowledge of books, the 
 progress of literature was necessarily slow, and its ex- 
 pansion narrow. But this is a topic which has already- 
 been treated unfairly, not with regard to Shakspeare 
 only, but to ^Milton, as well as many others. The 
 truth is, we have not facts enough to guide us ; for the 
 number of editions often tells nothing accurately as to 
 the number of copies. With respect to Shakspeare 
 it is certain, that, had his masterpieces been gathered 
 into small volumes, Shakspeare would have had a most 
 extensive sale. As it was, there can be no doubt, that 
 from his own generation, throughout the seventeenth 
 century, and until the eighteenth began to accommo- 
 date, not any greater popularity in him, but a greater 
 taste for reading in the public, his fame never ceased 
 to be viewed as a national trophy of honor ; and the 
 most illustrious men of the seventeenth century were 
 iio whit less fervent in their admiration than those of 
 ■he eighteenth and the nineteenth, either as respected 
 ts strength and sincerity, or as respected its open pro- 
 fession.''' 
 
 It is therefore a false notion, that the general sym- 
 ;«athy with the merits of Shaksjjeare ever beat with a 
 'languid or intermitting pulse. Undoubtedly, in times 
 Ashou the functions of critical journals and of news- 
 papers were not at hand to diffuse or to strengthen the 
 impressions whicb emanated from the capital, all opin- 
 8 
 
26 SHAKSPEAllB. 
 
 ions must have travelled slowly into the provinces. 
 But even then, whilst the perfect organs of communi- 
 cation were wanting, indirect substitutes were supplied 
 by the necessities of the times, or by the instincts of 
 political zeal. Two channels especially lay open be- 
 tween the great central organ of the national mind, 
 and the remotest provinces. Parliaments were occa- 
 Bionally summoned, (for the judges' circuits were too 
 brief to produce much effect,) and during their longest 
 suspensions, the nobility, with large retinues, continu- 
 ally resorted to the court. But an intercourse more 
 constant and more comprehensive was maintained 
 through the agency of the two universities. Already, 
 'u the time of James I., the growing importance of the 
 gentry, and the consequent birth of a new interest in 
 political questions, had begun to express itself at 
 Oxford, and still more so at Cambridge. Academic 
 persons stationed themselves as sentinels at London, 
 for the purpose of watching the court and the course 
 of public affairs. These persons wrote letters, like 
 those of the celebrated Joseph Mede, which we find in 
 Ellis's Historical Collections, reporting to their fellow- 
 Collegians all the novelties of public life as they arose, 
 or personally carried down such reports, and thus 
 conducted the general feelings at the centre into lesser 
 centres, from which again they were diffused into the 
 ten thousand parishes of England ; for, (with a very 
 few exceptions in favor of poor benefices, Welsh or 
 Cumbrian,) every parish priest must unavoidably have 
 spent his three years at one or other of the English 
 universities. And by this mode of diffusion it is, that 
 we can explain the strength with which Shakspeare's 
 thoughts and diction impressed themselves from a ver^ 
 
SHAKSPEAUE. 27 
 
 early period upon the national literature, and even 
 more generally upon the national thinking and conver- 
 sation. ^ 
 
 The question, therefore, revolves upon us in three- 
 fold difficulty — How, having stepped thus prema- 
 turely into this inheritance of fame, leaping, as it 
 were, thus abruptly into the favor alike of princes and 
 the enemies of princes, had it become possible that in 
 his native place, (honored still more in the final 
 testimonies of his preference when founding a family 
 mansion,) such a man's history, and the personal 
 recollections which cling so affectionately to the great 
 intellectual potentates who have recommended them- 
 selves by gracious manners, could so soon and so 
 utterly have been obliterated ? 
 
 Malone, with childish irreflection, ascribes the loss 
 of such memorials to the want of enthusiasm in his 
 admirers. Local researches into private history had 
 not then commenced. Such a taste, often petty 
 enough in its management, was the growth of after 
 ages. Else how came Spenser's life and fortunes to 
 be so utterly overwhelmed in oblivion ? No poet of a 
 high order could be more popular. 
 
 The answer we believe to be this : Twenty-six years 
 after Shakspeare's death commenced the great parlia- 
 mentary war. This it was, and the local feud? s.ri£ing 
 to divide family from family, brother from, brother, 
 upon which we must charge the extinction of traditions 
 and memorials, doubtless abundant up to that era. 
 The parliamentary contest, it will be said, did not last 
 above three years ; the king's standard having been 
 first raised at Nottingham in August, 1642, and the 
 battle of Naseby (which terminateu ihe open warfare) 
 
28 SHAKSPEARE. 
 
 having been fought in June, 1645. Or even if we 
 extend its duration to the surrender of the last garri- 
 son, that war terminated in the spring of 1646. And 
 the brief explosions of insurrection or of Scottish in 
 vasion, which occurred on subsequent occasions, were 
 all locally confined, and none came near to Warwick 
 shire, except the battle of Worcester, more than five 
 years after. This is true ; but a short war will do 
 much t(T efface recent and merely personal memorials. 
 And the following circumstances of the war were even 
 more important than the general fact. 
 
 First of all, the very mansion founded by Shak- 
 speare became the military head-quarters for the queen, 
 in 1644, when marching from the eastern coast of 
 England to join the king in Oxford; and one such 
 special visitation would be likely to do more serious 
 mischief in the way of extinction, than many years of 
 general warfare. Secondly, as a fact, perhaps, equally 
 important, Birmingham, the chief town of Warwick- 
 shire, and the adjacent district, the seat of our hard- 
 ware manufactures, was the very focus of disaffection 
 towards the royal cause. Not only, therefore, would 
 this whole region suffer more from internal and spon- 
 taneous agitation, but it would be the more frequently 
 traversed vindictively from without, and harassed by 
 flying parties from Oxford, or others of the king's 
 garrisons. Thirdly, even apart from the political 
 aspects of Warwickshire, this county happens to be 
 the central one of England, as regards the roads be- 
 tween the north and south ; and Birmingham has lung 
 been the great central axis,^ in which all the radii from 
 the four angles of England proper meet and intersect. 
 Mere accident therefore, of local position, much more 
 
SHAKSPEARE. 29 
 
 when united with that avowed inveteracy of malignant 
 fcclaig, which was bitter enough to rouse a re-actioc 
 of bitterness in the mind of Lord Clarendon, would go 
 far to account for i:he wreck of many memorials rela- 
 ting to Shakspeare, as Ave.l as for the subversion of 
 that quiet and security for humble life, in which the 
 traditional memory finds its best nidus. Thus we ob- 
 tain one solution, and perhaps the main one, of the 
 otherwise mysterious oblivion which had swept away 
 all traces of the mighty poet, by the time when those 
 quiet days revolved upon England, in which again 
 the solitary agent of learned research might roam in 
 security from house to house, gleaning those personal 
 remembrances which, even in the fury of civil strife, 
 might long have lingered by the chimney corner. But 
 the fierce furnace of war had probably, by its local 
 ravages, scorched this field of natural tradition, and 
 thinned the gleaner's inheritance by three parts out of 
 four. This, we repeat, may be one part of the solution 
 to this difficult problem. 
 
 And if another is still demanded, possibly it may be 
 found in the fact, hostile to the perfect consecration of 
 Shakspeare's memory, that, after all, he was a player. 
 Many a coarse-minded country gentleman, or village 
 pastor, Avho would have held his town glorified by the 
 distinction of having sent forth a great judge or an 
 eminent bishop, might disdain to cherish the personal 
 recollections which surrounded one whom custom 
 regarded as little above a mountebank, and the illiberal 
 law as a vagabond. The same degrading appreciation 
 attached both to the actor in plays and to their author. 
 The contemptuous appellation of ' play-book,' served 
 as readily to degrade the mighty volume which con- 
 
30 SHAKSPEAEE, 
 
 tained Lear and Hamlet, as that of ' play-actor,' or 
 ' player-man,' has always served with the illiberal or 
 jhe fanatical to dishonor the persons of Roscius or of 
 Garrick, of Talma or of Siddons. Nobody, indeed, 
 Avas better aware of this than the noble-minded Shak- 
 speare ; and feelingly he has breathed forth in his 
 sonnets this conscious oppression under which he lay 
 of public opinion, unfavorable by a double title to his 
 own pretensions ; for, being both dramatic author and 
 dramatic performer, he found himself heir to a two- 
 fold opprobrium, and at an era of English society 
 when the weight of that opprobrium was heaviest. In 
 reality, there was at this period a collision of forces 
 acting in opposite directions upon the estimation of the 
 stage and scenical art, and therefore of all the ministers 
 in its equipage. Puritanism frowned upon these pur- 
 suits, as ruinous to public morals ; on the other hand, 
 loyalty could not but tolerate what was patronized by 
 the sovereign ; and it happened that Elizabeth, James, 
 and Charles I., were all alike lovers and promoters of 
 theatrical amusements, which were indeed more indis- 
 pensable to the relief of court ceremony, and the 
 monotony of aulic pomp, than in any other region of 
 life. This royal support, and the consciousness that 
 any brilliant success in these arts implied an unusual 
 share of natural endowments, did something in mitiga- 
 tion of a scorn which must else have been intolerable 
 to all generous natures. 
 
 But whatever prejudice might thus operate against 
 the perfect sanctity of Shakspeare's posthumous repu- 
 tation, it is certain that the splendor of his worldly 
 success must have done much to obliterate that effect ; 
 &is admirable colloquial talents £. good deal, and his 
 
SHAKSPEAEE. 31 
 
 gracious affability still more. The wonder, therefore, 
 v/ill still remain, that Betterton, in less than a century 
 from his death, should have been able to glean so 
 little. And for the solution of this wonder, we must 
 throw ourselves chiefly upon the explanations we have 
 made as to the parliamentary war, and the local 
 ravages of its progress in the very district, of the 
 very town, and the very house. 
 
 If further arguments are still wanted to explain this 
 mysterious abolition, we may refer the reader to the 
 following succession of disastrous events, by which it 
 should seem that a perfect malice of misfortune pur- 
 S'iicd the vestiges of the mighty poet's steps. In 1613, 
 the Globe theatre, with which he had been so long 
 connected, was burned to the ground. Soon after- 
 wards a great fire occurred in Stratford ; and next, 
 (without counting upon the fire of London ; just fifty 
 years after his death, which, however, would consume 
 many an important record from periods far more re- 
 mote,) the house of Ben Jonson, in which probably, as 
 Mr. Campbell suggests, might be parts of his corres- 
 pondence, was also burned. Finally, there was an old 
 tradition that Lady Barnard, the sole grand-daughter 
 of Shakspeare, had carried ofi" many of his papers from 
 Stratford, and these papers have never since been 
 traced. 
 
 In many of the elder lives it has been asserted, that 
 John Shakspeare, the father of the poet, was a butcher, 
 and in others that he was a woolstapler. It is now 
 settled beyond dispute that he was a glover. This was 
 his professed occupation in Stratford, though it is cer- 
 tain that, with this leading trade, from which he took 
 bis denomination, he combined some collateral pur- 
 
82 SHAKSPEARE. 
 
 suits ; and it is possible enough that, as openingt 
 offered, he may have meddled with many. In that 
 age, in a provincial town, nothing like the exquisite 
 subdivision of labor was attempted which W3 now see 
 realized in the great cities of Christendom. And one 
 trade is often found to play into another with so much 
 reciprocal advantage, that even in our own days we 
 do not much wonder at an enterprising man, in coun- 
 try places, who combines several in his own person. 
 Accordingly, John Shakspeare is known to have united 
 Avith his town calling the rural and miscellaneous oc- 
 cupations of a farmer. 
 
 Meantime his avowed business stood upon a very 
 different footing from the same trade as it is exercised 
 in modern times. Gloves were in that age an article 
 of dress more costly by mucn, find more elaborately 
 decorated, than in our own. They were a customary 
 present from some cities to the judges of assize, and 
 to other official persons ; a custom of ancient standing, 
 and in some places, we believe, still subsisting ; and in 
 such cases it is reasonable to suppose that the gloves 
 must originally have been more valuable than the 
 trivial modern article of the same name. So also, 
 perhaps, in their origin, of the gloves given at funerals. 
 In reality, whenever the simplicity of an age makes it 
 difficult to renew the parts of a wardrobe, except in 
 dpital towns of difficult access, prudence suggests that 
 such wares should be manufactured of more durable 
 materials ; and, being so, they become obviously sus- 
 ceptible of more lavish ornament. But it will not 
 follow, from this essential difference in the gloves of 
 Shakspeare's age, that the glover's occupation waa 
 more lucrative. Doubtless he sold more costly gloves. 
 
SHAKSPEARE. 33 
 
 and upon eact pair had a larger profit, but for that 
 very reason he sold fewer. Two or three gentlemen 
 ' of worship ' in the neighborhood might occasionally 
 require a pair of gloves, but it is very doubtful whether 
 any inhabitant of Stratford would ever call for so mere 
 a luxury. 
 
 The practical result, at all events, of John Shak- 
 gpeare's vai-ious pursuits, does not appear permanently 
 to have met the demands of his establishment, and 
 in his maturer years there are indications still surviv- 
 ing that he was under a cloud of embarrassment. He 
 certainly lost at one time his social position in the town 
 of Stratford ; but there is a strong presumption, in 
 our construction of the case, that he finally retrieved 
 it ; and for this retrieval of a station, which he had 
 forfeited by personal misfortunes or neglect, he was 
 altogether indebted to the filial piety of his immortal 
 son. 
 
 Meantime the earlier years of the elder Shakspeare 
 wore the aspect of rising prosperity, however unsound 
 might ba the basis on which it rested. There can be 
 little doubt that William Shakspeare, from his birth up 
 to his tenth or perhaps his eleventh year, lived in care- 
 less plenty, and saw nothing in his father's house but 
 that style of liberal housekeeping, which has ever dis- 
 tinguished the upper yeomanry and the rural gentry 
 of England. Probable enough it is, that the resources 
 for meeting this liberality were not strictly commen- 
 surate with the family income, but were sometimes 
 allowed to entrench, by means of loans or mortgages, 
 upon capital funds. The stress upon the family finan- 
 ces w as perhaps at times severe ; and that it was borne 
 at all, must be imputed to the large and even splendifi 
 
34 SHAKSPEARE 
 
 portion whicL John Shakspeare received witii his 
 wife. 
 
 This lady, for such she really was in an eminent 
 sense, by birth as well as by connections, bore the 
 beautiful name of Mary Arden, a name derived from 
 the ancient forest district ^o of the country ; and doubt- 
 less she merits a more elaborate notice than our slender 
 materials will furnish. To have been the mother of 
 Shakspeare, — how august a title to the reverence of 
 infinite generations and of centuries beyond the vision 
 of prophecy. A plausible hypothesis has been started 
 in modern times, that the facial structure, and that the 
 intellectual conformation, may be deduced more fre- 
 quently from the corresponding characteristics in the 
 mother than in the father. It is certain that no very 
 great man has ever existed, but that his greatness has 
 been rehearsed and predicted in one or other of his 
 parents. And it cannot be denied that in the most 
 eminent men, where we have had the means of pursu- 
 ing the investigation, the mother has more frequently 
 been repeated and reproduced than the father. We 
 tiave known cases where the mother has furnished all 
 the intellect, and the father all the moral sensibility, 
 upon which assumption, the wonder ceases that Cicero, 
 Lord Chesterfield, and other brilliant men, who took 
 the utmost pains with their sons, should have failed so 
 conspif-uously ; for possibly the mothers had bee!i 
 women of excessive and even exemplary stupidity. 
 In the case of Shakspeare, each parent, if we had any 
 means of recovering their characteristics, could not fail 
 to furnish a £tudy of the most profound interest ; f.nd 
 with regard to his mother in particular, if the modern 
 hypothesis be true, and if we are indeed to deduce 
 
SHAKSPEARE. 35 
 
 from her tlic stupendous intellect of her son, in that 
 case she must have been a benefacti'ess to her hus- 
 band's family, beyond the promises of fairy land or the 
 dreams of romance ; for it is certain that to her chiefly 
 this family was also indebted for their worldly comfort. 
 Mary Arden was the youngest daughter and the 
 heiress of Robert Arden, of Wilmecote, Esq., in the 
 county of Warwick. The family of Arden was even 
 then of great antiquity. About one century and a 
 quarter before the birth of William Shakspeare, a 
 person bearing the same name as his maternal grand- 
 father had been returned by the commissioners in their 
 lis' of the Warwickshire gentry ; he was there styled 
 Robert Arden, Esq., of Bromich. This was in 1433, 
 or the 12th year of Henry VI. In Henry VH.'s reign, 
 the Ardcn's received a grant of lands from the crown ; 
 and in 1568, four years after the birth of William 
 Shakspeare, Edward Arden, of the same family, was 
 sheriff of the county. Mary Arden was, therefore, a 
 young lady of excellent descent and connections, and 
 an heiress of considerable wealth. She brought to her 
 husband, as her marriage portion, the landed estate of 
 Asbies, which, upon any just valuation, must be con- 
 sidered as a handsome dowry for a woman of her 
 station. As this point has been contested, and as it 
 goes a great way towards determining the exact social 
 position of the poet's parents, let us be excused for 
 sifting it a little more narrowly than might else seem 
 ■warranted by the proportions of our present life. 
 Every question which it can be reasonable to raise at 
 all, it must be reasonable to treat with at least so much 
 of minute research, as may justify the conclusions 
 which it is made to support. 
 
36 SHAKSPEAKE. 
 
 rhe estate of Asbies contained fifty acres of arable 
 land, six of meadow, and a right of commonage. 
 Wbat ma}^ we assume to have been the value of its 
 fee-simple ? Malone, who allows the total fortune of 
 Mary Arden to have been £110 13s. 4d., is sure that 
 the value of Asbies could not have been more than one 
 hundred pounds. But why ? Because, says he, the 
 ' average ' rent of land at that time was no more than 
 three shillings per acre. This we deny ; but upon 
 (hat assumption, the total yearly rent of fifty-six acres 
 would be exactly eight guineas.'^ And therefore, in 
 assigning the value of Asbies at one hundred pounds, 
 it appears that Malone must have estimated the land 
 at no more than twelve years' purchase, which would 
 carry the value to £100 16s. ' Even at this estimate,' 
 as the latest annotator '^ on this subject justly ob- 
 serves, ' Mary Arden's portion was a larger one than 
 was usually given to a landed gentleman's daughter.' 
 But this writer objects to Malone's principle of valua- 
 tion. ' We find,' says he, ' that John Shakspeare also 
 farmed the meadow of Tugton, containing sixteen acres, 
 at the Tate of eleven shillings per acre. Now what 
 proof has Mr. Malone adduced, that the acres of 
 Asbies were not as valuable as those of Tugton ? 
 And if they were so, the former estate must have been 
 worth between three and four hundred pounds.' In 
 the main drift of his objections we concur with Mr. 
 Campbell. But as they are liable to some criticism, 
 let UH clear the ground of all plausible cavils, and then 
 see what will be the result. Malone, had he been 
 aliv^, would probably have answered that Tugton waa 
 a farm especially privileged by nature ; and that if 
 pry man contended for so unusual a rent as eleven 
 
SHAKSPEABE. 37 
 
 snillings an acre for land not known to him, tbe amis 
 ■prohandi would lie upon him. Be it so ; eleven shil- 
 lings is certainly above the ordinary level of rent, but 
 three shillings is below it. Wo contend, that foi 
 tolerably good land, situated advantageously, that is, 
 with a ready access to good markets and good fairs, 
 such as those of Coventry, Birmingham, Gloucester, 
 "Worcester, Shrewsbury, &c., one noble might be 
 assumed as the annual rent ; and that in such situa- 
 tions twenty years' purcha^Je was not a valuation, even 
 in Elizabeth's reign, very unusual. Let us, however, 
 assume the rent at only five shillings, and land at 
 sixteen years' purchase. Upon this basis, the rent 
 would be £14, and the value of the fee-simple £224. 
 Now, if it were required to equate that sum with its 
 present value, a very operose '^ calculation might be 
 requisite. But contenting ourselves with the grosa 
 method of making such equations between 1560 and 
 the current century, that is, multiplying by five, Ave 
 shall find the capital value of the estate to be eleven 
 hundred and twenty pounds, whilst the annual rent 
 would be exactly seventy. But if the estate had been 
 sold, and the purchase-money lent upon mortgage, 
 (the only safe mode of investing money at that time,) 
 the annual interest would have reached £28, equal to 
 £140 of modern money; for mortgages in Elizabeth's 
 ag3 readily produced ten per cent. 
 
 A woman who should bring at this day an annual 
 income of £140 to a provincial tradesman, living in a 
 sort of rus in urhe, according to the simple fashions of 
 rustic life, Avould assuredly be considered as an excel- 
 lent match. And there can be little doubt that Mary 
 Arden's dowry it was which, for some ten or a dozen 
 
38 SHAKSrEARE. 
 
 years succeeding to his marriage, raised her husband 
 to so much social consideration in Stratford. In 1550 
 John Shakspeare is supposed to have first settled in 
 Stratford, having migrated from some other part of 
 Warwickshire. In 1557 he married Mary Arden ; 
 in 1565, the year subsequent to the birth of his sou 
 William, his third child, he was elected one of the 
 aldermen; and in the year 1568 he became first mag- 
 istrate of the town, by the title of high bailiff". This 
 year we may assume to have been that in which the 
 prosperity of this family reached its zenith ; for in this 
 year it was, over and above the presumptions furnished 
 by his civic honors, that he obtained a grant of arms 
 from Clarencieux of the Heralds' College. On this 
 occasion he declared himself worth five hundred 
 pounds derived from his ancestors. And we really 
 cannot understand the right by which critics, living 
 nearly three centuries from his time, undertake to 
 Know his affairs better than himself, and to tax him 
 with either inaccuracy or falsehood. No man would 
 be at leisure to court heraldic honors, when he knew 
 nimself to be embarrassed, or apprehended that he 
 soon might be so. A man whose anxieties had been 
 fixed at all upon his daily livelihood would, by this 
 chase after the aerial honors of heraldry, have made 
 himself a butt for ridicule, such as no fortitude could 
 enable him to sustain. 
 
 In 1568, therefore, when his son William would be 
 moving through his fifth year, John Shakspeare, (now 
 honored by the designation of Master,) would be found 
 at times in the society of the neighboring gentry. 
 Ten years in advance of this period he was already in 
 difficulties. But there is no proof that these difficulties 
 
SHAKSPEARE. 39 
 
 had tlion reached a point of degradation, or of memo- 
 rable distress. The sole positive indications of his 
 decaying condition are, that in 1578 he received an 
 exemption from the small weekly assessment levied 
 upon the aldermen of Stratijrd for the relief of the 
 poor ; and that in the following year, 1579, he is found 
 enrolled amongst the defaulters in the payment of 
 taxes. The latter fact undoubtedly goes to prove that, 
 like every man who is falling back in the world, he 
 was occasionally in arrears. Paying taxes is not like 
 the honors awarded or the possessions regulated by 
 the Clarencieux ; no man is ambitious of precedency 
 there ; and if a laggard pace in that duty is to be 
 received as evidence of pauperism, nine tenths of the 
 English people might occasionally be classed as pau- 
 pers. With respect to his liberation from the weekly 
 assessment, that may bear a construction different from 
 the one which it has received. This payment, which 
 could never have been regarded as a burden, not 
 amounting to five pounds annually of our present 
 money, may have been held up as an exponent of 
 wealth and consideration ; and John Shakspeare may 
 have been required to resign it as an honorable distinc- 
 tion, not suitable to the circumstances of an embar- 
 rassed man. Finally, the fact of his being indebted 
 to Robert Sadler, a baker, in the sum of five pounds, 
 and his being under the necessity of bringing a friend 
 as security for the payment, proves nothing at all. 
 There is not a town in Europe, in which opulent men 
 cannot be found that are backward in the payment 
 of their debts. And the probability is, that Mast-?] 
 Sadler acted like most people who, when they sup- 
 pose a man to be going down in the world, fpo] fbeij 
 
40 SHAKSPEAEE. 
 
 res^ „'ct for tim sensibly decaying, and think it wise to 
 tran.ple him under foot, provided only in that act of 
 trampling they can squeeze out of him their own indi- 
 vidual debt. Like that terrific chorus in Spohr's 
 oratorio of St. Paul, ' Stone him to death,' is the cry 
 of the selfish and the illiberal amongst creditors, alike 
 towards the just and the unjust amongst debtors. 
 
 It M as the wise and beautiful prayer of Agar, ' Give 
 me neither poverty nor riches ; ' and, doubtless, for 
 quiet, for peace, and the latentis semita vitce, that ia 
 the happiest dispensation. But, perhaps, with a view 
 to a school of discipline and of moral fortitude, it might 
 be a mo/e salutary prayer, ' Give me riches and pov- 
 erty, ai.d afterwards neither.' For the transitorial 
 state bovween riches and poverty will teach a lesson 
 both as to the baseness and the goodness of human 
 nature, i nd will impress that lesson with a searching 
 force, siich as no borrowed experience ever can ap- 
 proach. Most probable it is that Shakspeare drew 
 some of his powerful scenes in the Timon of Athens, 
 those which exhibit the vileness of ingratitude and the 
 impassioned frenzy of misanthropy, from his personal 
 recollections connected with the case of his own father. 
 Possibly, though a cloud of two hundred and seventy 
 years now veils it, this very Master Sadler, who was 
 so urgent for his five pounds, and who so little appre- 
 hended that he should be called over tbe coals for it in 
 the Encyclopaedia Britannica, may have sate for the 
 portrait of that Lucullus who says of Timon : 
 
 ' Aftis, good lord ! a noble gentleman 
 tis, if he would not keep so good a house. Many a time and 
 jften I have dined with him, and told him on't; and come agaiq 
 io supper to him, of purpose to have him spend less; and yet ha 
 
SHAKSPEAKE. 41 
 
 woul.l embrace no counsel, toko no warning by my coming. 
 Kvcry man has his foult, and ))onesty is his; I h<ave told him 
 on't; but could never get him from it.' 
 
 For certain years, perhaps, John Shakspeare moved 
 on in darkness and sorrow : 
 
 ' His familiars from his buried fortunes 
 Slunk all away; left their false vows with him. 
 Like empty purses pick'd; and his poor self, 
 A dedicated beggar to the air, 
 With his disease of all shunn'd poverty, 
 Walk'd, like contempt, alone.' 
 
 We, however, at this day, are chiefly interested in 
 the case as it bears ujDon the education and youthful 
 happiness of the poet. Now if we suppose that from 
 15G8, the high noon of the family prosperity, to 1578, 
 the first year of their mature embarrassments, one half 
 the interval was passed in stationary sunshine, and the 
 latter half in the gradual twilight of declension, it will 
 follow that the young "William had completed his tenth 
 year before he heard the first signals of distress ; and 
 for so long a period his education would probably be 
 conducted on as liberal a scale as the resources of 
 Stratford would allow. Through this earliest section 
 of his life he would undoubtedly rank as a gentleman's 
 son, possibly as the leader of his class, in Stratford. 
 But what rank he held through the next ten years, or, 
 more generally, what was the standing in society of 
 Shakspeare until he had created a new station for 
 himself by his own exertions in the metropolis, is a 
 question yet unsettled, but which has been debated as 
 keenly as if it had some great dependencies. Upon 
 this we shall observe, that could we by possibility be 
 called to settle beforehand what rank were Irest foi 
 
42 SHAKSPEARE. 
 
 favoring the development of intellectual powers, the 
 question might wear a face of deep practical impor- 
 tance ; but when the question is simply as to a matter 
 of fact, what was the rank held by a man whose intel- 
 lectual development has long ago been completed, this 
 becomes a mere question of curiosity. The tree hao 
 fallen ; it is confessedly the noblest of all the forest ; 
 and we must therefore conclude that the soil in which 
 it flourished was either the best possible, or, if not so, 
 that anything bad in its properties had been disarmed 
 and neutralized by the vital forces of the plant, or by 
 the benignity of nature. If any future Shakspeare 
 were likely to arise, it might be a problem of great 
 interest to agitate, whether the condition of a poor man 
 or of a gentleman were best fitted to nurse and stimu- 
 late his faculties. But for the actual Shakspeare, since 
 Avhat he was he was, and since nothing greater can be 
 imagined, it is now become a matter of little moment 
 whether his course lay for fifteen or twenty years 
 through the humilities of absolute poverty, or through 
 the chequered paths of gentry lying in the shade. 
 Whatever xoas, must, in this case at least, have been 
 the best, since it terminated in producing Shakspeare ; 
 and thus far we must all be optimists. 
 
 Yet still, it will be urged, the curiosity is not illib- 
 eral which Avould seek to ascertain the precise career 
 through which Shakspeare ran. This we readily con- 
 cede ; and we are anxious ourselves to contribute any- 
 thing in our power to the settlement of a point so 
 obscure. What we have wished to protest against, is 
 the spirit of partisanship in which this question has too 
 generally been discussed. For, whilst some with a 
 fcolish affectation of plebeian sympathies overwhelm ub 
 
SHAKSPEAEE. 43 
 
 \\ith the insipid commonplaces about birth and anci(;nt 
 descent, as honors containing nothing meritorious, and 
 rush cagerl)' into an ostentatious exhibition of all the 
 circumstances which favor the notion of a himible 
 station and humble connections ; others, with equal for- 
 getfulucss of true dignity, plead with the intemperance 
 and partiality of a legal advocate for the pretensions 
 of Shalvspeare to the hereditary rank of gentleman. 
 Both parties violate the majesty of the subject. When 
 we are seeking for the sources of the Euphrates or the 
 St. Lawrence, Ave look for no proportions to the mighty 
 volume of waters in that particular summit amongst 
 the chain of mountains which embosoms its earliest 
 fountains, nor are we shocked at the obscurity of these 
 fountains. Pursuing the career of Mahommed, or of 
 any man who has memorably impressed his own mind 
 or agency upon the revolutions of mankind, we feel 
 solicitude about the circumstances which might sur- 
 round his cradle to be altogether unseasonable and 
 impertinent. Whether he were born in a hovel or a 
 palace, whether he passed his infancy in squalid pov- 
 erty, or hedged around by the glittering spears of body- 
 guards, as mere questions of fact may be interesting ; 
 but, in the light of either accessories or counter-agen- 
 cies to the native majesty of the subject, are trivial and 
 below all philosophic valuation. So with regard to the 
 creator of Lear and Hamlet, of Othello and Macbeth ; 
 to him from whose golden urns the nations beyond the 
 far Atlantic, the multitude of the isles, and the genera- 
 tions unborn in Australian climes, even to the realms of 
 the rising sun (the aiaTuXai i^fXioio,"^ must in every age 
 draw perennial streams of intellectual life, we feei 
 that the little accidents of birth and social conditi.^u 
 
44 SHAKSPEAKE. 
 
 are so imspeakably below the grandeur of the theme, 
 are so irrelevant and disproportioned to the real interest 
 at issue, so incommensurable with any of its relations, 
 that a biographer of Shakspcare at once denounces 
 himself as below his subject, if he can entertain such a 
 question as seriously affecting the glory of the poet 
 In some legends of saints, we find that they were born 
 with a lambent circle or golden aureola about their 
 heads. This angelic coronet shed light alike upon the 
 chambers of a cottage or a palace, upon the gloomy 
 limits of a dungeon, or the vast expansion of a 
 cathedral ; but the cottage, the palace, the dungeon, 
 the cathedral, were all equally incapable of adding one 
 ray of color or one pencil of light to the supernatural 
 haio. 
 
 Having, therefore, thus pointedly guarded ourselves 
 from misconstruction, and consenting to entertain the 
 question as one in which we, the worshippers of 
 Shakspeare, have an interest of curiosity, but in 
 which he, the object of our worship, has no interest of 
 glory, we proceed to state what appears to us the re- 
 sult of the scanty facts surviving when collated with 
 each other. 
 
 By his mother's side, Shakspeare Avas an authentic 
 gentleman. By his father's he would have stood in a 
 more dubious position : but the effect of municipal 
 honors to raise and illustrate an equivocal rank, has 
 always been acknowledged under the popular tenden- 
 cies of our English political system. From the sort of 
 lead, therefore, which John Shakspeare took at one 
 time amongst his fellow-townsmen, and from his rank 
 of first magistrate, we may presume that, about the 
 year 1568, he had placed himself at the head of the 
 
SHAKSPEARE. 45 
 
 Stratford community. Afterwards lie continued for 
 some years to descend from this altitude ; and tlie 
 question is, at what point this gradual degradation may 
 be supposed to have settled. Now we shall avow it as 
 our opinion, that the composition of society in Stratford 
 Was such that, even had the Shakspoare family main- 
 tained their superiority, the main body of their daily 
 associates must still have been found amongst persons 
 bclnv the rank of gentry. The poet must inevitably 
 have mixed chiefly with mechanics and humble trades- 
 men, for such people composed perhaps the »^total 
 community. But had there even been a gentry in 
 Stratford, since they would have marked the distinc- 
 tions of their rank chiefly by greater reserve of man- 
 ners, it is probable that, after all, Shakspeare, with hia 
 enormity of delight in exhibitions of human nature, 
 would have mostly cultivated that class of society in 
 which the feelings are more elementary and simple, in 
 which the thoughts speak a plainer language, and in 
 ■which the restraints of factitious or conventional de- 
 corum are exchanged for the restraints of mere sexual 
 decency. It is a noticeable fact to all who have looked 
 upon human life with an eye of strict attention, that 
 the abstract image of womanhood, in its loveliness, its 
 delicacy, and its modesty, nowhere makes itself more 
 impressive or more advantageously ' felt than in the 
 humblest cottages, because it is there brought into im- 
 mediate juxtajiosition with the grossness of manners, 
 and the careless license of language incident to the 
 fathers and brothers of the house. And this is more 
 especially true in a nation of unaffected sexual gal- 
 lantry,''* such as the English and the Gothic races in 
 general : since, under the immunity which their women 
 
46, SHAK.SPEARE. 
 
 enjoy from all servile labors of a coarse or out-of-doors 
 order, by as mucli lower as tbey descend in the scale 
 of rank, by so mucb more do tbey benefit under the 
 force of contrast with, the men of their own level. A 
 young man of that class, however noble in appearance, 
 is somewhat degraded in the eyes of women, by the 
 necessity which his indigence imposes of working under 
 a master ; but a beautiful young woman, in the very 
 poorest family, unless she enters upon a life of domestic 
 servitude, (in which case her labors are light, suited to 
 her sex, and withdrawn from the public eye,) so long 
 in fact as she stays under her father's roof, is as per- 
 fectly her own mistress and sui juris as the daughter 
 of an earl. This personal dignity, brought into stronger 
 relief by the mercenary employments of her male con- 
 nections, and the feminine gentleness of her voice and 
 manners, exhibited under the same advantages of con- 
 trast, oftentimes combine to make a young cottage beauty 
 as fascinating an object as any woman of any station. 
 
 Hence we may in part account for the great event of 
 Shakspeare's early manhood, his premature marriage. 
 It has always been known, or at least traditionally- 
 received for a fact, that Shakspeare had married whilst 
 3^et a boy, and that his wife was unaccountably older 
 than himself. In the very earliest biographical sketch 
 of the poet, compiled by Rowe, from materials col- 
 lected by Betterton, the actor, it was stated, (and that 
 8tat?ment is now ascertained to have been correct,) 
 that: he had married Anne Hathaway, 'the daughter of 
 a substantial yeoman.' Further than this nothing was 
 known. But in September, 1836, was published a 
 very remarkable document, which gives the assurance 
 of law to the time and fact of this event, yet stilly 
 
SHAKSPEAKE. 47 
 
 unless collated with another record, does nothing to 
 lessen the mystery which had previoxisly surrounded its 
 circumstances. This document consists of two jiarts ; 
 the first, and principal, according to the logic of the 
 case, though second according to the arrangement, 
 being a license for the marriage of William Shakspeare 
 with Anne Hathaway, under the condition ' of once 
 asking of the bannes of matrimony,' that is, in effect, 
 dispensing with two out of the three customary ask- 
 ings ; the second or subordinate part of the document 
 being a hond entered into by two sureties, viz. : Fulke 
 Sandells and John Rychardson, both described as 
 agricoJce or yeomen, and both marksmen, (that is, 
 incapable of writing, and therefore subscribing by 
 means of marks,) for the payment of forty pounds 
 sterling, in the event of Shakspeare, yet a minor, and 
 incapable of binding himself, failing to fulfil the con- 
 ditions of the license. In the bond, drawn up in Latin, 
 there is no mention of Shakspeare's name ; but in the 
 license, which is altogether English, his name, of 
 course, stands foremost ; and, as it may gratify the 
 reader to see the veiy words and orthography of the 
 original, we here extract the operative part of this 
 document, prefacing only that the license is attached 
 by way of explanation to the bond. ' The condition 
 of this obligation is suche, that if hereafter there shall 
 not appere any lawfull lett or impediment, by reason of 
 any precontract, &c., but that Willm. Shagspere, one 
 thone ptie,' [on the one party,] ' and Anne Hathwey 
 of Stratford, in the diocess of Worcester, maiden, may 
 lawfully solemnize matrimony together ; and in the 
 same afterwards remaine and continew like man and 
 wifFn. And, moreover, if the said Willm, Shagspere 
 
48 SHAKSPEAKE. 
 
 do not proceed to solemnization of mai'iadg witli the 
 said Anne Hatliwcy, without the consent of hir frinds; 
 — then the said obligation ' [viz., to pay forty pounds] 
 ' to be voyd and of none effect, or els to stand & abide 
 in fall force and vertue.' 
 
 What are we to think of this document ? Trepida- 
 tion and anxiety are written upon its face. The 
 parties are not to be married by a special license ; not 
 even by an ordinary license ; in that case no proclama- 
 tion of banns, no public asking at all, would have been 
 requisite. Economical scruples are consulted ; and 
 yet the regular movement of the marriage ' through 
 the bell-ropes ' '^ is disturbed. Economy, which re- 
 tards the marriage, is here evidently in collision with 
 some opposite principle which precipitates it. How is 
 all this to be explained ? Much light is afforded by the 
 date when illustrated by another document. The bond 
 bears date on the 28th day of November, in the 25th 
 year of our lady the queen, that is, in 1582. No\v 
 the baptism of Shakspeare's eldest child, Susanna, is 
 registered on the 26th of May in the year following. 
 Suppose, therefore, that his marriage was solemnized 
 on the 1st day of December; it was barely possible 
 that it could be earlier, considering that the sureties, 
 drinking, perhaps, at Worcester throughout the 28th 
 of November, would require the 29th, in so dreary a 
 season, for their return to Stratford ; after which some 
 preparation might be requisite to the bride, since the 
 marriage was not celebrated at Stratford. Next sup- 
 pose the birth of Miss Susanna to have occurred, like 
 her father's, two days before her baptism, viz., on the 
 24th of May. From December the 1st to May the 
 24th, both days inclusively, are one hundred and 
 
SIIAKSPEAUE. 49 
 
 Beventy-five days ; whicli, divided by seven, gives 
 precisely twenty-five weeks, that is to say, six months 
 short by one week. Oh, fie, Miss Susanna, you came 
 rather before you were wanted. . 
 
 Mr. Campbell's comment upon the affair is, that ' if 
 this was the case,' viz., if the baptism were really 
 solemnized on the 2Gth of May, ' the poet's first child 
 ■would appear to have been born only six months and 
 eleven days after the bond was entered into.' And 
 he then concludes that, on this assumjjtion, ' Miss 
 Susanna Shakspcare came into the world a little pre- 
 maturely.' But this is to doubt where there never was 
 Any ground for doubting ; the baptism was certainly on 
 the 26th of May ; and, in the next place, the calcula- 
 tion of six months and eleven days is sustained by 
 substituting lunar months for calendar, and then only 
 by supposing the marriage to have been celebrated on 
 tho very day of subscribing the bond in Worcester, 
 and the baptism to have been coincident with the 
 birth ; of which suppositions the latter is improbable, 
 and the former, considering the situation of Worcester, 
 impossible. 
 
 Strange it is, that, whilst all biographers have 
 worked with so much zeal upon the most barren dates 
 or most baseless traditions in the great poet's life, 
 realizing in a manner the chimeras of Laputa, and 
 endeavoring ' to extract sunbeams from cucumbers,' 
 such a story with regard to such an event, no fiction 
 of village scandal, but involved in legal documents, a 
 story so significant and so eloquent to the intelligent, 
 should formerly have been dismissed without notice of 
 any kind, and even now, after the discovery of 1836, 
 with nothing beyond a slight conjectural insinuation. 
 6 
 
50 SHA.KSPEAKE. 
 
 For our parts, we should have been the last amongst 
 the biographers to unearth any forgotten scandal, or 
 after so vast a lapse of time, and when the grave had 
 shut out all but charitable thoughts, to point any moral 
 censures at a simple case of natural frality, youthful 
 precipitancy of passion, of all trespasses the most 
 venial, where the final intentions are honorable. But 
 in this case there seems to have been something moie 
 in motion than passion or the ardor of youth. ' I like 
 not,' says Parson Evans, (alluding to FalstafF in mas- 
 querade,) ' I like not when a woman has a great peard ; 
 I spy a great peard under her muffler.' Neither do 
 we like the spectacle of a mature young woman, five 
 years past her majority, wearing the semblance of 
 having been led astray by a boy who had still two years 
 and a half to run of his minority. Shakspeare him- 
 self, looking back on this part of his youthful history 
 from his maturest years, breathes forth pathetic coun- 
 sels against the errors into which his own inexperience 
 had been insnared. The disparity of years between 
 himself and his wife he notices in a beautiful scene of 
 the Twelfth Night. The Duke, Orsino, observing the 
 sensibility which the pretended Cesario had betrayed 
 on hearing some toviching old snatches of a love strain, 
 swears that his beardless page must have felt the pas- 
 sion of love, which the other admits. Upon this the 
 dia ogue proceeds thus : 
 
 * Duke. What kind of woman is't ? 
 Viola. Of your complexion. 
 
 D'lke. She is not worth thee then. What years ? 
 Viola. I' faith. 
 
 About your years, my lord. 
 Dake. Too old, by heaven. Let still the woman take 
 
 An elder than herself: so wears she to him. 
 
SHAKSPEARE. 51 
 
 So sivays she level in her hjisband^s heart. 
 For, boy, however we do praise ourselves. 
 Our fancies are more giddy and unfirm. 
 More longing, wavering, sooner lost and won, 
 Than women's are. 
 
 Viola. I think it well, my lord. 
 
 Duke. Then M thy love be younqer than thyself. 
 Or thy affection cannot hold the bent; 
 For women are as roses, whose fair flower, 
 Being once display'd, doth fall th«t very hour.' 
 
 These counsels were uttered nearly twenty years 
 after the event in his own life, to which they probably 
 look back ; for this play is supposed to have been 
 written in Shakspcare's thirty-eighth year. And we 
 may read an earnestness in pressing the point as to 
 the inrer'ed disparity of years, which indicates pretty 
 clearly an appeal to the lessons of his personal experi- 
 ence. But his other indiscretion, in having yielded so 
 far to passion and opportunity as to crop by preliba- 
 tion, and before they were hallowed, those flowers of 
 paradise which belonged to his marriage day ; this he 
 adverts to with even more solemnity of sorrow, and 
 with more pointed energy of moral reproof, in the 
 very last drama which is supposed to have proceeded 
 from his pen, and therefore with the force and sanctity 
 of testamentary counsel. The Tempest is all but 
 ascertained to have been composed in 1611, that is, 
 about five years before the poet's death ; and indeed 
 could not have been composed much earlier ; for the 
 very incident which suggested the basis of the plot, 
 and of the local scene, viz., the shipwreck of Sir 
 George Somers on the Bermudas, (which were in con- 
 sequence denominated the Somers' Islands,) did not 
 occur until the year 1609. In the opening of the 
 
52 SHAKSPEAXIE. 
 
 fourth act, Prospero formally betrotlis his daughter to 
 Ferdinand ; and in doing so he pays the prince a well- 
 merited compliment of having 'worthily purchas'd' 
 this rich jewel, by the patience with which, for hei 
 sake, he had supported harsh visage, and other pjiiaful 
 circumstances of his trial. But, he adds solemnly, 
 
 ' If thou dost break her virgin knot before 
 All sanctimonious ceremonies may 
 With full and holy rite be ministered ; 
 
 in that case what would follow ? 
 
 ' No sweet aspersion shall the heavens let fall, 
 To make this contract grow; but barren hate, 
 Sour-ey''d disdain and discord, shall bestrew 
 The union of your bed with weeds so loathly 
 That you shall hate it both. Therefore take heed, 
 As Hymen's lamps shall light you.' 
 
 The young prince assures him in reply, that no 
 strength of opportunity, concurring with the uttermost 
 temptation, not 
 
 • the murkiest den, 
 
 The most opportune place, the strong'st suggestion 
 Our worser genius can ,' 
 
 should ever prevail to lay asleep his jealousy of self- 
 control, so as to take any advantage of Miranda's 
 innocence. And he adds an argument for this absti- 
 nence, by way of reminding Prospero, that not honor 
 only, but even prudential care of his own happiness, is 
 interested in the observance of his promise. Any 
 unhallowed anticipation would, as he insinuates, 
 
 • take away 
 The edge of that day's celebration, 
 
 When I shall think, or Phoebus' steeds are founder "d. 
 Or night kept chain'd below ; ' 
 
 that is. when even the winged hours would seem to 
 
SHAKSPEAEE. 53 
 
 move too slowly. Even tlius Prospcro is not quite 
 satisfied. During his subsequent dialogue with jXriel, 
 we are to suppose that Ferdinand, in conversing apart 
 with Miranda, betrays more impassioned ardor than 
 the wise magician altogether approves. The prince's 
 cjiresses have not been unobserved ; and thus Prospcro 
 rencM s his warning : 
 
 ' Look thou be true : do not give dalliance 
 Too much the rein : the strongest oaths are sti'aw 
 To the fire i' the blood : be more abstemious, 
 Or else — good night your yow. ' 
 
 The royal lover reassures him of his loyalty to his 
 engagements ; and again the wise father, so honorably 
 jealous for his daughter, professes himself satisfied 
 with the prince's pledges. 
 
 Now in all these emphatic warnings, uttering the 
 language ' of that sad wisdom folly leaves behind,' 
 who can avoid reading, as in subtle hieroglyphics, the 
 secret record of Shakspeare's own nuptial disappoint- 
 ments ? We, indeed, that is, universal posterity 
 through every age, have reason to rejoice in these dis- 
 appointments ; for, to them, past all doubt, we are 
 indebted for Shakspeare's subsequent migration to 
 London, and his public occupation, which, giving him 
 a deep pecuniary interest in the productions of his pen, 
 such as no other literary application of his powers 
 could have approached in that day, were eventually the 
 means of drawing forth those divine works which have 
 survived their author for our everlasting benefit. 
 
 Our own reading and deciphering of the whole case 
 is as follows. The Shakspeares were a handsome 
 family, both father and sons. This Tre assume upon 
 the following grounds : First, on the presumption 
 
54 SHAKSPEAEE. 
 
 arising out of Jolin Shakspeare's having won the favoi 
 of a young heiress in higher rank than himself; 
 socondly, on the presumption involved in the fact of 
 three amongst his four sons, having gone upon the 
 stage, to which the most ohvious (and perhaps in those 
 days a sine qua nori) recommendation would be a good 
 person and a pleasing countenance ; thirdly, on the 
 direct evidence of Aubrey, who assures us that Wil- 
 liam Shakspeare was a handsome and a well-shaped 
 man ; fourthly, on the implicit evidence of the Strat- 
 ford monument, which exhibits a man of good figure 
 and noble countenance ; fifthly, on the confirmation of 
 this evidence by the Chandos portrait, which exhibiis 
 noble features, illustrated by the utmost sweetness of 
 expression ; sixthly, on the selection of theatrical parts, 
 which it is known that Shakspeare personated, most of 
 them being such as required some dignity of form, viz., 
 kings, the athletic (though aged) follower of an ath- 
 letic yjung man, and supernatural beings. On these 
 grounds, direct or circumstantial, we believe ourselves 
 warranted in assuming that William Shakspeare was a 
 handsome and even noble looking boy. Miss Anne 
 Hathaway had herself probably some personal attrac- 
 tions ; and, if an indigent girl, who looked for no 
 pecuniary advantages, would probably have been early 
 sought in marriage. But as the daughter of ' a sub- 
 stantial yeoman,' Avho would expect some fortune in 
 his daughter's suitors, she had, to speak coarsely, a 
 little outlived her market. Time she had none to lose. 
 William Shakspeare pleased her eye ; and the gentle- 
 ness of his nature made him an apt subject for female 
 blandishments, possibly for female arts. Withoiit 
 'mputing, however, to this Anne Hathaway any thing 
 
SHA.KSPEAT1E. 55 
 
 BO hateful as a settled plot for insnaring him, it waa 
 easy eaougli for a mature woman, armed with such 
 inevitable advantages of experience and of self-posses- 
 sion, to draw onward a blushing novice ; and, without 
 directly creating opportunities, to place him in the way 
 of turning to account such as naturally offered. Young 
 boys are generally flattered by the condescending 
 notice of grown-up women ; and perhaps Shakspeare's 
 own lines upon a similar situation, to a young boy 
 adorned with the same natural gifts as himself, may 
 give us the key to the result : 
 
 ' Gentle thou art, and therefore to be won ; 
 Beauteous thou art, therefore to be assail'd ; 
 And, when a woman woes, what woman's son 
 AVill soui'ly leave her till he have prevail'd ? ' 
 
 Once, indeed, entangled in such a pursuit, any person 
 of manly feeling would be sensible that he had no 
 retreat ; that would be — to insult a woman, grievously 
 to wound her sexual pride, and to insure her lasting 
 scorn and hatred. These were consequences which 
 the gentle-minded Shakspeare could not face. He 
 pursued his good fortunes, half perhaps in heedless- 
 ness, half in desperation, until he was roused by the 
 clamorous displeasure of her family upon first discov- 
 ering the situation of their kinswoman. For such a 
 nituation there could be but one atonement, and that 
 was hurried forward by both parties : whilst, out of 
 delicacy towards the bride the wedding was not cele- 
 braled in Stratford, (where the register contains no 
 noti-^e of such an event) ; nor, as INIalone imagined, in 
 Weslon-upon-Avon, that being in the diocese of Glou- 
 cester ; but in some parish, as yet undiscovered, in the 
 diocese of Wi rcestcr. 
 
56 SHAKSPEAKE. 
 
 But now arose a serious question as to the future 
 maintenance of the young people. John Shakspeare 
 was depressed in his circumstances, and he had other 
 children besides "William, viz., three sons and a daugh- 
 ter. The elder lives have represented him as burdened 
 with ten ; but this was an error, arising out of the con- 
 fusion between John Shakspeare the glover, and John 
 Shakspeare a shoemaker. This error has been thus 
 far of use, that, by exposing the fact of two John 
 Shakspeares (not kinsmen) residing in Stratford-upon- 
 Avon, it has satisfactorily proved the name to bo 
 amongst those which are locally indigenous to War- 
 wickshire. Meantime it is now ascertained that John 
 Shakspeare the glover had only eight children, viz., 
 four daughters and four sons. The order of their 
 succession was this : Joan, Margaret, William, Gil- 
 bert, a second Joan, Anne, Richard, and Edmund. 
 Three of the daughters, viz., the two eldest of the 
 family, Joan and Margaret, together with Anne, died 
 in childhood. All the rest attained mature ages, and 
 of these William was the eldest. This might give him 
 some advantage in his father's regard ; but in a ques- 
 tion of pecuniary provision, precedency amongst the 
 children of an insolvent is nearly nominal. For tha 
 present John Shakspeare could do little for his son ; 
 and, under these circumstances, perhaps the father of 
 Anne^ Hathaway would come forward to assist the new- 
 married couple. This condition of dependency would 
 furnish matter for painful feelings and irritating words. 
 The youthful husband, whose mind would be expand- 
 ing as rapidly as the leaves and blossoms of spring-time 
 in polar latitudes, would soon come to appreciate the 
 sort of wiles by which he had been caught. The female 
 
SHAKSPEAEE. 57 
 
 mind is quick, and almost gifted with the power of 
 witchcraft, to decipher what is passing in the thoughts 
 of familiar companions. Silent and forbearing as Wil- 
 liam Shakspcare might be, Anne, his staid wife, would 
 read his secret reproaches ; ill would she dissemble 
 her wrath, and the less so from the consciousness of 
 having deserved them. It is no uncommon case for 
 women to feel anger in connection with one subject, 
 and to express it in connection mth another ; which 
 other, perhaps, (except as a serviceable mask,) would 
 have been a matter of indifference to their feelings. 
 Anne would, therefore, reply to those inevitable re- 
 proaches which her own sense must presume to be 
 lurking in her husband's heart, by others equally 
 stinging, on his inability to support his family, and on 
 his obligations to her father's purse. Shakspeare, we 
 may be sure, would be ruminating every hour on the 
 means of his deliverance from so painful a depen- 
 dency; and at length, after four years' conjugal dis- 
 cord, he would resolve upon that plan of solitary 
 emigration to the metropolis, which, at the same time 
 that it released him from the humiliation of domestic 
 feuds, succeeded so splendidly for his worldly pros- 
 perity, and with a train of consequences so vast for all 
 future ages. 
 
 Such, we are persuaded, was the real course of 
 Shakspeare's transition from school-boy pursuits to hi? 
 public career. And upon the known temperament of 
 Shakspeare, his genial disposition to enjoy life without 
 disturbing his enjoyment by fretting anxieties, we build 
 the conclusion, that had his friends furnished him with 
 ampler funds, and had his marriage been well assorted 
 or happy, we — the world of posterity — should have 
 
58 SHAKSPEAKE. 
 
 lost the whole benefit and delight which we have since 
 / ?aped from his matchless faculties. The motives 
 which drove him yrom Stratford are clear enough; but 
 what motives determined his course to London, anc" 
 especially to the stage, still remains to be explained 
 Stratford-upon-Avon, lying in the high road from Lon- 
 don through Oxford to !6irmingham, (or more generally 
 to the north,) had been continually visited by some of 
 the best comedians during Shakspeare's childhood. 
 One or two of the most respectable metropolitan actors 
 were natives of Stratford. These would be well 
 known to the elder Shakspeare. But, apart from that 
 accident, it is notorious that mere legal necessity and 
 usage would compel all companies of actors, upon 
 coming into any town, to seek, in the first place, from 
 the chief magistrate, a license for opening a theatre, 
 and next, over and above this public sanction, to seek 
 his personal favor and patronage. As an alderman, 
 therefore, but still more whilst clothed with the ofiicial 
 powers of chief magistrate, the poet's father would 
 have opportunities of doing essential services to many 
 persons connectod with the London stage. The con- 
 versation of comedians acquainted with books, fresh 
 from the keen and sparkling circles of the metropolis, 
 and filled with racy anecdotes of the court, as well as 
 of public life generally, could not but have been fasci- 
 nating, by comparison with the stagnant society of 
 Stratford. Hospitalities on a liberal scale would be 
 ofi"ered to these men. Not impossibly this fact might 
 be one principal key to those dilapidations w^hich the 
 family estate had suff"ered. These actors, on their 
 part, would retain a grateful sense of the kindness they 
 naa received, and would seek to repay it to John Shak- 
 
SHAKSPEARE. 69 
 
 apeare, now that he was depressed in his fortunes, as 
 opportunities might offer. His oldest son, growing up 
 a handsome young man, and beyond all doubt from his 
 earliest days of most splendid colloquial powers, (for 
 assuredly of him it may be taken for granted, 
 
 ' Nee licuit populis parvum te, Nile, videre,) 
 
 would be often reproached in a friendly way for 
 burying himself in a country life. These overtures, 
 prompted alike by gratitude to the father, and' a real 
 selfish interest in the talents of his son, would at length 
 take a definite shape ; and upon some clear under- 
 standing as to the terms of such an arrangement, 
 William Shakspeare would at length, (about 1586, 
 according to the received account, that is, in the fifth 
 year of his married life, and the twenty-third or twen- 
 ty-fourth of his age,) unaccompanied by wife or chil- 
 dren, translate himself to London. Later than 1586 
 it could not well be, for already in 1589 it has been 
 recently ascertained that he held a share in the property 
 of a leading theatre. 
 
 We must here stop to notice, and the reader will 
 allow us to notice with summary indignation, the 
 slanderous and idle tale which represents Shakspeare 
 as having fled to London in the character of a criminal, 
 from the persecutions of Sir Thomas Lucy of Charle- 
 cot. This tale has long been propagated under two 
 separate impulses. Chiefly, perhaps, under the vulgar 
 love of pointed and glaring contrasts ; the splendor of 
 the man was in this instance brought into a sort of 
 epigrammatic antithesis with the humility of his for- 
 tunes ; secondly, under a baser impulse, the malicious 
 pleasure of seeing a great man degraded. Accord* 
 
60 SHAKSPEAKE. 
 
 ingly, as in the case of Milton,'' ^ it has been affirmed 
 that Shakspeare had suffered corporal chastisement, in 
 fact, (we abhor to utter such words,) that he had been 
 judicially whipt. Now, first of all, let us mark the 
 inconsistency of this tale. The poet was whipped, 
 that is, he was punished most disproportionately, and 
 yet he fled to avoid punishment. Next, we arc in- 
 formed that his offence was deer-stealing, and from 
 the park of Sir Thomas Lucy. And it has been well 
 ascertained that Sir Thomas had no deer, and had no 
 park. Moreover, deer-«tealing was regarded by our 
 ancestors exactly as poaching is regarded by ns. Deer 
 ran wild in all the great forests ; and no offence was 
 looked upon as so venial, none so compatible Avith a 
 noble Robin-Hood style of character, as this very 
 trespass upon what were regarded as ferce naturce, and 
 not at all as domestic property. But had it been other- 
 wise, a trespass was not punishable with whipping ; 
 nor had Sir Thomas Lucy the power to irritate a whole 
 community, like Stratford-upon-Avon, by branding with 
 permanent disgrace a young man so closely connected 
 . with three at least of the best families in the neighbor- 
 hood. Besides, had Shakspeare suffered any dishonor 
 of that kind, the scandal would infallibly have pursued 
 him at bis very heels to London ; and in that case 
 Greene, who has left on record, in a posthumous work 
 of 1592, his malicious feelings towards Shakspeare, 
 could not have failed to notice it. For, be it remem- 
 bered, that a judicial flagellation contains a twofold 
 ignominy. Flagellation is ignominious in its own na- 
 ture, even though unjustly inflicted, arid by a ruffian ; 
 econdly, any judicial punishment is ignominious, even 
 tftough not wearing a shade of personal degradation. 
 
SHAKSPEAKE. 61 
 
 Now a judicial flagellation include? both feat ares of 
 dishonor. And is it to be imagired tha; an enemy , 
 searching with the diligence of malice for matter 
 against Shakspcare, should have failed, six years after 
 the event, to hear of that very memorable disgrace 
 which had exiled him from Stmtford, and was the very 
 occasion of his first resorting to London ; or that a 
 leading company of players in the metropolis, one of 
 whom, and a chief one, was his own townsman, should 
 cheerfully adopt into their society, as an honored 
 partner, a young man yet flagrant from the lash of thu 
 executioner or the beadle ? 
 
 This tale is fabulous, and rotten to its core ; yet 
 even this does less dishonor to Sbakspeare's memory 
 than the sequel attached to it. A sort of scurrilous 
 rondeau, consisting of nine lines, so lopthsome in its 
 brutal stupidity, and so vulgar in its exp'-ession, that 
 we shall not pollute our pagee by transcribing it, has 
 been imputed to Shakspeare ever since the days of the 
 credulous Rowe. The total point of this idiot's drivel 
 consists in calling Sir Thomas ' an asse ; ' and well it 
 justifies the poet's own remark, 'Let there be gall 
 enough in thy ink, no matter though thou WTite with a 
 goose-pen.' Our own belief is, that these lines were 
 a production of Charles II. 's reign, and applied to a 
 Sir Thomas Lucy, not very far removed, if at all, fron^ 
 the age of him who first picked up the precious filth. 
 The phrase ' parliament meraher,' we believe to b« 
 qtrite unknown in the colloquial use of Queen Eliza 
 beth's reign. 
 
 ' But, that we may rid ourselves once and for ever 
 of this outrageous calumny upon Sbakspeare's memory, 
 we shall j'ursue the story to its final stage. Evea 
 
62 SHAKSPEARE. 
 
 Malone lias been tboviglitless enough to accredit tliis 
 closing chapter, wliicb contains, in fact, such a super- 
 fetation of folly as the annals of human dulness do not 
 exceed. Let us recapitulate the points of the story. 
 A baronet, who has no deer and no park, is supposed 
 to persecute a poet for stealing these aerial deer out of 
 tliis aerial park, both lying in nephelococcygia. The 
 poet sleeps upon this wrong for eighteen years ; but at 
 length, hearing that his persecutor is dead and buried, 
 he conceives bloody thoughts of revenge. And this 
 revenge he purposes to execute by picking a hole in 
 his dead enemy's coat-of-arms. Is this coat-of-arms, 
 then, Sir Thomas Lucy's ? Why, no ; Malone admits 
 that it is not. For the poet, suddenly recollecting that 
 this ridicule would settle upon the son of his enemy, 
 selects another coat-of-arms, w^ith which his dead 
 enemy never had any connection, and he spends his 
 thunder and lightning u|)on this irrelevant object ; and, 
 after all, the ridicule itself lies in a Welshman's mis- 
 pronouncing one single heraldic term — a Welshman 
 who mispronounces all words. The last act of the 
 poet's malice recalls to us a sort of jest-book story of 
 an Irishman, the vulgarity of which the reader will 
 pardon in consideration of its relevancy. The Irish- 
 man having lost a pair of silk stockings, mentions to a 
 friend that he has taken steps for recovering them by 
 an advertisement, offering a rew^ard to the finder. His 
 friend objects that the costs of advertising, and the 
 reward, would eat out the full A'alue of the silk stock- 
 ings. But to this the Irishman replies, with a knowing 
 air, that he is not so green as to have overlooked that ; 
 End that, to keep down the reward, he had advertised 
 the stockings as worsted. Not at all less flagrant is the 
 
SHAKSrEAKE. 63 
 
 bull ascribed to Shakspearc, wlicn be is made to punish 
 a dead man by personalities meant for bis exclusive 
 ear, tbrougb his coat-of-arms, but at the same time, 
 with the express purpose of blunting and defeating the 
 edge of his own scurrility, is made to substitute for the 
 real arms some others which had no more relation to 
 the dead enemy than they had to the poet himself. 
 This is the very sublime of folly, beyond which human 
 dotage cannot advance. 
 
 It is painful, indeed, and dishonorable to human 
 nature, that whenever men of vulgar habits and of 
 poor education wish to impress us with a feeling of 
 resjiect for a man's talent, they are sure to cite, by 
 way of evidence, some gross instance of malignity. 
 Power, in their minds, is best illustrated by malice or 
 by the infliction of pain. To this unwelcome fact we 
 have some evidence in the wretched tale which we 
 have just dismissed; and there is another of the same 
 description to be found in all lives of Shakspeare, 
 which we will expose to the contempt of the reader 
 whilst we are in this field of discussion, that we may 
 not afterwards have to resume so disgusting a subject. 
 
 This poet, who was a model of gracious benignity 
 in his manners, and of whom, amidst our general igno- 
 rance, thus much is perfectly established, that the 
 term gentle v/as almost as generally and by prescrip- 
 tive right associated with his name as the affix of 
 venerahle Avith Bede, or judicious with Hooker, is 
 alleged to have insulted a friend by an imaginary 
 epitaph beginning ' Ten in the Hundred,' and suppos- 
 ing him to be damned, yet without wit enough (A\hich 
 surely the Stratford bellman could have furnished) foi 
 devising any, even fanciful, reason for such a supposi- 
 
84 SHAKSPEAKE. 
 
 tion ; upon whicli the comment of some foolish critic 
 is, ' The sharpness of the satire is said to have stung 
 the man so much that he never forgave it.' We have 
 heard of the sting in tire tail atoning for the brainless 
 head ; but in this doggerel the tail is surely as sting- 
 less as the head is brainless. For, \st. Ten in the 
 hundred could be no reproach in Shakspeare's time, 
 any more than to call a man Three-and-a-haJf-per-cent. 
 in this present year, 1838 ; except, indeed, amongst 
 those foolish persons who built their morality ujjon 
 the Jewish ceremonial law. Shakspeare himself took 
 ten per cent. 2dly. It happens that John Combe, so 
 far from being the object of the poet's scurrility, or 
 viewing the poet as an object of implacable resentment, 
 was a Stratford friend ; that one of his family Avas 
 affectionately remembered in Shakspeare's will by the 
 bequest of his sword ; and that John Combe himself 
 recorded his perfect charity with Shakspeare by leaving 
 hira a legacy of £5 sterling. And in this lies the 
 kej to the whole story. For, 3dly, The four lines 
 were written and printed before Shakspeare was born. 
 The name Combe is a common one ; and some stupid 
 fellow, AAho had seen the name in Shakspeare's will, 
 and happened also to have seen the lines in a collection 
 of epigrams, chose to connect the cases by attribiiting 
 an identity to the two John Combe's, though at war 
 with chronology. 
 
 Finall} , there is another specimen of doggerel at- 
 tributed to Shakspeare, which is not equally unworthy 
 of him, becavise not equally malignant, but otherwise 
 equally below his intellect, no less than his scholar- 
 ship ; we mean the inscription on his gravestone. 
 This, as a sort of siste viator appeal to fntm ") sextons 
 
SHAKSPEABE. 65 
 
 is worthy of the grave-digger or the parish- clcr'A, who 
 was i)robably its author. Or it may have been an 
 antique formula, like the vulgar record of ownership 
 in books : — 
 
 ' Antbony Timothy Dolthead's book, 
 God give him grace therein to look.' 
 
 Thus far the matter is of little importance ; and it 
 might have been supposed that malignity itself could 
 hardly have imputed such trash to Shakspeare. But 
 when we find, even in this short compass, scarcely 
 wider than the po'sy of a ring, room found for traducing 
 the poet's memory, it becomes important to say, that 
 the leading sentiment, the horror expressed at any dis- 
 turbance offered to his bones, is not one to which 
 Shakspeare could have attached the slightest weight ; 
 far less could have outraged the sanctities of place 
 and subject, by affixing to any sentiment whatever 
 (and, according to the fiction of the case, his farewell 
 sentiment) the sanction of a curse. 
 
 Filial veneration and piety towards the memory of 
 this great man, have led us into a digression that might 
 have been unseasonable in any cause less weighty than 
 one, having for its object to deliver his honored name 
 from a load of the most brutal malignity. Never 
 more, we hope and venture to believe, will any 
 thoughtless biographer impute to Shakspeare the asi- 
 nine doggerel with which the uncritical blundering of 
 his earliest biographer has caused his name to be di"!- 
 honored. We now resume the thread of our biog- 
 raphy. The stream of history is centuries in working 
 itself clear of any calumny with which it has once 
 been jjolluted. 
 
66 SHAKSPEARE. 
 
 Most readers will be aware of an old story, accord- 
 ing to wliicli Shakspeare gained his livelihood for some 
 time after coming to London by holding the horses of 
 those who rode to the play. This legend is as idle aa 
 any one of those which we have just exposed. No 
 custom ever existed of riding on horseback to the play. 
 Gentlemen, who rode valuable horses, would assuredly 
 not expose them systematically to the injury of stand- 
 ing exposed to cold for two or even four hours ; and 
 persons of inferior rank would not ride on horseback 
 in the town. Besides, had such a custom ever existed, 
 stables (or sheds at least) would soon have arisen to 
 meet the public wants ; and in some of the dramatic 
 sketches of the day, which noticed every fashion as it 
 arose, this would not have been overlooked. The 
 <5tory is traced originally to Sir William Davenant. 
 Betterton the actor, who professed to have received it 
 from him, passed it onwards to Rowe, he to Pope, 
 Pope to Bishop Newton, the editor of Milton, and 
 Newton to Dr. Johnson. This pedigree of the fable, 
 however, adds nothing to its credit, and multiplies the 
 chances of some mistake. Another fable, not much 
 less absurd, represents Shakspeare as having from the 
 very first been borne upon the establishment of the 
 theatre, and so far contradicts the other fable, but 
 originally in the very humble character of call-hoy or 
 deputy prompter, whose business it was to summon 
 each performer according to his order of coming upon 
 the stage. This story, however, quite as much as the 
 other, is irreconcilable with the discovery recently 
 made by Mr. Collier, that in 1589 Shakspeare was a 
 shareholder in the important property of a principal 
 T-^idon theatre. It seems destined tnat all the un- 
 
SHAKSrEAKE. 67 
 
 doubted facts of Shakspeare's life should come to us 
 tlirougli tlie channel of legal documents, which are 
 better evidence even than imperial medals ; Avhilst, on 
 the other hand, all the fabulous anecdotes not having 
 an attorney's seal to them, seem to have been the 
 fictions of the wonder maker. The plain presumption 
 from the record of Shakspeare's situation in 1589, 
 coupled with the fact that his first arrival in London 
 was possibly not until 1587, but according to the 
 earliest account not before 1586, a space of time which 
 leaves but little room for any remarkable changes of 
 situation, seems to be, that, either in requital of ser- 
 vices done to the players by the poet's family, or in 
 consideration of money advanced by his father-in-law, 
 or on account of Shakspeare's personal accomplish- 
 ments as an actor, and as an adapter of dramatic 
 works to the stage ; for one of these reasons, or for all 
 of them united, William Shakspeare, about the 23d 
 year of his age, was adopted into the partnership of a 
 respectable histrionic company, possessing a first-rate 
 theatre in the metropolis. If 1586 were the year in 
 Avhich he came up to London, it seems probable 
 enough that his immediate motive to that step was the 
 increasing distress of his father ; for in that year John 
 Shakspeare resigned the office of alderman. There is, 
 however, a bare possibility that Shakspeare might have 
 gone to London about the time when he completr d his 
 twenty-first year, that is, in the spring of 1585, 1 at not 
 earlier. Nearly two years after the birth of his eldest 
 daughter Susanna, his wife lay in for a second and a 
 last time ; but she then brought her husband twins, 
 % son and a daughter. These children were baptized 
 m February of the year 1585 ; so that Shakspeare's 
 
68 SHAKSPEAKE. 
 
 whole family of three cMlclren were born and baptized 
 two months before lie completed bis majority. Tbo 
 twins were baptized by the names of Hamnet and 
 Judith, those being the names of two amongst their 
 sponsors, viz., Mr. Sadler and his wife. Hamnet, 
 which is a remarkable name in itself, becomes still 
 more so from its resemblance to the immortal name of 
 Hamlet ^"^ the Dane ; it was, however, the real baptis- 
 mal name of Mr. Sadler, a friend of Shakspeare's, 
 about fourteen years older than himself. Shakspeare's 
 son must then have been most interesting to his heart, 
 both as a twin child and as his only boy. He died in 
 1596, when he Avas about eleven years old. Both 
 daughters survived their father ; both married ; both 
 left issue, and thus gave a chance for continuing the 
 succession from the great poet. But all the four 
 grandchildren died without offspring. 
 
 Of Shakspeare personally, at least of Shakspeare 
 the man, as distinguished from the author, there 
 remains little more to record. Already in 1592, 
 Greene, in his posthumous Groat's-worth of Wit, had 
 expressed the earliest vocation of Shakspeare in the 
 following sentence : ' There is an upstart crow, beau- 
 tified with our feathers ; in his own conceit the only 
 Shakscene in a country ! ' This alludes to Shakspeare's 
 office of recasting, and even recomposing, dramatic 
 works, so as to fit them for representation ; and Master 
 Greene, it is probable, had suffered in his self-estima- 
 tion, or in his purse, by the alterations in some piece 
 of his own, which the duty of Shakspeare to the gen- 
 eral interest of the theatre had obliged him to make. 
 In 1591 it has been supposed that Shakspeare wrotu 
 bis first drama, the Two Gentlemen of Verona ; the 
 
SHAKSPEARE. 69 
 
 least characteristically marked of all his plays, and, 
 with the exception of Love's Labor's Lost, the least 
 interesting. 
 
 From this year, 1591, to that of 1611, are just 
 twenty years, within which space lie the whole dra- 
 matic creations of Shakspeare, averaging nearly one for 
 every six months. In 1611 was written the Tempest, 
 which is supposed to have been the last of all Shak- 
 speare's works. Even on that account, as Mr. Camp- 
 bell feelingly observes, it has ' a sort of sacredness ; ' 
 and it is a most remarkable fact, and one calculated to 
 make a man superstitious, that in this play the great 
 enchanter Prospcro, in whom, ' as if conscious,'' says 
 Mr. Campbell, ' that this would be his last work, the 
 poet has been inspired to tTjpify himself as a wise, 
 potent, and benevolent magician,'' of whom, indeed, as 
 of Shakspeare himself, it may be said, that ' within 
 that circle ' (the circle of his own art) ' none durst 
 tread but he,' solemnly and forever renovmces his mys- 
 terious functions, symbolically breaks his enchanter's 
 wand*, and declares that he will bury his books, his 
 science, and his secrets, 
 
 * Deeper thau did ever plummet sound.' 
 
 Nay, it is even ominous, that in this play, and 
 from the voice of Prospero, issues that magnificent 
 prophecy of the total destruction which should one day 
 swallow up 
 
 ' The solemn temples, the great globe itself. 
 Yea all which it inherit.' 
 
 And this prophecy is followed immediately by a most 
 profound ejaculation, gathering into one pathetic ab- 
 straction the total philosophy of life : 
 
70 SHAKSPEAKE. 
 
 ' We are such stuff 
 As dreams are made of; and our little life 
 Is rounded by a sleep ; ' 
 
 that is, in effect, our life is a little tract of feverish 
 vigils, surrounded and islanded by a shoreless ocean 
 of sleep — sleep before birth, sleep after death. 
 
 These remarkable passages were probably not unde- 
 signed ; but if we suppose them to have been thrown 
 off without conscious notice of their tendencies, then, 
 according to the superstition of the ancient Grecians, 
 they would have been regarded as prefiguring words, 
 prompted by the secret genius that accompanies every 
 man, such as insure along with them their own accom- 
 plishment. With or without intention, however, it is 
 believed that Shakspeare wrote nothing more after this 
 exquisite romantic drama. With respect to the re- 
 mainder of his personal history. Dr. Drake and others 
 have supposed, that during the twenty years from 1591 
 to 1611, he visited Stratford often, and latterly once a 
 year. 
 
 In 1589 he had possessed some share in a theatre; 
 in 1596 he had a considerable share. Through Lord 
 Southampton, as a surviving friend of Lord Essex, who 
 was viewed as the martyr to his Scottish politics, there 
 can be no doubt that Shakspeare had acquired the 
 favor of James I. ; and accordingly, on the 29th of 
 May, 1603, about two months after the king's acces- 
 sion to the throne of England, a patent was granted 
 to the company of players who possessed the Globe 
 theatre; in which patent Shakspeare's name stands 
 second. This patent raised the company to the rank 
 of his majesty's servants, whereas previously they are 
 supposed to have been simply the servants of the Lord 
 
SllAKSPEAKE. 71 
 
 Cliambcrlaiii. Perhaps it was in grateful acknowledg- 
 ment of this royal favor that Shakspeare afterwards, in 
 1 GOG, paid that sublime compliment to the house of 
 Stuart, which is involved in the vision shown to Mac- 
 beth. This vision is managed with exquisite skill. It 
 was impossible to display the whole series of princes 
 from Macbeth to James I. ; but he beholds the poster- 
 ity of Banquo, one ' gold-bound brow ' succeeding to 
 another, until he comes to an eighth apparition of a 
 Scottish king, 
 
 ' AVlio bears a glass 
 Which shows him many more; and some he sees 
 Who twofold balls and treble sceptres carry; ' 
 
 thus bringing down without tedium the long succession 
 to the very person of James I., by the symbolic image 
 of the two crowns united on one head. 
 
 About the beginning of the century Shakspeare had 
 become rich enough to purchase the best house in 
 Stratford, called The Great House, which name he 
 altered to New Place ; and in 1602 he bought one 
 hundred and seven acres adjacent to this house for a 
 sum (£320) corresponding to about 1500 guineas of 
 modern money. Malone thinks that he purchased the 
 house as early as 1597 ; and it is certain that about 
 that time he was able to assist his father in obtaining a 
 renewed grant of arms from the Herald's College, and 
 therefore, of course, to re-establish his father's for- 
 tunes. Ten years of a well-directed industry, viz., 
 from 1591 to 1601, and the prosperity of the theatre 
 in which he was a proprietor, had raised him to afflu- 
 ence ; and after another ten years, improved with the 
 same success, he was able to retire with an income of 
 ;f 300, or faccording to the customary computations') iw 
 
72 SHAKSPEARE. 
 
 modern money of ill 500, per annum. Slmkspeare 
 was in fact the first man of letters, Pope tlie second, 
 and Sir Walter Scott the third, who, in Great Britain, 
 has ever realized a large fortune by literature ; or in 
 Christendom, if we except Voltaire, and two dubious 
 cases in Italy. The four .or five latter years of his life 
 Shakspeare passed in dignified ease, in profound medi- 
 tation, we may be sure, and in universal respect, at his 
 native town of Stratford; and thtre he died, on the 
 23d of April, 161 6. '8 
 
 His daughter Susanna had been married on the 6tn 
 of June of the year 1607, to Dr. John Hall, '9 a phy- 
 sician in Stratford. The doctor died in November, 
 1635, aged sixty; his wife, at the age of sixty-six, on 
 July 11, 1640. They had one child, a daughter, 
 named Elizabeth, born in 1608, married April 22, 
 1626, to Thomas Nash, Esq., left a widow in 1647, 
 and subsequently remarried to Sir John Barnard ; but 
 this Lady Barnard, the sole grand-daughter of the 
 poet, had no children by either marriage. The other 
 daughter, Judith, on February 10, 1616, (about ten 
 weeks before her father's death,) married Mr. Thomas 
 Quiney of Stratford, by whom she had three sons, 
 Shakspeare, Richard, and Thomas. Judith was about 
 thirty-one years old at the time of her marriage ; and 
 living just forty-six years afterwards, she died in 
 February, 1662, at the age of seventy-seven. Her 
 three sons died without issue ; and thus, in the direct 
 lineal descent, it is certain that no representative has 
 survived of this transcendent poet, the most august 
 amongst created intellects. 
 
 After this review of Shakspeare's life, it becomes 
 our duty to take a summary survey of his works, of 
 
SHAKSPEARE. 73 
 
 liis intellectual powers, and of his station in literature, 
 a station which is now irrevocably settled, not so much 
 (which happens in other cases) by a vast overbalance 
 of favorable suffrages as by acclamation ; not so much 
 by the voices of those who admire him up to the verge 
 of idolatry, as by the acts of those who everywhere 
 seek for his works among the primal necessities of 
 ]ifc, demand them, and crave them as they do their 
 daily bread ; not so much by eulogy openly proclaim- 
 ing itself, as by the silent homage recorded in the 
 endless multiplication of what he has bequeathed us ; 
 not so much by his own com2)atriots, who, with regard 
 to almost every other author,20 compose the total 
 amount of his effective audience, as by the unanimous 
 ' all hail ! ' of intellectual Christendom ; finally, not 
 by the hasty partisanship of his own generation, nor by 
 the biassed judgment of an age trained in the same 
 modes of feeling and of thinking with himself, — but by 
 the solemn award of generation succeeding to genera- 
 tion; of one age correcting the obliquities or peculiari- 
 ties of another ; by the verdict of two hundred and 
 thirty years, which have now elapsed since the very 
 latest of his creations, or of two hundred and forty- 
 seven years if we date from the earliest ; a verdict 
 Avhich has been continually revived and re-opened, 
 probed, searched, vexed by criticism in every spirit, 
 from the most genial and intelligent, down to the most 
 malignant and scurrilously hostile which feeble heads 
 and great ignorance could suggest when cooperating 
 with impure hearts and narrow sensibilities ; a verdict, 
 in short, sustained and countersigned by a longer series 
 of writers, many of them eminent fcr wit or learning, 
 than were ever before congregated upon any inquest 
 7 
 
74 SHAKSPEAEE. 
 
 relating to any author, be he who he might, ancient ^1 
 or modern, Pagan or Christian. It was a most witty 
 saying with respect to a piratical and knavish publisher, 
 who made a trade of insulting the memories of de- 
 ceased authors by forged writings, that he was ' among 
 the new terrors of death.' But in the gravest sense it 
 may be affirmed of Shakspeare, that he is among the 
 modem luxuries of life ; that life, in fact, is a new 
 thing, and one more to be coveted, since Shakspeare 
 has extended the domains of human consciousness, 
 and pushed its dark frontiers into regions not so much 
 as dimly descried or even suspected before his time, 
 far less illuminated (as now they are) by beauty and 
 tropical luxuriance of life. For instance, — a single 
 instance, indeed one which in itself is a world of new 
 revelation, — the possible beauty of the female char- 
 acter had not been seen as in a dream before Shak- 
 speare called into perfect life the radiant shapes of 
 Desdemona, of Imogene, of Hermione, of Perdita, of 
 Ophelia, of Miranda, and many others. The Una of 
 Spenser, earlier by ten or fifteen years than most of 
 these, was an idealized portrait of female innocence 
 and virgin purity, but too shadowy and unreal for a 
 dramatic reality. And as to the Grecian classics, let 
 not the reader imagine for an instant that any prototj'pe 
 in this field of Shakspearian power can be looked for 
 there. The Antigone and the Electra of the tragic 
 poets are the two leading female characters that classi- 
 cal antiquity offers to our respect, but assuredly not to 
 our impassioned love, as disciplined and exalted in the 
 school of Shakspeare. They challenge our admiration, 
 severe, and even stern, as impersonations of filial duty, 
 cleaving to the steps of a desolate and afflicted old 
 
SHAKSPEAKE. 75 
 
 man ; or of slsiterly affection, maintaining tlie rights of 
 a brother under circumstances of peril, of desertion, 
 and consequently of perfect self-reliance. Ipliigenia, 
 again, though, not dramatically coming before us in her 
 own person, but according to the beautiful report of a 
 spectator, pi-esents us with a fine statuesque model of 
 heroic fortitude, and of one whose young heart, even 
 in the very agonies of her cruel immolation, refused to 
 forget, by a single indecorous gesture, or so much as a 
 moment's neglect of her own princely descent, and 
 that she herself was ' a lady in the land.' These are 
 fine marble groups, but they are not the warm breath- 
 ing realities of Shakspeare ; there is ' no speculation ' 
 in their cold marble eyes ; the breath of life is not in 
 their nostrils ; the fine pulses of womanly sensibilities 
 are not throbbing in their bosoms. And besides this 
 immeasurable difference between the cold moony re- 
 flexes of life, as exhibited by the power of Grecian 
 art, and the true sunny life of Shakspeare, it must be 
 observed that the Antigones, &c. of the antique put 
 forward but one single trait of character, like the aloe 
 with its single blossom. This solitary feature is pre- 
 sented to us as an abstraction, and as an insulated 
 quality; whereas in Shakspeare all is presented in the 
 concrete ; that is to say, not brought forward in relief, 
 as by some effort of an anatomical artist ; but em- 
 bodied and imbedded, so to speak, as by the force of a 
 creative nature, in the complex system of a human 
 life ; a life in which all the elements move and play 
 simultaneously, and with something more than mere 
 simultaneity or co-existence, acting and re-acting each 
 upon the other, nay, even acting by each other and 
 through each other. In Sliakspeare's characters is felt 
 
76 SHAKSPEAKE. 
 
 for ever a real organic life, where each is for the 
 whole and in the Avhole, and where the whole is for 
 each and in each. They only are real incarnations. 
 
 The Greek poets could not exhibit any approxima- 
 tions to female character, without violating the truth of 
 Grecian life, and shocking the feelings of the audience. 
 The drama with the Greeks, as with us, though much 
 less than with us, was a picture of human life ; and 
 that which could not occur in life could not wisely be 
 exhibited on the stage. Now, in ancient Greece, 
 women were secluded from the society of men. The 
 conventual sequestration of the ywaixwrLrt?, or female 
 apartment 22 of the house, and the Mahommedan con- 
 secration of its threshold against the ingress of males, 
 had been transplanted from Asia into Greece thousands 
 of years perhaps before either convents or Mahommed 
 existed. Thus barred from all open social intercourse, 
 women could not develope or express any character by 
 word or action. Even to have a character, violated, to 
 a Grecian mind, the ideal portrait of feminine excel- 
 lence ; Avhence, perhaps, partly the too generic, too 
 little individualized, style of Grecian beauty. But 
 prominently to express a character was impossible 
 under the common tenor of Grecian life, unless when 
 high tragical catastrophes transcended the decorums of 
 that tenor, or for a brief interval raised the curtain 
 which veiled it. Hence the subordinate part which 
 women play upon the Greek stage in all but some haU 
 dozen cases. In the paramount tragedy on that stage, 
 the model tragedy, the (Edipus Tyrannus oi Sophocles, 
 there is virtually no woman at all ; for Jocasta is a 
 party to the story merely as the dead Laius or the se]f- 
 murdered Sphinx was a party, viz., by her contriba- 
 
SHAKSPEAKE. 77 
 
 aons to the fatalities of tlie event, not by anything she 
 does or says spontaneously. In fact, the Greek poet, 
 if a wise poet, could not address himself genially to a 
 task in which he must begin by shocking the sensibili- 
 ties of his countrymen. And hence followed, not only 
 the dearth of female characters in the Grecian drama, 
 but also a second result still more favorable to the sense 
 of a new power evolved by Shakspeare. Whenever 
 the common law of Grecian life did give way, it was, 
 as we have observed, to the suspending force of some 
 great convulsion or tragical catastrophe. This for a 
 moment (like an earthquake in a nunnery) would set 
 at liberty even the timid, fluttering Grecian women, 
 those doves of the dove-cot, and would call some of 
 them into action. But which? Precisely those of 
 energetic and masculine minds ; the timid and femi- 
 nine would but shrink the more from public gaze and 
 from tumult. Thus it happened, that such female 
 characters as were exhibited in Greece, could not but 
 be the harsh and the severe. If a gentle Ismene 
 appeared for a moment in contest Avith some energetic 
 sister Antigone, (and, chiefly, perhaps, by way of draw- 
 ing out the fiercer character of that sister,) she was 
 soon dismissed as unfit for scenical efi'ect. So that not 
 only were female characters few, but, moreover, of 
 these few the majority were but repetitions of mascu- 
 line qualities in female persons. Female agency being 
 seldom summoned on the stage, except when it had 
 received a sort of special dispensation from its sexual 
 character, by some terrific convulsions of the house 
 or the city, naturally it assumed the style of action 
 suited to these circumstances. And hence it arose, 
 that not woman as she difi'ered from man, but woman 
 
<8 SHAKSPEAKE. 
 
 as she resembled man — woman, in short, seen under 
 circumstances so dreadful as to abolish the effect of 
 sexual distinction, was the woman of the Greek tra- 
 gedy. 23 And hence generally arose for Shakspeare 
 the wider field, and the more astonishing by its perfect 
 novelty, when he first introduced female characters, 
 not as mere varieties or echoes of masculine charac- 
 ters, a Medea or Clytemnestra, or a vindictive Hecuba, 
 the mere tigress of the tragic tiger, but female charac- 
 ters that had the appropriate beauty of fem^ale nature ; 
 woman no longer grand, terrific, and repulsive, but 
 woman ' after her kind ' — the other hemisphere of 
 the dramatic world ; woman, running through the vast 
 gamut of womanly loveliness ; woman, as emancipated, 
 exalted, ennobled, under a new law of Christian mo- 
 rality ; woman, the sister and coequal of man, lio 
 longer his slave, his prisoner, and sometimes his rebel, 
 'It is a far cry to Loch Awe ; ' and from the Athe- 
 nian stage to the stage of Shakspeare, it may be said, 
 is a prodigious interval. True; but prodigious as it 
 is, there is really nothing between them. The Roman 
 stage, at least the tragic stage, as is well known, was 
 put out, as by an extinguisher, by the cruel amphithe- 
 atre, just as a candle is made pale and ridiculous by 
 daylight. Those who were fresh from the real mur- 
 ders of the bloody amphitheatre regarded with con- 
 tempt the mimic murders of the stage. Stimulation too 
 coarse and too intense had its usual effect in making 
 the sensibilities callous. Christian emperors arose 
 at length, who abolished the amphitheatre in its 
 bloodier features. But by that time the genius of the 
 tragic muse had long slept the sleep of death. And 
 'hat muse had no resurrection until the age of Shak- 
 
SHAKSPEAKE, 79 
 
 spearc. So tliat, notwithstanding a gulf of nineteen 
 centuries and upwards separates Shakspeare from Euri- 
 pides, fhe last of the surviving Greek tragedians, the 
 one is still the nearest successor of the other, just as 
 Connaught and the islands in Clew Bay are next 
 neighbors to America, although three thousand watery 
 columns, each of a cubic mile in dimeiisions, divide 
 them from each other. 
 
 A second reason, which lends an emphasis of novelty 
 and effective power to Shakspeare's female world, is a 
 peculiar fact of contrast which exists between that and 
 his corresponding world of men. Let us explain. The 
 purpose and the intention of the Grecian stage was not 
 primarily to develope human character, whether in 
 men or in women : human fates were its object ; great 
 tragic situations under the mighty control of a vast 
 cloudy destiny, dimly descried at intervals, and brood- 
 ing over human life by mysterious agencies, and for 
 mysterious ends. Man, no longer the representative of 
 an august will, man, the passion-puppet of fate, could 
 not with any effect display what we call a character, 
 which is a distinction between man and man, ema- 
 nating originally from the will, and expressing its 
 determinations, moving under the large variety of 
 human impulses. The will is the central pivot of 
 character ; and this was obliterated, thwarted, can- 
 celled by the dark fatalism which brooded over the 
 Grecian stage. That explanation will sufficiently clear 
 up the reason why marked or complex variety of char- 
 acter was slighted by the great principles of the Greek 
 tragedy. And every scholar who has studied that 
 grand drama of Greece with feeling, — that drama, 
 BO magnificent, so regal, so stately, — and who has 
 
80 SHAKSPEARE. 
 
 thoughtfully investigated its principles, and its differ- 
 ence from the English drama, will acknoAvledge that 
 powerful and elaborate character, character, for in- 
 stance, that could employ the fiftieth part of that pro- 
 found analysis which has been applied to Hamlet, 
 to FalstafF, to Lear, to Othello, and applied by Mrs. 
 Jamicson so admirably to the full development of the 
 Shakspearian heroines, would have been as much 
 wasted, nay, would have been defeated, and interrujjtcd 
 the blind agencies of fate, just in the same way as i^ 
 would injure the shadowy grandeur of a ghost to indi- 
 vidualize it too much. Milton's angels are slightly 
 touched, superficially touched, with diff'erences of 
 character ; but they are such diff'erences, so simple 
 and general, as are just suflacient to rescue them from 
 the rejiroach applied to Virgil's '■fortemque Gyan, for- 
 temque CJoanthem ; ' just sufficient to make them know- 
 able apart. Pliny speaks of painters who painted 
 in one or two colors ; and, as respects the angelic 
 characters, Milton does so ; he is monochromatic. So, 
 and for reasons resting upon the same ultimate philoso- 
 phy, were the mighty architects of the Greek tragedy. 
 They also were monochromatic ; they also, as to the 
 characters of their persons, painted in one color. And 
 so far there might have been the same novelty in Shak- 
 peare's men as in his women. There might have been ; 
 but the reason why there is not must be sought in 
 the fact, that History, the muse of History, had there 
 even been no such muse as Melpomene, Avould have 
 forced us into an acquaintance with human charac- 
 ter. History, as the representative of actual life, of 
 real man, gives us powerful delineations of character 
 in its chief agents, that is, in men ; and therefore it 
 
SHAKSPEAEE. 8l 
 
 is tliat Shalvspeare, the absolute creatoi of femal& 
 character, was but the mightiest of all painters with 
 regard to male character. Take a single instance. The 
 Antony of Shakspeare, immortal for its execution, 
 is found, after all, as regards the primary conception, 
 in history. Shakspeare's delineation is but the expan- 
 sion of the germ already preexisting, by way of 
 scattered fragments, in Cicero's Philippics, in Cicero'a 
 Letters, in Appian, &c. But Cleopatra, equally fine 
 is a pure creation of art. The situation and the scenic 
 circumstances belong to history, but the character be- 
 longs to Shakspeare. 
 
 In the great world, therefore, of woman, as the 
 interpreter of the shifting phases and the lunar varie- 
 ties of that mighty changeable planet, that lovely 
 satellite of man, Shakspeare stands not the first only, 
 not the original only, but is yet the sole authentic 
 oracle of truth. Woman, therefore, the beauty of the 
 female mind, this is one great field of his power. The 
 supernatural world, the world of apparitions, that is 
 another. For reasons which it would be easy to give, 
 reasons emanating from the gross mythology of the 
 ancients, no Grecian,^^ no Roman, could have con- 
 ceived a ghost. That shadowy conception, the pro- 
 testing apparition, the awful projection of the human 
 conscience, belongs to the Christian mind. And in all 
 Christendom, who, let us ask, who, who but Shakspeare 
 has found the power for effectually working this mys- 
 terious mode of being ? In summoning back to earth 
 ' the majesty of buried Denmark,' how like an awful 
 necromancer does Shakspeare appear ! All the pomps 
 and grandeurs which religion, which the grave, which 
 the popular superstition had gathered about the subject 
 
82 SHAKSPEABE. 
 
 of apparitions, are here converted to his purpose, and 
 bend to one awful effect. The wormy grave brought 
 into antagonism with the scenting of the early dawn ; 
 the trumpet of resurrection suggested, and again as an 
 antagonist idea to the crowing of the cock, (a bird 
 ennobled in the Christian mythus by the part he is 
 made to play at the Crucifixion;) its starting 'as a 
 guilty thing' placed in opposition to its majestic ex- 
 pression of offended dignity when struck at by the 
 partisans of the sentinels ; its awful allusions to the 
 secrets of its prison-house ; its ubiquity, contrasted 
 with its local presence ; its aerial substance, yet 
 clothed in palpable armor ; the heart-shaking solemnity 
 of its language, and the appropriate scenery of its 
 haunt, viz., the ramparts of a capital fortress, with no 
 witnesses but a few gentlemen mounting guard at the 
 dead of night, — what a mist, what a mirage of vapor, 
 is here accumulated, through which the dreadful being 
 in the centre looms upon us in far larger proportions, 
 than could have happened had it been insulated and 
 left naked of this circumstantial pomp ! In the Tem- 
 pest, again, what new modes of life, preternatural, yet 
 far as the poles from the spiritualities of religioa ! 
 Ariel in antithesis to Caliban ! What is most ethereal 
 to what is most animal ! A phantom of air, an 
 abstraction of the dawn and of vesper sun-lights, a 
 bodiless sylph on the one hand ; on the other a gross 
 carnal monster, like the Miltonic Asmodai, ' the flesh- 
 liest incubus ' among the fiends, and yet so far enno- 
 bled into interest by his intellectual power, and by 
 the grandeur of misanthropy ! ^^ In the Midsummer- 
 NigJWs Dream, again, we have the old traditional 
 faiiy, a lovely mode of preternatural life, remodified 
 
SHAKSrEAIlE. 83 
 
 by Shal^spcare's eternal talisman. Oberon and Titanin 
 remind us at first glance of Ariel. They approach, 
 but how far they recede. They are like — ' like, but, 
 oh, how different ! ' And in no other exhibition of 
 this dreamy population of the moonlight forests and 
 forest-lawns, are the circumstantial proprieties of fairy 
 life so exquisitely imagined, sustained, or expressed. 
 The dialogue between Oberon and Titania is, of itself 
 and taken separately from its connection, one of the 
 most delightful poetic scenes that literature affords. 
 The witches in Macbeth are another variety of super- 
 natural life, in which Shakspeare's power to enchant 
 and to disenchant are alike portentous. The circum- 
 stances of the blasted heath, the army at a distance, 
 the withered attire of the mysterious hags, and the 
 choral litanies of their fiendish Sabbath, are as finely 
 imagined in their kind as those which herald and 
 which surround the ghost in Hamlet. There we see 
 the positive of Shakspeare's superior power. But now 
 turn and look to the negative. At a time when 
 the trials of witches, the royal book on demonology, 
 and popular superstition (all so far useful, as they pre- 
 pared a basis of undoubting faith for the poet's serious 
 use of such agencies) had degraded and polluted the 
 ideas of these mysterious beings by many mean asso- 
 ciations, Shakspeare does not fear to employ them in 
 high traged)', (a tragedy moreover which, though not 
 the very greatest of his efforts as an intellectual whole, 
 nor as a struggle of passion, is among the greatest in 
 any view, and positively the greatest for scenical gran- 
 deur, and in that respect makes the nearest approach 
 of all English tragedies to the Grecian model ;) he 
 does not fear to introduce, for the same appalling eff(;c* 
 
84 SHAKSPEAKE. 
 
 as that for wliicli ^'Escliylus introduced the Eumcnides, 
 a triad of old women, concerning whom an English 
 wit has remarked this grotesque peculiarity in the 
 popular creed of that day, — that although potent over 
 winds and storms, in league with powers of darkness, 
 they yet stood in awe of the constable, — yet relying 
 on his own supreme power to disenchant as well as to 
 enchant, to create and to uncreate, he mixes these 
 women and their dark machineries with the power of 
 armies, with the agencies of kings, and the fortunes of 
 martial kingdoms. Such was the sovereignty of this 
 poet, so mighty its compass ! 
 
 A third fund of Shakspeare's peculiar power lies in 
 his teeming fertility of fine thoughts and sentiments. 
 From his works alone might be gathered a golden 
 bead-roll of thoughts the deepest, subtil est, most 
 pathetic, and yet most catholic and universally intelli- 
 gible ; the most characteristic, also, and appropriate to 
 the particular person, the sitviation, and the case, yet, 
 at the same time, applicable to the circumstances of 
 every human being, under all the accidents of life, and 
 all vicissitudes of fortune. But this subject offers so 
 vast a field of observation, it being so eminently the 
 prerogative of Shakspeare to have thought more finely 
 and more extensively than all other poets combined, 
 that we cannot wrong the dignity of such a theme by 
 doing more, in our narrow limits, than simply no- 
 ticing it as one of the emblazonries upon Shakspeare's 
 shield. 
 
 Fourthly, we shall indicate (and, as in the last case, 
 harely indicate, without attempting in so vast a field to 
 offer any inadequate illustrations) one mode of Shak- 
 speare's dramatic excellence, which hitherto has not 
 
SHAKSPEABE. 85 
 
 attracted any special or separate notice. We allude to 
 the forms of life, and natural human passion, as appar- 
 ent in the structure of his dialogue. Among the many 
 defects and infirmities of the French and of the Italian 
 drama, indeed, we may say of the Greek, the dialogue 
 proceeds always by independent speeches, replying 
 indeed to each other, but never modified in its several 
 openings by tlie momentary effect of its several termi- 
 nal forms immediately preceding. Now, in Shak- 
 spcare, who first set an example of that most important 
 innovation, in all his impassioned dialogues, each rej)ly 
 or rejoinder seems the mere rebound of the previous 
 speech. Every form of natural interruption, breaking 
 through the restraints of ceremony under the impulses 
 of tempestuous passion ; every form of hasty interro- 
 gative, ardent reiteration when a question has been 
 evaded ; every form of scornful repetition of the hos- 
 tile words ; every impatient continuation of the hostile 
 statement ; in short, all modes and formulae by which 
 anger, hurry, fretfulness, scorn, imj^atience, or excite- 
 ment under any movement whatever, can disturb or 
 modify or dislocate the formal bookish style of com- 
 mencement, — these are as rife in Shakspeare's dia- 
 logue as in life itself; and how much vivacity, how 
 profound a verisimilitude, they add to the scenic effect 
 as an imitation of human passion and real life, we need 
 not say. A volume might be written, illustrating the 
 vast varieties of Shakspeare's art and power in this one 
 field of improvement ; another volume might be dedi- 
 cated to the exposure of the lifeless and unnatural 
 result from the opposite practice in the foreign stages 
 of France and Italy. And we may truly say, that 
 were Shakspeare distinguished from them by this 
 
86 
 
 SHAKSPEAEE. 
 
 single feature of nature and propriety, he would 
 on that account alone have merited a great immor- 
 tality. 
 
 The dramatic works of Snakspeare generally ac- 
 knowledged to be genuine consist of thirty-five pieces. 
 The following is the chronological order in which they 
 are supposed to have been written, according to Mr. 
 Malone, as given in his second edition of Shak- 
 speare, and by Mr. George Chalmers in his Supple- 
 mental Apology for the Believers in the Shakspeare 
 Papers : 
 
 1. The Comedy of Errors, 
 
 2. Love's Labor's Lost, 
 
 3. Romeo and Juliet, 
 
 4. Henry VI., the First Part, 
 
 5. Henry VI., the Second Part, 
 
 6. Henry VI., the Third Part, 
 
 7. The Two Gentlemen of Verona, 
 
 8. Richard III., 
 
 9. Richard II., 
 
 10. The Merry Wives of Windsor, 
 
 11. Henry IV., the First Part, 
 
 12. Henry IV., the Second Part, 
 
 13. Henry v., 
 
 14. Merchant of Venice, 
 
 15. Hamlet, 
 
 16. King John, 
 
 17. A Midsummer-Night's Dream, 
 
 18. The Taming of the Shrew, 
 
 19. All's Well that Ends Well, 
 
 20. Much Ado about Nothing, 
 
 21. A^ You Like It, 
 
 Chalmers. 
 
 Malone 
 
 1591 
 
 1592 
 
 1592 
 
 1594 
 
 1592 
 
 1596 
 
 1593 
 
 1589 
 
 1595 
 
 1591 
 
 1595 
 
 1591 
 
 , 1595 
 
 1591 
 
 1596 
 
 1593 
 
 1596 
 
 1593 
 
 1596 
 
 1601 
 
 1597 
 
 1597 
 
 1597 
 
 1599 
 
 1597 
 
 1599 
 
 1597 
 
 1594 
 
 1598 
 
 1600 
 
 1598 
 
 159*^ 
 
 1598 
 
 1594 
 
 1599 
 
 1596 
 
 1599 
 
 1606 
 
 1599 
 
 1600 
 
 1602 
 
 1599 
 

 SHAKSPEAJRE 
 
 
 8 
 
 
 
 Chalmers. 
 
 Malone. 
 
 22. 
 
 Troilus and Cressida, 
 
 1610 
 
 1602 
 
 23. 
 
 Timon of Athens, 
 
 1611 
 
 IGIO 
 
 24. 
 
 The Winter's Tale, 
 
 1601 
 
 1611 
 
 25. 
 
 Measure for Measure, 
 
 1604 
 
 1603 
 
 26. 
 
 King Lear, 
 
 1605 
 
 1605 
 
 27. 
 
 Cymbeline, 
 
 1606 
 
 1609 
 
 28. 
 
 Macbeth, 
 
 1606 
 
 1G06 
 
 29. 
 
 Julius Ciesar, 
 
 1607 
 
 1007 
 
 30. 
 
 Antony and Cleopatra, 
 
 1608 
 
 IGOB 
 
 31. 
 
 Coriolanus, 
 
 1609 
 
 1610 
 
 32. 
 
 The Tempest, 
 
 1613 
 
 1611 
 
 33. 
 
 The Twelfth Night, 
 
 1613 
 
 1607 
 
 34. 
 
 Henry VIII., 
 
 1613 
 
 1603 
 
 35. 
 
 Othello, 
 
 1614 
 
 1604 
 
 Pericles and Titus Andronicus, although, inserted in 
 all the late editions of Shakspeare's Plays, are omitted 
 in the above list, both by Malone and Chalmers, as not 
 being Shakspeare's. 
 
 The first edition of the Works was published in 
 1623, in a folio volume entitled Mr. William Shak- 
 speare's Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies. The 
 second edition was published in 1632, the third in 
 1664, and the fourth in 1685, all in folio; but the 
 edition of 1623 is considered the most authentic. 
 Rowe published an edition in seven vols. Bvo, in 1709. 
 Editions were published by Pope, in six vols. 4to, in 
 1725 ; by Warburton, in eight vols. 8vo, in 1747; by 
 Dr. Johnson, in eight vols. 8vo, in 1765 ; by Stevens, 
 in four vols. 8vo, m 1766 ; by Malone, in ten vols. 8vo, 
 in 1 789 ; by Alexander Chalmers, in nine vols. 8vo, in 
 1811 ; by Johnson and Steevens, revised by Isaac 
 Reed, in twenty-one vols. Bvo, in 1813 ; and the Plays 
 
8d SHAKSPEAEE. 
 
 and Poems, Avith notes by Malone, were edited by 
 James Boswell, and publisbed in twenty-one vols. 8vo, 
 in 1821. Besides these, numerous editions bave been 
 published from time to time. 
 
NOTES. 
 
 Note 1. Page 9. 
 
 Mr. Campbell, the latest editor of Shakspeare's dramatio 
 works, observes that ' the poet's name has been vai'iously writteu 
 Shaxpeare, Shackspeare, Shakspeare, and Shakspere : ' to which 
 varieties might be added Shagspere, from the Worcester Marriage 
 License, published in 1836 But the fact is, that by combining 
 with all the differences in spelling the first syllable, all those in 
 spelling the second, more tlian twenty-five distinct varieties of the 
 name may be expanded, (like an algebraic series,) for the choice of 
 the curious in mis-spelling. Above all things, those varieties 
 which arise fiom the intercalation of the middle e, (that is, the e 
 muuediately before the final syilable spear,) can never be ovei- 
 looked by those who remember, at the opening of the Dunciad, 
 the note upon this very question about the orthography of Shak- 
 speare's name, as also upon the other great question about the 
 title of the immortal Satire, Whether it ought not to have been 
 the Dunceiade, seeing that Dunce, its great author and progeni- 
 tor, cannot possibly dispense with the letter e. Meantime we 
 must remark, that the first three of Mr. Campbell's variations are 
 mere caprices of the press; as is Shagspere; or, more probal)ly, 
 this last euphonious variety arose out of the gross clownish pro- 
 nunciation of the two hiccuping ' marksmen ' who rode over to 
 Worcester for the license; and one cannot forbear laughing at tho 
 bishop's secretary for having been so misled by two vai'lets, pro- 
 fessedly incapable of signing their own names. The same drunken 
 villains had cut down the bride's name Hathawaxj into Huthwcy. 
 Finnlly, to treat the matter with seriousness, Sir Frederick Mad- 
 den has shown, in his recent letter to the Society of Antiquaries, 
 that the poet himself in all probability wrote the name uniform!/ 
 8 [89J 
 
90 NOTES. 
 
 Shakspere. Orthography, both of proper names, of appellatiyes, 
 and of words universally, was very unsettled up to a period long 
 subsequent to that of Shakspeare. Still it must usually have 
 happened that names written variously and laxly by others, would 
 be written uniformly by the owners; especially by those owners 
 who had occasion to sign their names frequently, and by literary 
 people, whose attention was often, as well as consciously, directed 
 to the proprieties of spelling. Shakspeare is now too familiar to 
 the eye for any alteration to be attempted ; but it is pretty cer- 
 tain that Sir Frederick Madden is right in stating the poet's own 
 signature to have been uniformly Shakspere. It is so written 
 twice in the course of his will, and it is so written on a blank leaf 
 of Florio's English translation of Montaigne's Essays; a book 
 recently discovered, and sold, on account of its autograph, for a 
 hundred guineas. 
 
 Note 2. Page 10. 
 But, as a proof that, even in the case of royal christenings, it 
 was not thought pious to ' tempt God,' as it were by delay, Edward 
 VI., the only son of Henry VIII., was born on the 12th day of 
 October, in the year 1537. And there was a delay on account of 
 the sponsors, since the birth was not in London. Yet how little 
 that delay was made, may be seen by this fact : The birth took 
 place in the dead of the night, the day was Friday ; and yet, in 
 spite of all delay, the christening was most pompously celebrated 
 on the succeeding Monday. And Prince Arthur, the elder 
 brother of Henry VIII., was christened on the very next Sunday 
 succeeding to his birth, notwithstanding an inevitable delay, occa- 
 sioned by the distance of Lord Oxford, his godfather, and the ex- 
 cessive rains, which prevented the earl being reached by couriers, 
 or himself reaching Winchester, without extraordinai-y exertions. 
 
 Note 3. Page 17. 
 A great modern poet refers to this very case of music entering 
 ' the mouldy chambers of the dull idiot's brain ; ' but in support 
 of what seems to us a baseless hypothesis. 
 
 Note 4. Page 18. 
 Probably Addison's fear of the national feeling was a good deal 
 
NOTES. 91 
 
 strengthened by his awe of- Milton and of Dryden, both of whom 
 had expressed a homage towards Shakspeare which language 
 cannot transcend. Amongst his political friends also were many 
 intense admirers of Shakspeare. 
 
 Note 5. Page 20. 
 He who is weak enough to kick and spurn his own native liter- 
 ature, even if it were done with more knowledge than is shown 
 by Lord Shaftesbury, will usually be kicked and spurned in his 
 turn ; and accordingly it has often been remarked that the Char- 
 acteristics are unjustly neglected in our days. For Lord Shafes- 
 bury, with all his pedantry, was a man of great talents. Leibnita 
 hatl the sagacity to see this through the mists of a translation. 
 
 Note 6. Page 21. 
 Perhaps the most bitter political enemy of Charles I. will have 
 the candor to allow that, for a prince of those times, he was truly 
 and eminently accomplished. His knowledge of the arts was con- 
 siderable; and, as a pati'on of art, he stands foremost amongst 
 all British sovereigns to this hour. He said truly of himself, and 
 wisely as to the principle, that he understood English law as well 
 as a gentleman ought to understand it ; meaning that an attorney's 
 minute knowledge of forms and technical niceties was illiberal. 
 Speaking of him as an author, we must remember that the Eikon 
 Basil ike is still unappropriated ; that question is still open. But 
 supposing the king's claim negatived, still, in his controversy with 
 Henderson, in his negotiations at the Isle of Wight and elsewhere, 
 he discovered a power of argument, a learning and a strength of 
 memory, which are truly admirable; whilst the whole of his ac 
 complishments are recommended by a modesty and a humility aa 
 rare as they are unaffected. 
 
 Note 7. Page 25. 
 The necessity of compression obliges us to omit many argu- 
 ments and references by which we could demonstrate the fact, that 
 Shakspeare's reputation was always in a progressive state; allow- 
 ing only for the interruption of about seventeen years , which thia 
 poet, in common with all others, sustained, not so much from the 
 Btate of war, (which did not fully occupy four of those years,) as 
 
92 NOTES. 
 
 from the triumpli of a gloomy fanaticism. Deduct the twenty- 
 three years of the seventeenth century, which had elapsed before 
 the first folio appeared, to this space add seventeen years of fa- 
 natical madness, during fourteen of which all dramatic entertain- 
 ments were suppressed, the remainder is sixty years. And surely 
 the sale of four editions of a vast folio in that space of time was 
 an expresMon of an abiding interest. JVo other poet, except 
 Spenser, lontinued to sell throughout the century. Besides, in 
 arguing the^ase of a dramatic poet, we must bear in mind, that 
 although reMers of learned books might be diflused over the face 
 of the land, and readers of poetry would be chiefly concentrated 
 in the metropolis; and such persons would have no need to buy 
 what they heard at the theatres. But then comes the questicn, 
 whether Shakspeare kept possession of the theatres. And we ai'e 
 really humiliated by the gross want of sense which has been 
 shown, by Malone chiefly, but also by many others, in discussing 
 this question. From the Restoration to 1682, says Malone, no 
 more than four plays of Shakspeare's were performed by a prin- 
 cipal company in London. ' Such was the lamentable taste of 
 those times, that the plays of Fletcher, Jonson, and Shirley, were 
 much oftener exhibited than those of our author.' "What cant ia 
 this ! If that taste were ' lamentable,' what are we to think of our 
 cap time^ when plays a thousand times below those of Fletcher, 
 or even of Shirley, continually displace Shakspeare ? Shakspeare 
 would himself have exulted in finding that he gave way only to dra- 
 matists so excellent. And, as we have before observed, both then 
 and now, it is the very familiarity with Shakspeare, which often 
 banishes him from audiences honestly in quest of relaxation and 
 amusement. Novelty is the very soul of such relaxation ; but in our 
 closets, when we are not unbending, when our minds are in a state 
 of tension from intellectual cravings, then it is that we resort to 
 Shakspeare : and oftentimes those who honor him most, like our- 
 selves, are the most impatient of seeing his divine scenes disfigured 
 by unequal representation, (good, perhaps, in a single persona- 
 tion, bad in all the rest;) or to hear his divine thoughts mangled 
 in the recitation; or, (which is worst of all,) to hear them dis- 
 honored and defeated by imperfect apprehension in the audience, 
 or by defective sympathy. _ Meantime, if one theatre played only 
 four of Shakspeare's dramas, another played at least seven. But 
 
NOTES. 93 
 
 the grossest fault of Malone is, in fancying the numerous altera- 
 tions so many insults to Shakspeare, whereas they expressed as 
 much homage to his memory as if the unaltered dramas had been 
 retained. The substance was retained. The changes were merely 
 concessions to the changing views of sccnical propriety; some- 
 times, no doubt, made with a simple view to the revolution ef- 
 fected by Davenant at the Restoration, in bringing scenes (in the 
 painter's sense) upon the stage; sometimes also with a view to 
 the altered fashions of the andience during the suspensions of the 
 action, or perhaps to the introduction of after-pieces, by which, 
 of course, the time was abridged for the main performance. A 
 volume might be written upon this subject. Meantime let us 
 never be told, that a poet was losing, or had lost his ground, who 
 found in his lowest depression, amongst his almost idolatrous 
 supporters, a great king distracted by civil wars, a mighty re- 
 publican poet distracted by puritanical fiinaticism, the greatest 
 successor by far of that great poet, a papist and a bigoted royal- 
 ist, and finally, the leading actor of the century, who gave and 
 reflected the ruling impulses of his age. 
 
 Note 8. Page 27. 
 One of the profoundest tests by which we can measnre the con- 
 geniality of an author with the national genius and temper, is the 
 degree in which his thoughts or his phrases interweave themselves 
 with our daily conversation, and pass into the currency of the 
 language. Few French authors, if any, have imparted one phrase 
 to the colloquial idiom ; with respect to Shakspeare, a large dic- 
 tionary might be made of such phrases as ' win golden opinions,' 
 ' in my mind's eye,' 'patience on a monument,' ' o'erstep the 
 modesty of nature,' ' more honor'd in the breach than in the 
 observance,' ' palmy state,' ' my poverty and not my will con- 
 sents,' and so forth, without end. This reinforcement of the 
 general language, by aids from the mintage of Shakspeare, had 
 already commenced in the seventeenth century. 
 
 Note 9. Page 28. 
 In ftict, by way of representing to himself the system or scheme 
 of the English roads, the reader has only to imagine one great 
 lelter X, or a St. Andrew's cross, laid down from north to south, 
 
94 WOTES. 
 
 and decussating at Birmingham. Even Coventry, whicli makes 
 a slight variation for one or two roads, and so far disturbs this 
 decussation, by shifting it eastwards, is still in Warwickshire. 
 
 Note 10. Page 34. 
 And probably so called by some remote ancestor who had emi- 
 grated from the forest of Ardennes, in the Netherlands, and now 
 forever memorable to English ears from its proximity to Waterloo 
 
 Note 11. Page 36. 
 Let not the reader impute to us the gross anachronism of mak- 
 ing an estimate for Shakspeare's days in a coin which did not 
 exist until a century, within a couple of years, after Shakspeare's 
 birth, and did not settle to the value of twenty-one shillings until 
 a century after his death. The nerve of such an anachronism 
 would lie in putting the estimate into a mouth of that age. And 
 this is precisely the blunder into which the foolish forger of 
 Vortigern, &c., has fallen. He does not indeed directly mention 
 guineas; but indirectly and virtually he does, by repeatedly giving 
 us accounts imputed to Shakspearian contemporaries, in which 
 the sum total amounts to £5 5s.; or to £26 5s.; or, again, to 
 £17 17s. M. A man is careful to subscribe £14 14s., and so 
 forth. But how could such amounts have arisen unless under a 
 Becret reference to guineas, which were not in existence until 
 Charles II. 's reign; and, moreover, to guineas at their final set- 
 tlement by law into twenty-one shillings each, which did not 
 take place until George I.'s reign ? 
 
 Note 12. Page 36. 
 Thcinas Campbell, the poet, in his eloquent Remarks on the 
 Life and AVritings of William Shakspeare, prefixed to a popular 
 edition of the poet's dramatic works. London, 1838. 
 
 Note 13. Page 37. 
 After all the assistance given to such equations between differ- 
 ent times or different places by Sir George Shuckborough'a 
 tables, and other similar investigations, it is still a very difficult 
 problem, complex, and, after all, merely tentative in the results, 
 to assign the true value in such cases; not only for the obvioua 
 
NOTES. 95 
 
 reason, that the powevs of money have yaried in different direc 
 tions with regard to dififerent objects, and in different degrees 
 where the direction has on the whole continued the same, but 
 because the very objects to be taken into computation are so inde- 
 terminate, and vary so much, not only as regards century and 
 century, kingdom and kingdom, but also, even in the same cen 
 tury and the same kingdom, as regards rank and rank. That 
 "which is a mere necessary to one, is a luxurious superfluity to 
 another. And, in order to ascertain these differences, it is an 
 indispensable qualification to have studied the habits and customs 
 of the several classes concerned, together with the variations of 
 those habits and customs. 
 
 Note 14. Page 45. 
 Never was the esse quani videri in any point more strongly 
 discriminated than in this very point of gallantry to the female 
 sex, as between England and France. In France, the verbal 
 homage to woman is so excessive as to betray its real purpose, 
 viz., that it is a mask for secret contempt. In England, little is 
 said ; but, in the meantime, we allow our sovereign ruler to be 
 a woman; which in France is impossible. Even that fact is of 
 some importance, but less so than what follows. In every coun- 
 try whatsoever, if any principle has a deep root in the moral 
 feelings of the jseople, we may rely upon its showing itself, by a 
 thousand evidences amongst the very lowest ranks, and in their 
 daily intercourse, and their undress manners. Now in England 
 there is, and always has been, a manly feeling, most widely 
 diffused, of unwillingness to see labors of a coarse order, or 
 requiring muscular exertions, thrown upon women. Pauperism, 
 amongst other evil effects, has sometimes locally disturbed this 
 predominating sentiment of Englishmen; but never at anytime 
 with such depth as to kill the root of the old hereditary manli- 
 ness. Sometimes at this day, a gentleman, either from careless- 
 ness, or from overi'uling force of convenience, or from real defect 
 of gallantry, will allow a fema'!e servant to carry his i>ortmanteau 
 for him; though, after all, that spectacle is a rare one. And 
 everywhere women of all ages engage in the pleasant, nay elegant, 
 labors of the hay-field; but in Great Britain women are never 
 ■uffered to mow, which is a most athletic and exhausting labor. 
 
96 NOTES. 
 
 noi' to load a cart, nor to drive a plough or hold it. In France, 
 on the other hand, before the Revolution, (at which period the 
 pseudo-homage, the lip-honor, was far more ostentatiously pro- 
 fessed towards the female sex than at present,) a Frenchman of 
 credit, and vouching for his statement by the whole weight of his 
 name and personal responsibility, (M. Simond, now an American 
 citizen,) records the following abominable scene as one' of no 
 uncommon occurrence. A woman was in some pi'ovinces yoked 
 side by side with an ass to the plough or the harrow; and M. 
 Simond protests that it excited no horror to see the driver ilis- 
 tributing his lashes impartially between the woman and her brute 
 yoke-fellow. So much for the wordy pomps of French gallantry. 
 In England, we trust, and we believe, that any man caught in 
 such a situation, and in such an abuse of his power, (supposing 
 the case otherwise a possible one,) would be killed on the spot. 
 
 Note 15. Page 48. 
 Amongst the people of humble rank in England, who only were 
 ever asked in chui-ch, until the new-fangled systems of marriage 
 came up within the last ten or fifteen years, during the currency 
 of the three Sundays on which the banns were proclaimed by the 
 clergyman from the reading desk, the young couple elect were 
 said jocosely to be ' hanging in the bell-ropes; ' alluding perhaps 
 to the joyous peal contingent on the final completion of the 
 marriage. 
 
 Note 16. Page 60. 
 In a little memoir of Milton, which the author of this ai*ticle 
 drew up some years ago for a public society, and which is printed 
 in an abridged shape, he took occasion to remark, that Dr. John- 
 son, who was meanly anxious to revive this slander against Mil- 
 ton, as well as some others, had supposed Milton himself to have 
 this flagellation in his mind, and indirectly to confess it, in one 
 of his Latin poems, where, speaking of Cambridge, and declaring 
 that he has no longer any pleasure in the thoughts of revisiting 
 that university, he says, 
 
 • Nee duri libet usque minas preferre magistri, 
 Caeteraque ingenio non subeunda meo.' 
 
97 
 
 This last line the malicious critic would translate — ' And other 
 things insufferable to a man of my temper.' But, as we then 
 observed, ingenium is properly expressive of the intellectual 
 Constitution, whilst it is the moral constitution that suffers 
 degradatioit from personal chastisement — the sense of honor, of 
 personal dignity, of justice, &c. Indoles is tlie proper term for 
 this latter idea ; and in using the word ingenium, there cannot 
 be a doubt that Milton alluded to the dry scholastic disputations, 
 which were shocking and odious to his fine poetical genius. If, 
 therefore, the vile story is still to be kept up in order to dishonor 
 a great man, at any rate let it not in future be pretended that 
 any countenance to such a slander can be drawn from the con- 
 fessions of the poet himself. 
 
 Note 17. Page 68. 
 And singular enough it is, as well as interesting, that Shak- 
 speare had so entirely superseded to his own ear and memory the 
 name Haninet by the dramatic name of Hamlet, that in writing 
 his will, he actually misspells the name of his friend Sadler, and 
 calls him Hamlet. His son, however, who should have familiar- 
 ized the true name to his ear, had then been dead for twenty 
 years. 
 
 Note 18. Page 72. 
 ' I have heard that Mr. Shakspeare was a natural wit, without 
 any art at all. Hee frequented the plays all his younger time, 
 but in his elder days lived at Startford, and supplied the stage 
 with two plays every year, and for itt had an allowance so large, 
 that he spent at the rate of £1,000 a year, as I have heard. 
 Shakespeare, Drayton, and Ben Jonson, had a merie meeting, 
 and it seems drank too hard, for Shakespear died of a feavour 
 there contracted.' (Diary of the Rev. John Ward, A. M., Vicar 
 of Stratford-upon-Avon, extending from 1648 to 1679, p. 183. 
 Loud. 1839, 8vo.) 
 
 Note 19. Page 72. 
 It is naturally to bfi supposed thai Dr. Hall would attend the 
 sick bed cf his father-in-law ; and the discovery of this gentle- 
 man's medical diary promised some gratifi'^ation to our curiosity 
 9 
 
98 NOTES. 
 
 as to tlie cause of Shakspeare's death. Unforl unately, it doej 
 not commence until tlie year 1617. 
 
 Note 20. Page 73. 
 An exception ought perhaps to be made for Sir Walter Scott 
 and for Cervantes; but with regard to all other writers, Dante, 
 suppose, or Ariosto amongst Italians, Camoens amongst tliose of 
 Portugal, Schiller amongst Germans, however ably they may 
 have been naturalized in foreign languages, as all of those here 
 mentioned (excepting only Ariosto) have in one part of their 
 works been most powerfully naturalized in English, it still re- 
 mains tiue, (and the very sale of the books is proof sufficient,) 
 that an alien author never does take root in the general sympa- 
 thies out of his own country; he takes his station in libraries, ho 
 is read by the man of learned leisure, he is known and valued by 
 the refined and the elegant, but he is not (what Shakspeare is for 
 Germany and America) in any proper sense a popular favorite. 
 
 Note 21. Page 74. 
 It will occur to many readers, that perhaps Homer may furnish 
 the sole exception to this sweeping assertion. Any but Homer ia 
 clearly and ludicrously below the level of the competition; but 
 even Homer, ' with his tail on,' (as the Scottish Highlanders 
 say of their chieftains when belted by their ceremonial retinues,) 
 musters nothing like the force which already follows Shak- 
 speare; and be it remembered, that, Homer sleeps and has long 
 slept as a subject of criticism or commentary, while in Germany 
 as well as England, and tiow even in France, the gathering of 
 wits to the vast equipage of Shakspeare is advancing in an accel- 
 erated ratio. There is, in fact, a great delusion cui-rent upon 
 this subject. Innumerable references to Homer, and brief critical 
 remarks on this or that pretension of Homer, this or that scene, 
 this or that passage, lie scattered over literature ancient and 
 modern; but the express works dedicated to the separate service 
 of Homer are, after all, not many. In Greek we have only the 
 large Commentary of Eustathius, and the Scholia of Didymus, 
 &c. ; in French little or nothing before the prose translation of 
 the seventeenth century, which Pope esteemed * elegant,' and the 
 ekirmishings of Madame Dacier, La ]Motte, &c. ; in English, be- 
 
NOTES. 9Q 
 
 sides the various translations and their prefiices, (which, by tho 
 way, began as early as 1555,) nothing of much importance until 
 tlie elaborate preface of Pope to the Iliad, and his elaborate pos1> 
 script to the Odyssey — nothing certainly before that, and very 
 little uidced since that, except Wood's Essay on the Life and 
 Genius of Homer. On the other hand, of the books written in 
 illustration or investigation of Shakspeare, a very considerable 
 library might be formed in England, and another in Germany. 
 
 Note 22. Page 76. 
 Apartment is here used, as the reader will observe, in its true 
 and continental acceptation, as a division or compartment of a 
 house including many rooms; a suite of chambers, but a suite 
 which is partitioned off, (as in palaces,) not a single chamber; a 
 sense so commonly and so erroneously given to this word in 
 England. 
 
 Note 23. Page 78. 
 And hence, by parity of reason, under the opposite circum- 
 staiices, under the circumstances which, instead of abolishing, 
 most emphatically drew forth the sexual distinctions, viz., in the 
 comic aspects of social intercourse, the reason that we see no 
 women on the Greek stage; the Greek Comedy, unless when it 
 afifeots the extravagant fun of farce, rejects women. 
 
 Note 24 Page 81. 
 It may be thought, however, by some readers, that ^schylus, 
 in his fine phantom of Darius, has approached the English ghost. 
 As a foreign ghost we would wish (and we are sure that our ex- 
 cellent readers would wish) to show every courtesy and attention 
 to this apparition of Darius. It has the advantage of being royal, 
 an advantage which it shares with the ghost of the royal Dane. 
 Yet how different, how removed by a total world, from that or 
 any of Shakspeare's ghosts ! Take that of Banquo, for instance. 
 llow shado^vy, how unreal, yet how real ! Darius is a mere state 
 ghost — a diplomatic ghost. But Banquo — he exists only for 
 Macbeth; the guests do not see him, yet how solemn, how real, 
 how heart-searching he is. 
 
100 NOTES. 
 
 Note 25. Page 82. 
 Caliban has not yet been thoroughly fathomed. For all Shak- 
 epeare's great creations are like works of nature, subjects of inex- 
 haustible study. It was this character of whom Charles I. and 
 some of his ministers expressed such fervent admiration; and, 
 among otlier circumstances, most justly they admired the new 
 language almost with which he is endowed, for the purpose of 
 expressing his fiendish and yet carnal thoughts of hatred to his 
 master. Caliban is evidently not meant for scorn, but for abom- 
 ination mixed with fear and partial respect. He is purposely 
 brought into contrast with the drunken Trinculo and Stephano, 
 with an advantageous result. He is much more intellectual than 
 either, uses a more elevated language, not disfigured by vulgar- 
 isms, and is not liable to the low passion for plunder as they are. 
 He is mortal, doubtless, as his ' dam ' (for Shakspeare will not 
 call her mother) Sycorax. But he inherits from her such quali- 
 ties of power as a witch could be supposed to bequeath. He 
 trembles indeed before Prospero ; but that is, as we are to under- 
 stand , through the moral superiority of Prospero in Christian 
 wisdom; for when he finds himself in the presence of dissolute 
 and unprincipled men, he rises at once into the dignity of intel- 
 lectual power. 
 
POPE 
 
 Alexander Pope, tlae most brilliant of all wita 
 wlio have at any period applied themselves to tlie 
 poetic treatment of human manners, to the selecting 
 from the play of himian character what is picturesque, 
 or the arresting what is fugitive, was born in the city 
 of London on the 21st^ day of May, in the memorable 
 year 1688 ; about six months, therefore, before the 
 landing of the Prince of Orange, and the opening of 
 the great revolution which gave the final ratification to 
 all previous revolutions of that tempestuous century. 
 By the ' city ' of London the reader is to understand 
 us as speaking with technical accuracy of that district, 
 which lies within the ancient walls and the jurisdiction 
 of the lord mayor. The parents of Pope, there is 
 good reason to think, were of ' gentle blood,' which is 
 the expression of the poet himself when describing 
 them in verse. His mother was so undoubtedly ; and 
 her illustrious son, in speaking of her to Lord Harvey, 
 at a time when any exaggeration was open to an easy 
 refutation, and writing in a spirit most likely to pro- 
 voke it, does not scruple to say, with a tone of digni- 
 fied haughtiness not unbecoming the situation of a 
 filial champion on behalf of an insulted mother, that 
 by birth and descent she wa? not below that young 
 lady, (one of the two beautifui Miss Lepels,) whom his 
 
 [101] 
 
102 POPE. 
 
 lordship had selected from all the choir of court heau- 
 ties as the future mother of his children. Of Pope's 
 extraction and immediate lineage for a space of two 
 generations we know enough. Beyond that we know 
 little. Of this little a part is duhious ; and what we 
 are disposed to receive as not dubious, rests chiefly on 
 his own authority. In the prologue to his Satires, 
 having occasion to notice the lampooners of the times, 
 who had represented his father as ' a mechanic, a 
 hatter, a farmer, nay a bankrupt,' he feels himself 
 called upon to state the truth about his parents ; and 
 naturally much more so at a time when the low scur- 
 rilities of these obscure libellers had been adopted, 
 accredited, and difi"used by persons so distinguished in 
 all points of personal accomplishment and rank as 
 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Lord Harvey : 
 ' hard as thy heart,'' was one of the lines in their joint 
 pasquinade, ' hard as thy hearty and as thy birth 
 ohscure.' Accordingly he makes the following formal 
 statement : ' Mr. Pope's father was of a gentleman's 
 family in Oxfordshire, the head of which was the Earl 
 of Downe. His mother was the daughter of William 
 Turner, Esq., of York. She had three brothers, one 
 of whom was killed ; another died in the service of 
 King Charles [meaning Charles L] ; the eldest, follow- 
 ing his fortunes, and becoming a general officer in 
 Spain, left her what estate remained after the seques- 
 irations and forfeitures of her family.' The seques- 
 trations here spoken of were those inflicted by the 
 commissioners for the parliament ; and usually they 
 levied a fifth, or even two fifths, according to the 
 apparent delinquency of the parties. But in such 
 cases two great diflferences arose in the treatment of 
 
POPE, 103 
 
 the royalists ; first, that the report was colored accord- 
 ing to tlie interest which a man possessed, or other 
 private means for biassing the commissioners ; secondly, 
 that often, when money could not be raised on mort- 
 gage to meet the seqiiestration, it became neccessary 
 to sell a family estate suddenly, and therefore in those 
 times at great loss ; so that a nominal fifth might be 
 depressed by favor to a tenth, or raised by the neces- 
 sity of selling to a half. And hence might arise the 
 small dowry of Mrs. Pope, notwithstanding the family 
 estate in Yorkshire had centred in her person. But, 
 by the way, we see from the fact of the eldest brother 
 having sought service in Spain, that Mrs. Pope was a 
 Papist ; not, like her husband, by conv,;rsion, but by 
 hereditary faith. This account, as publicly thrown 
 out in the way of challenge by Pope, was, however, 
 sneered at by a certain Mr. Pottinger of those days, 
 who, together with his absurd name, has been safely 
 transmitted to posterity in connection with this single 
 feat of'having contradicted Alexander Pope. We read 
 in a diary published by the Microcosm, ' Met a large 
 hat, with a. man under it.' And so, here, we cannot so 
 properly say that Mr. Pottinger brings down the con- 
 tradiction to our times, as that the contradiction brings 
 down Mr. Pottinger. ' Cousin Pope,' said Pottinger, 
 ' had made himself out a fine pedigree, but he wondered 
 where he got it.' And he then goes on to plead in 
 abatement of Pope's pretensions, ' that an old maiden 
 aunt, equally related,' (that is, standing in the same re- 
 lation to himself and to the poet,) ' a great genealogist, 
 who was always talking of her family, never mentioned 
 this circumstance.' And again we are told, from 
 another quarter, that the Earl of Guildford, after ex- 
 
104 POPE. 
 
 press investigation of this matter, ' was sure that,' 
 amongst the descendants of the Earls of Dc wne, ' there 
 was none of the name of Pope.' How it was that 
 Lord Guildford came to have any connection with the 
 affair, is not stated by the biographers of Pope; but 
 we have ascertained that, by marriage with a female 
 descendant from the Earls of Downe, he had come 
 into possession of their English estates. 
 
 Finally, though it is rather for the honor of the 
 Earls of Downe than of Pope to make out the connec- 
 tion, we must observe that Lord Guildford's testimony, 
 if ever given at all, is simply negative; he had found 
 no proofs of the connection, but he had not found any 
 proofs to destroy it ; whilst, on the other hand, it 
 ought to be mentioned, though unaccountably over- 
 looked, by all previous biographers, that one of Pope's 
 anonymous enemies, who hated him personally, but 
 was apparently master of his family history, and too 
 honorable to belie his own convictions, expressly 
 affirms of his own authority, and without reierence 
 to any claim put forward by Pope, that he was de- 
 scended from a junior branch of the Downe family. 
 Which testimony has a double value ; first as corrob- 
 orating the probability of Pope's statement viewed in 
 the light of a fact ; and, secondly, as corroborating 
 that same statement viewed in the light of a current 
 story, true or false, and not as a disingenuous fiction 
 put forward by Pope to confute Lord Harvey. 
 
 It is probable to us, that the Popes, who had been 
 originally transplanted from England to Ireland, had in 
 the person of some cadet been re-transplanted to Eng- 
 land ; and that having in that way been disconnected 
 from all personal recognition, and all local memorials 
 
POPE. 105 
 
 of the capital house, hy this sort of postliminium, the 
 junior branch had ceased to cherish the honor of a 
 descent which had now divided from all direct advan- 
 tage. At all events, the researches of Pope's biogra- 
 phers have not been able to trace him farther back in 
 the paternal line than to his grandfather ; and he 
 (which is odd enough, considering the popery of his 
 descendants) \vas a clergyman of the established 
 church in Hampshire. This grandfather had two sons. 
 Of the eldest nothing is recorded beyond the three 
 facts, that he went to Oxford, that he died there, and 
 that he spent the family estate. ^ The younger son, 
 whose name was Alexander, had been sent when 
 young, in some commercial character, to Lisbon ; 3 
 and there it was, in that centre of bigotry, that he 
 became a sincere and most disinterested Catholic. 
 He returned to England ; married a Catholic young 
 widow ; and became the father of a second Alexander 
 Pope, ullra Sauromatas notus et Antipodes. 
 
 By his own account to Spence, Pope learned ' very 
 early to read ; ' and writing he taught himself ' by 
 copying from printed books ; ' all which seems to argue, 
 that as an only chUd, with an indolent father and a 
 most indulgent mother, he was not molested with 
 much schooling in his infancy. Only one adventure is 
 recorded of his childhood, viz., that he was attacked 
 by a cow, thrown down, and wounded in the throat. 
 
 Pope escaped this disagreeable kind of vaccination 
 without serious injury, and was not farther tormented 
 by cows or schoolmasters until he was about eight 
 years old, when the family priest, that is, we presume, 
 the confessor of his parents, taught him, agreeably to 
 the Jesuit system, the rudiments of Greek and Latin 
 
106 POPE. 
 
 concurrently. This priest was named Banister ; and 
 his name is frequently employed, together with other 
 fictitious names, by way of signature to the notes in 
 the Dunciad, an artifice which was adopted for the 
 sake of giving a characteristic variety to the notes, 
 according to the tone required for the illustration of 
 the text. From his tuition Pope was at length dis- 
 missed to a Catholic school at Twyford, near Winches- 
 ter. The selection of a school in this neighborhood, 
 though certainly the choice of a Catholic family Avas 
 much limited, points apparently to the old Hampshire 
 connection of his father. Here an incident occurred 
 which most powerfully illustrates the original and con- 
 stitutional determination to satire of this irritable poet. 
 He knew himself so accurately, that in after times, 
 half by way of boast, half of confession, he says, 
 
 ' But touch me, and no Minister so sore : 
 Whoe'er offends, at some unlucky time 
 Slides into Terse and hitches in a rhyme, 
 Sacred to ridicule his whole life long. 
 And the sad burthen of some merry song.' 
 
 Already, it seems, in childhood he had the same 
 irresistible instinct, victorious over the strongest sense 
 of personal danger. He wrote a bitter satire upon the 
 presiding pedagogue, was brutally punished for this 
 youthful indiscretion, and indignantly removed by his 
 parents from the school. Mr. Roscoe speaks of Pope's 
 personal experience as necessarily unfavorable to pub- 
 lic schools ; but in reality he knew nothing of public 
 schools. All the establishments for Papists were nar- 
 row, and suited to their political depression ; and his 
 parents were too sincerely anxious for their son's 
 religious principles to risk the contagion of Protestant 
 association by sending him elsewhere. • 
 
POPE. 107 
 
 From the scene"* of his disgrace and illiberal punish- 
 ment, he passed, according to the received accounts, 
 under the tuition of several other masters in rapid 
 succession. But it is the less necessary to trouble the 
 reader \\ith their names, as Pope himself assures us, 
 that he learned nothing from any of them. To Ban- 
 ister he had been indebted for such trivial elements of 
 a schoolboy's learning as he possessed at all, excepting 
 those which he had taught himself. And upon him- 
 self it was, and his own admirable faculties, that he 
 was now finally thrown for the rest of his education, 
 at an age so immature that many boys are then first 
 entering their academic career. Pope is supposed to 
 have been scarcely twelve years old when he assumed 
 the office of self-tuition, and bade farewell for ever to 
 schools and tutors. 
 
 Such a phenomenon is at any rate striking. It is 
 the more so, under the circumstances which attended 
 the plan, and under the results which justified its exe- 
 cution. It seems, as regards the plan, hardly less 
 strange that prudent parents should have acquiesced 
 '.n a scheme of so much peril to his intellectual inter- 
 ests, than that the son, as regards the execution, should 
 have justified their confidence by his final success. 
 More especially this confidence surprises us in the 
 father. A doating mother might shut her eyes to all 
 remote evils in the present gratification to her affec- 
 tions ; but Pope's father was a man of sense and prin- 
 ciple ; he must have weighed the risks besetting a boy 
 left to his own intellectual guidance ; and to those 
 risks he would allow the more weight from his own 
 conscious defect of scholarship and inability to guide 
 or even to accompany his son's studies. He could 
 
108 POPE. 
 
 neither direct the proper choice of studies ; nor in any 
 one stud)", taken separately, could he suggest the propar 
 choice of books. 
 
 The case we apprehend to have been this. Alexan- 
 der Pope, the elder, was a man of philosophical desires 
 and unambitious character. Quiet and seclusion and 
 innocence of life, — these were what he affcctod for 
 himself; and that which had been found available for 
 his own happiness, he might reasonably wish for his 
 son. The two hinges upon which his plans may be 
 supposed to have turned, were, first, the political 
 degradation of his sect ; and, secondly, the fact that 
 his son was an only child. Had he been a Protestant, 
 or had he, though a Papist, been burthened with a 
 large family of children, he would doubtless have 
 pursued a different course. But to him, and, as he 
 sincerely hop2d, to his son, the strife after civil honors 
 was sternly barred. Apostasy only could lay it open. 
 And, as the sentiments of honor and duty in this point 
 fell in with the vices of his temperament, high princi- 
 ple concurring with his constitutional love of ease, we 
 need liot wonder that he should early retire from com- 
 merce with a very moderate competence, or that he 
 should suppose the same fortune sufficient for one who 
 was to stand in the same position. This son was from 
 his birth deformed. That made it probable that he 
 might not marry. If he should, and happened to have 
 children, a small family would find an adequate pro- 
 vision in the patrimonial funds ; and a large one at the 
 worst could only throw him upon the same commerciz.l 
 exertions to which he had been obliged himself. The 
 Roman Catholics, indeed, were just then situated as our 
 modern Quakers are. Law to the one, as conscience 
 
POPE. 109 
 
 to the otlicr, closed all modes of active employment 
 except that of commercial industry. Either his sou, 
 therefore, would be a rustic recluse, or, like himself, 
 he Avould be a merchant. 
 
 With such prospects, what need of an elaborate 
 education ? And where was such an education to be 
 sought ? At the petty establishments of the suffering 
 Catholics, the instruction, as he had found experimen- 
 tally, was poor. At the great national establishments 
 his son would be a degraded person ; one who was 
 permanently repelled from every arena of honor, and 
 sometimes, as in cases of public danger, was banished 
 from the capital, deprived of his house, left defenceless 
 against common ruffians, and rendered liable to the 
 control of every village magistrate. To one in these 
 circumstances solitude was the wisest position, and the 
 best qualification, for that was an education that would 
 furnish aids to solitary thought. No need for brilliant 
 accomplishments to him who must never display them ; 
 forensic arts, pulpit erudition, senatorial eloquence, 
 academical accomplishments — these would be lost to 
 one against whom the courts, the pulpit, the senate, the 
 universities, were closed. Nay, by possibility worse 
 than lost ; they might prove so many snares or positive 
 bribes to apostasy. Plain English, therefore, and the 
 high thinking of his compatriot authors, might prove 
 the best position for the mind of an English Papist 
 destined to seclusion. 
 
 Such are the considerations under which we read 
 and interpret the conduct of Pope's parents ; and they 
 lead us to regard as wise and conscientious a scheme 
 •which, under ordinary circumstances, would have been 
 pitiably foolish. And be it remembered, that to these 
 
no POPE. 
 
 considerations, derived exclusively from the civil cir- 
 cumstances of the family, were superadded othera 
 derived from the astonishing prematurity of the indi- 
 vidual. That boy who could write at twelve years of 
 age the beautiful and touching stanzas on Solitude, 
 might well be trusted with the superintendence of his 
 own studies. And the stripling of sixteen, who could 
 so far transcend in good sense the accomplished states- 
 men or men of the world with whom he afterwards 
 corresponded, might challenge confidence for such a 
 choice of books as v/ould best promote the develop- 
 ment of his own faculties. 
 
 In reality, one so finely endowed as Alexander Pope, 
 could not easily lose his way in the most extensive or 
 ill-digested library. And though he tells Atterbury, 
 that at one time he abused his opportunities by reading 
 controversial divinity, we may be sure that his own 
 native activities, and the elasticity of his mind, would 
 speedily recoil into a just equilibrium of study, under 
 wider and happier opportunities. Reading, indeed, for 
 a person like Pope, is rather valuable as a means of 
 exciting his own energies and of feeding his own 
 sensibilities, than for any direct acquisitions of know- 
 ledge, or for any trains of systematic research. All 
 men are destined to devour n^.uch rubbish between the 
 cradle and the grave ; and doubtless the man who is 
 wisest in the choice of his books, will have read many 
 a page before he dies, that a thoughtful review would 
 pronounce worthless. This is the fate jf all men. 
 But the reading of Pope, as a general result or mea- 
 sure of his judicious choice, is best justified in his 
 writings. They show him well furnished with what- 
 soever he wanted for matter or for en^bellishment, for 
 
POPE. Ill 
 
 H-gumcn'- or illustration, for example and model, or for 
 direct and explicit imitation. 
 
 Possibly, as we have already suggested, within the 
 range of English literature Pope might have found all 
 that he wanted. But variety the widest has its uses ; 
 and, for the extension of his influence with the polished 
 classes amongst whom he lived, he did wisely tD add 
 other languages ; and a question has thus arisen with 
 regard to the extent of Pope's attainments as a self- 
 taught linguist. A man, or even a boy, of great 
 originality, may happen to succeed best, in working 
 his own native mines of thought, by his unassisted ener- 
 gies. Here it is granted that a tutor, a guide, or even 
 a companion, may be dispensed with, and even bene- 
 ficially. But in the case of foreign languages, in at- 
 taining this machinery of literature, though anomalies 
 even here do arise, and men there are, like Joseph 
 Scaliger, who form ther own dictionaries and gram- 
 mars in the mere process of reading an unknown 
 language, by far the major part of students will lose 
 their time by rejecting the aid of tutors. As there has 
 been much difl'erence of opinion with regard to Pope's 
 skill in languages, we shall briefly collate and bring 
 into one focus the stray notices. 
 
 As to the French, Voltaire, who knew Pope person- 
 ally, declared that he ' could hardly read it, and spoke 
 not one syllable of the language.' But perhaps Vol- 
 taire might dislike Pope ? On the contrary, he was 
 acquainted with his works, and admired them to the 
 very level of their merits. Speaking of him after 
 death to Fi ederick of Prussia, he prefers him to 
 Horace and Boileau, asserting that, by co'n2)ari.son 
 with them. 
 
112 POPE. 
 
 'Pope approfondit ce qu'ils ont effleure. 
 D'un esprit plus hardi, d'un pas plus assurfe, 
 II porta le flambeau dans I'abime de I'etre; 
 Et rhomme uvec lui seul apprit i se connitre. 
 L'art quelquefois frivole, et quelquefois divine, 
 L'art des vers est dans Pope utile au genre humain.' 
 
 This is not a wise account of Pope, for it does not 
 abstract the characteristic feature of his power ; but it 
 id a very kind one. And of course Voltaire could not 
 have meant any unkindness in denying his knowledge 
 of French. But he was certainly wrong. Pope, in 
 Jds presence, would decline to speak or to read a 
 language of which the pronunciation was confessedly 
 beyond him. Or, if he did, the impression left would 
 be still worse. In fact, no man ever will pronounce or 
 talk a language which he does not use, for some part 
 of every day, in the real intercourse of life. But that 
 Pope read French of an ordinary cast with fluency 
 enough, is evident from the extensive use which he 
 made of Madame Dacier's labors on the Illiad, and still 
 more of La Valterie's prose translation of the Iliad. 
 Already in the year 1718, and long before his personal 
 knowledge of Voltaire, Pope had shown his accurate 
 acquaintance with some voluminous French aiithors, in 
 a way which, we suspect, was equally surprising and 
 offensive to his noble correspondent. The Duke of 
 Buckingham ^ had addressed to Pope a letter, contain- 
 ing some account of the controversy about Homer, 
 which had then been recently carried on in France 
 between La Motte and Madame Dacier. This account 
 was delivered with an air of teaching, which was very 
 little in harmony with its excessive shallowness. Pope, 
 who sustained the part of pupil in this interlude, re- 
 
POPE. 113 
 
 plied in a manner that exhibited a knowledge of the 
 parties concerned in the controversy much superior to 
 that of the duke. In particular, he characterized the 
 cxcel'.nit notes upon Horace of M. Dacier, the hus- 
 band, in very just terms, as distinguished from those of 
 his conceited and half-learned Avife ; and the whole 
 reply of Pope seems very much as though he had 
 been playing off a mystification on his grace. Un- 
 doubtedly the pompous duke felt that he had caught a 
 Tartar. Now, M. Dacier's Horace, which, with the 
 text, fills nine volumes. Pope could not have read 
 except in French ; for they are not even yet translated 
 into English. Besides, Pope read critically the French 
 translations of his own Essay on Man, Essay on Criti- 
 cism, Rape of the Lock, &c. He spoke of them ?.s 
 a critic ; and it was at no time- a fault of Pope's to 
 make false pretensions. All readers of Pope's Satires 
 must also recollect numerous proofs, that he had read 
 Boilcau with so much feeling of his peculiar merit, 
 that he has appropriated and naturalized in English 
 some of his best passages. Voltaire was, therefore, 
 certainly wrong. 
 
 Of Italian literature, meantime. Pope knew little or 
 nothing ; and simply because he knew nothing of the 
 language. Tasso, indeed, he admired ; and, which is 
 singular, more than Ariosto. But we believe that he 
 had read him only in English ; and it is certain th«t 
 he could not take up an Italian author, either in 
 prose or verse, for the unaffected amusement of his 
 leisure. 
 
 Greek, we all know, has been denied to Pope, ever 
 since he translated Homer, and chiefly in consequence 
 of that translation. This seems at first sight unfair, 
 10 
 
114 
 
 because criticism has not succeeded in fixing upon 
 Pope any errors of ignorance. Tlis deviations from 
 Homer were uniformly the result of imperfect sym- 
 pathy with the naked simplicity of the antique, and 
 therefore wilful deviations, not (like those of his more 
 pretending competitors, Addison and Tickell) pure 
 blunders of misapprehension. But yet it is not incon- 
 sistent with this concession to Pope's merits, that we 
 must avow our belief in his thorough ignorance of 
 Greek when he first commenced his task. And to us 
 it seems astonishing that nobody should have adverted 
 to that fact as a sufl[icient solution, and in fact the only 
 plausible solution, of Pope's excessive depression of 
 spirits in the earliest stage of his labors. This depres- 
 sion, after he had once pledged himself to his sub- 
 scribers for the fulfilment of his task, arose from, and 
 could have arisen from nothing else than, his conscious 
 ignorance of Greek in connection with the solemn 
 responsibilities he had assumed in the face of a great 
 nation. Nay, even countries as presumptuously dis- 
 dainful of tramontane literature as Italy took an inter- 
 est in this memorable undertaking. Bishop Berkeley 
 found Salvini reading it at Florence ; and Madame 
 Dacier even, who read little but Greek, and certainly 
 no English until then, condescended to study it. 
 Pope's dejection therefore, or rather agitation (for it 
 impressed by sympathy a tumultuous character upon his 
 dreams, which lasted for years after the cause had 
 ceased to operate) was perfectly natural under the ex- 
 planation we have given, but not otherwise. And 
 how did he surmount this unhappy self-distrust ? 
 Paradoxical as it may sound, we will venture to say, 
 that with the innumerable aids for interpreting HoraeT 
 
115 
 
 which even then existed, a man sufficiently acquainted 
 with liatin might make a translation even critically 
 exact. This Pope was not long in discovering. Other 
 alleviations of his labor concurred, and in a ratio daily 
 increasing. 
 
 The same formulae were continually recurring, such 
 as, 
 
 'But him answering, thus addressed the swift-footed Achilles ; ' 
 Or, 
 
 *But him sternly beholding, thus spoke Agamemnon the king 
 of men.' 
 
 Then, again, universally the Homeric Greek, from 
 many causes, is easy ; and especially from these two : 
 \st. The simplicity of the thought, which never gathers 
 into those perplexed knots of rhetorical condensation, 
 which we find in the dramatic poets of a higher civil- 
 ization. 2dly, From the constant bounds set to the 
 expansion of the thought by the form of the metre ; an 
 advantage of verse which makes the poets so much 
 easier to a beginner in the German language than the 
 illimitable weavers of prose. The line or the stanza 
 reins up the poet tightly to his theme, and will not 
 suffer him to expatiate. Gradually, therefore, Pope 
 came to read the Homeric Greek, but never accu- 
 rately ; nor did he ever read Eustathius without aid 
 from Latin. As to any knowledge of the Attic Greek, 
 of the Greek of the dramatists, the Greek of Plato, 
 the Greek of Demosthenes, Pope neither had it nor 
 affected to have it. Indeed it was no foible of Pope's, 
 as we will repeat, to make claims Avhich he had not, 
 or even to dwell ostentatiously iipon those which he 
 had. And with respect to Greek in particular, there is 
 a manuscript letter in existence from Pope to a Mr. 
 
116 POPE. 
 
 Bridges at Falham, wliicli, speaking of tlie original 
 Homer, distinctly records the knowledge which he had 
 of his own imperfectness in the language.' Chapman, 
 a most spirited translator of Homer, probably had no 
 very critical skill in Greek ; and Hobbes was, beyond 
 all question, as poor a Grecian as he was a doggerel 
 translator ; yet in this letter Pope professes his willing 
 submission to the ' authority' of Chapman and Hobbes, 
 as superior to his own. 
 
 P inally, in Latin, Pope was a ' considerable profi- 
 cient,' even by the cautious testimony of Dr. Johnson ; 
 and in this language only the doctor was an accom- 
 plished critic. If Pope had really the proficiency here 
 ascribed to him, he must have had it already in his 
 boyish years ; for the translation from Statius, which 
 is the principal monument of his skill, was executed 
 before he was fourteen. We have taken the trouble 
 to throw a hasty glance over it ; and whilst we readily 
 admit the extraordinary talent which it shows, as do 
 all the juvenile essays of Pope, we cannot allow that it 
 argues any accurate skill in Latin. The word Malea; 
 as we have seen noticed by some editor, he makes 
 Malea; which in itself, as the name was not of com- 
 mon occurrence, would not have been an error worth 
 noticing ; but taken in connection with the certainty 
 that Pope had the original line before him — 
 
 ' Arripit ex templo Maleaa de valle resurgens, ' 
 
 when not merely the scanning theoretically, but the 
 whole rhythmns practically, to the most obtuse ear, 
 would be annihilated by Pope's false quantity, is a 
 blunder which serves to show his utter ignorance of 
 prosody. But, even as a version of the sense, with 
 
POPE. 117 
 
 every allowance for a poet's license of compression 
 and expansion, Pope's translation is defective, and 
 argues an occasional inability to construe the text. 
 For instance, at the council summoned by Jupiter, it is 
 said that he at his first entrance seats himself upon his 
 starry throne, but not so the inferior gods ; 
 
 ' Nee protinus ausi 
 CoelicoliB, veniam donee pater ipse sedendi 
 Tranquilla jubet esse manu.' 
 
 In which passage there is a slight obscurity, from the 
 ellipsis of the word sedere, or sese locare ; but the 
 meaning is evidently that the other gods did not pre- 
 sume to sit down protinus, that is, in immediate suc- 
 cession to Jupiter, and interpreting his example as a 
 tacit license to do so, until, by a gentle wave of his 
 hand, the supreme father signifies his express permis- 
 sion to take their seats. But Pope, manifestly unable 
 to extract any sense from the passage, translates thus : 
 
 ' At Jove's assent the deities around 
 In solemn state the eonsistory crowned ; ' 
 
 Avhere at once the whole picturesque solemnity of the 
 celestial ritual melts into the vaguest generalities. 
 Again, at v. 178, ruptcp.que vices is translated, ' and all 
 the ties of nature broke ; ' but by vices is indicated 
 the alternate reign of the two brothers, as ratified by 
 mutual oaths, and subsequently violated by Eteocles. 
 Other mistakes might be cited, which seem to prove 
 that Pope, like most self-taught linguists, was a very 
 imperfect one."^ Pope, in short, never rose to such a 
 point in classical literature as to read either Greek or 
 Latin authors without effort, and for his private arause< 
 ment 
 
118 POPE. 
 
 The result, therefore, of Pope's self-tuition appears 
 to us, considered in the light of an attempt to acquire 
 certain accomplishments of knowledge, a most com- 
 plete failure. As a linguist, he read no language with 
 ease ; none with pleasure to himself ; and none with so 
 much accuracy as could have carried him through the 
 most popular author with a general independence of 
 interpreters. But, considered with a view to his par- 
 ticular faculties and slumhering originality of power 
 ■which required perhaps the stimlation of accident to 
 arouse them effectually, we are very much disposed to 
 think that the very failure of his education as an 
 artificial training was a great advantage finally for 
 inclining his mind to throw itself, by way of indemni- 
 fication, upon its native powers. Had he attained, as 
 with better tuition he would have attained, distin- 
 guished excellence as a scholar, or as a student of 
 science, the chances are many that he would have 
 settled down into such studies as thousands could 
 pursue not less successfully than he ; whilst as it was, 
 the very dissatisfaction which he could not but feel 
 with his slender attainments, must have given him a 
 strong motive for cultivating those impulses of original 
 power which he felt continually stirring within him, 
 and which were vivified into trials of competition as 
 ofti'n as any distinguished excellence was introduced 
 to his knowledge. 
 
 Pope's father, at the time of his birth, lived in Lom- 
 bard Street ; ''' a street still familiar to the public eye, 
 from its adjacency to some of the chief metropolitan 
 establishments, and to the English ear possessing a 
 degree of historical importance ; first, as the residence 
 of those Lombards, or Milanese, who affiliated our 
 
POPE. 119 
 
 infant commerce ^o the matron splendors of the Adri- 
 atic and the Mediterranean ; next, as the central resort 
 •of those jewellers, or ' goldsmiths,' as they were styled, 
 who performed all the functions of modern hankers 
 from the period of the parliamentary war to the rise 
 of the Bank of England, that is, for six years after the 
 birth of Pope ; and, lastly, as the seat, until lately, of 
 that vast Post-Office, through which, for so long a 
 period, has passed the correspondence of all nations 
 and languages, upon a scale unknown to any other 
 country. In this street Alexander Pope the elder had 
 a house, and a warehouse, we presume annexed, in 
 which he conducted the wholesale business of a linen 
 merchant. As soon as he had made a moderate fortune 
 he retired from business, first to Kensington, and 
 afterwards to Binfield, in Windsor Forest. The period 
 of this migration is not assigned by any writer. It is 
 probable that a prudent man would not adopt it with 
 any prospect of having more children. But this chance 
 might be considered as already extinguished at the 
 birth of Pope ; for though his father had then only 
 attained his forty-fourth year, Mrs. Pope had com- 
 pleted her forty-eighth. It is probable, from the 
 interval of seven days which is said to have elapsed 
 between Pope's punishment and his removal from the 
 school, that his parents were then living at such a dis- 
 tance from him as to prevent his ready communication 
 with them, else we may be sure that Mrs. Pope would 
 have flown on the wings of love and wrath to the 
 rescue of her darling. Supposing, therefore, as we do 
 suppose, that Mr. Bromley's school in London was the 
 scene of his disgrace, it would appear on this argument 
 tliat his parents were then living in Windsor Forest. 
 
1 20 POPE. 
 
 And this hypothesis falls in with another anecdote in 
 Pope's life, which we know partly upon his own 
 authority. He tells Wycherley that he had seen Dry- 
 den, and barely seen him. Virgilium vidi tantum. 
 This is presumed to have been in Will's Coffee-hou?e, 
 whither any person in search of Dryden would of 
 course resort; and it must have been before Pope was 
 twelve years old, for Dryden died in 1700. Now there 
 is a letter of Sir Charles Wogen's, stating that he first 
 took Pope to Will's ; and his words are, ' from our 
 forest.' Consequently, at that period, when he had 
 not completed his twelfth year, Pope was already living 
 in the forest. 
 
 From this period, and so long as the genial spirits 
 of youth lasted. Pope's life must have been one dream 
 of pleasure. He tells Lord Harvey that his mother 
 did not spoil him ; but that was no doubt because 
 there was no room for wilfulness or waywardness on 
 either side, when all was one placid scene of parental 
 obedience and gentle filial authority. We feel per- 
 suaded that, if not in words, in spirit and inclination, 
 they would, in any notes they might have occasion to 
 write, subscribe themselves 'Your dutiful parents.' 
 And of what consequence in whose hands were the 
 reins which were never needed ? Every reader must 
 be pleased to know that these idolizing parents lived 
 to see their son at the very summit of his public ele- 
 vation ; even his father lived two years and a half after 
 the publication of his Homer had commenced, and 
 when his fortune was made ; and his mother lived for 
 nearly eighteen years more. What a felicity for her, 
 how rare and how perfect to find that he, who to her 
 maternal eyes was naturally the most perfect of human 
 
POPE. 121 
 
 beingd, and the idol of her heart, had ah-cady been the 
 idol of the nation before he had completed his youth. 
 She had also another blessing not always commanded 
 by the most devoted love ; many sons there are who 
 think it essential to manliness that they should treat 
 their motlier's doating anxiety with levity or even 
 ridicule. But Pope, who w^as the model of a good son, 
 never swerved in words, manners, or conduct, from the 
 most respectful tenderness, or intermitted the piety of 
 his attentions. And so far did he carry this regard 
 for his mother's comfort, that, well knowing how she 
 lived upon his presence or by his image, he denied 
 himself for many years all excursions which could not 
 be fully accomplished within the revolution of a week. 
 And to this cause, combined with the excessive length 
 of his mother's life, must be ascribed the fact that 
 Pope never went abroad ; not to Italy with Thomson 
 or with Berkeley, or any of his diplomatic friends ; not 
 to Ireland, where his presence would have been hailed 
 as a national honor ; not even to France, on a visit to 
 his admiring and admired friend Lord Bolingbroke. 
 For as to the fear of sea-sickness, that did not arise 
 until a late period of his life ; and at any period would 
 not have operated to prevent his crossing from Dover 
 to Calais. It is possible that, in his earlier and more 
 sanguine years, all the perfection of his filial love may 
 not have availed to prevent him from now and then 
 breathing a secret m^irmur at confinement so constant. 
 But it is certain that, long before he passed the meridian 
 of his life. Pope had come to view this confinement with 
 far other thoughts. Experience had then taught him 
 that to no man is the privilege granted of possessing 
 more than one or two friends who are such in extrem- 
 
 n 
 
122 POPE. 
 
 .ty. By that time lie had come to vieA\ his mother's 
 death with fear and anguish. She, he ki ew by many 
 a sign, would have been happy to lay down licr life for 
 his sake ; but for others, even those who were the 
 most friendly an 1 the most constant in their attentions, 
 he felt but too certainly that his death, or his heavy 
 affliction, might cost them a few sighs, but would not 
 materially disturb their peace of mind. ' It is but in 
 a very narrow circle,' says he, in a confidential letter, 
 ' that friendship walks in this world, and I care not to 
 tread out of it more than I needs must; knowing well 
 it is but to two or three, (if quite so many,) that any 
 man's welfare or memory can be of consequence.' 
 After such acknowledgments, we are not surprised to 
 find him writing thus of his mother, and his fearful 
 struggles to fight off the shock of his mother's death, 
 at a time when it was rapidly approaching. After 
 having said of a friend's death, ' The subject is beyond 
 writing upon, beyond cure or ease by reason or reflec- 
 tion, beyond all but one thought, that it is the w^ill of 
 God,' he goes on thus, ' So will the death of my 
 mother be, which now I tremble at, now resign to, 
 now bring close to me, now set farther off; every day 
 alters, turns me about, confuses my whole frame of 
 mind.' There is no pleasure, he adds, which the 
 world can give, ' equivalent to countervail either the 
 death of one I have so long lived with, or of one I 
 have so long lived for.' How will he comfort himself 
 after her death ? ' I have nothing left but to turn my 
 thoughts "".o one comfort, the last we usually think of, 
 though tne only one we should in wisdom depend 
 upon. I sit in her room, and she is always present 
 before me but when I sleep. I wonder I am so well. 
 1 have shed many tears ; but now I weep at nothing.' 
 
POPE. 123 
 
 A man, therefore, happier thm Pope in his domestic 
 rela<.ions cannot easily have lived. It is true these 
 relations were circumscribed ; had they been -wider, 
 they coxild not have been so happy. But Pope was 
 equally fortunate in his social relations. What, indei^d, 
 most of all surprises us, is the courteous, flattering, 
 and even brilliant reception which Pope found from his 
 earliest boyhood amongst the most accomplished men 
 of the world. Wits, courtiers, statesmen, grandees the 
 most dignified, and men of fashion th3 most brilliant, 
 all alike treated him not only with pointed kindness, 
 but with a respect that seemed to acknowledge him as 
 their intellectual superior. Without rank, high birth, 
 fortune, without even a literary name, and in defiance 
 of a deformed person, Pope, whilst yet only sixteen 
 years of age, was caressed, and even honored ; and 
 all this with no one recommendation but simply the 
 knowledge of his dedication to letters, and the prema- 
 ture expectations Avhich he raised of future excellence. 
 Sir William Trumbull, a veteran statesman, who had 
 held the highest stations, both diplomatic and ministe- 
 rial, made him his daily companion. Wycherley, the 
 old roue of the town, a second-rate wit, but not the 
 less jealous on that account, showed the utmost defer- 
 ence to one whom, as a man of fashion, he must have 
 regarded with contempt, and between whom and him- 
 self there were nearly ' fifty good years of fair and 
 foul weatlier.' Cromwell,^ a fox-hunting country gen- 
 tleman, but uniting with that character the pretensions 
 of a wit, and aff"ecting also the reputation of a rake, 
 cultivated his regard with zeal and conscious inferi- 
 ority. Nay, which never in any other instance hap- 
 pened to the most fortunate poet, his very inaugural 
 
124 POPE. 
 
 essays iu verse were treated, not as prelusive t flforts o* 
 auspicious promise, but as finished works of art, enti- 
 tled to take tlieir station amongst the literature of the 
 land ; and in the most worthless of all his poems, 
 Walsh, an established authority, and whom Dryden 
 pronounced the ablest critic of the age, found proofs of 
 equality with Virgil. 
 
 The literary correspondence with these gentlemen is 
 interesting, as a model of what once passed for fine 
 letter-writing. Every nerve was strained to outdo 
 each other in carving all thoughts into a filagree work 
 of rhetoric ; and the amoebcean contest was like that 
 between two village cocks from neighboring farms 
 endeavoring to overthrow each other. To us, in this 
 age of purer and more masculine taste, the whole 
 scene takes the ludicrous air of old and young fops 
 dancing a minuet with each other, practising the most 
 elaborate grimaces, sinkings and risings the most awful, 
 bows the most overshadowing, until plain walking, 
 running, or the motions of natural dancing, are thought 
 too insipid for endurance. In this instance the taste 
 had perhaps really been borrowed from France, though 
 often enough we impute to France what is the native 
 growth of all minds placed in similar circumstances. 
 Madame de Sevigne's Letters were really models of 
 grace. But Balzac, whose letters, however, are not 
 without interest, had in some measure formed himself 
 upon the truly magnificent rhetoric of Pliny and 
 Seneca. Pope and his correspondents, meantime, 
 degraded the dignity of rhetoric by applying it to 
 trivial commonplaces of compliment; whereas Seneca 
 applied it to the grandest themes which life or contem- 
 plation can supply. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, 
 
POPE. 125 
 
 on first coming amongst the wits of the day, naturally 
 adopted their style. She found this sort of euphuism 
 established ; and it was not for a very young woman to 
 oppose it. But her masculine understanding and pow- 
 erful good sense, shaken free, besides, from all local 
 follies by travels and extensive commerce with the 
 world, first threw off these glittering chains of affecta- 
 tion. Dean Swift, by the very constitution of his 
 mind, plain, sinewy, nervous, and courting only the 
 strength that allies itself with homeliness, was always 
 indisposed to this mode of correspondence. And, 
 finally, Pope himself, as his earlier friends died off, and 
 his own understanding acquired strength, laid it aside 
 altogether. One reason doubtless was, that he found 
 it too fatiguing ; since in this way of letter- writing he 
 was put to as much expense of wit in amusing an indi- 
 vidual correspondent, as would for an equal extent 
 have sufficed to delight the whole world. A funambu- 
 list may harass his muscles and risk his neck on the 
 tight-rope, but hardly to entertain his own family. 
 Pope, however, had another reason for declining this 
 showy system of fencing ; and strange it is that he had 
 not discovered this reason from the very first. As life 
 advanced, it happened unavoidably that real business 
 advanced ; the careless condition of youth prompted 
 no topics, or at least prescribed none, but such as were 
 agreeable to the taste, and allowed of an ornamental 
 coloring. But when downright business occurred, 
 exchequer bills to be sold, meetings to be arranged, 
 negotiations confided, difficulties to be explained, here 
 and there by possibility a jest or two might be scat- 
 tered, a witty illusion thrown in, or a sentiment inter- 
 woven ; but for the main body of the case, t neithe* 
 
126 POPE 
 
 could receive any ornamental treatment, nor if by any 
 effort of ingenuity, it had, could it look otherwise tnan 
 silly and unreasonable : 
 
 • Ornari res ipsa negat, contenta doceri.' 
 
 Pope's idleness, therefore, on the one hand, concur- 
 ring with good sense and the necessities of business en 
 the other, drove him to quit his gay rhetoric in letter- 
 writing. But there are passages surviving in his 
 correspondence which indicate, that, after all, had 
 leisure and the coarse perplexities of life permitted it, 
 he still looked with partiality upon his youthful style, 
 and cherished it as a first love. But in this harsh 
 world, as the course of true love, so that of rhetoric, 
 never did run smooth ; and thus it hajDpened that, with 
 a lingering farewell, he felt himself forced to bid it 
 adieu. Strange that any man should think his own 
 sincere and confidential overflowings of thought and 
 feeling upon books, men, and public affairs, less 
 valuable in a literary view than the legerdemain of 
 throwing up bubbles into the air for the sake of watch- 
 ing their prismatic hues, like an Indian juggler with his 
 cups and balls. "We of this age, who have formed our 
 notions of epistolary excellence from the chastity of 
 Gray's, the brilliancy of Lady Mary Wortley Mon- 
 tagu's during her later life, and the mingled good sense 
 and fine feelings of Cowper's, value only those letters 
 of Pope which he himself thought of inferior value, 
 .^nd even with regard to these, we may say that there 
 is a great mistake made ; the best of those later letters 
 between Pope and Swift, &c., are not in themselves at 
 all superior to the letters of sensible and accomplished 
 women, such as leave every town in the island by 
 
POPE. 1S,7 
 
 e'serj- post. Their chief interest is a derivative one ; 
 wo arc pleased with any letter, good or bad, which 
 relates to men of such eminent talent ; and sometimes 
 the subjects discussed have a separate interest for 
 themselves. But as to the quality of the discussion, 
 ajjart from the person discussing and the thing dis- 
 cussed, so. trivial is the value of these letters in a large 
 proportion, that Ave cannot but wonder at the preposter- 
 ous value which was set upon them by the writers.^ 
 Pope especially ovight not to have his ethereal works 
 loaded by the mass of trivial prose which is usually 
 attached to them. 
 
 This correspondence, meantime, with the wits of the 
 time, though one mode by which, in the absence of 
 reviews, the reputation of an author was spread, did 
 not perhaps serve the interests of Pope so effectually 
 as the poems which iti this way he circulated in those 
 classes of English society whose favor he chiefly 
 courted. One of his friends, the truly kind and ac- 
 comjilished Sir William Trumbull, served him in that 
 way, and perhaps in another eventually even more 
 important. The library of Pope's father was composed 
 exclusively of polemical divinity, a proof, by the way, 
 that he was not a blind convert to the Roman Catholic 
 faith ; or, if he was so originally, had reviewed the 
 grounds of it, and adhered to it after strenuous study. 
 In this dearth of books at his own home, and until he 
 was able to influence his father in buying more exten- 
 sively, Pope had benefited by the loans of his friends ; 
 amongst whom it is probable that Sir William, as one 
 of the best scholars of the whole, might assist hirii 
 most. He certainly offered him the most touching 
 compliment, as it was also the a\ isest and most paterna] 
 
128 POPE. 
 
 counsel, when lie besought him as one gorldess-loiti, 
 to quit the convivial society of deep drinkers : 
 
 ' Heu, fuge nate dea, teque his, ait, eripe malis.' 
 
 With these aids from friends of rank, and his way 
 thus laid open to public favor, in the year 1709 Pope 
 first came forward upon the stage of literature. The 
 same year which terminated his legal minority intro- 
 duced him to the public. Miscellanies in those days 
 were almost periodical repositories of fugitive verse. 
 Tonson happened at this time to be publishing one of 
 some extent, the sixth volume of which offered a sort 
 of ambush to the young aspirant of Windsor Forest, 
 from which he might watch the public feeling. The 
 volume was opened by Mr. Ambrose Philips, in the 
 character of pastoral poet ; and in thp same character, 
 but stationed at . the end of the volume, and thus 
 covered by his bucolic leader, as a soldier to the rear 
 by the file in advance, appeared Pope ; so that he 
 might win a little public notice, without too much 
 seeming to challenge it. This half-clandestine emer- 
 sion upon the stage of authorship, and his furtive 
 position, are both mentioned by Pope as accidents, bi;t 
 as accidents in which he rejoiced, and not improbably 
 accidents which Tonson had arranged with a view to 
 his satisfaction. 
 
 It must appear strange that Pope at twenty-one 
 should choose to come forward for the first time with a 
 work composed at sixteen. A difference of five years 
 at that stage of life is of more effect than of twenty at 
 a later ; and his own expanding judgment could hardly 
 fail to inform him, that his Pastorals were by far the 
 worst of his works. In reality, let us not deny, thai 
 had Pope never written any thing else, his name woi Id 
 
POPE. 129 
 
 not have been known as a name even of promise, but 
 would probably have been redeemed from oblivion by 
 some satirist or writer of a Dunciad. Were a man to 
 meet with such a nondescript monster as the following, 
 viz., ' Love out of Mount Mtna hy Whirlwind,' he 
 would suppose himself reading the Racing Calendar. 
 Yet this hybrid creature is one of the many zoological 
 monsters to whom the Pastorals introduce us : 
 
 • I know thee, love ! on foreign mountains bred, 
 "Wolves gave thee suck, anil savage tigers fed. 
 Thou wert from Etna's burning entrails torn, 
 Got by fierce whirlwinds, and in thunder born.' 
 
 But the very names ' Damon ' and ' Strephon,' ' Phillis ' 
 and ' Delia,' are rank with childishness. Arcadian 
 life is, at the best, a feeble conception, and rests upon 
 the false principle of crowding together all the luscious 
 sweets of rural life, undignified by the danger which 
 attends pastoral life in our climate, and unrelieved by 
 shades, either moral or physical. And the Arcadia of 
 Pope's age was the spurious Arcadia of the opera 
 theatre, and, what is worse, of the French opera. 
 
 The hostilities which followed between these rival 
 wooers of the pastoral muse are well known. Pope, 
 irritated at what he conceived the partiality shown to 
 Philips in the Guardian, pursued the review ironically - 
 and, whilst affecting to load his antagonist with praises 
 draws into pointed relief some of his most flagrant 
 faults. The result, however, we cannot believe. That 
 all the wits, except Addison, were duped by the irony, 
 is quite impossible. Could any man of sense mistake 
 for praise the remark, that Philips had imitated ' every 
 line of Strada ; ' that he had introduced wolves into 
 England, and proved himself the first of gardeners by 
 
130 POPE. 
 
 making his flowers ' blow all in the same season.' 
 Or, suppose those passages unnoticed, could the broda 
 sneer esc8,pe him, where Pope taxes the other writer 
 fviz., himself) with having deviated ' into downright 
 poetry ; ' or the outrageous ridicule of Philips's style, 
 as setting up for the ideal type of the pastoral style, 
 the quotation from Gay, beginning, 
 
 • Rager, go vetch the kee, or else the zun 
 Will quite bego before ch' 'avs half a don ! ' 
 
 Philips is said to have resented this treatment by 
 threats of personal chastisement to Pope, and even 
 hanging up a rod at Button's coffee-house. We may 
 be certain that Philips never disgraced himself by such 
 ignoble conduct. If the public indeed were universally 
 duped by the paper, what motive had Philips for re- 
 sentment ? Or, in any case, what plea had he for 
 attacking Pope, who had not come forward as the 
 author of the essay ? But, from Pope's confidential 
 account of the matter, we know that Philips saw him 
 daily, and never offered him ' any indecorum ; ' though, 
 for some cause or other, Pope pursued Philips with 
 virulence through life. 
 
 In the year 1711, Pope published his Essay on 
 Criticism, which some people have very unreasonably 
 fancied his best performance ; and in the same year 
 his Rape of the Lock, the most exquisite monument 
 of playful fancy that universal literature ofi'ers. It 
 wanted, however, as yet, the principle of its vitality, 
 in wanting the machinery of sylphs and gnomes, with 
 which addition it was first published in 1714. 
 
 In the year 1712, Pope appeared again before the 
 public as the author of the Temple of Fame, and the 
 Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady. Much 
 
POPE. 131 
 
 speculation has arisen on the question concerning the 
 name of this lady, and the more interesting question 
 concerning the nature of the persecutions and mis- 
 fortunes which she suffered. Pope appears purposely 
 to decline answering the questions of his friends upon 
 that point ; at least the questions have reached us, and 
 the answers have not. Joseph Warton supjoosed him- 
 self to have ascertained four facts about her : that her 
 name was Wainsbury ; that she was deformed in 
 person ; that she retired into a convent from some 
 circumstances connected with an attachment to a 
 young man of inferior rank ; and that she killed her- 
 self, not by a sword, as the poet insinuates, but by a 
 halter. As to the latter statement, it may very possi- 
 bly be true ; such a change would be a very slight 
 exercise of the poet's privileges. As to the rest, there 
 are scarcely grounds enough for an opinion. Pope 
 certainly speaks of her under the name of Mrs. (^. e 
 Miss) W , which at least argues a poetical exag- 
 geration in describing her as a being ' that once had 
 titles, honor, wealth, and fame ; ' and he may as much 
 have exaggerated her pretensions to beauty. It is 
 indeed noticeable, that he speaks simply of her decent 
 limbs, which, in any English use of the word, does not 
 imply much enthusiasm of praise. She appears to 
 
 have been the niece of a Lady A ; and Mr. 
 
 Craggs, afterwards secretary of state, wrote to Lady 
 
 A on her behalf, and otherwise took an interest in 
 
 her fate. As to her being a relative of the Duke of 
 Buckingham's, that rests upon a mere conjectural 
 interpretation applied to a letter of that nobleman's. 
 But all things about this unhappy lady are as yet 
 enveloped in mystery. And not the least part of the 
 
132 poiE. 
 
 ■mystery is a letter of Pope*s to a Mr. C , 'bearmor 
 
 date 1732, that is, just twenty years after the ])ublica- 
 tion of the poem, in which Pope, in a manly tone, 
 justifies himself for his estrangement, and presses 
 against his unknown correspondent the very blame 
 which he had applied generally to the kinsman of the 
 poor victim in 1712. Now, unless, there is some mis- 
 take in the date, how are we to explain this gentle- 
 man's long lethargy, and his sudden sensibility to 
 Pope's anathema, with which the world has resounded 
 for twenty years ? 
 
 Pope had now established his reputation with the 
 public as the legitimate successor and heir to the 
 poetical supremacy of Dryden. His Rape of the 
 Lock was unrivalled in ancient or modern literature, 
 and the time had now arrived when, instead of seeking 
 to extend his fame, he might count upon a pretty 
 general support in applying what he had already 
 established to the promotion of his own interest. Ac- 
 cordingly, in the autumn of 1713, he formed a final 
 resolution of undertaking a new translation of the 
 Iliad. It must be observed, that already in 1709, 
 concurrently with his Pastorals, he had published 
 specimens of such a translation ; and these had been 
 communicated to his friends some time before. In 
 particular. Sir William Trumbull, on the 9th of April, 
 170S, urged upon Pope a complete translation of both 
 Iliad and Odyssey. Defective skill in the Greek 
 language, exaggeration of the difficulties, and the 
 timidity of a writer as yet unknown, and not quite 
 twenty years old, restrained Pope for five years and 
 more. What he had practised as a sort of hravura, 
 for a single eff'ort of display, he recoiled from as a 
 
roPE. 133 
 
 daily task to be pursued through much toil, and a con- 
 siderable section of his life. However, he dallied with 
 the purpose, starting difficulties in the temper of one 
 who wishes to hear them undervalued ; until at length 
 •Sir Richard Steele determined him to the undertaking, 
 4. fact overlooked by the biographer, but which is 
 ascertained by Ayre's account of that interview be- 
 tween Pope and Addison, probably in 1716, which 
 scaled the rupture between them. In the autumn of 
 1713, he made his design known amongst his friends. 
 Accordingly, on the 21st of October, we have Lord 
 Lansdown's letter, expressing his great pleasure at the 
 communication ; on the 2Cth we have Addison's letter 
 encouraging him to the task ; and in November of the 
 same year occurs the amusing scene so graphically 
 described by Bishop Kennet, when Dean Swift pre- 
 sided in the conversation, and, amongst other indica- 
 tions of his conscious authority, ' instructed a young 
 nobleman, that the best poet in England was Mr. Pope, 
 who had begun a translation of Homer into English 
 verse, for which he must have them all subscribe ; 
 for,' says he, ' the author shall not begin to print until 
 I have a thousand guineas for him.' 
 
 If this Avere the extent of what Swift anticipated 
 from the work, he fell miserably below the result. 
 But, perhaps, he spoke only of a cautionary arrha or 
 earnest. As this was unquestionably the greatest 
 literary labor, as to profit, ever executed, not excepting 
 the most lucrative of Sir Walter Scott's, if due allow- 
 ance be made for the altered value of money, and if 
 we consider the Odyssey as forming part of the labor, 
 it may be right to state the particulars of Pope's con- 
 tract with Lintot. 
 
Iii4 POPE. 
 
 The number of subscribers to the Iliad was 574, and 
 tbe number of copies subscribed for was 654. The 
 work was to be printed in six quarto volumes ; and the 
 subscription was a guinea a volume. Consequently by 
 the subscription Pope obtained six times 654 guineas, 
 or £4218 6s., (for the guinea then passed for 21s. 
 6d.) ; and for the copyright of each volume Lintot 
 offered £200, consequently £1200 for the whole six; 
 so that from the Iliad the profit exactly amounted to 
 £5310 16s. Of the Odyssey, 574 copies were sub- 
 scribed for. It was to be printed in five quarto 
 volumes, and the subscription was a guinea a volume. 
 Consequently by the subscription Poj^e obtained five 
 times 574 guineas, or £3085 5s. ; and for the copy- 
 right Lintot offered £600. The total sv;m received, 
 therefore, by Pope, on account of the Odyssey, was, 
 £3685 5s. But in this instance he had two coadju- 
 tors, Broome and Fenton ; between them they trans- 
 lated twelve books, leaving twelve to Pope. The notes 
 also were compiled by Broome ; but the postscript to 
 the notes was written by Pope. Fenton received £300, 
 Broome £500. Such at least is Warton's account, and 
 more probable than that of Ruff head, who not only 
 varies the proportions, but increases the whole sum 
 given to the assistants by £100. Thus far we had 
 followed the guidance of mere probabilities, as they lie 
 upon the face of the transaction. But we have since 
 detected a written statement of Pope's, unaccountably 
 overlooked by the biographers, and serving of. itself to 
 show how negligently they have read the works of their 
 illustrious subject. The statement is entitled to the 
 fullest attention and confidence, not being a hasty or 
 casual notice of the transaction, but pointedly shaped 
 
POPE. 135 
 
 lo meet a calumnious rumor against Pope in his char- 
 acter of paymaster ; as if he who had found so much 
 liberality from publishers in his own person, were 
 niggardly or unjust as soon as he assumed those rela- 
 tions to others. Broome, it v^as alleged, had expressed 
 himself dissatisfied with Pope's remuneration. Per- 
 haps he had. For he would be likely to frame his 
 estimate for his own services from the scale of Pope's 
 reputed gains ; and those gains would, at any rate, be 
 enormously exaggerated, as uniformly happens where 
 there is a basis of the marvellous to begin with. And, 
 secondly, it would be natural enough to assume the 
 previous result from the Iliad as a fair standard for 
 computation ; but in this, as we know, all parties found 
 themselves disappointed, and Broome had the less 
 right to murmur at this, since the agreement with 
 himself as chief journeyman in the job was one main 
 cause of the disappointment. There was also another 
 reason why Broome should be less satisfied than Fen- 
 ton. Verse for verse, any one thousand lines of a 
 translation so purely mechanical might stand against 
 any other thousand ; and so far the equation of claims 
 was easy. A book-keeper, with a pen behind his ear, 
 and Cocker's Golden Rule open before him, could do 
 full justice to Mr. Broome as a poet every Saturday 
 night. But Broome had a separate account current for 
 pure prose against Pope. One he had in conjunction 
 with Fenton for verses delivered on the premises at so 
 much per hundred, on which there could be no demur, 
 except as to the allowance for tare and tret as a 
 discount in favor of Pope. But the prose account, 
 the account for notes, requiring very various degrees 
 of reading and research, allowed of no such easy 
 
136 
 
 equation. There it was, we conceive, that Broome's 
 discontent arose. Pope, however, declares that he 
 had given him £500, thus confirming the proportions 
 of War ton against Ruff head, (that is, in effect, War- 
 burton,) and some other advantages which were not in 
 money, nor deductions at all from his own money 
 profits, but which may have been worth so much 
 money to Broome, as to give some colorable truth to 
 Ruff head's allegation of an additional £100. In direct 
 money, it remains certain that Fenton had three, and 
 Broome five hundred pounds. It follows, therefore, 
 that for the Iliad and Odyssey jointly he received a 
 sum of £8996 Is., and paid for assistance £800, 
 which leaves to himself a clear sum of £8196 Is. 
 And, in fact, his profits ought to be calculated without 
 deduction, since it was his own choice, from indolence, 
 to purchase assistance. 
 
 The Iliad was commenced about October, 1713. In 
 the summer of the following year he was so far ad- 
 vanced as to begin making arrangements with Lintot 
 for the printing ; and the first two books, in manu- 
 script, were jDut into the hands of Lord Halifax. In 
 June, 1715, between the 10th and 28th, the subscribers 
 received their copies of the first volume ; and in July 
 Lintot began to publish that volume generally. Some 
 readers will inquire, who paid for the printing and 
 paper, &;c. ? All this expense fell upon Lintot, for 
 whom Pope was superfluously anxious. The sagacious 
 bookseller understood what he was about ; and, when 
 a pirated edition was published in Holland, he counter- 
 acted the injury by printing a cheap edition, of which 
 7500 copies Avere sold in a few weeks ; an extraordi- 
 nary proof of the extended interest in literature. The 
 
137 
 
 Bccon.l, third, and fourth volumes of the Iliafl, each 
 containing, like the first, four books, were published 
 successively in 1716, 1717, 1718 ; and in 1720, Pope 
 completed the work by publishing the fifth volume, 
 containing five books, and the sixth, containing the 
 last three, with the requisite supplementary apparatus. 
 The Odyssey was commenced in 1723, (not 1722, 
 as Mr. Roscoe virtually asserts at p. 259,) and the 
 publication of it was finished in 1725. The sale, 
 however, was much inferior to that of the Iliad ; for 
 which more reasons than one might be assigned. But 
 there can be no doubt that Pope himself depreciated 
 the work, by his undignified arrangements for working 
 by subordinate hands. Such a process may answer in 
 sculpture, because there a quantity of rough-hewing 
 occurs, which can no more be improved by committing 
 it to a Phidias, than a common shop-bill could ^^e 
 improved in its arithmetic by Sir Isaac Newton. But 
 in literature such arrangements arc degrading ; and 
 above all, in a work which was but too much exposed 
 already to. the presumption of being a mere effort of 
 mechanic skill, or (as Curll said to the House of Lords) 
 ' a knack ; ' it was deliberately helping forward that 
 idea to let off" parts of the labor. Only think of 
 Milton letting off" by contract to the lowest offer, and tt 
 be delivered by such a day, (for which good security 
 to be found,) six books of Paradise Lost. It is triw? 
 tlie great dramatic authors were often collaborateurs 
 but their case was essentially diff'erent. The loss, 
 however, fell not upon Pope, but upon Lintot, who, on 
 this occasion, was out of temper, and talked rather 
 broadly of j^rosecution. But that was out of the ques- 
 tion. Pope had acted indiscreetly, but nothing could 
 12 
 
138 POPE. 
 
 be alleged against his honor ; for he had expressly 
 warned the public, that he did not, as in the other case, 
 profess to translate, but to under take^^ a translation 
 of the Odyssey. Lintot, however, was no loser, abso- 
 lutely, though he might be so in relation to his expec- 
 tations ; on the contrary, he grew rich, bought land, 
 and became sheriff of the county in which his estates 
 lay. 
 
 We have pursued the Homeric labors uninterrupted- 
 ly from their commencement in 1713, till their final 
 termination in 1725, a period of twelve years or 
 nearly ; because this was the task to which Pope owed 
 the dignity, if not the comforts of his life, since it was 
 this Avhich enabled him to decline a pension from all 
 administrations, and even from his friend Craggs, the 
 secretary, to decline the express off"er of £300 per 
 annum. Indeed Pope is always proud to own his 
 obligations to Homer. In the interval, however, be- 
 tween the Iliad and the Odyssey, Pope listened to 
 proposals made by Jacob Tonson, that he should revise 
 an edition of Shakspeaxe. For this, which was in fact 
 the first attempt at establishing the text of the mighty 
 poet. Pope obtained but little money, and still less 
 reputation. He received, according to tradition, only 
 £217 \2s. for his trouble of collation, which must 
 have been considerable, and some other trifling edito- 
 rial labor. And the opinion of all judges, from the 
 first so unfavorable as to have depreciated the money- 
 value of the book enormously perhaps from a prepos- 
 Bcssion of the public mind against the fitness of Pope 
 for executing the dull labors of revision, has ever since 
 pronounced this work the very worst edition in exist- 
 ence. For the edition we have little to plead ; but fol 
 
POPE. 139 
 
 the editor it is but just to make three apologies. In 
 the Jirst place, he wrote a brilliant preface, which, 
 although (like other works of the same class) too much 
 occupied in displaying his own ability, and too often, 
 for the sake of an eflfective antithesis, doing deep in- 
 justice to Shakspeare, yet undoubtedly, as a whole, 
 extended his fame, by giving the sanction and coun- 
 tersign of a great wit to the national admiration. 
 Secondly, as Dr. Johnson admits, Pope's failure point-ed 
 out the right road to his successors. Thirdly, even in 
 this failure it is but fair to say, that in a graduated 
 scale of merit, as distributed amongst the long succes- 
 sion of editors through that century. Pope holds a rank 
 proportionable to his age. For the year 1720, he is 
 no otherwise below Theobald, Hanmer, Capell, War- 
 burton, or even Johnson, than as they are successively 
 below each other, and all of them as to accuracy 
 below Steevens, as he again was below Malone and 
 Reed. 
 
 The gains from Shakspeare would hardly counter- 
 balance the loss which Pope sustained this year from 
 the South Sea Bubble. One thing, by the way, is still 
 unaccountably neglected by writers on this question. 
 How it was that the great Mississippi Bubble, during 
 the Orleans regency in Paris, should have happened to 
 coincide with that of London. If this were accident, 
 how marvellous that the same insanity should possess 
 the two great capitals of Christendom in the same 
 year ! If, again, it were not accident, but due to some 
 common cause, why is not that cause explained ? 
 Pope to his nearest friends never stated the amount of 
 his loss. The biographers report that at one time hia 
 stock was worth from twenty to thirty thousand pounds 
 
140 POPE. 
 
 But tliat was quite impossible. It is true, tliat as the 
 stock rose at one time a thousand per cent., this would 
 not imply on Pope's part an original purchase beyond 
 t\venty-five hundred pounds or thereabouts. But Pope 
 has furnished an argument against that, which we shall 
 improve. He quotes more than once, as applicable to 
 his own case, the old proverbial riddle of Hesiod, 
 nXiov i,uiav navroQ, the half is more than the whole. 
 What did he mean by that ? We understand it thus : 
 That between the selling and buying, the variations 
 had been such as to sink his shares to one half of the 
 price they had once reached, but, even at that depreci- 
 ation, to leave him richer on selling out than he had 
 been at first. But the half of c£25,000 would be a far 
 larger sum than Pope could have ventured to risk upon 
 a fund confessedly liable to daily fluctuation. £'3000 
 would be the utmost he could risk ; in which case the 
 half of £25,000 would have left him so very much 
 richer, that he would have proclaimed his good fortune 
 as an evidence of his skill and prudence. Yet, on the 
 contrary, he wished his friends to understand at times 
 that he had lost. But his friends forgot to ask one 
 important question : Was the word loss to be under- 
 stood in relation to the imaginary and nominal wealth 
 which he once possessed, or in relation to the absolute 
 sum invested in the South Sea fund ? The truth is, 
 Pope practised on this, as on other occasions, a little 
 finessing, which is the chief foible in his character. 
 His object was, that, according to circumstances, he 
 might vindicate his own freedom from the common 
 mania, in case his enemies should take that handle for 
 attacking him ; or might have it in his power to plead 
 poverty, and to account for it, in case he should over 
 
POPE. 141 
 
 accept tliat pension which had been so often tendered 
 but never sternly rejected. 
 
 In 1723 Pope lost one of his dearest friends, Bishop 
 Atterbury, by banishment ; a sentence most justly in- 
 curred, and mercifully mitigated by the hostile "Whig 
 government. On the bishop's trial a circumstance 
 occurred to Pope which flagrantly corroborated his own 
 belief in his natural disqualification for public life. 
 He was summoned as an evidence on his friend's 
 behalf. He had but a dozen words to say, simply 
 explaining the general tenor of his lordship's behavior 
 at Bromley, and yet, under this trivial task, though 
 supported by the enthusiasm of his friendship, he 
 broke down. Lord Bolingbroke, returning from exile, 
 met the bishop at the sea-side ; upon which it was 
 wittily remarked that they were ' exchanged.' Lord 
 Bolingbroke supplied to Pope the place, or perhaps 
 more than supplied the place, of the friend he had 
 lost ; for Bolingbroke was a free-thinker, and so far 
 more entertaining to Pope, even whilst partially dis- 
 senting, than Atterbury, whose clerical profession laid 
 him under restraints of decorum, and latterly, there is 
 reason to think, of conscience. 
 
 In 1725, on closing the Odyssey, Pope announces 
 his intention to Swift of quitting the labors of a trans- 
 lator, and thenceforwards applying himself to original 
 composition. This resolution led to the Essay on Man, 
 which appeared soon afterwards ; and, with the excep- 
 tion of two labors, which occupied Pope in the interval 
 between 1726 and 1729, the rest of his life may 
 properly be described as dedicated to the further exten- 
 Bion of that Essay. The two works which he inter- 
 posed were a collection of the fugitive papers, whethe* 
 
142 POPE. 
 
 prose or verse, which, he and Dean Swift had scattered 
 amongst their friends at different periods of life. The 
 avowed motive for this publication, and, in fact, the 
 secret motive, as disclosed in Pope's confidential 
 letters, was to make it impossible thenceforwards for 
 piratical publishers like Curll. Both Poj^e and Swift 
 dreaded the malice of Curll in case thej' should die 
 before him. It was one of Curll's regular artifices to 
 publish a heap of trash on the death of any eminent 
 man, under the title of his Remains ; and in allusion 
 to that practice, it was that Arbuthnot most wittily- 
 called Curll ' one of the new terrors of death.' By 
 publishing all, Pope would have disarmed Curll before- 
 hand ; and that Avas in fact the purpose ; and that pie* 
 only could be offered by two grave authors, one forty, 
 the other sixty years old, for reprinting jeux d'esprit, 
 that never had any other apology than the youth of 
 their authors. Yet, strange to say, after all, some 
 were omitted ; and the omission of one opened the 
 door to Curll as well as that of a score. Let Curll 
 have once inserted the narrow end of the wedge, he 
 would soon have driven it home. 
 
 This Miscellany, however, in three volumes, (pub- 
 lished in 1727, but afterwards increased by a fourth in 
 1732,) though in itself a trifling work, had one vast 
 consequence. It drew after it swarms of libels and 
 lampoons, levelled almost exclusively at Pope, although 
 the cipher of the joint authors stood entwined upon 
 the title-page. These libels in their turn produced a 
 second reaction ; and, by stimulating Pope to effectual 
 anger, eventually drew forth, for the everlasting admi- 
 ration of posterity, the very greatest of Pope's works ; 
 a monument of satirical power the greatest which mat) 
 
143 
 
 iias produced, not excepting the MacFleckno of Dry- 
 den, namely, the immortal Dunciad. 
 
 In October of the year 1727, this poem, in its 
 original form, was completed. Many editions, not 
 spurious altogether, nor surreptitious, but with some 
 connivance, not yet explained, from Pope, were printed 
 in Dublin and in London. But the first quarto and 
 acknowledged edition was published in London early 
 in '1728-9,' as the editors choose to write it, that 
 is, (without perplexing the reader,) in 1729. On 
 March 12th of which year it was presented by the 
 prime minister, Sir Robert Walpole, to the king and 
 queen at St. James's. 
 
 Like a hornet, who is said to leave his sting in the 
 wound, and afterwards to languish away. Pope felt so 
 greatly exhausted by the efforts connected with the 
 Dunciad, (which are far greater, in fact, than all his 
 Homeric labors put together,) that he prepared his 
 friends to expect for the future only an indolent com- 
 panion and a hermit. Events rapidly succeeded which 
 tended to strengthen the impression he had conceived 
 of his own decay, and certainly to increase his disgust 
 with the world. In 1732 died his friend Atterbury ; 
 and on December the 7th of the same year Gay, the 
 most unpretending of all the wits whom he knew, and 
 the one with whom he had at one time been domesti- 
 cated, expired, after an illness of three days, which 
 Dr. Arbuthnot declares to have been ' the most precipi- 
 tate ' he ever knew. But in fact Gay had long been 
 decaying from the ignoble vice of too much and too 
 luxurious eating. Six months after this loss, which 
 greatly affected Pope, came the last deadly wound 
 wliich this life could inflict, in the death of his mother. 
 
144 POPE. 
 
 She had for some time been in her dotage, and recog- 
 nized no face but that of her son, so that her death 
 was not unexpected ; but that circumstance did not 
 soften the blow of separation to Pope. She died on 
 the 7th of June, 1733, being then ninety-three years 
 old. Three days after, writing to Richardson, the 
 painter, for the purpose of urging him to come down 
 and take her portrait before the coffin was closed, ho 
 says, ' I thank God, her death was as easy as her life 
 was innocent ; and as it cost her not a groan, nor even 
 a sigh, there is yet upon her countenance such an 
 expression of tranquillity,' that ' it Avould afford the 
 finest image of a saint expired that ever painting drew. 
 Adieu, may you die as happily.' The funeral took 
 place on the 1 1th ; Pope then quitted the house, unable 
 to support the silence of her chamber, and did not 
 return for months, nor in fact ever reconciled himself 
 to the sight of her vacant apartment. 
 
 Swift also he had virtually lost for ever. In April, 
 1727, this unhappy man had visited Pope for the las< 
 time. During this visit occurred the death of George I, 
 Great expectations arose from that event amongst the 
 Tories, in which, of course. Swift shared. It was 
 reckoned upon as a thing of course that Walpole 
 would be dismissed. But this bright gleam of hope 
 proved as treacherous as all before ; and the anguish 
 of this final disappointment perhaps it was which 
 brought on a violent attack of Swift's constitutional 
 malady. On the last of August he quitted Pope's 
 house abruptly, concealed himself in London, and 
 iinally quitted it, as stealthily as he had before quitted 
 Twickenham, for Ireland, never more to return. He 
 left a most affectionate letter for Pope ; but his afflic- 
 
TOVE. 145 
 
 lion and his gloomy anticipations of insanity, were too 
 oppressive to allow of liis seeking a personal interview. 
 rarps might now describe himself pretty nearly as 
 uUiikus suorum ; and if he would have friends in 
 future, he must seek them, as he complains bitterly, 
 almost amongst strangers and another generation. 
 This sense of desolation may account for the acrimony 
 which too much disfigures his writings henceforward. 
 Between 1732 and 1740, he was chiefly engaged in 
 satires, which uniformly speak a higix moral tone in 
 the midst of personal invective ; or in poems directly 
 philosophical, which almost as uniformly speak the 
 bitter tone of satire in the midst of dispassionate ethics. 
 His Essay on Man was but one link in a general 
 course which he had projected of moral philosophy, 
 here and there pursuing his themes into the fields of 
 metaphysics, but no farther in either field of morals or 
 metaphysics than he could make compatible with a 
 poetical treatment. These works, however, naturally 
 entangled him in feuds of various complexions Avith 
 people of very various pretensions ; and to admirers 
 of Pope so fervent as we profess ourselves, it is painful 
 to acknowledge that the dignity of his latter years, and 
 the becoming tranquillity of increasing age, are sadly 
 disturbed by the petulance and the tone of irritation 
 ■which, alike to those in the wrong and in the right, 
 inevitably besiege all personal disputes. He was agi- 
 tated, besides, by a piratical publication of his coi'res- 
 pondence. This emanated, of course, from the den 
 of Curll, the universal robber and ' Matant least ' of 
 those days ; and, besides the injury offered to his 
 feelings by exposing some youthful sallies which he 
 wished to have suppressed, it drew upon him a far 
 13 
 
115 POPE. 
 
 more disgraceful imputation, most assuredly unfounded, 
 but accredited by Dr. Johnson, and consequently in full 
 currency to this day, of having acted collusively with 
 Curll, or at least through Curll, for the publication of 
 what he wished the world to see, but could not else 
 have devised any decent pretext for exhibiting. The 
 disturbance of his mind on this occasion led to a cir- 
 cular request, dispersed among his friends, that tliey 
 would return his letters. All complied except Swift. 
 Hr only delayed, and in fact shuffled. But it is easy 
 to read in his evasions, and Pope, in spite of his vexa- 
 tion, read the same tale, viz., that, in consequence of 
 his recurring attacks and increasing misery, he was 
 himself the victim of artifices amongst those who 
 surrounded him. What Pope apprehended happened. 
 The letters were all published in Dublin and in Lon- 
 don, the originals being then only returned when they 
 had done their work of exposure. 
 
 Such a tenor of life, so constantly fretted by petty 
 wrongs, or by leaden insults, to which only the celeb- 
 rity of their object lent force or wings, alloAved little 
 opportunity to Pope for recalling his powers from 
 angry themes, and converging them upon others of 
 more catholic philosophy. To the last he continued to 
 conceal vipers beneath his flowers ; or rather, speaking 
 proportionately to the case, he continued to sheath 
 amongst the gleaming but innocuous lightnings of his 
 departing splendors, the thunderbolts which blasted for 
 ever. His last appearance was his greatest. In 1 742 
 he published the fourth book of the Dunciad ; to which 
 it has with much reason been objected, that it stands in 
 no obvious relation to the other three, but which, taken 
 as s separate whole, is by far the most brilliant and the 
 
weightiest of his works. Pope was aware of the 
 h atus between this last book and the rest, on which 
 account he sometimes called it the greater Dunciad ; 
 and it would have been easy for him, with a shallow 
 Warburtonian ingenuity to invep.t links that might 
 have satisfied a mere verbal sense of connection. But 
 he disdained this puerile expedient. The fact w*s, 
 and could not be disguised from any penetrating eye, 
 that the poem was not a pursuit of the former subjects; 
 it had arisen spontaneously at various times, by looking 
 at the same general theme of dulness, (which, in 
 Pope-'s sense, includes all aberrations of the intellect, 
 nay, even any defective equilibrium amongst the 
 faculties,) under a different angle of observation, and 
 from a different centre. In this closing book, not only 
 bad authors, as in the other three, but all abuses of 
 science or antiquarian knowledge, or counoisseurship 
 in the arts, are attacked. Virtuosi, medalists, butterfly- 
 hunters, florists, erring metaphysicians, &c., are all 
 pierced through and through as with the shafts of 
 Apollo. But the imperfect plan of the work as to its 
 internal economy, no less than its exterior relations, is 
 evident in many places ; and in particular the whole 
 catastrophe of the poem, if it can be so called, is 
 linked to the rest by a most insufficient incident. To 
 give a closing grandeur to his work. Pope had con- 
 ceived the idea of representing the earth as lying 
 universally under the incubation of one mighty spirit 
 of dulness ; a sort of millennium, as we may call it, 
 for ignorance, error, and stupidity. This would take 
 leave of the reader with effect ; but how was it to be 
 introduced ? at what era ? under what exciting cause ? 
 As to the eras, Pope could not settle that ; unless it 
 
118 POl'E. 
 
 wore a future era, the description of it could not be 
 delivered as a prophecy ; and, not being prophetic, it 
 would want much of its grandeur. Yet as a part of 
 futuritjr, how is it connected with our present times ? 
 Do they and their pursuits lead to it as a possibility, or 
 as a contingency upon certain habits which we have it 
 in our power to eradicate, (in which case this vision of 
 dulness has a practical warning,) or is it a mere neces- 
 sity, one amongst the many changes attached to the 
 cycles of human destiny, or which chance brings 
 round with the revolutions of its wheel ? All this 
 Pope could not determine ; but the exciting cause he 
 has determined, and it is preposterously below the 
 effect. The goddess of dulness yawns ; and her 
 yawn, which, after all, should rather express the fact 
 and state of universal dulness than its cause, produces 
 a change over all nations tantamount to a long eclipse. 
 Meantime, with all its defects of plan, the poem, as to 
 execution, is superior to all which Pope has done ; the 
 composition is much superior to that of the Essay on 
 Man, and more profoundly poetic. The parodies 
 drawn from Milton, as also in the former books, have 
 a beauty and eifect which cannot be expressed ; and if 
 a young lady wished to cull for her album a passage 
 from all Pope's writings, which, without a trace of 
 irritation or acrimony, should yet present an exquisite 
 gem of independent beauty, she could not find another 
 passage equal to the little story of the florist and the 
 butterfly-hunter. They plead their cause separately 
 before the throne of dulness ; the florist telling how he 
 had reared a superb carnation, which, in honor of the 
 queen, he called Caroline, when his enemy, pursuing a 
 butterfly which settled on the carnation, in securing his 
 
POPE. 149 
 
 own object, had uestroyecl that of tlie plaintiff. The 
 defendant replies with equal beauty ; and it may cer- 
 tainly be affirmed, that, for brilliancy of coloring and 
 the art of poetical narration, the tale is not surpassed 
 by any in the language. 
 
 This was the last effort of Pope worthy of separa'^e 
 notice. He was now decaying rapidly, and sensible of 
 his own d^cay. His complaint was a dropsy of the 
 chest, and he knew it to be incurable. Under these 
 circumstances, his behavior was admirably philoso- 
 phical. He employed himself in revising and burnish- 
 ing all his later work?, as those upon which he wisely 
 relied for his reputation with future generations. In 
 this task he was assisted by Dr. Warburton, a new 
 literary friend, Avho had introduced himself to the 
 favorable notice of Pope about four years before, by a 
 defence of the Essay on Man, which Cronsaz had 
 attacked, but in general indirectly and ineffectually, by 
 attacking it through the blunders of a very faulty 
 translation. This poem, however, still labors, to 
 religious readers, under two capital defects. If man, 
 according to Pope, is now so admirably placed in the 
 universal system of things, that evil only could result 
 from any change, then it seems to follow, either that 
 a fall of man is inadmissible ; or at least, that, by 
 placing him in his true centre, it had been a blessing 
 universally. The other objection lies in this, that if 
 all is right already, and in this earthly station, then 
 one argument for a future state, as the scene in 
 which evil is to be redressed, seems weakened or un- 
 dermined. 
 
 As the weakness of Pope increased, his nearest 
 friends, Lord Bolingbroke, and a few others, gathered 
 
T50 POPE. 
 
 around liim. The last scefies were passed almost with 
 ease and tranquillity. He dined in company two days 
 before he died ; and on the very day preceding his 
 death he took an airing on Blackheath. A few morn- 
 ings before he died, he was found very early in his 
 library wriung on the immortality of the soul. This 
 was an effort of delirium ; and he suffered otherwise 
 from this affection of the brain, and from inability to 
 think in his closing hours. But his humanity and 
 goodness, it was remarked, had survived his intellec- 
 tual faculties. He died on the 30th of May, 1744 ; and 
 so quietly, that the attendants could not distinguish 
 the exact moment of his dissolution. 
 
 We had prepared an account of Pope's quarrels, in 
 which we had shown that, generally, he was not the 
 aggressor ; and often was atrociously ill used before 
 he retorted. This service to Pope's memory Ave had 
 judged important, because it is upon these quarrels 
 chiefly that the erroneous opinion has built itself of 
 Pope's fretfulness and irritability. And this vmamiable 
 feature of his nature, together with a proneness to 
 petty manoeuvring, are the main foibles that malice 
 has been able to charge upon Pope's moral character. 
 Yet, with no better foundation for their malignity than 
 these doubtful propensities, of which the first perhaps 
 was a constitutional defect, a defect of his tempera- 
 ment rather than his will, and the second has been 
 much exaggerated, many writers have taken upon 
 themselves to treat Pope as a man, if not absolutely 
 anprincipled and without moral sensibility, yet as 
 mean, little-minded, indirect, splenetic, vindictive, and 
 morose. Now the difference between ourselves and 
 Ihese AVriters is fundamental. They fancy that in 
 
151 
 
 Pope's character a basis of ignoble qualities was here 
 and there slightly relieved by a few shining spots ; 
 we, on the contrary, believe that in Pope lay a dis- 
 position radically noble and generous, clouded and 
 overshadowed by superficial foibles, or, to adopt the 
 distinction of Shakspcare, they see nothing but ' dust a 
 little gilt,' and we ' gold a little dusted.' A very rapid 
 glance we will throw over the general outline of his 
 character. 
 
 As a friend, it is noticed emphatically by Martha 
 Blount and other contemporaries, Avho must have had 
 the best means of judging, that no man was so warm- 
 hearted, or so much sacrificed himself for others, as 
 Pope ; and in fact many of his quarrels grew out of 
 this trait in his character. For once that he levelled 
 his spear in his own quarrel, at least twice he did so 
 on behalf of his insulted parents or his friends. Pope 
 was also noticeable for the duration of his friend- 
 ships ; " some dropped him, but he never any through- 
 out his life. And let it be remembered, that amongst 
 Pope's friends were the men of most eminent talents 
 in those days ; so that envy at least, or jealousy of 
 rival power, was assuredly no foible of his. In that 
 respect how different from Addison, Avhose petty 
 manoeuvring against Pope proceeded entirely from 
 malignant jealousy. That Addison was more in the 
 Avrong even than has generally been supposed, and 
 Pope more thoroughly innocent as well as more gener- 
 ous, we have the means at a proper opportunity of 
 showing decisively. As a son, we need not insist on 
 Pope's preeminent goodness. Dean Swift, who had 
 lived for months together at Twickenham, declares that 
 he had not only never witnessed, but had never heard 
 
152 POPE. 
 
 of anything like it. As a Christian, Pope appears in 
 a truly estimable light. He found himself a Roman 
 Catholic by accident of birth ; so was his mother ; but 
 tiis father was so upon personal conviction and conver- 
 sion, yet not without extensive study of the questions 
 at issue. It would have laid open the road to prefer- 
 ment, and preferment was otherwise abundantly before 
 him, if Pope would have gone over to the Protestant 
 faith. And in his conscience he found no obstacle to 
 that change ; he was a philosophical Christian, intol- 
 erant of nothing but intolerance, a bigot only against 
 bigots. But he remained true to his baptismal profes- 
 sion, partly on a general principle of honor in adhering 
 to a distressed and dishonored party, but chiefly out of 
 reverence and affection to his mother. In his relation 
 to women, Pope was amiable and gentlemanly ; and 
 accordingly was the object of affectionate regard and 
 admiration to many of the most accomplished in that 
 sex. This we mention especially, because we would 
 wish to express our full assent to the manly scorn with 
 which ISIr. Roscoe repels the libellous insinuations 
 against Pope and Miss Martha Blount. A more iniio- 
 cent connection we do not believe ever existed. As 
 an author, Warburton has recorded that no man ever 
 displayed more candor or more docility to criticisms 
 offered in a friendly spirit. Finally, we sum up all in 
 saying, that Pope retained to the last a true and diffu- 
 sive benignity ; that this was the quality which sur- 
 vived all others, notwithstanding the bitter trial which 
 his benignity must have stood through life, and the 
 excitement to a spiteful reaction of feeling which 
 was continually pressed ujDon him by the scorn and 
 
POPE. 153 
 
 insult whicri his deformity drew upon him from the 
 unworthy. 
 
 But the moral character of Pope is of secondary 
 interest. We are concerned with it only as connected 
 with his great intellectual power. There are three 
 errors which seem current upon this subject. First, 
 that Pope drew his impulses from French literature ; 
 secondly, that he was a poet of inferior rank ; thirdly, 
 that his merit lies in superior ' correctness.' With 
 respect to the first notion, it has prevailed by turns 
 in every literature. One stage of society, in every 
 nation, brings men of impassioned minds to the con- 
 templation of manners, and of the social affections of 
 man as exhibited in manners. With this propensity 
 cooperates, no doubt, some degree of despondency 
 when looking at the great models of the literature who 
 have usually preoccupied the grander passions, and 
 displayed their movements in the earlier periods of 
 literature. Now it happens that the French, from an 
 extraordinary defect in the higher qualities of passion, 
 have attracted the notice of foreign nations chiefly to 
 that field of their literature, in which the taste and 
 the unimpassioned understanding preside. But in all 
 nations such literature is a natural growth of the mind, 
 and would arise equally if the French literature had 
 never existed. The wits of Queen Anne's reign, or 
 even of Charles II. 's, were not French by their taste 
 or their imitation. Butler and Drydcn were surely 
 not French ; and of Milton we need not speak ; as little 
 was Pope French, either by his institution or by his 
 models. Boileau he certainly admired too much ; and, 
 for the sake of a poor parallelism with a passage about 
 Greece in Horace, he has falsified history in the most 
 
154 POPE. 
 
 ludicrous manner, without a shadow of countenance 
 ftoni facts, in order to make our that we, like the 
 Romans, received laws of taste from those whom we 
 had conquered. But these are insulated cases and 
 accidents, not to insist on his known and most pro- 
 found admiration, often expressed, for both Chaucer, 
 and Shakspeare, and Milton. Secondly, that Pope is to 
 be classed as an inferior poet, has arisen purely from a 
 vonfusion between the departments of poetry which he 
 cultivated and the merit of his culture. The first place 
 must undoubtedly be given for ever, — it cannot be 
 refused, — to the impassioned movements of the tragic, 
 and to the majestic movements of the epic muse. "\Ve 
 cannot alter the relations of things out of favor to an 
 individual. But in his own department, whether higher 
 or lower, that man is supreme who has not yet been 
 surpassed ; and such a man is Pope. As to the final 
 notion, first started by Walsh, and propagated by 
 Warton, it is the most absurd of all the three ; it is not 
 from superior correctness that Pope is esteemed more 
 correct, but because the compass and sweep of his 
 performances lies more within the range of ordinary 
 judgments. Many questions that have been raised 
 upon Milton or Shakspeare, questions relating to so 
 subtile a subject as the flux and reflux of human 
 passion, lie far above the region of ordinary capacities ; 
 and the indeterminateness or even carelessness of the 
 judgment is transferred by a common confusion to its 
 objects. But waiving this, let us ask, what is meant 
 by ' correctness ? ' Correctness in what ? In develop- 
 ing the thought ? In connecting it, or eff"ecting the 
 transitions? In the use of words ? In the grammar? 
 In the metre ? Under every one of these limitations 
 
POPE. 
 
 155 
 
 of tho idea, we maintain that Pope is not distinguished 
 by correctness ; nay, that, as compared with Shak- 
 speare, he is eminently incorrect. Produce us from 
 any drama of Shakspeare one of those leadin- pas- 
 ."ages that all men have by heart, and show I, any 
 eminent defect in the very sinews of the thou-ht It 
 IS impossible; defects there may be, but thev will 
 always be found irrelevant to the main central thouo-ht 
 or to Its expression. N^w turn to Pope; the first 
 striking passage which off-ers itself to our memory is 
 the famous character of Addison, ending thus : 
 
 ' Wlio would uot laugh, if such a man there be, 
 "Who but must weep, if Atticus were he ? ' 
 
 Why must we laugh? Because we find a grotesque 
 assembly of noble and ignoble qualities. Very well • 
 but why then must we weep .^ Because .this assem- 
 blage IS found actually existing in an eminent man of 
 genius. Well, that is a good reason for weepin<. • we 
 weep for the degradation of human nature. But then 
 revolves the question, why must we laugh .> Because, 
 11 the belonging to a man of genius were a sufficient 
 reason for weeping, so much we know from the very 
 first. The very first line says, ' Peace to all such. 
 But were there one whose fires true genius kindles and 
 fan- fame inspires?' Thus falls to the ground the 
 whole antithesis of this famous character. We are to 
 change our mood from laughter to tears upon a sudden 
 discovery that the character belonged to a man of 
 genius ; and this we had already known from the 
 beginning. Match us this prodigious oversight in 
 Shakspeare. Again, take the Essay on Criticism. It 
 la a collection of independent maxims, tied together 
 
156 POPE. 
 
 into a fasciculus by the printer, but having no natural 
 order or h)gical dcpendenc)' ; generall}'^ so vague as to 
 mean nothing. Like the general rules of justice, &c. 
 in ethics, to which ever}' man assents ; but when the 
 question comes about any practical case, is it just? 
 the opinions fly asunder far as the poles. And, what 
 is remarkable, many of the rules are violated by no 
 man so often as by Pope, and by Pope nowhere so 
 often as in this very poem. As a single instance, he 
 proscribes monosyllabic lines ; and in no English 
 poem of any pretensions are there so many lines of 
 that class as in this. We have counted above a score, 
 and the last line of all is monosyllabic. 
 
 Not, therefore, for superior correctness, but for 
 qualities the very same as belong to his most dis- 
 tinguished brethren, is Pope to be considered a great 
 poet; for impassioned thinking, powerful description, 
 pathetic reflection, brilliant narration. His character- 
 istic difference is simply that he carried these powers 
 into a diff'erent field, and moved chiefly amongst the 
 social paths of men, and Adewed their characters as 
 operating through their manners. And our obligations 
 to him arise chiefly on this ground, that having already, 
 in the persons of earlier poets, carried off" the palm in 
 all the grander trials of intellectual strength, for the 
 majesty of the epopee and the impassioned vehemence 
 of the tragic drama, to Pope we owe it that we can 
 now claim an equal preeminence in the sportive and 
 aerial graces of the mock heroic and satiric muse; 
 that in the Dunciad we possess a peculiar form of 
 satire, in which (according to a plan unattempted by 
 any other nation) we see alternately her festive smile 
 and her gloomiest scowl ; that the grave good sense of 
 
157 
 
 llie nalion has here found its brightest muTor ; ancl, 
 finally, that through Pope the cycle of our poetry ig 
 perfected and made orbicular, that from that day we 
 might claim the laurel equally, whether for dignity or 
 i^i-ace. 
 
NOTES. 
 
 Note 1. Page 101. 
 
 Dr. Johnson, however, and Joseph Warton, for reasons not 
 stated, have placed his birth on the 22d. To this statement, aa 
 opposed to that which comes from the personal friends of Pope, 
 little attention is due. Ruflhead and Spence, upon such ques- 
 tions, must always be of higher authority than Johnson and 
 Warton, and a fortiori than Bowles. But it ought not to 
 be concealed, though hitherto unnoticed by any person, that 
 some doubt after all remains whether any of the biographers is 
 right. An anonymous writer, contemporary with Pope, and evi- 
 dently familiar with his personal history, declares that he was 
 born on the 8th of June; and he connects it with an event that, 
 having a public and a partisan interest, (the birth of that Prince 
 of AVales, who was known twenty-seven years afterwards as the 
 Pretender,) would serve to check his own recollections, and give 
 them a collateral voucher. It is true he wrote for an ill-natured 
 purpose ; but no purpose whatever could have been promoted by 
 falsifying this particular date. What is still more noticeable, 
 however. Pope himself puts a most emphatic negative upon all these 
 statements. In a pathetic letter to a friend, when his attention 
 could not have been wandering, for he is expressly insisting upon 
 a sentiment which will find an echo in many a human heart, viz., 
 that a birthday, though from habit usually celebrated as a festal 
 day, too often is secretly a memorial of disappointment, and an 
 anniversary of sorrowful meaning, he speaks of the very day on 
 which he is then writing as his own birthday; and indeed what 
 else could give any propriety to the passage ? Now the date of 
 this letter is January 1, 1733. Surely Pope knew his own birth- 
 day better than those who have adopted a random rumor without 
 investigation 
 
 [158] 
 
NOTES. 159 
 
 But, ■whilst we are upon this subject, ive must caution the 
 readers of Pope against too much reliance upon the chronological 
 accuracy of his editors. Ml are scandalously careless ; and gen- 
 erally they are faithless. Many allusions are left unnoticed, 
 which a very little research would have illustrated; many facts 
 arc omitted, even yet recoverable, which are essential to the just 
 appreciation of Pope's satirical blows; and dates are constantly 
 misstated. Mr. Roscoe is the most careful of Pope's editors; but 
 even he is often wrong. For instance, he has taken the trouble 
 to write a note upon Pope's humoi-ous report to Lord Burlingtou 
 of his Oxford journey on horseback with Lintot; and this note 
 involves a sheer impossibility. The letter is undated, except as 
 to the month; and Mr. Roscoe directs the reader to supply 171-4 
 as the true date, which is a gross anachronism. For a ludicrous 
 anecdote is there put into Linton's mouth, representing some 
 angry critic, who had been turning over Pope's Homer, with fre- 
 quent pshaws, as having been propitiated, by Mr. Lintot's dinner, 
 into a gentler feeling towards Pope, and, finally, by the mere effect 
 of good cheer, without an effort on the publisher's part, as coming 
 to a confession, that what he ate and what he had been reading 
 were equally excellent. But in the year 1714, no part of Pope's 
 Homer was printed; June, 1715, was the month in which even 
 the subscribers first received the four eai-liest books of the Iliad ; 
 and the public generally not until July. This we notice by way 
 of specimen ; in itself, or as an error of mere negligence, it would 
 be of little importance; but it is a case to which Mr. Roscoe has 
 expressly applied his own conjectural skill, and solicited the at- 
 tention of his i"eader. We may judge, therefore, of his accuracy 
 in other cases which he did not think worthy of examination. 
 
 There is another instance, presenting itself in every page, of 
 ignorance concurring with laziness, on the part of all Pope's 
 editors, and with the effect not so properly of misleading as of 
 perplexing the general reader. Until Lord Macclesfield's bill for 
 altering the style in the very middle of the eighteenth century, 
 eii years, therefore, after the death of Pope, there was a custom, 
 arising from the collision between the civil and ecclesiastical year, 
 of dating the whole period that lies between December 31st and 
 March 25th, (both days exclusively,) as belonging indifferently 
 to the past or th? current year. This peculiarity had nothing to 
 
160 NOTES. 
 
 do with the old and new style, but was, we believe, redressed by 
 the same act of Parliament. Now in PojDe's time it was absolutely 
 necessary that a man should use this double date, because else 
 he was liable to be seriously misunderstood. For instance, it 
 was then always said that Charles I. had suffered on the 30th of 
 January, 164| ; and why ? Because, had the historian fixed the 
 date to what it really was, 1649, in that case all those (a very 
 numerous class) who supposed the year 1649 to commence on 
 Ladyday, or March 25, would have understood him to mean that 
 this event happened in what we now call 1650, for not until 1650 
 was there any January which they would have acknowledged as 
 belonging to 1049, since they added to the year 1648 all the days 
 from January 1 to March 24. On the other hand, if he had 
 said simply that Charles suffered in 1648, he would have been 
 truly understood by the class we have just mentioned ; but by 
 another class, who began the year from the 1st of January, he 
 would have been understood to mean what we now mean by the 
 year 1648. There would have been a sheer difference, not of one, 
 as the reader might think at first sight, but of two entire years in 
 the chronology of the two parties; which difference, and all possi- 
 bility of doubt, is met and remedied by the fractional date m|- ; 
 for that date says in effect it was 1648 to you who do not open the 
 new year till Ladyday; it was 1649 to you who open it from Jan- 
 uary 1 . Thus much to explain the real sense of the case ; and it 
 follows from this explanation, that no part of the year ever can 
 ha.-e the fractional or double date except the interval from Jan- 
 uary 1 to jNIarch 24 inclusively. And hence arises a practical 
 influence, viz., that the very same reason, and no other, which 
 formerly enjoined the use of the compound or fractional date, 
 viz., the prevention of a capital ambiguity or dilemma, now en- 
 joins its omission. For in our day, when the double opening of 
 the year is abolished, what sense is there in perplexing a reader 
 by using a fraction which offers him a choice without directing 
 him how to choose ? In fact, it is the denominator of the frac- 
 tion, if one may so style the lower figure, which expresses to a 
 modern eye the true year. Yet the editors of Pope, as well as 
 many other writers, have confused their readers by this double 
 date; and why ? Simply because they were confused themselves. 
 Many errors in literature of large extent have arisen from this 
 
161 
 
 Coiifusion. Thus it was said properly enough in the contempo- 
 rary accounts, for instance, in Lord Monmouth's Memoirs, that 
 Queen Elizabeth died on the hist day of the year 1602, for she 
 died on the •24th of March; and by a careful writer this event 
 would have beeu dated as March 24, 1|^|. But many writei-s, 
 misled by the phra^je above cited, have asserted that James I. 
 was proclaimed on the 1st of January, 1603. Heber, Bishop of 
 Calcutta, again, has ruined the entire chronology of the Life cf 
 Jeremy Taylor, and unconsciously vitiated the facts, by not un- 
 derstanding this fractional date. Mr. lloscoe even too often leaves 
 his readers to collect the true year as they can. Thus, e. g. at 
 p. 50.1, of his Life, he quotes from Pope's letter to Warburton, in 
 great vexation for tlic surreptitious publication of his letters in 
 Ireland, under date of February 4, 174°. But why not have 
 printed it intelligibly as 1741 .' Incidents there are in most men's 
 lives, which are susceptible of a totally ditferent moral value, ac- 
 cording as they are dated in one year or another. That might be 
 a kind and honorable liberality in 1740, which would be a fraud 
 upon creditors in 1741. Exile to a distance of ten miles from 
 London in January, 1744, might argue, that a man was a turbu- 
 lent citizen, and suspected of treason; whilst the same exile in 
 January,' 1745, would simply argue that, as a Papist, he had been 
 included amongst his whole body in a general measure of precau- 
 tion to meet the public dangers of that year. This explanation 
 we have thought it riglit to make, both for its extensive applica- 
 tion to all editions of Pope, and on account of the serious blunders 
 which have arisen from the case when ill understood; and be- 
 cause, in a work upon education, written jointly by Messrs. Lant, 
 Carpenter and Shepliard, tliough generally men of ability and 
 learning, this whole point is erroneously explained. 
 
 Note 2. Page 105. 
 It is .apparently with allusion to this part of the history, which 
 he would often have heard from the lips of his own fither, that 
 Pope glances at his uncle's memory somewhat disrespectfully in 
 his prose letter to Lord Harvey. 
 
 Note 3. Page 105. 
 Some accounts, however, say to Flanders, in which case, 
 14 
 
162 NOTES. 
 
 perhaps, Antwerp or Brussels would have tlie honor of his coa 
 
 Note 4. Page 107. 
 This, however, was not Twyford, according to an anonymous 
 pamphleteer of the times, but a Catholic seminary in Devonshire 
 Street, that is, in the Bloomsbury district of London; and the 
 same author asserts, that the scene of his disgrace, as indeed 
 seems probable beforehand, was not the first, but the last of hia 
 arenas as a schoolboy. Which indeed was first, and which last, 
 is very unimportant; but witli a view to another point, which is 
 not without interest, namely, as to the motive of Pope for so bitter 
 a lampoon as we must suppose it to have been, as well as with 
 regard to the topics which he used to season it, this anonymous 
 letter throws the only light which has been offered ; and strange 
 it is, that no biographer of Pope should have hunted upon the 
 traces indicated by him. Any solution of Popp's virulence, and 
 of the master's bitter retaliation, even as a solution, is so far 
 entitled to attention ; apart from which the mere straightforward- 
 ness of this man's story, and its minute circumstantiality, weigh 
 greatly in its favor. To our thiniiing, he unfolds the whole affair 
 in the simple explanation, nowhere else to be found, that the 
 master of the school, the mean avenger of a childish insult by a 
 bestial punishment, was a Mr. Bromley, one of James II. 's Popish 
 apostates; whilst the particular statements which he makes with 
 respect to himself and the young Duke of Norfolk of 1700, as two 
 schoolfellows of Pope at that time and place, together with hia 
 voluntary promise to come forward in person, and verify his ac- 
 count if it should happen to be challenged, — are all, we repeat, 
 so many presumptions in favor of his veracity. ' Mr. Alexander 
 Pope,' says he, ' before he had been four months at this school, 
 or was able to construe TuUy's Offices, employed his muse in 
 satirizing his master. It was a libel of at least one hundred 
 verses, which (a fellow-student having given information of it) was 
 found in his pocket; and the young satirist was soundly whipped, 
 and kept a prisoner to his room for seven days; whereupon hia 
 father fetched him awaj^ and I have been told he never went to 
 school more.' This Bromley, it has been ascertained, was the 
 Bon of a country gentleman in Worcestershire, and must have had 
 
NOTES. 163 
 
 eonsiderable prospects at one time, since it appears that he had 
 been a gentlcman-comnioner at Christ's Church, Oxford There 
 is an error in the punctuation of the letter we have just quoted, 
 which affects the sense in a way very important to the question 
 before us. Bromley is described as 'one of King James's con- 
 verts in Oxford, some years after that prince's abdication ; ' but, 
 if tills were really so, he must have been a conscientious convert. 
 The latter clause should be connected with what follows : ' Some 
 years after that prince's abdication he kept a little seminary ; ' 
 that is, when his mercenary views in quitting his religion were 
 effectually defeated, when the Boyne had sealed his despair, he 
 humbled himself into a petty schoolmaster. These facts are inter- 
 esting, because they suggest at once the motive for the merciless 
 punishment inflicted upon Pope. His own father was a Paj^ist 
 like Bromley, but a sincere and honest Papist, who had borne 
 double taxes, legal stigmas, and public hatred for conscience' 
 sake. His contempt was habitually pointed at those who tam- 
 pered with religion for interested purposes. His son inherited 
 these upright feelings. And we may easily guess what would be 
 the bitter sting of any satire he would write on Bromley. Such 
 a topic was too true to be forgiven, and too keenly barbed by 
 Bromley's conscience. By the way, this writer, like ourselves, 
 reads in this juvenile adventure a prefiguration of Pope's satirical 
 destiny. 
 
 Note 5. Page 112. 
 
 That is, Sheffield, and, legally speaking, of BuckinghamsAtre. 
 For he would not take the title of Buckingham, under a fear that 
 there was lurking somewhere or other a claim to that title 
 amongst the connections of the Villiers family. He was a pom- 
 pous grandee, who lived in uneasy splendor, and, as a writer, 
 most extravagantly overrated; accordingly, he is now forgotten. 
 Such was his vanity and his ridiculous mania for allying himself 
 with royalty, that he first of all had the presumption to court the 
 Princess (afterwards Queen) Anne. Being rejected, he then 
 offered himself to tlie illegitimate daughter of James XL, by the 
 daughter of Sir Charles Sedley. She was as ostentatious as him. 
 self, and accepted him. 
 
164 
 
 Note 6. Page 117. 
 Meantime, the felicities of this translation are at times perfectly 
 astonishing ; and it would be scarcely possible to express more 
 nervously or amply the words, 
 
 'jurisque secundi 
 
 Ambitus impatiens, er summo dulcius unum 
 Stare loco,' 
 
 than this child of fourteen has done in the following couplet, 
 which, most judiciously, by reversing the two clauses, gains the 
 power of fusing them into connection : 
 
 ' And impotent desire to reign alone, 
 That scorris the dull reversion of a throne.' 
 
 But the passage for which beyond all others we must make room, 
 is a series of eight lines, corresponding to six in the original ; and 
 this for two reasons : First, Because Dr. Joseph Warton has de- 
 liberately asserted, that in our whole literature, ' we have scarcely 
 eight more beautiful lines than these ; ' and though few readers 
 will subscribe to so sweeping a judgment, yet certainly these 
 must be wonderful lines for a boy, which could challenge such 
 commendation from an experienced polyhistor of infinite reading. 
 Secondly, Because the lines contain a night-scene. Now it must 
 be well known to many readers, that the famous night-scene in 
 the Iliad, so fomiliar to every schoolboy, has been made the sub- 
 • ject, for the last thirty years, of severe, and in many respects. 
 of just criticisms. This description will therefore have a double 
 interest by comparison; whilst, whatever may be thought of 
 either taken separately for itself, considered as a translation, 
 this which we now quote is as true to Statins as the other ia 
 undoubtedly faithless to Homer : 
 
 ' Jamque per emeriti surgens confinia Phabi 
 Titanis, late mundo subvecta silenti 
 Rorifera gelidum te/iuaverat aera biga. 
 Jam pecudes volucresque taceiit : jam somnus avaris 
 Jnserpit curis, pronusque per aera nutat. 
 Grata laboratce referens obliuia vitcB.' 
 
 Theb. i. 336-341- 
 
KOXES. 165 
 
 • 'T was now the time when Phoebus yields to night, 
 And rising Cynthia sheds her silver light ; 
 Wide o'er the world in solemn pomp she drew 
 Her airy chariot hung with pearly dew. 
 All birds and beasts lie hush'd. Sleep steals away 
 The wild desires of men and toils of day ; 
 And brings, descending through the silent air, 
 A sweet forgetfulncss of human care ' 
 
 Note 7. Page 118. 
 One writer of that age says, in Cheapside; but probably this 
 difference arose from contemplating Lombard Street as a pro- 
 longation of Cheapside. 
 
 Note 8. Page 123. 
 Dr. Johnson said, that all he could discover about Mr. Crom- 
 well, was the foct of his going a hunting in a tie-wig ; but Gay 
 hjis added another fact to Dr. Johnson's by calling him, 'lionest 
 halless Cromwell with red breeches ' This epithet has puzzled 
 the commentators; but its import is obvious enough. Cromwell, 
 as we learn from more than one person, was anxious to be con- 
 sidered a iine gentleman, and devoted to women. Now it was long 
 the custom in that age for such persons, when walking with 
 ladies, to carry their hats in their hand. Louis XV. used to ride 
 by the side of Madame de Pompadour hat in hand. 
 
 Note 9. Page 127. 
 It is strange enough to find, not only that Pope had so fre- 
 quently kept rough copies of his own letters, and that he thought 
 80 well of them as to repeat the same letter to different persons, 
 as in the case of the two lovers killed by lightning, or even to 
 two sisters, Martha and Therese Blount, (who were sure to com- 
 municate their letters,) and that even Swift hai retained copies 
 of his. 
 
 Note 10. Page 138. 
 
 The word x.ndirtake had not yet lost the meaning of Shak 
 
 Bpeare's age, in which it was understood to describe those cases 
 
 where, the labor being of a miscellaneous kind, some person in 
 
166 NOIES. 
 
 chief offered to overlook and conduct the whole, whether with or 
 without personal labor. The modern undertaker , limited to the 
 care of funerals, was then but one of numerous cases to which 
 the term was applied. 
 
 Note 11. Page 151. 
 We may illustrate this feature in the behavior of Pope to Sav- 
 age. When all else forsook him, when all beside pleaded the 
 insults of Savage for withdrawing their subscriptions, Pope sent 
 his in advance. And when Savage had insulted him also, arro- 
 gantly commanding him never ' to presume to interfere or meddle 
 in his affairs,' dignity and self-respect made Pope obedient to 
 these orders, except when there was an occasion of serving 
 Savage. On his second visit to Bristol, (when he returned from 
 Glamorganshire,) Savage had been thrown into the jail of the 
 city. One person only interested himself for this hopeless profli- 
 gate, arnd was causing an inquiry to be made about his debts at 
 the time Savage died. So much Dr. Johnson admits; but he 
 forgets, to mention the name of this long-suffering friend. It 
 was Pope. Meantime, let us not be supposed to believe the 
 lying legend of Savage; he was doubtless no son of Lady 
 Macclesfield's, but an impostor, who would not be sent to the 
 tread-mill. 
 
CHARLES LAMB. 
 
 It sounds paradoxical, but is not so in a 1 ad sense, 
 to say that in every literature of large compass some 
 authors will be found to rest much of the interest 
 which surrounds thcin on their essential won-popularity. 
 They arc good for the very reason that they are not in 
 conformity to the current taste. They interest be- 
 cause to the world they are not interesting. They 
 atlract by means of their repulsion. Not as though it 
 could separately furnish a reason for loving a book, 
 that the majority of men had found it repulsive. Prima 
 facie, it must suggest some presumption against a 
 book, that it has failed to gain public attention. To 
 have roused hostility indeed, to have kindled a feud 
 against its own principles or its temper, may happen 
 to be a good sign. That argues power. Hatred may 
 be promising. The deepest revolutions of mind 
 sometimes begin in hatred. But simply to have left 
 a reader unimpressed, is in itself a neutral result, from 
 which the inference is doubtful. Yet even that, even 
 simple failure to impress, may happen at times to be a 
 result from positive powers in a writer, from special 
 originalities, such as rarely reflect themselves in the 
 mirror of the ordinary understanding. It seems little 
 to be perceived, how much the great scriptural ' idea 
 
 [167] 
 
168 CHARLES LAMB. 
 
 of the worldly and the unworldly is found to emerge in 
 literature as well as in life. In reality the very same 
 combinations of moral qualities, infinitely A-aried, which 
 compose the harsh physiognomy of what we call world- 
 liness in the living groups of life, must unavoidably 
 present themselves in books. A library divides into 
 sections of worldly and unworldly, even as a crowd of 
 men divides into that same majority and minority. The 
 world has an instinct for recognizing its OAvn ; and re- 
 coils from certain qualities when exemplified in books, 
 with the same disgust or defective sympathy as would 
 have governed it in real life. From qualities for instance 
 of childlike simplicity, of shy profundity, or of inspired 
 self-communion, the world does and must turn away 
 its face towards grosser, bolder, more determined, or 
 more intelligible expressions of character and intellect ; 
 and not otherwise in literature, nor at all less in litera- 
 ture, than it does in the realities of life. 
 
 Charles Lamb, if any ever was, is amongst the class 
 here contemplated ; he, if ever any has, ranks amongst 
 writers whose works are destined to be for ever unpopu- 
 lar, and yet for ever interesting ; interesting, moreover, 
 by means of those very qualities which guarantee their 
 non-popularity. The same qualities which will be 
 found forbidding to the worldly and the thoughtless, 
 which will be found insipid to many even amongst 
 robust and powerful minds, are exactly those which will 
 continue to command a select audience in every gene- 
 ration. The prose essays, under the signature of Elia, 
 form the most delightful section amongst Lamb'.3 woiks. 
 They traverse a peculiar field of observation, seques- 
 tered from general interest ; and they are composed iu 
 a spirit too delicate and unobtrusive to catch the ear of 
 
CHAKLES LAMB. 169 
 
 the noisy crowd, clamoring for strong sensations. But 
 this retiring delicacy itself, the pensiveness chequered 
 by gleams of the fanciful, and the humor that is touched 
 Avith cross-lights of pathos, together with the picturesque 
 quaintness of the objects casually described, whether 
 men, or things, or usages, and, in the rear of all this, 
 the constant recurrence to ancient recollections and to 
 decaying forms of household life, as things retiring be- 
 fore the tumult of new and revolutionary generations ; 
 these traits in combination communicata to the papers 
 a grace and strength of originality which nothing in 
 any literature approaches, whether for degree or kind 
 of excellence, except the most felicitous papers of 
 Addison, such as those on Sir Roger de Coverley, and 
 some others in the same vein of composition. They 
 resemble Addison's papers also in the diction, which is 
 natural and idiomatic, even to carelessness. They are 
 equally faithful to the truth of nature ; and in this 
 only they differ remarkably — that the sketches of Elia 
 reflect the stamp and impress of the writer's own char- 
 acter, whereas in all those of Addison the personal 
 peculiarities of the delineator (though known to the 
 reader from the beginning through the account of the 
 club) are nearly quiescent. Now and then they are 
 »-ecalled into a momentary notice, but they do not act, 
 or at all modify his pictures of Sir Roger or Will 
 Wimble. They are slightly and amiably eccentric ; but 
 the Spectator himself, in describing them, takes the 
 station of an ordinary observer. 
 
 Everywhere, indeed, in the writings of Lamb, and 
 
 not merely in his Elia, the character of the writer 
 
 cooperates in an undercurrent to the effect of the thing 
 
 written To understand in the fullest se7ise either the 
 
 15 
 
1 70 CHARLES LAMB. 
 
 c>ayely or the tenderness of a particular parrsage, you 
 must have some insight into the peculiar bias of the 
 writer's mind, whether native and original, or impressed 
 gradually by the accidents of situation ; whether simply 
 developed out of predispositions by the action of life, or 
 violently scorched into the constitution by some fierce 
 fever of calamity. There is in modern literature a 
 whole class of writers, though not a large one, standing 
 within the same category ; some marked originality of 
 character in the writer becomes a coeificient with what 
 he says to a common result ; you must sympathize with 
 this personality in the author before you can appre- 
 ciate the most significant parts of his views. In most 
 books the writer figures as a mere abstraction, without 
 sex or age or local station, whom the reader banishes 
 from his thoughts. What is written seems to proceed 
 from a blank intellect, not from a man clothed with 
 fleshly peculiarities and diff'erences. These peculiari- 
 ties and diff'erences neither do, nor (generally speaking) 
 ^ould intermingle with the texture of the thoughts so 
 as to modify their force or their direction. In such 
 books, and they form the vast majority, there is noth- 
 ing to be found or to be looked for beyond the direct 
 objective. (Sit venia verho !) But, in a small section 
 of books, the objective in the thought becomes conflu- 
 ent with the subjective in the thinker — the two forces 
 unite for a joint product ; and fully to enjoy the pro- 
 duct, or fully to apprehend either element, both must 
 be known. It is singular, and worth inquiring into, for 
 tli3 reason that the Greek and Roman literature had no 
 such books. Timon of Athens, or Diogenes, one may 
 conceive qualified for this mode of authorship, had 
 joMinalism existed to rouse them in those days ; theii 
 
CHARLES LAMB. 171 
 
 * articles ' would no doubt have been fearfully caustic 
 liut, as they failed to produce anything, and Lucian in 
 an after age is scarcely characteristic enough for the 
 purpose, perhajjs we may pronounce Rabelais and 
 Montaigne the earliest of writers in the class described 
 In the century following theirs, came Sir Thomas 
 Browne, and immediately after him La Fontaine. Tien 
 come Swift, Sterne, wdth others less distinguished ; in 
 Germany, Hippel, the friend of Kant, Harmann, rhe 
 obscure ; and the greatest of the whole body — John 
 Paul Fr. llichter. In him, from the strength and de- 
 tcrminateness of his nature as well as fn oi the great 
 extent of his writing, the philosophy of this interaction 
 between the author as a human agency and his theme 
 as an intellectual reagency, might best be studied. 
 From him might be derived the largest number of cases 
 illustrating boldly his absorption of the universal into 
 the concrete — of the pure intellect into the human 
 nat'ire of the author. But nowhere could illustrations 
 be found more interesting — shy, delicate, evanescent — 
 shy as lightning, delicate and evanescent as the colored 
 pcncillings on a frosty night from the northern lights, 
 than in the better parts of Lamb. 
 
 To appreciate Lamb, therefore, it is requisite that 
 his character and temperament should be understood 
 in their coyest and most wayward features. A capital 
 defect it would be if these could not be gathered silently 
 from Lamb's works themselves. It would be. a fatal 
 mode of dependency upon an alien and separable acci- 
 dent if they needed an external commentary. Bat 
 they do not. The syllables lurk up and down the 
 writings of Lamb which decipher his eccentric nature. 
 His character lies there dispeised in anagram ; and tc 
 
172 CHAKLES LAMB. 
 
 any attentive reader the regathering and restoration of 
 tlae total word from its scattered parts is inevitable 
 without an effort. Still it is always a satisfaction in 
 knowing a result, to know also its V)hy and lioio ; and 
 in so far as every character is likely to be modified by 
 the particular experience, sad or joyous, through which 
 the life has travelled, it is a good contribution towards 
 the knowledge of that resulting character as a whole 
 to have a sketch of that particular experience. What 
 trials did it impose ? What energies did it task ? What 
 temptations did it unfold ? These calls upon the moral 
 powers, which, in music so stormy, many a life is 
 doomed to hear, how were they faced ? The character 
 in a capital degree moulds oftentimes the life, but the 
 life always in a subordinate degree moulds the charac- 
 ter. And the character being in this case of Lamb so 
 much of a key to the writings, it becomes important 
 that the life should be traced, however briefly, as a 
 key to the character. 
 
 That is one reason for detaining the reader with 
 some slight record of Lamb's career. Such a record 
 hy preference and of right belongs to a case where the 
 intellectual display, which is the sole ground of any 
 public interest at all in the man, has been intensely 
 modified by the humanities and moral personalities 
 distinguishing the subject. We read a Physiology, and 
 need no information as to the life and conversation of 
 its author ; a meditative poem becomes far better un- 
 derstood by the light of such information ; but a work 
 of genial and at the same time eccentric sentiment, 
 wandering upon untrodden paths, is barely intelligible 
 ■without it. There is a good reason for arresting judg- 
 ment on the writer, that the court may receive evidenca 
 
CHAKLES XAMB. 173 
 
 on the life of the man. But there is another reason, 
 and, in any other place, a better ; which reason lies in 
 the extraordinary value of the life considered separately 
 for itself. Logically, it is not allowable to say that 
 here ; and considering the principal purpose of this 
 paper, any possible independent value of the life must 
 rank' as a better reason for reporting it. Since, in a 
 case where the original object is professedly to esti- 
 mate the writings of a man, whatever promises to 
 further that object must, merely by that tendency, 
 have, in relation to that place, a momentary advantao-e 
 which it would lose if valued upon a more abstract 
 
 scale. Liberated from this casual office of throwino- 
 
 o 
 
 light upon a book — raised to its grander station of a 
 solemn deposition to the moral capacities of man in 
 conflict with calamity — viewed as a return made into 
 the chanceries of heaven — upon an issue directed 
 from that court to try the amount of power lodged in 
 a poor desolate pair of human creatures for facing the 
 very anarchy of storms — this obscure life of the two 
 Lambs, brother and sister, (for the two lives were one 
 life,) rises into a grandeur that is not paralleled onco 
 in a generation. 
 
 Rich, indeed, in moral instruction was the life of 
 Cliarles Lamb ; and perhaps in one chief result it offers 
 to the thoughtful observer a lesson of consolation that 
 is awful, and of hope that ought to be immortal, viz., 
 in the record which it furnishes, that by meekness of 
 submission, and by earnest conflict with evil, in the 
 spirit of cheerfulness it is possible ultimately to disarm 
 or to blunt the very heaviest of curses — even the 
 curse of lunacy. Had it been whispered, in hours of 
 infancy, to Lamb, by the angel who stood by his 
 
174 CHAKLES LAMB. 
 
 cradle — ' Thou, and the sister that walks by ten years 
 before thee, shall be through life, each to each, the 
 solitary fountain of comfort ; and except it be from 
 this fountain of mutual love, except it be as brothei 
 and sister, ye shall not taste the cup of peace on 
 earth ! ' — here, if there was sorrow in reversion, there 
 was also consolation. 
 
 But what funeral swamps would have instantly si~ 
 "gulfed this consolation, had some meddling fiend jrc- 
 longed the revelation, and, holding up the curtain from 
 the sad feature a little longer, had said scornfully — 
 ' Peace on earth ! Peace for you two, Charles and 
 Mary Lamb ! What peace is possible under the curse 
 which even now is gathering against your heads ? Is 
 there peace on earth for the lunatic — peace for the 
 parenticide — peace for the girl that, without warning, 
 and without time granted for a penitential cry to 
 Heaven, sends her mother to the last audit? And 
 then, without treachery, speaking bare truth, this 
 prophet of woe might have added — ' Thou, also, 
 thyself, Charles Lamb, thou in thy proper person, 
 ohalt enter the skirts of this dreadful hail-storm ; even 
 thou shalt taste the secrets of lunacy, and enter as a 
 captive its house of bondage ; whilst over thy sister 
 the accursed scorpion shall hang suspended through 
 life, like death hanging over the beds of hospitals, 
 striking at times, but more often threatening to strike : 
 or withdrawing its instant menaces only to lay bare 
 her mind more bitterly to the persecutions of a haunted 
 memory ! ' Considering the nature of the calamity, in 
 the first place ; considering, in the second place, its 
 lifelong duration ; and, in the last place, considering 
 the quality of the resistance by which it was met, and 
 
CHAKLES XAMB. 175 
 
 under wLat circumstances of humble resources in 
 monej' or friends — we have come to the deliberate 
 judgment, that the whole range of history scarcely 
 presents a more affecting spectacle of perpetual sorrow, 
 humiliation, or conflict, and that was supported to the 
 end, (that is, through forty years,) with more resigna- 
 tion, or with more absolute victory. 
 
 Chirlcs Lamb was born in February of the yeai 
 1775. His immediate descent Avas humble; for his 
 father, though on one particular occasion civilly de- 
 scribed as a ' scrivener,' was in reality a domestic 
 servant to Mr. Salt — a bencher (and therefore a bar- 
 rister of some standing) in the Inner Temple. John 
 Lamb the father belonged by birth to Lincoln ; from 
 which city, being transferred to London whilst yet a 
 boy, he entered the service of Mr. Salt without delay; 
 and apparently from this period throughout his life 
 continued in this good man's household to support the 
 honorable relation of a Roman client to his patronus, 
 much more than that of a mercenary servant to a tran- 
 sient and capricious master. The terms on which he 
 seems to live with the family of the Lambs, argue a 
 kindness and a liberality of nature on both sides. John 
 Lamb recommended himself as an attendant by the 
 versatility of his accomplishments ; and Mr. Salt, being 
 a widower without children, which means in effect an 
 old bachelor, naturally valued that encyclopaedic range 
 of dexterity which made his house independent of ex- 
 ternal aid for every mode of service. To kill one's 
 own mutton is but an operose way of arriving at a 
 dinner, and often a more costly way ; whereas to 
 combine one's own carpenter, locksmith, hair-dresser, 
 groom, ikc, all in one man's person, — to have a 
 
176 CHARLES LAMB. 
 
 Robinson Crusoe, up to all emergencies of life, always 
 in waiting, — is a luxury of the highest class for one 
 who values his ease. 
 
 A consultation is held more freely with a man familial 
 to one's eye, and more profitably with a man aware of 
 one's peculiar habits. And another advantage from 
 siich an arrangement is, that one gets any little altera- 
 tion or repair executed on the spot. To hear is to 
 obey, and by an inversion of Pope's rule — 
 • One always is, and never to be, blest.' 
 
 People of one sole accomplishment, like the homo 
 unius libri, are usually Avithin that narrow circle dis- 
 agreeably perfect, and therefore apt to be arrogant. 
 People who can do all things, usually do every one of 
 them ill ; and living in a constant efibrt to deny this 
 too palpable fact they become irritably vain. But Mr. 
 Lamb the elder seems to have been bent on perfection. 
 He did all things ; he did them all well ; and yet was 
 neither gloomily arrogant nor testily vain. And being 
 conscious apparently that all mechanic excellences 
 tend to illiberal results, unless counteracted by per- 
 petual sacrifices to the muses, he went so far as to 
 cultivate poetry ; he even printed his poems, and were 
 we possessed of a copy, (which we are 7iot, nor proba- 
 bly is the Vatican,) it would give us pleasure at this 
 point to digress for a moment, and to cut them up, 
 purely on considerations of respect to the author's 
 memory. It is hardly to be supposed that they did 
 not really merit castigation ; and we should best show 
 the sincerity of our respect for Mr. Lamb, senior, in 
 all those cases where we could conscientiously profesa 
 respect, by an unlimited application of the kno it iu 
 the cases where we could 7iot. 
 
CHARLES LAMB. 1<7 
 
 The wliole family of tlie Lambs seems to haA^e won 
 from Mr. Salt the consideration which is granted to 
 humble friends ; and from acquaintances nearer to their 
 own standing, to have won a tenderness of esteem such 
 as is granted to decayed gentry. Yet naturally, the 
 social rank of the parents, as people still living, must- 
 have operated disadvantageously for the children. It 
 is hard, even for the practised philosopher to distin- 
 guish aristocratic graces of manner, and capacities of 
 delicate feeling, in people whose very hearth and dress 
 bear witness to the servile humility of their station. 
 Yet sixch distinctions as t<-ild gifts of nature, timidly 
 and half-unconsciously asserted themselves in the un- 
 pretending Lambs. Already in their favor there existed 
 a silent privilege analogous to the famous one of Lord 
 Kinsale. He, by special grant from the crown, is 
 allowed, when standing before the king, to forget that 
 he is not himself a king ; the bearer of that peerage, 
 through all generations, has the privilege of wearing 
 his hat in the royal presence. By a general though 
 tacit concession of the same nature, the rising genera- 
 tion of the Lambs, John and Charles, the two sons, and 
 Mary Lamb, the only daughter, were permitted to foi- 
 gct that their grandmother had been a housekeeper for 
 sixty years, and that their father had worn a livery. 
 Charles Lamb, individually was so entirely humble, and 
 so careless of social distinctions, that he has taken 
 plea'jurc in recurring to these very facts in the family 
 records amongst the most genial of his Elia recollec- 
 tions. He only continued to remember, without shame, 
 and with a peculiar tenderness, these badges of plebeian 
 rank, when everybody else, amongst the few survivors 
 that could have known of their existence, had long dis« 
 missed them from their thoughts. 
 
178 CHAELES LAMB. 
 
 Probably througb Mr. Salt's interest, Cbarles Lamb, 
 in the autumn of 1782, wben be wanted sometldng 
 more tban four months of completing bis eighth year, 
 received a presentation to the magnificent school of 
 Christ's Hospital. The late Dr. Arnold, when con- 
 trasting the school of his own boyish experience, 
 Winchester, with Rugby, the school confided to his 
 management, found nothing so much to regret in the 
 circumstances of the latter as its forlorn condition with 
 respect to historical traditions. Wherever these were 
 wanting, and supposing the school of sufficient magni- 
 tude, it occurred to Dr. Arnold that something of a 
 compensatory effect for impressing the imagination 
 might be obtained by connecting the school with the 
 nation through the link of annual prizes issuing from 
 the exchequer. An official basis of national patron- 
 age might prove a substitute for an antiquarian or 
 ancestral basis. Happily for the great educational 
 foundations of London, none of them is in the naked 
 condition of Rugby. Westminster, St. Paul's, Mer- 
 chant Tailors,' the Charter-house, &c., are all crowned 
 with historical recollections ; and Christ's Hospital, 
 besides the original honors of its foundation, so fitted 
 to a consecrated place in a youthful imagination — an 
 asylum for boy-students, provided by a boy-king — 
 innocent, religious, prematurely wise, and prematurely 
 called away from earth — has also a mode of perpetual 
 connection with the state. It enjoys, therefore, loth 
 of Dr. Arnold's advantages. Indeed, all the great 
 foundation schools of London, bearing in their very 
 codes of organization the impress of a double function 
 — viz., the conservation of sound learning and of pure 
 religion — wear something of a monastic or cloisteral 
 
CHAKLES LAMB. 1 79 
 
 character In their aspect and usages, which is pecu- 
 liarly impressive, and even pathetic, amidst the uproars 
 of a capital the most colossal and tumultuous upon 
 earth. 
 
 Here Lamb remained until his fifteenth year, which 
 year threw him on the world, and brought him along- 
 side the golden dawn of the French Revolution. Here 
 he learned a little elementary Greek, and of Latin 
 more than a little ; for the Latin notes to Mr. Cary (of 
 Dante celebrity) though brief, are sufficient to reveal a 
 true sense of what is graceful and idiomatic in Latinity. 
 We say this, who have studied that subject more than 
 most men. It is not that Lamb would have found it an 
 easy task to compose a long paper in Latin — nobody 
 ca7i find it easy to do what he has no motive for habitu- 
 ally practising ; but a single sentence of Latin wearing 
 the secret countersign of the ' sweet Roman hand,' 
 ascertains sufficiently that, in reading Latin classics, a 
 man feels and comprehends their peculiar force or 
 beauty. That is enough. It is requisite to a man's 
 exjiansion of mind that he should make acquaintance 
 with a literature so radically diff"ering from all modern 
 literature as is the Latin. It is not requisite that he 
 should practise Latin composition. Here, therefore. 
 Lamb obtained in sufficient perfection one priceless 
 accomplishment, which even singly throws a graceful 
 air of liberality over all the rest of a man's attainments : 
 having rarely any pecuniary value, it challenges the 
 more attention to its intellectual value. Here also 
 Lamb commenced the friendships of his life ; and, of 
 all which he formed he lost none. Here it was, as the 
 consummation and crown of his advantages from the 
 time-honored hospital, that he came to know ' Poor 
 
 S. 1. C. " rov diXv^aoiwTuror. 
 
180 CHARLES liAXB. 
 
 Until 1796, it is probable tbat lie lost siglit of Coler- 
 idge, who was then occupied with Cambridge?, having 
 been transferred thitlier as a ' Grecian ' from the house 
 of Christ Church. The year 1795, was a year of 
 change and fearful calamity for Charles Lamb. On 
 that year revolved the wheels of his after-life. During 
 the three years succeeding to his school days, he had 
 held a clerkship in the South Sea House. In 1795, 
 he was transferred to the India House. As a junior 
 clerk, he could not receive more than a slender salary ; 
 but even this was important to the support of his pa- 
 rents and sister. They lived together in lodgings near 
 Holborn ; and in the spring of 1796, Miss Lamb, (hav- 
 ing previously shown signs of lunacy at intervals,) in 
 a sudden paroxysm of her disease, seized a knife from 
 the dinner table, and stabbed her mother, who died 
 upon the spot. A coroner's inquest easily ascertained 
 the nature of a case which was transparent in all its 
 circumstances, and never for a moment indecisive aa 
 regarded the medical symptoms. The poor young 
 lady was transferred to the establishment for lunatics 
 at Hoxton. She soon recovered, we believe ; but her 
 relapses were as sudden as her recoveries, and she 
 continued through life to revisit, for periods of uncer- 
 tain seclusion, this house of woe. This calamity of hla 
 fireside, followed soon after by the death of his father, 
 who had for some time been in a state of imbecility, 
 determined the future destiiiy of Lamb. Apprehend- 
 ing, witli the perfect grief of perfect love, that his sis- 
 ter's fate was sealed for life — viewing her as his own 
 greatest benefactress, which she really had been through 
 her advantage by ten years of age — yielding with im- 
 passioned readiness to the depth of his fraternal afFeC' 
 
CHAELES LAMB. 181 
 
 tion, wliat at any rate he Avould liave yielded to the 
 sanctities of duty as interpreted by his own conscience 
 — he resolved for ever to resign all thoughts of marriage 
 with a young lady whom he loved, for ever to abandon 
 all ambitious prospects that might have tempted him 
 into uncertainties, humbly to content himself with the 
 certainties of his Indian clerkship, to dedicate himself 
 for the future to the care of his desolate and prostrate 
 sister, and to leave the rest to God. These sacrifices 
 he made in no hurry or tumult, but deliberately, and 
 in religious tranquillity. These sacrifices were ac- 
 cepted in heaven — and even on this earth they had 
 their reward. She, for whom he gave up all, in turn 
 gave up all for him. She devoted herself to his com- 
 fort. Many times she returned to the lunatic estab- 
 lishment, but many times she was restored to illumi- 
 nate the household for /m?z ; and of the happiness 
 which for forty years and more he had, no hour seemed 
 true that was not derived from her. Henceforward, 
 therefore, until he was emancipated by the noble 
 generosity of the East India Directors, Lamb's time 
 for nine-and-twenty years, was given to the India 
 House. 
 
 ' O fortunati nimmrn, sua si bona norint,' is appli- 
 cable to more people than ' agricola.' Clerks of the 
 India House are as blind to their own advantages as 
 the blindest of ploughmen. Lamb was summoned, it is 
 true, through the larger and more genial section of his 
 life, to the drudgery of a copying clerk — making con- 
 fidential entries into mighty folios, on the subject of 
 calicoes and muslins. By this means, whether he 
 would or not, he became gradually the author of a 
 great ' serial ' work, in a frightful number of volumes, 
 
182 CHAKLES LAMB. 
 
 on as dry a department of literature as the children of 
 the great desert could have suggested. Nobody, he 
 must have felt, was ever likely to study this great work 
 of his, not even Dr. Dryasdust. He had written in 
 vain, which is not pleasant to know. There would be 
 no second edition called for by a discerning public in 
 Leadenhall Street ; not a chance of that. And con- 
 sequently the opera omnia of Lamb, drawn up in a 
 hideous battalion, at the cost of labor so enormous, 
 would be known only to certain families of spiders in 
 one generation, and of rats in the next. Such a labor 
 of Sisyphus, — the rolling up a ponderous stone to the 
 summit of a hill only that it might roll back again 
 by the gravitation of its own dulness, — seems a bad 
 employment for a man of genius in his meridian 
 energies. And yet, perhaps not. Perhaps the col- 
 lective wisdom of Europe could not have devised for 
 Lamb a more favorable condition of toil than this very 
 India House clerkship. His works (his Leadenhall 
 Street works) were certainly not read ; popular they 
 could not be, for they were not read by anybody ; but 
 then, to balance tliat, they were not reviewed. His 
 folios were of that order, which (in Cowper's words,) 
 ' not even critics criticize.' Is that nothing? Is it no 
 happiness to escape the hands of scoundrel reviewers ? 
 Many of us escape being read ; the worshipful reviewer 
 does not find time to read a line of us ; but we do not 
 for that reason escape being criticized, ' shown up,' 
 and martyred. The list of errata again, committed by 
 Lamb, was probably of a magnitude to alarm any pos- 
 sible compositor ; and yet these errata will never be 
 knoAvn to mankind. They are dead and buried. They 
 have been cut off prematurely ; and for any effect upon 
 
CHAKXES LAMB, 183 
 
 thefr generation, might as well never have existed. 
 Then the returns, in a pecuniary sense, from these 
 folios — how important were they ! It is not common, 
 certainly, to write folios ; but neither is it common to 
 draw a steady income of from 300Z. to 400Z. per an- 
 num from volumes of any size. This will be admitted ; 
 but would it not have been better to draw the income 
 without the toil ? Doubtless it would always be more 
 agreeable to have the rose without the thorn. But in 
 the case before us, taken with all its circumstances, 
 we deny that the toil is truly typified as a thorn ; so 
 far from being a thorn in Lamb's daily life, on the con- 
 trary, it was a second rose ingrafted upon the original 
 rose of the income, that he had to earn it by a moderate 
 but continued exertion. Holidays, in a national estab- 
 lishment so great as the India House, and in our too 
 fervid period, naturally could not be frequent ; yet all 
 great English corporations are gracious masters, and 
 indulgences of this nature could be obtained on a 
 special application. Not to count upon these accidents 
 of favor, we find that the regular toil of those in 
 Lamb's situation, began at ten in the morning and 
 ended as the clock struck four in the afternoon. Six 
 hours composed the daily contribution of labor, that is 
 precisely one fourth part of the total day. Only that, 
 as Sunday was exempted, the rigorous exjiression of 
 the quota was one fourth of six-sevenths, which 
 makes six twenty-eighths and not six twenty- fourths 
 of the total time. Less toil than this would hardly 
 have availed to deepen the sense of value in that 
 large part of the time still remaining disposable. Had 
 there been any resumption whatever of labor in the 
 evening, though but for half an hour, that one eii 
 
184 CHABLES IAMB. 
 
 croachment upon tte broad continuous area of tlie 
 eighteen free hours would have killed the tranquillity 
 of the whole day, by solving it (so to speak) with 
 intermitting anxieties — anxieties that, like tides, 
 would still be rising and falling. Whereas now, at 
 the early hour of four, when daylight is yet lingering 
 in the air, even at the dead of winter, in the latitude 
 of London, and when the enjoying section of the day 
 is barely commencing, everything is left which a man 
 would care to retain. A mere dilettante or amateur 
 student, having no mercenary interest concerned, 
 would, upon a refinement of luxury — would, upon 
 choice, give up so so much time to study, were it only 
 to sharpen the value of what remained for pleasure. 
 And thus the only difference between the scheme of 
 the India House distributing his time for Lamb, and 
 the scheme of a wise voluptuary distributing his time 
 for himself, lay, not in the amount of time deducted 
 from enjoyment, but in the particular mode of appro- 
 priating that deduction. An intellectual appropriation 
 of the time, though casually fatiguing, must have 
 pleasures of its own ; pleasures denied to a task so 
 mechanic and so monotonous as that of reiterating 
 endless records of sales or consignments not essentially 
 varying from each other. True ; it is pleasantcr to 
 pursue an intellectual study than to make entries in a 
 ledger. But even an intellectual toil is toil ; few peo- 
 ple can support it for more than six hours in a day. 
 And the only question, therefore, after all, is, at what 
 period of the day a man would prefer taking this 
 pleasure of study. Now, upon that point, as regards 
 the case of Lamb, there is no opening for doubt. He. 
 LiO^agst his Popular Fallacies, admirably illustrates 
 
CHARLES LAMB. 185 
 
 the necessity of evening and artificial lights to the 
 prosperity of studies. After exposing, with the per- 
 fection of fun, the savage unsociality of those eklcr 
 ancestors who lived (if life it was) before lamp-light 
 was invented, showing that 'jokes came in with 
 caudles,' since ' what repartees could have passed ' when 
 people were ' grumbling at one another in the dark,' 
 and ' when you must have felt about for a smile, and 
 handled a neighbor's cheek to be sure that he under- 
 stood it? ' — he goes on to say, ' This accounts for the 
 seriousness of the elder poetry,' viz., because they 
 had no candle-light. Even eating he objects to as a 
 very imperfect thing in the dark ; you are not con- 
 vinced that a dish tastes as it should do by the promise 
 of its name, if you dine in the twilight without candles. 
 Seeing is believing. ' The senses absolutely give and 
 take reciprocally.' The sight guarantees the taste. 
 For instance, ' Can you tell pork from veal in the dark, 
 or distinguish Sherries from pure Malaga ? ' To all 
 enjoyments whatsoever candles are indispensable as 
 an adjunct; but, as to reading, ' there is,' says Lamb, 
 ' absolutely no such thing but by a candle. We have 
 tried the affectation of a book at noon-day in gardens, 
 but it was labor thrown away. It is a mockery, all that 
 is reported of the influential Phrobus. No true poem 
 ever owed its birth to the sun's light. The mild 
 internal light, that reveals the fine shapings of poetry, 
 like fires on the domestic hearth, goes out in the sun- 
 shine. Milton's morning hymn in Paradise, we would 
 hold a good wager, was penned at midnight ; and Tay- 
 lor's rich description of a sunrise smells decidedly of 
 the taper.' This view of evening and candle-light aa 
 involved in literature may seem no more ihan a pleaa- 
 16 
 
186 CHAKLES LAMB. 
 
 ant extravaganza ; and no doubt it is in the nature of 
 such gayeties to travel a little into exaggeration, but 
 substantially it is certain that Lamb's feelings pointed 
 habitually in the direction here indicated. His literary 
 studies, whether taking the color of tasks or diversions, 
 courted the aid of evening, which, by means of phys- 
 ical weariness, produces a more luxurious state of re- 
 pose than belongs to the labor hours of day, and courted 
 the aid of lamp-light, which, as Lord Bacon remarked, 
 gives a gorgeousness to human pomps and pleasures, 
 such as would be vainly sought from the homeliness 
 of daylight. The hours, therefore, which were with- 
 drawn from his own control by the India House, 
 happened to be exactly that part of the day which 
 Lamb least valued, and could least have turned to 
 account. 
 
 The account given of Lamb's friends, of those whom 
 he endeavored to love because he admired them, or to 
 esteem intellectually because he loved them personally, 
 is too much colored for general acquiescence by Ser- 
 geant Talfourd's own early prepossessions. It is natural 
 that an intellectual man like the Sergeant, personally 
 made known in youth to people, whom from child- 
 hood he had regarded as powers in the ideal world, 
 and in some instances as representing the eternities of 
 human speculation, since their names had perhaps 
 dawned upon his mind in concurrence with the very 
 earliest suggestion of topics which they had treated, 
 should overrate theu- intrinsic grandeur. Hazlitt ac- 
 cordingly is styled ' The great thinker.' But had he 
 been such potentially, there was an absolute bar to his 
 achievement of that station in act and consummation. 
 No man can be a great thinker in our days upon large 
 
CHARLES LAMB. 187 
 
 and elaborate questions without being also a great stu- 
 dent. To think profoundly, it is indispensable that a 
 man should have read down to his own starting point, 
 and have read as a collating student to the particular 
 stage at which he himself takes up the subject. At 
 this moment, for instance, how could geology be treated 
 otherwise than childishly by one who should rely upon 
 the encyclopaedias of 1800 ? or comparative physiology 
 by the most ingenious of men unacquainted with Mar- 
 shall Hall, and with the apocalyptic glimpses of secrets 
 unfolding under the hands of Professor Owen? In 
 such a condition of undisciplined thinking, the ablest 
 man thinks to no purpose. He lingers upon parts of 
 the inquiry that have lost the importance which once 
 they had, under imperfect charts of the subject; he 
 wastes his strength upon problems that have become 
 obsolete ; he loses his way in paths that are not in the 
 line of direction upon which the improved speculation 
 is moving; or he gives narrow conjectural solutions of 
 difficulties that have long since received sure and com- 
 prehensive ones. It is as if a man should in these 
 days attempt to colonize, and yet, through inertia or 
 through ignorance, should leave behind him all modern 
 resources of chemistry, of chemical agriculture, or of 
 steam-power. Hazlitt had read nothing. Unacquaint- 
 ed with Grecian philosophy, with Scholastic philoso- 
 phy, and with the recomposition of these philosophies 
 in the looms of Germany during the last sixty and odd 
 years, trusting merely to the unrestrained instincts of 
 keen mother- wit — whence should Hazlitt have had 
 the materials for great thinking ? It is through the? 
 collation of many abortive voyages to polar regiona 
 that a man gains his first chance of entering the polai 
 
188 CHARLES XAMB. 
 
 basiiij oi of running ahead on a true line of approach 
 to it. The very reason for Hazlitt's defect in elo- 
 quence as a lecturer, is sufficient also as a reason why 
 he could not have been a comprehensive thinker. ' Ho 
 was not eloquent,' says the Sergeant, ' in the true 
 sense of the term.' But Avhy? Because it seems 'his 
 Lhoughts were too weighty to be moved along by the 
 shallow stream of feeling which an evening's excite- 
 ment can rouse,' — an explanation which leaves us in 
 doubt whether Hazlitt forfeited his chance of eloquence 
 by accommodating himself to this evening's excite- 
 ment, or by gloomily resisting it. Our own explana- 
 tion is different ; Hazlitt was not eloquent, because he 
 was discontinuous. No man can be eloquent whose 
 thoughts are abrupt, insulated, capricious, and (to bor- 
 row an impressive word from Coleridge) non-sequa- 
 cious. Eloquence resides not in separate or fractional 
 ideas, but in the relations of manifold ideas, and in the 
 mode of their evolution from each other. It is not 
 indeed enough that the ideas should be many, and 
 their relations coherent ; the main condition lies in the 
 key of the evolution, in the law of the succession. The 
 elements are nothing without the atmosphere that 
 moulds, and the dynamic forces that combine. Now 
 Hazlitt's brilliancy is seen chiefly in separate splinter- 
 ings of phrase or image which throw upon the eye a 
 vitreous scintillation for a moment, but spread no deep 
 s\iffusions of color, and distribiite no masses of mighty 
 shadow. A flash, a solitary flash, and all is gone. 
 Rhetoric, according to its quality, stands in many 
 degrees of relation to the permanences of truth ; and 
 all rhetoric, like all flesh, is partly unreal, and the 
 glory of both is fleeting. Even the mighty rhetoric 
 
CHARLES LAMB. 189 
 
 of Sir Thomas Browne, or Jeremy Taylor, to whom only 
 it has been granted to open the trum^^et-stop on that 
 great organ of passion, oftentimes leaves behind it the 
 sense of sadness which belongs to beautiful apparitions 
 starting out of darkness upon the morbid eye, only tc 
 be reclaimed by darkness in the instant of their birth, 
 or which belongs to pageantries in the clouds. But if 
 all rhetoric is a mode of pyrotechny, and all pyrotech- 
 nics are by necessity fugacious, yet even in these frail 
 pomps, there are many degrees of frailty. Some fire- 
 works require an hour's duration for the expansion of 
 their glory ; others, as if formed from fulminating 
 powder, expire in the very act of birth. Precisely on 
 that scale of duration and of power stand the glitter- 
 ings of rhetoric that are not worked into the texture, 
 but washed on from the outside. Hazlitt's thoughts 
 were of the same fractured and discontinuous order as 
 his illustrative images — seldom or never self-diffusive ; 
 and that is a sufficient argument that he had never 
 cultivated philosophic thinking. 
 
 Not, however, to conceal any part of the truth, we 
 are bound to acknowledge that Lamb thought otherwise 
 on this point, manifesting what seemed to us an extrav- 
 agant admiration of Hazlitt, and perhaps even in part 
 for that very glitter which we are denouncing — at least 
 he did so in conversation with ourselves. But, on 
 the other hand, as this conversation travelled a little 
 into the tone of a disputation, and our frost on this point 
 might seem to justify some undue fervor by way of 
 balance, it is very possible that Lamb did not speak his 
 absolute and most dispassionate judgment. And yet 
 again, if he did, may we, with all reverence for Lamb's 
 exquisite genius ha\e permission to say — that his own 
 
190 CHAKLES IAMB. 
 
 constitution of intellect sinned by this very habit of dis- 
 continuity. It was a habit of mind not unlikely to be 
 cherished by his habits of life. Amongst these habits 
 was the excess of his social kindness. He scorned so 
 much to deny his company and his redundant hospi- 
 tality to any man who manifested a wish for either by 
 calling upon him, that he almost seemed to think it a 
 criminality in himself if, by accident, he really was 
 from home on your visit, rather than by possibility a 
 negligence in you, that had not fore^varned him of your 
 intention. All his life, from this and other causes, he 
 must have read in the spirit of one liable to sudden 
 interruption ; like a dragoon, in fact, reading with one 
 foot in the stirrup, when expecting momentarily a 
 summons to mount for action. In such situations, read- 
 ing by snatches, and by intervals of precarious leisure, 
 people form the habit of seeking and unduly valuing 
 condensations of the meaning, where in reality the 
 truth suffers by this short-hand exhibition, or else they 
 demand too vivid illustrations of the meaning. Lord 
 Chesterfield himself, so brilliant a man by nature, 
 already therefore making a morbid estimate of bril- 
 liancy, and so hurried throughout his life as a public 
 man, read under this double coercion for craving instan- 
 taneous effects. At one period, his only time for read- 
 ing was in the morning, whilst under the hands of his 
 hair-dresser ; compelled to take the hastiest of flying 
 shots at his author, naturally he demanded a very con- 
 spicuous mark to fire at. But the author could not, in 
 80 brief a space, be always sure to crowd any very 
 prominent objects on the eye, unless by being auda- 
 ciously oracular and peremptory as regarded the senti- 
 ment, or flashy in excess as regarded its expressioa, 
 
CHAKLES LAMB. 191 
 
 « Come now. my friend,' was Lord Chesterfield' a 
 morning adjuration to his author ; ' come now, cut it 
 short — don't prose — don't hum and haw.' The 
 author had douhtlcss no ambition to enter his name on 
 the honorable and ancient roll of gentleman prosers ; 
 probably he conceived himself not at all tainted with 
 the asthmatic infirmity of humming and hawing ; but 
 as to ' cutting it short,' how could he be sure of meet- 
 ing his lordship's expectations in that point, unless by 
 dismissing the limitations that might be requisite to fit 
 the idea for use, or the adjuncts that might be requisite to 
 integrate its truth, or the final consequences that might 
 involve some deep arriere -pensee, which, coming last 
 in the succession, might oftentimes be calculated to lie 
 deepest on the mind. To be lawfully and usefully 
 brilliant after this rapid fashion, a man must come 
 forward as a refresher of old truths, where his suppres- 
 sions are supplied by the reader's memory ; not as an 
 expounder of new truths, where oftentimes a dislocated 
 fraction of the true is more dangerous than the false 
 itself. 
 
 To read therefore habitually, by hurried instalments, 
 has this bad tendency — that it is likely to found a taste 
 for modes of composition too artificially irritating, and 
 to disturb the equilibrium of the judgment in relation 
 to the colorings of style. Lamb, however, whose con- 
 stitution of mind was even ideally sound in reference 
 to the natural, the simple, the genuine, might seem of 
 all men least liable to a taint in this direction. And 
 undoubtedly he was so, as regarded those modes of 
 beauty which nature had specially qualified him for 
 apprehending. Else, and in relation to other modea 
 of beauty, where his sense of the true, and of its flis- 
 
192 CHAKLES LAMB. 
 
 tinction from the spurious, had been an acquired sense, 
 it is impossible for us to hide from ourselves — that not 
 through habits only, not through stress of injurious 
 accidents only, but by original structure and tempera 
 ment of mind, Lamb had a bias towards those very 
 defects on which rested the startling characteristics of 
 style which we have been noticing. He himself, we 
 fear, not bribed by indulgent feelings to another, not 
 moved by friendship, but by native tendency, shrank 
 from the continuous, from the sustained, from the 
 elaborate. 
 
 The elaborate, indeed, without which much truth and 
 beauty must perish in germ, was by name the object of 
 his invectives. The instances are many, in his own 
 beautiful essays, where he literally collajDses, literally 
 sinks away from openings suddenly offering themselves 
 to flights of pathos or solemnity in direct prosecution 
 of his own theme. On any such summons where an 
 ascending impulse, and an untired pinion were required, 
 he refuses himself (to use military language) invaria- 
 bly. The least observing reader of Elia cannot have 
 failed to notice that the most felicitous passages always 
 accomplish their circuit in a few sentences. The gyra- 
 tion within which the sentiment wheels, no matter of 
 what kind it may be, is always the shortest possible. 
 It does not prolong itself, and it does not repeat itself. 
 But in fact, other features in Lamb's mind would have 
 argued this feature by analogy, had we by accident 
 been left unaware of it directly. It is not by cliancf, 
 or without a deep ground in his nature, common to all 
 his qualities, both affirmative and negative, that Lamb 
 had an insensibility to music more absolute that can 
 have been often shared by any human creature, or 
 
CHAHLES LAMB. 193 
 
 pcrliaj)9 than was ever before acknowledged so can- 
 didly. The sense of mnsic, — as a pleasurable sunse, 
 or as anj' sense at all other than of certain unmeaning 
 and impertinent differences in respect to high and low, 
 sharj) or flat, — was iitterlj- obliterated as with a sponge 
 by nature herself from Lamb's organization. It was a 
 corollarj', from the same large suhslratum in his nature, 
 that Lamb had no sense of the rhythmical in prose 
 compositions. Rhythmus, or pomp of cadence, or so- 
 norous ascent of clauses, in the structure of sentences, 
 were effects of art as much thrown away upon Mm as 
 the voice of the charmer upon the deaf adder. We 
 ourselves, occupying the very station of polar opposi- 
 tion to that of Lamb, being as morbidly, perhaps, in 
 the one excess as he in the other, naturally detected 
 this omission in Lamb's nature at an early stage of our 
 acquaintance. Not the fabled Regulus with his eye- 
 lids torn away, and his uncurtained eye-balls exposed 
 to the noon-tide glare of a Carthaginian sun, coiild have 
 shrieked with more anguish of recoil from torture than 
 we from certain sentences and periods in which Lamb 
 perceived no fault at all. Pomp, in our apprehension, 
 ■was an idea of two categories ; the pompous might be 
 spurious, but it might also be genuine. It is well to 
 love the simple — we love it ; nor is there any opposition 
 at all between that and the very glory of pomp. But, 
 as we once put the case to Lamb, if, as a musician, as 
 the leader of a mighty orchestra, you had this theme 
 ofTered to you — ' Belshazzar the king gave a great 
 frast to a thousand of his lords ' — or this, ' And on 
 * certain day, Marcus Cicero stood up, and in a set 
 speech rendered solemn thanks to Caius Cpesar for 
 Quintus Ligarius pardoned, and for Marcus Marcellu'' 
 17 
 
194 CHAELES IAMB. 
 
 restored ' — surely no man would deny that, in such a 
 case, simplicity, though in a passive sense not lawfully 
 absent, must stand aside as totally insufficient for the 
 positive part. Simplicity might guide, even here, but 
 could not furnish the power ; a rudder it might be, but 
 not an oar or a sail. This, Lamb was ready to allow ; 
 as an intellectual quiddity, he recognized pomp in the 
 character of a privileged thing ; he was obliged to do 
 so ; for take away from great ceremonial festivals, 
 such as the solemn rendering of thanks, the celebration 
 of national anniversaries, the commemoration of public 
 benefactors, &c., the element of pomp, and you take 
 away their very meaning and life ; but, whilst allowing , 
 a place for it in the rubric of the logician, it is certain 
 that, sensuously, Lamb would not have sympathized 
 with it, nor have feJt its justification in any concrete 
 instance. We find a difficulty in px;rsuing this subject, 
 Avithout greatly exceeding our limits. We pause, 
 therefore, and add only this one suggestion as partly 
 explanatory of the case. Lamb had the dramatic in- 
 tellect and taste, perhaps, in perfection ; of the Epic, 
 he had none at all. Here, as happens sometimes to 
 men of genius pretcrnaturally endowed in one direction, 
 he might be considered as almost starved. A favorite 
 of nature, so eminent in some directions, by what right 
 could he complain that her bounties were not indis- 
 criminate ? From this defect in his nature it arose, 
 that, except by culture and by reflection. Lamb hg,d no 
 genial appreciation of Milton. The solemn planetary 
 wheelings of the Paradise Lost were not to his taste. 
 What he did comprehend, were the motions like those 
 of lightning, the fierce angular coruscations of that wild 
 agency which comes forward so vividly in the sudden 
 
chaki.es lamb. 195 
 
 ntni-jiTTfiu, in the revolutlonaiy catastrophe, and in the 
 tumultuous conflicts, through persons or through situ- 
 ations, of the tragic drama. 
 
 There is another vice in Mr. Hazlitt's mode of com- 
 position, viz., the habit of trite quotation, too common 
 to have challenged much notice, were it not for these 
 reasons : 1st, That Sergeant Talfourd speaks of it in 
 equivocal terms, as a fault perhaps, but as a ' felici- 
 tous ' fault, ' trailing after it a line of golden asso na- 
 tions ; ' 2dly, because the practice involves a dishon- 
 esty. On occasion of No. 1, we must profess our belief 
 that a more ample explanation from the Sergeant would 
 have left him in substantial harmony with ourselves. 
 We cannot conceive the author of Ion, and the friend 
 of Wordsworth, seriously to countenance that paralytic 
 ' mouth-diarrhcea,' (to borrow a phrase of Coleridge's) 
 — that Jliixe de bouc/ie (to borrow an earlier phrase of 
 Archbishop Huet's,) which places the reader at the 
 mercy of a man's tritest remembrances from his most 
 school-boy reading. To have the verbal memory 
 infested with tags of verse and ' cues ' of rhyme is in 
 itself an infirmity as vulgar and as morbid as the stable- 
 boy's habit of whistling slang airs upon the mere me- 
 chanical excitement of a bar or two whistled by some 
 other blockhead in some other stable. The very stage 
 has grown weary of ridiculing a folly, that having been 
 long since expelled from decent society has taken 
 refuge amongst the most imbecile of authors. Was 
 Mr. Hazlitt then of that class ? No ; he was a man of 
 gi-eat talents, and of capacity for greater things than ho 
 ever attempted, though without any pretensions of the 
 philosophic kind ascribed, to him by the Sergeant. 
 Meantime the reason for resisting the « example and 
 
196 CHAKLES LAMB. 
 
 practice of Hazlitt lies in this — tliat essentially it is at 
 waj with sincerity, the foundation of all good writing, 
 to express one's own thoughts by another man's words. 
 This dilemma arises. The thought is, or it is not, 
 worthy of that emphasis which belongs to a metrical 
 expression of it. If it is not, then we shall be guilty of 
 a mere folly in pushing into strong /elief that which 
 confessedly cannot support it. If it is, then how in- 
 credible that a thought strongly conceived, and bearing 
 about it the impress of one's own individuality, should 
 naturally, and without dissimulation or falsehood, bend 
 to anotl^er man's expression of it ! Simply to back 
 one's own view, by a similar view derived from another, 
 may be useful; a quotation that repeats one's own 
 sentiment, but in a varied form, has the grace which 
 belongs to the idejn in alio, the same radical idea ex- 
 pressed with a difference — similarity in dissimilarity ; 
 but to throw one's own thoughts, matter and form, 
 through alien organs so absolutely as to make another 
 man one's interpreter for evil and good, is either to 
 confess a singular laxity of thinking that can so flexibly 
 adapt itself to any casual form of words, or else to 
 confess that sort of carelessness about the expression" 
 which draws its real origin from a sense of indifference 
 about the things to be expressed. Utterly at war this 
 distressing practice is with all simplicity and earnest- 
 ness of writing ; it argues a state of indolent ease 
 inconsistent with the pressure and coersion of strong 
 fermenting thoughts, before we can be at leisure for 
 idle or chance quotations. But lastly, in reference to 
 No. 2, we must add that the j^i'actice is signally dis- 
 honest. It ' trails after it a line of golden associations.' 
 Yea and the burglar, who leaves an army-tailor's after 
 
CHARLES LAMB. 19? 
 
 ft -aiihiigcit; visit, trails after him perhaps a long roll of 
 gold bullion epaulettes which may look pretty by lamp- 
 light. 
 
 But that, in the present condition of moral philosophy 
 amongst the police, is accounted robbery ; and to 
 benefit too much by quotations is little less. At this 
 moment we have in our eye a work, at one time not 
 without celebrity, which is one continued cento of 
 splendid passages from other people. The natural effect 
 from so much fine writing is, that the reader rises with 
 the impression of having been engaged upon a most 
 eloquent W'ork. Meantime the whole is a series of 
 mosaics ; a tessellation made up from borrowed frag- 
 ments : and first, when the reader's attention is ex- 
 pressly directed upon the fact, he becomes aware that 
 the nominal author has contributed nothing more to the 
 book than a few passages of transition, or brief clauses 
 of connection. 
 
 In the year 1796, the main incident occurring of any 
 importance for English literature was the publication 
 by Soifthey of an epic poem. This poem, the Joan of 
 Arc, was the earliest work of much pretension amongst 
 all that Southey wrote ; and by many degrees it was 
 the worst. In the four great narrative poems of his 
 later years, there is a combination of two striking 
 qualities, viz., a peculiar command over the visually 
 splendid, connected with a deep-toned grandeur of 
 moral pathos. Especially we find this union in the 
 Thalaba and the Roderick ; but in the Joan of Arc w^e 
 miss it. What splendor there is for the fancy and the 
 eye belongs chiefly to the Vision, contiibuted by Coler- 
 idge, and this was subsequently withdrawn. Tha 
 fault lay in Southey's political relations at that era ; 
 
198 CHABLES XAMB. 
 
 his sympatliy with the French Revolution in its earlier 
 stages had been boundless ; in all respects it was a 
 noble sympathy, fading only as the gorgeous coloring 
 faded from the emblazonries of that awful event, droop- 
 ing only when the promises of that golden dawn sick- 
 ened under stationary eclipse. In 1796, Southey was 
 yet under the tyranny of his own earliest fascination ; 
 in his eyes the Revolution had suffered a momentary 
 blight from refluxes of panic ; but blight of some kind 
 is incident to every harvest on which human hopes are 
 suspended. Bad auguries were also ascending from 
 the unchaining of martial instincts. But that the Rev- 
 olution, having ploughed its way through unparalleled 
 storms, wag preparing to face other storms, did but 
 quicken the apprehensiveness of his love — did but 
 quicken the duty of giving utterance to this lovo. 
 Hence came the rapid composition of the poem, which 
 cost less time in writing than in printing. Hence, also, 
 came the choice of his heroine. What he needed in 
 his central character was, a heart with a capacity for 
 the wrath of Hebrew prophets applied to ancient 
 abuses, and for evangelic pity applied to the sufferings 
 of nations. This heart, with this double capacity — 
 where should he seek it ? A French heart it must be, 
 or how should it follow with its sympathies a French 
 movement ? There lay Southey's reason for adopting 
 the Maid of Orleans as the depositary of hopes and 
 aspirations on behalf of France as fervid as his own. 
 In choosing this heroine, so inadequately known at 
 that time, Southey testified at least his own nobility 
 of feeling; 3 but in executing his choice, he and his 
 friends overlooked two faults fatal to his purpose. 
 One was this : sympathy with the French Revolutioa 
 
CHAKLES LAMB. 199 
 
 meant sympathy with the opening prospects of rr.an — 
 meant sympathy with the Pariah of every clime — with 
 all that suffered social wrong, or saddened in hopeless 
 bondage. 
 
 That was the movement at work in the French Rev- 
 olution. But the movement of Joanna d'Arc took a 
 different direction. In her day also, it is true, the 
 human heart had yearned after the same vast enfran- 
 chisement for her children of labor as afterwards 
 worked in the great vision of the French Revolution. 
 In her days also, and shortly before them, the human 
 hand had sought by bloody acts to realize this dream of 
 the heart. And in her childhood, Joanna had not been 
 insensible to these premature motions upon a path too 
 bloody and too dark to be safe. But this view of hu- 
 man misery had been utterly absorbed to her by the 
 special misery then desolating France. The lilies of 
 France had been trampled underfoot by the conquering 
 stranger. Within fifty years, in three pitched battles 
 that resounded to the ends of the earth, the chivalry of 
 France had been exterminated. Her oriflamme had 
 been dragged through the dust. The eldest son of 
 Baptism had been prostrated. The daughter of France 
 had been surrendered on coercion as a bride to her 
 English conqueror. The child of that marriage, so 
 ignominious to the land, was king of France by the 
 consent of Christendom ; that child's uncle domineered 
 as regent of France ; and that child's armies were in 
 military possession of the land. But were they undis- 
 puted masters ? No ; and there precisely lay the sor- 
 row of the time. Under a perfect conquest there would 
 have been repose ; whereas the presence of the Eng- 
 lish armies did but furnish a pica, masking itself in 
 
200 * CHARXES LAME. 
 
 patriotism, for gatlicrings everywhere of lawless ma- 
 rauders ; of soldiers that had deserted their banners ; 
 and of robbers by profession. This was the woe of 
 France more even than the military dishonor. That 
 dishonor had been palliated from the first by the gene- 
 alogical pretensions of the English royal family to the 
 French throne, and these pretensions were strengthened 
 in the person of the present claimant. But the military 
 desolation of France, this it was that woke the faith of 
 Joanna in her own heavenly mission of deliverance. 
 It was the attitude of her prostrate country, crying 
 night and day for purification from blood, and not from 
 feudal oppression, that swallowed up the thoughts of 
 the impassioned girl. But that was not the cry tliat 
 uttered itself afterwards in the French Revolution. 
 In Joanna's days, the first step towards rest for France 
 was by expulsion of the foreigner. Independence of a 
 foreign yoke, liberation as between people and people, 
 was the one ransom to be paid for French honor and 
 peace. That debt settled, there might come a time for 
 thinking of civil liberties. But this time was not within 
 the prospects of the poor sheperdess. The field — 
 the area of her sympathies — never coincided with that 
 of a Revolutionary period. It followed, therefore, 
 that Southey could not have raised Joanna (with her 
 condition of feeling) by any management, into the 
 interpreter of his own. That was the first error in his 
 poem, and it was irremediable. The second was — 
 and strangely enough this also escaped notice — that 
 the heroine of Southey is made to close her career pre- 
 cisely at the point when its grandeur commences. She 
 believed herself to have a mission for the deliverance 
 of France ; and the great instrument which she was 
 
CHARLES LAMB. 201 
 
 Authorized to use towards this end, was the king, 
 Charles VII. Him she was to crown. With this 
 coronation, her triumph, in the plain historical sense, 
 ended. And there ends Southey's poem. But ex- 
 actly at this point, the grander stage of her mission 
 commences, viz., the ransom which she, a solitary 
 girl, paid in her own person for the national deliver- 
 ance. The grander half of the story was thus sacri- 
 ficed, as being irrelevant to Southey's political object ; 
 and yet, after all, the half which he retained did not 
 at all symbolize that object. It is singular, indeed, 
 to find a long jwem, on an ancient subject, adapting 
 itself hieroglyphically to a modern purpose ; 2dly, to 
 find it failing of this purpose ; and 3dly, if it had 
 not failed, so planned that it could have succeeded 
 only by a sacrifice of all that was grandest in the 
 theme. 
 
 To these capital oversights, Southey, Coleridge, and 
 Lamb, were all joint parties ; the two first as concerned 
 in the composition, the last as a frank though friendly 
 reviewer of it in his private correspondence with 
 Coleridge. It is, however, some palliation of these 
 oversights, and a very singular fact in itself, that 
 neither from English authorities nor from French, 
 though the two nations were equally brought into close 
 connection with the career of that extraordinary girl, 
 could any adequate view be obtained of her character 
 and acts. The official records of her trial, apart from 
 which nothing can be depended upon, were first in the 
 c )urse of publication from the Paris press during the 
 currency of last year. First in 1847, about four 
 Hundred and sixteen years after her ashes had been 
 dispersed to the winds, could it be seen distinctly 
 
202 CHAKLES XAMB. 
 
 tlirougli the clouds of fierce partisanships and tiatit)nal 
 prejudices, what had been the frenzy of the persecu- 
 tion against her, and the utter desolation of her posi- 
 tion ; what had been the grandeur of her conscientious 
 exia tence. 
 
 Anxious that our readers should see Lamb from as 
 u\any angles as possible, Ave have obtained from an 
 old friend of his a memorial — slight, but such as the 
 circumstances allowed — of an evening spent with 
 Charles and Mary Lamb, in the winter of 1821-22. 
 The record is of the most unambitious character ; it 
 pretends to nothing as the reader will see, not so 
 much as to a pun, which it really required some 
 singularity of luck to have missed from Charles Lamb, 
 Avho often continued to fire puns, as minute guns, all 
 through the evening. But the more unpretending this 
 record is, the more appropriate it becomes by that very 
 fact to the memory of Mm who, amongst all authors, 
 was the humblest and least pretending. "We have 
 often thought that the famous epitaph written for his 
 grave by Piron, the cynical author of La Metromanie, 
 might have come from Lamb, were it not for one 
 objection ; Lamb's benign heart would have recoiled 
 from a sarcasm, however eff"ective, inscribed upon a 
 grave-stone ; or from a jest, however playful, that 
 tended to a vindictive sneer amongst his own farewell 
 words. We once translated this Piron epitaph into a 
 kind of rambling Drayton couplet ; and the only point 
 needing explanation is, that, from the accident of 
 scientific men, fellows of the Royal Society being 
 "usually very solemn men, with an extra chance, there- 
 fore, for being dull men in conversation, naturally it 
 arose that sout^ wit amongst our great-grandfathers 
 
CHAKLES LAMB. 208 
 
 translated F. R-. S. into a short-hand expression for a 
 Fellow Remarkably Stupid; to which version of the 
 three letters our English epitaph alludes. The French 
 original of Piron is this : 
 
 « Ci git Pii-on ; qui ne fut rien; 
 Pus meuic academicicn.' 
 
 The bitter arrow of the second line was feathered to 
 hit the French Acaderaie, who had declined to elect 
 him a member. Our translation is this : 
 
 ♦ Here lies Piron ; who was — uothiiig ; or, if that could be, 
 
 was less : 
 How ! — nothing? Yes, nothing; not so much as F. R. S.' 
 
 But now to our friend's memorandum : 
 
 " October 6, 1848. 
 "Mv DEAR X. — You ask me for some memorial, 
 however trivial, of any dinner party, supper party, 
 water party, no matter what, that I can circumstan- 
 tially recall to recollection, by any features whatever, 
 puns or repartees, -wisdom or wit, connecting it with 
 Charles Lamb. I grieve to say that my meetings of 
 a/iy sort with Lamb were few, though spread through 
 a score of years. That sounds odd for one that loved 
 Lamb so entirely, and so much venerated his character. 
 But the reason was, that I so seldom visited London, 
 and Lamb so seldom quitted it. Somewhere about 
 1810 and 1812 I must have met Lamb repeatedly at 
 the Courier Office in the Strand ; that is, at Coleridge's, 
 to whom, as an intimate friend, Mr. Stuart (a projarie- 
 tor of the paper) gave up for a time the use of some 
 rooms in the office. Thither, in the London season, 
 (May especially and June,) resorted Lamb, Godwin, 
 Sir H. Davy, and, once or twice, Wordsworth, Avho 
 visited Sir George Beaumont's Leicestershire residence 
 
204 CHARLES LAMB. 
 
 of Coleorton early in tlie spring, and thon travelled 
 up to Grosvenor Square with Sir George and Lady 
 Beaumont: ^ sj^ectiUum veniens, vettiens spectelur at 
 ipse.' 
 
 But in these miscellaneous gatherings, Lamb said 
 little except when an opening arose for a pun. And 
 how effectual that sort of small shot was from him^ I 
 need not say to anybody who remembers his infirmity 
 of stammering, and his dexterous management of it 
 for purposes of light and shade. He was often able to 
 train the roll of stammers in settling upon the words 
 immediately preceding the effective one ; by wliich 
 means the key-note of the jest or sarcasm, benefiting 
 by the sudden liberatioir of his embargoed voice, was 
 delivered with the force of a pistol shot. That stam- 
 mer was worth an annuity to him as an ally of his wit. 
 Firing under cover of that advantage, he did triple 
 execution ; for, in the first place, the distressing sym- 
 pathy of the hearers with his distress of utterance won 
 for him unavoidably the silence of deep attention ; and 
 then, whilst he had us all hoaxed into this attitude of 
 mute suspense by an appearance of distress that he 
 perhaps did not really feel, down came a plunging shot 
 into the very thick of us, with ten times the effect it 
 would else have had. If his stammering, however, 
 often did him true ' yeoman's service,' sometimes it 
 led him into scrapes. Coleridge told me of a ludicrous 
 embarrassment which it caused him at Hastings. Lamb 
 had been medically advised to a course of sea-bathing ; 
 and accordingly at the door of his bathing machine, 
 whilst he stood shivering with cold, two stout fellows 
 laid hold of him, one at each shoulder, like heraldic 
 supporters : they waited for the word of command 
 
CHARLES LAMB. 205 
 
 from their principal, who began the following oration 
 to them : ' Hear me, men ! Take notice of this — I 
 am to be dipped.' What more he would have said is 
 unknown to land or sea or bathing machines ; for 
 having reached the word dipped, he commenced such a 
 rolling fire of Di — di — di — di, that when at length 
 lie descended a j)lo7nb upon the full word dipped, tlie 
 two men, rather tired of the long suspense, became 
 satisfied that they had reached what lawyers call the 
 ' operative clause ' of the sentence ; and both exclaim- 
 ing at once, ' Oh yes, Sir, we're quite aware of that,^ 
 down they plunged him into the sea. On emerging, 
 Lamb sobbed so much from the cold, that he found 
 no voice suitable to his indignation ; from necessity he 
 seemed tranquil ; and again addressing the men, who 
 stood respectfully listening, he began thus : ' Men ! is 
 it possible to obtain your attention ? ' ' Oh surely, 
 Sir,^by all means.' ' Then listen : once more I tell 
 you, I am to be di — di — di — ' — and then, with a 
 
 burst of indignation, ' dipped, I tell you,' ' Oh 
 
 decidedly, Sir,' rejoined the men, ' decidedly,' and 
 down the stammerer went for the second time. Petri- 
 fied with cold and wrath, once more Lamb made a 
 feeble attempt at explanation — ' Grant me pa — pa — 
 patience ; is it mum — um — murder you me — me — 
 mean? Again and a — ga — ga — gain, I tell you, 
 I'm to be di — di — di — dipped,' now speaking furi- 
 ously, with the voice of an injured man. ' Oh yes. 
 Sir,' the men replied, ' we know that, we fully under- 
 stood it,' and for the third time down v»'-ent Lamb into 
 the sea. ' Oh limbs of Satan ! ' he said, on coming up 
 for the third time, ' it's now too late ; I tell you that I 
 am — no, that I was — to be di — di — di — dipped 
 only onr/',.^ 
 
206 CHAKLES LAMB. 
 
 Since the rencontres with Lamb at Coleridge's, I 
 had met him once or twice at literary dinner parties. 
 One of these occurred at the house oi Messrs. Taylor 
 & Hesscy, the publishers. I myself was suffering too 
 much from illness at the time to take any pleasure 
 in what passed, or to notice it with any vigilance of 
 attention. Lamb, I remember, as usual, Avas full of 
 gayety ; and as usual he rose too rapidly to the zenith 
 of his gayety ; for he shot upwards like a rocket, and, 
 as usual, people said he was ' tipsy.' To me Lamb 
 never seemed intoxicated, but at most aerially elevated. 
 He never talked nonsense, which is a great point 
 gained ; nor polemically, which is a greater ; for it is 
 a dreadful thing to find a drunken man bent upon con- 
 verting oneself ; nor sentimentally, which is greatest of 
 all. You can stand a man's fraternizing with you ; or 
 if he swears an eternal friendship only once in an 
 hour, you do not think of calling the police ; but once 
 in every three minutes is too much. Lamb did none 
 of these things ; he was always rational, quiet, and 
 gentlemanly in his habits. Nothing memorable, I am 
 sure, passed upon this occasion, which was in Novem- 
 ber, of 1821 ; and yet the dinner was memorable by 
 means of one fact not discovered until many years 
 later. Amongst the company of all literary men, sate 
 a murderer, and a murderer of a freezing class; cool, 
 calculating, wholesale in his operations, and moving all 
 along under the advantages of unsuspecting domestic 
 confidence and domestic opportunities. This was Mr. 
 Wainwright, who was subsequently brought to trial, 
 but not for any of his murders, and transported for life. 
 The story has been told by Sergeant Talfourd, in the 
 second volume of these ' Final Memoirs,' and pre* 
 
CHARLES LAMB. 207 
 
 vioiisly by Sir Edward B. Lytton. Both liave been 
 much blamed for the use made of this extraordinary 
 case ; but we know not why. In itself it is a most 
 remarkable case, for more reasons than one. It is 
 remarkable for the apalling revelation which it makes 
 of power spread through the hands of people not liable 
 to suspicion, for purposes the most dreadful. It is 
 remarkable also by the contrast which existed in this 
 case between the murderer's appearance, and the ter- 
 rific purposes with which he Avas always dallying. 
 He was a contributor to a journal in which I also had 
 written several papers. This formed a shadowy link 
 between us ; and, ill as I was, I looked more attentive- 
 ly at him than at anybody else. Yet there were 
 several men of wit and genius present, amongst whom 
 Lamb (as I have said), and Thomas Hood, Hamilton 
 Reynolds, and Allan Cunningham. But them I already 
 knew, whereas Mr. W. I now saw for the first time and 
 the last. What interested me about him was this, the 
 papers which had been pointed out to me as his, 
 (signed Janus Weathercock, Vinkhooms, &;c.) were 
 written in a spirit of coxcombry that did not so much 
 disgust as amuse. The writer could not conceal the 
 ostentatious pleasure which he took in the luxurious 
 fittings up of his rooms, in the fancied splendor of his 
 bijouterie, &c. Yet it was easy for a man of any 
 experience to read two facts in all this idle etalage ; 
 one being, that his finery was but of a second-rate 
 order ; the other, that he was a parvenu, not' at home 
 even amongst his second-rate splendor. So far there 
 
 was nothing to distinguish Mr. W 's papers from 
 
 the papers of other triflcrs. But in this point there 
 was, viz., that in his judgmon<"-s upon the great Italian 
 
208 CHARLES LAMB. 
 
 masters of painting, Da Vinci, Titian, &c., tliere 
 seemed a tone of sinceritj' and of native sensibility, aa 
 in one who spoke from himself, and was not merely a 
 copier from book?. This it was that interested me ; 
 as also his reviews of the chief Italian engravers, 
 Morghen, Volpato, &c. ; not for the manner, which 
 overflowed with levities and impertinence, but for thvj 
 substance of his judgments in those cases where I 
 happened to have had an opportunity of judging for 
 myself. Here arose also a claim upon Lamb's atten- 
 tion ; for Lamb and his sister had a deep feeling for 
 what was excellent in painting. Accordingly Lamb 
 paid him a great deal of attention, and continued to 
 speak of him for years with an interest that seemed 
 dispropqrtioned to his pretensions. This might be 
 owing in part to an indirect compliment paid to Miss 
 
 Lamb in one of W 's papers ; else his appearance 
 
 would rather have repelled Lamb ; it was common- 
 place, and better suited to express the dandyism whicL 
 overspread the surface of his manner, than the unaf 
 fected sensibility which apparently lay in his nature 
 Dandy or not, however, this man, on account of thu 
 schism in his papers, so much amiable puppyism on 
 one side, so much deep feeling on the other, (feeling, 
 applied to some of the grandest objects that earth has 
 to show,) did rea^iy move a trifle of interest in me, on 
 a day when I hated the face of man and woman. Yet 
 again, if I had known this man for the murderer that 
 even theri he was, what sudden loss of interest, what 
 sudden growth of another interest, would have changed 
 the face of that party ! Trivial creature, that didst 
 carry thy dreadful eye kindling with perpetual trea- 
 sons ! Dreadful creature, that didst carry thy trivial 
 
CHARLES LAMB. 209 
 
 eye, niantlinjj Avith eternal levity, over tin.; sleeping 
 surfaces of confiding houseliokl life — oh, what a 
 revolution for man wouldst thou have accomplished 
 had thy deep wickedness prospered ! What teas that 
 wickedness ? In a few words I will say. 
 
 At this time (October 1848) the whole British island 
 is appalled by a new chapter in the history of poison- 
 ing. Locusta in ancient Rome, Madame Brinvillicrs 
 in Paris, were people of original genius : not in any 
 new artifice of toxicology, not in the mere manage- 
 ment of poisons, was the audacity of their genius dis- 
 played. No ; but in profiting by domestic openings 
 for murder, unsuspected through their very atrocity. 
 Such an opening was made same years ago by those 
 who saw the possibility of founding purses for parents 
 upon the murder of their children. This was done 
 upon a larger scale than had been suspected, and upon 
 a plausible pi-etence. To bury a corpse is costly ; but 
 of a hundred children only a few, in the ordinary 
 course of mortality, will die within a given time. 
 Five shillings a-piece will produce £25 annually, and 
 that will bury a considerable number. On this princi- 
 ple arose Infant Burial Societies. For a few shillings 
 annually, a parent could secure a funeral for every 
 child. If the child died, a few guineas fell due to the 
 parent, ana the funeral was accomplished without cost 
 of his. But on this arose the suggestion — Why not 
 execute an insurance of this nature twenty times over^ 
 One single insurance pays for the funeral — the other 
 nineteen are so much clear gain, a Iiicro pdhatur, for 
 the parents. Yes; but on the supposition that the 
 child died ! twenty are no better than one, unless thoy 
 are gathered into the garner. Now, if the child died 
 18 
 
210 CHAKLES LAMB. 
 
 naturally, all was right ; but how, if the child did not 
 die ? Why, clearly this, — the child that ccm die, and 
 won't die, may be made to die. There are many ways 
 of doing that ; and it is shocking to know, that, ac- 
 cording to recent discoveries, poison is comparatively a 
 very merciful mode of murder. Six years ago a 
 dreadful communication was made to the public by a 
 medical man, viz., that three thousand children were 
 annually burned to death under circumstances showing 
 too clearly that they had been left by their mothers 
 with the means and the temptations to set themselves 
 on fire in her absence. But more shocking, because 
 more lingering, are the deaths by artificial appliances 
 of wet, cold, hunger, bad diet, and disturbed sleep, to 
 the frail constitutions of children. By that machinery 
 it is, and not by poison, that the majority qualify 
 themselves for claiming the funeral allowances. Here, 
 however, there occur to any man, on reflection, two 
 eventual restraints on the extension of this domestic 
 curse : — 1st, as there is no pretext for wanting more 
 than one funeral on account of one child, any insur- 
 ances beyond one are in themselves a ground of sus- 
 picion. Now, if any plan were devised for securing 
 the puilication of such insurances, the suspicions 
 would travel as fast as the grounds for them. 2dly, 
 it occurs, that eventually the evil checks itself, since 
 a society established on the ordinary rates of mortality 
 would be ruined when a murderous stimulation was 
 applied to that rate too extensively. Still it is certain 
 that, for a season, this Mrocity has prospered in manu- 
 facturing districts for some years, and more recently, 
 as judicial investigations have shown, in one agricul- 
 tural district of Essex. Now, Mr. W. 's scheme 
 
CHARLES LAMB. 211 
 
 of murder was, in its outline, the very same, "but not 
 applied to the narrow purpose of obtaining burials 
 from a public fund. He persuaded, for instance, two 
 beautiful young ladies, visitors in his family, to insure 
 their lives for a short period of two years. This in- 
 surance was repeated in several different offices, until 
 a sum of £18,000 had been secured in the event of 
 
 their deaths within the two years. Mr. W took 
 
 care that they should die, and very suddenly, within 
 that period ; and then, having previously secured from 
 his victims an assignment to himself of this claim, he 
 endeavored to make this assignment available. But 
 the offices, which had vainly endeavored to extract 
 from the young ladies any satisfactory account of the 
 reasons for this limited insurance, had their suspicions 
 at last strongly roused. One office had recently ex- 
 perienced a case of the same nature, in which also 
 the young lady had been poisoned by the man in 
 whose behalf she had effected the insurance ; all the 
 offices declined to paj'^ ; actions at law arose ; in the 
 course of the investigation which followed, Mr. W.'s 
 character was fully exposed. Finally, in the midst 
 of the embarrassments which ensued, he committed 
 forgery, and was transported. 
 
 From this Mr. W , some few days afterwards, I 
 
 received an invitation to a dinner party, expressed in 
 terms that were obligingly earnest. He mentioned 
 the names of his principal guests, and amongst them 
 rested most upon those of Lamb and Sir David Wilkie. 
 From an accident I was unable to attend, and greatly 
 regretted it. Sir David one might rarely happen to 
 Bee, except at a crowded party. But as regarded 
 Lamb, I was sure to see him or to hear of him again 
 
212 CHARLES LAMB. 
 
 ill some waj* or other within a short time. This op- 
 portunity, in fact, offered itself within a month through 
 the kindness of the Lambs themselves. Thay had 
 heard of my being in solitary lodgings, and insisted on 
 my coming to dine with them, which more than once 
 I did in the winter of 1821-22. 
 
 The mere reception by the Lambs was so full of 
 goodness and hospitable feeling, that it kindled anima- 
 tion in the most cheerless or torpid of invalids. I can- 
 not imagine that any memorahilia occurred during the 
 visit ; but I will use the time that would else be lost 
 upon the settling of that point, in putting down any 
 triviality that occurs to my recollection. Both Lamb 
 and myself had a furious love for nonsense, headlong 
 nonsense. Excepting Professor Wilson, I have known 
 nobody who had the same passion to the same extent. 
 And things of that nature better illustrate the realities 
 of Lamb's social life than the gravities, which weighing 
 so sadly on his solitary hours he sought to banish from 
 his moments of relaxation. 
 
 There were no strangers ; Charles Lamb, his sister, 
 and myself made up the_ party. Even this was done 
 in kindness. They knew that I should have been 
 oppressed by an effort such as must be made in the 
 society of strangers ; and they placed me by their own 
 fireside, where I could say as little or as much as I 
 pleased. 
 
 We dined about five o'clock, and it was one of tne 
 hospitalities inevitable to the Lambs, that any game 
 which they might receive from rural friends in the 
 course of the week, was reserved for the day of a 
 friend's dining with them. 
 
 In regard to wine, Lamb and myself had the samts 
 
CHARLES liAlVIB. 213 
 
 habit — perhaps it rose to the dignity of a principle — ■ 
 viz., to take a great deal during dinner — none after it. 
 Consequently, as Miss Lamb (who drank only water) 
 retired almost with the dinner itself, nothing remained 
 for men of our principles, tho- rigor of which we had 
 illustrated by taking rather too much of old port before 
 the cloth was drawn, except talking ; amoebocan collo- 
 quy, or, in Dr. Johnson's phrase, a dialogue of ' brisk 
 reciprocation.' But this was impossible ; over Lamb, 
 at this period of his life, there passed regularly, after 
 taking wine, a brief eclipse of sleep. It descended 
 upon him as softly as a shadow. In a gross person, 
 laden Avith superfluous flesh, and sleeping heavily, this 
 Avould have been disagreeable ; but in Lamb, thin even 
 to meagreness, spare and wiry as an Arab of the desert, 
 or as Thomas Aquinas, wasted by scholastic vigils, the 
 affection of sleep seemed rather a network of aerial 
 gossamer than of earthly cobweb — more like a golden 
 haze falling upon him gently from the heavens than a 
 cloud exhaling upwards from the flesh.* Motionless in 
 his chair as a bust, breathing so gently as scarcely to 
 seem certainly alive, he presented the image of repose 
 midwa)' between life and death, like the repose of 
 sculpture ; and to one who knew his history, a repose 
 affectingly contrasting with the calamities and internal 
 storms of his life. I have heard more persons than I 
 can now distinctly recall, observe r>^ Lamb when sleep- 
 ing, that his coiuitenance in that state assumed an 
 expression almost seraphic, from its intellectual beauty 
 of outline, its childlike simplicity and its benignity. 
 It could not be called a transfiguration that sleep had 
 worked in his face ; for the features wore essentially 
 tne same expression when waking ; but sleep spiritual' 
 
214 CHAELES LAMB. 
 
 ized that expression, exalted it, and also tarmonized it. 
 Much of the change lay in that last process. The eyes 
 it was that disturbed the unity of effect in Lamb's 
 waking face. They gave a restlessness to the charac- 
 ter of his intellect, shifting, like northern lights, through 
 every mode of combination with fantastic playfulness, 
 and sometimes by fiery gleams obliterating for the mo- 
 ment that pure light of benignity which was the pre- 
 dominant reading on his features. Some people have 
 supposed that Lamb had Jewish blood in his veins, 
 which seemed to account for his gleaming eyes. It 
 might be so ; but this notion found little confidence in 
 Lamb's own way of treating the gloomy mediseval tra- 
 ditions propagated throughout Europe about the Jews, 
 and their secret enmity to Christian races. Lamb, i:i- 
 deed, might not be more serious than Shakspeare is 
 supposed to have been in his Shylock ; yet he spoke at 
 times as from a station of wilful bigotry, and seemed 
 (whether laughingly or not) to sympathize with the 
 barbarous Christian superstitions upon the pretended 
 bloody practices of the Jews, and of the early Jewish 
 physicians. Being himself a Lincoln man, he treated 
 Sir Hugh'^ of Lincoln, the young child that suff'ered 
 death by secret assassination in the Jewish quarter 
 rather than suppress his daily anthems to the Virgin, as 
 a true historical personage on the rolls of martyrdom : 
 careless that this fable, like that of the apprentice mur- 
 dered out of jealousy by his master, the architect, had 
 destroyed its own authority by ubiquitous diff'usion. 
 All over Europe the same legend of the murdered ap- 
 prentice and the martyred child reappears under differ- 
 ent nanies — so that in eff'ect the verification of the tale 
 ia none a' all^ because it is unanimous ; is too narrow, 
 
CHARLES LAMB. 215 
 
 because it is too impossibly broad. Lamb, bowever, 
 thougb it was often bard to say wbetber be were not 
 secretly laugbing, swore to tbe trutb of all tbese old 
 fables, and treated tbe liberalities of tbe present gene- 
 ation on sucb points as mere fantastic and effeminate 
 affectations, wbieb, no doubt, they often are as regards 
 tbe sincerity of tbose wbo profess tbem. Tbe bigotry 
 wbieb it pleased bis fancy to assume, be used like a 
 sword against tbe Jew, as tbe official weapon of tbe 
 Cbristian, upon tbe same principle tbat a Capulet would 
 have drawn upon a Montague, without conceiving it 
 any duty of his to rip up the grounds of so ancient a 
 quarrel ; it was a feud banded down to him by his 
 ancestors, and it was their business to see that originally 
 it had been an honest feud. I cannot yet believe tbat 
 Lamb, if seriously aware of any family interconnection 
 with Jewish blood, would, even in jest, have held that 
 one-sided language. More probable it is, that the 
 fiery eye recorded not any alliance with Jewish blood, 
 but tbat disastrous alliance with insanity which tainted 
 his own life, and laid desolate bis sister's. 
 
 On awakening from bis brief slumber, Lamb sat for 
 some time in profound silence, and then, with the most 
 startling rapidity, sang out — ' Diddle, diddle, dump- 
 kins ; ' not looking at me, but as if soliloquizing. For 
 five minutes he relapsed into tbe same deep silence ; 
 from which again he started up into the same abrupt 
 utterance of — 'Diddle, diddle, dumpkins.' I could 
 not help laughing aloud at the extreme energy of tbis 
 sudden communication, contrasted with tbe deep 
 silence that went before and followed. Lamb smil- 
 ingly begged to know what I was laughing at, and 
 with a look of as much surprise as if it wero I that 
 
 % 
 
216 CHAELES LA.MB. 
 
 had done sometliing unaccountable, and not himself. 
 I told him (as was the truth) that there had suddenly 
 occurred to me the possibility of my being in some 
 future period or other called on to give an account 
 of this very evening before some literary committee. 
 The committee might say to me — (supposing the case 
 that I outlived him) — ' You dined with Mr. Lamb in 
 January, 1822 ; now, can you remember any remark 
 or memorable observation which that celebrated man 
 made before or after dinner ? ' 
 
 I as respondent. ' Oh yes, I can.' 
 
 Com. ' What was it ? ' 
 
 Resp. ' Diddle, diddle, dumpkins.' 
 
 Com. ' And was this his only observation ? Did 
 Mr. Lamb not strengthen this remark by some other 
 of the same nature ? ' 
 
 Resp. ' Yes, he did.' 
 
 Com. ' And what was it ? ' 
 
 Resp. ' Diddle, diddle, dumpkins.' 
 
 Com. ' What is your secret opinion of Dumpkins r 
 Do you conceive Dumpkins to have been a thing or a 
 peison ? ' 
 
 Resp. ' I conceive Dumpkins to have been a person, 
 having the rights of a person.' 
 
 Co7n. ' Capable, for instance, of suing and being 
 sued ? ' 
 
 Resp. ' Yes, capable of both ; though I have reason 
 to think there would have been very little use in suing 
 Dumpkins.' 
 
 Com. ' How so ? Are the committee to understand 
 that you, the respondent, in your own case, have found 
 it a vain speculation, countenanced only by visionary 
 ^lawyers, to sue Dumpkins ? ' 
 
CHARLES LAMB. 217 
 
 Rcsp. ' No ; I never lost a shilling by Dumpkins, 
 the reason for which may be that Dvimpkinb never 
 owed me a shilling ; but from his pranomen of " did- 
 dle," I apprehend that he was too well acquainted 
 with joint-stock companies ! ' 
 
 Com. ' And your opinion, is, that he may have did- 
 dled Mr. Lamb ? ' 
 
 Resp. ' I conceive it to be not unlikely.' 
 
 Com. ' And, perhaps, from Mr. Lamb's pathetic re- 
 iteration of his name, "Diddle, diddle," you would be 
 disposed to infer that Dumpkins had practised his did- 
 dling talents upon Mr. L. more than once ? ' 
 
 Resj). ' I think it probable.' 
 
 Lamb laughed and brightened up ; tea was an- 
 nounced ; Miss Lamb returned. The cloud had passed 
 away from Lamb's spirits, and again he realized the 
 pleasure of evening, which, in his apprehension, was 
 so essential to the pleasure of literature. 
 
 On the table lay a copy of Wordsworth, in two 
 volumes : it was the edition of Longman, printed about 
 the time of Waterloo. Wordsworth was held in little 
 consideration, I believe, amongst the house of Long- 
 man ; at any rate, their editions of his works were got 
 up in the most slovenly manner. In particular, the 
 table of contents was drawn up like a short-hand bill 
 of parcels. By accident the book lay open at a part 
 of this table, where the sonnet beginning — 
 
 ' Alas ! what boots the long laborious quest ' — 
 
 had been entered with mercantile speed, as — 
 
 * Alas what boots,' 
 
 ' Yes,' said Lamb, reading this entry in a dolorous 
 tone of voice, 'he may well say thai. I paid Hoby 
 19 
 
218 CHARLES LAMB. 
 
 three guineas for a pair that tore like blotting-paper, 
 when I was leaping a ditch to escape a farmer that 
 pursued me with a pitch-fork for trespassing. But 
 why should W. Avear boots in Westmoreland ? Pray, 
 advise him to patronize shoes.' 
 
 The mercurialities of Lamb were infinite, and always 
 uttered in a spirit of absolute recklessness for the 
 ({uality or the prosperity of the sally. It seemed to 
 liberate his spirits from some burthen of blackest mel- 
 ancholy which oppressed it, when he had thrown off a 
 jest: he would not stop one instant to improve it; 
 nor did he rare the value of a straw whether it were 
 good enough to be remembered, or so mediocre as to 
 extort high moral indignation from a collector who re- 
 fused to receive into his collection of jests and puus 
 any that were not felicitously good or revoltingly 
 bad. 
 
 After tea. Lamb read to me a number of beautiful 
 compositions, which he had himself taken the trouble 
 to copy out into a blank paper folio from unsuccessful 
 authors. Neglected people in every class won the 
 sympathy of Lamb. One of the poems, I remember, 
 was a very beautiful sonnet from a volume recently 
 published by Lord Thurlow — which, and Lamb's just 
 remarks upon it, I could almost repeat verbatim at this 
 moment, nearly twenty-seven years later, if your limits 
 would allow me. But these, you tell me, allow of no 
 such thing ; at the utmost they allow only twelve linos 
 more. Now all the world knows that the sonnet itself 
 would require fourteen lines ; but take fourteen from 
 twelve, and there remains very little, I fear ; besides 
 which, I am afraid two of my twelve are already ex- 
 hausted. This forces me to interrupt my account of 
 
CHAKLES LAMB. 219 
 
 Laml/s reading, by reporting tlic very accident that did 
 interrupt it in fact ; since tliat no less characteristically 
 expressed Lamb's peculiar spirit of kindness, (always 
 quickening itself towards the ill-used or tbe down- 
 trodden,) than it had previously expressed itself in his 
 choice of obscure readings. Two ladies came in, oiv3 
 of whom at least had sunk in the scale of worldly con- 
 sideration. They were ladies who would not have 
 found much recreation in literary discussions ; elderly, 
 and habitually depressed. On their account. Lamb 
 proposed whist, and in that kind effort to amuse tliejn; 
 which naturally drew forth some momentary gayeties 
 from himself, but not of a kind to impress themselves 
 on the recollection, the evening terminated." 
 
 We have left ourselves no room for a sjiecial exam- 
 ination of Lamb's writings, some of which were failures, 
 and some were so memorably beautiful as to be uniques 
 in their class. The character of Lamb it is, and the 
 life-struggle of Lamb, that must fix the attention of 
 many, even amongst those wanting in sensibility to his 
 intellectual merits. This character and this struggle. 
 
 GO 7 
 
 as we have already observed, impress many traces of 
 themselves upon Lamb's writings. Even in that view, 
 therefore, they have a ministerial value ; but separately, 
 for themselves, they have an indejjendent value of the 
 highest order. Upon this point we gladly adopt the 
 eloquent words of Sergeant Talfourd : — 
 
 ' The sweetness of Lamb's character, breathed through 
 his writings, was felt even by strangers ; but its heroic as- 
 pect was unguessed even by many of his friends. Let them 
 now consider it, and ask if the annals of self-sacrifice can 
 show anything in human action and endurance mor'3 lovely 
 
220 CHARLES LAMB. 
 
 than its self-devotion exhibits ? It was not merely that he 
 saw, through the ensanguined cloud of misfortune which 
 had fallen upon his family, the unstained excellence of his 
 sister, whose madness had caused it ; that he was ready to 
 take her to his own home with reverential afifection, and 
 cherish her through life ; and he gave up, for her sake, all 
 meaner and more selfish love, and all the hopes which youth 
 blends witli the passion which disturbs and ennobles it ; not 
 even that he did all this cheerfully, without pluming him- 
 self upon his brotherly nobleness as a virtue, or seeking to 
 repay himself (as some uneasy martyrs do) by small instal- 
 ments of long repining ; but that he carried the spirit of the 
 hour in which he first knew and took his course to his last. 
 So far from thinking that his sacrifice of youth and love to 
 his sister gave him a license to follow his own caprice at the 
 expense of her feelings, even in the lightest matters, he al- 
 ways wrote and spoke of her as his wiser self, his generous 
 benefactress, of whose protecting care he was scarcely 
 worthy.' 
 
 It must be remembered, also, which th.e Sergeant 
 does not overlook, that Lamb's efforts for the becoming 
 support of his sister lasted through a period of forty 
 years. Twelve years before his death, the munificence 
 of the India House, by granting him a liberal retiring 
 allowance, had placed his own support under shelter 
 fi'om accidents of any kind. But this died with him- 
 self ; and he could not venture to suppose that, in the 
 event of his ovvn death, the India House would grant 
 to his sister the same allowance as by custom is 
 granted to a wife. This they did ; but not venturing 
 to calculate upon such nobility of patronage. Lamb 
 had applied himself through life to the saving of a 
 provision for his sister under any accident to himself. 
 And this he did with a persevering prudence, so little 
 known in tlie literary class, amongst a continued tenor 
 
CnARLES LAMB. 221 
 
 of generosities, often so princely as to be scarcely 
 known in any class. 
 
 AVas this man, so memorably good by life-long 
 sacrifice of himself, in any profound sense a Christian } 
 The impression is, that he was not. We, from private 
 communications with him, can undertake to say that, 
 according to his knowledge and opportunities for the 
 study of Christianity, he was. What has injured 
 Lamb on this point is, that his early opinions (which, 
 however, from the first were united with the deepest 
 piety) are read by the inattentive, as if they had been 
 the opinions of his mature days ; secondly, that he had 
 few religious persons amongst his friends, which made 
 him reserved in the expression of his own views ; 
 thirdly, that in any case where he altered opinions for 
 the better, the credit of the improvement is assigned to 
 Coleridge. Lamb, for example, beginning life as a 
 Unitarian, in not many years became a Trinitarian. 
 Coleridge passed through the same changes in the 
 same order ; and here, at least. Lamb is supposed 
 simply to have obeyed the influence, confessedly great, 
 of Coleridge. This, on our own knowledge of Lamb's 
 views, we pronounce to be an error. And the follow- 
 ing extracts from Lamb's letters will show, not only 
 that he was religiously disposed on impulses self- 
 derived, but that, so far from obeying the bias of 
 Coleridge, he ventured, on this one subject, firmly as 
 regarded the matter, though humbly as regarded the 
 manner, affectionately to reprove Coleridge. 
 
 In a letter to Coleridge, written in 1797, the year 
 after his first great affliction, he says : 
 
 • Coleridge, T have not one truly elevated character among 
 my acquaintance ; not one Christian ; not one but under- 
 
222 CHAELES LAMB. 
 
 values Christianity. Singly, what am I to do ? "Wesley — 
 [have you read his life ?] — was he not an elevated charac- 
 ter ? Wesley has said religion was not a solitary thing. 
 Alas ! it is necessarily so with me, or next to solitary. 'Tia 
 true you write to me ; but correspondence by letter and 
 personal intimacy are widely different. Do, do write to 
 me ; and do some good to my mind — already how much 
 ♦' warjjed and relaxed " by the world ! ' 
 
 In a letter written about three months previously, 
 he had not scrupled to blame Coleridge at some length 
 for audacities of religious speculation, which seemed to 
 him at war with the simplicities of pure religion. He 
 says : 
 
 ' Do continue to write to me. I read your letters with 
 my sister, and they give us both abundance of delight. 
 Especially they please us two when you talk in a religious 
 strain. Not but we are offended occasionally with a certain 
 freedom of expression, a certain air of mysticism, more 
 consonant to the conceits of pagan philosophy than consist- 
 ent with the humility of genuine piety.' 
 
 Then, after some instances of what he blames, he 
 says : 
 
 ' Be not angry with me, Coleridge. I wish not to cavil ; 
 I know I cannot instruct you ; I only wish to remind you 
 of that humility which best becometh the Christian char- 
 acter. God, in the New Testament, our best guide, la 
 represented to us in the kind, condescending, amiable, fa- 
 miliar light of a parent ; and, in my poor mind, 'tis best 
 for us so to consider him as our heavenly Father, and our 
 best friend, without indulging too bold conceptions of hia 
 character.' 
 
 About a month later, he says : 
 
 ' Few but laugh at me for reading my Testament. They 
 talk a language I understand not ; I conceal sentiments that 
 would be a puzzle to ihem.' 
 
CHiKLES LAMB. 223 
 
 We see by tliis last quotation where it was that 
 Lamb originally sought for consolation. We person- 
 ally can vouch that, at a maturer period, when ho was 
 approaching his fiftieth year, no change had affected 
 his opinions upon that point ; and, on the other hand, 
 that no changes had occurred in his needs for consola- 
 tion, we see, alas ! in the records of his life. Whither, 
 indeed, could he fly for comfort, if not to his Bible? 
 And to whom was the Bible an indispensable resource, 
 if not to Lamb ? We do not undertake to say, that in 
 his knowledge of Christianity he was everywhere pro- 
 found or consistent, but he was always earnest in his 
 aspirations after its spiritualities, and had an ajiprehen- 
 sive sense of its power. 
 
 Charles Lamb is gone ; his life was a continued 
 struggle in the service of love the purest, and within 
 a sphere visited by little of contemporary applause. 
 Even his intellectual displays won but a narrow sym- 
 pathy at any time, and in his earlier period were 
 saluted with positive derision and contumely on the 
 few occasions when they were not oppressed by entire 
 neglect. But slowly all things right themselves. All 
 merit, which is founded in truth, and is strong enough, 
 reaches by sweet exhalations in the end a higher sen- 
 sory ; reaches higher organs of discernment, lodged in 
 a selecter audience. But the original obtuseness or 
 vulgarity of feeling that thwarted Lamb's just estima- 
 tion in life, will continue to thwart its popular diffu- 
 sion. There are even some that continue to regard 
 him with the old hostility. And we, therefore, stand- 
 ing by the side of Lamb's grave, seemed to hear, on 
 one side, (but in abated tones,) strains of the ancient 
 malice — ' This man, that thought himself to be some- 
 
224 CHAKLES LAMB. 
 
 body, is dead — is buried — is forgotten ! ' and, on the 
 other side, seemed to hear ascending, as -with the 
 solemnity of an anthem — 'This man, that thought 
 himself to be nobody, is dead — is buried; his life 
 has been searched; and his memory is hallowed for 
 
 eve 
 
 r I ' 
 
NOTES. 
 
 Note 1. Page 167. 
 
 * Scriptural,' we call it, because this element of thought, so 
 indispensable to a pi'ofound philosophy of morals, is not simply 
 viore used in Scripture than elsewhere, but is so exclusively sig- 
 nificant or intelligible amidst the correlative ideas of Scripture, 
 as to be absolutely insusceptible of translation into classical Greek 
 or classical Latin. It is disgraceful that more reflection has not 
 been directed to the vast causes and consequences of so pregnant 
 a truth. 
 
 Note 2. Page 179. 
 ' Poor S. T. C' — The affecting expression by -which Coleridge 
 indicates himself in the few lines written during his last illness 
 for an inscription upon his grave; lines ill constructed in j^oint 
 of diction and compression, but otherwise speaking from the 
 depths of his heart. 
 
 Note 3. Page 198. 
 It is right to remind the reader of this, for a reason applying 
 forcibly to the present moment. Michelet has taxed Englishmen 
 ■with yielding to national animosities in the case of Joan, having 
 no plea whatever for that insinuation but the single one drawn 
 from Shakspeare's Henry VI. To this the answer is, first, that 
 Shakspeare's share in that trilogy is not nicely ascertained. 
 Secondly, that M. Michelet forgot (or, which is far worse, not 
 forgetting it, he dissembled) the fact, that in undertaking a series 
 of dramas upon the basis avowedly of national chronicles, and for 
 the very pui-pose of profiting by old traditionary recollections 
 connected with ancestral glories, it was mere lunacy to recast th9 
 
 [2253 
 
226 NOTES. 
 
 circumstances at the bidding of antiquarian research, so as 
 entirely to disturb tliese glories. Besides tha*, to Shakspeare'a 
 age no such spirit of research had blossomed. Writing for the 
 stage, a man would have risked lapidation by uttering a whispjr 
 in that direction. And, even if not, what sense could there ha re 
 been in openly running counter to the very motive that had 
 originally prompted that particular class of chronicle plays ? 
 Thirdly, if one Englishman had, in a memorable situation, 
 adopted the popular view of Joan's conduct, {'popular as much 
 in France as in England;) on the other hand, fifty years before 
 M. Michelet was writing this flagrant injustice, another English- 
 man (viz., Southey) had, in an epic poem, reversed this mis- 
 judgm^^nt, and invested the shepherd girl with a glory no-n here 
 else accorded to her, unless indeed by Schiller. Fourthly, ye 
 are not entitled to view as an attack upon Joanna, what, in the 
 worst construction, is but an unexamining adoption of the con- 
 temporary historical accounts. A poet or a dramatist is not 
 responsible for the accuracy of chronicles. But what is an at>- 
 tack upon Joan, being briefly the foulest and obscenest attempt 
 ever made to stifle the grandeur of a great human struggle, viz., 
 the French burlesque poem of La Pucelle — what memorable 
 man was it that wrote that 1 Was he a Frenchman, or was he 
 not ? That M. Michelet should pretend to have forgotten this vilest 
 of pasquinades, is more shocking to the general sense of justice 
 than any special untruth as to Shakspeare can be to the particu- 
 lar nationality of an Englishman. 
 
 Note 4. Page 214. 
 The story which furnishes a basis to the fine ballad in Percy's 
 Reliques, tind to the Canterbury Tale of Chaucer's Lady Abbess. 
 
GOETHE. 
 
 John Wolfgang von Goethe, a man of com- 
 manding uifluence in the literature of modern Germany 
 throughout the latter half of his long life, and possess- 
 ing two separate claims upon our notice ; one in right 
 of his own unquestionable talents ; and another much 
 stronger, though less direct, arising out of his position, 
 and the extravagant partisanship put forward on his 
 behalf for the last forty j'ears. The literarj^ bodj' in all 
 countries, and for reasons which rest upon a sounder 
 basis than that of private jealousies, have always been 
 disposed to a republican simplicity in all that regards 
 the assumption of rank and personal pretensions. 
 Valeat quantum valere potest, is the form of license to 
 every man's ambition, coupled with its caution. Let 
 his influence and authority be commensurate with his 
 attested value ; and because no man in the present in- 
 firmity of human speculation, and the present multi- 
 formity of human power can hope for more than a very 
 [imited superiority, there is an end at once to all abso- 
 lute dictatorship. The dictatorship in any case could 
 be only relative, and in relation to a single department 
 of art or knowledge ; and this for a reason stronger even 
 than that already noticed, viz., the vast extent of the 
 field on which the intellect is now summoned to employ 
 itself. That objection, as it applies only to the degree 
 of the difficulty, might be met by a corresponding de- 
 
 [227J 
 
228 GOETHE. 
 
 gree of mental energy ; such a thing may be supposed, 
 at least. But another difficulty there is of a profounder 
 character which cannot be so easily parried. Those 
 who have reflected at all upon the fine arts, know that 
 power of one kind is often inconsistent, positively in- 
 compatible with power of another kind. For example, 
 the dramatic mind is incompatible with the epic. And 
 though we should consent to suppose that some intel- 
 lect might arise endowed upon a scale of such angelic 
 comprehensiveness, as to vibrate equally and indiff'er- 
 ently towards either pole, still it is next to impossible, 
 in the exercise and culture of the two powers, but some 
 bias must arise which would give that advantage to the 
 one over the other which the right arm has over the 
 left. But the supposition, the very case put, is base- 
 less, and countenanced by no precedent. Yet, under 
 this previous difficulty, and with regard to a literature 
 convulsed, if any ever was, by an almost total anarchy, 
 it is a fact notorious to all who take an interest in 
 Germany and its concerns, that Goethe did in one way 
 or other, through the length and breadth of that vast 
 country, establish a supremacy of influence wholly 
 unexampled ; a supremacy indeed perilous in a less 
 honorable man, to those whom he might chance to 
 hate, and with regard to himself thus far unfortunate, 
 that it conferred upon every work proceeding from his 
 pen a sort of papal indulgence, an immunity from 
 criticism, or even from the appeals of good sense, such 
 as it is not wholesome that any man should enjoy. Yet 
 we repeat that German literature was and is in a condi- 
 tion of total anarchy. With this solitary exception, no 
 name, even in the most narrow section of knowledge 
 or of power, has ever been able in that country to 
 
GOETHE. 229 
 
 cnallenge unconditional reverence; whereas, with us 
 and in France, name the science, name the art, and 
 we will name the dominant professor ; a difference 
 which partly arises out of the fact that England and 
 France are governed in their opinions by two or three 
 capital cities, whilst Germany looks for its leadership 
 to as many cities as there are rcsidenzen and universi- 
 ties. For instance, the little territory with which 
 Goethe was connected presented no less than two such 
 public lights ; Wiemar, the rcsidenz or privileged 
 abode of the Grand Duke, and Jena, the university 
 founded by that house. Partly, however, tbis differ- 
 ence may be due to the greater restlessness, and to the 
 greater energy as respects mere speculation, of the 
 German mind. But no matter whence arising, or how 
 interpreted, the fact is what we have described ; abso- 
 lute confusion, the ' anarch old ' of Milton, is the one 
 deity whose sceptre is there paramount ; and yet there 
 it was, in that very realm of chaos, that Goethe built 
 his throne. That he must have looked with trepida- 
 tion and perplexity upon his wild empire and its ' dark 
 foundations,' may be supposed. The tenure was un- 
 certain to him as regarded its duration ; to us it is 
 equally uncertain, and in fact mysterious, as regards its 
 origin. INIeantime the mere fact, contrasted with the 
 general tendencies of the German literary world, is 
 sufficient to justify a notice, somewhat cirgumstantial, 
 of the man in whose favor, whether naturally by force 
 of genius, or by accident concurring with intrigue, so 
 unexampled a result was effected. 
 
 Goethe was born at noonday on the 28th of jVugust, 
 1749, in his father's house at Frankfort-on-the-Maine. 
 The circumstances of his birth were thus far remark- 
 
230 GOETHl!:, 
 
 able, that, unless Goethe's vanity deceived him, they 
 led to a happy revolution hitherto retarded by female 
 delicacy falsely directed. From some error of the 
 midwife who attended his mother, the infant Goethe 
 appeared to be still-born. Sons there were as yet none 
 from this marriage ; everybody was therefore interested 
 in the child's life ; and the panic which arose in con- 
 sequence, having survived its immediate occasion, was 
 improved into a public resolution, (for which no doubt 
 society stood ready at that moment,) to found some 
 course of public instruction from this time forward for 
 those who undertook professionally the critical duties 
 of accoucheur. 
 
 We have noticed the house in which Goethe was 
 born, as well as the city. Both were remarkable, and 
 fitted to leave lasting impressions upon a young per- 
 son of sensibility. As to the city, its antiquity is not 
 merely venerable, but almost mysterious ; towers were 
 at that time to be found in the mouldering lines of its 
 earliest defences, which belonged to the age of Charle- 
 magne, or one still earlier ; battlements adapted to a 
 mode of warfare anterior even to that of feudalism or 
 romance. The customs, usages, and local privileges 
 of Frankfort, and the rural districts adjacent, were of 
 a. corresponding character. Festivals were annually 
 celebrated at a short distance from the walls, which 
 had descended from a dateless antiquity. Everything 
 which met the eye spoke the language of elder ages ; 
 whilst the river on which the place was seated, its great 
 fair, which still held the rank of the greatest in Chris- 
 tendom, and its connection with the throne of C?esar 
 and his inauguration, by giving to Frankfort an i?iter- 
 est and a public character in the eyes of all Germany, 
 
231 
 
 had the effect of co intersigning, as it were, by state 
 authority, the importance which she otherwise chal- 
 lenged to her ancestral distinctions. Fit house for 
 such a city, and in due keeping with the general 
 scenery, was that of Goethe's father. It had in fact 
 been composed out of two contiguous houses ; that ac- 
 cident had made it spacious and rambling in its plan ; 
 whilst a further irregularity had grown out of the 
 original difference in point of level between the corres- 
 ponding stories of the two houses, making it necessary 
 to connect the rooms of the same suite by short flights 
 of steps. Some of these features were no doubt re- 
 moved by the recast of the house under the name of 
 ' repairs,' (to evade a city by-law,) afterwards executed 
 by his father ; but such was the house of Goethe's 
 infancy, and in all other circumstances of style and 
 furnishing equally antique. 
 
 The spirit of society in Frankfort, without a court, a 
 university, or a learned body of any extent, or a resi- 
 dent nobility in its neighborhood, could not be expected 
 to display any very high standard of polish. Yet, on 
 the other hand, as an independent city, governed by its 
 own separate laws and tribunals, (that privilege of 
 autonomy so dearly valued by ancient Greece,) and 
 possessing besides a resident corps of jurisprudents and 
 of .agents in various ranks for managing the interests 
 of the German emperor and other princes, Frc}.nkft)rt 
 had the means within herself of giving a liberal tone 
 to the pursuits of her superior citizens, and of co- 
 operating in no inconsiderable degree with the general 
 movement of the times, political or intellectual. The 
 memoirs of Goethe himself, and in particular the pic- 
 ture there given of his own family, as well as other 
 
2.32 GOETHE. 
 
 contemporary glimpses of German domestic society in 
 those clays, are sufficient to show that much knowledge, 
 much true cultivation of mind, much sound refinement 
 of taste, were then distributed through the middle 
 classes of German society ; meaning by that very in- 
 detenninate expression those classes which for Frank- 
 fort composed the aristocracy, viz., all who had daily 
 leisure, and regular funds for employing it to advan- 
 tage. It is not necessary to add, because that is a fact 
 applicable to all stages of society, that Frankfort pre- 
 sented many and various specimens of original talent, 
 moving upon all directions of human speculation. 
 
 Yet, with this general allowance made for the capa- 
 cities of the place, it is too evident that, for the most 
 part, they lay inert and undeveloped. In many respects 
 Frankfort resembled an English cathedral city, accord- 
 ing to the standard of such places seventy years ago, 
 not, that is to say, like Carlisle in this day, where a 
 considerable manufacture exists, but like Chester as it 
 is yet. The chapter of a cathedral, the resident eccle- 
 siastics attached to the duties of so large an establish- 
 ment, men always well educated, and generally having 
 families, compose the original nucleus, around which 
 soon gathers all that part of the local gentry who, for 
 any purpose, whether of education for their children, 
 or of social enjoyment for themselves, seek the advan- 
 tages of a town. Hither resort all the timid old ladies 
 who wish for conversation, or other forms of social 
 amusement ; hither resort the valetudinarians, male or 
 female, by way of commanding superior medical advice 
 at a cost not absolutely ruinous to themselves ; and 
 multitudes besides, with narrow incomes, to whom 
 Ihese quiet retreats are so many cities of refuge. 
 
GOETHE. 233 
 
 Sucli, In one view, they really are ; and yet in an- 
 other tlicy have a vicious constitution. Cathedral cities 
 in England, imperial cities without manufactures in 
 Germany, are all in an improgressive condition. The 
 amount of superior families oscillates rather than 
 changes ; that is, it fluctuates within fixed limits ; and, 
 for all inferior families, being composed either of shop- 
 keepers or of menial servants, they are determined by 
 the number, or, which, on a large average, is the same, 
 by the pecuniary power, of their employers. Hence 
 it arises, that room is made for one man, in whatever 
 line of dependence, only by the death of another ; and 
 the constant increments of the population are carried 
 off into other cities. Not less is the difference of 
 such cities as i^egards the standard of manners. How 
 striking is the soft and urbane tone of the lower orders 
 in a cathedral city, or in a watering-place dependent 
 upon ladies, contrasted with the bold, often insolent 
 demeanor of a self-dependent artisan or mutinous 
 mechanic of Manchester and Glasgow. 
 
 Children, however, are interested in the state of 
 society around them, chiefly as it aff"ects their parents. 
 Those of Goethe were respectable, and perhaps tolera- 
 bly representative of the general condition in their o\vn 
 rank. An English authoress of great talent, in her 
 Characteristics of Goethe, has too much countenanced 
 the notion that he owed his intellectual advantages 
 exclusively to his mother. Of this there is no proof. 
 His mother wins more esteem from the reader of this 
 day, because she was a cheerful woman of serene 
 temper, brought into advantageous comparison with a 
 husband much older than herself, whom circumstances 
 had rendered moody, fitful, sometimes capricious, and 
 20 
 
234 GOETHE. 
 
 confessedly obstinate in that degree wliicli Pope has 
 taught as to think connected with inveterate error : 
 
 'Stiff in opinion, always in the wrong,' 
 
 unhappily presents an association too often actually 
 occurring in nature, to leave much chance for error in 
 presuming either quality from the other. And, in fact, 
 Goethe's father was so uniformly obstinate in pressing 
 his own views upon all who belonged to him, whenever 
 he did come forward in an attitude of activity, that his 
 family had much reason to be thankful for the rarity of 
 such displays. Fortunately for them, his indolence 
 neutralized his obstinacy. And the worst shape in 
 which his troublesome temper showed itself, was in 
 what concerned the religious reading of the family. 
 Once begun, the worst book as well as the best, the 
 longest no less than the shortest, was to be steadfastly 
 read through to the last word of the last volume ; no 
 excess of yawning availed to obtain a reprieve, not, 
 adds his son, though he were himself the leader of the 
 yawners. As an illustration he mentions Bowyer's 
 History of the Popes ; which awful series of records, 
 the catacombs, as it were, in the palace of history, 
 were actually traversed from one end to the other of 
 the endless suite by the unfortunate house of Goethe. 
 Allowing, however, for the father's unamiableness in 
 this one point, upon all intellectual ground both parents 
 seem to have met very much upon a level. Two illus- 
 trations may suffice, one of which occurred during the 
 infancy of Goethe. The science of education was at that 
 time making its first rude motions towards an ampler 
 development ; and, anwngst other reforms then floating 
 In the general mind, was one for eradicating the child- 
 
GOETHE. 235 
 
 ish fear of ghosts, &c. The young Goethes, as it hap- 
 pened, slept not in separate beds only, but in separate 
 rooms ; and not unfrequcntly the poor children, under 
 the stinging terrors of their lonely situation, s.tole away 
 from their 'forms,' to speak in the hunter's phrase, and 
 sought to rejoin each other. But in these attempts they 
 were liable to surprises from the enemy ; papa and 
 mamma were both on the alert, and often intercepted 
 the young deserter by a cross march or an ambuscade ; 
 in which cases each had a separate policy for enforcing 
 obedience. The father, upon his general system of 
 ' perseverance,' compelled the fugitive back to his 
 quarters, and, in effect, exhorted him to persist in being 
 frightened out of his wits. To his wife's gentle heart 
 that course appeared cruel, and she reclaimed the de- 
 linquent by bribes ; the peaches which her garden 
 walls produced being the fund from which she chiefly 
 drew her supplies for this branch of the secret service. 
 What were her winter bribes, when the long nights 
 would seem to lie heaviest on the exchequer, is not 
 said. Speaking seriously, no man of sense can sup- 
 pose that a course of suffering from terrors the most 
 awful, under whatever influence supported, whether 
 under the naked force of compulsion, or of that con- 
 nected with bribes, could have any final effect in miti- 
 gating the passion of awe, connected, by our very 
 dreams, with the shadowy and the invisible, or in 
 tranquillizing the infantine imagination. 
 
 A second illustration involves a great moral event in 
 the history of Goethe, as it was, in fact, the first occa- 
 sion of his receiving impressions at war with his re- 
 ligious creed. Piety is so beautiful an ornament of 
 the youthful mind, doubt or distrust so unnatuial a 
 
236 GOETHE. 
 
 growtli from confiding innocence, that an infant free- 
 thinker is heard of not so much with disgust as with 
 perplexity. A sense of the ludicrous is apt to inter- 
 mingle ; and we lose out natural horror of the result 
 in wonder at its origin. Yet in this instance there is 
 no room for doubt ; the fact and the occasion are both 
 on record ; there can be no question about the date ; 
 and, finally, the accuser is no other than the accused. 
 Goethe's own pen it is which proclaims, that already, 
 in the early part of his seventh year, his reliance upon 
 God as a moral governor had sufi'ered a violent shock, 
 was shaken, if not undermined. On the 1st of No- 
 vember, 1755, occurred the great earthquake at Lis- 
 bon. Upon a double account, this event occvipied the 
 thoughts of all Europe for an unusual term of time ; 
 both as an expression upon a larger scale than usual 
 of the mysterious physical agency concerned in earth- 
 quakes, and also for the awful human tragedy* which 
 attended either the earthquake itself, or its immediate 
 sequel in the sudden irruption of the Tagus. Sixty 
 thousand persons, victims to the dark power in its first 
 or its second avatar, attested the Titanic scale upon 
 which it worked. Here it was that the shallow piety 
 of the Germans found a stumbling-block. Those who 
 have read any circumstantial history of the physical 
 
 * Of this no picture can ever hope to rival that hasty one 
 sketched in the letter of the chaplain to the Lisbon factory. The 
 plague of Athens as painted by Thucydides or Lucretius, nay 
 even the fabulous plague of London by De Foe, contain no 
 Bcenes or situations equal in effect to some in this plain historic 
 statement. Nay, it would perhaps be difficult to produce a pas- 
 sage from Ezekiel, from ^schylus, or from Shakspeare, which 
 would so profoundly startle the sense of sublimity as one or two 
 of his incidents. 
 
GOETHE. 237 
 
 signs wliicli preceded this earthquake, are aware that 
 in England and Northern Germany many singular 
 phenomena were observed, more or less manifestly 
 connected with the same dark agency which terminated 
 aj; Lisbon, and running before this final catastrophe at 
 times so accurately varying with the distances, as to 
 furnish something like a scale for measuring the 
 velocity with which it moved. These German phe 
 nomena, circulated rapidly over all Germany by the 
 journals of every class, had seemed to give to the 
 Germans a nearer and more domestic interest in the 
 great event, than belonged to them merely in their 
 universal character of humanity. It is also well known 
 to observers of national characteristics, that amongst 
 the Germans the household charities, the pieties of the. 
 hearth, as they may be called, exist, if not really in 
 greater strength, yet with much less of the usual 
 balances or restraints. A German father, for example, 
 is like the grandfather of other nations ; and thus a 
 piety, which in its own nature scarcely seems liable to 
 excess, takes, in its external aspect, too often an air of 
 effeminate imbecility. These two considerations are 
 necessary to explain the intensity with which this 
 Lisbon tragedy laid hold of the German mind, and 
 chiefly under the one single aspect of its undistinguish- 
 ing fury. Women, children, old men — these, doubt- 
 less, had been largely involved in the perishing sixty 
 thousand ; and that reflection, it would seem from 
 Goethe's account, had so far embittered the sympathy 
 of the Germans with their distant Portuguese brethren, 
 that, in the Frankfort discussions, sullen murmurs had 
 gradually ripened into bold impeachments of Provi- 
 dence. There can be no gloomier form of infidelity 
 
238 GOETHE. 
 
 than that wliicli questions the moral attributes of the 
 Great Being, in whose hands are the final destinies of 
 us all. Such, however, was the form of Goethe's 
 earliest scepticism, such its origin ; caught up from the 
 very echoes which rang through the streets of Frank- 
 fort when the subject occupied all men's minds. And 
 such, for anything that appears, continued to be its 
 form thenceforwards to the close of his life, if specula- 
 tions so crude could be said to have any form at all. 
 Many are the analogies, some close ones, between 
 England and Germany with regard to the circle of 
 changes they have run through, political or social, for 
 a century back. The challenges are frequent to a 
 comparison ; and sometimes the result would be to the 
 advantage of Germany, more often to ours. But in 
 religious philosophy, which in reality is the true popu- 
 lar philosophy, how vast is the superiority on the side 
 of this country. Not a shopkeeper or mechanic, we 
 may venture to say, but would have felt this obvious 
 truth, that surely the Lisbon earthquake yielded no 
 fresh lesson, no peculiar moral, beyond what belonged 
 to every man's experience in every age. A passage in 
 the New Testament about the fall of the tower of 
 Siloam, and the just construction of that event, had 
 already anticipated the difficulty, if such it could be 
 thought. Not to mention, that calamities upon the 
 same scale in the earliest age of Christianity, the fall 
 of the amphitheatre at Fidenae, or the destruction of 
 Pompeii, had presented the same problem as the Lis- 
 bon earthquake. Nay, it is presented daily in the 
 humblest individual case, where wrong is triumphant 
 over right, or innocence confounded with guilt in one 
 common disaster. And that the parents of Goethe 
 
GOETHE. 239 
 
 flhould have authorized his error, if only by their 
 silence, argues a degree of ignorance in them, which 
 could not have co-existed with much superior know".- 
 edge in the public mind. 
 
 Goethe, in his Memoirs, (Book vi.,) commends his 
 father for the zeal with which he superintended the 
 education of his children. But apparently it was a 
 zeal without knowledge. Many things were taught 
 imperfectly, but all casually, and as chance suggested 
 them. Italian was studied a little, because the elder 
 Goethe had made an Italian tour, and had collected 
 some Italian books, and engravings by Italian masters. 
 Hebrew was studied a little, because Goethe the son 
 had a fancy for it, partly with a view to theology, and 
 partly because there was a Jewish quarter, gloomy and 
 sequestrated, in the city of Frankfort. French offered 
 itself no doubt on many suggestions, but originally on 
 occasion of a French theatre, supported by the staff of 
 the French army when quartered in the same city. 
 Latin was gathered in a random way from a daily 
 sense of its necessity. English upon the temptation 
 of a stranger's advertisement, promising upon moder- 
 ate terms to teach that language in four weeks ; a 
 proof, by the way, that the system of bold innovations 
 in the art of tuition had already commenced. Riding 
 and fencing were also attempted under masters appa- 
 rently not very highly qualified, and in the same 
 desultory style of application. Dancing was taught 
 to his family, strange as it may seem, by Mr. Goethe 
 himself. There is good reason to believe that not one 
 of all these accomplishments was possessed by Goethe, 
 when ready to visit the university, in a degree which 
 made it practically of any use to him. Drawing and 
 
240 GOETHE. 
 
 music were pursued confessedly as amusements ; and it 
 would be difficult to mention any attainment whatso- 
 ever which. Goethe had carried to a point of excellence 
 in the years which he spent under his father's care, 
 unless it were his mastery over the common artifices 
 of metre and the common topics of rhetoric, which fit- 
 ted him for writing what are called occasional poems 
 and impromptus. This talent he possessed in a re- 
 markable degree, and at an early age ; but he owed its 
 cultivation entirely to himself. 
 
 In a city so orderly as Frankfort, and in a station 
 privileged from all the common hardships of poverty, 
 it can hardly be expected that many incidents should 
 arise, of much separate importance in themselves, to 
 break the monotony of life ; and the mind of Goethe 
 was not contem])lative enough to create a value for 
 common occurrences through any peculiar impressiofis 
 which he had derived from them. In the years 1763 
 and 1764, when he must have been from fourteen to 
 fifteen years old, Goethe witnessed the inauguration 
 and coronation of a king of the Romans, a solemn 
 spectacle connected by prescription with the city of 
 .Frankfort. He describes it circumstantially, but with 
 very little feeling, in his Memoirs. Probably the pre- 
 vailing sentiment, on looking back at least to this 
 transitory splendor of dress, processions, and ceremo- 
 nial forms, was one of cynical contempt. But this ha 
 could not express, as a person closely connected with 
 a German court, and without giving much and various 
 off'ence. It is with some timidity even that he hazards 
 a criticism upon single parts of the costume adopted 
 by s-sme of the actors in that gorgeous scene. White 
 silk stockings, and pumps of the common form, he 
 
GOETHE. 24l 
 
 objects to as out of harmony witli the antique and 
 heraldic aspects of the general costume, and ventures 
 to suggest either boots or sandals as an improvement. 
 Had Goethe felt himself at liberty from all restraints 
 of private consideration in composing these memoirs, 
 can it be doubted that he would have taken his retro- 
 spect of this Frankfort inauguration from a different 
 station ; from the station of that stern revolution 
 which, within his own time and partly under his own 
 eyes, had shattered the whole imperial system of 
 thrones, in whose equipage this gay pageant made so 
 principal a figure, had humbled Caesar himself to the 
 dust, and left him an emperor without an empire ? 
 We at least, for our parts, could not read without 
 some emotion one little incident of these gorgeous 
 scenes recorded by Goethe, namely, that when the 
 emperor, on rejoining his wife for a few moments, 
 held up to her notice his own hands and arms arrayed 
 in the antique habiliments of Charlemagne, Maria 
 ^Theresa — she whose children were summoned to so 
 sad a share in the coming changes — gave way to 
 sudden bursts of loud laughter, audible to the whole 
 populace below her. That laugh, on surveying the 
 departing pomps of Charlemagne, must, in any con- 
 templative ear, have rimg with a sound of deep sig- 
 nificance, and with something of the same effect 
 which belongs to a figure of death introduced by a 
 painter, as mixing in the festal dances of a bridal as- 
 sembly. 
 
 These pageants of 1763-64 occupy a considerable 
 space in Goethe's Memoirs, and with some logical 
 propriety at least, in consideration of their being ex- 
 clusively attached to Frankfort, and connected by 
 21 
 
242 GOETHE. 
 
 manifold links of person and office with, tiie privileged 
 character of the city. Perhaps he might feel a sort 
 of narrow local patriotism in recalling these scent. s to 
 public notice by description, at a time when they had 
 been irretrievably extinguished as realities. But, 
 after making every allowance for their local value to 
 a Frankfort family, and for their memorable splendor, 
 we may venture to suppose that by far the most im- 
 pressive remembrances which had gathered about the 
 boyhood of Goethe, were those which pointed to 
 Frederick of Prussia. This singular man, so imbecile 
 as a pretender to philosophy and new lights, so truly 
 heroic under misfortunes, was the first German who 
 created a German interest, and gave a transient unity 
 to the German name, iinder all its multijjlied divisions. 
 Were it only for this conquest of diificulties so pecu- 
 liar, he would deserve his German designation of Fred, 
 the Unique [Fritz der einzige). He had been par- 
 tially tried and known previously ; but it was the 
 Seven Years' War which made him the popular idol.. 
 This began in 1756; and to Frankfort, in a very 
 peculiar way, that war brought dissensions and heart- 
 burnings in its train. The imperial connections of 
 the city with many public and private interests, 
 pledged it to the anti-Prussian cause. It happened 
 also that the truly German character of the reigning 
 imperial family, the domestic habits of the empress 
 and her young daughters, and other circumstances, 
 were of a nature to endear the ties of policy ; self- 
 interest and affection pointed in the same direction. 
 And yet were all these considerations allowed to melt 
 away before the brilliant qualities of one man, and the 
 romantic enthusiasm kindled by his victories. Frank- 
 
GOETHE. 243 
 
 fort was divided within herself; the j'Oiing and the 
 generous were all dedicated to Frederick, A smaller 
 party, more cautious and prudent, were, for the im- 
 perialists. Families were divided upon this question 
 against families, and often against themselves ; feuds, 
 begun in private, issued often into public violence ; 
 and, according to Goethe's own illustration, the streets 
 Avere vexed by daily brawls as hot and as personal as 
 of old between the Capulets and Montagues. 
 
 These dissensions, however, were pursued with not 
 much personal risk to any of the Goethes, until a 
 French army passed the Rhine as allies of the imperi- 
 alists. One corps of this force took up their quarters 
 in Frankfort ; and the Compte Thorane, who held a 
 high appointment on the staff, settled himself for a 
 long period of time in the spacious mansion of Goethe's 
 father. This officer, whom his place made responsible 
 for the discipline of the army in relation to the citi- 
 zens, was naturally by temper disposed to moderation 
 and forbearance. He was indeed a favorable specimen 
 of French military officers under the old system ; well 
 bred, not arrogant, well informed, and a friend of the 
 fine arts. For painting, in particular, he professed 
 great regard and some knowledge. The Goethes were 
 able to forward his views amongst German artists ; 
 whilst, on the other hand, they were pleased to have 
 thus an opportunity of directing his patronage towards 
 some of their own needy connections. In this ex- 
 change of good offices, the two parties were for some 
 time able to maintain a fair appearance of reciprocal 
 good-will. This on the comte's side, if not particu- 
 larly warm, was probably sincere ; but in Goethe 
 the father it was a masque for inveterate dislike. A 
 
244 GOETHE. 
 
 natural ground of this existed in the original relations 
 between tliein. Under whatever disguise or pretext, 
 the Frenchman was in fact a military intruder. He 
 occupied the best suite of rooms in the house, used 
 the furniture as his own ; and, though upon private 
 motives he abstained from doing all the injury which 
 his situation authorized, (so as in particular to have 
 spread his fine military maps upon the floor, rathej 
 than disfigure the decorated walls by nails,) still he 
 claimed credit, if not services of requital, for all such 
 instances of forbearance. Here were grievances enough ; 
 but, in addition to those, the comte's official appoint- 
 ments drew upon him a weight of daily business which 
 kept the house in a continual uproar. Farewell to the 
 quiet of a literary amateur, and the orderliness of a 
 German household. Finally, the comte was a French- 
 man. These were too many assaults upon one man's 
 patience. It will be readily understood, therefore, 
 how it happened, that, whilst Goethe's gentle minded 
 mother, with her fiock of children, continued to be on 
 the best terms with Comte Thorane, the master of the 
 house kept moodily aloof, and retreated from all inter- 
 course. 
 
 Goethe, in his own Memoir, enters into large details 
 upon this subject ; and from him we shall borrow the 
 denouement of the tale. A crisis had for some time 
 been lowering over the French affairs in Frankfort ; 
 things seemed ripening for a battle ; and at last it 
 came. Flight, siege, bombardment, possibly a storm, 
 all danced before the eyes of the terrified citizens. 
 Fortunately, however, the battle took place at the dis- 
 tance of four or five miles from Frankfort. Monsieur 
 le Comte was absent, of course, on the field of battle. 
 
GOETHE. 24S 
 
 His unwilling host thougTit that on such an occasion 
 he also might go out in quality of spectator ; and Avith 
 this purpose he connected another, worthy of a Parson 
 Adams. It is his son who tells the story, whose filial 
 duty was not proof against his sense of the ludicrous. 
 The old gentleman's hatred of the French had hy this 
 time brought him over to his son's admiration of the 
 Prussian hero. Not doubting for an instant that vic- 
 tory would follow that standard, he resolved on this 
 day to oflfer in person his congratulations to the Prus- 
 sian army, whom he already viewed as his liberator 
 from a domestic nuisance. So purposing, he made his 
 way cautiously to the suburbs ; from the suburbs, still 
 listening at each advance, he went forward to the coun- 
 try ; totally forgetting, as his son insists, that, however 
 completely beaten, the French army must still occupy 
 some situation or other between himself and his Ger- 
 man deliverer. Coming, however, at length to a heath, 
 he found some of those marauders usually to be met 
 with in the rear of armies, prowling about, and at 
 intervals amusing themselves with shooting at a mark. 
 For want of a better, it seemed not improbable that a 
 large German head might answer their purpose. Cer- 
 tain signs admonished him of this, and the old gentle- 
 man crept back to Ffankfort. Not many hours after 
 came back also the comte, by no means creeping, how- 
 ever ; on the contrary, crowing with all his might for 
 u victory which he averred himself to have won. There 
 had in fact been an affair, but on no very great scale, 
 and with no distinguishing results. Some prisoners, 
 however, 'he brought, together with some wounded; 
 and naturally he expected all well disposed persons to 
 make their compliments of congratulations upon this 
 
246 GOETHE. 
 
 triumpli. Of this duty poor Mrs. Goetlie and h.ei 
 children cheerfully acquitted themselves that same 
 night ; { nd Monsieur le Comte was so well pleased 
 with the sound opinions of the little Goethes, that he 
 sent them in return a collection of sweetmeats and 
 fruits. All promised to go well ; intentions, after all, 
 are not acts ; and there certainly is not, nor ever was, 
 any treason in taking a morning's Avalk. But, as ill 
 luck would have it, just as Mr. Goethe was passing the 
 comte' s door, out came the comte in person, purely by 
 accident, as we are told ; but we suspect that the surly 
 old German, either under his morning hopes or his 
 evening disappointments, had talked with more frank- 
 ness than prudence. ' Good evening to you, Herr 
 Goethe,' said the comte ; ' you are come, I see, to pay 
 your tribute of congratulation. Somewhat of the latest, 
 to be sure ; but no matter.' ' By no means,' replied 
 the German : ' by no means ; mit nichten. Heartily I 
 wished, the whole day long, that you and your cursed 
 gang might all go to the devil together.' Here was 
 plain speaking, at least. The Comte Thorane could 
 no longer complain of dissimulation. His first move- 
 ment was to order an arrest ; and the official inter- 
 preter of the French army took to himself the whole 
 credit that he did not carry it into effect. Goethe 
 takes the trouble to report a dialogue, of length and 
 dulness absolutely incredible, between this interpreter 
 and the comte. No such dialogue, we may be assured, 
 ever took place. Goethe may, however, be right in 
 supposing that, amongst a foreign soldiery, irritated 
 by the pointed contrasts between the Frankfort treat- 
 ment of their own wounded, and of their prisoners, 
 »vho happened to be ir the same circumstances, and 
 
GOETHE. 247 
 
 under a military council not held to any rigorous re- 
 sponsibility, his father might have found no Aery 
 favorable consideration of his case. It is well, there- 
 fore, that aftei some struggle the comte's better nature 
 triumphed. He suffered Mrs. Goethe's merits to out- 
 weigh her husband's delinquency ; countermanded the 
 order for arrest, and, during the remainder of their 
 connection, kept at such a distance from his moody host 
 as was equally desirable for both. Fortunately that 
 remainder was not very long. Comte Thorane was 
 soon displaced ; and the whole army was soon after 
 wards withdrawn from Frankfort. 
 
 In his fifteenth year Goethe was entangled in some 
 connection with young people of inferior rank, amongst 
 whom was Margaret, a young girl about two years 
 older than himself, and the object of his first love 
 The whole aff'air, as told by Goethe, is somewhat mys- 
 terious. What might be the final views of the elder 
 parties it is difficult to say ; but Goethe assures us that 
 they used his services only in writing an occasional 
 epithalamium, the pecuniary acknowledgment for which 
 was spent jovially in a general banquet. The magis- 
 trates, however, interfered, and endeavored to extort a 
 confession from Goethe. He, as the son of a respect- 
 able family, was to be pardoned ; the others to be 
 punished. No confession, however, covild be extorted; 
 and for his own part he declares that, beyond the 
 offence of forming a clandestine connection, he had 
 nothing to confess. The affair terminated, as regarded 
 himself, in a severe illness. Of the others we heat 
 no more. 
 
 The next event of importance in Goethe's life was 
 his removal to college. His own wishes pointed to 
 
248 GOETHE. 
 
 Gottingen, but his father preferred Leipsic. Thithei 
 accordingly he went, but he carried his obedience no 
 farther. Declining the study of jurisprudence, he 
 attached himself to general literature. Subsequently 
 he removed to the university of Strasburg ; but in 
 neither place could it be said that he pursued any 
 regular course of study. His health suffered at times 
 during this period of his life ; at first, from an affection 
 of the chest, caused by an accident on his first journey 
 to Leipsic ; the carriage had stuck fast in the muddy 
 roads, and Goethe exerted himself too much in as- 
 sisting to extricate the wheels. A second illness con- 
 nected with the digestive organs brought him into 
 considerable danger. 
 
 After his return to Frankfort, Goethe commenced 
 his career as an author. In 1773, and the following 
 year, he made his maiden essay in Goetz of Bcrlicli- 
 ingen, a drama, (the translation of which, remarkably 
 enough, was destined to be the literary coup d'essai 
 of Sir Walter Scott,) and in the far-famed Wcrther. 
 The first of these was pirated ; and in consequence the 
 author found some difficulty in paying for the paper of 
 the genuine edition, which part of the expense, by his 
 contract with the publisher, fell upon himself. The 
 general and early popularity of the second v/ork is well 
 known. Yet, except in so far as it might spread his 
 name abroad, it cannot be supposed to have had much 
 influence in attracting that potent patronage which now 
 began to determine the course of his future life. So 
 much we collect from the account which Goethe him- 
 self has left us of this aff"air in its earliest stages. 
 
 ' I vv'as sitting alone in my room,' savs he, ' at my 
 father's house in Frankfort, when a gentleman entered, 
 
OOEIHE. 249 
 
 whom at first I took for Frederick Jacobi, but soon 
 discovered by the dubious light to be a stranger. He 
 had a military air ; and announcing himself by the 
 name of Von Knebel, gave me to understand in a short 
 explanation, that being in the Prussian service, he had 
 connected himself, during a long residence at Berlin 
 and Potsdam, with the literati of those places ; but that 
 at present he held the appointment from the court of 
 Weimar of travelling tutor to the Prince Constantino. 
 This I heard with pleasure ; for many of our friends 
 had brought us the most interesting accounts from 
 W "simar, in particular that the Duchess Amelia, mother 
 of the young grand duke and his brother, summoned 
 to her assistance in educating her sons the most dis- 
 tinguished men in Germany ; and that the university 
 of Jena cooperated powerfully in all her liberal plans. 
 I ivas aware also that Wielaud was in high favor ; and 
 that the German jNIcrcury (a literary journal of emi- 
 nence) was itself highly creditable to the city of Jena, 
 from which it issued. A beautiful and well-conducted 
 theatre had besides, as I knew, been lately established 
 at Weimar. This, it was true, had been destroyed ; 
 but that event, under common circumstances so likely 
 to be fatal as respected the present, had served only to 
 call forth the general expression of confidence in the 
 young prince as a restorer and upholder of all great 
 interests, and true to his purposes under any calamity.' 
 Thinking thus, and thus prepossessed in favor of Wei- 
 mar, it was natural that Goethe should be eager to see 
 the prince. Nothing was easier. It happened that he 
 and his brother Constantino were at this moment in 
 Frankfort, and Von Knebel willingly offered to present 
 Goethe. No sooner said than done ; they repaired to 
 
250 GOETHE. 
 
 the hotel, where they found the illustrious travellers, 
 with Count Goertz, the tutor of the elder. 
 
 Upon this occasion an accident, rather than any 
 previous rej)utation of Goethe, was probably the deter-- 
 mining occasion which led to his favor with the future 
 sovereign of Weimar. A new book lay upon the table ; 
 that none of the strangers had read it, Goethe inferred 
 fi-om observing that the leaves were as yet uncut. It 
 was a work of Moser, (Patriotische Phantasien ;) and, 
 being political rather than literary in its topics, it pre- 
 sented to Goethe, previously acquainted with its outline, 
 an opportunity for conversing with the prince upon 
 subjects nearest to his heart, and of showing that he 
 was not himself a mere studious recluse. The oppor- 
 tunity was not lost ; the prince and his tutor were much 
 interested, and perhaps a little sur^jrised. Such sub- 
 jects have the further advantage, according to Goethe's 
 own illustration, that, like the Arabian thousand and 
 one nights, as conducted by Sultana Scheherezade, 
 'never ending, still beginning,' they rarely come to 
 any absolute close, but so interweave one into another, 
 as still to leave behind a large arrear of interest. In 
 order to pursue the conversation, Goethe was invited to 
 meet them soon after at Mentz. He kept the appoint- 
 ment punctually ; made himself even more agreeable ; 
 and finally received a formal invitation to enter the ser- 
 vice of this excellent prince, who was now beginning 
 to collect around him all those persons who have since 
 made Weimar so distinguished a name in connection 
 with the German literature. With some opposition 
 from his father, who held wp the rupture between Vol- 
 taire and Frederick of Prussia as a precedent applying 
 to all possible connections of princes and literati, 
 
GOETHE. 251 
 
 Goethe accepted the invitation ; and hcnceforwards, 
 for upwards of fifty-five years, his fortunes were bound 
 up with the ducal house of Weimar. 
 
 The noble part which that house played in the great 
 modern drama of German politics is well known, and 
 would have been better known had its power been 
 greater. But the moral value of its sacrifices and its 
 risk is not the less. Had greater potentates shown 
 equal firmness, Germany would not have been laid at 
 the feet of Napoleon. In 1806, the Grand Duke was 
 aware of the peril which awaited the allies of Prussia ; 
 but neither his heart nor his conscience would allow of 
 his dcffDrtlng a friend in whose army he held a principal 
 ■command. The decisive battle took place in his own 
 territory, and not f;ir from his own palace and city of 
 Weimar. Personally he was with the Prussian army; 
 Vit his excellent consort stayed in the palace to encour- 
 ^ge her subjects, and as far as possible to conciliate the 
 onemy by her presence. The fortune of that great 
 day, the 14th of October, 1806, was decided early; 
 md the awful event was announced by a hot retreat 
 "nd a murderous pursuit through the streets of the 
 town. In the evening Napoleon arrived in person ; and 
 now came the trying moment. ' The duchess,' says an 
 Englishman well acquainted Avith Weimar and its court, 
 ' placed herself on the top of the staircase to greet him 
 -^dth the formality of a courtly reception. Napoleon 
 /Started when he beheld her : Qui ctes vous ? he ex- 
 ;laimcd with characteristic abruptness. Je suis la 
 Duchesne de Weimar. Je vous plains, he retorted 
 fiercely, J'ecraserai voire mart ; he then added, ' I 
 shall dine in my apartment,' and rushed by her. The 
 night was spent on the part of the soldiery in all the 
 
252 GOETHE. 
 
 horrid excesses of rapine. In the morning the dachcsa 
 sent to inquire concerning the health of his majost)" the 
 emperor, and to solicit an audience. He, who had now 
 benefited by his dreams, or by his reflections, returned 
 a gracious answer, and invited himself to breakfast with 
 hei in her apartment.' In the conversation which en- 
 sued. Napoleon ashed her if her husband were mad ; 
 upon which she justified the duke by appealing to his 
 own magnanimity, asking in her turn if his majesty 
 would have approved of his deserting the king of Prus- 
 sia at the moment w'hen he was attacked by so potent 
 a monarch as himself. The rest of the conversation 
 was in the same spirit, uniting with a sufficient conces- 
 sion to the circumstances of the moment a dignified 
 vindication of a high-minded policy. Napoleon was 
 deeply impressed with respect for her, and loudly ex- 
 pressed it. For her sake, indeed, he even affected to 
 pardon her husband, thus making a merit with her of 
 the necessity which he felt, from other motives, for 
 showing forbearance towards a family so nearly allied 
 to that of St. Petersburg. In 1813 the Grand Duke was 
 found at his post in that great gathering of the nations 
 ■which took place on the stupendous fields of Leipsic, 
 and was complimented by the allied sovereigns as onu 
 of the most faithful amongst the faithful to the great 
 cause, yet undecided, of national independence. 
 
 With respect to Goethe, as a councillor so near the 
 duke's person, it may be supposed that his pre-:encc 
 was never wanting where it promised to be useful. la 
 the earlier campaigns of the duke, Goethe was his com- 
 panion ; but in the final contest with Napoleon he was 
 unequal to the fatigues of such a post. In all the func- 
 tions of peane, however, he continued to be a useful 
 
OU£XHE. 253 
 
 servant '.o the last, though long released from all official 
 duties. Each had indeed most honorably earned the 
 gratitude of the other. Goethe had surrendered the 
 flower of his years and the best energies of his mind to 
 the service of his serene master. On the other hand, 
 tha* master had to him been at once his Augustus and 
 hi? Maecenas ; such is his own expression. Under him 
 he had founded a family, raised an estate, obtained 
 titles and decorations from various courts ; and in the 
 very vigor of his life he had been allowed to retire, 
 with all the honors of long service, to the sanctuary of 
 his own study, and to the cultivation of his leisure, as 
 the very highest mode in which he could further the 
 public interest. 
 
 The life of Goethe was so quiet and so uniform after 
 the year 1775, when he may first be said to have en- 
 tered into active life, by taking service with the Duke 
 of Weimar, that a biographer will find hardly any event 
 to notice, except two journeys to Italy, and one cam- 
 paign in 1792, until he draws near the close of his long 
 career. It cannot interest an English reader to see the 
 dates of his successive appointments. It is enough to 
 know that they soon raised him to as high a station as 
 was consistent with literary leisure ; and that he had 
 from the beginning enjoyed the unlimited confidence of 
 his sovereign. Nothing remained, in fact, for the sub- 
 ject to desire which the prince had not previously vol- 
 unteered. In 1825 they were able to look back upon a 
 course of uninterrupted friendship, maintained through 
 good ajid evil fortunes, unexampled in their agitation 
 and interest for fifty years. The duke commemorated 
 this remarkable event by a jubilee, and by a medal in 
 honor of Goethe. Full of years and honor, this emi« 
 
254 GOETHE. 
 
 nent man might now begin to think of his depart are. 
 However, his serenity continued unbroken nearly for 
 two years more, when his illustrious patron died. That 
 shock was the first which put his fortitude to trial. In 
 1830 others followed; the duchess who had won so 
 mucli admiration from Napoleon died ; then followed 
 his own son ; and there remained little now to connect 
 his wishes with the earth. The family of his patron he 
 had lived to see flourishing in his descendants to the 
 fourth generation. His own grandchildren were pros- 
 perous and happy. His intellectual labors v/ere now 
 accomplished. All that remained to wish for was a 
 gentle dismission. This he found in the spring of 1 832. 
 After a six days' illness, which caused him no apparent 
 suffering, on the morning of the 22d of March he 
 breathed away as if into a gentle sleep, surrounded by 
 his daughter-in-law and her children. Never was a 
 death more in harmony with the life it closed ; both 
 had the same character of deep and absolute serenity. 
 Such is the outline of Goethe's life, traced through 
 its principal events. But as the events, after all, bor- 
 row their interest mainly from the consideration allowed 
 to Goethe as an author, and as a model in the German 
 literature, — that being the centre about which all sec- 
 ondary feelings of interest in the man must finally 
 revolve, — it thus becomes a duty to throw a glance 
 over his principal works. Dismissing his songs, to 
 which has been ascribed by some critics a very high 
 value for their variety and their lyrical enthusiasm; 
 dismissing also a large volume of short miscellaneous 
 poems ; suited to the occasional circumstances in which 
 they arose ; we may throw the capital works of Goethe 
 into two classes, philosophic novels and dramas. The 
 
GOETHE. 255 
 
 novels, which we call 'philosophic by way of expressing 
 their main characteristic in being written to serve a 
 preconceived purpose, or to embody some peculiar 
 views of life, or some aspects of philosophic truth, are 
 three, viz., the Wcrthers Leiden; secondly, the Wii- 
 helm Mcister ; and, lastly, the Wahloer-wandschaflen. 
 The first two exist in English translations ; and though 
 the Werther had the disadvantage of coming to ua 
 through a French version, already, perhaps, somewhat 
 colored and distorted to meet the Parisian standards of 
 sentiment, yet, as respects Goethe and his reputation 
 amongst us, this wrong has been redressed, or com- 
 pensated at least, by the good fortune of his Wilhchn 
 Meister, in falling into the hands of a translator whose 
 original genius qualified him for sympathizing even to 
 excess with any real merits in that work. This novel 
 is in its own nature and purpose sufficiently obscure; 
 and the commentaries which have been written upon it 
 by the Humboldts, Schlegels, &c., make the enigma 
 still more enigmatical. We shall not venture abroad 
 upon an ocean of discussion so truly dark, and at the 
 same time so illimitable. Whether it be qualified to 
 excite any deep and sincere feeling of one kind or 
 another in the German mind, — in a mind trained 
 under German discipline, — this we will consent to 
 waive as a question not immediately interesting to our- 
 selves. Enough that it has not gained, and -will not 
 gain, any attention in this country ; and this not only 
 because it is thoroughly deficient in all points of at- 
 traction to readers formed upon our English literature, 
 but because in some capital circumstances it is abso- 
 lutely repulsive. We do not wish to offend the a.l- 
 mirers of Goethe; but the simplicity of truth will not 
 
256 
 
 allow us to conceal, that in yarious points of descrip- 
 tion or illustration, and sometimes in the very outline 
 of the story, the Wilhelm Meisler is at open war, not 
 with decorum and good taste merely, but with moral 
 purity and the dignity of human nature. As a novelist, 
 Goethe and his reputation are problems, and likely to 
 continue such, to the countrymen of Mrs. Inchbald, 
 Miss Harriet Lee, Miss Edgeworth, and Sir Walter 
 Scott. To the dramatic works of Goethe we are 
 di -posed to pay more homage; but neither in the 
 absolute amount of our homage at all professing to 
 approach his public admirers, nor to distribute the 
 proportions of this homage amongst his several per- 
 formances according to the graduations of their scale. 
 The Iphige?iie is built upon the old subject of Iphigenia 
 in Tauris, as treated by Euripides and other Grecian 
 dramatists ; and, if we are to believe a Schlegel, it is 
 in beauty and effect a mere echo or reverberation from 
 the finest strains of the old Grecian music. That it is 
 somewhat nearer to the Greek model than a play after 
 the fashion of Racine, we grant. Setting aside such 
 faithful transcripts from the antique as the Samson 
 Agonistes, we might consent to view Goethe as that 
 one amongst the moderns who had made the closest 
 approximation to the Greek stage. Proximus, we 
 might say, with Quintilian, but with him we must add, 
 ' sed Jongo intervallo ; ' and if in the second rank, yet 
 nearer to the third than to the first. Two other 
 dramas, the Clavigo and the Egmont, fall below the 
 Iphigenie by the very character of their pretensions ; 
 the first as too openly renouncing the grandeurs of tha 
 ideal ; the second as confessedly violating the historic 
 truth of character, without temptation to do so, and 
 
GOETHE. 257 
 
 Without any consequent indemnification. The Tassn 
 has been supposed to realize an Italian beauty of genial 
 warmth and of sunny repose ; but from the common 
 defect of German criticism — the absence of all suf- 
 ficient illustrations — it is as difficult to understand the 
 true nature and constituents of the supposed Italian 
 standard set up for the regulation of oar judgments, 
 as it is to measure the degree of approach made to that 
 standard in this particular work. Eugenie is celebra- 
 ted for the artificial burnish of the style, but otherwise 
 has been little relished. It has the beauty of marble 
 sculpture, say the critics of Goethe, but also the cold- 
 ness. We arc not often disposed to quarrel with these 
 critics as below the truth in their praises ; in this 
 instance we arc. The Eugenie is a fragment, or (as 
 Goethe himself called it in conversation) a torso, being 
 only the first drama in a trilogy or series of three 
 dramas, each having a separate plot, whilst all are 
 parts of a more general and comprehensive plan. It 
 may be charged with languor in the movement of the 
 action, and w'ith excess of illustration. Thus, e. g. 
 the grief of the prince for the supposed death of his 
 daughter, is the monotonous topic which occupies one 
 entire act. But the situations, though not those of 
 sccnical distress, are so far from being unexciting, that, 
 on the contrary, they are too powerfully afflicting. 
 
 The lustre of all these performances, ho\vever, is 
 eclipsed by the unrivalled celebrity amongst German 
 critics of the Faust. Upon this it is better to say 
 nothing than too little. How trifling an advance has 
 been made towards clearing the ground for any sane 
 criticism, may be understood from this fact, that as yet 
 no two people have agreed about the meaning o 
 22 
 
258 GOETHE. 
 
 any separate scene, or about the drift of the whole. 
 Neither is this explained by saying, that until lately 
 the Faust was a fragment ; for no additional light haa 
 dawned upon the main question since the publication 
 of the latter part. 
 
 One work there is of Goethe's which falls into 
 neither of the classes here noticed ; we mean the 
 Hermann and Dorothea, a narrative poem, in hexa- 
 meter verse. This appears to have given more plea- 
 sure to readers not critical, than any other work of its 
 author ; and it is remarkable that it traverses humbler 
 ground, as respects both it subject, its characters, and 
 its scenery. From this, and other indications of the 
 same kind, we are disposed to infer that Goethe mis- 
 took his destination ; that his aspiring nature misled 
 him; and that his success would have been greater 
 had he confined himself to the real in domestic life,' 
 without raising his eyes to the ideal. 
 
 We must also mention, that Goethe threw out som.e 
 novel speculations in physical science, and particularly 
 in physiology, in the doctrine of colors, and in com- 
 parative anatomy, which have divided the opinions of 
 . critics even more than any of those questions which 
 have arisen upon points more directly connected with 
 his avowed character of poet. 
 
 It now remains to say a few words by way of sum- 
 ming up his pretensions as a man, and his intellectual 
 power in the age to which he belonged. His rank and 
 value as a moral being are so plain as to be legible to 
 him who runs. Everybody must feel that his tempera- 
 ment and constitutional tendency was of that happy 
 quality, the animal so nicely balanced with the intel- 
 lectual, that with any ordinary measure of propriet5 
 
60ETHE. 259 
 
 he could not be otherwise than a good man, He 
 epcaks himself of his own ' virtue,' sans phrase ; and 
 ■we tax him with no vanity in doing so. As a young 
 man even at the universities, which at that time were 
 barbarously sensual in Germany, he was (or so much 
 we collect from his own Memoirs) eminently capable 
 of self-restraint. He preserves a tone of gravity, of 
 sincerity, of respect for female dignity, which we 
 never find associated with the levity and recklessness 
 of vice. We feel throughout, the presence of one 
 who, in respecting others, respects himself; and the 
 cheerfulness of the presiding tone persuades us at once 
 that the narrator is in a healthy moral condition, fears 
 no ill, and is conscious of having meditated none. 
 Yet at the same time Ave cannot disguise from our 
 selves, that the moral temperament of Goethe was one 
 which demanded prosperity. Had he been called to 
 face great afflictions, singular temptations, or a billowy 
 and agitated course of life, our belief is that his nature 
 ■would have been found unequal to the strife ; he would 
 have repeated the mixed and moody character of his 
 father. Sunny prosperity was essential to his nature ; 
 his virtues were adapted to that condition. And hap- 
 pily that was his fate. He had no personal misfor- 
 tunes ; his path was joyous in this life ; and even the 
 reflex sorrow from the calamities of his friends did not 
 press too heavily on his sympathies ; none of these 
 were in excess either as to degree or duration. 
 
 In this estimate of Goethe as a moral being, few 
 people will differ with us, unless it were the religious 
 bigot. And to him we must concede thus much, that 
 Goethe was not that religious creature which by nature 
 he Avas intended to become. This is to be regrett(;d. 
 
260 
 
 Goethe was naturally pious and reverential towards 
 higher natures ; and it was in the mere levity or 
 wantonness of youthful power, partly also through 
 that early false bias growing out of the Lisbon earth- 
 quake, that he falsified his original destination. Do 
 we mean, then, that a childish error could permanently 
 master his understanding? Not so; that would have 
 been corrected with his growing strength. But having 
 once arisen, it must for a long time have movdded his 
 feelings ; until corrected, it must have impressed a 
 corresponding false bias upon his practical way of 
 viewing things ; and that sort of false bias, once 
 established, might long survive a mere error of the 
 understanding. One thing is undeniable, — Goethe 
 had so far corrupted and clouded his natural mind, 
 that he did not look up to God, or the system of 
 things beyond the grave, with the interest of reverence 
 and awe, but with the interest of curiosity. 
 
 Goethe, however, in a moral estiinate, will be viewed 
 pretty uniformly. But Goethe intellectually, Goethe 
 as a power acting upon the age in Avhich he lived, that 
 is another question. Let us put a case ; suppose that 
 Goethe's death had occurred fifty years ago, that is, in 
 the year 1785, what would have been the general im- 
 pression ? Would Europe have felt a shock ? Would 
 Europe have been sensible even of the event ? Not at 
 all ; it would have been obscurely noticed in the news- 
 papers of Germany, as the death of a novelist who had 
 produced some effect about ten years before. In 1832, 
 it was announced by the post-horns of all Europe as 
 the death of him who had written the Wilhelm Meis- 
 ter, the Iphigenie, and the Faust, and who had been 
 enthroned by some of his admirers on the same seat 
 
261 
 
 witli Homer and Sliakspcare, as composing what fhcy 
 termed the trinity of men of genius. And yet it is a 
 fact, that, in the opinion of some amongst the ac- 
 knowledged leaders of our own literature for the last 
 twenty-five years, the Werther was superior to all 
 which followed it, and for mere power was the para- 
 mount -work of Goethe. For ourselves, we must 
 acknowledge our assent upon the whole to this ver- 
 dict; and at the same time we will avow our belief 
 that the reputation of Goethe must decline for the 
 next generation or two, until it reaches its just level. 
 Three causes, we are persuaded, have concurred to 
 push it so far beyond the proportion of real and 
 genuine interest attached to his works, for in Germany 
 his works are little read, and in this country not at 
 all. First, his extraordinary age ; for the last twenty 
 years Goethe had been the patriarch of the German 
 literature. Secondly, the splendor of his official rank 
 at the court of Weimar ; he was the minister and 
 private friend of the patriot sovereign amongst the 
 princes of Germany. Thirdly, the quantity of enig- 
 matical and unintelligible writing which he has 
 designedly thrown into his latter works, by way of 
 keeping up a system of discussion and strife upon 
 his own meaning amongst the critics of his country. 
 These disputes, had his meaning been of any value in 
 his own eyes, he would naturally have settled by a few 
 authoritative words from himself; but it was his policy 
 to keep alive the feud in a case where it was of im- 
 portance that his name should continue to agitate the 
 world, but of none at all that he should be rightly 
 interpreted. 
 
SCHILLER. 
 
 John Christopher Fkedekick yon Schilleb 
 was born at Marbacb, a small town in the ducby of 
 Wiirtemberg, on tbe lOtb day of November, 1759. It 
 will aid tbe reader in synchronizing the periods of 
 this great man's life with the corresponding events 
 throughout Christendom, if we direct his attention to 
 the fact, that Schiller's birth nearly coincided in point 
 of time with that of Robert Burns, and that it pre- 
 ceded that of Napoleon by about ten years. 
 
 The position of Schiller is remarkable. In the land 
 of bis birth, by those who undervalue him the most, 
 he is ranked as the second name in German literature ; 
 everywhere else he is ranked as the first. For us, 
 who are aliens to Germany, Schiller is the representa- 
 tive of the German intellect in its highest form ; and 
 to him, at all events, whether first or second, it is cer- 
 tainly due, that the German intellect has become a 
 known power, and a power of growing magnitude, for 
 the great commonwealth of Christendom. Luther and 
 Kepler, potent intellects as they were, did not make 
 themselves known as Germans. The revolutionary 
 vigor of the one, the starry lustre of the other, blended 
 with the convulsions of reformation, or with the aurora 
 of ascending science, in too kindly and genial a tone to 
 
 [2631 
 
2G4 SCHILLEK. 
 
 call off the attention from the work which thej' per- 
 formed, from the service which they promoted, to the 
 circumstances of their personal position. Their coun- 
 try, their birth, their abode, even their separate exist- 
 ence, was merged in the mighty cause to which they 
 lent their cooperation. And thus at the beginning of 
 the sixteenth century, thus at the beginning of the 
 seventeenth, did the Titan sons of Germany defeat 
 their own private pretensions by the very grandeur of 
 their merits. Their interest as patriots was lost and 
 confounded in their paramount interest as cosmopo- 
 lites. What they did for man and for human dignity 
 eclipsed what they had designed for Germany. After 
 them there was a long interlunar period of darkness 
 for the land of the Rhine and the Danube. The 
 German energy, too spasmodically excited, suffered a 
 -jollapse. Throughout the whole of the seventeenth 
 century, but one vigorous mind arose for permanent 
 effects in literature. This was Optiz, a poet who de- 
 serves even yet to be read with attention, but who is 
 DO more worthy to be classed as the Dry den, whom 
 his too partial countrymen have styled him, than the 
 Germany of the Thirty Years' War of taking rank by 
 the side of civilized and cultured England during the 
 Cromwellian era, or Klopstock of sitting on the s;imo 
 throne with Milton. Leibnitz was the one sole po- 
 tentate in the fields of intellect whom the Germany 
 of this century produced ; and he, like Luther and 
 Kepler, impresses us rather as a European than as a 
 German mind, partly perhaps from his having pursued 
 his self-development in foreign lands, partly from his 
 large circle of foreign connections, but most or all from 
 Lis having written chiefly in French or in Latin 
 
SCHILLER. 265 
 
 Passing onwards to the eighteenth centur)^ we find, 
 through its earlier half, an absolute wilderness, unre- 
 claimed and without promise of natural vegetation, as 
 the barren arena on which the few insipid writers of 
 Germany paraded. The torpor of academic dulness 
 domineered over the length and breadth of the land. 
 And as these academic bodies were universally found 
 harnessed in the equipage of petty courts, it followed 
 that the lethargies of pedantic dulness were uniformly 
 deepened by the lethargies of aulic and ceremonial 
 dulucss ; so that, if the reader represents to himself 
 the very abstract of birthday odes, sycophantish dedi- 
 cations, and court sermons, he will have some adequate 
 idea of the sterility and the mechanical formality 
 which at that era spread the sleep of death over Ger- 
 man literature. Literature, the very word literature, 
 points the laughter of scorn to what passed under that 
 name during the period of Gottsched. That such a 
 man indeed as this Gottsched, equal at the best to the 
 composition of a Latin grammar or a school arithmetic, 
 should for a moment have presided over the German 
 muses, stands out as in itself a brief and significant 
 memorial, too certain for contradiction, and yet almost 
 too gross for belief, of the apoplectic sleep under 
 Avhich the mind of central Europe at that era lay op- 
 prev<!sed. The rust of disuse had corroded the very 
 principles of activity. And, as if the double night of 
 academic dulness, combined with the dulness of court 
 • inanities, had not been sufficient for the stifling of all 
 native energies, the feebleness of French models (and 
 of these moreover naturalized through still feebler 
 imitations) had become the law and standard for all 
 attempts at original composition. The darkness of 
 23 
 
266 SCHILLEH. 
 
 night, it is usually said, grows deeper as it approaclies 
 the dawn ; and the very enormity of that prostration 
 under which the German intellect at this time groaned, 
 was the most certain pledge to any observing eye nt' 
 that inlense re-action soon to stir and kindle among 
 the smouldering activities of this spell-bound people. 
 This re-action, however, was not abrupt and theatrical. 
 It moved through slow stages and by equable grada- 
 tions. It might be said to commence from the middle 
 of the eighteenth century, that is, about nine years 
 before the birth of Schiller ; but a progress of forty 
 years had not carried it so towards its meridian alti- 
 tude, as that the sympathetic shock from the French 
 Kevolution was by one fraction more rude and shatter- 
 ing than the public torpor still demanded. There is a 
 memorable correspondency throughout all members of 
 Protestant Christendom in whatsoever relates to litera- 
 ture and intellectual advance. Plowever imperfect the 
 organization which binds them together, it was suffi- 
 cient even in these elder times to transmit reciprocally 
 from one to every other, so much of that illumination 
 which could be gathered into books, th?t no Christian 
 state could be much in advance of another, supposing 
 that Popery opposed no barriers to free communica- 
 tion, unless only in those points which depended upon 
 local gifts of nature, upon the genius of a particular 
 people, or upon the excellence of its institutions. 
 These advantages were incommunicable, let the free- 
 dom of intercourse have been what it might. England 
 could not send off by posts or by heralds her iron and 
 coals ; she could not send the indomitable energy of 
 her population ; she could not send the absolute se- 
 curity of property ; she could not send the good faith 
 
SCHILLEB. 267 
 
 of her parliaments. These were gifts indigenous tc 
 herself, either through the temperament of her people, 
 or through the original endowments of her soil. But 
 her condition of moral sentiment, her high-toned civic 
 elevation, her atmosphere of political feeling and 
 popular boldness, much of these she could and did 
 transmit, by the radiation of the press, to the very 
 extremities of the German empire. Not only were 
 our books translated, but it is notorious to those ac- 
 quainted with German novels, or other pictures of 
 German society, that as early as the Seven Years' 
 "War, (1756-1763,) in fact from the very era when 
 Cave and Dr. Johnson first made the parliamentary 
 debates accessible to the English themselves, most of 
 the German journals repeated, and sent forward as by 
 telegraph, those senatorial displays to every village 
 throughout Germany. From the polar latitudes to the 
 Mediterranean, from the mouths of the Rhine to the 
 Euxine, there was no other exhibition of free delibera- 
 tive eloquence in any popular assembly. And the 
 Luise of Voss alone, a metrical idyl not less valued 
 for its truth of portraiture than our own Vicar of 
 Wakefield, will show, that the most sequestered clergy- 
 man of a rural parish did not think his breakfast 
 equipage complete without the latest report from the 
 great senate that sat in London. Hence we need not 
 be astonished that German and English literature were 
 found by the French Revolution in pretty nearly the 
 same condition of semi-vigilance and imperfect anima- 
 tion. That mighty event reached us both, reached us 
 all, we may say, (speaking of Protestant states,) at the 
 same moment, by the same tremenaous galvanism. 
 1'he snake, the intellectual snake, that lay in ambush 
 
268 SCHILLER. 
 
 among all nations, roused itself, sloughed itself, re* 
 ncwed its youth, in all of them at the same period. A 
 new world opened upon us all ; new revolutions of 
 thought arose ; new and nobler activities were born ; 
 ' and other palms were won.' 
 
 But by and through Schiller it was, as its main 
 organ, that this great revolutionary impulse expressed 
 itself. Already, as we have said, not less than forty 
 years before the earthquake by which France exploded 
 and projected the scoria of her huge crater over all 
 Christian lands, a stirring had commenced among the 
 dry bones of intellectual Germany ; and symptoms 
 arose that the breath of life would soon disturb, by 
 nobler agitations than by petty personal quarrels, thf< 
 deathlike repose even of the German universities. 
 Precisely in those bodies, however, it was, in those as 
 connected with tyrannical governments, each academic 
 body being shackled to its own petty centre of local 
 despotism, that the old spells remained unlinked ; and 
 to them, equally remarkable as firm trustees of truth, 
 and as obstinate depositories of darkness or of super- 
 annuated prejudice, we must ascribe the slowness of 
 the German movement on the path of re-ascent. Mean- 
 time the earliest torch-bearer to the murky literature 
 of this great land, this crystallization of political states, 
 was Bodmer. This man had no demoniac genius, 
 such as the service required ; but he had some taste, 
 and, what was better, he had some sensibility. He 
 lived among the Alps ; and his reading lay among the 
 alpine sublimities of Milton and Shakspeare. Through 
 his very eyes he imbibed a daily scorn of Gottsched 
 ana his monstrous compound of German coarseness, 
 with French sensual levity. He could not look at hia 
 
SCHILLEH. 269 
 
 native Alps, but he saw in them, and their austere 
 grandeurs or tbeir dread realities, a spiritual reproach 
 to the liollowness and falsehood of that dull imposture, 
 which Gottschcd offered by way of substitute for 
 nature. He was taught by the Alps to crave for 
 something nobler and deeper. Bodmer, though far 
 below such a function, rose by favor of circumstances 
 into an apostle or missionary of truth for Germany. 
 He translated passages of English literature. He in- 
 oculated with his own sympathies the more fervent 
 mind of the youthful Klopstock, who visited him in 
 Switzerland. And it soon became evident, that Ger- 
 many was not dead, but sleeping ; and once again, 
 legibly for any eye, the pulses of life began to play freely 
 through the vast organization of central Europe. 
 
 Klopstock, however, though a fervid, a religious, 
 and, for that reason, an anti-Gallican mind, was himself 
 an abortion. Such, at least, is our own opinion of this 
 poet. He was the child and creature of enthusiasm, 
 but of enthusiasm not allied with a masculine intellect, 
 or any organ for that capacious vision, and meditative 
 range, which his subjects demanded. He was essen- 
 tially thoughtless, betrays everywhere a most effeminate 
 quality of sensibility, and is the sport of that pseudo- 
 enthusiasm, and baseless rapture, which we see so 
 )ften allied with the excitement of strong liquors. In 
 taste, or the sense of proportions and congruencies, or 
 the harmonious adaptations, he is perhaps the most 
 defective writer extant. 
 
 But if no patriarch of German literature, in the sense 
 of having shaped the moulds in which it was to flow, in 
 *ie sense of having disciplined its taste, or excited its 
 rivalship, by classical rr odels of excellence, or raised a 
 
270 SCHILLEK. 
 
 finislied standard of style, perhaps we must concede 
 that, on a minor scale, Klopstock did something of that 
 service in every one of these departments. His works 
 were at least Miltonic in their choice of subjects, if 
 ludicrously non-Miltonic in their treatment of those 
 subjects. And whether due to him or not, it is 
 undeniable that in his time the mother-tongue of Ger- 
 many revived from the most absolute degradation on 
 record, to its ancient purity. In the time of Gottsched, 
 the authors of Germany wrote a macaronic j argon, in 
 which French and Latin made up a considerable pro- 
 portion of every sentence : nay, it happened often that 
 foreign words were inflected with German forms ; and 
 the whole result was such as to remind the reader of 
 the medical examination in the Malade Imaginaire of 
 Moliere : 
 
 • Quid poetea est k faire ? 
 
 Saignare 
 
 Baignare 
 
 Ensuita purgare,' &c. 
 
 Now, is it not reasonable to ascribe some share in the 
 restoration of good to Klopstock, both because his own 
 writings exhibit nothing of this most abject euphuism, 
 (a euphuism expressing itself not in fantastic refine- 
 ments on the staple of the language, but altogether in 
 rejecting it for foreign words and idioms,) and because 
 he wrote expressly on the subject of style and compo- 
 sition ? 
 
 Wieland, meantime, if not enjoying so intense an 
 acceptation as Klopstock, had a more extensive one ; 
 and it is in vain to deny him the praise of a festive, 
 brilliant, and most versatile wit. The Schlegels showed 
 the haughty malignity of their ungenerous natures, in 
 
SCHILLER. 271 
 
 depreciating Wicland, at a time when old age had laid 
 a freezing hand upon the energy which he would once 
 have put forth in defending himself. He was the 
 Voltaire of Germany, and very much more than the 
 Voltaire ; for his romantic and legendary poems are 
 above the level of Voltaire. But, on the other hand, 
 he was a Voltaire in sensual impurity. To work, to 
 carry on a plot, to affect his readers by voluptuous im- 
 pressions, — these were the unworthy aims of Wieland ; 
 and though a good-natured critic would not refuse to 
 make some allowance for a youthful poet's aberrations 
 in this respect, yet the indulgence cannot extend itself 
 to mature years. Aq. old man corrupting his readers, 
 attempting to corrupt them, or relying for his effect 
 upon corruptions already effected, in the purity of their 
 affections, is a hideous object; and that must be a 
 precarious influence indeed which depends for its dura- 
 bility upon the licentiousness of men. Wieland, there- 
 fore, except in parts, will not last as a national idol ; 
 but such he was nevertheless for a time. 
 
 Bijrger wrote too little of any expansive compass to 
 give the measure of his powers, or to found national 
 impression ; Lichtenberg, though a very gracious ob- 
 server, never rose into what can be called a power, he 
 did not modify his age ; yet these were both men of 
 extraordinary talent, and BiJrger a man of undoubted 
 genius. On the other hand, Lessing was merely a 
 man of talent, but of talent in the highest degree 
 adapted to popularity. His very defects, and the shal- 
 lowness of his philosophy, promoted his popularity ; 
 and by comparison with the French ci'itics on the 
 dramatic or scenical proprieties he is ever profound. 
 His plummet, if not suited to the soundless depths of 
 
272 SCHILLER. 
 
 Shakspeare, was able ten times over to fatliom the little 
 rivulets of Parisian philosophy. This he did cflectu- 
 ally, and thus unconsciously levelled the path for 
 Shakspeare, and for that supreme dominion which he 
 has since held over the German stage, by crushing 
 with his sarcastic shrewdness the pretensions of all who 
 stood in the way. At that time, and even yet, the fimc- 
 tions of a literary man were very important in Germa- 
 ny ; the popular mind and the popular instinct pointed 
 one way, those of the little courts another. Multitudes 
 of little German states (many of which were absorbed 
 since 1816 by the process of mediatizing) made it their 
 ambition to play at keeping mimic armies in their pay, 
 and to ape the greater military sovereigns, by encour- 
 aging French literature only, and the French language 
 at their courts. It was this latter propensity which 
 had generated the anomalous macaronic dialect, of 
 Avhich we have already spoken as a characteristic cir- 
 cumstance in the social features of literary Germany dur- 
 ing the first half of the eighteenth century. Nowhere 
 else, within the records of human follies do we find a 
 corresponding case, in which the government and the 
 patrician orders in the state, taking for granted, and 
 absolutely postulating the utter worthlessness for 
 intellectual aims of those in and by whom they main- 
 tained their own grandeur and independence, undis- 
 guisedly and even professedly sought to ally themselves 
 Avith a foreign literature, foreign literati, and a foreign 
 language. In this unexampled display of scorn for 
 native resources, and the consequent collision between 
 the two principles of action, all depended upon the 
 people themselves. For a time the wicked and most 
 profligate contempt of the local governments for that 
 
SCHILJLISK. 273 
 
 native merit which it was their duty to evoke and to 
 cherish, naturally enough produced its own justifica- 
 tion. Like Jews or slaves, whom all the world have 
 agreed to hold contemptible, the German literati found 
 it hard to make head against so obstinate a prejudg- 
 ment ; and too often they became all that they were 
 presumed to be. Sint Mcecenates, non deerunt, Flacce, 
 Marones. And the converse too often holds good — 
 that when all who should have smiled scowl upon a 
 man, he turns out the abject thing they have predicted. 
 Where Frenchified Fredericks sit upon German thrones, 
 it should not surprise us to see a crop of Gottscheds 
 arise as the best fruitage of the land. But when there 
 is any latent nobility in the popular mind, such scorn, 
 by its very extremity, will call forth its own counterac- 
 tion. It was perhaps good for Germany that a prince 
 so eminent in one aspect as Fritz der einziger,'^ should 
 put on record so emphatically his intense conviction, 
 that no good thing could arise out of Germany. This 
 creed was expressed by the quality of the French minds 
 which he attracted to his court. The very refuse and 
 dregs of the Parisian coteries satisfied his hunger for 
 French garbage : the very oflfal of their shambles met 
 the demand of his palate ; even a Maupertuis, so long- 
 as he could produce a French baptismal certificate, was 
 good enough to manufacture into the president of a 
 Berlin academy. Such scorn challenged a re-action ; 
 the contest lay between the thrones of Germany and 
 the popular intellect, and the final result was inevitable. 
 
 * ' Freddy the unique ; ' which is the name by which the 
 Prussians expressed their admiration of the martial and indom 
 itablc, though somewhat fantastic, king.' 
 
27i SCHILLER. 
 
 Once aware tliat they were insulted, once enliglitenod 
 to th.e full consciousness of the scorn which trampled on 
 them as intellectual and predestined Heliots, even the 
 mild-tempered Germans became fierce, and now began 
 to aspire, not merely under the ordinary instincts of 
 personal ambition, but with a vindictive feeling, and as 
 conscious agents of retribution. It became a pleasure 
 with the German author, that the very same works 
 which elevated himself, wreaked his nation upon their 
 princes, and poured retorted scorn upon their most un- 
 generous and unparental sovereigns. Already, in the 
 reign of the martial Frederick, the men who put most 
 weight of authority into his contempt of Germans, — 
 Euler, the matchless Euler, Lambert, and Immanuel 
 Kant, — had vindicated the preeminence of German 
 mathematics. Already, in 1755, had the same Imman- 
 uel Kant, whilst yet a probationer for the chair of logic 
 in a Prussian university, sketched the outline of that 
 philosophy which has secured the admiration, though 
 not the assent, of all men known and proved to have 
 imderstood it, of all men able to state its doctrines in 
 terms admissible by its disciples. Already, and even 
 previously, had Haller, who wrote in German, placed 
 himself at the head of the current physiology. And in 
 the fields of science or of philosophy, the victory was 
 already decided for the German intellect in competition 
 with the French. 
 
 But the fields of literature were still comparatively 
 barren. Klopstock was at least an anomaly ; Lessing 
 did not present himself in the impassioned walks of 
 literature ; Herder was viewed too much in the exclu- 
 sive and professional light of a clergyman ; and, 
 with the exception of John Paul Richter, a man of 
 
SCHILLER. 275 
 
 most original genius, but quite unfitted for general 
 popularity, no commanding mind arose in Germany 
 witli powers for levying homage from foreign nations, 
 until tlie appearance, as a great scenical poet, of Fred- 
 erick Scliiller. 
 
 The father of this great poet was Caspar Schiller, an 
 officer in the military service of the Duke of Wiirtem- 
 berg. He had previously served as a surgeon in the 
 Bavarian army ; but on his final return to his native 
 country of Wiirtemberg, and to the service of his na- 
 tive prince, he laid aside his medical character for ever, 
 and obtained a commission as ensign and adjutant. 
 In 17G3, the Peace of Paris threw him out of his mili- 
 tary employment, with the nominal rank of captain. 
 But, having conciliated the duke's favor, he was still 
 borne on the books of the ducal establishment ; and, as 
 a planner of ornamental gardens, or in some other 
 civil capacity, he continued to serve his serene highness 
 for the rest of his life. 
 
 The parents of Schiller were both pious, upright 
 persons, with that loyal fidelity to duty, and that 
 humble simplicity of demeanor towards their superiors, 
 which is so often found among the unpretending na- 
 tives of Germany. It is probable, however, that 
 Schiller owed to his mother exclusively the preterna- 
 tural endowments of his intellect. She was of humble 
 origin, the daughter of a baker, and not so fortunate 
 as to have received much education. But she was 
 apparently rich in gifts of the heart and the imder- 
 standing. She read poetry with delight ; and through 
 the profound filial love Avith which she had inspired 
 her son, she found it easy to communicate her own 
 literary tastes. Her husband was not illiterate, and 
 
276 SCHILLER. 
 
 had in mature life so laudably applied himself tc tha 
 imiDrovement of his own defective knowledge, that at 
 length he thought himself capable of appearing before 
 the public as an author. His book related simply to 
 the subjects of his professional experience as a horti- 
 culturist, and was entitled Die Baumzucht, iin Grossen 
 (On the management of Forests). Some merit we 
 must suppose it to have had, since the public called for 
 a second edition of it long after his own death, and 
 even after that of his illustrious son. And although 
 he was a plain man, of no pretensions, and possibly 
 even of slow faculties, he has left behind him a prayer, 
 in which there is one petition of sublime and pathetic 
 piety, worthy to be remembered by the side of Agar's 
 wise prayer against almost the equal temptations of 
 poverty and riches. At the birth of his son, he had 
 been reflecting with sorrowful anxiety, not unminglcd 
 with self-reproach, on his own many disqualifications 
 for conducting the education of the child. But at 
 length, reading in his own manifold imperfections but 
 so many reiterations of the necessity that he should 
 rely upon God's bounty, converting his very defects 
 into so many arguments of hope and confidence in 
 Heaven, he prayed thus : ' Oh God, that knowest my 
 poverty in good gifts for my son's inheritance, gracious- 
 ly permit that, even as the want of bread became to 
 thy sou's hunger-stricken flock in the wilderness the 
 pledge of overflowing abundance, so likewise my dark- 
 ness may, in its sad extremity, carry with it the meas- 
 ure of thy unfathomable light ; and because I, thy 
 worm, cannot give to my son the least of blessings, do 
 thou give the greatest ; because in my hands there is 
 aot any thing, do thou from thine pour cmt all things ; 
 
SCHILLEB. 277 
 
 and ttat temple of a new-born spirit, which I cannot 
 adorn even with earthly ornaments of dust and ashes, 
 do thou irradiate with the celestial adornment of thy 
 presence, and finally with that peace that passeth all 
 understanding.' 
 
 Reared at the feet of parents so pious and affection- 
 ate, Schiller would doubtless pass a happy childhood ; 
 and probably to this ntter tranquillity of his earlier 
 years, to his seclusion from all that could create pain, 
 or even anxiety, we must ascribe the unusual dearth of 
 anecdotes from this period of his life ; a dearth which 
 has tempted some of his biographers into improving 
 and embellishing some puerile stories, which a man of 
 sentie will inevitably reject as too trivial for his gravity 
 or too fantastical for his faith. That nation is happy, 
 according to a common adage, which furnishes little 
 business to the historian ; for such a vacuity in facts 
 argues a condition of perfect peace and silent prosper- 
 ity. That childhood is happy, or may generally be 
 presumed such, which has furnished few records of 
 external experience, little that has appeared in doing or 
 in suffering to the eyes of companions ; for the child 
 who has been made happy by early thoughtfulness, 
 and by infantine struggles with the great ideas of his 
 origin and his destination, (ideas which settle with a 
 deep, dove-like brooding iipon the mind of childhood, 
 more than of mature life, vexed with inroads from the 
 noisy world,) will not manifest the workings of his 
 spirit by much of external activity. The falleniis 
 semita vitce, that path of noiseless life, which eludes 
 and deceives the conscious notice both of its sub- 
 ject and of all around him, opens equally to the 
 man and to the child ; and the happiest of all child- 
 
278 SCHILLEK. 
 
 * 
 
 hoods will have heen that of which the happiness has 
 survived and expressed itself, not in distinct records, 
 but in deep affection, in abiding love, and the haunt- 
 ings of meditative power. 
 
 Such a childhood, in the bosom of maternal tender- 
 ness, was probably passed by Schiller ; and his first 
 awaking to the world of strife and perjilexity happened 
 in his fourteenth year. Up to that period his life had 
 been vagrant, agreeably to the shifting necessities of the 
 ducal service, and his education desultory and domes- 
 tic. But in the year 1773 he was solemnly entered as 
 a member of a new academical institution, founded by 
 the reigning duke, and recently translated to his little 
 capital of Stutgard. This change took place at the 
 special request of the duke, who, under the mask of 
 patronage, took upon himself the severe control of the 
 whole simple family. The parents were probably both 
 too humble and dutiful in spirit towards one whom they 
 regarded in the double light of sovereign lord and of 
 personal benefactor, ever to miu-mur at the ducal be- 
 hests, far less to resist them. The duke was for them 
 an earthly providence ; and they resigned themselves, 
 together with their child, to the disposal of him who 
 dispensed their earthly blessings, not less meekly than 
 of Him whose vicegerent they presumed him to be. In 
 such a frame of mind, requests are but another name 
 for commands ; and thus it happened that a second 
 change arose upon the first, even more determinately 
 fatal to the young Schiller's happiness. Hitherto he 
 had cherished a day-dream pointing to the pastoral 
 office in some rural district, as that which would har- 
 monize best with his intellectual purposes, with his 
 love of quiet, and by means of its preparatory require' 
 
SCHILLER. 279 
 
 mcnts, best also with his own peculiar choice of studies. 
 But this scheme he now felt himself compelled to 
 sacrifice ; and the two evils which fell upon him con- 
 currently in his new situation, were, first, the formal 
 military discipline and monotonous routine of duty ; 
 secondly, the uncongenial direction of the studies, which 
 were shaped entirely to the attainment of legal know- 
 ledge, and the narrow service of the local tribunals. 
 So illiberal and so exclusive a system of education 
 was revolting to the expansive mind of Schiller ; and 
 the military bondage under which this system was 
 enforced, shocked the aspiring nobility of his moral 
 nature, not less than the technical narrowness of the 
 studies shocked his understanding. In point of ex- 
 pense, the whole establishment cost nothing at all to 
 those parents who were privileged servants of the 
 duke ; in this number were the parents of Schiller, 
 and that single consideration weighed too powerfully 
 upon his filial piety to allow of his openly murmuring 
 at his lot ; while on their part the parents were equally 
 shy of encouraging a disgust which too obviously 
 tended to defeat the promises of ducal favor. This 
 system of monotonous confinement was therefore car- 
 ried to its completion, and the murmurs of the young 
 Schiller were either dutifully suppressed, or found 
 vent only in secret letters to a friend. In one point 
 only Schiller was able to improve his condition ; jointly 
 \vith the juristic department, was another for training 
 young aspirants to the medical profession. To this, 
 as promising a more enlarged scheme of study, Schiller 
 by permission transferred himself in 1775. But what- 
 ever relief he mij^ht find in the nature of his new 
 
280 SCHILLER. 
 
 studies, he fooind none at all in tlie system of personal 
 discipline which prevailed. 
 
 Under the oppression of this detested system, and 
 by pure re-action against its wearing persecutions, we 
 learn from Schiller himself, that in his nineteenth year 
 he undertook the earliest of his surviving plays, the 
 Robbers, beyond doubt the most tempestuous, the 
 most volcanic, we might say, of all juvenile creations 
 anywhere recorded. He himself calls it ' a monster,' 
 and a monster it is ; but a monster which has never 
 failed to convulse the heart of young readers with the 
 temperament of intellectual enthusiasm and sensibility. 
 True it is, and nobody was more aware of that fact 
 than Schiller himself in after years, the characters of 
 the three Moors, father and sons, are mere impossibili- 
 ties ; and some readers, in whom the judicious ac- 
 quaintance with human life in its realities has outrun 
 the sensibilities, are so much shocked by these hyper- 
 natural phenomena, that they are incapable of enjoying 
 the terrific sublimities which on that basis of the vis- 
 ionary do really exist. A poet, perhaps Schiller might 
 have alleged, is entitled to assume hypothetically so 
 much in the previous positions or circumstances of his 
 agents as is requisite to the basis from which he starts. 
 It is undeniable that Shakspeare and others have 
 availed themselves of this principle, and with memor- 
 able success. Shaksjjcare, for instance, postulates his 
 witches, his Caliban, his Ariel : grant, he virtually 
 says, such modes of spiritual existence or of spiritual 
 relations as a possibility : do not expect me to demon- 
 strate this, and upon that single concession I will rear 
 a superstructure that shall be self-consistent ; every- 
 
SCHILLEK. 281 
 
 thing shall be internally coherent and reconciled, 
 whatever be its external relations as to our human 
 experience. But this species of assumption, on the 
 largest scale, is more Avithin the limits of credibility 
 and plausible verisimilitude when applied to modes of 
 existence, which, after all, are in such total darkness 
 to us, (the limits of the possible being so undefined 
 and shadowy as to what can or cannot exist,) than the 
 very slightest liberties taken with human character, or 
 with those principles of action, motives, and feelings, 
 upon which men would move under given circumstan- 
 ces, or Avith the modes of action which in common 
 prudence they would be likely to adopt. The truth 
 is, that, as a coherent work of art, the Robbers is 
 indefensible ; but, however monstrous it may be pro- 
 nounced, it possesses a power to agitate and convulse, 
 which will always obliterate its great faults to the 
 young, and to all whose judgment is not too much 
 developed. And the best apology for Schiller is found 
 in his own words, in recording the circiimstances and 
 causes under which this anomalous production arose. 
 ' To escape,' says he, ' from the formalities of a disci- 
 pline which was odious to my heart, I sought a retreat 
 in the Avorld of ideas and shadowy possibilities, while 
 as yet I knew nothing at all of that human world 
 from which I was harshly secluded by iron bars. 
 Of men, the actual men in this world below, I knew 
 absolutely nothing at the time when I composed my 
 Robbers. Four hundred human beings, it is true, 
 were my fellow-prisoners in this abode ; but they were 
 mere tautologies and reiterations of the self-same 
 mechanic creature, and like so many plaster-casta 
 24 
 
282 SCHILLER. 
 
 from the same original statue. Thus situated, of 
 necessity I failed. In making the attempt, my chis'jl 
 brought out a monster, of which [and that was 
 fortunate] the world had no type or resemblance to 
 show.' 
 
 Meantime this demoniac drama produced very oppo- 
 site results to Schiller's reputation. Among the young 
 men of Germany it was received with an enthusiasm 
 absolutely unparalleled, though it is perfectly untrue 
 that it excited some persons of rank and splendid 
 expectations (as a current fable asserted) to imitate 
 Charles Moor in becoming robbers. On the other 
 hand, the play was of too powerful a cast not in any 
 case to have alarmed his serenity the Duke of Wiir- 
 temberg ; for it argued a most revolutionary mind, and 
 the utmost audacity of self-will. But besides this 
 general ground of censure, there arose a special one, in 
 a quarter so remote, that this one fact may serve to 
 evidence the extent as well as intensity of the impres- 
 sion made. The territory of the Grisons had been, 
 called by Spiegelberg, one of the robbers, ' The Thief's 
 Athens.' Upon this the magistrates of that country 
 presented a complaint to the duke ; and his highness 
 having cited Schiller to his presence, and severely 
 reprimanded him, issued a decree that this dangerous 
 young student should henceforth confine himself to his 
 medical studies. 
 
 The persecution which followed exhibits such extra- 
 ordinary exertions of despotism, even for that land of 
 irresponsible power, that we must presume the duke to 
 have relied more upon the hold which he had upon 
 Schiller through his affection for parents so absolutely 
 ^pendent on his highness's power, than upon any 
 
SCHILLER. 283 
 
 laws, good or bad, wliicli he could have pleaded as hia 
 warrant. Germany, however, thought otherwise of 
 the new tragedy than the serene critic of Wiirtemberg : 
 it was performed with vast applause at the neigh- 
 boring city of Mannheim ; and thither, under a most 
 excusable interest in his own play, the young poet 
 clandestinely went. On his return he was placed under 
 arrest. And soon afterwards, being now thoroughly 
 disgusted, and, with some reason, alarmed by the 
 tyranny of the duke, Schiller finally eloped to Mann- 
 heim, availing himself of the confusion created in 
 Stutgard by the visit of a foreign prince. 
 
 At Mannheim he lived in the house of Dalberg, a 
 man of some rank and of sounding titles, but in Mann- 
 heim known chiefly as the literary manager (or what is 
 called director) of the theatre. This connection aided 
 in determining the subsequent direction of Schiller's 
 talents ; and his Fiesco, his Intrigue and Love, his 
 Don Carlos, and his Maria Stuart, followed within a 
 short period of years. None of these are so far free 
 from the faults of the Robbers as to merit a separate 
 notice ; for with less power, they are almost equally 
 licentious. Finally, however, he brought out his 
 Wallenstein, an immortal drama, and, beyond all 
 competition, the nearest in point of excellence to the 
 dramas of Shakspeare. The position of the characters 
 of Max Piccolomini and the Princess Thekla is the 
 finest instance of what, in a critical sense, is called 
 relief, that literature offers. Young, innocent, un- 
 fortunate, among a camp of ambitious, guilty, and 
 blood-stained men, they ofi"er a depth and solemnity 
 of impression which is equally required by way of 
 contrast and of final repose. 
 
284 SCHILLEK. 
 
 From Mannheim, where he had a transient love affair 
 with Laura Dalberg, the daughter of his friend the 
 director, Schiller removed to Jena, the celebrated uni- 
 versity in the territory of Weimar. The Grand Duke 
 of that German Florence was at this time gathering 
 around him the most eminent of the German intellects ; 
 and he was eager to enroll Schiller in the body of his 
 professors. In 1799 Schiller received the chair of 
 civil history ; and not long after he married Miss 
 Lengefeld, with whom he had been for some time 
 acquainted. In 1803 he was ennobled; that is, he 
 was raised to the rank of gentleman, and entitled to 
 attach the prefix of Vo'n to his name. His income 
 was now sufficient for domestic comfort and respect- 
 able independence ; while in the society of Goethe, 
 Herder, and other eminent wits, he found even more 
 relaxation for his intellect, than his intellect, so fer- 
 vent and so self-sustained, could require. 
 
 Meantime the health of Schiller was gradually under- 
 mined : his lungs had been long subject to attacks of 
 disease ; and the warning indications which constantly 
 arose of some deep-seated organic injuries in his pul- 
 mona ry system ought to have put him on his guard for 
 some years before his death. Of all men, however, it 
 is remarkable that Schiller was the most criminally 
 negligent of his health ; remarkable, we say, because 
 for a period of four years Schiller had applied himself 
 seriously to the study of medicine. The strong coffee, 
 and the wine which he drank, may not have been so 
 injurious as his biographers suppose ; but his habit of 
 sitting up through the night, and defrauding his wasted 
 frame of all natural and restorative sleep, had some- 
 thing in it of that guilt which belongs to suicide. On 
 
scnixLER. 285 
 
 the Qtli of May, I8O0, liis complaint readied its crisis. 
 Early in the morning he became delirious ; at noon his 
 delirium abated ; and at four in the afternoon he feli 
 into a gentle unagitated sleep, from which he soon 
 awoke. Conscious that he now stood on the veiy 
 edge of the grave, he calmly and fervently took a last 
 farewell of his friends. At six in the evening he fell 
 again into sleep, from which, however, he again awoke 
 once more to utter the memorable declaration, ' that 
 many things were growing plain and clear to his un- 
 derstanding.' After this the cloud of sleep again set- 
 tled upon him ; a sleep which soon changed into the 
 cloud of death. 
 
 This event produced a profound impression through- 
 out Germany. The theatres were closed at Weimar, 
 and the funeral was condvicted with public honors. 
 The position in point of time, and the peculiar ser- 
 vices of Schiller to the German literature, we have 
 already stated : it remains to add, that in person he 
 was tall, and of a strong bony structure, but not 
 muscular, and strikingly lean. His forehead was 
 lofty, his nose aquiline, and his mouth almost of Gre- 
 cian beauty. With other good points about his face, 
 and with auburn hair, it may be presumed that his 
 whole appearance was pleasing and impressive, while 
 in latter years the character of sadness and contempla- 
 tive sensibility deepened the impression of his counte- 
 nance. We have said enough of his intellectual merit, 
 which places him in our judgment at the head of the 
 Trans-Rhenish literature. But we add in concluding, 
 that Frederick von Schiller was something more than 
 a great author ; he was also in an eminent sense a 
 
286 SCHILLER. 
 
 great man ; and his works are not more wortTiy of being 
 studied for their singular force and originality, than 
 his moral character from its nobility and aspiring 
 grandeur. 
 
ESSAYS ON THE POETS, 
 
 OTHER ENGLISH WRITERS. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 FAGB 
 THE POETRY OF WORDSWORTH . . . . S 
 
 PiiRCY BYSSIIE SHELLEY ..... 42 
 
 JOHN KEATS ....... 77 
 
 OLIVER GOLDSMITH ..... 101 
 
 ALEXANDER POPE . . . . . .147 
 
 WILLIAM GODWIN ...... 207 
 
 JOHN FOSTER ....... 219 
 
 WILLIAM HAZLITT ...... 227 
 
 WALTER SAVAGE LANDOB . . . . ,244 
 
ON WORDSWORTH'S POETRY. 
 
 Heretofore, upon one impulse or another, 1 have 
 retiaced fugitive memorials of several persons cele- 
 brated in our own times ; but I have never undertaken 
 an examination of any man's w^ritings. The one labor 
 is, comparatively, without an effort ; the other is both 
 difficult, and, with regard to contemporaries, is invidi- 
 ous. In genial moments the characteristic remem- 
 brances of men expand as fluently as buds travel into 
 blossoms ; but criticism, if it is to be conscientious and 
 profound, and if it is applied to an object so unlimited 
 as poetry, must be almost as unattainable by any hasty 
 effort as fine poetry itself " Thou hast convinced 
 me," says Rasselas to Imlac, " that it is impossible to be 
 a poet ; " so vast had appeared to be the array of qualifi- 
 cations. But, with the same ease, Imlac might have 
 convinced the prince that it was impossible to be a critic. 
 And hence it is, that, in the sense of absolute and 
 philosophic criticism, we have little or none; for, before 
 thai can exist, we must have a good psychology ; whereas, 
 at present, we have none at all. 
 
 If, however, it is more difficult to write critical 
 sketches than sketches of personal recollections, often 
 
 (5) 
 
ON WORDSWORTH S POETRY. 
 
 It is much less connected with painful scruples. Of 
 books, resting only on grounds which, in sincerity, you 
 believe to be true, and speaking without anger or scorn, 
 you can hardly say the thing which ought to be taken 
 amiss. But of men and women you dare not, and must 
 nf^t, tell all that chance may have revealed to you. 
 Sometimes you are summoned to silence by pity for that 
 general human infirmity, which you also, the writer, 
 share. Sometimes you are checked by the consideration 
 that perhaps your knowledge of the case was originally 
 gained under opportunities allowed by confidence or by 
 unsuspecting carelessness. Sometimes the disclosure 
 would cause quarrels between parties now at peace. 
 Sometimes it would carry pain, such as you could not 
 feel justified in carrying, into the mind of him who was 
 its object. Sometimes, again, if right to be told, it might 
 be difficult to prove. Thus, for one cause or another, 
 some things are sacred, and some things are perilous, 
 amongst any personal revelations that else you might 
 have it in your power to make. And seldom, indeed, is 
 your own silent retrospect of such connections altogether 
 happy. "Put not your trust in princes, nor in the sons 
 of princes," — this has been the warning, — this has 
 been the farewell moral, winding up and pointing the 
 experience of dying statesmen. Not less truly it might 
 be said, " Put not your trust in the intellectual princes 
 of your age: " form no connections too close with any 
 who live only in the atmosphere of admiration and praise. 
 The love or the friendship of such people rarely con- 
 tracts itself into the narrow circle of individuals. You, 
 if you are brilliant like themselves, they will hate ; you, 
 if you are dull, they will despise. Gaze, therefore, ou 
 
ON WOKDSWOnTIl S POETRY. 7 
 
 the splendor of such idols as a passing stranger. Look 
 for a moment as one sharing in the idolatry ; but pass 
 on before the splendor has been sullied by human frailty, 
 or before your own generous homage has been con- 
 founded with offerings of weeds. 
 
 Safer, then, it is to scrutinize the works of eminent 
 poets, than long to connect yourself with themselves, or 
 to revive your remembrances of them in any personal 
 record. Now, amongst all works that have illustrated 
 our own age, none can more deserve an earnest notice 
 than those of the Laureate ; and on some grounds, pecu- 
 liar to themselves, none so much. Their merit in fact 
 is not only supreme but unique ; not only supreme in 
 their general class, but unique as in a class of their own. 
 And there is a challenge of a separate nature to the 
 curiosity of the readers, in the remarkable contrast 
 between the first stage of Wordsworth's acceptation with 
 the public and that which he enjoys at present. One 
 original obstacle to the favorable impression of the 
 Wordsworthian poetry, and an obstacle purely self- 
 created, was his theory of poetic diction. The diction 
 itself, without the theory, was of less consequence ; for 
 the mass of readers would have been too blind or too 
 careless to notice it. But the preface to the second 
 edition of his Poems (2 vols. 1799-1800), compelled 
 them to notice it. Nothing more injudicious was ever 
 done by man. An unpopular truth would, at any rate, 
 have been a bad inauguration, for what, on o^Aer accounts, 
 the author had announced as "an experiment." His 
 }>oetry was already an experiment as regarded the quality 
 of the subjects selected, and as regarded the mode of 
 treating them. That was surely trial enough for tlvi 
 
8 ON Wordsworth's poetry. 
 
 reader's untrained sensibilities, without the unpopular 
 truth besides, as to the diction. But, in the mean time, 
 this truth, besides being unpopular, was also, in part, 
 false : it was true, and it was not true. And it was not 
 true in a double way. Stating broadly, and allowing it 
 to be taken for his meaning, that the diction of ordinary 
 life, in his own words, " the very language of man," was 
 the proper diction for poetry, the writer meant no such 
 thing ; for only a part of this diction, according to his 
 own subsequent restriction, was available for such a use. 
 And, secondly, as his own subsequent practice showed, 
 even this part was available only for peculiar classes of 
 poetry. In his own exquisite " Laodamia," in his " Son- 
 nets," in his "Excursion," few are his obligations to the 
 idiomatic language of life, as distinguished from that of 
 books, or of prescriptive usage. Coleridge remarked, 
 justly, that " The Excursion " bristles beyond most poems 
 with what are called "dictionary" words; that is, poly- 
 syllabic words of Latin or Greek origin. And so it 
 must ever be, in meditative poetry upon solemn philo- 
 sophic themes. The gamut of ideas needs a correspond- 
 ing gamut of expressions ; the scale of the thinking, 
 which ranges through every key, exacts, for the artist, 
 an unlimited command over the entire scale of the 
 instrument which he employs. Never, in fact, was there 
 a more erroneous direction than that given by a modern 
 rector of the Glasgow University to the students, — viz.^ 
 that they should cultivate the Saxon part of our language, 
 at the cost of the Latin part. Nonsense ! Both are 
 indispensable ; and, speaking generally without stopping 
 to distinguish as to subjects, both are equally indispens- 
 able. Pathos, in situations which are homely, or at all 
 
ON WORDSWORTHS POETRY. V 
 
 connected with domestic affections, naturally moves by 
 Saxon words. Lyrical emotion of every kind, which 
 (to merit the name of lyrical), must be in the state of 
 flux and reflux, or, generally, of agitation, also requires 
 the Saxon element of our language. And why ? Be- 
 cause the Saxon is the aboriginal element; the basis, 
 and not the superstructure : consequently it comprehends 
 all the ideas which are natural to the heart of man and 
 to the elementary situations of life. And, although the 
 Latin often furnishes us with duplicates of these ideas, 
 yet the Saxon or monosyllabic part has the advantage 
 of precedency in our use and knowledge ; for it is the 
 language of the nursery, whether for rich or poor, in 
 which great philological academy no toleration is given 
 to words in ^' osity" or ^^ ation." There is, therefore, a 
 great advantage, as regards the consecration to our feel- 
 ings, settled, by usage and custom, upon the Saxon 
 strands, in the mixed yarn of our native tongue. And, 
 universally, this may be remarked — that, wherever the 
 passion of a poem is of that sort which uses, presumes, 
 or postulates the ideas, without seeking to extend them, 
 Saxon will be the " cocoon" (to speak by the language 
 applied to silk-worms) which the poem spins for itself 
 But, on the other hand, where the motion of the feeling 
 is by and thro2igk the ideas, where (as in religious or 
 meditative poetry — Young's for instance, or Cowper's) the 
 pathos creeps and kindles underneath the very tissues of 
 the thinking, there the Latin will predominate ; and so 
 much so that, whilst the flesh, the blood and the muscle, 
 will be often almost exclusively Latin, the articulations 
 only, or hinges of connection, will be anglo-Saxon. 
 But a blunder, more perhaps from thoughtlessness and 
 
 1* 
 
ON WORDSWORTH'S POETRY. 
 
 careless reading, than from malice on the part of the 
 professional critics, ought to have roused Wordsworth 
 into a firmer feeling of the entire question These 
 critics have fancied that, in Wordsworth'a estimate, 
 whatsoever was plebeian was also poetically just in dic- 
 tion ; not as though the impassioned phrase were some- 
 times the vernacular phrase, but as though the vernacular 
 phrase were universally the impassioned. They naturally 
 went on to suggest, as a corollary, which Wordsworth 
 could not refuse, that Dryden and Pope must be trans- 
 lated into the flash diction of prisons and the slang of 
 streets, before they could be regarded as poetically cos- 
 tumed. Now, so far as these critics were concerned, 
 the answer would have been — simply to say, that much 
 in the poets mentioned, but especially of the racy Dry- 
 den, actually is in that vernacular diction for which 
 Wordsworth contended; and, for the other part, which 
 is not, frequently it does require the very purgation, (if 
 that were possible), which the critics were presuming to 
 be so absurd. In Pope, and sometimes in Dryden, there 
 is much of the unfeeling and the prescriptive slang which 
 Wordsworth denounced. During the eighty years be- 
 tween 1660 and 1740, grew up that scrofulous taint in 
 our diction which was denounced by Wordsworth as 
 technically " poetic language ; " and, if Dryden and Pope 
 were less infected than others, this was merely because 
 their understandings were finer. Much there is in both 
 poets, as regards diction, which does require correction. 
 And if, so far, the critics should resist Wordsworth's 
 principle of reform, not he, but they, would have been 
 found the patrons of deformity. This course would 
 soon have turned the tables upon the critics. For the 
 
ON Wordsworth's poetry. 11 
 
 poets, or the class of poets, whom they unwisely selected 
 as models, susceptible of no correction, happen to be 
 those who chiefly require it. But their foolish selection 
 ought not to have intercepted or clouded the question 
 when jmt in another shape, since in this shape it opena 
 into a very troublesome dilemma. Spenser, Shakspeare, 
 the Bible of 1610, and Milton, — how say you, William 
 Wordsworth, — are these right and true as to diction, or 
 are they not ? If you say they are, then what is it that 
 you are proposing to change ? What room for a revolu- 
 tion ? Would you, as Sancho says, have " better bread 
 than is made of wheat ? " But if you say, no, they are 
 not ; then, indeed, you open a fearful range to your owa 
 artillery, but in a war greater than you could, appa 
 rently, have contemplated. In the first case, that is, if 
 the leading classics of the English literature are, in 
 quality of diction and style, loyal to the canons of sound 
 taste, then you cut away the loc7is standi for yourself as 
 a reformer : the reformation applies only to secondary 
 and recent abuses. In the second, if they also are 
 faulty, you undertake an onus of hostility so vast that 
 you will be found fighting against the stars. 
 
 It is clear, therefore, that Wordsworth erred, and 
 caused unnecessary embarrassment, equally to the attack 
 and to the defence, by not assigning the names of the 
 parties offended, whom he had specially contemplated. 
 The bodies of the criminals should have been had into 
 court. But much more he erred in another point, where 
 his neglect cannot be thought of without astonishment. 
 The whole appeal turned upon a comparison between 
 two modes of phraseology; each of thef;e, the bad and 
 the good, should have been extensively illustrated ; and, 
 
12 ON Wordsworth's poetry. 
 
 until that IS done, the whole dispute is an aerial sublilty 
 equally beyond the grasp of the best critic and the worst. 
 How could a man so much in earnest, and so deeply 
 interested in the question, commit so capital an over- 
 sight ? Tantamne rem tarn negligenter ? The truth is, 
 that, at this day, after a lapse of forty-seven years, and 
 some discussion, the whole question moved by Wcrds- 
 worth is still a res integra. And for this reason, that 
 no sufficient specimen has ever been given of the par- 
 ticular phraseology which each party contemplates as 
 good or as bad : no man, in this dispute, steadily under- 
 stands even himself; and, if he did, no other person 
 understands him for want of distinct illustrations. Not 
 only the answer, therefore, is still entirely in arrear, but 
 even the question has not yet practically explained 
 itself so as that an answer to it could be possible. 
 
 Passing from the diction of Wordsworth's poetry to its 
 matter, the least plausible objection ever brought against 
 it was that of Mr. Hazlitt : " One would suppose," he 
 said, " from the tenor of his subjects, that on this earth 
 there was neither marrying nor giving in marriage." 
 But as well might it be said of Aristophanes : " One 
 would suppose, that in Athens no such thing had been 
 known as sorrow and weeping." Or Wordsworth him- 
 self might say reproachfully to some of Mr. Hazlitt's 
 more favored poets ; " Judging by ymir themes, a man 
 must believe that there is no such thing on our planet 
 as fighting and kicking." Wordsworth has written many 
 memorable poems (for instance, " On the Tyrolean and 
 the Spanish Insurrections ; " " On the Retreat from Mos- 
 cow;" "On the Feast, of Brougham Castle"), all sym- 
 pathizing powerfully with the martial spirit. Otlier 
 
ON WORDSWORTH S POETRY, 
 
 13 
 
 poets, fiivoi-ites of Mr. Hazlitt, have never struck a 
 solitary note from this Tyrtasan lyre ; and who blames 
 thein? Surely, if every man finds his powers limited, 
 every man would do well to respect this silent admoni- 
 tion of nature, by not travelling out of his appointed 
 walk, through any coxcombry of sporting a spurious 
 versatility. And in this view, what Mr. Hazlitt made the 
 reproach of the poet, is amongst the first of his praises 
 Ikit there is another reason why Wordsworth could not 
 meddle with festal raptures like the glory of a wedding- 
 day. These raptures are not only too brief, but (which 
 is worse) they tend downwards : even for as long as 
 they last, they do not move upon an ascending scale. 
 And even that is not their worst fault : they do not dif- 
 fuse or conununicate themselves : the wretches chiefly 
 interested in a marriage are so selfish, that they keep all 
 the rapture to themselves. Mere joy, that does not 
 linn-er and reproduce itself in reverberations or mirrors, 
 is not fitted for poetry. What \vould the sun be itself, 
 if it were a mere blank orb of fire that did not multiply 
 its splendors through millions of rays refracted and 
 reflected; or if its glory were not endlessly caught, 
 splintered, and thrown back by atmospheric repercus- 
 sions ? 
 
 There is, besides, a still subtler reason (and one that 
 ought not to have escaped the acuteness of Mr. Hazlitt), 
 why the muse of Wordsworth could not glorify a wed- 
 ding festival. Poems no longer than a sonnet he vnght 
 derive from such an impulse : and one such poem of his 
 there really is. Bat whosoever looks searchingly into 
 the characteristic genius of Wordsworth, will see that he 
 does not u illingly deal with a passion in its direct aspect, 
 
14 OIN W0RDS"\\"CKTII'S POETRY. 
 
 or presenting an unmodified contour, but in forms more 
 complex and oblique, and when passing under the shadow 
 of some secondary passion. Joy, for instance, that wells 
 up from constitutional sources, joy that is ebullient from 
 youth to age, and cannot cease to sparkle, he yet exhib- 
 its in the person of Matthew,^ the village schoolmaster, 
 as touched and overgloomed by memories of sorrow. In 
 the poem of " We are Seven," which brings into day for 
 the first time a profound fact in the abysses of human 
 nature, namely, that the mind of an infant catmot admit 
 the idea of death, anymore than the fountain of light can 
 comprehend the aboriginal darkness (a truth on which 
 Mr. Ferrier has since commented beautifully in his 
 " Philosophy of Consciousness ") ; the little mountaineer, 
 who furnishes the text for this lovely strain, she whose 
 fulness of life could not brook the gloomy faith in a 
 grave, is yet (for the effect upon the reader) brought into 
 connection with the reflex shadows of the grave : and 
 if she herself has 7iot, the reader has, the gloom of that 
 contemplation obliquely irradiated, as raised in relief 
 upon his imagination, even by her. Death and its 
 sunny antipole are forced into connection, I remember 
 again to have heard a man complain, that in a little 
 poem having for its very subject the universal diffusion 
 and the gratuitous diffusion of joy — 
 
 "Pleasure is sjjread through the earth. 
 In stray gifts to be claimed by whoever shall find," 
 
 a picture occurs which overpowered him with melan- 
 choly : it was this — 
 
 1 See the exquisite poems, so little understood by the common- 
 place reader, of The Tu>o April Mornings, and The Fountain. 
 
ON wordswokth's poetry. 15 
 
 *' In sight of the spires 
 All alive with the fires 
 Of the sun going down to his rest, 
 In the broad open eye of the solitary sky, 
 They dance, — there ai-e three, as jocund as free, — 
 While they dance on the calm river's breast."! 
 
 Undeiii.'ibly there is (and without ground for complaint 
 there is) even liere, where the spirit of gayety is pro- 
 f(>ssedly invoked, an oblique though evanescent image 
 flashed upon us of a sadness that lies deep behind the 
 laughing figures, and of a solitude that is the real pos- 
 sessor in fee of all things, but is waiting an hour or so 
 for the dispossession of the false dancing tenants. 
 
 An inverse case, as regards the three just cited, is 
 found in the poem of ' Hart-leap-well,' over which the 
 mysterious spirit of the noon-day. Pan, seems to brood. 
 Out of suffering is there evoked the image of peace. 
 Out of the cruel leap, and the agonizing race through 
 thirteen hours ; out of the anguish in the perishing 
 brute, and the headlong courage of his final despair, 
 
 " Not unobserved by sympathy divine," — 
 
 out of the ruined lodge and the forgotten mansion, 
 
 1 Coleridge had a grievous infirmity of mind as regarded pain. 
 ric could not contemplate the shadows of fear, of sorrow, of suffer- 
 ing, with any steadiness of gaze. He was, in relation to that sub- 
 ject, what in Lancashire they call nesh, i. e., soft, or effeminate. 
 This frailty claimed indulgence, had he not erected it at times into 
 a ground of superiority. Accordingly, I remember that he also 
 complained of this passage in Wordsworth, and on the same 
 ground, as being too overpowcringly depressing in the fourth line, 
 when modified by the other five 
 
16 ON Wordsworth's poetry. 
 
 bowers that are trodden under foot, and pleasure-houses 
 that are dust, the poet calls up a vision of palingenesis ; 
 he interposes his solemn images of suffering, of decay, 
 and ruin, only as a visionary haze through which gleams 
 transpire of a trembling dawn far off, but surely on the 
 road. 
 
 " The pleasure-bouse is dust : behind, before. 
 
 This is no common waste, no common gloom ; 
 But Nature in due course of time once moi'e 
 Shall here put on her beauty and her bloom. 
 
 She leaves these objects to a slow decay. 
 
 That what we are, and have been, may be known 
 
 But, at the coming of the milder day, 
 
 These monuments shall all be overgrown." 
 
 This influx of the joyous into the sad, and the sad into 
 the joyous, this reciprocal entanglement of darkness in 
 light, and of light in darkness, offers a subject too occult 
 for popular criticism ; but merely to have suggested it, 
 may be sufficient to account for Wordsworth not having 
 chosen a theme of pure garish sunshine, such as the 
 hurry of a wedding-day, so long as others, more pictu- 
 resque or more plastic, were to be had. A wedding-day 
 is, in many a life, the sunniest of its days. But unless 
 it is overcast with some event more tragic than could be 
 wished, its uniformity of blaze, without shade or relief, 
 makes it insipid to the mere bystander. Accordingly, 
 all epithalamia seem to have been written under the 
 inspiration of a bank-note. 
 
 Far beyond these causes of repulsiveness to ordinary 
 readers was the class of subjects selected, and the mode 
 of treating them. The earliest line of readers, the van 
 
oisi Wordsworth's poetry. 17 
 
 m point ol' time, always includes a majority of the 
 youngs, the commonplace, and the unimpassioned. Sub- 
 sequently, these are sifted and winnowed, as the rear 
 ranlis come forward in succession. But at first it was 
 sure to ruin any poems, that the situations treated are 
 not those which reproduce to the fancy of readers their 
 own hopes and prospects. The meditative are interested 
 by all that has an interest for human nature. But what 
 cares a young lady, dreaming of lovers kneeling at hei 
 feet, for the agitations of a n'lother forced into resigning 
 her child ? or of a shepherd at eighty parting forever 
 amongst mountain solitudes with an only son of seven- 
 teen, innocent and hopeful, whom soon afterwards the 
 guilty town seduces into ruin irreparable ? Romances 
 and novels in verse constitute the poetry which is 
 immediately successful ; and that is a poetry, it may be 
 added, which, after one generation, is unsuccessful for- 
 ever. 
 
 But this theme is too extensive. Let us pass to the 
 separate works of Wordsworth ; and, in deference to 
 the opinion of the world, let us begin with " The Excur- 
 sion." This poem, as regards its opening, seems to 
 require a recast. The inaugurating story of Margaret 
 is in a wrong key, and rests upon a false basis. It is a 
 case of sorrow from desertion. So at least it is repre- 
 sented. Margaret loses, in losing her husband, the one 
 sole friend of her heart. And the wanderer, who is the 
 presiding philosopher of the poem, in retracing her story, 
 sees nothing in the case but a wasting away through 
 sorrow, at once natural in its kind, and preternatural in 
 its degree. 
 
 Tliere is a story somewhere told of a man who com- 
 2 
 
18 ON Wordsworth's poetry. 
 
 plained, and his friends complained, that his face looktd 
 almost always dirty. The man explained this strange 
 affection out of a mysterious idiosyncrasy in the face 
 Itself, upon which the atmosphere so acted as to force 
 out stains or masses of gloomy suffusion, just as it does 
 upon some qualities of stone in vapory weather. But, 
 said his friend, had you no advice for this strange affec- 
 tion ? yes : surgeons had prescribed ; chemistry had 
 exhausted its secrets upon the case ; magnetism had 
 done its best ; electricity had done its worst. His friend 
 mused for some time, and then asked : " Pray, amongst 
 these painful experiments, did it ever happen to you to 
 try one that I have read of, namely, a basin of soap and 
 water ? " And perhaps, on the same principle, it might 
 be allowable to ask the philosophic wanderer, who 
 washes the case of Margaret with so many coats of 
 metaphysical varnish, but ends with finding all unavail- 
 ing, " Pray, amongst your other experiments, did you 
 ever try the effect of a guinea?" Supposing this, 
 however, to be a remedy beyond his fortitude, at least 
 he might have offered a little rational advice, which costs 
 no more than civility. Let us look steadily at the case. 
 The particular calamity under which Margaret groaned 
 was the loss of her husband, who had enlisted. There 
 is something, even on the husband's part, in this enlist- 
 ment, to which the reader can hardly extend his coi:n- 
 passion. The man had not gone off, it is true, as a 
 heartless deserter of his family, or in profligate quest of 
 pleasure : cheerfully he would have stayed and vvorktd, 
 had trade been good ; but, as it was 7iot, he found it 
 impossible to support the spectacle of domestic suffering : 
 ae takes the bounty of a recruiting sergeant, and off he 
 
ON WORDbWORIH's POETRY. 19 
 
 murchcs with his regiment. Nobody reaches the sura- 
 niit of heartlessiiess at once; and, accordingly, iti this 
 early stage of his desertion, we are not surprised to find, 
 that part (but what part ?) of the bounty had been 
 silently conveyed to his wife. So far we are barely not 
 indignant; but as time wears on we become highly so; 
 for no letter does he ever send to his poor, forsaken part- 
 ner, either of tender excuse, or of encouraging prospects. 
 Yet, if he had done this, still we must condemn him. 
 Millions have supported (and supported without praise 
 or knowledge of man) that trial from which he so 
 weakly fled. Even in this, and going no further, he 
 was a voluptuary. Millions have heard and acknowl- 
 edged, as a secret call from Heaven, the summons, not 
 only to take their own share of household suffering, as a 
 mere sacrifice to the spirit of manliness, but also to 
 stand the far sterner trial of witnessing the same priva- 
 tions in a wife and little children. To evade this, to 
 slip his neck out of the yoke, when God summons a poor 
 man to such a trial, is the worst form of cowardice. 
 And Margaret's husband, by adding to this cowardice 
 subsequently an entire neglect of his family, not so much 
 as intimating the destination of the regiment, forfeits his 
 last hold upon our lingering sympathy. But with him, 
 It will be said, the poet has not connected the leading 
 thread of the interest. Certainly not ; though in some 
 degree by a reaction from his character depends the re- 
 spectability of Margaret's grief. And it is impossible to 
 turn away from his case entirely, because from the set 
 of the enlistment is derived the whole movement of 
 the story. Here it is that we must tax the wandering 
 philosopher with treason. He found ro luxurious a 
 
20 ON WORDSWORTH'S POETRY. 
 
 pleasure in contemplating a pathetic phthisis of heart in 
 the abandoned wife, that the one obvious counsel in her 
 particular distress which dotage could not have over- 
 looked he suppresses. And yet this in the revolution 
 of a week would have brought her effectual relief. 
 Surely the regiment, into which her husband had enlisted, 
 bore some number: it was the king's "dirty half-hun- 
 dred " — or the rifle brigade — or some corps known to 
 men and the Horse Guards. Instead, therefore, of 
 suffering poor Margaret to loiter at a gate, looking for 
 answers to her questions from vagrant horsemen, — a 
 process which reminds one of a sight, sometimes extort- 
 ing at once smiles and deep pity, in the crowded 
 thoroughfares of London, namely, a little child inno- 
 cently asking with tearful eyes from strangers for the 
 mother whom it has lost in that vast wilderness, — the 
 wanderer should at once have inquired for the station 
 of that detachment which had enlisted him. This rmist 
 have been in the neighborhood. Here he would have 
 obtained all the particulars. That same night he would 
 have written to the War-Office ; and in a very few days, 
 an official answer, bearing the indorsement. On H. M.'s 
 Service, would have placed Margaret in communication 
 with the truant. To have overlooked a point of policy 
 so broadly apparent as this, vitiates and nullifies the 
 very basis of the story. Even for a romance it will not 
 do ; far less for a philosophic poem dealing with intense 
 realities. No such case of distress could have lived for 
 one fortnight, nor have survived a single interview with 
 the rector, the curate, the parish-clerk, with the school- 
 master, the doctor, the attorney, the innkeeper, or the 
 exciseman. 
 
ON WORDSWOKTH'S TOETRY. 21 
 
 But, apart from the vicious mechanism of the inci- 
 dents, the story is even more objectionable by the doubt- 
 ful quality of the leading character from which it derives 
 its pathos. Had any one of us readers held the office 
 of coroner in her neighborhood, he would have found it 
 his duty to hold an inquest upon the body of her infant. 
 This child, as every reader could depose {now when the 
 details have been published by the poet), died of neglect ; 
 not through direct cruelty, but through criminal self- 
 indulgence. Self-indulgence in what ? Not in liquor, 
 yet not altogether in fretting. Sloth, and the habit of 
 gadding abroad, were most in fault. The wanderer 
 himself might have been called as a witness for the 
 crown, to prove that the infant was left to sleep in soli- 
 tude for hours : the key even was taken away, as if to 
 intercept the possibility (except through burglary) of 
 those tender attentions from some casual stranger, which 
 the unfeeling mother had withdrawn. The child abso- 
 lutely awoke whilst the philosopher was listening at the 
 door. It cried ; but finally hushed itself to sleep, That 
 looks like a case of Dalby's carminative. But this crisis 
 could not have been relied on : tragical catastrophes 
 arise from neglected crying ; ruptures in the first place, 
 a very common result in infants ; rolling out of bed fol- 
 lowed by dislocation of the neck ; fits, and other short 
 cuts to death. It is hardly any praise to Margaret that 
 she carried the child to that consummation by a more 
 ingering road. 
 
 This first tale, therefore, must and \^i^, if Mr. 
 Wordsworth retains energy for such recasts of a labo- 
 rious work, bo cut away from its connection with " The 
 Excursion." This is the more to be expected from a 
 
22 ON vvoudsworth's poetry. 
 
 poet aware of his own importance and anxious. for the 
 perfection of his works, because nothing in the following 
 books depends upon this narrative. No timbers or main 
 beams need to be sawed away ; it is but a bolt that is to be 
 slipped, a rivet to be unscrewed. And yet, on the other 
 hand, if the connection is slight, the injury is great; for 
 we all complain heavily of entering a temple dediccted 
 to new combinations of truth through a vestibule of 
 falsehood. And the falsehood is double ; falsehood in 
 the adjustment of the details (however separately possi- 
 ble), falsehood in the character which, wearing the mask 
 of profound sentiment, does apparently repose upon dys- 
 pepsy and sloth. 
 
 Far different in value and in principle of composition 
 is the next tale in " The Excursion." This occupies the 
 fourth book, and is the impassioned record from the 
 infidel solitary of those heart-shaking chapters in his 
 own life which had made him what the reader finds him. 
 Once he had not been a solitary ; once he had not been 
 an infidel ; now he is both. He lives in a little, urn-like 
 valley (a closet-recess from Little Langdale by the de- 
 scription), amongst the homely household of a yeoman : 
 he is become a bitter cynic ; and not against man alone, 
 or society alone, but against the laws of hope or fear, 
 upon which both repose. If he endures the society 
 with which he is now connected, it is because, being 
 dull, that society is of few words ; it is because, beinr 
 tied to hard labor, that society goes early to bed, and 
 packs up its dulness at eight, p. m., in blankets ; it is. 
 because, under the acute inflictions of Sunday, or the 
 chronic inflictions of the Christmas holidays, that dull 
 society is easily laid into a magnetic sleep by three 
 
ON WORDSWORTH'S POETKV. 23 
 
 passes of metaphysical philosophy. The narrative of 
 this misanthrope is grand and impassioned ; not creeping 
 by details and minute touches, but rolling through capital 
 events, and uttering its pathos through great representa- 
 tive abstractions. Nothing can be finer than when, upon 
 the desolation of his household, upon the utter emptying 
 of his domestic chambers by the successive deaths of 
 children and youthful wife, just at that moment the 
 mighty phantom of the French Revolution rises solemnly 
 above the horizon ; even then new earth and new 
 heavens are promised to human nature ; and suddenly 
 the solitary man, translated by the frenzy of human 
 grief into the frenzy of supernatural hopes, adopts these 
 radiant visions for the darlings whom he has lost — 
 
 "Society becomes his glittering bride, 
 And airy liopes bis children." 
 
 Yet it is a misfortune in the fate of this fine tragic 
 movement, rather than its structure, that it tends to col- 
 lapse : the latter strains, colored deeply by disappoint- 
 ment, do not correspond with the grandeur of the first. 
 And the hero of the record becomes even more painfully 
 a contrast to himself than the tenor of the incidents to 
 their earlier tenor. Sneering and querul'ous comments 
 upon so broad a field as human folly, make poor com- 
 pensation for the magnificence of youthful enthusiasm. 
 But may not this defect be redressed in a future section 
 of the poem ? It is probable, from a hint dropped by 
 the author, that one collateral object of the philosophical 
 discu^.:ions is — the reconversion of the splenetic infidel 
 to his ancient creed in some higher form, and to his 
 ancient temper of benignant hope : in which case, what 
 
SJ4 ON Wordsworth's POETRy. 
 
 now we feel to be a cheerless depression, will sweep 
 round into a noble reascent — quite on a level with the 
 aspirations of youth, and differing, not in degree, but 
 only in quality of enthusiasm. Yet, if this is the poet's 
 plan, it seems to rest upon a misconception. For how 
 should the sneering sceptic, who has actually found 
 solace in Voltaire's " Candide," be restored to the benig- 
 nities of faith and hope by argument ? It was not in 
 this way that he lost his station amongst Christian 
 believers. No false philosophy it had been which 
 wrecked his Christian spirit of hope ; but, on the con- 
 trary, his bankruptcy in hope which wrecked his Chris- 
 tian philosophy. Here, therefore, the poet will certainly 
 find himself in an " almighty fix; " because any possible 
 treatment, which could restore the solitary's former self, 
 such as a course of sea-bathing, could not interest the 
 reader ; and reversely, any successful treatment through 
 argument that could interest the philosophic reader 
 would not, under the circumstances, seem a plausible 
 restoration for the case. 
 
 What is it that has made the recluse a sceptic ? Is it 
 the reading of bad books ? In that case he may be re- 
 claimed by the arguments of those who have read better. 
 But not at all. He has become the unbelieving cynic 
 that he is, 1st, through his own domestic calamities 
 predisposing him to gloomy views of human nature ; 
 and, 2dly, through the overclouding of his high-toned 
 expectations from the French Revolution, which has dis- 
 posed him, in a spirit of revenge for his own disappoint- 
 ment, to contemptuous views of human nature. Now, 
 surely the dejection which supports his gloom, and the 
 despondency which supports his contempt, are not of a 
 
ON Wordsworth's poetry. 25 
 
 nature to give way before philosophic reasonings. Make 
 him happy by restoring what he has lost, and his genial 
 philosophy will return of itself. Make him triumphant 
 by realizing what had seemed to him the golden promises 
 of the French Revolution, and his political creed will 
 moult her sickly feathers. Do this, and he is still young 
 enough for hope ; but less than this restoration of his 
 morning visions will not call back again his morning 
 happiness ; and breaking spears with him in logical 
 tournaments will mend neither his hopes nor his temper. 
 Indirectly, besides, it ought not to be overlooked, that, 
 as respects the French Revolution, the whole college of 
 philosophy in " The Excursion," who are gathered 
 together upon the case of the recluse, make the same 
 mistake that he makes. Whj'- is the recluse disgusted with 
 the French Revolution ? Because it had not fulfilled 
 many of his expectations ; and, of those which it had 
 fulfilled, some had soon been darkened by reverses. 
 But really this was childish impatience. If a man 
 depends for the exuberance of his harvest upon the 
 splendor of the coming summer, you do not excuse him 
 for taking prussic acid because it rains cats and dogs 
 through the first ten days of April. All in good time, 
 we say ; take it easy ; make acquaintance with May and 
 June before you do anything rash. The French Revo- 
 lution has not, even yet [1845], come into full action. 
 It was the explosion of a prodigious volcano, which 
 scattered its lava over every kingdom of every continent, 
 everywhere silently manuring them for social struggles ; 
 this lava is gradually fertilizing all ; the revolutionary 
 movement is moving onwards at this hour as inexorably 
 as ever. Listen, if you have ears for such spiritual 
 
26 ON Wordsworth's poetry. 
 
 sounds, to the mighty tide even now slowly coming up 
 from the sea to Milan, to Rome, to Naples, to Vienna. 
 Hearken to the gentle undulations already breaking 
 against the steps of that golden throne which stretchers 
 from St. Petersburgh to Astrachau; — tremble at the 
 hurricanes which have long been mustering about the 
 pavilions of the Ottoman Padishah. All these are long 
 swells setting in from the French Revolution. Even as 
 regards France herself, that which gave the mortal 
 offence to the sympathies of the solitary was the Reign 
 of Terror. But how thoughtless to measure the cycles 
 of vast national revolutions by metres that would not 
 stretch round an ordinary human passion ! Even to a 
 frail sweetheart you would grant more indulgence thaa 
 to be off in a pet because some transitory cloud arose 
 between you. The Reign of Terror was a mere fleeting 
 phasis. The Napoleon dynasty was nothing more. Even 
 that scourge, which was supposed by many to have mas- 
 tered the Revolution, has itself passed away upon the wind, 
 ■ — leaving no wreck, relic, or record behind, except pre- 
 cisely those changes which it worked, not as an enemy to 
 the Revolution (which also it was), but as its servaiit and 
 its tool. See, even whilst we speak, the folly of that 
 cynical sceptic who would not allow time for great 
 natural processes of purification to travel onwards to 
 their birth, or wait for the evolution of natural results ; 
 — the storm that shocked him has wheeled away ; — 
 the frost and the hail that offended him have done their 
 office;.; — the rain is over and gone; — happier days 
 have descended upon France ; — the voice of the turtle 
 is heard in all her forests ; — man walks with his head 
 erect ; — bastiles are no more ; — every cottage is 
 
ON VVOKDSWOUTUS rOETRy. 2 
 
 searched by the golden light of law ; and the privileges 
 of conscience are consecrated forever. 
 
 Here, then, the poet himself, the philosophic wanderei, 
 the learned vicar, are all equally in fault with the solitary 
 sceptic ; for they all agree in treating his disappointment 
 as sound and reasonable in itself; but blamable only in 
 relation to those exalted hopes which he never ought to 
 have encouraged. Right (they say), to consider the 
 French Revolution, now, as a failure ; but Tiot right 
 originally, to have expected that it should succeed. 
 Whereas, in fact, it has succeeded ; it is propagating its 
 life; it is travelling on to new births — conquering, and 
 yet to conquer. 
 
 It is not easy to see, therefore, how the Laureate can 
 avoid making some change in the constitution of his 
 poem, were it only to rescue his philosophers, and, 
 therefore, his own philosophy, from the imputation of 
 precipitancy in judgment. They charge the sceptic with 
 rash judgment a parte ante ; and, meantime, they them- 
 selves are more liable to that charge a parte post. If he, 
 at the tirst, hoped too much (which is not clear, but only 
 that he hoped too impatiently), they afterwards recant 
 too blindly. And this error they will not, themselves, 
 fail to acknowledge, as soon as theyaAvaken to the truth, 
 that the Revolution did not close on the 18th Brumaire, 
 1790, at which time it was only arrested or suspended, 
 in one direction, by military shackles, but is still mining 
 under ground, like the ghost in Hamlet, through every 
 quarter of the globe. ^ 
 
 ' The reader must not understand the writer as unconditionally 
 approving of the French Revolution. It is his belief that the 
 
28 ON Wordsworth's poetry. 
 
 In paying so much attention to " Tlie Excursion ' 
 (of which, in a more extended notice, the two boolca 
 "entitled, " The Churchyard amongst the Mountains,' 
 would have claimed the profoundest attention), we yielo 
 less to our own opinion than to that of the public. Or, 
 perhaps, it is not so much the public as the vulgar 
 opinion, governed entirely by the consideration that 
 " The Excursion " is very much the longest poem of its 
 author; and, secondly, that it bears currently the title 
 of a philosophic poem ; on which account it is presumed 
 to have a higher dignity. The big name and the big 
 size are allowed to settle its rank. But in this there is 
 much delusion. In the very scheme and movement of 
 " The Excursion " there are two defects which interfere 
 greatly with its power to act upon the mind as a whole, 
 or with any effect of unity ; so that, infallibly it will be 
 read, by future generations, in parts and fragments ; 
 and, being thus virtually dismembered into many small 
 poems, it will scarcely justify men in allowing it the 
 rank of a long one. One of these defects is the undula- 
 tory character of the course pursued by the poem, which 
 
 resistance to the revolution was, in many high quarters, a sacred 
 duty ; and that this resistance it was which forced out, from the 
 Revolution itself, the benefits which it has since diffused. To speak 
 by the language of mechanics, the case was one which illustrated 
 the composition of forces. Neither the Revolution singly, nor the 
 resistance to the Revolution singly, was calculated to regenerate 
 social man. But the two forces in union — where the one modified, 
 mitigated, or even neutralized the other, at times, and where, at 
 times, each entered into a happy combination with the other, 
 — yielded for the world those benefits which, by its sepai-ate ten- 
 dency, either of the two was fitted to stifle. 
 
ON WOKUSWOliTU'S POETRY. 29 
 
 does not ascend uniformly, or even keep one steady 
 level, but trespasses, as if by forgetfulness, or chance, 
 into topics furnishing little inspiration, and not always 
 closely connected with the presiding theme. In part this 
 arises from the accident that a slight tissue of narrative 
 connects the different sections ; and to this the movement 
 of the narrative, the fluctuations of the speculative 
 themes, are in part obedient: the succession of the inci- 
 dents becomes a law for the succession of the thoughts, 
 as oftentimes it happens that these incidents are the 
 proximate occasions of the thoughts.- Yet, as the narra- 
 tive is not of a nature to be moulded by any determinate 
 piinciple of coercing passion, but bends easily to the ca 
 prices of chance and the moment, unavoidably it stamps, 
 by reaction, a desultory or even incoherent character 
 \ipon the train of the philosophic discussions. You 
 know not what is coming next; and, when it does come, 
 you do not always know why it comes. This has the 
 effect of crumbling the poem into separate segments, 
 and causes the whole (when looked at as a whole) to 
 appear a rope of sand. A second defect lies in the col- 
 loquial form which the poem sometimes assumes. It is 
 arvngerous to conduct a philosophic discussion hy talJdng. 
 If the nature of the argument could be supposed to roll 
 through logical quillets, or metaphysical conundrums, so 
 that, on putting forward a problem, the interlocutor 
 could bring matters to a crisis, by saying, " Do you give 
 it up ? " — in that case there might be a smart reciproca- 
 tion of dialogue, of swearing and denying, giving and 
 taking, butting, rebutting, and "surrebutting;"^ and 
 
 1 " Surrebutting : " this is not, directly, a term from Aristotle's 
 
30 ON Wordsworth's poetry. 
 
 thii: would confer nu interlocutory or amcebcean character 
 upon the process of altercation. But the topics, and the 
 quality of the arguments being moral, in which always 
 the reconciliation of the feelings is to be secured by 
 gradual persuasion, rather thaii the understanding to be 
 floored by a solitary blow, inevitably it becomes impos- 
 sible that anything of this brilliant conversational sword- 
 play, cut-and-thrust, " carte " and" tierce," can make for 
 itself an opening. Mere decorum requires that the 
 speakers should be prosy. And you yourself, though 
 sometimes disposed to say, " Do now, dear old soul, cut 
 it short," are sensible that he cannot cut it short. Dis- 
 quisitions, in a certain key, can no more turn round 
 upon a sixpence than a coach-and-six. They must have 
 sea-room to " wear " ship, and to tack. This in itself is 
 often tedious ; but it leads to a worse tediousness : a 
 practised eye sees from afar the whole evolution of the 
 coming argument ; and then, besides the pain of hearing 
 the parties preach, you hear them preach from a text 
 which already in germ had warned you of all the buds 
 and blossoms which it was laboriously to produce. And 
 this second blemish, unavoidable if the method of dia- 
 logue is adopted, becomes more painfully apparent 
 through a third, almost inalienable from the natural 
 constitution of' the subjects concerned. It is, that in 
 cases where a large interest of human nature is treated, 
 such as the position of man in this world, his duties, his 
 difficulties, many parts become necessary as transitiona. 
 
 mint, but indirectly it is ; for it belongs to the old science of 
 " special pleading," which, in part, is an oflFset from the Aristcte 
 lian logic. 
 
ON Wordsworth's poetry. 31 
 
 oT connecting links, which, per se, are not attractive, nor 
 can by any art be made so. Treating the whole theme 
 in extenso, the poet is driven, by natural corollary, or by 
 objections too obvious to be evaded, into discussions not 
 chcsen by his own taste, but dictated by the logic or 
 the tendencies of the question, and by the impossibility 
 of dismissing with partiality any one branch of a subject 
 which is essential to the integrity of the speculation, 
 simply because it is at war with the brilliancy of its 
 development. 
 
 Not, therefore, in " The Excursion " must we look 
 for that reversionary influence which awaits Words- 
 worth with posterity. It is the vulgar superstition in 
 behalf of big books and sounding titles ; it is the Aveak- 
 ness of supposing no book entitled to be considered a 
 power in the literature of the land, unless physically it 
 is weighty, that must have prevailed upon Coleridge 
 and others to undervalue, by comparison with the direct 
 philosophic .poetry of Wordsworth, those earlier poems 
 which are all short, but generally scintillating with 
 gems of far profounder truth. Let the reader under- 
 stand, however, that, by "truth," I understand, not 
 merely that truth which takes the shape of a formal 
 proposition, reducible to " mood " and " figure," but 
 truth which suddenly strengthens into solemnity an im- 
 pression very feebly acknowledged previously, or truth 
 which suddenly unveils a connection between objects 
 aivvays before regarded as irrelate and independent. In 
 astronomy, to gain the rank of discoverer, ii is not 
 required that you should reveal a star absolutely new ; 
 find out with respect to an old star some new affection — 
 T*. for instance, that it has an ascertainable parallax — ■ 
 
32 ON w JE dsworth's poetry. 
 
 and immediately you bring it within the verge of a 
 human interest ; or of some old familiar planet, that its 
 satellites suffer periodical eclipses, and immediately you 
 bring it within the verge of terrestrial uses. Gleams of 
 steadier vision, that brighten into certainty appearances else 
 doubtful, or that unfold relations else unsuspected, are 
 not less discoveries of truth than the revelations of the 
 telescope, or the conquests of the diving-bell. It is 
 astonishing how large a harvest of new truths would be 
 reaped, simply through the accident of a man's feeling, 
 or being made to feel, more deeply than other men. He 
 sees the same objects, neither more nor fewer, but he 
 sees them engraved in lines far stronger and more deter- 
 minate ; and the difference in the strength makes the 
 whole difference between consciousness and sub-con 
 sciousness. And in questions of the mere understanding, 
 we see the same fact illustrated : the author who rivets 
 notice the most, is not he that perplexes men by truths 
 drawn from fountains of absolute novelty, — truths un- 
 sunned as yet, and obscure from that cause ; but he that 
 awakens into illuminated consciousness old lineaments of 
 truth long slumbering in the mind, although too faint to 
 nave extorted attention. Wordsworth has brought many 
 a truth into life, both for the eye and for the understand 
 ing, which previously had slumbered indistinctly for al' 
 men. 
 
 For instance, as respects the eye, who does not ac 
 knowledge instantaneously the strength of reality in 
 that saying upon a cataract seen from a station two 
 miles off, that it was " frozen by distance " ? In all 
 nature there is not an object so essentially at war with 
 the stiffening of frost, as the headlong and desperate life 
 
ON WORDSWORTH'S POETRY. 33 
 
 of a cataract ; and yet notoriously the effect of distance 
 is to lock up this frenzy of motion into the most petritic 
 column of stillness. This effect is perceived at once 
 when pointed out; but how few are the eyes that ever 
 would have perceived it for themselves ! Twilight, 
 again, — who before Wordsworth ever distinctly noticed 
 its abstracting power ? — that power of removing, soften- 
 ing, harmonizing, by which a mode of obscurity executes 
 for the eye the same mysterious office which the mind so 
 often within its own shadowy realms executes for itself. 
 In the dim interspace between day and night, all disap- 
 pears from our earthly scenery, as if touched by an 
 enchanter's rod, which is either mean or inharmonious, 
 or unquiet, or expressive of temporary things. Leaning 
 a^jtiinst a column of rock, looking down upon a lake or 
 river, and at intervals carrying your eyes forward 
 through a vista of mountains, you become aware that 
 your sight rests upon the very same spectacle, unaltered 
 in a single feature, which once at the same hour was 
 beheld by the legionary Eoman from his embattled 
 camp, or by the roving Briton in his " wolf-skin vest,' 
 lying down to sleep, and looking 
 
 " through some leafy bower, 
 
 Before his eyes were closed." 
 
 How magnificent is the summary or abstraction of 
 tKj elementary features in such a scene, as executed 
 b)'' the poet himself, in illustration of this abstraction 
 daily executed by nature, through her handmaid Twi- 
 light ! Listen, reader, to the closing stram, solemn as 
 3 2^ 
 
34 
 
 ON WORDSWORTH S rOETRV. 
 
 twilight is solemn, and grand as the spectacle which it 
 describes : — 
 
 " By him [/. e., the roving Briton] was seen, 
 The self-same vision vyhich we now beliold. 
 At thy meek bidding, sliadowy Power, brought forth, 
 These mighty bai'riei's, and the gulf between ; 
 The floods, the stars, — a spectacle as old 
 ■As the beginning of the heavens and earth." 
 
 Another great field there is amongst the pomps of 
 nature, which, if Wordsworth did not first notice, he 
 certainly has noticed most circumstantially. I speak of 
 cloud-scenery, or those pageants of sky-built architecture, 
 which sometimes in summer, at noon-day, and in all sea- 
 sons about sunset, arrest or appal the meditative ; " per- 
 plexing monarohs " with the spectacle of armies ma- 
 noeuvring, or deepening the solemnity of evening by 
 towering edifices that mimic — but which also in mimick- 
 ing mock — the transitory grandeurs of man. It is 
 singular that these gorgeous phenomena, not less than 
 those of the Aurora Borealis, have been so little noticed 
 by poets. The Aiirora was naturally neglected by the 
 soutliern poets of Greece and Rome, as not much seen in 
 their latitudes. ^ But the cloud-architecture of the day- 
 
 iBut then, says the reader, why is it not proportionably the 
 more noticed by poets of the north ? Certainly, that question ia 
 fair. And the answer, it is scarcely possible to doubt, is this : — 
 That until the rise of Natural Philosophy, in Charles the Second's 
 reign, there was no -name for the appearance ; on which account, 
 some writers have been absurd enough to believe that the Aurora 
 did not exist, noticeably, until about 1690. Shalispeare. in his 
 journey down to Stratford (always performed on horseback), must 
 crten have been belated : he must sometimes have seen, he could 
 not but have admired, the fiery skirmishes of the Aurora. And 
 
ON wokusworth's poetry. 35 
 
 jght belongs alike to north and south. Accordingly, 1 
 remember one notice of it in Hesiod, a case were the 
 clouds exhibited 
 
 •' The beauteous semblance of a flock at rest." 
 
 Another there is, a thousand years later, in Lucan : 
 amongst the portents which prefigured the dreadfu. con- 
 vukions destined to shake the earth at Pharsalia, is 
 noticed by him some fiery coruscation of arms in the 
 heavens ; but, so far as I recollect, the appearances might 
 have belonged equally to the workmanship of the clouds 
 or the Aurora. Up and down the next eight hundred 
 years are scattered evanescent allusions to these vapory 
 appearances ; in Hamlet and elsewhere occur gleams of 
 such allusions; but I remember no distinct picture of 
 one before that in the " Antony and Cleopatra " of 
 Shakspeare, beginning, 
 
 " Sometimes we see a cloud that 's dragonish." 
 
 Subsequently to Shakspeare, these notices, as of all 
 phenomena whatsoever that demanded a familiarity with 
 nature in the spirit of love, became rarer and rarer. At 
 length, as the eighteenth century was winding up its 
 accounts, forth stepped William Wordsworth, of whom, 
 as a reader of all pages in nature, it may be said that, 
 if we except Dampier, the admirable buccaneer, and 
 some few professional naturalists, he first and he .ast 
 looked at natural objects with the eye that neither will 
 be dazzled from without nor cheated by preconceptions 
 from within. Most men look at nature in the hurry of 
 
 yet, for want of a word to fix and identify the object, how could 
 he introduce it as an image or allusion in his writings ' 
 
36 o.< Wordsworth's poetry. 
 
 a confusion that distinguishes nothing; their error is 
 from without. Pope, again, and many who live in 
 towns,^ make such blunders as that of supposing the 
 moon to tip with silver the hills behind which she is ris- 
 ing, not by erroneous use of their eyes (for they use 
 them not at all), but by inveterate preconceptions. 
 Scarcely has there been a poet with what could be called 
 a learned eye, or an eye exteiisively learned, before 
 Wordsworth, Much affectation there has been of that 
 sort since his rise, and at all times much counterfeit 
 enthusiasm ; but the sum of the matter is this, that 
 Wordsworth had his passion for nature fixed in his blood ; 
 — it was a necessity, like that of the mulberry-leaf to 
 the silk-v/orm ; and through his commerce with nature 
 did he live and breathe. Hence it was, namely, from the 
 truth of his love, that his knowledge grew ; whilst most 
 others, being merely hypocrites in their love, have 
 turned out merely charlatans in their knowledge. This 
 chapter, therefore, of sky scenery, may be said to have 
 been revivified amongst the resources of poetry by 
 Wordsworth — rekindled, if not absolutely kindled. 
 The sublime scene endorsed upon the draperies of the 
 storm in " The Excursion," — that witnessed upon the 
 passage of the Hamilton Hills in Yorkshire, — the 
 
 1 It was not, however, that all poets then lived in towns ; neither 
 had Pope himself generally lived in towns. But it is perfectly 
 useless to be familiar with nature unless there is a public trained 
 to love and value nature. It is not what the individual sees that 
 will fix itself as beautiful in his recollections, bwt what he sees 
 under a consciousness that others will sympathize with his feelings. 
 Under any other circumstances familiarity does but realize the 
 adage, and " breeds contempt." The great despis<^rs of rural 
 scenery are rustics. 
 
ON Wordsworth's poetry. ST 
 
 solemn " sky prospect " from the fields of France, aru 
 unrivalled in that order of composition ; and in one of 
 these records Wordsworth has given first of all the true 
 key-note of the sentiment belonging to these grand 
 pageants. They are, says the poet, speaking in a case 
 where the appearance had occurred towards night, 
 
 " Meek nature's evening comment on the shows 
 And iJl tlxe fuming vanities of eai'th " 
 
 V^es, that IS the secret moral whispered to the mind. 
 These mimicries express the laughter which is in heaven 
 it earthly pomps. Frail and vapory are the glories of 
 man, even as the parodies of those glories are frail 
 which nature weaves in clouds. 
 
 As another of those natural appearances which must 
 have haunted men's eyes since the Flood, but yet had 
 never forced itself into conscious notice until arrested by 
 Wordsworth, I may notice an effect of iteration daily 
 exhibited in the habits of cattle : — 
 
 " The cattle are grazing, 
 Their heads never raising ; 
 Tliereare forty feeding like one." 
 
 Now, merely as a fact, and if it were nothing more, this 
 characteristic appearance in the habits of cows, when all 
 repeat the action of each, ought not to have been over- 
 looked by those who profess themselves engaged in 
 holding up a mirror to nature. But the fact has also a 
 profound meaning as a hieroglyphic. In all animals 
 which live under the protection of man a life of peace 
 and quietness, but do not share in his labors or in his 
 pleasures, what we regard is the species, and not the 
 
3S ON WORDSWORTH S I'UETRY. 
 
 individual. Nobody but a grazier ever looks at one cow 
 amongst a field of cows, or at one sheep in a flock. Put 
 as to those animals which are more closely connected 
 with man, not passively connected, but actively, bemg 
 partners in his toils and perils and recreations, such as 
 horses, dogs, falcons, they are regarded as individuals, and 
 are allowed the benefit of an individual interest. It is not 
 that cows have not a differential character, each for her- 
 self ; and sheep, it is well known, have all a separate 
 physiognomy for the shepherd who has cultivated their 
 acquaintance. But men generally have no opportunity 
 or motive for studying the individualities of creatures, 
 however otherwise respectable, that are too much re- 
 garded by all of us in the reversionary light of milk, and 
 beef, and mutton. Far otherwise it is with horses, who 
 share in man's martial risks, who sympathize with man's 
 frenzy in hunting, who divide with man the burdens of 
 noonday. Far otherwise it is with dogs, that share the 
 hearths of man, and adore the footsteps of his children. 
 These man loves; of these he makes dear, though hum- 
 ble friends. These often fight for him ; and for them he 
 he will sometimes fight. Of necessity, therefore, every 
 horse and every dog is an individual — has a sort of 
 personality that makes him separately interesting — has 
 a boauty and a character of his own. Go to Melton, 
 therefore, and what will you see ? Every man, every 
 horse, every dog, glorying in the plentitude of life, is in 
 a different attitude, motion, gesture, action. It is not 
 there the sublime unity which you must seek, where 
 forty are like one ; but the sublime infinity, like that of 
 ocean, like that of Flora, like that of nature, where nc 
 
ON WORDSWORTH S POETRY. 39 
 
 repetitions are endured, no leaf the copy of another leaf, 
 no absolute identity, and no painful tautologies. This 
 subject might be pursued into profounder recesses ; but 
 in a popular discussion it is necessary to forbear. 
 
 A volume might be filled with such glimpses of 
 novelty as Wordsworth has first laid bare, even to the 
 apprehension of the senses. For the widerstanding, 
 when moving in the same track of human sensibi/ities, 
 he has done only not so much. How often to give 
 an instance or two) must the human heart have felt 
 that there are sorrows which descend far belovv the 
 region in which tears gather; and yet who has ever 
 given utterance to this feeling until Wordsworth came 
 with his immortal line — 
 
 " Tboughts that do often lie too deep for tears " ? 
 
 This sentiment, and others that might be adduced 
 (such as '• The child is father of the man"), have even 
 passed into the popular mind, and are often quoted by 
 those who know not whom they are quoting. Magnif- 
 icent, again, is the sentiment, and yet an echo to one 
 which lurks amongst all hearts, in relation to the 
 frailty of merely human schemes for working good, 
 which so often droop and collapse through the unsteadi- 
 ness of human energies, — 
 
 " foundations must be laid 
 
 In Heaven." 
 
 How? Foundations laid in realms that are above? 
 Eut that is at war with physics ; — foundations must 
 be laid below. Yes ; and even so the poet throws the 
 mind yet more forcibly on the hyperphj'sical character 
 
41) ON Wordsworth's poetry. 
 
 — on the grandeur transcending all physics — of those 
 shadowy fountains which alone are enduring. 
 
 But the great distinction of Wordsworth, and thtj 
 pledge of his increasing popularity, is the extent of his 
 sympathy with what is really permanent in human feel- 
 ings, and also the depth of this sympathy. Young and 
 Cowper, the two earlier leaders in the province of medi- 
 tative poetry, are too circumscribed in the range of their 
 symjiathies, too exclusive, and oftentimes not sufficiently 
 profound. Both these poets manifested, the quality of 
 their strength by the quality of their public reception 
 Popular in some degree from the first, they entered upon 
 the inheritance of their fame almost at once. Far dif- 
 ferent was the fate of Wordsworth ; for, in poetry of this 
 class, which appeals to what lies deepest in man, in 
 proportion to the native power of the poet, and his fitness 
 for permanent life, is the strength of resistance in the 
 public taste. Whatever is too original will be hated at 
 the first. It must slowly mould a public for itself; and 
 the resistance of the early thoughtless judgments must 
 be overcome by a counter resistance to itself, in a better 
 audience slowly mustering against the first. Forty and 
 seven years it is since William Wordsworth first ap- 
 peared as an author. Twenty of those years he was the 
 scoff of the world, and his poetry a by-word of scorn. 
 Since then, and more than once, senates have rung with 
 acclamations to the echo of his name. Now at this 
 moment, while we are talking about him, he has entered 
 upon his seventy-sixth year. For himself, according to 
 the course of nature, he cannot be far from his setting; 
 but his poetry is but now clearing the clouds that gath- 
 ered about its rising. Meditative poetry is perhaps that 
 
ON WORDSWOKTIl's POETRY. 41 
 
 which will finally maintain most power upon generations 
 more thoughtful ; and in this department, at least, there 
 is little competition to be appprehended by Wordsworth 
 from anything that has appeared since the death of 
 Shakspeare. 
 
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY. 
 
 There is no writer named amongst men, of whom, 
 so much as of Percy Bysshe Shelley, it is difficult for 
 a conscientious critic to speak with the truth and the 
 respect due to his exalted powers, and yet without 
 offence to feelings the most sacred, which too memo- 
 rably he outraged. The indignation which this power- 
 ful young writer provoked, had its root in no personal 
 feelings — those might have been conciliated ; in no 
 worldly feelings — those might have proved transitory ; 
 but in feelings the holiest which brood over human 
 life, and which guard the sanctuary of religious truth. 
 Consequently, — which is a melancholy thought for any 
 friend of Shelley's, — the indignation is likely to be co- 
 extensive and coenduring with the writings that pro- 
 voked it. That bitterness of scorn and defiance which 
 still burns against his name in the most extensively 
 meditative section of English society, namely, the reli- 
 gious section, is not of a nature to be propitiated. Selfish 
 interests, being wounded, might be compensated ; 
 merely human interests might be soothed ; but inter- 
 ests that transcend all human valuation, being so m- 
 sulted, must upon principle reject all human ransom 
 
 (42) 
 « 
 
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY. 43 
 
 or comlltious of human oonipromise. Less than peni- 
 tential recantation could not be accepted ; and that is 
 now impossible. " Will ye transact ^ with God ? " is 
 the indignant language of Milton in a case of that 
 nature. And in this case the language of many pious 
 lien said aloud, — "It is for God to forgive; but we, 
 liis servants, are bound to recollect that this young 
 man oflTered to Christ and to Christianity the deepest 
 insnlt which ear has heard, or which it has entered into 
 the heart of man to conceive." Others, as in Germany, 
 had charged Christ with committing suicide, on the 
 ])rinciple that he who tempts or solicits death by doc- 
 trines fitted to provoke that result, is virtually the 
 causer of his own destruction. But in this sense every 
 man commits suicide, who will not betray an interest 
 confided to his keeping under menaces of death ; the 
 martyr, who perishes for truth, when by deserting it 
 he might live ; the patriot, who perishes for his coun- 
 try, when by betraying it he might win riches and 
 honor. And, were this even otherwise, the objection 
 would be nothing to Christians — who, recognizing the 
 Deity in Christ, recognize his unlimited right over life. 
 Some, again, had pointed their insults at a part more 
 vital in Christianity, if it had happened to be as vul- 
 nerable as they fancied. The new doctrine introduced 
 by Christ, of forgiveness to those who injure or who 
 liate us, — on what footing was it placed ? Once, at 
 least in aj)pearance, on the idea, that by assisting or 
 forgiving an enemy, we should be eventually " heaping 
 coals of fire upon his head." Mr. Howdon, in a very 
 clever book [Rational Investigatiofi of the Principles 
 oj Natural Philosophy : Loiidoii, IS^IO], calls this "a 
 
44 PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY. 
 
 fiendish idea " (p. 290) : and I acknowledge tliat to 
 myself, in one part of my boyhood, it did seem a refine 
 ujent of mahce. My subtilizing habits, however, even 
 in those days, soon suggested to me that this aggrava- 
 tion of guilt in the object of our forgiveness was not 
 held out as the motive to the forgiveness, but as the 
 result of it ; secondly, that perhaps no aggravation of 
 his guilt was the point contemplated, but the salutary 
 stinging into life of his remorse, hitherto sleeping; 
 thirdly, that every doubtful or perplexing expression 
 must be overruled and determined by the prevailing 
 spirit of the system in which it stands. If Mr. How- 
 don's sense were the true one, then this passage would 
 be in pointed hostility to every other part of the Chris- 
 tian ethics. 2 
 
 These were affronts to the Founder of Christianity, 
 offered too much in the temper of malignity. But 
 Shelley's was worse ; more bitter, and with less of 
 countenance, even in show or shadow, from any fact, 
 or insinuation of a fact, that Scripture suggests. In 
 his " Queen Mab," he gives a dreadful portrait of God ; 
 and that no question may arise, of what God ? he names 
 him ; it is Jehovah. He asserts his existence ; he 
 affirms him to be " an almighty God, and vengeful as 
 almighty." He goes on to describe him as the " omnip- 
 otent fiend," who found " none but slaves " [Israel in 
 Egypt, no doubt] to be " his tools," and none but " a 
 murderer" [Moses, I presume] "to be his accomplice 
 in crime." He introduces this dreadful Almighty aa 
 speaking, and as speaking thus, — 
 
 '♦ From an eternity of idleness 
 
 I, God, awoke ; in seven days' toil made earth 
 From nothing ; rested ; and created man." 
 
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY. -tS 
 
 But man he hates ; and he goes on to curse him ; till at 
 the intercession of " the murderer," who is electrified 
 into pity for the human race by the very horror of the 
 divine curses, God promises to send his son — only, 
 however, for the benefit of a few. This son appears , 
 the poet tells us that — 
 
 " the Incarnate came ; humbly he came. 
 
 Veiling his horrible Godhead in the shape 
 
 Of man, scorned by the world, his name unheard 
 
 Save by the rabble of his native town." 
 
 The poet pursues this incarnate God as a teacher of 
 men ; teaching, " in semblance," justice, truth, and 
 peace ; but underneath all this, kindling " quenchless 
 flames," which eventually were destined 
 
 " to satiate, with the blood 
 
 Of truth and freedom, his malignant soul." 
 
 He follows him to his crucifixion ; and describes him, 
 whilst hanging on the cross, as shedding malice upon a 
 re viler, — mclice on the cross ! 
 
 " A smile of godlike malice reillumined 
 His fading lineaments : ' ' 
 
 and his parting breath is uttered in a memorable curse. 
 
 This atrocious picture of the Deity, in his dealings 
 with man, both pre-Christian and post-Christian, is 
 certainly placed in the mouth of the wandering Jew. 
 But the internal evidence, as well as collateral evidence 
 from without, make it clear that the Jew (Avhose version 
 of scriptural records nobody in the poem disputes) here 
 represents the person of the poet. Shelley had opened 
 his career as an atheist ; and as a proselytizing atheist. 
 
46 PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY. 
 
 But he waa then a boy. At the date of " Queen Mab," 
 he was a young man. And we now find him advanced 
 from the station of an atheist to the more intellectual 
 one of a believer in God and in the mission of Christ ; 
 bat of one who fancied himself called upon to defy and 
 to hate both, in so far as they had revealed their rela- 
 tions to man. 
 
 Mr. GilfiUan* thinks that " Shelley was far too 
 harshly treated in his speculative boyhood;" and it 
 strikes him " that, had pity and kind-hearted expostula- 
 tion been tried, instead of reproach and abrupt expulsion, 
 they might have weaned him from the dry dugs of 
 Atheism to the milky breast of the faith and " worship of 
 sorrovv ; " and the touching spectacle had been renewed, 
 of the demoniac sitting, " clothed, and in his right 
 mind," at the feet of Jesus. I am not of that opinion ; 
 and it is an opinion which seems to question the siTicerity 
 of Shelley, — that quality which in him was deepest, so 
 as to form the basis of his nature, — if we allow our- 
 selves to think that, by personal irritation, he had been 
 piqued into infidelity, or that by flattering conciliation 
 he could have been bribed back into a profession of 
 Christianity. Like a wild horse of the pampas, he 
 would have thrown up his heels, and whinnied his dis- 
 dain of any man coming to catch him with a bribe of 
 oats. He had a constant vision of a manger and a 
 halter in the rear of all such caressing tempter^, once 
 having scented the gales of what he thought perfect 
 freedom, from the lawless desert. His feud with Chris- 
 tianity was a craze derived from some early wrench of 
 
 * " Gallery of Literary Porti'aits." 
 
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY. 47 
 
 his understanding, and made obstinate to the degree in 
 which we find it, from having rooted itself in certain 
 combinations of ideas that, once coalescing, could not 
 be shaken loose ; such as, that Christianity under- 
 propped the corruptions of the earth, in the shape of 
 wicked governments that might else have been over- 
 thrown, or of wicked priesthoods that, but for the 
 shelter of shadowy and spiritual terrors, must have 
 trembled before those whom they overawed. Kings 
 that were clothed in bloody robes ; dark hierarchies 
 that scowled upon the poor children of the soil; these 
 objects took up a permanent station in the background 
 of Shelley's imagination, not to be dispossessed more 
 than the phantom of Banquo from the festival of Mac- 
 beth, and composed a towering Babylon of mystery 
 that, to his belief, could not have flourished under any 
 umbrage less vast ■ than that of Christianity. Such 
 was the inextricable association of images that domi- 
 neered over Shelley's mind ; such was the hatred 
 which he built upon that association, — an association 
 casual and capricious, yet fixed and petrified as if by 
 frost. Can we imagine the case of an angel touched 
 by lunacy ? Have we ever seen the spectacle of a 
 human intellect, exquisite by its functions of creation, 
 yet in one chamber of its shadowy house already ruined 
 before the light of manhood had cleansed its darkness ? 
 Such an angel, such a man, — if ever such there 
 were, — such a lunatic angel, such a ruined man, was 
 Shelley, whilst yet standing on the earliest threshold 
 of life. 
 
 Mr. GilfiUan, whose eye is quick to seize the lurk- 
 ing and the stealthy aspect of things, does not overlook 
 
48 PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY. 
 
 tlie absolute midsummer madness which possessec 
 Shelley upon the subject of Christianity. Shelley 'a 
 total nature was altered and darkened when that theme 
 arose ; transfiguration fell upon him. He that was so 
 gentle, became savage ; he that breathed by the very 
 lungs of Christianity — that was so merciful, so full of 
 tenderness and pity, of humility, of love and forgive- 
 ness, then raved and screamed like an idiot whom once 
 r personally knew, when offended by a strain of heav- 
 enly music at the full of the moon, la both cases, it 
 was the sense of perfect beauty revealed under the 
 sense of morbid estrangement. This it is, as I pre- 
 sume, which Mr. Gilfillan alludes to in the following 
 passage (p. 104) : " On all other subjects the wisest 
 of the wise, the gentlest of the gentle, the bravest of 
 the brave, yet, when one topic was introduced, he be- 
 came straightway insane ; his eyes glared, his voice 
 screamed, his hand vibrated frenzy." But Mr. Oilfil- 
 lan is entirely in the wrong when he countenances the 
 notion that harsh treatment had any concern in riveting 
 the fanaticism of Shelley. On the contrary, he met 
 with an indulgence to the first manifestation of his 
 anti-Christian madness, better suited to the goodness 
 of the lunatic than to the pestilence of his lunacy. It 
 V'as at Oxford that this earliest explosion of Shelleyism 
 occurred; and though, with respect to secrets of prison- 
 houses, and to discussions that proceed " with closed 
 doors," there is always a danger of being misinformed, 
 I believe, from the uniformity of such accounts as have 
 reached myself, that the following brief of the matter 
 may be relied on. Shelley, being a venerable sage of 
 sixteen, or rather less, came to the resolution that he 
 
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY. 49 
 
 vould convevt, and that it was his solemn duty to con- 
 vert, the universal Christian church to Atheism or to 
 Pantlicism, no great matter which. But, as such large 
 undertakings require time, twenty months, suppose, or 
 even two years, — for you kno\v, reader, that a rail- 
 way requires on an average little less, — Shelley was 
 determined to obey no impulse of youthful rashness. 
 O no ! Down with presumption, down with levity, 
 down with boyish precipitation ! Changes of religion 
 are awful things , people must have time to think: He 
 would move slowly and discreetly. So first he wrote 
 a pamphlet, clearly and satisfactorily explaining the 
 necessity of being an atheist; and with his usual ex- 
 emplary courage (for, seriously, he was the least false 
 of human creatures), Shelley put his name to the 
 pamphlet, and the name of his college. His ultimate 
 object was to accomplish a general apostasy in the 
 Christian church of whatever name. But for one six 
 months, it was quite enough if he caused a revolt in 
 the Church of England. And as, before a great naval 
 action, when the enemy is approaching, you throw a 
 long shot or two by way of trying his range, — on that 
 principle Shelley had thrown out his tract in Oxford. 
 Oxford formed the advanced squadron of the English 
 Church; and, by way of a coup d'essai, though in 
 itself a bagatelle, what if he should begin with con-, 
 verting Oxford ? To make any beginning at all is one 
 half the battle ; or, as a writer in this magazine [June, 
 1845] suggests, a good deal more. To speak seriously, 
 there is something even thus far in the boyish presump- 
 tion of Shelley not altogether without nobility. He 
 affronted the armies of Christendom. Had it been 
 
50 PERCY BYSSFK SHELLEY. 
 
 possible for him to be jesting, it would oiot have been 
 noble. But here, even in the most monstrous of his 
 undertakings, here, as always, he was perfectly sin 
 cere and single-minded. Satisfied that Atheism was 
 the sheet-anchor of the world, he was not the person 
 to speak by halves. Being a boy, he attacked those 
 (upon a point the most sure to irritate) who were gray; 
 having no station in society, he flew at the throats of 
 ii;3ne but those who had ; weaker than an infant for 
 the pu-rpose before him, he planted his fist in the face 
 of a giant, saying, " Take thxit^ you devil, and that^ 
 and that.'''' The pamphlet had been published ; and 
 though an undergraduate of Oxford is not (technically 
 speaking) a member of the university as a responsible 
 corporation, still he bears a near relation to it. And 
 the heads of colleges felt a disagreeable summons to 
 an extra meeting. There are in Oxford five-and-twenty 
 colleges, to say nothing of halls. Frequent and. full 
 the heads assembled in Golgotha, a well-known Oxonian 
 chamber, which, being interpreted (as scripturally we 
 know), is " the place of a skull," and must, therefore, 
 naturally be the place of a head. There the heads met 
 to deliberate. What was to be done ? Most of them 
 were inclined to mercy: to proceed at all — was to pro- 
 ceed to extremities ; and (generally speaking) to expel 
 a man from Oxford, is to ruin his prospects in any of 
 the liberal professions. Not, therefore, from considera- 
 tion for Shelley's position in society, but on the kindest 
 motives of forbearance towards one so young, the heads 
 decided for declining all notice of the pamphlet. Level- 
 led at them, it was not specially addressed to them ; and 
 amongst the infinite children born every morning from 
 
PF.KCY BYSSHE SHELLEY. 51 
 
 that imghtiest of mothers, the press, why should Gol- 
 gotha be supposed to have known anything, officially, 
 of this little brat ? That evasion might suit some peo- 
 ple, but not Percy Bysshe Shelley. There was a flaw 
 (was there?) in his process; his pleading could not, 
 regularly, come up before the court. Very well — 
 he would heal that defect immediately. So he sent 
 his pamphlet, with five-and-twenty separate letters, 
 addressed to the five-and-twenty heads of colleges in 
 Golgotha assembled ; courteously " inviting " all and 
 every of them to notify, at his earliest convenience, 
 his adhesion to the enclosed unanswerable arguments 
 for Atheism. Upon this, it is undeniable that Gol- 
 gotha looked black ; and, after certain formalities, 
 " invited " P. B. Shelley to consider himself expelled 
 from the University of Oxford, But, if this wern 
 harsh, how would Mr. GilfiUan have had them to pro- 
 ceed ? Already they had done, perhaps, too much in 
 the way of forbearance. There were many men in 
 Oxford who knew the standing of Shelley's family. 
 Already it was whispered that any man of obscure 
 connections would have been visited for his Atheism, 
 whether writing to Golgotha or not. And this whisper 
 would have strengthened, had any further neglect been 
 shown to formal letters, \vhich requested a formal 
 answer. The authorities of Oxford, deeply responsible 
 to the nation in a matter of so much peril, could not 
 have acted otherwise than they did. They were not 
 severe. The severity was extorted and imposed by 
 Shelley. But, on the other hand, in some palliation 
 of Shelley's conduct, it ought to be noticed that he is 
 unfairly piaced, by the undistinguishing, on the manly 
 
62 PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY. 
 
 Station of an ordinary Oxford student. The under- 
 graduates of Oxford and Cambridge are not "boys," as 
 a considerable proportion must be, for good reasons 
 in other universities, — the Scottish universities, for in- 
 stance, of Glasgow and St. Andrews, and many of those 
 on the continent. Few of the English students even 
 begin their residence before eighteen ; and the larger 
 proportion are at least twenty. Whereas Shelley was 
 really a boy at this era, and no man. He had entered 
 on his sixteenth year, and he was still in tho earliest 
 part of his academic career, when his obstinate and 
 reiterated attempt to inoculate the university with a 
 disease that he fancied indispensable to their mental 
 health, caused his expulsion. 
 
 I imagine that Mr. GilfiUan will find himself compelled, 
 hereafter, not less by his own second thoughts, than by 
 the murmurs of some amongst his readers, to revise that 
 selection of memorial traits, whether acts or habits, by 
 which he seeks to bring Shelley, as a familiar presence, 
 within the field of ocular apprehension. The acts 
 selected, unless characteristic, — the habits selected, un- 
 less representative, — must be absolutely impertinent to 
 the true identification of the man ; and most of those 
 rehearsed by Mr. GilfiUan, unless where they happen to 
 be merely accidents of bodily constitution, are such as 
 all of us would be sorry to suppose naturally belonging 
 to Shelley. To " rush out of the room in terror, as his 
 V'ild imagination painted to him a pair of eyes in a 
 lady's breast," is not so much a movement of poetic 
 frenzy, as of typhus fever — to " terrify an old lady out 
 of her wits," by assuming, in a stage-coach, the situation 
 of a r(!gal sufTerei from Shakspeare, is not eccentricity 
 
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY. 53 
 
 SO much as painful discourtesy — and to request of 
 Rowland Hill, a man most pious and sincere, " the use 
 of Surrey chapel," as a theatre for publishing infidelity, 
 would have been so thoroughly the act of a heartless 
 coxcomb, that I, for one, cannot bring myself to believe 
 it an authentic anecdote. Not that I doubt of Shelley's 
 violating at times his own better nature, as every man 
 is capable of doing, under youth too fervid, wine too 
 potent, and companions too misleading ; but it strikes me 
 tliat, during Shelley's very earliest youth, the mere acci- 
 dent of Rowland Hill's being a man well-born and aris- 
 tocratically connected, yet sacrificing these advantages 
 to what he thought the highest of services, spiritual 
 service on behalf of poor laboring men, would have laid 
 a pathetic arrest upon any impulse of fun in one who, 
 with the very same advantages of birth and position, 
 had the same deep reverence for the rights of the poor. 
 Willing, at all times, to forget his own pretensions in 
 the presence of those who seemed powerless — willing 
 in a degree that seems sublime — Shelley could not but 
 have honored the same nobility of feeling in another. 
 And Rowland Hill, by his guileless simplicity, had a 
 separate hold upon a nature so childlike as Shelley's. He 
 was full of love to mar ; so was Shelley. He was full 
 of humility ; so was Shelley. Difference of creed, how- 
 ever vast the interval which it created between the men. 
 fould not have hid from Shelley's eye the close approxi- 
 mation of their natures. Infidel by his intellect, Shelley 
 was a Christian in the tendencies of his heart. As to 
 his " lying asleep on the hearth-rug, with his small round 
 head thrust almost into the very fire," this, like his 
 " basking in the hottest beams of an Italian sun," illus- 
 
04 PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY. 
 
 trates nothing but his physical temperament. That he 
 should be seen " devouring large pieces of bread amid 
 his profound abstractions," simply recalls to my eye some 
 hundred thousands of children in the streets of great 
 cities, Edinburgh, Glasgow, London, whom I am daily 
 detecting in the same unaccountable practice ; and yet, 
 probably, with very little abstraction to excuse it ; whilst 
 his " endless cups of tea," in so tea-drinking a land as 
 ours, have really ceased to offer the attractions of novelty 
 which, eighty years ago, in the reign of Dr. Johnson, 
 and under a higher price of tea, they might have secured. 
 Such habits, however, are inoffensive, if not particularly 
 mysterious, nor particularly significant. But that, m 
 lefect of a paper boat, Shelley should launch upon the 
 Serpentine a fifty pound bank note, seems to my view 
 an act of childishness, or else (which is worse) an act 
 of empty ostentation, not likely to proceed from one who 
 generally exhibited in his outward deportment a sense 
 of true dignity. He who, through his family. ^ con- 
 nected himself with that " spirit without spot " (as Shelley 
 calls him in the " Adonais "), Sir Philip Sidney (a man 
 how like in gentleness, and in faculties of mind, to him- 
 self!) — he that, by consequence, connected himself 
 with that later descendant of Penshurst, the noble 
 martyr of freedom, Algernon Sidney, could not have 
 degraded himself by a pride so mean as any which roots 
 itself in wealth. On the other hand, in the anecdote cf 
 his repeating Dr. Johnson's benign act, by " lifting a poor 
 houseless outcast upon his back, and carrying her to a 
 place of refuge," I read so strong a character of internal 
 probability, that it would be gratifying to know upon 
 what external testimony it rests. 
 
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY. 
 
 55 
 
 Tiie life of Shelley, according to the remark ot Mr. 
 UilfiUan, was "among the most romantic in literary 
 story." Everything was romantic in his short career ; 
 everything wore a tragic interest. From his childhood 
 he moved through a succession of afflictions. Always 
 craving for love, loving and seeking to be loved, always 
 lie was destined to reap hatred from those with whom 
 life had connected him. If in the darkness he raised 
 up images of his departed hours, he would behold his 
 family disownmg him, and the home of his infancy 
 knowing him no more ; he would behold his magnificent 
 university, that, under happier circumstances, would have 
 gloried in his genius, rejecting him forever ; he would 
 behold his first wife, whom once he had loved passion- 
 ately, through calamities arising from himself, called 
 away to an early and tragic death. The peace after 
 which his heart panted forever, in what dreadful contrast 
 it stood to the eternal contention upon which his restless 
 intellect or accidents of position threw him like a pas- 
 sive victim ! It seemed as if not any choice of his, but 
 some sad doom of opposition from without, forced out, 
 as by a magnet, struggles of frantic resistance from Mm, 
 which as gladly he would have evaded as ever victim 
 of epilepsy yearned to evade his convulsions! Gladly 
 he would have slept in eternal seclusion, whilst eternally 
 the trump summoned him to battle. In storms unwil- 
 lingly created by himself, he lived; in a storm, cited by 
 the finger of God, he died. 
 
 It is affecting, — at least it is so for any one who 
 believes in the profound sincerity of Shelley, a man 
 (however erring) whom neither fear, nor hope, nor vanity, 
 nor hatred, ever seduced into falsehood, or even into 
 
56 PERCY BYSSHJE SHELLEY. 
 
 dissimulation, — to read the account which he gives of 
 a revolution occurring in his own mind at school: sc 
 early did his struggles begin ! It is m verse, and forms 
 part of those beautiful stanzas addressed to his second 
 wife, which he prefixed to "The Revolt of Islam." 
 Five or six of these stanzas may be quoted with a cer- 
 tainty of pleasing many readers, whilst they throw light 
 on the early condition of Shelley's feelings, and of his 
 early anticipations with regard to the promises and the 
 menaces of life. 
 
 " Thoughts of great deeds were mine, dear friend, when first 
 The clouds which wrap this world, from youth did pass. 
 I do remember well the hour which burst 
 My spirit's sleep ; a fresh May-dawn it was. 
 When I walked forth upon the glittering grass. 
 And wept — I knew not why ; until there rose, 
 From the near school-room, voices that, alas ' 
 Were but one echo from a world of woes — 
 
 The harsh and grating strife of tyrants and of foes. 
 
 And then I clasped my hands, and looked around — 
 (But none was near to mock my streaniing eyes. 
 Which poured their warm di'ops on the sunny ground) — 
 So without shame I spake — I will be wise. 
 And just, and free, and mild, if in me lies 
 Such power ; for I grow weary to behold 
 The selfish and the strong still tyrannize 
 Without reproach or check. I then controlled 
 My tears ; my heart grew calm ; and I was meek and lold. 
 
 And from that hour did I with earnest thought 
 Heap knowledge from forbidden mines of lore : 
 Yet nothing, tha** my tyrants knew or taught, 
 I cared to learn ; but from that secret store 
 Wrought linked armor for my soul, before 
 It might walk forth to war among mankind : 
 
PERCY BVSSIIE SHELLEY. 57 
 
 Thus power and hope were strengthened more and more 
 Within me, till there came upon my mind 
 A. sense of loneliness, a thirst with which I pined. 
 
 Alas, that love should be a blight and snare 
 To those who seek all sympathies in one ! — 
 Such once I sought in vam ; then black despair, 
 The shadow of a starless night, was thrown 
 Over the world in which I moved alone : — 
 Yet never found I one not false to me. 
 Hard hearts and cold, like weights of icy stone 
 Which ci"ushed and withered mine, that could not be 
 Aught but a lifeless clog, until revived by thee. 
 
 Thou, friend, whose presence on my wintry heart 
 Fell, like bright spring upon some herbless plain ; 
 How beautiful and calm and free thou wert 
 In thy young wisdom, when the mortal chain 
 Of Custom -i thou didst burst and rend in twain. 
 And walk'd as free as light the clouds among. 
 Which many an envious slave then breathed in vain 
 From his dim dungeon, and my spirit sprung 
 To meet thee from the woes which had begirt it long. 
 
 No more alone through the world's wilderness. 
 Although I trod the paths of high intent, 
 I journeyed now ; no more companionless. 
 Where solitude is like despair, I went. 
 
 Now has descended a serener hour ; 
 And, with inconstant fortune, friends return : 
 Though suffering leaves the knowledge and the power 
 Which says — Let scorn be not repaidwith scorn. 
 And from thy side two gentle babes are born 
 To fill our home with smiles ; and thus are we 
 Most fortunate beneath life's beaming morn ; 
 And these delights and thou have been to me 
 The parents of the song I consecrate to thee." 
 
 3* 
 
5S PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY. 
 
 My own attention was first drawn to Shelley by the 
 report of his Oxford labors as a missionary in the 
 service of infidelity. Abstracted from the absolute 
 sincerity and simplicity which governed that boyish 
 movement, qualities which could not be known to a 
 stranger, or even suspected in the midst of so much 
 extravagance, there was nothing in the Oxford reports 
 of him to create any interest beyond that of wonder 
 at his folly and presumption in pushing to such ex- 
 tremity what, naturally, all people viewed as an 
 elaborate jest. Some curiosity, however, even at that 
 time, must have gathered about his name ; for I re- 
 member seeing, in London, a little Indian ink sketch 
 of him in the academic costume of Oxford. The 
 sketch tallied pretty well with a verbal description 
 which I had heard of him in some company, namely, 
 that he looked like an elegant and slender flower, 
 whose head drooped from being surcharged with rain. 
 This gave, to the chance observer, an impression that 
 he was tainted, even in his external deportment, by 
 some excess of sickly sentimentalism, from which I 
 believe that, in all stages of his life, he was remark- 
 ably free. Between two and three years after this 
 period, which was that of his expulsion from Oxford, 
 he married a beautiful girl named Westbrook. She 
 was respectably connected ; but had not moved in a 
 rank corresponding to Shelley's ; and that accident 
 brought him into my own neighborhood For his 
 'amily, already estranged from him, were now thor- 
 oughly irritated by what they regarded as a mesalliance, 
 and withdrew, or greatly reduced, his pecuniary allow- 
 ances. Such, at least, was the story current. In this 
 
PERCY BYSSIIE SMFLLEY. 59 
 
 embarrassment, his wife's father made over to him an 
 annual income of £200 ; and, as economy had become 
 important, the youthful pair — both, in fact, still 
 children — came down to the Lakes, supposing this 
 region of Cumberland and Westmoreland to be a 
 sequestered place, which it ivas, for eight months in 
 the ear, and also to be a cheap place — which it was 
 not. Another motive to this choice arose with the 
 then Duke of Norfolk. He was an old friend of 
 Shelley's family, and generously refused to hear a 
 word of the young man's errors, except where he 
 could do anything to relieve him from their conse- 
 quences. His grace possessed the beautiful estate of 
 Gobarrow Park on Ulleswater, and other estates of 
 greater extent in the same two counties ; ^ his own 
 agents he had directed to furnish any accommodations 
 that might meet Shelley's views ; and he had written 
 to some fifentlemen amonsfst his agricultural friends in 
 Cumberland, requesting them to pay such neighborly 
 attentions to the solitary young people as circum- 
 stances might place in their power. This bias, being 
 impressed upon Shelley's wanderings, naturally brought 
 him to Keswick as the most central and the largest 
 of the little towns . dispersed amongst the lakes. 
 Southey, made aware of the interest taken in Shelley 
 by the Duke of Norfolk, with his usual kindness 
 immediately called upon him ; and the ladies of 
 Soutliey's family subsequently made an early :all 
 upon Mrs, Shelley. One of them mentioned to me 
 as occurring in this first visit an amusing expression 
 of the youthful matron, which, four years later, when 
 I heard of her gloomy end, recalled with the force 
 
60 PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY. 
 
 of a pathetic contrast, that icy arrest then chaining up 
 her youthful feet forever. The Shelleys had been 
 induced by one of their new friends to take part of a 
 house standing about half a mile out of Keswick, on 
 the Penrith road ; more, I believe, in that friend's 
 intention for the sake of bringing them easily within 
 his hospitalities, than for any beauty in the place. 
 There was, however, a pretty garden attached to it. 
 And whilst walking in this, one of the Southey party 
 asked Mrs. Shelley if the garden had been let with 
 their part of the house. " O, no," she replied, " the 
 garden is not ours ; but then, you know, the people 
 let us run about in it whenever Percy and I are tired 
 of sitting in the house." The naivete of this expres- 
 sion " run about," contrasting so picturesquely with 
 the intermitting efforts of the girlish wife at support- 
 ing a matron-like gravity, now that she was doing the 
 honors of her house to married ladies, caused all the 
 party to smile. And me it caused profoundly to sigh, 
 four years later, when the gloomy deatH of this young 
 creature, now frozen in a distant grave, threw back 
 my remembrance upon her fawn-like playfulness, 
 which, unconsciously to herself, the girlish phrase of 
 run about so naturally betrayed. 
 
 At that time I had a cottage myself in Grasmere, 
 just thirteen miles distant from Shelley's new abode. 
 As he had then written nothing of any interest, I had 
 no motive for calling upon him, except by way of 
 showing any little attentions in my power to a brother 
 Oxonian, and to a man of letters. These attentions, 
 indeed, he might have claimed simpiy in the character 
 of a neig-hbor. For as men living: on the coast oi 
 
PEKCY BVSSHE SlIKLLEY. 61 
 
 Mavo or Galway are apt to consider the dwellers on 
 the sea-board of North America in the light of next- 
 door neighbors, divided only by a party-wall of crystal, 
 — and what if accidentally three thousand miles 
 thick ? — on the same principle we amongst the 
 slender population of this lake region, and wherever 
 no ascent intervened between two parties higher than 
 Dunmaii Raise and the spurs of Helvellyn, were apt 
 to take with each other the privileged tone of neigh- 
 bors. Some neighborly advantages I might certainly 
 have placed at Shelley's disposal — Grasmere, for 
 instance, itself, which tempted at that time^ by a 
 beauty that had not been sullied ; Wordsworth, who 
 then lived in Grasmere ; Elleray and Professor Wilson, 
 nine miles further; finally, my own library, which, 
 being rich in the wickedest of German speculations, 
 would naturally have been more to Shelley's taste 
 than the Spanish librarj^ of Southey. 
 
 But all these temptations were negatived for Shelley 
 by his sudden departure. Off he went in a hurry ; 
 but why he went, or whither he went, I did not inquire ; 
 not guessing the interest which he would create in 
 my mind, six years later, by his "Revolt of Islam." 
 A life of Shelley, in a continental edition of his 
 works, says that he went to Edinburgh and to Ireland. 
 Some time after, we at the lakes heard that he was 
 living in Wales. Apparently he had the instinct 
 within him of his own Wandering Jew for eternal 
 restlessness. But events were now hurrying upon his 
 heart of hearts. Within less than ten years the whole 
 arrear of his life was destined to revolve. Within 
 that space, he had the whole burden of life and death 
 
62 PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY. 
 
 to exhaust ; he had all his suffering to suffer, and all 
 his work to work. 
 
 Ill about four years his first marriage was dissolved 
 by the death of his wife. She had brought to Shelley 
 two children. But feuds arose between them, owing 
 tc incompatible habits of mind. They parted. And 
 it IS one chief misery of a beautiful young woman, 
 separated from her natural protector, that her desolate 
 situation attracts and stimulates the calumnies of the 
 malicious. Stung by these calumnies, and oppressed 
 (as I have understood) by the loneliness of her abode, 
 perhaps also by the delirium of fever, she threw her- 
 self into a pond, and was drowned. The name under 
 which she first enchanted all eyes, and sported as the 
 most playful of nymph-like girls, is now forgotten 
 amongst men ; and that other name, for a brief period 
 her ambition and. her glory, is inscribed on her grave- 
 stone as the name under which she wept and she 
 despaired, — suffered and was buried, — turned away 
 even from the faces of her children, and sought a 
 hiding-place in darkness. 
 
 After this dreadful event, an anonymous life of 
 Shelley asserts that he was for some time deranged. 
 Pretending to no private and no circumstantial ac- 
 quaintance with the case, I cannot say how that really 
 was. There is a great difficulty besetting all sketches 
 of lives so steeped in trouble as was Shelley's, If 
 you have a confidential knowledge of the case, as a 
 dear friend privileged to stand by the bed-side of 
 raving grief, how base to use such advantages of 
 position for the gratification of a fugitive curiosity 
 in strangers ! If you have no such knowledge, how 
 
VERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY. 63 
 
 little qualified you must be for tracing the life with 
 the truth of sympathy, or for judging it with the truth 
 of charity ! To me it appears, from the peace of 
 mind which Shelley is reported afterwards to have 
 reco\ercd for a time, that he could not have had to 
 reproach himself with any harshness or neglect as 
 contributing to the shocking catastrophe. Neither 
 ought any reproach to rest upon the memory of this 
 first wife, as respects her relation to Shelley. Non- 
 conformity of tastes might easily rise between two 
 parties, without much blame to either, when one of 
 the two had received from nature an intellect and a 
 temperament so dangerously eccentric, and constitu- 
 tionally carried, by delicacy so exquisite of organiza- 
 tion, to eternal restlessness and irritability of nerves, 
 if not absolutely at times to lunacy. 
 
 About three years after this* tragic event, Shelley, 
 in company with his second wife, the daughter of God- 
 win, and Mary Wollstonecraft, passed over for a third 
 time to the Continent, from which he never came back. 
 On Monday, July 8, 1822, being then in his twenty- 
 ninth year, he was returning from Leghorn to his home 
 at Lerici, in a schooner-rigged boat of his own, twenty- 
 four feet long, eight in the beam, and drawing four 
 feet water. His companions were only two, — Mr. Wil- 
 liams, formerly of the Eighth Dragoons, and Charles 
 Vivian, an English seaman in Shelley's service. The 
 run homewards would not have occupied more than 
 six or eight hours. But the Gulf of Spezia is pecu- 
 liarly dangerous for small craft in bad weather ; and 
 unfortunately a squall of about one hour's duration 
 came on, the wind at the same time shifting so as to 
 
64 PERCY BYSSIIE SHELLEY. 
 
 blow exactly in the teetli of the course to Lerici 
 From the interesting narrative drawn up by Mr. Tre 
 lawney, well known at that time for his ronnection 
 with the Greek Revolution, it seems that for eight day? 
 the fate of the boat was unknown ; and during that 
 time couriers had been despatched along the whole line 
 of coast between Leghorn and Nice, under anxious 
 hopes that the voyagers might have run into some 
 creek for shelter. But at the end of the eight days 
 this suspense ceased. Some articles belonging to Shel- 
 ley's boat had previously been washed ashore : these 
 might have been thrown overboard ; but finally the 
 two bodies of Shelley and Mr. Williams came on shore 
 near Via Reggio, about four miles apart. Both were 
 in a state of advanced decomposition, but were fully 
 identified. Vivian's body was not recovered for three 
 weeks. From the state of the two corpses, it had 
 become difficult to remove them ; and they were there 
 fore burned by the seaside, on funeral pyres, with 
 the classic rites of paganism, four English gentlemen 
 being present, — Capt, Shenley of the navy, Mr. Leigh 
 Hunt, Lord Byron, and Mr. Trelawney. A circum 
 stance is added by Mr. GilfiUan, which previous 
 accounts do not mention, namely, that Shelley's heart 
 remained unconsumed by the fire ; but this is a phe- 
 nomenon that has repeatedly occurred at judicial deaths 
 by fire. The remains of Mr. Williams, when col- 
 lected from the fire, were conveyed to England; but 
 Slielley's were buried in the Protestant burying-ground 
 at Rome, not far from a child of his own and Keats 
 the poet. It is remarkable that Shelley, in the preface 
 to his Adonais, dedicated to the memory of that young 
 
PERCY BYSSIIE SHELLEY. 6^ 
 
 poet, had spoken with delight of this cemetery, — as 
 " An open space among the ruins " (of ancient Riime), 
 " covered in winter with violets and daisies ; " adding, 
 " It might make one in love with death, to think that 
 one should be buried in so sweet a place." 
 
 I have allowed myself to abridge the circumstances 
 as reported by Mr. Trelawney and Mr. Hunt, partly 
 on the consideration that three-and-twenty years have 
 passed since the event, so that a new generation has 
 had time to grow up — not feeling the interest of con- 
 tonporaries in Shelley, and generally, therefore, unac- 
 quainted with the case ; but partly for the purpose of 
 introducing the following comment of Mr. Gilfillan on 
 the striking points of a catastrophe, " which robbed 
 the world of this strange and great spirit," and which 
 secretly tempts men to superstitious feelings, even 
 whilst they are denying them : — 
 
 " Everybody knovs^ that, on the arrival of Leigh 
 Hunt in Italy, Shelley hastened to meet him. During 
 all the time he spent in Leghorn, he was in brilliant 
 spirits — to him ever a sure prognostic of coming evil." 
 [That is, in the Scottish phrase, he was fey. 1 " On his 
 return to his home dnd family, his skiff was overtaken 
 by a fearful hurricane, and all on board perished. To 
 a gentleman, who, at that time, was with a glass sur- 
 veying the sea, the scene of his drowning assumed a 
 very striking appearance. A great many vessels were 
 visible, and among them one small skiff, which at- 
 tracted his particular attention. Suddenly a dreadful 
 storm, attended by thunder and columns of lightning, 
 swept over the sea and eclipsed the prospect. When 
 U had passed he looked again. The larger vessels 
 5 
 
66 PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY. 
 
 were all safe, riding upon the swell ; the skiff only 
 had gone down forever. And in that skiff was Alas 
 tor ! "^ Here he had met his fate. Wert thou, 
 religious sea, only avenging on his head the cause of 
 thy denied and insulted Deity ? Were ye, ye ele- 
 ments, in your courses, commissioned to destroy him ? 
 Ah ! there is no reply. The surge is silent ; the ele- 
 ments have no voice. In the eternal councils the secret 
 is hid of the reason of the man's death. And there, 
 too, rests the still more tremendous secret of the char- 
 acter of his destiny." ^ 
 
 The last remark possibly pursues the scrutiny too 
 far ; and, conscious that it tends beyond the limits of 
 charity, Mr. Gilfillan recalls himself from the attempt 
 to fathom the unfathomable. But undoubtedly the 
 temptation is great, in minds the least superstitious, to 
 read a significance, and a silent personality, in such a 
 fate applied to such a defier of the Christian heavens. 
 As a shepherd by his dog fetches out one of his fliock 
 from amongst five hundred, so did the holy hurricane 
 seem to fetch out from the multitude of sails that one 
 which carried him that hated the hopes of the world; 
 and the sea, which swelled and ran down within an 
 hour, was present at the audit. We are rem.inded 
 forcibly of the sublime storm in the wilderness (as 
 given in the fourth book of "Paradise Regained"), 
 and the remark upon it made by the mysterious 
 tempter — 
 
 " This tempest at this desert most was bent. 
 Of men at thee." 
 
 Undoubtedly, I do not understand Mr. Gilfillan, more 
 
rEIlCV BYSSIIE SHELLEY. 67 
 
 than myself, to road a "judgment" in this catastrophe, 
 But there is a solemn appeal to the thoughtful, in 
 a death of so nmch terrific grandeur following upon 
 defiances of such unparalleled audacity. iEschylus 
 acknowledged the same sense of mysterious awe, and 
 all anli(iuity acknowledged it, in the story of Amphia- 
 raus.y 
 
 Shelley, it must be remembered, carried his irre- 
 ligion to a point beyond all others. Of the darkest 
 beings we are told, that they " believe and tremble ; " 
 but Shelley believed and hated; and his defiances 
 were meant to show that he did not tremble. Yet, 
 has he not the excuse of something like monomania 
 upon this subject? I firmly believe it. But a super- 
 stition, old as the world, clings to the notion, that 
 words of deep meaning, uttered even by lunatics or by 
 idiots, execute themselves ; and that also, when uttered 
 in presumption, they bring round their own retributive 
 chastisements. 
 
 On the other hand, however shocked at Shelley's 
 obstinate revolt from all religious sympathies with his 
 fellow-men, no man is entitled to deny the admirable 
 qualities of his moral nature, which were as striking 
 as his genius. Many people remarked something se- 
 raphic in the expression of his features ; and something 
 seraphic there was in his nature. No man was better 
 qualified to have loved Christianity ; and to no man, 
 resting under the shadow of that one darkness, would 
 Christianity have said more gladly — talis cum sis, 
 utiiiam nosier esses! Shelley would, from his earliest 
 manhood, have sacrificed all that he possessed t' any 
 comprehensive purpose of good for the race of man 
 
68 PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY. 
 
 He dismissed all injuries and insults from his memory. 
 He was the sincerest and the most truthful of human 
 creatures. He was also the purest. If he denounced 
 marriage as a vicious institution, that was but another 
 phasis of the partial lunacy which affected him ; for tc 
 no man were purity and fidelity more essential ele 
 ments in his idea of real love. 
 
 I agree, therefore, heartily with Mr. Gilfillan, in pro 
 testing against the thoughtless assertion of some write* 
 in The Edinburgh Reniew — that Shelley at all selected 
 the story of his " Cenci " on account of its horrors, or 
 that he has found pleasure in dwelling on those horrors. 
 So far from it, he has retreated so entirely from the 
 most shocking feature of the story, namely, the inces- 
 tuous violence of Cenci the father, as actually to leave 
 it doubtful whether the murder were in punishment of 
 the last outrage committed, or in repulsion of a menace 
 continually repeated. The true motive of the selection 
 of such a story was — not its darkness, but (as Mr. 
 Gilfillan, with so much penetration, perceives) the light 
 which fights with the darkness : Shelley found the 
 whole attraction of this dreadful tale in the angelic 
 nature of Beatrice, as revealed in the portrait of her 
 oy Guido. Everybody who has read with under- 
 standing the " Wallenstein " of Schiller, is aware of the 
 repose and the divine relief arising upon a background 
 of so much darkness, such a tumult of ruffians, bloody 
 intriguers, and assassins, from the situation of the two 
 lovers. Max. Piccolomini and the Princess Thekla, both 
 yearning so profoundly after peace, both so noble, both 
 so young, and both destined to be so unhappy. The 
 same fine relief, the same light shining in darkncra 
 
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY. 69 
 
 arises here from the touching- beauty of Beatrice, from 
 her noble aspirations after deliverance, from the re- 
 morse which reaches her in the midst of real inno- 
 cence, from her meekness, and from the agitation of 
 her inexpressible affliction. Even the murder, even 
 tlie parricide, though proceeding from herself, do but 
 deepen that background of darkness, which throws 
 into fuller revelation the glory of that suffering face 
 immortalized by Guido. 
 
 Something of a similar effect arises to myself when 
 reviewing the general abstract of Shelley's life, — so 
 brief, so full of agitation, so full of strife. When one 
 thinks of the early misery which he suffered, and of 
 the insolent infidelity which, being yet so young, he 
 wooed with a lover's passion, then the darkness of 
 midnight begins to form a deep, impenetrable back- 
 ground, upon which the phantasmagoria of all that is 
 to come may arrange itself in troubled phosphoric 
 streams, and in sweeping processions of woe. Yet, 
 again, when one recurs to his gracious nature, his fear- 
 lessness, his truth, his purity from all fleshliness of 
 appetite, his freedom from vanity, his diffusive love 
 and tenderness, — suddenly, out of the darkness, reveals 
 itself a morning of May ; forests and thickets of roses 
 advance to the foreground ; from the midst of them 
 looks out " the eternal '^^ child," cleansed from his sor- 
 row, radiant with joy, having power given him to forget 
 the misery which he suffered, power given him to forget 
 the misery w'hich he caused, and leaning with his heart 
 upon that dove-like faith against which his erring m- 
 tellect had rebelled. 
 
NOTES. 
 
 Note 1. Page 43. 
 
 "Transact:" — this word, used in this Roman sense, illus- 
 trates the particular mode of Milton's liberties with the English 
 language : liberties which have never yet been properly examined, 
 collated, numbered, or appreciated. In the Roman law, transi- 
 gere expressed the case, where each of two conflicting parties con- 
 ceded something of what originally he had claimed as the rigor of 
 his right ; and iransactio was the technical name for a legal com- 
 promise. Milton has here introduced no new word into the English 
 language, but has given a new and more learned sense to an old 
 one. Sometimes, it is true, as in the word sensuous, he introduces 
 a pure coinage of his own, and a vei-y useful coinage ; but gener- 
 ally to reendow an old foundation is the extent of his innovations. 
 M. de Tocqueville is therefore likely to be found wrong in saying, 
 that " Milton alone introduced more than six hundred words into 
 the English language, almost all derived from the Latin, the 
 Greek, or the Hebrew." The passage occurs in the 16th chapter 
 of his " Democracy in America," Part IL, where M. de Tocqueville 
 is discussing the separate agencies through which democratic life 
 on the one hand, or aristocratic on the other, affects the changes 
 of language. His English translator, Mr. H. Reeve, an able and 
 philosophic annotator, justly views this bold assertion as "start- 
 ling and probably erroneous." 
 
 (71) 
 
72 PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY. 
 
 Note 2. Page 44. 
 
 Since the boyish period in which these redressing corrections 
 occurred to me, I have seen some reason (upon considering the 
 oriental practice of placing live coals in a pan upon the head, and 
 its meaning as still in use amongst the Turks) to alter the whole 
 interpretation of the passage. It would too much interrupt the 
 tenor of the subject to explain this at length; but, if right, it 
 would equally harmonize with the spirit of Christian morals 
 
 Note 3. Page 54. 
 
 " Family : " i. e., the gens in the Roman sense, or collective 
 house. Shelley's own immediate branch of the house did not, in 
 a legal sense, represent the family of Peushurst, because the rights 
 of the lineal descent had settled upon another branch. But his 
 branch had a collateral participation in the glory of the Sidney 
 name, and might, by accidents possible enough, have come to be 
 its sole representative. 
 
 Note 4. Page 57. 
 
 " Of Custom : " — This alludes to a theory of Shelley's, on the 
 subject of marriage as a vicious institution, and an attempt to 
 realize his theory by way of public example ; which attempt there 
 is no use in noticing more particularly, as it was subsequently 
 abandoned. Originally he had derived his theory from the writ- 
 ings of Mary Wollstonecraft, the mother of his second wife, whose 
 birth in fact had cost that mother her life. But by the year 1812, 
 (the year following his first marriage), he had so fortified, from 
 other quarters, his previous opinions upon the wickedness of all 
 nuptial ties consecrated by law or by the church, that he apolo- 
 gized to his friends for having submitted to the marriage ceremony 
 as for an offence ; but an offence, he pleaded, rendered necessary 
 by the vicious constitution of society, for the comfort of his female 
 partner. 
 
 Note 5. Page 59. 
 Two counties:" — the frontier line between Westmoreland 
 
NOTEb. 73 
 
 and Cumberland, traverses obliquely the Lake of Ulleswater, so 
 that the banks on both sides lie partly in both counties. 
 
 Note 6. Page 61. 
 
 " At Ihat time ! " — the reader will say, who happens to be aware 
 of the mighty barriers which engirdle Grasmere, Fairfield, Ar- 
 thur's Chair, Seat Sandal, Steil Fell, &c. (the lowest above two 
 thousand, the highest above three thousand feet high) , — " what 
 then ? do the mountains change, and the mountain tarns ? " Per- 
 haps not ; but, if they do not change in substance or in form, they 
 " change countenance " when they are disfigured from below. One 
 cotton-mill, planted bj' the side of a torrent, disenchants the scene, 
 and banishes the ideal beauty even in the case where it leaves the 
 physical beauty untouched : a truth which, many years ago, I 
 saw illustrated in the little hamlet of Church Coniston. But is 
 there any cotton-mill in Grasmere ? Not that I have heard : but 
 if no water has been filched away from Grasmere, there is one 
 water too much which has crept lately into that loveliest of moun- 
 tain chambers ; and that is the " water-cure," which has built unto 
 itself a sort of residence in that vale ; whether a rustic nest, or a 
 lordly palace, I do not know. Meantime, in honesty it must be 
 owned, that many years ago the vale was half ruined by an insane 
 substruction carried along the eastern margin of the lake as a 
 basis for a mail-coach road. This infernal mass of solid masonry 
 swept away the loveliest of sylvan recesses, and the most absolutely 
 charmed against intrusive foot or angry echoes. It did worse ; it 
 swept away the stateliest of Flora's daughters, and swept away, at 
 the same time, the birth-place of a well-known verse, describing 
 that stately plant, which is perhaps (as a separate line) the most 
 exquisite that the poetry of earth can show. The plant was the 
 Osmunda regalis : 
 
 " Plant lovelier in its own recess 
 Than Grecian Naiad seen at earliest dawn 
 Tending her fount, or Indy of the lake 
 Sole-sitting by the shores of old romance." 
 
 It is this last line and a half which some have held to ascend in 
 beauty as much beyond any single line known to literature, as the 
 
74 PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY. 
 
 Osmunda ascends in luxury of splendor above other ferns. I have 
 restored the original word lake, which the poet himself under an 
 erroneous impression had dismissed for mere. But the line rests 
 no longer on an earthly reality — the recess, which suggested it, is 
 gone : the Osmunda has fled ; and a vile causeway, such as Sin and 
 Deatli build in Milton over Chaos, faste«iug it with "asphaltic 
 slinie " and " pins of adamant," having long displaced the loveliest 
 chapel (as I may call it) in the whole cathedral of Grasmere, I have 
 eiiice considei'ed Grasmere itself a ruin of its foi-mer self. 
 
 Note 7. Page 66. 
 
 *' Alastor," i. e., Shelley. Mr. Gilfillan names him thus fi'om 
 the designation, self-assumed by Shelley, in one of the least intel 
 ligible amongst his poems. 
 
 Note 8. Page 66. 
 
 The immediate cause of the catastrophe was supposed to be this : 
 — Shelley's boat had reached a distance of four miles from the 
 shore, when the storm suddenly arose, and the wind suddenly 
 shifted: " from excessive smoothness," says Mr. Trelawney, all at 
 once the sea was " foaming, breaking, and getting up into a very 
 heavy swell." After one hour the swell went down ; and towards 
 evening it was almost a calm. The circumstances wei-e all ad- 
 -'erse : the gale, the current setting into the gulf, the instantaneous 
 change of wind, acting upon an undecked boat, having all the 
 sheets fast, overladen, and no expert hands on bo.ard but one, made 
 the foundering as sudden as it was inevitable. The boat is sup- 
 posed to have filled to leeward, and (carrying two tons of ballast) 
 to have gone down like a shot. A book found in the po-^ket of 
 Shelley, and the unaltered state of the dress on all the corpses 
 when washed on shore, sufficiently indicated that not a nuiment'a 
 preparation for meeting the danger had been possible. 
 
 Note 9. Page 67. 
 See " The Seven against Thebes " of .^Eschylus. 
 
NOTES. 
 
 /5 
 
 Note 10. Page 69. 
 
 « The eternal child : " — this beautiful expression, so true in its 
 application to Shelley, I borrow from Mr. Gilfillan ; and I am 
 tempted to add the rest of his eloquent parallel between Shelley 
 and Lord Byron, so far as it relates to their external appearance : 
 _"In the forehead and head of Byron there is more massive 
 power and breadth : Shelley's has a smooth, arched, spiritual ex- 
 pression ; wrinkle there seems none on his brow ; it is as if per- 
 petual youth had there dropped its freshness. Byron's eye seems 
 the focus of pride and lust ; Shelley's is mild, pensive, fixed on 
 you, but seeing you through the mist of his own idealism. Defi- 
 ance curls on Byron's nostril, and sensuality steeps his full large 
 lips ; the lower features of Shelley's foce are frail, feminine, flexi- 
 ble Byron's head is turned upwards ; as if, having risen proudly 
 above his cotcmporaries, he were daring to claim kindred, or to 
 demand a contest, with a superior order of beings : Shelley s is 
 half bent in reverence and humility, before some vast vision seen 
 by his own eye alone. Misery erect, and striving to cover its re- 
 treat under an aspect of contemptuous fury, is the permanent and 
 pervading expression of Byron's countenance : - sorrow, softened 
 and shaded away by hope and habit, lies like a ' hoher day ot 
 still moonshine upon that of Shelley. In the portrait of Byron, 
 taken at the age of nineteen, you see the unnatural age of prema- 
 ture passion ; his hair is young, his dress is youthful ; but his 
 face is old -.-in Shelley you see the eternal child, none the less 
 that his hair is gray, and that ' sorrow seems half his immor- 
 tality.' " 
 
JOHN KEATS. 
 
 INlR. GiLFiLLAN* introduces this section with :-. d:3. 
 cussion upon the constitutional peculiarities ascribed 
 to n)en of genius ; such as nervousness of tempera- 
 a^ent, idleness, vanity, irritability, and other disagree- 
 able tendencies ending in ty or in ness ; one of the ties 
 bein^ " poverty ; " which disease is at least not amongst 
 those morbidly cherished by the patients. All that 
 can be asked from the most penitent man of gemus 
 is that he should humbly confess his own besettmg 
 infirmities, and endeavor to hate them; and as 
 respects this one infirmity at least, I never heard of 
 any man (however eccentric in genius) who did other- 
 wise. But what special relation has such a preface 
 to Keats? His whole article occupies twelve pages; 
 and six of these are allotted to this preliminary dis- 
 cussion, which perhaps equally concerns every other 
 xnan in the household of literature. Mr. Cxilfillan 
 «cems to have been acting here on celebrated prece- 
 dents. The "Ownes homines qui sese student prcpstare 
 crEteris animalibus^' has long been "smoked" by a 
 wicked posterity as an old hack of Sallust's fitted on 
 with paste and scissors to the Catilinarian conspiracy. 
 
 Gallery of Literary Purtraits." 
 
78 JOHN KEATS. 
 
 Cicero candidly admits that he kept in his writing-desk 
 an assortment of movable prefaces, beautifully fitted 
 (by means of avoiding all questions but " the general 
 question ") for parading, en grand costume, before any 
 conceivable ' book. And Coleridge, in his early days, 
 used the image of a man's " sleeping under a man- 
 chineel tree," alternately with the case of Alexander's 
 killing his friend Clitus, as resources for illustration 
 which Providence had bountifully made inexhaustible 
 in their applications. No emergency could by pos- 
 sibility arise to puzzle the poet, or the orator, but one 
 of these similes (please Heaven ! ) should be made to 
 meet it. So long as the manchineel continued to 
 blister with poisonous dews those who confided in its 
 shelter, so long as Niebuhr should kindly forbear to 
 prove that Alexander of Macedon was a hoax, and 
 his friend Clitus a myth, so long was Samuel Taylor 
 Coleridge fixed and obdurate in his determination that 
 one or other of these images should come upon duty 
 whenever, as a youthful writer, he found himself on 
 the brink of insolvency. 
 
 But it is less the generality of this preface, or even 
 its disproportion, which fixes the eye, than the ques- 
 tionableness of its particular statements. In that part 
 which reviews the idleness of authors, Horace is given 
 up as too notoriously indolent ; the thing, it seems, 
 is past denying ; but " not so Lucretius." Indeed ! 
 and how shall this be brought to proof? Perhaps the 
 reader has heard of that barbarian prince, who sent 
 to Europe for a large map of the world accompanied 
 by the best of English razors ; and the clever use 
 vhich he made of his importation was, that, first 
 
JOHN KEATS. 79 
 
 cutting out with exquisite accuracy the whole ring 
 fence of liis own dominions, and then doing the same 
 office, with the sanip equity (barbarous or barber-ous), 
 for the dominions of a hostile neighbor, next he pro- 
 ceeded to weigh off the rival segments against each 
 other in a pair of gold scales ; after which, of course, 
 he arrived at a satisfactory algebraic equation between 
 himself and his enemy. Now, upon this principle 
 of comparison, if we should take any common edition 
 (as the Delphin or the Variorum) of Horace and 
 Lucretius, strictly shaving away all notes, prefaces, 
 editorial absurdities, &c., all " flotsom " and " jetsom " 
 that may have gathered like barnacles about the two 
 weather-beaten hulks ; in that case we should have 
 the two old files undressed, and in puris naturalibus ; 
 they would be prepared for being weighed ; and, 
 going to the nearest grocer's, we might then settle the 
 point at once, as to which of the two had been the 
 idler man. I back Horace for my part ; and it is my 
 private opinion that, in the case of a quarto edition, 
 the grocer would have to throw at least a two-ounce 
 weight into the scale of Lucretius, before he could be 
 made to draw against the other. Yet, after all, this 
 would only be a collation of quantity against quantity ; 
 whilst, upon a second collation of quality against qual- 
 ity (I io not mean quality as regards the final merit 
 of the composition, but quality as regards the difficul- 
 ties in the process of composition), the difference in 
 amount of labor would jppear to be as between the 
 weaving of a blanket and the weaving of an exquisite 
 cambric. The curiosa felicitas of Horace in his lyric 
 compositions, the elaborate delicacy of workmanship 
 
80 JOHN KEATS. 
 
 in his thoughts and in his style, argue a scale of labor 
 that, as against any equal number of lines in Lucretius, 
 would measure itself by months against days. There 
 are single odes in Horace that must have cost him a 
 six weeks' seclusion from the wickedness of Rome. 
 Do I then question the extraordinary power of Lucre- 
 tius ? On the contrary, 1 admire him as the first of 
 demoniacs ; the frenzy of an earth-born or a hell-born 
 inspiration ; divinity of stormy music sweeping round 
 us in eddies, in order to prove that for us there could 
 be nothing divine ; the grandeur of a prophet's voice 
 "ising in angry gusts, by way of convincing us that 
 prophets were swindlers; oracular scorn of oracles; 
 frantic efforts, such as might seem reasonable in one 
 who was scaling the heavens, for the purpose of 
 degrading all things, making man to be the most 
 abject of necessities as regarded his causes, to be the 
 blindest of accidents as regarded his expectations ; 
 these fierce antinomies expose a mode of insanity, but 
 of an insanity affecting a sublime intellect. ^ One 
 would suppose him partially mad by the savagery of 
 his headlong manner. And most people who read 
 Lucretius at all, are aware of the traditional story 
 current in Rome, that he did actually write in a delir- 
 ious state ; not under any figurative disturbance of 
 brain, but under a real physical disturbance caused by 
 philters administered to him without his own knowl- 
 edge. But this kind of supernatural afflatus did not 
 .loliver into words and metre by lirgering oscillations, 
 and through processes of self-correction ; it threw 
 itself forward, and precipitated its own utterance, with 
 the hurrying and bounding of a cataract. It was an 
 
JOHN KEATS. 81 
 
 SBstrum, K rapture, the bounding of a majnad, by 
 which the muse of Lucretius lived and moved. So 
 much is known by the impression about him current 
 among his contemporaries : so much is evident in the 
 characteristic manner of his poem, if all anecdotes 
 had perished. And, upon the whole, let the propor- 
 tions of power between Horace and Lucretius be what 
 they may, the proportions of labor are absolutely 
 incommensurable : in Horace the labor was directly 
 as the power, in Lucretius inversely as the power. 
 Whatsoever in Horace was best — had been obtained 
 by most labor; whatsoever in Lucretius was best — by 
 least. In Horace, the exquisite skill cooperated with 
 the exquisite nature ; in Lucretius, the powerful nature 
 disdained the skill, which, indeed, would not have 
 been applicable to his theme, or to his treatment of 
 it, and triumphed by means of mere precipitation of 
 volume, and of headlong fury. 
 
 Another paradox of Mr. GilfiUan's, under this head, 
 is, that he classes Dr. Johnson as indolent ; and it is 
 the more startling, because he does not utter it as a 
 careless opinion upon which he might have been 
 thrown by inconsideration, but as a concession extorted 
 from him reluctantly; he had sought to evade it, but 
 could not. Now, that Dr. Johnson had a morbid 
 predisposition to decline labor from his scrofulous 
 habit of body,2 is probable. The question for us 
 however, is, not what nature prompted him to do, but 
 what he did. If he had an extra difficulty to fight 
 with in attempting to labor, the more was his merit 
 in the known result, that he did fight with that diffi- 
 culty, and that he conquered it. This is undeniable. 
 6 4* 
 
82 JOHN KEATS. 
 
 And the attempt to deny it presents itself in a comic 
 shape, when one imagines some ancient shelf in a 
 library, that has groaned for nearly a century under 
 the weight of the doctor's works, demanding, " How 
 say you ? Is this Sam Johnson, whose Dictionary 
 alone is a load for a camel, one of those authors 
 whom you call idle ? Then Heaven preserve us poor 
 oppressed book-shelves from such as you will consider 
 active." George III., in a compliment as happily 
 turned as if it had proceeded from Louis XIV., 
 expressed his opinion upon this question of the doctor's 
 industry by saying, that he also should join in thinking 
 Johnson too voluminous a contributor to literature, 
 were it not for the extraordinary merit of his contri- 
 butions. Now it would be an odd way of turning the 
 royal praise into a reproach, if we should say : " Sam, 
 had you been a pretty good writer, we, your country- 
 men, should have held you to be also an industrious 
 writer ; but, because you are a very good writer, there- 
 fore we pronounce you a lazy vagabond." 
 
 Upon other points in this discussion there is some 
 room to differ with Mr. Gilfillan. For instance, with 
 respect to the question of the comparative happiness 
 enjoyed by men of genius, it is not necessary to argue, 
 nor does it seem possible to prove, even in the case of 
 any one individual poet, that, on the whole, he was 
 either more happy or less happy than the average 
 mass of his fellow-men ; far less could this be argued 
 as to the whole class of poets. What seems really 
 open to proof, is, that men of genius have a larger 
 capacity of happiness, which capacity, both from 
 within and from without, may be defeated in ten thou 
 
JOII.\ KliATS. 83 
 
 sand ways. This seems involved in the very word 
 genius. For, after all the pretended and hollow at- 
 teni[)t£ to distinguish genius from talent, I shall continue 
 to thinU (what heretofore I have explained) that no 
 distinction in the case is tenable for a moment but this; 
 namely, that genius is that mode of intellectual power 
 wliicli moves in alliance with the genial nature, that is, 
 with the capacities of pleasure and pain; whereas talent 
 has no vestige of such an alliance, and is perfectly inde- 
 pendent of all human sensibilities. Consequently, genius 
 is a voice or breathing that represents the ^o?a:^ nature 
 of man ; whilst, on the contrary, talent represents only 
 a single function of that nature. Genius is the language 
 which interprets the synthesis of the human spirit with 
 the human intellect, each acting through the other; 
 whilst talent speaks only from the insulated intellect. 
 And hence also it is that, besides its relation to suffering 
 and enjoyment, genius always implies a deeper relation 
 to virtue and vice ; whereas talent has no shadow of a 
 relation to vioral qualities, any more than it has to vital 
 sensibilities. A man of the highest talent is often 
 obtuse and below the ordinary standard of men in his 
 feelings ; but no man of genius can unyoke himself from 
 the society of moral perceptions that are brighter, and 
 sensibilities that are more tremulous, than those of men 
 in general. 
 
 As to the e.xamples^ by which Mr. Gilfdlan supports 
 his prevailing views, they will be construed by any ten 
 tncusand men in ten thousand separate modes. The 
 objections are so endless that it would be abusing the 
 reader's time to urge them ; especially as every man 
 of the ten thousand will be wrong-, and will also be 
 
84 JOHN KTATS. 
 
 right, in all varieties of proportion. Two only it may 
 be useful to notice as examples, involving some degree 
 of error, namely, Addison and Homer. As to the first, 
 the error, if an error, is one of fact only. Lord Byron 
 had said of Addison, that he " died drunlc." This seems 
 lo M.. Gilfillan a "horrible statement;" for which he 
 supposes that no authority can exist but "a rumor circu- 
 lated by an inveterate gossip," meaning Horace Wal- 
 pole. But gossips usually go upon some foundation, 
 broad or narrow; and, until the rumor had been" authen- 
 tically put down, Mr. Gilfillan should not have pro- 
 nounced it a "malignant calumny." Me this story 
 caused to laugh exceedingly ; not at Addison, whose 
 fine genius extorts pity and tenderness towards his in- 
 firmities ; but at the characteristic misanthropy of Lord 
 Byron, who chuckles as he would do over a glass of 
 nectar, on this opportunity for confronting the old solemn 
 legend about Addison's sending for his step-son. Lord 
 Warwick, to witness the peaceful death of a Christian, 
 with so rich a story as this, that he, the said Christian, 
 "died drunk." Supposing that he did, the mere phys- 
 ical fact of inebriation, in a stage of debility where so 
 small an excess of stimulating liquor (though given 
 jnedicinally) sometimes causes such an appearance, 
 would uot infer the moral blame of drunkenness ; and if 
 such a thing were ever said by any person present at ihe 
 bed-side, I should feel next to certain that it was said in 
 that spirit of exaggeration to which most men are 
 tempted by circumstances unusually fitted to impress a 
 startling picturesqueness upon the statement. But, 
 without insisting upon Lord Byron's way of putting the 
 case, I believe it is generally understood that, laf'erjy, 
 
JOHN KEATS. 85 
 
 Addison gave way to habits of intemperance. He suf- 
 fered, not only from his wife's dissatisfied temper, but 
 also (and probably much more) from ennui. He did 
 not walk one mile a day, and he ought to have walked 
 ten. Dyspepsy was, no doubt, the true ground of his 
 unhappiness ; and he had nothing to hope for. To rem- 
 edy these evils, I have always understood that every 
 day (and especially towards night) he drank too much 
 of that French liquor, which, calling itself water of life, 
 nine times in ten proves the water of death. He lived 
 latterly at Kensington, namely, in Holland House, the 
 well-known residence of the late Lord Holland ; and the 
 tradition attached to the gallery in that house, is, that 
 duly as the sun drew near to setting, on two tables, one 
 at each end of the long ambulachrum, the right honorable 
 Joseph placed, or caused to be placed, two tumblers of 
 brandy, somewhat diluted with water; and those, the 
 said vessels, then and there did alternately to the lips of 
 him, the aforesaid Joseph, diligently apply, walking 
 to and fro during the process of exhaustion, and 
 dividing his attention between the two poles, arctic and 
 antartic, of his evening diaulos, with the impartiality to 
 be expected from a member of the Privy Council. How 
 often the two " blessed bears," northern and southern, 
 were replenished, entered into no affidavit that ever 
 reached me. But so much I have always understood, 
 that in the gallery of Holland House, the ex-secretary 
 of state caught a decided hiccup, which never after- 
 wards subsided. In all this there would have been 
 little to shock people, had it not been for the syco- 
 phancy which ascribed to Addison a religious reputa- 
 tion such as he neither merited nor wished to claim. 
 
86 JOHN KEATS. 
 
 But one penal reaction of mendacious adulation, for 
 him who is weak enough to accept it, must ever be 
 to impose restraints upon his own conduct, which 
 otherwise he would have been free to decline. How 
 lightly would Sir Koger de Coverley have thought of 
 a little sotting in any honest gentleman of right po. i- 
 tics ! And Addison would not, in that age, and as to 
 that point, have carried his scrupulosity higher than 
 his own Sir Roger. But such knaves as he who had 
 complimented Addison with the praise of having 
 written " no line which, dying, he could wish to blot," 
 whereas, in fact, Addison started in life by publishing 
 a translation of Petronius Arbiter, had painfully coerced 
 his free agency. This knave, I very much fear, was 
 Tickell the first ; and the result of his knavery was, to 
 win for Addison a disagreeable sanctimonious reputation 
 that was, first, founded in lies ; second, that painfully 
 limited Addison's free agency ; and, thirdly, that prepared 
 insult 3 to his memory, since it pointed a censorious eye 
 upon those things, viewed as the acts of a demure pre- 
 tender to piety, which would else have passed without 
 notice as the most venial of frailties in a layman. 
 
 Something I had to say also upon Homer, who 
 mingles amongst the examples cited by Mr. Gilfillan, 
 of apparent happiness connected with genius. But, for 
 want of room,^ I forbear to go further, than to lodge 
 my protest against imputing to Homer as any personal 
 merit, what belongs altogether to the stage of society in 
 which he lived. " They," says Mr. Gilfillan, speaking 
 of the " Iliad " and the " Odyssey," " are the healthiest 
 of works. There are in them no suUenness, no quer- 
 ulous complaint, not one personal allusion." No ; bu4 
 
JOHN KEATS. 87 
 
 how could there have been ? Subjective poetry had not 
 an existence in those days. Not only the powers for 
 introverting the eye upon the spectator, as himself, the 
 spectacidum, were then undeveloped and inconceivable, 
 but the sympathies did not exist to which such an inno- 
 vation could have appealed. Besides, and partly from 
 the same cause, even as objects, the human feelings and 
 affections were too hroadly and grossly distinguished, 
 had not reached even the infancy of that stage in which 
 the passions begin their process of intermodification, nor 
 could have reached it, from the simplicity of social life, 
 as well as from the barbarism of the Greek religion. 
 The author of the " Iliad," or even of the " Odyssey " 
 (though doubtless a product of a later period), could not 
 have been " unhealthy," or " sullen," or " querulous," 
 from any cause, except psora or elephantiasis, or scarcity 
 of beef, or similar afflictions with which it is quite im- 
 possible to inoculate poetry. The metrical romances of 
 the middle ages have the same shivering character of 
 starvation, as to the inner life of man ; and, if that con- 
 stitutes a meritorious distinction, no man ought to be 
 excused for wanting what it is so easy to obtain by 
 simple neglect of culture. On the same principle, a 
 cannibal, if truculently indiscriminate in his horrid diet, 
 might win sentimental praises for his temperance , 
 others were picking and choosing, miserable epicures ! 
 but he, the saint upon earth, cared not what he ate ; any 
 joint satisfied his moderate desires ; shoulder of man, leg 
 of child ; anything, in fact, that was nearest at hand, so 
 long as it was good, wholesome human flesh ; and the 
 more plainly dressed the better. 
 
 But these topics, so various and so fruitful, I toich 
 
S8 
 
 JOHN KEATS. 
 
 only because they are introduced, amongst many others, 
 by Mr, Gilfillan. Separately viewed, some of these 
 would be more attractive than any merely personal in- 
 terest connected with Keats. His biography, stripped, 
 of its false coloring, offers little to win attention ; for he 
 was not the victim of any systematic malignity, as has 
 been represented. He met, as I have understood, with 
 imusua. kindness from his liberal publishers, Messrs. 
 Taylor and Hessey. He met with unusual severity 
 from a cynical reviewer, the late Mr. Gifford, then 
 editor of The Quarterly Review. The story ran, thai 
 this article of Mr. G.'s had killed Keats; upon which 
 with natural astonishment. Lord Byron thus commentea 
 in the 1 1th canto of Don Juan : — 
 
 " John Keats who was killed off by one critique, 
 Just as he really promised something great, 
 
 If not intelligible, — without Greek, 
 
 Contrived to talk about the gods of late. 
 
 Much as they might have been supposed to speak. 
 Poor fellow ! his was an untoward fate : 
 
 'Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle. 
 
 Should let itself be snuffed out by an Article." 
 
 Strange, indeed ! and the friends who honor Keat^ 
 memory, should not lend themselves to a story so do 
 grading. He died, I believe, of pulmonary consumption 
 and would have died of it, probably, under any circum 
 stances of prosperity as a poet. Doubtless, in a condition 
 of languishing decay, slight causes of irritation act 
 powerfully. But it is«hardly conceivable that one ebul- 
 lition of splenetic bad feeling, in a case so proverbially 
 open to revision as the pretensions of a poet, could have 
 overtxirown any masculine life, unless where that life 
 
JOHN KEATS. 89 
 
 had already been irrecoverally undermined by sickness. 
 As a man, and viewed in relation to social objects, 
 Keats was nothing. It was as mere an affectation when 
 he talked with apparent zeal of liberty, or human rights, 
 or human prospects, as is the hollow enthusiasm which 
 many people jirofess for music, or most poets for external 
 nature. For these things Keats fancied that he cared ; 
 but in reality he cared not at all. Upon them, or any 
 of their aspects, he had thought too little, and too in- 
 determinately, to feel for them as personal concerns. 
 Whereas Shelley, from his earliest days, was mastered 
 and shaken by the great moving realities of life, as a 
 prophet is by the burden of wrath or of promise which 
 he has been commissioned to reveal. Had there been 
 no such thing as literature, Keats would have dwindled 
 into a cipher. Shelley, in the same event, would hardly 
 have lost one plume from his crest. It is in relation to 
 literature, and to the boundless questions as to the true 
 and the false arising out of literature and poetry, that 
 Keats challenges a fluctuating interest ; sometimes an 
 interest of strong disgust, sometimes of deep admiration. 
 There is not, I believe, a case on record throughout 
 European literature, where feelings so repulsive of each 
 other have centred in the same individual. The very 
 midsummer madness of affectation, of false vapory 
 sentiment, and of fantastic effeminacy, seemed to me 
 combined m Keats' Endymion, when I first saw it near 
 the close of 1821. The Italian poet, Marino, had been 
 reputed the greatest master of gossamery affectation in 
 Europe. But Ms conceits showed the palest of rosy 
 blushes by the side of Keats' bloody crimson. Natu- 
 'ally, I was discouraged from looking further But 
 
90 JOHN KEATS. 
 
 about a week later, by pure accident, my eye fell upoa 
 his Hyperion. The first feeling was that of incredulity 
 that the two poems could, under change of circum- 
 stances or lapse of time, have emanated from the same 
 mind. The ETidymion displays absolutely the most 
 shocking revolt against good sense and just feeling, that 
 all literature does now, or ever can furnish. The Hy- 
 perion, as Mr. GilfiUan truly says, " is the greatest of 
 poetical torsos." The first belongs essentially to the 
 vilest collections of wax-work filigree, or gilt ginger- 
 bread. The other presents the majesty, the austere 
 beauty, and the simplicity of Grecian temples enriched 
 with Grecian sculpture. 
 
 We have in this country a word, namely, the word 
 Folly, which has a technical appropriation to the case of 
 fantastic buildings. Any building is called " a folly," 6 
 which mimics purposes incapable of being realized, and 
 makes a promise to the eye which it cannot keep to the 
 experience. The most impressive illustration of this 
 idea, which modern times have seen, was, undoubtedly, 
 the ice-palace of the Empress Elizabeth ^ — 
 
 " That most magnificent and mighty freak," 
 
 which, about eighty years ago, was called up from the 
 depths of winter by 
 
 " The imperial mistress of the fur-clad Russ." 
 
 Winter and the Czarina were, in this architecture, fel- 
 low-laborers. She, by her servants, furnished the blocks 
 of ice, hewed them, dressed them, laid them : winter 
 furnished the cement, by freezing them together. The 
 palace has lorig melted back into water; and the poet 
 
JOHN KEATS. 
 
 91 
 
 who described it best, namely, Cowper, is not so much 
 read in this age, except by the religious. It will, there- 
 fore, be a sort of resurrection for both the palace and 
 the poet, if I cite his description of this gorgeous folly. 
 It is a passage in which Cowper assumes so much of a 
 Mib /-lie tone, that, of the two, it is better to have read 
 his lasting description, than to have seen, with bodily 
 eyes the fleeting reality. The poet is apostrophizing 
 the Empress Elizabeth. 
 
 " No forest fell, 
 
 When thou -wouldst build : no quarry sent its stores 
 To enrich thy walls : but thou didst hew the floods 
 And make thy marble of the glassy wave. 
 
 Silently as a dream the fabric rose : 
 
 No sound of hammer or of saw was there : 
 
 Ice upon ice, the well adjusted parts 
 
 Were soon conjoined, nor other cement asked 
 
 Than water interfused to make them one. 
 
 Lamps gracefully disposed, and of all hues, 
 
 Illumined every side ; a watery light 
 
 Gleamed through the clear transparency, that seemed 
 
 Another moon new-risen : 
 
 Nor wanted aught within 
 
 That royal residence might well befit 
 
 For grandeur or for use. Long weavy wreaths 
 
 Of flowers, that feared no enemy but warmth, 
 
 Blushed on the panels. Mirror needed none, 
 
 Where all was vitreous : but in order due 
 
 Convivial table and commodious seat 
 
 (What seemed at least commodious seat) were there 
 
 Sofa, and couch, and high-built throne august. 
 
 The same lubricity was found in all, 
 
92 JOHN KEATS. 
 
 And all was moist to the warm touch ; a scene 
 Of evanescent glory, once a stream, 
 And soon to slide into a stream again." 
 
 The poet concludes by viewing the whole as an ui> 
 intentional stroke of satire by the Czarina, 
 
 ^—— " On her own estate, 
 
 On human grandeur, and the courts of kings. 
 
 'T was transient in its nature, as in show 
 
 'T was durable ; as worthless, as it seemed 
 
 Intrinsically precious : to the foot 
 
 Treacherous and false, — it smiled, and it was cold." 
 
 Looking at this imperial plaything of ice in the 
 month of March, and recollecting that in May all its 
 crystal arcades would be weeping away into vernal 
 brooks, one would have been disposed to mourn over a 
 beauty so frail, and to marvel at a frailty so elaborate. 
 Yet still there was some proportion observed : the saloons 
 were limited in number, though not limited in splendor. 
 It was a petit Trianon. But what if, like Versailles 
 this glittering bauble, to which all the science of Europe 
 could not have secured a passport into June, had con- 
 tained six thousand separate rooms ? A " folly " on so 
 gigantic a scale would have moved every man to indig- 
 nation. For all that could be had, the beauty to the eye, 
 and the gratification to the fancy, in seeing water tor- 
 tured into every form of solidity, resulted from two or 
 three suites of rooms, as fully as from a thousand. 
 
 Now, such a folly, as would have been the Czarina's, 
 if executed upon the scale of Versailles, or of the new 
 palace at St. Petersburg, was the Endymion : a gigantic 
 edifice (for its tortuous engimas of thought multiplied 
 every line of the four thousand into fifty) reared upon a 
 
JOUX KEATS. 
 
 93 
 
 basis slighter and less apprehensible than moonshine. 
 As reasonably, and as hopefully in regard to human 
 -sympathies, might a man undertake an epic poem upon 
 tiie loves of two butterflies. The modes of existence 
 in the two parties to the love-fable of the Endymion, 
 their relations to each other and to us, their prospects 
 finaKy, and the obstacles to the instant realization of 
 these prospects, — all these things are more vague and 
 incomprehensible than the reveries of an oyster. Still 
 the unhappy subject, and its unhappy expansion, must 
 be laid to the account of childish years and childish in- 
 experience. But there is another fault in Keats, of the 
 first magnitude, which youth does not palliate, which 
 youth even aggravates. This lies in the most shocking 
 abuse of his mother-tongue. If there, is one thing in 
 this world that, next after the flag of his country and its 
 spotless honor, should be wholly in the eyes of a young 
 poet, — it is the langiiage of his country. He should 
 spend the third part of his life in studying this language, 
 and cultivating its total resources. He should be willing 
 to pluck out his right eye, or to circumnavigate the globe, 
 if by such a sacrifice, if by such an exertion, he could 
 attain to greater purity, precision, compass, or idiomatic 
 energy of diction. This if he were even a Kalmuck 
 Tartar, who by the way/ms the good feeling and patriotism 
 to pride himself upon his beastly language.'? But 
 Keats was an Englishman ; Keats had the honor to 
 speak the language of Chaucer, Shakspeare, Bacon, 
 Milton, Newton. The more awful was the obligation 
 of his allegiance. , And yet upon this mother tongue, 
 upon this English language, has Keats trampled as with 
 the hoofs of a bufTalo. With its syntax, wUh its pros- 
 
94 JOHN KEATS. 
 
 ody, with its idiom, he has played such fantastic tricks 
 as could enter only into the heart of a barbarian, and 
 for which only the anarchy of Chaos could furnish a 
 forgiving audience. Verily it required the Hyperion to 
 weigh against the deep treason of these unparalleled 
 jffences. 
 
NOTES. 
 
 Note 1. Page 80. 
 
 There is one peculiarity about Lucretius which, even in the ab- 
 sence of all anecdotes to that eflfect, "would have led an observing 
 reader to suspect some unsoundness in his brain. It is this, and 
 it lies in his manner. In all poetic enthusiasm, however grand 
 and sweeping may be its compass, so long as it is healthy and nat- 
 ural, there is a principle of self-restoration in the opposite direc- 
 tion : there is a counter state of repose, a compensatory state, as 
 in the tides of the sea, which tends continually to reestablish the 
 equipoise. The lull is no less intense than the fury of commotion. 
 But in Lucretius there is no lull. Nor would thei'e seem to be any, 
 were it not for two accidents : 1st, the occasional pause in his rav- 
 ing tone enforced by the interruption of an episode ; 2dly, the 
 restraints (or at least the susjiensions) imposed upon him by tlie dif- 
 ficulties of argument conducted in verse. To dispute metrically, 
 IS as embarrassing as to run or dance when knee-deep in sand. 
 Else, and apart from these counteractions, the motion of the style 
 is not only stormy, but self-kindling and continually accelerated. 
 
 Note 2. Page 81. 
 
 " Habit of body : " but much more from mismanagement of 
 his body. Dr. Johnson tampered with medical studies, and fancied 
 himself learned enough to prescribe for his female correspondents. 
 Tht affectionateness with which he sometimes did this is interest- 
 ing ; tut his ignorance of the subject is not the less apparent. In 
 
 (95) 
 
96 JOHN KEATS. 
 
 his own case he had the merit of one heroic self-conquest ; he 
 ■weaned himself from wine, having once become convinced that it 
 ■was injurious. But he never brought himself to take regular 
 exercise. He ate too much at all times of his life. And in another 
 point, he betrayed a thoughtlessness, which (though really com- 
 mon as laughter) is yet extravagantly childish. Everybody knows 
 that Dr. Johnson was all his life reproaching himself with lying 
 too long in bed. Always he was sinning (for he thought it a 
 Bin) ; always he was repenting , always he was vainly endeavoring 
 to reform. But why vainly ? Cannot a resolute man in six weeks 
 bring himself to rise at a?iy hour of the twenty-four? Certainly 
 he can ; but not without appropriate means. Now the Doctor rose 
 about eleven, A. m. This, he fancied, was shocking ; he was de- 
 termined to rise at eight, or at seven. Very well ; why not ? But 
 will it be credited that the one sole change occurring to the Doc- 
 tor's mind, was to take a flying leap backwards from eleven to 
 eight, without any corresponding leap at the other terminus of his 
 sleep? To rise at eight instead of eleven, presupposes that a man 
 goes off to bed at twelve instead of three. Yet this recondite 
 truth never to his dying day dawned on Dr. Johnson's mind. 
 The conscientious man continued to offend ; continued to repent ; 
 continued to pave a disagreeable place with good intentions, and 
 daily resolutions of amendment ; but at length died full of years, 
 without having once seen the sun rise, except in some Homeric 
 description, written (as Mr. Fynes Clifton makes it probable) 
 thirty centuries before. The fact of the sun's rising at all, the 
 Doctor adopted as a point of faith, and by no means of personal 
 knowledge, from an insinuation to that effect in the most ancient 
 of Greek books. 
 
 Note 3. Page 83. 
 
 One of these examples is equivocal, in a way that Mr. Gilfillan 
 is apparently not aware of. He cites Tickell, " whose very name " 
 (he says) " savors of laughter," as being, " in foct, a very happy 
 fellow." In the first place, Tickell would have been likely to" 
 " square " at Mr. Gilfillan for that liberty taken with his name ; or 
 might even, in Falstaff 's language, have tried to " tickle his ca- 
 tastrophe." It is a ticklish thing to lark with honest men's names 
 
NOTES. 97 
 
 But, secondly, which Tickell ? For there are tTvo at the least in 
 the field of English literature ; and if one of them was " very 
 happy," the chances are, according to D. Bernoulli and De Moivre, 
 that the other was particularly miserable. The first Tickell, who 
 may be described as Addison's Tickell, never tickled anything, that 
 I know of, except Addison's vanity. But Tickell the second, who 
 came into working order about fifty years later, was really a very 
 pleasant fellow. In the time of Burke he diverted the whole na- 
 tion by his poem of " Anticipation," in which he anticipated and 
 dramatically rehearsed the course of a whole parliamentary de- 
 bate (on the king's speech), which did not take place till a week 
 or two afterwards. Such a mimicry was easy enough ; but thai 
 did not prevent its fidelity and characteristic truth from delighting 
 the political world. 
 
 Note 4. Page 86. 
 
 For the same reason, I refrain from noticing the pretensions of 
 Savage. Mr. Gilfillan gives us to understand, that not from 
 want of room, but of time, he does not (which else he could) 
 prove him to be the man he pretended to be. For my own part, I 
 believe Savage to have been the vilest of swindlers ; and in these 
 days, under the surveillance of an active police, he would have lost 
 the chance which he earned of being hanged, by having long pre- 
 viously been transported to the plantations. How can Mr. Gilfil- 
 lan allow himself, in a case of this nature, to speak of " universal 
 impression " (if it had really existed) as any separate ground of 
 credibility for Savage's tale ? When the public have no access at 
 all to sound means of judging, what matters it in which direction 
 their " impression " lies, or how many thousands swell the belief, 
 for which not one of all these thousands has anything like a reason 
 to offer ? 
 
 Note 5. Page 90. 
 
 '• A folly." We English limit the application of this term to 
 buildings ; but the idea might as fitly be illustrated in other ob- 
 jects. For instance, the famous galley presented to one of the 
 Ptolemies, which offered the luxurious accommodations of capital 
 
^S JOHN KEATS. 
 
 cities, but required a little army of four thousand men to row i., 
 whilst its draught of water was too great to allow of its often ap- 
 proaching the shore ; this was "a folly" in our English sense. 
 So again was the Macedonian phalanx. The Roman legion could 
 form upon a7iy ground ; it was a true working tool. But the pha- 
 lanx was too fine and showy for use. It required for its manoeu- 
 vring a sort of opera stage, or a select bowling-green, such as few 
 fields of battle offered. 
 
 Note 6. Page 90. 
 
 I had written the "Empress Catherine;" but, on second 
 thoughts, it occurred to me that the " mighty freak " was, in fact, 
 due to the Empress Elizabeth. There is, however, a freak con- 
 nected with ice, not quite so "mighty," but quite as autocratic, 
 and even more feminine in its caprice, which belongs exclusively 
 to the Empress Catherine. A lady had engaged the affections of 
 some young nobleman, who was regarded favorably by the impe- 
 rial eye. No pretext offered itself for interdicting the marriage ; 
 but, by way of freezing it a little at the outset, the Czarina coupled 
 with her permission this condition — that the wedding night should 
 be passed by the young couple on a mattress of her gift. The 
 mattress turned out to be a block of ice, elegantly cut, by the 
 court upholsterer, into the likeness of a well-stuffed Parisian mat- 
 tress. One pities the poor bride, whilst it is difficult to avoid 
 laughing in the midst of one's sympathy. But it is to be hoped 
 that no ukase was issued against spreading seven Turkey carpets, 
 by way of under-blankets, over this amiable nuptial present. 
 Amongst others who have noticed the story, is Captain Colville 
 Frankland, of the navy. 
 
 Note 7. Page 93. 
 
 Bergmann, the German traveller, in his account of his long 
 rambles and residence amongst the Kalmucks, makes us acquainted 
 with the delirious vanity which possesses these demi-savages. 
 Their notion is, that excellence of every kind, perfection in the 
 least things as in the greatest, is briefly expressed by calling it 
 Kalmuckish. Accordingly, their hideous language, and their vast 
 
NOTES. 
 
 99 
 
 national poem (doubtless equally hideous), they hold to be the 
 immediate gifts of inspiration : and for this I honor them, as each 
 generation learns both from the lips of their mothers. This great 
 poem, by the way, measures (if I remember) seventeen English 
 miles in length ; but the most learned man amongst them, in fact 
 a monster of erudition, never read further than the eighth mile- 
 stone. What he could repeat by heart was little more than a mde 
 and a half; and, indeed, that was found too much for the choleric 
 part of his audience. Even the Kalmuck face, which to us foolish 
 Europeans looks so unnecessarily flat and ogre-like, these honest 
 Tartars have ascertained to be the pure classical model of human 
 beaoty,- which, in fact, it is, upon the principle of those people 
 who hold that the chief use of a face is - to frighten ones enemy. 
 
OLIVER GOLDSMITTT.* 
 
 This book accomplishes a retribution which the world 
 has waited for through seventy and odd years. Wel- 
 come at any rate by its purpose, it is trebly welcome 
 by its execution, to all hearts that linger indulgently 
 over the frailties of a national favorite once wickedly 
 exaggerated — to all hearts that brood indignantly over 
 the powers of that favorite once maliciously under- 
 valued. 
 
 A man of original genius, shown to us as revolving 
 through the leisurely stages of a biographical memoir, 
 lays open, to readers prepared for sympathy, two 
 separate theatres of interest : one in his personal 
 career; the other in his works and his intellectual 
 development. Both unfold together; and each bor- 
 rows a secondary interest from the other : the life 
 from the recollection of the works — the works from 
 the joy and sorrow of the life. There have, indeed, 
 been authors whose great creations, severely precon- 
 ceived in a region of thought transcendent to all 
 impulses of earth, would have been pretty nearly 
 what they are under any possible changes in the 
 
 'Tlie Life aivl Adventures of Goldsmitli, by Jolm Forster. 
 
 (101) 
 
102 OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 
 
 dramatic arrangement of their lives. Happy or not 
 happy — gay or sad — these authors would equally 
 have fulfilled a mission too solemn and too stern in 
 its obligations to suffer any warping from ".hance, or 
 to bend before the accidents of life, whether dressed 
 in sunshine or in wintry gloom. But generally this 
 is otherwise. Children of Paradise, like the Miltons 
 of our planet, have the privilege of stars — to " dwell 
 apart." But the children of flesh, whose pulses beat 
 too sympathetically with the agitations of mother- 
 earth, cannot sequester themselves in that way.- They 
 walk in no such altitudes, but at elevations easily 
 reached by ground-winds of humble calamity. And 
 from that cup of sorrow, which upon all lips is pressed 
 in some proportion, they must submit, by the very 
 tenure on which they hold their gifts, to drink, if not 
 more profoundly than others, yet always with more 
 peril to the accomplishment of their earthly mission. 
 
 Amongst this household of children too tremulously 
 associated to the fluctuations of earth, stands forward 
 conspicuously Oliver Goldsmith. And there is a belief 
 current, that he was conspicuous, not only in the 
 .sense of being constitutionally flexible to the impres- 
 sions of sorrow and adversity, in case they had hap- 
 pened to occur, but also that he really had more than 
 his share of those afflictions. We are disposed to 
 think that this was not so. Our trust is, that Gold- 
 smith lived upon the whole a life which, though 
 troubled, was one of average enjoyment. Unques- 
 tionably, when reading at midnight, and in the middle 
 watch of a century which he never reached, this 
 record ot one so amiable, so guileless, so upright, or 
 
OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 103 
 
 sccnung- to be otherwise for a moment only in the 
 eyes of those who did not know his difficulties, nor 
 could have understood them ; when recurring also to 
 his admirable genius, to the sweet natural gayety of 
 his oftentimes pathetic humor, and to the varied ac- 
 complishments from talent or erudition, by which he 
 gave eflect to endowments so fascinating — one cannot 
 but sorrow over the strife which he sustained, and 
 over the wrong by which he suffered. A few natural 
 tears one sheds at the rehearsal of so much contumely 
 from fools, which he stood under unresistingly as one* 
 bareheaded under a hail-storm ; ^ and worse to bear 
 than the scorn of fools, were the imperfect sympathy 
 and jealous, self-distrusting esteem which he received 
 to the last from friends. Doubtless he suffered much 
 wrong ; but so, in one way or other, do most men : 
 he suffered also this special wrong, that in his life- 
 time he never was fully appreciated by any one friend 
 — something of a counter-movement ever mingled 
 WMth praise for Min — he never saw himself enthroned 
 in the heart of any young and fervent admirer, and 
 he w^as always overshadowed by men less deeply 
 genial, though more showy than himself; but these 
 things happen, and have happened, to myriads amongst 
 the benefactors of earth. Their names ascend in 
 songs of thankful commemoration, but not until the 
 ears are deaf that would have thrilled to the music. 
 And these were the heaviest of Goldsmith's afflictions : 
 what are likely to be thought such, namely, the battles 
 which he fought for his daily bread, we do not numbei 
 amongst them. To struggle is not to sufTer. Heaven 
 grants to few of us a life of untroubled prosperity, 
 
11)4 OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 
 
 and grants it least of all to its favorites. Charles I. 
 carried, as it was thought by a keen Italian judge of 
 physiognomy, a predestination to misery written in 
 his features. And it is probable that if any Cornelius 
 Agrippa had then been living, to show him in early 
 life the strife, the bloodshed, the triumphs of enemies, 
 the treacheries of friends, the separation forever from 
 the familiar faces of his hearth, which darkened the 
 years from 1642 to 1649, he would have said — 
 " Prophet of woe ! if I bear to live through this vista 
 of seven years, it is because at the further end of it 
 thou showest me the consolation of a scaffold." And 
 yet our persuasion is, that in the midst of its deadly 
 agitations and its torments of suspense, probably 
 enough by the energies of hope, or even of anxiety 
 which exalted it, that period of bitter conflict was 
 found by the king a more ennobling life than he would, 
 have found in the torpor of a prosperity too profound. 
 To be cloj^ed perpetually is a worse fate than some- 
 times to stand within the vestibule of starvation ; and 
 we need go no further than the confidential letters 
 of the court ladies of this and other countries to satisfy 
 ourselves how much worse in its effects upon happi- 
 ness than any condition of alarm and peril, is the 
 lethargic repose of luxury too monotonous, and of 
 security too absolute. If, therefore, Goldsmith's life 
 had been one of continual struggle, it would not follow 
 that it had therefore sunk below the standard of ordi- 
 nary happiness. But the life-struggle of Goldsmith, 
 though severe enough (after all allowances) to chal- 
 lenge a feeling of tender compassion, was not in such 
 a degree "severe as has been represented. ^ He en 
 
OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 105 
 
 ,uyed two great immunities from suffering that have 
 been much overlooked ; and such immunities that, ia 
 our opinion, four in five of all the people ever con- 
 nected with Goldsmith's works, as publishers, printers, 
 compositors (that is, men taken at random), have very 
 probably suffered more, upon the whole, than he. 
 The immunities were these: — 1st, From any bodily 
 taint of low spirits. He had a constitutional gayety 
 of heart; an elastic hilarity; and, as he himself ex- 
 presses it, " a knack of hoping " — which knack could 
 not be bought with Ormus and with Ind, nor hired for 
 a day with the peacock-throne of Delhi. How easy 
 was it to bear the brutal affront of being to his face 
 described as " Doctor minor" when one hour or less 
 would dismiss the Doctor major, so invidiously con- 
 tradistinguished from himself, to a struggle with scrof- 
 ulous melancholy ; whilst he, if returning to solitude 
 and a garret, was returning also to habitual cheerful- 
 ness. There lay one immunity, beyond all price, 
 from a mode of strife to which others, by a large 
 majority, are doomed — strife with bodily wretched- 
 ness. Another immunity he had of almost equal 
 value, and yet almost equally forgotten by his biog- 
 raphers, namely, from the responsibilities of a family. 
 Wife and children he had not. They it is that, being 
 a man's chief blessings, create also for him the dead- 
 liest of his anxieties, that stuff his pillow with thorns, 
 that surround his daily path with snares. Suppose the 
 case of a man who has helpless dependents of this 
 claos upon himself summoned to face some sudden 
 failure of his resources : how shattering to the power 
 of exertion, and, above all, of exertion by an organ 
 
 5* 
 
106 OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 
 
 SO delicate as the creative intellect, dealing with sub- 
 jects so coy as those of imaginative sensibility, to know 
 that instant ruin attends his failure ! Success in such 
 paths of literature might at the best be doubtful ; 
 but success is impossible, with any powers whatever, 
 unless in a genial state of those powers ; and this 
 geniality is to be sustained, in the case supposed, whilst 
 the eyes are fixed upon the most frightful of abysses 
 yawning beneath his feet. He is to win his inspira- 
 tion for poetry or romance from the prelusive cries 
 of infants clamoring for daily bread. Now, on the 
 other hand, in the case of an extremity equally sudden 
 alighting on the head of a man in Goldsmith's posi- 
 tion, having no burden to support but the trivial one 
 of his own personal needs, the resources are endless 
 for gaining time enough to look around. Suppose 
 him ejected from his lodgings ; let him walk into the 
 country, with a pencil and a sheet of paper ; there, 
 sitting under a hay-stack for one morning, he may 
 produce what will pay his expenses for a week : a 
 day's labor will carry the sustenance of ten days. 
 Poor may be the trade of authorship, but it is as good 
 as that of a slave in Brazil, whose one hour's work 
 will defray the twenty-four hours' living. As a reader, 
 or corrector of proofs, a good Latin and French scholar 
 (like Goldsmith) would always have enjoyed a pref- 
 erence, we presume, at any eminent printing-office. 
 This again would have given him time for looking 
 round ; or, he might perhaps have obtained the same 
 advantage for deliberation from some confidential 
 friend's hospitality. In short, Goldsmith enjoyed the 
 two privileges, one subjective — the other objective-- 
 
OLIVER GOLDSBU'^H. 107 
 
 which, when uniting' in the same man, would prove 
 more than a match for all difficulties that could arise in 
 a literary career to him who was at once a man of 
 genius so popular, of talents so versatile, of reading so 
 various, and of opportunities so large for still more ex- 
 tended reading. The subjective privilege lay in his 
 huoyanc}^ of animal spirits ; the objective in his free- 
 dom frv.n responsibilities. Goldsmith wanted very little 
 more than DioL;enes ; now Diogenes could only have 
 been robbed of his tub ; ^ which perhaps Vv^as about as 
 big as most of poor Goldsmith's sitting-rooms, and far 
 better ventilated. So that the liability of these two 
 men cynic and non-cynic, to the kicks of fortune, was 
 pretty much on a par ; whilst Goldsmith had the advan- 
 tage of a better temper for bearing them, though cer- 
 tainly Diogenes had the better climate for soothing his 
 temper. 
 
 But it may be imagined, that if Goldsmith were thus 
 fprtunately equipped for authorship, on the other hand, 
 the position of literature, as a money-making resource, 
 WIS in Goldsmith's days less advantageous than ours. 
 We are not of that opinion ; and the representation by 
 which Mr. Forster endeavors to sustain it seems to us 
 a showy but untenable refinement. The outline of his 
 argument is, that the aristocratic patron had, in Gold- 
 smith's day, by the progress of society, disappeared ; he 
 belonged to the past — that the mercenary publisher had 
 taken his place — he represented the ugly present — but 
 I hat the great reading public (that true and equitable 
 pnt'on, as some fancy) had not yet matured its means of 
 effectual action upon literature ; this reading public 
 virtually, perhaps, belonged to the future. All this we 
 
108 OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 
 
 Steadfastly resist. No doubt the old full-blown patron 
 €71 grand costume, with his heraldic bearings ernblaziined 
 at the head of the Dedication, was dying out, like the 
 golden pippin. But he still lingered in sheltered situa- 
 tions. And part of the machinery by wliich patronage 
 had ever moved, namely, using influence for obtaining 
 subscriptions, was still in capital working order, — a fact 
 M'hich we know from Goldsmith himself (see the L.l- 
 quiry) ; for he tells us that a popular mode of publication 
 amongst bad authors, and certainly it needed no pub- 
 lisher's countersign, was by means of subscription 
 papers : upon which, as we believe, a considerable instal- 
 ment was usually paid down when as yet the book 
 existed only by way of title-page, supposing that the 
 whole sum were not even paid up. Then as to the 
 publisher (a nuisance, we dare say, in all stages of his 
 Natural History), he could not have been a weed firs* 
 springing up in Goldsmith's time, but must always havp 
 been an indispensable broker or middleman between thi- 
 author and the world. In the days even of Horace ani 
 Martial the hooV-seller (bibliopola) clearly acted as book 
 publisher. Amongst other passages proving this, ano 
 showing undeniably that Martial at least had sold the 
 copyright of his work to his publisher, is one arguin' 
 pretty certainly that the price of a gay drawing-roon 
 copy must have been hard upon £1. lis. Qd. Did eve 
 any man hear the like ? A New York newspaper woulr* 
 have been too happy to pirate the v.hole of Martia 
 had he been three times as big, and would have en 
 gaged to drive the bankrupt publisher into a madhousi 
 for twopence. Now, it cannot be supposed that Mar 
 tial, a gay, light-hearted fellow, willing to let the public 
 
OLIVER GOLDSMI'IH. 109 
 
 have his book for a shilling', or perhaps for love, had 
 been the person to put that ridiculous price upon it. 
 We may conclude that it was the publisher. As to 
 the public, that respectable character must always 
 have presided over the true and final court of appeal, 
 silently defying- alike the prestige of patronage and the 
 intriguing mysteries of publishing. Lordly patronage 
 might fill the sails of one edition, and masterly pub- 
 lishing of three. But the books that ran contagiously 
 through the educated circles, or that lingered amongst 
 them for a generation, must have owed their success 
 to the unbiased feelings of the reader — not overawed 
 by authority, not mystified by artifice. Varying, how- 
 ever, in whatever proportion as to power, the three 
 possible parties to an act of publication will always be 
 seen intermittingly at work — the voluptuous self-in- 
 dulging public, and the insidious publisher, of course • 
 but even the brow-beating patron still exists in a nevv 
 avatar. Formerly he made his descent upon earth in 
 the shape of Dedicatee ; and it is true that this august 
 being, to whom dedications burned incense upon an 
 altar, withdrew into sunset and twilight during Gold- 
 smith's period ; but he still revisits the glimpses of the 
 moon in the shape of author. When the auctoritas of 
 a peer could no longer sell a book by standing at the 
 head of a dedication, it lost none of its power when 
 standing on the title-page as the author. Vast cata- 
 logues might be composed of books and pamphlets that 
 have owed a transient success to no other cause on 
 earth than the sonorous title, or the distinguished posi- 
 tion of those who wrote them. Ceasing to patronize 
 other people's books, the grandee has still power to 
 
110 OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 
 
 patronize his own. All celebrities have this form ot 
 patronage. And, for instance, had the boy Jones * 
 (otherwise called Inigo Jones) possessed enough of 
 book-making skill to forge a plausible curtain-lecture, 
 as overheard by himself when concealed in Her Maj- 
 esty's bed-room, ten steam-presses, working day and 
 night, would not have supplied the public demand ; and 
 even Her Majesty must herself have sent for a large 
 paper copy, were it only to keep herself au courant 
 of English literature. In short, first, the extrinsic* 
 patronage of books ; secondly, the self-patronage of 
 books in right of their merits ; and, thirdly, the artifi- 
 cial machineries for difiiising the knowledge of their 
 existence, are three forces, in current literature that 
 ever have existed and must exist, in some imperfect 
 degree. Horace recognizes them in his 
 
 " Non Di, non homiues, non concessere columnoe." 
 
 The Di are the paramount public, arbitrating finally 
 on the fates of books, and generally on some just 
 ground of judgment, though it may be fearfully exag- 
 gerated on' the scale of importance. The homines are 
 the publishers ; and a sad homo the publisher some- 
 times is, particularly when he commits insolvency. 
 But the columncB are those pillars of state, the grandees 
 of our own age, or any other patrons, that support the 
 golden canopy of our transitory pomps, and thus shed 
 an alien glory of colored light from above upon the 
 books falling within that privileged area. 
 
 We are not, therefore, of Mr. Forster's opinion, that 
 Goldsmith fell upon an age less favorable fo the ex- 
 pansion of literary powers, or to the attainment of 
 
OLIVER GOLDSMITH. Ill 
 
 literary distinction, than any other. The patron might 
 be a tradition— but the public was not therefore a 
 prophecy. My lord's trumpets had ceased to sound, 
 but the vox pnpuli was not therefore muffled. The 
 means, indeed, of diffusive advertisement and of rapid 
 circulation, the combinations of readers into reading 
 societies, and of roads into iron net-works, were 
 as yet imperfectly developed. These gave a potent 
 stimulus to periodic literature. And a still more 
 operative difference between ourselves and them is — 
 that a new class of people has since then entered our 
 reading public, namely, the class of artisans and of all 
 below the gentry, which (taken generally) was in 
 Goldsmith's day a cipher, as regarded any real en- 
 couragement to literature. In our days, if The Vicar 
 of Wakefield had been published as a Christmas tale, 
 it would have produced a fortune to the writer. In 
 Goldsmith's time, few below the gentry were readers 
 on any large scale. So far there really loas a disad 
 vantage. But it was a disadvantage which applied 
 chiefly to novels. The new influx of readers in oui 
 times, the collateral afiluents into the main stream 
 from the mechanic and provincial sections of our 
 population, which have centupled the volume of the 
 original current, cannot be held as telling favorably 
 upon literature, or telling at all, except in the depart-- 
 ments of popularized science, of religion, of fictitious 
 tales and of journalism. To be a reader, is no longer, 
 as once it was, to be of a meditative turn. To be a 
 very popular author is no longer that honorary distinc- 
 tion which once it might have been amongst a more 
 elevated because more select body of readeis. We 
 
112 OLIVER fiOLDSiuITH. 
 
 do not say this invidiously, or with any special refer- 
 ence. But it is evident that writers and readers must 
 often act and reiict for reciprocal degradation. A 
 writer of this day, either in France or England, to be 
 very popular, must be a story-teller ; which is a func- 
 tion ot literature neither very noble in itself, nor, 
 secondly, tending to permanence. All novels what- 
 ever, the best equally with the worst, have faded almost 
 with the generation that produced them. This is a 
 curse written as a superscription above the whole class. 
 The modes of combining characters, the particular 
 objects selected for sympathy, the diction, and often 
 the manners,^ hold up an imperfect mirror to any 
 generation that is not their own. And the reader of 
 novels belonging to an obsolete era, whilst acknowl- 
 edging the skill of the groupings, or the beauty of the 
 situations, misses the echo to that particular revelation 
 of human nature which has met him in the social 
 aspects of his own day ; or too often he is perplexed 
 by an expression which, having dropped into a lower 
 use, disturbs the unity of the impression, or is revolted 
 by a coarse sentiment, which increasing refinement 
 Has made unsuitable to the sex or to the rank of the 
 character. How bestial and degrading at this day 
 seem many of the scenes in Smollett ! How coarse 
 are the ideals of Fielding ! — bis odious Squire West- 
 ern, his odious Tom Jones ! What a gallery of his- 
 trionic masqueraders is thrown open in the novels of 
 Richardson, powerful as they were once found by the 
 two leading nations of the earth. A popular writer, 
 therefore, who, in order to be popular, must speak 
 through novels, speaks to what is least permanent \\\ 
 
OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 115 
 
 human sensibilities. That is already to be se.f-de 
 ijraded. Secondly, because the novel-reading class ii 
 br far the most comprehensive one, and, being such, 
 must count as a large majority amongst its members 
 t/jose who are poor in capacities of thinking, and 
 are passively resigned to the instinct of immediate 
 pleasure — to these the writer must chiefly humbio 
 himself; he must study their sympathies, must assume 
 them, must give them back. In our days, he must 
 give them back even their own street slang ; so servile 
 is the modern novelist's dependence on his canaille of 
 an audience. In France, amongst the Sues, &c., it 
 has been found necessary to give back even the closest 
 portraits of obscene atrocities that shun the light, and 
 burrow only in the charnel-houses of vast manufac- 
 turing towns. Finally, the very principle of com- 
 manding attention only by the interest of a tale, which 
 means the interest of a momentary curiosity that is to 
 vanish forever in a sense of satiation, and of a mo- 
 mentary suspense, that, having once collapsed, can 
 never be rekindled, is in itself a confession of reli- 
 ance upon the meaner offices of the mind. The result 
 from all which is — that to be popular in the most 
 extensive walk of popularity, that is, as a novelist, a 
 writer must generally be in a very considerable degree 
 self-degraded by sycophancy to the lowest order of 
 minds, and cannot (except for mercenary purposes) 
 think himself advantageously placed. 
 
 To have missed, therefore, this enormous expansion 
 of the reading public, however unfortunate for Gold- 
 smith's purse, was a great escape for his intellectua. 
 purity. Every man has two-edged tendencies lurking 
 8 
 
"I ] I OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 
 
 within himself, pointing in one direction to what will 
 expand the elevating principles of his nature, pointing 
 In another to what will tempt him to its degradation. 
 4 mob is a dreadful audience for chafing and irri- 
 tating the latent vulgarisms of the human heart. 
 Exaggeration and caricature, before such a tribunal, 
 become inevitable, and sometimes almost a duty. 
 The genial but not very delicate humor of Goldsmith 
 would in such circumstances have slipped, by the most 
 natural of transitions, into buffoonery ; the unaffected 
 pathos of Goldsmith would, by a monster audience, 
 have been debauched into theatrical sentimentality. 
 All the motions of Goldsmith's nature moved in the 
 direction of the true, the natural, the sweet, the gentle. 
 In the quiet times, politically speaking, through which 
 his course of life tiavelled, he found a musical echo 
 to the tenor of his own original sensibilities — in the 
 architecture of European history, as it unfolded its 
 proportions along the line of his own particular expe- 
 rience, there was a symmetry with the propositions of 
 his own unpretending mind. Our revolutionary age 
 would have unsettled his brain. The colossal move- 
 ments of nations, from within and from without; the 
 sorrow of the times, which searches so deeply ; the 
 grandeur of the times, which aspires so loftily ; these 
 forces, acting for the last fifty years by secict syr.V- 
 pathy upon our fountains of thinking and impassioned 
 speculation, have raised them, from depths never 
 visited by our fathers, into altitudes too dizzy for 
 their contemplating. This generation and the last 
 with their dreadful records, would have untuned Gold 
 smith for writing in the key that suited him ; and 7/5 
 
OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 115 
 
 they would have untuned for understanding his music, 
 had we not learned to understand it in childhood, 
 before the muttering hurricanes in the upper air had 
 begun to reach our young ears, and forced them away 
 to the thundering overhead, from the carolling of birds 
 amongst earthly powers. 
 
 Goldsmith, therefore, as regards the political aspects 
 of his own times, was fortunately placed ; a thrush or 
 a nightingale is hushed by the thunderings which are 
 awakening to Jove's eagle. But an author stands in 
 relation to other influences than political ; and some 
 of these are described by Mr. Forster as peculiarly 
 unfavorable to comfort and respectability at the era of 
 Goldsmith's novitiate in literature. Will Mr. Forster 
 excuse us for quarrelling with his whole doctrine upon 
 this subject — a subject and a doctrine continually 
 forced upon our attention, in these days, by the extend- 
 ing lines of our own literary order, and continually 
 refreshed in warmth of coloring by the contrast as 
 regards social consideration, between our literary body 
 and the corresponding order in France. The ques- 
 tions arising have really a general interest, as well as 
 a special one, in connection with Goldsmith ; and 
 therefore we shall stir them a little, not with any view 
 of exhausting the philosophy that is applicable to the 
 case, but simply of amusing some readers (since 
 Pliny's remark on history is much more true of litera- 
 ture or literary gossip, namely, that " quoquo modo 
 scripta delectat ") ; and with the more ambitious purpose 
 of recalling some other readers from precipitate conclu- 
 sions upon a subject where nearly all that is most 
 plausible happens to be most untrue. 
 
116 OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 
 
 Mr. Forster, in his views upon the social rights of 
 literature, is rowing pretty nearly in the same boat 
 as Mr. Carlyle in his views upon the rights of labor. 
 Each denounces, or by implication denounces, as an 
 oppression and a nuisance, what we believe to be a 
 Lecessity inalienable from the economy and structure 
 of our society. Some years ago Mr. Carlyle offended 
 us all (or all of us that were interested in social phi- 
 losophy) by enlarging on a social affliction, which few 
 indeed needed to see exposed, but most men would 
 have rejoiced to see remedied, if it were but on paper, 
 and by way of tentative suggestion. Precisely at that 
 point, however, where his aid was invoked, Mr. Carlyle 
 halted. So does Mr. Forster with legard to his griev- 
 ance ; he states it, and we partly understand him — as 
 ancient Pistol says — " We hear him with ears ; " and 
 when we wait for him to go on, saying — " Well, here 's 
 a sort of evil in life, how would you redress it ? you 've 
 shown, or you 've made another hole in the tin-kettle 
 of society; how do you propose to tinker it?" — 
 behold ! he is suddenly almost silent. But this cannot 
 be allowed. The right to insist upon a well-known 
 grievance cannot be granted to that man (Mr. Carlyle, 
 for instance, or Mr. Forster) who uses it as matter of 
 blame and denunciation, unless, at the same time, he 
 points out the methods by which it could have been 
 prevented. He that simply bemoans an evil has a 
 right to his moan, though he should make no preten- 
 sions to a remedy; but he that criminates, that im- 
 putes the evil' as a fault, that charges the evil upon 
 selfishness or neglect lurking in some alterable arrange- 
 ments of society, has no light to do so, unless he can 
 
OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 117 
 
 instantly sketch the remedy ; for the very first step by 
 which he could ha^'e learned that the evil involved a 
 blame, the first step that could have entitled him to 
 denounce it as a wrong, must have been that step 
 which brought him within the knowledge (wanting to 
 eveiybody else) that it admitted of a cure. A wrong 
 it could not have been even in his eyes, so long as it 
 was a necessity, nor a ground of complaint until the 
 cure appeared to him a possibility. And the over- 
 riding motto for these parallel speculations of Messrs. 
 Carlyle and Forster, in relation to the frailties of our 
 social system, ought to have been, " Sanabilibus 
 (Bgrotamus nialis." Unless with this watchword they 
 had no right to commence their crusading march. 
 Curable evils justify clamorous complaints ; the incur- 
 able justify only prayers. 
 
 Why it was that Mr. Carlyle, in particular, halted bo 
 steadily at the point where his work of love was first 
 beginning, it is not difficult to guess. As the " Statutes 
 at large " have not one word against the liberty of 
 unlicensed hypothesis, it is conceivable that Mr. C. 
 might have indulged a little in that agreeable pastime; 
 but this, he was well aware, would have brought him 
 in one moment under the fire of Political Economy, 
 from the whole vast line of its modern batteries. 
 
 These o-entlemen, the economists, would have torn to 
 
 * ... 
 
 ribbons, within fifteen mmutes, any positive specula- 
 tion for amending the evil. It w^as better, therefore.. 
 to keep within the trenches of the blank negative, 
 pointing to everything as wrong — horribly wrong, but 
 never hinting at the mysterious right ; which, to this 
 
118 OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 
 
 day, we grieve to say, remains as mysterious as 
 ever. ® 
 
 Passing to Mr. Forster, who (being capable of a 
 splendor so original) disappoints us most when he 
 reminds us of Mr. Carlyle, by the most disagreeable 
 of that gentleman's phraseological forms ; and, in this 
 instance, by a speculation twin-sister to the economic 
 one just noticed ; we beg to premise that m anything 
 here said, it is far from our wish to express disaffection 
 to the cause of our literary brothers. We grudge 
 them nothing that they are ever likely to get. We 
 wish even that the House of Commons would see 
 cause for creating majorats in behalf of us all ; only 
 whispering in the ear of that honorable House to 
 appoint a Benjamin's portion to ourselves, as the parties 
 who suggested the idea. But what is the use of benev- 
 olently bequeathing larks for dinner to all literary 
 men, in all time coming, if the sky must fall before 
 they can bag our bequest ? We shall discuss Mr. 
 Forster's views, not perhaps according to any arrange- 
 ment of his, but according to the order in which they 
 come back to our own remembrance. 
 
 Goldsmith's period, Mr. F. thinks, was bad — not 
 merelj'' by the transitional misfortune (before noticed) 
 of coming too late for the patron, and too soon for the 
 public (which is the compound ill-luck of being a day 
 after one fair, and a month too soon for the next), — 
 but also by some cooperation in this evil destiny 
 through misconduct on the part of authors themselves 
 (p. 70). Not "the circumstances" only of authors 
 were damagrd, but the " literary character " it?elf. 
 We are sorry to hear that. But, as long as they did 
 
OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 119 
 
 not commit murder, we have a great indulgence for 
 the frailties of authors. If ever the " benefit of clergy " 
 could be fairly pleaded, it might have been by Grub 
 Street for petty larceny. The "clergy" they surely 
 could have pleaded ; and the call for larceny was so 
 audible in their condition, that in them it might be 
 called an instinct of self-preservation, which surely 
 was not implanted in man to be disobeyed. One word 
 allow us to say on these three topics : — 1. The con- 
 dition of the literary body in its hard-working section 
 at the time when Goldsmith belonged to it. 2. Upon 
 the condition of that body in England as compared 
 with that of the corresponding body in France. 3. 
 Upon the condition of the body in relation to patronage 
 purely political. 
 
 1. The pauperized (or Grub Street) section of the 
 literary body, at the date of Goldsmith's taking service 
 amongst it, was (in Mr. Forster's estimate) at its very 
 lowest point of depression. And one comic presump- 
 tion in favor of that notion we ourselves remember ; 
 namely, that Smart, the prose translator of Horace, and 
 a well-built scholar, actually let himself out to a month- 
 ly journal on a regular lease of ninety-nine years. '^ What 
 could move the rapacious publisher to draw the leass 
 for this monstrous term of years, we cannot conjec- 
 ture. Surely the villain might have been content with 
 threescore years and ten. But think, reader, of poor 
 Smart two years after, upon another publisher's apply- 
 ing to him vainly for contributions, and angrily de- 
 manding v'hat possible objection could be made to 
 offers so liberal, being reduced to answer — " No objec- 
 tion, sir, whatever, except an unexpired te-m of ninety* 
 
120 OLIVER GOLDhilvinrf. 
 
 seven years yet to run." The bookseller saw that he 
 must not apply again in that century ; and, in fact, 
 Smart could no longer let himself, but must be sub-let 
 (if let at all) by the original lessee. Query now — 
 was Smart entitled to vote as a freeholder, and Smart's 
 children (if any were born during the currency of 
 the lease), w^ould they be serfs, and ascripti prelo? 
 Goldsmith's own terms of self-conveyance to Griffiths 
 ■ — the terms we mean on which he "conveyed " his per- 
 son and free-agency to the uses of the said Griffiths 
 (or his assigns ?) — do not appear to have been much 
 more dignified than Smart's in the quality of the con- 
 ditions, though considerably so in the duration of the 
 term; Goldsmith's lease being only for one year, and 
 not for ninety-nine, so that he had (as the reader per- 
 ceives) a clear ninety-eight years at his own disposal. 
 We suspect that poor Oliver, in his guileless heart, 
 never congratulated himself on having made a more 
 felicitous bargain. Indeed, it was not so bad, if every- 
 thing be considered; Goldsmith's situation at the time 
 was bad ; and for that very reason the lease (otherwise 
 monstrous) was not bad. He was to have lodging, 
 board, and " a small salary," very small, we suspect ; 
 and in return for all these blessings, he had nothing to 
 do, but to sit still at a table, to work hard from an 
 early hour in the morning until 2 P. M. (at which ele- 
 gant hour we presume that the parenthesis of dinner 
 occurred), but also — which, not being an article in the 
 lease, might have been set aside, on a motion before the 
 King's Bench — to endure without mutiny the correc- 
 tion and revisal of all his MSS. by Mrs. Griffiths, 
 wife to Dr. G. the lessee. This affliction of Mrs. Br. 
 
OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 121 
 
 G. surmounting his shoulders, and controlling his pen, 
 seems to us not at all less dreadful than that of Sinbad 
 when indorsed with the old man of the sea ; and we, 
 in Goldsmith's place, should certainly have tried how 
 far Sinbad's method of abating the nuisance had lost 
 its efficacy by time, namely, the tempting our oppressor 
 to get drunk once or twice a day, and then suddenly- 
 throwing Mrs. Dr. G. off her perch. From that " bad 
 eminence," which she had audaciously usurped, what 
 harm could there be in thus dismounting this " old 
 woman of the sea " ? And as to an occasional thump 
 or so on the head, which Mrs. Dr. G. might have 
 caught in tumbling, that was her look-out ; and might 
 besides have improved her style. For really now, if 
 the candid reader will believe us, we know a case, odd 
 certainly but very true, where a young man, an author 
 by trade, 8 who wrote pretty well, happening to tumble 
 out of a first-floor in London, was afterwards observed 
 to grow very perplexed and almost unintelligible in his 
 style ; until some years later, having the good fortune 
 (like Wallenstein at Vienna) to tumble out of a two-pair 
 of stairs window, he slightly fractured his skull, but, on 
 the other hand, recovered the brilliancy of his long 
 fractured style. Some people there are of our ac- 
 quaintance who would need to tumble out of the attic 
 story before they could seriously improve their style. 
 
 Certainly these conditions — the hard work, the being 
 chained by the leg to the writing-table, and above all 
 the having one's pen chained to that of Mrs. Dr. Grif- 
 fiths, do seem to countenance Mr. F.'s idea, that Gold- 
 smith's period was the purgatory of authors. And we 
 freely confess — that excepting Smart's lainety-nine 
 
122 OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 
 
 years' lease, or the contract between the Devil and Dr. 
 Faustus, we never heard of a harder bargain driven 
 with any literary man. Smart, Faustus, and Goldsmith, 
 were clearly overreached. Yet, after all, was this treat- 
 ment in any important point (excepting as regards Dr. 
 Faustus) worse than that given to the whole college of 
 Grub Street in - the days of Pope ? The first edition 
 of the Dunciad dates from 1727 : Goldsmith's matric- 
 Uxation in Grub Street dates from 1757 — just thirty 
 years later; which is one generation. And it is im- 
 portant to remember that Goldsmith, at this time in his 
 twenty-ninth year, was simply an usher at an obscure 
 boarding-school ; had never practised writing for the 
 press ; and had not even himself any faith at all in 
 his own capacity for writing. It is a singular fact, 
 which we have on Goldsmith's own authority, that until 
 his thirtieth year (that is, the year he spent with Dr. 
 and Mrs. Griffiths) it never entered into his head that 
 literature was his natural vocation. That vanity, which 
 has been so uncandidly and sometimes so falsely attrib- 
 uted to Goldsmith, was compatible, we see, if at all it 
 existed, with the humblest estimate of himself. Still, 
 however much this deepens our regard for a man of so 
 much genius united with so much simplicity and unas- 
 sumingness, humility would not be likely to raise his 
 salary ; and we must not forget that his own want of 
 self-esteem would reasonably operate on the terms 
 offered by Griffiths. A man, who regarded himself as 
 little more than an amanuensis, could not expect much 
 Detter wages than an under-gardener, which perhaps 
 ne had. And, weighing all this, we see little to have 
 altered in the lease — that was fair enough ; only as 
 
OLIVER GOLDSJIITH, 123 
 
 regarded the execution of the lease, we really must 
 have protested, under any circumstances, against Mrs. 
 Doctor Griffiths. That woman would have broken the 
 back of a camel, which must be supposed tougher than 
 the heart of an usher. There we should have made a 
 ferocious stand ; and should have struck for much 
 higher wages, before we could have brought our mind 
 to think of capitulation. It is remarkable, however, 
 that this year of humble servitude was not only (or, as 
 if by accident) the epoch of Goldsmith's intellectual 
 development, but also the occasion of it. Nay, if all 
 were known, perhaps it may have been to Mrs. Doctor 
 Griffiths in particular that we owe that revolution in 
 his self-estimation which made Goldsmith an author 
 by deliberate choice. Hag-ridden every day, he must 
 have plunged and kicked violently to break loose 'from 
 this harness ; but, not impossibly, the very effort of 
 contending with the hag when brought into collision 
 with his natural desire to soothe the hag, and the inev- 
 itable counter-impulse in any continued practice of 
 composition, towards the satisfaction at the same time 
 of his own reason and taste, must have furnished a 
 most salutary palcBStra for the education of his literary 
 powers. When one lives at Rome, one must do as 
 they do at Rome : when one lives with a hag, one 
 must accommodate oneself to haggish caprices ; be- 
 sides, that once in a month the hag might be right ; or 
 if not, and supposing her always in the wrong, which 
 perhaps is too much to assume even of Mrs. Dr. G., 
 that would but multiply the difficulties of reconciling 
 her demands with the demands of the general reader 
 and of Goldsmith's own judgment. And in the pres- 
 
124 OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 
 
 sure of these difficulties would lie the very value of this 
 rough Spartan education. Rope-dancing cannot be 
 very agreeable in its elementary lessons ; but it must 
 be a capital process for calling out the agilities that 
 slumber in a man's legs. 
 
 Still, though these hardships turned out so beneft- 
 cially to Goldsmith's intellectual interests, and, conse- 
 quently, so much to the .advantage of all who have 
 since delighted in his works, not the less on that ac- 
 count they were hardships, and hardships that imposed 
 heavy degradation. So far, therefore, they would seem 
 to justify Mr. Forster's characterization of Goldsmith's 
 period by comparison with Addison's period ^ on the 
 one side, and our own on the other. But, on better 
 examination, it will be found that this theory is sus- 
 tained only by an unfair selection of the antithetic 
 objects in the comparison. Compare Addison's age 
 generally with Goldsmith's — authors, prosperous or 
 unprosperous, in each age taken indiscriminately — 
 and the two ages will be found to ofTer " much of a 
 muchness." But, if you take the paupers of one gener-_ 
 ation to contrast with the grandees of another, how is 
 there any justice in the result? Goldsmith at starting 
 was a penniless man. Except by random accidents 
 he had not money enough to buy a rope, in case he 
 had fancied himself in want of such a thing. Addison, 
 on the contrary, was the son of a tolerably rich man ; 
 lived gayly at a most aristocratic college (Magdalen), 
 in a most aristocratic university ; formed early and 
 brilliant connections with the political party that were 
 magnificently preponderant until the last four years of 
 Queen Anne ; travelled on the Continent, not as a 
 
OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 125 
 
 po;]('?trian mendicant, housing with owls, and thankful 
 fjr the bounties of a village fair, but with the appolnt- 
 PK^nts and introduction of a young nobleman ; and 
 became a secretary of state, not by means of his 
 "delicate humor," as Mr. Forster chooses to svppose, 
 but through splendid patronage, and (speaking Hiber- 
 nice) through a " strong back." His bad verses, his 
 Blenheim, his Cato, in later days, and other rubbish, 
 had been the only part of his works that aided his rise ; 
 and even these would have availed him little, had he 
 not originally possessed a locus standi, from which he 
 could serve his artilleries of personal flatteries with 
 commanding effect, and could profit by his successes. 
 As to the really exquisite part of his writings, that did 
 him no yeoman's service at all, nor could have done; 
 for he was a made man, and had almost received 
 notice to quit this world of prosperous whiggery, 
 before he had finished those exquisite prose miscella- 
 nies. Pope, Swift, Cxay, Prior, &c., all owed their 
 social positions to early accidents of good connections 
 and sometimes of luck, which would not, indeed, have 
 supplied the place of personal merit, but which gave 
 lustre and effect to merit where it existed in strength. 
 There were authors quite as poor as Goldsmith in the 
 Addisonian age ; there were authors quite as rich as 
 Pope, Steele, &c., in Goldsmith's age, and having the 
 same social standing. Goldsmith struggled with so 
 much distress, not because his period was more inau- 
 spicious, but because his connections and starting 
 advantages were incomparably less important. Hia 
 profits were so trivial because his capital was next to 
 none. 
 
126 OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 
 
 So far, as regards the comparison between Gold- 
 smith's age and the one immediately before it. But 
 now, as regards the comparison with our own, removed 
 by two generations — can it be said truly that the lit- 
 erary profession has risen in estimation, or is rising ? 
 There is a difficulty in making such an appraisement ; 
 and from different minds there would proceed very 
 different appraisements ; and even from the same mind, 
 surveying the case at different stations. For, on the 
 one hand, if a greater breadth of social respectability 
 catches the eye on looking carelessly over the body of 
 our modern literati, which may be owing chiefly to the 
 large increase of gentlemen that in our day have en- 
 tered the field of literature ; on the other hand, the 
 hacks and hayidicraftsmen whom the shallow education 
 of newspaper journalism has introduced to the press, 
 and whom poverty compels to labors not meriting the 
 name of literature, are correspondingly expandmg their 
 files. There is, however, one reason from analogy, 
 which may incline us to suppose that a higher consi^U 
 eration is now generally conceded to the purposes of 
 literature, and, consequently, a juster estimate made 
 of the persons who minister to those purposes. Litera- 
 ture — provided we use that word not for the mere 
 literature of knowledge, but for the literature of 
 power, using it for literature as it speaks to what 
 is genial in man, namely, to the human spirit, ana 
 7wt for literature (falsely so called) as it speaks to the 
 meagre understanding — is a fine art ; and not only 
 so, it is the supreme of the fine arts ; nobler, for in- 
 stance, potentially, 4han painting, or sculpture, or archi- 
 tecture. Now all the fine arts, thai popularly are 
 
OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 127 
 
 called such, have risen in esteem within the last gen- 
 eration. The most aristocratic of men will now ask 
 into his own society an artist, whom fifty years ago he 
 would have transferred to the house-steward's table 
 And why? Not simply because more attention hav 
 ing been directed to the arts, more notoriety has gath 
 ered about the artist ; for that sort of eclat would not 
 work any durable change ; but it is because the inter- 
 est in the arts having gradually become much more 
 of an enlightened interest, the public has been slowly 
 trained to fix its attention upon the intellect which is 
 presupposed in the arts, rather than upon the offices of 
 pleasure to which they minister. The fine arts have 
 now come to be regarded rather as powers that are to 
 mould, than as luxuries that are to embellish. And it 
 has followed that artists are valued more by the elabo- 
 rate agencies which they guide, than by the fugitive 
 sensations of wonder or sympathy which they evoke. 
 
 Now this is a change honorable to both sides. The 
 public has altered its estimate of certain men; and 
 yet has not been able to do so, without previously en- 
 larging its idea of the means through which those men 
 operate. It could not elevate the men, without previ- 
 ously elevating itself. But, if so, then, in correcting 
 their appreciation of the fine arts, the public must si- 
 rr.ultaneously have corrected their appreciation of lit- 
 erature ; because, whether men have or have not been in 
 Ihe habit of regarding literature as a fine art, this they 
 must have felt, namely, that literature, in its more genial 
 functions, works by the very same organs as the liberal 
 arts, speaks to the same heart, operates through the 
 same compound nature, and educates the same deep 
 
12S OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 
 
 sympathies with mysterious ideals of beauty. There 
 lies the province of the arts usually acknowledged as 
 fine or liberal ; there lies the province of fine or liberal 
 literature. And with justifiable pride a litterateur may 
 say — that his fine art wields a sceptre more potent 
 than any other ; literature is more potent than other 
 fine arts, because deeper in its impressions according- 
 to the usual tenor of human sensibilities ; because 
 more extensive, in the degree that books are more 
 diffused than pictures or statues ; because more dura- 
 hie, in the degree that language is durable beyond 
 marble or canvas, and in the degree that vicarious 
 powers are opened to books for renewing their phcenix 
 immortality through unlimited translations ; powers 
 denied to painting except through copies that are 
 feeble, and denied to sculpture except to casts that are 
 costly. 
 
 We infer that, as the fine arts have been rising, 
 literature (on the secret feeling that essentially it 
 moves by the same powers) must also have been rising ; 
 that, as the arts will continue to rise, literature will 
 continue to rise ; and that, in both cases, the men, the 
 ministers, must ascend in social consideration as the 
 things, the ministrations, ascend. But there is another 
 form, in which the same result offers itself to our 
 notice ; and this should naturally be the last paragraph 
 in this section 1, but, as we have little room to spare, 
 it may do equally well as the first paragraph in section 
 2, namely, on the condition of our own literary body by 
 comparison with the same body in France. 
 
 2. Who were the people amongst ourselves, that, 
 throughout the eighteenth century, chiefly came for 
 
OLIVKR GOLDSMITH. 129 
 
 ^'ard as luulervaluers of literature ? They belonged 
 to two very different classes — the aristocracy and the 
 commercial body, who agreed in the thing, but on 
 very different impulses. To the mercantile man, the 
 author was an object of ridicule, from natural poverty ; 
 natural, because there was no regular connection be- 
 tween literature and any mode of money-making. By 
 accident the author might not be poor, but profession- 
 ally, or according to any obvious opening for an income, 
 he was. Poverty was the badge of all his tribe. Amongst 
 the aristocracy, the instinct of contempt, or at least of 
 sliglu regard towards literature, was supported by the 
 irrelation of literature to the state. Aristocracy itself 
 was the flower and fruitage of the state; a nobility 
 was possible only in the ratio of the grandeur and 
 magnificence developed for social results; so that a 
 poor and unpopulous nation cannot create a great aris- 
 tocracy : the flower and foliation must be in relation 
 to the stem and the radix out of which they germinate. 
 Inevitably, therefore, a nobility so great as the English 
 — that not in pride, but in the mere logic of its politi- 
 cal relations, felt its order to be a sort of heraldic 
 shield, charged with the trophies and ancestral glories 
 of the nation — could not but in its public scale of 
 appreciation estimate every profession and rank of 
 men by the mode of their natural connection with 
 the state. Law and arms, for instance, were honored, 
 not because any capricious precedent had been estab- 
 lished of a title to public honor in favor of those pro- 
 lessions, but because, through their essential functions, 
 they opened for themselves a permanent necessity of 
 introsusception into the organism of the state. A grea 
 9 6^ 
 
130 OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 
 
 law officer, a great military leader, a popular admiral, 
 is already, bv virtue of his functions, a noble in men's 
 account, whether you gave or refused him a title ; and 
 in such cases it has always been the policy of an aris 
 tocratic state to confer, or even impose the title, lest 
 the disjunction of the virtual nobility from the titular 
 should gradually disturb the estimate of the latter 
 But literature, by its very grandeur, is degraded social- 
 ly; for its relations are essentially cosmopolitan, or. 
 speaking more strictly, not cosmopolitan, which might 
 mean to all other peoples considered as national states, 
 whereas literature has no relation to any sections or 
 social schisms amongst men — its relations are to the 
 race. In proportion as any literary work rises in its 
 pretensions ; for instance, if it works by the highest 
 forms of passion, its nisus, its natural effort is to 
 address the race, and not any individual nation. That 
 it found a bar to this nisus, in a limited language, was 
 but an accident: the essential relations of every great 
 intellectual work are to those capacities in man by 
 which he tends to brotherhood, and not to those by 
 which he tends to alienation. Man is ever coming^ 
 nearer to agreement, ever narrowing his differences, 
 notwithstanding that the interspace may cost an eter- 
 nity to traverse. Where the agreement is, not where 
 the difference is, in the centre of a man's affinities, not 
 of his repulsions, there lies the magnetic centre towards 
 which all poetry that is potent, and all philosophy 
 that is faithful, are eternally travelling by natural ten- 
 dency. Consequently, if indirectly literature may nold 
 a patriotic value as a gay plumage in the cap of a 
 nation, directly, and, by a far deeper tendency, litera- 
 
OLIVER GOLDCM-m. 131 
 
 ture is essentially alien. A poet, a book, a system of 
 religion, belongs to the nation best qualified for appre- 
 ciating their powers, and not to the nation that, per- 
 haps by accident, gave them birth. How, then, is it 
 wonderful that an intense organ of the social piin- 
 ciple in a nation, namely, a nobility, should fail, in 
 their professional character, to rate highly, or even to rec- 
 ognize, as liaving any proper existence, a fine art which 
 is by tendency anti-social (anti-social in this sense, 
 that what it seeks, it seeks by transcending all social 
 barriers and separations) ? Yet it is remarkable that 
 in England, where the aristocracy for three centuries 
 (16th, 17th, 18th) paid so little honor, in their public 
 or corporate capacity, to literature, privately they hon- 
 ored it with a rare courtesy. That same grandee, 
 who would have looked upon Camden, Ben Jonson, 
 Selden, or Hobbes, as an audacious intruder, if occu- 
 pying any prominent station at a state festival, would 
 have received him with a kind of filial reverence in 
 his own mansion ; for, in this place, as having no 
 national reference, as sacred to hospitality, which 
 regards the human tie, and not the civic tie, he would 
 be at liberty to regard the man of letters in his cos- 
 mopolitan character. And on the same instinct, a 
 prince in the very meanest state, would, in a state- 
 pageant commemorating the national honors, assign 
 a distinguished place to the national high admiral, 
 though he were the most stupid of men, and would 
 utterly neglect the stranger Columbus. But in his 
 own palace, and at his own table, he would perhaps 
 invert this order of precedency, and would place 
 Coiumbus at his own ricfht hand. 
 
132 OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 
 
 Some such principle, as is here explained, did 
 certainly prevail in the practice (whether consciously 
 perceived or not in the philosophy) of that England, 
 which extended through the sixteenth and seventeenth 
 centuries. First, in the eighteenth century all honol 
 to literature, under any relation, began to give way. 
 And why ? Because expanding politics, expanding 
 partisanship, and expanding journalism, then first 
 called into the field of literature an inferior class of 
 laborers. Then first it was that, from the noblest of 
 professions, literature became a trade. Literature it 
 was that gave the first wound to literature ; the hack 
 scribbler it was that first degraded the lofty literary 
 artist. For a century and a half we have lived under 
 the shade of this fatal revolution. But, however pain- 
 ful such a state of things may be to the keen sensi- 
 bilities of men pursuing the finest of vocations — 
 carrying forward as inheritors from past generations 
 the eternal chase after truth, and power, and beauty — 
 still we must hold that the dishonor to literature has 
 issued from internal sources proper to herself, and 
 not from without. The nobility of England have, for 
 three and a half centuries, personally practised litera- 
 ture as an elevated accomplishment : our royal and 
 noble authors are numerous ; and they would have 
 continued the same cordial attentions to the literary 
 body, had that body maintained the same honorable 
 composition. But a litterateur, simply as such, it is 
 no longer safe to distinguish with favor ; once, but not 
 now, he was liable to no misjudgment. Once he was 
 pretty sure to be a man of some genius, or, at the 
 least, of unusual scholarship. Now, on the contrary 
 
OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 
 
 133 
 
 a mob of traitors have mingled with the true men , 
 uiid the loyal perish with the disloyal, because it is 
 impossible, in a mob, so vast and fluctuating, for the 
 artillery of avenging scorn to select its victitns. 
 
 All this, bitter in itself, has become more bitter from 
 the contrast furnished by France. We know that 
 literature has long been misappreciated amongst our- 
 selves. In France it has long been otherwise appre- 
 ciated — more advantageously appreciated. And we 
 infer that therefore it is in France more wisely appre 
 riated. But this does not follow.. We have ever been 
 of opinion that the valuation of literature in France, 
 or at least of current literature, and as it shows itself 
 in the treatment of literary men, is unsound, extrava- 
 gant, and that it rests upon a basis originally false. 
 Simply to have been the translator from the English 
 of some prose book, a history or a memoir, neither 
 requiring nor admitting any display of mastery over 
 the resources of language, conferred, throughout tho 
 eighteenth century, so advantageous a position in 
 society upon one whom we English should view as a 
 literary scrub or mechanic drudge, that we really had 
 a riMit to expect the laws of France and the court 
 ceremonies to reflect this feature of public manners. 
 Naturally, for instance, any man honored so prepos- 
 terously ought in law to have enjoyed, in right of his 
 book, the jus trimn liberorum, and perpetual immunity 
 from taxes. Or again, as regards ceremonial honors, 
 on any fair scale of proportions, it was reasonable to 
 expect that to any man who had gone into a fourth 
 edition, the roj^al sentinels should present arms ; that 
 to the author of a successf'il tragedy, the guard should 
 
134 OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 
 
 everywhere turn out; and that an epic poet, if ever 
 such a difficult birth should make its epiphany in PariS; 
 must look to have his approach towards a soiree an- 
 nounced by a salvo of a hundred and one guns. 
 
 Our space will not allow us to go into the illustraiive 
 details of this monstrous anomaly in French society. 
 We confine ourselves to its cause — as sufficienlly 
 explaining why it is that no imitation of such absurdi- 
 ties can or ought to prosper in England. The same 
 state of things, under a different modification, takes 
 place in Germany ; and from the very same cause. 
 Is it not monstrous, or was it not until within recent 
 days, to find every German city drawing the pedantic 
 materials and the pedantic interest of its staple con- 
 versation from the systems and the conflicts of a few 
 rival academic professors ? Generally these para- 
 mount lords of German conversation, that swayed its 
 movements this way or that, as a lively breeze sways 
 a cornfield, were metaphysicians ; Fichte, for in- 
 stance, and Hegel. These were the arid sands that 
 bibulously absorbed all the perennial gushings of Ger- 
 man enthusiasm. France of the last century and the 
 modern Germany were, as to this point, on the same 
 level of foolishness. But France had greatly the ad- 
 vantage in point of liberality. For general literature 
 furnishes topics a thousand times more graceful and 
 fitted to blend with social pleasure, than the sapless 
 problems of ontological systems meant only for scholas- 
 tic use. 
 
 But what then was the cause of this social deform- 
 ity ? Why was literature allowed eventually to 
 disfigure itself by disturbing the natural currents of 
 
OLIVER GOLDSTiUTH. 135 
 
 conversation, to make itself odious by usurpation, and 
 thus virtually to operate as a mode of pedantry ? It 
 was because in neither land had the people any power 
 of free discussion. It was because every question 
 growing out of religion, or connecting itself with 
 laws, or with government, or with governors, with 
 political interests or political machineries, or with 
 judical courts, was an interdicted theme. The mind 
 sought in despair for some free area wide enough to 
 allow of boundless openings for individualities of sen- 
 timent — human enough to sustain the interests of 
 festive discussion. That open area was found in 
 books. In Paris to talk of politics was to talk of the 
 king ; Vetat c'est mot ; to talk of the king in any 
 spirit of discussion, to talk of that Jupiter optivius 
 maximus, from whom all fountains flowed of good and 
 evil things, before whom stood the two golden urns, 
 one filled with lettres de cachet, the other with 
 crosses, pensions, offices, what was it but to dance 
 on the margin of a volcano, or to swim cotillons in 
 the suction of a maelstrom ? Hence it was that 
 literature became the only safe colloquial subject of 
 a general nature in old France ; hence it was that 
 literature furnished the only " open questions ; " ar I 
 hence it is that the mode and the expression of honor 
 to literature in France has continued to this hour 
 tainted with false and histrionic feeling, because orig- 
 inally it grew up from spurious roots, prospered un- 
 naturally upon deep abuses in the system, and at this 
 day (so far as it still lingers) memorializes the politi- 
 cal bondage of the nation. Cleanse, therefore — is 
 our prayer — cleanse, O, unknown Herrules! this 
 
136 OLIVER GOLDSMITH, 
 
 Augean stable of our English current literature, rich m 
 dunghills, rich therefore in precipitate mushroom and 
 fraudulent fungus, yet rich also (if we may utter our 
 real thoughts) — rich preeminently at this hour in 
 seed-plots of immortal growths, and in secret vegeta- 
 tions of volcanic strength ; — cleanse it (O coming 
 rnan ! ) but not by turning through it any river of 
 Lethe, such as for two centuries swept over the jitera 
 ture of France. Purifying waters were these in one 
 sense ; they banished the accumulated depositions of 
 barbarism ; they banished Gothic tastes ; yes, but they 
 did this by laying asleep the nobler activities of a 
 great people, and reconciling them to forgetfulness of 
 all which commanded them as duties, or whispered to 
 them as rights. 
 
 If, therefore, the false homage of France towards 
 literature still survives, it is no object for imitation 
 amongst us ; since it arose upon a vicious element 
 in the social composition of that people. Partially it 
 does survive, as we all know by the experience of the 
 last twenty years, during which authors, and as authors 
 ^not like Mirabeau or Talleyrand in spite of author- 
 ship), have been transferred from libraries to senates 
 and privy councils. This has done no service to 
 literature, but, on the contrary, has degraded it by 
 seducing the children of literature from their proper 
 ambition. It is the glory of literature to rise as if on 
 wings into an atmosphere nobler than that of political 
 intrigue. And the whole result to French literature 
 has been, — that some ten or twelve of the leading 
 literati have been tempted away by bribes from theii 
 
OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 137 
 
 api)ro])nrite duties, while some five thousand have been 
 made envious and discontented. 
 
 At this point, when warned suddenly that the hour 
 glass is running out, which measures our residuum o( 
 flying minutes, we first perceive, on looking round, that 
 we have actually been skirmishing with Mr. Forster, 
 from the beginning of our paper to this very line ; 
 and thus we have left ourselves but a corner for the 
 main purpose (to which our other purpose of " ai'gle- 
 bargling" was altogether subordinate) of expressmg 
 emphatically our thanks to him for this successful 
 labor of love in restoring a half-subverted statue to its 
 upright position. We are satisfied that many thousands 
 of readers will utter the same thanks to him, with equal 
 fervor and with the same sincerity. Admiration for the 
 versatile ability with which he has pursued his object is 
 swallowed up for the moment in gratitude for his perfect 
 success. It might have been imagined, that exquisite 
 truth of household pathos, and of humor, with happy 
 graces of style plastic as the air or the surface of a lake 
 to the pure impulses of nature, sweeping them by the 
 motions of her eternal breath, were qualities authorized 
 to justif}' themselves before the hearts of men, in de- 
 fiance of all that sickly scorn or the condescension of 
 masquerading envy could avail for their disturbance. 
 And so they are ; and left to plead for themselves at 
 such a bar as unbiased human hearts, they could not 
 have their natural influences intercepted. But, in the 
 case of Goldsmith, literary traditions have 7iot left these 
 qualities to their natural influences. It is a fact that up 
 to this hour the contemporary falsehoods at Gold- 
 smith's expense, and (worse perhaps than those false* 
 
13S OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 
 
 hoods the maUcious constructions of incidents partly 
 true, having wings lent to them by the levity and 
 amusing gossip of Boswell, continue to obstruct the full 
 ratification of Goldsmith's pretensions. To this hour 
 the scorn from many of his own age, runs side by side 
 with the misgiving sense of his real native power. 
 A feeling still survives, originally derived from his own 
 age, that the " inspired idiot," wherever he succeeded, 
 ought not to have succeeded, — having owed his success 
 to accident, or even to some inexplicable perverseness in 
 running counter to his own nature. It was by shooting 
 awry that he had hit the mark; and, when most he 
 came near to the bull's eye, most of all " by rights " he 
 ought to have missed it. He had blundered into the 
 Traveller, into Mr. Croaker, into Tony Lumkin ; and 
 not satisfied with such dreadful blunders as these, he 
 had consummated his guilt by blundering into the Vicar 
 of Wakefield, and the Deserted Village ; atrocities over 
 which, in effect, we are requested to drop the veil of 
 human charity ; since, the more gem-like we may choose 
 to think these works, the more unnatural, audacious, 
 and indeed treasonable, it was in an idiot to produce 
 them. 
 
 In this condition of Goldsmith's traditionary character, 
 so injuriously disturbing to the natural eflfect of hia 
 inimitable works (for in its own class each of his best 
 works is inimitable), Mr. Forster steps forward with a 
 three-fold exposure of the falsehood inherent in the 
 anecdotes upon which this traditional character has 
 arisen. Some of these anecdotes he challenges as lit- 
 erally false ; others as virtually so. They are true, per- 
 haps, but under such a version of their circumstances as 
 
OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 1;J9 
 
 would altogether take out the sting of their oflfensive in 
 terpretation. For others again, and this is a profounder 
 service, he furnishes a most just and philosophic expla- 
 nation, that brings them at once within the reader's tol- 
 eration, nay, sometimes within a deep reaction of pity. 
 As a case, for instance, of downright falsehood, we may 
 cite tlie well-known story told by Boswell, — that, when 
 Goldsmith travelled in France with some beautiful youno- 
 English women (meaning the Miss Hornecks), he was 
 seriously uneasy*at the attentions which they received 
 from the gallantry of Frenchmen, as intruding upon his 
 own claims. Now this story, in logical phrase, proves 
 too much. For the man who could have expressed such 
 feelings in such a situation must have been ripe for 
 Bedlam. Coleridge mentions a man who entertained so 
 exalted an opinion of himself, and of his own right to 
 apotheosis, that he never uttered that great pronoun " /," 
 without solemnly taking off his hat. Even to the ob- 
 lique case " 7ne" which no compositor ever honors with 
 a capital M, and to the possessive pronoun vnjawA mine, 
 he held it a duty to kiss his hand. Yet this bedlamite 
 would not have been a competitor with a lady for the 
 attentions paid to her in right of her sex. In Gold- 
 smith's case, the whole allegation was dissipated in the 
 most decisive way. Some years after Goldsmith's death, 
 one of the sisters personally concerned in the case was 
 unafTectedly shocked at the printed story, when commg 
 to her knowledge, as a gross calumny ; her sorrow 
 made it evident that the whole had been a malicious dis- 
 tortion of some light-hearted gayety uttered by Gold- 
 smith. There is little doubt that the story of the bloom 
 
140 OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 
 
 colored coat, and of the puppet-show, rose on a similar 
 basis — the calumnious perversion of a jest. 
 
 But in other cases, where there really may have 
 been some fretful expression of self-esteem, Mr. Furs- 
 ter's explanation transfers the foible to a truer and 
 a more pathetic station. Goldsmith's own precipi- 
 tancy, his overmastering defect in proper reserve, in 
 self-control, and in presence of mind, falling in with 
 the habitual undervaluation of many amongst his 
 associates, placed him at a great disadvantage in 
 animated conversation. His very truthfulness, his 
 simplicity, his frankness, his hurry of feeling, all told 
 against him. They betrayed him into inconsiderate 
 expressions that lent a color of plausibility to the 
 malicious ridicule of those who. disliked him the more, 
 from being compelled, after all, to respect him. His 
 own understanding oftentimes sided with his disparag- 
 ers. He saw that he had been in the wrong; whilst 
 secretly he felt that his meaning — if properly ex- 
 plained — had been right. Defrauded in this way, and 
 by his own cooperation, of distinctions that naturally 
 belonged to him, he was driven unconsciously to 
 attempt some restoration of the balance, by claiming 
 for a moment distinctions to which he had no real pre- 
 tensions. The whole was a trick of sorrow, and of 
 sorrowing perplexity. He felt that no justice had been 
 done to him, and that he himself had made an opening 
 for the wrong. The result he saw, but the process he 
 could not disentangle ; and, in the confusion of his 
 distress, natural irritation threw him upon blind efforts 
 to recover his ground by unfounded claims, when 
 claims so well-founded had been maliciously disallowed 
 
OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 141 
 
 But a day of accounting comes at last, — a day of 
 rehearing for the cause, and of revision for the judg- 
 ment. The longer this review has been delayed, the 
 more impressive it becomes in the changes which it 
 works. Welcome is the spectacle when, after three- 
 fourths of a century have passed away, a writer — 
 qualified for such a task, by ample knowledge of 
 things and persons, by great powers for a comprehen- 
 sive estimate of the case, and for a splendid exposition 
 of its results, with deep sensibility to the merits of the 
 man chiefly concerned in the issue, enthusiastic, but 
 without partisanship — comes forward to unsettle false 
 verdicts, to recombine misarranged circumstances, and 
 to explain anew misinterpreted facts. Such a man 
 wields the authority of heraldic marshals. Like the 
 Otho of the Roman theatre, he has power to raise or 
 to degrade — to give or to take away precedency. 
 But, like this Otho, he has so much power because he 
 exercises it on known principles, and without caprice. 
 To the man of true genius, like Goldsmith, when 
 seating himself in humility on the lowest bench, he 
 says, "Go thou up to a higher place. Seat thyself 
 above those proud men, that once trampled thee in the 
 dust. Be thy memorial upon earth, not (as of some 
 who scorned thee) ' the whistling of a name.' Be 
 thou remembered amongst men by tears of tenderness, 
 by happy laughter untainted with malice, and by the 
 benedictions of those that, reverencing man's nature 
 see gladly its frailties brought within the gracious smile 
 of human charity, and its nobilities levelled to the ap' 
 prehension of simplicity and innocence." 
 
 Over every grave, even though tenanted by guilt and 
 
142 OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 
 
 shame, the human heart, when circumstantially made 
 acquainted with its silent records of suffering- or temp- 
 tation, yearns in love or in forgiveness to breathe a 
 solemn Requiescat ! How much more, then, over the 
 grave of a benefactor to the human race ! But it is a 
 natural feeling, with respect to such a prayer, that, how- 
 ever fervent and sincere, it has no perfect faith in its 
 own validity, so long as any unsettled feud from ancient 
 calumny hangs over the buried person. The undressed 
 wrong seems to haunt the sepulchre in the shape of a 
 perpetual disturbance to its rest. First of all, when this 
 wrong has been adjudicated and expiated, is the Re- 
 quiescat uttered with a perfect faith in itself. By a nat- 
 ural confusion we then transfer our own feelings to the 
 occupant of the grave. The tranquillization to our 
 own wounded sense of justice seems like an atonement 
 to his : the peace for us transforms itself under a fiction 
 of tenderness into a peace for him : the reconciliation 
 between the world that did the wrong and the grave that 
 seemed to suffer it, is accomplished ; the reconciler, in 
 such a case, whoever he may be, seems a double benefac- 
 tor — to him that endured the injury — to us that re- 
 sented it; and in the particular case now before the pub- 
 lic, we shall all be ready to agree that this reconciling 
 friend, who might have entitled his work Vindicice 
 Oliveriance, has, by the piety of his service to a man of 
 exquisite genius, so long and so foully misrepresented, 
 earned a right to interweave forever his own cipher and 
 cognizance in filial union with those of Oliver Gold- 
 smith. 
 
NOTES. 
 
 Note 1. Page 103. 
 
 We do not allude cbiefly to his experience in childhood, when 
 he is reported to have been a general butt of mockery for his 
 ugliness and his supposed stupidity ; since, as regarded the latter 
 reproach, he could not have suifered very long, having already, at 
 a childish age, vindicated his intellectual place by the verses 
 which opened to him an academic destination. We allude to his 
 mature life, and the supercilious condescension with which even 
 his reputed friends doled out their praises to him. 
 
 Note 2. Page 104. 
 
 We point this remark, not at Mr. Forster, who, upon the whole, 
 shares our opinion as to the tolerable comfort of Goldsmith's life ; 
 he speaks indeed elsewhere of Goldsmith's depressions ; but the 
 question still remains — were they of frequent recurrence, and 
 had they any constitutional settlement ? We are inclined to say 
 nj in both cases. 
 
 Note 3. Page 107. 
 
 Which tub the reader may fancy to have been only an old tar 
 barrel ; if so, he is wrong. Isaac Casauborn, after severe re 
 
 (U3) 
 
141 OLIVER GOLDS.MITH. 
 
 eearches into the nature of that tub, ascertained to the general 
 satisfaction of Christendom that it was not of wood, or within 
 the restorative powers of a cooper, but of earthenware, and , once 
 shattered by a horse's kick, quite past repair. In fact, it was a 
 large oil-jar, such as the remnant of tlie forty thieves lurked in, 
 when waiting for their captain's signal from Ali Baba's house ; 
 and, in Attica, it must have cost fifteen shillings, supposing that 
 the philosopher did not steal it. Consequently a week's loss of 
 house-room and credit to Oliver Goldsmith, at the rate of living 
 then prevalent in Grub street, was pretty much the same thing in 
 money value as the loss to Diogenes of his crockery house by burg- 
 lary, or in any nocturnal lark of young Attic wine-bibbers. The 
 underwriters would have done an insurance upon either man at 
 pretty much the same premium. 
 
 Note 4. Page 110. 
 
 It may be necessary to explain, for the sake of the many persons 
 who have come amongst the reading public since the period of the 
 incident referred to, that this was a boy called Jones, who was 
 continually entering Buckingham Palace clandestinely, was as 
 regularly ejected by tlie police, but with respectable pertinacity 
 constantly returned, and on one occasion effected a lodgment in 
 the royal bedchamber. Some happy wit, in just admiration of such 
 perseverance and impudence, christened him Iii-I-go Jones. 
 
 Note 5. Page 112. 
 
 Often, but not so uniformly (the reader will think) as the dic- 
 tion, because the manners are sometimes not those of the writer's 
 own age, being ingenious adaptations to meet the modern writer's 
 conjectural ideas of ancient manners. These, however (even in 
 Sir Walter Scott), are precisely the most mouldering parts in the 
 entire architecture, being always (as, for instance, in Ivanhoe) 
 fantastic, caricatured, and betraying the true modern ground 
 gleaming tlirough the artificial tarnish of antiquity. All novels, 
 in every language, are hurrying to decay ; and hurrying by in- 
 ternal changes, were those all ; but, in the mean time, the ever- 
 
145 
 
 lasting life and fertility of the human miud is forever accelerating 
 this hurry by superseding them, that is, by an external change. 
 Old forms, fading from the interest, or even from the apprehension, 
 have no chance at all as against new forms embodying the same 
 passions. It is only in the grander passions of poetry, allying 
 themselves with forms more abstract and permanent, that such a 
 conflict of the old with the new is possible. 
 
 Note 6. Page 118. 
 
 It onght, by this time, to be known equally amongst govern- 
 ments and philosophers — that for the state to promise with sin- 
 cerity the absorption of surplus labor, as fast as it accumulates, 
 cannot be postulated as a duty, until it can first be demonstrated 
 as a possibility. This was forgotten, however, by Mr. C, whose 
 vehement complaints, that the arable field, without a ploughman, 
 should be in one county, whilst in another county was the stout 
 ploughman without a field ; and sometimes (which was worse 
 still) that the surplus ploughmen should far outnumber the sui-- 
 plus fields, certainly proceeded on the secret assumption that all 
 this was within the remedial powers of the state. The same doc- 
 trine was more openly avowed by various sections of our radicals, 
 who (in their occasional insolent petitions to Parliament) many 
 times asserted that one main use and function of a government 
 was, to find work for everybody. At length (February and March, 
 1848) we see this doctrine solemnly adopted by a French body of 
 rulers, self-appointed, indeed, or perhaps appointed by their wives, 
 and so far sure, in a few weeks, to be answerable for nothing ; but, 
 on the other hand, adopting it as a practical undertaking, in the 
 lawyer's sense, and by no means as a mere gayety of rhetoric. 
 Meantime, they themselves will be "broken" befoi-e they will 
 have had time for being reproached with broken promises ; though 
 neither fracture is likely to i-equire much above the length of a 
 quarantine. 
 
 Note 7. Page 119. 
 
 When writing this passage, we were not aware (as. we now are) 
 that Mr. Forster had himself noticed the case. 
 
146 OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 
 
 • Note 8. Page 121. 
 
 His name began -with A, and ended with N ; there are but three 
 more letters in the name, and if doubt arises upon our story, in 
 the public mind, wc shall publish them. 
 
 Note 9. Page 124. 
 
 If Addison died (as we think he did) in 1717, then, because 
 Goldsmith commenced authorship in 1757, thei'e would be forty 
 years between the two periods. But, as it would be fairer to 
 measure from the centre of Addison's literary career, that is, from 
 1707, the diflerence would be just half a century. 
 
ALEXANDER POPE.* 
 
 Every great classic in our native language should 
 irom time to time be reviewed anew; and espe- 
 cially if he belongs in any considerable extent to 
 that section of the literature which connects itself 
 with manners ; and if his reputation originally, or his 
 style of composition, is likely to have been much influ- 
 enced by the transient fashions of his own age. The 
 withdrawal, for instance, from a dramatic poet, or a 
 satirist, of any false lustre which he has owed to his 
 momentary connection with what we may call the 
 personalities of a fleeting generation, or of any undue 
 shelter to his errors which may have gathered round 
 them from political bias, or from intellectual infirm- 
 ities amongst his partisans, will sometimes seriously 
 modify, after a century or so, the fairest original 
 appreciation of a fine writer. A window, composed 
 of Claude Lorraine glasses, spreads over the land- 
 scape outside a disturbing effect, which not the most 
 practised eye can evade. The eidola theatri effect us 
 all. No man escapes the contagion from his contem- 
 porary bystanders. And the reader may see, further 
 
 • The AVorks of Pope, by Roscoe. 
 
M3 ALEXANDER POFE. 
 
 on, that, had Pope been merely a satiric poet, he must 
 in these times have laid down much of the splendor 
 which surrounds him in our traditional estimate of his 
 merit. Such a renunciation would be a forfeit, n',t 
 always to errors in himself, but sometimes to errors 
 in that stago of English society, which forced the 
 ablest writer into a collusion with its own meretricious 
 tastes. The antithetical prose " characters," as they 
 were technically termed, which circulated amongst the 
 aristocracy in the early part of the last century, the 
 style of the dialogue in such comedy as was then pop- 
 ular, and much of the occasional poetry in that age, 
 expose an immoderate craving for glittering effects 
 from contrasts too harsh to be natural, too sudden to be 
 durable, and too fantastic to be harmonious. To meet 
 this vicious taste, from which (as from any diffusive 
 taste) it is vain to look for perfect immunity in any 
 writer lying immediately under its be'^ms, Pope sacri- 
 ficed, in (me mode of composition, the simplicities of 
 nature and sincerity ; and, had he practised no other 
 mode, we repeat that now he must have descended 
 from his pedestal. To some extent he is degraded 
 even as it is ; for the reader cannot avoid whispering 
 TO himself — what quality of thinking must that be 
 M'hich allies itself so naturally (as will be shown) with 
 distortions of fact or of philosophic truth ? But, had 
 his whole writings been of that same cast, he must 
 have been degraded altogether, and a star would have 
 fallen from our English galaxy of poets. 
 
 We mention this particular case as a reason gen- 
 erally for renewing by intervals the examination of 
 great writers, and liberating the verdict of their con« 
 
ALEXANDER TOPE. 149 
 
 teiiipnrarifts from the casual disturbances to which 
 every 'age is liable in its judgments, and in its tastes. 
 Ai books multiply to an unmanageable excess, selec- 
 tion becomes more and more a necessity for readers, 
 and the power of selection more and more a desperate 
 problem for the busy part of readers. The possibility 
 of selecting wisely is becoming continually more hope- 
 less, as the necessity for selection is becoming continu- 
 ally more crying. Exactly as the growing weight of 
 books overlays and stifles the power of comparison, part 
 passu is the call for comparison the more clamorous ; 
 and thus arises a duty correspondingly more urgent, of 
 searching and revising until everything spurious has 
 been weeded out from amongst the Flora of our highest 
 literature ; and until the waste of time for those who 
 have so little at their command, is reduced to a mini- 
 mum. For, where the good cannot be read in its twen- 
 tieth part, the more requisite it is that no part of the 
 bad should steal an hour of the available time ; and it 
 is not to be endured that people without a minute to 
 spare, should be obliged first of all to read a book 
 before they can ascertain whether it was at all worth 
 reading. The public cannot read by proxy as regards 
 the good which it is to appropriate, but it can as re- 
 gards the poison which it is to escape. And thus, as 
 literature expands, becoming continually more of a 
 household necessity, the duty resting upon critics (who 
 are the vicarious readers for the public) becomes con- 
 tinually more urgent — of reviewing all works that 
 may be supposed to have benefited too much or too 
 indiscriminately by the superstition of a name. The 
 prcBgitstatores should have tasted of every cup, and 
 
150 ALEXANDER POVE. 
 
 reported its quality, before the public call .or it ; and 
 above all, they should have done this in all cases of the 
 higher literature — that is, of literature properly so 
 called. 
 
 What is it that we mean by literature ? Popularly, 
 and amongst the thoughtless, it is held to include every- 
 thing that is printed in a book. Little logic is required 
 to disturb that definition ; the most thoughtless person 
 is easily made aware that in the idea of literature one 
 essential element is, — some relation to a general and 
 common interest of man, so that what applies only 
 to a local, or professional', or merely personal inter- 
 est, even though presenting itself in the shape of a 
 book, will not belong to literature. So far the defini- 
 tion is easily narrowed ; and it is as easily expanded. 
 For not only is much that takes a station in books not 
 literature ; but, inversely, much that really is litera- 
 ture never reaches a station in books. The weekly 
 sermons of Christendom, that vast pulpit literature 
 which acts so extensively upon the popular mind, — to 
 warn, to uphold, to renew, to comfort, to alarm, — does 
 not attain the sanctuary of libraries in the ten thou- 
 sandth part of its extent. The drama again, as, for 
 instance, the finest of Shakspeare's plays in England, 
 and all leading Athenian plays in the noontide of the 
 Atlic stage, operated as a literature on the public mind, 
 and were (according to the strictest letter of that term) 
 ptihlished through the audiences that witnessed i their 
 representation some time before they were published 
 as things to be read ; and they were published in this 
 scenical mode of publication with much more effect 
 
ALEXANDER POPE. 151 
 
 than they could liave had as books, during ages of 
 costly copying or of costly printing. 
 
 Books, therefore, do not suggest an idea coextensive 
 and interchangeable with, the idea o£ literature ; since 
 much literature, scenic, forensic, or didactic (as from 
 lectur-ers and public orators), may never come into 
 bocrcs ; and much that does come into books may 
 connect itself with no literary interest. But a far more 
 important correction, applicable to the common vague 
 idea of literature, is to be sought — not so much in a 
 better definition of literature, as in a sharper distinc- 
 tion of the two functions which it fulfils. In that great 
 social organ, which collectively we call literature, there 
 may be distinguished two separate offices that may 
 blend and often do so, but capable severally of a severe 
 insulation, and naturally fitted for reciprocal repulsion. 
 There is, first, the literature of Ji7iowledge, and, secondly, 
 the literature of power. The function of the first is, 
 to teax:h ; the function of the second is, to move : the 
 first is a rudder, the second an oar or a sail. The 
 first speaks to the mere discursive understanding; the 
 second speaks ultimately, it may happen, to the higher 
 understanding or reason, but always through affections 
 of pleasure and sympathy. Remotely, it may travel 
 towards an object seated in what Lord Bacon calls dry 
 '•ght; but proximately it does and must operate, else 
 it ceases to be a literature of power, on and through 
 .hat humid light which clothes itself in the mists and 
 glittering iris of human passions, desires, and genial 
 emotions. Men have so little reflected on the higher 
 functions of literature, as to find it a paradox if one 
 should describe it as a mean or subordinate purpose of 
 
152 ALEXANDER POPE. 
 
 books to give information. But this is a paradox only 
 in the sense which makes it honorable to be paradoxi- 
 cal. Whenever we talk in ordinary language of 
 seeking information or gaining knowledge, we under- 
 stand the words as connected with something of abso- 
 lute novelty. But it is the grandeur of all truth which 
 can occupy a very high place in human interests, that 
 it is never absolutely novel to the meanest of minds : 
 It exists eternally by way of germ or latent prmciple 
 in the lowest as in the highest, needing to be developed 
 but never to be planted. To be capable of trans- 
 plantation is the immediate criterion of a truth that 
 ranges on a lower scale. Besides which, there is a 
 rarer thing than truth, namely, 'power or deep sympa- 
 thy with truth. What is the effect, for instance, upon 
 society, of children ? By the pity, by the tender- 
 ness, and by the peculiar modes of admiration, which 
 connect themselves with the helplessness, with the 
 innocence, and with the simplicity of children, not 
 only are the primal affections strengthened and con- 
 tinually renewed, but the qualities which are dearest 
 in the sight of Heaven — the frailty, for instance, which 
 appeals to forbearance, the innocence which symbol- 
 izes the heavenly, and the simplicity which is most 
 alien from the worldly, are kept up in perpetual re- 
 membrance, and their ideals are continually refreshed. 
 A purpose of the same nature is answered by the 
 higher literature, namely, the literature of power. What 
 do you learn from Paradise Lost ? Nothing at all. 
 What do you learn from a cookery-book ? Something 
 new, something that you did not know before, in every 
 paragraph. But would you therefore put the wretched 
 
ALEXANDER POPE. 153 
 
 cookery-book on a higher level of estimation than the 
 divine poem ? Wliat you owe to Milton is not any 
 knowledge, of which a million separate items are still 
 but a million of advancing steps on the same earthly 
 level ; what you owe, is power, that is, exercise and 
 expansion to jour own latent capacity of sympathy 
 with the infinite, where every pulse and each separate 
 influx is a step upwards — a step ascending as upon a 
 Jacob's ladder from earth to mysterious altitudes above 
 the earth. All the steps of knowledge, from first to 
 last, carry you further on the same plane, but could 
 never raise you one foot above your ancient level of 
 earth ; whereas, the very Jirst step in power is a flight 
 — is an ascending into another element where earth 
 is forgotten. 
 
 Were it not that human sensibilities are ventilated 
 and continually called out into exercise by the great 
 phenomena of infancy, or of real life as it moves 
 through chance and change, or of literature as it re- 
 combines these elements in the mimicries of poetry, 
 romance, &c., it is certain that, like any animal power 
 or muscular energy falling into disuse, all such sensi- 
 bilities would gradually droop and dwindle. It is in 
 relation to these great moral capacities of man that the 
 literature of power, as contradistinguished from that 
 of knowledge, lives and has its field of action. It is 
 concerned with what is highest in man ; for the Scrip- 
 tures themselves never condescended to deal by sug- 
 gestion or cooperation, with the mere discursive un- 
 derstanding. When speaking of man in his intellect- 
 ual capacity, the Scriptures speak not of the under- 
 standing, but of "the UTiderstandiiig heart^'' — making 
 
 7# 
 
154 ALEXANDER POfc. 
 
 (he heart, that is, the great intuitive (or noivdiscursive^ 
 organ, to be the interchangeable formula for man in 
 his highesi, state of capacity for the infinite. Tragedy 
 romance, fliiry tale, or epopee, all alike restore to 
 man's mind the ideals of justice, of hope, of truth, of 
 mercy, of retribution, which else (left to the support 
 of daily life in its realities) would languish for want of 
 sutficient illustration. What is meant, for instance, by 
 poetic justice? — It does not mean a justice that diifers 
 by its object from the ordinary justice of human juris- 
 prudence ; for then it must be confessedly a very bad 
 kind of justice ; but it means a justice that diifers frora 
 common forensic justice, by the degree in which it 
 attains its object, a justice that is more omnipotent 
 over its own ends, as dealing — not with the refractory 
 elements of earthly life — but with elements of its 
 own creation, and with materials flexible to its own 
 purest preconceptions. It is certain that, were it not 
 for the literature of power, these ideals would often 
 remain amongst us as mere arid national forms 
 whereas, by the creative forces of man put forth in 
 literature, they gain a vernal life of restoration, and 
 germinate into vital activities. The commonest novel, 
 by moving in alliance with human fears and hopes, 
 with human instincts of wrong and right, sustains and 
 quickens those affections. Calling them into action, 
 it rescues them from torpor. And hence the pre- 
 cininency over all authors that merely teach, of the 
 tieanest that moves; or that teaches, if at all, indi- 
 rectly by moving. The very highest work that haa 
 ever existed in the literature of knowledge is but a 
 provisional work : a book upon trial and sufferance, 
 
ALEXANDER POPE. 155 
 
 and quanulm bene se gesserit. Let its teaching be 
 even partially revised, let it be but expanded, nuy, 
 even let its teaching be but placed in a better order, 
 and instantly it is superseded. Whereas the feeblest 
 works in the literature of power, surviving at all, sur- 
 vive as finished and unalterable amongst men. For 
 instance, the Principia of Sir Isaac Newton was a 
 book militant on earth from the first. In all stages of 
 its progress it would have to fight for its existence ; 
 first, as regards absolute truth ; secondly, when that com- 
 bat is over, as regards its form or mode of presenting 
 the truth. And as soon as a La Place, or anybody else, 
 builds higher upon the foundations laid by this book, 
 effectually he throws it out of the sunshine into decay 
 and darkness ; by weapons won from this book he 
 superannuates and destroys this book, so that soon the 
 name of Newton remains, as a mere nominis umhra, 
 but his book, as a living power, has transmigrated into 
 other forms. Now, on the contrary, the Iliad, the 
 Prometheus of ^schylus, — the Othello or King Lear-, 
 — the Hamlet or Macbeth, — and the Paradise Lost, 
 are not militant but triumphant forever as long as the 
 languages exist in which they speak or can be taught 
 to speak. They never can transmigrate into new 
 incarnations. To reproduce these in new forms, or 
 variations, even if in some things they should he im- 
 proved, would be to plagiarize. A good steam-engine 
 is properly superseded by a better. But one lovely 
 pastoral valley is not superseded by another, nor a 
 statue of Praxiteles by a statue of Michael Angelo. 
 These things are not separated by imparity, but by 
 disparity. They arc not thought of as unequal under 
 
156 ALEXANDER POPE. 
 
 the same standard, but as different in ki7id, and as 
 equal under a different standard. Human works of 
 immortal beauty and works of nature in one respect 
 stand on the same footing : they never absolutely 
 repeat each other ; never approach so near as not to 
 differ ; and they differ not as better and worse, or 
 simply by more and less ; they differ by undecipher- 
 able and ncommunicable differences, that cannot le 
 caught ' ly mimicries, nor be reflected in the mirror of 
 copies, nor become ponderable in the scales of vulgar 
 comparison. 
 
 Applying these principles to Pope, as a representa- 
 tive of fine literature in general, we would wish to 
 remark the claim which he has, or which any equal 
 writer has, to the attention and jealous winnowing of 
 those critics in particular who watch over public 
 morals. Clergymen, and all the organs of public 
 criticism put in motion by clergymen, are more espe- 
 cially concerned in the just appreciation of such 
 writers, if the two canons are remembered, which we 
 have endeavored to illustrate, namely, that all works 
 in this class, as opposed to those in the literature of 
 knowledge, first, work by far deeper agencies ; and, 
 secondly, are more permanent ; in the strictest sense 
 they are xtij/jutu h a,ev ; and what evil they do, or what 
 good they do, is commensurate with the national lan- 
 guage, sometimes long after the nation has departed. At 
 this hour, five hundred years since their creation, the 
 tales of^ Chaucer, 2 never equalled on this earth for their 
 tonderness, and for life of picturesqueness, are read 
 familiarly by many in the charming language of theii 
 natal day, and by others in the modernizations of 
 
ALEXANDER POPE. 
 
 151 
 
 Dryden, of Pope, and Wordsworth. At this hour, 
 one thousand eight hundred years since their creation, 
 the Paf-an tales of Ovid, never equalled on this earth 
 for the gayety of their movement and the capricious 
 graces of tlieir narrative, are read by all Christendom. 
 This man's people and their monuments are dust ; but 
 he is alive : he has survived them, as he told us thai 
 he had it in his commission to do, by a thousand years ; 
 " and shall a thousand more." 
 
 All the literature of knowledge builds only ground 
 nests, that are swept away by floods, or confounded 
 by the plough ; but the literature of power builds nesta 
 in aerial altitudes of temples sacred from violation, oi 
 of forests inaccessible to fraud. This is a great pre- 
 rogative of the power literature ; and it is a greater 
 which lies in the mode of its influence. The knoiol- 
 edge literature, like the fashion of this world, passeth 
 away. An Encyclopaedia is its abstract ; and, in this 
 respect, it may be taken for its speaking symbol, 
 that, before one generation has passed, an Encyclo- 
 pedia is superannuated; for it speaks through the 
 dead memory and unimpassioned understanding, which 
 have not the rest of higher faculties, but are continu- 
 ally enlarging and varying their phylacteries. But all 
 literature, properly so called — literature Jtwr' l?o/'/'', 
 for the very same reason that it is so much more 
 durable than the literature of knowledge — is (and by 
 the very same proportion it is) more intense and elec- 
 trically searching in its impressions. The directions 
 in which the tragedy of this planet has trained our 
 human feelings to play, and the combinations into 
 ivhich the poetrv of this planet has thrown our human 
 
158 ALEXANDER POPE. 
 
 passions of love and hatred, of admiration and cnn- 
 tempt, exercise a power bad or good over human life 
 that cannot be contemplated, when stretching through 
 many generations, without a sentiment allied to awe. a 
 And of this let every one be assured — that he owe." 
 to the impassioned books which he has read, maiiy a 
 thousand more of emotions than he can consciously 
 trace back to them. Dim by their origination, these 
 emotions yet arise in him, and mould him through life 
 like the forgotten incidents of childhood. 
 
 In making a revaluation of Pope, as regards some 
 of his principal works, we should have been glad to 
 examine more closely than we shall be able to do, 
 some popular errors affecting his whole intellectual 
 position ; and especially these two : first. That he be- 
 longed to what is idly called the French School of our 
 literature; secondly, That he was specially distin- 
 guished from preceding poets by correctness. The 
 first error has infected the whole criticism of Europe. 
 The Schlegels, with all their false airs of subtlety, fall 
 into this error in discussing every literature of Chris- 
 tendom. But, if by a mere accident of life any poet 
 had first turned his thoughts into a particular channel 
 on the suggestion of some French book, that would 
 not justify our classing what belongs to universal na- 
 ture, and what inevitably arises at a certain stage of 
 social progress, under the category of a French crea 
 tion. Somebody must have been first in point of time 
 upon every field; but this casual precedency estab- 
 lishes no title whatever to authority, or plea of original 
 dominion over fields that lie within the inevitable line 
 of march upon which nations are moving. Had it 
 
ALEXANDER POPE. 159 
 
 happened that the first European writer on the higher 
 geometry was a Grseco-Sicilian, that would not liave 
 made it rational to call geometry the Gi'ieco-Sicilian 
 Science. In every nation first comes the higher form 
 of passion, next the lower. This is the mere order of 
 nature in governing the movements of human intellect, 
 as connected with social evolution ; this is therefore 
 tiie universal order, that in the earliest stages of litera- 
 ture, men deal with the great elementary grandeurs of 
 passion, of conscience, of the will in self-conflict ; 
 they deal with the capital struggle of the human 
 race in raising empires, or in overthrowing them — in 
 vindicating their religion (as by crusades), or with the 
 more mysterious struofgles amongst spiritual races 
 allied to our own, that have been dimly revealed to 
 us. We have an Iliad, a Jerusalem Delivered, a Para- 
 dise Lost. These great subjects exhausted, or exhaust- 
 ed in their more inviting manifestations, inevitably 
 by the mere endless motion of society, there succeeds 
 a lower key of passion. Expanding social intercourse 
 in towns, multiplied and crowded more and more, 
 Danishes those gloomier and grander phases of human 
 history from literature. The understanding is quick- 
 ened ; the lower faculties of the mind — fancy, and 
 the habit of minute distinction — are applied to the con- 
 templation of society and manners. Passion begins 
 to wheel in lower flights, and to combine itself with 
 interests that in part are addressed to the insulated 
 understanding — observing, refining, reflecting. This 
 may be called the minor key of literature in opposi- 
 tion to the major, as cultivated by Shakspeare, Spen- 
 ser, Milton. But this key arises spontaneously in every 
 
160 ALEXANDER POPE. 
 
 people, and by a necessity as sure as any that moulds 
 the progress of civilization. Milton and Spenser were 
 not of any Italian school. Their Italian studies were 
 the result and not the cause of the determination given 
 to their minds by nature working in conjuction with 
 their social period. It is equally childish to say of 
 Dryden and Pope, that they belonged to any French 
 s:hool. That thing which they did, they would have 
 done though France had been at the back of China. 
 The school to which they belonged, was a school de- 
 veloped at a certain stage of progress in all nations 
 alike by the human heart as modified by the human 
 understanding. It is a school depending on the peculiar 
 direction given to the sensibilities by the reflecting 
 faculty, and by the new phases of society. Even as 
 a fact (though a change as to the fact could not make 
 any change at all in the philosophy of the case), it is 
 not true that either Dryden or Pope was influenced by 
 French literature. Both of them had a very imperfect 
 acquaintance with the French language. Dryden ridi- 
 culed French literature ; and Pope, except for some 
 purposes connected with his Homeric translations, read 
 as little of it as convenience would allow. But, had 
 this been otherwise, the philosophy of the case stands 
 good; that, after the prnnarj formations of the fer- 
 menting intellect, come everywhere — in Thebes or 
 Athens, France or England — the secondary; that, after 
 the, creating passion comes the reflecting and recom- 
 oming passion ; that after the solemnities and cloistral 
 grandeurs of life — solitary and self-conflicting — comes 
 the recoil of a self-observing and self-dissecting stage, 
 derived from life social and gregarious. After the 
 
ALEXANDER POPE. 161 
 
 fliad, but doubtless many generations after, comes a 
 Batracliomyomachia. After the gorgeous masque of 
 jur forefathers came always the anti-masque, that 
 threw off echoes as from some devil's laughter in 
 mockery of the hollow and transitory pomps that went 
 before. 
 
 It is an error equally gross, and an error in which 
 Pope himself participated, that his plume of distinction 
 from preceding poets consisted in correctness. Cor- 
 rectness in what ? Think of the admirable qualifica- 
 tions for settling the scale of such critical distinctions 
 which that man must have had who turned out upon 
 this vast world the single oracular word " correctness " 
 to shift for itself, and explain its own meaning to all 
 generations. Did he mean logical correctness in ma- 
 turing and connecting thoughts ? But of all poets that 
 have practised reasoning in verse, Pope is the one most 
 inconsequential in the deduction of his thoughts, and 
 the most severely distressed in any effort to effect or to 
 explain the dependency of their parts. There are not 
 ten consecutive lines in Pope unaffected by this infirm- 
 ity. All his thinking proceeded by insulated and 
 discontinuous jets ; and the only resource for Mm, or 
 chance of even seeming correctness, lay in the liberty 
 of stringing his aphoristic thoughts like pearls. Having 
 no relation to each other but that of contiguity. To 
 set them like diamonds was for Pope to risk distraction ; 
 to systematize was ruin. On the other hand, if this 
 elliptical word correctness is to be understood with 
 such a complimentary qualification as would restrict it 
 to Pope's use of language, that construction is even 
 more untenable than the other — more conspicuously 
 11 
 
IG2 ALEXANDER POPE. 
 
 untenable — for many are they who have erred by illog- 
 ical thinking, or by distracted evolution of thoughts ; 
 but rare is the man amongst classical writers in any 
 language who has disfigured his meaning more remark- 
 ably than Pope by imperfect expression. We do not 
 speak of plebeian phrases, of exotic phrases, of slang, 
 from which Pope was not free, though more free than 
 many of his contemporaries. From vulgarism indeed 
 he was shielded, though imperfectly, by the aristocratic 
 .so:;iety he kept : tliey being right, he was right ; and 
 he erred only in the cases where they misled him ; for 
 even the refinement of that age was oftentimes coarse 
 and vulgar. His grammar, indeed, is often vicious : 
 preterites and participles he constantly confounds, and 
 registers this class of blunders forever by the cast-iron 
 index of rhymes that never can mend. But worse 
 than this mode of viciousness is his syntax, which is 
 so bad as to darken his meaning at times, and at other 
 times to defeat it. But these were errors cleaving to 
 his times; and it would be unfair to exact from Pope 
 a better quality of diction than belonged to his con- 
 temporaries. Still it is indisputable that a better model 
 of diction and of grammar prevailed a century before 
 Pope. In Spenser, in Shakspeare, in the Bible of King 
 James' reign, and in Milton, there are very few gram- 
 matical errors.4 But Pope's defect in language was 
 almost peculiar to himself. It lay in an inability, 
 nursed doubtless by indolence, to carry out and perfect 
 the expression of the thought he wishes to commu- 
 nicate. The language does not realize the idea ; it 
 simply suggests or hints it. Thus, to gi'"o, a single 
 illustration : — 
 
ALEXANDER I'OPE, Ifi.T 
 
 «• Know, Goil and Nature only are the same ; 
 In man the jiulgment ahoots at flying game." 
 
 The first line one would naturally construe into this : 
 that God and Nature were in harmony, whilst all other 
 objects were scattered into incoherency by difference 
 and disunion. Not at all; it means nothing of the 
 kind ; but that God and Nature only are exempted 
 from the infirmities of change. They only continue 
 uniform and self-consistent. This might mislead 
 many readers ; but the second line must do so ; for 
 who would not understand the syntax to be, that the 
 judgment, as it exists in man, shoots at flying game ? 
 But, in fact, the meaning is, that the judgment, in 
 aiming its calculations at man, aims at an object that 
 is still on the wing, and never for a moment stationary. 
 \V'e give this as a specimen of a fault in diction, the 
 very worst amongst all that are possible, To write bad 
 grammar or colloquial slang does not necessarily ob- 
 scure the sense; but a fault like this is a treachery, 
 and hides the true meaning under the cloud of a co- 
 nundrum; nay, worse; for even a conundrum has 
 fixed conditions for determining its solution, but this 
 sort of mutilated expression is left to the solutions of 
 conjecture. 
 
 There are endless varieties of this fault in Pope, by 
 which he sought relief for himself from half-an-hour's 
 labor, at the price of utter darkness to his reader. 
 
 One editor distinguishes amongst the epistles that 
 which Pope addressed to Lord Oxford some years 
 after his fall, as about the most " correct, musical, 
 dignified, and aflfecting," that the poet has left. Now, 
 even as a specimen of vernacular English, it is con* 
 
164 ALEXANDER fOrE. 
 
 spicuously bad : the shocking gallicism, for instance, 
 of " attend" for " wait his leisure," in the line, " For 
 Mm (that is, on his behalf) thou oft hast bid the world 
 attend," would alone degrade the verses. To bid the 
 world attend — is to bid the world to listen attentively ; 
 whereas what Pope means is, that Lord Oxford bade 
 the world wait in his ante-chamber, until he had leisure 
 from his important conferences with a poet, to th:ow 
 a glance upon affairs so trivial as those of the hmnan 
 race. This use of the word attend is a shocking 
 violation of the English idiom; and even the slightest 
 would be an unpardonable blemish in a poem of 
 only forty lines, which ought to be polished as ex- 
 quisitely as a cameo. It is a still worse disfiguration of 
 the very same class, namely, a silent confession of defeat, 
 in a regular wrestling match with the difficulties of a 
 metrical expression, that the poem terminates thus - 
 
 " Nor fears to tell that Mortimer is be." 
 
 Why should he fear? Really there is no /ery despe- 
 rate courage required for telling the most horrible of 
 secrets about Mortimer. Had Mortimer even been so 
 wicked as to set the Thames on fire, safely it might 
 have been published by Mortimer's bosom friend to all 
 magistrates, sheriffs, and constables ; for not a man of 
 ihem would have guessed in what hiding-place to look 
 for Mortimer, or who Mortimer might be. True it is, 
 that a secondary earldom, conferred by Queen Anne 
 upon Robert Harley, was that of Mortimer; but it 
 lurked unknown to the public ear ; it was a coronet 
 that lay hid under the beams of Oxford — a title 
 so long familiar to English ears, when descending 
 
ALEXANDER POPE. 165 
 
 through six-and-twenty generations of de Veres. Quite 
 as reasonable it would be in a birth-day ode to the 
 Prince of Wales, if he were addressed as my Lord 
 of Chester, or Baron of Renfrew, or your Grace 
 of Cornwall. To express a thing in cipher may do 
 for a conspirator ; but a poet's correctness is shown in 
 his intelligibility. 
 
 Amongst the early poems of Pope, the " Eloisa to 
 Abelard " has a special interest of a double order 
 First, it has a personal interest as the poem of Pope, 
 because indicating the original destination of Pope's 
 intellect, and the strength of his native vocation to a 
 class of poetry in deeper keys of passion than any 
 which he systematically cultivated. For itself also, 
 and abstracting from its connection with Pope's natural 
 destination, this poem has a second interest, an in- 
 trinsic interest, that will always make it dear to impas- 
 sioned minds. The self-conflict — the flux and reflux 
 of the poor agitated heart — the spectacle of Eioisa 
 now bending penitentially before the shadowy austeri- 
 ties of a monastic future, now raving upon the remem- 
 brances of the guilty past — one moment reconciled 
 by the very anguish of her soul to the grandeurs of 
 religion and of prostrate adoration, the next moment 
 revolting to perilous retrospects of her treacherous 
 happiness — the recognition, by shining gleams through 
 the very storm and darkness evoked by her earthlv 
 sensibilities, of a sensibility deeper far in its ground, 
 and that trembled towards holier objects — the lyrical 
 tumult of the changes, the hope, the tears, the rap- 
 ture, the penitence, the despair — place the reader in 
 tumultuous sympathy with the poor distracted nun. 
 
166 ALEXANDER POPE, 
 
 Exquisitely imagined, among the passages towards the 
 end, is the introduction of a voice speaking to Eloisa 
 from the grave of some sister nun, that, in long- 
 forgotten years, once had struggled and suffered like 
 horself, 
 
 " Once (like herself) that trembled, wept, and prayed. 
 Love's victim then, though now a sainted maid." 
 
 Exquisite is the passage in which she prefigures a visit 
 yet to come from Abelard to herself — no more in the 
 character of a lover, but as a priest, ministering by 
 spiritual consolation to her dying hours, pointing her 
 thoughts to heaven, presenting the Cross to her 
 through the mists of death, and fighting for her as a 
 spiritual ally against the torments of flesh. That an- 
 ticipation was not gratified. Abelard died long before 
 her ; and the hour never arrived for hiin of which with 
 such tenderness she says, — 
 
 " It will be then no crime to gaze on me." 
 
 But another anticipation has been fulfilled in a degree 
 that she could hardly have contemplated ; the anticipa- 
 tion, namely, — 
 
 " That ages hence, when all her woes were o'er. 
 And that rebellious heart should beat no more," 
 
 wandering feet should be attracted from afar 
 
 " To Paraclete's white walls and silver springs," 
 
 as the common resting-place and everlasting marriage- 
 bed of Abelard and Eloisa ; that the eyes of many 
 that had been touched by their story, by the memory 
 of their extraordinary accomplishments in an age of 
 
ALEXANDER POPE. 167 
 
 darkness, and by tlie calamitous issue of their attach 
 meht, should seek, first and last, for the grave in 
 which the lovers trusted to meet again in peace ; and 
 should seek it with interest so absorbing, that even 
 amidst the ascent of hosannas from the choir, amidst 
 the grandeurs of high mass, the raising of the host, 
 and " the pomp of dreadful sacrifice," sometimes these 
 wandering eyes should steal aside to the solemn abid- 
 ing-place of Abelard and his Eloisa, offering so pathetic 
 a contrast, by its peaceful silence, to the agitations of 
 their lives; and that there, amidst thoughts which by 
 right were all due and dedicated 
 
 " to Heaven, 
 One human tear should drop and be forgiven." 
 
 We may properly close this subject of Abelard 
 and Eloisa, by citing, in English, the solemn Latin 
 inscription placed in the last century, six hundred 
 years after their departure from earth, over their com- 
 mon remains. They were buried in the same grave, 
 Abelard dying first by a few weeks more than twenty- 
 one years ; his tomb was opened again to admit the 
 coffin of Eloisa ; and the tradition at Quincey, the 
 parish near Nogent-sur-Seine, in which the monastery 
 of the Paraclete is situated, was, that at the moment 
 of interment Abelard opened his arms to receive the 
 impassioned creature that once had loved him so fran- 
 tically, and whom he had loved with a remorse so 
 memorable. The epitaph is singularly solemn in its 
 brief simplicity, considering that it came from Paris, 
 and from academic wits : " Here, under the same 
 marble slab, lie the founder of this monastery, Peter 
 
168 ALEXANDER POPE. 
 
 Abelard, and its earliest Abbess, Heloisa — once uniteo 
 in studies, in love, in their unhappy nuptial engage- 
 ments, and in penitential sorrow ; but now, our hope 
 is, reunited forever in bliss." 
 
 The Satires of Pope, and what under another name 
 are satires, namely, his Moral Epistles, offer a second 
 variety of evidence to his voluptuous indolence. They 
 offend against philosophic truth more heavily than the 
 Essay on Man ; but not in the same way. The Essay 
 on Man sins chiefly by want of central principle, and 
 by want therefore of all coherency amongst the sepa- 
 rate thoughts. But taken as separate thoughts, viewed 
 in the light of fragments and brilliant aphorisms, the 
 majority of the passages have a mode of truth ; not of 
 truth central and coherent, but of truth angular and 
 splintered. The Satires, on the other hand, were of 
 false origin. They arose in a sense of talent for caus- 
 tic effects, unsupported by any satiric heart. Pope had 
 neither the malice (except in the most fugitive form) 
 which thirsts for leaving wounds, nor, on the other 
 nand, the deep moral indignation which burns in men 
 whom Providence has from time to time armed with 
 scourges for cleansing the sanctuaries of truth and jus- 
 tice. He was contented enough with society as he 
 found it ; bad it might be, but it was good enough for 
 kim ; — and it was the merest self-delusion if at any 
 moment the instinct of glorying his satiric mis?;ion (the 
 magnijicabo apostolatum meum) persunded him that in 
 Ms case it might be said, Facit incagnaiio versinn. 
 The indignation of Juvenal was not always very noble 
 in its origin, or pure in its purpose ; it was sometimes 
 mean in its quality, false in its direction, extravagant 
 
ALEXANDER POPE. 169 
 
 \n itrf expression ; but it was tremendous in the roll of 
 its thunders, and as withering as the scowl of a Mephis- 
 lopheles. Pope, having no such internal principle of 
 wrath boiling in his breast, being really (if one must 
 speak the truth) in the most pacific and charitable 
 frame of mind towards all scoundrels whatever, except 
 such as might take it into their heads to injure a 
 particular Twickenham grotto, was unavoidably a 
 hypocrite of the first magnitude when he aflTected (or 
 sometimes really conceited himself) to be in a dread- 
 ful passion with offenders as a body. It provokes fits 
 of laughter, in a man who knows Pope's real nature, 
 to watch him in the process of brewing the storm that 
 spontaneously will not come ; whistling, like a mariner, 
 for a wind to fill his satiric sails ; and pumping up into 
 his face hideous grimaces in order to appear convulsed 
 with histrionic rage. Pope should have been coun- 
 selled never to write satire, except on those evenings 
 when he was suffering horribly from indigestion. By 
 this means the indignation would have been ready- 
 made. The rancor against all mankind would have 
 been sincere ; and there would have needed to be no 
 extra expense in getting up the steam. As it is, the 
 short puffs of anger, the uneasy snorts of fury, in Pope's 
 satires, give one painfully the feeling of a steam-engine 
 with unsound lungs. Passion of any kind may become 
 in some degree ludicrous, when disproportioned to its 
 exciting occasions. But it is never entirely ludicrous, 
 until it is self-betrayed as counterfeit. Sudden col- 
 lapses of the manufactured wrath, sudden oblivion of 
 the criminal, announce Pope's as always counterfeit. 
 Meantime insincerity is contagious. One falsehood 
 
170 ALKXANDER POPE. 
 
 draws on anotlier. And having begun by taking a 
 station of moral censorship, which was in the utter- 
 most degree a self-delusion, Pope . went on to other 
 self-delusions in reading history the most familiar, or 
 in reporting facts the most notorious. Warburton had 
 more to do with Pope's satires as an original sug- 
 ge5ter, ^ and not merely as a commentator, than with 
 any other section of his works. Pope and he hunted 
 in couples over this field ; and those who know the 
 absolute craziness of Warburton's mind, the perfect 
 frenzy and lymphalicus error which possessed him 
 for leaving all high-roads of truth and simplicity, in 
 order to trespass over hedge and ditch after coveys of 
 shy paradoxes, cannot be surprised that Pope's good 
 sense should often have quitted him under such guid- 
 ance. There is, amongst the earliest poems of 
 
 Wordsworth, one which has interested many readers 
 by its mixed strain of humor and tenderness. It de- 
 scribes two thieves who act in concert with each other. 
 One is a very aged man, and the other is his great- 
 grandson of three years old : 
 
 " There are ninety good years of fair and foul weather 
 Between them, and both go a stealing together." 
 
 What reconciles the reader to this social iniquity, is 
 the imperfect accountability of the parties ; the one 
 being far advanced in dotage, and the other an infant. 
 And thus 
 
 " Into what sin soeTer the couple may fall, 
 This child but half-knows it, and that not at all." 
 
 Nobody besides suffers from their propensities : since 
 the child's mother makes good in excess all their 
 
ALEXANDER POPE. 171 
 
 weprcdations ; and nobod}' is duped for an instant by 
 their {tioss attempts at fraud ; for 
 
 " 'Wherever they carry their plots and their -wiles, 
 Every fivce in the vilLige is dimpled with smiles." 
 
 There was not the same disparity of years between 
 Pope and Warburton as between old Daniel and his 
 descendant in the third generation : Warburton wa- 
 but ten years younger. And there was also this diffci- 
 ence, that in the case of the two thieves neither was 
 official ringleader; on the contrary, they took it turn 
 about ; great-grandpapa was ringleader to-day, and the 
 little great-grandson to-morrow : 
 
 " Each in his turn was both leader and led ; '' 
 
 whereas, in the connection of the two literary accom- 
 plices, the Doctor was latterly always the instigator to 
 any outrage on good sense ; and Pope, from mere 
 habit of deference to the Doctor's theology and theo- 
 logical wig, as well as from gratitude for the Doctor's 
 pugnacity in his defence (since Warburton really was 
 as good as a bull-dog in protecting Pope's advance or 
 retreat), followed with docility the leading of his rever- 
 end friend into any excess of folly. It is true that 
 oftentimes in earlier days Pope had run into scrapes 
 from his own heedlessness ; and the Doctor had not 
 the merit of suggesting the escapade, but only of de- 
 fending it : which he always does (as sailors express 
 it) " with a will ; " for he never shows his teeth so 
 much, or growls so ferociously, as when he suspects 
 the case to be desperate. But in the satires, although 
 the original absurdity comes forward in the text of 
 Pope, and the Warburtonian note in defence is appai' 
 
37^ ALEXANDER POPE. 
 
 ently no more than an afterthought of the good Doctor 
 in his usual style of threatening to cudgel anybody 
 A\ ho disputes his friend's assertion ; yet sometimes the 
 thought expressed and adorned by the poet had been 
 prompted by the divine. This only can account for 
 the savage crotchets, paradoxes, and conceits, which 
 disfigure Pope's later edition of his satires. 
 
 Truth, even of the most appreciable order, truth of 
 history, goes to wreck continually under the perversi- 
 ties of Pope's satire applied to celebrated men ; and 
 as to the higher truth of philosophy, it was still less 
 likely to survive amongst the struggles for striking 
 effects and startling contrasts But worse are Pope's 
 satiric sketches of women, as carrying the same out- 
 rages on good sense to a far greater excess ; and as 
 these expose the folse principles on which he worked 
 more brightly, and have really been the chief ground 
 of tainting Pope's memory with the reputation of a 
 woman-hater (which he was not), they are worthy of 
 separate notice. 
 
 It is painful to follow a man of genius through a 
 succession of inanities descending into absolute non- 
 sense, and of vulgarities sometimes terminating in 
 brutalities. These are harsh words, but not harsh 
 enough by half as applied to Pope's gallery of female 
 portraits. What is the key to his failure ? It is simply 
 that, throughout this whole satiric section, not one 
 word L. spoken in sincerity of heart, or with any 
 vestige of self-belief. The case was one of those 
 so often witnessed, where either the indiscretion of 
 friends, or some impulse of erring vanity in the writer 
 had put him upon undertaking a task in which he had 
 
ALEXANDER POPE. 173 
 
 too lidle natural interest to have either thouglit upon it 
 with oriijinality, or observed upon it with fidelity. 
 Sometimes the mere coercion of system drives a man 
 into such a folly. He treats a subject which branches 
 into A, B, and C. Having discussed A and B, upon 
 wliich he really had something to offer, he thinks it 
 necessary to integrate his work by going forward to 
 C. on which he knows nothing at all, and, what is even 
 worse, for which in his heart he cares nothing at all. 
 Fatal is all falsehood. Nothing is so sure to betray 
 a man into the abject degradation of self-exposure as 
 pretending to a knowledge which he has not, or to an 
 enthusiasm which is counterfeit. By whatever mistake 
 Pope found himself pledged to write upon the char- 
 acters of women, it was singularly unfortunate that he 
 had begun by denying to women any characters at all. 
 
 " Matter too soft a lasting mark to bear. 
 And best distinguished by black, brown, or fiiir." 
 
 Well for him if he had stuck to that liberal doctrine : 
 "Least said, soonest mended." And much he could 
 not easily have said upon a subject that he had pro- 
 nounced all but a nonentity. In Van Troll's work, or 
 n Horrebow's, upon Iceland, there is a well-known 
 cnapter regularly booked in the index — Concerning 
 the Snakes of Iceland. This is the title, the running 
 rubric ; and the body of the cnapter consists of these 
 words — " There are no snakes in Iceland." That 
 chapter is soon studied, and furnishes very little open- 
 ing foi foot-notes or supplements. Some people have 
 thought that Mr. Van T. might with advantage have 
 amputated this unsnaky chapter on snakes ; but at 
 
174 ALEXANDER POPE. 
 
 least nobody can accuse him of forgetting his own 
 extermination of snakes from Iceland, and proceed- 
 ing immediately to describe such horrible snakes as 
 eye had never beheld amongst the afflictions of the 
 island. Snakes there are none, he had protested ; and, 
 true to his word, the faithful man never wanders into 
 any description of Icelandic snakes. Not so our satiric 
 poet. He, with Mahometan liberality, had denied 
 characters, that is, souls, to women. "Most women," 
 he says, "have no character at all; "^ yet, for all that, 
 finding himself pledged to treat this very subject of 
 female characters, he introduces us to a museum of 
 monsters in that department, such as few fancies could 
 create, and no logic can rationally explain. What 
 was he to do ? He had entered upon a theme con- 
 cerning which, as the result has shown, he had not 
 one solitary thought — good, bad, or indifferent. Total 
 bankruptcy was impending. Yet he was aware of a 
 deep interest connected with this section of his satires ; 
 and, to meet this interest, he invented what was pun- 
 gent, when he found nothing to record which was 
 true. 
 
 It is a consequence of this desperate resource — 
 this plunge into absolute fiction — that the true objec- 
 tion to Pope's satiric sketches of the other sex ought 
 not to arise amongst women, as the people that suffered 
 by his malice, but amongst readers generally, as the 
 people that suffered by his fraud. He has promised 
 one thing, and done another. He has promised a 
 chapter in the zoology of nature, and he gives us a 
 chapter in the fabulous zoology of the herald's college. 
 A tigress is not much within ordinary experience, siill 
 
ALEXANDER POPE. 175 
 
 there is such a creature ; and in default of a better 
 choice, that is, of a choice settling on a more familiar 
 object, we are content to accept a good description of 
 a tigress. We are reconciled ; but we are 7iot recon- 
 ci ed to a description, however spirited, of a basilisk. 
 A viper might do ; but not, if you please, a dragoness 
 or a harpy. The describer knows, as well as any of 
 us the spectators know, that he is romancing ; the 
 incredulus odl overmasters us all ; and we cannot 
 submit to be detained by a picture which, according 
 to the shifting humor of the poet, angry .or laughing, 
 as a lie, where it is not a jest, is an affront to the truth 
 of nature, where it is not confessedly an extravagance 
 of drollery. In a playful fiction, we can submit with 
 pleasure to the most enormous exaggerations ; but 
 then they must be offered as such. These of Pope's 
 are not so offered, but as serious portraits ; and in 
 that character they affect us as odious and malignant 
 libels. The malignity was not real, as indeed nothing 
 was real, but a condiment for hiding insipidity. Let 
 us examine two or three of them, equally with a view 
 to the possibility of the object described, and to the 
 delicacy of the description. 
 
 " How soft is Silia ! fearful to ofifend ; 
 
 The frail one's advocate, the weak one's friend. 
 To her Calista proved her conduct nice ; 
 And good Simplicius asks other advice," 
 
 Here we have the general outline of Silia's charac- 
 ter ; not particularly striking, but intelligible. She has 
 a suavity of disposilion that accommodates itself to 
 all infirmities. And the worst thing one apprehends in 
 her is — falseness. People with such honeyed breath 
 
176 ALEXANDER POPE. 
 
 for present frailties, are apt to exhale their rancor upon 
 them when a little out of hearing. But really now 
 this is no foible of Silia's. One likes her very well, 
 and would be glad of her company to tea. For the 
 dramatic reader knows who Calista is ; and if Silia 
 has indulgence for her, she must be a thoroughly toler- 
 ant creature. Where is her fault, then ? You shall 
 hear — 
 
 " Sudden she storms ! she raves ! — You tip the wink , 
 But spare your censure ; Silia does not drink. 
 All eyes may see from what the change arose : 
 All eyes may see — (see what ?) — a pimple on her nose. '' 
 
 JSilia, the dulcet, is suddenly transformed into Silia the 
 fury. But why ? The guest replies to that question 
 by winking at his fellow-guest; which most atrocious 
 of vulgarities is expressed by the most odiously vul- 
 gar of phrases — he tips the wink — meaning to tip 
 an insinuation that Silia is intoxicated. Not so, says 
 the poet — drinking is no fault of hers — everybody 
 may see [why not the winker then ?] that what upsets 
 her temper is a pimple on the nose. Let us under- 
 stand you, Mr. Pope. A pimple ! — what, do you mean 
 tu say that pimples jump up on ladies' faces at the 
 unfurling of a fan ? If they really did so in the twelfth 
 of George II., and a lady, not having a pimple on 
 leavmg her dressing-room, might grow cne whilst 
 taking tea, then we think that a saint might be excused 
 for storming a little. But how is it that the wretch 
 who winks, does not see the pimple, the causa teter' 
 rima of the sudden wrath ; and Silia, who has no 
 looking-glass at her girdle, does ? And then who is it 
 
ALEXANDER POPE. 177 
 
 that Silia "stjnns" at — the company, or the piinple ? 
 If at the company, we cannot defend her; but if at 
 the pimple — 0, by all means — storm and welcome — 
 she can't say anything worse than it deserves. Wrong 
 or right, however, what moral does Silia illustrate 
 more profound than this — that a particular lady, 
 otherwise very amiable, falls into a passion upon 
 suddenly finding her face disfigured ? But then one 
 remembers the song, " My face is my fortune, sir, 
 she said, sir, she said " — it is a part of every woman's 
 fortune, so long as she is young. Now, to find one's 
 fortune dilapidating by changes so rapid as this — 
 pimples rising as suddenly as April clouds — is far too 
 trying a calamity, that a little fretfulness should merit 
 either reproach or sneer. Dr. Johnson's opinion was, 
 that the man who cared little for dinner, could not be 
 reasonably supposed to care much for anything. More 
 truly it may be said, that the woman who is reckless 
 about her face must be an unsafe person to trust with 
 a secret. But, seriously, what moral, what philosophic 
 thought can be exemplified by a case so insipid, and sc 
 imperfectly explained as this ? But we must move on 
 Next, then, let us come to the case of Narcissa : — 
 
 " ' Odious ! in icoollen ? '^ 'T would a saint provoke,' 
 Were tlie last words that poor Narcissa spoke. 
 ' No, let a charming chintz and Brussels lace 
 Wrap my cold limbs and shade my lifeless face ; 
 One would not sure be frightful when one 's dead : 
 And, Betty, give this check a little red.' " 
 
 Well, what's tlie matter now? What's amiss vvitb 
 
 Narcissa, that a satirist must be calle.l in to hold an 
 
 inquest upon her corpse, and take Betty's evidenca 
 
 12 8* 
 
17S ALEXANDER POPE. 
 
 against her mistress ? Upon hearing any such ques 
 tion, Pope would have started up in the character 
 ^very unusual with him) of religious censor, and 
 demanded whether one approved of a woman's fixing 
 her last dying thought upon the attractions of a person 
 so soon to dwell with darkness and worms ? Was 
 that right — to provide for coquetting in her coffin? 
 Why no, not strictly right, its impropriety cannot be 
 denied ; but what strikes me even more is, the 
 suspicion that it may be a lie. Be this as it may, 
 there are two insurmountable objections to the case of 
 Narcissa, even supposing it not fictitious — namely, first, 
 that so for as it offends at all, it otiends the religious 
 sense, and not any sense of which satire takes charge ; 
 secondlj'', that without reference to the special func- 
 tions of satire, any form of poetry whatever, or any 
 mode of moral censure, concerns itself not at all with 
 anomalies. If the anecdote of Narcissa were other 
 than a fiction, then it was a case too peculiar and 
 idiosyncratic to furnish a poetic illustration ; neither 
 moral philosophy nor poetry condescends to the mon- 
 strous or the abnormal ; both one and the other deal 
 with the catholic aiiu the representative. 
 
 There is another Narcissa amongst Pope's tulip- 
 beds of ladies, who is even more open to criticism — 
 because offering not so much an anomaly m one 
 single trait of her character, as an utter anarchy in all. 
 Flavia and Philomedc again present the same mul- 
 titude of features with the same absence of all central 
 principle for locking them into unity. They must 
 have been distracting to themselves, and they are dis- 
 tracting to us a century later. Philomede. by the way, 
 
ALEXANDER TOPE. 179 
 
 stands for the second Duchess of Marlborough, ^ daugh- 
 ter of the great Duke. And these names lead us 
 natural y to Sarah, the original, and (one may call 
 her) the historical Duchess, who is libelled under the 
 name of Atossa. This character amongst all Pope's 
 satiric sketches has been celebrated the most, with the 
 single exception of his Atticus. But the Atticus 
 rested upon a different basis — it was true ; and it was 
 noble. Addison really had the infirmities of envious 
 jealousy, of stimulated friendship, and of treacherous 
 collusion with his friend's enemies — which Pope 
 imputed to him under the happy parisyllabic name of 
 Atticus ; and the mode of imputation, the tone of 
 expostulation — indignant as regarded Pope's own 
 injuries, but yet full of respect for Addison, and even 
 of sorrowful tenderness ; all this in combination with 
 the interest attached to a feud between two men so 
 eminent, has sustained the Attiacs as a classic remenj- 
 brance in satiric literature. But the Atossa is a mere 
 chaos of incompatibilities, thrown together as into 
 some witch's cauldron. The witch, however, had 
 sometimes an unaffected malignity, a sincerity of 
 venom in her wrath, which acted chemically as a 
 solvent for combining the heterogeneous ingredients in 
 her kettle ; whereas the want of truth and earnestness 
 in Pope leaves the incongruities in his kettle of descrip- 
 tion to their natural incoherent operation on the reader. 
 We have a great love for the great Duchess of Marl-- 
 boroug-h, though too young by a hundred years ^ or so 
 to have been that true and faithful friend which, as 
 contemporaries, we might have been. 
 
 What we love Sarah for, is partly that she has been 
 
180 ALEXANDER POPE. 
 
 ill used by all subsequent authors, one copying from 
 another a fury against h^r which even in the first of 
 these authors »vas not real. And a second thing which 
 we love is her very violence, qualified as it was. Sul- 
 phureous vapors of wrath rose up in columns from the 
 crater of her tempestuous nature against him that 
 deeply offended her, but she neglected petty wrongs. 
 Wait, however, let the volcanic lava have time to cool, 
 and all returned to absolute repose. It has been said 
 that she did not write her own book. We are of a 
 different opinion. The mutilations of the book were 
 from other and inferior hands ; but the main texture 
 of the narrative and of the comments were, and must 
 have been, from herself, since there could have been 
 no adequate motive for altering them, and nobody else 
 could have had the same motive for uttering them. It 
 is singular that, in the case of the Duchess, as well as 
 that of the Lady M. W. Montagu, the same two men, 
 without concert, were the original aggressors amongst 
 the gois deplume, namely, Pope, and subsequently Horace 
 Walpule. Pope suffered more from his own libellous 
 ■assault upon Atossa, through a calumny against him 
 self rebounding from it, than Atossa could have done 
 from the point-blank shot of fifty such batteries. The 
 calumny circulated was, that he had been bribed by 
 the Duchess with a thousand pounds to suppress the 
 character — which of itself was bad enough ; but, as 
 •the consummation of baseness, it was added, that after 
 all, in spite of the bribe, he caused it to be published. 
 This calumny we believe to have been utterly without 
 foundation. It is repelled by Pope's character, inca- 
 pable of any act so vile, and by his position, needing 
 
ALEXANDER I'OrE. 181 
 
 no bribes. But what we wish to add, is that the 
 caUiinny is equally repelled by Sarah's character, 
 incapable of any propitiation so abject. Pope wanted 
 no thoui^and pounds; but neither did Sarah want his 
 clemeiicy. He would have rejected the £1000 cheque 
 with scorn ; but she would have scorned to offer it. 
 Pope cared little for Sarah ; but Sarah cared less for 
 Pope. 
 
 What is offensive, and truly so, to every generous 
 reader, may be expressed in two items: first, not pre- 
 tendiuLT to have been himself injured by the Duchess, 
 Pope was in this instance meanly adopting some third 
 person's malice, which sort of intrusion into other 
 people's quarrels is a sycophantic act, even where 
 it may not have rested upon a sycophantic motive ; 
 secondly, that even as a second-hand malice it is not 
 sincere. More shocking than the malice is the self- 
 imposture of the malice. In the very act of putBng out 
 his cheeks like ^olus, with ebullient fury, and con- 
 ceiting himself to be in a passion perfectly diabolic. 
 Pope is really unmoved, or angry only by favor of 
 dyspepsy ; and at a word of kind flattery from Sarah, 
 (whom he was quite the man to love)^ though not at 
 the clink of her thousand guineas, he would have 
 fallen at her feet, and kissed her beautiful hand with 
 rapture. To enter a house of hatred as a junior part- 
 ner, and to take the stock of malice at a valuation — 
 (we copy from advertisements) — that is an ignooie 
 act. But then how much worse in the midst of all 
 this unprovoked wrath, real as regards the persecution 
 which it meditates, but false as the flatteries of a slave 
 in relation to its pretended grounds, for the spectator 
 
182 ALEXANDER POPE. 
 
 to find its malice counterfeit, and the fury only a pla- 
 giarism from some personated fury in an opera ! 
 
 There is no truth in Pope's satiric sketches of 
 women — not even colorable truth ; but, if there were, 
 how frivolous, how hollow, to erect into solemn mon- 
 umental protestations against the whole female sex 
 what, if examined, turn out to be pure casual eccen- 
 tricities, or else personal idiosyncrasies, or else foibles 
 shockingly caricatured, but, above all, to be such 
 foibles as could not have connected themselves with 
 sincere feelings of indignation in any rational mind I 
 
 The length and breadth (almost we might say, 
 the depth) of the shallowness, which characterizes 
 Pope's Philosophy, cannot be better reflected than from 
 the four well-known lines — 
 
 " For modes of faith let graceless zealots fight, 
 His can't be wrong, whose life is in the right • 
 For forms of government let fools contest, 
 Whate'er is best administered is best." 
 
 In the first couplet, what Pope says is, that a life, 
 which is irreproachable on a human scale of appre- 
 ciation, neutralizes and practically cantels all poss.ible 
 errors of creed, opinion, or theory. But this schisni 
 between the moral life of man and his moral faith, 
 which takes for granted that either may possibly be 
 true, whilst the other is entirely false, can wear a 
 moment's plausibility only by understanding life in so 
 limited a sense as the sum of a man's external actions, 
 appreciable by man. He whose life is in the right, 
 cannot, says Pope, in any sense calling f(v blame, 
 hive a wrong fiiith ; that is, if his iJfe we?-6 light, his 
 weed might be disregarded. But the iswer is — that 
 
ALEXjVNDKa POPE. ISIi 
 
 his life, according to aay adequate idea of life in a 
 moral creijture, carviot be in the right unless in so far 
 as it bends to the influences of a true faith. How 
 feeble a conception must that man have of the infinity 
 which lurks in a human spirit, who can persuade hrna- 
 self that its total capacities of life are exhaustible by 
 the few gross acts incident to social relations or open \o 
 human valuation ! An act, which may be necessarily 
 limited and without opening for variety, may involve 
 a large variety of motives — motives again, meaning 
 grounds of action that are distinctly recognized for 
 such, may (numerically speaking) amount to nothing 
 at all when compared with the absolutely infinite 
 influxes of feeling or combination of feeling that vary 
 the thoughts of man ; and the true internal acts of 
 moral man are his thoughts, his yearnings, his 
 aspirations, his sympathies, his repulsions of heart. 
 This is the life of man as it is appreciable by heavenly 
 eyes. The scale ot an alphabet, how narrow is 
 that ! Four or six and twenty letters, and all is 
 finished. Syllables range through a wider compass. 
 Words are yet more than syllables. But what are 
 words to thoughts ? Every word has a thought corre- 
 sponding to it, so that not by so much a? one solitary 
 counter can the words outrun the thoughts. But every 
 thought has not a word corresponding to it ; so that 
 the thoughts may outrun the words by many a thou- 
 sand counters. In a developed nature they do so. 
 But what are the thoughts when set against the modifi- 
 cations of thoughts by feelings, hidden even from him 
 that feels them, or against the inter-combinations of 
 such modifications with others — complex with com 
 
184 ALEXANDER POPE. 
 
 plex, decomplex with decomplex — these can be un- 
 ravelled by no human eye ! This is the infinite music 
 that God only can read upon the vast harp of the 
 human heart. Some have fancied that musical com- 
 binations might be exhausted. A new Mozart might 
 be impossible. All that he could do might already 
 have been done. Music laughs at that, as ihe sea 
 laughs at palsy for its billows, as the morning laughs 
 at xd age and wrinkles for itself. But a harp, though 
 a world in itself, is but a narrow world by comparison 
 with the world of a human heart. 
 
 Now these thoughts, tinctured subtly with the per- 
 fume and coloring of human affections, make up the 
 sum of what merits y-ui' sSo/)]^ the name of life; and 
 these in a vast proportion depend for their possibilities 
 of truth upon the degree of approach which the thinker 
 makes to the appropriation of a pure fiiith. A man is 
 thinking all day long, and putting thoughts into words ; 
 he is acting comparatively seldom. But are any man's 
 thoughts brought into conformity with the openings to 
 truth that a f;xith like the Christian's faith suggests ? 
 Far from it. Probably there never was one thought, 
 from the foundation of the earth, that has passed 
 through the mind of man, which did not ofTer some 
 blemish, some sorrowful shadow of pollution, when ;'t 
 came up for review before a heavenly tribunal ; thr.t 
 i?, supposing it a thought entangled at all with human 
 mterest3 or human passions. But it is the key in 
 which tne thoughts move, that determines the stage 
 of moral advancement. So long as we are human, 
 many among the numerous and evanescent elements 
 that enter (half-observed or not observed at all) inte 
 
ALEXANDER POPE, 1S5 
 
 Dur thoughts, cannot but be tainted. But the govern- 
 ing, the predominant element it is which gives the 
 character and tlie tendency to the thought; and this 
 must become such, must become a governing element, 
 through the quality of the ideals deposited in the heait 
 by the quality of the religious faith. One pointed 
 illustration of this suggests itself from another poem 
 of Pope's, in which he reiterates his shallow doctrine, 
 In his Universal Prayer he informs us that it can 
 matter little whether we pray to Jehovah or to Jove, 
 so long as in either case we pray to the First Cause. 
 To contemplate God under that purely ontological 
 relation to the world, would have little more operative 
 value for what is most important m man, than if he 
 prayed to gravitation. And it would have been more 
 honest in Pope to say, as virtually he has said in the 
 couplet under examination, that it can matter little 
 whether man prays at all to any being. It deepens 
 the scandal of this sentiment, coming from a poet 
 professing Christianity, that a clergjanan (holding pre 
 ferment in the English Church) namely. Dr. Joseph 
 Warton, justifies Pope for this Pagan opinion, upon 
 the ground that an ancient philosopher had uttered the 
 same opinion long^ before. What sort of philosopher ? 
 A Christian ? No ; but a Pagan. What then is the 
 value of the justification ? To a Pagan it could be 
 no blame that he should avow a reasonable Pagan 
 doctrine. In Irish phrase, it Avas " true for him.''' 
 Amongst gods that were all utterly alienated from 
 any scheme of moral government, all equally remote 
 from the executive powers for sustaining such a 
 government, so long as there was a practical anarchy 
 
138 ALEXANDER POPb. 
 
 and rivalship amongst themselves, there could be no 
 sufficient reason for addressing vows to one rather 
 tlian to another. The whole pantheon collectively 
 could do nothing for moral influences ; a fortiori, no 
 separate individual amongst them. Pope indirectly 
 confesses this elsewhere by his own impassioned 
 expression of Christian feelings, though implicitly 
 denying it here by his mere understanding. For he 
 reverberates elsewhere, by deep echoes, that power in 
 Christianity, which even in a legendary tale he durst 
 not on mere principles of good sense and taste have 
 ascribed to Paganism. For instance, how could a 
 God, having no rebellion to complain of in man, 
 pretend to any occasion of large forgiveness of man 
 or of framing means for reconciling this forgiveness 
 with his own attribute of perfect holiness ? What 
 room, therefore, for ideals of mercy, tenderness, long- 
 suffering, under any Pagan religion, under any wor- 
 ship of Jove! How again from gods, disfigured 
 by fleshly voluptuousness in every mode, could any 
 countenance be derived to an awful ideal of purity ? 
 Accordingly we find, that even among the Romans 
 (the most advanced, as regards moral principle, of 
 all heathen nations) neither the deep fountain of 
 benignity, nor that of purity, was unsealed in man's 
 heart. So much of either was sanctioned as could 
 fall within the purposes of the magistrate, but beyond 
 that level neither fountain could have been permitted 
 to throw up its column of water, nor could in fact have 
 had any impulse to sustain it in ascending ; and not 
 merely because it would have been repressed by 
 ridicule as a deliration of the human mind, but ilso 
 
ALEXANDER TOPE. IST 
 
 because it would have been frowned upon gravely by 
 tbc very principle of the Roman polity, as wandering 
 away from civic objects. Even for so much of these 
 great restorative ventilations as Rome enjoyed, she 
 was indebted not to her religion, but to elder forces 
 that act in spite of her religion, namely, the original 
 law written upon the human heart. Now, on the other 
 hand, Christianity has left a separate system of ideah 
 amongst men, which (as regards their development; 
 are continually growing in authority. Waters, afler 
 whatever course of wandering, rise to the level of 
 their original springs. Christianity lying so far above 
 all other fountains of religious influence, no wonder 
 that its irrigations rise to altitudes otherwise unknown, 
 and from which the distribution to every level of 
 society becomes comparatively easy. Those men are 
 reached oftentimes — choosing or not choosing — by 
 the healing streams, who have not sought them nor 
 even recognized them. Infidels of the most deter- 
 mined class talk in Christian lands the morals of 
 Christianity, and exact that morality with their hearts, 
 constantly mistaking it for a morality coextensive with 
 man ; and why ? Simply from having been moulded 
 unawares by its universal pressure through infancy, 
 childhood, manhood, in the nursery, in the school, in 
 the market-place. Pope himself, not bj'^ system or by 
 aflfectation an infidel, not in any coherent sense a 
 doubter, but a careless and indolent assenter to such 
 doctrines of Christianity as his own Church prominently 
 put forward, or as social respectability seemed to 
 enjoin, — Pope, therefore, so far a very lukewarm 
 Christian, was yet unconsciously to himself searched 
 
ISS ALEXANDER POPE. 
 
 profoundly by the Christian types of purity. This vie 
 may read in his 
 
 " Hark, the herald angels say, 
 Sister spirit, come away ! " 
 
 Or, again, as some persons read the great lessons of 
 spiritual ethics more pathetically in those that have 
 transgressed them, than in those that have been faithful 
 to the end, — read them in the Magdalen that fades 
 away in penitential tears rather than in the virgin 
 martyr triumphant on the scafTold, — we may see in 
 his own Eloisa, and in her fighting with the dread 
 powers let loose upon her tempestucjns soul, how 
 profoundly Pope also had drunk from the streams 
 of Christian sentiment through which a new fountain 
 of truth had ripened a new vegetation upon earth. 
 What was it that Eloisa fought witli? What power 
 afflicted her trembling nature, that any Pagan religions 
 could have evoked ? The human love, " the nympho. 
 lepsy of the fond despair," might have existed in a 
 Vestal Virgin of ancient Rome ; but in the Vestal what 
 counter-influence could have come into conflict with 
 the passion of love through any operation whatever of 
 religion? None of any ennobling character that could 
 reach the Vestal's own heart. The way in which reli- 
 gion connected itself with the case was through a tra- 
 ditional superstition, not built upon any fine spiritual 
 sense of female chastity as dear to Heaven, but upon 
 a gross fear of alienating a tutelary goddess by offering 
 an imperfect sacrifice. This sacrifice, the sacrifice 
 of the natural household i** charities in a few injured 
 women on the altar of the goddess, was selfish in all 
 
ALEXANDER POPE. 189 
 
 its Stages — seltish in the dark deity that could be 
 pleased by the sufferings of a human being simply as 
 sufferings, and not at all under any fiction that they 
 were voluntary ebullitions of religious devotion — 
 selfish in the senate and people who demanded these 
 sufferings as a ransom paid through sighs and tears for 
 their ambition — selfish in the Vestal herself, as sus- 
 tained altogether by fear of a punishment too terrific 
 to face, sustained therefore by the meanest principle 
 in her nature. But in Eloisa how grand is the col- 
 lision between deep religious aspirations and the per- 
 secuting phantoms of her undying human passion' 
 The Vestal feared to be walled up alive — abandoned 
 to the pangs of hunger — to the trepidations of dark- 
 ness — to the echoes of her own lingering groans — 
 to the torments perhaps of frenzy rekindling at inter- 
 vals the decaying agonies of flesh. Was that what 
 Eloisa feared ? Punishment she had none to appre- 
 hend. The crime was past, and remembered only by 
 the criminals. There was none to accuse but herself; 
 there was none to judge but God. Wherefore should 
 Eloisa fear ? Wherefore and with what should she 
 fight? She fought by turns against herself and against 
 God, against her human nature, and against her spirit- 
 ual yearnings. How grand were the mysteries of her 
 faith, how gracious and forgiving its condescensions ! 
 How deep had been her human love, how imperishable 
 its remembrance on earth! "What is it," the Roman 
 Vestal would have said, " that this Christian lady is 
 afraid of? What is the phantom that she seems to 
 see ? " Vestal ! it is not fear, but grief. She sees an 
 innneasurable heaven that seems to touch her eyes; so 
 
190 ALEXANDER POPt,. 
 
 near is she to its love. Suddenly, an Abelard — the 
 glory of his race — appears, that seems to touch hef 
 lips. The heavens recede and diminish to a starry 
 point twinkling in an unfathomable abyss ; they are all 
 but lost for her. Fire, it is, in Eloisa, that searches 
 fire ; the holy that fights with the earthly ; fire that 
 cleanses with fire that consumes. Like cavalry the two 
 fres wheel and counterwheel, advancing and retreat- 
 ing, charging and countercharging through and through 
 each other. Eloisa trembles, but she trembles as a 
 guilty creature before a tribunal unveiled within the 
 secrecy of her own nature. There was no such trem- 
 bling in the heathen worlds, for there was no such 
 secret tribunal. Eloisa fights with a shadowy enemy. 
 There was no such fighting for Roman Vestals ; because 
 all the temples of our earth (which is the crowned 
 Vesta), no, nor all the glory of her altars, nor all the 
 pomp of her cruelties, could cite from the depths of a 
 human spirit any such fearful shadow as Christian 
 faith evokes from an afflicted conscience. 
 
 Pope, therefore, wheresoever his heart speaks loudly, 
 shows how deep had been his early impressions from 
 Christianity. That is shown in his intimacy with Cra- 
 shaw, in his Eloisa, in his Messiah, in his adaptation 
 to Christian purposes of the Dying Adrian, ice. It is 
 remarkable, also, that Pope betrays, in all places where 
 lie has occasion to argue about Christianity, how much 
 grander and more faithful to that great theme were the 
 subconscious perceptions of his heart than the explicit 
 commentaries of his understanding. He, like so many 
 others, was unable to read or interpret the testimonies 
 of his own heart, which is a deep over which diviner 
 
ALEXANDER POPE. 191 
 
 agencies brood than are legible to the intellect. The 
 cipher written on his Heaven-visited heart was deeper 
 than his understanding could interpret. 
 
 If the question were asked, What ought to have 
 been the best among Pope's poems ? most people 
 would answer, the Essay on Man. If the question 
 •ware asked. What is the worst? all people of judg- 
 ment would say, the Essay on Man. Whilst yet in its 
 rudiments, this poem claimed the first place by the 
 promise of its subject; when finished, by the utter 
 failure of its execution, it fell into the last. The case 
 possesses a triple interest — first, as illustrating the 
 character of Pope modified by his situation ; secondly, 
 as illustrating the true nature of that " didactic " poetry 
 to which this particular poem is usually referred ; 
 thirdly, as illustrating the anomalous condition to which 
 a poem so grand in its ambition has been reduced by 
 the double disturbance of its proper movement ; one 
 disturbance through the position of Pope, another 
 through his total misconception of didactic poetry. 
 First, as regards Pope's situation, it may seem odd — 
 but it is not so — that a man's social position should 
 overrule his intellect. The scriptural denunciation of 
 riches, as a snare to any man that is striving to rise 
 above worldly views, applies not at all less to the intel- 
 lect, and to any man seeking to ascend by some 
 aerial arch of flight above ordinary intellectual efforts. 
 Kiches are fatal to those continuities of energy without 
 which there is no success of that magnitude. Pope 
 had £800 a year. That seems not so much. No, 
 certainly not, with a wife and six children ; but by 
 accident Pope had no wife and no children. He was 
 
192 ALEXANDER POPE. 
 
 luxuriously at his ease : and this accident of his posi- 
 tion in life fell in with a constitutional infirmity that 
 predisposed him to indolence. Even his religious faith, 
 by shutting him out from those public employments 
 which else his great friends would have been too 
 happy to obtain for him, aided his idleness, or some- 
 times invested it with a false character of conscientious 
 self-denial. He cherished his religion confessedly as 
 a plea for idleness. The result of all this was, that in 
 his habits of thinking and of study (if study we can 
 call a style of reading so desultory as his), Pope be- 
 came a pure dilettante; in his intellectual eclecticism 
 he was a mere epicure, toying with the delicacies and 
 varieties of literature ; revelling in the first bloom of 
 moral speculations, but sated immediately ; fastidiously 
 retreating from all that threatened labor, or that ex- 
 acted continuous attention ; fathoming, throughout all 
 his vagrancies amongst books, no foundation ; filling 
 up no chasms ; and with all his fertility of thought 
 expanding no germs of new life. 
 
 This career of luxurious indolence was the result of 
 early luck which made it possible, and of bodily con- 
 stitution which made it tempting. And when we re- 
 member his youthful introduction to the highest circles 
 in the metropolis, where he never lost his footing, we 
 '^annot wonder that, without any sufficient motive for 
 resistance, he should have sunk passively under his 
 constitutional propensities, and should have fluttered 
 amongst the flower-beds of literature or philosophy far 
 more in the character of a libertine butterfly for casua. 
 enjoyment, than of a hard-working bee pursuing a pre 
 nieditated purpose. 
 
ALEXANDER TOrE. 193 
 
 Such a character, strengthened by such a situation, 
 would at any rate have disqualified Pope for compos, 
 mg- a work severely philosophic, or where philosophy 
 did more than throw a colored light of pensiveness 
 upon some sentimental subject. If it were necessary 
 that the pliilosophy should enter substantially into the 
 ver}" texture of the poem, furnishing its interest and 
 jirescribing its movement, in that case Pope's com- 
 Itming and theorizing faculty would have shrunk as 
 Irom the labor of building a pyramid. And woe to him 
 where it did not, as really happened in the case of the 
 Essay on Man. For his faculty of execution was 
 under an absolute necessity of shrinking in horror 
 from the enormous details of such an enterprise to 
 which so rashly he had pledged himself. He was 
 sure to find himself, as find himself he did, landed in 
 the most dreadful embarrassment upon reviewing his 
 own work. A work, which, when finished, was not 
 even begun ; whose arches wanted their key-stones ; 
 whose parts had no coherency; and whose pillars, in 
 the very moment of being thrown open to public view, 
 were already crumbling into ruins. This utter pros- 
 tration of Pope in a work so ambitious as an Essay on 
 Man — a prostration predetermined from the first by 
 the personal circumstances which we have noticed — 
 was rendered still more irresistible in the second place 
 by the general misconception in which Pope shared 
 as to the very meaning of " didactic " poetry. Upon 
 which point we pause to make an exposition of our own 
 views. 
 
 What is didactic poetry? What does "didactic" 
 niean when applied as a distinguishing epithet to such 
 
194 ALEXANDER POPE. 
 
 an idea as a poem ? The predicate destroys the sub- 
 ject. It is a case of what logicians call contradictio in 
 aajccto — the unsaying- by means of an attribute the 
 very thing which is the subject of that attribute you 
 have just affirmed. No poetry can have the function 
 of teaching. It is impossible that a variety of spei.ieb 
 should contradict the very purpose which contradistin- 
 guishes its genus. The several species differ partially; 
 but not by the whole idea which differentiates their 
 class. Poetry, or any one of the fine arts (all of which 
 alike speak through the genial nature of man and his 
 excited sensibilities), can teach only as nature teaches, 
 as forests teach, as the sea teaches, as infancy teaches, 
 namely, by deep impulse, by hieroglyphic ^ sugges- 
 tion. Their teaching is not direct or explicit, but lurk- 
 ing, implicit, masked in deep incarnations. To teach 
 formally and professedly, is to abandon the very dif- 
 ferential character and principle of poetry. If poetry 
 could condescend to teach anything, it would be truths 
 moral or religious. But even these it can utter only 
 through symbols and actions. The great moral, for 
 instance, the last result of the Paradise Lost, is once 
 formally announced ; but it teaches itself only by dif- 
 fusing its lesson through the entire poem in the total 
 succession of events and purposes ; and even this suc- 
 cession teaches it only when the whole is gathered into 
 unity by a reflex act of meditation ; just as the pulsa- 
 tion of the physical heart can exist only when all the 
 parts in an animal system are locked into one organi' 
 zation. 
 
 To address the iTisulated understanding is to lay 
 aside the Prospero's robe of poetry. The objection, 
 
ALEXANDER T'OPE. 195 
 
 thorefore, to didactic poetry, as vulgarly understood, 
 woidd be fatal, even if there were none but this logical 
 obji'ction derived from its definition. To be in self- 
 contradiction is, for any idea whatever, sufficiently tc 
 destroy itself. But it betrays a more obvious and prac- 
 tical contradiction when a little searched. If the true 
 purpose of a man's writing a didactic poem were to 
 teach, by what suggestion of idiocy should he choose 
 to begin by putting on fetters ? Wherefore should the 
 simple man volunteer to handcuff and manacle him- 
 s:elf, were it only by the incumbrances of metre, and 
 perhaps of rhyme ? But these he will find the very 
 least of his incumbrances. A far greater exists in the 
 sheer necessity of omitting in any poem a vast variety 
 of details, and even capital sections of the subject, 
 unless they will bend to purposes of ornament. Now 
 this collision between two purposes, the purpose of use 
 in mere teaching, and the purpose of poetic delight, 
 shows, by the uniformity of its solution, which is the 
 true purpose, and which the merely ostensible purpose. 
 Had the true purpose been instruction, the moment that 
 this was found incompatible with a poetic treatment, as 
 soon as it was seen that the sound education of the 
 reader-pupil could not make way without loitering to 
 gather poetic flowers, the stern cry of " duty " would 
 oblige the poet to remember that he had dedicated 
 himself to a didactic mission, and that he differed from 
 other poets, as a monk from other men, by his vows cf 
 self-surrender to harsh ascetic functions. But, on the 
 contrary, in the very teeth of this rule, wherever such 
 a collision docs really take place, and one or other of 
 the yupposed objects must give way, it is always the 
 
196 ALEXANDER POPE. 
 
 vulgar object of teaching (the pedagogue's object^ 
 which goes to the rear, whilst the higher object ol 
 poetic emotion moves on triumphantly. In reality not 
 one didactic poet has ever yet attempted to use any 
 parts or processes of the particular art which he made 
 his theme, unless in so far as they seemed susceptible 
 of poetic treatment, and only because they seemed so. 
 Look at the poem of Cyder, by Philips, of the Fleece 
 of Dyer, or (which is a still weightier example) at the 
 Georgics of Virgil, — does any of these poets show 
 the least anxiety for the correctness of your principles, 
 or the delicacy of your manipulations in the worshipful 
 arts they atfect to teach ? No ; but they pursue these 
 arts through every stage that offers any attractions of 
 beauty. And in the very teeth of all anxiety for teach- 
 ing, if there existed traditionally any very absurd way 
 of doing a thing which happened to be eminently pic- 
 turesque, and if, opposed to this, there were some im- 
 proved mode that had recommended itself to poetic 
 hatred by being dirty and ugly, the poet (if a good 
 one) would pretend never to have heard of this dis- 
 agreeable improvement. Or if obliged, by some rival 
 poet, not absolutely to ignore it, he would allow that 
 sucti a thing could be done, but hint that it was hateful 
 to the Muses or Graces, and very likely to breed a 
 pestilence. 
 
 This subordination of the properly didactic function 
 to the poetic, which, leaving the old essential distinc- 
 tion of poetry (namely, its sympathy with the genial 
 motions of man's heart) to override all accidents of 
 special, variation, and showing that the essence of 
 poetry never can be set aside by its casual modifica- 
 
ALKXAiNUER POPE. lO") 
 
 tions, will be compromised by some loose thinlvers. 
 under the idea that in didactic poetry the element of 
 instruction is in fact one element, though subordinate 
 and secondary. Not at all. What we are denying 
 is, that the element of instruction enters at all into 
 didactic poetry. The subject of the Georgics, for 
 instance, is Rural Economy as practised by Italian 
 farmers ; but Virgil not only omits altogether innumer- 
 able points of instruction insisted on as articles of reli- 
 gious necessity by Varro, Cato, Columella, &c., but, 
 even as to those instructions which he does communi- 
 cate, he is careless whether they are made technically 
 intelligible or not. He takes very little pains to keep 
 you from capital mistakes in practising his instruc- 
 tions ; but he takes good care that you shall not miss 
 any strong impression for the eye or the heart to which 
 the rural process, or rural scene, may naturally lead. 
 He pretends to give you a lecture on farming, in order 
 to have an excuse for carrying you all round the beau- 
 tiful farm. He pretends to show you a good plan for 
 a farm-house, as the readiest means of veiling his im- 
 pertinence in showing you the farmer's wife and her 
 rosy children. It is an excellent plea for getting a 
 peep at the bonny milk-maids to propose an inspection 
 of a model dairy. You pass through the poultry-yard, 
 under whatever pretence, in reality to see the peacock 
 and his harem. And so on to the very end, the pre- 
 tended instruction is but in secret the connecting tie 
 which holds together the laughing flowers going cflT 
 from it to the right and to the left; whilst if ever at 
 intervals this prosy thread of pure didactics is brought 
 forward more obtrusively, it is so by way of foil, to 
 
198 ALEXANDER POPE. 
 
 make more effective upon the eye the prodigality of 
 the floral magnificence. 
 
 We alHrm, therefore, that the didactic poet is so far 
 from seeking even a secondary or remote object in the 
 particular points of information which he may happen 
 to communicate, that much rather he would prefer the 
 having communicated none at all. We will explain 
 ourselves by means of a little illustration from Pope, 
 which will at the same time furnish us with a miniature 
 type of what we ourselves mean by a didactic poem, 
 both in reference to what it is and to what it is 7iot. 
 In the Rape of the Lock there is a game at cards 
 played, and played with a brilliancy of effect and felic- 
 ity of selection, applied to the circumstances, which 
 make it a sort of gem within a gem. This game was 
 not in the first edition of the poem, but was an after- 
 thought of Pope's, labored therefore with more than 
 usual care. We regret that o?nbre, the game described, 
 is no longer played, so that the entire skill with which 
 the mimic battle is fought cannot be so fully appre- 
 ciated as in Pope's days. The strategics have partly 
 perished, which really Pope ought not to complain of, 
 since he suffers only as Hannibal, Marlus, Sertorius, 
 suffered before him. Enough, however, survives of 
 what will tell its own storj'. For what is it, let us ask, 
 that a poet has to do in such a case, supposing that he 
 were disposed to weave a didactic poem out of a pack 
 of cards, as Vida has out of the chess-board ? In de- 
 scribmg any particular game, he does not seek to teach 
 you that game — he postulates it as already known to 
 yc u — but he relies upon separate resources. First, he 
 will revive in the reader's eye. for picturesque effect, 
 
ALEXAxNDER POPE. 199 
 
 the wcU-knowii personal distinctions of the several 
 kings, knaves, &c., their appearances and their powers. 
 Secondly, he will choose some game in which he may 
 display a happy selection applied to the chances and 
 turns of fortune, to the manoeuvres, to the situations of 
 doubt, of brightening expectation, of sudden danger, of 
 critical deliverance, or of final defeat. The interest of 
 a war will be rehearsed. — lis est de paupere regno — 
 that is true ; but the depth of the agitation on such 
 occasions, whether at chess, at draughts, or at cards, 
 is not measured of necessity by the grandeur of the 
 stake ; he selects, in short, whatever fascinates the eye 
 or agitates the heart by mimicry of life ; but so far 
 from teacldng, he presupposes the reader already taught, 
 in order that he may go along with the movement of 
 the descriptions. 
 
 Now, in treatmg a subject so vast, indeed so inex- 
 haustible, as man, this eclecticism ceases to be pos- 
 sible. Every part depends upon every other part. 
 In such a nexus of truths to insulate is to annihilate. 
 Severed from each other the parts lose their support, 
 their coherence, their very meaning ; you have no 
 liberty to reject or to choose. Besides, in treating the 
 ordinary themes proper for what is called didactic 
 poetry, — say, for instance, that it were the art of 
 rearing silk-worms or bees, or suppose it to be hor- 
 ticulture, landscape-gardening, hunting, or hawking, — ■ 
 rarely does there occur anything polemic ; or if a 
 slight controversy does arise, it is easily hushed asleep 
 — it is stated in a line, it is answered in a couplet. 
 But in the themes of Lucretius and Pope everything is 
 polemic ; you move only through dispute, you pros- 
 
200 ALEXANDER POPE. 
 
 per only by argument and never-ending controversy 
 There is not positively one capital proposition or doc- 
 trine about man, about his origin, his nature, his 
 relations to God, or his prospects, but must be fought 
 for with energy, watched at every turn with vigilance, 
 and followed into endleai mazes, not under the choice 
 of the writer, but under the inexorable dictation of the 
 argument. 
 
 Such a poem, so unwieldy, whilst at the same time 
 so austere in its philosophy, together with the innumer- 
 able polemic parts essential to its good faith and even 
 to its evolution, would be absolutely unmanageable 
 from excess and from disproportion, since often a 
 secondary demur would occupy far more space than 
 a principled section. Here lay the impracticable 
 dilemma for Pope's Essay on Man. To satisfy the 
 demands of the subject, was to defeat the objects of 
 poetry. To evade the demands in the way that Pope 
 has done, is to offer us a ruin for a palace. The very 
 same dilemma existed for Lucretius, and with the very 
 same result. The De Rerum Natura (which might, 
 agreeably to its theme, have been entitled De Omnibus 
 Rebus), and the Essay on Man (which might equally 
 have borne the Lucretian title De Rerum Natura), are 
 both, and from the same cause, fragments that could 
 not have been completed. Both are accumulations of 
 diamond-dust without principles of coherency. n a 
 succession of pictures, such as usually form the niate- 
 rials of didactic poems, the slightest thread of mter- 
 dependency is sufficient. But, in works essentially 
 and everywhere argumentative and polemic, to omit 
 the connecting links, as often as they are insusceptible 
 
ALEXANDER POPE. 201 
 
 of poetic effect, is to break vip the unify of the parts, 
 and to undermine the foundations, in what expressly 
 offers itself as a systematic and architectural whole 
 Pope's poem has suffered even more than that of 
 Lucretius from this want of cohesion. • It is indeed 
 the realization of anarchy ; and one amusing- test of 
 this may be found in the fact that different commen- 
 tators have deduced from it the very opposite doc- 
 trines. In some instances this apparent antinomy is 
 douhiful, and dependent on the ambiguities or obscu- 
 rities of the expression. But in others it is fairly de- 
 duo ible ; and the cause lies in the elliptical structure 
 of the work. The ellipsis, or (as sometimes it may be 
 called) the chasm, may be filled up in two different 
 modes essentially hostile; and he that supplies the 
 hiatus, in effect determines the bias of the poem this 
 way or that — to a religious or to a sceptical result. 
 In this edition the commentary of Warburton has been 
 retained, which ought certainly to have been dismissed. 
 The Essay is, in effect, a Hebrew word with the vowel- 
 points omitted ; and Warburton supplies one set of 
 vowels, whilst Crousaz with equal right supplies a con- 
 tradictory set. 
 
 As a whole, the edition before us is certainly the 
 most agreeable of all that we possess. The fidelity of 
 jMr. Eoscoe to the interests of Pope's reputation, con- 
 trasts pleasingly with the harshness at times of Bowles, 
 and the reckless neutrality of Warton. In the editor 
 of a great classic, we view it as a virtue, wearing the 
 grace of loyalty, that he should refuse to expose 
 frailties or defects in a spirit of exultation. Mr. 
 Roscoe's own notes are written with a pocu iar good 
 
 9# 
 
202 ALEXANDER POPE. 
 
 sense, temperance, and kind feeling. The only ob- 
 jection to them, which applies, however, still more to 
 the notes of the former editors, is the want of com- 
 pactness. They are not written under that austere 
 instinct of coftipression and verbal parsimony, as the 
 ideal merit in an annotator, which ought to govern all 
 such ministerial labors in our days. Books are be- 
 coming too much the oppression of the intellect, and 
 cannot endure any longer the accumulation of undi- 
 gested commentaries, or that species of diffhsion in 
 editors which roots itself in laziness. The efforts of 
 condensation and selection are painful ; and they 
 are luxuriously evaded by reprinting indiscriminately 
 whole masses of notes — though often in substance 
 reiterating each other. But the interests of readers 
 clamorously call for the amendment of this system. 
 The principle of selection must now be applied even 
 to the text of great authors. It is no longer advisable 
 to reprint the whole of either Dryden or Pope. Not 
 that we would wish to see their works mutilated. Let 
 such as are selected be printed in the fullest integrity 
 of the text. But some have lost their interest;'^ 
 others, by the elevation of public morals since the 
 days of those great wits, are felt to be now utterly 
 unfit for general reading. Equally for the reader's 
 sake and the poet's, the time has arrived when they 
 may be advantageously retrenched ; for they are pain- 
 fully at war with those feelings of entire and honorable 
 esteem with which all lovers of exquisite intellectua 
 brilliancy must wish to surround the name and memory 
 of Pope. 
 
JNOTES. 
 
 Note 1. Page 150. 
 
 Charles I., for example, when Prince of Wales, and many others 
 in his father's court, gained their known familiarity with Shaks- 
 peai-e — not through the oi"iginal quartos, so slenderly diifused, 
 nor through the first folio of 1623, but through the court repre- 
 sentations of his chief dramas at Whitehall. 
 
 Note 2. Page 156. 
 
 The Canterbury Tales were not made public until 1380, or there- 
 abouts ; but the composition must have cost thirty or more years ; 
 not to mention that the work had probably been finished for some 
 years before it was divulged. 
 
 Note 3. Page 158. 
 
 The reason why the broad distinctions between the two litera- 
 tures of power and knowledge so little fix the attention, lies in the 
 fact, that a vast proportion of books — history, biography, travels, 
 niisKellaneous essays, &c. — lying in a middle zone, confound these 
 di-^tinctions by interblending them. All that we call " amuse- 
 Dieut" or " entertainment," is a diluted form of the power belong- 
 ing to passion, and also a mixed form ; and whei'e threads of direct 
 insfruclion intermingle in the texture with these threads of pojyer, 
 this absorption of the duality into one representative nuance neutral- 
 izes the separate perception of either. Fused into a tcrlium quid, 
 
 (203) 
 
204 ALEXANDER POPE. 
 
 or neutral state, they disappear to the popular eye as the repelling 
 forces, which in fact they are. 
 
 Note 4. Page 162. 
 
 And this purity of diction shows itself in many points arguing 
 great yigilance of attention, and also great anxiety for using the 
 language powerfully as the most venerable of traditions, whan 
 treating the most venerable of subjects. For instance, the Biblo 
 never condescends to the mean colloquial preterites of chid for did 
 chide, or writ for did write, but always uses the full-dress word 
 chode, and wrote. Pope might have been happier had he read his 
 Bible more ; but assuredly he would have improved his English. 
 A question naturally arises, how it was that the elder writers — 
 Shakspeare in particular (who had seen so little of higher so- 
 ciety when he wrote his youthful poems of Lucrece and Adonis) — 
 should have maintained so much purer a grammar ? Dr. John- 
 son indeed, but most falsely, says that Shakspeare's grammar ia 
 licentious. " The style of Shakspeare " (these are the exact 
 words of the doctor in his preface) " was in itself ungrammatical, 
 perplexed, and obscure." An audacious misrepresentation ! In 
 the doctor himself, a legislator for the language, we undertake to 
 show not only more numerically of trespasses against grammar, but 
 (which is worse still) more unscholarlike trespasses. Shakspeare 
 is singularly correct in grammar. One reason, we believe, was 
 this : from the restoration of Charles II. decayed the ceremonious 
 exteriors of society. Stiffness and reserve melted away before tho 
 familiarity and impudence of French manners. Social meetings 
 grew far more numerous as towns expanded ; social pleasure far 
 more began now to depend upon conversation ; and conversation, 
 growing less formal, quickened its pace. Hence came the call for 
 rapid abbreviations: the '* is and 'twas, the can't find don't, of 
 the two post-Miltonic genei ations arose under this impulse ; and 
 the general impression has ever since subsisted amongst English 
 writers, that language, instead of being an exquisitely beautiful 
 vehicle for the thoughts — a robe that never can be adorned with 
 too much care or piety — is in fact a dirty high-road, which all 
 people detest whilst all are forced to use it, and to the keeping of 
 which in repair no rational man ever contributes a trifle that is not 
 forced from him by some severity of Quarter Sessions. The great 
 
20c 
 
 sorrupter of English was the conversational instinct for rapidity. 
 A more honorable source of corruption lay in the growth of new 
 ideas, and the continual influx of foreign words to meet them. 
 Spanish words arose, like reformado, prixado, desperado, and 
 Freiicli ones past counting. But, as these retained their foreign 
 forms of structure, they reacted to vitiate the language still more 
 by introducing a piebald aspect of books which it seemed a matter 
 of necessity to tolerate for the interests of wider thinking. The 
 perfection of this horror was never attained except amongst the 
 CerLians. 
 
 Note 5. Page 170. 
 
 It was after his connection with AVarburton that Pope introduced 
 several of his living portraits into the Satires. 
 
 Note G. Page 174. 
 By what might seem a strange oversight, but which in fact is a 
 very natural oversight to one who was not uttering one word in 
 which he seriously believed. Pope, in a prose note on verse 207, 
 roundly asserts " that the particular characters of women are more 
 rartoiw than those of men." It is no evasion of this insufferable 
 contradiction, that he couples with tlie greater variety of charac- 
 ters in women a greater uniformity in wliat he presumes to be 
 their ruling passion. Even as to this ruling passion he cannot 
 agree with himself for ten minutes ; generally he says, that it is 
 the love of pleasure ; but sometimes (as at verse 208) forgetting 
 tiiis monotony, he ascribes to women a dualism of passions, — love 
 of pleasure and love of power, — which dualism of itself must bo 
 a source of self-conflict, and therefore of inexhaustible variety in 
 chiH-acter : 
 
 "Those only fixed, they first or last obey — 
 The love of pleasure aud the love of sway." 
 
 Note 7. Page 177. 
 
 This refers to the Act of Parliament for burying corpses in 
 woollen, which greatly disturbed the fashionable costume in coffins 
 CO mine ilfuut. 
 
206 ALEXANDER POPE. 
 
 Note 8. Page 179. 
 
 The sons of the Duke having died, the title and estates were so 
 settled as to descend through this daughter, -who married the Earl 
 of Sunderland. In consequence of this arrangement, Spenser 
 (until lately) displaced the great name of Churchill ; and the 
 Earl became that second Duke of Marlborough, about whom Smol- 
 lett tells us in his History of England (Reign of George II.) so 
 remarkable and to this hour so mysterious a story. 
 
 Note 9. Page 179. 
 
 The Duchess died in the same year as Pope, namely, just in time 
 by a few months to miss the Rebellion of 1745, and the second 
 Pretender ; spectacles which for little reasons (vindictive or other- 
 wise) both of them would have enjoyed until the spring of 1746. 
 
 Note 10. Page 188. 
 
 The Vestals not only renounced marriage, at least for those 
 years in which marriage could be a natural blessing, but also left 
 their fjithers' houses at an age the most trying to the human heart 
 as regards the pangs of separation. 
 
 Note 11. Page 202. 
 
 We do not include the Dunciad in this list. On the contrary, 
 the arguments by which it has been generally undervalued, as 
 though antiquated by lapse of time and by the fading of names, 
 are all unsound. "We ourselves hold it to be the greatest of Pope's 
 efforts. But for that very reason we retire from the examination 
 of it, which we had designed, as being wholly disproportioned to 
 the nari'ow limits remaining to us. 
 
WILLIAM GODWIN* 
 
 It is no duty of a notice so cursory to discuss Mr. 
 Godwin as a philosopher. Mr. Gilfillan admits that 
 in this character he did not earn much popularity by 
 any absolute originality; and of such popularity as 
 he may hav^e snatched surreptitiously without it, 
 clearly all must have long since exhaled before it 
 could be possible for "a respectable person" to de- 
 mand of Mr. Gilhilan •' Who 's Godwin ? " A ques- 
 tion which Mr. Gilfillan justly thinks it possible that 
 "some readers," of the piesent day, November, 1845, 
 may repeat. That is, we must presume, not who is 
 Godwin the novelist ? but who is Godwin the political 
 phdosopher? In that character he is now forgotten. 
 And yet in that he carried one single shock into the 
 bosom of English society, fearful but momentary, like 
 that from the electric blow of the gymnotus ; or, per- 
 haps, the intensity of the brief panic which, fifty years 
 ago, he impressed on the public mind, may be more 
 adequately expressed by the case of a ship in the 
 middle ocean suddenly scraping, with her keel, a rag- 
 
 ♦ " A Gallery of Literary Portraits." By George Gilfillan. 
 
 (207) 
 
29S WILLIAM GODWIN. 
 
 ged rock, hanging for one moment, as if impaled upon 
 the teeth of the dreadful sierra, then, by the mere 
 impetus of her mighty sails, grinding audibly to 
 lowder the fangs of this accursed submarine harrow, 
 leaping into deep water again, and causing the panic 
 of ruin to be simultaneous with the deep sense of de- 
 liverance. In the quarto (that is, the original) edition 
 of his " Political Justice," Mr. Godwin advanced against 
 thrones and dominations, powers and principalities, 
 with the air of some Titan slinger or monarchist 
 from Thebes and Troy, saying, " Come hither, ye 
 wretches, that I may give your flesh to the fowls of 
 the air." But, in the second, or octavo edition, — and 
 under what motive has never been explained, — he 
 recoiled, absolutely, from the sound himself had made : 
 everybody else was appalled by the fury of the chal- 
 lenge; and, through the strangest of accidents, Mr. 
 (jiodwin also was appalled. The second edition, as 
 regards principles, is not a recast, but absolutely a trav- 
 esty of the first : nay, it is all but a palinode. In this 
 collapse of a tense excitement, I myself find the true 
 reason for the utter extinction of the " Political Jus- 
 tice," and of its author considered as a philosopher. 
 Subsequently, he came forward as a philosophical 
 speculator, in " The Enquirer," and elsewhere ; but 
 here it was always some minor question which hs 
 raised, or sonne mixed question, rather allied to philos- 
 ophy than philosophical. As regarded the main cre- 
 ative nisus of his philosophy, it remained undeniable 
 that, in relation to the hostility of the world, he was 
 like one who, in some piratical ship, should drop his 
 anchor before Portsmouth, — should defy the navies of 
 
WILLIAM GODWIN. 209 
 
 England to come out and fight, and then, whilst a thou- 
 sand vessels were contending for the preference in blow- 
 ing him out of the seas, should suddenly slip his 
 cables and run. 
 
 But it is as a novelist, not as a political theorist, that 
 Mr. Gilfillan values Godwin ; and specially for his nove^ 
 of " Caleb Williams." Now, if this were the eccentric 
 judgment of one unsupported man,, however able, and 
 had received no countenance at all from others, it 
 might be injudicious to detain the reader upon it. It 
 happens, however, that other men of talent have raised 
 " Caleb Williams " to a station in the first rank of nov- 
 els ; whilst many more, amongst whom I am compelled 
 to class myself, can see in it no merit of any kind. 
 A schism, which is really perplexing, exists in this 
 particular case ; and, that the reader may judge for 
 himself, I will state the outline of the plot, out of which 
 it is that the whole interest must be supposed to grow ; 
 for the characters are nothing, being mere generalities, 
 and very slightly developed. Thirty-five years it is 
 since I read the book ; but the nakedness of the incidents 
 makes them easily rememberable. — Falkland, who 
 passes for a man of a high-minded and delicate honat, 
 but is, in fact, distinguished only by acute sensibil- 
 ity to the opinion of the world, receives a dreadful 
 insult in a most public situation. It is, indeed, more 
 than an insult, being the most brutal of outrages. In 
 a ball-room, where the local gentry and his neighbors 
 are assembled, he is knocked down, kicked, dragged 
 along the floor, by a ruffian squire, named Tyrrel. It 
 is vain to resist ; he himself is slightly built, and hia 
 antagonist is a powerful man. In these circumstances, 
 14 
 
210 WILLIAM GODWIN. 
 
 and under the eyes of all the ladies in the county 
 witnessing every step of his humiliation, no man could 
 severely have blamed him, nor would English law 
 have severely punished him, if, in the frenzy of his 
 agitation, he had seized a poker and laid his assailant 
 dead upon the spot. Such allowance does the natural 
 feeling of men, such allowance does the sternness of 
 the judgment-seat, make for human infirmity when 
 tried to extremity by devilish provocation. But Falk- 
 land does not avenge himself thus : he goes out, makes 
 his little arrangements, and, at a later hour of the 
 night, he comes, by surprise, upon Tyrrel, and mur- 
 ders him in the darkness. Here is the first vice in the 
 story. With any gleam of generosity in his nature, 
 no man in pursuit of vengeance would have found it 
 in such a catastrophe. That an enemy should die by 
 apoplexy, or by lightning, would be no gratification 
 of wrath to an impassioned pursuer : to make it a 
 retribution for him, he himself must be associated to 
 the catastrophe in the consciousness of his victim. 
 Falkland for some time evades or tramples on detec- 
 tion. But his evil genius at last appears in the shspe 
 of Caleb Williams ; and the agency through which 
 Mr. Caleb accomplishes his mission is not that of any 
 grand passion, but of vile eavesdropping inquisitive- 
 ness. Mr. Falkland had hired him as an amanuensis; 
 and in that character Caleb had occasion to observe 
 that some painful remembrance weighed upon his 
 master's mind; and that something or other — docu- 
 ments or personal memorials connected with this re- 
 membrance — were deposited in a trunk visited at 
 intervals by Falkland. But of- what nature could these 
 
WILLIAM GODWIN. 211 
 
 meuicrials be ? Surely Mr. Falkland would uot keep 
 ill brandy the gory head of Tyrrel; and anything 
 short of that could not proclaim any murder at all, 
 much less the particular murder. Strictly speaking 
 nothing- could be in the trunk, of a nature to connect 
 Falkland with the murder more closely than the cir- 
 cumstances had already connected him; and those 
 circumstances, as we know, had been insufficient. It 
 puzzles one, therefore, to imagine any evidence which 
 the trunk could yield, unless there were secreted within 
 it some known personal property of Tyrrel's ; in which 
 case the aspiring Falkland had committed a larceny 
 as well as murder. Caleb, meantime, wastes no 
 labor in hypothetic reasonings, but resolves to have 
 ocular satisfaction in the matter. An opportunity 
 ofTers ; an alarm of fire is given in the day-time ; and 
 whilst Mr. Falkland, with his people, is employed on 
 the lawn manning the buckets, Caleb skulks ofT to the 
 trunk ; feeling, probably, that his first duty was to 
 himself, by extinguishing the burning fire of curiosity 
 in his own heart, after which there might be time 
 enough for his second duty, of assisting to extinguish 
 the fire in his master's mansion. Falkland, however, 
 misses the absentee. To pursue him, to collar him, 
 and, we may hope, to kick him, are the work of a 
 moment. Had Caleb found time for accomplishing 
 his inquest? I really forget; but no matter. Either 
 now, or at some luckier hour, he does so : he becomes 
 master of Falkland's secret — consequently, as both 
 fancy, of Falkland's life. At this point commences a 
 flight of Caleb, and a chasing of Falkland, in order to 
 watch his motions, which forms the most spirited part 
 
212 WILLIAM GODWIN. 
 
 of the story. Mr. Godwin tells us that he derived thii 
 situation, the continual flight and continual pursuit, 
 from a South American tradition of some Spanish 
 vengeance. Always the Spaniard was riding in to 
 any given town on the road, when his d,.^stined victim 
 was riding 02it at the other end ; so that the relations 
 of "whereabouts" were never for a moment lost: the 
 trail was perfect. Now, this might be possible in cer- 
 tain countries; but in England! — heavens! could 
 not Caleb double upon his master, or dodge round a 
 gate (like Falkland when he murdered Mr. Tyrrel), or 
 take a headlong plunge into London, where the scent 
 might have lain cold for forty years ? =*= Other acci- 
 dents by thousands would interrupt the chase. On the 
 hundredth day, for instance, after the flying parties 
 had become well known on the road, Mr. Falkland 
 would drive furiously up to some King's Head or 
 White Lion, putting his one question to the waiter, 
 " Where 's Caleb ? " And the waiter would reply, 
 "Where's Mr. Caleb, did you say, sir? Why, he 
 went off at five by the Highflyer, booked inside the 
 whole way to Doncaster; and Mr. Caleb is now, sir, 
 precisely forty-five miles ahead." Then would Falk- 
 land furiously demand " four horses on ; " and then 
 would the waiter plead a contested election in excuse 
 for having no horses at all. Really, for dramatic 
 
 * " Forty years : " so long, according to my recollection of 
 Boswell, did Dr. Johnson walk about London before he met an 
 old Derbyshire friend, who also had been walking about Lon- 
 don with the same punctual regularity for every day of the 
 same forty years. The nodes of intersection did not come round 
 sooner. 
 
•WILLIAIiI bODWIN. 213 
 
 offect, it is a pity that the tale were not translated for- 
 ward to the days of railroads. Sublime would look 
 the fiery pursuit, and the panic-stricken flight, when 
 racing from Fleetwood to Liverpool, to Birmingham, 
 to London ; then smoking along the Great Western, 
 where Mr. Caleb's forty-five miles ahead would avail 
 him little, to Bristol, to Exeter ; thence doubling back 
 upon London, like the steam leg in Mr. H. G. Bell's 
 admirable story. 
 
 But, after all, what was the object, and what the 
 result of all this racing ? Once I saw two young men 
 facing each other upon a high road, but at a furlong's 
 distance, and playing upon the foolish terrors of a 
 young woman by continually heading her back from 
 cue to the other, as alternately she approached towards 
 either. Signals of some dreadful danger in the north 
 being made by the northern man, back the poor girl 
 flew towards the southern, who, in Ms turn, threw out 
 pantomimic warnings of an equal danger to the south. 
 And thus, like a tennis-ball, the simple creature kept 
 rebounding from one to the other, until she could move 
 no further through sheer fatigue ; and then first the 
 question occurred to her. What was it that she had 
 been running from ? The same question seems to 
 have struck at last upon the obtuse mind of Mr. Caleb ; 
 it was quite as easy to play the part of hunter, as that 
 of hunted game, and likely to be cheaper. He turns 
 therefore sharp round upon his master, who in his turn 
 is disposed to fly, when suddenly the sport is brought 
 to a dead lock by a constable, who tells the murdering 
 squire that he is " wanted." Caleb has lodged informa- 
 tions ; all parties meet for a final " reunion " before the 
 
214 WILLIAM GODWIN. 
 
 magistrate; Mr. Falkland, oddly enough, regards him- 
 self in the light of an ill-iised. man ; which theory of 
 the case, even more oddly, seems to be adopted, by 
 Mr. Gilfillan ; but, for all that he can say, Mr. Falk- 
 land is fully committed ; and as laws were made for 
 every degree, it is plain that Mr. Falkland (however 
 much of a pattern-man) is in some danger of swing- 
 ing. But the catastrophe is intercepted ; a novelist 
 may raise his hero to the peerage ; he may even con- 
 fer the garter upon him ; but it shocks against usage 
 and courtesy that he should hang him. The circu- 
 lating libraries would rise in mutiny, if he did. And 
 therefore it is satisfactory to believe (for all along I 
 speak from memory), that Mr. Falkland reprieves him- 
 self from the gallows by dying of exhaustion from his 
 travels. 
 
 Such is the fable of '• Caleb Williams," upon which, 
 by the way, is built, I think, Colman's drama of " The 
 Iron Chest." I have thought, it worth the trouble 
 (whether for the reader, or for myself), of a flying 
 abstract ; and chiefly with a view to the strange col- 
 lision of opinions as to the merit of the work ; some, 
 as I have said, exalting it to the highest class of novels, 
 others depressing it below the lowest of those which 
 achieve any notoriety. They who vote against it are 
 in a large majority. The Germans, whose literature 
 oflers a free port to all the eccentricities of the earth, 
 have never welcomed " Caleb Williams." Chenier, tlie 
 ruling litterateur of Paris, in the days of Napoleon, 
 when reviewing the literature of his own day, dis- 
 misses Caleb contemptuously as coarse and vulgar. 
 It is not therefore -to the German taste ; it is not to the 
 
WILLUM GODWIN. 215 
 
 French. And as to our own country, Mr. Gilfillan is 
 undoubtedly wrong in supposing that it " is in every 
 circulating library, and needs, more frequently than 
 almost any novel, to be replaced." If this were so, in 
 presence of the immortal novels which for one hun- 
 dred and fifty years have been gathering into the 
 garners of our English literature, I should look next 
 to see the race of rnen returning from venison and 
 wh cat to their primitive diet of acorns. But I believe 
 th)t the number of editions yet published, would at 
 once discredit this account of the book's popularity. 
 Neither is it likely, a priori, that such a popularity 
 could arise even for a moment. The interest from 
 secret and vindictive murder, though coarse, is un- 
 doubtedly deep. What would make us thrill ni real 
 life, — the case for instance of a neighbor lying under 
 the suspicion of such a murder, — would make us thrill 
 in a novel. But then it must be managed with art, 
 and covered with mystery. For a long time it m.ust 
 continue doubtful, both as to the fact, and the circum- 
 stances, and the motive. Whereas, in the case of 
 Mr. Falkland, there is little mystery of any kind ; not 
 much, and only for a short time, to Caleb ; and none 
 at all to the reader, who could have relieved the curi- 
 osity of Mr. Caleb from the first, if he were placed in 
 communication with him. 
 
 Differing so much from Mr. Gilfillan, as to the 
 effectiveness of the novel, I am only the more im- 
 pressed with the eloquent images and expressions by 
 which he has conveyed his own sense of its power. 
 Power there must be, though many of us cannot 
 discern it, to react upon us, through impressions so 
 
216 WILLIAM GODWIN. 
 
 powerful in other minds. Some of Mr. Gilfillan's im- 
 pressions, as they are clothed in striking images by 
 himself, I will here quote : — " His," Godwin's " heat is 
 never that of the sun with all his beams around him ; 
 but of the round, rayless orb seen shining from the 
 summit of Mont Blanc, still and stripped in the black 
 ether. He has more passion than imagination. And 
 even his passion he has learned more by sympathy 
 than by personal feeling. And, amid his most tem- 
 pestuous scenes, you see the calm and stern eye of 
 philosophic analysis looking on. His imagery is not 
 copious, nor always original ; but its sparseness is its 
 strength — the flash comes sudden as the lightning. No 
 preparatory flourish, or preliminary sound ; no sheets 
 of useless splendor : each figure is a fork of fire, 
 which strikes and needs no second blow. Nay, often 
 his images are singularly common-place, and you 
 wonder how they move you so, till you resolve this 
 into the power of the hand which jaculates its own 
 energy in them.'''' And again, " His novels resemble 
 the paintings of John Martin, being a gallery, nay a 
 world, in themselves. In both, monotony and man- 
 nerism are incessant ; but the monotony is that of the 
 sounding deep, the mannerism that of the thunderbolts 
 of heaven. Martin might append to his one continual 
 flash of lightning, which is present in all his pictures, — • 
 now to reveal a deluge, now to garland the brow of a 
 fiend — now to rend the veil of a temple, and now to 
 guide the invaders through the breach of a city, — the 
 words, John Martin, his mark. Godwin's novels are 
 not less terribly distinguished to those who understand 
 
WILLIAM GODWIN. 2J7 
 
 their cipher — the deep scar of misery branded upon 
 the brow of the ' victim of society.' " 
 
 And as to the earliest of these novels, the " Caleb 
 Williams," he says, " There is about it a stronger 
 suction and swell of interest than in any novel we 
 know, with the exception of one or two of Sir 
 Walter's. You are in it ere you are aware. You 
 put your hand playfully into a child's, and are sur- 
 prised to find it held in the grasp of a giant. It 
 becomes a fascination. Struggle you may, and kick, 
 but he holds you by his glittering eye*." In reference, 
 again, to " St. Leon," the next most popular of God- 
 win's novels, there is a splendid passage upon the 
 glory and pretensions of the ancient alchemist, in the 
 infancy of scientific chemistry. It rescues the char- 
 acter from vulgarity, and displays it idealized as 
 sometimes, perhaps, it must have been. I am sorry 
 that it is too long for extracting ; but, in compensation 
 to the reader, I quote two very picturesque sentences, 
 describing what, to Mr. Gilfillan, appears the quality 
 of Godwin's style : — " It is a smooth succession of short 
 and simple sentences, each clear as crystal, and none 
 ever distracting the attention from the subject to its 
 own construction. It is a style in which you cannot 
 ^j.plain how the total effect rises out of the individual 
 parts, and which is forgotten as entirely during perusal 
 \s in the pane of glass through which you gaze at a 
 comet or a star." Elsewhere, and limiting his remark 
 to the style of the " Caleb Williams," he says finely : — 
 'The writing, though far from elegant or finished, has 
 m parts the rude power of those sentences which 
 
218 WILMAM GODWIN. 
 
 criminals, martyrs, and maniacs, scrawl upon their walls 
 or windows in the eloquence of desperation."* 
 
 These things perplex me. The possibility that any 
 individual in the minority can have regarded Godwin 
 with such an eye, seems to argue that we of the 
 majority must be wrong. Deep impressions seem to 
 justify themselves. We may have failed to perceive 
 things which are in the object; but it is not so easy 
 for others to perceive things which are not ; or, at 
 least, hardly in a case like this, where (though a 
 minority) these '^others" still exist in number sufficient 
 to check and to confirm each other. On the other 
 hand, Godwin's name seems sinking out of remem- 
 brance; and he is remembered less by the novels that 
 succeeded, or by the philosophy that he abjured, than 
 as the man that had Mary Wolstonecraft for his wife, 
 Mrs. Shelley for his daughter, and the immortal Shelley 
 as his son-in-law. 
 
 * "Desperation." Yet, as martyrs ai'e concerned in the pic- 
 ture, it ought to have been said, " of desperation and of farewell 
 to earth," or something equivalent. 
 
JOHN FOSTER. 
 
 Mr. GiLFiLLAN* possibly overrates the power of this 
 essayist, and the hold which he has upon the public 
 mind. It is singular, meantime, that whatever might 
 be its degree, much or little, originally his influence 
 was due to an accident of position which in some 
 countries would have tended to destroy it. He was a 
 Dissenter. Now, in England, tliat sometimes operates 
 as an advantage. To dissent from the established 
 form of religion, which could not affect the value of a 
 writer's speculations, may easily become the means 
 of diffusing their reputation, as well as of facilitating 
 their introduction. And in the following way : The 
 great mass of the reading population are absolutely in- 
 different to such deflexions from the national standard. 
 The man, suppose, is a Baptist : but to be a Baptist is 
 still to be a Protestant, and a Protestant agreeing with 
 his countrymen in everything essential to purity of 
 life and faith. So far there is the most entire neutrality 
 in the public rnind, and readiness to receive any im- 
 pression which the man's powers enable him to make. 
 
 • " Gallery of Literary Portraits." 
 
220 ' JOHN FOSTER. 
 
 There is, indeed, so absolute a carelessness for all 
 inoperative shades of religious difference lurking- in 
 the background, that even the ostentatiously liberal 
 hardly feel it a case for parading their liberality. But, 
 on the other hand, his own sectarian party are as ener 
 getic to push him forward as all others are passive. 
 They favor him as a brother, and also as one whose 
 credit will react upon their common sect. And this 
 favor, pressing like a wedge upon the unresisting 
 neutrality of the public, soon succeeds in gaining for 
 any able writer among sectarians an exaggerated reputa- 
 tion. Nobody is against him ; and a small section 
 acts /or him in a spirit of resolute partisanship. 
 
 To this accident of social position, and to his con- 
 nection with the Eclectic Review, Mr. Foster owed 
 his first advantageous presentation before the public. 
 The misfortune of many an able writer is, not that he 
 is rejected by the world, but that virtually he is never 
 brought conspicuously before them: he is not dis- 
 missed unfavorably, but he is never effectually intro- 
 duced. From this calamity, at the outset, Foster was 
 saved by his party. I happened myself to be in 
 Bristol at the moment when his four essays were first 
 issuing from the press ; and everywhere I heard so 
 pointed an account of the expectations connected with 
 Foster by his religious party, that I made it a duty to 
 read his book without delay. It is a distant incident 
 to look back upon — gone by for more than thirty 
 years ; but I remember my first impressions, which 
 were these . — first, That the novelty or weight of the 
 thinking was hardly sufficient to account for the sudden 
 popularity without souxq extra influence at work; and, 
 
JOHN FOSTER. 22_ 
 
 secondly, That the contrast was remarkable between 
 the uncolored style of his general diction, and the 
 brilliant felicity of occasional images embroidered 
 upon the sober ground of his text. The splendor did 
 not seem spontaneous, or gro\ving up as part of the 
 texture within the loom ; it was intermitting, and 
 seemed as extraneous to the substance as the flowers 
 which are chalked for an evening upon the floors of 
 ball-rooms. 
 
 Subsequently, I remarked two other features of 
 difference in his manner, neither of which has been 
 overlooked by Mr. Gilfillan, namely, first. The unsocial 
 gloom of his eye, travelling over all things with 
 dissatisfaction ; second (which in our days seemed 
 unaccountable), the remarkable limitation of his knowl- 
 edge. You might suppose the man, equally by his 
 ignorance of passing things and by his ungenial 
 moroseness, to be a specimen newly turned out from 
 the silent cloisters of La Trappe. A monk he seemed 
 by the repulsion of his cloistral feelings, and a monk 
 by the superannuation of his knowledge. Both pecu- 
 liarities he drew in part from that same sectarian 
 position, operating for evil, to which, in another 
 direction as a conspicuous advantage, he had been 
 indebted for his favorable public introduction. It is 
 not that Foster was generally misanthropic ; neither 
 was he, as a sectarian, "a good hater" at any special 
 angle ; that is, he was not a zealous hater ; but, by 
 temperament, and in some measure by situation, as 
 one pledged to a polemic attitude by his sect, \Aras 
 a general disliker and a general suspecter. His con- 
 fidence in human nature was small ; for he saw the 
 
222 JOHN FOSTER. 
 
 clay of the composite statue, but not its gold ; and 
 apparently his satisfaction with himself was not much 
 greater. Inexhaustible was his jealousy; and for that 
 reason his philanthropy was everywhere checked by 
 frost and wintry chills. This blight of asceticism in 
 his nature is not of a kind to be briefly illustrated, for 
 it lies diflTused through the texture of his writings. But 
 of his other monkish characteristic, his abstraction 
 from the movement and life of his own age, I may 
 give this instance, which I observed by accident about 
 a year since in some late edition of his Essays. 
 He was speaking of the term radical as used to 
 designate a large political party ; but so slightly was 
 he acquainted with the history of that party, so little 
 had he watched the growth of this important interest 
 in our political system, that he supposes the term 
 " Radical " to express a mere scoff' or movement of 
 irony from the antagonists of that party. It stands, 
 as he fancies, upon the same footing as " Puritan,'' 
 •' Roundhead," &c., amongst our fathers, or " Swaddler," 
 applied to the Evangelicals amongst ourselves. This 
 may seem a trifle ,* nor do I mention the mistake for 
 any evil which it can lead to, but for the dreamy inat- 
 tention which It argues to what was most important in 
 the agitations around him. It may cause nothing ; but 
 how much does it presume ? Could a man, interested 
 in the motion of human principles, or the revolutions of 
 his own country, have failed to notice the rise of a new 
 party which loudly proclaimed its own mission and 
 purposes in the very name which it assumed ? The 
 term "Radical" was used elliptically : Mr. Hunt, and 
 all about him, constantly gave out that they were 
 
JOHN FOSTER, 223 
 
 reformers who went to the root — radical reiormers ; 
 wliilst all previous political parties they held to be 
 merely masquerading as reformers, or, at least, want- 
 ing in the determination to go deep enough. The 
 party name "Radical" was no insult of enemies; it 
 was a cognizance self-adopted by the party which it 
 designates, and worn with pride ; and whatever might 
 be the degree of personal weight belonging to Mr. 
 Hunt, no man, who saw into the composition of society 
 amongst ourselves, could doubt that his principles were 
 destined to a most extensive diffusion — were sure of 
 a permanent settlement amongst the great party in- 
 terests — and, therefore, sure of disturbing thencefor- 
 wards forever the previous equilibrium of forces in 
 our English social system. To mistake the origin or 
 history of a word is nothing ; but to mistake it, when 
 that history of a word ran along with the history of a 
 thing destined to change all the aspects of our English 
 present and future, implies a sleep of Epimenides 
 amongst the shocks which are unsettling the realities of 
 earth. 
 
 The four original essays, by which Foster was first 
 known to the public, are those by which he is still best 
 known. It cannot be said of them that they have any 
 •practical character calculated to serve the uses of life. 
 They terminate in speculations that apply themselves 
 little enough to any business of the world. Whether 
 a man should write memoirs of himself cannot have 
 any personal interest for one reader in a myriad. 
 And two of the essays have even a misleading ten- 
 dency. That upon " Decision of Character " places a 
 very exaggerated v^iluation upon one quality of human 
 
224 JOHN FOSTER. 
 
 temperament, w'licli is neither rare, nor at all necessa- 
 rily allied with the most elevated features of moral 
 grandeur. Coleridge, because he had no business tal- 
 ents himself, admired them preposterously in others 
 or fancied them vast when they existed only in a slight 
 degree. And, upon the same principle, I suspect that 
 ]\Ir. Foster rated so highly the quality of decision in 
 matters of action, chiefly because he wanted it himself. 
 Obstinacy is a gift more extensively sown than Foster 
 was willing to admit. And his scale of appreciation, 
 if it were practically applied to the men of history, 
 would lead to judgments immoderately perverse. Mil- 
 ton would rank far below Luther. In reality, as Mr. 
 Gilfillan justly remarks, " Decision of character is not, 
 strictly, a moral power ; and it is extremely dangerous 
 to pay that homage to any intellectual quality, which is 
 sacred to virtue alone." But even this estimate must 
 often tend to exaggeration ; for the most inexorable 
 decision is much more closely connected with bodily 
 differences of temperament than with any superiority 
 of mind. It rests too much upon a physical basis ; 
 and, of all qualities whatever, it is the most liable to 
 vicious varieties of degeneration. The worst result 
 from this essay is not merely speculative ; it trains the 
 feelings to false admirations ; and upon a path which 
 is the more dangerous, as the besetting temptation of 
 our English life lies already towards an estimate much 
 too high of all qualities bearing upon the active and the 
 practical. We need no spur in that direction. 
 
 The essay upon the use of technically religious 
 language seems even worse by its tendency, although 
 the necessities of the subject will forever neutralize 
 
JOHN FOSTER. 225 
 
 Foster's advice. Mr. Gilfillan is, in this' instance dis- 
 posed to defend him : " Foster does not ridicule the 
 use, but the abuse, of technical language, as applied 
 to divine things; and proposes, merely as an experi- 
 ment, to translate it in accommodation to fastidious 
 tastes." Safely, however, it may be assumed, that, in 
 all such cases, the fastidious taste is but another aspect 
 of hatred to religious themes, — a hatred which there 
 is neither justice nor use in attempting to propitiate. 
 Cant words ouglit certainly to be proscribed, as de- 
 grading to the majesty of religion: the word "prayer- 
 ful," for instance, so commonly used of late years, 
 seems objectionable ; and such words as " savory," 
 which is one of those cited by Foster himself, are 
 absolutely abominable, when applied to spiritual or 
 intellectual objects. It is not fastidiousness, but man- 
 liness and good feeling, which are outraged by such 
 vulgarities. On the other hand, the word " grace " 
 expresses an idea so exclusively belonging to Chris- 
 tianity, and so indispensable to the wholeness of its 
 philosophy, that any attempt to seek for equivalent 
 terms of mere human growth, or amongst the vocabu- 
 laries of mere worldly usage, must terminate ia con- 
 scious failure, or else in utter self-delusion. Chris- 
 tianity, having introduced many ideas that are absolutely 
 new, such as faith, charity, holiness, the nature 
 of God, of human frailty, &c., is as much entitled 
 (nay as much obliged and pledged) to a peculiar lin- 
 guage and terminology as chemistry. Let a laan try 
 if he can find a word in the market-place fitted to bo 
 the substitute for the word gas ox alkali. The danger, 
 in fact, lies exactly in the opposite direction to that 
 15 10^ 
 
226 JOHN FOSTER. 
 
 indicated by Foster. No fear that men of elegiinl 
 taste should be revolted by the use of what, after allj 
 is scriptural language ; for it is plain that he who could 
 be so revolted, wants nothing seriously with religion. 
 But there is great fear that any general disposition to 
 angle for readers of extra refinement, or to court the 
 effeminately fastidious, by sacrificing the majestic sim- 
 plicities of scriptural diction, would and must end in 
 a ruinous dilution of religious truths ; along with the 
 characteristic language of Christian philosophy, would 
 ■ xliale its characteristic doctrines. 
 
WILLIAM HAZLITT.* 
 
 This man, who would have drawn in the scaljs 
 against a select vestry of Fosters, is for the present 
 deeper in the world's oblivion than the man with whom 
 I here connect his name. That seems puzzling. For, 
 if Hazlitt were misanthropic, so was Foster : both as 
 Avriters were splenetic and more than peevish ; but 
 Hazlitt requited his reader for the pain of travelling 
 through so gloomy an atmosphere, by the rich vegeta- 
 tion which his teeming intellect threw up as it moved 
 along. The soil in his brain was of a volcanic fertility ; 
 whereas, in Foster, as in some tenacious clay, if the 
 life were deep, it was slow and sullen in its throes. 
 The reason for at all speaking of them in connec- 
 tion is, that both were essayists ; neither in fact writing 
 anything of note except essays, moral or critical ; and 
 both were bred at the feet of Dissenters. But how 
 diflerent were the results from that connection ! Foster 
 turned it to a blessing, winning the jewel that is most 
 of all to be coveted, peace and the fallentis semita 
 viicB. Hazlitt, on the other hand, sailed wilfully away 
 
 ♦ " Gallery of Literary Portraits," By George Gilfillan. 
 
 (227) 
 
228 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 from this sheltering harbor of his father's profession, — 
 for sheltering it might have proved to hiniy and did 
 prove to his yoath, — only to toss ever afterwards as a 
 drifting wreck at the mercy of storms. Hazlitt w^as 
 not one of those who could have illustrated the benefits 
 of a connection with a sect, that is, with a small confed- 
 eration hostile by position to a larger ; for the hostility 
 from without, iu order to react, presumes a concord 
 from within. Nor does his case impeach the correct- 
 ness of what I have said on that subject in speaking 
 of Foster. He owed no introduction to the Dissenters ; 
 but it was because he would owe none. The Ishmael- 
 ite, whose hand is against every man, yet smiles at 
 the approach of a brother, and gives the salutation of 
 " Peace be with you ! " to the tribe of his father. But 
 Hazlitt smiled upon no man, nor exchanged tokens of 
 peace with the nearest of fraternities. Wieland, in his 
 " Oberon," says of a benign patriarch — 
 
 " His eye a smile on all creation beamed." 
 
 Travestied as to one word, the line would have described 
 Hazlitt — 
 
 " His eye a scowl on all creation beamed." 
 
 This inveterate misanthropy was constitutional ; exas- 
 perated it certainly had been by accidents of life, by 
 disappointments, by mortifications, by insults, and still 
 more by having wilfully placed himself in collision 
 from the first with all the interests that were in the 
 sunshine of this world, and with all the persons that 
 were then powerful in England. But my impression 
 was, if I had a right to have any impression with regard 
 to one whom I knew so slightly, that no change of 
 
WILLIAM IIAZLITT. 229 
 
 position or of fortunes could have brought Hazlitt into 
 reconciliation with the fashion of this world, or of this 
 England, or " this now." It seemed to me that he 
 natcd tliose whom hollow custom obliged him to call liis 
 " friends," considerably more than those whom notori- 
 ous differences of opinion entitled him to rank as his 
 enemies. At least within the ring of politics this was 
 so. Between those particular Whigs whom literature 
 had conrected him with, and the whole gang of us 
 Conservatives, he showed the same difference in his 
 mode of fencing and parrying, and even in his style of 
 civilities, as between the domestic traitor hiding a 
 stiletto among his robes of peace, and the bold enemy 
 who 'sends a trumpet before him, and rides up sword- 
 in-hand against your gates. Whatever is — so much 
 I conceive to liave been a fundamental lemma for 
 Hazlitt — is wro7ig. So much he thought it safe to 
 postulate. How it was wrong, might require an im- 
 practicable investigation ; you might fail for a century 
 to discover : but that it was wrong, he nailed down as 
 a point of faith, that could stand out against all counter- 
 presumptions from argument, or counter-evidences from 
 experience. A friend of his it was, a friend wishing- 
 to love him, and admiring him almost to extravagance, 
 who told me, in illustration of the dark, sinister gloom 
 which sat forever upon Hazlitt's countenance and 
 gestures, that involuntarily when Hazlitt put his hand 
 within his waistcoat (as a mere unconscious trick of 
 habit), lie himself felt a sudden recoil of fear, as from 
 one wlio was searching for a hidden dagger. Like " a 
 Moore of Malabar," as described in the Faery Queen, 
 at intervals Hazlitt threw up his angry eyes, and dark 
 
230 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 locks, as if wishing to affront the sun, or to search 
 the ail* for hostility. And the same friend, on another 
 occasion, described the sort of feudal fidelity to his 
 belligerent duties, which in company seemed to ani- 
 mate Hazlitt, as though he were mounting guard on all 
 the citadels of malignity, under some sacrament\:u 
 ?mlitaire, by the following trait, — that, if it had hap- 
 pened to Hazlitt to be called out of the room, or to 
 be withdrawn for a moment from the current of the 
 general conversation, by a fit of abstraction, or by a 
 private whisper to himself from some person sitting at 
 his elbow, always, on resuming his place as a party to 
 what might be called the public business of the compa- 
 ny, he looked round him with a mixed air of suspicion 
 and defiance, such as seemed to challenge everybody by 
 some stern adjuration into revealing whether, duriiig his 
 own absence or inattention, anything had been said 
 demanding condign punishment at his hands. "Has 
 any man uttered or presumed to insinuate," he seemed 
 to insist upon knowing, " during this interr^g)iu7n, 
 things that I ought to proceed against as treasonable 
 to the interests which I defend ?" He had the unrest- 
 ing irritability of Rousseau, but in a nobler shape ; 
 for Rousseau transfigured every possible act or desigc 
 of his acquaintances into some personal relation t& 
 himself. The vile act was obviously meant, as a child 
 coulc? understand, to injure the person of Rrusseau, or 
 h'-i interests, or his reputation. It was meant to wound 
 hi's feelings, or to misrepresent his acts calumniously, 
 or secretly to supplant his footing. But, on the con- 
 trary, Hazlitt viewed all personal affronts or casual 
 slights towards himself, as tending to som^lih'ng more 
 
WILLIAM HAZLITT. 23 
 
 general, and masking under a pretended horror of 
 Hazlitt, the author, a real hatred, deeper than it was 
 always safe to avow, for those social interests which he 
 was reputed to defend. " It was not Hazlitt whom the 
 wretches struck at; no, no — it was democracy, or i> 
 was freedom, or it was Napoleon, whose shadow they 
 saw in the rear of Hazlitt; and Napoleon, not for any* 
 thing in him that might be really bad, but in revenge 
 of that consuming wrath against the thrones of Chris- 
 tendom, for which (said Hazlitt) let us glorify his name 
 eternally." 
 
 Yet Hazlitt, like other men, and perhaps with more 
 bitterness than other men, sought for love and for 
 intervals of rest, in which all anger might sleep, and 
 enmity might be laid aside like a travelling-dress, after 
 tumultuous journeys : 
 
 " Though the sea-horse on the ocean 
 Own no dear domestic cave, 
 Yet he slumbers without motion 
 On the still and halcyon waTC. 
 
 If, on windy days, the raven 
 
 Gambol like a dancing skiff, 
 Wot the less he loves his haven 
 
 On the bosom of a cliff. 
 
 If almost with eagle pinion 
 
 O'er the Alps the chamois roam, 
 
 Yet he has some small dominion, 
 Which, no doubt, he calls his home." 
 
 But Hazlitt, restless as the sea-horse, as the raven, 
 as the chamois, found not their respites from storm ; 
 he sought, but sought in vain. And for him the 
 
232 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 closing stanza of that little poem remained true to h's 
 dying hour. In the person of the " Wandering Jew," 
 he might complain, — 
 
 *' Day and night my toils redouble : 
 Never nearer to the goal, 
 Night and day I feel the trouble 
 Of the wanderer in my soul." 
 
 Domicile he had not, round whose hearth his affections 
 might gather ; rest he had not for the sole of his 
 burning foot. One chance of regaining some peace, 
 or a chance as he trusted for a time, was torn from 
 him at the moment of gathering its blossoms. He 
 had been divorced from his wife, not by the law of 
 England, which would have argued criminality in her, 
 but by Scottish law, satisfied with some proof of 
 frailty in himself. Subsequently he became deeply 
 fascinated by a young woman, in no very elevated 
 rank, — for she held some domestic office of superin- 
 tendence in a boarding-house kept by her father, — but 
 of interesting person, and endowed with strong intel- 
 lectual sensibilities. She had encouraged Hazlitt ; 
 had gratified him by reading his works with intelligent 
 sympath}'; and. under what form of duplicity it is 
 hard to say, had partly engaged her faith to Hazlitt 
 as his future wife, whilst secretly she was holding a 
 correspondence, too tender to be misinterpreted, with 
 a gentleman resident in the same establishment. Sus- 
 picions were put aside for a time ; but they returned, 
 and gathered too thickly for Hazlitt's penetration to 
 cheat itself any longer. Once and forever he re- 
 solved to satisfy himself. On a Sunday, fatal to him 
 
WILLIAM HAZLITT. 2^3 
 
 and his farewell hopes of domestic happiness, he had 
 reason to believe that she, whom he now loved to 
 excess, had made some appointment out-of-doors with 
 his riv&l. It was in London ; and through the crowds 
 of Lor.don, Hazlitt followed her steps to the rendez- 
 vous. Fancying herself lost in the multitude that 
 streamed through Lincolns-iim-fields, the treacherous 
 young woman met her more favored lover without 
 alarm, and betrayed, too clearly for any further decep- 
 tion, the state of her aflfections by the tenderness of 
 her manner. There went out the last light that threw 
 a guiding ray over the storm-vexed course of Hazlitt. 
 He was too much in earnest, and he had witnessed 
 too much, to be deceived or appeased. "I whistled 
 her down the wind," was his own account of the catas- 
 trophe ; but, in doing so, he had torn his own heart- 
 strings, entangled with her "jesses." Neither did he, 
 as others would have done, seek to disguise his misfor- 
 tune. On the contrary, he cared not for the ridicule 
 attached to such a situation amongst the unfeelina: ' 
 the wrench within had been too profound to leave 
 room for sensibility to the sneers outside. A fast 
 friend of his at that time, and one who never ceased 
 to be his apologist, described him to me as having 
 become absolutely maniacal during the first pressure 
 of this atfliction. He went about proclaiming the 
 case, and insisting on its details, to every stranger 
 that would listen. He even published the whole story 
 to the world, in his " Modern Pygmalion." And peo- 
 ple generally, who could not be aware of his feelings, 
 or the way in which this treachery acted upon his 
 mind as a ratification of all other treacheries and 
 
234 WILLUM HAZLITT. 
 
 wrongs that he had suffered through life, laughed a 
 him, or expressed disgust for him as too coarsely 
 indelicate in making such disclosures. But there was 
 no indelicacy in such an act of confidence, growing, as 
 it did, out of his lacerated heart. It was an explosion 
 of frenzy. He threw out his clamorous anguish to the 
 clouds, and to the winds, and to the air; caring not who 
 might listen, who might sympathize, or who might sneer. 
 Pity was no demand of his : laughter was no wrong : 
 the sole necessity for him was — to empty his over- 
 burdened spirit. 
 
 After this desolating experience, the exasperation 
 of Hazlitt's political temper grew fiercer, darker, 
 steadier. His " Life of Napoleon " was prosecuted 
 subsequently to this, and perhaps under this remem- 
 brance, as a reservoir that might receive all the vast 
 overflows of his wrath, much of which was not merely 
 political, or in a spirit of bacchanalian partisanship, 
 but was even morbidly anti-social. He hated, with 
 all his heart, every institution of man, and all his 
 pretensions. He loathed his own relation to the human 
 race. 
 
 It was but on a few occasions that I ever met Mr. 
 Hazlitt myself; and those occasions, or all but one, 
 were some time subsequent to the case of female 
 treachery which I have here described. Twice, I 
 think, or it might be three times, we walked for a 
 few miles together : it was in London, late at night, 
 and after leaving a party. Though depressed by the 
 spectivcle of a mind always in agitation from the 
 gloomier passions, I was yet amused by the perti- 
 nacity with which he clung, through bad reasons :i 
 
WILLIAM HAZLITT. 235 
 
 no reasons, to any public slander floating against men 
 in power, or in the highest rank. No feather, or dowl 
 of a feather, but was heavy enough for him. Amongst 
 other instances of this willingness to be deluded by 
 rumors, if they took a direction favorable to his own 
 bias, Hazlitt had adopted the whole strenglh of popu- 
 lar hatred which for many years ran violently against 
 the King of Hanover, at that time Duke of Cumber- 
 land. A dark calumny had arisen against this prince, 
 amongst the populace of London, as though he had 
 been accessary to the death of his valet. This valet 
 [Sellis] had, in fact, attempted to murder the prince ; 
 and all that can be said in palliation of his act, is, 
 that he believed himself to have sustained, in the 
 person of his beautiful wife, the heaviest dishonor 
 incident to man. How that matter stood, I pretend not 
 to know : the attempt at murder was baffled ; and 
 the valet then destroyed himself with a razor. All 
 this had been regularly sifted by a coroner's inquest ; 
 and I remarked to Hazlitt, that the witnesses seemed 
 to have been called, indifferently, from all quarters 
 likely to have known the facts ; so that, if this inquest 
 had failed to elicit the truth, we might, with equal 
 reason, presume as much of all other inquests. From 
 the verdict of a jury, except in very peculiar cases, 
 no candid and temperate man will allow himself to 
 believe any appeal sustainable ; for, having the wit- 
 nesses before them face to face, and hearing the whole 
 of the evidence, a jury have always some means of 
 forming a judgment which cannot be open to him who 
 depends upon an abridged report. But, on this sub- 
 ject, Hazlitt would hear no reason. He said — "No, 
 
236 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 all the princely houses of Europe have the instinct 
 of murder running in their blood; — they cherish it 
 through their privilege of making war, which being 
 wholesale murder, once having reconciled themselves 
 to that, they think of retail murder, committed on 
 you or me, as of no crime at all." Under this obsti- 
 nate prejudice against the duke, Hazlitt read every- 
 thing that he did, or did not do, in a perverse spirit. 
 And, in one of these nightly walks, he mentioned to 
 me, as something quite worthy of a murderer, tnt, 
 following little trait of casuistry in the royal duke's 
 distribution of courtesies. " I saw it myself," said 
 Hazlitt, " so no coroner's jury can put me down." His 
 royal highness had rooms in St. James' ; and, one 
 day, as he was issuing from the palace into Pail-Mall, 
 Hazlitt happened to be immediately behind him; he 
 could therefore watch his motions along the whole 
 line of his progress. It is the custom in England, 
 wheresoever the persons of the royal family are fa- 
 miliar to the public eye, as at Windsor, &c., that all 
 passengers in the streets, on seeing them, walk bare- 
 headed, or make some signal of dutiful respect. On 
 this occasion, all the men, who met the prince, took 
 off their hats ; the prince acknowledging every such 
 obeisance by a separate bow. Pali-Mall being fin- 
 ^ ished, and its whole harvest of royal salutations gath- 
 ered in, next the duke came to Cockspur street. But 
 here, and taking a station close to the crossing, which 
 daily he beautified and polished with his broom, stood 
 a Negro sweep. If human at all, which some people 
 doubted, he was pretty nearly as abject a representa- 
 tive of our human family divine as can ever have 
 
WILLIAM HAZLITT. 237 
 
 existed. Still he was held to be a man by the law of 
 the land, which would have hanged any person, gentle 
 or simple, for cutting his throat. Law (it is certain), 
 conceived him to be a man, however poor a one ; 
 though Medicine, in an under-tone, muttered, some- 
 times, a demur to that opinion. But here the sweep 
 icas, whether man or beast, standing humbly in the 
 paih of royaltj'' ; vanish he would not ; he was (as 
 The Thnes says of the Corn-League) " a great fact," 
 if rather a muddy one; and though, by his own con- 
 fession (repeated one thousand times a day), both 
 "a nigger" and a sweep [=' Remember poor nigger, 
 your honor ! " " remember poor sweep! "], yet the crea- 
 ture could take off his rag of a hat, and earn the bow 
 of a prince, as well as any white native of St. James'. 
 What was to be done ? A great case of conscience 
 was on the point of being raised in the person of a 
 paralytic nigger; nay, possibly a state question — 
 Ought a son of England,^ could a son of England, 
 
 * " Son of England ; " that is, prince of the blood in the rfireci, 
 and not in the collateral, line. I mention this for the sake of 
 Bonie readers, ■who may not be aware that this beautiful form- 
 ula, so well known in France, is often transferred by the 
 French writers of memoirs to our English princes, though little 
 used amongst ourselves. Gaston, Duke of Orleans, brother of 
 Louis XIV., was " a sow of France," as being a child of Louis 
 Xin. But the son of Gaston, namely, the Regent Duke of 
 Orleans, was a grandson of France. The first wife of Gaston, 
 our Princess Henrietta, was called " Fille d'Angleterre," as 
 being a daughter of Charles I. The Princess Charlotte, again., 
 was a daughter of England ; her present majesty, a grand- 
 daughter of England. But all these ladies collectively would be 
 called, on the French principle, the children of England. 
 
2'SS WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 descend from his majestic pedestal to g'ild with the 
 rays of his condescension such a grub, juch a very 
 doubtful grub, as this ? Total Pall-Mall was sagacious 
 of the coming crisis ; judgment was going to be deliv- 
 ered ; a precedent to be raised ; and Pail-Mall stood 
 still, with Hazlitt at its head, to learn the issue. How 
 if the black should be a Jacobin, and (in the event of 
 the duke's bowing) should have a bas-relief sculptured 
 on his tomb, exhibiting an English prince, and a Ger- 
 man king, as two separate personages, in the act of 
 worshipping his broom ? Luckily, it was not the 
 black's province to settle the case. The Duke of 
 Cumberland, seeing no counsel at hand to argue either 
 the pro or the contra, found himself obliged to settle 
 the question de piano ; so, drawing out his purse, he 
 kept his hat as rigidly settled on his head as William 
 Penn and Mead did before the Eecorder of London. 
 All Pall-Mall applauded : contradicente Gulielmo Haz- 
 litt, and Hazlitt only. The black swore that the 
 prince gave him half-a-crown ; but whether he re- 
 garded this in the light of a god-send to his avarice 
 or a shipwreck to his ambition — whether he was more 
 thankful for the money gained, or angry for the honor 
 lost — did not transpire. "No matter," *feaid Hazlitt, 
 " the black might be a fool ; but I insist upon it, that 
 he was entitled to the bow, since all Pall-Mall had it 
 before him ; and tliat it was unprincely to refuse it." 
 Either as a black or as a scavenger, Hazlitt held him 
 •' qualified " for sustaining a royal bow : as a black, 
 was he not a specimen (if rather a damaged one) of 
 the homo sapiens described by Linnaeus ? As a sweep, 
 in possession (by whatever title) of a lucrative cross- 
 
WILLIAM HAZLITT. 239 
 
 ing-, had liG not a kind of estate in London? Was he 
 not, said Hazlitt, a fellow-subject, capable of com- 
 mittmgf treason, and paying taxes into the treasury ? 
 Not perhaps in any direct shape, but indirect taxes 
 most certainly on his tobacco — and even on his 
 broom. 
 
 These things could not be denied. But still, when 
 my turn came for speaking, I confessed frankly that 
 (politics apart) my feeling in the case went along with 
 the duke's. The bow would not be so useful to the 
 black as the half-crown : he could not possibly have 
 both ; for how could any man make a bow to a beggar 
 when in the act of giving him half-a-crown ? Then, 
 on the other hand, this bow, so useless to the sweep, 
 and (to speak by a vulgar adage) as superfluous as a 
 side-pocket to a cow, would react upon the other bows 
 distributed along the line of Pall-Mail, so as to neutral- 
 ize them one and all. No honor could continue such 
 in which a paralytic negro sweep was associated. This 
 distinction, however, occurred to me ; that if, instead 
 of a prince and a subject, the royal dispenser of bows 
 had been a king, he ought not to have excluded the 
 black from participation ; because, as the common 
 father of his people, he ought not to know of any dif- 
 ference amongst those who are equally his children. 
 And in illustration of that opinion, I sketched a little 
 scene which I had myself witnessed, and with great 
 pleasure, upon occasion of a visit made to Drury Lane 
 by George IV. when regent. At another time I may 
 tell it to the reader. Hazlitt, however, listened fret- 
 fully to me when praising the deportment and beautiful 
 gestures of one conservative leader ; though he had 
 
2-iO WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 compelled me to hear the most disadvantageous com- 
 ments on another. 
 
 As a lecturer, I do not know what Hazlitt was, hav- 
 ing never had an opportunity of hearing him. Some 
 qualities in his style of composition were calculated to 
 assist the purposes of a lecturer, who must produce au 
 effect oftentimes by independent sentences and para- 
 graphs, who must glitter and surprise, who must turn 
 round within the narrowest compass, and cannot rely 
 upon any sort of attention that would cost an efforL 
 Mr. Gilfillan says, that " He proved more popular than 
 was expected by those who knew his uncompromising 
 scorn of all those tricks and petty artifices which are 
 frequently employed to pump up applause. His man- 
 ner was somewhat abrupt and monotonous, but earnest 
 and energetic." At the same time, Mr. Gilfillan takes 
 an occasion to express some opinions, which appear 
 very just, upon the unfitness (generally speaking) of 
 men whom he describes as "fiercely inspired," for this 
 mode of display. The truth is, that all genius implies 
 originality, and sometimes uncontrollable singularity, 
 in the habits of thinking, and in the modes of viewing 
 as well as of estimating objects. Whereas a miscella- 
 neous audience is best conciliated by that sort of talent 
 which reflects the average mind, which is not over- 
 weighted in any one direction, is not tempted into any 
 extreme, and is able to preserve a steady, rope-dancer's 
 equilibrium of posture upon themes where a man of 
 genius is most apt to lose it. 
 
 It would be interesting to have a full and accurate 
 list of Hazlitt's works, including, of course, his con- 
 tributions to journals and encyclopeedias. These last, 
 
WILLIAM HAZLITT. 241 
 
 as shorter, and oftener springing from an impromptu 
 efTort, are more likely, than his regular books, to have 
 been written with a pleasurable enthusiasm ; and the 
 writer's proportion of pleasure, in such cases, very 
 often becomes the regulating law for his reader's. 
 Amongst the philosophical works of Hazlitt, I do not 
 obser/e that Mr. Gilfillan is aware of two that are 
 likely to be specially interesting. One is an examina- 
 tion of David Hartley, at least as to his law of associa- 
 tion. Thirty years ago, I looked into it slightly ; but 
 my reverence for Hartley offended me with its tone ; 
 and afterwards, hearing that Coleridge challenged for 
 his own most of what was important in the thoughts, I 
 lost all interest in the essay. Hazlitt, having heard 
 Coleridge talk on this theme, must have approached it 
 with a mind largely preoccupied as regarded the weak 
 points in Hartley, and the particular tactics for assail- 
 ing them. But still the great talents for speculative 
 research which Hazlitt had from nature, without having 
 given to them the benefit of much culture or much 
 exercise, would justify our attentive examination of the 
 work. It forms part of the volume which contains the 
 " Essay on Human Action ; " which volume, by the 
 way, Mr. Gilfillan supposes to have won the special 
 applause of Sir James Mackintosh, then in Bengal. 
 This, if accurately stated, is creditable to Sir James' 
 generosity ; for in this particular volume it is that 
 Hazlitt makes a pointed assault, in sneering terms, and 
 very unnecessarily, upon Sir .Tames. 
 
 The other little work unnoticed by Mr. Gilfillan, is 
 an examination (but under what title I cannot say) of 
 Lindley Murray's English Grammar. This may seem. 
 
242 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 by its subject, a trifle ; yet Hazlitt could hardly have 
 had a motive t'or such an effort but in some philosophic 
 perception of the ignorance betrayed by many gram- 
 mars of our language, and sometimes by that of 
 Lindley Murray; which Lindley, by the way, though 
 resident in England, was an American. There is great 
 room for a useful display of philosophic subtlety in an 
 English grammar, even though meant for schools. 
 Hazlitt could not but have furnished something of 
 value towards such a display. And if (as I was once 
 told) his book was suppressed, I imagine that this sup- 
 pression must have been purchased by some powerful 
 publisher interested in keeping up the current reputa- 
 tion of Murray. 
 
 " Strange stories," says Mr. Gilfillan, " are told about 
 his [Hazlitt's] latter days, and his death-bed." I know 
 not whether I properly understand Mr. Gilfillan. The 
 stories which I myself have happened to hear, were 
 not so much " strange," since they arose, naturally 
 enough, out of pecuniary embarrassments, as they 
 were afflicting in the turn they took. Dramatically 
 viewed, if a man were speaking of things so far re- 
 moved from our own times and interests as to excuse 
 that sort of language, the circumstances of Hazlitt's 
 last hours might rivet the gaze of a critic as fitted, 
 harmoniously, with almost scenic art, to the whole 
 tenor of his life ; fitted equally to rouse his wrath, to 
 deepen his dejection, and in the hour of death to justify 
 his misanthropy. But I have no wish to utter a word 
 on things which I know only at second-hand, and can- 
 not speak upon without risk of misstating facts oi 
 
WILLIAM IIAZLITT. 243 
 
 Ao'ms; injustice to persons. I prefer closing this section 
 with the words of Mr. Gilfillan : 
 
 "Well says Buhver, that of all the mental wrecks 
 which have occurred in our era, this was the most mel- 
 ancholy. Others may have been as unhappy in their 
 domestic circumstances, and gone down steeper places 
 of dissipation than he ; but they had meanwhile the 
 breath of popularity, if not of wealth and station, to 
 give them a certain solace." What had Hazlitt of this 
 nature ? Mr. (xilfillan answers, — " Absolutely nothing 
 to support and cheer him. With no hope, no fortune, 
 no status in society ; no certain popularity as a writer, 
 no domestic peace, little sympathy from kindred spirits, 
 little support from his political party, no moral man- 
 agement, no definite belief; with great powers, and 
 great passions within, and with a host of powerful 
 enemies without, it was his to enact one of the saddest 
 tragedies on which the sun ever shone. Such is a 
 faithful portraiture of an extraordinary man, whose 
 restless intellect and stormy passions have now, for 
 fifteen years, found that repose in the grave which was 
 denied them above it." Mr. Gilfillan concludes with 
 expressing his conviction, in which I desire to concur, 
 that both enemies and friends will now join in admira- 
 tion for the man; "both will readily concede 7iow, that 
 a subtle thinker, an eloquent writer, a lover of beauty 
 and poetry, and man and truth, one of the best of 
 critics, and not the worst of men, expired in William 
 Hazlitt." Requiescat in pace . 
 
NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR* 
 
 JNoBODY in this generation reads The Spectator. 
 There are, however, several people still surviving 
 who have read No. 1 ; in which No. 1 a strange mis- 
 take is made. It is there asserted, as a general 
 affection of human nature, that it is impossible to 
 read a book with satisfaction until one has ascertained 
 whether the author of it be tall or short, corpulent or 
 thin, and, as to complexion, whether he be a " black '' 
 man (which, in the Spectator'' s time, was the absurd 
 expression for a swarthy man), or a fair 'man, or a 
 sallow man, or perhaps a green man, which Southey 
 affirmed ^ to be the proper description of many stout 
 artificers in Birmingham, too much given to work in 
 metallic fumes ; on which account the name of Southey 
 IS an abomination to this day in certain furnaces of 
 Warwickshire. But can anything be more untrue than 
 this Spectatorial doctrine ? Did ever the youngest of 
 female novel readers, on a" sultry day, decline to eat a 
 bunch of grapes until she knew whether the fruiterer 
 were a good-looking man ? Which of us ever heard 
 B stranger inquiring for a "Guide to the Trosachs," 
 
 * The Works of Walter Savage Landor. 2 vols. 
 
 (244) 
 
NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 245 
 
 but saying-, "I scruple, however, to pay for this boolc, 
 until I know whether the author is heather-legged." 
 On tliis principle, it" any such principle prevailed, we 
 authors should be liable to as strict a revision of our 
 physics before having any right to be read, as we all 
 are before having our lives insured from the medical 
 advisers of insurance offices ; fellows that examine one 
 with stethoscopes ; that pinch one, that actually punch 
 one in the ribs, until a man becomes savage, and — in 
 case the insurance should miss fire in consequence of 
 the medical report — speculates on the propriety of 
 prosecuting the medical ruffian for an assault, for a 
 iTiost unprovoked assault and battery, and, if possible, 
 including in the indictment the now odious insurance 
 office as an accomplice before the fact. Meantime 
 the odd thing is, not that Addison should have made 
 a mistake, but that he and his readers should, in this 
 mistake, have recognized a hidden truth, — the sudden 
 illumination of a propensity latent in all people, but 
 now first exposed ; for it happens that there really is a 
 propensity in all of us, very like what Addison de- 
 scribes very difTerent, and yet, after one correction 
 the very same. No reader cares about an author's 
 persoi'. before reading his book ; it is after reading it, 
 and supposing the book to reveal something of the 
 writer's morral nature, as modifying his intellect ; it is 
 foi his fun, his fancy, his sadness, possibly his crazi- 
 ness, that any reader cares about seeing the author in 
 person. Afflicted with the very satyriasis of curiosity 
 no man ever wished to see the author of a Ready 
 Brckoner, or of a treatise on the Agistment Tithe 
 01 on ^he P;^se?it dcnhralle Dry-rot in Potatoes. 
 
246 jsroTEs on walter savage landor. 
 
 " Bund.e off, sir, as fast as you can," the most diligent 
 leader would say to such an author, in case he insisted 
 on submitting his charms to inspection. "I have had 
 quite enough distress of mind from reading your 
 works, without needing the additional dry-rot of your 
 bodily presence." Neither does any man, on descend- 
 ing from a railway train, turn to look Avhether the 
 carriage in which he has ridden happens to be a good- 
 looking carriage, or wish for an introduction to the 
 coach-maker. 'Satisfied that the one has not broken 
 his bones, and that the other has no writ against his 
 person, he dismisses with the same frigid scowl both the 
 carriage and the author of its existence. 
 
 But, with respect to Mr. Landor, as at all connected 
 with this reformed doctrine of the Spectator, a diffi- 
 culty arises. He is a man of great genius, and, as 
 such, he ought to interest the public. More than enough 
 appears of his strong, eccentric nature, through every 
 page of his now extensive writings, to win, amongst 
 those who have read him, a corresponding interest in 
 all that concerns him personally ; in his social rela- 
 tions, in his biography, in his manners, in his appear- 
 ance. Out of two conditions for attracting a periional 
 - interest, he has powerfully realized one. His moral 
 nature, shining with colored light through the crystal 
 shrine of his thoughts, will not allow of your forgetting 
 it. A sunset of Claude, or a dying dolphin can be 
 forgotten, and generally is forgotten ; but not the fiery 
 radiations of a human spirit built by nature to animate 
 a leader in storms, a martyr, a national reformer, an 
 arch-rebel, as circumstances might dictate, but whom 
 too much wealth, 2 anc the accidents of education, have 
 
NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. S-IT 
 
 turned aside into a contemplative reclase. Had Mr. 
 Landor, therefore, been read in any extent answering 
 to his merits, he must have become, for the English 
 public, an object of prodigious personal interest. We 
 should have had novels upon him, lampoons upon him, 
 libels upon him ; he would have been shown up dra- 
 matically on the stage ; he would, according to the old 
 joke, have been " traduced " in French, and also " over- 
 set " in Dutch. Meantime he has not been. read. It 
 would be an affectation to think it. Many a writer is, 
 by the sycophancy of literature, reputed to be read, 
 whom in all Europe not six eyes settle upon through 
 the revolving year. Literature, with its cowardly false- 
 hoods, exhibits the largest field of conscious Phrygian, 
 adulation that human life has ever exposed to the de- 
 rision of the heavens. Demosthenes, for instance, or 
 Plato, is not read to the extent of twenty pages annu- 
 ally by ten people in Europe. The sale of their works 
 would not account for three readers ; the other six or 
 seven are generally conceded as possibilities furnished 
 by the great public libraries. But, then, Walter Savage 
 Landor, though writing a little in Latin, and a very 
 little in Italian, does not write at all in Greek. So far 
 he has some advantage over Plato ; and, if he writes 
 chiefly in dialogue, which few^ people love to read any 
 more than novels in the shape of letters, that is a crime 
 
 common to both. So that he has the d I's luck 
 
 and his own, all Plato's chances, and one of his own 
 beside — namely, his English. Still, it is no use count- 
 ing chances ; facts are the thing. And printing-presses, 
 whether of Europe or of England, bear witness that 
 neither Plato nor Landor is a marketable commodity. 
 
248 NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 
 
 In fact, these two men resemble each other in more 
 particulars than it is at present necessary to say. 
 Especially they were both inclined to be luxurious ; 
 both had a hankering after purple and fine linen ; 
 both hated " filthy dowlas " with the hatred of FalstafF, 
 whether in apparelling themselves or their diction ; and 
 both bestowed pains as elaborate upon the secret art 
 of a dialogue, as a lapidary would upon *he cutting of a 
 sultan's tubies. 
 
 But might not a man build a reputation on the basis 
 of not being read ? To be read is undoubtedly some- 
 thing : to be read by an odd million or so, is a sort of 
 feather in a man's cap ; but it is also a distinction that 
 he has been read absolutely by nobody at all. There 
 have been cases, and one or two in modern times, 
 where an author could point to a vas-t array of his own 
 works, concerning which no evidence existed that so 
 much as one had been opened by human hand, o\ 
 glanced at- by human eye. That was awful ; such a 
 sleep of pages by thousands in one eternal darkness, 
 never to be visited by light ; such a rare immunity 
 from the villanies of misconstruction ; such a Sabbath 
 from the impertinencies of critics ! You shuddered 
 to reflect that, for anything known to the contrary, 
 there m:ght lurk jewels of truth explored in vain, or 
 treasure forever intercepted to the interests of man. 
 But such a sublimity supposes total defect of readers ; 
 whereas it can be proved against Mr. Landor, thai he 
 has been read by at least a score of people, all wide 
 awake; and if any treason is buried in a page cf his, 
 thank Heaven, by this time it must have been found 
 out and reported to the authorities. So that neither 
 
NOTES JN WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 249 
 
 tan Laiulor plead the unlimited popularity of a novel- 
 ist, aided by the interest of a tale, and by an artist, 
 nor the total obscuration of a German metaphysician. 
 Neither do mobs read him, as they do M. Sue ; nor da 
 all men turn away their eyes from him, as they do from 
 Hegel. -^ 
 
 This, however, is true only of Mr. Landor's prose 
 works. His first work was a poem, namely, Gebir and 
 it had the sublime distinction, for some time, of having 
 enjoyed only two readers ; which two were Southey 
 and myself. It was on first entering at Oxford that I 
 found " Gebir " printed and (nominally) published ; 
 whereas, in fact, all its advertisements of birth and 
 continued existence were but so many notifications of 
 its intense privacy. Not knowing Southey at that 
 time, I vainly conceited myself to be the one sole pur- 
 chaser and reader of this poem. I even fancied 
 myself to have been pointed out in the streets of 
 Oxford, where the Landors had been well know^n in 
 times preceding my own, as the one inexplicable man 
 authentically known to possess "Gebir," or even (it 
 might be whispered mysteriously) to have read " Ge- 
 bir." It was not clear but this reputation might stand 
 in lieu of any independent fame, and might raise 
 me to literary distinction. The preceding generation 
 had greatly esteemed the man called " Single-Speech 
 IIamilto?i;" not at all for the speech (which, thougi 
 good, very few people had read), but entirely for the 
 supposed {-Act that he had exhausted himself in that 
 one speech, and had become physically incapable of 
 making a second ; so that afterwards, when he really 
 did make a second, everybody was incredulous; urtil, 
 
 J1# 
 
250 NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 
 
 the thing being past denial, naturally the world waa 
 disgusted, and most people dropped his acquaintance. 
 To be a Mono-Gebirist was quite as good a title to 
 notoriety ; and five years after, when I found that I 
 had " a brother near the throne," namely, Southey, 
 mortification would have led me willingly to resign alto- 
 gether in his favor. Shall I make the reader acquainted 
 with the story of Gebir ? 
 
 Gebir is the king of Gibraltar ; which, however, it 
 would be an anachronism to call Gibraltar, since it 
 drew that name from this very Gebir; and doubtless, 
 by way of honor to his memory. Mussulmans tell a 
 difTerent story ; but who cares for what is said by 
 infidel dogs ? King, then, let us call him of Calpe ; 
 and a very good king he is ; young, brave, of upright 
 intentions; but being also warlike,, and inflamed by 
 popular remembrances of ancient wrongs, he resolves 
 to seek reparation from the children's children of the 
 wrong-doers ; and he weighs anchor in search of Mr. 
 Pitt's " indemnity for the past," though not much re- 
 garding that right honorable gentleman's " security for 
 the future." Egypt was the land that sheltered the 
 wretches that represented the ancestors that had done 
 the wrong. To Egypt, therefore, does king Gebir steer 
 his expedition, which counted ten thousand picked 
 men : 
 
 "Incenst 
 
 By meditating on primeval wrongs. 
 
 He blew his battle-horn ; at which uprose 
 
 "Whole nations : here ten thousand of most might 
 
 He called aloud ; and soon Charoba saw 
 
 His dark helm hover o'er the land of Nile." 
 
NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 251 
 
 Who is Charoba ? As respects the reader, she is the 
 heroine of the poem ; as respects Egypt, she is queen 
 bjf^ the grace of God, defender of the foith, and so 
 forth. Young and accustomed to unlimited obedience, 
 how could she be otherwise than alarmed by the 
 descent of a hoht far more martial than her own effem- 
 inate people, and assuming a religious character — 
 avengers of wrong in some forgotten age ? In her 
 trepidation, she turns for aid and counsel to her nurse 
 Dalica. Dalica, by the way, considered as a word, is 
 a dactyle , that is, you must not lay the accent on the 
 i, but on the first syllable. Dalica, considered as a 
 woman, is about as bad a one as even Egj^pt could 
 furnish. She is a thorough gypsy ; a fortune-teller, 
 and soinething worse, in fact. She is a sorceress, 
 "stiff in opinion ; " and it needs not Pope's authority to 
 
 infer that of course she " is always in the wrong." 
 
 By her advice, but for a purpose known best to herself, 
 an interview is arranged between Charoba and the 
 invading monarch. At this interview, the two youth 
 ful sovereigns, Charoba the queen of hearts and Gebir 
 the king of clubs, fall irrevocably in love with each 
 other. There 's an end of club law ; and Gebir is ever 
 afterwards disarmed. But Dalica, that wicked Dalica, 
 that sad old dactyle, who sees everything clearly that 
 happens to be twenty years distant, cannot see a pike- 
 staff if it is close before her nose ; and of course she 
 mistakes Charoba's agitations of love for paroxysms of 
 anger. Charoba is herself partly to blame for this ; 
 but you must excuse her. The poor child readily 
 confided her terrors to Dalica ; but how can she be 
 expected to make a love confidante of a tawny old 
 
252 NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE LANDOE. 
 
 Witch li Ice her? Upon this mistake, however, proceeds 
 the whole remaining plot. Dr. Dalica (which means 
 doctor D., and by no means dear D.), having totally 
 mistaken the symptoms, the diagnosis, the prognosis, 
 and everything that ends in osis, necessarily mistakes 
 also the treatment of the case, and, like some other 
 doctors, failing to make a cure, covers up her blunders 
 by a general slaughter. She visits her sister, a sorceress 
 more potent than herself, living 
 
 " Deep in the wilderness of woe, Masar." 
 
 Between them they concert heftish incantations. From 
 these issues a venomous robe, like that of the centaui 
 Nessus. This, at a festal meeting between the two 
 nations and their princes, is given by Charoba to hei 
 lover — her lover, but as yet not recognized as such by 
 her, nor, until the moment of his death, avowed as 
 such by himself. Gebir dies — the accursed robe, dipped 
 in the " viscous poison * exuding from the gums of the 
 gray cerastes, and tempered by other venomous juices 
 of plant and animal, proves too much for his rocky 
 constitution — Gibraltar is found not impregnable — 
 the blunders of Dalica, the wicked nurse, and the arts 
 of her sister Myrthyr, the wicked witch, are found too 
 potent; and in one moment the union of two nations, 
 with the happiness of two sovereigns, is wrecked for- 
 ever. The closing situation of the parties — monarch 
 and monarch, nation and nation, youthful king and 
 youthful queen, dying or despairing — nation and 
 nation that had been reconciled, starting asunder once 
 again amidst festival and flowers — these objects are 
 ■^cenically effective. The conception of the grouping 
 
IS 
 
 NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 253 
 
 good- the wise en scene is good; but, from want of 
 parns-taldng, uot sufficiently brought out into strong 
 relief; and the dying words of Gebir, which wind up 
 the whole, are too bookish ; they seem to be part of 
 some article which he had been writing for the Gibraltar 
 Quarterly. 
 
 There are two episodes, composing jointly about two- 
 sevenths of the poem, and by no means its weakest 
 parts. One describes the descent of Gebir to Hades. 
 His guide is a man — who is this man ? 
 
 " Living — they called him Aroar." 
 
 Ishe ??oMiving, then? No. Is he dead, then ? No, 
 
 nor dead either. Poor Aroar cannot live, and cannot 
 
 die — so that he is in an almighty fix. In this dis- 
 
 agreeable dilemma, he contrives to amuse himself 
 
 with poiitics— and, rather of a Jacobinical cast: like 
 
 the Virgilian jEneas, Gebir is introduced not to the 
 
 shades of the past only, but of the future. He sees 
 
 the preexisting ghosts of gentlemen who are yet to 
 
 come, silent as ghosts ought to be, but destined at some 
 
 far distant time to make a considerable noise in our 
 
 upper world. Amongst these is our worthy old George 
 
 III., who (strange to say !J is not foreseen as galloping 
 
 from Windsor to Kew, surrounded by an escort of 
 
 "dragoons, nor in a scarlet coat riding after a fox, nor 
 
 taking his morning rounds amongst his sheep and his 
 
 turnips; but in the likeness of some savage creature. 
 
 whom really, were it not for his eyebrows and hia 
 
 ^'slanting'' forehead, the reader would never recog 
 
 nize : 
 
254 NOTES ON^ WALTF.R SAVAGE LANDOR. 
 
 " Aroar ! what wretch that nearest U!^ ' what wretch 
 Is that, with eyebrows white and slanting brow ? 
 
 king : 
 
 Iberia bore him ; but tlie breed accurst 
 Inclement winds blew blighting from north-east." 
 
 Iberia is spiritual Enc-land ; and north-east is mystica, 
 Hanover. But what, then, were the "wretch's" crimes? 
 The white eyebrows I confess to ; those were certainly 
 crimes of considerable magnitude : but what else ? 
 Gebir has the same curiosity as myself, and propounds 
 something- like the same fishing question : 
 
 " He was a warrior then, nor feared the gods ? " 
 
 To which Aroar answers — 
 
 " Gebir ! he feared the demons, not the gods ; 
 Though them, indeed, his daily face adored. 
 And was no warrior ; yet the thousand lives 
 Squandered as if to exercise a sling, &c. &c." 
 
 Really Aroar is too Tom-Painish, and seems up (o a 
 little treason. He makes the poor king answeraole 
 for more than his own share of national offences, if 
 such they were. All of us in the last generation were 
 rather fond of fighting and assisting at fights in the 
 character of mere spectators. I am sure I was. But 
 if that is any fault, so was Plato, who (though probably 
 inferior as a philosopher to you and me, reader) was 
 much superior to either of us as a cock-fighter. So 
 was Socrates in the preceding age ; for, as he notori- 
 ouily haunted the company of Alcibiades at all hours, 
 he must often have found his pupil diverting himself 
 with these fighting quails which he kept in such 
 numbers. Be assured that the oracle's " wisest of 
 
NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGfi LANDOR. 255 
 
 men " lent a liand very cheerfully to putting on the 
 spurs when a main was to be fought; and; as to bet- 
 ting, probably that was the reason that Xannppe was 
 so often down upon him when he went home at night. 
 To come home reeling from a fight, without a drachma 
 left in his pocket, would naturally provoke any woman. 
 Posterity has been very much misinformed about these 
 things; and, no doubt, about Xantippe, poor woman, 
 in particular. If she had had a disciple to write books, 
 as her cock-fighting husband had, perhaps we should 
 have read a very different story. By the way, the 
 propensity to scandalum magnatum in Aroar was one 
 of the things that fixed my youthful attention, and 
 perhaps my admiration, upon Gebir. For myself, as 
 perhaps the reader may have heard, I was and am a 
 Tory ; and in some remote geological era, my bones 
 may be dug up by some future Buckland as a specimen 
 of the fossil Tory. Yet, for all that, I loved audacity ; 
 and I gazed with some indefinite shade of approbation 
 upon a poet whom the attorney-general might have 
 occasion to speak with. 
 
 This, however, was a mere condiment to the mam 
 attraction of the poem. That lay in the picturesque- 
 ness of the' images, attitudes, groups, dispersed every- 
 where. The eye seemed to rest everywhere upon 
 festal processions, upon the panels of Theban gates, 
 or upon sculptured vases. The very first lines that by 
 accident met my eye were tho~e which follow. I cite 
 them in mere obedience to the fact as it really was ; 
 else there are more striking illustrations of this sculp- 
 turesque faculty in Mr, Landor ; and for this faculty 
 it was that both Southey and myself separately and 
 
256 NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 
 
 independently had named him the English Valerius 
 Flaccus, 
 
 GEBIR ON REPAIRING TO HIS FIRST INTERVIEW WITH 
 CHAROBA. 
 
 " But Gebir, when he heard of her approach, 
 Laid by his orbed shield : his vizor helm, 
 His buckler and his corslet he laid' by. 
 And bade that none attend him : at his side 
 Two faithful dogs that urge the silent course, 
 Shaggy, deep-chested, croucht ; the crocodile. 
 Crying, oft made them raise their flaccid ears. 
 And push their heads within their master's hand. 
 There was a lightning paleness in his face, 
 Such as Diana rising over the rocks 
 Sliowered on the lonely Latmian ; on his brow 
 Sorrow there was, but there was naught severe." 
 
 " And the long moonbeam on the hard wet sand 
 Lay like a jasper column half up-reared." 
 
 •' The king, who sate before his tent, descried 
 The dust rise reddened from the setting su7i." 
 
 Now let us pass to the imaginary dialogues : — 
 Marshal Bitgeaud and Arab Chieftain. — This dia- 
 logue, which is amongst the shortest, would not chal- 
 lenge a separate notice, were it not for the freshness 
 in the public mind, and the yet uncicatrized raw- 
 ness of that atrocity which it commemorates. Here 
 is an official account from the commander-in-chief: — 
 "Of seven hundred refractory and rebellious, who 
 took refuge in the caverns, thirty" [says the 
 glory-hunting Marshal], "and thirty only, are alive; 
 and of these thirty there are four only who are 
 capable of labor, or indeed of motion," How precious 
 to the Marshal's heart must be that harvest of misery* 
 
KOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 237 
 
 from wliich he so reluctantly allows the discount of 
 about one-half per cent ! Four only out of seven hun- 
 dred, he is happy to assure Christendom, remain capa- 
 ble of hopping about ; as to working, or getting honest 
 bread, or doing any service in this world to themselves 
 or others, it is truly delightful to announce, for public 
 information, that all such practices are put a stop to for- 
 ever. 
 
 Amongst the fortunate four, who retain the power 
 of hopping, we must reckon the Arab Chieftain, who 
 is introduced into the colloquy in the character of 
 respondent. He can hop, of course, ex hypothest, 
 being one of the ever-lucky quaternion ; he can hop a 
 little also as a rhetorician ; indeed, as to that, he is too 
 i.iuch for the Marshal ; but on the other hand he can- 
 not see ; the cave has cured him of any such imperti- 
 nence as staring into other people's faces ; he is also 
 lame, the cave has shown him the absurdity of ram- 
 bling about; — and, finally, he is a beggar; or, if he 
 will not allow himself to be called by that name, upon 
 the argument [which seems plausible] that he cannot 
 be a beggar if he never begs, it is not the less certain 
 that, in case of betting a sixpence, the chieftain would 
 find it inconvenient to stake the cash. 
 
 The Marshal, who apparently does not pique him- 
 self upon politeness, adresses the Arab by the follow- 
 ing assortment of names — "Thief, assassm, tra tor ; 
 blind graybeard ! lame beggar ! " The three first 
 titles being probably mistaken for compliments, the 
 Arab pockets in silence ; but to the double-barrelled 
 discharges of the two last he replies thus: — "Cease 
 there Thou canst never make me beg for bread, for 
 17 
 
25S NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 
 
 water, or for life ; my gray beard is from God ; my 
 blindness and lameness are from thee." This is a 
 pleasant way of doing business ; rarely does one find 
 little accounts so expeditiously settled and receipted. 
 Beggar ? But how if I do not beg ? Graybeard ? 
 Put that down to the account of God. Cripple ? Put 
 that down to your own. Getting sulky under this 
 mode of fencing from the desert-born, the Marshal 
 invites him to enter one of his new-made law courts, 
 where he will hear of something probably not to his 
 advantage. Our Arab friend, however, is no con- 
 noisseur m courts of law: small wale* of courts ia 
 the desert ; he does not so much " do himself the honor 
 to decline" as he turns a deaf ear to this proposal, and 
 on his part presents a little counter invitation to the 
 Marshal for a pic-nic party to the caves of Dahra. 
 "Enter" (says the unspai'ing Sheik), "and sing and 
 whistle in the cavern where the bones of brave men 
 are never to bleach, are never to decay. Go, where 
 the mother and infant are inseparable forever — one 
 mass of charcoal ; the breasts that gave life, the lips 
 that received it — all, all, save only where two arms, 
 in color and hardness like corroded iron, cling round 
 a brittle stem, shrunken, warped, and where two heads 
 are calcined. Even this massacre, no doubt, will find 
 defenders in yojir country, for it is the custom of your 
 country to cover blood with lies, and lies with blood." 
 " And (says the facetious French Marshal) here and 
 there a sprinkling of ashes over both." Arab. " End- 
 ing in merriment, as befits ye. But is it ended ? " But 
 is it ended? A.y; the wilderness beyond Algiers 
 returns an echo to those ominous words of the blind 
 
NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 259 
 
 and mutilated chieftain. No, brave Arab, although 
 the Marshal scoflingly rejoins that at least it is ended 
 for you, ended it is not; for the great quarrel by which 
 human nature pleads with such a fiendish spirit of 
 warfare, carried on under the countenance A him who 
 stands first in authority under the nation that stands 
 £&:ond in authority amongst the leaders of civiliza- 
 tion; — quarrel of that sort, once arising, does not 
 go to sleep again until it is righted forever. As the 
 English martyr at Oxford said to his fellow-martyr — • 
 '' Brother, be of good cheer, for we shall this day light 
 up a fire in England that, by the blessing of God, can- 
 not be extinguished forever," — even so the atrocities 
 of these hybrid campaigns between baffled civil iza 
 tion and barbarism, provoked into frenzy, will, lik,« 
 the horrors of the middle passage rising up from tin 
 Atlantic deep, suddenly, at the bar of the British 
 senate, sooner or later reproduce themselves, in stronj 
 reactions of the social mind throughout Christendom 
 upon all the horrors of war that are wilful and super 
 fl'ious. In that case there will be a consolation ir 
 reserve for the compatriots of those, the bra\e men, 
 the woiTien, and the innocent children, who died in that 
 fiery furnace at Dahra. 
 
 " Their moans 
 The vales redoubled to the hills, and ihey 
 To heaven." ^ 
 
 The caves of Dahra repeated the woe to the hil' 
 and the hills to God. But such a furnace, thoug 
 fierce, mav be viewed as brief indeed if it shall ter 
 ruinate in permanently pointing the wrath of nations 
 
260 NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 
 
 (as in this dialogue it has pointed the wrath of genius) 
 to the particular outrage and class of outrages whicli 
 it concerns. The wrath of nations is a consuming 
 wrath, and the scorn of intellect is a withering scorn, 
 for all abuses upon which either one or the other is 
 led, by strength of circumstances, to settle itself sys- 
 tematically. The danger is for the most part that the 
 very violence of public feeling should rock it asleep 
 — the tempest exhausts itself by its own excesses — 
 and the thunder of one or two immediate explosions, 
 by satisfying the first clamors of human justice ^nd 
 indignation, is too apt to intercept that sustained roll of 
 artillery which is requisite for the effectual assault of 
 long-established abuses. Luckily in the present case 
 of the Dahra massacre there is the less danger of such 
 a result, as the bloody scene has happened to fall 
 in with a very awakened state of the public sensibility 
 as to the evils of war generally, and with a state of 
 expectation almost romantically excited as to the possi- 
 bility of readily or soon exterminating these evils. 
 
 Hope, meantime, even if unreasonable, becomes wise 
 and holy when it points along a path of purposes 
 that are more than usually beneficent. According to 
 a fine illustration of Sir Phillip Sidney's, drawn from 
 the practice of archery, by attempting- more than wp 
 can possibly accomplish, we shall yet reach further 
 than ever we should have reached with a less ambitious 
 aim ; we shall do much for the purification of war, if 
 nothing at all for its abolition ; and atrocities of this 
 Algerinc. order are amongst the earliest that will give 
 way. They will sink before the growing illumination, 
 and (what is equally important) before the growing 
 
KOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE ULNDOR. 261 
 
 combination of minds acting simultaneously from vari« 
 ous centres, in nations otherwise the most at variance. 
 By a rate of motion continually accelerated, the gath- 
 ering power of the press, falling in with the growing 
 facilities of personal intercourse, is, day hy day, bring- 
 ing Europe more and more into a state of fusion, in 
 which the sublime name of Christendom will contin- 
 ually become more and more significant, and will 
 express a unity of the most awful order, namely, in 
 the midst of strife, long surviving as to inferior interests 
 and subordinate opinions, will express an agreement 
 continually more close, and an agreement continually 
 more operative, upon all capital questions affecting 
 human rights, duties, and the interests of human pro' 
 gress. Before that tribunal, which every throb of 
 every steam-engine, in printing houses and on railroads, 
 is hurrying to establish, all flagrant abuses of bellige- 
 rent powers will fall prostrate ; and, in particular, no 
 form of pure undisguised murder will be any longer 
 allowed to confound itself with the necessities of honor- 
 able warfare. 
 
 Much already has been accomplished on this path ; 
 more than people are aware of; so gradual and silent 
 has been the advance. How noiseless is the growth 
 of corn ! Watch it night and day for a week, and you 
 will never see it growing; but return after two months, 
 and you will find it all whitening for the harvest. Such. 
 and so imperceptible, in the stages of their motion, are 
 the victories of the press. Here is one instance. Just 
 forty-seven years ago, on the shores of Syria, was 
 celebrated, by Napoleon Bonaparte, the most damnable 
 carnival of murder that romance hal fabled, or tha; 
 
562 NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 
 
 history has recorded. Rather more than four thousand 
 meri — not (like Tyrolese or Spanish guerillas), even 
 in pretence, " insurgent rustics," but regular troops, 
 serving the Pacha and the Ottoman Sultan, not old men 
 that might by odd fractions have been thankful for 
 dismissal from a life of care or sorrow, but all young 
 A.':. inians, in the early morning of manhood, the oldest 
 not twenty-four — were exterminated by successive 
 rolls of muskefi'y, when helpless as infants, having 
 their arms pinioned behind their backs like felons on 
 the scaffold, and having surrendered their muskets 
 (which else would have made so desperate a resist- 
 ance), on the faith that they were dealing with soldiers 
 and men of honor. I have elsewhere examined, as a 
 question in casuistry, the frivolous pretences for this 
 infamous carnage, but that examination 1 have here no 
 wish to repeat ; for it would draw off the attention 
 from one feature of the case, which I desire to bring 
 before the reader, as giving to this Jaffa tragedy a 
 depth of atrocity wanting in that of Dahra. The four 
 thousand and odd young Albanians had been seduced, 
 trepanned, fraudulently decoyed, from a post of con- 
 siderable strength, in which they could and would have 
 so d their lives at a bloody rate, by a solemn promise 
 of safety from -authorized French officers. *' But," 
 said Napoleon, in part of excuse, " these men, my 
 aides-de-camp, were poltroons ; to save their own lives, 
 they made promises which they ought not to have 
 made." Suppose it so ; and suppose the case one in 
 whi^h the supreme authority has a right to disavow 
 his agents ; what then ? This entitles that authority tc 
 refuse ms ratification to the terms agreed on ; but this. 
 
NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 263 
 
 at tlic same time, obliges him to replace the hostile 
 parties in the advantages from which his agents had 
 wiled them by these terms. A robber, who even owns 
 himself such, will not pretend that he may refuse the 
 price of the jewel as exorbitant, and yet keep pos- 
 session of the jewel. And next comes a fraudulent 
 advantage, not obtained by a knavery in the aid-de- 
 camp, but in the leader himself. The surrender of the 
 weapons, and the submission to the fettering of the 
 arms, were not concessions from the Albanians, filched 
 by the representatives of Napoleon, acting (as he 
 says) without orders, but by express falsehoods, ema- 
 nating from himself. The officer commanding at 
 Dahra could not have reached his enemy without the 
 shocking resource which he employed ; Napoleon 
 could. The officer at Dahra violated no covenant ; 
 Napoleon did. The officer at Dahra had not by lies 
 seduced his victims from their natural advantages ; 
 Napoleon had. Such was the atrocity of Jaffa in the 
 year 1799. Now, the relation of that great carnage 
 to the press, the secret argument through which that 
 vast massacre connects itself with the progress of the 
 press, is this — that in 1799, and the two following 
 years, when most it had become important to search 
 the character and acts of Napoleon, excepting Sir 
 Robert Wilson, no writer in Europe, no section of the 
 press, cared much to insist upon this, by so many 
 degrees, (he worst deed of modern^ military life. 
 From that deed all the waters of the Atlantic would 
 not have cleansed him ; and yet, since 1804, we have 
 heard much oftener of the sick men whom he poisoned 
 in his Syrian hospital (an act of merely erroneous 
 
264 NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 
 
 humanity), and more of the Due d'Enghien's execu- 
 tion, than of either ; though this, savage as it was. 
 admits of such palliations as belong to doubtful pro 
 vocations in the sufferer, and to extreme personal terror 
 in the inflicter. Here, then, we have a case of whole- 
 sale military murder, emanating from Christendom, 
 and not less treacherous than the worst which have 
 been ascribed to the Mahometan Timur, or even to any 
 Hindoo Rajah, which hardly moved a vibration of 
 anger, or a solitary outcry of protestation from the 
 European press (then, perhaps, having the excuse of 
 deadly fear for herself), or even from the press of 
 moral England, having no such excuse. Fifty years 
 have passed ; a less enormity is perpetrated, but again 
 by a French leader ; and, behold, Europe is now con- 
 vulsed from side to side by unaffected indignation ! So 
 travels the press to victory ; such is the light, and so 
 broad, which it diffuses ; such is the strength for action 
 by which it combines the hearts of nations. 
 
 MELANCTHON AND CALVIN. 
 
 Of Mr. Lander's notions in religion it would be use- 
 less, and without polemic arguments it would be arro- 
 gant, to say that they are false. It is sufficient to say 
 that they are degrading. In the dialogue between 
 Melancthon and Calvin, it is clear that the former rep- 
 resents Mr. L. himself, and is not at all the Melancthon 
 whom we may gather from his writings. Mr. Landor 
 has heard that he was gentle and timid in action; and 
 he exhibits him as a mere development of that key- 
 note ; as a compromiser of all that is severe in dcc- 
 trme ; and as on effeminate picker and chooser in 
 
NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 265 
 
 morals. God, in his conception of him, is not a lather 
 so much as a benign, but somewhat weak, old grand- 
 father; and we, his grandchildren, being now and then 
 rather naughty, are to be tickled with a rod made of 
 feathers, but, upon the whule, may rely upon an eter- 
 iiit}' of sugar-plums. For instance, take the puny idea 
 ascribed to Melancthon upon Idolatry; and consider, 
 for one moment, how little it corresponds to the vast 
 machinery reared up by God himself against this 
 secret poison and dreadful temptation of human na- 
 ture. Melancthon cannot mean to question the truth 
 or the importance of the Old Testament; and yet, if 
 his view of idolatry (as reported by L.) be sound, the 
 Bible must have been at the root of the worst mischief 
 ever yet produced by idolatry. He begins by de- 
 scribing idolatry as " Jeivish ; " insinuating that it was 
 an irregularity chiefly besetting the Jews. But how 
 perverse a fancy ! In the Jews, idolatry was a dis- 
 ease ; in Pagan nations, it was the normal state. In a 
 nation (if any such nation could exist) of cretiTis or of 
 lepers, nobody would talk of cretinism or leprosy as 
 of any morbid affection ; that would be the regular 
 and natural condition of man. But where either was 
 spoken of with horror as a ruinous taint in human flesh, 
 it would argue that naturally (and, perhaps, by a large 
 majority) the people were uninfected. Amongst Pa- 
 gans, nobody talked of idolatry — no such idea existed 
 — because that was the regular form of religious wor- 
 ship. To be named at all, idolatry must be viewed as 
 standmg in opposition to some higher worship that is 
 TUit idolatry. But, next, as we are all agreed that in 
 idolatry there is something evil, and differ only as to 
 
266 NOT£i ON WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 
 
 the propriety of considering it a Jewish evil, in what 
 does this evil lie? It lies, according to the profound 
 Landorian Melancthon, in this, that different idolaters 
 figure the Deity under different forms; if they could 
 all agree upon one and the same mode of figuring the 
 invisible Being, there need be no quarrelling; and in 
 this case, consequently, there would be no harm in 
 iioUtry, none whatever. But, unhappily, it seems 
 each nation, or sometimes section of a nation, has a 
 different fancy ; they get to disputing ; and from that 
 they get to boxing, in which, it is argued, lies the true 
 evil of idolatry. It is an extra cause of broken heads. 
 One tribe of men represent the Deity as a beautiful 
 young man, with a lyre and a golden bow ; another as 
 a snake; and a third — Egyptians, for instance, of 
 old — as a beetle or an onion; these last, according to 
 Juvenal's remark, having the happy privilege of grow- 
 ing their own gods in their own kitchen-gardens. In 
 all this there would be no harm, were it not for subse- 
 quent polemics and polemical assaults. Such, if we 
 listen to Mr. L., is Melancthon's profound theory "^ of 
 a lalse idolatrous religion. Were the police every- 
 where on an English footing, and the magistrates as 
 unlike as possible to Turkish Cadis, nothing could be 
 less objectionable ; but, as things are, the beetle- 
 worshipper despises the onion-worshipper; which 
 breeds ill blood ; whence grows a cudgel ; and from 
 the cudgel a constable ; and from the constable an 
 aiijust magistrate. Not so, Mr. Landor ; thus did not 
 Melancthon speak ; and if he did, and would defend 
 it for a thousand times, then for a thousand times he 
 would deserve to be trampled by posterity into that 
 
NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 267 
 
 rierman mire which he souirht to evade by his Grecian 
 disguise.^ The true evil of idolatry is this : There is 
 one sole idea of God, wliich corresponds adequately 
 to his total nature. Of this idea, two things may be 
 affirmed : the first being, that it is at the root of all 
 absolute grandeur, of all truth, and of all moral per- 
 fection ; the second being, that, natural and easy as 
 it seems when once unfolded, it could only have been 
 unfolded by revelation; and, to all eternity, he that 
 started with a false conception of God, could not, 
 through any efTort of his own, have exchanged it for a 
 true one. iVll idolaters alike, though not all in equal 
 degrees, by intercepting the idea of God through the 
 prism of some representative creature tlwit partially 
 resembles God, refract, splinter, and distort that idea. 
 Even the idea of light, of the pure, solar light — the old 
 Persian symbol of God — has that depraving neces- 
 sity. Light itself, besides being an imperfect symbol, 
 is an incarnation for us. However pure itself, or in 
 its original divine manifestation, for us it is incarnated 
 in forms and in matter that are not pure : it gravitates 
 towards physical alliances, and therefore towards un- 
 spiritual pollutions. And all experience shows that 
 the tendency for man, left to his own imagination, is 
 downwards. The purest symbol, derived from created 
 things, can and will condescend to the grossness of 
 inferior human natures, by submitting to mirror itself 
 in more and more carnal representative symbols, until 
 finally the mi.ved element of resemblance to God is 
 altogether buried and lost. God, by this succession of 
 imperfect interceptions, falls more and more under the 
 taint and limitation of the alien elements associated 
 
26S NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 
 
 with all created things; and, for the ruin of all moral 
 grandeur in man, every idolatrous nation left to itself 
 will gradually bring' round the idea of God into the 
 idea of a powerful demon. Many things check and 
 disturb this tendency for a time ; but finally, and under 
 that intense civilization to which man intellectually is 
 always hurrying under the eternal evolution of physi- 
 cal knowledge, such a degradation of God's idea, 
 ruinous to the moral capacities of man, would un- 
 doubtedly perfect itself, were it not for the kindling of 
 a purer standard by revelation. Idolatry, therefore, is 
 not merely a7i evil, and one utterly beyond the power 
 of social institutions to redress, but, in fact, it is the 
 fountain of all other evil that seriously menaces the 
 destinv of the human race. 
 
 PORSON AND SOUTHEY. 
 
 The two dialogues between Southey and Porson 
 relate to Wordsworth ; and they connect Mr. Landor 
 with a body of groundless criticism, for which vainly 
 he will seek to evade his responsibility by pleading the 
 caution posted up at the head of his Conversations, 
 namely, — " Avoid a mistake in attributing to i\\c writer 
 any opinions in this book but what are spoken under 
 his own name." If Porson, therefore, should happen 
 to utter villanies that are indictable, that (you are to 
 understand) is Porson's affliir. Render unto Landoi 
 the eloquence of the dialogue, but render unto Porson 
 any kicks which Porson may have merited by his 
 atrocities against a man whom assuredly he never 
 heard of, and probably never saw. Now, unless 
 Wordsworth ran into Porson in the streets of Cam- 
 
NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 269 
 
 orklge on some dark night about the era of the French. 
 Revolution, and capsized him into the kennel — a 
 thing which is exceedingly improbable, considering 
 that Wordsworth was never tipsy except once in his 
 life, yet, on the other hand, is exceeding probable, 
 considering that Porson was very seldom otherwise — 
 barring this one opening for a collision, there is no 
 human possibility or contingency known to insurance 
 offices, through which Person ever cmdd have been 
 brought to trouble his head about Wordsworth. It 
 would have taken three witches, and three broom- 
 sticks, clattering about his head, to have extorted from 
 Person any attention to a contemporary poet that did 
 not give first-rate feeds. And a man that, besides his 
 criminal conduct in respect of dinners, actually made 
 it a principle to drink nothing but water, would have 
 seemed so depraved a character in Person's eyes that, 
 out of regard to public decency, he would never have 
 mentioned his name, had he even happened to know 
 it. " O no ! he never mentioned him." Be assured 
 of that. As to Poetry, be it known that Person read 
 none whatever, unless it were either political or ob- 
 scene. With no seasoning of either sort, " wherefore," 
 he would ask indignantly, " should I waste my time 
 upon a poem ? " Person had read the Rolliad, because 
 it concerned his political party ; he had read the epistle 
 of Obereea, Queen of Otaheite, to Sir Joseph Banks, 
 because, if Joseph was rather too demure, the poem was 
 not. Else, and with such exceptions, he condescended 
 not to any metrical writer subsequent to the era of Pope, 
 whose Eloisa to Abelard he could say by heart, and 
 rould even sing from beginning to end ; which, indeed. 
 
2/0 NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 
 
 he ivould do, whether you chose it or not, after a suffi- 
 cient charge of brandy, and sometimes even though 
 threatened with a cudgel, in case he persisted in his 
 molestations. Waller he had also read and occasion- 
 ally quoted with effect. But as to a critique on Words- 
 worth, whose name had not begun to mount from the 
 ground when Porson died,^ as reasonably and charac- 
 teristically might it have been put into the mouth of 
 the Hetman Platoff. Instead of Porson's criticisms on 
 writings which he never saw, let us hear Porson's 
 account of a fashionable rout in an aristocratic London 
 mansion : it was the only party of distinction that this 
 hirsute but most learned Theban ever visited; and his 
 history of what passed (comic alike and tragic) is 
 better worth preserving than " Brantome," or even than 
 Swift's " Memoirs of a Parish Clerk." It was by the 
 hoax of a young Cantab that the professor was ever 
 decoyed into such a party : the thing was a swindle ; 
 but his report of its natural philosophy is not on that 
 account the less picturesque : — 
 
 . SouTHET. — Why do you repeat the word rout so often .' 
 
 Porson. — I was once at one by mistake ; and I'eally I saw 
 there what you describe ; and this made me repeat the word and 
 smile. You seem curious. 
 SouTHET. — Rather, indeed. 
 
 Porson. — I had been dining out ; there were some who 
 smolied after dinner : within a few hours, the fumes of their 
 pipes produced such an eifect on my head that I wa? willing 
 to go into the air a little. Still I continued hot and thirsty • 
 and an undergraduate, whose tutor was my old acquaintance, 
 proposed that we should turn into an oyster-cellar, and refresh 
 ourselves with oysters and porter. The rogue, instead of this, 
 conducted me to a fashionable house in the neighborhood of St. 
 
NOIES ON WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 271 
 
 James' ; arnl, altliough I expostulated with him, and insisted 
 that we were going up stairs and not down, he appeared to me 
 BO ingenuous in his protestations to the contrary that I could 
 well disbelieve him no longer. Nevertheless, receiving on the 
 stairs many shoves and elbowings, I could not help telling him 
 plainly, that, if indeed it was the oyster-cellar in Fleet street, 
 tlie company was much altered for the worse ; and that, in 
 future, I should frequent another. When the fumes of. the 
 pipes had left me, I discovered the deceit by the brilliancy and 
 indecency of the dresses ; and was resolved not to fall into 
 temptation. Although, to my great satisfaction, no immodest 
 proposal was directly made to me, I looked about anxious that 
 no other man should know me beside him whose wantonness 
 had conducted me thither ; and I would have escaped, if I could 
 have found the door, from which every effort I made appeared 
 to remove me farther and farther. * * * A pretty woman 
 Baid loudly, " He has no gloves on ! " " What nails the crea- 
 ture has ! " replied an older one — " Piano-forte keys wanting 
 the white." 
 
 I pause to say that this, by all accounts which have 
 reached posterity, was really no slander. The profes- 
 sor's forks had become rather of the dingiest, probably 
 through inveterate habits of scratching up Greek roots 
 from diluvian mould, some of it older than Deucalion's 
 flood, and very good, perhaps, for turnips, but less so 
 for the digits which turn up turnips. What followed, 
 however, if it were of a nature to be circumstantially 
 repeated, must have been more trying to the sensibili- 
 ties of the Greek oracle, and to the blushes of the 
 policemen dispersed throughout the rooms, than even 
 the harsh critique upon his nails ; which, let the wits 
 say what they would in their malice, were no doubt 
 washed regularly enough once every three years. 
 And, even if they were not, I should say that this is not 
 
272 NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 
 
 SO strong a fact as some that are reported about many 
 a continental professor. Mrs. CI nt, with the two- 
 fold neatness of an Englishwoman and a Quaker, told 
 me that, on visiting Pestalozzi, the celebrated educaticjn 
 professor, at Yverdun, about 1820, her first impression, 
 from a distant view of his dilapidated premises, was 
 profound horror at the grimness of his complexion, 
 which struck her as no complexion formed by nature, 
 but as a deposition from half a century of atmospheric 
 rust — a most ancient cerugo. She insisted on a radical 
 purification, as a sine qua non towards any interview 
 with herself. The mock professor consented. Mrs. CI. 
 hired a stout Swiss charwoman, used to the scouring of 
 staircases, kitchen floors, &c. ; the professor, whom, on 
 this occasion, one may call " the prisoner," was accom- 
 modated with a seat (as prisoners at the bar sometimes 
 are with us) in the centre of a mighty washing-tub, and 
 then scoured through a long summer forenoon, by the 
 strength of a brawny Helvetian arm, " And now, my 
 dear friends," said Mrs. CI. to myself, " is it thy opinion 
 that this was cruel ? Some people say it was ; and J 
 wiA to disguise nothing; — it was not mere soap 
 that I had him scoured with, but soap and sand ; so 
 say honestly, dost thee call that cruel ? " Laughing no 
 more than the frailty of my human nature compelled 
 me, I replied, " Far from it ; on the contrary, every- 
 body must be charmed with her consideration for the 
 professor, in not having him cleaned on the same 
 pxmciple as her carriage, namely, taken to the stable- 
 yard, mopped severely" \^'- Mobhed, dost thee say?" she 
 exclaimed. " No, no," I said, " not mobbed, but mopped, 
 until the gravel should be all gone "], " then pelted with 
 
NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE I.ANDOR. 273 
 
 buckets of water by firemen, and, finally, currycombed 
 and rubbed down by two grooms, keeping a sharp 
 susurncs between them, so as to soothe his wounded 
 feelings ; after all which, a feed of oats might not have 
 been amiss." The result, however, of this scouring 
 extraordinary was probably as fatal as to Mambrino's 
 helmet in Don Quixote. Pestalozzi issued, indeed, 
 from the washing-tub like Aeson from Medea's kettle ; 
 he took his station amongst a younger and fairer gen- 
 eration ; and the dispute was now settled whether he 
 belonged to the Caucasian or Mongolian race. But 
 his intellect was thought to have suffered seriously. 
 The tarnish of fifty or sixty years seemed to have 
 acquired powers of reacting as a stimulant upon the 
 professor's fancy, through the rete vmcosum, or through 
 — Heaven knows what. He was too old to be convert- 
 ed to cleanliness ; the Paganism of a neglected person 
 at seventy becomes a sort of religion interwoven with 
 the nervous system — just as the well-known Plica Po' 
 lonica from which the French armies suffered so much 
 in Poland, during 1807-8, though produced by neglect 
 of the hair, will not be cured by extirpation of the hair. 
 The hair becomes matted into Medusa locks, or what 
 look like snakes ; and to cut these off is oftentimes to 
 cause nervous frenzy, or other great constitutional 
 disturbance. I never heard, indeed, that Pestalozzi 
 suffered apoplexy from his scouring; but certainly his 
 ideas on education grew bewildered, and will be found 
 essentially damaged, after that great epoch — his bap- 
 tism by water and sand. 
 
 Now, in comparison of an Orson like this man of 
 Vverdun — this great Swiss reformer, who might, pe^ 
 18 12* 
 
274 NOTES ox WALTER SAVAGE LANDOK. 
 
 haps, have bred a pet variety of typhns-fevei for hi& own 
 separate use — what signify nails, though worse than 
 Caliban's or Nebuchadnezzar's ? 
 
 This Greek professor Porson — whose knowledge of 
 English was so limited that his total cargo might have 
 been embarked on board a walnut-shell, on the bosom 
 of a slop-basin, and insured for three halfpence — 
 astonishes me, that have been studying English for 
 thirty years and upwards, by the strange discoveries 
 that he announces in this field. One and all, 1 fear, 
 are mares' nests. He -discovered, for instance, on his 
 first and last reception amongst aristocratic people, that 
 in this region of society a female bosom is called her 
 neck. But, if it really liad been so called, I see no 
 objection to the principle concerned in such disguises ; 
 and I see the greatest to that savage franlcness which 
 virtually is indicated with applause in the Porsonian 
 remark. Let vis consider. It is not that we cannot 
 speak freely of the female bosom, and we do so daily. 
 In discussing a statue, we do so without reserve ; and 
 in the act of suckling an infant, the bosom of every 
 woman is an idea so sheltered by the tenderness and 
 sanctity with which all but ruffians invest the organ 
 of maternity, that no man scruples to name it, if the 
 occasion warrants it. He suppresses it oidy as he 
 suppresses the name of God; not as an idea that can 
 itself contain any indecorum, but, on the contrary, as 
 making other and more trivial ideas to become inde- 
 corous when associated with a conception rising so 
 much above their own standard. Equally, the words 
 affliction, guilt, penitence, remorse, &:c., are proscribed 
 from the ordinary current of conversation amongst 
 
NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 275 
 
 mere acquaintances; and for the same reason, namely, 
 that they touch chords too impassioned and profound 
 for harmonizing with the key in which the mere social 
 civilities of life are exchanged. Meantime, it is not 
 true that any custom ever prevailed in any class of 
 calling a woman's bosom her neck. Porson goes on 
 to say, that, for his part, he was born in an age when 
 people had thighs. Well, a great many people have 
 thighs still. ]]ut in all ages there must have been 
 many of whom it is lawful to suspect such a fact zo- 
 ologically ; and yet, as men honoring our own race, 
 and all its veils of mystery, not too openly to insist 
 upon it, which, luckily, there is seldom any occasion 
 to do. 
 
 Mr. Landor conceives that we are growing worse m 
 the pedantries of false delicacy. I think not. His 
 own residence in Italy has injured his sense of discrim- 
 mation. It is not his countrymen that have grown 
 conspicuously more demure and prudish, but he himself 
 that has grown in Italy more tolerant of what is really 
 a blainable coarseness. Various instances occur in 
 these volumes of that faulty compliance with Southern 
 grossness. The tendencies of the age, among our- 
 selves, lie certainly in one channel towards excessive 
 refinement. So far, however, they do but balance the 
 opposite tendencies in some other channels. The 
 craving for instant effect in style — as it brings forward 
 many disgusting Germanisms and other barbarisms — 
 as it transplants into literature much slang from the 
 street — as it relicts painfully upon the grandeurs of the 
 antique scriptural diction, by recalling into colloquiai 
 use many consecrated words which thus lose their 
 
270 NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 
 
 Gothic beauty — also operates daily amongst journil- 
 ists, by the temptations of apparent strength that lurk 
 in plain speaking or even in brutality. What other 
 temptation, for instance, can be supposed to govern 
 those who, in speaking of hunger as it affects our 
 paupers, so needlessly affect us by the very coarsest 
 English word for the Latin word venter? Surely the 
 word stomach would be intelligible to everybody, and 
 yet disgust nobody. It would do for him that affectc 
 plain speaking; it would do for you and me that revolt 
 from gross speaking. Signs from abroad speak the 
 very same language, as to the liberal tendencies (in 
 this point) of the nineteenth century. Formerly, it 
 was treason for a Spaniard, even in a laudatory copy 
 of verses, to suppose his own Queen lowered to the 
 level of other females by the possession of legs ! Con- 
 stitutionally, the Queen w^as incapable of legs. How 
 else her Majesty contrived to walk, or to dance, the 
 Inquisition soon taught the poet was no concern of his. 
 Royal legs for females were an inconceivable thing — 
 except amongst Protestant nations ; some of whom the 
 Spanish Church affirmed to be even disfigured by tails ' 
 Having tails, of course they might have legs. But not 
 Catholic Queens; Now-a-days, so changed is all this 
 that if you should even express your homage to hei 
 Most Catholic Majesty, by sending her a pair of em 
 broidered garters — which certainly presuppose \egi> 
 — there is no doubt that the Spanish Minister of 
 Finance would gratefully carry them to account — or 
 the principle that " every little helps." Mr. Person is 
 equally wrong, as I conceive, in another illustration 
 of this matter, drawn from the human toes, and spe- 
 
KOVES ON WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 271 
 
 cificall)' from the great toe. It is true, that, in refined 
 society, upon any rare necessity arising for alluding to 
 so inconsiderable a member of the human statue, gen- 
 erally this is done at present by the French term doigU 
 de-pied — though not always — as may be seen in 
 various honorary certificates granted to chiropodists 
 within the last twenty months. And whereas Mr. Por- 
 son asks pathetically — What harm has the great toe 
 done, that it is never to be named? I answer — The 
 greatest harm ; as may be seen in the first act of 
 ^ Coriolanus," where Menenius justly complains that 
 this arrogant subaltern of the crural system, 
 
 " Being basest, meanest, vilest, 
 
 Still goeth foremost." 
 
 Even in the villany of running away from battle, this 
 unworthy servant still asserts precedency. I repeat, 
 however, that the general tendencies of the age, as to 
 the just limits of parrhesia (using the Greek word in a 
 sense wider than of old), are moving at present upon 
 two opposite tracks ; which fact it is, as in some ether 
 lases, that makes the final judgment difficult. 
 
 KOMAN IMPERATOR. 
 
 Mr. Landor, though really learned, often puts his 
 learning into his pocket. 
 
 Thus, with respect to the German Empire, Mr. L 
 asserts that it was a chimajra ; that the Impermin Ger 
 manicum was a mere usage of speech, founded (if J 
 understand him) not even in a legal fiction, but in 
 a blunder; that a German Imperator never had a true 
 historical existence ; and, finally, that even the Roman 
 
278 NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 
 
 title of Imperator — which, unquestionnblv, surmount 'd 
 in grandeur all titles of honor that ever were or will be 
 — ranged in dignity below the title o^ Rex. 
 
 I believe him wrong in every one of these doctrines ; 
 let us confine ourselves to the last. The title of Impe- 
 rator was not nriginally eitlier above or below the title 
 of Eex, or even upon the same levtl ; it was what 
 logicians call disparate — it radiated from a difTerent 
 centre, precisely as the modern title of Decanus, or 
 Dean, which is originally astrological [see the elder 
 Scaliger on Manilius], has no relation, whether of 
 superiority or equality or inferiority, to the title of 
 Colonel, nor the title of Cardinal any such relation to 
 that of Field-Marshal ; and quite as little had Rex to 
 Imperator. Masters of Ceremonies, or Lord Chamber- 
 lains, may certainly create a precedency in favor of 
 any title whatever in regard to any other title; but 
 such a precedency for any of the cases before us would 
 be arbitrary, and not growing out of any internal prin- 
 ciple, though useful for purposes of convenience. As 
 regards the Roman Imperator, originally like the Ro- 
 man Prmtor — this title and the official ranic pointci^ 
 exclusively to military distinctions. In process of time 
 the PrjEtor came to be a legal officer, and the Impera- 
 tor to bt the supreme political officer. But the motive 
 for assuming the title of Imperator, as the badge or 
 cognizance of the sovereign authority, when the great 
 transfiguration of the Republic took place, seems to 
 have been this. An essentially new distribution of 
 political powers had become necessary, and thif change 
 masked itself to Romans, published itself in menaces 
 and muttering thunder to foreign states, through the 
 
NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE LANDUR. 279 
 
 martial title of Imperator. A new eq\iilibiiuin was 
 demanded by the changes which time and luxury and 
 pauperism had silently worked on the composition of 
 Roman society. If Rome was- to be saved from herself 
 — if she was to be saved from the eternal flux and 
 reflux — action and reaction — amongst her oligarchy 
 of immense estates (which condiiion of things it was 
 that forced on the great siiie qua non reforms of Caesar, 
 against all the babble of the selfish Cicero, of the 
 wicked Cato, and of the debt-ridden Senate) — then it 
 was indispensable that a new order of powers should 
 be combined for bridling her internal convulsions. To 
 carry her ofT from her own self-generated vortex, 
 which would, in a very few years, have engulfed her 
 and drawn her down into fragments, some machinery 
 as new as steam-power was required ; her own native 
 sails filled in the v/rong direction. There were already 
 powers in the constitution equal to the work, but dis- 
 tracted and falsely lodged. These must be gathered 
 into one hand. And, yet, as names are all-powerful 
 upon our frail race, this recast must be verbally dis- 
 guised. The title must be such as, whilst flattering 
 the Roman pride, might yet announce to Oriental 
 powers a plenipotentiary of Rome who argued all dis- 
 puted points, not so much strongly as (an Irish phrase) 
 witli "a strong back " — not so much piquing himself 
 on Aristotelian syllogisms that came within BaTbary 
 and Celarent, as upon thirty legions that stood within 
 call. The Consulship was good for little ; that, with 
 some reservations, could be safely resigned into subor 
 dinate hands. The Consular name, and the name oi 
 Senate, which was still suffered to retain an obscure 
 
280 NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE LAN'DOR. 
 
 vitality and power of resurrection, continued to throw 
 a popular lustre over the government. Millions were 
 duped. But the essential offices, the offices in which 
 settled the organs of all the life in the administration, 
 were these : — 1, of Military Commander-in-Chief (in- 
 cluding such a partition of the provinces as might seal 
 the authority in this officer's hands, and yet flatter the 
 people through the Senate) ; 2, of Censor, so as to 
 watch the action of morals and social usages upon 
 politics ; 3, of Pontifex Maximus ; 4, and finally, 
 of Tribune. The tribunitial power, next after the 
 military power, occupied the earliest anxieties of the 
 Csesars. All these powers, and some others belonging 
 to less dignified functions, were made to run through 
 the same central rings (or what in mail-coach harness 
 is called the turrets) : the " ribbons " were tossed up to 
 one and the same imperial coachman, looking as ami- 
 able as he could, but, in fact, a very truculent person- 
 age, having powers more unlimited than was always 
 safe for himself. And now, after all this change of 
 things, what was to be the name 1 By what title should 
 men know him? Much depended upon that. The 
 tremendous symbols of S. P. Q. R. still remained ; nor 
 had they lost their power. On the contrary, the great 
 idea of the Roman destiny, as of some vast phantom 
 moving under God to some unknown end, was greater 
 than ever ; the idea was now so great, that it had 
 outgrown all its representative realities. Consul and 
 Proconsul would no longer answer, because they rep- 
 resented too exclusively the interior or domestic foun- 
 tains of power, and not the external relations to the 
 terraqueous globe which were beginning to expand with 
 
NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 281 
 
 suJden accelerations of velocity. The ceMral povvpr 
 could not be forgotten by any who were near enough 
 to have tasted its wrath ; but now there was arising a 
 necessity for expressing, by some great unity of de- 
 nomination, so as no longer to lose the totality in the 
 separate partitions — the enormity of the ciraimfereiice. 
 A necessity for this had repeatedly been found in nego- 
 tiations, and in contests ot ceremonial rank with oriental 
 powers, as between ourselves and China. With Persia, 
 the greatest of these powers, an instinct of inevitablo 
 collisioni** had, for some time, been ripening. It bc' 
 came requisite that there should be a representative 
 officer for the whole Roman grandeur, and one capable 
 of standing on the same level as the Persian king of 
 kings ; and this necessity arose at the very same 
 moment that a new organization was required of Ro- 
 man power for domestic purposes. There is no doubt 
 that both purposes were consulted in the choice of th'i 
 title of Imperator. The chief alternative title was that 
 of Dictator. But to this, as regarded Romans, there 
 were two objections — first, that it was a mere provis- 
 ional title, always commemorating a transitional emer 
 gency, and pointing to some happier condition, wh>ch 
 the extraordinary powers of the officer ought socn to 
 establish. It was in the nature of a problem, ana con- 
 tinually asked for its own solution. The Dictator dic- 
 tated. He was the greatest ipse dixit that ever was 
 heard of. It reminded the people verbalhj of despotic 
 powers and autocracy. Then again, as regarded foreign 
 nations, unacquainted with the Roman constitution, and 
 throughout the servile East incapable of understanding 
 it, the title of Dictator had no meaning at all. Th*. 
 
282 NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 
 
 Speaker is a magnificent title in England, and makes 
 brave men sometimes shake in their shoes. But, yet, 
 if from rustic ignorance it is not understood, even that 
 tii'lle means nothing. 
 
 Of the proudest Speaker that England ever saw, 
 namely. Sir Edward Seymour, it is recorded that his 
 grandeur failed him, sank under him, like the New- 
 gate drop, at the very moment when his boiling anger 
 most relied upon and required it. He was riding 
 near Barnet, when a rustic wagoner ahead of him, 
 by keeping obstinately the middle of the road, pre- 
 vented him from passing. Sir Edward motioned to 
 him magnificently, that he must turn his horses to 
 the left. The carter, on some fit of the sulks (perhaps 
 from the Jacobinism innate in man), despised this 
 pantomime, and sturdily persisted in his mutinous 
 disrespect. On which Sir Edward shouted — " Fellow, 
 do you know who I am ? " " Noo-ah" replied our 
 rebellious friend, meaning, when faithfully translated, 
 no. "Are you aware, sirrah," said Sir Edward, now 
 thoroughly incensed, " that I am the right honorable 
 the Speaker ? At your peril, sir, in the name of 
 the Commons of England, in Parliament assembled, 
 quarter instantly to the left." This was said in that 
 dreadful voice which sometimes reprimanded penitent 
 offenders, kneeling at the bar of the House. The 
 carter, more struck by the terrific tones than the 
 words, spoke an aside to " Dobbin " (his " thill " horse), 
 which procured an opening to the blazing Spep.ker, 
 and then replied thus — " Speaker! Why, if so be as 
 thou canst speak, whoy-y-y-y-y " (in the tremulous un- 
 dulation with which he was used to utter his sovereig-n 
 
^rOFES 0^ WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 283 
 
 \vl)oah-li-h-h to his horses), " "\vhoy-)-y-y didn't-a speuk 
 afore ? " The wagoner, it set'ined, had presumed Sir 
 Edward, from his inute pantomime, to be a dumb man ; 
 and -all which the proud Speaker gained, by the 
 proclamation of his style and title, was, to be exoner- 
 ated from that suspicion, but to the heavy discredit of 
 hi:, sanity. A Roman Dictator stood quite as poor a 
 chance with foreigners, as our Speaker with a rustic, 
 "Dictator! let him dictate to his wife; but he sha'n't 
 dictate to us." Any title, to prosper with distant 
 nations, must rest upon the basis of arms. And this 
 fell in admirably with the political exigency for Rome 
 herself. The title of Imperator was liable to no 
 jealousy. Being entirely a military title, it clashed 
 with no civil pretensions whatever. Being a military 
 title, that recorded a triumph over external enemies in 
 the field, it was dear to the patriotic heart; whilst it 
 directed the ej'e to a quarter where all increase of 
 power was concurrent with increase of benefit to the 
 State. And again, as the honor had been hitherto 
 purely titular, accompanied by some axictorUas, in the 
 Roman sense (not always honor, for Cicero was an 
 Imperator for Cilician exploits, which he reports with 
 laughter), but no separate authority in our modern 
 sense. Even in military circles it was open to little 
 jealousy ; nor apparently could ripen into a shape that 
 ever would be so, since, according to all precedent, it 
 would be continually balanced by the extension of the 
 iame title, under popular military suffrage, to other 
 fortunate leaders. Who could foresee, at the inaugu- 
 ration of this reform, that this precedent would be 
 abolished ? who could cfuess that henceforwards no 
 
2S4 NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 
 
 more triumphs (but only a sparing distribution )f 
 triumphal decorations), henceforwards no more im- 
 peratorial titles for anybody out of the one consecrated 
 family ? AH this was hidden in the bosom of the 
 earliest Imperator ; he seemed, to the great mass of 
 the people, perfectly innocent of civic ambition ; he 
 rested upon his truncheon, that is, upon S. P. Q. R. ; like 
 Napoleon, he said, "I am but the first soldier of the 
 republic," that is, the most dutiful of her servants ; and, 
 like Napoleon, under cover of this martial paludavien- 
 turriy he had soon filched every ensign of authority by 
 which the organs of public power could speak. But, 
 at the beginning, this title of Imperator was the one 
 by far the best fitted to mask all this, to disarm sus- 
 picion, and to win the confidence of the people. 
 
 The title, therefore, began in something like impos- 
 ture ; and it was not certainly at first the gorgeous 
 title into which it afterwards blossomed. The earth 
 did not yet ring with it. The rays of its diadem were 
 not then the first that said All hail! to the rising — 
 the last that said Fareivell ! to the setting sun. But 
 still it was already a splendid distinction ; and, in a 
 Roman ear, it must have sounded fiir above all com- 
 petition from the trivial title (in that day) of " Rex," 
 unless it were the Persian Rex, namely, " Rex Regum." 
 Romans gave the title; they stooped not to accept it.^i 
 Even Mark Antony, in the all-magnificent description 
 of him by Shakspeare's Cleopatra, could give it in 
 showers — kings waited in his ante-room, "and from his 
 pocket fell crowns and sceptres." The title of Imperator 
 was indeed repeated in glory that transcended the glory 
 of earth, but it was not, therefore, sown in dishonor. 
 
NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 285 
 
 We are all astonished at Mr. Landor — myself and 
 three hundred select readers. What can he mean by 
 tilting against the Imperator — Semper Augustus? 
 Before him the sacred fire (that ^burned from century 
 to century) went pompously in advance — before him 
 the children of Europe and Asia — of Africa and the 
 islands, rode as dorypheroi ; his soviatophulakes were 
 princes ; and his empire, when burning out in Byzar- 
 tium, furnished from its very ruins the models for our 
 western honors and ceremonial. Had it even begun 
 in circumstances of ignominy, that would have been 
 cured easily by its subsequent triumph. Many are the 
 titles of earth that have found a glory in looking back 
 to the humiiitv of their origin as its most memorable 
 feature. The fisherman who sits upon Mount Pala- 
 tine, in some respects the grandest of all potentates, 
 as one wielding both earthly and heavenly thunders, is 
 the highest example of this. Some, like the Mame- 
 lukes of Egypt and the early Janizaries of the Porte, 
 have glorified themselves in being slaves. Others, 
 like the Caliphs, have founded their claims to men's 
 homage in the fact of being s7/ccessors to those who 
 (between ourselves) were knaves. And once it hap- 
 pened to Professor Wilson and myself, that we trav- 
 elled in the same post-chaise with a most agreeable 
 madman, who, amongst a variety of other select facts 
 which he communicated, was kind enough to give us 
 the following etymological account of our much- 
 respected ancestors the Saxons; which furnishes a 
 further illustration (quite unknown to the learned) of 
 the fact — that honor may glory in deducing itself 
 from circumstances of humility. He assured us that 
 
2S6 NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE LANDOK. 
 
 these worthy Pagans were a league, comprehending 
 every single brave man of German blood ; so much 
 so, that on sailing away they left that unhappy land 
 in a state of universal cowardice, which accounts for the 
 li:king it subsequently received from Napoleon. The 
 Saxons were very poor, as brave men too often are. 
 [ii fact they had no breeches, and, of course, no silk 
 stockings. They had, however, sacks, which they 
 mounted on their backs, whence naturally their name 
 iSax-on. Sacks-071 ! was the one word of command, 
 and that spoken, the army was ready. In reality it 
 was treason to take them off. But this indorsement 
 of their persons was not assumed on any Jewish prin- 
 ciple of humiliation ; on the contrary, in the most 
 flagrant spirit of defiance to the whole race of man. 
 For they proclaimed that, having no breeches nor silk 
 stockings of their own, they intended, v\^ind and weather 
 permitting, to fill these same sacks with those of other 
 men. The Welshmen then occupying England were 
 reputed to have a good stock of both, and in quest of 
 this Welsh wardrobe the Sacks-on army sailed. With 
 what success it is not requisite to say, since here in 
 one post-chaise, four hundred and thirty years after, 
 were three of their posterity, the professoi*, the mad- 
 man, and myself, indorsees (as you may say) of the 
 original indorsers, who were all well equipped with 
 the object of this great Sacks-on exodus. 
 
 It is true that the word emperor is not in every 
 situation so impressive as the word Iii7ig. But that 
 arises in part from the latter word having less of 
 specialty about it ; it is more catholic, and to that 
 extent more poetic ; and in part from accidents ol 
 
NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 28T 
 
 position which disturb the relations of many other 
 titles besides. The Froconsul had a grander sound, as 
 regarded military expeditions, than the principal from 
 whom he emanated. The Siireiia left a more awful 
 remembrance of his title upon the comrades of Julian 
 in his Persian expedition than the Surena's master. 
 And there are many cases extant m which the word 
 angel strikes a deeper key — cases where pow"er is con- 
 templated, as well as beauty or mysterious existence — 
 than the word archangel, though confessedly higher in 
 the hierarchies of heaven. 
 
 Let me now draw the reader's attention to Count 
 Julian, a great conception of Mr. Landor's. 
 
 The fable of Count Julian (that is, when compre- 
 hending all the parties to that web, of which he is the 
 centre) may be pronounced the grandest which mod- 
 ern history unfolds. It is, and it is 7iot, scenical. In 
 some portions (as the fate so mysterious of Roderick, 
 and in a higher sense of Julian) it rises as much above 
 what the stage could illustrate, as does Thermopylas 
 above the petty details of narration. The man was 
 mad that, instead of breathing from a hurricane of 
 harps some mighty ode over Thermopylae, fancied the 
 little conceit of weaving it into a metrical novel or suc- 
 cession of incidents. Yet, on the other hand, though 
 rising higher. Count Julian sinks lower : though the 
 passions rise far above Troy, above Marathon, above 
 ThermopyloB, and are such passions as could not have 
 existed under Paganism, in some respects they conde- 
 scend and preconform to the stage. The characters 
 are all different, all marked, all in position; by which, 
 never assuming fixed attitudes as to purpose and inter- 
 
2SS NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 
 
 est, the passions are deliriously complex, and the situa 
 tions are of corresponding grandeur. Metius Fuffetius, 
 Alban traitor ! that wert torn limb from limb by antag- 
 onist yet confederate chariots, thy tortures, seen by 
 shuddering armies, were not comparable to the unseen 
 tortures in Count Julian's mind; who — whether his 
 treason prospered or not, whether his dear outraged 
 daughter lived or died, whether his king were tram- 
 pled in the dust by the horses of infidels, or escaped 
 as a wreck from the fiery struggle, whether his dear 
 native Spain fell for ages under misbelieving hounds, 
 or, combining her strength, tossed ofT them, but then 
 also himself, with one loathing from her shores — saw, 
 as he looked out into the mighty darkness, and stretched 
 out his penitential hands vainly for pity or for pardon, 
 nothing but the blackness of ruin, and ruin that was 
 too probably to career through centuries. " To this 
 pass," as Cgesar said to his soldiers at Pharsalia, " had 
 his enemies reduced him ; " and Count Julian might 
 truly say, as he stretched himself a rueful suppliant 
 before the Cross, listening to the havoc that was driving 
 onwards before the dogs of the Crescent, "M?/ enemies, 
 because they would not remember that I was a man, 
 forced me to forget that I was a Spaniard : — to forget 
 thee, O native Spain, — and, alas! thee, faith of 
 Christ ! " 
 
 The story is wrapped in gigantic mists, and looms 
 upon one like the Grecian fable of CEdipus ; and there 
 will be great reason for disgust, if the deep Arabic re- 
 searches now going on in the Escurial, or at Vienna, 
 should succeed in stripping it of its grandeurs. For, 
 as it stands at present, it is the most fearful lesson 
 
NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE LANUOR. 289 
 
 extant of the great moral, that crime propagates crime, 
 and violence inherits violence ; nay, a lesson on the 
 awful necessity which exists at times, that one tremen- 
 dous wrong should blindly reproduce itself in endless 
 retaliatory wrongs. To have resisted the dread temp- 
 tation, would have needed an angel's nature; to have 
 yielded, is but human; should it, then, plead in vain 
 for pardon ? and yet, by some mystery of evd, to have 
 perfected this human vengeance, is, finally, to land all 
 parties alike, oppressor and oppressed, in the passions 
 of hell. 
 
 Mr. Landor, who always rises with his subject, and 
 dilates like Satan into Teneriffe or Atlas, when he sees 
 be tore him an antagonist worthy of his powers, is' prob- 
 ably the one man in Europe that has adequately con- 
 ceived the situation, the stern self-dependency and the 
 monumental misery of Count Julian. That sublimity 
 of penitential grief, which cannot accept consolation 
 from man, cannot hear external reproach, cannot con- 
 descend to notice insult, cannot so much as see the 
 curiosity of by-standers ; that awful carelessness of 
 all but the troubled deeps within his own heart, and of 
 God's spirit brooding upon their surface, and searching 
 their abysses, never was so majestically described as in 
 the following lines ; it is the noble Spaniard, Hernando, 
 comprehending and loving Count Julian in the midst of 
 his treasons, who speaks: — Tarik, the gallant Moor, 
 having said that at' last the Count must be happy ; for 
 that 
 
 •' Delicious calm 
 Follows the fierce enjoyment of revenge." 
 
 Hernando replies thus : — 
 
 19 13 
 
290 NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 
 
 " That calm was never his ; no other icill be. 
 Kot victorj', that o'ershadows him, sees he. 
 No airy and light pas-^ion stirs abi'oad 
 To ruffle or to soothe him ; all are quelled 
 Beneath a mightier, sterner, stress of mind. 
 Wakeful he sits, and lonely, and unmoved. 
 Beyond the arrows, shouts, and views of men^ 
 As oftentimes an eagle, ere the sun 
 Throws o'er the varj'ing earth his early ray. 
 Stands solitary — stands immovable 
 Upon some highest cliff, and rolls his eye, 
 Clear, constant, unobservant, unabased, 
 In the cold light above the dews of morn." 
 
 One change suggests itself to me us possibly for the 
 Letter, namely, if the magnificent line — 
 
 " Beyond the arrows, shouts, and views of men " — 
 
 were transferred to the secondary object, the eagle, 
 placed after what is jiojv the last line, it would give a 
 fuller rythmus to the close of the entire passage ; it 
 would be more literally applicable to the majestic and 
 solitary bird, than to the majestic and solitary man ; 
 whilst the figurative expression even more impassioned 
 might be found for the utter self-absorpiion of Count 
 Julian's spirit — too grandly sorrowful to be capable of 
 disdain. 
 
 It completes the picture of this ruined prince, that 
 Hernando, the sole friend (except his daughter) still 
 cleaving to him, dwells with yearning desire upon his 
 death, knowing the necessity of this consummation to 
 his own secret desires, knowing the forgiveness which 
 would settle upon his memory after that last penalty 
 should have been paid for his errors, comprehending 
 the peace that would then ?^ wallow up the storm : — 
 
NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. S91 
 
 •• For his own sake I could endure his loss. 
 Pray for it, and thank God : yet mourn I must 
 Him above all, so great, so bountiful. 
 So blessed once ! " 
 
 It is no satisfaction to Hernando tliat Julian should 
 '' yearn for death with speechless love," but Julian does 
 so ; and it is in vain now amongst these irreparable 
 ruins, to wish it otherwise. 
 
 " 'T is not my solace that 't is i- his desire : 
 Of all who pass us in life's drear descent 
 We grieve the most for those who wished to die." 
 
 How much, then, is in this brief drama of Count 
 Julian, chiselled, as one might think, by the hands of 
 that sculptor who fancied the great idea of chiselling 
 Mount Athos into a demigod, which almost insists oc 
 being quoted ; which seems to rebuke and frown on 
 one for not quoting it : passages to which, for their 
 solemn grandeur, one raises one's hat as at night in 
 walking under the Coliseum ; passages which, for their 
 luxury of loveliness, should be inscribed on the phy- 
 lacteries of brides, or upon the frescoes of Ionia, illus- 
 trated by the gorgeous allegories of Rubens. 
 
 " Sed fugit interea, fugit irreparibile tempus. 
 Singula dum capti circumvectamur amore." 
 
 Yet, reader, in spite of time, one word more on the 
 subject we are quitting. Father Time is certainly be- 
 come very importunate and clamorously shrill since he 
 has been fitted up with that horrid railway whistle ; 
 and even old Mother Space is growing rather imperti- 
 nent, when she speaks out of monthly journals licensed 
 to carry but small quantities of bulky goods ; yet one 
 thing I must say in spite of them both. 
 
292 NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 
 
 It is, that although we have had from men of memo- 
 rable genius, Shelley in particular, both direct and 
 mdirect attempts (some of them powerful attempts"* 
 to realize the g^eat idea of Prometheus, which idea 
 is so great, that (like the primeval majesties of Hu 
 man Innocence, of Avenging Deluges that are past^ 
 of Fiery Visitations yet to come) it has had strength 
 to pass through many climates, and through many 
 religions, without essential loss, but surviving, without 
 tarnish, every furnace of chance and change ; so it is 
 that, after all has been done which intellectual power 
 could do since jEschylus (and since Milton in his 
 Satan), no embodiment of the Promethean situation, 
 none of the Promethean character, fixes the attentive 
 eye upon itself with the same secret feeling of fidelity 
 to the vast archetype, as Mr. Landor's " Count Julian." 
 There is in this modern aerolith the same jewelly 
 lustre, which cannot be mistaken ; the same " non 
 imitabile fulgur^'' and the same character of " fracture," 
 or cleavage, as mineralogists speak, for its beaming 
 iridescent grandeur, redoubling under the crush of 
 misery. The color and the coruscation are the same 
 when splintered by violence ; the tones of the rocky ^^ 
 harp are the same when swept by sorrow. There is 
 the same spirit of heavenly persecution against his 
 enemy, persecution that would have hung upon his 
 rear, and " burned after him to the bottomless pit," 
 though it had yawned for both ; there is the same gulf 
 fixed between the possibilities of their reconciliation, 
 the same immortality of resistance, the same abysmal 
 anguish. Did Mr. Landor consciously cherish this, 
 .^schylean ideal in composing " Count Julian " ? ) 
 
 bnnw nnt : iht^rp, it is. 
 
NOTES. 
 
 Note 1. Page 244. 
 
 "Southey affirmed: " — namely, in the " Letters of Espriella," 
 »n imaginary Spaniard on a visit to England, about the year 1810. 
 
 Note 2. Page 246. 
 
 " Too much wealth : " — Mr. Landor, who should know best, 
 speaks of himself (once at least), as " poor ; " but that is all non- 
 Bense. I have known several people with annual incomes border- 
 ing on twenty thousand pounds, who spoke of themselves, and 
 seemed seriously to think themselves, unhappy " paupers." Lady 
 Hester Stanhope, with twenty-seven hundred pounds a year (of 
 which about twelve arose from her go vei-nment pension), and with- 
 out one solitary dependent in her train, thought herself rich enough 
 to become a queen (an Arabic malekij) in the Syrian mountains, 
 but an absolute pauper for London ; *' for how, you know" (aa 
 she would say, pathetically), "could the humblest of spinsters 
 live decently upon that pittance ? ' ' 
 
 Note 3. Page 249. 
 
 " From Hegel : " — I am not prepared with an affidavit that 
 no man ever read Mr. Hegel, that great master of the impenetraltle. 
 But sulhoieiit evidence of that fact, as I conceive, may be drawn 
 from thjse who have written commentaries upon him. 
 
 (293) 
 
294 NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 
 
 Note 4. Page 258, 
 
 Wale (Germauice wahl), the old ballad word for choice. But 
 the motive for using it in this place is in allusion to an excellent 
 old Scottish story (not sufficiently known in the south), of a rus- 
 tic laird, who profited by the hospitality of his neighbors, 
 duly to get drunk once (and no more) every lawful night, 
 returning in the happiest frame of mind under the escort of 
 his servant Andrew. In spite of Andrew, however, it sometimes 
 happened that the laird fell off his horse ; and on one of these occa- 
 sions, as he himself was dismounted from his saddle, his wig was 
 dismounted from his cranium. Both fell into a peat-moss, and 
 both were fished out by Andrew. But the laird, in his confusion, 
 putting on the wig wrong side before, reasonably " jaloused " that 
 this could not be his own wig, but some other man's, which sus- 
 picion he communicated to Andrew, who argued contra by the 
 memorable reply — "Hout, laird! there's nae wale o' wigs i' a 
 peat-moss." 
 
 Note 5. Page 259, 
 
 Milton, in uttering his grief (but also his hopes growing out 
 of his grief) upon a similar tragedy, namely, the massacre of 
 the Protestant women and children by " the bloody Piedmontese," 
 
 Note 6, Page 263, 
 
 "Modern military life:^' — By modern I mean since the 
 opening of the thirty years' war. In this war, the sack, or partial 
 sack, of Magdeburg, will ccaur to the reader as one of the worst 
 amongst martial ruffianisms. But this happens to be a hoax. It 
 is an old experience, that, when once the demure mu-se of history 
 has allowed herself to tell a lie, she never retracts it. Many are 
 the falsehoods in our own history, which our children read tradi- 
 tionally for truths, merely because our uncritical grandfathers 
 believed them to be such, Magdeburg was not sacked. What 
 iault there was in the ease belonged to the King of Sweden, who 
 certainly was remiss in this instance, though with excuses moro 
 than were hearkened to at that time. Tilly, the Bavarian general 
 had no reason for severity in this case, and showed none. AcccVvi 
 
NOTES. 295 
 
 mg to the regular routine of war, Magdeburg had become forfeited 
 to military execution ; "whicli, let the reader remember, was not, 
 in those days, a right of the general as against the enemy, and by 
 way of salutary warning to other cities, lest they also should abuse 
 the right of a reasonable defence, but was a right of the soldiery 
 as against their own leaders. A town stormed was then a little 
 perquisite to the ill-fed and ill-paid soldiers. So of prisoners. If 
 I made a prisoner of " Signer Drew" [see Henry V.], it was my 
 business to fix his ransom ; tlie general had no business to inter- 
 fere with that. Magdeburg, therefore, had incurred the common 
 penalty (which she must have foreseen) of obstinacy ; and the only 
 difference between her case and that of many another brave little 
 town, that quietly submitted to the usual martyrdom, without howl 
 ing through all the speaking-trumpets of history, was this — that 
 the penalty was, upon Magdeburg, but partially enforced. Harte, 
 the tutor of Lord Chesterfield's son, first published, in his Life of 
 Gustavus Adolphus, an authentic diary of what passed at that 
 time, kept by a Lutheran clergyman. This diary shows suflSciently 
 that no real departures were made from the customary routine, 
 except in the direction of mercy. But it is evident that the people 
 of Magdeburg were a sort of German hogs, of whom, it is notori- 
 ous, that if you attempt in the kindest way to shear them, all you 
 get is horrible yelling, and (the proverb asserts) very little wool. 
 The case being a classical one in the annals of military outrages, 
 I have noticed its real features. 
 
 Note 7. Page 266. 
 
 '* Melanchthon's profound theory." — That the reader may not 
 suppose me misrepresenting Mr. L., I subjoin his words, p. 224, 
 vol. 1 : — " The evil of idolatry is this — rival nations have raised 
 up rival deities ; war hath been denounced in the name of Heaven ; 
 men have been murdered for the love of God ; and such impiety 
 hatli darkened all the regions of the woi'ld, that the Lord of all 
 things hath been mocked by all simultaneously as the Lord of 
 hosts." The evil of idolatry is, not that it disfigures the Deity 
 (in which, it seems, there might be no great harm), but that one 
 man's disfiguration differs from another man's ; which leads to 
 quarrelling, and that to fighting 
 
296 NOTES ON Vi/'ALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 
 
 Note 8. Page 267. 
 
 " Grecian disguise : " — The true German name of this learned 
 reformer was Schwarzerd (black earth) ; but the homeliness and 
 pun-provoking quality of such a designation induced Melanchthon 
 to mask it in Greek. By the way, I do not understand how Mr. 
 Laudor, the arch-purist in orthography, reconciles his spelling of 
 the name to Greek orthodoxy ; there is no Greek word that could 
 be expressed by the English syllable " cthon." Such a word as 
 Melancthon* would be a hybrid monster — neither fish, flesh, nor 
 good red herring. 
 
 Note 9. Page 270. 
 
 An equal mistake it is in Mr. Landor to put into the mouth of 
 Porson any vituperation of Mathias as one that had uttered opin- 
 ions upon Wordsworth. In the Puisuits of Literature, down to 
 the fifteenth edition, there is no mention of Wordsworth's name. 
 Southey is mentioned slightingly, and chiefly with reference to his 
 then democratic principles ; but not Coleridge, and not Words- 
 worth. Mathias soon after went to Italy, where he passed the 
 remainder of his life — died, I believe, and was buried — never, 
 perhaps, having heard the name of Wordsworth. As to Porson, 
 it is very true that Mathias took a few liberties with his private 
 habits, such as his writing paragraphs in the little cabinet fitted 
 up for the ge7is de plume, at the Morning Chronicle office, and 
 other trifles. But these, though impertinences, were not of a 
 nature seriously to oflend. They rather flattered, by the interest 
 which they argued in his movements. And with regard to Per- 
 son's main pretension, his exquisite skill in Greek, Mathias was 
 not the man to admire this too little ; his weakness, if in that 
 point he had a weakness, lay in the opposite direction. His own 
 Greek was not a burthen that could have foundered a camel ; he 
 was neither accurate, nor extensive, nor profound. But yet Mr. 
 Landor is wrong in thinking that he drew it from an Index. In 
 
 * The reader of this edition will notice that the American printer has altered 
 the spelling ia the I'^xt, without reference to Mr. De Quincey's remarks on Mr 
 
 L'lador's mtthoj. 
 
NOTES. 297 
 
 uia Italian, he had the advantage probably of Mr. Landor himself; 
 at least he ■wrote it with more apparent fluency and compass. 
 
 Note 10. Page 281. 
 
 Herod the Great, and his father Autipater, owed the favor of 
 R')me, and, finally, the throne of Judtca, to the seasonable elec- 
 tion which they made between Rome and Persia ; but made not 
 without some doubts, as between forces hardly yet brought to a 
 satisfactory equation. 
 
 Note 11. Page 284. 
 
 "Stooped not to accept it." — The notion that Julius Coesar, 
 who of all men must have held cheapest the title of Rex, had 
 seriously intrigued to obtain it, arose (as I conceive) from two 
 mistakes — first. From a misintei'pretation of a figurative cere- 
 mony in the pageant of the Lupercalia. The Romans were 
 ridiculously punctilious in this kind of jealousy. They charged 
 Pompey, at one time, with a plot for making himself king, be- 
 cause he wore white bandages I'ound his thighs ; now white, in 
 olden days, was as much the regal color as purple. Think, dear 
 reader, of us — of you and me — being charged with making 
 ourselves kings, because we may choose to wear white cotton 
 drawers. Pompey was very angry, and swore bloody oaths that 
 it was not ambition which had cased his thighs in white fascice 
 "Why, what is it then?" said a grave citizen. "What is it, 
 man?" replied Pompey, " it is rheumatism." Dogberry must 
 have had a hand in this charge : — " Dost thou hear, thou varlet ? 
 Thou art charged with incivism ; and it shall go hard with mo 
 but I will prove thee to thy fixce a false knave, and guilty of flat 
 rheumatism." The other reason which has tended to confirm pos- 
 terity in the belief that Cassar really coveted the title of Rex, was 
 the confusion of the truth arising with Greek writers. Basileus, 
 the term by which indiffei'ently they designated the mighty Artax- 
 erxes and the pettiest regulus, was the original translation used 
 for Iinperaior. Subsequently, and especiall}' after Dioclesian had 
 approximated the aulic pomps to eastern models, the terms .duto- 
 
298 NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 
 
 crator, Kaisar, Augustus, Sebastos, &c., came more into use. But 
 after Trajan's time, or even to that of Commodus, generally the 
 same terms which expressed Imperator and Imperitorial [viz., 
 Basileus and Basilikos'] to a Grecian ear expressed Rex and 
 Regalis. 
 
 Note 12. Page 291. 
 
 "Tis;" — Scotchmen and Irishmen (for a reason which 
 it may be elsewhere worth while explaining) make the same 
 mistake of supposing '< is and 'i was admissible in prose ; which is 
 sliocking to an English ear, for since 1740 they have become essen- 
 tially poetic forms, and cannot, without a sense of painful aifecta- 
 tion and sentimentality, be used in conversation or in any mode 
 of prose. Mr. Landor does not make ihat mistake, but the redu- 
 plication of the H is in this line, — will he permit me to say ? — is 
 dreadful. He is wide awake to such blemishes in other men of all 
 nations ; so am I. He blazes away all day long against the tres- 
 passes of that class, like a man in spring, protecting corn-fields 
 against birds. So do I at times. And if ever I publish that work 
 on Style, which for years has been in preparation, I fear that, from 
 Mr. Landor, it will be necessary to cull some striking flaws in 
 composition, were it only that in his works must be sought some 
 of its most striking brilliancies. 
 
 Note 13. Page 292. 
 
 " Rocky harp :^' — There are now known other cases, besides 
 the ancient one of Memnon's statue, in which the "deep-grooved " 
 granites, or even the shifting sands of wildernesses, utter myste- 
 rious music to ears that watch and wait for the proper combina- 
 tion of circumstances. 
 
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